Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  What I suppose gets me yet is what got me when I stayed away from the Elks Club and went walking in the hills when I was trying to be a manufacturer, and what got me fired when I was a race-track swipe. I get to thinking of what that darned old man once told me. I’ll bet he was a Bolshevik. What he told me set me dreaming about swimming in clear streams, and seeing white cities sitting on hills, and of other cities up along the northern end of my State, facing Lake Erie, where in the evening canoes and maybe even gondolas would drift in and out of the lake and among the stone houses, whose color was slowly changing and growing richer with the passage of time.

  But, as I say, that’s all poet stuff and bunk. Having such pipe dreams is just what put the old kibosh on my factory, I’ll bet anything. What I think is that a man should be glad it’s getting harder and harder for any of our sons to make the same mistakes I did. For, as I figure it out, things are going just splendidly over in Ohio now. Why, nearly every town is a factory town now and some of them have got streets in them that would make New York or London or Chicago sit up and take notice. What I mean is, almost as many people to every square foot of ground and just as jammed up and dirty and smoky.

  To be sure, the job isn’t all done yet. There are lots of places where you can still see the green hills and every once in a while a citizen of a city like Cleveland, for example, gets a kind of accidental glimpse at the lake, but even in a big town like Chicago, where they have a lot of money and a large police force, a thing like that will happen now and then. You can’t do everything all at once. But things are getting better all the time. A little more push, a little more old zip and go, and a man over in Ohio can lead a decent life.

  He can get up in the morning and go through a street where all the houses are nicely blacked up with coal soot, and into a factory where all he has to do all day long is to drill a hole in a piece of iron. It’s fine the way Ford and Willys and all such fellows have made factory work so nice. Nowadays all you have to do, if you live in an up-to-date Ohio town, is to make, say, twenty-three million holes in pieces of iron, all just alike, in a lifetime. Isn’t that fine? And at night a fellow can go home thanking God, and he can walk right past the finest cinder piles and places where they dump old tin cans and everything without paying a cent.

  And so I don’t see why what such cities as Cleveland and Cincinnati have done to knock dreaminess and natural beauty of scene galley-west can’t be done also by all the smaller towns and cities pretty fast now. What I’m sure is they can do it if the old New England stock hasn’t worn out and if they keep out foreign influences all they can. And even the farmers can make their places out in the country look more modern and like the slums of a good live city like Chicago or Cleveland if they’ll only pep up and work a little harder this fall when the crops are laid by.

  And so, as far as I can see, what I say is, Ohio is O.K.

  A MEETING SOUTH

  HE TOLD ME the story of his ill fortune with a very gentlemanly little smile on his very sensitive lips. Such things happened. He might well have been speaking of another. I liked his tone, liked him.

  This happened in New Orleans, where I had gone to live. When he came, Fred, for whom he was looking, had gone away, but immediately I felt a strong desire to know him better and so suggested we spend the evening together. When we went down the stairs I noticed that he was a cripple. The slight limp, the look of pain that occasionally drifted across his face, the little laugh that was intended to be jolly, but did not quite achieve its purpose, all these things began at once to tell me the story I have now set myself down to write.

  “I shall take him to see Aunt Sally,” I thought. One does not take every chance caller to Aunt Sally. However when she is in fine feather, when she has taken a fancy to her visitor, there is no one like her. Although she has lived in New Orleans for thirty years, Aunt Sally is Middle-Western, born and bred.

  However I am plunging a bit too abruptly into my story.

  First of all I must speak more of my guest and for convenience’s sake I shall call him David. I felt at once that he would be wanting a drink and such things can be managed. We achieved several and my own head became somewhat shaky, but I could see that what we had taken had not affected him. Evening was coming, the abrupt waning of the day and the quick smoky soft-footed coming of night characteristic of our semi-tropic city, when he produced a bottle from his hip pocket. It was so large that I was amazed. How had it happened that the carrying of so large a bottle had not made him look deformed? His body was very small and delicately built. “Perhaps, like the kangaroo, his body has developed some kind of a natural pouch for taking care of supplies,” I thought. Really he walked as one might fancy a kangaroo would walk when out for a quiet evening stroll. I went along thinking of Darwin and the marvels of prohibition. “We are a wonderful people, we Americans,” I thought. We were both in fine humor, had begun to like each other immensely.

  He explained the bottle. The stuff, he said, was made by a nigger on his father’s plantation somewhere over in Alabama. We sat on the steps of a vacant house deep down in the old French Quarter of New Orleans — the Vieux Carre — while he explained that his father had no intention of breaking the law — that is to say, in so far as the law remained reasonable. “Our nigger just makes whisky for us,” he said. “We keep him for that purpose. He doesn’t have anything else to do, just makes the family whisky, that’s all. If he went selling any we’d raise hell with him. I dare say Dad would shoot him if he caught him up to any such unlawful trick, and you bet, Jim, our nigger I’m telling you of, knows it too.”

  “He’s a good whisky maker though, don’t you think?” David added. He talked of Jim in a warm friendly way. “Lord he’s been with us always, was born with us. His wife cooks for us and Jim makes our whisky. It’s a race to see which is best at their job, but I think Jim will win. He’s getting a little better all the time and all of our family — well I guess we just like and need our whisky more than we do our food.”

  Do you know Orleans? Have you lived there in the summer when it is hot, in the winter when it rains, and through the glorious late falls? Its own people scorn it now. In New Orleans there is a sense of shame because the city is not more like Chicago or Pittsburgh.

  It however suited David and me. We walked, slowly, on account of his bad leg, through many streets of the Old Town, negro women laughing all around us in the dusk, shadows playing over old buildings, children with their shrill cries dodging in and out of old hallways. The old city was once almost altogether French, but now it is becoming more and more Italian. It however remains Latin. People live out of doors. Families were sitting down to dinner within full sight of the street — all doors and windows open. A man and his wife quarreled in Italian. In a patio back of an old building a negress sang a French song.

  We came out of the narrow little streets and had a drink in front of the dark cathedral and another in a little square in front. There is a statue of General Jackson, always taking off his hat to Northern tourists who in the winter come down to see the city. At his horse’s feet an inscription— “The Union must and will be preserved.” We drank solemnly to that declaration and the general seemed to bow a bit lower. “He was sure a proud man,” David said as we went over toward the docks to sit in the darkness and look at the Mississippi. All good New Orleansians go to look at the Mississippi at least once a day. At night it is like creeping into a dark bedroom to look at a sleeping child — something of that sort — gives you the same warm nice feeling I mean. David is a poet and so in the darkness by the river we spoke of Keats and Shelley, the two English poets all good Southern men love.

  All of this, you are to understand, was before I took him to see Aunt Sally.

  Both Aunt Sally and myself are Middle-Westerners. We are but guests down here, but perhaps we shall both stay here until we die. Something of the sort is in the wind. I don’t quite know how it has happened.

  A great many Northern men and women come down our way
and when they go back North write things about the South. The trick is to write nigger stories. The North likes them. They are so amusing. One of the best known writers of nigger stories was down here recently and a man I know, a Southern man, went to call on him. The writer seemed a bit nervous. “I don’t know much about the South or Southerners,” he said. “But you have your reputation,” my friend said. The writer had a notion he was being made sport of. “Now look here,” he said, “I don’t claim to be no highbrow. I’m a business man myself. At home, up North, I associate mostly with business men and when I am not at work I go out to the country club. I want you to understand I am not setting myself up.” My friend said he appeared angry. “About what now, do you fancy?” he asked innocently.

  However, I am not thinking of the Northern writer of negro stories. I am thinking of the Southern poet, with the bottle clasped firmly in his hands, sitting in the darkness beside me on the docks facing the Mississippi.

  He spoke at some length of his gift for drinking. “I didn’t always have it. It is a thing built up,” he said. The story of how he chanced to be a cripple came out slowly. You are to remember that my own head was a bit unsteady. In the darkness the river, very deep and very powerful off New Orleans, was creeping away to the gulf. The whole river seemed to move away from us and then to slip noiselessly into the darkness like a vast moving sidewalk.

  When he had first come to me, in the late afternoon, and when we had started for our walk together I had noticed that one of his legs dragged as we went along and that he kept putting a thin hand to an equally thin cheek.

  Sitting over by the river he explained as a boy would explain that he had stubbed his toe running down a hill.

  When the World War broke out he went over to England and managed to get himself enrolled as an aviator, very much, I gathered, in the spirit in which a countryman, in a city for a night, might take in a show.

  The English had been glad enough to take him on. He was one more man. They were glad enough to take any one on just then. He was small and delicately built, but after he got in he turned out to be a first rate flyer, serving all through the war with a British flying squadron, but at the last got into a crash and fell.

  Both legs were broken, one of them in three places, the scalp was badly torn and some of the bones of the face had been splintered.

  They had put him into a field hospital and had patched him up. “It was my fault if the job was rather bungled,” he said. “You see it was a field hospital, a hell of a place. Men were torn all to pieces, groaning and dying. Then they moved me back to a base hospital and it wasn’t much better. The fellow who had the bed next to mine had shot himself in the foot to avoid going into a battle. A lot of them did that, but why they picked on their own feet that way is beyond me. It’s a nasty place, full of small bones. If you’re ever going to shoot yourself don’t pick on a spot like that. Don’t pick on your feet. I tell you it’s a bad idea.

  “Anyway the man in the hospital was always making a fuss and I got sick of him and the place too. When I got better I faked, said the nerves of my leg didn’t hurt, said the nerves up in my face didn’t hurt. It was a lie of course. The nerves of my leg and of my face have never quit hurting. I guess maybe, if I had told the truth, they might have fixed me up all right.”

  I got it. No wonder he carried his drinks so well. When I understood I wanted to keep on drinking with him, wanted to stay with him until he got tired of me as he had of the man who lay beside him in the base hospital over there somewhere in France.

  The point was that he never slept, could not sleep, except when he was a little drunk. “I’m a nut,” he said smiling.

  It was after we got over to Aunt Sally’s that he talked most. Aunt Sally had gone to bed when we got there, but she got up when we rang the bell and we all went to sit together in the little patio back of her house. She is a large woman with great arms and rather a paunch and she had put on nothing but a light flowered dressing gown over a thin, ridiculously girlish, nightgown. By this time the moon had come up and, outside, in the narrow street of the Vieux Carre, three drunken sailors from a ship in the river were sitting on a curb and singing a song,

  “I’ve got to get it,

  You’ve got to get it,

  We’ve all got to get it

  In our own good time.”

  They had rather nice boyish voices and every time they sang a verse and had done the chorus they all laughed together heartily.

  In Aunt Sally’s patio there are many broad-leafed banana plants and a Chinaberry tree throwing their soft purple shadows on a brick floor.

  As for Aunt Sally, she is as strange to me as he was. When we came and when we were all seated at a little table in the patio, she ran into her house and presently came back with a bottle of whisky. She, it seemed, had understood him at once, had understood without unnecessary words that the little Southern man lived always in the black house of pain, that whisky was good to him, that it quieted his throbbing nerves, temporarily at least. “Everything is temporary when you come to that,” I can fancy Aunt Sally saying.

  We sat for a time in silence, David having shifted his allegiance and taken two drinks out of Aunt Sally’s bottle. Presently he arose and walked up and down the patio floor, crossing and recrossing the network of delicately outlined shadows on the bricks. “It’s really all right, the leg,” he said, “something just presses on the nerves, that’s all.” In me there was a self-satisfied feeling. I had done the right thing. I had brought him to Aunt Sally. “I have brought him to a mother.” She has always made me feel that way since I have known her.

  And now I shall have to explain her a little. It will not be so easy. Our whole neighborhood is alive with tales concerning her.

  Aunt Sally came to New Orleans in the old days, when the town was alive, in the wide-open days. What she had been before she came here no one knows, but anyway she opened a place. That was very, very long ago when I was myself but a lad, up in Ohio. As I have already said Aunt Sally came from somewhere up in the Middle-Western country. In some obscure subtle way it would flatter me to think she came from my state.

  The house she had opened was one of the older places in the French Quarter down here, and when she had got her hands on it Aunt Sally had a hunch. Instead of making the place modern, cutting it up into small rooms, all that sort of thing, she left it just as it was and spent her money in rebuilding falling old walls, mending winding broad old stairways, repairing dim high-ceilinged old rooms, soft-colored old marble mantels. After all we do seem attached to sin and there are so many people busy making sin unattractive. It is good to find someone who takes the other road. It would have been so very much to Aunt Sally’s advantage to have made the place modern, that is to say, in the business she was in at that time. If a few old rooms, wide old stairways, old cooking ovens built into the walls, if all these things did not facilitate the stealing in of couples on dark nights they at least did something else. She had opened a gambling and drinking house, but one can have no doubt about the ladies stealing in. “I was on the make all right,” Aunt Sally told me once.

  She ran the place and took in money and the money she spent on the place itself. A falling wall was made to stand up straight and fine again, the banana plants were made to grow in the patio, the Chinaberry tree got started and was helped through the years of adolescence. On the wall the lovely Rose of Montana bloomed madly. The fragrant Lantana grew in a dense mass at a corner of the wall.

  When the Chinaberry tree, planted at the very center of the patio, began to get up into the light it filled the whole neighborhood with fragrance in the spring.

  Fifteen, twenty years of that, with Mississippi River gamblers and racehorse men sitting at tables by windows in the huge rooms upstairs in the house that had once, no doubt, been the town house of some rich planter’s family — in the boom days of the ‘forties. Women stealing in, too, in the dusk of evenings. Drinks being sold. Aunt Sally raking down the kitty from the game, rak
ing in her share, quite ruthlessly.

  At night getting a good price too from the lovers. No questions asked, a good price for drinks. Moll Flanders might have lived with Aunt Sally. What a pair they would have made. The Chinaberry tree beginning to be lusty. The Lantana blossoming — in the fall the Rose of Montana.

  Aunt Sally getting hers. Using the money to keep the old house in fine shape. Salting some away all the time.

  A motherly soul, good, sensible Middle-Western woman, eh? Once a racehorse man left twenty-four thousand dollars with her and disappeared. No one knew she had it. There was a report the man was dead. He had killed a gambler in a place down by the French Market and while they were looking for him he managed to slip in to Aunt Sally’s and leave his swag. Sometime later a body was found floating in the river and it was identified as the horseman, but in reality he had been picked up in a wire-tapping haul in New York City and did not get out of his Northern prison for six years.

  When he did get out naturally he skipped for New Orleans. No doubt he was somewhat shaky. She had him. If he squealed there was the murder charge to be brought up and held over his head. It was night when he arrived and Aunt Sally went at once to an old brick oven built into the wall of the kitchen and took out a bag. “There it is,” she said. The whole affair was a part of the day’s work for her in those days.

  Gamblers at the tables in some of the rooms upstairs — lurking couples — from the old patio below the fragrance of growing things.

  When she was fifty Aunt Sally had got enough and had put them all out. She did not stay in the way of sin too long and she never went in too deep, like that Moll Flanders, and so she was all right and sitting pretty. “They wanted to gamble and drink and play with the ladies. The ladies liked it all right. I never saw none of them come in protesting too much. The worst was in the morning when they went away. They looked so sheepish and guilty. If they felt that way what made them come? If I took to a man you bet I’d want him and no monkey business or nothing doing.