by Collected Stories- Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses
Tom tapped me on the shoulder, and then tapped with his empty glass on the table. He laughed.
“Ladybug, ladybug, why do you roam?
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,”
he recited. When the whiskey had come he leaned forward and made one of the odd and truthful observations on life that were always coming out of him at unexpected moments. “I want you to notice something,” he began; “You have seen a lot of bartenders—well, if you’ll notice, there is a striking similarity in appearance between bartenders, great generals, diplomats, presidents and all such people. I just happened to think why it is. It’s because they are all up to the same game. They have to spend their lives handling weary dissatisfied people and they learn the trick of giving things just a little twist, out of one dull meaningless channel into another. That is their game and practising it makes them all look alike.”
I smiled sympathetically. Now that I come to write of my friend I find it somewhat difficult not to misrepresent him on the sentimental side. I forget times when I was with him and he was unspeakably dull, when he also talked often for hours of meaningless things. It was all foolishness, this trying to be anything but a dull business man, he sometimes said, and declared that both he and I were fools. Better for us both that we become more alert, more foxy, as he put it. But for the fact that we were both fools we would both join the Chicago Athletic Club, play golf, ride about in automobiles, pick up flashy young girls and take them out to road-houses to dinner, go home later and make up cock and bull stories to quiet our wives, go to church on Sunday, talk continuously of money making, woman and golf, and in general enjoy our lives. At times he half convinced me he thought the fellows he described led gay and cheerful lives.
And there were times, too, when he, as a physical being, seemed to fairly disintegrate before my eyes. His great bulk grew a little loose and flabby, he talked and talked, saying nothing.
And then, when I had quite made up my mind he had gone the same road I and all the men about me were no doubt going, the road of surrender to ugliness and to dreary meaningless living, something would happen. He would have talked thus, as I have just described, aimlessly, through a long evening, and then, when we parted for the night, he would scribble a few words on a bit of paper and push it awkwardly into my pocket. I watched his lumbering figure go away along a street and going to a street lamp read what he had written.
“I am very weary. I am not the silly ass I seem but I am as tired as a dog, trying to find out what I am,” were the words he had scrawled.
But to return to the evening in the place in Wells Street. When the whiskey came we drank it and sat looking at each other. Then he put his hand on the table and closing the fingers, so that they made a little cup, opened the hand slowly and listlessly. “Once I had life, like that, in my hand, my own life. I could have let go of it as easily as that. Just why I didn’t I’ve never quite figured out. I can’t think why I kept my fingers cupped, instead of opening my hand and letting go,” he said. If, a few minutes before, there had been no integrity in the man there was enough of it now.
He began telling the story of an evening and a night of his youth.
It was when he was still on his father’s farm, a little rented farm down in Southeastern Ohio, and when he was but eighteen years old. That would have been in the fall before he left home and started on his adventures in the world. I knew something of his history.
It was late October and he and his father had been digging potatoes in a field. I suppose they both wore torn shoes as, in telling the story, Tom made a point of the fact that their feet were cold, and that the black dirt had worked into their shoes and discolored their feet.
The day was cold and Tom wasn’t very well and was in a bitter mood. He and his father worked rather desperately and in silence. The father was tall, had a sallow complexion and wore a beard, and in the mental picture I have of him, he is always stopping—as he walks about the farmyard or works in the fields he stops and runs his fingers nervously through his beard.
As for Tom, one gets the notion of him as having been at that time rather nice, one having an inclination toward the nicer things of life without just knowing he had the feeling, and certainly without an opportunity to gratify it.
Tom had something the matter with him, a cold with a bit of fever perhaps and sometimes as he worked his body shook as with a chill and then, after a few minutes, he felt hot all over. The two men had been digging the potatoes all afternoon and as night began to fall over the field, they started to pick up. One picks up the potatoes in baskets and carries them to the ends of the rows where they are put into two-bushel grain bags.
Tom’s step-mother came to the kitchen door and called. “Supper,” she cried in her peculiarly colorless voice. Her husband was a little angry and fretful. Perhaps for a long time he had been feeling very deeply the enmity of his son. “All right,” he called back, “we’ll come pretty soon. We got to get done picking up.” There was something very like a whine in his voice. “You can keep the things hot for a time,” he shouted.
Tom and his father both worked with feverish haste, as though trying to outdo each other and every time Tom bent over to pick up a handful of the potatoes his head whirled and he thought he might fall. A kind of terrible pride had taken possession of him and with the whole strength of his being he was determined not to let his father—who, if ineffectual, was nevertheless sometimes very quick and accurate at tasks—get the better of him. They were picking up potatoes—that was the task before them at the moment—and the thing was to get all the potatoes picked up and in the bags before darkness came. Tom did not believe in his father and was he to let such an ineffectual man outdo him at any task, no matter how ill he might be?
That was somewhat the nature of Tom’s thoughts and feelings at the moment.
And then the darkness had come and the task was done. The filled sacks were set along a fence at the end of the field. It was to be a cold frosty night and now the moon was coming up and the filled sacks looked like grotesque human beings, standing there along the fence—standing with grey sagging bodies, such as Tom’s step-mother had—sagged bodies and dull eyes—standing and looking at the two men, so amazingly not in accord with each other.
As the two walked across the field Tom let his father go ahead. He was afraid he might stagger and did not want his father to see there was anything the matter with him. In a way boyish pride was involved too. “He might think he could wear me out working,” Tom thought. The moon coming up was a huge yellow ball in the distance. It was larger than the house towards which they were walking and the figure of Tom’s father seemed to walk directly across the yellow face of the moon.
When they got to the house the children Tom’s father had got—thrown in with the woman, as it were, when he made his second marriage—were standing about. After he left home Tom could never remember anything about the children except that they always had dirty faces and were clad in torn dirty dresses and that the youngest, a baby, wasn’t very well and was always crying fretfully.
When the two men came into the house the children, from having been fussing at their mother because the meal was delayed, grew silent. With the quick intuition of children they sensed something wrong between father and son. Tom walked directly across the small dining room and opening a door entered a stairway that led up to his bedroom. “Ain’t you going to eat any supper?” his father asked. It was the first word that had passed between father and son for hours.
“No,” Tom answered and went up the stairs. At the moment his mind was concentrated on the problem of not letting anyone in the house know he was ill and the father let him go without protest. No doubt the whole family were glad enough to have him out of the way.
He went upstairs and into his own room and got into bed without taking off his clothes, just pulled off the torn shoes and crawling in pulled the covers up over himself. There was an old quilt, not very clean.
His brain cleared a litt
le and as the house was small he could hear everything going on down stairs. Now the family were all seated at the table and his father was doing a thing called “saying grace.” He always did that and sometimes, while the others waited, he prayed intermittently.
Tom was thinking, trying to think. What was it all about, his father’s praying that way? When he got at it the man seemed to forget everyone else in the world. There he was, alone with God, facing God alone and the people about him seemed to have no existence. He prayed a little about food, and then went on to speak with God, in a strange confidential way, about other things, his own frustrated desires mostly.
All his life he had wanted to be a Methodist minister but could not be ordained because he was uneducated, had never been to the schools or colleges. There was no chance at all for his becoming just the thing he wanted to be and still he went on and on praying about it, and in a way seemed to think there might be a possibility that God, feeling strongly the need of more Methodist ministers, would suddenly come down out of the sky, off the judgment seat as it were, and would go to the administrating board, or whatever one might call it, of the Methodist Church and say, “Here you, what are you up to? Make this man a Methodist minister and be quick about it. I don’t want any fooling around.”
Tom lay on the bed upstairs listening to his father praying down below. When he was a lad and his own mother was alive he had always been compelled to go with his father to the church on Sundays and to the prayer meetings on Wednesday evenings. His father always prayed, delivered sermons to the other sad-faced men and women sitting about, under the guise of prayers, and the son sat listening and no doubt it was then, in childhood, his hatred of his father was born. The man who was then the minister of the little country church, a tall, raw-boned young man, who was as yet unmarried, sometimes spoke of Tom’s father as one powerful in prayer.
And all the time there was something in Tom’s mind. Well he had seen a thing. One day when he was walking alone through a strip of wood, coming back barefooted from town to the farm he had seen—he never told anyone what he had seen. The minister was in the wood, sitting alone on a log. There was something. Some rather nice sense of life in Tom was deeply offended. He had crept away unseen.
And now he was lying on the bed in the half darkness upstairs in his father’s house, shaken with a chill, and downstairs his father was praying and there was one sentence always creeping into his prayers. “Give me the gift, O God, give me the great gift.” Tom thought he knew what that meant—“the gift of the gab and the opportunity to exercise it, eh?”
There was a door at the foot of Tom’s bed and beyond the door another room, at the front of the house upstairs. His father slept in there with the new woman he had married and the three children slept in a small room beside it. The baby slept with the man and woman. It was odd what terrible thoughts sometimes came into one’s head. The baby wasn’t very well and was always whining and crying. Chances were it would grow up to be a yellow-skinned thing, with dull eyes, like the mother. Suppose . . . well suppose . . . some night . . . one did not voluntarily have such thoughts—suppose either the man or woman might, quite accidentally, roll over on the baby and crush it, smother it, rather.
Tom’s mind slipped a little out of his grasp. He was trying to hold on to something—what was it? Was it his own life? That was an odd thought. Now his father had stopped praying and downstairs the family were eating the evening meal. There was silence in the house. People, even dirty half-ill children, grew silent when they ate. That was a good thing. It was good to be silent sometimes.
And now Tom was in the wood, going barefooted through the wood and there was that man, the minister, sitting alone there on the log. Tom’s father wanted to be a minister, wanted God to arbitrarily make him a minister, wanted God to break the rules, bust up the regular order of things just to make him a minister. And he a man who could barely make a living on the farm, who did everything in a half slipshod way, who, when he felt he had to have a second wife, had gone off and got one with four sickly kids, one who couldn’t cook, who did the work of his house in a slovenly way.
Tom slipped off into unconsciousness and lay still for a long time. Perhaps he slept.
When he awoke—or came back into consciousness—there was his father’s voice still praying and Tom had thought the grace-saying was over. He lay still, listening. The voice was loud and insistent and now seemed near at hand. All of the rest of the house was silent. None of the children were crying.
Now there was a sound, the rattling of dishes downstairs in the kitchen and Tom sat up in bed and leaning far over looked through the open door into the room occupied by his father and his father’s new wife. His mind cleared.
After all, the evening meal was over and the children had been put to bed and now the woman downstairs had put the three older children into their bed and was washing the dishes at the kitchen stove. Tom’s father had come upstairs and had prepared for bed by taking off his clothes and putting on a long soiled white nightgown. Then he had gone to the open window at the front of the house and kneeling down had begun praying again.
A kind of cold fury took possession of Tom and without a moment’s hesitation he got silently out of bed. He did not feel ill now but very strong. At the foot of his bed, leaning against the wall, was a whippletree, a round piece of hard wood, shaped something like a baseball bat, but tapering at both ends. At each end there was an iron ring. The whippletree had been left there by his father who was always leaving things about, in odd unexpected places. He leaned a whippletree against the wall in his son’s bedroom and then, on the next day, when he was hitching a horse to a plow and wanted it, he spent hours going nervously about rubbing his fingers through his beard and looking.
Tom took the whippletree in his hand and crept barefooted through the open door into his father’s room. “He wants to be like that fellow in the woods—that’s what he’s always praying about.” There was in Tom’s mind some notion—from the beginning there must have been a great deal of the autocrat in him—well, you see, he wanted to crush out impotence and sloth.
He had quite made up his mind to kill his father with the whippletree and crept silently across the floor, gripping the hardwood stick firmly in his right hand. The sickly looking baby had already been put into the one bed in the room and was asleep. Its little face looked out from above another dirty quilt and the clear cold moonlight streamed into the room and fell upon the bed and upon the kneeling figure on the floor by the window.
Tom had got almost across the room when he noticed something—his father’s bare feet sticking out from beneath the white nightgown. The heels and the little balls of flesh below the toes were black with the dirt of the fields but in the centre of each foot there was a place. It was not black but yellowish white in the moonlight.
Tom crept silently back into his own room and closed softly the door between himself and his father. After all he did not want to kill anyone. His father had not thought it necessary to wash his feet before kneeling to pray to his God, and he had himself come upstairs and had got into bed without washing his own feet.
His hands were trembling now and his body shaking with the chill but he sat on the edge of the bed trying to think. When he was a child and went to church with his father and mother there was a story he had heard told. A man came into a feast, after walking a long time on dusty roads, and sat down at the feast. A woman came and washed his feet. Then she put precious ointments on them and later dried the feet with her hair.
The story had, when he heard it, no special meaning to the boy but now . . . He sat on the bed smiling half foolishly. Could one make of one’s own hands a symbol of what the woman’s hands must have meant on that occasion, long ago, could not one make one’s own hands the humble servants to one’s soiled feet, to one’s soiled body?
It was a strange notion, this business of making oneself the keeper of the clean integrity of oneself. When one was ill one got things a little distorte
d. In Tom’s room there was a tin wash-basin, and a pail of water, he himself brought each morning from the cistern at the back of the house. He had always been one who fancied waiting on himself and perhaps, at that time, he had in him something he afterward lost, or only got hold of again at long intervals, the sense of the worth of his own young body, the feeling that his own body was a temple, as one might put it.
At any rate he must have had some such feeling on that night of his childhood and I shall never forget a kind of illusion I had concerning him that time in the Wells Street place when he told me the tale. At the moment something seemed to spring out of his great hulking body, something young hard clean and white.
But I must walk carefully. Perhaps I had better stick to my tale, try only to tell it simply, as he did.
Anyway he got off the bed, there in the upper room of that strangely disorganized and impotent household, and standing in the centre of the room took off his clothes. There was a towel hanging on a hook on the wall but it wasn’t very clean.
By chance he did have, however, a white nightgown that had not been worn and he now got it out of the drawer of a small rickety dresser that stood by the wall and recklessly tore off a part of it to serve as a washcloth. Then he stood up and with the tin washbasin on the floor at his feet washed himself carefully in the icy cold water.
No matter what illusions I may have had regarding him when he told me the tale, that night in Wells Street, surely on that night of his youth he must have been, as I have already described him, something young hard clean and white. Surely and at that moment his body was a temple.
* * *
As for the matter of his holding his own life in his hands—that came later, when he had got back into the bed, and that part of his tale I do not exactly understand. Perhaps he fumbled it in the telling and perhaps my own understanding fumbled.
I remember that he kept his hand lying on the table in the Wells Street place and that he kept opening and closing the fingers as though that would explain everything. It didn’t for me, not then at any rate. Perhaps it will for you who read.