Poor White

by Sherwood Anderson

  Clara looked at her aunt and blushed; then became suddenly and furiously angry. Dropping the bag she had opened to the floor, she ran out of the room. At the door she stopped and turned on the surprised and startled woman. “No, I haven’t,” she declared furiously. “It’s nobody’s business whether I have or not. I went to school for an education. I didn’t go to get me a man. If that’s what you sent me for, why didn’t you say so?”

  Clara hurried out of the house and into the barnyard. She went into all of the barns, but there were no men about. Even the strange farm hand who had carried her bags into the house had disappeared, and the stalls in the horse and cattle barns were empty. Then she went into the orchard and climbing a fence went through a meadow and into the wood to which she had always fled, when as a girl on the farm she was troubled or angry. For a long time she sat on a log beneath a tree and tried to think her way through the new idea of marriage she had got from her father’s words. She was still angry and told herself that she would leave home, would go to some city and get work. She thought of Kate Chanceller who intended to be a doctor, and tried to picture herself attempting something of the kind. It would take money for study. She tried to imagine herself talking to her father about the matter and the thought made her smile. Again she wondered if he had any definite person in mind as her husband, and who it could be. She tried to check off her father’s acquaintances among the young men of Bidwell. “It must be some new man who has come here, some one having something to do with one of the factories,” she thought.

  After sitting on the log for a long time, Clara got up and walked under the trees. The imaginary man, suggested to her mind by her father’s words, became every moment more and more a reality. Before her eyes danced the laughing eyes of the young man who for a moment had lingered beside her while Kate Chanceller talked to his companion that evening when they had been challenged on the streets of Columbus. She remembered the young school teacher, who had held her in his arms through a long Sunday afternoon, and the day when, as an awakening maiden, she had heard Jim Priest talking to the laborers in the barn about the sap that ran up the tree. The afternoon slipped away and the shadows of the trees lengthened. On such a day and alone there in the quiet wood, it was impossible for her to remain in the angry mood in which she had left the house. Over her father’s farm brooded the passionate fulfillment of summer. Before her, seen through the trees, lay yellow wheat fields, ripe for the cutting; insects sang and danced in the air about her head; a soft wind blew and made a gentle singing noise in the tops of the trees; at her back among the trees a squirrel chattered; and two calves came along a woodland path and stood for a long time staring at her with their large gentle eyes. She arose and went out of the wood, crossed a falling meadow and came to a rail fence surrounding a corn field. Jim Priest was cultivating corn and when he saw her left his horses and came to her. He took both her hands in his and pumped her arms up and down. “Well, Lord A’mighty, I’m glad to see you,” he said heartily. “Lord A’mighty, I’m glad to see you.” The old farm hand pulled a long blade of grass out of the ground beneath the fence and leaning against the top rail began to chew it. He asked Clara the same question her aunt had asked, but his asking did not annoy her. She laughed and shook her head. “No, Jim,” she said, “I seem to have made a failure of going away to school. I didn’t get me a man. No one asked me, you see.”

  Both the woman and the old man became silent. Over the tops of the young corn they could see down the hillside into the distant town. Clara wondered if the man she was to marry was there. The idea of a marriage with her had perhaps been suggested to his mind also. Her father, she decided, was capable of that. He was evidently ready to go to any length to see her safely married. She wondered why. When Jim Priest began to talk, striving to explain his question, his words fitted oddly into the thoughts she was having in regard to herself. “Now about marriage,” he began, “you see now, I never done it. I didn’t get married at all. I don’t know why. I wanted to and I didn’t. I was afraid to ask, maybe. I guess if you do it you’re sorry you did and if you don’t you’re sorry you didn’t.”

  Jim went back to his team, and Clara stood by the fence and watched him go down the long field and turn to come back along another of the paths between the corn rows. When the horses came to where she stood, he stopped again and looked at her. “I guess you’ll get married pretty soon now,” he said. The horses started on again and he held the cultivating machine with one hand and looked back over his shoulder at her. “You’re one of the marrying kind,” he called. “You ain’t like me. You don’t just think about things. You do ‘em. You’ll be getting yourself married before very long. You are one of the kind that does.”

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  CHAPTER XI

  IF MANY THINGS HAD HAPPENED to Clara Butterworth in the three years since that day when John May so rudely tripped her first hesitating girlish attempt to run out to life, things had also happened to the people she had left behind in Bidwell. In so short a space of time her father, his business associate Steve Hunter, Ben Peeler the town carpenter, Joe Wainsworth the harness maker, almost every man and woman in town had become something different in his nature from the man or woman bearing the same name she had known in her girlhood.

  Ben Peeler was forty years old when Clara went to Columbus to school. He was a tall, slender, stoop-shouldered man who worked hard and was much respected by his fellow townsmen. Almost any afternoon he might have been seen going through Main Street, wearing his carpenter’s apron and with a carpenter’s pencil stuck under his cap and balanced on his ear. He went into Oliver Hall’s hardware store and came out with a large package of nails under his arm. A farmer who was thinking of building a new barn stopped him in front of the post-office and for a half hour the two men talked of the project. Ben put on his glasses, took the pencil out of his cap and made some notation on the back of the package of nails. “I’ll do a little figuring; then I’ll talk things over with you,” he said. During the spring, summer and fall Ben had always employed another carpenter and an apprentice, but when Clara came back to town he was employing four gangs of six men each and had two foremen to watch the work and keep it moving, while his son, who in other times would also have been a carpenter, had become a salesman, wore fancy vests and lived in Chicago. Ben was making money and for two years had not driven a nail or held a saw in his hand. He had an office in a frame building beside the New York Central tracks, south of Main Street, and employed a book-keeper and a stenographer. In addition to carpentry he had embarked in another business. Backed by Gordon Hart, he had become a lumber dealer and bought and sold lumber under the firm name of Peeler and Hart. Almost every day cars of lumber were unloaded and stacked under sheds in the yard back of his office. He was no longer satisfied with his income as a workman but, under the influence of Gordon Hart, demanded also a swinging profit on the building materials. Ben now drove about town in a vehicle called a buckboard and spent the entire day hurrying from job to job. He had no time now to stop for a half hour’s gossip with a prospective builder of a barn, and did not come to loaf in Birdie Spinks’ drug-store at the end of the day. In the evening he went to the lumber office and Gordon Hart came over from the bank. The two men figured on jobs to be built, rows of workingmen’s houses, sheds alongside one of the new factories, large frame houses for the superintendents and other substantial men of the town’s new enterprises. In the old days Ben had been glad to go occasionally into the country on a barn-building job. He had liked the country food, the gossip with the farmer and his men at the noon hour and the drive back and forth to town, mornings and evenings. While he was in the country he managed to make a deal for his winter potatoes, hay for his horse, and perhaps a barrel of cider to drink on winter evenings. Now he had no time to think of such things. When a farmer came to see him he shook his head. “Get some one else to figure on your job,” he advised. “You’ll save money by getting a barn-building carpenter. I can’t bother. I have t
oo many houses to build.” Ben and Gordon sometimes worked in the lumber office until midnight. On warm still nights the sweet smell of new-cut boards filled the air of the yard and crept in through the open windows, but the two men, intent on their figures, did not notice. In the early evening one or two teams came back to the yard to finish hauling lumber to a job where the men were to work on the next day. The voices of the men, talking and singing as they loaded their wagons, broke the silence. Later the wagons loaded high with boards went creaking away. When the two men grew tired and sleepy, they locked the office and walked through the yard to the driveway that led to a residence street. Ben was nervous and irritable. One evening they found three men, sleeping on a pile of boards in the yard, and drove them out. It gave both men something to think about. Gordon Hart went home and before he slept made up his mind that he would not let another day go by without getting the lumber in the yard more heavily insured. Ben had not handled affairs long enough to come quickly to so sensible a decision. All night he rolled and tumbled about in his bed. “Some tramp with his pipe will set the place afire,” he thought. “I’ll lose all the money I’ve made.” For a long time he did not think of the simple expedient of hiring a watchman to drive sleepy and penniless wanderers away, and charging enough more for his lumber to cover the additional expense. He got out of bed and dressed, thinking he would get his shotgun out of the barn and go back to the yard and spend the night. Then he undressed and got into bed again. “I can’t work all day and spend my nights down there,” he thought resentfully. When at last he slept, he dreamed of sitting in the lumber yard in the darkness with the gun in his hand. A man came toward him and he discharged the gun and killed the man. With the inconsistency common to the physical aspect of dreams, the darkness passed away and it was daylight. The man he had thought dead was not quite dead. Although the whole side of his head was torn away, he still breathed. His mouth opened and closed convulsively. A dreadful illness took possession of the carpenter. He had an elder brother who had died when he was a boy, but the face of the man on the ground was the face of his brother. Ben sat up in bed and shouted. “Help, for God’s sake, help! It’s my own brother. Don’t you see, it is Harry Peeler?” he cried. His wife awoke and shook him. “What’s the matter, Ben,” she asked anxiously. “What’s the matter?” “It was a dream,” he said, and let his head drop wearily on the pillow. His wife went to sleep again, but he stayed awake the rest of the night. When on the next morning Gordon Hart suggested the insurance idea, he was delighted. “That settles it of course,” he said to himself. “It’s simple enough, you see. That settles everything.”

  In his shop on Main Street Joe Wainsworth had plenty to do after the boom came to Bidwell. Many teams were employed in the hauling of building materials; loads of paving brick were being carted from cars to where they were to be laid on Main Street; and teams hauled earth from where the new Main Street sewer was being dug and from the freshly dug cellars of houses. Never had there been so many teams employed and so much repairing of harness to do. Joe’s apprentice had left him, had been carried off by the rush of young men to the places where the boom had arrived earlier. For a year Joe had worked alone and had then employed a journeyman harness maker who had drifted into town drunk and who got drunk every Saturday evening. The new man was an odd character. He had a faculty for making money, but seemed to care little about making it for himself. Within a week after he came to town he knew every one in Bidwell. His name was Jim Gibson and he had no sooner come to work for Joe than a contest arose between them. The contest concerned the question of who was to run the shop. For a time Joe asserted himself. He growled at the men who brought harness in to be repaired, and refused to make promises as to when the work would be done. Several jobs were taken away and sent to nearby towns. Then Jim Gibson asserted himself. When one of the teamsters who had come to town with the boom came with a heavy work harness on his shoulder, he went to meet him. The harness was thrown with a rattling crash on the floor and Jim examined it. “Oh, the devil, that’s an easy job,” he declared. “We’ll fix that up in a jiffy. You can have it to-morrow afternoon if you want it.”

  For a time Jim made it a practice to come to where Joe stood at work at his bench and consult with him regarding prices to be charged for work. Then he returned to the customer and charged more than Joe had suggested. After a few weeks he slopped consulting Joe at all. “You’re no good,” he exclaimed, laughing. “What you’re doing in business I don’t know.” The old harness maker stared at him for a minute and then went to his bench and to work. “Business,” he muttered, “what do I know about business? I’m a harness maker, I am.”

  After Jim came to work for him, Joe made in one year almost twice the amount he had lost in the failure of the plant-setting machine factory. The money was not invested in stock of any factory but lay in the bank. Still he was not happy. All day Jim Gibson, whom Joe had never dared tell the tales of his triumph as a workman and to whom he did not brag as he had formerly done to his apprentices, talked of his ability to get the best of customers. He had, he declared, managed, in the last place he had worked before he came to Bidwell, to sell a good many sets of harness as handmade that were in reality made in a factory. “It isn’t like the old times,” he said, “things are changing. We used to sell harness only to farmers or to teamsters right in our towns who owned their own horses. We always knew the men we did business with and always would know them. Now it’s different. The men now, you see, who are here in this town to work—well, next month or next year they’ll be somewhere else. All they care about you and me is how much work they can get for a dollar. Of course they talk big about honesty and all that stuff, but that’s only their guff. They think maybe we’ll fall for it and they’ll get more for the money they pay out. That’s what they’re up to.”

  Jim tried hard to make his version of how the shop should be run clear to his employer. Every day he talked for hours regarding the matter. He tried to get Joe to put in a stock of factory-made harness and when he was unsuccessful was angry. “O the devil,” he cried. “Can’t you understand what you’re up against? The factories are bound to win. For why? Look here, there can’t any one but some old moss-back who has worked around horses all his life tell the difference between hand- and machine-sewed harness. The machine-made can be sold cheaper. It looks all right and the factories are able to put on a lot of do-dads. That catches the young fellows. It’s good business. Quick sales and profits, that’s the story.” Jim laughed and then said something that made the shivers run up and down Joe’s back. “If I had the money and was steady I’d start a shop in this town and show you up,” he said. “I’d pretty near run you out. The trouble with me is I wouldn’t stick to business if I had the money. I tried it once and made money; then when I got a little ahead I shut up the shop and went on a big drunk. I was no good for a month. When I work for some one else I’m all right. I get drunk on Saturdays and that satisfies me. I like to work and scheme for money, but it ain’t any good to me when I get it and never will be. What I want you to do here is to shut your eyes and give me a chance. That’s all I ask. Just shut your eyes and give me a chance.”

  All day Joe sat astride his harness maker’s horse, and when he was not at work, stared out through a dirty window into an alleyway and tried to understand Jim’s idea of what a harness maker’s attitude should be toward his customers, now that new times had come. He felt very old. Although Jim was as old in years lived as himself, he seemed very young. He began to be a little afraid of the man. He could not understand why the money, nearly twenty-five hundred dollars he had put in the bank during the two years Jim had been with him, seemed so unimportant and the twelve hundred dollars he had earned slowly after twenty years of work seemed so important. As there was much repair work always waiting to be done in the shop, he did not go home to lunch, but every day carried a few sandwiches to the shop in his pocket. At the noon hour, when Jim had gone to his boarding-house, he was alone, and if no one ca
me in, he was happy. It seemed to him the best time of the day. Every few minutes he went to the front door to look out. The quiet Main Street, on which his shop had faced since he was a young man just come home from his trade adventures, and which had always been such a sleepy place at the noon hour in the summer, was now like a battle-field from which an army had retreated. A great gash had been cut in the street where the new sewer was to be laid. Swarms of workingmen, most of them strangers, had come into Main Street from the factories by the railroad tracks. They stood in groups in lower Main Street by Wymer’s tobacco store. Some of them had gone into Ben Head’s saloon for a glass of beer and came out wiping their mustaches. The men who were digging the sewer, foreign men, Italians he had heard, sat on the banks of dry earth in the middle of the street. Their dinner pails were held between their legs and as they ate they talked in a strange language. He remembered the day he had come to Bidwell with his bride, the girl he had met on his trade journey and who had waited for him until he had mastered his trade and had a shop of his own. He had gone to New York State to get her and had arrived back in Bidwell at noon on just such another summer day. There had not been many people about, but every one had known him. On that day every one had been his friend. Birdie Spinks rushed out of his drug store and had insisted that he and his bride go home to dinner with him. Every one had wanted them to come to his house for dinner. It had been a happy, joyous time.

  The harness maker had always been sorry his wife had borne him no children. He had said nothing and had always pretended he did not want them and now, at last, he was glad they had not come. He went back to his bench and to work, hoping Jim would be late in getting back from lunch. The shop was very quiet after the activity of the street that had so bewildered him. It was, he thought, like a retreat, almost like a church when you went to the door and looked in on a week day. He had done that once and had liked the empty silent church better than he did a church with a preacher and a lot of people in it. He had told his wife about the matter. “It was like the shop in the evening when I’ve got a job of work done and the boy has gone home,” he had said.