Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 9

  Rousing himself, he went into the house. A neighbour woman, employed for the purpose, had prepared the evening meal and now began complaining of his lateness, saying that the food had got cold.

  Sam ate in silence. While he ate the woman went out of the house and presently returned, bringing a daughter.

  There was in Caxton a code that would not allow a woman to be alone in a house with a man. Sam wondered if the bringing of the daughter was an attempt on the part of the woman to abide by the letter of the code, if she thought of the sick woman in the house as one already gone. The thought amused and saddened him.

  “You would have thought her safe,” he mused. She was fifty, small, nervous and worn and wore a set of ill-fitting false teeth that rattled as she talked. When she did not talk she rattled them with her tongue because of nervousness.

  In at the kitchen door came Windy, far gone in drink. He stood by the door holding to the knob with his hand and trying to get control of himself.

  “My wife — my wife is dying. She may die any day,” he wailed, tears standing in his eyes.

  The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed had been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with anger and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and began sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped and Sam could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as the man turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels rose a voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had begun to rain.

  “He has got into the wrong street,” thought the boy stupidly.

  Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother’s ironing board stood against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering in Sam’s heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of his father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate’s wedding, when Windy had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and the mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house, sick with humiliation.

  The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy’s anger. Sam began thinking again of his mother’s life.

  The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now seemed utterly fruitless. “I would like to repay him,” he thought, shaken with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him. The cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages on the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol of the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he turned his face and stared at the wall.

  He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith’s house. Freedom had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just as to-night he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and just as Sam was shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the stable door had come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy girl of fourteen with the strength of a man and an inclination to burst out of her clothes at unexpected places, they had come charging into the stables to carry Sam off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them on, his voice roaring in the stable so that the horses jumped about in their stalls. Into the house they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of four, sitting astride his back and beating on his head with a woollen cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern and giving an occasional helpful push with his hand.

  A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of the big dining room in Freedom’s house came back into the mind of the boy now sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted, badly-cooked food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great dishes heaped with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had always been just enough food for the single meal. The thing was nicely calculated, when you had finished the table was bare.

  How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the tomboy girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of the boy.

  “My mother never knew anything like that,” he thought.

  The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking loudly — some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he talked of the cost of school books.

  “They change the books in the school too often,” he declared in a loud voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an audience. “It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I will not stand it.”

  Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a message upon it.

  “Be silent,” he wrote. “If you say another word or make another sound to disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the street.”

  Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a fork taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under the lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a desire to spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had brought his mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking at her very death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared about the kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.

  Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his pocket.

  “A dog is dead, eh?” he shouted. “Well you’re getting too big and smart, lad. What do I care for a dead dog?”

  Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.

  “I must not kill,” he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a stranger. “I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill.”

  In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise, struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at him and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a start that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly it stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had become.

  “I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with so little extra pressure,” he thought.

  The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon of drunken carousing.

  “If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it looks now all the days of my life,” thought the boy.

  In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and went carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down upon him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind, shaking loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it against his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before the house he stopped and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into the road. Then turning he went, bareheaded, through the gate and up the street.

  “I will go for Mary Underwood,” he thought, his mind returning to the friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer’s tirades against all women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his bare head.

  “We need a woman in our house,” he kept saying over and over to himself. “We need a woman in our house.”


  CHAPTER VII

  LEANING AGAINST THE wall under the veranda of Mary Underwood’s house, Sam tried to get in his mind a remembrance of what had brought him there. He had walked bareheaded through Main Street and out along a country road. Twice he had fallen, covering his clothes with mud. He had forgotten the purpose of his walk and had tramped on and on. The unexpected and terrible hatred of his father that had come upon him in the tense silence of the kitchen had so paralysed his brain that he now felt light-headed and wonderfully happy and carefree.

  “I have been doing something,” he thought; “I wonder what it is.”

  The house faced a grove of pine trees and was reached by climbing a little rise and following a winding road out beyond the graveyard and the last of the village lights. The wild spring rain pounded and rattled on the tin roof overhead, and Sam, his back closely pressed against the front of the house, fought to regain control of his mind.

  For an hour he stood there staring into the darkness and watched with delight the progress of the storm. He had — an inheritance from his mother — a love of thunderstorms. He remembered a night when he was a boy and his mother had got out of bed and gone here and there through the house singing. She had sung softly so that the sleeping father did not hear, and in his bed upstairs Sam had lain awake listening to the noises — the rain on the roof, the occasional crash of thunder, the snoring of Windy, and the unusual and, he thought, beautiful sound of the mother singing in the storm.

  Now, lifting up his head, he looked about with delight. Trees in the grove in front of him bent and tossed in the wind. The inky blackness of the night was relieved by the flickering oil lamp in the road beyond the graveyard and, in the distance, by the lights streaming out at the windows of the houses. The light coming out of the house against which he stood made a little cylinder of brightness among the pine trees through which the raindrops fell gleaming and sparkling. An occasional flash of lightning lit up the trees and the winding road, and the cannonry of the skies rolled and echoed overhead. A kind of wild song sang in Sam’s heart.

  “I wish it would last all night,” he thought, his mind fixed on the singing of his mother in the dark house when he was a boy.

  The door opened and a woman stepped out upon the veranda and stood before him facing the storm, the wind tossing the soft kimono in which she was clad and the rain wetting her face. Under the tin roof, the air was filled with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted her head and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her fine contralto voice rising above the rattle of the rain on the roof and going on uninterrupted by the crash of the thunder. She sang of a lover riding through the storm to his mistress. One refrain persisted in the song —

  “He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,”

  sang the woman, putting her hand upon the railing of the little porch and leaning forward into the storm.

  Sam was amazed. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, who had been his friend when he was a boy in school and toward whom his mind had turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman standing singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother singing on the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on, seeing pictures as he used to see them when a boy walking under the stars and listening to the talk of John Telfer. He saw a broad-shouldered man shouting defiance to the storm as he rode down a mountain path.

  “And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet cloak,” went on the voice of the singer.

  Mary Underwood’s singing there in the rain made her seem near and likeable as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.

  “John Telfer was wrong about her,” he thought.

  She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down across her cheeks. A flash of lightning cut the darkness, illuminating the spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud upon his clothes and the bewildered look upon his face. A sharp exclamation of surprise broke from her lips:

  “Hello, Sam! What are you doing here? You had better get in out of the rain.”

  “I like it here,” replied Sam, lifting his head and looking past her at the storm.

  Walking to the door and standing with her hand upon the knob, Mary looked into the darkness.

  “You have been a long time coming to see me,” she said, “come in.”

  Within the house, with the door closed, the rattle of the rain on the veranda roof sank to a subdued, quiet drumming. Piles of books lay upon a table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the shelves along the walls. On a table burned a student’s lamp and in the corners of the room lay heavy shadows.

  Sam stood by the wall near the door looking about with half-seeing eyes.

  Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and who now returned clad in a long cloak, looked at him with quick curiosity, and began moving about the room picking up odds and ends of woman’s clothing scattered on the chairs. Kneeling, she lighted a fire under some sticks piled in an open grate at the side of the room.

  “It was the storm made me want to sing,” she said self-consciously, and then briskly, “we shall have to be drying you out; you have fallen in the road and got yourself covered with mud.”

  From being morose and silent Sam became talkative. An idea had come into his mind.

  “I have come here courting,” he thought; “I have come to ask Mary Underwood to be my wife and live in my house.”

  The woman, kneeling by the blazing sticks, made a picture that aroused something that had been sleeping in him. The heavy cloak she wore, falling away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by the kimono, wet and clinging to them. The slender, youthful figure, the soft grey hair and the serious little face, lit by the burning sticks caused a jumping of his heart.

  “We are needing a woman in our house,” he said heavily, repeating the words that had been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept streets and along the mud-covered roads. “We are needing a woman in our house, and I have come to take you there.

  “I intend to marry you,” he added, lurching across the room and grasping her roughly by the shoulders. “Why not? I am needing a woman.”

  Mary Underwood was dismayed and frightened by the face looking down at her, and by the strong hands clenched upon her shoulders. In his youth she had conceived a kind of maternal passion for the newsboy and had planned a future for him. Her plans if followed would have made him a scholar, a man living his life among books and ideas. Instead, he had chosen to live his life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about the country like Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen him driving at evening through the street to Freedom’s house, going in and out of Wildman’s, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim way she knew that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from the things of which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John Telfer, the talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had come back to her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of the road, and talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother, of marriage and of coming to live with him in his house. She stood, chilled, looking into the eager, strong face and the eyes with the pained, dazed look in them.

  Under her gaze, something of the old feeling of the boy came back to Sam, and he began vaguely trying to tell her of it.

  “It was not the talk of Telfer drove me from you,” he began, “it was because you talked so much of the schools and of books. I was tired of them. I could not go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks and looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to get out of there and into the streets myself.”

  Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and stared into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from his trousers legs. His mind, still working
beyond his control, began to reconstruct an old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer’s, that had years before come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and Telfer had made of the ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central figure, a stoop-shouldered, feeble old man stumbling along the street, muttering to himself and poking in a gutter with a stick. The picture was a caricature of puttering old Frank Huntley, superintendent of the Caxton schools.

  Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood’s house, become, for the moment, a boy, facing a boy’s problems, Sam did not want to be such a man. He wanted only that in scholarship which would help him to be the kind of man he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of the world and making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get expressed when he was a boy and her friend, coming again into his mind, he felt that he must here and now make it plain to Mary Underwood that the schools were not giving him what he wanted. His brain worked on the problem of how to tell her about it.

  Turning, he looked at her and said earnestly: “I am going to quit the schools. It is not your fault, but I am going to quit just the same.”

  Mary, who had been looking down at the great mud-covered figure in the chair began to understand. A light came into her eyes. Going to the door opening into a stairway leading to sleeping rooms above, she called sharply, “Auntie, come down here at once. There is a sick man here.”

  A startled, trembling voice answered from above, “Who is it?”

  Mary Underwood did not answer. She came back to Sam and, putting her hand gently on his shoulder, said, “It is your mother and you are only a sick, half-crazed boy after all. Is she dead? Tell me about it.”

  Sam shook his head. “She is still there in the bed, coughing.” He roused himself and stood up. “I have just killed my father,” he announced. “I choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in front of the house. He made horrible noises in the kitchen and mother was tired and wanted to sleep.”