Sherwood Anderson

“ And then there was the notion, that if one tried to think with the mind without taking the body into account, one got all balled-up. True conscious life built itself up like a pyramid. First the body and mind of a beloved one must come into one’s thinking and feeling and then, in some mystic way, the bodies and minds of all the other people in the world must come in, must come sweeping in like a great wind—or something of the sort.
Is all this a little tangled up to you, who read my story of Wilson? It may not be. ”

“ Dashing into the barn I went to lean against the feedbox of a stall, where an old farm-horse was eating hay. The warm day outside had suddenly seemed cold and chill but in the barn it was warm again. Oh, what a lovely thing to a boy is a barn, with the rich warm comforting smell of the cured hay and the animal life, lying like a soft bed over it all. ”

“ There was always plenty of time for thinking things out—in the late afternoons as she helped her mother with the housework and in the long winter evenings when she went to bed early and for a long time did not go to sleep. The old man in the store had admired her quick brain—for that he had forgiven her being an Edgley, one of the cattle. Her thoughts went round and round in circles. Even as a child she had always felt shut in, walled in from life. She struggled to escape out of herself, out into life. ”

“ It was early summer and May sat talking with Maud Welliver by a tree in the field back of the Edgley’s kitchen door—building steadily her tower of romance. Two or three times each week, since that first talk by the blacksmith shop, Maud had managed to get to the Edgley house unobserved by her aunt. In her passionate devotion to the little dark-skinned woman, who had lived through so many and such romantic adventures in life, she was ready to risk anything, even to the wrath of her father’s iron-jawed housekeeper. ”

“ The new fear that swept in upon her comprehended something more than the grotesque masses of tree roots, that now appeared to dance madly in the moonlight, something more than Sid Gould, Cal Mosher and Jerome Hadley—that had become a fear of life itself, of all she had ever known of life, all she had ever been permitted to see of life—that fear was now heavy upon her. ”

“ I’m only an old fool after all. Don’t pay too much attention to me. I guess Kate and I haven’t set you such a good example,” she said softly.
Lillian sat on the edge of the porch and put her hand on May’s knee and when she felt the trembling of the younger woman’s body a sharp mother feeling awakened within her. “I say, kid,” she began again, “a girl gets notions into her head. I’ve had them myself. A girl thinks she’ll find a man that’s all right. She kinda dreams of a man that doesn’t exist. She wants to be good and at the same time she wants to be something else. ”

“ As the threshing crew went about, over the roads and through the villages from farm to farm, women and young girls looked at the young man and smiled. Sometimes as he came from the fields to a farmer’s barn, with a load of wheat in bags on his wagon, the daughter of the farmer stepped out of the farm house and stood looking at him. Tom looked at the woman and hunger crept into his heart and, in the evenings while the thresherman and his sons sat on the ground by the barns and talked of their affairs, he walked nervously about. ”

“ For her May Edgley’s tales had become golden apples of existence, to taste which she would risk anything. “What a person!” she thought as she crept forward in the darkness, lifting and putting down her feet on the grass like a kitten compelled to walk in water. She thought of May Edgley’s adventure in the 85wood with Jerome Hadley. How stupid her father had been, how stupid everyone in the town of Bidwell! “It must be so with men and women everywhere,” she thought vaguely. “They go on thinking they know what’s happening, and they know nothing.” ”

“ It was not true, as Lillian had said, that her mother had counted on her. It was because of death that she was silent, when Lillian and then Kate went on the turf. The dead did not care! The dead are dead!
May wondered if she herself had passed out of life, if she had died. “It may be,” she thought, “I may never have lived and my thinking I was alive may only have been a trick of mind.”
“I’m smart,” May thought. Lillian had said that, her brothers had said it, the whole town had said it. How she hated her own smartness. ”

“ May ran like a frightened rabbit along the beach, stopping occasionally to listen. From the dance hall came an uproar and oaths and cries broke the silence of the night. At her heels two men ran, lumbering along slowly. The drink within had taken effect and one of them fell. As she ran May came presently into the place of huge stumps and logs, thrown up by the storms of winter, and saw Maud Welliver standing at the edge of the water with the grocer Hunt—who had his arm about Maud’s waist. ”

“ There must be a great noise and bustle, the firing of cannons, the roll of drums, the shouting of many words. The spirit within must be killed. “What liars people are,” May thought breathlessly. It seemed to her that all the people of her town stood before her, were in a way being judged by her, and her own lie, told to defeat a universal lie, now seemed a small, a white innocent thing. ”

“ The man with whom she was to spend the evening waited until darkness had come and then, hiring a horse at a livery stable, drove to an appointed place. Side curtains were put on the buggy and the pair set forth into the darkness and loneliness of country roads. As the evening advanced and the more ardent mood of the occasion passed, a sudden sense of freedom swept over the man. “It is better not to fool around with a young girl or with some other man’s wife. With Lillian one does not get found out and get into trouble,” he thought. ”

“ Tom talked always on two subjects, writing and race horses, but mostly about race horses. The quiet sounds about the race tracks and the smells of horses, and the things that go with horses, seemed to get him all excited. “Oh, hell, Herman Dudley,” he would burst out suddenly, “don’t go talking to me. I know what I think. I’ve been around more than you have and I’ve seen a world of people. There isn’t any man or woman, not even a fellow’s own mother, as fine as a horse, that is to say a thoroughbred horse.” ”

“ On another street, in another house a woman was doing housework, just as she had been doing—making beds, washing dishes, cooking food. The woman had just passed from one room of her house to another and a door had shut with a bang. “Well,” May thought, “she is a human being, she feels things as I do, she thinks, eats food, sleeps, dreams, walks about her house.”
It didn’t matter who the woman was. Being or not being an Edgley made no difference. Any woman would do for the purposes of May’s thoughts. All people who lived, lived! Men walked about too, and had thoughts, young girls laughed. ”

“ For the first time Tom’s body burned with eager desire for a female. He lay where he could see out through a crack, in the side of the barn, and at first his thoughts were all about animals. He had brought a horse blanket up from the stable below and crawling under it lay on his side with his eyes close to the crack and thought about the love-making of horses and cattle. Things he had seen in the stables when he worked for Whitehead, the racing man, came back to his mind and a queer animal hunger ran through him so that his legs stiffened. ”

“ On the streets of the neighboring towns of Clyde, Norwalk, Fremont, Tiffin, and even in Toledo and Cleveland, she was well known. On summer evenings she went up and down our main street wearing a huge hat with a white ostrich feather that fell down almost to her shoulder. She, like her sister Kate, who never succeeded in attaining to a position of prominence in the town’s life, was a blonde with cold staring blue eyes. On almost any Friday evening she might have been seen setting forth on some adventure, from which she did not return until the following Monday or Tuesday. ”

“ It was more like the feeling you get maybe from a horse, only his eyes weren’t like a horse’s eyes. Horses’ eyes have a kind of calm something in them and his hadn’t. If you’ve ever carried a lantern through a wood at night, going along a path, and then suddenly you felt something funny in the air and stopped, and there ahead of you somewhere were the eyes of some little animal, gleaming out at you from a dead wall of darkness—The eyes shine big and quiet but there is a point right in the centre of each, where there is something dancing and wavering. ”

“ Lillian had said, “men are no good,” and it was clear Lillian had also killed the thing within herself, had let it be killed. She had let some Jerome Hadley kill it, and then she had grown slowly and steadily more and more angry at life, had come to hate life, had thrown it away. And the thing had happened to her mother, too. That was the reason for her life of silence—death walking about. “The dead rise up to strike the dead.”
The story May had told to Maud Welliver was not a lie—it was the living truth. ”

“ Once an old man had met her on the sidewalk in front of one of the stores and taking her by the hand had led her inside and had bought her a bag of candy. The man was a merchant in Bidwell and had a daughter who was a teacher in the schools, but May had never seen him before, had heard nothing of him, knew nothing about him. He came up to her out of nothingness, out of the stream of life. He had heard about May, of her quick active mind, that always defeated the other children in the school room, that in every test came out ahead. ”

“ Ed is now a man of nearly forty and on that night his mind ran back to his young manhood in the city,—and stayed there. Like other boys who had become grown men in Chicago, he had come to the city from a farm at the edge of a prairie town, and like all such town and farm boys, he had come filled with vague dreams. ”

“ The town was delighted and clerks ran from store to store making comments, they longed to repeat within hearing of one of the brothers. “Have you seen the Edgley boys?” they asked one another. “They got what was coming to them. Ed Pesch gave them what for.” The more excitable and imaginative of the clerks spoke of the fight in the darkness as though they had been on hand and had seen every blow struck. “They are bullies and can be beaten by any man who stands up for his rights,” declared Walter Wills, a slender, nervous young man who worked for Albert Twist, the grocer. ”

“ For just a moment his mouth opened and closed queerly, like the mouth of a fish, when you take it out of the water and hold it in your hand.
When he returned to the house at supper time things were better. He had left his bundle on a chair in the kitchen and Kate had wrapped it more carefully, and had put in a number of things he had forgotten. His father called him into the front room. “It’s all right, Will. Every young fellow ought to take a whirl out in the world. I did it myself, at about your age,” Tom had said, a little pompously. ”

“ Her body was strong and wiry. All the Edgleys, even Ma Edgley, had been strong. They were all, except May, large people and in her the family strength seemed to have concentrated. She was never physically weary and after the time of her intensive thinking began, and when she often slept little at night her body seemed to grow constantly stronger. Her breasts grew larger and her figure changed slightly. It grew less boyish. She was becoming a woman.
After the telling of the lie, May’s body became for a time no more than a tree growing in a forest through which she walked. ”

“ She thought of the long ride to the shore of Sandusky Bay. Maud had conveyed to her some notion of what the trip meant to her. May’s mind raced. “I could not be alone with a man. I wouldn’t dare,” she thought. Maud had said they would go in a surrey and there was something, that could be used now, in the story she had told about the prince. She could insist that, because of the prince, Maud was not to leave her alone with another man, with the strange grocer, not for a moment.
May arose and stood irresolutely by the front door of the Edgley house and watched Maud go through the gate. ”

“ The woman once told me the story of that afternoon in the big, ugly grey building, with Dreiser, looking heavy and lumpy and old, sitting on a platform, folding and refolding his pocket-handkerchief xiiand watching the children—all in their little uniforms, trooping in.
“The tears ran down his cheeks and he shook his head,” the woman said, and that is a real picture of Theodore Dreiser. He is old in spirit and he does not know what to do with life, so he tells about it as he sees it, simply and honestly. ”

“ But in the fields, with all the older women about—to have thought anything at all of a young man and a girl working together and blushing and laughing, would have been to misunderstand the whole spirit of the berry picking season.
And it was evident May had misunderstood. Later no one blamed Jerome, at least none of the young fellows did. As the pickers ate lunch May sat a little apart from the others. That was her custom and Jerry lay in the long grass at the edge of the orchard also a little apart. A sudden tenseness crept into the groups under the trees. ”

“ Bow your heads down to the ground. Kick your heels and let her fly. The night is fine and the moon’s on high,” he sang.
In a corner of the big room with her escort, the grocer, from the town of Muncie in Indiana, sat May Edgley. He was a rather heavy and fleshy man of forty-five, whose wife had died during the year before, and for the first time since that event he was with a woman and the thought had excited him. There was a round bald spot on the top of his head and blushes kept running up his cheeks, into his hair and out upon the bald spot, like waves upon a beach. ”