# Children Vs. Wizards

Олег Павлович Рыбаченко

Now the children's special forces are fighting an army of orcs and Chinese. Evil wizards are trying to seize the Far East. But Oleg and Margarita and the other young warriors fight and defend the USSR!

CHILDREN VS. WIZARDS

ANNOTATION

Now the children's special forces are fighting an army of orcs and Chinese. Evil wizards are trying to seize the Far East. But Oleg and Margarita and the other young warriors fight and defend the USSR!

PROLOGUE

The Chinese are attacking alongside hordes of orcs. Regiments stretch out to the horizon. Troops on some kind of mechanical steeds, tanks, and fanged bears are also moving.

But ahead lies the invincible children's space special forces.

Oleg and Margarita aim the gravity gun. Both the boy and the girl brace themselves with their bare, childish feet. Oleg presses the button. A hypergravity beam of enormous, deadly force is emitted. And thousands of Chinese and orcs are instantly flattened, as if a steamroller had rolled over them. The ugly bears that the orcs so resembled spurted reddish-brown blood. That was lethal pressure.

Oleg, who looked like a boy of about twelve, sang:

My beloved country Russia,

Silver snowdrift and golden fields...

My bride will look more beautiful in it,

We will make the whole world happy!


Wars roar like hellish fires,

The fluff of flowering poplars is in disgrace!

The conflict burns with cannibalistic heat,

The fascist megaphone roars: kill them all!


The evil Wehrmacht broke through to the Moscow region,

The monster made the city burn...

The kingdom of the underworld came to Earth,

Satan himself brought an army to the Fatherland!


The mother is crying - her son was torn to pieces,

The hero is killed - having gained immortality!

Such a chain is a heavy burden,

When a hero became weak as a child!


The houses are charred - the widows are shedding tears,

The crows flocked to grab the corpses...

Barefoot, in rags - the maidens are all new,

The bandit takes everything that is not his!


Lord Savior - the lips call,

Come quickly to sinful Earth!

Let Tartarus turn into a sweet paradise,

And the pawn will find its way to the queen!


The time will come when evil will not last forever,

The Soviet bayonet will pierce the Nazi snake!

Know that if our goals are humane,

We will cut down the Hades-Wehrmacht at the root!


We will enter Berlin to the sound of the drum,

The Reichstag under the scarlet red flag!

For the holiday we will eat a bunch or two of bananas,

After all, they didn"t know kalach during the entire war!


Will children understand the harsh military labor,

What did we fight for? That is the question.

A good world will come - know that a new one will come soon,

The Most High God - Christ - will resurrect everyone!

And the kids were firing, and others were shooting. Alisa and Arkasha, in particular, were firing hyper blasters. Pashka and Mashka were firing, and Vova and Natasha were shooting. It was truly a colossal impact.

Having killed a couple hundred thousand Chinese and orcs, the children took off using ultragravity belts and teleported to another part of the front. Where Mao's countless hordes were marching. There were already many Chinese, and with the orcs, there were even more. Hundreds of millions of soldiers were descending on the USSR like an avalanche. But the children showed their true potential. These were truly superfighters.

And Svetlana and Petka-a boy and girl from the children's special forces-also fire hyperlasers at the horde, and throw gifts of annihilation with their bare toes. Now that's a deadly effect. And no one can hold back the child special forces.

Valka and Sashka are also attacking the Orcs. They use destructive cosmic and laser beams. And they hit the Orcs and Chinese with deadly force.

Fedka and Anzhelika are also in battle. And the child warriors are ejected with hyperplasma from the hyperplasma launcher. Like a giant whale spewing a fiery fountain. It's truly a conflagration, engulfing all positions of the Celestial Empire.

And the tanks are literally melting.

Lara and Maximka, also brave children, use non-commissioned laser weapons that produce a freezing effect. They turn orcs and Chinese into blocks of ice. And the children themselves slap their bare toes, and how they stab with pulsars. And they sing:

How the world can change overnight,

God the Holy Creator throws the dice...

Caliph, sometimes you are cool for an hour,

Then you become an empty traitor to yourself!


War does this to people,

The big shot is also burning in the fire!

And I want to tell trouble - go away,

You are like a barefoot boy in this world!


But he swore allegiance to his homeland,

I swore to her in our twenty-first century!

To keep the Fatherland - as strong as metal,

After all, strength of spirit is in a wise man!


You found yourself in a world where the evil hordes are legion,

The fascists are rushing madly and furiously...

And in the wife"s thoughts there is a peony in her hands,

And I want to hug my wife sweetly!


But we must fight - this is our choice,

We must not show that we were cowards in battle!

Go into a frenzy like a Scandinavian demon,

Let the Fuhrer lose his antennae in fear!


There is no word - know brothers, retreat,

We made a bold choice to go forward!

Such an army stood up for the Fatherland,

What have the snow-white swans become in scarlet!


The Fatherland - we will preserve it,

Let's push the fierce Fritz back to Berlin!

A cherub flies away from Jesus,

When the lamb became the cool Malyuta!


We broke the Fritz's horn near Moscow,

Even stronger, the Battle of Stalingrad!

Although the harsh fate is merciless to us,

But there will be a reward - know it's royal!


You are the master of your own destiny,

Courage, valor - will make a man!

Yes, the choice is multifaceted, but all is one -

You can't drown things in empty talk!

This is how the child terminators from the space special forces sang. A battalion of boys and girls was distributed along the front lines. And the systematic extermination of the Chinese and orcs began with the help of various space and nanoweapons.

Oleg, while firing, noted:

-The USSR is a great country!

Margarita Magnetic, releasing pulsars with her bare toes, agreed with this:

- Yes, great, and not only in military power, but also in moral qualities!

Meanwhile, older girls, who had also previously served in the children's special forces, entered the battle, but now they were not girls, but young women.

Very beautiful Soviet girls climbed into a flamethrower tank. They were wearing nothing but bikinis.

Elizabeth pressed the joystick button with her bare toes, released a stream of fire at the Chinese, burning them alive, and sang:

- Glory to the world of communism!

Elena also struck the enemy with her bare foot, released a stream of fire and yelped:

- For the victories of our Motherland!

And the Chinese are burning hard. And getting charred.

Ekaterina also fired from the flamethrower tank, this time using her bare heel, and yelped:

- For the higher generations!

And finally, Euphrosyne struck, too. Her bare foot struck with great energy and force.

And again, the Chinese got it real bad. A fiery, searing stream swept over them.

The girls burn patterns and sing, baring their teeth and winking at the same time with their sapphire and emerald eyes:

We wander all over the world,

We don't look at the weather...

And sometimes we spend the night in the mud,

And sometimes we sleep with homeless people!

And after these words the girls burst out laughing. And stuck out their tongues.

And then they will take off their bras.

And Elizabeth again hits the enemy with the help of her scarlet breast nipples, pressing them on the joysticks.

After which it will whistle and the fire from the barrel will completely scorch the Chinese.

The girl cooed:

-Here ahead, helmets flash,

And with my bare chest I tear the taut rope...

No need to howl stupidly - take off your masks!

Elena took hold of her bra and pulled it off, too. She pressed the joystick button with her crimson nipple. And again, a stream of fire erupted, incinerating a mass of Chinese soldiers.

Elena took it and sang:

Maybe we offended someone in vain,

And sometimes the whole world is raging...

Now the smoke is pouring out, the earth is burning,

Where the city of Beijing once stood!

Catherine giggled and sang, baring her teeth and pressing the button with her ruby nipple:

We look like falcons,

We soar like eagles...

We don't drown in water,

We don't burn in fire!

Euphrosyne took and hit the enemy with the help of her strawberry nipple, pressing the joystick button and roared:

- Don't spare them,

Destroy all the bastards...

Like crushing bedbugs,

Beat them like cockroaches!

And the warriors sparkled with pearly teeth. And what do they love most?

Of course, licking the pulsating, jade rods with your tongue. And that's such a pleasure for girls. It's impossible to describe with a pen. They love sex, after all.

And here's Alenka, too, firing at the Chinese with a powerful but light machine gun. And the girl cries:

- We will kill all our enemies at once,

The girl will become a great hero!

And the warrior will take it and with her bare toes hurl a deadly gift of death. And she will tear apart the mass of Chinese troops.

The girl is really cool. Even though she did time in a juvenile detention center. She walked around barefoot there, too, in a prison uniform. She even walked barefoot in the snow, leaving behind graceful, almost childish footprints. And she felt so good about it.

Alenka pressed the bazooka button with her scarlet nipple. She released the devastating gift of death and chirped:

The girl had many roads,

She walked barefoot, not sparing her feet!

Anyuta also pummeled her opponents with immense aggression, and threw peas with devastating effect with her bare toes.

And at the same time, she was firing a machine gun. Which she did quite accurately. And her crimson nipple, as usual, was in action.

Anyuta isn't averse to earning a lot of money on the street. She's a very beautiful and sexy blonde, after all. And her eyes sparkle like cornflowers.

And how nimble and playful her tongue is.

Anyuta started singing, baring her teeth:

The girls are learning to fly,

From the sofa straight to the bed...

From the bed straight to the sideboard,

From the buffet straight to the toilet!

The feisty, red-haired Alla also fights like a tough girl, with a not-at-all-heavy demeanor. And if she gets going, she won't back down. And she starts thrashing her enemies with great abandon.

And with her bare toes, throw gifts of annihilation at her enemies. Now that's a woman.

And when he presses the bazooka button with his scarlet nipple, the result will be something extremely lethal and destructive.

Alla is actually a feisty girl. And her copper-red hair flutters in the wind like a flag over the Aurora. Now that's a girl of the highest order. And she can work wonders with men.

And her bare heel threw the package of explosives. And it exploded with colossal destructive force. Wow, that was amazing!

The girl took it and began to sing:

- Apple trees are in bloom,

I love a man...

And for the beauty,

I'll punch you in the face!

Maria is a girl of rare beauty and fighting spirit, extremely aggressive and beautiful at the same time.

She'd really like to work in a brothel as a night fairy. But instead, she has to fight.

And the girl, with her bare toes, throws a deadly gift of annihilation. And the mass of warriors of the Celestial Empire is torn apart. And totalitarian destruction begins.

And then Maria, with her strawberry nipple, presses the button and a colossal, destructive missile flies out. And it hits the Chinese soldiers, crushing them into a coffin.

Maria took it and began to sing:

We girls are very cool,

We easily beat the Chinese...

And the girls' feet are bare,

Let our enemies be blown up!

Olympiada also fights confidently, firing bursts, mowing down Chinese soldiers. She builds entire mounds of corpses and roars:

- One, two, three - tear apart all the enemies!

And the girl, with her bare toes, throws a gift of death with great, deadly force.

And then her sparkling Kevlar nipples explode like lightning bolts at the Chinese, which is pretty cool. And then the enemies are massacred and incinerated with napalm.

Olympiada took and began to sing:

Kings can do everything, kings can do everything,

And the fate of the whole earth, they sometimes decide...

But whatever you say, whatever you say,

There are only zeros in my head, there are only zeros in my head,

And a very stupid one, that king!

And the girl went and licked the RPG's barrel. And her tongue was so nimble, strong, and flexible.

Alenka giggled and also sang:

You've heard crazy nonsense,

It's not the patient's delirium from a mental hospital...

And the delirium of crazy barefoot girls,

And they sing ditties, laughing!

And the warrior again beats with her bare toes - this is top notch.

And in the air, Albina and Alvina are simply super girls. And their bare toes are so nimble.

The warriors also took off their bras and began to hit their enemies with their scarlet nipples using the joystick buttons.

And Albina took and sang:

- My lips love you very much,

They want chocolate in their mouths...

An invoice was issued - a penalty accrued,

If you love, everything will go smoothly!

And the warrior once again bursts into tears. Her tongue flies out, and the button hits the wall.

Alvina fired at the enemy with her bare toes, hitting the enemies.

And she took out a mass of enemies with a missile with lethal force.

Alvina took it and sang:

What a blue sky,

We are not supporters of robbery...

You don't need a knife to fight a braggart,

You'll sing along with him twice,

And make a mac with it!

The warriors, of course, without bras, look simply amazing. And their nipples, frankly, are so scarlet.

And here's Anastasia Vedmakova in battle. Another top-tier woman, she pummels her opponents with wild fury. And her nipples, sparkling like rubies, press buttons and spit out gifts of death. And they knock out a ton of manpower and equipment.

The girl is also red-haired and cries, baring her teeth:

I am a warrior of light, a warrior of warmth and wind!

And winks with emerald-colored eyes!

Akulina Orlova also sends gifts of death from the sky. And they fly from under the wings of her fighter.

And they cause colossal devastation. And so many Chinese die in the process.

Akulina took it and sang:

- The girl kicks me in the balls,

She is capable of fighting...

We will defeat the Chinese,

Then get drunk in the bushes!

This girl is simply superb barefoot and in a bikini.

No, China is powerless against such girls.

Margarita Magnitnaya is also second to none in combat, demonstrating her class. She fights like Superman. And her feet are so bare and graceful.

The girl had been captured before. And then the executioners smeared her bare soles with rapeseed oil. And they did it very thoroughly and generously.

And then they brought a brazier to the beautiful girl's bare heels. And she was in so much pain.

But Margarita endured courageously, clenching her teeth. Her gaze was so strong-willed and determined.

And she hissed in rage:

- I won't tell! Ugh, I won't tell!

And her heels were burning. And then the torturers smeared her breasts too. And very thickly too.

And then they held a torch to each of their breasts, each holding a rosebud. That was pain.

But even after that, Margarita said nothing and didn't betray anyone. She demonstrated her greatest courage.

She never groaned.

And then she managed to escape. She pretended to want sex. She knocked out the guard and took the keys. She grabbed some more girls and freed the other beauties. And they ran off, flashing their bare feet, their heels covered in blisters from burns.

Margarita Magnitnaya pounded away, using her ruby nipple. She smashed the Chinese car and sang:

Hundreds of adventures and thousands of victories,

And if you need me, I'll give you a blowjob without any questions!

And then three girls press the buttons with their scarlet nipples and fire missiles at the Chinese troops.

And they will roar at the top of their lungs:

- But pasaran! But pasaran!

It will be a shame and disgrace for the enemies!

Oleg Rybachenko is also fighting. He looks like a boy of about twelve, and he hacks at his enemies with swords.

And with each swing they lengthen.

The boy knocks off heads and roars:

- There will be new centuries,

There will be a change of generations...

Is it really forever?

Will Lenin be in the Mausoleum?

And the boy-terminator, with his bare toes, threw the gift of annihilation at the Chinese. And he did it quite deftly.

And so many fighters were torn apart at once.

Oleg is an eternal boy, and he had so many missions, one more challenging than the other.

For example, she helped the first Russian Tsar, Vasily III, take Kazan. And that was a big deal. Thanks to the immortal boy, Kazan fell back in 1506, and this determined Muscovy's advantage. The word "Russia" didn't exist back then.

And then Vasily III became the Grand Duke of Lithuania. What an achievement!

He ruled well. Poland and then the Astrakhan Khanate were conquered.

Of course, not without the help of Oleg Rybachenko, who's a pretty cool guy. Livonia was then captured.

Vasily III reigned long and happily, and managed to make many conquests. He conquered both Sweden and the Sibir Khanate. He also waged war with the Ottoman Empire, which ended in defeat. The Russians even captured Istanbul.

Vasily III lived for seventy years and passed the throne to his son Ivan when he was old enough. And the boyar rebellion was avoided.

Oleg and his team then changed the course of history.

And now the boy-terminator threw a few poisonous needles with his bare toes. And a dozen warriors fell at once.

Other fighters are also fighting.

Here's Gerda, bashing the enemy in a tank. She's no fool either. She just went and bared her breasts.

And with her scarlet nipple she pressed the button. And like a deadly high-explosive shell, it exploded at the Chinese.

And so many of them are scattered and killed.

Gerda took it and sang:

- I was born in the USSR,

And the girl won't have any problems!

Charlotte also hit her opponents and squealed:

- There won't be any problems!

And she hit him with her crimson nipple. And her bare, round heel hit the armor.

Christina noted, baring her teeth and firing at the enemy with her ruby nipple, doing it accurately:

- There are problems, but they can be solved!

Magda also slammed her opponent. She also used the strawberry nipple, and bared her teeth as she said:

We start the computer, the computer,

Even though we can"t solve all the problems!

Not all problems can be solved,

But it will be very cool sir!

And the girl just burst out laughing.

The warriors here are of such a caliber that men go crazy for them. Indeed, what does a politician earn his living with his tongue? A woman does the same, but delivers far more pleasure.

Gerda took it and sang:

Oh, language, language, language,

Give me a blowjob...

Give me a blowjob,

I'm not very old!

Magda corrected her:

- We must sing - eggs for dinner!

And the girls laughed in unison, slapping their bare feet against the armor.

Natasha also took on the Chinese, chopping them down with her swords like cabbage. One swing of her sword and there's a pile of corpses.

The girl took it and with her bare toes threw a gift of annihilation with the deadly force.

She tore apart a mass of Chinese and squealed:

- From wine, from wine,

No headache...

And the one who hurts is the one who hurts,

Who doesn't drink anything!

Zoya, firing at her enemies with a machine gun and hitting them with a grenade launcher by pressing her crimson nipple on their breasts, squealed:

- Wine is famous for its enormous power - it knocks mighty men off their feet!

And the girl took it and launched the gift of death with her bare toes.

Augustina fired at the Chinese with her machine gun, crushing them with frenzy, and the girl released a stream from her ruby nipple and pressed the grenade launcher button. And unleashed a murderous torrent of destruction. And she strangled so many Chinese and cried out:

- I'm a simple barefoot girl, I've never been abroad in my life!

I have a short skirt and a big Russian soul!

Svetlana is also crushing the Chinese. She beats them with aggression as if with chains, screaming:

- Glory to communism!

And the strawberry nipple will pierce the breast like a nail. And the Chinese won't be satisfied.

And the spread from her rocket is so lethal.

Olga and Tamara are also hammering the Chinese. They do it with great energy. And they're hammering the troops with great fervor.

Olga hurled a devastating grenade at the enemy with her bare, graceful foot, so seductive to men. She tore the Chinese apart and chirped, baring her teeth:

- Light the barrels of gasoline like fires,

Naked girls blow up cars...

The era of bright years is approaching,

The guy, however, is not ready for love!

The guy, however, is not ready for love!

Tamara giggled, bared her teeth that sparkled like pearls, and winked, remarking:

-From hundreds of thousands of batteries,

For the tears of our mothers,

The gang from Asia is under fire!

Viola, another bikini-clad girl with red nipples, roars as she shoots her enemies with a fancy gun:

Ata! Oh, have fun, slave class,

Wow! Dance, boy, love the girls!

Atas! Let him remember us today,

Raspberry berry! Atas! Atas! Atas!

Victoria is also firing. She fired a Grad missile, using her scarlet nipple to press the button. Then she howled:

- The light won't go out until the morning,

Barefoot girls sleep with the boys...

The notorious black cat,

Take care of our guys!

Aurora will also hit the Chinese, and with precision and lethal force, and will continue:

-Girls with a soul as naked as a falcon,

Earned medals in battle...

After a peaceful day of work,

Satan will rule everywhere!

And the girl will use her ruby-red, glittering nipple when shooting. And she can also use her tongue.

Nicoletta is also eager to fight. She's an extremely aggressive and angry girl.

And what can't this girl do? She's, let's say, hyper-class. She loves being with three or four men at once.

Nicoletta pounded her breasts with her strawberry nipple, breaking up the advancing Chinese.

She tore a whole dozen of them apart and yelped:

- Lenin is the sun and spring,

Satan will rule the world!

What a girl. And how she throws a murderous gift of annihilation with her bare toes.

This girl is a top-class hero.

Here Valentina and Adala are in battle.

Gorgeous girls. And of course, as befits such women - barefoot and naked, in just their panties.

Valentina fired with her bare toes and squeaked, and at the same time roared:

There was a king named Dularis,

We used to be afraid of him...

The villain deserves torment,

A lesson for all Dularis!

Adala also fired, using a nipple as scarlet as a pink loaf of bread, and cooed:

Be with me, sing a song,

Have fun Coca-Cola!

And the girl just shows off her long, pink tongue. And she's such a tough, feisty warrior.

These are girls - punch them in the balls. Or rather, not girls in the balls, but lustful men.

There's no one cooler than these girls in the world, no one in the world. I have to say it vehemently - one is not enough for them, one is not enough for them!

Here comes another group of girls, eager to fight. They run into battle, stomping their bare, very tanned, and graceful feet. And at their head is Stalenida. Now that's a girl who's truly the real deal.

And now she's holding a flamethrower in her hands, and she presses the button with the strawberry nipple of her full breast. And the flames burst into flames. And they burn with incredible intensity. And they flare up completely.

And the Chinese burn in it like candles.

Stalenida took it and began to sing:

- Knock, knock, knock, my iron caught fire!

And she howls, and then she barks, and then she eats someone. This woman is simply super.

Nothing can stop girls like her, and no one can defeat them.

And the warrior's knees are bare, tanned, and shine like bronze. And frankly, it's charming.

Warrior Monica fires a light machine gun at the Chinese, knocking them out in huge numbers and screaming:

- Glory to the Fatherland, Glory!

Tanks rush forward...

Girls with bare butts,

The people greet with laughter!

Stalenida confirmed, baring her teeth and growling with wild rage:

- If the girls are naked, then the men will definitely be left without pants!

Monica giggled and chirped:

- Captain, captain, smile,

After all, a smile is a present for girls...

Captain, captain, pull yourself together,

Russia will soon have a new president!

Warrior Stella roared, hitting the enemy with her strawberry nipple and piercing the side of the enemy tank, while twisting her bust:

- Falcons, falcons, restless fate,

But why, to be stronger...

Do you need trouble?

Monica chirped, baring her teeth:

- We can do it all - one, two, three,

Let the bullfinches begin to sing!

Warriors are really capable of doing such things, you can sing and roar!

And indeed, the girls thrash the enemy's troops with great relish and enthusiasm. And they're so aggressive that you can't expect any mercy.

Angelica and Alice, of course, are also participating in the extermination of the Chinese army. They have excellent rifles.

Angelina fired a well-aimed shot. And then, with the bare toes of her strong feet, she hurled a lethal, invincible piece of explosive.

He will tear apart a dozen opponents at once.

The girl took it and sang:

- The great Gods fell in love with beauties,

And they finally gave us back our youth!

Alice giggled, fired, piercing the general to death and noted, baring her teeth:

- Do you remember how we took Berlin?

And the girl threw a boomerang with her bare toes. It flew past and cut off several heads of Chinese warriors.

Angelica confirmed, baring her teeth, which are like pearls, and cooing:

- We have conquered the peaks of the world,

Let's commit hara-kiri on all these guys...

They wanted to take over the whole world,

All that happened was to end up in the toilet!

And the girl went and hit the enemy by pressing the RPG button with the help of her scarlet breast nipple.

Alice noted, baring her pearly teeth, which sparkled and shimmered like jewels:

- That's cool! Even though the toilet stinks! No, it's better to let the bald Fuhrer sit in his toilet!

And the girl fired with the help of her ruby nipples, throwing out a lethal mass of colossal force.

Both girls sang with fervor:

Stalin, Stalin, we want Stalin,

So that they can"t break us,

Rise up, master of the Earth...

Stalin, Stalin - the girls are tired, after all,

The groan goes across the whole country,

Where are you, master, where!

Where are you!

And the warriors again launched gifts of death with their ruby nipples.

Stepanida, a girl with very strong muscles, kicked the Chinese officer in the jaw with her bare heel and roared:

We are the strongest girls,

The voice of orgasm is ringing!

Marusya, firing at the Chinese and confidently decimating them, smashed the enemy with her scarlet nipple. She caused colossal destruction when she hit the Chinese warehouse and cooed:

- Glory to communism, glory,

We are on the offensive...

Ours is such a state,

It lashes out with a scorching fire!

Matryona, also roaring and kicking aggressively, jumping up and down like a wound-up toy, and hitting the Chinese with the throws of her bare, nimble feet, tearing them to pieces, howled:

- We will crush our enemies,

And we will show the highest class...

The thread of life will not be broken,

Karabas won't devour us!

Zinaida fired a burst from her machine gun, cutting down an entire line of Chinese soldiers, causing them to commit hara-kiri.

After which she threw the gift of annihilation with her bare toes and squeaked:

Batyanya, daddy, daddy battalion commander,

You were hiding behind the girls' backs, bitch!

You'll lick our heels for this, you scoundrel,

And the bald-headed Fuhrer will come to an end!

CHAPTER No 1.

And then it began. In the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam McPherson, a tall, broad-boned boy of thirteen with brown hair, black eyes, and a curious habit of lifting his chin as he walked, stepped out onto the station platform in the small corn-delivering town of Caxton, Iowa. It was a plank platform, and the boy walked carefully, lifting his bare feet and placing them with extreme caution on the hot, dry, cracked boards. He carried a bundle of newspapers under his arm. In his hand was a long black cigar.

He stopped in front of the station; and Jerry Donlin, the trunk-keeper, seeing the cigar in his hand, laughed and winked slowly, with difficulty.

"What game is it tonight, Sam?" he asked.

Sam walked up to the baggage compartment door, handed him a cigar, and began giving directions, gesturing toward the baggage compartment, his voice focused and businesslike, despite the Irishman's laughter. Then, turning, he walked across the station platform toward the town's main street, his eyes never leaving his fingertips as he worked out calculations with his thumb. Jerry watched him go, grinning so hard that his red gums showed in his bearded face. A glint of paternal pride lit his eyes, and he shook his head and murmured admiringly. Then, lighting a cigar, he walked down the platform to where a bundle of newspapers lay wrapped up near the telegraph office window. Taking it by the arm, he disappeared, still grinning, into the baggage compartment.

Sam McPherson walked down Main Street, past a shoe store, a bakery, and Penny Hughes's candy store, toward a group of people milling around in front of Geiger's Drug Store. Outside the shoe store, he paused for a moment, pulled a small notebook from his pocket, ran his finger down the pages, then shook his head and continued on his way, once again absorbed in calculating on his fingers.

Suddenly, among the men at the drugstore, the evening silence of the street was broken by the roar of a song, and a voice, huge and guttural, brought a smile to the boy's lips:

He washed the windows and swept the floor,

And he polished the handle of the large front door.

He polished this pen so carefully,

That he is now the ruler of the Queen's fleet.


The singer, a short man with grotesquely broad shoulders, wore a long, flowing moustache and a black, dust-covered coat that reached his knees. He held a smoking briar pipe and beat time with it to a row of men seated on a long stone beneath a shop window, their heels tapping on the pavement to form the chorus. Sam's smile turned into a smirk as he glanced at the singer, Freedom Smith, a butter and egg buyer, and past him at John Telfer, the orator, the dandy, the only man in town except for Mike McCarthy, who kept his trousers rumpled. Of all the residents of Caxton, Sam admired John Telfer most, and in his admiration, he entered the town's social scene. Telfer loved good clothes and wore them with an air of importance, and never allowed Caxton to see him poorly or indifferently dressed, laughingly declaring that his mission in life was to set the tone of the city.

John Telfer had a small income left to him by his father, who had once been a city banker, and in his youth he went to New York to study art and then to Paris. But, lacking either the ability or the industry to succeed, he returned to Caxton, where he married Eleanor Millis, a successful milliner. They were the most successful married couple in Caxton, and after many years of marriage, they still loved each other; they were never indifferent to each other and never quarreled. Telfer treated his wife with the same attention and respect as if she were a lover or a guest in his home, and she, unlike most wives in Caxton, never dared question his comings and goings, but left him free to live his life as he pleased while she ran the millinery business.

At forty-five, John Telfer was a tall, slender, handsome man with black hair and a small, pointed black beard, and there was something lazy and carefree about his every movement and impulse. Dressed in white flannel, with white shoes, a smart cap on his head, spectacles hanging from a gold chain, and a cane swinging gently in his hand, he cut a figure that might pass unnoticed strolling in front of some fashionable summer hotel. But it seemed a violation of the laws of nature to be seen on the streets of an Iowa corn-shipping town. And Telfer was aware of what an extraordinary figure he cut; it was part of his life's program. Now, as Sam approached, he put his hand on Freedom Smith's shoulder to test the song and, his eyes shining with mirth, began poking the boy's legs with his cane.

"He'll never be the Queen's fleet commander," he declared, laughing and following the dancing boy in a wide circle. "He's a little mole, working underground, hunting for worms. That sniffy way he puts his nose in the air is just his way of sniffing out stray coins. I heard from Banker Walker that he brings a basket of them to the bank every day. One of these days he'll buy a city and put it in his vest pocket."

Spinning across the stone sidewalk, dancing to avoid a flying cane, Sam dodged the arm of Valmore, a huge old blacksmith with shaggy tufts of hair on the backs of his hands, and found refuge between him and Freed Smith. The blacksmith's hand slipped and landed on the boy's shoulder. Telfer, legs spread, his cane gripped in his hand, began rolling a cigarette; Geiger, a yellow-skinned man with thick cheeks and arms folded over his round belly, smoked a black cigar and grunted his satisfaction with each puff into the air. He wished Telfer, Freed Smith, and Valmore would come to his place for the evening instead of going to their nighttime nest in the back of Wildman's Grocery Store. He thought he wanted the three of them to be here night after night, discussing the goings-on of the world.

Silence fell once again on the sleepy street. Over Sam's shoulder, Valmore and Freedom Smith talked about the upcoming corn harvest and the country's growth and prosperity.

"Times are getting better here, but there's hardly any wild game left," said Freedom, who bought hides and skins during the winter.

The men sitting on the rock beneath the window watched Telfer's work with paper and tobacco with idle interest. "Young Henry Kearns got married," one of them remarked, trying to start a conversation. "He married a girl from just across Parkertown. She gives painting lessons-china painting-something of an artist, you know."

Telfer let out a cry of disgust as his fingers trembled and the tobacco that should have been the basis of his evening smoke rained down onto the pavement.

"An artist!" he exclaimed, his voice tense with emotion. "Who said 'artist'? Who called her that?" He glanced around furiously. "Let's put an end to this flagrant abuse of fine old words. To call a man an artist is to touch the pinnacle of praise."

Tossing the cigarette paper after the spilled tobacco, he reached into his trouser pocket. With his other hand, he held his cane, tapping it on the pavement to emphasize his words. Geiger, his cigar between his fingers, listened open-mouthed to the ensuing outburst. Valmore and Freedom Smith paused in their conversation and focused their attention with broad smiles, while Sam McPherson, his eyes wide with surprise and admiration, once again felt the thrill that always coursed through him at the drumbeat of Telfer's eloquence.

"An artist is one who hungers and thirsts for perfection, not one who arranges flowers on plates to choke the gullets of diners," Telfer declared, preparing for one of the long speeches with which he loved to amaze the residents of Caxton, gazing intently at those seated on the stone. "It is the artist, of all men, who possesses divine courage. Does he not rush into a battle in which all the geniuses of the world are engaged against him?"

Pausing, he glanced around, searching for an opponent on whom he could unleash his eloquence, but was greeted by smiles on all sides. Undeterred, he charged again.

"A businessman-what is he?" he demanded. "He achieves success by outwitting the little minds he comes into contact with. The scientist is more important-he pits his brain against the dull unresponsiveness of inanimate matter and makes a hundredweight of black iron do the work of a hundred housewives. But the artist tests his brain against the greatest minds of all time; he stands at the pinnacle of life and hurls himself against the world. A girl from Parkertown who paints flowers on plates to be called an artist-ugh! Let me pour out my thoughts! Let me clear my mouth! The man who pronounces the word 'artist' should have a prayer on his lips!"

"Well, we can't all be artists, and a woman can paint flowers on plates for all I care," Valmore said, laughing good-naturedly. "We can't all paint pictures and write books."

"We don't want to be artists-we don't dare be," Telfer shouted, twirling his cane and shaking it at Valmore. "You have the wrong idea of the word."

He straightened his shoulders and thrust out his chest, and the boy standing next to the blacksmith raised his chin, unconsciously imitating the man's swagger.

"I don't paint pictures; I don't write books; but I am an artist," Telfer declared proudly. "I am an artist practicing the most difficult of all arts-the art of living. Here, in this Western village, I stand and challenge the world. 'On the lips of the least great among you,' I cry, 'life was sweeter.'"

He turned from Valmor to the people on the stone.

"Study my life," he commanded. "It will be a revelation to you. I greet the morning with a smile; I boast at noon; and in the evening, like Socrates of old, I gather around me a small group of you lost villagers and shove wisdom into your teeth, seeking to teach you judgment with great words."

"You talk too much about yourself, John," Freedom Smith grumbled, taking his pipe out of his mouth.

"The subject is complex, varied and full of charm," Telfer replied, laughing.

Taking a fresh supply of tobacco and paper from his pocket, he rolled a cigarette and lit it. His fingers no longer trembled. Swinging his cane, he threw back his head and blew smoke into the air. He thought that, despite the burst of laughter that greeted Freed Smith's comment, he had defended the honor of art, and this thought made him happy.

The newspaperman, leaning against the window in admiration, seemed to catch in Telfer's conversation an echo of the conversation that must be taking place among people in the great outside world. Hadn't this Telfer traveled far away? Hadn't he lived in New York and Paris? Unable to comprehend the meaning of what he was saying, Sam sensed it must be something grand and compelling. When the squeal of a locomotive was heard in the distance, he stood motionless, trying to make sense of Telfer's attack on the simple remark of a slacker.

"It's seven forty-five," Telfer shouted sharply. "Is the war between you and Fatty over? Are we really going to miss out on an evening's entertainment? Did Fatty cheat you, or are you getting rich and lazy like Papa Geiger?"

Leaping up from his seat beside the blacksmith and snatching up a bundle of newspapers, Sam ran down the street, Telfer, Valmore, Freedom Smith and the idlers following more slowly.

As the evening train from Des Moines stopped at Caxton, a train news vendor in a blue coat hurried onto the platform and began looking around anxiously.

"Hurry up, Fatty," came Freedom Smith's loud voice, "Sam's already halfway across the car."

A young man named "Fatty" ran up and down the station platform. "Where's that stack of Omaha papers, you Irish bum?" he shouted, shaking his fist at Jerry Donlin, who was standing on a truck at the front of the train, tipping suitcases into the baggage car.

Jerry stopped, his trunk dangling in the air. "In the storage locker, of course. Hurry up, man. You want the kid to work the whole train?"

A sense of impending doom hung over the idlers on the platform, the train crew, and even the passengers who were beginning to disembark. The engineer stuck his head out of the cab; the conductor, a dignified-looking man with a gray moustache, threw back his head and shook with laughter; a young man with a suitcase in his hand and a long pipe in his mouth ran to the luggage compartment door and shouted, "Hurry! Hurry, Fatty! The kid's been working the whole train. You won't be able to sell a newspaper."

A fat young man ran out of the baggage compartment onto the platform and shouted again to Jerry Donlin, who was now slowly rolling the empty truck along the platform. A clear voice came from inside the train: "The last Omaha papers! Get your change! Fatty, the train's newspaper boy, has fallen in a well! Get your change, gentlemen!"

Jerry Donlin, followed by Fatty, disappeared from view again. The conductor, waving his hand, jumped onto the train steps. The engineer ducked his head, and the train pulled away.

A fat young man emerged from the baggage compartment, vowing revenge on Jerry Donlin. "You shouldn't have put it under the mailbag!" he shouted, shaking his fist. "I'll pay you back for this."

Amid the shouts of travelers and the laughter of loafers on the platform, he climbed onto the moving train and began running from car to car. Sam McPherson tumbled out of the last car, a smile on his lips, a stack of newspapers vanished, coins jingling in his pocket. The evening's entertainment for the town of Caxton had come to an end.

John Telfer, standing next to Valmore, waved his cane in the air and began to speak.

"Hit him again, by God!" he cried. "A bully for Sam! Who said the spirit of the old pirates is dead? This boy didn't understand what I said about art, but he's still an artist!"

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CHAPTER II


WINDY MAC PHERSON, _ _ _ _ Newsboy Caxton's father, Sam McPherson, was touched by the war. The civilian clothes he wore made his skin itch. He could not forget that he had once been a sergeant in an infantry regiment and commanded a company in a battle fought in the ditches along a Virginia country road. He chafed at his present obscure position in life. If he could have replaced his uniform with a judge's robe, a statesman's felt hat, or even a village chieftain's club, life might have retained something of its sweetness, but he would have ended up as an obscure house painter. In a village that lived by growing corn and feeding it to red steers-ugh!-the thought made him shudder. He looked enviously at the blue tunic and brass buttons of the railroad agent; He tried in vain to get into Caxton Cornet's band; he drank to forget his humiliation, and finally resorted to loud boasting and the conviction that it was not Lincoln and Grant, but he himself, who had thrown the winning die in the great struggle. He said the same thing in his cups, and the corn grower in Caxton, punching his neighbor in the ribs, shook with delight at the announcement.

When Sam was a barefoot twelve-year-old boy, he wandered the streets as the wave of fame that swept Windy McPherson in '61 lapped the shores of his Iowa village. This strange phenomenon, called the APA movement, catapulted the old soldier into prominence. He founded a local chapter; he led processions through the streets; he stood on corners, pointing a trembling index finger to where the flag fluttered on the schoolhouse next to the Roman Cross, and hoarsely shouted, "See, the cross rising above the flag! We'll end up being killed in our beds!"

But though some of Caxton's hard-bitten, money-making men joined the movement started by the boastful old soldier, and though for the moment they vied with him in sneaking through the streets to secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind his hands, the movement died down as suddenly as it had begun, and only left its leader the more devastated.

In a small house at the end of the street on the banks of Squirrel Creek, Sam and his sister Kate disdained their father's warlike demands. "We're out of oil, and Dad's army leg's going to hurt tonight," they whispered across the kitchen table.

Following her mother's example, Kate, a tall, slender sixteen-year-old girl already a breadwinner and a clerk at Winnie's dry goods store, remained silent under Windy's boasting, but Sam, striving to emulate them, wasn't always successful. Occasionally, a mutinous muttering would be heard, intended to warn Windy. One day, it erupted into an open quarrel, in which the winner of a hundred battles left the field vanquished. Half-drunk, Windy picked up an old ledger from the kitchen shelf, a relic of his days as a prosperous merchant when he first came to Caxton, and began reading to the small family a list of names of people he claimed had caused his demise.

"Now it's Tom Newman," he exclaimed excitedly. "He's got a hundred acres of good corn land, and he won't pay for the harnesses on his horses' backs or the plows in his barn. The receipt he got from me was a forgery. I could have him jailed if I wanted. To beat up an old soldier!-to beat up one of the boys of '61!-that's shameful!"

"I've heard about what you owe and what people owe you; you've never had anything worse," Sam retorted coldly, while Kate held her breath and Jane Macpherson, working at the ironing board in the corner, half turned and looked silently at the man and the boy, the slightly increased pallor of her long face the only sign that she had heard.

Windy didn't press the argument. After standing for a moment in the middle of the kitchen, book in hand, he glanced from his pale, silent mother at the ironing board to his son, now standing and staring at him. He slammed the book down on the table and fled the house. "You don't understand," he shouted. "You don't understand the heart of a soldier."

In a way, the man was right. The two children didn't understand the boisterous, pretentious, ineffective old man. Walking shoulder to shoulder with gloomy, silent men to the completion of great deeds, Windy couldn't catch the flavor of those days in his outlook on life. Strolling in the dark along the sidewalks of Caxton, half-drunk on the evening of the quarrel, the man was inspired. He squared his shoulders and walked with a fighting gait; he drew an imaginary sword from its sheath and swung it upward; stopping, he carefully aimed at a group of imaginary people who were approaching him, shouting, through a wheat field; he felt that life, having made him a house painter in an Iowa farming village and given him an ungrateful son, had been cruelly unfair; he wept at the injustice of it.

The American Civil War was an event so passionate, so ardent, so vast, so all-consuming, it so affected the men and women of those fruitful days, that only a faint echo of it has penetrated to our own time and minds; no real meaning of it has yet penetrated the pages of printed books; it still cries out for its Thomas Carlyle; and in the end we have to listen to the boasts of old men in the streets of our villages to feel its living breath on our cheeks. For four years, the inhabitants of American cities, villages, and farms walked across the smoldering embers of a burning earth, approaching and receding as the flames of this universal, passionate, deadly being fell upon them or retreated to the smoking horizon. Is it so strange that they could not come home and begin again in peace to paint houses or mend broken shoes? Something within them cried out. This made them brag and brag on the street corners. When passersby continued to think only of their brickwork and how they shoveled corn into their cars, when the sons of these war gods, walking home in the evening and listening to the empty boasts of their fathers, began to doubt even the facts of the great struggle, something clicked in their brains, and they began to chatter and shout their futile boasts to everyone, eagerly looking around for believing eyes.

When our own Thomas Carlyle comes to write about our Civil War, he'll write a lot about our Windy Macphersons. He'll see something grand and pathetic in their greedy search for auditors and their endless talk of war. He'll wander with greedy curiosity into the small GAR halls in villages and think about the men who came there night after night, year after year, endlessly and monotonously recounting their battle stories.

Let us hope that in his passion for the elderly, he will not fail to show tenderness to the families of these veteran talkers-families who, at breakfast and dinner, in the evening by the fire, during fasts and holidays, at weddings and funerals, were again and again bombarded with this endless, eternal stream of warlike words. Let him reflect on the fact that peaceful people in corn-growing counties do not willingly sleep among the dogs of war or wash their linen in the blood of their country's enemy. Let him, sympathizing with the speakers, kindly recall the heroism of their listeners.


On a summer day, Sam McPherson sat on a crate in front of Wildman's Grocery Store, lost in thought. He held a yellow ledger in his hand and buried his face in it, trying to erase from his mind the scene unfolding before his eyes on the street.

The knowledge that his father was an inveterate liar and braggart cast a shadow over his life for years, a shadow made all the darker by the fact that, in a country where the least fortunate can laugh in the face of need, he had repeatedly faced poverty. He believed that the logical answer to the situation was money in the bank, and with all the ardor of his boyish heart, he strove to realize that answer. He wanted to make money, and the totals at the bottom of the pages of his dirty yellow bankbook were milestones marking the progress he had already made. They told him that the daily struggle with Fatty, the long walks through the streets of Caxton on dreary winter evenings, and the endless Saturday nights when crowds filled the shops, pavements, and pubs while he worked among them tirelessly and persistently had not been without fruit.

Suddenly, above the din of men's voices on the street, his father's voice rang out loud and insistent. A block down the street, leaning against the door of Hunter's Jewelry Store, Windy was talking at the top of his lungs, waving his arms up and down like a man delivering a fragmentary speech.

"He's making a fool of himself," Sam thought, and returned to his bankbook, trying to shake off the dull anger that had begun to burn in his mind by contemplating the totals at the bottom of the pages. Looking up again, he saw Joe Wildman, the grocer's son and a boy his own age, join the group of men laughing and jeering at Windy. The shadow on Sam's face grew heavier.

Sam was in Joe Wildman's house; he knew the atmosphere of plenty and comfort that hung about it; the table laden with meat and potatoes; a group of children laughing and eating to the point of gluttony; the quiet, gentle father, who never raised his voice amid the noise and tumult; and the well-dressed, fussy, rosy-cheeked mother. In contrast to this scene, he began to conjure up a picture of life in his own home, deriving a perverse pleasure from his dissatisfaction with it. He saw the boastful, incompetent father, telling endless stories of the Civil War and complaining of his wounds; the tall, stooped, silent mother, with deep lines on her long face, constantly working over a trough among dirty clothes; the silent, hastily eaten food, snatched from the kitchen table; and the long winter days, when ice formed on his mother's skirts and Windy lazed about the town while the little family ate bowls of cornmeal, were endlessly repeated.

Now, even from where he sat, he could see that his father was half a drunk, and he knew he was bragging about his service in the Civil War. "He's either doing that, or talking about his aristocratic family, or lying about his homeland," he thought resentfully, and, unable to bear the sight of what seemed to him like his own humiliation, he stood up and walked into the grocery store, where a group of Caxton citizens stood talking with Wildman about a meeting to be held that morning at the town hall.

Caxton was supposed to celebrate the Fourth of July. An idea born in the minds of a few was embraced by many. Rumors of it spread through the streets in late May. People were talking about it in Geiger's Drug Store, in the back of Wildman's Grocery Store, and on the street in front of the New Leland House. John Telfer, the only idle man in town, had been going from place to place for weeks, discussing details with prominent figures. Now a mass meeting was to be held in the hall above Geiger's Drug Store, and the people of Caxton came to the meeting. The house painter came down the stairs, clerks locked the doors of stores, and groups of people walked through the streets, heading for the hall. As they walked, they shouted to each other. "The old town is awake!" they cried.

On the corner near Hunter's jewelry store, Windy McPherson leaned against a building and addressed the passing crowd.

"Let the old flag fly," he cried excitedly, "let the men of Caxton show themselves true blue and rally to the old standards."

"That's right, Windy, talk to them," cried the wit, and a roar of laughter drowned out Windy's answer.

Sam McPherson also went to the meeting at the hall. He left the grocery store with Wildman and walked down the street, keeping his eyes on the sidewalk and trying not to see the drunk man talking in front of the jewelry store. In the hall, other boys stood on the stairs or ran back and forth along the sidewalk, talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the city's life, and his right to intrude among the men was unquestioned. He squeezed through the mass of legs and took a place on the windowsill, from where he could watch the men enter and take their seats.

As the only newspaperman in Caxton, Sam's paper sold both his livelihood and a certain status in the town's life. To be a newspaperman or a shoeshine boy in a small American town where novels are read is to become a celebrity in the world. Don't all the poor newspapermen in books become great men, and can't this boy, who so diligently walks among us day after day, become such a figure? Isn't it our duty to nudge future greatness forward? So reasoned the people of Caxton, and they paid a kind of courtship to the boy who sat on the hall windowsill while the town's other boys waited on the sidewalk below.

John Telfer was the chairman of the mass meeting. He always chaired public meetings in Caxton. The hard-working, silent, influential people of the town envied his relaxed, bantering manner of public speaking, though they pretended to disdain him. "He talks too much," they said, flaunting their own ineptitude with clever and apt words.

Telfer didn't wait to be named chairman of the meeting, but went forward, ascended a small dais at the end of the hall, and usurped the presidency. He paced the platform, bantering with the crowd, returning their taunts, calling out notables, and receiving and giving a keen sense of satisfaction with his talent. When the hall filled, he called the meeting to order, appointed committees, and launched into a speech. He outlined plans to advertise the event in other cities and offer low rail fares for excursion groups. The program, he explained, included a musical carnival featuring brass bands from other cities, a mock military company fight on the fairgrounds, horse races, speeches from the steps of City Hall, and an evening fireworks display. "We'll show them a living city here," he declared, pacing the platform and waving his cane, while the crowd applauded and cheered.

When the call for voluntary subscriptions to pay for the festivities was made, the crowd fell silent. One or two men stood up and began to leave, grumbling that it was a waste of money. The fate of the celebration rested in the hands of the gods.

Telfer rose to the occasion. He called out the names of those leaving and cracked jokes at their expense, causing them to collapse back into their chairs, unable to bear the roaring laughter of the crowd. He then yelled at a man at the back of the room to close and lock the door. Men began standing in different parts of the room and shouting out amounts. Telfer loudly repeated the name and amount to young Tom Jedrow, the bank clerk who was writing them down in the book. When the amount signed didn't meet his approval, he protested, and the crowd, cheering him on, forced him to demand an increase. When the man didn't rise, he shouted at him, and the man responded in kind.

Suddenly, there was a disturbance in the hall. Windy McPherson emerged from the crowd at the back of the hall and walked down the center aisle toward the platform. He walked unsteadily, his shoulders squared and his chin jutting out. Reaching the front of the hall, he pulled a wad of bills from his pocket and tossed it onto the platform at the chairman's feet. "From one of the '61 guys," he announced loudly.

The crowd cheered and clapped joyfully as Telfer took the bills and ran his finger across them. "Seventeen dollars from our hero, the mighty McPherson," he shouted, as the bank teller wrote down the name and amount in a book, and the crowd continued to laugh at the title bestowed upon the drunken soldier by the chairman.

The boy slid to the floor on the windowsill and stood behind the crowd of men, his cheeks burning. He knew that at home his mother was doing the family laundry for Leslie, the shoe merchant who had donated five dollars to the Fourth of July fund, and of the indignation he felt when he saw his father addressing the crowd in front of the jewelry store. The store had caught fire anew.

After the subscriptions were accepted, men in different parts of the hall began suggesting additional features for this great day. The crowd listened respectfully to some speakers, while others were booed. An old man with a gray beard told a long, rambling story about his childhood Fourth of July celebrations. When the voices trailed off, he protested and shook his fist in the air, pale with indignation.

"Oh, sit down, old daddy," cried Freedom Smith, and this sensible suggestion was greeted with a roar of applause.

Another man stood up and began to speak. He had an idea. "We will have," he said, "a bugler on a white horse who will ride through the city at dawn , blowing reveille. At midnight, he will stand on the steps of the town hall and blow the faucets to end the day."

The crowd applauded. The idea captured their imagination and instantly became a part of their consciousness as one of the real events of the day.

Windy McPherson reappeared from the crowd at the back of the room. Raising his hand for silence, he told the crowd he was a bugler, having served two years as a regimental bugler during the Civil War. He said he would be happy to volunteer for this position.

The crowd cheered, and John Telfer waved his hand. "White horse for you, MacPherson," he said.

Sam McPherson edged along the wall and walked out to the now-unlocked door. He was astonished at his father's stupidity, but even more astonished at the stupidity of the others who had accepted his claim and given up such an important place for such a big day. He knew his father must have had some part in the war, as he had been a member of the G.A.R., but he completely disbelieved the stories he had heard about his experiences in the war. Sometimes he caught himself wondering if such a war had ever really existed, and he thought it must be a lie, like everything else in Windy McPherson's life. For years, he wondered why some sane and respectable man, like Valmore or Wildman, hadn't stood up and told the world in a matter-of-fact tone that there had never been such a thing as the Civil War, that it was merely a fiction in the minds of pompous old men demanding undeserved glory from their fellow men. Now, hurrying down the street with burning cheeks, he decided that there had to be such a war. He felt the same way about birthplaces, and there could be no doubt that people are born. He had heard his father name his birthplace as Kentucky, Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Scotland. This had left a kind of blemish in his consciousness. For the rest of his life, whenever he heard a man name his birthplace, he would look up suspiciously, and a shadow of doubt would flit across his mind.

After the rally, Sam went home to his mother and laid the matter out plainly. "This has to stop," he declared, standing with blazing eyes in front of her trough. "This is too public. He can't blow the bugle; I know he can't. The whole town will laugh at us again."

Jane Macpherson listened silently to the boy's cry, then turned and began to rub her clothes again, avoiding his gaze.

Sam shoved his hands into his trouser pockets and stared sullenly at the ground. A sense of fairness told him not to press the issue, but as he walked away from the trough and headed for the kitchen door, he hoped they would discuss it frankly during dinner. "The old fool!" he protested, turning to the empty street. "He's going to show himself again."

When Windy McPherson returned home that evening, something in his silent wife's eyes and the boy's sullen face frightened him. He ignored his wife's silence but looked closely at his son. He sensed he was facing a crisis. He excelled in emergency situations. He spoke with flourish of the mass meeting and declared that the citizens of Caxton had risen as one to demand that he assume the responsible position of official crucible. Then, turning, he looked across the table at his son.

Sam openly and defiantly stated that he did not believe his father was capable of blowing the bugle.

Windy roared with astonishment. He rose from the table and declared in a loud voice that the boy had insulted him; he swore he had been a bugler on the colonel's staff for two years, and launched into a long story of the surprise the enemy had given him while his regiment slept in tents, and of how he had stood in the face of a hail of bullets, urging his comrades to action. With one hand on his forehead, he rocked back and forth as if about to fall, declaring that he was trying to hold back the tears torn from him by the injustice of his son's insinuation, and, shouting so that his voice carried far down the street, he vowed that the town of Caxton should ring and echo with his bugle, as it had echoed that night in the sleeping camp in the Virginia woods. Then, sitting down again in his chair and supporting his head with his hand, he assumed an air of patient submission.

Windy McPherson had triumphed. The house erupted in a great commotion and a flurry of preparation. Wearing white overalls and temporarily forgetting his honorable wounds, his father went to work day after day as a painter. He dreamed of a new blue uniform for the big day, and he finally achieved his dream, not without the financial assistance of what was known in the house as "Mother's Wash Money." And the boy, convinced by the story of the midnight attack in the Virginia woods, began, against his better judgment, to rekindle the long-held dream of his father's reformation. Boyish skepticism was cast to the wind, and he eagerly began to draw up plans for this great day. Walking through the quiet streets of the house, delivering evening papers, he threw back his head and reveled in the thought of the tall figure in blue, on a large white horse, passing like a knight before the gaping eyes of the people. In a moment of fervor, he even withdrew money from his carefully crafted bank account and sent it to a firm in Chicago to pay for a shiny new horn to complete the picture he had formed in his mind. And when the evening papers were distributed, he hurried home to sit on the front porch and discuss with his sister, Kate, the honor bestowed upon their family.


As dawn broke on the great day, the three McPhersons hurried hand in hand toward Main Street. On all sides of the street, they saw people emerging from their houses, rubbing their eyes and buttoning their coats as they walked along the sidewalk. All of Caxton seemed foreign.

On Main Street, people crowded the sidewalks, gathered on the sidewalks, and in the doorways of shops. Heads appeared in windows, flags fluttered from rooftops or hung from ropes stretched across the street, and a loud roar of voices broke the stillness of dawn.

Sam's heart was pounding so hard he could hardly hold back the tears. He sighed as he thought of those anxious days that had passed without a new horn sounding from the Chicago company, and looking back, he relived the horror of those days of waiting. All of this was important. He couldn't blame his father for raving and shouting about home; he wanted to rave himself, and he'd sunk another dollar of his savings into telegrams before the treasure finally landed in his hands. Now the thought that it might not have happened disgusted him, and a small prayer of gratitude escaped his lips. Sure, one might have arrived from the next town, but not a shiny new one to go with his father's new blue uniform.

A cheer erupted from the crowd gathered along the street. A tall figure rode out onto the street, mounted on a white horse. The horse was Calvert's livery, and the boys had braided ribbons into its mane and tail. Windy Macpherson, sitting very upright in the saddle and looking remarkably impressive in his new blue uniform and wide-brimmed campaign hat, had the air of a conqueror accepting the city's homage. A gold band hung across his chest, and a glittering horn rested on his hip. He gazed at the crowd with stern eyes.

The lump in the boy's throat grew ever more intense. A huge wave of pride washed over him, overwhelming him. In an instant, he forgot all the past humiliations his father had inflicted on his family, and understood why his mother had remained silent when he, in his blindness, wanted to protest her seeming indifference. Glancing up furtively, he saw a tear on her cheek, and felt like he, too, wanted to sob loudly for his pride and happiness.

Slowly and with a stately gait, the horse walked down the street between rows of silent, waiting people. In front of the town hall, a tall military figure rose in the saddle, looked haughtily at the crowd, and then, raising a bugle to his lips, blew.

The only sound that came from the horn was a thin, shrill whine, followed by a squeal. Windy raised the horn to his lips again, and once again the same mournful whine was his only reward. His face wore an expression of helpless, boyish amazement.

And in a moment, people knew. It was just another one of Windy MacPherson's pretensions. He couldn't blow a bugle at all.

A loud laughter echoed through the street. Men and women sat on the curbs and laughed until they were exhausted. Then, looking at the figure on the motionless horse, they laughed again.

Windy looked around with anxious eyes. It was doubtful he'd ever held a bugle to his lips before, but he was filled with amazement and astonishment that the reveille hadn't begun. He'd heard it a thousand times and remembered it clearly; with all his heart he wanted it to roll, and he imagined the street ringing with it and the applause of the people; this thing, he felt, was inside him, and that it hadn't burst forth from the flaming end of the bugle was only a fatal flaw of nature. He was stunned by such a grim conclusion to his great moment-he was always stunned and helpless before facts.

The crowd began to gather around the motionless, astonished figure, their laughter continuing to send them into convulsions. John Telfer, seizing the horse by the bridle, led it down the street. The boys shouted and cried to the rider, "Blow! Blow!"

The three MacPhersons stood in the doorway leading to the shoe store. The boy and his mother, pale and speechless with humiliation, didn't dare look at each other. A flood of shame washed over them, and they stared straight ahead with stern, stony eyes.

A procession led by John Telfer, bridle-tied on a white horse, marched down the street. Looking up, the laughing, shouting man's eyes met the boy's, and a look of pain flickered across his face. Throwing down his bridle, he hurried through the crowd. The procession moved on, and, biding their time, the mother and two children crept home through the alleys, Kate weeping bitterly. Leaving them by the door, Sam walked straight down the sandy road toward a small forest. "I've learned my lesson. I've learned my lesson," he muttered over and over as he walked.

At the edge of the forest, he stopped and leaned against the fence, watching until he saw his mother approach the pump in the backyard. She began to draw water for her afternoon wash. For her, too, the party was over. Tears streamed down the boy's cheeks, and he shook his fist at the town. "You may laugh at that fool Windy, but you'll never laugh at Sam McPherson," he shouted, his voice trembling with emotion.

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CHAPTER III


ABOUT THE EVENING WHEN HE GREW UP TO OUTSIDE WINDY. Sam McPherson, returning from delivering newspapers, found his mother dressed in her black church gown. There was an evangelist working in Caxton, and she had decided to listen to him. Sam winced. It was clear in the house that when Jane McPherson went to church, her son went with her. Nothing was said. Jane McPherson did everything without words; nothing was always said. Now she stood in her black gown and waited as her son walked through the door, hurriedly put on his best clothes, and walked with her to the brick church.

Wellmore, John Telfer, and Freedom Smith, who had assumed a sort of shared guardianship over the boy and with whom he spent evening after evening in the back of Wildman's grocery store, did not attend church. They talked about religion and seemed unusually curious and interested in what others thought about it, but they refused to be persuaded to attend a meetinghouse. They did not discuss God with the boy, who became the fourth participant in the evening meetings in the back of the grocery store, answering the direct questions he sometimes asked, changing the subject. One day, Telfer, a poetry reader, answered the boy. "Sell newspapers and fill your pockets with money, but let your soul sleep," he said sharply.

In the absence of the others, Wildman spoke more freely. He was a spiritualist and tried to show Sam the beauty of that faith. On long summer days, the grocer and the boy would ride for hours through the streets in a rattling old wagon, and the man would earnestly try to explain to the boy the elusive ideas about God that lingered in his mind.

Although Windy McPherson had led a Bible class in his youth and was a driving force at revival meetings in his early days in Caxton, he no longer attended church, nor did his wife invite him. On Sunday mornings, he lay in bed. If there was work to do around the house or yard, he complained of his wounds. He complained of his wounds when rent was due and when there was not enough food in the house. Later in life, after Jane McPherson's death, the old soldier married a farmer's widow, with whom he had four children and with whom he attended church twice on Sundays. Kate wrote Sam one of her infrequent letters about this. "He's met his match," she said, and was extremely pleased.

Sam regularly lay down to sleep at church on Sundays, resting his head on his mother's arm and sleeping through the service. Jane McPherson loved having the boy by her side. It was the only thing they did together, and she didn't mind him sleeping all the time. Knowing how late he stayed outside selling newspapers on Saturday evenings, she looked at him with eyes full of tenderness and sympathy. One day, the minister, a man with a brown beard and a firm, tightly set mouth, spoke to her. "Can't you keep him awake?" he asked impatiently. "He needs sleep," she said, and hurried past the minister and left the church, looking ahead and frowning.

The evening of the evangelistic meeting was a summer evening in the middle of winter. A warm wind had blew from the southwest all day. The streets were covered in soft, deep mud, and among the puddles of water on the sidewalks were dry patches from which steam rose. Nature had forgotten itself. The day that should have sent the old folks to their nests behind store stoves sent them lounging in the sun. The night was warm and overcast. A thunderstorm was threatening in February.

Sam walked along the sidewalk with his mother, heading toward the brick church, wearing a new gray coat. The night hadn't called for a coat, but Sam wore it out of an inordinate amount of pride in its possession. The coat had an air. It had been made by the tailor Gunther, using a sketch sketched by John Telfer on the back of some wrapping paper, and paid for with the newspaperman's savings. A small German tailor, after talking with Valmore and Telfer, had made it for a surprisingly low price. Sam strutted with an air of importance.

He did not sleep in the church that evening; indeed, he found the silent church filled with a strange mixture of sounds. Carefully folding his new coat and placing it on the seat next to him, he watched the people with interest, feeling something of the nervous excitement that permeated the air. The evangelist, a short, athletic man in a gray business suit, seemed out of place in the church to the boy. He had the confident, businesslike air of a traveler arriving at New Leland House, and it seemed to Sam that he looked like a man with goods to sell. He did not stand quietly behind the pulpit, distributing texts, as the brown-bearded minister did, nor did he sit with his eyes closed and his hands folded, waiting for the choir to finish singing. While the choir sang, he ran back and forth on the platform, waving his arms and excitedly shouting to the people in the pews, "Sing! Sing! Sing!" Sing to the glory of God!

When the song was finished, he began, quietly at first, to talk about life in the city. As he spoke, he grew more and more excited. "The city is a cesspool of vice!" he shouted. "It reeks of evil! The devil considers it a suburb of hell!"

His voice rose, and sweat poured down his face. He was overcome with a kind of madness. He took off his coat and, throwing it on a chair, ran up and down the platform and into the aisles among the people, shouting, threatening, pleading. People began to stir restlessly in their seats. Jane MacPherson stared stonily at the back of the woman in front of her. Sam was terribly frightened.

The Caxton newspaperman was not without a religious fervor. Like all boys, he thought about death often and often. At night, he would sometimes wake up cold with fear, thinking that death must come very soon, when the door of his room would not be waiting for him. When he caught a cold and cough in the winter, he trembled at the thought of tuberculosis. Once, when he was stricken with a fever, he fell asleep and dreamed that he was dead and walking along the trunk of a fallen tree above a ravine filled with lost souls shrieking in terror. Upon awakening, he prayed. If anyone had entered his room and heard him pray, he would have been ashamed.

On winter evenings, strolling through dark streets with papers under his arm, he thought about his soul. As he thought, a feeling of tenderness came over him; a lump rose in his throat, and he began to pity himself; he felt that something was missing in his life, something he desperately desired.

Under the influence of John Telfer, the boy who dropped out of school to devote himself to earning money read Walt Whitman and for a time admired his own body, with its straight white legs and head balanced so joyfully on its body. Sometimes on summer nights, he would wake up so filled with a strange melancholy that he would crawl out of bed and, throwing open the window, sit on the floor, his bare legs protruding from under his white nightgown. Sitting there, he would yearn greedily for some beautiful impulse, some calling, some sense of grandeur and leadership that had been missing from his life. He would gaze at the stars and listen to the sounds of the night, so filled with melancholy that tears welled up in his eyes.

One day, after the horn incident, Jane Macpherson fell ill-and the first touch of death's finger touched her-as she sat with her son in the warm darkness on the small lawn in front of the house. It was a clear, warm, starry evening with no moon, and as they sat close together, the mother sensed death approaching.

At dinner, Windy McPherson talked a lot, ranting and raving about the house. He said a painter with a real sense of color shouldn't try to work in a dump like Caxton. He'd had trouble with his landlady over the paint he'd mixed for the porch floor, and at his table, he raved about the woman and how, he claimed, she lacked even a rudimentary sense of color. "I'm sick of all this," he shouted as he left the house and walked unsteadily up the street. His wife wasn't moved by this outburst, but in the presence of the quiet boy whose chair brushed against her own, she trembled with a strange new fear and began talking about life after death, struggling to get what she wanted-let's say, and she could only find expression in short sentences punctuated by long, agonizing pauses. She told the boy that she had no doubt that some future life existed and that she believed she should see him and live with him again after they had finished with this world.

One day, a minister, irritated by Sam's sleeping in his church, stopped Sam on the street to talk to him about his soul. He suggested that the boy should consider becoming one of the brothers in Christ by joining the church. Sam listened silently to the conversation of a man he instinctively disliked, but he sensed something insincere in his silence. With all his heart, he longed to repeat the phrase he had heard from the lips of the gray-haired, wealthy Valmore: "How can they believe and not lead a life of simple, fervent devotion to their faith?" He considered himself superior to the thin-lipped man who spoke to him, and if he could express what was in his heart, he might say, "Listen, man! I'm made of different stuff than all the people in the church. I'm new clay from which a new man will be molded. Even my mother isn't like me. I don't accept your ideas about life just because you say they are good, any more than I accept Windy McPherson just because he is my father."

One winter, Sam spent evening after evening reading the Bible in his room. It was after Kate's marriage: she had begun an affair with a young farmer who had kept her name on whispered tongues for months, but was now a housewife on a farm on the outskirts of a village a few miles from Caxton. His mother was once again busy with her endless work among the dirty clothes in the kitchen, while Windy Macpherson drank and bragged about the town. Sam secretly read a book. On a small stand by his bed stood a lamp, and next to it a novel lent to him by John Telfer. When his mother came up the stairs, he tucked the Bible under the covers and immersed himself in it. He felt that caring for his soul was not entirely consistent with his goals as a businessman and moneymaker. He wanted to hide his uneasiness, but with all his heart he wanted to absorb the message of the strange book that people argued about hour after hour on winter evenings in the shop.

He did not understand it; and after a while he stopped reading the book. Left to himself, he might have sensed its meaning, but on all sides of him were the voices of men-the Wildman men, who professed no religion but were full of dogmatism as they talked over the stove in the grocery store; the brown-bearded, thin-lipped minister in the brick church; the shouting, pleading evangelists who came to town in the winter; the kindly old grocer, talking vaguely of the spiritual world-all these voices were ringing in the boy's head, pleading, insisting, demanding, not that Christ's simple message that men love one another to the end, that they work together for the common good, be well received, but that their own complicated interpretation of His word be carried to the end that souls might be saved.

Eventually, the boy from Caxton reached the point where he began to fear the word "soul." He felt that mentioning it in conversation was shameful, and that thinking about the word or the illusory entity it signified was cowardice. In his mind, the soul became something to be hidden, concealed, and not thought about. It might be permissible to speak of it at the moment of death, but for a healthy man or boy to have a thought about his soul or even a word about it on his lips would be better to become downright blasphemous and go to hell with abandon. With delight, he imagined himself dying and, with his last breath, hurling a round curse into the air of his death chamber.

Meanwhile, Sam continued to be tormented by inexplicable desires and hopes. He continued to surprise himself with the changes in his outlook on life. He found himself indulging in the most petty acts of meanness, accompanied by flashes of a kind of lofty intelligence. Looking at a girl passing on the street, incredibly evil thoughts arose in him; and the next day, as he passed the same girl, a phrase caught from John Telfer's babble escaped his lips, and he went on his way, muttering, "June's been June twice since she breathed it in with me."

And then a sexual motif entered the boy's complex character. He already dreamed of having women in his arms. He would glance timidly at the ankles of women crossing the street and listen avidly as the crowd around the stove at the Wildman's began to tell obscene stories. He sank to incredible depths of triviality and sordidness, timidly glancing into dictionaries for words that appealed to the animal lust in his strangely perverted mind, and when he came across them, he completely lost the beauty of the old Bible story of Ruth, hinting at the intimacy between man and woman that it brought him. And yet Sam McPherson was not a malicious boy. In fact, he possessed a quality of intellectual honesty that greatly appealed to the pure and simple-minded old blacksmith Valmore; He awakened something like love in the hearts of the schoolmistresses at Caxton, at least one of whom continued to take an interest in him, taking him on walks along country roads and constantly talking to him about the development of his opinions; and he was a friend and good companion of Telfer, a dandy, a reader of poetry, an ardent lover of life. The boy struggled to find himself. One night, when the urge of sex kept him awake, he got up, dressed, went and stood in the rain by the stream in Miller's pasture. The wind carried the rain across the water, and the phrase flashed through his mind: "Little feet of rain running on water." There was something almost lyrical about the Iowa boy.

And this boy, who couldn't control his impulse toward God, whose sexual impulses made him at times vile, at times full of beauty, and who had decided that the desire for trade and money was the most valuable impulse he cherished, now sat next to his mother in church and stared wide-eyed at the man who had taken off his coat, who was sweating profusely, and who had called the city in which he lived a cesspool of vice and its inhabitants the devil's amulets.

The evangelist, speaking about the city, began to speak instead of heaven and hell, and his seriousness attracted the attention of the listening boy, who began to see pictures.

A picture of a burning fire pit came into his mind, with enormous flames engulfing the heads of the people writhing in the pit. "That would be Art Sherman," Sam thought, materializing the picture he saw; "nothing can save him; he has a saloon."

Filled with pity for the man he saw in the photograph of the burning pit, his thoughts focused on the person of Art Sherman. He liked Art Sherman. He had often felt a touch of human kindness in the man. The roaring and boisterous saloon owner helped the boy sell and collect money for the newspapers. "Pay the kid or get out of here," the red-faced man shouted at the drunken men leaning on the bar.

And then, looking into the burning pit, Sam thought of Mike McCarthy, for whom he had at that moment felt a kind of passion, akin to the blind devotion of a young girl to her lover. With a shudder, he realized that Mike would also go into the pit, because he had heard Mike mock churches and declare that there was no God.

The evangelist ran out onto the platform and addressed the people, demanding that they stand up. "Stand up for Jesus," he shouted. "Stand up and be counted among the host of the Lord God."

In the church, people began to rise to their feet. Jane McPherson stood with the others. Sam didn't. He had crept behind his mother's dress, hoping to pass through the storm unnoticed. The call for the faithful to rise was something to be obeyed or resisted, depending on the people's will; it was something entirely outside of himself. It didn't occur to him to count himself among either the lost or the saved.

The choir began singing again, and a bustle of activity began among the people. Men and women walked up and down the aisles, shaking hands with those in the pews, talking loudly and praying. "Welcome among us," they said to some standing on their feet. "Our hearts rejoice to see you among us. We are glad to see you among the saved. It is good to confess Jesus."

Suddenly, a voice from the bench behind him struck terror into Sam's heart. Jim Williams, who worked at Sawyer's barber shop, was kneeling and loudly praying for Sam McPherson's soul. "Lord, help this lost boy who wanders up and down in the company of sinners and publicans," he cried.

In an instant, the terror of death and the fiery pit that had possessed him passed, and instead, Sam was filled with a blind, silent rage. He remembered that this same Jim Williams had treated his sister's honor so lightly at the moment of her disappearance, and he wanted to stand up and vent his anger on the head of the man he felt had betrayed him. "They wouldn't have seen me," he thought. "This is a fine trick Jim Williams played on me. I'll get even with him for this."

He rose to his feet and stood next to his mother. He had no qualms about impersonating one of the lambs, safe in the flock. His thoughts were focused on appeasing Jim Williams' prayers and avoiding human attention.

The minister began calling on those standing to testify of their salvation. People came forward from various parts of the church, some loudly and boldly, with a hint of confidence in their voices, others trembling and hesitant. One woman wept loudly, crying out between bouts of sobbing, "The burden of my sins is heavy upon my soul." When the priest called upon them, young women and men responded with timid, hesitant voices, asking to sing a verse of a hymn or quoting a line from Scripture.

At the back of the church, the evangelist, one of the deacons, and two or three women gathered around a small, dark-haired woman, the baker's wife, to whom Sam was delivering papers. They urged her to rise and join the flock, and Sam turned and watched her curiously, his sympathy shifting to her. He hoped with all his heart that she would continue to stubbornly shake her head.

Suddenly, the restless Jim Williams broke free again. A shudder ran through Sam's body, and the blood rushed to his cheeks. "There's another sinner saved," Jim shouted, pointing to the standing boy. "Consider this boy, Sam McPherson, in the pen among the lambs."

On the platform, a brown-bearded minister stood on a chair, looking over the crowd's heads. An ingratiating smile played on his lips. "Let's hear from a young man, Sam McPherson," he said, raising his hand for silence, and then encouragingly, "Sam, what can you say to the Lord?"

Sam was overcome with terror at becoming the center of attention in the church. His rage against Jim Williams was forgotten in the spasm of fear that gripped him. He glanced over his shoulder at the door at the back of the church and thought longingly of the quiet street outside. He hesitated, stuttered, grew increasingly red and unsure, and finally broke out: "Lord," he said, then looked around hopelessly, "Lord commands me to lie down in green pastures."

A chuckle erupted from the seats behind him. A young woman sitting among the singers in the choir raised her handkerchief to her face and, throwing her head back, swayed back and forth. The man near the door burst into loud laughter and hurried out. People throughout the church began to laugh.

Sam turned his gaze to his mother. She was staring straight ahead, her face red. "I'm leaving this place and never coming back," he whispered, stepping into the hallway and boldly heading for the door. He decided that if the evangelist tried to stop him, he would fight. Behind him, he felt rows of people looking at him and smiling. The laughter continued.

He hurried down the street, consumed by indignation. "I'll never go to any church again," he vowed, shaking his fist in the air. The public confessions he'd heard in church seemed cheap and unworthy to him. He wondered why his mother had stayed there. With a wave of his hand, he dismissed everyone in the church. "This is a place to publicly expose people's asses," he thought.

Sam McPherson wandered down Main Street, dreading encountering Valmore and John Telfer. Finding the chairs behind the stove at Wildman's Grocery empty, he hurried past the grocer and hid in a corner. Tears of anger stood in his eyes. He had been made a fool of. He imagined the scene that would unfold the next morning when he went out with the papers. Freedom Smith would be sitting there in an old, battered buggy, roaring so loudly that the whole street would listen and laugh. "Sam, are you going to spend the night in some green pasture?" he shouted. "Aren't you afraid you'll catch a cold?" Valmore and Telfer stood outside Geiger's Drug Store, eager to join in the fun at his expense. Telfer was banging his cane against the side of the building and laughing. Valmore blew a trumpet and shouted after the fleeing boy. "You sleeping alone in those green pastures?" Freedom Smith roared again.

Sam stood up and walked out of the grocery store. He hurried, blinded by anger, and felt like he wanted to fight someone in a hand-to-hand fight. Then, hurrying and avoiding people, he merged with the crowd on the street and witnessed the strange event that had occurred that night in Caxton.


On Main Street, groups of quiet people stood talking. The air was heavy with excitement. Lonely figures moved from group to group, whispering hoarsely. Mike McCarthy, the man who had renounced God and won the favor of a newspaperman, had attacked a man with a penknife and left him bleeding and wounded on a country road. Something big and sensational had happened in the life of the city.

Mike McCarthy and Sam were friends. For years, the man had wandered the city streets, loitering, bragging, and chatting. He'd sit for hours in a chair under a tree in front of the New Leland house, reading books, performing card tricks, and engaging in long discussions with John Telfer or anyone else who would challenge him.

Mike McCarthy got into trouble because of a fight over a woman. A young farmer living on the outskirts of Caxton returned home from the fields to find his wife in the arms of a brave Irishman, and the two men left the house together to fight on the road. The woman, crying in the house, went to beg her husband's forgiveness. Running along the road in the gathering darkness, she found him cut and bleeding, lying in a ditch under a hedge. She ran along the road and appeared at a neighbor's door, screaming and calling for help.

The story of the roadside brawl reached Caxton just as Sam came around the corner from behind the stove at Wildman's and appeared in the street. Men ran up and down the street from store to store and from group to group, saying that the young farmer was dead and that a murder had occurred. At the corner, Windy McPherson addressed the crowd, declaring that the people of Caxton should rise up to defend their homes and tie the murderer to a lamppost. Hop Higgins, riding a Calvert livery horse, appeared on Main Street. "He'll be at McCarthy's farm," he shouted. When several men, emerging from Geiger's drugstore, stopped the marshal's horse, saying, "You'll have trouble there; you'd better get help," the little, red-faced marshal with the injured leg laughed. "What trouble?" he asked. "To get Mike McCarthy? I'll ask him to come, and he'll come." The rest of this game won't matter. Mike can fool the entire McCarthy family."

There were six McCarthy men, all but Mike, silent, sullen men who spoke only when drunk. Mike provided the town's social link to the family. It was a strange family, living in this rich corn country, a family with something wild and primitive about it, belonging to western mining camps or the half-wild inhabitants of deep city back alleys. The fact that he lived on an Iowa corn farm was, in the words of John Telfer, "something monstrous in nature."

The McCarty farm, located about four miles east of Caxton, once contained a thousand acres of good corn land. Lem McCarty, the father, inherited it from his brother, a gold prospector and a sporty owner of fast horses who planned to breed racehorses on Iowa soil. Lem came from the back streets of an eastern city, bringing with him his brood of tall, silent, wild boys to live on the land and, like the forty-niners, engage in sports. Believing the wealth that came his way far outweighed his expenses, he immersed himself in horse racing and gambling. When, after two years, five hundred acres of the farm had to be sold to pay gambling debts and the vast acres were overgrown with weeds, Lem became alarmed and set to work hard, with the boys working all day in the fields and, at long intervals, coming into town at night to get into trouble. Lacking mother or sister, and knowing no Caxton woman could be hired to work there, they did the housework themselves; on rainy days, they'd sit outside the old farmhouse, playing cards and fighting. On other days, they'd stand around the bar at Art Sherman's Saloon in Piatt Hollow, drinking until they lost their savage silence and became loud and quarrelsome, heading out into the streets looking for trouble. One day, entering Hayner's Restaurant, they grabbed a stack of plates from the shelves behind the bar and, standing in the doorway, hurled them at passersby, the crash of breaking dishes accompanied by their loud laughter. Having driven the men into hiding, they mounted their horses and ran up and down Main Street, shouting wildly, between the rows of tied horses, until Hop Higgins, the town marshal, appeared, as they rode off to the village, waking the farmers along the dark road as they ran shouting and singing toward home.

When the McCarthy boys got into trouble in Caxton, old Lem McCarthy rode into town and got them out, paying for the damage and claiming the boys had done no harm. When told not to let them into town, he shook his head and said he'd try.

Mike McCarthy didn't ride along the dark road with his five brothers, cursing and singing. He didn't toil all day in the hot cornfields. He was a family man, and dressed in fine clothes, he strolled the streets instead or loitered in the shade in front of the New Leland house. Mike was educated. He attended college in Indiana for several years, from which he was expelled for an affair with a woman. After returning from college, he stayed in Caxton, living in a hotel and pretending to study law in the office of old Judge Reynolds. He paid little attention to his studies, but with endless patience, he trained his hands so well that he became remarkably adept at handling coins and cards, snatching them out of thin air and making them appear in shoes, hats, and even the clothes of passersby. By day, he strolled the streets, looking at saleswomen in stores, or stood on the station platform, waving to female passengers on passing trains. He told John Telfer that flattery was a lost art he intended to restore. Mike McCarthy carried books in his pockets, reading them while sitting in a chair in front of a hotel or on the rocks in front of shop windows. When the streets were crowded on Saturdays, he stood on street corners, demonstrating his magic with cards and coins and eyeing the village girls in the crowd. One day, a woman, the wife of a town stationer, shouted at him, calling him a lazy lout. He then tossed a coin into the air, and when it didn't fall, he rushed toward her, shouting, "It's in her stocking." When the stationer's wife ran into her shop and slammed the door, the crowd laughed and cheered.

Telfer liked the tall, gray-eyed, loitering McCarthy, and sometimes sat with him, discussing a novel or a poem; Sam, standing in the background, listened avidly. Valmore didn't care for the man, shaking his head and declaring that such a guy couldn't end well.

The rest of the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, aware of this, sunbathed, drawing the town's ire. To bolster the publicity that rained down on him, he declared himself a socialist, anarchist, atheist, and pagan. Of all the McCarthy boys, he alone cared deeply about women and publicly and openly declared his passion for them. Before the men gathered around the stove at Wildman's Grocery, he would drive them wild with declarations of free love and vows to take the best from any woman who would give him the chance.

The thrifty and hardworking newspaperman held this man in a respect bordering on passion. Listening to McCarthy, he experienced a constant sense of pleasure. "There's nothing he wouldn't dare do," the boy thought. "He's the freest, the boldest, the bravest man in town." When the young Irishman, seeing the admiration in his eyes, tossed him a silver dollar, saying, "These are for your beautiful brown eyes, my boy; if I had them, half the women in town would follow me," Sam kept the dollar in his pocket and considered it a treasure of sorts, like a rose given to a lover by a loved one.


It was past eleven o'clock when Hop Higgins returned to town with McCarthy, riding quietly down the street and through the alley behind the town hall. The crowd outside had dispersed. Sam moved from one muttering group to another, his heart fluttering with fear. Now he stood behind the crowd of men gathered at the jail doors. An oil lamp burning on a pole above the door cast a dancing, flickering light across the faces of the men before him. The threatening thunderstorm hadn't broken, but an unnaturally warm wind continued to blow, and the sky overhead was inky black.

The city marshal rode through the alley toward the jail doors, young McCarthy sitting in the carriage next to him. The man rushed forward to rein in the horse. McCarthy's face was chalky white. He laughed and shouted, raising his hand to the sky.

"I am Michael, the son of God. I slashed a man with a knife until his red blood flowed across the ground. I am the son of God, and this filthy prison will be my refuge. There I will speak aloud to my Father," he roared hoarsely, shaking his fist at the crowd. "Sons of this cesspool of respectability, stay and listen! Send for your women and let them stand in the presence of a man!"

Taking the wild-eyed white man by the arm, Marshal Higgins led him into the jail, the clanking of locks, the low murmur of Higgins's voice, and McCarthy's wild laughter carried to the group of silent men standing in the dirt alley.

Sam McPherson ran past the group of men toward the edge of the jail and, finding John Telfer and Valmore leaning silently against the wall of Tom Folger's wagon shop, slipped between them. Telfer reached out and placed his hand on the boy's shoulder. Hop Higgins, emerging from the jail, addressed the crowd. "Don't answer if he talks," he said. "He's as mad as a madman."

Sam moved closer to Telfer. The prisoner's voice, loud and full of astonishing courage, came from the prison. He began to pray.

"Hear me, Father Almighty, who has allowed this town of Caxton to exist and allowed me, Your son, to grow to manhood. I am Michael, Your son. They have put me in this prison where rats run on the floor and stand in the filth outside while I talk to You. Are you there, old Corpse Penny?"

A breath of cold air blew through the alley, and then it began to rain. The group under the flickering lamp at the prison entrance retreated toward the building's walls. Sam dimly saw them pressed against the wall. The man in the prison laughed loudly.

"I had a philosophy of life, O Father," he cried. "I saw men and women here who lived year after year without children. I saw them hoarding pennies and denying You a new life over which to do Your will. I went to these women secretly and spoke of carnal love. I was gentle and kind to them; I flattered them."

A loud laugh escaped the prisoner's lips. "Are you here, O denizens of the cesspool of respectability?" he shouted. "You stand in the mud with frozen feet and listen? I've been with your wives. I've been with eleven of Caxton's wives, childless, and it was fruitless. I just abandoned the twelfth woman, leaving my man on the road, a bleeding victim to you. I will name the eleven. I will also have my vengeance on the husbands of these women, some of whom wait with the others in the mud outside."

He began naming Caxton's wives. A shudder ran through the boy, heightened by the new chill in the air and the night's excitement. A murmur arose among the men standing along the prison wall. They gathered again under the flickering light by the prison door, ignoring the rain. Valmore, emerging from the darkness beside Sam, stood before Telfer. "It's time for the boy to go home," he said. "He shouldn't hear this."

Telfer laughed and pulled Sam closer. "He's heard enough lies in this town," he said. "The truth won't hurt him. I won't go, you won't go, and the boy won't go. This McCarthy has a brain. Even though he's half crazy now, he's trying to figure something out. The boy and I will stay and listen."

The voice from the prison continued to name Caxton's wives. Voices in the group outside the prison door began shouting, "This has to stop. Let's tear down the prison."

McCarthy laughed loudly. "They wriggle, O Father, they wriggle; I hold them in the pit and torture them," he cried.

A sickening sense of satisfaction washed over Sam. He had a feeling the names shouted from the prison would be repeated throughout the city again and again. One of the women whose names were called stood with the evangelist at the back of the church, trying to persuade the baker's wife to rise and join the flock of lambs.

The rain falling on the shoulders of the men at the prison doors turned to hail, the air grew cold, and hailstones pounded the roofs of the buildings. Some men joined Telfer and Valmore, talking in low, agitated voices. "And Mary McCain's a hypocrite too," Sam heard one of them say.

The voice inside the prison changed. Still praying, Mike McCarthy seemed to be talking to the group in the darkness outside.

"I am tired of my life. I have sought leadership and have found none. O Father! Send us a new Christ, one who will take possession of us, a modern Christ with a pipe in his mouth, who will scold and confuse us so that we parasites who pretend to be made in Your image will understand. Let him enter churches and courthouses, cities and towns, crying, "For shame!" For shame, for your cowardly concern for your whining souls! Let him tell us that our lives, so miserable, will never be repeated after our bodies rot in the grave."

A sob escaped his lips and a lump rose in Sam's throat.

"Oh, Father! Help us men of Caxton to understand that this is all we have, this life of ours, this life so warm and hopeful and laughing in the sun, this life with its awkward boys full of strange possibilities, and its girls with their long legs and freckled arms, noses that are meant to carry life, new life, kicking and wiggling and waking them at night."

The voice of prayer broke off. Wild sobs replaced speech. "Father!" cried the broken voice. "I have taken the life of a man who moved, spoke, and whistled in the sun on a winter morning; I have killed."


The voice inside the prison became inaudible. A silence, broken only by soft sobs from the prison, settled over the small, dark alley, and the listeners began to quietly disperse. The lump in Sam's throat grew even stronger. Tears welled in his eyes. He walked out of the alley with Telfer and Valmore onto the street, the two men walking in silence. The rain had stopped, and a cold wind blew.

The boy felt a squeeze. His mind, his heart, even his tired body felt strangely purified. He felt a new affection for Telfer and Valmore. When Telfer began to speak, he listened eagerly, thinking he finally understood him and understood why men like Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and Telfer loved each other and continued their friendship year after year, despite difficulties and misunderstandings. He thought he grasped the idea of brotherhood that John Telfer had so often and eloquently spoken of. "Mike McCarthy is just a brother who went down a dark path," he thought, and felt a surge of pride at the thought and the aptness of its expression in his mind.

John Telfer, oblivious to the boy, was talking calmly to Valmore, while the two men stumbled through the darkness, lost in their thoughts.

"It's a strange thought," Telfer said, his voice sounding distant and unnatural, like a voice from a prison cell. "It's a strange thought that if it weren't for a quirk of the brain, this Mike McCarthy might himself be a kind of Christ with a pipe in his mouth."

Valmore stumbled and half-fell into the darkness at the street intersection. Telfer continued speaking.

"Someday the world will find a way to some understanding of its extraordinary people. Now they suffer terribly. Regardless of the success or failure that befell this inventive, strangely perverse Irishman, their fate is sad. Only the ordinary, simple, thoughtless man glides peacefully through this troubled world."

Jane McPherson sat in the house, waiting for her boy. She thought of the scene in the church, and a bright light burned in her eyes. Sam walked past his parents' bedroom, where Windy McPherson snored peacefully, and climbed the stairs to his own room. He undressed, turned off the light, and knelt on the floor. From the wild delirium of the man in prison, he grasped something. Amid Mike McCarthy's blasphemy, he felt a deep and abiding love for life. Where the church had failed, a bold sensualist had succeeded. Sam felt he could pray in front of the entire town.

"O Father!" he cried, raising his voice in the silence of the little room, "make me adhere to the thought that the right living of this, my life, is my duty to you.

At the door downstairs, while Valmore waited on the sidewalk, Telfer talked to Jane McPherson.

"I wanted Sam to hear," he explained. "He needs religion. All young people need religion. I wanted him to hear how even a man like Mike McCarthy instinctively tries to justify himself before God."

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CHAPTER IV


JOHN T. ELFER'S FRIENDSHIP had a formative influence on Sam McPherson. His father's uselessness and the growing awareness of his mother's plight had given life a bitter taste, but Telfer sweetened it. He eagerly probed Sam's thoughts and dreams and courageously tried to awaken in the quiet, hardworking, money-making boy his own love of life and beauty. At night, as they walked along country roads, the man would stop and, waving his arms, quote Poe or Browning, or, in another mood, draw Sam's attention to the rare scent of haymaking or a moonlit patch of meadow.

Before the people gathered in the streets, he teased the boy, calling him a covetous man and saying, "He's like a mole that works underground. As a mole seeks a worm, so this boy seeks a nickel. I've watched him. A traveler leaves town, leaving a dime or a nickel here, and within an hour it's in this boy's pocket. I've spoken to Banker Walker about him. He trembles lest his vaults become too small to contain the wealth of this young Croesus. The day will come when he'll buy the city and put it in his vest pocket."

Despite all his public bullying of the boy, Telfer was a genius when they were alone. Then he would talk to him openly and freely, just as he had talked to Valmore, Freed Smith, and his other friends on the streets of Caxton. As he walked along the road, he would point his cane toward the town and say, "There's more realness in you and your mother than in all the other boys and mothers in this town put together."

In all the world, Caxton Telfer was the only man who knew books and took them seriously. Sam sometimes found his attitude puzzling, and he'd stand open-mouthed, listening to Telfer curse or laugh at a book, just as he did at Valmore or Freedom Smith. He had a beautiful portrait of Browning, which he kept in his stable, and before that, he'd stand with his legs apart, his head cocked to one side, and talk.

"You're a rich old sport, huh?" he'd say, grinning. "You force yourself to be discussed in clubs by women and college professors, huh? You old swindler!"

Telfer had no mercy for Mary Underwood, the schoolteacher who became Sam's friend and with whom the boy sometimes walked and talked. Mary Underwood was something of a thorn in Caxton's side. She was the only child of Silas Underwood, the town's saddlemaker, who had once worked in a shop owned by Windy McPherson. After Windy's failure in business, he struck out on his own and prospered for a time, sending his daughter to school in Massachusetts. Mary didn't understand the people of Caxton, and they misunderstood and mistrusted her. By not participating in town life and keeping to herself and her books, she aroused a certain fear in others. Because she didn't join them for church suppers or gossip from door to door with other women on long summer evenings, they considered her something of an anomaly. On Sundays she sat alone in her pew at church, and on Saturday afternoons, come storm or shine, she strolled along the country roads and through the woods, accompanied by her collie. She was a short woman with a straight, slender figure and beautiful blue eyes, full of changing light, hidden by spectacles, which she almost always wore. Her lips were very full and red, and she sat with them parted so that the edges of her beautiful teeth were revealed. Her nose was large, and her cheeks glowed with a beautiful russet color. Though she was different from others, she, like Jane Macpherson, had a habit of silence; and in her silence, like Sam's mother, she possessed an unusually strong and energetic mind.

As a child, she was something of a semi-invalid and had no friendships with other children. It was then that her habit of silence and reserve took hold. Years at school in Massachusetts restored her health, but did not break this habit. She returned home and took a job teaching in order to earn money to return East, dreaming of a teaching position at an Eastern college. She was that rare individual: a woman scholar who loved scholarship for its own sake.

Mary Underwood's position in the town and the schools was precarious. Her silent, solitary life gave rise to a misunderstanding that, at least once, took a serious form and nearly drove her out of the town and the schools. Her resistance to the barrage of criticism that rained down on her for weeks was due to her habit of silence and her determination to get her way, no matter what.

It was a reference to the scandal that had left her with gray hair. The scandal had died down before she became friends with Sam, but he knew about it. In those days, he knew everything that was happening in the city-his quick ears and eyes missed nothing. He'd heard men talking about her more than once while waiting for a shave at Sawyer's Barber Shop.

Rumor had it she was having an affair with a real estate agent who later left town. The man, a tall, handsome man, was said to be in love with Mary and wanted to leave his wife and go with her. One night, he pulled up to Mary's house in a covered carriage, and the two of them drove out of town. They sat for hours in the covered carriage on the side of the road, talking, and people passing by saw them talking.

Then she climbed out of the buggy and walked home alone through the snowdrifts. The next day, she was at school as usual. Upon learning of this, the school principal, a dull old man with empty eyes, shook his head in dismay and declared that the matter needed to be looked into. He called Mary into his small, narrow office in the school building, but lost his courage when she sat down before him and said nothing. The man at the barbershop, who repeated the story, said that the estate agent had driven to a distant station and taken a train into town, returning to Caxton a few days later and moving his family out of the city.

Sam dismissed the story. After befriending Mary, he'd placed the man from the barbershop in Windy McPherson's class and considered him a pretender and a liar who talked for the sake of talking. He recalled with shock the crude flippancy with which the loafers in the store had treated the story's repetition. Their comments came back to him as he walked down the street with his newspapers, and it jolted him. He walked under the trees, thinking of the sunlight falling on gray hair as they strolled together on summer days, and he bit his lip, convulsively opening and closing his fist.

During Mary's second year at Caxton School, her mother died, and at the end of the following year, her father, having failed in his saddlery business, Mary became a regular at the school. Her mother's house on the outskirts of town was taken over by her, and she lived there with an elderly aunt. After the scandal surrounding the realtor died down, the town lost interest in her. At the time of her first friendship with Sam, she was thirty-six and living alone among her books.

Sam was deeply touched by her friendship. He found it significant that adults with their own affairs were so serious about his future as she and Telfer were. In his boyish way, he considered this more a tribute to himself than to his charming youth, and he was proud of it. Lacking any real love for books and only pretending to do so out of a desire to please, he would sometimes switch between his two friends, passing off their opinions as his own.

Telfer always caught him out with this trick. "That's not your opinion," he'd shout, "your schoolteacher told you that. That's a woman's opinion. Their opinions, like the books they sometimes write, are based on nothing. They're not real things. Women don't know anything. Men only care about them because they didn't get what they wanted from them. No woman is truly great-except maybe my woman, Eleanor."

As Sam continued to spend a lot of time in Mary's company, Telfer became increasingly embittered.

"I'd like you to observe women's minds and not let them influence your own," he told the boy. "They live in a world of unreality. They even like vulgar people in books, but they shun the simple, down-to-earth people around them. This schoolteacher is like that. Is she like me? Does she, while loving books, also love the very scent of human life?"

In a sense, Telfer's attitude toward the kindly little schoolteacher became Sam's. Though they walked and talked together, he never accepted the course of study she had planned for him, and as he got to know her better, the books she read and the ideas she advanced attracted him less and less. He thought she, as Telfer claimed, lived in a world of illusion and unreality, and he said so. When she lent him books, he put them in his pocket and didn't read them. When he did read, he felt as if the books reminded him of something that had hurt him. They were somehow false and pretentious. He thought they resembled his father. Once, he tried to read aloud to Telfer a book Mary Underwood had lent him.

It was the story of a poetic man with long, dirty fingernails who walked among the people, preaching the gospel of beauty. It all began with a scene on a hillside during a downpour, where the poetic man sat under a tent, writing a letter to his beloved.

Telfer was beside himself. Jumping up from his place under a tree by the side of the road, he waved his arms and shouted:

"Stop! Stop it! Don't go on like this. History lies. A man couldn't write love letters under those circumstances, and he was a fool to pitch his tent on a hillside. A man in a tent on a hillside during a thunderstorm would get cold, wet, and get rheumatism. To write letters, he'd have to be an unspeakable ass. He'd better go dig a trench to keep the water from running through his tent."

Telfer walked down the road, waving his arms, and Sam followed, thinking he was quite right, and if later in life he learned that there were people who could write love letters on a piece of roof during a flood, he didn't know it then, and the slightest hint of frivolity or pretense settled heavily in his stomach.

Telfer was a great enthusiast for Bellamy's Looking Backward, reading it aloud to his wife on Sunday afternoons under the apple trees in the orchard. They had a store of little personal jokes and sayings that they were always laughing about, and she derived endless pleasure from his commentary on the life and people of Caxton, but she did not share his love of books. When she sometimes dozed off in her chair during Sunday afternoon readings, he would poke her with his cane and laughingly tell her to wake up and listen to the dream of a great dreamer. Among Browning's poems, his favorites were "The Easy Woman" and "Fra Lippo Lippi," and he recited them aloud with great pleasure. He proclaimed Mark Twain the greatest man in the world and, when in the mood, would walk down the road beside Sam, repeating over and over a line or two of poetry, often from Poe:

Helen, your beauty is for me

Like some kind of Nicene bark of bygone times.

Then, stopping and turning to the boy, he asked if such lines were worth living his life for.

Telfer had a pack of dogs that always accompanied them on their nightly walks, and he had given them long Latin names that Sam could never remember. One summer, he bought a trotting mare from Lem McCarthy and lavished much attention on the colt, whom he named Bellamy Boy, riding him up and down the small driveway near his house for hours and declaring that he would be a fine trotter. He would recount the colt's pedigree with great pleasure, and when talking to Sam about a book, he would repay the boy's attention by saying, "You, my boy, are as superior to all the boys in town as the colt himself. Bellamy Boy is superior to the farm horses that are brought to Main Street on Saturday afternoons. And then, with a wave of his hand and a very serious expression, he would add, "And for the same reason. You, like him, were under the guidance of the head youth trainer.


One evening, Sam, now a man of his own size and full of the awkwardness and self-consciousness of his new height, sat on a cracker barrel in the back of Wildman's Grocery Store. It was a summer evening, and a breeze blew through the open doors, swaying the hanging oil lamps that burned and crackled overhead. As usual, he listened silently to the conversation going on among the men.

Standing with his legs wide apart and occasionally poking Sam's legs with his cane, John Telfer discussed the subject of love.

"It's a subject poets write about well," he declared. "By writing about it, they avoid having to accept it. In their attempt to create a graceful line, they forget to notice the graceful ankles. He who sings most passionately of love has been least in love; he courts the goddess of poetry and only gets into trouble when, like John Keats, he turns to a villager's daughter and tries to live up to the lines he wrote."

"Nonsense, nonsense," roared Freedom Smith, who had been leaning back in his chair, his feet against the cold stove, smoking a short black pipe, and now slammed his feet to the floor. Admiring Telfer's flow of words, he feigned contempt. "The night is too hot for eloquence," he roared. "If you must be eloquent, talk about ice cream or mint juleps or recite a poem about an old swimming pool."

Telfer wet his finger and raised it into the air.

"The wind is northwest; the animals are roaring; a storm awaits us," he said, winking at Valmore.

Banker Walker entered the store accompanied by his daughter. She was a small, dark-skinned girl with quick, dark eyes. Seeing Sam sitting, swinging his legs, on a cracker barrel, she spoke to her father and left the store. On the sidewalk, she stopped, turned, and made a quick gesture with her hand.

Sam jumped down from the cracker barrel and headed for the front door. A flush crept into his cheeks. His mouth felt hot and dry. He walked with extreme caution, stopping to bow to the banker and pausing for a moment to read the newspaper lying on his cigarette case, to avoid any comments he feared might prompt his departure among the men at the stove. His heart trembled lest the girl disappear into the street, and he glanced guiltily at the banker, who had joined the group at the back of the store and was now standing listening to the conversation while he read from a list he held in his hands, and Wildman walked back and forth, collecting packages and repeating aloud the titles of the articles the banker had recalled.

At the end of the illuminated business section of Main Street, Sam found a girl waiting for him. She began to tell him how she managed to escape from her father.

"I told him I was going home with my sister," she said, shaking her head.

Taking the boy by the hand, she led him down the shady street. For the first time, Sam was walking in the company of one of the strange creatures that had begun to bring him restless nights. Overwhelmed by this wonder, the blood rushed through his body and made his head spin, so that he walked in silence, unable to understand his emotions. He felt the girl's soft hand with delight; his heart pounded against the walls of his chest, and a feeling of suffocation constricted his throat.

Walking down the street past the lighted houses, where soft female voices floated to his ears, Sam felt unusually proud. He thought he wished he could turn around and walk with this girl down the illuminated Main Street. If only she hadn't chosen him from all the boys in town; hadn't she waved her small white hand and called out to him, and he wondered why the people on the cracker barrels hadn't heard? Her courage, and his own, took his breath away. He couldn't speak. His tongue felt paralyzed.

A boy and a girl walked down the street, loitering in the shadows, hurrying past the dim oil lamps at the intersections, each receiving wave after wave of exquisite little sensations from the other. Neither spoke. They were beyond words. Hadn't they committed this daring act together?

In the shade of a tree, they stopped and stood facing each other; the girl looked at the ground and stood facing the boy. He reached out and placed his hand on her shoulder. In the darkness across the street, a man stumbled home along the boardwalk. The lights of Main Street glowed in the distance. Sam pulled the girl toward him. She raised her head. Their lips met, and then, wrapping her arms around his neck, she kissed him hungrily again and again.


Sam's return to Wildman's was marked by extreme caution. Though he'd only been gone fifteen minutes, it felt like hours, and he wouldn't have been surprised to find the stores locked and Main Street in darkness. It was unthinkable that the grocer would still be packing packages for the banker, Walker. Worlds had been remade. Manhood had come to him. Why! A man should have wrapped the entire store, package by package, and shipped it to the ends of the earth. He lingered in the shadows by the first store light, where, years ago, as a boy, he'd walked to meet her, a mere girl, and gazed in wonder at the illuminated path before him.

Sam crossed the street and, standing in front of Sawyer's, peered into Wildman's. He felt like a spy peering into enemy territory. Before him sat people into whose midst he had the opportunity to cast a lightning bolt. He could have walked up to the door and said, truthfully enough, "Here before you is the boy who, with a wave of his white hand, became a man; here is the one who broke a woman's heart and ate his fill from the tree of knowledge of life."

At the grocery store, the men were still chatting around the cracker barrels, seemingly unaware of the boy's sneaking in. Indeed, their conversation had faded. Instead of talking about love and poets, they were talking about corn and steers. Banker Walker, reclining on the counter with bags of groceries, was smoking a cigar.

"You can hear the corn growing quite clearly this evening," he said. "It just needs another rain or two, and we'll have a record harvest. I plan to feed a hundred steers on my farm off Rabbit Road this winter."

The boy climbed back onto the cracker barrel and tried to appear indifferent and interested in the conversation. However, his heart was pounding; his wrists still throbbed. He turned and looked at the floor, hoping his nervousness would go unnoticed.

The banker, picking up the packages, walked out the door. Valmore and Freedom Smith went to the livery barn to play pinochle. And John Telfer, twirling his cane and calling a pack of dogs loitering in the alley behind the store, took Sam for a walk outside the city.

"I will continue this talk of love," said Telfer, striking the weeds along the road with his cane and calling sharply from time to time to the dogs, who, filled with delight at being abroad, ran growling and somersaulting over each other in the dusty road.

"This Freedom Smith is the very picture of life in this town. At the word "love," he puts his feet down on the floor and pretends to be disgusted. He will talk of corn, or steers, or the stinking hides he buys, but at the mention of the word "love," he is like a hen that sees a hawk in the sky. He runs around in circles, making a noise. "Here! Here! Here!" he cries. "You are revealing what should be hidden. You are doing in broad daylight what should only be done with a shamefaced face in a darkened room." Yes, boy, if I were a woman in this town, I couldn"t stand it-I"d go to New York, to France, to Paris-To be courted for a moment by a bashful, artless lout-ah-it"s unthinkable."

The man and the boy walked in silence. The dogs, scenting the rabbit, disappeared into the long pasture, and the owner let them go. Every now and then, he threw back his head and took a deep breath of the night air.

"I'm not Banker Walker," he declared. "He thinks of corn farming in terms of fat steers feeding on Rabbit Run; I think of it as something majestic. I see long rows of corn, half-hidden by men and horses, hot and suffocating, and I think of the vast river of life. I catch the breath of the fire that was in the mind of the man who said, 'The earth flows with milk and honey.' My thoughts bring me joy, not the dollars jingling in my pocket."

"And then in the fall, when the corn stands in shock, I see a different picture. Here and there, armies of corn stand in groups. When I look at them, my voice rings. 'These orderly armies led humanity out of chaos,' I say to myself. 'On a smoking black ball, cast by the hand of God from boundless space, man raised these armies to defend his home from the dark, attacking armies of need.'"

Telfer stopped and stood in the road, legs spread. He took off his hat and, throwing his head back, laughed at the stars.

"Now Freedom Smith must hear me," he cried, rocking back and forth with laughter and directing his cane at the boy's legs, so that Sam had to skip merrily down the road to avoid it. "Thrown by the hand of God from the boundless expanse-ah! Not bad, aha! I should be in Congress. I'm wasting my time here. I'm giving priceless eloquence to dogs who'd rather chase rabbits and a boy who's the worst money-grubber in town."

The summer madness that had gripped Telfer passed, and for a while he walked in silence. Suddenly, placing his hand on the boy's shoulder, he stopped and pointed to where a faint glow in the sky marked the illuminated city.

"They are good men," he said, "but their ways are not my ways or your ways. You will get out of town. You have genius. You will be a financier. I have watched you. You are not stingy, you do not cheat, and you do not lie-the result is that you will not make a small businessman. What is it you have? You have a gift for seeing dollars where other boys in town see nothing, and you are tireless in the search for these dollars-you will become a big man in dollars, that is clear." A note of bitterness entered his voice. "I have been marked, too. Why do I carry a cane? Why don"t I buy a farm and raise bulls? I am the most useless creature in the world. I have a touch of genius, but I have not the energy to make it count."

Sam's mind, inflamed by the girl's kiss, cooled in Telfer's presence. There was something about the man's summer madness that calmed the fever in his blood. He eagerly followed the words, saw images, experienced thrills, and was filled with happiness.

On the outskirts of town, a buggy passed a couple walking. A young farmer sat in the carriage, his arm around the girl's waist, her head resting on his shoulder. Far in the distance, the faint call of dogs could be heard. Sam and Telfer sat down on the grassy bank under a tree, and Telfer rolled over and lit a cigarette.

"As I promised, I will talk to you about love," he said, waving his hand widely each time he put a cigarette in his mouth.

The grassy bank on which they lay had a rich, scorching scent. A wind rustled the standing corn, which formed a kind of wall behind them. The moon hung high in the sky, illuminating the ranks of serried clouds. The pomposity vanished from Telfer's voice, and his face grew serious.

"My stupidity is more than half serious," he said. "I think a man or a boy who sets himself a task had better leave women and girls alone. If he is a man of genius, he has a goal independent of the world, and he must hack, hack, and fight his way to it, forgetting everyone, especially the woman who will engage him in combat. She, too, has a goal to which she is striving. She is at war with him and has a goal that is not his goal. She believes that the pursuit of women is the end of all life. Although they now condemn Mike McCarthy, who was sent to an asylum because of them and who, loving life, was close to committing suicide, the women of Caxton do not condemn his madness for themselves; they do not accuse him of wasting his good years or of making a useless mess of his good brain. While he pursued women as an art, they secretly applauded. Didn't twelve of them accept the challenge thrown by his eyes as he wandered the streets?

The man, now speaking quietly and seriously, raised his voice and waved his lit cigarette in the air, while the boy, once again thinking about the banker Walker's dark-skinned daughter, listened attentively. The barking of the dogs grew closer.

"If you, boy, can learn from me, a grown man, the meaning of women, you will not have lived in this city in vain. Set your own record in making money if you like, but aim for it. Let yourself go, and a sweet, wistful pair of eyes seen in a street crowd, or a pair of little feet running across a dance floor, will stunt your growth for years. No man or boy can achieve the goal of life while he thinks about women. Let him try, and he will perish. What is a fleeting joy to him is the end to them. They are devilishly clever. They will run and stop, run and stop again, remaining just out of his reach. He sees them here and there around him. His mind is filled with vague, delicious thoughts emanating from the very air; before he realizes what he has done, he has spent his years in vain searching, and, turning, finds himself old and lost."

Telfer began poking the ground with a stick.

"I had my chance. In New York I had the money to live on and the time to become an artist. I won prize after prize. The master, pacing back and forth behind us, lingered longer than anyone over my easel. Next to me sat a guy who had nothing. I laughed at him and named him Sleepy Jock, after the dog we had at home here in Caxton. Now here I am, idly waiting for death and that Jock, where is he? Only last week I read in the paper that he had won a place among the world"s greatest artists with his painting. At school I watched the girls" eyes and went with them night after night, winning, like Mike McCarthy, fruitless victories. Sleepy Jock got the best of it. He did not look around with open eyes, but kept gazing into the master"s face. My days were full of small successes. I could wear clothes. I could make soft-eyed girls turn and look at me in the ballroom. I remember the night. We students were dancing, and Sleepy Jock came along. He walked around asking for dances, and the girls laughed and told him they had nothing to offer, that the dances were taken. I followed him, my ears filled with flattery, and my calling card filled with names. Riding the wave of small successes, I acquired the habit of small successes. When I failed to grasp the line I wanted to bring to life, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl's arm, went out of town for the day. One day, sitting in a restaurant, I overheard two women talking about the beauty of my eyes, and I was happy for a whole week.

Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.

"My flow of words, my ready method of conversation; where does it lead me? Let me tell you. It led me, at fifty, who might have been an artist, fixing the minds of thousands on something beautiful or true, to become a village habitué, a beer-drinker, a lover of idle pleasures. Words in the air of a village intent on growing corn.

"If you ask me why, I will tell you that my mind was paralyzed by a small success, and if you ask me where I got the taste for it, I will tell you that I felt it when I saw it hidden in a woman's eyes and heard the sweet songs that lull one to sleep on a woman's lips."

The boy sitting on the grassy bank next to Telfer began to think about life in Caxton. The man, smoking a cigarette, lapsed into one of his rare silences. The boy thought about the girls who came to mind at night, about how he'd been moved by the look of a little blue-eyed schoolgirl who'd once visited Freedom Smith's house, and about how he'd gone one night to stand under her window.

In Caxton, young love had a masculinity befitting a country that grew so many bushels of yellow corn and drove so many fat steers through the streets to be loaded into trucks. Men and women went their separate ways, believing, with a characteristically American attitude toward the needs of childhood, that it was healthy for growing boys and girls to be alone with each other. Leaving them alone was a matter of principle. When a young man visited his sweetheart, her parents sat in the presence of the two with apologetic eyes and soon disappeared, leaving them alone. When parties for boys and girls were held in Caxton homes, the parents left, leaving the children to their own devices.

"Now have fun and don't tear the house down," they said as they went upstairs.

Left to their own devices, the children played kissing, while the young men and tall, half-mature girls sat on the porch in the dark, excited and half-frightened, crudely and unguidedly testing their instincts, their first glimpse of the mystery of life. They kissed passionately, and the young men, walking home, lay on their beds, feverish and unnaturally aroused, brooding.

Young men would regularly enter the company of girls, knowing nothing about them except that they stirred their entire being, a kind of riot of emotion to which they returned on other evenings, like drunkards to their cups. After such an evening, the next morning they found themselves bewildered and filled with vague desires. They had lost their sense of fun; they overheard men's conversations at the train station and in the shops, without really hearing them; they walked in groups along the streets, and people, seeing them, nodded their heads and said, "This is a boorish age."

If Sam wasn't aging rudely, it was due to his relentless struggle to keep the sums at the bottom of his yellow bankbook, his mother's increasingly ill health, which was beginning to frighten him, and the company of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now sat brooding next to him. He began to think he would have nothing more to do with the Walker girl. He recalled his sister's affair with the young farmer and shuddered at its crude vulgarity. He glanced over the shoulder of the man sitting beside him, lost in thought, and saw rolling fields spread out in the moonlight, and Telfer's speech came into his mind. So vivid and touching was the image of the armies of standing corn that people had lined up in the fields to defend themselves against the march of merciless Nature, and Sam, holding this image in his mind, followed the tenor of Telfer's conversation. He thought of the entire society as divided into a few stalwart souls who continued to move forward despite everything, and he was overcome by the desire to make himself into another like him. The desire within him seemed so overwhelming that he turned and, haltingly, tried to express what was on his mind.

"I'll try," he muttered, "I'll try to be a man. I'll try to have nothing to do with them-with women. I'll work and earn money-and-and-"

Speech deserted him. He rolled over and, lying on his stomach, looked at the ground.

"To hell with women and girls," he blurted out, as if throwing something unpleasant out of his throat.

A commotion arose on the road. The dogs, abandoning their pursuit of the rabbits, came into view, barking and growling, and raced along the grassy bank, shielding the man and boy. Shaking off his reaction to his sensitive nature, Telfer's boy became emotional. His composure returned. Slashing left and right with his stick at the dogs, he joyfully shouted, "We've had enough of the eloquence of man, boy, and dog. We'll be on our way. We'll take this boy Sam home and put him to bed."

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CHAPTER V


SAM WAS A half-grown man of fifteen when the city's call came to him. For six years he had been on the streets. He had seen the hot, red sun rise over the cornfields, and wandered the streets in the bleak darkness of winter mornings when the trains from the north pulled into Caxton, covered in ice, and the railroad workers stood in the deserted little street, the platform whipping their hands and shouting at Jerry Donlin to hurry up with his work so they could get back into the warm, stale air of the smoking machine.

Over the course of six years, the boy became increasingly determined to become a rich man. Nurtured by the banker Walker, his silent mother, and, somehow, by the very air he breathed, his inner belief that earning money and having it would somehow compensate for the old, half-forgotten humiliations of the McPherson family's life and place it on a more solid foundation than the shaky Windy had provided grew and influenced his thoughts and actions. He tirelessly continued his efforts to get ahead. At night, in bed, he dreamed of dollars. Jane McPherson was passionate about thrift. Despite Windy's incompetence and her own declining health, she kept the family from going into debt, and although during the long, harsh winters Sam sometimes ate cornmeal until his mind rebelled at the thought of a cornfield, the rent on the little house was paid from scratch, and her son was forced to increase the amounts in the yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who after the death of his wife lived in the attic above his shop and in the old days was a blacksmith, first a worker and then a money-maker, did not disdain the idea of profit.

"Money moves the mare," he said with a certain reverence as the banker Walker, fat, well-groomed and prosperous, pompously emerged from Wildman's grocery store.

The boy wasn't sure about John Telfer's attitude toward making money. The man followed the impulse of the moment with joyful abandon.

"That's right," he exclaimed impatiently when Sam, who had begun to voice his opinion at grocery store meetings, hesitantly remarked that newspapers counted rich people regardless of their achievements: "Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big world! Make your name as a modern, upscale American!"

And with his next breath, turning to Freedom Smith, who had begun to scold the boy for not going to school, and who had predicted that the day would come when Sam would wish he knew his books, he shouted, "Let go of the schools! They are only musty beds for old office workers to sleep on!"

Among the traveling men who came to Caxton to sell their wares, a favorite was a boy who continued selling paper even after reaching human height. Sitting in armchairs in front of the New Leland house, they talked to him about the town and the money they could make there.

"This is a place for a lively young man," they said.

Sam had a talent for engaging people in conversation about himself and his business, and he began cultivating traveling men. From them, he inhaled the scent of the city, and, listening to them, he saw wide streets filled with hurrying people, tall buildings touching the sky, people running around trying to earn money, and clerks working year after year for meager wages, receiving nothing, some, but not understanding the impulses and motives of the businesses that supported them.

In this picture, Sam seemed to see a place for himself. He perceived life in the city as a grand game, one in which he believed he could play a flawless role. Hadn't he created something out of nothing in Caxton, hadn't he systematized and monopolized newspaper sales, hadn't he introduced the sale of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the Saturday night crowds? The boys had already gone to work for him, and the bankbook had already exceeded seven hundred dollars. He felt a surge of pride at the thought of all he had done and would continue to do.

"I'm going to be richer than anyone in this town," he declared proudly. "I'm going to be richer than Ed Walker."

Saturday night was a great night in Caxton's life. The store clerks prepared themselves for it, Sam sent out the peanut and popcorn salesmen, Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and placed glasses next to the beer tap under the bar, and mechanics, farmers, and laborers dressed in their Sunday best and went out to socialize with their comrades. On Main Street, crowds filled the shops, sidewalks, and saloons; men stood in groups talking, and young women with their lovers walked back and forth. In the lobby above Geiger's Drug Store, the dance continued, and the caller's voice rose above the din of voices and the clatter of horses outside. Occasionally, fights broke out among the rioters in Piety Hollow. One day, a young farmhand was stabbed to death.

Sam walked through the crowd, promoting his wares.

"Remember the long, quiet Sunday afternoon," he said, thrusting a newspaper into the hands of the slow-witted farmer. "Recipes for new dishes," he urged the farmer's wife. "This is a page on new fashions in clothing," he told the girl.

Sam did not finish the day's work until the last light had gone out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow and the last reveler had ridden off into the darkness with a Saturday paper in his pocket.

And it was on Saturday evening that he decided to refuse to sell the paper.

"I'll take you into business with me," Freedom Smith announced, stopping him as he hurried past. "You're getting too old to sell newspapers, and you know too much."

Sam, still intent on making money that Saturday night, didn't stop to discuss the matter with Freed, but he had been quietly looking for something to do for a year, and now he nodded his head as he hurried away.

"This is the end of romance," shouted Telfer, standing next to Freed Smith in front of Geiger's drugstore and overhearing the proposal. "The boy who saw the secret workings of my mind, who heard me recite Poe and Browning, will become a merchant selling stinking skins. The thought haunts me."

The next day, sitting in the garden behind his house, Telfer discussed the matter with Sam at length.

"For you, my boy, I put money first," he declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and occasionally tapping Eleanor"s shoulder with his cane. "For any boy, I put making money first. Only women and fools despise making money. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she puts into selling hats could kill me, but it has made her. Look how refined and determined she has become. Without the hat business, she would be an aimless fool, obsessed with clothes, but with this, she is everything a woman should be. To her, it"s like a child."

Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the ground, a shadow crossing her face. Telfer, who had begun to speak mindlessly due to the excess of words, looked from the woman to the boy. He knew the proposal of a child had touched Eleanor's secret regret, and he began to try to wipe the shadow from her face, throwing himself into the topic that had just happened to be on his tongue, causing the words to roll and fly from his lips.

"Whatever happens in the future, these days, making money precedes many of the virtues that are always on people's lips," he declared fiercely, as if trying to confuse his opponent. "It is one of the virtues that proves man is not a savage. It is not making money that has elevated him, but the ability to make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys fear. Having it means sanitary houses and well-tailored clothes. It brings beauty and a love of beauty into men's lives. It allows a man to embark on a journey of life's blessings, as I have done.

"Writers love to tell stories of the gross excesses of great wealth," he continued quickly, glancing back at Eleanor. "Surely what they describe actually happens. It's the money that's to blame, not the ability and instinct to make money. But what about the grosser manifestations of poverty, the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silence of the crowded, unsanitary homes of the poor, the inefficient and defeated? Sit in the drawing room of the most commonplace rich man's town club, as I did, and then sit at noon among the workers of a factory. You'll find that virtue has no more love for poverty than you and I, and that a man who has merely learned to be industrious, and has not acquired that eager hunger and insight that enables him to succeed, can make a strong, agile team in body, while his mind is diseased and decaying."

Seizing his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his eloquence, Telfer forgot about Eleanor and began to speak for the love of conversation.

"The mind that harbors a love of beauty, that which makes our poets, painters, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for the skillful acquisition of money, otherwise it will destroy itself," he declared. "And truly great artists have it. In books and stories, great men starve in garrets. In real life, they more often ride in carriages down Fifth Avenue and have country retreats on the Hudson. Go and see for yourself. Visit a starving genius in his garret. The odds are one hundred to one that you will find him not only incapable of making money, but also incapable of practicing the very art he craves."

After a hasty message from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer for his paper business. He liked the proposed location and wanted a chance there. By buying potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and hides, he thought he could make money; besides, he knew that his dogged persistence in saving money in the bank had captured Freedom's imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of this.

Within a few days, the deal was done. Sam received three hundred and fifty dollars for the newspaper client list, the peanut and popcorn business, and the exclusive agencies he had established with the daily newspapers of De Moine and St. Louis. The two boys bought the business with the support of their fathers. A conversation in the back room of the bank, where the teller explained Sam's track record as a depositor, and the remaining seven hundred dollars sealed the deal. When it came to the deal with Freedom, Sam took him to the back room and showed him his savings, just as he had shown them to the two boys' fathers. Freedom was impressed. He thought the boy would make money for him. Twice that week, Sam witnessed the quiet, impressive power of money.

The deal Sam struck with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, more than enough to cover all his needs, and he was to receive two-thirds of everything he saved to buy Freedom. Freedom, on the other hand, was to provide the horse, transportation, and upkeep, while Sam was to care for the horse. The prices to be paid for the items purchased were to be set each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought for less than the stated prices, two-thirds of the savings went to him. This arrangement was suggested by Sam, who thought he would earn more from the savings than from the wages.

Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matters in a loud voice, roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great inventor of descriptive names, having a name for every man, woman, and child he knew and loved. "Old Maybe-Not," he called Windy McPherson, growling at him in the grocery store, begging him not to spill rebel blood in a sugar barrel. He traveled the country in a low, creaking buggy with a wide hole in the top. As far as Sam knew, neither the buggy nor Freedom washed during his stay with the man. He had his own method of shopping: stopping in front of a farmhouse, he would sit in his wagon and roar until the farmer emerged from the field or the house to speak with him. And then, haggling and shouting, he would make a deal or go on his way, while the farmer, leaning against the fence, laughed like a lost child.

Freedom lived in a large old brick house overlooking one of Caxton's finest streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to the neighbors, who liked him personally. He knew this and stood on the porch, laughing and roaring about it. "Good morning, Mary," he called to the neat German woman across the street. "Wait and see how I tidy up this place. I'm going to do it right now. First, I'll brush the flies off the fence."

He once ran for a county office and received virtually every vote in the county.

Liberty had a passion for buying old, worn-out buggies and farm implements, bringing them home to sit in the yard, collecting rust and rot, and swearing they were as good as new. The lot held half a dozen buggies, a family wagon or two, a traction engine, a mower, several farm wagons, and other farm implements whose names defy description. Every few days, he'd come home with a new prize. They'd leave the yard and sneak onto the porch. Sam never knew he'd sell any of it. At one point, he'd had sixteen sets of harness, all broken and unrepaired, in the barn and the shed behind the house. A huge flock of chickens and two or three pigs wandered among this rubbish, and all the neighboring children joined the four Freedoms and ran howling and screaming over and under the crowd.

Svoboda's wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely left the house. She liked the hard-working and industrious Sam, and she would occasionally stand by the back door and talk to him in a quiet, even voice in the evenings as he stood unharnessing his horse after a day on the road. Both she and Svoboda held him in great respect.

As a buyer, Sam achieved even greater success than he had as a paper seller. He was an instinctive buyer, systematically covering vast swaths of the country, and within a year, he more than doubled Freedom's sales volume.

Every man has a touch of Windy McPherson's grotesque pretentiousness, and his son soon learned to seek it out and exploit it. He'd let people talk until they exaggerated or overstated the value of their goods, then abruptly call them to account and, before they could recover from their confusion, close the deal. In Sam's time, farmers didn't follow daily market reports; markets weren't as systematized and regulated as they later were, and buyer's skill was paramount. Having this skill, Sam constantly used it to put money in his own pockets, yet somehow retained the trust and respect of the people he traded with.

The boisterous and boisterous Liberty, like a father, was proud of the boy's commercial ability, and thundered his name up and down the streets and in the stores, proclaiming him the smartest boy in Iowa.

"There's a mighty little old Maybe-Not in this boy," he shouted at the loafers in the store.

Although Sam had an almost morbid desire for order and system in his own affairs, he didn't try to bring this influence into Freedom's affairs. Instead, he meticulously kept his records and tirelessly purchased potatoes and apples, butter and eggs, furs and pelts. He worked with zeal, always working to increase his commissions. Freedom took risks in business and often made little profit, but the two liked and respected each other, and it was through Freedom's efforts that Sam finally escaped Caxton and moved on to larger enterprises.

One evening in late autumn, Freedom walked into the stable where Sam was standing, unharnessing his horse.

"Here's your chance, my boy," he said, placing a gentle hand on Sam's shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to which he sold most of his purchases, telling them about Sam and his abilities, and the firm had responded with an offer that Sam believed exceeded anything he could have hoped for in Caxton. He held the offer in his hand.

When Sam read the letter, his heart leaped. He thought it opened up a vast new field of activity and money-making for him. He thought his childhood was finally over and that he would have his chance in the city. Only that morning, old Dr. Harkness had stopped him at the door as he was getting ready for work and, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the spot where his mother lay exhausted and asleep in the house, told him that in a week she would be gone. And Sam, with a heavy heart and filled with anxious longing, walked through the streets to the Liberty stables, wishing he would go too.

Now he walked through the stable and hung the harness he had taken off his horse on a hook in the wall.

"I"ll be glad to go," he said heavily.

Svoboda emerged from the stable door next to young McPherson, who had come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered eighteen-year-old. He didn't want to lose Sam. He had written to the Chicago company out of affection for the boy and because he believed he was capable of more than Caxton had offered. Now he walked silently, holding his lantern aloft and leading the way through the wreckage in the yard, filled with regret.

At the back door of the house, his wife stood pale and tired, reaching out to take the boy's hand. Tears welled in her eyes. Then, without a word, Sam turned and hurried down the street. Freedom and his wife approached the main gate and watched him go. From the corner, where he stopped in the shade of a tree, Sam could see them: the lantern in Freedom's hand swaying in the breeze, and his slender, elderly wife, a white spot against the darkness.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER VI


SAM WALKED ALONG the boardwalk, heading home, hurried by the piercing March wind, which made the lantern swing in Liberty's hand. A gray-haired old man stood in front of the white frame of the house, leaning on the gate and looking at the sky.

"We"re going to have rain," he said in a trembling voice, as if giving a decision on the matter, and then turned and, without waiting for an answer, walked along the narrow path into the house.

The incident brought a smile to Sam's lips, followed by a certain weariness of mind. Ever since he'd started working with Freedom, he'd seen Henry Kimball standing at his gate, staring at the sky, day after day. The man was an old customer of Sam's, and something of a figure in town. He was said to have been a Mississippi River gambler in his youth and to have shared in more than one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War, he'd ended his days in Caxton, living alone and keeping meticulous weather tables year after year. Once or twice a month during the warmer months, he'd stop by Wildman's and, sitting by the stove, boast about the accuracy of his records and the antics of the mangy dog that followed him. In his current mood, the endless monotony and tedium of this man's life struck Sam as amusing and, in a way, sad.

"To depend on going to the gate and looking at the sky to determine the day, to wait impatiently and depend on that-how deadly!" he thought, and, putting his hand in his pocket, he felt with pleasure the letter from the Chicago company that was to open up so much of the great outside world to him.

Despite the shock of unexpected sadness that came with the almost certain separation from Liberty, and the grief caused by his mother's approaching death, Sam felt a powerful thrill of confidence in his own future that made him head home, almost cheerful. The thrill of reading Liberty's letter was renewed by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, gazing at the sky.

"I will never be like this, sitting at the edge of the world, watching a mangy dog chase a ball, and peering into a thermometer day after day," he thought.

Three years of service with Freedom Smith taught Sam to be confident in his ability to handle any business challenges that might arise. He knew he had become what he wanted to be: a good businessman, one of those people who direct and control the affairs they are involved in thanks to an inherent quality called business sense. He recalled with pleasure the fact that the people of Caxton stopped calling him a smart boy and now spoke of him as a good businessman.

At the gate to his own house, he stopped and stood, thinking about all this and the dying woman inside. He remembered again the old man he'd seen at the gate, and with him, the thought that his mother's life had been as barren as that of a man whose companionship depended on a dog and a thermometer.

"Indeed," he told himself, pursuing the thought, "it had been worse. She had no fortune to live in peace, and she had no memories of youthful days of wild adventure to console the old man's final days. Instead, she watched me as the old man watched his thermometer, and my father was a dog in her house, chasing toys." He liked that figure. He stood at the gate, the wind singing in the trees along the street and occasionally flinging raindrops onto his cheek, and thought about this and about his life with his mother. For the last two or three years, he had been trying to make peace with her. After selling the newspaper business and the beginning of his success at Freedom, he had kicked her out of the trough, and ever since she had begun to feel ill, he had spent evening after evening with her instead of going to Wildman's to sit with four friends and listen to the conversation that was going on among them. He no longer walked with Telfer or Mary Underwood along the country roads, but instead sat by the sick woman's bedside or, when it was a fine night, helped her into a chair on the front lawn.

Sam felt the years had been good. They had helped him understand his mother and given seriousness and purpose to the ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone, he and his mother rarely spoke; a lifetime of habit had made it impossible for her to talk much, and his growing understanding of her personality had made it unnecessary for him. Now, in the darkness outside the house, he thought of the evenings he'd spent with her and how miserably her beautiful life had been squandered. The things that had wounded him and against which he had been bitter and unforgiving had faded into insignificance, even the actions of pretentious Windy, who, in the face of Jane's illness, continued to go on long drunken binges after retirement and who only came home to weep and wail throughout the house when the pension money was gone. Regretfully, Sam honestly tried to think about the loss of both his laundress and his wife.

"She was the most wonderful woman in the world," he told himself, and tears of joy welled up in his eyes as he thought of his friend John Telfer, who in the old days had praised his mother to a newsboy running beside him in the moonlight. He thought of her long, haggard face, now terrifying against the whiteness of the pillows. A photograph of George Eliot, pinned to the wall behind the broken seatbelt in the kitchen of Freedom Smith's house, had caught his eye a few days ago, and in the darkness he had taken it from his pocket and raised it to his lips, realizing that in some indescribable way he resembled his mother before her illness. Freedom's wife had given him the photograph, and he carried it with him, taking it out of his pocket on lonely stretches of road as he walked about his work.

Sam quietly walked around the house and stopped near the old barn that remained from Windy's attempts to raise chickens. He wanted to continue his mother's thoughts. He began to recall her youth and the details of a long conversation they had shared on the front lawn. It was unusually vivid in his mind. He seemed to remember every word even now. The sick woman spoke of her youth in Ohio, and as she spoke, images formed in the boy's mind. She told him of her days as a tied-up girl in the family of a thin-lipped, hard-bitten New Englander who had come West to start a farm, and of her efforts to get an education, of the pennies she saved to buy a book, of her joy when she passed her exams and became a schoolteacher, and of her marriage to Windy-then John McPherson.

A young McPherson had come to the Ohio village to take a prominent place in town life. Sam smiled when he saw her painting of the young man walking up and down the village street with little girls in his arms and teaching the Bible at Sunday school.

When Windy proposed to the young schoolteacher, she happily accepted, finding it incredibly romantic that such a dashing man would choose such an unknown figure among all the women in town.

"And even now I have no regrets, although for me it meant nothing but labor and misfortune," the sick woman said to her son.

After marrying the young dandy, Jane went with him to Caxton, where he bought a store and where, three years later, he handed the store over to the sheriff and his wife to the position of town laundress.

In the darkness, a grim smile, half scornful, half amused, flickered across the dying woman's face as she spoke of the winter when Windy and another young man traveled from school to school, putting on a show across the state. The former soldier had become a comic singer and wrote letter after letter to his young wife, telling of the applause that greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the shows, the small, dimly lit schoolhouses with their weathered faces shining in the light of a leaky magic lantern, and the enthusiastic Windy running to and fro, speaking in stage jargon, donning his colorful clothes and strutting around the small stage.

"And all winter he didn"t send me a single penny," said the sick woman, interrupting his thoughts.

Finally awakened to express her feelings and filled with memories of her youth, the silent woman spoke of her people. Her father had died in the forest when a tree fell. She told a short, darkly humorous anecdote about her mother, which surprised her son.

A young schoolteacher once went to visit her mother and sat for an hour in the parlor of an Ohio farmhouse while the fierce old woman looked at her with a bold, questioning gaze that made the daughter feel like a fool for coming there.

At the station, she heard a joke about her mother. The story was that a burly tramp had once come to a farmhouse and, finding the woman alone, had tried to intimidate her. The tramp and the woman, then in their prime, had fought for an hour in the backyard. The railroad agent who told Jane this story threw back his head and laughed.

"She knocked him out too," he said, "knocked him down and then got him drunk on hard cider until he staggered into town and declared her the best woman in the state."

In the darkness near the ruined barn, Sam's thoughts shifted from his mother to his sister Kate and her affair with the young farmer. He thought sadly of how she, too, had suffered because of their father's mistakes, how she had to leave the house and wander the dark streets to escape the endless evenings of military conversation that a guest always provoked at the MacPherson house, and of the night when, taking equipment from Calvert's livery, she rode alone out of town, only to return triumphantly to gather her clothes and show off her wedding ring.

A picture of a summer day flashed before him, witnessing part of the lovemaking that had preceded it. He'd gone into the store to visit his sister when a young farmer entered, glanced around awkwardly, and handed Kate a new gold watch across the counter. A sudden wave of respect for his sister washed over the boy. "What a price that must have cost," he thought, and with renewed interest he glanced at his lover's back, his flushed cheek, and his sister's sparkling eyes. When the lover turned and saw young MacPherson standing at the counter, he laughed sheepishly and walked out the door. Kate was embarrassed, secretly pleased, and flattered by the look in her brother's eyes, but she pretended to treat the gift lightly, casually twirling it back and forth on the counter and pacing back and forth, waving her arms.

"Don't tell," she said.

"Then don"t pretend," the boy replied.

Sam thought that his sister's indiscretion in bringing her a child and a husband in the same month had ended better in the end than his mother's indiscretion in marrying Windy.

Having come to his senses, he entered the house. The neighbor, hired for this purpose, had prepared dinner and now began to complain about his lateness, saying that the food had gotten cold.

Sam ate in silence. While he was eating, the woman left the house and soon returned with her daughter.

In Caxton, there was a code that forbade a woman to be alone in the house with a man. Sam wondered if the arrival of her daughter was an attempt by the woman to uphold the code, whether she thought of the sick woman in the house as already gone. The thought both amused and saddened him.

"You'd think she'd be safe," he mused. She was fifty years old, small, nervous, and haggard, with ill-fitting false teeth that rattled when she spoke. When she wasn't speaking, she would flick her tongue at them nervously.

Windy walked through the kitchen door, very drunk. He stood by the door, holding the handle with his hand, trying to pull himself together.

"My wife... my wife is dying. She could die any day," he lamented, tears in his eyes.

The woman and her daughter entered the small living room, where a bed had been set up for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table, speechless with anger and disgust, while Windy slumped forward, fell into a chair, and began sobbing loudly. A man driving a horse stopped on the road near the house, and Sam heard the scraping of wheels on the back of the carriage as the man turned the narrow street. A voice swore obscenities over the screeching of wheels. The wind continued to blow, and it began to rain.

"He"s on the wrong street," the boy thought stupidly.

Windy, his head in his hands, cried like a boy with a broken heart, his sobs echoing through the house, his heavy breath from the alcohol fouling the air. His mother's ironing board stood in the corner by the stove, and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smoldering in Sam's heart. He remembered the day he stood in the shop doorway with his mother and witnessed his father's grim and humorous failure with the forge, and a few months before Kate's wedding, when Windy had rushed through town threatening to kill her lover. And the mother and boy remained with the girl, hiding in the house, sick with humiliation.

The drunk man, his head on the table, fell asleep, his snoring replaced by sobs, which angered the boy. Sam began to think again about his mother's life.

The attempts he'd made to repay her for the hardships of her life now seemed utterly futile. "I wish I could repay him," he thought, shaken by a sudden surge of hatred as he looked at the man before him. The dreary kitchen, the cold, undercooked potatoes and sausage on the table, and the sleeping drunk seemed like a symbol of the life he'd lived in this house, and he shuddered and turned his face to stare at the wall.

He thought of the dinner he'd once eaten at Freedom Smith's house. That evening, Freedom had brought an invitation to the barn, just as he'd brought a letter from the Chicago company that evening, and just as Sam was shaking his head in refusal, the children came through the barn door. Led by the eldest, a big, tomboyish fourteen-year-old with the strength of a man and a penchant for tearing out of her clothes in the most unexpected places, they burst into the barn to carry Sam off to dinner, Freedom urging them on, laughing, his voice roaring through the barn so loud the horses jumped in their stalls. They dragged him into the house, a baby, a four-year-old boy, riding on his back and hitting him over the head with his woolen cap, while Freedom waved a lantern and occasionally helped push him with her hand.

The image of a long table covered with a white tablecloth at the end of the large dining room of the Freedom House came to mind as the boy sat in the small, empty kitchen before a tasteless, poorly prepared meal. It was laden with an abundance of bread, meat, and delicious dishes, piled high with steaming potatoes. In his own house, there was always only enough food for one meal. Everything was well-planned; when you finished, the table was empty.

How he loved this dinner after a long day on the road. Svoboda, noisily and bellowing at the children, held the plates high and handed them out, while his wife or the tomboy brought endless fresh produce from the kitchen. The joy of the evening, with conversations about the kids at school, the sudden revelation of the tomboy's femininity, the atmosphere of abundance and the good life, haunted the boy.

"My mother never knew anything like this," he thought.

A sleeping drunk man woke up and started talking loudly - some old forgotten grievance had returned to his mind, he was talking about the cost of school textbooks.

"They change books too often at school," he declared loudly, turning to face the stove as if addressing the audience. "This is a bribery scheme for old soldiers with children. I won't stand for it."

Sam, in an unspeakable rage, tore a sheet of paper from his notebook and scribbled a message on it.

"Be quiet," he wrote. "If you say another word or make another sound that disturbs Mom, I will strangle you and throw you out into the street like a dead dog."

Leaning over the table and touching his father's hand with a fork he'd taken from his dish, he placed the note on the table beneath the lamp before his eyes. He struggled with the urge to leap across the room and kill the man he believed had driven his mother to her death, who now sat, sobbing and talking, at her deathbed. The urge warped his mind so that he looked around the kitchen as if caught in a crazed nightmare.

Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly, and then, not understanding its meaning and only half grasping its meaning, put it in his pocket.

"The dog died, huh?" he shouted. "Well, you're getting too big and smart, kid. What do I care about a dead dog?"

Sam didn't answer. Rising carefully, he walked around the table and placed his hand on the muttering old man's throat.

"I must not kill," he repeated aloud to himself, as if speaking to a stranger. "I must strangle him until he is silent, but I must not kill."

In the kitchen, the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise, kicked wildly and helplessly. Sam, looking down at him and studying his eyes and the color of his cheeks, shuddered, realizing he hadn't seen his father's face in years. How vividly it was imprinted in his mind now, and how rough and raw it had become.

"I could repay all the years my mother spent over that dreary trough with just one long, hard grip on that skinny throat. I could kill him with just that little bit of extra pressure," he thought.

The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue began to stick out. A streak of dirt ran down the forehead, collected somewhere during a long day of drunken revelry.

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

In the silence of the house, he heard the neighbor's voice addressing her daughter sharply. The familiar, dry, tired cough of a sick person followed. Sam picked up the unconscious old man and carefully and silently walked to the kitchen door. Rain poured down on him, and as he walked around the house with his burden, the wind shook off a dry branch from a small apple tree in the yard and struck him in the face, leaving a long, stinging cut. At the fence in front of the house, he stopped and dropped his burden from the low grassy bank onto the road. Then, turning, he walked bareheaded through the gate and up the street.

"I'll choose Mary Underwood," he thought, returning to the friend who had walked with him along the country roads many years ago, whose friendship he had broken because of John Telfer's tirades against all women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain pounding his bare head.

"We need a woman in our house," he repeated to himself over and over again. "We need a woman in our house."

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CHAPTER VII


TRAINING _ AGAINST THE VERANDA Wall beneath Mary Underwood's house, Sam tried to remember what had brought him here. He had walked bareheaded across Main Street and out onto a country road. Twice he had fallen, splattering his clothes with mud. He had forgotten the purpose of his walk and walked further and further. The sudden and terrible hatred for his father, which had fallen upon him in the tense silence of the kitchen, had so paralyzed his mind that now he felt light-headed, surprisingly happy, and carefree.

"I was doing something," he thought; "I wonder what it was?"

The house overlooked a pine grove and was reached by climbing a small hill and following a winding road past the cemetery and the last village lamppost. A wild spring rain pounded the tin roof overhead, and Sam, his back pressed against the house's facade, struggled to regain control of his mind.

For an hour he stood, staring into the darkness, watching the storm unfold with rapt attention. He had-inherited from his mother-a love of thunderstorms. He remembered a night when he was a boy and his mother had gotten out of bed and was pacing the house, singing. She sang so softly that his sleeping father didn't hear, and Sam lay in his bed upstairs, listening to the noise-the rain on the roof, the occasional rumble of thunder, Windy's snores, and the unusual and... he thought, beautiful sound of his mother singing in a thunderstorm.

Now, raising his head, he looked around in delight. The trees in the grove before him bent and swayed in the wind. The inky darkness of the night was broken by a flickering oil lantern on the road beyond the cemetery and, in the distance, light streaming through the windows of houses. The light emanating from the house opposite him formed a small, bright cylinder among the pines, through which raindrops glittered and sparkled. Occasional flashes of lightning illuminated the trees and the winding road, and overhead, heavenly cannons thundered. A wild song sang in Sam's heart.

"I wish this could go on all night," he thought, focusing his thoughts on his mother singing in the dark house when he was a boy.

The door opened, and a woman stepped out onto the veranda and stood before him, facing the storm, the wind whipping the soft kimono she was wearing, and the rain soaking her face. Beneath the tin roof, the air was filled with the pounding of the rain. The woman raised her head and, as the rain pounded her, began to sing, her beautiful contralto voice rising above the pounding of the rain on the roof and continuing, uninterrupted by the peals of thunder. She sang of a lover riding through the storm to his mistress. The song retained one refrain:

"He rode and thought about her red-red lips,"


" the woman sang, placing her hand on the porch railing and leaning forward, into the storm.

Sam was stunned. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, his schoolmate, to whom his thoughts had turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman standing before him, singing, became part of his thoughts of his mother singing on a stormy night in the house, and his mind wandered further, seeing images as he had seen them before, when he was a boy walking under the stars and listening to conversations about John Telfer. He saw a broad-shouldered man shouting, braving the storm as he rode along a mountain trail.

"And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet raincoat," the singer"s voice continued.

Mary Underwood's singing in the rain made her seem as close and sweet as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.

"John Telfer was wrong about her," he thought.

She turned and looked at him, tiny streams of water trickling from her hair down her cheeks. A flash of lightning tore through the darkness, illuminating the spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with dirty clothes and a confused expression. A sharp cry of surprise escaped her lips.

"Hey, Sam! What are you doing here? You better get out of the rain.

"I like it here," Sam replied, lifting his head and looking past her into the storm.

Mary walked up to the door and grabbed the handle, looking into the darkness.

"You"ve been coming to see me for a long time," she said, "come in."

Inside the house, with the door closed, the patter of rain on the veranda roof gave way to a muffled, quiet drumbeat. Stacks of books lay on a table in the center of the room, and more books lined the shelves along the walls. A student lamp burned on the table, and heavy shadows fell in the corners of the room.

Sam stood against the wall near the door, looking around with half-seeing eyes.

Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and now returned dressed in a long cloak, glanced at him with quick curiosity and began pacing the room, gathering up the remains of women's clothing scattered across the chairs. Kneeling, she lit a fire under sticks stacked in an open grate in the wall.

"It was the storm that made me want to sing," she said sheepishly, then brightly: "We'll have to dry you off; you fell on the road and got covered in mud."

Sam, who had been sullen and silent, became talkative. An idea occurred to him.

"I have come here to court," he thought; "I have come to ask Mary Underwood to become my wife and to live in my house."

The woman, kneeling by the flaming sticks, created a scene that awakened something dormant within him. The heavy cloak she wore fell away, revealing round shoulders, poorly covered by a wet, clinging kimono. Her slender, youthful figure, soft gray hair, and serious face, illuminated by the burning sticks, made his heart leap.

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

"I intend to marry you," he added, crossing the room and roughly grabbing her shoulders. "Why not? I need a woman."

Mary Underwood was alarmed and frightened by the face staring at her and the strong hands clasping her shoulders. In his youth, she had harbored a kind of maternal passion for the newspaperman and planned his future. Had her plans been followed, he would have become a scholar, a man living among books and ideas. Instead, he chose to live among people, earn money, and travel the country like Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She saw him driving down the street toward Freedom's house in the evening, going in and out of Wildman's, and strolling the streets with men. Dimly, she knew he was under influence, aimed at distracting him from the things she dreamed of, and that she secretly blamed John Telfer, the talking, laughing idler. Now, after the storm, the boy returned to her, his hands and clothes covered in road mud, and spoke to her, a woman old enough to be his mother, about marriage and how he intended to live with her in his home. She stood, frozen, looking into his energetic, strong face and into his eyes with a pained, stunned expression.

Under her gaze, something of Sam's old boyish feeling returned to him, and he began to vaguely try to tell her about it.

"It wasn't the talk of Telfer that turned me off," he began, "but the way you talked so much about schools and books. I was tired of them. I couldn't go on sitting in a stuffy little classroom year after year when there was so much money to be made in the world. I was tired of schoolteachers drumming their fingers on desks and looking out the windows at men passing on the street. I wanted to get out of there myself and get out into the street."

Removing his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in the chair and stared at the fire, now burning steadily. Steam began to rise from the seat of his trousers. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to reconstruct an old childhood fantasy, half his own, half John Telfer's, that had occurred to him many years ago. It was about a conception he and Telfer had created of the ideal scientist. The central character in the picture was a stooped, frail old man stumbling down the street, muttering under his breath and poking a stick into a gutter. The photograph was a caricature of old Frank Huntley, headmaster of Caxton School.

Sitting in front of the fire in Mary Underwood's house, momentarily becoming a boy, facing boyish problems, Sam didn't want to be that person. In science, he wanted only what would help him become the man he wanted to be, a man of the world, doing worldly work and earning money through his work. What he hadn't been able to express as a boy, and her friend, came back to him, and he felt he had to make Mary Underwood understand here and now that schools weren't giving him what he wanted. His mind was racing with the problem of how to tell her.

He turned, looked at her, and said seriously, "I'm going to quit school. It's not your fault, but I'm going to quit anyway."

Mary, looking at the huge, dirt-covered figure in the chair, began to understand. A light appeared in her eyes. Approaching the door leading to the stairs leading to the sleeping quarters upstairs, she called sharply, "Auntie, come down here immediately. There's a sick man here."

A frightened, trembling voice answered from above: "Who is it?"

Mary Underwood didn't answer. She returned to Sam and, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder, said, "This is your mother, and you, after all, are just a sick, half-crazy boy. Is she dead? Tell me about it."

Sam shook his head. "She's still in bed, coughing." He came to and stood up. "I just killed my father," he announced. "I strangled him and threw him off the bank onto the road in front of the house. He was making horrible noises in the kitchen, and Mom was tired and wanted to sleep."

Mary Underwood paced the room. From a small alcove under the stairs, she pulled out clothes and scattered them across the floor. She pulled on a stocking and, unaware of Sam's presence, lifted her skirt and buttoned it. Then, slipping one shoe onto her stockinged foot and the other onto her bare foot, she turned to him. "We'll go back to your place. I think you're right. You need a woman there."

She walked quickly down the street, clinging to the arm of a tall man who walked silently beside her. Sam felt a surge of energy. He felt like he'd accomplished something, something he'd been meaning to achieve. He thought of his mother again, and realizing he was walking home from work at Freedom Smiths, he began planning the evening he'd spend with her.

"I'll tell her about the letter from the Chicago company and what I'll do when I go to town," he thought.

At the gate in front of the MacPherson house, Mary glanced down the road beneath the grassy bank that sloped down from the fence, but in the darkness she saw nothing. The rain continued to pour, and the wind howled and howled through the bare branches of the trees. Sam walked through the gate and around the house to the kitchen door, intending to reach his mother's bedside.

Inside the house, the neighbor was sleeping in a chair in front of the kitchen stove. The daughter had left.

Sam walked through the house to the living room and sat down on a chair next to his mother's bed, took her hand and squeezed it in his. "She's probably asleep," he thought.

Mary Underwood paused at the kitchen door, turned, and ran into the darkness of the street. The neighbor was still asleep by the kitchen fire. In the living room, Sam, sitting on a chair next to his mother's bed, looked around. A dim lamp burned on a stand beside the bed, its light falling on a portrait of a tall, aristocratic woman with rings on her fingers hanging on the wall. The photograph belonged to Windy and was claimed by him to be his mother, and it had once caused an argument between Sam and his sister.

Kate took the portrait of this lady seriously, and the boy saw her sitting before him in a chair, her hair arranged and her hands resting on her knees, imitating the pose that the great lady had so haughtily assumed when looking down at him.

"It's a scam," he declared, irritated by what he considered his sister's devotion to one of his father's claims. "It's a scam he picked up somewhere and now calls his mother to make people believe he's something big."

The girl, ashamed at being caught in her pose and furious at the attack on the portrait's authenticity, erupted into a fit of indignation, clasping her hands to her ears and stamping her foot on the floor. She then ran across the room, fell to her knees in front of the small couch, buried her face in the pillow, and shook with anger and grief.

Sam turned and left the room. It seemed to him that his sister's emotions resembled one of Windy's outbursts.

"She likes it," he thought, ignoring the incident. "She likes believing lies. She's like Windy and would rather believe them than not."


Mary Underwood ran through the rain to John Telfer's house, pounding on the door with her fist until Telfer, followed by Eleanor, emerged, holding a lamp above her head. She walked back down the street with Telfer to Sam's house, thinking of the horrible, strangled, and mutilated man they would find there. She walked, clinging to Telfer's hand, as she had clinged to Sam's before, unaware of her bare head and scanty attire. In his hand, Telfer carried a lantern taken from the stable.

They found nothing on the road in front of the house. Telfer paced back and forth, waving his flashlight and peering into the gutters. The woman walked beside him, her skirts hiked up, mud splashing onto her bare leg.

Suddenly Telfer threw back his head and laughed. Taking her hand, he led Mary up the bank and through the gate.

"What a stupid old fool I am!" he cried. "I"m getting old and stupefied! Windy McPherson isn"t dead! Nothing could kill that old warhorse! He was in Wildman"s Grocery after nine o"clock this evening, covered in mud and swearing he"d fought Art Sherman. Poor Sam and you-they came to me and found me a fool! Fool! Fool! What a fool I"ve become!"

Mary and Telfer burst through the kitchen door, startling the woman at the stove, causing her to jump to her feet and nervously tap her false teeth. In the living room, they found Sam asleep, his head on the edge of the bed. In his hand, he held Jane McPherson's cold one. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood leaned over and kissed his damp hair when a neighbor entered the doorway with a kitchen lamp, and John Telfer, pressing a finger to his lips, ordered him to remain silent.

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CHAPTER VIII


T H E FUNERAL OF Jane Macpherson was a difficult ordeal for her son. He thought his sister Katia, holding the baby in her arms, had grown coarse-she looked old-fashioned, and while they were in the house, she looked as if she had quarreled with her husband when they emerged from their bedroom in the morning. During the service, Sam sat in the living room, surprised and irritated by the endless number of women crowding the house. They were everywhere: in the kitchen, in the bedroom off the living room; and in the living room, where the dead woman lay in a coffin, they gathered together. As the thin-lipped minister, book in hand, expounded on the virtues of the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the floor and thought that this is how they would have mourned the body of dead Windy if his fingers had clenched even slightly. He wondered if the minister would have spoken in the same way-frankly and without knowledge-about the virtues of the dead. In a chair by the coffin, the grieving husband, dressed in new black clothes, wept loudly. The bald, importunate undertaker continued to move nervously, focused on the ritual of his craft.

During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the floor at Sam's feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad for something to distract him from the minister's voice and the faces of the weeping women, none of whom had ever been in the house before and all of whom, in his opinion, were strikingly lacking any sense of the sanctity of privacy. The note was from John Telfer.

"I will not attend your mother's funeral," he wrote. "I respected your mother while she was alive, and I will leave you alone with her now that she is dead. In her memory, I will perform a ceremony in my heart. If I am at Wildman's, I may ask him to stop selling soap and tobacco for a while, and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore's, I will go up to his attic and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If he or Freedom Smith come to your home, I warn them that I will sever their friendship. When I see the carriages passing and know the deed has been well done, I will buy flowers and take them to Mary Underwood as a token of gratitude to the living in the name of the dead."

The note brought joy and comfort to Sam. It gave him back control over something that had eluded him.

"It's common sense, after all," he thought, and realized that even in those days when he had been forced to suffer through horrors, and in the face of the fact that the long and difficult role of Jane Macpherson was only being played out for... Finally, the farmer was in the field sowing corn, Valmore was pounding on the anvil, and John Telfer was scribbling notes with a flourish. He stood up, interrupting the minister's speech. Mary Underwood entered just as the priest began to speak and huddled in a dark corner near the door leading to the street. Sam squeezed past the staring women, the frowning minister, and the bald undertaker, who wrung his hands and, dropping a note into her lap, said, ignoring the people who were watching and listening with breathless curiosity: "This is from John Telfer. Read it. Even he, who hates women, now brings flowers to your door.

A whisper rose in the room. The women, heads together and hands in front of their faces, nodded to the schoolmaster, and the boy, unaware of the sensation he had evoked, returned to his chair and looked at the floor again, waiting for the conversation, singing, and marching through the streets to end. The minister began reading his book again.

"I'm older than all these people here," the young man thought. "They're playing at life and death, and I felt it with the fingers of my hand."

Mary Underwood, deprived of Sam's unconscious connection to people, looked around with flushed cheeks. Seeing the women whispering and leaning their heads together, a chill of fear ran through her. The face of an old enemy-the scandal of a small town-appeared in her room. Taking the note, she slipped out the door and wandered down the street. Her old maternal love for Sam returned, strengthened and ennobled by the horror she had endured with him that night in the rain. Reaching the house, she whistled to her collie and set off down the dirt road. At the edge of the grove, she stopped, sat on a log, and read Telfer's note. The warm, sharp scent of new growth wafted from the soft earth into which her feet sank. Tears welled in her eyes. She thought that much had come to her in just a few days. She had a boy on whom she could pour out the motherly love of her heart, and she became friends with Telfer, whom she had long regarded with fear and doubt.

Sam stayed in Caxton for a month. It seemed to him that they wanted to do something there. He sat with the men in the back of the Wildman and wandered aimlessly through the streets and out of town along country roads where men worked all day in the fields on sweaty horses, plowing the earth. There was a feeling of spring in the air, and in the evening a song sparrow sang in the apple tree outside his bedroom window. Sam walked and wandered silently, looking at the ground. A fear of people filled his head. The conversations of the men in the store tired him, and when he set out alone for the village, he was accompanied by the voices of all those from whom he had come from the city to escape. On a street corner, a thin-lipped, brown-bearded priest stopped him and began to talk about the future, just as he had stopped and talked with the barefoot newsboy.

"Your mother," he said, "has just passed away. You must enter the narrow path and follow her. God has sent you this sorrow as a warning. He wants you to enter into the way of life and eventually join her. Start coming to our church. Join the work of Christ. Find the truth."

Sam, who had been listening but not hearing, shook his head and continued. The minister's speech seemed like nothing more than a meaningless jumble of words, from which he had only drawn one thought.

"Find the truth," he repeated to himself after the minister, letting his mind play with the idea. "All the best people try to do this. They spend their lives on this task. They're all trying to find the truth."

He walked down the street, pleased with his interpretation of the minister's words. The terrible moments in the kitchen following his mother's death had given him a new air of seriousness, and he felt a renewed sense of responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the street and wished him luck in the city. News of his passing became public knowledge. The issues that interested Freedom Smith were always public affairs.

"He would take his drum with him to make love to his neighbor's wife," John Telfer said.

Sam felt that in some ways he was Caxton's child. It had taken him into its fold early; it had made him a semi-public figure; it had encouraged him in his pursuit of money, humiliated him through his father, and lovingly patronized him through his toiling mother. When he was a boy, scurrying among the drunkards' legs on Saturday nights in Piety Hollow, there had always been someone to speak a word to him about his morals and shout encouraging advice. Had he chosen to stay there, with his three and a half thousand dollars already in the Savings Bank, created for this purpose during his years at Freedom Smith, he might soon have become one of the city's solid men.

He didn't want to stay. He felt his calling was elsewhere, and he'd happily go there. He wondered why he hadn't just boarded the train and left.

One night, as he lingered on the road, loitering by fences, hearing the lonely barking of dogs near distant farmhouses, inhaling the scent of freshly plowed earth, he came into town and sat on a low iron fence that ran past the station platform to wait for the midnight train north. Trains took on new meaning for him, for any day now he might see himself on one, heading off to his new life.

A man with two bags in his hands walked out onto the station platform, followed by two women.

"Look here," he said to the women, putting the bags on the platform; "I'll go get the tickets," and disappeared into the darkness.

Both women resumed their interrupted conversation.

"Ed's wife has been ill for the last ten years," one said. "Now that she's dead, it'll be better for her and Ed, but I'm dreading the long trip. I wish she'd died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I'm sure I'd get sick on the train."

Sam, sitting in the dark, thought about one of John Telfer's old conversations with him.

"They are good people, but they are not your people. You will leave here. You will be a rich man, that is clear.

He began to listen idly to the two women. The man ran a shoe repair shop in the alley behind Geiger's Drug Store, and the two women, one short and plump, the other tall and thin, ran a small, dark millinery shop and were Eleanor Telfer's only competitors.

"Well, the town knows her for who she is now," the tall woman said. "Millie Peters says she won"t rest until she puts that stuck-up Mary Underwood in her place. Her mother worked in the McPherson house, and she told Millie about it. I"ve never heard such a story. Thinking about Jane McPherson, working all those years, and then when she was dying, things like this happened in her house, Millie says Sam left early one evening and came home late with that Underwood thing, half-dressed, hanging on his arm. Millie"s mother looked out the window and saw them. Then she ran to the stove and pretended to be asleep. She wanted to see what had happened. And the brave girl walked right into the house with Sam. Then she left, and a while later she came back with that John Telfer. Millie will make sure Eleanor Telfer hears about this." I think that would humiliate her too. And there's no telling how many other men Mary Underwood is running around with in this town. Millie says...

The two women turned as a tall figure emerged from the darkness, roaring and cursing. Two hands reached out and buried themselves in their hair.

"Stop it!" Sam growled, slamming his heads together. "Stop your filthy lies!" You ugly creatures!

Hearing the two women's screams, the man who had gone to buy train tickets came running along the station platform, followed by Jerry Donlin. Sam leaped forward, pushing the cobbler over the iron fence into a freshly filled flowerbed, then turned toward the trunk.

"They lied about Mary Underwood," he screamed. "She tried to save me from killing my father, and now they lie about her."

Both women grabbed their bags and ran down the station platform, whimpering. Jerry Donlin climbed over the iron fence and stood before the surprised and frightened shoemaker.

"What the hell are you doing in my flowerbed?" he growled.


As Sam hurried through the streets, his mind was in turmoil. Like a Roman emperor, he wished the world had only one head, so he could chop it off with a blow. The city that had once seemed so paternal, so cheerful, so intent on his well-being, now seemed terrifying. He imagined it as a huge, crawling, slimy creature, lying in wait among the cornfields.

"To speak of her, of this white soul!" he cried loudly on the empty street, all his boyish devotion and loyalty to the woman who had extended her hand to him in his hour of trouble, aroused and burning within him.

He wanted to meet another man and give him the same blow to the nose he'd given the astonished shoemaker. He went home and stood leaning against the gate, looking at it and cursing senselessly. Then, turning, he walked back through the deserted streets past the train station, where, since the night train had come and gone and Jerry Donlin had gone home for the night, everything was dark and quiet. He was filled with horror at what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane McPherson's funeral.

"It"s better to be completely bad than to speak ill of another," he thought.

For the first time, he became aware of another side of village life. In his mind's eye, he saw a long line of women walking past him along the dark road-women with rough, unlit faces and dead eyes. He recognized many of their faces. They were the faces of Caxton's wives, to whose houses he delivered newspapers. He remembered how impatiently they would rush out of their houses to fetch papers and how, day after day, they would discuss the details of sensational murder cases. Once, when a Chicago girl was killed while diving, and the details were unusually gruesome, two women, unable to contain their curiosity, came to the station to wait for the newspaper train, and Sam heard them rolling the horrible mess over and over on their tongues.

In every town and village there's a class of women whose very existence paralyzes the mind. They live in small, unventilated, unsanitary houses, and year after year, they spend their time washing dishes and clothes-only their fingers are occupied. They don't read good books, don't think pure thoughts, make love, as John Telfer said, with kisses in a darkened room with a bashful lout, and, having married such a lout, live a life of indescribable emptiness. Their husbands come to these women's homes in the evening, tired and taciturn, to eat a quick meal and then go out again, or, when the blessing of complete physical exhaustion has come upon them, to sit for an hour in their stockings before crawling off to sleep and oblivion.

These women have neither light nor vision. Instead, they have fixed ideas to which they cling with a tenacity bordering on heroism. They cling to the man they have torn from society with a tenacity measured only by their love for a roof over their heads and their thirst for food to put in their bellies. As mothers, they are the despair of reformers, the shadow of dreamers, and they strike black fear into the heart of the poet who exclaims, "Woman in this species is more deadly than the male." At their worst, they can be seen drunk with emotion amid the dark horrors of the French Revolution or immersed in the secret whispers, the creeping terror of religious persecution. At their best, they are the mothers of half humanity. When wealth comes to them, they rush to flaunt it, flashing their wings at the sight of Newport or Palm Beach. In their native lair, in cramped houses, they sleep in the bed of a man who has placed clothes on their backs and food in their mouths, for this is the custom of their species, and they surrender their bodies to him, reluctantly or willingly, as the law demands. They do not love; instead, they sell their bodies at market, crying out that a man will witness their virtue, for they have had the joy of finding one buyer instead of many from the red sisterhood. A fierce animalism within them compels them to cling to the infant at their breast, and in the days of its softness and charm, they close their eyes and try to recapture an old, fleeting dream of their childhood, something vague, ghostly, no longer part of them, brought with the infant from infinity. Having left the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of emotions, weeping over the bodies of unknown dead or sitting under the eloquence of evangelists shouting about heaven and hell-a call to the one who calls others-shouting in the restless air of hot little churches, where hope struggles in the jaws of banality: "The burden of my sins weighs heavily on my soul." They walk the streets, lifting their heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and grab a morsel that rolls down their heavy tongues. Having found a sidelight in the life of Mary Underwood, they return to it again and again, like a dog to its own waste. Something touching in the lives of such people-walks in the clean air, dreams within dreams, and the courage to be beautiful, surpassing the beauty of bestial youth-drives them mad, and they scream, running from kitchen door to kitchen door, tearing for the prize. Like a hungry beast that finds a corpse. Let serious women find a movement and push it forward until the day when it smells of success and promises the wonderful emotions of achievement, and they will pounce on it screaming, driven by hysteria rather than reason. They are all femininity-and none of it. For the most part, they live and die invisible, unknown, eating disgusting food, sleeping too much, and sitting on summer days rocking in chairs and watching people pass by. In the end, they die full of faith, hoping for a future life.

Sam stood in the road, dreading the attacks these women were now making on Mary Underwood. The rising moon illuminated the fields along the road, revealing their early spring nakedness, and they seemed as bleak and repulsive to him as the faces of the women marching in his head. He pulled on his coat and shivered as he walked on, mud spattered him, the damp night air deepening the melancholy of his thoughts. He tried to regain the confidence he had felt in the days before his mother's illness, to recapture the firm belief in his destiny that had kept him earning and saving money and driven him to strive to rise above the level of the man who had raised him. He failed. The feeling of old age that had come over him among the people mourning his mother's body returned, and turning away, he walked along the road towards the town, saying to himself: "I will go and talk to Mary Underwood.

Waiting on the veranda for Mary to open the door, he decided that marriage with her might yet lead to happiness. The half-spiritual, half-physical love for a woman, the glory and mystery of youth, had departed from him. He thought that if he could only banish from her presence the fear of the faces that appeared and disappeared in his mind, he, for his part, would be content with his life as a worker and moneymaker, a man without dreams.

Mary Underwood came to the door, wearing the same heavy, long coat she'd worn that night, and taking her hand, Sam led her to the edge of the veranda. He gazed with satisfaction at the pine trees in front of the house, wondering if some beneficent influence must have compelled the hand that had planted them to stand there, clothed and dignified, amidst the barren land at the end of winter.

"What is it, boy?" the woman asked, her voice filled with concern. A renewed maternal passion colored her thoughts for several days, and with all the ardor of a strong nature, she gave herself over to her love for Sam. Thinking of him, she imagined the pains of birth, and at night in her bed, she reminisced with him about his childhood in the city and made anew plans for his future. During the day, she laughed at herself and said tenderly, "You old fool."

Sam told her, rudely and frankly, what he'd heard on the station platform, looking past her at the pines and clutching the veranda railing. From the dead earth came the scent of new growth again, the same scent he'd carried on the way to his revelation at the station.

"Something told me not to leave," he said. "It must have been that thing hanging in the air. Those evil crawling things have already started working. Oh, if only the whole world, like you, Telfer, and some of the others here, valued a sense of privacy."

Mary Underwood laughed quietly.

"I was more than half right when I dreamed, back in the day, of making you into a person who worked on intellectual matters," she said. "What a sense of privacy! What a man you've become! John Telfer's method was better than mine. He taught you to speak with panache."

Sam shook his head.

"There's something here that can't be endured without laughing," he said decisively. "There's something here-it's tearing at you-it must be met. Even now, women wake up in bed and ponder this question. Tomorrow they'll come to you again. There's only one way, and we must take it. You and I must marry."

Mary looked at the new serious features of his face.

"What a proposal!" she exclaimed.

Impulsively, she began to sing, her voice, thin and strong, carrying through the quiet night.

"He rode and thought about her red-red lips,"


She sang and laughed again.

"You should come like this," she said, and then, "You poor, confused boy. Don"t you know I"m your new mother?" she added, taking his hands and turning him to face her. "Don"t talk nonsense. I don"t need a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own, and I"ve found one. I adopted you here, in this house, the night you came to me sick and covered in filth. And as for those women-away with them-I"ll challenge them-I"ve done it once before and I"ll do it again. Go to your town and fight. Here in Caxton, it"s a woman"s fight."

"It's terrible. You don't understand," Sam objected.

A grey, tired expression appeared on Mary Underwood's face.

"I understand," she said. "I've been on this battlefield. It can only be won by silence and tireless waiting. Your very efforts to help will only make things worse."

The woman and the tall boy, suddenly a man, fell into thought. She thought about the end her life was approaching. How differently she had planned it. She thought about college in Massachusetts and the men and women walking there under the elm trees.

"But I have a son, and I'm going to keep him," she said out loud, placing her hand on Sam's shoulder.

Very serious and worried, Sam walked down the gravel path toward the road. He sensed something cowardly about the role she had assigned him, but he saw no alternative.

"After all," he thought, "it"s reasonable - it"s a woman"s battle."

Halfway to the road he stopped and, running back, caught her in his arms and hugged her tightly.

"Goodbye, Mommy," he cried and kissed her on the lips.

And watching him walk down the gravel path again, she was overcome with tenderness. She walked to the back of the porch and, leaning against the house, rested her head on her hand. Then, turning and smiling through her tears, she called after him.

"Did you break their heads hard, boy?" she asked.


Sam left Mary's house and headed home. An idea struck him on the gravel path. He entered the house and, sitting at the kitchen table with pen and ink, began writing. In the bedroom off the living room, he heard Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and rewriting. Then, pulling up a chair in front of the kitchen fireplace, he reread what he had written over and over again. Putting on his coat, he walked at dawn to the house of Tom Comstock, editor of the Caxton Argus, and roused him from his bed.

"I'll put it on the front page, Sam, and it won't cost you anything," Comstock promised. "But why run it? Let's leave that question.

"I'll have just enough time to pack my things and catch the morning train to Chicago," Sam thought.

Early the previous evening, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at Valmore's suggestion, visited Hunter's jewelry store. They spent an hour haggling, selecting, rejecting, and berating the jeweler. When the choice was made and the gift shone against the white cotton in its box on the counter, Telfer made a speech.

"I'm going to have a straight talk with that boy," he said, laughing. "I'm not going to waste my time teaching him how to make money and then let him fail me. I'm going to tell him that if he doesn't make money in Chicago, I'm coming and taking his watch away."

Putting the gift in his pocket, Telfer left the store and walked down the street to Eleanor's shop. He walked through the showroom to the studio, where Eleanor sat with her hat in her lap.

"What should I do, Eleanor?" he asked, standing with his legs spread and frowning at her. "What will I do without Sam?"

A freckled boy opened the shop door and tossed a newspaper to the floor. The boy had a clear voice and quick brown eyes. Telfer walked through the showroom again, touching the posts on which the finished hats hung with his cane and whistling. Standing in front of the shop, cane in hand, he rolled a cigarette and watched the boy run from door to door down the street.

"I'll have to adopt a new son," he said thoughtfully.

After Sam left, Tom Comstock stood up in his white nightshirt and reread the statement he'd just been given. He read it over and over again, then, laying it on the kitchen table, filled and lit his corncob pipe. A gust of wind blew into the room beneath the kitchen door, chilling his thin shins, so he slid his bare feet through the protective wall of his nightshirt, one by one.

"On the night of my mother's death," the statement read, "I was sitting in the kitchen of our home eating dinner when my father came in and began screaming and talking loudly, disturbing my sleeping mother. I grabbed him by the throat and squeezed until I thought he was dead, carried him through the house, and threw him into the road. I then ran to the house of Mary Underwood, who had once been my schoolteacher, and told her what I had done. She drove me home, woke John Telfer, and then went to look for the body of my father, who was not dead after all. John McPherson knows this to be true, if he can be made to tell the truth."

Tom Comstock called to his wife, a small, nervous woman with red cheeks who set type in the store, did her own housework, and collected most of the news and advertising for the Argus.

"Isn't this a slasher movie?" he asked, handing her the statement Sam had written.

"Well, that should stop the nasty things they say about Mary Underwood," she snapped. Then, removing her glasses from her nose, she looked at Tom, who, though he hadn't found time to be of much help with the Argus, was the best checkers player in Caxton and had once attended a state tournament for experts in the game. Sport, she added, "Poor Jane MacPherson, she had a son like Sam, and no better father for him than that liar Windy. Strangled him, huh? Well, if the men of this town had the guts, they'd finish the job."

OceanofPDF.com

BOOK II


OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER I


For two years, Sam lived the life of a traveling shopper, visiting towns in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa and making deals with people who, like Freedom Smith, were buying farm produce. On Sundays, he'd sit in chairs in front of country inns and stroll the streets of unfamiliar towns, or, returning to the city on weekends, stroll the downtown streets and the crowded parks with young men he'd met on the street. Occasionally, he'd drive to Caxton and sit for an hour with the men at Wildman's, then sneak off for an evening with Mary Underwood.

In the shop, he heard news of Windy, who was dogging the farmer's widow he would later marry and who rarely showed up in Caxton. In the shop, he saw a boy with freckles on his nose-the same one John Telfer had seen running down Main Street the night he went to show Eleanor the gold watch he'd bought for Sam. He was now sitting on a cracker barrel in the shop, and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging cane and listen to the eloquence pouring out over the night airwaves. Telfer hadn't had the chance to join the crowd at the station and deliver a farewell speech to Sam, and secretly he resented the loss of that opportunity. After pondering the matter and considering many beautiful flourishes and sonorous periods to add color to the speech, he was forced to mail the gift. And though this gift touched him deeply and reminded him of the unwavering kindness of the city amid the cornfields, so that he lost much of the bitterness caused by the attack on Mary Underwood, he could only respond timidly and hesitantly to the four. In his room in Chicago, he spent the evening rewriting and rewriting, adding and removing luxurious flourishes, and finally sent a brief line of thanks.

Valmore, whose affection for the boy had grown slowly and who now that he was gone missed him more than anyone else, one day told Freedom Smith of the change that had come over young Macpherson. Freedom was sitting in a wide old phaeton on the road in front of Valmore's shop while the blacksmith walked around the gray mare, lifting her feet and examining her horseshoes.

"What's happened to Sam-he's changed so much?" he asked, lowering the mare onto his leg and leaning on the front wheel. "The city has already changed him," he added regretfully.

Svoboda took a match from his pocket and lit a short black pipe.

"He bites his words," Valmore continued; "he sits in the shop for an hour, and then leaves and doesn't come back to say goodbye when he leaves town. What's come over him?

Freedom gathered the reins and spat over the dashboard into the road dust. The dog, lounging on the street, jumped as if a stone had been thrown at it.

"If you had anything he wanted to buy, you'd find he's a good talker," he exploded. "He rips my teeth out every time he comes to town, then gives me a cigar wrapped in foil to make me like it."


For several months after his hasty departure from Caxton, the changing, hurried life of the city deeply interested the tall, strong boy from the Iowa village, who combined the cool, quick business moves of a moneymaker with an unusually active interest in the problems of life and existence. Instinctively, he viewed business as a great game, played by many people, in which capable and quiet men patiently waited until the right moment, and then pounced on what was theirs. They pounced with the speed and precision of animals upon their prey, and Sam sensed he had this stroke, and he used it ruthlessly in his dealings with country buyers. He knew that dim, uncertain look that appeared in the eyes of unsuccessful businessmen at critical moments, and he watched for it and exploited it, as a successful boxer watches the same dim, uncertain look in the eyes of his opponent.

He found his job and gained the confidence and assurance that come with that discovery. The touch he saw on the hands of successful businessmen around him was also the touch of a great artist, scientist, actor, singer, or prizefighter. It was the touch of Whistler, Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. He had sensed it as a boy, watching the sums in his yellow bankbook grow, and he recognized it from time to time in Telfer's conversation on a country road. In a city where the rich and influential rubbed elbows with him on streetcars and passed him in hotel lobbies, he watched and waited, telling himself, "I'll be like that too."

Sam hadn't lost the vision he'd had as a boy, walking along the road and listening to Telfer talk, but now he thought of himself as someone who not only thirsted for achievement but also knew where to find it. Occasionally, he'd have thrilling dreams of the immense work his hand would accomplish, ones that made his blood throb, but for the most part, he went his way quietly, making friends, looking around, occupying his mind with his own thoughts, and striking deals.

During his first year in the city, he lived in the home of the former Caxton family, a family named Pergrin, who had lived in Chicago for several years but continued to send their members, one by one, to the Iowa countryside for summer vacations. He delivered letters to these people, sent to him within a month of his mother's death, and letters about him came to them from Caxton. In the house where eight people dined, only three besides himself were from Caxton, but thoughts and conversations about the city permeated the house and permeated every conversation.

"I was thinking about old John Moore today-does he still drive that team of black ponies?" the housekeeper, a mild-looking woman in her thirties, would ask Sam at the dinner table, interrupting a conversation about baseball or a story told by one of the tenants of the new office building to be built in the Loop.

"No, he doesn't," replied Jake Pergrin, a plump bachelor in his forties who was the foreman in the machine shop and the owner of the house. Jake had been the final authority on Caxton matters for so long that he considered Sam an intruder. "Last summer, when I was home, John told me he intended to sell the blacks and buy some mules," he added, looking defiantly at the young man.

The Pergrin family was effectively living in a foreign land. Living amid the hustle and bustle of Chicago's vast west side, they still yearned for the corn and steers, hoping that in this paradise they could find work for Jake, their mainstay.

Jake Pergrin, a bald, paunchy man with a short, steel-gray mustache and a dark streak of machine oil circling his fingernails so that they jutted out like formal flower beds at the edge of a lawn, worked diligently from Monday morning until Saturday evening, going to bed at nine o'clock and until then wandering from room to room in his worn carpet slippers, whistling, or sitting in his room practicing his violin. On Saturday evening, with the habits formed in Caxton still strong, he came home with his wages, settled in with two sisters for the week, sat down to dinner, neatly shaved and combed, and then disappeared into the murky waters of the city. Late Sunday evening, he reappeared, empty pockets, unsteady gait, bloodshot eyes, and a noisy attempt to maintain composure, hurrying upstairs and into bed, preparing for another week of toil and respectability. This man had a certain Rabelaisian sense of humor, and he kept track of the new ladies he encountered during his weekly flights, penciled on the wall of his bedroom. One day, he took Sam upstairs to show off his record. A row of them ran around the room.

Besides the bachelor, there was a sister, a tall, thin woman of about thirty-five who taught school, and a thirty-year-old housekeeper, meek and endowed with a surprisingly pleasant voice. Then there was the medical student in the living room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a gray-haired stenographer whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a customer from a wholesale dry goods store with a cheerful, happy face-a little Southern wife.

Sam found the women in the Pergrin household extremely preoccupied with their health, talking about it every evening, it seemed to him, more than his mother had during her illness. While Sam lived with them, they were all under the influence of some strange healer and were taking what they called "health recommendations." Twice a week, the healer came to the house, laid his hands on their backs, and took money. The treatment provided Jake with endless amusement, and in the evenings he would walk around the house, placing his hands on the women's backs and demanding money from them. But the dry goods merchant's wife, who had coughed at night for years, slept peacefully after a few weeks of treatment, and the cough never returned as long as Sam remained in the house.

Sam had a position in the household. Glittering tales of his business acumen, his tireless work ethic, and the size of his bank account preceded him from Caxton, and Pergrina, in her devotion to the town and all its products, never allowed herself to be coy in her retelling. The housekeeper, a kind woman, took a liking to Sam and, in his absence, would boast about him to casual visitors or to the boarders gathered in the parlor in the evenings. It was she who laid the foundation for the medical student's belief that Sam was something of a genius when it came to money, a belief that later enabled him to launch a successful attack on the young man's inheritance.

Sam befriended Frank Eckardt, a medical student. On Sunday afternoons, they would stroll the streets or, carrying two of Frank's girlfriends, also medical students, they would go to the park and sit on benches under the trees.

Sam felt something akin to tenderness for one of these young women. He spent Sunday after Sunday with her, and one late autumn evening, strolling through the park, with the dry brown leaves crunching underfoot and the sun setting in a red splendor before their eyes, he took her hand and entered. The silence, the feeling of being intensely alive and vital, was the same as he had felt that night, strolling under the Caxton trees with the dark-skinned daughter of the banker Walker.

The fact that nothing came of this affair and that after some time he no longer saw the girl was explained, in his opinion, by his own growing interest in making money and the fact that in her, like in Frank Eckardt, there was a blind devotion to something that he himself could not understand.

He once discussed this with Eckardt. "She's a good woman, driven, like a woman I knew in my hometown," he said, thinking of Eleanor Telfer, "but she won't talk to me about her work the way she sometimes talks to you. I want her to talk. There's something about her I don't understand and I want to understand. I think she likes me, and once or twice I thought she wouldn't mind too much if I made love to her, but I still don't understand her.

One day, at the office of the company where he worked, Sam met a young advertising executive named Jack Prince, a lively, energetic man who made money quickly, spent it generously, and had friends and acquaintances in every office, every hotel lobby, every bar and restaurant downtown. A chance encounter quickly blossomed into friendship. The clever and witty Prince made a hero of Sam, admiring his restraint and common sense and boasting about him all over town. Sam and Prince had been having the occasional light drinking spree, and one day, in the midst of thousands of people sitting at tables drinking beer at the Coliseum on Wabash Avenue, he and Prince got into a fight with two waiters, Prince claiming he had been cheated, and Sam, though he believed his friend was in the wrong, punched him and dragged Prince through the door and into a passing streetcar to escape the onslaught of other waiters rushing to help the man who lay stunned and rustling on the sawdust floor.

After these evenings of carousing, which continued with Jack Prince and the young men he met on trains and in country hotels, Sam would stroll for hours through the city, lost in his own thoughts and absorbing his own impressions of what he had seen. In his dealings with the young men, he played a largely passive role, following them from place to place and drinking until they became loud and boisterous or sullen and quarrelsome, then slipping off to his room, amused or irritated as circumstances or the temperaments of his companions made or marred the evening's gaiety. At night, alone, he would stuff his hands in his pockets and walk endless miles along the illuminated streets, dimly aware of the vastness of life. All the faces passing him-women in furs, young men smoking cigars on their way to the theater, bald old men with rheumy eyes, boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, and slender prostitutes lurking in the corridors-must have deeply intrigued him. In his youth, with the pride of dormant strength, he saw them only as people who would one day test their abilities against his own. And if he scrutinized them closely, noting face after face in the crowd, he watched like a model in a great business game, exercising his mind, imagining this or that person pitted against him in a deal, and planning the method by which he would triumph in this imaginary struggle.

At that time, there was a place in Chicago accessible by a bridge over the Illinois Central Railroad tracks. Sam would sometimes go there on stormy nights to watch the lake whipped by the wind. Vast masses of water, moving swiftly and silently, crashed with a roar against wooden pilings supported by mounds of rock and earth, and the spray from the broken waves fell on Sam's face and, on winter nights, froze on his coat. He learned to smoke and, leaning on the bridge railing, would stand for hours with his pipe in his mouth, watching the moving water, filled with awe and admiration at its silent power.

One September night, as he was walking alone on the street, an incident occurred that also revealed to him the silent power within himself, a power that startled and, for a moment, frightened him. Turning onto a small street behind Dearborn, he suddenly saw the faces of women looking at him through the small square windows cut into the facades of the houses. Here and there, ahead and behind him, faces appeared; voices called, smiles called, hands beckoned. Men walked up and down the street, looking at the sidewalk, their coats raised to their necks, hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces of the women pressed against the square panes, and then, suddenly turning as if pursued, ran through the doors of the houses. Among the passersby on the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats who shuffled hastily, and young boys with the flush of virtue on their cheeks. Lust hung in the air, heavy and disgusting. It sank into Sam's mind, and he stood hesitant and uncertain, frightened, numb, terrified. He remembered a story he'd once heard from John Telfer, a story of disease and death lurking in the small alleys of towns and spilling out onto Van Buren Street and thence into the illuminated state. He climbed the stairs of the elevated railroad and, jumping on the first train, headed south to walk for hours along the gravel road by the lake in Jackson Park. The breeze off the lake, the laughter and conversation of people passing under the lampposts, cooled the fever in him, just as it had once been cooled by the eloquence of John Telfer, walking along the road near Caxton, his voice commanding the armies of standing corn.

Sam's mind conjured up a vision of cold, silent water moving in vast masses beneath the night sky, and he thought that in the world of men there existed a force equally irresistible, equally obscure, equally little discussed, ever moving forward, silently powerful-the force of sex. He wondered how this force would be broken in his own case, to what breakwater it would be directed. At midnight, he walked home through town and made his way to his alcove in the Pergrins' house, puzzled and, for a time, utterly exhausted. In his bed, he turned his face to the wall and, resolutely closing his eyes, tried to sleep. "There are things one cannot understand," he told himself. "Living with dignity is a matter of common sense. I will continue to think about what I want to do, and I will not go to such a place again."

One day, when he had been in Chicago for two years, an incident of another kind occurred, an incident so grotesque, so Pan-like, and so juvenile, that for several days after it had happened, he thought of it with delight, and would walk along the street or sit in a passenger train, laughing joyfully at the recollection of some new detail of the affair.

Sam, who was Windy MacPherson's son and had often mercilessly condemned all men who filled their mouths with liquor, got drunk and walked for eighteen hours, shouting poetry, singing songs, and screaming at the stars like a forest god at a bend.

Late one evening in early spring, he was sitting with Jack Prince at DeJong's restaurant on Monroe Street. Prince, reclining on the table in front of him with a watch and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers, was talking to Sam about the man they had been waiting for half an hour.

"He'll be late, of course," he exclaimed, filling Sam's glass. "That man has never been on time in his life. To be on time for a meeting would cost him something. It would be like the bloom draining from a girl's cheeks."

Sam had already seen the man they were waiting for. He was thirty-five years old, short, narrow-shouldered, with a small, wrinkled face, a huge nose, and glasses perched on his ears. Sam had seen him at the club on Michigan Avenue, where Prince was ceremoniously throwing silver dollars into a chalk mark on the floor alongside a group of serious, respectable old men.

"This is a crowd that has just closed a big deal on Kansas oil stocks, and the youngest is Morris, who was doing the publicity for them," Prince explained.

Later, as they walked down Michigan Avenue, Prince spoke at length about Morris, whom he admired immensely. "He's the best publicist and advertising man in America," he declared. "He's not a con man like me, and he doesn't make as much money, but he can take another person's ideas and express them so simply and compellingly that they tell that person's story better than they knew it themselves. And that's what advertising is all about."

He started laughing.

"It's ridiculous to think about it. Tom Morris will do the job, and the man he does it for will swear he did it himself, that every sentence on the printed page Tom gets is his own. He'll howl like a beast while paying Tom's bill, and then next time he'll try to do the job himself and mess it up so badly he'll have to send for Tom just to see the trick done all over again, like husking corn from the cob. Chicago's finest people send for him.

Tom Morris walked into the restaurant with a huge cardboard folder under his arm. He seemed hurried and nervous. "I'm going to the office of the International Cookie Lathe Company," he explained to Prince. "I can't stop. I have a mock-up prospectus for bringing to market some more of their common stock, which hasn't paid a dividend for ten years."

Prince extended his hand and pulled Morris into a chair. "Ignore the Biscuit Machine people and their inventory," he commanded. "They'll always have common stock to sell. It's inexhaustible. I want you to meet McPherson here, and one day he'll have something important you can help him with."

Morris leaned across the table and took Sam's hand; his own was small and soft, like a woman's. "I'm working myself to death," he complained. "I'm looking at a chicken farm in Indiana. I'm going to live there."

For an hour, the three men sat in the restaurant while Prince talked about a spot in Wisconsin where the fish were supposed to bite. "One man told me about this place twenty times," he said. "I'm sure I could find it in a railroad file. I've never fished it, and you haven't fished it, and Sam comes from a place where they haul water in wagons across the plains.

The little man, who had drunk copiously of wine, looked from the Prince to Sam. From time to time, he removed his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief. "I don't understand your presence in such company," he declared. "You have the respectable and dignified air of a merchant. The Prince won't go anywhere here. He's honest, trading on the wind and his charming company, and spending the money he earns instead of marrying and putting it in his wife's name."

The prince stood up. "It's no use wasting time on persiflage," he began, and then, turning to Sam, "There's a place in Wisconsin," he said uncertainly.

Morris picked up the briefcase and, with a grotesque effort to maintain his balance, headed for the door, followed by the unsteady steps of Prince and Sam. Outside, Prince snatched the briefcase from the little man's hands. "Tommy, let your mother carry this," he said, shaking a finger in Morris's face. He began to sing a lullaby. "When the bough bends, the cradle will fall."

The three men walked out of Monroe onto State Street, Sam's head strangely light. The buildings along the street swayed against the sky. Suddenly, a frantic thirst for wild adventure gripped him. At the corner, Morris stopped, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his glasses again. "I want to be sure I see clearly," he said; "I think, at the bottom of my last glass of wine, I saw the three of us in a taxi with a basket of life-giving oil on the seat between us, walking to the station to catch the train to the place Jack's friend lied to the fish about."

The next eighteen hours opened a new world for Sam. With the smoke of alcohol rising in his head, he rode a two-hour train, tramped through the darkness along dusty roads, and, having lit a fire in the forest, danced by its light on the grass, holding hands with the prince and a small, wrinkled-faced man. He stood solemnly on a stump at the edge of a wheat field and recited Poe's "Helen," adopting the voice, gestures, and even the habit of spreading his legs, of John Telfer. And then, having overdone the latter, he suddenly sat down on the stump, and Morris, coming forward with a bottle in his hand, said, "Fill the lamp, man-the light of reason is gone."

After a campfire in the woods and Sam's performance on the stump, the three friends hit the road again, and their attention was drawn to a belated farmer, half asleep, riding home on the seat of his wagon. With the agility of an Indian boy, the diminutive Morris leaped onto the wagon and thrust a ten-dollar bill into the farmer's hand. "Lead us, O man of the earth!" he cried. "Lead us to the gilded palace of sin! Take us to the saloon! The oil of life in the can is running low!"

Beyond the long, bumpy ride in the wagon, Sam couldn't quite figure out the situation. Vague images of a wild party in a village tavern, himself serving as bartender, and a huge, red-faced woman rushing back and forth under the direction of a tiny man, dragging reluctant villagers to the bar and ordering them to continue drinking the beer Sam had scooped up until the last ten dollars she'd given the wagon driver had gone into her cash box, flashed through his mind. He also imagined Jack Prince placing a stool on the bar and sitting on it, explaining to a hurrying crate of beer that while Egyptian kings built great pyramids to celebrate themselves, they never built anything more gigantic than the cog Tom Morris was constructing among the farmers in the room.

Later, Sam thought that he and Jack Prince had been trying to sleep under a pile of grain sacks in the barn and that Morris had come to them crying because everyone in the world was asleep, and most of them were lying under tables.

And then, when his head cleared, Sam found himself walking along the dusty road again with two others at dawn, singing songs.

On the train, three men, assisted by a black porter, were trying to wipe away the dust and stains of the wild night. The cardboard folder containing the cookie company's brochure was still tucked under Jack Prince's arm, and the little man, wiping and polishing his glasses, stared intently at Sam.

"Did you come with us or are you a child we adopted here in these parts?" he asked.

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CHAPTER II


It was a wonderful place, that South Water Street in Chicago where Sam had come to start his business in the city, and the fact that he failed to fully grasp its meaning and its message was proof of his dry indifference. All day long, the narrow streets flowed with the produce of the great city. Broad-shouldered drivers in blue shirts shouted from the roofs of tall wagons at the scurrying pedestrians. On the sidewalks, in boxes, sacks, and barrels, lay oranges from Florida and California, figs from Arabia, bananas from Jamaica, nuts from the hills of Spain and the plains of Africa, cabbage from Ohio, beans from Michigan, corn and potatoes from Iowa. In December, men in furs hurried through the forests of northern Michigan to gather Christmas trees, which were thrown outside to warm fires. Summer and winter alike, millions of hens laid eggs gathered there, and cattle on thousands of hills sent their yellow, oily fat, packed into tubs and dumped on trucks, to add to the confusion.

Sam walked out onto the street, thinking little about the wonders of these things, his thoughts haltingly, grasping their magnitude in dollars and cents. Standing in the doorway of the commission house where he would be working, strong, well-dressed, capable, and efficient, he scanned the streets, seeing and hearing the hustle and bustle, the roar and shouts of voices, and then, with a smile, his lips moved inside. An unspoken thought lingered in his mind. As ancient Scandinavian marauders gazed upon the majestic cities of the Mediterranean, so did he. "What a spoil!" said a voice within him, and his mind began to devise methods by which he could secure his share.

Years later, when Sam was already a man of great affairs, he was riding through the streets in a carriage one day and, turning to his companion, a gray-haired, dignified Bostonian, who sat next to him, said: "I once worked here and used to sit on a barrel of apples on the curb and think how smart I was that I made more money in a month than the man who grew apples made in a year."

A Bostonian, excited by the sight of such abundance of food, and touched in his mood to the point of epigram, looked up and down the street.

"The products of the empire are thundering on the stones," he said.

"I should have made more money here," Sam replied dryly.

The commission firm where Sam worked was a partnership, not a corporation, and was owned by two brothers. Of the two, Sam believed the elder, a tall, bald, narrow-shouldered man with a long, narrow face and a courteous manner, was the real boss and represented most of the partnership's talent. He was oily, silent, and tireless. All day long, he would wander in and out of the office, the warehouses, and up and down the crowded street, nervously sucking on an unlit cigar. He was an excellent minister of a suburban church, but also a shrewd and, Sam suspected, unscrupulous businessman. Occasionally, the priest or one of the women from the suburban church would drop by the office to talk to him, and Sam was amused to think that Narrow Face, when he talked about church affairs, bore a striking resemblance to the brown-bearded minister of the Caxton church.

The other brother was a very different type, and in business, in Sam's opinion, a far inferior. He was a heavyset, broad-shouldered, square-built man of about thirty who sat in an office, dictated letters, and lingered for two or three hours at lunch. He sent out letters, signed by himself on company letterhead, with the title of General Manager, and Narrow Face allowed him to do so. Broadpladers had been educated in New England, and even after several years away from college, he seemed more interested in that than in the welfare of the business. For a month or more each spring, he spent much of his time having one of the two stenographers employed by the firm write letters to Chicago high school graduates, urging them to come East to finish their education; and when a college graduate came to Chicago looking for work, he would lock his desk and spend his days going from place to place, introducing, persuading, recommending. However, Sam noticed that when the firm hired a new person for its office or for field work, it was Narrow Face who chose him.

Broad-Faced had once been a famous football player and wore an iron brace on his leg. The offices, like most of the offices on the street, were dark and narrow, smelling of rotting vegetables and rancid oil. On the sidewalk in front of the building, noisy Greek and Italian traders argued, and Narrow-Faced was among them, hurrying to close deals.

On South Water Street, Sam did well, multiplying his thirty-six hundred dollars by ten in the three years he stayed there, or went from there to the cities and towns, directing part of the great flowing river of food through the front door of his firm.

Almost from his first day on the streets, he began to see opportunities for profit everywhere and set to work diligently to acquire the money with which to take advantage of the opportunities he saw so enticingly opening up. Within a year, he had made significant progress. He received six thousand dollars from a woman on Wabash Avenue, planned and executed a coup that enabled him to use twenty thousand dollars inherited from a friend, a medical student who lived in the Pergrins' house.

Sam had eggs and apples in a warehouse at the top of the steps; game smuggled across state lines from Michigan and Wisconsin lay frozen in cold storage with his name on it, ready to be sold at a large profit to hotels and fancy restaurants; and there were even secret bushels of corn and wheat lying in other warehouses along the Chicago River, ready to be thrown to market at his word, or, since the margin on which he held the goods had not been collected, at a word from a broker on LaSalle Street.

Receiving twenty thousand dollars from a medical student was a turning point in Sam's life. Sunday after Sunday, he strolled the streets with Eckardt or loitered in parks, thinking about the money lying idle in the bank and the deals he could make with it on the street or on the road. With each passing day, he saw the power of money more clearly. Other commission traders from South Water Street came running to his firm's office, tense and worried, begging Narrow Face to help them with difficult day trading situations. Broad-Shouldered, who lacked business acumen but had married a wealthy woman, received half the profits month after month, thanks to the abilities of his tall and astute brother and Narrow Face, who had taken a liking to Sam. Those who stopped to talk with him from time to time spoke of this often and eloquently.

"Spend your time with no one who has money to help you," he said. "Look for men with money along the way, and then try to get it. That's all there is to business-making money." And then, looking at his brother's desk, he added, "I'd throw half the businessmen out of it if I could, but I have to dance to the tune of money."

One day Sam went to the office of a lawyer named Webster, whose reputation for skill in negotiating contracts had been passed down to him by Narrow Face.

"I want a contract drawn up that gives me absolute control over twenty thousand dollars without any risk on my part if I lose the money, and without a promise to pay more than seven percent if I don't lose," he said.

The lawyer, a slender middle-aged man with dark skin and black hair, placed his hands on the table in front of him and looked at the tall young man.

"What deposit?" he asked.

Sam shook his head. "Can you draw up a contract that will be legal and what will it cost me?" he asked.

The lawyer laughed good-naturedly. "Of course I can draw it. Why not?"

Sam took a wad of bills out of his pocket and counted the amount lying on the table.

"Who are you anyway?" Webster asked. "If you can get twenty thousand without bail, you're worth knowing. Maybe I'll put together a gang to rob a mail train."

Sam didn't answer. He pocketed the contract and went home to his alcove in Pergrin's. He wanted to be alone and think. He didn't believe he'd accidentally lose Frank Eckardt's money, but he knew Eckardt himself would back out of the deals he'd hoped to make with the money, that they would frighten and alarm him, and he wondered if he'd been honest.

After dinner, in his room, Sam carefully examined the agreement Webster had made. He felt it covered what he wanted covered, and, having fully grasped this, he tore it up. "It's no good for him to know I've been to see a lawyer," he thought guiltily.

As he lay in bed, he began to make plans for the future. With over thirty thousand dollars at his disposal, he thought he could make rapid progress. "In my hands, it will double every year," he told himself, and, getting out of bed, he pulled a chair to the window and sat there, feeling strangely alive and alert, like a young man in love. He saw himself moving forward and forward, directing, managing, managing people. It seemed to him there was nothing he couldn't do. "I'll manage factories, banks, and maybe mines and railroads," he thought, and his thoughts raced forward, so that he saw himself, gray-haired, stern, and capable, sitting at a wide desk in a huge stone building, the materialization of John. Telfer's verbal picture: "You'll be a big man in dollars-that's clear."

And then another image formed in Sam's mind. He remembered a Saturday afternoon when a young man had rushed into the office on South Water Street-a young man who owed Narrow Face money and couldn't pay it. He recalled the unpleasant tightening of his lips and the sudden, penetrating, stern look on his employer's long, narrow face. He heard little of the conversation, but he sensed the strained, pleading note in the young man's voice as he repeated, slowly and painfully, "But, man, my honor is at stake," and the coldness in his reply as he insistently replied, "It's not about honor for me, it's about dollars, and I'll get them."

From the alcove window, Sam looked out onto a vacant lot covered in patches of melting snow. Across the lot from him stood a flat building, and the snow, melting on the roof, formed a trickle that flowed down some hidden pipe and thundered to the ground. The sound of falling water and the distant footsteps walking home through the sleeping town reminded him of other nights when, as a boy in Caxton, he'd sat like this, pondering incoherent thoughts.

Without knowing it, Sam was fighting one of the real battles of his life, a battle in which the odds were heavily stacked against the qualities that had forced him out of bed and out into the snowy wasteland.

In his youth, there was much of the rough-and-tumble tradesman, blindly pursuing profit; many of the same qualities that gave America so many of its so-called great men. It was this very quality that sent him secretly to Webster, the lawyer, to defend himself, not the simple, trusting young medical student, and that made him say, returning home with a contract in his pocket, "I'll do the best I can," when what he really meant was, "I'll get everything I can."

In America, there may be businessmen who don't get what they deserve and who simply love power. Here and there, you can see people in banks, at the head of large industrial trusts, in factories, and in large trading houses, who one would like to think of in precisely this way. These are the people whose awakening people dream of, who have found themselves; these are the people whom hopeful thinkers try to remember again and again.

America is looking to these people. It calls on them to maintain faith and resist the power of the brutal trader, the dollar man, the man who, with his cunning, wolfish quality of acquisitiveness, has ruled the nation's business for too long.

I've already said that Sam's sense of justice fought an unequal battle. He was in business, and young in business, in the day when all of America was engulfed in a blind struggle for profit. The nation was intoxicated by it; trusts were formed, mines opened; oil and gas gushed from the earth; railroads, pushing westward, annually opened up vast empires of new lands. To be poor was to be a fool; thought waited, art waited; and men gathered their children around their firesides and spoke enthusiastically of the dollar men, considering them prophets worthy to guide the youth of a young nation.

Sam knew how to create new things and run a business. It was this quality in him that made him sit by the window and think before approaching a medical student with an unfair contract, and it was this same quality that drove him to walk the streets alone night after night when other young men were going to the theater or strolling with girls in the park. In truth, he loved the lonely hours when thoughts grew. He was one step ahead of the young man rushing to the theater or immersed in stories of love and adventure. There was something in him that craved a chance.

A light appeared in a window in the apartment building across from the vacant lot, and through the illuminated window he saw a man in pajamas, leaning his sheet music against a vanity table and holding a shiny silver horn. Sam watched with mild curiosity. The man, not expecting an audience at such a late hour, had begun a carefully thought-out and amusing plan to impersonate him. He opened the window, raised the horn to his lips, and, turning, bowed to the illuminated room as if before an audience. He raised his hand to his lips and scattered kisses, then raised his pipe to his lips and looked again at the sheet music.

The note that floated through the still air from the window was a failure, turning into a shriek. Sam laughed and rolled down the window. The incident reminded him of another man who had bowed to the crowd and blown a horn. He crawled into bed, pulled the covers over him, and fell asleep. "I'll get Frank's money if I can," he told himself, resolving the question that was on his mind. "Most men are fools, and if I don't get his money, someone else will."

The next day, Eckardt had lunch with Sam downtown. Together they went to the bank, where Sam showed off the profits from his trades and the growth of his bank account. Then they went out to South Water Street, where Sam spoke enthusiastically of the money a shrewd man could make, one who knew the ways of trading and had a good head on his shoulders.

"That's it," said Frank Eckardt, quickly falling into Sam's trap and hungry for profit. "I've got the money, but I don't have the head on my shoulders to use it. I'd like you to take it and see what you can do."

With his heart pounding, Sam rode home across town to the Pergrins' house, Eckardt beside him on the elevated train. In Sam's room, the agreement was written by Sam and signed by Eckardt. During dinner, they invited the haberdashery buyer to be a witness.

And the agreement proved profitable for Eckardt. Sam never returned less than ten percent of his loan in a single year, and eventually repaid more than double the principal, allowing Eckardt to leave his medical practice and live off the interest from his capital in a village near Tiffin, Ohio.

With thirty thousand dollars in hand, Sam began expanding his operations. He was constantly buying and selling not only eggs, butter, apples, and grain, but also houses and building lots. Long rows of figures passed through his mind. Deals were drawn in detail in his mind as he strolled around town, drinking with young men, or sat over dinner at the Pergrins' house. He even began to mentally formulate various schemes for infiltrating the firm where he worked, and thought he might be able to work on Broadshoulders, capturing his interest and forcing himself to take control. And then, with his fear of Narrowface holding him back and his growing success in deals occupying his thoughts, he was suddenly confronted with an opportunity that completely changed his plans for himself.

At Jack Prince's suggestion, Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey Arms Company sent for him and offered him the position of buyer for all materials used in their factories.

This was precisely the connection Sam had been unconsciously seeking-a company strong, old, conservative, and world-renowned. His conversation with Colonel Tom hinted at future opportunities to acquire company stock and perhaps even become an official-though these were, of course, distant prospects-but they were something to dream about and strive for-the company had made this part of its policy.

Sam said nothing, but he had already made up his mind to take the job and was considering the lucrative deal regarding the percentage of the money saved on the purchase that had worked so well for him over the years with Freed Smith.

Sam's job at a firearms company took him away from travel and kept him in the office all day. In a way, he regretted it. The complaints he heard from travelers at country inns about the difficulties of travel were, in his view, insignificant. Any travel brought him immense pleasure. He balanced the hardships and inconveniences with the enormous benefits of seeing new places and faces, gaining insight into many lives, and with a certain retrospective joy he looked back on three years of rushing from place to place, catching trains, and chatting with casual acquaintances he encountered. Moreover, his years on the road provided him with numerous opportunities to strike his own secret and lucrative deals.

Despite these advantages, his position with Rainey brought him into close and constant contact with the men of great affairs. The Arms Company's offices occupied an entire floor of one of Chicago's newest and largest skyscrapers, and millionaire shareholders and high-ranking officials in the state and Washington government filed in and out through the door. Sam eyed them closely. He wanted to challenge them and see if his acumen on Caxton and South Water Streets could keep his head on LaSalle Street. The opportunity seemed great to him, and he calmly and skillfully went about his work, determined to make the most of it.

At the time of Sam's arrival, the Rainey Arms Company was still largely owned by the Rainey family, father and daughter. Colonel Rainey, a gray-mustached, paunchy man with a military air, was president and the largest individual shareholder. He was a pompous, arrogant old man, prone to making the most trivial pronouncements with the air of a judge passing a death sentence. Day after day, he sat obediently at his desk with a very important and thoughtful air, smoking long black cigars and personally signing piles of letters brought to him by the heads of various departments. He considered himself a silent but highly important spokesman for the government in Washington, issuing numerous orders daily that the department heads received with respect and secretly ignored. Twice, he was widely mentioned in connection with cabinet positions in the national government, and in conversations with his friends at clubs and restaurants, he gave the impression that on both occasions he had actually declined the offer of appointment.

Having established himself as a business management force, Sam discovered many things that surprised him. In every company he knew, there was a single person to whom everyone turned for advice, who would become dominant at critical moments, saying, "Do this and that," without providing any explanation. At Rainey's company, he found no such person, but instead, a dozen strong departments, each with its own leader and more or less independent of the others.

Sam lay in his bed at night and walked around in the evening, thinking about this and its significance. There was great loyalty and devotion to Colonel Tom among the department heads, and he thought there were several among them devoted to interests other than their own.

At the same time, he told himself something was wrong. He himself lacked such a sense of loyalty, and although he was willing to verbally support the colonel's grandiose talk of the company's good old traditions, he couldn't bring himself to believe in the idea of running a huge business on a system based on loyalty to tradition or personal fidelity.

"There must be unfinished business lying around everywhere," he thought, and followed that thought with another. "A man will come along, gather up all these loose ends, and run the whole store. Why not me?"

The Rainey Arms Company earned millions for the Rainey and Whittaker families during the Civil War. Whittaker was an inventor who created one of the first practical breech-loading rifles, and the original Rainey was a dry goods merchant in an Illinois town who supported the inventor.

It proved a rare combination. Whittaker developed into a remarkable store manager and stayed home from the start, creating rifles and making improvements, expanding the factory, and selling the goods. The dry goods merchant bustled across the country, visiting Washington and state capitals, tugging at wires, appealing to patriotism and national pride, and accepting large orders at high prices.

There's a Chicago tradition that he made numerous trips south of the Dixie Line, and that after these trips, thousands of Rainey-Whittaker rifles fell into the hands of Confederate soldiers. But this story only deepened Sam's respect for energetic little dry goods merchants. His son, Colonel Tom, indignantly denied it. In fact, Colonel Tom would have liked to think of the original Rainey as a huge gun god, like Jupiter. Like Windy McPherson of Caxton, if he had the chance, he would have invented a new ancestor.

After the Civil War and Colonel Tom's coming of age, the Rainey and Whittaker fortunes were merged into one by the marriage of Jane Whittaker, the last of her line, to the sole surviving Rainey, and upon her death, her fortune increased to over a million, standing in the name of twenty-six-year-old Sue Rainey, the sole product of the marriage.

From day one, Sam began to rise through the ranks at Rainey's. He eventually discovered a fertile field for impressive savings and profits, and he exploited it to the fullest. The buyer position had been occupied for ten years by a distant relative of Colonel Tom, now deceased. Sam couldn't decide whether the cousin was a fool or a crook, and he didn't particularly care, but after taking matters into his own hands, he felt this man must have cost the company a huge amount of money, which he intended to save.

Sam's agreement with the company, in addition to a fair salary, gave him half the savings on fixed prices for standard materials. These prices remained fixed for years, and Sam met them, cutting prices left and right, earning himself twenty-three thousand dollars in the first year. At the end of the year, when the directors asked for an adjustment and the cancellation of the percentage contract, he received a generous share of the company's stock, the respect of Colonel Tom Rainey and the directors, the fear of some department heads, the loyal devotion of others, and the title of company treasurer.

In fact, Rainey Arms largely thrived on the reputation forged by the energetic and resourceful Rainey and the inventive genius of his partner, Whittaker. Under Colonel Thom, he found new conditions and new competition, which he ignored or met halfheartedly, relying on his reputation, his financial might, and the glory of his past achievements. Dry rot had eaten away at his heart. The damage done was small, but it was growing. The department heads, who handled much of the running of the business, were many incompetent men with nothing to commend them other than their long years of service. And in the treasury sat a quiet young man, barely twenty, friendless, determined to get his own way, shaking his head at office conventions and proud of his lack of faith.

Seeing the absolute necessity of working through Colonel Tom and with ideas in mind about what he wanted to do, Sam began working to instill suggestions in the senior man's mind. For a month after his promotion, the two men had lunch together daily, and Sam spent many extra hours behind closed doors in Colonel Tom's office.

Although American business and manufacturing had not yet achieved the modern concept of efficient management of stores and offices, Sam held many of these ideas in his mind and tirelessly expounded them to Colonel Tom. He hated waste; he cared nothing for company traditions; he had no idea, as other department heads did, of settling down on a comfortable cot and spending the rest of his days there; and he was determined to run the great Rainey Company, if not directly, then through Colonel Tom, whom he felt was just putty in his hands.

In his new position as treasurer, Sam didn't give up his job as buyer, but after a conversation with Colonel Tom, he merged the two departments, hired his own capable assistants, and continued his work of erasing his cousin's traces. For years, the company had been overpaying for substandard material. Sam appointed his own materials inspectors to the West Side mills and invited several major Pennsylvania steel companies rushing to Chicago to recoup the losses. The repayments were heavy, but when Colonel Tom was approached, Sam went to lunch with him, bought a bottle of wine, and strained his back.

One afternoon, a scene unfolded in a room at the Palmer House that would remain etched in Sam's memory for days as a kind of realization of the role he wanted to play in the business world. The president of a logging company took Sam into the room and, placing five thousand-dollar bills on the table, walked to the window and stood looking out.

For a moment, Sam stood staring at the money on the table and the man's back by the window, seething with indignation. He felt like he wanted to grab the man by the throat and squeeze, just as he had once squeezed Windy McPherson. Then a cold glint appeared in his eyes, he cleared his throat, and said, "You're small here; you'll have to make this pile even bigger if you expect to interest me."

The man at the window shrugged-a slender young man in a fashionable waistcoat-and then, turning and pulling a wad of bills from his pocket, walked over to the table, facing Sam.

"I hope you will be reasonable," he said, placing the bills on the table.

When the stack reached twenty thousand, Sam reached out, took it, and put it in his pocket. "You'll get a receipt for this when I get back to the office," he said. "It concerns what you owe our company for inflated prices and shoddy materials. As for our business, I signed a contract with another company this morning."

Having streamlined the Rainey Arms Company's purchasing operations to his liking, Sam began spending a lot of time in the stores and, through Colonel Tom, brought about significant changes everywhere. He fired useless foremen, knocked down partitions between rooms, and everywhere he went, pushed for greater and better quality work. Like a modern efficiency freak, he walked around with a watch in his hand, cutting out wasted motions, rearranging spaces, and getting his way.

It was a time of great unrest. The offices and shops buzzed like disturbed bees, and dark glances followed him. But Colonel Tom mastered the situation and followed Sam around, sauntering, giving orders, straightening his shoulders like a transformed man. He spent the entire day at this, discharging, directing, fighting against waste. When a strike broke out in one of the shops over the innovations Sam had imposed on the workers, he sat on a bench and delivered a speech Sam had written about man's place in the organization and management of great modern industry and his duty to improve as a worker.

The men silently picked up their tools and returned to their benches, and when he saw that they were so moved by his words, Colonel Tom brought what threatened to become a flurry to a hurricane climax by announcing a five-percent pay raise. The scale was Colonel Tom's own signature touch, and the enthusiastic reception of this speech brought a flush of pride to his cheeks.

Although Colonel Tom still ran the company's affairs and was becoming increasingly prominent, the officers and stores, and later the major speculators and buyers, as well as the wealthy directors of LaSalle Street, knew that a new force had entered the company. Men began quietly entering Sam's office, asking questions, proposing proposals, asking for favors. He felt he was being held hostage. About half of the department heads fought with him and were secretly sentenced to slaughter; the rest came to him, expressed approval of what was happening, and asked him to inspect their departments and, through them, make suggestions for improvement. Sam gladly did so, securing their loyalty and support, which would later serve him well.

Sam also had a hand in selecting new recruits for the company. The method he used was characteristic of his relationship with Colonel Tom. If a candidate was suitable, he was admitted to the colonel's office and listened to a half-hour discussion about the company's good old traditions. If the candidate didn't suit Sam, he wasn't allowed to speak to the colonel. "They can't waste your time," Sam explained.

At Rainey, various department heads were shareholders and elected two members of their ranks to the board of directors, and in his second year, Sam was elected as one of these employee directors. That same year, five department heads who had resigned in protest at one of Sam's innovations (they were later replaced by two others) had their shares returned to the company by a prearranged agreement. These shares, along with another block assigned to him by the colonel, came into Sam's hands thanks to money from Eckardt, the woman from Wabash Avenue, and his own cozy stack.

Sam was a growing force in the company. He served on the board of directors and was recognized by shareholders and employees as the hands-on leader of the business; he had halted the company's march to second place in its industry and challenged it. All around him, in the offices and stores, a new life was thriving, and he felt he could move forward toward real control, and he began to lay the groundwork for that end. Standing in the offices on LaSalle Street or amid the din and clatter of the stores, he would lift his chin with the same strange gesture that had attracted the Caxton men when he was a barefoot newsboy and the son of the town drunk. Great, ambitious projects were brewing in his mind. "I have a great tool in my hand," he thought. "With it, I will carve out for myself the place I intend to occupy among the great men of this city and this country."

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CHAPTER III


SAM MK F. HERSON, WHO stood on the shop floor among the thousands of employees of the Rainey Arms Company, who looked unseeingly at the faces of those busy with the machines, and saw in them only so much help to the ambitious projects boiling in his brain, who, even as a boy, by his characteristic courage combined with the gift of acquisitiveness, had become a foreman, who, untrained, uneducated, knowing nothing of the history of industry or social endeavor, walked out of his company office and walked through the crowded streets to the new apartment he had rented on Michigan Avenue. It was a Saturday evening at the end of a busy week, and as he walked, he thought about what he had accomplished during the week and made plans for the future. He crossed Madison Street into State, seeing crowds of men and women, boys and girls, climbing cable cars, crowding the sidewalks, forming groups, groups breaking up and forming, all making a tense picture. disorienting, awe-inspiring. Just as in the workshops, where workers were, so too here, young people with unseeing eyes wandered. He liked it all: the crowds; clerks in cheap clothes; old men with young women in their arms, heading out to lunch in restaurants; a young man with a pensive look in his eyes waiting for his beloved in the shadow of a tall office building. The impatient, tense rush of it all seemed to him nothing more than a kind of gigantic stage for action; the action was controlled by a few quiet, capable people, of whom he intended to be one, striving for growth.

On State Street, he stopped at a store and, after buying a bouquet of roses, stepped out into the crowded street again. A tall woman walked freely in the crowd ahead of him, her hair a mass of reddish-brown. As she passed through the crowd, men stopped and glanced back at her, their eyes shining with admiration. Seeing her, Sam leaped forward with a cry.

"Edith!" he cried, running forward and thrusting the roses into her hand. "For Janet," he said, and, lifting his hat, walked beside her down State to Van Buren Street.

Leaving the woman on the corner, Sam entered a district of cheap theaters and dingy hotels. Women were talking to him; young men in bright overcoats and with a peculiar, assertive, animal-like sway of their shoulders were loitering in front of theaters or in hotel entrances; from a restaurant upstairs came the voice of another young man, singing a popular street song. "It's going to be hot in the old town tonight," the voice sang.

Crossing the intersection, Sam emerged onto Michigan Avenue, which opened onto a long, narrow park and, beyond the railroad tracks, onto the piles of new land where the city was trying to reclaim the lakeshore. At the street corner, standing in the shadow of the elevated train, he encountered a whining, drunken old woman who lunged forward and laid her hand on his coat. Sam tossed her a quarter and moved on, shrugging. Here, too, he walked with unseeing eyes; this, too, was part of the gigantic machine that tall, quiet, competent people worked on.

From his new top-floor hotel apartment overlooking the lake, Sam walked north along Michigan Avenue to a restaurant where black men moved silently among white-covered tables, serving men and women talking and laughing under shaded lamps. A confident, confident air permeated the air. As he passed through the restaurant door, the wind blowing over the city toward the lake carried the sound of a voice floating with it. "It's going to be hot in Old Town tonight," the voice repeated insistently.

After dinner, Sam climbed into a truck heading down Wabash Avenue and sat in the front seat, letting the city panorama unfold before him. He walked from the dime-store theater district, through streets lined with saloons, each with wide, bright doors and dimly lit "ladies' entrances," and into a neighborhood of neat little shops where women with baskets in their arms stood at the counters, and Sam was reminded of Saturday nights in Caxton.

Two women, Edith and Janet Eberly, met through Jack Prince, one of whom Sam had sent roses from the other and from whom he had borrowed six thousand dollars when he first arrived in the city. They had been living in Chicago for five years when Sam met them. For those five years, they lived in a two-story frame house that had previously been an apartment building on Wabash Avenue near 39th Street and was now both an apartment building and a grocery store. The upstairs apartment, accessible by stairs from the grocery store, had been transformed over the course of five years, under Janet Eberly's management, into a beautiful property, perfect in its simplicity and completeness of purpose.

Both women were the daughters of a farmer living in a Midwestern state across the Mississippi River. Their grandfather was a prominent figure in the state: he served as one of the first governors and later in the Senate in Washington. A county and a large city were named in his honor, and he was once considered a possible vice presidential candidate, but he died in Washington before the convention at which his name was to be nominated. His only son, a promising young man, went to West Point and served with distinction during the Civil War, after which he commanded several Western army posts and married the daughter of another soldier. His wife, a beautiful woman from the army, died after giving birth to two daughters.

After the death of his wife, Major Eberly took to drinking and, to escape the habit and the army atmosphere in which he lived with his wife, whom he loved dearly, he took his two little girls and returned to his home state to settle on a farm.

In the neighborhood where both girls grew up, their father, Major Eberly, had gained notoriety by rarely seeing people and rudely rejecting the friendly advances of his neighboring farmers. He spent his days at home, poring over books, of which he owned many, hundreds of which now stood on open shelves in the two girls' apartment. These days of study, during which he tolerated no interruption, were followed by days of furious toil, during which he led team after team into the fields, plowing or harvesting day and night, with no rest except for food.

On the edge of the Eberli farm stood a small wooden village church, surrounded by hayfields. On summer Sunday mornings, the former soldier could always be found in the fields, driving some noisy, rattling piece of farm equipment behind him. He would often go down beneath the church windows, disrupting the villagers' worship; in winter, he would pile up a pile of firewood there and, on Sundays, go chop wood beneath the church windows. While his daughters were young, he was repeatedly hauled into court and fined for cruel neglect of his animals. Once, he locked a large flock of beautiful sheep in the barn, entered the house, and sat for several days, absorbed in his books, so that many of them suffered terribly from lack of food and water. When he was brought to trial and fined, half the county came to the court and gloated over his humiliation.

Their father was neither cruel nor kind to the two girls, leaving them mostly to their own devices but giving them no money, so they wore dresses repurposed from their mother's dresses, which had been stored in chests in the attic. When they were little, an elderly black woman, a former servant of an army beauty, lived with and raised them, but when Edith was ten, the woman went home to Tennessee, leaving the girls to fend for themselves and run the household as they pleased.

At the beginning of her friendship with Sam, Janet Eberly was a thin, twenty-seven-year-old woman with a small, expressive face, quick, nervous fingers, piercing black eyes, black hair, and the ability to become so immersed in the exposition of a book or two. As conversation progressed, her small, tense face would transform, her quick fingers would grasp the listener's hand, her eyes would lock with his, and she would lose all awareness of his presence or the opinions he might express. She was crippled: as a young woman, she had fallen from a barn loft and injured her back, so she spent the entire day in a specially made reclining wheelchair.

Edith was a stenographer and worked for a downtown publishing house, while Janet cut hats for a milliner a few doors down the street from their home. In his will, their father left the money from the sale of the farm to Janet, and Sam used it, taking out a ten-thousand-dollar life insurance policy in her name while it was in his possession, handling it with a care entirely absent from his dealings with the medical student's money. "Take it and make money for me," the little woman said impulsively one evening, soon after they had become acquainted and after Jack Prince had spoken glowingly of Sam's business ability. "What good is talent if you don't use it for the benefit of those who have none?"

Janet Eberly was a clever woman. She disdained all the usual feminine points of view and had her own unique perspective on life and people. In a way, she understood her stubborn, gray-haired father, and during her immense physical suffering, they developed a kind of understanding and affection for each other. After his death, she wore a miniature of him, made as a child, on a chain around her neck. When Sam met her, they immediately became close friends, spending hours talking and eagerly anticipating evenings spent together.

In the Eberly household, Sam McPherson was a benefactor, a miracle worker. In his hands, six thousand dollars brought in two thousand a year, immeasurably adding to the atmosphere of comfort and good living that reigned there. For Janet, who managed the household, he was a guide, an advisor, and more than just a friend.

Of the two women, Sam's first friend was the strong, energetic Edith, with reddish-brown hair and the kind of physical presence that made men stop to look at her on the street.

Edith Eberly was physically strong, prone to outbursts of anger, intellectually silly, and deeply greedy for wealth and a place in the world. Through Jack Prince, she heard of Sam's money-making skills, his abilities, and his prospects, and for a time she plotted to win his affections. Several times, when they were alone, she characteristically impulsively squeezed his hand, and once, on the stairs outside the grocery store, she offered him her lips for a kiss. Later, a passionate affair developed between her and Jack Prince, which Prince ultimately abandoned out of fear of her violent outbursts. After Sam met Janet Eberly and became her loyal friend and henchman, all expressions of affection or even interest between him and Edith ceased, and the kiss on the stairs was forgotten.


As Sam climbed the stairs after the cable car ride, he stood next to Janet's wheelchair in the front room of the apartment overlooking Wabash Avenue. A chair stood by the window, facing the open fire in the fireplace she'd built into the wall of the house. Outside, through the open arched door, Edith moved silently, clearing plates from the table. He knew that Jack Prince would arrive shortly and take her to the theater, leaving him and Janet to finish their conversation.

Sam lit his pipe and began to speak between puffs, making a statement that he knew would excite her, and Janet, impulsively placing her hand on his shoulder, began to tear the statement to pieces.

"You say!" she flushed. "Books aren"t full of pretense and lies; you"re businessmen-you and Jack Prince. What do you know about books? They"re the most wonderful things in the world. Men sit and write them and forget to lie, but you businessmen never forget. You and books! You haven"t read books, not real ones. Didn"t my father know; didn"t he save himself from madness through books? Don"t I, sitting here, sense the real movement of the world through the books people write? Suppose I saw those people. They put on airs and airs and took themselves seriously, just like you, Jack, or the grocer downstairs. You think you know what"s going on in the world. You think you"re doing something, you Chicago people of money and action and growth. You"re blind, all of you."

The little woman, with a slight, half-scornful, half-amused look, leaned forward and ran her fingers through Sam's hair, laughing at the astonished face he turned towards her.

"Oh, I'm not afraid, despite what Edith and Jack Prince say about you," she continued impulsively. "I like you, and if I were a healthy woman, I'd make love to you and marry you, and then I'd make sure there was something in this world for you besides money, tall buildings, people, and machines that make guns."

Sam grinned. "You're like your father, driving his mower back and forth under the church windows on Sunday mornings," he declared. "You think you can change the world by shaking your fist at it. I'd like to go and see you fined in a courtroom for starving a sheep."

Janet, closing her eyes and leaning back in her chair, laughed with delight and declared that they would have a wonderful evening of arguing.

After Edith had gone, Sam sat all evening with Janet, listening to her talk about life and what she thought it must mean to a strong and capable man like himself, as he had listened to her ever since they had known each other. In that conversation, as in the many conversations they had had together, conversations that had been ringing in his ears for years, the little black-eyed woman had given him a glimpse into a whole purposeful universe of thought and action he had never dreamed of, introducing him to a new world of men: the methodical, hard-headed Germans, the emotional, dreamy Russians, the analytical, bold Norwegians, Spaniards, and Italians with their sense of beauty, and the clumsy, hopeful Englishmen who wanted so much and got so little; so that at the end of the evening he left her feeling strangely small and insignificant against the vast world she had painted for him.

Sam didn't understand Janet's point. It was too new and alien to everything he'd learned in life, and he wrestled with her ideas in his mind, clinging to his own concrete, practical thoughts and hopes. But on the train home, and later in his room, he replayed what she'd said over and over in his mind, trying to grasp the vastness of the concept of human life she'd gained while sitting in a wheelchair and looking down on Wabash Avenue.

Sam loved Janet Eberly. It was never a word between them, and he saw her hand reach out and grasp Jack Prince's shoulder as she expounded upon some law of life as she saw it, how he had so often broken free and seized it. He loved her, but if she could just hop out of her wheelchair, he would take her hand and walk with her to the priest's office within an hour, and deep down he knew she would gladly go with him.

Janet died suddenly during Sam's second year at the gun company, without him directly declaring his love. But during the years they spent much time together, he thought of her as his wife, and when she died, he was in despair, drinking night after night and wandering aimlessly through deserted streets at hours when he should have been sleeping. She was the first woman who ever possessed and stirred his masculinity, and she awakened something in him that later enabled him to see life with a breadth and breadth of vision that was not characteristic of the assertive, energetic young man of dollars and industry who sat beside her wheelchair on Wabash Avenue in the evenings.

After Janet's death, Sam did not continue his friendship with Edith, but gave her ten thousand dollars, which in his hands grew to six thousand of Janet's money, and never saw her again.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER IV


ONE NIGHT IN APRIL Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey Arms Company and his top aide, young Sam McPherson, the company's treasurer and chairman, were sleeping together in a St. Paul hotel room. It was a double room with two beds, and Sam, lying on his pillow, looked across the bed to where the colonel's belly, jutting between him and the light from the long, narrow window, formed a round mound over which the moon was just peeking. That evening, the two men sat for several hours at a table in the downstairs grill while Sam discussed an offer he was making the following day to a speculator in St. Paul. The major speculator's account was under threat from Lewis, the Jewish manager of the Edwards Arms Company, Rainey's only significant Western competitor, and Sam was full of ideas on how to checkmate the Jew's shrewd sales move. At the table, the colonel was silent and uncommunicative, which was unusual for him, and Sam lay in bed and watched the moon gradually move across the undulating mound of his stomach, wondering what was on his mind. The mound sank, revealing the full face of the moon, and then rose again, hiding it.

"Sam, have you ever been in love?" the colonel asked with a sigh.

Sam turned over and buried his face in the pillow, the white bedspread bobbing up and down. "Old fool, has it really come to this?" he asked himself. "After all these years of living alone, is he going to start chasing women now?"

He didn't answer the colonel's question. "Changes are coming your way, old man," he thought, the figure of quiet, determined little Sue Rainey, the colonel's daughter, as he saw her on the rare occasions when he dined at the Rainey house or when she came to the office on LaSalle Street, coming to mind. With a thrill of pleasure from the mental exercise, he tried to imagine the colonel as a swashbuckling sword among women.

The colonel, oblivious to Sam's amusement and his silence about his experiences with love, began to speak, compensating for the silence in the grill. He told Sam he had decided to take a new wife and confessed that the prospect of his daughter's future work troubled him. "Children are so unfair," he complained. "They forget a person's feelings and fail to realize that their hearts are still young."

With a smile on his lips, Sam began to imagine the woman lying in his place, gazing at the moon above the pulsating hill. The Colonel continued talking. He became more frank, revealing the name of his beloved and the circumstances of their meeting and courtship. "She's an actress, a working girl," he said with feeling. "I met her one night at a dinner given by Will Sperry, and she was the only woman there who didn't drink wine. After dinner, we went for a drive together, and she told me about her difficult life, her struggles with temptation, and about her artist brother, whom she was trying to make a life for. We were together a dozen times, wrote letters, and, Sam, we discovered an affinity for each other.

Sam sat up in bed. "Letters!" he muttered. "The old dog's going to interfere." He fell back onto the pillow. "Well, so be it. Why should I bother?"

The colonel, having started speaking, couldn't stop. "Although we only saw each other a dozen times, a letter passed between us every day. Oh, if you could see the letters she writes. They're magnificent."

The Colonel let out a worried sigh. "I want Sue to invite her in, but I'm afraid," he complained. "I'm afraid she'll make a mistake. Women are such determined creatures. She and my Luella must meet and get to know each other, but if I go home and tell her, she might make a scene and hurt Luella's feelings."

The moon rose, bathing Sam's eyes in light, and he turned his back to the colonel and prepared to sleep. The older man's naive trustfulness stirred a source of amusement within him, and the bedspread continued to tremble meaningfully from time to time.

"I wouldn't hurt her feelings for anything. She's the squarest little woman in the world," the colonel's voice declared. The voice broke, and the colonel, usually vocal about his feelings, began to hesitate. Sam wondered if it was the thoughts of his daughter or the lady on stage that had touched his feelings. "It's wonderful," the colonel sobbed, "when a young and beautiful woman gives her whole heart to the care of a man like me."

A week passed before Sam learned more about the case. One morning, rising from his desk in the LaSalle Street office, he found Sue Rainey standing before him. She was a short, athletic woman with black hair, square shoulders, cheeks tanned by the sun and wind, and calm gray eyes. She faced Sam's desk and removed her glove, looking at him with amused and mocking eyes. Sam stood and, leaning over the flat-topped desk, took her hand, wondering what had brought her there.

Sue Rainey didn't dwell on the matter and immediately launched into an explanation of the purpose of her visit. From birth, she had lived in an atmosphere of wealth. Although not considered a beautiful woman, her wealth and charming personality had earned her much courtship. Sam, who had briefly spoken with her half a dozen times, had long been fascinated by her personality. As she stood before him, looking so beautifully groomed and confident, he thought she was bewildering and perplexing.

"Colonel," she began, then hesitated and smiled. "You, Mr. Macpherson, have become a figure in my father's life. He depends greatly on you. He tells me that he spoke to you about Miss Luella London from the theater and that you agreed with him that the Colonel and she should marry.

Sam looked at her seriously. A flash of amusement flickered through him, but his face was serious and impassive.

"Yes?" he said, looking into her eyes. "Have you met Miss London?"

"Yes," Sue Rainey replied. "And you?"

Sam shook his head.

"She's impossible," declared the colonel's daughter, clutching her glove and looking at the floor. A flush of anger flooded her cheeks. "She's a rude, harsh, and cunning woman. She dyes her hair, cries when you look at her, doesn't even have the decency to be ashamed of what she's trying to do, and she's embarrassed the colonel."

Sam looked at Sue Rainey's rosy cheek and thought its texture was beautiful. He wondered why he'd heard her called a common woman. The bright flush that came to her face with anger, he thought, transformed her. He liked the direct and assertive manner in which she presented the colonel's case, and he was acutely aware of the compliment implied by her coming to him. "She respects herself," he told himself, and felt a thrill of pride in her behavior, as if it had been inspired by himself.

"I've heard a lot about you," she continued, looking at him and smiling. "In our house, you're brought to the table with soup and taken away with liqueur. My father supplements his table talk and presents all his new wisdom on economics, efficiency, and growth by constantly repeating the phrases 'Sam says' and 'Sam thinks.' And the men who come to the house talk about you, too. Teddy Forman says that at board meetings, they all sit like children, waiting for you to tell them what to do."

She extended her hand impatiently. "I'm in a hole," she said. "I could handle my father, but I can't handle this woman."

While she was talking to him, Sam glanced past her and out the window. When her gaze tore away from his face, he looked back at her tanned, firm cheeks. From the very beginning of the interview, he had intended to help her.

"Give me this lady's address," he said; "I'll go and examine her."

Three evenings later, Sam invited Miss Louella London to a midnight dinner at one of the city's finest restaurants. She knew his motive for taking her, for he had been completely frank in those few minutes of conversation at the stage door of the theater when the engagement had been sealed. Over the meal, they talked about Chicago theater productions, and Sam told her a story about an amateur performance he had once given in the hall above Geiger's Drug Store in Caxton when he was a boy. In the play, Sam played a drummer boy killed on the battlefield by a smug villain in a gray uniform, and John Telfer, as the villain, became so serious that his pistol, which failed to explode after one step, chased Sam across the stage at the critical moment, trying to hit him with the butt of his gun, while the audience roared with delight at the realistic expression of Telfer's rage and the terrified boy begging for mercy.

Luella London laughed heartily at Sam's story, and then, when the coffee was served, she touched the handle of her cup and a shrewd look came into her eyes.

"And now you are a big businessman and you have come to me about Colonel Rainey," she said.

Sam lit a cigar.

"How much do you count on this marriage between you and the colonel?" he asked bluntly.

The actress laughed and poured cream into her coffee. A line appeared and disappeared between her eyes on her forehead. Sam thought she looked capable.

"I was thinking about what you said to me at the stage door," she said, a childish smile playing on her lips. "You know, Mr. McPherson, I don't understand you. I just don't understand how you got yourself into this. And where is your authority, anyway?"

Sam, without taking his eyes off her face, jumped into the darkness.

"Well," he said, "I'm something of an adventurer myself. I fly the black flag. I come from where you come from. I had to reach out and take what I wanted. I don't blame you one bit, but it just so happened that I saw Colonel Tom Rainey first. He's my game, and I'm not suggesting you play the fool. I'm not bluffing. You'll have to get off him."

Leaning forward, he looked at her intently, then lowered his voice. "I have your recording. I know the man you were living with. He'll help me get you if you don't leave him.

Sam leaned back in his chair, watching her solemnly. He'd seized the odd opportunity to win quickly through bluffing, and he'd won. But Luella London wasn't to be defeated without a fight.

"You're lying," she cried, half-rising from her chair. "Frank never..."

"Oh, yes, Frank already," Sam replied, turning as if to call a waiter; "If you want to see him, I'll bring him here in ten minutes."

The woman picked up her fork and began nervously picking holes in the tablecloth, a tear welling up on her cheek. She took a handkerchief from the bag hanging over the back of a chair near the table and wiped her eyes.

"It's all right! It's all right!" she said, gathering her courage. "I'll give it up. If you dug up Frank Robson, then you have me. He'll do anything you say, for money."

They sat in silence for a few minutes. A tired look appeared in the woman's eyes.

"I wish I were a man," she said. "I get beaten for everything I do because I'm a woman. I'm almost done with my days of earning money in the theater, and I thought a colonel was fair game."

"Yes," Sam replied dispassionately, "but you see I"m ahead of you on this. He"s mine."

After carefully looking around the room, he took a wad of bills out of his pocket and began laying them out one by one on the table.

"Look," he said, "you've done a good job. You should have won. For ten years, half the society women of Chicago have been trying to marry their daughters or sons off to the Rainey fortune. They had everything they needed: wealth, beauty, and position in the world. You have none of that. How did you do it?"

"Anyway," he continued, "I'm not going to see you get a haircut. I've got ten thousand dollars here, the finest Rainey money ever printed. You sign this paper, and then put the roll in your purse."

"That's right," Luella London said as she signed the document, the light returning to her eyes.

Sam called over a restaurant owner he knew and asked him and the waiter to sign up as witnesses.

Luella London put a wad of bills in her purse.

"Why did you give me this money when you made me beat you in the first place?" she asked.

Sam lit a new cigar and, folding the paper, put it in his pocket.

"Because I like you and admire your skill," he said, "and in any case, so far I have not succeeded in defeating you."

They sat, studying the people rising from their tables and walking through the door to the waiting carriages and cars, the well-dressed women with their confident airs serving as a contrast to the woman sitting next to him.

"I suppose you're right about women," he said thoughtfully, "it must be a tough game for you if you like to win on your own."

"Victory! We won't win." The actress's lips parted, revealing white teeth. "No woman ever won if she tried to fight a fair fight for herself."

Her voice became tense and the wrinkles on her forehead appeared again.

"A woman can't stand alone," she continued, "she's a sentimental fool. She gives her hand to some man, and he ends up hitting her. Why, even when she plays the game like I played against the Colonel, some rat-like man like Frank Robson, for whom she gave everything a woman is worth, sells her out.

Sam looked at his ring-covered hand lying on the table.

"Let's not misunderstand each other," he said quietly. "Don't blame Frank for this. I never knew him. I just imagined him."

A puzzled look appeared in the woman's eyes and a blush spread across her cheeks.

"You're a bribe-taker!" she smirked.

Sam called over a passing waiter and ordered a bottle of fresh wine.

"What's the point of being sick?" he asked. "It's simple enough. You've bet against the best mind. Anyway, you have ten thousand, don't you?"

Luella reached for her purse.

"I don't know," she said, "I'll see. Haven't you decided to steal it back yet?"

Sam laughed.

"I"m getting there," he said, "don"t rush me."

They sat looking at each other for a few minutes, and then, with a serious ring in his voice and a smile on his lips, Sam began to speak again.

"Look here!" he said, "I'm not Frank Robson, and I don't enjoy inflicting the worst on a woman. I've studied you, and I can't imagine you running around with ten thousand dollars in real money. You don't fit into the picture, and the money wouldn't last a year in your hands.

"Give it to me," he begged. "Let me invest it for you. I'm a winner. In a year, I'll double it for you."

The actress glanced past Sam's shoulder to where a group of young people sat at a table, drinking and talking loudly. Sam began telling a joke about Irish luggage from Caxton. When he finished, he looked at her and laughed.

"The way that shoemaker looked at Jerry Donlin, you, as the colonel's wife, looked at me," he said. "I had to get you out of my flowerbed."

A look of determination flashed in Louella London's wandering eyes as she picked up her purse from the back of a chair and pulled out a wad of bills.

"I'm a sportsman," she said, "and I'm going to bet on the best horse I've ever seen. You can cut me short, but I'll always take my chances.

Turning around, she called the waiter and, handing him the bill from her purse, threw the bun on the table.

"Take from this the payment for the spread and the wine we drank," she said, handing him a blank bill and then turning to Sam. "You must conquer the world. Either way, your genius will be recognized by me. I'm paying for this party, and when you see the Colonel, say goodbye to him for me."

The next day, at his request, Sue Rainey stopped by the Arms Company office, and Sam handed her a document signed by Luella London. It was an agreement on her part to split equally with Sam any money she could extort from Colonel Rainey.

The colonel's daughter looked from the newspaper to Sam's face.

"I thought so," she said, a puzzled look in her eyes. "But I don't understand it. What does this newspaper do, and how much did you pay for it?"

"The newspaper," Sam replied, "puts her in a hole, and I paid ten thousand dollars for it."

Sue Rainey laughed, took a checkbook out of her purse, placed it on the table, and sat down.

"Did you get your half?" she asked.

"I understand," Sam replied, then leaned back in his chair and began to explain. When he told her about the conversation in the restaurant, she sat down with her checkbook in front of her and a puzzled look in her eyes.

Without giving her time to comment, Sam became immersed in what he was about to tell her.

"The woman won't bother the Colonel anymore," he declared. "If this newspaper doesn't keep her, something else will. She respects me and fears me. We talked after she signed the document, and she gave me ten thousand dollars to invest in her. I promised to double the amount for her within a year, and I intend to keep it. I want you to double it now. Write a check for twenty thousand."

Sue Rainey wrote out a check payable to bearer and slid it across the table.

"I can't say I understand yet," she admitted. "Are you in love with her, too?"

Sam grinned. He wondered if he could put into words exactly what he wanted to say to her about the actress, the soldier of fortune. He looked across the table into her frank gray eyes, then impulsively decided to say it directly, as if she were a man.

"That"s right," he said. "I like ability and a good mind, and this woman has them. She"s not a very good woman, but nothing in her life has made her want to be good. She"s been going down the wrong path all her life, and now she wants to get back on her feet and get better. That"s why she pursued the Colonel. She didn"t want to marry him; she wanted him to give her the start she was looking for. I got the better of her because somewhere out there is a whining little man who has taken everything good and beautiful out of her and is now willing to sell her for a few dollars. When I saw her, I imagined such a man, and I bluffed my way into his hands. But I don"t want to whip a woman, even in a matter like this, because of some man"s cheapness. I want to do the honest thing by her. That"s why I asked you to write a check for twenty thousand."

Sue Rainey rose and stood at the table, looking down at him. He thought about how remarkably clear and honest her eyes were.

"What about the colonel?" she asked. "What will he think about all this?"

Sam walked around the table and took her hand.

"We'll have to agree not to pursue it," he said. "We actually did that, you know, when we started this case. I think we can count on Ms. London to put the finishing touches on the work."

And Miss London did just that. A week later, she sent for Sam and placed two and a half thousand dollars in his hand.

"This isn't for me to invest," she said, "it's for yourself. According to the agreement I signed with you, we were supposed to split everything I got from the colonel. Well, I went light. I only got five thousand dollars."

With money in his hand, Sam stood near the small table in her room and looked at her.

"What did you tell the colonel?" he asked.

"Last night I called him into my room and, lying there in bed, I told him that I had just discovered that I had become the victim of an incurable disease. I told him that within a month I would be in bed forever, and I asked him to marry me immediately and take me away with him to some quiet place where I could die in his arms."

Luella London walked up to Sam, put her hand on his shoulder and laughed.

"He began to plead and make excuses," she continued, "and then I brought out his letters and spoke frankly. He immediately bowed down and meekly paid the five thousand dollars I asked for the letters. I could have made fifty, and with your talent, you should have everything he has in six months.

Sam shook her hand and told her of his success in doubling the money she'd deposited with him. Then, pocketing the twenty-five hundred dollars, he returned to his desk. He never saw her again, and when a lucky market move increased her remaining twenty thousand dollars to twenty-five thousand, he transferred it to a trust company and forgot about the incident. Years later, he heard that she was running a fashionable tailor shop in a Western city.

And Colonel Tom Rainey, who for months had talked only of the efficiency of the factories and what he and young Sam McPherson were going to do to expand the business, the next morning launched into a tirade against women that continued for the rest of his life.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER V


Sue Rainey had long captured the imagination of Chicago society youth, who, despite her slender figure and the substantial fortune behind her, were nonetheless puzzled and confused by her attitude. On the wide verandas of golf clubs, where young men in white trousers lounged and smoked cigarettes, and in downtown clubs where the same young men spent winter afternoons playing Kelly pool, they spoke of her, calling her an enigma. "She'll end up an old maid," they declared, shaking their heads at the thought of such a good connection hanging freely in the air just beyond their reach. Every now and then, one of the young men would break from the group contemplating her and, with an initial volley of books, candy, flowers, and theater invitations, rush at her, only to find the youthful ardor of his assault cooled by her continued indifference. When she was twenty-one, a young English cavalry officer, visiting Chicago to participate in horse shows, was frequently seen in her company for several weeks, and rumors of their engagement spread throughout the city, becoming the talk of the nineteenth hole at country clubs. The rumor turned out to be unfounded: the cavalry officer was attracted not by the colonel's quiet little daughter, but by a rare vintage wine the colonel kept in his cellar, and by a sense of camaraderie with the arrogant old gunsmith.

After he'd first met her, and throughout his days of tinkering around the gun company's offices and stores, Sam had heard stories of eager and often needy young men camped out on her trail. They were supposed to stop by the office to see and talk with the colonel, who had confided to Sam several times that his daughter, Sue, was past the age at which sensible young women should marry, and in her father's absence, two or three of them had developed a habit of stopping to talk to Sam, whom they'd met through the colonel or Jack Prince. They'd declared they were "making peace with the colonel." "It shouldn't be that hard," Sam thought, sipping wine, smoking cigars, and eating lunches with an open mind. One day at lunch, Colonel Tom discussed these young men with Sam, slamming the table so hard the glasses bounced, and calling them damned upstarts.

For his part, Sam didn't feel he knew Sue Rainey, and although a slight curiosity about her had pricked him after their first meeting one evening at the Raineys' house, no opportunity to satisfy it had presented itself. He knew she was athletic, had traveled widely, had ridden, shot, and sailed; and he had heard Jack Prince speak of her as a clever woman, but until the incident with the Colonel and Luella London had momentarily brought them into the same enterprise and caused him to think of her with real interest, he had seen and spoken to her only for brief moments, occasioned by their mutual interest in her father's affairs.

After Janet Eberly's sudden death, while Sam was still grieving her loss, he had his first long conversation with Sue Rainey. It was in Colonel Tom's office, and Sam, hurrying in, found her sitting at the colonel's desk, looking out the window at the vast expanse of flat rooftops. His attention was drawn to a man climbing a flagpole to replace a slipped rope. Standing by the window, looking at the tiny figure clinging to the swinging pole, he began to talk about the absurdity of human endeavor.

The colonel's daughter listened respectfully to his rather obvious platitudes and, rising from her chair, stood beside him. Sam turned slyly to look at her firm, tanned cheeks, as he had that morning when she came to visit him about Luella London, and was struck by the thought that she somehow vaguely reminded him of Janet Eberly. A moment later, to his own surprise, he launched into a long speech about Janet, the tragedy of her loss, and the beauty of her life and character.

The nearness of the loss, and the proximity of someone he thought might be a sympathetic listener, spurred him on, and he found himself getting a kind of relief from the painful sense of losing his dead comrade by heaping praise on her life.

When he finished speaking his mind, he stood by the window, feeling awkward and embarrassed. The man who had climbed the flagpole, threading a rope through the ring at the top, suddenly slipped off the pole, and, thinking for a moment he had fallen, Sam quickly grabbed at the air. His clenching fingers closed around Sue Rainey's hand.

He turned around, amused by the incident, and began to give a confused explanation. Tears appeared in Sue Rainey's eyes.

"I wish I knew her," she said, pulling her hand free from his. "I wish you knew me better, so I could know your Janet. They"re rare, women like that. They"re worth knowing. Most women like most men..."

She made an impatient gesture with her hand, and Sam turned and walked toward the door. He felt like he might not trust himself to answer her. For the first time since he'd become an adult, he felt like tears were about to well up in his eyes at any moment. The grief over losing Janet engulfed him, confusing and overwhelming.

"I've been unfair to you," Sue Rainey said, looking at the floor. "I thought of you as something other than what you are. I heard a story about you that gave me the wrong impression.

Sam smiled. Overcoming his inner turmoil, he laughed and explained the incident with the man who had slipped from the pole.

"What story did you hear?" he asked.

"It was a story a young man told in our house," she explained hesitantly, not allowing herself to be distracted from her serious mood. "It was about a little girl you saved from drowning, and about a handbag he made and gave you. Why did you take the money?"

Sam looked at her intently. Jack Prince enjoyed telling this story. It was about an incident from his early business life in the city.

One afternoon, while still working at the commission firm, he took a group of men on a lake excursion boat ride. He had a project he wanted them to participate in, and he took them aboard the boat to gather them together and present the merits of his plan. During the trip, a little girl fell overboard, and Sam jumped in after her and carried her safely aboard the boat.

A roar of applause erupted on the excursion boat. A young man in a wide-brimmed cowboy hat ran around collecting coins. People crowded forward to grab Sam's hand, and he took the collected money and pocketed it.

Among the men on board the boat, there were several who, while not dissatisfied with Sam's project, felt his taking the money was unmanly. They told this story, and it reached Jack Prince, who never tired of repeating it, always ending the story with a request for the listener to ask Sam why he took the money.

Now, in Colonel Tom's office, face to face with Sue Rainey, Sam gave the explanation that so pleased Jack Prince.

"The crowd wanted to give me the money," he said, slightly puzzled. "Why shouldn't I take it? I didn't save the girl for the money, but because she was a little girl; and the money paid for my ruined clothes and travel expenses."

Placing his hand on the doorknob, he stared at the woman in front of him.

"And I needed money," he declared, a hint of defiance in his voice. "I've always wanted money, any money I could get."

Sam returned to his office and sat down at his desk. He was surprised by the warmth and friendliness Sue Rainey displayed toward him. Impulsively, he wrote a letter defending his position on the excursion boat money and outlining some of his views on money and business matters.

"I can"t imagine believing the nonsense most businessmen talk," he wrote at the end of the letter. "They are full of feelings and ideals that don"t correspond to reality. When they have something to sell, they always say it"s the best, although it may be third-rate. I don"t object to that. What I do object to is the way they cherish the hope that a third-rate thing is first-rate, until that hope becomes a conviction. In a conversation with the actress Louella London, I told her that I myself was flying the black flag. Well, that"s what I do. I would lie about goods to sell them, but I wouldn"t lie to myself. I won"t dull my mind. If a man crosses swords with me in a business deal, and I come out with money, it"s not a sign that I"m the greater scoundrel, but rather a sign that I"m the more astute man."

As the note lay on his desk, Sam wondered why he'd written it. It seemed a precise and straightforward statement of his business credo, but a rather awkward note to a woman. Then, without giving himself time to consider his actions, he addressed the envelope and, walking out to headquarters, dropped it in the mailbox.

"It will still let her know where I am," he thought, returning to the defiant mood in which he had told her the motive for his action on the boat.

Over the next ten days after the conversation in Colonel Tom's office, Sam saw Sue Rainey enter or leave her father's office several times. Once, meeting in the small vestibule near the office entrance, she paused and extended her hand, which Sam took awkwardly. He had the feeling she would not have regretted the opportunity to continue the sudden intimacy that had developed between them after a few minutes of conversation about Janet Eberly. This feeling arose not from vanity, but from Sam's belief that she was somehow lonely and yearning for companionship. Although she had been much courted, he thought, she lacked a talent for companionship or quick friendship. "Like Janet, she's more than half intellectual," he told himself, and felt a twinge of regret for the slight infidelity of further thinking that there was something more substantial and enduring about Sue than Janet had.

Suddenly, Sam began to wonder if he wanted to marry Sue Rainey. His mind played with the idea. He took it to bed with him, and he carried it around with him all day on hurried trips to offices and stores. The thought persisted, and he began to see her in a new light. The strange, half-clumsy movements of her hands and their expressiveness, the subtle brown texture of her cheeks, the clarity and honesty of her gray eyes, the quick sympathy and understanding of his feelings for Janet, and the subtle flattery of the thought that he realized she was interested in him-all these thoughts came and went in his head as he scanned columns of figures and made plans for expanding the Armory Company's business. Unconsciously, he began to make her part of his plans for the future.

Sam later discovered that, for several days after their first conversation, the idea of marriage had also crossed Sue's mind. Afterward, she went home and stood in front of the mirror for an hour, studying herself, and one day she told Sam that she had cried in bed that night because she had never been able to evoke in him the note of tenderness he'd heard in his voice when he spoke to her about Janet.

And two months after their first conversation, they had another. Sam, who hadn't allowed his grief over the loss of Janet or his nightly attempts to drown it in drink to slow down the great forward momentum he felt he was experiencing in the work of the offices and stores, sat alone one afternoon, deep in a stack of factory estimates. His shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, revealing his white, muscular forearms. He was absorbed, absorbed, in the sheets.

"I intervened," said a voice above his head.

Sam glanced up quickly and jumped to his feet. "She must have been there for minutes, looking down at me," he thought, and the thought sent a thrill of pleasure through him.

The contents of the letter he'd written her came to mind, and he wondered if he'd been a fool after all, and if the idea of marrying her had been nothing more than a whim. "Perhaps when we get to that point, it won't be attractive to either of us," he decided.

"I interrupted," she began again. "I was thinking. You said something-in the letter and when you talked about your dead friend Janet-something about men and women and work. You may not remember them. I... I was curious. I... are you a socialist?"

"I don"t think so," Sam replied, wondering what had given her that idea. "You?"

She laughed and shook her head.

- And what about you? She came. "What do you believe in? I'm interested to know. I thought your note-sorry-I thought it was some kind of pretense.

Sam winced. A shadow of doubt about the sincerity of his business philosophy flashed through his mind, accompanied by the smug figure of Windy McPherson. He walked around the desk and, leaning against it, looked at her. His secretary left the room, and they were alone. Sam laughed.

"There was a man in the town where I grew up who said I was a little mole, working underground and collecting worms," he said, then, waving his hands toward the papers on his desk, added, "I'm a businessman. Isn't that enough? If you could look over some of these estimates with me, you'd agree they're necessary."

He turned and looked at her again.

"What should I do with beliefs?" he asked.

"Well, I think you have some convictions," she insisted, "you must have them. You get things done. You should hear the way men talk about you. Sometimes they gossip around the house about what a wonderful guy you are and what you do here. They say you go further and further. What drives you? I want to know."

At this point, Sam half suspected she was secretly laughing at him. Finding her perfectly serious, he started to reply, but then stopped, looking at her.

The silence between them went on and on. The clock on the wall ticked loudly.

Sam walked closer to her and stopped, looking down into her face as she slowly turned towards him.

"I want to talk to you," he said, his voice breaking. He felt as if a hand had grabbed him by the throat.

In an instant, he firmly decided that he would try to marry her. Her interest in his motives became a kind of half-decision he had accepted. In one enlightening moment during a long silence between them, he saw her in a new light. The feeling of vague intimacy evoked by his thoughts of her turned into a firm belief that she belonged to him, was a part of him, and he was captivated by her manner and her personality, standing there as if with a gift given to him.

And then a hundred other thoughts came into his head, noisy thoughts, coming from the hidden parts of his body. He began to think that she could blaze the trail he wanted to follow. He thought of her wealth and what it would mean to a man hungry for power. And through these thoughts, others shot out. Something in her possessed him-something that was also in Janet. He was curious about her curiosity about his beliefs, and he wanted to question her about her own beliefs. He did not see in her the blatant incompetence of Colonel Tom; he believed that she was filled with truth, like a deep spring filled with pure water. He believed that she would give him something, something he had desired all his life. The old, nagging hunger that had haunted him at night as a child returned, and he thought that at her hands it could be satisfied.

"I... I have to read a book about socialism," he said uncertainly.

They stood in silence again, she looking at the floor, he past her head and out the window. He couldn't bring himself to bring up their intended conversation again. He was boyishly afraid she'd notice the tremor in his voice.

Colonel Tom entered the room, captivated by the idea Sam had shared with him during dinner, which, having penetrated his consciousness, had become, in the Colonel's sincere conviction, his own. This intervention brought Sam a strong sense of relief, and he began to talk about the Colonel's idea as if it had taken him by surprise.

Sue walked to the window and began tying and untying the curtain cord. When Sam looked up at her, he caught her eyes watching him, and she smiled, still looking straight at him. It was his eyes that broke away first.

From that day on, Sam's mind was ablaze with thoughts of Sue Rainey. He would sit in his room or, walking into Grant Park, stand by the lake, gazing at the still, moving water, as he had done when he first came to town. He didn't dream of holding her in his arms or kissing her on the lips; instead, with a burning heart, he thought of the life he had lived with her. He wanted to walk beside her through the streets, to have her suddenly enter his study door, look into her eyes, and question him, as she had, about his beliefs and hopes. He thought that in the evening he would like to go home and find her there, sitting and waiting for him. All the charm of his aimless, half-dissolute life had died within him, and he believed that with her he could begin to live more fully and perfectly. From the moment he finally decided he wanted Sue to be his wife, Sam stopped abusing alcohol, staying in his room, and strolling the streets and parks instead of seeking out his old friends at clubs and drinking establishments. Sometimes, moving his bed to the window overlooking the lake, he would undress immediately after dinner and, with the window open, spend half the night watching the lights of the boats far out over the water and thinking about her. He could imagine her pacing the room, pacing back and forth, and occasionally coming to bury her hand in his hair and look down at him, as Janet had done, helping him with her sensible conversation and quiet ways to shape his life for the good.

And when he fell asleep, Sue Rainey's face haunted his dreams. One night, he thought she was blind, and sat in his room, eyes unseeing, repeating over and over like a madman, "The truth, the truth, give me back the truth so I can see," and he awoke, sick with horror at the thought of the look of suffering on her face. Sam had never dreamed of holding her in his arms or of kissing her lips and neck, as he had dreamed of other women who had won his affections in the past.

Despite thinking of her so constantly and so confidently building his dream of the life he would spend with her, months passed before he saw her again. Through Colonel Tom, he learned that she had left for a visit to the East, and he busied himself with his work, concentrating on his own affairs during the day and only allowing himself to be immersed in thoughts of her in the evenings. He had the feeling that, although he said nothing, she knew of his desire for her and that she needed time to think things over. Several evenings, he wrote her long letters in his room, filled with petty, boyish explanations of his thoughts and motives, letters that he immediately destroyed after writing. A woman from the West Side with whom he had once had an affair met him on the street one day, familiarly laid her hand on his shoulder, and momentarily awakened an old desire in him. After leaving her, he did not return to the office, but took a car heading south, spent the day walking through Jackson Park, watching children playing on the grass, sitting on benches under the trees, going out of his body and his mind - the insistent call of the flesh returning to him.

Then, that evening, he suddenly saw Sue riding a spirited black horse along a path at the top of the park. It was just at the beginning of a gray night. She stopped the horse and sat down, looking at him, and, approaching her, he placed his hand on the bridle.

"We could talk about it," he said.

She smiled at him, and her dark cheeks began to blush.

"I've been thinking about it," she said, a familiar serious look coming into her eyes. "After all, what should we say to each other?"

Sam watched her closely.

"I have something to tell you," he announced. "That is to say... well... yes, if things are as I hope." She dismounted, and they stood together at the side of the path. Sam never forgot the few minutes of silence that followed. The wide expanse of green lawn, the golfer trudging wearily toward them through the dim light, his bag over his shoulder, the air of physical weariness with which he walked, leaning slightly forward, the faint, soft sound of the waves washing the low beach, and the tense, expectant expression she raised to him, made an impression on his memory that remained with him all his life. It seemed to him that he had reached a kind of culmination, a starting point, and that all the vague, ghostly uncertainties that had flickered through his mind in moments of reflection were to be swept away by some action, some word, from this woman's lips. He realized with a rush how constantly he'd thought about her and how much he'd counted on her to go along with his plans, and that realization was followed by a sickening moment of fear. How little he really knew about her and her way of thinking. What certainty had he that she wouldn't laugh, jump back on her horse, and ride away? He was afraid as never before. His mind dully searched for a way to begin. The expressions he'd caught and noticed on her strong, serious face, when he'd reached them, but a faint curiosity about her returned to his mind, and he desperately tried to construct a snapshot of her from them. And then, turning away from her, he plunged straight into his thoughts of the past months, as if she were talking to the colonel.

"I thought we could get married, you and I," he said, and cursed himself for the rudeness of the statement.

"You manage to get everything done, don't you?" she replied, smiling.

"Why did you have to think about something like that?"

"Because I want to live with you," he said. "I talked to the colonel."

"About marrying me?" She seemed about to laugh.

He hurried on. "No, that"s not it. We were talking about you. I couldn"t leave him alone. He might know. I kept pushing him. I made him tell me about your ideas. I felt I needed to know."

Sam looked at her.

"He thinks your ideas are absurd. I don"t. I like them. I like you. I think you"re beautiful. I don"t know if I love you or not, but for weeks now I"ve been thinking about you, clinging to you, and repeating to myself over and over again, "I want to spend my life with Sue Rainey." I didn"t expect to go this route. You know me. I"ll tell you something you don"t know."

"Sam McPherson, you're a miracle," she said, "and I don't know if I'll ever marry you, but I can't say right now. I want to know a lot of things. I want to know if you're willing to believe what I believe and live for what I want to live."

The horse, fidgeting, began to tug at its bridle, and she spoke sharply to him. She launched into a description of the man she'd seen on the lecture stage during her visit to the East, and Sam looked at her, puzzled.

"He was beautiful," she said. "He was in his sixties, but he looked like a boy of twenty-five, not in his body, but in the air of youth that hung over him. He stood before people talking, quiet, capable, and efficient. He was pure. He lived in pure body and mind. He had been a companion and employee of William Morris, and had once been a miner in Wales, but he had a vision, and he lived for it. I didn"t hear what he said, but I kept thinking, "I need a man like that.""

"Will you be able to accept my beliefs and live the way I want?" she persisted.

Sam looked at the ground. He felt like he was going to lose her, like she wouldn't marry him.

"I don"t accept beliefs or goals in life blindly," he said decisively, "but I want them. What are your beliefs? I want to know. I think I don"t have any. When I reach for them, they disappear. My mind shifts and shifts. I want something solid. I like solid things. I want you."

"When can we meet and discuss everything in detail?"

"Right now," Sam answered bluntly, a certain look on her face changing his entire perspective. Suddenly, it felt like a door had opened, letting a bright light into the darkness of his mind. Confidence returned. He wanted to strike and keep striking. Blood rushed through his body, and his brain began to work rapidly. He was confident of ultimate success.

Taking her hand and leading the horse, he walked with her along the path. Her hand trembled in his, and as if answering the thought in his head, she looked at him and said:

"I'm no different from other women, even though I don't accept your proposal. This is an important moment for me, perhaps the most important moment in my life. I want you to know that I feel this, even though I want some things more than you or any other man.

There were hints of tears in her voice, and Sam had the feeling the woman in her wanted him to take her in his arms, but something inside him told him to wait and help her, waiting. Like her, he wanted something more than the feeling of a woman in his arms. Ideas raced through his head; he thought she was going to give him a bigger idea than he had imagined. The figure she had drawn for him of the old man standing on the platform, young and handsome, the old boyish need for a purpose in life, the dreams of recent weeks-all of it was part of the burning curiosity he had. They were like hungry little animals waiting to be fed. "We must have all this here and now," he told himself. "I must not let the rush of feeling carry me away, and I must not let her do it."

"Don't think," he said, "that I don't have tenderness for you. I'm filled with it. But I want to talk. I want to know what you think I should believe and how you want me to live."

He felt her hand tighten in his.

"Whether we are right for each other or not," she added.

"Yes," he said.

And then she began to speak, telling him in a quiet, even voice that somehow reinforced in him what she wanted to achieve with her life. Her idea was to serve humanity through children. She had seen her friends with whom she had gone to school grow up and marry. They had wealth and education, beautiful, well-trained bodies, and they had married only to live lives more fully devoted to pleasure. One or two women who had married poor men did so only to satisfy their passions, and after marriage, they joined the rest in the greedy pursuit of pleasure.

"They do nothing at all," she said, "to repay the world for what they have been given: wealth, well-trained bodies, and disciplined minds. They go through life day after day and year after year, wasting themselves, and in the end they end up with nothing but lazy, sloppy vanity."

She thought it all over and tried to plan her life with different goals and wanted a husband who matched her ideas.

"It's not that hard," she said. "I can find a man I can control and who will believe the same way I do. My money gives me that power. But I want him to be a real man, a capable man, a man who does something for himself, a man who has adapted his life and his achievements to be the father of children who do something. And that's why I started thinking about you. I have men who come to the house to talk about you.

She lowered her head and laughed like a shy boy.

"I know much of the story of your early life in this small town in Iowa," she said. "I learned the story of your life and your accomplishments from someone who knew you well."

The idea struck Sam as surprisingly simple and beautiful. It seemed to add immense dignity and nobility to his feelings for her. He stopped on the path and turned her to face him. They were alone at that end of the park. The soft darkness of the summer night enveloped them. A cricket chirped loudly in the grass at their feet. He moved to pick her up.

"It's wonderful," he said.

"Wait," she demanded, placing a hand on his shoulder. "It"s not that simple. I"m rich. You"re capable, and there"s some immortal energy in you. I want to give both my wealth and your abilities to my children-our children. It won"t be easy for you. It means giving up your dreams of power. I might lose my courage. Women do that after two or three have come along. You"ll have to provide for it. You"ll have to make a mother of me, and keep making a mother of me. You"ll have to become a new kind of father, one with something maternal about him. You"ll have to be patient, diligent, and kind. You"ll have to think about these things at night instead of thinking about your own advancement. You"ll have to live entirely for me, because I"ll be their mother, giving me your strength, your courage, and your common sense. And then, when they come, you"ll have to give them all that, day after day, in a thousand little ways."

Sam took her in his arms, and for the first time in his memory, hot tears came to his eyes.

The horse, left unattended, turned, tossed its head, and ran down the path. They let go and followed him hand in hand, like two happy children. At the park entrance, they approached him, accompanied by a park police officer. She mounted the horse, and Sam stood beside her, looking up.

"I'll inform the colonel in the morning," he said.

"What will he say?" she muttered thoughtfully.

"Damn ungrateful," Sam mimicked the colonel's throaty, boisterous tone.

She laughed and took the reins. Sam put his hand on her.

"How soon?" he asked.

She lowered her head next to him.

"We won"t waste any time," she said, blushing.

And then, in the presence of a police officer, on the street at the entrance to the park, among passers-by, Sam kissed Sue Rainey's lips for the first time.

After she left, Sam walked. He had no sense of time passing; he wandered the streets, rebuilding and adjusting his outlook on life. What she had said had awakened every vestige of dormant nobility within him. He felt as if he had seized what he had unconsciously sought all his life. His dreams of controlling the Rainey Arms Company and other important business plans he had planned seemed like nonsense and vanity in the light of their conversations. "I will live for this! I will live for this!" he repeated to himself over and over again. He seemed to see the little white creatures lying in Sue's arms, and his new love for her and for what they were destined to achieve together pierced and wounded him so that he wanted to scream in the dark streets. He looked up at the sky, saw the stars, and imagined them looking down upon two new and glorious beings living on earth.

He turned the corner and emerged onto a quiet residential street, where frame houses stood amid small green lawns, and thoughts of his childhood in Iowa returned. Then his thoughts moved on, recalling nights in the city when he slipped into the arms of women. A hot shame burned on his cheeks, and his eyes blazed.

"I must go to her, I must go to her house, right now, this evening, and tell her all this, and beg her to forgive me," he thought.

And then the absurdity of such a course struck him, and he laughed out loud.

"It cleanses me! It cleanses me!" he said to himself.

He remembered the men who sat around the stove at Wildman's Grocery when he was a boy, and the stories they sometimes told. He remembered running through crowded streets as a boy in the city, fleeing the horror of lust. He began to understand how warped, how strangely twisted, his entire attitude toward women and sex had been. "Sex is a solution, not a threat, it's wonderful," he told himself, not fully understanding the meaning of the word as it escaped his lips.

When he finally turned onto Michigan Avenue and headed toward his apartment, the late moon was already rising in the sky, and a clock in one of the sleeping houses was striking three.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER VI


ONE EVENING, SIXTH A few weeks after their conversation in the gathering darkness in Jackson Park, Sue Rainey and Sam McPherson sat on the deck of a steamboat on Lake Michigan, watching the lights of Chicago twinkle in the distance. They had been married that day at Colonel Tom's large house on the South Side; and now they sat on the boat's deck, swept into the darkness, having vowed motherhood and fatherhood, more or less afraid of each other. They sat silently, looking at the flickering lights and listening to the soft voices of their fellow passengers, also seated in chairs along the deck or strolling leisurely, and to the lapping of the water against the sides of the boat, eager to break the slight reserve that had grown between them during the solemn ceremony.

A picture flashed through Sam's mind. He saw Sue, all in white, radiant and wonderful, coming down the wide stairs toward him, toward him, the Caxton newspaperman, the game smuggler, the hooligan, the greedy money-grubber. All these six weeks he had been waiting for this hour when he could sit beside the small figure in gray, receiving from her the help he wanted in rebuilding his life. Unable to speak as he thought, he still felt confident and light-hearted. The moment she descended the stairs, a feeling of intense shame half overwhelmed him, a return of the shame that had overwhelmed him the night she gave her word, and he walked the streets hour after hour. He fancied he should have heard a voice from among the guests standing around: "Stop! Don't go on! Let me tell you about this fellow-this MacPherson!" And then he saw her on the arm of the smug, pretentious Colonel Tom, and he took her hand to become one with her, two curious, feverish, strangely different people, making a vow in the name of their God, with flowers growing around them and people looking at them.

When Sam went to see Colonel Tom the morning after that evening in Jackson Park, a scene ensued. The old gunsmith raged, roared, and barked, pounding his fist on the table. When Sam remained cool and unimpressed, he stormed out of the room, slamming the door and shouting, "Upstart! Damn upstart!" Sam returned to his desk, smiling, slightly disappointed. "I told Sue he'd say 'Ungrateful,'" he thought. "I'm losing my knack for guessing what he'll do and say."

The colonel's rage didn't last long. For a week, he bragged about Sam to casual visitors as "the best businessman in America," and despite his solemn promise, Sue spread the news of the impending wedding to every journalist he knew. Sam suspected him of secretly calling newspapers whose representatives hadn't tracked him down.

During the six weeks of waiting, there was little lovemaking between Sue and Sam. Instead, they talked or, going into the countryside or parks, strolled under the trees, gripped by a strange, burning passion of anticipation. The idea she had given him in the park grew in Sam's mind: to live for the young things that would soon be theirs, to be simple, straightforward, and natural, like trees or the beasts of the field, and then to have the natural honesty of such a life, illuminated and ennobled by mutual intelligence, the goal of making their children something more beautiful and better than anything in Nature, through the intelligent use of their own good minds and bodies. In the shops and on the streets, the hurrying men and women took on a new meaning for him. He wondered what secret, great purpose their lives might hold, and with a slight leap of his heart, he read a newspaper announcement of an engagement or marriage. He looked at the girls and women working at their typewriters in the office with questioning eyes, wondering why they didn't pursue marriage openly and decisively. He saw the healthy, single woman as mere waste material, a machine for creating a healthy new life, idle and unused in the great workshop of the universe. "Marriage is the port, the beginning, the starting point from which men and women embark on the real journey of life," he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. "Everything that happens before is merely preparation, construction. The pains and triumphs of all unmarried people are merely good oak planks nailed in place to make the vessel fit for the real voyage." Or, again, one night, when they were rowing in a boat on the lagoon in the park, and around them in the darkness they could hear the splash of oars in the water, the cries of excited girls, and the sounds of calling voices, he allowed the boat to drift to the shore of a small island and crept up to the boat to kneel, lay his head in her lap, and whisper: "It's not the love of a woman that possesses me, Sue, but the love of life. I've managed to glimpse the great mystery. This-this is why we are here-this is what justifies us."

Now, as she sat beside him, her shoulder pressed against his own, carried away with him into darkness and solitude, the private side of his love for her pierced Sam like a flame, and, turning, he pulled her head down onto his shoulder.

"Not yet, Sam," she whispered, "not now, with those hundreds of people sleeping and drinking and thinking and going about their business almost within our reach."

They stood and walked along the rocking deck. A clear wind called to them from the north, the stars looked down upon them, and in the darkness of the boat's bow, they parted for the night in silence, speechless with happiness and with the dear, unspoken secret between them.

At dawn, they landed in a small, cluttered town where the boat, blankets, and camping gear had gone earlier. A river flowed out of the forest, past the town, passing under a bridge and turning the wheel of a sawmill standing on the riverbank facing the lake. The clean, sweet smell of freshly cut logs, the song of saws, the roar of water crashing over the dam, the shouts of blue-shirted lumberjacks working among the floating logs above the dam filled the morning air. And above the song of saws, another song sang, a breathless song of anticipation, a song of love and life, singing in the hearts of husband and wife.

At a small, crudely built loggers' inn, they ate breakfast in a room overlooking the river. The innkeeper, a large, red-faced woman in a clean cotton dress, was waiting for them and, after serving breakfast, left the room, smiling good-naturedly and closing the door behind her. Through the open window, they looked out at the cold, swiftly flowing river and at a freckled boy carrying bundles wrapped in blankets and loading them into a long canoe tied to a small dock next to the inn. They ate and sat, looking at each other like two strange boys, and said nothing. Sam ate little. His heart pounded in his chest.

On the river, he plunged his paddle deep into the water, paddling against the current. During six weeks of waiting in Chicago, she had taught him the rudiments of canoeing , and now, as he paddled the canoe under a bridge and around a bend in the river, out of sight of the city, a superhuman strength seemed to well up in his soul. His arms and back were covered with it. Before him, Sue sat in the bow of the boat, her straight, muscular back bending and straightening again. Nearby, high hills covered with pine trees rose up, and at the foot of the hills, piles of cut logs lay along the shore.

At sunset, they landed in a small clearing at the foot of the hill and pitched their first camp on the wind-swept crest. Sam fetched branches and spread them out, plaiting them like feathers in a bird's wings, and carried blankets up the hill, while Sue, at the foot of the hill, near the overturned boat, lit a fire and cooked their first meal outdoors. In the dim light, Sue took out a rifle and gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, but his awkwardness made it seem like a half-joke. And then, in the soft silence of the young night, with the first stars appearing and a clear, cold wind blowing in their faces, they walked hand in hand up the hill beneath the trees to where the treetops rolled and spread before their eyes like the turbulent waters of a great sea, and they lay down together for their first long, tender embrace.

There's a special pleasure in experiencing nature for the first time in the company of a woman a man loves, and the fact that this woman is an expert, with a keen appetite for life, adds a zest and piquancy to the experience. During his childhood, consumed by aspiration and nickel-digging in the city surrounded by hot cornfields, and his youth, full of intrigue and the lust for money in the city, Sam didn't think about vacations or places to relax. He strolled the country roads with John Telfer and Mary Underwood, listening to their conversations, absorbing their ideas, blind and deaf to the small life in the grass, in the leafy branches of the trees, and in the air around him. In the clubs, hotels, and bars of the city, he heard people talking about the outdoors and told himself, "When my time comes, I'll try all this."

And now he tasted them, lying on his back on the grass along the river, floating down quiet side streams in the moonlight, listening to the night cries of birds or watching the flight of frightened wild creatures, pushing the canoe into the silent depths of the great forest around them.

That night, under the small tent they'd brought, or under blankets under the stars, he slept lightly, waking frequently to look at Sue lying beside him. Perhaps the wind had blown a strand of her hair across her face, her breath playing with it, tossing it somewhere; perhaps it was only the calm of her expressive face that captivated and held him, so that he reluctantly fell asleep again, thinking he could have happily looked at her all night.

For Sue, the days passed easily, too. She, too, woke up in the night and lay looking at the man sleeping next to her, and once she told Sam that when he woke, she pretended to be asleep, afraid to deprive him of the pleasure she knew these secret lovemaking episodes brought them both.

They weren't alone in this northern forest. Along the rivers and on the shores of small lakes, they found people-a new kind of people to Sam-who had abandoned all the ordinary things of life and fled to the woods and streams to spend long, happy months in the open air. He was surprised to discover that these adventurers were men of modest means, small industrialists, skilled workers, and retailers. One of those he spoke with was a grocer from a small town in Ohio, and when Sam asked him whether bringing his family into the woods for an eight-week stay wouldn't jeopardize the success of his business, he agreed with Sam that it would. He nodded and laughed.

"But if I hadn't left this place, there would have been a much greater danger," he said, "the danger that my boys would grow up to be men and I wouldn't have been able to have any real fun with them."

Among all the people they met, Sue moved with a happy freedom that disconcerted Sam, who had formed the habit of thinking of her as a reserved person. She knew many of the people they saw, and he concluded that she had chosen this place for their lovemaking because she admired and appreciated the outdoor life of these people and wanted her lover to be somewhat like them. From the secluded woods, on the shores of small lakes, they called to her as she passed, demanding that she come ashore and show her husband, and she sat among them, talking of other seasons and the lumberjack raids in their paradise. "The Burnhams were on the shores of Lake Grant this year, two schoolteachers from Pittsburgh were due to arrive early in August, a man from Detroit with a crippled son was building a cabin on the banks of the Bone River."

Sam sat silently among them, constantly renewing his admiration for the miracle of Sue's past life. She, Colonel Tom's daughter, a wealthy woman in her own right, had found friends among these people; she, whom the young people of Chicago considered an enigma, had all these years secretly been the companion and soulmate of these lakeside vacationers.

For six weeks they led a wandering, nomadic life in this half-wild country; for Sue, six weeks of tender lovemaking and the expression of every thought and impulse of her beautiful nature; for Sam, six weeks of adaptation and freedom, during which he learned to sail a boat, shoot, and imbue his being with the wonderful taste of this life.

And so one morning they returned to the small forest town at the mouth of the river and sat on the dock, awaiting the steamer from Chicago. They were once again connected to the world and to the life together that had been the foundation of their marriage and that was to be the end and purpose of their two lives.

If Sam's childhood life had been largely barren and devoid of many pleasant things, his life over the next year was astonishingly full and complete. At the office, he ceased to be a pushy upstart who broke with tradition and became Colonel Tom's son, the voter of Sue's large blocks of stock, a practical, guiding leader, and the genius behind the company's destiny. Jack Prince's loyalty was rewarded, and a massive advertising campaign made the name and merits of the Rainey Arms Company known to every reading American. The barrels of Rainey-Whittaker rifles, revolvers, and shotguns glared menacingly at man from the pages of great popular magazines; hunters in brown furs performed daring deeds before our eyes, kneeling on snow-covered rocks, preparing to hasten the winged death awaiting mountain sheep; Enormous bears, their jaws gaping, swooped down from the fonts at the top of the pages, seemingly about to devour the cold-blooded and calculating sportsmen who stood undaunted, setting down their trusty Rainey-Whittaker rifles, while presidents, explorers, and Texas gunners loudly proclaimed the Rainey-Whittaker's achievements to the world of gun buyers. For Sam and Colonel Tom, it was a time of great dividends, mechanical progress, and satisfaction.

Sam worked hard in offices and stores, but he retained a reserve of strength and determination that he could use at work. He played golf and took morning horseback rides with Sue, and he spent long evenings with her, reading aloud, absorbing her ideas and beliefs. Sometimes, for entire days, they were like two children, setting out together for walks along country roads and spending the night in village inns. On these walks, they walked hand in hand or, jokingly joking, raced down long hills and lay panting in the grass by the roadside.

Towards the end of their first year, she told him one evening of the fulfillment of their hopes, and they sat all evening alone by the fire in her room, filled with the white wonder of that light, renewing to each other all the beautiful vows of their first days of lovemaking.

Sam could never recreate the atmosphere of those days. Happiness is such a vague thing, so uncertain, so dependent on a thousand little twists and turns of daily events, that it visits only the luckiest and at rare intervals, but Sam thought he and Sue had been in constant contact with near-perfect happiness during that day. There were weeks and even months of their first year together that subsequently vanished entirely from Sam's memory, leaving only a sense of fullness and well-being. Perhaps he could recall a moonlit winter walk by a frozen lake, or a visitor who sat and talked all evening by the fire. But in the end, he had to return to that: that something had been singing in his heart all day, and that the air was sweeter, the stars shone brighter, and the wind and rain and hail on the windowpanes sang sweeter in his ears. He and the woman who lived with him had wealth, position, and the endless joy of each other's presence and personality, and the great idea burned like a lamp in a window at the end of the road they traveled.

Meanwhile, events were happening and going around him in the world. A president had been elected, the gray wolves of the Chicago City Council were being hunted, and a powerful competitor to his company was thriving in his own city. On other days, he would have been attacking this rival, fighting, planning, and working to destroy it. Now he sat at Sue's feet, dreaming and talking to her about the brood that, under their care, would grow into wonderful, reliable men and women. When Lewis, a talented sales manager for Edwards Arms, received business from a Kansas City speculator, he smiled, wrote a poignant letter to his contact in the territory, and went out for a round of golf with Sue. He had fully embraced Sue's vision of life. "We have wealth for every occasion," he told himself, "and we will spend our lives serving humanity through the children who will soon come into our home."

After their wedding, Sam discovered that Sue, despite her apparent coldness and indifference, had her own small circle of men and women in Chicago, just as she had in the northern woods. Sam had met some of these people during his engagement, and they gradually began to come to the house for evenings with the McPhersons. Sometimes a few would gather for a quiet dinner, during which there was much good conversation, after which Sue and Sam would sit half the night pursuing some thought he had brought to their attention. Among the people who had come to them, Sam shone brilliantly. Somehow, he felt they had done him a favor, and the thought was immensely flattering. A college professor, who had given a brilliant speech during the evening, approached Sam for approval of his conclusions, a cowboy writer asked him to help him overcome difficulties in the stock market, and a tall, dark-haired artist paid him a rare compliment for repeating one of Sam's observations as his own. It was as if, despite their talk, they considered him the most gifted of them all, and for a while he was puzzled by their attitude. Jack Prince came, sat at one of the dinner parties, and explained.

"You have what they want and can't get: money," he said.

After the evening, when Sue had told him the wonderful news, they had dinner. It was a kind of welcome party for the new guest, and while the people at the table ate and talked, Sue and Sam, at opposite ends of the table, raised their glasses high and, looking into each other's eyes, sipped. A toast to the one who was about to come, the first of a great family, a family that would live two lifetimes to achieve its success.

At the table sat Colonel Tom, in a loose white shirt, with a white pointed beard and a grandiloquent speech; Jack Prince sat beside Sue, pausing in his open admiration for Sue to glance at the pretty girl from New York who sat at the end of the table from Sam, or to puncture, with a flash of his brief common sense, some balloon of theory launched by Williams. A man from the University sat on the other side of Sue; an artist who hoped to get a commission for a picture of "Colonel Tom" sat opposite him and bemoaned the extinction of fine old American families; and a little German scholar with a serious face sat next to Colonel Tom and smiled while the artist talked. The man, it seemed to Sam, was laughing at both of them, and perhaps at all of them. He did not mind. He looked at the scholar and at the faces of the other people at the table, and then at Sue. He saw how she directed and carried on the conversation; he saw the play of muscles on her strong neck and the fine firmness of her straight little body, and his eyes grew moist, and a lump rose in his throat at the thought of the secret that lay between them.

And then his thoughts returned to another night in Caxton, when he had sat and eaten for the first time among strangers at Freedom Smith's table. He saw again the tomboy and the sturdy boy and the lantern swinging in Freedom's hand in the cramped little stable; he saw the absurd painter trying to blow his horn in the street; and the mother talking to her death-boy on a summer evening; the fat foreman writing notes of his love on the walls of his room, the narrow-faced commissioner rubbing his hands before a group of Greek tradesmen; and then this-this house with its security and its secret, high purpose, and him sitting there at the head of it all. It seemed to him, like the novelist, that he should admire and bow his head before the romance of fate. He considered his position, his wife, his country, his end of life, if you look at it rightly, to be the very pinnacle of life on earth, and in his pride it seemed to him that he was in some sense the master and creator of all this.

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CHAPTER VII


LATE ONE EVENING, a few weeks after the McPhersons had given a dinner party in honor of the impending arrival of the first member of the great family, they walked down the steps of the north house together to the waiting carriage. Sam thought they had spent a delightful evening. The Grovers were people whose friendship he was particularly proud of, and since marrying Sue, he had often taken her to soirees at the venerable surgeon's home. Dr. Grover was a scholar, a distinguished figure in the medical world, and also a quick and engaging conversationalist and thinker on any subject that interested him. A certain youthful enthusiasm in his outlook on life had endeared him to Sue, who, after meeting him through Sam, considered him a notable addition to her small group of friends. His wife, a white-haired, plump little woman, though somewhat shy, was in fact his intellectual equal and companion, and Sue quietly took her as a model in her own efforts to achieve full womanhood.

The entire evening, spent in a rapid exchange of opinions and ideas between the two men, Sue sat silently. One day, glancing at her, Sam thought he was surprised by the irritated look in her eyes, and he was puzzled by it. For the rest of the evening, her eyes refused to meet his, instead looking at the floor, a flush creeping across her cheeks.

At the carriage door, Frank, Sue's coachman, stepped on the hem of her dress and tore it. The tear was minor, an incident Sam considered entirely inevitable, caused as much by a momentary clumsiness on Sue's part as by Frank's awkwardness. Frank had been Sue's faithful servant and devoted admirer for many years.

Sam laughed and, taking Sue's hand, began to help her into the carriage door.

"Too many clothes for an athlete," he said pointlessly.

In an instant, Sue turned and looked at the coachman.

"Clumsy brute," she said through her teeth.

Sam stood on the sidewalk, speechless with astonishment, when Frank turned and climbed into his seat without waiting for the carriage door to close. He felt the same way he might have felt if, as a boy, he had heard his mother curse him. Sue's gaze, as she turned it on Frank, struck him like a blow, and in an instant his entire carefully constructed image of her and her character was shattered. He wanted to slam the carriage door behind her and go home.

They rode home in silence, Sam feeling as if he were riding alongside a new and strange creature. In the light of the passing streetlights, he could see her face, straight ahead, her eyes staring stonily at the curtain ahead. He didn't want to reproach her; he wanted to grab her hand and shake it. "I'd like to take the whip that stood in front of Frank's seat and give her a good beating," he told himself.

At the house, Sue jumped out of the carriage and ran past him through the door, closing it behind her. Frank drove toward the stables, and when Sam entered the house, he found Sue standing halfway up the stairs to her room, waiting for him.

"I suppose you don't know that you've been openly insulting me all evening," she cried. "Your disgusting conversations there at the Grovers'-it was unbearable-"who are these women? Why parade your past life before me?"

Sam said nothing. He stood at the foot of the stairs, looking at her, and then, turning just as she ran up the stairs and slammed the door of her room, he entered the library. A log was burning in the grate, and he sat down and lit his pipe. He didn't try to think it through. He felt he was confronted with a lie, and that the Sue who had lived in his mind and in his affections no longer existed, that in her place there was another woman, this woman who had insulted her own servant and twisted and distorted the meaning of his conversation throughout the evening.

Sitting by the fire, filling and refilling his pipe, Sam carefully reviewed every word, gesture, and incident of the evening at the Grover's, and could not discern a single part of it that, in his opinion, could fairly serve as an excuse for an outburst of anger. Upstairs, he heard Sue moving restlessly, and felt a sense of satisfaction in the thought that her mind was punishing her for such a strange fit. He and Grover might have been a little carried away, he told himself; they had talked of marriage and its meaning, and both had expressed some warmth against the idea that a woman's loss of virginity was in any way an obstacle to an honorable marriage, but he had said nothing that he thought could be interpreted as an insult to Sue or Mrs. Grover. He found the conversation quite good and clearly thought out, and left the house cheerful and secretly preening with the thought that he had spoken with unusual force and good sense. In any case, what was said had been said before in Sue's presence, and he thought he remembered her enthusiastically expressing similar ideas in the past.

Hour after hour he sat in his chair before the dying fire. He dozed off, and his pipe fell from his hand and landed on the stone hearth. A dull anguish and anger filled him as he replayed the evening's events over and over in his mind.

"What made her think she could do this to me?" he kept asking himself.

He remembered certain strange silences and stern looks in her eyes over the past few weeks, silences and looks that had taken on meaning in the light of the evening's events.

"She has a fiery temper, a brutal character. Why doesn't she speak up and tell me about it?" he asked himself.

The clock struck three when the library door quietly opened, and Sue entered, dressed in a robe that clearly revealed the new curves of her lithe little figure. She ran to him and, laying her head on his lap, began to weep bitterly.

"Oh, Sam!" she said, "I think I"m going crazy. I"ve hated you as I haven"t hated you since I was a wicked child. What I"ve been trying to suppress for years has come back. I hate myself and the baby. I"ve been fighting this feeling inside for days, and now it"s come out, and maybe you"ve started to hate me. Will you ever love me again? Will you ever forget the meanness and cheapness of it? You and poor innocent Frank... Oh, Sam, the devil was in me!"

Sam leaned down and picked her up, holding her close like a child. He remembered a story he'd heard about the caprices of women in such times, and it became a light that illuminated the darkness of his mind.

"I understand now," he said. "It's part of the burden you bear for both of us."

For several weeks after the outburst at the carriage door, things at the MacPherson household proceeded smoothly. One day, as he stood at the stable door, Frank rounded the corner of the house and, peeking shyly from under his cap, said to Sam, "I understand about the mistress. It's the birth of a child. We've had four at home," and Sam, nodding his head, turned and began rapidly recounting his plans to replace the carriages with automobiles.

But at home, even though the Grovers' question of Sue's deformity had been cleared up, a subtle change had occurred in their relationship. Although they faced together the first event that was to be a stopover on the great journey of their lives, they did not greet it with the same understanding and benevolent tolerance with which they had faced lesser events in the past. The past-disagreements over the method of shooting rapids or entertaining an unwanted guest. A tendency to outbursts of anger weakens and unsettles all the threads of life. A melody won't play itself. You stand waiting for dissonance, tense, missing the harmonies. So it was with Sam. He began to feel he had to control his tongue, and that things they had discussed with great freedom six months ago now irritated and irritated his wife when brought up for after-dinner discussion. Sam, who during his life with Sue had learned the joy of free, open conversation on any topic that came to his mind, and whose innate interest in life and the motives of men and women had blossomed in leisure and independence, had tried it last year. It was, he thought, like trying to maintain free and open communication with members of an Orthodox family, and he had fallen into the habit of prolonged silences, a habit he later discovered, once formed, to be incredibly difficult to break.

One day, a situation arose in the office that seemed to require Sam's presence in Boston on a specific day. He'd been waging a trade war with some of his Eastern industrialists for several months, and he believed an opportunity had arisen to settle the matter to his advantage. He wanted to handle the matter himself and went home to explain everything to Sue. It was the end of a day in which nothing had happened to anger her, and she agreed with him that he shouldn't be forced to entrust such an important matter to someone else.

"I'm not a child, Sam. I'll take care of myself," she said, laughing.

Sam telegraphed his man from New York asking him to arrange a meeting in Boston and picked up a book to spend the evening reading aloud to her.

And then, when he came home the next evening, he found her in tears, and when he tried to laugh off her fears, she fell into a black fit of rage and ran out of the room.

Sam went to the phone and called his contact in New York, intending to instruct him about the Boston conference and abandon his own travel plans. As he reached his contact, Sue, who was standing outside the door, burst in and placed her hand on the phone.

"Sam! Sam!" she cried. "Don't cancel the trip! Scold me! Beat me! Do whatever you want, but don't let me continue to make a fool of myself and ruin your peace of mind! I'll be miserable if you stay home because of what I said!"

Central's insistent voice came over the phone, and Sam put his hand down and spoke to his man, leaving the engagement in force and outlining some of the details of the conference, answering the need for a call.

Sue repented again, and again, after her tears, they sat before the fire until his train arrived, talking like lovers.

In the morning a telegram from her arrived in Buffalo.

"Come back. Let go of the business. I can't stand it," she telegraphed.

While he was sitting and reading the telegram, the porter brought another one.

"Please, Sam, don't pay any attention to my telegrams. I'm fine and only half a fool."

Sam was irritated. "This is deliberate pettiness and weakness," he thought when, an hour later, the doorman brought another telegram demanding his immediate return. "The situation demands decisive action, and perhaps one good, sharp rebuke will stop it forever."

On entering the dining-car he wrote a long letter, calling her attention to the fact that he was entitled to a certain freedom of action, and stating that he intended in future to act according to his own discretion and not according to her impulses.

Once Sam had begun writing, he continued and continued. No one interrupted him, not a shadow crossed his beloved's face to tell him he was hurt, and he had said everything he wanted to say. The small, sharp reproaches that had popped into his head but never uttered now found their expression, and when he had poured his overloaded mind into the letter, he sealed it and sent it to the station.

An hour after the letter left his hands, Sam regretted it. He thought of the little woman bearing the burden for both of them, and what Grover had told him about the misery of women in her position came back to him, so he wrote and sent her a telegram asking her not to read the letter he had mailed, assuring her that he would hurry through the conference in Boston and return to her immediately.

When Sam returned, he knew that at an awkward moment, Sue had opened and read the letter sent from the train and had been surprised and hurt by this knowledge. The act seemed like a betrayal. He said nothing, continuing to work with a restless mind and watching with growing concern her alternating bouts of white-hot rage and terrible remorse. He thought she was getting worse with each passing day and began to worry about her health.

And then, after his conversation with Grover, he began spending more and more time with her, forcing her to take long walks in the fresh air every day. He tried valiantly to keep her mind on happy things and went to bed happy and relieved when the day ended without any major events between them.

There were days during that period when Sam felt on the brink of madness. With a maddening glint in her gray eyes, Sue would pick up some trivial detail, a remark he'd made, or a passage he'd quoted from a book, and in a dead, flat, plaintive tone, she'd talk about it until his head was spinning and his fingers ached from holding himself together. After such a day, he'd slip away alone and, walking quickly, try to force his mind to abandon the memory of that insistent, plaintive voice through sheer physical fatigue. At times, he'd give in to fits of anger and curse helplessly down the quiet street, or, in other moods, he'd mutter and talk to himself, praying for strength and courage to keep his head during the ordeal he thought they were going through together. And when he returned from such a walk and from such a struggle with himself, it often happened to him that he found her waiting in an armchair in front of the fireplace in his room, with a clear mind and a face wet with tears of remorse.

And then the struggle was over. It had been arranged with Dr. Grover that Sue would be taken to the hospital for the great event, and one night they drove there hurriedly through the quiet streets, Sue's recurring pains gripping her, her hands clasped his. A sublime joy of life overcame them. Confronted with the true struggle for a new life, Sue was transformed. There was triumph in her voice, and her eyes sparkled.

"I'm going to do it," she cried. "My black fear is gone. I'm going to give you a child-a male child. I'm going to succeed, my friend Sam. You'll see. It will be beautiful."

As the pain overwhelmed her, she grabbed his hand, and a spasm of physical sympathy overwhelmed him. He felt helpless and ashamed of his helplessness.

At the entrance to the hospital grounds, she laid her face on his lap, so that hot tears ran down his hands.

"Poor, poor old Sam, it was terrible for you."

At the hospital, Sam paced the corridor through the revolving doors at the end of which she had been taken. All traces of regret for the difficult months behind him had vanished, and he paced the corridor, feeling that one of those great moments had arrived when a person's mind, his understanding of affairs, his hopes and plans for the future, all the little details and minutiae of his life, freeze, and he waits anxiously, holding his breath, expectant. He glanced at the small clock on the table at the end of the corridor, almost expecting it, too, to stop and wait with him. His wedding hour, which had seemed so great and vital, now, in the quiet corridor, with its stone floor and silent nurses in white and rubber boots walking back and forth, seemed enormously diminished in the presence of this great event. He paced back and forth, peering at the clock, looking at the swinging door, and biting the mouthpiece of his empty pipe.

And then Grover appeared through the revolving door.

"We can have the baby, Sam, but to have it, we'll have to take a risk with her. Do you want to do that? Don't wait. Decide."

Sam rushed past him to the door.

"You are an incompetent man," he shouted, his voice echoing down the long, silent corridor. "You don't know what this means. Let me go."

Dr. Grover grabbed his arm and spun him around. The two men stood facing each other.

"You will stay here," the doctor said, his voice remaining quiet and firm. "I will take care of business. If you went in there now, it would be pure madness. Now answer me: do you want to take the risk?"

"No! No!" Sam shouted. "No! I want her, Sue, alive and well, back through that door.

A cold gleam flashed in his eyes and he shook his fist in front of the doctor's face.

"Don't try to fool me about this. I swear to God, I...

Dr. Grover turned and ran back through the revolving door, leaving Sam staring blankly at his back. The nurse, the same one he'd seen in Dr. Grover's office, came out the door and, taking his hand, walked beside him up and down the hallway. Sam put an arm around her shoulder and spoke. He had the illusion that he needed to comfort her.

"Don't worry," he said. "She'll be fine. Grover will take care of her. Nothing can happen to little Sue."

The nurse, a small, sweet-faced Scottish woman who knew and admired Sue, was crying. Something in his voice touched the woman in her, and tears streamed down her cheeks. Sam continued speaking, the woman's tears helping him compose himself.

"My mother is dead," he said, and the old sadness came back to him. "I wish you, like Mary Underwood, could be a new mother to me."

When it came time to lead him to the room where Sue lay, his composure returned, and his mind began to blame the small, dead stranger for the misfortunes of the past months and for the long separation from what he thought was the real Sue. Outside the door of the room she was led to, he paused, hearing her voice, thin and weak, speaking to Grover.

"Unfit, Sue McPherson is unfit," said the voice, and Sam thought it sounded like it was filled with endless weariness.

He ran out the door and fell to his knees beside her bed. She looked at him, smiling bravely.

"We'll do it next time," she said.

The young MacPhersons' second child arrived prematurely. Sam walked again, this time down the hallway of his own home, without the comforting presence of the pretty Scottish woman, and again shook his head at Dr. Grover, who had come to comfort and soothe him.

After the death of her second child, Sue lay in bed for months. In his arms, in her room, she wept openly in front of Grover and the nurses, screaming about her unworthiness. For days, she refused to see Colonel Tom, harboring the notion that he was somehow responsible for her physical inability to bear live children. When she did get out of bed, she remained white, listless, and gloomy for months, determined to make one more attempt at that small life she so longed to hold in his arms.

During the days when she was carrying her second child, she again had violent and disgusting fits of anger, which shattered Sam's nerves, but, having learned to understand, he calmly went about his work, trying to close his ears to the noise as best he could. Sometimes she said sharp, hurtful things; and for the third time it was agreed between them that if they failed again, they would turn their thoughts to other things.

"If this doesn't work out, we might as well be finished with each other forever," she said one day in one of those fits of cold anger that were, for her, part of the process of bearing a child.

That second night, as Sam walked down the hospital corridor, he was beside himself. He felt like a young recruit, called upon to face an invisible enemy, standing motionless and inert in the presence of death singing through the air. He recalled a story told to him as a child by a fellow soldier visiting his father about prisoners at Andersonville creeping in the dark past armed guards to a small pond of stagnant water beyond the line of death, and he felt himself crawling, unarmed and helpless, on death's doorstep. At a meeting at his home several weeks earlier, the three had decided, after tearful insistence from Sue and stance from Grover, that he would not continue on the case unless he was allowed to use his own judgment about the need for surgery.

"Take the risk if you have to," Sam told Grover after the conference. "She can never stand another defeat. Give her the child."

In the hallway, it seemed like hours had passed, and Sam stood motionless, waiting. His feet were cold, and he felt as if they were wet, even though the night was dry and the moon was shining outside. When a groan reached his ears from the far side of the hospital, he shook with fear and wanted to scream. Two young interns, dressed in white, walked past.

"Old Grover's having a C-section," one of them said. "He's getting old. I hope he doesn't ruin this."

Sam's ears rang with the memory of Sue's voice, the same Sue who had entered the room through the revolving doors that first time, a determined smile on her face. He thought he saw that white face again, looking up from the wheeled cot on which she had been wheeled through the door.

"I'm afraid, Doctor Grover, I'm afraid I'm unfit," he heard her say as the door closed.

And then Sam did something he would curse himself for the rest of his life. Impulsively and driven mad by the unbearable anticipation, he walked up to the revolving doors and, pushing them open, entered the operating room where Grover was working on Sue.

The room was long and narrow, with floors, walls, and a ceiling of white cement. A huge, bright light suspended from the ceiling cast its rays directly upon a white-clad figure lying on a white metal operating table. Other bright lamps in shiny glass reflectors hung on the walls of the room. And here and there, in a tense atmosphere of anticipation, a group of men and women, faceless and hairless, moved and stood silently, only their strangely bright eyes visible through the white masks that covered their faces.

Sam, standing motionless by the door, looked around with wild, half-seeing eyes. Grover worked quickly and silently, occasionally reaching into the revolving table and pulling out small, shiny instruments. The nurse standing next to him looked up at the light and began calmly threading a needle. And in a white basin on a small stand in the corner of the room lay Sue's last, enormous efforts toward a new life, the last dream of a great family.

Sam closed his eyes and fell. His head hitting the wall woke him, and he struggled to his feet.

Grover began to curse as he worked.

- Damn it, dude, get out of here.

Sam's hand groped for the door. One of the hideous figures in white approached him. Then, shaking his head and closing his eyes, he backed out the door and ran down the hallway and down the wide staircase, out into the open air and darkness. He had no doubt that Sue was dead.

"She"s gone," he muttered, hurrying bareheaded through the deserted streets.

He ran down street after street. Twice he came to the lakeshore, then turned and walked back toward the heart of the city, through streets bathed in warm moonlight. Once, he quickly turned a corner and emerged into a vacant lot, stopping behind a high board fence as a policeman strolled down the street. The thought occurred to him that he had killed Sue and that the figure in blue, trudging along the stone sidewalk, was searching for him, to lead him to where she lay white and lifeless. He stopped again in front of the small frame drugstore on the corner and, sitting down on the steps in front of it, openly and defiantly cursed God, like an angry boy defying his father. Some instinct made him look up at the sky through the tangle of telegraph wires overhead.

"Go ahead and do what you dare!" he cried. "Now I won't follow you. After this, I'll never try to find you again.

Soon he began to laugh at himself for the instinct that compelled him to look up at the sky and shout his defiance, and, rising, he wandered on. During his wanderings, he came upon a railroad track where a freight train groaned and rumbled at a crossing. Approaching it, he jumped onto an empty coal car, fell on the rise, and cut his face on the sharp pieces of coal scattered across the car's floor.

The train moved slowly, stopping from time to time, the locomotive squealing hysterically.

After a while, he stepped out of the car and collapsed on the ground. On all sides were marshes, long rows of marsh grass rolling and swaying in the moonlight. When the train passed, he stumbled after it. As he walked, following the flickering lights at the end of the train, he thought of the scene in the hospital and Sue lying dead because of it-that deathly pale, shapeless clink on the table under the light.

Where the hard ground met the tracks, Sam sat down under a tree. Peace descended on him. "This is the end of it all," he thought, like a tired child being consoled by his mother. He thought of the pretty nurse who had walked with him down the hospital corridor that time, who had cried because of his fears, and then of the night he had felt his father's throat between his fingers in the squalid little kitchen. He ran his hands over the earth. "Good old earth," he said. A sentence came to his mind, followed by the figure of John Telfer, walking with a stick in his hand along the dusty road. "Now spring has come and it's time to plant flowers in the grass," he said aloud. His face swollen and sore from his fall into the boxcar, he lay down on the ground under the tree and fell asleep.

When he awoke, it was morning, and gray clouds drifted across the sky. A trolleybus passed within sight on the road to town. Ahead of him, in the middle of a swamp, lay a shallow lake, and a raised path with boats tied to poles led down to the water. He walked down the path, dipped his bruised face in the water, and, getting into the car, returned to town.

A new thought came to him in the morning air. The wind swept along the dusty road next to the highway, raising handfuls of dust and playfully scattering it. He had a tense, impatient feeling, as if someone were listening to a faint call from afar.

"Of course," he thought, "I know what it is, it's my wedding day. Today I'm marrying Sue Rainey.

When he got home, he found Grover and Colonel Tom standing in the breakfast room. Grover looked at his swollen, distorted face. His voice trembled.

"Poor thing!" he said. "You had a night!"

Sam laughed and clapped Colonel Tom on the shoulder.

"We'll have to start preparing," he said. "The wedding is at ten. Sue will be worried.

Grover and Colonel Tom took his arm and led him up the stairs. Colonel Tom wept like a woman.

"Silly old fool," thought Sam.

When he opened his eyes again and regained consciousness two weeks later, Sue was sitting beside his bed in a reclining chair, holding her small, thin white hand in his.

"Take the child!" he cried, believing in everything possible. "I want to see the child!"

She laid her head on the pillow.

"When you saw it, he was already gone," she said and hugged him around the neck.

When the nurse returned, she found them lying with their heads on the pillow, crying weakly like two tired children.

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CHAPTER VIII


The blow of this life plan, so carefully conceived and so readily accepted by the young McPhersons, threw them back on themselves. For several years they lived on the hilltop, taking themselves very seriously and preening themselves not a little with the thought that they were two highly unusual and thoughtful people engaged in a worthy and noble enterprise. Sitting in their corner, immersed in admiration for their own goals and thoughts of the energetic, disciplined, new life they were to give to the world through the combined efficiency of their two bodies and minds, they were, at a word and a shake of the head from Dr. Grover, forced to reshape the outlines of their shared future.

Life was bustling around them, enormous changes in the nation's industrial life were looming, cities were doubling and tripling their populations, war was raging, and their country's flag was fluttering in the ports of strange seas, while American boys trudged through the tangled jungles of foreign lands, carrying Rainey-Whittaker rifles. And in a huge stone house, situated on a wide expanse of green lawns near the shore of Lake Michigan, Sam McPherson sat, looking at his wife, who in turn was looking at him. He, like her, was trying to adjust to the joyful acceptance of their new prospect of a childless life.

Looking at Sue across the dinner table or seeing her straight, sinewy body astride her horse, riding alongside him through the parks, it seemed incredible to Sam that childless womanhood would ever be her destiny, and more than once he longed to risk another effort to achieve his hopes. But when he recalled her still-white face that night in the hospital, her bitter, haunting cry of defeat, he shuddered at the thought, feeling he couldn't go through that ordeal with her again; that he couldn't let her look forward again, weeks and months from now, to a little life that had never smiled upon her breast or laughed in her face.

Yet Sam, the son of Jane Macpherson, who had won the admiration of Caxton residents for her tireless efforts to keep her family afloat and her hands clean, couldn't sit idly by, living on his own income and Sue's. An exciting, moving world called to him; he looked around at the vast, significant movements in business and finance, at new people rising to prominence and seemingly finding a way to express new, great ideas, and he felt youth awakening within him, his mind drawn to new projects and new ambitions.

Given the necessity of economy and the hard, prolonged struggle for livelihood and competence, Sam could imagine living his life with Sue and deriving something like satisfaction merely from her companionship and her participation in his efforts-here and there throughout the years of waiting; he had met people who found such satisfaction-the foreman at the store or the tobacconist from whom he bought cigars-but for himself, he felt that he had gone too far down the other road with Sue to turn back there now with anything like mutual ardor or interest. His mind, fundamentally, was not strongly inclined to the idea of loving women as the goal of life; he loved, and did love, Sue with a fervor akin to religious, but this fervor was more than half due to the ideas she gave him and the fact that, with him, she was to be the instrument for realizing those ideas. He was a man with children in his loins, and he had abandoned the struggle for prominence in business to prepare for a kind of noble fatherhood-children, many, strong children, worthy gifts to the world for two exceptionally fortunate lives. In all his conversations with Sue, this idea was present and dominant. He looked around and, in the arrogance of his youth and the pride of his good body and mind, condemned all childless marriages as a selfish waste of a good life. He agreed with her that such a life was meaningless and pointless. Now he remembered that in her days of boldness and audacity, she had often expressed the hope that, if their marriage ended childlessly, one of them would have the courage to cut the knot that bound them and risk marriage-another attempt to live the right life at any cost.

In the months following Sue's final recovery, and during the long evenings when they sat together or strolled under the stars in the park, thoughts of these conversations often visited Sam, and he found himself pondering her current attitude and wondering how boldly she would accept the idea of separation. He eventually decided that such a thought had never occurred to her, that, faced with the vast reality, she had clung to him with a new dependence and a new need for his company. He thought that the conviction of the absolute necessity of children as the justification for a man and woman's life together was more deeply ingrained in his mind than in hers; it clung to him, returning again and again to his mind, forcing him to turn restlessly this way and that, making adjustments in his search for a new light. Since the old gods were dead, he was seeking new gods.

Meanwhile, he sat at home, face to face with his wife, immersed in the books Janet had recommended to him years ago, and pondering his own thoughts. Often in the evenings, he would look up from his book or from his preoccupied gaze at the fire to find her eyes fixed on him.

"Talk, Sam; talk," she said; "don't sit and think."

Or at other times she would come into his room at night and, laying her head on the pillow next to him, would spend hours planning, crying, begging him to give her his love again, his former passionate, devoted love.

Sam tried to do this sincerely and honestly, going on long walks with her when a new call, a case began to bother him, forced him to sit at the table, reading aloud to her in the evenings, urging her to get rid of her old dreams and take up new work and new interests.

All the days he spent at the office, he remained in a kind of stupor. An old feeling of childhood returned, and it seemed to him, as it had seemed when he wandered aimlessly through the streets of Caxton after his mother's death, that something still needed to be done, a report needed to be filed. Even at his desk, with the clacking of typewriters in his ears and piles of letters clamoring for his attention, his thoughts slipped back to the days of his courtship with Sue and to those days in the northern forest when life beat powerfully within him, and every young, wild creature, every new sprout, renewed the dream that filled his being. Sometimes, on the street or during a walk in the park with Sue, the cries of children playing would break through the dark dullness of his mind, and he would shudder at the sound, a bitter indignation taking hold of him. When he glanced furtively at Sue, she was talking about other things, apparently unaware of his thoughts.

Then a new phase of his life began. To his surprise, he found himself looking at women on the street with more than a passing interest, and his old desire for companionship with unfamiliar women returned, in a sense coarsened and materialized. One evening at the theater, a woman sat next to him, a friend of Sue's and the childless wife of his own business friend. In the darkness of the theater, her shoulder pressed against his. In the excitement of the critical situation onstage, her hand slipped into his, and her fingers clasped and held his.

An animal desire overwhelmed him, a feeling devoid of sweetness, cruel, making his eyes glow. When the theater was flooded with light between acts, he looked up guiltily and met another pair of eyes, equally full of guilty hunger. The challenge had been given and accepted.

In their car, heading home, Sam pushed thoughts of the woman away from himself and, taking Sue in his arms, silently prayed for some kind of help against, he didn"t know what.

"I think I'll go to Caxton in the morning and have a talk with Mary Underwood," he said.

After returning from Caxton, Sam began to search for new interests that might occupy Sue's mind. He spent the day talking with Valmore, Freed Smith, and Telfer, and thought there was a certain flatness to their jokes and aging comments about each other. Then he left them to talk to Mary. They talked half the night, Sam receiving forgiveness for not writing and a long, friendly lecture about his duty to Sue. He thought she had somehow missed the point. She seemed to assume that the loss of her children had befallen only Sue. She hadn't counted on him, but he had counted on her to do just that. As a boy, he had come to his mother wanting to talk about himself, and she had wept at the thought of her childless wife and told him how to make her happy.

"Well, I'll get to it," he thought on the train, returning home. "I'll find this new interest for her and make her less dependent on me. Then I'll get back to work and develop a lifestyle program for myself."

One afternoon, returning home from the office, he found Sue truly brimming with a new idea. With flushed cheeks, she sat next to him all evening, talking about the joys of a life dedicated to social service.

"I've been thinking it all through," she said, her eyes shining. "We mustn't allow ourselves to become filthy. We must hold to the vision. We must together give humanity the best of our lives and our condition. We must become participants in the great modern movements for social upliftment."

Sam looked into the fire, a cold sense of doubt gripping him. He couldn't see himself as a whole in anything. His thoughts weren't exhausted by the thought of belonging to the army of philanthropists or wealthy social activists he'd met, talking and explaining in club reading rooms. No answering flame ignited in his heart, as it had that evening on the riding trail in Jackson Park when she'd outlined another idea. But at the thought of the need for renewed interest in her, he turned to her with a smile.

"It sounds good, but I don't know anything about such things," he said.

After that evening, Sue began to pull herself together. The old fire returned to her eyes, and she walked around the house with a smile on her face, talking in the evenings to her silent, attentive husband about a useful, full life. One day she told him about her election as president of the Fallen Women's Aid Society, and he began seeing her name in the newspapers in connection with various charitable and civic movements. A new type of man and woman began to appear at the dinner table; strangely serious, feverish, semi-fanatical people, Sam thought, with a penchant for uncorseted dresses and uncut hair, who talked late into the night and worked themselves into a kind of religious fervor for what they called their movement. Sam discovered that they were prone to making astonishing statements, noticed that they sat on the edge of their chairs while talking, and was puzzled by their tendency to make the most revolutionary pronouncements without pausing to back them up. When he questioned one of these men's statements, he pounced on them with a passion that completely captivated him, and then, turning to the others, he looked at them wisely, like a cat that has swallowed a mouse. "Ask us another question, if you dare," their faces seemed to say, and their tongues declared that they were merely students of the great problem of right living.

Sam never developed a real understanding or friendship with these new people. For a while, he tried earnestly to win their ardent commitment to their ideas and impress them with what they said about their humanitarianism, even attending some of their meetings with them, at one of which he sat among the fallen women gathered and listened to Sue's speech.

The speech wasn't a great success; the fallen women moved restlessly. A large woman with a huge nose fared better. She spoke with a rapid, infectious zeal that was quite moving, and listening to her, Sam remembered the evening he'd sat before another zealous speaker at Caxton Church, and Jim Williams, the barber, had tried to force him into the churchyard. While the woman spoke, a small, plump member of the demi-monde sitting next to Sam wept profusely, but by the end of the speech, he couldn't remember anything that had been said and wondered if the weeping woman would remember.

To demonstrate his determination to remain Sue's companion and partner, Sam spent one winter teaching a class of young men in a boarding house in the factory district on the West Side. The assignment was a failure. He found the young men heavy and dull from fatigue after a day's work in the shops, more inclined to fall asleep in their chairs or wander off one by one to lounge and smoke in the nearest corner than to remain in the room listening to the person reading or speaking before them.

When one of the young workers entered the room, they sat down and briefly became interested. One day, Sam overheard a group of them talking about these workers on the landing of a dark staircase. The experience shocked Sam, and he abandoned the classes, confessing to Sue his failure and lack of interest, and bowing his head to her accusations of a lack of male affection.

Later, when his own room was on fire, he tried to draw a moral from the experience.

"Why should I love these men?" he asked himself. "They are what I could be. Only a few of the people I've known have loved me, and some of the best and purest of them have worked energetically for my defeat. Life is a battle in which few men win and many are defeated, and in which hatred and fear play their part as well as love and generosity. These young men with heavy features are part of the world as men have made it. Why this protest against their fate when we all make them more and more with every turn of the clock?"

Over the next year, after the fiasco of the settlement class, Sam found himself increasingly distancing himself from Sue and her new outlook on life. The growing gulf between them manifested itself in a thousand small, everyday actions and impulses, and every time he looked at her, he felt she was increasingly separate from him, no longer part of the real life that was happening within him. In the old days, there had been something intimate and familiar about her face and her presence. She seemed a part of him, like the room he slept in or the coat he wore on his back, and he looked into her eyes as thoughtlessly and with as little fear of what he might find there as he looked at his own hands. Now, when his eyes met hers, they lowered, and one of them began to speak hurriedly, like a man aware of something he must hide.

Downtown, Sam rekindled his old friendship and intimacy with Jack Prince, going with him to clubs and drinking establishments and often spending evenings among the smart, money-spending young men who laughed, made deals, and made their way through life alongside Jack. Among these young men, Jack's business partner caught his eye, and within a few weeks, Sam and this man developed an intimacy.

Maurice Morrison, Sam's new friend, was discovered by Jack Prince, who worked as assistant editor of a local statewide daily newspaper . The man, Sam thought, had something of the Caxton dandy Mike McCarthy about him, combined with long and ardent, if somewhat intermittent, bouts of industry. In his youth, he had written poetry and briefly studied for the ministry, but in Chicago, under Jack Prince's tutelage, he had become a moneymaker and lived the life of a talented, rather unscrupulous socialite. He kept a mistress, was a frequent drinker, and Sam considered him the most brilliant and persuasive speaker he had ever heard. As Jack Prince's assistant, he was responsible for the Rainey Company's large advertising budget, and a mutual respect developed between the two men, who met frequently together. Sam considered him devoid of moral sense; He knew that he was talented and honest, and in his intercourse with him he found a whole store of strange, charming characters and actions, which gave an inexpressible charm to the personality of his friend.

It was Morrison who caused Sam's first serious misunderstanding with Sue. One evening, the brilliant young advertising executive was dining at the Macphersons'. The table, as usual, was filled with Sue's new friends, including a tall, thin man who, as soon as the coffee arrived, began speaking in a high, serious voice about the coming social revolution. Sam looked across the table and saw the light dancing in Morrison's eyes. Like a dog unleashed, he rushed among Sue's friends, tearing the rich to shreds, calling for further development of the masses, quoting all sorts of Shelley and Carlyle, gazing earnestly up and down the table, and finally completely captivating the hearts of women with his defense of fallen women, which stirred even his friend and host's blood.

Sam was surprised and a little irritated. He knew it was all just a blatant act, with just the right amount of sincerity for the man, but no depth or real meaning. He spent the rest of the evening watching Sue, wondering if she, too, had figured out Morrison and what she thought of him taking the star role from the tall, thin man who had obviously been assigned to it, who sat at the table and then wandered among the guests, irritated and confused.

Late that evening Sue entered his room and found him reading and smoking by the fireplace.

"It was cheeky of Morrison to extinguish your star," he said, looking at her and laughing apologetically.

Sue looked at him doubtfully.

"I came to thank you for bringing it," she said; "I think it's magnificent."

Sam looked at her, and for a moment he considered dropping the question. Then his old tendency to be open and frank with her took over, and he closed the book and stood, looking down at her.

"The little beast has deceived your crowd," he said, "but I don't want him to deceive you. It's not that he hasn't tried. He has the courage to do anything."

A blush appeared on her cheeks and her eyes sparkled.

"That"s not true, Sam," she said coldly. "You say that because you"re becoming hard, cold, and cynical. Your friend Morrison spoke from the heart. It was beautiful. People like you, who have such a strong influence over him, may lead him away, but in the end, such a man will come to give his life to serving society. You must help him; don"t adopt a position of disbelief and don"t laugh at him."

Sam stood by the hearth, smoking his pipe and looking at her. He thought about how easy it would have been to explain things to Morrison in the first year after their marriage. Now he felt he was only making things worse, but he continued to adhere to his policy of being completely honest with her.

"Listen, Sue," he began quietly, "be a good sport." Morrison was joking. "I know the man. He's a friend of people like me because he wants to be and because it suits him. He's a chatterbox, a writer, a talented, unscrupulous wordsmith. He earns a big salary by taking the ideas of people like me and expressing them better than we could ourselves. He's a good worker, a generous, open man with a lot of anonymous charm, but he's not a man of conviction. He might bring tears to the eyes of your fallen women, but he's far more likely to persuade good women to accept their condition."

Sam put his hand on her shoulder.

"Be reasonable and don't be offended," he continued, "accept this man for who he is and be happy for him. He suffers little and has a lot of fun. He could make a convincing case for civilization returning to cannibalism, but in reality, you see, he spends most of his time thinking and writing about washing machines, ladies' hats, and liver pills, and most of his eloquence ultimately boils down to just that. After all, it's 'Send to catalog, department K.'"

Sue's voice was colorless with passion as she answered.

"This is unbearable. Why did you bring this guy here?

Sam sat down and picked up his book. In his impatience, he lied to her for the first time since their wedding.

"Firstly, because I like him, and secondly, because I wanted to see if I could create a man who could surpass your socialist friends," he said quietly.

Sue turned and left the room. In a sense, this action was final, marking the end of their understanding. Putting his book down, Sam watched her go, and whatever feeling he had retained for her, which had distinguished her from all other women, died within him as the door closed between them. Throwing the book aside, he jumped to his feet and stood, looking at the door.

"The old call to friendship is dead," he thought. "From now on, we'll have to explain and apologize like two strangers. No more taking each other for granted."

After turning off the light, he sat down in front of the fire again to consider the situation he faced. He didn't think she would return. His last shot had destroyed that possibility.

The fire in the fireplace had died down, and he didn't bother to rekindle it. He looked past it at the darkened windows and heard the rumble of cars on the boulevard below. He was a boy from Caxton again, hungrily seeking the end of life. The woman's flushed face at the theater danced before his eyes. He remembered with shame how, a few days earlier, he had stood in the doorway, watching the woman's figure lift her gaze to him as they passed along the street. He longed to go out for a walk with John Telfer and fill his thoughts with eloquence about standing corn, or to sit at Janet Eberle's feet while she talked of books and life. He rose and, turning on the light, began to prepare for bed.

"I know what I'm going to do," he said. "I'm going to go to work. I'm going to do some real work and make some extra money. This is the place for me."

And he went to work, real work, the most sustained and meticulously planned work he had ever done. For two years, he left his house at dawn for long, invigorating walks in the crisp morning air, followed by eight, ten, even fifteen hours in the office and shops; hours during which he ruthlessly destroyed the Rainey Arms Company and, openly wresting all vestiges of control from Colonel Thom, began plans for the consolidation of American firearms companies, which later put his name on the front pages of newspapers and awarded him the rank of financial captain.

There's widespread misunderstanding abroad about the motives of many American millionaires who rose to fame and fortune during the rapid and astonishing growth that followed the end of the Spanish Civil War. Many of them weren't the crude traders, but rather men who thought and acted quickly, with a boldness and daring beyond the average mind. They were power-hungry, and many were utterly unscrupulous, but for the most part, they were men with a burning fire within them, men who became who they were because the world offered them no better outlet for their immense energy.

Sam McPherson was tireless and unwavering in his first, hard-fought struggle to rise above the vast, unknown masses in the city. He abandoned the pursuit of money when he heard what he perceived as a call to a better way of life. Now, still blazing with youth, and with the training and discipline gained from two years of reading, comparative leisure, and reflection, he was ready to demonstrate to Chicago's business world the tremendous energy needed to write his name in the city's industrial history as one of the first Western financial giants.

Approaching Sue, Sam frankly told her about his plans.

"I want complete freedom to manage your company shares," he said. "I can't manage this new life of yours. It may help and support you, but it's none of my business. I want to be myself now and live my life my way. I want to run the company, really run it. I can't stand idly by and let life take its course. I'm hurting myself, and you stand here and watch. Besides, I'm in a different kind of danger, which I want to avoid by dedicating myself to hard, constructive work."

Without question, Sue signed the papers he brought her. A flash of her former frankness toward him returned.

"I don't blame you, Sam," she said, smiling bravely. "As we both know, things didn't go as planned, but if we can't work together, let's at least not hurt each other."

When Sam returned to take charge of his affairs, the country was only just beginning a great wave of consolidation that would finally transfer the nation's entire financial power to a dozen pairs of competent and effective hands. With the sure instincts of a born trader, Sam had anticipated this movement and studied it. Now he took action. He approached the same swarthy lawyer who had secured him the contract to oversee the medical student's twenty thousand dollars and who had jokingly suggested he join a gang of train robbers. He told him of his plans to begin working toward the consolidation of all the country's arms companies.

Webster wasted no time in banter. He laid out his plans, tweaked and adjusted them in response to Sam's insightful suggestions, and when the subject of payment was mentioned, he shook his head.

"I want to be a part of this," he said. "You're going to need me. I was made for this game and I've been waiting for the chance to play it. If you want, just consider me a promoter."

Sam nodded. Within a week, he had formed a pool of shares in his company, controlling what he believed to be a safe majority, and had begun working on forming a similar pool of shares in his only major Western competitor.

The last job was challenging. Lewis, a Jew, had consistently excelled at the company, just as Sam had excelled at Rainey's. He was a moneymaker, a sales manager of rare ability, and, as Sam knew, a planner and executor of first-class business coups.

Sam didn't want to deal with Lewis. He respected the man's ability to make good deals and felt he wanted to wield the whip when it came to dealing with him. To that end, he began visiting bankers and the heads of large Western trust companies in Chicago and St. Louis. He worked slowly, feeling his way through, trying to reach each person with some effective appeal, buying huge sums of money with the promise of common stock, the lure of a large active bank account, and, here and there, the hint of a directorship in a large new merged company.

For a while, the project progressed slowly; indeed, there were weeks and months when it seemed to be standing still. Working secretly and with extreme caution, Sam encountered many disappointments and returned home day after day to sit among Sue's guests, pondering his own plans and listening indifferently to the talk of revolution, social unrest, and the masses' new class consciousness that rumbled and crackled across his dining room table. He thought it must be Sue trying. He clearly had no interest in her interests. At the same time, he thought he was achieving what he wanted out of life and went to bed at night believing that he had found and would find some kind of peace simply by clearly thinking about one thing day after day.

One day, Webster, eager to participate in the deal, came to Sam's office and gave his project its first major boost. He, like Sam, thought he clearly understood the trends of the times and coveted the common stock package that Sam promised would come to him upon completion.

"You're not using me," he said, sitting down in front of Sam's desk. "What's stopping the deal?"

Sam started to explain, and when he finished, Webster laughed.

"Let"s go straight to Tom Edwards of Edward Arms," he said, and then, leaning over the table, "Edwards is a vain little peacock and a second-rate businessman," he declared decisively. "Scare him, then flatter his vanity. He has a new wife with blond hair and large, soft blue eyes. He wants publicity. He"s afraid to take big risks himself, but he craves the reputation and profit that come from big deals. Use the method the Jew used; show him what it means for a yellow-haired woman to be the wife of the president of a large, consolidated arms company. THE EDWARDS ARE CONSOLIDATING, huh? Get to Edwards. Fool him and flatter him, and he"ll be your man."

Sam paused. Edwards was a short, gray-haired man of about sixty, with a dry, unresponsive air about him. Though taciturn, he gave the impression of extraordinary insight and ability. After a lifetime of hard labor and the strictest austerity, he had become wealthy and, through Lewis, had entered the arms business, which was considered one of the brightest stars in his glittering Jewish crown. He was able to lead Edwards alongside him in his bold and daring management of the company's affairs.

Sam looked across the table at Webster and thought of Tom Edwards as the titular head of the firearms trust.

"I was saving the icing on the cake for my Tom," he said; "It was something I wanted to give to the Colonel."

"Let's see Edwards tonight," Webster said dryly.

Sam nodded and, late that evening, struck a deal that gave him control of two important Western companies and allowed him to attack Eastern companies with every prospect of complete success. He approached Edwards with exaggerated reports of the support he had already received for his project and, having intimidated him, offered him the presidency of the new company, promising that it would be registered under the name The Edwards Consolidated Firearms Company of America.

The Eastern companies quickly fell. Sam and Webster tried an old trick on them, telling each one that the other two had agreed to come, and it worked.

With Edwards' arrival and the opportunities presented by the Eastern companies, Sam began to gain the support of LaSalle Street bankers. The Firearms Trust was one of the few large, fully controlled corporations in the West, and after two or three bankers agreed to help finance Sam's plan, others began asking to be included in the underwriting syndicate he and Webster had formed. Just thirty days after closing the deal with Tom Edwards, Sam felt ready to act.

Colonel Tom had known about Sam's plans for months and didn't object. In fact, he'd let Sam know that his shares would vote alongside Sue's, which Sam controlled, as well as those of other directors who knew about and hoped to share in the profits from Sam's deal. The veteran gunsmith had believed all his life that other American firearms companies were mere shadows, destined to fade before the rising sun of Rainey, and he considered Sam's project an act of providence, furthering this desired goal.

At the moment of his tacit agreement with Webster's plan to land Tom Edwards, Sam had doubts, and now that the success of his project was in sight, he began to wonder how the wild old man would view Edwards as the main character, the head of a large company, and Edwards' name in the company's name.

For two years, Sam saw little of the Colonel, who had abandoned all pretensions of active participation in the management of the business and who, finding Sue's new friends embarrassing, rarely came to the house, living in clubs and spending all day playing billiards or sitting by the club windows, boasting to casual listeners about his part in the construction of the Rainey Arms Company.

With his thoughts full of doubt, Sam went home and posed the matter to Sue. She was dressed and ready for an evening at the theater with a group of friends, and the conversation was brief.

"He won't mind," she said indifferently. "Go and do what you want."

Sam returned to the office and called his assistants. He felt he could do it all over again, and with options and control over his own company, he was ready to go out and get the deal done.

Morning newspapers reporting on the proposed new major consolidation of firearms companies also carried a nearly life-size halftone image of Colonel Tom Rainey, a slightly smaller image of Tom Edwards, and grouped around these small photographs were smaller ones of Sam, Lewis, Prince, Webster, and several men from the East. By using the halftone size, Sam, Prince, and Morrison attempted to reconcile Colonel Tom with Edwards' name in the new company's name and with Edwards's upcoming presidential bid. The story also played up the former glory of Rainey's company and its genius director, Colonel Tom. One sentence, written by Morrison, brought a smile to Sam's lips.

"This great old patriarch of American business, retired from active service, is like a weary giant who, after raising a brood of young giants, retires to his castle to rest, reflect, and count the scars received in many a hard-fought battle he has fought."

Morrison laughed as he read it out loud.

"This should go to the colonel," he said, "but the newspaperman who prints it should be hanged."

"They'll print it anyway," Jack Prince said.

And they printed it; Prince and Morrison, moving from one newspaper office to another, monitored it, using their influence as major buyers of advertising space and even insisting on proofreading their own masterpiece.

But it didn't work. Early the next morning, Colonel Tom showed up at the arms company's office with blood in his eyes and vowed that the consolidation shouldn't be carried through. For an hour, he paced back and forth in Sam's office, his outbursts of anger interspersed with childish pleas for Rainey's name and fame to be preserved. When Sam shook his head and went with the old man to the meeting where they would decide on his lawsuit and sell the company to Rainey, he knew he was in for a fight.

The meeting was a lively one. Sam delivered a report outlining what had been accomplished, and Webster, after voting with some of Sam's trusted confidants, made a motion to accept Sam's offer regarding the old company.

And then Colonel Tom fired. Walking back and forth across the room in front of the men, seated at a long table or on chairs leaning against the walls, he began, with all his former flamboyant pomp, to recount the former glory of the Rainey Company. Sam watched as he calmly considered the exhibition as something separate and apart from the business of the meeting. He recalled a question that had occurred to him as a schoolboy and first encountered history in school. There was a photograph of Indians at a war dance, and he wondered why they danced before, and not after, the battle. Now his mind answered the question.

"If they hadn't danced before, they might never have had this chance," he thought, smiling to himself.

"I urge you, boys, to stick to your guns," the colonel roared, turning and charging at Sam. "Don't let that ungrateful upstart, the son of a drunken country house painter I picked up from a cabbage patch on South Water Street, rob you of your loyalty to the old chief. Don't let him cheat you out of what we've earned through years of hard work."

The colonel leaned on the table and looked around the room. Sam felt relief and joy at the direct attack.

"This justifies what I'm about to do," he thought.

When Colonel Tom finished, Sam glanced casually at the old man's flushed face and trembling fingers. He was sure his outburst of eloquence had fallen on deaf ears, and without comment, he put Webster's motion to a vote.

To his surprise, two of the new employee directors voted their shares along with those of Colonel Tom, but the third man, who had voted his own shares along with those of a wealthy Southern real estate agent, did not vote. The votes reached a deadlock, and Sam, looking at the table, raised an eyebrow at Webster.

"We adjourn the meeting for twenty-four hours," Webster barked, and the motion was carried.

Sam looked at the paper lying on the table in front of him. He had been writing this sentence over and over again on the piece of paper while the votes were being counted.

"The best people spend their lives in search of truth."

Colonel Tom walked out of the room like a winner, refusing to speak to Sam as he passed, and Sam glanced across the table at Webster and nodded his head toward the man who had not voted.

Within an hour, Sam's battle was won. After lashing out at the man representing the southern investor's stock, he and Webster didn't leave the room until they had gained absolute control of Rainey's company, and the man who refused to vote had pocketed twenty-five thousand dollars. Two associate directors, whom Sam had dispatched to the slaughterhouse, were also involved. Then, after spending the afternoon and early evening with representatives of the eastern companies and their lawyers, he went home to Sue.

It was already nine o'clock when his car stopped in front of the house, and, immediately entering his room, he found Sue sitting in front of the fireplace, her arms raised above her head and looking at the burning coals.

As Sam stood in the doorway and looked at her, a wave of indignation washed over him.

"The old coward," he thought, "he brought our struggle here."

After hanging up his coat, he filled his pipe and, drawing up a chair, sat down next to her. Sue sat there for five minutes, staring into the fire. When she spoke, there was a note of harshness in her voice.

"When all is said and done, Sam, you owe a lot to your father," she remarked, refusing to look at him.

Sam said nothing, so she continued.

"It"s not that I think we created you, Father and I. You"re not the kind of person people make or break. But Sam, Sam, think what you"re doing. He"s always been a fool in your hands. He used to come home here when you were new to the company and tell you what he was doing. He had a whole new set of ideas and phrases; all about waste and efficiency and orderly work toward a specific goal. It didn"t fool me. I knew the ideas, and even the phrases he used to express them, weren"t his, and I soon learned they were yours, that it was simply you expressing yourself through him. He"s a big helpless child, Sam, and he"s old. He hasn"t got long to live. Don"t be harsh, Sam. Be merciful."

Her voice did not tremble, but tears streamed down her frozen face, and her expressive hands clutched at her dress.

"Can't anything change you? Must you always have your own way?" she added, still refusing to look at him.

"It's not true, Sue, that I always want to have my own way and people change me; you changed me," he said.

She shook her head.

"No, I didn"t change you. I discovered you were hungry for something, and you thought I could feed it. I gave you an idea, which you took and brought to life. I don"t know where I got it from, probably from a book or someone"s conversations. But it was yours. You built it, nurtured it in me, and colored it with your personality. It"s your idea today. It means more to you than all that gun-related credibility that fills the newspapers.

She turned to look at him, reached out her hand and placed it in his.

"I wasn't brave," she said. "I'm standing in your way. I had hope that we would find each other again. I had to free you, but I wasn't brave enough, I wasn't brave enough. I couldn't give up on the dream that one day you would truly take me back."

Rising from her chair, she fell to her knees, her head resting on his lap, shaking with sobs. Sam sat there, stroking her hair. Her agitation was so intense that it made her muscular back tremble.

Sam looked past her at the fire and tried to think clearly. He wasn't particularly bothered by her anxiety, but he wanted with all his heart to think things through and come to the right and honest decision.

"It"s time for big things," he said slowly, with the air of a man explaining to a child. "As your socialists say, great changes are coming. I don"t believe your socialists really understand what these changes mean, and I"m not sure that I do, or that anyone does, but I know they mean something big, and I want to be in them and be a part of them; all big men do that; they"re struggling like chickens in a shell. Why, look here! What I do must be done, and if I don"t do it, another man will. The Colonel must go. He will be cast aside. He belongs to something old and worn out. I think your socialists call this the age of competition."

"But not by us and not by you, Sam," she pleaded. "After all, he is my father."

A stern look appeared in Sam's eyes.

"That doesn"t sound right, Sue," he said coldly. "Fathers don"t mean much to me. I strangled my own father and threw him out into the street when I was just a boy. You knew that. You heard about it when you went to inquire about me that time in Caxton. Mary Underwood told you. I did it because he lied and believed lies. Don"t your friends say that a man who gets in the way should be crushed?"

She jumped to her feet and stopped in front of him.

"Don"t quote that crowd," she exploded. "They"re not real. Do you think I don"t know that? Don"t I know they come here because they hope to capture you? Haven"t I watched them and seen the expressions on their faces when you weren"t there or listening to their conversations? They"re afraid of you, all of them. That"s why they speak so bitterly. They"re afraid, and they"re ashamed of being afraid."

"How are the workers in the store?" he asked thoughtfully.

"Yes, that's right, and so am I, because I failed in my part of our lives and didn't have the courage to step out of the way. You are worth all of us, and despite all our talk, we will never succeed or begin to succeed until we make people like you want what we want. They know it, and I know it."

"And what do you want?"

"I want you to be big and generous. You can be. Failure can"t hurt you. You and people like you can do anything. You can even fail. I can"t. None of us can. I can"t subject my father to such shame. I want you to embrace failure."

Sam stood up and, taking her hand, led her to the door. At the door, he turned her around and kissed her on the lips like a lover.

"Okay, Sue girl, I'll do it," he said, pushing her toward the door. "Now let me sit alone and think it over."

It was a September night, and the air carried the whisper of approaching frost. He opened the window, took a deep breath of the crisp air, and listened to the rumble of the overpass in the distance. Looking down the boulevard, he saw the lights of cyclists forming a glittering stream flowing past the house. Thoughts of his new car and all the wonders of the world's mechanical progress flashed through his mind.

"Men who make machines do not hesitate," he said to himself; "even if a thousand hard-hearted people stood in their way, they would go on."

A phrase from Tennyson came to his mind.

"And the nation's air and naval forces fight in the central blue," he quoted, thinking of an article he had read predicting the advent of airships.

He thought about the lives of steel workers and what they had done and would do.

"They have," he thought, "freedom. Steel and iron do not run home to carry the fight to the women sitting by the fire."

He walked back and forth across the room.

"Fat old coward. Bloody fat old coward," he muttered to himself over and over.

It was already past midnight when he got into bed and began trying to calm himself down enough to fall asleep. In his dream, he saw a fat man with a chorus girl hanging from his arm, banging his head on a bridge over a fast-flowing stream.

When he came down to the breakfast room the next morning, Sue was gone. He found a note next to his plate saying she'd gone to fetch Colonel Tom and take him out of town for the day. He went to the office, thinking of the incompetent old man who, in the name of sentimentality, had defeated him in what he considered the greatest undertaking of his life.

On his desk he found a message from Webster. "The old turkey has escaped," he said; "We should have saved twenty-five thousand."

Over the phone, Webster told Sam about his earlier visit to the club to see Colonel Tom, and how the old man had left town for the day in the country. Sam was about to tell him about his changed plans, but he hesitated.

"See you in your office in an hour," he said.

Back outside, Sam strolled and thought about his promise. He walked down the lake to where the railroad and the lake beyond had stopped him. On the old wooden bridge, looking down at the road and down to the water, he stood, as he had at other critical moments in his life, and thought about the struggle of the previous night. In the clear morning air, with the roar of the city behind him and the still waters of the lake ahead, the tears and conversation with Sue seemed only part of her father's absurd and sentimental attitude and the promise he had made, so paltry and unfairly won. He carefully considered the scene, the conversations, the tears, and the promise he had made as he led her to the door. It all seemed distant and unreal, like some promise made to a girl in childhood.

"It was never part of any of this," he said, turning and looking at the city rising before him.

He stood for an hour on the wooden bridge. He thought of Windy Macpherson, raising his horn to his lips in the streets of Caxton, and again the roar of the crowd rang in his ears; and again he lay in bed beside Colonel Tom in that northern town, watching the moon rise over a round belly and hearing the idle chatter of love.

"Love," he said, still looking at the city, "is a matter of truth, not lies and pretense."

Suddenly it seemed to him that if he went forward honestly, after a while he would even win Sue back. His mind lingered on thoughts of the love that comes to a man in this world, of Sue in the windswept northern woods, and of Janet in her wheelchair in the small room where cable cars thundered past the window. And he thought of other things: of Sue reading newspapers culled from books before fallen women in the small hall on State Street, of Tom Edwards with his new wife and tearful eyes, of Morrison and the long-fingered socialist struggling for words at his desk. And then, pulling on his gloves, he lit a cigar and walked back through the crowded streets to his office to do what he had planned.

At the meeting that same day, the project passed without a single dissenting vote. In Colonel Tom's absence, the two associate directors voted with Sam with almost panicked haste, and Sam, looking at the well-dressed and composed Webster, laughed and lit a fresh cigar. Then he voted for the shares Sue had entrusted to him for the project, feeling that in doing so, he was severing, perhaps forever, the knot that bound them.

When the deal was completed, Sam would win five million dollars, more money than Colonel Tom or any of the Rainey family had ever controlled, and establish himself in the eyes of Chicago and New York businessmen where he had once been in the eyes of Caxton and South Water Street. Instead of another Windy McPherson who failed to sound his horn before a waiting crowd, he would still be a man who had achieved good things, a man who had achieved, a man of whom America was proud before the whole world.

He never saw Sue again. When news of his betrayal reached her, she left for the East, taking Colonel Tom with her, while Sam locked up the house and even sent someone there to fetch his clothes. He wrote a short note to her East address, obtained from her lawyer, offering to hand over to her or Colonel Tom all his winnings from the deal, concluding with the cruel declaration: "After all, I couldn't be an ass, even for you."

To this note, Sam received a cold and curt reply, instructing him to divest her shares in the company and those belonging to Colonel Tom and to appoint an Eastern Trust Company to receive the proceeds. With Colonel Tom's help, she carefully assessed the value of their assets at the time of the merger and categorically refused to accept a penny more than that amount.

Sam felt another chapter of his life close. Webster, Edwards, Prince, and the Easterners met and elected him chairman of the new company, and the public eagerly snapped up the flood of common stock he sent to market. Prince and Morrison masterfully manipulated public opinion through the press. The first board meeting concluded with a free-flowing dinner, and Edwards, drunk, stood up and boasted about the beauty of his young wife. Meanwhile, Sam, sitting at his desk in his new office in the Rookery, grimly began to play the role of one of the new kings of American business.

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CHAPTER IX


T H E STORY OF Sam's life in Chicago over the next few years ceases to be the story of an individual and becomes the story of a type, a crowd, a gang. What he and the group of people around him, making money with him, did in Chicago, other people and other groups did in New York, Paris, and London. Having come to power on the wave of prosperity that accompanied the first McKinley administration, these people went crazy with making money. They toyed with great industrial institutions and railroad systems like excited children, and one Chicagoan won the attention and some admiration of the world by his willingness to bet a million dollars on changing the weather. In the years of criticism and perestroika that followed this period of sporadic growth, writers recounted with great clarity how it was done, and some of the participants, captains of industry turned scribes, Caesars turned inkwells, turned the story into a world of admiration.

Given time, inclination, the power of the press, and unscrupulousness, what Sam McPherson and his followers accomplished in Chicago was easy. Advised by Webster, as well as the talented Prince and Morrison, to pursue their own publicity, he quickly unloaded his vast holdings of common stock on an eager public, retaining the bonds he had pledged to banks to increase his working capital while maintaining control of the company. Once the common stock was sold, he and a group of like-minded individuals launched an attack on it through the stock market and the press, buying it back at a low price, holding it ready for sale when the public was certain it would be forgotten.

The trust's annual spending on firearms advertising ran into the millions, and Sam's influence over the national press was almost unbelievably powerful. Morrison quickly developed extraordinary audacity and daring in exploiting this tool and forcing it to serve Sam's purposes. He concealed facts, created illusions, and used newspapers as a whip to harass congressmen, senators, and state legislators when they faced issues like firearms appropriations.

Sam, who had taken on the task of consolidating firearms companies, dreaming of himself as a great master in the field, a sort of American Krupp, quickly succumbed to his dream of taking greater risks in the world of speculation. Within a year, he had replaced Edwards as head of the firearms trust and installed Lewis in his place, with Morrison as secretary and sales manager. Under Sam's leadership, the two, like a small haberdasher from the old Rainey Company, traveled from capital to capital and from town to town, negotiating contracts, influencing the news, placing advertising contracts where they could do the most good, and recruiting people.

Meanwhile, Sam, along with Webster, a banker named Crofts, who had profited greatly from the firearms merger, and sometimes Morrison or Prince, began a series of stock raids, speculations, and manipulations that attracted national attention and became known in the newspaper world as the McPherson Chicago crowd. They dabbled in oil, railroads, coal, western lands, mining, lumber, and streetcars. One summer, Sam and Prince built, profited, and sold a massive amusement park. Day after day, columns of figures, ideas, schemes, and increasingly impressive profit opportunities raced through his mind. Some of the ventures he participated in, though their size made them seem more dignified, actually resembled the game smuggling of his South Water Street days, and all his operations utilized his old instinct for making deals and finding good deals. for finding buyers, and for Webster's ability to strike dubious deals that brought him and his followers almost constant success, despite opposition from the city's more conservative business and financial people.

Sam had begun a new life, owning racehorses, memberships in numerous clubs, a country house in Wisconsin, and hunting grounds in Texas. He drank constantly, played high-stakes poker, contributed to newspapers, and day after day led his team into the financial high seas. He didn't dare think, and deep down, he was fed up with it. It hurt so much that whenever an idea occurred to him, he would get out of bed in search of boisterous companions or, taking out pen and paper, sit for hours, devising new, bolder money-making schemes. The great advancement in modern industry, which he dreamed of being a part of, turned out to be a huge, meaningless gamble with high odds against a gullible public. With his followers, he did things day after day without thinking. Industries were organized and launched, people were employed and laid off, cities were destroyed by the destruction of industry, and other cities were created by the construction of other industries. At his whim, a thousand men began to build a city on a sandhill in Indiana, and at the wave of his hand, another thousand residents of the Indiana town sold their houses with chicken coops in the backyards and vineyards grown outside their kitchen doors and rushed to buy up the allotted plots of land on the hill. He never ceased to discuss with his followers the significance of his actions. He told them of the profits to be made, and then, having done so, he would go out with them for drinks in bars and spend the evening or day singing, visiting his stable of racing horses, or, more often, sitting silently at a card table playing for high stakes. While earning millions by manipulating the public during the day, he would sometimes sit up half the night, fighting with his comrades for possession of thousands.

Lewis, a Jew, the only one of Sam's comrades who didn't follow him in his impressive moneymaking, remained in the firearms company's office and ran it like the talented, scientific man he was in business. Although Sam remained chairman of the board and had an office, desk, and the title of CEO there, he let Lewis run the company while he spent his time at the stock exchange or in some corner with Webster and Crofts, planning some new money-making venture.

"You've got the better of me, Lewis," he said one day in a reflective mood; "You thought I cut the ground out from under you when I got Tom Edwards, but I've only put you in a stronger place."

He gestured towards the large main office with its rows of busy clerks and the dignified look of work being done.

"I could have gotten the job you do. I've been planning and plotting for that very purpose," he added, lighting a cigar and walking out the door.

"And you have been seized by the money famine," Lewis laughed, looking after him, "the famine that seizes Jews, Gentiles, and all who feed them."

On any given day in those years, you could have encountered a crowd of McPhersons in Chicago around the old Chicago Stock Exchange: Croft, tall, abrupt, and dogmatic; Morrison, slim, dapper, and graceful; Webster, well-dressed, courteous, and gentlemanly; and Sam, silent, restless, often sullen and unattractive. Sometimes Sam felt as if they were all unreal, both he and the people with him. He watched his companions slyly. They constantly posed for pictures in front of the passing crowd of brokers and small speculators. Webster, approaching him on the floor of the exchange, would tell him about the raging snowstorm outside with the air of a man parting with a long-cherished secret. His companions would go from one to another, vowing eternal friendship, and then, keeping an eye on one another, would hurry to Sam with tales of secret betrayals. They willingly, if sometimes timidly, accepted any deal he offered, and almost always won. Together, they made millions by manipulating a firearms company and the Chicago and North Lake Railroad, which he controlled.

Years later, Sam recalled it all as a kind of nightmare. He felt as if he'd never lived or thought clearly during that period. The great financial leaders he'd seen weren't, in his opinion, great men. Some, like Webster, were masters of craft or, like Morrison, of words, but for the most part, they were merely shrewd, greedy vultures, feeding on the public or each other.

Meanwhile, Sam was rapidly deteriorating. His stomach bloated in the mornings, and his hands trembled. A man of voracious appetite and determined to avoid women, he almost constantly overdrank and overate, and during his leisure hours, he greedily rushed from place to place, avoiding thought, avoiding sensible, quiet conversation, avoiding himself.

Not all of his comrades suffered equally. Webster seemed destined for life, thriving and expanding thanks to it, constantly saving his winnings, attending suburban church on Sundays, and avoiding the publicity that associated his name with horse racing and the major sporting events that Crofts craved and Sam subordinated. One day, Sam and Crofts caught him trying to sell them to a group of New York bankers in a mining deal, and instead pulled a stunt on him, after which he left for New York to become a respectable figure in big business and a friend of senators and philanthropists.

Crofts was a man with chronic domestic problems, one of those men who begin each day by cursing their wives in public and yet continue to live with them year after year. There was a rough, square quality about him, and after closing a successful deal, he'd rejoice like a boy, slapping men on the back, shaking with laughter, throwing money around, and cracking crude jokes. After leaving Chicago, Sam finally divorced his wife and married a vaudeville actress. After losing two-thirds of his fortune in an attempt to seize control of a southern railroad, he went to England and, under the guidance of his actress wife, transformed himself into an English country gentleman.

Sam was a sick man. Day after day, he drank more and more, gambling for higher and higher stakes, allowing himself to think less and less about himself. One day, he received a long letter from John Telfer, informing him of Mary Underwood's sudden death and scolding him for neglecting her.

"She had been ill for a year and had no income," Telfer wrote. Sam noticed the man's hand was beginning to shake. "She lied to me and said you sent her money, but now that she's dead, I find that although she wrote to you, she received no reply. Her elderly aunt told me."

Sam pocketed the letter and, entering one of his clubs, began drinking with a crowd of men he found lounging there. For several months, he paid little attention to his correspondence. No doubt Mary's letter was received by his secretary and discarded along with those from thousands of other women-begging letters, love letters, letters addressed to him because of his wealth and the notoriety the newspapers attributed to his exploits.

After telegraphing an explanation and mailing a check the size of which delighted John Telfer, Sam and half a dozen of his fellow rebels spent the rest of the day and evening moving from saloon to saloon on the South Side. When he reached his quarters late that evening, his head was spinning, his mind filled with distorted memories of men and women drinking, and of himself standing on a table in some dingy watering hole, calling on the shouting and laughing hangers-on of his crowd of wealthy spenders to think, work, and seek the Truth.

He fell asleep in his chair, his thoughts filled with the dancing faces of dead women, Mary Underwood, Janet, and Sue, tear-stained faces calling out to him. After waking and shaving, he went outside and headed to another club downtown.

"I wonder if Sue died too," he muttered, remembering his dream.

At the club, Lewis called him to the telephone and asked him to come immediately to his office at Edwards Consolidated. When he got there, he found a telegram from Sue. In a moment of loneliness and despondency over the loss of his former business position and reputation, Colonel Tom shot himself in a New York hotel.

Sam sat at the table, sorting through the yellow paper in front of him and trying to clear his head.

"Old coward. Bloody old coward," he muttered. "Anyone could have done it."

When Lewis entered Sam's office, he found his boss sitting at his desk, shuffling a telegram and muttering to himself. When Sam handed him the wire, he walked over and stood next to Sam, placing a hand on his shoulder.

"Well, don"t blame yourself for that," he said with quick understanding.

"No," Sam muttered. "I don"t blame myself for anything. I"m the result, not the cause. I"m trying to think. I"m not finished yet. I"m going to start again when I"ve thought it through."

Lewis left the room, leaving him to his thoughts. For an hour, he sat and pondered his life. As he recalled the day he humiliated Colonel Tom, he remembered the phrase he'd written on a piece of paper while counting the votes: "The best men spend their lives seeking the truth."

Suddenly, he made a decision and, calling Lewis, began to formulate a plan. His head cleared, and the ring returned to his voice. He granted Lewis an option on all his Edwards Consolidated stock and bond holdings and charged him with clearing up trade after trade in which he was interested. Then, calling his broker, he began placing a ton of shares on the market. When Lewis told him that Crofts had been "frantically calling around town trying to find him, and that, with the help of another banker, he was holding up the market and taking Sam's shares as fast as they offered," he laughed and, after giving Lewis instructions on how to manage his money, left the office, a free man again and once again seeking an answer to his problem.

He made no attempt to reply to Sue's telegram. He was impatient to get to something on his mind. He went to his apartment, packed his bag, and disappeared without saying goodbye. He had no clear idea of where he was going or what he intended to do. He only knew that he would follow the message written in his own hand. He would try to dedicate his life to the search for truth.

OceanofPDF.com

BOOK III


OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER I


ABOUT THE DAY WHEN Young Sam McPherson was new to town. On a Sunday afternoon, he went to a downtown theater to hear a sermon. The sermon, delivered by a short, black Bostonian, struck young McPherson as learned and well-thought-out.

"The greatest man is the one whose actions impact the greatest number of lives," the speaker said, and the thought stuck in Sam's mind. Now, walking down the street with his duffel bag, he remembered the sermon and the thought and shook his head doubtfully.

"What I've done here in this city must have touched thousands of lives," he mused, feeling his blood quicken as he simply let go of his thoughts, something he hadn't dared to do since the day he broke his word to Sue and began his career as a business giant.

He began to think about the search he had begun and felt a keen satisfaction in the thought of what he should do.

"I'll start all over again and find the Truth through work," he said to himself. "I'll leave this money famine behind me, and if it comes back, I'll come back here to Chicago and watch my fortune accumulate, and people rushing around the banks, and the stock exchange, and the courts they pay to fools and brutes like me, and that will cure me."

He walked into Illinois Central Station-a strange sight. A smile touched his lips as he sat on a bench along the wall between a Russian immigrant and a plump little farmer's wife, who held a banana and nibbled on it for the rosy-cheeked baby in her arms. He, an American multimillionaire, a man in the midst of making money, having realized the American dream, had fallen ill at a party and emerged from a fashionable club with a bag in his hand, a roll of beer, bills in his pocket, and set out on this strange quest-to seek Truth, to seek God. A few years of greedy, fast living in a city that had seemed so magnificent to the boy from Iowa and to the men and women who lived in his city, and then in this Iowa town a woman died, lonely and needy, and on the other side of the continent, a fat, violent old man shot himself in a New York hotel and sat here.

Leaving his bag in the care of the farmer's wife, he crossed the room to the ticket counter and stood there, watching as people with specific goals approached, deposited money, and, having taken tickets, quickly left. He wasn't afraid of being known. Although his name and photo had been on the front pages of Chicago newspapers for years, he felt such a profound change in himself from this one decision that he was certain he would go unnoticed.

A thought struck him. Looking up and down the long room, filled with a strange cluster of men and women, he was overcome by a sense of vast, toiling masses of people, workers, small tradesmen, skilled mechanics.

"These Americans," he began to say to himself, "these men with their children about them and the hard daily work, and many of them with stunted or imperfectly developed bodies, not Crofts, not Morrison and I, but these others who toil without hope of luxury and wealth, who make up armies in time of war and educate boys and girls to do in their turn the work of peace."

He found himself in line at the ticket counter, behind a burly-looking old man who was holding a box of carpentry tools in one hand and a bag in the other, and bought a ticket to the very town in Illinois where the old man was headed.

On the train, he sat next to an old man, and they chatted quietly-the old man talked about his family. He had a married son who lived in the town in Illinois he was planning to visit, and he began bragging about him. The son, he said, had moved to the town and prospered there, owning a hotel that his wife managed while he worked in construction.

"Ed," he said, "has fifty or sixty men on staff all summer. He sent for me to lead the gang. He knows perfectly well I'll get them to work.

From Ed the old man moved on to talk about himself and his life, telling the bare facts with directness and simplicity and making no effort to hide the slight hint of vanity in his success.

"I have raised seven sons and made them all good workers, and they are all doing well," he said.

He described each of them in detail. One of them, a bookish man, worked as a mechanical engineer in a New England industrial town. His children's mother had died the year before, and two of his three daughters had married mechanics. The third, Sam realized, hadn't fared so well, and the old man said he thought perhaps she'd taken the wrong path back in Chicago.

Sam spoke to the old man about God and about man's desire to extract truth from life.

"I've thought about it a lot," he said.

The old man was intrigued. He looked at Sam, then at the car window, and began to discuss his beliefs, the essence of which Sam couldn't understand.

"God is a spirit, and he lives in the growing corn," the old man said, pointing out the window at the passing fields.

He began to talk about churches and ministers against whom he was full of bitterness.

"They're draft dodgers. They don't understand anything. They're damn draft dodgers pretending to be good," he declared.

Sam introduced himself, saying he was alone in the world and had money. He said he wanted to work outdoors not for the money it would bring him, but because he had a big belly and his hands shook in the mornings.

"I have been drinking," he said, "and I want to work hard day after day so that my muscles will become strong and sleep will come to me at night."

The old man thought that his son would be able to find a place for Sam.

"He's a driver, Ed," he said, laughing, "and he won't pay you much. Ed, don't let go of the money. He's tough."

By the time they reached the town where Ed lived, night had fallen, and the three men walked across a bridge with a roaring waterfall beneath them, toward the town's long, dimly lit main street and Ed's hotel. Ed, a young, broad-shouldered man with a dry cigar lodged in the corner of his mouth, walked ahead. He contacted Sam, who stood in the darkness on the station platform and accepted his story without comment.

"I'll let you carry logs and hammer nails," he said, "it will toughen you up."

On the way across the bridge he talked about the city.

"It's a vibrant place," he said, "we attract people here."

"Look at that!" he exclaimed, chewing his cigar and pointing to the waterfall foaming and roaring almost beneath the bridge. "There's a lot of power there, and where there's power, there'll be a city."

At Ed's hotel, about twenty people were sitting in a long, low office. They were mostly middle-aged workers, sitting silently, reading and smoking pipes. At a desk pushed against the wall, a bald young man with a scar on his cheek was playing solitaire with a greasy deck of cards, and in front of him, sitting in a chair propped against the wall, a sullen-looking boy lazily watched the game. As the three men entered the office, the boy dropped the chair to the floor and stared at Ed, who stared back. There seemed to be some kind of competition going on between them. A tall, neatly dressed woman with a brisk manner and pale, expressionless, stern blue eyes stood behind a small desk and cigarette case at the end of the room, and as the three walked toward her, her gaze shifted from Ed to the sullen boy, and then back to Ed. Sam concluded that she was a woman who wanted to do things her own way. She had that look.

"This is my wife," Ed said, waving his hand to introduce Sam and moving around the table to stand next to her.

Ed's wife turned the hotel registration to face Sam, nodded her head, and then leaned over the table to quickly kiss the old carpenter's leather cheek.

Sam and the old man took their places on chairs against the wall and sat among the silent men. The old man pointed to a boy sitting in a chair next to the card players.

"Their son," he whispered carefully.

The boy looked at his mother, who in turn looked at him intently, and rose from his chair. At the table, Ed was talking quietly to his wife. The boy, stopping in front of Sam and the old man, still looking at the woman, extended his hand, which the old man took. Then, without a word, he walked past the table, through the doorway, and began noisily climbing the stairs, followed by his mother. As they climbed, they cursed each other, their voices rising to a high pitch and echoing throughout the upper part of the house.

Ed approached them and spoke to Sam about assigning a room, and the men began to look at the stranger; noticing his beautiful clothes, their eyes filled with curiosity.

"Anything to sell?" asked a large, red-haired young man, rolling a pound of tobacco around in his mouth.

"No," Sam answered shortly, "I"m going to work for Ed."

The silent men sitting in chairs along the wall dropped their newspapers and stared at them, while the bald young man at the table sat open- mouthed, holding a card in the air. Sam became the center of attention for a moment, and the men shifted in their chairs, began whispering and pointing at him.

A large man with watery eyes and rosy cheeks, wearing a long coat with stains down the front, walked through the door and crossed the room, bowing and smiling at the men. Taking Ed's hand, he disappeared into the small bar, where Sam could hear his quiet conversation.

After a while, a man with a ruddy face came up and stuck his head through the bar door into the office.

"Come on, boys," he said, smiling and nodding left and right, "the drinks are on me."

The men stood up and walked into the bar, leaving the old man and Sam sitting on their chairs. They began talking in low voices.

"I'll make them think - these people," said the old man.

He pulled a brochure from his pocket and handed it to Sam. It was a crudely written attack on rich people and corporations.

"Whoever wrote this has a lot of brains," said the old carpenter, rubbing his hands and smiling.

Sam didn't think so. He sat, reading, and listening to the loud, boisterous voices of the men in the bar. A ruddy-faced man was explaining the details of a proposed city bond issue. Sam realized that the river's hydroelectric power needed to be developed.

"We want to make this city come alive," Ed's voice said sincerely.

The old man leaned over and put his hand to his mouth and began to whisper something to Sam.

"I'm willing to bet there's a capitalist deal behind this energy scheme," he said.

He nodded his head up and down and smiled knowingly.

"If it happens, Ed will be in it," he added. "You can't lose Ed. He's smart.

He took the brochure from Sam's hands and put it in his pocket.

"I'm a socialist," he explained, "but don't say anything. Ed is against them.

The men came back into the room in a crowd, each with a freshly lit cigar in his mouth, and the ruddy-faced man followed them and went out to the office door.

"Well, bye, boys," he called heartily.

Ed silently climbed the stairs to join his mother and the boy, whose voices, in outbursts of anger, could still be heard from above as the men took their former chairs along the wall.

"Well, Bill is all right, of course," said the red-haired young man, obviously expressing the men"s opinion regarding the ruddy face.

A small, stooped old man with sunken cheeks stood up and, walking across the room, leaned against the cigarette case.

"Have you ever heard this?" he asked, looking around.

Apparently unable to provide an answer, the bent old man began telling a vile and pointless joke about a woman, a miner, and a mule. The crowd paid close attention and burst into loud laughter when he finished. The socialist rubbed his hands and joined in the applause.

"That was good, huh?" he commented, turning to Sam.

Sam, grabbing his bag, climbed the stairs, and the red-haired young man began to tell another story, a little less sordid. In his room, where Ed, still chewing on an unlit cigar, had led him, meeting him at the top of the stairs, he turned off the light and sat on the edge of the bed. He was homesick, like a boy.

"True," he muttered, looking out the window at the dimly lit street. "Are these people looking for the truth?"

The next day, he went to work wearing the suit he'd bought from Ed. He worked with Ed's father, hauling logs and hammering nails as he'd instructed. His gang included four men staying at Ed's hotel and four more who lived in town with their families. At noon, he asked an old carpenter how the hotel men, who didn't live in town, could vote on government bonds. The old man grinned and rubbed his hands.

"I don't know," he said. "I suppose Ed's inclined to it. He's a clever fellow, Ed.

At work, the men, so silent in the hotel office, were cheerful and surprisingly busy, hurrying here and there at the old man's command, furiously sawing and hammering nails. They seemed to strive to outdo each other, and when one of them fell behind, they laughed and shouted at him, asking if he had decided to retire for the day. But although they seemed determined to outdo him, the old man stayed ahead of them all, his hammer pounding the boards all day. At noon, he gave each of the men a brochure from his pocket, and in the evening, returning to the hotel, he told Sam that the others had tried to expose him.

"They wanted to see if I had any juice," he explained, walking alongside Sam and shaking his shoulders comically.

Sam was sick with fatigue. His hands were blistered, his legs weak, and his throat burned with a terrible thirst. All day he trudged forward, gloomily grateful for every physical discomfort, every pulsation of his tense, tired muscles. In his weariness and his struggle to keep up with the others, he forgot about Colonel Tom and Mary Underwood.

All that month and the next, Sam remained with the old man's gang. He stopped thinking and only worked desperately. He was overcome by a strange feeling of loyalty and devotion to the old man, and he felt he, too, had to prove his worth. At the hotel, he went to bed immediately after a silent supper, fell asleep, woke up sick, and went back to work.

One Sunday, one of his gang members came into Sam's room and invited him to join a group of workers on a trip out of town. They set out in boats, carrying kegs of beer, to a deep ravine surrounded by dense forest on both sides. In the boat with Sam sat a red-haired young man named Jake, loudly talking about the time they would spend in the forest and boasting that he had been the one initiating the trip.

"I've thought about it," he repeated over and over again.

Sam wondered why he'd been invited. It was a mild October day, and he sat in a ravine, looking out at the paint-splattered trees and breathing deeply, his whole body relaxed, grateful for the day of rest. Jake came over and sat next to him.

"What are you doing?" he asked bluntly. "We know you're not a working man."

Sam told him a half-truth.

"You're quite right about that; I have enough money not to work. I used to be a businessman. I sold guns. But I have an illness, and the doctors told me that if I don't work on the streets, part of me will die."

A man from his own gang approached them, inviting him on the ride, and brought Sam a foaming glass of beer. He shook his head.

"The doctor says this won't work," he explained to the two men.

The red-haired man named Jake began to speak.

"We're going to fight Ed," he said. "That's what we came here to talk about. We want to know where you stand. Let's see if we can get him to pay as well for the work here as the men get paid for the same work in Chicago."

Sam lay down on the grass.

"Okay," he said. "Go ahead and continue. If I can help, I will. I don't really like Ed."

The men began to chat among themselves. Jake, standing among them, read aloud the list of names, including the one Sam had written down at Ed's hotel reception.

"This is a list of names of people we think will stick together and vote together on the bond issue," he explained, turning to Sam. "Ed's involved, and we want to use our votes to scare him into giving us what we want. Will you stay with us? You look like a fighter."

Sam nodded and stood up to join the men standing by the beer kegs. They began talking about Ed and the money he'd made in town.

"He's done a lot of city work here, and it was all bribery," Jake explained firmly. "It's time to make him do the right thing."

While they talked, Sam sat, watching the men's faces. They didn't seem as repulsive to him now as they had that first evening in the hotel office. He began to think about them silently and intently throughout the day at work, surrounded by influential people like Ed and Bill, and this thought strengthened his opinion of them.

"Listen," he said, "tell me about this case. Before I came here, I was a businessman, and maybe I can help you guys get what you want.

Standing up, Jake took Sam's hand and they walked along the gorge, Jake explaining the situation in the city.

"The game," he said, "is to get taxpayers to pay for a mill to develop hydroelectric power on the river, and then trick them into handing it over to a private company. Bill and Ed are both in on the deal, working for a man from Chicago named Crofts. He was here at the hotel when Bill and Ed talked. I see what they're up to." Sam sat down on a log and laughed heartily.

"Crofts, huh?" he exclaimed. "He says we're going to fight this thing. If Crofts was here, you can be sure the deal makes sense. We'll simply crush this whole gang for the good of the city."

"How would you do that?" Jake asked.

Sam sat down on a log and looked at the river flowing past the mouth of the ravine.

"Just fight," he said. "Let me show you something."

He took a pencil and a piece of paper from his pocket and, listening to the voices of the men around the beer kegs and the red-haired man peering over his shoulder, began writing his first political pamphlet. He wrote, erased, and changed words and phrases. The pamphlet was a factual presentation of the value of hydroelectric power and was addressed to the community's taxpayers. He supported the theme by arguing that a fortune lay dormant in the river and that the city, with a little forethought now, could build a fine city, owned by the people, with that fortune.

"This river fortune, properly managed, will cover the government's expenses and give you permanent control of a vast source of revenue," he wrote. "Build your mill, but beware the wiles of politicians. They are trying to steal it. Reject the offer of a Chicago banker named Crofts. Demand an investigation. A capitalist has been found who will take hydroelectric bonds at four percent and support the people in this fight for a free American city." On the cover of the brochure, Sam wrote the caption, "A River Paved with Gold," and handed it to Jake, who read it and whistled softly.

"Good!" he said. "I'll take this and print it out. This will make Bill and Ed sit up.

Sam took a twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to the man.

"To pay for the printing," he said. "And when we lick them, I'm the guy who'll take the four-percent bonds."

Jake scratched his head. "How much do you think this deal is worth to Crofts?"

"A million, otherwise he wouldn't be bothered," Sam replied.

Jake folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

"That would make Bill and Ed cringe, wouldn't it?" he chuckled.

Walking home along the river, the men, full of beer, sang and shouted as the boats, led by Sam and Jake, sailed. The night grew warm and quiet, and Sam felt as if he'd never seen a sky so strewn with stars. His mind was filled with the idea of doing something for the people.

"Maybe here, in this city, I"ll start what I want," he thought, and his heart filled with happiness, and the songs of drunken workers rang in his ears.

Over the next few weeks, there was a flurry of activity among Sam's gang and Ed's hotel. In the evenings, Jake would wander among the men, talking in hushed tones. One day, he took a three-day leave, telling Ed he wasn't feeling well, and spent the time among the men working the plows upriver. From time to time, he'd come to Sam for money.

"To the campaign," he said with a wink and hurried away.

Suddenly, a loudspeaker appeared and began speaking at night from a booth in front of a drugstore on Main Street, and after dinner, Ed's hotel office was empty. A man had a board hanging on a pole, on which he was drawing figures estimating the cost of electricity in the river, and as he spoke, he grew increasingly excited, waving his arms and cursing certain lease provisions in the bond proposal. He declared himself a follower of Karl Marx and delighted the old carpenter, who danced back and forth along the road, rubbing his hands.

"Something will come of it, you"ll see," he said to Sam.

One day, Ed showed up in a buggy at Sam's work site and called the old man out onto the road. He sat there, tapping one hand against the other and speaking in a low voice. Sam thought the old man might have been careless, distributing socialist pamphlets. He seemed nervous, dancing back and forth next to the buggy and shaking his head. Then, hurrying back to where the men were working, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

"Ed wants you," he said, and Sam noticed that his voice was shaking and his hand was trembling.

Ed and Sam rode in the buggy in silence. Ed was chewing on his unlit cigar again.

"I want to talk to you," he said as Sam climbed into the buggy.

At the hotel, two men got out of the buggy and walked into the office. Ed, who had come up behind him, leaped forward and grabbed Sam's arms. He was as strong as a bear. His wife, a tall woman with expressionless eyes, ran into the room, her face contorted with hatred. She held a broom in her hand and, with its handle, struck Sam repeatedly across the face, accompanying each blow with a half-shout of rage and a volley of vile names. A boy with a sullen face, already alive and with eyes blazing with jealousy, ran down the stairs and pushed the woman away. He punched Sam in the face again and again, laughing each time as Sam flinched from the blows.

Sam tried furiously to break free from Ed's powerful grip. This was the first time he'd been beaten, and the first time he'd faced hopeless defeat. The anger inside him was so intense that the shaking from the blows seemed secondary to the need to break free from Ed's grip.

Ed suddenly turned and, pushing Sam in front of him, threw him through the office door and into the street. His head hit a hitching post as he fell, leaving him dazed. Partially recovered from the fall, Sam stood up and walked down the street. His face was swollen and bruised, and his nose was bleeding. The street was empty, and the attack went unnoticed.

He went to a hotel on Main Street-a more upscale place than Ed's, near the bridge leading to the train station-and as he walked in, he saw through the open door Jake, the red-haired man, leaning against the counter and talking to Bill, the ruddy-faced man. Sam, having paid for the room, went upstairs and went to bed.

Lying in bed, with cold bandages on his battered face, he tried to take control of the situation. Hatred for Ed coursed through his veins. His hands clenched, his mind spun, and the cruel, passionate faces of the woman and the boy danced before his eyes.

"I"ll reform them, the cruel hooligans," he muttered out loud.

And then the thought of his search returned to his mind and calmed him. The roar of the waterfall drifted through the window, interrupted by the noise of the street. As he fell asleep, they mingled with his dreams, soft and quiet, like quiet family conversations about the evening fire.

He was awakened by a knock on the door. At his call, the door opened and the old carpenter's face appeared. Sam laughed and sat up in bed. The cold bandages had already soothed the throbbing of his battered face.

"Go away," the old man asked, rubbing his hands nervously. "Get out of town."

He raised his hand to his mouth and spoke in a hoarse whisper, looking over his shoulder through the open door. Sam, getting out of bed, began filling his pipe.

"You can't beat Ed, boys," the old man added, backing toward the door. "He's a smart one, Ed. You better leave town."

Sam called the boy and gave him a note for Ed asking him to return his clothes and bag to his room. He then presented the boy with a large bill, asking him to pay for everything owed. When the boy returned with the clothes and bag, he returned the bill intact.

"They're scared of something there," he said, looking at Sam's broken face.

Sam dressed carefully and went downstairs. He remembered that he had never seen a printed copy of the political pamphlet written in the ravine, and he realized that Jake had used it to make money.

"Now I"ll try something else," he thought.

It was early evening, and crowds of people walking along the railroad tracks from the arable mill turned left and right as they reached Main Street. Sam walked among them, climbing a small, hilly lane toward the number he'd received from the drugstore clerk outside whom the socialist was speaking. He stopped at a small frame house and, within moments of knocking, found himself standing before the man who, night after night, spoke from a booth outside. Sam decided to see what he could do about it. The socialist was a short, stout man with curly gray hair, shiny, round cheeks, and black, broken teeth. He sat on the edge of his bed and looked as if he'd slept in his clothes. A corncob pipe smoked among the bedcovers, and he spent most of the conversation holding one shoe in his hand, as if he were about to put it on. Paperback books lay in neat stacks around the room. Sam sat in a chair by the window and explained his mission.

"This theft of power is a big deal here," he explained. "I know the man behind it, and he wouldn't sweat the small stuff. I know they're planning to force the town to build a mill and then steal it. It'll be a big deal for your group here if you step up and stop them. Let me tell you how."

He explained his plan and spoke of Crofts, his wealth and his dogged, aggressive determination. The socialist seemed beside himself. He put on his shoe and began pacing the room.

"Election time," Sam continued, "is almost here. I"ve studied this thing. We"ve got to defeat this bond issue and then see it through. There"s a train leaving Chicago at seven o"clock, an express train. You"ve got fifty speakers here. If necessary, I"ll pay for a special train, hire a band, and help stir things up. I can give you enough facts to shake this city to its foundations. You"ll come with me and call Chicago. I"ll pay everything. I"m McPherson, Sam McPherson from Chicago."

The socialist ran to the closet and began pulling on his coat. The name had such an effect on him that his hand began to tremble, and he could barely fit his hand into the sleeve of his coat. He began apologizing for the room's appearance and continued to stare at Sam with the air of someone unable to believe what he had just heard. When the two men left the house, he ran ahead, holding the door open for Sam to pass.

"And you will help us, Mr. Macpherson?" he exclaimed. "You, a man of millions, will you help us in this struggle?"

Sam had the feeling the man was about to kiss his hand or do something equally ridiculous. He looked like a deranged club doorman.

At the hotel, Sam stood in the lobby while the fat man waited in the phone booth.

"I'll have to call Chicago, I'll just have to call Chicago. We socialists don't do anything like that right away, Mr. McPherson," he explained as they walked down the street.

When the socialist emerged from the booth, he stood before Sam, shaking his head. His entire demeanor had changed, and he looked like a man caught in a stupid or absurd act.

"Do nothing, do nothing, Mr. MacPherson," he said, heading for the hotel door.

He stopped at the door and shook his finger at Sam.

"It won't work," he said decisively. "Chicago is too wise."

Sam turned and walked back to his room. His name had ruined his only chance of defeating Crofts, Jake, Bill, and Ed. In his room, he sat and looked out the window at the street.

"Where can I get a foothold now?" he asked himself.

Turning off the light, he sat down, listening to the roar of the waterfall and thinking about the events of the past week.

"I had time," he thought. "I tried something, and although it didn't work, it was the best fun I've had in years."

The hours passed, and night fell. He heard people shouting and laughing in the street, and, going downstairs, he stood in the corridor at the edge of the crowd gathered around the socialist. The speaker shouted and waved his hand. He seemed as proud as a young recruit who had just undergone his first baptism of fire.

"He tried to make a fool of me - McPherson of Chicago - a millionaire - one of the capitalist kings - he tried to bribe me and my party."

Among the crowd, an old carpenter danced on the road and rubbed his hands. With the feeling of a man who has finished a job or turned the last page of a book, Sam returned to his hotel.

"I"ll go in the morning," he thought.

There was a knock on the door and a red-haired man walked in. He quietly closed the door and winked at Sam.

"Ed made a mistake," he said, laughing. "The old man told him you were a socialist, and he thought you were trying to sabotage the bribe. He's afraid you'll get beat up, and he's very sorry. He's fine, Ed's fine, and Bill and I got the votes. What kept you undercover for so long? Why didn't you tell us you were McPherson?"

Sam saw the futility of any attempt to explain. Jake had obviously betrayed the people. Sam wondered how.

"How do you know you can deliver the votes?" he asked, trying to lead Jake further.

Jake rolled the pound around in his mouth and winked again.

"It was easy enough to fix those people when Ed, Bill, and I got together," he said. "You know something else. There's a clause in the law that allows for bond issuance-a 'sleeper,' as Bill calls it. You know more about that than I do. Either way, power will be transferred to the person we're talking about."

"But how do I know you"ll be able to deliver the votes?"

Jake extended his hand impatiently.

"What do they know?" he asked sharply. "They want higher wages. There's a million involved in a power deal, and they can't comprehend a million more than they can say what they want to do in Heaven. I promised Ed's comrades citywide. Ed can't kick. He'll make a hundred thousand as is. Then I promised the plow crew a ten percent raise. We'll get it for them if we can, but if we can't, they won't know until the deal is done."

Sam walked over and held the door open.

"Good night," he said.

Jake looked irritated.

"You're not even going to make an offer to Crofts?" he asked. "We're not involved with him if you'll do better by us. I'm in this because you got me involved. That article you wrote upriver scared the shit out of them. I want to do right by you. Don't be mad at Ed. If he knew, he wouldn't have done this."

Sam shook his head and stood, his hand still on the door.

"Good night," he said again. "I"m not involved in this. I"ve given it up. There"s no use trying to explain."

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER II


For weeks and months, Sam led a vagabond life, and certainly no stranger or more restless drifter ever took to the road. He almost always had between one and five thousand dollars in his pocket, his bag moving from place to place ahead of him, and every now and then he'd catch up with it, unpack, and don a suit of his old Chicago clothes on the streets of some city. Most of the time, however, he wore the rough clothes he'd bought from Ed, and when those disappeared, others like them-a warm canvas overcoat and, for inclement weather, a pair of heavy, lace-up boots. People generally thought he was a well-off working man, well-off and making his own way.

During all these months of wandering, and even when he returned to something closer to his former way of life, his mind was unbalanced and his outlook on life disturbed. At times, he felt as if he were alone among all men, an innovator. Day after day, his mind focused on his problem, and he was determined to search and keep searching until he found his way to peace. In the towns and countryside through which he passed, he saw clerks in stores, merchants with worried faces hurrying to the banks, farmers, roughened by hard work, dragging their tired bodies home at nightfall, and he told himself that all life was sterile, that on all sides it was wearing itself out in small, futile efforts or fleeing in side currents, that nowhere did it move steadily, continuously forward, indicating the enormous sacrifices involved in living and working in this world. He thought of Christ, who had gone to see the world and talk to people, and he imagined that he, too, would go and talk to them, not as a teacher, but as one yearning to be taught. At times he was filled with melancholy and unspeakable hopes, and like the boy from Caxton, he rose from his bed, not to stand in Miller's pasture watching the rain fall on the surface of the water, but to walk endless miles through the darkness, finding blessed relief from the weariness in his body. He often paid for two beds and occupied them in a single night.

Sam wanted to get back to Sue; he wanted peace and something like happiness, but most of all he wanted work, real work, work that would demand from him day after day all that was best and finest in him, so that he would be tied to the necessity of continually renewing the best impulses of life. He was at the peak of his life, and a few weeks of hard physical work as a nail-driver and log-carrier had begun to restore his body to its trimness and strength, so that he was filled again with all his natural restlessness and energy; but he was determined not to devote himself any more to work that would reflect on him as it did on his money-making, his dream of beautiful children, and that last half-formed dream of a kind of financial fatherhood in an Illinois town.

The incident with Ed and the red-haired man was his first serious attempt at something akin to social service, achieved through control or an attempt to influence public consciousness, for his was the kind of mind that yearned for the concrete, the real. As he sat in the ravine talking with Jake, and later, rowing home under a multitude of stars, he looked up from the drunken workers and saw before his mind a city built for the people, an independent city, beautiful, strong, and free. But the glance of the red-haired man through the bar door and the socialist tremors at the name dispelled the vision. Returning from the socialist's hearing, who, in turn, was surrounded by complex influences, and on those November days as he walked south through Illinois, seeing the former splendor of the trees and breathing the pure air, he laughed at himself for having had such a vision. It wasn't that the redhead had sold him out, it wasn't the beatings he'd received from Ed's sullen son, or the slaps to the face from his energetic wife-it was simply that, deep down, he didn't believe the people wanted reform; they wanted a ten percent wage increase. The public consciousness was too vast, too complex, and too inert to achieve a vision or ideal and push it far.

And then, walking the road and trying to find the truth even within himself, Sam had to come to something else. Essentially, he was neither a leader nor a reformer. He wanted a free city not for free people, but as a task to be accomplished with his own hands. He was a McPherson, a moneymaker, a man who loved himself. This fact, not the sight of Jake befriending Bill or the timidity of a socialist, blocked his path to work as a political reformer and builder.

Walking south between rows of shaken corn, he laughed at himself. "The experience with Ed and Jake did something for me," he thought. "They were making fun of me. I was something of a bully myself, and what happened was good medicine for me."

Sam walked the roads of Illinois, Ohio, New York, and other states, over hills and flats, through winter drifts and spring storms, talking to people, asking about their way of life and the goal they were striving for. They worked. At night he dreamed of Sue, his childhood difficulties in Caxton, Janet Eberly sitting in a chair and talking about writers, or, picturing the stock exchange or some flashy drinking establishment, he saw again the faces of Crofts, Webster, Morrison, and Prince, intent and impatient, proposing some money-making scheme. Sometimes at night he would wake, seized with terror, to see Colonel Tom with a revolver pressed to his head; and, sitting up in his bed, and all the next day, he would talk aloud to himself.

"Damned old coward," he would shout into the darkness of his room or into the wide, peaceful vista of the countryside.

The idea of Colonel Tom committing suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, and horrific. As if some chubby, curly-haired boy had done it to himself. The man was so boyish, so irritatingly incompetent, so utterly and completely lacking in dignity and purpose.

"And yet," Sam thought, "he found the strength to flog me, a capable man. He took utter and unconditional revenge for the disregard I had shown to the small game world in which he was king."

In his mind's eye, Sam could see the big belly and the little white pointed beard sticking out of the floor of the room where the dead Colonel lay, and there came into his mind a utterance, a sentence, a distorted memory of a thought he had gotten from something in Janet's book or from some conversation he had overheard, perhaps at his own dinner table.

"It's horrible to see a fat man with purple veins on his face dead."

At such moments, he hurried along the road as if hunted. People passing in carriages, seeing him and hearing the stream of conversation flowing from his lips, turned and watched him disappear from sight. And Sam, hurrying and seeking relief from his thoughts, called upon his old instincts of common sense, like a captain rallying his forces to resist an attack.

"I will find a job. I will find a job. I will seek the Truth," he said.

Sam avoided large cities or hurried through them, spending night after night in country inns or some hospitable farmhouse, and with each passing day he increased the length of his walks, deriving genuine satisfaction from the pain in his legs and the bruises on his unaccustomed feet from the difficult road. Like Saint Jerome, he had a desire to beat his body and subjugate the flesh. He, in turn, was blown by the wind, chilled by the winter frost, soaked by the rain, and warmed by the sun. In the spring, he bathed in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides, watching the cattle grazing in the fields and the white clouds drifting across the sky, and continually his legs grew harder, his body flatter and more sinewy. One night, he spent the night in a haystack on the edge of a forest, and in the morning he was awakened by the farmer's dog licking his face.

Several times he approached hobos, umbrella makers, and other roadsters and strolled with them, but he found no incentive in their company to join them on their cross-country flights on freight trains or at the front of passenger trains. Those he met, talked to , and strolled with held little interest for him. They had no purpose in life, no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them drained the romance from their vagabond lives. They were utterly dull and stupid, almost without exception astonishingly unclean, they passionately desired to get drunk, and they seemed eternally escaping life with its problems and responsibilities. They always talked about big cities, about "Chi," "Cinci," and "Frisco," and longed to get to one of these places. They denounced the rich, begged for alms, and stole from the poor, boasting of their own bravery, and whining and begging as they ran before the village constables. One of them, a tall, angry youth in a gray cap, approached Sam one evening on the outskirts of an Indiana village and attempted to rob him. Filled with renewed vigor and thinking of Ed's wife and sullen son, Sam lunged at him and avenged the beating he had received in Ed's hotel office by beating the youth in turn. When the tall youth partially recovered from the beating and staggered to his feet, he fled into the darkness, stopping just out of reach to hurl a stone that splashed in the dirt at Sam's feet.

Sam sought out people everywhere who would talk to him about themselves. He had a certain faith that a message would come to him from the lips of some simple, unassuming village or farmer. A woman he spoke with at a train station in Fort Wayne, Indiana, intrigued him so much that he boarded a train with her and rode all night in a day car, listening to her stories about her three sons, one of whom died of weak lungs and, along with two younger brothers, occupied government land in the West. The woman stayed with them for several months, helping them get started.

"I grew up on a farm and knew things they couldn't know," she told Sam, raising her voice above the rumble of the train and the snoring of her fellow passengers.

She worked with her sons in the fields, plowing and planting, pulling a team of horses across the country hauling boards to build a house, and in this work she became tanned and strong.

"And Walter's getting better. His arms are as brown as mine, and he's gained eleven pounds," she said, rolling up her sleeves to reveal her heavy, muscular forearms.

She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle factory in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, saleswomen in a haberdashery, and return to the new country, sensing the listener's interest in her story. She spoke of the grandeur of the West and the loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that sometimes they made her heart ache. Sam thought she had succeeded in some way, though he didn't see how her experience could serve as a guide for him.

"You've arrived somewhere. You've found the truth," he said, taking her hand as he stepped off the train in Cleveland at dawn.

Another time, late in the spring, as he was wandering through southern Ohio, a man rode up to him and, reining up his horse, asked, "Where are you going?" adding good-naturedly, "Perhaps I can give you a ride."

Sam looked at him and smiled. Something about the man's manner and dress suggested a man of God, and he adopted a mocking expression.

"I'm heading to the New Jerusalem," he said seriously. "I'm someone who's looking for God."

The young priest took the reins with trepidation, but seeing the smile playing at the corners of Sam's mouth, he turned the wheels of his carriage.

"Come in and come with me, and we will talk about the New Jerusalem," he said.

On impulse, Sam got into the buggy and, driving along the dusty road, told the main parts of his story and his search for a purpose he could work towards.

"It would all be simple enough if I were penniless and driven by dire necessity, but that's not the case. I want to work not because it's work and will bring me bread and butter, but because I need to do something that will satisfy me when I'm done. I don't want to serve people so much as I want to serve myself. I want to achieve happiness and usefulness, just as I have for so many years earned money. For a person like me, there is a right way of life, and I want to find it."

A young minister, a graduate of the Lutheran Seminary in Springfield, Ohio, who emerged from college with a very serious outlook on life, took Sam home with him, and together they sat up half the night talking. He had a wife, a country girl with a baby at her breast, who cooked dinner for them and afterward sat in the shade in a corner of the living room, listening to their conversation.

The two men sat together. Sam smoked his pipe, and the minister poked at the coal fire in the stove. They talked about God and what the idea of God meant to people; but the young priest didn't try to answer Sam's problem; on the contrary, Sam found him strikingly dissatisfied and unhappy with his lifestyle.

"There's no spirit of God here," he said, angrily poking at the coals in the stove. "The people here don't want me to talk to them about God. They're not interested in what He wants from them or why He put them here. They want me to tell them about a heavenly city, a kind of glorified Dayton, Ohio, where they can go when they've finished their working lives and put their money away in the savings bank."

Sam stayed with the priest for several days, traveling with him around the country and talking about God. In the evenings, they sat at home, continuing their conversation, and on Sunday, Sam went to hear the man preach at his church.

The sermon disappointed Sam. Although his master spoke energetically and well in private, his public address was pompous and unnatural.

"This man," thought Sam, "has no sense of public speaking, and treats his people badly by not giving them the fullest expression of the ideas he laid before me in his own home." He decided that there was something to be said to the people who had listened patiently week after week, and who had given this man a livelihood for such a paltry effort.

One evening, after Sam had been living with them for a week, his young wife approached him as he stood on the porch in front of the house.

"I wish you'd go away," she said, standing with the baby in her arms and looking at the porch floor. "You're irritating him and making him unhappy."

Sam stepped off the porch and hurried down the road into the darkness. There were tears in his wife's eyes.

In June, he walked with the threshing crew, working among the workers and eating with them in the fields or around the tables of the crowded farmhouses where they stopped to thresh. Each day, Sam and his entourage worked in a different spot, assisted by the farmer for whom they threshed and a few of his neighbors. The farmers worked at a breakneck pace, and the threshing crew had to keep abreast of each new batch day after day. At night, the threshers, too tired to talk, crept into the barn loft, slept until dawn, and then began another day of heartbreaking labor. On Sunday mornings, they went swimming in a stream, and after dinner, they sat in the barn or under the trees of the orchard, sleeping or indulging in distant, fragmented conversations-conversations that never rose above a low, tedious level. They spent hours trying to settle a dispute over whether a horse they'd seen at a farm during the week had three or four white legs, and one member of the crew sat on his heels for long stretches without speaking. On Sunday afternoons, he whittled a stick with a penknife.

The threshing machine Sam operated belonged to a man named Joe, who owed the manufacturer money for it and, after working with the men all day, spent half the night driving around the country, negotiating deals with farmers for other days of threshing. Sam thought he was constantly on the verge of collapse from overwork and worry, and one of the men who had worked with Joe for several seasons told Sam that at the end of the season, their employer didn't have enough money left over from his season's work to pay the interest on his machines, and that he consistently took on jobs for less than the cost of doing them.

"We have to keep moving forward," Joe said when Sam approached him about it one day.

When he was told to keep Sam's salary for the rest of the season, he looked relieved and at the end of the season he approached Sam looking even more worried and said he had no money.

"I will give you a note of great interest if you will give me a little time," he said.

Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of the shadows behind the barn.

"Why don't you give it all up and start working for someone else?" he asked.

Joe looked indignant.

"Man wants independence," he said.

When Sam got back onto the road, he stopped at a small bridge over a stream and tore up Joe's note, watching its fragments float away in the brown water.

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CHAPTER III


Through that summer and into the early fall, Sam continued his wanderings. Days when something happened, or when something outside himself interested or attracted him, were special, providing him with food for hours of reflection, but for the most part he walked and walked for weeks, immersed in a kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. He was always trying to reach the people he encountered and learn something about their way of life and the goal they sought, as well as the many open-mouthed men and women he left on the road and sidewalks of villages, staring at him. He had one principle of action: whenever an idea occurred to him, he did not hesitate but immediately began to test the feasibility of living by that idea, and although practice brought him no end and seemed only to multiply the difficulties of the problem he sought to solve, it brought him many strange experiences.

He once worked for a few days as a bartender in a saloon in eastern Ohio. The saloon was a small wooden building overlooking the railroad tracks, and Sam walked in with a worker he'd met on the sidewalk. It was a wild September night toward the end of his first year as a traveler, and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, buying drinks for the worker and cigars for himself, several men came in and stood at the bar, drinking together. As they drank, they became increasingly friendly, slapping each other on the back, singing songs, and boasting. One of them stepped onto the floor and danced a jig. The owner, a round-faced man with one dead eye who drank heavily himself, set his bottle on the bar and, approaching Sam, began complaining about the lack of a bartender and the long hours he had to work.

"Drink what you want, boys, and then I'll tell you what you owe," he said to the men standing along the bar.

Looking around the room at the men drinking and playing like schoolboys, and looking at the bottle on the counter, the contents of which momentarily brightened the gloomy grayness of the workers' lives, Sam said to himself, "I'll take this deal. I might like it. At least I'll be selling forgetfulness and not wasting my life wandering the road and thinking."

The saloon he worked in was profitable and, despite its obscure location, had left its owner in what was called a "well-maintained" state. A side door opened onto an alley, and this alley led to the town's main street. The front door, facing the railroad tracks, was rarely used-perhaps two or three young men from the freight depot down the tracks would enter at midday and stand there drinking beer-but the trade that flowed through the alley and through the side door was prodigious. All day long, people hurried in and out, downing drinks and rushing out again, scanning the alley and scurrying when they found the way clear. All these men drank whiskey, and after Sam had worked there for a few days, he made the mistake of reaching for the bottle when he heard the door open.

"Let them ask," the owner said rudely. "Do you want to insult a man?"

On Saturdays, the place was full of farmers drinking beer all day, and on other days, at odd hours, men would come in, whining and asking for a drink. Left alone, Sam looked at the men's trembling fingers and placed a bottle in front of them, saying, "Drink as much as you like."

When the owner entered, the people asking for drinks stood by the stove for a while, and then came out with their hands in their coat pockets and looking at the floor.

"The bar flies," the owner explained laconically.

The whiskey was terrible. The owner mixed it himself and poured it into stone jugs under the bar, then poured it into bottles as they emptied. He kept bottles of famous whiskeys in glass cases, but when a man walked in and asked for one of those brands, Sam handed him a bottle with that label from under the bar-a bottle Al had previously filled from jugs of his own blend. Since Al didn't sell mixed drinks, Sam was forced to know nothing about bartending and spent the day dispensing Al's toxic drinks and the foaming glasses of beer the workers drank in the evenings.

Of the men who entered through the side door, the ones that most interested Sam were the shoe salesman, the grocer, the restaurant owner, and the telegraph operator. Several times a day, these men would emerge, glance over their shoulders at the door, and then, turning toward the bar, would give Sam an apologetic look.

"Give me some from the bottle, I have a bad cold," they said, as if repeating a formula.

At the end of the week, Sam was back on the road. The rather odd notion that staying there would sell him oblivion to life's troubles had dissipated on his first day on duty, and his curiosity about his customers proved his undoing. When the men entered through the side door and stood before him, Sam leaned over the bar and asked why they were drinking. Some laughed, some cursed him, and the telegraph operator reported it to Al, calling Sam's question impertinent.

"You fool, don't you know better than throwing stones at a bar?" Al roared and let him go with a curse.

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CHAPTER IV


OH NE PERFECTLY WARM One autumn morning, Sam sat in a small park in the center of a Pennsylvania industrial town, watching men and women walk along the quiet streets to their factories, trying to overcome the depression brought on by the previous evening's experiences. He had driven into town along a poorly made clay road through barren hills, and, depressed and weary, stood on the bank of a river, swollen from the early autumn rains, that flowed along the outskirts of town.

In the distance, he peered into the windows of a huge factory, the black smoke from which added to the gloom of the scene before him. Workers scurried back and forth through the dimly visible windows, appearing and disappearing, the bright light of the furnace flames illuminating them sharply. At his feet, the falling waters, tumbling and spilling over a small dam, fascinated him. As he peered at the rushing water, his head, light with physical fatigue, swayed, and, fearing he might fall, he was forced to clutch tightly to the small tree against which he leaned. In the backyard of the house across the stream from Sam's, facing the factory, four guinea fowl perched on a wooden fence, their strange, plaintive cries providing a particularly fitting accompaniment to the scene unfolding before him. In the yard itself, two ragged birds were fighting each other. Again and again they charged, striking with their beaks and spurs. Exhausted, they began to pick and scratch at the debris in the yard, and when they had recovered somewhat, they resumed the fight. For an hour, Sam watched this scene, his gaze shifting from the river to the gray sky and the factory belching black smoke. He thought that these two feeble birds, lost in their meaningless struggle amidst such mighty force, represented much of the human struggle in the world. He turned and walked along the sidewalks toward the village inn, feeling old and tired. Now, on a bench in a small park, with the early morning sun shining through the glittering raindrops clinging to the red leaves of the trees, he began to lose the feeling of depression that had haunted him all night.

A young man strolling through the park saw him idly watching the hurrying workers and stopped to sit down next to him.

"On the road, brother?" he asked.

Sam shook his head and he began to speak.

"Fools and slaves," he said gravely, gesturing at the men and women walking along the sidewalk. "See how they walk like animals into their slavery? What do they get for it? What kind of life do they lead? The lives of dogs."

He looked at Sam, expecting approval of his opinion.

"We are all fools and slaves," Sam said decisively.

Jumping to his feet, the young man began waving his arms.

"There, you speak reason," he shouted. "Welcome to our city, stranger. We have no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity among them. Come have breakfast with me."

At the restaurant, a young man began talking about himself. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father died while he was still in school, leaving him a modest fortune, which he and his mother lived on. He didn't work and was extremely proud of this fact.

"I refuse to work! I despise it!" he declared, shaking his breakfast bun in the air.

After finishing school, he dedicated himself to the socialist party in his hometown and boasted of his leadership. His mother, he claimed, was alarmed and concerned about his involvement with the movement.

"She wants me to act respectable," he said sadly, adding, "What's the point of trying to explain it to a woman? I can't make her see the difference between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist, and I've given up trying. She expects me to end up blowing someone up with dynamite or going to jail for throwing bricks at the local police."

He told of a strike going on among the workers at a Jewish shirt factory in the city, and Sam, immediately interested, began asking questions and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to the scene of the strike.

The shirt factory was located in the attic above a grocery store, and three picket lines of girls were pacing the sidewalk in front of the store. A brightly dressed Jewish man, smoking a cigar and with his hands in his pockets, stood on the stairs leading to the attic and glared at the young socialist and Sam. A stream of vile words, pretending to address them to empty air, poured from his lips. When Sam approached him, he turned and ran up the stairs, shouting curses over his shoulder.

Sam joined the three girls and began talking to them, walking back and forth with them in front of the grocery store.

"What do you do to win?" he asked when they told him of their grievances.

"We're doing what we can!" said a Jewish girl with wide hips, large motherly breasts, and beautiful, soft brown eyes, who appeared to be the leader and spokesperson among the strikers. "We walk back and forth here and try to talk to the strikebreakers the boss brought in from other towns as they come and go."

Frank, the university man, weighed in. "We put stickers up everywhere," he said. "I've put up hundreds of them myself."

He pulled a printed sheet of paper, taped shut on one side, from his coat pocket and told Sam he'd been hanging them on walls and telegraph poles all over town. The story was vilely worded. "Down with Dirty Scabs," the headline read, written in bold black letters at the top.

Sam was shocked by the vileness of the signature and the crude cruelty of the text printed on the sheet of paper.

"Is that what you call the workers?" he asked.

"They took our jobs," the Jewish girl replied simply, and began again, telling the story of her striking sisters and what low wages meant to them and their families. "It's not that big a deal to me; I have a brother who works in a clothing store, and he can support me, but many of the women in our union here only have a paycheck to feed their families."

Sam's mind began to work on the problem.

"Here," he declared, "something definite needs to be done, a battle in which I will take on this employer for the sake of these women."

He dismissed his experience in the Illinois town, telling himself that the young woman walking beside him would have a sense of honor unknown to the red-haired young laborer who had sold him to Bill and Ed.

"I don"t have money," he thought, "now I"ll try to help these girls with my energy."

After approaching the Jewish girl, he made a quick decision.

"I'll help you get your places back," he said.

Leaving the girls, he crossed the street to the barber shop, where he could observe the factory entrance. He wanted to plan his course of action and also wanted to observe the female strikebreakers as they arrived for work. After a while, several girls walked down the street and turned onto the stairs. A brightly dressed Jewish man, smoking a cigar, stood again at the entrance to the stairs. Three pickets, running forward, attacked a group of girls climbing the stairs. One of them, a young American with yellow hair, turned and shouted something over her shoulder. A man named Frank shouted back, and the Jew took the cigar out of his mouth and laughed heartily. Sam filled and lit his pipe, and a dozen plans for helping the striking girls raced through his mind.

In the morning, he stopped at the corner grocery store, the saloon next door, and returned to the barber shop, chatting with the strikers. He ate lunch alone, still thinking about the three girls patiently walking up and down the stairs. Their incessant walking seemed a waste of energy to him.

"They should do something more definite," he thought.

After dinner he joined a good-natured Jewish girl and they walked down the street together, discussing the strike.

"You can"t win this strike just by calling them names," he said. "I don"t like the "dirty crust" sticker Frank had in his pocket. It doesn"t help you and it only irritates the girls who took your place. People here in this part of town want to see you win. I"ve talked to the men who come into the saloon and barber shop across the street, and you"ve already earned their sympathy. You want to win the sympathy of the girls who took your place. Calling them dirty crusts only makes them martyrs. Did the yellow-haired girl call you names this morning?"

The Jewish girl looked at Sam and laughed bitterly.

"Rather; she called me a loud street person."

They continued down the street, crossed the railroad tracks and a bridge, and found themselves on a quiet residential street. Carriages were parked at the curb in front of houses, and pointing to these and the well-kept houses, Sam said, "Men buy these things for their women."

A shadow fell across the girl's face.

"I believe we all want what these women have," she replied. "We don't really want to fight and stand on our own two feet, at least not when we know the world. What a woman really wants is a man," she added curtly.

Sam began to talk and told her about a plan he'd come up with. He remembered Jack Prince and Morrison talking about the appeal of the direct personal letter and how effectively it was used by mail order companies.

"We're going to have a mail strike here," he said, and went on to detail his plan. He suggested that she, Frank, and several other striking girls walk around the city and find out the names and mailing addresses of the strikebreaking girls.

"Find out the names of the boarding house keepers where these girls live, and the names of the men and women who live in those same houses," he suggested. "Then gather the brightest girls and women together and invite them to tell me their stories. We will write letters day after day to the strikebreaking girls, the women who run the boarding houses, and the people who live in the houses and sit at their table. We will not name names. We will tell the story of what it means to be defeated in this struggle for the women in your union, tell it simply and truthfully, as you told it to me this morning."

"It will cost a lot," said the Jewish girl, shaking her head.

Sam took a wad of bills out of his pocket and showed it to her.

"I'll pay," he said.

"Why?" she asked, looking at him intently.

"Because I'm a man who wants to work just like you," he replied, then quickly continued, "It's a long story. I'm a rich man wandering the world in search of Truth. I don't want this to become known. Take me for granted. You won't regret it."

Within an hour, he had rented a large room, paying a month's rent in advance, and chairs, a table, and typewriters were brought into the room. He placed an ad in the evening paper for female stenographers, and the printer, urged on by the promise of extra pay, produced several thousand forms for him, with the words "Girl Strikers" written at the top in bold black type.

That night, Sam held a meeting of the striking girls in a room he'd rented, explaining his plan and offering to cover all the expenses of the struggle he proposed to wage for them. They clapped and cheered, and Sam began to outline his campaign.

He ordered one of the girls to stand in front of the factory in the morning and evening.

"I'll have other help for you there," he said. "This evening, before you go home, the printer will be here with a batch of brochures I printed for you."

On the advice of a kindly Jewish girl, he encouraged others to obtain additional names for the mailing list he needed, and he received many important names from the girls in the room. He asked six of the girls to come in the morning to help him with the addresses and mailing of the letters. He assigned the Jewish girl to take charge of the girls working in the room, which would become the office the following day, and to oversee the receipt of the names.

Frank rose in the back of the room.

"Who are you anyway?" he asked.

"A man with money and the ability to win this strike," Sam told him.

"Why are you doing this?" Frank demanded.

The Jewish girl jumped to her feet.

"Because he believes in these women and wants to help," she explained.

"Moth," Frank said, walking out the door.

When the meeting ended, it was snowing, and Sam and the Jewish girl finished their conversation in the hallway leading to her room.

"I don't know what Harrigan, the union leader from Pittsburgh, will say about this," she told him. "He's put Frank in charge of leading and directing the strike here. He doesn't like interference, and he might not like your plan. But we working women need men, men like you, who can plan and get things done. We have too many men living here. We need men who will work for us all, the way men work for the women in carriages and cars." She laughed and extended her hand. "See what you've gotten yourself into? I want you to be the husband of our entire union."

The next morning, four young women stenographers went to work at Sam's strike headquarters, and he wrote his first strike letter, a letter telling the story of a striking girl named Hadaway, whose younger brother was ill with tuberculosis. Sam didn't sign the letter; he felt he didn't need to. He thought that with twenty or thirty such letters, each briefly and truthfully telling the story of one of the amazing girls, he could show one American city how its other half lived. He passed the letter on to four young women stenographers on a mailing list he already had and began writing to each of them.

At eight o'clock, a man arrived to install the telephone, and the striking girls began adding new names to the mailing list. At nine o'clock, three more stenographers arrived and were pressed into service, and the former girls began submitting new names by telephone. The Jewish girl paced back and forth, giving orders and making suggestions. From time to time, she ran up to Sam's desk and suggested other sources for names on the mailing list. Sam thought that while the other working girls had seemed timid and embarrassed before him, this one was not. She was like a general on the battlefield. Her soft brown eyes glowed, her mind worked quickly, and her voice was clear. At her suggestion, Sam gave the girls at the typewriters lists of the names of city officials, bankers, and prominent businessmen, as well as the wives of all these men, as well as the presidents of various women's clubs, socialites, and charitable organizations. She called reporters from two city dailies and asked them to interview Sam, and at her suggestion, he gave them printed copies of the Hadaway girl's letter.

"Print it," he said, "and if you can't use it as news, make it into an advertisement and bring me the bill."

At eleven o'clock, Frank entered the room with a tall Irishman with sunken cheeks, black, dirty teeth, and a coat that was too tight for him. Leaving him standing by the door, Frank crossed the room to Sam.

"Come and have lunch with us," he said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the tall Irishman. "I picked him up," he said. "The best brain this town has had in years. He's a marvel. Used to be a Catholic priest. He doesn't believe in God, or love, or anything else. Come out and listen to him talk. He's magnificent."

Sam shook his head.

"I'm too busy. There's work to be done here. We're going to win this strike."

Frank looked at him doubtfully, then at the busy girls.

"I don't know what Harrigan will think of all this," he said. "He doesn't like interference. I never do anything without writing to him. I wrote and told him what you were doing here. I had to, you see. I'm responsible to headquarters."

That afternoon, a Jewish shirt factory owner came to strike headquarters, walked across the room, took off his hat, and sat down near Sam's desk.

"What do you want here?" he asked. "The guys from the newspapers told me what you were planning to do. What's your game?"

"I want to spank you," Sam replied quietly, "to spank you properly. You might as well stand in line. You'll lose this one."

"I'm just one," said the Jew. "We have a shirt makers' association. We're all in this. We're all on strike. What will you gain by defeating me here? After all, I'm just a little man."

Sam laughed and, taking a pen, began to write.

"You're unlucky," he said. "I just happened to get a foothold here. Once I beat you, I'll go on and beat the rest. I'll bring in more money than all of you, and I'm going to beat every single one of you."

The next morning, a crowd stood in front of the steps leading to the factory when the strikebreaking girls arrived for work. Letters and newspaper interviews had proven effective, and more than half the strikebreakers did not show up. The rest hurried down the street and turned onto the steps, ignoring the crowd. The girl Sam had scolded stood on the sidewalk handing out pamphlets to the strikebreakers. The pamphlets were titled "The Story of Ten Girls" and briefly and meaningfully told the stories of the ten striking girls and what losing the strike meant to them and their families.

After a while, two carriages and a large car pulled up, and a well-dressed woman emerged from the car, took a bundle of pamphlets from a group of girls on the picket line, and began distributing them. Two police officers standing in front of the crowd removed their helmets and escorted her. The crowd applauded. Frank hurried across the street to where Sam stood in front of the barbershop and slapped him on the back.

"You are a miracle," he said.

Sam hurried back to his room and prepared a second letter for the mailing list. Two more stenographers arrived at work. He had to send for more machines. A reporter from the city evening newspaper ran up the stairs.

"Who are you?" he asked. "The city wants to know."

From his pocket he took a telegram from a Pittsburgh newspaper.

"What about the strike plan by mail? State the name and background of the new strike leader.

At ten o'clock Frank returned.

"There's a telegram from Harrigan," he said. "He's coming here. He wants a big meeting of the girls tonight. I'm supposed to get them together. We'll meet here in this room.

Work continued in the room. The mailing list doubled. A picket line outside the shirt factory reported that three more strikebreakers had left. The Jewish girl was agitated. She paced the room, her eyes shining.

"This is great," she said. "The plan is working. The whole city is excited for us too. We'll win in another twenty-four hours."

Then, at seven o'clock that evening, Harrigan entered the room where Sam was sitting with the assembled girls and locked the door behind him. He was a short, stocky man with blue eyes and red hair. He paced the room silently, followed by Frank. Suddenly, he stopped and, picking up one of the typewriters Sam had rented for writing letters, lifted it above his head and threw it on the floor.

"Disgusting strike leader," he roared. "Look at this. Lousy machines!"

"Stenographer's scab!" he said through clenched teeth. "Scab the printing! Scratch it all out!"

Taking the stack of forms, he tore them up and walked to the front of the room, shaking his fist in Sam's face.

"Leader of the Scabs!" he shouted, turning to the girls.

The soft-eyed Jewish girl jumped to her feet.

"He wins for us," she said.

Harrigan approached her menacingly.

"It's better to lose than to win a lousy victory," he roared.

"Who are you anyway? What kind of swindler sent you here?" he demanded, turning to Sam.

He began his speech. "I've been watching this guy, I know him. He has a plan to destroy the union, and he's on the payroll of the capitalists."

Sam waited, hoping to hear no more. He stood up, put on his canvas jacket, and headed for the door. He knew he was already involved in a dozen union code violations, and the thought of trying to convince Harrigan of his selflessness didn't occur to him.

"Don't pay any attention to me," he said, "I'm leaving."

He walked between the rows of frightened, pale-faced girls and unlocked the door; the Jewish girl followed him. At the top of the stairs leading to the street, he stopped and pointed back into the room.

"Come back," he said, handing her a wad of bills. "Keep working if you can. Get more machines and a new stamp. I'll help you secretly."

Turning, he ran down the stairs, hurried through the curious crowd standing at the foot, and walked quickly forward in front of the illuminated shops. A cold rain, half snow, was falling. Beside him walked a young man with a brown, pointed beard, one of the newspaper reporters who had interviewed him the day before.

"Harrigan cut you off?" the young man asked, then added, laughing, "He told us he intended to throw you down the stairs."

Sam walked silently, filled with anger. He turned into an alley and stopped when his companion placed a hand on his shoulder.

"This is our dump," the young man said, pointing to a long, low frame building overlooking the alley. "Come in and tell us your story. It should be good."

Another young man sat in the newspaper office, his head resting on his desk. He was dressed in a strikingly bright checkered frock coat, had a slightly wrinkled, good-natured face, and appeared to be drunk. The bearded young man explained Sam's identity by taking the sleeping man by the shoulder and shaking him vigorously.

"Wake up, skipper! There's a good story here!" he shouted. "The union has kicked out the strike leader by mail!"

The skipper rose to his feet and began shaking his head.

"Of course, of course, Old Top, they would have fired you. You have some brains. No man with brains could lead a strike. It's against the laws of Nature. Something was bound to strike you. Did the thug come from Pittsburgh?" he asked, turning to a young man with a brown beard.

Then, looking up and taking a cap that matched his plaid coat from a nail on the wall, he winked at Sam. "Come on, Old Top. I need a drink.

The two men walked through a side door and down a dark alley, entering the saloon's back door. The mud lay deep in the alley, and Skipper waded through it, spattering Sam's clothes and face. In the saloon, at a table across from Sam, a bottle of French wine between them, he began to explain.

"I have a bill due this morning, and I haven't got the money to pay it," he said. "When it comes due, I'm always broke, and I always get drunk. The next morning, I pay the bill. I don't know how I do it, but I always do. It's the system. Now about this strike." He immersed himself in discussing the strike, while the men came and went, laughing and drinking. At ten o'clock, the landlord locked the front door, drew the curtain, and, going to the back of the room, sat down at the table with Sam and Skipper, bringing out another bottle of French wine, from which the two men continued to drink.

"That man from Pittsburgh robbed your house, didn't he?" he said, turning to Sam. "A man came here this evening and told me. He sent for the typewriter people and made them take the machines."

When they were ready to leave, Sam pulled money from his pocket and offered to pay for the bottle of French wine ordered by Skipper, who stood up and staggered to his feet.

"Are you trying to insult me?" he demanded indignantly, throwing a twenty-dollar bill on the table. The owner returned only fourteen dollars.

"I might as well wipe the board while you wash up," he remarked, winking at Sam.

The skipper sat down again, took a pencil and notepad out of his pocket and threw them on the table.

"I need an editorial about the strike at the Old Rag," he told Sam. "Make one for me. Do something strong. Strike. I want to talk to my friend here.

Sam placed his notebook on the table and began writing an editorial for the newspaper. His head seemed remarkably clear, and his words unusually well-written. He drew public attention to the situation, the struggle of the striking girls, and the intelligent fight they were waging for victory in a just cause. He then pointed out in paragraphs that the effectiveness of the work done had been nullified by the position adopted by the labor and socialist leaders.

"These guys don't really care about the results," he wrote. "They don't care about the unemployed women who need to support their families; they only care about themselves and their puny leadership, which they fear is under threat. Now we're in for the usual display of the old ways: struggle, hatred, and defeat."

When he finished "Skipper," Sam returned through the alley to the newspaper office. Skipper was splashing through the mud again, carrying a bottle of red gin. At his desk, he took the editorial from Sam's hand and read it.

"Perfect! Perfect to the thousandth of an inch, Old Top," he said, clapping Sam on the shoulder. "Just what Old Rag meant about the strike." Then, climbing onto the desk and propping his head on his plaid coat, he fell asleep peacefully, and Sam, sitting near the desk in a rickety office chair, slept too. At dawn they were awakened by a Negro with a broom in his hand, and, entering a long, low room full of presses, Skipper put his head under the water tap and returned waving a dirty towel and with water dripping from his hair.

"And now about the day and its labors," he said, grinning at Sam and taking a long swig from the bottle of gin.

After breakfast, he and Sam took a place in front of the barber shop, opposite the stairs leading to the shirt factory. Sam's girlfriend with the pamphlets had disappeared, as had the quiet Jewish girl, and in their place, Frank and a Pittsburgh leader named Harrigan were pacing back and forth. Again, carriages and automobiles were parked at the curb, and again, a well-dressed woman emerged from a car and walked toward three brightly colored girls approaching on the sidewalk. Harrigan greeted the woman, shaking his fist and shouting, before returning to the car she had driven away from. From the stairs, the brightly dressed Jewish man looked out at the crowd and laughed.

"Where's the new mail-order striker?" he called to Frank.

With these words, a worker ran out of the crowd with a bucket in his hand and knocked the Jew back onto the stairs.

"Hit him! Hit the dirty leader of the filthy!" Frank shouted, dancing back and forth on the sidewalk.

Two police officers ran forward and led the worker down the street, still clutching the lunch bucket in one hand.

"I know something," Skipper shouted, clapping Sam on the shoulder. "I know who'll sign this note with me. The woman Harrigan forced back into his car is the richest woman in town. I'll show her your editorial. She'll think I wrote it and she'll understand. You'll see." He ran down the street, shouting over his shoulder, "Come to the junkyard, I want to see you again."

Sam returned to the newspaper office and sat down to wait for Skipper, who entered a short time later, took off his coat, and began writing furiously. Every now and then, he took large swigs from a bottle of red gin and, silently offering it to Sam, continued to scroll through page after page of scrawled material.

"I asked her to sign a note," he said over his shoulder to Sam. "She was furious with Harrigan, and when I told her we were going to attack him and protect you, she quickly fell for it. I won by following my system. I always get drunk, and that always wins."

At ten o'clock, the newspaper office was in a state of commotion. A small man with a brown, pointed beard and another man ran to Skipper, asking for advice, laying out typewritten sheets of paper before him, and telling him how they'd written them.

"Give me a direction. I need another headline on the front page," Skipper continued to yell at them, working like a madman.

At ten-thirty, the door opened and Harrigan walked in, accompanied by Frank. Seeing Sam, they paused, looking uncertainly at him and the man working at the desk.

"Come on, talk. This isn't a ladies' room. What do you guys want?" Skipper barked, looking at them.

Frank came forward and placed a typewritten sheet of paper on the table, which the newspaperman read hastily.

"Will you use it?" Frank asked.

The skipper laughed.

"I wouldn't change a word," he shouted. "Of course I'll use it. That's what I wanted to get across. Guys, watch me."

Frank and Harrigan walked out, and Skipper rushed to the door and began shouting into the room beyond.

"Hey, Shorty and Tom, I have one last lead."

Returning to the desk, he began writing again, grinning as he worked. He handed Sam the typed sheet Frank had prepared.

"A vile attempt to win the workers' cause by the dirty, lousy leaders and the slippery capitalist class," it began, followed by a wild jumble of words, meaningless words, meaningless sentences, in which Sam was called a floury, chatty mail-order collector, and Skipper was casually referred to as a craven ink-slinger.

"I'll review the material and comment on it," Skipper said, handing Sam what he'd written. It was an editorial offering the public an article prepared for publication by the strike leaders, and expressing sympathy for the striking girls, who felt their case had been lost due to the incompetence and folly of their leaders.

"Hurrah for Rafhouse, the brave man who leads the working girls to defeat so that he can retain the lead and achieve reasonable efforts in the cause of labor," wrote Skipper.

Sam looked at the sheets and out the window, where a snowstorm raged. He felt as if a crime was being committed, and he felt sick and disgusted by his own inability to stop it. The skipper lit a short black pipe and took his cap from its nail on the wall.

"I'm the nicest newspaper guy in town, and a bit of a financier, too," he said. "Let's go have a drink."

After drinking, Sam walked through town toward the countryside. On the outskirts of town, where houses were scattered and the road began to disappear into a deep valley, someone behind him said hello. Turning, he saw a soft-eyed Jewish girl running along a path beside the road.

"Where are you going?" he asked, stopping to lean against the wooden fence, snow falling on his face.

"I'll go with you," the girl said. "You're the best and strongest person I've ever seen, and I won't let you go. If you have a wife, it doesn't matter. She's not what she should be, or you wouldn't be wandering the country alone. Harrigan and Frank say you're crazy, but I know better. I'll go with you and help you find what you want."

Sam thought for a moment. She pulled a wad of bills from her dress pocket and gave it to him.

"I spent three hundred and fourteen dollars," she said.

They stood looking at each other. She reached out and placed her hand on his shoulder. Her eyes, soft and now glowing with a hungry light, looked at him. Her round chest rose and fell.

"Wherever you say. I will be your servant if you ask me to.

Sam was overcome by a wave of burning desire, followed by a swift reaction. He thought about the months of tedious searching and his overall failure.

"You'll go back to town if I have to stone you," he told her, turning and running down the valley, leaving her standing by the board fence with her head in her hands.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER V


ABOUT NE CRISP WINTER One evening, Sam found himself on a busy street corner in Rochester, New York, watching from a doorway as crowds of people hurried or milled about. He stood in a doorway near what appeared to be a social gathering place, and from all directions, men and women approached, met at the corner, stood for a moment talking, and then left together. Sam found himself beginning to wonder about meetings. In the year since he left the Chicago office, his mind had become increasingly wistful. Little things-the smile on the lips of a shabbily dressed old man muttering and hurrying past him on the street, or the wave of a child's hand from the door of a farmhouse-had given him food for many hours of thought. Now he watched the little happenings with interest: nods, handshakes, hurried, furtive glances from men and women who met momentarily on the corner. On the sidewalk outside his door, several middle-aged men, apparently from the large hotel around the corner, looked unpleasant and hungry and furtively glanced at the women in the crowd.

A large blonde appeared in the doorway next to Sam. "Waiting for someone?" she asked, smiling and looking at him intently with that restless, uncertain, and hungry light he'd seen in the eyes of middle-aged men on the sidewalk.

"What are you doing here with your husband at work?" he ventured.

She looked scared and then laughed.

"Why don't you punch me if you want to shake me like that?" she demanded, adding, "I don't know who you are, but whoever you are, I want to tell you that I left my husband."

"Why?" Sam asked.

She laughed again and, coming closer, looked at him carefully.

"I think you're bluffing," she said. "I don't believe you even know Alf. And I'm glad you don't. I left Alf, but he'd still raise Cain if he saw me hanging around here."

Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down the alley past the illuminated theater. Women on the street glanced up at him, and behind the theater, a young woman brushed against him and muttered, "Hi, Sport!"

Sam longed to escape the sick, hungry look he saw in the eyes of men and women. His mind began to dwell on this aspect of the lives of countless people in cities-men and women on street corners, the woman who, from the safety of a comfortable marriage, had once challenged him to his face as they sat together in the theater, and a thousand little incidents in the lives of all modern city men and women. He wondered how much this greedy, agonizing hunger prevented men from taking up life and living it seriously and purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he sensed that all men and women, deep down, wanted to live it. As a boy in Caxton, he had often been struck by outbursts of cruelty and rudeness in the speech and actions of kind, well-meaning people; now, walking the city streets, he thought he was no longer afraid. "It's the quality of our lives," he decided. "American men and women have not learned to be pure, noble, and natural, like their forests and their wide, clear plains."

He thought of what he had heard of London, Paris, and other cities of the old world; and, following an impulse acquired in his solitary wanderings, he began to talk to himself.

"We are no better or purer than these," he said, "and we descend from a vast, pure new land, across which I have walked all these months. Will humanity forever continue to live with the same agonizing, strangely expressed hunger in its blood and with such a look in its eyes? Will it never rid itself of itself, understand itself, and turn fiercely and energetically to the building of a greater and purer human race?"

"Not unless you help," came the answer from some hidden part of his soul.

Sam began to think about the people who write and those who teach, and he wondered why they all don't speak more thoughtfully about vice, and why they so often waste their talents and their energies on futile attacks on some stage of life and end their efforts to improve humanity by joining or promoting a temperance league, or by giving up playing baseball on Sundays.

Indeed, weren't many writers and reformers unconsciously in league with the pimp, considering vice and debauchery to be essentially charming? He himself saw none of this vague charm.

"For me," he reflected, "there was no François Villon or Safos in the clippings of American cities. Instead, there was only heartbreaking illness, ill health, and poverty, stern, cruel faces, and tattered, greasy clothes."

He thought of people like Zola, who saw this side of life clearly, and how he, as a young man in the city, had read this man at Janet Eberle's suggestion and been helped-helped, frightened, and forced to see. And then there came into his mind the grinning face of the used-bookstore owner in Cleveland, who a few weeks ago had slid a paperback copy of Nana's Brother across the counter and said with a grin, "It's something sporty." And he wondered what he would think if he had bought the book to stimulate the imagination the bookseller's comment was meant to awaken.

In the small towns Sam roamed, and in the small town where he grew up, vice was overtly crude and masculine. He fell asleep sprawled on a dirty, beer-soaked table in Art Sherman's saloon in Piety Hollow, and a newsboy passed him by without comment, regretting that he was asleep and that he had no money to buy newspapers.

"Debauchery and vice are permeating the lives of young people," he thought as he approached a street corner where young men were playing billiards and smoking cigarettes in a darkened pool hall, and turned back toward the city center. "It permeates all modern life. A farm boy coming to the city to work hears lewd stories in a steaming train car, and men traveling from the cities tell a group stories about city streets and stoves in village stores."

Sam wasn't bothered by the touch of vice in his youth. Such things were part of the world men and women created for their sons and daughters to live in, and that night, wandering the streets of Rochester, he thought he wished all young people knew, if they could know, the truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of the people who lent a romantic charm to the filthy and ugly things he saw in this city and in every city he knew.

A drunken man with a boy at his side stumbled past him down a street lined with small frame houses, and Sam's thoughts went back to those first years he had spent in the city and to the staggering old man he had left behind him in Caxton.

"One would think there was no man better armed against vice and debauchery than this artist's son, Caxton," he reminded himself, "and yet he embraced vice. He discovered, like all young men, that there was much misleading talk and writing on the subject. The businessmen he knew refused to part with their best help because they would not sign a pledge. Ability was too rare and too independent a thing to sign oaths, and the feminine notion, 'lips that touch liquor will never touch mine,' was reserved for lips that did not invite.

He began to recall the carousing he'd done with his fellow businessmen, the policeman he'd run over in the street, and himself, quietly and skillfully climbing onto tables to deliver speeches and shout out the deepest secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on... in Chicago bars. He wasn't usually a good conversationalist. He was a man who kept to himself. But during these carousing sessions, he let loose and earned a reputation as a bold and daring man, slapping men on the back and singing along. He was overcome with a fiery warmth, and for a while, he truly believed there was such a thing as high-flying vice that glittered in the sun.

Now, stumbling past illuminated salons, wandering the unknown streets of the city, he knew better. Any vice was impure, unhealthy.

He remembered the hotel where he had once slept, a hotel where dubious couples were admitted. Its halls had become dark; its windows remained unopened; dirt had collected in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they walked, peering intently into the faces of stealthy couples; the curtains on the windows were torn and discolored; strange, growling curses, cries, and yells irritated his strained nerves; peace and purity had left the place; men hurried through the halls with hats pulled down over their faces; sunlight, fresh air, and cheerful, whistling bellhops were locked out.

He thought of the tedious, restless walks of young men from farms and villages through city streets; young men who believed in the golden vice. Hands beckoned them from doorways, and the women of the city laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago, he walked just like that. He also searched, searched for the romantic, impossible lover who lurked in the depths of men's stories about the underwater world. He wanted his golden girl. He was like the naive German boy from the warehouses on South Water Street who once told him (he was a thrifty soul): "I'd like to find a nice girl, quiet and modest, who would be my mistress, and not charge for anything."

Sam hadn't found his golden girl, and now he knew she didn't exist. He hadn't seen the places preachers called dens of sin, and now he knew such places didn't exist. He wondered why the youth couldn't be made to understand that sin was vile and that immorality smacked of vulgarity. Why couldn't they be told outright that there were no cleanup days in the Tenderloin?

During his married life, men had come to the house and discussed this matter. He remembered one of them firmly insisting that the scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary, decent social life could not continue without it. Over the past year, Sam had often thought about this man's conversations, and his mind had reeled from the thought. In towns and on country roads, he had seen crowds of little girls, laughing and shouting, emerging from schoolhouses, and he had wondered which of them would be chosen for this service to humanity; and now, in his hour of depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his dinner table could come with him and share his thoughts.

Turning back onto a bright, bustling city street, Sam continued to study the faces in the crowd. This calmed his mind. His legs were beginning to feel tired and he thought gratefully that he should get a good night's sleep. The sea of faces rolling toward him under the lights filled him with peace. "There's so much life," he thought, "that it must come to an end."

Looking closely at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the faces elongated and almost meeting above the nose, the faces with long, heavy, sensual jaws and the empty, soft faces on which the burning finger of thought had left no trace, his fingers ached, trying to take the pencil in his hand or to put the faces on the canvas with permanent pigments, to show them to the world and to be able to say: "These are the faces that you, your lives, have made for yourselves and for your children."

In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a small tobacconist's counter to buy fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so intently at a woman dressed in long soft furs that she hurried anxiously to her machine to wait for her escort, who had apparently come up in the elevator.

Once outside, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that had toiled over the soft cheeks and serene eyes of that one woman. He remembered the face and figure of the little Canadian nurse who had once tended him during his illness-her quick, deft fingers and muscular little hands. "Another like her," he murmured, "has worked on the face and body of this gentlewoman; a hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to procure the warm furs that adorn her; for her there has been tragedy-a shot, and red blood on the snow, and a struggling beast waving its claws in the air; for her the woman has toiled all morning, washing her white limbs, her cheeks, her hair."

A man had also been appointed for this gentlewoman, a man like himself, a man who had deceived and lied and spent years chasing dollars to pay everyone else, a man of power, a man who could achieve, who could accomplish. He felt a renewed yearning for the artist's power, the power not only to see the meaning of faces on the street but to reproduce what he saw, to convey with slender fingers the story of human achievement in the faces hanging on the wall.

On other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer speak, and in Chicago and New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get a sense of the artist's passion; now, walking and looking at the faces passing him down the long street, he thought he understood.

Once, when he had just arrived in town, he had been carrying on an affair for several months with a woman, the daughter of a cattle rancher from Iowa. Now her face filled his field of vision. How solid it was, how charged with the message of the earth beneath his feet; thick lips, dull eyes, a strong, bullet-like head-how they resembled the cattle her father bought and sold. He remembered the small room in Chicago where he had had his first love affair with this woman. How sincere and healthy it had seemed. With what joy both man and woman had hurried to the rendezvous in the evening. How her strong arms had clasped his. The woman's face in the car outside the office building danced before his eyes, a face so peaceful, so free of traces of human passion, and he wondered which cattle rancher's daughter had deprived the man who had paid for the beauty of that face of passion.

In an alley, near the illuminated facade of a cheap theater, a woman standing alone and half hidden in the doorway of a church quietly called out to him, and, turning, he approached her.

"I'm not a client," he said, looking at her thin face and bony hands, "but if you'd like to come with me, I'll treat you to a good dinner. I'm hungry and I don't like eating alone. I want someone to talk to me so I don't have to think."

"You're a strange bird," the woman said, taking his hand. "What have you done that you don't want to think about?"

Sam said nothing.

"There's a place over there," she said, pointing to the illuminated facade of a cheap restaurant with dirty curtains on the windows.

Sam kept walking.

"If you don't mind," he said, "I'll choose this place. I want to buy a good dinner. I need a place with clean linen on the table and a good cook in the kitchen."

They stopped at the corner to talk about dinner, and at her suggestion, he waited at a nearby drugstore while she went to her room. While he waited, he went to the phone and ordered dinner and a taxi. When she returned, she was wearing a clean shirt and her hair was combed. Sam thought he caught the scent of gasoline, and he assumed she was working on the stains on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still waiting.

"I thought maybe it was a stall," she said.

They rode in silence to the place Sam had in mind: a roadside cottage with clean, scrubbed floors, painted walls, and open fireplaces in the private dining rooms. Sam had been there several times over the course of a month, and the food was well prepared.

They ate in silence. Sam wasn't interested in hearing her talk about herself, and she didn't seem to know how to make small talk. He didn't study her, but brought her, as he'd said, because he was lonely and because her thin, tired face and frail body, peering out from the darkness by the church door, called to him.

She had, he thought, an air of stern chastity, like someone who had been spanked but not beaten. Her cheeks were thin and freckled, like a boy's. Her teeth were broken and in poor condition, though clean, and her hands looked worn and barely used, like his own mother's. Now, as she sat before him in the restaurant, she vaguely resembled his mother.

After dinner, he sat smoking a cigar and looking into the fire. A street woman leaned across the table and touched his arm.

"Are you going to take me somewhere after this-after we leave here?" she said.

"I'm going to take you to the door of your room, that's all."

"I'm glad," she said. "I haven't had an evening like this in a long time. It makes me feel clean."

They sat in silence for a while, and then Sam began talking about his hometown in Iowa, letting go and expressing the thoughts that came to him. He told her about his mother and Mary Underwood, and she, in turn, talked about her hometown and her life. She had a slight hearing problem, which made conversation difficult. Words and sentences had to be repeated to her, and after a while, Sam lit a cigarette and looked into the fire, giving her a chance to speak. Her father was the captain of a small steamboat plying Long Island Sound, and her mother was a caring, insightful woman and a good housewife. They lived in a village in Rhode Island, and they had a garden behind their house. The captain didn't marry until he was forty-five and died when she was eighteen, and her mother died a year later.

The girl was little known in her Rhode Island village, shy and reserved. She kept the house clean and helped the captain in the garden. When her parents died, she was left alone with thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and a small house. She married a young man who worked as a clerk in a railroad office and sold the house to move to Kansas City. The great plains terrified her. Her life there had been unhappy. She was lonely among the hills and waters of her New England village, and by nature, she was reserved and dispassionate, so she had little success in winning her husband's affection. He undoubtedly married her for the small treasure and began to extract it from her in various ways. She gave birth to a son, her health deteriorated for a time, and she accidentally discovered that her husband was spending her money on debauchery among the women of the city.

"It was no use wasting words when I found out he didn't care about me or the baby or support us, so I left him," she said in a flat, businesslike tone.

By the time she reached the count, after separating from her husband and taking a shorthand course, she had a thousand dollars in savings and felt completely secure. She took a stand and went to work, feeling quite satisfied and happy. Then she began having trouble hearing. She began losing jobs, and eventually had to settle for a small salary copying forms for the witch doctor by mail. She gave the boy to a talented German woman, the gardener's wife. She paid him four dollars a week for him, and they were able to buy clothes for herself and the boy. Her salary from the witch doctor was seven dollars a week.

"So," she said, "I started going out on the streets. I didn"t know anyone, and I had nothing else to do. I couldn"t do that in the town where the boy lived, so I left. I went from town to town, working mostly for patent medicine men and supplementing my income with what I earned on the street. I"m not the kind of woman who cares about men, and not many of them care about me. I don"t like it when they touch me with their hands. I can"t drink like most girls; it makes me sick. I want to be left alone. Maybe I shouldn"t have married. Not that I minded my husband. We got along very well until I had to stop giving him money. When I realized where he was going, my eyes were opened. I felt I needed to have at least a thousand dollars for the boy in case something happened to me. When I found out I had nothing better to do than just go out on the streets, I went. I tried other jobs, but I had no energy, and when it came to the exam, I cared more about the boy than about myself-any woman would have. I thought he was more important than what I wanted.

"It wasn't easy for me. Sometimes, when a man is with me, I walk down the street, praying that I won't flinch or back away when he touches me with his hands. I know that if I do, he'll leave, and I won't get any money.

"And then they talk and lie about themselves. I made them try to work me off for bad money and worthless jewelry. Sometimes they try to make love to me, and then steal the money they gave me. That's the hardest part-lying and pretending. All day long I write the same lies over and over again for the patent doctors, and at night I listen to these others lie to me."

She fell silent, leaned over, propped her cheek on her hand and sat looking into the fire.

"My mother," she began again, "didn"t always wear a clean dress. She couldn"t. She was always on her knees scrubbing the floor or pulling weeds in the garden. But she hated dirt. If her dress was dirty, her underwear was clean, and so was her body. She taught me to be like that, and I wanted to be like that. It happened naturally. But I"m losing it all. I sit here with you all evening thinking that my underwear isn"t clean. Most of the time, I don"t care. Being clean doesn"t fit with what I do. I have to keep trying to look bright on the street, so that men stop when they see me on the street. Sometimes, when I"m doing well, I don"t go out for three or four weeks. Then I clean my room and take a bath. My landlady lets me do the laundry in the basement at night. I don"t seem to care about cleanliness on the weeks I"m on the street."

A small German orchestra began to play a lullaby, and a fat German waiter entered through the open door and added wood to the fire. He paused at the table and remarked on the muddy road outside. From the other room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughter. The girl and Sam once again immersed themselves in conversation about their hometowns. Sam felt very attracted to her and thought that if she were his, he would find a foundation on which to live contentedly with her. She possessed the honesty he always sought in people.

As they drove back to town, she put her hand on his shoulder.

"I wouldn"t mind you," she said, looking at him frankly.

Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. "It's been a good evening," he said, "we'll see this through."

"Thank you for that," she said, "and I want to tell you one more thing. You might think poorly of me. Sometimes, when I don't feel like going out, I get down on my knees and pray for the strength to walk boldly. Does that seem bad? We're a praying people, we New Englanders."

Standing outside, Sam could hear her labored, asthmatic breathing as she climbed the stairs to her room. Halfway up, she stopped and waved at him. It was awkward and boyish. Sam felt like he wanted to pick up a gun and start shooting civilians in the streets. He stood in the illuminated city, looking down the long, deserted street, and thought about Mike McCarthy in Caxton Prison. Like Mike, he raised his voice in the night.

"Are you here, O God? Have you abandoned your children here on earth, hurting each other? Do you really put the seed of a million children into a man, the seed of a forest planted in a single tree, and allow people to destroy, harm, and ruin?"

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CHAPTER VI


ABOUT NE MORNING, At the end of his second year of wandering, Sam rose from his bed in a cold little hotel in a West Virginia mining town, looked at the miners with lamps in their caps walking along the dimly lit streets, ate a portion of leather cakes for breakfast, paid his hotel bill, and boarded a train to New York. He had finally abandoned the idea of achieving his desires by wandering the country and meeting random acquaintances on the roadside and in villages and decided to return to a lifestyle more consistent with his income.

He felt that he was not a wanderer by nature, and that the call of the wind, the sun, and the brown road was not insistent in his blood. The spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were spring mornings during his wanderings that resembled mountain peaks in his life's experience-mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran through the trees, the grass, and the body of a wanderer, and when the call of life seemed to cry out and invite him down the wind, filling him with rapture from the blood in his body and the thoughts in his brain-yet deep down, despite these days of pure joy, he was ultimately a man of the city and the crowd. Caxton, South Water Street, and LaSalle Street had left their marks on him, and so, throwing his canvas jacket into the corner of his West Virginia hotel room, he returned to the refuge of his kind.

In New York, he went to an uptown club where he had a membership, and then stopped at a grill where he met an actor friend named Jackson for breakfast.

Sam sank into a chair and looked around. He recalled his visit here several years ago with Webster and Crofts, and again felt the calm elegance of the surroundings.

"Hello, Moneymaker," Jackson said cordially. "I heard you joined a convent."

Sam laughed and started ordering breakfast, causing Jackson to open his eyes in surprise.

"You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand how a man could spend month after month in the open air in search of a good body and the end of life, and then suddenly change his mind and return to such a place," he remarked.

Jackson laughed and lit a cigarette.

"How little you know me," he said. "I'd live my life openly, but I'm a very good actor and just finished another long run in New York. What are you going to do now that you're thin and dark? Are you going to go back to Morrison and Prince and making money?"

Sam shook his head and looked at the calm elegance of the man in front of him. How contented and happy he looked.

"I'm going to try to live among the rich and idle," he said.

"This is a rotten team," Jackson assured him, "and I'm taking the night train to Detroit. Come with me. We'll talk it over."

That evening on the train they got into conversation with a broad-shouldered old man who told them about his hunting trip.

"I'm going to set sail from Seattle," he said, "and go anywhere and hunt anything. I'm going to shoot the heads off every big game left in the world, and then I'm going to come back to New York and stay there until I die."

"I"ll go with you," Sam said, and in the morning he left Jackson in Detroit and continued west with his new acquaintance.

For several months, Sam traveled and shot with the old man, an energetic and generous man who, having become rich through an early investment in Standard Oil Company stock, had dedicated his life to his lustful, primitive passion for shooting and killing. They hunted lions, elephants, and tigers, and when Sam boarded a boat to London on the west coast of Africa, his companion paced the beach, smoking black cigars and declaring that the fun was only half over and that Sam was a fool to go.

After a year of royal hunting, Sam spent another year living the life of a wealthy and entertaining gentleman in London, New York, and Paris. He drove, fished, and wandered the shores of northern lakes, canoeed across Canada with a nature author, and sat in clubs and fashionable hotels, listening to the conversations of the men and women of this world.

Late one evening in the spring of that year, he drove to the village on the Hudson River where Sue had rented a house, and almost immediately saw her. He followed her for an hour, watching her quick, active figure as she walked through the village streets, wondering what life had come to mean to her. But when, suddenly turning, she seemed about to meet him face to face, he hurried down a side street and caught a train to the city, feeling he couldn't face her empty-handed and ashamed after so many years.

Eventually, he began drinking again, but no longer moderately, but steadily and almost constantly. One night in Detroit, he got drunk with three young men from his hotel and found himself in the company of women for the first time since his breakup with Sue. Four of them met at a restaurant, got into a car with Sam and the three young men, and drove around the city, laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling out to passersby on the street. They ended up at a diner on the outskirts of town, where the group sat for hours at a long table, drinking and singing.

One of the girls sat on Sam's lap and hugged him around the neck.

"Give me some money, rich man," she said.

Sam looked at her carefully.

"Who are you?" he asked.

She began to explain that she worked as a saleswoman in a store in the city center and that she had a lover who drove a van with lingerie.

"I go to these bats to earn money for good clothes," she confided, "but if Tim saw me here, he would kill me."

After putting the bill in her hand, Sam went downstairs and got into a taxi, heading back to his hotel.

After that night, he often indulged in similar sprees. He sank into a kind of prolonged stupor of inactivity, talked of trips abroad that he never took, bought a huge farm in Virginia that he never visited, planned to return to business but never did, and continued to squander his days month after month. He would rise at noon and begin drinking constantly. By the end of the day, he had become cheerful and talkative, calling people by name, slapping casual acquaintances on the back, playing pool or billiards with skilled young men eager for profit. Early in the summer, he had arrived here with a group of young men from New York and spent months with them, completely idle. Together, they would drive powerful cars on long trips, drink, quarrel, and then go aboard a yacht to stroll alone or with women. At times, Sam would leave his companions and travel across the country for days on express trains, sitting for hours in silence, gazing out the window at the country passing by and marveling at his own endurance in the life he led. For several months, he took with him a young man he called his secretary, paying him a handsome salary for his storytelling and clever songwriting skills, but suddenly fired him for telling a dirty story that reminded Sam of another story told by a stooped old man in Ed's hotel office in Illinois.

From the silent and taciturn state of his wandering months, Sam became sullen and belligerent. While continuing the empty, aimless lifestyle he had adopted, he nonetheless felt that there was a right way for him, and he was astonished by his continued inability to find it. He lost his natural energy, grew fat and coarse, spent hours enjoying trivial things, read no books, lay drunk in bed for hours, talking nonsense to himself, ran through the streets cursing vilely, habitually coarsened in thought and speech, constantly sought out a more base and vulgar circle of companions, was rude and obnoxious to the staff at the hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, yet ran like a coward to sanatoriums and resorts at the doctor's nod.

OceanofPDF.com

BOOK IV


OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER I


ABOUT NOON In early September, Sam boarded a train heading west, intending to visit his sister on a farm near Caxton. He hadn't heard from Kate for years, but he knew she had two daughters, and he thought he'd do something for them.

"I'll put them on a farm in Virginia and make a will leaving them my money," he thought. "Perhaps I can make them happy by providing them with comfortable living conditions and nice clothes."

In St. Louis, he disembarked from the train, vaguely aware that he would have to meet with a lawyer and negotiate a will, and stayed for several days at the Planters Hotel with a group of drinking companions he had chosen. One afternoon, he began wandering from place to place, drinking and gathering friends. An ugly light burned in his eyes, and he looked at the men and women passing through the streets, feeling that he was among enemies and that for him, the peace, satisfaction, and good humor shining in the eyes of others were beyond his reach.

Towards evening, accompanied by a group of rowdy comrades, he came out into a street surrounded by small brick warehouses overlooking the river, where steamboats lay moored to floating docks.

"I want a boat to take me and my company on a cruise up and down the river," he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. "Take us up and down the river until we get tired of it. I'll pay whatever it costs."

It was one of those days when he wasn't overcome by drunkenness, and he went to his comrades, bought drinks, and felt like a fool for continuing to entertain the vile crew sitting around him on the boat's deck. He began shouting and ordering them around.

"Sing louder," he ordered, stomping back and forth and frowning at his comrades.

A young man from the party, reputed to be a dancer, refused to perform on command. Sam leaped forward and pulled him onto the deck in front of the screaming crowd.

"Now dance!" he growled. "Or I'll throw you in the river."

The young man danced furiously, and Sam paced back and forth, looking at him and at the angry faces of the men and women milling about the deck or shouting at the dancer. The drink was beginning to take effect, a strangely distorted version of his old passion for reproduction came over him, and he raised his hand for silence.

"I want to see a woman who will become a mother," he shouted. "I want to see a woman who has given birth to children."

A small woman with black hair and glowing black eyes jumped out from the group gathered around the dancer.

"I gave birth to children-three of them," she said, laughing in his face. "I can handle more of them."

Sam looked at her blankly and, taking her hand, led her to a chair on the deck. The crowd laughed.

"Belle's here for a bun," whispered the short, fat man to his companion, a tall woman with blue eyes.

As the steamboat, laden with men and women drinking and singing, moved upriver past tree-covered bluffs, a woman next to Sam pointed out a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.

"My kids are there. They're having dinner now," she said.

She began singing, laughing, and waving the bottle at the others sitting on deck. A heavy-faced young man stood on a chair, singing a street song, while Sam's companion, jumping to her feet, counted the time with the bottle in her hand. Sam approached where the captain stood, looking upriver.

"Turn back," he said, "I'm tired of this command."

On the way back down the river, the black-eyed woman sat down next to Sam again.

"We're going to my house," she said quietly, "just you and me. I'll show you the children."

As the boat turned, darkness thickened over the river, and the city lights began to twinkle in the distance. The crowd had fallen silent, sleeping on chairs along the deck or gathered in small groups, talking in hushed voices. The black-haired woman began to tell Sam her story.

According to her, she was the wife of a plumber who abandoned her.

"I drove him crazy," she said, laughing softly. "He wanted me to stay home with him and the kids night after night. He stalked me around town at night, begging me to come home. When I didn't come, he left with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn't a man. He would do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and left the kids in my arms."

Sam, with a dark-haired woman at his side, rode around the city in an open carriage, oblivious to the children as they wandered from place to place, eating and drinking. They sat in a theater box for an hour, but grew tired of the performance and climbed back into the carriage.

"We're going to my house. I want you to be alone," the woman said.

They passed street after street of workmen's houses, where children ran, laughing and playing under the lamps, and two boys, their bare feet flashing in the light of the lamps overhead, ran after them, holding on to the back of the carriage.

The driver whipped the horses and looked back, laughing. The woman stood up and, kneeling on the carriage seat, laughed into the faces of the running boys.

"Run, devils!" she screamed.

They held on, running madly, their legs shimmering and sparkling in the light.

"Give me a silver dollar," she said, turning to Sam, and when he gave it to her, she dropped it with a clatter onto the sidewalk under a street lamp. Two boys rushed toward it, shouting and waving at her.

Swarms of huge flies and beetles swirled under the streetlights, swatting Sam and the woman in the faces. One of them, a huge black crawler, landed on her chest and, taking it in his hand, crept forward and dropped it on the driver's neck.

Despite the drunkenness of the day and evening, Sam's head was clear, and a calm hatred of life burned within him. His thoughts returned to the years since he had broken his word to Sue, and he was filled with contempt for all his efforts.

"This is what a man who seeks Truth gets," he thought. "He comes to a beautiful end in life."

Life flowed around him on all sides, playing on the sidewalk and leaping through the air. It swirled, hummed, and sang above his head on a summer night in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the carriage next to the black-haired woman, it began to sing. Blood coursed through his body; the old, half-dead melancholy, half-hunger, half-hope awakened within him, pulsing and insistent. He looked at the laughing, drunken woman next to him, and a feeling of masculine approval washed over him. He began to think about what she had said to the laughing crowd on the steamer.

"I have given birth to three children and can give birth to more."

His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awakened his sleeping brain, and he once again began to argue with life and what it offered him. He thought he would always stubbornly refuse to accept life's call unless he could receive it on his own terms, unless he could command and direct it the way he commanded and directed an artillery company.

"Otherwise, why am I here?" he muttered, looking away from the woman's blank, laughing face and at the broad, muscular back of the driver in the front seat. "Why do I need a brain, a dream, and hope? Why did I go looking for the Truth?"

A thought flowed through his mind, sparked by the sight of the swirling beetles and the running boys. The woman rested her head on his shoulder, her black hair falling across his face. She swiped furiously at the swirling beetles, laughing like a child when she caught one in her hand.

"People like me are made for a purpose. They can't be played with the way I'm played," he muttered, clutching the hand of the woman he thought was also being tossed around by life.

A carriage pulled up in front of the saloon, on the street where cars drove. Through the open front door, Sam could see workers standing in front of the bar, drinking foaming beer from glasses, the lamps hanging overhead casting black shadows on the floor. A strong, musty smell emanated from behind the door. A woman leaned over the side of the carriage and screamed, "Oh, Will, come out here."

A man wearing a long white apron and his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows came out from behind the counter and started talking to her, and as they got going, she told Sam about her plan to sell her house and buy the place.

"Will you launch it?" he asked.

"Of course," she said. "Children can take care of themselves."

At the end of a street of half a dozen neat cottages, they disembarked from the carriage and walked unsteadily along the sidewalk that curved around a high cliff and overlooked the river. Beneath the houses, a tangled mass of bushes and small trees gleamed dark in the moonlight, and in the distance, the gray body of the river was faintly visible. The undergrowth was so dense that, looking down, all one could see were the tops of the thickets and, here and there, gray outcrops of rock, glistening in the moonlight.

They climbed the stone steps to the porch of one of the houses overlooking the river. The woman stopped laughing and hung heavily on Sam's arm, her feet groping for the steps. They walked through the door and found themselves in a long, low-ceilinged room. An open staircase at the side of the room led to the upper floor, and through a curtained door at the end, they could peer into a small dining room. A rag rug covered the floor, and three children sat around a table under a hanging lamp in the center. Sam looked at them intently. His head spun, and he grabbed the doorknob. A boy of about fourteen, with freckles on his face and the backs of his hands, reddish-brown hair, and brown eyes, was reading aloud. Beside him, a younger boy with black hair and black eyes sat with his knees bent on the chair in front of him, his chin resting on his knees, listening. A tiny girl, pale, with yellow hair and dark circles under her eyes, slept in the other chair, her head lolling uncomfortably to one side. She was about seven years old, the black-haired boy ten.

The freckled boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman; the sleeping girl shifted restlessly in her chair, and the black-haired boy straightened his legs and looked over his shoulder.

"Hello, Mom," he said warmly.

The woman walked hesitantly to the curtained door leading to the dining room and pulled back the curtains.

"Come here, Joe," she said.

The freckled boy stood up and walked toward her. She stood to the side, supporting herself with one hand, holding onto the curtain. As he passed , she struck him across the back of the head with an open palm, sending him flying into the dining room.

"Now you, Tom," she called to the black-haired boy. "I told you children to wash up after dinner and put Mary to bed. It's been ten minutes, nothing's been done, and you two are reading books again."

The black-haired boy stood up and obediently walked towards her, but Sam quickly walked past him and grabbed the woman's hand so hard that she flinched and arched in his grip.

"You will come with me," he said.

He led the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned heavily on his arm, laughing and looking into his face.

At the top of the stairs he stopped.

"We'll go in here," she said, pointing to the door.

He led her into the room. "Sleep," he said, and as he left, he closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.

Downstairs, he found two boys among the dishes in the tiny kitchen next to the dining room. The girl was still sleeping restlessly in a chair by the table, the hot lamplight streaming down her thin cheeks.

Sam stood by the kitchen door and looked at the two boys, who looked back at him with embarrassment.

"Which of you two puts Mary to bed?" he asked, and then, without waiting for an answer, turned to the taller boy. "Let Tom do it," he said. "I'll help you here."

Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen, working on the dishes; the boy, pacing briskly, showed the man where to put the clean dishes and handed him dry towels. Sam's coat was off, his sleeves rolled up.

The work continued in a half-awkward silence, and a storm raged within Sam's chest. When the boy Joe glanced at him shyly, it felt as if a whip had cut through flesh that had suddenly become soft. Old memories began to stir within him, and he recalled his own childhood: his mother at work among other people's dirty clothes, Windy's father coming home drunk, and the cold in his mother's heart and his own. Men and women owed something to childhood, not because it was childhood, but because new life was being born within it. Beyond any question of parenthood, a debt had to be repaid.

Silence reigned in the little house on the cliff. Beyond the house, darkness reigned, and darkness enveloped Sam's spirit. The boy, Joe, walked quickly, putting away the dishes Sam had dried on the shelves. Somewhere on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The backs of the boy's hands were covered with freckles. How quick and skillful his hands were. Here was new life, still pure, uncontaminated, unshaken by life. Sam was ashamed of the trembling in his own hands. He had always longed for speed and firmness in his own body, for the health of the body, which is the temple of the health of the spirit. He was an American, and deep within him lived the moral fervor characteristic of an American, which had become so strangely perverted in himself and in others. As often happened to him, when he was deeply agitated, a host of wandering thoughts raced through his head. These thoughts took the place of the constant scheming and planning of his days as a businessman, but so far all his musings had led to nothing and only made him more shocked and insecure than ever.

All the dishes were now dry, and he left the kitchen, glad to be rid of the boy's shy, silent presence. "Has life really drained from me? Am I nothing but a walking corpse?" he asked himself. The children's presence made him feel like he himself was just a child, a tired and shaken child. Somewhere beyond that lay maturity and manhood. Why couldn't he find it? Why couldn't it come to him?

Tom returned from putting his sister to bed, and both boys said goodnight to the strange man in their mother's house. Joe, the bolder of the two, stepped forward and extended his hand. Sam shook it solemnly, and then the younger boy stepped forward.

"I think I"ll be here tomorrow," Sam said hoarsely.

The boys retreated into the quiet of the house, and Sam paced the small room. He was restless, as if about to embark on a new journey, and he began to run his hands over his body, half-consciously wishing it were as strong and firm as it had been when he walked the road. Just as he had left the Chicago club on his quest for Truth, he allowed his mind to wander, free to play with his past life, examining and analyzing.

He spent hours sitting on the porch or pacing the room, where the lamp still burned brightly. The smoke from his pipe was once again a pleasant taste on his tongue, and all the night air was sweet, reminding him of the ride along the equestrian trail in Jackson Park, when Sue had given him, and with her, a new impetus to life.

It was two o'clock when he lay down on the living room sofa and turned out the light. He didn't undress, but threw his shoes on the floor and lay there, gazing at the broad beam of moonlight streaming through the open door. In the darkness, his mind seemed to work faster, and the events and motives of his restless years seemed to rush past like living creatures across the floor.

Suddenly he sat up and listened. The voice of one of the boys, heavy with sleep, echoed through the upper part of the house.

"Mother! Oh Mother!" a sleepy voice called, and Sam thought he heard a small body moving restlessly in the bed.

Silence followed. He sat on the edge of the sofa and waited. He felt as if he was moving toward something; as if his brain, which had been working faster and faster for hours, was about to produce what he was waiting for. He felt the same as he had that night, waiting in the hospital corridor.

In the morning, the three children descended the stairs and finished dressing in the long room, the little girl last, carrying her shoes and stockings and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. A cool morning breeze blew in from the river and through the open screen doors as she and Joe prepared breakfast, and later, when the four of them sat at the table, Sam tried to talk, but with little success. His language was heavy, and the children seemed to look at him with strange, questioning eyes. "Why are you here?" their eyes asked.

Sam stayed in town for a week, visiting the house daily. He talked briefly with the children, and that evening, after their mother had left, a little girl came to him. He carried her to a chair on the veranda outside, and while the boys sat inside reading by the lamp, she fell asleep in his arms. Her body was warm, and her breath soft and sweet. Sam looked over the cliff and saw the countryside and the river far below, caressing in the moonlight. Tears welled in his eyes. Was a new, sweet purpose aroused within him, or were the tears merely a sign of self-pity? He wondered.

One night, the dark-haired woman came home again, heavily intoxicated, and Sam led her up the stairs again, watching as she fell onto the bed, muttering and muttering. Her companion, a short, brightly dressed man with a beard, ran away when he saw Sam standing in the living room under the lamp. The two boys he was reading to said nothing, shyly glancing at the book on the table and occasionally out of the corner of their eye at their new friend. A few minutes later, they too came up the stairs and, as on that first evening, awkwardly extended their hands.

All night long, Sam sat outside in the dark or lay awake on the couch. "Now I'll try again, I'll find a new purpose in life," he told himself.

The next morning, after the children had gone to school, Sam got in the car and drove into town, stopping first at a bank to withdraw a large sum of cash. He then spent many tense hours going from store to store, buying clothes, caps, soft underwear, suitcases, dresses, nightwear, and books. Lastly, he bought a large, dressed doll. He sent all these things to his hotel room, leaving someone there to pack the suitcases and luggage and deliver them to the train station. A large, maternal-looking woman, a hotel employee, passing through the lobby offered to help with the packing.

After one or two more visits, Sam got back in the car and drove home again. He had several thousand dollars in large bills in his pockets. He remembered the power of cash in the transactions he'd made in the past.

"I"ll see what happens here," he thought.

Inside the house, Sam found a dark-haired woman lying on the living room couch. When he walked through the door, she stood up hesitantly and looked at him.

"There's a bottle in the kitchen cupboard," she said. "Get me a drink. Why are you hanging around here?"

Sam brought the bottle and poured her a drink, pretending to drink with her, raising the bottle to his lips and throwing his head back.

"What was your husband like?" he asked.

"WHO? Jack?" she said. "Oh, he was fine. He stuck with me. He stood for anything until I brought people here. Then he went crazy and left." She looked at Sam and laughed.

"I didn't really care about him," she added. "He couldn't make enough money for a living woman."

Sam started talking about the salon she was going to buy.

"The children will be a nuisance, right?" he said.

"I have an offer on the house," she said. "I wish I didn't have children. They're a nuisance."

"I found out," Sam told her. "I know a woman in the East who would take them in and raise them. She's crazy about children. I'd like to do something to help you. I could take them to her."

"For heaven's sake, man, take them away," she laughed and took another sip from the bottle.

Sam pulled out of his pocket a paper he had received from a lawyer downtown.

"Invite a neighbor to witness this," he said. "A woman will want it to be regular. This relieves you of all responsibility for the children and places it on her."

She looked at him suspiciously. "What's the bribe? Who gets stuck over a toll in the east?"

Sam laughed and walked to the back door, calling out to a man sitting under a tree behind the neighboring house, smoking a pipe.

"Sign here," he said, placing the paper in front of her. "Here's your neighbor, who will sign as a witness. You won't be stuck for a cent."

The half-drunk woman signed the paper after a long, skeptical look at Sam, and once she had signed and taken another sip from the bottle, she lay down on the sofa again.

"If anyone wakes me up in the next six hours, they'll be killed," she declared. It was obvious she knew little of what she'd done, but at the moment, Sam didn't care. He was a bargainer again, ready to take advantage. He vaguely sensed that perhaps he was bargaining for a purpose in life, a purpose that would come to him.

Sam quietly descended the stone steps and walked along the little street at the top of the hill to the highway and waited in the car at the school door at noon when the children came out.

He drove across town to Union Station, where the three children accepted him and everything he'd done without question. At the station, they found the man from the hotel with the suitcases and three brightly colored new ones. Sam went to the express mail office, put some bills in a sealed envelope, and mailed it to the woman, while the three children walked back and forth through the train yard, carrying the suitcases, beaming with pride.

At two o'clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and one of the boys sitting on either side of him, was sitting in the cabin of the New York flyer bound for Sue.

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CHAPTER II


SAM MK P. KHERSON is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money, acquired with so many years and so much energy, has little meaning for him. What is true of him is true of richer Americans than is commonly believed. Something happened to him, as happened to the others-how many of them? Courageous men, strong in body and quick intellect, men of a strong race, picked up what they considered the banner of life and carried it forward. Tired, they stopped on the road leading up a long hill and leaned the banner against a tree. Strained minds relaxed a little. Strong convictions grew weak. The old gods are dying.

"Only when you are torn away from the pier and

drifting like a rudderless ship, I can come

around you."


The banner was carried forward by a strong, brave man, full of determination.

What is written on it?

Perhaps it would be dangerous to probe too closely. We Americans believed that life should have meaning and purpose. We called ourselves Christians, but we were ignorant of the sweet Christian philosophy of failure. To say that one of us had failed was to rob him of life and courage. For so long, we had to move forward blindly. We needed to cut roads through our forests, we needed to build great cities. What in Europe was slowly built from the fibers of generations, we must build now, in a lifetime.

In our father's time, wolves howled at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and across the vast prairies. Our fathers and mothers were filled with fear as they forged ahead, carving out a new land. When the land was conquered, the fear remained-the fear of failure. Deep in our American souls, the wolves still howl.


There were moments after Sam returned to Sue with three children when he thought he had snatched success from the jaws of failure.

But what he'd spent his entire life running from was still there. It hid in the branches of the trees that lined the New England roads where he'd gone for walks with his two boys. At night, it looked down on him from the stars.

Perhaps life wanted him to accept it, but he couldn't. Perhaps his story and his life ended with his return home, perhaps it began then.

Returning home itself wasn't entirely a happy occasion. There was a house with a light at night and the voices of children. Sam felt something alive and growing in his chest.

Sue was generous, but she was no longer the Sue of the Jackson Park riding trail in Chicago, or the Sue who tried to remake the world by raising fallen women. When he came to her house one summer night, suddenly and strangely entering with three strange children, a little prone to tears and homesickness, she was confused and nervous.

It was getting dark as he walked along the gravel path from the gate to the front door of the house, carrying Mary in his arms and two boys, Joe and Tom, walking sedately and solemnly beside him. Sue had just emerged from the front door and stood looking at them, amazed and a little frightened. Her hair had turned gray, but as she stood there, Sam thought her slender figure almost boyish.

With quick generosity she cast aside her tendency to ask many questions, but there was a hint of mockery in the question she asked.

"Have you decided to come back to me and is this your homecoming?" she asked, stepping out onto the path and looking not at Sam, but at the children.

Sam didn't answer right away, and little Mary began to cry. It was help.

"They'll all need something to eat and a place to sleep," he said, as if returning to his long-abandoned wife and bringing three strange children with him was an everyday occurrence.

Though she was puzzled and frightened, Sue smiled and walked into the house. The lamps came on, and the five people, so suddenly gathered together, stood and looked at each other. The two boys huddled together, and little Mary wrapped her arms around Sam's neck and buried her face in his shoulder. He untied her clutching hands and boldly handed her over to Sue. "Now she will be your mother," he said defiantly, not looking at Sue.


The evening was over, he had made a mistake, Sam thought, and very noble Sue.

There was still a maternal hunger in her. He was counting on it. It blinded her to other things, and then an idea occurred to her, and the opportunity for a particularly romantic act presented itself. Before the idea could be dashed, Sam and the children were settled into the house later that evening.

A tall, strong black woman entered the room, and Sue gave her instructions regarding the children's food. "They'll want bread and milk, and we need to find beds for them," she said, and then, though her mind was still filled with the romantic thought that they were Sam's children by some other woman, she took the plunge. "This is Mr. McPherson, my husband, and these are our three children," she announced to the puzzled, smiling servant.

They entered a low-ceilinged room with windows overlooking the garden. An old black man with a watering can was watering flowers in the garden. A little light still remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad to be gone. "Don't bring a lamp; a candle will do," Sue said, coming to the door next to her husband. The three children were on the verge of tears, but the black woman, quickly grasping the situation intuitively, began to chatter, trying to make them feel at home. She awakened wonder and hope in the boys' hearts. "There's a barn with horses and cows. Old Ben will show you around tomorrow," she said, smiling at them.


A dense grove of elms and maples stood between Sue's house and the road leading down the hill to the New England village, and while Sue and the black woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. The tree trunks were dimly visible in the dim light, but the thick branches overhead formed a barrier between him and the sky. He returned to the darkness of the grove, then back to the open space in front of the house.

He was nervous and confused, and the two Sam McPhersons seemed to be fighting over his identity.

He was a man whom the life around him had taught to always bring to the surface, a man of insight, a man of ability, who got his way, trampled people underfoot, moved forward, always hoped forward, a man of achievement.

And then there was another personality, a different being entirely, buried inside him, long abandoned, often forgotten, a timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never truly breathed or lived or walked before people.

What was wrong with him? The life Sam led didn't take into account the shy, destructive creature within him. And yet it was powerful. Hadn't it torn him from life, made him a homeless wanderer? How many times had it tried to speak its mind, to take complete possession of him?

Now he tried again, and again, and out of old habit, Sam fought him, driving him back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into the darkness.

He continued to whisper to himself. Perhaps now was the test of his life. There was a way to approach life and love. There was Sue. In her, he could find a basis for love and understanding. Later, this impulse could be continued in the lives of the children he found and brought to her.

He had a vision of himself as a truly humble man, kneeling before life, kneeling before the intricate miracle of life, but he was afraid again. When he saw Sue's figure, dressed in white, a dull, pale, sparkling being, descending the steps toward him, he wanted to run, to hide in the darkness.

And he, too, wanted to run to her, to kneel at her feet, not because she was Sue, but because she was human and, like him, full of human perplexities.

He did neither. The boy from Caxton was still alive within him. Raising his head like a boy, he walked boldly toward her. "Nothing but courage will answer now," he told himself.


They walked along the gravel path in front of the house, and he tried unsuccessfully to tell his story, the story of his wanderings, his search. When he reached the story of finding the children, she stopped on the path and listened, pale and tense, in the semi-darkness.

Then she threw back her head and laughed nervously, half-hysterically. "I took them and you, of course," she said, after he came up to her and put his arm around her waist. "My life itself hasn't been very inspiring. I decided to take them and you into that house. The two years you were gone seemed like an eternity. What a stupid mistake my mind made. I thought they must be your own children by some other woman, the woman you found instead of me. It was a strange thought. Why, the older of the two must be about fourteen.

They walked towards the house, and the black woman, on Sue's command, found food for Sam and set the table, but at the door he stopped and, apologizing, stepped again into the darkness under the trees.

The lamps were lit in the house, and he could see Sue's figure walking through the front room toward the dining room. She soon returned and drew the curtains over the front windows. A place was being prepared for him there, a closed place where he would live out the rest of his life.

When the curtains were drawn, darkness descended upon the figure of the man standing right in the grove, and darkness descended upon the man within as well. The struggle within him became more intense.

Could he give himself to others, live for others? The house loomed before him. It was a symbol. In the house was a woman, Sue, ready and willing to begin rebuilding their life together. Upstairs in the house now were three children, three children who would begin life as he had, who would listen to his voice, Sue's voice, and all the other voices they would hear, speaking words into the world. They would grow up and go forth into the world of men, as he had.

For what purpose?

The end had come. Sam firmly believed it. "Putting the burden on the children's shoulders is cowardice," he whispered to himself.

He was overcome by an almost overwhelming urge to turn and run away from the house, from Sue, who had welcomed him so generously, and from the three new lives he had become embroiled in and would be forced to participate in in the future. His body trembled with such force, but he stood motionless under the trees. "I can't run away from life. I have to accept it. I have to start trying to understand these other lives, to love them," he told himself. The inner being buried within him came to the surface.

How quiet the night had become. A bird moved on a thin branch in the tree beneath which he stood, and a faint rustling of leaves could be heard. The darkness ahead and behind him was a wall through which he somehow had to break through to reach the light. Holding his hand out in front of him, as if trying to push away some dark, blinding mass, he emerged from the grove and, stumbling, climbed the steps and entered the house.

END

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Marching men


First published in 1917, The Marching Men was the second novel published by John Lane under a three-book contract with Anderson. It tells the story of Norman "Beau" MacGregor, a young man dissatisfied with the powerlessness and lack of personal ambition among the miners of his hometown. After moving to Chicago, he realizes his goal is to empower the workers, inspiring them to march in unison. The novel's major themes include labor organization, the eradication of disorder, and the role of the exceptional man in society. This last theme prompted critics after World War II to compare Anderson's militaristic approach to homosocial order with the fascists of the Axis powers. Of course, the establishment of order through male strength is a common theme, as is the idea of the "superman," embodied in the exceptional physical and mental qualities that make MacGregor especially suited to the role of male leader.

Like his first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, Anderson wrote his second while working as an advertising copywriter in Elyria, Ohio, between 1906 and 1913, several years before he published his first literary work and a decade before he became an established writer. Although the author later claimed he wrote his first novels in secret, Anderson's secretary remembers typing the manuscript during work hours "around 1911 or 1912."

The literary influences of The Marching Men include Thomas Carlyle, Mark Twain, and Jack London. The novel's inspiration came in part from the author's time as a laborer in Chicago between 1900 and 1906 (where, like his protagonist, he worked in a warehouse, attended night school, was mugged several times, and fell in love) and his service in the Spanish-American War, which occurred near the end of the war and immediately after the armistice of 1898-99. Anderson wrote about the latter experience in his "Memoirs" of an occasion when he was marching and a stone lodged in his shoe. Separating from his fellow soldiers to remove it, he observed their figures and recalled, "I had become a giant. ... I was something enormous, terrible, and yet noble in myself. I remember sitting for a long time while the army passed, opening and closing my eyes."

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First edition

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CONTENT

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

BOOK III

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

BOOK IV

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

BOOK V

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

BOOK VI

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

BOOK VII

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II


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An advertisement for the Marching Men that appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger.

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Title page of the first edition

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TO

AMERICAN WORKERS

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BOOK I


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CHAPTER I


UNCLE CHARLIE WHEELER stomped up the steps in front of Nancy McGregor's Bakery on the main street of Coal Creek, Pennsylvania, then hurried inside. Something caught his eye, and as he stood before the counter, he laughed and whistled softly. Winking at Reverend Minot Weeks, who stood by the door leading to the street, he rapped his knuckles on the display case.

"He has a beautiful name," he said, pointing to the boy who was unsuccessfully trying to wrap Uncle Charlie's loaf of bread neatly. "They call him Norman-Norman MacGregor." Uncle Charlie laughed heartily and stamped his feet on the floor again. Putting a finger to his forehead in a gesture of deep thought, he turned to the minister. "I'm going to change all that," he said.

"Norman indeed! I'll give him a name that will stick! Norman! Too soft, too soft and gentle for Coal Creek, huh? It will be renamed. You and I will be Adam and Eve in the garden, naming things. We will call him Beauty-Our Beauty-Beauty MacGregor."

Reverend Minot Weeks laughed too. He tucked four fingers of each hand into his pants pockets, letting his outstretched thumbs rest along the line of his bulging waist. From the front, his thumbs looked like two tiny boats on the horizon of a choppy sea. They bounced and bounced on his rolling, trembling belly, appearing and disappearing as laughter shook him. Reverend Minot Weeks walked out the door before Uncle Charlie, still laughing. It seemed he would walk down the street from store to store, telling the story of the baptism and laughing again. The tall boy could imagine the details of the story.

It was an unlucky day for a birth in Coal Creek, even for the birth of one of Uncle Charlie's inspirations. Snow lay piled high on the sidewalks and in the gutters of Main Street-black snow, filthy with the accumulated dirt of human activity that raged day and night beneath the hills. Miners stumbled through the muddy snow, silent and black-faced, carrying their lunch pails with their bare hands.

The McGregor boy, tall and awkward, with a high nose, a huge hippopotamus mouth, and flaming red hair, followed Uncle Charlie, the Republican politician, postmaster, and village wit, to the door and watched him hurry down the street, a loaf of bread tucked under his arm. Behind the politician came the minister, still enjoying the scene in the bakery. He boasted of his familiarity with mining town life. "Didn't Christ himself laugh, eat, and drink with publicans and sinners?" he thought, trudging through the snow. The McGregor boy's eyes, as he watched the two departing figures, and then as he stood in the bakery doorway, watching the struggling miners, gleamed with hatred. It was precisely this intense hatred for his fellow men in the black hole between the Pennsylvania hills that distinguished the boy and set him apart from his fellow men.

In a country with such a diversity of climates and occupations as America, it is absurd to speak of an American type. The country is like a vast, disorganized, undisciplined army, leaderless and inspirationless, marching step by step along a road leading to an unknown end. In the prairie towns of the West and the river towns of the South, from which so many of our writers come, city dwellers saunter through life with abandon. Drunken old scoundrels lie in the shade by the riverbank or wander the streets of a corn-shed village on Saturday nights, grinning. Some touch of nature, a sweet undercurrent of life, remains alive in them and is transmitted to those who write about them, and the most worthless man walking the streets of an Ohio or Iowa city may be the father of an epigram that colors the whole life of the man around him. In a mining town or deep in the bowels of one of our cities, life is different. There, the disorder and aimlessness of our American life become a crime for which people pay heavily. As they lose one step after another, they also lose their sense of individuality, so that a thousand of them can be herded in a disorderly mass through the doors of a Chicago factory, morning after morning, year after year, and not a single epigram will escape the lips of one of them.

In Coal Creek, when men got drunk, they wandered the streets in silence. If one of them, in a moment of foolish, animal-like frolic, performed an awkward dance on the bar floor, his workmates would stare blankly at him or turn away, leaving him to finish his awkward merriment in private.

Standing in the doorway and looking out over the dreary village street, a vague awareness of the disorganized inefficiency of life as he knew it came to the boy McGregor. It seemed right and natural that he should hate people. With a smirk, he thought of Barney Butterlips, the town socialist who always spoke of the day when people would march shoulder to shoulder and life in Coal Creek, life everywhere, would cease to be aimless and become defined and full of meaning.

"They'll never do it, and who would want them to," thought the McGregor boy. A gust of wind carrying snow swept over him, and he turned into the store and slammed the door behind him. Another thought flashed through his mind, bringing a flush to his cheeks. He turned and stood in the silence of the empty store, trembling with excitement. "If I could form an army from the people of this place, I'd march them to the mouth of the old Shumway Valley and push them in," he threatened, shaking his fist at the door. "I stood by and watched the whole town struggle and drown in the black water, as untouched as if I were watching a litter of dirty little kittens drown."


The next morning, as Beauty McGregor pushed the baker's cart down the street and began the climb up the hill toward the miners' cottages, he walked not as Norman McGregor, the town baker's boy, merely the product of Cracked McGregor's loins from Coal Creek, but as a character, a creature, a work of art. The name given to him by Uncle Charlie Wheeler made him a remarkable man. He was the hero of a popular novel, animated by life and walking in the flesh before men. Men looked at him with new interest, describing anew his enormous mouth, nose, and flaming hair. The bartender, sweeping snow from the saloon door, shouted at him. "Hey, Norman!" he called. "Dear Norman! Norman is too pretty a name. Beauty-that's the name for you! Oh, you Beauty!"

The tall boy pushed the cart silently down the street. He hated Coal Creek all over again. He hated the bakery and the cart. He hated Uncle Charlie Wheeler and Reverend Minot Weeks with a burning, satisfying hatred. "Fat old fools," he muttered, shaking snow from his hat and stopping to breathe in the struggle on the hill. He had something new to hate. He hated his name. It actually sounded funny. He used to think it was quaint and pretentious. It didn't suit a boy with a bakery cart. He wished it were just John, or Jim, or Fred. A shudder of irritation ran through him at his mother. "She might have more sense," he muttered.

And then the thought occurred to him that his father might have chosen this name. This halted his flight into universal hatred, and he began pushing the cart forward again, a happier stream of thoughts racing through his mind. The tall boy relished the memory of his father, "Cracked MacGregor." "They called him Cracked until it became his name," he thought. "Now they're on me." The thought renewed the camaraderie between him and his dead father, softening him. As he reached the first of the dreary miners' houses, a smile played at the corners of his huge mouth.

In his day, Cracked McGregor wasn't exactly a well-known figure in Coal Creek. He was a tall, silent man with a sullen, dangerous presence. He inspired fear born of hatred. He worked in the mines silently and with fiery energy, hating his fellow miners, who considered him "a little crazy." They called him "Cracked" McGregor and avoided him, though they generally agreed he was the best miner in the area. Like his fellow miners, he sometimes got drunk. When he entered a saloon where other men stood in groups buying drinks for each other, he bought only for himself. One day, a stranger, a fat man who sold liquor at a wholesale store, approached him and slapped him on the back. "Come, cheer up, and have a drink with me," he said. A cracked McGregor turned and tackled the stranger to the floor. When the fat man fell, he kicked him and glared at the crowd in the room. Then he slowly walked to the door, glancing around, hoping someone would intervene.

Cracked MacGregor was silent in his own home, too. When he spoke at all, it was kindly and he looked into his wife's eyes with an impatient, expectant expression. He seemed to perpetually lavish a kind of silent affection on his red-haired son. He would hold the boy in his arms and sit for hours, rocking back and forth, saying nothing. When the boy was ill or troubled by strange dreams at night, the feeling of his father's embrace calmed him. In his arms, the boy fell asleep happily. A single thought constantly recurred in his father's mind: "We only have one child, and we won't put him in a hole in the ground," he said, looking hungrily at his mother for approval.

Crack MacGregor took two walks with his son on Sunday afternoons. Taking the boy by the hand, the miner climbed the hillside, past the last miner's house, through the pine grove at the summit, and further up the hill, overlooking a wide valley on the far side. As he walked, he turned his head sharply to the side, as if listening. A falling log in the mines had deformed his shoulder, leaving a huge scar on his face, partially hidden by his red beard, filled with coal dust. The blow that had deformed his shoulder clouded his mind. "He muttered as he walked, talking to himself like an old man."

The red-haired boy ran happily beside his father. He didn't see the smiles on the faces of the miners who came down the hill and stopped to look at the strange couple. The miners went further down the road to sit in front of the shops on Main Street, their day brightened by the memory of the hurrying McGregors. They had a comment they made. "Nancy McGregor shouldn't have looked at her man when she got pregnant," they said.

The MacGregors climbed the hillside. A thousand questions clamored for answers in the boy's head. Looking at his father's silent, grim face, he suppressed the questions rising in his throat, saving them for the quiet time with his mother after Cracked MacGregor had gone to the mine. He wanted to know about his father's childhood, about life in the mine, about the birds flying overhead and why they circled and flew in huge ovals across the sky. He looked at the fallen trees in the forest and wondered what had caused them to fall and whether others would soon fall in their turn.

The silent couple crested the hill and, through a pine forest, reached a rise halfway down the far side. When the boy saw the valley, so green, wide, and fertile, lying at their feet, he thought it was the most wondrous sight in the world. He wasn't surprised his father had brought him there. Sitting on the ground, he opened and closed his eyes, his soul thrilling at the beauty of the scene unfolding before them.

On the hillside, Cracked MacGregor performed a peculiar ceremony. Sitting on a log, he used his hands as a telescope and scanned the valley inch by inch, as if searching for something lost. For ten minutes, he stared intently at a clump of trees or at a stretch of river running through the valley, where it widened and the wind-ruffled water glittered in the sun. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, he rubbed his hands, muttered incoherent words and fragments of sentences, and once began to sing a quiet, humming song.

The first morning the boy sat on the hillside with his father, it was spring, and the earth was bright green. Lambs played in the fields; birds sang their mating songs; in the air, on the ground, and in the flowing river, it was a time of new life. Below, the flat valley of green fields was dotted with the brown, freshly turned earth. Cattle grazing with their heads down, eating sweet grass, farmhouses with red barns, the sharp smell of new land kindled his mind and awakened in the boy a dormant sense of beauty. He sat on a log, intoxicated with happiness that the world he lived in could be so beautiful. That night in bed, he dreamed of the valley, confusing it with the old biblical story of the Garden of Eden, told to him by his mother. He dreamed that he and his mother crossed a hill and descended into a valley, but his father, dressed in a long white robe and with his red hair blowing in the wind, stood on the hillside, waving a long, fire-blasting sword, and drove them back.

When the boy crossed the hill again, it was October, and a cold wind blew in his face. In the forest, golden-brown leaves scurried like frightened little animals, and golden-brown were the leaves on the trees around the farmhouses, and golden-brown corn stood shaken in the fields. This scene saddened the boy. A lump rose in his throat, and he longed for the green, radiant beauty of spring to return. He longed to hear the birds singing in the air and in the grass on the hillside.

Cracked MacGregor was in a different mood. He seemed more contented than on his first visit, pacing back and forth on the small rise, rubbing his hands and trouser legs. He sat on a log all day, muttering and smiling.

On the way home through the dark forest, the restless, scurrying leaves frightened the boy so much that the fatigue of walking against the wind, the hunger from going without food all day, and the chill nipping at his body made him cry. His father picked the boy up and, holding him to his chest like a baby, walked down the hill toward their house.

On Tuesday morning, Crack McGregor died. His death was imprinted on the boy's mind as something beautiful, and the scene and circumstances remained with him throughout his life, filling him with a secret pride, like the knowledge of good blood. "It means something to be the son of such a man," he thought.

It was already ten in the morning when the cry of "Fire in the mine" reached the miners' homes. Panic gripped the women. In their minds, they saw men rushing over old cuts, hiding in secret corridors, stalked by death. Cracked MacGregor, one of the night shift, was asleep in his house. The boy's mother threw a shawl over her head, took his hand, and ran down the hill toward the mouth of the mine. A cold wind, spitting snow, blew in their faces. They ran along the railroad tracks, tripping over the sleepers, and stopped on the railway embankment that overlooked the runway leading to the mine.

Silent miners stood near the runway and along the embankment, their hands in their trouser pockets, phlegmatically staring at the closed mine door. There was no impulse among them to act together. Like animals at the door of a slaughterhouse, they stood as if awaiting their turn to be driven through. An old woman, her back bent and a huge stick in her hand, walked from one gesturing and talking miner to another. "Take my boy-my Steve! Get him out of there!" she shouted, waving her stick.

The mine door opened, and three men staggered out, pushing a small car on rails. Three more men lay silent and motionless inside the car. A thinly clad woman with enormous, cave-like dents in her face climbed the embankment and sat down on the ground beneath the boy and his mother. "There's a fire in the old McCrary open-pit mine," she said, her voice shaking and a silent, hopeless look in her eyes. "They can't get through to close the doors. My buddy Ike's in there." She bowed her head and sat there, crying. The boy knew the woman. She was a neighbor and lived in an unpainted house on the hillside. A gaggle of children played among the rocks in her front yard. Her husband, a big fellow, had gotten drunk and, when he came home, kicked his wife. The boy had heard her scream in the night.

Suddenly, among the growing crowd of miners beneath the Butte embankment, MacGregor saw his father pacing restlessly. He wore a cap with a lit miner's lamp on his head. He moved from group to group among the men, his head cocked to one side. The boy looked at him intently. He remembered the October day on the rise overlooking the fertile valley, and he thought again of his father as an inspired man undergoing a kind of ceremony. The tall miner rubbed his hands up and down his legs, peering into the faces of the silent men standing around him, his lips moving, his red beard dancing up and down.

As the boy watched, Cracked MacGregor's face changed. He ran to the foot of the embankment and looked up. His eyes held the look of a bewildered animal. His wife leaned over and began talking to the crying woman lying on the ground, trying to console her. She couldn't see her husband, and the boy and the man stood silently, gazing into each other's eyes.

Then the puzzled expression vanished from the father's face. He turned and ran, shaking his head, until he reached the closed door of the shaft. A man in a white collar, a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth, extended his hand.

"Stop! Wait!" he shouted. Pushing the man aside with his powerful hand, the runner swung open the shaft door and disappeared onto the runway.

A hubbub erupted. A man in a white collar removed a cigar from his mouth and began cursing furiously. A boy stood on the embankment and saw his mother running toward the mine's runway. The miner grabbed her hand and led her back up the embankment. A woman's voice shouted from the crowd, "That was Crack MacGregor going to close the door to McCrary's open pit."

The man in the white collar looked around, chewing the end of his cigar. "He's gone crazy," he shouted, closing the door to the shaft again.

Cracked MacGregor died in the mine, almost within reach of the door to the old fire-pit. All but five of the imprisoned miners perished with him. All day, groups of men tried to descend into the mine. Below, in secret passages beneath their own homes, the scurrying miners died like rats in a burning barn, while their wives, shawls over their heads, sat silently and wept on the railway embankment. That evening, the boy and his mother walked alone up the mountain. From the houses scattered across the hill, came the sound of women's wailing.


For several years after the mining disaster, the McGregors, mother and son, lived in a house on a hillside. Every morning, the woman went to the mine offices, where she washed windows and scrubbed floors. This position was a kind of recognition from the mine management of Cracked McGregor's heroism.

Nancy McGregor was a short, blue-eyed woman with a sharp nose. She wore glasses and was known in Coal Creek for her quick wit. She didn't stand by the fence to chat with the other miners' wives, but sat in her home, sewing or reading aloud to her son. She subscribed to a magazine, and bound copies stood on shelves in the room where she and the boy ate breakfast early in the morning. Until her husband's death, she maintained a habit of silence in the house, but after his death, she broadened her horizons and freely discussed every phase of their narrow life with her red-haired son. As he grew older, the boy began to believe that she, like the miners, hid a secret fear of his father behind her silence. Some things she revealed about her life prompted this belief.

Norman McGregor grew up a tall, broad-shouldered boy with strong arms, fiery red hair, and a penchant for sudden, violent outbursts of anger. There was something about him that caught everyone's attention. As he grew older and was renamed by his Uncle Charlie Wheeler, he began looking for trouble. When boys called him "Pretty Boy," he knocked them down. When men shouted that name at him on the street, he watched them with dark eyes. It became a point of honor for him to resent that name. He associated it with the town's injustice toward Cracked McGregor.

In the house on the hillside, the boy and his mother lived happily. Early in the morning, they descended the hill and crossed the tracks to the mine offices. From the office, the boy climbed the hill at the far end of the valley and sat on the steps of the school building or wandered the streets, waiting for the school day to begin. In the evening, mother and son sat on the steps in front of their house and watched the glow of the coke ovens in the sky and the lights of the fast-moving passenger trains, roaring, whistling, and disappearing into the night.

Nancy MacGregor told her son about the big world beyond the valley, telling him about cities, seas, strange lands, and peoples beyond the seas. "We're burrowed into the earth like rats," she said, "me and my people and your father and his people. It'll be different with you. You'll go from here to other places and other jobs." She bristled at the thought of life in the city. "We're stuck here in the mud, living in it, breathing it," she complained. "Sixty men died in this hole in the ground, and then the mine started up again with new men. We stay here year after year, digging coal to burn in the engines that carry other men across the seas to the West."

When her son grew to be a tall and strong fourteen-year-old, Nancy McGregor bought a bakery, and the purchase required money saved by Cracked McGregor. He had planned to use it to buy a farm in the valley beyond the hill. Dollar by dollar, the miner saved it, dreaming of a life on his own fields.

The boy worked in the bakery and learned to bake bread. Kneading dough, his hands and arms became as strong as a bear's. He hated work, hated Coal Creek, and dreamed of life in the city and the role he would play there. He began to make friends here and there among the young people. Like his father, he attracted attention. Women looked at him, laughed at his large frame and strong, plain features, and looked again. When spoken to in the bakery or on the street, he answered fearlessly and looked them in the eye. Young schoolgirls walked home from the hill with the other boys and dreamed at night of Handsome McGregor. When someone spoke ill of him, they responded by defending and praising him. Like his father, he was a well-known figure in Coal Creek.

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CHAPTER II


One Sunday afternoon, three boys sat on a log on the hillside overlooking Coal Creek. From their vantage point, they could see the night shift workers lounging in the sun on Main Street. A thin trail of smoke rose from the coke ovens. A heavily loaded freight train rounded the hill at the end of the valley. Spring had arrived, and even this hive of black industry held out the faint promise of beauty. The boys talked about the lives of the people in their town, and as they talked, each thought about himself.

Though he'd never left the valley and grown strong and big there, Handsome MacGregor knew a thing or two about the outside world. This was no time for people to be cut off from their fellows. Newspapers and magazines had done their job too well. They'd even reached the miner's cabin, and merchants on Coal Creek's main street stood outside their shops in the afternoons, talking about world events. Handsome MacGregor knew that life in his town was exceptional, that not everywhere did men toil all day in black, filthy dungeons, that not all women were pale, bloodless, and hunched over. As he delivered bread, he whistled a song. "Take Me Back to Broadway," he sang after a soubrette in a show that once ran in Coal Creek.

Now, sitting on the hillside, he spoke seriously, gesturing with his hands. "I hate this town," he said. "The men here think they're ridiculous. They care about nothing but stupid jokes and drinking. I want to leave." His voice rose, and hatred flared within him. "Wait," he boasted. "I'll make men stop being fools. I'll make children out of them. I..." He paused and looked at his two comrades.

Bute poked the ground with a stick. The boy sitting next to him laughed. He was a short, well-dressed, dark-haired boy with rings on his fingers who worked in the town pool hall, shuffling billiard balls. "I'd like to go where the women are, with blood in them," he said.

Three women came up the hill to meet them: a tall, pale, brown-haired woman of about twenty-seven and two young, fair-haired girls. The black-haired boy adjusted his tie and began to think about the conversation he would start when the women approached him. Boat and the other boy, a fat grocer's son, looked down the hill at the town over the heads of the newcomers, continuing the thoughts that had started the conversation.

"Hello, girls, come sit here," the black-haired boy called out, laughing and looking boldly into the eyes of the tall, pale woman. They stopped, and the tall woman began stepping over fallen logs and approaching them. Two young girls followed, laughing. They sat down on a log next to the boys, the tall, pale woman at the end next to the red-haired McGregor. An embarrassed silence fell over the party. Both Bo and the fat man were confused by this turn of their day's walk and wondered what would happen next.

The pale woman began to speak in a quiet voice. "I want to get away from here," she said. "I would like to hear the birds singing and see the greenery growing."

Bute MacGregor had an idea. "You're coming with me," he said. He stood up and climbed over the logs, and the pale woman followed him. The fat man shouted at them, trying to ease his embarrassment, trying to embarrass them. "Where are you two going?" he shouted.

Bo said nothing. He stepped over the logs onto the road and began climbing the hill. A tall woman walked beside him, holding her skirts out of the deep road dust. Even her Sunday dress bore a faint black mark along the seams-the Coal Creek sign.

As MacGregor walked, his embarrassment faded. He thought it was wonderful to be alone with a woman. When she grew tired from the climb, he sat down with her on a log by the road and began talking about the black-haired boy. "He's wearing your ring," he said, looking at her and laughing.

She pressed her hand tightly to her side and closed her eyes. "I'm sore from the climb," she said.

Tenderness overwhelmed Beauty. As they continued walking, he followed her, holding her back and pushing her up the hill. The urge to tease her about the black-haired boy had passed, and he wanted to say nothing about the ring. He remembered the story the black-haired boy had told him about how he had won the woman. "It was probably a complete lie," he thought.

At the crest of the hill, they stopped and rested, leaning against a worn fence near the woods. Below them, a group of men descended the hill in a wagon. The men sat on planks laid across the wagon and sang a song. One of them stood on the seat next to the driver, waving a bottle. It seemed he was giving a speech. The others shouted and clapped. The sounds came faint and sharp, rising up the hill.

In the woods near the fence, rotten grass grew. Hawks soared over the valley below. A squirrel, running alongside the fence, stopped and spoke to them. MacGregor thought he'd never had such a delightful companion. With this woman, he felt a sense of complete, warm camaraderie and friendliness. Without knowing how it was accomplished, he felt a certain pride in it. "Don't mind what I said about the ring," he insisted. "I was only trying to tease you."

The woman next to MacGregor was the daughter of an undertaker who lived above his shop next to the bakery. He had seen her that evening, standing on the stairs outside the shop. After the story the black-haired boy had told him, he felt embarrassed for her. Passing her on the stairs, he hurried forward and peered into the gutter.

They walked down the hill and sat on a log on the hillside. A group of elders had gathered around the log after his visits there with Cracked MacGregor, so the place was enclosed and shadowed, like a room. The woman took off her hat and placed it next to her on the log. A faint blush colored her pale cheeks, and a flash of anger flickered in her eyes. "He must have lied to you about me," she said. "I didn't let him wear that ring. I don't know why I gave it to him. He wanted it. He asked me for it again and again. He said he wanted to show it to his mother. And now he's shown it to you, and I suppose he's lied about me."

Bo was annoyed and regretted not mentioning the ring. He felt it was causing unnecessary fuss. He didn't believe the black-haired boy was lying, but he didn't think it mattered.

He began talking about his father, bragging about him. His hatred for the town flared. "They thought they knew him down there," he said. "They laughed at him and called him 'cracked.' They thought his running into the mine was just a crazy idea, like a horse running into a burning stable. He was the best man in town. He was braver than any of them. He went in there and died when he had almost enough money to buy a farm here." He pointed across the valley.

Bo began telling her about his visits to the hill with his father and described the impact the scene had on him as a child. "I thought it was paradise," he said.

She placed her hand on his shoulder, seeming to soothe him, like a caring groom soothing a nervous horse. "Don't pay any attention to them," she said. "In a little while, you'll go away and find your place in the world."

He wondered how she knew this. A deep respect for her filled him. "She really wants to figure it out," he thought.

He began to talk about himself, bragging and puffing out his chest. "I'd like to have a chance to show what I can do," he declared. The thought that had been in his head that winter day when Uncle Charlie Wheeler had called him Bute returned, and he paced back and forth in front of the woman, making grotesque movements with his arms, while Cracked McGregor paced back and forth in front of him.

"I'll tell you what," he began, his voice harsh. He'd forgotten the woman's presence and half forgotten what was on his mind. He muttered and looked over his shoulder at the hillside, struggling for words. "Oh, damn men!" he exploded. "They're cattle, stupid cattle." A fire flashed in his eyes, and his voice grew confident. "I'd like to gather them together, all of them," he said. "I'd like them to..." He ran out of words and sat down again on the log next to the woman. "Well, I'd like to take them to the old mine shaft and shove them in," he concluded resentfully.


On a rise, Bo and the tall woman sat and looked down at the valley. "I wonder why Mom and I don't go there," he said. "When I see it, I'm overcome with this thought. I think I want to be a farmer and work in the fields. Instead, Mom and I sit and plan a city. I'm going to be a lawyer. That's all we talk about. Then I come here, and it seems like this is the place for me."

The tall woman laughed. "I see you coming home from the fields at night," she said. "Perhaps to that white house with the windmill. You"d be a big man, with dust in your red hair and perhaps a red beard growing on your chin. And a woman would come out of the kitchen door with a child in her arms and stand leaning against the fence, waiting for you. When you came up, she"d put her arms around your neck and kiss you on the lips. Your beard would tickle her cheek. When you grow up, you should grow a beard. Your mouth is so big."

A strange new feeling swept through Bo. He wondered why she'd said that, and he wanted to take her hand and kiss it right then and there. He stood and looked at the sun setting behind a hill far across the valley. "We better get along," he said.

The woman remained seated on the log. "Sit down," she said, "I'll tell you something-something you'll be pleased to hear. You're so big and red that you tempt a girl to bother you. But first, tell me why you're walking down the street looking into the gutter when I'm standing on the stairs in the evening."

Bo sat back down on the log and thought about what the black-haired boy had told him about her. "Then it was true-what he said about you?" he asked.

"No! No!" she cried, jumping up in turn and starting to put on her hat. "Let's go."

Bute sat phlegmatically on a log. "What's the point of disturbing each other?" he said. "Let's sit here until the sun goes down. We can get home before dark."

They sat down and she began to talk, bragging about herself as he had bragged about his father.

"I'm too old for that boy," she said; "I'm many years older than you. I know what boys talk about and what they talk about women. I'm fine. I have no one to talk to except my father, and he sits all evening reading the paper and falling asleep in his chair. If I let boys come and sit with me in the evening or stand and talk to me on the stairs, it's because I'm lonely. There's not a single man in town I'd marry, not a single one.

Bow's speech seemed disjointed and abrupt. He wanted his father to rub his hands and mutter something, not this pale woman who upset him and then spoke sharply, like the women at the back doors in Coal Creek. He thought again, as before, that he preferred the black-faced miners, drunk and silent, to their pale, talking wives. Impulsively, he told her so, saying it harshly, so harshly that it hurt.

Their conversation was ruined. They stood up and began walking up the hill, heading home. She placed her hand on her hip again, and again he longed to put his hand on her back and push her up the hill. Instead, he walked silently beside her, hating the city again.

Halfway down the hill, a tall woman stopped on the side of the road. Darkness was falling, and the glow of the coke ovens lit the sky. "Someone who lives here and never goes down there might think this place is quite majestic and grand," he said. The hatred returned. "They might think the people who live there know something, and aren't just a herd of cattle."

A smile appeared on the tall woman's face, and a softer look came into her eyes. "We attack each other," she said, "we can't leave each other alone. I wish we wouldn't fight. We could be friends if we tried. There's something about you. You attract women. I've heard others say so. Your father was like that. Most women here would rather marry an ugly Cracked MacGregor than stay with their husbands. I heard my mother say that to my father when they were arguing in bed at night, and I lay there listening."

The boy was overcome by the thought that the woman was speaking to him so frankly. He looked at her and said what was on his mind. "I don"t like women," he said, "but I liked you when I saw you standing on the stairs, thinking you did as you pleased. I thought maybe you had achieved something. I don"t know why you should care what I think. I don"t know why a woman should care what a man thinks. I think you"ll continue to do what you want, just like Mom and I did, about me being a lawyer.

He sat on a log by the road not far from where he'd met her, watching her come down the hill. "I'm such a good boy for talking to her like that all day," he thought, and a feeling of pride in his growing manhood filled him.

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CHAPTER III


The town of Coal Creek was dreadful. People from the prosperous cities of the Midwest, from Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, heading east to New York or Philadelphia, looked out their car windows and, seeing the poor houses scattered along the hillside, thought of the books they had read. Life in the shanty towns of the old world. In the chair cars, men and women leaned back and closed their eyes. They yawned and wished the journey would end. If they thought of the town at all, they gently regretted it and dismissed it as a necessity of modern life.

The houses on the hillside and the shops on Main Street belonged to the mining company. The mining company, in turn, belonged to railroad officials. The mine manager had a brother who was a department head. This was the mine manager who stood at the mine door when Crack McGregor went to his death. He lived in a town about thirty miles away and traveled there by train in the evening. Clerks and even stenographers from the mine offices went with him. After five o'clock in the afternoon, the streets of Coal Creek were no longer a white-collared place.

In town, the men lived like animals. Stupefied by toil, they drank greedily in the saloon on Main Street and went home to beat their wives. A constant, low muttering continued among them. They felt the injustice of their lot, but couldn't articulate it, and when they thought of the men who owned the mine, they cursed silently, using vile curses even in their thoughts. Every now and then, a strike would break out, and Barney Butterlips, a thin little man with a cork leg, would stand on a crate and deliver speeches about the coming brotherhood of man. One day, a troop of cavalry disembarked and marched down Main Street in a battery. The battery consisted of a few men in brown uniforms. They set up a Gatling gun at the end of the street, and the strike died down.

An Italian man who lived in a house on a hillside cultivated a garden. His house was the only beautiful spot in the valley. He wheelbarrowed earth from the forest at the top of the hill, and on Sundays he could be seen pacing back and forth, whistling cheerfully. In the winter, he would sit in his house and draw on a piece of paper. In the spring, he took the drawing and planted his garden according to it, using every inch of his land. When the strike began, the mine manager advised him to return to work or leave home. He thought about the garden and the work he had done and returned to his daily work in the mine. While he was working, the miners climbed the hill and destroyed the garden. The next day, the Italian joined the striking miners.

An old woman lived in a small, one-room hut on a hill. She lived alone and was terribly dirty. Her house was filled with old, broken chairs and tables, scattered throughout the town, piled so high that she could barely move. On warm days, she would sit in the sun in front of the hut, chewing on a stick dipped in tobacco. Miners climbing the hill would throw pieces of bread and scraps of meat from their lunch pails into a box nailed to a tree by the road. The old woman collected them and ate them. When soldiers came to town, she walked down the street, mocking them. "Handsome boys! Scabs! Dudes! Haberdashers!" she shouted after them, passing the tails of their horses. A young man with glasses on his nose, sitting on a gray horse, turned and shouted to his comrades: "Leave her alone-it's old Mother Misfortune herself."

When the tall, red-haired boy looked at the workers and the old woman following the soldiers, he didn't sympathize with them. He hated them. In a way, he sympathized with the soldiers. His blood stirred at the sight of them marching shoulder to shoulder. He thought of order and decency among the ranks of uniformed men, moving silently and quickly, and he almost wished they would destroy the city. When the strikers destroyed the Italian's garden, he was deeply moved and paced the room in front of his mother, proclaiming himself. "I'd kill them if it were my garden," he said. "I wouldn't leave a single one of them alive." Deep down, like Cracked MacGregor, he harbored hatred for the miners and the city. "This is a place you have to get out of," he said. "If a man doesn't like it here, he should get up and leave." He remembered his father working and saving for a farm in the valley. "They thought he was crazy, but he knew more than they did. They wouldn't dare touch the garden he planted."

Strange, half-formed thoughts began to find a home in the miner's son's heart. Recalling in his dreams at night the moving columns of men in uniform, he invested new meaning in the scraps of history he had collected at school, and the movements of the men of old history began to have significance for him. One summer day, loitering in front of the town hotel, beneath which was the saloon and billiard room where the black-haired boy worked, he overheard two men talking about the importance of men.

One of the men was a traveling ophthalmologist who came to a mining town once a month to fit and sell glasses. After selling several pairs, the ophthalmologist became drunk, sometimes staying drunk for a week. When drunk, he spoke French and Italian and sometimes stood at the bar in front of the miners, quoting Dante's poetry. His clothes were greasy from long wear, and he had an enormous nose with red and purple veins. Because of his knowledge of languages and his poetry recitation, the miners considered the ophthalmologist infinitely wise. They believed that a man with such intelligence must possess an almost unearthly knowledge of the eye and the fitting of glasses, and they proudly wore the cheap, ill-fitting glasses he foisted on them.

From time to time, as if making a concession to his customers, the ophthalmologist would spend an evening among them. Once, after reading one of Shakespeare's sonnets, he placed his hand on the counter and, rocking gently back and forth, began to sing in a drunken voice a ballad that began with the words, "The harp that once passed through the halls of Tara, shed the soul of music." After the song, he laid his head on the counter and wept, while the miners looked at him with sympathy.

One summer day, as Bute MacGregor listened, the ophthalmologist was engaged in a heated argument with another man, just as drunk as he was. The other man was a slender, dapper middle-aged man who sold shoes at a Philadelphia employment agency. He was sitting in a chair leaning against the wall of the hotel, attempting to read a book aloud. After he'd gotten into a long paragraph, the ophthalmologist interrupted him. Staggering back and forth along the narrow boardwalk in front of the hotel, the old drunkard raved and cursed. He seemed beside himself with rage.

"I'm tired of this kind of slobbery philosophy," he declared. "Even reading it makes your mouth water. You don't speak harshly, and words shouldn't be spoken harshly. I'm a strong man myself."

The ophthalmologist, legs spread wide and cheeks puffed out, hit him in the chest. With a wave of his hand, he dismissed the man in the chair.

"You only slobber and make a disgusting noise," he declared. "I know your kind. I spit on you. The Congress in Washington is full of such people, as is the House of Commons in England. In France, they were once in charge. They ran things in France until a man like me came along. They are lost in the shadow of the great Napoleon."

The ophthalmologist, seemingly dismissing the dapper man, turned to Bowe. He spoke French, and the man in the chair sank into a restless sleep. "I'm like Napoleon," the drunk declared, switching back to English. Tears began to form in his eyes. "I take these miners' money and give them nothing. The glasses I sell to their wives for five dollars cost me only fifteen cents. I ride over these beasts like Napoleon across Europe. I'd have order and purpose if I weren't a fool. I'm like Napoleon in that I have utter contempt for men."


Again and again, the drunkard's words returned to the boy MacGregor's mind, influencing his thoughts. While he grasped none of the philosophy behind the man's words, his imagination was nonetheless captivated by the drunkard's tale of the great Frenchman, babbling in his ears, and somehow it seemed to convey his hatred of the disorganized inefficiency of life around him.


After Nancy McGregor opened the bakery, another strike disrupted business. Once again, miners wandered lazily through the streets. They came to the bakery for bread and told Nancy to write off their debt. Handsome McGregor was alarmed. He watched his father's money being spent on flour, which, baked into loaves, left the shop under the shuffling hands of miners. One night, a man staggered past the bakery, his name appearing in their books, followed by a long entry about loaded loaves. McGregor went to his mother and protested. "They have money to get drunk," he said, "let them pay for their bread."

Nancy MacGregor continued to trust the miners. She thought of the women and children in the houses on the hill, and when she heard of the mining company's plans to evict the miners from their homes, she shuddered. "I was a miner's wife, and I'll stick by them," she thought.

One day, the mine manager walked into the bakery. He leaned over the display case and began talking to Nancy. Her son came over and stood next to his mother to listen. "This has to stop," the manager said. "I won't let you ruin yourself over this brute. I want you to close this place until the strike is over. If you don't close it, I will. We own the building. They didn't appreciate what your husband did, so why should you ruin yourself for them?"

The woman looked at him and replied in a quiet, determined voice. "They thought he was crazy, and he was," she said. "But what made him this way were the rotten logs in the mine that broke and crushed him. You, not they, are responsible for my man and what he was."

Handsome McGregor interrupted. "Well, I guess he's right," he declared, leaning over the bar next to his mother and looking her in the face. "Miners don't want the best for their families; they want more money to buy them drink. We'll close the doors here. We won't invest any more in bread that goes down their throats. They hated Father, and he hated them, and now I hate them too."

The bot walked around the counter and headed for the door with the mine manager. He locked it and pocketed the key. Then he walked to the back of the bakery, where his mother sat on a box, crying. "It's time for a man to take over here," he said.

Nancy McGregor and her son sat in the bakery, looking at each other. Miners walked down the street, yanked the door open, and left grumbling. Rumors spread from mouth to mouth up and down the hill. "The mine manager has closed Nancy McGregor's shop," the women said, leaning over the fence. The children, sprawled on the floors of the houses, raised their heads and howled. Their lives were a series of new horrors. When a day passed without any new horrors to shake them, they went to bed, happy. When the miner and his wife stood by the door, talking quietly, they cried, expecting to be sent to bed hungry. When the cautious conversation outside the door failed to continue, the miner came home drunk and beat his mother, while the children lay on their beds along the wall, trembling with fear.

Late in the evening, a group of miners approached the bakery door and began pounding their fists. "Open up!" they shouted. Bo emerged from the room above the bakery and stood in the empty shop. His mother sat in a chair in her room, trembling. He walked to the door, unlocked it, and walked out. The miners stood in groups on the wooden sidewalk and in the dirt road. Among them was an old woman, walking alongside the horses and shouting at the soldiers. A miner with a black beard approached and stood in front of the boy. Waving to the crowd, he said, "We've come to open the bakery. Some of our stoves don't have ovens. Give us the key, and we'll open this place. We'll break down the door if you don't want to. The company can't blame you if we do it by force. You can keep track of what we take. Then, when the strike is settled, we'll pay you."

The flames hit the boy"s eyes. He walked down the steps and stopped among the miners. He shoved his hands in his pockets and searched their faces. When he spoke, his voice carried through the street. "You made fun of my father, Crack MacGregor, when he went into the mine for you. You laughed at him because he saved his money and didn"t spend it on buying you drinks. Now you come here for bread bought with his money and don"t pay. Then you get drunk and stagger past this very door. Now let me tell you something." He threw his hands up and shouted. "The mine manager didn"t close this place. I closed it. You made fun of Crack MacGregor, who was a better man than any of you. You had your fun with me-you laughed at me. Now I laugh at you." He ran up the steps, unlocked the door, and stood in the doorway. "Pay the money you owe this bakery, and bread will be sold here," he shouted, entered, and locked the door.

The miners walked down the street. The boy stood in the bakery, his hands shaking. "I told them something," he thought, "I showed them they can't fool me." He climbed the stairs to the rooms above. His mother sat by the window, her head in her hands, looking out onto the street. He sat in a chair and considered the situation. "They'll come back here and destroy this place, just like they destroyed that garden," he said.

The next evening, Beau sat in the dark on the steps outside the bakery. He held a hammer in his hand. A dull hatred for the town and the miners burned in his mind. "I'll give some of them hell if they come here," he thought. He hoped they would. As he glanced at the hammer in his hand, a phrase from the drunken old ophthalmologist, babbling Napoleon, came to mind. He began to think that he, too, must resemble the figure the drunkard had spoken of. He recalled the ophthalmologist's story of a street fight in a European city, muttering something and swinging the hammer. Upstairs, by the window, his mother sat, her head in her hands. A light from a saloon down the street shone onto the wet sidewalk. The tall, pale woman who had accompanied him to the rise overlooking the valley descended the steps above the undertaker's shop. She ran along the sidewalk. She had a shawl on her head, and as she ran, she clutched it with her hand. She pressed her other hand to her side.

When the women approached the boy, who sat silently in front of the bakery, she placed her hands on his shoulders and pleaded with him. "Go away," she said. "Take your mother and come to us. They're going to beat you here. You'll get hurt."

Beau stood up and pushed her away. Her arrival gave him new courage. His heart leaped at the thought of her interest in him, and he wished the miners would come so he could fight them before she did. "I wish I could live among decent people like her," he thought.

The train stopped at a station further down the street. The sound of footsteps and quick, sharp commands could be heard. A stream of men poured out of the train and onto the sidewalk. A line of soldiers, weapons slung over their shoulders, marched down the street. Boat was once again delighted by the sight of trained orderlies marching shoulder to shoulder. In the presence of these men, the disorganized miners seemed pitifully weak and insignificant. The girl threw a shawl over her head, ran down the street, and disappeared down the stairs. The boy unlocked the door, went upstairs, and went to bed.

After the strike, Nancy McGregor, with nothing but unpaid bills, was unable to reopen her bakery. A small man with a gray mustache and chewing tobacco came from the mill, took the unused flour, and carted it away. The boy and his mother continued to live above the bakery warehouse. In the morning, she went back to washing windows and scrubbing floors in the mine offices, while her red-haired son stood outside or sat in the pool hall, talking to the black-haired boy. "Next week I'll go into town and start making something of myself," he said. When it was time to leave, he waited and loafed on the street. One day, when a miner mocked him for his idleness, he knocked him into a ditch. The miners, who hated him for his speech on the steps, admired his strength and brute courage.

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CHAPTER IV


I'M IN THE BASEMENT - LIKE It In a house driven like a stake into the hillside above Coal Creek, Kate Hartnett lived with her son, Mike. Her husband had died with the others in a mine fire. Her son, like Bute MacGregor, didn't work in the mine. He hurried across Main Street or half-ran through the trees on the hills. The miners, seeing him hurrying, his face pale and tense, shook their heads. "He's broken," they said. "He'll hurt someone else."

Bo saw Mike bustling about the streets. One day, meeting him in the pine forest above town, he followed him and tried to get him to talk. Mike carried books and pamphlets in his pockets. He set traps in the woods and brought home rabbits and squirrels. He collected bird eggs, which he sold to women on trains stopping at Coal Creek. When he caught birds, he stuffed them, inserted beads into their eyes, and sold them as well. He declared himself an anarchist and, like Painted McGregor, muttered to himself as he hurried forward.

One day, Bo stumbled upon Mike Hartnett, reading a book, sitting on a log overlooking the city. A shock ran through McGregor as he looked over the man's shoulder and saw what book he was reading. "Strange," he thought, "that this guy sticks to the same book that fat old Weeks does for a living."

Bo sat on a log next to Hartnett, watching him. The man reading raised his head and nodded nervously, then slid along the log to the far end. Bute laughed. He looked at the city, then at the frightened, nervous man reading a book on the log. Inspiration struck.

"If you had the power, Mike, what would you do with Coal Creek?" he asked.

The nervous man jumped, tears welling in his eyes. He stood before the log and spread his arms. "I would go among Christ-like people," he exclaimed, raising his voice as if addressing an audience. "Poor and humble, I would go and teach them love." Spreading his arms as if pronouncing a blessing, he cried out, "Oh, people of Coal Creek, I would teach you love and the destruction of evil."

Boat leaped from the log and paced before the trembling figure. He was strangely moved. Grabbing the man, he pushed him back onto the log. His own voice rolled down the hillside in a roar of laughter. "People of Coal Creek," he shouted, imitating Hartnett"s gravity, "listen to the voice of McGregor. I hate you. I hate you because you mocked my father and me, and because you deceived my mother, Nancy McGregor. I hate you because you are weak and disorganized, like cattle. I would come to you teaching you strength. I would kill you one by one, not with weapons, but with my bare fists. If they have made you work like rats buried in a hole, they are right. It is a man"s right to do what he can. Rise and fight." Fight, and I will cross over to the other side, and you can fight me. I will help drive you back into your holes.

Bo fell silent and, leaping over logs, ran down the road. At the first miner's house, he stopped and laughed awkwardly. "I'm broken too," he thought, "screaming into the void on the hillside." He continued in a pensive mood, wondering what force had possessed him. "I'd like a fight-a struggle against all odds," he thought. "I'll stir things up when I become a lawyer in town."

Mike Hartnett ran down the road after McGregor. "Don't tell," he begged, trembling. "Don't tell anyone about me in town. They'll laugh and call me names. I want to be left alone."

Bo shook off the hand holding him and walked down the hill. When he was out of Hartnet's sight, he sat down on the ground. For an hour he looked at the town in the valley and thought about himself. He was half proud, half ashamed of what had happened.


McGregor's blue eyes flared suddenly and quickly with anger. He swayed through the streets of Coal Creek, his enormous frame awe-inspiring. His mother grew serious and silent as she worked in the mine offices. She was once again in the habit of remaining silent at home, looking at her son with a half-fear of him. She worked in the mine all day, and in the evening she sat silently in a chair on her front porch, looking out onto Main Street.

Handsome MacGregor did nothing. He sat in a dark little pool hall, talking to a black-haired boy, or strolled through the hills, waving a stick in his hand and thinking about the city he would soon travel to to begin his career. As he walked down the street, women stopped to look at him, reflecting on the beauty and strength of his maturing body. Miners passed him silently, hating him and fearing his wrath. As he strolled through the hills, he thought a lot about himself. "I'm capable of anything," he thought, raising his head and looking at the high hills. "I wonder why I stay here."

When he was eighteen, Bo's mother fell ill. She lay on her back in bed all day in the room above the empty bakery. Bo snapped out of his waking daze and went looking for work. He didn't feel lazy. He had been waiting. Now he shook himself. "I won't go into the mines," he said. "Nothing will take me there."

He found work at a livery stable, grooming and feeding horses. His mother got out of bed and went back to the mine office. After starting work, Beau stayed, thinking it was just a way station on the way to the position he would one day achieve in the city.

Two boys, the sons of coal miners, worked in the stable. They transported travelers from the trains to the farming villages in the valleys among the hills, and in the evenings they sat on a bench in front of the barn with Handsome MacGregor and shouted at people passing by the stables on their way up the hill.

The livery stable in Coal Creek belonged to a hunchback named Weller, who lived in town and went home at night. During the day, he sat in the barn and talked to the red-haired McGregor. "You're a big beast," he said, laughing. "You talk about going to the city and making something of yourself, and yet you stay here doing nothing. You want to stop talking about being a lawyer and become a prizefighter. The law is a place for brains, not brawn." He walked through the barn, head cocked to one side, looking at the big man grooming the horses. McGregor looked at him and grinned. "I'll show you," he said.

The hunchback was pleased when he paraded before MacGregor. He'd heard people talk about his groom's strength and vicious nature, and he liked having such a fierce man grooming horses. At night in town, he'd sit under a lamp with his wife and boast. "I make him walk," he'd say.

In the stables, the hunchback stalked MacGregor. "And one more thing," he said, shoving his hands in his pockets and rising on tiptoe. "You keep an eye on that undertaker's daughter. She wants you. If she gets you, there'll be no law school for you, but a place in the mines. You'll leave her alone and start looking after your mother."

Beau continued grooming the horses and thinking about what the hunchback had said. He supposed it made sense. He was also afraid of the tall, pale girl. Sometimes, when he looked at her, pain shot through him, and a mixture of fear and desire overwhelmed him. He had escaped that and become free, just as he had been freed from life in the darkness of the mine. "He has a kind of talent for staying away from things he doesn't like," the liveryman said, talking to Uncle Charlie Wheeler in the sun outside the post office.

One afternoon, two boys who worked in the stable with McGregor got him drunk. The affair was a crude prank, carefully planned. The hunchback had been in town all day, and none of the travelers left the train to travel through the hills. During the day, hay brought over the hill from the fertile valley was stacked in the barn loft, and between loads, McGregor and the two boys sat on a bench by the barn door. The two boys went into the saloon and fetched beer, paying for it from a fund set aside for this purpose. The fund was the result of a system devised by the two drivers. When a passenger gave one of them a coin at the end of a day's riding, he put it into a common fund. When the fund reached a certain amount, the two went into the saloon and stood in front of the bar, drinking until it was depleted, then returned to sleep it off on some hay in the barn. After a successful week, the hunchback would occasionally give them a dollar into the fund.

McGregor drank only one foaming glass of beer. In all his idle time at Coal Creek, he'd never tasted beer before, and it tasted strong and bitter in his mouth. He lifted his head, swallowed, then turned and walked to the back of the barn to hide the tears that the taste of the drink brought to his eyes.

Both drivers sat on the bench and laughed. The drink they gave Bot turned out to be a terrible mess, concocted at their suggestion by the laughing bartender. "We'll get the big guy drunk and hear him roar," the bartender said.

As he walked toward the back of the stable, Botha was overcome with nausea. He tripped and fell forward, cutting his face on the floor. Then he rolled over onto his back and groaned, a trickle of blood running down his cheek.

Both boys jumped up from the bench and ran toward him. They stood there, staring at his pale lips. Fear gripped them. They tried to pick him up, but he fell from their hands and lay again on the stable floor, white and motionless. Terrified, they ran out of the stable and across Main Street. "We need to call a doctor," they said, hurrying. "He's very sick, this boy."

A tall, pale girl stood in the doorway leading to the rooms above the undertaker's shop. One of the running boys stopped and addressed her: "Your redhead," he shouted, "is lying blindly drunk on the stable floor. He's cut his head and is bleeding."

The tall girl ran down the street toward the mine office. She hurried to the stables with Nancy McGregor. Shopkeepers on Main Street peered out of their doors and saw two pale, frozen-faced women carrying the enormous figure of Beauty McGregor down the street and entering the bakery.


At eight o'clock that evening, Handsome McGregor, still shaking on his legs and pale in the face, boarded a passenger train and disappeared from the life of Coal Creek. On the seat next to him lay a bag containing all his clothes. In his pocket was a ticket to Chicago and eighty-five dollars-Cracked McGregor's last savings. He looked out the car window at the small, thin, exhausted woman standing alone on the station platform, and a wave of anger washed over him. "I'll show them," he muttered. The woman looked at him and forced a smile. The train began to move west. Beau looked at his mother, at the deserted streets of Coal Creek, put his head in his hands, and sat in the crowded car before the gaping people wept with joy at seeing the last days of their youth. He looked back at Coal Creek, filled with hatred. Like Nero, he might wish that all the inhabitants of the city had only one head, so that he could cut it off with a swing of his sword or knock it into a ditch with one sweeping blow.

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BOOK II


OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER I


It was late in the summer of 1893 when McGregor arrived in Chicago, a difficult time to be a boy or a man in that city. The Great Exposition of the previous year had attracted thousands of restless workers to the city, and its leading citizens, who had clamored for the Exposition and loudly talked of the great growth to come, did not know what to do with the growth now that it had arrived. The depression that followed the Great Exposition and the financial panic that swept the country that year left thousands of hungry men waiting stupidly on park benches, studying advertisements in the daily newspapers and staring blankly at lake or lake. They wandered aimlessly through the streets, filled with foreboding.

In times of plenty, a great American city like Chicago continues to show the world a more or less cheerful face, while in the hidden corners of alleys and side streets, poverty and misery hunker down in small, stinking rooms, breeding vice. In times of depression, these creatures creep forth, joined by thousands of unemployed people who wander the streets through long nights or sleep on park benches. In the alleys off Madison Street on the West Side and State Street on the South Side, impatient women, driven by need, sold their bodies to passersby for twenty-five cents. A newspaper ad for a single unfilled job prompted a thousand men to block the streets in daylight in front of a factory gate. The crowds cursed and beat each other. Desperate workers took to the quiet streets, while citizens, bewildered, took their money and watches and fled, trembling, into the darkness. A girl on Twenty-fourth Street was kicked and thrown into a gutter because she had only thirty-five cents in her purse when the thieves attacked her. A University of Chicago professor, addressing his audience, said that after looking at the hungry, distorted faces of five hundred people applying for dishwasher jobs in a cheap restaurant, he was ready to declare all pretensions of social progress in America a figment of the imagination of optimistic fools. A tall, awkward man walking down State Street threw a rock through a store window. A policeman pushed him through the crowd. "You'll get jail time for this," he said.

"You fool, that's what I want. I want property that won't give me work to feed me," said a tall, thin man who, raised in the cleaner, healthier poverty of the frontier, might have been a Lincoln suffering for humanity.

Into this maelstrom of suffering and grim, desperate need entered Handsome MacGregor of Coal Creek-huge, graceless in body, lazy in mind, unprepared, uneducated, and world-hating. In two days, before the eyes of this hungry, marching army, he won three awards, three places where a man, working all day, could earn clothes to wear on his back and food to eat.

In a sense, MacGregor already sensed something, the realization of which would greatly help any man become a powerful figure in the world. He could not be intimidated by words. Orators could preach to him all day about human progress in America, flags would wave, and newspapers could fill his head with the wonders of his country. He would only shake his big head. He did not yet know the full story of how people who emerged from Europe and received millions of square miles of black, fertile land and forests failed in the challenge thrown down to them by fate and produced from the majestic order of nature only the hideous disorder of man. MacGregor did not know the full tragic history of his race. He only knew that the people he saw were, for the most part, pygmies. On the train to Chicago, a change came over him. The hatred of Coal Creek that had burned within him ignited something else. He sat, looking out the car window at the stations that passed by that night and the next day at the Indiana cornfields, and made plans. He intended to do something in Chicago. Coming from a society where no one rose above the level of silent, brutal toil, he intended to emerge into the light of power. Full of hatred and contempt for humanity, he meant for humanity to serve him. Raised among men who were just men, he intended to become a master.

And his equipment was better than he thought. In a chaotic, random world, hatred is as effective an impulse, driving people toward success as love and high hopes. It's an ancient impulse, dormant in the human heart since the time of Cain. In a sense, it resonates true and powerful above the sordid chaos of modern life. By instilling fear, it usurps power.

McGregor wasn't afraid. He hadn't yet met his master, and he looked with disdain on the men and women he knew. Unbeknownst to him, besides his enormous, unyielding body, he possessed a clear, lucid mind. The fact that he hated Coal Creek and considered it terrible was proof of his insight. It was terrifying. It was entirely possible that Chicago trembled, and the rich strolling along Michigan Boulevard at night glanced around in fear, when this huge red-haired man, carrying a cheap handbag and gazing with blue eyes at the restlessly moving crowds, walked down its streets for the first time. Within his very body lay the possibility of something, a blow, a shock, a jolt of the lean soul of strength into the gelatinous flesh of weakness.

In the world of men, there is nothing rarer than knowledge of people. Christ himself found merchants selling their wares, even on the floor of a temple, and in his naive youth, he flew into a rage and chased them out the door like flies. And history, in turn, presented him as a man of the world, so that after these centuries, churches are once again supported by the commerce of goods, and his beautiful boyish anger is forgotten. In France, after the great revolution and the babble of many voices speaking of the brotherhood of man, it took only a short and very determined man with an instinctive knowledge of drums, cannons, and stirring words to send those same chatterboxes screaming into the open, stumbling through ditches and throwing themselves headlong into the arms of death. In the interests of one who did not believe in the brotherhood of man at all, those who wept at the mention of the word "brotherhood" died fighting their brothers.

In the heart of every man slumbers a love of order. How to achieve order from our strange jumble of forms, from democracies and monarchies, dreams and aspirations-this is the mystery of the universe and what an artist calls a passion for form, something he, too, would laugh in the face. Death is in all men. Recognizing this fact, Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, and our own Grant made heroes of the dumbest men who walk, not the one man out of all the thousands who marched with Sherman to the sea but lived the rest of their lives with something sweeter and braver. And a better dream in his soul than will ever be created by a reformer railing against brotherhood from a soapbox. The long march, the burning in the throat and the stinging dust in the nostrils, the touch of shoulder to shoulder, the quick connection of a common, undeniable, instinctive passion that flares up in the orgasm of battle, the forgetting of words and the doing of a deed, whether it be winning battles or destroying ugliness, the passionate unification of men to accomplish deeds - these are the signs, if they ever awaken in our country, by which you may know that you have come to the days of Man's creation.

Chicago in 1893, and the men wandering aimlessly through its streets that year, looking for work, bore none of these characteristics. Like the mining town from which Bute MacGregor came, the city lay before him sprawling and inefficient, a bland, haphazard dwelling for millions, built not to create men, but to create millions by a handful of eccentric meatpackers and dry goods merchants.

Raising his mighty shoulders slightly, MacGregor felt these things, though he could not express his feeling, and the hatred and contempt for people born in his youth in a mining town were rekindled by the sight of the townspeople wandering in fear and confusion through the streets of their city.

Knowing nothing of the customs of the unemployed, MacGregor didn't wander the streets looking for "Men Wanted" signs. He didn't sit on park benches, studying job postings-job postings that so often turned out to be nothing more than bait, placed up grimy stairs by polite people to extract the last few pennies from the pockets of the needy. Walking down the street, he thrust his enormous body through doorways leading to factory offices. When a brazen young man tried to stop him, he didn't utter a word, but jerked his fist back threateningly and angrily entered. The young men at the factory doors looked at his blue eyes and let him pass unhindered.

On the afternoon of the first day of searching, Bo landed a job at an apple warehouse on the North Side, the third position offered to him that day, and the one he accepted. His chance came through a show of strength. Two men, old and stooped, were struggling to carry a barrel of apples from the sidewalk to a platform that ran waist-high along the warehouse's facade. The barrel had rolled onto the sidewalk from a truck parked in a ditch. The truck driver stood with his hands on his hips and laughed. A blond German man stood on the platform, cursing in broken English. McGregor stood on the sidewalk and watched the two men struggling with the barrel. His eyes shone with immense contempt for their weakness. Pushing them aside, he grabbed the barrel and, with a mighty jerk, threw it onto the platform and carried it through the open door into the warehouse's receiving area. Two workers stood on the sidewalk, smiling sheepishly. Across the street, a group of city firefighters, relaxing in the sun in front of the engine room, clapped their hands. The truck driver turned and prepared to steer another barrel along the plank that ran from the truck across the sidewalk to the storage platform. A gray head poked out of a window at the top of the storage area, and a sharp voice called out to the tall German. "Hey, Frank, hire that husky, and let those six dead people you've got here go home."

McGregor leaped onto the platform and entered the warehouse door. The German followed him, appraising the red-haired giant with a certain disapproval. His gaze seemed to say, "I like strong men, but you're too strong." He perceived the confusion of the two weak workers on the sidewalk as a kind of self-reflection. The two men stood in the reception area, looking at each other. A passerby might have thought they were preparing for a fight.

Then a freight elevator slowly descended from the top of the warehouse, and a short, gray-haired man with a tack in his hand hopped out. He had a sharp, anxious gaze and a short, gray beard. Hitting the floor, he began to speak. "We pay two dollars here for nine hours of work-start at seven, finish at five. You coming?" Without waiting for an answer, he turned to the German. "Tell those two old 'fools' to take their time and get out of here," he said, turning again and looking expectantly at McGregor.

McGregor liked the quick little man and grinned, approving of his decisiveness. He nodded his agreement to the proposal and, looking at the German, laughed. The little man disappeared through the door leading to the office, and McGregor walked out into the street. At the corner, he turned and saw the German standing on the platform in front of the warehouse, watching him go. "He's wondering if he can give me a good spanking," McGregor thought.


McGregor worked in the apple warehouse for three years, rising to foreman in his second year and replacing a tall German. The German expected trouble with McGregor and was determined to deal with him quickly. He was offended by the actions of the gray-haired superintendent who had hired the man and felt his prerogative had been ignored. All day, he watched McGregor, trying to gauge the strength and courage in his enormous frame. He knew hundreds of hungry men roamed the streets, and ultimately decided that if not the man's spirit, then the demands of the job would render him docile. In his second week, he put the question burning in his mind to the test. He followed McGregor into a dimly lit upper room, where barrels of apples, stacked to the ceiling, left only narrow passages. Standing in the semi-darkness, he shouted and called a swear word at the man who was working among the apple barrels: "I won"t have you hanging around there, you red-haired bastard," he shouted.

MacGregor said nothing. He took no offense at the vile name the German had called him, accepting it merely as a challenge he had been waiting for and intended to accept. With a grim smile on his lips, he approached the German, and when only one apple barrel remained between them, he reached out and dragged the snorting and cursing foreman down the corridor toward the window at the end of the room. He stopped at the window and, pressing his hand to the struggling man's throat, began to choke him, forcing him to submit. The blows landed on his face and body. The German, struggling terribly, struck MacGregor's legs with desperate energy. Though his ears rang from the hammer blows on his neck and cheeks, MacGregor remained silent in the storm. His blue eyes gleamed with hatred, and the muscles of his enormous arms danced in the light from the window. Staring into the bulging eyes of the writhing German, he thought of the fat Reverend Minot Weeks of Coal Creek and tugged even harder at the flesh between his fingers. When the man against the wall made a gesture of submission, he stepped back and released his grip. The German fell to the floor. Standing over him, McGregor delivered his ultimatum. "If you report this or try to fire me, I will kill you on the spot," he said. "I intend to stay here in this job until I'm ready to leave. You can tell me what to do and how to do it, but when you speak to me again, say 'McGregor'-Mr. McGregor, that's my name."

The German rose to his feet and walked down the aisle between the rows of stacked barrels, using his hands to help himself along the way. MacGregor returned to work. After the German retreated, he shouted, "Find a new place when you can speak Dutch. I'll take this job from you when I'm ready."

That evening, as McGregor walked to his car, he saw the small, gray-haired superintendent waiting for him in front of the saloon. The man motioned, and McGregor walked over and stood next to him. They entered the saloon together, leaned against the counter, and looked at each other. A smile played on the small man's lips. "What were you doing with Frank?" he asked.

McGregor turned to the bartender standing before him. He thought the superintendent was going to try to patronize him by buying him a drink, and he didn't like the idea. "What will you have? I'll take a cigar," he said quickly, ruining the superintendent's plan by speaking first. When the bartender brought the cigars, McGregor paid for them and walked out the door. He felt like a man playing a game. "If Frank wanted to bully me into submission, this man is worth something, too."

On the sidewalk in front of the saloon, McGregor paused. "Listen," he said, turning to face the superintendent, "I need Frank's house. I'm going to learn the business as fast as I can. I won't let you fire him. By the time I get ready for this place, he won't be there."

A light flashed in the little man's eyes. He held the cigar MacGregor had paid for as if he were about to throw it into the street. "How far do you think you can go with those big fists of yours?" he asked, raising his voice.

McGregor smiled. He thought he'd earned another victory, and, lighting a cigar, he held a lit match in front of the little man. "Brains are meant to support fists," he said, "and I've got both."

The manager looked at the burning match and the cigar between his fingers. "If I don't do this, what will you do against me?" he asked.

McGregor threw the match into the street. "Oh! Don't ask," he said, handing over another match.

McGregor and the superintendent were walking down the street. "I'd like to fire you, but I won't. Someday you'll run this warehouse like a clock," the superintendent said.

MacGregor sat on the tram and thought about his day. It had been a day of two battles. First, a brutal fistfight in the corridor, and then another battle with the superintendent. He thought he had won both fights. He hadn't thought much about the fight with the tall German. He had expected to win that one. The other was different. He felt the superintendent wanted to patronize him, patting him on the back and buying him drinks. Instead, he was patronizing the superintendent. A battle had raged within the minds of these two men, and he had won. He had met a new kind of man, one who didn't live by the brute force of his muscles, and he had acquitted himself well. The conviction washed over him that, in addition to a good pair of fists, he also had a good brain, which glorified him. He thought of the sentence, "Brains are meant to support fists," and wondered how he had even thought of such a thing.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER II


T H E STREET The house McGregor lived in Chicago was called Wycliffe Place, named after a family of that name who once owned land nearby. The street was full of its own horror. Nothing more unpleasant could be imagined. Given free rein, an indiscriminate crowd of poorly trained carpenters and masons had built houses along the paved road, which was fantastically unsightly and inconvenient.

There are hundreds of such streets in Chicago's large West Side neighborhood, and the coal town McGregor came from was a more inspiring place to live. As an unemployed young man, not particularly inclined to casual encounters, Beau spent many long evenings wandering alone through the hillsides above his hometown. At night, the place had a terrifying beauty. The long, black valley with its thick curtain of smoke rising and falling, taking strange shapes in the moonlight, the poor little houses clinging to the hillside, the occasional screams of a woman being beaten by her drunken husband, the glare of the coke fires and the rumble of the coal cars being pushed along the railway tracks - all this made a grim and rather exhilarating impression on the young man's mind, so that, although he hated the mines and the miners, he would sometimes stop in his nightly wanderings and stand with his great shoulders hunched over, he would sigh deeply and feel something that he had no words to express.

At Wycliffe Place, MacGregor received no such reaction. A foul dust filled the air. All day, the street roared and roared beneath the wheels of trucks and light, hurrying wagons. Soot from the factory chimneys was picked up by the wind and, mixed with powdered horse manure from the roadway, entered the eyes and nostrils of pedestrians. The hum of voices continued constantly. At the corner of the saloon, teamsters stopped to fill their cans with beer and stood there, cursing and shouting. In the evening, women and children walked to and from their homes, carrying beer in jugs from the same saloon. Dogs howled and fought, drunken men staggered along the sidewalk, and the town women appeared in their cheap clothes and paraded in front of the loafers at the saloon doors.

The woman who rented a room to McGregor bragged to him about Wycliffe's blood. It was this story she told him that had brought her to Chicago from her home in Cairo, Illinois. "This place was left to me, and not knowing what else to do with it, I came here to live," she said. She explained that the Wycliffes were prominent figures in Chicago's early history. The huge old house with its cracked stone steps and a "ROOMS TO RENT" sign in the window had once been their family home.

This woman's story is typical of much of American life. She was essentially a healthy person who should have lived in a neat frame house in the country and tended a garden. On Sundays, she should have dressed carefully and gone to sit in the village church, arms folded, her soul at rest.

But the thought of owning a house in the city paralyzed her mind. The house itself cost several thousand dollars, and her mind couldn't rise above that fact, so her good, broad face became dirty from the city's filth, and her body was tired from the endless labor of caring for her tenants. On summer evenings, she would sit on the steps in front of her house, dressed in Wycliffe's clothes taken from a chest in the attic, and when a tenant emerged from the door, she would look at him longingly and say, "On a night like this, you could hear the whistles on the riverboats in Cairo."

MacGregor lived in a small room at the end of a high, second-story building in the Wycliffe family home. The windows overlooked a dingy courtyard, almost surrounded by brick warehouses. The room was furnished with a bed, a chair that was always in danger of falling apart, and a desk with flimsy carved legs.

In this room, McGregor sat night after night, striving to realize his dream at Coal Creek-to train his mind and achieve some kind of authority in the world. From seven-thirty to nine-thirty, he sat at his desk in night school. From ten until midnight, he read in his room. He didn't think about his surroundings, the vast chaos of life around him, but tried with all his might to bring some semblance of order and purpose to his mind and his life.

In the small courtyard beneath the window, stacks of wind-blown newspapers lay scattered. There, in the very heart of town, surrounded by the wall of a brick warehouse and half-hidden by a pile of cans, chair legs, and broken bottles, lay what were undoubtedly two logs, part of a grove that once grew around the house. The neighborhood had so quickly replaced country estates with houses, and then houses with rental housing and huge brick warehouses, that the marks of the lumberjack's axe were still visible on the butts of the logs.

MacGregor rarely saw this small courtyard, except when its ugliness was subtly masked by darkness or moonlight. On hot evenings, he would put his book aside and lean far out the window, rubbing his eyes and watching the discarded newspapers, stirred by the eddies of wind in the courtyard, scurry back and forth, smashing against the warehouse walls and vainly attempting to escape through the roof. The sight fascinated him and gave him an idea. He began to think that the lives of most people around him were much like a dirty newspaper, blown by a headwind and surrounded by ugly walls of fact. This thought made him turn away from the window and return to his books. "I'll do something here anyway. I'll show them," he growled.

A man living in the same house with McGregor during those first years in town might have found his life silly and banal, but to him it didn't seem so. For the miner's son, it was a time of sudden and enormous growth. Filled with confidence in the strength and speed of his body, he also began to believe in the strength and clarity of his mind. He walked around the warehouse with his eyes and ears open, mentally devising new ways to move goods, observing the workers at work, noting those strolling, preparing to pounce on the tall German as foreman.

The warehouse foreman, not understanding the turn of his conversation with McGregor on the sidewalk outside the saloon, decided to make a point and laughed when they met in the warehouse. The tall German maintained a policy of sullen silence and did everything possible to avoid addressing him.

At night in his room, MacGregor began reading law books, rereading each page over and over and thinking about what he had read the next day while rolling and stacking barrels of apples in the aisles of the warehouse.

MacGregor had a knack and a thirst for facts. He read law the way another, gentler nature might read poetry or ancient legends. What he read at night, he memorized and pondered during the day. He had no aspirations to the glory of law. The fact that these rules, established by humans to govern their social organization, were the result of a centuries-old quest for perfection, held little interest for him, and he thought of them merely as weapons with which to attack and defend himself in the battle of wits he was currently engaged in. His mind gloated in anticipation of the battle.

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CHAPTER III


ND _ THEN A new element asserted itself in McGregor's life. He was attacked by one of the hundreds of disintegrating forces that assault strong natures seeking to dissipate their strength in the undercurrents of life. His large body began to feel the call of sex with a weary insistence.

In the house on Wycliffe Place, MacGregor remained an enigma. By maintaining silence, he earned a reputation for wisdom. The servants in the bedroom corridors thought he was a scholar. A woman from Cairo thought he was a theology student. In the corridor, a beautiful girl with large black eyes who worked in a downtown department store dreamed of him at night. When he slammed the door to his room that evening and walked down the corridor to night school, she sat down on a chair by the open door of her room. As he passed, she looked up and gazed boldly at him. When he returned, she was again at the door, gazing boldly at him.

In his room, after his encounters with the dark-eyed girl, MacGregor could hardly concentrate on his reading. He felt the same way he had with the pale girl on the hillside beyond Coal Creek. With her, as with the pale girl, he felt the need to protect himself. He made a habit of hurrying past her door.

The girl in the bedroom down the hall thought constantly about McGregor. When he went to night school, another young man in a Panama hat arrived on the floor above and, with his hands on the doorframe of her room, stood looking at her and talking. He held a cigarette between his lips, which dangled limply from the corner of his mouth as he spoke.

The young man and the dark-eyed girl were constantly commenting on the actions of the red-haired McGregor. The topic, started by the young man, who hated him for his silence, was picked up by the girl, who wanted to talk about McGregor.

On Saturday evenings, the young man and woman sometimes went to the theater together. One summer night, as they were returning home, the woman stopped. "Let's see what that big redhead is doing," she said.

After going round the block, they crept in the darkness into a side street and stood in a small dirty courtyard, looking up at MacGregor, who, with his feet out of the window and a lamp burning on his shoulder, sat in his room reading.

When they returned to the house, the dark-eyed girl kissed the young man, closed her eyes, and thought of McGregor. Later, she lay in her room, dreaming. She imagined being attacked by a young man who had crept into her room, and McGregor rushing down the hallway, roaring, to grab him and throw him out the door.

At the end of the hallway, near the stairs leading to the street, lived a barber. He'd abandoned his wife and four children in a town in Ohio and, to avoid being recognized, had grown a black beard. This man and McGregor struck up a friendship, and on Sundays they would go for walks in the park together. The black-bearded man called himself Frank Turner.

Frank Turner had a passion. In the evenings and on Sundays, he would sit in his room and make violins. He worked with a knife, glue, pieces of glass, and sandpaper, and spent the money he earned on ingredients for varnish. When he received a piece of wood that seemed to be the answer to his prayers, he took it to MacGregor's room and, holding it up to the light, explained what he would do with it. Sometimes he would bring a violin and, sitting by the open window, test its sound. One evening, he spent an hour of MacGregor's time talking about Cremona varnish and reading him a tattered book about old Italian violin makers.


On a park bench sat Turner, the violin maker and man who dreamed of rediscovering Cremona varnish, talking to MacGregor, the son of a Pennsylvania miner.

It was Sunday, and the park was bustling with activity. All day, streetcars had been unloading Chicagoans at the park entrance. They arrived in pairs and groups: young people with their sweethearts, and fathers with their families trailing close behind. And now, late in the day, they continued to arrive, a steady stream of people flowing along the gravel path past a bench where two men sat talking. Across and through the stream, another stream flowed, heading home. Babies cried. Fathers called to their children playing on the grass. Cars that had arrived at the park full, left full.

MacGregor looked around, thinking of himself and the restlessly moving people. He lacked that vague fear of crowds common to many solitary souls. His disdain for people and for human life heightened his natural courage. The odd slight rounding of the shoulders, even in athletic young men, made him square his own with pride. Whether fat or thin, tall or short, he thought of all men as counterattacks in some vast game in which he was destined to become a master.

A passion for form began to awaken within him, that strange, intuitive force felt by so many and understood by no one but the masters of human life. He was already beginning to realize that for him, law was merely an episode in some vast design, and he was completely unmoved by the desire to succeed in the world, that greedy grasping at trivialities that constituted the entire purpose of life for so many people around him. When a band began playing somewhere in the park, he nodded his head up and down and nervously ran his hand up and down his trousers. He had a sudden urge to boast to the barber about what he intended to do in this world, but he pushed it aside. Instead, he sat, blinking silently, wondering about the persistent inefficiency among the people passing by. When a band passed by, playing a march, followed by about fifty people in white feathers on their hats, walking with shy awkwardness, he was astonished. He thought he saw a change among the people. Something like a running shadow passed over them. The murmur of voices ceased, and people, like himself, began to nod their heads. A thought, gigantic in its simplicity, began to occur to him, but was immediately crushed by his impatience with the marchers. The madness of leaping up and running among them, disorienting them and forcing them to march with the strength that comes from solitude, almost lifted him from the bench. His mouth twitched, and his fingers ached for action.


People moved among the trees and greenery. Men and women sat by the pond, eating dinner from baskets or white towels laid out on the grass. They laughed and shouted at each other and at their children, calling them back from the gravel driveways filled with moving carriages. Beau saw a girl throw an eggshell, hitting a young man between the eyes, then run laughing along the pond's edge. Under a tree, a woman nursed a baby, covering her breast with a shawl so that only the baby's black head was visible. Its tiny hand clasped the woman's mouth. In the open space, in the shadow of a building, young men played baseball, the shouts of spectators rising above the roar of voices on the gravel driveway.

A thought occurred to MacGregor, something he wanted to discuss with the old man. He was moved by the sight of the women around him and shook himself, like someone waking from sleep. Then he began looking at the ground and kicking up gravel. "Listen," he said, turning to the barber, "what's a man to do with women? How do he get what he wants from them?"

The barber seemed to understand. "So it's come to this?" he asked, looking up quickly. He lit his pipe and sat, looking around at the people. It was then that he told MacGregor about his wife and four children in the Ohio town, describing the small brick house, the garden, and the chicken coop behind it, like a man lingering in a place dear to his imagination. When he finished, there was something old and tired in his voice.

"It"s not up to me to decide," he said. "I left because there was nothing else I could do. I"m not apologizing, I"m just telling you. There was something chaotic and unsettled about it all, about my life with her and with them. I couldn"t stand it. I felt myself being pulled down by something. I wanted to be neat and work, you know. I couldn"t afford to go into violin making alone. God, how I tried... tried to bluff it out, calling it a fad.

The barber glanced nervously at MacGregor, confirming his interest. "I had a shop on the main street of our town. Behind it was a blacksmith shop. During the day, I'd stand by a chair in my shop and talk to the men shaving about love for women and a man's duty to his family. On summer days, I'd go to the blacksmith shop for a keg and talk to the blacksmith about the same thing, but it didn't do me any good.

"When I let myself go, I dreamed not of my duty to my family, but of quiet work, as I do now here in the city, in my room in the evenings and on Sundays."

A sharp edge entered the speaker's voice. He turned to McGregor and spoke forcefully, like a man defending himself. "My woman was a good enough woman," he said. "I suppose love is an art, like writing books, painting pictures, or making violins. People try, but they never succeed. We finally quit that job and just lived together, like most people. Our lives became chaotic and meaningless. That's how it was."

Before she married me, my wife worked as a stenographer in a can factory. She loved the job. She could make her fingers dance across the keys. When she read a book at home, she didn't think the writer had accomplished anything if he made punctuation errors. Her boss was so proud of her that he showed off her work to visitors and sometimes went fishing, leaving the running of the business in her hands.

"I don't know why she married me. She was happier there, and she's happier there now. We'd go for walks together on Sunday evenings and stand under the trees in the alleys, kissing and looking at each other. We talked about a lot. It was like we needed each other. Then we got married and started living together.

"It didn"t work out. After we"d been married for a few years, everything changed. I don"t know why. I thought I was the same as I was, and I think she was too. We"d sit and fight about it, blaming each other. Either way, we didn"t get along.

"One evening we sat on the small veranda of our house. She bragged about her work at the cannery, and I dreamed of silence and the opportunity to work on violins. I thought I knew a way to improve the quality and beauty of the tone, and I had the idea for varnish I told you about. I even dreamed of doing something those old men from Cremona never did.

"When she'd been talking about her work in the office for about half an hour, she'd look up and find I wasn't listening. We'd quarrel. We even quarreled in front of the children after they'd arrived. One day she said she didn't understand what it would mean if violins were never made, and that night I dreamed I was strangling her in bed. I woke up and lay next to her, thinking about it with a kind of genuine satisfaction at the mere thought that one long, firm grip of my fingers would get her out of my way forever.

"We didn't always feel this way. Every now and then, a shift would occur in both of us, and we would begin to show interest in each other. I would be proud of the work she did at the factory and would brag about it to the men who came into the shop. In the evening, she would commiserate with the violins and put the baby to bed so that I would be left alone to work in the kitchen.

"Then we would sit in the dark of the house and hold each other's hands. We would forgive each other for what had been said and play a kind of game, chasing each other around the room in the dark, knocking on chairs and laughing. Then we would start looking at each other and kissing. Soon another child would be born.

The barber threw up his hands impatiently. His voice had lost its softness and reminder. "Those times didn"t last long," he said. "Basically, there was nothing left to live for. I left. The children are in a government institution, and she went back to work in the office. The town hates me. They"ve made a heroine out of her. I"m talking to you here with these sideburns on my face so that people from my town won"t recognize me if they come. I"m a barber and I"d shave them off quickly enough if it weren"t for this."

A woman passing by glanced back at MacGregor. Her eyes held an invitation. Something about them reminded him of the pale eyes of the undertaker's daughter from Coal Creek. A shudder of unease ran through him. "What do you do with women now?" he asked.

The little man's voice rang out sharp and excited in the evening air. "I feel like I'm having a tooth fixed," he said. "I pay money for the service and think about what I want to do. There are plenty of women for that, women who are good only for this. When I first came here, I wandered at night, wanting to go to my room and work, but my mind and will were paralyzed by this feeling. I don't do that now, and I won't do it again. What I do is done by many men-good men, men who do good work. What's the point of thinking about it if all you do is run into a stone wall and get hurt?"

The black-bearded man stood up, shoved his hands into his trouser pockets, and looked around. Then he sat back down. He seemed overcome with suppressed excitement. "Something hidden is happening in modern life," he said, speaking quickly and excitedly. "It used to only affect people at a higher level; now it affects people like me-barbers and workers. Men know about it, but they don't speak of it and don't dare think about it. Their women have changed. Women used to do everything for men; they were simply their slaves. The best people don't ask about it now, and they don't want it."

He jumped to his feet and stood over McGregor. "The men don't understand what's going on, and they don't care," he said. "They're too busy with business, playing ball, or squabbling over politics.

"And what do they know about it, if they"re so stupid as to think so? They fall into false impressions. They see all around them so many beautiful, goal-oriented women, perhaps caring for their children, and they blame themselves for their vices, they feel ashamed. Then they turn to other women anyway, close their eyes, and move on. They pay for what they want, as they pay for dinner, thinking no more of the women who serve them than of the waitresses who serve them in restaurants. They refuse to think about the new kind of woman who is growing up. They know that if they get sentimental about her, they"ll get into trouble or be assigned new tests, they"ll be upset, you see, and ruin their work or their peace of mind. They don"t want to get into trouble or be bothered. They want to get a better job, or enjoy a ball game, or build a bridge, or write a book. They think that a man who is sentimental about any woman is a fool, and of course he is."

"You mean they all do that?" MacGregor asked. He wasn't upset by what he'd heard. It seemed true. As for himself, he was afraid of women. He felt as if his companion was building a road so he could travel safely. He wanted the man to keep talking. A thought flashed through his mind that if he'd had something to do, the end of the day spent with the pale girl on the hillside would have been different.

The barber sat down on the bench. A flush crept into his cheeks. "Well, I did pretty well myself," he said, "but you know I make violins and don"t think about women. I lived in Chicago for two years and only spent eleven dollars. I"d like to know how much the average man spends. I"d like someone to get the facts and publish them. It would make people sit up. Millions must be spent here every year."

"You see, I'm not very strong, and I stand on my feet in the barber shop all day." He looked at McGregor and laughed. "The dark-eyed girl in the hall is chasing you," he said. "You better be careful. You left her alone. Stick to your law books. You're not like me. You're big, red, and strong. Eleven dollars won't pay you here in Chicago for two years."

McGregor looked again at the people walking toward the park entrance in the gathering darkness. He found it miraculous that the brain could think so clearly, and that words could express thoughts so clearly. His desire to follow the girls with his eyes vanished. He was interested in the older man's point of view. "What about the children?" he asked.

The elderly man sat sideways on the bench. There was concern in his eyes, and suppressed impatience in his voice. "I'm going to tell you about it," he said. "I don't want to hide anything.

"Look here!" he demanded, sliding along the bench toward MacGregor and emphasizing his words by clapping one hand over the other. "Aren"t all children my children?" He paused, trying to organize his scattered thoughts. As MacGregor began to speak, he raised his hand, as if warding off another thought or another question. "I"m not trying to evade it," he said. "I"m trying to distill the thoughts that have been in my head day after day into a form that can be articulated. I haven"t tried to express them before. I know men and women cling to their children. It"s the only thing left of the dream they had before they got married. I felt that way. It held me back for a long time. The only thing holding me back now would be the violins pulling so hard."

He raised his hand impatiently. "You see, I had to find an answer. I couldn"t think of becoming a skunk-running away-and I couldn"t stay. I had no intention of staying. Some men are called to work, take care of children, and perhaps serve women, but others have to spend their whole lives trying to achieve something indefinite-like me trying to find a sound on a violin. If they don"t get it, it doesn"t matter; they have to keep trying."

"My wife told me I'd get tired of this. No woman ever truly understands a man who cares about anything but himself. I beat that out of her."

The little man looked at McGregor. "Do you think I'm a skunk?" he asked.

McGregor looked at him seriously. "I don't know," he said. "Come on, tell me about the kids."

"I said that's the last thing worth clinging to. They exist. We used to have religion. But that's long gone now-an old way of thinking. Now men think about children, I mean a certain type of man-those who have a job they want to do. Children and work are the only things that concern them. If they have feelings for women, they're only for their own-the ones they have at home. They want it to be better than they are. So they influence paid women with other feelings.

"Women worry about men loving children. They worry about it. It"s just a plan to demand flattery they don"t deserve. Once, when I first came to the city, I took a job as a servant in a rich family. I wanted to remain undercover until my beard grew. Women would come there for receptions and afternoon meetings to talk about the reforms they were interested in-Bah! They work and scheme, trying to get to men. They do this all their lives, flattering, distracting us, instilling false ideas in us, pretending to be weak and insecure when they are strong and determined. They have no mercy. They wage war against us, trying to make us slaves. They want to take us captive to their homes, as Caesar took captives home to Rome.

"Look at this!" He jumped to his feet again and wagged his fingers at McGregor. "Just try something. You try to be open, frank, and honest with a woman-any woman-the same way you would with a man. Let her live her life, and ask her to let you live yours. You try it. She won't. She'll die first."

He sat back down on the bench and shook his head back and forth. "God, how I wish I could talk!" he said. "I'm all mixed up and I want to tell you. Oh, how I wanted to tell you! I think a man should tell a boy everything he knows. We must stop lying to them."

MacGregor looked at the ground. He was deeply, deeply moved and intrigued, for never before had he been moved by anything other than hatred.

Two women walking along a gravel path stopped under a tree and looked back. The barber smiled and tipped his hat. When they smiled back, he stood up and walked toward them. "Come on, boy," he whispered to McGregor, placing his hand on his shoulder. "Let's get them."

When McGregor looked at the scene, his eyes filled him with rage. The smiling barber, hat in hand, the two women waiting under the tree, the expression of half-guilty innocence on their faces, all of them ignited a blind fury in his mind. He leaped forward, grabbing Turner by the shoulder. Spinning him around, he threw him on all fours. "Get out of here, women!" he yelled at the women, who fled in terror down the path.

The barber sat back down on the bench next to McGregor. He rubbed his hands together to brush bits of gravel off his body. "What's wrong with you?" he asked.

MacGregor hesitated, wondering how to say what was on his mind. "Everything is in its place," he said finally. "I wanted to continue our conversation."

Lights flickered in the darkness of the park. Two men sat on a bench, each lost in thought.

"I want to do some work on the clips this evening," the barber said, checking his watch. The two men walked down the street together. "Look here," McGregor said. "I didn't mean to hurt you. Those two women who came up and interfered with our work made me furious."

"Women always interfere," the barber said. "They create a scandal with the men." His mind went blank, and he began toying with the age-old problem of gender. "If many women fall in the struggle against us men and become our slaves, serving us the same way paid women do, should they worry about it? Let them be the game and try to help figure it out, just as men have been the game, working and thinking for centuries, in confusion and defeat."

The barber paused on the street corner to fill and light his pipe. "Women can change everything when they want," he said, looking at MacGregor and letting the match burn out in his fingers. "They can have maternity pensions and the chance to solve their own problems in the world or whatever else they really want. They can stand toe-to-toe with men. They don't want to. They want to enslave us with their faces and bodies. They want to continue the old, old, tiresome struggle." He patted MacGregor's hand. "If some of us, wanting to achieve something with all our might, beat them at their own game, don't we deserve to win?" he asked.

"But sometimes I think I wish a woman would live, you know, just sit and talk to me," McGregor said.

The barber laughed. Smoking his pipe, he walked down the street. "Be confident! Be confident!" he said. "I would. Any man would do it. I like to sit in a room in the evening and talk with you, but I wouldn't want to give up violin making and be tied down my whole life to still serve you and your goals."

In the hallway of their own home, the barber spoke to MacGregor, looking down the hallway to where the door to the dark-eyed girl's room had just opened. "You leave women alone," he said. "When you feel you can't stay away from them any longer, come and discuss it with me."

MacGregor nodded and walked down the hallway to his room. In the darkness, he stood by the window, looking out into the courtyard. The feeling of hidden strength, the ability to rise above the chaos of modern life that had come to him in the park, returned, and he paced nervously. When he finally sat down in a chair, leaned forward, and clasped his head in his hands, he felt like a man setting out on a long journey through a strange and dangerous land and unexpectedly encountering a friend traveling the same path.

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CHAPTER IV


T H E PEOPLE FROM CHICAGO return home from work in the evening-drifting, they walk in crowds, hurrying. It's amazing to look at them. People have bad language. Their mouths are relaxed, and their jaws don't hang properly. Their mouths are like the shoes they wear. The shoes are worn at the corners from too much pounding on the hard sidewalk, and their mouths are twisted from too much mental fatigue.

Something is wrong with modern American life, and we Americans don't want to look at it. We prefer to call ourselves great people and leave things as they are.

It's evening, and the people of Chicago are heading home from work. Thump, thump, thump, as they walk on the hard sidewalks, their jaws wiggle, the wind blows, and dirt flies and sifts through the masses. Everyone's ears are dirty. The stench in the streetcars is terrible. The ancient bridges over the rivers are crowded. The commuter trains going south and west are cheaply built and dangerous. The people who call themselves great and who live in a city also called great disperse to their homes as just a disorderly mass of people with cheap equipment. Everything is cheap. When people return home, they sit on cheap chairs in front of cheap tables and eat cheap food. They gave their lives for cheap things. The poorest peasant in one of the old countries is surrounded by even greater beauty. His very equipment for life has greater solidity.

Modern man is content with cheapness and unattractiveness because he hopes for worldly advancement. He has dedicated his life to this dismal dream and teaches his children to follow the same dream. This touched McGregor. Confused about sex, he heeded the barber's advice and intended to settle the matter on the cheap. One evening, a month after the conversation in the park, he hurried down Lake Street on the West Side with precisely this goal in mind. It was around eight o'clock, dark was falling, and McGregor should have been at night school. Instead, he walked down the street, looking at the dilapidated frame houses. Fever burned in his blood. An impulse had seized him, for the moment stronger than the impulse that had driven him to work on his books night after night in the big, chaotic city, and even stronger than any new impulse to march energetically and convincingly through life. His eyes gazed out the windows. He hurried, filled with a lust that dulled his mind and will. A woman sitting by the window of a small frame house smiled and beckoned to him.

MacGregor walked along the path leading to the small frame house. The path wound through a squalid yard. It was a filthy place, like the yard beneath his window behind the house on Wycliffe Place. And here, too, discolored papers fluttered in wild circles, stirred by the wind. MacGregor's heart pounded, and his mouth felt dry and unpleasant. He wondered what he should say and how he should say it when he found himself in the presence of a woman. He wanted to be punched. He didn't want to make love; he wanted relief. He would have preferred a fight.

The veins in MacGregor's neck began to bulge, and he cursed as he stood in the darkness before the door of the house. He looked up and down the street, but the sky, the sight of which might have helped him, was hidden from view by the elevated railway structure. Pushing the door open, he entered. In the dim light, he saw nothing but a figure leaping out of the darkness, and a pair of powerful hands pinned his arms to his sides. MacGregor glanced around quickly. A man, as large as himself, was pinning him tightly against the door. He had one glass eye and a short black beard, and in the dim light he looked sinister and dangerous. The hand of the woman who had beckoned to him from the window rummaged through MacGregor's pockets and emerged clutching a small roll of money. Her face, now frozen and ugly like a man's, stared at him from beneath her ally's arms.

A moment later, MacGregor's heart stopped pounding, and the dry, unpleasant taste left his mouth. He felt relief and joy at this sudden turn of events.

With a swift, upward thrust, his knees into the stomach of the man holding him, McGregor broke free. A blow to the neck sent his attacker groaning and falling to the floor. McGregor leaped across the room. He caught the woman in the corner by the bed. Grabbing her hair, he spun her around. "Give me that money," he said furiously.

The woman raised her hands and pleaded with him. The grip of his hands in her hair brought tears to her eyes. She thrust a wad of bills into his hands and waited, trembling, thinking he was going to kill her.

A new feeling overwhelmed MacGregor. The thought of coming to the house at this woman's invitation repelled him. He wondered how he could have been such a beast. Standing in the dim light, thinking about this and looking at the woman, he became lost in thought and wondered why the idea the barber had given him, which had previously seemed so clear and sensible, now seemed so foolish. His eyes fixed on the woman, and his thoughts returned to the black-bearded barber talking on the park bench, and he was overcome with blind rage, a rage directed not at the people in the dingy little room, but at himself and his own blindness. Once again, a great hatred for the disorder of life took hold of him, and as if she personified all the disorderly people in the world, he cursed and shook the woman as a dog might shake a dirty rag.

"Sneak. Dodger. You meaty fool," he muttered, thinking of himself as a giant being attacked by some sickening beast. The woman screamed in horror. Seeing the expression on her attacker's face and mistaking the meaning of his words, she trembled and thought of death again. Reaching under the pillow on the bed, she pulled out another wad of bills and thrust it into McGregor's hands. "Please go away," she begged. "We were wrong. We thought you were someone else.

McGregor walked past the man on the floor, groaning and rolling around, to the door. He turned the corner onto Madison Street and got into a car bound for night school. As he sat there, he counted the money in the scroll the kneeling woman had thrust into his hand and laughed so loudly that the people in the car looked at him in amazement. "Turner spent eleven dollars on it over two years, and I made twenty-seven dollars in one night," he thought. He jumped out of the car and walked under the streetlights, trying to think things through. "I can't depend on anyone," he muttered. "I have to make my own way. The barber is as confused as the rest of them, and he doesn't even know it. There is a way out of this mess, and I'm going to find it, but I'll have to do it alone. I can't take anyone's word for anything."

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CHAPTER V


T H E M A N G E F O R M A N G E F R E S T I O N McGregor's attitude toward women and sexual advances certainly wasn't settled by the fight in the house on Lake Street. He was a man who, even in his most brutal days, strongly appealed to women's mating instincts, and more than once, his goal was to shock and confound his mind with the forms, faces, and eyes of women.

McGregor thought he'd solved the problem. He forgot about the dark-eyed girl in the hallway and thought only about advancing through the warehouse and studying in his room at night. Every now and then, he'd take a day off and go for a stroll through the streets or to one of the parks.

On the streets of Chicago, under the night lights, among the restless movements of people, he was a figure who was remembered. Sometimes he didn't see people at all, but walked, swaying, in the same spirit with which he strolled through the hills of Pennsylvania. He strove to master some elusive quality of life that seemed forever out of reach. He didn't want to be a lawyer or a storekeeper. What did he want? He walked down the street, trying to decide, and since he had a hard nature, his bewilderment drove him to anger, and he cursed.

He walked up and down Madison Street, muttering words. Someone played the piano in the corner of a saloon. Groups of girls passed by, laughing and talking. He approached the bridge that led across the river to the Beltway, then turned back restlessly. On the sidewalks of Canal Street, he saw burly men loitering in front of cheap flophouses. Their clothes were dirty and threadbare, and their faces showed no sign of determination. The thin spaces of their clothing held the filth of the city they lived in, and the fabric of their beings also harbored the filth and disorder of modern civilization.

MacGregor walked, looking at the man-made objects, and the flame of anger within him grew stronger and stronger. He saw floating clouds of people of all nationalities wandering Halsted Street at night, and, turning into an alley, he also saw Italians, Poles, and Russians gathering in the evenings on the sidewalks in front of the apartment buildings in the area.

MacGregor's desire for action turned into madness. His body trembled with the force of his desire to put an end to the vast disorder of life. With all the ardor of youth, he wanted to see if he could, with the force of his own hand, shake humanity out of its laziness. A drunken man passed by, followed by a large man with a pipe in his mouth. The large man walked without the slightest hint of strength in his legs. He trudged forward. He resembled an enormous child with chubby cheeks and a huge, untrained body, a child without muscles or firmness, clinging to the skirts of life.

MacGregor couldn't bear the sight of the large, hulking figure. The man seemed to embody everything his soul rebelled against, and he stopped and crouched, a fierce light burning in his eyes.

A man rolled into a ditch, stunned by the force of the blow dealt him by the miner's son. He crawled on all fours, calling for help. His pipe rolled into the darkness. McGregor stood on the sidewalk and waited. The crowd of men standing in front of the apartment building ran toward him. He crouched again. He prayed they would come out and let him fight them too. His eyes shone with anticipation of a great fight, and his muscles twitched.

And then the man in the gutter rose to his feet and ran away. The men running toward him stopped and turned back. MacGregor continued on, his heart heavy with defeat. He felt a little sorry for the man he'd struck, who had made such a ridiculous figure crawling on all fours, and he was more confused than ever.


McGregor tried again to solve the woman problem. He was very pleased with the outcome of the affair in the little frame house, and the next day he bought law books for the twenty-seven dollars thrust into his hand by a frightened woman. Later, he stood in his room, stretching his huge body like a lion returning from a kill, and thought of the small, black-bearded barber in the room down the hall, bent over his violin, his mind busy trying to justify himself, because he wouldn't have encountered any of life's problems. The resentment toward the man faded. He thought of the course this philosopher had charted for himself and laughed. "There's something about this to be avoided, like digging in the dirt underground," he told himself.

McGregor's second adventure began on a Saturday evening, and he again allowed himself to be drawn into it by the barber. The night was hot, and the young man sat in his room, eager to hit the road and explore the city. The silence of the house, the distant rumble of streetcars, and the sounds of a band playing far away in the street disturbed and distracted his thoughts. He longed to pick up a walking stick and wander the hills, just as he had on such nights in his youth in the Pennsylvania town.

The door to his room opened and the barber walked in. He held two tickets in his hand. He sat down on the windowsill to explain.

"There"s a dance going on at the hall on Monroe Street," the barber said excitedly. "I"ve got two tickets here. The politician sold them to the boss of the store where I work." The barber threw back his head and laughed. He thought there was something delightful in the idea of politicians forcing the head barber to buy tickets to a dance. "They"re two dollars each," he shouted, shaking with laughter. "You should have seen the way my boss writhed. He didn"t want the tickets, but he was afraid he wouldn"t take them. The politician could get him into trouble, and he knew it. You see, we make a horse-racing guide in the store, and that"s illegal. The politician could get us into trouble." The boss, cursing under his breath, paid over the four dollars, and when the politician left, he threw them at me. "Here, take them," he shouted, "I don"t want rotten things. Is man a horse trough at which every animal can stop to drink?"

McGregor and the hairdresser sat in the room, laughing at the boss, the hairdresser, who, consumed by internal anger, bought the tickets with a smile. The hairdresser invited McGregor to go dancing with him. "We'll make a night of it," he said. "We'll see women there-two I know. They live upstairs above the grocery store. I've been with them. They'll open your eyes. They're women you haven't met yet: brave, smart, and good people, too."

MacGregor stood up and pulled his shirt over his head. A wave of feverish excitement coursed through him. "We'll figure this out," he said, "and see if this isn't another false path you're leading me down. You go to your room and get ready. I'm going to get myself ready."

In the dance hall, McGregor sat on a chair against the wall with one of the two women the hairdresser had praised and a third, frail and bloodless. For him, this adventure had ended in failure. The swaying dance music evoked no response in him. He watched the couples on the floor, embracing, twisting and turning, swaying back and forth, gazing into each other's eyes and then turning away, wanting to return to their room among their law books.

The barber was chatting with two women, making fun of them. McGregor found the conversation pointless and trivial. It skirted the boundaries of reality and drifted into vague references to other times and adventures he knew nothing about.

The barber was dancing with one of the women. She was tall, and his head barely reached her shoulder. His black beard glistened against her white dress. Two women sat next to him, talking. MacGregor realized the frail woman was a hat maker. Something about her drew him in, and he leaned against the wall and looked at her, oblivious to their conversation.

A young man approached and took another woman away. The hairdresser beckoned him across the hallway.

A thought flashed through his mind. This woman beside him was frail, thin, and bloodless, like the women of Coal Creek. He was overcome with a feeling of closeness to her. He felt the same way he had felt for the tall, pale girl from Coal Creek when they had climbed the hill together to the high ground overlooking the valley of farms.

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CHAPTER VI


E DIT CARSON - TO The milliner whom fate had thrown into McGregor's company was a frail woman of thirty-four, living alone in two rooms at the back of her millinery shop. Her life was almost devoid of color. On Sunday mornings, she wrote a long letter to her family on their Indiana farm, then donned a hat from the sample cases along the wall and went to church, sitting alone in the same place Sunday after Sunday, and then remembering nothing of the sermon.

On Sunday afternoon, Edith took the streetcar to the park and strolled alone under the trees. If rain threatened, she sat in the larger of the two rooms behind the workshop, sewing new dresses for herself or for her sister, who had married a blacksmith in Indiana and had four children.

Edith had soft, mouse-colored hair and gray eyes with small brown spots on the irises. She was so slender that she wore pads under her dresses to fill out her figure. In her youth, she had a lover-a fat, chubby boy who lived on a neighboring farm. One day, they went to the county fair together, and, returning home in the carriage at night, he hugged her and kissed her. "You're not very big," he said.

Edith went to a mail order store in Chicago and bought a lining to wear under her dress. Along with it came some oil, which she rubbed herself with. The label on the bottle spoke highly of its contents as a remarkable developer. The heavy pads left wounds on her sides where her clothes rubbed, but she endured the pain with grim stoicism, remembering what the fat man had said.

After Edith arrived in Chicago and opened her own store, she received a letter from her former admirer. "I like to think that the same wind that blows over me blows over you," it read. After that letter, she never heard from him again. He took the phrase from a book he'd read and wrote Edith a letter to use it. After the letter was sent, he thought of her frail figure and regretted the impulse that had prompted him to write. In a state of semi-anxiety, he began courting her and soon married another woman.

Sometimes, during her rare visits home, Edith would see her former lover driving along the road. Her sister, who had married a blacksmith, said he was stingy, that his wife had nothing to wear except a cheap cotton dress, and that on Saturday he went into town alone, leaving her to milk the cows and feed the pigs and horses. One day, he met Edith on the road and tried to force her into his wagon to go with him. Although she walked along the road without paying him any attention, on spring evenings or after a walk in the park, she would take the letter about the wind blowing on them both from her desk drawer and reread it. After reading it, she would sit in the dark in front of the store, looking through the screen door at the people on the street, and wonder what life would mean to her if she had a man to whom she could give her love. Deep down, she believed that, unlike the fat young man's wife, she would have given birth to children.

In Chicago, Edith Carson made money. She had a talent for frugality in running her business. Within six years, she had paid off a large debt to the store and had a decent balance in the bank. Girls who worked in factories or stores would come and leave most of their meager surplus in her shop, while other girls who weren't working would come, scattering dollars and talking about "gentlemen friends." Edith hated negotiating, but she conducted it shrewdly and with a quiet, disarming smile on her face. What she enjoyed was sitting quietly in a room and trimming hats. As the business grew, she had a woman to look after the store and a girl who sat next to her and helped with the hats. She had a friend, the wife of a streetcar driver, who sometimes came to her in the evenings. The friend was a small, plump woman, unhappy in her marriage, and she persuaded Edith to make her several new hats a year, for which she paid nothing.

Edith went to a dance where she met McGregor, along with the engineer's wife and a girl who lived above the bakery next door. The dance was held in a room above the saloon and was organized to benefit a political organization led by the baker. The baker's wife arrived and sold Edith two tickets: one for herself and one for the engineer's wife, who happened to be sitting next to her at the time.

That evening, after the engineer's wife had gone home, Edith decided to go dancing, and the decision itself was something of an adventure. The night was hot and muggy, lightning flashed in the sky and clouds of dust swept down the street. Edith sat in the darkness behind the locked screen door and watched the people hurrying home along the street. A wave of protest against the narrowness and emptiness of her life swept over her. Tears welled up in her eyes. She closed the shop door, went into the back room, lit the gas, and stood looking at herself in the mirror. "I'll go dancing," she thought. "Maybe I'll find a man. If he doesn't marry me, he can still get whatever he wants from me."

In the dance hall, Edith sat modestly against the wall near the window, watching couples gyrate on the floor. Through the open door, she could see couples sitting at tables in another room, drinking beer. A tall young man in white trousers and white slippers walked across the dance floor. He smiled and bowed to the women. Once, he walked toward Edith, and her heart pounded, but when she thought he was about to speak to her and the engineer's wife, he turned and walked to the other side of the room. Edith followed him with her eyes, admiring his white trousers and shining white teeth.

The engineer's wife left with a short, straight-backed man with a gray mustache, whose eyes Edith thought were unpleasant, and two girls came and sat next to her. They were customers of her shop and lived together in an apartment above a grocery store on Monroe Street. Edith heard the girl sitting next to her in the shop make disparaging remarks about them. The three of them sat along the wall and talked about hats.

Then two men walked across the dance floor: a huge red-haired fellow and a small man with a black beard. Two women called out to them, and the five of them sat together, forming a party against the wall, while the small man continued to comment incessantly on the people on the floor, along with Edith's two companions. The dance began, and, taking one of the women, the black-bearded man danced away. Edith and the other woman began talking about hats again. The huge man next to her said nothing, but his eyes followed the women in the dance floor. Edith thought she had never seen such a plain-looking man.

At the end of the dance, a black-bearded man walked through the door into a room full of tables and motioned for the red-haired man to follow him. A boyish-looking man appeared and left with another woman, leaving Edith sitting alone on a bench against the wall next to MacGregor.

"I'm not interested in this place," McGregor said quickly. "I don't like sitting around watching people hop on eggshells. If you want to come with me, we'll leave here and go somewhere where we can talk and get to know each other."


The little milliner walked across the floor arm in arm with MacGregor, her heart leaping with excitement. "I have a man," she thought jubilantly. She knew this man had deliberately chosen her. She heard the black-bearded man's familiarity and banter and noted the large man's indifference to other women.

Edith looked at her companion's enormous figure and forgot his homeliness. A memory of a fat boy, now a man, riding down the road in a van, grinning and begging her to come with him, flashed through her. The memory of the look of greedy confidence in his eyes washed over her with anger. "That guy could knock him over a six-rail fence," she thought.

"Where are we going now?" she asked.

MacGregor looked down at her. "Somewhere where we can talk," he said. "I'm tired of this place. You need to know where we're going. I'm coming with you. You're not coming with me."

McGregor wished he were at Coal Creek. He felt like he wanted to take this woman over the hill and sit on a log and talk about his father.

As they walked down Monroe Street, Edith thought about the decision she'd made standing before the mirror in her room at the back of the store the night she'd decided to attend the dance. She wondered if a great adventure was about to unfold, and her hand trembled on MacGregor's. A hot wave of hope and fear swept through her.

At the door of the fashion store, she fumbled with uncertain hands, unlocking the door. A delightful feeling came over her. She felt like a bride, delighted and at the same time ashamed and frightened.

In the room at the back of the shop, MacGregor lit the gas and, taking off his coat, tossed it onto the sofa in the corner. He was unfazed and, with a steady hand, lit the small stove. Then, raising his head, he asked Edith if he could smoke. He had the air of a man coming home to his own house, while the woman sat on the edge of a chair, unbuttoning her hat, hopefully awaiting the course of the night's adventure.

For two hours, MacGregor sat in a rocking chair in Edith Carson's room, talking about Coal Creek and his life in Chicago. He spoke freely, letting himself go, like a man talking to one of his people after a long absence. His demeanor and the quiet tone in his voice confused and perplexed Edith. She had expected something quite different.

Walking into a small room off to the side, she got out the kettle and prepared to make tea. The large man was still sitting in her chair, smoking and talking. A wonderful feeling of safety and comfort washed over her. She considered her room beautiful, but her satisfaction was mingled with a faint gray streak of dread. "Of course he won't come back," she thought.

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CHAPTER VII


I N THAT YEAR After meeting Edith Carson, MacGregor continued to work steadily and steadily in the warehouse and on his books at night. He was promoted to foreman, replacing a German, and he thought he had made progress in his studies. When he wasn't attending night school, he would go to Edith Carson's and sit, reading a book and smoking a pipe at a small table in the back room.

Edith moved about the room, entering and leaving her shop, softly and quietly. The light began to penetrate her eyes and flush her cheeks. She didn't speak, but new and bold thoughts entered her mind, and a thrill of awakened life ran through her body. With gentle persistence, she refused to allow her dreams to be expressed in words and almost hoped she could continue so forever, when this strong man would appear in her presence and sit, absorbed in his affairs, within the walls of her home. Sometimes she wished he would speak, and wished she had the power to coax him into revealing small facts about his life. She longed to be told about his mother and father, about his childhood in the Pennsylvania town, about his dreams and desires, but for the most part she was content to wait, only hoping that nothing would happen to end her waiting.

MacGregor began reading history books and became fascinated by the figures of certain individuals, all the soldiers and leaders who perused the pages on which the story of a man's life was written. The figures of Sherman, Grant, Lee, Jackson, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and Wellington seemed to stand out from the other figures in the books. Heading to the Public Library at noon, he borrowed books about these men and, for a time, abandoned his interest in studying law and devoted himself to contemplating lawbreakers.

There was something beautiful about McGregor in those days. He was as pristine and pure as a piece of hard, black coal mined from the hills of his own state, and like coal ready to burn itself into power. Nature had been kind to him. He had the gift of silence and isolation. Around him were others, perhaps as strong physically as he, and more mentally trained, who were destroyed while he was not. For others, life is exhausted by endlessly performing small tasks, pondering small thoughts, and repeating groups of words over and over again, like parrots in cages, earning their keep by crowing two or three sentences at passersby.

It's terrifying to contemplate how man has been defeated by his ability to speak. The brown bear in the forest lacks such power, and its absence has allowed him to retain a kind of nobility of behavior that we, sadly, lack. We move through life, back and forth, socialists, dreamers, legislators, salesmen, and women's suffrage advocates, and we constantly speak words-worn words, crooked words, words without power or pregnancy.

This is a question that young men and women prone to talkativeness should seriously consider. Those who have this habit will never change. The gods, leaning over the edge of the world to mock us, have noted their sterility.

And yet, the word must go on. MacGregor, silent, wanted to speak. He wanted his true individuality to resonate through the hubbub of voices, and then he wanted to use the strength and masculinity within him to carry his word far. What he didn't want was for his mouth to become foul, his mind to become numb from speaking words and pondering the thoughts of others, and for him, in turn, to become simply a toiling, food-consuming, chattering puppet before the gods.

The miner's son had long wondered what power resided in the people whose figures stood so boldly on the pages of the books he read. He tried to ponder this question while sitting in Edith's room or strolling alone down the street. In the warehouse, he looked with renewed curiosity at the people working in the large rooms, stacking and unstacking apple barrels, crates of eggs, and fruit. When he entered one of the rooms, the groups of people standing there, idly chatting about their work, had become more businesslike. They no longer chatted, but while he remained, they worked frantically, furtively watching him stand and watch them.

MacGregor paused. He tried to fathom the secret of the force that made them want to work until their bodies bent and flexed, that made them unafraid of fear, and that ultimately made them mere slaves to words and formulas.

The puzzled young man, watching the men in the warehouse, began to wonder if there might be some kind of reproductive urge at play. Perhaps his constant relationship with Edith had sparked this thought. His own loins were laden with the seed of children, and only his preoccupation with finding himself kept him from devoting himself to satisfying his lusts. One day, he discussed this matter in the warehouse. The conversation went like this.

One morning, men swarmed through the door at the warehouse, arriving like flies through open windows on a summer day. Their eyes downcast, they shuffled across the long floor, white with mortar. Morning after morning, they filed through the door and silently retreated to their places, staring at the floor and frowning. A slender, bright-eyed young man who worked as a freight clerk during the day sat in a small chicken coop, while people passing by shouted out their numbers. Every now and then, the Irish shipping clerk would try to joke with one of them, tapping his pencil sharply on the table as if trying to get their attention. "They're no good," he told himself, when they only smiled vaguely at his antics. "Even though they only get a dollar and a half a day, they're overpaid!" Like McGregor, he felt nothing but contempt for the people whose numbers he recorded in the ledger. He took their stupidity as a compliment. "We're the kind of people who get things done," he thought, pressing his pencil to his ear and closing the book. The futile pride of a middle-class man flared in his mind. In his contempt for the workers, he also forgot his contempt for himself.

One morning, MacGregor and the shipping clerk were standing on the wooden platform facing the street, and the shipping clerk was discussing their origins. "The workers' wives here have children like cattle have calves," the Irishman said. Driven by some hidden feeling within himself, he added heartily, "Well, what's a man for? It's nice to have children in the house. I have four myself. You should see them playing in the garden at my house in Oak Park when I come home in the evening.

MacGregor thought of Edith Carson, and a faint hunger began to grow within him. The desire that would later nearly thwart his life's purpose began to make itself felt. He struggled with it, growling, and confused the Irishman by attacking him. "Well, what's better for you?" he asked bluntly. "Do you consider your children more important than them? You may have a superior mind, but their bodies are superior, and your mind, as far as I can see, hasn't made you a particularly striking figure."

Turning away from the Irishman, who began to hiss with anger, MacGregor took the elevator to the back of the building to ponder the Irishman's words. From time to time, he spoke sharply to a worker loitering in one of the aisles between piles of crates and barrels. Under his leadership, work in the warehouse began to improve, and the small, gray-haired manager who had hired him rubbed his hands with satisfaction.

MacGregor stood in the corner by the window, wondering why he, too, didn't want to devote his life to fathering children. A fat old spider crawled slowly in the dim light. There was something about the insect's repulsive body that reminded the struggling thinker of the world's laziness. His mind struggled to find words and ideas to express what was in his head. "Ugly crawling things that look at the floor," he muttered. "If they have children, it's without order or purpose. It's an accident, like a fly caught in the web the insect has built here. The arrival of children is like the arrival of flies: it breeds a kind of cowardice in people. Men vainly hope to see in children what they lack the courage to see."

MacGregor cursed, smashing his heavy leather glove against the fat man wandering aimlessly through the world. "I shouldn't be bothered by trifles. They're still trying to drag me into that hole in the ground. There's a hole here where people live and work, just like in the mining town I came from."


That evening, MacGregor hurried from his room to visit Edith. He wanted to look at her and think. In a small room at the back of the house, he sat for an hour, trying to read a book, and then, for the first time, he shared his thoughts with her. "I'm trying to understand why men are so unimportant," he said suddenly. "Are they just tools for women? Tell me what. Tell me what women think and what they want?"

Without waiting for an answer, he returned to reading his book. "Well," he added, "that shouldn't bother me. I won't allow any woman to turn me into a reproductive tool for her."

Edith was alarmed. She perceived MacGregor's outburst as a declaration of war against herself and her influence, and her hands trembled. Then a new thought occurred to her. "He needs money to live in this world," she told herself, and a slight joy washed over her as she thought of her own carefully guarded treasure. She wondered how she could offer it to him without risking refusal.

"You're fine," McGregor said, preparing to leave. "You don't interfere with a person's thoughts."

Edith blushed and, like the workers in the warehouse, looked at the floor. Something in his words startled her, and when he left, she went to her desk and, taking out her bankbook, turned its pages with renewed pleasure. Without hesitation, she, who never indulged in anything, would have given everything to MacGregor.

And the man went out into the street, minding his own business. He put thoughts of women and children out of his mind and began thinking again about the moving historical figures who had so captivated him. As he crossed one of the bridges, he paused and leaned over the railing to look at the black water below. "Why has thought never been able to replace action?" he asked himself. "Why are people who write books somehow less meaningful than people who do things?"

MacGregor was shaken by the thought that had occurred to him, and he wondered if he'd made the wrong choice by coming to the city and attempting to educate himself. He stood in the darkness for an hour, trying to think things through. It began to rain, but he didn't mind. A dream of immense order emerging from disorder began to creep into his mind. He was like a man standing before some gigantic machine with many complex parts that had begun to work madly, each part oblivious to the purpose of the whole. "Thinking is also dangerous," he muttered vaguely. "There's danger everywhere-in work, in love, and in thinking. What am I to do with myself?"

MacGregor turned and raised his hands. A new thought flashed like a broad beam of light through the darkness of his mind. He began to understand that the soldiers who had led thousands into battle had turned to him because they had used human lives with the recklessness of gods to achieve their goals. They had found the courage to do so, and their courage was magnificent. Deep in their hearts, a love of order slumbered, and they had seized upon that love. If they had used it poorly, would it have mattered? Had they not shown the way?

A night scene in his hometown flashed through MacGregor's mind. He pictured the poor, unkempt street facing the railroad tracks, groups of striking miners huddled in the light outside a saloon door, while a detachment of soldiers in gray uniforms and grim faces marched down the road. The light was vague. "They marched," MacGregor whispered. "That's what made them so powerful. They were ordinary men, but they marched forward, one man at a time. Something about that ennobled them. That's what Grant knew, and that's what Caesar knew. That's why Grant and Caesar seemed so great. They knew, and they weren't afraid to use their knowledge. Perhaps they didn't bother to consider how it would all turn out. They hoped a different kind of man would do the thinking. Perhaps they didn't think at all, but simply marched forward, each trying to do his own thing.

"I'll do my part," McGregor shouted. "I'll find a way." His body trembled, and his voice roared along the bridge path. The men stopped to look back at the large, screaming figure. Two women passing by screamed and ran out into the street. McGregor walked quickly to his room and his books. He didn't know how he'd manage to use the new impetus that had come to him, but as he made his way through the dark streets and past rows of dark buildings, he thought again of the great machine, working madly and aimlessly, and he was glad he wasn't part of it. "I'll keep my composure and be ready for whatever happens," he said, burning with renewed courage.

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BOOK III


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CHAPTER I


When MCG REGOR _ _ _ HAD gotten a job in the apple warehouse and went home to the house on Wycliffe Place with his first week's wages of twelve dollars. A five-dollar bill sent her a letter. "I'll take care of her now," he thought, and with the rough sense of fairness that working people have in such matters, he wasn't about to put on airs. "She fed me, and now I'll feed her," he told himself.

The five dollars were returned. "Leave it. I don't need your money," the mother wrote. "If you have any money left after paying your expenses, start getting yourself in order. Better yet, buy a new pair of shoes or a hat. Don't try to take care of me. I won't tolerate it. I want you to take care of yourself. Dress well and hold your head up, that's all I ask. In the city, clothes matter a lot. In the end, it will be more important to me to see you be a real man than to be a good son."

Sitting in her room above the empty bakery in Coal Creek, Nancy began to find new satisfaction in contemplating herself as a woman with her son in the city. In the evening, she imagined him moving through the crowded streets among men and women, and her bent old woman straightened with pride. When a letter arrived about his work at the night school, her heart leaped, and she wrote a long letter filled with conversations about Garfield, Grant, and Lincoln lying by a burning pine knot, reading his books. It seemed incredibly romantic to her that her son would someday become a lawyer and stand in a crowded courtroom, expressing his thoughts to other men. She thought that if this huge, red-haired boy, who was so unruly and quick to fight at home, eventually became a man of books and intelligence, then she and her man, Cracked McGregor, had not lived in vain. A new, sweet sense of peace came over her. She forgot the years of her toil, and gradually her thoughts returned to the silent boy who had sat with her on the steps in front of her house a year after her husband's death, when she had talked to him of peace, and so she thought of him, the quiet, impatient boy who had wandered boldly through the distant city.

Death took Nancy McGregor by surprise. After one long day of hard labor in the mine, she awoke to find him sitting sullen and expectant beside her bed. For years, like most women in the coal town, she had suffered from what was known as "heart trouble." From time to time, she had "bad periods." On this spring evening, she lay in bed and, sitting among the pillows, struggled alone, like an exhausted animal trapped in a burrow in the forest.

In the middle of the night, the conviction came to her that she would die. Death seemed to walk around the room, waiting for her. Two drunken men stood outside, talking; their voices, preoccupied with their own human affairs, drifted through the window and made life seem very near and dear to the dying woman. "I've been everywhere," one of the men said. "I've been to towns and cities whose names I can't even remember. Ask Alex Fielder, who owns a saloon in Denver. Ask him if Gus Lamont was there."

The other man laughed. "You were at Jake's and drank too much beer," he sneered.

Nancy heard two men walking down the street, and the traveler protesting his friend's disbelief. It seemed to her that life, with all its colorful sounds and meaning, was fleeing from her presence. The exhaust of the mine engine rang in her ears. She imagined the mine as a huge monster sleeping underground, its enormous nose upturned and its mouth open, ready to devour people. In the darkness of the room, her coat, thrown over the back of a chair, took the shape and contours of a face, enormous and grotesque, silently staring past her at the sky.

Nancy McGregor gasped, her breathing becoming labored. She clutched the bedclothes in her hands and struggled, grim and silent. She hadn't thought about the place she would go after death. She tried her best not to go there. It had become a habit in her life to fight not to dream about dreams.

Nancy thought of her father, a drunk and a spendthrift in the old days before she was married, of the walks she'd taken with her lover on Sunday afternoons as a young woman, and of the times they'd go sit together on the hillside overlooking farmland. As in a vision, the dying woman saw a wide, fertile expanse of land before her and blamed herself for not having done more to help her man carry out the plans they'd made to go there and live. Then she thought of the night her boy came, and how, when they went to get her man from the mine, they found him apparently dead under fallen logs, so that she felt as if life and death had visited her hand in hand in a single night.

Nancy sat up stiffly in bed. She thought she heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. "Bute coming out of the store," she muttered, and fell back onto the pillow, dead.

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CHAPTER II


B E A U T M C G REGOR WALKED home to Pennsylvania to bury his mother, and on a summer day he again strolled the streets of his hometown. From the train station, he went straight to the empty bakery above which he lived with his mother, but he didn't stay. He stood for a moment, bag in hand, listening to the voices of the miners' wives in the room above, then placed the bag behind an empty crate and hurried away. The women's voices broke the silence of the room in which he stood. Their subtle sharpness wounded something inside him, and he couldn't bear the thought of the equally subtle and sharp silence he knew would fall upon the women tending his mother's body in the room above when he entered the presence of the dead.

On Main Street, he stopped at a hardware store and then into the mine. Then, with a pick and shovel over his shoulder, he began to climb the hill he had climbed with his father as a boy. On the train home, an idea came to him. "I'll find her among the bushes on the hillside overlooking the fertile valley," he told himself. Details of a religious discussion between two workers that had taken place one afternoon in the warehouse came to mind, and as the train headed east, he found himself contemplating for the first time the possibility of life after death. Then he dismissed the thoughts. "Anyway, if Cracked McGregor ever comes back, you'll find him there, sitting on a log on the hillside," he thought.

With his tools slung over his shoulder, McGregor walked up the long hillside road, now covered in black dust. He was about to dig a grave for Nancy McGregor. He didn't look at the miners passing by waving their lunch pails, as he had in the old days, but looked at the ground, thinking about the dead woman, and wondering a little what place a woman would still have in his own life. A sharp wind blew across the hillside, and the big boy, just coming of age, worked vigorously, throwing dirt. As the hole deepened, he stopped and looked down to where, in the valley below, a man piling corn was calling to a woman standing on the porch of a farmhouse. Two cows, standing by a fence in a field, raised their heads and howled loudly. "This is a place where the dead can lie," McGregor whispered. "When my time comes, I will be raised here." An idea occurred to him. "I'll move my father's body," he told himself. "When I earn some money, I'll do it. This is where we'll all end up, all of us MacGregors."

The thought that occurred to MacGregor pleased him, and he was pleased with himself for it. The man inside him made him straighten his shoulders. "We are two of a feather, Father and I," he muttered, "two of a feather, and Mother understood neither of us. Perhaps no woman was ever meant to understand us."

Leaping out of the pit, he stepped over the crest of the hill and began his descent toward the city. It was already evening, and the sun had disappeared behind the clouds. "I wonder if I understand myself, if anyone understands me," he thought, walking quickly, his tools clanking over his shoulder.

MacGregor didn't want to return to the town and the dead woman in the small room. He thought of the miners' wives, the handmaidens of the dead, who sat with their arms crossed and looked at him, and turned off the road to sit on a fallen log, where one Sunday afternoon he had sat with the black-haired boy who worked in the pool hall, and the undertaker's daughter had come to his side.

And then the woman herself climbed the long hill. As she approached, he recognized her tall figure, and for some reason, a lump rose in his throat. She'd seen him leave town with a pick and shovel over his shoulder, waiting what she assumed was a long enough time for tongues to settle before the gossip began. "I wanted to talk to you," she said, climbing over the logs and sitting down next to him.

For a long time, the man and woman sat in silence, gazing at the city in the valley below. MacGregor thought she had grown paler than ever, and he stared at her. His mind, more accustomed to judging women critically than the boy who had once sat and talked with her on the same log, began to describe her body. "She's already slouching," he thought. "I wouldn't want to make love to her right now."

The undertaker's daughter approached him along the log and, in a sudden burst of courage, placed her slender hand in his. She began talking about the dead woman lying in the town room upstairs. "We've been friends since you left," she explained. "She liked talking about you, and I liked it too."

Emboldened by her own boldness, the woman hurried on. "I don't want you to misunderstand me," she said. "I know I can't get you. I'm not thinking about it."

She began to talk about her affairs and her dreary life with her father, but MacGregor's mind couldn't focus on her conversation. As they began to descend the hill, he longed to pick her up and carry her, as Cracked MacGregor had once carried him, but he was so embarrassed that he didn't offer to help. It felt like the first time someone from his hometown had approached him, and he looked at her hunched figure with a strange new tenderness. "I won't live long, maybe not more than a year. I have consumption," she whispered softly as he left her at the entrance to the hallway leading to her house, and MacGregor was so moved by her words that he turned and spent another hour wandering alone along the hillside before going to see his mother's body.


In the room above the bakery, McGregor sat by the open window, looking out onto the dimly lit street. His mother lay in a coffin in the corner of the room, and in the darkness behind him sat two miners' wives. Everyone was silent and embarrassed.

MacGregor leaned out the window and watched the group of miners gathered on the corner. He thought about the undertaker's daughter, now dying, and wondered why she had suddenly come so close to him. "It's not because she's a woman, I know that," he told himself, trying to push the question out of his mind as he watched the people on the street below.

A meeting was taking place in a mining town. A box stood on the edge of the sidewalk, and on it climbed the same young Hartnett who had once spoken to MacGregor and who earned his living collecting birds' eggs and catching squirrels in the hills. He was frightened and spoke quickly. Soon he introduced a large man with a flat nose, who, when he, in turn, climbed onto the box, began telling stories and jokes designed to amuse the miners.

MacGregor listened. He wished the undertaker's daughter were sitting next to him in the darkened room. He thought he wanted to tell her about his life in the city and how disorganized and inefficient all of modern life seemed to him. Sadness gripped his mind, and he thought of his dead mother and how this other woman would soon die. "It's for the best. Perhaps there is no other way, no orderly progression to an orderly end. Perhaps that means dying and returning to nature," he whispered to himself.

On the street below, a man on a crate, a traveling socialist orator, began to speak of the coming social revolution. As he spoke, MacGregor felt as if his jaw had become loose from constant wiggling, and that his entire body was loose and devoid of strength. The orator danced up and down the crate, his hands flapping, and they, too, seemed free, not part of his body.

"Vote with us, and the job will be done," he shouted. "Are you going to let a few men run things forever? Here you live like animals, paying tribute to your masters. Wake up. Join us in the fight. You can be masters yourselves, if you only think so."

"You're going to have to do more than just think," MacGregor roared, leaning far out the window. And again, as always when he heard people speak words, he was blinded by anger. He vividly recalled the walks he sometimes took at night through the city streets and the atmosphere of chaotic inefficiency that surrounded him. And here, in the mining town, it was the same. On all sides of him, he saw empty, blank faces and flabby, poorly constructed bodies.

"Humanity must be like a great fist, ready to smash and strike. It must be ready to demolish everything that stands in its way," he shouted, astonishing the crowd on the street and driving two women sitting with him next to the dead woman in a darkened room to hysterics.

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CHAPTER III


T H E FUNERAL OF Nancy McGregor was at the event at Coal Creek. In the minds of the miners, she meant something. Fearing and hating her husband and her tall, pugnacious son, they still harbored a tenderness for their mother and wife. "She lost her money handing out bread to us," they said, pounding on the saloon counter. Rumors swirled among them, and they returned to the topic again and again. The fact that she had lost her man twice-once in the mine, when a log fell and clouded his mind, and then later, when his body lay black and distorted near McCrary's door, carved out after a terrible mine fire-may have been forgotten, but the fact that she had once run a store and lost her money tending it was not.

On the day of the funeral, the miners emerged from the mine and stood in groups on the open street and in the deserted bakery. The night shift workers washed their faces and placed white paper collars around their necks. The saloon owner locked the front door and, pocketing the keys, stood on the sidewalk, silently gazing at the windows of Nancy McGregor's rooms. Other miners, the day shift workers, emerged from the mines along the runway. Setting their lunch pails on a stone in front of the saloon, they crossed the railroad tracks, knelt, and washed their blackened faces in the red stream that trickled at the foot of the embankment. The preacher's voice, a slender, wasp-like young man with black hair and dark shadows under his eyes, caught the attention of his listeners. A coke train passed through the rear of the shops.

McGregor sat at the head of the coffin, dressed in a new black suit. He stared at the wall behind the preacher's head, deaf, lost in his own thoughts.

Behind MacGregor sat the undertaker's pale daughter. She leaned forward, touched the back of the chair in front of her, and sat down, burying her face in a white handkerchief. Her cries cut through the preacher's voice in the cramped, crowded room filled with miners' wives, and in the middle of his prayer for the dead, she was overcome by a violent coughing fit, forcing her to rise and hurried from the room.

After the service, a procession formed in the rooms above the bakery on Main Street. Like awkward boys, the miners broke into groups and walked behind the black hearse and carriage, in which sat the deceased woman's son and the priest. The men continued to exchange glances and smile shyly. There had been no agreement to follow the body to the grave, and as they thought of their son and the affection he had always shown for them, they wondered if he would want them to follow.

And MacGregor was unaware of all this. He sat in the carriage next to the minister, staring blankly over the horses' heads. He thought about his life in the city and what he would do there in the future, about Edith Carson sitting in a cheap dance hall and the evenings he had spent with her, about the barber on a park bench, talking about women, and about his life with his mother as a boy in a mining town.

As the carriage slowly climbed the hill, followed by the miners, MacGregor began to love his mother. For the first time, he realized that her life was meaningful and that, as a woman, she had been as heroic in her years of patient toil as her man, Crack MacGregor, had been when he ran to his death in the burning mine. MacGregor's hands trembled, and his shoulders straightened. He remembered the men, the mute, blackened children of toil, dragging their tired legs up the hill.

For what? MacGregor stood up in the carriage and turned to look at the men. Then he fell to his knees on the carriage seat and watched them hungrily, his soul crying out for something he thought must be hidden among their black mass, something that was the leitmotif of their lives, something he didn't seek and didn't believe in.

McGregor, kneeling in an open carriage at the top of a hill, watching the marching men slowly ascend, suddenly experienced one of those strange awakenings that reward obesity in fat souls. A strong wind lifted the smoke from the coke ovens and carried it up the hillside on the far side of the valley, and the wind also seemed to lift some of the haze that had obscured his eyes. At the foot of the hill, along the railroad, he saw a small stream, one of the blood-red streams of the mining country, and the dull red houses of the miners. The red of the coke ovens, the red sun setting behind the hills to the west, and finally the red stream flowing like a river of blood down the valley created a scene that seared the brain of a miner's son. A lump rose in his throat, and for a moment he vainly tried to recapture his old, satisfying hatred of the town and the miners, but it was impossible. He stared down the hill for a long moment, to where the night shift miners marched up the hill behind the crew and the slowly moving hearse. It seemed to him that they, like himself, were marching out of the smoke and squalid houses, away from the banks of the blood-red river, into something new. What? MacGregor shook his head slowly, like an animal in pain. He wanted something for himself, for all these people. He felt as if he would gladly lie dead, like Nance MacGregor, if only he could learn the secret of that desire.

And then, as if in answer to his heart's cry, the line of marching men fell into step. A momentary impulse seemed to run through the ranks of hunched, toiling figures. Perhaps they, too, looking back, caught the splendor of the image scratched across the landscape in black and red, and were moved by it so that their shoulders straightened, and a long, muffled song of life sang through their bodies. With a sway, the marchers fell into step. A thought flashed through MacGregor's mind of another day, standing on this same hill with a half-mad man who stuffed birds and sat on a log by the roadside reading the Bible, and how he hated these men for not marching with the disciplined precision of the soldiers who had come to conquer them. In an instant, he knew that whoever hated the miners no longer hated them. With Napoleonic insight, he learned a lesson from the accident when the men fell into step with his carriage. A great, dark thought flashed through his mind. "Someday a man will come who will force all the workers of the world to walk like this," he thought. "He will force them to conquer not one another, but the terrible disorder of life. If their lives have been ruined by disorder, it is not their fault. They have been betrayed by the ambitions of their leaders, by all men." MacGregor thought that his mind rushed over the men, that the impulses of his mind, like living beings, ran among them, calling to them, touching them, caressing them. Love invaded his spirit and made his body tremble. He thought of the warehouse workers in Chicago and of the millions of other workers who, in this great city, in all cities, everywhere, at the end of the day walked through the streets to their homes, carrying with them neither song nor melody. Nothing, I hope, but a few measly dollars with which to buy food and support the endless, harmful scheme of things. "There"s a curse on my country," he cried. "Everyone came here for profit, to get rich, to succeed. Suppose they wanted to live here. Suppose they were to stop thinking about profit, the leaders and the followers of the leaders. They were children. Suppose they, like children, began to play the great game. Suppose they could simply learn to march, and nothing more. Suppose they began to do with their bodies what their minds were incapable of-simply learn one simple thing-to march, whenever two, four, or a thousand of them got together, to march."

MacGregor's thoughts moved him so much he wanted to scream. Instead, his face hardened, and he tried to compose himself. "No, wait," he whispered. "Train yourself. This is what will give your life meaning. Be patient and wait." His thoughts drifted away again, rushing to the advancing men. Tears welled in his eyes. "The men only taught them this important lesson when they wanted to kill. This must be different. Someone must teach them an important lesson just for their own sake, so they can learn it too. They must rid themselves of fear, confusion, and aimlessness. That must come first."

MacGregor turned and forced himself to sit calmly next to the minister in the carriage. He hardened against the leaders of humanity, the figures of ancient history who had once occupied such a central place in his consciousness.

"They half taught them the secret only to betray them," he muttered. "Men of books and minds have done the same. That slack-jawed fellow in the street last night-there must be thousands like him, talking until their jaws hang like worn-out gates. Words mean nothing, but when a man marches with a thousand other men, and does so not for the glory of some king, then it means something. Then he will know he is part of something real, and he will catch the rhythm of the masses and be glorified in being part of the masses and in the fact that he is part of the masses and that the masses have meaning. He will feel great and powerful." MacGregor smiled grimly. "That"s what the great leaders of armies knew," he whispered. "And they sold men. They used that knowledge to subjugate men, to force them to serve their own petty ends."

McGregor continued to look around at the men, strangely surprised by himself and the thought that had occurred to him. "It can be done," he said out loud shortly afterward. "Someday, someone will do it. Why not me?"

Nancy McGregor was buried in a deep hole dug by her son in front of a log on the hillside. On the morning of his arrival, he secured permission from the mining company that owned the land to make it the McGregor burial site.

When the graveside service ended, he looked back at the miners standing uncovered along the hill and on the road leading to the valley, and he felt a desire to tell them what was on his mind. He felt an urge to leap onto the log beside the grave, and before the green fields his father had loved, and across Nancy McGregor's grave, shouting to them, "Your business will be my business. My brain and strength will be yours. Your enemies I will smite with my bare fist." Instead, he quickly passed them and, climbing the hill, descended toward the town, into the gathering night.

McGregor couldn't sleep on the last night he would spend in Coal Creek. As darkness fell, he walked down the street and stopped at the foot of the stairs leading to the undertaker's daughter's house. The emotions that had overwhelmed him during the day had broken his spirit, and he longed for someone equally composed and calm. When the woman didn't descend the stairs or stand in the hallway, as she had in his childhood, he approached and knocked on her door. Together, they walked down Main Street and up the hill.

The undertaker's daughter struggled to walk and was forced to stop and sit down on a rock by the road. When she tried to rise, MacGregor pulled her into his arms, and when she protested, he patted her thin shoulder with his large hand and whispered something to her. "Be quiet," he said. "Don't say anything. Just be calm."

Nights in the hills above the mining towns are magnificent. Long valleys, cut by railroad tracks and ugly with the miners' squalid cottages, are half-lost in the soft blackness. Sounds emerge from the darkness. Coal cars creak and protest as they roll along the rails. Voices shout. With a long rumble, one of the mine cars dumps its load down a metal chute into a car parked on the tracks. In winter, workers who work for alcohol light small fires along the tracks, and on summer nights, the moon rises and touches with wild beauty the plumes of black smoke rising from the long rows of coke ovens.

With the sick woman in his arms, MacGregor sat silently on the hillside above Coal Creek, allowing new thoughts and new impulses to play with his spirit. The love for his mother, which had come to him that day, returned, and he took the woman from the mining country into his arms and held her tightly to his chest.

A struggling man on the hills of his country, trying to cleanse his soul of the hatred of humanity nurtured by a life of disorder, raised his head and pressed the body of the undertaker's daughter tightly to his own. The woman, understanding his mood, picked at his coat with her slender fingers, wishing she could die there, in the darkness, in the arms of the man she loved. When he sensed her presence and loosened his grip on her shoulders, she lay motionless, waiting for him to forget to hold her tightly again and again, allowing her to feel his immense strength and masculinity in her exhausted body.

"This is work. This is something great I can try to do," he whispered to himself, and in his mind's eye he saw a vast, chaotic city on the western plains, rocked by the swaying and rhythm of people awakening and awakening the song of new life in their bodies.

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BOOK IV


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CHAPTER I


HIKAGO IS A vast city, and millions of people live within its reach. It stands in the very heart of America, almost within earshot of the creaking green leaves of corn in the vast cornfields of the Mississippi Valley. It is inhabited by hordes of people from all nations, who have come overseas or from the western corn shipping cities to make their fortunes. On all sides, people are busy making fortunes.

In small Polish villages it was whispered that "there was a lot of money to be made in America," and brave souls would set out only to finally land, a little bewildered and confused, in narrow, foul-smelling rooms on Halsted Street in Chicago.

In American villages, this story was told. Here, it wasn't whispered, but shouted. Magazines and newspapers did their job. Word of making money swept across the land like the wind through corn. Young people listened and fled to Chicago. They were full of energy and youth, but they hadn't developed any dreams or a tradition of devotion to anything other than profit.

Chicago is one vast abyss of disorder. It's the passion for profit, the very spirit of a bourgeoisie intoxicated with desire. The result is something terrible. Chicago has no leader; it's aimless, sloppy, and follows in the footsteps of others.

And beyond Chicago, long cornfields stretch away, undisturbed. There's hope for the corn. Spring comes, and the corn turns green. It rises from the black earth and lines up in orderly rows. The corn grows and thinks of nothing but growth. The fruit comes to the corn, it is cut off and disappears. The barns are filled to capacity with yellow corn kernels.

And Chicago forgot the lesson of corn. All the men forgot. Young men who come from the cornfields and move to the city were never told this.

Once, and only once, in our time did the soul of America stir. The Civil War swept across the country like a purifying fire. Men marched together and knew what it meant to move shoulder to shoulder. Stocky, bearded figures returned to the villages after the war. The beginnings of a literature of strength and masculinity emerged.

And then the time of sorrow and restless effort passed, and prosperity returned. Only the old people were now bound by the grief of that time, and no new national sorrow arose.

It's a summer evening in America, and city dwellers are sitting in their homes after the day's efforts. They talk about children at school or the new difficulties associated with high food prices. In the cities, orchestras play in parks. In the villages, the lights go out, and the clatter of hurrying horses can be heard on distant roads.

A thoughtful man, strolling along the streets of Chicago on such an evening, sees women in white shirts around their waists and men with cigars in their mouths sitting on the porches of houses. The man is from Ohio. He owns a factory in one of the large industrial cities and has come to the city to sell his products. He is a man of the best kind, quiet, hard-working, kind. In his community, everyone respects him, and he respects himself. Now he walks and indulges in thought. He passes a house set among the trees where a man mows the lawn by the light streaming in from the window. The song of the lawnmower excites the walker. He wanders down the street and looks out the window at the engravings on the walls. A woman in white sits and plays the piano. "Life is good," he says, lighting a cigar; "It rises more and more to a kind of universal justice."

And then, in the light of a streetlamp, the pedestrian sees a man staggering along the sidewalk, muttering something and leaning his hands against the wall. The sight doesn't greatly disturb the pleasant, satisfying thoughts wandering through his mind. He's had a good dinner at the hotel and knows that drunken men often turn out to be nothing more than merry, money-spinning dogs who return to work the next morning feeling secretly better after an evening of wine and song.

My caring man is an American with the disease of comfort and prosperity in his blood. He walks on and turns the corner. He's content with the cigar he smokes and, he decides, content with the century he lives in. "The agitators may howl," he says, "but overall, life is good, and I intend to do my job for the rest of my life."

The walker turned the corner into an alley. Two men emerged from a saloon door and stood on the sidewalk under a streetlamp. They waved their arms up and down. Suddenly, one of them leaped forward and, with a swift thrust and a flash of his clenched fist in the lamplight, knocked his comrade into the ditch. Further down the street, he saw rows of tall, grimy brick buildings, hanging black and ominous against the sky. At the end of the street, a huge mechanical apparatus lifted coal cars and, with a roar and crash, dropped them into the bowels of a ship moored in the river.

Walker tosses away his cigar and looks around. A man is walking ahead of him down the quiet street. He sees the man raise his fist to the sky and is shocked to note the movement of his lips, his huge, ugly face in the lamplight.

He continues walking again, now hurrying, turning another corner onto a street filled with pawnshops, clothing stores, and the hubbub of voices. A picture flashes through his mind. He sees two boys in white overalls feeding clover to a tame rabbit on a suburban backyard lawn, and he longs to be home, at home. In his imagination, his two sons are strolling under the apple trees, laughing and fighting over a large bunch of freshly picked, fragrant clover. The strange-looking, red-skinned man with the huge face he saw on the street peers at the two children over the garden wall. There's a threat in his gaze, and this threat unsettles him. The thought occurs to him that the man peering over the wall wants to ruin his children's future.

Night falls. A woman in a black dress with gleaming white teeth descends the stairs next to a clothing store. She makes a strange, jerking motion, turning her head toward her walker. A patrol car speeds down the street, its bells jingling, and two blue-clad police officers sit motionless in its seats. A boy-no more than six years old-runs down the street, shoving dirty newspapers under the noses of loafers on corners, his shrill, childish voice rising above the rumble of trolleybuses and the clanking of the patrol car.

Walker tosses his cigar into the gutter and, climbing the steps of the streetcar, returns to his hotel. His fine, pensive mood has vanished. He almost wishes for something beautiful to come into American life, but the wish doesn't last. He's merely irritated, feeling that a pleasant evening has somehow been ruined. He wonders if he'll succeed in the business that brought him to the city. Turning off the light in his room and laying his head on the pillow, he listens to the noise of the city, now merged into a quiet, humming roar. He thinks of the brickyard on the Ohio River, and falls asleep. A red-haired man's face descends upon him from the factory door.


When McGregor returned to the city after his mother's funeral, he immediately began trying to bring his vision of the marching people to life. For a long time, he didn't know where to begin. The idea was vague and elusive. It belonged to the nights in the hills of his native country and seemed a little absurd when he tried to think about it in the daylight of North State Street in Chicago.

McGregor felt he needed to prepare. He believed he could study books and learn a lot from the ideas people expressed in them without being distracted by their thoughts. He became a student and left the apple warehouse, to the secret relief of the small, bright-eyed superintendent, who could never bring himself to be as angry with the big red guy as he was with the German. This was before McGregor's time. The warehouseman sensed that something had happened during the meeting on the corner in front of the saloon the day McGregor started working for him. The miner's son had stripped him of his staff. "A man should be boss where he is," he sometimes muttered to himself, strolling the corridors among the rows of stacked apple barrels at the top of the warehouse, wondering why McGregor's presence irritated him.

From six o'clock in the evening until two o'clock in the morning, McGregor now worked as a night cashier at a restaurant on South State Street near Van Buren, and from two to seven in the morning he slept in a room overlooking Michigan Boulevard. On Thursday, he was free; his place for the evening was taken by the restaurant's owner, a small, excitable Irishman named Tom O'Toole.

McGregor's chance to attend college came courtesy of a bank account belonging to Edith Carson. The opportunity arose in this way. One summer evening after returning from Pennsylvania, he sat with her in a darkened store behind a closed screen door. McGregor was sullen and silent. The previous evening, he had tried to talk to several men in the warehouse about the Marching Men, but they hadn't understood. He blamed his inability to speak, sat in the semi-darkness, his face buried in his hands, and stared out into the street, saying nothing and thinking bitter thoughts.

The idea that had come to him intoxicated him with its possibilities, and he knew he couldn't let it intoxicate him. He wanted to start making people do simple, meaningful things, not chaotic, ineffective ones, and he had a constant urge to stand up, stretch, run out into the street, and with his enormous hands see if he couldn't sweep people before him, sending them on a long, purposeful march that would usher in the world's rebirth and imbue people's lives with meaning. Then, once he'd driven the fever out of his blood and frightened people on the streets with the grim expression on his face, he tried to train himself to sit quietly and wait.

The woman sitting next to him in the low rocking chair tried to tell him something she had in mind. Her heart leaped, and she spoke slowly, pausing between sentences to hide the tremor in her voice. "Would it help you in what you want to do if you could leave the warehouse and spend your days studying?" she asked.

MacGregor looked at her and nodded absently. He thought of the nights in his room when the hard day's work in the warehouse seemed to dull his brain.

"Besides the business here, I have seventeen hundred dollars in the savings bank," Edith said, turning away to hide the eager hope in her eyes. "I want to invest it. I don't want it to sit there doing nothing. I want you to take it and become a lawyer."

Edith sat motionless in her chair, waiting for his answer. She felt she'd put him to the test. A new hope was born in her mind. "If he takes it, he won't just walk out the door one night and never come back."

McGregor tried to think. He wasn't trying to explain his new outlook on life to her, and he didn't know where to begin.

"After all, why not stick to my plan and become a lawyer?" he asked himself. "It might open a door. I'll do it," he said out loud to the woman. "Both you and Mom talked about it, so I'll give it a try. Yes, I'll take the money."

He looked at her again as she sat before him, flushed and ardent, and was touched by her devotion, just as he had been touched by the devotion of the undertaker's daughter at Coal Creek. "I don't mind being obligated to you," he said; "I don't know anyone else I'd take it from."

Later, a worried man walked down the street, trying to formulate new plans to achieve his goal. He was irritated by what he considered the dullness of his own brain, and he raised his fist to examine it in the lamplight. "I'll prepare to use this wisely," he thought. "A man needs a trained brain, backed by a big fist, in the fight I'm about to enter."

Just then, a man from Ohio walked past with his hands in his pockets, catching his attention. The aroma of rich, aromatic tobacco filled McGregor's nostrils. He turned and paused, looking at the intruder, lost in thought. "This is what I'm going to fight," he growled. "Comfortably wealthy people who accept a disordered world, complacent people who see nothing wrong with it. I'd like to scare them, so they'll throw away their cigars and start scurrying like ants when you kick anthills in a field."

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CHAPTER II


Mr. S. G. REGOR NACHALC attended a few classes at the University of Chicago and strolled among the massive buildings, built largely through the generosity of one of his country's leading businessmen, wondering why this great center of learning seemed such an insignificant part of the city. To him, the university seemed completely isolated, out of harmony with its surroundings. It was like an expensive ornament placed on the dirty hand of a street urchin. He didn't stay there long.

One day, during one of his classes, he fell out of favor with his professor. He sat in the room among other students, his thoughts preoccupied with the future and how he could start a marching people movement. In the chair next to him sat a large girl with blue eyes and hair like yellow wheat. She, like McGregor, was unaware of what was happening to her and sat with half-closed eyes, watching him. A glimmer of amusement flickered in the corners of hers. She sketched his enormous mouth and nose on a pad of paper.

To McGregor's left, a young man sat with his legs stretched out in the aisle, thinking about the yellow-haired girl and planning a campaign against her. His father was a berry box manufacturer in a brick building on the West Side, and he wanted to attend school in another city so he wouldn't have to live at home. All day, he'd been thinking about dinner and his father's arrival, nervous and tired, to quarrel with his mother over the management of the servants. Now he was trying to devise a plan to get money from his mother so he could enjoy dinner at a restaurant downtown. He looked forward to such an evening with a pack of cigarettes on the table and the yellow-haired girl sitting across from him under the red lights. He was a typical American upper-middle-class man and had only gone to university because he was in no hurry to start his life in the commercial world.

In front of MacGregor sat another typical student, a pale, nervous young man drumming his fingers on the cover of a book. He took the acquisition of knowledge very seriously, and when the professor paused, he clasped his hands and asked a question. When the professor smiled, he laughed loudly. He was like an instrument on which the professor was strumming chords.

The professor, a short man with a thick black beard, heavy shoulders and large, powerful glasses, spoke in a shrill, excited voice.

"The world is full of unrest," he said. "Men are struggling like chickens in a shell. Deep down in every soul, uneasy thoughts are stirring. I draw your attention to what is happening in German universities."

The professor stopped and looked around. McGregor was so irritated by what he perceived as the man's verbosity that he couldn't contain himself. He felt the same way he had when the socialist orator spoke on the streets of Coal Creek. Cursing, he stood up and kicked his chair. The notebook fell from the large girl's knees, scattering leaves across the floor. A light lit up McGregor's blue eyes. As he stood before the frightened class, his head, large and red, had something noble about it, like the head of a beautiful animal. His voice burst from his throat, and the girl looked at him, her mouth open.

"We wander from room to room, listening to conversations," McGregor began. "On street corners downtown in the evenings, in towns and villages, men talk and talk. Books are written, jaws wobble. Men's jaws are loose. They hang loose, saying nothing."

McGregor's agitation grew. "If all this chaos is happening, why isn't anything being accomplished?" he demanded. "Why don't you, with your trained brains, try to find the secret order amidst this chaos? Why isn't something being done?"

The professor paced back and forth on the platform. "I don't understand what you mean," he exclaimed nervously. MacGregor slowly turned and stared at the class. He tried to explain. "Why don't men live like men?" he asked. "They should be taught to march, hundreds of thousands of them. Don't you think so?"

MacGregor's voice rose, and his enormous fist rose. "The world must become a great camp," he exclaimed. "The brains of the world must be in the organization of humanity. There's disorder everywhere, and men chatter like monkeys in a cage. Why doesn't someone start organizing a new army? If there are people who don't understand what I mean, let them be knocked down."

The professor leaned forward and looked at McGregor over his glasses. "I understand your point," he said, his voice shaking. "The class is dismissed. We condemn violence here."

The professor hurried through the door and down the long hallway, the class chattering behind him. McGregor sat on a chair in the empty classroom, staring at the wall. As he left, the professor muttered to himself, "What's going on here? What's getting into our schools?"


Late the next evening, MacGregor sat in his room, thinking about what had happened in class. He had decided he would no longer spend time at the university and would devote himself entirely to studying law. Several young men entered.

Among the university students, MacGregor seemed very old. He was secretly admired and often the subject of conversation. Those who were now visiting him wanted him to join the Greek Letter Brotherhood. They sat near his room, on the windowsill and on a chest against the wall. They smoked pipes and were boyishly energetic and enthusiastic. A flush shone on the cheeks of the representative-a neat young man with black curly hair and round, rosy-white cheeks, the son of a Presbyterian minister from Iowa.

"Our comrades have chosen you to be one of us," the representative said. "We want you to become Alpha Beta Pi. It's a great fraternity with chapters at the best schools in the country. Let me tell you."

He began to list the names of statesmen, college professors, businessmen, and famous athletes who were members of the order.

McGregor sat against the wall, looking at his guests and wondering what he would say. He was a little surprised and half-hurt, and felt like a man stopped on the street by a Sunday school boy who asked about his soul's welfare. He thought of Edith Carson waiting for him in her store on Monroe Street; of the angry miners standing in the Coal Creek saloon, preparing to storm the restaurant while he sat hammer in hand, awaiting the battle; of old Mother Misery walking on foot, at the heels of the soldiers' horses, through the streets of the mining camp; and, last of all, the terrifying certainty that these bright-eyed boys would be destroyed, swallowed up by the vast commercial city in which they were destined to live.

"It means a lot to be one of us when a guy goes out into the world," said the curly-haired youth. "It helps you get along and mix with the right people. You can't live without the people you know. You should mix with the best guys." He hesitated and looked at the floor. "I don't mind telling you," he said with a flash of candor, "that one of our stronger men-mathematician Whiteside-wanted you to come with us. He said you were worth it. He thought you should see us and get to know us better, and we should see you and get to know you."

MacGregor stood up and took his hat from its peg on the wall. Feeling the utter futility of trying to express what was on his mind, he descended the stairs to the street, the group of boys following him in embarrassed silence, stumbling through the darkness of the corridor. At the front door, he paused and looked at them, struggling to put his thoughts into words.

"I can't do what you're asking," he said. "I like you, and I like that you're asking me to go with you, but I'm planning on dropping out of university." His voice softened. "I'd like to be your friend," he added. "You say it takes time to get to know people. Well, I'd like to know you while you're who you are now. I don't want to know you after you become who you'll become."

McGregor turned, ran down the remaining steps to the stone sidewalk, and quickly walked up the street. A stern expression was frozen on his face, and he knew he would spend a quiet night thinking about what had happened. "I hate hitting boys," he thought, hurrying to his evening job at the restaurant.

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CHAPTER III


When MCG REGOR _ _ _ was admitted to the bar and ready to take his place among the thousands of young lawyers scattered throughout the Chicago area, he half-decided on starting his own practice. He didn't want to spend his entire life arguing over trivial matters with other lawyers. He found it disgusting that his place in life was determined by his ability to find fault.

Night after night, he walked the streets alone, thinking about it. He grew angry and cursed. Sometimes, he was so overcome by the futility of any life offered to him that he was tempted to leave the city and become a vagabond, one of the hordes of enterprising, dissatisfied souls who spend their lives wandering back and forth along America's railroads.

He continued working at the South State Street restaurant, which had gained the patronage of the underworld. In the evenings, from six to noon, business was quiet, and he would sit, read books, and watch the restless crowd scurrying past the window. Sometimes he would become so absorbed that a customer would sidle past and flee through the door without paying the bill. On State Street, people moved nervously back and forth, wandering this way and that, aimlessly, like cattle penned in a corral. Women in cheap imitations of the dresses their sisters wore two blocks away on Michigan Avenue, their faces painted, glanced sideways at the men. In the brightly lit storerooms, where cheap and impressive performances were staged, a piano thundered constantly.

In the eyes of the people lounging on South State Street in the evenings, there was a pronounced, terrifying, empty, aimless look of modern life. Along with the gaze, the shuffling gait, the wagging jaw, and the utterance of meaningless words had vanished. On the wall of the building opposite the restaurant entrance hung a banner reading "Socialist Headquarters." Where modern life had found near-perfect expression, where there was neither discipline nor order, where people did not move but drifted like sticks on a sea-washed beach, hung a socialist banner with the promise of cooperative collaboration. A community.

McGregor looked at the banner and the moving people and sank into meditation. Emerging from behind the ticket booth, he paused outside the door and looked around. A fire blazed in his eyes, and the fists tucked into his coat pockets clenched. Again, just as he had as a child in Coal Creek, he hated people. The beautiful love for humanity, founded on the dream of humanity driven by some great passion for order and meaning, was lost.

After midnight, business picked up at the restaurant. Waiters and bartenders from the trendy restaurants in the Loop District began dropping in to meet their female friends. When a woman entered, she approached one of the young men. "What kind of night were you having?" they asked each other.

The waiters who arrived stood and chatted quietly. As they spoke, they absentmindedly practiced the art of concealing money from customers, who were their source of income. They played with coins, tossing them in the air, squeezing them in their palms, making them appear and disappear with astonishing speed. Some of them sat on stools along the counter, eating pie and drinking hot coffee.

A cook in a long, dirty apron entered the room from the kitchen, placed a dish on the counter, and began to eat its contents. He tried to win the admiration of the idlers by boasting. In a loud voice, he familiarly called out to the women seated at the tables along the wall. The cook had once worked in a traveling circus and constantly recounted his adventures on the road, striving to become a hero in the eyes of the public.

MacGregor read the book lying on the counter in front of him and tried to forget the squalid disarray surrounding him. He read again about great historical figures, soldiers and statesmen who had been leaders of men. When the cook asked him a question or made a remark intended for his ears, he looked up, nodded, and read on. When a commotion began in the room, he growled a command, and the restlessness subsided. From time to time, well-dressed, half-drunk middle-aged men approached and, leaning over the counter, whispered something to him. He motioned to one of the women sitting at tables along the wall, idly playing with toothpicks. When she approached him, he pointed at the man and said, "He wants to buy you dinner."

The women of the underworld sat at tables and talked about McGregor, each secretly wishing he were her lover. They gossiped like suburban wives, filling their conversations with vague references to things he'd said. They commented on his clothes and his reading. When he looked at them, they smiled and fidgeted restlessly, like timid children.

One of the women of the underworld, a thin woman with sunken, red cheeks, sat at a table, talking with other women about raising white Leghorn chickens. She and her husband, a fat, old, roan waiter who worked as a waiter in a backwater restaurant, had bought a ten-acre country farm, and she was helping pay for it with the money she earned on the streets in the evenings. A small, dark-eyed woman, sitting next to the smoker, touched a cloak hanging on the wall and, taking a piece of white cloth from its pocket, began sketching pale blue flowers for the front waist of a shirt. A young man with unhealthy-looking skin sat on a stool at the counter, talking with the waiter.

"The reformers have created hell for business," the young man boasted, looking around to make sure he had an audience. "I used to have four women working here on State Street during the World's Fair, but now I only have one, and she spends half her time crying and sick."

MacGregor stopped reading the book. "Every city has a vice spot, a place where diseases emerge to poison the people. The world's best legislative minds have made no progress in combating this evil," the report states.

He closed the book, tossed it aside, and looked at his large fist lying on the counter and the young man boasting to the waiter. A smile played at the corners of his mouth. He thoughtfully opened and closed his fist. Then, taking a law book from the shelf under the counter, he began reading again, moving his lips and resting his head on his hands.

McGregor's law office was located upstairs, above a used clothing store on Van Buren Street. There he sat at a desk, reading and waiting, and in the evenings he returned to the restaurant on State Street. From time to time, he went to the police station on Harrison Street to hear a trial, and under O'Toole's influence, every now and then he was assigned a case that earned him a few dollars. He tried to think of his years in Chicago as years of training. He knew what he wanted to do, but he didn't know where to begin. Instinctively, he waited. He saw the march and countermarch of events in the lives of people tramping the sidewalks beneath his office window, he saw in his mind's eye the miners of the Pennsylvania village descending from the hills to disappear underground, he watched the girls hurrying. The swinging doors of department stores in the early morning, wondering which of them would now be sitting idle with toothpicks in O'Toole's, waiting for a word or a movement on the surface of this human sea that would become a sign. To an outside observer, he might have seemed like just another of the exhausted people of modern life, a drifter in a sea of things, but he was not. The people walking the streets with passionate seriousness about nothing succeeded in drawing him into the whirlpool of commercialism in which they fought and into which, year after year, the best of American youth was drawn.

The idea that had come to him while sitting on a hill above a mining town grew and grew. Day and night, he dreamed of the tangible physical manifestations of workers rising to power, and of the thunder of millions of feet shaking the world and driving a great song of order, purpose, and discipline into the souls of Americans.

Sometimes it seemed to him that the dream would never become more than a dream. He sat in his dusty office, tears welling up in his eyes. At such moments, he was convinced that humanity would forever continue along the same old path, that the young would continue to grow older, grow fat, decay, and die in the great fluctuation and rhythm of life, remaining a meaningless mystery to them. "They will see the seasons and the planets marching through space, but they will not walk," he muttered, walking to the window and looking down at the dirt and disorder of the street below.

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CHAPTER IV


I N T O OFFICE On Van Buren Street, where McGregor occupied another desk besides his own. The desk belonged to a short man with an unusually long mustache and greasy stains on his coat lapel. He arrived in the morning and sat in a chair with his feet on the desk. He smoked long black cigars and read the morning papers. On the glass panel of the door was the inscription: "Henry Hunt, Real Estate Broker." Having finished with the morning papers, he disappeared and returned tired and dejected in the late afternoon.

Henry Hunt's real estate business was a myth. Although he didn't buy or sell any property, he insisted on his title, and in his desk sat a stack of forms listing the types of properties he specialized in. On his wall hung a glass-framed photograph of his daughter, a graduate of Hyde Park High School. That morning, as he walked out the door, he paused to look at McGregor and said, "If anyone comes looking for property, take care of them on my behalf. I'll be gone for a while."

Henry Hunt was a tithe collector for the political bosses of the First Ward. All day he walked from place to place in the ward, interviewing women, checking their names against a little red book he carried in his pocket, promising, demanding, making veiled threats. In the evenings, he sat in his apartment overlooking Jackson Park and listened to his daughter play the piano. He hated his place in life with all his heart, and as he commuted back and forth to the city on the Illinois Central trains, he looked out over the lake and dreamed of owning a farm and living a free life in the country. In his mind's eye, he could see merchants standing and gossiping on the sidewalk in front of their stores in the Ohio village where he had lived as a boy, and in his mind's eye, he could picture himself as a boy again, driving cows down the village street in the evenings, engaging in delightful little games. The splash-slap of bare feet in the deep dust.

It was Henry Hunt, in his secret office as collector and assistant to the "boss" of the first section, who moved the stage for McGregor's emergence as a public figure in Chicago.

One night, a young man-the son of one of the city's millionaire wheat speculators-was found dead in a small alley behind the resort known as Mary's House on Polk Street. He lay curled up against a board fence, completely dead, with a bruise on his head. A policeman found him and dragged him to a lamppost at the corner of the alley.

The policeman had been standing under the streetlight for twenty minutes, waving his baton. He heard nothing. A young man approached, touched his arm, and whispered something. When he turned to go into the alley, the young man ran off down the street.


The authorities in charge of Chicago's First Ward were furious when the identity of the deceased was revealed. The "chief," a mild-looking, blue-eyed man in a neat gray suit and a silky mustache, stood in his office, convulsively opening and clenching his fists. Then he called the young man and sent for Henry Hunt and the well-known policeman.

For weeks, Chicago newspapers waged a campaign against vice. Crowds of reporters thronged the House. Daily, they churned out verbal portraits of life in the underworld. Front-page stories featuring senators, governors, and millionaires divorced from their wives also featured the names of Ugly Brown Chophouse Sam and Caroline Keith, along with descriptions of their establishments, their closing hours, and the class and size of their patrons. A drunken man rolled on the floor in the back of a saloon on Twenty-second Street, his wallet stolen, and his photo appeared on the front page of the morning papers.

Henry Hunt sat in his office on Van Buren Street, trembling with fear. He expected to see his name in the newspaper and his occupation revealed.

The authorities who ruled the First-quiet and shrewd men who knew how to make money and profit, the very flower of commercialism-were terrified. They saw in the deceased's fame a real opportunity for their immediate enemies-the press. For several weeks, they sat quietly, weathering the storm of public disapproval. In their minds, they imagined the parish as a separate kingdom, something alien and separate from the city. Among their followers were people who had not crossed Van Buren Street into foreign territory for many years.

Suddenly, a threat loomed in these men's minds. Like a small, quiet boss, the man under his charge clenched his fist. A warning cry echoed through the streets and alleys. Like birds of prey disturbed in their nests, they fluttered about, screeching. Throwing his cigar into the gutter, Henry Hunt ran through the ward. From house to house, he carried his cry: "Hide! Don't take any pictures!"

The little boss in his office at the front of the salon looked from Henry Hunt to the policeman. "Now is no time for hesitation," he said. "If we act quickly, it will prove a blessing. We must arrest and prosecute this killer, and we must do it now. Who's our man? Quick. Let's act."

Henry Hunt lit a new cigar. He nervously played with his fingertips, wishing he had left the room and the prying eyes of the press. In his mind's eye, he could hear his daughter screaming in horror at the sight of his name written in bright letters for all the world to see, and he thought of her, her youthful face flushed with disgust, turning away from him forever. His thoughts raced in terror. The name escaped his lips. "It could have been Andy Brown," he said, taking a drag on his cigar.

The little boss swung his chair around. He began gathering up the papers scattered across the table. When he spoke, his voice was soft and gentle again. "That was Andy Brown," he said. "Whisper the word o. Have a Tribune employee find Brown for you. Do it right, and you'll save your scalp and get those stupid papers off Number One's back."


Brown's arrest brought a respite to his protégé. The insightful little boss's prediction came true. Newspapers abandoned their loud calls for reform and instead began demanding Andrew Brown's life. Newspaper artists stormed the police station and hurriedly sketched them, which an hour later appeared on the faces of extras on the streets. Serious scholars used their photographs as headlines for articles titled "Criminal Characteristics of the Head and Face."

A crafty and inventive writer for the day's newspaper called Brown the Jekyll and Hyde of the clipping and hinted at other murders committed by the same hand. From the relatively quiet life of a not-too-industrious Yeghman, Brown emerged from the top floor of a furnished house on State Street to stoically confront the world of men-the eye of a storm, around which swirled the wrath of an awakening city.

The thought that flashed through Henry Hunt's mind as he sat in his quiet boss's office was to create an opportunity for MacGregor. He and Andrew Brown had been friends for months. Yeggman, a powerfully built, slow-speaking man, resembled a seasoned locomotive engineer. Arriving at O'Toole's in the quiet hours between eight and twelve, he sat down to dinner and conversed with the young lawyer in a half-joking, humorous tone. A cruel cruelty lurked in his eyes, softened by idleness. It was he who gave MacGregor the name that still clings to him in this strange, wild land: "Judge Mac, the Big Man."

When he was arrested, Brown sent for McGregor and offered to hand over his case to him. When the young lawyer refused, he persisted. In a cell at the county jail, they discussed it. A guard stood at the door behind them. McGregor peered into the gloom and said what he thought needed to be said. "You're in a hole," he began. "You don't need me, you need a big name. They're ready to hang you there." He waved his hand at First. "They're going to hand you over as the answer to an uproarious city. This is a job for the biggest and best criminal defense lawyer in town. Name that man, and I'll find him for you and help you raise the money to pay him."

Andrew Brown stood and walked over to MacGregor. Looking him up and down, he spoke quickly and decisively. "You do what I say," he growled. "You take this job. I didn"t do the job. I was asleep in my room when it was taken down. Now you take this job. You won"t clear me. That"s not in the plans. But you"ll still get the job."

He sat back down on the iron cot in the corner of the cell. His voice slowed, and a hint of cynical humor entered it. "Listen, Big One," he said, "the gang pulled my number right out of a hat. I'm transferring, but someone's offering a good advertisement, and you're going to get it."

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CHAPTER V


T H E T R I S I O N F O R E S Andrew Brown became both an opportunity and a challenge for McGregor. For several years, he had lived a solitary life in Chicago. He had no friends, and his mind was undisturbed by the endless chatter that most of us live through. Evening after evening, he strolled the streets alone and stood outside a restaurant on State Street, a solitary figure, detached from life. Now he was about to be drawn into a whirlpool. In the past, life had left him alone. Isolation had been a great blessing for him, and in this isolation, he dreamed a great dream. Now the quality of sleep and the power of its influence on him would be tested.

MacGregor couldn't escape the influence of his time. A deep human passion slumbered within his large frame. Before his "Marching Men," he had yet to endure the most perplexing of all modern male trials: the beauty of meaningless women and the equally meaningless din of success.

So, on the day of his conversation with Andrew Brown in the old Cook County Jail on Chicago's North Side, we should think of McGregor as facing a test. After speaking with Brown, he walked down the street and approached the bridge that led across the river to the Beltway. Deep down, he knew he was facing a battle, and the thought stirred him. With renewed strength, he crossed the bridge. He looked at the people and once again allowed his heart to fill with contempt for them.

He wished the fight for Brown to be a fistfight. Seated in a car on the West Side, he sat looking out the window at the passing crowd and imagined himself among them, throwing punches left and right, clutching at their throats, demanding the truth that would save Brown and bring it before the people's eyes.

When McGregor reached the fashionable shop on Monroe Street, it was evening, and Edith was getting ready to go out to dinner. He stood and looked at her. There was a note of triumph in his voice. His contempt for the men and women of hell gave rise to boasting. "They gave me a job they didn't think I could handle," he said. "I'm going to be Brown's lawyer in a major murder case." He placed his hands on her frail shoulders and pulled her toward the light. "I'm going to knock them down and show them," he boasted. "They think they're going to hang Brown-the oily snakes. Well, they didn't count on me. Brown doesn't count on me. I'm going to show them." He laughed loudly in the empty shop.

In a small restaurant, McGregor and Edith discussed the ordeal he would face. While he spoke, she sat silently, staring at his red hair.

"Find out if your man Brown has a lover," she said, thinking to herself.


America is a country of murder. Day after day, in cities and towns, on deserted country roads, violent death stalks people. Undisciplined and disordered in their lifestyle, citizens are powerless to do anything. After each murder, they demand new laws, which, though written in the statute books, are violated by the legislature itself. Exhausted by a lifetime of persistent demands, their days leave them no time for the peace in which thoughts can grow. After days of senseless rushing around the city, they hop on trains or streetcars and rush to leaf through their favorite newspapers, catch up on ball games, comics, and market reports.

And then something happens. The moment arrives. A murder that might have been the subject of a single column on the inside page of yesterday's newspaper now spills its horrific details across the entire country.

Newspaper vendors scurry restlessly through the streets, stirring up the crowd with their cries. People, eagerly relaying tales of the city's disgrace, snatch up their newspapers and greedily and exhaustively read the story of the crime.

And into this maelstrom of rumors, disgusting, impossible stories, and well-laid plans to combat the truth, McGregor threw himself. Day after day, he wandered the wicked district south of Van Buren Street. Prostitutes, pimps, thieves, and saloon hangers-on looked at him and smiled knowingly. The days passed, and with no progress, he fell into despair. One day, an idea occurred to him. "I'll go to the beautiful woman from the shelter," he told himself. "She won't know who killed the boy, but she might find out. I'll make her find out."


In Margaret Ormsby, MacGregor was supposed to recognize what, for him, was a new kind of femininity-something reliable, dependable, protected, and prepared, as a good soldier prepares to make the most of it in the struggle for survival. Something he didn't know yet had to appeal to this woman.

Margaret Ormsby, like MacGregor himself, was not defeated by life. She was the daughter of David Ormsby, the head of a major plow manufacturer headquartered in Chicago, a man nicknamed "Prince Ormsby" by his colleagues for his confident approach to life. Her mother, Laura Ormsby, was somewhat nervous and tense.

With a shy selflessness devoid of any sense of security, Margaret Ormsby, beautifully formed and beautifully dressed, moved back and forth among the outcasts of the First Section. Like all women, she awaited an opportunity she hadn't even spoken of to herself. It was something the single-minded and primitive MacGregor must approach with caution.

Hurrying down a narrow street lined with cheap saloons, McGregor entered the door of a residential building and sat down in a chair behind a desk, facing Margaret Ormsby. He knew something about her work in the First Section and that she was beautiful and cool. He was determined to get her to help him. Sitting in the chair and looking at her across the desk, he stifled in her throat the short phrases with which she usually greeted customers.

"It's all very well for you to sit there dressed and tell me what women in your position can and cannot do," he said, "but I came here to tell you what you will do if you are one of those who want to be useful."

MacGregor's speech was a challenge that Margaret, the modern daughter of one of our modern greats, could not ignore. Hadn't she summoned the courage in her timidity to walk calmly among prostitutes and filthy, mumbling drunks, calmly aware of her business objective? "What do you want?" she asked sharply.

"You have only two things that will help me," McGregor said: "Your beauty and your virginity. Those things are a kind of magnet that draws women off the street to you. I know. I heard them talking.

"Women come here who know who killed that boy in the hallway and why it was done," McGregor continued. "You're a fetish among these women. They're children, and they come here to watch you, the way children peer out from behind curtains at guests sitting in their living rooms.

"Well, I want you to call these children into the room and let them tell you family secrets. The whole room here knows the story of this murder. The air is filled with it. Men and women keep trying to tell me, but they're afraid. The police scared them, they half told me, and then ran away like frightened animals.

"I want them to tell you. You don't count for anything here with the police. They think you're too pretty and too good to touch these people's real lives. Neither of them-the bosses or the police-are keeping an eye on you. I'll keep kicking up dust, and you'll get the information I need. You can do this job if you're good.

After McGregor's speech, the woman sat silently and watched him. For the first time, she had met a man who stunned her and who in no way distracted her from her beauty or her composure. A heated wave of half-anger, half-admiration washed over her.

McGregor looked at the woman and waited. "I need facts," he said. "Give me the story and the names of those who know it, and I'll make them tell. I have some facts now-I got them by harassing a girl and strangling a bartender in an alley. Now I want you to help me get more facts, in your own way. You make women talk and talk to you, and then you talk to me."

When MacGregor left, Margaret Ormsby rose from her desk in the apartment building and walked across town to her father's office. She was shocked and terrified. In an instant, the words and manner of this cruel young lawyer made her realize she was a mere child in the hands of the forces that had toyed with her in the First Section. Her composure wavered. "If they are children-these city women-then I am a child, a child swimming with them in a sea of hatred and ugliness."

A new thought occurred to her. "But he's not a child-this McGregor. He's nobody's child. He stands on the rock, unshakable."

She tried to resent the man's blunt frankness. "He spoke to me as he would to a woman of the street," she thought. "He wasn't afraid to suggest that deep down we were alike, mere playthings in the hands of a man who dared."

Outside, she stopped and looked around. Her body trembled, and she realized that the forces surrounding her had transformed into living beings, ready to pounce on her. "Either way, I'll do what I can. I'll help him. I have to," she whispered to herself.

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CHAPTER VI


T H E PURIFICATION OF Andrew Brown caused a sensation in Chicago. At the trial, McGregor delivered one of those breathtaking dramatic climaxes that captivate a crowd. At the tense, dramatic moment of the trial, a frightened silence fell over the courtroom, and that evening, men in their homes instinctively turned from their newspapers to look at their beloved seated around them. A chill of fear ran through the women's bodies. For a moment, the beautiful McGregor allowed them to peer beneath the crust of civilization, awakening a centuries-old tremor in their hearts. In his fervor and impatience, McGregor screamed not against Brown's random enemies, but against all of modern society and its formlessness. It seemed to the listeners that he had shaken humanity by the throat and, with the strength and determination of his solitary figure, exposed the pitiful weakness of his fellow men.

In the courtroom, McGregor sat grim and silent, allowing the state to present its case. His expression was defiant, his eyes swollen from under swollen lids. For weeks, he had been tireless, like a bloodhound, scurrying through the First Ward, building his case. Police officers had seen him emerge from an alley at three in the morning; a quiet boss, hearing of his actions, had impatiently questioned Henry Hunt; a bartender at a dive bar on Polk Street had felt a hand on his throat; and a trembling townswoman had knelt before him in a small, dark room, begging for protection from his wrath. In the courtroom, he sat and waited.

When the state's special prosecutor, a man with a big name in the courts, finished his insistent and persistent plea for the blood of the silent, impassive Brown, McGregor sprang into action. Leaping to his feet, he hoarsely shouted across the silent courtroom to a large woman sitting among the witnesses. "They've deceived you, Mary," he roared. "This story of a pardon after the excitement dies down is a lie. They're stringing you along. They're going to hang Andy Brown. Get up there and tell the honest truth, or his blood will be on your hands."

A furor erupted in the crowded courtroom. The lawyers leaped to their feet, objecting, protesting. A hoarse, accusing voice rose above the din. "Don't let Mary of Polk Street and every woman stay here," he shouted. "They know who killed your man. Put them back on the stand. They'll tell. Look at them. The truth is coming out of them."

The noise in the room died down. The silent, red-haired lawyer, the joke of the case, had triumphed. Walking the streets at night, Edith Carson's words returned to his mind, and with Margaret Ormsby's help, he was able to grasp the clue she had given him through suggestion.

Find out if your man Brown has a girlfriend.

A moment later, he saw the message the underworld women, O'Toole's protectors, were trying to convey. Polk Street Mary was Andy Brown's lover. Now, in the quiet courtroom, a woman's voice, broken by sobs, rang out. The crowd listening in the small, crowded room heard the story of the tragedy in the darkened house before which a policeman stood, lazily swinging his nightstick-the story of a girl from rural Illinois, bought and sold to the son of a broker-of a desperate struggle in a small room between an impatient, lustful man and a frightened, courageous girl-a blow from a chair in the girl's hands, bringing death to the man-the women of the house, trembling on the stairs, and a body hastily thrown into the aisle.

"They told me they would get Andy out when it was all over," the woman lamented.


McGregor walked out of the courtroom and onto the street. The glow of victory illuminated him, and his heart pounded as he walked. His path led him across the bridge to the North Side, and on his journey, he passed the apple warehouse where he had begun his career in the city and where he had fought the Germans. As night fell, he walked down North Clark Street and heard the newsboys shouting his victory. A new vision danced before him, a vision of himself as a major figure in the city. He felt within himself the power to stand out among the people, to outwit and defeat them, to achieve power and a place in the world.

The miner's son was half-drunk with a new sense of achievement that had come over him. Leaving Clark Street, he walked east along a residential street toward the lake. Near the lake, he saw a street of large houses surrounded by gardens, and the thought occurred to him that someday he might own a house like that. The chaotic din of modern life seemed very distant. As he approached the lake, he stood in the darkness, thinking about how a useless hooligan from a mining town had suddenly become the town's great lawyer, and the blood rushed through his body. "I will be one of the winners, one of the few who will come to light," he whispered to himself, and with a leap in his heart, he also thought of Margaret Ormsby, looking at him with her beautiful, questioning eyes as he stood before the men in the courtroom and, with the force of his personality, pierced the fog of lies to victory and truth.

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BOOK V


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CHAPTER I


MARGARET O'RMSBY was a natural product of her age and contemporary American social life. Her personality was beautiful. Although her father, David Ormsby, the Plow King, had risen to his position and wealth from obscurity and poverty and knew in his youth what it was like to face defeat, he made it his mission to ensure his daughter would not have such an experience. The girl was sent to Vassar, where she was taught to discern the fine line between quiet, beautiful, expensive clothing and clothing that merely looked expensive; she knew how to enter and leave a room, and she possessed a strong, well-trained body and an active mind. On top of all this, she had, without the slightest knowledge of life, a strong and rather self-assured confidence in her ability to face life.

During her years at Eastern College, Margaret had decided that, come what may, she would not allow her life to be dull or uninteresting. One day, when a friend from Chicago came to visit her at college, the two of them spent the day outdoors and sat on a hillside to talk things over. "We women have been fools," Margaret declared. "If Mother and Father think I"m going to go home and marry some idiot, they"re mistaken. I"ve learned to smoke cigarettes and drunk my share of a bottle of wine. That may mean nothing to you. I don"t think it means much either, but it means something. It makes me sick to think how men have always patronized women. They want to keep the evil away from us-Bah! I"m sick of the idea, and a lot of the other girls here feel the same way. What right do they have? I suppose someday some small businessman will take charge of me. He better not." I'm telling you, a new kind of woman is growing up, and I'm going to be one of them. I'm embarking on an adventure to experience life intensely and deeply. My father and mother might as well have decided to do this.

The agitated girl paced back and forth in front of her companion, a meek-looking young woman with blue eyes, raising her arms above her head as if about to strike. Her body resembled that of a beautiful young animal, ready to meet an enemy, and her eyes reflected her intoxicated mood. "I want all of life," she cried. "I need the lust, the power, and the evil of it. I want to be one of the new women, the saviors of our sex."

An unusual bond developed between David Ormsby and his daughter. Six feet three inches tall, blue-eyed, and broad-shouldered, he possessed a strength and dignity that distinguished him from other men, and his daughter sensed his strength. She was right. In his own way, this man was an inspiration. Before his eyes, the minutiae of plowmaking transformed into fine art. At the factory, he never lost the team spirit that inspired confidence. Foremen rushed to the office, worried about equipment breakdowns or accidents involving workers who returned to quietly and efficiently complete their work. Salesmen who traveled from village to village selling plows were, under his influence, filled with the zeal of missionaries bringing the gospel to the unenlightened. Shareholders of the plow company, rushing to him with rumors of impending economic disaster, remained to write checks to obtain a new valuation for their shares. He was the man who restored people's faith in business and faith in people.

For David, making a plow was his life's purpose. Like others of his type, he had other interests, but they were secondary. He secretly considered himself more culturally minded than most of his everyday companions, and without allowing this to hinder his efficiency, he tried to stay in touch with the thoughts and movements of the world through reading. After the longest and most arduous day at the office, he would sometimes spend half the night reading in his room.

As Margaret Ormsby grew older, she became a constant source of worry for her father. It seemed to him that overnight she had transformed from an awkward and rather cheerful girlhood into a distinctive, determined, new femininity. Her adventurous spirit troubled him. One day, he sat in his study, reading a letter announcing her return home. The letter seemed nothing more than a typical outburst from the impulsive girl who had fallen asleep in his arms the night before. He was uneasy at the thought that an honest ploughman should have a letter from his little girl, describing a lifestyle he believed could only lead a woman to ruin.

And the next day, a new, imperious figure sat at his desk, demanding his attention. David rose from the table and hurried to his room. He wanted to organize his thoughts. On his desk lay a photograph his daughter had brought home from school. He had a common experience: the photograph told him what he was trying to grasp. Instead of a wife and child, he now had two women in the house with him.

Margaret graduated from college with a beautiful face and figure. Her tall, erect, well-toned body, her jet-black hair, her soft brown eyes, her air of preparedness for life's challenges attracted and held the attention of men. The girl had something of her father's grandeur and more than a little of her mother's secret, blind desires. To an attentive household, on the night of her arrival, she announced her intention to live her life fully and vividly. "I will learn things I can't get from books," she said. "I intend to touch life in many corners, to taste things in my mouth. You thought me a child when I wrote home, telling you I wouldn't stay locked up at home and marry a tenor from the church choir or an empty-headed young businessman, but now you will see. If necessary, I will cry, but I will live."

In Chicago, Margaret began to live as if she needed nothing but strength and energy. In typical American fashion, she tried to make life a fuss. When the men in her circle seemed embarrassed and shocked by her opinions, she withdrew from her company and made the common mistake of assuming that those who don't work and talk glibly about art and freedom are therefore free. Men and artists.

Yet she loved and respected her father. The strength in him appealed to her own. To a young socialist writer living in the boarding house where she was currently living, who sought her out to sit at her desk and rail against the rich and powerful, she demonstrated the quality of her ideals by pointing to David Ormsby. "My father, the head of an industrial trust, is a better man than all the noisy reformers who ever lived," she declared. "He still makes ploughs-makes them well-by the millions. He doesn't waste time talking and running his fingers through his hair. He works, and his work has lightened the toils of millions, while chatterboxes sit and think noisy thoughts and slouch."

In truth, Margaret Ormsby was puzzled. If shared experiences had allowed her to be a true sister to all other women and to know their shared legacy of defeat, if she had loved her father as a boy but known what it was like to walk around completely broken and battered, a man's face bruised, and then rise again and again to fight life, she would have been magnificent.

She didn't know. In her opinion, any defeat carried a tinge of something akin to immorality. When she saw around her only a vast crowd of defeated and confused people trying to navigate a tangled social order, she was beside herself with impatience.

The distraught girl turned to her father, trying to grasp the essence of his life. "I want you to tell me something," she said, but her father, unable to understand, merely shook his head. It hadn't occurred to him to speak to her as if she were a wonderful friend, and a playful, half-serious conversation had developed between them. The plowman rejoiced at the thought that the cheerful girl he'd known before his daughter went to college had returned to live with him.

After Margaret went to the orphanage, she dined with her father almost every day. An hour spent together amid the hustle and bustle of their lives became a cherished privilege for both of them. Day after day, they would sit for an hour in a fashionable downtown cafeteria, renewing and strengthening their camaraderie, laughing and chatting among the crowd, reveling in their closeness. With each other, they playfully assumed the air of two businessmen, each taking turns treating the other's work as something to be taken lightly. Secretly, no one believed what he said.

As Margaret struggled to catch and move the filthy human remains floating in the doorway of the apartment building, she thought of her father, sitting at his desk, supervising the manufacture of plows. "It's clean and important work," she thought. "He's a big, efficient man."

Sitting at his desk in the Plow Trust office, David thought about his daughter from the apartment building on the outskirts of the First District. "She's a white, shining creature amidst filth and ugliness," he thought. "Her whole life is like her mother's in those hours when she once bravely lay down to meet death for the sake of a new life."

On the day of her meeting with MacGregor, father and daughter were sitting in the restaurant as usual. Men and women walked up and down the long, carpeted aisles, gazing at them with admiration. A waiter stood at Ormsby's shoulder, expecting a generous tip. In the air around them, in that small, secret atmosphere of camaraderie they so carefully cherished, a sense of a new identity emerged. Beside her father's calm, noble face, marked by ability and kindness, another face floated in Margaret's memory-the face of the man who had spoken to her in the orphanage-not Margaret Ormsby, the daughter of David Ormsby, not as a woman of trust, but as a woman who could serve his purposes and whom he believed she should serve. The vision haunted her, and she listened indifferently to her father's conversations. She felt the young lawyer's stern face, with its strong mouth and commanding air, seeming to draw nearer, and she tried to recapture the feeling of hostility she'd experienced when he'd first burst through the door of the orphanage. She could only recall a few firm intentions that offset and softened the cruelty of his expression.

Sitting in the restaurant across from her father, where they had worked so hard day after day to build a true partnership, Margaret suddenly burst into tears.

"I met a man who made me do something I didn't want to do," she explained to the astonished man, then smiled at him through the tears glistening in her eyes.

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CHAPTER II


In HICKAGO, Ormsby lived in a large stone house on Drexel Boulevard. The house had a history. It belonged to a banker who was a major stockholder and one of the directors of a plow trust. Like everyone who knew him well, the banker admired and respected David Ormsby's ability and integrity. When the plowman came to town from Wisconsin to become the owner of a plow trust, he offered him the use of the house.

The banker inherited the house from his father, a grim and determined old merchant of a previous generation who died hated by half of Chicago after toiling sixteen hours a day for sixty years. In his old age, the merchant built the house to express the power his wealth had given him. The floors and woodwork were skillfully crafted from expensive wood by workers sent to Chicago by a Brussels firm. A chandelier that cost the merchant ten thousand dollars hung in the long parlor at the front of the house. The staircase leading to the floor above came from a prince's palace in Venice; it was purchased for the merchant and shipped across the sea to the Chicago house.

The banker who inherited the house didn't want to live there. Before his father's death and after an unhappy marriage, he lived in a club in the city center. In his old age, the retired merchant lived in the house of another elderly inventor. He couldn't find peace, even though he had given up his business to achieve this goal. Having dug a trench in the lawn behind the house, he and a friend spent their days trying to transform the waste from one of their factories into something of commercial value. A fire burned in the trench, and at night, a gloomy old man, his hands smeared with tar, sat in the house under a chandelier. After the merchant's death, the house stood empty, looking out at passersby on the street, its paths and walkways overgrown with weeds and rotten grass.

David Ormsby blended into his home. Whether strolling the long hallways or sitting smoking a cigar in a chair on the expansive lawn, he looked both dressed and surrounded. The house became a part of him, like a well-tailored and tastefully worn suit. He moved a pool table into the living room beneath a ten-thousand-dollar chandelier, and the clink of ivory balls dispelled the church-like atmosphere of the place.

American girls, Margaret's friends, walked up and down the stairs, their skirts rustling, their voices echoing through the vast rooms. In the evenings after dinner, David played billiards. He was intrigued by the careful calculation of angles and Englishmen. Playing with Margaret or a friend in the evening, the fatigue of the day passed, and his honest voice and ringing laughter brought smiles to the lips of those passing by. In the evening, David brought his friends to chat with him on the wide verandas. Sometimes he retired alone to his room on the top floor of the house and buried himself in books. On Saturday nights, he would get rowdy and sit at the card table in the long living room with a group of friends from the city, playing poker and drinking cocktails.

Laura Ormsby, Margaret's mother, never seemed like a real part of her life. Even as a child, Margaret considered her a hopeless romantic. Life had treated her too well, and she expected qualities and reactions from everyone around her that she would never have attempted to achieve in herself.

David had already begun to rise when he married her, a slender, brown-haired woman, the daughter of a village shoemaker. Even then, the small plow company, whose property was scattered among the surrounding merchants and farmers, began to make progress in the state under his leadership. His master was already spoken of as the man of the future, and Laura as the wife of the man of the future.

Laura wasn't entirely happy with this. Sitting at home and doing nothing, she still yearned passionately to be known as a person, a woman of action. Walking beside her husband on the street, she beamed at people, but when those same people called them a beautiful couple, her cheeks flushed, and a flash of indignation flickered through her mind.

Laura Ormsby lay awake at night in her bed, thinking about her life. She had a fantasy world in which she lived during such times. A thousand exciting adventures awaited her in her dream world. She imagined a letter in the mail telling of an affair in which David's name was combined with that of another woman, and she lay quietly in bed, embracing the thought. She gazed tenderly at David's sleeping face. "Poor boy, in his predicament," she murmured. "I will be humble and cheerful and gently restore him to his rightful place in my heart."

The morning after a night spent in this dream world, Laura looked at David, so cool and businesslike, and was irritated by his businesslike manner. When he playfully placed his hand on her shoulder, she pulled away and, sitting across from him at breakfast, watched him read the morning paper, unaware of the rebellious thoughts in her head.

One day, after moving to Chicago and Margaret's return from college, Laura had a faint premonition of adventure. Though it turned out to be modest, it stuck with her and somehow softened her thoughts.

She was alone in a sleeper car traveling from New York. A young man sat down across from her, and they began talking. As she spoke, Laura imagined running away with him, and she gazed intently at his weak, pleasant face from under her eyelashes. She kept up the conversation while the others in the car crawled away for the night behind the green, billowing curtains.

Laura discussed ideas she'd gleaned from reading Ibsen and Shaw with her boyfriend. She became bolder and more assertive in expressing her opinions and tried to provoke him into some frank words or actions that might anger her.

The young man didn't understand the middle-aged woman sitting next to him, speaking so boldly. He knew only one distinguished man named Shaw, and that man had been governor of Iowa and then a member of President McKinley's cabinet. He was astonished at the thought that a prominent member of the Republican Party could hold such thoughts or express such opinions. He talked about fishing in Canada and a comic opera he had seen in New York, and at eleven o'clock he yawned and disappeared behind the green curtains. Lying on his bunk, the young man muttered to himself, "What did that woman want?" A thought occurred to him, and he reached for where his trousers dangled in the small hammock above the window and checked to make sure his watch and wallet were still there.

At home, Laura Ormsby entertained the idea of talking to the strange man on the train. In her mind, he became something romantic and daring, a ray of light in what she liked to consider her gloomy life.

Over dinner, she talked about him, describing his charms. "He had a wonderful mind, and we sat up late into the night talking," she said, looking at David's face.

When she said this, Margaret looked up and said with a laugh, "Have a heart, Dad. That's romance. Don't be blind to it. Mother is trying to scare you with a supposed love affair.

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CHAPTER III


ABOUT NE EVENING THREE A few weeks after his high-profile murder trial, McGregor took long walks through the streets of Chicago, trying to plan his life. He was troubled and confused by the events that followed his dramatic success in the courtroom, and more than a little disturbed by the fact that his mind was constantly toying with the dream of Margaret Ormsby becoming his wife. He had become a power in the city, and instead of the names and photographs of criminals and brothel keepers, his name and photograph now appeared on the front pages of newspapers. Andrew Leffingwell, the Chicago political representative of a wealthy and successful sensational newspaper publisher, visited him in his office and offered to make him a political figure in the city. Finley, a prominent criminal defense attorney, offered him a partnership. The lawyer, a small, smiling man with white teeth, didn't ask McGregor for an immediate decision. In a sense, he took the decision for granted. Smiling good-naturedly and rolling his cigar across McGregor's desk, he spent an hour telling stories of famous courtroom triumphs.

"One such triumph is enough to make a man," he declared. "You can't even imagine how far such success will take you. Word of it continues to linger in people's minds. A tradition has been established. The memory of it influences the minds of jurors. Cases are won for you simply by associating your name with the case."

McGregor walked slowly and heavily through the streets, seeing no one. On Wabash Avenue, near Twenty-third Street, he stopped at a saloon and drank a beer. The saloon was below sidewalk level, the floor covered with sawdust. Two half-drunk workmen stood at the bar, arguing. One of the workers, a socialist, constantly cursed the army, and his words made McGregor reflect on the dream he had nurtured for so long, which now seemed to have faded. "I"ve been in the army, and I know what I"m talking about," the socialist declared. "There"s nothing national about the army. It"s a private thing. Here it secretly belongs to the capitalists, and in Europe to the aristocracy. Don"t tell me-I know. The army is made up of bums. If I"m a bum, then I am one. You"ll quickly see what kind of guys will be in the army if this country ever gets drawn into a big war."

The agitated socialist raised his voice and pounded the counter. "Hell, we don"t even know ourselves," he shouted. "We"ve never been tested. We call ourselves a great nation because we"re rich. We"re like a fat man who ate too much pie. Yes, sir, that"s exactly what we are here in America, and as for our military, it"s a fat man"s plaything. Stay away from it."

McGregor sat in the corner of the saloon, looking around. Men were coming and going through the door. A child carried a bucket down the short steps from the street and ran across the sawdust floor. Her voice, thin and sharp, cut through the babble of men's voices. "Ten cents-give me a lot," she begged, lifting the bucket over her head and setting it on the counter.

MacGregor recalled the confident, smiling face of attorney Finley. Like David Ormsby, the successful plowmaker, the lawyer viewed people as pawns in a grand game, and like the plowmaker, his intentions were noble and his goal clear. He intended to make the most of his life. If he played the criminal's side, it was merely a chance. That's how things worked out. In his mind, there was something else-an expression of his own purpose.

MacGregor stood and walked out of the salon. Men stood in groups on the street. On Thirty-ninth Street, a crowd of young people milling about on the sidewalk bumped into a tall, muttering man walking past, hat in hand. He began to feel as if he were in the midst of something too vast to be moved by a single man. The man's pitiful insignificance was obvious. Like a long procession, figures passed before him, trying to escape the ruins of American life. With a shudder, he realized that for the most part, the people whose names filled the pages of American history meant nothing. Children who read of their deeds remained indifferent. Perhaps they only added to the chaos. Like men passing through the street, they crossed the face of things and disappeared into darkness.

"Perhaps Finley and Ormsby are right," he whispered. "They get all they can get, and they have the common sense to realize that life moves quickly, like a bird darting past an open window. They know that if a man thinks of anything else, he'll likely become another sentimentalist and spend his life hypnotized by the wagging of his own jaw."


During his travels, MacGregor visited a restaurant and open-air garden far to the south. The garden was built for the entertainment of the rich and successful. An orchestra played on a small platform. Although the garden was surrounded by a wall, it was open to the sky, and the stars shone above the laughing people seated at the tables.

McGregor sat alone at a small table on the balcony, dimly lit. Beneath him on the terrace were other tables occupied by men and women. Dancers had appeared on the stage in the center of the garden.

MacGregor, who had ordered dinner, left it untouched. A tall, graceful girl, very reminiscent of Margaret Ormsby, danced on the platform. Her body moved with infinite grace, and like a creature carried by the wind, she moved back and forth in the arms of her partner, a slender young man with long black hair. The dancing woman's figure expressed much of the idealism that men sought to materialize in women, and MacGregor was delighted by it. A sensuality so subtle that it hardly seemed sensual began to overwhelm him. With a renewed hunger, he awaited the moment when he would see Margaret again.

Other dancers appeared on the stage in the garden. The lights at the tables were dimmed. Laughter rose from the darkness. MacGregor looked around. The people sitting at the tables on the terrace caught and held his attention, and he began to peer into the men's faces. How cunning these successful men were. Weren't they wise men, after all? What cunning eyes hid behind the flesh so thick on the bones. It was the game of life, and they had played it. The garden was part of the game. It was beautiful, and didn't all beauty in the world end in service to them? The art of men, the thoughts of men, the impulses for beauty that come to mind in men and women-didn't all these things work solely to make life easier for successful people? The eyes of the men at the tables, as they looked at the dancing women, were not overly greedy. They were full of confidence. Wasn't it for them that the dancers turned this way and that, displaying their grace? If life was a struggle, did they not succeed in that struggle?

MacGregor rose from the table, leaving his food untouched. At the entrance to the garden, he paused and, leaning against a pillar, looked once more at the scene unfolding before him. A whole troupe of dancers had appeared on stage. They were dressed in colorful robes and performing a folk dance. As MacGregor watched, the light began to penetrate his eyes again. The women now dancing were unlike her, who reminded him of Margaret Ormsby. They were short, and there was something stern in their faces. They moved in crowds back and forth across the platform. With their dance, they sought to convey a message. A thought occurred to MacGregor. "This is the dance of labor," he murmured. "Here, in this garden, it is corrupted, but the note of labor is not lost. A hint of it remained in these figures, who labor even as they dance."

MacGregor stepped away from the shadow of the column and stood, hat in hand, beneath the garden lanterns, as if awaiting a call from the ranks of dancers. How furiously they worked! How their bodies twisted and writhed! The sweat broke out on the face of the man standing and watching, sympathetic to their efforts. "What a storm must be going on just beneath the surface of labor," he muttered. "Everywhere, stupid, brutalized men and women must be waiting for something, not knowing what they want. I will stick to my goal, but I will not abandon Margaret," he said aloud, turning and almost running out of the garden into the street.

That night, in his sleep, MacGregor dreamed of a new world, a world of soft words and gentle hands that soothed the growing beast within him. It was an old dream, a dream from which women like Margaret Ormsby were created. The long, slender hands he'd seen lying on the dorm table now touched his own. He tossed restlessly on the bed, and desire overwhelmed him, waking him. People were still walking back and forth along the boulevard. MacGregor stood in the darkness by his window, watching. The theater had just spat out its share of richly dressed men and women, and when he opened the window, the women's voices reached his ears, clear and sharp.

The man stared into the darkness, distracted, his blue eyes troubled. The vision of a disorderly and disorganized group of miners marching silently after the funeral of his mother, into whose life he had somehow, through some supreme effort, been shattered by a more defined and beautiful vision that came to him.

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CHAPTER IV


DURING THE DAYS Since she had seen MacGregor, Margaret had thought of him almost constantly. She had weighed her inclinations and decided that, if the opportunity presented itself, she would marry the man whose strength and courage so appealed to her. She was half disappointed that the resistance she had seen on her father's face when she had told him about MacGregor and betrayed herself with her tears had not become more active. She wanted to fight, to defend the man she had secretly chosen. When nothing was said on the matter, she went to her mother and tried to explain. "We will take him here," her mother said quickly. "I am giving a reception next week. I will make him the main figure. Let me know his name and address, and I will take care of the matter."

Laura stood and entered the house. A piercing glint came into her eyes. "He'll be a fool before our people," she told herself. "He's an animal, and he'll be made to look like one." She couldn't contain her impatience and sought out David. "He's a man to be feared," she said. "He'll stop at nothing. You must think of some way to end Margaret's interest in him. Do you know a better plan than leaving him here, where he'll look like a fool?"

David took the cigar out of his mouth. He felt annoyed and irritated that the matter concerning Margaret had been brought up for discussion. Deep down, he was also afraid of MacGregor. "Leave it," he said sharply. "She's a grown woman, she has more sense and common sense than any other woman I know." He stood up and threw the cigar across the veranda into the grass. "Women are incomprehensible," he half-shouted. "They do inexplicable things, have inexplicable fantasies. Why don't they move forward in a straight line like a sane person? I stopped understanding you years ago, and now I'm forced to stop understanding Margaret.


At Mrs. Ormsby's reception, MacGregor appeared in the black suit he'd bought for his mother's funeral. His fiery red hair and rugged expression drew everyone's attention. He was the subject of conversation and laughter from all sides. Just as Margaret had been uneasy and uneasy in the crowded courtroom where a life-and-death struggle was taking place, so he, among these people, uttering abrupt sentences and laughing stupidly at nothing, felt oppressed and insecure. Among the company, he occupied almost the same status as a ferocious new animal, safely captured and now on display in a cage. They thought Mrs. Ormsby had acted wisely in welcoming him, and he was, in a rather unconventional sense, the lion of the evening. The rumor that he would be there prompted more than one woman to abandon other engagements and come there where she could take this newspaper hero by the hand and talk, and men, shaking his hand, looked at him intently and wondered what strength and what cunning was hidden in him.

Following the murder trial, the newspapers were in an uproar over MacGregor. Afraid to publish the full substance of his speech on vice, its meaning and significance, they filled their columns with talk of this man. The formidable Scottish lawyer of the "Tenderloin" was hailed as something new and striking in the gray mass of the city's population. Then, as in the bold days that followed, the man irresistibly captured the imagination of writers, himself mute in written and spoken words, except in the fervor of inspired impulse, when he perfectly expressed that pure, brute force for which the thirst slumbers in the souls of artists.

Unlike the men, the beautifully dressed women at the reception weren't afraid of McGregor. They saw him as something tameable and captivating, and they gathered in groups to engage him in conversation and respond to the questioning look in his eyes. They thought that with such an unconquered soul, life could take on new ardor and interest. Like the women playing with toothpicks at O'Toole's, many of the women at Mrs. Ormsby's reception subconsciously desired such a man as their lover.

One by one, Margaret brought forth men and women from her world to associate their names with MacGregor's and try to establish him in the atmosphere of confidence and ease that permeated the house and its people. He stood by the wall, bowing and looking around boldly, and thought that the confusion and distraction of his mind that had followed his first visit to Margaret at the shelter were growing immeasurably with every moment. He looked at the glittering chandelier on the ceiling and at the people walking around-the men, relaxed and comfortable, the women with surprisingly delicate, expressive hands, with round white necks and shoulders protruding above their dresses-and a feeling of utter helplessness came over him. Never before had he been in such effeminate company. He thought of the beautiful women around him, regarding them in his rough, assertive manner as simply women working among men, pursuing some goal. "For all the delicate, sensual sensuality of their clothes and faces, they must somehow have sapped the strength and purpose of these people who walked so indifferently among them," he thought. He couldn't think of anything within himself that could be created as a defense against what he imagined such beauty must be for the man who lived with it. Its power, he imagined, must be something monumental, and he gazed with admiration at the calm face of Margaret's father as he moved among the guests.

MacGregor left the house and stood in the semi-darkness on the veranda. As Mrs. Ormsby and Margaret followed him, he looked at the old woman and sensed her hostility. His old love of battle overcame him, and he turned and stood silently, looking at her. "This beautiful lady," he thought, "is no better than the women of the First Parish. She's got the idea that I'll give in without a fight."

The fear of Margaret's people's confidence and stability, which had almost overwhelmed him in the house, vanished from his mind. A woman who had spent her entire life thinking of herself as someone who only waited for the opportunity to prove herself as a commanding figure in affairs, made her presence a failure in her attempt to suppress MacGregor.


Three people stood on the veranda. MacGregor, who had been silent, became talkative. Seized by one of those inspirations that were part of his nature, he began talking about sparring and counterattacks with Mrs. Ormsby. When he thought it was time to do what was on his mind, he entered the house and soon emerged with his hat. The sharpness that crept into his voice when he was excited or determined startled Laura Ormsby. Looking at her, he said, "I'm going to take your daughter for a walk outside. I want to talk to her."

Laura hesitated and smiled uncertainly. She'd decided to speak out, to be like this man, rude and direct. By the time she'd gathered herself and was ready, Margaret and MacGregor were already halfway down the gravel path to the gate, and the opportunity to distinguish themselves had passed.


MacGregor walked beside Margaret, lost in thought. "I work here," he said, waving his hand vaguely toward the city. "It's a big job, and it demands a lot from me. I didn't come to you because I had doubts. I was afraid you'd overpower me and drive thoughts of work from my head."

At the iron gate at the end of the gravel path, they turned and looked at each other. MacGregor leaned against the brick wall and looked at her. "I want you to marry me," he said. "I think about you constantly. Thinking about you only gets my job done halfway. I start to think that another man might come and take you away, and I waste hours in fear."

She took his shoulder with a trembling hand, and he, thinking to cut off her attempt at an answer before finishing, hurried on.

"We need to talk and understand some things before I can come to you as your groom. I didn't think I should treat a woman the way I treat you, and I need to make some adjustments. I thought I could get by without women like that. I thought you weren't meant for me-not with the work I planned to do in this world. If you don't marry me, I'd be glad to know now so I can come to my senses."

Margaret raised her hand and placed it on his shoulder. This act was a kind of acknowledgment of his right to speak to her so directly. She said nothing. Filled with a thousand messages of love and tenderness that she wanted to pour into his ear, she stood silently on the gravel path, her hand on his shoulder.

And then something absurd happened. The fear that Margaret might make some quick decision that would affect their entire future together infuriated MacGregor. He didn't want her to speak, and he wanted his words to remain unspoken. "Wait. Not now," he cried, and raised his hand, intending to take hers. His fist struck the hand resting on his shoulder, and it, in turn, knocked his hat off, sending it flying onto the road. MacGregor ran after him, and then stopped. He raised his hand to his head and seemed to think. As he turned again to pursue the hat, Margaret, no longer able to control herself, screamed with laughter.

Hatless, MacGregor walked down Drexel Boulevard in the soft silence of the summer night. He was dissatisfied with the evening's outcome and, deep down, wished Margaret would send him away defeated. His arms ached with the desire to hold her to his chest, but objections to marrying her arose in his mind, one after another. "Men are absorbed in such women and forget their work," he told himself. "They sit gazing into the soft brown eyes of their lover, thinking of happiness. A man should be busy with his work, thinking of it. The fire coursing through his veins should illuminate his mind. A woman's love should be perceived as the goal of life, and a woman accepts this and becomes happy because of it." He thought gratefully of Edith in her shop on Monroe Street. "I don't sit in my room at night, dreaming of holding her in my arms and showering her lips with kisses," he whispered.


Mrs. Ormsby stood in the doorway of her house, watching MacGregor and Margaret. She saw them stop at the end of their walk. The man's figure was lost in the shadows, while Margaret's stood alone, outlined against the distant light. She saw Margaret's outstretched hand-she was clutching his sleeve-and heard the murmur of voices. Then the man ran out into the street. His hat catapulted in front of him, and the silence was broken by a quick burst of semi-hysterical laughter.

Laura Ormsby was furious. As much as she hated MacGregor, she couldn't bear the thought of laughter breaking the spell of romance. "She's just like her father," she muttered. "At least she could have shown some spirit and not acted like a wooden thing, ending her first conversation with her lover with such laughter."

As for Margaret, she stood in the darkness, trembling with happiness. She imagined herself climbing the dark stairs to McGregor's office on Van Buren Street, where she had once gone to tell him news of the murder case, putting her hand on his shoulder and saying, "Take me in your arms and kiss me. I am your woman. I want to live with you. I am ready to renounce my people and my world and live your life for you." Margaret, standing in the darkness in front of the huge old house on Drexel Boulevard, imagined herself with Handsome McGregor-living with him as his wife in a small apartment above a fish market on the West Side. Why a fish market, she couldn't say.

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CHAPTER V


E DIT CARSON was six years older than MacGregor and lived entirely within herself. She was one of those natures that do not express themselves in words. Although her heart beat faster when he entered the shop, no color rose in her cheeks, nor did her pale eyes flash in response to his message. Day after day she sat in her shop at work, quiet, strong in her faith, ready to give money, her reputation, and if necessary, her life, to realize her own dream of womanhood. She did not see in MacGregor a man of genius, like Margaret, nor did she hope to express through him a secret desire for power. She was a working woman, and to her he represented all men. In her heart of hearts, she thought of him simply as a man-her man.

For MacGregor, Edith was a companion and a friend. He watched her sit year after year in her shop, saving money in the savings bank, maintaining a cheerful demeanor for the world, never pushy, kind, and self-assured in her own way. "We could continue living as we do now, and she wouldn't be any less content," he told himself.

One afternoon after a particularly difficult week at work, he came to her home to sit in her small workshop and consider marrying Margaret Ormsby. Edith was off-season, and she was alone in the shop, serving a customer. MacGregor lay down on the small sofa in the workshop. For the past week, he had addressed workers' meetings night after night, and later sat in his room, thinking about Margaret. Now, on the sofa, with voices in his ears, he fell asleep.

When he woke up, it was already late at night, and Edith was sitting on the floor next to the sofa, running her fingers through his hair.

MacGregor quietly opened his eyes and looked at her. He saw a tear roll down her cheek. She was staring straight ahead, at the wall of the room, and in the dim light coming through the window, he could see the tied strings around her small neck and the mousy-colored bun on her head.

MacGregor quickly closed his eyes. He felt as if he'd been awakened by a trickle of cold water splashing on his chest. He was overcome by the feeling that Edith Carson was expecting something from him that he wasn't prepared to give.

After a while, she rose and crept quietly into the shop, and he, with a bang and a fuss, also rose and began calling loudly. He demanded time and complained about a missed appointment. Edith turned on the gas and walked with him to the door. Her face still wore the same calm smile. MacGregor hurried into the darkness and spent the rest of the night wandering the streets.

The next day, he went to see Margaret Ormsby at the shelter. He used no artifice with her. Getting straight to the point, he told her about the undertaker's daughter sitting next to him on the hill above Coal Creek, about the barber and his conversations about women on the park bench, and how that led him to that other woman kneeling on the floor of the little frame house, his fists in her hair, and Edith Carson, whose companionship had saved him from all this.

"If you can't hear all this and still want to live with me," he said, "then there's no future for us together. I want you. I'm afraid of you and I'm afraid of my love for you, but I still want you. I've seen your face hovering over the audiences in the halls where I worked. I've looked at the babies in the arms of the workers' wives and wanted to see my child in your arms. I care more about what I do than I do about you, but I love you."

MacGregor stood and stood over her. "I love you, my arms reach out to you, my brain plans the triumph of the workers, with all the old, confusing human love I almost thought I'd never want.

"I can't bear this waiting. I can't bear this, not knowing enough to tell Edith. I can't think about you while people are starting to catch the idea bug and are looking to me for clear direction. Take me or leave me, and live your life."

Margaret Ormsby looked at MacGregor. When she spoke, her voice was as quiet as her father's telling a mechanic what to do with a broken car.

"I will marry you," she said simply. "I'm full of thoughts about it. I want you, I want you so blindly that I don't think you can understand.

She stood facing him and looked into his eyes.

"You'll have to wait," she said. "I must see Edith, I must do it myself. She's served you all these years-it's been her privilege."

McGregor looked across the table into the beautiful eyes of the woman he loved.

"You belong to me, even if I belong to Edith," he said.

"I'll see Edith," Margaret replied again.

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CHAPTER VI


Mr. S. Gregor Levy then told the story of his love for Margaret. Edith Carson, who knew defeat so well and had the courage to defeat, was about to meet defeat at his hands through an undefeated woman, and he allowed himself to forget all about it. For a month, he tried unsuccessfully to convince the workers to accept the idea of "The Marching Men," and after a conversation with Margaret, he stubbornly continued to work.

And then one evening, something happened that aroused him. The idea of marching men, more than half intellectualized, once again became a burning passion, and the question of his life with women was quickly and finally clarified.

It was night, and McGregor stood on the elevated train platform at State and Van Buren Streets. He felt guilty about Edith and was about to go home with her, but the scene on the street below captivated him, and he remained standing, looking out at the illuminated street.

A teamsters' strike had raged in the city for a week, and a riot had broken out that afternoon. Windows were smashed, and several men were injured. Now the evening crowd had gathered, and the speakers climbed into the boxes to speak. A loud rattling of jaws and waving of arms was heard everywhere. McGregor recalled it. He thought of the small mining town, and again he saw himself as a boy, sitting in the dark on the steps outside his mother's bakery, trying to think. Again, in his imagination, he saw the disorganized miners pouring out of the saloon and standing in the street, cursing and threatening, and again he was filled with contempt for them.

And then, in the heart of a vast Western city, the same thing happened as when he was a boy in Pennsylvania. City officials, determined to intimidate striking teamsters with a show of force, sent a regiment of state troopers to march through the streets. The soldiers wore brown uniforms. They were silent. As McGregor looked down, they turned off Polk Street and walked at a measured pace down State Street, past the disorderly crowd on the sidewalk and the equally disorderly speakers on the curb.

MacGregor's heart pounded so hard he almost choked. The men in uniform, each one meaningless on its own, marched together, alive with meaning. He wanted to scream again, to run out into the street and embrace them. The strength in them seemed to kiss, as in a lover's kiss, the strength within him, and when they passed and the chaotic murmur of voices rang out again, he got into his car and drove to Edith, his heart burning with determination.

Edith Carson's hat shop had changed hands. She had sold out and fled. McGregor stood in the showroom, examining the display cases filled with feathered garments and the hats hanging on the wall. The light from a street lamp streaming through the window made millions of tiny dust motes dance before his eyes.

A woman emerged from a room at the back of the store-the room where he'd seen tears of anguish in Edith's eyes-and told him that Edith had sold the business. Excited by the news she had to deliver, she walked past the waiting man and walked to the screen door, facing the street with her back to him.

The woman glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. She was a petite, black-haired woman with two gleaming gold teeth and glasses. "There's been a lovers' quarrel here," she told herself.

"I bought the store," she said out loud. "She asked me to tell you she's gone."

McGregor didn't wait any longer and hurried past the woman into the street. A feeling of silent, aching loss filled his heart. Impulsively, he turned and ran back.

Standing outside by the screen door, he hoarsely shouted, "Where did she go?" he demanded.

The woman laughed merrily. She felt that the store gave her an air of romance and adventure that was very appealing to her. Then she walked to the door and smiled through the screen. "She just left," she said. "She went to the Burlington station. I think she went West. I heard her tell the man about her trunk. She"s been here two days, since I bought the store. I think she was waiting for you to come. You didn"t come, and now she"s gone, and perhaps you won"t find her. She didn"t seem like the kind of person who would quarrel with her lover."

The woman in the store laughed softly as McGregor hurried away. "Who would have thought this quiet little woman would have such a lover?" she asked herself.

McGregor was running down the street and, raising his hand, flagged down a passing car. The woman saw him sitting in the car, talking to the gray-haired man behind the wheel, and then the car turned around and disappeared down the street, illegally.

MacGregor saw Edith Carson's character anew. "I see her doing it," he told himself, "cheerfully telling Margaret it doesn't matter, and always planning it in the back of her mind. Here, all these years, she's been living her own life. Secret yearnings, desires, and the old human thirst for love, happiness, and self-expression lingered beneath her calm exterior, just as they do beneath mine."

MacGregor thought back on the tense days and realized with shame how little Edith had seen of him. It was back in the days when his great "Marching People" movement had only just begun to emerge, and the night before, he'd attended a workers' conference that wanted him to publicly demonstrate the power he'd been secretly building. Every day, his office was filled with reporters asking questions and demanding explanations. Meanwhile, Edith was selling her store to this woman and preparing to disappear.

At the station, MacGregor found Edith sitting in a corner, her face buried in the crook of her arm. Her serene appearance had vanished. Her shoulders seemed narrower. Her hand, hanging over the back of the seat in front of her, was white and lifeless.

MacGregor said nothing, but grabbed the brown leather bag that sat beside her on the floor and, taking her hand, led her down the stone steps to the street.

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CHAPTER VII


I N O RMSBY _ A father and daughter sat in the dark on the veranda. After Laura Ormsby's meeting with MacGregor, she and David had another conversation. Now she was visiting her hometown in Wisconsin, and father and daughter were sitting together.

David pointedly told his wife about Margaret's affair. "This isn't a matter of common sense," he said. "You can't pretend there's any prospect of happiness in such a thing. This man is no fool, and he may someday become a great man, but it won't be the kind of greatness that will bring happiness or fulfillment to a woman like Margaret. He could end up in prison."


MacGregor and Edith walked down the gravel path and stopped at the front door of the Ormsby house. From the darkness of the veranda, David's cordial voice came. "Come and sit here," he said.

MacGregor stood silently and waited. Edith clutched his arm. Margaret stood and, walking forward, stood looking at them. Her heart leaped, and she felt a crisis provoked by the presence of these two people. Her voice trembled with anxiety. "Come in," she said, turning and heading into the house.

The man and woman followed Margaret. At the door, McGregor stopped and called out to David. "We want you here with us," he said sharply.

Four people waited in the living room. A huge chandelier cast its light on them. Edith sat in her chair, looking at the floor.

"I made a mistake," said MacGregor. "I've been making mistakes all along." He turned to Margaret. "There's something we weren't counting on here. There's Edith. She's not what we thought."

Edith said nothing. The tired stoop remained in her shoulders. She felt that if MacGregor had brought her into the house and to this woman he loved to seal their separation, she would have sat quietly until it was over, and then moved on to the solitude she believed was her lot.

For Margaret, the appearance of a man and a woman was an omen of evil. She, too, remained silent, awaiting the shock. When her lover spoke, she, too, looked at the floor. Silently, she said, "He's going to leave and marry another woman. I must be prepared to hear it from him." David stood in the doorway. "He's going to bring Margaret back to me," he thought, and his heart leaped with happiness.

MacGregor crossed the room and paused, looking at the two women. His blue eyes were cold and filled with intense curiosity about them and himself. He wanted to test them and test himself. "If I'm clear-headed now, I'll continue sleeping," he thought. "If I fail at this, I fail at everything." Turning, he grabbed David by the sleeve of his coat and pulled him across the room so that the two men stood together. Then he looked closely at Margaret. He had remained standing there as he spoke to her, his hand on her father's arm. This action attracted David, and a thrill of admiration ran through him. "This is a man," he told himself.

"You thought Edith was ready to see us get married. Well, she was. Now she's here, and you see what it's done to her," McGregor said.

The plowman's daughter began to speak. Her face was chalky white. MacGregor clasped his hands.

"Wait," he said, "a man and a woman can't live together for years and then part like two male friends. Something gets in their way. They discover they love each other. I realized that even though I want you, I love Edith. She loves me. Look at her."

Margaret rose from her chair. MacGregor continued. His voice took on a sharpness that made people fear him and follow him. "Oh, we will marry, Margaret and I," he said. "Her beauty has captivated me. I follow beauty. I want beautiful children. It's my right."

He turned to Edith and stopped, looking at her.

"You and I could never have the feeling Margaret and I had when we looked into each other's eyes. We suffered from it-each one desiring the other. You are made to endure. You will overcome everything and, after a while, become cheerful. You know that, don't you?

Edith's eyes met his own.

"Yes, I know," she said.

Margaret Ormsby jumped up from her chair, her eyes swollen.

"Stop," she cried. "I don't want you. I would never marry you now. You belong to her. You belong to Edith.

McGregor's voice became soft and quiet.

"Oh, I know," he said; "I know! I know! But I want children. Look at Edith. Do you think she can bear me children?"

A change came over Edith Carson. Her eyes hardened and her shoulders straightened.

"That's for me to say," she cried, leaning forward and grabbing his hand. "This is between me and God. If you're going to marry me, come now and do it. I wasn't afraid of leaving you, and I'm not afraid of dying after having children."

Releasing MacGregor's hand, Edith ran across the room and stopped in front of Margaret. "How do you know you're more beautiful or could bear more beautiful children?" she demanded. "What do you even mean by beauty? I deny your beauty." She turned to MacGregor. "Listen," she cried, "it doesn't stand the test."

Pride filled the woman who had come to life in the body of a little milliner. She looked calmly at the people in the room, and when she looked back at Margaret, a challenge rang in her voice.

"Beauty must endure," she said quickly. "It must be courageous. He will have to endure many years of life and many defeats." A hard look appeared in her eyes as she challenged the daughter of wealth. "I have the courage to suffer defeat, and I have the courage to take what I want," she said. "Do you have that courage? If you do, take this man. You want him, and so do I. Take his hand and walk away with him. Do it now, here, before my eyes."

Margaret shook her head. Her body trembled, and her eyes darted wildly around. She turned to David Ormsby. "I didn't know life could be like this," she said. "Why didn't you tell me? She's right. I'm scared."

A light lit up MacGregor's eyes, and he turned quickly. "I see," he said, looking intently at Edith, "that you, too, have a goal." Turning again, he looked into David's eyes.

"There's something to be resolved here. Perhaps it's the ultimate test in a person's life. A person struggles to hold a thought in their mind, to be impersonal, to see that life has a purpose beyond their own. Perhaps you've gone through this struggle. You see, I'm doing it now. I'm going to take Edith and get back to work."

At the door, McGregor stopped and extended his hand to David, who took it and looked respectfully at the big lawyer.

"I"m glad you"re leaving," the plowman said briefly.

"I'm glad to go," said MacGregor, aware that there was nothing but relief and honest antagonism in David Ormsby's voice and mind.

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BOOK VI


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CHAPTER I


MARCHING MEN _ _ _ _ Movement was never a subject for intellectualization. For years, McGregor tried to achieve this through conversation. He failed. The rhythm and scope underlying movement ignited the fire. The man had endured long periods of depression and was forced to drive himself forward. And then, after the scene with Margaret and Edith at Ormsby's house, the action began.

There was a man named Mosby, around whose personality the action revolved for a while. He worked as a bartender for Neil Hunt, a notorious figure on South State Street, and had once been a lieutenant in the army. Mosby was what today's society would call a scoundrel. After West Point and several years at some isolated army post, he took to drinking and one night, during a rowdy outing, half-crazed with the boredom of his life, shot a private in the shoulder. He was arrested and his honor was compromised for not running away, but escaping. For years, he wandered the world as a haggard, cynical figure, drinking whenever money came his way and doing anything to break the monotony of existence.

Mosby enthusiastically embraced the idea of the "Marching Men." He saw it as an opportunity to excite and disturb his fellow men. He persuaded his bartenders and waiters' union to give the idea a try, and that morning they began marching up and down a strip of parkland overlooking the lake on the edge of the First Ward. "Keep your mouths shut," Mosby ordered. "We can harass the officials of this city like crazy if we do this right. When asked questions, don't say anything. If the police try to arrest us, we'll swear we're only doing this for practice."

Mosby's plan worked. Within a week, crowds began gathering in the mornings to watch the "Marching Men," and the police began investigating. Mosby was delighted. He quit his job as a bartender and recruited a motley crew of young hooligans, whom he coaxed into practicing their marching steps in the afternoons. When he was arrested and hauled into court, McGregor acted as his lawyer, and he was released. "I want to bring these people to justice," Mosby declared, looking innocent and guileless. "You see for yourself how the waiters and bartenders turn pale and slouch while they work, and as for these young thugs, wouldn't it be better for society to have them marching than to loiter in bars and plot God knows what mischief?"

A smile appeared on the faces of the First Section. MacGregor and Mosby had organized another company of marchers, and a young man who had been a sergeant in a company of regulars was invited to assist with the drill. To the men themselves, it was all a joke, a game that appealed to the mischievous boy in them. Everyone was curious, and that added a special flavor to the proceedings. They grinned as they marched up and down. For a while, they exchanged taunts with the onlookers, but MacGregor put an end to it. "Keep quiet," he said, passing among the men during a break. "That's the best thing to do. Keep quiet and mind your business, and your march will be ten times more effective."

The movement of marching men grew. A young Jewish newspaperman, half scoundrel, half poet, wrote a chilling article for a Sunday paper, declaring the birth of the Labor Republic. The story was illustrated with a cartoon depicting MacGregor leading a vast horde across an open plain toward a city whose tall chimneys billowed plumes of smoke. Standing beside MacGregor in the photograph, dressed in a colorful uniform, was the former army officer Mosby. The article called him the commander of a "secret republic growing within the great capitalist empire."

It began to take shape-the Marching People movement. Rumors began to circulate. A question appeared in the men's eyes. Slowly, at first, it began to form in their minds. A sharp clatter of feet could be heard on the sidewalk. Groups formed, men laughed, groups disappeared only to reappear. In the sun, people stood before the factory doors, talking, half-understanding, beginning to sense that there was something greater in the wind.

At first, the movement achieved nothing among the workers. There would be a meeting, perhaps a series of meetings, in one of the small halls where workers gathered to conduct their union business. McGregor would speak. His harsh, commanding voice could be heard on the streets below. Merchants emerged from their shops and stood in their doorways, listening. Young men smoking cigarettes stopped looking at the passing girls and gathered in crowds under the open windows. The slow-moving brain of labor was awakening.

After a while, several young men, some who operated saws at the box factory and others who operated machines at the bicycle factory, volunteered to follow the example of the men of the First Section. On summer evenings, they would gather in vacant lots and march back and forth, looking at their feet and laughing.

MacGregor insisted on training. He never intended for his Marching Movement to become simply a disorganized group of pedestrians, like the ones we've all seen at so many workers' parades. He meant for them to learn to march rhythmically, swaying like veterans. He was determined that they would finally hear the clatter of feet, sing a great song, carrying a message of powerful brotherhood into the hearts and minds of the marchers.

McGregor devoted himself entirely to the movement. He earned a meager living in his profession, but he didn't think much of it. A murder case brought him other cases, and he took on a partner, a small, ferret-eyed man who would research the details of the cases brought into the firm and collect the fees, half of which he would give to the partner who intended to solve them. Something else. Day after day, week after week, month after month, McGregor walked back and forth across the city, talking to workers, learning to speak, striving to get his message across.

One September evening, he stood in the shadow of a factory wall, watching a group of men march across a vacant lot. The traffic had become very intense by then. A fire burned in his heart at the thought of what this might become. Darkness was falling, and clouds of dust raised by the men's feet swept across the face of the setting sun. About two hundred men marched across the field before him-the largest company he had managed to assemble. For a week, they remained on the march, evening after evening, and began to understand his spirit. Their leader on the field, a tall, broad-shouldered man, had once been a captain in the state militia and now worked as an engineer in a soap factory. His commands rang sharply and clearly in the evening air. "Fours in line," he shouted. The words barked. The men squared their shoulders and turned energetically. They began to enjoy the march.

In the shadow of the factory wall, MacGregor shifted restlessly. He felt that this was the beginning, the true birth of his movement, that these people had truly emerged from the ranks of labor, and that understanding was growing in the chests of the marching figures out there in the open.

He was mumbling something and pacing back and forth. A young man, a reporter for one of the city's largest daily newspapers, jumped out of a passing tram and stopped next to him. "What's going on here? What is this? What is this? You better tell me," he said.

In the dim light, McGregor raised his fists above his head and spoke loudly. "It's permeating them," he said. "What can't be put into words is self-expression. Something is happening here in this area. A new force is coming into the world."

Half beside himself, MacGregor paced back and forth, waving his arms. Turning again to the reporter standing by the factory wall, a rather dapper man with a tiny mustache, he shouted:

"Don't you see?" he cried. His voice was sharp. "Look how they march! They understand what I mean. They've caught the spirit of it!"

MacGregor began to explain. He spoke quickly, his words coming out in short, clipped sentences. "For centuries, men have talked about brotherhood. Men have always talked about brotherhood. The words meant nothing. Words and talk have only created a slack-jawed race. Men's jaws may shake, but their legs don't wobble."

He walked back and forth again, dragging the half-frightened man along the thickening shadow of the factory wall.

"You see, it's beginning-now it's beginning in this field. The legs and feet of people, hundreds of legs and feet, are creating a kind of music. Now there will be thousands, hundreds of thousands. For a time, people will cease to be individuals. They will become a mass, a moving, all-powerful mass. They will not express their thoughts in words, but nevertheless, thought will grow within them. They will suddenly begin to realize that they are part of something enormous and powerful, something that moves and seeks new expression. They were told about the power of labor, but now, you see, they will become the power of labor."

Overwhelmed by his own words and perhaps by something rhythmic in the moving mass of people, MacGregor frantically worried about the dapper young man understanding. "Do you remember when you were a boy, how some man who had been a soldier told you that marching men had to break stride and walk across a bridge in a disorderly crowd, because their orderly gait would shake the bridge?"

A shudder ran through the young man. In his spare time, he wrote plays and short stories, and his trained dramatic sense quickly grasped the meaning of MacGregor's words. A scene on the village street of his Ohio home came to mind. In his mind's eye, he saw a village fife and drum corps marching past. His mind recalled the rhythm and cadence of the melody, and once again, as in childhood, his legs ached as he ran out among the men and walked away.

In his excitement he began to speak as well. "I see," he cried; "Do you think there is a thought in this, a great thought, which people have not understood?"

On the field, the men, becoming bolder and less shy, rushed past, their bodies breaking into a long, swaying stride.

The young man thought for a moment. "I understand. I understand. Everyone who stood and watched as I did, when the troop of flutists and drummers passed by, felt the same as I did. They hid behind their masks. Their legs tingled, too, and the same wild, warlike beating sounded in their hearts. You figured this out, right? Is this how you want to manage labor?"

The young man stared open-mouthed at the field and the moving mass of people. His thoughts became oratorical. "Here's a big man," he muttered. "Here's Napoleon, the Caesar of Labor, coming to Chicago. He's not like the little leaders. His mind isn't clouded by the pale veneer of thought. He doesn't think that the great, natural impulses of man are foolish and absurd. He's got something that will work. The world better keep an eye on this man."

Half beside himself, he walked back and forth along the edge of the field, trembling all over.

A worker emerged from the marching ranks. Words emerged from the field. The captain's voice, issuing commands, tinged with irritation. The newspaperman listened with apprehension. "This is what will ruin everything. The soldiers will become disheartened and leave," he thought, leaning forward and waiting.

"I've been working all day and I can't walk back and forth here all night," complained the worker's voice.

A shadow passed over the young man's shoulder. Before his eyes, on the field, ahead of the waiting rows of men, stood MacGregor. His fist fired, and the complaining worker collapsed to the ground.

"This is no time for words," said a sharp voice. "Get back there. This is not a game. This is the beginning of a man's self-realization. Go there and say nothing. If you can't come with us, leave. The movement we started can't afford whiners."

A cheer rose among the men. Near the factory wall, an excited newspaperman danced back and forth. At the captain's command, the line of marching men swept across the field again, and he looked on with tears in his eyes. "It will work," he shouted. "It will definitely work. Finally, a man has come to lead the workers."

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CHAPTER II


JOHN VAN MOOR _ _ _ One day, a young advertising man from Chicago walked into the offices of the Wheelright Bicycle Company. The company's factory and offices were located far on the west side. The factory was a huge brick building with a wide cement sidewalk and a narrow green lawn dotted with flower beds. The building used for offices was smaller and had a veranda facing the street. Grape vines grew along the walls of the office building.

Like the reporter watching the Marching Men in the field by the factory wall, John Van Moore was a dapper young man with a mustache. In his spare time, he played the clarinet. "It gives a man something to cling to," he explained to his friends. "A man sees life passing by and feels he's not just a drifting log in the current of things. Although I'm worthless as a musician, at least it makes me dream."

Among the employees of the advertising agency where he worked, Van Moore was known as something of a fool, redeemed by his ability to string words together. He wore a heavy black braided watch chain and carried a cane, and he had a wife who, after marrying, studied medicine and with whom he lived separately. Sometimes on Saturday nights, they would meet at a restaurant and sit for hours, drinking, and laughing. After his wife retired, the advertising executive continued the merriment, moving from salon to salon, delivering long speeches outlining his philosophy of life. "I'm an individualist," he declared, pacing back and forth and swinging his cane. "I'm a dilettante, an experimenter, if you will. Before I die, I dream of discovering a new quality in existence."

For a bicycle company, an advertiser was tasked with writing a brochure telling the company's history in a romantic and accessible manner. Once completed, the brochure would be sent to those who responded to advertisements placed in magazines and newspapers. The company had a manufacturing process specific to Wheelright bicycles, and this had to be emphasized in the brochure.

The manufacturing process John Van Moore was supposed to have described so eloquently was conceived in the mind of a worker and was responsible for the company's success. Now the worker had died, and the company president had decided that the idea would be his own. He pondered the matter carefully and decided that, in truth, the idea must have been more than his own. "It must have been," he told himself, "or it wouldn't have turned out so well."

In the bicycle company's office, the president, a gruff, gray man with tiny eyes, paced the long, heavily carpeted room. In response to questions from an advertising executive seated at a desk with a notepad in front of him, he stood on tiptoe, stuck his thumb into the armhole of his vest, and told a long, rambling story in which he was the hero.

The story concerned a purely imaginary young worker who spent the first years of his life in horrific labor. In the evenings, he would rush out of the workshop where he worked and, without taking off his clothes, toil for long hours in a small attic. When the worker discovered the secret of the Wheelwright bicycle's success, he opened a shop and began to reap the rewards of his efforts.

"That was me. I was that guy," exclaimed the fat man who had actually bought a stake in the bicycle company after turning forty. He thumped his chest and paused, as if overcome with emotion. Tears came to his eyes. The young worker had become a reality for him. "All day long I ran around the shop shouting, 'Quality! Quality!' I do it now. I have a fetish for it. I make bicycles not for the money, but because I am a worker who takes pride in my work. You can put that in a book. You can quote me. My pride in my work should be especially noted." The advertising man nodded his head and began to scribble something in a notebook. He almost could have written this story without visiting the factory. When the fat man wasn't looking, he turned away and listened carefully. With all his heart he wished the president would go away and leave him alone to wander the factory.

The previous evening, John Van Moore had been involved in an adventure. He and a friend, a fellow who drew cartoons for daily newspapers, had gone into a saloon and met another newspaperman.

The three men sat in the saloon until late into the night, drinking and talking. The second newspaperman-the same dapper fellow who had watched the marchers at the factory wall-told the story of MacGregor and his marchers over and over again. "I'm telling you, there's something growing here," he said. "I've seen this MacGregor, and I know. You can believe me or not, but the fact is, he's learned something. There's an element in men that hasn't been understood before-there's a thought hidden in the breast of the birth, a great unspoken thought-it's part of the human body, and also of their minds. Suppose this fellow understood it, and understood it, ah!"

Continuing to drink, the newspaperman, growing increasingly agitated, was half-mad in his conjectures about what was about to happen in the world. Slamming his fist on the beer-soaked table, he turned to the advertiser. "There are things animals understand that humans don't," he exclaimed. "Take bees. Did you think humans haven't tried to develop a collective mind? Why wouldn't humans try to figure it out?"

The newsboy's voice grew low and tense. "When you come to the factory, I want you to keep your eyes and ears open," he said. "Go into one of the large rooms where a lot of men are working. Stand perfectly still. Don't try to think. Wait."

The agitated man jumped up from his seat and paced back and forth in front of his companions. A group of men standing in front of the bar listened, raising their glasses to their lips.

"I'm telling you that there already is a labor song. It hasn't yet been expressed or understood, but it's in every shop, in every field where people work. Dimly, the people who work understand this song, though if you mention it, they'll only laugh. The song is low, stern, rhythmic. I'm telling you that it comes from the very soul of labor. It's similar to what artists understand and what's called form. This McGregor understands something of this. He's the first labor leader to understand it. The world will hear of him. One day, the world will ring with his name."

At the bicycle factory, John Van Moore looked at the notebook in front of him and thought about the words of the half-drunk man in the showroom. Behind him, the vast workshop echoed with the steady grinding of countless machines. The fat man, mesmerized by his own words, continued to pace back and forth, recounting the hardships that had once befallen an imaginary young worker, over which he had triumphed. "We hear a lot about the power of labor, but a mistake has been made," he said. "People like me-we are the power. See, we come from the masses? We step forward."

Stopping in front of the advertiser and looking down, the fat man winked. "You don't have to say that in the book. There's no need to quote me. Our bicycles are bought by workers, and it would be foolish to offend them, but what I say is nonetheless true. Aren't people like me, with our cunning minds and the strength of our patience, the ones who create these great modern organizations?"

The fat man waved his hand toward the workshops, where the roar of machinery could be heard. The advertising man nodded absently, trying to hear the work song the drunken man had been talking about. It was time to finish work, and the sound of many feet could be heard throughout the factory floor. The roar of the machines ceased.

And again the fat man paced back and forth, telling the story of the career of a worker who had risen from the ranks of the working class. Men began to emerge from the factory and enter the street. Footsteps could be heard on the wide cement sidewalk past the flower beds.

Suddenly the fat man stopped. The advertiser sat with a pencil suspended above the paper. Sharp commands came from the stairs below. And again the sound of people moving came from the windows.

The bicycle company president and the advertising man ran to the window. There, on the cement sidewalk, stood the company's soldiers, lined up in columns of four and divided into companies. At the head of each company stood a captain. The captains turned the men around. "Forward! March!" they shouted.

The fat man stood with his mouth open, looking at the men. "What's going on there? What do you mean? Stop it!" he yelled.

A mocking laugh was heard from the window.

"Attention! Forward, point right!" shouted the captain.

The men rushed along the wide cement sidewalk past the window and the advertiser. There was something determined and grim about their faces. A pained smile flickered across the gray-haired man's face, then vanished. The advertiser, without even realizing what was happening, sensed the older man's fear. He felt terror on his own face. Deep down, he was glad to see it.

The producer began talking animatedly. "What is this?" he demanded. "What's going on? What kind of volcano are we businessmen walking up? Haven't we had enough trouble with childbirth? What are they doing now?" He walked past the desk again, where the advertiser sat, looking at him. "We'll leave the book," he said. "Come tomorrow. Come anytime. I want to get to the bottom of this. I want to know what's going on."

Leaving the bicycle company office, John Van Moore ran down the street past the shops and houses. He made no attempt to follow the marching crowd, but ran blindly ahead, filled with excitement. He recalled the newspaperman's words about the labor song and was intoxicated by the thought of capturing its sweep. A hundred times he had seen people rush out of the factory doors at the end of the day. Before, they had always been just a mass of individuals. Each minding their own business, each dispersed down their own street and lost in the dark alleys between tall, dirty buildings. Now all that had changed. The men no longer shuffled alone, but marched shoulder to shoulder down the street.

A lump rose in this man's throat, and he, like the man at the factory wall, began to utter the words. "The song of labor is already here. It has begun to sing!" he exclaimed.

John Van Moore was beside himself. He remembered the fat man's face, pale with terror. On the sidewalk in front of the grocery store, he stopped and screamed with delight. Then he began dancing wildly, terrifying a group of children, who stood with their fingers in their mouths and stared wide-eyed.

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CHAPTER III


LL _ THROUGH THAT In the first months of that year, rumors circulated among businessmen in Chicago about a new and incomprehensible movement among workers. In a sense, the workers understood the latent terror that their collective march had evoked, and like an advertising man dancing on the sidewalk in front of a grocery store, they were pleased. A grim satisfaction settled in their hearts. Remembering their childhood and the creeping terror that had invaded their fathers' homes during the Depression, they were delighted to sow terror in the homes of the rich and well-to-do. For years, they had walked through life blindly, striving to forget age and poverty. Now they felt that life had a purpose, that they were moving toward some end. When in the past they had been told that power resided within them, they had not believed it. "He can't be trusted," thought the man at the machine, looking at the man working at the next machine. "I heard him talk, and deep down he's a fool."

Now the man at the machine didn't think about his brother at the next machine. That night, in his sleep, a new vision began to come to him. Power breathed its message into his mind. Suddenly, he saw himself as part of a giant striding across the world. "I am like a drop of blood coursing through the veins of birth," he whispered to himself. "In my own way, I add strength to the heart and brain of labor. I have become part of this thing that has begun to move. I will not speak, but I will wait. If this march has meaning, then I will go. Even though I am tired by the end of the day, that will not stop me. Many times I have been tired and alone. Now I am part of something enormous. I know that the consciousness of power has crept into my mind, and even though I will be persecuted, I will not give up what I have acquired."

A meeting of businessmen was convened at the office of the plow trust. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the unrest among the workers. It had broken out at the plowing plant. That evening, the men no longer walked in a disorderly crowd, but marched in groups along the cobbled street past the factory gates.

At the meeting, David Ormsby was, as always, calm and composed. An aura of good intentions hung about him, and when the banker, one of the company's directors, finished speaking, he stood up and began pacing back and forth, his hands in his trouser pockets. The banker was a stout man with thin brown hair and slender hands. As he spoke, he held a pair of yellow gloves and slapped them on the long table in the center of the room. The soft slap of the gloves on the table reinforced his point. David gestured for him to sit. "I'll go see this MacGregor myself," he said, crossing the room and placing his hand on the banker's shoulder. "Perhaps, as you say, there's a new and terrible danger lurking here, but I don't think so. For thousands, no doubt millions, of years the world has followed its own path, and I don't think it can be stopped now."

"I'm lucky to have met and known this McGregor," David added, smiling at the rest of the room. "He's a man, not Joshua making the sun stand still."

In the Van Buren Street office, David, gray-haired and confident, stood in front of the desk where McGregor sat. "We'll leave here, if you don't mind," he said. "I want to talk to you and I don't want to be interrupted. I feel like we're talking on the street."

Two men took the trolley to Jackson Park and, forgetting lunch, strolled for an hour along the tree-lined paths. A breeze off the lake cooled the air, and the park emptied.

They went to stand on the pier overlooking the lake. On the pier, David tried to start the conversation that had been their life's purpose together, but he felt the wind and water slapping against the pier's piles made it too difficult. Although he couldn't explain why, he felt relieved at the need for a delay. They walked back to the park and found a spot on a bench overlooking the lagoon.

In the silent presence of MacGregor, David suddenly felt awkward and uneasy. "By what right do I interrogate him?" he asked himself, unable to find an answer in his mind. Half a dozen times he started to say what he had come to say, but then stopped, and his speech devolved into trivialities. "There are men in the world you haven't considered," he said finally, forcing himself to begin. He continued with a laugh, relieved that the silence had been broken. "You see, you and the others have missed the deepest secret of strong men."

David Ormsby looked hard at MacGregor. "I don't believe you believe we're just chasing money, we businessmen. I believe you see something bigger. We have a goal, and we pursue it quietly and doggedly."

David looked again at the silent figure sitting in the dim light, and again his mind fled, seeking to penetrate the silence. "I'm not a fool, and perhaps I know that the movement you've started among the workers is something new. There's power in it, as there is in all great ideas. Perhaps I think there's power in you. Why else would I be here?"

David laughed again, uncertainly. "In a way, I sympathize with you," he said. "Even though I've served money all my life, it hasn't been my own. You mustn't think that people like me care about anything but money."

The old plowman looked over MacGregor's shoulder to where the leaves of the trees shook in the wind off the lake. "There have been men and great leaders who understood the silent, competent servants of wealth," he said, half-irritated. "I want you to understand these people. I would like you to become like that yourself-not for the wealth it will bring, but because in the end, you will serve all people. In this way, you will reach the truth. The power within you will be preserved and used more wisely."

"Of course, history has paid little or no attention to the people I'm talking about. They passed through life unnoticed, quietly accomplishing great things."

The plowmaker paused. Although McGregor said nothing, the older man sensed the interview wasn't proceeding as it should. "I'd like to know what you mean, what you ultimately hope to achieve for yourself or for these people," he said somewhat sharply. "After all, there's no point in beating around the bush."

MacGregor said nothing. Rising from the bench, he walked back down the path with Ormsby.

"The truly strong men of the world have no place in history," Ormsby declared bitterly. "They didn"t ask. They were in Rome and Germany during the time of Martin Luther, but nothing is said about them. While they don"t mind history"s silence, they would like other strong men to understand this. The world march is more than the dust kicked up by the heels of a few workers walking down the streets, and these men are responsible for the world march. You are making a mistake. I invite you to become one of us. If you plan to upset something, you may go down in history, but in reality, you will not matter. What you are trying to do will not work. You will come to a bad end."

As the two men left the park, the older man again felt as if the interview had been a failure. He felt sorry. That evening, he felt, had been a failure, and he wasn't used to failure. "There's a wall here I can't penetrate," he thought.

They walked silently along the park beneath the grove. MacGregor seemed oblivious to the words addressed to him. When they reached a long stretch of vacant lots overlooking the park, he stopped and, leaning against a tree, looked out over the park, lost in thought.

David Ormsby also fell silent. He thought about his youth in a small village plow factory, about his attempts to make it in the world, about long evenings spent reading books and trying to understand the movements of people.

"Is there an element in nature and youth that we don't understand or overlook?" he asked. "Do the patient efforts of the world's workers always end in failure? Can some new stage of life suddenly arise, ruining all our plans? Do you really think of people like me as part of a vast whole? Do you deny us individuality, the right to step forward, the right to solve problems and control?"

The plowman looked at the enormous figure standing near the tree. He grew angry again and continued lighting cigars, which he threw away after two or three puffs. In the bushes behind the bench, insects began to sing. The wind, now coming in gentle gusts, slowly swayed the tree branches overhead.

"Is there such a thing as eternal youth, a state from which people emerge through ignorance, a youth that forever destroys, demolishes what has been built?" he asked. "Does the mature life of strong men really mean so little? Do you enjoy empty fields basking in the summer sun, the right to remain silent in the presence of people who had thoughts and tried to put those thoughts into action?"

Still silent, MacGregor pointed toward the road leading to the park. A group of men turned a corner from the alley and strode toward the two of them. As they passed under a streetlamp swaying gently in the breeze, their faces, flickering and fading in the light, seemed to mock David Ormsby. For a moment, anger flared within him, and then something-perhaps the rhythm of the moving mass-brought him a gentler mood. The men turned another corner and disappeared beneath the elevated railway structure.

Ploughman walked away from McGregor. Something about the interview, which had ended with the presence of marching figures, left him feeling powerless. "After all, there's youth and the hope of youth. What he's planning might work," he thought as he boarded the tram.

In the car, David stuck his head out the window and looked at the long row of apartment buildings lining the street. He thought again of his youth and the evenings in rural Wisconsin when, as a young man, he'd walked with other young people singing and marching in the moonlight.

In the vacant lot he again saw a group of marching people, moving back and forth and quickly carrying out the commands of a slender young man standing on the sidewalk under a street lamp and holding a stick in his hand.

In the car, the gray-haired businessman rested his head on the back of the front seat. Half conscious of his thoughts, his thoughts began to focus on his daughter's figure. "If I were Margaret, I wouldn't let him go. No matter the cost, I had to hold on to that man," he muttered.

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CHAPTER IV


I AM DIFFICULT There's no need to hesitate about the phenomenon now called, and perhaps justifiably, "The Madness of the Marching Men." In one mood, it returns to consciousness as something inexpressibly large and inspiring. Each of us runs the treadmill of our lives, trapped and confined, like small animals in a vast menagerie. We, in turn, love, marry, have children, experience moments of blind and futile passion, and then something happens. Unconsciously, change creeps up on us. Youth fades. We become discerning, cautious, immersed in trivialities. Life, art, great passions, dreams-all pass. Under the night sky, a suburbanite stands in the moonlight. He hoes radishes and worries because one of his white collars has torn at the laundromat. The railroad is supposed to run an extra morning train. He remembers the fact he heard at the store. For him, the night becomes more beautiful. He can spend another ten minutes tending to the radishes every morning. Much of human life is contained in the figure of a suburbanite standing, lost in thought, among the radishes.

And so we go about our lives, and suddenly the feeling that gripped us all in the Year of the Marching Men resurfaces. In a moment, we are once again part of the moving mass. The old religious exaltation returns, the strange emanation of MacGregor the Man. In our imagination, we feel the earth tremble beneath the feet of the men participating in the march. With a conscious effort of the mind, we strive to capture the leader's mental processes in that year when people sensed his meaning, when they saw how he saw the workers-saw them gathered and moving through the world.

My own mind, feebly trying to follow this greater and simpler mind, gropes. I distinctly recall the words of a writer who said that people create their own gods, and I understand that I myself witnessed something like the birth of such a god. For then he was close to becoming a god-our MacGregor. What he did still thunders in people's minds. Its long shadow will fall on people's thoughts for centuries. The tantalizing attempt to understand its meaning will always tempt us to endless reflection.

Only last week I met a man-he was a steward at the club, and was talking to me over a cigarette case in an empty billiard room-who suddenly turned away to hide from me two large tears that had come into his eyes because of a certain tenderness in my voice when I mentioned the marching men.

A different mood sets in. Perhaps it's the right mood. As I walk to my office, I see sparrows hopping along the ordinary road. Before my eyes, tiny winged seeds fly from a maple tree. A boy rides past, sitting in a grocery truck, overtaking a rather skinny horse. On the way, I overtake two shuffling workers. They remind me of those other workers, and I tell myself that people have always shuffled like this, that they have never swayed forward to this global, rhythmic march of workers.

"You were intoxicated by youth and some kind of global madness," says my usual self, moving forward again, trying to think it all through.

Chicago is still here-Chicago after McGregor and the Marching People. Elevated trains still thump the frogs as they turn onto Wabash Avenue; ground cars still ring their bells; crowds of people pour out onto the runway leading to the Illinois Central trains in the morning; life goes on. And the men in their offices sit in their chairs and say what happened was a failure, a brainstorm, a wild outburst of rebellion, disorder, and hunger in the minds of men.

What a begging question. At the very soul of the Marching People was a sense of order. Therein lay a message, something the world had not yet grasped. People had not grasped that we must understand the desire for order, imprint it on our consciousness before moving on to other things. We possess this madness for individual self-expression. For each of us, a small moment to run forward and raise our thin, childlike voices amidst the great silence. We had not learned that from all of us, marching shoulder to shoulder, a greater voice could arise, something that would make the very waters of the seas tremble.

McGregor knew. He had a mind that wasn't obsessed with trivialities. When he had a great idea, he thought it would work, and he wanted to make sure it worked.

He was well-equipped. I saw a man talking in the hallway, his huge body swaying back and forth, his enormous fists raised in the air, his voice harsh, insistent, insistent-like a drum-beating against the upturned faces of the men crowded into the stuffy little spaces.

I remember the newspapermen sitting in their little holes and writing about him, saying that time had made MacGregor. I don't know about that. The city caught fire with this man at the moment of his terrible speech in the courtroom, when Mary from Polk Street got scared and told the truth. There he stood, an inexperienced, red-haired miner from the pits and the Tenderloin, face to face with an angry court and a crowd of protesting lawyers, delivering a city-shaking philippic against the rotten old First Chamber and the creeping cowardice in people that allows vice and disease to continue and permeate all of modern life. In a sense, it was another "J'accuse!" from the lips of another Zola. People who heard it told me that when he finished, not a single person in the entire court spoke and not a single person dared to feel innocent. "In that moment, something-a part, a cell, a figment of the human brain-opened up-and in that terrible, enlightening moment, they saw themselves for who they were and what they had allowed life to become."

They saw something else, or thought they saw something else; they saw in McGregor a new force Chicago would have to reckon with. After the trial, one young newspaperman returned to his office and, running from desk to desk, shouted in the faces of his fellow reporters, "Hell is high noon. We've got a big, red-haired Scottish lawyer here on Van Buren Street who's sort of the new scourge of the world. Watch Section One do it."

But MacGregor never looked at the First Chamber. It didn't bother him. From the courtroom, he marched with the men across the new field.

A time of waiting and patient, quiet work followed. In the evenings, MacGregor handled court cases in a spare room on Van Buren Street. That strange little bird, Henry Hunt, still remained with him, collecting tithes for the gang and going home at night to his respectable home-a strange triumph for the fellow who had escaped MacGregor's tongue that day in court, when so many names were ruined. He was the world's roll call-a roll call of men who were merely merchants, brothers in vice, men who should have been masters of the city.

And then the Marching People movement began to surface. It penetrated the men's blood. That shrill, drum-like sound began to shake their hearts and legs.

People everywhere began to see and hear about the marchers. The question ran from mouth to mouth: "What's going on?"

"What's going on?" The cry echoed through Chicago. Every newspaperman in the city was tasked with writing the story. The papers were loaded with them every day. They appeared all over the city, everywhere-the Marching Men.

There were plenty of leaders! The Cuban War and the state militia had taught too many men the art of marching, so every small company lacked at least two or three competent drill masters.

And then there was the marching song the Russian wrote for McGregor. Who could forget it? Its high, strident feminine tone rang in the mind. The way it swayed and tumbled on that wailing, inviting, endless high note. The rendering had strange pauses and intervals. The men didn't sing it. They chanted it. There was something strange, captivating about it, something Russians can put into their songs and the books they write. It's not a matter of the quality of the soil. Some of our music has that. But there was something else in this Russian song, something worldly and religious-a soul, a spirit. Perhaps it was simply a spirit hovering over this strange land and people. There was something Russian about McGregor himself.

In any case, the marching song was the most piercing sound Americans had ever heard. It echoed through the streets, shops, offices, alleys, and the air above-a wail, half-shout. No noise could drown it out. It swayed, swayed, and raged through the air.

And there was the guy who recorded the music for MacGregor. He was the real deal, and his legs bore the marks of shackles. He remembered the march, hearing it sung by men marching across the steppes to Siberia, men rising from poverty to greater poverty. "It would appear out of thin air," he explained. "Guards would run along the line of men, shouting and lashing them with short whips. 'Stop it!' they would cry. And yet it went on for hours, against all odds, out there on the cold, bleak plains."

And he brought it to America and set it to music for the MacGregor marchers.

Of course, the police tried to stop the marchers. They ran out into the streets shouting, "Disperse!" The men dispersed only to reappear in some vacant lot, working on perfecting the march. One day, an agitated police squad seized their company. The next evening, the same people lined up again. The police couldn't arrest a hundred thousand people because they marched shoulder to shoulder through the streets, singing a strange marching song as they went.

This wasn't just the beginning of a new birth. This was something different from anything the world had ever seen before. It had unions, but beyond them were Poles, Russian Jews, musclemen from the stockyards and steel mills of South Chicago. They had their own leaders, speaking their own languages. And how they could even put their feet up in a march! The armies of the old world had been preparing men for years for the strange demonstration that had erupted in Chicago.

It was hypnotic. It was grand. It's absurd to write about it in such grand terms now, but you'll have to go back to the newspapers of the time to understand how the human imagination was captured and held.

Each train brought writers to Chicago. In the evening, fifty people gathered in the back room of Weingardner's restaurant, where such people congregated.

And then it spread across the country: steel towns like Pittsburgh, Johnstown, Lorain, and McKeesport, and people working in small independent factories in towns in Indiana began practicing and singing the marching song on summer evenings on a country baseball field.

How afraid the people were, the comfortable, well-fed middle class! It swept the country like a religious revival, like a creeping fear.

The writers quickly got to McGregor, the brains behind it all. His influence was everywhere. That afternoon, a hundred newspapermen stood on the stairs leading to the large, empty office on Van Buren Street. He sat at his desk, tall, red, and silent. He looked like a man half asleep. I suppose what they were thinking had something to do with the way people looked at him, but in any case, the crowd at Winegardner's agreed that there was something about the man that was as awe-inspiring as the way he moved. He started and led.

Now it seems absurdly simple. There he was, sitting at his desk. The police could have come and arrested him. But if you start thinking like that, it all becomes absurd. What difference does it make if people march home from work, swaying shoulder to shoulder or shuffling aimlessly, and what harm can singing a song do?

You see, MacGregor understood something none of us had counted on. He knew that everyone had an imagination. He was waging war on people's minds. He challenged something in us we never even knew existed. He sat there for years, pondering this. He watched Dr. Dowie and Mrs. Eddy. He knew what he was doing.

One evening, a crowd of journalists came to hear MacGregor speak at a large open-air meeting on the North Side. With them was Dr. Cowell, a prominent British statesman and writer who later drowned on the Titanic. A formidable man, physically and mentally, he had come to Chicago to see MacGregor and try to understand what he was doing.

And McGregor got it, like all men. There, under the sky, the people stood silently, Cowell's head jutting out from the sea of faces, and McGregor spoke. The reporters said he couldn't speak. They were wrong. McGregor had a way of throwing up his arms, straining himself, and shouting out his proposals that penetrated people's souls.

He was a kind of crude artist, painting pictures in his mind.

That evening, as always, he spoke of labor, labor personified, the vast, crude old Laborism. How he made the people before him see and feel a blind giant who had lived in the world since the beginning of time and who still walks blindly, stumbling, rubbing his eyes, and going to sleep for centuries in the dust of fields and factories.

A man rose from the crowd and climbed onto the platform next to MacGregor. It was a bold move, and the crowd's knees trembled. As the man crawled to the platform, shouts erupted. We're thinking of the image of a bustling little man entering the house and upper room where Jesus and his followers were dining together, and then going in to argue over the price of the wine.

The man who took the podium with MacGregor was a socialist. He wanted to argue.

But McGregor didn't argue. He leaped forward, the swift movement of a tiger, and spun the socialist around, leaving him standing before the crowd, small, blinking, and ridiculous.

Then MacGregor began to speak. He transformed the stuttering, argumentative little socialist into a figure personifying all labor, making him the embodiment of the old, weary world struggle. And the socialist who had come to argue stood there with tears in his eyes, proud of his position in the eyes of the people.

Throughout the city, McGregor spoke of the old Labourites and how the Marching People's movement was meant to revive them and bring them before the people. How we wanted to keep up and march with him.

The sound of a wailing march came from the crowd. Someone always started it.

That night on the North Side, Dr. Cowell grabbed a newspaperman by the shoulder and led him to his car. He who had known Bismarck and sat in council with kings walked and chatted half the night through the empty streets.

It's funny now to think about the things people said under McGregor's influence. Like old Dr. Johnson and his friend Savage, they wandered the streets half-drunk and swore that, come what may, they would stick to the movement. Dr. Cowell himself said equally absurd things.

And all over the country this idea came to people-the Marching Men-the old Labour men, marching en masse before the eyes of the people-the old Labour men who were to make the world see-see and feel at last their greatness. Men were to end their strife-men united-March! March! March!

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CHAPTER V


I N ALL OF AT THE TIME OF THE "MARCHING MEN" LEADERS, MacGregor had only one written work. Its circulation was in the millions, and it was printed in every language spoken in America. A copy of the little circular lies before me now.

PARTICIPANTS

"They ask us what we mean.

Well, here is our answer.

We intend to continue the march.

We want to go in the morning and evening when the sun is out

goes down.

On Sundays they might sit on the porch or yell at the men playing.

ball in the field

But we will go.

On the hard cobblestones of city streets and through the dust

We will go along country roads.

Our legs may be tired and our throats may be hot and dry,

But we will still go shoulder to shoulder.

We will walk until the earth shakes and the tall buildings tremble.

Shoulder to shoulder we will go - all of us -

Forever and ever.

We will neither talk nor listen to talk.

We will march and teach our sons and daughters

march.

Their minds are troubled. Our minds are clear.

We don't think or joke with words.

We are marching.

Our faces have become rough, and our hair and beards are covered with dust.

You see, the insides of our hands are rough.

And yet we march - we, the workers."

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CHAPTER VI


WHO _ WILL ALWAYS forgotten that Labor Day in Chicago? How they marched! Thousands and thousands and thousands more! They filled the streets. Cars stopped. People trembled with the importance of the approaching hour.

Here they come! How the earth trembles! Repeat, repeat of that song! This must have been how Grant felt at the great veterans' review in Washington, as they marched past him all day, Civil War veterans, the whites of their eyes showing in their tanned faces. McGregor stood on the stone curb above the tracks in Grant Park. As the people marched, they crowded around him, thousands of laborers, steelworkers and ironworkers, and huge, red-necked butchers and teamsters.

And the marching song of the workers howled in the air.

The world that wasn't marching huddled in the buildings overlooking Michigan Boulevard and waited. Margaret Ormsby was there. She sat with her father in a carriage near where Van Buren Street ended at the boulevard. As men crowded around them, she nervously clutched the sleeve of David Ormsby's coat. "He's going to speak," she whispered, pointing. Her tense, expectant expression echoed the crowd's feelings. "Look, listen, he's going to speak."

It must have been five o'clock when the march ended. They had gathered all the way to the Twelfth Street station of the Illinois Central. McGregor raised his hands. In the silence, his harsh voice carried far. "We're at the front," he shouted, and a hush fell over the crowd. In the silence, anyone standing near her could have heard Margaret Ormsby's soft cry. A soft whisper could be heard, the kind that always prevails where many people stand at attention. The woman's cry was barely audible, but it continued, like the sound of waves on a beach at the end of the day.

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BOOK VII


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CHAPTER I


The idea, common among men, that a woman, to be beautiful, must be shielded and protected from the realities of life, has done more than just create a race of women lacking physical strength. It has also robbed them of their strength of soul. After the evening when she stood face to face with Edith and when she failed to rise to the challenge posed by the little milliner, Margaret Ormsby was forced to confront her soul, and she lacked the strength for the ordeal. Her mind insisted on justifying her failure. A woman of the people in such a situation would have been able to take it calmly. She would have gone about her work soberly and persistently, and after a few months of weeding in a field, trimming hats in a shop, or teaching children in a classroom, she would have been ready to launch out again, facing yet another challenge in life. Having suffered many defeats, she would have been armed and prepared for defeat. Like a small animal in a forest populated by other, larger animals, she would know the benefits of lying perfectly still for long periods of time, making patience part of her life's equipment.

Margaret decided she hated McGregor. After the scene in her home, she quit her job at the boarding school and nursed her hatred for a long time. As she walked down the street, her mind continued to hurl accusations at him, and at night in her room, she sat by the window, looking at the stars and uttering harsh words. "He's an animal," she declared fervently, "just an animal, untouched by a culture that demands meekness. There's something bestial and terrible in my nature that made me care for him. I'll tear it out. In the future, I'll try to forget this man and all the horrible underworld he represents."

Filled with this idea, Margaret walked among her people, trying to interest herself in the men and women she met at dinners and receptions. It didn't work, and when, after several evenings spent in the company of men absorbed in the pursuit of money, she discovered that they were nothing but dull creatures whose mouths were filled with meaningless words, her irritation grew, and she blamed MacGregor for this, too. "He had no right to enter my consciousness and then leave," she declared bitterly. "This man is even more brutal than I thought. He undoubtedly preys on everyone, as he preyed on me. He is devoid of tenderness, knows nothing of the meaning of tenderness. The colorless creature he married will serve his body. That is what he wants. He has no need of beauty. He is a coward who does not dare resist beauty and fears me."

When the Marching Men movement began to gain momentum in Chicago, Margaret went to New York City. She stayed for a month with two friends in a large hotel by the sea, then hurried home. "I will see this man and hear him speak," she told herself. "I cannot heal myself from his memory by running away. Perhaps I am a coward myself. I will go into his presence. When I hear his cruel words and see again the hard glint that sometimes appears in his eyes, I will be healed."

Margaret went to hear McGregor speak to the assembled workers in the Westside lobby and returned more animated than ever. In the lobby, she sat, hidden in the deep shadows by the door, waiting with trepidation.

Men crowded around her on all sides. Their faces were washed, but the grime of the shops hadn't yet completely washed away. Men from steel mills with the burnt looks that come from prolonged exposure to intense artificial heat, construction workers with broad hands, big men and small men, ugly men and straight-backed working men-all sat at attention, waiting.

Margaret noticed that while MacGregor spoke, the workers' lips were moving. Their fists were clenched. The applause was as quick and sharp as gunshots.

In the shadows at the far end of the hall, the black coats of the workers formed a spot from which tense faces peered out and onto which the flickering gas jets in the center of the hall cast dancing lights.

The speaker's words were harsh. His sentences seemed disjointed and incoherent. As he spoke, gigantic images flashed through the minds of the listeners. The men felt enormous and exalted. The little steelworker sitting next to Margaret, who had been assaulted by his wife earlier in the evening because he wanted to come to the meeting instead of helping with the dishes at home, looked around furiously. He thought he'd like to fight hand in hand with a wild animal in the forest.

Standing on the narrow stage, McGregor seemed like a giant seeking self-expression. His mouth moved, sweat beaded on his forehead, and he moved restlessly up and down. At times, with his arms extended and his body leaning forward, he resembled a wrestler about to grapple with his opponent.

Margaret was deeply moved. Years of education and refinement had been stripped from her, and she felt like the women of the French Revolution, she wanted to take to the streets and march, shouting and fighting in feminine fury for what this man thought.

McGregor had barely begun to speak. His personality, something large and impatient within him, captured and held this audience, as it had captured and held other audiences in other halls, and was to hold them night after night for months.

MacGregor was understood by the people he spoke to. He himself became expressive and moved them in a way no other leader had ever done before. His very lack of flamboyance, the thing within him that clamored for expression but was not, made him seem like one of them. He didn't confuse their minds, but drew large scribbles for them and shouted, "March!" and in exchange for their march, he promised them self-realization.

"I've heard people in colleges and speakers in halls talk about the brotherhood of man," he exclaimed. "They don't want that kind of brotherhood. They'll run before it does. But by our march, we'll create such a brotherhood that they'll tremble and say to each other, 'See, the old Labour man has woken up.' He's found his strength. They'll hide and eat their words about brotherhood."

"There will be a noise of voices, many voices, shouting: 'Disperse! Stop the march! I'm afraid!'

"This talk of brotherhood. Words mean nothing. Man cannot love man. We don't know what they mean by such love. They harm us and underpay us. Sometimes one of us gets his arm torn off. Should we lie in our beds, loving a man who got rich thanks to an iron machine that tore his arm off at the shoulder?

"We gave birth to our children on our knees and in our arms. We see them on the streets-the spoiled children of our madness. You see, we let them run around and misbehave. We gave them cars and wives in soft, form-fitting dresses. When they cried, we cared for them.

"And they, being children, have children's minds in confusion. The noise of business disturbs them. They run around, waving their fingers and giving orders. They speak with pity of us-Trud-their father.

"And now we will show them their father in all his might. The little cars they have in their factories are toys we gave them and which we leave in their hands for a while. We don't think of toys or soft-bodied women. We are making ourselves into a mighty army, a marching army, marching shoulder to shoulder. We may like that.

"When they see us, hundreds of thousands of us, entering their minds and their consciousness, then they will be afraid. And in their small gatherings, when three or four of them sit and talk, daring to decide what we should get from life, a picture will appear in their minds. We will put a seal there.

"They have forgotten our strength. Let us awaken him. See, I shake Old Labour by the shoulder. He stirs. He sits up. He throws his huge figure from where he slept in the dust and smoke of the mills. They look at him and are afraid. Look, they tremble and run away, falling on each other. They did not know Old Labour was so great.

"But you, workers, are not afraid. You are the hands, feet, arms, and eyes of Labor. You thought yourselves small. You did not merge into one mass so that I could shake you up and excite you.

"You have to get there. You have to march shoulder to shoulder. You have to march so that you will know for yourselves what a giant you are. If any of you are whining, complaining, or standing on a box throwing words, knock them down and keep marching.

"When you march and transform into one giant body, a miracle will happen. The giant you created will grow a brain.

- Will you come with me?

Like a salvo from a cannon battery, a sharp response rang out from the impatient, upturned faces of the crowd. "We will! Let's march!" they shouted.

Margaret Ormsby stepped through the door and into the crowd on Madison Street. As she strolled past the press, she lifted her head with pride that a man with such intelligence and the simple courage to try to express such magnificent ideas through human beings had ever shown her favor. Humility washed over her, and she blamed herself for the petty thoughts she'd had about him. "It doesn't matter," she whispered to herself. "Now I know nothing matters but his success. He must do what he sets out to do. He can't be denied. I would shed blood from my body or subject my body to shame if it could bring him success."

Margaret rose in her humility. When the carriage took her home, she quickly ran upstairs to her room and knelt by the bed. She began to pray, but soon stopped and jumped to her feet. Running to the window, she looked out at the city. "He must succeed," she cried again. "I myself will be one of his marchers. I will do everything for him. He is tearing the scales from my eyes, from the eyes of all people. We are children in the hands of this giant, and he must not be defeated at the hands of children."

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CHAPTER II


THAT DAY, amid the great demonstration, when MacGregor's hold on the minds and bodies of workers drove hundreds of thousands to march and sing in the streets, there was one man unmoved by the song of labor, expressed in the stamping of their feet. David Ormsby, in his calm manner, considered everything. He expected that the new impetus given to the rallying of workers would create problems for him and his kind, that it would ultimately result in strikes and widespread industrial unrest. He wasn't worried. Ultimately, he believed that the silent, patient power of money would bring victory to his people. He didn't go to his office that day, but in the morning he stayed in his room, thinking about MacGregor and his daughter. Laura Ormsby was out of town, but Margaret was at home. David believed he had accurately measured MacGregor's hold on her mind, but doubts crept into his mind from time to time. "Well, it's time to deal with her," he decided. "I must assert my dominance over her mind. What's happening here is truly a battle of wits. McGregor is different from other union leaders, just as I am different from most moneyed leaders. He has a brain. Very well. I'll meet him on that level. Then, when I've made Margaret think the way I do, she'll come back to me."


When he was still a small manufacturer in a small town in Wisconsin, David used to go out in the evenings with his daughter. During his passions, he'd been almost loverlike in his attention to the child, but now, as he considered the forces at work within her, he was convinced she was still a child. Early that afternoon, he ordered a carriage brought to the door and drove into town with her. "She'll want to see this man at the height of his power. If I'm right in assuming she's still under the influence of his personality, then a romantic desire will arise."

"I'll give her a chance," he thought proudly. "In this fight, I won't ask him for mercy, and I won't make the mistake parents often make in such cases. She's enchanted by the figure he's created for himself. Striking men who stand out from the crowd possess that power. She's still under his influence. Why else is she so constantly distracted and disinterested in other things? Now I'll be with her when a man is at his strongest, when he's at his most advantageous, and then I'll fight for her. I'll show her another path, the path that true winners in life must learn to tread."

Together, David, a quiet and efficient representative of wealth, and his daughter sat in a carriage on the day of MacGregor's triumph. For a moment, it seemed as if an unbridgeable gulf separated them, and each watched with intense eyes the crowds gathered around the labor leader. At that moment, MacGregor seemed to encompass all men with his movement. Businessmen closed their desks, labor was in full swing, writers and contemplatives wandered, dreaming of the realization of the brotherhood of man. In the long, narrow, treeless park, the music created by the steady, endless tramp of feet transformed into something vast and rhythmic. It was like a mighty choir emanating from the hearts of men. David was adamant. From time to time, he spoke to the horses and glanced from the faces of the people gathered around him to his daughter's. It seemed to him that in the rough faces he saw only a crude intoxication, the result of a new kind of emotionality. "He won't survive thirty days of ordinary life in their wretched surroundings," he thought gloomily. "That's not the kind of rapture Margaret would enjoy. I can sing her a more wonderful song. I must prepare for that."

When MacGregor rose to speak, Margaret was overcome with emotion. Falling to her knees in the carriage, she rested her head on her father's arm. For days, she had told herself that there was no room for failure in the future of the man she loved. Now she whispered again that she could not deny this huge, powerful figure his destiny. When, in the silence that followed the gathering of workers around him, a sharp, booming voice rang out over the heads of the crowd, her body trembled as if from a chill. Extravagant fantasies took over her mind, and she wished she had the chance to do something heroic, something that would make her live again in MacGregor's mind. She longed to serve him, to give him something of herself, and she wildly imagined that perhaps the time and way would come when the beauty of her body could be given to him as a gift. The semi-mythical figure of Mary, Jesus's beloved, came to her mind, and she longed to be like her. Shaking with emotion, she tugged at the sleeve of her father's coat. "Listen! It's coming now," she muttered. "The brain of labor will express the dream of labor. A sweet and lasting impulse will come into the world."


David Ormsby said nothing. When MacGregor began to speak, he touched the horses with his whip and rode slowly down Van Buren Street, past silent, attentive lines of people. As he emerged onto one of the streets by the river, thunderous applause erupted. The city seemed to shake as the horses reared and leaped forward on the rough cobblestones. David calmed them with one hand, while the other clutched his daughter's hand. They crossed the bridge and entered the West Side, and as they rode, the marching song of the workers, bursting from thousands of throats, filled their ears. For a while, the air seemed to pulse with it, but as they traveled west, it became less and less distinct. Finally, when they turned into a street surrounded by tall factories, it died away completely. "This is the end of it for me and me," David thought, and returned to the task at hand.

Street after street, David let the horses wander, clutching his daughter's hand and thinking about what he wanted to say. Not every street was lined with factories. Some, the most hideous in the evening light, bordered workers' houses. The workers' houses, crowded together and black with dirt, were bustling with life. Women sat in doorways, and children ran along the road, screaming and shouting. Dogs barked and howled. Dirt and disorder reigned everywhere-a terrible testimony to human failure in the difficult and delicate art of living. On one street, a little girl, perched on a fence post, cut a grotesque figure. As David and Margaret rode past, she kicked her heels against the post and screamed. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and her disheveled hair was blackened with dirt. "I want a banana! I want a banana!" " she howled, looking at the blank walls of one of the buildings. Margaret, despite herself, was touched, and her thoughts abandoned the figure of McGregor. By a strange coincidence, the child on the pole turned out to be the daughter of the socialist speaker who, one night on the North Side, had climbed onto the platform to confront McGregor with Socialist Party propaganda.

David turned the horses onto the wide boulevard that ran south through the western factory district. As they reached the boulevard, they saw a drunkard sitting on the sidewalk in front of a saloon, drum in hand. The drunkard beat the drum and tried to sing a workers' marching song, but only managed to make a strange grunting sound, like that of an aggrieved animal. The sight brought a smile to David's lips. "It's already beginning to fall apart," he muttered. "I brought you to this part of town on purpose," he told Margaret. "I wanted you to see for yourself how much the world needs what he's trying to do. This man is terribly right about the need for discipline and order. He's a great man doing a great thing, and I admire his courage. He would be a great man indeed if he had more courage."

On the boulevard where they turned, all was quiet. The summer sun was setting, and the western light blazed over the rooftops. They passed a factory surrounded by small garden plots. Some employer was trying unsuccessfully to beautify the area around his men. David pointed with his whip. "Life is a shell," he said, "and we men of action, who take ourselves so seriously because fate has been kind to us, have strange, foolish little fantasies. Look at what this fellow has been doing, fixing and striving to create beauty on the surface of things. You see, he's like McGregor. I wonder if this man has made himself beautiful, if he, or McGregor, has ensured that within the shell he wears around him there is something beautiful, something he calls his body, if he has seen through life to the spirit of life. I don't believe in fixing things, and I don't believe in disrupting the structure of things, as McGregor dared to do. I have my own convictions, and they belong to my family. This man, the creator of small gardens, is like MacGregor. He would do better to let men find their own beauty. That's my path. I like to think I've saved myself for sweeter and bolder endeavors."

David turned and stared at Margaret, who was beginning to be affected by his mood. She waited, her back turned, looking at the sky above the rooftops. David began to talk about himself in relation to her and her mother, a note of impatience creeping into his voice.

"You"ve come a long way, haven"t you?" he said sharply. "Listen. I"m not speaking to you now as your father or as Laura"s daughter. Let"s be clear: I love you, and I"m in the fight for your love. I"m McGregor"s rival. I accept fatherhood. I love you. You see, I allowed something inside me to affect you. McGregor didn"t. He refused what you offered, but I didn"t. I focused my life on you, and I did so quite consciously and after much thought. The feeling I experience is something quite special. I"m an individualist, but I believe in the unity of man and woman. I would dare take a chance on only one life besides my own, and that of a woman. I"ve decided to ask you to let me come into your life. We"ll talk about it."

Margaret turned and looked at her father. Later, she thought something strange must have happened at that moment. It was as if a film had fallen from her eyes, and she saw in David not the shrewd and calculating man of business, but something magnificently youthful. Not only was he strong and robust, but his face at that moment reflected the deep lines of thought and suffering she had seen on MacGregor's. "Strange," she thought. "They are so different, yet both men are beautiful."

"I married your mother when I was a child, just as you are a child now," David continued. "Of course, I was passionate about her, and she was passionate about me. It passed, but while it lasted, it was quite beautiful. It had no depth, no meaning. I want to tell you why. Then I'm going to explain McGregor to you so you can appreciate the man. I'm getting there. I'll have to start from the beginning.

"My factory began to grow, and as an employer I became interested in the lives of many people."

His voice grew sharp again. "I was impatient with you," he said. "Do you think this MacGregor is the only man who saw and thought about other men in the crowd? I did, and I was tempted. I could also have become sentimental and ruined myself. I didn't. Love for a woman saved me. Laura did that for me, though when it came to the true test of our love and understanding, she failed. Nevertheless, I am grateful to her for once being the object of my love. I believe in the beauty of that."

David paused again and began telling his story anew. The figure of McGregor returned to Margaret's consciousness, and her father began to feel that removing him entirely would be a momentous achievement. "If I can take her from him, then I and others like me can take the world from him too," he thought. "It will be another victory for the aristocracy in its endless battle with the mafia."

"I"ve come to a turning point," he said aloud. "All men come to this point. Of course, the vast masses drift along rather foolishly, but we"re not talking about people in general now. There"s you and me, and then there"s what McGregor could have been. Each of us is something special in our own way. We, men like ourselves, come to a place where there are two roads. I took one, and McGregor took the other. I know why, and perhaps he knows why. I admit he knows what he did. But now the time has come for you to decide which road you will take. You"ve seen the crowds move along the broad path he chose, and now you will go your own way. I want you to watch mine with me."

They approached the bridge over the canal, and David stopped the horses. A group of MacGregor marchers passed, and Margaret's pulse quickened again. However, when she looked at her father, he was indifferent, and she felt a little ashamed of her emotions. David waited for a while, as if seeking inspiration, and when the horses began moving again, he began to speak. "A union leader came to my factory, a diminutive MacGregor with a crooked appearance. He was a scoundrel, but everything he told my people was true. I was making money for my investors, most of it. They could have won in a fight. One evening I went out of town to walk alone under the trees and think it all over.

David's voice grew harsh, and Margaret thought it sounded oddly like MacGregor's voice talking to the workers. "I bribed that man," David said. "I used the cruel weapon that men like me have to use. I gave him money and told him to go away and leave me alone. I did it because I needed to win. Men of my type must always win. On that walk I took alone, I found my dream, my faith. I have that same dream now. It means more to me than the well-being of a million people. For this, I will crush everything that opposes me. I will tell you about the dream.

"It's a shame I have to talk. Talk kills dreams, and talk will also kill all people like McGregor. Now that he's started talking, we'll get the better of him. I'm not worried about McGregor. Time and talk will lead to his destruction."

David's thoughts took a new turn. "I don't think a person's life matters much," he said. "No one person is big enough to grasp all of life. That's a foolish, childish fantasy. An adult knows he can't see life in one fell swoop. It's impossible to understand it that way. A person must realize that he lives in a patchwork of many lives and many impulses."

"A person should be struck by beauty. This is the realization that comes with maturity, and that is precisely the role of a woman. This is something McGregor wasn't wise enough to understand. He's a child you see in a land of excitable children."

The quality of David's voice changed. He hugged his daughter and pulled her face to his. Night descended upon them. The woman, tired from long reflections, began to feel grateful for the touch of his strong hand on her shoulder. David had achieved his goal. For the moment, he had made his daughter forget that she was his. There was something hypnotic in the calm strength of his mood.

"Now I come to the women on your side," he said. "We're going to talk about something I want you to understand. Laura failed as a woman. She never saw the point. When I was growing up, she didn't grow up with me. Because I didn't talk about love, she didn't understand me as a lover, didn't know what I wanted, what I demanded of her.

I wanted to express my love on her figure, the way one puts a glove on a hand. You see, I was an adventurer, a man bewildered by life and its problems. The struggle for existence and money was unavoidable. I had to endure this struggle. She didn't. Why couldn't she understand that I didn't want to come to her for rest or to speak empty words? I wanted her to help me create beauty. We had to be partners in this. Together, we had to undertake the most subtle and difficult of all battles-the struggle for living beauty in our daily affairs.

Bitterness overwhelmed the old plowman, and he spoke harshly. "The whole point is what I"m saying now. That was my cry to that woman. It came from my soul. It was the only cry I ever made to another. Laura was a little fool. Her thoughts were distracted by trivialities. I don"t know what she wanted me to be, and now I don"t care. Perhaps she wanted me to be a poet, stringing words together, composing piercing songs about her eyes and lips. Now it doesn"t matter what she wanted.

- But you matter.

David's voice cut through the fog of new thoughts that were confusing his daughter's mind, and she felt his body tense. A shudder ran through her, and she forgot McGregor. With all the strength of her soul, she was absorbed in what David was saying. In the challenge coming from her father's lips, she began to sense a purpose being born in her own life.

"Women want to break out into life, to share with men the mess and turmoil of trivialities. What a desire! Let them try, if they want. They will tire of the attempt. They are missing something greater they could be doing. They have forgotten the old things, Ruth in the corn and Mary with her jar of precious ointment; they have forgotten the beauty they were meant to help people create.

"Let them share only human endeavors to create beauty. This is a great and delicate task to which they must dedicate themselves. Why instead try to accomplish a cheaper, lesser task? They are like this McGregor."

The plowman fell silent. Taking up his whip, he urged the horses on quickly. He thought he had made his point and was satisfied that he had let his daughter's imagination do the rest. They turned off the boulevard and crossed a street lined with small shops. In front of a saloon, a crowd of street urchins, led by a drunken, hatless man, staged a grotesque imitation of the MacGregor Marches before a crowd of laughing idlers. With a sinking heart, Margaret realized that even at the height of his power, forces were at work that would ultimately destroy the impulses of the MacGregor Marches. She crawled closer to David. "I love you," she said. "Someday I may have a lover, but I will always love you. I will try to be what you want of me."

It was already two o'clock in the morning when David rose from his chair, where he had been quietly reading for several hours. With a smile on his face, he approached the window facing north, toward the city. All evening, groups of men had been passing by the house. Some walked forward, a disorderly crowd, some walked shoulder to shoulder, singing a workers' marching song, and a few, under the influence of alcohol, stopped in front of the house to shout threats. Now all was quiet. David lit a cigar and stood for a long time, looking out over the city. He thought of MacGregor and wondered what kind of excited dream of power this day had brought to this man's head. Then he thought of his daughter and her escape. Soft light struck his eyes. He was happy, but when he partially undressed, a new mood came over him, he turned off the light in the room and went back to the window. In the room upstairs, Margaret could not fall asleep and also crept to the window. She was thinking again about MacGregor and she was ashamed of her thoughts. By chance, both father and daughter simultaneously began to doubt the truth of what David had said during their walk along the boulevard. Margaret couldn't put her doubts into words, but tears welled up in her eyes.

As for David, he rested his hand on the windowsill, and for a moment his body trembled, as if from age and fatigue. "I wonder," he murmured, "if I had youth, perhaps MacGregor knew he would fail, and yet had the courage to fail. Trees, was I wrong? What if, after all, MacGregor and his woman knew both roads? What if, having consciously looked at the path to success in life, they had chosen the path to failure without regret? What if MacGregor, and not I, had known the path to beauty?"

END

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Poor White


Published in 1920, Poor White Man became Anderson's most successful novel to date, following his highly successful short story collection Winesburg, Ohio (1919). It tells the story of inventor Hugh McVeigh, who rises from poverty on the banks of the Mississippi River. The novel explores the impact of industrialism on rural America.

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First edition

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CONTENT

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

BOOK FOUR

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

BOOK FIVE

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII


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Title page of the first edition

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TO

TENNESSEE MITCHELL ANDERSON

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BOOK ONE

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CHAPTER I


Hugh M. Ts. Wei was born in a small village stranded on the muddy bank of the Mississippi River in Missouri. It was a terrible place to be born. Except for a narrow strip of black mud along the river, the land ten miles from town, which the rivermen derided as "Mudcat Landing," was almost entirely useless and unproductive. The soil, yellow, shallow, and rocky, was, in Hugh's time, tilled by a race of long, thin men who seemed as emaciated and useless as the land they inhabited. They were chronically discouraged, a situation similar to that of the town's merchants and artisans. Merchants who ran their shops-poor, ramshackle businesses-on credit were unable to receive payment for the goods they sold through their counters, while artisans such as shoemakers, carpenters, and saddlers were unable to receive payment for the work they did. Only two saloons in the city thrived. Saloon owners sold their wares for cash, and since the townspeople and visiting farmers felt life was unbearable without alcohol, there was always cash to get drunk.

Hugh McVeigh's father, John McVeigh, worked on a farm in his youth, but before Hugh was born, he moved to town to find work in a tannery. The tannery operated for a year or two and then went out of business, but John McVeigh stayed in town. He also became a drunk. For him, it was the easiest and most obvious thing to do. While working at the tannery, he was married and had a son. Then his wife died, and the idle laborer took the child and settled into a tiny fishing shack by the river. How the boy spent the next few years, no one ever knew. John McVeigh wandered the streets and the riverbank, emerging from his usual torpor only when, driven by hunger or a craving for drink, he went to work for a day in a farmer's field during harvest time or joined a host of other idle souls for an adventurous trip down the river on a timber raft. The child was left locked in a hut by the river or carried around wrapped in a dirty blanket. Soon after he was old enough to walk, he had to find work to feed himself. The ten-year-old wandered listlessly around town, following his father. The two found work, which the boy did while his father slept in the sun. They cleaned cisterns, swept warehouses and saloons, and at night, carried a wheelbarrow and a box to haul the contents of the outbuildings and dump them into the river. At fourteen, Hugh was the same height as his father and had almost no education. He could read a little and write his name, skills he'd picked up from other boys who came with him to fish on the river, but he never attended school. Sometimes, for entire days, he did nothing but lie half-asleep in the shade of a bush on the riverbank. He sold the fish he caught in his more industrious days for a few cents to a housewife, thus earning enough money to feed his large, growing, lazy body. Like an animal entering manhood, he turned away from his father not out of resentment for his difficult youth, but because he decided it was time to forge his own path.

At fourteen, when the boy was on the verge of falling into the same animal-like stupor in which his father lived, something happened to him. A railroad ran along the river to his town, and he got a job as a stationmaster. He swept the station, loaded suitcases onto trains, mowed the grass in the station yard, and in a hundred other ways assisted the man who combined the jobs of ticket collector, baggage handler, and telegraph operator in a small, remote town. Way, place.

Hugh was beginning to come to his senses. He was living with his employer, Henry Shepard, and his wife, Sarah Shepard, and for the first time in his life, he was eating regularly. His life, spent lounging by the riverbank on long summer days or sitting perfectly still for endless hours in a boat, had instilled in him a dreamy, detached outlook on life. He found it difficult to be specific and to do specific things, but despite his foolishness, the boy possessed an enormous reserve of patience, perhaps inherited from his mother. In his new post, the stationmaster's wife, Sarah Shepard, a sharp-tongued, good-natured woman who hated the town and the people among whom fate had cast her, scolded him all day long. She treated him like a six-year-old, telling him how to sit at the table, how to hold a fork while eating, how to address people who came to the house or the station. The mother was aroused by Hugh's helplessness and, having no children of her own, began to take the tall, awkward boy to heart. She was a small woman, and as she stood in the house scolding the big, stupid boy who looked at her with his small, bewildered eyes, the two of them created a picture that brought endless pleasure to her husband, a short, fat, bald man dressed in blue overalls and a blue cotton shirt. Approaching the back door of his house, which was two steps from the station, Henry Shepard stood with his hand on the doorframe, watching the woman and the boy. Above the woman's scolding, his own voice rang out. "Look out, Hugh," he shouted. "Jump, boy! Cheer up. She'll bite you if you're not very careful out there."

Hugh earned little money for his work at the railway station, but for the first time in his life, things were going well. Henry Shepherd bought the boy clothes, and his wife, Sarah, a master culinary artist, filled the table with delicious food. Hugh ate until both the man and the woman declared he would burst if he didn't stop. Then, when they weren't looking, he went into the station yard and, crawling under a bush, fell asleep. The stationmaster came looking for him. He cut a branch from the bush and began beating the boy's bare feet. Hugh woke up bewildered. He rose to his feet and stood trembling, half-fearing he would be taken away from his new home. The man and the embarrassed, blushing boy clashed for a moment, and then the man adopted his wife's method and began cursing. He was irritated by what he considered the boy's idleness and found a hundred petty tasks for him to perform. He devoted himself to finding tasks for Hugh, and when he couldn't think of new ones, he invented them. "We'll have to keep this big sloth from jumping. That's the secret," he told his wife.

The boy learned to keep his naturally lazy body moving and focus his foggy, sleepy mind on specific things. For hours, he would wander straight ahead, performing some assigned task over and over again. He forgot the purpose of the work he'd been assigned and did it because it was work, and it kept him awake. One morning, he was ordered to sweep the station platform, and because his employer had left without giving him any additional tasks, and because he was afraid that if he sat down, he would fall into the strange, detached stupor in which he'd spent so much time, he continued sweeping for two or three hours at a time for most of his life. The station platform was built of rough planks, and Hugh's hands were very powerful. The broom he used began to fall apart. Pieces flew off, and after an hour of work, the platform looked even dirtier than when he'd started. Sara Shepard approached the door of her house and stood, watching. She was about to call out to him and scold him again for his stupidity, when suddenly a new impulse came over her. She saw the serious, determined look on the boy's long, haggard face, and a flash of understanding came to her. Tears sprang to her eyes, and her arms ached with the desire to take the great boy and hold him tightly to her bosom. With all her motherly soul, she wanted to protect Hugh from a world that, she was sure, would always treat him like a beast of burden and ignore what she considered the flaws of his birth. Her morning's work was done, and without saying anything to Hugh, who continued to pace up and down the platform, diligently sweeping, she left through the front door of the house and headed to one of the town shops. There she bought half a dozen books, a textbook on geography, arithmetic, a spelling book, and two or three e-readers. She had decided to become Hugh McVeigh's schoolmistress, and with her characteristic energy, she did not delay but set about it at once. When she returned to her own house and saw the boy still stubbornly pacing up and down the platform, she did not scold him, but spoke to him with her new tenderness. "Well, my boy, you can put away your broom now and come inside," she suggested. "I've decided to take you for my boy, and I don't want to be ashamed of you. If you're going to live with me, I won't let you grow up a lazy good-for-nothing like your father and the other men in this hole. You'll have a lot to learn, and I suppose I'll have to be your teacher."

"Come inside at once," she added sharply, waving quickly at the boy, who stood there, broom in hand, staring blankly. "When work must be done, there's no point in putting it off. It won't be easy to make an educated man out of you, but it must be done. We might as well get started on your lessons right away."


Hugh McVeigh lived with Henry Shepard and his wife until he grew to manhood. After Sara Shepard became his schoolteacher, things improved for him. The New England woman's scolding, which only served to highlight his awkwardness and stupidity, ended, and life in the foster home became so quiet and peaceful that the boy thought of himself as a man in a kind of paradise. For a while, the two older people discussed sending him to a town school, but the woman objected. She began to feel so close to Hugh that he seemed part of her own flesh and blood, and the thought of him, so huge and awkward, sitting in a schoolroom with the town children irritated and irritated her. In her imagination, she saw the other boys laughing at him, and she couldn't bear the thought. She disliked the townspeople and didn't want Hugh to associate with them.

Sarah Shepard came from a people and a country quite different in character from those in which she now lived. Its inhabitants, thrifty New Englanders, had come west a year after the Civil War to occupy the cleared timberlands on the southern edge of Michigan. She was a grown girl when her father and mother set out west, and after arriving in their new home, they worked alongside their father in the fields. The land was covered with enormous stumps and difficult to cultivate, but the New Englanders were accustomed to hardship and were undaunted. The soil was deep and rich, and the people who settled it were poor but hopeful. They felt that every day of hard work clearing the land was like hoarding treasures for the future. In New England, they had battled the harsh climate and managed to eke out a living on the rocky, barren soil. The milder climate and rich, deep soil of Michigan, they believed, offered great promise. Sarah's father, like most of his neighbors, had fallen into debt for his land and the tools used to clear and cultivate it, and each year he spent most of his income paying off the interest on a mortgage owed to a banker in a neighboring town. But it didn't help. Don't dissuade him. He whistled as he worked and often spoke of a future of ease and abundance. "In a few years, when the land is cleared, we'll make a fortune," he declared.

As Sarah grew older and began to walk among young people in a new country, she heard much talk about mortgages and the difficulty of making ends meet, but everyone spoke of these difficult circumstances as temporary. In every mind, the future was bright and promising. Across Midland, in Ohio, northern Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, a spirit of hope prevailed. In every breast, hope waged a successful war against poverty and despair. Optimism permeated the children's blood and later led to the same hopeful, courageous development throughout the Western country. The sons and daughters of these courageous people were undoubtedly overly focused on the problem of paying off mortgages and getting ahead in life, but they had courage. If they, along with the thrifty and sometimes stingy New Englanders from whom they descended, have given modern American life an overly materialistic flavor, they have at least created a country in which less decidedly materialistic people can in turn live comfortably.

In the midst of a small, hopeless community of beaten men and yellow, defeated women on the banks of the Mississippi River, the woman who had become Hugh McVeigh's second mother and in whose veins flowed the blood of pioneers, felt undefeated and invincible. She felt that she and her husband would remain in the Missouri town for a while, and then move to a larger city and gain a better position in life. They would move on and on until the little fat man became a railroad president or a millionaire. And so it all happened. She had no doubt about the future. "Do everything well," she told her husband, who was quite content with his position in life and had no lofty ideas about his future. "Remember to make your reports neat and clear. Show them that you can do the job assigned to you perfectly, and you will be given the chance to take on a bigger job. One day, when you least expect it, something will happen. You will be called to a position of leadership. We won't have to stay in this hole for long.

An ambitious, energetic little woman who had taken the lazy farmhand's son to heart, she constantly talked to him about her people. Every day, while she was doing chores, she took the boy into the living room and spent hours with him on his homework. She worked on the problem of eradicating stupidity and boredom from his mind, just as her father had worked on the problem of uprooting stumps from the Michigan soil. After the day's lesson had been repeated over and over until Hugh had fallen into a stupor from mental fatigue, she put her books aside and spoke to him. With ardent enthusiasm, she painted for him a picture of her youth, the people and places where she had lived. In a photograph, she presented the New Englanders of a Michigan farming community as a strong, godlike race, always honest, always thrifty, and always moving forward. She condemned her own people decisively. She pitied them for the blood coursing through their veins. Then, and throughout his life, the boy had certain physical difficulties she could never understand. Blood didn't flow freely through his long body. His feet and hands were always cold, and he experienced an almost sensual satisfaction simply lying quietly in the train station courtyard, letting the hot sun beat down on him.

Sara Shepard considered what she called Hugh's laziness a spiritual matter. "You have to deal with it," she declared. "Look at your people-the poor white trash-how lazy and helpless they are. You can't be like them. It's a sin to be so dreamy and worthless."

Captured by the woman's energetic spirit, Hugh fought the urge to indulge in vague fantasies. He became convinced that his own people were truly inferior, to be set aside and disregarded. During the first year after moving in with the Shepards, he occasionally gave in to the urge to return to his former lazy life with his father in a cabin by the river. People disembarked from steamboats in town and boarded trains to other towns inland. He earned a little money carrying suitcases of clothing or traveling up the hill from the steamboat landing to the train station with samples of men's clothing. Even at fourteen, the strength of his long, lean body was so great that he could outrun any man in town, so he slung one of the suitcases over his shoulder and walked with it slowly and phlegmatically, as a farm horse might. country road, on whose back sat a six-year-old boy.

Hugh gave the money he earned this way to his father for a while, and when his father was stupefied by drink, his father grew angry and demanded that the boy return to live with him. Hugh didn't have the heart to refuse, and sometimes he didn't even want to. When neither the stationmaster nor his wife were present, he slipped away and went with his father to sit for half a day, leaning his back against the wall of the fisherman's hut, at peace. He sat in the sunlight and stretched out his long legs. His small, sleepy eyes gazed out at the river. A delightful feeling overwhelmed him, and for a moment he thought himself completely happy and decided he never wanted to return to the station or to the woman who had so determined to excite him and make him a man of his own kind.

Hugh looked at his father, sleeping and snoring in the tall grass by the riverbank. A strange sense of betrayal washed over him, making him uneasy. The man's mouth was open and he was snoring. The smell of fish emanated from his greasy, threadbare clothes. Flies had gathered in swarms and settled on his face. Disgust overwhelmed Hugh. A flickering, yet ever-present light appeared in his eyes. With all the strength of his awakening soul, he fought the urge to succumb to the urge to stretch out beside the man and fall asleep. The words of the New England woman, who he knew was striving to lead him out of laziness and ugliness into some brighter, better way of life, echoed vaguely in his mind. When he stood and walked back down the street to the stationmaster's house, and when the woman there looked at him reproachfully and muttered words about the poor white trash of the city, he felt ashamed and looked at the floor.

Hugh began to hate his father and his people. He associated the man who raised him with a terrifying tendency toward laziness within himself. When a farmhand came to the station and demanded the money he had earned carrying suitcases, he turned and walked across the dusty road to Shepard's house. After a year or two, he no longer paid attention to the lecherous farmhand who occasionally came to the station to scold and curse him; and when he had earned a little money, he gave it to the woman to keep. "Well," he said slowly and with the hesitant drawl characteristic of his people, "if you give me time, I will learn. I want to be what you want me to be. If you stay with me, I will try to make a man of myself."


Hugh McVeigh lived in Missouri Township under the guardianship of Sarah Shepard until he was nineteen. Then the stationmaster quit his job on the railroad and returned to Michigan. Sarah Shepard's father died after clearing 120 acres of cleared timberland, leaving her in her care. The dream that had lingered in the back of the little woman's mind for years, in which she had seen the bald, good-natured Henry Shepard become a force in the railroad world, began to fade. In newspapers and magazines, she constantly read about other men who, starting with humble railroad jobs, soon became rich and influential, but nothing of the sort seemed to happen with her husband. Under her watchful eye, he did his job well and meticulously, but nothing came of it. Railroad officials sometimes passed through town in private cars attached to the end of one of the through trains, but the trains didn't stop, and the officials didn't get out. They summoned Henry from the station, rewarding his loyalty with a slap on the wrist. He was given new responsibilities, just as the railroad officials in the stories she'd read did in such cases. When her father died and she saw an opportunity to turn her face east again and live among her people, she ordered her husband to resign with the air of a man accepting an undeserved defeat. The stationmaster managed to appoint Hugh in his place, and one gray October morning they departed, leaving the tall, awkward young man in charge. He had books to keep, bills of lading to be filed, messages to be received, and dozens of specific tasks to be completed. Early in the morning, before the train that was to take her away pulled into the station, Sarah Shepard called the young man to her and repeated the instructions she had so often given to her husband. "Do everything carefully and cautiously," she said. "Prove yourself worthy of the trust placed in you."

The New England woman wanted to assure the boy, as she had often assured her husband, that if he worked diligently and conscientiously, advancement was inevitable; but in the face of the fact that Henry Shepard had for years performed the work Hugh was supposed to do without criticism, and had received neither praise nor censure from his superiors, she found it impossible to utter the words that burst from her lips. The woman and the son of the people among whom she had lived for five years and whom she had so often criticized stood side by side in embarrassed silence. Deprived of a sense of purpose in life and unable to repeat her accustomed formula, Sarah Shepard had nothing to say. Hugh's tall figure, leaning against the post that supported the roof of the little house where she had taught him his lessons day after day, seemed suddenly aged to her, and it seemed to her that his long, solemn face expressed the wisdom of an older and more mature age than her own. A strange revulsion overcame her. For a moment, she began to doubt the wisdom of trying to be smart and succeed in life. If Hugh had been a little shorter, so that her mind could grasp the fact of his youth and immaturity, she would undoubtedly have embraced him and spoken out against her doubts. Instead, she, too, fell silent, and the minutes slipped away as the two people stood facing each other, staring at the porch floor. When the train she was due to ride blew its warning whistle and Henry Shepard called out to her from the station platform, she placed her hand on Hugh's lapel and, lowering his face, kissed him on the cheek for the first time. Tears welled in her eyes and in the young man's. As he crossed the porch to pick up her bag, Hugh stumbled awkwardly over a chair. "Well, you're doing the best you can here," Sara Shepard said quickly, then, out of habit and half-consciously, repeated her formula. "Do the little things well, and the big ones will come," she declared, walking quickly alongside Hugh across the narrow road to the station and the train that would take her away.

After Sarah and Henry Shepard left, Hugh continued to struggle with his tendency to give in to daydreams. He felt he had to win the fight to show his respect and gratitude to the woman who had spent so many long hours with him. Although under her tutelage he had received a better education than any other young man in the river town, he had not lost his physical desire to sit in the sun and do nothing. When he worked, every task had to be performed consciously, minute by minute. After the woman left, there were days when he sat in his chair at the telegraph office, waging a desperate struggle with himself. A strange, determined light shone in his small gray eyes. He rose from his chair and paced back and forth along the station platform. Each time he raised one of his long legs and slowly lowered it, he had to exert a special effort. Moving at all was a painful task, something he did not want to do. All physical activity was boring to him, but a necessary part of his preparation for the dim and glorious future that would one day come to him in a brighter and more beautiful land, lying in a direction vaguely considered the East. "If I don't move and keep moving, I'll become like my father, like all the people here," Hugh told himself. He thought of the man who had raised him, whom he occasionally saw wandering aimlessly along Main Street or sleeping in a drunken stupor by the riverbank. He loathed him, and he shared the stationmaster's wife's opinion of the people of the Missouri village. "They're miserable, lazy louts," she declared a thousand times, and Hugh agreed with her, but sometimes he wondered if he, too, would eventually become a lazy lout. He knew the possibility was within him, and for the sake of the woman, as well as for his own, he was determined not to let it happen.

The truth is, the people of Mudcat Landing were completely unlike anyone Sara Shepard had ever known, or anyone Hugh would have known throughout his adult life. Someone descended from a dull race had to live among intelligent, energetic men and women and be called a great man by them, without understanding a word of what they were saying.

Almost all the residents of Hugh's hometown were of Southern descent. Originally living in a country where all physical labor was performed by slaves, they developed a profound aversion to physical labor. In the South, their fathers, lacking the money to buy their own slaves and unwilling to compete with slave labor, tried to live without labor. They lived mostly in the mountains and hills of Kentucky and Tennessee, on land too poor and unproductive for their wealthy slave-owning neighbors in the valleys and plains to consider it worth cultivating. Their food was meager and monotonous, and their bodies deteriorated. Their children grew tall, emaciated, and yellow, like poorly nourished plants. A vague, indefinable hunger gripped them, and they abandoned themselves to dreams. The most energetic among them, dimly sensing the injustice of their situation, became vicious and dangerous. Feuds arose among them, and they killed each other to express their hatred of life. When, in the years leading up to the Civil War, some of them moved north along the rivers and settled in southern Indiana and Illinois, as well as eastern Missouri and Arkansas, they seemed exhausted by the journey and quickly returned to their old, lazy ways. Their urge to emigrate didn't take them far, and few ever reached the rich cornfields of central Indiana, Illinois, or Iowa, or the equally rich lands across the river in Missouri or Arkansas. In southern Indiana and Illinois, they blended into the surrounding life and, with the influx of new blood, were somewhat revived. They tempered the qualities of the peoples of these regions, making them perhaps less energetic than their pioneer ancestors. In many river towns in Missouri and Arkansas, the situation changed little. A visitor to these places can see them there today, long, haggard and lazy, sleeping their whole lives and awakening from their torpor only after long intervals and at the call of hunger.

As for Hugh McVeigh, he remained in his hometown and among his people for a year after the man and woman who had been his father and mother had passed away, and then he, too, had passed away. Throughout the year, he worked tirelessly to cure himself of the curse of idleness. Upon waking in the morning, he dared not lie in bed for a moment, fearing that laziness would overcome him and he would be unable to rise at all. Rising immediately, he dressed and went to the train station. There was little work to do during the day, and he spent hours walking up and down the station platform. Sitting down, he immediately picked up a book and set to work. When the pages of the book grew dim before his eyes and he felt inclined to daydream, he rose again and began pacing the platform. Having accepted the New England woman's view of her people and not wanting to associate with them, his life became utterly lonely, and his loneliness also drove him to work.

Something happened to him. Although his body was not and never had been active, his mind suddenly began to work with feverish fervor. Vague thoughts and feelings that had always been a part of him, but vague, undefined things, like clouds floating far away in a misty sky, began to take on more definite form. That evening, after he finished work and locked the station for the night, he did not go to the town inn where he rented a room and ate, but wandered through the town and along the road leading south, next to the great, mysterious river. Hundreds of new, distinct desires and aspirations awakened within him. He longed to talk to people, to get to know men and, above all, women, but disgust for his comrades in the town, engendered in him by Sara Shepard's words and, above all, by those things in his nature that resembled theirs, forced him to retreat. When, late in the fall of the year, after the Shepards had left and he was living alone, his father was killed in a senseless quarrel with a drunken riverman over the ownership of a dog, suddenly and, as it seemed to him, at the moment when a heroic decision came to him. Early one morning, he went to one of the town's two saloonkeepers, a man who had been his father's closest friend and companion, and gave him money to bury the dead man. Then he telegraphed the railroad company headquarters and asked them to send a replacement to Mudcat Landing. On the afternoon of the day his father was buried, he bought himself a purse and packed his few belongings. Then he sat alone on the steps of the station and waited for the evening train that would bring the man who was to replace him and also take him away. He didn't know where he was going, but he knew he wanted to enter a new land and find new people. He thought he would go east and north. He remembered long summer evenings in the river town, when the stationmaster slept and his wife talked. The boy listening wanted to sleep too, but because of Sarah Shepard's intense gaze, he didn't dare. The woman spoke of a country dotted with towns, where all the houses were painted bright colors, where young girls dressed in white dresses strolled in the evenings, strolling under the trees along brick-paved streets, where there was neither dust nor dirt, where the shops were bright and vibrant places, filled with beautiful goods that people had the money to buy in abundance, and where everyone was alive and doing worthy things, and no one was lazy or idle. The boy, now a man, wanted to go to such a place. Working at the train station had given him some understanding of the country's geography, and although he couldn't tell whether the woman who spoke so seductively was referring to her childhood in New England or her childhood in Michigan, he knew that the general path to reaching the land and people who would show him the best way to build his own life was to head east. He decided that the further east he went, the more beautiful life would become, and that he'd better not try to go too far at first. "I'll go to northern Indiana or Ohio," he told himself. "There must be beautiful towns in those parts."

Hugh had a boyish desire to get going and immediately become a part of life in his new place. The gradual awakening of his mind had given him courage, and he considered himself armed and ready to interact with people. He wanted to meet and befriend people whose lives were well lived and who themselves were beautiful and meaningful. As he sat on the steps of a train station in a poor small town in Missouri, his bag by his side, thinking about all the things he wanted to do with his life, his mind became so energetic and restless that some of his restlessness infected his body. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he stood up without conscious effort and paced the station platform, overcome with energy. He thought he couldn't wait for the train to arrive and bring the man who was to take his place. "Well, I'm going away, I'm going away to be a man among men," he told himself over and over again. The statement became a kind of refrain, and he spoke it unconsciously. As he repeated these words, his heart beat strongly in anticipation of the future that he thought lay before him.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER II


Hugh left the town of Mudcat Landing in early September of 1886. He was twenty years old and six feet four inches tall. His entire upper body was extremely strong, but his long legs were clumsy and lifeless. He obtained a pass from the railroad company that hired him and traveled north along the river on an overnight train until he arrived in a large city called Burlington, Iowa. There a bridge spanned the river, and the railroad tracks joined the tracks and ran east toward Chicago; but Hugh did not continue his journey that night. After getting off the train, he went to a nearby hotel and took a room for the night.

The evening was cool and clear, and Hugh was restless. The city of Burlington, a prosperous place in the middle of rich farming country, overwhelmed him with its noise and bustle. For the first time, he saw cobblestone streets and lantern-lit streets. Although it was already around ten o'clock when he arrived, people were still strolling the streets, and many shops were open.

The hotel where he booked a room overlooked the railroad tracks and stood on the corner of a brightly lit street. After being shown into his room, Hugh sat by the open window for half an hour, then, unable to sleep, decided to go for a walk. He strolled for a while through the streets, where people stood in front of shops, but his tall figure attracted attention and he sensed people watching him, so he soon wandered out into a side street.

Within minutes, he was completely lost. He walked what seemed like miles of streets lined with frame and brick houses, occasionally passing people, but was too timid and embarrassed to ask for directions. The street sloped upward, and after a while, he emerged into open ground and followed a road that ran alongside a cliff overlooking the Mississippi River. The night was clear, the sky glittering with stars. In the open, away from the many houses, he no longer felt awkward and timid; he walked cheerfully. After a while, he stopped and stood facing the river. Standing on a high cliff, with a grove of trees behind him, it seemed as if all the stars had gathered in the eastern sky. Below him, the river reflected the stars. They seemed to be paving his way to the East.

A tall fellow Missouri man sat down on a log at the edge of the cliff and tried to see the river below. Nothing was visible except the stars dancing and twinkling in the darkness. He reached a spot far above the railroad bridge, but soon a passing passenger train passed overhead from the west, and the train's lights, too, became like stars-stars that moved and beckoned, seemingly flying like flocks of birds from West to East.

For several hours, Hugh sat on a log in the darkness. He decided it was hopeless to return to the inn and welcomed the excuse to remain abroad. For the first time in his life, his body felt light and strong, and his mind was feverishly alert. Behind him, a carriage carrying a young man and woman drove along the road, and after the voices died down, silence descended, broken only occasionally, during the hours when he sat pondering his future, by the barking of a dog at some distant house or the clatter of the paddlewheels of a passing riverboat.

Hugh McVeigh's first years were spent surrounded by the sound of the Mississippi River. He saw it in the hot summers, when the waters receded and the mud lay caked and cracked along the water's edge; in the spring, when the floods raged and the water rushed past, carrying away tree logs and even parts of houses; in the winter, when the water seemed deathly cold and ice drifted past; and in the fall, when it was quiet, calm, and beautiful, seeming to draw an almost human warmth from the redwoods that lined its banks. Hugh spent hours and days sitting or lying in the grass by the riverbank. The fishing cabin where he lived with his father until he was fourteen was half a dozen long steps from the riverbank, and the boy was often left there alone for weeks at a time. When his father was away on a rafting trip carrying timber or working for a few days on some rural farm far from the river, the boy, often penniless and with only a few loaves of bread, would go fishing when he was hungry, and when he was away, he spent his days lounging in the grass by the riverbank. Boys from the town would sometimes come to spend an hour with him, but in their presence he would become embarrassed and a little irritated. He longed to be alone with his dreams. One of the boys, a sickly, pale, and underdeveloped ten-year-old, often stayed with him all summer day. He was the son of a town merchant and quickly tired when trying to follow the other boys. On the riverbank, he lay silently next to Hugh. They boarded Hugh's boat and went fishing, and the merchant's son became animated and began to talk. He taught Hugh to write his name and read a few words. The shyness that separated them began to disappear when the merchant's son contracted some childhood illness and died.

That night, in the darkness above the cliff in Burlington, Hugh recalled things from his childhood that hadn't crossed his mind for years. The very thoughts that had come to him during those long days of idleness by the river came flooding back.

After he turned fourteen and went to work at the railroad station, Hugh stayed away from the river. Between working at the station and in Sara Shepard's back garden, and studying after lunch, he had little free time. Sundays, however, were different. Sara Shepard hadn't attended church since arriving in Mudcat Landing, but she didn't work on Sundays. On summer Sunday afternoons, she and her husband would sit on chairs under a tree near the house and retire to sleep. Hugh made it a habit to wander off alone. He, too, wanted to sleep, but he didn't dare. He walked along the riverbank on the road south of town, and after two or three miles, he turned into a grove of trees and lay down in the shade.

Long summer Sundays had been a delightful time for Hugh, so delightful that he eventually gave them up, fearing they might force him back into his old, sleepy ways. Now, as he sat in the darkness above the same river he had gazed upon on those long Sundays, a spasm of something akin to loneliness overwhelmed him. For the first time, he considered, with a keen sense of regret, leaving the river country and setting out for a new land.

On Sunday afternoons in the woods south of Mudcat Landing, Hugh lay motionless in the grass for hours. The smell of dead fish that was always present in the cabin where he spent his childhood was gone, and there were no swarms of flies. Above him, a breeze played in the tree branches, and insects sang in the grass. Everything was clean. A beautiful silence reigned over the river and the forest. He lay on his stomach and looked down at the river, his eyes heavy with sleep into the misty distance. Half-formed thoughts flitted through his head like visions. He dreamed, but his dreams were formless and hazy. For several hours, that half-dead, half-alive state in which he had fallen remained. He did not sleep, but lay between sleep and wakefulness. Pictures formed in his mind. The clouds floating across the sky above the river took on strange, grotesque shapes. They began to move. One of the clouds separated from the others. It quickly retreated into the misty distance, then returned. It had become half-human and seemed to control the other clouds. Under its influence, they became agitated and began to move restlessly. Long, steamy sleeves extended from the body of the most active cloud. They tugged and tugged at the other clouds, making them also restless and agitated.

Hugh's mind, as he sat in the darkness on a cliff above the river in Burlington that night, was deeply stirred. He found himself as a boy again, lying in the woods above his river, and the visions he had had there returned with startling clarity. He climbed off the log and, lying on the wet grass, closed his eyes. His body grew warm.

Hugh thought his mind had left his body and ascended into the sky to join the clouds and stars, to play with them. He seemed to look down from the sky onto the earth and see rolling fields, hills, and forests. He took no part in the lives of men and women on earth, but was cut off from them, left to his own devices. From his place in the sky above the earth, he saw a great river flowing majestically. For a time, the sky was quiet and pensive, like the sky when he, as a boy, lay on his stomach in the forest below. He saw people in boats floating by and dimly heard their voices. A great silence fell, and he looked beyond the wide expanse of the river and saw fields and cities. All were silent and still. An air of expectation hung over them. And then the river was set in motion by some strange, unknown force, something that came from a distant place, from the place where the cloud had gone and from where it had returned to stir and agitate other clouds.

The river now rushed forward. It overflowed its banks and swept across the land, uprooting trees, forests, and towns. The white faces of drowned men and children, swept away by the current, stared into the mind of Hugh, who, at the moment of his emergence into a certain world of struggle and defeat, allowed himself to slip back into the hazy dreams of his childhood.

Lying in the wet grass in the darkness on a cliff, Hugh tried to regain consciousness, but for a long time, to no avail. He rolled and writhed, his lips muttering words. It was useless. His mind, too, had been carried away. The clouds, of which he felt himself a part, drifted across the sky. They blotted out the sun above, and darkness descended upon the land, upon the restless cities, upon the shattered hills, upon the ruined forests, upon the silence and peace of all places. The land stretching from the river, where once all had been peaceful and tranquil, was now in turmoil and unrest. Houses were destroyed and instantly rebuilt. People gathered in seething crowds.

The dreamer felt himself part of something significant and terrible happening to the earth and its peoples. He struggled to wake up again, to force himself back into consciousness from the world of dreams. When he finally awoke, it was already dawn, and he was sitting on the very edge of a cliff overlooking the Mississippi River, now gray in the dim morning light.


The towns where Hugh lived during the first three years after beginning his journey east were small settlements of a few hundred people, scattered across Illinois, Indiana, and western Ohio. All the people among whom he worked and lived during this time were farmers and laborers. In the spring of his first year of travel, he passed through Chicago and spent two hours there, entering and exiting at the same train station.

He had no temptation to become a city dweller. The vast trading city at the foot of Lake Michigan, due to its commanding position at the very center of a vast farming empire, had already become gigantic. He never forgot the two hours he spent standing at the train station in the heart of town and strolling along the street adjacent to it. It was evening when he arrived at this roaring, clanking place. On the long, wide plains west of town, he saw farmers working on their spring plowing as the train sped past. Soon the farms became small, and the prairie was dotted with towns. The train didn't stop there, but plunged into a crowded network of streets filled with multitudes. Reaching the large, dark station, Hugh saw thousands of people scurrying around like disturbed insects. Countless thousands were leaving the city at the end of the workday, and trains were waiting to take them to the prairie towns. They arrived in droves, hurrying like maddened cattle across the bridge to the station. Crowds of people entering and exiting trains from cities in the East and West climbed the stairs to the street, while those leaving tried to descend the same stairs at the same time. The result was a seething mass of humanity. Everyone pushed and jostled. Men cursed, women grew angry, and children cried. A long line of cabbies screamed and roared near the door leading to the street.

Hugh watched the people rush past him, trembling with the nameless fear of crowds common to country boys in the city. When the tide of people died down a bit, he left the station and, crossing a narrow street, stopped in front of a brick store. Soon the crowd began again, and again men, women, and boys hurried across the bridge and ran through the doorway leading into the station. They came in waves, like water washing onto a beach during a storm. Hugh felt as if if he accidentally found himself in the crowd, he would be swept away to some unknown and terrible place. After waiting for the tide to subside a bit, he crossed the street and went to the bridge to look at the river flowing past the station. It was narrow and filled with ships, and the water looked gray and dirty. A cloud of black smoke obscured the sky. From all sides of him and even in the air above his head there was a loud clatter and roar of bells and whistles.

With the air of a child setting off into a dark forest, Hugh walked a short distance down one of the streets leading west from the station. He stopped again and stood in front of a building. Nearby, a group of young city toughs were smoking and chatting in front of a saloon. A young woman emerged from a nearby building, approached, and spoke to one of them. The man began cursing furiously. "Tell her I'll be here in a minute and smash her face in," he said, and, ignoring the girl, turned and stared at Hugh. All the young men loitering in front of the saloon turned and stared at their tall compatriot. They began laughing, and one of them quickly approached him.

Hugh ran down the street to the station, followed by the shouts of young hooligans. He didn't dare leave the house again, and when his train was ready, he boarded it and happily left the vast, complex home of modern Americans.

Hugh traveled from town to town, always moving east, always seeking a place where happiness would come to him and where he could find companionship with men and women. He cut fence posts in the woods on a large Indiana farm, worked in the fields, and at one point served as a railroad foreman.

On a farm in Indiana, about forty miles east of Indianapolis, he was deeply moved for the first time by the presence of a woman. She was the daughter of Hugh's farmer, a vibrant, beautiful woman of twenty-four who had worked as a schoolteacher but had given up her job because she was getting married. Hugh considered the man who was to marry her the luckiest person in the world. He lived in Indianapolis and came by train to spend the weekend at the farm. The woman prepared for his arrival by wearing a white dress and a rose in her hair. The two people strolled in the garden next to the house or rode along country roads. The young man, who Hugh was told worked in a bank, wore stiff white collars, a black suit, and a black Derby hat.

On the farm, Hugh worked in the fields with the farmer and ate at the family's table, but he didn't meet them. On Sunday, when the young man arrived, he took the day off and went to a nearby town. Courtship had become a very personal matter for him, and he experienced the excitement of the weekly visits as if he were one of the directors. The farmer's daughter, sensing that the silent farmhand was agitated by her presence, became interested in him. Sometimes in the evening, while he was sitting on the veranda in front of the house, she would come to him and sit, looking at him with a particularly distant and interested air. She tried to speak, but Hugh responded to all her advances so briefly and half-frightened that she abandoned the attempt. One Saturday evening, when her lover arrived, she took him for a ride in the family carriage, while Hugh hid in the hayloft of the barn to await their return.

Hugh had never seen or heard of a man expressing affection for a woman in any way. It seemed to him an extremely heroic act, and he hoped, hidden in the barn, to see it happen. It was a bright moonlit night, and he waited until almost eleven o'clock for the lovers to return. High up in the hayloft, beneath the eaves, there was an opening. Thanks to his great height, he could reach up and pull himself up, and when he did, he found support on one of the beams that formed the barn's frame. The lovers stood unharnessing a horse in the barnyard below. When the townsman led the horse into the stable, he hurried out again and walked with the farmer's daughter along the path to the house. The two people laughed and tugged at each other like children. They fell silent and, approaching the house, stopped by a tree to embrace. Hugh watched as the man picked up the woman and held her tightly to his body. He was so excited he almost fell off the beam. His imagination fired, and he tried to imagine himself in the place of the young city dweller. His fingers gripped the planks he clung to, and his body trembled. The two figures standing in the dim light by the tree became one. For a long moment they clung tightly to each other, then separated. They entered the house, and Hugh climbed down from his place on the beam and lay down on the hay. His body shook as if with a chill, and he was half sick with jealousy, anger, and an overwhelming sense of defeat. At that moment, it didn't seem worthwhile for him to go further east or try to find a place where he could mingle freely with men and women, or where something as wondrous as what had happened to him-the man in the barnyard below-could have happened.

Hugh spent the night in the hayloft, then crawled out in daylight and made his way to the neighboring town. He returned to the farm late Monday evening, when he was sure the townsman had left. Despite the farmer's protests, he immediately gathered his clothes and announced his intention to leave. He didn't wait for supper but hurried out of the house. As he reached the road and started to walk away, he looked back and saw the landlord's daughter standing by the open door, looking at him. Shame for what he had done the night before overwhelmed him. For a moment, he looked at the woman, who stared back at him with intense, interested eyes, and then, head down, he hurried away. The woman watched him disappear from sight, and later, when her father paced the house, blaming Hugh for leaving so suddenly and declaring that the tall Missouri man was undoubtedly a drunkard looking for a drink, she had nothing to say. In her heart she knew what had happened to her father's farmer, and she regretted that he had gone before she had had the chance to exercise her full power over him.


None of the towns Hugh visited during his three years of wandering came close to realizing the life Sarah Shepard had described. They were all very similar. There was a main street with a dozen stores on either side, a blacksmith shop, and perhaps a grain elevator. The town was empty all day, but in the evening, the townspeople gathered on Main Street. On the sidewalks in front of the stores, young farmers and clerks sat on boxes or on the curbs. They paid no attention to Hugh, who, when he approached them, remained silent and kept in the background. The farm hands talked about their work and boasted about the number of bushels of corn they could harvest in a day or their plowing skills. The clerks were determined to play practical jokes, which greatly delighted the farm hands. While one of them was loudly extolling his prowess at work, a shopkeeper crept up to the door of one of the stores and approached him. He held a pin in his hand and poked the speaker in the back with it. The crowd cheered and cheered. If the victim got angry, a fight would break out, but that didn't happen often. Other men joined the party, and they were told a joke. "Well, you should have seen the look on his face. I thought I was going to die," said one witness.

Hugh found work for a carpenter who specialized in barn building and stayed with him all autumn. Later, he went to work as a foreman on the railroad. Nothing happened to him. He was like a man forced to go through life blindfolded. All around him, in towns and on farms, flowed the undercurrent of life, untouched by him. Even in the smallest towns, populated only by farm laborers, a quaint, interesting civilization was developing. The men worked hard, but they were often outdoors and had time to think. Their minds strove to unravel the mystery of existence. The schoolteacher and the village lawyer read Tom Paine's "The Age of Reason" and Bellamy's "Looking Backward." They discussed these books with their comrades. There was a feeling, poorly expressed, that America had something real and spiritual to offer the rest of the world. The workers shared the latest intricacies of their craft, and after hours of discussing new methods of growing corn, making horseshoes, or building barns, they would talk about God and His intentions for humanity. Lengthy discussions ensued about religious beliefs and the political fate of America.

These discussions were accompanied by stories of events taking place beyond the small world in which city dwellers lived. People who had fought in the Civil War, who had fought in the hills and swum across wide rivers in fear of defeat, told tales of their adventures.

In the evening, after a day's work in the fields or on the railroad with the police, Hugh didn't know what to do with himself. The reason he didn't go to bed immediately after dinner was that he considered his tendency to sleep and dream to be the enemy of his development; and an unusually persistent determination to make something living and worthwhile of himself-the result of five years of constant conversations on the subject with a woman from New England-took possession of him. "I'll find the right place and the right people, and then I'll begin," he constantly told himself.

And then, exhausted by fatigue and loneliness, he went to bed in one of the small hotels or boarding houses where he lived during those years, and his dreams returned. The dream he had that night, lying on a cliff above the Mississippi River near Burlington, returned again and again. He sat upright on his bed in the darkness of his room, shaking the fuzzy, hazy feeling from his mind and afraid to fall asleep again. He didn't want to disturb the residents of the house, so he got up, dressed, and paced the room without putting on his shoes. Sometimes the room he occupied had a low ceiling, forcing him to stoop. He would crawl out of the house, carrying his shoes in his hand, and sit on the sidewalk to put them on. In all the towns he visited, people saw him walking alone through the streets late at night or early in the morning. Rumors circulated about it. The story of what was called his eccentricity reached the men he worked with, and they found themselves unable to speak freely and comfortably in his presence. At noon, when the men were eating their lunch brought to work, when the boss left and it was customary for the workers to talk about their own affairs, they would go off alone. Hugh followed them. They went to sit under a tree, and when Hugh came and stood beside them, they fell silent, or the most vulgar and superficial of them began to boast. While he worked with half a dozen other workers on the railroad, two always did the talking. Whenever the boss left, the old man, who had a reputation for being a wit, would tell stories about his affairs with women. The young man with red hair followed his example. The two men talked loudly and continued to look at Hugh. The younger of the two wits turned to the other worker, who had a weak and timid face. "Well, and you," he cried, "what about your old woman? What about her? Who is your son's father? Dare you tell?

Hugh strolled through the cities in the evenings, trying to focus on specific things. He felt humanity, for some unknown reason, drifting away from him, and his thoughts returned to Sara Shepard. He remembered that she was never idle. She scrubbed the kitchen floor and cooked; she washed, ironed, kneaded bread dough, and darned clothes. In the evening, while she forced the boy to read to her from schoolbooks or calculate on a slate, she knitted socks for him or her husband. Except when something happened to her that made her swear and her face turn red, she was always cheerful. When the boy had nothing to do at the station and the stationmaster sent him to work around the house, draw water from the cistern for the family wash, or weed the garden, he heard the woman singing as she walked, as she performed her countless little tasks. Hugh decided he should also perform small tasks, focusing his attention on specific things. In the city where he worked on the site, almost every night he experienced a cloudy dream in which the world became a spinning, anxious center of disaster. Winter had arrived, and he walked the night streets in the dark and deep snow. He was almost frozen; but since his entire lower body was usually cold, he didn't mind the additional discomfort too much, and the reserves of strength in his large frame were so great that the loss of sleep didn't affect his ability to work all day effortlessly.

Hugh walked out onto one of the residential streets in town and counted the pickets on the fences in front of the houses. He returned to the hotel and counted the pickets on every fence in town. Then he picked up a ruler from a hardware store and carefully measured the pickets. He tried to calculate the number of stakes that could be cut from trees of a certain size, and this gave him another opportunity. He counted the number of trees on every street in town. He learned to estimate at a glance and with relative accuracy how much lumber could be cut from a tree. He built imaginary houses from lumber cut from the trees growing along the streets. He even tried to figure out how to use small branches cut from the treetops, and one Sunday he went into the woods outside of town and cut a large armful of branches, which he carried back to his room, and then, with great pleasure, brought back to the room, woven into a basket.

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BOOK TWO


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CHAPTER III


BIDWELL, OHIO, WAS an old town, as ancient as cities in the Central West were, long before Hugh McVeigh, seeking a place where he could penetrate the wall separating him from humanity, went there to live and try to solve his problem. Now it is a bustling industrial city with a population of nearly one hundred thousand; but the time has not yet come to tell the story of its sudden and astonishing growth.

From its inception, Bidwell was a prosperous place. The town lies in the valley of a deep, fast-flowing river, which floods directly above the town, briefly becomes wide and shallow, and quickly flows, singing, over the rocks. South of the town, the river not only widens, but the hills also recede. To the north, a wide, flat valley stretches. In the days before factories, the land immediately around the town was divided into small farms devoted to growing fruits and berries, while beyond the small farms were larger plots that were extremely productive, yielding huge harvests of wheat, corn, and other crops.

When Hugh was a boy sleeping his last days on the grass near his father's fishing cabin on the banks of the Mississippi River, Bidwell had already overcome the hardships of pioneer days. The farms in the wide valley to the north had been cleared of timber, their stumps ripped from the ground by a bygone generation. The soil was easy to cultivate and retained little of its pristine fertility. Two railroads, the Lake Shore and the Michigan Central (later part of the great New York Central system), passed through the town, as did a less important coal road called the Wheeling and Lake Erie. Bidwell then had a population of 2,500, mostly descended from pioneers who had arrived by boat across the Great Lakes or by wagon through the mountains from New York and Pennsylvania.

The town stood on a gentle slope rising from the river, and the Lake Shore and Michigan Central Railroad station was on the riverbank, at the foot of Main Street. Wheeling Station was a mile to the north. Access was by crossing a bridge and following a paved road that had already begun to resemble a street. Facing Turner's Pike were a dozen houses, and between them were berry fields and the occasional orchard of cherries, peaches, or apples. A rugged trail descended to the distant roadside station, and in the evening, this trail, winding beneath the branches of fruit trees that stretched over the farm fences, was a favorite strolling spot for lovers.

Small farms near the town of Bidwell grew berries that fetched the highest prices in the two cities, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, reached by two railroads, and everyone in town who wasn't employed in any trade-shoemaking, carpentry, horse shoeing, house painting, and the like-or who wasn't a member of the small trades and professional classes, worked the land during the summer. On summer mornings, men, women, and children went out to the fields. In early spring, when the planting was underway, and throughout late May, June, and early July, when the berries and fruits began to ripen, everyone was busy with work, and the town streets were deserted. Everyone went to the fields. At dawn, huge hay wagons loaded with children, laughing girls, and staid women rolled out of Main Street. Tall boys walked alongside them, pelting the girls with green apples and cherries from the trees along the road, and the men, who walked behind, smoked their morning pipes and discussed the current prices of produce from their fields. After they left, a Saturday silence descended on the town. Merchants and clerks loitered in the shade of the awnings in front of the shops, and only their wives and the wives of two or three wealthy men in town came to buy and interrupt their conversations about horse racing, politics, and religion.

That evening, when the wagons returned home, Bidwell awoke. Weary berry pickers walked home from the fields through the dusty roads, swinging pails filled with lunch. Wagons creaked underfoot, piled high with crates of berries ready for shipment. Crowds gathered in the stores after supper. Old men lit pipes and sat gossiping along the curb on Main Street; women with baskets in their arms plied their trade for the next day's food; young men donned stiff white collars and Sunday clothes, and girls who had spent the day crawling between rows of berries or picking their way through tangled masses of raspberry bushes put on white dresses and walked down ahead of the men. The friendships that had blossomed between boys and girls in the fields blossomed into love. Couples strolled through the streets, houses under the trees, talking in hushed voices. They grew silent and shy. The boldest kissed. The end of berry picking season brought a new wave of marriages to the town of Bidwell every year.

In every town in the American Midwest, it was a time of expectation. With the country cleared, the Indians driven to a vast, remote place vaguely called the West, the Civil War fought and won, and no serious national issues deeply affecting their lives, people's minds turned inward. The soul and its destiny were openly discussed on the streets. Robert Ingersoll came to Bidwell to speak at Terry Hall, and after his departure, the question of Christ's divinity occupied the minds of the townspeople for months. Ministers preached sermons on the subject, and in the evenings it was the talk of the shops. Everyone had something to say. Even Charlie Mook, who dug ditches and stuttered so much that half a dozen people in town couldn't understand him, expressed his opinion.

Throughout the great Mississippi Valley, each town developed its own character, and the people who lived in them treated each other like members of an extended family. Each member of the great family developed their own unique personality. A kind of invisible roof extended over each town, under which everyone lived. Under this roof, boys and girls were born, grew up, quarreled, fought, and befriended their fellow townspeople, learned the secrets of love, married and became parents, grew old, became ill, and died.

In the invisible circle and under the great roof, everyone knew and was known to their neighbors. Strangers didn't come and go quickly and mysteriously, there was no constant and disorienting noise of machines and new projects. At that moment, it seemed as if humanity would need time to try to understand itself.

In Bidwell, there lived a man named Peter White. He was a tailor and worked hard at his trade, but once or twice a year he would get drunk and beat his wife. He was arrested each time and forced to pay a fine, but there was general understanding of the impulse that led to the beating. Most women who knew his wife sympathized with Peter. "She's very noisy, and her jaw never stays still," the wife of grocer Henry Teeters told her husband. "If he gets drunk, it's only to forget he's married to her. Then he goes home to sleep it off, and she starts nagging at him. He endures it as long as he can. It takes a fist to shut that woman up. If he hits her, that's the only thing he can do."

Crazy Allie Mulberry was one of the city's most colorful characters. He lived with his mother in a dilapidated house on Medina Road, just outside of town. Besides being feebleminded, he had a problem with his legs. They wobbled and weakened, and he could barely move them. On summer days, when the streets were deserted, he would hobble down Main Street with his jaw hanging down. He carried a large club, partly to support his weak legs and partly to ward off dogs and mischievous boys. He enjoyed sitting in the shade, leaning his back against a building, whittling, and he also enjoyed being around people and appreciating his talent as a whittler. He made fans from pieces of pine, long chains of wooden beads, and one day, he achieved a remarkable mechanical triumph that brought him widespread fame. He built a ship that floated in a beer bottle, half-filled with water and resting on its side. The ship had sails and three tiny wooden sailors standing at attention, hands raised to their caps in salute. After it was crafted and placed in the bottle, it proved too large to be removed through the neck. How Ellie achieved this, no one ever knew. The clerks and merchants who had gathered around to watch him work discussed the matter for days. For them, it was an endless miracle. That evening, they told the berry pickers who had come to the stores, and in the eyes of the people of Bidwell, Ellie Mulberry became a hero. The bottle, half-filled with water and securely corked, sat on a cushion in the window of Hunter's Jewelry Store. As it floated in the ocean, crowds gathered to watch. Above the bottle, prominently displayed, hung a plaque reading, "Carved by Ally Mulberry of Bidwell." Beneath these words was a printed query. "How did it get into the bottle?" was the question. The bottle sat on display for months, and merchants took visiting travelers to see it. Then they escorted their guests to where Ally, leaning against the wall of a building, his club at his side, was working on some new piece of carved art. The travelers were impressed and told the story abroad. Ally's fame spread to other towns. "He's got a good brain," said a Bidwell resident, shaking his head. "He doesn't seem to know much, but look at what he does! He must have all sorts of ideas in his head."

Jane Orange, the widow of a lawyer and, with the sole exception of Thomas Butterworth, a farmer who owned over a thousand acres of land and lived with her daughter on a farm a mile south of town, was the richest person in town. Everyone in Bidwell loved her, but she was unpopular. She was called stingy, and it was said that she and her husband had cheated everyone they dealt with to get their start in life. The town coveted the privilege of what they called "taking them down." Jane's husband had once been Bidwell's town attorney and later was responsible for settling the estate of Ed Lucas, a farmer who died leaving two hundred acres and two daughters. Everyone said the farmer's daughters "came out on the small end of the horn," and John Orange began to grow rich. He was said to be worth fifty thousand dollars. Late in his life, the lawyer traveled weekly to Cleveland on business, and when he was home, even in the hottest weather, he wore a long black coat. While shopping for household goods, Jane Orange was closely watched by shopkeepers. She was suspected of taking small items that could be placed in dress pockets. One afternoon at Toddmore's Grocery, when she thought no one was watching, she removed half a dozen eggs from a basket and, after a quick glance around to make sure she hadn't been seen, slipped them into her dress pocket. Harry Toddmore, the grocer's son, who witnessed the theft, said nothing and left unnoticed through the back door. He had recruited three or four clerks from other stores, and they were waiting for Jane Orange on the corner. When she approached, they hurried away, and Harry Toddmore fell on top of her. Throwing out his hand, he struck the pocket containing the eggs with a swift, sharp blow. Jane Orange turned and hurried home, but as she was halfway down Main Street, clerks and merchants emerged from the shops, and a voice from the gathering crowd called attention to the fact that the contents of the stolen eggs had leaked inside. A stream of water ran from her dress and stockings onto the sidewalk. A pack of town dogs ran at her heels, excited by the shouts of the crowd, barking and sniffing the yellow trickle dripping from her shoes.

An old man with a long white beard came to live in Bidwell. He was an ordinary governor of a Southern state in the days of reconstruction after the Civil War, and he was making money. He bought a house on Turner's Pike near the river and spent his days pottering in a small garden. In the evening, he crossed the bridge onto Main Street and wandered into Birdie Spink's drugstore. He spoke with great frankness and sincerity about his life in the South during that terrible time when the country was trying to emerge from the black gloom of defeat, and he gave the people of Bidwell a new perspective on their old enemies, the Rebs.

The old man-the name he gave in Bidwell was Judge Horace Hanby-believed in the manhood and integrity of the people he had briefly ruled, who were waging a long, grim war with the North, the New Englanders, and the sons of New Englanders from the West and Northwest. "They're all right," he said with a grin. "I cheated them and made a little money, but I liked them. One time a mob of them came to my house and threatened to kill me, and I told them I didn't really blame them, so they left me alone." The judge, a former New York City politician who had been involved in some affair that made it inconvenient for him to return to that city, became prophetic and philosophical after coming to live in Bidwell. Despite the doubts everyone had about his past, he was something of a scholar and a book reader and earned respect for his obvious wisdom. "Well, there's going to be a new war here," he said. "It won't be like the Civil War, where they'll just shoot and kill people's bodies. First, it'll be a war between people over which class a person belongs to; then it'll be a long, quiet war between classes, between those who have and those who can't have. It'll be the worst war of all."

The conversation about Judge Hanby, which continued almost every evening and was explained in detail to a silent and attentive group in the drugstore, began to have an effect on the minds of the young men in Bidwell. At his suggestion, several city boys-Cliff Bacon, Albert Small, Ed Prowl, and two or three others-began saving money to go to college in the East. It was also at his suggestion that Tom Butterworth, a wealthy farmer, sent his daughter to school. The old man made many prophecies about what would happen in America. "I tell you, the country will not remain as it is," he said earnestly. "The changes have already come in the Eastern cities. Factories are being built, and everyone will work in them. Only an old man like me can see how this changes their lives. Some men stand at the same bench and do the same thing not for hours, but for days and years. There are signs posted there saying they are not allowed to talk. Some of them are making more money than they did before the factories came along, but I'm telling you, it's like being in prison. What would you say if I told you that all of America, all of you guys who talk so much about freedom, would end up in prison, huh?

"And there's something else. There are already a dozen men in New York worth a million dollars. Yes, sir, I tell you, it's true, a million dollars. What do you think of that, huh?

Judge Hanby grew excited and, inspired by the audience's rapt attention, described the scope of events. In England, he explained, towns were constantly expanding, and almost everyone either worked in a factory or owned stock in one. "In New England, things are happening just as fast," he explained. "The same thing will happen here. Farming will be done with tools. Almost everything done by hand will be done by machines. Some will become rich, some poor. The point is to get an education, yes, that's the whole point, to prepare for what's to come. That's the only way. The younger generation must be smarter and more perceptive."

The words of the old man, who had seen many places, people, and cities, echoed on the streets of Bidwell. A blacksmith and a wheelwright echoed his words as they stopped in front of the post office to exchange news of their affairs. Ben Peeler, a carpenter who had been saving up to buy a house and a small farm to retire to when he became too old to climb the frames of buildings, instead used the money to send his son to Cleveland to work at a new technical school. Steve Hunter, the son of Abraham Hunter, a Bidwell jeweler, declared he intended to keep up with the times and, when he went to work at the factory, go to an office, not a store. He went to Buffalo, New York, to enroll in business college.

The air in Bidwell began to swirl with talk of new times. The harsh words spoken about the advent of a new life were soon forgotten. The country's youth and optimistic spirit prompted it to seize the hand of the giant of industrialism and lead it, laughing, into the ground. The cry of "live in peace," which swept across America during that period and still echoes in American newspapers and magazines, echoed through the streets of Bidwell.

One day, business took on a new tone in Joseph Wainsworth's saddle shop. The saddlemaker was an old-school craftsman and a fiercely independent man. He'd mastered his craft after five years as an apprentice, and had spent another five years moving from place to place as an apprentice, and he felt he knew his trade. He also owned his own shop and home, and he had twelve hundred dollars in the bank. One afternoon, while he was alone in the shop, Tom Butterworth walked in and said he'd ordered four sets of farm harness from a factory in Philadelphia. "I came to ask if you'd repair them if they broke down," he said.

Joe Wainsworth began fiddling with tools on his workbench. Then he turned to look the farmer in the eye and deliver what he later described to his friends as "laying down the law." "When cheap things start to fall apart, take them somewhere else to get them fixed," he snapped. He was furious. "Take those damn things back to Philadelphia where you bought them," he shouted at the farmer, who turned to leave the store.

Joe Wainsworth was upset and thought about the incident all day. When farmers came to buy his goods and stood there to talk about their business, he had nothing to say. He was a talkative man, and his apprentice, Will Sellinger, the son of a house painter from Bidwell, was puzzled by his silence.

When the boy and the man were alone in the shop, Joe Wainsworth would talk about his days as an apprentice, moving from place to place working at his trade. If a track was being sewn on or a bridle made, he would tell how it was done in the shop where he worked, in Boston, and in another shop in Providence, Rhode Island. Taking a sheet of paper, he would make drawings illustrating leather cuts made in other places and stitching methods. He claimed to have developed his own method of doing things and that his was better than anything he had seen in all his travels. To the men who came into the shop on winter evenings, he would smile and talk about their business, about the price of cabbage in Cleveland, or the effect of cold weather on winter wheat, but when he was alone with the boy, he talked only about harness making. "I don't say anything about that. What good is bragging? "However, I could learn something from every harness maker I have ever seen, and I have seen the best of them," he stated emphatically.

That afternoon, after hearing about the four factory-made harnesses being brought into what he had always considered his trade as a first-class laborer, Joe was silent for two or three hours. He thought about old Judge Hanby's words and the constant talk of a new era. Suddenly turning to his apprentice, who was puzzled by his long silence and ignorant of the incident that had alarmed his master, he burst out. He was defiant and defiant. "Well, then, let them go to Philadelphia, let them go anywhere they please," he growled, and then, as if his own words had restored his self-respect, he squared his shoulders and looked at the puzzled and alarmed boy. "I know my business, and I don't have to bow to anyone," he declared. He expressed the old merchant's faith in his craft and the rights it gave the master. "Learn your craft. Don't listen to talk," he said seriously. "A man who knows his business is a real man. He can advise anyone to go to the devil."

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CHAPTER IV


He was twenty-three years old when he came to live in Bidwell. A telegraph operator's position at the Wheeling station, a mile north of town, had become vacant, and a chance meeting with a former resident of the neighboring town landed him the job.

A Missouri man worked in a sawmill near a town in northern Indiana during the winter. In the evenings, he wandered the country roads and town streets, but spoke to no one. As elsewhere, he had a reputation as an eccentric. His clothes were threadbare, and although he had money in his pockets, he hadn't bought any new ones. In the evening, as he walked the town streets and saw the smartly dressed clerks standing in front of the stores, he looked at his shabby face and was ashamed to enter. Sara Shepard had always bought him clothes when he was a child, and he decided to go to the place in Michigan where she and her husband had retired and pay her a visit. He wanted Sara Shepard to buy him new clothes, but he also wanted to talk to her.

After three years of moving from place to place and working with other men as a laborer, Hugh hadn't developed any great impulse that he felt would point the way his life should go; but the study of mathematical problems, undertaken to alleviate his loneliness and cure his tendency to daydream, had begun to tell on his character. He thought that if he saw Sarah Shepard again, he would be able to talk to her and, through her, begin to communicate with others. At the sawmill where he worked, he responded to casual comments from his fellow workers in a slow, hesitant drawl; his body was still awkward and his gait shuffled, but he did his work more quickly and accurately. In the presence of his adoptive mother and in his new clothes, he believed he could now speak to her in a way that had been impossible in his youth. She would notice the change in his character and be inspired by it. They would move on to a new basis, and he would feel respected on another.

Hugh went to the train station to inquire about a ticket to Michigan, where he had an adventure that upset his plans. As he stood at the ticket window, the ticket clerk, also a telegraph operator, tried to strike up a conversation. After providing the requested information, he followed Hugh out of the building into the darkness of the rural railroad station at night, and the two men stopped and stood next to an empty luggage truck. The ticket clerk spoke of the loneliness of city life and said he wished he could return home and be with his people again. "It may not be better in my town, but I know everyone there," he said. He was curious about Hugh, as were everyone else in the Indiana town, and he hoped to draw him out to find out why he walked alone at night, why he sometimes spent the entire evening working on books and figures in his room at a country hotel, and why he had so little to say to his companions. Hoping to understand Hugh's silence, he insulted the town they both lived in. "Well," he began, "I think I know how you feel. You want to get out of this place." He explained his predicament. "I'm married," he said. "I've got three children. A man can make more money on the railroad here than in my state, and living costs are pretty cheap. Just today I got an offer of a job in a nice town near my home in Ohio, but I can't take it. The job only pays forty a month. It's a nice town, one of the best in the northern part of the state, but the work, you see, is no good. Lord, how I wish I could go. I'd like to go back to living among people like those who live in this part of the country."

The railroad worker and Hugh were walking down the street leading from the station to the main thoroughfare. Wanting to appreciate his comrade's success but unsure how to do so, Hugh adopted a method he'd heard his fellow workers use with each other. "Well," he said slowly, "let's go have a drink."

The two men entered the saloon and stopped at the bar. Hugh made a great effort to overcome his embarrassment. While he and the railwayman drank foaming beer, he explained that he, too, had once been a railwayman and had known telegraphy, but had been in other work for several years. His companion glanced at his shabby clothes and nodded. He gestured with his head, indicating that he wanted Hugh to follow him outside into the darkness. "Well, well," he exclaimed as they emerged onto the street again and walked down the street toward the station. "Now I understand. They were all interested in you, and I heard a lot of talk. I won't say anything, but I'm going to do something for you."

Hugh went to the station with his new friend and sat down in the lighted office. The railwayman took out a sheet of paper and began writing a letter. "I'll give you this job," he said. "I'm writing this letter now and it'll arrive on the midnight train. You need to get back on your feet. I was a drunk myself, but I cut it all out. A glass of beer now and then is about my limit."

He began to talk about the small town in Ohio where he'd offered Hugh a job that would help him enter the world and break his drinking habit, describing it as an earthly paradise filled with intelligent, clear-thinking people and beautiful women. Hugh vividly recalled the conversation he'd heard Sara Shepard have with him when, in his youth, she'd spent long evenings telling him about the wonders of her towns and people in Michigan and New England, contrasting the life she'd lived there with the life she'd lived with the people of his own place.

Hugh decided not to try to explain the mistake made by his new acquaintance, but to accept the offer to help him get a job as a telegraph operator.

The two men exited the station and paused again in the darkness. The railroad worker felt like a man privileged to snatch a soul from the darkness of despair. Words flowed from his lips, and his presumption of knowledge of Hugh's character was entirely unfounded under the circumstances. "Well," he exclaimed heartily, "you see, I saw you off. I told them you're a good man and a good operator, but you'll take this position at a low salary, because you're ill and can't work much right now." The agitated man followed Hugh down the street. It was late, and the lights in the shop had gone out. A murmur of voices came from one of the two saloons in the city that stood between them. Hugh's old childhood dream returned to him: finding a place and people among whom, sitting still and breathing the air that others breathed, he could enter into a warm intimacy with life. He paused outside the saloon to listen to the voices inside, but the railwayman tugged at his coat sleeve and protested. "Now, now, are you going to cut that out, huh?" he asked anxiously, then quickly explained his concern. "Of course I know what's wrong with you. Didn't I tell you I've been there myself? You were working around it. I know why. You don't have to tell me. If something hadn't happened to him, no one who knows telegraphy would have worked in a sawmill."

"Well, there's no point in talking about it," he added thoughtfully. "I gave you a send-off. You're going to stop this, huh?"

Hugh tried to protest and explain that he had no addiction to drink, but the Ohioan would not listen. "It"s all right," he said again, and then they reached the hotel where Hugh was staying, and he turned to go back to the station and wait for the midnight train that would carry the letter and which, he felt, would also carry his demand that a man who had strayed from the modern path of work and progress be given a new chance. He felt magnanimous and surprisingly gracious. "It"s all right, my boy," he said cordially. "It"s no use talking to me. This evening, when you came to the station to ask the fare to that hole in Michigan, I saw that you were embarrassed. What"s the matter with that guy?" I said to myself. I thought about it. Then I came into town with you, and you bought me a drink right away. I wouldn"t have thought anything of it if I hadn"t been there myself. You"ll get back on your feet. Bidwell, Ohio, is full of good people. You'll join them, and they'll help you and stay with you. You'll like these people. They've got a knack for it. The place you'll be working is way out in the country. It's about a mile from a small, country-like place called Pickleville. There used to be a saloon and a pickle factory there, but both are gone now. You won't be tempted to slip in this place. You'll have a chance to get back on your feet. I'm glad I thought of sending you there.


The Wheeling River and Lake Erie flowed through a small wooded basin that crossed a vast expanse of open farmland north of the town of Bidwell. It carried coal from the rolling hills of West Virginia and southeastern Ohio to ports on Lake Erie and paid little attention to passenger traffic. In the morning, a train consisting of an express car, a baggage car, and two passenger cars departed north and west toward the lake, and in the evening the same train returned, heading southeast into the hills. It seemed strangely disconnected from city life. The invisible roof, under which the life of the town and the surrounding country lived, did not obscure it. As a railroad worker from Indiana told Hugh, the station itself was located in a place known locally as Pickleville. Behind the station stood a small building for storage and nearby four or five houses overlooking Turner's Pike. The pickle factory, now abandoned and with its windows smashed in, stood across the railroad tracks from the station and next to a small stream that ran under a bridge and through a grove of trees to the river. On hot summer days, a sour, pungent smell wafted from the old factory, and at night, its presence lent a ghostly tang to the tiny corner of the world inhabited by perhaps a dozen people.

All day and night a tense, persistent silence hung over Pickleville, while in Bidwell, a mile away, a new life began. In the evenings and on rainy days, when men could not work in the fields, old Judge Hanby would walk along Turner's Pike, across the wagon bridge to Bidwell, and sit in a chair in the back of Birdie Spink's drugstore. He talked. Men came to listen and went away. A new conversation swept through the town. The new force that was being born in American life and in life everywhere fed on the old, dying individualistic life. The new force stirred and inspired the people. It satisfied a universal need. Its purpose was to unite men, to erase national boundaries, to walk the seas and fly the air, to change the whole face of the world in which men lived. The giant who was to be king in the place of old kings was already calling his servants and his armies to serve him. He used the methods of old kings and promised his followers spoils and profits. Everywhere he went, surveying the land, raising a new class of men to positions of leadership. Railroads were already being laid across the plains; vast coal deposits were being discovered, from which food had to be extracted to warm the blood in the giant's body; iron deposits were being discovered; the roar and breath of the terrible novelty, half-hideous, half-beautiful in its possibilities, which for so long was to drown the voices and baffle the thoughts of men, were heard not only in the cities but even on lonely farms at home, where his willing servants, newspapers, and magazines began to circulate in ever-increasing numbers. In the town of Gibsonville, near Bidwell, Ohio, and in Lima and Finley, Ohio, oil and gas fields were being discovered. In Cleveland, Ohio, a precise and decisive man named Rockefeller was buying and selling oil. From the very beginning, he served the new cause well and soon found others who could serve with him. The Morgans, the Fricks, the Goulds, the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the servants of the new king, the princes of the new faith-all merchants, a new type of ruler of men-challenged the world's age-old class law, which places the merchant below the artisan, and further confused people by posing as creators. They were renowned merchants and traded in gigantic things-in people's lives, in mines, forests, oil and gas fields, factories, and railroads.

And all over the land, in the towns, farmhouses, and growing cities of the new country, people stirred and awakened. Thought and poetry had died or been inherited by weak, servile men who also became servants of the new order. Earnest young men in Bidwell and other American towns, whose fathers had walked together on moonlit nights along Turner's Pike to talk about God, went off to technical schools. Their fathers walked and talked, and thoughts grew within them. This impulse reached their father's fathers on the moonlit roads of England, Germany, Ireland, France, and Italy, and beyond them to the moonlit hills of Judea, where shepherds talked and earnest young men, John, Matthew, and Jesus, caught the conversation and turned it into poetry; but the earnest sons of these men in the new land were distracted from thinking and dreaming. From all sides, the voice of a new age, destined to accomplish certain deeds, cried out to them. They joyfully took up the cry and ran with it. Millions of voices arose. The noise became terrifying and confused the minds of all people. Paving the way for a new, broader brotherhood that would one day encompass humanity, expanding the invisible roofs of cities and towns to cover the entire world, people cut their way through human bodies.

And while the voices grew louder and more excited, and the new giant walked around, preliminary surveying the land, Hugh spent his days at the quiet, sleepy railroad station in Pickleville, trying to adjust his mind to the fact that he was not to be accepted as a compatriot by the citizens of the new place he had come to. During the day, he sat in the tiny telegraph office, or, having pulled the express train up to the open window near his telegraph instrument, he lay on his back with a sheet of paper, his bony knees propped up, and counted. Farmers passing on Turner's Pike saw him there and talked about him in the shops of town. "He's a strange, silent man," they said. "What do you think he's up to?"

Hugh walked the streets of Bidwell at night, just as he walked the streets of towns in Indiana and Illinois. He approached groups of men loitering on street corners, then hurried past them. On quiet streets, passing under trees, he saw women sitting in houses by lamplight, and he longed for a home and a woman of his own. One afternoon, a schoolteacher came to the train station to inquire about the fare to a town in West Virginia. Since the station agent wasn't around, Hugh gave her the information she sought, and she lingered a few minutes to talk with him. He answered her questions in monosyllables, and soon she left, but he was ecstatic and regarded the experience as an adventure. That night, he dreamed of the schoolteacher, and when he awoke, he imagined she was with him in his bedroom. He reached out and touched the pillow. She was soft and smooth, the way he imagined a woman's cheek might be. He didn't know the schoolteacher's name, but he made one up for her. "Be quiet, Elizabeth. Don't let me disturb your sleep," he muttered into the darkness. One evening he went to the schoolteacher's house and stood in the shade of a tree until he saw her come out and walk toward Main Street. Then he took a detour and passed her on the sidewalk in front of the lighted shops. He didn't look at her, but as he passed, her dress brushed his arm, and he was so excited afterward that he couldn't sleep and spent half the night walking and thinking about the wonderful thing that had happened to him.

The agent for tickets, express, and freight services on the Wheeling and Lake Erie railroad in Bidwell, a man named George Pike, lived in a house near the station and, in addition to his duties with the railroad, owned and worked a small farm. He was a slender, alert, silent man with a long, drooping mustache. Both he and his wife worked as Hugh had never seen a man and a woman work together before. Their division of labor was based not on field, but on convenience. Sometimes Mrs. Pike would come to the station to sell tickets, load express boxes and trunks onto passenger trains, and deliver heavy crates of freight to drivers and farmers, while her husband worked in the field behind his house or cooked dinner. Sometimes the opposite was true, and Hugh would not see Mrs. Pike for days at a time.

During the day, the station agent and his wife had little to do at the station, so they disappeared. George Pike laid the wires and pulleys connecting the station, and a large bell hung on the roof of his house. When someone arrived at the station to pick up or deliver a load, Hugh pulled the wire, and the bell began to ring. A few minutes later, George Pike or his wife would rush in from the house or the fields, finish their work, and quickly leave again.

Day after day, Hugh sat in a chair near the station desk or went outside and paced the platform. Locomotives passed, pulling long trains of coal cars. The brakemen waved, and the train disappeared into a grove of trees growing beside the creek where the tracks ran. A creaking farm wagon appeared on Turner's Pike, then disappeared down the tree-lined road to Bidwell. The farmer turned in his seat and looked at Hugh, but unlike the railroad workers, he didn't wave. Brave boys emerged from the road out of town and, shouting and laughing, climbed across the tracks along the rafters of the abandoned pickle factory or went fishing in the creek in the shadow of the factory walls. Their shrill voices added to the loneliness of the place. Hugh found it almost unbearable. In despair, he turned away from the rather meaningless calculations and problem-solving surrounding the number of fences that could be cut from wood, or the number of steel rails or ties required to build a mile of railroad-the countless petty problems that occupied him-and turned to more concrete, practical problems. He recalled the autumn when he had been harvesting corn on a farm in Illinois and, upon entering the station, had waved his long arms, imitating the movements of a man cutting corn. He wondered if it would be possible to create a machine that could do this work, and he attempted to draw the parts of such a machine. Feeling incapable of mastering such a complex task, he sent for books and began to study mechanics. He enrolled in a correspondence school founded by a man in Pennsylvania and spent several days working on problems the man sent him to solve. He asked questions and began to slowly understand the mystery of the application of force. Like other young men in Bidwell, he began to tap into the spirit of the times, but unlike them, he didn't dream of sudden wealth. While they embraced new and futile dreams, he worked to eradicate his penchant for dreaming.

Hugh arrived in Bidwell early in the spring, and in May, June, and July, the quiet station at Pickleville woke up for an hour or two each evening. A certain percentage of the sudden and almost overwhelming surge in express shipping that came with the ripening fruit and berry harvest had been concentrated in Wheeling, and each evening a dozen express trucks, piled high with boxes of berries, waited for the southbound train. When the train pulled into the station, a small crowd had gathered. George Pike and his plump wife worked feverishly, throwing boxes into the door of the express car. The idlers standing around became curious and offered a helping hand. The engineer climbed out of the locomotive, stretched out his legs, and, crossing the narrow road, drank from a pump in George Pike's yard.

Hugh walked to the door of his telegraph office and, standing in the shadows, watched the bustling scene. He wanted to take part, to laugh and talk with the men standing nearby, to approach the engineer and ask questions about the locomotive and its construction, to help George Pike and his wife, and perhaps break their silence and his own. It was enough to get to know them. He thought about all this, but he remained in the shadow of the telegraph office door until, at the train engineer's signal, the engineer boarded his engine and the train began to pull away into the evening darkness. When Hugh emerged from his office, the station platform was empty again. Crickets chirped in the grass beyond the tracks and near the ghostly old factory. Tom Wilder, a hired driver from Bidwell, had pulled a traveling man from the train, and the dust left by his crew's heels still hung in the air above Turner's Pike. From the darkness looming above the trees along the creek behind the factory, came the hoarse croaking of frogs. On Turner's Pike, half a dozen young men from Bidwell, accompanied by an equal number of town girls, walked along the path alongside the road beneath the trees. They had come to the station for somewhere to go, forming a group, but now the half-conscious purpose of their visit became apparent. The group broke into pairs, each trying to get as far away from the others as possible. One pair returned along the path to the station and approached the pump in George Pike's yard. They stood by the pump, laughing and pretending to drink from a tin cup, and when they emerged onto the road again, the others had disappeared. They fell silent. Hugh walked to the end of the platform and watched them slowly walk. He became furiously jealous of the young man who put his arm around his companion's waist and then, when he turned and saw Hugh looking at him, pulled her away again.

The telegraph operator walked quickly along the platform until he was out of the young man's sight, and when he decided the gathering darkness would conceal him, he returned and crawled after him along the path beside the road. The Missourian was once again overcome by a hungry desire to enter the lives of those around him. Being a young man in a stiff white collar, neatly tailored clothes, and strolling in the evening with young girls seemed like the beginning of a path to happiness. He wanted to run screaming along the path beside the road until he caught up with the boy and girl, begging them to take him with them, to accept him as one of their own. But when the momentary impulse passed and he returned to the telegraph office and lit the lamp, he looked at his long, awkward body and couldn't imagine that, as always, he had accidentally become what he wanted to be. Sadness overcame him, and his haggard face, already cut and lined with deep wrinkles, grew longer and thinner. The old childhood notion, implanted in his mind by the words of his adoptive mother, Sara Shepard, that the city and its people could remake him and erase from his body the traces of what he considered his inferior birth, began to fade. He tried to forget the people around him and with renewed vigor applied himself to studying the problems in the books that now lay in a stack on his desk. His tendency to daydream, tempered by the persistent concentration of his mind on specific subjects, began to manifest itself in a new form, and his brain no longer played with images of clouds and people in excited movement, but mastered steel, wood, and iron. The stupid masses of materials dug from the earth and forests were molded into fantastic shapes by his mind. Sitting at the telegraph office by day or strolling alone through the streets of Bidwell at night, he mentally saw thousands of new machines, created by his hands and brain, performing the work done by human hands. He came to Bidwell not only in the hope of finally finding company there, but also because his mind was truly stimulated and he longed for the leisure to begin engaging in tangible activities. When the residents of Bidwell refused to accept him into their town life, leaving him standing on the sidelines, and the tiny men's quarters where he lived, called Pickleville, stood apart from the town's invisible rooftop, he decided to try to forget the men and devote himself fully to his work.

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CHAPTER V


X UGH _ _ THE FIRST INVENTIVE This attempt deeply excited the town of Bidwell. As word of it spread, people who had heard Judge Horace Hanby's speech and whose thoughts were turned to the arrival of a new impulse for forward movement in American life thought they saw in Hugh the instrument of its arrival in Bidwell. From the day he came to live with them, there was much curiosity in shops and houses about the tall, thin, slow-speaking stranger in Pickleville. George Pike told the druggist, Birdie Spinks, how Hugh spent his days working on books and how he made drawings of parts for mysterious machines and left them on his desk at the telegraph office. Birdie Spinks told others, and the story grew. When Hugh walked alone down the street in the evening and thought no one was paying attention to his presence, hundreds of pairs of curious eyes followed him.

A tradition began to emerge regarding the telegraph operator. This tradition made Hugh a towering figure, always walking on a level above that of others. In the imaginations of his fellow citizens of Ohio, he was always pondering great thoughts, solving the mysterious and intricate problems associated with the new mechanical age that Judge Hanby described to eager listeners in the drugstore. The alert, talkative people saw among them a man who could not speak, whose long face was habitually serious, and they could not imagine him as someone who had to deal with the same petty problems as themselves every day.

Young Bidwell, who had come to the Wheeling station with a group of other young men, who had seen the evening train leave for the south, who had met one of the town girls at the station and, to save himself and the others and to be alone with her, had taken her to the pump in George Pike's yard under the pretext of wanting a drink and had walked away with her into the darkness of the summer evening, his thoughts focused on Hugh. The young man's name was Ed Hall, and he was an apprentice to Ben Peeler, a carpenter who had sent his son to Cleveland to attend a technical school. He wanted to marry the girl he had met at the station and didn't see how he could do it on his apprentice carpenter's wages. When he looked back and saw Hugh standing on the station platform, he quickly removed his arm from around the girl's waist and began to speak. "I'll tell you what," he said seriously, "if things don't pick up around here soon, I'm leaving." I'll go to Gibsonburg and get a job in the oil fields, that's what I'll do. I need more money." He sighed heavily and looked over the girl's head into the darkness. "They say that telegraph operator at the station is up to something," he ventured. "It's all talk. Birdie Spinks says he's an inventor; says George Pike told him; says he's always working on new inventions to do things with machines; that his being a telegraph operator is just a bluff. Some people think maybe he was sent here to sort out the question of opening a factory to make one of his inventions, sent by rich people, perhaps to Cleveland or somewhere. Everyone says there will be factories here in Bidwell soon. If only I knew. I don't want to leave unless I have to, but I need more money. Ben Peeler will never give me a raise so I can get married or nothing. I wish I knew that guy in the back so I could ask him what's going on. They say he's smart. I guess he wouldn't tell me anything. I wish I was smart enough to invent something and maybe get rich. I wish I was the kind of guy they say he is."

Ed Hall hugged the girl around the waist again and left. He forgot about Hugh and thought about himself and how he wanted to marry the girl whose young body pressed against his own-he wanted her to be his entirely. For a few hours, he stepped out of Hugh's growing sphere of influence on the city's collective thought and immersed himself in the momentary pleasure of kissing.

And when he emerged from Hugh's influence, others came. That evening on Main Street, everyone was speculating about the purpose of the Missouri man's arrival in Bidwell. The forty dollars a month the Wheeling Railroad paid him couldn't tempt such a man. They were sure of it. Steve Hunter, the son of a jeweler, had returned to town after attending business college in Buffalo, New York, and overheard the conversation and became intrigued. Steve had the makings of a real businessman and decided to investigate. However, Steve wasn't one for direct action, and he was impressed by the idea, then abroad in Bidwell, that Hugh had been sent to town by someone, perhaps a group of capitalists who intended to open factories there.

Steve thought he'd have it easy. In Buffalo, where he was attending business college, he met a girl whose father, E. P. Horn, owned a soap factory; he met her at church and was introduced to her father. The soapmaker, an assertive and positive man who made a product called "Horn's Home Friend Soap," had his own ideas about what a young man should be and how he should make his way in the world, and he enjoyed talking with Steve. He told Bidwell, the son of a jeweler, how he'd started his own factory with little money and achieved success, and he gave Steve plenty of practical advice on starting a company. He talked a lot about such a thing as "control." "When you're ready to strike out on your own, keep this in mind," he said. "You can sell stock and borrow money from the bank, anything you can get, but don't give up control. Wait. That's how I succeeded. I always stayed in control."

Steve wanted to marry Ernestine Horne, but he felt he should prove himself as a businessman before attempting to infiltrate such a wealthy and prominent family. When he returned to his hometown and heard talk of Hugh McVeigh and his inventive genius, he remembered the soap maker's words about control and repeated them to himself. One evening, he was strolling down Turner's Pike and stopped in the dark outside an old pickle factory. He saw Hugh working under the lamp at the telegraph office and was impressed. "I'll lay low and see what he's up to," he told himself. "If he has an invention, I'll form a company. I'll get the money and open a factory. People here will fall over each other to get into a situation like this. I don't believe anyone sent him here. I bet he's just an inventor. People like that are always strange. I'll keep my mouth shut and take my chance." If something starts, I will start it and take control, that's what I will do, I will take control."


In the country extending north beyond the small berry farms located immediately around town, there were other, larger farms. The land on which these larger farms were located was also rich and yielded abundant crops. Large acreages were planted with cabbage, for which markets were built in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Residents of nearby towns often derided Bidwell, calling it Cabbageville. One of the largest cabbage farms, owned by a man named Ezra French, was located on Turner's Pike, two miles from town and a mile from Wheeling Station.

On spring evenings, when the station was dark and quiet, and the air was heavy with the scent of new growth and freshly plowed earth, Hugh would rise from his chair in the telegraph office and walk in the soft darkness. He walked along Turner's Pike into town, saw groups of men standing on the sidewalks in front of stores and young girls walking arm in arm down the street, and then returned to the silent station. A warmth of desire began to creep into his long, habitually cool body. The spring rains had begun, and a soft wind blew from the hills to the south. One moonlit evening, he walked around the old pickle factory to where the brook babbled under the leaning willows, and, standing in the heavy shadows by the factory wall, tried to imagine himself as a man suddenly clean-footed, graceful, and agile. A bush grew by the stream, not far from the factory. He grabbed it with his powerful hands and tore it out by the roots. For a moment, the strength of his shoulders and arms brought him intense masculine satisfaction. He thought of how tightly he could press a woman's body against his, and the spark of spring fire that touched him turned into flame. He felt reborn and tried to leap lightly and gracefully across the stream, but stumbled and fell into the water. Later, he returned soberly to the station and again tried to immerse himself in the problems he had discovered in his books.

Ezra French's farm was located near Turner's Pike, a mile north of Wheeling Station, and consisted of two hundred acres, much of it planted with cabbage. Growing the crop was profitable and required no more care than corn, but planting it was a daunting task. Thousands of plants, grown from seeds planted in a bed behind the barn, had to be laboriously transplanted. The plants were delicate and had to be handled with care. The planter crawled slowly and painfully, looking from the road like a wounded animal struggling to reach a burrow in the distant woods. He crawled forward a short distance, then stopped and hunched over. Picking up a plant dropped on the ground by one of the drippers, he dug a hole in the soft earth with a small triangular hoe and packed the soil around the plant's roots with his hands. Then he crawled on again.

Ezra, a cabbage farmer, came west from a New England state and became wealthy, but he didn't hire additional labor to tend the plants; his sons and daughters did all the work. He was a short, bearded man who, as a youth, had broken his leg in a fall from a barn loft. Unable to properly brace him, he could do little and limped painfully. He was known to the residents of Bidwell as a witty individual, and during the winter he would go into town every day to stand in stores and tell the Rabelaisian stories for which he was famous. But when spring came, he became restlessly active and became a tyrant in his own home and farm. During cabbage planting, he drove his sons and daughters like slaves. When the moon rose in the evening, he forced them to return to the fields immediately after dinner and work until midnight. They walked in sullen silence: the girls limped slowly, throwing plants out of the baskets they carried, and the boys crawled behind them, planting. In the dim light, a small group of people walked slowly up and down the long fields. Ezra hitched a horse to a wagon and brought plants from a bed behind the barn. He walked back and forth, cursing and protesting at every delay in the work. When his wife, a tired little old woman, finished her evening chores, he forced her to come to the fields too. "Now, now," he said sharply, "we need every pair of hands we can get." Although he had several thousand dollars in Bidwell Bank and held mortgages on two or three neighboring farms, Ezra feared poverty and, to keep his family working, pretended he was about to lose everything. "Now we have a chance to save ourselves," he declared. "We must have a big harvest." If we don't work hard now, we'll starve to death." When his sons in the field found they couldn't crawl any longer without resting and stood up to stretch their tired bodies, he stood by the fence at the edge of the field and cursed. "Well, look at the mouths I have to feed, you lazybones!" he shouted. "Keep working. Don't be idle. In two weeks it will be too late to plant, and then we can rest. Every plant we plant now will help save us from ruin. Keep working. Don't be idle."

In the spring of his second year at Bidwell, Hugh often went in the evenings to watch the planters at work by moonlight on a French farm. He made no sign of himself, but hid in a corner of a fence behind some bushes and watched the workers. When he saw the hunched, misshapen figures slowly crawling forward and heard the words of the old man driving them like cattle, his heart was deeply touched, and he wanted to protest. In the dim light, slowly moving figures of women appeared, followed by crouching, crawling men. They walked toward him in a long line, writhing in his field of vision, like grotesquely deformed animals driven by some god of the night to perform a terrible task. His hand rose. He fell again quickly. The triangular hoe sank into the earth. The slow rhythm of the crawler was broken. He reached with his free hand toward a plant lying on the ground in front of him and lowered it into the hole he'd made with his hoe. He patted the soil around the plant's roots with his fingers and began to slowly crawl forward again. There were four French boys, and the two older ones worked silently. The younger boys complained. Three girls and their mother, who had been digging up the plants, reached the end of the row and, turning, walked off into the darkness. "I'm going to leave this slavery," said one of the younger boys. "I'll find work in town. I hope it's true what they say about the factories coming."

The four young men approached the end of the row and, with Ezra out of sight, paused for a moment at the fence near where Hugh was hiding. "I'd rather be a horse or a cow than what I am," the plaintive voice continued. "What good is being alive if you have to work like this?"

For a moment, listening to the voices of the complaining workers, Hugh longed to approach them and beg to participate in their work. Then another thought occurred to him. Crawling figures suddenly appeared in his field of vision. He no longer heard the voice of the youngest French boy, who seemed to have emerged from the ground. The machine-like swaying of the workers' bodies vaguely suggested to him the possibility of building a machine that could do the work they were doing. His mind greedily seized on the idea, and he felt a sense of relief. There was something about the crawling figures and the moonlight from which the voices came that began to awaken in his mind that tremulous, dreamy state in which he had spent much of his childhood. Thinking about the possibility of creating a machine for planting plants was safer. It was in keeping with what Sara Shepard had so often told him about living a safe life. As he walked back through the darkness to the train station, he thought about this and decided that becoming an inventor would be the surest way to finally set out on the path of progress that he was trying to find.

Hugh was consumed by the idea of inventing a machine that could do the work he saw people doing in the fields. He thought about it all day. The idea, once firmly established in his mind, gave him something tangible to work on. His study of mechanics, undertaken purely as an amateur, hadn't progressed far enough to feel capable of actually constructing such a machine, but he believed difficulties could be overcome with patience and experimentation with combinations of wheels, gears, and levers carved from pieces of wood. He bought a cheap watch at Hunter's jewelry store and spent several days disassembling and reassembling it. He abandoned solving mathematical problems and went to buy books describing the construction of machines. A flood of new inventions that were destined to completely change the methods of tillage in America had already begun to spread across the country, and many new and unusual types of agricultural implements arrived at the Bidwell warehouse of the Wheeling Railroad. There Hugh saw a grain harvester, a hay mower, and a strange, long-nosed implement designed for uprooting potatoes, much like the method used by energetic pigs. He studied them carefully. For a moment, his mind turned away from the craving for human contact, content to remain an isolated figure, absorbed in the workings of his own awakening mind.

Something absurd and amusing happened. After the impulse to invent a plant-planting machine had struck him, he'd hidden in a corner of the fence every evening and watched a French family at work. Absorbed in watching the mechanical movements of the people crawling across the fields in the moonlight, he'd forgotten they were human. After he saw them crawl out of sight, turn around at the end of the rows, and then crawl away again into the hazy light, reminding him of the dim distances of his native land on the Mississippi River, he was overcome by a desire to crawl after them and try to imitate their movements. He thought that some of the complex mechanical problems he'd already encountered in connection with the proposed machine could be better understood if he could acquire the necessary movements to implement them in his own body. His lips began to mutter words, and, emerging from the corner of the fence where he'd been hiding, he crawled across the field after the French boys. "The downward thrust will be like this," he muttered, raising his hand and swinging it above his head. His fist landed on the soft earth. He forgot about the rows of newly sprouting plants and crawled right over them, pressing them into the soft earth. He stopped crawling and waved his hand. He tried to connect his hands with the mechanical arms of the machine that was being created in his mind. Holding one hand firmly in front of him, he moved it up and down. "The stroke will be shorter. The machine must be built close to the ground. The wheels and horses will move along the paths between the rows. The wheels must be wide to provide traction. I will transfer the power from the wheels to get the power to operate the mechanism," he said out loud.

Hugh rose and stood in the moonlight in the cabbage field, his arms still flexing upward and downward. The enormous length of his figure and arms was emphasized by the flickering, uncertain light. The workers, sensing a strange presence, jumped to their feet and stopped, listening and watching. Hugh advanced toward them, still muttering words and waving his arms. Terror gripped the workers. One of the IV women screamed and fled across the field, the others following her, crying. "Don't do this. Go away," shouted the eldest of the French boys, and then he and his brothers ran too.

Hearing voices, Hugh stopped and looked around. The field was empty. He plunged back into his mechanical calculations. He returned by road to Wheeling Station and the telegraph office, where he spent half the night working on a crude drawing he was attempting to make from parts of his plant-planting apparatus, oblivious to the fact that he was creating a myth that would spread throughout the village. The French boys and their sisters boldly declared that a ghost had come to the cabbage fields and threatened them with death unless they left and stopped working at night. Their mother, her voice trembling, confirmed their claim. Ezra French, who hadn't seen the ghost and didn't believe its story, sensed revolution. He swore. He threatened the entire family with starvation. He declared that the lie had been invented to deceive and betray him.

But the night's work in the cabbage fields of the French farm came to an end. This story was told in the town of Bidwell, and, as the entire French family, except Ezra, swore to its veracity, it was believed. Tom Foresby, an elderly citizen who was a spiritualist, claimed to have heard his father say that there had once been an Indian burial ground on Turner Pike.

The cabbage field on the French farm became locally famous. A year later, two other men claimed to have seen the figure of a giant Indian dancing and singing a dirge in the moonlight. The farm boys, who had spent the evening in town and were returning late to the lonely farmhouses, let their horses run when they arrived at the farm. Once he was far behind, they breathed a sigh of relief. Despite his continued cursing and threats, Ezra was never able to take his family out into the fields at night again. In Bidwell, he claimed that the ghost story, concocted by his lazy sons and daughters, had robbed him of the opportunity to earn a decent living on his farm.

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CHAPTER VI


Steve H UNTER decided it was time to do something to wake up his hometown. The call of the spring wind awakened something in him, as it had in Hugh. It came from the south, bringing rain, followed by warm, clear days. Robins galloped across the front lawns of the houses on the residential streets of Bidwell, and the air was once again filled with the rich sweetness of freshly plowed earth. Like Hugh, Steve strolled alone through the dark, dimly lit streets of home on spring evenings, but he didn't try to clumsily leap streams in the dark or pull bushes from the ground, nor did he waste time dreaming of becoming physically young, clean, and handsome.

Before his great industrial achievements, Steve wasn't highly regarded in his hometown. He was a loud and boastful youth, spoiled by his father. When he was twelve, so-called safety bicycles first came into use, and for a long time, he was the only one in town. In the evenings, he would ride up and down Main Street, frightening the horses and arousing the envy of the town boys. He learned to ride without his hands on the handlebars, and the other boys began calling him Smarty Hunter. Later, because he wore a stiff white collar that folded over his shoulders, they gave him a girl's name. "Hello, Susan," they would shout, "don't fall and get your clothes dirty."

In the spring that marked the beginning of his great industrial adventure, a soft spring breeze set Steve dreaming his own dreams. Strolling the streets, avoiding other young men and women, he remembered Ernestine, the daughter of a Buffalo soap maker, and thought long and hard about the splendor of the large stone house where she lived with her father. His body ached for her, but he felt he could handle it. How he could achieve the financial position that would allow him to ask for her hand in marriage was a more difficult problem. Since returning from business college and settling in his hometown, he had secretly, and for the price of two new five-dollar dresses, entered into a physical union with a girl named Louise Trucker, whose father was a farm laborer. He left his mind free for other things. He intended to become a manufacturer, the first in Bidwell, to become the leader of the new movement sweeping the country. He had thought through what he wanted to do and now only needed to find something to manufacture to carry out his plans. First of all, he carefully selected the few people he intended to ask to go with him. There were John Clarke, the banker, his own father, E. H. Hunter, the town jeweler, Thomas Butterworth, a wealthy farmer, and young Gordon Hart, who worked as an assistant cashier at the bank. For a month, he had been dropping hints to these people that something mysterious and important was about to happen. With the exception of his father, who had boundless faith in his son's insight and abilities, the people he wanted to impress were only amused. One day, Thomas Butterworth entered the bank and discussed the matter with John Clarke. "The young miser has always been a clever fellow and a strong blowhard," he said. "What is he doing now? What is he nudging and whispering about?"

As he strolled down Bidwell's main street, Steve began to acquire the air of superiority that would later make him so respected and feared. He hurried forward with an unusually intense and absorbed gaze. He saw his fellow townspeople as if through a haze, and sometimes he didn't see them at all. Along the way, he pulled papers from his pocket, read them quickly, and then quickly put them away again. When he finally spoke-perhaps to someone who had known him since childhood-there was something affable in his manner, bordering on condescension. One March morning, on the sidewalk in front of the post office, he met Zebe Wilson, the town shoemaker. Steve stopped and smiled. "Well, good morning, Mr. Wilson," he said. "And what is the quality of the leather you get from the tanneries these days?"

Word of this strange greeting spread among the merchants and artisans. "What is he doing now?" they asked each other. "Mr. Wilson, indeed! So what's wrong between this young man and Zebe Wilson?"

That afternoon, four salesmen from Main Street shops and carpenter's apprentice Ed Hall, who had half the day off due to rain, decided to investigate. One by one, they walked down Hamilton Street to Zebe Wilson's shop and went inside to repeat Steve Hunter's greeting. "Well, good afternoon, Mr. Wilson," they said, "and what is the quality of the leather you get from the tanneries these days?" Ed Hall, the last of the five to enter the shop to repeat the formal and polite question, barely escaped with his life. Zebe Wilson hurled a cobbler's hammer at him, and it pierced the glass at the top of the shop door.

One day, while Tom Butterworth and banker John Clark were discussing the new, important appearance he'd adopted and half-indignantly wondering what he meant by whispering that something momentous was about to happen, Steve walked down Main Street past the front door of the bank. John Clark called to him. The three men bumped into each other, and the jeweler's son sensed that the banker and the wealthy farmer were amused by his pretensions. He immediately showed himself to be what everyone in Bidwell would later recognize: a man skilled in managing people and affairs. Lacking any evidence to support his claims at the time, he decided to bluff. With a wave of his hand and an air of knowing what he was doing, he led the two men into the back room of the bank and closed the door leading to the large room where the general public was admitted. "You'd think he owned the place," John Clarke later told young Gordon Hart with a hint of admiration in his voice as he described what happened in the back room.

Steve immediately became immersed in what he wanted to say to the two wealthy citizens of his town. "Well, look here, you two," he began seriously. "I'm going to tell you something, but you have to keep quiet." He walked over to the window overlooking the alley and glanced around, as if afraid he might be overheard, then sat down in the chair that John Clark usually occupied on the rare occasions when the Bidwell Bank directors held meetings. Steve looked over the heads of the two men, who, despite themselves, were beginning to look impressed. "Well," he began, "there's a guy in Pickleville. You may have heard people talking about him. He's a telegraph operator there. You may have heard him always drawing machine parts. I guess everyone in town is wondering what he's up to."

Steve looked at the two men, then stood nervously from his chair and began pacing the room. "That guy's my man. I put him there," he declared. "I didn't want to tell anyone yet."

The two men nodded, and Steve lost himself in the idea conjured up by his imagination. It didn't occur to him that what he'd just said wasn't true. He began to scold the two men. "Well, I guess I'm on the wrong track here," he said. "My man has made an invention that will bring in millions of dollars in profit to anyone who understands it. I'm already talking to big bankers in Cleveland and Buffalo. A big plant is about to be built, and you see for yourself how it is, here I am at home. I was raised here as a boy."

The excited young man launched into an exposition of the spirit of the new times. He grew bolder and scolded the older men. "You know yourself that factories are springing up everywhere, in towns all over the state," he said. "Will Bidwell wake up? Will we have factories here? You know damn well we won"t, and I know why. It"s because a man like me, who grew up here, has to go to the city for money to carry out his plans. If I talked to you guys, you"d laugh at me. Maybe in a few years I"ll make you more money than you"ve earned in your entire life, but what"s the point of talking? I"m Steve Hunter; you knew me when I was a kid. You"d laugh. What"s the point of trying to tell you guys about my plans?"

Steve turned as if to leave the room, but Tom Butterworth grabbed his arm and pulled him back to his chair. "Now tell us what you're up to," he demanded. He, in turn, became indignant. "If you've got something to produce, you can get support here as anywhere else," he said. He was convinced the jeweler's son was telling the truth. It hadn't occurred to him that the young man from Bidwell would dare lie to such respectable men as John Clark and himself. "You leave those city bankers alone," he said firmly. "You'll tell us your story. What do you mean?"

In the quiet little room, the three men looked at each other. Tom Butterworth and John Clark, in turn, began to dream. They recalled stories they had heard of the vast fortunes quickly amassed by men possessing new and valuable inventions. The country was full of such stories at that time. They were scattered in every wind. They quickly realized they had made a mistake in their attitude toward Steve and were eager to win his favor. They had summoned him to the bank to intimidate and ridicule him. Now they regretted it. As for Steve, all he wanted was to go away-to be alone and think. A hurt expression flitted across his face. "Well," he said, "I thought I"d give Bidwell a chance. There are three or four men here. I"ve talked to you all and dropped a few hints, but I"m not ready to say anything definite yet."

Seeing the new look of respect in the two men's eyes, Steve grew bolder. "I was going to call a meeting when I was ready," he declared pompously. "You two are doing the same thing I am. You keep your mouth shut. Don't go near that telegraph operator and don't talk to anyone. If you mean business, I'll give you a chance to make a ton of money, more than you ever dreamed of, but don't rush." He pulled a stack of letters from his inside coat pocket and tapped them on the edge of the table in the center of the room. Another bold thought occurred to him.

"I've received letters offering me large sums of money to move my factory to Cleveland or Buffalo," he declared emphatically. "This isn't hard-to-get money. I can tell you that, men. What a man wants in his hometown is respect. He doesn't want to be looked upon as a fool because he's trying to do something to get ahead in the world."


Steve walked boldly out of the bank onto Main Street. When he was free of the two men, he was frightened. "Well, I did it. I made a fool of myself," he muttered out loud. At the bank, he had said that the telegraph operator, Hugh McVeigh, was his man and that he had brought the fellow to Bidwell. What a fool he had been. In an effort to impress the two older men, he had told a story whose falsity could have been exposed in a few minutes. Why hadn't he maintained his dignity and waited? There was no reason for such certainty. He had gone too far; he had gotten carried away. Of course, he had told the two men not to approach the telegraph operator, but that would undoubtedly only arouse their suspicions about the insincerity of his story. They would discuss the matter and begin their own investigation. Then they would find out he had lied. He imagined the two men already whispering about the likelihood of his story. Like most perceptive people, he had an exalted view of the perspicacity of others. He walked a short distance from the shore and then turned to look back. A shudder ran through him. A sickening fear crossed his mind that the telegraph operator in Pickleville wasn't an inventor at all. The town was full of stories, and at the bank he'd exploited this fact to impress; but what proof did he have? No one had seen any of the inventions supposedly invented by the mysterious stranger from Missouri. After all, there was nothing but whispered suspicions, old wives' tales, fables concocted by people with nothing better to do than hang out in drugstores and make up stories.

The thought that Hugh McVeigh might not be an inventor overwhelmed him, and he quickly dismissed it. He needed to think of something more urgent. The story of the bluff he'd just pulled at the bank would get out, and the whole town would laugh at him. The town's young people didn't like him. They twisted the story around their tongues. Old losers with nothing better to do happily picked up the story and elaborated on it. Guys like cabbage farmer Ezra French, who had a talent for saying he was cutting things, could show it off. They would dream up imaginary inventions, grotesque, absurd inventions. Then they would invite the young men to his place and offer to hire them, promote them, and make them all rich. The men would joke at his expense as he walked down Main Street. His dignity would be gone forever. Even schoolchildren would have made a fool of him, as they had in his youth, when he bought a bicycle and rode it in the evenings in front of the other boys.

Steve hurried off Main Street and crossed the bridge over the river to Turner's Pike. He didn't know what he was going to do, but he sensed that much was at stake and that he had to act immediately. The day was warm and overcast, and the road leading to Pickleville was muddy. It had rained the night before, and more was forecast. The path along the road was slippery, and he was so absorbed that as he moved forward, his feet slipped from under him, and he sat down in a small puddle of water. A farmer passing on the road turned and laughed at him. "Go to hell," Steve shouted. "Mind your business and go to hell."

The distracted young man tried to walk sedately along the path. The tall grass along the path soaked his boots, and his hands were wet and dirty. The farmers turned in their wagon seats and stared at him. For some obscure reason he couldn't quite fathom, he was terrified of meeting Hugh McVeigh. At the bank, he had been in the presence of people trying to outwit him, outsmart him, and have fun at his expense. He sensed it and resented it. This knowledge gave him a certain courage; it allowed him to concoct a story about an inventor secretly working on his own account and the city bankers eager to provide him with capital. Although he was terrified of being found out, he felt a slight surge of pride at the thought of the audacity with which he had pulled the letters from his pocket and challenged the two men to call his bluff.

Steve, however, sensed something special about this man from the Pickleville telegraph office. He'd been in town for nearly two years, and no one knew anything about him. His silence could mean anything. He feared the tall, taciturn Missourian might decide to have nothing to do with him, and he imagined being rudely dismissed and told to mind his own business.

Steve instinctively knew how to deal with business people. They simply created the idea of money being made effortlessly. He did the same with the two men at the bank, and it worked. Eventually, he managed to make them respect him. He had mastered the situation. He wasn't such a fool at such things. The next thing he encountered might have been quite different. Perhaps Hugh McVeigh was a great inventor after all, a man with a powerful creative mind. Perhaps he had been sent to Bidwell by a big businessman from some town. Big businessmen did strange and mysterious things; they ran wires in all directions, controlling a thousand little avenues to wealth creation.

Just beginning his career as a businessman, Steve developed an overwhelming respect for what he considered the subtlety of business. Like all other American young men of his generation, he was swept off his feet by the propaganda that was then and continues to be used, designed to create the illusion of greatness associated with the possession of money. He didn't know it then, and despite his own success and his later use of illusion-creating techniques, he never learned that in the industrial world, a reputation for greatness of mind is built the same way a Detroit automobile manufacturer might. He didn't know that people are hired to promote a politician's name so that he can be called a statesman, like a new brand of breakfast cereal so that it can be sold; that most of today's great men are merely illusions, born of a national thirst for greatness. Someday, a wise man who hasn't read too many books but has walked among the people will discover and expound a very interesting thing about America. The earth is vast, and individuals have a national thirst for vastness. Everyone wants an Illinois-sized man for Illinois, an Ohio-sized man for Ohio, and a Texas-sized man for Texas.

Of course, Steve Hunter had no idea about any of this. He never had. The people he'd already begun to consider great and tried to emulate were like those strange, gigantic protrusions that sometimes grow on the slopes of unhealthy trees, but he didn't know that. He didn't know that, even in those early days, a system for creating a myth of greatness was being built across the country. At the seat of American government in Washington, D.C., crowds of quite intelligent and completely unhealthy young people were already being recruited for this purpose. In more halcyon times, many of these young people might have become artists, but they weren't strong enough to withstand the growing power of the dollar. Instead, they became newspaper correspondents and politicians' secretaries. All day, every day, they used their wits and their talent as writers to create plots and create myths about the people they worked for. They were like trained sheep, used in large slaughterhouses to lead other sheep into the pens for slaughter. Having polluted their minds for the sake of employment, they made a living by polluting the minds of others. They had already realized that the work they were about to perform didn't require great intelligence. What was required was constant repetition. They simply had to repeat over and over again that the person they worked for was great. No evidence was needed to substantiate their assertions; the people who became great in this way didn't need to perform great deeds, the way brands of crackers or breakfast foods are made to sell. Silly, prolonged, and persistent repetition was all that was needed.

Just as industrial-era politicians created a myth about themselves, so too did the owners of dollars, big bankers, railroad operators, and patrons of industrial enterprises. The impulse to do so is partly driven by insight, but mostly by an inner desire to be aware of some real moment in the world. Knowing that the talent that made them rich is merely a secondary talent, and somewhat uneasy about it, they hire people to glorify it. Having hired someone for this purpose, they themselves are childish enough to believe the myth they paid to create. Every rich person in the country unconsciously hates their press agent.

Although he never read books, Steve was a regular newspaper reader and was deeply impressed by the stories he read about the acumen and ability of America's captains of industry. To him, they were supermen, and he would have groveled before Gould or Cal Price, influential figures among the wealthy of the time. Walking along Turner's Pike on the day that industry was born in Bidwell, he thought of these men, as well as the less wealthy men of Cleveland and Buffalo, and he feared that as he approached Hugh, he might find himself in competition with one of them. Hurrying under the gray sky, however, he realized that the time had come for action and that he must immediately put the plans he had formed in his mind to a feasibility test; that he must immediately see Hugh McVeigh, find out whether he really had an invention that could be manufactured, and try to secure some property rights to it. "If I don't act now, either Tom Butterworth or John Clarke will beat me to it," he thought. He knew they were both shrewd and capable men. Hadn't they become wealthy? Even during their conversation at the bank, when his words seemed to have made an impression on them, they might well have been plotting to get the better of him. They would act, but he had to act first.

Steve lacked the courage to tell a lie. He lacked the imagination to understand the power of a lie. He walked quickly until he reached the Wheeling station in Pickleville, and then, lacking the courage to confront Hugh right away, he passed the station and crept behind the abandoned pickle factory opposite the tracks. He climbed through a broken window in the back and crept like a thief across the dirt floor until he reached the window overlooking the station. A freight train passed slowly by, and a farmer came into the station to collect his load of goods. George Pike ran from his home to attend to the farmer's needs. He returned to his house, and Steve was left alone in the presence of the man on whom he felt his entire future depended. He was as excited as a country girl before her lover. Through the telegraph windows, he saw Hugh sitting at the table with a book in front of him. The book's presence frightened him. He decided that the mysterious Missouri man must be some strange intellectual giant. He was sure that anyone who could sit quietly and read for hours on end in such a secluded, isolated place couldn't be made of ordinary clay. As he stood in the deep shadows inside the old building, looking at the man he was trying to find the courage to approach, a Bidwell resident named Dick Spearsman approached the station and, going inside, spoke with the telegraph operator. Steve was shaking with anxiety. The man who had come to the station was an insurance agent who also owned a small berry farm on the outskirts of town. He had a son who had moved west to set up land in Kansas, and the father was thinking of visiting him. He had come to the station to inquire about train fares, but when Steve saw him talking to Hugh, the thought occurred to him that John Clark or Thomas Butterworth might have sent him to the station to investigate the truth about what had happened. statements he made at the bank. "That would be like them," he muttered to himself. "They wouldn't come themselves. They'll send someone they think I won't suspect. Damn it, they'll tread carefully."

Trembling with fear, Steve paced back and forth through the empty factory. A hanging cobweb brushed his face, and he jumped back as if a hand were reaching out of the darkness to touch him. Shadows lurked in the corners of the old building, and distorted thoughts began to creep into his head. He rolled and lit a cigarette, then remembered that the match flame could probably be seen from the station. He cursed himself for his carelessness. Throwing the cigarette onto the dirt floor, he ground it out with his heel. When Dick Spearsman finally disappeared down the road to Bidwell, emerged from the old factory, and reentered Turner's Pike, he felt incapable of talking business, yet he had to act immediately. In front of the factory, he stopped on the road and tried to wipe the dirt from the seat of his trousers with a handkerchief. Then he went to the stream and washed his dirty hands. With wet hands, he straightened his tie and adjusted the collar of his coat. He had the air of a man about to ask a woman to marry him. Trying to appear as important and dignified as possible, he walked across the station platform and into the telegraph office to confront Hugh and find out once and for all what fate the gods had in store for him.


This undoubtedly contributed to Steve's happiness in the afterlife, during his days of growing rich and later, when he was achieving public honors, contributing to campaign funds, and even secretly dreaming of serving in the United States Senate or becoming governor. He never knew how much he had outsmarted himself that day in his youth when he struck his first business deal with Hugh at Wheeling Station in Pickleville. Later, Hugh's interest in Stephen Hunter's industrial enterprises was taken over by a man as astute as Steve himself. Tom Butterworth, who had earned money and knew how to make and handle it, managed such things for the inventor, and Steve's chance was lost forever.

But that's part of the story of Bidwell's development, a story Steve never understood. When he overdid it that day, he didn't know what he'd done. He'd made a deal with Hugh and was happy to escape the predicament he thought he'd gotten himself into by talking too much to the two men at the bank.

Although Steve's father always had great faith in his son's insight and, when talking to other men, presented him as an unusually capable and underappreciated person, in private they did not get along. In the Hunter house, they bickered and snarled at each other. Steve's mother died when he was a small boy, and his only sister, two years older than him, always stayed home and rarely went out. She was semi-invalid. Some unknown nervous disorder had distorted her body, and her face twitched constantly. One morning in the shed behind the Hunter house, Steve, then fourteen, was oiling his bicycle when his sister appeared and stopped, watching him. A small wrench was lying on the ground, and she picked it up. Suddenly and without warning, she began hitting him on the head. He had to knock her down to wrest the wrench from her hand. After the incident, she lay in bed for a month.

Elsie Hunter was always a source of unhappiness for her brother. As he matured in life, Steve's passion for the respect of his peers grew. It became something of an obsession, and among other things, he desperately wanted to be thought of as a man with good blood. A man he hired investigated his pedigree, and with the exception of his immediate family, he found it quite satisfactory. His sister, with her twisted body and persistently twitching face, seemed to constantly sneer at him. He was almost afraid to enter her presence. After he began to acquire wealth, he married Ernestine, the daughter of a soap maker from Buffalo, and when her father died, she too had a lot of money. His own father died, and he set up his own farm. This was at a time when large houses began to appear on the outskirts of the berry fields and in the hills south of Bidwell. After their father's death, Steve became his sister's guardian. The jeweler was left a small estate, and it was entirely in his hands. Elsie lived with one servant in a small town house and found herself completely dependent on her brother's generosity. In a sense, one could say she lived on her hatred for him. When he occasionally came to her home, she didn't see him. A servant came to the door and announced that she was asleep. Almost every month she wrote a letter demanding that he hand over her share of their father's money, but this brought no result. Steve sometimes spoke to an acquaintance about his difficulties with her. "I pity this woman more than I can express," he said. "To make a poor, suffering soul happy is the dream of my life. You see for yourself that I provide her with all the comforts of life. We are an old family. From an expert in such matters, I learned that we are descendants of a certain Hunter, a courtier of King Edward II of England. "Our blood may have thinned a little. The family's entire lifeblood was concentrated in me. My sister doesn't understand me, and this has caused much unhappiness and heartache, but I will always fulfill my duty to her."

Late in the evening of a spring day that was also the most eventful day of his life, Steve walked quickly along the Wheeling station platform toward the telegraph office. It was a public place, but before entering, he paused, adjusted his tie again, brushed off his clothes, and knocked on the door. When there was no answer, he quietly opened the door and peered inside. Hugh was sitting at his desk but didn't look up. Steve entered and closed the door. Coincidentally, the moment of his entrance also became a significant moment in the life of the man he had come to visit. The mind of the young inventor, so long dreamy and uncertain, suddenly became unusually clear and free. He had experienced one of those moments of inspiration that come to intense people working hard. The mechanical problem he had been trying so hard to solve became clear. It was one of those moments that Hugh later considered the justification for his existence, and in later life, he began to live for such moments. Nodding to Steve, he stood and hurried toward the building the Wheeling used as a freight warehouse. The jeweler's son followed close behind. On a raised platform in front of the warehouse stood a strange-looking piece of farm equipment-a potato digger, received the day before and now awaiting delivery to a farmer. Hugh knelt down beside the machine and examined it closely. Inarticulate exclamations escaped his lips. For the first time in his life, he felt uninhibited in the presence of another person. The two men, one almost grotesquely tall, the other short and already leaning toward plump, stared at each other. "What are you making up? I came to you about this," Steve said timidly.

Hugh didn't answer the question directly. He crossed the narrow platform to the freight warehouse and began sketching roughly on the wall of the building. Then he tried to explain his plant adjustment machine. He spoke of it as something he'd already accomplished. That was precisely how he thought of it at the moment. "I hadn't thought of using a large wheel with levers attached at regular intervals," he said absently. "Now I have to find the money. That's the next step. Now I need to build a working model of the machine. I need to figure out what changes I'll have to make to my calculations."

The two men returned to the telegraph office, and while Hugh listened, Steve made his offer. Even then, he didn't understand what the machine he needed to build was supposed to do. It was enough for him that the machine needed to be built, and he wanted immediate ownership. As the two men walked back from the freight depot, Hugh's remark about getting paid flashed through his mind. He felt scared again. "There's someone in the background," he thought. "Now I have to make an offer he can't refuse. I can't leave until I've made a deal with him."

Growing increasingly preoccupied with his own worries, Steve offered to fund the model car from his own pocket. "We"ll rent the old pickle factory across the street," he said, opening the door and pointing with a trembling finger. "I can get it cheap. I"ll put in windows and a floor. Then I"ll find someone to draw the model car. Ellie Mulberry can do it. I"ll get him for you. He can make it all go away if you just show him what you want. He"s half crazy and doesn"t want to reveal our secret. When the model is done, leave it to me, just leave it to me."

Rubbing his hands, Steve boldly walked up to the telegraph operator's desk, picked up a sheet of paper, and began writing a contract. It stipulated that Hugh would receive a royalty of ten percent of the sale price of the machine he had invented, which would be manufactured by a company organized by Stephen Hunter. The contract also stipulated that a promotional company would be organized immediately and that funds would be allocated for the experimental work Hugh had yet to conduct. The Missouri resident was to begin receiving his salary immediately. As Steve explained in detail, he was not to risk anything. Once he was ready, mechanics were to be hired and paid. Once the contract was written and read aloud, a copy was made, and Hugh, again indescribably embarrassed, signed his name.

With a wave of his hand, Steve placed a small stack of money on the table. "This is for starters," he said, frowning at George Pike, who at that moment approached the door. The freight agent quickly left, and the two men were alone. Steve shook hands with his new partner. He went out, then came back in. "You see," he said mysteriously. "Fifty dollars is your first month's pay. I was ready for you. I brought it with me. Just leave it all to me, just leave it to me." He went out again, and Hugh was alone. He watched as the young man crossed the tracks to the old factory and paced back and forth in front of it. When the farmer approached and shouted at him, he did not respond, but stepped back into the road and surveyed the abandoned old building as a general might survey a battlefield. Then he walked quickly down the road toward town, and the farmer turned in the seat of the wagon and watched him go.

Hugh McVeigh watched, too. After Steve left, he walked to the end of the station platform and looked out at the road leading into town. It seemed miraculous to finally be talking to a Bidwell resident. Part of the contract he'd signed arrived, and he went into the station, picked up his copy, and pocketed it. Then he went out again. As he reread it and realized anew that he should be paid a living wage, have time, and be helped to solve a problem that had now become so crucial to his happiness, it seemed as if he were in the presence of some kind of god. He recalled Sara Shepard's words about the vibrant and alert citizens of eastern cities, and he realized that he was in the presence of such a being, that he had somehow connected with such a being in his new job. The realization overwhelmed him completely. Completely forgetting his duties as a telegraph operator, he closed the office and went for a walk through the meadows and small patches of forest that still remained on the open plain north of Pickleville. He returned only late in the evening, and when he did, he still hadn't solved the mystery of what had happened. All he gained from it was the fact that the machine he was trying to create had enormous and mysterious significance for the civilization he had come to inhabit and of which he so passionately wanted to become a part. This fact seemed almost sacred to him. He was overcome with a new determination to complete and perfect his installation machine.


A meeting to organize an advertising campaign that would, in turn, launch the first industrial enterprise in the town of Bidwell took place in the back room of the Bidwell Bank one June afternoon. Berry season had just ended, and the streets were bustling with people. A circus had arrived in town, and at one o'clock the parade began. Harnessed horses belonging to visiting farmers lined the shops in two long rows. The bank meeting didn't take place until four o'clock, when the bank's business had already concluded. The day was hot and muggy, and a thunderstorm was threatening. For some reason, the entire town knew about the meeting that day, and despite the excitement generated by the circus's arrival, it was on everyone's minds. From the very beginning of his career, Steve Hunter had a knack for imbuing everything he did with an air of mystery and importance. Everyone saw the mechanism that created his myth at work, but they were nonetheless impressed. Even the people of Bidwell, who retained the ability to laugh at Steve, could not laugh at what he did.

Two months before the meeting, the town was on edge. Everyone knew that Hugh McVeigh had suddenly given up his job at the telegraph office and was engaged in some kind of venture with Steve Hunter. "Well, I see he's dropped the mask, that guy," said Alban Foster, superintendent of Bidwell schools, when he mentioned the matter to the Reverend Harvey Oxford, a Baptist minister.

Steve made sure that, although everyone was curious, their curiosity remained unsatisfied. Even his father remained in the dark. The two men had a heated argument about it, but since Steve had three thousand dollars left to him by his mother and was well over twenty-one, his father could do nothing.

In Pickleville, the windows and doors in the rear of the abandoned factory were bricked up, and over the windows and door in the front, where the floor had been laid, iron bars had been installed, specially crafted by Lew Twining, a blacksmith from Bidwell. The bars above the door sealed the room at night, creating a prison-like atmosphere in the factory. Every night before bed, Steve took a stroll through Pickleville. The building's ominous appearance at night gave him a special satisfaction. "They'll find out what I'm up to when I want to," he told himself. Ellie Mulberry worked in the factory during the day. Under Hugh's direction, he carved pieces of wood into various shapes, but he had no idea what he was doing. No one was accepted into the telegraph operator's company except the idiot and Steve Hunter. When Ellie Mulberry walked out onto Main Street at night, everyone stopped him and asked him a thousand questions, but he only shook his head and smiled stupidly. On Sunday afternoon, crowds of men and women walked along Turners Pike in Pickleville and stood looking at the empty building, but no one attempted to enter. The bars were in place, and the windows were boarded up. A large sign hung above the door facing the street. "Stay out. This means you," it read.

The four men who met Steve at the bank were vaguely aware that some invention was being perfected, but they didn't know what it was. They discussed the matter informally with their friends, which heightened their curiosity. Everyone tried to guess what it was. When Steve wasn't around, John Clark and young Gordon Hart pretended to know everything, but they gave the impression of being sworn to secrecy. The fact that Steve hadn't told them anything seemed like an insult. "He's a young upstart, I believe, but he's bluffing," the banker told his friend Tom Butterworth.

On Main Street, the old and young men standing in front of the shops in the evenings also tried to ignore the jeweler's son and the air of importance he always assumed. He, too, was spoken of as a young upstart and chatterbox, but after his association with Hugh McVeigh began, the conviction in their voices disappeared. "I read in the paper that a man from Toledo made thirty thousand dollars on his invention. He did it in less than twenty-four hours. He just thought of it. It's a new way to seal fruit cans," a man absentmindedly remarked in the crowd in front of Birdie Spink's Drug Store.

In the drugstore, Judge Hanby, standing by the empty stove, spoke insistently of the time when the factories would come. To those listening, he seemed like a kind of John the Baptist, calling for a new day. One May evening of that year, when a good crowd had gathered, Steve Hunter walked in and bought a cigar. Everyone fell silent. Birdie Spinks, for some mysterious reason, was a little upset. Something had happened in the store that, had there been someone there to write it down, might later be remembered as the moment that marked the dawn of a new era in Bidwell. The druggist, holding out the cigar, glanced at the young man whose name was so suddenly on everyone's lips, whom he had known since childhood, and then addressed him as he had never addressed a young man his age before. From an older man in town. "Well, good evening, Mr. Hunter," he said respectfully. - And how are you feeling this evening?

To the people who met him at the bank, Steve described the factory setup machine and the work it would perform. "It's the most perfect thing of its kind I've ever seen," he said with the air of a man who had spent his entire life as an expert in machine research. Then, to everyone's amazement, he produced sheets of figures estimating the cost of manufacturing the machine. It seemed to those present that the question of the machine's feasibility had already been decided. The sheets, covered with figures, created the impression that the actual start of production was already near. Without raising his voice and as if it were something self-evident, Steve proposed that those present subscribe to three thousand dollars' worth of advertising stock; this money would be used to improve the machine and put it to practical use in the fields, while a larger company was being organized to build the factory. For these three thousand dollars, each of the men would later receive six thousand dollars in stock in the larger company. They would do this 100 percent on their initial investment. As for himself, he owned an invention, and it was very valuable. He had already received numerous offers from other men in other places. He wanted to stay in his town and among the people who had known him since childhood. He would retain a controlling interest in a larger company, and this would allow him to take care of his friends. He offered to make John Clark the treasurer of the promotion company. Everyone could see that he would be the right man. Gordon Hart was to become the manager. Tom Butterworth could, if he found the time, help him with the actual organization of the larger company. He didn't propose to do anything in the details. Most of the shares would have to be sold to farmers and townspeople, and he saw no reason why a certain commission should not be paid for the sale of shares.

Four men emerged from the back room of a bank just as the storm that had been threatening all day broke on Main Street. They stood together by the window and watched people scurry past the shops, heading home from the circus. Farmers jumped into their wagons and urged their horses into a trot. The entire street was filled with shouting and running people. To an observer standing at the bank window, Bidwell, Ohio, might have seemed no longer a quiet town filled with people living quiet lives and thinking calm thoughts, but a tiny part of some gigantic modern city. The sky was extraordinarily black, as if from a mill smoke. The hurrying people could have been workers escaping from the mill at the end of the day. Clouds of dust swept down the street. Steve Hunter's imagination was awakened. For some reason, the black clouds of dust and the running people gave him an enormous sense of power. It almost seemed as if he had filled the sky with clouds, and that something hidden within him frightened people. He longed to get away from the people who had only just agreed to join him on his first great industrial adventure. He felt that, ultimately, they were merely puppets, creatures he could use, people he carried along with him, just as people running through the streets were carried along by a storm. He and the storm were, in a sense, alike. He longed to be alone with the storm, to walk with dignity and right in its face, because he felt that in the future, he would walk with dignity and right in the face of people.

Steve walked out of the bank and onto the street. The people inside shouted at him, telling him he was going to get wet, but he ignored their warning. As he left, and as his father hurried across the street to his jewelry store, the three men remaining in the bank looked at each other and laughed. Like the men loitering outside Birdie Spinks's drugstore, they wanted to belittle him and were inclined to call him names; but for some reason, they couldn't. Something had happened to them. They looked at each other, questioningly, each waiting for the others to speak. "Well, whatever happens, we have nothing to lose," John Clark finally remarked.

And across the bridge onto Turner's Pike stepped Steve Hunter, a budding industrial magnate. A fierce wind swept across the vast fields that stretched alongside the road, tearing leaves from the trees and carrying with it enormous masses of dust. It seemed to him that the scurrying black clouds in the sky resembled plumes of smoke billowing from the chimneys of the factories he owned. In his mind's eye, he also saw his town become a city, shrouded in the smoke of his factories. Looking at the fields whipped by the storm, he realized that the road he was walking along would one day become a city street. "Pretty soon I'll get an option on this land," he said thoughtfully. A feeling of elation came over him, and when he reached Pickleville, he didn't go to the store where Hugh and Ellie Mulberry worked, but turned and walked back to town, through the mud and pouring rain.

It was a time when Steve wanted to be alone, to feel like a great man in society. He had intended to go to the old pickle factory and escape the rain, but when he reached the railroad tracks, he turned back, because he suddenly realized that in the presence of the silent, focused inventor, he could never feel great. He wanted to feel great that evening, and so, ignoring the rain and his hat, caught by the wind and blown into the field, he walked along the deserted road, thinking great thoughts. Where there were no houses, he stopped for a moment and raised his tiny hands to the sky. "I'm a man. I'll tell you what, I'm a man. Whatever anyone says, I'll tell you what: I'm a man," he shouted into the void.

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CHAPTER VII


MODERN TIMES _ MEN AND WOMEN living in industrial cities are like mice emerging from the fields to live in houses that don't belong to them. They dwell within the dark walls of houses, where only dim light penetrates, and so many of them have come that they grow thin and exhausted from the constant labor of obtaining food and warmth. Beyond the walls, crowds of mice scurry about, squealing and chattering loudly. Every now and then, a bold mouse rises on its hind legs and addresses the others. It declares that it will break through the walls and defeat the gods who built the house. "I will kill them," it declares. "The mice will rule. You will live in light and warmth. There will be food for all, and no one will go hungry."

The mice, gathered in the darkness, out of sight, in large houses, squeal with delight. After a while, when nothing happens, they become sad and depressed. Their thoughts return to the time when they lived in the fields, but they do not leave the walls of their houses, because long living in crowds has made them afraid of the silence of long nights and the emptiness of the sky. Giant children are raised in houses. When children fight and scream in houses and on the streets, the dark spaces between the walls shake with strange and terrifying sounds.

Mice are terribly afraid. Every now and then, a single mouse will momentarily escape the general terror. Such a person is struck by a feeling, and a light appears in their eyes. As the noise spreads through the houses, they make up stories about them. "The horses of the sun have been pulling carts through the treetops for days," they say, quickly looking around to see if they've heard. When they discover a female mouse looking at them, they run away, flicking their tail, and the female follows. While the other mice repeat his words and derive some small comfort from it, they find a warm, dark corner and lie close together. It is because of them that the mice that live in the walls of houses continue to be born.

When the first small model of Hugh McVeigh's plant-planting machine was completely destroyed by the feeble-minded Ellie Mulberry, it replaced the famous ship floating in a bottle that had lain in the display case of Hunter's jewelry store for two or three years. Ellie was immensely proud of her new work. Working under Hugh's direction on a workbench in the corner of an abandoned pickle factory, he resembled a strange dog that had finally found a master. He ignored Steve Hunter, who, with the air of a man harboring some gigantic secret, came in and out the door twenty times a day, but he kept his eyes fixed on the silent Hugh, who sat at the table, sketching on sheets of paper. Ellie valiantly tried to follow the instructions given to him and understand what his master was trying to make, and Hugh, undeterred by the presence of the imbecile, would sometimes spend hours explaining the operation of some complex part of the proposed machine. Hugh crudely crafted each part from large pieces of cardboard, while Ellie would reproduce it in miniature. The eyes of the man who had spent his entire life carving meaningless wooden chains, baskets from peach pits, and ships designed to float in bottles began to show intelligence. Love and understanding began to do for him little by little what words could not. One day, when a part Hugh had fashioned didn't work, the idiot himself made a model of the part that worked perfectly. When Hugh plugged it into the machine, he was so happy he couldn't sit still and began pacing back and forth, cooing with delight.

When the model of the machine appeared in the jewelry store window, a feverish excitement took hold of the people. Everyone spoke either for or against it. Something like a revolution took place. Parties were formed. People who had no stake in the success of the invention and, by the nature of things, were unable to do so, were ready to fight anyone who dared doubt its success. Among the farmers who came to town to see the new wonder, there were many who said the machine would not, could not work. "It"s impractical," they said. Leaving one by one and forming groups, they whispered warnings. Hundreds of objections fell from their lips. "Look at all the wheels and gears of this thing," they said. "You see, it won"t work. You"re walking through a field now, where there are rocks and roots of old trees, perhaps sticking out of the ground. You"ll see. Fools will buy the machine, yes. They will spend their money. They will plant plants. The plants will die." The money will be wasted. There will be no harvest." Old men who had spent their lives growing cabbages in the countryside north of Bidwell, their bodies battered by the brutal toil of the cabbage fields, hobbled into town to inspect the model of the new machine. Their opinions were anxiously sought by a merchant, a carpenter, a craftsman, a doctor-everyone in town. Almost without exception, they shook their heads doubtfully. Standing on the sidewalk in front of a jeweler"s window, they looked at the machine, and then, turning to the crowd gathered around, they shook their heads doubtfully. "Ah," they exclaimed, "a thing made of wheels and gears, huh? Well, young Hunter expects this creature to take the place of a man. He"s a fool. I always said that boy was a fool. The merchants and townspeople, somewhat dampened by the unfavorable decision of those who knew the business, dispersed. They stopped at Birdie Spinks's drugstore, but ignored Judge Hanby's conversation. "If the machine works, the town will wake up," someone declared. "That means factories, new people coming in, houses being built, goods being bought." Visions of sudden wealth began to float through their minds. Young Ed Hall, carpenter Ben Peeler's apprentice, grew angry. "Damn it," he exclaimed, "why listen to this damned old woe-saying? It's the town's duty to get out and hook up that machine. We need to wake up here. We need to forget what we used to think of Steve Hunter. Anyway, he saw a chance, didn't he? And he took it. I'd like to be him. I just wish I were him. And what about that guy we thought was just a telegraph operator? He fooled us all, didn't he? I'm telling you we should be proud that people like him and Steve Hunter live in Bidwell. That's what I said. I'm telling you it's the city's duty to get out there and hook them and that machine up. If we don't, I know what's going to happen. Steve Hunter's alive. I thought maybe he was. He'll take that invention and that inventor of his to some other town or city. That's what he'll do. Damn it, I'm telling you we need to get out there and support these guys. That's what I said.

By and large, the residents of Bidwell agreed with young Hall. The excitement didn't wane, but rather grew stronger with each passing day. Steve Hunter ordered a carpenter to come to his father's shop and build a long, shallow box in the shape of a field in the storefront facing Main Street. He filled it with crushed earth, and then, using ropes and pulleys connected to a clockwork mechanism, the machine was pulled across the field. Several dozen tiny plants, no larger than pins, were placed in a reservoir on top of the machine. When the clockwork mechanism was wound and the strings pulled taut, simulating horsepower, the machine slowly crawled forward. An arm descended and made a hole in the ground. The plant fell into the hole, and spoon-like hands appeared and compacted the soil around the plant's roots. A tank filled with water sat on top of the machine, and when the plant was in place, a precisely calculated amount of water flowed through a pipe and settled at the plant's roots.

Night after night, the machine crawled across the tiny field, tidying the plants into perfect order. Steve Hunter was the one doing this; he did nothing else; and rumors were swirling that a major company would be formed in Bidwell to manufacture the device. Every night a new tale was told. Steve was away in Cleveland for the day, and rumors were swirling that Bidwell would miss its chance, that big money had persuaded Steve to move his factory project to the city. Overhearing Ed Hall berating a farmer who doubted the machine's practicality, Steve took him aside and spoke to him. "We're going to need lively young men who know how to handle other men for superintendent positions and such," he said. "I'm not making any promises. I just want to tell you that I like lively young men who can see a hole in a basket. I like that kind of guy. I like to see them rise in the world."

Steve heard farmers constantly express skepticism that the machines would grow to maturity, so he ordered a carpenter to build another tiny field in the side window of the store. He had the machine moved and the plants planted in the new field. He let them grow. When some plants began to show signs of wilting, he would secretly come in at night and replace them with stronger shoots, so that the miniature field always presented a bold and vigorous appearance to the world.

Bidwell became convinced that the harshest form of human labor practiced by its people had come to an end. Steve made and hung a large chart in the shop window, showing the relative costs of planting an acre of cabbage by machine versus by hand, which was now called "the old way." He then formally announced that a joint-stock company would be formed in Bidwell and that anyone would have a chance to join. He published an article in the weekly newspaper, explaining that he had received many offers to implement his project in the town or in other, larger cities. "Mr. McVeigh, the famous inventor, and I both want to stick to our people," he said, even though Hugh knew nothing of the article and had never been involved in the lives of the people he was addressing. A day was set for the stock subscriptions to begin, and Steve whispered privately about the enormous profits awaiting him. The matter was discussed in every home, and plans were made to raise money to buy the stock. John Clark agreed to lend a percentage of the value of the town property, and Steve received a long-term option on all the land adjacent to Turner's Pike, as far as Pickleville. When the town heard of this, it was full of amazement. "Gee," exclaimed those loitering in front of the store, "old Bidwell will grow up. Now look at this, will you? There will be houses as far as Pickleville." Hugh went to Cleveland to see that one of his new machines was made of steel and wood and of a size that would allow it to be used in the field. conditions. He returned as a hero in the eyes of the city. His silence allowed people who couldn't fully forget their previous disbelief in Steve to let their minds grasp what they considered truly heroic.

That evening, having once again stopped to look at the car in the jewelry store window, crowds of young and old wandered along Turner's Pike toward the Wheeling station, where Hugh had been replaced by a new man. They barely noticed the evening train arriving. Like devotees before a shrine, they gazed with a kind of reverence at the old pickle factory. When Hugh happened to be among them, unaware of the sensation he created, they were embarrassed, as he was always embarrassed by their presence. Everyone dreamed of suddenly becoming rich through the power of the human mind. They thought he was always thinking great thoughts. Sure, Steve Hunter might be more than half bluff, punch, and pretense, but with Hugh there was no bluff or punch. He didn't waste time on words. He thought, and from his thoughts came almost unbelievable miracles.

A new impulse for progress was felt in every part of Bidwell. Old men, accustomed to their way of life and beginning to spend their days in a kind of sleepy submission to the idea of their lives gradually fading away, woke up and walked down Main Street in the evening to argue with skeptical farmers. Besides Ed Hall, who had become Demosthenes on questions of progress and the city's duty to wake up and stick with Steve Hunter and the machine, a dozen more men spoke on street corners. Oratorical talent was awakening in the most unexpected places. Rumors passed from mouth to mouth. It was said that within a year Bidwell would have a brickyard covering acres of land, that there would be paved streets and electric lighting.

Oddly enough, the most persistent critic of the new spirit at Bidwell was the man who, if the machine proved successful, stood to gain the most from its use. Ezra French, an uninitiated man, refused to believe. Under pressure from Ed Hall, Dr. Robinson, and other enthusiasts, he appealed to the word of the God whose name was so often on his lips. The blasphemer of God became the defender of God. "You see, this can"t be done. It"s not all right. Something terrible will happen. There won"t be any rain, and the plants will wither and die. It will be like it was in Egypt in Bible times," he declared. An old farmer with a sprained leg stood before a crowd in a drugstore and proclaimed the truth of God"s Word. "Doesn"t the Bible say that men must work and toil in the sweat of their brow?" he asked sharply. "Can such a machine sweat? You know it"s impossible." And he can't work either. No, sir. Men must do it. It's been that way ever since Cain killed Abel in the Garden of Eden. That's the way God intended it, and no telegraph operator or smart young man like Steve Hunter-boys in a city like this-can come before me and change the workings of God's laws. It can't be done, and even if it could be done, it would be wicked and impious to try. I won't have anything to do with it. It's wrong. I say so, and all your smart talk won't change my mind.

It was in 1892 that Steve Hunter founded the first industrial enterprise to come to Bidwell. It was called the Bidwell Plant-Setting Machine Company, and it ultimately failed. A large factory was built on the riverbank overlooking the New York Central thoroughfare. It is now occupied by the Hunter Bicycle Company, and in industry parlance, it's called a going concern.

For two years, Hugh worked diligently, attempting to perfect the first of his inventions. After working models of the adjuster were brought from Cleveland, Bidwell hired two trained mechanics to come and work with him. An engine was installed in the old pickling mill, along with lathes and other toolmaking machines. For a long time, Steve, John Clark, Tom Butterworth, and other enthusiastic supporters of the enterprise had no doubt about the end result. Hugh wanted to perfect the machine; his heart was set on the work he set out to do. But he did it then, and, for that matter, he continued to do it throughout his life, with little idea of the impact it would have on the lives of those around him. Day after day, along with two mechanics from town and Ellie Mulberry, who drove a team of horses provided by Steve, he drove out to a rented field north of the factory. The complex mechanism developed weaknesses, and new, stronger parts were fabricated. For a time, the machine worked perfectly. Then other defects appeared, and other parts had to be reinforced and replaced. The machine became too heavy for a single crew to handle. It wouldn't work if the soil was too wet or too dry. It worked perfectly in both wet and dry sand, but did nothing in clay. During the second year, when the plant was nearing completion and much equipment had been installed, Hugh approached Steve and told him what he believed were the machine's limitations. He was dejected by his failure, but by working with the machine, he felt he had succeeded in educating himself, something he could never have done by studying books. Steve decided to launch the factory and build some of the machines and sell them. "Leave the two men you have and don't talk," he said. "The machine may be better than you think. You never know." I made sure they kept their cool. That afternoon, the day he spoke with Hugh, Steve called the four people he'd been involved with in promoting the venture into the back room of the bank and told them the situation. "We're in trouble here," he said. "If we let word get out about this machine malfunctioning, where will we end up? It's a case of survival of the fittest."

Steve explained his plan to the men in the room. After all, he said, none of them had any reason to worry. He'd taken them in and offered to get them out. "I'm just that kind of guy," he said pompously. In a way, he said, he was glad things had worked out the way they had. Four men had invested little real money. They were all honestly trying to do something for the city, and he would make sure it worked out well. "We'll be fair to everyone," he said. "The company's shares are all sold. We'll make a few machines and sell them. If they turn out to be failures, as this inventor thinks, it won't be our fault. The plant, you see, will have to be sold cheap. When those times come, the five of us will have to save ourselves and the future of the city. The machines we bought are, you see, iron and woodworking machines, the latest in technology. They can be used to make something else. If the factory machine breaks down, we'll simply buy the plant at a low price and make something else. Perhaps the town would be better off if we had complete control of the inventory. You see, we few men have to manage everything here. It will be our job to make sure the labor force is used. A multitude of small shareholders is a nuisance. Man to man, I'll ask each of you not to sell your shares, but if anyone comes to you and asks about their value, I expect you to be loyal to our enterprise. I'll start looking for something to replace the installation machine, and when the store closes, we'll start working again. It's not every day that people get the chance to sell themselves a beautiful plant full of new equipment, as we can do in about a year now."

Steve walked out of the bank and left the four men looking at each other. Then his father stood up and walked out. The other men, all connected with the bank, stood up and walked away. "Well," John Clark said somewhat ponderously, "he"s a smart man. I guess we"ll have to stay with him and the town after all. He says we need to use labor. I don"t see how it"s any good for a carpenter or a farmer to have a small supply in the factory. It only distracts them from their work. They have foolish dreams of getting rich, and they don"t mind their own business. It would be a real advantage to the town if the factory were owned by a few men." The banker lit a cigar and, going to the window, looked out onto Bidwell"s main street. The town had already changed. On Main Street, right from the bank window, three new brick buildings were going up. Workers who had worked on the factory construction had come to live in town, and many new houses were being built. Business was in full swing everywhere. The company's shares were oversubscribed, and almost every day people came into the bank to talk about buying more. Just the day before, a farmer had come in with two thousand dollars. The banker's mind was beginning to secrete the poison of his age. "In the end, it's men like Steve Hunter, Tom Butterworth, Gordon Hart, and me who have to take care of everything, and to be fit to do that, we have to take care of ourselves," he soliloquized. He looked back at Main Street. Tom Butterworth left through the front door. He wanted to be alone and think about his own business. Gordon Hart returned to the empty back room and, standing by the window, looked out the alley. His thoughts were flowing in the same vein as those of the bank president. He also thought about the people who wanted to buy shares in a company doomed to failure. He began to doubt Hugh McVeigh's judgment in the event of failure. "People like that are always pessimistic," he told himself. From a window at the back of the bank, he could see over the roofs of a row of small barns and onto a residential street where two new workhouses were under construction. His thoughts differed from John Clark's only because he was younger. "A few younger men like Steve and me are going to have to step up to the plate," he muttered aloud. "We need money to work with. We're going to have to take responsibility for owning money."

John Clark puffed on a cigar at the bank entrance. He felt like a soldier weighing the odds of battle. Dimly, he fancied himself a general, a sort of American industrial grant. The lives and happiness of many, he told himself, depended on the precise functioning of his brain. "Well," he thought, "when factories come to a town and it begins to grow the way this town is growing, no one can stop it. A man who thinks about individuals, little people with nest eggs who might suffer from an industrial collapse, is simply a weakling. Men have to face the responsibilities that life brings. The few who see clearly must think first of themselves. They must save themselves to save others."


Business was booming in Bidwell, and chance played into Steve Hunter's hands. Hugh invented a device that could lift a loaded coal car from the railroad tracks, hoist it high into the air, and dump its contents into a chute. With it, an entire carload of coal could be unloaded with a roar into the hold of a ship or the engine room of a factory. A model of the new invention was made and a patent was filed. Steve Hunter then took it to New York. For this, he received two hundred thousand dollars in cash, half of which went to Hugh. Steve's faith in the inventive genius of Missourians was renewed and strengthened. With a feeling almost close to satisfaction, he awaited the moment when the town would have to admit the failure of the factory machine and the factory with its new machines would have to be thrown on the market. He knew that his associates in promoting the enterprise were secretly selling their shares. One day, he went to Cleveland and had a long conversation with a banker. Hugh was working on a corn harvester and had already purchased a claim on it. "Perhaps when the time comes to sell the factory, there will be more than one bidder," he told Ernestine, the soap maker's daughter, who married him a month after selling the wagon unloader. He was outraged when he told her about the infidelity of two men at the bank and a wealthy farmer, Tom Butterworth. "They're selling their stock and letting the small shareholders lose their money," he declared. "I told them not to. Now, if anything happens to spoil their plans, they won't blame me."

Almost a year was spent convincing Bidwell residents to become investors. Then things began to move. The groundwork for the factory was laid. No one knew of the difficulties encountered in trying to perfect the machine, and rumor had it that in actual field trials, it had proven completely practical. Skeptical farmers who came to town on Saturdays laughed at the town's enthusiasts. A field, planted during one of the brief periods when the machine, finding ideal soil conditions, worked perfectly, was left to grow. Just as when he'd operated the tiny model in the storefront, Steve took no chances. He instructed Ed Hall to go out at night and replace the dead plants. "It's fair enough," he explained to Ed. "A hundred things could cause the plants to die, but if they die, it's the machine's fault. What will happen to this town if we don't believe in what we're going to produce here?"

The crowds of people who strolled along Turner's Pike in the evenings to look at the fields with long rows of sturdy young cabbage moved restlessly and talked of new days. From the fields, they walked along the railroad tracks to the factory site. Brick walls began to rise into the sky. Machines began to arrive, stored under temporary shelters until they could be erected. An advance party of workers arrived in town, and new faces appeared on Main Street that evening. What was happening in Bidwell was happening in towns across the Midwest. Industry was advancing through the coal and iron regions of Pennsylvania, into Ohio and Indiana, and further west, into the states bordering the Mississippi River. Gas and oil were discovered in Ohio and Indiana. Overnight, villages became cities. Madness took hold of people's minds. Villages like Lima and Findlay in Ohio, and Muncie and Anderson in Indiana, grew into small towns within weeks. Excursion trains plied some of these places, eager to get to and invest their money. Town lots that could have been purchased for a few dollars just weeks before oil or gas was discovered sold for thousands. Wealth seemed to flow from the earth itself. On farms in Indiana and Ohio, giant gas wells ripped drilling equipment from the ground, spilling the fuel so essential to modern industrial development onto the open. A witty man, standing in front of one roaring gas well, exclaimed, "Papa, the Earth has indigestion; it's got gas in its stomach. Its face will be covered with pimples."

Because there was no market for gas before the factories arrived, wells were lit, and at night, huge, fiery torches lit the sky. Pipes were laid across the earth's surface, and in a day's work, a worker earned enough to heat his home all winter in the tropical heat. Farmers who owned oil-producing lands went to bed poor and in debt at the bank, and woke up rich in the morning. They moved to the cities and invested their money in the factories that sprang up everywhere. In one county in southern Michigan, over five hundred patents for woven-wire farm fencing were issued in a single year, and almost every patent became a magnet around which a fencing company formed. A tremendous energy seemed to emerge from the earth and infect the people. Thousands of the most energetic people in the middle states exhausted themselves by creating companies, and when those companies failed, they immediately started others. In rapidly growing cities, those organizing companies representing millions of dollars lived in hastily constructed houses by carpenters who, before the great awakening, had built barns. It was a time of hideous architecture, a time when thought and learning had ceased. Without music, without poetry, without beauty in their lives and impulses, an entire people, full of their native energy and vitality, living in a new land, rushed in disarray into a new era. An Ohio horse dealer made a million dollars selling patents he bought for the price of a farm horse, took his wife to Europe, and bought a painting in Paris for fifty thousand dollars. In another Midwestern state, a man who sold patent medicines nationwide went into oil leasing, became fabulously wealthy, bought three daily newspapers, and, before reaching the age of thirty-five, succeeded in electing his state's governor. In the celebration of his energy, his unsuitability as a statesman was forgotten.

In the pre-industrial days, before the frenzied awakening, Midwestern towns were sleepy places devoted to old trades, agriculture, and commerce. In the morning, city dwellers would head out to work in the fields or engage in carpentry, horse shoeing, wagon making, harness repair, shoemaking, and clothing making. They read books and believed in a God born in the minds of people emerging from a civilization very similar to their own. On farms and in townhouses, men and women worked together to achieve the same goals in life. They lived in small frame houses set on flat land, box-like but solidly built. The carpenter who built a farmhouse distinguished it from a barn by placing what he called scrollwork under the eaves and building a porch with carved posts in front. After many years of living in one of the poor houses, after children were born and men died, after men and women suffered and shared moments of joy in the tiny rooms under the low roofs, a subtle change took place. The houses became almost beautiful in their former humanity. Each house began to vaguely reflect the personalities of the people who lived within its walls.

Life in the farmhouses and houses along the village lanes awoke with the dawn. Behind each house was a barn for horses and cows, as well as sheds for pigs and chickens. During the day, the silence was broken by a chorus of neighs, squeals, and cries. Boys and men emerged from their houses. They stood in the open space in front of the barns, stretching out their bodies like sleepy animals. Their arms extended upward, as if praying to the gods for good days, and clear days arrived. Men and boys went to the pump next to the house and washed their faces and hands with cold water. The smell and sound of cooking filled the kitchen. Women were also on the move. The men went into the barns to feed the animals, then hurried into the houses to feed themselves. A continuous grunting came from the barns where the pigs were eating corn, and a contented silence fell over the houses.

After the morning meal, men and animals went out into the fields together to do their chores, while in their homes, women mended clothes, stored fruit in jars for winter, and discussed women's matters. On market days, lawyers, doctors, district court officials, and merchants strolled through the city streets in long sleeves. A painter walked with a ladder over his shoulder. The sound of carpenters' hammers could be heard in the silence, building a new house for a merchant's son who had married a blacksmith's daughter. A sense of quiet growth awoke in dormant minds. It was a time of awakening art and beauty in the country.

Instead, a giant industry awoke. Boys who had read in school about Lincoln walking miles through the woods to pick up his first book, and about Garfield, the trail boy who became president, began reading in newspapers and magazines about people who, by developing their skills for earning and saving money, suddenly became incredibly rich. Hired writers called these people great, but people lacked the mental maturity to resist the power of oft-repeated pronouncements. Like children, people believed what they were told.

While the new refinery was being built with carefully saved money from the people, young men from Bidwell left for work elsewhere. After oil and gas were discovered in neighboring states, they traveled to the boomtowns and returned home with wonderful stories. In the boomtowns, men earned four, five, and even six dollars a day. Secretly, and when no one older was around, they told stories of the adventures they had in the new places; of how, attracted by the flow of money, women came from the cities; and of the times they spent with these women. Young Harley Parsons, whose father was a shoemaker and learned the blacksmith's trade, went to work in one of the new oil fields. He came home in a fashionable silk vest and amazed his comrades by buying and smoking cigars for ten cents. His pockets were full of money. "I'm not going to be in this town long, you can bet on it," he declared one evening, standing surrounded by a group of admirers in front of Fanny Twist, a fashion accessories store on lower Main Street. "I've been with a Chinese girl, an Italian girl, and a South American girl." He took a drag on his cigar and spat on the sidewalk. "I'm going to get everything I can out of life," he declared. "I'm going back and I'm going to make a record. Before I'm done, I'll be with every woman on earth, that's what I'm going to do."

Joseph Wainsworth, a harness maker who was the first in Bidwell to feel the heavy hand of industrialism, couldn't overcome the impact of a conversation with Butterworth, a farmer who asked him to repair harnesses made by machines at the factory. He became silent and disgruntled, muttering as he went about his work in the shop. When Will Sellinger, his apprentice, quit his job and went to Cleveland, he had no other boy, and for a time he worked alone in the shop. He became known as a "bad fellow," and farmers no longer came to him on winter days to laze around. A sensitive man, Joe felt like a pygmy, a tiny creature always walking alongside a giant who could destroy him at any moment at his whim. Throughout his life, he was somewhat rude to his customers. "If they don't like my work, they can go to hell," he told his students. "I know my business, and I don't need to bow to anyone here."

When Steve Hunter founded the Bidwell Plant-Setting Machine Company, a seat belt manufacturer invested his $1,200 savings in company stock. One day, while the factory was under construction, he heard that Steve had paid $1,200 for a new lathe that had just arrived in a shipment and was being installed on the floor of the unfinished building. A promoter told a farmer the lathe could do the work of a hundred men, and the farmer came into Joe's shop and repeated the statement. This stuck with Joe, and he concluded that the $1,200 he'd invested in stock had been used to buy the lathe. It was money he'd earned over years of effort, and now it could buy a machine capable of doing the work of a hundred men. His money had already increased a hundredfold, and he wondered why he couldn't be happy about it. Some days he'd be happy, and then his happiness would be followed by a strange bout of depression. Suppose the plant-setting machine didn't work after all? What then could be done with the lathe, with the machine bought with his money?

One evening after dark, without telling his wife, he walked down Turner's Pike to the old Pickleville mill, where Hugh, the half-witted Ellie Mulberry, and two town mechanics were trying to fix a plant-planting machine. Joe wanted to catch a glimpse of the tall, thin man from the West, and he had the idea of trying to strike up a conversation with him and ask his opinion on the new machine's chances of success. A man of the age of flesh and blood wanted to walk in the presence of a man of the new age of iron and steel. When he reached the mill, it was dark, and two town workers were sitting in an express truck in front of the Wheeling station, smoking their evening pipes. Joe walked past them to the station door, then back along the platform and boarded the Turner's Pike again. He wandered along the path alongside the road and soon saw Hugh McVeigh walking toward him. It was one evening when Hugh, overcome by loneliness and puzzled by the fact that his new position in city life did not bring him closer to people, went into town for a stroll down Main Street, half hoping that someone would break through his embarrassment and enter into conversation with him.

When the harness maker saw Hugh walking along the path, he crept to a corner of the fence and, crouching, watched the man the way Hugh watched French boys working in the cabbage fields. Strange thoughts crossed his mind. He found the unusually tall figure before him terrifying. He felt a childish anger and for a moment considered holding a stone in his hand and hurling it at the man whose brainwork had so upset his own life. Then, as Hugh's figure moved away down the path, a different mood came over him. "I've worked all my life for twelve hundred dollars, enough to buy one machine that this man doesn't care about," he muttered aloud. "I might get more money out of it than I put in: Steve Hunter says I might. If machines kill the harness industry, who cares? I'll be all right." All you have to do is enter the new times, wake up-that's the ticket. It's the same with me as with everyone else: nothing ventured, nothing gained."

Joe emerged from around the corner of the fence and crept along the road behind Hugh. A feeling of urgency gripped him, and he thought he'd like to crawl closer and touch the hem of Hugh's coat with his finger. Afraid of doing something so daring, his mind took a new turn. He ran in the darkness along the road toward the city, and after crossing the bridge and reaching the New York Central Railroad, he turned west and followed the tracks until he came to the new factory. In the darkness, unfinished walls jutted into the sky, and piles of building materials lay around. The night had been dark and cloudy, but now the moon was beginning to break through. Joe crawled over a pile of bricks and through a window into the building. He felt along the walls until he came upon a pile of iron covered with a rubber blanket. He was sure it must be the lathe he'd bought with his money, a machine that would do the work of a hundred men and that would make him comfortably rich in his old age. No one spoke of any other machine being brought to the factory floor. Joe knelt down and wrapped his arms around the heavy iron legs of the machine. "What a strong thing it is! It won't break easily," he thought. He was tempted to do something he knew would be foolish: kiss the machine's iron legs or kneel before it and say a prayer. Instead, he rose to his feet and, climbing out the window again, walked home. He felt renewed and filled with new courage thanks to the night's experiences, but when he reached his house and stood outside the door, he heard his neighbor, David Chapman, a wheelwright who worked in Charlie Collins's wagon shop, praying in his bedroom before an open window. Joe listened for a moment, and for some reason he couldn't understand, his newfound faith was shattered by what he heard. David Chapman, a devout Methodist, prayed for Hugh McVeigh and the success of his invention. Joe knew his neighbor had also invested his savings in the new company's stock. He thought he alone doubted its success, but it was clear doubt had crept into the wheelwright's mind as well. The pleading voice of a man praying, breaking the silence of the night, broke through and, for a moment, completely shattered his confidence. "Oh God, help this man Hugh McVeigh remove all obstacles standing in his way," David Chapman prayed. "Make the plant tuning machine a success. Bring light into dark places. Oh Lord, help Hugh McVeigh, your servant, to successfully build the planting machine."

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BOOK THREE


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CHAPTER VIII


When Clara Butterworth, Tom Butterworth's daughter, turned eighteen, she graduated from the town's high school. Until the summer of her seventeenth birthday, she was a tall, strong, muscular girl, shy in the presence of strangers and bold with people she knew well. Her eyes were unusually gentle.

The Butterworth house on Medina Road stood behind an apple orchard, with another orchard adjacent. Medina Road ran south from Bidwell and gradually climbed toward a landscape of gently rolling hills, offering a magnificent view from the side porch of the Butterworth house. The house itself, a large brick building with a cupola on top, was considered the most pretentious place in the county at the time.

Behind the house were several large barns for horses and cattle. Most of Tom Butterworth's farmland was north of Bidwell, and some of his fields were five miles from his home; but since he didn't farm the land himself, this didn't matter. The farms were rented out to men who worked them on a share basis. In addition to farming, Tom had other interests. He owned two hundred acres of land on the hillside near his home, and with the exception of a few fields and a strip of woodland, it was devoted to grazing sheep and cattle. Milk and cream were delivered to the Bidwell householders each morning in two wagons driven by his employees. Half a mile west of his house, on a side road and at the edge of a field where cattle were slaughtered for the Bidwell market, was a slaughterhouse. Tom owned it and hired the men who carried out the killings. The stream that flowed down from the hills through one of the fields behind his house was dammed, and to the south of the pond was an ice house. He also supplied the town with ice. Over a hundred beehives stood under the trees in his orchards, and every year he delivered honey to Cleveland. The farmer himself seemed to do nothing, but his shrewd mind was always at work. During long, sleepy summer days, he rode around the county, buying sheep and cattle, stopping to trade horses with a farmer, haggling over new plots of land, and was constantly busy. He had one passion. He loved fast horses, but he didn't want to indulge himself in owning them. "That game only leads to trouble and debt," he told his friend John Clark, a banker. "Let other people own horses and ruin themselves racing them. I'll go to the races." Every fall I can go to Cleveland to the racetrack. If I'm crazy about a horse, I'll bet ten dollars he wins. If he doesn't, I lose ten dollars. If I owned him, I'd probably lose hundreds in training and all that." The farmer was a tall man with a white beard, broad shoulders, and rather small, thin white hands. He chewed tobacco, but despite the habit, he meticulously kept himself and his white beard clean. His wife had died when he was still in the full vigour of life, but he had no interest in women. His mind, as he once told a friend, was too occupied with his own affairs and thoughts of the fine horses he had seen to indulge in such nonsense.

For many years, the farmer paid little attention to his daughter, Clara, his only child. Throughout her childhood, she was cared for by one of his five sisters, all of whom, except the one who lived with him and managed his household, were happily married. His own wife was a rather frail woman, but his daughter inherited his physical strength.

When Clara was seventeen, she and her father had a quarrel that ultimately destroyed their relationship. The argument began in late July. Summer on the farms was a busy one, with more than a dozen people working in the barns, delivering ice and milk to town and to the slaughterhouses half a mile away. That summer, something happened to the girl. For hours, she would sit in her room in the house, reading books, or lie in a hammock in the garden, gazing through the fluttering apple tree leaves at the summer sky. The light, strangely soft and inviting, sometimes reflected in her eyes. Her figure, previously boyish and strong, began to change. As she walked through the house, she sometimes smiled at nothing. Her aunt barely noticed what was happening to her, but her father, who had seemed barely aware of her existence all her life, became interested. In her presence, he began to feel like a young man. As in the days of his courtship with her mother, before possessive passion had destroyed his capacity for love, he began to sense, dimly, that life around him was full of meaning. Sometimes in the afternoon, when he set out on one of his long drives across the country, he would ask his daughter to accompany him, and although he had little to say, a certain gallantry crept into his attitude toward the waking girl. While she was with him in the carriage, he did not chew tobacco, and after one or two attempts to indulge the habit, not allowing the smoke to blow in her face, he gave up smoking a pipe during the drive.

Until this summer, Clara had always spent the months outside of school in the company of farmers. She rode in carts, visited barns, and when she tired of the company of older people, she went into town to spend the day with one of her friends among the city girls.

In the summer of her seventeenth year, she did none of this. She ate silently at the table. The Butterworth family at that time was run on an old-fashioned American plan, and the farm hands, the men who drove the ice and milk wagons, and even the men who slaughtered and butchered the cattle and sheep ate at the same table with Tom Butterworth, his sister, who worked as a housekeeper, and his daughter. Three hired girls worked in the house, and after everything was served, they too came and took their places at the table. The older men among the farmer's employees, many of whom had known her since childhood, had a habit of teasing their mistress. They made comments about the town boys, young men who worked as clerks in stores or were apprenticed to some merchant, one of whom might have brought a girl home late at night from a school party or one of the so-called "social parties" held at the town churches. After they had eaten, with that peculiarly silent and concentrated manner of hungry laborers, the farm hands leaned back in their chairs and winked at each other. Two of them began a detailed conversation about some incident in the girl's life. One of the older men, who had worked on the farm for many years and had a reputation among the others for his wit, chuckled softly. He began speaking to no one in particular. This man's name was Jim Priest, and although the Civil War broke out in the country when he was in his forties, he had been a soldier. In Bidwell, he was looked upon as a crook, but his employer liked him very much. The two men often spent hours discussing the merits of the well-known trotting horses. During the war, Jim had been a so-called hired gun, and rumors around town whispered that he was also a deserter and bounty hunter. He didn't go into town with the other men on Saturday afternoons and never attempted to join the G.A.R. office in Bidwell. On Saturdays, while the other farm hands washed, shaved, and dressed in their Sunday clothes in preparation for the weekly ride to town, he called one of them into the barn, slipped a quarter into his hand, and said, "Bring me a half-pint, and don't forget." On Sunday afternoons, he would climb into the hayloft of one of the barns, drink his weekly ration of whiskey, get drunk, and sometimes not show up until it was time to go to work on Monday morning. That fall, Jim took his savings and went to a huge racing meeting in Cleveland for a week, where he bought an expensive gift for his employer's daughter and then bet the rest of his money on the races. When he struck lucky, he stayed in Cleveland, drinking and carousing until his winnings were gone.

It was Jim Priest who always led the bouts of teasing at the table, and the summer she turned seventeen, when she was no longer in the mood for such jokes, it was Jim who put an end to it. At the table, Jim leaned back in his chair, stroked his red, bristly beard, now rapidly graying, looked out the window over Clara's head, and told the story of a suicide attempt by a young man in love with Clara. He said that the young man, a clerk in a store in Bidwell, took a pair of trousers from a shelf, tied one leg to his neck and the other to a bracket in the wall. Then he jumped off the counter and was saved from death only because a town girl passing by the store saw him, rushed in, and stabbed him. "What do you think of that?" he cried. "He was in love with our Clara, I tell you."

After the story was told, Clara rose from the table and ran out of the room. The farm workers, joined by her father, burst into hearty laughter. Her aunt wagged her finger at Jim Priest, the hero of the occasion. "Why don't you leave her alone?" she asked.

"She'll never marry if she stays here, where you ridicule every young man who pays attention to her." Clara paused at the door and, turning, stuck her tongue out at Jim Priest. Another burst of laughter erupted. Chairs scraped the floor, and the men filed out of the house in droves to return to work in the barns and on the farm.

That summer, when the change came over her, Clara sat at the table and ignored the stories Jim Priest told her. She thought the farm workers, who ate so greedily, were vulgar, something she'd never experienced before, and she wished she didn't have to eat with them. One afternoon, while lying in a hammock in the garden, she overheard several men in the nearby barn discussing the change in her. Jim Priest explained what had happened. "Our fun with Clara is over," he said. "Now we'll have to treat her differently. She's not a child anymore. We'll have to leave her alone, or pretty soon she'll stop talking to any of us. That's what happens when a girl starts thinking about being a woman." The sap began to rise up the tree.

The puzzled girl lay in her hammock, gazing at the sky. She thought about Jim Priest's words and tried to understand what he meant. Sadness washed over her, and tears welled in her eyes. Although she didn't know what the old man had meant by the words about sap and wood, she detachedly, subconsciously, understood something of their meaning and was grateful for the thoughtfulness that had led him to tell the others to stop teasing her at the table. The shabby old farmhand with his bristly beard and strong old body had become a figure of significance to her. She remembered with gratitude that, despite all his teasing, Jim Priest had never said anything that could offend her. In the new mood that had come over her, this meant a great deal. She was overcome with an even greater hunger for understanding, love, and friendship. She didn't think to turn to her father or her aunt, with whom she never spoke of anything intimate or close to her, but turned to the gruff old man. A hundred little things about Jim Priest's character that she had never considered before came rushing to her mind. He never mistreated the animals in the barns, as other farm hands sometimes did. When he was drunk on Sundays and staggered through the barns, he didn't beat the horses or curse at them. She wondered if she could talk to Jim Priest, ask him questions about life and people and what he meant when he talked about sap and wood. The farm owner was old and unmarried. She wondered if he had ever loved a woman in his youth. She decided he had. His words about sap, she was sure, were somehow connected to the idea of love. How strong his arms were. They were rough and gnarled, but there was something incredibly powerful about them. She wished the old man were her father. In their youth, in the dark of night, or when he was alone with a girl, perhaps in a quiet forest late in the evening, as the sun was setting, he had placed his hands on her shoulders. He had drawn her to him. He had kissed her.

Clara quickly jumped out of the hammock and walked under the trees in the garden. She was struck by thoughts of Jim Priest's youth. It was as if she had suddenly entered a room where a man and a woman were making love. Her cheeks burned, and her hands trembled. As she slowly walked through the thickets of grass and weeds growing between the trees where sunlight filtered through, bees, returning home to their hives, heavily laden with honey, flew in crowds above her head. There was something intoxicating and purposeful in the work song emanating from the hives. It penetrated her blood, and her step quickened. Jim Priest's words, constantly echoing in her mind, seemed part of the same song the bees sang. "The sap began to run up the tree," she repeated aloud. How significant and strange those words seemed! They were the kind of words a lover might use when speaking to his beloved. She had read many novels, but they hadn't spoken such words. It was better this way. Better to hear them from human lips. She thought again of Jim Priest's youth and boldly regretted that he was still young. She told herself that she would like to see him young and married to a beautiful young woman. She stopped at a fence overlooking a meadow on the hillside. The sun seemed unusually bright, the grass in the meadow greener than she had ever seen. Two birds were making love in a tree nearby. The female flew madly, and the male pursued her. In his zeal, he was so focused that he flew right in front of the girl's face, his wing almost touching her cheek. She walked back through the garden to the barns and through one of them to the open door of the long shed that was used to store wagons and carts, her thoughts occupied with the idea of finding Jim Priest and perhaps standing beside him. He wasn't there, but in the open space in front of the barn, John May, a young man of twenty-two who had just come to work on the farm, was oiling the wheels of the wagon. His back was turned, and as he steered the heavy wheels of the wagon, the muscles rippled beneath his thin cotton shirt. "This is what Jim Priest must have looked like in his youth," the girl thought.

The farm girl wanted to approach the young man, talk to him, ask him questions about the many strange things in life she didn't understand. She knew she couldn't do it under any circumstances, that it was just a meaningless dream she'd dreamed, but the dream was sweet. However, she didn't want to talk to John May. At the moment, she was experiencing a girlish revulsion at what she considered the vulgarity of the men who worked there. At the table, they ate noisily and greedily, like hungry animals. She longed for a youth like her own, perhaps rough and uncertain, but yearning for the unknown. She longed to be close to something young, strong, tender, persistent, beautiful. When the farm worker looked up and saw her standing and staring at him, she felt embarrassed. For a while, the two cubs, so different from each other, stood looking at each other, and then, to ease her embarrassment, Clara began to play a game. Among the men who worked on the farm, she had always been considered a tomboy. In the hayfields and barns, she wrestled and playfully fought with both old and young. To them, she had always been a privileged person. They liked her, and she was the boss's daughter. No one was to be rude to her, nor was anyone to say or do anything rude. A basket of corn stood right by the barn door, and running to it, Clara picked up an ear of yellow corn and threw it at a farmhand. It hit a barn post right above his head. Laughing shrilly, Clara ran into the barn among the wagons, the farmhand pursuing her.

John May was a very determined man. He was the son of a laborer from Bidwell and had worked for two or three years at the doctor's stables. Something had happened between him and the doctor's wife, and he left because he had a feeling the doctor was becoming suspicious. This experience had taught him the value of boldness in dealing with women. Ever since he came to work at the Butterworth farm, he had been haunted by thoughts of the girl who, he assumed, had directly challenged him. He was a little taken aback by her boldness, but he couldn't stop wondering: she was openly inviting him to pursue her. That was enough. His usual awkwardness and clumsiness disappeared, and he easily leaped over the outstretched tongues of carts and wagons. He caught Clara in a dark corner of the barn. Without a word, he hugged her tightly and kissed her first on the neck, then on the lips. She lay trembling and weak in his arms, and he grabbed the collar of her dress and tore it open. Her brown neck and firm, round breasts were exposed. Clara's eyes widened in fear. Strength returned to her body. With her sharp, hard fist, she struck John May in the face; and when he retreated, she quickly ran out of the barn. John May didn't understand. He thought she had once been looking for him and would return. "She's a little green. I was too quick. I scared her. Next time I'll go easier," he thought.

Clara ran through the barn, then slowly approached the house and went upstairs to her room. The farm dog followed her up the stairs and stopped at her door, wagging its tail. She closed the door in his face. At that moment, everything that lived and breathed seemed crude and ugly to her. Her cheeks turned pale, she drew the curtains over the window and sat on the bed, overcome by a strange new fear of life. She didn't want even the sunlight to shine into her presence. John May followed her through the barn and now stood in the barnyard, looking at the house. She saw him through the cracks in the blinds and wished she could kill him with a wave of her hand.

The farmhand, full of masculine confidence, waited for her to approach the window and look down at him. He wondered if anyone else was in the house. Perhaps she would beckon him. Something similar had happened between him and the doctor's wife, and that's what had happened. When he didn't see her after five or ten minutes, he returned to greasing the cart wheels. "This will be slower. She's a shy, green girl," he told himself.

One evening, a week later, Clara was sitting on the side porch of the house with her father when John May walked into the barnyard. It was Wednesday evening, and the farm hands didn't usually go into town until Saturday, but he was dressed in his Sunday clothes, shaved, and oiled his hair. For weddings and funerals, workers oiled their hair. This indicated that something very important was about to happen. Clara glanced at him, and despite the feeling of disgust that gripped her, her eyes sparkled. Since that incident in the barn, she had managed to avoid him, but she wasn't afraid. He had truly taught her something. There was a power within her that could conquer men. Her father's insight, which was part of her nature, came to her aid. She wanted to laugh at this man's foolish pretensions, to make a fool of him. Her cheeks flushed with pride at her mastery of the situation.

John May almost reached the house, then turned onto the path leading to the road. He gestured with his hand, and by chance, Tom Butterworth, who had been looking across the open land toward Bidwell, turned and saw both the movement and the smirking, confident smile on the farmer's face. He stood and followed John May onto the road, amazement and anger warring within him. The two men stood talking for three minutes on the road in front of the house, then returned. The farmhand went to the barn and then returned along the path to the road, carrying a sack of grain containing his work clothes under his arm. He didn't look up as he passed. The farmer returned to the porch.

The misunderstanding that was destined to ruin the tender relationship between father and daughter began that very evening. Tom Butterworth was furious. "He muttered, clenching his fists." Clara's heart pounded. For some reason, she felt guilty, as if she had been caught in an affair with this man. Her father remained silent for a long moment, and then, like a farmhand, he attacked her with fury and cruelty. "Where were you with that guy? What did you have to do with him?" he asked sharply.

For a moment, Clara didn't answer her father's question. She wanted to scream, to punch him in the face, just like she had the man in the barn. Then her mind struggled to process the new situation. The fact that her father had accused her of searching for what had happened made her hate John May less heartily. She had someone else to hate.

That first evening, Clara didn't think things through clearly, but denying she'd ever been anywhere with John May, she burst into tears and ran into the house. In the darkness of her room, she began to think about her father's words. For some reason she couldn't understand, the assault on her spirit seemed more terrible and unforgivable than the attack on her body by the farmhand in the barn. She began to dimly understand that the young man had been confused by her presence on that warm, sunny day, just as she had been confused by Jim Priest's words, the singing of the bees in the garden, the lovemaking of the birds, and her own vague thoughts. He was confused, foolish, and young. His confusion was justified. It was understandable and manageable. Now she had no doubt in her ability to cope with John May. As for her father, he might be suspicious of the farmhand, but why was he suspicious of her?

Confused, the girl sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness, a hard look in her eyes. A short while later, her father came up the stairs and knocked on her door. He didn't enter, but stood in the hallway, talking. While they were talking, she remained calm, which disconcerted the man who had expected to find her in tears. The fact that she didn't seem to him proof of guilt.

Tom Butterworth, a perceptive and observant man in many ways, never understood his own daughter's qualities. He was a very possessive man, and one day, when he had just married, he suspected something was wrong between his wife and a young man who worked on the farm where he then lived. The suspicion was unfounded, but he let the man go, and one evening, when his wife went into town to shop and didn't return at the usual time, he followed her and, seeing her on the street, went into a store to avoid an encounter. She was in trouble. Her horse had suddenly gone lame, and she had to walk home. Not letting her see him, her husband followed her down the road. It was dark, and she heard footsteps on the road behind her and, frightened, ran the last half mile to her house. He waited until she entered, then followed her, pretending to have just left the barn. When he heard her account of the horse's accident and its fright on the road, he felt ashamed; but as the horse, left in the livery stable, seemed to be all right the next day when he went to fetch it, he became suspicious again.

Standing before his daughter's door, the farmer felt the same as he had that evening, walking down the road to pick up his wife. When he suddenly looked up on the porch below and saw the farmhand's gesture, he glanced quickly at his daughter. She looked confused and, in his opinion, guilty. "Well, there you go again," he thought bitterly. "Like mother, like daughter-they're both the same." Quickly rising from his chair, he followed the young man out onto the road and dismissed him. "Go tonight. I don't want to see you here again," he said. In the darkness outside the girl's room, he thought of many bitter things he wanted to say. He forgot she was a girl and spoke to her as he would to a mature, refined, and guilty woman. "Come on," he said, "I want to know the truth. If you've been working with this farmer, you've been starting at a young age. Did something happen between you?"

Clara walked to the door and bumped into her father. The hatred for him, born in that hour and never leaving her, gave her strength. She didn't know what he was talking about, but she felt acutely that he, like that foolish young man in the barn, was trying to violate something very precious in her nature. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said calmly, "but I know this. I'm not a child anymore. In the last week, I've become a woman. If you don't want me in your house, if you don't like me anymore, say so, and I'll leave."

The two people stood in the darkness, trying to look at each other. Clara was struck by her own strength and the words that had come to her. These words clarified something. She felt that if only her father would take her in his arms or say some kind, understanding word, everything could be forgotten. Life could begin anew. In the future, she would understand much that she had not understood. She and her father could become closer. Tears welled up in her eyes, and a sob shook in her throat. However, when her father did not respond to her words and turned to leave silently, she slammed the door shut and then lay awake all night, white and furious with anger and disappointment.

That fall, Clara left home to attend college, but before she left, she had another argument with her father. In August, a young man who was supposed to teach in the city schools arrived to live with the Bidwells, and she met him at a dinner in the church basement. He went home with her and came back the following Sunday afternoon to call. She introduced the young man, a slender man with black hair, brown eyes, and a serious face, to her father, who nodded and left. They walked down a country road and into the woods. He was five years older than her and in college, but she felt much older and wiser. What happens to many women happened to her. She felt older and wiser than any man she had ever seen. She decided, as most women eventually do, that there are two types of men in the world: kind, gentle, well-intentioned children, and those who, while remaining children, are obsessed with foolish male vanity and imagine themselves born masters of life. Clara's thoughts on this matter weren't very clear. She was young, and her thoughts were uncertain. However, she was shaken by her embrace of life, and she was made of the kind of material that can withstand the blows life deals.

In the forest, together with a young schoolteacher, Clara began an experiment. Evening fell, and it became dark. She knew her father would be furious if she didn't return home, but she didn't care. She encouraged the schoolteacher to talk about love and the relationship between men and women. She feigned innocence, an innocence that wasn't hers. Schoolgirls know many things they don't apply to themselves until something like what happened to Clara happens to them. The farmer's daughter regained consciousness. She knew a thousand things she hadn't known a month ago, and she began to take revenge on men for their betrayal. In the darkness, as they walked home together, she seduced the young man into kissing her, and then lay in his arms for two hours, completely confident, striving to learn what she wanted to know without risking her life.

That night, she quarreled with her father again. He tried to scold her for staying out late with a man, but she shut the door in his face. Another evening, she boldly left the house with the schoolteacher. They walked along the road to a bridge over a small stream. John May, who still believed the farmer's daughter was in love with him, followed the schoolteacher to the Butterworth house that evening and waited outside, intending to frighten his rival with his fists. On the bridge, something happened that drove the schoolteacher away. John May approached the two men and began threatening them. The bridge had just been repaired, and a pile of small, sharp-edged stones lay nearby. Clara picked up one and handed it to the schoolteacher. "Hit him," she said. "Don't be afraid. He's nothing but a coward. Hit him over the head with the stone."

The three people stood silently, waiting for something to happen. John May was confused by Clara's words. He thought she wanted him to chase her. He stepped toward the schoolteacher, who dropped the stone they'd placed in his hand and ran away. Clara walked back up the road to her house, followed by the muttering farmhand, who hadn't dared approach after her speech on the bridge. "Perhaps she was bluffing. Perhaps she didn't want this young man to guess what was between us," he muttered, stumbling in the darkness.

At home, Clara sat for half an hour at the table in the lighted living room next to her father, pretending to read a book. She almost hoped he'd say something that would allow her to attack him. When nothing happened, she went upstairs and went to bed, only to spend another sleepless night, pale with anger at the thought of the cruel and inexplicable things life seemed to be trying to do to her.

In September, Clara left the farm to enroll at Columbus State University. She was sent there because Tom Butterworth had a sister who was married to a plow manufacturer and lived in the state capital. After the incident with the farmhand and the resulting misunderstanding between him and his daughter, he had become uncomfortable with her in the house and was glad to see her go. He didn't want to frighten his sister with the story and tried to be diplomatic when writing. "Clara has been spending too much time among the rough men who work on my farms and has become a little rough," he wrote. "Take her in hand. I want her to become more of a lady. Introduce her to the right people. Secretly, he hoped she would meet and marry a young man while she was away. His two sisters went off to school, and so it happened.

A month before his daughter's departure, the farmer tried to be more humane and gentle in his attitude toward her, but he was unable to dispel the deep-rooted hostility toward him. At the table, he cracked jokes that drew boisterous laughter from the farm workers. Then he looked at his daughter, who seemed not to be listening. Clara ate quickly and hurried from the room. She did not visit her friends in town, and the young schoolteacher no longer visited her. On long summer days, she strolled in the garden among the beehives or climbed the fence and went into the woods, where she sat for hours on a fallen log, gazing at the trees and the sky. Tom Butterworth also hurried away from home. He pretended to be busy and traveled across the country every day. Sometimes he felt as if he had been cruel and rude in his treatment of his daughter, and he resolved to speak to her about it and ask her to forgive him. Then his suspicions returned. He lashed his horse with his whip and rode furiously along the deserted roads. "Well, something's wrong," he muttered aloud. "Men don't just look at women and boldly approach them, like that young man did with Clara. He did it before my eyes. He was given some encouragement." An old suspicion reawakened within him. "Something was wrong with her mother, and something's wrong with her. I'll be glad when the time comes for her to marry and settle down so I can let her go," he thought bitterly.

That evening, when Clara left the farm to catch the train that was to take her away, her father said he had a headache, something he had never complained of before, and told Jim Priest to take her to the station. Jim drove the girl to the station, saw to her luggage, and waited for her train to arrive. Then he boldly kissed her cheek. "Goodbye, little girl," he said gruffly. Clara was so grateful she couldn't respond. She cried quietly for an hour on the train. The old farmer's rough gentleness did much to soften the growing bitterness in her heart. She felt ready to start her life anew and regretted not leaving the farm without finding a better understanding with her father.

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CHAPTER IX


The Woodburns of Columba were wealthy by the standards of their time. They lived in a large house, maintained two carriages and four servants, but had no children. Henderson Woodburn was small in stature, sported a gray beard, and was noted for his neat and orderly manners. He was treasurer of a plow company and also treasurer of the church he and his wife attended. In his youth, he was nicknamed "Chicken" Woodburn and bullied by larger boys, but as he grew into manhood, after his persistent shrewdness and patience had led him to a position of some authority in the business life of his native country, he, in turn, became something of a bully to those beneath him in town. He thought his wife, Priscilla, came from a better family than his own and was somewhat afraid of her. When they disagreed on something, she would express her opinion gently but firmly, and he would protest for a while and then give in. After the misunderstanding, his wife wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed the top of his bald head. Then the matter was forgotten.

Life in the Woodburn household flowed silently. After the hustle and bustle of the farm, the silence of the house frightened Clara for a long time. Even when alone in her room, she walked on tiptoe. Henderson Woodburn was absorbed in his work and, returning home that evening, ate a silent supper and then went back to work. He brought home the ledgers and papers from the office and spread them out on the living room table. His wife, Priscilla, sat in a large chair under the lamp, knitting children's stockings. They were, she told Clara, intended for the children of the poor. In fact, the stockings never left her home. In a large chest in her upstairs room lay hundreds of pairs, knitted over twenty-five years of marriage.

Clara wasn't entirely happy in the Woodburn household, but she wasn't entirely unhappy either. While studying at the university, she made decent grades, and in the late afternoons she'd stroll with a classmate, attend a theater matinee, or read a book. In the evenings, she'd sit with her aunt and uncle until she couldn't stand the silence any longer, then retire to her room, where she'd study until bedtime. Occasionally, she'd accompany two older men to social events at the church where Henderson Woodburn served as treasurer, or accompany them to dinners at the homes of other wealthy and respectable businessmen. Several evenings, young men would come over-the sons of the people the Woodburns dined with, or university students. On these occasions, Clara and the young man would sit in the living room and talk. After a while, they grew silent and shy in each other's presence. From the next room, Clara heard the rustling of papers containing columns of figures as her uncle worked. Her aunt's knitting needles clicked loudly. A young man was telling a story about a football match or, if he had already set out into the world, recounting his experiences as a traveler selling goods produced or sold by his father. All such visits began at the same hour, eight o'clock, and the young man left the house promptly at ten. Clara sensed that she was being sold to and that they had come to inspect the merchandise. One evening, one of the men, a young man with laughing blue eyes and curly yellow hair, unwittingly disturbed her greatly. He spoke the same way everyone else spoke all evening and then rose from his chair to leave at the appointed hour. Clara walked him to the door. She extended her hand, which he shook heartily. Then he looked at her, and his eyes sparkled. "I had a good time," he said. Clara felt a sudden and almost irresistible urge to embrace him. She wanted to shatter his confidence, to frighten him, kiss him on the lips or hold him tightly in her arms. Quickly closing the door, she stood, her hand on the doorknob, her whole body trembling. The trivial byproducts of the industrial madness of her age were evident in the next room. Sheets of paper rustled and knitting needles clicked. Clara thought she would like to call the young man back into the house, bring him to the room where the endless senseless activity continued, and there do something that would shock them, and him, as they had never been shocked before. She ran quickly upstairs. "What's happening to me?" she asked herself anxiously.


One May evening, during her third year at university, Clara sat by the bank of a tiny stream near a grove of trees, far on the outskirts of a suburban village north of Columbus. Beside her sat a young man named Frank Metcalf, whom she had known for a year and who had once been in her class. He was the son of the president of a plow company, where her uncle served as treasurer. As they sat together by the stream, the daylight began to fade and darkness fell. Across the open field stood a factory, and Clara remembered that the whistle had long ago sounded and the workers had gone home. She became restless and jumped to her feet. Young Metcalf, who had spoken very seriously, stood up and stood beside her. "I can't get married for two years, but we can be engaged, and it will be the same as far as the right and wrong of what I want and need is concerned." "It's not my fault I can't ask you to marry me now," he declared. "In two years, I'll inherit eleven thousand dollars. My aunt left it to me, and the old fool went and fixed it so I wouldn't get it if I married before I was twenty-four. I want that money. I have to have it, but I need you, too."

Clara looked out into the evening darkness and waited for him to finish his speech. All day he had been giving practically the same speech, over and over again. "Well, I can"t help it, I"m a man," he said stubbornly. "I can"t help it, I want you. I can"t help it, my aunt was an old fool." He began to explain that it was necessary to remain single in order to get the eleven thousand dollars. "If I don"t get that money, I"ll be the same as I am now," he declared. "I"ll be no good." He grew angry and, with his hands in his pockets, also looked across the field into the darkness. "Nothing can satisfy me," he said. "I hate doing my father"s business and I hate going to school. In just two years I"ll get the money. Father can"t hide it from me. I"ll take it and pay it off. I don"t know what I"ll do. Maybe I"ll go to Europe, that"s what I"m going to do." My father wants me to stay here and work in his office. To hell with it. I want to travel. I'll be a soldier or something. Either way, I'm going to leave here, go somewhere and do something exciting, something alive. You can come with me. We'll carve together. You haven't got the guts? Why don't you be my woman?

Young Metcalfe grabbed Clara by the shoulder and tried to hug her. They struggled for a moment, and then he pulled away from her in disgust and began cursing again.

Clara crossed two or three vacant lots and emerged onto a street lined with workers' houses, the man following closely behind. Night had fallen, and the people on the street facing the factory had already finished their supper. Children and dogs played in the road, and the air was thick with the smell of cooking. To the west, a passenger train passed through the fields, heading for the city. Its light cast flickering yellow spots against the bluish-black sky. Clara wondered why she had come to this remote place with Frank Metcalf. She didn't like him, but there was a restlessness in him that mirrored her own. He refused to accept life dully, and that made him a brother to herself. Though only twenty-two, he had already earned a bad reputation. A servant in his father's house had given birth to his child, and it had cost a great deal of money to persuade her to take the child and leave without causing an open scandal. The year before, he had been expelled from university for throwing another young man down the stairs, and it was rumored among the female students that he often drank heavily. For a year, he tried to ingratiate himself with Clara, writing her letters, sending her flowers at home, and, meeting her on the street, stopping to persuade her to accept his friendship. One May day, she met him on the street, and he begged her for a chance to talk to her. They met at a crossroads where cars passed through the suburban villages surrounding the city. "Come on," he urged, "let's ride the tram, get out of the crowd, I want to talk to you." He grabbed her hand and practically dragged her toward the car. "Come and listen to what I have to say," he urged, "then if you don't want to have anything to do with me, fine. You can say so, and I'll leave you alone." After accompanying him to a suburb of workers' houses, near which they spent a day in the fields, Clara discovered he had nothing to impose on her except the needs of his body. And yet she sensed he wanted to say something that hadn't been said. He was restless and dissatisfied with his life, and deep down, she felt the same way about hers. Over the past three years, she had often wondered why she had come to school and what she would gain by learning things from books. Days and months passed, and she learned some rather uninteresting facts she hadn't known before. How these facts were supposed to help her survive, she couldn't understand. They had nothing to do with issues such as her relationship with men like John May, the farmhand, the schoolteacher who had taught her something by holding her in his arms and kissing her, and the dark, sullen young man who now walked beside her and talked about the needs of his body. Clara felt like every additional year spent at university only emphasized his inadequacy. The same was true of the books she read and the thoughts and actions of older people toward her. Her aunt and uncle spoke little, but seemed to take for granted that she wanted to live a different life than they had. She dreaded the prospect of marrying a plowman or some other dull necessity of life, then spending her days making stockings for unborn babies or some other equally useless expression of her dissatisfaction. She realized with a shudder that men like her uncle, who spent their lives adding up numbers or doing some extremely trivial thing over and over again, had no conception of any prospects for their women beyond living in the home, physically serving them, wearing perhaps good enough clothes to help them demonstrate prosperity and success, and finally slipping into a foolish acceptance of boredom - an acceptance that both she and the passionate, perverted man beside her were fighting against.

In her third year of university, Clara met a woman named Kate Chancellor, who had moved to Columbus with her brother from a town in Missouri. It was this woman who gave her a form of reflection that truly made her consider the inadequacy of her life. Her brother, a studious, quiet man, worked as a chemist at a factory somewhere on the outskirts of town. He was a musician and aspired to be a composer. One winter evening, his sister, Kate, brought Clara to the apartment they shared, and the three became friends. Clara learned something there that she hadn't yet understood and had never clearly penetrated her consciousness. The truth was that her brother looked like a woman, and Kate Chancellor, who wore skirts and had a woman's body, was inherently a man. Kate and Clara later spent many evenings together and discussed many things that college girls usually avoid. Kate was a bold, energetic thinker, eager to grasp her own life's problems, and many times, as they walked down the street or sat together in the evening, she would forget her companion and talk about herself and the difficulties of her position in life. "It's absurd how things work," she said. "Because my body is built a certain way, I have to accept certain rules of life. Rules weren't made for me. Men manufactured them the way they manufacture can openers, wholesale." She looked at Clara and laughed. "Try to imagine me in a little lace cap like your aunt wears at home, spending my days knitting children's stockings," she said.

The two women spent hours talking about their lives and reflecting on the differences in their natures. The experience proved extremely instructive for Clara. Since Kate was a socialist and Columbus was rapidly becoming an industrial city, she spoke of the importance of capital and labor, as well as the impact of changing conditions on the lives of men and women. Clara could talk to Kate as if she were talking to a man, but the antagonism that so often exists between men and women did not interfere or spoil their friendly conversation. That evening, when Clara went to Kate's house, her aunt sent a carriage to take her home at nine. Kate went home with her. They reached the Woodburns' house and went inside. Kate was bold and free with the Woodburns, as she was with her brother and Clara. "Well," she said, laughing, "put away your figures and knitting." Let's talk." She sat cross-legged in a large chair, talking with Henderson Woodburn about the affairs of the plow company. They discussed the relative merits of free trade and protectionism. Then the two old men went to bed, and Kate talked to Clara. "Your uncle is an old bum," she said. "He knows nothing of the meaning of what he does in life." As she walked home through town, Clara was alarmed for her safety. "You must call a taxi or let me wake Uncle's man; something might happen," she said. Kate laughed and walked away, walking down the street like a man. Sometimes she put her hands in her skirt pockets, like men's trouser pockets, and Clara found it hard to remember that she was a woman. In Kate's presence, she became bolder than she ever had with anyone. One evening, she told a story about what had happened to her that day, long before On the farm, that day, her mind ablaze with Jim Priest's words about sap rising up a tree and the warm, sensual beauty of the day, she longed to connect with someone. She explained to Kate how she had been so cruelly deprived of the inner feeling she thought was right. "It was like being punched in the face by God," she said.

Kate Chancellor was moved as Clara told this story, listening with a fiery light in her eyes. Something in her manner prompted Clara to tell of her experiments with the schoolteacher, and for the first time, she felt a sense of fairness toward men while talking to a woman who was half a man. "I know it wasn't fair," she said. "I know it now, as I speak to you, but I didn't know it then. I was as unfair to the schoolteacher as John May and my father were to me. Why must men and women fight each other? Why must the battle between them continue?"

Kate paced back and forth in front of Clara, cursing like a man. "Oh, damn," she cried, "men are such fools, and I suppose women are just as fools. They"re both too much the same. I"m caught between them. I have a problem too, but I won"t talk about it. I know what I"m going to do. I"m going to find some work and do it." She began to talk about the stupidity of men in their approach to women. "Men hate women like me," she said. "They can"t use us, they think. What fools! They have to watch and study us. Many of us spend our lives loving other women, but we have skills. Being half women, we know how to treat women. We don"t make mistakes and we"re not rude. Men want a certain thing from you. He"s delicate and easy to kill. Love is the most sensitive thing in the world. It"s like an orchid. Men try to pick orchids with ice picks, fools."

Approaching Clara, who was standing by the table, and taking her by the shoulder, the agitated woman stood there for a long moment, looking at her. Then she picked up her hat, placed it on her head, and with a wave of her hand, headed for the door. "You can rely on my friendship," she said. "I will do nothing to confuse you. You'll be lucky if you can receive such love or friendship from a man."

Clara kept thinking about Kate Chancellor's words that evening as she strolled the streets of the suburban village with Frank Metcalfe, and later as they sat in the car that took them back to town. With the exception of another student named Phillip Grimes, who had visited her a dozen times during her second year at the university, young Metcalfe was the only one of the dozen or so men she had met since leaving the farm who attracted her. Phillip Grimes was a slender young man with blue eyes, yellow hair, and a sparse mustache. He came from a small town upstate, where his father published a weekly newspaper. Coming to Clara's, he sat on the edge of his chair and spoke rapidly. He was intrigued by a man he had seen on the street. "I saw an old woman in a car," he began. "She had a basket in her hand. It was filled with groceries. She sat next to me and talked out loud to herself." Clara's guest repeated the old woman's words in the car. He thought about her, wondered what her life was like. After talking about the old woman for ten or fifteen minutes, he dropped the subject and began to tell of another incident, this time with a man selling fruit on a street crossing. It was impossible to talk on a personal level with Phillip Grimes. Nothing was personal except his eyes. Sometimes he looked at Clara in a way that made her feel as if her clothes were being ripped from her body and that she was being forced to stand naked in a room before a visitor. This experience, when it came, was not entirely physical. It was only partial. When it happened, Clara saw her whole life laid bare. "Don't look at me like that," she said one day, somewhat sharply, when his gaze made her so uncomfortable that she could no longer remain silent. Her remark frightened Phillip Grimes. He immediately stood up, blushed, muttered something about a new engagement and hurried away.

On the streetcar, heading home next to Frank Metcalf, Clara thought about Phillip Grimes and wondered if he would have stood the test of Kate Chancellor's speech about love and friendship. He had embarrassed her, but perhaps that was her own fault. He hadn't asserted himself at all. Frank Metcalf had done nothing else. "It takes a man," she thought, "to find a way to find a man somewhere who respects himself and his desires, but also understands a woman's desires and fears." The streetcar bounced over railroad crossings and residential streets. Clara glanced at her companion, who was staring straight ahead, and then turned and looked out the window. The window was open, and she could see the interiors of the workers' houses along the street. In the evening, with the lamps lit, they seemed cozy and comfortable. Her thoughts returned to life in her father's house and his loneliness. For two summers, she had avoided returning home. At the end of her freshman year, she used her uncle's illness as an excuse to spend the summer in Columbus, and at the end of her sophomore year, she found another excuse not to go. This year, she felt she would have to go home. She would have to sit day after day at the farm table with the farmhands. Nothing would happen. Her father remained silent in her presence. She would tire of the endless chatter of city girls. If any of the city boys paid her any special attention, her father would become suspicious, and that would lead to resentment within her. She would do something she didn't want to do. In the houses along the streets where the car passed, she saw women moving about. Children cried, and men came out of doors and stood talking to each other on the sidewalks. She suddenly decided she was taking the problem of her life too seriously. "I need to get married and then sort it all out," she told herself. She came to the conclusion that the mysterious, persistent antagonism that existed between men and women was entirely explained by the fact that they weren't married and lacked the married people's way of solving problems that Frank Metcalfe had been talking about all day. She wished she could be with Kate Chancellor to discuss this new point of view with her. When she and Frank Metcalfe got out of the car, she was no longer in a hurry to go home to her uncle's house. Knowing she didn't want to marry him, she thought she would speak up in turn, that she would try to make him see her point of view, just as he had been trying to make her see his all day.

For an hour, the two walked, and Clara talked. She forgot about the passage of time and the fact that she hadn't eaten dinner. Not wanting to talk about marriage, she spoke instead of the possibility of friendship between a man and a woman. As she spoke, her thoughts seemed to clear. "It's all stupid for you to act like this," she declared. "I know how dissatisfied and unhappy you are sometimes. I often feel that way myself. Sometimes I think I want marriage. I really do think I want to get close to someone. I believe everyone craves that experience. We all want something we're not willing to pay for. We want to steal it or have it taken from us. That's the case with me, and that's the case with you."

They approached the Woodburn house and, turning, stood on the porch in the darkness by the front door. At the back of the house, Clara saw a light on. Her aunt and uncle were busy with their perpetual sewing and knitting. They were seeking a substitute for life. This was what Frank Metcalfe protested against, and it was the real reason for her own constant, secret protest. She grabbed his coat lapel, intending to make a plea, to instill in him the idea of a friendship that would mean something to them both. In the darkness, she couldn't see his rather heavy, sullen face. Her maternal instincts grew stronger, and she thought of him as a wayward, discontented boy, yearning for love and understanding, as she had longed to be loved and understood by her father when life, at the moment of her awakening womanhood, seemed ugly and cruel. With her free hand, she stroked the sleeve of his coat. Her gesture was misunderstood by the man, who was thinking not of her words but of her body and his desire to possess it. He picked her up and held her tightly to his chest. She tried to pull away, but although she was strong and muscular, she found herself unable to move. Holding her, her uncle, who had heard two people ascend the steps to the door, pushed it open. Both he and his wife had repeatedly warned Clara to have nothing to do with young Metcalfe. Once, when he sent flowers home, her aunt persuaded her to refuse them. "He's a bad, dissolute, wicked man," she said. "Have nothing to do with him." When he saw his niece in the arms of the man who had been the subject of so much discussion in his own home and in all the respectable houses of Columbus, Henderson Woodburn was furious. He forgot that young Metcalf was the son of the president of the company where he was treasurer. He felt as if he had been personally insulted by a common bully. "Get out of here," he shouted. "What do you mean, you vile villain? Get out of here."

Frank Metcalfe, laughing defiantly, walked down the street as Clara entered the house. The sliding doors to the living room were open, and the light from the hanging lamp spilled onto her. Her hair was disheveled and her hat was tilted to one side. The man and woman stared at her. The knitting needles and piece of paper they held in their hands suggested what they had been doing while Clara was learning yet another life lesson. Her aunt's hands trembled, and the knitting needles clicked together. Nothing was said, and the confused and angry girl ran up the stairs to her room. She locked the door and knelt on the floor beside her bed. She didn't pray. Her encounter with Kate Chancellor had given her another outlet for her emotions. Pounding her fists on the bedspread, she cursed. "Fools, damned fools, there's nothing in the world but a lot of damned fools."

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CHAPTER X


TO LARA BUTTERWORTH _ LEFT Bidwell, Ohio, in September of the same year that Steve Hunter's machinery installation company was taken over by a receiver, and in January of the following year this enterprising young man, together with Tom Butterworth, bought the plant. In March a new company was organized, which immediately began manufacturing the Hugh corn shredder, which was a success from the start. The failure of the first company and the sale of the plant created a furor in the town. However, both Steve and Tom Butterworth could point to the fact that they held on to their stock and lost their money along with everyone else. Tom did sell his stock because, as he explained, he needed cash, but he demonstrated his good faith by buying again shortly before the crash. "Do you think I would have done this if I had known what had happened?" he asked the men gathered in the stores. "Go and look at the company books. Let's make an investigation here. You'll find that Steve and I stuck by the other shareholders. We lost money along with the others. If anyone was dishonest and, seeing the looming disaster, went and got out from under someone else, it wasn't Steve and I. The company's accounts will show we were in on it. It wasn't our fault the equipment installation rig didn't work.

In the back room of the bank, John Clark and young Gordon Hart cursed Steve and Tom, who, they claimed, had sold them out. They hadn't lost any money because of the mishap, but on the other hand, they hadn't gained anything either. The four men had bid for the plant when it was put up for sale, but, not expecting competition, they hadn't offered much. It went to a Cleveland law firm, which offered slightly more, and was later resold privately to Steve and Tom. An investigation was launched, and it was discovered that Steve and Tom owned large blocks of stock in the defunct company, while the bankers owned virtually nothing. Steve openly admitted that he had long known about the possibility of bankruptcy, warned the major shareholders, and asked them not to sell their shares. "While I was trying so hard to save the company, what were they doing?" he asked sharply, a question echoed in stores and homes.

The truth, the town never learned, was that Steve had originally intended to get the plant for himself, but ultimately decided it would be better to take someone with him. He was afraid of John Clark. He thought about the matter for two or three days and decided the banker couldn't be trusted. "He's too good a friend of Tom Butterworth's," he told himself. "If I tell him my plan, he'll tell Tom. I'll go to Tom myself. He's a moneymaker, and he's a man who knows the difference between a bicycle and a wheelbarrow if you put one in his bed."

One September evening, Steve drove to Tom's house late. He didn't want to go, but he was convinced it was for the best. "I don't want to burn all my bridges behind me," he told himself. "I need to have at least one respectable friend here in town. I'll have to deal with these scoundrels, maybe for the rest of my life. I can't close myself off too much, at least not yet."

When Steve reached the farm, he asked Tom to climb into his buggy, and the two men set out on a long ride. The horse, a gray gelding with one blind eye, hired for the occasion from Neighbors Livery, slowly made its way through the rolling countryside south of Bidwell. It had carried hundreds of young men and their sweethearts. As he walked slowly, perhaps thinking of his own youth and the tyranny of the man who had made him a gelding, he knew that as long as the moon shone and the tense, silent stillness continued to reign over the two people in the buggy, the whip would not leave its socket, and he should not be expected to hurry.

However, on that September evening, the gray gelding carried a burden it had never borne before. The two people in the buggy that evening were not foolish, wandering lovers, thinking only of love and allowing their moods to be influenced by the beauty of the night, the softness of the black shadows on the road, and the gentle night winds that wove along the ridges of the hills. These were respectable businessmen, mentors of a new age, men who, in the future of America and perhaps the world, would become the creators of governments, the shapers of public opinion, the owners of the press, book publishers, art buyers, and, out of the goodness of their hearts, the providers of the occasional starving or unwary poet lost on other roads. In any case, the two men sat in the buggy while the gray gelding wandered through the hills. Vast splashes of moonlight lay on the road. By chance, it was that very evening that Clara Butterworth left home to enroll at the State University. Remembering the kindness and gentleness of the gruff old farmhand, Jim Priest, who had driven her to the station, she lay on her bunk in the sleeper car and watched the moonlit roads slip away like ghosts. She thought of her father that night and the misunderstanding that had arisen between them. For the moment, she was tender with regret. "After all, Jim Priest and my father must be very similar," she thought. "They lived on the same farm, ate the same food; they both love horses. There can't be much difference between them." All night she thought about this. An obsession with the idea that the whole world was on a moving train, and that as it sped along, it was carrying the people of the world into some strange labyrinth of misunderstanding, took hold of her. It was so powerful that it touched her deeply hidden subconscious and made her terribly afraid. She felt as if the walls of the sleeping car were like the walls of a prison, cutting her off from the beauty of life. The walls seemed to close in around her. The walls, like life itself, blocked her youth and her youthful desire to extend the hand of her beauty to the hidden beauty of others. She sat down on the berth and suppressed the urge to break the car window and leap from the fast-moving train into the quiet, moonlit night. With girlish generosity, she took responsibility for the misunderstanding that had arisen between her and her father. Later, she lost the impulse that had led her to this decision, but that night it remained. Despite the horror caused by the hallucination of the moving walls of the bunk, which seemed about to crush her and returned again and again, it was the most beautiful night she had ever experienced, and it remained etched in her memory throughout her life. In fact, she later came to think of that night as a time when it would be especially wonderful and right for her to give herself to her lover. Although she didn't know it, the kiss on her cheek from Jim Priest's mustachioed lips undoubtedly had something to do with that thought when it occurred to her.

And while the girl struggled with the oddities of life and tried to break through the imaginary walls that were depriving her of the opportunity to live, her father also rode through the night. He watched Steve Hunter's face with a piercing gaze. It was already beginning to thicken a little, but Tom suddenly realized it was the face of a capable man. Something in the jaws made Tom, who had dealt with livestock a lot, think of a pig's face. "The man gets what he wants. He's greedy," thought the farmer. "Now he's up to something. To get what he wants, he'll give me a chance to get what I want. He's going to make me some kind of offer about the plant. He's devised a plan to distance himself from Gordon Hart and John Clark because he doesn't need too many partners. Fine, I'll go with him. Any of them would do the same if they had the chance."

Steve smoked a black cigar and talked. As he grew more confident in himself and the affairs that consumed him, he also became smoother and more persuasive in his words. He spoke for some time about the necessity of the survival and constant growth of certain people in the industrial world. "It"s necessary for the good of society," he said. "A few reasonably strong men are good for a city, but if there are fewer of them and they are relatively stronger, so much the better." He turned and looked sharply at his companion. "Well," he exclaimed, "we were talking back at the bank about what we would do if the factory went bad, but there were too many people in the scheme. I didn"t realize it then, but I understand it now." He flicked the ash from his cigar and laughed. "You know what they did, don"t you?" he asked. "I asked you all not to sell your shares. I didn"t want to upset the whole city. They wouldn"t have lost anything." "I promised to see them through, get them a plant at a low price, help them make real money. They were playing the game in a provincial way. Some men can think in thousands of dollars, others have to think in hundreds. It's just that their minds are big enough to grasp it. They seize a small advantage and miss a big one. That's what these people did."

They drove in silence for a long time. Tom, who had also sold his shares, wondered if Steve knew. He had decided what he had done. "He's decided to deal with me, though. He needs someone, and he chose me," he thought. He had decided to be bold. After all, Steve was young. Just a year or two ago, he'd been nothing more than a young upstart, and even the kids on the street had laughed at him. Tom was a little indignant, but he thought carefully before speaking. "Perhaps, even though he's young and unassuming, he thinks faster and more perceptively than any of us," he told himself.

"You sound like a man with something up his sleeve," he said, laughing. "If you must know, I sold my shares just like everyone else. I wasn"t going to take a chance and be a loser if I could help it. Maybe that"s the way it is in a small town, but you know something I might not. You can"t blame me for living up to my standards. I"ve always believed in survival of the fittest, and I had a daughter to support and send to college. I want to make a lady out of her. You don"t have children yet, and you"re younger. Maybe you want to take a chance, and I don"t want to take a chance. How am I supposed to know what you"re up to?"

And again they rode in silence. Steve braced himself for a conversation. He knew there was a chance that the corn picker Hugh had invented might in turn prove impractical, and that he might end up with the factory to himself, with nothing to produce. However, he did not hesitate. And again, as on that day at the bank when he had encountered the two older men, he was bluffing. "Well, you can come in or stay out, as you wish," he said a little sharply. "I"m going to take over this factory if I can, and I"ll make corn pickers. I"ve already promised enough orders to last me a year. I can"t take you with me and tell everyone in town that you were one of those who sold out the small investors. I have a hundred thousand dollars" worth of company stock. You can have half of that. I"ll take your note for fifty thousand. You"ll never have to pay it back. The profits from the new factory will clear you. However, you"ll have to confess to everything." Of course, you can follow John Clark and go out and start an open fight for the factory yourselves if you want. I have the rights to the corn picker, and I'll take it somewhere else and build it. I don't mind telling you that if we part ways, I'll give a great publicity to what you three guys did to the small investors after I asked you not to do it. You can all stay here and own your empty factory and get the maximum satisfaction from the love and respect you get from the people. You can do whatever you want. I don't care. My hands are clean. I haven't done anything I'm ashamed of, and if you want to come with me, you and I will do something in this town together that neither of us will have to be ashamed of.

The two men returned to the Butterworth farmhouse, and Tom got out of the buggy. He was about to tell Steve to go to hell, but as they drove down the road, he changed his mind. The young schoolteacher from Bidwell, who had come to visit his daughter Clara several times, was abroad that night with another young woman. He climbed into the buggy, his arm around her waist, and drove slowly through the rolling hills. Tom and Steve passed them, and the farmer, seeing the woman in the man's arms in the moonlight, imagined his daughter in her place. The thought infuriated him. "I'm losing my chance to become a big man in this town just to play it safe and be sure of money to leave Clara, and all she cares about is having fun with some young whore," he thought bitterly. He began to feel like an unappreciated and resentful father. Stepping out of the buggy, he stood at the wheel for a moment and looked at Steve carefully. "I'm as good at the sport as you are," he said finally. "Bring your supplies, and I'll give you the note. That's all it is, you understand: just my note. I don't promise to put up any collateral for it, and I don't expect you to put it up for sale." Steve leaned out of the buggy and took his hand. "I'm not selling your note, Tom," he said. "I'll put it away. I want a partner to help me. You and I are going to do something together."

The young promoter drove off, and Tom went into the house and went to bed. Like his daughter, he didn't sleep. He thought about her for a moment, and in his mind's eye he saw her again in the stroller with the schoolteacher cradling her. The thought made him shift uneasily under the sheets. "Anyway, damn women," he muttered. To distract himself, he thought of other things. "I'll draw up the deed and transfer my three properties to Clara," he decided shrewdly. "If something goes wrong, we won't be completely broke. I know Charlie Jacobs at the county courthouse. If I grease Charlie's hand a little, I can register the deed without anyone knowing."


Clara's last two weeks at the Woodburn home were spent in a heated struggle, made all the more intense by the silence. Henderson Wood, Byrne, and his wife all believed Clara owed them an explanation for the scene at the front door with Frank Metcalf. When she didn't offer, they were offended. When he flung open the door and confronted two people, the plowmaker had the impression Clara was trying to escape Frank Metcalf 's embrace. He told his wife he didn't hold her responsible for the scene on the porch. Not being the girl's father, he could view the matter coldly. "She's a good girl," he declared. "That brute Frank Metcalf is to blame for everything. I dare say he followed her home. She's upset now, but in the morning she'll tell us the story of what happened."

Days passed, and Clara said nothing. During the last week they spent in the house, she and the two older men barely spoke. The young woman felt a strange relief. Every evening she went to dinner with Kate Chancellor, who, when she heard the story of that day in the suburbs and the incident on the porch, left without knowing it and talked with Henderson Woodburn in his office. After their conversation, the manufacturer was puzzled and a little afraid of both Clara and her friend. He tried to explain this to his wife, but it wasn't very clear. "I can't understand it," he said. "She's one of those women I can't understand, this Kate. She says Clara wasn't to blame for what happened between her and Frank Metcalfe, but she doesn't want to tell us the story because she thinks young Metcalfe wasn't to blame either." Though he'd been respectful and polite while listening to Kate speak, he grew angry when he tried to explain to his wife what she'd said. "I'm afraid it was just a mix-up," he declared. "I'm glad we don't have a daughter. If neither of them was guilty, what were they up to? What's happening to the new generation of women? For that matter, what happened to Kate Chancellor?"

The plowmaker advised his wife not to say anything to Clara. "Let's wash our hands," he suggested. "In a few days, she'll be going home, and we won't say anything about her return next year. Let's be polite, but let's act as if she doesn't exist."

Clara accepted her aunt and uncle's new attitude without comment. That afternoon, she didn't return from the university but went to Kate's apartment. Her brother came home and played the piano after dinner. At ten o'clock, Clara walked home, and Kate accompanied her. The two women struggled to sit on a park bench. They talked about a thousand hidden phases of life that Clara had previously barely dared to contemplate. For the rest of her life, she considered those last weeks in Columbus the most profound time she had ever experienced. The Woodburn house made her uncomfortable because of the silence and her aunt's hurt, aggrieved expression, but she didn't spend much time there. That morning, at seven o'clock, Henderson Woodburn breakfasted alone and, clutching his ever-present briefcase of papers, drove to the plow mill. Clara and her aunt breakfasted silently at eight, and then Clara, too, hurried away. "I'll go out to lunch and then to Kate's for dinner," she said as she left her aunt, not with the air of asking permission she usually had with Frank Metcalfe, but as one entitled to manage her own time. Only once did her aunt manage to break the cool, offended dignity she had adopted. One morning, she followed Clara to the front door and, watching her descend the steps from the porch to the alley leading to the street, called out to her. Perhaps some faint memory of the rebellious period of her own youth came over her. Tears welled in her eyes. To her, the world was a place of horror, where wolf-like men roamed in search of women to devour, and she feared that something terrible would happen to her niece. "If you don't want to tell me, that's all right," she said boldly, "but I'd like you to feel like you can." When Clara turned to look at her, she hastened to explain. "Mr. Woodburn said I shouldn't disturb you, and I won't," she added quickly. Folding her hands nervously, she turned and looked out into the street with the air of a frightened child peering into a den of animals. "Oh, Clara, be a good girl," she said. "I know you're all grown up, but, oh, Clara, be careful! Don't get into trouble."

The Woodburn house in Columbus, like the Butterworth house in the countryside south of Bidwell, was located on a hill. The street sloped sharply toward downtown and the trolley line, and that morning, when her aunt spoke to her and tried with her feeble hands to pry a few stones from the wall under construction between them, Clara hurried down the street under the trees, feeling like she, too, wanted to cry. She saw no way to explain to her aunt the new thoughts about life she was beginning to have, and she didn't want to hurt her by trying. "How can I explain my thoughts when they're unclear in my head, when I'm just rambling blindly?" she asked herself. "She wants me to be good," she thought. "What would she think if I told her I'd come to the conclusion that, by her standards, I was too good? What's the point of trying to talk to her if I'll only hurt her and make things worse?" She reached the crossroads and looked back. Her aunt was still standing at the door of her house, looking at her. There was something soft, small, round, insistent, terribly weak and terribly strong at the same time, about the perfectly feminine creature she had made of herself, or that life had made of her. Clara shuddered. She had not symbolized her aunt's figure, and her mind had not formed the connection between her aunt's life and who she had become, the way Kate Chancellor's mind would have. She saw the small, round, crying woman as a child, walking along the tree-lined streets of the city, and suddenly saw the pale face and bulging eyes of a prisoner staring at him through the iron bars of the city jail. Clara was afraid, as a boy would have been afraid, and like a boy, she wanted to run away as quickly as possible. "I must think of something else and other women, or everything will be terribly distorted," she told herself. "If I think about her and women like her, I'll start to fear marriage and want to get married as soon as I find the right man. That's the only thing I can do. What else can a woman do?"

As they strolled that evening, Clara and Kate talked constantly about the new position Kate believed women were about to occupy in the world. The woman, who was essentially a man, wanted to talk about marriage and condemn it, but she constantly fought this urge. She knew that if she let herself go, she would say many things that, while true enough about herself, wouldn't necessarily be true about Clara. "The fact that I don't want to live with a man or be his wife isn't very good evidence that the institution is wrong. Maybe I want to keep Clara for myself. I think about her more than anyone else I've ever met. How can I really think about her marrying some man and losing her sense of the things that mean the most to me?" she asked herself. One evening, as the women were walking from Kate's apartment to the Woodburns' house, two men approached them and wanted to go for a walk. There was a small park nearby, and Kate led the men there. "Come on," she said, "you and I won't go, but you can sit with us here on the bench." The men sat down next to them, and the older one, a man with a small black mustache, made some comment about the clarity of the night. The young man sitting next to Clara looked at her and laughed. Kate got right down to business. "Well, you wanted to go for a walk with us: why?" she asked sharply. She explained what they were doing. "We were walking and talking about women and what they should do with their lives," she explained. "You see, we were expressing opinions. I'm not saying either of us said anything very wise, but we were having a good time and trying to learn something from each other. What can you tell us?" You interrupted our conversation and wanted to come with us: why? You wanted to be in our company: now tell us what contribution you can make. You can't just show up and hang out with us like fools. What can you offer that, in your opinion, will allow us to interrupt our conversations with each other and spend time talking with you?

The older man with the mustache turned and looked at Kate, then stood up from the bench. He walked a little to the side, then turned and motioned to his companion. "Come on," he said, "let's get out of here. We're wasting time. This is a cold trail. It's a couple of intellectuals. Come on, let's go."

The two women walked down the street again. Kate couldn't help but feel a little proud of the way she'd dealt with the men. She'd been talking about it until they reached the Woodburns' door, and as she walked down the street, Clara thought she was a little too forward. She stood by the door and watched her friend until she disappeared around the corner. A flash of doubt about the infallibility of Kate's methods with men flashed through her mind. She suddenly remembered the soft brown eyes of the younger of the two men in the park and wondered what lurked deep within them. Perhaps, after all, if she'd been alone with him, he would have had something as pertinent to say as what he and Kate had said to each other. "Kate made fools of men, but she wasn't exactly fair," she thought as she entered the house.


Clara stayed in Bidwell for a month before she realized the changes that had taken place in her hometown. Business on the farm was as usual, except that her father was there very rarely. He and Steve Hunter were deeply immersed in a project manufacturing and selling corn pickers and handled most of the factory's sales. Almost every month, he made trips to Western cities. Even when he was in Bidwell, he had gotten into the habit of stopping overnight at the town hotel. "It's too much trouble to keep running back and forth," he explained to Jim Priest, whom he had put in charge of the farm. He bragged to the old man, who had been practically a partner in his small business ventures for so many years. "Well, I wouldn't like to say anything, but I think it would be a good idea to keep an eye on what's going on," he declared. "Steve's fine, but business is business." We're dealing with big things, he and I. I'm not saying he'll try to get the better of me; I'm just telling you that in the future, I'll have to spend most of my time in the city, and I won't be able to think about anything here. You're looking after the farm. Don't bother me with details. Just tell me about it when you need to buy or sell something."

Clara arrived in Bidwell late in the afternoon of a warm June day. The rolling hills through which her train had entered the town were in full bloom with their summer beauty. In the small patches of flat land between the hills, grain was ripening in the fields. In the streets of tiny towns and on dusty country roads, peasants in overalls stood in their carts and cursed their horses, rearing and prancing, half-feigning fear of the passing train. In the woods on the hillsides, the open spaces among the trees were cool and inviting. Clara pressed her cheek against the car window and imagined wandering through the cool forest with her lover. She forgot Kate Chancellor's words about women's independent future. That, she vaguely thought, was something to consider only after some more pressing problem had been resolved. She didn't know exactly what the problem was, but she knew it was a close, warm connection with life that she couldn't yet establish. When she closed her eyes, strong, warm hands seemed to appear out of nowhere and touched her flushed cheeks. The fingers were as strong as tree branches. They touched with the hardness and softness of tree branches swaying in the summer breeze.

Clara sat up straight in her seat, and when the train stopped at Bidwell, she got off and walked with a firm, businesslike air toward her waiting father. Emerging from dreamland, she had acquired something of the determined air of Kate Chancellor. She looked at her father, and an outside observer might have thought they were two strangers meeting to discuss some business arrangement. An air of something like suspicion hung over them. They got into Tom's buggy, and since Main Street had been torn up to make way for a brick sidewalk and a new sewer, they took a circuitous route through residential streets until they reached Medina Road. Clara looked at her father and suddenly felt very wary. She felt far removed from the green, guileless girl who so often walked the streets of Bidwell; that her mind and spirit had expanded considerably during her three years of absence; And she wondered if her father would understand the change in her. She felt that either of two reactions on his part could make her happy. He could suddenly turn and, taking her hand, welcome her into fellowship, or he could accept her as a woman and his daughter, kissing her.

He did neither. They rode silently through town, crossed a small bridge, and onto the road leading to the farm. Tom was curious about his daughter, and a little uneasy. Ever since that evening on the farmhouse porch, when he'd accused her of some unspecified affair with John May, he'd felt guilty in her presence, but he'd managed to convey his guilt to her. While she was at school, he'd felt comfortable. Sometimes he wouldn't think of her for a month. Now she'd written that she wasn't going to return. She hadn't asked his advice, but she'd said positively that she was coming home to stay. He wondered what had happened. Was she having another affair with a man? He wanted to ask, was about to ask, but in her presence, he found the words he'd intended to say lingering on his lips. After a long silence, Clara began asking questions about the farm, the men who worked there, her aunt's health-the usual questions about returning home. Her father answered in general terms. "They're all right," he said, "everything and everyone is fine."

The road began to emerge from the valley in which the town lay, and Tom reined in his horse and, pointing his whip, began to talk about the town. He was glad the silence had been broken and decided not to say anything about the letter announcing the end of her school life. "You see," he said, pointing to where the wall of the new brick factory rose above the trees by the river. "We"re building a new factory. We"re going to make corn choppers there. The old factory is too small. We sold it to a new company that"s going to make bicycles. Steve Hunter and I sold it. We got twice what we paid for it. When the bicycle factory opens, he and I will control it too. I"m telling you, the town is on the rise."

Tom was bragging about his new position in town, and Clara turned and glared at him, then quickly looked away. He was irritated by this action, and a flush of anger spread across his cheeks. A side of his character his daughter had never seen before surfaced. As a simple farmer, he had been too shrewd to try to play the aristocrat with his farmhands, but often, strolling through the barns or driving along the country roads and seeing the people working in his fields, he felt like a prince in the presence of his vassals. Now he spoke like a prince. This was precisely what frightened Clara. An inexplicable air of regal prosperity hung around him. When she turned and looked at him, she noticed for the first time how much his personality had changed. Like Steve Hunter, he had begun to put on weight. The thin firmness of his cheeks had disappeared, his jaw had become heavier, even his hands had changed color. He wore a diamond ring on his left hand, glittering in the sun. "Everything changed," he declared, still pointing toward the city. "You want to know who changed it? Well, I had more to do with it than anyone else. Steve thinks he did it all, but he didn"t. I"m the guy who did the most. He started a machine-tuning company, but it was a failure. Seriously, it would have all gone wrong again if I hadn"t gone to John Clark, talked to him, and tricked him into giving us the money we wanted. My biggest concern was also finding a big market for our corn choppers. Steve lied to me and said he sold them all within a year. He sold nothing at all."

Tom cracked his whip and rode quickly down the road. Even when the climb became difficult, he didn't let go of his horse, but continued to crack the whip across its back. "I'm a different man than I was when you left," he declared. "You should know I'm a big man in this town. It's practically my town, in a nutshell. I'm going to take care of everyone in Bidwell and give everyone a chance to make money, but my town's right here now, and you probably know it, too."

Embarrassed by his own words, Tom spoke to cover his embarrassment. What he had been meaning to say was already said. "I'm glad you've gone to school and are preparing to be a lady," he began. "I want you to get married as soon as possible. I don't know whether you met anyone at school or not. If you have, and he's all right, then I'm all right. I don't want you to marry an ordinary man, but a smart, educated gentleman. We Butterworths will be here more and more. If you marry a good man, a smart man, I'll build you a house; not just a little house, but a big place, the biggest place Bidwell has ever seen." They arrived at the farm, and Tom stopped the buggy on the road. He called to the man in the barnyard, who came running for her bags. When she got out of the cart, he immediately turned his horse and rode away. Her aunt, a large, plump woman, met her on the steps leading to the front door and gave her a warm hug. The words her father had just spoken raced through Clara's mind. She realized she'd been thinking about marriage for a year, wanting a man to come up to her and talk about it, but she hadn't thought about it the way her father had put it. The man had spoken of her as if she were his property to be disposed of. He had a personal interest in her marriage. It was, in a sense, not a personal matter, but a family one. She realized it had been her father's idea: she had to marry to consolidate what he called his position in society, to help him become some vague being he called a big man. She wondered if he had someone in mind and couldn't help but feel a little curious about who it might be. It had never occurred to her that her marriage could mean anything to her father beyond a parent's natural desire for their child to be happily married. She began to bristle at the thought of her father's approach to the matter, but she was still curious to know if he'd gone so far as to invent someone to play the role of a husband, and she thought she'd try asking her aunt. A strange farmhand entered the house with his bags, and she followed him upstairs to the room that had always been her own. Her aunt came up behind her, puffing. The farmhand left, and she began unpacking, while an elderly woman, her face very red, sat on the edge of the bed. "You didn't get engaged to a man where you went to school, did you, Clara?" she asked.

Clara looked at her aunt and blushed; then suddenly and furiously she became angry. Throwing her open bag on the floor, she ran from the room. At the door, she stopped and turned to the surprised and frightened woman. "No, I didn't do it," she declared furiously. "It's no one's business whether I have one or not. I went to school to get an education. I didn't intend to find a man. If that's what you sent me for, why didn't you tell me?"

Clara hurried out of the house and into the barnyard. She checked all the barns, but there were no men there. Even the strange farmhand who had brought her bags into the house had vanished, and the stalls in the stables and barns were empty. Then she went into the garden and, climbing over a fence, crossed the meadow and into the woods, where she always ran when, as a girl on the farm, she was worried or angry. She sat for a long time on a log under a tree, trying to think through the new idea of marriage she had gleaned from her father's words. She was still angry and told herself she would leave home, go to a city, and get a job. She thought of Kate Chancellor, who was planning to be a doctor, and tried to imagine herself trying something similar. She would need money for school. She tried to imagine herself talking to her father about it, and the thought made her smile. She wondered again if he had a specific man in mind for her husband, and who it might be. She tried checking her father's connections among Bidwell's young men. "There must be someone new here, someone connected to one of the factories," she thought.

After sitting a long time on the log, Clara rose and walked under the trees. The imaginary man, suggested to her by her father's words, became more and more real with each passing moment. Before her eyes danced the laughing eyes of the young man who had lingered beside her for a moment while Kate Chancellor talked with her companion on the evening they had been challenged on the streets of Columbus. She remembered the young schoolteacher who had held her in his arms all through the long Sunday afternoon, and the day when, as a waking girl, she had heard Jim Priest talking to the workmen in the barn about the sap that ran down the tree. The day slipped away, and the shadows of the trees lengthened. On such a day, alone in the silent woods, she could not remain in the angry mood in which she had left the house. Over her father's farm the passionate onset of summer reigned. Before her, through the trees, lay yellow fields of wheat, ripe for the cutting; The insects sang and danced in the air above her head; a soft breeze blew and made a soft song in the treetops; a squirrel chattered among the trees behind her; and two calves came along a woodland path and stood for a long time looking at her with their large, gentle eyes. She rose and walked out of the woods, crossed a rolling meadow, and came to the fence that surrounded a cornfield. Jim Priest was growing corn, and when he saw her, he left his horses and came up to her. He took both her hands in his and led her up and down. "Well, Lord Almighty, I"m glad to see you," he said cordially. " Lord Almighty, I"m glad to see you." The old farmhand pulled a long blade of grass from the ground under the fence and, leaning against the top of the fence, began to chew it. He asked Clara the same question as her aunt, but his question did not anger her. She laughed and shook her head. "No, Jim," she said, "I don't think I managed to go to school. I didn't manage to find a man. You see, no one asked me.

Both the woman and the old man fell silent. From beyond the tops of the young corn, they could see the hillside and the distant town. Clara wondered if the man she was to marry was here. Perhaps he, too, had come up with the idea of marrying her. Her father, she decided, was capable of it. He was obviously willing to do anything to see her safely married. She wondered why. When Jim Priest began to speak, trying to explain his question, his words fit strangely with the thoughts she had about herself. "Now about getting married," he began, "you see, I"ve never done it. I"ve never married. I don"t know why. I wanted to and I didn"t. I was afraid to ask, maybe. I think if you do, you"ll regret it, and if you don"t, you"ll regret it."

Jim returned to his team, and Clara stood by the fence, watching him walk across the long field and turn to return along another path between the rows of corn. As the horses approached where she stood, he stopped again and looked at her. "I think you"ll be married very soon now," he said. The horses moved forward again, and he, holding the cultivator with one hand, looked back at her over his shoulder. "You"re the kind of man who gets married," he called. "You"re not like me. You don"t just think about things. You do them. You"ll be married very soon. You"re one of those people who does."

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CHAPTER XI


I'VE BEEN A LOT OF THINGS. What happened to Clara Butterworth in the three years since John May so rudely cut short her first, halfhearted, girlish attempt to escape life, so too did the people she left behind in Bidwell. In that short space of time, her father, his business partner Steve Hunter, the town carpenter Ben Peeler, the saddlemaker Joe Wainsworth, almost every man and woman in town, had become something different in nature from the man or woman who bore the same name she had known as a child.

Ben Peeler was forty years old when Clara went to school in Columbus. He was a tall, slender, stooped man who worked hard and was highly respected by the townspeople. Almost any day, he could be seen walking down Main Street wearing a carpenter's apron and a carpenter's pencil tucked under his cap, balanced on his ear. He stopped at Oliver Hall's hardware store and emerged with a large bundle of nails under his arm. A farmer thinking about building a new barn stopped him in front of the post office, and the two men discussed the project for half an hour. Ben put on his glasses, took a pencil from his cap, and made a note on the back of the package of nails. "I'll do a little figuring; then I'll talk it over with you," he said. In the spring, summer, and fall, Ben always hired another carpenter and an apprentice, but when Clara returned to town, he employed four teams of six men each and had two foremen to oversee the work and keep it running, while his son, who would have been a carpenter in another era, became a salesman, wore fashionable vests, and lived in Chicago. Ben earned money and went two years without hammering a nail or holding a saw. He had an office in a frame building next to the New York Central tracks, just south of Main Street, and employed a bookkeeper and a stenographer. In addition to carpentry, he took up another business. With the support of Gordon Hart, he became a lumber merchant, buying and selling lumber under the firm name "Peeler & Hart." Almost every day, truckloads of lumber were unloaded and stored under sheds in the yard behind his office. No longer satisfied with his labor income, Ben, under Gordon Hart's influence, also demanded the unstable profits from building materials. Now he drove around town in a vehicle called a "backboard," rushing from job to job all day. He no longer had time to stop and chat for half an hour with a would-be barn builder, nor did he come to Birdie Spinks's drugstore at the end of the day to laze around. In the evening, he went to the lumber office, and Gordon Hart came from the bank. The two men hoped to build workplaces: rows of workers' houses, barns next to one of the new factories, large frame houses for the managers and other respectable people of the town's new businesses. Ben had previously been happy to venture out of town from time to time to build barns. He enjoyed the country food, the afternoon gossip with the farmer and his men, and the commute back and forth to town morning and evening. While he was in the village, he managed to arrange for the purchase of winter potatoes, hay for the horse, and perhaps a barrel of cider to drink on winter evenings. He had no time to think about such things now. When the farmer came to him, he shook his head. "Get someone else to do your work," he advised. "You'll save money by hiring a carpenter to build barns. I can't bother. I have too many houses to build." Ben and Gordon sometimes worked at the sawmill until midnight. On warm, quiet nights, the sweet smell of freshly cut boards filled the air in the yard and filtered through the open windows, but the two men, focused on their figures, didn't notice. Early in the evening, one or two crews returned to the yard to finish hauling lumber to the work site where the men would work the next day. The silence was broken by the voices of men talking and singing as they loaded their wagons. Then, with a creak, the wagons loaded with boards rolled past. When the two men grew tired and wanted to sleep, they locked the office and walked across the yard to the driveway leading to the street where they lived. Ben was nervous and irritable. One evening, they found three men sleeping on a pile of lumber in the yard and kicked them out. This gave both men cause for reflection. Gordon Hart went home and, before going to bed, decided he wouldn't let another day go by without better insuring the lumber in the yard. Ben hadn't been in business long enough to come to such a sensible decision. He tossed and turned in his bed all night. "Some tramp with a pipe will set this place on fire," he thought. "I'll lose all the money I've earned." He didn't think long about the simple solution of hiring a watchman to keep sleepy, penniless tramps away and charging enough for the lumber to cover the extra expenses. He got out of bed and dressed, thinking he'd get his gun from the shed, go back out into the yard, and spend the night. Then he undressed and went back to bed. "I can't work all day and spend my nights there," he thought resentfully. When he finally fell asleep, he dreamed he was sitting in the dark in a lumberyard, gun in hand. A man walked up to him, fired the pistol, and killed the man. With the inconsistency inherent in the physical aspect of dreams, the darkness dissipated and daylight came. The man he thought dead was not quite dead. Although the entire side of his head had been torn off, he was still breathing. His mouth opened and closed spasmodically. A terrible disease had taken hold of the carpenter. He had an older brother who had died when he was a boy, but the face of the man lying on the ground was his brother's. Ben sat up in bed and screamed. "Help, for God's sake, help! It's my own brother. Can't you see, it's Harry Peeler? he cried. His wife woke up and shook him. "What's the matter, Ben?" she asked anxiously. "What's the matter?" "It was a dream," he said, and dropped his head wearily onto the pillow. His wife fell asleep again, but he didn't sleep the rest of the night. When Gordon Hart proposed the insurance idea the next morning, he was delighted. "Of course, that settles it," he said to himself. "You see, it's simple enough. That settles it all.

After the boom began in Bidwell, Joe Wainsworth had plenty to do in his Main Street shop. Numerous crews were busy hauling building materials; trucks were hauling loads of sidewalk bricks to their final locations on Main Street; crews were hauling earth from the new Main Street sewer dig and from freshly dug basements . Never before had there been so many crews working here, or so much harness repair work. Joe's apprentice abandoned him, swept away by the rush of young men to the places where the boom had arrived earlier. Joe worked alone for a year, then hired a saddlemaker who came to town drunk and got drunk every Saturday night. The new man turned out to be an odd character. He had the ability to make money, but he seemed to care little about earning it for himself. Within a week of his arrival, he knew everyone in Bidwell. His name was Jim Gibson, and no sooner had he started working for Joe than a rivalry arose between them. The contest was over who would run the shop. For a while, Joe asserted himself. He growled at people who brought harnesses for repair and refused to make promises about when the work would be completed. Several jobs were taken away and sent to nearby towns. Then Jim Gibson made a name for himself. When one of the teamsters, riding into town with an arrow, arrived with a heavy work harness slung over his shoulder, he went to meet him. The harness clattered to the floor, and Jim inspected it. "Oh, hell, that's an easy job," he declared. "We'll fix it in a jiffy. If you want it, you can have it tomorrow afternoon."

For a while, Jim made a habit of coming to where Joe was working and consulting with him about the prices he was charging. Then he returned to the customer and charged more than Joe had offered. After a few weeks, he refused to consult with Joe at all. "You're no good," he exclaimed, laughing. "I don't know what you do in business." The old saddler looked at him for a moment, then went to his bench and set to work. "Business," he muttered, "what do I know about business? I'm a harness maker, yes."

After Jim came to work for him, Joe earned almost twice as much in a year as he had lost in the collapse of the machine-setup plant. The money was not invested in stocks of any plant, but was sitting in the bank. And yet he was not happy. All day Jim Gibson, to whom Joe never dared tell stories of his triumphs as a worker, and to whom he did not boast as he once did to his apprentices, talked about his ability to win over customers. He claimed that at the last place where he worked before coming to Bidwell, he managed to sell quite a few sets of hand-made harnesses that were actually made in the factory. "It's not like the old days," he said, "things are changing. We used to sell harnesses only to farmers or teamsters right in our towns who had their own horses. We always knew the people we did business with, and we always will. Things are different now. "You see, those men who have come to this city to work now-well, next month or next year they'll be somewhere else. All they care about is how much work they can get for a dollar. Sure, they talk a lot about honesty and all that, but that's just talk. They think maybe we'll buy it, and they'll get more for the money they pay. That's what they're up to."

Jim struggled to get his employer to understand his vision of how a store should be run. He spent hours every day talking about it. He tried to talk Joe into stocking up on factory-made equipment, but when he failed, he became angry. "Oh, hell!" he exclaimed. "Don"t you see what you"re up against? The factories are bound to win. Why? Look, no one but some old, musty man who"s worked with horses all his life can tell the difference between hand-made and machine-made. Machine-made equipment sells for less. It looks good, and the factories can make a lot of knick-knacks. That"s what attracts young guys. It"s good business. Quick sales and profits-that"s the whole point." Jim laughed, then said something that sent a shiver down Joe"s spine. "If I had the money and the stability, I"d open a store in this town and show you around," he said. "I almost kicked you out. The problem with me is that I wouldn"t go into business if I had the money. I tried it once and made some money; then, when I"d gotten a little ahead, I closed the shop and got drunk. I was miserable for a month. When I work for someone else, I"m fine. I get drunk on Saturdays, and that satisfies me. I love to work and scheme for money, but once I get it, it"s no use to me, and it never will be. I want you to close your eyes and give me a chance. That"s all I ask. Just close your eyes and give me a chance."

All day Joe sat astride his harness maker's horse, and when he wasn't at work, he looked out the dirty window into the alley and tried to understand Jim's idea of how a harness maker should treat his customers now that new times had come. He felt very old. Although Jim was his own age, he seemed very young. He began to be a little afraid of the man. He couldn't understand why the money, almost twenty-five hundred dollars he had deposited in the bank during the two years Jim had been with him, seemed so unimportant, while the twelve hundred dollars he had slowly earned after twenty years of work seemed so important. Since there was always a lot of repair work going on in the shop, he didn't go home for lunch but carried a few sandwiches into the shop in his pocket every day. At noon, when Jim went to his boarding house, he was alone, and if no one came in, he was happy. It seemed to him that this was the best time of day. Every few minutes he went to the front door to look out. The quiet main street, which his store had fronted since he was a young man just returning home from his trading adventures, and which had always been such a sleepy place on a summer afternoon, now resembled a battlefield from which an army had retreated. A huge hole had been torn in the street where a new sewer was to be installed. Crowds of workers, most of them strangers, had come to Main Street from the factories along the tracks. They stood in groups at the bottom of Main Street, near Wymer's cigar store. Some of them went into Ben Head's saloon for a glass of beer and came out wiping their mustaches. The men digging the sewers, foreigners, Italians, he heard, sat on the bank of dry earth in the middle of the street. They held their lunch pails between their legs, and as they ate, they conversed in a strange language. He remembered the day he arrived in Bidwell with his fiancée, a girl he'd met on his trading journey and who'd waited for him until he'd mastered his trade and opened his own store. He'd followed her to New York State and returned to Bidwell at noon on a similar summer day. There weren't many people there, but everyone knew him. Everyone was his friend that day. Birdie Spinks rushed out of the drugstore and insisted he and his fiancée go home with him for dinner. Everyone wanted them to come to his house for dinner. It was a happy, joyful time.

The saddler had always regretted that his wife had never borne him children. He had said nothing and always pretended not to want them, but now, at last, he was glad they hadn't come. He returned to his bench and set to work, hoping Jim would be late from lunch. The shop was very quiet after the bustle of the street that had so disconcerted him. It was, he thought, like solitude, almost like church, when you come to the door and look in on a weekday. He did this once, and he liked the empty, quiet church better than the church with the preacher and a crowd of people in it. He told his wife about it. "It was like going to the store in the evening when I finished work and the boy went home," he said.

The harness maker peered through the open door of his shop and saw Tom Butterworth and Steve Hunter walking down Main Street, deep in conversation. Steve had a cigar tucked into the corner of his mouth, and Tom was wearing a smart vest. He thought again of the money he'd lost at the machine shop and was furious. The afternoon was ruined, and he was almost glad when Jim returned from his midday meal.

The position he found himself in in the shop amused Jim Gibson. He chuckled to himself as he waited on customers and worked on the bench. One day, walking back down Main Street after his midday lunch, he decided to try an experiment. "If I lose my job, what difference does it make?" he asked himself. He stopped at a saloon and drank whiskey. Arriving at the shop, he began cursing at his employer, threatening him as if he were his apprentice. Entering suddenly, he walked up to where Joe was working and rudely slapped him on the back. "Well, cheer up, old daddy," he said. "Shut up your gloom. I'm tired of your muttering and growling about something."

The employee stepped back and looked at his employer. If Joe had ordered him to leave the store, he wouldn't have been surprised, and as he later said when he told Ben Head's bartender about the incident, he wouldn't have cared. The fact that he didn't care undoubtedly saved him. Joe was afraid. For a moment, he was so angry he couldn't speak, and then he remembered that if Jim left him, he'd have to wait for the auction and haggle with the strange teamsters over the repair of his work harness. Leaning over the bench, he worked in silence for an hour. Then, instead of demanding an explanation for the rude familiarity with which Jim had treated him, he began to explain. "Now listen, Jim," he begged, "don't pay any attention to me. Do whatever you want here. Don't pay any attention to me."

Jim said nothing, but a triumphant smile lit up his face. Late that evening, he left the store. "If anyone comes in, tell them to wait. I won"t stay long," he said brazenly. Jim went into Ben Head"s saloon and told the bartender how his experiment had ended. Later, the story was told from store to store along Bidwell"s main street. "He looked like a boy caught red-handed in a jam pot," Jim explained. "I can"t figure out what"s the matter with him. If I were in his shoes, I"d throw Jim Gibson out of the store. He told me to ignore him and run the store as I pleased. What do you think of that? What do you think of a man who owns his own store and has money in the bank? I tell you, I don"t know what it is, but I don"t work for Joe anymore. He works for me." One day you'll come into a casual store, and I'll be running it for you. I'm telling you, I don't know how it happened, but I'm the boss, like hell.

All of Bidwell looked at himself and questioned himself. Ed Hall, who had previously been a carpenter's apprentice and earned only a few dollars a week for his employer, Ben Peeler, was now foreman at the corn mill and received a wage of twenty-five dollars every Saturday night. It was more money than he had ever dreamed of earning in a week. On weekends, he dressed in his Sunday clothes and got a shave at Joe Trotter's barber shop. Then he walked down Main Street, shuffling his money, almost afraid he would suddenly wake up and discover it had all been a dream. He stopped at Wymer's cigar store for a cigar, and old Claude Wymer came to serve him. On the second Saturday evening after he took his new position, the cigar store owner, a rather obsequious man, called him Mr. Hall. This was the first time something like this had happened, and it upset him a little. He laughed and joked about it. "Don't get cocky," he said, turning to wink at the men milling about the store. He thought about it later and wished he'd accepted the new title without protest. "Well, I'm the foreman, and a lot of the young guys I've always known and fooled around with will be working under me," he told himself. "I can't be bothered with them."

Ed walked down the street, acutely aware of the importance of his new place in society. Other young men at the factory earned $1.50 a day. At the end of the week, he received $25, almost three times that amount. Money was a sign of superiority. There was no doubt about that. Ever since he was a child, he'd heard older people speak respectfully of those with money. "Go out into the world," they'd say to young men when they were talking seriously. Among themselves, they didn't pretend not to want money. "Money makes the mare go," they'd say.

Ed walked down Main Street toward the New York Central tracks, then turned off the street and disappeared into the station. The evening train had already passed, and the place was empty. He entered the dimly lit reception area. An oil lamp, lowered and attached to the wall with a bracket, cast a small circle of light in the corner. The room resembled a church on an early winter morning: cold and silent. He hurried toward the light and, taking a wad of bills from his pocket, counted them. Then he left the room and walked along the station platform almost to Main Street, but was dissatisfied. Impulsively, he returned to the reception area again and, late that evening on his way home, stopped there to count the money one last time before going to bed.

Peter Fry was a blacksmith, and his son worked as a clerk at the Bidwell Hotel. He was a tall young man with curly yellow hair, watery blue eyes, and a habit of smoking cigarettes-a habit that offended the nostrils of his time. His name was Jacob, but he was derisively known as Fizzy Fry. The young man's mother had died, and he ate at the hotel and slept at night on a cot in the hotel office. He had a penchant for bright ties and vests and was constantly trying unsuccessfully to attract the attention of the town's girls. When he and his father passed on the street, they didn't speak to each other. Sometimes the father would stop and look at his son. "How did I end up the father of such a thing?" he muttered out loud.

The blacksmith was a broad-shouldered, heavily built man with a thick black beard and a prodigious voice. In his youth, he sang in a Methodist choir, but after the death of his wife, he stopped going to church and began using his voice for other purposes. He smoked a short clay pipe, blackened by age and hidden at night by his curly black beard. Smoke billowed from his mouth and seemed to rise from his belly. He resembled a volcanic mountain, and the people hanging around Birdie Spinks's drugstore called him Smoky Pete.

Smoky Pete was much like a mountain prone to eruptions. He wasn't a heavy drinker, but after his wife's death, he developed a habit of downing two or three whiskeys every night. The whiskey inflamed his mind, and he'd walk up and down Main Street, ready to pick a fight with anyone in sight. He took to cursing at his fellow townspeople and making obscene jokes about them. Everyone was a little afraid of him, and he somehow became the town's moral enforcer. Sandy Ferris, a house painter, had become a drunk and couldn't support his family. Smoky Pete would insult him on the streets and in front of all the men. "You're a piece of shit, warming your belly with whiskey while your kids freeze. Why don't you try being a man?" " he shouted at the painter, who staggered out into the alley and fell asleep drunk in the stall of Clyde Neighbors' livery barn. The blacksmith stuck by the painter until the whole town took up his cry and the saloons became ashamed to accept his custom. He was forced to reform.

However, the blacksmith did not discriminate in his choice of victims. He lacked the spirit of a reformer. A merchant from Bidwell, who had always been highly respected and an elder in his church, went to the county hall one evening and found himself in the company of a notorious woman known throughout the county as Nell Hunter. They entered a small room at the back of a saloon and were spotted by two young men from Bidwell who had gone to the county hall for an evening of adventure. When the merchant, Pen Beck, realized he had been spotted, he feared that the story of his indiscretion would spread back to his hometown and left the woman to join the young men. He was not a drinker, but he immediately began buying liquor for his companions. All three became heavily intoxicated and drove home late that evening in a car the young men had hired for the occasion from Clyde Neighbors. Along the way, the merchant repeatedly tried to explain his presence in the woman's company. "Say nothing about it," he urged. "That would be misunderstood. I have a friend whose son was taken away by a woman. I tried to get her to leave him alone.

The two young men were glad to have caught the merchant off guard. "It's all right," they assured him. "Be a good man, and we won't tell your wife or your minister." When they had all the liquor they could carry, they loaded the merchant into the buggy and began whipping the horse. They rode halfway to Bidwell and were all in a drunken sleep when the horse spooked something in the road and bolted. The buggy flipped, throwing them all onto the road. One of the young men suffered a broken arm, and Pen Beck's coat was nearly torn in half. He paid the young man's doctor's bill and arranged for Clyde Neighbors to compensate for the damage to the buggy.

The story of the merchant's adventure remained quiet for a long time, and when it did, only a few of the young man's close friends knew it. Then it reached the ears of Smokey Pete. The day he heard it, he could hardly wait for evening. He hurried to Ben Head's saloon, drank two shots of whiskey, and then stopped with his shoes in front of Birdie Spinks's drugstore. At half past six, Penn Beck turned onto Main Street from Cherry Street, where he lived. When he was more than three blocks from the crowd of men in front of the drugstore, Smokey Pete's roaring voice began to question him. "Well, Penny, my boy, have you gone to sleep among the ladies?" he shouted. "You were fooling around with my girl, Nell Hunter, at the county seat. I'd like to know what you mean. You'll have to give me an explanation."

The merchant stopped and stood on the sidewalk, unable to decide whether to face his tormentor or flee. It was just at the quiet time of evening, when the town housewives had finished their evening work and stopped to rest by their kitchen doors. Pen Beck felt as if Smokey Pete's voice could be heard a mile away. He decided to confront the blacksmith and, if necessary, fight him. As he hurried toward the group in front of the drugstore, Smokey Pete's voice told the story of the merchant's wild night. He emerged from the crowd of men in front of the store and seemed to address the entire street. Vendors, traders, and customers ran out of their shops. "Well," he exclaimed, "so you had a night with my girl, Nell Hunter. When you sat with her in the back room of the saloon, you didn't know I was there. I was hidden under the table. If you had done anything more than bite her neck, I would have come out and called you in time.

Smokey Pete burst out laughing and waved his arms at the people gathered in the street, wondering what was going on. It was one of the most exciting places he'd ever been. He tried to explain to the people what he was talking about. "He was with Nell Hunter in the back room of the county seat saloon," he shouted. "Edgar Duncan and Dave Oldham saw him there. He came home with them, and the horse ran away. He didn't commit adultery. I don't want you to think that happened. All that happened was he bit my best girl, Nell Hunter, on the neck. That's what pisses me off so much. I don't like it when he bites her. She's my girl, and she belongs to me."

The blacksmith, a precursor to the modern city newspaper reporter, fond of taking center stage to highlight the misfortunes of his fellow citizens, didn't finish his tirade. The merchant, white with rage, jumped up and struck him in the chest with his small, rather thick fist. The blacksmith knocked him into a ditch, and later, when he was arrested, proudly walked to the mayor's office and paid the fine.

Smokey Pete's enemies said he hadn't bathed in years. He lived alone in a small frame house on the outskirts of town. Behind his house was a large field. The house itself was unspeakably filthy. When the factories came to town, Tom Butterworth and Steve Hunter bought the field, intending to cut it into building lots. They wanted to buy the blacksmith's house and eventually got it, paying a high price. He agreed to move in for a year, but after the money was paid, he repented and wished he hadn't sold. A rumor began circulating around town linking Tom Butterworth's name with Fanny Twist, the town milliner. It was said that the wealthy farmer had been seen leaving her shop late at night. The blacksmith also heard another story, which was whispered on the streets. Louise Trucker, the farmer's daughter once seen strolling down a side street in the company of young Steve Hunter, had gone to Cleveland and was said to have become the owner of a prosperous house of ill repute. It was claimed that Steve's money had been used to start her business. These two stories offered unlimited opportunities for the blacksmith's expansion, but as he prepared to do what he called the destruction of two men in full view of the whole town, an event occurred that upset his plans. His son, Fizzy Frye, had left his position as a hotel clerk and gone to work in a corn-picker factory. One day, his father saw him returning from the factory at noon with a dozen other workers. The young man was wearing overalls and smoking a pipe. Seeing his father, he stopped, and as the others moved on, he explained his sudden transformation. "I'm in the store now, but I won't be there long," he said proudly. "Did you know Tom Butterworth is staying at the hotel? Well, he gave me a chance. I had to stay at the store for a while to learn something. After that, I'll have a chance to become a delivery clerk. Then I'll be a traveler on the road." He looked at his father, and his voice broke. "You didn't think much of me, but I'm not that bad," he said. "I don't mean to be a sissy, but I'm not very strong. I worked at the hotel because I couldn't do anything else."

Peter Fry went home, but couldn't eat the food he'd cooked for himself on the tiny stove in the kitchen. He went outside and stood for a long time, looking at the cow pasture that Tom Butterworth and Steve Hunter had purchased and which they believed would become part of the rapidly growing town. He himself hadn't participated in the new impulses sweeping the town, except to take advantage of the failure of the town's first industrial attempt to shout insults at those who'd lost their money. One evening, he and Ed Hall had gotten into a fight over the matter on Main Street, and the blacksmith had to pay another fine. Now he wondered what had happened to him. Apparently, he'd been wrong about his son. Had he been wrong about Tom Butterworth and Steve Hunter?

The puzzled man returned to his workshop and worked in silence all day. His heart was set on creating a dramatic scene on Main Street by openly attacking two of the town's most prominent men, and he even imagined that he would likely be thrown into the town jail, where he would have the opportunity to shout through the iron bars at the citizens gathered in the street. Anticipating such an event, he prepared to attack the reputations of others. He had never assaulted a woman, but if he were sent to prison, he intended to do so. John May once told him that Tom Butterworth's daughter, who had been away at college for a year, had been sent away because she was a nuisance to the family. John May claimed to be responsible for her condition. According to him, several of Tom's farmhands were intimate with the girl. The blacksmith told himself that if he got into trouble for publicly attacking his father, he would have the right to reveal everything he knew about his daughter.

That evening, the blacksmith didn't show up on Main Street. Returning home from work, he saw Tom Butterworth standing with Steve Hunter in front of the post office. For several weeks, Tom had spent most of his time out of town, only appearing in town for a few hours at a time and never seen on the streets in the evenings. The blacksmith had been waiting to catch both men on the street at the same time. Now that the opportunity had presented itself, he began to fear he wouldn't dare take advantage of it. "What right do I have to ruin my boy's chances?" he asked himself as he trudged down the street toward his house.

It rained that evening, and for the first time in years, Smokey Pete didn't go out onto Main Street. He told himself the rain had kept him home, but that thought didn't satisfy him. He paced restlessly throughout the evening, and at eight-thirty he went to bed. He didn't sleep, however; he lay in his pants, smoking a pipe, trying to think. Every few minutes, he'd take the pipe out, blow out a cloud of smoke, and curse angrily. At ten o'clock, the farmer who owned the cow pasture behind the house, and who still kept his cows there, saw his neighbor wandering through the field in the rain, saying what he'd planned to say on Main Street for the whole town to hear.

The farmer had gone to bed early, too, but at ten o'clock he decided that since it was still raining and getting a bit chilly, he'd better get up and turn the cows into the barn. He didn't dress, threw a blanket over his shoulders, and went out without a light. He lowered the fence separating the field from the barnyard, and then saw and heard Smokey Pete in the field. The blacksmith had been pacing back and forth in the darkness, and when the farmer stood by the fence, he began talking loudly. "Well, Tom Butterworth, you've been fooling around with Fanny Twist," he called out into the still, empty night. "You've been sneaking into her store late at night, haven't you? Steve Hunter set up Louise Trucker's business out of a house in Cleveland. Are you and Fanny Twist going to open a house here? Is this the next industrial plant we're going to build here in this town?"

The astonished farmer stood in the rain in the darkness, listening to his neighbor's words. The cows passed through the gate and entered the barn. His bare feet were cold, and he pulled them under the blanket one by one. For ten minutes, Peter Fry paced the field. One day, he came very close to the farmer, who crouched by the fence and listened, full of amazement and fear. He vaguely saw the tall old man pacing and waving his arms. After uttering many bitter and hateful words about the two most prominent men in Bidwell, he began insulting Tom Butterworth's daughter, calling her a bitch and a dog's daughter. The farmer waited until Smokey Pete returned to his house, and when he saw the light in the kitchen and thought he also saw his neighbor cooking on the stove, he went back into his house. He himself had never quarreled with Smokey Pete and was glad of it. He was also glad that the field behind his house had been sold. He intended to sell the rest of his farm and move west to Illinois. "That man is crazy," he said to himself. "Who but a madman would talk like that in the dark? I suppose I should report him and lock him up, but I guess I"ll forget what I heard. A man who talks like that about good, respectable people would do anything. One night he might set my house on fire or something. I guess I"ll just forget what I heard."

OceanofPDF.com

BOOK FOUR


OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER XII


AFTER _ THAT SUCCESS With his corn chopper and coal car unloader, which earned him a hundred thousand dollars in cash, Hugh could no longer remain the isolated figure he had been during the first few years of his life in the Ohio community. Men's hands reached out to him from all sides: more than one woman thought she would like to be his wife. All people live behind a wall of misunderstanding that they themselves have built, and most people die silently and unnoticed behind that wall. From time to time, a man, cut off from his fellow men by the peculiarities of his nature, immerses himself in something impersonal, useful, and beautiful. Word of his activities spreads through the walls. His name is shouted and carried away by the wind into the tiny enclosure in which other people live, and in which they are mostly absorbed in the performance of some petty task for their own comfort. Men and women stop complaining about the injustice and inequality of life and start wondering about the person whose name they heard.

Hugh McVey's name was known from Bidwell, Ohio, to farms across the Midwest. His corn-cutting machine was called the McVey Corn-Cutter. The name was printed in white letters on a red background on the side of the machine. Farm boys in Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and all the great corn-growing states saw it and, in their leisure moments, wondered who the man was who invented the machine they operated. A reporter from Cleveland came to Bidwell and drove to Pickleville to see Hugh. He wrote a story recounting Hugh's early poverty and his quest to become an inventor. When the reporter spoke with Hugh, he found the inventor so shy and uncommunicative that he gave up trying to get the story. He then went to Steve Hunter, who talked with him for an hour. The story made Hugh a strikingly romantic figure. The story went that his people came from the mountains of Tennessee, but they were not poor whites. It was suggested that they were of the best English stock. There was a story about how, as a boy, Hugh invented a kind of engine that carried water from the valley to a mountain settlement; another about seeing a clock in a store in a Missouri town and later making a wooden clock for his parents; and a story about going into the woods with his father's gun, shooting a wild pig, and carrying it over his shoulder up a mountainside to get money for school books. After the story was published, the advertising manager of a corn mill one day invited Hugh to go with him to Tom Butterworth's farm. Many bushels of corn had been carried out of the rows, and on the ground, at the edge of the field, a huge mound of corn had grown. Beyond the mound of corn was a cornfield just beginning to sprout. Hugh was told to climb the mound and sit there. Then his photograph was taken. It was sent to newspapers across the West, along with copies of his biography clipped from a Cleveland newspaper. Later, both the photograph and biography were used in a catalog describing McVeigh's corn shredder.

Cutting corn and placing it in shakers while it husks is hard work. It has recently become known that much of the corn grown on the prairie lands of Central America is not cut. The corn is left standing in the fields, and in late fall, people walk through them to collect the yellow ears. Workers throw the corn onto their shoulders in a wagon driven by a boy who follows them as they slowly move, and then it is hauled into cribs. Once the field is harvested, cattle are driven in and spend the winter gnawing on the dry corn stalks and trampling the stalks into the ground. All day long, on the wide western prairies, as the gray days of autumn approach, you can see people and horses slowly making their way through the fields. Like tiny insects, they crawl across the vast landscape. Cattle follow them in late fall and winter, when the prairies are covered with snow. They're brought from the Far West in cattle cars, and after gnawing on corn knives all day, they're carted off to barns and stuffed full of corn. When they're fat, they're sent to huge slaughter pens in Chicago, the giant city on the prairie. On quiet autumn nights, standing on prairie roads or in the barnyard of a farmhouse, you can hear the rustle of dry corn stalks, followed by the rumble of the animals' heavy bodies as they move forward, gnawing and trampling.

Corn harvesting methods used to be different. There was poetry in the operation then, as there is now, but it was set to a different rhythm. When the corn was ripe, men would go out into the fields with heavy corn knives and cut the corn stalks close to the ground. The stalks were cut with the right hand, swinging the knife, and carried in the left arm. All day, a man would carry a heavy load of stalks, from which hung yellow ears. When the load became unbearably heavy, it was transferred to a stack, and when all the corn had been cut in a certain area, the stack was secured by tying it with tarred rope or a tough stalk twisted like rope. When the cutting was complete, long rows of stalks stood in the fields like sentries, and the men, completely exhausted, crawled home to sleep.

Hugh's machine took on all the heavy lifting. He cut the corn at the ground and tied it into sheaves, which fell onto the platform. Two men followed behind the machine: one drove the horses, the other attached bundles of stalks to the shock absorbers and tied the finished shock absorbers together. The men walked, smoking pipes and talking. The horses stopped, and the driver looked out over the prairie. His arms didn't ache from fatigue, and he had time to think. The wonder and mystery of the open spaces had become a part of his life. In the evening, when the work was finished, the cattle fed and settled into their barns, he didn't go straight to bed, but sometimes went outside and stood for a moment under the stars.

This was what the brain of a mountain man's son, a poor white man from a river town, did for the people of the plains. The dreams he had tried so hard to push away, the dreams that a New England woman named Sara Shepard had told him would lead to his destruction, had come true. A car unloader, sold for two hundred thousand dollars, gave Steve Hunter the money to buy a plant for equipment installations and, along with Tom Butterworth, to start manufacturing corn shredders. It touched fewer lives, but it carried the name of Missouri to other places and created a new kind of poetry in railroad yards and along rivers deep in towns where ships were loaded. On city nights, as you lie in your homes, you might suddenly hear a long, booming roar. It's a giant clearing his throat with a carload of coal. Hugh McVeigh helped free a giant. He's still doing it. In Bidwell, Ohio, he's still at it, inventing new inventions, cutting the giant's bonds. He's the only man undistracted by life's challenges.

But it almost happened. After his success, thousands of small voices began calling him. Soft, feminine hands reached out from the crowd around him, from both old and new residents of the town that was growing around the factories where his machines were being manufactured in ever-increasing numbers. New houses were constantly being built on Turner's Pike, leading to his shop in Pickleville. In addition to Ellie Mulberry, a dozen mechanics now worked in his experimental shop. They helped Hugh with a new invention-a hay loading device he was working on-and also made special tools for use in the corn harvester factory and the new bicycle factory. In Pickleville itself, a dozen new houses were built. The mechanics' wives lived in the houses, and from time to time one of them would visit her husband in the shop. Hugh found it increasingly easier to talk to people. The workers, who themselves did not speak much, did not find his habitual silence strange. They were more skilled with tools than Hugh and considered it more of a coincidence that he had done what they hadn't. Since he had made a fortune along the way, they also tried their hand at inventing. One of them made a patented door hinge, which Steve sold for ten thousand dollars, keeping half the profit for his services, as he had done with Hugh's car unloading device. At midday, the men hurried home to eat, then returned to laze in front of the factory, smoking their afternoon pipes. They talked about earnings, food prices, the advisability of buying a house on a partial payment basis. Sometimes they talked about women and their adventures with women. Hugh sat alone outside the store door and listened. In the evening, as he went to bed, he thought about what they had said. He lived in a house that belonged to Mrs. McCoy, the widow of a railroad worker killed in a train accident, and who had a daughter. His daughter, Rose McCoy, taught in a rural school and was away from home from Monday morning until late Friday evening for most of the year. Hugh lay in bed, thinking about what his workers said about women, and heard the old housekeeper walking on the stairs. Sometimes he got out of bed and sat by the open window. Since she was the woman whose life had touched him most, he often thought of the schoolteacher. The McCoy house, a small frame house with a picket fence separating it from Turner's Pike, stood with its back door facing the Wheeling railroad. The railroad workers remembered their former colleague, Mike McCoy, and wanted to be kind to his widow. Sometimes they threw half-rotted ties over the fence into the potato patch behind the house. At night, when heavily laden coal trains passed by, brakemen tossed large pieces of coal over the fence. The widow woke every time a train passed. When one of the brakemen threw a lump of coal, he screamed, his voice audible over the rumble of the coal cars. "That's for Mike," he shouted. Sometimes one of the pieces would knock a picket off the fence, and the next day Hugh would put it back up. When the train passed, the widow got out of bed and carried the coal into the house. "I don't want to give the boys away by leaving them lying around in the daylight," she explained to Hugh. On Sunday mornings, Hugh would take a crosscut saw and cut the railroad ties into lengths suitable for the kitchen stove. Gradually, his place in the McCoy household became established, and when he received a hundred thousand dollars and everyone, even his mother and daughter, expected him to move, he didn't. He tried unsuccessfully to persuade the widow to take more money for his support, and when this attempt failed, life in the McCoy house went on as it had when he was a telegraph operator receiving forty dollars a month.

In the spring or fall, sitting by the window at night, the moon rising and the dust on Turner's Pike turning silvery white, Hugh thought of Rose McCoy asleep in some farmhouse. It didn't occur to him that she, too, might be awake and thinking. He imagined her lying motionless in bed. The daughter of a laborer in the department was a slender woman of about thirty, with tired blue eyes and red hair. In her youth, her skin had been heavily freckled, and her nose still bore a freckled mark. Although Hugh didn't know it, she had once been in love with George Pike, a Wheeling Station agent, and a wedding date had been set. Then religious differences arose, and George Pike married another woman. It was then that she became a schoolteacher. She was a woman of few words, and she and Hugh were never alone, but when Hugh sat by the window on autumn evenings, she lay awake in the room of the farmhouse where she boarded during the school season, thinking about him. She wondered if Hugh had remained a telegraph operator with a salary of forty dollars a month, something might have happened between them. Then other thoughts, or rather sensations, came to her, little connected with thoughts. The room in which she lay was very quiet, and a sliver of moonlight filtered through the window. In the barn behind the farmhouse, she could hear the cattle stirring. A pig grunted, and in the silence that followed, she heard the farmer, lying in the next room with his wife, snoring softly. Rose was not very strong, and her physical body did not control her temper, but she was very lonely, and she thought that, like the farmer's wife, she wished she had a man lying beside her. Warmth spread through her body, and her lips grew dry, so she moistened them with her tongue. If you had been able to sneak into the room unnoticed, you might have mistaken her for a kitten lying by the stove. She closed her eyes and gave herself over to a dream. In her mind, she dreamed of marrying the bachelor Hugh McVeigh, but deep inside, there was another dream, a dream rooted in the memory of her only physical contact with a man. When they were engaged, George had kissed her often. One spring evening, they had gone to sit together on the grassy bank by the stream in the shade of the pickle factory, then deserted and silent, and had almost escalated to kissing. Why nothing more happened, Rose wasn't sure. She protested, but her protest was weak and didn't convey what she felt. George Pike gave up his attempts to force love on her because they were to be married and he did not think it right to do what he considered to be using the girl.

In any case, he refrained, and long afterward, as she lay in the farmhouse, consciously thinking of her mother's bachelor boarding house, her thoughts grew less and less clear, and when she fell asleep, George Pike returned to her. She fidgeted restlessly in bed and muttered words. Rough but gentle hands touched her cheeks and played in her hair. As night fell and the moon shifted, a strip of moonlight illuminated her face. One of her hands reached up and seemed to caress the moonbeams. The weariness vanished from her face. "Yes, George, I love you, I belong to you," she whispered.

If Hugh had been able to creep like a moonbeam toward the sleeping schoolteacher, he would inevitably have fallen in love with her. He might also have realized that it was best to approach people directly and boldly, as he had approached the mechanical problems that filled his days. Instead, he sat by the window on a moonlit night and thought of women as beings entirely unlike himself. The words Sara Shepard spoke to the waking boy floated in his memory. He thought women were meant for other men, but not for him, and he told himself he didn't need a woman.

And then something happened at Turner's Pike. A farm boy, who was in town, pushing a neighbor's daughter in his buggy, stopped in front of the house. A long freight train, slowly creeping past the station, blocked the road. He held the reins in one hand, the other wrapped around the waist of his companion. Their heads sought each other, and their lips met. They pressed together. The same moon that had illuminated Rose McCoy in the distant farmhouse illuminated the open space where the lovers sat in the buggy on the road. Hugh had to close his eyes and fight an almost overwhelming physical hunger. His mind still protested that women were not for him. When his imagination pictured Rose McCoy, the schoolteacher, asleep in bed, he saw in her only a chaste white creature, to be worshipped from afar and never to be approached, at least not by himself. He opened his eyes again and looked at the lovers, whose lips were still locked. His long, hunched body tensed, and he sat up straighter in his chair. Then he closed his eyes again. A rough voice broke the silence. "This is for Mike," he shouted, and a large lump of coal, thrown from the train, sailed over the potato patch and hit the back of the house. Downstairs, he heard old Mrs. McCoy getting out of bed to claim the prize. The train passed, and the lovers in the buggy drifted apart. In the stillness of the night, Hugh heard the steady hoofbeats of the farm boy's horse, carrying him and his woman into the darkness.

Two people living in a house with a nearly dead old woman and struggling to cling to life themselves never quite reached any definite conclusions regarding each other. One Saturday evening in late autumn, the state governor came to Bidwell. A political rally was to follow the parade, and the governor, who was running for reelection, was to address the people from the steps of City Hall. Prominent citizens were to stand on the steps next to the governor. Steve and Tom were supposed to be there, and they begged Hugh to come, but he declined. He asked Rose McCoy to accompany him to the meeting, and at eight o'clock they left the house and walked into town. Then they stood in the crowd in the shadow of a store building and listened to the speech. To Hugh's astonishment, his name was mentioned. The governor spoke of the town's prosperity, indirectly implying that it was due to the political acumen of the party he represented, and then mentioned several individuals who were also partly responsible for it. "The whole country is moving forward to new triumphs under our banner," he declared, "but not every community is as fortunate as I find you here. Workers are hired at good wages. Life here is fruitful and happy. You are fortunate to have among you such businessmen as Stephen Hunter and Thomas Butterworth; and in inventor Hugh McVeigh, you see one of the greatest minds and most useful men who ever lived to help lift the burdens from the shoulders of labor. What his brain does for labor, our party does in a different way. The protective tariff is truly the father of modern prosperity."

The speaker paused, and the crowd broke into applause. Hugh grabbed the schoolteacher's hand and pulled her into the alley. They walked home in silence, but as they approached the house and were about to enter, the schoolteacher hesitated. She wanted to ask Hugh to walk with her in the dark, but she lacked the courage to fulfill her wish. As they stood at the gate, the tall man with his long, serious face looking down at her, she remembered the speaker's words. "How could he care about me? How could a man like him care about a plain schoolteacher like me?" she asked herself. Out loud, she said something completely different. As they walked along Turner's Pike, she decided to boldly suggest a stroll under the trees along Turner's Pike beyond the bridge, and told herself that later she would lead him to a place by the stream, in the shade of the river. the old pickle factory where she and George Pike had become so intimate lovers. Instead, she paused for a moment at the gate, then laughed awkwardly and walked in. "You should be proud. I'd be proud if people could say that about me. I don't understand why you continue to live here, in a cheap house like ours," she said.

On a warm spring Sunday evening the year Clara Butterworth returned to live at Bidwell, Hugh made what felt like a desperate attempt to approach the schoolmaster. It was a rainy day, and Hugh had spent part of it at home. He came home from the store at noon and went to his room. While she was home, the schoolmaster occupied the room next door. His mother, who rarely left the house, had gone out of town that day to visit her brother. His daughter had cooked dinner for herself and Hugh, and he tried to help her wash the dishes. A plate fell from his hands, and its breakage seemed to break the silent, embarrassed mood that had come over them. For a few minutes, they were children and acted like children. Hugh picked up another plate, and the schoolmaster told him to put it down. He refused. "You're as clumsy as a puppy. I don't see how you manage to do anything in that store of yours."

Hugh tried to hold on to the plate the schoolteacher was trying to take away, and for a few minutes they shared a hearty laugh. Her cheeks flushed, and Hugh thought she looked charming. An impulse came over him he'd never had before. He wanted to scream at the top of his lungs, throw the plate at the ceiling, sweep all the dishes off the table and hear them fall to the floor, play like some enormous animal lost in a tiny world. He looked at Rose, and his hands trembled with the force of this strange impulse. As he stood there watching, she took the plate from his hands and went into the kitchen. Not knowing what else to do, he put on his hat and went for a walk. Later, he went to the workshop and tried to work, but his hand trembled as he tried to hold the tool, and the hay-loading apparatus he was working on suddenly seemed very trivial and unimportant.

At four o'clock, Hugh returned to the house and found it apparently empty, although the door leading onto Turner's Pike was open. The rain had stopped, and the sun was struggling to break through the clouds. He went upstairs to his room and sat on the edge of the bed. The conviction came to him that the landlord's daughter was in her room next door, and although the thought upset all the notions he had ever had about women, he decided she had gone to her room to be near him when he entered. Somehow, he knew that if he approached her door and knocked, she would not be surprised or refuse him admission. He took off his shoes and carefully placed them on the floor. Then he tiptoed out into the small hallway. The ceiling was so low that he had to bend over to avoid hitting his head on it. He raised his hand, intending to knock on the door, but then lost the courage. Several times he went out into the hall with the same intention, and each time he returned noiselessly to his room. He sat in a chair by the window and waited. An hour passed. He heard a noise that indicated the schoolteacher was lying on her bed. Then he heard footsteps on the stairs and soon saw her leave the house and walk along Turner's Pike. She didn't go into town, but across the bridge, past his store, into the countryside. Hugh was out of sight. He wondered where she could have gone. "The roads are muddy. Why is she coming out? Is she afraid of me?" he asked himself. When he saw her turn on the bridge and look back at the house, his hands trembled again. "She wants me to follow her. She wants me to go with her," he thought.

Hugh soon left the house and walked down the road, but didn't encounter the schoolteacher. She did cross the bridge and walked along the bank of the stream on the far side. Then she crossed again over a fallen log and stopped at the wall of a pickle factory. A lilac bush grew near the wall, and she disappeared behind it. When she saw Hugh on the road, her heart pounded so hard she had trouble breathing. He walked along the road and soon disappeared from sight, and a great weakness overcame her. Although the grass was wet, she sat down on the ground near the wall of the building and closed her eyes. Later, she covered her face with her hands and began to cry.

The bewildered inventor did not return to his boarding house until late that evening, and when he did, he was inexpressibly glad he had not knocked on Rose McCoy's door. During his walk, he had decided that the very idea that she wanted him had originated in his own mind. "She's a nice woman," he repeated to himself over and over again as he walked, and he thought that by coming to that conclusion, he had dismissed all possibility of anything else in her. He was tired when he returned home and went straight to bed. The old woman had returned home from the village, and her brother was sitting in his carriage, calling to the schoolteacher , who had come out of her room and run down the stairs. He heard two women carry something heavy into the house and drop it on the floor. His brother, the farmer, had given Mrs. McCoy a sack of potatoes. Hugh thought of mother and daughter standing together downstairs and was inexpressibly glad he had not given in to his impulse to boldness. "She would have told her now." She is a good woman and I would tell her now," he thought.

At two o'clock that same day, Hugh rose from his bed. Despite his conviction that women were not for him, he found he couldn't sleep. Something that had shone in the schoolteacher's eyes as she wrestled with him for possession of the plate kept calling to him, and he stood and went to the window. The clouds had already cleared, and the night was clear. Rose McCoy sat at the next window. She was dressed in her nightgown and looking along Turner's Pike to the place where George Pike, the stationmaster, lived with his wife. Without giving himself time to think, Hugh knelt down and extended his long arm across the space between the two windows. His fingers almost touched the back of her head and were about to play with the mass of red hair that fell over her shoulders when he was overcome with embarrassment again. He quickly withdrew his hand and sat up straight in the room. His head hit the ceiling, and he heard the window in the next room quietly lower. With a conscious effort, he pulled himself together. "She's a good woman. Remember, she's a good woman," he whispered to himself, and as he climbed back into bed, he didn't allow himself to linger on the schoolteacher's thoughts, but forced them to turn to the unresolved problems he still had to face before he could complete the hay-loading device. "Mind your own business and don't go down that road again," he said, as if addressing another person. "Remember, she's a good woman, and you have no right to do this. That's all you have to do. Remember, you have no right," he added with a note of command in his voice.

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CHAPTER XIII


X UGH THE FIRST SAW Clara Butterworth, one July day after she'd been home for a month. Late one evening, she came into his shop with her father and the man hired to manage the new bicycle factory. The three of them got out of Tom's buggy and went into the shop to see Hugh's new invention-a hay-loading device. Tom and a man named Alfred Buckley went to the back of the shop, and Hugh was left alone with the woman. She was dressed in a light summer dress, her cheeks flushed. Hugh stood on a bench by the open window and listened as she talked about how much the town had changed in the three years she'd been away. "That's your business; everyone says so," she declared.

Clara was looking forward to talking to Hugh. She began asking questions about his work and what would come of it. "When machines do everything, what's a human being supposed to do?" she asked. She seemed to take for granted that the inventor had been deeply reflecting on the subject of industrial development, something Kate Chancellor had often discussed throughout the evening. Hearing Hugh described as a man with a great mind, she wanted to see how that mind worked.

Alfred Buckley often visited her father's house and wanted to marry Clara. That evening, the two men sat on the porch of the farmhouse, talking about the city and the great things that lay ahead. They talked about Hugh, and Buckley, an energetic, talkative man with a long jaw and restless gray eyes, who had come from New York, proposed schemes for exploiting him. Clara realized there was a plan to gain control of Hugh's future inventions and thereby gain an advantage over Steve Hunter.

All this puzzled Clara. Alfred Buckley had proposed marriage, but she had put it off. The proposal was formal, not at all what she expected from the man she intended to be her lifelong partner, but at that moment Clara was very serious about marriage. The man from New York came to her father's house several evenings a week. She never went out with him, and they were not in any way close. He seemed too busy with work to discuss personal matters, and he proposed marriage by writing her a letter. Clara received the letter in the mail, and it upset her so much that she felt she couldn't meet anyone she knew for some time. "I'm unworthy of you, but I want you to be my wife. I'll work for you. I'm new here, and you don't know me very well. All I ask is the privilege of proving my worth. "I want you to be my wife, but before I dare come and ask you to do me such a great honor, I feel that I must prove that I am worthy of it," the letter said.

On the day she received the letter, Clara rode into town alone, then got into her buggy and rode south past Butterworth's farm toward the hills. She forgot to go home for lunch or dinner. The horse trotted slowly, protesting and trying to turn back at every intersection, but she kept going and didn't get home until midnight. When she reached the farmhouse, her father was waiting. He went with her to the barnyard and helped unharness the horse. Nothing was said, and after a moment of conversation that had nothing to do with the subject that occupied both of them, she went upstairs and tried to think it all through. She became convinced that her father had something to do with the marriage proposal, that he knew about it and was waiting for her return home to see how it affected her.

Clara wrote a reply that was as evasive as the proposal itself. "I don't know whether I want to marry you or not. I'll have to get to know you. However, I thank you for your proposal, and when you feel the time is right, we'll talk about it," she wrote.

After exchanging letters, Alfred Buckley came to her father's house more often than before, but he and Clara never became better acquainted. He spoke not to her, but to her father. Although she didn't know it, rumors that she would marry a man from New York had already spread throughout the city. She didn't know who had told the story: her father or Buckley.

On summer evenings on the farmhouse porch, the two men talked about progress, the city, and the role they were embracing and hoping to play in its future development. A New Yorker proposed a plan to Tom. He would go to Hugh and offer a contract giving the two of them the choice of all his future inventions. Once completed, the inventions would be financed in New York, and the two men would forgo manufacturing and make money much more quickly as promoters. They hesitated because they feared Steve Hunter and because Tom feared Hugh wouldn't support their plan. "I wouldn't be surprised if Steve already had a contract like that with him. If he doesn't, he's a fool," the older man said.

Night after night, the two men talked, and Clara sat in the deep shadows behind the porch and listened. The enmity between her and her father seemed forgotten. The man who had proposed marriage didn't look at her, but her father did. Buckley did most of the talking, referring to New York businessmen, already renowned in the Middle West as financial giants, as if they were his lifelong friends. "They'll do anything I ask of them," he declared.

Clara tried to think of Alfred Buckley as a husband. Like Hugh McVeigh, he was tall and thin, but unlike the inventor she'd seen two or three times on the street, he wasn't sloppily dressed. There was something sleek about him, something reminiscent of a well-behaved dog, perhaps a hound. When he spoke, he leaned forward like a greyhound chasing a rabbit. His hair was neatly parted, and his clothes clung to him like an animal's skin. He wore a diamond scarf pin. His long jaw seemed to wag constantly. Within days of receiving his letter, she decided she didn't want him as a husband, and she was convinced he didn't want her. She was certain the whole marriage had somehow been suggested by her father. When she came to this conclusion, she was simultaneously angry and strangely touched. She didn't interpret this as fear of some indiscretion on her part, but thought her father wanted her to marry because he wanted her to be happy. As she sat in the darkness on the farmhouse porch, the voices of the two men became indistinct. It was as if her mind had left her body and, like a living being, was traveling the world. Dozens of men she had seen and spoken to by chance arose before her, young men who attended school in Columbus, and city boys with whom she had gone to parties and dances as a little girl. She saw their figures clearly, but she remembered them from some opportune moment of contact. In Columbus, there lived a young man from a town on the southern edge of the state, one of those always in love with a woman. In his first year at school, he noticed Clara and couldn't decide whether to pay attention to her or to the small, dark-eyed city girl in their class. Several times, he walked down the college hill and down the street with Clara. They stood at the intersection where she usually got in her car. Several cars passed by, parked together near a bush growing against a high stone wall. They talked about trivial matters, about the school comedy club, the football team's chances of winning. The young man was one of the actors in a play put on by the comedy club, and he told Clara about his impressions of rehearsals. As he spoke, his eyes lit up, and it seemed to him as if he were looking not at her face or body, but at something inside her. For a while, perhaps fifteen minutes, there was a possibility that these two people might fall in love. Then the young man left, and later she saw him strolling under the trees on the college grounds with a small, dark-eyed city girl.

On summer evenings, sitting on the porch in the dark, Clara thought about this incident and the dozens of other fleeting encounters she'd made with men. The two men's voices talking about making money went on and on. Every time she emerged from her introspective world of thoughts, Alfred Buckley's long jaw would wag. He was always at work, doggedly, persistently trying to convince her father of something. Clara found it hard to think of her father as a rabbit, but the idea that Alfred Buckley resembled a dog stayed with her. "A wolf and a wolfhound," she thought absently.

Clara was twenty-three years old and considered herself mature. She had no intention of wasting her time going to school, and she didn't want to be a career woman like Kate Chancellor. There was something she wanted, and somehow some man-she didn't know who it would be-was interested in it. She craved love, but she could get it from another woman. Kate Chancellor would have liked her. She didn't realize that their friendship was more than that. Kate liked to hold Clara's hand, she wanted to kiss and caress her. This desire was suppressed by Kate herself, a struggle raging within her, and Clara was vaguely aware of it and respected Kate for it.

Why? Clara had asked herself this question a dozen times in the first weeks of that summer. Kate Chancellor had taught her to think. When they were together, Kate had thought and spoken, but now Clara's mind had a chance. There was something hidden behind her desire for a man. She wanted something more than affection. There was a creative impulse within her that couldn't manifest until a man made love to her. The man she desired was merely a tool she sought to realize herself. Several times during those evenings, in the presence of two men who spoke only of making money from the products of one another's minds, she almost repressed her mind with the specific thought of women, and then it would cloud over again.

Clara, tired of thinking, listened to the conversation. Hugh McVeigh's name echoed like a refrain in the persistent conversation. It became ingrained in her mind. The inventor was unmarried. Thanks to the social system she lived in, this and this only made him possible for her purposes. She began to think about the inventor, and her mind, tired of playing with her own figure, began to play with the figure of the tall, serious man she had seen on Main Street. When Alfred Buckley went into town for the night, she went upstairs to her room but didn't go to bed. Instead, she turned out the light and sat by the open window overlooking the orchard and from where she could see a short stretch of road that ran past the farmhouse toward town. Every evening before Alfred Buckley's departure, a small scene ensued on the porch. When the guest rose to leave, her father, under some pretext, went into the house or around the corner to the barnyard. "I'll ask Jim Priest to harness your horse," he said, and hurried away. Clara was left in the company of a man who pretended to want to marry her, but who, she was convinced, wanted nothing of the sort. She wasn't embarrassed, but she sensed his embarrassment and enjoyed it. He made formal speeches.

"Well, the night is lovely," he said. Clara embraced the thought of his discomfort. "He took me for a green country girl, impressed by him because he was from the city and well dressed," she thought. Sometimes her father would be gone for five or ten minutes, and she would not say a word. When her father returned, Alfred Buckley shook his hand and then turned to Clara, apparently now completely relaxed. "I'm afraid we're boring you," he said. He took her hand and, bending down, ceremoniously kissed the back of it. Her father turned away. Clara went upstairs and sat by the window. She could hear the two men continuing to talk on the road in front of the house. After a while, the front door slammed, her father entered the house, and the guest drove away. All was quiet, and for a long time she could hear the hooves of Alfred Buckley's horse quickly clattering along the road leading to town.

Clara thought of Hugh McVeigh. Alfred Buckley had described him as a country man with a certain genius. He constantly talked about how he and Tom could use him for their own ends, and she wondered if both men were making the same grave mistake about the inventor as they had about her. On a quiet summer night, when the clatter of horses' hooves had faded and her father had stopped stirring around the house, she heard another sound. The corn-picker factory was very busy and working the night shift. When the night was still, or when a light breeze blew from the city up the hill, a low rumble could be heard from the many machines working on wood and steel, followed at regular intervals by the steady breathing of a steam engine.

The woman at the window, like everyone else in her town and all the towns of the Midwest, was touched by the romance of industry. The dreams of the boy from Missouri, with whom he had struggled, had been twisted by the force of his persistence into new forms and expressed in specific things: machines for harvesting corn, machines for unloading coal cars, and machines for gathering hay from fields and loading it onto wagons without the aid of human hands were still dreams and capable of inspiring dreams in others. They awakened dreams in the woman's mind. The figures of other men that had swirled in her head faded, leaving only one figure. Her mind was inventing stories about Hugh. She had read an absurd story printed in a Cleveland newspaper, and it had captured her imagination. Like every other American, she believed in heroes. In books and magazines, she had read about heroic men who had risen from poverty through some strange alchemy and had combined all the virtues in their full bodies. The wide, rich land demanded giant figures, and the minds of men created these figures. Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, Sherman, and half a dozen other men were more than mere men in the minds of the generation that followed the days of their astonishing performances. Industry was already creating a new set of semi-mythical figures. The factory that worked at night in the town of Bidwell became, in the mind of the woman sitting by the farmhouse window, not a factory but a mighty animal, a mighty beast-like creature that Hugh had tamed and made useful to his fellows. Her mind raced forward and accepted the taming of the beast as a matter of course. The hunger of her generation found a voice in her. Like everyone else, she wanted heroes, and the hero was Hugh, whom she had never spoken to and knew nothing about. Her father, Alfred Buckley, Steve Hunter, and the rest were, after all, pygmies. Her father was a schemer; He even planned to marry her off, perhaps to further his own plans. In fact, his plans were so ineffective that she had no need to be angry with him. Among them, there was only one man who wasn't a schemer. Hugh was who she wanted to be. He was a creative force. In his hands, dead, inanimate things became creative force. He was who she wanted to be, not for herself, but perhaps for her son. The thought, finally articulated, frightened Clara, and she rose from her chair by the window and prepared to go to bed. Something inside her ached, but she didn't allow herself to continue thinking about what was haunting her.

The day she went with her father and Alfred Buckley to Hugh's store, Clara realized she wanted to marry the man she saw there. The thought didn't form within her, but lay dormant, like a seed just planted in fertile soil. She arranged for a ride to the factory and managed to leave her with Hugh while the two men went to look at the unfinished hay loader in the back of the store.

She began talking to Hugh as the four of them stood on the lawn in front of the store. They went inside, and her father and Buckley went in through the back door. She stopped near a bench, and as she continued talking, Hugh was forced to stop and stand beside her. She asked questions, paid him vague compliments, and while he struggled to make conversation, she studied him. To hide his confusion, he turned away and looked out the window at Turner's Pike. His eyes, she decided, were beautiful. They were a little small, but there was something gray and cloudy about them, and the gray cloudiness gave her confidence in the man behind them. She could, she felt, trust him. There was something in his eyes like what was most grateful to her own nature: the sky seen over open country or over a river running straight into the distance. Hugh's hair was coarse, like a horse's mane, and his nose was like a horse's nose. He, she decided, was very much like a horse; an honest, strong horse, a horse humanized by the mysterious, hungry creature that expressed itself in his eyes. "If I have to live with an animal; if, as Kate Chancellor once said, we women must decide what other animal we will live with before we can become human, I would rather live with a strong, kind horse than with a wolf or a wolfhound," she found herself thinking.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER XIV


Hugh had no suspicion that Clara was considering him as a possible husband. He knew nothing about her, but after she left, he began to wonder. She was a woman, pleasant to look at, and she immediately took Rose McCoy's place in his mind. All unloved men, and many loved ones, subconsciously play with the figures of many women, just as a woman's consciousness plays with the figures of men, seeing them in many situations, vaguely caressing them, dreaming of closer contacts. Hugh's attraction to women had developed late, but it grew stronger with each passing day. When he talked to Clara and while she remained in his presence, he felt more embarrassed than ever before, because he was more aware of her than he had ever been of any other woman. Secretly, he was not the modest man he thought himself to be. The success of his corn picker and truck unloader, as well as the respect, bordering on worship, he sometimes received from the people of his Ohio town, fueled his vanity. It was a time when all of America was obsessed with a single idea, and for the people of Bidwell, nothing was more important, necessary, or vital to progress than what Hugh had accomplished. He didn't walk or talk like the other townspeople; his body was too large and loosely built, but secretly, he didn't want to be different, even physically. Occasionally, an opportunity arose to test his physical strength: he had to lift an iron bar or swing a part of some heavy machine in the shop. During such a test, he discovered he could lift almost twice as much as another man could. Two men grunted and strained as they tried to lift a heavy barbell from the floor and place it on a bench. He arrived and completed the job alone, without any apparent effort.

In his room at night, late afternoon or summer evening, as he strolled the country roads, he sometimes felt a keen hunger for recognition from his comrades, and, having no one to praise him, he praised himself. When the state governor praised him before a crowd, and when he forced Rose McCoy to leave because he felt it immodest to stay and hear such words, he found he couldn't sleep. After two or three hours in bed, he got up and crept quietly out of the house. He resembled a man with an unmusical voice singing to himself in the bathtub, the water making a loud splash. That night, Hugh wanted to be an orator. Wandering in the dark along Turner's Pike, he imagined himself as the state governor addressing a crowd. A mile north of Pickleville, a thicket grew beside the road, and Hugh stopped and addressed the young trees and bushes. In the darkness, the mass of bushes resembled a crowd standing at attention, listening. The wind blew and played through the thick, dry vegetation, and a multitude of voices could be heard whispering words of encouragement. Hugh said many stupid things. Expressions he had heard from the lips of Steve Hunter and Tom Butterworth came into his head and were repeated by his lips. He spoke of the rapid growth of Bidwell as if it were a true blessing, of factories, homes of happy, contented people, the advent of industrial development as something like a visitation from the gods. Reaching the pinnacle of egotism, he shouted, "I did it. I did it."

Hugh heard a buggy approaching down the road and ran into the thicket. The farmer, who had gone into town for the evening and stayed behind after the political meeting to talk with other farmers at Ben Head's saloon, went home asleep in his buggy. His head bobbed up and down, heavy with the steam rising from many glasses of beer. Hugh emerged from the thicket feeling somewhat ashamed. The next day, he wrote a letter to Sarah Shepard, telling her of his progress. "If you or Henry need money, I can provide you with anything you want," he wrote, and couldn't resist telling her something about what the governor had said about his work and his thoughts. "Anyway, they must think I'm worth something, whether I do it or not," he said thoughtfully.

Realizing his importance in the lives of those around him, Hugh longed for direct, human appreciation. After the failed attempt he and Rose had made to break through the wall of embarrassment and reserve that separated them, he knew beyond doubt that he wanted a woman, and the idea, once established in his mind, grew to gigantic proportions. All women became interesting, and he looked with hungry eyes at the workers' wives who sometimes approached the store doors to exchange a word with their husbands, at the young farm girls who drove along Turner's Pike on summer afternoons, and at the city girls who stopped by. Bidwell Street in the evening, the fair-haired and dark-haired women. As he desired a woman more consciously and decisively, he became more afraid of individual women. His success and association with the shop workers had made him less shy in the presence of men, but women were different. In their presence, he felt ashamed of his secret thoughts about them.

On the day he was alone with Clara, Tom Butterworth and Alfred Buckley lingered in the back of the shop for nearly twenty minutes. It was a hot day, and beads of sweat stood out on Hugh's face. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and his hairy arms were coated with shop dirt. He raised his hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, leaving a long, black mark. Then he noticed that while she spoke, the woman had been looking at him with an intent, almost calculating expression. As if he were a horse and she a customer inspecting him to ensure his health and good nature. As she stood beside him, her eyes sparkled and her cheeks flushed. The awakening, assertive masculinity in him whispered that the flush on her cheeks and the sparkle in her eyes were telling him something. He had learned this lesson from a brief and thoroughly unsatisfactory experience with the schoolmistress at his boarding school.

Clara left the store with her father and Alfred Buckley. Tom drove, and Alfred Buckley leaned forward and spoke. "You must find out if Steve has a use for the new tool. It would be foolish to ask directly and give yourself away. This inventor is stupid and vain. These guys are always like that. They seem quiet and insightful, but they always let the cat out of the bag. We must flatter him somehow. A woman could find out everything he knows in ten minutes." He turned to Clara and smiled. There was something infinitely insolent in the fixed, animal-like gaze of his eyes. "We include you in our plans, your father and I, yes?" he said. "You must be careful not to give us away when you talk to this inventor."

From his shop window, Hugh looked at the backs of three heads. Tom Butterworth's buggy had the top down, and as he spoke, Alfred Buckley leaned forward, his head disappearing. Hugh thought Clara must look like the kind of woman men think of when they talk about a lady. The farmer's daughter had a flair for dress, and the idea of aristocracy through clothing arose in Hugh's mind. He thought the dress she wore was the most stylish thing he had ever seen. Clara's friend, Kate Chancellor, though masculine in her dress, had a flair for style and taught Clara several valuable lessons. "Any woman can dress well if she knows how," Kate declared. She taught Clara to explore and enhance her body with clothing. Next to Clara, Rose McCoy looked sloppy and ordinary.

Hugh walked to the back of his shop, where the faucet was, and washed his hands. Then he went to a bench and tried to get back to work. Five minutes later, he went back to wash his hands. He left the shop and stopped by a small stream that trickled beneath willow bushes and disappeared under the bridge below Turner's Pike, then returned for his coat and left work for the day. Instinct compelled him to pass the stream again, kneel on the grass by the bank, and wash his hands again.

Hugh's growing vanity was fueled by the idea that Clara was interested in him, but it wasn't yet strong enough to support the idea. He took a long walk, two or three miles north from the store along Turner's Pike and then along a crossroads between corn and cabbage fields to where he could cross a meadow and enter the woods. For an hour he sat on a log at the edge of the woods and looked south. In the distance, above the rooftops of the town, he saw a white speck against the greenery-the Butterworth farmhouse. Almost immediately, he decided that what he had seen in Clara's eyes, which was a sister to what he had seen in Rose McCoy's, had nothing to do with him. The mantle of vanity he had worn fell away, leaving him naked and sad. "What does she want with me?" he asked himself, rising from behind the log to look critically at his long, bony body. For the first time in two or three years, he thought of the words Sara Shepard had repeated so often in his presence during the first few months after he left his father's cabin on the banks of the Mississippi River to work at the railroad station. She had called his people lazy louts and poor white trash and criticized his penchant for daydreaming. Through struggle and toil, he had conquered his dreams, but he had been unable to conquer his ancestry or change the fact that, at his core, he was poor white trash. With a shudder of disgust, he saw himself again as a boy in tattered clothes that smelled of fish, lying stupidly and half-asleep in the grass on the banks of the Mississippi River. He forgot the grandeur of the dreams that sometimes visited him and remembered only the swarms of flies that, attracted by the dirt of his clothes, circled around him and his drunken father, sleeping beside him.

A lump rose in his throat, and for a moment he was overcome with self-pity. Then he emerged from the woods, crossed the field, and with his peculiar, long, shuffling gait, which enabled him to move with surprising speed over the earth, he returned to the road. If there had been a stream nearby, he would have been tempted to tear off his clothes and dive in. The idea that he could ever become a man who would in any way be attractive to a woman like Clara Butterworth seemed the greatest folly in the world. "She's a lady. What does she want with me? I'm not right for her. I'm not right for her," he said aloud, unconsciously slipping into his father's dialect.

Hugh walked all day, then returned to his shop in the evening and worked until midnight. He worked so energetically that he managed to solve a number of complex problems in the design of the hay loading apparatus.

On the second evening after meeting Clara, Hugh went for a stroll through the streets of Bidwell. He thought about the work he'd done all day, and then about the woman he'd decided he'd never be able to win. As darkness fell, he headed out of town and returned at nine along the railroad tracks past the corn mill. The mill worked day and night, and the new mill, also located next to the tracks and not far from it, was almost finished. Beyond the new mill was a field that Tom Butterworth and Steve Hunter had bought and laid out on the streets with workers' houses. The houses were cheaply built and ugly, and there was great disarray in every direction; but Hugh didn't see the disorder and ugliness of the buildings. The sight before him reinforced his fading vanity. Something in his free, shuffling gait went awry, and he squared his shoulders. "What I've done here means something. "I'm all right," he thought, and had almost reached the old corn mill when several people came out of a side door and, standing on the tracks, walked in front of him.

Something happened at the corn mill that excited the men. Ed Hall, the superintendent, was playing a joke on his fellow workers. He put on overalls and went to work at a workbench in a long room with about fifty other men. "I'm going to show you off," he said, laughing. "You're looking at me. We're late with the job, and I'm going to invite you in."

The workers' pride was hurt, and for two weeks they worked like demons, trying to outdo their boss. At night, when the workload was being tallied, Ed was ridiculed. Then they heard that piecework would be introduced at the plant, and they feared they would be paid according to a scale calculated based on the volume of work completed over two weeks of frantic effort.

A workman stumbling along the tracks cursed Ed Hall and the men he worked for. "I lost six hundred dollars to a broken setting machine, and that's all I get because I'm being played by a young wretch like Ed Hall," a voice grumbled. Another voice took up the refrain. In the dim light, Hugh saw the speaker, a bent-backed man who had grown up in the cabbage fields and come to town looking for work. Although he didn't recognize it, he had heard the voice before. It came from the son of cabbage farmer Ezra French, and it was the same voice he had once heard complaining at night as the French boys crawled through the cabbage fields in the moonlight. Now the man said something that startled Hugh. "Well," he declared, "the joke's on me. I left Daddy and hurt him; now he won't take me back anymore. He says I'm a slacker and no good. I thought I'd come to the city to work in the factory and that things would be easier for me here. Now I'm married and I have to stick to my job no matter what they do. In the village I worked like a dog for a few weeks a year, but here I'll probably have to work like a dog all the time. That's the way it is. I thought it was very funny - all this talk about working in a factory being so easy. I wish the old days would come back. I don't understand how that inventor or his inventions ever helped us workers. Dad was right about him. He said an inventor wouldn't do anything for the workers. He said a telegraph operator would be better off tarred and feathered. I guess Dad was right."

Hugh's swagger faded, and he paused to allow the men to pass along the tracks out of sight and earshot. As they walked a short distance, an argument broke out. Each man felt the others should bear some responsibility for his betrayal in the dispute with Ed Hall, and accusations flew back and forth. One of the men hurled a heavy stone, which skittered along the tracks and leaped into a ditch overgrown with dry weeds. It made a loud crash. Hugh heard heavy footsteps. Fearing the men were about to attack him, he climbed the fence, crossed the barnyard, and emerged onto the empty street. Trying to understand what had happened and why the men were angry, he encountered Clara Butterworth, who was standing, apparently waiting for him, under a streetlamp.


Hugh walked beside Clara, too bewildered to try to understand the new impulses filling his mind. She explained her presence in the street by saying she had come into town to post a letter and intended to walk home by a side road. "You can come with me if you just want a stroll," she said. They both walked in silence. Hugh's thoughts, unaccustomed to traveling in wide circles, were focused on his companion. It seemed life had suddenly led him down strange paths. In two days, he had experienced more new emotions and felt them more deeply than anyone could imagine. The hour he had just lived through had been extraordinary. He left his boarding house sad and depressed. Then he arrived at the factory and was filled with pride at what he believed he had accomplished. Now it was obvious that the workers in the factories were dissatisfied; something was wrong. He wondered if Clara would find out what had happened and whether she would tell him if he asked. He wanted to ask many questions. "That's what I need a woman for. I want someone by my side who understands things and will tell me about them," he thought. Clara remained silent, and Hugh decided she disliked him, just like the complaining worker stumbling along the tracks. The man said he wished Hugh had never come to town. Perhaps everyone in Bidwell secretly felt the same.

Hugh no longer felt proud of himself or his accomplishments. He was overcome with bewilderment. As he and Clara drove out of town onto a country road, he began to think of Sara Shepard, who had been friendly and kind to him as a boy, and he wished she were with him, or, better yet, that Clara would take the same attitude. She had taken it into her head to swear, as Sara Shepard had, he would have felt relieved.

Instead, Clara walked silently, minding her own business and planning to use Hugh for her own ends. It had been a difficult day for her. Late in the evening, a scene had broken out between her and her father, and she had left home and come into town because she couldn't bear his presence any longer. Seeing Hugh approaching, she stopped under a street lamp to wait for him. "I could fix everything if he'd ask me to marry him," she thought.

The new difficulty that arose between Clara and her father was something she had nothing to do with. Tom, who considered himself so shrewd and cunning, had been hired by a local named Alfred Buckley. That afternoon, a federal officer arrived in town to arrest Buckley. The man turned out to be a notorious con artist, wanted in several cities. In New York, he was part of a counterfeiting ring, and in other states, he was wanted for defrauding women, two of whom he had illegally married.

The arrest was like a shot fired at Tom by a member of his own family. He almost came to think of Alfred Buckley as a member of his own family, and as he drove quickly home, he felt deep sorrow for his daughter and intended to ask her forgiveness for betraying her false position. The fact that he had not openly participated in any of Buckley's plans, had not signed any documents or written any letters that would betray the conspiracy he had entered into against Steve, filled him with joy. He intended to be generous and even, if necessary, to confess his indiscretion to Clara by talking about a possible marriage, but when he reached the farmhouse, led Clara into the parlor, and closed the door, he changed his mind. He told her about Buckley's arrest and then began pacing the room excitedly. Her composure infuriated him. "Don't sit there like a clam!" he shouted. "Don't you know what happened? Don't you know that you've been disgraced, that you've dishonored my name?"

The enraged father explained that half the town knew of her engagement to Alfred Buckley, and when Clara declared that they were not engaged and that she had never intended to marry the man, his anger did not subside. He had whispered the proposal to the town himself, told Steve Hunter, Gordon Hart, and two or three others that Alfred Buckley and his daughter would undoubtedly do what he called "make it up," and they, of course, had told their wives. The fact that he had betrayed his daughter to such a disgraceful situation gnawed at his consciousness. "I suppose the scoundrel said so himself," he said in response to her statement, and gave vent to his anger again. He looked at his daughter and wished she were his son so he could hit her with his fists. His voice rose to a shout, and it could be heard in the barnyard where Jim Priest and the young farmer were working. They stopped their work and listened. "She's up to something. "Do you think some man got her into trouble?" asked the young farmer.

At home, Tom aired his old grievances with his daughter. "Why didn't you get married and settle down like a proper woman?" he shouted. "Tell me what. Why didn't you get married and settle down? Why are you always getting into trouble? Why didn't you get married and settle down?"


Clara walked down the road beside Hugh, thinking that all her troubles would end if he asked her to marry him. Then she felt ashamed of her thoughts. As they passed the last streetlight and prepared to take the detour down the dark road, she turned and looked at Hugh's long, serious face. The tradition that made him different from other men in the eyes of the people of Bidwell was beginning to affect her. Ever since she returned home, she had heard people speak of him with something like awe in their voices. She knew that marrying the town hero would elevate her in the eyes of the people. It would be a triumph for her and restore her standing not only in the eyes of her father but in the eyes of everyone else. Everyone seemed to think she should marry; even Jim Priest said so. He said she was the marrying type. Here was her chance. She wondered why she didn't want to take it.

Clara wrote a letter to her friend Kate Chancellor announcing her intention to leave home and go to work, and walked into town to mail it. On Main Street, as she walked through the crowd of men who had come to stroll in front of the stores the day before, the force of her father's words about the connection of her name with that of Buckley the con man struck her for the first time. The men were gathered in groups, talking animatedly. No doubt they were discussing Buckley's arrest. Her own name was no doubt being discussed. Her cheeks burned, and a sharp hatred of humanity took possession of her. Now her hatred of others awakened in her an almost reverent attitude toward Hugh. By the time they had walked together for five minutes, all thoughts of using him for her own ends had evaporated. "He's not like Father, Henderson Woodburn, or Alfred Buckley," she told herself. "He doesn't scheme or twist things to get the best of someone else. He works, and through his efforts, things get done." The image of farmer Jim Priest, working in a cornfield, came to her mind. "The farmer works," she thought, "and the corn grows. This man does his job in his store and helps the town grow."

In her father's presence, Clara remained calm throughout the day and seemingly unfazed by his tirade. In the city, in the presence of the men she was sure were attacking her heroine, she grew angry and ready to fight. Now she wanted to lay her head on Hugh's shoulder and cry.

They came to a bridge near where the road curved toward her father's house. It was the same bridge she had reached with the schoolteacher and the one John May had followed, looking for a fight. Clara stopped. She didn't want anyone in the house to know Hugh had come home with her. "Father wants me to marry so much that he'll go to him tomorrow," she thought. She placed her hands on the bridge railing and leaned over, burying her face between them. Hugh stood behind her, turning his head from side to side and rubbing his hands on his trouser legs, beside himself with embarrassment. Next to the road, not far from the bridge, was a flat, marshy field, and after a moment of silence, the cries of many frogs broke the silence. Hugh felt very sad. The idea that he was a big man and deserved to have a woman with whom he could live and understand him had completely vanished. For now, he wanted to be a boy and rest his head on a woman's shoulder. He wasn't looking at Clara, but at himself. In the dim light, his nervously fumbling hands, his long, loosely built body, everything connected with his personality seemed ugly and utterly unattractive. He could see the woman's small, firm hands resting on the bridge railing. They were, he thought, like everything connected with her personality, slender and beautiful, just as everything connected with his own personality was ugly and unattractive.

Clara snapped out of her pensive mood and, shaking Hugh's hand and explaining that she didn't want him to go any further, left. Just when he thought she was gone, she returned. "You'll hear that I was engaged to that Alfred Buckley who got into trouble and was arrested," she said. Hugh didn't answer, and her voice became sharp and a little defiant. "You'll hear that we were going to get married. I don't know what you'll hear. It's a lie," she said, turning and hurrying away.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER XV


Hugh and Lara were married less than a week after their first walk together. A chain of circumstances that had touched their lives led them to marriage, and the opportunity for intimacy with the woman Hugh so craved came to him with a speed that made his head spin.

It was a Wednesday evening, overcast. After a silent dinner with his mistress, Hugh set out along Turner's Pike toward Bidwell, but when he was almost to town, he turned back. He had left the house, intending to walk through town to Medina Road and the woman who now occupied so much of his thoughts, but he lacked the courage. Every evening for almost a week he had gone for a walk, and every evening he had returned to almost the same place. Disgusted and angry with himself, he went to his store, walking in the middle of the road and raising clouds of dust. People passed along the path under the trees at the side of the road and turned to look at him. A laborer with a fat wife, who puffed as she walked beside him, turned and began cursing. "I tell you what, old woman, I should never have married and had children," he grumbled. "Look at me, then look at this guy. He goes there thinking great thoughts that will make him richer and richer. "I have to work for two dollars a day, and very soon I'll be old and thrown away. I could be as rich an inventor as he is if I gave myself a chance."

The worker walked on, grumbling at his wife, who ignored his words. She needed breath to walk, and as for her marriage, that was already taken care of. She saw no reason to waste words on the matter. Hugh went into the store and stood leaning against the doorframe. Two or three workmen were busy near the back door, lighting the gas lamps hanging over the workbenches. They did not see Hugh, and their voices carried throughout the empty building. One of them, an old man with a bald head, was entertaining his comrades by impersonating Steve Hunter. He lit a cigar and, putting on his hat, tilted it slightly to one side. Puffing out his chest, he walked back and forth, talking about money. "Here's a ten-dollar cigar," he said, handing a long cigar to one of the workers. "I buy them by the thousands to give away. I'm interested in improving the lives of the workers in my hometown. This is what takes up all my attention."

The other workers laughed, and the little man continued to hop back and forth and talk, but Hugh didn't hear him. He stared sullenly at the people walking along the road to town. Darkness was falling, but he could still see dim figures striding forward. Beyond the corn-picker foundry, the night shift was ending, and a sudden bright light sparkled in the heavy cloud of smoke hanging over the town. Church bells began to ring, calling people to Wednesday evening prayer meetings. An enterprising citizen had begun building workers' houses in the field behind Hugh's store, and they were occupied by Italian laborers. Their crowd passed by. What would one day become a residential area grew in a field next to a cabbage patch belonging to Ezra French, who had said that God would not allow people to change the field of their labor.

An Italian passed under a lamppost near the Wheeling station. He wore a bright red handkerchief around his neck and a bright shirt. Like other Bidwell residents, Hugh disliked the sight of foreigners. He didn't understand them, and seeing them walking in groups along the streets frightened him a little. A man's duty, he thought, was to resemble his fellow men as much as possible, to blend in with the crowd, but these people were unlike other men. They loved color and gestured rapidly with their hands as they spoke. The Italian was with a woman of his own race on the road, and in the gathering darkness, he placed his hand on her shoulder. Hugh's heart began to beat faster, and he forgot his American prejudices. He wished he were a working man, and Clara a working man's daughter. Then, he thought, perhaps he would find the courage to go to her. His imagination, fired by desire and channeled in new directions, allowed him at that moment to imagine himself in the place of the young Italian walking along the road with Clara. She was dressed in a cotton dress, and her soft brown eyes looked at him, full of love and understanding.

The three workers finished the work they'd returned to after dinner, turned off the lights, and walked to the front of the store. Hugh moved away from the door and hid in the thick shadows against the wall. His thoughts about Clara were so vivid that he didn't want anyone to interfere with them.

The workmen emerged from the workshop doors and stood talking. A bald man was telling a story that the others listened avidly. "It's all over town," he said. "From what I've heard from everyone, it's not the first time she's gotten into such trouble. Old Tom Butterworth claimed to have sent her to school three years ago, but now they say that's not true. They say she was on her way to one of her father's farmers and had to leave town." The man laughed. "Lord, if Clara Butterworth were my daughter, she'd be in a wonderful position, wouldn't she?" he said, laughing. "As it is, she's all right. Now she's gone off and got involved with that swindler Buckley, but her father's money will fix everything. Whether she has a child, no one will know. She may have had one already. They say she's ordinary among men.

While the man spoke, Hugh walked to the door and stood in the darkness, listening. For a moment the words didn't penetrate his consciousness, and then he remembered what Clara had said. She had said something about Alfred Buckley and that there would be a story linking her name with his. She had been hot and angry and had declared the story a lie. Hugh didn't know what it was, but it was obvious there was a story going on abroad, a scandalous story, involving her and Alfred Buckley. A hot, impersonal anger took hold of him. "She's in trouble-here's my chance," he thought. His tall frame straightened, and as he stepped through the shop door, his head slammed sharply against the doorframe, but he didn't feel the impact that at another time might have knocked him down. In his entire life, he had never punched anyone and never felt the desire to do so, but now the urge to strike and even kill completely possessed him. With a cry of rage, he swung his fist, and the old man, still unconscious, fell into the weeds growing near the door. Hugh spun and punched the second man, who fell through the open door into the store. The third man fled into the darkness down Turner's Pike.

Hugh walked quickly into town and down Main Street. He saw Tom Butterworth walking down the street with Steve Hunter, but he turned the corner to avoid them. "My chance has come," he kept telling himself as he hurried down Medina Road. "Clara's in trouble. My chance has come."

By the time he reached the Butterworths' door, Hugh's newfound courage had all but deserted him, but before it could, he raised his hand and knocked. As luck would have it, Clara came to the door. Hugh took off his hat and twirled it awkwardly in his hands. "I've come here to ask you to marry me," he said. "I want you to be my wife. Will you do that?"

Clara left the house and closed the door. A whirlwind of thoughts raced through her mind. For a moment, she wanted to laugh, but then something that had been her father's insight came to her aid. "Why shouldn't I do it?" she thought. "Here's my chance. This man is worried and upset right now, but I can respect him. This is the best marriage I'll ever have. I don't love him, but maybe I will. Maybe this is how marriages are made."

Clara reached out and placed her hand on Hugh's shoulder. "Well," she said hesitantly, "wait here a minute."

She entered the house and left Hugh standing in the darkness. He was terribly afraid. It seemed as if all the secret desires of his life had suddenly and openly expressed themselves. He felt naked and ashamed. "If she comes out and says she'll marry me, what will I do? What will I do then?" he asked himself.

When she emerged, Clara was wearing a hat and a long coat. "Come on," she said, leading him around the house and through the barnyard to one of the sheds. She entered a dark stall, led the horse out, and, with Hugh's help, pulled the cart out of the barn and into the barnyard. "If we're going to do this, there's no point in putting it off," she said, her voice shaking. "We might as well go to the county office and do it right away."

The horse was harnessed, and Clara climbed into the buggy. Hugh climbed in and sat beside her. She was about to pull out of the barnyard when Jim Priest suddenly emerged from the darkness and grabbed the horse by the head. Clara took the whip in her hand and raised it to strike the horse. A desperate determination not to interfere with her marriage to Hugh took hold of her. "If necessary, I'll take that man down," she thought. Jim came over and stopped next to the buggy. He looked past Clara at Hugh. "I thought maybe it was that Buckley," he said. He placed his hand on the dashboard of the buggy and placed the other on Clara's arm. "You're a woman now, Clara, and I think you know what you're doing. I think you know I'm your friend," he said slowly. "You've been in trouble, I know. I couldn't help but overhear what your father said to you about Buckley; he spoke so loudly." Clara, I don't want you to get into trouble.

The farmhand walked away from the cart, then returned and placed his hand on Clara's shoulder again. The silence that reigned in the barnyard continued until the woman felt she could speak without a break in her voice.

"I won't go very far, Jim," she said, laughing nervously. "This is Mr. Hugh McVeigh, and we're going to the county seat to get married. We'll be home before midnight. You put a candle in the window for us."

With a sharp kick to her horse, Clara rode quickly past the house and onto the road. She turned south, into the rolling hills through which ran the road to the county seat. As the horse trotted briskly, Jim Priest's voice called to her from the darkness of the barnyard, but she didn't stop. The day and evening were overcast, the night dark. She was glad of it. As the horse trotted forward, she turned and looked at Hugh, who sat very primly in the buggy seat, staring straight ahead. The Missourian's long, equine face, with its huge nose and deeply lined cheeks, was ennobled by a soft darkness, and a tender feeling swept over her. When he proposed marriage, Clara had rushed like a wild animal in search of prey, and the fact that she resembled her father-firm, shrewd, and quick-witted-made her resolve to see it through. Once. She felt ashamed now, and her tender mood robbed her of her hardness and insight. "This man and I have a thousand things we must say to each other before we rush into marriage," she thought, and was almost about to turn her horse and ride back. She wondered if Hugh had also heard the stories linking her name with Buckley's, stories that she was sure were now being passed from mouth to mouth through the streets of Bidwell, and what version of the story had reached him. "Perhaps he has come to propose marriage to protect me," she thought, and decided that if that was his purpose, she was taking an unfair advantage. "This is what Kate Chancellor would call 'playing a dirty and mean trick on a man,'" she told herself; but no sooner had the thought occurred to her than she leaned forward and, touching her horse with her whip, urged him even faster down the road.

A mile south of the Butterworth farmhouse, the road to the county seat crossed the crest of a hill, the highest point in the county, offering a magnificent view of the countryside to the south. The sky began to clear, and as they reached a point known as Lookout Hill, the moon broke through a tangle of clouds. Clara reined in her horse and turned to look up the hillside. Below, the lights of her father's farmhouse, where he had come as a young man and where, long ago, he had brought his bride, were visible. Far below the farmhouse, a cluster of lights outlined a rapidly growing town. The resolve that had sustained Clara until now wavered again, and a lump rose in her throat.

Hugh turned to look, but he didn't see the dark beauty of the land, adorned with the jewels of night lights. The woman he so passionately desired and so feared turned away from him, and he dared to look at her. He saw the sharp curve of her breasts, and in the dim light, her cheeks seemed to glow with beauty. A strange thought occurred to him. In the uncertain light, her face seemed to move independently of her body. It approached him, then retreated. Once, it seemed to him that a dimly visible white cheek would touch his own. He waited, holding his breath. A flame of desire ran through him.

Hugh's thoughts drifted back through the years, to his childhood and adolescence. In the river town he grew up in, the raftsmen and saloon hangers-on who sometimes came to spend the day on the riverbank with his father, John McVeigh, often talked about women and marriage. Lying on the burnt grass in the warm sunlight, they conversed, and the half-asleep boy listened. The voices seemed to come from clouds or from the lazy waters of a great river, and the women's conversations awakened childish lusts in him. One of the men, a tall young man with a mustache and dark circles under his eyes, told a story in a lazy, drawling voice about an adventure that had befallen a woman one night when the raft he was working on moored near St. Louis, and Hugh listened with envy. As he told this story, the young man roused himself slightly from his stupor, and when he laughed, the other men lying around him laughed with him. "I finally got the better of her," he boasted. "After it was all over, we went into a small room at the back of the saloon. I took my chance, and when she fell asleep in her chair, I pulled eight dollars out of her stocking."

That night, sitting in the carriage next to Clara, Hugh thought of himself lying by the riverbank on summer days. Dreams came to him there, sometimes gigantic dreams; but also ugly thoughts and desires. Near his father's cabin, the pungent, rancid smell of rotting fish always lingered, and swarms of flies filled the air. There, in the clean Ohio country, in the hills south of Bidwell, it seemed to him that the smell of rotting fish had returned, that it was in his clothes, that it had somehow permeated his nature. He raised his hand and ran it over his face, unconsciously returning to the constant motion of brushing flies from his face as he lay half-asleep by the river.

Tiny lustful thoughts continued to come to Hugh, making him feel ashamed. He shifted uneasily in the carriage seat, a lump forming in his throat. He looked at Clara again. "I'm a poor white man," he thought. "It's not fitting for me to marry this woman."

From the high ground on the road, Clara looked down on her father's house and below at the lights of the city, which had already spread so far into the countryside, and up over the hills to the farm where she had spent her childhood and where, as Jim Priest said, "the sap began to run up the tree." She had fallen in love with the man who was to be her husband, but, like city dreamers, she saw in him something slightly inhuman, a man almost gigantic in his size. Much of what Kate Chancellor had said as the two developing women walked and talked through the streets of Columbus came back to her. As they set off down the road again, she continually harassed the horse, tapping it with her whip. Like Kate, Clara wanted to be honest and fair. "A woman should be honest and fair, even with a man," Kate had said. "The man I will have for a husband is simple and honest," she thought. "If there's anything unfair or unjust about this town, he has nothing to do with it." Understanding, for a moment, that Hugh was having trouble expressing what he must be feeling, she wanted to help him, but when she turned and saw that he wasn't looking at her, but staring steadily into the darkness, pride silenced her. "I'll have to wait until he's ready. I've already taken too much into my own hands. I can endure this marriage, but when it comes to anything else, he'll have to start," she told herself, a lump forming in her throat and tears welling up in her eyes.

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CHAPTER XVI


And with him stood. Alone in the barnyard, excited by the thought of the adventure Clara and Hugh were about to embark on, Jim Priest remembered Tom Butterworth. For over thirty years, Jim had worked for Tom, and they shared a powerful bond-a shared love of fine horses. More than once, the two men had spent the day together on the grandstand at the Fall Meeting in Cleveland. Late on such a day, Tom would find Jim wandering from stall to stall, watching the horses being waxed and prepared for the day's races. In a generous mood, he bought his employee lunch and seated him in the grandstand. All day, the two men watched the races, smoked, and bickered. Tom claimed that Bud Doble, cheerful, dramatic, and handsome, was the greatest of all racehorses, while Jim Priest despised Bud Doble. Of all the drivers, there was only one man he truly admired: Pop Gears, the shrewd, silent one. "That Gears of yours doesn't drive at all. He just sits there like a stick," Tom grumbled. "If a horse can win, it'll follow. I like to see a driver. Now look at that Doble. Watch him lead a horse through the stretch.

Jim looked at his employer with something like pity in his eyes. "Ha," he exclaimed. "If you don't have eyes, you can't see."

The farmer had two great loves in his life: his employer's daughter and his racehorse, Gears. "Gears," he declared, "was a man born old and wise." He often saw Gears at the track the morning before an important race. The driver sat on an overturned box in the sun in front of one of the stables. Around him, the banter of riders and grooms could be heard. Bets were placed and goals were set. Horses not racing that day were training on the nearby tracks. The clatter of their hooves was like music, making Jim's blood tingle. Blacks laughed, and horses poked their heads out of stall doors. Stallions neighed loudly, and the hooves of an impatient horse pounded the stall walls.

Everyone in the booths was talking about the day's events, and Jim, leaning against the front of one, listened, filled with happiness. He wished fate had made him a racer. Then he looked at Pop Gears, the silent one, who sat for hours, dull and taciturn, at the feed trough, lightly tapping the ground with his racing whip and chewing on a straw. Jim's imagination was awakened. He had once seen another silent American, General Grant, and was filled with admiration for him.

It was a great day in Jim's life, the day he saw Grant about to accept Lee's surrender at Appomattox. There had been a battle with Union soldiers pursuing the fleeing Rebels from Richmond, and Jim, armed with a bottle of whiskey and a chronic aversion to fighting, had managed to crawl into the woods. He heard shouts in the distance and soon saw several men riding furiously down the road. It was Grant and his aides, heading for where Lee waited. They rode up to where Jim sat with his back against a tree, a bottle between his legs; then he stopped. Grant then decided not to take part in the ceremony. His clothes were covered in mud, and his beard was shaggy. He knew Lee and knew he would be dressed for the occasion. He was just that kind of man; he was a man suited to historical pictures and events. Grant was not. He ordered his assistants to go to the place where Lee was waiting, told them what was to be done, then jumped his horse over the ditch and rode along the path under the trees to the place where Jim lay.

It was an event Jim never forgot. He was captivated by the thought of what that day had meant to Grant, and by his apparent indifference. He sat silently by the tree, and when Grant dismounted and came closer, now walking along a path where sunlight filtered through the trees, he closed his eyes. Grant walked up to where he was sitting and stopped, apparently thinking he was dead. His hand reached down and picked up the bottle of whiskey. For a moment, something passed between them, Grant and Jim. They both recognized the bottle of whiskey. Jim thought Grant was about to drink and opened his eyes slightly. Then he closed them. The cork fell from the bottle, and Grant clutched it tightly in his hand. A deafening scream was heard from far away, picked up and carried by distant voices. The tree seemed to sway with it. "It's done. The war's over," Jim thought. Then Grant reached out and smashed the bottle against the tree trunk above Jim's head. A shard of flying glass cut his cheek, drawing blood. He opened his eyes and looked straight into Grant's. The two men stared at each other for a moment, and then a loud cry echoed across the country. Grant hurried down the path to where he had left his horse, mounted it, and rode away.

Standing on the track and looking at Gears, Jim thought about Grant. Then his thoughts turned to another hero. "What a man!" he thought. "Here he goes, riding from town to town and from track to track all spring, summer, and fall, and he never loses his head, never gets excited. Winning races is the same as winning battles. When I'm at home plowing corn on summer days, this Gears is out on some track somewhere, with people gathered around, waiting. To me it would be like being drunk all the time, but he's not drunk. Whiskey might make him stupid. It couldn't intoxicate him. There he sits, hunched over like a sleeping dog. He looks as if he doesn't have a care in the world, and he'll sit like that for three-quarters of the hardest race, waiting, using every little patch of hard, firm ground on the track, saving his horse, watching, watching. His horse is waiting, too. What a man! He leads the horse to fourth place, to third, to second. The crowd in the stands, guys like Tom Butterworth, didn't see what he was doing. He sits motionless. By God, what a man! He waits. He looks half asleep. If he doesn't have to do it, he doesn't make any effort. If the horse is capable of winning without help, it sits motionless. People scream and jump up from their seats in the stands, and if this Bud Doble has a horse in the race, he leans forward, sulking, yelling at his horse and making a big show of himself.

"Ha, that Gears! He"s waiting. He"s not thinking of people, but of the horse he"s riding. When the time is right, just the right time, Gears will let the horse know. In that moment, they"re one, like Grant and I over a bottle of whiskey. Something happens between them. Something inside the man says, "Now," and the message is transmitted through the reins to the horse"s brain. It flies to his feet. There"s a rush. The horse"s head just moved forward a few inches-not too fast, nothing unnecessary. Ha, that Gears! Bud Dobble, ha!"

On the night of Clara's wedding, after she and Hugh had disappeared on the county road, Jim hurried to the barn, led out the horse, and leaped onto its back. He was sixty-three years old, but he could mount like a young man. As he rode furiously toward Bidwell, he thought not of Clara and her adventures, but of her father. For both men, the right marriage meant success for a woman in life. Nothing else would matter much if that was achieved. He thought of Tom Butterworth, who, he told himself, fussed over Clara the way Bud Dobble often fussed over a horse at the races. He himself was like Pop Gears. All this time he had known and understood the mare Clara. Now she was through; she had won the race of life.

"Ha, that old fool!" Jim whispered to himself as he rode quickly down the dark road. As his horse thundered over a small wooden bridge and approached the first house in town, he felt as if he had come to announce victory, and half expected a loud shout to come out of the darkness, as he had at the moment of Grant's victory over Lee.

Jim couldn't find his employer at the hotel or on Main Street, but he remembered a story he'd heard whispered. Fanny Twist, a milliner, lived in a small frame house on Garfield Street, far on the east side of town, and he drove there. He knocked boldly on the door, and a woman appeared. "I need to see Tom Butterworth," he said. "It's important. It's about his daughter. Something has happened to her."

The door closed, and soon Tom appeared from around the corner of the house. He was furious. Jim's horse was standing in the road, and he walked straight up to it and took the reins. "What do you mean, come here?" he asked sharply. "Who told you I was here? Why did you come here and expose yourself? What's the matter with you? Are you drunk or crazy?"

Jim dismounted and told Tom the news. They stood there for a moment, looking at each other. "Hugh McVeigh... Hugh McVeigh, damn right, Jim?" Tom exclaimed. "No misfires, huh? She actually went and did it? Hugh McVeigh, huh? Damn right!"

"They're on their way to County Hall now," Jim said quietly. "A misfire! Not in this life." His voice had lost the cool, quiet tone he so often wished he could maintain in emergencies. "I reckon they'll be back by twelve or one," he said impatiently. "We've got to blow them up, Tom. We've got to give that girl and her husband the biggest explosion this county has ever seen, and we've only got about three hours to get ready for it."

"Get off your horse and give me a push," Tom commanded. With a grunt of satisfaction, he leaped onto the horse's back. The belated impulse to debauchery that had sent him crawling through the alleys and byways to Fanny Twist's door an hour earlier had vanished entirely, and in its place was the spirit of a businessman, a man who, as he had often boasted, made things move and kept them moving. "Look here, Jim," he said sharply, "there are three livery stables in this town. You put every horse they have to use for the night. Hook the horses up to any kind of equipment you can find: buggies, surreys, spring wagons, whatever. Have them clear the drivers off the streets, anywhere. Then have them all brought to the Bidwell house and held for me. When you've done that, you go to Henry Heller's house. I think you can find him." You found this house where I was quick enough. He lives on Campus Street, just behind the new Baptist Church. If he's gone to sleep, you wake him up. Tell him to assemble his band and ask them to bring all the live music he has. Tell him to bring his men to Bidwell House as quickly as possible.

Tom rode down the street, Jim Priest trotting at his horse's heels. After walking a short distance, he stopped. "Don't let anyone fuss with you about prices tonight, Jim," he shouted. "Tell everyone it's for me. Tell them Tom Butterworth will pay whatever they ask. There's no limit tonight, Jim. That's the word-no limit."

For the older residents of Bidwell, those who lived there when everyone's business was the town's business, this evening will long be remembered. The new people-Italians, Greeks, Poles, Romanians, and many other strange-sounding blacks who came with the factories-were going about their lives that evening, like every other. They worked the night shift at the corn-cutter plant, the foundry, the bicycle factory, or the large new tool-making plant that had just moved to Bidwell from Cleveland. Those not at work loitered the streets or wandered aimlessly in and out of saloons. Their wives and children were housed in hundreds of new frame houses on streets that now sprawled in all directions. In those days, new houses in Bidwell seemed to spring up from the ground like mushrooms. In the morning, on Turner Pike or any of the dozen roads leading out of town, there was a field or an orchard. Green apples hung on the trees in the orchard, ready to ripen. Grasshoppers sang in the tall grass beneath the trees.

Then Ben Peeler appeared with a crowd of people. The trees were felled, and the song of the grasshopper died away under piles of boards. A loud shout and the sound of hammers rang out. A whole street of identical, equally ugly houses was added to the vast number of new houses already built by the energetic carpenter and his partner, Gordon Hart.

For the people who lived in these houses, the excitement of Tom Butterworth and Jim Priest meant nothing. They worked grimly, striving to earn enough money to return home. In their new home, they were not welcomed as brothers, as they had hoped. Marriage or death meant nothing to them there.

But for the older townspeople, those who remembered Tom as a simple farmer and when Steve Hunter was looked down upon as a boastful young whore, the night was filled with excitement. Men ran through the streets. Drivers whipped their horses along the roads. Tom was everywhere. He was like a general in charge of the defense of a besieged city. The cooks from all three hotels were sent back to their kitchens, waiters were found and hurried to the Butterworth house, and Henry Heller's orchestra was ordered to immediately begin playing the liveliest music.

Tom invited every man and woman he could see to the wedding party. The innkeeper and his wife and daughter were invited, and two or three storekeepers who had come to the inn for supplies were invited and ordered to come. And then there were the factory workers, the clerks and managers, new people who had never seen Clara. They were invited too, as were the town bankers and other respectable people with money in the banks who were investors in Tom's enterprises. "Put on the best clothes you have in the world, and let your women do the same," he said, laughing. "Then hurry to my house as soon as you can. If you can't get there, come to Bidwell House. I'll get you out."

Tom hadn't forgotten that for his wedding to go the way he wanted, he'd have to serve the drinks. Jim Priest wandered from bar to bar. "What kind of wine do you have? Good wine? How much do you have?" he'd ask at each place. Steve Hunter kept six cases of champagne in the basement of his house, in case some important guest, a state governor or congressman, came to town. He felt it was up to him to make the town, as he put it, "proud of itself." When he heard what was happening, he rushed to Bidwell House and offered to ship his entire supply of champagne to Tom's house, and his offer was accepted.


Jim Priest had an idea. When all the guests had arrived and the farm kitchen was filled with cooks and waiters tripping over each other, he shared his idea with Tom. He explained that there was a shortcut through fields and lanes to the county road, three miles from the house. "I'll go there and hide," he said. "When they arrive, unsuspecting, I'll ride out on horseback and arrive here half an hour before them. You make everyone in the house hide and remain silent as they enter the yard. We'll turn out all the lights. We'll give this couple the surprise of a lifetime."

Jim hid a liter bottle of wine in his pocket and, while riding out on assignment, stopped occasionally for a drink. As his horse trotted through lanes and fields, the horse carrying Clara and Hugh home from their adventure pricked up its ears and remembered the comfortable stall filled with hay in the Butterworth barn. The horse trotted briskly, and Hugh, in the carriage beside Clara, lost himself in the same thick silence that had hung over him like a cloak all evening. He was somewhat resentful and felt time was passing too quickly. The hours and passing events were like the waters of a river in flood, and he was like a man in a boat without oars, helplessly carried forward. Sometimes he thought he gained courage, and he half-turned toward Clara and opened his mouth, hoping the words would escape, but the silence that gripped him was like a sickness whose grip was impossible to break. He closed his mouth and licked his lips. Clara had seen him do this several times. He began to seem bestial and ugly to her. "It's not true that I thought of her and asked her to marry me just because I wanted a woman," Hugh reassured himself. "I've been alone, all my life I've been alone. I want to find a way to someone's heart, and she's the only one."

Clara, too, remained silent. She was angry. "If he didn't want to marry me, then why did he ask me? Why did he come?" she asked herself. "Well, I'm married. I did what we women always think," she told herself, and her thoughts took a different turn. The thought frightened her, and a shudder of fear ran through her. Then her thoughts turned to defending Hugh. "It's not his fault. I shouldn't have rushed things so much. Maybe I'm not cut out for marriage at all," she thought.

The journey home dragged on indefinitely. The clouds cleared, the moon came out, and the stars looked down on the two bewildered people. To ease the tension that gripped her mind, Clara resorted to a trick. Her eyes searched for a tree or the lights of the farmhouse far ahead, and she tried to count the horse's hoofbeats until they reached it. She longed to get home, yet dreaded the prospect of a night alone with Hugh in the dark farmhouse. Not once during the journey home did she remove her whip from its holder or speak to the horse.

When the horse finally crested the hill that offered such a magnificent view of the countryside below, neither Clara nor Hugh looked back. They rode with heads bowed, each trying to find the courage to face the night's possibilities.


At the farmhouse, Tom and his guests waited tensely in the wine-lit atmosphere, until Jim Priest finally rode out of the alley, shouting, toward the door. "They're coming, they're coming," he cried, and ten minutes later, after Tom had lost his temper twice and cursed the giggling waitresses from the city hotels, the house was silent and dark. and the barnyard. When all was quiet, Jim Priest crept into the kitchen and, tripping over the guests' feet, went to the window and set down a lit candle. Then he left the house and lay down on his back under a bush in the yard. Inside, he'd procured himself a second bottle of wine, and as Clara and her husband turned the gate and drove into the barnyard, the only sound breaking the tense silence was the soft gurgle of the wine as it traveled. down his throat.

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CHAPTER XVII


A S B MOST In old American houses, the kitchen at the back of the Butterworth farmhouse was large and comfortable. Much of the family's life was spent there. Clara sat by the deep window overlooking a small ravine where a small stream ran along the edge of the barnyard in the spring. She had been a quiet child then and loved to sit for hours unnoticed and undisturbed. Behind her was the kitchen with its warm, rich smells and the soft, quick, insistent footsteps of her mother. Her eyes closed, and she fell asleep. Then she woke. Before her lay a world into which her imagination could penetrate. A small wooden bridge crossed the stream before her eyes, and across it in the spring horses went to the fields or to the barns, where they were harnessed to wagons loaded with milk or ice. The sound of the horses' hooves pounding the bridge was like thunder, harnesses rattled, voices cried. Beyond the bridge, a path led to the left, along which stood three small houses where ham was smoked. Men emerged from the barns with meat on their shoulders and entered the houses. Fires were lit, and smoke lazily drifted up the roofs. A man came to plow the field beyond the smokehouses. A child, curled up on the windowsill, was happy. When she closed her eyes, she imagined flocks of white sheep running out of a green forest. Although she later became a tomboy, running around the farm and barns, and although all her life she loved the soil and the feeling of everything growing and preparing food for hungry mouths, even as a child she had always had a thirst for spiritual life. In her dreams, women in beautiful dresses and rings on their hands came to her to push back the wet, tangled hair from their foreheads. Before her eyes, wonderful men, women, and children walked across the small wooden bridge. The children ran forward, shouting at her. She thought of them as brothers and sisters who would move into the farmhouse and make the old house ring with laughter. The children ran toward her with outstretched hands, but they never reached the house. The bridge widened. It stretched beneath their feet so that they ran forever forward across the bridge.

And behind the children came men and women, sometimes together, sometimes alone. They didn't look like the children who belonged to her. Like the women who had come to touch her warm forehead, they were beautifully dressed and walked with majestic dignity.

The child climbed out the window and onto the kitchen floor. Her mother hurried. She was feverishly active and often didn't hear when the child spoke. "I want to know about my brothers and sisters: where are they, why don't they come here?" she asked, but her mother didn't hear, or even if she did, she had nothing to say. Occasionally she paused to kiss the child, tears welling in her eyes. Then something cooking on the stove demanded attention. "Run outside," she said hastily and returned to her work.


From the chair where Clara sat at the wedding feast, fueled by her father's energy and Jim Priest's enthusiasm, she could see over her father's shoulder into the farmhouse kitchen. As in childhood, she closed her eyes and dreamed of another feast. With a growing sense of bitterness, she realized that her entire life, her entire girlhood and youth, she had waited for this, her wedding night, and that now, having arrived, the event she had so long and so excitedly anticipated, so often dreamed of, had become an occasion for ugliness and vulgarity. Her father, the only person in the room with any connection to her, sat at the other end of the long table. Her aunt had gone away visiting, and in the crowded, noisy room there was no woman to whom she could turn for understanding. She looked over her father's shoulder directly at the wide window seat where she had spent so many hours of her childhood. She longed for her brothers and sisters again. "The beautiful men and women of dreams were supposed to come at this time, that's what the dreams were about; but like unborn children running with outstretched hands, they can't make it across the bridge into the house," she thought vaguely. "I wish Mom were alive, or Kate Chancellor were here," she whispered to herself, looking up at her father.

Clara felt like an animal, cornered and surrounded by enemies. Her father sat at a banquet between two women, Mrs. Steve Hunter, a woman inclined to plumpness, and a thin woman named Bowles, the wife of an undertaker from Bidwell. They whispered constantly, smiled, and nodded their heads. Hugh sat at the opposite side of the same table, and when he looked up from the plate of food in front of him, he could see past the head of the large, masculine-looking woman into the farmhouse parlor, where another table stood, also filled with guests. Clara turned away from her father and looked at her husband. He was nothing more than a tall man with a long face who couldn't look up. His long neck protruded from a stiff white collar. To Clara, at that moment, he was a creature without personality, a man absorbed by the crowd at the table, who were also diligently devouring food and wine. When she looked at him, it seemed he had drunk heavily. His glass was constantly being filled and emptied. At the suggestion of the woman sitting next to him, he completed the task of emptying it without looking up, and Steve Hunter, sitting across the table, leaned over and refilled it. Steve, like her father, whispered and winked. "On my wedding night, I was as excited as a hatter. It's a good thing. It gives a man courage," he explained to the masculine-looking woman, to whom he was recounting with great attention to detail the story of his own wedding night.

Clara no longer looked at Hugh. What he had done seemed unimportant. Bowles, the undertaker from Bidwell, had succumbed to the influence of the wine that had been flowing freely since the guests arrived, and now rose to his feet and began to speak. His wife tugged at his coat and tried to force him back into his seat, but Tom Butterworth snatched her hand away. "Oh, leave him alone. He has a story to tell," he said to the woman, who blushed and covered her face with her handkerchief. "Well, that's a fact, that's how it was," the undertaker declared loudly. "You see, the sleeves of her nightgown were tied in tight knots by her scoundrel brothers. When I tried to undo them with my teeth, I made big holes in the sleeves."

Clara gripped the armrest of her chair. "If I can get through the night without showing these people how much I hate them, I'll succeed," she thought gloomily. She looked at the platters filled with food, wanting to smash them one by one over the heads of her father's guests. As a relief, she glanced past her father's head again and through the doorway into the kitchen.

In the large room, three or four cooks busily prepared food, and waitresses continually brought steaming dishes and placed them on the tables. She thought of her mother's life, the life she had led in this room, married to the man who had been her own father and who, no doubt, had circumstances not made him a rich man, would have been pleased to see his daughter lead such a different life.

"Kate was right about men. They want something from women, but what do they care what kind of life we lead after they get it?" she thought grimly.

To further separate herself from the feasting, laughing crowd, Clara tried to think through the details of her mother's life. "It was a beast's life," she thought. Like herself, her mother had come to the house with her husband on the night of her wedding. It was another such celebration. The country was young then, and the people were, for the most part, desperately poor. There was still drink. She had heard her father and Jim Priest talk about the drinking bouts of their youth. The men had come, just as they were now, and with them had come the women, women hardened by the way they lived. Pigs were slaughtered, and game was brought in from the forest. The men drank, shouted, fought, and played practical jokes. Clara wondered if any of the men and women in the room would dare go upstairs to her bedroom and tie the knots in her nightgown. They had done so when her mother came into the house as a bride. Then they all left, and her father led the bride upstairs. He was drunk, and her own husband, Hugh, was now a drunk. Her mother submitted. Her life was a story of submission. Kate Chancellor said that this was how married women lived, and her mother's life proved the truth of that statement. In the farmhouse kitchen, where three or four cooks now toiled, she lived her entire life alone. From the kitchen, she went straight upstairs and slept with her husband. Once a week, on Saturdays, after dinner, she went into town and stayed long enough to buy groceries for another week's cooking. "They must have kept her going until she dropped dead," Clara thought, and her thoughts turned again, adding, "And many others, both men and women, must have been forced by circumstances to serve my father in the same blind way. All this was done so that he could prosper and have money with which to commit vulgar acts."

Clara's mother had given birth to only one child. She wondered why. Then she wondered if she would ever have a child. Her hands no longer gripped the arms of her chair but lay on the table before her. She looked at them, and they were strong. She herself was a strong woman. After the feast ended and the guests had departed, Hugh, buoyed by the drink he continued to consume, came upstairs to her. Some twist of her mind made her forget her husband, and in her imagination she felt herself about to be attacked by a stranger on a dark road at the edge of the forest. The man tried to embrace her and kiss her, but she managed to grab him by the throat. Her hands, lying on the table, twitched convulsively.

The wedding feast continued in the farmhouse's large dining room and the parlor, where the second table of guests sat. Later, when she thought about it, Clara always remembered her wedding feast as an equestrian affair. Something in Tom Butterworth and Jim Priest's personalities, she thought, had come out that night. The banter that echoed around the table had a horse-like quality, and it seemed to Clara that the women seated at the tables were heavy and mare-like.

Jim didn't come to the table to sit with the others; he wasn't even invited, but he kept popping in and out all evening, looking like the master of ceremonies. Entering the dining room, he paused at the door and scratched his head. Then he went out. It was as if he said to himself, "Well, everything's all right, everything's going well, everything's alive, you see." Jim had been a whiskey drinker all his life and knew his limits. His drinking system had always been fairly simple. On Saturday afternoons, after the barn work was done and the other workers had left, he would sit on the steps of the corn crib with a bottle in his hand. In winter, he would sit by the kitchen fire in the small house under the apple orchard where he and the other employees slept. He would take a long swig from the bottle and then, holding it in his hand, sit for a while, reflecting on the events of his life. Whiskey made him somewhat sentimental. After a long drink, he thought about his youth in a small town in Pennsylvania. He was one of six children, all boys, and his mother died at an early age. Jim thought of her, then of his father. When he came west to Ohio, and then as a soldier in the Civil War, he despised his father and revered his mother's memory. In the war, he found himself physically unable to stand his ground against the enemy during battle. When the guns roared and the rest of his company grimly formed up and marched forward, something went wrong with his legs, and he wanted to run. The desire was so strong that cunning grew in his mind. Seizing his chance, he pretended to be shot and dropped to the ground, and when the others had gone, he crawled away and hid. He discovered that it was entirely possible to disappear completely and reappear elsewhere. The draft had gone into effect, and many men who disliked the idea of war were willing to pay large sums of money to men who would go in their place. Jim took up recruiting and deserting. Everyone around him talked about saving the country, and for four years he thought only about saving his own skin. Then, suddenly, the war ended, and he became a farmhand. Working all week in the fields, and sometimes in the evenings, lying in bed at moonrise, he thought of his mother, the nobility and self-sacrifice of her life. He wanted to be like her. After two or three drinks from the bottle, he admired his father, who had a reputation in his Pennsylvania town as a liar and a scoundrel. After his mother's death, his father managed to marry a widow who owned a farm. "The old man was a clever man," he said aloud, tossing back the bottle and taking another long swig. "If I'd stayed home until I understood more, the old man and I could have done something together." He'd finish the bottle and go to sleep on the hay, or, if it was winter, throw himself on one of the bunks in the barracks. He dreamed of becoming someone who would go through life extorting money from people, living by his own wits, getting the best from everyone.

Jim had never tried wine before Clara's wedding, and since it didn't make him sleepy, he considered himself unaffected. "It's like sugar water," he said, entering the darkness of the barnyard and pouring another half bottle down his throat. "This stuff has no effect. Drinking it is like drinking sweet cider."

Jim felt cheerful and walked through the crowded kitchen into the dining room where the guests had gathered. At that moment, the rather boisterous laughter and storytelling ceased, and all became quiet. He was worried. "Things aren't going well. Clara's party is getting frosty," he thought resentfully. He began to dance a lumbering jig in the small open space by the kitchen door, and the guests stopped talking to watch. They shouted and clapped. A thunderous applause rang out. The guests sitting in the living room, who hadn't seen the performance, stood up and crowded in the doorway connecting the two rooms. Jim became unusually bold, and when one of the young women Tom had hired as waitresses at that moment passed by with a large platter of food, he quickly turned and picked her up. The platter flew across the floor and smashed against a table leg, and the young woman screamed. The farm dog, which had snuck into the kitchen, burst into the room and barked loudly. Henry Heller's orchestra, hidden under the stairs leading to the upper part of the house, began to play furiously. A strange, animal fervor gripped Jim. His legs flew quickly, and his heavy feet pounded the floor. The young woman in his arms screamed and laughed. Jim closed his eyes and screamed. He felt that the wedding had been a failure up to this point and that he had turned it into a success. Rising to their feet, the men shouted, clapped their hands, and pounded their fists on the table. When the orchestra reached the end of the dance, Jim stood before the guests, flushed and triumphant, holding the woman in his arms. Despite her resistance, he pressed her tightly to his chest and kissed her eyes, cheeks, and mouth. Then, releasing her, he winked and gestured for silence. "On your wedding night, someone needs to have the courage to make a little love," he said, looking pointedly at where Hugh sat, his head down, looking at the glass of wine at his elbow.


It was already two o'clock when the feast came to an end. As the guests began to leave, Clara stood alone for a moment and tried to compose herself. Something inside her felt cold and old. If she often thought she needed a man and that married life would end her problems, she didn't think so at that moment. "Above all, I want a woman," she thought. All evening, her mind had been trying to grasp and hold on to the almost forgotten figure of her mother, but she was too vague and ghostly. She had never walked or talked with her mother late at night on city streets, when the world slept and when thoughts were born within her. "After all," she thought, "mother could have belonged to all this." She looked at the people preparing to leave. Several men had gathered in a group near the door. One of them told a story that made the others laugh loudly. The women standing around had flushed and, Clara thought, rough faces. "They married like cattle," she told herself. Her mind, escaping the room, began to caress the memory of her only friend, Kate Chancellor. Often, on late spring evenings, when she and Kate walked together, something very much like lovemaking happened between them. They walked quietly, and evening fell. Suddenly they stopped on the street, and Kate put her arm around Clara's shoulders. For a moment, they stood so close, and a strange, tender, yet hungry look appeared in Kate's eyes. It lasted only a moment, and when it happened, both women were somewhat embarrassed. Kate laughed and, taking Clara's hand, pulled her along the sidewalk. "Let's walk like hell," she said. "Come on, let's speed up."

Clara pressed her hands to her eyes, as if trying to block out the scene in the room. "If I could be with Kat this evening, I could come to a man who believes in the sweetness of marriage," she thought.

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CHAPTER XVIII


JIM PRIEST WAS very drunk, but he insisted on loading the team into Butterworth's carriage and driving it, loaded with guests, into town. Everyone laughed at him, but he rode up to the farmhouse door and loudly declared that he knew what he was doing. Three men got into the carriage and beat the horses viciously, and Jim sent them galloping away.

When the opportunity presented itself, Clara silently walked out of the hot dining room and through the door onto the porch at the back of the house. The kitchen door was open, and the town waitresses and cooks were getting ready to leave. One of the girls emerged into the darkness, accompanied by a man, obviously one of the guests. They both drank and stood in the darkness for a while, their bodies pressed together. "I wish this could be our wedding night," the man's voice whispered, and the woman laughed. After a long kiss, they returned to the kitchen.

The farm dog appeared and, coming up to Clara, licked her hand. She walked around the house and stopped in the darkness near the bush where the carriages were being loaded. Her father, Steve Hunter and his wife, arrived and climbed into the carriage. Tom was in an expansive and generous mood. "You know, Steve, I told you and a few others that my Clara was engaged to Alfred Buckley," he said. "Well, I was wrong. It was all a lie. The truth is, I screwed myself up by not talking to Clara. I saw them together, and Buckley used to come here in the evenings from time to time, though he only came when I was here. He told me Clara had promised to marry him, and like a fool I took his word for it. I never even asked. That"s what a fool I was, and I was an even bigger fool to go and tell that story." All this time, Clara and Hugh were engaged, something I didn't even suspect. They told me about it this evening.

Clara stood by the bush until it seemed the last of the guests had left. The lie her father had told seemed only part of the banality of the evening. At the kitchen door, waitresses, cooks, and musicians were being loaded onto a bus that pulled away from Bidwell House. She went into the dining room. Sadness had replaced her anger, but when she saw Hugh, it returned. Piles of plates filled with food lay around the room, and the air was thick with the smell of cooking. Hugh stood by the window, looking out onto the dark farmyard. He held his hat in his hand. "You can put your hat away," she said sharply. "Have you forgotten that you're married to me and that you live here in this house now?" She laughed nervously and went to the kitchen door.

Her thoughts still clung to the past, to those days when she was a child and spent so many hours in the big, silent kitchen. Something was going to happen that would take away her past, destroy it, and the thought terrified her. "I wasn't very happy in this house, but there were certain moments, certain feelings I had," she thought. Crossing the threshold, she stood in the kitchen for a moment with her back to the wall and her eyes closed. A crowd of figures flashed through her mind: the plump, determined figure of Kate Chancellor, who knew how to love silently; the hesitant, hurrying figure of her mother; her father in his youth, coming after a long drive to warm his hands by the kitchen fire; a strong, stern-faced woman from the city who had once worked as Tom's cook and was reported to be the mother of two illegitimate children; and the figures of her childhood, imagining themselves walking across the bridge toward her, dressed in beautiful clothes.

Behind these figures stood other figures, long forgotten but now vividly remembered: farm girls coming to work in the afternoon; vagrants fed at the kitchen door; young farm hands who suddenly vanished from the routine of farm life and were never seen again; a young man with a red handkerchief around his neck who kissed her as she stood with her face pressed against the window.

One night, a schoolgirl from the city came to spend the night with Clara. After dinner, both girls went into the kitchen and stood by the window, looking out. Something happened within them. Driven by a shared impulse, they went outside and walked for a long time under the stars along quiet country roads. They came to a field where people were burning brush. Where there had been a forest, there was now only a stump and the figures of people carrying armfuls of dry tree branches and throwing them into the fire. The fire flared with vibrant colors in the deepening darkness, and for some unknown reason, both girls were deeply moved by the sights, sounds, and scents of the night. The figures of the men seemed to dance back and forth in the light. Instinctively, Clara raised her face and looked at the stars. She became aware of them, their beauty, and the boundless beauty of the night as never before. The wind began to sing in the trees of the distant forest, dimly visible far beyond the fields. The sound was soft and insistent, penetrating her soul. In the grass at her feet, insects sang along to the quiet, distant music.

How vividly Clara remembered that night now! It came back sharply as she stood with her eyes closed in the village kitchen, awaiting the end of the adventure she had embarked on. Along with it came other memories. "How many fleeting dreams and half-visions of beauty I've had!" she thought.

Everything in life that she thought could somehow lead to beauty now seemed to Clara to lead to ugliness. "How much I've missed," she muttered, and opening her eyes, she returned to the dining room and spoke to Hugh, who was still standing and staring into the darkness.

"Come on," she said sharply and went up the stairs. They walked up the stairs in silence, leaving a bright light in the rooms below. They approached the door leading to the bedroom, and Clara opened it. "It"s time for a man and his wife to go to bed," she said in a quiet, hoarse voice. Hugh followed her into the room. He went to a chair by the window, sat down, took off his shoes and sat holding them in his hand. He was looking not at Clara, but at the darkness outside the window. Clara let down her hair and began to unbutton her dress. She took off her top dress and threw it on the chair. Then she went to a drawer and, pulling it out, looked for her nightgown. She became angry and threw several things on the floor. "Damn it!" she said explosively and walked out of the room.

Hugh jumped to his feet. The wine he'd drunk had had no effect, and Steve Hunter was forced to return home disappointed. All evening, something stronger than wine had overcome him. Now he knew what it was. All evening, thoughts and desires had been swirling in his mind. Now they were all gone. "I won't let her do this," he muttered, and quickly ran to the door, quietly closing it. Still holding his shoes in his hand, he climbed through the window. He was about to leap into the darkness, but by chance his stockinged feet landed on the roof of the farmhouse kitchen, which extended out the back of the house. He quickly ran from the roof and jumped, landing in a thicket of bushes that left long scratches on his cheeks.

Hugh ran for five minutes toward the town of Bidwell, then turned and, climbing over a fence, crossed the field. His boots were still tightly clutched in his hand, and the field was rocky, but he didn't notice or acknowledge the pain from his bruised feet or the torn spots on his cheeks. Standing in the field, he heard Jim Priest driving home along the road.

"My beauty lies above the ocean,

My beauty lies above the sea,

My beauty lies above the ocean,

"Oh, give me back my beauty."


sang the farm worker.

Hugh walked through several fields and, coming to a small stream, sat down on the bank and put on his shoes. "I had my chance and I blew it," he thought bitterly. He repeated these words several times. "I had my chance, but I blew it," he said again, stopping at the fence dividing the fields through which he was walking. At these words, he stopped and pressed his hand to his throat. A half-suppressed sob escaped him. "I had my chance, but I blew it," he said again.

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CHAPTER XIX


THAT DAY after Tom and Jim's feast, it was Tom who brought Hugh back to live with his wife. The next morning, the elderly man arrived at the farmhouse with three women from town, who, he explained to Clara, were there to clean up the mess left by the guests. Clara was deeply touched by Hugh's actions and, at that moment, deeply loved him, but she refused to tell her father how she felt. "I suppose you and your friends got him drunk," she said. "Anyway, he's not here."

Tom said nothing, but when Clara told the story of Hugh's disappearance, he rode off quickly. "He'll come to the store," he thought, and walked there, leaving his horse tied to a post ahead. At two o'clock, his brother-in-law slowly crossed Turner's Pike Bridge and approached the store. He was hatless, his clothes and hair were covered with dust, and there was the look of a hunted animal in his eyes. Tom greeted him with a smile and asked no questions. "Come on," he said, and taking Hugh by the hand, led him to the buggy. After untying the horse, he stopped to light a cigar. "I'm going to one of my lower farms. Clara thought you might want to come with me," he said politely.

Tom drove up to the McCoys' house and stopped.

"You'd better tidy up a bit," he said, not looking at Hugh. "You come in, shave, and change. I'm going into town. I need to go shopping."

After driving a short distance down the road, Tom stopped and shouted. "You might want to pack your things and take them with you," he shouted. "You're going to need your things. We won't be coming back here today."

The two men spent the entire day together, and that evening Tom took Hugh to the farm and stayed for dinner. "He was a little drunk," he explained to Clara. "Don't be hard on him. He was a little drunk."

For both Clara and Hugh, that evening was the most difficult of their lives. After the servants left, Clara sat under the dining room lamp and pretended to read a book, while Hugh, in despair, tried to read as well.

Once again, it was time to go upstairs to the bedroom, and once again, Clara led the way. She approached the door of the room Hugh had escaped from, opened it, and stepped aside. Then she extended her hand. "Good night," she said, walked down the hall, entered another room, and closed the door.

Hugh's experience with the schoolteacher was repeated on his second night in the farmhouse. He took off his shoes and prepared for bed. Then he crept into the hallway and quietly approached Clara's door. Several times he walked down the carpeted hallway, and once his hand rested on the doorknob, but each time he lost heart and returned to his room. Although he didn't know it, Clara, like Rose McCoy that other time, expected him to come to her, and she knelt right by the door, waiting, hoping, and dreading his arrival.

Unlike the schoolteacher, Clara wanted to help Hugh. Marriage may have given her this impulse, but she didn't act on it, and when Hugh finally, shocked and ashamed, stopped fighting with himself, she rose and went to her bed, where she threw herself on the ground and wept, just as Hugh had wept the previous evening, standing in the darkness of the fields.

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CHAPTER XX


I WAS A It was a hot, dusty day, a week after Hugh's wedding to Clara, and Hugh was working in his shop in Bidwell. How many days, weeks, and months had he already toiled there, thinking with iron-twisted, twisted, tortured to follow the twists and turns of his mind-standing all day at the workbench next to the other workers-before him always the small piles of wheels, strips of raw iron and steel, blocks of wood, the paraphernalia of an inventor's craft. Around him, now that money had come to him, there were more and more workers, men who invented nothing, who were invisible in public life, who had not married a rich man's daughter.

In the morning, other workers, skilled lads who knew their craft as Hugh never had, would make their way through the workshop door into his presence. They felt a little awkward in his presence. The greatness of his name rang in their minds.

Many of the workers were husbands, fathers of families. They had been happy to leave their homes in the morning, but were somewhat reluctant to enter the store. They walked down the street past other houses, smoking their morning pipes. Groups formed. Many feet wandered along the street. At the store door, every man paused. A sharp thud rang out. Pipe bowls were knocked against the threshold. Before entering the store, each man glanced around at the open space stretching to the north.

For a week now, Hugh had been married to a woman who was not yet his wife. She belonged, and still belonged, to a world he thought was beyond the realm of his life. Wasn't she young, strong, and slender? Wasn't she dressed in incredibly beautiful clothes? The clothes she wore were her symbol. For him, she was unattainable.

And yet she agreed to become his wife, stood with him before the man who spoke words of honor and obedience.

Then came two terrible evenings: the night he returned with her to the farmhouse to find a wedding feast had been held in their honor, and the night old Tom brought him back to the farmhouse a defeated, frightened man who hoped the woman had reached out to comfort him.

Hugh was certain he'd missed a great opportunity in his life. He'd gotten married, but his marriage wasn't a marriage. He'd gotten himself into a situation from which there was no escape. "I'm a coward," he thought, looking at the other workers in the shop. They, like him, were married men and lived in a house with a woman. That night, they'd bravely gone out to meet the woman. He'd failed to do so when the opportunity presented itself, and Clara hadn't been able to come to him. He could understand that. His hands had built a wall, and the days that had passed had become like huge stones placed on top of it. What he hadn't done became more and more impossible with each passing day.

Tom, having taken Hugh back to Clara, was still unsettled by the outcome of their adventure. He came to the shop every day and visited them at the farmhouse in the evening. He hovered around like a mother bird whose young had been prematurely pushed from the nest. Every morning, he came to the shop to talk to Hugh. He joked about family life. Winking at a man standing nearby, he placed a familiar hand on Hugh's shoulder. "So, how's family life going? I think you're looking a little pale," he said, laughing.

That evening, he came to the farm and sat, discussing his affairs, the development and growth of the town, and his role in it. Undetected, Clara and Hugh sat silently, pretending to listen, delighted in his presence.

Hugh arrived at the shop at eight. On other days, throughout that long week of waiting, Clara had driven him to work, and they had both driven in silence along Medina Road and through the crowded streets of the city; but that morning he went.

On Medina Road, not far from the bridge where he had once stood with Clara and where he had seen her in a rage, something trivial happened. A male bird was pursuing a female through the bushes by the road. Two feathered, living creatures, brightly colored and full of life, swayed and dived through the air. They looked like moving balls of light, moving in and out of the dark green foliage. There was a madness about them, a riot of life.

Hugh was tricked into stopping at the side of the road. The tangle of things that filled his mind-wheels, gears, levers, all the complex parts of a hay-loading machine-things that had lived in his head until his hand had turned them into facts-were scattered like dust. For a moment, he watched the living, riotous creatures, and then, as if tugged back onto the path his feet had wandered, he hurried forward toward the store, watching himself walk not into the tree branches but down onto the dusty road.

At the store, Hugh spent the entire morning trying to organize his mind, to reclaim the things that had been so carelessly blown away by the wind. At ten, Tom came in, chatted for a bit, and then flew away. "You're still here. My daughter still has you. You haven't run away again," he seemed to tell himself.

The day had warmed, and the sky, visible through the shop window near the bench where Hugh was trying to work, was overcast.

At midday, the workers left, but Clara, who came to take Hugh to the farm for lunch on other days, didn't show up. When the shop quieted down, he stopped working, washed his hands, and put on his coat.

He walked to the shop door and then returned to the bench. In front of him lay the iron wheel he'd been working on. It was meant to drive some intricate part of a hay loading machine. Hugh picked it up and carried it to the back of the shop, where the anvil stood. Unconscious and barely aware of what he'd done, he placed it on the anvil and, taking the enormous sled in his hand, swung it over his head.

The blow dealt was devastating. Hugh channeled his entire protest against the grotesque position his marriage to Clara had placed him in.

The impact had no effect. The sled sank, and the relatively fragile metal wheel twisted and deformed. It tore free from under the sled's head, flew past Hugh's head, and flew out the window, shattering the glass. The shards of broken glass fell with a sharp clang onto a pile of twisted pieces of iron and steel lying near the anvil...

Hugh didn't eat lunch that day, didn't go to the farm, and didn't return to work at the store. He walked, but this time he didn't walk along the country roads where male and female birds dart in and out of the bushes. He was overcome by a powerful desire to learn something intimate and personal about men and women and the lives they led in their homes. He strolled in the daylight up and down the streets of Bidwell.

To the right, beyond the bridge over Turners Road, Bidwell's main street ran along the riverbank. In this direction, the hills of the southern countryside descended to the riverbank, and there was a high bluff. On the bluff and behind it, on the gentle slope of the hill, many of the most pretentious new homes of Bidwell's wealthy citizens were built. Facing the river stood the largest houses, their lots planted with trees and shrubs, while on the streets along the hill, less and less pretentious the further they got from the river, more and more houses were built-long rows of houses, long streets lined with houses, houses of brick, stone, and wood.

Hugh walked away from the river back into this maze of streets and houses. Some instinct had led him there. This was where the men and women of Bidwell, those who had prospered and married, came to live and build homes. His father-in-law had offered to buy him a house on the riverbank, and that alone meant a lot to Bidwell.

He wanted to see women like Clara who had husbands, and what they were like. "I've seen enough men," he thought, half-offended, as he continued walking.

All day he strolled the streets, passing by the houses where women lived with their husbands. A distant mood overcame him. He stood for an hour under a tree, idly watching the workers building yet another house. When one of the workers spoke to him, he left and went out into the street, where people were laying concrete pavement in front of a newly built house.

He continued to secretly search for the women, eager to see their faces. "What are they up to? I'd like to find out," his mind seemed to say.

Women emerged from their doorways and passed him as he walked slowly. Other women rode through the streets in carriages. They were well-dressed and seemed confident. "I'm all right. Everything is settled and arranged for me," they seemed to say. Every street he walked along seemed to tell a story of things arranged and arranged. The houses spoke the same thing. "I am a house. I'm not created until everything is settled and arranged. I mean exactly that," they said.

Hugh was very tired. Late in the evening, a small, bright-eyed woman-no doubt one of the guests at his wedding-stopped him. "Are you planning to buy or develop, Mr. McVeigh?" she asked. He shook his head. "I'm just looking around," he said, and hurried away.

Anger replaced his confusion. The women he saw on the streets and in doorways were women just like his own wife, Clara. They had married men-"no better than me," he told himself, emboldened.

They had married men, and something had happened to them. Things had been sorted out. They could live on the streets and in houses. Their marriages were real marriages, and he had a right to a real marriage. There wasn't much to expect from life.

"Clara has a right to that too," he thought, and his mind began to idealize marriages between a man and a woman. "I see them everywhere-neat, well-dressed, beautiful women like Clara. How happy they are!"

"Their feathers are ruffled," he thought angrily. "It was the same with them as with that bird I saw being chased through the trees. There was pursuit and a preliminary attempt to escape. There was an effort that wasn't really an effort, but here the feathers were ruffled."

With his thoughts in a semi-desperate mood, Hugh left the streets of bright, ugly, newly built, freshly painted, and furnished houses and headed into town. He received a call from several men heading home at the end of the workday. "I hope you're thinking about buying or developing our way," they said cordially.


It began to rain and darkness fell, but Hugh didn't go home to Clara. He didn't feel like he could spend another night with her in the house, lying awake, listening to the quiet night noises, waiting-for courage. He couldn't sit under the lamp for another evening, pretending to read. He couldn't walk up the stairs with Clara only to leave her with a cold "Goodnight" at the top of the stairs.

Hugh walked along Medina Road almost to the house, then backtracked and emerged into a field. There was a low, marshy spot where the water reached his boots, and after he crossed it, he found himself in a field overgrown with tangled grapevines. The night had grown so dark he could see nothing, and darkness reigned in his soul. For hours he walked blindly, but it never occurred to him that, as he waited, hating it, Clara was waiting too; that for her, too, this was a time of trial and uncertainty. He imagined her path to be simple and easy. She was a white and pure creature, waiting-for what?-for the courage to come to him, to encroach upon her whiteness and purity.

It was the only answer Hugh could find within himself. Destroying what was white and pure was a necessary part of life. It was what people had to do for life to go on. As for women, they had to be white and pure-and wait.


Filled with internal resentment, Hugh finally set out for the farm. Wet and dragging his feet, he turned off Medina Road and found the house dark and apparently empty.

Then a new and mysterious situation arose. When he crossed the threshold and entered the house, he realized that Clara was there.

That day, she didn't drive him to work in the morning or pick him up at noon because she didn't want to look at him in the light of day, didn't want to see that puzzled, frightened look in his eyes again. She wanted him alone in the darkness, waiting for it. Now the house was dark, and she waited for him.

How simple it was! Hugh entered the living room, moved forward into the darkness, and found a hat rack against the wall near the stairs leading to the bedrooms above. He again abandoned what he would undoubtedly call his masculinity, hoping only to escape the presence he felt in the room, to creep up to his bed, to lie awake, listening to the noise, and longingly awaiting another day ahead. But as he placed his wet hat on one of the rack's pegs and found the bottom step, plunging his foot into the darkness, a voice called to him.

"Come here, Hugh," Clara said softly and firmly, and like a boy caught in the act, he approached her. "We've been very foolish, Hugh," he heard her voice softly.


Hugh approached Clara, who was sitting in a chair by the window. There was no protest on his part, no attempt to avoid the lovemaking that followed. He stood silently for a moment, seeing her white figure beneath him in the chair. It was like something still far away, yet swiftly flying toward him, like a bird, upward toward him. Her hand rose and lay in his. It seemed impossibly large. It was not soft, but hard and firm. When her hand rested in his for a moment, she stood and stood beside him. Then her hand left his and touched, caressed his wet fur, his wet hair, his cheeks. "My flesh must be white and cold," he thought, and thought no more.

Joy filled him, a joy that welled up from within him as she approached him from the chair. For days, weeks, he had thought of his problem as a man's problem, his defeat a man's defeat.

Now there was no defeat, no problem, no victory. He didn't exist on his own. Something new was born within him, or something that had always lived with him came to life. It wasn't awkward. It wasn't afraid. It was as swift and sure as a male bird's flight through the branches of a tree, and it pursued something light and swift within her, something that could fly through light and darkness without flying too fast, something he didn't need to fear, something he could understand without needing to understand, just as one understands the need to breathe in a cramped space.

With a laugh as soft and confident as her own, Hugh lifted Clara into his arms. A few minutes later, they climbed the stairs, and Hugh stumbled twice on the stairs. It didn't matter. His long, awkward body was something outside of himself. He might have tripped and fallen many times, but what he had discovered, what was inside him, responded to the fact that the shell that was his wife, Clara, had not stumbled. He flew like a bird, out of darkness into light. At that moment, he thought the rapid flight of life that had begun would last forever.

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BOOK FIVE


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CHAPTER XXI


IT WAS a summer night in Ohio, and the wheat in the long, flat fields that stretched north of the town of Bidwell was ripe for cutting. Between the wheat fields lay fields of corn and cabbage. In the cornfields, green stalks towered like young trees. Across from the fields lay white roads, once quiet roads, quiet and empty at night, and often for many hours of the day, the silence of the night broken only occasionally by the clatter of horses' hooves heading home, and the stillness of the days, the creaking of wagons. On a summer evening, a young farm laborer rode along the road in his wagon, the purchase of which he had spent his summer wages, a long summer of sweaty toil in the hot fields. The hooves of his horse clattered softly on the road. His beloved sat beside him, and he was in no hurry. All day he had worked in the harvest, and tomorrow he would work again. It didn't matter. For him, the night lasted until the roosters on the isolated farms greeted the dawn. He forgot about the horse, and he didn't care which way he turned. For him, all roads led to happiness.

Along the long roads stretched an endless string of fields, broken every now and then by a strip of forest, where the shadows of the trees fell across the roads, forming pools of inky blackness. In the tall, dry grass at the corners of the fence, insects sang; rabbits scurried across the young cabbage fields, flying away like shadows in the moonlight. The cabbage fields, too, were beautiful.

Who wrote or sang of the beauty of cornfields in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, or the vast cabbage fields of Ohio? In cabbage fields, the broad outer leaves fall, creating a backdrop for the changing, delicate colors of the soil. The leaves themselves are a riot of color. As the season progresses, they change from light to dark green, emerging and fading in a thousand shades of purple, blue, and red.

The cabbage fields along the Ohio roads slept in silence. Automobiles hadn't yet sped down the roads, their flashing lights-also beautiful to see on a summer night-having made the roads an extension of the cities. Akron, that dreadful city, hadn't yet begun to unroll its countless millions of rubber hoops, each filled with its own portion of God's compressed air and finally imprisoned, like the farmers who had fled to the cities. Detroit and Toledo hadn't yet begun sending out their hundreds of thousands of automobiles to scream and scream all night long on the country roads. Willis was still working as a mechanic in Indiana, and Ford was still working in a bicycle repair shop in Detroit.

It was a summer night in Ohio, and the moon was shining. The village doctor's horse hurried along the roads. People on foot moved quietly and at long intervals. A farmhand, his horse lame, walked toward town. An umbrella repairman, lost on the road, hurried toward the lights of a distant town. In Bidwell, a place that on other summer nights was a sleepy town filled with gossiping berry pickers, everything was bustling.

Change and what people call growth were in the air. Perhaps a revolution of sorts was in the air, a quiet, real revolution that grew alongside the growth of cities. On that quiet summer night in the bustling, bustling town of Bidwell, something happened that astounded people. Something happened, and then, a few minutes later, it happened again. Heads shook, special editions of daily newspapers were printed, a vast human hive was stirred, beneath the invisible roof of the city that had so suddenly become a city, the seeds of self-awareness were sown in new soil, in American soil.

But before all this could begin, something else happened. The first automobile rolled through the streets of Bidwell and onto the moonlit roads. Tom Butterworth was at the wheel, carrying his daughter Clara and her husband, Hugh McVeigh. Tom had brought the car from Cleveland the week before, and the mechanic who was riding with him had taught him the art of driving. Now he was driving alone and boldly. Early that evening, he ran out to the farm to take his daughter and son-in-law for their first ride. Hugh climbed in next to him, and after they were on their way out of town, Tom turned to him. "Now watch me step on her tail," he said proudly, using for the first time the motoring slang he had picked up from the Cleveland mechanic.

As Tom steered the car down the road, Clara sat alone in the backseat, unimpressed by her father's new acquisition. She had been married for three years and felt she didn't yet know the man she was marrying. The story was always the same: moments of light, then darkness again. The new car, moving along the roads at astonishingly increased speed, might have changed the entire face of the world, as her father claimed, but it hadn't changed certain facts of her life. "Am I a failure as a wife, or is Hugh an impossible husband?" she asked herself, probably for the thousandth time, as the car, turning onto a long stretch of clear, straight road, seemed to leap and soar through the air like a bird. "Anyway, I married a husband, and yet I don't have a husband; I was in the arms of a man, but I don't have a lover; I took life into my own hands, but life slipped through my fingers."

Like her father, Hugh seemed to Clara preoccupied only with things outside himself, with the outer crust of life. He was like her father and yet unlike him. She was baffled by him. There was something about the man she longed for but couldn't find. "It must be my fault," she told herself. "He's fine, but what about me?"

After the night he fled her wedding bed, Clara often thought a miracle had occurred. Sometimes it did. That night, when he came to her out of the rain, it happened. There was a wall there that a blow could destroy, and she raised her hand to strike. The wall was destroyed, then built anew. Even as she lay in her husband's arms at night, the wall rose up in the darkness of the bedroom.

On nights like these, a thick silence hung over the farmhouse, and she and Hugh, out of habit, remained silent. In the darkness, she raised her hand and touched his face and hair. He lay motionless, and she felt as if some great force were holding him, holding her. A sharp sense of struggle filled the room. The air was heavy with it.

When the words were spoken, they did not break the silence. The wall remained.

The words that came were empty, meaningless words. Hugh suddenly spoke. He described his work in the workshop and his progress on some complex mechanical problem. If it had happened in the evening, when the two people left the lighted house where they had sat together, every sensation of darkness would have encouraged them both to try to knock down the wall. They walked along the lane, past the barns, and across a small wooden bridge over a stream that ran through the barnyard. Hugh didn't want to talk about the work in the workshop, but he couldn't find the words for anything else. They approached the fence where the lane turned and from where the hillside and the town could be seen. He didn't look at Clara, but looked down the hillside, and the words about the mechanical difficulties that had occupied him all day ran and walked. When they returned to the house later, he felt a slight relief. "I've said the words. Something has been accomplished," he thought.


And so, three years into her marriage, Clara climbed into the car with her father and husband and sped through the summer night. The car followed the hilly road from the Butterworth farm, through a dozen residential streets in town, and then onto the long, straight roads of the rich, flat country to the north. It circled the town, like a hungry wolf might silently and swiftly surround a fire-lit hunter's camp. To Clara, the car seemed like a wolf-bold, cunning, and at the same time, frightened. Its huge nose pierced the restless air of the quiet roads, frightening the horses, breaking the silence with an insistent purr, drowning out the singing of insects. The headlights also disturbed her sleep. They broke into barnyards where birds slept in the lower branches of trees, played on the barn walls, drove cattle across fields and galloped into the darkness, and terrified the wild animals, red squirrels and chipmunks, that lived in the roadside fences of Ohio country. Clara hated the car and began to hate all machines. Thoughts of machines and their construction, she decided, were the reason for her husband's inability to communicate with her. A rebellion against the entire mechanical impulse of her generation began to take hold of her.

And while she was driving, another, even more terrible, uprising against the machine began in the town of Bidwell. In fact, it had begun even before Tom had left the Butterworth farm in his new motor, even before the summer moon had risen, even before the gray mantle of night had settled over the hills south of the farmhouse.

Jim Gibson, an apprentice working in Joe Wainsworth's store, was beside himself that night. He had just won a great victory over his employer and wanted to celebrate. For several days, he had been telling the story of his anticipated victory in saloons and the store, and now it had happened. After lunch at his boarding house, he went to a saloon and had a drink. Then he went to other saloons and had other drinks, after which he strutted through the streets to the store door. Although a spiritual hooligan by nature, Jim had no shortage of energy, and his employer's store was full of work demanding his attention. For a week, he and Joe returned to their workstations every evening. Jim wanted to come because some inner influence compelled him to love the idea of work always in motion, and Joe because Jim compelled him to come.

Much was happening in the bustling, busy town that evening. A piecework inspection system instituted by Superintendent Ed Hall at the corn picker plant had led to Bidwell's first industrial strike. The disgruntled workers were unorganized, and the strike was doomed to failure, but it had deeply stirred the town. One day, a week earlier, out of the blue, about fifty or sixty men had decided to walk out. "We won't work for a man like Ed Hall," they declared. "He sets the price scale, and then, when we've worked ourselves to the limit to earn a decent day's wage, he lowers it." After leaving the store, the men filed into Main Street, and two or three of them, suddenly eloquent, began making speeches on street corners. The strike spread the next day, and the store was closed for several days. Then a union organizer came from Cleveland, and on the day of his arrival the news spread through the streets that strikebreakers were to be brought in.

And on this evening of many adventures, another element was introduced into the already turbulent life of the community. At the corner of Main and McKinley Streets, just beyond the site where three old buildings were being torn down to make way for a new hotel, a man appeared, climbed onto a box, and attacked not the piecework prices at the corn-picker factory, but the entire system that built and maintained factories, where workers' wages could be set at the whim or need of one man or group. As the man on the box spoke, the workers in the crowd, all American by birth, began shaking their heads. They moved away and, gathering in groups, discussed the stranger's words. "Tell you what," said the little old man, nervously tugging at his graying mustache, "I'm on strike, and I'm here to hold out until Steve Hunter and Tom Butterworth fire Ed Hall, but I don't like this kind of talk." "I'll tell you what this man is doing. He's attacking our government, that's what he's doing." The workers went home grumbling. Government was sacred to them, and they didn't want their demands for better wages to be thwarted by the talk of anarchists and socialists. Many of Bidwell's workers were the sons and grandsons of pioneers who had opened up the land where great sprawling towns were now growing into cities. They or their fathers had fought in the great Civil War. As children, they had breathed reverence for government from the very air of the cities. All the great men mentioned in the textbooks had been connected with government. Ohio had Garfield, Sherman, fighting McPherson, and others. Lincoln and Grant came from Illinois. For a time, it seemed as if the very soil of this middle American country was belching out great men, just as it now belches out gas and oil. Government had justified itself by the men it produced.

And now there were men among them who had no respect for government. What the orator had first dared to say openly on the streets of Bidwell was already being discussed in the shops. The new men, foreigners from many lands, brought with them strange doctrines. They began to make acquaintances among the American workers. "Well," they said, "you"ve had great men here; no doubt about it; but now you"ve got a new kind of great men. These new men aren"t born of men. They"re born of capital. What is a great man? He"s one who has power. Isn"t that a fact? Well, you boys must understand that these days power comes with the possession of money. Who are the big men in this town? Not some lawyer or politician who can make a good speech, but the men who own the factories you have to work in. Your Steve Hunter and Tom Butterworth are the great men of this town."

The socialist who came to speak on the streets of Bidwell was a Swede, and his wife had come with him. While he spoke, his wife drew figures on a blackboard. The old story of the townspeople's swindle in a car company was revived and repeated again and again. The Swede, a large man with heavy fists, called the prominent townspeople thieves who had robbed their fellow citizens by swindling them. As he stood on a couch next to his wife, his fists raised, shouting harsh condemnations of the capitalist class, the men who had left in anger returned to listen. The speaker declared himself a worker like themselves, and, unlike the religious saviors who occasionally spoke on the streets, he did not ask for money. "I'm a worker just like you," he shouted. "Both my wife and I are working until we save a little money. Then we'll come to some small town and fight capital until we're arrested. We've been fighting for years and will continue to fight as long as we live."

As the speaker bellowed his proposals, he raised his fist as if about to strike, looking little different from one of his ancestors, the Scandinavians who, in ancient times, sailed far and wide across uncharted seas in search of their favorite battles. The people of Bidwell began to respect him. "After all, what he says sounds like common sense," they said, shaking their heads. "Maybe Ed Hall is as good as anyone else. We have to break the system. That's a fact. One of these days, we'll have to break the system."


Jim Gibson approached the door of Joe's store at half past six. Several men were standing on the sidewalk, and he stopped and stood before them, intending to tell the story of his triumph over his employer once again. Inside, Joe was already at his desk, working. The men, two of them strikers from the corn-picker plant, were complaining bitterly about the difficulty of supporting their families, and the third man, a fellow with a large black mustache who was smoking a pipe, began repeating some axioms from a socialist orator about industrialism and class warfare. Jim listened for a moment, then turned, placed his thumb on his buttocks, and wiggled his fingers. "Oh, hell," he chuckled. "What are you fools talking about? You're going to form a union or join the socialist party. What are you talking about? A union or a party can't help a man who can't take care of himself."

The raging and half-drunk saddler stood in the open doorway of the shop, once again recounting the story of his triumph over the boss. Then another thought occurred to him, and he began talking about the thousand dollars Joe had lost on the hardware stock. "He lost his money, and you guys are going to lose this fight," he declared. "You guys are all wrong when you talk about unions or joining the Socialist Party. What matters is what a man can do for himself. Character matters. Yes, sir, character makes a man what he is."

Jim tapped him on the chest and looked around.

"Look at me," he said. "I was a drunk and a drunkard when I came to this town; a drunkard, that's what I was and that's what I am. I came to work in this store, and now, if you want to know, ask anyone in town who runs this place. The socialist says money is power. Well, there's a man here who has money, but I bet I have power.

Jim slapped his knees and laughed heartily. A week ago, a traveler came into the shop to sell a machine-made harness. Joe told the man to leave, and Jim called him back. He placed an order for eighteen sets of harnesses and had Joe sign for them. The harness had arrived that afternoon and was now hanging in the shop. "It's hanging in the shop now," Jim called. "Come and see for yourself."

Jim strode triumphantly back and forth in front of the men on the sidewalk, his voice echoing through the store where Joe sat on his harness horse under a swinging lamp, hard at work. "I tell you, character is what counts," the roaring voice cried. "See, I'm a working man just like you guys, but I don't join the union or the Socialist Party. I get my way. My boss Joe out there is a sentimental old fool, that's what he is. He's been sewing harnesses by hand all his life, and he thinks it's the only way. He claims he's proud of his work, that's what he claims."

Jim laughed again. "You know what he did the other day when that traveler came out of the store, after I made him sign that order?" he asked. "Cried, that's what he did. By God, he did it-he sat there and cried."

Jim laughed again, but the workers on the sidewalk didn't join in. Approaching one of them, the one who had announced his intention to join the union, Jim began to scold him. "You think you can kiss Ed Hall, Steve Hunter, and Tom Butterworth behind his back, huh?" he asked sharply. "Well, I'll tell you what: you can't. All the unions in the world won't help you. They'll kiss you-for what?"

"Why? Because Ed Hall is like me, that's why. He's got character, that's what he's got."

Tired of his bragging and the public's silence, Jim was about to walk through the door, but when one of the workers, a pale man of about fifty with a graying mustache, spoke, he turned and listened. "You're a scumbag, a scumbag, that's what you are," the pale man said in a voice trembling with passion.

Jim ran through the crowd of men and knocked the speaker to the sidewalk with a punch. The other two workers seemed about to intercede for their fallen brother, but when Jim stood his ground despite their threats, they hesitated. They went to help the pale worker to his feet, while Jim entered the workshop and closed the door. Mounting his horse, he headed off to work, while the men walked down the sidewalk, still threatening to do what they hadn't done when the opportunity presented itself.

Joe worked silently beside his co-worker, and night began to fall upon the troubled city. Above the din of voices outside, the loud voice of a socialist speaker could be heard, taking up his evening position on a nearby corner. When it was completely dark outside, the old saddler dismounted and, going to the front door, quietly opened it and looked out over the street. Then he closed it again and went to the back of the shop. In his hand, he held a crescent-shaped harness knife with an unusually sharp round blade. The saddler's wife had died the year before, and since then he had slept poorly at night. Often, for a week, he would not sleep at all, but lie all night with his eyes wide open, thinking strange, new thoughts. During the day, when Jim was out, he would sometimes spend hours sharpening the crescent-shaped knife on a piece of leather; and the day after the incident with the custom-made harness, he stopped at a hardware store and bought a cheap revolver. He sharpened his knife while Jim talked to the workers outside. As Jim began to tell the story of his humiliation, he stopped sewing the broken harness in the vice and, standing, pulled the knife from its hiding place under a pile of leather on the bench to hold its blade a few times, caressing it with his fingers.

Knife in hand, Joe shuffled toward where Jim sat, absorbed in his work. A pensive silence seemed to fall over the shop, and even outside, on the street, all noise suddenly ceased. Old Joe's gait changed. As he passed behind Jim's horse, life entered his frame, and he walked with a soft, catlike gait. Joy shone in his eyes. As if warned of something impending, Jim turned and opened his mouth to growl at his employer, but the words never left his lips. The old man took a strange half-step, half-leap past the horse, and the knife lashed through the air. With one blow, it had practically severed Jim Gibson's head from his body.

There was no sound in the shop. Joe tossed the knife into the corner and quickly ran past the horse on which Jim Gibson's body sat upright. Then the body crashed to the floor, and the sharp click of heels could be heard on the wooden floor. The old man locked the front door and listened impatiently. When all was quiet again, he went looking for the discarded knife, but couldn't find it. Taking Jim's knife from the bench beneath the hanging lamp, he stepped over the body and climbed onto the horse to turn off the light.

Joe remained in the shop with the dead man for a full hour. Eighteen sets of harnesses, shipped from the Cleveland factory, had been received that morning, and Jim insisted they be unpacked and hung on hooks along the walls of the shop. He had forced Joe to help hang the seat belts, and now Joe removed them alone. One by one, they were laid on the floor, and the old man, with Jim's knife, cut each strap into tiny pieces, creating a pile of debris on the floor that reached up to his waist. This done, he walked back to the back of the shop, again stepping almost inadvertently over the dead man, and took a revolver from his coat pocket, which hung by the door.

Joe left the store by the back door and, carefully locking it, crept through the alley onto the lighted street where people were walking back and forth. The next place after him was a barber shop, and as he hurried along the sidewalk, two young men came out and called out to him. "Hey," they shouted, "do you believe in factory-made seat belts now, Joe Wainsworth? Hey, what do you say? Do you sell factory-made harnesses?"

Joe didn't answer, but stepped off the sidewalk and walked down the road. A group of Italian workers passed by, talking rapidly and gesturing. As he walked deeper into the heart of the growing city, past a socialist orator and a union organizer addressing a crowd of men on another corner, his gait became catlike, just as it had been when the knife flashed at Jim Gibson's throat. The crowds terrified him. He imagined himself being attacked by a mob and hanged from a lamppost. The voice of the labor orator cut through the din of voices on the street. "We must take power into our own hands. We must continue our own battle for power," the voice declared.

The tailor turned the corner and found himself on a quiet street, his hand gently caressing the revolver in his coat pocket. He intended to commit suicide, but he didn't want to die in the same room with Jim Gibson. In his own way, he had always been a very sensitive man, and his only fear was being attacked by rough hands before he finished his evening work. He was absolutely certain that if his wife were alive, she would understand what had happened. She always understood everything he did and said. He recalled his courtship. His wife was a country girl, and on Sundays after their wedding, they would go out together to spend the day in the woods. After Joe brought his wife to Bidwell, they continued their practice. One of his clients, a prosperous farmer, lived five miles north of town, and his farm had a grove of beech trees. Almost every Sunday for several years, he would take a horse from the livery stable and drive his wife there. After dinner at the farmhouse, he and the farmer chatted for an hour while the women washed the dishes, and then he took his wife and went into the beech forest. There was no undergrowth beneath the spreading branches of the trees, and when the two men were silent for a while, hundreds of squirrels and chipmunks would come to chat and play. Joe carried nuts in his pocket and scattered them. The trembling little creatures approached, then fled, their tails flicking. One day, a boy from a neighboring farm came into the forest and shot one of the squirrels. This happened just as Joe and his wife emerged from the farmhouse and saw the wounded squirrel hanging from a tree branch and then falling. It lay at his feet, and his wife, ill, leaned against him for support. He said nothing, but stared at the trembling creature on the ground. When it lay motionless, the boy came and picked it up. Still, Joe said nothing. Taking his wife's arm, he walked to the place where they usually sat and reached into his pocket to scatter nuts on the ground. The peasant boy, sensing the reproach in the eyes of the man and woman, emerged from the forest. Suddenly, Joe began to cry. He was ashamed and didn't want his wife to see it, and she pretended not to.

On the night he killed Jim, Joe decided he would go to the farm and the beech forest and kill himself there. He hurried past the long row of dark stores and warehouses in the newly built section of town and came out onto the street where his home was. He saw a man walking toward him and entered the storefront. The man paused under a streetlight to light a cigar, and the harness maker recognized him. It was Steve Hunter, the man who had encouraged him to invest twelve hundred dollars in stock in a machinery company, the man who had brought new times to Bidwell, the man who had been at the origins of all such innovations as the harnesses he made. Joe had killed his employee, Jim Gibson, in cold anger, but now a new kind of rage had taken hold of him. Something danced before his eyes, and his hands trembled so much that he was afraid the pistol he pulled from his pocket would fall to the sidewalk. It trembled as he raised it and fired, but chance came to his aid. Steve Hunter leaned forward toward the sidewalk.

Without stopping to pick up the revolver that had fallen from his hand, Joe ran up the stairs and into a dark, empty hall. He felt the wall and soon came to another staircase leading down. It led him to an alley, and after following it, he emerged near a bridge that led over the river, onto what had once been Turner's Pike, the road he had taken with his wife to the farm and the beech forest.

But one thing now puzzled Joe Wainsworth. He had lost his revolver and didn"t know how to cope with his own death. "I"ve got to do it somehow," he thought when at last, after nearly three hours of trudging and hiding in fields to avoid the teams traveling along the road, he reached a beech forest. He went to sit under a tree not far from the place where he had so often sat on quiet Sunday afternoons next to his wife. "I"ll rest a little, and then I"ll think about how to do this," he thought wearily, holding his head in his hands. "I mustn"t go to sleep. If they find me, they"ll hurt me. They"ll hurt me before I have a chance to kill myself. They"ll hurt me before I have a chance to kill myself," he repeated over and over, holding his head in his hands and rocking gently back and forth.

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CHAPTER XXII


T H E CAR DRIVEN Tom Butterworth stopped in some town, and Tom got out to fill his pockets with cigars and, incidentally, enjoy the surprise and admiration of the townspeople. He was in high spirits, and words flowed from him. As the engine rumbled under the hood, so the brain purred and spewed words under his graying old head. He talked to loafers in front of drugstores in the towns, and when the car started again and they found themselves in the open, his voice, high-pitched enough to be heard over the rumble of the engine, became shrill. With a shrill, new-age tone, the voice went on and on.

But the voice and the speeding car didn't disturb Clara. She tried to block out the voices and, staring at the soft landscape flowing beneath the moon, tried to think of other times and places. She thought of the nights she'd walked the streets of Columbus with Kate Chancellor, and of the quiet ride she'd taken with Hugh the evening they were married. Her thoughts drifted back to her childhood, and she recalled the long days she'd spent riding with her father through that same valley, going from farm to farm to haggle over calves and pigs. Her father hadn't spoken then, but sometimes, when they'd traveled far and were heading home in the fading evening light, words would come to him. She remembered one summer evening after her mother's death, when her father often took her on trips. They stopped for dinner at a farmhouse, and when they set off again, the moon was up. Something in the spirit of the night stirred Tom, and he spoke of his boyhood in the new country, of his fathers and brothers. "We worked hard, Clara," he said. "The whole country was new, and every acre we planted had to be cleared." The mind of a prosperous farmer drifted into memories, and he recounted the small details of his life as a boy and young man; the days of chopping wood alone in the quiet white forest, when winter came and it was time to gather firewood and logs for new outbuildings, the log piles to which neighboring farmers came, when great log piles were stacked and set alight to make room for planting. In the winter, the boy went to school in the village of Bidwell, and because even then he was an energetic, assertive youth, already determined to make his way in the world, he set traps in the woods and on the banks of streams and walked among them. queue on the way to and from school. In the spring, he shipped his pelts to the growing city of Cleveland, where they were sold. He talked about the money he received and how he finally saved enough to buy his own horse.

That evening Tom talked of many other things: spelling bees at the town school, barn cleaning and dancing, the evening he'd gone skating on the river and met his wife for the first time. "We liked each other right away," he said softly. "There was a fire going on by the river, and after I'd skated with her, we went and sat down to warm up.

"We wanted to marry each other right then and there," he told Clara. "I walked home with her after we'd gotten tired of skating, and after that, I thought of nothing but having my own farm and my own house."

While the daughter sat in the engine, listening to her father's shrill voice, which now spoke only of making machines and money, another man, speaking quietly in the moonlight as the horse trotted slowly along the dark road, seemed very far away. All such people seemed very far away. "Everything worthwhile is very far away," she thought bitterly. "The machines that people strive so hard to create have come a long way from the old, sweet things."

As the engine sped along the roads, Tom thought of his long-held desire to own and ride fast racehorses. "I used to be crazy about fast horses," he shouted to his son-in-law. "I didn't do it because owning fast horses was a waste of money, but I kept thinking about it. I wanted to go fast: faster than anyone else." In a kind of ecstasy, he gave the engine more gas and increased the speed to fifty miles an hour. The hot summer air, transformed into a strong wind, whistled overhead. "Where will those damned racehorses be now," he shouted, "where will your Maud S. or your J.I.C. be, trying to catch me in this car?"

Yellow wheat fields and fields of young corn, already tall and whispering in the moonlight, rushed past like squares on a chessboard, designed for the amusement of some giant's child. The car sped through miles of land-sparse country, through main streets where people ran out of stores to stand on the sidewalks and gaze at this new wonder, through dormant patches of forest-remnants of the great forests Tom had worked in as a boy-and across wooden bridges over small streams lined with tangled masses of elderberries, now yellow and fragrant with blossoms.

At eleven o'clock, having already covered some ninety miles, Tom turned the car back. His gait became more sedate, and he began talking again about the mechanical triumphs of the era in which he lived. "I brought you back with me, you and Clara," he said proudly. "I'll tell you what, Hugh, Steve Hunter and I quickly helped you out in a lot of ways. You have to give Steve credit for seeing something in you, and you have to give me credit for putting my money back into your brains. I don't want to take Steve's responsibility. There's enough credit for everyone. All I can say for myself is that I saw the hole in the donut. Yes, sir, I wasn't that blind. I saw the hole in the donut.

Tom stopped to light a cigar, then drove off again. "I'll tell you what, Hugh," he said. "I wouldn't tell anyone but my family, but the truth is, I'm the man who runs the big things down there in Bidwell. That town's going to be a city now, a mighty big city. Cities in this state like Columbus and Toledo and Dayton better take care of themselves. I'm the man who always kept Steve Hunter steady and on track, because that car moves with my hand on the wheel."

"You don"t know anything about it, and I don"t want you to say it, but new things are happening in Bidwell," he added. "When I was in Chicago last month, I met a man who made rubber buggies and bicycle tires. I"m going with him, and we"re going to open a tire plant right here in Bidwell. The tire business is bound to become one of the largest in the world, and that"s no reason why Bidwell shouldn"t become the greatest tire center the world has ever known." Though the machine was now running quietly, Tom"s voice became shrill again. "Hundreds of thousands of these cars will be roaring along every road in America," he declared. "Yes, sir, they will; and if I calculate correctly, Bidwell will be the greatest tire town in the world."

Tom drove for a long time in silence, and when he spoke again, he was in a new mood. He told a story about life in Bidwell that deeply moved both Hugh and Clara. He was angry, and if Clara hadn't been in the car, he would have sworn furiously.

"I'd like to hang the people who are causing trouble in the shops of this city," he burst out. "You know who I mean, I mean the workers who are trying to make trouble for Steve Hunter and me. There are socialists talking in the streets every night. I tell you, Hugh, the laws of this country are wrong." He spoke for about ten minutes about the labor difficulties in the shops.

"They'd better be careful," he declared, his anger so intense that his voice rose to something like a suppressed scream. "We're inventing new machines pretty fast these days," he exclaimed. "Pretty soon we'll be doing all the work with machines. Then what are we going to do? We'll fire all the workers and let them strike until they get sick, that's what we'll do. They can talk all they want about their stupid socialism, but we'll show them, the fools."

His anger had passed, and as the car turned onto the final fifteen-mile stretch of road leading to Bidwell, he told the story that had so deeply moved his passengers. Chuckling softly, he recounted Bidwell harness maker Joe Wainsworth's fight to prevent the sale of machine-made harnesses in the community, as well as his experience with his employee, Jim Gibson. Tom had heard the story in the bar at Bidwell House and it had left a deep impression on him. "I'll tell you what," he declared, "I'm going to contact Jim Gibson. That's the kind of man he is when it comes to his workers. I only heard about him this evening, but I'm going to see him tomorrow."

Tom leaned back in his seat and laughed heartily as he told the story of the traveler who had visited Joe Wainsworth's shop and placed an order for factory-made harnesses. Somehow, he felt that when Jim Gibson had placed the harness order on the shop bench and, by the force of his personality, had forced Joe Wainsworth to sign it, he had vindicated all such men as himself. In his imagination, he was living the moment with Jim, and, like Jim, the incident had awakened his tendency to boast. "Why, many a cheap workhorse couldn't run over a man like me any more than Joe Wainsworth could run over that Jim Gibson," he declared. "They haven't got any guts, you see, that's the thing, they haven't got any guts." Tom touched something connected to the car's engine, and it suddenly jerked forward. "Suppose one of those union leaders was standing there on the road," he exclaimed. Hugh instinctively leaned forward and peered into the darkness, through which the car's lights cut like a huge scythe, while in the backseat, Clara rose to her feet. Tom shouted with delight, and as the car moved down the road, his voice turned triumphant. "Damned fools!" he exclaimed. "They think they can stop the machines. Let them try. They want to continue their old, man-made way. Let them watch. Let them keep an eye on people like Jim Gibson and me."

As they came down a slight slope in the road, the car shot out and made a wide turn, and then the jumping, dancing light, running far ahead, revealed a spectacle that made Tom put his foot out and slam on the brakes.

Three men struggled on the road and in the very center of the circle of light, as if acting out a scene on a stage. When the car stopped so suddenly that Clara and Hugh were thrown from their seats, the struggle came to an end. One of the struggling figures, a small man without a coat or hat, leaped away from the others and ran toward the fence on the side of the road separating him from the grove of trees. A large, broad-shouldered man leaped forward and, grabbing the fleeing man by the tail of his coat, dragged him back into the circle of light. His fist shot out and hit the small man square in the mouth. He fell, face down, dead in the road dust.

Tom slowly drove the car forward, its headlights still shining above the three figures. From a small pocket on the side of the driver's seat, he pulled out a revolver. He quickly drove the car to a spot near the group on the road and stopped.

"How are you?" he asked sharply.

Ed Hall, the factory manager and the man who struck the little man, stepped forward and recounted the tragic events of the evening in town. The factory manager recalled that as a boy, he had once worked for several weeks on a farm, part of which was the woods by the road, and that on Sunday afternoons, a saddler and his wife would come to the farm, and two other people would go for a walk to the very spot where he had just been found. "I had a feeling he'd be here," he boasted. "I get it. Crowds were moving out of town in all directions, but I made it out alone. Then I happened to see this guy and just for company, I took him along." He raised his hand and, looking at Tom, tapped him on the forehead. "Broken," he said, "he always was. A friend of mine saw him once in those woods," he said, pointing at him. "Someone shot a squirrel, and he took it as if he'd lost a child. Then I told him he was crazy, and he certainly proved me right."

At her father's command, Clara sat in the front seat on Hugh's lap. Her body trembled, and she was cold with fear. When her father told the story of Jim Gibson's triumph over Joe Wainsworth, she had passionately wanted to kill the wild man. Now it was done. In her mind, the saddlemaker had become a symbol of all the men and women in the world who secretly rebelled against the century's absorption by machines and machine products. He stood as a figure of protest against what her father had become and what she believed her husband had become. She had wanted to kill Jim Gibson, and she had done it. As a child, she had often gone to Wainsworth's store with her father or some other farmer, and now she clearly remembered the peace and quiet of the place. At the thought of that same place, now the scene of a desperate murder, her body trembled so much that she clutched Hugh's arms, trying to stay on her feet.

Ed Hall picked up the old man's limp form in the road and half-threw him into the backseat of the car. For Clara, it was as if his rough, uncomprehending hands were on her own body. The car moved quickly down the road, and Ed recounted the story of the night's events. "I'm telling you, Mr. Hunter is in very bad shape; he could die," he said. Clara turned to look at her husband and thought he seemed completely unaffected by what had happened. His face was calm, like her father's. The factory manager's voice continued to explain his role in the evening's adventures. Ignoring the pale worker lost in the shadows in the corner of the backseat, he spoke as if he had single-handedly undertaken and carried out the capture of the killer. As he later explained to his wife, Ed felt foolish not to come alone. "I knew I could handle him," he explained. "I wasn't afraid, but I realized he was crazy. It made me feel unsure. When they were getting together to go hunting, I said to myself, I'll go alone. I said to myself, I'll bet he went into those woods at Wrigley Farm where he and his wife used to go on Sundays. I started, and then I saw another man standing on the corner, and I made him come with me. He didn't want to come, and I wished I'd gone alone. I could have handled him, and all the glory would have been mine."

In the car, Ed told the story of the night on the streets of Bidwell. Someone had seen Steve Hunter shot in the street and claimed the harness maker had done it, then fled. A crowd had come to the harness shop and found Jim Gibson's body. The factory harnesses lay cut up on the shop floor. "He must have been there an hour or two working, staying there with the man he killed. It's the craziest thing anyone has ever done."

The harness master, lying on the floor of the car where Ed had thrown him, stirred and sat up. Clara turned to look at him and winced. His shirt was torn so that his thin, old neck and shoulders were clearly visible in the dim light, and his face was covered in dried blood, now black with dust. Ed Hall continued the tale of his triumph. "I found him where I said I would find him. Yes, sir, I found him where I said I would find him.

The car pulled up to the first of the town's houses, long rows of cheap frame houses standing on the site of Ezra French's vegetable garden, where Hugh had crawled along the ground in the moonlight, solving mechanical problems in the building of his factory machine. Suddenly, distraught and frightened, the man crouched on the floor of the car, raised himself up on his hands, and lunged forward, trying to leap over the side. Ed Hall grabbed his arm and yanked him back. He jerked his hand back to strike again, but Clara's voice, cold and full of passion, stopped him. "If you touch him, I'll kill you," she said. "Whatever he does, don't you dare hit him again."

Tom drove slowly through the streets of Bidwell toward the police station. Word of the killer's return had spread, and a crowd had gathered. Although it was already two in the morning, lights were still on in the shops and saloons, and crowds were lining every corner. With the help of a policeman, Ed Hall, keeping one eye on the front seat where Clara sat, began to lead Joe Wainsworth away. "Come on, we won't hurt you," he said soothingly, and pulled his man from the car when he struggled. Returning to the back seat, the madman turned and looked at the crowd. A sob escaped his lips. For a moment he stood trembling with fear, and then, turning, he saw for the first time Hugh, the man whose tracks he had once crept in the dark on Turner's Pike, the man who had invented the machine that had swept away a life. "It wasn't me. You did it. "You killed Jim Gibson," he screamed, leaping forward and sinking his fingers and teeth into Hugh's neck.

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CHAPTER XXIII


ONE DAY In October, four years after his first car ride with Clara and Tom, Hugh went on a business trip to Pittsburgh. He left Bidwell in the morning and arrived in the steel city at noon. By three o'clock, his business was done, and he was ready to return.

Although he didn't yet realize it, Hugh's career as a successful inventor was being seriously tested. His ability to get straight to the point and fully immerse himself in what was happening before him was lost. He went to Pittsburgh to cast new parts for a hay loading machine, but what he did in Pittsburgh was of no consequence to the people who would manufacture and sell this worthy and economical tool. Although he didn't realize it, a young man from Cleveland, hired by Tom and Steve, had already accomplished what Hugh had halfheartedly pursued. The machine was completed and ready for sale in October three years ago, and after repeated testing, a lawyer formally applied for a patent. It then transpired that an Iowa resident had already applied for and received a patent for a similar device.

When Tom came into the store and told him what had happened, Hugh was ready to give up on the whole thing, but Tom wasn't thinking about it. "Damn it!" he said. "You think we're going to waste all this money and effort?"

The Iowa man's plans for the machine had been received, and Tom tasked Hugh with what he called "working around" the other man's patents. "Do the best you can, and we'll get on with it," he said. "You see, we have money, and that means power. Make all the changes you can, and then we'll get on with our production plans. We'll take this guy to court. We'll fight him until he gets tired of fighting, and then we'll buy him out cheap. I've found this guy, he's broke, and he's a drunk. You go ahead. We'll fix this guy."

Hugh bravely tried to follow the path his father-in-law had laid out for him, abandoning other plans to restore the machine he thought was finished and inoperable. He made new parts, replaced others, studied the Iowa man's plans for the machine, and did everything he could to accomplish his task.

Nothing happened. His conscious decision not to infringe on the Iowan's job stood in his way.

Then something happened. One evening, sitting alone in his workshop after a long period of studying the plans for someone else's machine, he put them aside and sat staring into the darkness beyond the circle of light cast by his lamp. He forgot about the machine and thought of an unknown inventor, a man far away beyond the forests, lakes, and rivers, who had been working for months on the same problem that occupied his thoughts. Tom said the man was penniless and a drunk. He could be defeated by buying him cheap. He himself was working on a weapon to defeat this man.

Hugh left the store and went for a walk, the problem of reshaping the iron and steel parts of the hay loader remaining unresolved. The man from Iowa had become a distinct, almost comprehensible personality for Hugh. Tom said he'd had a drink, got drunk. His own father had been a drunkard. Once upon a time, the man, the very man who had been the instrument of his own arrival in Bidwell, had taken it for granted that he was a drunkard. He wondered if some twist in his life had made him one.

Thinking about the man from Iowa, Hugh began to think about other men. He thought about his father and himself. When he longed to escape the dirt, the flies, the poverty, the fishy smell, the illusory dreams of his life by the river, his father often tried to draw him back to that life. In his mind's eye, he saw before him the depraved man who had raised him. On summer days in the river town, when Henry Shepard was away, his father would sometimes come to the station where he worked. He had begun to earn a little money, and his father wanted them to buy drinks. Why?

A problem arose in Hugh's mind, a problem that couldn't be solved with wood and steel. He walked and thought about it when he should have been making new parts for the haystack. He lived little in the life of the imagination, he was afraid to live it; he had been warned and warned again against it. The ghostly figure of the unknown inventor from Iowa, who was his brother, working on the same problems and reaching the same conclusions, slipped away, followed by the almost equally ghostly figure of his father. Hugh tried to think about himself and his life.

For a time, it seemed a simple and easy way out of the new and complex task he had set before his mind. His own life was a matter of history. He knew about himself. After walking far beyond the town, he turned and walked back to his store. His path led through the new town that had grown since he came to Bidwell. Turner's Pike, once a country road along which lovers strolled on summer evenings to Wheeling Station, and Pickleville, was now a street. This entire section of the new town was given over to workers' homes, with a few stores here and there. The Widow McCoy house had disappeared, and in its place stood a warehouse, black and silent under the night sky. How gloomy the street late at night! The berry pickers who once walked along the road in the evening were now gone forever. Like Ezra French's sons, they might have become factory workers. Apple and cherry trees once grew along the road. They dropped their flowers on the heads of wandering lovers. They, too, disappeared. One day, Hugh crept along the road behind Ed Hall, who was walking with his arm around a girl's waist. He heard Ed lamenting his fate and crying out for new times. It was Ed Hall who had introduced piecework wages to the Bidwell mills and provoked a strike that killed three people and sowed discontent among hundreds of silent workers. Tom and Steve had won that strike, and they had since won larger and more serious strikes. Ed Hall now headed a new plant being built along the Wheeling tracks. He was growing fat and prosperous.

When Hugh returned to his studio, he lit the lamp and again took out the drawings he had come from home to study. They lay unnoticed on the table. He looked at his watch. It was two o'clock. "Clara may be awake. I should go home," he thought vaguely. He had his own car now, and it was parked in the road in front of the store. Getting into the car, he drove across the bridge in the darkness, out of Turner's Pike, and down a street lined with factories and railroad sidings. Some factories were working and lit up. Through the lighted windows, he could see people standing along benches and bending over huge iron machines. That evening he had come from home to study the work of an unknown man from distant Iowa, to try to outdo this man. Then he went for a walk and thought about himself and his life. "The evening was wasted. "I haven't done anything," he thought gloomily as his car climbed the long street lined with the houses of the town's wealthier residents and turned onto the short stretch of Medina Road that still remained between the town and Butterworth's farmhouse.


On the day he left for Pittsburgh, Hugh arrived at the station where he was to catch the train home at three, but the train didn't leave until four. He entered the large reception area and sat down on a bench in the corner. After a while, he stood up and, going to a newsstand, bought a newspaper, but didn't read it. It lay unopened on the bench next to him. The station was filled with men, women, and children, moving restlessly. A train arrived, and the crowd departed, carried away to distant corners of the country, while new people arrived at the station from the next street. He looked at those leaving the depot. "Maybe some of them are going to that town in Iowa where this guy lives," he thought. It was strange how thoughts of the unknown man from Iowa clung to him.

One day that same summer, just a few months earlier, Hugh had gone to Sandusky, Ohio, on the same mission that had brought him to Pittsburgh. How many hay loader parts had been cast and then discarded! They'd gotten the job done, but he'd always felt like he'd tampered with someone else's machine. When it happened, he didn't consult Tom. Something inside him warned him against it. He destroyed the part. "That wasn't what I wanted," he told Tom, who was disappointed in his son-in-law but hadn't expressed his displeasure openly. "Well, well, he's lost his spirit; marriage has taken the life out of him. We'll have to get someone else to do the job," he told Steve, who had fully recovered from the wound he'd received at the hands of Joe Wainsworth.

The day he left for Sandusky, Hugh had to wait several hours for the train home, so he went for a walk along the bay. Several brightly colored stones caught his eye, picked them up, and put them in his pockets. At the Pittsburgh train station, he took them out and held them in his hand. Light filtered through the window, a long, slanting light that played across the stones. His wandering, restless mind was caught and held. He rolled the stones back and forth. The colors blended, then separated again. When he looked up, a woman and child on a nearby bench, also drawn by the bright piece of color he held in his hand like a flame, were staring at him.

He was at a loss and walked out of the station onto the street. "How stupid I've become, playing with colored stones like a child," he thought, but at the same time he carefully put the stones in his pockets.

Ever since the night he was attacked in his car, Hugh had felt an inexplicable inner struggle, as it continued that day at the Pittsburgh train station and that night in the store when he found himself unable to focus on the Iowa man's car prints. Unconsciously and completely without intention, he had entered a new level of thought and action. He had been an unconscious worker, a doer, and now he was becoming someone else. The time of comparatively simple struggle with certain things, with iron and steel, was over. He was struggling to accept himself, to understand himself, to connect with the life around him. The poor white man, the son of a defeated dreamer by the river, who had outpaced his comrades in mechanical development, was still ahead of his brothers in the growing cities of Ohio. The struggle he was waging was a struggle that each and every one of his brothers of the next generation would have to wage.

Hugh boarded the four-o'clock train home and stepped into the smoking car. A somewhat distorted and twisted fragment of thought that had been swirling around in his head all day remained with him. "What difference does it make if the new parts I ordered for the machine have to be thrown out?" he thought. "If I never finish the machine, no big deal. The one the man from Iowa made works."

For a long time, he struggled with this thought. Tom, Steve, and all the Bidwell people he associated with had a philosophy that didn't fit this idea. "Once you put your hand to the plow, don't look back," they said. Their language was full of such sayings. To try something and fail was the greatest crime, a sin against the Holy Spirit. Hugh's attitude toward completing the work that would help Tom and his business partners "outflank" the Iowa man's patent was an unconscious challenge to all of civilization.

The train from Pittsburgh traveled through northern Ohio to the junction where Hugh was to catch another train to Bidwell. Along the way lay the large, prosperous cities of Youngstown, Akron, Canton, and Massillon-all industrial cities. Hugh sat in the smokehouse, again playing with the colored stones in his hand. The stones provided relief to his mind. Light played constantly around them, and their colors shifted and shifted. He could look at the stones and rest his thoughts. He raised his eyes and looked out the car window. The train passed through Youngstown. His eyes glided over the dirty streets with their worker's houses, closely grouped around huge mills. The same light that played over the stones in his hand began to play in his mind, and for a moment he became not an inventor, but a poet. The revolution within him had truly begun. A new declaration of independence was written within him. "The gods have scattered cities like stones upon the plain, but stones have no color. "They don"t burn or change in the light," he thought.

Two men sitting on seats on a westbound train started talking, and Hugh listened. One of them had a son in college. "I want him to become a mechanical engineer," he said. "If he doesn't, I'll help him go into business. This is the mechanical age and the business age. I want him to succeed. I want him to be in tune with the times."

Hugh's train was scheduled to arrive in Bidwell at ten, but it didn't arrive until half past ten. It went from the station through town to Butterworth's farm.

At the end of their first year of marriage, Clara had a daughter, and shortly before his trip to Pittsburgh, she told him she was pregnant again. "Maybe she's sitting. I should go home," he thought, but when he reached the bridge near the farmhouse, the bridge where he had stood next to Clara the first time they were together, he stepped off the road and sat down on a fallen log at the edge of a grove of trees.

"How quiet and peaceful the night is!" he thought, leaning forward and covering his long, troubled face with his hands. He wondered why peace and quiet didn't come to him, why life wouldn't leave him alone. "After all, I've lived a simple life and done good," he thought. "Some of the things they said about me are true enough. I invented machines that save useless labor; I made people's work easier."

Hugh tried to hold on to the thought, but it wouldn't stay in his mind. All the thoughts that had given his mind peace and tranquility had flown away, like birds seen on the distant horizon in the evening. It had been that way since the night when the madman in the engine room had suddenly and unexpectedly attacked him. Before that, his mind had often been restless, but he knew what he wanted. He wanted men and women, and close companionship with both men and women. Often, his problem was even simpler. He needed a woman who would love him and lie beside him at night. He wanted the respect of his comrades in the city where he had come to live out his life. He wanted to succeed in the specific task he had taken on.

The attack on him by the mad harness maker initially seemed to solve all his problems. At the moment when the frightened and desperate man sank his teeth and fingers into Hugh's neck, something happened to Clara. It was Clara who, with astonishing strength and speed, tore the madman away. All that evening, she hated her husband and father, and then suddenly she loved Hugh. The seeds of a child were already alive within her, and when her man's body was subjected to a furious attack, he, too, became her child. Swiftly, like a shadow across the surface of a river on a windy day, a change occurred in her attitude toward her husband. All that evening, she hated the new age, which she thought was so perfectly embodied in two men talking about creating machines, while the beauty of the night was carried away into the darkness along with a cloud of dust raised in the air. A flying motor. She hated Hugh and sympathized with the dead past that he and others like him were destroying, a past that was represented by the figure of the old saddlemaker who wanted to do his work by hand in the old way, a man who had earned her father's scorn and ridicule.

And then the past rose to strike. It struck with claws and teeth, and claws and teeth sank into Hugh's flesh, into the flesh of the man whose seed was already alive within her.

At that moment, the woman who had been a thinker stopped thinking. A mother arose within her, fierce, indomitable, strong as the roots of a tree. For her then and forever after, Hugh was not a hero remaking the world, but a confused boy, wronged by life. He never left her childhood in her mind. With the strength of a tigress, she tore the madman from Hugh and, with the somewhat superficial cruelty of another Ed Hall, threw him onto the floor of the car. When Ed and the policeman, aided by a few bystanders, ran forward, she waited almost indifferently as they pushed the screaming and kicking man through the crowd to the police station door.

For Clara, she thought, what she so longed for had happened. In quick, sharp tones, she ordered her father to drive the car to the doctor's house, and then stood by while they bandaged the torn and bruised flesh on Hugh's cheek and neck. What Joe Wainsworth had stood for, what she had believed to be so precious to her, no longer existed in her mind, and if she felt nervous and half-sick for weeks afterward, it wasn't because of any thoughts about the fate of the old harness maker.

A sudden attack from the city's past had brought Hugh to Clara, making him a source of income, albeit a less-than-satisfactory companion for her, but for Hugh it had brought something entirely different. The man's teeth had been overbitten and the rips on his cheeks left by strained fingers had healed, leaving only a small scar; but the virus had entered his veins. A disease of thought had corrupted the harness maker's mind, and the germ of its infection had entered Hugh's bloodstream. It had reached his eyes and ears. Words that people had thoughtlessly uttered, words that in the past had flown past him like chaff blown off wheat during harvest, now remained, echoing and echoing in his mind. In the past, he had seen cities and factories grow, and he had unquestioningly accepted the words of people that growth was always a good thing. Now his eyes looked at the cities: Bidwell, Akron, Youngstown, and all the great new towns scattered across the American Midwest, just as on the train and in the station in Pittsburgh he had looked at the colored pebbles in his hand. He looked at the cities and wanted the light and color to play on them as they played on the stones, and when this did not happen, his mind, filled with strange new desires born of the disease of thought, made up words over which the lights played. "The gods have scattered cities across the plains," said his mind as he sat in the smoking train car, and the phrase came back to him later as he sat in the darkness on a log, his head raised in his hands. It was a good phrase, and the lights could play on it as they played on the colored stones, but it in no way solved the problem of how to "get around" the Iowa man's patent for a device for loading hay.

Hugh didn't reach the Butterworth farm until two in the morning, but when he arrived, his wife was already awake and waiting for him. She heard his heavy, dragging footsteps as he turned the corner at the farm gate, rose quickly from his bed, threw his cloak over his shoulders, and stepped out onto the porch facing the barns. The late moon had risen, and the barnyard was bathed in moonlight. From the barns came the soft, sweet sounds of contented animals grazing in the mangers in front, from the row of barns behind one of the sheds came the soft bleating of sheep, and in a distant field a calf lowed loudly and its mother answered.

As Hugh emerged into the moonlight from around the corner of the house, Clara ran down the steps to meet him, taking his hand and leading him past the barns and across the bridge where, as a child, she had seen figures in her imagination approaching him. Hers. Sensing his uneasiness, her maternal spirit was awakened. He was dissatisfied with the life he led. She understood it. So it was with her. They walked down the lane to the fence, where only open fields lay between the farm and the town far below. Sensing his uneasiness, Clara thought neither of Hugh's trip to Pittsburgh nor of the challenges involved in completing the haystack machine. Perhaps, like her father, she dismissed all thoughts of him as the man who would continue to help solve the mechanical problems of his age. Thoughts of his future success had never meant much to her, but something had happened to Clara that evening, and she wanted to tell him about it, to make him happy. Their first child had been a girl, and she was sure the next would be a boy. "I felt him tonight," she said, as they reached the spot by the fence and saw the city lights below. "I felt him tonight," she repeated, "and oh, he was strong! He kicked all over the place. I'm sure it's a boy this time."

For about ten minutes, Clara and Hugh stood by the fence. The mental illness that had rendered Hugh useless for work his age had washed away much of his old self, and he was not embarrassed by his woman's presence. When she told him of the struggle of someone of another generation, yearning to be born, he embraced her and pressed her to his long body. They stood in silence for a while, then began to return to the house and sleep. As they passed the barns and bunkhouse, where several people now slept, they heard, as if from the past, the loud snores of the rapidly aging farmer Jim Priest. Then, above this sound and the noise of the animals in the barns, another sound was heard, shrill and intense, perhaps a greeting to the unborn Hugh McVeigh. For some reason, perhaps to announce the change of crews, the Bidwell mills, busy with night work, raised a loud whistle and shout. The sound carried up the hill and rang in Hugh's ears as he put his arm around Clara's shoulders and walked up the steps and through the farmhouse door.

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Many marriages


First published in 1923 to generally positive reviews (F. Scott Fitzgerald later called it Anderson's best novel), Many Marriages also attracted unwanted attention as a prurient paragon of immorality for its handling of the new sexual freedom-an attack that led to poor sales and affected Anderson's reputation.

Despite the title, the novel actually focuses on a single marriage, which, it is implied, shares many of the problems and dilemmas faced by "many marriages." The narrative unfolds over the course of a single night, revealing the psychological impact of one man's decision to escape the confines of a small town and the equally restrictive social and sexual mores that go with it.

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Cover of the first edition

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CONTENT

EXPLANATION

PREFACE

BOOK ONE

I

II

III

IV

IN

BOOK TWO

I

II

III

IV

BOOK THREE

I

II

III

IV

IN

VI

VII

VIII

IX

BOOK FOUR

I

II

III

IV

IN


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Tennessee Claflin Mitchell, the second of Anderson's four wives, whom he divorced in 1924.

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TO

PAUL ROSENFELD

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EXPLANATION


I WISH to give an explanation-perhaps it should also be an apology-to Dial readers.

I would like to express my gratitude to the magazine for permission to publish this book.

I must explain to Dial readers that this story has expanded considerably since it first appeared in serial form. The temptation to expand my interpretation of the theme was irresistible. If I've managed to indulge myself in this way without compromising my story, I'll be only too happy.

SHERWOOD ANDERSON.

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PREFACE


I am the ONE who seeks to love and goes to her directly or as directly as possible, in the midst of the difficulties of modern life a person may be insane.

Haven't you known that moment when doing something that would have seemed like the most trivial thing at another time and under slightly different circumstances suddenly becomes a gigantic undertaking?

You are in the hallway of a house. In front of you is a closed door, and behind the door, in a chair by the window, sits a man or woman.

It's late evening on a summer day, and your goal is to walk up to the door, open it, and say, "I'm not going to continue living in this house. My suitcase is packed, and the person I've already spoken to will be here in an hour. I only came to tell you that I can't live with you anymore."

There you are, standing in the hallway, about to enter the room and say those few words. The house is silent, and you stand there for a long time, frightened, hesitant, silent. You vaguely realize that when you descended into the corridor above, you were tiptoeing.

For you and the person on the other side of the door, it might be better not to continue living in the house. You'd agree with that if you could reasonably discuss the matter. Why can't you speak normally?

Why is it so hard for you to take three steps to the door? You don't have any leg problems. Why do your legs feel so heavy?

You are a young man. Why do your hands shake like an old man's?

You've always considered yourself a brave person. Why do you suddenly lack courage?

Is it funny or tragic that you know you won't be able to walk up to the door, open it, and, once inside, utter a few words without your voice shaking?

Are you sane or crazy? Where does this whirlwind of thoughts in your brain come from, a whirlwind of thoughts that, while you're currently standing there in indecision, seems to be sucking you deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit?

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BOOK ONE

OceanofPDF.com

I


THERE WAS A MAN named Webster lived in a town of twenty-five thousand people in the state of Wisconsin. He had a wife named Mary and a daughter named Jane, and he himself was a fairly successful manufacturer of washing machines. When what I am about to write about happened, he was thirty-seven or eight years old, and his only child, a daughter, was seventeen. Of the details of his life before this moment of some revolution took place in him it is superfluous to go into. He was, however, a rather quiet man, given to dreams, which he tried to repress in order to work as a washing machine manufacturer; and no doubt at odd moments when he was traveling somewhere on a train, or perhaps on Sunday afternoons in summer, when he would walk alone to the deserted factory office and sit for several hours looking out the window and along the railroad track, he gave himself up to these dreams.

However, for many years, he quietly went his own way, doing his job like any other small manufacturer. Occasionally, he would have prosperous years when money seemed plentiful, followed by lean years when local banks threatened to shut him down, but as an industrialist, he managed to survive.

And here was this Webster, about to turn forty, his daughter having just graduated from the town's high school. It was early autumn, and he seemed to be going about his normal life, and then this happened to him.

Something inside his body began to afflict him, like a disease. It's a little difficult to describe the feeling he experienced. It was as if something had been born. If he had been a woman, he might have suspected he'd suddenly become pregnant. There he would sit in his office at work or walk the streets of his city, and he would have the most astonishing sensation of not being himself, but something new and completely strange. Sometimes the feeling of dispossession would become so strong within him that he would suddenly stop on the street and stand, looking and listening. For example, he would stand in front of a small store on a side street. Beyond was a vacant lot with a tree growing in it, and beneath the tree stood an old workhorse.

If a horse had come up to the fence and spoken to him, if a tree had lifted one of its heavy lower branches and kissed him, or if the sign hanging over the store had suddenly cried, "John Webster, go and prepare for the day of God's coming"-his life at that moment would not have seemed stranger than it seemed. Nothing that could have happened in the outside world, in the world of such hard facts as the sidewalks beneath his feet, the clothes on his body, the locomotives pulling trains along the tracks near his factory, and the streetcars rumbling through the streets where he stood-none of these could have made anything more astonishing than what was happening within him at that moment.

You see, he was a man of medium height, with slightly graying black hair, broad shoulders, large hands, and a full, somewhat sad and perhaps sensual face. He was very fond of smoking cigarettes. At the time I'm talking about, he found it very difficult to sit still and do his work, so he was constantly on the move. Quickly rising from his chair in the factory office, he went to the workshop. To do this, he had to pass through a large vestibule containing the accounting department, a desk for his factory manager, and other desks for three girls who also performed some office work, sending out brochures for washing machines to potential buyers, and paying attention to other details.

A broad-faced woman of about twenty-four sat in his office, a secretary. She had a strong, well-built body, but she wasn't particularly beautiful. Nature had given her a broad, flat face and thick lips, but her skin was very clear, and her eyes were very clear and beautiful.

A thousand times since John Webster became a manufacturer, he had walked from his office into the factory headquarters, through the door and down the boardwalk to the factory itself, but not as he walked now.

Well, he'd suddenly found himself entering a new world; that was a fact that couldn't be denied. An idea occurred to him. "Maybe I'm going a little crazy for some reason," he thought. The thought didn't alarm him. It was almost pleasant. "I like myself better the way I am now," he concluded.

He was about to leave his small inner office for the larger one and then to the factory, but he paused at the door. The woman who worked with him in the room was named Natalie Schwartz. She was the daughter of a German salon owner who had married an Irishwoman and then died without leaving money. He remembered hearing about her and her life. They had two daughters, and the mother had an ugly personality and had been driven to drink. The older daughter became a teacher in the town school, and Natalie learned shorthand and went to work in the factory office. They lived in a small frame house on the outskirts of town, and sometimes the old mother got drunk and abused the two girls. They were good girls and worked hard, but the old mother accused them of all sorts of immorality in her teacups. All the neighbors pitied them.

John Webster stood by the door, the doorknob in his hand. He stared at Natalie, but strangely enough, he felt no embarrassment whatsoever, and neither did she. She was arranging some papers, but she stopped working and looked straight at him. It was a strange sensation, being able to look someone straight in the eyes. As if Natalie were a house, and he was looking out a window. Natalie herself lived in a house that was her body. What a quiet, strong, sweet person she was, and how strange it was that he could sit next to her every day for two or three years without once thinking to look inside her house. "How many houses are there I haven't looked into," he thought.

A strange, rapid circle of thoughts swirled through him as he stood there, unabashed, looking into Natalie's eyes. How neatly she kept her house. The old Irish mother might scream and rage in her teacups, calling her daughter a whore, as she sometimes did, but her words didn't penetrate Natalie's house. John Webster's small thoughts became words, not spoken aloud, but words that sounded like voices quietly crying within himself. "She is my beloved," said one voice. "You will go to Natalie's house," said another. A blush slowly spread across Natalie's face, and she smiled. "You haven't been feeling well lately. Are you worried about something?" she said. She had never spoken to him like that before. There was a hint of intimacy in it. In fact, the washing machine business was booming at the time. Orders came in quickly, and the factory was in full swing. There were no bills in the bank to pay. "But I'm very healthy," he said, "very happy, and very healthy right now."

He walked into the reception area, and the three women working there, along with the accountant, stopped their work to look at him. Their glance from behind their desks was merely a gesture. They meant nothing by it. The accountant came in and asked a question about some bill. "Well, I'd like you to give me your own opinion on that," John Webster said. He was vaguely aware that the question concerned someone's credit. Someone from a distant place had ordered twenty-four washing machines. He sold them in a store. The question was, would he pay the manufacturer when the time came?

The whole structure of the business, the thing that involved every man and woman in America, including himself, was strange. He hadn't really thought about it much. His father had owned this factory and died. He didn't want to be a manufacturer. What did he want to be? His father had certain things called patents. Then his son, that is, himself, grew up and took over the factory. He got married, and after a while his mother died. Then the factory was his. He made washing machines designed to remove dirt from people's clothes, and hired people to make them, and other people to go and sell them. He stood in the reception area and for the first time saw the whole of modern life as a strange, confusing thing.

"It requires understanding and a lot of thought," he said aloud. The accountant turned to return to his desk, but stopped and glanced back, thinking he'd been spoken to. Near where John Webster stood, a woman was delivering memos. She looked up and suddenly smiled, and he liked her smile. "There's a way-something happens-people suddenly and unexpectedly become close to each other," he thought, and walked out the door and along the board toward the factory.

The factory was filled with the sound of singing and a sweet smell. Huge piles of cut lumber lay everywhere, and the singing sound of saws cutting the lumber to the required lengths and shapes for washing machine components. Outside the factory gates, three trucks loaded with lumber stood, and workers were unloading the lumber and transporting it along a sort of runway into the building.

John Webster felt very much alive. The lumber undoubtedly came to his mill from far away. It was a strange and interesting fact. Back in his father's time, Wisconsin had been teeming with timberland, but now the forests had been largely cleared, and the lumber was shipped from the South. Somewhere where the lumber that was now unloaded at his factory gates came from, there were forests and rivers, and people went into the forests and cut down trees.

He hadn't felt so alive in years as he did at that moment, standing at the factory door and watching the workers haul planks from the machine down the runway into the building. What a peaceful, quiet scene! The sun was shining, and the planks were a bright yellow. They emanated a peculiar aroma. His own mind, too, was a wondrous thing. At that moment, he could see not only the machines and the men unloading them, but also the land from which the planks had come. Far to the south, there was a place where the waters of a low, swampy river had swelled until the river was two or three miles wide. It was spring, and there had been a flood. At any rate, in the imaginary scene, many trees were submerged, and men in boats, black men, were pushing logs out of the flooded forest and into the wide, slow stream. The men were very strong, and as they worked, they sang a song about John, the disciple and close companion of Jesus. The men wore high boots and carried long poles. Those in boats on the river itself were catching logs as they were pushed out from behind the trees and gathering them together to form a large raft. Two men jumped out of their boats and ran across the floating logs, securing them with saplings. The other men, somewhere in the forest, continued singing, and the people on the raft responded. The song was about John and how he went fishing in the lake. And Christ came to call him and his brothers from the boats to walk across the hot and dusty land of Galilee, "following in the footsteps of the Lord." Soon the singing ceased, and silence reigned.

How strong and rhythmic the workers' bodies were! Their bodies swayed back and forth as they worked. There was a kind of dance within their bodies.

Now, in John Webster's strange world, two things happened. A woman, a golden-brown woman, was coming down the river in a boat, and all the workers had stopped working and stood watching her. She was bareheaded, and as she pushed the boat forward through the slow water, her young body swayed from side to side, just as the male workers swayed as they held the logs. The hot sun beat down on the dark-skinned girl's body, leaving her neck and shoulders bare. One of the men on the raft called out to her. "Hello, Elizabeth," he cried. She stopped rowing and let the boat drift for a moment.

"Hello, Chinese boy," she replied, laughing.

She began rowing vigorously again. From behind the trees on the riverbank, trees submerged in the yellow water, a log emerged, and on it stood a young Black man. With a pole in his hand, he vigorously pushed one of the trees, and the log quickly rolled toward the raft, where two other men stood waiting.

The sun shone on the neck and shoulders of the dark-skinned girl in the boat. The movements of her hands reflected dancing lights on her skin. Her skin was brown, golden-copper-brown. Her boat slipped around a bend in the river and disappeared. For a moment, there was silence, and then a voice from the trees began to play a new song, and the other black people joined in:


"Doubting Thomas, doubting Thomas,

If you doubt Thomas, doubt no more.

And before I become a slave,

I would be buried in my grave,

And go home to my father and be saved."


John Webster stood blinking, watching the men unload lumber at the door of his factory. Quiet voices within him spoke strange, joyful things. You couldn't just be a washing machine manufacturer in a Wisconsin town. Despite himself, at certain moments a man became someone else. A man became part of something as vast as the land on which he lived. He walked alone through the small town store. The store was in a dark place, next to the railroad tracks and a shallow stream, but at the same time, it was part of something enormous that no one had yet begun to understand. He himself was a man standing tall, dressed in ordinary clothes, but inside his clothes, inside his body, there was something-well, maybe not enormous in itself, but vaguely, infinitely connected to some enormous thing. It was strange that he had never thought of this before. Had he thought of it? Before him stood men unloading logs. They touched the logs with their hands. A kind of alliance developed between them and the black men who cut the logs and floated them downstream to a sawmill in some far southern place. One walked all day, each day touching things that other people had touched. There was something desirable, the awareness of what had been touched. An awareness of the significance of things and people.


"And before I become a slave,

I would be buried in my grave,

And go home to my father and be saved."


He walked through the door into his shop. Nearby, a man was sawing boards at a machine. Surely, the parts chosen for his washing machine weren't always the best. Some soon broke. They were placed in a part of the machine where it didn't matter, where they couldn't be seen. The machines had to be sold at a low price. He felt a little ashamed, and then he laughed. It was easy to get caught up in trivialities when one should be thinking about big, rich things. One was a child, and he had to learn to walk. What did he need to learn? To walk, to smell, to taste, perhaps to feel. First, he needed to find out who else was in the world besides himself. He had to look around a bit. It was all very well to think that the washing machines should be filled with the better boards that poor women bought, but one could easily become corrupted by indulging in such thoughts. There was a danger of a kind of smug complacency that came from the thought of loading only good boards into washing machines. He knew such people and always felt some contempt for them.

He walked through the factory, past rows of men and boys standing at working machines, assembling the various parts of washing machines, putting them back together, painting them, and packing them for shipping. The upper portion of the building was used as a materials warehouse. He made his way through piles of cut lumber to a window overlooking a shallow, now half-dried stream, on the banks of which the factory stood. No-smoking signs were posted everywhere throughout the factory, but he forgot, so he pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it.

Within him, a rhythm of thought reigned, somehow connected to the rhythm of the bodies of the black people working in the forest of his imagination. He stood before the door of his factory in a small town in Wisconsin, but at the same time, he was in the South, where several black people worked on the river, and at the same time with several fishermen on the seashore. He was on Galileo, when a man came ashore and began speaking strange words. "There must be more than one of me," he thought vaguely, and as his mind formed this thought, it was as if something had happened within him. A few minutes earlier, standing in the office in the presence of Natalie Schwartz, he had thought of her body as the house in which she lived. This, too, was an instructive thought. Why couldn't more than one person live in such a house?

If this idea had spread abroad, much would have become clearer. No doubt many others had the same idea, but perhaps they hadn't expressed it clearly enough. He himself attended school in his hometown and then went to the University of Madison. Over time, he read quite a few books. For a time, he thought he'd like to become a writer.

And no doubt, many of the authors of these books have had thoughts just like his now. On the pages of some books, one could find a kind of refuge from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Perhaps, as they wrote, they felt, as he does now, inspiration and enthusiasm.

He took a drag on his cigarette and looked out across the river. His factory was on the outskirts of town, and beyond the river lay the fields. All men and women, like himself, stood on common ground. All over America, and indeed all over the world, men and women acted on the outside as he did. They ate, they slept, they worked, they made love.

He grew a little tired from thinking and rubbed his forehead with his hand. His cigarette had burned out, and he dropped it on the floor and lit another. Men and women were trying to penetrate each other's bodies, at times almost madly yearning to do so. This was called making love. He wondered if there might come a time when men and women would do this completely freely. It was difficult to try to sort through such a tangled web of thoughts.

One thing was certain: he'd never been in this state before. Well, that wasn't true. There had been a time once. It was when he got married. He'd felt the same way then as he did now, but something had happened.

He began to think about Natalie Schwartz. There was something clear and innocent about her. Perhaps, without realizing it, he had fallen in love with her, the innkeeper's daughter and the drunken old Irish woman. If that had happened, it would have explained a lot.

He noticed the man standing next to him and turned. A few feet away stood a workman in overalls. He smiled. "I think you've forgotten something," he said. John Webster smiled too. "Well, yes," he said, "a great many things. I'm almost forty years old, and I seem to have forgotten how to live. And you?"

The worker smiled again. "I mean the cigarettes," he said, pointing to the burning, smoking end of a cigarette lying on the floor. John Webster placed his foot on it, then, dropping another cigarette on the floor, stepped on it. He and the worker stood looking at each other, just as he had recently looked at Natalie Schwartz. "I wonder if I can come into his house too," he thought. "Well, thank you. I forgot. My mind was elsewhere," he said out loud. The worker nodded. "I'm like that sometimes myself," he explained.

The puzzled factory owner left his upstairs room and walked along the railroad spur that led to his store, to the main tracks, which he followed toward the more populated part of town. "It must be almost noon," he thought. He usually ate lunch somewhere near his factory, and his employees brought him lunches in bags and tin pails. He thought he would now go home. No one was expecting him, but he thought he would like to see his wife and daughter. A passenger train rushed along the tracks, and although the whistle sounded madly, he did not notice. Then, just as it was about to overtake him, a young black man, perhaps a tramp, at least a black man in rags, who was also walking along the tracks, ran up to him and, grabbing his coat, yanked him sharply to the side. The train rushed past, and he stood watching it. He and the young black man also looked into each other's eyes. He put his hand in his pocket, instinctively feeling that he should pay this man for the service he had rendered him.

And then a shudder ran through his body. He was very tired. "My mind was far away," he said. "Yes, boss. I'm like that sometimes myself," said the young black man, smiling and walking away along the tracks.

OceanofPDF.com

II


JOHN WEBSTER rode to his house by streetcar. It was half past eleven when he arrived, and, as he expected, no one was expecting him. Behind his house, a rather ordinary-looking frame structure, was a small garden with two apple trees. He walked around the house and saw his daughter, Jane Webster, lying in a hammock suspended between the trees. Under one of the trees, near the hammock, stood an old rocking chair, and he went and sat in it. His daughter was surprised that he had bumped into her like that on an afternoon when he was so rarely seen. "Well, hello, Daddy," she said listlessly, sitting down and dropping the book she had been reading on the grass at his feet. "Something wrong?" she asked. He shook his head.

He picked up the book and began reading, and her head fell back onto the hammock pillow. It was a contemporary novel of the period, set in the old city of New Orleans. He read a few pages. It was certainly something to stir a person's spirit, to take them away from the drabness of life. A young man, a cloak draped over his shoulders, made his way down the street in the darkness. The moon shone overhead. Blooming magnolias filled the air with their fragrance. The young man was very handsome. The novel was set in the pre-Civil War era, and he owned a large number of slaves.

John Webster closed the book. He didn't have to read it. When he was still a young man, he himself sometimes read such books. They exasperated him, making the drabness of everyday existence less dreadful.

It was a strange thought: everyday existence should be boring. Sure, the last twenty years of his life had been boring, but that morning life was different. He felt like he'd never experienced a morning like this before.

There was another book in the hammock, he took it and read a few lines:


"You see," Wilberforce said calmly, "I'm returning to South Africa soon. I don't even plan to link my fate with Virginia."

Resentment erupted in protest, and Malloy approached and placed a hand on John's shoulder. Then Malloy looked at his daughter. As he'd feared, her gaze was fixed on Charles Wilberforce. When he'd brought her to Richmond that evening, he'd thought she looked wonderful and cheerful. And she was, for she faced the prospect of seeing Charles again in six weeks. Now she was lifeless and pale, like a candle whose flame had been lit.


John Webster looked at his daughter. Sitting up, he could look straight into her face.

"Pale as a candle that's never been lit, huh. What a quaint way of putting it." Well, his own daughter Jane wasn't pale. She was a robust young man. "A candle that's never been lit," he thought.

It was a strange and terrible fact, but the truth was, he'd never really thought much about his daughter, and yet here she was, practically a woman. There was no doubt she already had a woman's body. The functions of womanhood continued within her. He sat, looking straight at her. Just a moment ago, he'd been very tired; now the weariness was completely gone. "Perhaps she's already had a child," he thought. Her body was prepared for childbearing, it had grown and developed to this point. How immature her face was. Her mouth was beautiful, but there was something emptiness in it. "Her face is like a blank sheet of paper, with nothing written on it."

Her wandering eyes met his. It was strange. Something like fear gripped them. She sat up quickly. "What's wrong, Dad?" she asked sharply. He smiled. "It's okay," he said, looking away. "I thought I was coming home for lunch. Is there anything wrong with that?"


His wife, Mary Webster, came to the back door of the house and called their daughter. When she saw her husband, her eyebrows shot up. "That's unexpected. What brings you home at this time of day?" she asked.

They entered the house and walked down the hall to the dining room, but there was no room for him. He had the feeling they both thought there was something wrong, almost immoral, about him being home at this time of day. It was unexpected, and unexpectedness had a dubious connotation. He concluded he had better explain. "I had a headache, and I thought I'd come home and lie down for an hour," he said. He felt them breathe a sigh of relief, as if he'd lifted a weight off their souls, and he smiled at the thought. "Can I have a cup of tea? Will it be too much trouble?" he asked.

While the tea was being brought, he pretended to look out the window, but secretly studied his wife's face. She was like her daughter. Her face was blank. Her body was growing heavy.

When he married her, she was a tall, slender girl with yellow hair. Now she gave the impression of someone who had grown aimlessly, "like cattle being fattened for slaughter," he thought. No one could feel the bones and muscles of her body. Her yellow hair, which when she was younger had shone strangely in the sun, was now quite colorless. It looked dead at the roots, and her face was folds of utterly meaningless flesh, among which rivulets of wrinkles wandered.

"Her face is an empty thing, untouched by the finger of life," he thought. "She is a high tower without a foundation, soon to collapse." There was something very pleasant and at the same time quite terrible for him in the state he now found himself in. There was a poetic power in the things he said or thought to himself. A group of words formed in his mind, and the words had power and meaning. He sat and played with the handle of his teacup. Suddenly, he was overcome by an overwhelming desire to see his own body. He stood up and, excusing himself, left the room and climbed the stairs. His wife called him: "Jane and I are going out of town. Is there anything I can do for you before we go?"

He paused on the stairs but didn't answer right away. Her voice was like her face, a little meaty and heavy. How strange it was for him, an ordinary washing machine manufacturer from a small town in Wisconsin, to think this way, to notice all the little details of life. He resorted to a ruse, wanting to hear his daughter's voice. "Did you call me, Jane?" he asked. His daughter answered, explaining that it was her mother speaking and repeating what she had said. He said he needed nothing more than to lie down for an hour and went up the stairs to his room. His daughter's voice, like his mother's, seemed to represent her exactly. It was young and clear, but it had no resonance. He closed the door to his room and locked it. Then he began to take off his clothes.

Now he wasn't the least bit tired. "I'm sure I must be a little crazy. A sane person wouldn't notice every little thing that happens the way I did today," he thought. He sang softly, wanting to hear his own voice, to compare it with the voices of his wife and daughter. He hummed the words of a black song that had been swirling in his head since earlier that day:

"And before I become a slave,

I would be buried in my grave,

And go home to my father and be saved."


He thought his own voice was fine. The words came out of his throat clearly, and they, too, had a certain resonance. "If I'd tried to sing yesterday, it wouldn't have sounded like this," he concluded. The voices of his mind were busy playing. There was a certain amusement in him. The thought that had come to him that morning when he looked into Natalie Schwartz's eyes returned. His own body, now naked, was home. He walked over, stood in front of the mirror, and looked at himself. Outwardly, his body was still slim and healthy. "I think I know what I'm going through," he concluded. "It's a kind of housecleaning. My house has been empty for twenty years. Dust has settled on the walls and furniture. Now, for some reason I can't understand, the doors and windows have opened. I'll have to wash the walls and floors, make everything nice and clean, like Natalie's house. Then I'll invite people to visit." He ran his hands over his naked body, his chest, arms, and legs. Something inside him laughed.

He went and threw himself naked on the bed. There were four bedrooms on the top floor of the house. His own was in a corner, and the doors led to his wife's and daughter's rooms. When he first married his wife, they slept together, but after the baby was born, they gave it up and never did it again. From time to time, he went to his wife at night. She wanted him, made it clear to him, in a womanly way, that she wanted him, and he left, not joyfully or impatiently, but because he was a man and she was a woman, and so it was done. The thought tired him a little. "Well, that hasn't happened for several weeks." He didn't want to think about it.

He had a horse and carriage, kept in the livery stables, and they were now pulling up to the door of his house. He heard the front door close. His wife and daughter were leaving for the village. The window of his room was open, and the wind blew against his body. A neighbor had a garden and grew flowers. The air that entered was fragrant. All sounds were soft, quiet. Sparrows were chirping. A large winged insect flew to the mesh covering the window and slowly crawled upward. Somewhere in the distance, a locomotive bell rang. Perhaps it was on the tracks near his factory, where Natalie was now sitting at her desk. He turned and looked at the winged creature, slowly crawling. The quiet voices that inhabited a person's body were not always serious. Sometimes they played like children. One of the voices declared that the insect's eyes looked at him with approval. Now the insect was speaking. "You're a damned man to have slept so long," it said. The sound of the locomotive was still audible, coming from far away, quietly. "I'll tell Natalie what that winged one said," it thought, smiling at the ceiling. His cheeks were flushed, and he slept quietly, his hands behind his head, like a child.

OceanofPDF.com

III


When he woke up an hour later, he was scared at first. He looked around the room, wondering if he was sick.

Then his eyes began to take stock of the room's furniture. He didn't like anything there. Had he lived twenty years of his life among such things? They were certainly fine. He knew little about such things. Few men did. A thought occurred to him. How few men in America ever really thought about the homes they lived in, the clothes they wore. Men were willing to live long lives without making any effort to adorn their bodies, to make the homes they inhabited beautiful and meaningful. His own clothes hung on the chair where he had thrown them when he entered the room. In a moment he would stand and put them on. Thousands of times since he became an adult, he had thoughtlessly dressed his body. The clothes had been bought at random in some store. Who made them? What had gone into making them and wearing them? He looked at his body lying on the bed. The clothes would envelop him, envelop him.

A thought came into his head, sounding in the spaces of his mind like a bell ringing over the fields: "Nothing living or inanimate can be beautiful unless it is loved."

Getting out of bed, he quickly dressed and, hurriedly leaving the room, ran down the stairs to the floor below. At the bottom, he stopped. He suddenly felt old and tired and thought that perhaps it would be best not to return to the factory that afternoon. His presence there was unnecessary. Everything was going well. Natalie kept an eye on everything that arose.

"It's a fine thing if I, a respectable businessman with a wife and a grown daughter, get involved in an affair with Natalie Schwartz, the daughter of a man who owned a cheap saloon in life, and that awful old Irish woman who's the scandal of the town and who, when drunk, talks and screams so loudly that the neighbors threaten to arrest her, and they're only restrained because they sympathize with the daughters.

"The thing is, a person can work and work to build a decent place for themselves, and then a stupid act can ruin everything. I'll have to take care of myself a little. I've been working too steadily. Maybe I should take a vacation. I don't want to get into trouble," he thought. How glad he was that, despite being in such a state all day, he hadn't said anything to anyone that would have given away his state.

He stood with his hand on the stair railing. He'd been thinking a lot for the last two or three hours, anyway. "I haven't wasted any time."

An idea struck him. After he got married and discovered that his wife was frightened and driven by every urge of passion, and that making love to her therefore brought little pleasure, he developed the habit of setting off on secret expeditions. Leaving was easy enough. He told his wife he was going on a business trip. Then he drove off somewhere, usually to Chicago. He didn't go to one of the big hotels, but to some obscure place on a side street.

Night fell, and he set out to find a woman. He always performed the same rather stupid act. He didn't drink, but now he had a few glasses. He could have gone straight to some house where women were supposed to be, but he really wanted something else. He wandered the streets for hours.

There was a dream. They vainly hoped to find, while wandering somewhere, a woman who would somehow miraculously love them freely and selflessly. They usually walked along the streets in dark, poorly lit places, where there were factories, warehouses, and poor dwellings. Someone wanted a golden woman to emerge from the filth of the place they walked through. This was madness and stupidity, and the man knew these things, but he persisted madly. Amazing conversations were imagined. A woman was supposed to emerge from the shadow of one of the dark buildings. She, too, was lonely, "hungry, defeated." One of them boldly approached her and immediately struck up a conversation filled with strange and beautiful words. Love flooded their two bodies.

Well, perhaps that was a bit of an exaggeration. Surely no one had ever been foolish enough to expect something so wonderful. In any case, a man would wander dark streets for hours and eventually meet some prostitute. Both would silently hurry into a small room. Hmm. There was always the feeling: "Maybe other men have been here with her this evening." There was an attempt to strike up a conversation. Would they be able to recognize each other, this woman and this man? The woman had a businesslike air. The night was not over yet, and her work had been done overnight. Too much time could not be wasted. From her point of view, a lot of time would have to be wasted anyway. They often walked half the night without earning any money.

After this adventure, John Webster returned home the next day feeling very angry and unclean. Nevertheless, he worked better at the office and slept better at night for a long time. First, he was focused on his work and didn't give in to dreams and vague thoughts. Having someone else in charge of the factory was an advantage.

Now he stood at the foot of the stairs, wondering if perhaps he should embark on such an adventure again. If he stayed home and sat all day, every day, in Natalie Schwartz's presence, who knew what would happen. He might as well face the facts. After the experience of that morning, after looking into her eyes, just as he had, the lives of the two people in the office had changed. Something new would be in the very air they breathed together. It would be better if he didn't return to the office, but left immediately and took a train to Chicago or Milwaukee. As for his wife, the thought of a kind of death of the flesh occurred to him. He closed his eyes and leaned against the banister. His mind went blank.

The door leading to the house's dining room opened, and a woman stepped forward. She was Webster's only servant and had lived in the house for many years. She was now over fifty, and as she stood before John Webster, he looked at her as he hadn't in a long time. A multitude of thoughts rushed through him quickly, like a handful of shot thrown through a windowpane.

The woman standing before him was tall and thin, her face deeply lined. These were men's strange notions of feminine beauty, the ones that came to mind. Perhaps Natalie Schwartz, at fifty, would have looked very much like this woman.

Her name was Catherine, and her arrival at the Websters' had long ago sparked a quarrel between John Webster and his wife. There had been a railroad accident near the Webster factory, and the woman had been riding in the day car of the wrecked train with a much younger man who had been killed. The young man, a bank employee from Indianapolis, had run off with a woman who had been a servant in his father's house, and after his disappearance, a large sum of money went missing from the bank. He had died in the crash while sitting next to the woman, and all trace of him was lost until someone from Indianapolis, quite by chance, saw and recognized Catherine on the streets of her adopted city. The question was what had happened to the money, and Catherine was accused of knowing about it and covering it up.

Mrs. Webster wanted to fire her immediately, and a quarrel ensued, from which her husband ultimately emerged victorious. For some reason, he poured all his energy into the matter, and one night, standing in the bedroom they shared with his wife, he uttered such a harsh statement that he was surprised by the words that escaped his lips. "If this woman leaves this house against her will, then I will too," he said.

Now John Webster stood in the hallway of his house, looking at the woman who had long been the cause of their quarrel. Well, he'd seen her silently pacing the house almost every day for years since it happened, but he hadn't looked at her the way he did now. When she grew up, Natalie Schwartz might look like this woman now. If he'd been foolish enough to run off with Natalie, as that young man from Indianapolis had once done with this woman, and if it had turned out the train wreck had never happened, he might someday live with a woman who looked something like Catherine now.

The thought didn't disturb him. On the whole, it was a rather pleasant thought. "She lived, sinned, and suffered," he thought. There was a strong, quiet dignity in the woman's personality, and it was reflected in her physical being. Undoubtedly, there was some dignity in his own thoughts as well. The idea of going to Chicago or Milwaukee, to walk the filthy streets, yearning for a golden woman to come to him from the filth of life, now completely vanished.

The woman, Catherine, smiled at him. "I didn't have lunch because I wasn't hungry, but now I'm hungry. Is there anything to eat in the house, anything you could get for me without too much trouble?" he asked.

She lied cheerfully. She had just cooked herself lunch in the kitchen, but now she offered it to him.

He sat at the table, eating the food Catherine had prepared. The sun shone beyond the house. It was a little after two o'clock, and the day and evening lay before him. It was strange how the Bible, the ancient Testaments, continued to assert themselves in his mind. He had never been much of a Bible reader. Perhaps there was some immense grandeur in the book's prose that now matched his own thoughts. In the days when people lived on the hills and plains with their herds, life in the body of a man or woman lasted a long time. They were talking about people who lived several hundred years. Perhaps there were several ways to calculate lifespan. In his own case, if he could live each day as fully as he lived this day, life for him would be extended to infinity.

Catherine entered the room with more food and a pot of tea, and he looked up and smiled at her. Another thought occurred to him. 'It would be a most wonderful thing if everyone, every living man, woman, and child, were suddenly, with a common impulse, to come out of their homes, their factories, their shops, and come, let's say, onto a great plain where everyone could see everyone else, and if they did so, right there, all of them, in the light of day, where everyone in the world knew fully what everyone else in the world was doing, if they were all to commit, by one common impulse, the most unpardonable sin of which they were conscious, and what a great time of purification that would be.'

His mind was in a frenzy of images, and he ate the food Catherine placed before him without thinking about the physical act of eating. Catherine started to leave the room, and then, noticing that he hadn't acknowledged her presence, she stopped at the kitchen door and stood there, looking at him. He had never suspected that she knew of the struggle he had gone through for her all those years ago. If he hadn't undertaken that struggle, she wouldn't have stayed in the house. Indeed, on the evening he declared that if she was forced to leave, he would too, the door to the upstairs bedroom was slightly ajar, and she found herself in the hallway below. She had gathered her few belongings, bundled them into a bundle, and intended to slip away somewhere. There was no point in staying. The man she loved was dead, and now the newspapers were hounding her, and there was a threat that unless she revealed where the money was hidden, she would be sent to prison. As for the money, she didn't believe the murdered man knew more about it than she did. No doubt the money had been stolen, and then, since he'd run off with her, the crime had been blamed on her lover. It was a simple matter. The young man worked in a bank and was engaged to a woman of his own class. Then one night, he and Catherine were alone in his father's house, and something happened between them.

Standing and watching her employer eat the food she'd prepared for herself, Catherine proudly recalled the long-ago evening when she'd recklessly become another man's lover. She recalled the struggle John Webster had once put her through, and she thought with disdain of the woman who had been her employer's wife.

"That such a man should have such a woman," she thought, remembering the long, heavy figure of Mrs. Webster.

As if sensing her thoughts, the man turned again and smiled at her. "I'm eating the food she's prepared for herself," he said to himself and quickly rose from the table. He went out into the hallway, took his hat from the coat rack, and lit a cigarette. Then he returned to the dining room door. The woman stood by the table, looking at him, and he, in turn, looked at her. There was no embarrassment. "If I left with Natalie, and she became like Catherine, that would be wonderful," he thought. "Well, well, good-bye," he said haltingly, and, turning, he quickly walked out of the house.

As John Webster walked down the street, the sun was shining and a light breeze was blowing, a few leaves were falling from the maple trees that lined the streets. Soon the frost would come, and the trees would burst into color. If one could only realize it, glorious days lay ahead. Even in Wisconsin, glorious days could be spent. A slight pang of hunger, a new kind of hunger, swelled within him as he paused and took a moment to look down the street he was walking down. Two hours earlier, lying naked on his bed in his own home, thoughts of clothes and houses had visited him. It was a charming thought, but it also brought sadness. Why were so many of the houses along the street ugly? Were people unaware? Could anyone be completely unaware? Was it possible to wear ugly, commonplace clothes, to live forever in an ugly or commonplace house on a commonplace street in a commonplace town, and always remain ignorant?

Now he was thinking about things he thought were best left out of a businessman's thoughts. However, for this one day, he gave himself over to pondering every thought that came to his mind. Tomorrow would be different. He would return to what he had always been (except for a few lapses, when he was much the same as now): a quiet, orderly man, minding his own business and not prone to stupidity. He would run a washing machine business and try to concentrate on that. In the evenings, he read the newspapers and kept abreast of the day's events.

"I don't get to bat very often. I deserve a little vacation," he thought rather sadly.

A man was walking along the street ahead of him, almost two blocks away. John Webster had met this man once. He was a professor at a small town college, and one day, two or three years ago, the president of the college had attempted to raise money among local businessmen to help the school through a financial crisis. A dinner had been given, attended by several college professors and representatives of an organization called the Chamber of Commerce, to which John Webster belonged. The man who now walked in front of him had been at the dinner, and he and the washing machine manufacturer were sitting together. He wondered if he could now afford this brief acquaintance-to go and talk to this man. Some rather unusual thoughts had occurred to him, and perhaps if he could talk to another person, and especially to a person whose business in life was to have thoughts and understand thoughts, something could be accomplished.

Between the sidewalk and the roadway was a narrow strip of grass, across which John Webster ran. He simply grabbed his hat and ran bareheaded for about two hundred yards, then stopped and calmly surveyed the street.

In the end, everything was fine. Apparently, no one had seen his strange performance. There were no people sitting on the porches of the houses along the street. He thanked God for that.

Ahead of him, a college professor walked soberly, a book under his arm, unaware that he was being watched. Seeing his absurd performance go unnoticed, John Webster laughed. "Well, I was in college once myself. I've heard enough college professors talk. I don't know why I should expect anything from someone of that stripe.

Perhaps it would take some kind of new language to talk about the things that were on his mind that day.

There was this idea that Natalie was a house, clean and pleasant to live in, a house one could enter with joy and happiness. Could he, a washing machine manufacturer from Wisconsin, stop a college professor on the street and say, "I want to know, Mr. College Professor, if your house is clean and pleasant to live in, so that people can come into it. And if so, I want you to tell me how you did it to clean your house."

The idea was absurd. Even the thought of such a thing made people laugh. There had to be new figures of speech, a new way of looking at things. First, people would have to be more self-aware than ever before.

Almost in the center of town, in front of a stone building housing some public institution, there was a small park with benches, and John Webster stopped behind a college professor, walked over, and sat down on one. From his position, he could see two major business streets.

Successful washing machine manufacturers didn't do this while sitting on park benches in the middle of the day, but at the moment, he didn't particularly care. Truth be told, the place for a man like him, the owner of a factory that employed many people, was at his desk in his own office. In the evening, he could take a stroll, read the newspapers, or go to the theater, but now, at this hour, the most important thing was getting things done, being at work.

He smiled at the thought of himself lounging on a park bench, like a social loafer or a drifter. On the other benches in the small park sat other men, and that's exactly what they were. Well, they were the kind of guys who didn't fit in anywhere, who didn't have a job. You could tell by looking at them. There was a kind of languor about them, and although the two men on the adjacent bench were talking to each other, they did so in a bored, listless manner that showed they weren't really interested in what they were saying. Were men, when they talked, truly interested in what they were saying to each other?

John Webster raised his arms above his head and stretched. He was more aware of himself and his body than he had been in years. "Something is happening, like the end of a long, harsh winter. Spring is coming within me," he thought, and the thought pleased him, like the caress of a loved one's hand.

He had been plagued by weary moments of fatigue all day, and now another had arrived. He was like a train traveling through mountainous terrain, occasionally passing through tunnels. One moment the world around him was alive, and the next it was just a dull, dreary place that frightened him. The thought that occurred to him was something like this: "Well, here I am. There"s no point in denying it; something unusual has happened to me. Yesterday I was one thing. Now I"m something else. All around me are the people I"ve always known, here in this town. Down the street in front of me, on the corner, in this stone building is the bank where I do the banking for my factory. Sometimes I don"t owe them any money at this very moment, and a year from now I might be deeply in debt to this institution." During the years I lived and worked as an industrialist, there were times when I was completely at the mercy of the people who now sit at desks behind these stone walls. Why they didn't shut me down and take my business away from me, I don't know. Perhaps they deemed it impractical, and then perhaps they felt that if they kept me there, I'd still be working for them. In any case, it doesn't seem to matter much now what an institution like a bank might decide to do.

"It's impossible to know what other men are thinking. Perhaps they don't think at all.

"If you come down to it, I guess I've never really thought about it myself. Perhaps all life here, in this city and everywhere, is just some random event. Stuff happens. People are fascinated, right? That's how it should be."

This was incomprehensible to him, and his mind soon grew tired of thinking further along this path.

We returned to the subject of people and houses. Perhaps we could discuss it with Natalie. There was something simple and clear about her. "She's been working for me for three years now, and it's strange that I never thought much of her before. She has a way of explaining things clearly and directly. Everything has gotten better since she's been with me."

It would be something to ponder if Natalie had understood, all the time, since she'd been with him, things that were only now beginning to dawn on him. Suppose she'd been willing to let him withdraw into himself from the very beginning. One could approach the matter quite romantically, if one allowed oneself to consider it.

Here she is, you see, this Natalie. In the morning, she got out of bed and, in her room, in a small frame house on the outskirts of town, said a short prayer. Then she walked the streets and along the railroad tracks to work and sat all day in the presence of a man.

It was an interesting thought, if only one were to suppose, let's say, as a humorous amusement, that she, this Natalie, was pure and clean.

In this case, she won't think much of herself. She loved, that is, she opened doors for herself.

One of them contained a photograph of her standing with her body doors open. Something was constantly flowing out of her and into the man in whose presence she had spent the day. He was unaware of it and too absorbed in his own trivial affairs to notice.

She, too, began to become absorbed in his affairs, lifting the burden of petty and unimportant details from his mind so that he, in turn, would become aware of her standing there, with the doors of her body open. What a pure, sweet, and fragrant home she lived in! Before entering such a home, she also needed to purify herself. That was clear. Natalie had done this with prayer and devotion, a single-minded dedication to the interests of another. Could one purify one's own home in this way? Could one be as much a man as Natalie had been a woman? It was a test.

As for houses, if a person thought of their body this way, where would it all end? One could go further and think of one's body as a city, a town, a world.

This, too, was the road to madness. One could imagine people constantly entering and exiting each other. There would be no more secrecy in the whole world. Something like a strong wind would sweep across the world.

"A people intoxicated with life. A people drunk and joyful with life."

The sentences rang out in John Webster like the ringing of enormous bells. He sat right there on a park bench. Did the apathetic boys sitting around him on other benches hear these words? For a moment, it seemed to him that these words, like living beings, could fly through the streets of his city, stopping people in their tracks, forcing them to look up from their work in offices and factories.

"Better to take things a little slower and not get out of control," he told himself.

He began to think differently. Across a small patch of grass and the roadway in front of him was a store with trays of fruit-oranges, apples, grapefruit, and pears-laid out on the sidewalk. Now a cart had stopped at the store's door and was unloading more items. He stared long and hard at the wagon and the storefront.

His mind drifted off into a new direction. There he was, John Webster, sitting on a park bench in the heart of a Wisconsin town. It was autumn, and frost was approaching, but new life still flickered in the grass. How green the grass was in the small park! The trees, too, were alive. Soon they would burst into a blaze of color, and then, for a time, fall asleep. The flames of evening would come upon all this living green world, and then winter night.

The fruits of the earth will fall before the world of animal life. From the earth, from trees and bushes, from the seas, lakes, and rivers, they emerged-creatures that were to sustain animal life during the period when the world of plant life slept its sweet winter sleep.

That, too, was something to think about. Everywhere, everyone around him, there must have been men and women who lived completely unaware of such things. Frankly, he himself had never suspected anything his entire life. He had just eaten food, forced it into his body through his mouth. There was no joy. In fact, he hadn't tasted or smelled anything. How filled with fragrant, enticing smells life could be!

It must have happened that as men and women left the fields and hills to live in cities, as factories grew, and as railroads and steamships began to transport the fruits of the earth back and forth, a kind of terrible ignorance must have grown up in people. Without touching things with their hands, people lost their meaning. That's all, I think.

John Webster recalled that when he was a boy, such matters were handled differently. He lived in the city and knew little about rural life, but back then, city and country were more closely linked.

In the fall, just about that time of year, farmers would come to town and deliver supplies to his father's house. Back then, everyone had large cellars beneath their homes, and in those cellars were bins that needed to be filled with potatoes, apples, and turnips. The man had learned a trick. Straw was brought from the fields near town, and pumpkins, squash, cabbages, and other hard vegetables were wrapped in straw and stored in a cool part of the cellar. He remembered how his mother would wrap pears in pieces of paper and keep them sweet and fresh for months.

As for himself, although he didn't live in the village, he realized at the time that something quite momentous was happening. The wagons arrived at his father's house. On Saturdays, a farm woman, driving an old gray horse, came to the front door and knocked. She brought the Websters their weekly supply of butter and eggs, and often a chicken for Sunday dinner. John Webster's mother came to the door to greet her, and the child ran forward, clinging to his mother's skirts.

The farm woman entered the house and sat up straight in her chair in the living room while her basket was emptied and oil was taken from a stone jug. The boy stood with his back to the wall in the corner, studying her. Nothing was said. What strange hands she had, so different from his mother's, soft and white. The farm woman's hands were brown, and her knuckles resembled the bark-covered pine cones that sometimes grew on tree trunks. These were hands that could hold things, hold them tightly.

After the village folk arrived and put things in the bins in the basement, you could go down there in the afternoon when someone returned from school. Outside, leaves were falling from the trees, and everything looked bare. At times it felt a little sad, even scary, but visiting the basement was calming. The rich smell of things, the fragrant, strong odors! One took an apple from one of the crates and began to eat it. In the far corner stood dark containers with pumpkins and gourds buried in straw, and all along the walls stood glass jars of fruit that his mother had placed there. How much of it there was, what an abundance of everything. You could eat forever and still have plenty.

Sometimes at night, when you go upstairs and go to bed, you think of the cellar, the farmer's wife and the farmer's men. It was dark and windy outside the house. Soon there would be winter, snow, and ice skating. The farmer's wife, with strange, strong-looking hands, urged the gray horse down the street where the Webster house stood and around the corner. One stood at the window below and watched as she disappeared from sight. She had gone to some mysterious place called the country. How big was the country, and how far away was it? Had she gotten there yet? It was night now and very dark. The wind was blowing. Could she really still be urging the gray horse, holding the reins in her strong brown hands?

The boy lay down on his bed and pulled the covers over himself. His mother entered the room, kissed him, and left, taking the lamp with her. He was safe in the house. Next to him, in another room, slept his father and mother. Only the village woman with the strong arms remained alone in the night. She urged the gray horse further and further into the darkness, toward that strange place from which emanated all the good, richly scented things now stored in the cellar beneath the house.

OceanofPDF.com

IV


"WELL, HELLO, Mister Webster. This is a wonderful place to daydream. I've been standing here looking at you for minutes now, and you haven't even noticed me."

John Webster jumped to his feet. The day had passed, and a certain grayness had settled over the trees and grass in the small park. The evening sun illuminated the figure of the man standing before him, and although the man was short and thin, his shadow on the stone path was grotesquely long. The man was obviously amused by the thought of the prosperous manufacturer dreaming here in the park, and he chuckled softly, swaying his body slightly back and forth. The shadow swayed too. It was like something suspended on a pendulum, swinging back and forth, and even as John Webster jumped to his feet, a sentence flashed through his mind. "He takes life in a long, slow, easy swing. How does that happen? He takes life in a long, slow, easy swing," his mind said. It seemed like a fragment of thought, torn from nowhere, a fragmentary dancing little thought.

The man standing before him owned a small used bookstore on a side street where John Webster used to stroll on his way to his factory. On summer evenings, he would sit in a chair in front of his store, commenting on the weather and the events of the people strolling up and down the sidewalk. One day, when John Webster was with his banker, a gray-haired, stately-looking man, he was somewhat embarrassed because the bookseller called out his name. He had never done such a thing before that day, and never since. The manufacturer, embarrassed, explained the situation to the banker. "I really don't know the man," he said. "I've never been in his store."

In the park, John Webster stood before the little man, deeply embarrassed. He'd told a harmless lie. "I've had a headache all day, so I just sat down here for a minute," he said sheepishly. It irritated him that he wanted to apologize. The little man smiled knowingly. "You should bring something for this. This could get a man like you into a hell of a mess," he said, and walked away, his long shadow dancing behind him.

John Webster shrugged and walked quickly down the busy business street. He was now absolutely certain he knew what he wanted. He didn't loiter or let vague thoughts wander, but walked quickly down the street. "I'll occupy my thoughts," he decided. "I'll think about my business and how to develop it." Last week, an advertiser from Chicago had come into his office and told him about advertising his washing machine in major national magazines. It would cost a lot of money, but the advertiser said he could raise the selling price and sell many more machines. It seemed possible. It would make the business big, a national institution, and he himself a major figure in the industrial world. Other men had gotten into similar positions thanks to the power of advertising. Why shouldn't he do something similar?

He tried to think about it, but his mind wasn't working very well. It was a blank. What happened was that he walked with his shoulders back, feeling childishly important about nothing. He had to be careful, otherwise he would start laughing at himself. A secret fear lurked within him that in a few minutes he would start laughing at John Webster's figure as a man of national importance in the industrial world, and this fear made him hurry faster than ever. When he reached the railroad tracks leading to his factory, he was practically running. It was amazing. The Chicago advertising man could use big words, apparently without any danger of suddenly bursting into laughter. When John Webster was a young man, fresh out of college, he had read a great many books and sometimes thought he would like to become a writer; at that time, he often thought he wasn't cut out for that, or even to be a businessman at all. Perhaps he was right. A man who had no more common sense than to laugh at himself had better not try to become a figure of national importance in the industrial world, that's for sure. It wanted serious people to successfully occupy such positions.

Well, now he began to feel a little sorry for himself, for not being cut out to be a major figure in the industrial world. How childish he had been! He began to scold himself: "Will I never grow up?"

As he hurried along the railroad tracks, trying to think, trying not to think, he kept his eyes on the ground, and something caught his attention. In the west, above the distant treetops and beyond the shallow river on whose banks his factory stood, the sun was already setting, and its rays were suddenly caught by something like a piece of glass lying among the stones on the railroad tracks.

He stopped running along the tracks and bent down to pick it up. It was something, perhaps a precious stone, perhaps just a cheap toy some child had lost. The stone was the size and shape of a small kidney bean and was dark green. When the sun hit it as he held it in his hand, the color changed. It could be valuable after all. "Perhaps some woman, riding through the city on a train, lost it from a ring or a brooch she wears around her neck," he thought, and an image briefly flashed in his mind. The picture showed a tall, strong blonde standing not on a train, but on a hill above a river. The river was wide and, since it was winter, covered with ice. The woman raised her hand and pointed. On her finger was a ring set with a small green stone. He could see everything in great detail. A woman stood on a hill, and the sun shone upon her, and the stone in the ring was sometimes pale, sometimes dark, like the waters of the sea. Next to the woman stood a man, a rather heavy-looking man with gray hair, with whom the woman was in love. The woman was saying something to the man about the stone set in the ring, and John Webster heard the words very clearly. What strange words she spoke. "My father gave it to me and told me to wear it with all my might. He called it 'the pearl of life,'" she said.

Hearing the rumble of a train in the distance, John Webster stepped off the rails. There was a high embankment by the river at that spot, allowing him to walk. "I'm not going to get killed by a train like I was this morning when that young black man saved me," he thought. He looked west, into the evening sun, and then down the riverbed. The river was low now, and only a narrow channel of water ran through the wide banks of caked mud. He placed a small green pebble in his vest pocket.

"I know what I'm going to do," he told himself decisively. A plan quickly formed in his mind. He went to his office and hastily glanced through all the incoming letters. Then, without looking at Natalie Schwartz, he stood up and left. There was a train to Chicago at eight o'clock, and he told his wife he had business in the city and would take it. What a man had to do in life was face the facts and then act. He would go to Chicago and find himself a woman. When the truth came out, he would go for the usual battering. He would find himself a woman, get drunk, and, if he felt like it, stay drunk for days.

There were times when it might have been necessary to be a real bastard. He would have done that too. While he was in Chicago with the woman he'd found, he'd write a letter to his accountant at the factory and ask him to fire Natalie Schwartz. Then he'd write Natalie a letter and send her a large check. He'd send her six months' pay. All of this might have cost him a pretty penny, but it was better than what was happening to him, to a regular crazy person.

As for a woman in Chicago, he'll find her. A few drinks give you courage, and when you have money to spend, you can always find women.

It was a pity that this was so, but the truth was that women's needs were part of a man's identity, and that fact, too, could be acknowledged. "After all, I'm a businessman, and this is a businessman's place in the scheme of things, to face the facts," he decided, and suddenly felt very determined and strong.

As for Natalie, to be honest, there was something about her that he found a little difficult to resist. "If it were just my wife, everything would be different, but there's my daughter Jane. She's a pure, young, innocent creature, and she needs to be protected. I can't let her in here because of the mess," he told himself, striding boldly along the small spur of the tracks leading to the gates of his factory.

OceanofPDF.com

IN


When he had opened the door to the small room where he had sat and worked next to Natalie for three years, he quickly closed it behind him and stood with his back to the door, his hand on the doorknob, as if seeking support. Natalie's desk stood by the window in the corner of the room, behind his own desk, and through the window one could see the empty space next to the siding that belonged to the railroad company, but in which he had been granted the privilege of working. They were laying down a reserve supply of lumber. The logs were stacked so that in the soft evening light the yellow boards formed a kind of backdrop for Natalie's figure.

The sun shone on the pile of firewood, the last soft rays of the evening sun. Above the pile of firewood was a clear expanse of light, and Natalie's head poked into it.

Something astonishing and beautiful had happened. As this fact dawned on him, something inside John Webster broke. What a simple, yet profound, act Natalie had performed. He stood there, clutching the doorknob, gripping it, and something he had been trying to avoid had happened inside him.

Tears welled up in his eyes. Throughout his life, he never lost the feeling of that moment. In an instant, everything inside him became clouded and dirty with thoughts of the upcoming trip to Chicago, and then all the dirt and grime disappeared, swept away as if by a swift miracle.

"At any other time, what Natalie did might have gone unnoticed," he later told himself, but that fact in no way diminished its significance. All the women who worked in his office, as well as the accountant and the men at the factory, were in the habit of carrying their lunches, and Natalie, as always, had brought her lunch that morning. He remembered seeing her walk in with it, wrapped in a paper bag.

Her house was far away, on the outskirts of the city. None of her employees had come from such a great distance.

And that afternoon she didn't eat lunch. There it was, ready-made, packaged, lying on the shelf behind her head.

What happened was this: at midday, she ran out of the office and ran home to her mother's house. There was no bathtub there, but she drew water from the well and poured it into the communal trough in the shed behind the house. Then she dove into the water and washed herself from head to toe.

Having done this, she went upstairs and put on a special dress, the best she owned, the one she always saved for Sunday evenings and special occasions. While she was dressing, her old mother, who had followed her everywhere, scolding her and demanding explanations, stood at the foot of the stairs leading to her room, calling her vile names. "You little slut, you"re going on a date with some man tonight, so you"re getting yourself ready as if you were going to get married. A great chance for me; two daughters are supposed to get married someday. If you have any money in your pocket, give it to me. I wouldn"t care if you were hanging around if you ever had any money," she declared in a loud voice. The night before, she had received money from one of her daughters, and in the morning she had stocked up on a bottle of whiskey. Now she was enjoying herself.

Natalie ignored her. Fully dressed, she hurried down the stairs, pushing past the old woman, and half-ran back to the factory. The other women working there laughed as they saw her approach. "What's Natalie up to?" they asked each other.

John Webster stood looking at her, thinking. He knew all about what she had done and why she had done it, though he could see nothing. Now she wasn't looking at him, but, with her head slightly turned, she was staring at the piles of wood.

Well, then, she'd known all day what was going on inside him. She'd understood his sudden urge to immerse himself, so she'd run home to bathe and get dressed. "It'd be like cleaning the windowsills in her house and hanging freshly washed curtains," he thought petulantly.

"You've changed your dress, Natalie," he said aloud. It was the first time he'd called her by that name. Tears welled up in his eyes, and his knees suddenly felt weak. He walked, a little unsteadily, across the room and knelt down beside her. Then he laid his head on her lap and felt her broad, strong hand in his hair and on his cheek.

He knelt for a long time, breathing deeply. The thoughts of the morning returned. Eventually, though he hadn't thought about it. What was happening inside him wasn't as clear as thoughts. If his body was a house, then now was the time to cleanse that house. Thousands of little creatures ran through the house, quickly going up and down the stairs, opening windows, laughing, crying to each other. The rooms of his house filled with new sounds, joyful sounds. His body trembled. Now, after this had happened, a new life would begin for him. His body would be more alive. He saw things, smelled things, tasted things, as never before.

He looked into Natalie's face. How much did she know about all this? Well, she certainly couldn't put it into words, but there was a way she understood. She'd run home to bathe and get dressed. That's how he knew she knew. "How long have you been prepared for this to happen?" he asked.

"For a year," she said. She turned a little pale. The room began to darken.

She stood up, carefully pushing him aside, walked to the door leading to the reception area, and pulled back the bolt that prevented the door from being opened.

Now she stood with her back to the door, her hand on the handle, as he had stood a while ago. He stood, walked to his desk near the window overlooking the train tracks, and sat down in his office chair. Leaning forward, he covered his face with both hands. Inside him, the shaking continued. And yet, small, joyful voices rang out. The inner cleansing continued and continued.

Natalie was talking about office business. "There were a few letters, but I answered them and even dared to sign my name. I didn't want you to be disturbed today.

She walked over to where he sat, leaning forward on the table, trembling, and knelt down beside him. After a moment, he placed his hand on her shoulder.

The outside noises in the office continued. Someone was typing in the reception area. The inner office was now completely dark, but a lamp hung suspended above the railroad tracks, two or three hundred yards away. When it was lit, a faint light penetrated the dark room and fell upon two hunched figures. Soon, a whistle blew, and the factory workers departed. In the reception area, four people were getting ready to go home.

A few minutes later, they left, closing the door behind them, and also headed toward the exit. Unlike the factory workers, they knew the two were still in the inner office and were curious. One of the three women boldly walked to the window and peered in.

She returned to the others, and they stood for a few minutes, forming a small, tense group in the semi-darkness. Then they slowly walked away.

As the group broke up, on the embankment above the river, the accountant, a man in his mid-thirties, and the oldest of the three women went right along the tracks, while the other two went left. The accountant and the woman he was with didn't report what they had seen. They walked together for several hundred yards and then separated, turning off the tracks onto separate streets. When the accountant was alone, he began to worry about the future. "You'll see. In a few months, I'll have to look for a new place. When things like this happen, business goes under." He was worried that, with a wife and two children and a modest salary, he had no savings. "Damn Natalie Schwartz. I'll bet she's a whore, that's what I'm willing to bet," he muttered as he walked.

As for the two remaining women, one wanted to talk about the two people kneeling in the darkened office, and the other didn't. The older of them made several unsuccessful attempts to discuss it, but then they too parted. The youngest of the three, the one who had smiled at John Webster that morning when he had just left Natalie's presence and when he had first realized the doors of her being were open to him, walked down the street past the bookstore door and up the rising street into the illuminated business district of the city. She continued to smile as she walked, and it was because of something she didn't understand.

It was because she herself was the one with the little voices speaking, and now they were busy. Some phrase, perhaps taken from the Bible when she was a little girl and went to Sunday school, or from some book, kept repeating itself in her head. What a charming combination of simple words in everyday use. She kept repeating them in her mind, and after n times, when she came to a spot on the street where no one was around, she said them out loud. "And as it turned out, there was a marriage in our house," she said.

OceanofPDF.com

BOOK TWO

OceanofPDF.com

I


And with you, freedom. Remember, the room in which John Webster slept was in the corner of the house, upstairs. One of its two windows looked out onto the garden of a German man who owned a shop in his town, but whose real interest in life was his garden. He worked on it all year, and if John Webster had been more active, he might have derived great pleasure during the years he lived in this room, looking down on his neighbor at work. Early in the morning and late in the evening, the German man could always be seen smoking his pipe and digging, and a variety of smells would drift in through the window of the room upstairs: the sour, slightly acidic smell of rotting vegetables, the rich, heady odor of manure, and then, throughout the summer and late fall, the fragrant scent of roses and the marching procession of seasonal flowers.

John Webster lived in his room for many years, never really considering what a room might be like, a room in which a person lived, the walls of which enveloped him like a garment when he slept. It was a square room, one window overlooking the German's garden, the other the blank walls of the German's house. There were three doors: one led to the hallway, one to the room where his wife slept, and the third to his daughter's room.

A man would come here at night, close the doors, and get ready for bed. Behind two walls were two more people, also getting ready for bed, and beyond the walls of the German's house, the same was undoubtedly happening. The German had two daughters and a son. They were getting ready for bed or had already gone to bed. At the end of the street was something like a small village, where people were getting ready for bed or were already asleep.

For many years, John Webster and his wife had not been very close. Long ago, when he married her, he also discovered that she had her own theory of life, gleaned somewhere, perhaps from her parents, perhaps simply absorbed from the general atmosphere of fear in which so many modern women live and breathe, as if shrinking and using it as a weapon against too close contact with another. She thought, or believed that she thought, that even in marriage, a man and a woman should not be lovers except for the purpose of producing children. This belief created a kind of heavy atmosphere of responsibility in lovemaking. A person cannot freely enter and leave another's body when entry and exit involve such a heavy responsibility. The doors of the caravan rust and creak. "Well, you see," John Webster sometimes explained later, "a person is quite seriously engaged in bringing another person into the world. Here is a Puritan in full bloom. Night has come. From the gardens behind the men's houses comes the fragrance of flowers. Subtle, muffled sounds arise, followed by silence. The flowers in their gardens have known ecstasy, unfettered by any sense of responsibility, but man is something else. For centuries, he has taken himself with extraordinary seriousness. You see, the race must be perpetuated. He must be improved. There is something of a commitment to God and one's fellow man in this endeavor. Even when, after long preparation, conversations, prayers, and the acquisition of a certain wisdom, a kind of self-forgetfulness is achieved, as in mastering a new language, something utterly alien to flowers, trees, and plants is still achieved. "Life and the continuation of life among the so-called lower animals."

As for the sincere, God-fearing people among whom John Webster and his wife then lived, and among whom they counted themselves for so many years, the likelihood that ecstasy would ever be attained is slim. Instead, a kind of cold sensuality, tempered by a nagging conscience, prevails. That life can continue at all in such an atmosphere is one of the wonders of the world and proves, like nothing else, the cold determination of nature not to be conquered.

And so, for many years, this man had the habit of coming to his bedroom at night, taking off his clothes and hanging them on a chair or in a closet, then crawling into bed and sleeping heavily. Sleep was an essential part of life, and if he thought at all before bed, it was about his washing machine business. A bill was due at the bank the next day, and he didn't have the money to pay it. He thought about this and what he could say to the banker to encourage him to extend the bill. Then he thought about the trouble he was having with the foreman at his factory. The man wanted a bigger salary and wondered if the foreman would quit if he didn't give it to him and force him to find another foreman.

When he slept, he slept uneasily, and no fantasies visited his dreams. What should have been a sweet time of renewal turned into a difficult time, filled with distorted dreams.

And then, after the doors of Natalie's body had swung open for him, he realized. After that evening of kneeling together in the dark, he'd found it difficult to go home that night and sit at the table with his wife and daughter. "Well, I can't do this," he told himself, and dined at a restaurant downtown. He stayed close, strolling the deserted streets, talking or remaining silent next to Natalie, and then walked with her to her own house, far on the outskirts of town. People saw them walking together like this, and since there was no effort to hide, the town erupted in animated conversation.

When John Webster returned home, his wife and daughter had already gone to bed. "I'm very busy at the store. Don't expect to see much of me for a while," he told his wife the morning after telling Natalie of his love. He had no intention of continuing his washing machine business or pursuing a family life. What he would do, he wasn't quite sure. First, he wanted to live with Natalie. The time had come to do that.

He told Natalie about this on that first evening of their intimacy. That evening, after everyone had left, they went for a walk together. As they walked the streets, people in their homes were sitting down to dinner, but the man and woman weren't thinking about food.

John Webster's tongue loosened, and he talked a lot, while Natalie listened silently. All the people he didn't know in the town became romantic figures in his waking consciousness. His imagination wanted to play with them, and he allowed himself to. They walked down a residential street toward the open countryside, and he continued to talk about the people in the houses. "Now, Natalie, my woman, you see all these houses here," he said, waving his arms left and right. "Well, what do you and I know about what goes on behind these walls?" He continued to breathe deeply as he walked, just as he had done back in the office, when he ran across the room to kneel at Natalie's feet. The small voices within him still spoke. Something like this had happened to him sometimes as a child, but no one had ever understood the wild play of his imagination, and over time he came to the conclusion that letting his imagination run wild was foolish. Then, when he was young and married, there came a new, sharp burst of extravagant living, but then it had been frozen within him by fear and the vulgarity born of fear. Now he played madly. "You see, Natalie," he cried, stopping on the sidewalk to seize both her hands and wave them wildly back and forth, "you see, this is how it is. These houses here look like ordinary houses, just like the ones you and I live in, but they are not at all. You see, the outside walls are just protruding objects, like scenery on a stage. A breath could destroy the walls, and a flash of flame could devour them all in an hour. I bet that-I bet that you think the people behind the walls of these houses are ordinary people. They are not at all. That is where you are mistaken, Natalie, my love. The women in the rooms behind these walls are beautiful, lovely women, and you should just go into the rooms. They are hung with beautiful paintings and tapestries, and the women have jewels on their hands and in their hair.

"And so men and women live together in their homes, and there are no good people, only beautiful ones, and children are born, and their fancies are allowed to run wild everywhere, and no one takes themselves too seriously or thinks about everything. The outcome of a person's life depends on himself, and people go out of these houses to work in the morning and return at night, and where they get all the rich comforts of life that they have, I cannot understand. It is because somewhere in the world there really is such an abundance of everything, and they have found out about it, I suppose.

On their first evening together, he and Natalie walked out of town and onto a country road. They walked for about a mile, then turned onto a small side road. A large tree grew by the road, and they walked up to it, leaned against it, and stood silently next to each other.

It was after they kissed that he told Natalie of his plans. "There are three or four thousand dollars in the bank, and the factory costs another thirty or forty thousand. I don't know how much it's worth, maybe nothing at all.

"In any case, I'll take the thousand dollars and go with you. I suppose I'll leave some deeds to this place with my wife and daughter. I suppose that would be the right thing to do."

"Then I"ll have to talk to my daughter, make her understand what I"m doing and why. Well, I don"t know if she can be understood, but I"ll have to try. I"ll have to try to say something that will stick in her memory, so that she, in turn, will learn to live, and not close and lock the doors of her being, as I have locked my own. You see, it might take two or three weeks to think about what I want to say and how to say it. My daughter Jane doesn"t know anything. She"s an American girl from the middle class, and I helped her to become one. She"s a virgin, and I"m afraid, Natalie, you don"t understand that. The gods took your virginity, or maybe it was your old mother, who"s drunk and calls you names, eh? Perhaps that would help you. You wanted so much for something sweet and pure to happen to you, to something deep inside you, that you walked around with the doors of your being open, eh? They didn"t have to be forced open. Virginity and respectability didn't hold them together with bolts and locks. Your mother must have completely killed any notion of respectability in your family, eh, Natalie? It's the most wonderful thing in the world-to love you and know that there's something in you that makes it impossible for your lover to think you're cheap and second-rate. Oh, my Natalie, you're a strong woman, worthy of love."

Natalie didn't respond, perhaps not understanding the outpouring of his words, and John Webster fell silent and moved away until he was facing her. They were about the same height, and as he approached, they looked directly into each other's eyes. He placed his hands so that they rested on her cheeks, and for a long time they stood there, wordlessly, gazing at each other, as if neither could get enough of the other's face. Soon the late moon rose, and they instinctively emerged from the tree's shadow and walked into the field. They continued to move slowly forward, stopping constantly and standing there, their hands on her cheeks. Her body began to tremble, and tears began to flow from her eyes. Then he laid her down on the grass. It was an experience with a new woman in his life. After their first lovemaking, and as their passion faded, she seemed even more beautiful to him than before.

He stood at the door of his house, and it was late at night. The air within these walls was not particularly pleasant. He was tempted to sneak through the house without being heard, and he was grateful when he reached his room, undressed, and went to bed without saying a word.

He lay in bed with his eyes open, listening to the night noises outside the house. They weren't so simple. He'd forgotten to open the window. When he did, a low humming sound could be heard. The first frost hadn't yet set in, and the night was warm. In the German's garden, in the grass in his backyard, in the branches of the trees along the streets, and in the distant village, life was teeming with abundance.

Perhaps Natalie would have a child. It didn't matter. They would leave together, live together in some faraway place. Now Natalie would be at home, in her mother's house, and she, too, would be lying awake. She would be breathing deeply of the night air. He had done it himself.

He could think about her, and also about the people nearby. A German lived next door. Turning his head, he could vaguely see the walls of the German's house. His neighbor had a wife, a son, and two daughters. Perhaps they were all asleep now. In his imagination, he entered his neighbor's house, quietly moving from room to room. An old man slept next to his wife, and in another room, his son, his legs curled up so that he lay like a ball. He was a pale, slender young man. "Perhaps he has indigestion," whispered John Webster's imagination. In another room, two daughters lay on two beds placed close together. One could easily walk between them. Before going to sleep, they whispered to each other, perhaps about a lover they hoped would come someday in the future. He stood so close to them that he could touch their cheeks with his outstretched fingers. He wondered why it had happened that he had become Natalie's lover and not one of these other girls. "It could have happened. I could have fallen in love with any of them if they had opened the door for themselves the way Natalie did."

Loving Natalie didn't preclude the possibility of loving others, perhaps many others. "A rich man can have many marriages," he thought. It was clear that the potential for human relationships hadn't even been tapped yet. Something stood in the way of a sufficiently broad acceptance of life. Before loving, one had to accept oneself and others.

As for himself, he now had to accept his wife and daughter, to bond with them for a while before leaving with Natalie. It was hard to think about. He lay wide-eyed on his bed, trying to direct his imagination to his wife's room. He couldn't. His imagination could penetrate his daughter's room and see her sleeping in her bed, but with his wife, it was different. Something inside him retreated. "Not now. Don't try that. It's not allowed. If she ever takes a lover now, it will have to be someone else," said a voice inside him.

"Did she do something to ruin that opportunity, or did I?" he asked himself, sitting on the bed. There was no doubt that human relationships had been damaged, ruined. "That's not allowed. It's not allowed to make a mess on the temple floor," a voice inside him said sternly.

It seemed to John Webster that the voices in the room were talking so loudly that when he lay down again and tried to sleep, he was a little surprised that they did not wake the rest of the house from their sleep.

OceanofPDF.com

II


I AM NOT _ THE AIR A new element had entered the air of the Webster house, as well as the office and factory of John Webster. There was an internal tension in him from all sides. When he was not alone, or in the company of Natalie, he no longer breathed freely. "You have traumatized us. You are harming us," everyone else seemed to be saying.

He wondered about it, tried to think about it. Natalie's presence gave him a respite every day. When he sat next to her in the office, he breathed freely, the tension inside him relaxing. Because she was simple and straightforward. She said little, but her eyes spoke often. "It's okay. I love you. I'm not afraid to love you," her eyes said.

But he was constantly thinking about others. The accountant refused to look him in the eye or speak with his new, refined politeness. He had already made a habit of discussing John Webster and Natalie's affair with his wife every evening. He now felt awkward in the presence of his employer, and the same was true for the two older women in the office. As he passed through the office, the youngest of the three still occasionally looked up and smiled at him.

Of course, in the modern world of people, no one can do anything in isolation. Sometimes, when John Webster walked home late at night after spending several hours with Natalie, he stopped and looked around. The street was empty, the lights were out in many houses. He raised both hands and looked at them. Not long ago, they had hugged a woman tightly, and this woman was not the one he had lived with for so many years, but a new woman he had found. His arms held her tightly, and her arms held him. There was joy in it. Joy ran through their bodies during their long embrace. They sighed deeply. Had the breath knocked from their lungs poisoned the air that others were meant to breathe? As for the woman they called his wife, she did not want such an embrace, and even if she did, she could neither take nor give. A thought occurred to him. "If you love in a world where there is no love, you confront others with the sin of not loving," he thought.

The streets, lined with houses where people lived, were dark. It was already past eleven o'clock, but there was no need to rush home. When he went to bed, he couldn't sleep. "It would be better to walk for another hour," he decided, and when he reached the corner that led to his own street, he didn't turn around but continued on, heading far out to the edge of town and back again. His feet made a sharp sound on the stone sidewalks. Occasionally, he would meet a man heading home, and as they passed, the man would look at him with surprise and something akin to distrust in his eyes. He would pass by and then turn to look back. "What are you doing abroad? Why aren't you at home and in bed with your wife?" the man seemed to ask.

What was the man really thinking? Were there many thoughts going on in all the dark houses along the street, or were people simply entering them to eat and sleep, as he always did in his own home? In his mind's eye, he quickly saw a multitude of people lying on beds raised high into the air. The walls of the houses receded from them.

One year earlier, a house on his street had caught fire, and the front wall had collapsed. When the fire was extinguished, someone walked down the street, revealing two upstairs rooms where people had lived for many years. Everything was slightly charred and burned, but otherwise intact. Each room contained a bed, one or two chairs, a square piece of furniture with drawers for storing shirts or dresses, and a closet off to the side for other clothing.

The house below was completely burned, and the staircase was destroyed. When the fire broke out, people must have fled the rooms like frightened and alarmed insects. A man and a woman lived in one room. A dress lay on the floor, a pair of half-burnt trousers hung over the back of a chair, and in the second room, apparently occupied by a woman, there was no sign of a man's attire. The scene made John Webster reflect on his family life. "It might have been like this if my wife and I hadn't stopped sleeping together. This could have been our room, and next door our daughter Jane's room," he thought the morning after the fire, passing by and stopping with other curious loiterers to watch the scene above.

And now, as he walked alone through the sleeping streets of his city, his imagination managed to strip away every wall from every house, and he walked as if through some strange city of the dead. That his imagination could flare up like this, running through entire streets of houses and erasing walls like the wind sways the branches of trees, was a new and living miracle to him. "I have been given a life-giving gift. For many years I was dead, and now I am alive," he thought. To give free rein to his imagination, he stepped off the sidewalk and walked down the center of the street. The houses lay before him in complete silence, and the late moon appeared, forming black puddles under the trees. Houses, stripped of their walls, stood on either side of him.

In the houses, people slept in their beds. So many bodies lay and slept close together, babies slept in cribs, boys sometimes slept two or three to a bed, young women slept with their hair loose.

While they slept, they dreamed. What were they dreaming about? He had a deep desire for what had happened to him and Natalie to happen to them all. After all, making love in the field was merely a symbol of something more meaningful than the simple act of two bodies embracing and the transfer of the seeds of life from one to another.

A great hope flared within him. "The time will come when love, like a sheet of fire, will sweep through cities and towns. It will tear down walls. It will tear down ugly houses. It will tear ugly garments from the bodies of men and women. They will rebuild and build beautifully," he declared aloud. As he walked and spoke thus, he suddenly felt like a young prophet, come from some distant, foreign, pure land to visit people on the streets with the blessing of his presence. He stopped and, putting his hands to his head, laughed out loud at the picture he imagined. "You'd think I was another John the Baptist, living in the desert, feeding on locusts and wild honey, and not a washing machine manufacturer in Wisconsin," he thought. A window of one of the houses was open, and he heard quiet voices. "Well, I better go home before they lock me up for being crazy," he thought, leaving the road and turning off the street at the nearest corner.

There were no such moments of mirth in the office during the day. Only Natalie seemed to be in complete control of the situation. "She has strong legs and strong feet. She knows how to stand her ground," thought John Webster, sitting at his desk and looking at her.

She wasn't indifferent to what was happening to her. Sometimes, when he suddenly looked up at her, and she didn't know he was looking, he saw something that convinced him her lonely hours were no longer very happy. His eyes tightened. Without a doubt, she would have to face her own little hell.

Yet she went to work every day, outwardly unperturbed. "That old Irishwoman, with her temper, her drinking, and her love of loud, picturesque blasphemy, managed to drive her daughter into the path of a seedling," he decided. It was a good thing Natalie was so level-headed. "God knows we may need all her poise before we end our lives," he decided. Women had a kind of strength few understood. They could withstand a slip-up. Now Natalie did his work, and her own. When a letter arrived, she answered it, and when a decision had to be made, she made it. Sometimes she looked at him as if to say, "Your work, the cleaning you'll have to do in your own house anyway, will be harder than anything I'll have to deal with. You've let me handle these minor details of our lives now. It will make the waiting time easier."

She never said anything like that in words, being a person not given to words, but there was always something in her eyes that let him know what she wanted to say.

After that first lovemaking in the field, they were no longer lovers while they remained in the Wisconsin town, although they went for walks together every evening. After dinner at her mother's house, where she had to pass under the questioning gaze of her sister, a teacher, also a silent woman, and endure the fiery outburst of her mother, who came to the door and shouted questions after her as she walked down the street, Natalie returned along the railroad tracks and found John Webster waiting for her in the dark at the office door. Then they boldly walked through the streets and out of town, and once on a country road, they walked hand in hand, mostly in silence.

And day by day, in the office and in the Websters' home, the feeling of tension became more and more evident.

At home, when he arrived late that night and crept into his room, he had the feeling that both his wife and daughter were lying awake, thinking about him, wondering about him, wondering what strange thing had happened that had suddenly made him a new person. From what he had seen in their eyes during the day, he realized they had both suddenly noticed him. He was no longer just a breadwinner, a man who came in and out of his home like a workhorse in and out of a stable. Now, as he lay in his bed, behind the two walls of his room and the two closed doors, voices awoke within them, small, frightened voices. His mind was accustomed to thinking about walls and doors. "One night the walls will collapse, and two doors will open. I must be ready for the time when that happens," he thought.

His wife was one of those people who, when upset, hurt, or angry, would plunge into an ocean of silence. Perhaps the whole town knew about his evening stroll with Natalie Schwartz. If news of it had reached his wife, she wouldn't have told her daughter. A thick silence reigned in the house, and the daughter knew something was wrong. There had been times like this before. The daughter would have been afraid, perhaps it would have been simply a fear of change, of something about to happen that would disrupt the measured and regular flow of days.

One afternoon, two weeks after making love with Natalie, he walked toward downtown, intending to stop at a restaurant for lunch, but instead walked straight along the tracks for almost a mile. Then, unsure of the impulse that had brought him there, he returned to the office. Natalie and everyone else, except the youngest of the three women, had left. Perhaps the air of the place had become so heavy with unexpressed thoughts and feelings that none of them wanted to remain there when they weren't working. The day was bright and warm, a golden-red Wisconsin day in early October.

He entered the inner office, stood there for a moment, looking around vaguely, and then emerged again. The young woman sitting there stood up. Was she going to tell him something about her affair with Natalie? He, too, stopped and stood looking at her. She was a small woman with sweet, feminine lips, gray eyes, and a certain weariness evident in her entire being. What did she want? Did she want him to continue the affair with Natalie, which she undoubtedly knew about, or did she want him to stop? "It would be terrible if she tried to bring it up," he thought, and suddenly, for some inexplicable reason, he realized she wouldn't.

They stood there for a moment, gazing into each other's eyes, and that gaze, too, was like making love. It was very strange, and that moment later gave him much to think about. In the future, his life would undoubtedly be filled with many thoughts. Before him stood a woman he didn't know at all, and in their own way, they were lovers. If this hadn't happened between him and Natalie so recently, if he hadn't already been filled with it, something similar could easily have happened between him and this woman.

In fact, the two people stood there, looking at each other, for only a moment. Then she sat up, a little confused, and he quickly left.

There was a certain joy in him now. "There"s a lot of love in the world. It can take many paths to express itself. The woman out there longs for love, and there"s something beautiful and generous about her. She knows that Natalie and I are in love, and in some strange way that I can"t yet understand, she"s given herself over to it until it, too, has become an almost physical experience for her. There are a thousand things in life that no one truly understands. Love has as many branches as a tree."

He walked up the main street of the city and turned into a section he wasn't very familiar with. He passed a small shop near a Catholic church, the kind patronized by devout Catholics, which sold figurines of Christ on the cross, Christ lying at the foot of the cross with bleeding wounds, the Virgin Mary standing with her arms crossed, looking modestly downwards, blessed candles, candlesticks, and the like. He stood in front of the shop window for a while, examining the figurines on display, then went in and bought a small framed painting of the Virgin Mary, a supply of yellow candles, and two glass candlesticks shaped like crosses and holding small gilded figures of Christ on the cross.

Frankly, the Virgin Mary's figure was little different from Natalie's. A certain quiet strength was felt about her. She stood, holding a lily in her right hand, and the thumb and index finger of her left hand lightly touched a huge heart pinned to her chest with a dagger. Across the heart was a wreath of five red roses.

John Webster stood for a moment, looking into the Virgin's eyes, then bought his things and hurried out of the store. Then he boarded the tram and went home. His wife and daughter were out, so he went up to his room and put the packages in the closet. When he came down, his maid, Catherine, was waiting for him. "Can I get you something to eat today?" she asked with a smile.

He didn't stay for dinner, but it was okay if he was asked to stay. At least, she remembered that day when she stood next to him while he ate. He had enjoyed being alone with her that day. Perhaps she felt the same way, and she enjoyed being with him.

He walked straight out of the city, took a country road, and soon turned off into a small forest. He sat on a log for two hours, gazing at the trees ablaze with color. The sun shone brightly, and after a while, the squirrels and birds became less aware of his presence, and the animal and bird life, which had quieted with his arrival, resumed.

It was the day after the night he'd walked the streets between rows of houses whose walls his imagination had torn down. "Tonight I'll tell Natalie about this, and also about what I plan to do at home, in my room. I'll tell her, and she won't say anything. She's strange. When she doesn't understand, she believes. There's something in her that accepts life, like these trees," he thought.

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III


A STRANGE VIEW - The evening ceremony began in John Webster's corner room on the second floor of his home. Upon entering the house, he quietly walked upstairs and into his room. He then removed all his clothes and hung them in the closet. When he was completely naked, he took out a small image of the Virgin Mary and placed it on a sort of chest of drawers standing in the corner between two windows. On the chest of drawers, he also placed two candlesticks with images of Christ on the cross. He placed two yellow candles in them and lit them.

Undressing in the dark, he couldn't see the room or himself until he saw them by candlelight. Then he began pacing, thinking about whatever thoughts came to his mind.

"I have no doubt that I am mad," he said to himself, "but while I am, it may well be a purposeful madness. I do not like either this room or the clothes I am wearing. Now that I have taken off my clothes, perhaps I can somehow clean the room a little. As for my wandering the streets and letting my fantasy play with many people in their homes, that, in turn, will also be good, but right now my problem is this house. Many years of foolish living have passed in this house and in this room. Now I will continue this ceremony; I will strip naked and walk back and forth here before the Virgin Mary until neither my wife nor my daughter can remain silent. One night they will burst in here completely unexpectedly, and then I will say what I must say before I leave with Natalie.

"As for you, my Maiden, I dare say I won't offend you," he said aloud, turning and bowing to the woman in her frame. She stared at him, as she might have stared at Natalie, and he continued to smile at her. Now it seemed perfectly clear to him what his life's path would be. He slowly considered everything. In a sense, he didn't need much sleep at the time. Simply letting go, as he did, was a kind of rest.

Meanwhile, he paced the room, naked and barefoot, trying to plan his future life. "I admit I'm currently insane, and I hope I stay that way," he told himself. After all, it was perfectly clear that the sane people around him didn't enjoy life as much as he did. The point was, he'd brought the Virgin Mary naked to him and placed her beneath the candles. For one thing, the candles cast a soft, radiant light throughout the room. The clothes he'd habitually worn, which he'd learned to dislike because they'd been sewn not for himself but for some impersonal being in some clothing factory, now hung, out of sight, in the closet. "The gods have been kind to me. I'm no longer very young, but somehow I haven't allowed my body to grow fat and coarse," he thought, stepping into the circle of candles and gazing long and earnestly at himself.

In the future, after those nights when his pacing attracted the attention of his wife and daughter until they had to break in, he would take Natalie with him and leave. He had saved himself some money, enough to last them a few months. The rest would be for his wife and daughter. After he and Natalie left the city, they would go somewhere, perhaps to the West. Then they would settle down somewhere and earn a living.

He himself, more than anything, longed to give free rein to his inner impulses. "It must be that when I was a boy and my imagination played wildly with all the life around me, I was destined to be someone other than the dull lump I"ve been all these years. In Natalie"s presence, as in the presence of a tree or a field, I can be myself. I dare say that sometimes I"ll have to be a little careful, for I don"t want to be declared crazy and locked away somewhere, but Natalie will help me with that. In a way, letting go of myself will be an expression for both of us. In her own way, she, too, was locked in a prison. Walls have been erected around her, too.

"Perhaps, you see, there is something of the poet in me, and Natalie should have a poet for a lover.

"The truth is, I will somehow bring grace and meaning into my life. After all, that's what life is meant to be about."

"It wouldn't really be so bad if I didn't accomplish anything important in the few years of life I have left. When it comes down to it, achievements aren't the most important thing in life.

"As things stand here, in this city and in every other city I've ever been, things are in a great deal of disarray. Everywhere, life is lived aimlessly. Men and women either spend their lives going in and out of houses and factories, or they own houses and factories, live their lives, and finally face death and the end of life without having lived at all."

He continued to smile to himself and his thoughts as he paced the room, occasionally stopping to make a graceful bow to the Virgin. "I hope you're a true virgin," he said. "I brought you into this room and to my naked body because I thought you'd be like that. You see, being a virgin means you can't have anything but pure thoughts."

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IV


Quite often, during the day, and after the nightly ceremony in his room had begun, John Webster had moments of fear. "Suppose," he thought, "my wife and daughter were to peer through the keyhole into my room one night and decide to lock me in instead of coming here and giving me a chance to talk to them. In this situation, I would be unable to carry out my plans unless I could bring them both into the room without inviting them in."

He was acutely aware that what would happen in his room would be terrible for his wife. Perhaps she wouldn't be able to bear it. Cruelty developed within him. He rarely entered his study during the day anymore, and when he did, he stayed there for only a few minutes. Every day, he took long walks through the countryside, sat under trees, wandered forest paths, and in the evening, strolled silently with Natalie, also outside the city. The days passed in the quiet splendor of autumn. A pleasant new responsibility emerged-simply to remain alive when you felt so alive.

One day, he climbed a small hill, from whose summit he could see the factory chimneys of his town beyond the fields. A soft haze lay over the forests and fields. The voices within him no longer raged, but quietly conversed.

As for his daughter, he needed, if possible, to make her aware of the reality of life. "I owe her one," he thought. "Though what is about to happen will be terribly hard for her mother, it may bring Jane back to life. After all, the dead must give way to the living. When I went to bed with that woman, my Jane's mother, long ago, I took on a certain responsibility. As it turns out, her going to bed may not have been the most wonderful thing in the world, but it was done, and the result was this child, who is no longer a child but has become a woman in her physical life. By helping to give her that physical life, I must now try to give her at least this other life, this inner life."

He looked down across the fields toward the city. When the work he still had to do was done, he would leave and spend the rest of his life moving among people, looking at people, thinking about them and their lives. Perhaps he would become a writer. That's how it would turn out.

He rose from his spot on the grass at the top of the hill and walked down the road that led back to town and his evening stroll with Natalie. It would soon be evening now. "Anyway, I'll never preach to anyone. If by chance I ever become a writer, I'll try to tell people only what I've seen and heard in my life, and beyond that, I'll spend my time walking back and forth, looking and listening," he thought.

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BOOK THREE

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I


ND ON THAT That same night, after he had sat on the hill and thought about his life and what he would do with what was left of it, and after he had gone for his usual evening walk with Natalie, the doors of his room opened and his wife and daughter came in.

It was about half past eleven, and for an hour he had been quietly pacing back and forth before the image of the Virgin Mary. The candles were lit. His feet made a soft, cat-like sound on the floor. There was something strange and frightening about hearing that sound in the quiet house.

The door to his wife's room opened, and she stopped, looking at him. Her tall figure filled the doorway, her hands clutching the sides. She was very pale, her eyes fixed and intent. "John," she said hoarsely, then repeated the word. It seemed she wanted to say more, but she couldn't. There was a sharp sense of a futile struggle.

It was clear she wasn't very beautiful standing there. "Life pays people. Turn away from life, and it will equal you. When people don't live, they die, and when they're dead, they look dead," he thought. He smiled at her, then turned away and stood listening.

It came-the sound he'd been waiting for. There was a commotion in his daughter's room. He'd been so hopeful that everything would work out the way he wanted, even had a premonition that it would happen this very night. He thought he understood what had happened. For over a week, this storm had been raging over his wife's ocean of silence. It was the same prolonged, hurt silence that followed their first attempt at lovemaking and after he'd spoken a few harsh, hurtful words to her. Gradually, it had worn away, but this new thing was something else. He couldn't wear away like this. What he'd prayed for had happened. She was forced to meet him here, in the place he'd prepared.

And now his daughter, who had also lain awake night after night, hearing strange noises in her father's room, would be forced to come. He felt almost gay. That evening, he told Natalie that he thought his struggle might reach a critical point that night, and asked her to be prepared for him. The train was scheduled to leave the city at four in the morning. "Maybe we can make it through this," he said.

"I will wait for you," said Natalie, and there stood his wife, pale and trembling, as if about to fall, and looking from the Virgin Mary between her candles to his naked body, and then there was the sound of someone moving in his daughter's room.

And then her door quietly opened an inch, and he immediately walked over and swung it open completely. "Come in," he said. "Both of you come in. Come and sit on the bed together. I have something to say to you both." His voice was commanding.

There was no doubt that both women, at least for the moment, were completely terrified and frightened. How pale they both were. The daughter covered her face with her hands and ran across the room to sit upright, holding onto the railing at the foot of the bed, one hand still pressed to her eyes, while his wife approached and fell facedown on the bed. For a while, she let out a continuous series of soft moans, then buried her face in the bedclothes and fell silent. Clearly, both women thought he was completely insane.

John Webster began pacing back and forth in front of them. "What an idea," he thought, looking down at his bare feet. He smiled, looking back at his daughter's frightened face. "Hito, tito," he whispered to himself. "Now don't lose your head. You can handle this. Keep your head on your shoulders, my boy." Some strange quirk made him raise both his hands, as if bestowing some kind of blessing on the two women. "I've gone crazy, come out of my shell, but I don't care," he mused.

He turned to his daughter. "Well, Jane," he began, speaking with great seriousness and in a clear, quiet voice, "I can see that you are frightened and upset by what is happening here, and I don't blame you.

The truth is, this was all planned. For a week now, you've been lying awake in your bed in the next room, hearing me walking around, and your mother is lying in that room. I wanted to tell you and your mother something, but as you know, conversation has never been a habit in this house.

"The truth is, I wanted to scare you, and I think I succeeded."

He crossed the room and sat on the bed between his daughter and his wife's heavy, inert body. They were both dressed in nightgowns, and his daughter's hair fell over her shoulders. It looked like his wife's hair when he married her. Her hair had been exactly that golden yellow back then, and when the sun shone on it, it sometimes showed copper and brown highlights.

"I'm leaving this house tonight. I'm not going to live with your mother anymore," he said, leaning forward and looking at the floor.

He sat up straight and looked at his daughter's body for a long time. It was young and slender. She wouldn't have been exceptionally tall like her mother, but would have been a woman of average height. He studied her body carefully. Once, when Jane was six, she had been ill for almost a year, and now he remembered how dear she had been to him all that time. It had been a year when business had been bad, and he thought he would go bankrupt at any moment, but he had managed to keep a qualified nurse in the house throughout the entire period, until he returned from the factory at noon and went to his daughter's room.

There was no fever. What had happened? He threw the blanket off the child's body and looked at it. She had been very thin then, and her bones were clearly visible. There was only a tiny bony structure, over which light white skin was stretched.

The doctors said it was due to malnutrition, that the food they were giving the child wasn't satisfying him, and they couldn't find suitable food. The mother couldn't feed the child. Sometimes, during this time, he would stand for long periods, looking at the child, whose tired, listless eyes looked back at him. Tears would flow from his own eyes.

It was very strange. From that time on, and after she suddenly began to recover and become strong again, he somehow lost all connection with his daughter. Where was he all this time, and where was she? They were two people, and all these years they had lived in the same house. What was it that separated people from each other? He looked closely at his daughter's body, now clearly defined under a thin nightgown. Her hips were quite wide, like a woman's, and her shoulders were narrow. How her body trembled. How afraid she was. "I am a stranger to her, and that's not surprising," he thought. He leaned forward and looked at her bare feet. They were small and well-shaped. Someday a lover would come to kiss them. Someday a man would treat her body the same way he now treated the strong, firm body of Natalie Schwartz.

His silence seemed to awaken his wife, who turned and looked at him. Then she sat up in bed, and he jumped to his feet and stood before her. "John," she repeated in a hoarse whisper, as if calling him back from some dark, mysterious place. Her mouth opened and closed two or three times, like a fish out of water. He turned away, no longer paying attention to her, and she sank her face back into the bedclothes.

"Long ago, when Jane was just a little girl, I just wanted life to come into her, and that's what I want now. That's all I want. That's what I need now," thought John Webster.

He began pacing the room again, experiencing a sense of wonderful leisure. Nothing would happen. Now his wife was once again immersed in an ocean of silence. She lay on the bed, saying nothing, doing nothing, until he finished what he wanted to say and left. His daughter was now blind and mute with fear, but perhaps he could rid her of it. "I must take this matter slowly, without rushing, and tell her everything," he thought. The frightened girl removed her hand from her eyes and looked at him. Her mouth trembled, and then a word formed. "Father," she said invitingly.

He smiled encouragingly at her and gestured toward the Virgin Mary, who sat solemnly between two candles. "Look there for a moment while I speak to you," he said.

He immediately launched into an explanation of his situation.

"Something's broken," he said. "It's a habit of life in this house. You won't understand it now, but someday you will."

"For many years I was not in love with this woman who was your mother and my wife, and now I have fallen in love with another woman. Her name is Natalie, and tonight, after we talk, we will move in together.

Impulsively, he went and knelt on the floor at his daughter's feet, then quickly jumped up again. "No, this is wrong. I won't ask her for forgiveness; I have something to tell her," he thought.

"Well," he began again, "you'll think I'm crazy, and perhaps I am. I don't know. In any case, when I'm here in this room, with the Maiden and without any clothes, the strangeness of it all will make you think I'm crazy. Your mind will cling to that thought. It will want to cling to that thought," he said aloud. "For a while, it might be."

He seemed perplexed by how to say everything he wanted to say. This whole thing, the scene in the room, the conversation with his daughter that he had so carefully planned, would prove more difficult than he had expected. He had thought that in his nakedness, in the presence of the Virgin Mary and her candles, there would be some final meaning. Had he really reversed the scene? He wondered, continuing to stare with worried eyes at his daughter's face. It meant nothing to him. She was simply frightened and clinging to the railing at the foot of the bed, as a person suddenly thrown into the sea might cling to a floating piece of wood. His wife's body, lying on the bed, had a strange, frozen appearance. Well, for years there had been something hard and cold in the woman's body. Perhaps she had died. That was bound to happen. It would be something he had not counted on. It was rather strange that now, when he was faced with the problem before him, his wife's presence had so little to do with the matter at hand.

He stopped looking at his daughter and began pacing, talking as he went. In a calm, if slightly tense, voice, he began trying to explain, first and foremost, the presence of the Virgin Mary and the candles in the room. Now he was talking to someone, not his daughter, but a person like himself. He immediately felt relief. "Well, now. This is the ticket. This is how it should be," he thought. He talked for a long time and paced back and forth. It was better not to think too much. He had to cling to the faith that what he had so recently found in himself and in Natalie was somewhere alive in her too. Until that morning, when this whole story between him and Natalie began, his life was like a beach, littered with trash and lying in darkness. The beach was covered with old, dead, submerged trees and stumps. The twisted roots of old trees stuck out into the darkness. Before him lay a heavy, slow, inert sea of life.

And then a storm blew inside, and now the beach was clean. Could he keep it clean? Could he keep it clean, so it would sparkle in the morning light?

He was trying to tell his daughter Jane something about the life he had lived with her in the house, and why, before he could talk to her, he had been forced to do something unusual, like bring the Virgin Mary into his room and take off his own clothes, clothes that, when he wore them, made him seem to her simply as someone going in and out of the house, a provider of bread and clothing for himself, which she had always known.

Speaking very clearly and slowly, as if afraid of losing his way, he told her something about his life as a businessman, and how little real interest he had ever had in the affairs that occupied his days.

He forgot about the Virgin Mary and for a moment spoke only of himself. He came over again, sat down next to her, and as he spoke, boldly placed his hand on her leg. Her body was cold beneath her thin nightgown.

"I was as young as you are now, Jane, when I met the woman who became your mother and my wife," he explained. "You must try to adjust your mind to the idea that both your mother and I were once young people like you.

"I imagine your mother was about the same age as you are now, at your age. She would have been a little taller, of course. I remember her body being very long and slender back then. I thought it was very cute then.

"I have a reason to remember your mother's body. We first met through our bodies. At first, there was nothing else, only our naked bodies. We had it, and we denied it. Perhaps everything could have been built on that, but we were too ignorant or too cowardly. It was because of what happened between your mother and me that I brought you to me naked and brought here an image of the Virgin Mary. I have a desire to somehow make flesh sacred for you."

His voice became soft and reminiscent, and he removed his hand from his daughter's leg and touched her cheeks, then her hair. He was making love to her openly now, and she was somewhat swayed by it. He leaned over and, taking one of her hands, squeezed it tightly.

"You see, we met with your mother at a friend's house. Although I hadn't thought about that meeting for years until a few weeks ago, when I suddenly fell in love with another woman, at this moment it's as clear in my mind as if it had happened here, in this house, tonight.

"The whole affair, which I now wish to tell you in detail, took place right here, in this city, in the house of a man who was my friend at the time. He is no longer alive, but back then we were always together. He had a sister, a year younger than him, whom I loved, but although we often went out together, we were not in love. Afterwards, she got married and left the city.

"There was another young woman, the same woman who is now your mother, who came to this house to visit my friend's sister, and since they lived on the other side of town, and since my father and mother were out of town visiting, I was asked to go there too. It was supposed to be a special occasion of sorts. Christmas break was approaching, and there were supposed to be a lot of parties and dancing.

"Something happened to me and your mother that, in essence, wasn't so different from what happened to you and me here this evening," he said sharply. He felt a little agitated again and thought he'd better get up and go. Releasing his daughter's hand, he jumped to his feet and paced nervously for a few minutes. All this, the frightened fear of him that kept appearing in his daughter's eyes, and the inert, silent presence of his wife, made what he wanted to do more difficult than he'd imagined. He looked at his wife's body, lying silent and motionless on the bed. How many times had he seen the same body lying just like that? She had long ago submitted to him and had been submitting to the life within him ever since. The figure his mind had created, "an ocean of silence," suited her well. She was always silent. At best, all she had learned from life was a half-resentful habit of submission. Even when she spoke to him, she didn't really speak. It was indeed strange that Natalie, from her silence, could tell him so many things, while he and this woman, in all the years of their life together, had said nothing that really concerned each other's lives.

He looked from the motionless body of the old woman to his daughter and smiled. "I can enter her," he thought triumphantly. "She can't close me off, she won't close me off." Something in his daughter's face told him what was going on in her mind. The young woman now sat, gazing at the figure of the Virgin Mary, and it was clear that the mute fear that had so completely overwhelmed her when she was abruptly ushered into the room and the presence of the naked man was beginning to subside. Grasp. Despite herself, she thought. There was a man, her own father, walking around the room naked as a tree in winter, stopping every now and then to look at her, the dim light, the Virgin Mary with the burning candles below, and the figure of her mother lying on the bed. Her father was trying to tell her some story she wanted to hear. In some way, it concerned herself, some vital part of herself. There was no doubt that it was wrong, terribly wrong, to tell this story and listen to it, but she wanted to hear it now.

"After all, I was right," thought John Webster. "What happened here could make or break a woman Jane's age, but either way, it will all work out well. She has a touch of cruelty in her, too. There's a certain health in her eyes now. She wants to know. After this experience, she might no longer be afraid of the dead. It's the dead that always frighten the living."

He continued the thread of his story, walking back and forth in the dim light.

"Something happened to your mother and me. I went to my friend's house early in the morning, and your mother was supposed to arrive by train later in the afternoon. There were two trains: one at noon, the other around five, and since she had to get up in the middle of the night to catch the first train, we all assumed she would arrive later. My friend and I had planned to spend the day rabbit hunting in the fields outside of town, and we returned to his house around four.

"We'll have plenty of time to bathe and dress before the guest arrives. When we got home, my friend's mother and sister had already left, and we thought the house was empty except for the servants. In fact, the guest, you see, had arrived by train at noon, but we didn't know that, and the servant didn't tell us. We hurried upstairs to undress, then went downstairs and into the barn to bathe. People didn't have baths in their houses at that time, so the servant filled two tubs with water and placed them in the barn. After filling the tubs, she disappeared, out of the way.

"We were running around the house naked, just like I'm doing here now. What happened was I came out of the shed downstairs naked and climbed the stairs up to the top of the house, heading for my room. The day had warmed up, and it was almost dark now."

And again John Webster came over, sat down with his daughter on the bed and took her hand.

"I walked up the stairs, down the hall, and opening the door, walked across the room to what I thought was my bed, where I laid out the clothes I had brought that morning in a bag.

"You see, what happened was this: your mother got out of bed in her town at midnight the night before, and when she arrived at my friend's house, his mother and sister insisted that she undress and get into bed. She didn't unpack her bag, but she threw off her clothes and crawled under the sheets, as naked as I was when I entered her room. As the day had grown warm, I suppose she became somewhat restless and, in her fuss, threw the bed linen aside.

"She was lying, you see, completely naked on the bed, in the dim light, and as I had no shoes on my feet, I made no sound when I went in to her.

"It was an amazing moment for me. I walked right up to the bed, and she was just inches away from my arms, hanging next to me. It was the most beautiful moment your mother had ever had with me. As I said, she was very slender then, and her long body was as white as the sheets of the bed. At that time, I had never been near a naked woman. I had just come from the bath. You see, it was like a wedding.

"How long I stood there looking at her, I don't know, but either way, she knew I was there. Her eyes rose to me in a dream, like a swimmer emerging from the sea. Perhaps, perhaps, she was dreaming of me, or of some other man.

"At least for a moment, she wasn't at all scared or frightened. You see, it truly was our wedding moment.

"Oh, if only we had known how to live to see that moment! I stood and looked at her, and she sat on the bed and looked at me. There must have been something alive in our eyes. I didn"t know then all that I felt, but much later, sometimes when I was walking in the village or riding on the train, I thought. Well, what did I think? You see, it was evening. I mean, afterward, sometimes when I was alone, when it was evening and I was alone, I would look into the distance beyond the hills, or see the river leaving a white streak below when I stood on the cliff. I mean, I spent all these years trying to get that moment back, and now it"s dead."

John Webster threw up his hands in disgust and quickly rose from the bed. His wife's body began to stir, and now she rose. For a moment, her rather enormous figure writhed on the bed, looking like some enormous animal, on all fours, sick and trying to get up and walk.

And then she stood up, planted her feet firmly on the floor, and slowly walked out of the room, not looking at the two of them. Her husband stood with his back against the wall and watched her go. "Well, that's the end for her," he thought gloomily. The door leading to her room slowly approached him. It was now closed. "Some doors, too, must be closed forever," he told himself.

He was still close to his daughter, and she wasn't afraid of him. He went to the closet, took out his clothes, and began to dress. He realized this had been a terrible moment. Well, he had played the cards he held in his hand to the limit. He was naked. Now he had to put on his clothes, clothes that he felt were meaningless and utterly unattractive because the unknown hands that had created them had been indifferent to the desire to create beauty. An absurd thought occurred to him. "Does my daughter have a sense of the moment? Will she help me now?" he asked himself.

And then his heart leapt. His daughter Jane had done a wonderful thing. While he was hurriedly dressing, she had turned and thrown herself face down on the bed, in the same position her mother had been in just a moment before.

"I walked out of her room into the hallway," he explained. "My friend had come upstairs and was standing in the hallway, turning on a lamp attached to a bracket on the wall. You can probably imagine what was going through my head. My friend looked at me, still unaware. You see, he didn"t yet know this woman was in the house, but he saw me leave the room. He had just turned on the lamp when I went out and closed the door behind me, and the light fell on my face. Something must have frightened him. We never spoke about it again. As it turned out, everyone was confused and bewildered by what had happened and what was yet to happen.

"I must have walked out of the room like a man walking in a dream. What was going through my mind? What was going through my head as I stood next to her naked body, and even before? It was a situation that might never happen again. You just saw your mother walk out of this room. I dare say you wonder what was going through her mind. I can tell you. There is nothing in her head. She has turned her mind into a void where nothing important can enter. She has dedicated her entire life to this, as, I dare say, have most people.

"As for that evening when I stood in the corridor, and the light of that lamp shone on me, and my friend looked on and wondered what was the matter - that is what I must finally try to tell you about."

From time to time he would be partially dressed, and Jane would be sitting on the bed again. He came over and sat next to her in his sleeveless shirt. Much later, she remembered how unusually young he had looked at that moment. It seemed he was determined to make her fully understand everything that had happened. "Well, you see," he said slowly, "that although she had seen my friend and his sister before, she had never seen me. At the same time, she knew that I was to remain in the house during her visit. No doubt she was thinking of the strange young man she was about to meet, and it is true that I was thinking of her, too."

Even at that moment when I entered her presence naked, she was a living being in my mind. And when she approached me, you see, waking up, before she could even think, I was a living being to her then. What living beings we were to each other, we dared to comprehend only for a moment. I know it now, but for many years after it happened, I didn't know and was only confused.

"I was also confused when I walked out into the hallway and faced my friend. You understand that he didn't yet know she was in the house.

I needed to tell him something, and it was like telling publicly the secret of what happens between two people in a moment of love.

"It's impossible, you understand," and so I stood there, stuttering, and with each passing minute it got worse. A guilty expression must have appeared on my face, and I immediately felt guilty, although when I was in that room, standing by the bed, as I explained, I didn't feel guilty at all, quite the contrary.

"I walked into this room naked and stood next to the bed, and this woman is there now, all naked."

I said.-'

"My friend was, of course, amazed. "What woman?" he asked.

"I tried to explain. 'Your sister's friend. She's there, naked, on the bed, and I came in and stood next to her. She arrived on the train at noon,' I said.

"You see, I seemed to know everything about everything. I felt guilty. That"s what was wrong with me. I suppose I stammered and acted embarrassed. "Now he"ll never believe it was an accident. He"ll think I was up to something strange," I thought immediately. Whether he ever had all or any of the thoughts that crossed my mind at that moment and for which I seemed to blame him, I never knew. After that moment, I was always a stranger in that house. You see, for what I did to be perfectly clear would have required a lot of whispered explanations, which I never offered, and even after your mother and I were married, things were never the same between my friend and me.

"And so I stood there, stammering, and he looked at me with a puzzled and frightened look. The house was very quiet, and I remember the light from the lamp hanging on the wall falling on our two naked bodies. My friend, the man who witnessed that moment of vital drama in my life, is now dead. He died about eight years ago, and your mother and I dressed in our best clothes and rode in a carriage to his funeral, and then to the cemetery to watch his body being buried, but at that moment he was very much alive. And I will always continue to think of him as he was then. We had been wandering through the fields all day, and he, like me, you remember, had just come from the bathhouse. His young body was very slender and strong, and it made a luminous white mark on the dark wall of the corridor where he stood.

"Perhaps we both expected something more to happen, expected something more to happen? We stopped speaking to each other and stood in silence. Perhaps he was simply struck by my announcement of what I had just done, and by something a little odd in the way I told him. Normally, after such an incident, there would have been some comical confusion, it would have been passed off as some secret and delicious joke, but I killed any possibility of it being perceived in that spirit by the way I looked and acted when I came out to him. I suppose I was simultaneously too and not enough aware of the significance of what I had done.

"And we just stood there in silence, looking at each other, and then the door downstairs leading to the street opened, and his mother and sister walked in. They had taken advantage of their guest's bedtime to go shopping in the business district.

"As for me, the hardest thing to explain is what was going on inside me at that moment. I had a hard time pulling myself together, you can be sure of that. What I think now, at this moment, is that then, in that moment long ago, when I stood naked in that hallway next to my friend, something left me that I couldn't immediately take back.

"Perhaps when you grow up, you will understand what you cannot understand now."

John Webster stared long and hard at his daughter, who stared back at him. For both of them, the story he was telling had become rather impersonal. The woman who had been so closely connected to them both as wife and mother had dropped out of the story entirely, just as she had stumbled out of the room just moments before.

"You see," he said slowly, "what I didn't understand then, what couldn't be understood then, was that I had actually lost my temper in love with a woman on a bed in a room. No one understands that something like that can happen, just a thought flashing through the mind. What I'm beginning to believe now, and I'd like to cement this in your mind, young woman, is that such moments happen in all lives, but of all the millions of people who are born and live long or short lives, only a few of them ever truly come to know what life is. You see, it's a kind of eternal denial of life."

"I was stunned when I stood in the hallway outside that woman"s room many years ago. At that moment I described to you, something flickered between me and that woman when she approached me in my dream. Something deep within us was touched, and I couldn"t quickly recover. There had been a marriage, something very private for both of us, and by a happy coincidence it had become a sort of public affair. I suppose things would have turned out the same if we had just stayed in the house. We were very young. Sometimes it seems to me that all people in the world are very young. They cannot carry the fire of life when it flares up in their hands.

"And in the room, behind the closed door, the woman must have been experiencing something similar to me at that moment. She had sat up and was now sitting on the edge of the bed. She listened to the sudden silence of the house, while my friend and I listened. It may sound absurd, but it is nevertheless true that my friend's mother and sister, who had just entered the house, were both, in some unconscious way, also affected as they stood below in their coats and also listened.

"It was then, at that moment, in the dark room, that the woman began to sob like a broken child. Something absolutely overwhelming had come over her, and she couldn"t contain it. Of course, the immediate cause of her tears and the way she would explain her grief was shame. That"s what she believed had happened to her: she had been placed in a shameful, ridiculous position. She was a young girl. I dare say that thoughts of what everyone else would think had already crossed her mind. In any case, I know that at that moment and afterwards, I was purer than she.

"The sound of her sobs echoed through the house, and below, my friend"s mother and sister, who had been standing and listening as I spoke, now ran to the foot of the stairs leading up.

"As for me, I did something that must have seemed ridiculous, almost criminal, to everyone else. I ran to the bedroom door, threw it open, and ran inside, slamming the door behind me. The room was almost completely dark by this time, but without thinking, I ran to her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, rocking back and forth, sobbing. At that moment, she was like a slender young tree standing in an open field, with no other trees to protect it. She was shaken, like a great storm, that's what I mean.

"And so, you see, I ran up to her and hugged her body.

"What happened to us before happened again, for the last time in our lives. She gave herself to me, that's what I'm trying to say. There was another marriage. For a moment she was completely silent, and in the uncertain light her face was turned towards me. From her eyes emanated that same look, as if it were approaching me from a deep burial, from the sea or something like that. I always thought of the place from which she came as the sea.

"I dare say that if anyone but you had heard me say this, and if I had told you this under less bizarre circumstances, you would have thought me nothing but a romantic fool. 'She was smitten,' you will say, and I dare say she was. But there was something else too. Though the room was dark, I felt this thing glowing deep within her, and then rising straight up to me. The moment was indescribably beautiful. It lasted only a split second, like the click of a camera shutter, and then it was gone.

"I was still holding her tightly when the door opened, and my friend, his mother, and his sister stood there. He took the lamp from its wall bracket and held it in his hand. She was sitting completely naked on the bed, and I was standing next to her, one knee on the edge of the bed, my arms wrapped around her."

OceanofPDF.com

II


TEN OR FIFTEEN Minutes passed, and in that time, John Webster had completed preparations to leave the house and set out with Natalie on his new adventure in life. Soon he would be with her, and all ties that bound him to his old life would be severed. It was clear that, no matter what happened, he would never see his wife again, and perhaps never again see the woman who was now in the room with him, who was his daughter. If the doors of life could be opened, they could also be closed. A certain stage of life could be exited, as if leaving a room. His traces might be left behind, but he would no longer be there.

He put on his collar and coat and settled everything down quite calmly. He also packed a small bag with extra shirts, pajamas, toiletries, and so on.

All this time, his daughter sat at the foot of the bed, her face buried in the crook of her arm hanging over the railing. Was she thinking? Were there voices inside her? What was she thinking?

In the interval, when my father's account of his life at home ceased, and while he was going through the necessary little mechanical steps before setting out on a new way of life, there came that meaningful time of silence.

There was no doubt that even if he had gone mad, the madness within him was becoming more and more entrenched, becoming more and more a habit of his being. A new outlook on life was becoming more and more deeply ingrained within him, or rather, to fantasize a little and speak of the matter in a more modern spirit, as he himself would later do with a laugh, one could say that he was forever captivated and held by a new rhythm of life.

In any case, it's true that much later, when this man sometimes spoke of the experiences of that time, he himself said that a person, through his own efforts and if he only dared to let go, could enter and exit various planes of life almost at will. Speaking of such things later, he sometimes gave the impression that he quite calmly believed that a person, having acquired the talent and courage for this, could even go so far as to walk on air down the street to the second floor of buildings and observe people going about their private business in the upper rooms, just as a certain historical figure from the East is said to have once walked on the surface of the sea. All this was part of the vision that was germinating in his mind of tearing down walls and releasing people from prisons.

In any case, he was in his room, adjusting, say, a tie pin. He had pulled out a small bag, into which, thinking about them, he put things he might need. In the next room, his wife, a woman who had grown large, heavy, and inert over the course of life, lay silently on her bed, as she had lain there only recently in his presence. And his daughter.

What dark and terrible thoughts were on her mind? Or was her mind blank, as John Webster sometimes thought?

Behind him, in the same room with him, stood his daughter, wearing a thin nightgown, her hair loose around her face and shoulders. Her body-he could see its reflection in the glass as he adjusted his tie-was sagging and limp. The experiences of that evening had undoubtedly drained something from her, perhaps forever. He pondered this, and his eyes, wandering around the room, once again found the Virgin Mary with the burning candles beside her, calmly gazing upon this scene. Perhaps this was the calm that people venerated in the Virgin Mary. A strange turn of events had prompted him to bring her, calm, into the room, to make her a part of this whole remarkable affair. Without a doubt, it was that calm virginity he had possessed at that moment when he took from his daughter; it was the release of that element from her body that had rendered her so limp and seemingly lifeless. There was no doubt that he had been bold. The hand that was adjusting his tie was shaking slightly.

Doubt set in. As I said, the house was very quiet at that moment. In the next room, his wife, lying on the bed, made no sound. She floated in a sea of silence, as she had done since that night, long before, when shame, in the form of a naked and distraught man, consumed her nakedness in the presence of these others.

Had he, in turn, done the same to his daughter? Had he plunged her into this sea, too? It was a startling and terrifying thought. Surely someone had upset the world, becoming mad in a sane world, or sane in an insane world. Quite unexpectedly, everything had been upset, turned completely upside down.

And then it might well have been true that the whole matter simply boiled down to the fact that he, John Webster, was just a man who had suddenly fallen in love with his stenographer and wanted to go live with her, and that he had lacked the courage to do such a simple thing without making a fuss about it, in fact, without carefully justifying himself at the expense of these others. To justify himself, he had invented this strange affair-exposing himself naked before a young girl who was his daughter and who, in fact, being his daughter, deserved his most careful attention. There was no doubt that, from one point of view, what he had done was utterly unforgivable. "After all, I'm still just a washing machine manufacturer in a small Wisconsin town," he told himself, whispering the words slowly and clearly.

This was something to keep in mind. Now his bag was packed, and he was fully dressed and ready to go. When the mind no longer moved forward, sometimes the body took its place and made the completion of an action once begun absolutely inevitable.

He walked across the room and stood for a moment, looking into the calm eyes of the Virgin Mary in the frame.

His thoughts were like the ringing of bells across the fields again. "I am in a room in a house on a street in a Wisconsin town. At the moment, most of the other people here in the town among whom I have always lived are in bed and asleep, but tomorrow morning, when I am gone, the town will be here and will go on with its life, as it has done since I was a young man, married a woman, and began to live my present life." There were these definite facts of existence. One wore clothes, ate, moved among his fellow men and women. Some stages of life were lived in the darkness of night, others in the light of day. In the morning, the three women who worked in his office, as well as the accountant, seemed to be going about their usual business. When, after a while, neither he nor Natalie Schwartz appeared, glances began to pass from one to the other. After a while, whispers began. Whispers began that ran through the town, visiting all the houses, stores, and shops. Men and women stopped on the street to talk to each other, men talking to other men, women talking to other women. The women who were his wives were a little angry with him, and the men were a little envious, but the men perhaps spoke of him more bitterly than the women. This would have meant covering up their own desire to somehow alleviate the boredom of their own existence.

A smile spread across John Webster's face, and then he sat down on the floor at his daughter's feet and told her the rest of his family story. After all, there was a certain malicious satisfaction to be derived from his situation. As for his daughter, it was also a fact: nature had made the connection between them utterly inevitable. He could toss the new aspect of life that had come to him into her lap, and then, if she chose to reject it, it would be her business. People wouldn't blame her. "Poor girl," they would say, "what a pity she had such a father." On the other hand, if, after listening to all he had said, she decided to run through life a little faster, to open her arms, so to speak, what he had done would be a help. There was Natalie, whose old mother had gotten herself into a lot of trouble by getting drunk and screaming so loudly that all the neighbors could hear, calling her hard-working daughters whores. It may have been absurd to think that such a mother could give her daughters a better chance in life than a perfectly respectable mother could have given them, and yet, in a world that had been upset and turned upside down, it might well have been true too.

In any case, Natalie had a quiet confidence that, even in his moments of doubt, remarkably calmed and healed him. "I love her and accept her. If her old mother, letting herself go and shouting in the streets in some drunken splendor, in some intoxicated splendor, paved the way for Natalie to follow, then glory to her," he thought, smiling at the thought.

He sat at his daughter's feet, talking quietly, and as he spoke, something within her grew quieter. She listened with growing interest, occasionally looking down at him. He sat very close to her, leaning over slightly every now and then to rest his cheek against her leg. "Damn it! It was quite obvious he'd made love to her, too." Such a thought hadn't occurred to her, exactly. A subtle sense of confidence and assurance passed from him to her. He began talking about his marriage again.

On an evening in his youth, when his friend, his friend's mother, and his friend's sister stood before him and the woman he was to marry, he was suddenly overcome by the same thing that would later leave such an indelible scar on her. Shame overwhelmed him.

What was he to do? How could he explain this second run into this room and the presence of a naked woman? It was a question that couldn't be explained. A sense of despair overwhelmed him, and he ran past the people at the door and down the hallway, this time reaching the room he'd been assigned to.

He closed and locked the door behind him, then dressed hurriedly, feverishly. Once dressed, he left the room with his bag. The hallway was quiet, and the lamp had been returned to its place on the wall. What had happened? No doubt the owner's daughter was with the woman, trying to console her. His friend had probably gone to his room and was currently dressing, no doubt also thinking about something. There should have been no end to restless, anxious thoughts in the house. Everything might have been fine if he hadn't entered the room a second time, but how could he explain that the second entry was as unintentional as the first? He quickly went downstairs.

Downstairs, he encountered his friend's mother, a woman of fifty. She stood in the doorway leading to the dining room. A servant was setting supper on the table. The house rules were being observed. It was time for dinner, and in a few minutes the inhabitants of the house would dine. "Holy Moses," he thought, "I wonder if she'll be able to come here now and sit at the table with me and the others and eat? Can the habits of existence be restored so quickly after such a profound shock?"

He set the bag down on the floor at his feet and looked at the elderly woman. "I don't know," he began, standing there, looking at her and stuttering. She was embarrassed, as everyone in the house must have been at that moment, but there was something very kind about her that evoked sympathy when it couldn't understand. She started to speak. "It was an accident, and no one was hurt," she began, but he didn't listen. Taking the bag, he ran out of the house.

What was he to do then? He hurried across town to his home, where it was dark and quiet. His father and mother had left. His grandmother, his mother's mother, was gravely ill in another city, and his father and mother had gone there. They might not return for several days. Two servants worked in the house, but since no one lived there, they were allowed to leave. Even the fires were out. He couldn't stay there; he had to go to an inn.

"I walked into the house and put my bag down by the front door," he explained, a shudder running through him as he recalled the dreary evening of that long-ago day. It was supposed to be a night of fun. Four young men were planning to go dancing, and in anticipation of the figure he would carve with a new girl from out of town, he had worked himself up to a state of semi-arousal. Damn it! He had expected to find in her something-well, what was it?-the thing a young man always dreams of finding in some strange woman who would suddenly come to him out of nowhere and bring with her a new life, which she gave him voluntarily, without asking for anything. "You see, the dream is obviously unrealistic, but it exists in youth," he explained, smiling. He continued to smile throughout this part of his story. Did his daughter understand? Her understanding could not be doubted too much. "A woman should arrive in sparkling clothes and with a calm smile on her face," he continued, constructing his whimsical picture. "With what regal grace she carries herself, and yet, you understand, she is not some impossible, cold, and distant creature. There are many men standing around, and all of them, without a doubt, are more worthy than you, but it is to you that she comes, walking slowly, her whole body alive. She is an indescribably beautiful Virgo, but there is something very earthly about her. The truth is , she can be very cold, proud, and distant when it comes to anyone else but you, but in your presence all the coldness leaves her.

"She approaches you, and her hand, holding a golden tray before her slender young body, trembles slightly. On the tray is a small, intricately crafted box, and inside it is a jewel, a talisman intended for you. You are to remove from the box a precious stone set in a gold ring and place it on your finger. Nothing special. This strange and beautiful woman has brought this to you simply as a sign that she lies at your feet before anyone else, a sign that she lies at your feet. As your hand reaches forward and removes the jewel from the box, her body begins to tremble, and the golden tray falls to the floor with a loud crash. Something terrible happens to everyone else witnessing this scene. Suddenly, everyone present realizes that you, whom they always thought of as a simple person, not to say, as worthy as themselves, well, you see, they've been forced, thoroughly forced, to realize your true self. Suddenly, you appear before them in your true form, finally fully revealed. A radiant splendor emanates from you, brightly illuminating the room where you, the woman, and everyone else, the men and women of your city, whom you've always known and who always thought they knew you, stand, stare, and gasp in amazement.

"This is the moment. The most incredible thing is happening. There's a clock on the wall, and it ticks and ticks, ticking away your life and the lives of everyone else. Beyond the room in which this wonderful scene is taking place is the street, where street business is taking place. Men and women may be hurrying up and down, trains coming and going from distant stations, and even further away, ships sail across many wide seas, and strong winds stir the waters.

"And suddenly everything stopped. That's a fact. The clocks on the wall stop ticking, the moving trains become dead and lifeless, the people on the streets, who had begun to speak to each other, now stand with their mouths open, the winds no longer blow on the seas.

"For all life, everywhere, there exists this moment of silence, and from all of this, what is buried within you emerges. From this great silence, you emerge and take a woman in your arms. Now, in a moment, all life can begin to move and exist again, but after this moment, all life will forever be colored by this act of yours, this marriage. It was for this marriage that you and this woman were created.

All this might be reaching the extreme limits of fiction, as John Webster carefully explained to Jane, and yet here he was in the upstairs bedroom with his daughter, suddenly finding himself next to a daughter he had never known until that moment, and he was trying to talk to her about his feelings at that moment when, in his youth, he had once played the role of the superior and innocent fool.

"The house was like a grave, Jane," he said, his voice breaking.

It was obvious that the old childhood dream had not yet died. Even now, in his mature years, some faint aroma of that scent wafted to him as he sat on the floor at his daughter's feet. "The fire in the house had been out all day, and it was getting colder outside," he began again. "The whole house had that damp chill that always makes you think of death. You must remember that I thought, and still think, of what I did at my friend's house as the act of a mad fool. Well, you see, our house was heated by stoves, and my room upstairs was small. I went into the kitchen, where kindling was always kept in a drawer behind the stove, cut and ready, and, gathering an armful, went upstairs.

"In the hallway, in the darkness at the foot of the stairs, my foot hit a chair, and I dropped a bunch of kindling on the chair seat. I stood in the darkness, trying to think and not think. 'I'm probably going to puke,' I thought. I had no self-respect, and maybe I shouldn't think at times like these.

"In the kitchen, above the stove, where my mother or our maid, Adalina, always stood when the house was alive and not dead as it is now, right where it could be seen over the women's heads, stood a small clock, and now this clock began to make such a loud sound, as if someone were pounding on iron sheets with large hammers. In the next house, someone was talking, or perhaps reading aloud. The wife of the German who lived next door had been ill in bed for several months, and perhaps he was now trying to entertain her with a story. The words came steadily, but also intermittently. I mean, it would be a steady little set of sounds, then it would break off and start again. Sometimes the voice would rise a little, no doubt for emphasis, and it would sound like a splash, like when waves along a beach run for a long time to the same spot, clearly marked on the wet sand, and then one wave comes that goes far beyond all the others and breaks on the rock.

"You can probably see the state I was in. The house was, as I said, very cold, and I stood there for a long time, not moving at all, thinking that I never wanted to move again. The voices from far away, from the German"s house next door, were like voices coming from some secret, buried place inside me. There was one voice telling me that I was a fool and that after what had happened I would never be able to hold my head up in this world again, and another voice telling me that I was not a fool at all, but for a while the first voice had the better of the argument. I just stood there in the cold and tried to let the two voices battle it out without picking up an oar, but after a while, perhaps because I was so cold, I began to cry like a child, and I was so ashamed that I quickly walked to the front door and left the house, forgetting to put on my coat.

"Well, I also left my hat in the house and stood outside in the cold with my head uncovered, and soon, as I walked, keeping as close as I could to the deserted streets, it began to snow.

"Okay," I said to myself, "I know what I'll do. I'll go to their house and ask her to marry me."

"When I arrived, my friend's mother was nowhere to be seen, and three young men were sitting in the living room of the house. I peered in through the window, and then, afraid I might lose my courage if I hesitated, I boldly walked up and knocked on the door. In any case, I was glad that they felt they couldn't go to the dance after what had happened, and when my friend arrived and opened the door, I said nothing, but went straight into the room where the two girls were sitting.

She was sitting on the sofa in the corner, dimly lit by the lamp on the table in the center of the room, and I walked straight up to her. My friend had followed me into the room, but now I turned to him and his sister and asked them both to leave. "Something happened here tonight that's hard to explain, and we'll have to be alone for a few minutes," I said, gesturing to where she was sitting on the sofa.

"When they left, I followed the door and closed it behind them.

"And so I found myself in the presence of the woman who would later become my wife. As she sat on the sofa, there was a strange sagging sensation about her whole figure. Her body, as you can see, had slid off the sofa, and now she was lying down, not sitting. I mean, her body was lying on the sofa. It was like a garment carelessly thrown down. This had been the case since I entered the room. I stood before it for a moment, and then knelt down. Her face was very pale, but her eyes looked straight into mine.

"I did something very strange twice this evening," I said, turning away and no longer looking her in the eye. I suppose her eyes frightened and confused me. That must have been all. I had a certain speech to make, and I wanted to see it through. There were certain words I was going to say, but I now know that at that very moment, other words and thoughts were going on inside me that had nothing to do with what I was saying.

"First of all, I knew that my friend and his sister were standing at the door of the room at that moment, waiting and listening.

"What were they thinking? Well, it doesn't matter.

"What was I thinking? What was the woman I was about to propose to thinking?

"I came into the house bareheaded, as you can imagine, and I certainly looked a bit wild. Perhaps everyone in the house thought I'd suddenly gone mad, and perhaps I had."

"Anyway, I felt very calm, and that evening, and all these years, up until the moment I fell in love with Natalie, I've always been a very calm person, or at least I thought I was. I was so dramatic about it. I suppose death is always a very calm thing, and that evening I must have committed suicide in a sense.

"A few weeks before this happened, a scandal erupted in the city, which reached the court and was cautiously reported in our weekly newspaper. It was a rape case. A farmer, who had hired a young girl to work in his house, sent his wife into town for supplies, and while she was away, he dragged the girl upstairs and raped her, tearing off her clothes and even beating her before forcing her to comply with his wishes. He was later arrested and brought to town, where he was in jail at the very time I knelt before the body of my future wife.

"I'm saying this because, as I was kneeling there, I remember now, a thought came into my head that connected me to this man. 'I'm committing rape too,' something inside me said.

"To the woman who was in front of me, so cold and white, I said something else.

"You understand that this evening, when I first came to you naked, it was an accident," I said. "I want you to understand that, but I also want you to understand that when I came to you the second time, it was no accident. I want you to understand everything completely, and then I want to ask you to marry me, to agree to be my wife."

"That's what I said, and after I said it, he took one of her hands in his and, without looking at her, knelt at her feet, waiting for her to speak. Maybe if she had spoken then, even if it had been with condemnation of me, everything would have been all right.

"She didn"t say anything. Now I understand why she couldn"t, but I didn"t understand it then. I confess I"ve always been impatient. Time passed, and I waited. I was like someone who has fallen from a great height into the sea and feels himself sinking lower and lower, deeper and deeper. You understand that a person in the sea is under enormous pressure, and he can"t breathe. I suppose that in the case of a person falling into the sea in this way, the force of his fall wears off after a while, and he stops in his fall, and then suddenly begins to rise again to the surface of the sea.

"And something similar happened to me. After kneeling at her feet for a while, I suddenly jumped up. Going to the door, I opened it, and there, as I expected, stood my friend and his sister. I must have seemed almost cheerful to them at that moment; perhaps they later considered it mad merriment. I can"t say. After that evening, I never returned to their home again, and my former friend and I began to avoid each other"s presence. There was no danger that they would tell anyone what had happened-out of respect for the guest, you understand. As far as their conversations were concerned, the woman was safe.

"Anyway, I stood before them and smiled. "Your guest and I have found ourselves in a difficult situation due to a series of absurd accidents, which perhaps didn"t look like accidents, and now I"ve proposed marriage. She hasn"t decided on that yet," I said, speaking very formally, turning away from them and leaving the house for my father"s, where I quite calmly picked up my coat, hat, and bag. "I"ll have to go to the hotel and stay until my father and mother return home," I thought. In any case, I knew that the evening"s affairs would not lead me, as I had expected earlier in the evening, to a state of illness.

OceanofPDF.com

III


"I DON'T... I mean to say that after that evening I thought more clearly, but after that day and its adventures other days and weeks passed, and since nothing special happened as a result of what I did, I could not remain in the semi-elevated state I was in then."

John Webster rolled over on the floor at his daughter's feet and, twisting so that he lay on his stomach facing her, looked into her face. His elbows rested on the floor, and his chin rested on both hands. There was something devilishly strange in the way youth had returned to his figure, and he had completely achieved his goal with his daughter. You see, he wanted nothing in particular from her and gave himself to her wholeheartedly. For a moment, even Natalie was forgotten, and as for his wife, lying on the bed in the next room, perhaps in her own dull way suffering as he had never suffered, for him at that moment she simply did not exist.

Well, there was a woman before him, his daughter, and he gave himself to her. He probably completely forgot at that moment that she was his daughter. He thought now of his youth, when he had been a young man deeply confused by life, and he saw in her a young woman who, inevitably and often as life went on, found herself as bewildered as he was. He tried to describe to her his feelings as a young man who had proposed to a woman who had not responded, yet in whom there existed, perhaps romantically, the notion that he had somehow, inevitably and irrevocably, become attached to this particular woman.

"You see, Jane, what I did then is something you might do someday, something everyone will inevitably do." He reached forward, took his daughter's bare foot, pulled it toward him, and kissed it. Then he quickly sat up straight, clasping his knees with his arms. Something like a blush quickly crossed his daughter's face, and then she began to look at him with very serious, puzzled eyes. He smiled cheerfully.

"And so, you see, I was living right here, in this very city, and the girl I proposed marriage to had gone away, and I never heard from her again. She stayed at my friend's house only a day or two after I had managed to make the beginning of her visit so astonishing.

"My father had been scolding me for a long time for not showing much interest in the washing machine factory, and I was expected to take him for a run after work, so I decided I'd better do something called 'calming down.' That is, I decided it would be better for me to give in less to dreams and that awkward youth that only led to such inexplicable actions as the second time I encountered that naked woman.

"The truth is, of course, that my father, who in his youth reached the day when he made exactly the same decision I was making then, that he, for all his sedateness and his becoming an industrious man, a sensible man, did not get much for it; but I didn't think of that then. Well, he wasn't the cheerful old dog I remember him as now. I suppose he always worked very hard and sat at his desk for eight or ten hours every day, and in all the years I knew him, he had bouts of indigestion during which everyone in our house had to walk quietly, afraid that his head would ache worse than before. The attacks would happen about once a month, and he would come home and my mother would lay him down on the couch in our living room, heat up the irons, wrap them in towels and place them on his stomach, and there he would lie all day, grunting and, as you can imagine, turning life in our house into a cheerful, festive event.

"And then, when he was getting better again and only looked a little gray and haggard, he would come to the table during meals with the rest of us and tell me about his life as a completely successful business, and take it for granted, I wanted exactly this different life.

"For some silly reason, I don't understand now, I thought then that this was exactly what I wanted. I suppose I was always wanting something else, and it made me spend most of my time in vague daydreams, and not only my father, but all the old people in our town, and probably all the other towns along the railroad to the East and West, thought and talked to their sons in exactly the same way, and I suppose I was carried along by the general stream of thought, and I just walked into it blindly, with my head down, without thinking at all.

"So I was a young washing machine manufacturer, and I had no woman, and after that incident at his house I hadn't seen my former friend, with whom I tried to talk about the vague, but nonetheless more important, colorful dreams of my idle hours. A few months later, my father sent me on a trip to see if I could sell washing machines to dealers in small towns, and sometimes I succeeded, and I sold some, and sometimes I didn't.

"At night in the cities I would walk the streets and sometimes I would meet a woman, a waitress from the hotel or a girl I met on the street.

"We walked under the trees along the residential streets of the city, and when I was lucky, I sometimes persuaded one of them to come with me to a small cheap hotel or into the darkness of the fields on the outskirts of the city.

"At such moments we talked about love, and sometimes I was very touched, but in the end I was not very moved.

"All this made me think of the slender naked girl I had seen on the bed, and the expression in her eyes the moment she woke up and her eyes met mine.

"I knew her name and address, so one day I plucked up the courage and wrote her a long letter. You must understand that by this time I felt I had become a completely reasonable person, and so I tried to write rationally.

"I remember sitting in the writing room of a small hotel in Indiana when I did this. The desk I was sitting at was by the window next to the main street of the town, and since it was evening, people were walking down the street to their homes, I suppose, heading home for dinner.

"I don't deny that I've become quite romantic. Sitting there, feeling lonely and, I suppose, filled with self-pity, I looked up and saw a small drama unfolding in the hallway across the street. It was a rather old, dilapidated building with a side staircase leading to the top floor, where it was obvious someone lived, as there were white curtains on the window.

"I sat looking at this place, and I suppose I dreamed of the long, slender body of a girl on a bed upstairs in the other house. It was evening and gathering dusk, you see, and it was just such a light that fell on us at that moment when we looked into each other"s eyes, at that moment when there was no one else but the two of us, before we had time to think. And remember the others in that house, when I was coming out of a waking dream and she was coming out of a dream, at that moment when we accepted each other and the full and instant loveliness of each other-well, you see, the same light in which I stood and she lay, as one might lie on the soft waters of some southern sea, the same other light lay now over the little bare writing-room of a dirty little hotel in this town, and across the way a woman came down the stairs and stood in the same other light.

"As it turned out, she was also tall, like your mother, but I couldn"t see what clothes she was wearing, or what color. There was something peculiar in the light; it created an illusion. Damn it! I"d like to tell you what happened to me without this eternal concern that everything I say should seem a little strange and supernatural. Someone walks in the woods in the evening, say, Jane, and has strange, fascinating illusions. The light, the shadows from the trees, the spaces between the trees-all this creates illusions. Often the trees seem to beckon someone. Old, strong trees look wise, and you think they will tell you some great secret, but they are not. You find yourself in a forest of young birches. Such naked girlish things, running and running, free, free. Once I was in such a forest with a girl. We were planning something. Well, it did not go further than the fact that at that moment we had a great feeling for each other. We kissed, and I remember stopping twice in the half-light and touching her face with my fingers-gently, gently, you know. She was a small, dumb, shy girl I'd picked up on the streets of a small town in Indiana, the kind of freewheeling, amoral little thing you sometimes find in small towns. I mean, she was free with men in a strange, shy way. I picked her up on the street, and then, when we walked out into the woods, we both felt the strangeness of things and the strangeness of being with each other.

"There we were, you see. We were about to... I don't know exactly what we were about to do. We stood there and looked at each other.

"And then we both suddenly looked up and saw a very dignified and handsome old man standing on the road before us. He was wearing a robe that was thrown loosely over his shoulders and spread out behind him on the forest floor, between the trees.

"What a regal old man! Indeed, what a regal man! We both saw him, both stood looking at him with eyes full of wonder, and he stood and looked at us.

"I had to go forward and touch the thing with my hands before the illusion created by our minds could be dispelled. The royal old man was nothing more than a half-rotted old stump, and the clothes he wore were nothing more than violet night shadows falling on the forest floor, but seeing this creature together changed everything between me and the shy little city girl. What we both intended to do could not possibly be accomplished in the spirit in which we approached it. I shouldn't try to tell you about it now. I shouldn't deviate too much from the path.

"I'm just thinking that such things happen. You see, I'm talking about another time and place. That evening, as I sat in the hotel writing room, another light was on, and across the street, a girl or woman was coming down the stairs. I had the illusion that she was naked, like a young birch tree, and was coming toward me. Her face was a grayish, wavering shadow in the corridor, and she was obviously waiting for someone, her head poking out and looking up and down the street.

"I have become a fool again. This is the story, I dare say. As I sat and watched, leaning forward, trying to peer deeper and deeper into the evening light, a man hurried down the street and stopped at the steps. He was as tall as she, and when he stopped, I remember, he took off his hat and stepped into the darkness, holding it in his hand. Apparently there was something hidden and concealed in the love affair between these two people, for the man also stuck his head over the top of the steps and looked long and hard up and down the street before taking the woman in his arms. Perhaps she was some other man"s wife. In any case, they retreated a little back into even greater darkness and, it seemed to me, completely absorbed each other. How much I saw and how much I imagined, I will, of course, never know. In any case, two grayish-white faces seemed to float and then merge and turn into a single grayish-white spot.

A powerful shudder ran through my body. There, it seemed to me, several hundred feet from where I sat, now in the almost total darkness, love was finding its magnificent expression. Lips pressed against lips, two warm bodies pressed together, something utterly magnificent and beautiful in life, something that I, running in the evenings with poor city girls and trying to persuade them to go with me into the fields to satisfy only my animal hunger-well, you see, there was something to be found in life, something that I had not found and that at that moment, it seemed to me, I could not find, because in a time of great crisis I had not found the courage to persistently go after it.

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IV


"AND SO YOU SEE, I lit the lamp in the study of this hotel and forgot my supper, and sat there and wrote pages and pages to the woman, and I too fell into stupidity and confessed to a lie, that I was ashamed of what had happened between us several months ago, and that I did it only because I had only run into her room for the second time, because I was a fool, and a lot of other unspeakable nonsense."

John Webster jumped to his feet and began pacing the room nervously, but now his daughter was more than just a passive listener to his story. He approached where Our Lady stood between the burning candles and was heading back toward the door leading to the hallway and down the stairs when she jumped up and, running toward him, impulsively threw her arms around his neck. She began to sob and buried her face in his shoulder. "I love you," she said. "I don't care what happened, I love you."

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IN


And so there was John Webster in his home, and he had succeeded, at least for the moment, in breaking down the wall that separated him from his daughter. After her outburst, they went and sat together on the bed, his arm around her and her head on his shoulder. Years later, sometimes, when he was with a friend and in a certain mood, John Webster would speak of this moment as the most important and beautiful of his entire life. In a sense, his daughter was giving herself to him, just as he gave himself to her. He realized it was a kind of marriage. "I was a father and a lover. Perhaps the two are indistinguishable. I was a father who was not afraid to recognize the beauty of his daughter's body and to fill his senses with her scent," is what he said.

As it turned out, he could have sat there, talking to his daughter, for another half hour, and then left the house to go with Natalie, without any drama, but his wife, lying on the bed in the next room, heard her daughter's cry of love, and it must have touched something deep within her. She rose silently from the bed and, walking to the door, quietly opened it. Then she stood, leaning against the doorframe, and listened to her husband speak. A cruel terror was evident in her eyes. Perhaps she wanted to kill the man who had been her husband for so long, and only didn't do so because long years of inaction and submission to life had robbed her of the ability to raise a hand to strike.

In any case, she stood silently, and one would have thought she was about to fall to the floor, but she didn't. She waited, and John Webster continued talking. Now, with a kind of devilish attention to detail, he was telling his daughter the entire story of their marriage.

What happened, at least in this man's version, was that after writing one letter, he couldn't stop and wrote another that same evening and two more the next day.

He continued writing letters, and he himself believed that letter-writing had given rise to a kind of frenzied passion for lying, one that, once started, was impossible to stop. "I started what's been going on inside me all these years," he explained. "It's a trick people practice-lying to themselves about themselves." It was obvious that his daughter hadn't followed him, though she tried. He spoke now of something she hadn't experienced, couldn't experience-the hypnotic power of words. She had already read books and been deceived by words, but she had no awareness of what had already been done to her. She was a young girl, and since her life often lacked anything exciting or interesting, she was grateful for the life of words and books. It was true that one of them remained completely empty, vanished from her mind without a trace. Well, they were created from a kind of dream world. One had to live and experience much in life before coming to the realization that beneath the surface of ordinary, everyday life, a profound and touching drama always unfolds. Only a few come to appreciate the poetry of reality.

It was obvious her father had come to this conclusion. Now he was speaking. He was opening doors for her. It was like walking through an old city, seemingly familiar, with a surprisingly inspired guide. You walked in and out of old houses, seeing things as you'd never seen them before: all the household objects, the painting on the wall, the old chair by the table, the table itself, where a man you'd always known sat smoking a pipe.

Somehow, miraculously, all these things have now acquired new life and meaning.

The artist Van Gogh, who is said to have committed suicide in a fit of despair because he couldn't capture within his canvas all the wonder and glory of the sun shining in the sky, once painted a picture of an old chair in an empty room. When Jane Webster grew older and gained her own understanding of life, she one day saw the painting hanging in a New York gallery. A strange wonder of life could be gleaned from looking at a picture of an ordinary, crudely made chair, perhaps belonging to a French peasant, a peasant in whose house the artist might have stayed for an hour on a summer day.

It must have been a day when he was very much alive and very aware of the whole life of the house he was sitting in, so he painted the chair and channeled into the painting all his emotional reactions to the people in that particular house and in the many other houses he visited.

Jane Webster was in the room with her father, and he was holding her, and he was talking about something she couldn't understand, but she understood too. Now he was a young man again, and he felt the loneliness and uncertainty of youthful maturity, just as she sometimes felt the loneliness and uncertainty of her young womanhood. Like her father, she had to try to understand at least a little of what was happening. He was an honest man now; he spoke honestly to her. That alone was a miracle.

In his youth, he wandered through cities, met girls, and did things to them that she'd heard whispered about. It made him feel unclean. He didn't feel deeply enough what he'd done to those poor girls. His body made love to women, but he didn't do it. Her father knew this, but she didn't yet know. There was so much she didn't know.

Her father, then still a young man, began writing letters to a woman he had once visited completely naked, as he had appeared to her shortly before. He tried to explain how his mind, sensing his surroundings, had settled on the figure of a certain woman, as one toward whom he could direct his love.

He sat in his hotel room and wrote the word "love" in black ink on a white sheet of paper. Then he went out for a stroll through the quiet night streets of the city. Now she could picture him perfectly clearly. The strangeness of him being so much older than her and being her father disappeared. He was a man, and she was a woman. She wanted to quiet the screaming voices inside him, to fill the emptiness. She pressed her body even closer to his.

His voice continued to explain things. There was a passion for explanations in it.

Sitting in his hotel, he wrote certain words on a piece of paper, put the paper in an envelope, and mailed it to a woman living in a remote place. Then he walked and walked, thinking up more words, and, returning to the hotel, wrote them down on other sheets of paper.

Something arose within him, something difficult to explain, something he himself didn't understand. They walked under the stars and along quiet city streets beneath the trees, and sometimes on summer evenings they heard voices in the darkness. People, men and women, sat in the dark on the porches of houses. An illusion was created. Somewhere in the darkness, a deep, quiet splendor of life was felt and ran toward it. There was a kind of desperate zeal. In the sky, the stars shone brighter with thought. A light breeze blew, and it seemed as if a lover's hand touched his cheeks and played in his hair. There was something beautiful in life that needed to be found. When a person was young, he could not stand still; he had to move towards it. Writing letters was an attempt to get closer to the goal. It was an attempt to find support in the darkness on strange, winding roads.

So, with his letter, John Webster committed a strange and false act towards himself and the woman who would later become his wife. He created a world of unreality. Will he and this woman be able to live together in this world?

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VI


IN THE DARKNESS. From the room, while the man spoke to his daughter, trying to make her understand the elusive thing, the woman who had been his wife for so many years, from whose body the young woman who now sat next to her husband had emerged, also began to try to understand. After a while, unable to stand any longer, she managed, without attracting the attention of the others, to slide to the floor. She let her back slide along the door frame, and her legs sprawled out beneath her heavy body. The position she found herself in was uncomfortable; her knees ached, but she didn't mind. In fact, one could derive a kind of satisfaction from physical discomfort.

The man had lived so many years in a world that was now crumbling before his eyes. There was something evil and godless in defining life too harshly. Some things should not be spoken of. The man moved vaguely through a dim world, not asking too many questions. If death was in silence, then the man had accepted death. What good was denial? The body had become old and heavy. When he sat on the floor, his knees ached. There was something unbearable in the fact that the man with whom they had lived for so many years, who had been so clearly accepted as part of the mechanism of life, suddenly became someone else, became this terrible questioner, this gathering of forgotten things.

If someone lived behind a wall, they preferred life behind a wall. Behind a wall, the light was dim and unseen. Memories were sealed. The sounds of life grew faint and indistinct in the distance. There was something barbaric and savage in all this tearing down of walls, making cracks and breaches in the wall of life.

A struggle was also raging within the woman, Mary Webster. A strange new life was coming and going in her eyes. If a fourth person had entered the room at that moment, they might have been more aware of her than the others.

There was something terrifying in the way her husband, John Webster, had prepared the ground for the battle that was now about to unfold within her. After all, this man was a playwright. The acquisition of the image of the Virgin Mary and the candles, the construction of the small stage on which the drama was to be performed-there was an unconscious artistic expression in all of it.

He may not have intended anything of the sort outwardly, but with what devilish confidence he acted. The woman now sat on the floor in the semi-darkness. Between her and the burning candles stood a bed, on which two others sat: one talking, the other listening. The entire floor of the room next to where she sat was covered in heavy black shadows. She leaned one hand on the doorframe to support herself.

The candles in their high place flickered, burning. The light fell only on her shoulders, head, and raised arm.

She was almost immersed in a sea of darkness. From time to time, her head would fall forward from sheer exhaustion, and it felt as if she were completely submerged.

Nevertheless, her hand remained raised, and her head returned to the surface of the sea. Her body swayed slightly. She resembled an old boat, half-submerged, lying in the sea. Small, trembling waves of light seemed to play across her heavy, white, upturned face.

Breathing was a little labored. Thinking was a little difficult. The man had lived for years without thinking. Better to lie quietly in the sea of silence. The world was absolutely right to excommunicate those who disturbed the sea of silence. Mary Webster's body trembled slightly. She could have killed, but she didn't have the strength to kill, she didn't know how to kill. Killing is a business, and one must learn it.

It was unbearable, but sometimes I had to think about it. Something had happened. A woman had married a man, and then, quite unexpectedly, discovered she hadn't married him. Strange, unacceptable ideas about marriage had emerged in the world. Daughters shouldn't be told what their husbands were now telling their daughters. Could a young, virginal girl's mind be violated by her own father and forced to realize the unspeakable things in life? If such things were permitted, what would become of all decent and orderly life? Virginal girls shouldn't learn anything about life until the time comes to live what they, as women, must finally accept.

Within every human body, there is always a vast reservoir of silent thought. Certain words are spoken outwardly, but at the same time, in deep, hidden places, other words are spoken. There is a veil of thoughts, unexpressed emotions. How many things are thrown into a deep well, hidden in a deep well!

The well's mouth is covered with a heavy iron lid. When the lid is securely fastened, everything is in order. A person speaks words, eats food, meets people, conducts business, saves money, wears clothes-they live an orderly life.

Sometimes at night in my sleep the lid shakes, but no one knows about it.

Why should anyone want to rip the well covers off and breach the walls? It's better to leave everything as is. Anyone who disturbs the heavy iron covers should be killed.

The heavy iron lid of the deep well inside Mary Webster's body shook violently. It danced up and down. The flickering candlelight resembled small, playful waves on the surface of a calm sea. In her eyes, he encountered a different kind of dancing light.

On the bed, John Webster spoke freely and naturally. If he had set the stage, then he had also assigned himself the role of speaker in the drama that was to be played out on it. He himself believed that everything that had happened that evening was directed against his daughter. He had even dared to think that he could change her life. Her young life was like a river, still small and making only a faint murmur as it flowed through quiet fields. One could still step over a stream that had been later, after it had absorbed other streams to become a river. One could risk throwing a log across a stream, sending it in an entirely different direction. All this was a bold and utterly reckless act, but it was an act that could not be avoided.

Now he put the other woman, his ex-wife Mary Webster, out of his mind. He thought that when she left the bedroom, she had finally left the scene. It was satisfying to see her go. He had truly never had any contact with her in their entire life together. When he thought she was gone from the scene of his life, he felt a sense of relief. He could breathe deeper, speak more freely.

He thought she had left the scene, but she was back. He still had to deal with her.

Memories were awakening in Mary Webster's mind. Her husband was telling the story of their marriage, but she couldn't hear his words. A story began to unfold within her, one that began long ago, when she was still a young woman.

She heard a cry of love for a man rip from her daughter's throat, and that cry touched something so deeply within her that she returned to the room where her husband and daughter sat together on the bed. A similar cry had once been heard within another young woman, but somehow it had never escaped her lips. At that moment when it could have come from her, at that moment long ago when she lay naked on the bed and looked into the eyes of a naked young man, something-what people called shame-stood between her and receiving that joyful cry.

Now her thoughts wearily returned to the details of this scene. The old railway journey was repeated.

Everything was mixed up. First she lived in one place, and then, as if nudged by an invisible hand, she went to visit somewhere else.

The journey there was made in the middle of the night, and since there were no sleeping cars on the train, she had to sit in a day car for several hours in the dark.

Outside the train window, darkness reigned, broken occasionally when the train stopped for a few minutes in some town in western Illinois or southern Wisconsin. There was a station building with a lantern attached to the outside wall, and occasionally a lone man, bundled up in a coat, perhaps pushing a truck filled with suitcases and boxes along the station platform. In some towns, people were boarding the train, while in others, people were disembarking and walking into the darkness.

An old woman with a basket containing a black and white cat sat down on the seat with her, and after she got off at one of the stations, an old man took her place.

The old man didn't look at her, but continued muttering words she couldn't understand. He had a ragged gray mustache that drooped over his wrinkled lips, and he constantly stroked them with a bony old hand. The words, spoken in a low voice, were muttered behind his hand.

The young woman from that long-ago train journey fell into a half-awake, half-asleep state after a while. Her mind raced ahead of her body toward the end of the journey. A girl she knew at school invited her to visit, and several letters were written to her. Two young men were present in the house throughout the visit.

One of the young men she had already seen. He was her friend's brother and one day he came to the school where the two girls studied.

What would another young man be like? She wondered how many times she'd asked herself that question. Now her mind conjured up strange images of him. The train was traveling through low hills. Dawn was approaching. It would be a day of cold, gray clouds. Snow threatened. A muttering old man with a gray mustache and a bony hand stepped off the train.

The sleepy eyes of a tall, slender young woman gazed at the low hills and long stretches of plain. The train crossed a bridge over a river. She fell asleep, and was again startled by the train starting or stopping. A young man walked across a distant field in the gray morning light.

Did she dream of a young man walking across a field next to a train, or did she actually see such a man? How was he connected to the young man she was supposed to meet at the end of her journey?

It was a little absurd to think that the young man in the field could be made of flesh and blood. He walked at the same pace as the train, easily stepping over fences, moving quickly through city streets, passing like a shadow through strips of dark forest.

When the train stopped, he stopped too and stood there, looking at her and smiling. He almost felt like he could enter his own body and emerge with the same smile. The idea, too, was surprisingly sweet. Now he walked for a long time along the surface of the river along which the train passed.

And all the while, he looked into her eyes, gloomily, as the train passed through the forest and the interior became dark, smiling as they emerged into the open again. There was something in his eyes that invited her, calling her. Her body grew warm, and she shifted restlessly in her car seat.

The train crew lit a fire in the stove at the end of the car, and all the doors and windows were closed. It looked like the day wouldn't be so cold after all. It was unbearably hot in the car.

She rose from her seat and, holding on to the edges of the other seats, made her way to the back of the car, where she opened the door and stood for a moment, looking out at the passing landscape.

The train pulled into the station where she was supposed to get off, and there, on the platform, stood her friend, who had come to the station on the strange chance that she would be arriving on this train.

Then she went with her friend to a stranger's house, and her friend's mother insisted she go to bed and sleep until evening. Both women kept asking how she'd come on that train, and since she couldn't explain, she felt a little awkward. It was true that she could have taken another, faster train and traveled the entire journey during the day.

She'd just felt a feverish urge to get out of her hometown and her mother's house. She couldn't explain it to her people. She couldn't tell her mother and father that she simply wanted to leave. In her own home, a tangle of questions had arisen about the whole thing. Well, she'd been cornered and asked unanswerable questions. She hoped her friend would understand, and she kept repeating, in the hopes of it, what she'd said over and over again, rather meaninglessly, at home. "I just wanted to do it. I don't know, I just wanted to do it."

She went to bed in a strange house, glad to be rid of the annoying question. When she woke up, they would have forgotten everything. Her friend came into the room with her, and she wanted to let her go and have some time alone. "I'm not going to unpack my bag now. I think I'll just undress and crawl between the sheets. It'll be warm anyway," she explained. It was absurd. Well, she'd expected something completely different upon arrival: laughter, young people standing around looking a little embarrassed. Now she only felt uncomfortable. Why did people keep asking why she'd gotten up at midnight and taken a slow train instead of waiting until morning? Sometimes you just want to have fun, little things, without having to explain. When her friend left the room, she shed all her clothes, quickly got into bed, and closed her eyes. She had another stupid idea - the desire to be naked. If she hadn't boarded the slow, uncomfortable train, the thought of a young man walking alongside the train in the fields, along city streets, through the forests would never have occurred to her.

It was good to be naked sometimes. I could feel things on my skin. If only I could experience this joyful feeling more often. Sometimes, when I was tired and sleepy, I could fall into a clean bed, and it was like falling into the strong, warm embrace of someone who could love and understand my foolish impulses.

The young woman slept on her bed, and in her dream she was once again carried swiftly through the darkness. The woman with the cat and the muttering old man no longer appeared, but many other people came and went through her dream world. A swift, confusing march of strange events unfolded. She walked forward, always forward, toward what she wanted. Now it was closer. A tremendous zeal took hold of her.

It was strange that she was naked. The young man who had walked so quickly through the fields appeared again, but she hadn't noticed before that he, too, was naked.

The world went dark. There was a gloomy darkness.

And now the young man stopped advancing and, like her, fell silent. They both hung in a sea of silence. He stood and looked her straight in the eyes. He could enter her and leave her again. The thought was infinitely sweet.

She lay in the soft, warm darkness, and her body was hot, too hot. "Someone foolishly lit a fire and forgot to open the doors and windows," she thought vaguely.

The young man who was now so close to her, who stood silently so close and looked straight into her eyes, could make everything right. His hands were inches from her body. In a moment, they would touch, bringing a cool peace to her body, and to her very being.

Sweet peace could be found by looking directly into the young man's eyes. They glowed in the darkness, like tiny puddles one could dive into. Ultimate and endless peace and joy could be found by jumping into pools.

Is it possible to remain like this, lying peacefully in the soft, warm, dark pools? One found himself in a secret place behind a high wall. Strange voices cried out: "Shame! Shame!" When he listened to the voices, the puddles became disgusting and repulsive places. Should he listen to the voices or should he close his ears, close his eyes? The voices behind the wall grew louder and louder: "Shame! To be disgraced!" Listening to the voices brought death. Does closing your ears to the voices also bring death?

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VII


JOHN WEBSTER WAS telling a story. There was something he himself wanted to understand. The desire to understand everything was a new passion that had come to him. What a world he had always lived in, and how little he wanted to understand it. Children were born in cities and on farms. They grew up to be men and women. Some went to college, others, after a few years of education in city or country schools, went out into the world, perhaps married, found work in factories or stores, went to church on Sundays or to ball games, became parents of children.

People everywhere were telling different stories, talking about things they thought interested them, but no one was telling the truth. Truth was ignored at school. What a tangled mess of other, unimportant things. "Two plus two is four. If a merchant sells a man three oranges and two apples, and the oranges sell for twenty-four cents a dozen and the apples for sixteen, how much does the man owe the merchant?"

A truly important matter. Where's the guy going with three oranges and two apples? He's a short man in brown shoes, his cap perched on his temple. A strange smile plays around his mouth. The sleeve of his coat is torn. What happened? Kuss hums a song to himself. Listen:


"Diddle-de-di-do,

Diddle-de-di-do,

Chinaberry grows on the Chinaberry tree.

Diddle-de-di-do.


What does he mean, in the name of the bearded men who came to the queen's bedchamber when the Roman king was born? What is Chinaberry?

John Webster was talking to his daughter, sitting with his arm around her and talking, while behind him, unseen, his wife was struggling to put the iron lid back in place, which should always be pressed tightly against the well opening. of unexpressed thoughts within herself.

There was a man who had come to her naked in the twilight of a late afternoon long ago. He had come to her and done something to her. A rape of the unconscious self. Over time, it had been forgotten or forgiven, but now he was doing it again. He was talking now. What was he talking about? Weren't there things that were never spoken? What was the purpose of a deep well within oneself if not to become a place where one could place what cannot be spoken?

Now John Webster tried to tell the whole story of his attempt to make love to the woman he had married.

Writing letters containing the word "love" led to something. After some time, when he had sent several of these letters, written in the hotel's writing rooms, and just when he was beginning to think he'd never get a response to any of them and might as well give up on the whole thing, a reply arrived. Then a flood of letters poured in from him.

Even back then, he was still traveling from town to town, trying to sell washing machines to merchants, but that only took up part of each day. That left the evenings, the mornings, when he rose early and sometimes went for a stroll through the streets of one of the towns before breakfast, the long evenings, and Sundays.

All this time, he was filled with an inexplicable energy. It must have been because he was in love. If a person weren't in love, they couldn't feel so alive. Early in the morning and evening, when he walked, looking at the houses and people, everyone suddenly seemed close to him. Men and women emerged from their houses and walked along the streets, factory whistles blared, men and boys entered and exited the factories.

One evening, he stood by a tree on a strange street in a strange city. A child was crying in the house next door, and a woman's voice spoke softly to him. His fingers gripped the tree bark. He wanted to run into the house where the child was crying, snatch the child from its mother's arms, and comfort it, maybe even kiss the mother. What if he could only walk down the street, shaking men's hands and putting his arm around young girls' shoulders?

He had extravagant fantasies. Perhaps there was a world in which there would be new and wonderful cities. He kept imagining such cities. First, the doors of all the houses were wide open. Everything was clean and tidy. The window sills of the houses were washed. He went into one of the houses. So the people had left, but in case some guy like him wandered in, they had set up a small feast on the table in one of the rooms downstairs. There was a loaf of white bread, next to it a carving knife for cutting slices, cold meats, squares of cheese, a decanter of wine.

He sat alone at the table and ate, feeling very happy, and after his hunger was satisfied, he carefully brushed away the crumbs and carefully prepared everything. Someone else might come later and wander into the same house.

Young Webster's dreams during this period of his life filled him with delight. Sometimes, during nighttime walks through the dark streets of his home, he would stop and stand, looking at the sky and laughing.

There he was in a fantasy world, a place of dreams. His mind took him back to the house he'd visited in his dream world. What curiosity he felt about the people who lived there. It was night, but the place was illuminated. There were little lamps you could pick up and carry around. There was a city where every house was a place of feasting, and this was one of those houses, and in its sweet depths you could feed more than just your stomach.

One walked through the house, nourishing all his senses. The walls were painted bright colors that had faded with age, becoming soft and delicate. In America, the days when people constantly built new houses were gone. They built sturdy homes and then stayed in them, decorating them slowly and confidently. It was a house you'd probably want to be in during the day when the owners were home, but it was also nice to be alone at night.

A lamp held above their heads cast dancing shadows on the walls. Someone climbed the stairs to the bedrooms, wandered the hallways, descended the stairs again, and, having replaced the lamp, fainted at the open front door.

How pleasant it was to linger for a moment on the porch, dreaming new dreams. And what about the people who lived in this house? He imagined a young woman sleeping in one of the upstairs bedrooms. If she were asleep in bed and he entered her room, what would happen?

Perhaps in a world, well, one might as well say in some imaginary world-perhaps it would take a real people too long to create such a world-but could there not be a people in the world? What do you think, a people with truly developed senses, people who really smell, see, taste, touch things with their fingers, hear things with their ears? One could dream of such a world. It was early evening, and there was no need to return to the small, dirty city hotel for several hours.

Someday, perhaps, a world inhabited by living people will emerge. Then the constant talk of death will end. People took hold of life firmly, like a filled cup, and carried it until the time came to toss it over their shoulder. They will understand that wine was created for drinking, food for nourishing and nourishing the body, ears for hearing all sorts of sounds, and eyes for seeing things.

What unknown feelings might not be developed in the bodies of such people? Well, it's entirely possible that a young woman, such as John Webster tried to imagine, might lie peacefully on a bed in the upper room of one of the houses along the dark street on such evenings. One entered the open door of the house and, taking a lamp, approached it. The lamp itself could also be imagined as something beautiful. It had a small ring through which one could slip a finger. One wore the lamp like a ring on his finger. Its small flame was like a precious stone, shining in the darkness.

One climbed the stairs and quietly entered the room where the woman lay on the bed. One held a lamp above his head. Its light shone into her eyes and into the woman's. A long moment passed as they simply stood there, looking at each other.

The question was asked: "Are you for me? Am I for you? " People developed a new sense, many new senses. People saw with their eyes, smelled with their nostrils, heard with their ears. Deeper, hidden senses of the body also developed. Now people could accept or reject each other with a gesture. There was no longer the slow starvation of men and women. It was no longer necessary to live a long life, during which one could only experience the faintest glimpses of a few semi-golden moments.

There was something about all these fantasies, so closely connected to his marriage and his life after it. He tried to explain it to his daughter, but it was difficult.

There was a moment when he entered the upper room of the house and found a woman lying before him. A sudden and unexpected question arose in his eyes, and he found a quick and impatient answer in hers.

And then-damn it, how hard it was to fix it! In a sense, a lie had been told. By whom? There was the poison he and the woman had inhaled together. Who had released the cloud of toxic vapor into the air of the upstairs bedroom?

That moment kept returning to the young man's mind. He walked the streets of unfamiliar cities, dreaming of reaching the upstairs bedroom of a new kind of woman.

Then he went to the hotel and sat for hours writing letters. Of course, he didn't write down his fantasies. Oh, if only he had the courage to do so! If only he knew enough to do so!

What he was doing was writing the word "love" over and over again, rather stupidly. "I was walking and thinking about you, and I loved you so much. I saw a house I liked, and I thought about you and me living in it as husband and wife. I'm sorry I was so stupid and inattentive when I saw you that time. Give me another chance, and I'll prove my 'love' to you."

What a betrayal! After all, it was John Webster who poisoned the wellsprings of truth from which he and this woman would have to drink as they walked the path to happiness.

He wasn't thinking about her at all. He was thinking about the strange, mysterious woman lying in the top bedroom of his fantasy city.

It all started out wrong, and then nothing could be fixed. One day, a letter arrived from her, and then, after writing many more letters, he went to her city to visit her.

There was a time of confusion, and then the past seemed forgotten. They went for a walk together under the trees in a strange city. Later, he wrote more letters and came to see her again. One night, he proposed marriage.

That same devil! He didn't even hug her when he asked. There was a certain fear in all of this. "I'd rather not do this after what happened earlier. I'll wait until we get married. Then everything will be different." One of them had an idea. The thing was, after marriage, a person became completely different from before, and the person they loved also became something completely different.

And so, with this idea in mind, he managed to get married, and he and the woman went on their honeymoon together.

John Webster held his daughter's body close to him, trembling slightly. "I had this thought in my head that I'd better go slowly," he said. "You see, I've already frightened her once. 'We'll go slowly here,' I kept telling myself. 'Well, she doesn't know much about life; I'd better go slower.'"

The memory of the wedding moment deeply moved John Webster.

The bride descended the stairs. Strange people stood around her. All the while, inside these strange people, inside all people everywhere, thoughts were going on that no one seemed to suspect.

"Now look at me, Jane. I'm your father. I was like that. All these years I was your father, I was just like that. "Something happened to me. Somewhere, a lid was lifted from me. Now, you see, I'm standing as if on a high hill, looking down into the valley where my whole former life was lived. All of a sudden, you see, I recognize all the thoughts I've had all my life.

"You'll hear it. Well, you'll read it in the books and stories people write about death. 'At the moment of death, he looked back and saw his whole life spread out before him.' That's what you'll read.

"Ha! That's fine, but what about life? What about the moment when, after being dead, a person comes back to life?"

John Webster grew agitated again. He removed his hand from his daughter's shoulder and rubbed his hands together. A slight tremor ran through both his body and his daughter's. She didn't understand what he was saying, but strangely, it didn't matter. In that moment, they were deeply united. The sudden revival of one's entire being after years of partial death was an ordeal. A new balance of body and mind had to be found. One felt very young and strong, then suddenly old and tired. Now one carried one's life forward, as one carries a filled cup along a crowded street. One had to remember all the time, keep in mind, that the body needed a certain relaxation. One had to give a little and sway with things. This must always be kept in mind. If one became rigid and tense at any time except when throwing one's body into that of a lover, one's foot would stumble or one would bump into something, and the filled cup one was carrying would be emptied with an awkward gesture.

Strange thoughts continued to come to the man's mind as he sat on the bed with his daughter, trying to compose himself. He could very easily become one of those people seen everywhere, one of those people whose empty bodies wandered through cities, towns, and farms, "one of those people whose life is an empty bowl," he thought, and then a more sublime thought came and calmed him. There was something he had once heard or read about. What was it? "Do not awaken or awaken my love until he wishes," said a voice within him.

He began to tell the story of his marriage again.

"We went on our honeymoon to a farm in Kentucky, traveling there in a sleeper car on a train at night. I kept thinking about going slowly with her, kept telling myself I'd better go slower, so that night she slept on the bottom bunk and I snuck into the top. We were going to visit a farm owned by her uncle, her father's brother, and we reached the town where we were supposed to get off the train before breakfast.

"Her uncle was waiting at the station with a carriage, and we immediately went to the place in the country we were supposed to visit."

John Webster told the story of two men's arrival in a small town with meticulous attention to detail. He had slept very little that night and was acutely aware of everything that was happening to him. A row of wooden warehouses ran from the station, and after a few hundred yards it became a residential street, then a country road. A man in a shirtsleeved shirt walked along the sidewalk on one side of the street. He was smoking a pipe, but when a carriage passed, he took the pipe out of his mouth and laughed. He called to another man, who was standing in front of an open storefront on the opposite side of the street. What strange words he spoke. What did they mean? "Make it unusual, Eddie," he shouted.

The carriage, carrying three people, moved quickly. John Webster hadn't slept all night, and there was a tension within him. He was alive, eager. Her uncle in the front seat was a large man, like her father, but his skin had turned brown from life outdoors. He also had a gray mustache. Was it possible to meet him? Would anyone ever be able to say something intimate and confidential to him?

And anyway, would anyone ever be able to say such intimate and confidential things to the woman they married? The truth was, his body ached all night with anticipation of the coming lovemaking. How strange that no one talked about such things when they married women from respectable families in respectable industrial cities of Illinois. Everyone at the wedding was supposed to know. No doubt this was what the young married men and women, so to speak, smiled and laughed about, behind the scenes.

The carriage was pulled by two horses, and they rode calmly and steadily. The woman who would become John Webster's fiancée sat, very straight and tall, on the seat next to him, her hands folded in her lap. They were on the outskirts of town, and a boy came out of the front door of a house and stood on the small porch, looking at them with empty, questioning eyes. A little further on, under a cherry tree, next to another house, a large dog slept. He let the carriage almost pass before moving. John Webster watched the dog. "Should I get up from this comfortable place and make a fuss about this carriage or not?" the dog seemed to be asking itself. Then he jumped up and, racing madly down the road, began barking at the horses. The man in the front seat struck him with a whip. "I suppose he decided he had to do it, that it was the right thing to do," John Webster said. His fiancée and her uncle looked at him questioningly. "Eh, what was that? What did you say?" his uncle asked, but received no answer. John Webster suddenly felt awkward. "I was only talking about the dog," he said after a while. He had to explain somehow. The rest of the ride passed in silence.

Late in the evening of the same day, the matter which he had been awaiting with such hopes and doubts reached a kind of completion.

Her uncle's farmhouse, a large, comfortable white frame building, stood on the riverbank in a narrow, green valley, with hills rising both before and behind it. That afternoon, young Webster and his fiancée walked past the barn behind the house and onto a lane that ran alongside an orchard. They then climbed a fence and, crossing a field, entered a forest that led up the hillside. At the top was another meadow, and then more forest, completely covering the hilltop.

It was a warm day, and they tried to make conversation as they went along, but it was no use. From time to time, she glanced at him shyly, as if to say, "The path we're about to take in life is a very dangerous one. Are you sure you're a reliable guide?"

Well, he sensed her question and doubted the answer. Surely it would have been better if the question had been asked and answered long ago. When they reached a narrow path in the forest, he let her go ahead, and then he could look at her confidently. There was fear in him, too. "Our shyness will make us confuse everything," he thought. It was hard to remember if he had truly thought of anything so specific back then. He was afraid. Her back was very straight, and once, when she bent to pass under the branch of an overhanging tree, her long, slender body, rising and falling, made a very graceful gesture. A lump rose in his throat.

He tried to focus on the little things. It had rained a day or two ago, and small mushrooms had grown near the path. In one spot there was a whole army of them, very graceful, with caps decorated with delicate multicolored spots. He picked one out. How strangely sharp in his nostrils. He wanted to eat it, but she was afraid and protested. "Don"t," she said. "It could be poison." For a moment it seemed as if they might get acquainted after all. She looked straight at him. It was strange. They hadn"t called each other pet names yet. They hadn"t addressed each other by their first names at all. "Don"t eat it," she said. "Okay, but isn"t it tempting and wonderful?" he replied. They looked at each other for a while, and then she blushed, and then they walked down the path again.

They climbed to a hill overlooking the valley, and she sat down, leaning her back against a tree. Spring had passed, but as they walked through the forest, the sensation of new growth was palpable everywhere. Small green, pale green creatures were just pushing up from the dead brown leaves and black earth, and the trees and bushes, too, seemed to be sprouting new growth. Were new leaves appearing, or were the old leaves standing a little straighter and stronger because they had been refreshed? This, too, was something to consider when one was perplexed and faced with a question that demanded an answer, but one could not answer it.

Now they were on the hill, and lying at her feet, he didn't have to look at her, but could look down at the valley. Perhaps she was looking at him and thinking the same things as he, but that was her own business. A man had done well enough to have his own thoughts, to put his affairs in order. The rain, having refreshed everything, brought a multitude of new scents into the forest. How fortunate that there was no wind. The scents did not blow away, but lay low, like a soft blanket covering everything. The earth had its own aroma, mingled with the scent of decaying leaves and animals. Along the top of the hill ran a path where sheep sometimes walked. On the hard path behind the tree where she sat, piles of sheep droppings lay. He didn't turn to look, but knew they were there. Sheep droppings were like marble. It was pleasant to feel that within the scope of his love of smells he could include all life, even the excrements of life. Somewhere in the forest, a flowering tree grew. It couldn't be far. Its fragrance mingled with all the other scents wafting over the hillside. The trees called to bees and insects, which responded with frantic zeal. They flew swiftly through the air above John Webster's head and hers. One puts aside other tasks to play with thoughts. Odin lazily tossed little thoughts into the air, like boys playing, tossing them, and then catching them again. In time, when the time was right, a crisis would come in the lives of John Webster and the woman he married, but for now, one could play with thoughts. Odin tossed thoughts into the air and caught them again.

People walked everywhere, knowing the scent of flowers and certain other things, spices, and the like, which poets described as fragrant. Is it possible to build walls based on smells? Wasn't there once a Frenchman who wrote a poem about the scent of women's armpits? Was it something he heard about among young people at school, or was it just a silly idea that popped into his head?

The task was to sense the fragrance of all things in the mind: the earth, plants, people, animals, insects. A golden mantle could be woven to dispel the earth and people. The strong scents of animals, combined with the scent of pine and other heavy odors, gave the mantle strength and durability. Then, on the foundation of this strength, one could give free rein to one's imagination. It was time for all the little poets to gather. On the solid foundation created by John Webster's imagination, they could weave all sorts of patterns, using all the scents their less resilient nostrils dared to perceive: the scent of violets growing along forest paths, small fragile mushrooms, the scent of honey dripping from sacks underground, the bellies of insects, the hair of girls fresh from the bathhouse.

Finally, John Webster, a middle-aged man, sat on his bed with his daughter, recounting the events of his youth. Against his will, he gave the account of this experience a surprisingly perverse twist. He was undoubtedly lying to his daughter. Had that young man on the hillside long ago experienced the many and complex feelings he was now ascribing to him?

Every now and then he would stop talking and shake his head, a smile playing on his face.

"How secure the relationship between him and his daughter now was. There was no doubt that a miracle had occurred."

It even seemed to him that she knew that he was lying, that he was throwing some kind of romantic mantle over the experience of his youth, but it seemed to him that she also knew that only by lying to the extreme could he arrive at the truth.

Now the man was back in his imagination on the hillside. There was an opening among the trees, and through it he could look out, seeing the entire valley below. Somewhere downriver was a large city-not the one where he and his fiancée had disembarked, but a much larger one, with factories. Some people had come upriver in boats from the city and were preparing to have a picnic in a grove, upstream and across the river from her uncle's house.

There were both men and women at the party, the women wearing white dresses. It was charming to watch them wander back and forth among the green trees, and one of them approached the riverbank and, placing one foot in a boat moored on the bank and the other on the bank itself, bent down to fill a pitcher with water. There was a woman and her reflection in the water, barely visible even from this distance. There was a resemblance and a separation. Two white figures opened and closed like an exquisitely painted shell.

Young Webster, standing on the hill, didn't look at his bride, and they were both silent, but he was almost insanely excited. Was she thinking the same thoughts as he? Had her nature been revealed, like his?

It became impossible to maintain a clear mind. What was he thinking, and what was she thinking and feeling? Far in the forest beyond the river, white female figures wandered among the trees. The men who had been at the picnic, in their darker clothing, were no longer distinguishable. They were no longer considered. Female figures in white robes swirled among the sturdy, jutting tree trunks.

Behind him on the hill was a woman, and she was his bride. Perhaps she had the same thoughts as he. It must have been true. She was a young woman and would have been afraid, but the time had come when fear had to be cast aside. One of them was a male, and at the right moment he approached the female and seized her. There was a certain cruelty in nature, and in time this cruelty became part of masculinity.

He closed his eyes and, turning over onto his stomach, got up on all fours.

If you'd remained lying quietly at her feet any longer, it would have been a kind of madness. There was already too much anarchy inside. "At the moment of death, all of life passes before a person." What a stupid idea. "What about the moment of life's emergence?"

He knelt like an animal, looking at the ground but not yet looking at her. With all the strength in his being, he tried to tell his daughter the significance of this moment in his life.

"How can I say what I felt? Perhaps I should have become an artist or a singer. My eyes were closed, and inside me were all the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations of the world of the valley I was looking into. Within myself, I comprehended all things.

"Everything happened in flashes, in colors. At first there were yellows, golds, shining yellows, things not yet born. The yellows were small, shining streaks, hidden beneath the dark blues and blacks of the soil. The yellows were things not yet born, not yet brought to light. They were yellow because they were not yet green. Soon the yellows would blend with the dark colors of the earth and emerge into a world of flowers.

There would be a sea of flowers, running in waves and splashing everything. Spring will come, inside the earth, inside me too."

Birds flew in the air above the river, and young Webster, with his eyes closed and bowed before the woman, was the birds in the air, the air itself, and the fish in the river below. Now it seemed to him that if he opened his eyes and looked back down into the valley, he could see, even from such a great distance, the movement of fish fins in the river far below.

Well, he'd better not open his eyes now. He'd once looked into a woman's eyes, and she'd come to him like a swimmer emerging from the sea, but then something had happened that ruined everything. He'd crept up on her. Now she'd begun to protest. "Don't," she said, "I'm scared. There's no point in stopping now. This is the moment when you can't stop." He raised his arms and took her, protesting and crying, into his arms.

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VIII


"WHY SHOULD ONE commit rape, rape of the mind, rape of the unconscious?"

John Webster jumped up beside his daughter and spun around. The word burst from his wife, sitting unnoticed on the floor behind him. "Don't," she said, and then, opening and closing her mouth twice, repeated the word to no avail. "Don't, don't," she said again. The words seemed to spill from her lips. Her body, lying on the floor, had become a strange, deformed lump of flesh and bone.

She was pale, pale as dough.

John Webster jumped out of bed as a dog sleeping in the dust of the road might jump out of the way of a fast-moving car.

Damn it! His mind snapped back to the present. A moment ago, he'd been with a young woman on a hillside above a wide, sunlit valley, making love to her. The lovemaking hadn't been successful. It had gone badly. Once upon a time, there lived a tall, slender girl who'd given her body to a man, but she'd been terribly frightened and plagued by guilt and shame. Afterward, she'd cried, not from an excess of tenderness, but because she felt unclean. Later, they'd walked down the hillside, and she'd tried to tell him how she felt. Then he, too, had begun to feel vile and unclean. Tears had welled up in his eyes. He thought she must be right. What she'd said, almost everyone had said. After all, man wasn't an animal. Man was a conscious being trying to escape animalism. He tried to think it all through that same night, when he lay in bed next to his wife for the first time, and came to some conclusions. She was undoubtedly right in believing that men have certain impulses that are best subdued by willpower. If a man simply lets himself go, he becomes no better than a beast.

He tried very hard to think it through clearly. What she wanted was for there to be no lovemaking between them except for the purpose of raising children. If one were busy bringing children into the world, raising new citizens for the state, and all the rest, then lovemaking might have a certain dignity. She tried to explain how humiliated and vile she had felt that day when he had stood naked before her. It was the first time they had spoken of it. It was made ten times, a thousand times worse, because he had come a second time, and others had seen him. The pure moment of their relationship was denied with resolute insistence. After it had happened, she couldn't remain in her friend's company, and as for her friend's brother-how could she ever look him in the face again? Every time he looked at her, he saw her not as properly dressed as she should have been, but shamelessly naked, lying on a bed with a naked man holding her in his arms. She had to leave the house, go home immediately, and, of course, when she returned, everyone was puzzled as to what had happened, that her visit had been cut short so abruptly. The trouble was, when her mother questioned her, the day after her arrival home, she suddenly burst into tears.

What they thought after that, she didn't know. The truth was, she began to fear everyone's thoughts. When she went into her bedroom at night, she was almost ashamed to look at her body, and she took to undressing in the dark. Her mother constantly made comments. "Is your sudden return home connected with the young man in this house?"

After returning home and feeling deeply embarrassed in front of others, she decided to join the church, a decision that pleased her father, a devout church member. In fact, the whole incident brought her and her father closer together. Perhaps because, unlike her mother, he never bothered her with awkward questions.

In any case, she decided that if she ever married, she would try to make it a pure marriage, based on companionship. She felt she would eventually have to marry John Webster if he ever repeated his marriage proposal. After what had happened, it was the only right thing for both of them, and now that they were married, it would be equally right for them to try to make amends for the past by leading pure and clean lives and trying never to give way to the animal impulses that shocked and frightened people.

John Webster stood face to face with his wife and daughter, and his thoughts returned to the first night they shared bed, and to the many other nights they had spent together. On that first night, long ago, as she lay talking to him, moonlight had filtered through the window and fallen on her face. She had been very beautiful then. Now that he no longer approached her, blazing with passion, but lay calmly beside her, his body slightly drawn back and his arm around her shoulders, she was not afraid of him and occasionally raised her hand to touch his face.

In fact, it occurred to him that she possessed some kind of spiritual power, completely separate from the flesh. Beyond the house, along the riverbank, frogs made guttural noises, and one night a strange, strange cry came from the air. It must have been some nocturnal bird, perhaps a loon. In fact, the sound wasn't a bell. It was a kind of wild laughter. From another part of the house, on the same floor, came the snoring of her uncle.

Neither man slept much. There was so much to say. After all, they barely knew each other. At the time, he'd thought she wasn't a woman after all. She was a child. Something terrible had happened to the child, and it was his fault, and now that she was his wife, he would do everything he could to make things right. If passion had frightened her, he would have suppressed his own. A thought had occurred to him that had lingered for many years. The fact was that spiritual love was stronger and purer than physical love, that they were two distinct and different things. When this thought occurred to him, he felt greatly inspired. Now, standing and looking at his wife's figure, he wondered what had happened, that the thought, once so strong within him, had prevented him or her from finding happiness together. Someone had spoken those words, and then, in the end, they meant nothing. They were the kind of cunning words that always deceived people, leading them into false positions. He hated those words. "Now I accept flesh first, all flesh," he thought vaguely, still looking down at her. He turned and crossed the room to look in the mirror. The candlelight provided enough light for him to see himself perfectly clearly. It was a rather puzzling thought, but the truth was that every time he looked at his wife over the past few weeks, he wanted to run and look at himself in the mirror. He wanted to be sure of something. The tall, slender girl who had once lain beside him in bed, the moonlight falling on her face, had transformed into the heavy, inert woman now in the room with him, the woman who at that moment crouched on the floor at the doorway, at the foot of the bed. How much had he become like this?

Animalism can't be so easily avoided. Now the woman on the floor resembled an animal more than he did. Perhaps he was saved by the very sins he had committed, his occasional shameful escape to other women in the cities. "This statement could be thrown into the teeth of good, pure people, if it were true," he thought with a quick inner thrill of satisfaction.

The woman on the floor resembled a heavy animal suddenly taken ill. He retreated to the bed and looked at her with a strange, impersonal light in his eyes. She was having trouble holding her head up. The candlelight, cut off from her submerged body by the bed itself, fell brightly on her face and shoulders. The rest of her body was buried in darkness. His mind remained as alert and alert as it had been since he found Natalie. Now he could think more in an instant than he had in a year. If he ever became a writer, and he sometimes thought he might after leaving with Natalie, he would never want to write about anything worth writing about. If a person were to keep the lid of the well of thought within themselves, let the well empty itself, let the mind consciously think any thoughts that come to it, accept all thoughts, all ideas, just as the flesh accepts people, animals, birds, trees, and plants, one could live a hundred or a thousand lives in one lifetime. Of course, it would be absurd to expand the boundaries too much, but one can at least play with the idea of becoming something more than just a single man and woman living a single, narrow, limited life. One can tear down all walls and fences, enter and exit a multitude of people, become many people. One can become an entire city full of people, a city, a nation.

But now, at this moment, one must keep in mind the woman on the floor, the woman whose voice, but a moment ago, had again spoken the word that her lips had always spoken to him.

"No! No! Let's not do this, John! Not now, John! What a persistent denial of oneself, and perhaps of oneself too.

It was absurdly cruel, how impersonally he treated her. Perhaps only a few people in the world ever realized the depth of cruelty slumbering within them. All the things that emerged from the well of thoughts within him when he lifted the lid were not easy to accept as part of himself.

As for the woman on the floor, if you let your imagination run wild, you could stand as you are now, looking straight at the woman, and think the most absurdly insignificant thoughts.

At first, one might have thought that the darkness into which her body had sunk due to the fact that no candlelight fell upon it was the sea of silence in which she had been staying all these years, sinking deeper and deeper.

And the sea of silence was just another, fancier name for something else, for that deep well inside all men and women that he had thought about so much over the past few weeks.

The woman who was his wife, and indeed all people, sank deeper and deeper into this sea their entire lives. If one were to fantasize about it more and more, to indulge in a sort of drunken debauchery of fantasy, one could, half-jokingly, leap over some invisible line and say that the sea of silence into which people were always so determined to drown themselves was, in fact, death. A race was underway between mind and body toward the goal of death, and mind almost always came first.

The race began in childhood and never ended until body or mind wore out and ceased to function. Each person constantly carried life and death within them. Two gods sat on two thrones. One could worship either of them, but on the whole, humanity preferred to kneel before death.

The god of denial had triumphed. To reach his throne room, one had to navigate long corridors of evasion. This was the road to his throne room, a road of evasion. One twisted and turned, feeling his way through the darkness. There were no sudden, blinding flashes of light.

John Webster had an idea of his wife. It was clear that the heavy, inert woman who now stared at him from the darkness of the floor, unable to speak to him, had little or nothing in common with the slender girl he had once married. For one thing, they were so different physically. This was a completely different woman. He could see it. Anyone looking at the two women could see that physically there was nothing in common between them. But did she know this, had she ever thought about it, was she even slightly, if not superficially, aware of the change that had come over her? He decided she didn't. There was a kind of blindness common to almost all people. What men looked for in women was what they called beauty, and what women, though they didn't often talk about it, also looked for in men, was no longer there. When it existed at all, it came to people only in flashes. One happened to be next to another, and there was a flash. How confusing it was. Strange things followed, like marriages. "Till death do us part." Well, that was okay too. If possible, you should try to fix everything. When one grasped at what was called beauty in the other, death always came, raising its head as well.

How many marriages do nations have! John Webster's thoughts were racing everywhere. He stood and looked at the woman who, though they had parted long before-once truly and irrevocably parted on a hill above a valley in Kentucky-was still strangely bound to him, and there was another woman who was his daughter in the same room. His daughter stood beside him. He could have reached out and touched her. She looked not at herself or her mother, but at the floor. What was she thinking? What thoughts had he awakened in her? How would the events of that night turn out for her? There were things he could not answer, things he had to leave in the lap of the gods.

His mind raced and raced. There were certain men he always saw in this world. They usually belonged to a class of men with shaky reputations. What had happened to them? There were men who moved through life with a certain effortless grace. In a sense, they were beyond good and evil, standing outside the influences that made or destroyed others. John Webster had seen several such men and could never forget them. Now they passed, like a procession, before his mind's eye.

Once upon a time there was an old man with a white beard, carrying a heavy cane, and a dog following him. He had broad shoulders and walked with a certain gait. John Webster met the man one day while riding along a dusty country road. Who was this guy? Where was he going? There was a certain air about him. "Then go to hell," his demeanor seemed to say. "I am the man coming here. There is a kingdom within me. Talk about democracy and equality if you like, worry your foolish heads about the afterlife, make up little lies to cheer yourself up in the darkness, but get out of my way. I walk in the light."

Perhaps John Webster's current thought about the old man he'd once encountered while walking along a country road was simply a silly thought. He was certain he remembered the figure with extraordinary clarity. He stopped his horse to watch the old man, who didn't even bother to turn to look at him. Well, the old man walked with a regal gait. Perhaps that was why he had caught John Webster's attention.

Now he thought about him and a few other such men he'd seen in his life. There was one, a sailor, who had come to the docks in Philadelphia. John Webster was in the city on business and one afternoon, having nothing better to do, he'd wandered down to where ships were being loaded and unloaded. A sailing vessel, a brigantine, was moored at the dock, and the man he'd seen came down to it. He had a bag over his shoulder, perhaps containing sea clothes. He was undoubtedly a sailor, about to sail on the brigantine before the mast. He simply walked up to the side of the vessel, tossed his bag overboard, and called to another man, who poked his head in the cabin door and, turning, walked away.

But who taught him to walk like that? Old Harry! Most men, and women too, slithered through life like weasels. What made them feel so subservient, so like dogs? Did they constantly smear themselves with accusations of guilt, and if so, what made them do it?

An old man on the road, a sailor walking down the street, a Negro boxer he had once seen driving a car, a gambler at the races in a Southern town who walked in a brightly coloured checkered vest before a crowded stand, a woman actress he had once seen appear on the stage of a theatre, perhaps anyone wicked and walking with a regal tread.

What gave such men and women such self-respect? It was obvious that self-respect must be at the heart of the matter. Perhaps they had none of the guilt and shame that had transformed the slender girl he had once married into the heavy, inarticulate woman who now squatted so grotesquely on the floor at his feet. One could imagine someone like him saying to himself: "Well, here I am, you see, in the world. I have a long or short body, brown or yellow hair. My eyes are a certain color. I eat food, I sleep at night. I will have to spend my whole life among people in this body of mine. Should I crawl before them or walk upright like a king? Will I hate and fear my body, this house I am destined to live in, or should I respect it and take care of it? Well, damn it! The question is not worth answering. I will accept life as it comes. "The birds will sing for me, in the spring the greenery will spread across the earth, the cherry tree in the garden will bloom for me."

John Webster had a bizarre image of a man in his imagination entering a room. He closed the door. A row of candles stood on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. The man opened a box and removed a silver crown. Then he laughed softly and placed the crown on his head. "I call myself a man," he said.


It was astonishing. One was in a room, looking at the woman who was his wife, and the other was about to leave on a trip and never see her again. Suddenly, a blinding flood of thoughts washed over me. Fantasy played everywhere. It seemed like the man had been standing in one place, pondering, for hours, but in reality, only a few seconds had passed since his wife's voice, shouting that word "don't," interrupted his own voice, telling the story of an ordinary, failed marriage.

Now he had to remember his daughter. He'd better get her out of the room now. She walked toward the door to her room and a moment later disappeared. He turned away from the pale-faced woman on the floor and looked at his daughter. Now his own body was caught between the two women's. They couldn't see each other.

There was a story of a marriage that he had not finished telling and would never finish telling now, but in time his daughter would understand how that story must inevitably end.

There was much to think about now. His daughter was leaving him. He might never see her again. A man constantly dramatized life, acted it out. It was inevitable. Every day of a person's life consisted of a series of small dramas, and everyone always assigned themselves an important role in the play. It was a shame to forget your lines, to not take the stage when they were given. Nero fiddled while Rome burned. He forgot what role he had assigned himself, and fiddled so as not to give himself away. Perhaps he intended to give a speech like an ordinary politician about a city rising again from the flames.

Blood of the saints! Would his daughter be able to calmly leave the room without looking back? What else was he going to tell her? He was starting to get a little nervous and upset.

His daughter stood in the doorway to her room, looking at him, and there was a tense, half-mad mood about her, the same one he'd carried all evening. He'd infected her with something of his own. Finally, what he'd wanted had happened: a real marriage. After this evening, the young woman could never have become what she could have been if not for this evening. Now he knew what he wanted from her. Those men whose images had just crossed his mind-the racetrack participant, the old man on the road, the sailor on the docks-were things they owned, and he wanted her to own them too.

Now he was leaving with Natalie, his woman, and he would never see his daughter again. In reality, she was still a young woman. All her femininity lay before her. "I'm damned. I'm crazy, like a madman," he thought. He suddenly had the absurd urge to start singing a stupid chorus that had just popped into his head.


Diddle-de-di-do,

Diddle-de-di-do,

Chinaberry grows on the Chinaberry tree.

Diddle-de-di-do.


And then his fingers, rummaging through his pockets, came across what he had been unconsciously searching for. He grabbed it, half-convulsively, and walked towards his daughter, holding it between his thumb and forefinger.


On the afternoon of the day when he first entered the door of Natalie's house and when he was almost distracted from long reflections, he found a bright pebble on the railway tracks near his factory.

When someone tried to navigate a path too difficult, they could get lost at any moment. You'd walk along some dark, lonely road, and then, frightened, you'd become both shrill and distracted. Something had to be done, but there was nothing to be done. For example, at the most crucial moment in life, you could ruin everything by starting to sing a silly song. Others would shrug their shoulders. "He's crazy," they'd say, as if such a statement ever meant anything.

Well, he was once the same as he was now, at this very moment. Too much thinking had upset him. The door to Natalie's house was open, and he was afraid to enter. He planned to escape from her, go into town, get drunk, and write her a letter asking her to go somewhere where he would never have to see her again. He thought he preferred to walk alone and in the dark, to follow the path of evasion to the throne room of the God of Death.

And just as all this was happening, his eye caught the glint of a small green pebble lying among the gray, meaningless stones on the gravel layer of the railroad track. It was late afternoon, and the sun's rays were caught and reflected by the small stone.

He picked it up, and this simple act broke some absurd resolve within him. His imagination, incapable at the moment of playing with the facts of his life, was playing with the stone. A person's imagination, the creative element within him, was actually meant to be a healing, complementary, and restorative influence on the workings of the mind. Men sometimes committed what they called "going blind," and in such moments they performed the least blind acts of their entire lives. The truth was that the mind, acting alone, was merely a one-sided, crippled creature.

"Hito, Tito, it's no use trying to be a philosopher." John Webster approached his daughter, who was waiting for him to say or do something he hadn't yet done. Now he was all right again. A momentary internal reorganization had occurred, as had happened on so many other occasions over the past few weeks.

A sort of cheerful mood came over him. "In one evening, I've managed to immerse myself quite deeply in the sea of life," he thought.

He had become a little vain. Here he was, a middle-class man who had lived his entire life in a Wisconsin industrial town. But a few weeks ago, he had been just a colorless guy in an almost completely colorless world. For years he had gone about his business just like this, day after day, week after week, year after year, walking the streets, passing people on the streets, lifting and lowering his feet, tap-tap, eating, sleeping, borrowing money from banks, dictating letters in offices, walking, tap-tap, not daring to think or feel anything at all.

Now he could think more, have more imaginations, taking three or four steps across the room to his daughter, than he had sometimes dared to take in a whole year of his previous life. Now an image of himself arose in his imagination that he liked.

In a bizarre image, he climbed to a high spot above the sea and stripped off his clothes. Then he ran to the end of the cliff and leaped into space. His body, his own white body, the very body in which he had lived all these dead years, now described a long, graceful arc against the blue sky.

This, too, was quite pleasant. It created a picture that could be captured in the mind, and it was pleasant to think of one's body creating sharp and striking images.

He plunged deep into the sea of life, into the clear, warm, calm sea of Natalie's life, into the heavy, salty dead sea of his wife's life, into the fast-flowing young river of life that was in his daughter Jane.

"I can mix up my turns of phrase, but at the same time I'm an excellent swimmer in the sea," he said out loud to his daughter.

Well, he should be a little more careful, too. Confusion returned to her eyes. It would take a long time for one person, living with another, to get used to the sight of things suddenly erupting from the wells of thought within them, and perhaps he and his daughter would never live together again.

He looked at the small pebble clutched so tightly between his thumb and forefinger. It would be better to focus his thoughts on it now. It was a small, tiny creature, but one could imagine it looming large on the surface of a calm sea. His daughter's life was a river flowing toward the sea of life. She wanted something to cling to when she was thrown into the sea. What an absurd idea. The little green pebble didn't want to float in the sea. It would drown. He smiled knowingly.

A small stone was held outstretched before him. He'd once picked it up on the railroad tracks and indulged in fantasies about it, and these fantasies had healed him. By indulging in fantasies about inanimate objects, a person strangely glorifies them. For example, a man might go and live in a room. On the wall was a framed painting, the walls of the room, an old desk, two candles beneath a Virgin Mary, and human fantasy had made this place sacred. Perhaps the whole art of life consisted of allowing fantasy to eclipse and color the facts of life.

The light from the two candles beneath the Virgin Mary fell upon the stone he held before him. It was the shape and size of a small bean, dark green in color. Under certain lighting conditions, its color changed rapidly. A yellow-green flash flared, like that of young plants just emerging from the ground, and then it faded, leaving the stone a deep green, like oak leaves at the end of summer, as one might imagine.

How clearly John Webster remembered it all now. The stone he'd found on the railroad tracks had been lost by a woman traveling west. She'd worn it, among other stones, in a brooch around her neck. He remembered how his imagination had conjured her up in that moment.

Or was it set into a ring and worn on a finger?.."

It was all a bit ambiguous. He saw the woman now, as clearly as he had once imagined her, but she wasn't on a train, but standing on a hill. It was winter, the hill was covered in a light blanket of snow, and below it, in the valley, flowed a wide river, coated in a glittering layer of ice. A middle-aged man, rather heavy-set in appearance, stood next to the woman, and she was pointing at something in the distance. The stone was set in a ring worn on an outstretched finger.

Now everything became perfectly clear to John Webster. Now he knew what he wanted. The woman on the hill was one of those strange people, like the sailor who had boarded the ship, the old man on the road, the actress who had emerged from the theater porch, one of those people who had crowned themselves with the crown of life.

He walked up to his daughter and, taking her hand, opened it and placed the pebble in her palm. Then he gently squeezed her fingers until her hand formed a fist.

He smiled knowingly and looked into her eyes. "Well, Jane, it's rather difficult for me to tell you what I'm thinking," he said. "You see, there's a lot inside me that I can't get out until I have time, and now I'm leaving. I want to give you something."

He hesitated. "This stone," he began again, "is something you might perhaps cling to, yes, that's all. In moments of doubt, cling to it. When you're almost distracted and don't know what to do, hold it in your hand."

He turned his head, and his eyes seemed to scan the room slowly and carefully, as if unwilling to forget anything that formed part of the picture, the central figures of which were now he and his daughter.

"In fact," he began again, "a woman, a beautiful woman, you see, can hold many jewels in her hand. You see, she can have many loves, and the jewels can be jewels of experience, the trials of life she has faced, eh?"

John Webster seemed to be playing some strange game with his daughter, but she was no longer as frightened as when she first entered the room, nor as puzzled as she had been a moment ago. She was absorbed in what he was saying. The woman sitting on the floor behind her father was forgotten.

"Before I go, I need to do one thing. I need to give you a name for this little stone," he said, still smiling. Unclasping her hand again, he took it out, walked over, and stood for a moment, holding it in front of one of the candles. Then he returned to her and placed it in her hand again.

"It's from your father, but he's giving it to you at a time when he's no longer your father and has begun to love you as a woman. Well, I think you'd better hold on to it, Jane. You'll need it, God knows. If you need a name for it, call it 'The Jewel of Life,'" he said, and then, as if he'd already forgotten the incident, he placed his hand on her arm and gently pushed her through the door, closing it behind her.

OceanofPDF.com

IX


There were still some things left for John Webster to do in the room. When his daughter had gone, he picked up his bag and walked out into the hallway as if to leave, without another word to his wife, who still sat on the floor, her head bowed, as if unaware of any life around her.

He went out into the hallway and closed the door, put down his bag, and returned. Standing in the room with a pen in his hand, he heard a noise from the floor below. "It's Catherine. What is she doing at this time of night?" he thought. He took out his watch and walked closer to the burning candles. It was a quarter to three. "Good, we'll catch the early morning train at four," he thought.

On the floor, at the foot of the bed, lay his wife, or rather, the woman who had been his wife for so long. Now her eyes looked straight at him. But her eyes said nothing. They didn't even plead with him. There was something hopelessly perplexed in them. If the events that had happened in the room that night had torn the lid off the well she carried within her, she had managed to close it again. Now, perhaps, the lid would never move from its place again. John Webster felt as he imagined an undertaker might feel when called to a dead body in the middle of the night.

"Damn! Guys like that probably didn't have feelings like that." Without really realizing what he was doing, he took out a cigarette and lit it. He felt strangely impersonal, like watching a rehearsal for a play you weren't particularly interested in. "Yes, it's time to die," he thought. "A woman is dying. I can't tell if her body is dying, but something inside her has already died." He wondered if he had killed her, but he felt no guilt about it.

He walked to the foot of the bed and, placing his hand on the railing, leaned over to look at her.

It was a time of darkness. A shudder ran through his body, and dark thoughts, like flocks of blackbirds, swept across the field of his imagination.

"The devil! There's hell there too! There's such a thing as death, and there's such a thing as life," he told himself. However, there was also a surprising and rather interesting fact here. It had taken the woman lying on the floor before him a long time and much grim determination to find her way to death's throne room. "Perhaps no one, as long as there's life within them capable of lifting the lid, will ever completely sink into the swamp of decaying flesh," he thought.

Thoughts stirred within John Webster that hadn't occurred to him for years. As a young man in college, he must have truly been more alive than he'd realized. Things he'd heard discussed by other young men, people with literary leanings, and read in the books he was required to read, had been returning to his mind over the past few weeks. "You'd think I'd been keeping track of things like this all my life," he thought.

The poet Dante, Milton with his Paradise Lost, the Jewish poets of the ancient Testaments, all such people must have seen at some time in their lives what he saw at that very moment.

A woman lay on the floor before him, her eyes staring straight into his. Something had been struggling within her all evening, something that wanted to come out to him and his daughter. Now the struggle was over. It was capitulation. He continued to look down at her with a strange, intense gaze in his own eyes.

"It's too late. It didn't work," he said slowly. He didn't say the words out loud, but whispered them.

A new thought occurred to him. All his life with this woman, he'd clung to one idea. It was a kind of beacon, which, he now felt, had led him astray from the very beginning. In a sense, he'd adopted the idea from others. It was a uniquely American idea, always obliquely repeated in newspapers, magazines, and books. Behind it lay a mad, unconvincing philosophy of life. "All things work together for good. God is in his heaven, all is right with the world. All men are created free and equal."

"What an ungodly multitude of noisy, meaningless statements has been hammered into the ears of men and women trying to live their lives!"

A strong feeling of disgust washed over him. "Well, there's no point in me staying here any longer. My life in this house is over," he thought.

He walked to the door, and when he opened it, she turned around again. "Good night and goodbye," he said as cheerfully as if he had just left home that morning to spend the day at the factory.

And then the sound of a closing door suddenly broke the silence of the house.

OceanofPDF.com

BOOK FOUR

OceanofPDF.com

I


SPIRIT OF Death was certainly lurking in the Webster house. Jane Webster felt its presence. She suddenly became aware of the possibility of feeling within herself a multitude of unspoken, unannounced things. When her father took her hand and pushed her back into the darkness behind the closed door of her own room, she went straight to her bed and threw herself on the coverlet. Now she lay clutching the small pebble he had given her. How glad she was to have something to grasp. Her fingers pressed against it so that it was already embedded in the flesh of her palm. If her life before tonight had been a quiet river flowing through fields to the sea of life, it would no longer be so. Now the river entered a dark, rocky region. Now it ran through rocky passages, between high, dark cliffs. What could not happen to her tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. Her father was leaving with a strange woman. There would be a scandal in town. All her young friends, both men and women, looked at her with questioning eyes. Perhaps they would pity her. Her spirits lifted, and the thought made her writhe with anger. Strange, yet true, she felt no particular sympathy for her mother. Her father had managed to get close to her. Somehow, she understood what he was about to do, why he was doing it. She kept seeing the naked figure of a man pacing back and forth before her. For as long as she could remember, she had always had a curiosity about male bodies.

Once or twice, she'd discussed the matter with some young girls she knew well, a cautious, half-frightened conversation. "The man was such-and-such. What happened when a man grew up and got married was simply terrible." One of the girls had seen something. A man lived down the street from her, and he didn't always bother to draw the curtains on his bedroom window. One summer day, the girl was lying on her bed in her room when the man came in and took off all his clothes. He was up to something silly. There was a mirror, and he was jumping back and forth in front of it. He must have been pretending to fight the person whose reflection he saw in the glass, constantly advancing and retreating, making the most comical movements with his body and arms. He lunged, frowned, and punched, then jumped back as if the man in the glass had struck him.

The girl on the bed saw everything, the man's entire body. At first, she thought she'd run out of the room, but then she decided to stay. Well, she didn't want her mother to know what she'd seen, so she quietly got up and crept across the floor to lock the door so her mother or the maid couldn't suddenly come in. She always had to find out something, and she might as well take advantage of this opportunity. It was terrifying, and she couldn't sleep for two or three nights after it happened, but she was still glad she'd seen it. You can't always be a fool and not know anything.

As Jane Webster lay on her bed, pressing her fingers to the stone her father had given her, she seemed very young and guileless when she spoke of the naked man she had seen in the house next door. She felt a certain contempt for him. As for herself, she was indeed in the presence of a naked man, and this man was sitting next to her and holding her. His hands had practically touched her own flesh. In the future, no matter what happened, men would not be the same to her as they had been before, or as they had been to the young women who had been her friends. Now she would know men in a way she had never known before, and she would not fear them. She was glad of this. Her father was leaving with a strange woman, and the scandal that would undoubtedly erupt in the city could destroy the quiet security in which she had always lived, but she had achieved much. Now the river that had been her life flowed through dark corridors. He might have fallen down the sharp protruding rocks.

Of course, it would be wrong to attribute such specific thoughts to Jane Webster, although later, when she recalled that evening, her own mind began to build a tower of romance around it. She lay on her bed, clutching a pebble, frightened, yet strangely joyful.

Something had been torn apart, perhaps a door to life for her. The Webster house had felt like death, but she had a new sense of life and a new joyful sense of no fear of life.


Her father walked down the stairs into the dark corridor below, carrying his bag and also thinking about death.

Now there was no end to the development of thought that took place within John Webster. In the future, he would become a weaver, weaving patterns from the threads of thought. Death was a thing, like life, that came to people suddenly, flickering within them. There were always two figures who strolled through cities and towns, entering and exiting houses, factories, and shops, visiting lonely farmhouses at night, strolling along cheerful city streets in daylight, boarding and exiting trains, always in motion, appearing before people at the most unexpected moments. It might be somewhat difficult for a person to learn to enter and exit other people, but for the two gods, Life and Death, it was effortless. Within every man and woman was a deep well, and when Life entered the door of the house-that is, the body-it leaned over and tore the heavy iron cover from the well. The dark, hidden things festering in the well came to light and found expression, and the miracle was that, once expressed, they often became very beautiful. When the God of Life entered, a purification, a strange renewal, took place in the man or woman's home.

As for Death and his appearance, that's a different matter. Death, too, played many strange tricks on people. Sometimes he allowed their bodies to live for a long time, content to simply close the lid of the well inside. It was as if he were saying, "Well, there's no need to rush physical death. In due time, it will become inevitable. Against my opponent, Life, I can play a much more ironic and subtle game. I will fill the cities with the damp, fetid stench of death, while even the dead think they're still alive. As for me, I'm cunning. I'm like a great and cunning king: everyone serves, while he speaks only of freedom and makes his subjects think it's he who serves, not they themselves. I'm like a great general, always having a vast army at his command, ready to spring to arms at the slightest sign."

John Webster walked down the dark corridor below to the door leading outside and placed his hand on the handle of the outer door. Instead of walking straight out, he paused and considered for a moment. He was a bit vain in his thoughts. "Perhaps I am a poet. Perhaps only a poet can keep the lid of the inner well and survive until the last moment, when his body wears out and he must climb out," he thought.

His vain mood abated, he turned and glanced curiously down the hallway. At that moment, he was very much like an animal moving through a dark forest, deaf but nonetheless aware that life is bustling and perhaps waiting just nearby. Perhaps that was the figure of the woman he'd seen sitting a few feet away? In the hallway near the front door stood a small, old-fashioned hat rack, the bottom of which served as a sort of seat.

You'd think a woman was sitting there quietly. She also had a packed bag, and it was standing on the floor next to her.

Old Harry! John Webster was a little taken aback. Had his imagination gotten a little out of control? There was no doubt that a few feet away from where he stood, a woman sat with the doorknob in her hand.

He wanted to reach out and see if he could touch the woman's face. He thought of the two gods, Life and Death. An illusion had undoubtedly arisen in his mind. There was a deep sense of a presence sitting silently there, at the bottom of the hat rack. He moved a little closer, and a shudder ran through him. There stood a dark mass, roughly depicting the outline of a human body, and as he stood and looked, it seemed to him that the face became more and more defined. The face, like the faces of two other women who had surfaced before him at important and unexpected moments in his life-the face of a young naked girl lying on a bed long ago, the face of Natalie Schwartz, seen in the darkness of a night field as he lay beside her-these faces seemed to float toward him, as if emerging from the deep waters of the sea.

He had undoubtedly allowed himself to become a little overtired. No one walked the path they walked lightly. He had dared to venture out onto life's path and tried to take others with him. He was undoubtedly more excited and agitated than he had imagined.

He gently reached out and touched the face, which now seemed to float toward him out of the darkness. Then he jumped back, hitting his head on the opposite wall of the corridor. His fingers felt warm flesh. He had a startling sensation, like something was spinning in his brain. Had he really lost his mind? A comforting thought flashed through his turmoil.

"Catherine," he said loudly. It was a challenge to himself.

"Yes," the female voice answered quietly, "I didn"t intend to let you go without saying goodbye."

The woman who had been his servant for so many years explained her presence there in the darkness. "I"m sorry I startled you," she said. "I was just going to talk. You"re leaving, and so am I. I have everything packed and ready. I came upstairs this evening and heard you say you were leaving, so I came down and packed my things myself. It didn"t take me long. I didn"t have much to pack."

John Webster opened the front door and asked her to come outside with him, and for a few minutes they stood talking on the steps leading down from the porch.

Outside the house, he felt better. A faintness had followed the fear, and for a moment he sat on the steps while she stood and waited. Then the faintness passed, and he stood. The night was clear and dark. He took a deep breath and felt immense relief at the thought that he would never again enter the door he had just exited. He felt very young and strong. Soon, a streak of light would appear in the eastern sky. When he picked up Natalie and they boarded the train, they would board the day car on the east-facing side. It would be pleasant to see the dawn of a new day. His imagination ran ahead of his body, and he saw himself and the woman sitting together on the train. They entered the illuminated carriage from the darkness outside, shortly before dawn. During the day, people on the bus slept, huddled on the seats, looking uncomfortable and tired. The air would be heavy with the musty breath of people crammed together. The heavy, acrid smell of clothes that had long since absorbed the acids secreted by their bodies hung heavy in his dread. He and Natalie would take the train to Chicago and get off there. Perhaps they would immediately take another train. Perhaps they would stay in Chicago for a day or two. There would be plans, perhaps long hours of conversation. Now a new life was about to begin. He himself had to consider what he wanted to do with his days. It was strange. He and Natalie had no plans other than to take the train. Now, for the first time, his imagination tried to crawl beyond this moment, to penetrate the future.

It was a good thing it was a clear night. I wouldn't have wanted to set out and walk to the station in the rain. The stars were so bright in the early morning hours. It was Catherine speaking now. It would be nice to hear what she had to say.

She told him with a kind of brutal frankness that she did not like Mrs. Webster, had never liked her, and that she had remained in the house all these years as a servant only because of him.

He turned and looked at her, and her eyes looked straight into his. They stood very close to each other, almost as close as lovers could stand, and in the uncertain light her eyes were strangely similar to Natalie's. In the darkness, they seemed to glow, just as Natalie's eyes had glowed that night when he lay with her in the field.

Was it just a chance that this new sense of being able to refresh and renew himself through loving others, through entering and leaving the open doors of other people's homes, had come to him through Natalie, and not through this woman? Catherine? "Ha, that's marriage, everyone's looking for marriage, that's what they're up to, looking for marriage," he told himself. There was something quiet, beautiful, and powerful about Catherine, like Natalie. Perhaps if at some point, during all his dead, unconscious years of living in the same house with her, he had found himself alone with Catherine in a room, and if the doors of his own being had opened in that moment, something might have happened between him and this woman, something that would have begun as part of a revolution similar to the one he had undergone.

"That, too, is possible," he decided. "People would benefit greatly if they learned to remember this thought," he thought. His imagination briefly played with the idea. One could walk through cities and towns, enter and exit houses, walk in and out of people's presence with a new sense of respect, if only the notion could once become ingrained in people's minds that at any moment and anywhere they could come to the one who carried before him, as on a golden platter, the gift of life and the consciousness of life for his beloved. Well, one had to keep a picture in mind, a picture of a land and people, neatly dressed, a people bearing gifts, a people who had learned the mystery and beauty of giving unsolicited love. Such people would inevitably keep themselves clean and tidy. They would be vibrant people with a certain sense of decorum, a certain self-awareness in relation to the houses in which they lived and the streets along which they walked. Man could not love until he had purified and somewhat beautified his body and mind, until he had opened the doors of his being and let in the sun and air, until he had freed his mind and imagination.

John Webster now struggled with himself, trying to push his thoughts and fantasies into the background. There he stood in front of the house where he'd lived all these years, so close to the woman Catherine, and she was now talking to him about her affairs. It was time to pay attention to her.

She explained that for a week or more, she had been aware of the fact that something was wrong in the Webster house. You didn't have to be very perceptive to figure it out. It was in the very air you breathed. The air in the house was heavy with it. As for herself, she thought John Webster had fallen in love with some woman, not Mrs. Webster. She had been in love once herself, and the man she loved had been murdered. She knew about love.

That night, hearing voices in the room above, she climbed the stairs. She didn't sense that anyone was eavesdropping, as it directly affected her. Long ago, when she was in trouble, she heard voices upstairs and knew that John Webster had supported her in her hour of need.

After that, long ago, she had decided that as long as he remained in the house, she would remain. She had to work, and she might as well work as a servant, but she had never felt close to Mrs. Webster. When someone was a servant, it was sometimes quite difficult to maintain self-respect, and the only way to do it was to work for someone who also had self-respect. Few people seemed to understand this. They thought people worked for money. In fact, no one really worked for money. People only thought they did, perhaps. To do so would mean becoming a slave, and she, Catherine, was not a slave. She had money saved up, and besides, she had a brother who owned a farm in Minnesota, who had written to her several times asking her to move in and live with him. She intended to go there now, but she did not want to live in her brother's house. He was married, and she did not intend to interfere in his house. In fact, she'll probably take the money she saves and buy her own small farm.

"Anyway, you're leaving this house tonight. I heard you say you were going out with another woman, and I thought I'd go too," she said.

She fell silent and stood, looking at John Webster, who was also looking at her, absorbed in his contemplation of her. In the dim light, her face transformed into that of a young girl. Something about her face at that moment reminded him of his daughter's face as she looked at him in the dim candlelight in the room upstairs. It was true, and yet it was also like Natalie's face, as it had looked that day in the office, when he and she had first approached each other, and as it had looked that other night in the dark field.

It's so easy to get confused. "It's okay if you leave, Catherine," he said aloud. "You know about it, I mean, you know what you want to do."

He stood silently for a moment, thinking. "Well, Catherine," he began again. "My daughter Jane is upstairs. I'm leaving, but I can't take her with me, just as you can't live at your brother's house back in Minnesota. I think Jane will have a hard time for the next two or three days, maybe even weeks.

"There's no telling what's going to happen here." He gestured toward the house. "I'm leaving, but I suppose I was counting on you staying here until Jane gets a little better. You know what I mean, until she can stand on her own."

In the bed upstairs, Jane Webster's body grew increasingly rigid and tense as she lay listening to the hidden noises in the house. There was a sound of movement in the next room. The doorknob slammed against the wall. The floorboards creaked. Her mother was sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed. Now she was standing. She placed her hand on the bedrail to push herself up. The bed shifted slightly. It moved on its rollers. A low rumbling sound was heard. Would her mother come into her room? Jane Webster didn't want any more words, no further explanation of what had happened to ruin the marriage between her mother and father. She wanted to be left alone, to think for herself. The thought of her mother entering her bedroom terrified her. Oddly enough, she now had a sharp and distinct sense of the presence of death, somehow connected with her mother's figure. If the old woman were to enter her room now, even without saying a word, it would be like seeing a ghost. The thought sent shivers down her spine. It felt like small, soft, hairy creatures were running up and down her legs, up and down her back. She shifted restlessly on the bed.

Her father came downstairs and walked down the hallway, but she didn't hear the front door open and close. She lay there, listening to the sound, waiting for it.

The house was quiet, too quiet. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the loud ticking of a clock. A year earlier, when she'd graduated from the city's high school, her father had given her a small watch. Now it lay on the dressing table at the far end of the room. Its rapid ticking resembled a small creature clad in steel shoes, running swiftly, the shoes clicking against each other. The small creature ran swiftly down the endless hallway, running with a kind of mad, sharp determination, but never approaching or retreating. An image of a small, impish boy with a wide, grinning mouth and pointed ears sticking straight up above his head like a fox terrier's ears formed in her mind. Perhaps this idea came from a photograph of Puck she remembered from a children's book. She realized that the sound she heard came from the clock on the dresser, but the image remained in her mind. The demon-like figure stood motionless, head and body still, its legs working furiously. It grinned at her, its small, steel-clad legs clicking together.

She made a conscious effort to relax her body. She had several hours to spend lying on the bed before a new day would dawn and she would have to face the challenges of a new day. There would be plenty to face. Her father would leave with a strange woman. People would stare at her as she walked down the street. "That's his daughter," they would say. Perhaps, as long as she stayed in the city, she would never again be able to walk the streets without being stared at, but then again, perhaps she wouldn't. There was a thrill in the thought of going to strange places, perhaps to some big city where she would always be walking among strangers.

She was driving herself to the point where she'd have to pull herself together. There had been times, though she was young, when her mind and body seemed to have nothing in common. They'd do things to the body, put it to bed, make it get up and walk, force its eyes to read the pages of a book, do all sorts of things to the body, while the mind continued to go about its business, oblivious. It thought about things, invented all sorts of absurd things, went its own way.

At such moments in the past, Jane's mind had managed to force her body into the most absurd and astonishing situations, while it acted wildly and freely as it pleased. She lay in her room with the door closed, but her imagination carried her body out into the street. She walked, aware that every man she passed was smiling, and she kept wondering what was going on. She hurried home and went into her room only to discover that her dress was unbuttoned at the back. It was terrifying. She walked down the street again, and the white pantaloons she wore under her skirts had somehow unbuttoned themselves. A young man was approaching her. He was a new man who had just arrived in town and started working in a store. Well, he was going to talk to her. He picked up his hat, and at that moment her pantaloons began to slide down her legs. Jane Webster lay in her bed, smiling at the memory of the fears that had visited her when, in the past, her mind had become addicted to wild, uncontrollable running. Things would be different in the future. She had been through something, and perhaps she still had much more to endure. What had once seemed so terrifying might now be merely amusing. She felt infinitely older and more refined than she had been just a few hours ago.

How strange it was that the house was so quiet. From somewhere in the city, the sound of horses' hooves on the hard road and the clatter of a cart could be heard. A voice called faintly. A townsman, a cart driver, was getting ready to leave early. Perhaps he was heading to another city to pick up a load of goods and bring them back. He must have a long journey ahead of him, since he was starting so early.

She shrugged uneasily. What had happened to her? Was she afraid in her bedroom, in her bed? What was she afraid of?

She sat up suddenly and abruptly in bed, and then, a moment later, let her body fall back again. A shrill cry tore from her father's throat, a cry that reverberated throughout the house. "Catherine," her father's voice cried. There was only one word. It was the name of Webster's only servant. What did her father want with Catherine? What had happened? Had something terrible happened in the house? Had something happened to her mother?

Something lurked in the depths of Jane Webster's mind, a thought that refused to be expressed. It couldn't yet escape from the hidden parts of her soul into her mind.

What she feared and expected couldn't happen yet. Her mother was in the next room. She had just heard her moving around there.

A new sound came into the house. Her mother was moving heavily down the hallway just outside the bedroom door. The Websters had converted the small bedroom at the end of the hallway into a bathroom, and her mother was getting ready to go there. Her feet landed slowly, evenly, heavily, and deliberately on the hallway floor. After all, the only reason her feet made that strange sound was because she was wearing soft slippers.

Now, downstairs, if she listened closely, she could hear voices murmuring words. It must be her father talking to the maid, Catherine. What could he want from her? The front door opened, then closed again. She was afraid. Her body trembled with fear. It was terrible of her father to leave and leave her alone in the house. Could he have taken the maid, Catherine, with him? The thought was unbearable. Why was she so afraid of being left alone in the house with her mother?

Inside her, deep inside her, lurked a thought that refused to be expressed. Now, in a few minutes, something was going to happen to her mother. She didn't want to think about it. In the bathroom, on the shelves of a small, box-like cabinet, stood certain bottles. They were labeled poison. It was hard to understand why they were kept there, but Jane had seen them many times. She kept her toothbrush in a glass tumbler in the cabinet. One could assume the bottles contained medications that were only to be taken externally. People rarely thought about such things; they weren't in the habit of thinking about them.


Now Jane sat upright in bed again. She was alone in the house with her mother. Even the maid, Catherine, was gone. The house seemed utterly cold and lonely, deserted. In the future, she would always feel out of place in this house where she had always lived, and also, in some strange way, would feel separated from her mother. Being alone with her mother now, perhaps, always made her feel a little lonely.

Could it be that Catherine's maid was the woman her father was planning to leave with? It couldn't be. Catherine was a large, heavyset woman with ample breasts and dark, graying hair. It was impossible to imagine her leaving with a man. One could imagine her silently wandering around the house, doing chores. Her father would leave with a younger woman, a woman not much older than herself.

A person should pull themselves together. When a person was worried, letting themselves go, the imagination sometimes played strange and terrible tricks. Her mother was in the bathroom, standing next to a small, box-like cabinet. Her face was pale, pale as dough. She had to hold on to the wall with one hand to keep from falling. Her eyes were gray and heavy. There was no life in them. A heavy, cloud-like veil enveloped her eyes. It was like a heavy gray cloud in a blue sky. Her body, too, swayed back and forth. At any moment, he could fall. But just recently, even despite the strange adventure in her father's bedroom, everything suddenly seemed perfectly clear. She understood something she had never understood before. Now nothing could be understood. A whirlwind of tangled thoughts and actions in which a person was immersed.

Now her own body began to rock back and forth on the bed. The fingers of her right hand clutched the tiny pebble her father had given her, but at the moment she was unaware of the small, round, hard object resting in her palm. Her fists continued to beat against her own body, her own legs and knees. There was something she wanted to do, something that was now right and appropriate, and she had to do it. It was time for her to scream, to leap out of bed, to run down the hall to the bathroom, and rip the bathroom door open. Her mother was about to do something that couldn't be done passively and watch. She had to scream at the top of her lungs, to cry for help. That word had to be on her lips now. "No, no," she had to scream now. Her lips had to pronounce that word throughout the entire house now. She had to make the house and the street it stood on echo and echo with the word.

And she couldn't say anything. Her lips were sealed. Her body couldn't move from the bed. He could only rock back and forth on the bed.

Her imagination continued to paint pictures, fast, bright, scary pictures.

There was a bottle of brown liquid in the bathroom cabinet, and her mother reached up and grabbed it. Now she brought it to her lips. She swallowed the entire contents.

The liquid in the bottle was brown, a reddish-brown. Before she swallowed it, her mother lit the gas lamp. It was directly above her head as she stood facing the cabinet, and its light fell on her face. There were small, puffy, red bags of flesh under her eyes, looking strange and almost repulsive against the pale whiteness of her skin. Her mouth was open, and her lips were also gray. A reddish-brown stain ran from the corner of her mouth down her chin. A few drops of liquid fell onto her mother's white nightgown. Convulsive spasms, as if in pain, ran across her pale, pale face. Her eyes remained closed. A trembling, shaking movement of her shoulders was heard.

Jane's body continued to rock back and forth. Her flesh began to tremble. Her body was rigid. Her fists were clenched, tightly. They continued to beat against her legs. Her mother managed to escape through the bathroom door and down a small hallway to her room. She threw herself face down on the bed in the darkness. Had she thrown herself or fallen? Was she dying now, would she die soon, or was she already dead? In the next room, the room where Jane had seen her father walk naked before her mother and her, candles still burned beneath an icon of the Virgin Mary. There was no doubt that the old woman would die. In her mind's eye, Jane saw the label on a bottle of brown liquid. It read "Poison." Apothecaries painted such bottles with a skull and crossbones.

And now Jane's body stopped rocking. Perhaps her mother was dead. Now she could try to think about other things. She felt, vaguely, yet almost delightfully, a new element in the air of the bedroom.

A pain appeared in the palm of his right hand. Something had hurt it, and the sensation of pain was refreshing. It brought life back. Self-awareness was present in the awareness of bodily pain. His thoughts could begin to travel back along the road from some dark, distant place to which he had madly fled. His mind could hold the thought of a small bruised spot on the soft flesh of his palm. There was something hard and sharp there, cutting into the flesh of his palm as hard, tense fingers pressed against it.

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II


IN THE PALM In Jane Webster's hand lay the small green stone her father had picked up on the railroad tracks and given her as he left. "The jewel of life," he had called it, in that moment when confusion forced him to give way to a desire for a gesture. A romantic thought occurred to him. Hadn't people always used symbols to overcome life's difficulties? There was the Virgin Mary with her candles. Wasn't she also a symbol? At some point, deciding in a moment of vanity that thought was more important than fantasy, people abandoned that symbol. A Protestant type of man emerged who believed in what was called "the age of reason." There was a terrible kind of egotism. Men could trust their own minds. As if they knew anything about the workings of their minds at all.

With a gesture and a smile, John Webster placed the stone in his daughter's hand, and now she clung to it. You could press hard with your finger and feel that delicious, healing ache in her soft palm.

Jane Webster was trying to reconstruct something. In the darkness, she tried to feel the wall. Small, sharp points jutted out from the wall, cutting her palm. If she walked along the wall far enough, she would reach a lit area. Perhaps the wall was strewn with jewels, placed there by others groping in the darkness.

Her father left with a woman, a young woman very much like her. Now he will live with this woman. She may never see him again. Her mother is dead. In the future, she will be alone in life. She will have to start now and start living her own life.

Was her mother dead or was she just dreaming a horrible fantasy?

A man was suddenly thrown from a high, safe place into the sea, and then had to try to swim to save himself. Jane's mind began to toy with the idea of herself floating in the sea.

Last summer, she and several young men and women went on an excursion to a town on the shores of Lake Michigan and a nearby resort. A man had dived into the sea from a tall tower perched high in the sky. He had been hired to entertain the crowd, but things didn't go as planned. It should have been a clear, sunny day for such an undertaking, but it had rained in the morning, and by lunchtime it had turned cold, and the sky, covered with low, heavy clouds, was also heavy and cold.

Cold gray clouds raced across the sky. The diver fell from his perch into the sea before the eyes of a small, silent crowd, but the sea did not welcome him warmly. It waited for him in cold, gray silence. Seeing him fall like this sent a chill down his spine.

What was this cold grey sea into which the man's naked body fell so quickly?

On the day the professional diver made his dive, Jane Webster's heart stopped beating until he descended into the sea and his head resurfaced. She stood next to the young man who had been accompanying her for the day, her hands impatiently clasping his arm and shoulder. When the diver's head reappeared, she rested her head on the young man's shoulder, her own shoulders shaking with sobs.

It was undoubtedly a very stupid performance, and she was later ashamed of it. The diver was a professional. "He knows what he's doing," the young man said. Everyone present laughed at Jane, and she was angry because her escort was laughing too. If he'd had the common sense to understand how she was feeling at that moment, she thought she wouldn't have minded everyone else's laughter.


"I'm a great little sea swimmer."

It was truly amazing how ideas, expressed in words, would dart from head to head. "I'm a fine little sea swimmer." But her father had spoken those words shortly before, as she stood in the doorway between the two bedrooms, and he had approached her. He wanted to give her the stone she was now holding in her palm, and he wanted to say something about it, but instead of words about the stone, those words about sea swimming had escaped his lips. There was something puzzled and confused in his demeanor at that moment. He was upset, just as she was now. The moment now quickly replayed itself in his daughter's mind. Her father stepped toward her again, holding the stone between his thumb and forefinger, and a wavering, uncertain light once again lit up his eyes. Quite distinctly, as if he were in her presence again, Jane heard again the words that had seemed meaningless only a short time ago, meaningless words coming from the mouth of a man temporarily drunk or insane: "I am a fine little swimmer in the sea."

She had been thrown from a high, safe place into a sea of doubt and fear. Just yesterday, she had stood on solid ground. She could have let her imagination play with the thought of what had happened to her. There would have been some comfort in that.

She stood on solid ground, high above the vast sea of confusion, and then, quite suddenly, she was pushed off the solid ground into the sea.

Now, at this very moment, she was falling into the sea. Now a new life was about to begin for her. Her father had left with a strange woman, and her mother had died.

She was falling from a high, safe platform into the sea. With some awkward movement, like a gesture of his hand, her own father had thrown her down. She was dressed in a white nightgown, and her falling figure stood out like a white streak against the cold, gray sky.

Her father put a meaningless pebble in her hand and left, and then her mother went into the bathroom and did a terrible, unthinkable thing to herself.

And now she, Jane Webster, had gone far out to sea, far, far away, to a lonely, cold, gray place. She had descended to the place from which all life came and to which, ultimately, all life goes.

There was heaviness, a deadly heaviness. All life had become gray, cold, and old. Alone, he walked in the darkness. His body fell with a soft thud onto the gray, soft, unyielding walls.

The house he lived in was empty. It was an empty house on an empty street in an empty city. All the people Jane Webster had known, the young men and women she had lived with, the ones she had walked with on summer evenings, could not be part of what she faced now. She was completely alone now. Her father was gone, and her mother had committed suicide. There was no one. One walked alone in the darkness. The man's body hit the soft, gray, unyielding walls with a soft thud.

The small stone that he held so tightly in his palm caused pain and pain.

Before her father gave it to her, he approached and held it in front of a candle flame. In certain light, its color changed. Yellowish-green lights appeared and faded within it. The yellowish-green lights were the color of young plants emerging from the damp, cold, frozen ground in spring.

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III


JANE WEBSTER lay on her bed in the darkness of her room, crying. Her shoulders shook with sobs, but she made no sound. Her finger, pressed so tightly against her palms, relaxed, but a spot remained in the palm of her right hand, burning with a warm glow. Her mind had become passive. Fancy had released her from her grip. She resembled a fussy and hungry child, fed and lying quietly, facing the white wall.

Her sobs meant nothing now. It was a release. She felt a little ashamed of her lack of self-control, and she kept raising the hand holding the stone, carefully closing it at first so the precious stone wouldn't get lost, and wiping away her tears with her fist. At that moment, she wished she could suddenly become a strong and decisive woman, capable of calmly and firmly handling the situation that had arisen in the Webster house.

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IV


MAID CATHERINE climbed the stairs. After all, she wasn't the woman Jane's father had left with. How heavy and determined Catherine's steps were! One could be determined and strong even if one knew nothing of what was going on in the house. One could walk as if one were climbing the stairs of an ordinary house, on an ordinary street.

When Catherine placed her foot on one of the steps, the house seemed to shake slightly. Well, you couldn't say the house shook. That would be stretching the point. What we were trying to convey was that Catherine wasn't very sensitive. She was someone who had made a direct, frontal assault on life. If she had been very sensitive, she might have learned something about the terrible things going on in the house without even waiting to be told.

Now Jane's mind played a cruel joke on her again. An absurd phrase popped into her head.

"Wait until you see the whites of their eyes, then shoot."

It was stupid, utterly stupid and absurd, the thoughts that now raced through her head. Her father had unleashed something within her that, sometimes relentlessly and often inexplicably, represented unleashed fantasy. It was a thing that could color and embellish the facts of life, but in some cases, it could continue to operate independently of the facts of life. Jane believed she was in the house with the corpse of her mother, who had just committed suicide, and something inside her told her that she should now give in to grief. She cried, but her crying had nothing to do with her mother's death. It ignored it. In the end, she wasn't so much sad as excited.

The crying, which had been quiet before, could now be heard throughout the house. She was making noise like a stupid child, and she was ashamed. What would Catherine think of her?

"Wait until you see the whites of their eyes, then shoot."

What a utterly stupid jumble of words. Where did they come from? Why were such meaningless, stupid words dancing in her mind at such a vital moment in her life? She'd picked them up from some school book, perhaps a history textbook. Some general had shouted these words to his men as they stood waiting for the advancing enemy. And what did that have to do with Catherine's footsteps on the stairs? In a moment, Catherine would enter the room where she was.

She thought she knew exactly what she would do. She quietly got out of bed, walked to the door, and let the servant in. Then she turned on the light.

She pictured herself standing at the dressing table in the corner of the room, calmly and decisively addressing a servant. Now she had to begin a new life. Yesterday, she might have been a young woman without experience, but now she was a mature woman facing difficult challenges. She would have to face not only Catherine, the maid, but the entire city. Tomorrow, a person would find herself in the position of a general, commanding troops facing an attack. She had to behave with dignity. There were people who wanted to scold her father, others who wanted to feel sorry for themselves. Perhaps she, too, would have to attend to business matters. Preparations would be necessary to sell her father's factory and raise money so she could move on with her life and make plans for herself. At such a moment, she could not be a foolish child, sitting and sobbing on her bed.

And yet, at such a tragic moment in her life, when the servant entered, it was impossible to suddenly burst out laughing. Why did the sound of Catherine's determined footsteps on the stairs make her want to laugh and cry at the same time? "Soldiers advancing resolutely across an open field toward the enemy. Wait until you see the whites of their eyes. Stupid ideas. Stupid words dancing in her mind. She didn't want to laugh or cry. She wanted to behave with dignity.

There was a tense struggle going on within Jane Webster, which had now lost its dignity and become nothing more than a struggle to stop crying loudly, not to laugh, and to be ready to receive the servant Catherine with a certain dignity.

As the footsteps drew closer, the struggle intensified. Now she was sitting upright on the bed again, her body rocking back and forth again. Her fists, doubled and hard, struck her legs again.

Like everyone else in the world, Jane had been staging her approach to life her entire life. Some had done it as children, and then as little girls at school. A mother had died suddenly, or someone had become gravely ill and was facing death. Everyone had gathered at the deathbed and been struck by the quiet dignity with which the situation could be handled.

Or again, there was the young man who smiled at someone on the street. Perhaps he had the courage to think of one of them simply as a child. Very well. Let them both find themselves in a difficult situation, and then we'll see which of them can behave with more dignity.

There was something terrifying about the whole situation. After all, Jane had felt it was within her power to live a somewhat prosperous life. It was certain that no other young woman she knew had ever found herself in the situation she found herself in now. Even now, though they knew nothing of what had happened, the eyes of the entire town were upon her, and she simply sat in the dark on her bed, sobbing like a child.

She began to laugh harshly, hysterically, then the laughter stopped and the loud sobs began again. Catherine's maid approached her bedroom door, but instead of knocking and giving Jane a chance to rise and receive her with dignity, she entered immediately. She ran across the room and knelt by Jane's bed. Her impulsive action ended Jane's desire to be a great lady, at least for the night. The woman, Catherine, through her swift impulsiveness, had become a sister to something that was also her true essence. There were two women, shaken and in distress, both deeply troubled by some inner storm, clinging to each other in the darkness. For a while, they stood like that on the bed, embracing.

So, Catherine wasn't such a strong and determined person after all. There was no need to be afraid of her. This thought was infinitely comforting to Jane. She, too, was crying. Perhaps if Catherine were to jump up and start walking now, she wouldn't have to worry about her strong, determined steps shaking the house. If she were Jane Webster, perhaps she, too, wouldn't be able to get out of bed and calmly and with cool dignity recount everything that had happened. After all, Catherine, too, might have been unable to control the urge to cry and laugh out loud at the same time. Well, she wasn't such a scary person after all, such a strong, determined, and terrifying person.

The young woman, now sitting in the darkness, her whole body pressed against the older woman's more robust frame, felt a sweet, intangible sensation of being nourished and refreshed by this other woman's body. She even gave in to the urge to reach up and touch Catherine's cheek. The older woman had enormous breasts to press against. What a comfort her presence was in the quiet house.

Jane stopped crying and suddenly felt tired and a little cold. "Let's not stay here. Let's go down to my room," Catherine said. Could it be that she knew what had happened in that other bedroom? It was obvious that she knew. It was true then. Jane's heart stopped beating, and her body shook with fear. She stood in the darkness beside the bed, leaning her hand against the wall to steady herself. She told herself that her mother had taken poison and committed suicide, but it was obvious that some part of her didn't believe it, didn't dare believe it.

Katherine found a coat and draped it over Jane's shoulders. It felt strange: so cold when the night had been comparatively warm.

Both women left the room and entered the hallway. The gas light was on in the bathroom at the end of the hallway, and the bathroom door was left open.

Jane closed her eyes and pressed herself against Catherine. The thought that her mother had committed suicide was now certain. It was so obvious now that Catherine knew it too. The drama of suicide played out before Jane's eyes in the theater of her imagination. Her mother stood facing the small cabinet attached to the bathroom aisle. Her face was turned upward, and the light from above fell upon it. One hand was braced against the wall of the room to keep her body from falling, and the other held a bottle. Her face, turned toward the light, was white, a pasty white. It was a face that, through long association, had become familiar to Jane, and yet was strangely unfamiliar. Her eyes were closed, and small reddish bags were visible under them. Her lips hung loosely, and a reddish-brown streak ran from the corner of her mouth down her chin. Several spots of brown liquid fell onto her white nightgown.

Jane's body was shaking violently. "How cold it has become in the house, Catherine," she said, opening her eyes. They had reached the top of the stairs and, from where they stood, could look straight into the bathroom. A gray bath mat lay on the floor, and a small brown bottle had fallen onto it. As she left the room, the heavy foot of the woman who had swallowed the bottle's contents stepped on the bottle and broke it. Perhaps her foot was cut, but she didn't mind. "If there had been pain, a sore spot, it would have been a comfort to her," Jane thought. In her hand, she still held the stone her father had given her. How absurd that he had called it "The Jewel of Life." A spot of yellowish-green light reflected off the rim of the broken bottle on the bathroom floor. When her father held the stone to the candle in the bedroom and held it up to the candlelight, another yellowish-green light flared from it too. "If Mother were still alive, she'd probably be making some kind of noise right now. She'll be wondering what Catherine and I are doing wandering around the house, and she'll get up and go to her bedroom door to find out," she thought gloomily.

After Catherine had tucked Jane into her own bed in the small room off the kitchen, she went upstairs to make some preparations. No explanation was given. She left the light on in the kitchen, and the maid's bedroom was illuminated by the reflected light coming through the open door.

Catherine went to Mary Webster's bedroom, opened the door without knocking, and entered. A gas lamp was burning, and the woman, no longer desiring to live, tried to lie down in bed and die with dignity between the sheets, but she could not. Her attempts were unsuccessful. The tall, slender girl, who had once given up love on a hillside, was seized by death before she could protest. Her body, half-reclining on the bed, struggled, writhed, and slid off the bed onto the floor. Catherine lifted it, laid it on the bed, and went for a damp cloth to wipe her disfigured and discolored face.

Then an idea occurred to her and she removed the cloth. She stood in the room for a moment, looking around. Her face turned very white, and she felt ill. She turned off the light and, entering John Webster's bedroom, closed the door. The candles near the Virgin Mary were still burning, and she took a small framed photograph and placed it high on the closet shelf. Then she blew out one of the candles and carried it, along with the lit one, down the stairs to the room where Jane waited.

The servant went to the closet, grabbed an extra blanket, and draped it over Jane's shoulders. "I don't believe I'm going to undress," she said. "I'll sit on the bed with you just as you are."

"You've already figured that out," she said matter-of-factly as she sat down and placed her hand on Jane's shoulder. Both women were pale, but Jane's body no longer trembled.

"If Mother is dead, then at least I'm not alone in the house with a corpse," she thought gratefully. Catherine hadn't given her any details of what she'd found upstairs. "She's dead," she said, and after they waited in silence for a moment, she began to develop an idea that had occurred to her as she stood in the dead woman's presence in the upstairs bedroom. "I don't think they'll try to connect your father with this, but they might," she said thoughtfully. "I saw something like this happen once. A man died, and after his death, some people tried to pass him off as a thief. I think this: we'd better sit here together until morning. Then I'll call a doctor. We'll say we knew nothing about what happened until I went to call your mother for breakfast. By then, you see, your father will be gone."

The two women sat silently next to each other, staring at the white bedroom wall. "I suppose we'd both better remember that we heard Mother moving about the house after Father left," Jane whispered shortly afterward. It was nice to be part of Catherine's plans to protect her father. Her eyes were shining now, and there was something feverish in her desire to understand everything clearly, but she continued to press her body against Catherine's. She still held the stone her father had given her in her palm, and now, whenever her finger pressed even lightly against it, a comforting throb of pain erupted from the tender, bruised spot of her palm.

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IN


AND AS THE two women sat on the bed, John Webster walked through the quiet, deserted streets to the train station with his new woman, Natalie.

"Well, damn," he thought as he walked forward, "what a night this has been! If the rest of my life is as busy as the last ten hours, I'll be able to keep my head above water."

Natalie walked silently, carrying her bag. The houses along the street were dark. Between the brick sidewalk and the roadway was a strip of grass, and John Webster stepped across it and walked along it. He liked the thought of his feet making no sound as he escaped the city. How nice it would be if he and Natalie were winged creatures, able to fly away unnoticed in the darkness.

Now Natalie was crying. Well, that was normal. She wasn't crying out loud. John Webster didn't actually know for sure that she was crying. And yet he knew. "At least," he thought, "when she cries, she does her job with some dignity." He himself was in a rather impersonal mood. There's no point in thinking too much about what I've done. What's done is done. I've started a new life. I couldn't turn back even if I wanted to.

The houses along the street were dark and quiet. The entire city was dark and quiet. People were sleeping in the houses, dreaming all sorts of strange dreams.

Well, he'd expected to encounter some kind of quarrel at Natalie's house, but nothing of the sort happened. The old mother was simply wonderful. John Webster almost regretted never having known her personally. There was something about this terrible old woman that resembled himself. He smiled as he walked along the strip of grass. "It may well be that I'll end up an old scoundrel, a real old bully," he thought almost cheerfully. His mind played with the idea. He'd certainly made a good start. Here he was, a man well past middle age, and it was already past midnight, almost morning, and he was walking through the deserted streets with the woman with whom he intended to live a so-called bastard life. "I started late, but now that I've started, I'm making things a bit of a mess," he told himself.

It was a great pity Natalie hadn't stepped off the brick sidewalk and crossed the grass. It was better to move quickly and quietly when setting out on new adventures. Countless roaring lions of respectability must be sleeping in the houses along the streets. "They're as nice as I was when I came home from the washing machine factory and slept next to my wife in the days when we were newly married and moved back to this city," he thought sardonically. He imagined countless people, men and women, climbing into bed at night and sometimes talking the way he and his wife often did. They were always covering up something, talking busily, covering up something. "We make a lot of noise talking about the purity and sweetness of life, don't we?" he whispered to himself.

Yes, the people in the houses were asleep, and he didn't want to wake them. It was a shame Natalie was crying. She couldn't be disturbed in her grief. It would have been unfair. He wanted to talk to her, ask her to step off the sidewalk and walk silently across the grass along the road or along the edge of the lawn.

His thoughts returned to those few moments at Natalie's house. Damn it! He'd expected a scene there, but nothing of the sort happened. When he approached the house, Natalie was waiting for him. She was sitting by the window in the dark room downstairs at Schwartz's cottage, her bag packed and standing next to her. She walked to the front door and opened it before he could knock.

And now she was ready to go. She came out with her bag and said nothing. In fact, she hadn't said anything to him yet. She had just left the house and walked beside him to where they had to go through the gate to get out into the street, and then her mother and sister came out and stood on the small porch to watch them go.

What a troublemaker the old mother was. She even laughed at them. "Well, you two have some nerve. You're leaving looking as cool as a cucumber, aren't you?" she shouted. Then she laughed again. "Do you know there's going to be a hell of a row all over town in the morning about this?" she asked. Natalie didn't answer. "Well, good luck to you, you big whore, running off with your damned scoundrel," her mother shouted, still laughing.

The two men turned the corner and disappeared from view of Schwartz's house. No doubt, other people were keeping vigil in other houses along the street, and they were no doubt listening and wondering. Two or three times, one of the neighbors wanted to arrest Natalie's mother for her foul language, but others dissuaded them out of respect for their daughters.

Was Natalie now crying because she had parted with her old mother, or because of the schoolteacher's sister whom John Webster had never known?

He really wanted to laugh at himself. The truth was, he knew little about Natalie or what she might be thinking or feeling at a time like this. Had he really gotten involved with her simply because she was some kind of tool to help him escape his wife and the life he hated? Had he simply been using her? Did he really have any real feelings for her, any understanding of her?

He wondered.

There was a great noise, he decorated the room with candles and an image of the Virgin Mary, exposed himself naked in front of women, and bought himself glass candlesticks with bronze crucified Christs on them.

Someone made a big fuss, pretending to upset the whole world, to do something that a truly brave person would have done in a simple and straightforward manner. Another person might have done everything he did with a laugh and a gesture.

What was he planning anyway?

He was leaving, he was deliberately leaving his hometown, leaving the city where he had been a respectable citizen for many years, even his entire life. He was planning to leave the city with a woman younger than himself, who caught his fancy.

All this was a matter that anyone could easily enough understand, any person you might meet on the street. At least, everyone would be quite sure they understood. Eyebrows rose, shoulders shrugged. Men stood in small groups and talked, and women ran from house to house, talking and talking. Oh, those cheerful little shrugs! Oh, the cheerful chatterboxes! Where did man come from in all this? What, after all, did he think of himself?

Natalie walked in the semi-darkness. She sighed. She was a woman with a body, with arms, with legs. Her body had a trunk, and on her neck sat a head, with a brain inside. She thought thoughts. She had dreams.

Natalie walked down the street in the dark, her footsteps sharp and clear as she walked along the sidewalk.

What did he know about Natalie?

It's entirely possible that when he and Natalie really got to know each other, when they faced the challenge of living together together... Well, maybe it wouldn't have worked at all.

John Webster was walking down the street in the dark, along the strip of grass that in Midwestern cities lies between the sidewalk and the roadway. He tripped and almost fell. What had happened to him? Was he tired again?

Did his doubts arise because he was tired? It's entirely possible that everything that happened to him last night was because he was caught up and carried away by some temporary madness.

What happens when the madness passes, when he becomes sane, well, a normal person again?

Hito, Tito, what's the point of thinking about turning back when it's too late to turn back? If in the end he and Natalie discover they can't live together, there's still life left. Life was life. There's still a way to live life.

John Webster began to gather his courage again. He looked at the dark houses lining the street and smiled. He looked like a child playing a game with his Wisconsin friends. In the game, he was a kind of public figure, receiving applause from the residents for some brave act. He imagined himself riding down the street in a carriage. People stuck their heads out of their windows and shouted, and he turned his head from side to side, bowing and smiling.

Since Natalie wasn't looking, he enjoyed the game for a while. As he passed, he kept turning his head from side to side and bowing. A rather absurd smile played on his lips.

Old Harry!


"A Chinese berry grows on a Chinese tree!"


It would have been better if Natalie hadn't made such a noise with her feet on the stone and brick sidewalks.

One might be discovered. Perhaps, quite suddenly, without warning, all the people now sleeping so peacefully in the dark houses along the street would sit up in their beds and start laughing. It would be terrible, and it would be the same thing John Webster himself would do if he, a decent man, were lying in bed with his lawful wife and saw some other man commit the same stupidity he is now committing.

It was irritating. The night was warm, but John Webster felt a little cold. He shivered. No doubt it was because he was tired. Perhaps it was the thought of respectable married people lying in beds in the houses he and Natalie passed through that made him shudder. One could get very cold, being a respectable married man and lying in bed with a respectable wife. The thought that had been coming and going in his head for two weeks now came again: "Perhaps I'm crazy and have infected Natalie, and for that matter my daughter Jane, with my madness."

There was no point in crying over spilled milk. "What's the point of thinking about it now?"

"Diddle dee doo!"

"A Chinese berry grows on a Chinese tree!"

He and Natalie had left the working-class part of town and were now passing houses occupied by merchants, small manufacturers, people like John Webster himself, lawyers, doctors, and the like. Now they were passing the house where his own banker lived. "What a swear word. He's got plenty of money. Why doesn't he build himself a bigger, better house?"

To the east, dimly visible through the trees and above the treetops, was a bright spot extending into the sky.

Now they came to a place where there were several vacant lots. Someone had donated these lots to the city, and a foot movement had begun to raise money for the construction of a public library. A man approached John Webster and asked him to contribute to the fund for this purpose. This had happened just a few days ago.

He had thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and now he felt like giggling just thinking about it.

He was sitting, looking, he thought, quite dignified at his desk in the factory office, when the man walked in and told him about the plan. He was overcome by the urge to make an ironic gesture.

"I'm making quite detailed plans regarding this fund and my contribution to it, but I don't want to say what I plan to do at this particular moment," he declared. What a lie! He wasn't the least bit interested in the matter. He simply enjoyed the man's surprise at his unexpected interest and was having a good time, making a swaggering gesture.

The man who came to visit him had once served with him on the Chamber of Commerce committee, a committee created to try to bring new businesses to the city.

"I didn"t know you were particularly interested in literary matters," the man said.

A crowd of mocking thoughts came into John Webster's head.

"Oh, you'll be surprised," he assured the man. At that moment, he felt the same way he imagined a terrier might feel when disturbing a rat. "I think American writers have done wonders to inspire people," he said solemnly. "But you do realize it was our writers who constantly reminded us of moral codes and virtues? People like you and me, who own factories and are, in a sense, responsible for the happiness and well-being of the people in our community, can't be too grateful to our American writers. I tell you what: they really are such strong, passionate fellows, always standing up for what's right."

John Webster laughed as he thought of his conversation with the man from the Chamber of Commerce and the man's bewildered look as he left.

Now, as he and Natalie walked, the intersecting streets led east. There was no doubt a new day would dawn. He paused to light a match and check his watch. They would be just in time for the train. Soon they would enter the city's business district, where they would both make a loud noise walking along the stone sidewalks, but then it wouldn't matter. People didn't spend the night in the business districts of cities.

He wanted to talk to Natalie, ask her to walk on the grass and not wake the people sleeping in the houses. "Well, I'll do that," he thought. It was strange how much courage it took just to talk to her now. Neither of them had spoken since they'd set out on this adventure together. He stopped and stood for a moment, and Natalie, realizing he was no longer walking beside her, stopped too.

"What is it? What's the matter, John?" she asked. It was the first time she had addressed him by that name. Doing so made everything easier.

And yet his throat felt a little tight. It couldn't be that he wanted to cry too. What nonsense.

There was no need to admit defeat to Natalie until she arrived. There were two sides to his judgment of what he'd done. Of course, there was a chance, a possibility, that he'd created this whole scandal, ruined his entire past life, ruined his wife and daughter, and Natalie too, in vain, simply because he wanted to escape the boredom of his former existence.

He stood on a strip of grass at the edge of a lawn in front of a quiet, respectable house, someone's house. He tried to see Natalie clearly, tried to see himself clearly. What figure did he imagine? The light wasn't very clear. Natalie was just a dark mass before him. His own thoughts were just a dark mass before him.

"Am I just a lustful man wanting a new woman?" he asked himself.

Let's assume this is true. What does it mean?

"I am myself. I am trying to be myself," he told himself firmly.

One must try to live outside oneself, to live in others. Did he try to live in Natalie? He went into Natalie. Did he really enter her because there was something inside her that he wanted and needed, something he loved?

There was something inside Natalie that ignited something inside him. It was this ability of hers to ignite him that he had wanted, and still wanted.

She did it for him and still does it for him. When he can no longer respond to her, perhaps he will be able to find another love. She could do that too.

He laughed softly. There was a certain joy in him now. He'd given himself and Natalie, as they say, a bad name. A group of figures arose in his imagination again, each with a bad name in their own way. There was the gray-haired old man he'd once seen walking with an air of pride and joy in the journey, the actress he'd seen stepping out onto the stage at the theater, the sailor who'd thrown his bag aboard the ship and walked down the street with an air of pride and joy in the life within him.

There were such guys in the world.

The bizarre picture in John Webster's mind shifted. A man entered the room. He closed the door. A row of candles stood on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. The man was playing some kind of game with himself. Well, everyone played some kind of game with themselves. The man in his imagination took a silver crown from a box. He placed it on his head. "I crown myself with the crown of life," he said.

Was this a stupid performance? If so, what did it matter?

He took a step toward Natalie and stopped again. "Come on, woman, walk across the grass. Don't make such a noise while we're walking," he said out loud.

Now he walked with a certain casualness toward Natalie, who stood silently at the edge of the sidewalk, waiting for him. He walked over and stood in front of her, looking into her face. It was true that she had been crying. Even in the dim light, delicate tears were visible on her cheeks. "It was just a stupid idea. I didn't want to disturb anyone when we left," he said, laughing softly again. He put his hand on her shoulder and pulled her toward him, and they continued walking again, now both stepping softly and carefully on the grass between the sidewalk and the roadway.

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Dark laughter


B RUS DUDLEY STOOD by a paint-stained window, through which he could barely see first a pile of empty boxes, then a more or less cluttered factory yard, sloping down to a steep cliff and beyond, the brown waters of the Ohio River. It would soon be time to raise the windows. Spring would soon be here. Beside Bruce at the next window stood Sponge Martin, a thin, wiry old man with a thick black mustache. Sponge chewed tobacco and had a wife who sometimes got drunk with him on paydays. Several times a year, on such evenings, they didn't dine at home, but went to a restaurant on a hillside in downtown Old Harbor and dined there in style.

After lunch, they grabbed sandwiches and two liters of Kentucky "moon" whiskey and headed out to fish the river. This only happened in the spring, summer, and fall, when the nights were clear and the fish were biting.

They built a fire of driftwood and sat around it, extinguishing their catfish lines. Four miles upriver was a place where, during flood season, there had once been a small sawmill and woodyard for supplying the river packs with fuel, and they headed there. It was a long walk, and neither Sponge nor his wife were very young, but they were both strong, wiry little men, and they had corn whiskey to invigorate them on the way. The whiskey wasn't colored to resemble commercial whiskey, but it was clear as water, very raw and throat-burning, and its effect was quick and long-lasting.

After heading out for the night, they collected wood to start a fire as soon as they reached their favorite fishing spot. Everything was fine then. Sponge had told Bruce dozens of times that his wife didn't mind. "She's as tough as a fox terrier," he said. The couple had two children before, and the older boy's leg was amputated while jumping on a train. Sponge spent two hundred and eighty dollars on doctors, but he could have saved the money just as easily. The child died after six weeks of suffering.

When he mentioned the other child, a girl playfully named Bugs Martin, Sponge became a little upset and began chewing tobacco more vigorously than usual. She was a real terror from the start. Don't do anything to her. You couldn't keep her away from the boys. Sponge tried, and his wife tried, but what good did it do?

One payday in October, when SpongeBob and his wife were upriver at their favorite fishing spot, they returned home at five o'clock the next morning, both still a little scorched, and what had happened? Does Bruce Dudley think they discovered what was going on? Keep in mind, Bugs was only fifteen at the time. So, SpongeBob entered the house before his wife, and there, on the new rag rug in the hallway, lay the baby asleep, and next to her, the young man.

What a nerve! The young man worked at Mauser's grocery store. He no longer lived in Old Harbor. God knows what became of him. When he woke up and saw Sponge standing there, his hand on the doorknob, he quickly jumped up and ran out, almost knocking Sponge down as he lunged through the door. Sponge kicked him but missed. He was fairly well lit.

Then SpongeBob went after Bugs. He shook her until her teeth chattered, but did Bruce think she screamed? She didn't! Whatever you thought of Bugs, she was a playful little child.

She was fifteen when Sponge beat her up. He hit her pretty good. "She's in the house in Cincinnati now," Sponge thought. She wrote letters to her mother from time to time, and she always lied in them. She said she worked in a store, but it was a bunk. Sponge knew it was a lie because he got the information about her from a man who used to live in Old Harbor but now had a job in Cincinnati. One night, he went into the house and saw Bugs there, causing a ruckus with a crowd of rich young athletes from Cincinnati, but she never saw him. He kept a low profile and later wrote to Sponge about it. He said Sponge should try to make things right with Bugs, but what was the point in making a fuss? She'd been like that since she was a kid, hadn't she?

And when you get to the point, why did this guy want to interfere? What was he doing in such a place-so high and mighty afterward? He better keep his nose in his own backyard. SpongeBob didn't even show the letter to his old lady. What was the point of making her nervous? If she wanted to believe that nonsense about Bugs having a good job at the store, why not let her? If Bugs ever came home for a visit, as she always wrote to her mother about, maybe she would come someday; SpongeBob himself would never tell her.

Old Sponge was fine. When she and Sponge went there after the som and both drank five or six good, strong shots of "moon," she acted like a child. She made Sponge feel-Oh, my God!

They were lying on a pile of half-rotted old sawdust near the fire, right where the woodshed had once been. When the old woman perked up a bit and acted like a child, Sponge felt the same way. It was easy to see that the old woman was a good athlete. Since marrying her when he was about twenty-two, Sponge had never fooled around with any other woman-except perhaps a few times when he was away from home and a little drunk.

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CHAPTER TWO


IT WAS - And the whimsical idea, of course, was the same one that had brought Bruce Dudley to the position he found himself in now - working in a factory in the town of Old Harbor, Indiana, where he had lived as a child and a young man, and where he was now. He posed as a worker under an assumed name. The name amused him. The thought flashed through his mind, and John Stockton became Bruce Dudley. Why not? In any case, for the moment, he allowed himself to be whatever he wanted. He had received this name in the town in Illinois, where he had come from the deep south, or more precisely, from New Orleans. This was when he was returning to Old Harbor, where he had also ended up on a whim. In the Illinois town, he had to change cars. He had just been walking down the main street of the town and saw two signs above two shops: "Bruce, the Smart and the Weak - Hardware" and "Dudley Brothers - Grocery."

It was like being a criminal. Perhaps he was a kind of criminal, and suddenly he became one. It was quite possible that the criminal was simply someone like himself, who had suddenly strayed a little from the beaten path that all men travel. Criminals had taken the lives of others or stolen property that wasn't theirs, and he had taken-what? Himself? It was quite possible that was exactly how it could be put.

"Slave, do you think your own life is your own? Hocus, Pocus, now you see it, and now you don't. Why not Bruce Dudley?"

Navigating the town of Old Harbor as John Stockton can be a bit of a complication. It's unlikely anyone here will remember the shy boy who was John Stockton, or recognize him in the thirty-four-year-old man, but many people might remember the boy's father, schoolteacher Edward Stockton. They might even have looked alike. "Like father, like son, eh?" There was something about the name Bruce Dudley. It suggested gravitas and respectability, and Bruce amused himself for an hour while waiting for the train to Old Harbor, walking the streets of the Illinois town and trying to think of other possible Bruce Dudleys in the world. "Captain Bruce Dudley, U.S. Army, Bruce Dudley, minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Hartford, Connecticut. But why Hartford? Well, why not Hartford? He, John Stockton, had never been to Hartford, Connecticut. Why did this place come to mind? It meant something, didn't it? It was very likely because Mark Twain had lived there for a long time, and there was some kind of connection between Mark Twain and a Presbyterian, Congregational, or Baptist minister in Hartford. There was also some kind of connection between Mark Twain and the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and John Stockton had been wandering up and down the Mississippi River for six months the day he got off the train in Illinois town bound for Old Harbor. And wasn't Old Harbor on the Ohio River?

T'witchelti, T'vidleti, T'vadelti, T'vum,

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"A large, slow river flows from a wide, rich, and fertile valley between distant mountains. Steamboats are on the river. Comrades curse and hit Negroes over the heads with clubs. Negroes sing, Negroes dance, Negroes carry loads on their heads, Negro women give birth - easily and free - many of them half-white."

The man who had once been John Stockton and who suddenly, on a whim, became Bruce Dudley thought a lot about Mark Twain for six months before he adopted his new name. Being near and on the river made him reflective. It's no surprise, then, that he also happened to think of Hartford, Connecticut. "He's really crusted over, that boy," he whispered to himself that day as he walked the streets of the Illinois town that would first bear the name Bruce Dudley.

- A man like that, yes, who saw what this man had, a man who could write and feel and think like this Huckleberry Finn, went there to Hartford and...

T'witchelti, T'vidleti, T'vadelti, T'vum,

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"Oh my God!

"How fun it is to think, to feel, to cut grapes, to take a few of the grapes of life into your mouth, to spit out the seeds.

"Mark Twain trained as a Mississippi River pilot in his early days in the valley. What he must have seen, felt, heard, thought! When he wrote a real book, he had to put everything aside; everything he had learned, felt, thought as a human being had to return to his childhood. He did it well, jumping up and down, didn't he?

"But suppose he had actually tried to put into books much of what he heard, felt, thought, and saw as a man on the river. What an outcry! He never did that, did he? He wrote something once. He called it 'Conversations at Queen Elizabeth's Court,' and he and his friends passed it around and laughed at it.

"If he'd come down to the valley like a man, let's say, he could have given us a lot of mementos, eh? It must have been a rich place, full of life and quite rancid."

"A large, slow, deep river flowing between the muddy banks of the empire. In the north, they grow corn. The rich lands of Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri cut down the tall trees and then grow corn. Farther south, quiet forests, hills, blacks. The river gradually grows larger and larger. The towns along the river are rugged towns.

"Then, far below, the moss growing on the river banks, and the land of cotton and sugar cane. More Negroes.

"If you've never been loved by a black person, you've never been loved at all."

"After years of this... what... Hartford, Connecticut! Other things - "Innocents Abroad,"

"Roughing It" - the old jokes have piled up, everyone applauds.

T'witchelti, T'vidleti, T'vadelti, T'vum,

Catch your nigga by the thumb -

"Make a slave out of him, huh? Tame the boy.

Bruce didn't look like a factory worker. It took more than two months to grow his short, bushy beard and mustache, and while they were growing, his face itched constantly. Why did he want to grow it? After leaving Chicago with his wife, he headed to a place called LaSalle, Illinois, and sailed down the Illinois River in an open boat. He later lost the boat and spent nearly two months growing his beard, sailing downriver to New Orleans. It was a little trick he'd always wanted to pull off. Ever since he was a child reading "Huckleberry Finn," he'd remembered it. Almost everyone who's lived in the Mississippi Valley for long has this image tucked away somewhere. The great river, now lonely and empty, somehow resembled a lost river. Perhaps it had become a symbol of the lost youth of Middle America. Song, laughter, profanity, the smell of goods, dancing blacks-life everywhere! Huge, brightly colored boats on the river, wooden rafts floating down, voices in the silent nights, songs, an empire unloading its riches on the surface of the river! When the Civil War began, the Midwest stood up and fought, like Old Harry, because it didn't want its river taken away. In its youth, the Midwest breathed the river's breath.

"The factory men were pretty clever, weren't they? The first thing they did when the opportunity presented itself was to dam the river and deprive the romance of commerce. Perhaps they didn't intend it that way; romance and commerce were simply natural enemies. With their railroads, they made the river as dead as a doornail, and it's been that way ever since."

A large river, now quiet. Slowly sliding past muddy banks and pitiful little towns, the river is as powerful as ever, as strange as ever, but now quiet, forgotten, abandoned. A few tugboats towing barges. No more brightly colored boats, profanity, songs, gamblers, excitement, or life.

As he traveled downriver, Bruce Dudley thought Mark Twain, when he returned to visit the river after the railroads had stifled its life, could have written an epic. He could have written about the lost songs, the lost laughter, the people driven into a new age of speed, the factories, the fast, speeding trains. Instead, he filled the book mostly with statistics and wrote outdated jokes. Oh well! You can't always offend someone, can you, fellow writers?

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IN CHAPTER THREE


WHEN HE HAD When Bruce reached Old Harbor, the place of his childhood, he didn't spend much time thinking about epics. That wasn't his position then. He was working towards something, had been working towards it for a whole year. What it was, he couldn't say in so many words. He had left his wife in Chicago, where she worked for the same newspaper he worked for, and suddenly, with less than three hundred dollars to his name, he had embarked on an adventure. There was a reason, he thought, but he was willing enough to leave it alone, at least for the moment. He hadn't grown a beard because his wife had made any special effort to find him when he went missing. It was a whim. It was such fun to think of himself going through life like that, unknown, mysterious. If he had told his wife what he was planning, there would have been no end to the conversations, the arguments, the rights of women and the rights of men.

They were so kind to each other, he and Bernice-that's how they started out together and kept it that way. Bruce didn't think his wife was to blame. "I helped start it all off wrong-acting as if she were somehow superior," he thought with a grin. He remembered telling her of her superiority, her intelligence, her talent. They seemed to express a hope that something graceful and beautiful would blossom out of her. Perhaps, at first, he spoke like that because he wanted to worship her. She half seemed the great person he called her because he felt so worthless. He played the game without really thinking about it, and she fell in love with her, she liked it, she took what he said seriously, and then he didn't like what she became, what he helped create.

If he and Bernice had ever had children, perhaps what he did would have been impossible, but they didn't. She didn't want any. "Not from a man like you. You're too flighty," she said then.

But Bruce was fickle. He knew it. Enticed by newspaper work, he drifted for ten years. He always wanted to do something- perhaps write-but every time he tried out his own words and ideas, writing them down, it tired him. Perhaps he had become too enamored with newspaper clichés, with jargon-the jargon of words, ideas, moods. As Bruce advanced, he committed words to paper less and less. There was a way to become a newspaperman without writing at all. You made a phone call, let someone else write it. There were plenty of people like that around who would write lines-wordsmiths.

The guys mixed up words and wrote newspaper slang. Things got worse and worse with each passing year.

Deep down, Bruce may have always harbored a tenderness for words, ideas, and moods. He longed to experiment, slowly, carefully, treating words like precious stones, setting them in a precise way.

It was something you didn't talk about much. Too many people do things like that in a flashy way, getting cheap recognition-like Bernice, his wife.

And then the war, the "executions on beds" are worse than ever - the government itself begins "executions on beds" on a large scale.

My God, what a time! Bruce managed to keep busy with local affairs-murders, bootlegger busts, fires, labor scandals-but each time he grew more and more bored, fed up with it all.

As for his wife, Bernice, she also believed he had achieved nothing. She simultaneously despised and, oddly enough, feared him. She called him "fickle." Had he managed to cultivate a contempt for life in ten years?

The factory in Old Harbor where he now worked produced automobile wheels, and he found work in the varnish shop. Broke, he was forced to find a way to make ends meet. There was a long room in a large brick house on the riverbank with a window overlooking the factory yard. The boy brought the wheels in a truck and dumped them next to a peg, where he placed them one by one to be varnished.

He was lucky to have gotten a seat next to Sponge Martin. He thought of him often enough in connection with the men he'd been involved with since he'd become an adult-intelligent men, newspaper reporters who wanted to write novels, feminist women, illustrators who drew pictures for newspapers and advertisements but liked to have what they called a studio and sit and talk about art and life.

Next to Sponge Martin, on the other hand, sat a sullen fellow who had barely spoken all day. Sponge winked frequently and whispered about him to Bruce. "I'll tell you what it is. He thinks his wife is having fun with another man here in town, and she does too, but he doesn't dare look into the matter too closely. He might find out that what he suspects is fact, so he just gets gloomy," Sponge said.

As for Sponge himself, he'd been working as a carriage painter in the town of Old Harbor before anyone had even thought of building anything like a wheel factory there, before anyone had even considered such a thing as an automobile. Some days he'd even talk about the old days, when he'd owned his own shop. There was a certain pride in him when he broached the subject, but only disdain for his current job of painting wheels. "Anyone could do it," he'd said. "Look at you. You don't have the hands for it, but if you got your strength together, you could turn almost as many wheels as I could, and make them just as good."

But what else could this guy do? Sponge could have become a foreman in the factory finishing shop if he'd been willing to lick a few boots. He had to smile and bow slightly when young Mr. Gray came by, which he did about once a month.

The problem with Sponge was that he'd known the Grays for too long. Perhaps young Gray had gotten it into his head that he, Sponge, was too much of a drunk. He'd known the Grays when this young man, now such a big bug, was still a child. One day, he'd finished a carriage for old Gray. He'd come to Sponge Martin's shop, bringing his child with him.

The carriage he built was probably a Darby. It was built by old Sil Mooney, who had a carriage shop right next to Sponge Martin's finishing shop.

Describing the carriage built for Gray, a banker from Old Harbor, when Bruce himself was a boy and when Sponge had his own shop, took all day. The old workman was so deft and quick with his brush that he could finish a wheel, capturing every angle without even looking at it. Most of the men in the room worked silently, but Sponge never stopped talking. In the room behind Bruce Dudley, through the brick wall, the low rumble of machinery constantly echoed, but Sponge managed to make his voice rise just above the noise of his racket. He spoke in a precise tone, and every word carried clearly and distinctly to his fellow worker.

Bruce watched Sponge's hands, trying to imitate his movements. The brush was held just like that. It was a quick, gentle movement. Sponge was able to fill the brush completely and still handle it without the varnish running down or leaving unsightly thick spots on the wheels. The stroke of the brush was like a caress.

Sponge talked about the days when he owned his own store and told the story of the carriage built for old banker Gray. As he spoke, Bruce had an idea. He kept thinking about how easily he'd left his wife. They'd had a silent argument, the kind they often had. Bernice wrote features for the Sunday paper and wrote a story that was accepted by the magazine. Then she joined the Chicago Writers' Club. All this happened without Bruce trying to do anything special with his work. He did exactly what he had to do, nothing more, and gradually Bernice respected him less and less. It was obvious she had a career ahead of her. Writing features for Sunday papers, becoming a successful magazine writer, right? Bruce walked with her for a long time, went with her to writers' club meetings, visited studios where men and women sat and talked. In Chicago, not far from Forty-seventh Street, near the park, there was a place where a lot of writers and artists lived, a low, little building that had been built there during the World's Fair, and Bernice wanted him to live there. She wanted to interact more and more with people who wrote, drew, read books, talked about books and pictures. From time to time, she spoke to Bruce in a certain way. Was she beginning to patronize him, even a little?

He smiled at the thought, smiled at the thought of himself now working in the factory next to Sponge Martin. One day he'd gone to the meat market with Bernice-they were buying chops for dinner-and he'd noticed the way the fat old butcher handled his tools. The sight had fascinated him, and as he stood next to his wife, waiting his turn to be served, she'd spoken to him, but he hadn't heard. He thought of the old butcher, the deft, quick hands of the old butcher. They represented something to him. What was it? The man's hands held a quarter of a rib with a sure, quiet touch that perhaps represented to Bruce the way he wanted to handle words. Well, perhaps he didn't want to handle words at all. He was a little afraid of words. They were such tricky, elusive things. Perhaps he didn't know what he wanted to handle. Perhaps that was the thing about him. Why not go and find out?

Bruce left the house with his wife and walked down the street, her still talking. What was she talking about? Bruce suddenly realized he didn't know and didn't care. When they got to their apartment, she went to cook the chops, and he sat by the window, looking out onto the city street. The building stood near the corner where men coming from downtown got out of cars going north and south to get into cars going east or west, and the evening rush hour had begun. Bruce worked for the evening newspaper and was free until the early morning, but as soon as he and Bernice ate the chops, she went into the back room of the apartment and started writing. God, how much she wrote! When she wasn't working on her Sunday specials, she was working on a story. At that moment, she was working on one of them. It was about a very lonely man in the city who, while strolling one evening, saw in a shop window a wax replica of what, in the dark, he mistook for a very beautiful woman. Something happened to the street lamp on the corner where the shop stood, and for a moment the man thought the woman in the window was alive. He stood and looked at her, and she looked back at him. It was a thrilling experience.

And then, you see, later the man in Bernice's story realized his foolish mistake, but he was as lonely as ever, and he kept returning to the store window night after night. Sometimes there was a woman there, and sometimes she was taken away. She appeared in one dress, then another. She was in expensive furs and walking down a winter street. Now she was wearing a summer dress and standing on the seashore, or in a bathing suit and about to dive in.


It was all a whimsical idea, and Bernice was delighted with it. How would she pull it off? One night, after the street lamp on the corner was fixed, the light was so bright that a man couldn't help but see that the woman he loved was made of wax. What would it be like if he took a cobblestone and smashed the street lamp? Then he could press his lips to the cold windowpane and run into the alley, never to be seen again.


T'vichelti, T'vidleti, T'vadelti, T'vum.


Bruce's wife, Bernice, would one day be a great writer, right? Was he, Bruce, jealous? When they went together to one of the places where other newspapermen, illustrators, poets, and young musicians gathered, people tended to look at Bernice and direct their comments at her, not him. She had a way of doing things for people. A young woman graduated from college and wanted to become a journalist, or a young musician wanted to meet someone influential in the music industry, and Bernice arranged it all for them. Gradually, she built a following in Chicago, and she was already planning a move to New York. A New York newspaper made her an offer, and she was considering it. "You can find work there just as well as here," she told her husband.

Standing next to his workbench in the Old Harbor factory, varnishing a car wheel, Bruce listened to Sponge Martin boast about the time he owned his own shop and was finishing a carriage built for the elder Gray. He described the wood used, how smooth and fine the grain was, how each part was meticulously fitted to the other parts. During the day, the elder Gray would sometimes come to the shop after the bank was closed for the day, and sometimes he would bring his son with him. He was in a hurry to finish the job. Well, there was a special event in town on a certain day. The governor of the state was coming, and the banker was supposed to entertain him. He wanted the new carriage to drive him from the station.

Sponge talked and talked, savoring his own words, and Bruce listened, hearing every word, and at the same time continuing to have his own thoughts. How many times had he heard Sponge's story, and how pleasant it was to continue to hear it. This moment was the most important in Sponge Martin's life. The carriage had failed to be finished the way it should have been and to get it ready for the governor's arrival. That was all. In the days when a man had his own store, a man like Old Man Gray could rave and rave, but what good would it do him? Silas Mooney had done a good job when he built the carriage, and did Old Man Gray think Sponge was going to turn around and do some lazy, hasty job? They had succeeded once, and Old Man Gray's son, young Fred Gray, who now owned the wheelwright's shop where Sponge worked as a common laborer, stood and listened. Sponge thought Young Man Gray had been slapped in the face that day. No doubt he thought his father was some kind of Almighty God just because he owned a bank and because people like state governors came to visit him at home, but if he had, his eyes would still have been opened that time.

Old Gray grew angry and began cursing. "This is my carriage, and if I tell you to wear a few fewer layers and not let each coat dry for too long before you wash it and put on another, you must do as I say," he declared, shaking his fist at Sponge.

Aha! And wasn't that Sponge's moment? Bruce wanted to know what he'd said to old Gray? As it happened, he'd had about four good shots that day, and when he got a little fired up, the Lord Almighty couldn't tell him not to do any work. He walked up to old Gray and clenched his fist. "Look," he said, "you're not so young anymore, and you've put on a little weight. You want to remember that you've been sitting in that bank of yours too long. Suppose you turn gay with me now, and because you need to hurry with the carriage, you come here and try to take my job away from me or something. Do you know what'll happen to you? You'll get fired, that's what'll happen. I'll smash your fat face in with my fist, that's what's going to happen, and if you start cheating and send someone else here, I'll come to your bank and tear you apart there, that's what I'll do.

Sponge told the banker this. Neither he nor anyone else was going to rush him into doing some mediocre job. He told the banker this, and then, when the banker left the store without saying anything, he went into the corner saloon and bought a bottle of good whiskey. Just to show old Grey something he had locked in the store and stolen for the day. "Let him drive his governor around in livery." That's what he said to himself. He took the bottle of whiskey and went fishing with his old woman. It was one of the best parties they'd ever been to. He told the old woman about it, and she was tickled to death by what he'd done. "You did everything right," she said. Then she told Sponge that he was worth a dozen men like old Grey. Perhaps that was a bit of an exaggeration, but Sponge was pleased to hear it. Bruce should have seen his old woman back in those days. She was young then and looked as beautiful as anyone in the state.

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CHAPTER FOUR


WORDS ARE SCARY - THROUGH the mind of Bruce Dudley, varnishing wheels at the Gray Wheel Company factory in Old Harbor, Indiana. Thoughts raced through his head. Drifting images. He was beginning to regain control of his fingers. Could one, too, eventually learn to think? Could thoughts and images ever be imprinted on paper the way Sponge Martin applies varnish, not too thick, not too thin, not too clumpy?

A laborer, Sponge, tells Old Man Gray to go to hell, offering to throw him out of the store. The state governor rides in livery because a laborer won't rush to do idle work. Bernice, his wife, at her typewriter in Chicago, writes special articles for the Sunday newspapers, a story about a man and a woman's wax figure in a store window. Sponge Martin and his woman go out to celebrate because Sponge told the local prince, a banker, to go to hell. A photograph of a man and woman on a pile of sawdust, a bottle next to them. A bonfire on the riverbank. A catfish fails. Bruce thought this scene took place on a mild summer night. There were wonderful mild summer nights in the Ohio Valley. Up and down the river, above and below the hill on which Old Harbor stood, the land was low, and in the winter the floods came and inundated the land. The floods left a soft silt on the land, and it was rich and rich. Where the land was not cultivated, weeds, flowers and tall flowering berry bushes grew.

They lay on a pile of sawdust, Sponge Martin and his wife, dimly lit, the fire blazing between them and the river, the catfish coming out, the air filled with scents, the soft fishy smell of the river, the scent of flowers, the scent of growing plants. Perhaps the moon hung above them.

The words Bruce heard from Sponge:

"When she's a little cheerful, she acts like a child, and I feel like a child too."

Lovers lie on an old sawdust pile under a summer moon on the banks of the Ohio.

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BOOK TWO


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CHAPTER FIVE


THIS STORY BERNICE _ _ wrote about a man who saw a wax figure in a shop window and thought it was a woman.

Did Bruce really wonder how it had happened, what ending she'd given it? Frankly, he didn't. There was something wicked about the whole thing. It seemed absurd and childish to him, and he was glad it was so. If Bernice had actually succeeded in her intended endeavor-so casually, so unceremoniously-the whole problem of their relationship would have been quite different. "Then I'd have to worry about my self-respect," he thought. That smile wouldn't come so easily.

Sometimes Bernice talked-she and her friends talked a lot. All of them, the young illustrators and writers who gathered in the rooms in the evenings to talk-well, they all worked in newspaper offices or advertising agencies, like Bruce. They pretended to despise what they did, but they kept doing it. "We need to eat," they said. There was so much talk about the need for food.

As Bruce Dudley listened to Sponge Martin's story of the banker's defiance, a memory of the evening he left the apartment he shared with Bernice and left Chicago floated through his mind. He sat by the front window of the apartment, looking out onto the street, while in the back, Bernice cooked steaks. She wanted potatoes and salad. It would take her twenty minutes to prepare everything and put it on the table. Then they would both sit down at the table to eat. So many evenings had we sat like this-two or three feet apart physically, yet miles apart. They had no children because Bernice never wanted them. "I have a job," she said two or three times when he mentioned it while they lay in bed together. She said it, but she meant something else. She didn't want to commit herself to him or to the man she had married. When she talked about him to others, she always laughed good-naturedly. "He's fine, but he's fickle and won't work. He's not very ambitious," she sometimes said. Bernice and her friends used to talk openly about their love. They compared notes. Perhaps they used every little emotion as fodder for stories.

On the street outside the window where Bruce sat waiting for his chops and potatoes, a crowd of men and women were getting off trams and waiting for other cars. Gray figures on a gray street. "If a man and a woman are such-and-such together-well, then they are such-and-such."

In the store in Old Harbor, just as when he worked as a newspaperman in Chicago, the same thing always happened. Bruce had a way of moving forward, performing the task set before him reasonably well, while his mind pondered the past and the present. Time stood still for him. In the store, working next to Sponge, he thought about Bernice, his wife, and now suddenly he began to think about his father. What had happened to him? He had worked as a country schoolteacher near Old Harbor, Indiana, and then married another schoolteacher who had moved there from Indianapolis. Then he took a job in the city schools, and when Bruce was a small boy, he got a job at a newspaper in Indianapolis. The small family moved there, and his mother died. Bruce then went to live with his grandmother, and his father went to Chicago. He was still there. Now he worked in an advertising agency, had another wife, and with her three children. In town, Bruce saw him about twice a month, when father and son would dine together at a downtown restaurant. His father had married a young woman, and she didn't like Bernice, and Bernice didn't like her. They got on each other's nerves.

Now Bruce was thinking about old thoughts. His thoughts were going in circles. Was it because he wanted to be a man who controlled words, ideas, moods-and hadn't achieved it? The thoughts that had come to him while working at the Old Harbor factory had visited him before. They had been in his head that evening, when chops sizzled in the frying pan in the kitchen at the back of the apartment where he had lived with Bernice for a long time. This wasn't his apartment.

While putting everything in order, Bernice kept herself and her own desires in mind, and that's as it should be. There she wrote her Sunday specials and also worked on her stories. Bruce didn't need a place to write, since he wrote little or nothing. "I just need a place to sleep," he told Bernice.

"A lonely man who fell in love with a scarecrow in a shop window, huh? I wonder how she'll manage that. Why doesn't the cute young woman who works there walk through the window one night? That would be the start of a romance. No, she'll have to do it the more modern way. That would be too obvious."

Bruce's father was a funny guy. He'd had so many enthusiasms in his long life, and now, although he was old and gray, when Bruce dined with him, he almost always had a new one. When father and son went to dinner together, they avoided talking about their wives. Bruce suspected that, since he'd married a second wife almost as young as his son, his father always felt a little guilty in his presence. They never talked about their wives. When they met at some restaurant in the Loop, Bruce said, "So, Dad, how are the kids?" Then his father told him about his latest hobby. He was an advertising writer, and he'd been sent out to write ads for soap, safety razors, and automobiles. "I've got a new account on a steam engine," he said. "The engine is a marvel. It'll go thirty miles to a gallon of kerosene. No gears to change. As smooth and soft as a boat ride on a calm sea. My God, what power!" They still have some work to do, but they'll do it well. The man who invented this machine is a marvel. The greatest mechanical genius I've ever seen. Tell you what, son: when this thing breaks, it's going to crash the gasoline market. Just wait and see."

Bruce fidgeted nervously in his restaurant chair while his father talked-Bruce couldn't say anything as he strolled with his wife through Chicago's intellectual and artistic milieu. There was Mrs. Douglas, a wealthy woman who owned a country house and one in town, who wrote poetry and plays. Her husband owned a large property and was an art connoisseur. Then there was the crowd outside Bruce's newspaper. When the paper was finished in the afternoon, they sat and talked about Huysmans, Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Lawrence. There was great pride in the words. Such and such a man had a way with words. Small groups around town talked about men of words, sound engineers, people of color, and Bruce's wife, Bernice, knew them all. What was this eternal fuss about painting, music, writing? There was something about it. People couldn't let the subject rest. A man could write something by simply knocking the props out from under every artist Bruce had ever heard of-no big deal, he thought-but once the job was done, that wouldn't prove anything either.

From where he sat by the window of his apartment that evening in Chicago, he could see men and women getting on and off streetcars at the intersection where the cars going through town met the cars coming in and out of the Loop. God, what people in Chicago! He had a lot of running around the streets of Chicago at his job. He had moved most of his things, and some guy in the office had handled the paperwork. There was a young Jewish guy in the office who was great at making words dance on the page. He did a lot of Bruce's stuff. What they liked about Bruce in the local room was that he had to have a head. He had a certain reputation. His own wife didn't think he was a good newspaperman, and the young Jewish guy thought he was worthless, but he got a lot of important assignments that other people wanted. He had a knack for it. What he did was get to the heart of the matter-something like that. Bruce smiled at the praise he was giving himself in his thoughts. "I guess we all have to keep telling ourselves we're good, otherwise we'd all go and jump in the river," he thought.

How many people move from one machine to another. They all worked downtown, and now they were moving into apartments very similar to the one he shared with his wife. What was his father's relationship with his wife, the young wife he had after Bruce's mother died. He already had three children with her, and only one remained with Bruce's mother-Bruce himself. There was plenty of time for more. Bruce was ten when his mother died. His grandmother, with whom he lived in Indianapolis, was still alive. When she died, she would undoubtedly leave Bruce her small fortune. She must be worth at least fifteen thousand. He hadn't written to her for more than three months.

Men and women on the streets, the same men and women who were now getting out and into cars on the street in front of the house. Why did they all look so tired? What had happened to them? It wasn't physical fatigue that was on his mind right now. In Chicago and other cities he'd visited, people all had that tired, bored look on their faces when they were caught unawares, walking down the street or standing on a street corner waiting for a car, and Bruce was afraid he looked the same. Sometimes at night, when he was out alone, when Bernice was going to some party he wanted to avoid, he'd see people eating in a cafe or sitting together in a park and they didn't look bored. During the day, downtown, in the Loop, people walked, wondering how to cross the next intersection. A policeman crossing the street was about to blow his whistle. They fled in little flocks, like flocks of quail, most of them escaping. When they reached the sidewalk on the other side, they looked triumphant.

Tom Wills, the man from the city desk at the office, was fond of Bruce. After the newspaper ran out in the afternoon, he and Bruce would often go to a German drinking establishment and share a pint of whiskey. The German made a special offer on Tom Wills's rather good counterfeit goods, because Tom had attracted a lot of people there.

Tom and Bruce were sitting in a small back room, and after they'd taken a few swigs from the bottle, Tom started talking. He always said the same thing. First, he cursed the war and condemned America for entering it, and then he cursed himself. "I'm no good," he said. Tom was like every newspaperman Bruce had ever known. He really wanted to write a novel or a play, and he liked to talk to Bruce about it because he didn't think Bruce had such ambitions. "You're a tough guy, aren't you?" he said.

He told Bruce of his plan. "There"s a note I"d like to strike. It"s about impotence. Have you ever noticed, walking down the streets, that all the people you see are tired, impotent?" he asked. "What"s a newspaper-the most impotent thing in the world. What"s a theater? Have you walked much lately? They make you so tired your back hurts, and movies, God, movies are ten times worse, and if this war isn"t a sign of the general impotence that"s sweeping the world like a disease, I don"t know much. A friend of mine, Hargrave from Eagle, was there, in a place called Hollywood. He told me about it. He says all the people there are like fish with their fins cut off. They wriggle around, trying to make efficient movements, and they can"t. He says they all have some kind of terrible inferiority complex-tired journalists who retired in their old age to get rich, and all that." Women are all trying to be ladies. Well, not trying to be ladies, exactly. That's not the idea. They try to look like ladies and gentlemen, live in houses that ladies and gentlemen are supposed to live in, walk and talk like ladies and gentlemen. "It's such a terrible mess," he says, "as you never dreamed, and you have to remember that movie people are America's sweethearts." Hargrave says that after you've been in Los Angeles for a while, if you don't jump in the sea, you'll go crazy. He says the whole Pacific coast is a lot like that-I mean that exact tone-impotence crying out to God that it's beautiful, that it's big, that it's effective. Look at Chicago, too: "I will" is our motto as a city. Did you know that? They had one in San Francisco, too, says Hargrave: "San Francisco knows how to do it." Knows how to do what? How do you get tired fish out of Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, huh? Hargrave says there are thousands of people walking the streets in Los Angeles with nowhere to go. He says a lot of smart guys sell them lots of desert spots because they're too tired to figure things out. They buy them, then head back to the city and walk up and down the streets. He says a dog scenting a street pole will make 10,000 people stop and stare, as if it were the most exciting thing in the world. I think he's exaggerating a bit.

"And anyway, I"m not bragging. When it comes to impotence, if you can beat me, you"re a fool. What am I supposed to do? I sit at my desk and hand out little sheets of paper. And what do you do? You take the forms, read them, and run around town looking for little things to publish in the newspaper, and you"re so powerless you don"t even write your own stuff. What is it? One day they kill someone in this town and get six lines out of it, and the next day, if they commit the same murder, they"re in every paper in town. It all depends on what happened between us. You know how it is. And I should write my own novel or play if I"m ever going to do it. If I write about the only thing I know anything about, do you think anyone in the world will read it?" "The only thing I could write about is the same nonsense I always give you-impotence, how much of it there is. Do you think anyone needs such things?"

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CHAPTER SIX


ABOUT THIS - ONE EVENING in his Chicago apartment, Bruce sat thinking about this, smiling softly to himself. For some reason, he was always amused by Tom Wills railing against the impotence of American life. He didn't think Tom was impotent. He thought the proof of the man's strength could be found only in the fact that he sounded so angry when he spoke. To be angry at something, you need something in a person. For that, he needed a little juice in him.

He stood up from the window to cross the long studio room to where his wife, Bernice, had set the table, still smiling, and it was precisely this smile that confused Bernice. When he wore it, he never spoke, because he lived outside himself and the people around him. They didn't exist. Nothing real existed at the moment. It was strange that at a time like this, when nothing in the world was quite certain, he himself was likely to do something certain. At such a moment, he could have lit the fuse connected to a building filled with dynamite and blown himself, the entire city of Chicago, all of America, as calmly as he might have lit a cigarette. Perhaps, at such moments, he himself was a building filled with dynamite.

When he was like this, Bernice was afraid of him and ashamed of being afraid. Being afraid made her feel less important. Sometimes she would sullenly remain silent, and sometimes she would try to laugh it off. At such moments, she said, Bruce looked like an old Chinese man wandering down an alley.

The apartment Bruce and his wife were living in was one of those now being built in American cities to accommodate childless couples like him and Bernice. "Couples who don't have children and don't intend to have them are people whose aspirations are higher than that," Tom Wills would say in one of his angry moods. Such places were common in New York and Chicago, and they quickly became fashionable in smaller cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Des Moines. They were called studio apartments.

The one Bernice had found and set up for herself, while Bruce had a long room at the front with a fireplace, a piano, and a couch where Bruce slept at night-when he wasn't visiting Bernice, which he didn't particularly enjoy-and beyond that was a bedroom and a tiny kitchen. Bernice slept in the bedroom and wrote in the studio, with the bathroom located between the studio and Bernice's bedroom. When the couple ate at home, they would bring something, usually from the delicatessen, for the occasion, and Bernice would serve it on a folding table that could later be tucked away in the closet. In what was known as Bernice's bedroom was a chest of drawers where Bruce kept his shirts and underwear, while his clothes had to be hung in Bernice's closet. "You should see me ducking outside the diner in the morning on shift," he once told Tom Wills. "It's a shame Bernice isn't an illustrator." She might get something interesting from me about modern city life in my BVD. - The writer's husband is preparing for today. The guys put some of this in the Sunday papers and call it "Among Us, Mortals."

"Life as We Know It"-something like that. I don't watch Sundays once a month, but you know what I mean. Why should I watch things? I don't look at anything in the newspapers except my own, and I only do it to see what that clever Jew managed to get out of it. If I had his brains, I'd write something myself."

Bruce walked slowly across the room to the table where Bernice had already sat. On the wall behind her hung her portrait, done by a young man who had stayed in Germany for a year or two after the Armistice and returned full of enthusiasm for the reawakening of German art. He had drawn Bernice with broad, colorful lines and had slightly twisted her mouth to the side. One ear had been made twice as large as the other. This was for distortion. Distortion often produced effects that could not be achieved by simple drawing. One evening, the young man had been at a party at Bernice's apartment when Bruce was there, and they had talked a lot. A few days later, one afternoon, when Bruce came home from the office, the young man was sitting with Bernice. Bruce felt as if he had intruded where he was not wanted, and he was embarrassed. It was an awkward moment, and Bruce wanted to back out after poking his head around the studio door, but he didn't know how to do so without embarrassing them.

He had to think quickly. "If you'll excuse me," he said, "I have to go again. I have an assignment I might have to work on all night." He said this, and then hurried across the studio to Bernice's bedroom to change his shirt. He felt he had to change something. Was there something between Bernice and the young man? He didn't particularly care.

After that, he thought about the portrait. He wanted to ask Bernice about it, but he didn't dare. He wanted to ask why she insisted on it looking the way she looked in the portrait.

"I suppose it's for art's sake," he thought, still smiling that evening as he sat down at the table with Bernice. Thoughts of Tom Wills's conversation, thoughts of Bernice's expression and the young artist's-they came to him suddenly that time, thoughts of himself, of the absurdity of his mind and his life. How could he suppress a smile, even though he knew it always upset Bernice? How could he explain that the smile had no more to do with her absurdities than with his own?

"For art's sake," he thought, placing a cutlet on a plate and handing it to Bernice. His mind loved to play with such phrases, silently and maliciously mocking both her and himself. Now she was angry with him for smiling, and they had to eat their food in silence. Afterward, he would sit by the window, and Bernice would rush out of the apartment to spend the evening with one of her friends. She couldn't order him to leave, so he sat there and smiled.

Perhaps she would go back to her bedroom and work on this story. How would she get it out? Suppose a policeman came and saw a man in love with a wax woman in a shop window and thought he was crazy, or a thief planning to break into the store-suppose the policeman were to arrest that man. Bruce continued to smile at his thoughts. He imagined the conversation between the policeman and the young man, trying to explain his loneliness and his love. In the bookstore downtown, there was a young man whom Bruce had once seen at an artists' party he had once attended with Bernice, and who now, for some reason inexplicable to Bruce, had become the hero of a fairy tale Bernice was writing. The man in the bookstore was short, pale, and thin, with a small, neat black mustache, and that was exactly how she had made her hero. He also had unusually thick lips and glittering black eyes, and Bruce remembered hearing he wrote poetry. Perhaps he really had fallen in love with a scarecrow in a store window and told Bernice about it. Bruce thought that perhaps that's what a poet was like. Surely only a poet could fall in love with a scarecrow in a store window.

"For art's sake." The phrase echoed through his head like a refrain. He continued to smile, and now Bernice was furious. At least he had managed to ruin her dinner and evening. At least he hadn't intended to. The poet and the wax woman would remain, as if suspended in midair, unrealized.

Bernice rose and stood over him, looking at him across the small table. How furious she was! Was she going to hit him? What a strange, puzzled, confused look in her eyes. Bruce looked at her impersonally, as if he were looking out a window at the scene outside. She said nothing. Had things gone beyond conversation between them? If they had, it would be his fault. Would she dare hit him? Well, he knew she wouldn't. Why did he keep smiling? That was what made her so furious. Better to go through life gently-leaving people alone. Did he have some special desire to torture Bernice, and if so, why? Now she wanted to deal with him, bite, hit, kick, like an enraged little animal, but Bernice had a flaw: when she was fully aroused, she couldn't speak. She just went white, and there was this look in her eyes. Bruce had an idea. Did she, his wife Bernice, really hate and fear all men, and did she make the hero of her story such a fool because she wanted to make all men sing? That would certainly make her, a female, seem larger than life. Perhaps that was what the whole feminist movement was all about. Bernice had already written several stories, and in all of them, the men were like that guy in the bookstore. It was a little strange. Now she herself had become somewhat like that guy in the bookstore.

- For the sake of art, right?

Bernice hurried out of the room. If she had stayed, he would at least have had a chance of getting her, as men sometimes did. "You get off your seat, and I'll get off mine. Relax. Act like a woman, and I'll let you act like a man." Was Bruce ready for this? He thought he always was-with Bernice or any other woman. When it came to the test, why did Bernice always run away? Would she go to her bedroom and cry? Well, no. Bernice wasn't the crying type, after all. She'd sneak out of the house until he left, and then-when she was alone-perhaps work on that story-about the gentle little poet and the wax woman in the window, huh? Bruce was well aware of how damaging his own thoughts were. Once, the thought had occurred to him that Bernice wanted him to beat her. Was that possible? If so, why? If a woman has reached this point in a relationship with a man, what is the cause?

Bruce, driven into deep water by his thoughts, sat by the window again and looked out onto the street. Both he and Bernice had left their chops uneaten. Whatever happened now, Bernice wouldn't return to the room to sit while he was there, at least not that evening, and the cold chops would lie there, on the table. The couple had no servants. A woman came every morning for two hours to clean up. That was how such establishments operated. And if she wanted to leave the apartment, she would have to walk through the studio in front of him. Slipping out the back door, through the alley, would be beneath her dignity as a woman. It would be humiliating for the female sex Bernice represented, and she would never lose her sense of the need for dignity in sex.

"For art's sake." Why did that phrase stick in Bruce's mind? It was a stupid refrain. Had he really been smiling all evening, driving Bernice crazy with fury because of that smile? What was art anyway? Did people like him and Tom Wills really want to laugh at it? Did they tend to think of art as silly, sentimental exhibitionism on the part of stupid people because it made them seem rather grand and noble-above all, such nonsense-something like that? Once, when she wasn't angry, when she was sober and serious, soon after their wedding, Bernice had said something like that. That was before Bruce had managed to destroy something in her, perhaps her own self-respect. Did all men want to break something in women, to make them slaves? Bernice had said so, and for a long time he had believed her. They seemed to have gotten along then. Now things have definitely gone wrong.

In the end, it was obvious that Tom Wills, at heart, cared more about art than anyone Bruce had ever known, and certainly more than Bernice or any of her friends. Bruce didn't think he knew or understood Bernice or her friends very well, but he thought he knew Tom Wills. The man was a perfectionist. For him, art was something beyond reality, a fragrance touching the reality of things with the fingers of a humble man, filled with love-something like that-perhaps a little like the beautiful lover a man, the boy within a man, longed for, to bring to life all the rich and beautiful things of his mind, his imagination. What he had to bring seemed such a meager offering to Tom Wills that the thought of attempting to make it made him feel ashamed.

Although Bruce sat by the window, pretending to look out, he couldn't see the people on the street outside. Was he waiting for Bernice to pass through the room, wanting to punish her a little more? "Am I becoming a sadist?" he asked himself. He sat with his arms crossed, smiling, smoking a cigarette, and looking at the floor, and the last feeling he ever experienced from his wife Bernice's presence was when she passed through the room and he didn't look up.

And so she decided she could walk across the room, ignoring him. It had all started at the meat market, where he'd been more interested in the butcher's hands as he cut the meat than in what she was saying. Was she talking about her latest story or an idea for a special article for the Sunday paper? Without hearing what she'd said, he couldn't remember. At least, his mind had checked her out.

He heard her footsteps in the room where he sat, staring at the floor, but at that moment he was thinking not of her, but of Tom Wills. He was again doing what angered her most, what always angered her when it happened. Perhaps at that very moment he was smiling that particularly irritating smile that always drove her crazy. How fateful that she should remember him like this. She always felt like he was laughing at her-at her aspirations as a writer, at her pretensions to willpower. Sure, she did make some such pretensions, but who hasn't made pretensions of one kind or another?

Well, she and Bernice were certainly in a tight spot. She'd gotten dressed that evening and gone out without saying anything. Now she'd spend the evening with her friends, maybe that guy who worked at the bookstore, or the young artist who'd been to Germany and painted her portrait.

Брюс встал со стула и, зажег электрический свет, встал и посмотрел на портрет. Идея искажения, несомненно, что-то значила для европейских художников, начавших ее, но он сомневался, что молодой человек точно понимал, что она означает. Насколько он был выше! Неужели он хотел подставить себя - сразу решить, что знает то, чего не знал молодой человек? Он стоял так, глядя на портрет, и вдруг пальцы его, висящие сбоку, почувствовали что-то жирное и неприятное. Это была холодная несъеденная отбивная на его собственной тарелке. Его пальцы коснулись его, пощупали, а затем, пожав плечами, он достал из заднего кармана носовой платок и вытер пальцы. - Т'витчелти, Т'видлети, Т'ваделти, Т'вум. Поймайте негра за большой палец. Предположим, правда, что искусство - самая требовательная вещь в мире? It's generally true that a certain type of man, not particularly physically strong, was almost always involved in the arts. When a man like him walked out with his wife among so-called artists, or entered a room full of them, he often gave the impression not of masculine strength and virility, but of something downright feminine. Husky men like Tom Wills tried to stay as far away from conversations about art as possible. Tom Wills never discussed the subject with anyone except Bruce, and only began to do so after the two men had known each other for several months. There were plenty of other men. Bruce, as a reporter, had a lot of contact with gamblers, racetrack enthusiasts, baseball players, boxers, thieves, bootleggers, and all sorts of colorful people. When he first started working for a newspaper, he was a sportswriter for a while. He had a reputation on paper. He couldn't write much-he never tried. Tom Wills thought he could sense things. It was an ability Bruce didn't often talk about. Let him track down a murder. So he walked into a room where several men were gathered, say, a bootlegger's flat in an alley. He'd be willing to bet that if this guy were nearby, he'd be able to spot the man who'd done the job. Proving it was another matter. But he had a talent, a "nose for news," as the newspapermen called it. Others had it too.

Oh, Lordy! If he had it, if it was so all-powerful, why did he want to marry Bernice? He returned to his chair by the window, turning off the light as he went, but it was now pitch dark outside. If he had such an ability, why hadn't it worked when it was vitally important for him to have it work?

He smiled again in the darkness. Now suppose, just suppose, that I'm as nuts as Bernice or any of them. Suppose I'm ten times worse. Suppose Tom Wills is ten times worse, too. Perhaps I was just a kid when I married Bernice, and a little older now. She thinks I'm dead, that I can't keep up with the show, but suppose now that she's the one who's lagging behind. I might think that, too. It's a lot more flattering to me than simply thinking I'm a fool, or that I was a fool when I married her.

OceanofPDF.com

BOOK THREE


OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER SEVEN


IT WAS SO LONG ABOUT Thinking such thoughts, John Stockton, who later became Bruce Dudley, left his wife one autumn evening. He sat in the dark for an hour or two, then picked up his hat and left the house. His physical connection to the apartment he shared with Bernice was tenuous: a few half-worn ties hung on a hook in the closet, three pipes, some shirts and collars in a drawer, two or three suits, a winter jacket, and a coat. Later, when he was working in a factory in Old Harbor, Indiana, working alongside Sponge Martin, listening to Sponge Martin talk, hearing something about Sponge Martin's history with "his old woman," he didn't particularly regret the way he had gone. "When you're going away, one way is better than another, and the less fuss you make about it, the better," he told himself. He'd heard most of what Sponge said before, but it was nice to hear good conversation. The story about the time Sponge kicked the banker out of his carriage-painting shop-let Sponge tell it a thousand times, and it would be nice to hear it. Maybe that was the art, capturing the true dramatic moment of life, eh? He shrugged, thinking. "Sponge, a pile of sawdust, drinks. Sponge comes home drunk early in the morning and finds Bugs asleep on the new rag rug, her arm around the young man's shoulders. Bugs, a small living creature filled with passion, later turned ugly, now lives in a house in Cincinnati. A sponge to a city, the Ohio River valley, sleeping on a pile of old sawdust - his attitude to the earth beneath him, the stars above, the brush in his hand as he painted car wheels, the caress in the hand that held the brush, the profanity, the rudeness - the love of an old woman - alive as a fox terrier."

What a floating, disjointed creature Bruce felt like. He was a physically strong man. Why hadn't he ever held life in his hands? Words are the beginning of poetry, perhaps. The poetry of seed hunger. "I'm a seed floating on the wind. Why haven't I planted myself? Why haven't I found soil in which to take root?"

Suppose I came home one evening and, approaching Bernice, struck her. Before planting, farmers plowed the soil, plucking out old roots, old weeds. Suppose I threw Bernice's typewriter out the window. "Damn it, there are no more stupid words here. Words are delicate things, leading to poetry or lies. Leave the craft to me. I go there slowly, carefully, humbly. I am a worker. Get in line and become a worker's wife. I will plow you like a field. I will torment you.

As Sponge Martin spoke, telling this story, Bruce could hear every word being said and at the same time continue to have his own thoughts.

That night after he left Bernice-he would think of her vaguely for the rest of his life, like something heard in the distance-weak, determined footsteps crossed the room as he sat staring at the floor, thinking about Tom Wills and what you think... oh, God, words. If a man can't smile at himself, laugh at himself as he walks, what's the point of living? Suppose he went to see Tom Wills that night after leaving Bernice. He tried to imagine himself driving to the suburb where Tom lived and knocking on the door. For all he knew, Tom had a wife very much like Bernice. She might not write stories, but she might also be obsessed with something-respectability, say.

Let's say that on the night he left Berniece, Bruce went to see Tom Wills. Tom's wife comes to the door. "Come in." Then Tom comes in wearing bedroom slippers. Bruce is shown in the front room. Bruce remembered someone at the newspaper office once telling him, "Tom Wills's wife is a Methodist."

Just imagine Bruce in that house, sitting in the living room with Tom and his wife. "You know, I've been thinking about leaving my wife. Well, you see, she's more interested in other things than being a woman.

"I just thought I"d come out and tell you guys, because I"m not coming into the office this morning. I"m cutting. Honestly, I haven"t really thought about where I"m going. I"m going on a little voyage of discovery. I think I am a land that few people know about. I thought I"d take a little journey inward, look around a bit. God knows what I"ll find. The idea excites me, that"s all. I"m thirty-four years old, and my wife and I don"t have children. I guess I"m a primitive man, a traveler, huh?

Off again, on again, gone again, Finnegan.

"Maybe I'll become a poet."

After Bruce left Chicago, he wandered south for a few months, and later, when he worked in a factory near Sponge Martin, seeking to learn from Sponge something of the worker's dexterity with his hands, thinking that the beginning of education might lie in a man's relationship with his hands, what he could do with them, what he could feel with them, what message they could convey through his fingers to his brain, about things, about steel, iron, earth, fire, and water-while all this went on, he amused himself by trying to imagine how he would go to such lengths to communicate his goal to Tom Wills and his wife-to anyone, for that matter. He thought how funny it would be to try to tell Tom and his Methodist wife everything that was on his mind.

Of course, he never met Tom or his wife, and, frankly, what he actually did was of secondary importance to Bruce. He had a vague notion that he, like almost all American men, had become detached from things-the rocks lying in the fields, the fields themselves, the houses, the trees, the rivers, the factory walls, the tools, the women's bodies, the sidewalks, the people on the sidewalks, the men in overalls, the men and women in the cars. The entire visit to Tom Wills had been imaginary, a fun idea to play with while he polished the wheels, and Tom Wills himself had become a kind of ghost. He had been replaced by Sponge Martin, the man who actually worked alongside him. "I guess I'm a man lover. Maybe that's why I couldn't stand Bernice's presence any longer," he thought, smiling at the thought.

There was a certain sum of money in the bank, about three hundred and fifty dollars, which had been deposited in his name for a year or two, and which he had never mentioned to Bernice. Perhaps, from the moment he married her, he had actually intended to do something with Bernice, as he eventually did. When, as a young man, he had left his grandmother's house and moved to Chicago, she had given him five hundred dollars, and he had kept three hundred and fifty of that amount untouched. He, too, was very lucky, he thought, strolling through the streets of Chicago that evening after a silent argument with a woman. Leaving his apartment, he went for a walk in Jackson Park, then walked downtown to a cheap hotel and paid two dollars for a room for the night. He slept well enough, and in the morning, when he arrived at the bank at ten, he had already learned that the train to La Salle, Illinois, left at eleven. It was a strange and amusing idea, he thought, that a man was going to go to a town called La Salle, buy a used boat there, and begin rowing quite casually down the river, leaving his bewildered wife somewhere in the wake of his boat. It was also a strange and amusing idea that such a man should spend the morning toying with the idea of visiting Tom Wills and his Methodist wife at their house in the suburbs.

"And wouldn't his wife be offended, wouldn't she scold poor Tom for being friends with a random guy like me? After all, you see, life is a very serious matter, at least when you tie it to someone else," he thought, sitting on the train-the morning he left.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER EIGHT


THE FIRST THING and then another. A liar, an honest man, a thief, suddenly slipped out of the daily newspaper of an American city. Newspapers are a necessary part of modern life. They weave the ends of life into a pattern. Everyone is interested in Leopold and Loeb, young killers. All people think alike. Leopold and Loeb become the nation's pets. The nation was horrified by what Leopold and Loeb did. What is Harry Thaw doing now, the divorced man who ran away with the bishop's daughter? The dance life! Wake up and dance!

A secret man leaving Chicago on the train at eleven in the morning without telling his wife about his plans. A married woman misses her man. A dissolute life is dangerous for women. Once formed, a habit is hard to break. Better to keep a man at home. He'll come in handy. Besides, Bernice would have a hard time explaining Bruce's unannounced disappearance. At first, she lied. "He had to leave town for a few days."

Everywhere, men try to explain their wives' actions, women try to explain their husbands' actions. People didn't have to destroy homes to find themselves in a situation where they had to give explanations. Life isn't supposed to be the way it is. If life weren't so complicated, it would be simpler. I'm sure you'd like a man like that-if you liked a man like that, huh?

Bernice would likely have thought Bruce was drunk. After he married her, he attended two or three royal banquets. Once, he and Tom Wills spent three days drinking and would have both lost their jobs, but it happened during Tom's vacation. Tom saved the reporter's scalp. But no matter. Bernice might have thought the newspaper had sent him out of town.

Tom Wills might ring the apartment doorbell, a little angrily, "Is John sick or what?"

"No, he was here last night when I left."

Bernice's pride is hurt. A woman can write short stories, do Sunday chores, and have free rein with men (modern women with any common sense do this often these days-it's the mood of the day), "and all that," as Ring Lardner would say, "It doesn't matter." Women these days fight a little to get what they want, what they think they want anyway.

It doesn't make them any less women at heart - or maybe not.

Then a woman is a special thing. You have to see it. Wake up, man! Everything has changed in the last twenty years. You asshole! If you can have her, you can have her. If you can't, you can't. Don't you think the world is progressing at all? Of course it is. Look at the flying machines we have, and the radio. Didn't we have a cool war? Didn't we kiss the Germans?

Men want to cheat. That's where a lot of misunderstandings arise. What about the three fifty dollars that Bruce kept secret for over four years? When you go to the races, and the meeting lasts, say, thirty days, and you haven't taken a single trick, and then the meeting is over, how are you going to leave town if you haven't put a penny aside, quietly? You'll have to leave town or sell the mare, won't you? Better hide it in the hay.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER NINE


Three or four times after Bruce married Bernice Jay, they both flew higher than a kite. Bernice had to borrow money, and so did Bruce. And yet he said nothing about those three fifty. Something downwind, huh? Did he really intend all along to do exactly what he eventually did? If you're that kind of person, you might as well smile, laugh at yourself if you can. You'll be dead pretty soon, and then maybe there won't be any laughter. No one ever thought even heaven was a very cheerful place. The dance life! Catch the rhythm of the dance if you can.

Bruce and Tom Wills talked occasionally. They both had the same bees in their hats, though the buzzing was never verbalized. Just a faint, distant hum. After a few drinks, they began to talk tentatively about some guy, an imaginary figure, who had quit his job, walked away from work, and set off on a grand mystery. Where? Why? When they reached this part of the conversation, they both always felt a little lost. "They grow good apples in Oregon," Tom said. "I'm not that hungry for apples," Bruce replied.

Tom had an idea that it wasn't just men who found life a bit overwhelming and difficult most of the time, but women too-at least many of them. "If they weren't religious or didn't have children, they'd have hell to pay," he said. He told of a woman he knew. "She was a good, quiet wife, and she kept an eye on her home, making every comfort possible for her husband, without ever saying a word."

"Then something happened. She was really pretty and played the piano pretty well, so she got a job playing at church, and then some guy who owned a movie theater went to church one Sunday because his little daughter had died and gone to heaven the summer before, and he felt like he should keep his cool when the White Sox weren't playing at home.

"And so he offered her the best job in his movies. She had a sense of keys, and she was a neat, pretty little thing-at least, that's what a lot of men thought." Tom Wills said he didn't think she'd intended to do it at all, but the next thing you know, she started looking down on her husband. "There she was, on top," Tom said. "She leaned down and started looking at her husband. He'd once seemed special, but now-it wasn't her fault. After all, young or old, rich or poor, men were pretty easy to get-if you had the right instincts. She couldn't help it-being so talented." Tom meant that the premonition of escape was in everyone's head.

Tom never said, "I wish I could beat this myself." He was never that strong. People at the newspaper office said Tom's wife had something against him. A young Jewish man who worked there once told Bruce that Tom was scared to death of his wife, and the next day, when Tom and Bruce were having lunch together, Tom told Bruce the same story about the young Jewish man. The Jew and Tom never got along. When Tom came in the morning and wasn't feeling very good-natured, he would always snap at the Jew. He never did that to Bruce. "A nasty little chatterbox," he said. "He's so full of himself that he can make words stand on their heads." He leaned over and whispered to Bruce. "The fact is," he said, "it happens every Saturday night."

Was Tom kinder to Bruce, did he give him a lot of unexpected tasks because he thought they were in the same boat?

OceanofPDF.com

BOOK FOUR


OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER TEN


X IS! Bruce Dudley _ _ just came down the river.

June, July, August, September in New Orleans. You can't make a place what it won't be. River travel was slow. Few or no boats. I often spent entire days lounging in river towns. You could hop on a train and go wherever you wanted, but what's the rush?

Bruce, at the time he'd just left Berniece and his job at the newspaper, had something in mind, summed up in the phrase, "What's your hurry?" He'd sat in the shade of the trees on the riverbank, had once taken a ride on a barge, had ridden in local sacks, sat in front of stores in river towns, sleeping, dreaming. People spoke slowly, drawlingly, blacks hoeed cotton, other blacks fished for catfish in the river.

Bruce had a lot to look at and think about. So many black men slowly turning brown. Then came the light brown, velvety brown, Caucasian features. Brown women getting to work, making the race easier and easier. Soft southern nights, warm twilight nights. Shadows gliding along the edges of cotton fields, along the dim roads of sawmills. Quiet voices, laughter, laughter.


Oh my banjo dog

Oh ho, my dog is banjo.


And I won't give you a single jelly roll.

American life is full of such things. If you're a thinking person-and Bruce was-you make half-acquaintances, half-friends-French, German, Italian, English-Jewish. The intellectual circles of the Midwest, on the fringes of which Bruce played, watching Bernice delve ever more boldly into them, were filled with people who weren't American at all. There was a young Polish sculptor, an Italian sculptor, a French dilettante. Was there such a thing as an American? Perhaps Bruce himself was just that. He was reckless, timid, bold, shy.

If you are a canvas, do you sometimes shudder when the artist stands before you? Everyone else adds their color. The composition is formed. The composition itself.

Could he ever really know a Jew, a German, a Frenchman, an Englishman?

And now the black man.

The consciousness of brown men, brown women, increasingly entering into American life-and thereby entering into himself.

More eager to come, more thirsty to come than any Jew, German, Pole, or Italian. I stand and laugh-I walk through the back door-shuffling my feet, laughter-a dance of the body.

The established facts will have to be recognized someday - by individuals - perhaps when they are on an intellectual high - as Bruce was then.

In New Orleans, when Bruce arrived, long docks jutted out onto the river. On the river directly ahead of him, as he paddled the last twenty miles, was a small houseboat, powered by a gas engine. Signs on it: "JESUS WILL SAVE." Some traveling preacher from upriver, heading south to save the world. "THY WILL BE DONE." The preacher, a sallow man with a dirty beard and barefoot, was steering a small boat. His wife, also barefoot, sat in a rocking chair. Her teeth were black stumps. Two barefoot children lay on the narrow deck.

The city's docks curve around a large crescent. Large ocean-going cargo ships arrive, bringing coffee, bananas, fruit, and other goods, while cotton, lumber, corn, and oils are exported.

Blacks on the docks, blacks on the city streets, blacks laughing. The slow dance always continues. German sea captains, French, Americans, Swedes, Japanese, English, Scots. The Germans now sail under flags other than their own. The "Scotsman" flies the English flag. Clean ships, dirty tramps, half-naked blacks-a dance of shadows.

How much does it cost to be a good person, a serious person? If we can't raise good, serious people, how will we ever make any progress? You'll never get anywhere unless you're conscious, seriously. A dark-skinned woman with thirteen children-a man for each child-goes to church, sings, dances, broad shoulders, broad hips, soft eyes, a soft, laughing voice-finds God on Sunday night-gets-what-on Wednesday night?

Men, you must be willing to take action if you want to progress.

William Allen White, Heywood Broun - Judging Art - Why Not - Oh, My Dog Banjo - Van Wyck Brooks, Frank Crowninshield, Tululla Bankhead, Henry Mencken, Anita Loos, Stark Young, Ring Lardner, Eva Le Gallienne, Jack Johnson, Bill Heywood, H.G. Wells write good books, don't you think? Literary Digest, The Book of Modern Art, Garry Wills.

They dance in the south - in the open air - white in a pavilion in one field, black, brown, dark brown, velvety brown in a pavilion in the next field - but one.

There need to be more serious people in this country.

Grass grows in the field between them.

Oh my banjo dog!

A song in the air, a slow dance. Heat it up. Bruce didn't have much money then. He could get a job, but what's the point? Well, he could head downtown and look for work at the New Orleans Picayune, or the Subject, or the Stats. Why not go see Jack McClure, the ballad writer, at the Picayune? Give us a song, Jack, a dance, a gumbo drift. Come on, the night is hot. What's the use? He still had some of the money he'd pocketed when he left Chicago. In New Orleans, you can rent a loft to crash in for five dollars a month, if you're smart. You know how it is when you don't want to work-when you want to watch and listen-when you want your body to be lazy while your mind works. New Orleans isn't Chicago. It's not Cleveland or Detroit. Thank God for that!

Black girls on the streets, black women, black men. A brown cat hides in the shadow of a building. "Come on, brown pussy, get your cream." The men who work on the docks in New Orleans have slender flanks like running horses, broad shoulders, drooping heavy lips, sometimes faces like old monkeys, and bodies like young gods, sometimes. On Sundays, when they go to church or are baptized in the river, the dark-skinned girls, of course, refuse flowers-the bright black colors on the black women make the streets glow-dark purple, red, yellow, green, like young corn shoots. Suitable. They sweat. The coloring of their skin is brown, golden yellow, russet, purple-brown. As the sweat runs down their high brown backs, the colors appear and dance before the eyes. Remember this, you foolish artists, catch it dancing. Song-like sounds in words, music in words, and also in colors. Foolish American artists! They chase Gauguin's shadow to the South Seas. Bruce wrote a few poems. Bernice had come so far in such a short time. It's good she didn't know. It's good no one knows how unimportant he is. We need serious people-we must have them. Who will run things if we don't become like that? For Bruce-at that moment-there were no sensual sensations that needed to be expressed through his body.

Hot days. Dear mom!

It's funny, Bruce tries to write poetry. When he worked at a newspaper, where a man was supposed to write, he never wanted to write at all.

White Southern songwriters are first filled with Keats and Shelley.

Many mornings I give away my wealth.

At night, when the waters of the seas murmur, I murmur.

I gave myself over to the seas, the suns, the days and the rocking ships.

My blood is thick with surrender.

It will come out through the wounds and color the seas and the land.

My blood will stain the land where the seas will come for a night kiss, and the seas will turn red.

What does that mean? Oh, laugh a little, men! What difference does it make what it means?

Or once again -

Give me your word.

Let my throat and my lips caress the words of Your lips.

Give me your word.

Give me three words, a dozen, a hundred, a story.

Give me your word.

A broken jargon of words fills my head. In Old New Orleans, narrow streets are lined with iron gates, leading past damp old walls into cool courtyards. It's very beautiful-old shadows dancing on the lovely old walls, but one day all the walls will be torn down to make way for factories.

Bruce lived for five months in an old house where the rent was low and cockroaches scurried along the walls. Black women lived in a house across the narrow street.

You lie naked on your bed on a hot summer morning, letting the slow, creeping river breeze come if it wants. Across the room, at five, a black woman in her twenties gets up and stretches her arms. Bruce rolls over and watches. Sometimes she sleeps alone, but sometimes a brown man sleeps with her. Then they both stretch out. The thin-sided brown man. The black woman with the slender, lithe body. She knows Bruce is watching. What does it mean? He's watching the way you look at trees, at young foals playing in a pasture.


Slow dancing, music, ships, cotton, corn, coffee. The slow, lazy laughter of the blacks. Bruce remembered a line written by a black man he had once seen: "Would the white poet ever know why my people walk so softly and laugh at dawn?"

Heat up. The sun rises in a mustard-colored sky. Torrential rains have begun, drenching half a dozen city blocks, and within ten minutes, not a trace of moisture remains. There's too much damp heat for a little more damp heat to matter. The sun licks it, taking a sip. This is where clarity can be gained. Clarity about what? Well, take your time. Take your time.

Bruce lay lazily in bed. The brown girl's body resembled the thick, waving leaf of a young banana plant. If you were an artist now, maybe you could draw that. Draw a brown Negress as a broad, fluttering leaf and send her north. Why not sell her to a New Orleans society woman? Get a little money to lie around a little longer. She won't know, she'll never guess. Draw the narrow, suave flanks of a brown laborer on a tree trunk. Send him to the Art Institute of Chicago. Send him to the Anderson Galleries in New York. The French artist went to the South Seas. Freddie O'Brien fell. Remember when the brown woman tried to ruin him, and he told us how he managed to escape? Gauguin put a lot of inspiration into his book, but they cut it for us. No one really cared, at least not after Gauguin's death. For five cents you get a cup of this coffee and a large loaf of bread. No swill. In Chicago, morning coffee at cheap places is like swill. Blacks love good things. Nice, big, sweet words, flesh, corn, cane. Niggas love freedom to sing. You're a Southern Negro with some white blood in you. A little more, and a little more. They say northern travelers help. Oh Lord! Oh my banjo dog! Remember the night when Gauguin came home to his hut, and there, on the bed, a slender, dark girl was waiting for him? Better read this book. They call it "Noah-Noah". Brown mysticism in the walls of the room, in the hair of a Frenchman, in the eyes of a brown girl. Noah-Noah. Remember the feeling of strangeness? The French artist kneels on the floor in the dark and smells strangeness. The dark brown girl smelled a strange smell. Love? What ho! It smells strange.

Go slowly. Take your time. What's all the shooting about?

A little whiter, a little whiter, grey-white, cloudy-white, thick lips - sometimes remaining. We are coming!

Something is also lost. A dance of bodies, a slow dance.

Bruce on the bed in the five-dollar room. The broad leaves of young banana plants flutter in the distance. "Do you know why my people laugh in the morning? Do you know why my people walk quietly?

Sleep again, white man. Don't rush. Then down the street for coffee and a roll of bread, five cents. Sailors disembark from ships, bleary-eyed. Old blacks and white women go to market. They know each other, white women, blacks. Be gentle. Don't rush!

A song is a slow dance. A white man lies motionless on the docks, in a five-dollar-a-month bed. Heat it up. Take your time. When you get rid of this rush, maybe your mind will work. Maybe a song will begin to play within you.

God, it would be great if Tom Wills were here.

Should I write him a letter? No, better not. In a little while, when the cooler days come, you'll head north again. Come back here someday. Stay here someday. Watch and listen.

Song-dance-slow dance.

OceanofPDF.com

BOOK FIVE


OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER ELEVEN


"SATURDAY NIGHT - And dinner is on the table. My old lady is cooking dinner - what! I have a pipe in my mouth."


Lift the pan, lower the lid,

Mom is going to bake me some risen bread.


"I won't give you

No more of my jelly rolls.


"I won't give you

No more of my jelly rolls.


It's Saturday evening at the Old Harbor factory. Sponge Martin is putting away his brushes, and Bruce is imitating his every move. "Leave the brushes like this, and they'll be fine by Monday morning."

Sponge sings, putting things away and brightening up. A small, neat curse-Sponge. He has a worker's instinct. He likes things like this, his tools in order.

"I'm sick of dirty men. I hate them.

The sullen man working next to Sponge was in a hurry to get out the door. He'd been ready to go for ten minutes.

There was no cleaning up of his brushes or tidying up after him. He checked his watch every two minutes. His haste amused Sponge.

"He wants to go home and see if his old woman is still there-alone. He wants to go home and doesn't want to go. If he loses her, he's afraid he'll never find another woman. Women are damn hard to get. There's hardly anything left of them. There are only about ten million of them free, without a soul, especially in New England, from what I've heard," Sponge said with a wink as the sullen worker hurried away without saying goodnight to his two comrades.

Bruce had a suspicion that Sponge had made up the story about the worker and his wife to amuse himself, to entertain Bruce.

He and Sponge walked out the door together. "Why don't you come over for Sunday dinner?" Sponge said. He invited Bruce every Saturday night, and Bruce had already accepted several times.

Now he walked with Sponge along the rising street toward his hotel, a small workers' hotel, on a street halfway up Old Harbor Hill, a hill that rose steeply almost from the riverbank. On the riverbank, on a shelf of land just above the flood line, there was room only for the railroad tracks and a row of factory buildings between the tracks and the riverbank. Across the tracks and a narrow road near the factory gates, streets climbed up the hillside, while other streets ran parallel to the tracks around the hill. The business part of town was located almost halfway up the hillside.

Long red brick buildings of the wheelwrights' company, then a dusty road, railroad tracks, and then clusters of streets of workers' houses, small frame houses closely packed together, then two streets of shops, and over the beginning of what the Sponges called "the posh part of town."

The hotel Bruce lived in was on a working-class street, just above the business streets, "half rich, half poor," Gubka said.

There was a time-when Bruce, then John Stockton, was a boy and briefly lived in the same hotel-it was in the "poshest" part of town. The land up the hill was almost rural back then, covered in trees. Before cars, the climb was too steep, and Old Harbor didn't have many waves. This was when his father took the position of principal of Old Harbor High School, and just before the small family moved to Indianapolis.

Bruce, then in pants, lived with his father and mother in two adjoining rooms-small ones on the second floor of a three-story frame hotel. Even then, it wasn't the best hotel in town, and not what it is now-a half-dormitory for workers.

The hotel was still owned by the same woman, the widow who had owned it when Bruce was a boy. She had been a young widow with two children, a boy and a girl-the boy two or three years older. He had disappeared from the scene when Bruce returned to live there, moving to Chicago, where he worked as a copywriter for an advertising agency. Bruce grinned when he heard about it. "My God, what a circle of life. You start somewhere and you end up back where you started. It doesn't really matter what your intentions are. You go around in circles. Now you see it, but now you don't." His father and this child both worked the same jobs in Chicago, crossed paths with each other, and both took their work seriously. When he heard what the owner's son was doing in Chicago, a story one of the boys in the newspaper office told him came to Bruce's mind. It was a story about certain people: people from Iowa, people from Illinois, people from Ohio. A Chicago newspaperman saw many people when he went on a road trip with a friend. "They"re in business or own a farm, and suddenly they feel like they can"t get anywhere. Then they sell the little farm or store and buy a Ford. They start traveling, men, women, and children. They go to California and get tired of it. They move to Texas, then to Florida. The car rattles and clatters like a milk truck, but they keep going. Finally, they get back to where they started and start the whole show all over again. The country fills with thousands of these caravans. When such an enterprise fails, they settle down anywhere, become farmhands or factory workers. There are many of them. I think it"s the American wanderlust, a little incipient."

The widow's son, who owned the hotel, moved to Chicago, got a job, and married, but the daughter had no luck. She hadn't found a man. Now the mother was aging, and her daughter was slipping away to take her place. The hotel had changed because the city had changed. When Bruce was a child, living there in his pants with his mother and father, a few unimportant people lived there-for example, his father, a high school principal, a young unmarried doctor, and two young lawyers. To save a little money, they didn't go to a more expensive hotel on the main business street, but settled for a neat little place on the hillside higher up. In the evenings, when Bruce was a child, these men would sit on chairs in front of the hotel and talk, explaining to each other their presence in a less expensive place. "I like it. It's quieter here," one of them said. They were trying to make a little money off the expenses of their travelers and seemed ashamed of the fact.

The house's daughter was then a pretty little girl with long yellow curls. On spring and autumn evenings, she always played in front of the hotel. Traveling men petted and fussed over her, and she loved it. One after another, they sat her on their laps and gave her coins or candy. "How long had this been going on?" Bruce wondered. At what age had she, a woman, become shy? Perhaps she had unknowingly slipped from one to the other. One evening, she was sitting on a young man's lap and suddenly had a feeling. She didn't know what it was. She shouldn't do such things anymore. She jumped down and walked away with such a majestic air that she made the traveling men and others sitting around laugh. The young traveler tried to persuade her to come back and sit on his lap again, but she refused, and then went to the hotel and went up to her room feeling-who knows what.

Did this happen when Bruce was a child there? He, his father, and his mother would sometimes sit on chairs outside the hotel door on spring and fall evenings. His father's position in high school gave him a certain dignity in the eyes of others.

What about Bruce's mother, Martha Stockton? It's strange how distinct and yet elusive a figure she's been for him since he became an adult. He's dreamed and thought about her. Sometimes, in his imagination, she was young and beautiful, sometimes old and world-weary. Had she simply become a figure his fantasy played with? A mother after her death, or after you no longer live near her, is something a man's fantasy can play with, dream about, make part of the movement of life's grotesque dance. Idealize her. Why not? She's gone. She won't come close to break the thread of the dream. The dream is as true as reality. Who knows the difference? Who knows anything?


Mom, dear mom, come to my house now

The clock on the spire strikes ten.


Silver threads among gold.


Sometimes Bruce wondered if the same thing had happened to his father's image of a dead woman as had happened to his own. When he and his father had lunch together in Chicago, he'd sometimes wanted to ask the older man questions, but he didn't dare. Perhaps he would have, if not for the tension between Bernice and his father's new wife. Why did they dislike each other so much? He should have been able to say to the older man, "What about this, Dad? What do you prefer to have around-the living body of a young woman or the half-real, half-imagined dream of a dead woman?" The figure of his mother, suspended in solution, in a floating, shifting liquid-a fantasy.

A bright young Jewish man in a newspaper office could certainly have offered some excellent maternal advice: "Mothers with gold stars send their sons to war-the mother of a young murderer in court-in black-inserted there by her son's lawyer-a fox, that fine fellow, a good member of the jury." When Bruce was a child, he lived with his mother and father on the same floor of a hotel in Old Harbor, where he later got a room. Then there was a room for his father and mother, and a smaller room for himself. The bathroom was on the same floor, a few doors down. The place may have looked the same then as it does now, but to Bruce it seemed much squalid. The day he returned to Old Harbor and went to the hotel, and when he was shown his room, he trembled, thinking that the woman who led him upstairs was going to take him to the same room. At first, when he was alone in the room, he thought that maybe this was the same room he had lived in as a child. His mind was going, "click, click," like an old clock in an empty house. "Oh, my God! Spin around the pink, will you?" Slowly, it all became clear. He decided this was the wrong room. He didn't want things to be like this.

"Better not. One night I might wake up crying for my mother, wanting her soft arms to hold me, my head to rest on her soft breast. Mother complex-something like that. I must try to free myself from the memories. If I can, breathe new breath into my nostrils. The dance of life! Don't stop. Don't go back. Dance the dance to the end. Listen, can you hear the music?

The woman who showed him into the room was undoubtedly the daughter of the Curly Hairs. He knew that from her name. She had put on a little weight, but she wore neat clothes. Her hair had already turned a little gray. Was she still a child inside? Did he want to be a child again? Was that what had driven him back to Old Harbor? "Well, hardly," he told himself firmly. "I'm on a different bed now."

What about that woman, the hotel owner's daughter, who now works as a hotel owner herself?

Why hadn't she found a man? Perhaps she didn't want to. Perhaps she'd seen too many men. He himself, as a child, had never played with the two children from the hotel because the little girl made him shy when he saw her alone in the lobby, and because, being two or three years older, he was shy too.

In the morning, when he was a child in knee-length trousers and living in a hotel with his father and mother, he would go to school, usually taking walks with his father, and in the afternoon, when school was out, he would come home alone. His father would stay late at school, correcting papers or something like that.

Late in the afternoon, when the weather was fine, Bruce and his mother went for a walk. What had she done all day? There was nothing to cook. They dined in the hotel dining room among traveling men, farmers, and city dwellers who had come to eat. A few businessmen came too. Dinner then cost twenty-five cents. A procession of strange people constantly entered and exited the boy's imagination. There was plenty to fantasize about back then. Bruce was a rather silent boy. His mother was the same type. Bruce's father spoke for the family.

What did his mother do all day? She sewed a lot. She also made lace. Later, when Bruce married Bernice, his grandmother, with whom he lived after his mother's death, sent her a lot of lace his mother had made. It was quite delicate, a little yellowed over time. Bernice was delighted to receive it. She wrote her grandmother a note saying how kind of her to send it.

One afternoon, when the boy, now thirty-four, returned home from school around four o'clock, his mother took him for a walk. Several river packets regularly arrived at Old Harbor at the time, and the woman and child loved to go down to the dam. What a bustle! What singing, cursing, and shouting! The town, which had slept all day in the sultry river valley, suddenly woke up. Carts drove haphazardly along the hilly streets, a cloud of dust rose, dogs barked, boys ran and shouted, a whirlwind of energy swept over the town. It seemed a matter of life and death if the boat wasn't held at the dock at the wrong moment. Boats unloaded goods, picked up and dropped off passengers near a street lined with small shops and saloons, which stood on the site now occupied by the Gray Wheel Factory. The shops overlooked the river, and at their backs ran the railroad, slowly but surely suffocating the life of the river. How unromantic the railway, the visible river and river life seemed.

Bruce's mother led the child down the sloping street to one of the small shops overlooking the river, where she usually bought some trifle: a pack of pins or needles or a spool of thread. Then she and the boy sat on a bench in front of the shop, and the shopkeeper came to the door to talk to her. He was a neat man with a gray mustache. "The boy likes to look at the boats and the river, doesn't he, Mrs. Stockton?" he said. The man and woman talked about the heat of the late September day and the chance of rain. Then a customer appeared, and the man disappeared inside the shop and didn't come out again. The boy knew his mother had bought this trinket in the shop because she didn't like sitting on the bench out front without doing a little favors. This part of town was already falling apart. The business life of the town had moved away from the river, turned away from the river where all the city life had once been concentrated.

The woman and the boy sat on the bench for a full hour. The light began to soften, and a cool evening breeze blew across the river valley. How rarely this woman spoke! It was clear that Bruce's mother wasn't very sociable. The school principal's wife might have had plenty of friends in town, but she didn't seem to need them. Why?

When the boat arrived or departed, it was very interesting. A long, wide, cobblestoned pier was lowered onto the sloping causeway, and black men would run or jog along the boat with loads on their heads and shoulders. They were barefoot and often half-naked. On the hot days of late May or early September, how their black faces, backs, and shoulders glistened in the daylight! There was the boat, the slowly moving gray waters of the river, the green trees on the Kentucky bank, and a woman sitting next to a boy-so close and yet so far away.

Certain things, impressions, images, and memories became ingrained in the boy's mind. They remained there after the woman died and he became a man.

Woman. Mystery. Love of women. Contempt for women. What are they like? Are they like trees? To what extent can a woman delve into the mystery of life, think, feel? Love men. Take women. Drift with the passing of days. The fact that life goes on doesn't concern you. It concerns women.

Thoughts of a man dissatisfied with life as he saw it mingled with what he imagined the boy must have felt, sitting by the river with a woman. Before he was old enough to recognize her as a being like himself, she had died. Had he, Bruce, in the years after her death, while he was maturing into a man, created the feeling he had for her? Perhaps so. Perhaps he did so because Bernice didn't seem like much of a mystery.

A lover must love. It's his nature. Did people like Sponge Martin, who were workers, who lived and felt through their fingers, perceive life more clearly?

Bruce walks out of the factory with Sponge on a Saturday evening. Winter is almost over, spring is coming.

A woman stands behind the wheel of a car in front of the factory gates-the wife of Gray, the factory owner. Another woman sits on a bench next to her son, watching the riverbed move in the evening light. Wandering thoughts, fantasies in a person's mind. The reality of life is clouded at this moment. The hunger of sowing seeds, the famine of the soil. A group of words, entangled in the web of the mind, penetrated his consciousness, forming words on his lips. While Sponge spoke, Bruce and the woman in the car looked into each other's eyes for just a moment.

The words that were in Bruce's head at that moment were from the Bible. "And Judah said to Onan, 'Go in to your brother's wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to your brother.'"

What a strange jumble of words and ideas. Bruce had been away from Bernice for months. Could he really be looking for another woman now? Why did the woman in the car look so frightened? Had he embarrassed her by looking at her? But she was looking at him. There was an expression in her eyes as if she were about to speak to him, a worker at her husband's factory. He was listening to Sponge.

Bruce walked beside SpongeBob, not looking back. "What a thing this Bible is!" It was one of the few books Bruce never tired of reading. When he was a boy, and after his mother died, his grandmother always had a book about reading the New Testament, but he read the Old Testament. Stories-men and women in relation to each other-fields, sheep, growing grain, the famine that came to the land, the coming years of plenty. Joseph, David, Saul, Samson, the strong man-honey, bees, barns, cattle-men and women going to the barns to lie down on the threshing floors. "When he saw her, he thought she was a harlot, because she covered her face." And he came to his sheepshearers in Timorat, he and his friend Hirah the Adullamite.

"And he turned to her on the road and said, "Come, let me come in to you.""

And why didn't that young Jewish guy in the Chicago newspaper office read his father's book? Then there wouldn't have been such chatter.

Sponge on a sawdust pile in the Ohio River Valley next to his old woman - an old woman who was as alive as a fox terrier.

The woman in the car looks at Bruce.

The Worker, like the Sponge, saw, felt, and tasted things with his fingers. The disease of life arose because people were moving away from their hands, as well as their bodies. Things are felt with the whole body-rivers-trees-the sky-the growth of grass-the cultivation of grain-ships-the movement of seeds in the earth-city streets-dust on city streets-steel-iron-skyscrapers-faces on city streets-men's bodies-women's bodies-children's fast, slender bodies.

This young Jewish man from the Chicago newspaper office delivers a brilliant speech-it lifts the bed. Bernice writes a story about a poet and a wax woman, and Tom Wills scolds the young Jewish man. "He's afraid of his woman."

Bruce leaves Chicago and spends weeks on the river and on the docks of New Orleans.

Thoughts of his mother-a boy's thoughts of his mother. A man like Bruce could think a hundred different thoughts while walking ten steps next to a worker named Sponge Martin.

Did Sponge notice the small gap between him-Bruce-and the woman in the car? He felt it, perhaps through his fingers.

"You liked this woman. Better watch out," said Sponge.

Bruce smiled.

More thoughts about his mother while he was walking with Sponge. Sponge was talking. He didn't bring up the woman in the car. Perhaps it was just a worker's bias. Workers were like that; they only thought of women in one way. There was something terrifyingly prosaic about workers. Most likely, most of their observations were lies. De dum dum dum! De dum dum dum!

Bruce remembered, or thought he remembered, certain things about his mother, and after he returned to Old Harbor, they accumulated in his mind. Nights at the hotel. After dinner, and on clear nights, he and his mother and father would sit with strangers, travelers, and others outside the hotel door, and then Bruce would be put to bed. Sometimes the school principal would get into a discussion with a man. "Is a protective tariff a good thing? Don't you think it will raise prices too much? Anyone in the middle will be crushed between the upper and lower millstones."

What is a bottom millstone?

The father and mother went to their rooms: the man read his school notebooks, and the woman a book. Sometimes she sewed. Then the woman entered the boy's room and kissed him on both cheeks. "Now go to bed," she said. Sometimes, after he went to bed, his parents went out for a walk. Where did they go? Did they go to sit on a bench by a tree in front of the store on the street facing the river?

The river, ever-flowing, was a vast thing. It never seemed to be in a hurry. After a while, it joined another river, called the Mississippi, and moved south. More and more water flowed. When he lay in bed, the river seemed to flow over the boy's head. Sometimes on spring nights, when the man and woman were away, a sudden rain would fall, and he would get out of bed and go to the open window. The sky was dark and mysterious, but when one looked down from one's second-floor room, one could see the joyful sight of people hurrying down the street, down the street toward the river, hiding in doorways and exits to escape the rain.

On other nights, the only thing in the bed was a dark space between the window and the sky. Men passed along the corridor outside his door-traveling men, getting ready for bed-most of them heavy-legged, fat men.

Somehow, Bruce the man's idea of a mother had become confused with his feelings for the river. He was well aware that it was all a jumble in his head. Mother Mississippi, Mother Ohio, right? Of course, it was all nonsense. "A poet's cot," Tom Wills would have said. It was symbolism: out of control, saying one thing and meaning another. And yet there might be something in it-something Mark Twain almost understood but didn't dare try-the beginning of a kind of great continental poetry, eh? Warm, big, rich rivers flowing down-Mother Ohio, Mother Mississippi. When you start getting smart, you'll have to watch over a cot like that. Be careful, brother, if you say that out loud, some sly city dweller might laugh at you. Tom Wills growls, "Oh, come on!" When you were a boy, sitting looking at the river, something appeared, a dark spot far off in the distance. You saw it slowly sinking, but it was so far away you couldn't see what it was. The waterlogged logs bobbed occasionally, only one end sticking up, like a person swimming. Perhaps it was a swimmer, but of course it couldn't be that. Men don't swim miles and miles down the Ohio, nor miles and miles down the Mississippi. When Bruce was a child, sitting on a bench watching, he half-closed his eyes, and his mother, sitting next to him, did the same. Later, when he was a grown man, it would be revealed whether he and his mother had the same thoughts at the same time. Perhaps the thoughts Bruce later imagined he had as a child had never occurred to him at all. Fantasy was a complicated thing. With the help of imagination, man tried to connect himself with others in some mysterious way.

You watched the log bob and sway. It was now facing you, not far from the Kentucky shore, where there was a slow, strong current.

And now it began to grow smaller and smaller. How long could you keep it in your sight against the gray background of the water, a small black creature growing smaller and smaller? It became a test. The need was terrible. What was needed? To keep your gaze fixed on a drifting, floating black spot on the moving yellow-gray surface, to keep your gaze still for as long as possible.

What were the men and women doing, sitting on a bench outside on a gloomy evening, gazing at the darkening face of the river? What did they see? Why did they need to do such an absurd thing together? When a child's father and mother walked alone at night, was there anything similar about them? Were they really satisfying a need in such a childish way? When they came home and went to bed, they sometimes spoke in a quiet voice, sometimes remained silent.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER TWELVE


Another strange memory for Bruce, walking with Sponge. When he left Old Harbor for Indianapolis with his father and mother, they took a boat to Louisville. Bruce was twelve at the time. His recollection of this event might be more reliable. They rose early in the morning and walked to the dock in a shack. There were two other passengers, two young men, obviously not citizens of Old Harbor. Who were they? Certain figures, seen under certain circumstances, remain forever etched in the memory. However, taking such things too seriously is a difficult matter. It could lead to mysticism, and an American mystic would be something absurd.

That woman in the car at the factory gates, the one Bruce and Sponge had just driven past. It's strange that Sponge knew there was some sort of passage between her and Bruce. He wasn't looking for it.

It would also be strange if Bruce's mother always made such contacts, keeping them and her man - Bruce's father - unaware of it.

She herself might not have known this - not consciously.

That day of his childhood on the river was undoubtedly a very vivid memory for Bruce.

Of course, Bruce was a child then, and for a child, the adventure of moving to a new place is something amazing.

What will be visible in the new place, what kind of people will be there, what kind of life will be there?

The two young men who had boarded the boat that morning when he and his mother and father left Old Harbor stood by the railing on the upper deck, talking as the boat pulled out into the river. One was a rather heavyset, broad-shouldered man with black hair and large hands. He was smoking a pipe. The other was slender and had a small black mustache, which he constantly stroked.

Bruce sat with his father and mother on a bench. The morning had passed. The passengers had boarded and the goods had been unloaded. The two young passengers continued strolling, laughing and talking earnestly, and the child had the feeling that one of them, the slender man, had some kind of connection with his mother. As if the man and woman had once known each other and were now embarrassed to find themselves in the same boat. As they passed the bench where the Stocktons were sitting, the slender man looked not at them, but at the river. Bruce felt a shy, boyish urge to call out to him. He was absorbed in the young man and his mother. How young she looked that day-like a girl.

Отец Брюса долго разговаривал с капитаном лодки, который хвастался своими впечатлениями, полученными в первые дни на реке. Он говорил о черных матросах: "Тогда мы владели ими, как и многими лошадьми, но нам приходилось заботиться о них, как о лошадях. Именно после войны мы начали получать от них максимальную выгоду. Понимаете, они все равно были нашей собственностью, но мы не могли их продать и всегда могли получить все, что хотели. Ниггеры любят реку. Вы не сможете удержать ниггера подальше от реки. Раньше мы получали их за пять или шесть долларов в месяц и не платили им этого, если не хотели. Почему мы должны это делать? Если негр становился геем, мы сбрасывали его в реку. В те времена никто никогда не наводил справки о пропавшем ниггере.

The boat captain and the schoolteacher went to another part of the boat, and Bruce was left alone with his mother. In his memory-after death-she remained a slender, rather petite woman with a sweet, serious face. She was almost always quiet and reserved, but sometimes-rarely-as on that day on the boat, she would become strangely lively and energetic. That afternoon, when the boy tired of running around the boat, he went to sit with her again. Evening had fallen. In an hour, they would be tied up in Louisville. The captain led Bruce's father to the wheelhouse. Two young men stood next to Bruce and his mother. The boat approached the dock, the last stop before reaching the city.

There was a long, gently sloping beach with cobblestones laid in the mud of the river embankment, and the town they stopped at was very similar to Old Harbor, only a little smaller. They had to unload many sacks of grain, and the Negroes ran up and down the wharf, singing as they worked.

Strange, haunting notes emanated from the throats of the ragged black men running up and down the dock. Words were caught, thrashed, lingered in their throats. Lovers of words, lovers of sounds-blacks seemed to preserve their tone in some warm place, perhaps beneath their red tongues. Their thick lips were walls beneath which the tone hid. An unconscious love for inanimate things lost to whites-the sky, the river, a moving boat-a black mysticism-never expressed except in song or in the movements of bodies. The bodies of the black workers belonged to each other as the sky belongs to the river. Far downriver, where the sky was splashed red, it touched the riverbed. The sounds from the throats of the black workers touched each other, caressed each other. On the deck of the boat stood the red-faced mate, cursing, as if at the sky and the river.

The boy couldn't understand the words coming from the throats of the black workers, but they were powerful and beautiful. Later, recalling this moment, Bruce always remembered the singing voices of the black sailors as colors. Streaming reds, browns, golden yellows burst from black throats. He felt a strange excitement within himself, and his mother, sitting next to him, was also excited. "Oh, my baby! Oh, my baby!" The sounds were caught and lingered in black throats. The notes broke into quarter notes. Words, as meaning, are irrelevant. Perhaps words have always been unimportant. There were strange words about a "banjo dog." What is a "banjo dog"?

"Oh, my banjo dog! Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, my banjo dog!

Brown bodies running, black bodies running. The bodies of all the men running up and down the pier were one body. He couldn't tell one from the other. They were lost in each other.

Could the bodies of the people he'd lost so much be in each other? Bruce's mother took the boy's hand and squeezed it tightly and warmly. Beside him stood the slender young man who had climbed into the boat that morning. Did he know what the mother and boy had felt at that moment, and did he want to be part of them? Surely, all day, as the boat sailed upriver, there had been something between the woman and the man, something they were both only half-aware of. The schoolteacher didn't know, but the boy and the slender young man's companion did. Sometimes, long after that evening, thoughts come to the mind of the man who was once a boy on a boat with his mother. All day, as the man wandered the boat, he talked to his companion, but inside him there was a calling for the woman with the child. Something within him moved toward the woman as the sun sank toward the western horizon.

Now the evening sun seemed about to fall into the river far to the west, and the sky was pinkish-red.

The young man's hand rested on his companion's shoulder, but his face was turned toward the woman and child. The woman's face was as red as the evening sky. She was looking not at the young man, but away from him, across the river, and the boy's gaze shifted from the young man's face to his mother's. His mother's hand clasped tightly.

Bruce never had brothers or sisters. Perhaps his mother wanted more children? Sometimes, long after he'd left Bernice, when he'd been sailing the Mississippi River in an open boat, before he'd lost the boat in a storm one night when he'd gone ashore, strange things would happen. He'd beached the boat somewhere under a tree and lay down on the grass by the riverbank. Before his eyes was an empty river, filled with ghosts. He was half asleep, half awake. Fantasies filled his mind. Before the storm had broken and carried his boat away, he'd lay for a long time in the darkness at the water's edge, reliving another evening on the river. The strangeness and wonder of things in nature he'd known as a boy and somehow lost later, the meaning lost in living in the city and marrying Bernice-could he ever regain them? There was the strangeness and wonder of the trees, the sky, the city streets, the black and white people-the buildings, the words, the sounds, the thoughts, the fantasies. Perhaps the fact that white people have prospered so quickly in life, with newspapers, advertising, great cities, intelligent and clever minds, ruling the world, has cost them more than they have gained. They haven't achieved much.

The young man Bruce once saw on an Ohio riverboat, when he was a boy traveling upriver with his mother and father-was he, that evening, anything like the man Bruce would later become? It would be a strange reversal of the mind if that young man had never existed, if the boy had invented him. Suppose he simply invented him later-somehow-to explain his mother to himself, as a means of getting closer to the woman, his mother. A man's memory of a woman, his mother, can also be a fiction. A mind like Bruce's sought explanations for everything.

On a boat on the Ohio River, evening was fast approaching. A town stood high on the bluff, and three or four men disembarked. The Negroes continued to chant and trot and dance back and forth along the wharf. A ramshackle shack, to which two decrepit-looking horses were tied, moved down the street toward the town on the bluff. Two white men stood on the bank. One was small and agile, holding a ledger. He was checking the sacks of grain as they were brought ashore. "One hundred twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four."

"Oh, my banjo dog! Oh, ho! Oh, ho!

The second white man on the shore was tall and thin, with a wild look in his eyes. The captain's voice, speaking to Bruce's father up in the wheelhouse or on the upper deck, was clear in the still evening air. "He's crazy." The second white man on the shore sat on top of the dike, his knees tucked between his arms. His body rocked slowly back and forth to the rhythm of the Negroes' singing. The man had been in some kind of accident. There was a cut on his long, thin cheek, and blood trickled into his dirty beard and dried there. A tiny streak of red was barely visible against the red sky to the west, like the fiery streak the boy could see when he looked downriver toward the setting sun. The wounded man was dressed in rags, his lips hanging open, thick lips hanging like those of the Negroes when they sang. His body swayed. The body of the slender young man on the boat, trying to carry on a conversation with his companion, a broad-shouldered man, swayed almost imperceptibly. The body of the woman who was Bruce's mother swayed.

To the boy in the boat that evening, the whole world, the sky, the boat, the shore receding into the gathering darkness, seemed to be shaking from the voices of singing blacks.

Could it all have been just a fantasy, a whim? Could it have been that he, as a boy, had fallen asleep on a boat, clutching his mother's hand, and that he had dreamed it all? The narrow-deck riverboat had been hot all day. The gray water flowing next to the boat lulled the boy to sleep.

What happened between the little woman sitting silently on the boat's deck and the young man with the tiny mustache who spent the entire day talking to his friend without once addressing the woman? What could happen between people no one knew anything about, and about whom they themselves knew little?

When Bruce was walking next to Sponge Martin and passed a woman sitting in a car, and something - some kind of flash flashed between them - what did it mean?

That day on the river boat, Bruce's mother turned to face the young man, though the boy watched them both. As if she had suddenly agreed to something-perhaps a kiss.


No one knew about it except the boy and, perhaps, a wild, bizarre idea, the madman sitting on the river embankment, staring at the boat with his thick, drooping lips. "He's three-quarters white, one-quarter Negro, and he's been crazy for ten years," the captain's voice explained to the schoolteacher on the deck above.

The madman sat hunched over on the shore, atop the dam, until the boat pulled away from the moorings, then rose to his feet and screamed. The captain later said he did this every time a boat docked in town. According to the captain, the man was harmless. The madman, with a streak of red blood on his cheek, rose to his feet, straightened, and spoke. His body resembled the trunk of a dead tree growing on top of the dam. Perhaps there was a dead tree there. The boy may have fallen asleep and dreamed the whole thing. He was strangely drawn to the slender young man. He might have wanted the young man near him, and allowed his imagination to draw him closer through the body of the woman, his mother.

How tattered and dirty were the madman's clothes! A kiss passed between a young woman on deck and a slender young man. The madman shouted something. "Stay afloat! Stay afloat!" he shouted, and all the blacks below, on the lower deck of the boat, fell silent. The mustachioed youth's body trembled. The woman's body trembled. The boy's body trembled.

"Okay," the captain's voice called. "It's okay. We'll take care of ourselves."

"He's just a harmless lunatic, comes down every time a boat comes in and always yells something like that," the captain explained to Bruce's father as the boat lurched into the current.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER THIRTEEN


Saturday night - And dinner is on the table. The old woman is preparing dinner - what!


Lift the pan, lower the lid,

Mom will make me some risen bread!


And I won't give you a single jelly roll.

And I won't give you a single jelly roll.


It was a Saturday evening in early spring in Old Harbor, Indiana. The first faint promise of hot, humid summer days was in the air. In the lowlands up and downriver from Old Harbor, floodwaters still covered deep, flat fields. Warm, rich land where trees grew, where forests grew, where corn grew. The whole Middle American empire, swept by frequent and delicious rains, great forests, prairies where early spring flowers grew like a carpet, a land of many rivers flowing to the brown, slow, strong Mother River, a land where one could live and make love. Dance. Once upon a time the Indians danced there, feasted there. They scattered poems like seeds in the wind. Names of rivers, names of cities. Ohio! Illinois! Keokuk! Chicago! Illinois! Michigan!

On Saturday evening, as Sponge and Bruce put down their brushes and left the factory, Sponge continued to persuade Bruce to come to his house for Sunday dinner. "You don't have an old lady. My old lady likes having you here.

On Saturday night, Sponge was in a playful mood. On Sunday, he'd gorge himself on fried chicken, mashed potatoes, chicken gravy, and pie. Then he'd stretch out on the floor by the front door and fall asleep. If Bruce came over, he'd somehow manage to get his hands on a bottle of whiskey, and Sponge would have to lug it around a few times. After Bruce took a couple of sips, Sponge and his old woman would finish the ride. Then the old woman would sit in the rocking chair, laughing and teasing Sponge. "He's not so good anymore-he's not getting any juice. He must be eyeing a younger man-like you, for example," she said, winking at Bruce. Sponge would laugh and roll around on the floor, occasionally grunting like a fat, clean old pig. "I gave you two children. What's wrong with you?"

- Now it's time to think about fishing - some payday - soon, eh, old woman?

There were unwashed dishes on the table. Two elderly people were asleep. A sponge pressed her body against the open door, an old woman in a rocking chair. Her mouth was open. She had false teeth on her upper jaw. Flies flew in through the open door and settled on the table. Feed them, they're flying! There was a lot of fried chicken left, a lot of gravy, a lot of mashed potatoes.

Bruce had an idea that the dishes were left unwashed because Sponge wanted to help with the cleaning, but neither he nor the old woman wanted another man to see him helping with a woman's task. Bruce could imagine the conversation between them even before he arrived. "Listen, old woman, you left them alone with the dishes. Wait until he leaves."

Gubka owned an old brick house, once a stable, near the riverbank where the stream turned north. The railroad ran past his kitchen door, and in front of the house, closer to the water's edge, was a dirt road. During spring floods, the road would sometimes be submerged, and Gubka had to wade through the water to reach the tracks.

The dirt road had once been the main road into town, and there had been a tavern and a stagecoach there, but the little brick stable that Sponge had bought at a low price and turned into a house-when he was a young man just married-was the only sign of its former grandeur left on the road.

Five or six hens and a rooster were walking along a road full of deep ruts. Few cars traveled this route, and while the others slept, Bruce carefully stepped over Sponge's body and walked out of town along the road. After he'd walked half a mile and left town, the road turned away from the river into the hills, and just at this point the current dropped sharply onto the riverbank. The road could fall into the river there, and at such moments, Bruce liked to sit on a log at the edge and look down. The drop was about ten feet, and the current kept eroding the banks. Logs and snags, carried along by the current, almost touched the bank before being washed back into the middle of the stream.

It was a place to sit, dream, and think. When he tired of the river, he headed into the mountains, returning to the city in the evening along a new road that led straight through the hills.

Sponge in the store just before the whistle blew on Saturday afternoon. He was a man who worked, ate, and slept all his life. When Bruce worked for a newspaper in Chicago, he'd leave the newspaper office one afternoon feeling dissatisfied and empty. Often he and Tom Wills would go sit in some dark alley restaurant. Just across the river, on the North Side, there was a place where you could buy bootleg whiskey and wine. They'd sit and drink for two or three hours in a small, dark place while Tom growled.

"What kind of life is it for an adult to abandon their beds and send others to collect city scandals-the Jew embellishes this with colorful words."

Although he was old, Sponge didn't look tired when the day's work was done, but as soon as he got home and ate, he wanted to sleep. All day Sunday, after Sunday dinner, at noon, he slept. Was the man completely content with life? Did his work, his wife, the house he lived in, the bed he slept in satisfy him? Did he have no dreams, did he seek nothing he couldn't find? When he woke up one summer morning after a night on a pile of sawdust by the river and his old woman, what thoughts came into his head? Could it be that for Sponge, his old woman was like the river, like the sky above, like the trees on the distant riverbank? Was she for him a fact of nature, something about which you didn't ask questions, like birth or death?

Bruce decided the old man wasn't necessarily satisfied with himself. It didn't matter whether he was satisfied or not. He had a kind of humility about him, like Tom Wills, and he liked the craftsmanship of his own hands. It gave him a sense of peace in life. Tom Wills would have liked this man. "He's got something for you and me," Tom would have said.

As for his old woman, he'd grown accustomed to her. Unlike many workers' wives, she didn't look worn out. Perhaps it was because she'd always had two children, but it could also be for something else. There was work to be done, and her man could do it better than most men. He rested in this fact, and his wife rested in it. Man and woman remained within the limits of their strength, moving freely within the small but precise circle of life. The old woman was a good cook and enjoyed the occasional walk with Sponge-they dignifiedly called it "fishing trips." She was a strong, wiry creature and never tired of life-of Sponge, her husband.

Satisfaction or dissatisfaction with life had nothing to do with Sponge Martin. On Saturday afternoon, as he and Bruce were getting ready to leave, he threw up his hands and declared, "Saturday night and dinner on the table. That's the happiest time in a working man's life." Did Bruce want something very similar to what Sponge Martin got? Perhaps he left Bernice only because she didn't know how to work with him. She didn't want to team up with him. What did she want? Well, ignore her. Bruce thought about her all day, about her and his mother, about what he could remember of his mother.

It's quite possible that someone like Sponge didn't walk around like he did, with a churning brain, drifting fantasies, feeling trapped and never released. Most people must have reached a place after a while where everything stood still. Little fragments of thoughts flying around in their heads. Nothing organized. The thoughts wandered further and further.

Once, as a boy, he saw a log bobbing on the riverbank. It receded further and further, until it was a tiny black spot. Then it vanished into an endless, fluid grayness. It didn't disappear suddenly. When you peered at it intently, trying to see how long you could keep it in your sight, then...

Was it there? It was! It wasn't! It was! It wasn't!

A trick of the mind. Let's say most people were dead and didn't know it. When you were alive, a stream of thoughts and fantasies flowed through your mind. Perhaps if you organized those thoughts and fantasies a little, made them act through your body, made them part of yourself-

Then they could be used-perhaps the same way Sponge Martin used a paintbrush. You could lay them on something, the way Sponge Martin might apply varnish. Let's assume that about one person in a million actually tidied up at least a little. What would that mean? What would such a person be like?

Would he have been Napoleon, Caesar?

Probably not. It would be too much trouble. If he became Napoleon or Caesar, he'd have to think about others all the time, try to exploit them, try to wake them up. Well, no, he wouldn't try to wake them up. If they woke up, they'd be just like him. "I don't like how thin and hungry he looks. He thinks too much." Something like that, right? Napoleon or Caesar would have to give others toys to play with, armies to conquer. He'd have to put himself on display, have wealth, wear beautiful clothes, make everyone envious, make them all want to be like him.

Bruce had thought a lot about Sponge when he worked next to him in the store, when he walked next to him on the street, when he saw him sleeping on the floor like a pig or a dog after stuffing himself with the food his old woman had prepared. Sponge had lost his carriage paint shop through no fault of his own. There were too few carriages to paint. Later, he could have opened a car paint shop if he'd wanted, but he was probably too old for that. He continued painting wheels, talking about the time he had the shop, eating, sleeping, getting drunk. When he and his old woman were a little drunk, she seemed like a child to him, and for a while, he became that child. How often? About four times a week, Sponge said once, laughing. Perhaps he was bragging. Bruce tried to imagine himself as Sponge at such a moment, Sponge lying on a pile of sawdust by the river with his old woman. He couldn't do it. Such fantasies mixed with his own reactions to life. He couldn't be Sponge, an old worker, stripped of his position as foreman, drunk and trying to act like a child with an old woman. What happened was that this thought brought back certain unpleasant events from his own life. He had once read Zola's "The Earth," and later, shortly before leaving Chicago, Tom Wills showed him Joyce's new book, "Ulysses." There were certain pages. A man named Bloom standing on a beach with women. A woman, Bloom's wife, in her bedroom at home. The woman's thoughts-her night of animalism-everything recorded, minute by minute. The realism in the letter rose sharply to something burning and irritating, like a fresh wound. Others come to look at sores. For Bruce, trying to think of Sponge and his wife at the moment of their pleasure with each other, the kind of pleasure known in youth, was precisely that. It left a faint, unpleasant smell in the nostrils, like rotten eggs thrown into the forest, beyond the river, far away.

Oh, my God! Was his own mother-on the boat when they saw the crazy, mustachioed guy-was she some kind of Bloom at that moment?

Bruce didn't like the idea. Bloom's figure seemed true to him, beautifully true, but it hadn't originated in his mind. A European, a continental man-that Joyce. People there had lived in one place for a long time and left something of themselves everywhere. A sensitive person who had walked there and lived there had absorbed it into their being. In America, much of the land was still new, unsullied. Stick to the sun, the wind, and the rain.


LAME

To JJ

At night, when there is no light, my city is a man who gets out of bed and looks into the darkness.

By day, my city is the son of a dreamer. It became the companion of thieves and prostitutes. It abandoned its father.

My city is a skinny little old man living in a flophouse on a dirty street. He wears false teeth that are loose and make a sharp clicking sound when he eats. He can't find a woman and indulges in self-torture. He picks cigarette butts out of the gutter.

My city lives in the roofs of houses, in the eaves. A woman came to my city, and it threw her far down, from the eaves, onto a pile of stones. The people of my city say she fell.

There is an angry man whose wife is unfaithful to him. He is my city. My city is in his hair, in his breath, in his eyes. When he breathes, his breath is the breath of my city.

Many cities stand in rows. There are cities that sleep, cities standing in the mud of swamps.

My city is very strange. It is tired and nervous. My city has become a woman whose lover is sick. She creeps through the hallways of the house and eavesdrops at the door of the room.

I can't say what my city is like.

My city is the kiss of the feverish lips of many tired people.

My city is the murmur of voices coming from the pit.

Did Bruce flee his hometown of Chicago, hoping to find something in the quiet nights of the river town that would cure him?

What was he up to? Suppose it was something like this-suppose the young man in the boat suddenly said to the woman sitting there with the child, "I know you won't live very long and that you'll never have any more children. I know everything about you that you can't know." There might be moments when men and men, women and women, men and women could approach each other like that. "Ships passing in the night." These were the kind of things that made a man seem foolish to think of himself, but he was quite sure there was something that people liked-himself, his mother before him, this young man on the river packet, people scattered everywhere, here and there, that they were pursuing.

Bruce's consciousness returned. Since leaving Bernice, he'd been thinking and feeling a lot, something he'd never done before, and that was accomplishing something. He might not have achieved anything special, but he was enjoying himself in a way, and he wasn't bored like before. Hours spent varnishing wheels in the shop hadn't yielded much benefit. You could varnish wheels and think about anything, and the more skillful your hands became, the more free your mind and imagination were. There was a certain pleasure in the hours passing. Sponge, a good-natured child of the male sex, was playing, bragging, talking, showing Bruce how to carefully and beautifully varnish wheels. For the first time in his life, Bruce had done something well with his own hands.

If a person could use their thoughts, feelings, and fantasies the same way a sponge could use a brush, what then? What would that person be like?

Would an artist be like that? It would be wonderful if he, Bruce, running away from Bernice and her crowd, from the conscious artists, had done so only because he wanted to be exactly what they wanted to be. The men and women in Bernice's company always talked about being artists, talked about themselves as artists. Why did men like Tom Wills and himself feel a kind of disdain for them? Did he and Tom Wills secretly want to become a different kind of artist? Wasn't that what he, Bruce, had been doing when he left Bernice and returned to Old Harbor? Was there something in the town he had missed as a child, something he wanted to find, some chord he wanted to grasp?

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER FOURTEEN


Saturday night - And Bruce walks out the door of the store with Sponge. Another worker, a sullen man at the next desk, hurried out right before them, hurried away without saying goodnight, and Sponge winked at Bruce.

"He wants to get home quickly and see if his old lady is still there, wants to see if she's gone off with that other guy she's always fooling around with. He comes to her house during the day. His desire to take her away is not dangerous. Then he'll have to support her. She would hurry if he asked her, but he doesn't. Much better to let this one do all the work and earn the money to feed and clothe her, eh?

Why did Bruce call Sponge simple? God knows, he was quite malicious. He had such a thing as masculinity, virility, and he was as proud of it as of his craftsmanship. He got his woman fast and hard and despised any man who couldn't do the same. His disdain no doubt rubbed off on the worker next to him, making him even more sullen than he would have been had Sponge treated him the way he treated Bruce.

When Bruce came into the store in the morning, he always talked to the man at the second wheel, and it seemed to him that the man sometimes looked at him with longing, as if to say: "If I had the chance to tell you, if I knew how to tell you, there would be my side of the story. This is who I am. If I lost one woman, I would never know how to get another. I"m not the kind of person who gets them easily. I don"t have the courage. Frankly, if you only knew, I"m much more like you than that Sponge. He has everything in his hands. He gets everything from him through his hands. Take his woman away, and he"ll get another with his hands. I"m like you. I"m a thinker, maybe a dreamer. I"m the kind of person who makes his life miserable."

How much easier it was for Bruce to be a sullen and silent worker than to be Sponge. And yet he liked Sponge, whom he wanted to be like. Did he? In any case, he wanted to be a little like him.

On the street near the factory, in the gathering twilight of an early spring evening, as the two men crossed the railroad tracks and walked up the rising cobblestone street toward the Old Harbor business district, Sponge was smiling. It was the same distant, half-evil smile Bruce sometimes wore around Bernice, and it always drove her crazy. It wasn't directed at Bruce. Sponge was thinking of the surly worker who strutted like a rooster because he was more of a man, more of a man. Was Bruce planning some similar trick on Bernice? No doubt he was. God, she should be glad he was gone.

His thoughts whirled further. Now his thoughts focused on the sullen workman. Some time ago, just minutes before, he had tried to imagine himself as Sponge, lying on a pile of sawdust under the stars, Sponge with a skin full of whiskey, and his old woman lying next to him. He had tried to imagine himself in such circumstances, with the stars shining, the river flowing quietly nearby, tried to imagine himself in such circumstances, feeling like a child and feeling the woman next to him like a child. It hadn't worked. What he would do, what a man like himself would do in such circumstances, he knew all too well. He woke in the cold morning light with thoughts, too many thoughts. What he had managed to do was make himself feel very ineffective in the moment. He had recreated himself in the imagination of the moment, not as Sponge, an effective, direct man who could give himself completely, but himself in some of his most ineffective moments. He remembered times, two or three times, when he'd been with women, but to no avail. Perhaps he'd been useless with Bernice. Was he useless, or was she?

It was much easier, after all, to imagine himself as a sullen worker. He could do that. He could imagine himself being beaten by a woman, afraid of her. He could imagine himself as a guy like Bloom in Ulysses, and it was clear that Joyce, the writer and dreamer, was in the same boat. He, of course, made his Bloom much better than his Stephen, made him much more real-and Bruce, in his imagination, could make a sullen worker more real than

Sponge could have entered into him faster, understood him better. He could be a sullen, ineffective worker, he could, in her imagination, be a man in bed with his wife, he could lie there scared, angry, hopeful, full of pretense. Perhaps that's exactly how he was with Bernice-at least partly. Why didn't he tell her when she wrote this story, why didn't he swear to her what this nonsense was, what it really meant? Instead, he wore that smirk that so puzzled and angered her. He retreated into the depths of his mind, where she couldn't follow, and from that vantage point, he smirked at her.

Now he was walking down the street with Sponge, and Sponge was grinning the same smile he so often wore in Bernice's presence. They were sitting together, perhaps having lunch, and she suddenly stood up from the table and said, "I have to write." Then the smile appeared. Often, this would throw her off balance for the entire day. She couldn't write a word. How mean, really!

Sponge, however, wasn't doing this to him, Bruce, but to the sullen worker. Bruce was quite sure of it. He felt safe.

They reached the city's business street and walked alongside a crowd of other workers, all employees of the wheel factory. The car carrying young Gray, the factory owner, and his wife climbed the hill in second gear, emitting a sharp, whining engine, and passed them. The woman behind the wheel turned around. Sponge told Bruce who was in the car.

"She's been coming there quite often lately. She's bringing him home. She's the one he stole from somewhere around here when he was at war. I don't think he actually got her. Maybe she's lonely in a strange city where there aren't many like her, and she likes to come to the factory before they leave to inspect them. She's been keeping an eye on you quite regularly lately. I've noticed that."

Sponge smiled. Well, it wasn't a smile. It was a grin. At that moment, Bruce thought he looked like a wise old Chinese man-something like that. He became self-conscious. Sponge was probably making fun of him, like the sullen worker at the next desk. In the picture Bruce had taken of his workmate, which he liked, Sponge certainly didn't have many very subtle thoughts. It would be somewhat humiliating for Bruce to think that a worker was very sensitive to impressions. Sure, he had jumped out of a woman's car, and that had happened three times already. Thinking of Sponge as a highly sensitive person was like thinking of Bernice as better than he had ever been at what he most wanted to be. Bruce wanted to be outstanding at something-to be more sensitive to everything that happened to him than others.

They reached the corner where Bruce turned up the hill, heading for his hotel. Sponge was still smiling. He continued to persuade Bruce to come to his house for dinner on Sunday. "Okay," Bruce said, "and I"ll manage to get a bottle. There"s a young doctor at the hotel. I"ll call him for a prescription. I think he"ll be fine."

Sponge continued to smile, entertaining his thoughts. "That would be a boost. You're not like the rest of us. Maybe you'll make her remember someone she's already attached to. I wouldn't mind seeing Gray get that kind of a kick."

As if not wanting Bruce to comment on what he'd just said, the old worker quickly changed the subject. "I wanted to tell you something. You better take a look around. Sometimes you have the same expression on your face as that Smedley," he said, laughing. Smedley was a grumpy worker.

Still smiling, Sponge walked down the street, Bruce standing and watching him go. As if sensing he was being watched, he straightened his old shoulders slightly, as if to say, "He doesn't think I know as much as I do." The sight made Bruce grin too.

"I think I know what he means, but the chances are slim. I didn't leave Bernice to find another woman. I've got another bee in my bonnet, though I don't even know what it is," he thought as he climbed the hill toward the hotel. The thought that Sponge had fired and missed sent a wave of relief, even joy, through him. "It's not good for that little bastard to know more about me than I could have," he thought again.

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BOOK SIX


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CHAPTER FIFTEEN


Perhaps she had understood all this from the very beginning and did not dare to say it to herself. She saw him first, walking with a short man with a thick mustache along the cobbled street leading from her husband's factory, and she formed such an impression of her own feelings that she would like to stop him one evening when he came out of the factory door. She felt the same way about the Parisian man she had seen in Rose Frank's apartment and who had eluded her. She had never managed to get close to him, to hear a word from his lips. Perhaps he belonged to Rose, and Rose had managed to get him out of the way. And yet Rose did not look like that. She seemed a woman who would take a risk. Perhaps both this man and the one in Paris were equally unaware of her. Aline did not want to do anything rude. She considered herself a lady. And in fact, nothing in life would have happened if you didn't have some subtle way of getting things. Many women openly pursued men, drove them straight at them, but what did they get? It's useless to pursue a man as a man and nothing else. So she had Fred, her husband, and, as she thought, he had everything he had to offer.

It wasn't much-a kind of sweet, childish faith in her, hardly justified, she thought. He had a clear idea of what a woman, the wife of a man in his position, should be like, and he took her for granted, and she was just as he thought. Fred took too much for granted.

Outwardly, she lived up to all his expectations. That was hardly the point. You couldn't stop yourself from thinking. Life can only be this-living-watching the days go by-being a wife, and now perhaps a mother-dreaming-keeping order within yourself. If you couldn't always keep order, then at least you could keep it out of sight. You walked a certain way-wore the right clothes-knew how to talk-maintained some kind of connection with art, with music, painting, new moods in the home-read the latest novels. You and your husband together had a certain status to maintain, and you did your part. He expected certain things from you, a certain style-a certain appearance. In a town like Old Harbor, Indiana, that wasn't so difficult.

And anyway, the man working at the factory was probably a factory worker-nothing more. You couldn't think about him. His resemblance to the man she'd seen in Rose's apartment was undoubtedly a coincidence. Both men had the same air, a kind of willingness to give and not ask for much. Just the thought of such a man, who walked in completely by chance, became captivated by something, burned out by it, and then abandoned it-perhaps just as casually. Burned out by what? Well, say, by some job or by love for a woman. Did she want to be loved like that by such a man?

"Well, that's what I do! Every woman does. But we don't understand it, and if it were suggested, most of us would be scared. At our core, we're all pretty practical and stubborn; we're all made that way. It's what a woman is, and all that."

"I wonder why we always try to create another illusion while feeding on it ourselves?"

I need to think. Days pass. They are too similar-days. An imagined experience is not the same as a real one, but it is something. When a woman gets married, everything changes for her. She has to try to maintain the illusion that everything is as it was before. This can't be, of course. We know too much.

Alina often came to pick up Fred in the evenings, and when he was a little late, men would pour out of the factory doors and pass her as she sat behind the wheel of the car. What did she mean to them? What did they mean to her? Dark figures in overalls, tall men, short men, old men, young men. She remembered one man perfectly. It was Bruce, as he walked out of the store with Sponge Martin, a small old man with a black mustache. She didn't know who Sponge Martin was, she'd never heard of him, but he talked, and the man next to him listened. Was he listening? At least he glanced at her only once or twice-a fleeting, shy glance.

So many men in the world! She'd found herself a man with money and status. Perhaps it was a stroke of luck. She'd been getting on in years when Fred had asked her to marry him, and sometimes she'd vaguely wondered if she would have accepted if marrying him hadn't seemed such a perfect solution. Life was all about taking risks, and this was a good one. A marriage like this got you a house, a position, clothes, a car. If you were stuck in a small Indiana town eleven months a year, at least you were on top. Caesar passes through the miserable town on his way to join his army, and Caesar says to a comrade, "Better to be a king on a dunghill than a beggar in Rome." Something like that. Alina wasn't quite precise in her quotations and probably hadn't thought of the word "dunghill." It wasn't a word women like herself knew anything about; it wasn't in their vocabulary.

She thought a lot about men, pondered them. In Fred's mind, everything was settled for her, but was it really? When everything was settled, you were finished and might as well sit rocking in your chair, waiting to die. Death before life began.

Alina didn't have children yet. She wondered why. Hadn't Fred touched her deeply enough? Was there something within her that still needed to be awakened, woken from its slumber?

Her thoughts shifted, and she became what she would call cynical. After all, it was quite amusing how she managed to impress people in Fred's town, how she managed to impress him. Perhaps it was because she'd lived in Chicago and New York and had been to Paris; because her husband, Fred, had become the most important man in town after their father's death; because she had a knack for dressing and a certain air about her.

When the women of the town came to see her-the judge's wife, the wife of Stryker, the teller of the bank in which Fred was the largest shareholder, the doctor's wife-when they came to her home, they came up with this idea. They would talk about culture, about books, music, and painting. Everyone knew she was studying art. This embarrassed and worried them. It was perfectly clear she wasn't a favorite in town, but the women didn't dare pay her for a slight. If any of them had been able to attack her, they could have made mincemeat of her, but how could they do something like that? Even thinking about it was a bit vulgar. Alina didn't like such thoughts.

There was nothing to be gained from it, and there never will be.

Alina, driving an expensive car, watched Bruce Dudley and Sponge Martin walk down the cobblestone street among a crowd of other workers. Of all the men she'd seen emerge from the factory doors, they were the only ones who seemed particularly interested in each other, and what an odd sight they were. The young man didn't look like a laborer. But what did a laborer look like? What distinguished a laborer from another man, from the men who were Fred's friends, from the men she'd known in her father's house in Chicago as a young girl? One might think a laborer would naturally appear modest, but it was clear there was nothing meek about this small man with his broad back, and as for Fred, her own husband, when she first saw him, there was nothing to suggest he was anything special. Perhaps she was attracted to these two men only because they seemed interested in each other. The little old man was so brash. He walked down the cobbled street like a bandit rooster. If Alina had been more like Rose Frank and her Parisian gang, she would have thought of Sponge Martin as a man who always liked to show off in front of women, like a rooster in front of a hen, and such a thought, expressed in slightly different terms, actually occurred to her. Smiling, she thought that Sponge could very well be Napoleon Bonaparte, walking like that, stroking his black mustache with his stubby fingers. The mustache was too black for such an old man. It was shiny-coal black. Perhaps he had dyed it, this impudent old man. He needed some distraction, he needed something to think about.

What was holding Fred back? Since his father died and he'd inherited his money, Fred clearly took life quite seriously. He seemed to feel the weight of things on his shoulders, always talking as if the factory would fall apart if he didn't stay at work all the time. She wondered how true his talk about the importance of what he did was.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN


THE LINE WAS - I met my husband, Fred, at Rose Frank's apartment in Paris. It was the summer after the so-called World War II had ended, and that evening deserves to be remembered. It's funny, too, in this global business. The Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians always used the word "best in the world," "biggest in the world," "world wars," "world champions."

You go through life, thinking little, feeling little, knowing little-about yourself or anyone else-thinking that life is such and such, and then-bam! Something happens. You're not at all who you thought you were. Many realized this during the war.

Under certain circumstances, you thought you knew what you were doing, but all your thoughts were likely lies. After all, perhaps you never truly knew anything until it touched your own life, your own body. There's a tree growing in a field. Is it really a tree? What is a tree? Go ahead, touch it with your fingers. Step back a few feet and press your whole body against it. It's as unshakable as a rock. How rough the bark is! Your shoulder hurts. There's blood on your cheek.

A tree is something to you, but what does it mean to someone else?

Suppose you have to chop down a tree. You lay an axe against its body, against its sturdy trunk. Some trees bleed when they are wounded, others weep bitter tears. One day, when Alyn Aldridge was a child, her father, who was interested in turpentine forests somewhere in the South, returned home from a trip and was talking with another man in the Aldridges' living room. He told her how trees were chopped down and mutilated to obtain the sap for turpentine. Alyn sat in the room on a stool at her father's knee and heard it all-the story of a vast forest of trees, felled and mutilated. For what? To obtain turpentine. What was turpentine? Was it some strange golden elixir of life?

What a fairy tale! When they told her this, Alina turned a little pale, but her father and his friend didn't notice. Her father was giving a technical description of the turpentine production process. The men didn't think about her thoughts, didn't sense her thoughts. Later that night, in her bed, she cried. Why did they want to do this? Why did they need that damned old turpentine?

The trees scream-they bleed. Men walk by, wounding them, chopping them down with axes. Some trees fall with a groan, while others rise, bleeding, calling out to the child in the bed. The trees had eyes, arms, legs, and bodies. A forest of wounded trees, swaying and bleeding. The ground beneath the trees was red with blood.

When the World War began and Aline became a woman, she remembered her father's story about the turpentine trees and how they extracted it. Her brother George, three years her senior, had been killed in France, and Teddy Copeland, the young man she was going to marry, had died of "flu" in an American camp; and in her mind, they remained not dead but wounded and bleeding, far away, in some unfamiliar place. Neither her brother nor Ted Copeland seemed very close to her, perhaps no closer than the trees in the forest in the story. She hadn't touched them closely. She had said she would marry Copeland because he was going off to war, and he had asked her. It seemed the right thing to do. Could you say "no" to a young man at such a time, perhaps going to his death? It would have been like saying "no" to one of the trees. Let's say you were asked to bandage a tree's wounds, and you said no. Well, Teddy Copeland wasn't exactly a tree. He was a young man, and very handsome. If she married him, Alina's father and brother would be pleased.

When the war ended, Alina went to Paris with Esther Walker and her husband, Joe, the artist who had painted her dead brother's portrait from a photograph. He had also painted a picture of Teddy Copeland for his father, and then another of Alina's deceased mother, receiving five thousand dollars for each. It was Alina who told her father about the artist. She had seen his portrait at the Art Institute, where she was then studying, and told her father about it. Then she met Esther Walker and invited her and her husband to the Aldridge home. Esther and Joe were kind enough to say a few nice words about her work, but she thought they were just politeness. Although she had a talent for drawing, she didn't take it very seriously. There was something about painting, real painting, that she couldn't understand, couldn't grasp. After the war started and her brother and Teddy left, she wanted to do something, but she couldn't bring herself to work every minute to "help win the war" by knitting socks or running around selling Liberty Bonds. The truth was, she was bored with the war. She didn't know what it was all about. If that hadn't happened, she would have married Ted Copeland and at least learned something.

Young men are going to their deaths, thousands, hundreds of thousands. How many women have felt the same way she did? It robbed women of something, their chances for something. Let's say you're in a field and it's spring. A farmer is walking toward you with a sack full of seeds. He's almost to the field, but instead of going to plant the seed, he stops by the road and burns it. Women can't have such thoughts directly. They can't do it if they're good women.

It's better to take up art, take painting lessons-especially if you're good with a brush. If you can't, take up culture-read the latest books, go to the theater, listen to music. When music plays-certain music-but it doesn't matter. This is also something a good woman doesn't talk about or think about.

There are many things in life that are worth forgetting, that's for sure.

Before arriving in Paris, Alina hadn't known who the artist Joe Walker was or who Esther was, but on the boat she began to suspect, and when she finally figured them out, she had to smile to think how she'd been so willing to let Esther decide everything for her. The artist's wife had so quickly and cleverly repaid Alina's debt.

You've done us a great service-fifteen thousand is nothing to sneeze at-now we'll do the same for you. Never before has there been, nor ever will there be, such rudeness as a wink or a shrug from Esther. Alina's father was deeply wounded by the tragedy of war, and his wife had died since Alina was ten years old, and while she was in Chicago and Joe was working on portraits, five thousand was too much to raise. Dollar portraits are too quick; each one requires at least two or three weeks. While she practically lived in the Aldridge house, Esther made the older man feel as if he had a wife again to look after him.

She spoke with such respect about the character of this man and about her daughter's undoubted abilities.

People like you have made such sacrifices. It's the quiet, capable man who goes it alone, helping to keep the social order intact, facing all unforeseen circumstances without complaint-it's precisely such people-it's something that can't be spoken of openly, but in times like these, when the entire social order is shaken, when old standards of living are crumbling, when the youth has lost faith..."

"We, the older generation, must now be father and mother to the younger generation."

"Beauty will endure - things worth living will endure."

"Poor Alina, who lost both her future husband and her brother. And she has that talent too. She's just like you, very quiet, doesn't talk much. A year abroad might save her from some kind of nervous breakdown.

How easily Esther had misled Alina's father, a shrewd and capable corporate lawyer. Men really were too simple. There was no doubt that Alina should have stayed home-in Chicago. A man, any man, unmarried and with money, shouldn't be left idle with women like Esther. Though she had little experience, Alina was no fool. Esther knew it. When Joe Walker came to the Aldridges' Chicago home to paint their portraits, Alina was twenty-six. When she got behind the wheel of her husband's car that evening in front of the Old Harbor factory, she was twenty-nine.

What a mess! How complicated and inexplicable life can be!

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


MARRIAGE! Did she intend to marry? Did Fred really intend to marry that night in Paris when Rose Frank and Fred nearly went crazy, one after the other? How could anyone get married? How did it happen? What did people think they were up to when they did it? What made a man who had met dozens of women suddenly decide to marry a specific one?

Fred was a young American, educated at an Eastern college, the only son of a wealthy father, then a soldier, a wealthy man, who had rather solemnly enlisted as a private to help win the war, then in an American training camp, then in France. When the first American contingent passed through England, the Englishwomen-war-starved-the Englishwomen-

American women too: "Help win the war!"

What Fred must have known, he never told Aline.


That evening, as she sat in the car in front of the Old Harbor factory, Fred was clearly in no hurry. He told her that an advertising agent was coming from Chicago and might decide to conduct what he called a "national advertising campaign."


The factory was making a lot of money, and if someone didn't spend some of that money on building goodwill for the future, they had to pay it all back in taxes. Advertising was an asset, a legitimate expense. Fred decided to try his hand at advertising. He was probably in his office right now, talking to an ad man from Chicago.

It was getting dark in the factory's shadow, but why turn on the light? It was pleasant to sit in the semi-darkness at the wheel, thinking. A slender woman in a rather elegant dress, a fine hat she'd brought from Paris, long, slender fingers resting on the steering wheel, men in overalls emerging from the factory doors and crossing the dusty road, passing right next to the car-tall men-short men-the quiet murmur of male voices.

There is some modesty in the workers driving past such a car and such a woman.

There was very little humility in the short, broad-shouldered old man, stroking his too-black mustache with his stubby fingers. He seemed to want to laugh at Alina. "I'm attacking you," he seemed to want to shout-the insolent old man. His companion, to whom he seemed devoted, really did look like the man in Rose's apartment in Paris that night, that all-important night.

That night in Paris, when Alina first saw Fred! She went with Esther and Joe Walker to Rose Frank's apartment because both Esther and Joe thought they were better off. By then, Esther and Joe had already amused Alina. She had a feeling that if they stayed in America long enough and if her father saw more of them, he would understand it too-after a while.

In the end, they chose to put him at a disadvantage - to talk about art and beauty - things like that in relation to a man who had just lost a son in the war, a son whose portrait Joe had painted - and got a very good likeness of.

Never before had they been a couple looking for a major opportunity, never before had they raised a woman as quick and insightful as Alina. There's little danger for such a couple if they stay in one place too long. Their arrangement with Alina was something special. No words were needed about it. "We'll give you a peek under the tent at the exhibition, and you won't take any risks. We were married. We're completely decent people-we always know the best people, you can see for yourself. That's the advantage of being our kind of artist. You see all sides of life and don't take any risks. New York is becoming more and more like Paris every year. But Chicago..."

Alina had lived in New York two or three times, for several months each time, with her father when he had important business there. They stayed in an expensive hotel, but it was clear the Walkers knew things about modern New York life that Alina didn't.

They managed to make Alina's father feel comfortable around her-and perhaps he felt comfortable without her-at least for a while. Esther was able to convey this idea to Alina. It was a good arrangement for all concerned.

And of course, she thought, this is instructive for Alina. That's what people are like, really! How strange that her father, a clever man in his own way, hadn't realized it sooner.

They worked as a team, getting people like her father five thousand each. Solid, respectable people, Joe and Esther. Esther worked diligently on the thread, and Joe, who never took risks when seen in anything but the best company when they were in America, who drew very skillfully and spoke boldly enough but not too boldly, also helped create a rich, warm atmosphere of art as they forged a new perspective.

Alina smiled in the darkness. What a sweet little cynic I am. In your imagination, you could live a whole year of your life waiting, maybe three minutes, for your husband to emerge from the factory gates, and then you could run up the hill and catch up with the two workers whose sight set your brain racing, you could catch them before they'd even walked three blocks up the hillside street.

As for Esther Walker, Elin thought they'd gotten along quite well that summer in Paris. When they traveled together to Europe, both women were ready to lay their cards on the table. Alina feigned a deep interest in art (perhaps it wasn't just an act) and possessed a talent for making small drawings, while Esther talked a lot about hidden abilities that needed to be discovered. And so on.

"You're on me, and I'm on you. Let's go together, without saying anything about it." Without saying anything, Esther managed to convey this message to the young woman, and Alina succumbed to her mood. Well, it wasn't a mood. People like that weren't moody. They were just playing a game. If you wanted to play with them, they could be very friendly and sweet.

Alina received all this, confirmation of what she'd thought one night on the boat, and she had to think quickly and hold herself together-maybe for thirty seconds-while she made up her mind. What a disgusting feeling of loneliness! She had to double her fists and fight to keep the tears from welling up.

Then she took the bait-decided to play a game-with Esther. Joe doesn't count. You'll get an education quickly if you let yourself. She can't touch me, maybe inside. I'll go and keep my eyes open.

She had. They were truly rotten, the Walkers, but there was something in Esther. On the outside she was tough, a schemer, but inside there was something she tried to hold on to, something that was never touched. It was clear her husband, Joe Walker, would never be able to touch it, and Esther was perhaps too cautious to risk it with another man. One day later, she gave Aline a hint. "The man was young, and I had just married Joe. It was a year before the war started. For about an hour I thought I"d do it, but then I didn"t. It would have given Joe an advantage I didn"t dare give him. I"m not the type to go all the way and ruin myself. The young fellow was reckless-a young American boy. I decided it was better not to do it. You understand."

She tried something on Aline-that time on the boat. What exactly was Esther trying? One evening, while Joe was talking to several people, telling them about modern painting, telling them about Cézanne, Picasso, and others, politely and kindly talking about rebels in art, Esther and Aline went to sit on chairs in another part of the deck. Two young men approached and tried to join them, but Esther knew how to distance herself without taking offense. She obviously thought Aline knew more than she did, but it wasn't Aline's job to disappoint her.

What an instinct, somewhere inside, to preserve something!

What did Esther try on Alina?

There are many things that cannot be expressed in words, even in thoughts. What Esther spoke of was a love that demands nothing, and how wonderful that sounded! "It has to be between two people of the same sex. Between yourself and a man, it won't work. I've tried," she said.

She took Alina's hand, and they sat in silence for a long time, a strange, eerie feeling deep inside Alina. What a test-to play the game with such a woman-not to let her know what your instincts were doing to you-inside-not to let your hands tremble-not to show any physical signs of any contraction. A soft, feminine voice, filled with caress and a certain sincerity. "They understand each other in a more subtle way. It lasts longer. It takes longer to understand, but it lasts longer. There's something white and beautiful you're reaching for. I've probably been waiting a long time just for you. As for Joe, I'm fine with him. It's a little difficult to talk. There's so much that can't be said. In Chicago, when I saw you there, I thought, 'At your age, most women in your position are married.' I suppose you'll have to do that someday, too, but what matters to me is that you haven't done it yet-that you hadn't done it when I found you. It happens that if a man and another man, or two women, are seen together too often, a conversation ensues. America is becoming almost as sophisticated and wise as Europe. This is where husbands are of great help. You help them in any way you can, no matter what their game, but you save the best of yourself for someone else-for someone who understands what you're really getting at."

Alina fidgeted restlessly behind the wheel, thinking about that evening on the boat and all it meant. Was this the beginning of refinement for her? Life isn't written in notebooks. How much do you dare let yourself know? The game of life is the game of death. It's so easy to become romantic and frightened. American women certainly had it easy. Their people know so little-dare to let themselves know so little. You can decide nothing if you want, but is it fun to never know what's going on-from the inside? If you peer into life, get to know its many spots, can you stay away from yourself? "Not so much," Alina's father would undoubtedly say, and her husband, Fred, would say something similar. Then you have to live your own life. When her boat left American shores, she left behind more than Alina wanted to think about. Around the same time, President Wilson discovered something similar. It killed him.

In any case, he was certain that the conversation with Esther had further strengthened Aline's resolve to marry Fred Gray when she later came to him. It had also made her less demanding, less self-assured, like most of the others she'd seen that summer in Joe and Esther's company. Fred was, he was as wonderful as, say, a well-behaved dog. If what he had was American, she, as a woman, was happy enough to risk American chances, she thought then.

Esther's speech was so slow and soft. Alina could think about it all, remember it all so clearly in a few seconds, but Esther must have needed more time to utter all the sentences necessary to convey her meaning.

And a meaning that Aline must have grasped, knowing nothing, grasped instinctively, or not grasped at all. Esther would always have a clear alibi. She was a very intelligent woman, there was no doubt about that. Joe was lucky to have her, being who he was.

It hasn't worked yet.

You rise and fall. A woman of twenty-six, if she has anything at all, is ready. And if she has nothing, then another, like Esther, doesn't want her at all. If you want a fool, a romantic fool, how about a man, a good American businessman? He'll recover, and you'll remain safe and sound. Nothing touches you at all. A long life has been lived, and you're always high, dry, and safe. Is that what you want?

In fact, it was as if Esther had pushed Alina off the ship into the sea. And the sea had been very beautiful that evening when Esther spoke to her. Perhaps that was one of the reasons Alina continued to feel safe. You get something outside yourself, like the sea, and it helps only because it's beautiful. There's the sea, small waves breaking, the white sea running in the wake of the ship, washing over the side of the ship like soft silk tearing, and the stars slowly appearing in the sky. Why, when you knock things out of their natural order, when you become a little sophisticated and want more than ever before, does the risk become relatively greater? It's so easy to become rotten. A tree never becomes like that, because it's a tree.

A voice speaking, a hand touching yours in a certain way. The words drift apart. On the other side of the boat, Joe, Esther's husband, is talking about art. Several women gathered around Joe. Then they talked about it, quoting his words. "As my friend Joseph Walker, the famous portrait painter, you know, told me, 'Cézanne is such and such. Picasso is such and such.'"

Imagine you were a twenty-six-year-old American woman, educated like the daughter of a wealthy Chicago lawyer, simple but insightful, with a fresh and strong body. You had a dream. Well, the young Copeland you thought you were going to marry wasn't quite that dream. He was nice enough. Not quite in the know-in a strange way. Most American men probably never get past the age of seventeen.

Suppose you were like that, and you were thrown off a boat into the sea. Joe's wife, Esther, did this little thing for you. What would you do? Try to save yourself? Down you go-down and down, cutting through the surface of the sea fast enough. Oh, Lord, there are many places in life that the mind of the average man or woman never touches. I wonder why not? Everything-most things, anyway-is obvious enough. Perhaps even a tree isn't a tree to you until you hit it. Why do some people's lids lift while others remain whole and watertight? Those women on deck, listening to Joe while he talks, are chatterboxes. - A sock with an artist-merchant's eyes bulging. Apparently neither he nor Esther wrote down names and addresses in a little book. Good idea for them to cross paths every summer. Also in the fall. People like to meet artists and writers on a boat. It's a first-hand glimpse of what Europe symbolizes. Many of them do this. And don't fall for it, Americans! The fish rise to the bait! Both Esther and Joe experienced moments of terrible fatigue.

What you do when you're pushed away like Alina was by Esther is hold your breath and don't get irritated or upset. It's okay if you start to get upset. If you think Esther can't escape, can't clean her skirts, you don't know much.

Once you've cut through the surface, you think only of rising to the surface again, as pure and clear as when you came down. Below, everything is cold and damp-death, this road. You know the poets. Come and die with me. Our hands intertwined in death. A white, distant road together. Man and man, woman and woman. Such love-with Esther. What is the point of life? Who cares if life goes on-in new forms, created by ourselves?

If you're one of them, then for you it's a dead white fish and nothing more. You have to figure this out for yourself, and if you're one of those people who never gets pushed off a boat, none of this will ever happen to you, and you're safe. Perhaps you're hardly interesting enough to ever be in danger. Most people walk high and safe-their whole lives.

Americans, huh? You'd gain something by going to Europe with a woman like Esther anyway. After that, Esther never tried again. She'd thought it all through. If Alina hadn't been what she wanted for herself, she could still use her. The Aldridge family had a good reputation in Chicago, and there were other portraits available. Esther quickly learned how people generally viewed art. If Aldridge Sr. had commissioned Joe Walker to paint two portraits, and when they were finished, they looked at him the way he thought his wife and son looked, then he'd likely back Walker's Chicago play, and, having paid five thousand each, he'd value the portraits even more for that very reason. "The greatest living artist. I think," Esther could imagine him saying to his Chicago friends.

Daughter Alina might become wiser, but she's unlikely to speak. When Esther made her decision about Alina, she covered her tracks very carefully-she did it well enough that evening on the boat, and she reinforced her position that other evening, after six weeks in Paris, when she, Alina, and Joe strolled together to Rose Frank's apartment. That evening, when Alina had seen something of the Walkers' life in Paris, and when Esther thought she knew much more, she continued to speak to Alina in a low voice, while Joe walked on, not hearing, not trying to hear. It was a very pleasant evening, and they strolled along the left bank of the Seine, turning away from the river near the Chamber of Deputies. People were sitting in the little cafes on the Rue Voltaire, and the clear Parisian evening light-the light of an artist-hung over the scene. "Here one must take care of both women and men," Esther said. "Most Europeans think we Americans are fools simply because there are things we don't want to know. That's because we're from a new country and there's something fresh and healthy about us."

Esther had said a lot of things like that to Alina. In reality, she'd said something completely different. She'd actually denied having meant anything that night on the boat. "If you think I did this, it's because you're not very kind yourself." Something like that, she'd said. Alina let it fly over her head. "She won the battle that night on the boat," she thought. There had been just a moment when she'd had to fight to get fresh air into her lungs, to keep her hands from shaking as Esther held them, to keep from feeling too lonely and sad-leaving childhood-girlhood-behind her, like that-but after that moment, she'd become very quiet and mouse-like, so much so that Esther was a little afraid of her-and that was exactly what she wanted. It's always better to let the enemy clear out the dead after the battle-don't worry about that.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


F RED HAD COME, he stepped out at the trading post door and felt a little angry with Aline-or pretended to-because she was sitting in the car in the semi-darkness without telling him. The advertising man he was talking to inside had gone off down the street, and Fred hadn't offered him a ride. That was because Aline was there. Fred would have had to introduce him. That would have allowed both Fred and Aline to establish a new connection, and would have slightly changed the relationship between Fred and this man. Fred offered to drive, but Aline laughed at him. She liked the feel of the car, quite powerful, as it sped along the steep streets. Fred lit a cigar and, before losing himself in his thoughts, protested once again that she was sitting in the car in the gathering darkness, waiting there without telling him. In fact, he liked it, liked the thought of Aline, his wife, part servant, waiting for him, a businessman. "If I wanted you, all I had to do was blow my horn. In fact, I saw you talking to that man through the window," Aline said.

The car was cruising down the street in second gear, and there was a man standing on the corner under a streetlamp, still talking to a short, broad-shouldered man. He must have had a face very similar to the man, the American, she had seen in Rose Frank's apartment that very evening she had met Fred. It was odd that he worked in her husband's factory, and yet she remembered that evening in Paris: the American in Rose's apartment had told someone that he had once been a worker in an American factory. It had been during a lull in the conversation, before Rose Frank's outburst. But why was this one so absorbed in the small man he was with? They weren't very similar, these two men.

Workers, men, were coming out of the factory doors, her husband's factory. Tall men, short men, broad men, slender men, lame men, men blind in one eye, men with one arm, men in sweaty clothes. They walked, shuffling, shuffling-over the cobblestones in front of the factory gates, crossed the railroad tracks, disappeared into the town. Her own house stood on the top of a hill above the town, overlooking the town, overlooking the Ohio River where it made a wide turn around the town, overlooking many miles of lowland where the river valley widened above and below the town. In winter, the valley was gray. The river spilled over the lowlands, turning into a vast gray sea. When he was a banker, Fred's father-"Old Gray," as everyone in town called him- had managed to get his hands on most of the land in the valley. At first, they didn't know how to farm it profitably, and since they couldn't build farmhouses and barns there, they considered the land worthless. In fact, it was the richest land in the state. Every year, the river flooded, leaving a fine gray silt on the land, which enriched it wonderfully. The first farmers tried to build dams, but when they broke, houses and barns were washed away in the flood.

Old Gray waited like a spider. The farmers came to the bank and borrowed some money on cheap land, then let them go, allowing him to foreclose. Was he wise, or was it all a fluke? Later, it was discovered that if you simply let the water run off and cover the land, in the spring it would drain away again, leaving that fine, rich silt that makes corn grow almost like trees. In late spring, you went out onto the land with an army of mercenaries who lived in tents and shacks built high on stilts. You plowed and sowed, and the corn grew. Then you harvested the corn and stacked it in barns, also built high on stilts, and when the flood came back, you sent barges across the flooded land to bring back the corn. You made money the first time. Fred told Aline about it. Fred thought his father was one of the shrewdest men who ever lived. Sometimes he spoke of him the way the Bible speaks of Father Abraham. "Nestor of the House of Gray," something like that. What did Fred think about his wife not bearing him children? No doubt he had many strange thoughts about her when he was alone. That's why he sometimes acted so frightened when she looked at him. Perhaps he was afraid she knew his thoughts. Did she?

"Then Abraham gave up the ghost and died at a good old age, an old man and full of years; and he was gathered to his people.

"And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Manreh.

"The field which Abraham bought from the sons of Heth; there Abraham and Sarah his wife were buried.

"And it came to pass after the death of Abraham, that God blessed his son Isaac: and Isaac dwelt by the well of Lahaira."


It was a little strange that, despite everything Fred had told her, Aline couldn't fix the image of Old Gray, the banker, in her mind. He died immediately after Fred married her, in Paris, while Fred was rushing home, leaving his new wife behind. Perhaps Fred didn't want her to see her father, didn't want her father to see her. He had just built a boat the evening of the day he learned of her father's illness, and Aline didn't set sail until a month later.

For Alina, he remained a myth-"Old Gray"-at that time. Fred said he had elevated the situation, elevated the town. Before him, it was just a dirty village, Fred said. "Now look at this." He had made the valley produce, he had made the town produce. Fred was a fool not to see things more clearly. After the war ended, he stayed in Paris, wandered around, even considered taking up art for a while, something like that. "In all of France, there has never been a man like my father," Fred once declared to his wife, Alina. He was too categorical when he made such statements. If he hadn't stayed in Paris, he would never have met Alina, he would never have married her. When he made such statements, Alina would smile a soft, understanding smile, and Fred would change his tone slightly.

There was that guy he'd roomed with in college. This guy was always talking and giving Fred books to read, George Moore, James Joyce-"The Artist as a Young Man." He'd baffled Fred and even gone so far as to almost challenge his father about coming home; and then, when he saw his son's decision had been made, Old Gray did what he thought was a shrewd move. "You'll spend a year in Paris studying art, doing whatever you like, and then come home and spend a year here with me," Old Gray wrote. The son was to have all the money he wanted. Now Fred regretted spending the first year at home. "I could have been some consolation to him. I was superficial and frivolous. I could have met you, Aline, in Chicago or New York," Fred said.

What Fred got out of his year in Paris was Aline. Was it worth it? An old man living alone at home, waiting. He'd never even seen his son's wife, never even heard of her. A man with only one son, and that son in Paris, fooling around after the war ended, after he'd done his share of the work there. Fred had some talent for drawing, as did Aline, but so what? He didn't even know what he wanted. Did Aline know what she was after? It would be great if he could talk about all this with Aline. Why couldn't he? She was sweet and sweet, very quiet most of the time. You had to be careful with a woman like that.

The car was already climbing the hill. There was one short street, very steep and winding, where they needed to shift into low gear.

Men, laborers, advertising lawyers, businessmen. Fred's friend in Paris, the guy who talked him into defying his father and trying his hand at being an artist. He was a man who could very well have turned out to be a guy like Joe Walker. He had already worked with Fred. Fred thought that he, Tom Burnside, his college friend, was everything an artist should be. He knew how to sit in a cafe, knew the names of wines, spoke French with an almost perfect Parisian accent. Pretty soon he would start traveling to America to sell paintings and paint portraits. He had already sold Fred a painting for eight hundred dollars. "It's the best thing I've ever done, and a man here wants to buy it for two thousand, but I don't want it out of my hands yet. I'd rather have it in your hands. My only real friend." Fred fell for it. Another Joe Walker. If he could only find Esther somewhere, he would be fine. There's nothing better than making friends with a rich man while you're both young. When Fred showed the painting to some of his friends in the town of Old Harbor, Alina had a vague feeling she wasn't in the presence of her husband, but at home, in the presence of her father-her father showing some guy, a lawyer, or a client-portraits taken by Joe Walker.

If you're a woman, why couldn't you have the man you married as a child and be content with that? Was it because the woman wanted her own children, didn't want to adopt them or marry them? Men, workers in her husband's factory, tall men, short men. Men walking down a Parisian boulevard at night. The French with a certain look. They pursued women, the French. The idea was to stay on top when it came to women, to use them, to force them to serve. Americans were sentimental fools when it came to women. They wanted them to do for a man what he didn't have the strength to try to do for himself.

The man in Rose Frank's apartment, the evening she first met Fred. Why was he so strangely different from the others? Why had he remained so vividly in Alina's memory all these months? Just one encounter on the streets of that Indiana town with a man who had made such an impression on her had stirred her, confounding her mind and imagination. It happened two or three times that evening when she went to pick up Fred.

Perhaps that night in Paris when she got Fred, she wanted another man instead.

He, the other man she found in Rose's apartment when she came there with Esther and Joe, did not pay any attention to her, did not even speak to her.

The workman she'd just seen walking down the hillside street with a short, broad-shouldered, brash man bore a vague resemblance to the other man. How absurd that she couldn't talk to him, find out anything about him. She asked Fred who the short man was, and he laughed. "That's Sponge Martin. He's the card," Fred said. He could have said more, but he wanted to think about what the Chicago ad man had told him. He was smart, that ad man. Okay, so far as her own game was concerned, but if it matched Fred's, so what?

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER NINETEEN


A TREE OF FRANK'S _ _ _ apartment in Paris, that evening, after the half-experience with Esther on the boat and after several weeks among Esther and Joe's acquaintances in Paris. The artist and his wife knew many wealthy Americans in Paris who were looking for an exciting pastime, and Esther managed this so well that she and Joe attended many parties without spending much money. They added an artistic touch, and were also discreet-when discretion was wise.

And after the evening on the boat, Esther felt more or less at ease with Alina. She credited Alina with having a greater understanding of life than she had.

For Alina, this was an achievement, or at least she considered it an achievement. She began to move more freely within the circle of her thoughts and impulses. Sometimes she thought, "Life is just a dramatization. You decide your role in life, and then try to play it skillfully." To play it badly, ineptly, was the greatest sin. Americans in general, young men and women like herself, who had enough money and enough social standing to be secure, could do whatever they wanted, as long as they were careful to cover their tracks. At home, in America, in the very air you breathed, there was something that made you feel safe and at the same time terribly limited you. Good and evil were certain things, morality and immorality were certain things. You moved within a clearly defined circle of thoughts, ideas, and emotions. Being a good woman earned you the respect from men that they thought a good woman should have. Even if you had money and a respectable position in life, you had to openly do something that openly defied social laws before you could enter the free world, and the free world you entered with any such action wasn't free at all. It was a terribly limited and even ugly world, populated, say, by movie actresses.

In Paris, despite Esther and Joe, Aline felt a keen sense of something about French life that enchanted her. The small details of life, the men's stables on the open streets, the stallions harnessed to garbage trucks and trumpeting like mares, the lovers openly kissing each other on the streets in the late afternoon-a kind of prosaic acceptance. A life that the English and Americans seemed unable to achieve rather enchanted her. Sometimes she went with Esther and Joe to the Place Vendôme and spent the day with their American friends, but more and more she developed the habit of going off alone.

An unaccompanied woman in Paris always had to be prepared for trouble. Men talked to her, made suggestive gestures with their hands and mouths, and followed her down the street. Whenever she went out alone, it was a kind of attack on her as a woman, as a being with female flesh, on her secret feminine desires. If something was gained through the openness of continental life, much was also lost.

She went to the Louvre. Back home, she'd taken drawing and painting lessons at the institute, and people called her clever. Joe Walker praised her work. Others praised it. Then she thought Joe must be a real artist. "I've fallen for the American trick of thinking that what's done well means it's good," she thought, and this thought, coming as her own and not imposed on her by someone else, was a revelation. Suddenly, she, an American, began to walk among men's work, feeling very modest. Joe Walker, all the men of his type, successful artists, writers, musicians who were American heroes, became smaller and smaller in her eyes. Her own small, skillful imitative art seemed mere child's play in the presence of the works of El Greco, Cézanne, Fra Angelico, and other Latins, while American men, who occupied a high place in the history of America's attempts at cultural life-

There was Mark Twain, who wrote "The Innocents Abroad," a book Alina's father loved. When she was a child, he always read it and laughed at it, but in reality, it was nothing more than a little boy's rather nasty disdain for things he couldn't understand. A dad for vulgar minds. Could Alina honestly think her father or Mark Twain were vulgar men? Well, she couldn't. To Alina, her father had always been sweet, kind, and gentle-perhaps even too gentle.

One morning she was sitting on a bench in the Tuileries, and next to her, on another bench, two young men were talking. They were French and, unseen by her, they fell into conversation. It was pleasant to hear such conversations. A peculiar passion for the art of painting. Which path was the right one? One of them declared himself a supporter of the modernists, of Cézanne and Matisse, and suddenly burst into passionate hero worship. The people he spoke of had clung to the good path their entire lives. Matisse still did. Such people possessed devotion, grandeur, and a majestic demeanor. Before their arrival, this grandeur had been largely lost to the world, but now-after their arrival and thanks to their wonderful devotion-it had a chance to truly be reborn into the world.

Alina leaned forward on her bench to listen. The young Frenchman's words, flowing quickly, were a little difficult to catch. Her own French was rather casual. She waited for each word, leaning forward. If such a man-if someone so passionate about what he considered beautiful in life-if only he could be brought closer-

And then, at that moment, the young man, seeing her, seeing the expression on her face, rose to his feet and walked toward her. Something warned her. She would have to run and call a taxi. This man was, after all, a continental. There was a sense of Europe, of the Old World, a world in which men knew too much about women and perhaps not enough. Were they right or not? There was an inability to think or feel women as anything other than flesh, it was at once terrifying and, strangely enough, quite true-for an American, for an Englishwoman, perhaps too astonishing. When Alina met such a man, in the company of Joe and Esther-as she sometimes did-when her position was clear and secure, he seemed, next to most American men she had ever known, thoroughly grown up, graceful in his approach to life, far more valuable, far more interesting, with an infinitely greater capacity for accomplishment-real accomplishment.

Walking with Esther and Joe, Esther continued to tugg at Alina nervously. Her mind was full of little hooks that wanted to hook into Alina's. "Are you excited or moved by life here? Are you just a stupid, self-satisfied American looking for a man and thinking that solves anything? You walk in-a prim, neat woman's figure, with good ankles, a small, sharp, interesting face, a good neck-a body, too, graceful and charming. What are you planning? Very soon-in three or four years-your body will begin to sag. Someone is going to tarnish your beauty. I'd rather do that. There would be satisfaction in it, a kind of joy. Do you think you can escape? Is that what you're planning, you little American fool?"

Esther strolled the Parisian streets, thinking. Joe, her husband, missed everything and didn't care. He smoked cigarettes and twirled his cane. Rose Frank, their destination, was a correspondent for several American newspapers that needed weekly gossip letters about Americans in Paris, and Esther thought it would be a good idea to stay with her. If Rose was Esther and Joe's, what did it matter? They were the kind of people the American newspapers wanted to gossip about.

It was the evening after the Quatz Arts Ball, and as soon as they reached the apartment, Alina realized something was wrong, though Esther-not so acute at the time-didn't sense it. Perhaps she was preoccupied with Alina, thinking about her. Several people had already gathered, all Americans, and Alina, who had been very sensitive to Rose and her mood from the start, immediately concluded that if she hadn't already invited people to come to her place that evening, Rose would have been happy to be alone, or almost alone.

It was a studio apartment with a large room, filled with people, and the owner, Rosa, wandered among them, smoking cigarettes and with a strange, empty gaze. Seeing Esther and Joe, she gestured with the hand holding her cigarette. "Oh, my God, you too, did I invite you?" the gesture seemed to say. At first, she didn't even glance at Alina; but later, when several more men and women entered, she was sitting on the sofa in the corner, still smoking cigarettes and looking at Alina.

"Well, well, so this is who you are? You're here too? I don't remember ever meeting you. You work for Walker's team, and I think you're a journalist. Miss So-and-So from Indianapolis. Something like that. Walkers don't take risks. When they drag someone along, it means money."

Rose Frank's thoughts. She smiled, looking at Alina. "I've encountered something. I've been hit. I'm going to talk. I have to. It doesn't much matter to me who's here. People have to take risks. Every now and then, something happens to a person-it can happen even to a rich young American like you-something that weighs too heavily on the mind. When it happens, you'll have to talk. You have to explode. Watch out, you! Something will happen to you, young lady, but it's not my fault. It's your fault you're here."

It was obvious that something was wrong with the American journalist. Everyone in the room sensed it. A hurried, rather nervous conversation broke out, involving everyone except Rose Frank, Aline, and the man sitting in the corner of the room, who hadn't noticed Aline, Joe, Esther, or anyone else as they entered. At one point, he spoke to the young woman sitting next to him. "Yes," he said, "I was there, lived there for a year. I worked there painting bicycle wheels in a factory. It's about eighty miles from Louisville, isn't it?"

It was the evening after the Quatz Arts Ball in the year the war ended, and Rose

Frank, who had attended the ball with a young man who was not at her party the following evening, wanted to talk about something that had happened to her.

"I have to talk about this, otherwise I"ll explode if I don"t," she said to herself, sitting in her apartment among the guests and looking at Aline.

She began. Her voice was high, full of nervous excitement.

Everyone else in the room, everyone who had been talking, suddenly stopped. An embarrassed silence fell. People, men and women, were gathered in small groups, sitting on chairs pushed together and on a large sofa in the corner. Several young men and women sat in a circle on the floor. Aline, after Rose's first glance at them, instinctively moved away from Joe and Esther and sat alone on a chair near the window overlooking the street. The window was open, and since there was no screen, she could see the people moving. Men and women walking down the Rue Voltaire to cross one of the bridges to the Tuileries or to sit in a cafe on the boulevard. Paris! Paris at night! The silent young man, who had said nothing except a single suggestion about working in a bicycle factory somewhere in America, apparently in response to a question, seemed to have some vague connection with Rose Frank. Aline kept turning her head to look at him and at Rose. Something was about to happen in the room, and for some inexplicable reason, it directly affected the silent man, herself, and the young man named Fred Gray, who sat next to the silent man. "He's probably just like me, he doesn't know much," Alina thought, glancing at Fred Gray.

Four people, mostly strangers, strangely isolated in a room full of people. Something was about to happen that would touch them in a way no one else could. It was already happening. Did the silent man, sitting alone and staring at the floor, love Rose Frank? Could there be such a thing as love among such a gathering of people, such Americans gathered in a room in a Paris apartment-newspapermen, young radicals, art students? It was a strange thought that Esther and Joe should be there. They were ill-suited, and Esther sensed it. She was a little nervous, but her husband, Joe... he found what followed delightful.

Four people, strangers, isolated in a room full of people. People were like drops of water in a flowing river. Suddenly, the river grew angry. It became furiously energetic, spreading across the land, uprooting trees and sweeping away houses. Small whirlpools formed. Certain drops of water swirled in circles, constantly touching each other, merging with each other, absorbing each other. A time came when people ceased to be isolated. What one felt, the others felt. You could say that at certain moments, a person left their own body and completely passed into the body of another. Love can be something like that. As Rose Frank spoke, the silent man in the room seemed a part of her. How strange!

And the young American-Fred Gray-clung to Alina. "You're someone I can understand. I'm out of my element here."

A young Irish-American journalist, sent to Ireland by an American newspaper to report on the Irish Revolution and interview the revolutionary leader, began to speak, persistently interrupting Rose Frank. "I was taken in a taxi blindfolded. I had no idea, of course, where I was going. I had to trust this man, and I did. The blinds were drawn. I kept thinking about Madame Bovary's ride through the streets of Rouen. The cab rattled over the cobblestones in the dark. Perhaps the Irish enjoy the drama of such things.

"And so, there I was. I was in the same room with him-with V, the one so diligently hunted by the British government's secret agents-sitting in the same room with him, cramped and cozy, like two bugs in a carpet. I have a great story. I'm going to get promoted."

It was an attempt to stop Rose Frank from talking.

Did everyone in the room sense that something was wrong with this woman?

Having invited the others to her apartment for the evening, she didn't want them there. She really wanted Aline. She wanted the silent man sitting alone and the young American named Fred Gray.

Why she needed these four people in particular, Alina couldn't say. She sensed it. The young Irish-American newspaperman tried to recount his experiences in Ireland to ease the tension in the room. "Now you wait! I'll talk, and then someone else will. We'll have a comfortable and pleasant evening. Something happened. Perhaps Rose had a fight with her lover. That man sitting there alone could be her lover. I've never seen him before, but I'm willing to bet he is. Give us a chance, Rose, and we'll help you through this difficult time." Something along these lines, the young man, as he told his story, was trying to tell Rose and the others.

It won't work. Rose Frank laughed, a strange, high, nervous laugh-a dark laugh. She was a plump, strong-looking little American woman of about thirty, considered very intelligent and skilled at her job.

"Well, hell, I was there. I was in it all, I saw it all, I felt it all," she said in a loud, sharp voice, and although she didn't say where she was, everyone in the room, even Alina and Fred Grey, knew what she meant.

It had been hanging in the air for days now-a promise, a threat-that year's Quatz Arts Ball, and it had taken place the night before.

Alina sensed him approaching in the air, as did Joe and Esther. Joe secretly wanted to go, yearned to go.

The Parisian Quat'z Arts Ball is an institution. It's part of student life in the capital of the arts. It's held every year, and on that evening, young art students from all over the Western world-America, England, South America, Ireland, Canada, Spain-come to Paris to study one of four very fine arts-they go wild.

Grace of lines, delicacy of lines, sensitivity of color - for this evening - bam!

Women came-usually models from studios-free women. Everyone goes to the limit. It's expected. This time, at least!

It happens every year, but the year after the war ended... Well, that was a year, wasn't it?

There was something in the air for a long time.

Too long!

Alina saw something like the explosion in Chicago on the first Armistice Day, and it strangely moved her, as it did everyone who saw and felt it. Similar stories happened in New York, Cleveland, St. Louis, New Orleans-even in small American towns. Gray-haired women kissing boys, young women kissing young men-factories empty-ban lifted-offices empty-a song-dance once more in your life-you who weren't at war, in the trenches, you who are simply tired of shouting about war, about hatred-joy-grotesque joy. A lie, considering the lie.

The end of lies, the end of pretense, the end of such cheapness - the end of War.

Men lie, women lie, children lie, they are taught to lie.

Preachers lie, priests lie, bishops, popes and cardinals lie.

Kings lie, governments lie, writers lie, artists paint false pictures.

The depravity of lies. Keep it up! An unpleasant residue! Outlive another liar! Make him eat it! Murder. Kill some more! Keep killing! Freedom! The love of God! The love of men! Murder! Murder!

The events in Paris were carefully thought out and planned. Didn't young artists from all over the world, who had come to Paris to study the finest arts, instead go to the trenches-to France-dear France? The mother of the arts, right? Young people-artists-the most sensitive people in the Western world-

Show them something! Show them something! Slap it at them!

Give them a limit!

They speak so loudly - do it so they like it!

Well, it's all gone to hell: the fields are ruined, the fruit trees are cut down, the grapevines are torn from the ground, old Mother Earth herself has been slapped. Is our damn cheap civilization really supposed to live politely, never getting a slap in the face? What do you say?

Yes, yes? Innocent! Children! Sweet femininity! Purity! Hearth and home!

Smother the baby in her crib!

Bah, that's not true! Let's show them!

Slap the women! Hit them where they live! Give it to the chatterboxes! Give them a slap!

In city gardens, moonlight on the trees. You've never been in the trenches, have you-one year, two years, three, four, five, six?

What will the moonlight say?

Give the women a slap in the face once! They were up to their necks in it. Sentimentality! Gush! That's what's behind it all-at least in large part. They loved it all-the women. Give them a party once! Cherches la femme! We were sold out, and they helped us out a lot. And lots of David and Uriah stuff. Lots of Bathsheba.

Women talked a lot about tenderness-"our beloved sons"-remember? The French scream, the English, the Irish, the Italians. Why?

Dip them in the stench! Life! Western civilization!

The stench of the trenches - in your fingers, clothes, hair - stays there - penetrates your blood - trench thoughts, trench feelings - trench love, eh?

Isn't this dear Paris, the capital of our Western civilization?

What do you say? Let's take a look at them at least once! Weren't we who we were? Didn't we dream? Didn't we love a little, huh?

Nudity now!

Perversion - so what?

Throw them on the floor and dance on them.

How good are you? How much is left in you?

How come your eye is bulging and your nose isn't a bore?

All right. There's this little brown chubby thing. Look at me. Look at the trench hound again!

Young artists of the Western world. Let's show them the Western world-at least once!

The limit, eh, is just one time!

You like it - huh?

Why?

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER TWENTY


ROSE FRANK, an American journalist, was at the Quatz Arts Ball the day before Alina saw her. For several years, throughout the war, she had earned her living by sending clever Parisian gossip to American newspapers, but she also craved the ultimate. It was then that the thirst for the ultimate was in the air.

That evening, in her apartment, she had to talk. It was a desperate need for her. After spending the whole night in debauchery, she hadn't slept all day, pacing her room and smoking cigarettes-perhaps waiting to talk.

She'd been through it all. The press couldn't get in, but the woman could have-if she'd taken the risk.

Rose went with a young American art student, whose name she did not reveal. When she insisted, the young American laughed.

"It's okay. You fool! I'll do it."

The young American said he would try to take care of her.

"I'll try to cope. Of course, we'll all be drunk.


And after it was all over, early in the morning the two of them went for a ride in a fiacre to Bois. Birds were singing softly. Men, women, and children were walking. An elderly, gray-haired man, quite handsome, was riding a horse in the park. He could have been a public figure-a member of the Chamber of Deputies or something like that. On the grass in the park, a boy of about ten was playing with a small white dog, and a woman stood nearby and watched. A soft smile played on her lips. The boy had such beautiful eyes.


Oh my God!

Oh, Kalamazoo!


It takes a tall, skinny, dark-skinned girl to make the preacher put down his Bible.


But what an experience it was! It taught Rose something. What? She doesn't know.

What she regretted and was ashamed of was the amount of trouble she'd caused the young American. After she got there, and it was happening everywhere, everything started spinning-she felt dizzy, she lost consciousness.

And then desire-black, ugly, hungry desire-like a desire to kill everything that was ever beautiful in the world-in oneself and others-everyone.

She danced with a man who tore her dress. She didn't care. A young American came running and kidnapped her. This happened three, four, five times. "Some kind of swoon, an orgy, a wild, untamed beast. Most of the men there were young men who had been in the trenches for France, for America, for England, you know. France to preserve, England to control the seas, America for souvenirs. They got their souvenirs quickly enough. They became cynical-they didn't care. If you're here and you're a woman, what are you doing here? I'll show you. Damn your eyes. If you want to fight, so much the better. I'll hit you. That's the way to make love. Didn't you know?

"Then the kid took me for a ride. It was early morning, and in the Bois the trees were green and the birds were singing. Such thoughts in my head, things my kid had seen, things I had seen. The kid was okay with me, laughing. He had been in the trenches for two years. "Of course we kids can survive a war. What do you say? We have to protect people all our lives, right?" He thought about the greenery, continuing to climb out of the riz-raz. "You let yourself do it. I told you, Rose," he said. He could have taken me like a sandwich, devoured me, I mean, eaten me. What he told me was common sense. "Don"t try to sleep tonight," he said.

"I saw it," he said. "What of it? Let her ride. It doesn"t irritate me any more than it irritated me, but now I don"t think it"s better for you to see me today. You might hate me. In war and such things, you can hate all people. It doesn"t matter that nothing happened to you, that you slipped away. It doesn"t mean anything. Don"t let it make you ashamed. Consider that you married me and found out that you don"t want me, or that I don"t want you, something like that."

Rose fell silent. She had been pacing the room nervously while talking, smoking cigarettes. When the words stopped escaping her, she sank into a chair and sat, tears streaming down her plump cheeks, while several women in the room approached and tried to console her. They seemed to want to kiss her. One by one, several women approached her and, bending down, kissed her hair, while Esther and Alina each sat in their respective places, squeezing her hands. What it meant to one was irrelevant to the other, but they were both upset. "That woman was a fool to let something get to her like that, to get upset and give herself away," Esther would have said.

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BOOK SEVEN


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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


The GRAYS, FRED _ _, and Alina, having walked up the hill to their house in Old Harbor, had lunch. Was Alina playing the same little trick with her husband, Fred, that Bruce used to play with his wife, Bernice, in their Chicago apartment? Fred Gray told them about his business, about his plan to advertise wheels manufactured at his factory in national magazines.

For him, the wheel factory became the center of his life. He moved around there, a small king in a world of petty officials, clerks, and workers. The factory and his position meant even more to him because he had served as a private in the army during the war. Something inside him seemed to expand in the factory. It was, after all, a vast toy, a world apart from the city-a walled city within a city-of which he was the ruler. If the men wanted to take a day off because of a national holiday-Armistice Day or something like that-he would say yes or no. One was a little careful not to become overbearing. Fred often said to Harcourt, who was the company secretary, "After all, I'm just a servant." It was useful to say such things from time to time, to remind himself of the responsibility a businessman must bear, responsibility to property, to other investors, to workers, to their families. Fred had a hero-Theodore Roosevelt. What a pity he wasn't at the helm during the World War. Didn't Roosevelt have something to say about rich people who didn't take responsibility for their situation? If Teddy had been there at the start of the World War, we would have penetrated faster and defeated them.

The factory was a small kingdom, but what about Fred's home? He was a little nervous about his position there. That smile his wife sometimes wore when he talked about his business. What did she mean?

Fred thought he should talk.

We have a market for all the wheels we can produce now, but that could change. The question is, does the average person driving a car know or care where the wheels come from? It's worth thinking about. National advertising costs a lot of money, but if we don't do it, we'll have to pay a lot more in taxes-overearning, you know. The government allows you to deduct the amount you spend on advertising. I mean, they allow you to consider it a legitimate expense. I'm telling you, newspapers and magazines have tremendous power. They weren't going to let the government take that picture. Well, I guess I could have.

Alina sat and smiled. Fred always thought she looked more European than American. When she smiled like that and said nothing, was she laughing at him? Damn it, the whole question of whether the wheel company would work or not was as important to her as it was to him. She had always been accustomed to nice things, as a child and after marriage. Luckily for her, the man she married had plenty of money. Alina spent thirty dollars on a pair of shoes. Her feet were long and narrow, and it was hard to find custom-made shoes that wouldn't hurt her feet, so she had them made. There must have been twenty pairs in the closet of her room upstairs, and each pair cost her thirty or forty dollars. Two times three is six. Six hundred dollars just for the shoes. Oh, my!

Perhaps she didn't mean anything special by that smile. Fred suspected that his affairs, the affairs of the factory, were a little over Alina's head. Women didn't care or understand such things. It took a human brain. Everyone thought he, Fred Gray, would ruin his father's affairs when he was suddenly forced to take charge, but he didn't. As for women, he didn't need a woman who knew how to manage affairs, the kind who tried to teach you how to manage affairs. Alina suited him perfectly. He wondered why he didn't have children. Was it her fault or his? Well, she was in one of her moods. When she was like that, you could leave her alone. She'd come out of it after a while.

After the Grays had finished dinner, Fred, rather persistently pursuing the conversation about a national car tire commercial, wandered into the living room to sit in a soft armchair under the lamp and read the evening paper while he smoked a cigar, and Alina slipped away unnoticed. The days had become unusually warm for the time of year, and she threw on a raincoat and went out into the garden. Nothing was growing yet. The trees were still bare. She sat down on a bench and lit a cigarette. Fred, her husband, liked her smoking. He thought it gave her an air-perhaps of European class, at any rate.

The garden had the soft dampness of late winter or early spring. What was it? The seasons were balanced. How quiet everything was in the garden on the hilltop! There was no doubt about the Midwest's isolation from the world. In Paris, London, New York-at this hour-people were getting ready to go to the theater. Wine, lights, crowds, conversation. You were caught up, carried along. No time to get lost in the maelstrom of your own thoughts-they rushed through you like raindrops driven by the wind.

Too many thoughts!

That night when Rose spoke - her intensity that captured Fred and Aline, that played with them like the wind plays with dry, dead leaves - the war - its ugliness - people soaked in ugliness, like rain - the years that.

Truce - liberation - an attempt at naked joy.

Rose Frank speaks-a stream of naked words-dances. After all, most of the women at the ball in Paris were what? Whores? An attempt to cast off pretense, falsehood. So much false talk during the war. A war for justice-to make the world Free. Young people are sick, sick, sick of it. But laughter-grim laughter. It is the men who receive it standing. Rose Frank's words, spoken of her shame, of not having reached her limit, were ugly. Strange, incoherent thoughts, women's thoughts. You want a man, but you want the best of them all-if you can get him.

There was a young Jew who talked to Aline in Paris one evening after she married Fred. For an hour he was in the same mood that Rose and Fred had been in-only once-the time he asked Aline to marry him. She smiled at the thought. A young American Jew, a connoisseur of prints and the owner of a valuable collection, had run away to the trenches. "What I did was dig latrines-it seemed like a thousand miles of latrines. Digging, digging, digging in the rocky soil-trenches-latrines. They have a habit of making me do that. I was trying to write music when the war started; that is, when I got my ass kicked. I thought, "Well, a sensitive person, a neurotic," I thought. I thought they"d let me through. Every man, not a stupid, blind fool, thought that and hoped so, whether he said so or not. At least he hoped so. For the first time, it felt good to be crippled, blind, or diabetic. There was so much of it: the drilling, the ugly shacks we lived in, no privacy, learning too much about your fellow man too quickly. The latrines. Then it all ended, and I didn't try to write music anymore. I had a little money, and I started buying prints. I wanted something delicate-a delicacy of line and feeling-something outside of myself, more subtle and sensitive than I could ever be-after what I'd been through."

Rose Frank went to that ball where everything exploded.

No one really talked about it in Alina's presence afterward. Rose was American, and she'd managed to escape. She'd slipped away from him, as far as she could, thanks to the child who'd been caring for her-an American child.

Had Alina slipped through the cracks too? Had Fred, her husband, remained untouched? Was Fred the same man he would have been if the war had never started, thinking the same thoughts, perceiving life the same way?

That night, after they all left Rose Frank's house, Fred was drawn to Aline-almost instinctively. He left that place with Esther, Joe, and her. Perhaps Esther had gathered him together after all, with something in mind. "Everyone's just grist going into the mill"-something like that. The young man who'd sat next to Fred and said that about working in a factory in America before Rose had even begun speaking. He'd stayed behind after the others had left. Being in Rose's apartment that night, for everyone there, was a lot like entering a bedroom where a naked woman was lying. They all felt it.

Fred was walking with Alina when they left the apartment. What had happened had drawn him to her, drawn her to him. There had never been any doubt about their closeness-at least that night. That evening, he was like that American child who went to the prom with Rose, only nothing like what Rose described had happened between them.

Why didn't anything happen? If Fred had wanted it to-that night. He didn't. They had just been walking down the streets, Esther and Joe somewhere ahead, and soon they lost Esther and Joe. If Esther felt any responsibility for Aline, she wasn't worried. She knew who Fred was, if not for Aline. Trust Esther, she knew about a young man who had as much money as Fred. She was a real hound, who spotted such specimens. And Fred knew who she was, too, that she was the respectable daughter, oh, such a respectable lawyer from Chicago! Was there a reason for that? How many things could have been asked of Fred that she never asked and couldn't-now that she was his wife-in Old Harbor, Indiana.

Both Fred and Aline were shocked by what they heard. They walked along the left bank of the Seine and found a small café where they stopped and had a drink. When they had finished, Fred looked at Aline. He was quite pale. "I don't want to seem greedy, but I'd like a few strong drinks-brandy-one straight up. Do you mind if I take them?" he asked. Then they wandered along the Quai Voltaire and crossed the Seine at the Pont Neuf. Soon they entered a small park behind Notre Dame Cathedral. The fact that she had never seen the man she was with before struck Aline as pleasant that night, and she kept thinking, "If he needs anything, I can..." He was a soldier-a private who had served in the trenches for two years. Rose had made Aline so vividly feel the shame of running away when the world had sunk into mud. The fact that he had never seen the woman he was with before struck Fred Gray as pleasant that night. He had an idea about her. Esther had told him something. Alina didn't yet understand what Fred's idea was.

In the small, park-like space they'd wandered into, sat the French residents of the neighborhood: young lovers, old men with their wives, fat middle-class men and women with their children. Babies lay on the grass, their little fat legs kicking, women feeding their babies, babies crying, a stream of conversation, French conversation. Alina had once heard something about the French from a man while she was at a party with Esther and Joe. "They can kill men in battle, bring back the dead from the battlefield, make love-it doesn't matter. When it's time to sleep, they sleep. When it's time to eat, they eat."

It was indeed Alina's first night in Paris. "I want to stay out all night. I want to think and feel. Maybe I want to get drunk," she told Fred.

Fred laughed. As soon as he was alone with Alina, he felt strong and courageous, and he thought it was a pleasant feeling. The tremors inside him began to subside. She was an American, the kind he would marry when he returned to America-and that would be soon. Staying in Paris had been a mistake. There were too many things that reminded you of what life was like when you saw it raw.

What's wanted from a woman is not a conscious participation in the facts of life, but in its vulgarities. There are many such women among Americans-at least in Paris-many of them Rose Franks and others like her. Fred only went to Rose Frank's apartment because Tom Burnside took him there. Tom came from good stock in America, but he thought-since he was in Paris and since he was an artist-well, he thought he should stick with the crowd of wild people-the bohemians.

The task was to explain it to Alina, to make her understand. What? Well, these good people-at least the women-knew nothing about what Rose was talking about.

Fred's three or four glasses of brandy calmed him. In the dim light of the small park behind the cathedral, he continued to gaze at Aline-at her sharp, delicate, small features, at her slender legs clad in expensive shoes, at her slender hands resting in her lap. In Old Harbor, where the Grays had a brick house in a garden perched on the very top of a hill above the river, how exquisite she would have been-like one of those small, old-fashioned white marble statues that people used to place on pedestals among the green foliage of their gardens.

The main thing was to tell her-an American-pure and beautiful-what? What kind of American, an American like himself, who had seen what he had seen in Europe, what such a man wanted. After all, that very night, the night before, when he was sitting with Alina, whom he had seen, Tom Burnside had taken him to some place in Montmartre to see Parisian life. Such women! Ugly women, ugly men-the indulgence of American men, English men.

This Rose Frank! Her outburst-such feelings coming from a woman's lips.

"I need to tell you something," Fred finally managed to say.

"What?" Alina asked.

Fred tried to explain. He sensed something. "I've seen too many things like Rose's explosion," he said. "I was ahead of the curve."

Fred's real intention was to say something about America and life back home-to remind her. He felt there was something he needed to reaffirm to a young woman like Aline, and to himself as well, something he couldn't forget. The brandy had made him a little chatty. Names floated before his mind-names of people who had meant something in American life. Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, W.D. Howells-"The Best Parts of Our American Life"-Roosevelt, the poet Longfellow.

"Truth, freedom is human freedom. America, humanity's great experiment in freedom."

Was Fred drunk? He was thinking one thing and saying another. That fool, that hysterical woman, talking there, in that apartment.

Thoughts dance in his head-horror. One night, during the fighting, he was out on patrol in no man's land and saw another man stumbling in the dark, so he shot him. The man fell dead. It was the only time Fred deliberately killed a man. In war, people are rarely killed. They just die. What he did was quite hysterical. He and the men with him could have forced the guy to surrender. They were all jammed. After it happened, they all ran away together.

The man was killed. They sometimes rot, lying like this in shell craters. You go out to collect them, and they fall apart.

One day during an offensive, Fred crawled out and fell into a shell crater. There was a guy lying face down. Fred crawled closer and asked him to move over a bit. Move, damn it! The man was dead, rotted away.

Perhaps it was the same guy he shot that night when he was hysterical. How could he tell if the guy was German or not in such darkness? He was hysterical that time.

In other cases, before the advance, men pray, talking about God.

Then it all ended, and he and the others remained alive. Other people, living like him, became rotten from life.

A strange desire for filth-on the tongue. To utter words that stank and stank, like the trenches-is madness for this-after such an escape-an escape with life-a precious life-a life with which one can be disgusting, ugly. Swear, curse God, go to the limit.

America is far away. Something sweet and beautiful. You must believe in it-in men and women.

Wait! Hold it with your fingers, with your soul! Sweetness and truth! It must be sweet and true. Fields - cities - streets - houses - trees - women.


Especially women. Kill anyone who says anything against our women-our fields-our cities.

Especially women. They don't know what's happening to them.

We are tired - damn tired, terribly tired.

Fred Gray is talking one evening in a small park in Paris. At night, on the roof of Notre Dame, you can see angels rising into the sky-women in white robes-approaching God.

Perhaps Fred was drunk. Perhaps Rose Frank's words had gotten him drunk. What happened to Alina? She cried. Fred pressed himself against her. He didn't kiss her; he didn't want to. "I want you to marry me and live with me in America." Looking up, he saw white-stone women-angels-walking into the sky, onto the roof of the cathedral.

Alina thought to herself, "A woman? If he wants something-he's a hurt, violated man-why should I cling to myself?"

Rose Frank's words in Alina's mind, the impulse, Rose Frank's shame for staying - what is called pure.

Fred started crying, trying to talk to Aline, and she picked him up. The French in the little park didn't mind much. They'd seen a lot-concussions, all that-modern warfare. It was late. Time to go home and sleep. French prostitution during the war. "They never forgot to ask for money, did they, Ruddy?"

Fred clung to Aline, and Aline clung to Fred-that night. "You"re a nice girl, I noticed you. That woman you were with told me Tom Burnside introduced me to her. Everything"s fine at home-nice people. I need you. We have to believe in something-kill the people who don"t."

Early the next morning, they went for a cab ride-all night-to Bois, just as Rose Frank and her American child had done. After that, marriage seemed inevitable.

It's like a train when you're riding and it starts moving. You need to go somewhere.

More talk. - Talk, boy, maybe it will help. Talk about a dead man - in the dark. I have too many ghosts, I don"t want any more talk. We Americans were fine. Getting along. Why did I stay here when the war was over? Tom Burnside made me do it - maybe for you. Tom was never in the trenches - a lucky man, I hold no grudge against him.

"I don't want to talk about Europe anymore. I want you. You will marry me. You must. All I want is to forget and leave. Let Europe rot."

Alina rode in a cab with Fred all night. It was a courtship. He clung to her hand, but didn't kiss her or say anything tender.

He was like a child, wanting what she stood for-for him-desperately wanting it.

Why not give yourself? He was young and handsome.

She was ready to give...

It looks like he didn't want that.

You get what you reach out and take. Women always take, if they have the courage. You take a man, or a mood, or a child who's been hurt too much. Esther was as tough as nails, but she knew a thing or two. It had been instructive for Alina to go to Europe with her. There was little doubt that Esther considered the result of her uniting Fred and Alina a triumph of her system, her way of managing affairs. She knew who Fred was. It would be a great advantage for Alina's father when he realized what she had done. If he had a choice of a husband for his daughter, he would choose simply Fred. There aren't many like him lying around. With a man like that, a woman-what Alina would become when she was a little wiser and older-well, she could handle anything. In time, she, too, would be grateful to Esther.

That's why Esther went through with the marriage, the next day, or rather, that same day. "If you're going to keep a woman like that out of the house all night-young man." Managing Fred and Alina wasn't difficult. Alina seemed numb. She was numb. All night, and the next day, and for days after that, she was out of her mind. What was she like? Perhaps for a while she'd imagined herself as that newspaper girl, Rose Frank. The woman had confused her, made her whole life seem strange and upside down for a while. Rose had given her the war, the feeling of it-all of it-like a blow.

She-Rose-was guilty of something and ran away. She was ashamed of her escape.

Aline wanted to be in something-to the hilt-to the limit-at least one day.

She got into...

Marriage to Fred Gray.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


IN THE GARDEN, Alina rose from the bench where she had sat for half an hour, maybe even an hour. The night was full of the promise of spring. In another hour, her husband would be ready for bed. Perhaps it had been a hard day at the factory. She would come into the house. No doubt he would fall asleep in his chair, and she would wake him. There would be some kind of conversation. "Is business going well at the factory?"

"Yes, dear. I'm very busy these days. I'm trying to decide on an ad right now. Sometimes I think I'll do it, sometimes I think I won't."

Alina would be alone in the house with a man, her husband, and outside would be the night when he seemed unconscious. As spring lingered for a few more weeks, tender greenery would sprout all over the hillside on which the house stood. The soil there was rich. Fred's grandfather, whom the town elders still called Old Wash Gray, had been a fairly prolific horse trader. It was said that during the Civil War, he sold horses to both sides and took part in several major mounted raids. He sold horses to Grant's army, a rebel raid occurred, the horses disappeared, and soon Old Wash sold them again to Grant's army. The entire hillside had once been a huge horse corral.

A place where spring is a time of greenery: trees unfurling their leaves, grasses sprouting, early spring flowers appearing, and bushes in bloom everywhere.

After a few exchanges, silence fell over the house. Alina and her husband climbed the stairs. Always, when they reached the top step, there came a moment when they had to decide something. "Should I come over to your place this evening?"

"No, darling; I'm a little tired." Something hung between the man and the woman, a wall separating them. It had always been there-except once, for an hour, one night in Paris. Did Fred really want to tear it away? It would take something. In fact, living with a woman is not living alone. Life takes on a new aspect. There are new problems. You have to feel things, face things. Alina wondered if she wanted the wall to be broken down. Sometimes she made the effort. At the top of the stairs, she turned and smiled at her husband. Then she took his head in both hands and kissed him, and when she had done so, she walked quickly to her room, where later, in the dark, he came to her. It was strange and surprising, how close another could come and yet remain far away. Could Alina, if she wanted, break down the wall and truly get close to the man she had married? Was that what she wanted?

How good it was to be alone on an evening like the one when we crept into Alina's thoughts. In the terraced garden at the top of the hill on which the house stood, there were a few trees with benches beneath them and a low wall separating the garden from the street, which ran past the house up the hill and down again. In summer, when the trees were in leaf and when the terraces were thick with shrubs, the other houses on the street were invisible, but now they stood out clearly. In the house next door, where Mr. and Mrs. Willmott lived, guests were gathering for the evening, and two or three motorbikes were parked outside the door. People were sitting at tables in the brightly lit room, playing cards. They laughed, talked, and occasionally got up from one table to move to another. Alina had been invited to come with her husband, but she managed to decline, saying she had a headache. Slowly but surely, since arriving in Old Harbor, she had been limiting her social life and that of her husband. Fred said he really enjoyed this and praised her for her ability to cope. In the evenings after dinner, he would read the newspaper or a book. He preferred detective stories, saying he enjoyed them and that they didn't distract him from his work like so-called serious books did. Sometimes he and Alina would go for an evening drive, but not often. She also managed to limit their car use. It had distracted her from Fred too much. There was nothing to talk about.

When Alina rose from her place on the bench, she walked slowly and quietly through the garden. She was dressed in white and was playing a little childish game with herself. She would stand near a tree and, with her hands folded, modestly turn her face to the ground, or, plucking a branch from a bush, she would stand clutching it to her chest as if it were a cross. In old European gardens and in some old American places where there are trees and dense bushes, a certain effect is achieved by placing small white figures on columns amid the dense foliage, and Alina would be transformed in her imagination into such a white, graceful figure. It was a stone woman bending over to pick up a small child standing with upraised arms, or a nun in a monastery garden, clutching a cross to her chest. Being such a tiny stone figure, she had neither thoughts nor feelings. What she sought was a kind of accidental beauty amid the dark, night-time foliage of the garden. She became part of the beauty of the trees and dense bushes growing from the earth. Although she didn't know it, her husband Fred had once imagined her just like this-the night he proposed marriage. For years, days, and nights, perhaps even for eternity, she could stand with outstretched arms, about to hold a child, or like a nun, clutching to her body the symbol of the cross on which her spiritual lover had died. It was a dramatization, childish, meaningless, and full of a kind of comforting satisfaction for one who, in the reality of life, remains unfulfilled. Sometimes, when she stood like this in the garden, while her husband was at home reading the newspaper or sleeping in a chair, moments passed when she thought nothing, felt nothing. She became part of the sky, the earth, the passing winds. When it rained, she was the rain. When thunder rolled through the Ohio River Valley, her body trembled slightly. A small, beautiful stone figure, she had achieved nirvana. Now the time had come for her lover to spring from the earth-to leap from the tree branches-to take her, laughing at the very thought of asking for her consent. Such a figure as Alina, placed on display in a museum, would have seemed absurd; but in the garden, among the trees and bushes, caressed by the low hues of night, it became strangely beautiful, and Alina's entire relationship with her husband made her want, above all, to be strange and beautiful in her own eyes. Was she saving herself for something, and if so, for what?

After she'd positioned herself in this position several times, she grew tired of the childish game and was forced to smile at her own foolishness. She returned along the path to the house and, looking out the window, saw her husband asleep in the armchair. The newspaper had fallen from his hands, and his body had collapsed into the enormous depths of the chair, so that only his rather boyish head was visible. After gazing at him for a moment, Alina again moved along the path toward the gate leading to the street. There were no houses where the Gray Place opened onto the street. Two roads leading out of the town below merged into the street at the corner of the garden, and on the street stood a few houses, in one of which, looking up, she could see people still playing cards.

A large walnut tree grew near the gate, and she stood, her whole body pressed against it, looking out onto the street. A streetlight burned at the corner where two roads met, but at the entrance to the Gray Place the light was dim.

Something happened.

A man came up the road from below, walked under the light, and turned toward the Gray Gate. It was Bruce Dudley, the man she'd seen leaving the factory with the short, broad-shouldered worker. Alina's heart leaped, and then seemed to stop. If the man inside him were preoccupied with thoughts of her, as she was with him, then they were already something for each other. They were something for each other, and now they would have to accept that.

The man in Paris, the same one she'd seen in Rose Frank's apartment the night she'd found Fred. She'd made a brief attempt at him, but to no avail. Rose had caught him. If the chance came again, would she be bolder? One thing was certain: if it happened, her husband Fred would be ignored. "When it happens between a woman and a man, it happens between a woman and a man. No one else even considers it," she thought, smiling despite the fear that had gripped her.

The man she was now watching was walking down the street directly toward her, and when he reached the gate leading to the Gray Garden, he stopped. Alina stirred slightly, but a bush growing near a tree obscured her body. Had the man seen her? An idea occurred to her.


Now, with some purpose, she would try to become one of those small stone statues people put in their gardens. The man worked in her husband's factory, and it was quite possible he had come to Fred's on business. Alina's notions of the relationship between employee and employer at the factory were very vague. If the man had actually walked along the path to the house, he would have passed close enough to touch her, and the situation could easily have become absurd. It would have been better for Alina to casually walk down the path from the gate where the man now stood. She realized this, but she didn't move. If the man had seen her and spoken to her, the tension of the moment would have been broken. He would have asked something about her husband, and she would have answered. The entire childish game she had been playing inside herself would have ended. Like a bird crouching in the grass when a hunting dog runs across a field, so Alina crouched.

The man stood about ten feet away, looking first at the illuminated house above, then calmly at her. Had he seen her? Did he know she was aware? When a hunting dog finds its bird, it doesn't rush toward it, but stands motionless and waits.

How absurd that Alina couldn't talk to the man on the road. She'd been thinking about him for days. Perhaps he was thinking about her.

She wanted him.

For what?

She doesn't know.

He stood there for three or four minutes, and it seemed to Alina like one of those strange pauses in life that are so absurdly unimportant and yet so crucial. Did she have the courage to emerge from the shelter of the tree and bush and talk to him? "Then something will begin. Then something will begin." The words danced in her head.

He turned and walked away reluctantly. Twice he stopped to look back. First his legs, then his body, and finally his head disappeared into the darkness of the hillside, beyond the circle of light from the streetlamp overhead. It seemed as if he had sunk into the ground from which he had suddenly emerged only moments before.

This man stood as close to Alina as the other man in Paris, the man she met leaving Rose's apartment, the man on whom she had once tried, without much success, to show her feminine charm.

The arrival of a new person was a test in this sense.

Will she accept it?

With a smile playing on her lips, Alina walked along the path to the house and to her husband, who was still fast asleep in his chair, and the evening newspaper lay next to him on the floor.

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BOOK EIGHT


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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


SHE WAS GOT IT to him. There was little doubt left in his mind; but since he took some pleasure in thinking of himself as devoted and of her as indifferent, he didn't tell himself the exact truth. However, it happened. When he saw it all in full, he smiled and was quite happy. "Anyway, it's settled," he told himself. It was flattering to think that he could do it, that he could surrender like that. One of the things Bruce told himself at that time went something like this: "A man must, at some point in his life, concentrate the entire force of his being on one thing, on doing some work, on being completely absorbed in it, or on some other person, at least for a time." All his life, Bruce had been much like that. When he felt closest to people, they seemed more distant than when he felt-which was rare-self-sufficient. Then a tremendous effort was required, an appeal to someone.

As for creativity, Bruce didn't feel like enough of an artist to think he'd find a place in art. Occasionally, when he was deeply moved, he'd write what might be called poetry, but the idea of being a poet, of being known as a poet, was quite terrifying to him. "It'd be like being a well-known lover, a professional lover," he thought.

A normal job: varnishing wheels in a factory, writing news for a newspaper, and so on. At least, not much chance for an outpouring of emotion. People like Tom Wills and Sponge Martin puzzled him. They were shrewd, moving easily within a certain limited circle of life. Perhaps they didn"t want or need what Bruce wanted and thought-periods of rather intense emotional outpouring. Tom Wills, at least, was aware of his futility and impotence. Sometimes he talked to Bruce about the newspaper they both worked for. "Think about it, man," he said. "Three hundred thousand readers. Think what that means. Three hundred thousand pairs of eyes fixed on the same page at practically the same hour every day, three hundred thousand minds must be working, absorbing the contents of the page. And such a page, such things. If they really were minds, what would happen? Good God! An explosion that would shake the world, huh?" If eyes could see! If fingers could feel, if ears could hear! Man is dumb, blind, deaf. Could Chicago or Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Youngstown or Akron-modern war, modern factory, modern college, Reno, Los Angeles, movies, art schools, music teachers, radio, government-could such things go on peacefully if all three hundred thousand, all three hundred thousand, were not intellectual and emotional idiots?

As if it mattered to Bruce or Sponge Martin. It seemed to matter a lot to Tom. It touched him.

The sponge was an enigma. He went fishing, drank moon whiskey, and found satisfaction in the realization. He and his wife were both fox terriers, not quite human.

Aline had Bruce. The mechanism for getting him, her move, was laughable and crude, almost like placing an ad in a matrimonial newspaper. When she fully realized that she wanted him by her side, at least for a while, wanted his man by her side, she couldn't initially figure out how to make it happen. She couldn't send a note to his hotel. "You look like a man I once saw in Paris, you arouse the same subtle desires in me. I missed him. A woman named Rose Frank got the better of me on the only chance I ever had. Would you mind coming closer so I can see what you're like?"

It's impossible to do this in a small town. If you're Alina, you won't be able to do it at all. What can you do?

Alina took a chance. A black gardener working in the Gray area had been laid off, so she placed an ad in the local newspaper. Four men came forward, and they were all found unsatisfactory before she got Bruce, but in the end, she got him.

It was an awkward moment when he approached the door and she saw him for the first time up close and heard his voice.

It was a test of sorts. Would he make it easy for her? He at least tried, smiling inwardly. Something danced inside him, as it had ever since he'd seen the ad. He'd seen it because two workers at the hotel had told him about it. Suppose you play with the idea that a game is being played between you and a very charming woman. Most men spend their lives playing exactly that game. You tell yourself a lot of little lies, but perhaps you have the wisdom to do so. You certainly have some illusions, don't you? It's fun, like writing a novel. You'll make a lovely woman even more charming if your imagination can help, making her do whatever you want, having imaginary conversations with her, and sometimes, at night, imaginary love encounters. It's not entirely satisfying. However, such a limitation doesn't always exist. Sometimes you win. The book you're writing comes to life. The woman you love wants you.

In the end, Bruce didn't know. He knew nothing. In any case, he was tired of painting wheels, and spring was approaching. If he hadn't seen the ad, he would have quit on the spot. Seeing it, he smiled at the thought of Tom Wills and cursed the newspapers. "Newspapers are useful, anyway," he thought.

Bruce had spent very little money since he had been in Old Harbor, so he had silver in his pocket. He had wanted to apply for the position in person, so he had resigned the day before he saw her. A letter would have ruined everything. If-she-had been what he thought, what he wanted to think of her, writing a letter would have settled the matter immediately. She wouldn"t have bothered to answer. What puzzled him most was Sponge Martin, who had only smiled knowingly when Bruce announced his intention to leave. Did the little bastard know? When-Sponge Martin found out what he was doing-if he-had gotten-the position-well, it was a moment of intense satisfaction for Sponge Martin. I noticed it, realized it before he did. She caught him, didn"t she? Well, that"s all right. I like her looks myself.

It's strange how much a man hates giving another man such pleasure.

With Aline, Bruce was quite frank, though during their first conversation he couldn't look her straight. He wondered if she was looking at him, and rather thought she was. In a way, he felt like a purchased horse, or a slave, and he liked the feeling. "I used to work in your husband's factory, but I quit," he said. "You see, spring is coming, and I want to try working outdoors. As for being a gardener, that's absurd, of course, but I'd like to try it, if you don't mind helping me. It was a bit reckless of me to come here and apply. Spring is approaching so quickly, and I want to work outdoors. In fact, I'm quite clumsy with my hands, and if you hire me, you'll have to tell me everything."

How poorly Bruce had played his game. His ticket, at least for a while, was to work as a laborer. The words he spoke didn't sound like the kind of words any worker he knew would utter. If you're going to dramatize yourself, play a role, you should at least play it well. His mind raced, searching for something more rude to say.

"Don't worry about the paycheck, ma'am," he said, barely containing his laughter. He continued to look at the ground and smile. This was better. It was a note. How much fun it would be to play this game with her, if she wanted. It could go on for a long time, without any disappointments. There might even be a contest. Who would fail first?

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR


HE WAS HAPPY as he had never been before, absurdly happy. Sometimes in the evenings, when his day's work was done, as he sat on a bench in the small building behind the house further up the hill where he had been given a cot to sleep on, he thought he had deliberately overdone it. A few Sundays he went to visit Sponge and his wife, and they were very nice. Just a little internal laughter on Sponge's part. He didn't much like the Grays. Once upon a time, long ago, he had asserted his manhood with old Gray, told him where to get off, and now Bruce, his friend... Sometimes at night, as Sponge lay in bed next to his wife, he toyed with the idea of being himself in Bruce's current position. He imagined that something had already happened that might not have happened at all, tested his figure in Bruce's place. It wouldn't work. In a house like the Grays'... The truth was that in Bruce's situation, as he imagined it, he would have been embarrassed by the house itself, the furniture in the house, the grounds around it. He had put Fred Gray's father at a disadvantage that time: he found himself in his own store, on his own dunghill. In fact, Sponge's wife enjoyed the thought of what was happening most of all. At night, while Sponge was thinking about himself, she lay beside him and thought of delicate underwear, soft, colorful bedspreads. Bruce's presence in their home on Sunday was like the arrival of a hero from a French novel. Or something by Laura Jean Libby-books she had read when she was younger and her eyes were better. Her thoughts didn't frighten her the way her husband's did, and when Bruce arrived, she wanted to feed him delicate food. She really wanted him to stay healthy, young, and handsome, so that she could better use him in her nightly thoughts. That he had once worked in the store next to Sponge Martin seemed to her like a desecration of something almost sacred. It was as if the Prince of Wales had done something like that, some kind of joke. Like the pictures you sometimes see in the Sunday papers: the President of the United States spreading hay on a Vermont farm, the Prince of Wales holding a horse ready for a jockey, the Mayor of New York throwing out the first baseball pitch at the start of the baseball season. Great men become ordinary to make ordinary people happy. Bruce, at any rate, had made Mrs. Sponge Martin's life happier, and when he went to visit them and left, strolling along the little-used river road to climb the path through the bushes up the hill to Gray Place, he had it all and was at once surprised and pleased. He felt like an actor rehearsing a role for his friends. They were uncritical, kind. Easy enough to play the part for them. Could he successfully play it for Alina?

His own thoughts, as he sat on the bench in the barn where he now slept at night, were complex.

"I'm in love. That's what he should do. As for her, maybe it doesn't matter. At least she's willing to play with the idea.

People tried to avoid love only when it wasn't love. Very capable people, skilled in life, pretend they don't believe in it at all. Authors of books who believe in love and make love the basis of their books always turn out to be surprisingly stupid. They ruin everything by trying to write about it. No intelligent person wants that kind of love. It might be enough for old-fashioned single women or something for tired stenographers to read on the subway or on the elevator, walking home from the office in the evening. These are the kinds of things that should be contained within the confines of a cheap book. If you try to bring it to life-bam!

In a book, you make a simple statement-"They loved"-and the reader must believe it or throw it away. It's easy enough to make statements like, "John stood with his back turned, and Sylvester crawled out from behind a tree. He raised his revolver and fired. John fell dead." Such things happen, of course, but they don't happen to anyone you know. Killing a person with words scrawled on a piece of paper is a very different matter than killing them while they're still alive.

Words that make people lovers. You say they exist. Bruce didn't so much want to be loved. He wanted to love. When flesh appears, it's something else. He didn't have that vanity that makes people think they're attractive.


Bruce was quite certain he hadn't yet begun to think or feel Alina as flesh. If that happened, it would be a different problem than the one he now took on. More than anything, he longed to transcend himself, to focus his life on something outside himself. He'd tried physical labor but hadn't found any that captivated him, and upon seeing Alina, he realized Bernice didn't offer him enough opportunities for beauty within herself-in her face. She was someone who had rejected the possibility of personal beauty and femininity. In truth, she was too much like Bruce himself.

And how absurd-really! If one could be a beautiful woman, if one could achieve beauty within oneself, wouldn't that be enough, wouldn't that be all one could ask for? At least, that's what Bruce thought at that moment. He found Alina beautiful-so lovely that he hesitated to get too close. If his own imagination helped make her more beautiful-in his own eyes-wasn't that an achievement? "Gently. Don't move. Just be," he wanted to whisper to Alina.

Spring was fast approaching in southern Indiana. It was mid-April, and by mid-April in the Ohio River Valley-at least in many seasons-spring is already upon us. The winter floodwaters had already receded from much of the river valley flats around and below Old Haven, and while Bruce went about his new work in the Grays' garden under Aline's guidance, hauling wheelbarrows of earth and digging, planting seeds, and transplanting, he would occasionally straighten his body and, standing at attention, survey the land.


Though the flood-waters which had covered all the lowlands of this country during the winter were only just receding, leaving everywhere broad, shallow pools-pools which the southern Indiana sun would soon have drunk up-though the receding flood-waters had left everywhere a thin layer of gray river mud, the grayness was now rapidly receding.

Everywhere, greenery began to emerge from the gray earth. As the shallow puddles dried, the greenery advanced. On some warm spring days, he could almost see the greenery creeping forward, and now that he had become a gardener, a digger of the earth, he occasionally experienced the thrilling feeling of being part of it all. He was an artist, working on a vast canvas, shared with others. The soil where he dug soon blossomed with red, blue, and yellow flowers. A small corner of the vast expanse of earth belonged to Alina and himself. There was an unspoken contrast. His own hands, always so clumsy and useless, now guided by her mind, might well become less useless. From time to time, when she sat next to him on the bench or strolled through the garden, he would steal a timid glance at her hands. They were very graceful and quick. Well, they weren't strong, but his own hands were strong enough. Strong, rather thick fingers, broad palms. When he worked in the shop next to Sponge, he watched Sponge's hands. There was a caress in them. Alina's hands felt a caress when, as sometimes happened, she touched one of the plants Bruce handled awkwardly. "You do it like this," the quick, deft fingers seemed to say to his fingers. "Stay out of it. Let the rest of your human sleep. Focus everything now on the fingers that guide hers," Bruce whispered to himself.

Soon, the farmers who owned the flat lands in the river valley far below the hill where Bruce worked, but who also lived among the hills, would come out onto the plains with their teams and tractors for the spring plowing. The low hills lying away from the river resembled hunting dogs huddled at the riverbank. One of the dogs crawled closer and stuck its tongue in the water. It was the hill on which Old Harbor stood. On the plain below, Bruce could already see people strolling. They looked like flies flitting across a distant windowpane. Dark-gray people walked across the vast, bright grayness, watching, waiting for the time of spring greenery, waiting to help spring greenery come.

Bruce had seen the same thing when he was a boy climbing Old Harbor Hill with his mother, and now he saw it with Aline.

They didn't talk about it. So far, they'd only talked about the work that lay ahead in the garden. When Bruce was a boy and climbed the hill with his mother, the old woman couldn't tell her son how she felt. The son couldn't tell his mother how he felt.

Often he wanted to shout to the tiny grey figures flying below. "Come on! Come on! Start plowing! Plow! Plow!"

He himself was a gray man, like the tiny gray men below. He was a madman, like the madman he had once seen sitting on the riverbank with dried blood on his cheek. "Stay afloat!" the madman called to the steamer heading upriver.

"Plow! Plow! Start plowing! Tear up the soil! Turn it over. The soil is warming up! Start plowing! Plow and plant!" That's what Bruce wanted to shout now.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE


BRUCE WAS becoming a part of the Gray family's life on the hill above the river. Something was building inside him. Hundreds of imaginary conversations with Aline, never to be, swirled in his head. Sometimes, when she came into the garden and talked to him about his work, he waited, as if she would pick up where she had dropped the imaginary conversation they had had as he lay on his bunk the night before. If Aline immersed herself in him as he did in her, a break would be inevitable, and after each break, the whole tone of life in the garden would change. Bruce thought he had suddenly discovered an old wisdom. Sweet moments in life are rare. A poet has a moment of ecstasy, and then it must be postponed. He works in a bank or is a college professor. Keats sings to the nightingale, Shelley to the lark or the moon. Both men then return home to their wives. Keats sat at the table with Fanny Brawne-a little plumper, a little rougher-and uttered words that irritated the eardrums. Shelley and his father-in-law. God help the good, the true, and the beautiful! They were discussing domestic matters. What shall we have for dinner tonight, my dear? No wonder Tom Wills always cursed life. "Good morning, Life. Do you think this is a beautiful day? Well, you see, I"ve got an attack of indigestion. I shouldn"t have had the shrimp. I hardly ever like shellfish."

Because moments are hard to find, because everything disappears so quickly, is that a reason to become second-rate, cheap, cynical? Any clever newspaper writer can turn you into a cynic. Anyone can show you how rotten life is, how stupid love is-it's easy. Take it and laugh. Then accept what comes later as joyfully as possible. Perhaps Alina felt nothing like Bruce did, and what was an event for him, perhaps the crowning achievement of a lifetime, was for her just a fleeting fantasy. Perhaps from boredom with life, being the wife of a rather ordinary factory owner from a small town in Indiana. Perhaps physical desire itself is a new experience in life. Bruce thought that for him, this could be what he had done, and he was proud and pleased with what he considered his sophistication.

On his bunk at night, there were moments of intense sadness. He couldn't sleep and crawled out into the garden to sit on a bench. One night it rained, and the cold rain soaked him to the skin, but he didn't mind. He had already lived more than thirty years, and he felt himself at a turning point. Today I am young and foolish, but tomorrow I will be old and wise. If I don't love completely now, I will never love. Old people don't walk or sit in the cold rain in the garden, looking at a dark, rain-drenched house. They take the feelings I have now and turn them into poems, which they publish to increase their fame. A man in love with a woman, his physical being fully aroused, is a common enough sight. Spring comes, and men and women stroll in city parks or along country roads. They sit together on the grass under a tree. They'll do it next spring and in the spring of 2010. They did it on the evening of the day Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Does it matter? People over thirty and with intelligence understand such things. The German scientist can explain it perfectly. If you don't understand something about human life, consult the works of Dr. Freud.

The rain was cold, and the house was dark. Was Alina sleeping next to the husband she'd found in France, the man she'd found frustrated, torn because he'd been in battle, hysterical because he'd seen people alone, because in a moment of hysteria he'd once killed a man? Well, that wouldn't be a good situation for Alina. The picture didn't fit the pattern. If I were her acknowledged lover, if I owned her, I'd have to accept her husband as a necessary fact. Later, when I leave here, when this spring has passed, I'll accept him, but not now. Bruce walked softly through the rain and touched his fingers to the wall of the house where Alina slept. Something had been decided for him. Both he and Alina were in a quiet, still place, in the middle between events. Yesterday, nothing happened. Tomorrow, or the day after, when the breakthrough comes, nothing will happen. Well, at least. There will be such a thing as knowledge of life. Touching the wall of the house with his wet fingers, he crept back to his bunk and lay down, but after a while he got up to turn on the light. He couldn't quite shake off the urge to suppress some of the moment's feelings, to preserve them.

I'm slowly building myself a house-a house I can live in. Day after day, bricks are laid in long rows to form walls. Doors are hung and roof tiles are cut. The air is filled with the scent of freshly cut logs.

In the morning you can see my house - on the street, on the corner by the stone church - in the valley behind your house, where the road goes down and crosses the bridge.

It's morning now and the house is almost ready.

It's evening, and my house lies in ruins. Weeds and vines have grown up in the crumbling walls. The rafters of the house I wanted to build are buried in tall grass. They've rotted away. Worms live in them. You'll find the ruins of my house on a street in your town, on a country road, on a long street shrouded in clouds of smoke, in the city.

It's a day, a week, a month. My house isn't built. Would you come into my house? Take this key. Come in.

Bruce wrote words on sheets of paper as he sat on the edge of his bunk, the spring rains pouring down the hill where he was temporarily living near Alina.

My house is scented with the rose that grows in her garden, it sleeps in the eyes of a Negro working on the docks of New Orleans. It is built on a thought I am not man enough to express. I am not smart enough to build my house. No man is smart enough to build his house.

Perhaps it can't be built. Bruce got out of bed and went outside into the rain again. A dim light burned in the upstairs room of the Gray house. Perhaps someone was sick. How absurd! When you build, why not build? When you sing a song, sing it. Far better to tell yourself that Alina wasn't sleeping. For me, that's a lie, a golden lie! Tomorrow or the day after, I'll wake up, I'll be forced to wake up.

Did Alina know? Did she secretly share the excitement that shook Bruce so, making his fingers fumble as he worked in the garden throughout the day, making it so difficult for him to look up at her when there was even the slightest chance she was looking at her? at him? "Now, now, calm down. Don't worry. You haven't done anything yet," he told himself. After all, all of this, his petition for a place in the garden, being with her, had been just an adventure, one of life's adventures, adventures he might have secretly sought out when he left Chicago. A series of adventures-little bright moments, flashes in the darkness, and then pitch black and death. He had been told that some of the bright insects that invaded the garden on warmer days lived only one day. However, it was not good to die before your moment had come, killing the moment with too much thought.

Every day she came to the garden to supervise its work was a new adventure. Now there was some use for the dresses she had bought in Paris within a month of Fred's departure. If they were unsuitable for morning wear in the garden, did it matter? She didn't wear them until Fred left that morning. There were two servants in the house, but both were Black. Black women have an instinctive understanding. They say nothing, being wise in women's lore. What they can get, they take. That's understandable.

Fred left at eight, sometimes driving, sometimes walking down the hill. He didn't speak to Bruce or look at him. Clearly, he didn't like the idea of a young white man working in the garden. His distaste for the idea was evident in his shoulders, in the lines of his back as he walked away. It gave Bruce a kind of half-ugly satisfaction. Why? The man, her husband, he told himself, was irrelevant and nonexistent-at least in the world of his imagination.

The adventure consisted of her leaving the house and staying with him sometimes for an hour or two in the morning and another hour or two in the afternoon. He shared her plans for the garden, meticulously following all her instructions. She spoke, and he heard her voice. When he thought her back was turned, or when, as sometimes happened on warm mornings, she sat on a bench at a distance and pretended to read a book, he would steal a glance. How good it was that her husband could buy her expensive and simple dresses, well-made shoes. The fact that a large wheel company was moving downriver, and Sponge Martin was varnishing car wheels, began to make sense. He himself had worked in the factory for several months and varnished a certain number of wheels. A few pence from the profits of his own labor probably went to buy things for her: a piece of lace on her wrists, a quarter yard of the fabric from which her dress was made. It was good to look at her and smile at his own thoughts, to play with his own thoughts. Might as well accept things as they are. He himself could never have become a successful manufacturer. As for her being Fred Gray's wife... If an artist painted a canvas and hung it up, would it still be his canvas? If a man wrote a poem, would it still be his poem? How absurd! As for Fred Gray, he should have been glad. If he loved her, how nice to think that someone else does too. You're doing well, Mr. Gray. Mind your own business. Earn money. Buy her lots of nice things. I don't know how to do it. As if the shoe were on the other foot. Well, you see, it's not so. It can't be. Why think about it?

In fact, the situation was all the better because Alina belonged to someone else, not Bruce. If she had belonged to him, he would have had to come into the house with her, sit at the table with her, see her too often. The worst thing was that she saw him too often. She would find out about him. That was hardly the purpose of his adventures. Now, under the present circumstances, she could, if she so chose, think of him as he thought of her, and he would do nothing to disturb her thoughts. "Life has become better," Bruce whispered to himself, "now that men and women have become civilized enough not to want to see each other too often. Marriage is a relic of barbarism. It is the civilized man who dresses himself and his women, developing his decorative sense in the process. Once upon a time, men did not even dress their own bodies or their women"s. Stinking skins dry on the cave floor. Later, they learned to dress not only the body but every detail of life. Sewers became fashionable; the ladies-in-waiting of the first French kings, as well as the Medici ladies, must have smelled terribly before they learned to douse themselves with perfumes.

Nowadays, houses are built that allow for a certain degree of separate existence, an individual existence within the walls of the home. It would be better if men built their homes even more sensibly, separating themselves more and more from each other.

Let the lovers in. You yourself will become a creeping, creeping lover. What makes you think you're too ugly to be a lover? The world wanted more lovers and fewer husbands and wives. Bruce didn't really think much about the sanity of his own thoughts. Would you question the sanity of Cézanne standing before his canvas? Would you question the sanity of Keats when he sang?

It was much better that Alina, his lady, belonged to Fred Gray, a factory owner from Old Harbor, Indiana. Why have factories in towns like Old Harbor if nothing will come out of Alina? Must we always remain barbarians?

In a different mood, Bruce might well have wondered how much Fred Grey knew, how much he was capable of knowing. Could anything happen in the world without the knowledge of all concerned?

However, they will try to suppress their own knowledge. How natural and human that is. Neither in war nor in peacetime do we kill a person we hate. We try to kill what we hate in ourselves.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX


F RED GRAY He walked along the road to the gate in the morning. Occasionally he turned and looked at Bruce. The two men didn't speak to each other like a veterinarian.

No man likes the thought of another man, a white man, quite pleasant to look at, sitting alone with his wife in the garden all day-no one around but two black women. Black women have no moral sense. They'll do anything. They might like it, but don't pretend you don't. That's what makes white people so angry at them when they think about it. Such jerks! If there can't be good, serious men in this country, where are we going?

One May day, Bruce went down to town to buy some gardening tools and walked back up the hill with Fred Gray walking right in front of him. Fred was younger than himself, but two or three inches shorter.

Now that he was sitting at his desk in the factory office all day and living well, Fred was prone to gaining weight. He had developed a belly and his cheeks were puffy. He thought it would be nice, at least for a while, to commute to work. If only Old Harbor had a golf course. Someone had to promote it. The problem was, there weren't enough people of his class in town to support a country club.

The two men climbed the hill, and Fred felt Bruce's presence behind him. What a pity! If he had been behind, with Bruce ahead, he could have regulated his pace and spent the time sizing the man up. Having glanced back and seen Bruce, he didn't look back. Did Bruce know he'd turned his head to look? It was a question, one of those little irritating questions that can get on a person's nerves.

When Bruce came to work in the Grays' garden, Fred immediately recognized him as the man who worked at the factory next to Sponge Martin, and asked Aline about him, but she simply shook her head. "True, I don't know anything about him, but he does very good work," she said then. How could you go back to that? You couldn't. Imply, hint at anything. Impossible! A human being can't be such a barbarian.

If Alina didn't love him, why did she marry him? If he'd married a poor girl, he might have had reason to be suspicious, but Alina's father was a respectable man with a large law practice in Chicago. A lady is a lady. That's one of the perks of marrying a woman. You don't have to constantly question yourself.

What's the best thing to do when you're walking up the hill to the man who's your gardener? In Fred's grandfather's time, and even in his father's, all the men in small Indiana towns were a lot alike. At least they thought they were a lot alike, but times have changed.

The street Fred was climbing was one of the most prestigious in Old Harbor. Doctors and lawyers, a bank teller, the town's finest, now lived there. Fred would have preferred to pounce on them, because the house at the very top of the hill had been in his family for three generations. Three generations in Indiana, especially if you had money, meant something.

The gardener Alina hired had always been close to Sponge Martin when he worked at the factory; and Fred remembered Sponge. When he was a boy, he'd gone to Sponge's carriage paint shop with his father, and there'd been a row. Well, Fred thought, times have changed; I'd fire that Sponge, only... The problem was, Sponge had lived in town since he was a boy. Everyone knew him, and everyone liked him. You don't want the town to fall on you if you have to live there. And besides, Sponge was a good worker, no doubt about that. The foreman had said he could do more work than anyone else in his department, and do it with one hand tied behind his back. A man had to understand his obligations. Just because you own or control a factory doesn't mean you can treat men as you please. There's an obligation implicit in control of capital. You must realize this.

If Fred waited for Bruce and walked beside him up the hill, past the houses scattered across it, what then? What would the two men talk about? "I don't much like the look of him," Fred told himself. He wondered why.

A factory owner like him had a certain tone toward the people who worked for him. When you're in the army, of course, everything is different.

If Fred had been driving that evening, it would have been easy enough for him to stop and offer the gardener a ride. That's something different. It puts things on a different footing. If you're driving a nice car, you stop and say, "Jump in." Nice. It's democratic, and at the same time, you're okay. Well, you see, after all, you have a car. You change gear, you step on the gas. There's plenty to talk about. There's no question of whether one person is a little more huffing and puffing than the other going up the hill. Nobody's huffing and puffing. You talk about the car, growling at it a little. "Yes, it's a nice enough car, but it takes too long to maintain. Sometimes I think I'll sell it and buy a Ford." You praise Ford, talk about Henry Ford as a great man. "He's exactly the kind of man we should have as President. What we need is good, considerate business administration." You speak of Henry Ford without a trace of envy, showing that you're a man of broad horizons. "That idea he had for a peaceful ship was pretty crazy, don't you think? Yes, but he's probably destroyed it all since then."

But on foot! On his own two feet! A man should quit smoking so much. Since leaving the army, Fred has been sitting at a desk too much.

Sometimes he read articles in magazines or newspapers. Some great businessman carefully watched his diet. In the evening before bed, he drank a glass of milk and ate a cracker. In the morning, he got up early and took a quick walk. His head was clear for business. Damn it! You buy a good car and then walk to improve your wind and stay in shape. Alina was right about not caring much about evening car rides. She enjoyed working in her garden. Alina had a good figure. Fred was proud of his wife. A fine little woman.

Fred had a story from his time in the army that he liked to tell Harcourt or some traveler: "You can't predict what people will become when they're put to the test. In the army, we had big men and little men. You'd think, wouldn't you, that the big men would stand up to hard work the best? Well, you'd be fooled. There was a guy in our company who weighed only one hundred and eighteen. Back home, he was a drug dealer or something like that. He barely ate enough to keep a sparrow alive, he always felt like he was going to die, but he was a fool. God, he was tough. He just kept going."

"Better walk a little faster, avoid an awkward situation," Fred thought. He picked up his pace, but not too much. He didn't want the guy behind him to know he was trying to avoid him. A fool might think he was afraid of something.

The thoughts continue. Fred didn't like these thoughts. Why the hell wasn't Aline satisfied with the black gardener?

Well, a man can't say to his wife, "I don't like the way things look here. I don't like the idea of a young white man being alone with you in the garden all day. What the man might imply is-well, physical danger. If he did, she'd laugh.

To say too much would be... Well, something like equality between him and Bruce. In the army, such things were par for the course. You had to do them there. But in civilian life-to say anything was to say too much, to imply too much.

Curse!

Better to move faster. Show him that even though a man sits at a desk all day, providing work for workers like himself, ensuring their wages flow, feeding other people's children, and so on, despite everything, he has legs and the wind, and everything is fine.

Fred reached the Grays' gate, but was a few steps ahead of Bruce, and immediately, without looking back, he entered the house. The walk was a revelation of sorts for Bruce. It was a matter of constructing himself in his own mind as a man who asks for nothing-nothing but the privilege of love.

She had a rather unpleasant tendency to taunt her husband, to make him feel uncomfortable. The gardener's footsteps came closer and closer. The sharp click of heavy boots first on the cement sidewalk, then on the brick sidewalk. Bruce's wind was good. He didn't mind climbing. Well, he saw Fred looking around. He knew what was going on in Fred's head.

Fred, listening to footsteps: "I wish some of the men who work in my factory showed as much life. I bet when he worked in the factory, he never rushed to work.

Bruce - with a smile on his lips - with a rather meager feeling of inner satisfaction.

"He's scared. Then he knows. He knows, but he's afraid to find out."

As they approached the top of the hill, Fred felt the urge to run, but he restrained himself. It was an attempt at dignity. The man's back told Bruce what he needed to know. He remembered the man, Smedley, whom Sponge had liked so much.

"We men are pleasant creatures. We have so much good will in us."

He had almost reached the point where he could, with a special effort, step on Fred's heels.

Something sings inside-a challenge. "I could, if I wanted to. I could, if I wanted to."

What can?

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BOOK NINE


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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN


SHE WAS-he was beside her, and he seemed mute to her, afraid to speak for himself. How brave one can be in imagination, and how very difficult it is to be brave in reality. His presence there, in the garden at work, where she could see him every day, made her realize, as she had never realized before, the masculinity of a man, at least an American man. A Frenchman would have been another problem. She was infinitely relieved that he wasn't French. What strange creatures men really were. When she wasn't in the garden, she could go upstairs to her room and sit and watch him. He tried so hard to be a gardener, but mostly he did it poorly.

And the thoughts that must be going through his head. If Fred and Bruce had known how she sometimes laughed at them both from the window above, they might both have gotten angry and left this place forever. When Fred left at eight that morning, she ran quickly upstairs to watch him go. He walked along the path to the main gate, trying to maintain his dignity, as if to say, "I know nothing about what"s going on here; in fact, I"m sure nothing"s going on. It"s beneath me to suggest that anything is going on. To admit that anything is going on would be too great a humiliation. You see how it"s happening. Watch my back as I walk. You see, don"t you, how unflappable I am? I"m Fred Grey, aren"t I? And as for these upstarts...!"

For a woman, this is normal, but she shouldn't play for too long. For males, it's there.

Alina was no longer young, but her body still retained a rather delicate elasticity. Within her body, she could still stroll through the garden, feeling it-her body-the way one might feel a perfectly tailored dress. When you get a little older, you adopt male notions of life, of morality. Human beauty is perhaps something like a singer's throat. You're born with it. You have it or you don't. If you're a man and your woman is unattractive, your job is to bestow upon her the scent of beauty. She'll be very grateful for it. Perhaps that's what imagination is for. At least, according to a woman, that's what a man's fantasy is for. What other use is it?

Only when you're young, as a woman, can you be a woman. Only when you're young, as a man, can you be a poet. Hurry. Once you've crossed the line, you can't turn back. Doubts will creep in. You'll become moral and stern. Then you must begin to think about life after death, find yourself, if you can, a spiritual lover.

The blacks are singing -

And the Lord said...

Faster faster.

Sometimes the singing of black people helped one grasp the ultimate truth of things. Two black women sang in the kitchen of the house while Alina sat by the upstairs window, watching her husband walk down the path, watching a man named Bruce digging in the garden. Bruce stopped digging and looked at Fred. He had a definite advantage. He looked at Fred's back. Fred didn't dare turn and look at him. There was something Fred needed to hold on to. He was holding on to something with his fingers, clinging to what? Himself, of course.

Things had become a little tense in the house and garden on the hill. How much innate cruelty there is in women! The two black women in the house sang, did their work, watched, and listened. Alina herself was still quite cool. She didn't commit herself to anything.

Sitting by the window upstairs or walking in the garden, there was no need to look at the man working there, no need to think about another man coming down the hill to the factory.

You could look at the trees and growing plants.

There was a simple, natural, cruel thing called nature. You could think about it, feel a part of it. One plant grew quickly, suffocating the one growing beneath it. A tree, with a better start, cast its shadow downwards, blocking the sunlight from the smaller tree. Its roots spread faster through the earth, sucking up life-giving moisture. A tree was a tree. No one questioned it. Could a woman be just a woman for a while? She had to be that way to be a woman at all.

Bruce walked around the garden, plucking weaker plants from the ground. He had already learned a lot about gardening. It didn't take long to learn.

For Alina, the feeling of life washed over her in the spring days. Now she was herself, the woman who had given her a chance, perhaps the only chance she would ever have.

"The world is full of hypocrisy, isn't it, my dear? Yes, but it's better to pretend you signed up."

A shining moment for a woman to be a woman, for a poet to be a poet. One evening in Paris, she, Alina, sensed something, but another woman, Rose Frank, got the better of her.

She tried weakly, being in the imagination of Rose Frank, Esther Walker.

From the window upstairs, or sometimes sitting in the garden with a book, she would look at Bruce questioningly. What stupid books!

"Well, my dear, we need something to help us through the dull times. Yes, but most of life is dull, isn't it, dear?

As Alina sat in the garden, looking at Bruce, he hadn't yet dared to look up at her. When he did, the test might come.

She was absolutely sure.

She told herself that he was the one who could, at some point, become blind, let go of all chains, throw himself into the nature from which he came, be a man for her woman, at least for a moment.

After this happened - ?

She'd wait and see what happened after it happened. Asking ahead of time would have meant becoming a man, and she wasn't ready for that yet.

Alina smiled. There was one thing Fred couldn't do, but she didn't yet hate him for his inability. Such hatred might have arisen later, if nothing had happened now, if she had missed her chance.

From the very beginning, Fred always wanted to build a nice, strong little wall around himself. He wanted to be safe behind a wall, to feel safe. A man within the walls of a house, safe, a woman's hand warmly holding his, waiting for him. Everyone else was trapped within the walls of a house. Is it any wonder that people were so busy building walls, strengthening walls, fighting, killing each other, constructing systems of philosophy, constructing systems of morality?

"But, my dear, outside the walls they meet without competition. Do you blame them? You see, it's their only chance. We women do the same when we save a man. It's good when there's no competition, when you're confident, but how long can a woman remain confident? Be reasonable, my dear. It's perfectly reasonable that we can live with men at all."

In fact, very few women have lovers. Few men and women today even believe in love. Look at the books they write, the pictures they paint, the music they create. Perhaps civilization is nothing more than a process of searching for what you can't have. What you can't have, you ridicule. You belittle it if you can. You make it unpleasant and different. Sling mud at it, mock it-want it God knows how much, of course, all the time.

There's one thing men don't accept. They're too rude. They're too childish. They're proud, demanding, self-assured and self-righteous.

Everything is about life, but they put themselves above life.

What they do not dare to accept is the fact, the mystery, life itself.

Flesh is flesh, wood is wood, grass is grass. The flesh of a woman is the flesh of trees, flowers, and grass.

Bruce, in the garden, touching young trees and young plants with his fingers, touched Alina's body. Her flesh grew warm. Something swirled and swirled inside.

For many days she didn't think at all. She walked in the garden, sat on a bench with a book in her hands, and waited.

What are books, painting, sculpture, poetry? Men write, carve, draw. It's a way to escape problems. They like to think problems don't exist. Look, look at me. I am the center of life, the creator-when I cease to exist, nothing exists.

Well, isn't that true, at least for me?

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT


THE LINE WENT _ Into her garden, watching Bruce.

It might have been more obvious to him that she would not have gone so far if she had not been ready to go further at the right moment.

She was really going to test his courage.

There are times when courage is the most important attribute in life.

Days and weeks passed.

The two black women in the house watched and waited. They often glanced at each other and giggled. The air on the hilltop was filled with laughter-a dark laughter.

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" one of them shouted to the other. She laughed a shrill, black laugh.

Fred Gray knew, but he was afraid to find out. Both men would have been shocked if they'd known how insightful and courageous Alina-innocent, quiet in appearance-had become, but they would never have known. The two Black women might have known, but it didn't matter. Black women know how to keep quiet when it comes to white people.

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BOOK TEN


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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE


LINE _ _ Into her bed. It was late one evening in early June. It happened, and Bruce had gone, Alina didn't know where. Half an hour ago, he'd come down the stairs and left the house. She'd heard him moving along the gravel path.


The day was warm and balmy, and a light breeze blew across the hill and through the window.

If Bruce were wise now, he would simply disappear. Could a person possess such wisdom? Alina smiled at the thought.

Alina was absolutely sure of one thing, and when this thought came to her mind, it was as if a cool hand lightly touched hot, feverish flesh.

Now she was going to have a child, possibly a son. That was the next step-the next event. It was impossible to be so deeply moved unless something happened, but what would she do when it did? Would she go along quietly, letting Fred think the child was his?

Why not? This event would make Fred so proud and happy. Surely, since she had married him, Fred had often irritated and bored Aline, his childishness, his stupidity. But now? Well, he thought the factory mattered, that his own military record mattered, that the Gray family's standing in society mattered most of all; and all of this mattered to him, as it did to Aline, in a way that was entirely secondary, as she now knew. But why deny him what he so wanted in life, what, at least, he thought he wanted? The Grays of Old Harbor, Indiana. They had three generations of them already, and that had been a long time in America, in Indiana. First, Gray, a shrewd horse trader, a bit rough around the edges, chewing tobacco, fond of betting on races, a true Democrat, a good comrade, well received, constantly saving money. Then banker Gray, still shrewd but now cautious-a friend of the state governor and a contributor to Republican campaign funds-once spoke softly of him as a candidate for the United States Senate. He might have gotten it if he hadn't been a banker. It wasn't good policy to put a banker on the ticket in a dubious year. The two elder Grays, and then Fred, weren't as bold, not as shrewd. There was no doubt that Fred, in his own way, was the best of the three. He wanted a sense of quality, sought a consciousness of quality.

The fourth Gray, who wasn't a Gray at all. Her Gray. She could call him Dudley Gray-or Bruce Gray. Would she have the courage to do that? Perhaps it would be too risky.

As for Bruce-well, she chose him-unconsciously. Something happened. She was much bolder than she had planned. In reality, she had only intended to toy with him, to exert her power over him. One could get very tired and bored while waiting-in a garden on a hill in Indiana.

Lying on her bed in her room at the Gray house on the hilltop, Aline could turn her head on the pillow and see, along the horizon, above the hedges surrounding the garden, the top of a figure walking down the only street on the hilltop. Mrs. Willmott had left the house and was walking down the street. And so she, too, had stayed home that day when everyone else on the hilltop had gone down to town. Mrs. Willmott had had hay fever that summer. In another week or two, she would be leaving for northern Michigan. Would she come to visit Aline now, or would she go down the hill to some other house for an afternoon visit? If she came to the Gray house, Aline would have to lie quietly, pretending to sleep. If Mrs. Willmott had known of the events that had taken place at the Gray house that day! What joy for her, joy like the joy of thousands over a story on the front page of a newspaper. Aline shuddered slightly. She had taken such a risk, such a risk. There was something in her like the satisfaction men feel after a battle from which they have emerged unscathed. Her thoughts were a little vulgarly human. She wanted to gloat over Mrs. Willmott, who had come down the hill to visit a neighbor, but whose husband had later taken her away so she wouldn't have to climb back into her own house. When you have hay fever, you have to be careful. If only Mrs. Willmott had known. She didn't know. There was no reason why anyone should know now.


The day began with Fred donning his soldier's uniform. The town of Old Harbor, following the example of Paris, London, New York, and thousands of smaller cities, was to express its grief for those lost in the Great War by dedicating a statue in a small park on the riverbank, down by Fred's factory. In Paris, the President of France, members of the Chamber of Deputies, great generals, the Tiger of France himself. Well, Tiger would never have to argue with Prexy Wilson again, would he? Now he and Lloyd George could rest and relax at home. Despite France being the center of Western civilization, a statue would be unveiled here that would make the artist uneasy. In London, the King, the Prince of Wales, the Dolly Sisters-no, no.

In Old Harbor, the mayor, city council members, and the state governor come to give a speech, and prominent citizens drive in.

Fred, the richest man in town, marched with the common soldiers. He wanted Aline there, but she assumed she'd stay home, and he found it hard to protest. Although many of the men he'd be marching shoulder to shoulder with-private men like himself-were workers at his factory, Fred felt perfectly at ease about it. It was different from marching up a hill with a gardener, a worker-really, a servant. Man becomes impersonal. You march and are part of something greater than any individual; you are part of your country, its strength and power. No man can claim equality with you because you marched with him into battle, because you marched with him in a parade commemorating battles. There are certain things common to all people-for example, birth and death. You do not claim equality with a man, because you and he are both born of women, because when your time comes, you will both die.

Fred looked ridiculously boyish in his uniform. Really, if you're going to do that kind of thing, you shouldn't develop a belly or chubby cheeks.

Fred rode up the hill at midday to put on his uniform. Somewhere in the center of town, a band was playing, its brisk marching notes carried on the wind, clearly audible up the hill, into the house and garden.

Everybody on the march, the world on the march. Fred had such a lively, businesslike air. He wanted to say, "Come down, Aline," but he didn't. When he walked down the path to the car, Bruce the gardener was nowhere to be seen. It was true, it was nonsense that he couldn't get a commission when he went to war, but what was done was done. In city life, there were people of much lower station who would wear swords and tailored uniforms.

After Fred left, Aline spent two or three hours in her room upstairs. The two black women were getting ready to go too. Soon they came down the path to the gate. It was a special occasion for them. They wore colorful dresses. There was a tall black woman and an older woman with dark brown skin and a huge, broad back. "They walked down to the gate together, dancing a little," Aline thought. When they reached the city, where men marched and bands played, they would prance even more. Black women pranced after black men. "Come on, baby!"

"Oh my God!"

"Oh my God!"

- Were you at war?

"Yes, sir. Government war, labor battalion, American army. It's me, sweetie.

Alina had no plans, no intentions. She sat in her room and pretended to read Howells's "The Rebellion of Silas Lapham."

The pages danced. Below, in the city, a band played. Men marched. There was no war now. The dead cannot rise and march. Only those who survive can march.

"Now! Now!"

Something whispered inside her. Did she really intend to do this? Why, after all, did she want the man Bruce by her side? Was every woman, at her core, first and foremost, a slut? What nonsense!

She put the book aside and picked up another. Indeed!

Lying on her bed, she held a book in her hand. Lying on her bed and looking out the window, she could see only the sky and the treetops. A bird flew across the sky and lit up one of the branches of a nearby tree. The bird looked straight at her. Were they laughing at her? She was so wise, she considered herself superior to her husband, Fred, and also to the man, Bruce. As for the man, Bruce, what did she know about him?

She took another book and opened it at random.

I won't say that "it means little," for, on the contrary, knowing the answer was of the utmost importance to us. But in the meantime, and until we know whether the flower is attempting to preserve and perfect the life implanted within it by nature, or whether nature is striving to maintain and improve the flower's level of existence, or, finally, whether chance ultimately rules chance, a multitude of appearances urge us to believe that something equal to our highest thoughts sometimes emanates from a common source.

Thoughts! "Problems sometimes stem from a common source." What did the man of the book mean? What did he write about? Men write books! Do you do it or not? What do you want?

"My dear, books fill the gaps in time." Alina stood up and went down to the garden with a book in her hand.

Perhaps the man Bruce and the others had taken to the city with. Well, that was unlikely. He hadn't said anything about it. Bruce wasn't the type to go to war unless forced to. He was what he was: a man who wandered everywhere, searching for something. Men like that separate themselves too much from ordinary men, and then they feel alone. They're always searching-waiting-for what?

Bruce was working in the garden. That day, he had donned a new blue uniform, the kind worn by workers, and now stood with a garden hose in his hand, watering the plants. The blue of the workers' uniforms was quite attractive. The rough fabric felt firm and pleasant to the touch. He also looked strangely like a boy pretending to be a worker. Fred was pretending to be an ordinary person, a rank-and-file member of society.

Strange world of make-believe. Keep it up. Keep it up.

"Stay afloat. Stay afloat."

If we take a moment to think about it - ?

Alina sat on a bench under a tree on one of the garden terraces, while Bruce stood with a garden hose on the lower terrace. He didn't look at her. She didn't look at him. Really!

What did she know about him?

Suppose she throws him a decisive challenge? But how?

How absurd it is to pretend to read a book. The orchestra in town, silent for a while, began playing again. How long had it been since Fred had gone? How long had it been since the two black women had gone? Did the two black women know, as they walked along the path-prancing-did they know that while they were gone-that day-

Alina's hands were shaking now. She rose from the bench. When she looked up, Bruce was looking straight at her. She paled slightly.

So the challenge had to come from him? She didn't know. The thought made her a little dizzy. Now that the test had arrived, he didn't look frightened, but she was terribly frightened.

Him? Well, no. Perhaps about myself.

She walked with trembling legs along the path to the house, hearing his footsteps on the gravel behind her. They sounded firm and confident. That day, when Fred had climbed the hill, pursued by those same footsteps... She felt it, looking out the window upstairs, and she felt ashamed of Fred. Now she felt ashamed of herself.

As she approached the door of the house and stepped inside, her hand reached out as if to close the door behind her. If she had, he certainly wouldn't have persisted. He would approach the door, and when it closed, he would turn and leave. She would never see him again.

Her hand reached for the doorknob twice, but found nothing. She turned and walked across the room to the stairs leading to her room.

He didn't hesitate at the door. What was about to happen now would happen.

There was nothing she could do about it. She was glad about it.

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CHAPTER THIRTY


THE LINE WAS _ THE LIAR on her bed upstairs in the Grays' house. Her eyes were like those of a sleepy cat. There was no point in thinking about what had happened now. She had wanted it to happen, and she had made it happen. It was obvious that Mrs. Willmott would not come to her. Perhaps she was asleep. The sky was very clear and blue, but the tone was already deepening. Soon the evening would come, the black women would come home, Fred would come home... She would have to meet Fred. As for the black women, it didn't matter. They would think as their nature made them think, and feel as their nature made them feel. You could never tell what a black woman was thinking or feeling. They looked at you like children with their surprisingly soft and innocent eyes. White eyes, white teeth on a dark face - laughter. It was a laughter that didn't hurt too much.

Mrs. Willmott disappeared from sight. No more bad thoughts. Peace of mind and body.

How gentle and strong he was! At least she wasn't mistaken. Would he leave now?

The thought frightened Alina. She didn't want to think about it. Better to think about Fred.

Another thought occurred to her. She actually loved her husband, Fred. Women have more than one way to love. If he came to her now, confused, upset...

He'll probably come back happy. If Bruce disappeared from this place forever, that would make him happy too.

How comfortable the bed was. Why was she so sure she would have a baby now? She imagined her husband, Fred, holding the baby in his arms, and the thought pleased her. After this, she would have more children. There was no reason to leave Fred in the position she had placed him in. If she had to spend the rest of her life living with Fred and having his children, life would be fine. She had been a child, and now she was a woman. Everything in nature had changed. This writer, the man who had written the book she had been trying to read when she went into the garden. It was not said very well. Dry mind, dry thinking.

"A multitude of similarities induces us to believe that something equal to our highest thoughts sometimes comes from a common source."

A sound was heard downstairs. Two black women returned home after the parade and the statue unveiling ceremony. How fortunate that Fred hadn't died in the war! He could have returned home at any moment, he could have gone straight upstairs to his room, then to hers, he could have come to her.

She didn't move and soon heard his footsteps on the stairs. Memories of Bruce's footsteps retreating. Fred's footsteps approaching, perhaps approaching her. She didn't mind. If he came, she would be very happy.

He actually came over, opened the door rather timidly, and when her gaze invited her in, he came over and sat on the edge of the bed.

"Well," he said.

He spoke of the need to prepare for dinner, and then about the parade. Everything had gone very well. He didn't feel shy. Though he didn't say so, she understood that he was pleased with his appearance, marching alongside the workers, an ordinary man of the time. Nothing had affected his sense of the role a man like him should play in the life of his city. Perhaps Bruce's presence would no longer bother him, but he didn't know that yet.

A person is a child, and then becomes a woman, perhaps a mother. Perhaps this is the true function of a person.

Alina invited Fred with her eyes, and he leaned in and kissed her. Her lips were warm. A shudder ran through him. What had happened? What a day this had been for him! If he had Alina, he had truly gotten her! He had always wanted something from her-recognition of his masculinity.

If only he understood this - completely, deeply, as never before...

He picked her up and held her tightly against his body.

Downstairs, the black women were preparing dinner. During the parade downtown, something happened that amused one of them, and she told the other about it.

A shrill black laugh echoed through the house.

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BOOK ELEVEN


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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE


LATE IN _ THAT On an early autumn evening, Fred was climbing Old Harbor Hill, having just signed a contract for a national magazine advertising campaign for "Grey Wheels." In a few weeks, it would begin. Americans read the ads. There was no doubt about it. One day, Kipling wrote to the editor of an American magazine. The editor sent him a copy of the magazine without the ads. "But I want to see the ads. That's the most interesting thing about the magazine," Kipling said.

Within weeks, the Grey Wheel name was splashed across the pages of national magazines. People in California, Iowa, New York, and small towns in New England were reading about Grey Wheels. "Gray Wheels are for the amateurs."

"Samson's Road"

"Road Seagulls." We needed just the right phrase, something that would catch the reader's eye, make them think of Gray Wheels, want Gray Wheels. The Chicago advertisers didn't have the right line yet, but they would get it right. The advertisers were pretty smart. Some ad writers were getting fifteen, twenty, even forty or fifty thousand dollars a year. They wrote down advertising slogans. Let me tell you: this is the country. All Fred had to do was "convey" what the advertisers wrote. They created the designs, wrote out the ads. All he had to do was sit in his office and look at them. Then his brain decided what was good and what wasn't. The sketches were done by young people who had studied art. Sometimes famous artists, like Tom Burnside from Paris, would come to them. When American businessmen started to achieve something, they achieved it.

Fred now kept his car in a garage in the city. If he wanted to go home after an evening at the office, he simply called, and a man would come pick him up.

It was a good night for a walk, though. A man had to keep in shape. As he walked through the business streets of Old Harbor, one of the big shots from the Chicago advertising agency walked with him. (They'd sent their best men here. The Gray Wheel case was important to them.) As he strolled, Fred looked around the business streets of his city. He, more than anyone else, had already helped turn a small river town into half a city, and now he would do much more. Look what happened to Akron after they started making tires, look what happened to Detroit because of Ford and a few others. As a Chicagoan pointed out, every car that ran had to have four wheels. If Ford could do it, why can't you? All Ford did was see an opportunity and take it. Wasn't that just the test of being a good American-if anything?

Fred left the advertising man at his hotel. There were actually four advertising men, but the other three were writers. They walked alone, behind Fred and their boss. "Of course, bigger people like you and me really should pitch them our ideas. It takes a cool head to know what to do and when, and to avoid mistakes. A writer is always a little crazy at heart," the advertising man told Fred, laughing.

However, when they approached the hotel door, Fred stopped and waited for the others. He shook everyone's hands. When a man at the head of a large enterprise becomes insolent and begins to think too highly of himself-

Fred walked up the hill alone. It was a fine night, and he was in no hurry. When you were climbing like that, and you began to get short of breath, you stopped and stood for a while looking down at the city. There was a factory down there. Then the Ohio River flowed on and on. Once you started a big thing, it didn't stop. There are fortunes in this country that can't be hurt. Suppose you have a few bad years and lose two or three hundred thousand. What of it? You sit and wait for your chance. The country is too big and rich for a depression to last very long. What happens is that the little guys get weeded out. The main thing is to become one of the big men and dominate your field. Much of what the Chicago man told Fred had already become part of his own thinking. In the past, he had been Fred Gray of the Gray Wheel Company of Old Harbor, Indiana, but now he was destined to be somebody national.

How wonderful that night had been! At the street corner, where a light was burning, he glanced at his watch. Eleven o'clock. He walked into the darker space between the lights. Looking straight ahead, up the hill, he saw a blue-black sky strewn with bright stars. When he turned to look back, though he couldn't see it, he was aware of the great river below, the river on whose banks he had always lived. It would be something now if he could make the river come alive again, as it had in his grandfather's time. Barges approaching the Gray Wheel docks. Cries of people, clouds of gray smoke from factory chimneys rolling down the river valley.

Fred felt strangely like a happy groom, and a happy groom loves the night.

Nights in the Army-Fred, a private, marching down a road in France. You get a strange feeling of smallness, of insignificance, when you're foolish enough to enlist as a private in the army. And yet, there was that spring day when he marched through the streets of Old Harbor in his private uniform. How the people rejoiced! It's a shame Alina didn't hear it. He must have caused a stir in town that day. Someone said to him, "If you ever want to be mayor, or get into Congress, or even the United States Senate..."

In France, people walking the roads in the dark-men positioned to advance on the enemy-tense nights awaiting death. The young man had to admit to himself that it would have meant something to the town of Old Harbor if he had died in one of the battles he had fought in.

On other nights, after the offensive, the terrible work is finally completed. Many fools who had never fought in a battle always rushed to get there. It's a shame they weren't given the chance to see what it's like to be a fool.

Nights after battles, tense nights too. You might lie down on the ground, trying to relax, every nerve twitching. Lord, if only a man had a lot of real booze right now! How about, say, two liters of good old Kentucky Bourbon whiskey? Don't you think they make anything better than bourbon? A man can drink a lot of that, and it won't hurt him later. You should see some of the old men in our town drinking it since childhood, and some live to be a hundred.

After the battle, despite the tense nerves and fatigue, there was a strong joy. I'm alive! I'm alive! Others are already dead or torn to pieces and lying somewhere in a hospital awaiting death, but I'm alive.

Fred climbed Old Harbor Hill and thought. He walked a block or two, then stopped, stood by a tree, and looked back at the city. There were still plenty of empty lots on the hillside. One day, he stood for a long time by the fence built around a vacant lot. In the houses along the rising streets, almost everyone had already gone to bed.

In France, after the fight, the men stood and looked at each other. "My buddy got his. Now I need to find myself a new buddy.

"Hello, so you're still alive?"

I thought mostly about myself. "My hands are still here, my arms, my eyes, my legs. My body is still whole. I wish I were with a woman right now." Sitting on the ground felt good. It felt good to feel the earth beneath my cheeks.

Fred remembered a starry night when he sat by the side of the road in France with another man he had never seen before. The man was obviously Jewish, a large man with curly hair and a large nose. How Fred knew the man was Jewish, he couldn't say. You could almost always tell. Strange idea, huh, a Jew going to war and fighting for his country? I guess they made him leave. What would have happened if he had protested? "But I'm a Jew. I don't have any country." Doesn't the Bible say a Jew must be a man without a country, or something like that? What a chance! When Fred was a boy, there was only one Jewish family in Old Harbor. The man owned a cheap store by the river, and his sons went to public school. One day, Fred joined several other boys in bullying one of the Jewish boys. They followed him down the street, shouting, "Christicide! Christicide!

It's strange what a man feels after a battle. In France, Fred sat on the side of the road and repeated the vicious words to himself: "Christ-killer, Christ-killer." He didn't say them out loud, because they would hurt the strange man sitting next to him. It's quite funny to imagine hurting such a man, any man, by thinking thoughts that burn and sting like bullets, without saying them out loud.

A Jew, a quiet and sensitive man, sat by the side of the road in France with Fred after a battle in which so many people had died. The dead didn't matter. What mattered was being alive. It was a night like the one he'd climbed the hill in Old Flarborough. The young stranger in France looked at him and smiled a hurt smile. He raised his hand to the blue-black sky, strewn with stars. "I wish I could reach out and take a handful. I wish I could eat them, they look so good," he said. As he said this, a look of intense passion crossed his face. His fingers were clenched. It was as if he wanted to pluck the stars from the sky, eat them, or throw them away in disgust.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO


READY RED _ THOUGHT considered himself a father of children. He kept thinking. Since leaving the war, he had succeeded. If the advertising plans had failed, it wouldn't have broken him. The guy had to take a risk. Alina was supposed to have a child, and now that she was starting to move in this direction, she could have several children. You don't want to raise one child alone. He (or she) needs someone to play with. Every child needs their own start in life. Perhaps not all of them will earn money. You can't say whether a child will be gifted or not.

On the hill stood a house, toward which he slowly climbed. He imagined the garden around the house, filled with the laughter of children, small figures dressed in white running among the flowerbeds, and swings hanging from the lower branches of the large trees. He would build a children's playhouse at the bottom of the garden.

Now, when a man goes home, there's no need to think about what he should say to his wife when he gets there. How Alina has changed since she was expecting!

In fact, she had changed since that summer day when Fred rode in the parade. He came home that day to find her just waking up, and what an awakening! Women are so strange. No one ever knows anything about them. A woman can be one way in the morning, and then in the afternoon she can lie down for a nap and wake up as something completely different, something infinitely better, more beautiful, and sweet-or something worse. That's what makes marriage such an uncertain and risky thing.

That summer evening, after Fred had been at the parade, he and Aline didn't come down for dinner until almost eight o'clock, and they had to cook dinner a second time, but what did they care? If Aline had seen the parade and Fred's role in it, her new attitude might have been more understandable.

He told her all about it, but only after he sensed a change in her. How tender she was! She was again the same as that night in Paris when he proposed marriage. Then, true, he had just returned from the war and was upset by overhearing women talking, the horrors of war suddenly crashing down on him and temporarily depriving him of his command, but later, on that other evening, nothing of the sort happened at all. His participation in the parade had been a great success. He had expected to feel a little awkward, out of place, marching as a private among a crowd of workers and shop assistants, but everyone treated him as if he were a general leading the parade. And only when he appeared did the applause really break out. The richest man in town marching on foot like a private. He had definitely established himself in the city.

And then he came home, and Alina was like he'd never seen her since their wedding. Such tenderness! As if he were sick, wounded, or something.

A conversation, a stream of conversation, flowed from his lips. As if he, Fred Gray, had finally, after a long wait, found himself a wife. She was so gentle and caring, like a mother.

And then - two months later - when she told him she was going to have a baby.

When he and Alina were first married, that day in a hotel room in Paris, as he was packing to hurry home, someone left the room and left them alone. Later, in Old Harbor, in the evenings when he returned home from the factory. She didn't want to go out to the neighbors or go for a drive, so what was she supposed to do? That evening after dinner, he looked at her, and she looked at him. What was there to say? There was nothing to say. Often the minutes dragged on endlessly. In despair, he read the newspaper, and she went out for a walk in the garden in the dark. Almost every night, he went to sleep in his armchair. How could they talk? There was nothing special to say.

But now!

Now Fred could go home and tell Alina everything. He told her about his advertising plans, brought ads home to show her, and recounted the little things that happened during the day. "We've got three big orders from Detroit. We've got a new press in the shop. It's half the size of the one at home. Let me tell you how it works. Do you have a pencil? I'll draw you a picture." Now, as Fred walked up the hill, he often thought only of what to tell her. He even told her stories he'd picked up from the salesmen-as long as they weren't too crude. When they were, he changed them. It was fun to live and have such a woman for a wife.

She listened, smiled, and never seemed to tire of his conversations. There was something in the very air of the house now. Well, it was tenderness. Often she came and hugged him.

Fred climbed the hill, thinking. Flashes of happiness came, followed every now and then by small bursts of anger. The anger was strange. It always concerned the man who had first been an employee at his factory, then a gardener for the Grays, and who had suddenly disappeared. Why did this guy keep coming back to him? He'd vanished just as Alina's change was coming in, gone without warning, without even waiting for her paycheck. That's what they were like, fly-by-nighters, unreliable, good for nothing. A black man, an old man, was now working in the garden. That was better. Everything was better in the Grays' house now.

It was the climb up the hill that made Fred think of that guy. He couldn't help but recall another evening when he'd been climbing the hill with Bruce right behind him. Naturally, someone working outdoors, doing a normal job, would have better wind than someone working indoors.

But I wondered what would have happened if there hadn't been other kinds of men? Fred recalled with satisfaction the words of the Chicago ad man. The men who wrote ads, the men who wrote for newspapers, all such men were really working men of a sort, and when it came down to it, could you rely on them? They couldn't. They had no judgment, that was the reason. No ship ever got anywhere without a pilot. It simply floundered, drifted, and after a while sank. That's the way society worked. Some men were always meant to keep their hands on the wheel, and Fred was one of them. From the very beginning, he was meant to be just that.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE


F RED DID NOT want to think about Bruce. It always made him feel a little uneasy. Why? There are people who get into your mind and never come out. They force their way into places where they're not wanted. You're going about your business, and there they are. Sometimes you meet someone who somehow crosses your path, and then they disappear. You decide to forget them, but you don't.

Fred was in his office at the factory, perhaps dictating letters or strolling the shop floor. Suddenly, everything stopped. You know how it is. On certain days, everything is like that. It seems as if everything in nature has stopped and stands still. On such days, men speak in hushed voices, go about their business more quietly. All reality seems to fall away, and a kind of mystical connection arises with a world beyond the real world in which you move. On such days, the figures of half-forgotten people return. There are men you want to forget more than anything in the world, but you cannot.

Fred was in his office at the factory when someone approached the door. There was a knock. He jumped up. Why, when something like this happened, did he always assume it was Bruce back? What did he care about that man or the man with him? Had a task been set but not yet accomplished? Damn it! When you start thinking such thoughts, you never know where you'll end up. Better to leave all such thoughts alone.

Bruce left, vanished on the very day that a change occurred in Alina. It was the day Fred was at parade, and two servants came down to watch the parade. Alina and Bruce spent the entire day alone on the hill. Later, when Fred returned home, the man had disappeared, and Fred never saw him again. He asked Alina about it several times, but she seemed irritated and didn't want to talk about it. "I don't know where he is," she said. That's all. If a man allowed himself to wander, he might think. After all, Alina had met Fred because he was a soldier. It's strange that she didn't want to see the parade. If a man lets go of his fantasy, he might think.

Fred began to feel angry as he walked up the hill in the dark. He always saw the old worker, Sponge Martin, in the shop now, and whenever he saw him, he thought of Bruce. "I'd like to fire the old bastard," he thought. The man had once shown outright insolence toward Fred's father. Why did Fred keep him around? Well, he was a good worker. It was stupid to think a man was a boss just because he owned a factory. Fred tried to repeat certain things to himself, certain standard phrases he always repeated out loud in the presence of other men, phrases about the obligations of wealth. Suppose he were confronted with the real truth-that he hadn't dared fire the old worker, Sponge Martin, that he hadn't dared fire Bruce when he was working in the garden on the hill, that he hadn't dared to investigate too closely the fact of Bruce's murder. And then, suddenly, he disappeared.

What Fred did was overcome all his doubts, all his questions. If a person were to start this journey, where would they end up? Eventually, they might begin to doubt the origins of their unborn child.

The thought was driving him crazy. "What's wrong with me?" Fred asked himself sharply. He had almost reached the top of the hill. Alina was there, no doubt asleep. He tried to think through his plans for advertising Grey wheels in magazines. Everything was going according to Fred's plan. His wife loved him, the factory was thriving, he was a big man in his town. Now there was work to do. Alina would have a son, and another, and another. He straightened his shoulders and, since he walked slowly and without breath, he walked for a while with his head up and his shoulders thrown back, like a soldier.

Fred had almost reached the top of the hill when he stopped again. There was a large tree at the top of the hill, and he was leaning against it. What a night!

Joy, the joy of life, the possibilities of life-all mixed in my mind with strange fears. It was like being at war again, something like the nights before a battle. Hopes and fears warred within. I don't believe this will happen. I won't believe this will happen.

If Fred ever gets a chance to fix things for good, a war to end war and finally achieve peace.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR


F RED WALKED ACROSS the short stretch of dirt road at the top of the hill and reached his gate. His footsteps made no sound in the dust of the road. In the Gray Garden, Bruce Dudley and Alina sat and talked. Bruce Dudley returned to the Gray house at eight in the evening, expecting Fred to be there. He fell into a kind of despair. Was Alina his woman or did she belong to Fred? He would see Alina and find out if he could. He boldly returned to the house, approached the door-he himself was no longer a servant. In any case, he would see Alina again. There was a moment when we looked into each other's eyes. If it had been the same with her as with him, during those weeks since he had seen her, then the fat would have burned, something would have been decided. After all, men are men, and women are women-life is life. Was he really forced to spend his whole life in hunger because someone would get hurt? And there was Alina. Perhaps she wanted Bruce only for the moment, just a matter of flesh, a woman bored with life, craving a little momentary excitement, and then perhaps she would feel the same as he did. Flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone. Our thoughts merging in the silence of the night. Something like that. Bruce wandered for weeks, thinking-taking jobs from time to time, thinking, thinking, thinking-about Alina. Disturbing thoughts came to him. "I have no money. She'll have to live with me, like Sponge's old woman lives with Sponge." He remembered something that existed between Sponge and his old woman, an old salty knowledge of each other. A man and a woman on a sawdust pile under a summer moon. Fishing lines out. A soft night, a river flowing quietly in the darkness, youth gone, old age coming, two immoral, unchristian people lying on a sawdust pile and enjoying the moment, enjoying each other, being part of the night, the star-strewn sky, the earth. Many men and women lie together all their lives, hungry apart. Bruce did the same with Bernice, and then ended the relationship. To stay here would mean betraying both himself and Bernice day after day. Had Alina done just that to her husband and did she know? Would she be as glad as he was to be able to end it? Would her heart leap with joy, when would she see him again? He thought he would find out when he came to her door again.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE


And SUCH A BRUSH _ _ came that evening and found Aline shocked, frightened, and infinitely happy. She took him into the house, touched his coat sleeve with her fingers, laughed, cried a little, told him about the baby, his baby, who would be born in a few months. In the kitchen of the house, two black women exchanged glances and laughed. When a black woman wants to live with another man, she does so. Black men and women "make peace" with each other. Often, they remain "occupied" for the rest of their lives. White women provide black women with endless hours of entertainment.

Alina and Bruce went out into the garden. Standing in the darkness, saying nothing, the two black women-it was their day off-walked down the path, laughing. What were they laughing about? Alina and Bruce returned to the house. They were gripped by a feverish excitement. Alina laughed and cried: "I thought it wasn't a big deal to you. I thought it was just a passing thing with you. I'm so sorry." They spoke little. The fact that Alina would go with Bruce was somehow, in some strange, silent way, taken for granted. Bruce sighed deeply and then accepted the fact. "Oh, my God, I have to work now. I have to be sure." Every thought Bruce had was also racing through Alina's head. After Bruce had been with her for half an hour, Alina entered the house and hastily packed two bags, which she carried out of the house and left in the garden. In her mind, in Bruce's mind, there had been one figure all evening-Fred. They were simply waiting for him-for his arrival. What would happen then? They didn't discuss it. Whatever would happen, would happen. They tried to make tentative plans-some kind of life together. "I'd be a fool if I said I didn't need money. I need it terribly, but what can I do? I need you more," Alina said. It seemed to her that finally she, too, was about to become something definite. "In fact, I've become another Esther, living here with Fred. One day, Esther faced a test, and she didn't dare take it. She became who she is," Alina thought. She didn't dare think about Fred, about what she had done to him, and what she was going to do. She would wait until he climbed the hill to the house.

Fred reached the garden gate before he heard voices: a woman's voice, Alina's, and then a man's. As he climbed the hill, his thoughts were so disturbing that he was already a little confused. All evening, despite the feeling of triumph and well-being he had received from talking with the Chicago advertising people, something had been threatening him. For him, the night was supposed to be the beginning and the end. A person finds his place in life, everything is arranged, everything is going well, the unpleasant things of the past are forgotten, the future is rosy-and then-what a person wants is to be left alone. If only life flowed straight, like a river.

I'm building myself a house, slowly, a house I can live in.

Evening, my house lies in ruins, Weeds and vines have grown within the broken walls.

Fred silently entered his garden and stopped by the tree where, another evening, Alina had stood silently and looked at Bruce. It was the first time Bruce had climbed the hill.

Had Bruce come again? He had. Fred knew he couldn't see anything in the darkness yet. He knew everything, everything. Deep down, he'd known it all along. A terrifying thought came to him. Ever since that day in France when he'd married Alina, he'd been waiting for something terrible to happen to him, and now it was going to happen. When he'd asked Alina to marry him that evening in Paris, he'd been sitting with her behind Notre Dame Cathedral. Angels, white, pure women, descending from the roof of the cathedral into the sky. They'd just come from that other woman, the hysterical one, the woman who cursed herself for pretending, for her deception in life. And all the time, Fred had wanted women to cheat, wanted his wife, Alina, to cheat if necessary. It's not what you do that matters. You do what you can. What matters is what you seem to do, what others think of you-that's all. "I try to be a civilized person.

Help me, woman! We men are what we are, what we should be. White, pure women, descending from the cathedral roof into the sky. Help us believe this. We, people of a later time, are not people of antiquity. We cannot accept Venus. Leave us Virgo. We must gain something, or we perish."

Ever since he married Alina, Fred had been waiting for a certain hour, dreading its arrival, pushing away thoughts of its departure. Now it had arrived. Suppose, at any moment last year, Alina had asked him, "Do you love me?" Suppose he had to ask Alina that question. What a terrible question! What did it mean? What was love? Deep down, Fred was modest. His faith in himself, in his ability to awaken love, was weak and wavering. He was an American. For him, a woman meant both too much and too little. Now he was shaking with fear. Now all the vague fears he had been harboring since that day in Paris when he had managed to fly away from Paris, leaving Alina behind, were about to become reality. He had no doubt about who was with Alina. A man and a woman were sitting on a bench somewhere near him. He heard their voices clearly. They were waiting for him to come and tell him something, something terrible.

That day when he walked down the hill to the parade ground, and the servants followed suit... After that day, a change came over Aline, and he was foolish enough to think it was because she had begun to love and admire him-her husband. "I've been a fool, a fool." Fred's thoughts made him feel unwell. That day when he went to the parade ground, when the whole town proclaimed him the most important man in town, Aline stayed home. That day, she was busy getting what she wanted, what she had always wanted-a lover. For a moment, Fred faced everything: the possibility of losing Aline, what it would mean to him. What a shame, Gray of Old Harbor-his wife had run off with a common laborer-men turned to look at him on the street, in the office-Harcourt-afraid to talk about it, afraid not to talk about it.

The women also look at him. The women, being bolder, express sympathy.

Fred stood leaning against the tree. In a moment, something would take control of his body. Would it be anger or fear? How did he know that the terrible things he was just telling himself were true? Well, he knew. He knew everything. Alina had never loved him, he hadn't been able to awaken love in her. Why? Hadn't he been brave enough? He would have been brave. Perhaps it wasn't too late.

He became furious. What a trick! Without a doubt, the man Bruce, whom he thought was gone from his life forever, never left Old Harbor at all. On that very day, when he was in the city on parade, when he was fulfilling his duty as a citizen and soldier, when they became lovers, a plan was hatched. The man hid out of sight, stayed out of sight, and then when Fred was minding his own business, when he was working in the factory and making money for her, this guy was crawling around. All those weeks when he was so happy and proud, thinking that he had won Alina for himself, she changed her behavior towards him only because she was secretly dating another man, her lover. The very child whose promised arrival had filled him so with pride was not then his child. All the servants in his house were blacks. Such people! The Negro has no sense of pride or morality. "Can't trust a nigga." It's entirely possible that Alina was holding onto Bruce's man. Women in Europe did things like that. They married someone, a hardworking, upstanding citizen, just like him, who wore himself out, aged prematurely, earning money for his woman, buying her beautiful clothes, a lovely house to live in, and then? What did she do? She hid another man, younger, stronger, and more handsome-her lover.

Hadn't Fred found Alina in France? Well, she was an American girl. He found her in France, in such a place, in the presence of such people... He vividly remembered an evening in Rose Frank's Paris apartment, a woman talking-such conversations-the tension in the air of the room-men and women sitting-women smoking cigarettes-words from women's lips-such words. Another woman-also an American-was at some performance called the Quatz Arts Ball. What was that? A place, obviously, where an ugly sensuality had broken free.

And Brad thought - Alina -

One moment Fred felt a cold, furious rage, and the next he felt so weak that he thought he wouldn't be able to stand upright any longer.

A sharp, hurtful memory came back to him. Another evening, a few weeks ago, Fred and Alina were sitting in the garden. The night was very dark, and he was happy. He was talking to Alina about something, probably telling her about his plans for the factory, and she sat for a long time, as if not listening.

And then she told him something. "I'm having a baby," she said calmly, calmly, just like that. Sometimes Alina could drive you crazy.

At a time when the woman you married tells you something like this - first child...

The point is to pick her up and hug her tenderly. She should cry a little, be scared and happy all at the same time. A few tears would be the most natural thing in the world.

And Alina told him so calmly and quietly that at the moment he was unable to say anything. He simply sat and looked at her. The garden was dark, and her face was just a white oval in the darkness. She looked like a stone woman. And then, at that moment, while he was looking at her and while a strange feeling of inability to speak came over him, a man entered the garden.

Both Alina and Fred jumped to their feet. They stood together for a moment, frightened, frightened-of what? Were they both thinking the same thing? Now Fred knew it was so. They both thought Bruce had arrived. That was all. Fred stood, trembling. Alina stood, trembling. Nothing had happened. A man from one of the city's hotels had gone out for an evening stroll and, having lost his way, had wandered into the garden. He stood for a while with Fred and Alina, talking about the city, the beauty of the garden, and the night. Both had recovered. When the man left, the time for a tender word to Alina had passed. The news of the imminent birth of a son sounded like a comment on the weather.

- thought Fred, trying to suppress his thoughts... Perhaps-after all, the thoughts he was having now could be completely wrong. It was entirely possible that that evening, when he was afraid, he was afraid of nothing, not even a shadow. On a bench next to him, somewhere in the garden, a man and a woman were still talking. A few quiet words, and then a long silence. There was a sense of anticipation-no doubt of himself, of his arrival. Fred was in a flood of thoughts, of horrors-a thirst for murder strangely mingled with the desire to flee, to escape.

He began to succumb to temptation. If Alina allowed her lover to approach her so boldly, she wouldn't be too afraid of being exposed. He had to be very careful. The goal wasn't to get to know her. She wanted to challenge him. If he boldly approached these two people and found what he so feared, then everyone would have to come out at once. He would be forced to demand an explanation.

He felt like he was demanding an explanation, an effort to keep his voice even. It came-from Alina. "I waited only to make sure. The child you thought was going to be yours is not yours. That day, when you went into town to show off, I found my beloved. He's here with me now."

If something like that had happened, what would Fred have done? What does a man do in those circumstances? Well, he killed a man. But that didn't solve anything. You got into a bad situation and made it worse. You should have avoided making a scene. Maybe this was all a mistake. Fred was now more afraid of Aline than of Bruce.

He began to creep quietly along the gravel path lined with rose bushes. By leaning forward and moving very carefully, he could reach the house unnoticed and unheard. What would he do then?

He crept upstairs to his room. Alina might have acted foolishly, but she couldn't be a complete idiot. He had money, status, he could provide her with everything she wanted-her life was safe. If she were a little reckless, she would soon have it all figured out. When Fred was almost home, a plan occurred to him, but he didn't dare return along the path. However, when the man who was now with Alina left, he would creep out of the house again and re-enter noisily. She would think he knew nothing. In fact, he knew nothing definite. While making love to this man, Alina forgot about the passage of time. She never intended to be so bold as to be discovered.

If she were discovered, if she knew that he knew, there would have to be an explanation, a scandal - The Old Harbor Grays - Fred Gray's wife - Alina possibly leaving with another man - the man an ordinary man, a simple factory worker, a gardener.

Fred suddenly became very forgiving. Alina was just a stupid child. If he pushed her into a corner, it could ruin her life. His time would come eventually.

And now he was furious with Bruce. "I'll catch him!" In the library at home, in a desk drawer, lay a loaded revolver. Once, when he was in the army, he had shot a man. "I'll wait. My time will come."

Pride filled Fred, and he straightened up on the path. He wouldn't sneak up on his own door like a thief. Standing upright now, he took two or three steps, heading toward the house, not the source of the voices. Despite his boldness, he placed his feet very carefully on the gravel path. It would truly be very comforting if he could bask in the feeling of courage without being discovered.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX


HOWEVER, IT WAS USELESS. Fred's foot struck a round stone, he stumbled, and was forced to take a quick step to keep from falling. Alina's voice rang out. "Fred," she said, and then there was silence, a very meaningful silence, as Fred stood trembling on the path. The man and woman rose from the bench and approached him, and a painful feeling of loss came over him. He was right. The man with Alina was Bruce, the gardener. As they approached, the three stood silently for a few moments. Was it anger or fear that had taken hold of Fred? Bruce had nothing to say. The issue that needed to be resolved was between Alina and her husband. If Fred were to do something cruel-shoot, for example-he would necessarily become a direct participant in the scene. He was an actor standing aside while the other two actors performed their roles. Well, it was fear that took hold of Fred. He was terribly afraid not of the man Bruce, but of the woman Alina.

He had almost reached the house when he was discovered, but Alina and Bruce, having approached him along the upper terrace, now stood between him and the house. Fred felt like a soldier about to go into battle.

There was the same feeling of emptiness, of utter loneliness in some strangely empty place. As you prepare for battle, you suddenly lose all connection with life. You are preoccupied with death. Death concerns only you, and the past is a fading shadow. There is no future. You are unloved. You love no one. The sky above, the earth still beneath your feet, your comrades marching beside you, beside the road you walk along with several hundred other men - all just like you, empty cars - like things - the trees grow, but the sky, the earth, the trees have nothing to do with you. Your comrades have nothing to do with you now. You are a disjointed creature floating in space, about to be killed, about to try to escape death and kill others. Fred knew well the feeling he was experiencing now; And the fact that he would receive her again after the war was over, after these months of peaceful life with Alina, in his own garden, at the door of his own home, filled him with the same horror. In battle, you are not afraid. Courage or cowardice have nothing to do with it. You are there. Bullets will fly around you. You will be hit, or you will run.

Alina no longer belonged to Fred. She had become the enemy. In a moment, she would begin to speak words. Words were bullets. They hit you or they missed, and you ran. Although for weeks Fred had fought the conviction that something had happened between Alina and Bruce, he no longer had to continue that struggle. Now he had to find out the truth. Now, as in a battle, he would either be wounded or he would run. Well, he had been in battles before. He was lucky, he had managed to avoid battles. Alina standing before him, the house dimly visible over her shoulder, the sky above his head, the ground beneath his feet-none of it belonged to him now. He remembered something-a young stranger by the road in France, a young Jewish man who wanted to pluck the stars from the sky and eat them. Fred knew what the young man had meant. He had meant that he wanted to become part of things again, that he wanted things to become part of him.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN


THE LINE WAS SPEAKING. The words came slowly and painfully from her lips. He couldn't see her lips. Her face was a white oval in the darkness. She looked like a stone woman standing before him. She had discovered that she loved another man, and he had come for her. When she and Fred were in France, she had been a girl and knew nothing. She had thought of marriage as just that-two people living together. Although she had done something completely unforgivable to Fred, nothing like that had been intended. She thought that even after she had found her man and after they had become lovers, she had tried... Well, she thought she could still continue to love Fred while living with him. A woman, like a man, needs time to grow up. We know so little about ourselves. She had kept lying to herself, but now the man she loved was back, and she couldn't keep lying to him or to Fred. Continuing to live with Fred would be a lie. Not going with my lover would be a lie.

"The child I'm expecting is not your child, Fred."

Fred said nothing. What was there to say? When you're in battle, getting hit by bullets or running away, you're alive, you're enjoying life. A heavy silence fell. The seconds dragged slowly and painfully. The battle, once begun, seemed never to end. Fred thought, he believed, that when he returned home to America, when he married Alina, the war would end. "A war to end war."

Fred wanted to fall down on the path and cover his face with his hands. He wanted to cry. When you're in pain, that's what you do. You scream. He wanted Alina to shut up and not say anything else. What terrible things words could be. "No! Stop! Don't say another word," he wanted to beg her.

"I can't do anything about it, Fred. We're getting ready now. We were just waiting to tell you," Alina said.

And now the words came to Fred. How humiliating! He begged her. "This is all wrong. Don"t go, Alina! Stay here! Give me time! Give me a chance! Don"t go!" Fred"s words were like shooting at the enemy in battle. You fired in the hope that someone would get hurt. That"s all. The enemy was trying to do something terrible to you, and you were trying to do something terrible to the enemy.

Fred kept repeating the same two or three words over and over. It was like firing a rifle in battle-shot, then shot again. "Don"t do it! You can"t! Don"t do it! You can"t!" He could feel her pain. That was good. He felt almost joyful at the thought of Alina being hurt. He almost didn"t notice the man, Bruce, who stepped back a little, leaving the man and wife facing each other. Alina put her hand on Fred"s shoulder. His whole body was tense.

And now the two of them, Alina and Bruce, were walking away down the path where he stood. Alina wrapped her arms around Fred's neck and would have kissed him, but he pulled back a little, his body tensing, and the man and woman walked past him while he stood there. He was letting go of her. He had done nothing. It was obvious that preparations had already been made. The man, Bruce, was carrying two heavy bags. Was a car waiting for them somewhere? Where were they going? They had reached the gate and were emerging from the garden onto the road when he cried out again. "Don't do this! You can't! Don't do this!" he exclaimed.

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BOOK TWELVE


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CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT


LINE AND B RUS - gone. For better or worse, a new life had begun for them. Experimenting with life and love, they'd been caught. Now a new chapter would begin for them. They'd have to face new challenges, a new way of life. Having tried life with one woman and failed, Bruce would have to try again, Aline would have to try again. What curious experimental hours lay ahead: Bruce might be a laborer, and Aline had no money to spend freely, without luxuries. Was what they'd done worth it? In any case, they'd done it; they'd taken a step from which they couldn't turn back.

As always happens with men and women, Bruce was a little afraid-half-frightened, half-affectionate-and Aline's thoughts took a practical turn. After all, she was an only child. Her father would be furious for a while, but eventually he would have to give in. The baby, when it arrived, would arouse the male sentimentality of both Fred and her father. Bernice, Bruce's wife, might be more difficult to handle. And then there was the matter of some money. There was no chance she would ever get it again. A new marriage would follow soon.

She continued to touch Bruce's hand, and because of Fred, standing there in the darkness, now alone, she cried quietly. It was strange that he, who had desired her so much and now that he had her, almost immediately began to think of something else. He wanted to find the right woman, a woman he could actually marry, but that was only half the battle. He also wanted to find the right job. Alina leaving Fred was inevitable, as was his leaving Bernice. That was her problem, but he still had his own.

As they walked through the gate, out of the garden onto the road, Fred stood still for a moment, frozen and motionless, then ran down the steps to watch them go. His body still seemed frozen with fear and terror. Of what? Of everything that had come upon him at once, without warning. Well, something inside was trying to warn him. "Damn this!" The man from Chicago, whom he had just left at the door of the downtown hotel, his words. "There are certain people who can take a position so powerful that they cannot be touched. Nothing can happen to them." He meant money, of course. "Nothing can happen. Nothing can happen." The words rang in Fred's ears. How he hated that man from Chicago. In a moment, Aline, who had been walking beside her lover along the short stretch of road at the top of the hill, would turn back. Fred and Aline would begin a new life together. That was how it would happen. That was how it was supposed to happen. His thoughts returned to money. If Alina left with Bruce, she wouldn't have any money. Ha!

Bruce and Alina didn't take one of the two roads into town, but took a little-used path that led steeply down the hillside to the river road below. This was the path Bruce used to take on Sundays to have lunch with Sponge Martin and his wife. The path was steep and overgrown with weeds and brush. Bruce walked ahead, carrying two bags, and Alina followed without looking back. She was crying, but Fred didn't know. First her body disappeared, then her shoulders, and finally her head. She seemed to sink into the earth, plunging into darkness. Perhaps she didn't dare look back. If she did, she might lose her courage. Lot's wife-a pillar of salt. Fred wanted to scream at the top of his lungs...

- Look, Alina! Look!" He said nothing.

The chosen road was used only by workers and servants who worked in the houses on the hill. It descended steeply to the old road that ran alongside the river, and Fred remembered walking down it with other boys as a boy. Sponge Martin had lived there, in an old brick house that had once been part of the inn's stables, when the road was the only one leading to the small river town.

"It"s all a lie. She"ll be back. She knows there"ll be talk if she"s not here in the morning. She wouldn"t dare. She"ll be going back to the hill now. I"ll take her back, but from now on, life in our house will be a little different. I"ll be the boss here. I"ll tell her what she can and can"t do. No more nonsense."

Both men had completely disappeared. How quiet the night! Fred moved heavily toward the house and went inside. He pressed a button, and the lower part of the house lit up. How strange his house seemed, the room in which he stood. There was a large armchair there, where he usually sat in the evenings and read the evening paper while Alina walked in the garden. In his youth, Fred had played baseball and never lost his interest in the sport. In the summer evenings, he always watched the various teams in the league. Would the Giants win the pennant again? Quite automatically, he picked up the evening paper and tossed it.

Fred sat down in a chair, his head in his hands, but quickly rose. He remembered that there was a loaded revolver in a drawer in the small room on the first floor of the house, called the library, and he went and got it out and, standing in the lighted room, held it in his hand. His hands. He stared at it dully. Minutes passed. The house seemed unbearable to him, and he went out into the garden again and sat on the bench where he had sat with Alina that time she told him about the expected birth of a child-a child that was not his.

"A man who has been a soldier, a man who is truly a man, a man who deserves the respect of his fellow men, will not sit quietly and let another man get away with his woman."

Fred said the words to himself, as if talking to a child, telling him what to do. Then he re-entered the house. Well, he was a man of action, a doer. Now it was time to do something. Now he was starting to get angry, but he wasn't sure if he was angry at Bruce, at Aline, or at himself. With something like a conscious effort, he directed his anger at Bruce. He was a man. Fred tried to centralize his feelings. His anger wouldn't pool. He was angry at the advertising agent from Chicago he'd been with an hour ago, at the servants in his house, at the man Sponge Martin, who was Bruce's friend Dudley. "I'm not going to get involved in this advertising scheme at all," he told himself. For a moment, he wished one of his house's black servants would walk into the room. He would raise a revolver and shoot. Someone would be killed. His manhood would assert itself. Blacks were like that! "They have no moral sense." For just a moment he was tempted to press the barrel of the revolver to his own head and shoot, but then the temptation quickly passed.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE


We Go Softly - And Silently leaving the house and leaving the light on, Fred hurried along the path to the garden gate and out onto the road. Now he was determined to find this man Bruce and kill him. His hand gripped the handle of his revolver, he ran along the road and began to hastily descend the steep path to the lower road. From time to time he fell. The path was very steep and uncertain. How did Aline and Bruce manage to get down? Perhaps they were somewhere below. He would shoot Bruce, and then Aline would return. Everything would be as it was before Bruce appeared and destroyed himself and Aline. If only Fred, having become the owner of the Gray Wheels factory, had only fired that old scoundrel, Sponge Martin.

He still clung to the thought that at any moment he might encounter Alina, struggling along the path. From time to time, he stopped to listen. Descending to the lower road, he stood for a few minutes. Nearby was a place where the current came close to the bank and part of the old river road had been eaten away. Someone had tried to stop the hungry river gnawing at the earth by dumping cartloads of trash, tree brandy, and a few tree trunks. What a foolish idea-that a river like the Ohio could be so easily diverted from its purpose. However, someone could be hiding in the brush pile. Fred approached him. The river made a quiet noise in that very spot. Somewhere far away, upriver or downriver, the faint sound of a steamboat whistle could be heard. It sounded like a cough in a dark house at night.

Fred had decided to kill Bruce. That would be relevant now, wouldn't it? Once it was done, no more words needed to be spoken. No more terrible words from Alina's mouth. "The child I'm expecting isn't your child." What an idea! "She can't... she can't be that stupid."

He ran along the river road toward town. A thought occurred to him. Perhaps Bruce and Alina had gone to Sponge Martin's house, and he would find them there. There was some kind of conspiracy. This man, Sponge Martin, had always hated the Grays. When Fred was a boy, in Sponge Martin's store... Well, insults had been hurled at Fred's father. "If you try, I'll beat you. This is my store. Neither you nor anyone else will rush me into doing idle work." Such was the man, a lowly worker in a town where Fred's father was the dominant citizen.

Fred kept stumbling as he ran, but he kept a firm grip on the butt of his revolver. Reaching the Martins' house and finding it dark, he boldly approached and began pounding on the door with the butt of his Silence revolver. Fred grew angry again and, stepping out onto the road, fired the revolver, not at the house, but into the silent, dark river. What an idea! After the shot, everything was quiet. The sound of the shot woke no one. The river flowed in the darkness. He waited. Somewhere in the distance, a scream was heard.

He walked back along the road, now weak and tired. He wanted to sleep. Well, Alina was like a mother to him. When he was disappointed or upset, he could talk to her. Lately, she was becoming more and more like a mother. Could a mother abandon a child like that? He was once again sure that Alina would return. When he returned to the place where the path led up the hillside, she would be waiting. Perhaps it was true that she loved another man, but there could be more than one love. Let it go. He wanted peace now. Perhaps she got something from him that Fred could not give, but in the end, she was only gone for a while. The man had just left the country. When he left, he had two bags. Alina had simply walked down the path on the hillside to say goodbye to him. A lovers' separation, right? A married woman must fulfill her duties. All old-fashioned women were like that. Alina was not a new woman. She came from good people. Her father was a man to be respected.

Fred was almost cheerful again, but when he reached the brush pile at the foot of the trail and found no one there, he gave in to sadness again. Sitting down on a log in the darkness, he dropped the revolver to the ground at his feet and covered his face with his hands. He sat there for a long time and cried, like a child might.

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CHAPTER FORTY


T H E NIGHT CONTINUED It was very dark and quiet. Fred climbed the steep hill and found himself in his house. Once up and into his room, he undressed, completely automatically, in the dark. Then he went to bed.

He lay exhausted in bed. Minutes passed. In the distance, he heard footsteps, then voices.

Were they back now, Alina and her man, did they want to torment him again?

If only she could come back now! She'd see who's boss in the Grays' house.

If she hadn't come, I would have had to explain something.

He would say that she went to Chicago.

"She went to Chicago." "She went to Chicago." He whispered the words out loud.

The voices on the road in front of the house belonged to two black women. They had returned from an evening on the town and brought two black men with them.

"She went to Chicago. - She went to Chicago.

Eventually, people will have to stop asking questions. Fred Gray was a strong man in Old Harbor. He will continue to implement his advertising plans, growing stronger and stronger.

This Bruce! Shoes are twenty to thirty dollars a pair. Ha!

Fred wanted to laugh. He tried, but he couldn't. Those absurd words kept ringing in his ears. "She went to Chicago." He heard himself saying it to Harcourt and others, smiling as he did so.

A brave man. What a man does is smile.

When a person comes out of something, they feel a sense of relief. In war, in battle, when they're wounded-a sense of relief. Now Fred will no longer have to play a role, be a man for someone's woman. That will depend on Bruce.

In war, when you're wounded, there's a strange sense of relief. "It's done. Now get well."

"She's gone to Chicago." That Bruce! Shoes for twenty to thirty dollars a pair. A laborer, a gardener. Ho, ho! Why couldn't Fred laugh? He kept trying, but he failed. On the road in front of the house, one of the black women was now laughing. There was a shuffling sound. The older black woman tried to calm the younger, black woman, but she continued to laugh with a shrill black laugh. "I knew it, I knew it, I knew it all along," she cried, and the shrill, shrill laughter swept through the garden and reached the room where Fred sat upright and motionless in bed.

END

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Tar: A Midwestern Childhood


The fictional memoir Tar (1926) was originally published by Boni & Liveright and has since been reprinted several times, including a critical edition in 1969. The book is composed of episodes from the childhood of Edgar Moorehead (nicknamed Tar-heel, or Tar, because of his father's North Carolina origins). The novel's fictional setting is similar to Camden, Ohio, Anderson's birthplace, despite the fact that he only spent his first year there. An episode from the book later appeared in a revised form as the short story "Death in the Woods" (1933).

According to Sherwood Anderson scholar Ray Lewis White, it was in 1919 that the author first mentioned in a letter to his then-publisher, B.W. Huebsch, that he was interested in compiling a series of short stories based on "...country life on the outskirts of a small Midwestern town." However, nothing came of this idea until around February 1925, when the popular monthly magazine The Woman's Home Companion expressed interest in publishing such a series. Over the course of that year, including a summer during which Anderson lived with his family in Troutdale, Virginia, where he wrote in a log cabin, the draft of Small: A Midwestern Childhood was written. Although work on the book progressed more slowly than expected during the summer, Anderson reported to his agent, Otto Liveright, in September 1925 that approximately two-thirds of the book was completed. This was enough for parts of Woman's Home Companion to be sent out in February 1926 and published in due course between June 1926 and January 1927. Anderson then completed the rest of the book, which was published in November 1926.

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Cover of the first edition

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CONTENT

PREFACE

PART I

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

PART II

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

PART III

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

PART IV

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

PART V

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII


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A modern view of the small town of Troutdale, Virginia, where Anderson wrote part of the book.

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Anderson, close to publication time

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TO

ELIZABETH ANDERSON

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PREFACE


I HAVE a confession to make. I am a storyteller, beginning to tell a tale, and I cannot be expected to tell the truth. Truth is impossible for me. It is like goodness: something to be strived for but never achieved. A year or two ago, I decided to try to tell the story of my childhood. Great, I set to work. What work! I boldly took on the task, but soon reached an impasse. Like every other man and woman in the world, I always thought the story of my own childhood would be fascinating [very interesting].

I started writing. For a day or two, everything went well. I sat at the table and wrote something. I, Sherwood Anderson, an American, did such and such in my youth. Well, I played ball, stole apples from orchards, soon, being a man, I began to think about women, sometimes I was afraid at night in the dark. What nonsense to talk about all this. I felt ashamed.

And yet, I wanted something I didn't have to be ashamed of. Childhood is something wonderful. Manhood and refinement are worth striving for, but innocence is a little sweeter. Perhaps it would be wiser to remain innocent, but that's impossible. I wish it were possible.

In a New Orleans restaurant, I overheard a man explaining the fate of crabs. "There are two good kinds," he said. "Basters are so young they're sweet. Soft-shell crabs have the sweetness of age and weakness."

It's my weakness to talk about my youth; perhaps it's a sign of aging, but I'm ashamed. There's a reason for my shame. Any description of myself is selfish. However, there's another reason.

I am a man with living brothers, and they are strong and, dare I say it, ruthless fellows. Suppose I like having a certain type of father or mother. It is the [single] great privilege of a writer-life can be continually recreated in the field of fantasy. But my brothers, respectable men, may have very different ideas about how these worthy people, my parents and their parents, should be presented to the world. We modern writers have a reputation for courage, too courageous for most people, but none of us likes to be knocked down or stabbed in the street by former friends or our relatives. We are not prize-fighters, nor are [horse-wrestlers, most of us]. A rather poor people, to tell the truth. Caesar was quite right in hating scribblers.

Now it turns out that my friends and family have largely abandoned me. I constantly write about myself and draw them in, re-creating it to my taste, and they've been very patient. It's truly terrible to have a writer in the family. Avoid it if you can. If you have a son who's prone to this, hurry to immerse him in industrial life. If he becomes a writer, he might give you away.

You see, if I were to write about my childhood, I'd have to ask myself how much longer these people could endure. God knows what I might do to them when I'm gone.

I kept writing and crying. Ugh! My progress was so woefully slow. I couldn't create a ton of little Lord Fauntleroys growing up in a Midwestern American town. If I made myself too good, I knew it wouldn't work, and if I made myself too bad (and that was tempting), no one would believe me. Bad people, when you get close to them, turn out to be such simpletons.

"Where is the Truth?" I asked myself, "Oh, Truth, where are you? Where have you hidden yourself?" I looked under the table, under the bed, got out, and scanned the road. I've always looked for this scoundrel, but I can never find him. Where does he keep himself?

"Where is the Truth?" What an unsatisfactory question to be constantly asked if you are a storyteller.

Let me explain if I can.

A narrator, as you all know, lives in his own world. It's one thing to see him walking down the street, going to church, a friend's house, or a restaurant, and quite another when he sits down to write. While he's writing, nothing happens except his imagination, and his imagination is always at work. Indeed, you should never trust such a person. Don't use him as a witness in a trial for your life-or for money-and be very careful never to believe anything he says, under any circumstances.

Let's take me, for example. Let's say I'm walking down a country road, and a man runs across a nearby field. This happened once, and what a story I made up about it.

I see a man running. Nothing else really happens. He runs across a field and disappears over a hill, but now keep an eye out for me. Later, I may tell you a story about this man. Leave it to me to invent a story about why this man ran away, and to believe my own story after it's written.

The man lived in a house just over the hill. Of course there was a house there. I created it. I must know. Why, I could draw you a house, even though I've never seen one. He lived in a house over the hill, and something exciting and thrilling had just happened in the house.

I am telling you the story of what happened with the most serious face in the world, believe this story yourself, at least while I am telling it.

You see how it happens. When I was a kid, this ability irritated me. It constantly got me into hot water. Everyone thought I was a bit of a liar, and of course I was. I walked about ten yards past the house and stopped behind an apple tree. There was a gentle hill there, and near the top of the hill were some bushes. A cow came out of the bushes, probably nibbled some grass, and then returned to the bushes. It was flying time, and I suppose the bushes were a comfort to her.

I made up a story about a cow. She became a bear to me. There was a circus in the neighboring town, and the bear escaped. I heard my father say he'd read an account of the escape in the newspapers. I gave my story some credibility, and the strangest thing is that after thinking it over, I actually believed it. I think all kids do tricks like that. It worked so well that I had local men with guns slung over their shoulders comb the woods for two or three days, and all the neighborhood children shared my fear and excitement.

[A literary triumph-and I'm so young.] All fairy tales, strictly speaking, are nothing but lies. That's what people can't understand. Telling the truth is too difficult. I gave up on that attempt long ago.

But when it came to telling the story of my own childhood-well, this time, I told myself, I'll stick to the line. An old pit I'd fallen into often before I fell again. I boldly took on my task. I pursued the Truth in my memory, like a dog chasing a rabbit through dense bushes. What labor, what sweat, poured onto the sheets of paper before me. "Telling honestly," I told myself, "means being good, and this time I'll be good. I'll prove how impeccable my character is. People who have always known me, and who perhaps had too many reasons in the past to doubt my word, will now be surprised and delighted."

I dreamed people gave me a new name. As I walked down the street, people whispered to each other. "Here comes Honest Sherwood." Perhaps they would insist on electing me to Congress or sending me as an ambassador to some foreign country. How happy all my relatives would be.

"He finally gives us all good character. He made us respectable people.

As for the residents of my hometown or towns, they would also be happy. Telegrams will be received, meetings will be held. Perhaps an organization will be created to raise standards of citizenship, of which I will be elected president.

I've always wanted to be the president of something. What a wonderful dream.

Alas, it won't work. I wrote one sentence, ten, a hundred pages. They had to be torn up. The truth disappeared into a thicket so dense it was impossible to penetrate.

Like everyone else in the world, I had recreated my childhood so thoroughly in my imagination that the Truth was completely lost.

And now a confession. I love confessions. I don't remember the face of my [own mother, my] own father. My wife is in the next room as I sit and write, but I don't remember what she looks like.

My wife is an idea for me, my mother, my sons, my friends are ideas.

My fantasy is a wall between me and the Truth. There is a world of imagination into which I constantly immerse myself and from which I rarely emerge completely. I want every day to be thrillingly interesting and exciting, and if it isn't, I try to make it so with my fantasy. If you, a stranger, come to me, there's a chance that for a moment I'll see you as you really are, but in another moment you'll be lost. You say something that makes me think, and I leave. Tonight, perhaps I'll dream of you. We'll have wonderful conversations. My fantasy will cast you into strange, noble, and perhaps even vile situations. Now I have no doubts. You are my rabbit, and I am the hound pursuing you. Even your physical being is transformed by the onslaught of my fantasy.

And here let me say something about the writer's responsibility for the characters he creates. We writers always get out of this by abdicating responsibility. We deny responsibility for our dreams. How absurd. How often, for example, have I dreamed of making love to some woman who didn't really want me. Why deny responsibility for such a dream? I do it because I enjoy it [╝-even though I don't do it consciously. It seems we writers, too, must take responsibility for the unconscious.]

Am I to blame? I'm built that way. I'm like everyone else. You're more like me than you'd like to admit. After all, it was partly your fault. Why did you capture my imagination? Dear reader, I'm sure if you came to me, my imagination would be instantly captured.

Judges and lawyers who have had to deal with witnesses during trials know how widespread my disease is, they know how few people can rely on the truth.

As I suggested, when it came to writing about myself, I, the narrator, would be fine if there were no living witnesses to verify me. They, of course, would also alter the actual events of our shared life to suit their own fantasies.

I'm doing it.

You do it.

Everyone does it.

A much better way to handle the situation is as I have done here - to create a Tara Moorehead who will stand up for himself.

At least it frees my friends and family. I admit it's a writer's trick.

And in fact, it was only after I created Tara Moorehead, brought him to life in my own fantasy, that I could sit in front of the sheets and feel at ease. And only then did I confront myself, accept myself. "If you're a born liar, a man of fantasy, why not be who you are?" I said to myself, and having said this, I immediately began writing with a new sense of comfort.

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PART I


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CHAPTER I


POOR PEOPLE HAVE children without much feeling of exaltation. Alas, children are just coming. This is another child, and children are born easily. In this case, the man, for some unclear reason, feels a little ashamed. The woman runs away because she is ill. Let's see, now there were two boys and one girl. So far, that's three. It's good that this last one is another boy. He won't be worth much for a long time. He can wear his older brother's clothes, and then, when he grows up and demands his own things, he will be able to work. To work is the common destiny of man. This was intended from the beginning. Cain killed Abel with a club. It happened at the edge of a field. A photograph of this scene is in a Sunday school brochure. Abel lies dead on the ground, and Cain stands over him with a club in his hand.

In the background, one of God's angels pronounces a terrible sentence: "In the sweat of your brow shall you eat your bread." This sentence has been uttered across the centuries to catch a little boy from Ohio among all the others. Well, boys find it easier to find jobs than girls. They earn more.

A boy named Edgar Moorehead was called Edgar only when he was very young. He lived in Ohio, but his father was a North Carolinian, and North Carolina men are [derisively] called "Tar Heels." A neighbor referred to him as another little "Tar Heel," and after that, he was called first "Tar Heel," and then simply "Tar." What a black, sticky name!

Tar Moorhead was born in Camden, Ohio, but upon leaving, he was taken into his mother's arms. A conscientious man, he never saw the city, never walked its streets, and later, as an adult, he tried never to return.

Being a child with a rich imagination and not liking to be disappointed, he preferred to have one place of his own, the fruit of his own fantasy.

Tar Moorhead became a writer and wrote stories about people in small towns, how they lived, what they thought, what happened to them, but he never wrote about Camden. Incidentally, such a place exists. It's on the railroad. Tourists pass through there, stopping to fill up their gas tanks. There are stores selling chewing gum, electrical appliances, tires, and canned fruits and vegetables.

Tar cast all these things aside when he thought of Camden. He considered it his own city, a figment of his own imagination. Sometimes it sat at the edge of a long plain, and its inhabitants could look out from their windows across a vast expanse of land and sky. A place for an evening stroll across the wide, grassy plain, a place to count the stars, feel the evening breeze on one's cheek, and hear the quiet sounds of the night drifting in from afar.

As a man, Tar woke up, say, in a city hotel. All his life, he'd tried to breathe life into the tales he'd written, but his work had been difficult. Modern life is complicated. What are you going to say about it? How are you going to fix it?

Take a woman, for example. How will you, as a man, understand women? Some male writers pretend they've solved the problem. They write with such confidence that when you read a published story, it completely knocks you off your feet, but then, when you think it over, it all seems false.

How are you going to understand women if you can't understand yourself? How can you ever understand anyone or anything?

As a man, Tar would sometimes lie in his bed in the city and think of Camden, the city he was born in, the city he had never seen and never intended to see, a city full of people he could understand and who had always understood him. [There was a reason for his love of the place.] He owed no one money there, never cheated anyone, never made love to a Camden woman, as he later learned he didn't want to.

Camden now became a place among the hills for him. It was a small white town in a valley with high hills on either side. You reached it by stagecoach from a railroad town twenty miles away. A realist in his writings and thoughts, Tar didn't make the houses of his town particularly comfortable, nor the people particularly good or in any way exceptional.

They were what they were: simple people, living a rather hard life, eking out a living from small fields in the valleys and on the hillsides. Because the land was rather poor and the fields steep, modern agricultural tools couldn't be introduced, and people lacked the money to buy them.

In the town where Tar was born, a purely imaginary place that bore no resemblance to the real Camden, there was no electric light, no running water, and no one owned a car. During the day, men and women went out into the fields to sow corn by hand and harvested wheat using cradleboards. At night, after ten o'clock, the streets with their scattered poor houses were unlit. Even the houses were dark, save for the rare homes where someone was sick or where company was gathering. In short, it was the kind of place one might have found in Judea during the Old Testament. Christ, during his ministry, followed by John, Matthew, that strange, neurotic Judas, and the rest, could easily have visited just such a place.

A place of mystery-a home of romance. How much might the residents of real Camden, Ohio, dislike Thar's vision of their city?

In truth, Tar was trying to achieve something in his own city that was nearly impossible to achieve in the real world. In real life, people never stood still. Nothing in America stands still for very long. You're a city boy and you leave to live for only twenty years. Then one day you come back and walk the streets of your town. Everything is not as it should be. The shy little girl who lived on your street and whom you thought was so wonderful is now a woman. Her teeth are buckling, and her hair is already thinning. What a shame! When you knew her as a boy, she seemed the most wonderful thing in the world. On your way home from school, you tried your best to pass her house. She was in the front yard, and when she saw you coming, she ran to the door and stood just inside the house in the semi-darkness. You stole a glance, and then didn't dare look again, but you imagined how beautiful she was.

It's a miserable day for you when you return to the true place of your childhood. Better to go to China or the South Seas. Sit on the deck of a ship and dream. Now the little girl is married and the mother of two. The boy who played shortstop on the baseball team and whom you envied to the point of pain has become a barber. Everything went wrong. Far better to accept Tar Moorhead's plan, leave town early, so early that you won't remember a thing for sure, and never return.

Tar considered the city of Camden something special in his life. Even as an adult and considered successful, he clung to his dreams of the place. He spent the evening with some men in a large city hotel and didn't go back to his room until late. Well, his head was tired, his spirit was tired. There had been conversations and perhaps some disagreements. He had gotten into an argument with a fat man who wanted him to do something he didn't want to do.

Then he went up to his room, closed his eyes, and immediately found himself in the city of his fantasies, the place of his birth, a city he had never consciously seen, Camden, Ohio.

It was night, and he was walking in the hills above the city. The stars were shining. A slight breeze made the leaves rustle.

When he walked through the hills until he was tired, he could pass through meadows where cows grazed and pass by houses.

He knew the people in every house on the streets, knew everything about them. They were just as he had dreamed of people as a little boy. The man he thought was brave and kind was actually brave and kind; the little girl he thought was beautiful had grown into a beautiful woman.

Getting close to people hurts. We discover that people are just like us. It's better [if you want peace] to stay away and dream about people. Men who make their whole life seem romantic are [perhaps] right after all. Reality is too terrible. "By the sweat of your brow you will earn your bread."

Including deception and all sorts of tricks.

Cain made life difficult for all of us that time he killed Abel in the outfield. He did it with a hockey stick. What a mistake it must have been to carry clubs. If Cain hadn't carried a club that day, Camden, where Tar Moorhead was born, might have looked more like the Camden of his dreams.

But then, perhaps, he wouldn't have wanted that. Camden wasn't the progressive city Tar had envisioned.

How many more towns after Camden? Tar Moorehead's father was a drifter, just like him. There are certain people who settle down in one place in life, hang in there, and finally make their mark, but Dick Moorehead, Tar's father, wasn't like that. If he finally settled down, it was because he was too tired and worn out to take another step.

Tar became a storyteller, but as you've noticed, tales are told by carefree vagabonds. Few storytellers are good citizens. They only pretend to be.

Dick Moorehead, Tar's father, was a Southerner, from North Carolina. He must have just come down the mountainside, looking around and sniffing the ground, just like the two men Joshua son of Nun sent from Shittim to see Jericho. He crossed the corner of the old state of Virginia, the Ohio River, and finally settled in a town where he believed he could thrive.

What he did on the way, where he spent the night, what women he saw, what he thought he was planning, no one will ever know.

He was quite handsome in his youth, and he had a small fortune in a community where money was scarce. When he opened a harness shop in Ohio, people flocked to him.

For a while, sailing was easy. The other store in town was owned by an old, grumpy fellow who was a decent enough craftsman but not very cheerful. In those days, Ohio communities had no theaters, no movies, no radio, no lively, brightly lit streets. Newspapers were rare. Magazines were nonexistent.

What a stroke of luck it was to have a man like Dick Moorhead coming to town. Coming from afar, he certainly had something to say, and people wanted to listen.

And what an opportunity for him. Having little money and being a Southerner, he naturally hired a man to do most of his work and prepared to spend his time in pleasure, a kind of work that was more in keeping with his work. He bought himself a black suit and a heavy silver watch with a heavy silver chain. Tar Moorhead, his son, saw the watch and chain much later. When times got tough for Dick, they were the last thing he let go of.

As a young man and prosperous at the time, the harness salesman was a crowd favorite. The land was still new, the forests were still being cleared, and the cultivated fields were littered with stumps. There was nothing to do at night. During the long winter days, there was nothing to do.

Dick was a favorite with single women, but for a time he focused his attention on men. There was a certain slyness about him. "If you pay too much attention to women, you'll get married first and then see where you stand."

A dark-haired man, Dick had grown a mustache, and this, combined with his thick black hair, gave him a somewhat foreign appearance. It was impressive to see him walking down the street in front of the shops in a neat black suit, a heavy silver watch chain dangling from his then-slim waist.

He paced. "Well, well, ladies and gentlemen, look at me. Here I am, come to live among you." In the backwoods of Ohio at that time, a man who wore a tailored suit on weekdays and shaved every morning was bound to make a deep impression. At the small inn, he had the best seat at the table and the best room. Clumsy country girls, who had come to town to work as inn attendants, would come into his room, trembling with excitement, to make his bed and change the sheets. Dreams of them, too. In Ohio, Dick was something of a king back then.

He stroked his mustache, spoke affectionately to the hostess, the waitresses and the maids, but so far he had not courted any woman. "Wait. Let them court me. I am a man of action. I need to get down to business.

Farmers came to Dick's shop with harnesses for repair, or wanted to buy new harnesses. Townspeople came too. There was a doctor, two or three lawyers, and a county judge. There was a buzz in town. It was a time of great conversation.

Dick arrived in Ohio in 1858, and the story of his arrival is unlike that of Tar. However, the tale does touch, albeit somewhat vaguely, on his childhood in the Middle West.

In fact, the backdrop is a poor, poorly lit village about twenty-five miles back from the Ohio River in southern Ohio. Among the rolling hills of Ohio was a fairly rich valley, and there lived exactly the kind of people you find today in the hills of North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. They came into the country and occupied the land: the more fortunate in the valley itself, the less fortunate on the hillsides. For a long time, they lived mainly by hunting, then cut timber, hauled it over the hills to the river, and floated it south for sale. The game gradually disappeared. Good farmland began to be worth something, railroads were built, canals with boats and steamboats appeared on the river. Cincinnati and Pittsburgh were not far away. Daily newspapers began to circulate, and soon telegraph lines appeared.

In this community and against this awakening backdrop, Dick Moorhead strutted his way through his few prosperous years. Then came the Civil War and upset everything. Those were the days he always remembered and later extolled. Well, he was prosperous, popular, and in business.

He was then staying in a town hotel run by a short, fat man who allowed his wife to run the hotel while he tended the bar, [and] talked about racehorses and politics, and it was in the bar that Dick spent most of his time. This was the time when women worked. They milked cows, did laundry, cooked, bore children, and sewed clothes for them. After they married, they were practically out of sight.

It was the kind of town that, in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, Douglas, and Davis might well have visited during the days of the trial. Men gathered in the bar, harness shop, hotel office, and livery stable that evening. Conversation ensued. Men drank whiskey, told stories, chewed tobacco, and talked about horses, religion, and politics, and Dick was among them, seating them at the bar, expressing his opinions, telling stories, cracking jokes. That evening, when nine o'clock rolled around, and if the townspeople hadn't come to his shop, he closed up and headed for the livery stable, where he knew they could be found. Well, it was time to talk, and there was a lot to talk about.

First of all, Dick was a Southerner from a Northern community. That was what set him apart. Was he loyal? I bet. He was a Southerner and he knew that Negroes and Negroes were now in the spotlight. A newspaper came from Pittsburgh. Samuel Chase from Ohio was giving a speech, Lincoln from Illinois was debating Stephen Douglas, Seward from New York was talking about war. Dick was sticking with Douglas. All this nonsense about Negroes. Well, well! What an idea! The Southerners in Congress, Davis, Stevens, Floyd, were so serious, Lincoln, Chase, Seward, Sumner and the other Northerners were so serious. "If war comes, we"ll find it here in Southern Ohio. Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia will come in. The city of Cincinnati is not very loyal."

Some of the nearby towns had a southern feel, but Dick found himself in a hot northern place. In the early days, many mountaineers settled here. It was sheer luck.

At first he was silent and listened. Then people began to want him to speak. Very well, he would have. He was a southerner, fresh from the South. "What can you say?" It was a tricky question.

- What can I say, huh? Dick had to think fast. "There won't be a war over Negroes." Back home in North Carolina, Dick's people had Negroes, and a few of them. They weren't cotton farmers, but lived in other mountain country and grew corn and tobacco. - Well, you see. Dick hesitated, then ducked. What did he care about slavery? It meant nothing to him. There were a few Negroes hanging around. They weren't very good workers. You had to have a few at home to be respectable and not be called a "poor white man."

While he hesitated and remained silent before taking the decisive step of becoming a determined abolitionist and Northerner, Dick thought a lot.

His father had once been a prosperous man, inheriting land, but he was a careless man, and things hadn't been going well before Dick left home. The Moorheads weren't broke or in dire straits, but their numbers had dwindled from two thousand acres to four or five hundred.

Something happened. Dick's father went to a neighboring town and bought a couple of black men, both over sixty. The old black woman had no teeth, and her old black man had a bad leg. He could just hobble.

Why did Ted Moorhead buy this couple? Well, the man who owned them was broke and wanted them to have a home. Ted Moorhead bought them because he was a Moorhead. He bought them both for a hundred dollars. Buying Negroes like that was just like a Moorhead.

The old black man was a real scoundrel. None of that monkey business from Uncle Tom's Cabin stuff. He owned property in half a dozen places in the Deep South, and he always managed to maintain a liking for some black woman who stole for him, bore his children, and took care of him. Back in the Deep South, when he owned a sugar plantation, he made himself a set of reed pipes and could play them. It was the pipe playing that attracted Ted Moorehead.

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When Dick's father brought the elderly couple home, they couldn't do much. The woman helped some in the kitchen, and the man pretended to work with the Moorhead boys in the field.

An old black man told stories and played his pipe, and Ted Moorhead listened. Finding a shady spot under a tree at the edge of the field, the old black scoundrel took out his pipe and played or sang songs. One of the Moorhead boys supervised the work in the field, and Moorhead is Moorhead. The work was in vain. Everyone gathered around.

The old black man could go on like this all day and all night. Stories of strange places, the Deep South, sugar plantations, big cotton fields, the time the owner leased him out as a hand on a Mississippi riverboat. After the conversation, we'd turn on the trumpets. Sweet, strange music echoed through the woods at the edge of the field, climbing up the nearby hillside. Sometimes it made the birds stop singing with envy. Strange that the old man could be so mean and make such sweet, heavenly sounds. It made you question the value of goodness and all that. It wasn't surprising, though, that the old black woman took a liking to her black man and became attached to him. The problem was, the whole Moorhead family was listening, preventing the work from going any further. There were always too many black men like that around. Thank God, a horse cannot tell stories, a cow cannot play the pipe when it should be given milk.

You pay less for a cow or a good horse, and a cow or a horse cannot tell strange stories of far-off places, cannot tell stories to young people when they have to plow corn or chop tobacco, cannot make music on reed pipes that will make you forget the need to do any work.

When Dick Moorhead decided he wanted to start his own business, old Ted simply sold a few acres of land to give him a head start. Dick worked for a few years as an apprentice in a saddle shop in a nearby town, and then the old man came into the money. "I think you'd better head north; it's more entrepreneurial territory," he said.

Enterprising indeed. Dick was trying to be enterprising. In the North, especially where the abolitionists came from, they would never tolerate wasteful Negroes. Suppose an old Negro can play the flute until it makes you sad, happy, and careless about your work. Better leave the music alone. [Today you can get the same thing from a talking machine.] [It's a devilish business.] Enterprise is enterprise.

Dick was one of those who believed in what those around him believed. In small town Ohio, they read "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Sometimes he thought of black houses and secretly smiled.

"I've come to a place where people are against debauchery. Negroes are responsible." Now he began to hate slavery. "This is a new century, new times. The South is too stubborn."

Being entrepreneurial in business, at least in retail, simply meant being around people. You had to be there to lure them into your store. If you're a Southerner in a Northern community and you adopt their point of view, you're more relatable than you would have been if you'd been born a Northerner. There's more joy in Heaven over one sinner, and so on.

How could Dick say that he himself plays the flute?

Blow your reed pipes, ask a woman to take care of your children - if you have any misfortune - tell stories, go with the crowd.

Dick had gone too far. His popularity in the Ohio community had reached boiling point. Everyone wanted to buy him a drink at the bar; his store was full of men that evening. Now Jeff Davis, Stevenson from Georgia, and others were making fiery speeches in Congress, threatening him. Abraham Lincoln from Illinois was running for president. The Democrats were divided, fielding three tickets. Fools!

Dick even joined the crowd that ran away from the blacks at night. If you're doing something, you might as well see it through to the end, and in any case, running away from the blacks was half the fun of the game. On the one hand, it was against the law-against the law and against all good, law-abiding citizens, even the best of them.

They lived quite easily, flattering their masters, flattering the women and children. "Shrewd and cunning people, these Southern Negroes," Dick thought.


Dick didn't think much about it. Runaway blacks were taken to some farmhouse, usually on a side road, and after feeding, hidden in a barn. The next night, they would be sent on their way, to Zanesville, Ohio, to a remote place called Oberlin, Ohio, places where abolitionists were thick. "Anyway, damn abolitionist." They were going to give Dick hell.

Sometimes the posses chasing down escaped Blacks were forced to hide in the woods. The next town west was as strongly Southern in its sentiments as Dick's town was abolitionist. Residents of the two towns hated each other, and the neighboring town organized posses to capture Black fugitives. Dick would have been among them, had he been fortunate enough to settle there. For them, it was a game, too. None of the crowd owned slaves. Occasionally, shots rang out, but no one was ever hurt in either town.

For Dick at the time, it was fun and exciting. Being promoted to the front in the abolitionist ranks made him a noticeable figure, a prominent figure. He never wrote letters home, and his father, of course, knew nothing of what he was doing. Like everyone else, he didn't think the war would actually start, and if it did, so what? The North thought it could defeat the South in sixty days. The South thought it would take them thirty days to lash out at the North. "The Union must and will be preserved," said Lincoln, the president-elect. In any case, it seemed like common sense. He was a country boy, this Lincoln. Those in the know said he was tall and awkward, a typical country man. The smart kids from the East would handle him just fine. When it came to the final confrontation, either the South or the North would surrender.

Dick sometimes went to look for the escaped Negroes hiding in the barns at night. The other white men were in the farmhouse, and he was alone with two or three blacks. He stood above them, looking down. That's the Southern way. A few words were spoken. The blacks knew he was a Southerner, all right. Something in his tone told them. He thought about what he'd heard from his father. "For the small whites, the simple white farmers in the South, it would have been better if there had never been any slavery, if there had never been any blacks." When you had them around, something happened: you thought you didn't have to work. Before his wife died, Dick's father had seven strong sons. In reality, they were helpless men. Dick himself was the only one who owned any business and ever wanted to leave. If there had never been blacks, he and all his brothers could have been taught to work, the Moorhead house in North Carolina might have meant something.

Repeal, huh? If only repeal could repeal. War wouldn't make any significant change in white attitudes toward blacks. Any black man or woman would lie to a white man or woman. He made the blacks in the barn tell him why they ran away. They lied, of course. He laughed and went back into the house. If war came, his father and his brothers would march on the South side [as casually as he had marched on the North side]. What did they care about slavery? They really cared how the North talked. The North cared how the South talked. Both sides sent spokesmen to Congress. It was natural. Dick himself was a talker, an adventurer.

And then the war began, and Dick Moorehead, Tar's father, entered it. He became a captain and carried a sword. Could he resist? Not Dick.

He went south to Middle Tennessee, serving in Rosecrans's army and then in Grant's. His harness shop was sold. By the time he'd paid off his debts, there was almost nothing left. He'd hosted them too often in the tavern during those exciting days of the draft.

What fun it was to be called up, what excitement. Women bustling about, men and boys bustling about. Those were great days for Dick. He was the town's hero. You don't get many chances like that in life unless you're born a moneymaker and can pay your way into a prominent position. In peacetime, you just go around telling stories, drinking with other men at the bar, spending money on a nice suit and a heavy silver watch, growing a mustache, stroking it, talking when another man wants to. Talk as much as you do. And he might even be a better talker.

Sometimes at night, during the excitement, Dick thought of his brothers leaving for the Southern army, much in the same spirit he'd left for the Northern army. They listened to speeches, the women of the neighborhood held meetings. How could they stay away? They came here to keep guys like this lazy old Negro at bay, playing his reed pipe, singing his songs, lying about his past, entertaining the whites so he wouldn't have to work. Dick and his brothers might someday shoot each other. He refused to think about that aspect of the matter. The thought came only at night. He had been promoted to captain and carried a sword.

One day, a chance to distinguish himself presented itself. The Northerners among whom he lived, now his fellow tribesmen, were excellent marksmen. They called themselves "Ohio Squirrel Shooters" and boasted of what they would do if they took aim at Reb. Back when companies were being formed, they held rifle matches.

Everything was fine. The men approached the edge of a field near the city and attached a small target to a tree. They stood at an incredible distance, and almost all of them hit the target. If they didn't hit the center of the target, they at least caused the bullets to do what they called "paper biting." Everyone was under the illusion that wars are won by good marksmen.

Dick really wanted to shoot, but he didn't dare. He'd been elected company captain. "Be careful," he told himself. One day, when all the men had gone to the shooting range, he picked up a rifle. He'd hunted a few as a child, but not often, and had never been a good shot.

Now he stood with a rifle in his hands. A small bird was flying high in the sky above the field. With complete nonchalance, he raised the rifle, took aim, and fired, and the bird landed almost at his feet. The bullet had been right on the head. One of those strange incidents that makes it into stories but never actually happens-when you want it to.

Dick left the field with a pompous air and never returned. Things were going wrong for him; he was a hero even before the war.

A magnificent throw, Captain. He had already taken his sword with him, and spurs were buckled onto the heels of his shoes. As he walked the streets of his city, young women peered at him from behind curtained windows. Almost every evening, there was a party at which he was the central figure.

How could he have known that after the war he would have to marry and have many children, that he would never again become a hero, that he would have to build the rest of his life on these days, creating in his imagination a thousand adventures that never happened.

The race of storytellers is always unhappy, but fortunately, they never realize how unhappy they are. They always hope to find believers somewhere who live by this hope. It's in their blood.

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CHAPTER II


FOREHEAD _ _ _ life began with a procession of houses. At first, they were very vague in his mind. They marched. Even when he became a man, houses flickered in his imagination like soldiers on a dusty road. As during the march of soldiers, some of them were remembered very vividly.

Houses were like people. An empty house was like an empty man or woman. Some houses were cheaply built, thrown together. Others were carefully constructed and lived in with care, paying close and loving attention.

Entering an empty house was sometimes a terrifying experience. Voices kept ringing. They must have been the voices of the people who lived there. Once, when Tar was a boy and went out alone to pick wild berries in the fields outside the city, he saw a small, empty house standing in a cornfield.

Something prompted him to enter. The doors were open, and the windows were full of glass. Gray dust lay on the floor.

A small bird, a swallow, flew into the house and couldn't escape. Terrified, he flew straight at Tar, into the doors, into the windows. His body slammed against the window frame, and terror began to seep into Tar's blood. Terror was somehow connected to empty houses. Why should houses be empty? He ran away, looked back at the edge of the field, and saw the swallow fleeing. It flew joyfully, joyfully, circling above the field. Tar was beside himself with the desire to leave the earth and fly through the air.

For a mind like Tar's-truth always washed with the colors of his imagination-it was impossible to pinpoint the houses he'd lived in as a child. There was one house (he was quite certain) he'd never lived in, but one he remembered very well. It was low and long, and occupied by a grocer and his large family. Behind the house, whose roof almost touched the kitchen door, was a long, low barn. Tar's family must have lived close by, and he undoubtedly longed to live under its roof. A child always wants to try living in some other house than his own.

There was always laughter in the grocer's house. In the evening, they sang songs. One of the grocer's daughters drummed the piano, and the others danced. There was also an abundance of food. Tar's sharp nose smelled the aroma of food being prepared and served. Didn't the grocer sell groceries? Why wasn't there an abundance of food in such a house? At night, he lay in bed at home and dreamed that he was the grocer's son. The grocer was a strong man with red cheeks and a white beard, and when he laughed, the walls of his house seemed to shake. In despair, Tar told himself that he really lived in this house, that he was the grocer's son. What he had dreamed of became, at least in his imagination, a fact. So it happened that all the grocer's children were daughters. Why not engage in a trade that would make everyone happy? Tar chose the grocer's daughter to come and live in his house, and he went to hers as a son. She was small and rather quiet. Perhaps she wouldn't protest as much as the others. She didn't seem like one.

What a glorious dream! Since the grocer's only son, Thar, was given the choice of what food was on the table, he rode on the grocer's horse, sang songs, danced, and was treated like a prince of sorts. He'd read or heard fairy tales in which a prince like him longed to live in such a place. The grocer's house was his castle. So much laughter, so much singing and food. What more could a boy want?

Tar was the third child in a family of seven, five of whom were boys. From the very beginning, former soldier Dick Moorehead's family was on the move, and no two children were born into the same household.

What wouldn't a child's home be? It should have a garden with flowers, vegetables, and trees. There should also be a barn with stalled horses and a vacant lot behind the barn where tall weeds grow. For older children, a car is certainly a nice thing to have in the house, but for a small child, nothing can replace a gentle old black or gray horse. If a later, adult Tar Moorhead were born again, he would probably choose a grocer with a fat, cheerful wife as his parent, and he wouldn't want him to have a delivery truck. He would want him to deliver the groceries by horse, and in the morning, Tar would want the older boys to come to the house and take them away.

Then Tar would run out of the house and touch every horse's nose. The boys would give him gifts, apples or bananas, things they'd bought at the store, and afterward he'd have a triumphant breakfast and wander through the empty barn to play in the tall weeds. The weeds would grow high above his head, and he could hide among them. There he could be a bandit, a man fearlessly prowling through dark forests-anything.

Other houses, besides the ones Tara's family lived in as a child, often on the same street, had all these things, while his house always seemed to be located on a small, bare lot. In the barn behind the neighbor's house, there was a horse, often two horses, and a cow.

In the morning, sounds came from neighboring houses and barns. Some neighbors kept pigs and chickens, which lived in pens in the backyard and fed on table scraps.

In the mornings, pigs grunted, roosters crowed, chickens clucked softly, horses neighed, and cows bellowed. Calves were born-strange, charming creatures with long, clumsy legs, on which they immediately began to follow their mother around the barn, comically and hesitantly.

Later, Tar had a vague memory of early morning in bed, his older brother and sister at the window. Another child had already been born in the Moorhead household, perhaps two since Tar's birth. Babies didn't get up and walk like calves and foals. They lay on their backs in bed, sleeping like puppies or kittens, then waking up and making horrible noises.

Children just beginning to understand life, like Tar was at the time, aren't interested in younger siblings. Kittens are something, but puppies are something else entirely. They lie in a basket behind the stove. It's nice to touch the warm nest where they sleep, but the other children in the house are a nuisance.

How much better a dog or a kitten. Cows and horses are for rich people, but the Moorheads could have had a dog or a cat. How Tar would gladly have traded a child for a dog, and as for the horse, it's good he resisted temptation. If the horse had been gentle and allowed him to ride on its back, or if he could sit alone in the cart and hold the reins on the horse's back, like an older neighbor boy did in one of the towns where he lived, he could have sold the entire Moorhead family.

There was a saying in the Moorhead house: "The baby broke your nose." What a terrible saying! The newborn cried, and Tar's mother went to pick him up. There was a strange connection between mother and baby, one that Tar had already lost when he started walking on the floor.

He was four years old, his older sister was seven, and the firstborn in the family was nine. Now, in some strange and incomprehensible way, he belonged to the world of his older brother and sister, the world of the neighbors' children, the front and back yards where other children came to play with his brother and sister, a tiny piece of a vast world in which he would now have to try to live, not for his mother at all. His mother was already a dark, strange creature, a little far away. He might still cry, and she would call for him, and he might run and lay his head in her lap while she stroked his hair, but there was always that later child, the baby, far away there, in her arms. His nose really was wrong. What would clear it all up?

Crying and winning favor in this way was already a shameful act in the eyes of the older brother and sister.

Of course, Tar didn't want to remain a baby forever. What did he want?

How vast the world was. How strange and terrible it was. His older brother and sister, playing in the yard, were incredibly old. If only they would stand still, stop growing, stop aging for two or three years. They wouldn't. Something told him that wouldn't happen.

And then his tears stopped; he had already forgotten what made him cry, as if he were still a baby. "Now run and play with the others," his mother said.

But how difficult it is for the others! If only they would stand still until he caught up.

A spring morning in a house on a street in a mid-American town. The Moorehead family moved from town to town like houses, putting them on and taking them off like a nightgown. There was a certain isolation between them and the rest of the town. Ex-soldier Dick Moorehead never managed to settle down after the war. Marriage may have upset him. It was time to become a solid citizen, and he wasn't cut out to be a solid citizen. Towns and years slipped away together. A procession of houses on bare lots without barns, a string of streets, and towns too. Mother Tara was always busy. There were so many children, and they came so quickly.

Dick Moorehead didn't marry a rich woman, as he perhaps might have done. He married the daughter of an Italian laborer, but she was beautiful. It was a strange, dark beauty, the kind one might find in the Ohio town where he met her after the war, and she enchanted him. She always enchanted Dick and his children.

But now, with the children approaching so quickly, no one had time to breathe or look out. The tenderness between people grows slowly.

A spring morning in a house on the street of a mid-American town. Tar, now a grown man and a writer, was staying at a friend's house. His friend's life was completely different from his own. The house was surrounded by a low garden wall, and Tar's friend was born there and lived there his entire life. He, like Tar, was a writer, but what a difference between the two lives. Tar's friend had written many books-all stories of people who lived in another era-books about warriors, great generals, politicians, explorers.


This man's whole life was lived in books, but Tara's life was lived in the world of people.

Now his friend had a wife, a gentle woman with a soft voice, whom Tar heard walking around the room upstairs of the house.

Tar's friend was reading in his workshop. He was always reading, but Tar rarely did. His children were playing in the garden. There were two boys and a girl, and an old black woman was looking after them.

Tar sat in the corner of the porch behind the house under the rose bushes and thought.

The day before, he and a friend had been talking. The friend had mentioned some of Tar's books, raising an eyebrow. "I like you," he said, "but some of the people you write about-I've never met any of them. Where are they? Such thoughts, such terrible people."

What Tar's friend had said about his books, others had said as well. He thought of the years his friend had spent reading, of the life he'd lived behind a garden wall while Tar had wandered everywhere. Even then, as an adult, he'd never had a home. He was an American, he'd always lived in America, and America was vast, but not a single square foot of it had ever belonged to him. His father had never owned a single square foot of it.

Gypsies, huh? Useless people in the age of property. If you want to be someone in this world, own land, own goods.

When he wrote books about people, the books were often condemned, as his friend condemned them, because the people in the books were ordinary, because they often really meant ordinary things.

"But I'm just an ordinary man," Tar said to himself. "It's true that my father wanted to be a remarkable man, and he was also a storyteller, but the stories he told never stood up to scrutiny.

"Dick Moorehead's stories were enjoyed by the farmers and farm hands who came to his saddle shops when he was a young man, but suppose he had been forced to write them for the people-like the man in whose house I am now a guest," thought Tar.

And then his thoughts returned to his childhood. "Perhaps childhood is always different," he said to himself. "It's only when we grow up that we become more and more vulgar. Was there ever such a thing as a vulgar child? Could such a thing exist?"

As an adult, Tar thought a lot about his childhood and houses. He sat in one of the small rented rooms where, as a man, he always lived, his pen gliding across the paper. It was early spring, and he thought the room was nice enough. Then a fire broke out.

He began again, as he always did, with the theme of houses, places where people live, where they come at night and when it is cold and stormy outside the house - houses with rooms in which people sleep, in which children sleep and dream.

Later, Tar understood this matter a little. The room he sat in, he told himself, contained his body, but also his thoughts. Thoughts were as important as bodies. How many people have tried to make their thoughts color the rooms in which they slept or ate, how many have tried to make rooms part of themselves. At night, when Tar lay in bed and the moon shone, shadows played on the walls and his fantasies played. "Do not clutter a house where a child should live, and remember that you, too, are a child, always a child," he whispered to himself.

In the East, when a guest entered a house, their feet were washed. "Before I invite the reader into the house of my fantasy, I must make sure the floors are washed, the windowsills are scrubbed."

The houses resembled people standing silently and at attention on the street.

"If you honor and respect me and enter my home, come quietly. Think for a moment of kindness, and leave the quarrels and ugliness of your life outside my home."

There's a home, and for a child, there's a world outside. What's the world like? What are the people like? The elderly, the neighbors, the men and women who strolled along the sidewalk in front of the Moorheads' house when Tar was a small child, all immediately went about their business.

A woman named Mrs. Welliver was heading toward a mysteriously captivating place known as "the center of town," market basket in hand. Tar, a child, never ventured beyond the nearest corner.

The day arrived. What an event! A neighbor, who must have been rich, since she had two horses in a barn behind her house, came to take Tar and his sister-["three] years older"-for a ride in the carriage. They were to go into the country.

They were about to venture far into a strange world, across Main Street. Early in the morning, they were told that Tar's older brother, who wasn't supposed to go, was angry, while Tar was happy about his brother's misfortune. The older brother already had so many things. He wore pants, and Tar still wore skirts. Back then, you could achieve something, being small and helpless. How Tar longed for pants. He thought he'd gladly trade a trip out of town for five more years and his brother's pants, but why should a brother expect all the good things in this life? The older brother wanted to cry because he wasn't going to go, but how many times had Tar wanted to cry because his brother had something Tar couldn't have.

They set off, and Tar was excited and happy. What a vast, strange world. The small Ohio town seemed like a huge city to Tar. Now they reached Main Street and saw a locomotive attached to the train, a very scary thing. A horse ran halfway across the rails in front of the engine, and a bell rang. Tar had heard this sound before-the night before, in the room where he slept-the ringing of an engine bell in the distance, the shriek of a whistle, the rumble of a train rushing through the city, in the darkness and silence, outside the house, beyond the windows and wall of the room where he lay.

How was this sound different from the sounds of horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens? Warm, friendly sounds were the sounds of the others. Tar himself cried; he screamed when he was angry. Cows, horses, and pigs also made sounds. The animal sounds belonged to a world of warmth and intimacy, while the other sound was strange, romantic, and terrible. When Tar heard the engine at night, he crept closer to his sister and said nothing. If she woke up, if his older brother woke up, they would laugh at him. "It's just a train," they said, their voices full of disdain. Tar felt as if something [giant] and terrible was about to burst through the walls into the room.

On the day of his first great journey into the world, as a horse, a creature of flesh and blood like himself, frightened by the breath of the enormous iron horse, carried a speeding carriage past, he turned and looked. Smoke billowed from the long, upturned nose of the engine, and the terrible metallic ringing of the bell rang in his ears. A man stuck his head out the taxi window and waved. He was talking to another man standing on the ground near the engine.

The neighbor was pulling out fines and trying to calm the excited horse, which had infected Tara with its fright, and his sister, filled with three additional years of worldly knowledge and a little contemptuous of him, hugged him by the shoulders.

And so the horse trotted sedately, and everyone turned to look back. The locomotive began to move slowly, majestically pulling the train of carriages behind it. How fortunate that it hadn't decided to follow the path they had taken. It crossed the road and walked away, past a row of small houses toward the distant fields. Tar's fright passed. In the future, when the noise of a passing train woke him at night, he wouldn't be afraid. When his brother, who was two years younger, had grown a year or two and began to be frightened at night, he could speak to him with disdain in his voice. "It's just a train," he might say, disdaining his younger brother's childishness.

They rode on, over a hill, and across a bridge. At the top of the hill, they stopped, and Sister Tara pointed to the train moving through the valley below. There, in the distance, the departing train looked beautiful, and Thar clapped his hands in delight.

As it was with the child, so it was with the man. Trains moving through distant valleys, rivers of automobiles flowing through the streets of modern cities, squadrons of airplanes in the sky-all the wonders of the modern mechanical age, viewed from afar, filled the later Tar with wonder and awe, but when he approached them, he became afraid. A power hidden deep in the belly of the engine made him tremble. Where did this come from? The words "fire,"

"water,"

"Oil" was an old word for an old thing, but the unification of these things within iron walls, from which power emerged at the press of a button or a lever, seemed the work of the devil-or of a god. He didn't pretend to understand devils or gods. It was difficult enough for men and women.

Was he an old man in a new world? Words and colors could be combined. In the world around him, his imagination could sometimes penetrate the color blue, which, when combined with red, created something strange. Words could be combined to form sentences, and sentences had supernatural power. A sentence could ruin a friendship, win a woman, start a war. Late Tar walked fearlessly among words, but what happened within the narrow steel walls was never clear to him.

But now he was still a child, thrust out into the vast world, and already a little frightened and homesick. His mother, who had already been too far separated from him by another [and later by the child in her arms], was nonetheless the rock on which he tried to build the home of his life. Now he found himself on quicksand. The neighbor looked strange and repulsive. She was busy managing her horse. The houses along the road were far apart. There were wide open spaces, fields, large red barns, orchards. What a [vast] world!

The woman who took Tar and his sister for a ride must have been very wealthy. She owned a house in town with two horses in the barn, and a farm in the country with a house, two large barns, and countless horses, sheep, cows, and pigs. They turned into a driveway with an apple orchard on one side and a cornfield on the other and entered the farmyard. The house seemed thousands of miles away to Tar. Would he recognize his mother when he returned? Would they ever find their way back? His sister laughed and clapped her hands. A wobbly-legged calf was tied to a rope on the front lawn, and she pointed at it. "Look, Tar," she called, and he looked at her with serious, thoughtful eyes. He was beginning to realize the extreme frivolity of women.

They were in the barn yard, across from a large red barn. A woman emerged from the back door of the house, and two men emerged from the barn. The farm woman was not unlike Tar's mother. She was tall, her fingers long and calloused from hard work, like his mother's. Two children clung to her skirt as she stood by the door.

There was conversation. Women always talked. What a chatterbox his sister already was. One of the men from the barn, undoubtedly the farmer's husband and father of the strange children, stepped forward but had little to say. The townspeople disembarked from the carriage, and the man, muttering a few words, retreated back into the barn, accompanied by one of the two children. While the women continued talking, a child emerged from the barn door-a boy similar to Thar, but two or three years older, riding on the farmer's enormous horse, led by his father.

Tar remained with the women, his sister, and another farm child, also a girl.

What a decline for him! The two women went to the farmhouse, and he was left with the two girls. In this new world, he felt at home in his own yard. At home, his father was away all day at the store, and his older brother had little need of him. His older brother thought of him as a baby, but Tar was no longer a baby. Didn't his mother have another child in her arms? His sister was caring for him. The women ran the show. "You take him and the little girl to play with you," the farmer's wife said to her daughter, pointing at Tar. The woman touched his hair with her fingers, and [the two women] smiled. How far away it all seemed. At the door, one of the women paused to give other instructions. "Remember, he's just a child. Don't let him get hurt." What an idea!

The farm boy sat astride his horse, and a second man, undoubtedly a hired hand, emerged from the barn door leading another horse, but made no offer to take Tara aboard. The men and the farm boy walked along the path next to the barn toward the distant fields. The boy on the horse glanced back, not at Tara, but at the two girls.

The girls Tar was staying with exchanged glances and laughed. Then they headed for the barn. Well, Tar's sister was on top of things. Didn't he know her? She wanted to hold his hand, pretend she was his mother, but he wouldn't let her. That was what girls did. They pretended to care for you, but in reality they were just showing off. Tar walked resolutely forward, wanting to cry because he'd suddenly been abandoned in a [vast] strange place, but he didn't want to give his sister, who was three years older than him, the satisfaction of showing off to a strange girl by caring for him. If women cared about motherhood in secret, how much better it would be.

Tar was now completely alone in the midst of such a vast, strangely beautiful and at the same time [terrible] surroundings. How warmly the sun shone. For a long, long time afterward, oh [how] many times afterward, he was to dream of this scene, to use it as a backdrop for fairy tales, to use it all his life as a backdrop for some great dream he had always dreamed of one day owning his own farm, a place of huge barns with unpainted wooden beams grayed with time, the rich smell of hay and animals, sunlit and snow-covered hills and fields, and smoke rising from the chimney of the farmhouse into the winter sky.

For Tar, these are dreams of another, much later time. The child walking toward the great [yawning] barn doors, his sister clinging to his hand as she joined in the stream of conversation he and the farm girl were forced to keep up until they drove Tar half-mad with loneliness, had no such thoughts. There was no consciousness in him of barns and their smells, of tall corn growing in the fields, of ears of wheat standing like sentinels on distant hills. There was only a small, short-skirted, bare-legged, footless creature, the son of a saddler from a rural Ohio village, who felt abandoned and alone in the world.

The two girls entered the barn through the wide swinging doors, and Sister Tara pointed to a box near the door. It was a small box, and an idea occurred to her. She would get rid of it [for a while]. Pointing to the box and adopting as best she could his mother's tone when giving a command, Sister ordered him to sit down. "You stay here until I come back, and don't you dare go," she said, shaking her finger at him. Hm! Indeed! What a little woman she thought herself! She had black curls, she wore slippers, and Mother Tara had let her put on her Sunday dress, while the farmer's wife and Tara were barefoot. Now she was a great lady. If she only knew how much Tara resented her tone. If he had been a little older, he might have told her, but if he had tried to speak at that moment, he would surely have burst into tears.

The two girls began to climb the ladder to the hayloft above, the farmer's wife leading the way. Sister Tara was afraid and trembling as she climbed, wanting to be a city girl and timid, but having taken on the role of a grown woman ["with a child"], she had to see it through. They disappeared into the dark hole above and rolled and tumbled in the hay in the loft for a while, laughing and screaming as girls do at such times. Then silence fell over the barn. Now the girls were hidden in the loft, no doubt talking about women's matters. What did women talk about when they were alone? Thar always wanted to know. Grown women in the farmhouse talked, girls in the loft talked. Sometimes he heard them laugh. Why was everyone laughing and talking?

Women always came to the door of the town house to speak with his mother. Left alone, she might have maintained a prudent silence, but they never left her alone. Women couldn't leave each other alone the way men did. They weren't as wise or courageous. If women and babies had kept their distance from his mother, Tar might have gotten more from her.

He sat down on a box near the barn door. Was he glad to be alone? One of those strange things that always happened later in life, when he was growing up. A particular scene, a country road climbing a hill, a view from a bridge overlooking a city at night from a railroad crossing, a grassy road leading into the woods, the garden of an abandoned, dilapidated house-some scene that, at least superficially, had no more significance than a thousand other scenes that had flashed before his eyes, perhaps that same day, imprinted in minute detail on the walls of his consciousness. The house of his mind had many rooms, and each room was a mood. Pictures hung on the walls. He had hung them there. Why? Perhaps some inner sense of selection was at work.

The open barn doors formed the frame for his painting. Behind him, at the barn-like entrance to the barn, a blank barn wall was visible on one side, with a ladder leading to the loft above which the girls climbed. Wooden pegs hung on the wall, holding harnesses, horse collars, a row of iron horseshoes, and a saddle. On the opposite walls were openings through which horses could stick their heads while standing in their stalls.

A rat came from nowhere, scurried quickly across the dirt floor, and disappeared under a farm cart at the back of the barn, while an old gray horse stuck its head out of one of the openings and looked at Thar with sad, impersonal eyes.

And so he emerged into the world alone for the first time. How isolated he felt! His sister, despite all her mature, motherly manners, had given up her work. She had been told to remember he was a baby, but she didn't.

Well, he wasn't a baby anymore, so he decided he wouldn't cry. He sat stoically, looking out the open barn doors at the scene before him.

What a strange scene. This is how Thar's later hero, Robinson Crusoe, must have felt, alone on his island. What a vast world he had entered! So many trees, hills, fields. Suppose he climbed out of his box and began to walk. In the corner of the opening through which he was looking, he could see a small part of a white farmhouse, into which the women had gone. Thar couldn't hear their voices. Now he couldn't hear the voices of the two girls in the attic. They had disappeared through the dark hole above his head. Every now and then he heard a buzzing whisper, and then a girlish laugh. It was truly funny. Perhaps everyone in the world had gone into some strange dark hole, leaving him sitting there in the middle of a vast empty space. Terror began to take hold of him. In the distance, as he looked through the barn doors, there were hills, and as he sat staring, a tiny black dot appeared in the sky. The dot slowly grew larger and larger. After what seemed like a long time, the dot turned into a huge bird, a hawk, circling and circling in the vast sky above his head.

Tar sat and watched the hawk slowly moving in large circles across the sky. In the barn behind him, the old horse's head vanished and reappeared. Now the horse had filled its mouth with hay and was eating. A rat, which had scurried into a dark hole under a cart at the back of the barn, emerged and began crawling toward him. What bright eyes! Tar was about to scream, but now the rat had found what it wanted. An ear of corn lay on the barn floor, and he began gnawing on it. His sharp little teeth made a soft, grinding sound.

Time passed slowly, oh so slowly. What kind of joke had Sister Tara played on him? Why were she and the farm girl named Elsa so silent now? Had they gone away? In another part of the barn, somewhere in the darkness behind the horse, something began to move, rustling the straw on the barn floor. The old barn was infested with rats.

Tar climbed down from his crate and quietly walked through the barn doors into the warm sunlight of the house. Sheep were grazing in the meadow near the house, and one of them raised its head to look at him.

Now all the sheep were watching and watching. In the garden behind the barns and the house lived a red cow, who also raised her head and looked. What strange, impersonal eyes.

Tar hurried across the farmyard to the door through which the two women had emerged, but it was locked. Inside the house, too, there was silence. He was left alone for about five minutes. It felt like hours.

He pounded on the back door with his fists, but there was no answer. The women had just come up to the house, but it seemed to him they must have gone far away-that his sister and the farm girl had gone far away.

Everything had moved far away. Looking up at the sky, he saw a hawk circling far overhead. The circles grew larger and larger, and then suddenly the hawk flew straight into the blue. When Tar had first seen it, it had been a tiny dot, no bigger than a fly, and now it was becoming that way again. As he watched, the black dot grew smaller and smaller. It wavered and danced before his eyes, and then vanished.

He was alone in the farmyard. Now the sheep and cow were no longer looking at him, but eating grass. He walked up to the fence and stopped, looking at the sheep. How contented and happy they seemed. The grass they ate must have been delicious. For every sheep, there were many other sheep; for every cow, there was a warm barn at night and the company of other cows. The two women in the house had each other: his sister Margaret had the farm girl Elsa; the farm boy had his father, a hired hand, work horses, and a dog he saw running at the heels of the horses.

Only Tar was alone in the world. Why hadn't he been born a sheep, so he could be with other sheep and eat grass? Now he wasn't afraid, only lonely and sad.

He walked slowly through the barn yard, followed by men, boys, and horses along the green path. He wept softly as he walked. The grass in the alley was soft and cool under his bare feet, and in the distance he could see blue hills, and beyond the hills, a cloudless blue sky.

The street, which had seemed so long to him that day, turned out to be very short. There was a small patch of woodland through which he emerged onto fields-fields lying in a long, flat valley with a stream running through it-and in the woods, the trees cast blue shadows on the grassy road.

How cool and quiet it was in the forest. The passion that had clung to Tara his entire life perhaps began that day. He stopped in the forest and sat for what seemed like a long time on the ground beneath a tree. Ants scurried here and there, then disappeared into holes in the ground, birds flew among the tree branches, and two spiders, which had hidden at his approach, emerged again and began spinning their webs.

If Tar had been crying when he entered the forest, he stopped now. His mother was far, far away. He might never find her again, but if he didn't, it would be her own fault. She had torn him from her arms to take charge of another, younger family member. The neighbor, who was she? She had pushed him into the arms of his sister, who, with a ridiculous command to sit on the box, promptly forgot all about him. There was the world of boys, but at the moment, boys meant his older brother, John, who had repeatedly shown his disdain for Tar's company, and people like the farm boy who rode off on a horse without bothering to speak to him or even give him a parting glance.

"Well," thought Tar, filled with bitter resentment, "if I am removed from one world, another will appear."

The ants at his feet were quite happy. What a fascinating world they lived in. Ants scurried out of their holes in the ground toward the light and built a mound of sand. Other ants set off on journeys around the world and returned laden with burdens. An ant was dragging a dead fly along the ground. A stick stood in its way, and now the fly's wings were caught on the stick, preventing it from moving. It ran like crazy, tugging at the stick, then the fly. A bird flew down from a nearby tree and, casting light on a fallen log, looked at Tar, and far away in the forest, through a crevice between the trees, a squirrel climbed down a tree trunk and began to scamper along the ground.

The bird looked at Thar, the squirrel stopped running and straightened up to look, and the ant, which had been unable to move the fly, made frantic signs with its tiny, hair-like antennae.

Was Tar accepted into the natural world? Grandiose plans began to form in his mind. He noticed that the sheep in the field near the farmhouse were eagerly eating grass. Why couldn't he eat grass? The ants lived warm and cozy in a hole in the ground. One family contained many ants, apparently the same age and size, and after Tar found his hole and ate so much grass that he became as big as a sheep-or even a horse or a cow-he would find his own kind.

He had no doubt that there was a language of sheep, squirrels, and ants. Now the squirrel began to chatter, and the bird on the log called, and another bird somewhere in the forest answered.

The bird flew away. The squirrel disappeared. They went to join their comrades. Only Thar was without a comrade.

He bent down and picked up the stick so that his tiny ant brother could continue his business, and then, getting on all fours, he put his ear to the anthill to see if it could hear the conversation.

He heard nothing. Well, he was too big. Far from others like him, he seemed big and strong. He followed the path, now crawling on all fours like a sheep, and reached the log where the bird had been perched just a moment before.


The log was hollow at one end, and it was obvious that with a little effort he could climb into it. He would have somewhere to go at night. He suddenly felt as if he had entered a world where he could move freely, where he could live freely and happily.

He decided it was time to go and eat some grass. Walking along a road through the forest, he came to a path leading into the valley. In a distant field, two men, driving two horses, each tethered to a cultivator, were plowing corn. The corn reached up to the horses' knees. A farm boy rode one of the horses. The farm dog trotted behind the other horse. From a distance, it seemed to Taru that the horses looked no larger than the sheep he had seen in the field near the house.

He stood by the fence, looking at the people and horses in the field and the boy on the horse. Well, the farm boy had grown up-he had moved into the world of men, and Tar remained in the care of women. But he had renounced the feminine world; he would immediately depart for the warm, cozy world-the world of the animal kingdom.

Dropping to all fours again, he crawled through the soft grass that grew near the fence by the alley. White clover grew among the grass, and the first thing he did was bite into one of the clover blossoms. It didn't taste so bad, and he ate more and more. How much would he have to eat, how much grass would he have to eat before he grew as big as a horse or even as big as a sheep? He continued to crawl, biting into the grass, but the edges of the blades were sharp and cut his lips. When he chewed a piece of grass, it tasted strange and bitter.

He persisted, but something inside him kept warning him that what he was doing was ridiculous and that if his sister or brother John knew, they would laugh at him. So every now and then, he stood up and looked back along the path through the woods to make sure no one was coming. Then, back on all fours, he crawled through the grass. Since it was difficult to tear the grass with his teeth, he used his hands. He had to chew the grass until it became soft before he could swallow it, and how disgusting it tasted.

How hard it is to grow up! Tar's dream of suddenly becoming big by eating grass faded, and he closed his eyes. With his eyes closed, he could perform a trick he sometimes performed in bed at night. He could recreate his own body in his imagination, making his legs and arms long, his shoulders broad. With his eyes closed, he could be anyone: a horse trotting through the streets, a tall man walking along the road. He could be a bear in a dense forest, a prince living in a castle with slaves who brought him food, he could be a grocer's son and rule over a women's house.

He sat on the grass with his eyes closed, pulling at the grass and trying to eat it. The green juice from the grass stained his lips and chin. He was probably growing bigger now. He'd already eaten two, three, half a dozen mouthfuls of the grass. In two or three more, he'd open his eyes and see what he'd accomplished. Perhaps he'd already have the legs of a horse. The thought frightened him a little, but he reached out, pulled off some more grass, and put it in his mouth.

Something terrible had happened. Tar quickly leaped to his feet, ran two or three steps, and sat up quickly. Reaching for his last handful of grass, he caught a bee sucking honey from one of the clover flowers and raised it to his lips. The bee stung him on the lip, and then, in a convulsive moment, his hand half-crushed the insect, and it was flung aside. He saw it lying on the grass, struggling to rise and fly away. Its broken wings flapped madly in the air, making a loud buzzing sound.

The worst pain came to Tar. He raised his hand to his lip, rolled over onto his back, closed his eyes, and screamed. As the pain intensified, his screams grew louder and louder.

Why had he left his mother? The sky he now gazed at, when he dared to open his eyes, was empty, and he had retreated from all humanity into an empty world. The world of crawling and flying creatures, the world of four-legged animals he had thought so warm and safe, had now become dark and threatening. The small, struggling winged beast on the grass nearby was just one of a vast army of winged creatures surrounding him on all sides. He wanted to rise to his feet and run back through the forest to the women in the farmhouse, but he didn't dare move.

There was nothing to do but let out this humiliating scream, and so, lying on his back in the alley with his eyes closed, Tar continued to scream for what seemed like hours. Now his lip was burning and growing large. He felt it pulsate and throb beneath his fingers. Growing up back then had been a matter of horror and pain. What a terrible world he'd been born into.

Tar didn't want to grow big, like a horse or a man. He wanted someone to come. The world of growth was too empty and lonely. Now his cries were interrupted by sobs. Would no one ever come?

The sound of running feet came from the alley. Two men, accompanied by a dog and a boy, came from the field, women from the house, and girls from the barn. Everyone ran and called for Tara, but he didn't dare look. When the farm woman approached him and picked him up, he still kept his eyes closed and soon stopped screaming, though his sobs became louder than ever.

There was a hurried conference, many voices speaking at once, and then one of the men stepped forward and, lifting his head from the woman's shoulder, pushed Tar's hand away from his face.

"Listen," he said, "the rabbit was eating grass and a bee stung him."

The farmer laughed, the hired hand and the farm boy laughed, and Sister Tara and the farm girl squealed with delight.

Tar kept his eyes closed, and it seemed to him that the sobs now shaking his body were growing deeper and deeper. There was a place, deep inside, where the sobs began, and it hurt more than his swollen lip. If the herb he'd swallowed so painfully were now causing something inside him to grow and burn, as his lip had grown, how terrible that would be.

He buried his face in the farmer's shoulder and refused to look at the world. The farmer's boy found a wounded bee and showed it to the girls. "He tried to eat it. He ate grass," he whispered, and the girls squealed again.

These terrible women!

Now his sister would return to town and tell John. She told the neighbor kids who came to play in Moorhead's yard. The place inside Thar ached more than ever.

The small group followed the path through the forest toward the house. The great journey alone, which was supposed to completely separate Tar from humanity, from a world beyond understanding, had been completed in just a few minutes. The two farmers and the boy returned to the field, and the horse that had brought Tar from the city was harnessed to a cart and tied to a post at the side of the house.

Tara's face would be washed, he'd be loaded into a buggy, and driven back to town. The farmers and the boy he'd never see again. The farm woman who held him in her arms had made his sister and the farm girl stop laughing, but would his sister stop when she returned to town to see his brother?

Alas, she was a woman, and Tar didn't believe it. If only women could be more like men. The farm woman took him into the house, washed the grass stains from his face, and applied soothing lotion to his swollen lip, but something inside him continued to swell.

In his mind's eye, he heard his sister, brother, and the neighbor children whispering and giggling in the yard. Cut off from his mother by the presence of the youngest child in her arms and the angry voices in the yard repeating over and over, "The rabbit tried to eat grass; a bee stung it," where could he turn?

Tar didn't know and couldn't think. He buried his face in the farmer's chest and continued to sob bitterly.

Growing up, in any way he could imagine at the moment, seemed a dreadful, if not impossible, task. For now, he was content to be a baby in a strange woman's arms, in a place where there wasn't another baby [waiting to push him away].

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CHAPTER III


MEN LIVE IN ONE WORLD, WOMEN IN ANOTHER. When Tar was little, people would always come to the kitchen door to talk to Mary Moorehead. There was an old carpenter who had injured his back in a fall from a building and who was sometimes a little drunk. He didn't come into the house, but sat on the steps by the kitchen door and talked to the woman while she worked at the ironing board. The doctor came too. He was a tall, thin man with strange hands. His hands resembled old vines clinging to tree trunks. People's hands, rooms in houses, the faces of fields-the child remembered all this. The old carpenter had short, stubby fingers. His nails were black and broken. The doctor's fingers were like his mother's, quite long. Tar later used the doctor in several of his printed stories. When the boy grew up, he couldn't remember exactly what the old doctor looked like, but by then his imagination had already conjured up a figure who could take his place. From the doctor, the old carpenter, and several female visitors, he got a sense of gentleness. They were all people defeated by life. Something had gone wrong with them, just as something had gone wrong with Tara's mother.

Could it have been her marriage? He asked himself this question only much later. As an adult, Tar found in an old chest the diary his father had kept during and immediately after the war. The entries were brief. For several days, nothing was written, and then the soldier would write page after page. He also had a penchant for writing.

Throughout the war, something gnawed at the soldier's conscience. Knowing that his brothers would enlist for the South, he was haunted by the thought that he might someday meet one of them in battle. Then, if nothing worse happened, he would be discovered. How could he explain it? "Well, the women were applauding, the flags were waving, the bands were playing." When he fired a shot in battle, the bullet, flying through the space between the Northerners and the Southerners, could lodge in his brother's chest or even in his father's. Perhaps his father had also enlisted for the South. He himself went to war without a criminal record, almost by chance, because the people around him went for a captain's uniform and a sword to hang at their side. If a man thought much about war, he certainly wouldn't go. As for blacks-they were free men or slaves... He still held to the position of a Southerner. If, while walking down the street with Dick Moorehead, you saw a Negro woman, beautiful in her own way, walking with an easy, carefree carriage, her skin a beautiful golden-brown, and you mentioned the fact of her beauty, Dick Moorehead would look at you with amazement in his eyes. "Beautiful! I say! My dear friend! She is a Negro." Looking at Negroes, Dick saw nothing. If the Negro served his purpose, if he was funny-very good. "I am a white man and a Southerner. I belong to the ruling race. We had an old black man in our house. You should have heard him play his pipe. Negroes are what they are. Only we Southerners understand them."

The book the soldier kept during the war and afterward was full of entries about women. Sometimes Dick Moorehead was a religious man and a regular churchgoer, sometimes not. In one town where he lived immediately after the war, he was a Sunday school principal, and in another, he taught Bible classes.

As an adult, Tar looked at the notebook with delight. He had completely forgotten that his father had been so naive, so charmingly human and understandable. "I was at the Baptist church and managed to take Gertrude home. We walked a long way past a bridge and stopped for almost an hour. I tried to kiss her, but at first she wouldn't let me, but then she did. Now I'm in love with her."

"On Wednesday evening, Mabel passed the store. I closed up immediately and followed her to the end of Main Street. Harry Thompson was after her and got his boss to let him go on some pretext. We both walked down the street, but I got there first. I went home with her, but her father and mother were still up. They stayed up until I had to go, so I got nothing. Her father is a timid talker. He has a new riding horse, and he talked and bragged about it all evening. It was a disastrous evening for me."

Entry after entry of this kind fills the diary the young soldier kept after returning from the war and beginning his restless march from town to town. Finally, he found a woman, Maria, in one of the towns and married her. Life took on a new flavor for him. With a wife and children, he now sought the company of men.

In some of the towns Dick moved to after the war, life was fairly good, but in others he was unhappy. First, although he had entered the war on the side of the North, he never forgot the fact that he was a Southerner and, therefore, a Democrat. In one town lived a half-crazy man, teased by boys. There he was, Dick Moorhead, a young merchant, a former army officer who, whatever his inner feelings, nevertheless fought to preserve the Union that had helped hold these United States together, and there, on the same street, was the madman. The madman walked with his mouth agape and a strange, empty stare. Winter and summer, he wore no coat, but a shirt with sleeves. He lived with his sister in a small house on the outskirts of town, and was usually harmless enough, but when little boys, hiding behind trees or in shop doors, shouted at him, calling him a "democrat," he would fly into a rage. Running out into the street, he picked up stones and hurled them recklessly. One day, he broke a storefront window, and his sister had to pay for it.

Wasn't this an insult to Dick? A true Democrat! His hand shook as he wrote this in his notebook. Being the only true Democrat in town, the screams of little boys made him want to run and beat them up. He maintained his dignity, didn't give himself away, but as soon as he could, he sold his store and moved on.

Well, the shirt-sleeved madman wasn't really a Democrat; he didn't resemble Dick, the born Southerner. The word, picked up by the boys and repeated over and over again, merely triggered his half-hidden madness, but for Dick, the effect was something special. It made him feel that, though he had fought a long and bitter war, he had fought in vain. "Those are the kind of people," he muttered to himself as he hurried away. After selling his store, he was forced to buy a smaller one in the neighboring town. After the war and his marriage, Dick's financial fortunes steadily declined.

For a child, the master of the house, the father, is one thing, but the mother is quite another. The mother is something warm and safe, something the child can go to, while the father is the one who goes out into the world. Now he began to understand, little by little, the home in which Tar lived. Even if you live in many houses in many cities, a house is a home. There are walls and rooms. You pass through doors into a courtyard. There is a street with other houses and other children. You can see a long path along the street. Sometimes on Saturday evenings, a neighbor hired for this purpose would come to look after the other children, and Tar was allowed to go downtown with his mother.

Tar was now five, and his older brother, John, was ten. There was Robert, now three, and the newborn baby, always in its crib. Although the baby couldn't help but cry, she already had a name. His name was Will, and when she was home, he was always in his mother's arms. What a little pest! And to have a name, a boy's name! There was another Will outside, a tall boy with a freckled face who sometimes came into the house to play with John. He called John "Jack," and John called him "Bill." He could throw a ball like a punch. John hung a trapeze from a tree from which a boy named Will could hang by his toes. He went to school like John and Margaret and got into a fight with a boy two years older than him. Tar heard John talking about it. When John wasn't around, he told Robert about it himself, pretending to see the fight. Well, Bill hit the boy, knocked him down. He gave the boy a bloody nose. - You should have seen it.

It was all right and proper when such a person was named Will and Bill, but he was a baby in a crib, a little girl, always in his mother's arms. What nonsense!

Sometimes on Saturday evenings, Tara was allowed to go into town with her mother. They couldn't start work until the lights came on. First, they had to wash the dishes, help Margaret, and then put the baby to bed.

What a fuss he had caused, that little rascal. Now that he could have easily ingratiated himself with his brother [Tar] by being reasonable, he cried and cried. First Margaret had to hold him, and then Tar's mother had to take her turn. Margaret was having fun. She could pretend to be a woman and girls like that. When there are no children around, they are made of rags. They talk, swear, coo, and hold things in their hands. Tar was already dressed, like his mother. The best part of the trip to town was the feeling of being alone with her. That rarely happens these days. The baby was ruining everything. Very soon it would be too late to go, the shops would be closed. Tar paced restlessly around the yard, wanting to cry. If he did, he would [have to stay home]. He had to look casual and say nothing.

A neighbor came over, and the child went to bed. Now his mother stopped to talk to the woman. They talked and talked. Tar held his mother's hand and continued to tug, but she ignored him. Finally, however, they emerged into the street and plunged into darkness.

Tar walked, holding his mother's hand, ten steps, twenty, a hundred. He and his mother passed through the gate and walked along the sidewalk. They passed the Musgraves' house, the Wellivers' house. When they reached the Rogers' house and turned the corner, they would be safe. Then, if the child cried, Tar's mother couldn't hear.

He began to feel at ease. What a time for him. Now he was going out into the world not with his sister, who had her own rules and thought too much of herself and her desires, or with the neighbor in the carriage, a woman who understood nothing, but with his mother. Mary Moorehead put on a black Sunday dress. It was beautiful. When she wore a black dress, she also wore a piece of white lace at her neck and other details on her wrists. The black dress made her look young and slender. The lace was thin and white. It was like a spider's web. Tar wanted to touch it with his fingers, but he didn't dare. He might tear it.

They passed one streetlight, then another. The electrical storms hadn't started yet, and the streets of the Ohio town were lit by kerosene lamps mounted on poles. They were spaced far apart, mostly on street corners, and darkness reigned between the lamps.

How fun it was to walk in the dark, feeling safe. Going anywhere with her mother was like being home and abroad at the same time.

When he and his mother left their street, the adventure began. These days, the Moorheads always lived in small houses on the outskirts of town, but when they walked onto Main Street, they walked along streets lined with tall buildings. The houses stood far back on lawns, and huge trees lined the sidewalks. There was a large white house, with women and children sitting on the wide porch, and as Tar and his mother drove past, a carriage with a black driver pulled into the driveway. The woman and child had to step aside to let it pass.

What a royal place. The white house had at least ten rooms, and its own lamps hung from the porch ceiling. There was a girl about Margaret's age, dressed all in white. The carriage-Tar saw a black man driving it-could drive right into the house. There was a porte-cochère. His mother told him about it. How magnificent!

[What a world Tar had come to.] The Mooreheads were poor and growing poorer every year, but Tar didn't know that. He didn't wonder why his mother, who had seemed so beautiful to him, wore only one good dress and walked while another woman rode in a carriage, why the Mooreheads lived in a small house through the cracks of which snow seeped in during the winter, while others lived in warm, brightly lit houses.

The world was the world, and he saw it, holding his mother's hand in his. They passed more streetlights, passed a few more dark places, and now they turned the corner and saw Main Street.

Now life really began. So many lights, so many people! On Saturday evening, crowds of villagers came to town, and the streets were filled with horses, carts, and carriages. [There was so much to see.]

Red-faced young men who had worked in the cornfields all week came into town in their best clothes and white collars. Some of them rode alone, while others, more fortunate, had girls with them. They tied their horses to posts along the street and walked along the sidewalk. Grown men thundered down the street on horseback, while women stood and chatted by the shop doors.

The Moorheads now lived in a fairly large town. It was the county seat, and it had a square and a courthouse, past which ran the main street. Well, there were shops in the side streets, too.

A patent medicine salesman came to town and set up his stand on the corner. He shouted loudly, inviting people to stop and listen, and for several minutes, Mary Moorehead and Tar stood at the edge of the crowd. A torch glowed at the end of a pole, and two black men sang songs. Tar remembered one of the poems. What did it mean?


White man, he lives in a big brick house,

The yellow man wants to do the same,

An old black man lives in the county jail,

But his house is still made of brick.


When the black men began singing the verses, the crowd screamed with delight, and Tar laughed too. Well, he laughed because he was so excited. His eyes were shining with excitement [now]. As he grew up, he began to spend all his time among the crowds. He and his mother walked down the street, the child clinging to the woman's hand. He didn't dare wink, afraid of missing something. [Again], the Moorehead house seemed far away, in another world. Now not even a child could come between him and his mother. The little rascal could cry [and cry], but [he shouldn't care], John Moorehead, his brother, was almost [grown up]. On Saturday nights, he sold newspapers on Main Street. He sold a paper called the Cincinnati Enquirer and another called the Chicago Blade. The Blade had bright pictures and sold for five cents.

A man was bent over a pile of money on the table, while another fierce-looking man was sneaking up on him with an open knife in his hand.

A wild-looking woman was about to throw a child from a [high] bridge onto [the] rocks [far] below, but a boy rushed forward and saved the child.

Now the train was racing around a bend in the mountains, and four men on horseback, guns in hand, were waiting. They had piled rocks and trees onto the tracks.

Well, they intended to stop the train and then rob it. It was Jesse James and his band. Tar heard his brother John explaining the pictures to a boy named Bill. Later, when no one was around, he stared at them for a long time. Looking at the pictures gave him bad dreams at night, but during the day they were wonderfully exciting.

It was fun to imagine myself part of life's adventures, in a man's world, during the day. The people who bought John's papers probably got a lot for five cents. After all, you could take a scene like that and change everything.

You sat on the porch of your house and closed your eyes. John and Margaret had gone to school, and the baby and Robert were both asleep. The baby slept well enough when Tar didn't want to go anywhere with his mother.

You sat on the porch of the house and closed your eyes. Your mother was ironing. The damp, clean clothes being ironed smelled pleasant. This old, disabled carpenter, who could no longer work, who had been a soldier and received a so-called "pension," was talking on the back porch of the house. He was telling [Tara's] mother about the buildings he had worked on in his youth.

He told of how log cabins were built in the woods when the country was young, and of how men went out to hunt wild turkeys and deer.

It was fun enough to listen to old carpenter talk, but it was even more fun to make up your own talk, to build your own world.

The colorful pictures in the newspapers John sold on Saturdays truly came to life. In his imagination, Tar grew into a man, and a brave one at that. He participated in every desperate scene, changed them, threw himself into the very thick of life's whirlpool and bustle.

A world of grown-ups moving around, and Tar Moorhead among them. Somewhere in the crowd on the street, John was now running, selling his newspapers. He held them up under people's noses, showing them color pictures. Like a grown man, John went to saloons, to stores, to the courthouse.

Soon Tar would grow up on his own. It couldn't take long. How long the days sometimes seemed.

He and his mother made their way through the crowd. Men and women were talking to his mother. A tall man didn't see Tar and knocked on his door. Then another very tall man with a pipe in his mouth fucked him again.

The man wasn't all that nice. He apologized and gave Tar a nickel, but it didn't do any good. The way he did it hurt more than the explosion. Some men think a child is just a child.

And so they turned off Main Street and found themselves on the one where Dick's store was located. It was a Saturday night and there were a lot of people. Across the street stood a two-story building where a dance was taking place. It was a square dance, and a man's voice was heard. "Do it, do it, do it. Gentlemen, everyone leads to the right. Balance everything." The whining voices of violins, laughter, a multitude of talking voices.

[They entered the shop.] Dick Moorehead was still able to dress in some style. He still wore his watch on a heavy silver chain, and before Saturday evening he had shaved and waxed his mustache. A silent old man, very much like the carpenter who had come to visit Tar's mother, was working in the shop and was now working there, sitting on his wooden horse. He was sewing a belt.

Tar thought his father's life was magnificent. When a woman and child entered the store, Dick immediately ran to the drawer, pulled out a handful of money, and offered it to his wife. Perhaps it was all the money he had, but Tar didn't know that. Money was something you bought things with. You either had it or you didn't.

As for Tar, he had his own money. He had a nickel that a man on the street had given him. When the man had slapped him and given him the nickel, his mother had asked sharply, "Well, Edgar, what do you say?" and he had responded by looking at the man and saying rudely, "Give me more." This made the man laugh, but Tar hadn't seen the point. The man had been rude, and he had been rude too. His mother had been hurt. It was [very] easy to hurt his mother.

At the store, Tar sat on a chair in the back, while his mother sat on another chair. She only took a few coins Dick offered.

The conversation began again. Grown-ups always indulge in conversation. There were half a dozen farmers in the store, and when Dick offered his wife money, he did it with panache. Dick did everything with panache. That was his nature. He said something about the value of women and children. He was as rude as a man in the street, but Dick's rudeness never mattered. He didn't mean what he said.

[And] in any case, Dick was a businessman.

How he bustled about. Men kept coming into the store, bringing seat belts and throwing them on the floor with a bang. The men talked, and Dick [too] talked. He talked more than anyone else. In the back of the store were only Tar, his mother, and an old man on a horse sewing a belt. This man looked like the carpenter and doctor who came to the house when Tar was home. He was small, shy, and spoke timidly, asking Mary Moorehead about the other children and the baby. Soon he got up from the bench and, arriving at Tar, gave him another nickel. How rich Tar had become. This time he didn"t wait for his mother to ask, but immediately said what he knew he should say.

Tar's mother left him in the shop. Men came and went. They talked. Dick went outside with a few men. The businessman who had taken the order for the new harness was expected to adjust it. Every time he returned from such a trip, Dick's eyes shone brighter, and his mustache straightened. He came over and stroked Tar's hair.

"He's a smart man," he said. Well, Dick was bragging [again].

It was better when he talked to the others. He told jokes, and the men laughed. When the men doubled over laughing, Tar and the old harness on the horse looked at each other and laughed too. It was as if the old man had said, "We're out of this, my boy. You're too young, and I'm too old." In fact, the old man hadn't said anything [at all]. It was all made up. The best things for a boy are always imagined. You're sitting in a chair in the back of your father's store on a Saturday night while your mother is out shopping, and you're having thoughts like these. You can hear the sound of a violin in the dance hall outside, and the pleasant sound of men's voices in the distance. There's a lamp hanging in the front of the store, and harnesses hanging on the walls. Everything is neat and orderly. The harnesses have silver buckles, and there are brass buckles. Solomon had a temple, and in the temple there were shields of brass. There were vessels of silver and gold. Solomon was the wisest man in the world.

On a Saturday evening in a saddlery, oil lamps sway gently from the ceiling. Pieces of brass and silver are everywhere. As the lamps swing, tiny flames appear and disappear. The lights dance, men's voices, laughter, and the sounds of violins can be heard. People walk back and forth in the street.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER IV


FOR _ _ BOY As far as man is concerned, there is the world of imagination and the world of facts. Sometimes the world of facts is very gloomy.

Solomon had silver vessels, he had gold vessels, but Tar Moorehead's father was no Solomon. A year after the Saturday evening when Tar sat in his father's shop and saw the bright gleam of buckles in the swaying lights, the shop was sold to pay Dick's debts, and the Mooreheads lived in another town.

All summer Dick worked as a painter, but now the cold weather had arrived, and he found work. Now he was just a worker in a harness shop, sitting on horse harnesses sewing belts. The silver watch and chain were gone.

The Moorheads lived in a squalid house, and Tar was ill all autumn. As autumn approached, a period of very cold days began, followed by a period of mild [warm] days.

Tar sat on the porch, wrapped in a blanket. Now the corn in the distant fields was in shock, and the remaining crops had been hauled away. In a small field nearby, where the corn harvest had been poor, a farmer went out to harvest the corn and then drove the cows into the field to nibble on the stalks. In the forest, red and yellow leaves were rapidly falling. With each gust of wind, they flew like bright birds across Tar's field of vision. In the kom-field, the cows, picking their way among the dry corn stalks, made a low rumble.

Dick Moorehead had names Tar had never heard before. One day, as he sat on the porch of his house, a man carrying a board walked past the house and, seeing Dick Moorehead coming out the front door, stopped and spoke to him. He called Dick Moorehead "Major."

"Hello, Major," he shouted.

The man's hat was cocked jauntily, and he was smoking a pipe. After he and Dick had walked down the road together, Tar rose from his chair. It was one of those days when he felt strong enough. The sun was shining.

Walking around the house, he found a board that had fallen from the fence and tried to carry it as the man in the road had done, balancing it on his shoulder as he walked back and forth along the path in the back yard, but it fell and the end hit him on the head, causing a large bump.

Tar returned and sat alone on the porch. A newborn baby was about to arrive. He'd heard his father and mother talking about it that night. With three children younger than himself in the house, it was time for him to grow up.

His father's names were "Captain" and "Major." His mother, Tara, sometimes called her husband "Richard." How wonderful it is to be a man and have so many names.

Tar began to wonder if he'd ever become a man. What a long wait! How frustrating it would be to be sick and not be able to go to school.

Today, immediately after he ate his meal, Dick Moorehead hurried out of the house. He didn't return home that evening until everyone had gone to bed. In his new town, he joined a brass band and belonged to several lodges. When he wasn't working at the store at night, he could always visit the lodge. Although his clothes were shabby, Dick wore two or three brightly colored badges on his coat lapels, and on special occasions, colorful ribbons.

One Saturday evening, when Dick returned home from the store, something happened.

The whole house felt it. It was dark outside, and dinner had been long overdue. When the children finally heard their father's footsteps on the sidewalk leading from the gate to the front door, everyone fell silent.

How strange. Footsteps echoed along the hard driveway outside and stopped in front of the house. Now the front gate opened, and Dick walked around the house to the kitchen door, where the rest of the Moorehead family sat waiting. It was one of those days when Tar felt strong and [he] approached the table. While the footsteps were still echoing along the driveway, his mother stood silently in the middle of the room, but as they moved through the house, she hurried to the stove. When Dick reached the kitchen door, she didn't look at him, and throughout the entire meal, engrossed in the strange new silence, she didn't speak to her husband or children.

Dick drank. Many times when he came home that fall, he was drunk, but the children had never seen him truly out of his mind. As he walked along the road and the path leading around the house, all the children recognized his footsteps, which at the same time were not his. Something was wrong. Everyone in the house sensed it. Every step was hesitant. This man, perhaps quite consciously, had given over part of himself to some outside force. He had relinquished control of his faculties, his mind, his imagination, his tongue, the muscles of his body. At that time, he was utterly helpless in the hands of something his children could not understand. It was a kind of attack on the spirit of the house. At the kitchen door, he lost control a little and had to quickly catch himself, bracing his hand on the doorframe.

Entering the room and setting his hat aside, he immediately headed over to where Tar was sitting. "Well, well, how are you, little monkey?" he exclaimed, standing in front of Tar's chair and laughing a little stupidly. He undoubtedly felt everyone's eyes on him, sensed the frightened silence of the room.

To convey this, he picked up Tara and tried to walk to his place at the head of the table and sit down. He almost fell. "How big you're getting," he said to Tara. He didn't look at his wife.

Being in his father's arms was like being on top of a wind-blown tree. When Dick regained his balance, he walked over to the chair and sat down, resting his cheek against Tar's. He hadn't shaved for days, and his half-grown beard cut Tar's face, while his father's long mustache was wet. His breath smelled strange and pungent. The scent made Tar feel a little ill, but he didn't cry. He was too scared to cry.

The child's fright, the fright of all the children in the room, was something special. The sense of gloom that had permeated the house for months reached its climax. Dick's drinking was a kind of affirmation. "Well, life has been too hard. I'll let things go. There's a man in me, and there's something else. I tried to be a man, but I failed. Look at me. Now I've become who I am. How do you like that?"

Seeing his chance, Tar crawled out of his father's arms and sat down next to his mother. All the children in the house instinctively pulled their chairs closer to the floor, leaving his father completely alone, with wide, open spaces on either side. Tar felt feverishly powerful. His mind conjured up strange images, one after another.

He kept thinking about trees. Now his father was like a tree in the middle of a large open meadow, a tree tossed by the wind, a wind that everyone else standing at the edge of the meadow couldn't feel.

The strange man who suddenly entered the house was Tar's father, but he wasn't his father. The man's hands continued to move hesitantly. He was serving baked potatoes for dinner, and he tried to serve the children by stabbing his fork into the potato, but he missed, and the fork hit the edge of the dish. It made a sharp, metallic sound. He tried two or three times, and then Mary Moorehead, rising from her seat, walked around the table and took the dish. Once everyone had been served, they ate silently.

The silence was unbearable for Dick. It was an accusation of sorts. His whole life, now that he was married and the father of children, was an accusation of sorts. "Too many accusations. A man is what he is. You're expected to grow up and be a man, but what if you weren't made that way?"

It's true that Dick drank and didn't save money, but other men were the same way. "There's a lawyer in this very town who gets drunk two or three times a week, but look at him. He's successful. He makes money and dresses well. I'm all mixed up. Frankly, I made a mistake by becoming a soldier and going against my father and brothers. I've always made mistakes. Being a man isn't as easy as it looks.

"I made a mistake when I got married. I love my wife, but I can't do anything for her. Now she'll see me for who I am. My children will see me for who I am. What's in it for me?"

Dick had worked himself into a frenzy. He began speaking, addressing not his wife and children, but the stove in the corner of the room. The children ate silently. Everyone turned white.

Tar turned and looked at the stove. How strange, he thought, for a grown man to talk to a stove. It was something a child like him might do, alone in a room, but a man is a man. As his father spoke, he vividly saw faces appearing and disappearing in the darkness behind the stove. The faces, brought to life by his father's voice, emerged clearly from the darkness behind the stove and then just as quickly vanished. They danced in the air, growing large, then small.

Dick Moorehead spoke as if he were giving a speech. There were some people who, when he lived in another town and owned a harness shop, when he was a man of action and not a simple laborer as he was now, did not pay for the harnesses bought in his shop. "How can I live if they don't pay?" he asked aloud. Now he held a small baked potato on the end of his fork and began waving it. Mother Tara looked at her plate, but his brother John, his sister Margaret, and his younger brother Robert stared at their father with wide eyes. As for Mother Tara, when something happened that she didn't [understand or disapprove of], she walked around the house with a strange, lost look in her eyes. The eyes were frightened. They frightened Dick Moorehead and the children. Everyone became shy, afraid. It was as if she had been struck, and, looking at her, you immediately felt that the blow had been struck by your own hand.

The room in which the Mooreheads now sat was lit only by a small oil lamp on the table and the light from the stove. Since it was already late, darkness had fallen. The kitchen stove had many cracks through which ash and pieces of burning coal occasionally fell. The stove was connected by wires. The Mooreheads were indeed in a very difficult situation at that time. They had reached the lowest point in all the memories Tara later retained of his childhood.

Dick Moorehead declared his situation in life to be dire. At home, at the table, he stared into the darkness of the kitchen stove and thought about the men who owed him money. "Look at me. I'm in a certain position. Well, I've got a wife and kids. I've got kids to feed, and these men owe me money, but they won't pay me. I'm desperate, and they laugh at me. I want to do my part like a man, but how can I do it?"

The drunk man began shouting out a long list of names of people he claimed owed him money, and Tar listened in amazement. It was odd that, when he grew up and became a storyteller, Tar remembered many of the names his father had uttered that evening. Many of them were later attached to characters in his stories.

His father had named names and condemned people who had not paid for harnesses bought when he was prosperous and owned his own shop, but Tar had not subsequently associated those names with his father or with any injustice done to him.

Something happened [to Tar]. [Tar] was sitting on a chair next to his mother, facing the stove in the corner.

The light flickered on and off the wall. As Dick spoke, he held a small baked potato on the end of his fork.

The baked potato cast dancing shadows on the wall.

The outlines of faces began to appear. As Dick Moorehead spoke, movement began in the shadows.

Names were mentioned one by one, and then faces appeared. Where had Tar seen these faces before? They were the faces of people seen driving past the Moorhead house, faces seen on trains, faces seen from the seat of a buggy that time Tar had driven out of town.

There was a man with a gold tooth and an old man with a hat pulled down over his eyes, followed by others. The man who had been holding a board over his shoulder and calling Tar's father "major" stepped out of the shadows and stood looking at Tar. The illness from which Tar had suffered and from which he had begun to recover was now returning. Cracks in the stove created dancing flames on the floor.

The faces Tar saw appeared so suddenly out of the darkness and then vanished so quickly that he couldn't connect with his father. Each face seemed to have a life of its own for him.

His father continued speaking in a hoarse, angry voice, and faces appeared and disappeared. The meal continued, but Tar did not eat. The faces he saw in the shadows did not frighten him; they filled the child with wonder.

He sat at the table, glancing occasionally at his angry father, and then at the men who had mysteriously entered the room. How glad he was that his mother was there. Did the others see what he saw?

The faces dancing on the walls of the room were the faces of men. Someday he himself would be a man. He watched and waited, but while his father spoke, he didn't connect the faces with the words of condemnation coming from his lips.

Jim Gibson, Curtis Brown, Andrew Hartnett, Jacob Wills-men from rural Ohio who bought harnesses from a small manufacturer and then didn't pay. The names themselves were a subject of reflection. Names were like houses, like pictures people hang on the walls of their rooms. When you see a painting, you don't see what the person who painted it saw. When you enter a house, you don't feel what the people living there feel.

The names mentioned create a certain impression. Sounds also create images. Too many photographs. When you're a child and sick, the images pile up too quickly.

Now that he was ill, Tar spent too much time alone. On rainy days, he sat by the window, and on clear days, on a chair on the porch.

Illness had forced him into habitual silence. Throughout his illness, Tara's older brother, John, and his sister, Margaret, had been kind. John, who was busy with chores in the yard and on the road and who was often visited by other boys, came to bring him some marbles, and Margaret came to sit with him and tell him about the events at school.

Tar sat, looking around and saying nothing. How could he tell anyone what was going on inside? Too much was happening inside. He couldn't do anything with his weak body, but within it, intense activity was raging.

There was something strange inside, something constantly torn apart and then put back together. Tar didn't understand it and never would.

First, everything seemed far away. On the side of the road in front of the Moorheads' house, there was a tree that kept popping up out of the ground and floating into the sky. Tara's mother came to sit with him in the room. She was always at work. When she wasn't bending over the washing machine or ironing board, she was sewing. She, the chair she sat on, even the walls of the room seemed to float away. Something inside Tara constantly fought to put everything back and put it back in its place. If only everything stayed in its place, how peaceful and pleasant life would be.

Tar knew nothing of death, but he was afraid. What should have been small became large, what should have remained large became small. Often Tar's hands, white and small, seemed to break away from his own and float away. They floated above the treetops visible through the window, almost disappearing into the sky.

Tar's job was to keep everything from disappearing. It was a problem he couldn't explain to anyone, and it consumed him completely. Often, a tree emerging from the ground and floating away would become just a black dot in the sky, but his job was to keep it in sight. If you lost sight of a tree, you lost sight of everything. Tar didn't know why this was true, but it was. He kept a grim face.

If he had held onto the tree, everything would have gone back to normal. Someday he would adapt again.

If Tar held out, everything would finally work out. He was absolutely certain of that.

The faces on the street in front of the houses where the Mooreheads lived sometimes floated in the sick boy's imagination, just as now in the Moorehead kitchen those faces floated on the wall behind the stove.

Tar's father continued to name new names, and new faces continued to arrive. Tar turned very white.

The faces on the wall appeared and disappeared faster than ever. Thar's small white hands gripped the edges of his chair.

If it were a test for him to follow all the faces with his imagination, should he follow them as he followed the trees when they seemed to float into the sky?

The faces became a swirling mass. The father's voice seemed distant.

Something slipped. Tar's hands, clutching the edges of his chair so tightly, released their grip, and with a soft sigh, he slid off the chair onto the floor, into the darkness.

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CHAPTER V


IN THE APARTMENT The neighborhoods of American cities, among the poor in small towns-strange things for a boy to see. Most of the houses in small Midwestern towns have no dignity. They are cheaply built, thrown together. The walls are thin. Everything was done in a hurry. What goes on in one room is known to the child who is sick in the next room. Well, he knows nothing. Another thing is what he feels. He can't say what he feels.

At times, Tar resented his father, as well as the fact that he had younger children. Although he was still weak from illness, at that time, after a drunken episode, his mother was pregnant. He didn't know the word, didn't know for sure that another child would be born. And yet, he knew.

Sometimes on warm, clear days, he sat in a rocking chair on the porch. At night, he lay on a cot in the room next to his parents' room, downstairs. John, Margaret, and Robert slept upstairs. The baby lay in bed with his parents. There was another child, not yet born.

Tar has already seen and heard a lot.

Before he fell ill, his mother was tall and slender. While she was working in the kitchen, the baby lay on a chair among the cushions. For a while, the baby breastfed. Then he began bottle-feeding.

What a little pig! The baby's eyes were slightly squinted. He had been crying even before he took the bottle, but then, as soon as it went into his mouth, he stopped. His tiny face turned red. When the bottle was empty, the baby fell asleep.

When there's a child in the house, there are always unpleasant odors. Women and girls don't mind.

When your mother suddenly becomes round as a barrel, there's a reason. John and Margaret knew. It had happened before. Some children don't apply what they see and hear happening around them to their [own] lives. Others do. The three older children didn't talk to each other about what was happening in the air. Robert was too young to know.

When you're a child and sick, as Tar was then, everything human mingles with animal life in your mind. Cats screamed at night, cows bellowed in the barns, dogs ran in packs along the road in front of the house. Something is always moving-in people, animals, trees, flowers, grasses. How are you supposed to determine what's disgusting and what's good? Kittens, calves, foals were born. Neighborhood women had babies. A woman who lived near the Moorheads gave birth to twins. From what people said, it was unlikely that anything more tragic could have happened.

Boys in small towns, after they go to school, write on fences with chalk they steal from the classroom. They make drawings on the sides of barns and on sidewalks.

Even before he went to school, Tar [knew something]. [How did he know?] Perhaps his illness made him more [aware]. There was a strange feeling inside-fear was growing [in him]. His mother, his own relative, the tall woman who walked around the Moorhead house and did chores, was in some way involved in this.

Tar's illness complicated matters. He couldn't run around the yard, play ball, or go on adventurous trips to the nearby fields. When the baby took a bottle and fell asleep, his mother brought her sewing and sat next to him. Everything was still in the house. If only things could stay like this. From time to time, her hand would stroke his hair, and when she stopped, he wanted to ask her to keep doing it forever, but he couldn't bring himself to form the words.

Two city boys, John's age, went one day to a place where a small stream crossed the street. There was a wooden bridge with gaps between the planks, and the boys crawled under it and lay quietly for a long time. They wanted to see something. Afterward, they came to the Moorheads' yard and talked with John. Their stay under the bridge had something to do with the women crossing the bridge. When they arrived at the Moorheads' house, Tar was sitting among the pillows in the sun on the porch, and when they began to talk, he pretended to be asleep. The boy who told John about the adventure whispered when he got to the most important part, but to Tar, lying on the pillows with his eyes closed, the very sound of the boy's whisper was like tearing fabric. It was like a curtain being torn, and you were facing something? [Perhaps nakedness. It takes time and maturity to build up the strength to confront nakedness. Some never understand it. Why should they? A dream can be more important than reality. It depends on what you want.

Another day, Tar was sitting in the same chair on the porch while Robert played outside. He walked down the road to where the field was and soon came back running. In the field, he saw something he wanted to show Tar. He couldn't say what it was, but his eyes were big and round, and he whispered one word over and over. "Come on, come on," he whispered, and Tar got up from his chair and followed him.

Tar was so weak at the time that, hurrying after Robert, he had to stop several times to sit down by the road. Robert danced restlessly in the dust in the middle of the road. "What is that?" Tar kept asking, but his younger brother couldn't tell. If Mary Moorehead hadn't been so preoccupied with the baby already born and the one about to be born, she might have left Tar at home. With so many children, one child gets lost.

Two children approached the edge of a field surrounded by a fence. Elderberries and berry bushes grew between the fence and the road, and they were [now] in bloom. Tar and his brother climbed into the bushes and peered over the fence, between the rails.

What they saw was quite astonishing. No wonder Robert was excited. The sow had just given birth to piglets. It must have happened while Robert was running to the house [to fetch Tara].

The mother pig stood facing the road and her two children [with wide eyes]. Tar could look her straight in the eye. For her, this was all part of the daily work, part of the pig's life. It happened just as the trees turned green in spring, just as the berry bushes blossomed and later bore fruit.

Only trees, grass, and berry bushes hid things from view. The trees and bushes had no eyes, across which shadows of pain flickered.

Mother Pig stood for a moment, then lay down. She still seemed to be looking straight at Tar. Beside her on the grass was something-a writhing mass of life. The secret inner life of pigs was revealed to the children. Mother Pig had coarse white hair growing from her nose, and her eyes were heavy with fatigue. Tar's mother's eyes often looked like this. The children were so close to Mother Pig that Tar could have reached out and touched her hairy muzzle. After that morning, he always remembered the look in her eyes, the writhing creatures beside her. When he grew up and was tired or ill himself, he would walk the city streets and see many people with that look in their eyes. The people crowding the city streets, the city apartment buildings, resembled the writhing creatures on the grass at the edge of an Ohio field. When he turned his eyes to the sidewalk or closed them for a moment, he again saw the pig trying to get up on trembling legs, lying down on the grass and then getting up tiredly.

For a moment, Tar watched the scene unfold before him, and then, lying on the grass beneath the elders, he closed his eyes. His brother Robert was gone. He'd crawled off into the thicker bushes, already in search of new adventures.

Time passed. The elderberry blossoms near the fence were very fragrant, and bees came in swarms. They made a soft, hollow sound in the air above Thar's head. He felt very weak and ill and wondered if he would be able to return [home]. As he lay there, a man passed by and, as if sensing the boy's presence beneath the bushes, stopped and stood looking at him.

He was a crazy guy who lived a few doors down from the Moorheads on the same street. He was thirty years old, but he had the mind of a four-year-old. Every Midwestern town has kids like that. They stay gentle their whole lives, or one of them suddenly turns vicious. In small towns, they live with relatives, usually working people, and everyone neglects them. People give them old clothes, too big or too small for their bodies.

[Well, they're useless. They don't earn anything. They need to be fed and given a place to sleep until they die.]

The crazy man didn't see Tara. Perhaps he heard the mother sow pacing the field behind the bushes. Now she was standing, and the piglets-five of them-were cleaning themselves and preparing for life. They were already busy trying to get fed. When fed, piglets make a sound similar to a baby's. They also squint their eyes. Their faces turn red, and after they've fed, they fall asleep.

Is there any point in feeding piglets? They grow quickly and can be sold for money.

The half-witted man stood and looked out over the field. Life can be a comedy, understood only by feeble-minded people. The man opened his mouth and laughed softly. In Tara's memory, this scene and this moment remained unique. It seemed to him later that at that moment, the sky above, the flowering bushes, the bees buzzing in the air, even the ground on which he lay, laughed.

[And then] the new [Moorhead] baby was born. It happened at night. These things usually happen. Tar was in the living room of the [Moorhead] house, fully conscious, but he managed to make it look like he was asleep.

The night it began, there was a moan. It didn't sound like Tar's mother. She never moaned. Then there was a restless movement on the bed in the next room. Dick Moorehead [awoke]. "Perhaps I had better get up?" a quiet voice answered, and another moan was heard. Dick hurried to dress. He entered the living room with a lamp in his hands and stopped by Tar's bed. "He's asleep [here]. Perhaps I had better wake him and take him upstairs?" More whispered words were intercepted by [more] moans. The lamp in the bedroom cast a dim light through the open door into the room.

They decided to let him stay. Dick put on his coat and went out the back kitchen door. He put on his coat because it was raining. The rain pounded steadily against the wall of the house. Tar heard his footsteps on the planks that led around the house to the front gate. The planks had simply been abandoned, some of them aged and warped. You had to be careful when stepping on them. In the dark, Dick had no luck. He muttered a curse under his breath. He stood [there] in the rain, rubbing his shin. Tar heard his footsteps on the sidewalk outside, and then the sound faded. It was lost over the steady patter of the rain on the side walls of the house.

[╝Tar lay], listening intently. He was like a young quail hiding under the leaves while a dog prowls the field. Not a muscle moved in his body. In a home like the Moorheads', a child doesn't instinctively run to its mother. Love, warmth, natural expressions [of affection], all such [impulses] were buried. Tar had to live his life, lie quietly and wait. Most Midwestern families [in the old days] were like that.

Tar lay [in bed] and listened [for a long time]. His mother moaned softly. She stirred in her bed. What was happening?

Tar knew because he'd seen pigs born in the field, [he] knew because what happened in the Moorhead house always happened in some house down the street where the Moorheads lived. It happened to the neighbors, and the horses, and the dogs, and the cows. The eggs hatched into chickens, turkeys, and birds. It was much better. The mother bird didn't moan in pain [while it happened].

It would have been better, Tar thought, if he hadn't seen that creature in the field, if he hadn't seen the pain in the pig's eyes. His own illness was something special. His body was sometimes weak, but there was no pain. These were dreams, distorted dreams that never ended. When times got tough, he always had to hold on to something to keep from falling into oblivion, into some black, cold, gloomy place.

If Tar had not seen the mother sow in the field, if the older boys had not come into the yard and talked [to John]...

The mother pig, standing in the field, had pain in her eyes and made a sound like a groan.

She had long, dirty-white hair on her nose.

The sound coming from the next room didn't seem to come from Tar's mother. She was something beautiful to him. [Birth had been ugly and shocking. It couldn't be her.] [He clung to that thought. What was happening was shocking. It couldn't happen to her.] It was a comforting thought [when it came]. He held on to [the thought]. The illness had taught him a trick. When [he felt like he was about to fall into darkness, into nothingness, [he] simply held on. There was something inside him that helped.

One night, during the waiting period, Tar crawled out of bed. He was absolutely certain his mother wasn't in the next room, that it wasn't her moaning he heard there, but he wanted to be absolutely certain. He crept to the door and peered. When he lowered his feet to the floor and stood up straight, the moaning in the room stopped. "Well, you see," he said to himself, "what I heard was just a fantasy." He silently returned to bed, and the moaning began again.

His father came with the doctor. He had never been in this house before. These things happen unexpectedly. The doctor you were planning to see has left town. He's gone to see a patient in the village. You do the best you can.

The doctor [who arrived] was a large man with a loud voice. He entered the house with his loud voice, and a neighbor woman also came. Father Tara came over and closed the door leading to the bedroom.

He got out of bed again, but didn't go to the bedroom door. He knelt down beside the cot and felt around until he grabbed the pillow, then covered his face. He pressed the pillow to his cheeks. This way, he could block out all sound.

What Tar achieved [pressing a soft pillow to his ear, burying his face in the worn pillow] was a feeling of closeness to his mother. She couldn't stand in the next room and moan. Where was she? Birth was the business of the world of pigs, cows, and horses [and other women]. What was happening in the next room wasn't happening to her. His own breathing after his face had been buried in the pillow for a few moments made it a warm place. The dull sound of the rain outside the house, the doctor's booming voice, his father's strange, apologetic voice, the neighbor's voice-all sounds were muted. His mother had gone somewhere, but he could retain his thoughts of her. This was a trick his illness had taught him.

Once or twice, since he was old enough to understand such things, and especially after he became ill, his mother took him in her arms and pressed his face [thus downwards] against her body. This was at a time when the youngest child in the house was sleeping. If there had been no children, this would have happened more often.

Burying his face in the pillow and clasping it with his hands, he achieved the illusion.

[Well, he] didn't want his mother to have another baby. He didn't want her lying in bed moaning. He wanted her in the dark [front] room with him.

By imagining, he [could lead] her there. If you have an illusion, hold on [to it].

Tar remained gloomy. Time passed. When he finally lifted his face from the pillow, the house was quiet. The silence frightened him a little. Now he considered himself completely convinced that nothing had happened.

He walked quietly to the bedroom door and quietly opened it.

There was a lamp on the table, and his mother was lying on the bed with her eyes closed. She was very white. Dick Moorehead was sitting in the kitchen in a chair by the stove. He was soaking wet, having gone out into the rain to dry his clothes.

The neighbor had water in a pan and she was washing something.

Tar stood by the door until the newborn baby began to cry. Now it needed to be dressed. Now it would begin to wear clothes. It wouldn't be like a piglet, a puppy, or a kitten. Clothes wouldn't grow on it. It would need to be cared for, dressed, and washed. After a while, it began to dress and wash itself. Tar had already done so.

Now he could accept the fact of the child's birth. It was the question of birth that he could not bear. Now it was done. [There was nothing to be done about it now.]

He stood by the door, trembling, and when the child began to cry, his mother opened her eyes. It had cried before, but, pressing a pillow to his ears, Tar did not hear. His father, sitting in the kitchen, did not move [or look up]. He sat and stared at the lit stove [a figure of a discouraged appearance]. Steam rose from his [wet] clothes.

Nothing moved except Tara's mother's eyes, and he didn't know whether she saw him standing there or not. The eyes seemed to look at him reproachfully, and he quietly backed out of the room into the darkness [of the front room].

In the morning, Tar went into the bedroom with John, Robert, and Margaret. Margaret immediately went to the newborn. She kissed him. Tar didn't look. He, John, and Robert stood at the foot of the bed and said nothing. Something moved under the blanket next to the mother. They were told it was a boy.

They went outside. After the night's rain, the morning was bright and clear. Luckily for John, a boy his age appeared on the street, called out to him, and hurried away.

Robert entered the woodshed behind the house. He was doing some work there with some lumber.

Well, he was all right, and so was Tar [now]. The worst was over. Dick Moorehead would walk downtown and stop at a saloon. He'd had a rough night and wanted a drink. While he drank, he'd tell the bartender the news, and the bartender would smile. John would tell the boy next door. Maybe he already knew. News like that travels fast in a small town. [For a few days] the boys and their father alike would be [semi] ashamed, [with] some strange, secret shame, and then it would pass.

Over time, they [all] will accept the newborn as their own.

Tar was weak after the night's adventure, as was his mother. John and Robert felt the same way. [It had been a strange, difficult night in the house, and now that it was over, Tar felt relieved.] He wouldn't have to think about it [again]. A child is only a child, but [for a boy] an unborn child in the house is something [he is glad to see it come into the world].

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PART II


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CHAPTER VI


HENRY FULTON was a thick-shouldered, thick-headed boy, much larger than Tar. They lived in the same part of town in Ohio, and when Tar went to school, he had to pass the Fulton house. On the bank of a creek, not far from the bridge, stood a small frame house, and beyond it, in a small valley formed by the creek, lay a cornfield and thickets of unharvested earth. Henry's mother was a plump, red-faced woman who walked barefoot in the backyard. Her husband drove a wagon. Tar could have gone to school another way. He could have strolled along the railroad embankment or walked around the waterworks pond, located almost half a mile from the road.

It was fun on the railroad embankment. There was a certain risk. Taru had to cross a railroad bridge built high above a stream, and when he found himself in the middle, he looked down. Then he glanced nervously up and down the tracks, and a shudder ran through him. What if a train was about to come? He planned what he would do. Well, he lay flat on the tracks, letting the train pass over him. A boy at school told him about another boy who had done it. I tell you, it took nerve. You have to lie flat as a pancake and not move a muscle.

And then a train comes. The engineer sees you, but he can't stop the train. It rushes on. If you keep your composure now, what a story you'll have to tell. Not many boys have been hit by trains and escaped unscathed. Sometimes, when Tar walked to school by the railroad embankment, he almost wished for a train to come. It had to be an express passenger train, going sixty miles an hour. There's a thing called "suction" that you have to watch out for. Tar and a school friend were discussing it. "One day, a boy was standing next to the tracks when a train went by. He got too close. The suction pulled him right under the train. Suction is what pulls you. It has no arms, but you better be careful.

Why did Henry Fulton attack Tar? John Moorehead walked past his house without a second thought. Even little Robert Moorehead, now in his playroom at elementary school, walked that way without a second thought. The question is, did Henry really mean to hit Tar? How could Tar have known? When Henry saw Tar, he screamed and rushed toward him. Henry had strange, small gray eyes. His hair was red and stood straight up on his head, and when he lunged at Tar, he laughed, and Tar shook with laughter as if he were walking across a railroad bridge.

Now, about suction, when you're caught crossing a railroad bridge. When a train approaches, you want to tuck your shirt into your pants. If the end of your shirt sticks up, it gets caught on something rotating underneath the train, and you're pulled upward. Talk about sausage!

The best part is when the train has already passed. Finally, the engineer shuts off the engine. The passengers disembark. Of course, everyone is pale. Tar lay motionless for a while, because he wasn't afraid anymore. He would fool them a little, just for fun. When they reached where he was, white, anxious men, he would jump up and walk away, calm as a cucumber. This story would spread throughout the city. After this happened, if a boy like Henry Fulton had followed him, there would always be a big boy around who could take Tar's role. "Well, he's got moral courage, that's all. That's what generals have in battle. They don't fight. Sometimes it's the little guys. You could almost put Napoleon Bonaparte in the neck of a bottle."

Tar knew a thing or two about "moral courage," because his father often talked about it. It was like a suction. It couldn't be described or seen, but he was as strong as a horse.

And so Tar could have asked John Moorehead to speak out against Henry [Fulton], but in the end he couldn't. You can't tell your older brother about such things.

There was one more thing he could do if he were hit by a train, if he had the courage. He could wait until the train was approaching him. Then he could fall between two sleepers and hang by his arms, like a bat. Perhaps that would be the best option.

The house the Mooreheads now lived in was larger than any they'd had in Tar's time. Everything had changed. Tar's mother petted her children more than before, she talked more, and Dick Moorehead spent more time at home. Now he always took one of the children with him when he went home or when he painted signs on Saturdays. He drank a little, but not as much as he drank, just enough to speak clearly. It didn't take long.

As for Tar, he was fine now. He was in the third room of the school. Robert was at the primaries. She had two newborns: little Fern, who died a month after her birth, Will, still almost a baby, and Joe. Although Tar didn't know it, Fern was supposed to be the last child born in the family. For some reason, although he always resented Robert, Will and little Joe were a lot of fun. Tar even liked to take care of Joe, not too often, but every now and then. You could tickle his toes, and he would make the funniest sounds. It was funny to think that you were once like this: unable to speak, unable to walk, and needing someone to feed you.

Most of the time, the boy couldn't understand older people, and it was pointless to try. Sometimes Tara's parents were one way, sometimes another. If he'd been dependent on his mother, it wouldn't have worked. She had children, and she had to think about them after they were born. A child is useless for the first two or three years, but a horse, no matter how big, can work and all that by the age of three.

Sometimes Tar's father was fine, and sometimes he was wrong. When Tar and Robert rode with him, painting signs on fences on Saturdays, and when there were no older people around, he was left alone. K. Sometimes he talked about the Battle of Vicksburg. He did win the battle. Well, at least he told General Grant what to do, and he did it, but General Grant never gave Dick credit afterwards. The thing is, after the city was captured, General Grant left Tar's father in the West with the army of occupation, and he took Generals Sherman, Sheridan, and many other officers with him to the East, and gave them a chance Dick never had. Dick never even got a promotion. He was a captain before the Battle of Vicksburg and a captain after. It would have been better if he had never told General Grant how to win the battle. If Grant had taken Dick to the East, he wouldn't have spent so much time fawning over General Lee. Dick would have come up with a plan. He came up with one, but never told anyone.

"I'll tell you what. If you tell another man how to do something, and he does it, and it works, he's not going to like you very much later. He wants all the glory for himself. As if there weren't enough of them to go around. That's how men are."

Dick Moorehead was fine when there weren't any other men around, but he let another man come in, and then what? They talked and talked, mostly about nothing. You never painted almost any signs.

The best thing, Tar thought, would be to have a friend who was another boy almost ten years older. Tar was smart. He'd already missed a whole grade in school and could skip another if he wanted. Maybe he would. The best thing would be to have a friend who was as strong as an ox but stupid. Tar would get lessons for him, and he would fight for Tar. Well, in the morning, he'd come to Tar's to go to school with him. He and Tar passed Henry Fulton's house. Henry had better stay out of sight.

Old people have strange ideas. When Tar was in first grade in elementary school (he only stayed there for two or three weeks because his mother taught him to write and read while he was sick), when he was in elementary school, Tar lied. He said he didn't throw the rock that broke the window in the school building, even though everyone knew he did.

Tar said he didn't do it and stuck to the lie. What a fuss there was. The teacher came to the Moorhead house to talk to Tar's mother. Everyone said if he confessed, confessed, he'd feel better.

Tar had already endured this for a long time. He wasn't allowed to go to school for three days. How strange his mother was, so unreasonable. You didn't expect it from her. He'd come home all excited, to see if she'd forgotten the whole pointless story, but she never did. She'd agreed with the teacher that if he confessed, everything would be fine. Even Margaret could say that. John had more common sense. He kept to himself, didn't say a word.

And it was all nonsense. Tar finally confessed. The truth was, by then there had been such a commotion that he couldn't really remember whether he'd thrown the stone or not. But what if he had? So what? There was already another pane of glass in the window. It was just a small stone. Tar hadn't thrown it. That was the whole point.

If he admitted to such a thing, he would be getting recognition for something he never intended to do.

Tar finally confessed. Of course, he'd been feeling ill for three days. No one knew how he felt. At times like these, you have moral courage, and that's something people can't understand. When everyone's against you, what can you do? Sometimes, for three days, he cried when no one was looking.

It was his mother who made him confess. He sat with her on the back porch, and she again told him that if he confessed, he would feel better. How did she know he wasn't feeling well?

He confessed suddenly, without thinking.

Then his mother was pleased, the teacher was pleased, everyone was pleased. After he told them what they believed to be the truth, he went to the barn. His mother hugged him, but her arms weren't feeling so good that time. It was better not to tell him that when everyone would make such a fuss [about it], [but] after you told him... At least for three days; everyone knew something. Tar could stick to something if he made a decision.

The nicest thing about the place where the Moorheads now lived was the barn. Of course, there was no horse or cow, but a barn is a barn.

After Tar confessed that time, he went out to the barn and climbed into the empty attic. What a feeling of emptiness inside-the lie was gone. When he restrained himself, even Margaret, who had to go preach, felt a kind of admiration for him. If, when Tar grew up, he ever became a great outlaw like Jesse James or someone else, and he was caught, they would never add another confession from him. He had decided so. He would defy them all. "Well, go ahead, hang me then." Standing on the gallows, he smiled and waved. If they had let him, he would have put on his Sunday clothes-all white. "Ladies and gentlemen, I, the notorious Jesse James, am about to die. I have something to say. You think you can get me off this perch? Well, try it."

"You can all go to hell, that's where you can go."

Here's how to do something similar. Adults have such complicated ideas. There are so many things they never understand.

When you have a guy ten years older, plump but dumb, you're all right. Once upon a time there was a boy named Elmer Cowley. Tar thought he might be just right for the job, but he was too dumb. Besides, he never paid any attention to Tar. He wanted to be John's friend, but John didn't want him. "Oh, he's a dumbass," John said. If only he hadn't been so dumb and hadn't spoken his mind to Tar, maybe this would have been just the thing.

The problem with a boy like that, who was too stupid, was that he never got the point. Let Henry Fulton harass Tar while they were getting ready for school in the morning, and Elmer would probably just laugh. If Henry had actually started hitting Tar, he might have barged in, but that wasn't the point. Being hit wasn't the worst part. Expecting to be hit was the worst part. If a boy wasn't smart enough to know that, what good was he?

The problem with going around a railway bridge or a waterworks pond was that Tar was being cowardly towards himself. What if no one knew? What difference did it make?

Henry Fulton had a gift Tar would have given anything for. He probably only wanted to scare Tar because Tar had caught up with him at school. Henry was almost two years older, but they both shared a room and, unfortunately, both lived on the same side of town.

About Henry's special gift. He was a natural "oil." Some people are born that way. Tar wished he were there. Henry could put his head down and run against anything, and it didn't seem to hurt his head at all.

There was a high wooden fence in the schoolyard, and Henry could back up and run, hitting the fence with all his might, and then just smile. You could hear the fence boards creaking. Once, at home, in the barn, Tar tried this. He didn't run at full speed and was glad later that he hadn't. His head was already hurting. If you don't have a gift, then you don't have one. You might as well give up on this.

Tar's only gift was that he was smart. It costs nothing to get the kind of lessons you get at school. Your class is always full of dumb boys, and the whole class has to wait for them. If you have a little common sense, you won't have to work hard. Although being smart isn't much fun. What's the use?

A boy like Henry Fulton was more fun than a dozen smart boys. At recess, all the other boys gathered around him. Tar kept a low profile only because Henry had the idea to follow his example.

There was a high fence in the school yard. During recess, the girls played on one side of the fence, the boys on the other. Margaret was there, on the other side, with the girls. The boys drew pictures on the fence. They threw stones, and in the winter, snowballs, over the fence.

Henry Fulton knocked one of the boards out with his head. Some older boys encouraged him to do it. Henry was truly stupid. He could have become Tar's best friend, the best in school, given his talent, but it didn't happen.

Henry ran full speed toward the fence, then ran again. The board began to give slightly. It began to creak. The girls on their side knew what was happening, and all the boys gathered around. Tar was so envious of Henry that it hurt inside.

Bang, Henry's head hit the fence, then he jerked back, and bang, and the blow came again. He said it didn't hurt at all. Maybe he was lying, but his head must have been strong. The other boys came over to feel it. There wasn't a single lump raised at all.

And then the board gave way. It was a wide board, and Henry knocked it right out of the fence. You could have crawled right up to the girls.

Afterwards, when they all returned to the room, the superintendent approached the door of the room where Tar and Henry were sitting. He, the superintendent, was a large man with a black beard, and he admired Tar. All the senior Mooreheads, John, Margaret, and Tar, were distinguished by their intelligence, and that is what a man like the superintendent "admires."

"Another one of Mary Moorehead's kids. And you skipped a grade. Well, you're smart people.

The whole school room heard him say it. It put the boy in a bad position. Why didn't the man keep quiet?

He, the superintendent, was always lending books to John and Margaret. He told all three older Moorhead children to come to his house anytime and borrow any book they wanted.

Yes, it was fun reading the books. Rob Roy, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson. Margaret read the Elsie Books, but she didn't get them from the headmaster. The dark-pale woman who worked at the post office started lending them to her. They made her cry, but she liked it. Girls like nothing better than to cry. In the Elsie Books, there was a girl about Margaret's age sitting at the piano. Her mother had died, and she was afraid that her daddy would marry another woman, an adventuress, who was sitting right in the room. She, the adventuress, was the kind of woman who made a fuss over a little girl, kissing her and petting her when her daddy was around, and then maybe hitting her over the head with a clip when her daddy wasn't looking, that is, after she married her daddy.

Margaret read this part of one of Elsie's books to Tara. She just had to read it to someone. "It was so full of emotion," she said. She cried when she read it.

Books are great, but it's best not to let other boys know you like them. Being smart is fine, but when the school principal outs you right in front of everyone, what's so interesting about that?

On the day Henry Fulton knocked a board out of the fence during recess, the superintendent approached the door of the room with a whip in his hand and called Henry Fulton in. The room was dead silent.

Henry was about to be beaten, and Tar was glad. At the same time, he wasn't glad.

As a result, Henry will immediately leave and take it as coolly as you like.

He'll get a lot of praise he doesn't deserve. If Tar's head were made like that, he could knock a board out of a fence, too. If they flogged the boy for being smart, for taking lessons so he could skip them right away, he'd get as many licks as any boy in school.

The teacher was silent in the classroom, all the children were silent, and Henry stood up and walked to the door. He made a loud stomping sound with his feet.

Tar couldn't help but hate him for being so brave. He wanted to lean over to the boy in the seat next to him and ask, "Do you think...?"

What Tar wanted to ask the boy was rather difficult to put into words. A hypothetical question arose. "If you were a boy born with a thick head and a knack for knocking boards out of fences, and if the superintendent recognized you (probably because some girl told), and you were about to be flogged, and you were alone in the corridor with the superintendent, would the same insolence that made you stop the other boys from getting their heads when you headbutted the fence be the same insolence you had back then that made you headbutt the superintendent?"

Just standing up and licking it without crying means nothing. Maybe even Tar could do that.

Now Tar entered a period of reflection, one of his questioning moods. One of the reasons reading books was fun was that while you were reading, if the book was even remotely good and had any interesting passages, you didn't think or question it while you were reading. At other times-oh well.

Tar was currently going through one of his worst times. During those times, he would force himself to do things in his imagination that he might never have done if he'd had the chance. Then, sometimes, he'd be tricked into telling others what he'd imagined as fact. This was fine, too, but almost every time, someone caught him. This was something Tar's father always did, but his mother never did. That's why almost everyone respected their mother so much, while they loved their father and barely respected him. Even Tar knew the difference.

Tar wanted to be like his mother, but secretly feared that he was becoming more and more like his father. Sometimes he hated the thought of it, but he remained the same.

He was doing it now. Instead of Henry Fulton, he, Tar Moorhead, had just walked out of the room. He wasn't born to be butter; no matter how hard he tried, he'd never been able to knock a board out of a fence with his head, but here he was pretending he could.

It seemed to him that he had just been taken out of the classroom and was left alone with the principal in the hall where the children were hanging up their hats and coats.

There was a staircase leading down. Tara's room was on the second floor.

The superintendent was as cool as you'd like. It was all part of a day's work with him. You caught a boy doing something and gave him a spanking. If he cried, fine. If he didn't cry, if he was the kind of stubborn kid who wouldn't cry, you'd just give him a few extra clips for good luck and let him go. What else could you do?

There was a clear space right at the top of the stairs. That's where the boss administered the spanking.

Good for Henry Fulton, but what about Tara?

When he, Tar, was there, in his imagination, what difference did it make? He was just walking, like Henry would have, but he was thinking and planning. That's where resourcefulness comes in. If you have a thick head that knocks boards out of fences, you get good grades, but you can't think.

Tar thought about the time the superintendent had come over and pointed out his Moorehead-esque savvy to the whole room. Now it was time for revenge.

The superintendent didn't expect anything from Moorehead at all. He'd have thought it was because they were smart, they were such women. Well, that wasn't true. Margaret might have been one of them, but John wasn't. You should have seen the way he punched Elmer Cowley in the chin.

Just because you can't butt fences doesn't mean you can't butt people. People are pretty soft, right down the middle. Dick said that what made Napoleon Bonaparte such a great man was that he always did what no one expected.

In Tar's mind, he walked in front of the manager, right up to that spot at the top of the stairs. He moved forward a bit, just enough to give him a chance to take off, and then turned around. He used only the same technique Henry had used on the fences. Well, he'd watched it often enough. He knew how to do it.

He took off hard and aimed straight for the superintendent's soft spot in the center, and he hit it too.

He knocked the superintendent down the stairs. This caused a ruckus. People came running from all the rooms into the hall, including female teachers and scientists. Tar was shaking all over. People with rich imaginations, when they do something like that, always shake afterward.

Tar sat trembling in the schoolroom, having accomplished nothing. When he'd thought of it, he'd been shaking so much that even when he tried to write on the blackboard, he couldn't. His hand was shaking so badly he could barely hold a pencil. If anyone wanted to know why he'd felt so bad that time Dick came home drunk, it was this. If you're meant to be like this, you are.

Henry Fulton returned to the room as calm as you could wish. Of course, everyone else was looking at him.

What did he do? He licked and didn't cry. People thought he was brave.

Did he knock the superintendent down the stairs, like Tar did? Did he use his brains? What's the point of having a mind capable of butting fence boards if you don't know enough to hit the right thing at the right moment?

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CHAPTER VII


WHAT WAS REALLY The hardest and most bitter thing for Tar was that a man like him almost never put any of his wonderful plans into action. Tar did it once.

He was walking home from school, and Robert was with him. It was spring, and there was a flood. Near the Fulton house, the creek was full and bursting under the bridge that stood right next to the house.

Tar didn't want to go home that way, but Robert was with him. It's impossible to explain all the time.

The two boys walked down the street through a little valley that led to the part of town where they lived, and there was Henry Fulton with two other boys, Tar did not know, standing on the bridge throwing sticks into the stream.

They threw them up and then ran across the bridge to see them fire. Perhaps Henry hadn't intended to chase Thar down and make him look like a coward that time.

Who knows what someone is thinking, what their intentions are? How can you tell?

Tar walked alongside Robert as if Henry didn't exist. Robert chatted and talked. One of the boys threw a large stick into the stream, and it sailed under the bridge. Suddenly, all three boys turned and looked at Tar and Robert. Robert was ready to join in the fun, pick up a few sticks, and throw them.

Tar had fallen on hard times again. If you're one of those people who have those moments, you always think, "Now so-and-so is going to do such-and-such." Maybe they don't happen at all. How do you know? If you're that kind of person, you assume people will do things just as badly as they do. Henry, when he saw Tar alone, always lowered his head, narrowed his eyes, and followed him. Tar ran like a scared cat, and then Henry stopped and laughed. Everyone who saw it laughed. He couldn't catch Tar running, and he knew he couldn't.

Tar stopped at the edge of the bridge. The other boys weren't looking, and Robert wasn't paying any attention, but Henry was. He had such funny eyes. He leaned against the bridge railing.

The two boys stood and looked at each other. What a situation! Tar was then what he had been all his life. Leave him alone, let him think and fantasize, and he could devise the perfect plan for anything. That's what later enabled him to tell stories. When you write or tell stories, everything can turn out just fine. What do you think Dick would have done if he had to stay where General Grant was after the Civil War? It might have ruined his style in some terrible way.

A writer can write, and a storyteller can tell stories, but what if they were put in a position where they had to act? Such a person always does either the right thing at the wrong time or the wrong thing at the right time.

Perhaps Henry Fulton had no intention of following Tar's example and making him look like a coward in front of Robert and the two strange boys. Perhaps Henry had no other thought than throwing sticks into the stream.

How could Tar have known? He thought, "Now he'll lower his head and headbutt me. If I choose Robert, the others will start laughing. Robert will probably go home and tell John. Robert was a pretty good player for a kid, but you can't expect a young kid to act sensibly. You can't expect him to know when to keep his mouth shut.

Tar took a few steps across the bridge toward Henry. Ugh, now he was shaking again. What had happened to him? What was he going to do?

All of this happened because you were smart and thought you were going to do something, even though you weren't. At school, Tar thought about that weak spot among people, about headbutting the principal from the stairs-something he would never have had the courage to try-and now.

Was he going to try to butt the champion with butter? What a stupid idea. Taru almost wanted to laugh at himself. Of course, Henry hadn't expected anything like that. He'd have to be very smart to expect some boy to butt him, and he wasn't smart. That wasn't his line.

Another step, another, and another. Tar was in the middle of the bridge. He quickly dove and-great Scott-he did it. He butted Henry, hit him right in the middle.

The worst moment came when this was done. What happened was this: Henry, who had expected nothing, was caught completely off guard. He doubled over and went straight over the bridge railing into the stream. He was upstream of the bridge, and his body immediately disappeared. Whether he knew how to swim or not, Tar didn't know. Since there was a flood, the stream was raging.

As it turned out, this was one of the few times in his life that Tar did something that actually worked. At first, he just stood there, shaking. The other boys were speechless with amazement and did nothing. Henry was gone. Perhaps only a second passed before he reappeared, but Tar felt like hours. He ran to the bridge railing, like everyone else. One of the strange boys ran to the Fulton house to tell Henry's mother. In another minute or two, Henry's body would be dragged ashore. Henry's mother was bending over him, crying.

What would Tar do? Of course, the city marshal would come for him.

After all, it might not have been so bad-if he'd kept his composure, not run, not cry. They'd parade him through town, everyone watching, everyone pointing. "That's Tar Moorhead, the killer. He killed Henry Fulton, the butter champion. He beat him to death."

It wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for the hanging at the end.

What happened was that Henry climbed out of the stream himself. It wasn't as deep as it looked, and he could swim.

It would have all ended well for Tar if he hadn't been shaking so much. Instead of staying there, where the two strange boys could see how cool and collected he was, he had to [leave].

He didn't even want to be with Robert, at least not for a while. "You run home and keep your mouth shut," he managed to say. He hoped Robert wouldn't realize how upset he was, wouldn't notice how his voice trembled.

Tar walked to the stream pond and sat down under a tree. He felt disgusted with himself. Henry Fulton had a frightened look on his face as he crawled out of the stream, and Tar thought maybe Henry would be afraid of him all the time now. For just a second, Henry stood on the bank of the stream, looking at Tar. [Tar] wasn't crying [at least]. Henry's eyes said this: "You're crazy. Of course I'm afraid of you. You're crazy. A man can't tell what you'll do.

"It was good and profitable," Tar thought. Ever since he started school, he'd been planning something, and now he'd made it happen.

If you're a boy and you read, don't you always read about things like this? There's a bully at school and a smart boy, pale and not very healthy. One day, to everyone's surprise, he licks the school bully. He has something called "moral courage." It's like a "suction." It's what keeps him going. He uses his brain, learns to box. When two boys meet, it's a contest of wits and strength, and brains win.

"It's all right," Tar thought. This was exactly what he'd always planned to do but never done.

What it all boiled down to was this: if he had planned ahead to beat Henry Fulton, if he had practiced on, say, Robert or Elmer Cowley, and then, in front of everyone at school during recess, he had walked right up to Henry and challenged him...

What good would it do? Tar stayed by the water supply pond until his nerves calmed, then went home. Robert was there, as was John, and Robert told John.

It was perfectly normal. After all, Tar was a hero. Jon had made a big deal about him and wanted him to talk about it, and he did.

When he said he was fine. Well, he might have added a few flourishes. The thoughts that had plagued him when he was alone had vanished. He could make it sound pretty good.

Eventually, the story would get around. If Henry Fulton had thought he, Tar, was a little crazy and desperate, he would have stayed away. Older boys, unaware of what Tar knew, would have thought he, Tar, had planned the whole thing and carried it out with cold-blooded determination. Older boys would want to be his friend. That's the kind of boy he was.

After all, this was a very good thing, Tar thought, and began to put on a little airs. Not much. Now he had to be careful. John was quite cunning. If he went too far, he would be exposed.

Doing something is one thing, talking about it is another.

At the same time, Tar thought that he wasn"t so bad.

In any case, when you're telling this story, you might as well use your brain. The problem with Dick Moorhead, as Tar had already begun to suspect, was that when he told his stories, he exaggerated them. Better to let others do most of the talking. If others exaggerate, as Robert was now doing, shrug. Deny it. Pretend you don't want any credit. "Oh, I never did anything."

That was the path. Now Thar had some ground under his feet. The story of what had happened on the bridge, when he had acted without thinking, in some crazy way, began to take shape in his imagination. If he could just hide the truth for a while, everything would be fine. He could reconstruct it all to his own taste.

The only ones who had to fear were John and his mother. If his mother had heard this story, she might have smiled one of her smiles.

Tar thought he'd be fine if only Robert kept calm. If Robert hadn't been too worried, and simply because he'd temporarily considered Tar a hero, he wouldn't have said too much.

As for John, there was a lot of maternal in him. That he seemed to swallow the story as Robert told it was a comfort to Tara.

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CHAPTER VIII


HORSES TROT - AROUND the racetrack in Ohio City on a Sunday morning, squirrels run along the top of the ramshackle fence in summer, apples ripen in the orchards.

Some of the Moorhead children attended Sunday school on Sundays, others didn't. When Tar had a clean suit of Sunday clothes, he sometimes went. The teacher told the story of David slaying Goliath and Jonah fleeing from the Lord and hiding on a ship bound for Tarshish.

What a strange place this Tarshish must be. Words [form] pictures in Tar's mind. The teacher had said little about Tarshish. That was a mistake. Thinking about Tarshish kept Tar's concentration from the rest of the lesson. If his father had been teaching in class, he might have been away, dispersing throughout the city, the country, or wherever. Why did Jonah want to go to Tarshish? Just then, Tar's passion for racehorses was overcome. He saw in his mind's eye a wild place with yellow sand and bushes-a wind swept by. Men racing horses along the seashore. Perhaps he got the idea from a picture book.

Most places to have fun are bad places. Jonah ran from the Lord. Perhaps Tarshish was the name of a racetrack. That would be a good name.

The Moorheads never owned horses or cows, but horses grazed in the field near the Moorhead house.

The horse had amusingly thick lips. When Tar picked up an apple and stuck his hand through the fence, the horse's lips closed over the apple so gently that he barely felt a thing.

Yes, he did. The horse's funny, hairy, thick lips tickled the inside of his arm.

Animals were funny creatures, but so were people. Tar talked to his friend Jim Moore about dogs. "A strange dog, if you run away from him and get scared, will chase you and act like he's going to eat you, but if you stand still and look him straight in the eye, he won't do anything. No animal can withstand the intense, penetrating gaze of the human eye." Some people have a more penetrating gaze than others. That's a good thing.

A boy at school told Thar that when a strange, ferocious dog is chasing you, the best thing to do is turn your back, bend over, and look at the dog through your legs. Thar had never tried this, but as an adult, he read the same thing in an old book. In the days of the ancient Norse sagas, boys would tell other boys the same story on their way to school. Thar asked Jim if he'd ever tried it. They both agreed they'd try it someday. However, it would be ridiculous to find yourself in such a situation if it didn't work. It would certainly be a help to the dog.

"The best plan is to pretend to pick up stones. When you're being chased by a ferocious dog, you're unlikely to find any good stones, but a dog is easily fooled. It's better to pretend to pick up a stone than to actually pick one up. If you throw a stone and miss, where will you be?"

You have to get used to people in cities. Some go one way, some another. Older people behave so strangely.

When Tar fell ill that time, an old doctor came to the house. He had to work hard with the Mooreheads. What was wrong with Mary Moorehead was that she was too good.

If you're too nice, you think, "Well, I'll be patient and kind. I won't scold you, no matter what." Sometimes in salons, when Dick Moorehead was spending money he should have taken home, he'd overhear other men talking about their wives. Most men are afraid of their wives.

Men said all sorts of things. "I don't want an old woman sitting on my neck." It was just a way of saying it. Women don't really sit on men's necks. A panther, chasing a deer, jumps on a woman's neck and pins her to the ground, but that's not what the man in the saloon meant. He meant he'd get a "Viva Columbia" when he got home, and Dick almost never got "Viva Columbia." Dr. Reefy said he should get it more often. Perhaps he gave it to Dick himself. He could have had a stern talk with Mary Moorehead. Tar had never heard anything about it. He could have said, "Look, woman, your husband needs a gaff on him every now and then."

Everything in the Moorhead household had changed, gotten better. It wasn't that Dick had become a good person. No one expected that.

Dick stayed home more and brought home more money. The neighbors came over more. Dick could tell his war stories on the porch in the presence of a neighbor, a cab driver, or a man who was a section foreman on the Wheeling Railroad, and the children could sit and listen.

Mother Tara always had a habit of pulling the wool over people's eyes, sometimes with petty remarks, but she was increasingly restraining herself. There are people who, when they smile, make the whole world smile. When they freeze, everyone around them freezes. Robert Moorehead became a lot like his mother as he grew older. John and Will were stoic. The youngest of them all, little Joe Moorehead, was destined to become the family artist. Later, he became what is called a genius, and he had a hard time making a living.

After his childhood ended and she died, Tar thought his mother must have been smart. He'd been in love with her his whole life. This trick of imagining someone perfect doesn't give them much of a chance. Growing up, Tar always left his father alone-just the way he was. He liked to think of him as a sweet, carefree guy. He may even have later attributed to Dick a multitude of sins he never committed.


Dick wouldn't have minded. "Well, pay attention to me. If you can't tell I'm good, then think of me as bad. Whatever you do, give me a little attention." Dick would have felt something like that. Tar had always been a lot like Dick. He liked the idea of always being the center of attention, but he also hated it.

You might be more likely to love someone you can't be like. After Dr. Reefy started coming to the Moorehead house, Mary Moorehead changed, but not that much. After they went to bed, she went into the children's room and kissed them all. She acted like a young girl and seemed incapable of caressing them in daylight. None of her children had ever seen her kiss Dick, and the sight would have frightened them, even shocked them a little.

If you have a mother like Mary Moorehead, and she's a joy to look at (or you think she is, which is the same thing), and she dies when you're young, you'll spend your whole life using her as dream material. It's unfair to her, but that's what you do.

It's very likely that you'll make her sweeter than she was, kinder than she was, wiser than she was. What's the harm?

You always want to be thought of as almost perfect by someone because you know you can't be that way yourself. If you ever try, you'll give up after a while.

Little Fern Moorehead died when she was three weeks old. Tar was in bed that time, too. After the night Joe was born, he developed a fever. He wasn't feeling well for another year. That's what brought Dr. Reefy to the house. He was the only person Tar knew who spoke to his mother. He made her cry. The doctor had big, funny hands. He looked like pictures of Abraham Lincoln.

When Fern died, Tara didn't even have the opportunity to go to the funeral, but he didn't mind, even welcomed it. "If you have to die, it's too bad, but the fuss people make is terrible. It makes everything so public and terrible."

Tar avoided all of this. This will be a time when Dick will be at his worst, and Dick, at his worst, will be very bad.

Tar's illness made him miss everything, and his sister Margaret had to stay home with him, and she missed him too. A boy always gets the best from girls and women when he's sick. "That's their best time," Tar thought. Sometimes he thought about it in bed. "Perhaps that's why men and boys are always sick."

When Tar was sick and had a fever, he would lose his mind for a time, and all he ever knew of his sister Fern was a sound, sometimes at night, in the next room-a sound like a tree toad. It entered his dreams during the fever and remained there. Later, he thought Fern was more real to him than anyone else.

Even as a man, Tar would walk down the street, sometimes thinking of her. He'd be walking and talking to another man, and she'd be right in front of him. He saw her in every beautiful gesture other women made. If, when he was a young man and very susceptible to feminine charms, he'd say to a woman, "You make me think of my sister Fern, who died," it was the best compliment he could give, but the woman didn't seem to appreciate it. Beautiful women want to stand on their own two feet. They don't want to remind you of anyone.

When a child dies in a family, and you knew the child alive, you always think of them as they were at the moment of death. The child dies in convulsions. It's terrifying to think about.

But if you've never seen a child.

Tar could think of Fern as fourteen when he was fourteen. He could think of her as forty when he was forty.

Imagine Tar as an adult. He's had a fight with his wife and leaves the house in a rage. Now it's time to think about Fern. She's a grown woman. He's a little confused in his mind with the figure of his dead mother.

When he grew up-around forty-Tar always imagined Fern as eighteen. Older men like the idea of an eighteen-year-old woman with forty-year-old wisdom, physical beauty, and the tenderness of a girl. They like to think such a person is bound to them by iron belts. That's how older men are.

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CHAPTER IX


OHIO [IN THE spring or summer,] racehorses trot around the track, corn grows in the fields, little streams flow in the narrow valleys, people go out to plow in the spring, nuts ripen in the woods near Ohio City in the fall. In Europe, everyone is harvesting. They have many people and not much land. When he became a man, Tar saw Europe and liked it, but all the time he was there, he had an American famine, and it was not the famine of the "Star-Spangled Banner."

What he craved were empty lots and open spaces. He wanted to see growing weeds, abandoned old gardens, empty, haunted houses.

An old wormwood fence where elderberries and berries grow wild wastes a lot of land, while a barbed wire fence saves it, but it's nice. It's a place where a boy can crawl and hide for a while. A man, if he's any good, never stops being a boy.

The woods around Midwestern towns in Tar's time were a world of empty spaces. From the hilltop where the Moorheads lived, after Tar had recovered and gone to school, it was only a matter of walking through a cornfield and the meadow where the Shepards kept their cow to reach the woods along Squirrel Creek. John was busy selling newspapers, so perhaps he couldn't go because Robert was too young.

Jim Moore lived down the road in a freshly painted white house and was almost always free to leave. The other boys at school called him "Pee-wee Moore," but Tar didn't. Jim was a year older and quite strong, but that wasn't the only reason. Tar and Jim walked through the cornfields and across the meadow.

If Jim can't go, that's okay.

As Tar walked alone, he imagined all sorts of things. His imagination sometimes frightened him, sometimes delighted him.

The corn, when it grew high, resembled a forest, beneath which a strange, soft light always glowed. It was hot under the corn, and Tar sweated. In the evening, his mother forced him to wash his feet and hands before bed, so he got as dirty as he wanted. Nothing was saved by maintaining cleanliness.

Sometimes he would stretch out on the ground and lie there for a long time in a sweat, watching the ants and beetles on the ground under the corn.

Ants, grasshoppers, and beetles all had their own world, birds had their own world, wild and tame animals had their own world. What does a pig think? Tame ducks in someone's yard are the funniest creatures in the world. They're scattered around, one of them gives a signal, and they all start running. The duck's back end bobs up and down as it runs. Their flat feet make a stomp, stomp, the funniest sound. And then they all gather together, and nothing special happens. They stand there, looking at each other. "Well, why did you signal? Why did you call us, you fool?

In the forest along a stream in a desolate rural area, rotting logs lie. First, there's a clearing, then an area so overgrown with brush and berry bushes that nothing can be seen. It's a good place for rabbits or snakes.

In a forest like this, there are paths everywhere, leading nowhere. You're sitting on a log. If there's a rabbit in the brush in front of you, what do you think he's thinking? He sees you, but you don't see him. If there's a man and a rabbit, what do they say to each other? Do you think the rabbit will ever get a little excited and come home and sit there bragging to the neighbors about how he served in the army, and how the neighbors were just privates while he was a captain? If a man-rabbit does this, he certainly speaks quite quietly. You can't hear a word he says.

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CHAPTER X


TAB HAD _ RECEIVED a male friend through Dr. Reefy, who came to his home when he was ill. His name was Tom Whitehead, he was forty-two years old, fat, owned racehorses and a farm, had a fat wife, and had no children.

He was a friend of Dr. Reefy, who also had no children. The doctor married a young woman of twenty when he was over forty, but she only lived for a year. After his wife's death and when he was not at work, the doctor went out with Tom Whitehead, an old nurseryman named John Spaniard, Judge Blair, and a dull young fellow who drank a lot but said funny and sarcastic things when he was drunk. The young man was the son of a United States Senator, now deceased, and he had been left some money; everyone said he was as quick as he could be.

All the men who were friends of the doctor suddenly liked the Moorehead children, and the racehorse seemed to choose Tara.

The others helped John earn money and gave gifts to Margaret and Robert. The doctor did everything. He handled everything without any fuss.

What happened to Tar was that late in the afternoon, or on Saturdays, or sometimes on Sundays, Tom Whitehead would drive down the road past the Moorehead house and stop for him.

He was in the trolley and Tar was sitting on his lap.

First, they walked along a dusty road past a pond with waterworks, then climbed a small hill and entered the fairgrounds. Tom Whitehead had a stable next to the fairgrounds and a house next to it, but it was more fun to go to the racetrack itself.

Not many boys had such chances, Tar thought. John didn't because he had to work hard, but Jim Moore didn't. Jim lived alone with his mother, who was a widow, and she fussed over him a lot. When he went out with Tar, his mother gave him a lot of instructions. "It's early spring, and the ground is wet. Don't sit on the ground.

"No, you can't go swimming, not yet. I don't want you little ones going swimming when there aren't any old people around. You might get cramps. Don't go in the woods. There are always hunters shooting guns around. Just last week I read in the paper that a boy was killed.

Better to die outright than to fuss all the time. If you have a mother like that, loving and fussy, you'll have to endure it, but that's bad luck. It was a good thing Mary Moorehead had so many children. It kept her busy. She couldn't think of so many things a boy shouldn't do.

Jim and Tar discussed it. The Moores didn't have much money. Mrs. Moore owned a farm. In some ways, being a woman's only child was fine, but overall, it was a disadvantage. "It's the same with chickens and chicks," Tar said to Jim, and Jim agreed. Jim didn't know how painful it could be-when you wanted your mother to fuss over you, but she was so busy with one of the other children that she couldn't spare you any attention.

Few boys had the chance Tara had after Tom Whitehead took him in. After Tom had visited him a few times, he didn't wait to be invited; he came almost every day. Whenever he went to the stables, there were always men there. Tom had a farm in the country where he raised several foals, and he bought others as yearlings at the Cleveland sale in the spring. Other men who raise racing foals bring them to the sale, and they are sold at auction. You stand there and bid. That's where a good eye for a horse comes in handy.

You buy a colt that hasn't been trained at all, or two, or four, or maybe a dozen. Some will be corkers, and some will be duplicates. As good an eye as Tom Whitehead was, and as renowned as horsemen all over the state, he made plenty of mistakes. When a colt turned out to be a dud, he said to the men sitting around, "I'm slipping. I thought there was nothing wrong with this cove. He's got good blood, but he'll never go fast. He doesn't have anything extra. It's not in him. I think I'd better go to the optometrist and get my eyes fixed. Maybe I'm getting old and a little blind."

It was fun in the Whitehead stables, but even more fun at the fairground racetracks, where Tom trained his foals. Dr. Reefy came to the stables and sat, Will Truesdale, a handsome young man who was kind to Margaret and gave her gifts, came, and Judge Blair came.

A crowd of men sat and talked-always about horses. There was a bench in front. Neighbors told Mary Moorehead she shouldn't let her boy keep such company, but she moved on. Many times, Tar couldn't understand the conversation. The men always made sarcastic remarks to each other, just as his mother sometimes did to people.

The men discussed religion and politics, and whether humans have souls and horses don't. Some were of one opinion, some of another. The best thing, Tar thought, was to return to the stable.

There was a plank floor and a long row of stalls on each side, and in front of each stall was a hole with iron bars, so he could see through it, but the horse inside couldn't get out. That was a good thing, too. Tar walked slowly, peering inside.

"Fassig's Irish Maid; The Old Hundred; Tipton Ten; Ready-to-Please; Saul the First; Passenger Boy; Holy Mackerel."

The names were on small tickets attached to the front of the stalls.

The passenger boy was as black as a black cat, and walked like a cat when he rode fast. One of the grooms, Henry Bardsher, said he could knock the crown off the king's head if he had the chance. "He'd knock the stars off the flag, he'd knock the beard off your face," he said. "When he's done racing, I'll make him my barber."

On a bench in front of the stables on summer days when the racetrack was empty, the men talked-sometimes about women, sometimes about why God allows certain things, sometimes about why the farmer always growls. Tar soon grew tired of the conversation. "There's already too much talk in his head," he thought.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER XI


A T _ TRACKING in the morning, what difference did it make? The horses were now in charge. Passenger Boy and Old Hundred and Holy Mackerel were absent. Tom had been busy developing Passenger Boy himself. He, the gelding Holy Mackerel, and a three-year-old, whom Tom believed was the fastest he had ever owned, were planning to run a mile together after they warmed up.

The boy passenger was old, fourteen, but you'd never guess it. He had a funny, cat-like gait-smooth, low, and fast when it didn't feel fast.

Tar came to a place where a few trees grew in the center of the path. Sometimes, when Tom didn't come for him or pay [him] no attention, he would walk alone and arrive there early in the morning. If he had to go without breakfast, no big deal. You're waiting for breakfast, and what happens? Your sister Margaret says, "Find some firewood in Tar, get some water, watch the house while I go to the store."

Old horses like Passenger Boy are like some old men, Tar realized much later, when he became a man. Old men take a lot of warming up-pushing them-but when they start working properly-boy, watch out. What you need to do is warm them up. One day in the stables, Tar heard young Bill Truesdale say that many of the men he called ancients behaved the same way. "Now look at King David. They had a lot of trouble trying to warm him up for the last time. People and horses change little."

Will Truesdale always talked about antiquity. People said he was a born scholar, but he was drugged about three times a week. He claimed there were plenty of precedents for this. "Many of the smartest people the world has ever known could have stuffed me under the table. I don't have the stomach they had."

Such conversations, half-joyful, half-serious, took place in the stables where the men sat, while at the racetrack, there was mostly silence. When a good horse is racing fast, even a talkative person can't say much. In the very center, inside the oval track, grew a large tree, an oak, and as you sat beneath it and slowly walked around, you could see the horse at every step of the mile.

One early morning, Tar walked up there and sat down. It was Sunday morning, and he thought it was a good time to go. If he'd stayed home, Margaret would have said, "You might as well go to Sunday school." Margaret wanted Tar to learn everything. She was ambitious for him, but you learn a lot on the slopes, too.

On Sunday, when you get dressed up, your mom has to wash your shirt afterwards. You can't help but get it dirty. She has enough to do as it is.

When Tar reached the tracks early, Tom, his men, and the horses were already there. One by one, the horses were led out. Some worked quickly, others simply ran for miles and miles. This was done to strengthen their legs.

Then the Boy Passenger appeared, a little stiff at first, but after being shaken for a while, he gradually settled into that light, catlike gait. The Holy Mackerel rose high and proud. The trouble with him was that when he was at his speed, if you weren't very careful and pushed too hard, he could break and ruin everything.

Now Tar had mastered everything perfectly: racing words, slang. He loved pronouncing horse names, racing words, horse words.

Sitting like this, alone under the tree, he continued to talk to the horses in a low voice. "Easy, boy, now... go there now... hello boy... hello boy..." ["hello, boy... hello, boy"...] pretending to be driving.

"Hello, boy" was the sound you made when you wanted the horse to straighten out in its stride.

If you're not yet a man and can't do what men do, you can have almost as much fun pretending to do it... if no one is watching or listening.

Tar watched the horses and dreamed of one day becoming a rider. On Sunday, as he was heading out onto the track, something happened.

When he got there early in the morning, the day started out gray, like many Sundays, and a light rain began to fall. At first, he thought the rain might spoil the fun, but it didn't last long. The rain merely dusted the track.

Tar left home without breakfast, but as the summer was drawing to a close and Tom would soon have to send some of his horses to the races, some of his men lived on the tracks, keeping their horses there and getting their meals there.

They cooked outdoors and lit a small fire. After the rain, the day had cleared halfway, creating a soft light.

On Sunday morning, Tom saw Tar entering the fairgrounds and, calling out to him, gave him some fried bacon and bread. It was delicious, better than anything Tar could ever get at home. Perhaps his mother told Tom Whitehead that he was so obsessed with the outdoors that he often left home without breakfast.

After he gave Tar the bacon and bread-Tar turned it into a sandwich-Tom didn't pay any attention to him anymore. That was just as well. Tar didn't want attention [not that day]. There are days when, if everyone leaves you alone, it's just fine. They don't happen often in life. For some people, the best day is when they get married, for others, it's when they become rich, have a lot of money left over, or something like that.

In any case, there are days when everything seems to be going well, like Saint Mackerel when he doesn't break in the stretch, or like old Passenger Boy when he finally settles into his soft, cat-like gait. Such days are as rare as ripe apples on a tree in winter.

Once he'd hidden the bacon and bread, Tar walked up to the tree and could survey the road. The grass was wet, but under the tree it was dry.

He was glad that Jim Moore wasn't there, glad that his brother John or Robert weren't there.

Well, he wanted to be alone, that's all.

Early in the morning he decided that he would not go home all day, not until the evening.

He lay on the ground under an oak tree and watched the horses work. When Holy Mackerel and Passenger Boy got down to business, Tom Whitehead stood near the judge's stand with a stopwatch in his hand, letting a lighter man drive; it was certainly exciting. Many people think it's great when one horse bites another right at the wire, but if you're a rider, you should be well aware of which horse is most likely biting the other. He wasn't set up at the wire, but probably in the backstretch, where no one could see. Tar knew this was true because he'd heard Tom Whitehead say it. It was a shame Tom was so fat and heavy. He would have been as good a driver as Pop Gears or Walter Cox if he hadn't been so fat.

The backstretch is where the horse is decided, because one horse behind the other says, "Come on, big mongrel, let's see what you've got." Races are won by what you have or don't have.

What happens is, these nippers always end up in the papers and in articles. You know, newspaper writers like things like that: "You feel the wire, the wind sobs in your mighty lungs," you know. Newspapermen like that, and the crowd at the races likes it. [Some drivers and racers always work in the grandstands.] Sometimes Tar thought that if he had been a driver, his father would have been as kind, and maybe he himself, but the thought made him ashamed.

And sometimes a man like Tom Whitehead will say to one of his drivers, "You let Holy Mackerel get in front. Take old Passenger back a bit, to the front of the line. Then let him get out."

You get the idea. It doesn't mean Passenger Boy couldn't win. It means he couldn't win given the disadvantage he had if he was taken back like that. This was supposed to get Holy Macrel into the habit of landing in front. Old Passenger Boy probably didn't care. He knew he'd get the oats anyway. If you've been in front plenty of times and heard the applause and all that, what do you care?

Knowing a lot about racing or anything else takes something away, but it also gives you something. It's all nonsense to win anything unless you win it right. "There's about three people in Ohio who know about it, and four of them are dead," Tar once heard Will Truesdale say. Tar didn't quite understand what that meant, and yet, in a way, he did.

The thing is, the way a horse moves is something in itself.

Regardless, Holy Mackerel won Sunday morning after Passenger Boy was dropped back early in the stretch, and Tar watched as he was picked off, then watched as Passenger Boy ate up the space between them and nearly forced Holy Mackerel to break through at the finish. It was a critical moment. He might have broken if Charlie Friedley, riding Passenger Boy, had let out a certain cry at the right moment, as he would have done in a race.

He saw this and the movements of the horses along the entire path.

Then a few more horses, mostly foals, trained, and noon came and noon, and Tar did not move.

He felt fine. It was just a day when he didn't want to see anyone.

After the horsemen finished their work, he didn't return to where the people were. Some of them had left. They were Irish and Catholic and perhaps would have come to Mass.

Tar lay on his back under the oak tree. Every good man in the world has had a day like that. Days like that, when they come, make a person wonder why there are so few of them.

Perhaps it was simply a feeling of peace. Tar lay on his back under a tree, looking up at the sky. Birds flew overhead. Every now and then, a bird would perch on the tree. For a while, he heard the voices of people working with horses, but he couldn't make out a word.

"Well, a big tree is something in itself. A tree can sometimes laugh, sometimes smile, sometimes frown. Suppose you are a big tree and a long dry season comes. A big tree must need a lot of water. There is no worse feeling than being thirsty and knowing you have nothing to drink.

"A tree is one thing, but grass is another. Some days you"re not hungry at all. Put food in front of you, and you wouldn"t even want it. If your mother sees you just sitting there and not saying anything, she"ll probably, if she doesn"t have many other children to keep her busy, start fidgeting. It"s probably not the first thing on her mind, but food. "You better eat something." Jim Moore"s mother was like that. She stuffed him until he was so fat he could barely climb over the fence."

Tar remained under the tree for a long time, and then heard a sound in the distance, a low buzzing sound that grew louder from time to time and then died down again.

What a funny sound for a Sunday!

Tar thought he knew what it was, and soon stood up and walked slowly across the field, climbed a fence, crossed the tracks, and then climbed another fence. As he crossed the tracks, he looked up and down. When he stood on the tracks, he always wished he were a horse, young like Saint Mackerel, and full of wisdom, speed, and meanness, like Passenger Boy.

Tar had already left the race track. He crossed a stubby field, climbed over a wire fence, and drove onto the road.

It wasn't a major road, but a small country road. Such roads have deep ruts and often have protruding rocks.

And now he was already out of town. The sound he heard grew a little louder. He passed the farmhouses, walked through the forest, and climbed a hill.

Soon he saw it. It was what he had been thinking about. Some men were threshing grain in a field.

"What the hell! On Sunday!

"They must be some kind of foreigners, like Germans or something. They can't be very civilized."

Tar had never been there before and he didn't know any of the men, but he climbed over the fence and walked towards them.

The wheat stacks stood on a hill near the forest. As he approached, he walked more slowly.

Well, there were a lot of village boys around his age standing around. Some were dressed for Sundays, some in casual clothes. They all looked strange. The men were strange. Tar walked past the car and the locomotive and sat down under a tree by the fence. A large old man with a gray beard sat there, smoking a pipe.

Tar sat beside him, looking at him, looking at the men at work, looking at the village boys his own age standing around.

What a strange feeling he experienced. You have that feeling. You walk down a street you've been down a thousand times, and suddenly everything becomes different [and new]. Everywhere you go, people are doing something. On certain days, everything they do is of interest. If they're not training colts at the racetrack, they're threshing wheat.

You'll be amazed at how wheat flows out of the threshing machine like a river. Wheat is ground into flour and baked into bread. A field that's not very large and can be walked through quickly will yield bushels and bushels of wheat.

When people thresh wheat, they behave the same way they do when they train colts for a race. They make funny comments. They work like hell for a while, and then they rest and maybe even fight.

Tar saw a young man working on a stack of wheat push another to the ground. He then crawled back, and they both put down their forks and began wrestling. On a raised platform, a man feeding wheat into a separator began to dance. He picked up a sheaf of wheat, shook it in the air, made a motion like a bird trying to fly but unable to, and then began dancing again.

The two men in the haystack were struggling with all their might, laughing all the time, and the old man at the fence near Tara was growling at them, but it was clear that he did not mean what he said.

All threshing work came to a halt. Everyone was focused on watching the fight in the haystack until one guy knocked another to the ground.

Several women walked along the path with baskets, and all the men walked away from the car and sat by the fence. It was midday, but that's what people do in the village when it's threshing time. They eat and eat, at any time. Tar had heard his father talk about it. Dick liked to paint the country house when the threshing machines came. Many served wine then, some making it themselves. A good German farmer was the best. "Germans need to eat and drink," Dick often said. Funny, Dick wasn't as fat as he could eat when he was away from home, and he could get it.


As the farm's residents, visiting threshers, and neighbors who had come to help, sat by the fence, eating and drinking, they continued to offer Tar a little, but he didn't take it. He didn't know why. And not because it was Sunday and it was strange to see people at work. For him, it was a strange day, a stupid day. One of the farm boys, about his age, came over and sat next to him, holding a large sandwich. Tar hadn't eaten anything since breakfast on the track, and it was early, around six o'clock. They always work the horses as early as possible. It was already well past four o'clock.

Tar and the strange boy were sitting by an old stump, which was hollow, and in it a spider had spun its web. A large ant crawled up the farmer's leg and, when he knocked it down, fell into the web. It struggled furiously. If you looked closely at the web, you could see the old, fat spider peeking out from a cone-shaped spot.

Tar and the strange boy looked at the spider, at the struggling ant, and at each other. It's strange that some days you can't talk to save yourself. "He's finished," said the farm boy, pointing at the struggling ant. "I bet," said Tar.

The men returned to work, and the boy disappeared. The old man, who had been sitting by the fence smoking a pipe, went to work. He left the matches lying on the ground.

Tar went and got them. He collected the straw and tucked it into his shirt. He didn't know why he needed the matches and the straw. Sometimes a boy just likes to touch things. He collects stones and carries them around when he doesn't really need them.

"There are days when you like everything, and days when you don't. Other people almost never know how you feel."

Tar moved away from the threshing machines, rolled along the fence, and landed in the meadow below. Now he could see the farmhouse. When the threshing machines are in operation, a lot of neighbors come to the farmhouse. More than enough. They cook a lot, but they also fool around a lot. What they like to do is talk. You've never heard such chatter.

Although it was funny that they were doing this on a Sunday.

Tar crossed the meadow and then crossed the stream on a fallen log. He knew roughly which direction town and the Moorhead house were. What would his mother think if he was gone all day? Suppose things turned out like Rip Van Winkle and he was gone for years. Usually, when he went to the racetrack alone early in the morning, he was home by ten. If it was Saturday, there was always a lot to do. Saturday was John's big paperwork day, and Tar was bound to be busy.

He had to chop and bring firewood, collect water, and go to the store.

In the end, Sunday was much better. It was a strange day for him, an exceptional day. When an exceptional day arrives, you should do only what comes to mind. If you don't, everything will be ruined. If you want to eat, eat; if you don't want to eat, don't eat. Other people and what they want don't count, not on this day.

Tar climbed a small hill and sat down by another fence in the forest. Emerging from the forest, he saw the fairground fence and realized that in ten or fifteen minutes he could return home-if he wanted to. He didn't.

What did he want? It was already late. He must have been in the forest for at least two hours. How time flew by-sometimes.

He walked down the hill and came to a stream that led to a pond with hydraulic works. A dam had been built on the pond, holding up the water. Next to the pond was an engine house, which ran at full capacity when there was a fire in town and also provided the town with electric lights. When there was moonlight, they left the lights on. Dick Moorhead always grumbled about this. He didn't pay any taxes, and a man who doesn't pay any taxes is always the grumpier. Dick always said that taxpayers should also provide school books. "A soldier serves his country, and that makes up for not paying taxes," Dick said. Tar sometimes wondered what Dick would have done if he hadn't had the chance to be a soldier. It gave him so much to grumble, brag, and talk about. He liked being a soldier, too. "It was a life tailor-made for me." "If I'd been at West Point, I'd have stayed in the Army. If you're not a West Point man, everyone else looks down on you," Dick said.

In the engine room of the waterworks, there was an engine with a wheel twice the height of your head. It spun and spun so fast you could barely see the spokes. The engineer said nothing. If you approached the door and stopped, looking in, he never looked at you. You'd never seen a man with so much fat on a single pair of pants.

Up the creek, where Tar had just come, there had once been a house, but it had burned down. There had been an old apple orchard there, all the trees fallen, so many little shoots sprouting from the branches that it was barely possible to climb. The orchard was located on the slope of a hill leading directly to the creek. Nearby was a cornfield.

Tar sat by the stream, at the edge of a cornfield and garden. After he'd been sitting there for a while, a groundhog on the opposite bank of the stream emerged from its hole, stood up on its hind legs, and looked at Tar.

Tar didn't move. It was a strange thought, carrying a straw under his shirt. It tickled.

He took it out, and the groundhog disappeared into its hole. It was already getting dark. He would have to go home very soon. Sunday turned out to be funny: some people went to church, others stayed home.

Those who stayed at home still dressed up.

Tara was told that today was God's day. He collected a few dry leaves along the fence near the garden, then moved a little further toward the corn. When the corn is almost ripe, there are always some outer leaves that have dried and withered.

"A barren lump makes the bread bitter." Tar heard Will Truesdale say it one day while sitting with other men on a bench in front of Tom Whitehead's stable. He wondered what it meant. It was poetry Will was quoting. It would be nice to have an education like Will's, but without being a sapper, and to know all the words and their meanings. If you put words together in a certain way, they sound beautiful, even if you don't know what they mean. They go well together, just like some people do. Then you walk alone and say the words silently, enjoying the sound they make.

The pleasant sounds of the old orchard and communications field at night are perhaps the best sounds you can hear. These are made by crickets, frogs, and grasshoppers.

Tar lit a small pile of leaves, dried corn husks, and straw. Then he applied a few sticks. The leaves weren't very dry. There was no large, rapid fire, only a quiet one with white smoke. Smoke curled through the branches of one of the old apple trees in the orchard, planted by a man who thought he'd build a house there by the creek. "He got tired or disillusioned," Tar thought, "and after his house burned down, he left. People were always leaving one place and moving to another."

The smoke rose lazily into the tree branches. When a light breeze blew, some of it drifted through the standing corn.

People talked about God. There was nothing concrete in Tara's mind. Often you do something-like carry straw from the threshing floor all day in your shirt (it tickles you)-and you don't know why you do it.

There are things to think about that you'll never be able to think about. If you talk to a boy about God, he'll get all confused. One time, the kids were talking about death, and Jim Moore said that when he died, he wanted them to sing a song called "Going to the Fair in a Car" at his funeral, and a big boy standing nearby laughed, ready to kill.

He didn't have the common sense to realize that Jim didn't mean what he said. He meant that he liked the sound. Perhaps he'd heard someone singing the song, someone with a pleasant voice.

The preacher who came to the Mooreheads' house one day and talked a lot about God and hell frightened Tar and angered Mary Moorehead. What was the point of being so nervous?

If you're sitting on the edge of a cornfield and an orchard, and you have a little fire burning, and it's almost night, and there's a cornfield, and the smoke is lazily and slowly rising into the sky, and you look up...

Tar waited until the fire burned out and went home.

It was dark when he got there. If your mother has any common sense, she knows enough to know that certain days are certain days. If on one of those days you do something she doesn't expect, she'll never say a word.

Tara's mother said nothing. When he returned home, his father had left, as had John. Dinner was over, but his mother brought him some. Margaret was talking to a neighbor girl in the backyard, and Robert was just sitting around. The baby was asleep.

After dinner, Tar simply sat on the porch with his mother. She sat next to him, occasionally touching him with her fingers. [He felt as if he were going through some kind of ceremony. Simply because, overall, everything was so good and all was well. In Bible times, they liked to light a fire and watch the smoke rise. That was a long time ago. When you have a fire like that, alone, and the smoke rises lazily through the branches of old apple trees and among corn that has grown higher than your head, and when you look up, it"s already late evening, almost dark, the sky where the stars are, a bit far away, okay.]

OceanofPDF.com

PART III


OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER XII


HE WAS _ AN old woman and lived on a farm not far from the town where the Moorheads lived. Everyone in the country and towns has seen such old women, but few know about them. Such an old woman rides into town on an old, tired horse or comes on foot with a basket. She might have a few chickens and eggs to sell. She brings them in the basket and takes them to the grocery store. There she sells them. She gets some salt pork and some beans. Then she takes a pound or two of sugar and a little flour.

After that, she goes to the butcher and asks for some dog meat. She might spend ten or fifteen cents, but when she spends, she asks for something. In Tar's day, butchers gave liver to anyone who wanted it. It was always like that in the Moorhead family. [One day] one of Tar's brothers pulled out a whole cow's liver from the slaughterhouse near the fan square. He staggered home with it, and then the Moorheads had it until they got tired of it. It never cost a cent. Tar hated that thought for the rest of his life.

An old woman from the farm brought her some liver and a soup bone. She never visited anyone and, as soon as she got what she wanted, she went home. For such an old body, this was quite a burden. No one gave her a ride. People drove right down the road and didn't notice such an old woman.

During the summer and fall, when Tar was ill, the old woman would come into town past the Moorehead house. Later, she would walk home with a heavy backpack on her back. Two or three large, emaciated-looking dogs followed at her heels.

Well, there was nothing special about her. She was someone few people knew, but she had infiltrated Tar's thoughts. Her name was Grimes, and she lived with her husband and son in a small, unpainted house on the banks of a small stream four miles outside of town.

The husband and son were a difficult couple. Although the son was only twenty-one, he had already served time in prison. Rumors circulated that the woman's husband had stolen horses and driven them to some other county. From time to time, when a horse disappeared, the man would vanish too. He was never caught.

One day later, while Tar was hanging around Tom Whitehead's barn, a man came up and sat down on the bench in front. Judge Blair and two or three other men were there, but no one spoke to him. He sat there for a few minutes, then got up and left. As he left, he turned and looked at the men. There was a defiant look in his eyes. "Well, I was trying to be friendly. You won't talk to me. It's always been that way, wherever I go in this town. If one of your fine horses ever goes missing, well, what then?"

He didn't actually say anything. "I'd like to break one of your jaws," his eyes said. Tar later recalled how that look sent a shiver down his spine.

The man belonged to a family that had once had money. His father, John Grimes, had owned a sawmill in the country's youth and made a living. Then he started drinking and chasing women. When he died, there was little left of him.

Jake Grimes blew up the rest. Soon, the lumber was gone, and his land was almost completely gone.

He took his wife from a German farmer, where he went to work harvesting wheat one June day. She was young and scared to death at the time.

You see, the farmer had been up to something with a girl they called "the bound girl," and his wife had her suspicions. She took it out on the girl when the farmer wasn't around. Then, when his wife had to go into town for supplies, the farmer followed her. She told young Jake that nothing had actually happened, but he wasn't sure whether to believe her or not.

He'd gotten her pretty easily the first time he'd been with her. Well, he wouldn't have married her if a German farmer hadn't tried to show him the ropes. One evening, Jake persuaded her to ride with him in his cart while he threshed the land, then came back for her the following Sunday evening.

She managed to sneak out of the house without her employer seeing her, and then, as she was getting into the buggy, he appeared. It was almost dark, and he suddenly appeared at the horse's head. He grabbed the horse by the bridle, and Jake pulled out his whip.

They had it right there. The German was a tough man. Perhaps he didn't care if his wife knew. Jake hit him across the face and shoulders with his whip, but the horse started acting up, and he had to get out.

Then the two men went at it. The girl didn't see it. The horse started running and went nearly a mile down the road before the girl stopped it. Then she [managed] to tie him to a tree by the roadside. Tar learned all about it later. He must have remembered it from small-town stories he'd heard hanging around where men talked. Jake found her after he'd dealt with the German. She was curled up in the carriage seat, crying, scared to death. She told Jake a lot of things: how the German had tried to get her, how he'd chased her into the barn once, how another time when they were alone in the house he'd torn her dress right in front of the door. The German, she said, might have gotten her then if he hadn't heard his old woman ride in the gate. His wife had gone into town for supplies. Well, she'd put the horse in the barn. The German managed to slip away into the field unnoticed. He told the girl he would kill her if she told. What could she do? She lied about tearing her dress in the barn while feeding the livestock. She was a tied-up girl and didn't know who or where her father and mother were. Perhaps she didn't have a father. The reader will understand.

She married Jake and had a son and a daughter, but the daughter died young.

Then the woman began feeding the cattle. That was her job. She cooked for the German and his wife. The German's wife was a strong woman with large hips and spent most of her time working in the fields with her husband. [The girl] fed them and fed the cows in the barn, fed the pigs, horses, and chickens. As a child, every moment of every day was spent feeding something.

Then she married Jake Grimes, and he needed to be supported. She was short, and after three or four years of marriage and the birth of two children, her slender shoulders began to slouch.

Jake always had a lot of big dogs at his house, standing near the abandoned old sawmill by the creek. He was always selling horses when he wasn't stealing anything, and he had many poor, skinny horses. He also kept three or four pigs and a cow. They all grazed on the few acres left over from the Grimes house, and Jake did almost nothing.

He went into debt for a thresher and maintained it for several years, but it didn't pay off. People didn't trust him. They were afraid he'd steal the grain in the night. He had to travel far to find work, and the journey was too expensive. In the winter, he hunted and collected a little firewood to sell in a nearby town. When his boy grew up, he was just like his father. They got drunk together. If there was nothing to eat in the house when they came home, the old man would hit the old woman over the head with a clip. She had several chickens of her own, and she had to kill one of them in a hurry. When they were all killed, she would have no eggs to sell when she went to town, and then what would she do?

She had to spend her entire life planning how to feed the animals, feeding the pigs so they would grow fat enough to be slaughtered in the fall. When they were slaughtered, her husband took most of the meat to town and sold it. If he didn't do it first, the boy did. Sometimes they quarreled, and when they did, the old woman stood aside, trembling.

She already had a habit of keeping silent - this was corrected.

Sometimes, when she was beginning to get old-she was not yet forty-and when her husband and son were away trading horses, or drinking, or hunting, or stealing, she would walk about the house and the barn yard, muttering to herself.

How she would feed everyone was her problem. The dogs needed feeding. There wasn't enough hay in the barn for the horses and cow. If she didn't feed the chickens, how would they lay eggs? Without eggs to sell, how could she buy the things necessary to keep the place running in town? Thank goodness, she didn't have to feed her husband in a specific way. This didn't last long after their wedding and the birth of their children. Where he went on his long journeys, she didn't know. Sometimes he was gone for weeks at a time, and when the boy grew up, they would travel together.

They left everything at home to her, and she had no money. She didn't know anyone. No one ever spoke to her. In the winter, she had to gather firewood for the fire, trying to provide for the livestock with very little grain, very little hay.

The livestock in the barn cried out eagerly to her, and the dogs followed her. The hens laid plenty of eggs in the winter. They huddled in the corners of the barn, and she continued to watch them. If a hen lays an egg in the barn in winter and you don't find it, it will freeze and break.

One winter day, an old woman went into town with a few eggs, and her dogs followed her. She didn't start work until almost three o'clock, and it began to snow heavily. She hadn't been feeling well for several days, so she walked, muttering, half-dressed, with her shoulders hunched. She had an old grain sack in which she carried eggs, hidden at the bottom. There weren't many, but eggs go up in price in winter. She would get some meat [in exchange for the eggs], some salted pork, some sugar, and maybe some coffee. Maybe the butcher would give her a piece of liver.

When she arrived in town and sold eggs, the dogs were lying outside the door. She had succeeded, getting everything she needed, even more than she had hoped for. Then she went to the butcher, and he gave her some liver and dog meat.

For the first time in a long time, someone spoke to her in a friendly manner. When she entered, the butcher was alone in his shop, irritated by the thought of such a sick-looking old woman coming out on such a day. It was bitterly cold, and the snow, which had subsided in the afternoon, was falling again. The butcher said something about her husband and son, cursing them, and the old woman stared at him with mild surprise in her eyes. He said that if her husband or son took the liver or the heavy bones with the chunks of meat hanging from them that he had placed in the sack of grain, he would be the first to see [him] die of starvation.

Starving, huh? Well, they had to feed. People had to be fed, and the horses, which were no good but could perhaps be exchanged, and the poor, skinny cow, who hadn't given milk for three months.

Horses, cows, pigs, dogs, people.

The old woman had to get home before dark, if she could. The dogs followed her closely, sniffing the heavy sack of grain she had strapped to her back. When she reached the outskirts of town, she stopped at a fence and tied the sack to her back with a piece of rope she carried in her dress pocket for this purpose. It was an easier way to carry it. Her arms ached. She had a hard time climbing over fences, and once she fell and landed in the snow. The dogs began to frolic. She struggled to her feet, but she managed. The point of climbing the fence was that there was a shortcut through the hill and forest. She could go around the road, but it was a mile further. She was afraid she wouldn't be able to do that. And then there was feeding the livestock. There was some hay left, some corn. Perhaps her husband and son would bring something home when they arrived. They left in the only carriage the Grimes family had, a rickety machine with a rickety horse tied to it and two more rickety horses leading the reins. They were going to trade the horses and get some money, if they could. They might come home drunk. It would be nice to have something in the house when they returned.

The son was having an affair with a woman in the county seat, fifteen miles from here. She was a bad woman, harsh. One summer, the son brought her home. Both she and the son were drinking. Jake Grimes was away, and the son and his woman bossed the old woman around like a servant. She didn't mind much; she was used to it. No matter what happened, she never said anything. It was her way of getting along. She had succeeded at it when she was a young girl with the German, and ever since she married Jake. That time, her son brought his woman home, and they stayed the whole night, sleeping together as if they were married. This didn't shock the old woman too much. She overcame the shock at an early age.

With a backpack on her back, she struggled across the open field, trudging through deep snow, and reached the forest. She had to climb a small hill. There wasn't much snow in the forest.

There was a road, but it was difficult to navigate. Just beyond the top of the hill, where the forest was thickest, was a small clearing. Had anyone ever thought of building a house there? The clearing was as large as a city building lot, big enough for a house and garden. The path ran alongside the clearing, and when she reached it, the old woman sat down to rest at the foot of a tree.

It was stupid. It felt good to settle down, her backpack pressed against the tree trunk, but what about getting up again? She worried about that for a moment, then closed her eyes.

She must have been asleep for a while. When you're this cold, it doesn't get any colder. The day warmed up a bit, and the snow fell harder than ever. Then, after a while, the weather cleared up. The moon even came out.

Mrs. Grimes was followed into town by four of Grimes' dogs, all tall, skinny fellows. Men like Jake Grimes and his son always keep dogs just like that. They kick them and insult them, but they stay. Grimes' dogs had to forage for food to keep from starving, and they did so while the old woman slept with her back to a tree at the edge of the clearing. They chased rabbits in the woods and surrounding fields and picked up three more farm dogs.

After a while, all the dogs returned to the clearing. They were agitated by something. Nights like these-cold, clear, and moonlit-do something to dogs. Perhaps some old instinct, inherited from the time when they were wolves and roamed the forest in packs on winter nights, was returning.

The dogs in the clearing caught two or three rabbits before the old woman, and their immediate hunger was sated. They began to play, running in circles around the clearing. They ran in a circle, each dog's nose touching the tail of the next. In the clearing, under the snow-covered trees and the winter moon, they presented a strange picture, running silently in a circle made by their running in the soft snow. The dogs didn't make a sound. They ran and ran in a circle.

Perhaps the old woman saw them doing this before she died. Perhaps she woke up once or twice and gazed at the strange spectacle with her dim, old eyes.

She wouldn't be very cold now, she'd just like to sleep. Life drags on. Perhaps the old woman has gone mad. She might have dreamed of her maidenhood with a German, and before that, when she was a child, and before her mother abandoned her.

Her dreams couldn't have been very pleasant. Not many pleasant things happened to her. Every now and then, one of Grimes' dogs would leave the running circle and stop in front of her. The dog would lean its muzzle toward her. Its red tongue would flick out.

Running with the dogs could have been a kind of death ceremony. Perhaps the dogs' primal wolf instinct, awakened by the night and the running, made them afraid.

"We're not wolves anymore. We're dogs, servants of humans. Live, man. When humans die, we become wolves again."

When one of the dogs came to the place where the old woman sat with her back to the tree and pressed his nose to her face, he seemed satisfied and [went] back to run with the pack. All of Grimes's dogs had done this some evening before she died. Tar Moorhead learned all about it later, when he became a man, for one winter night in the woods he saw a pack of dogs behaving [exactly] like that. The dogs were waiting for him to die, as they had waited for the old woman that night when he was a child, [but] when it happened to him, he was a young man and had no intention of dying.

The old woman died quietly and peacefully. When she died, and when one of Grimes' dogs approached her and found her dead, all the dogs stopped running.

They gathered around her.

Well, she was dead now. She'd fed the Grimes dogs when she was alive, but what about now?

On her back lay a backpack, a sack of grain containing a piece of salted pork, the liver the butcher had given her, dog meat, and soup bones. The town butcher, suddenly overcome with pity, heavily loaded her sack of grain. For the old woman, it was a great haul.

Now there's a big catch for the dogs.

One of Grimes' dogs suddenly leaped out from the crowd and began tugging at the pack on the old woman's back. If the dogs really were wolves, one of them would be the pack leader. What he did, so did all the others.

Everyone sank their teeth into the sack of grain that the old woman had tied to her back with ropes.

The old woman's body was dragged into an open clearing. Her worn, old dress quickly tore from her shoulders. When she was found a day or two later, the dress had been torn off her body down to her hips, but the dogs hadn't touched her. They'd scooped some meat from a sack of grain, and that was all. When she was found, her body was frozen solid, her shoulders so narrow and her body so frail that in death, it resembled that of a young girl.

Things like this happened in Midwestern towns, on farms just outside town, when Tar Moorhead was a boy. A rabbit hunter found the old woman's body and left it alone. Something-the round path through the small snow-covered clearing, the quiet of the place, the place where dogs had harassed the body, trying to pull out a sack of grain or tear it open-something frightened the man, and he hurried away into town.

Tar was on Main Street with his brother John, who was delivering the day's newspapers to stores. It was almost night.

The hunter went into a grocery store and told his story. Then he went to a hardware store and a pharmacy. The men began gathering on the sidewalks. Then they moved down the road to a spot in the woods.

Of course, John Moorehead should have continued his newspaper distribution business, but he didn't. Everyone was heading into the woods. The undertaker and the town marshal went. Several men boarded a wagon and rode to where the trail branched off from the road, but the horses weren't well-shod and slipped on the slippery surface. They had no better time than those who walked.

The town marshal was a large man whose leg had been wounded during the Civil War. He carried a heavy cane and limped quickly along the road. John and Tar Moorhead followed close behind, and as they advanced, other boys and men joined the crowd.

By the time they reached the spot where the old woman had turned off the road, it was already dark, but the moon had risen. The marshal thought there might have been a murder. He continued questioning the hunter. The hunter walked with a rifle over his shoulder, his dog at his heels. It's not often that a rabbit hunter gets the chance to be so visible. He took full advantage of it, leading the procession with the town marshal. "I didn't see any wounds. She was a young girl. Her face was buried in snow. No, I didn't know her." The hunter hadn't really looked closely at the body. He was scared. She could have been murdered, or someone could have jumped out from behind a tree and killed him. In the forest, late in the evening, when the trees are bare and the ground is covered in white snow, when everything is quiet, something eerie crawls over the body. If something strange or supernatural happened in the neighboring prison, you think about how to get out of there as quickly as possible.

A crowd of men and boys reached the place where the old woman had crossed the field and followed the marshal and the hunter up the slight slope into the forest.

Tar and John Moorehead were silent. John had a stack of papers slung over his shoulder in his bag. When he returned to town, he would have to continue distributing his papers before going home for dinner. If Tar went with him, as John had undoubtedly already decided, they would both be late. Either Tar's mother or his sister would have to heat up their dinner.

Well, they would have had a story to tell. The boy didn't often have such a chance. Luckily, they happened to be in the grocery store when the hunter walked in. The hunter was a country boy. Neither boy had ever seen him before.

Now the crowd of men and boys had reached the clearing. Darkness falls quickly on such winter nights, but the full moon made everything clear. Two of Moorehead's boys stood near the tree under which the old woman had died.

She didn't look old, lying there, frozen, [not] in this light. One of the men turned her over in the snow, and Tar saw everything. His body was shaking, just like his brother's. Perhaps it was the cold.

None of them had ever seen a woman's body before. Perhaps the snow clinging to her frozen flesh made her so white, so marble-like. Not a single woman had come with the company from the town, but one of the men, the town blacksmith, took off his coat and covered him with her. Then he picked her up and set off for the town, the others following silently. At that time, no one knew who she was.

Tar saw everything, saw the round [track] on the snow, like a miniature hippodrome, where the dogs had rims, saw how puzzled the people were, saw the white bare young shoulders, heard the whispered comments of the men.

The men were simply puzzled. They took the body to the undertaker, and when the blacksmith, the hunter, the marshal, and a few others came inside, they closed the door. If Dick Moorehead had been there, he might have been able to get in and see and hear everything, but the [two] Moorehead boys couldn't.

Tar went with his brother John to hand out [the rest of] the papers, and when they returned home, it was John who told the story.

Tar remained silent and went to bed early. Perhaps he wasn't satisfied with the way John told the story.

Later, in town, he must have heard other fragments of the old woman's story. He remembered her passing by the Moorhead house while he was ill. The next day, she was identified, and an investigation was launched. Her husband and son were found somewhere and brought to town. An attempt was made to connect them to the woman's death, but it didn't work. They had a pretty good alibi.

But the city was against them. They had to escape. Tar never heard where they went.

He remembered only the scene there, in the forest, the men standing around, a naked girl lying face down in the snow, the circle formed by the running dogs, and the clear, cold winter sky above. White fragments of clouds floated across the sky, racing across the small open space among the trees.

The forest scene, unbeknownst to Tara, became the basis for a story the child couldn't understand and which demanded understanding. For a long time, the fragments had to be slowly pieced together.

Something happened. When Tar was a young man, he went to work on a German farm. There was a girl hired, and she was afraid of her employer. The farmer's wife hated her.

Tar had seen something in this place. One later winter night, on a clear moonlit night, he had a semi-darkened, mystical adventure with dogs in the woods. When he was a schoolboy, on a summer day, he and a friend had walked along a stream a few miles outside of town and came to a house where an old woman lived. Since her death, the house had been deserted. The doors were torn off their hinges, the lanterns in the windows were all broken. As the boy and Tar stood on the road near the house, two dogs ran out from around the corner of the house-no doubt just stray farm dogs. The dogs were tall, thin fellows; they approached the fence and stared intently at the boys standing in the road.

This whole story, the story of the old woman's death, was like music heard from afar for Tar as he grew older. The notes had to be picked up slowly, one at a time. Something had to be understood.

The deceased woman was one of those who feed [animals]. Since childhood, she had fed animals: people, cows, chickens, pigs, horses, dogs. She spent her life feeding all kinds of [animals]. Her experience with her husband was a purely animal experience. Having children was an animal experience for her. Her daughter died in childhood, and she apparently had no human relationship with her only son. She fed him as she fed her husband. When her son grew up, he brought a woman home, and the old woman fed them without saying a word. On the night of her death, she hurried home, carrying food for the animals on her body.

She died in a clearing in the forest and even after death continued to feed the animals - dogs that ran out of the city on her heels.

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CHAPTER XIII


Something had been bothering Tar for a long time. The summer of his thirteenth year, the situation worsened. His mother hadn't been feeling well for a long time, but that summer she seemed to improve. [Tar was now selling the papers, not John], but it didn't take long. Since his mother wasn't very well and had other younger children who were in no hurry, she couldn't pay [Tar] much attention.

After lunch, he and Jim Moore would go into the woods. Sometimes they just lazed around, sometimes they'd go fishing or swimming. Along the creek, farmers worked in their fields. When they went swimming at a place called "Mama Culver's Hole," other boys from town would come. Young people would sometimes walk down through the fields to the creek. There was one young man who had fits. His father was the town blacksmith [who had carried the dead woman out of the woods]. He swam like everyone else, but someone had to keep an eye on him [all the time]. One day, he had a fit in the water and had to be pulled out to keep him from drowning. Tar saw it, saw the naked man lying on the bank of the creek, saw the strange look in his eyes, the strange jerking movements of his legs, arms, and body.

The man muttered words Tar couldn't understand. It could have been like a bad dream you have sometimes at night. He only looked for a moment. Soon enough, the man stood up and dressed. He walked slowly across the field, head down, and sat down, leaning his back against a tree. How pale he was.

When the older boys and young men arrived at the bathhouse, Tar and Jim Moore became enraged. Older boys in such places like to take out their anger on the younger ones. They throw mud on the bodies of the little boys after they emerge from the bathhouse partially clothed. When he catches you, you have to go and wash yourself again. Sometimes they do this dozens of times.

Then they hide your clothes or soak them in water and tie knots in your shirt sleeve. When you want to get dressed and leave, you can't.

[A tender bunch - small town boys - sometimes.]

They take a shirt sleeve and dip it in the water. Then they tie a tight knot and pull with all their might, making it difficult for the boy to untie. If he has to try, the older boys in the water laugh and shout. There's a song about it, full of words worse than you'd hear in any livery stable. "Eat beef," the older boys shout. Then they shout out a song. The whole thing rings with that. It's not some kind of fancy singing.

What bothered Tara also bothered Jim Moore. Sometimes, when they were alone in the woods, by the stream behind their usual swimming hole, they would go in together. Then they would come out and lie naked on the grass by the stream in the sun. It was pleasant.

[Then] they began to talk about what they had heard at school among the young people at the bathhouse.

"Suppose you ever get a chance to meet a girl, what then?" Maybe little girls walking home from school together, without boys, talk the same way.

"Oh, I won't get that chance. I'd probably be scared, wouldn't you?

"I think you can overcome your fear. Let's go."

You can talk and think about a lot of things, and then, when you return home to your mother and sister, it doesn't seem to matter much. If you had a chance and done something, everything could have been different.

Sometimes, when Tar and Jim lay like this on the bank of the stream, one of them would touch the other's body. It was a strange sensation. When this happened, they both jumped up and started running. Several young trees grew along the bank of the stream in that direction, and they climbed up the trees. The trees were small, smooth, and slender, and the boys pretended to be monkeys or some other wild animal. They continued this for a long time, both acting quite crazy.

One day, while they were doing this, a man approached, and they had to run and hide in the bushes. They were in a cramped space and had to stick close to each other. After the man left, they immediately went to get their clothes, both feeling strange.

Strange about what? Well, what do you say? All boys are like that sometimes.

There was a boy Jim and Tar knew who had the nerve to do anything. One day, he was with a girl and they went into a barn. The girl's mother saw them enter and followed her. The girl got a spanking. Neither Tar nor Jim thought anything really happened, but the boy said it did. He bragged about it. "It's not the first time."

Such talk. Tar and Jim thought the boy was lying. "Do you think he wouldn't have the courage?"

They talked about these things more than they wanted to. They couldn't help it. When they talked too much, they both felt uneasy. So how are you going to learn anything? When men talk, you listen as much as you can. If men see you hanging around, they'll tell you to leave.

Tar saw things while delivering papers to houses in the evening. A man would arrive with a horse and cart and wait at a certain spot on a dark street, and after a while, a woman would join him. The woman was married, and so was the man. Before the woman arrived, the man pulled the side curtains of his carriage. They drove off together.

Tar knew who they were, and after a while, the man realized he knew. One day, he met Tar on the street. The man stopped and bought a newspaper. Then he stood and looked at Tar, his hands in his pockets. This man had a large farm a few miles outside of town, where his wife and children lived, but he spent almost all his time in town. He was a buyer of agricultural produce and shipped it to nearby towns. The woman Tar had seen getting into the buggy was the merchant's wife.

The man pressed a five-dollar bill into Tara's hand. "I think you know enough to keep your mouth shut," he said. That was all.

Having said this, the man calmed down and left. Tara had never had so much money, never had money he didn't expect to account for. This was an easy way to get it. Whenever one of the Moorehead children earned money, they gave it to their mother. She never asked for anything like that. It seemed natural.

Tar bought himself a quarter's worth of candy and a pack of Sweet Caporal cigarettes. He and Jim Moore would try smoking them sometime when they were in the woods. Then he bought a fancy tie for fifty cents.

Everything was fine. He had a little over four dollars in his pocket. He received his change in silver dollars. Ernest Wright, who owned a small hotel in town, always stood in front of his inn with a wad of silver dollars in his hand, gambling with them. At the fair in the fall, when many con artists from out of town came to the fair, they set up gambling booths. You could win a cane by slipping a ring on it, or a gold watch, or a revolver by choosing the right number on a wheel. There were many such places. One day, Dick Moorehead, out of work, got a job at one of them.

In all these places, piles of silver dollars were stacked in conspicuous places. Dick Moorhead said that a farmer or hired hand had about as much chance of winning money as a snowball in hell.

It was nice to see a pile of silver dollars, though, and it was nice to see Ernest Wright jingling silver dollars in his hands as he stood on the sidewalk in front of his hotel.

It was nice that Tar had four big silver dollars he didn't feel the need to account for. They'd just landed in his hand, as if from heaven. Candy he could eat, cigarettes he and Jim Moore would try smoking someday soon. A new tie would be a bit of a hassle. Where would he tell the others at home he'd gotten it? Most boys his age in town never got fifty-cent ties. Dick never got more than two new ones a year-when there was a GAR convention or something. Tar could say he'd found it, and he'd also found four silver dollars. Then he could give the money to his mother and forget about it. It felt good to have the heavy silver dollars in his pocket, but they'd come his way in a strange way. Silver was much nicer to have than bills. It felt like more.

When a man is married, you see him with his wife and think nothing of it, but there's a man like that waiting in a buggy on a side street, and then a woman comes along, trying to act as if she's about to visit some neighbor-it's already evening, dinner is over, and her husband has returned to his shop. Then the woman looks around and quickly climbs into the buggy. They drive away, drawing the curtains.

Lots of Madame Bovaries in American towns - what!

Tar wanted to tell Jim Moore about this, but he didn't dare. There was some kind of agreement between him and the man from whom he'd taken the five dollars.

The woman knew he knew as well as the man. He emerged from the alleyway, barefoot, silent, with a stack of papers under his arm, and ran straight toward them.

Perhaps he did it on purpose.

The woman's husband picked up the morning paper at his store, and the afternoon paper was delivered to his home. It was funny to walk into his store later and see him there, talking to some man who knew nothing, Tar, just a child who knew so much.

So what did he know?

The trouble is, things like that make a boy think. You want to see a lot, and when you do, it excites you and almost makes you regret not having seen it. The woman, when Tar brought the newspaper home, didn't show anything. She was completely overwhelmed.

Why did they disappear like that? The boy knows, but he doesn't know. If Tar could only discuss this with John or Jim Moore, it would be a relief. You can't talk about such things with anyone in your family. You need to go outside.

Tar saw other things too. Win Connell, who worked at Carey's drugstore, married Mrs. Gray after her first husband died.

She was taller than him. They rented a house and furnished it with her first husband's furniture. One evening, when it was raining and dark, only about seven o'clock, Tar was delivering newspapers behind their house, and they forgot to close the blinds on the windows. None of them were wearing anything, and he chased her everywhere. I never thought adults could behave like that.

Tar was in an alley, just like he had been the time he'd seen the people in the buggy. Going through alleys saves time [delivering documents] when the train is late. He stood holding his papers under his coat to keep them from getting wet, and next to him were two adults who were behaving like that.

There was a kind of living room and a staircase leading up, and then several more rooms on the ground floor that had no light at all.

The first thing Tar saw was a woman running like that, naked, across the room, and her husband following her. It made Tar laugh. They looked like monkeys. The woman ran upstairs, and he followed her. Then she went back down. They ducked into dark rooms, and then came out again. Sometimes he caught her, but she must have been slippery. She got away every time. They kept doing it and kept doing it. It was so crazy to see. There was a couch in the room Tar was looking at, and as soon as she sat down, he was in front. He put his hands on the back of the couch and jumped off. You wouldn't think [a drug dealer] could do that.

Then he chased her into one of the dark rooms. Tar waited and waited, but they didn't emerge.

A guy like Win Connell had to work in the store after dinner. He got dressed and went there. People came in for prescriptions, maybe a cigar. Win stood behind the counter and smiled. "Is there anything else? Of course, if anything is unsatisfactory, please return it. We strive to please."

Tar leaves the road, arrives for dinner later than ever, to pass by Carey's Pharmacy and pop in to see Win there, like any other man, doing what he did all the time, every day. And less than an hour ago...

Win was not yet that old, but he was already bald.

The world of the elderly gradually opens up to the boy carrying his papers. Some of the elderly seemed to possess great dignity. Others did not. Boys the same age as Tara had secret vices. Some boys in the bathhouse did things, said things. As men grow older, they become sentimental about the old bathhouse. They remember only the pleasant things that happened. There is a trick of the mind that makes one forget [unpleasant] things. This is for the best. If you could see life clearly and directly, you might not be able to live.

A boy wanders around the city, full of curiosity. He knows where the vicious dogs are, that people speak kindly to him. There are diseases everywhere. You can't get anything out of them. If the newspaper is an hour late, they growl and fuss at you. What the hell? You don't run the railroad. If the train is late, it's not your fault.

This Vin Connell does it. Tar sometimes laughed about it at night in bed. How many other people cut all sorts of capers behind the blinds of their houses? In some houses, men and women fought constantly. Tar walked down the street and, opening the gate, entered the yard. He was going to put the newspaper under the back door. Some people wanted it there. As he walked around the house, the sounds of an argument could be heard inside. "I didn't do it either. You're a liar. I'll blow your damn head off. Try it once." The low, growling voice of a man, the sharp, cutting voice of an angry woman.

Tar knocked on the back door. Perhaps it was the night of his collection. Both the man and the woman approached the door. They both thought it might be a neighbor and that they had been caught in an argument. ["Well, it's just a boy."] When they saw, there was only a look of relief on [Smol's] faces. The man paid Tar with a growl. "You've been late twice this week. I want my paper here when I get home."

The door slammed, and Tar paused for a moment. Were they going to start arguing again? They did. Perhaps they enjoyed it.

Nighttime streets of houses with closed blinds. Men emerge from their front doors to head downtown. They went to salons, the drugstore, the barbershop, or the tobacconist. There they sat, sometimes bragging, sometimes simply silent. Dick Moorehead didn't quarrel with his wife, but still, it was one thing at home and another when he was out for an evening stroll among the men. Tar slipped through the groups while his father was speaking. He slipped out quite quickly. At home, Dick had to sing quite softly. Tar wondered why. It wasn't because Mary Moorehead had scolded him.

In almost every house he visited, either a man or a woman ruled the roost. In the city center, among other men, [the man] always tried to create the impression that [he] was the boss. "I told my old woman, 'Look here,' I said, 'You do this and that.' I bet she did it."


Did you do it? Most of the houses Tar visited were the same as the Mooreheads'-the women were strong. Sometimes they ruled with bitter words, sometimes with tears, sometimes with silence. Silence was Mary Moorehead's habit.

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PART IV


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CHAPTER XIV


HERE WAS _ A girl, the same age as Tara, came to visit Colonel Farley's house on Maumee Street. The street ran behind the Farley house and ended at the city cemetery. Farley Place was the second-to-last house on the street, an old [rickety] house where the Thompsons lived.

The Farley house was large and had a dome on top. In front of the house, facing the road, was a low hedge, and to the side was an apple orchard. Beyond the orchard stood a large red barn. It was one of the most luxurious properties in town.

The Farleys were always nice to Tar after he started selling newspapers, but he didn't see them often. Colonel Farley had served in the war, like Tar's father, and was a married man when he enlisted. He had two sons, both of whom were in college. Then they went off to live in some city and must have gotten rich. Some said they married rich women. They sent money home to the colonel and his wife, lots of it. The colonel was a lawyer, but he didn't have much practice-he just fooled around, collecting pensions for old soldiers and the like. Sometimes he stayed out of his office all day. Tar saw him sitting on the porch, reading a book. His wife was sewing. She was short and fat. When he collected the money for the newspaper, the colonel always gave Tar an extra nickel. People like that, Tar thought, were all right.

Another elderly couple lived with them. The man took care of their carriage and drove the colonel and his wife around on fine days, while the woman cooked and did housework. It was a rather comfortable home, Tar thought.

They bore little resemblance to the Thompsons, who lived beyond them on the street just inside the cemetery gates.

The Thompsons were a tough team. They had three grown sons and a girl Tara's age. Tara almost never saw old Boss Thompson or the boys. Every summer they went to the circus or the street fair. One time, they had a stuffed whale in a boxcar.

They surrounded it with canvas, went around towns and charged ten cents to look at it.

When they were home, the Thompsons, father and sons, would hang out in saloons and show off. Old Boss Thompson always had plenty of money, but he made his women live like dogs. His old woman never had a new dress and looked all worn out, while the old man and the boys always strutted down Main Street. That year, Old Keith Thompson wore a hat and always had a smart vest. He liked to go into a saloon or store and pull out a big roll of bills. If he had a nickel in his pocket when he wanted a beer, he never showed it. He would take out a ten-dollar bill, separate it from the big roll, and throw it on the bar. Some of the men said most of the roll was made up of one-dollar bills. The boys were the same way, but they didn't have enough money to strut about. The old man kept it all for himself.

The girl who came to visit the Farleys that summer was their son's daughter. Her father and mother had left for Europe, so she planned to stay until they returned. Tar had heard about it before she arrived-such things spread quickly through the city-and [here he was] at the station to pick up his sheaf of papers when she walked in.

She was fine. Well, she had blue eyes and yellow hair, and she was wearing a white dress and white stockings. The colonel, his wife, and the old man driving the carriage met her at the station.

Tar received his papers-the baggage handler always dropped them on the station platform at his feet-and hurried to see if he could sell them to people getting on and off the train. When the girl got off-she had been entrusted to the conductor, who [handed] her over] himself-the colonel approached Tar and asked for his newspaper. "I might as well save you if you get out of our way," he said. He held the girl's hand. "This is my [granddaughter], Miss Esther Farley," he said. Tar blushed. It was the first time anyone had introduced him to a lady. He didn't know what to do, so he took off his cap but said nothing.

The girl didn't even blush. She just looked at him.

"Jesus," Tar thought. He didn't want to wait to see her again until he had to take the paper to Farley's the next day, [so] he went there that afternoon, but saw nothing. The worst part was, when he passed Farley's house, he had to do one of two things. The street went nowhere, just to the cemetery gate and stopped, and he had to go on into the cemetery, through it and over the fence [and] onto another street, or go back past Farley's again. Well, he didn't want the colonel, his wife, or his girlfriend to think he was hanging around.

The girl woke him up immediately. This was the first time something like this had happened. He dreamed about her at night and didn't even dare mention her to Jim Moore. One day, Jim said something about her. Tar blushed. He had to [quickly] change the subject. He couldn't think of anything to say.

[Tar] began to wander off on his own. He walked about a mile from the railroad tracks-toward the small town of Greenville-then turned through the fields and came to a creek that didn't flow through [his] town at all.

If he wanted, he could walk all the way to Greenville. He did it once. It was only five miles. It was nice to be in a town where he didn't know a soul. The main street was twice as long as the one in his own town. People he'd never seen before stood in the store doors, strange people walking the streets. They looked at him with curiosity in their eyes. He was now a familiar figure in his own town, rushing about with newspapers morning and evening.

The reason he liked going away alone that summer was because, when he was alone, he felt like he had a new girl with him. Sometimes, when he picked up the newspaper, he'd see her at the Farley house. She'd even come out to get it from him sometimes, doing so with a discreet smile on her face. If he was embarrassed in her presence, he wasn't.


She said "good morning" to him, and all he could do was mumble something she didn't hear. Often, when he was out in the afternoon with the newspapers, he'd see her riding with her grandparents. Everyone would talk to him, and he'd awkwardly take off his cap.

After all, she was just a girl, like his sister Margaret.

When he left the city alone on summer days, he could imagine she was with him. He took her hand as they walked. Then he wasn't afraid.

The best place to go is the beech forest about half a mile from the tracks.

Beech trees grew in a small, grassy ravine that led to a stream and a hill above. In early spring, a branch of the stream ran through the ravine, but in summer it dried up.

"There's no forest like a beech forest," Tar thought. The ground beneath the trees was clear, free of small bushes, and among the large roots jutting out of the ground, there were places where he could lie down like in a bed. Squirrels and chipmunks scurried everywhere. When he was still a long time away, they came [quite] close. That summer, Tar could have shot any number of squirrels, and perhaps if he had done so and carried them home to cook, it would have been a great help to the Moorheads, but he never carried a gun.

John had one. He bought it cheap, used. Tar could have easily borrowed it. He didn't want to.

He wanted to go to the beech forest because he wanted to dream about the new girl in town, wanted to pretend she was with him. Once he got there, he settled into a comfortable spot among the roots and closed his eyes.

There was a girl next to him in his imagination [of course]. He spoke little [to her]. What was there to say? He took her hand in his, pressed her palm to his cheek. Her fingers were so soft and small that when he held her hand, his own looked as big as a man's hand.

He was going to marry the Farley girl when he grew up. He had decided that. He didn't know what marriage was. Yes, he had. The reason he felt so ashamed and blushed when he went up to her was because he always had those thoughts when she was not around. First, he would have to grow up and go to the city. He would have to become rich like her. It would take time, but not much. Tar made four dollars a week selling newspapers. He was in a town where there weren't many people. If the town were twice as big, he would make twice as much; if four times as big, four times as much. Four times four is sixteen. There are fifty-two weeks in a year. Four times fifty-two is two hundred and eight dollars. Lord, that was a lot.

And he won't just sell papers. Maybe he'll buy him a store. Then he'll get him a carriage or a car. He was driving up to her house.

Tar tried to imagine what the town house the girl lived in might have been like when she was home. The Farley house on Maumee Street was perhaps the most stately place in town, but Colonel Farley's wealth didn't equal that of his sons in the city. Everyone in town said so.

In the beech forest on summer days, Tar would close his eyes and dream his dreams for hours. Sometimes he would go to sleep. Now he always stayed awake at night. In the forest, he could barely distinguish between sleep and wakefulness. All that summer, none of his family seemed to pay him any attention. He simply came and went to the Moorhead house, mostly silently. Occasionally, John or Margaret would speak to him. "What's wrong?"

"Oh, nothing." Perhaps his mother was a little puzzled by his condition. However, she said nothing. Tar was glad of that.

In the beech forest, he lay on his back and closed his eyes. Then he slowly opened them. The beech trees at the foot of the gorge were massive, large fellows. Their fur was mottled with colorful patches: white bark alternating with jagged brown areas. A clump of young beech trees grew in one spot on the hillside. Tar could imagine the forest above him continuing endlessly.

In the books, the events always took place in the forest. A young girl got lost in such a place. She was very beautiful, like the new girl in town. Well, she was alone in the forest, and night fell. She had to sleep in a hollow tree or in a place among the tree roots. As she lay there and darkness fell, she saw something. Several men rode into the forest and stopped near her. She was very quiet. One of the men dismounted and said strange words: "Open Sesame" - and the ground beneath his feet opened up. There was a huge door, so skillfully covered with leaves, stones, and earth that you would never guess it was there.

The men descended the stairs and remained there for a long time. When they emerged, they mounted their horses, and the chief-an unusually handsome man-exactly the man he imagined Tar would be when he grew up-said a few more strange words. "Shut it, Sesame," he said, and the door closed, and everything was as before.

Then the girl tried. She approached the spot and spoke the words, and the door opened. Many strange adventures followed. Tar vaguely remembered them from the book Dick Moorehead read aloud to children on winter evenings.

There were other stories, too; other things always happened in the woods. Sometimes boys or girls would turn into birds, trees, or animals. The young beech trees growing on the side of the ravine had bodies like those of young girls. When a light breeze blew, they swayed gently. To Taru, when he kept his eyes closed, the trees seemed to beckon him. There was one young [beech]-he never understood why he singled it out-perhaps it was Colonel Farley's granddaughter.

One day, Tar approached the spot where it stood and touched it with his finger. The sensation he experienced in that moment was so real that he blushed when he did so.

He became obsessed with the idea of going out into the beech grove at night, and one night he did so.

He chose a moonlit night. Well, the neighbor was at the Mooreheads', and Dick was talking on the porch. Mary Moorehead was there, but, as usual, she said nothing. All of Tar's papers had been sold. If he were absent for a while, his mother wouldn't care. She sat silently in the rocking chair. Everyone listened to Dick. He usually managed to make them do that.

Tar turned into the back door and hurried through the back streets toward the railroad tracks. As he left the city, a freight train pulled in. A throng of vagrants sat in an empty coal car. Tar saw them as clear as day. One of them was singing.

He reached the place where he had to turn off the tracks and easily found his way to the beech grove.

[Everything was different than during the day.] [Everything was strange.] Everything was quiet and eerie. He found a place where he could lie down comfortably and began to wait.

[For what?] What did he expect? He didn't know. Perhaps he thought the girl might come to him, that she was lost and would be somewhere in the forest when he got there. In the dark, he wouldn't be so embarrassed when she was nearby.

She wasn't there, of course. [He hadn't really expected it.] There was no one there. No robbers had arrived on horseback, nothing had happened. He remained completely motionless for a long time, and not a sound was heard.

Then the faint sounds began. He could see things more clearly as his eyes adjusted to the dim light. A squirrel or a rabbit scurried along the bottom of the ravine. He saw a flash of something white. A sound came from behind him, one of the soft sounds tiny animals make when they move at night. His body trembled. It was as if something was running over his body, under his clothes.

It might have been an ant. He wondered if ants came out at night.

The wind blew harder and harder-not a gale, just a steady gusty, up the gorge from the stream. He could hear the stream babbling. Nearby was a spot where he'd had to drive over rocks.

Tar closed his eyes and kept them closed for a long time. Then he wondered if he'd slept. If he had, it couldn't have taken long.

When he opened his eyes again, he was looking straight at the spot where the young beech trees grew. He saw the single young beech tree he had crossed the ravine to touch, standing out from all the others.

While he was ill, things-trees, houses, and people-were constantly lifting off the ground and floating away from him. He needed to hold onto something. If he didn't, he might die. No one understood it but him.

Now the white young beech was approaching him. Perhaps it had something to do with the light, the breeze, and the swaying of the young beech trees.

He didn't know. One tree seemed to simply abandon the others and head toward him. He was as frightened as he had been when Colonel Farley's granddaughter spoke to him when he brought the newspaper to their house, but in a different way.

He was so frightened that he jumped up and ran, and as he ran, he became even more frightened. He never learned how he managed to escape the forest and return to the railroad tracks without being injured. He continued running after he reached the tracks. He walked barefoot, and the embers hurt, and once he stubbed his toe so hard it bled, but he never stopped running and being afraid until he returned to town and returned to his home.

He couldn't be gone long. When he returned, Dick was still working on the porch, and the others were still listening. Tar stood by the woodshed for a long time, catching his breath and letting his heart stop beating. Then he had to wash his feet and wipe the dried blood from his injured toe before he crept upstairs and went to bed. He didn't want the sheets to get bloody.

And after he went upstairs and got into bed, and after the neighbors had gone home and his mother had come upstairs to check that he and the others were all right, he couldn't sleep.

There were many nights that summer when Tar could not sleep for long.

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CHAPTER XV


ANOTHER ADVENTURE - It was a completely different story one afternoon that same summer. Tar couldn't stay away from Momi Street. By nine o'clock in the morning, he'd finished selling his papers. Sometimes he had a job mowing someone's lawn. After such work, there were plenty of other boys. They didn't get too fat.

It's not nice to fool around at home. When Tar was with his friend Jim Moore that summer, he probably kept quiet. Jim didn't like it, so he found someone else to go with him to the woods or to the swimming hole.

Tar went to the fairgrounds and watched people working with racehorses, hanging around Whitehead's barn.

There were always old, unsold newspapers lying around in the woodshed. Tar tucked a few under his arm and walked down Momi Street, passing the Farleys' house. Sometimes he saw the girl, sometimes he didn't. When he did, when she was on the porch with her grandmother, in the yard, or in the garden, he didn't dare look.

The papers under his arm were meant to give the impression that he was conducting business in this manner.

It was quite thin. Who could have pulled out the paper like that? No one but the Thompsons.

They take a piece of paper - aha!

Now old Boss Thompson and the boys were somewhere at a circus. It would be fun to do that when [Tar] grew up, but circuses, of course, brought a lot of men with them. When the circus came to town where Tar lived, he got up early, went down to the grounds, and saw everything from the very beginning, saw the tent going up, the animals being fed, everything. He saw the men getting ready for the parade on Main Street. They wore bright red and purple coats right over their old horse clothes, soaked in manure. The men didn't even bother to wash their hands and faces. Some of them were stared at, even though they never washed.

The women in the circus and the child performers behaved much the same. They looked great in the parade, but you have to see how they live. The Thompsons' women had never been in a circus that came to town, but they were like that.

Tar thought he knew a thing or two about what a real big shot looked like since the Farley girl had come to town. She was always dressed in clean clothes, no matter what time of day Tar saw her. He'd bet anything she was washed with fresh water every day. Maybe she bathed everywhere, every day. Farley had a bathtub, one of the few in town.

The Moorheads were fairly clean, especially Margaret, but don't expect too much. Constantly washing in winter is a real hassle.

But it's nice when you see someone else doing it, especially the girl you're crazy about.

It's a wonder Mayme Thompson, old Boss Thompson's only daughter, didn't join the circus with her father and brothers. Perhaps she learned to ride a horse standing up or perform on the trapeze. There weren't many young girls who did such things in circuses. Well, they rode a horse standing up. So what? It was usually an old, sure-footed horse that anyone could ride. Hal Brown, whose father owned a grocery store and kept cows in the barn, had to go out into the field every night to get the cows. He was a friend of Tar's, and sometimes Tar went with him, and later he went with Tar delivering papers. Hal could ride a horse standing up. He could ride a cow that way. He did it many times.

Tar began to think about Mame Thompson, about the same time she began to notice him. [He] was perhaps to her what the Farley girl had been to him, someone to think about. The Thompsons, despite old Boss Thompson spending money and bragging about it, didn't have a very good reputation in town. The old woman hardly went anywhere. She stayed home, like Tar's mother, but not for the same reason. Mary Moorehead had a lot to do, so many children, but what was old Mrs. Thompson to do? There was no one at home all summer except the little girl Mame, and she was old enough to help with the work. Old Mrs. Thompson looked haggard. She was always in dirty clothes, just like Mame was when she was home.

Tar began seeing her frequently. Two or three times a week, sometimes every day, he'd slip away this way and couldn't help but pass by Farley on his way to their house.

As he passed the Farley house, the road revealed a cliff and a bridge over a ditch that had been dry all summer. Then he came to the Thompson barn. It stood just off the road, and the house was on the opposite side, a little further on, right at the cemetery gate.

They buried a general in their cemetery and erected a stone monument. He stood with one foot on a cannon and his finger pointed straight at [the Thompson house].

One would think that the city, if it were so accused of pride in its dead general, would have arranged something more beautiful for him to point to.

The house was small, unpainted, with many shingles missing from the roof. It looked like Old Harry. There used to be a porch, but most of the flooring had rotted away.

The Thompsons had a barn, but there wasn't a horse or even a cow. There was only old, half-rotted hay on top, and chickens were scurrying around below. The hay must have been in the barn for a long time. Some of it was sticking out through the open door. Everything was black and moldy.

Mame Thompson was a year or two older than Tar. She had more experience. At first, when he started acting like this, Tar didn't think about her at all, but then he remembered. She began to notice him.

She began to wonder what he was up to, always giving himself away like this. He didn't blame her, but what was he to do? He could turn back at the bridge, but if he went down the street, it would be pointless. He always carried a few papers with him for bluffing. Well, he [thought he] had to keep bluffing if he could.

Mame had this habit: when she saw him approaching, she would cross the road and stand by the open barn door. Tar almost never saw old Mrs. Thompson. He had to walk past the barn or turn back. Mame stood outside the barn door, pretending not to see him, just as he always pretended not to see her.

It was getting worse and worse.

Mame wasn't slender like the Farley girl. She was a little plump and had big feet. She almost always wore a dirty dress, and sometimes her face was dirty. Her hair was red, and she had freckles on her face.

Another boy in town, Pete Welch, walked right into the barn with the girl. He told Tar and Jim Moore about it and bragged about it.

Despite himself, Tar began thinking about Mame Thompson. It was a wonderful thing to do, but what could he do about it? Some of the boys at school had girlfriends. They gave them things, and when they walked home from school, a few of the brave ones even took a short stroll with their girlfriends. It took nerve. When a boy did this, the others followed him, shouting and jeering.

Tar might have done the same to Farley's girlfriend if he'd had the chance. He never would. First, she'd leave before classes started, and even if she stayed, she might not need him.

He wouldn't dare say anything if Mame Thompson happened to be his girlfriend. What an ideal. It would be sheer madness for Pete Welch, Hal Brown, and Jim Moore. They would never give up.

Oh, lord. Tar began to think of Mame Thompson at night now, mixed her up with his thoughts of the Farley girl, but his thoughts of her did not mix up with the beech trees, or the clouds in the sky, or anything of the sort.

Sometimes his thoughts became quite clear. Would he ever have the courage? Oh, lord. What a question to ask himself. Of course he wouldn't.

She wasn't so bad after all. He had to look at her as he passed. Sometimes she covered her face with her hands and giggled, and sometimes she pretended not to see him.

One day it happened. Well, he never intended to do it. He got to the barn and didn't see her [at all]. Perhaps she was gone. The Thompson house across the street looked as usual: closed and dark, no washing hanging in the yard, no cats or dogs around, no smoke rising from the kitchen chimney. You'd think that while the old man and the boys were out, old Mrs. Thompson and Mame never ate or washed.

Tar didn't see Mame as he walked along the road and across the bridge. She was always standing in the barn, pretending to be doing something. What was she doing?

He stopped at the barn door and peered in. Then, hearing and seeing nothing, he went inside. What possessed him to do so, he didn't know. He got halfway into the barn, and then, when he turned to go out [again], there she was. She was hiding behind the door [or something else].

She said nothing, and neither did Tar. They stood and looked at each other, and then she walked to the rickety old staircase leading to the attic.

It was up to Thar whether he would follow him or not. That's what she meant, okay, okay. When she was almost to her feet, she turned and looked at him, but said nothing. There was something in her eyes. Oh, Lordi.

Tar never thought he could be so brave. Well, he wasn't brave. He walked shaky across the barn to the foot of the ladder. It seemed his arms and legs lacked the strength to climb [up. In such a situation, a boy is terrified.] There may be boys who are naturally brave, as Pete Welsh said, and who don't care. All they need is a chance. Tar wasn't like that.

He felt as if he were dead. It couldn't have been him, Tar Moorhead, doing what he did. It was too bold and terrible-but also beautiful.

When Tar climbed up to the barn loft, Mame was sitting on a small pile of old black hay near the door. The loft door was open. You could see for miles. Tar could see straight into Farley's yard. His legs were so weak that he sat down right next to the girl, but he didn't look at her, didn't dare. He peered through the barn door. The grocery boy had brought things for Farley. He walked around the house to the back door with a basket in his hand. When he came back around the house, he turned his horse and rode away. It was Cal Sleschinger, who drove the delivery wagon for Wagner's store. He had red hair.

Mame too. Well, her hair wasn't exactly red. It was a sandy place. Her eyebrows were sandy too.

Now Tar didn't think about the fact that her dress was dirty, her fingers were dirty, and perhaps her face was dirty. He didn't dare look at her [face]. He was thinking. What was he thinking about?

"If you saw me on Main Street, I bet you wouldn't talk to me. You're too stuck in your ways.

Mame wanted to be reassured. Tar wanted to respond, but he couldn't. He was so close to her, he could have reached out and touched her.

She said one or two things. "Why do you keep talking like that if you're so self-absorbed?" Her voice was a little sharp [now].

It was obvious she didn't know about Tara and Farley's girl, didn't connect them in her thoughts. She thought he'd come here to see her.

That time, Pete Welch entered the barn with a girl whose mother was visiting. Pete ran, and the girl got spanked. Tar wondered if they'd gone up to the attic. He peered down through the attic door to see how far he'd have to jump. Pete hadn't said anything about jumping. He'd just bragged. Jim Moore kept repeating, "I bet you've never done that. I bet you've never done that," and Pete snapped back, "Neither have we. I'm telling you, we've done it."

Tar might have, perhaps, if he'd had the courage. If you've had the nerve once, maybe next time it'll come naturally. Some boys are born nervous, and others aren't. For them, everything is easy.

[Now] Tara's silence and fear infected Mame. They sat and looked through the barn door.

Something [else] happened. Old Mrs. Thompson came into the barn and called to Mame. Had she seen Tar come in? The two children sat silently. The old woman stood downstairs. The Thompsons kept a few chickens. Mame reassured Tar. "She's looking for eggs," she whispered softly. Tar could barely hear her voice [now].

They [both] [were] silent again, and when the old woman came out of the barn, Mame rose and began to crawl up the stairs.

Perhaps she had come to despise Tar. She didn't look at him when she came down, and when she left, and when Tar heard her leave the barn, he sat for a few minutes and looked through the door into the attic.

He wanted to cry.

The worst part was, Farley's girlfriend came out of Farley's house and stood looking down the road [towards the barn]. She [could] look out the window and see him and Mame go in [to the barn]. Now, if Tara had the chance, he would never have spoken to her, never dared to be where she was.

He'll never get any girl. That's how it turns out if you don't have the guts. He wanted to beat himself up, hurt himself somehow.

When Farley's girlfriend returned to the house, he went to the attic door and lowered himself as far as he could, then collapsed. As part of his bluff, he had brought some old newspapers with him and left them in the attic.

Oh God. There was no way to get out of the hole he was in [now] except to cross the property. Along a small dry ditch there was a depression where you could sink almost knee-deep. Now that was the only way [he] could go without passing either the Thompsons or the Farleys.

Tar walked there, sinking into the soft mud. Then he had to walk through berry thickets, where the rose hips tore at his legs.

He was quite happy about this. The sore spots felt almost better.

Oh, my lord! [No one knows what a boy sometimes feels when he is ashamed of everything.] If only he had the courage. [If only he had the courage.]

Tar couldn't help but wonder what things would be like if...

Oh, my lord!

After that, go home and see Margaret, his mother, and everyone else. When he was alone with Jim Moore, he might have asked questions, but the answers he got probably wouldn't have been many. "If you had the chance... If you were in the barn with a girl like Pete, it would have been at that time..."

What's the point of asking questions? Jim Moore would just laugh. "Ah, I'll never get that chance. I bet Pete didn't do that. I bet he's just a liar.

The worst thing for Tar was not being at home. No one knew anything. Perhaps the strange girl in town, Farley's girl, knew. Tar couldn't say. Perhaps she was thinking a lot of things that weren't true. [Nothing happened.] You never know what such a good girl will think.

The worst thing for Tar would be to see the Farleys riding in a carriage on Main Street, with a girl sitting with them. If it were on Main Street, he [could] go into a store, [and] if on a residential street, he would walk straight into someone's yard. [He would walk straight into any yard] with or without a dog. "Better to be bitten by a dog than to face one now," he thought.

He did not take the paper to Farley until dark and allowed the colonel to pay him when they met on Main Street.

Well, the colonel can complain. "You used to be so fast. The train can't be late every day.

Tar continued to be late with the paper and sneak out at the most inopportune times until autumn came and the strange girl returned to town. Then he would be all right. [He figured] he could evade Mame Thompson. She didn't come to town often, and when school started, she would be in a different grade.

She would have been okay, because maybe she was ashamed too.

Perhaps sometimes, when they were dating, when they were both older, she'd laughed at him. It was an almost unbearable thought [for Tar, but he put it aside. It might return at night-for a while] [but that didn't happen often. When it did, it was mostly at night, when he was in bed.]

[Perhaps the feeling of shame would not last long. When night fell, he soon fell asleep or began to think about something else.

[Now he thought about what might happen if he had the courage. When this thought came to him at night, it took him much longer to fall asleep.]

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PART V


OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER XVI


DAYS _ _ SNOW followed by a deep, muddy rain on the dirt streets of Tar, Ohio. March always brings a few warm days. Tar, Jim Moore, Hal Brown, and a few others headed to the swimming hole. The water was high. Willows were blooming along the creek bank. It seemed to the boys that all of nature was shouting, "Spring has come, spring has come." What fun it was to take off heavy coats and heavy boots. The Moorehead boys had to wear cheap boots, which by March had holes in them. On cold days, snow would break through the broken soles.

The boys stood on the bank of the stream and looked at each other. Several insects disappeared. A bee flew past Tara's face. "Lord! Try it! You go in, and I'll go in too."

The boys undressed and dove into the water. What a disappointment! How icy the swift water was! They quickly climbed out and dressed, shivering.

But it's fun to wander along the banks of streams, through leafless strips of forest, under the blazing, clear sun. A great day to skip school. Suppose a boy is hiding from the superintendent. What's the difference?

During the cold winter months, Tar's father was often away from home. The slender woman he married was the mother of seven children. You know what that does to a woman. When she's not feeling well, she looks like the devil. Gaunt cheeks, hunched shoulders, constantly shaking hands.

People like Father Tara accept life as it comes. Life rolls off them like water off a goose's back. What's the point of hanging around where the air is thick with sadness, with problems you can't solve, just being who you are?

Dick Moorhead loved people, and they loved him. He told stories and drank hard cider on farms. Throughout his life, Tar would later recall the few trips out of town he took with Dick.

In one house, he saw two distinguished German women: one married, the other single and living with her sister. The German woman's husband was also impressive. They had a whole keg of draft beer, and oceans of food on the table. Dick seemed more at home there than in the city, at the Moorheads' house. That evening, the neighbors came over and everyone was dancing. Dick looked like a child rocking big girls. He could tell jokes that made all the men laugh, and the women giggled and blushed. Tar couldn't understand the jokes. He sat in the corner and watched.

Another summer, a group of men set up camp in the woods on the bank of a stream in the village. They were former soldiers and made a night of it.

And again, as darkness fell, the women came. That's when Dick began to shine. People liked him because he made everything come alive. That night by the fire, when everyone thought Tar was asleep, both men and women lit up a little. Dick walked off with the woman back into the darkness. It was impossible to tell who were the women and who were the men. Dick knew all sorts of people. He had one life at home in the city, and another when he was abroad. Why did he take his son on such expeditions? Perhaps Mary Moorehead had asked him to take the boy, and he didn't know how to refuse. Tar couldn't stay away for long. He needed to get back to town and catch up on his paperwork. Both times they left town in the evening, and Dick brought him back the next day. Then Dick dozed off again, alone. Two lives led by the man who was Tar's father, two lives led by many of the seemingly quiet people of the city.

Tar was slow to grasp things. When you're a boy, you don't go out and sell newspapers with your eyes closed. The more you see, the more you like it.

Perhaps later you'll lead several types of fives yourself. Today you're one thing, tomorrow another, changing like the weather.

There are respectable people and not so respectable people. Generally, it's more fun not to be too respectable. Respectable, good people miss a lot.

Perhaps Tara's mother knew things she never let on. What she knew, or didn't know, made Tara ponder and ponder for the rest of her life. Hatred for her father set in, and then, after a long time, [the understanding began to dawn]. Many women are like mothers to their husbands. They should be. Some men just can't grow up. A woman has many children and gets this and that. What she wanted from a man, she no longer wants at first. Better to let him go and do your own thing. Life isn't that fun for any of us, even if we're poor. There comes a time when a woman wants her children to have a chance, and that's all she asks for. She'd like to live long enough to see it happen, and then...

Mother Tara must have been glad that most of her children were boys. The cards are stacked favorably for boys. I won't deny it.

The Moorehead house, where Mother Tara was now always half-sick and constantly weakening, was no place for a man like Dick. Now the mistress of the house lived on edge. She lived because she didn't want to die, not yet.

Such a woman grows up very determined and silent. Her husband, more than her children, perceives her silence as a kind of reproach. God, what can a person do?

Some unknown illness was consuming Mary Moorehead's body. She did her housework with Margaret's help and continued to wash clothes, but she grew steadily pale, and her hands trembled more and more. John worked at the factory every day. He, too, had become habitually silent. Perhaps the work was too much for his young body. As a child, no one spoke to Tara about the child labor laws.

The thin, long, callused fingers of Tar's mother captivated him. He remembered them clearly much later, when her figure had begun to fade from his memory. Perhaps it was the memory of his mother's hands that made him think so much about the hands of others. Hands with which young lovers tenderly touched each other, with which artists trained their hands over long years to follow the dictates of their imagination, with which men in workshops grasped tools. Hands young and strong, boneless, soft hands at the ends of the hands of boneless, soft men, the hands of fighters who knock down other men, the steady, quiet hands of railroad engineers on the throttles of enormous locomotives, soft hands creeping toward bodies in the night. Hands beginning to age, to tremble-the hands of a mother touching a baby, the hands of a mother clearly remembered, the hands of a father forgotten. My father remembered a half-rebellious man, telling fairy tales, boldly grabbing huge German women, grabbing whatever came to hand, and moving forward. Well, what's a man to do anyway?

Over the winter, after a summer spent in the bathhouse with Mame Thompson, Tar had come to hate a lot of things and people he had never really thought about before.

Sometimes he hated his father, sometimes a man named Hawkins. Sometimes it was a traveler who lived in the city but returned home only once a month. Sometimes it was a man named Whaley, who was a lawyer, but in Tar's opinion, that was pointless.

Tar's hatred was almost entirely tied to money. He was tormented by a thirst for money that tormented him day and night. This feeling was intensified by his mother's illness. If only the Mooreheads had money, if only they had a big, warm house, if only his mother had warm clothes, lots of them, like some of the women he visited with newspapers...

Well, Tara's father could have been a different kind of person. Gays are good when you don't need them for anything special, but just want to have fun. They can make you laugh.

Let's say you don't really feel like laughing.

That winter, after John went to the factory, he returned home after dark. Tar was delivering newspapers in the dark. Margaret hurried home from school and helped her mother. Margaret was Fr. K.

Tar thought a lot about money. He thought about food and clothing. A man from town arrived and went skating on the pond. He was the father of a girl who had come to visit Colonel Farley. Tar was very nervous, wondering if he might get close to such a girl from such a family. Mr. Farley was skating on the pond and asked Tar to hold his coat. When he came to get it, he gave Tar fifty cents. He didn't know who Tar was, as if he were a pole on which he hung his coat.

The coat Tar held for twenty minutes was lined with fur. It was made of a fabric Tar had never seen before. This man, though the same age as Tar's father, looked like a boy. Everything he wore was such that it was both joyful and sad. It was a coat a king could wear. "If you have enough money, you act like a king and have nothing to worry about," Tar thought.

If only Tar's mother had a coat like that. What's the point of thinking? You start thinking, and you get sadder and sadder. What's the use? If you keep this up, maybe you'll be able to play the child. Another child comes up and says, "What's the matter, Tar?" What are you going to say?

Tar spent hours trying to come up with new ways to make money. There was work in the city, but too many boys were hunting for it. He saw men traveling, disembarking from trains in nice, warm clothes, and women dressed warmly. A traveler who lived in the city came home to see his wife. He was standing in Shooter's bar, drinking with two other men, and when Tar grabbed him for the money he owed for the newspaper, he pulled a large wad of bills from his pocket.

- Oh, shit, dude, I don't have change. Save this for next time.

Really, let them go! People like that don't know what forty cents is. These are the kind of guys who walk around with other people's money in their pockets! If you get annoyed and insist, they'll stop publishing the newspaper. You can't afford to lose customers.

One evening, Tar waited two hours in Lawyer Whaley's office, trying to get some money. It was approaching Christmas. Lawyer Whaley owed him fifty cents. He saw a man coming up the stairs to the lawyer's office and figured maybe the man was a client. He had to keep a close eye on guys like [Lawyer Whaley]. [He] owed money to the whole town. A guy like that, if he had money, he'd scoop it up, but it didn't come to him often. You had to be there.

That evening, a week before Christmas, Tar saw a man, a farmer, approach the office, and since his train with papers was late, he followed right behind him. There was a small, dark outer office and an inner office with a fireplace, where the lawyer sat.

If you had to wait outside, you'd probably catch a cold. Two or three cheap chairs, some flimsy cheap table. Not even a magazine to look at. Even if there had been one, it would have been so dark you couldn't see anything.

Tar sat in his office and waited, full of disdain. He thought about the other lawyers in town. Lawyer King had a big, beautiful, and neat office. People said he dallied with other people's wives. Well, he was a smart man, owned practically every good practice in town. If a man like that owed you money, you wouldn't worry. You'd run into him on the street once, and he'd pay you without a word, just figured it out himself, and apparently didn't give you a quarter too much. At Christmas, a man like that was worth a dollar. If it had been two weeks since Christmas before he'd thought about it, he'd give it up the moment he saw you.

Such a man could be free with other people's wives, he could be ready for a polished practice. Perhaps other lawyers said he did this only out of jealousy, and besides, his wife was rather careless. Sometimes, when Tar walked around with the daily newspaper, she didn't even do her hair. The grass in the yard was never mown, nothing was maintained, but Attorney King compensated for this with the way he arranged his office. Perhaps it was his penchant for staying in the office rather than at home that made him such a good lawyer.

Tar sat in Attorney Whaley's office for a long time. He could hear voices inside. When the farmer finally began to leave, the two men stood for a moment by the outer door, and then the farmer took some money from his pocket and handed it to the lawyer. As he left, he nearly fell on Tar, who thought that if he had any legal business, he would take it to Attorney King, not to a man like Whaley.

He stood up and walked into Whaley's lawyer's office. "There's no chance he'll tell me to wait until another day." The man stood by the window, still holding the money.

He knew what Tar wanted. "How much do I owe you?" he asked. It was fifty cents. He pulled out a two-dollar bill, and Tar had to think quickly. If the boy was lucky enough to catch him flushing, the man might give him a dollar for Christmas, or he might give him nothing at all. Tar decided to say he didn't have change. The man could think about Christmas approaching and give him an extra fifty cents, or he could say, "Well, come back next week," and Tar would have to wait in vain. He'd have to do it all over again.

"I don't have any change," Tar said. Either way, he'd taken the plunge. The man hesitated for a moment. There was an uncertain light in his eyes. When a boy like Tar needs money, he learns to look people in the eye. After all, Lawyer Whaley had three or four children, and clients didn't come around very often. Perhaps he was thinking about Christmas for his children.

When such a person can't make a decision, they're likely to do something stupid. That's what makes them who they are. Tar stood there with a two-dollar bill in his hand, waiting, not offering to return it, and the man didn't know what to do. First, he made a small, not very forceful, movement with his hand, then he increased it.

He took the plunge. Tar felt a little ashamed and a little proud. He had handled the man well. "Oh, keep the change. It"s for Christmas," the man said. Tar was so surprised to receive an extra dollar and a half that he couldn"t respond. As he walked outside, he realized he hadn"t even thanked Lawyer Whaley. He wanted to go back and put the extra dollar on the lawyer"s desk. "Fifty cents is enough for Christmas from a man like you. Chances are, when Christmas comes, he won"t have a cent to buy his children presents." The lawyer was wearing a black coat, all shiny, and a small black tie, also shiny. Tar didn"t want to go back and wanted to keep the money. He didn"t know what to do. He had played a game with the man, saying he didn"t have change when he did, and the game had worked too well. If he had gotten at least fifty cents, as he had planned, everything would have been fine.

He kept the dollar and a half for himself and took it home to his mother, but for several days every time he thought about the incident he felt ashamed.

That's just the way it is. You come up with a clever scheme to get something for nothing, and you get it, [and] then when you get it, it's not half as good as you hoped.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER XVII


EVERYONE EATS FOOD. [Tar Moorhead thought a lot about food.] Dick Moorhead, when he went out of town, was doing pretty well. Many people said good things about food. Some women were naturally good cooks, others weren't. The grocer sold food in his store and could bring it home. John, working in the factory, needed something substantial. He was already grown and looked almost like a man. When he was at home, at night and on Sundays, he was silent, like his mother. Perhaps this was because he was worried, perhaps he had to work too much. He worked where bicycles were made, but he didn't have any. Tar often passed a long brick factory. In the winter, all the windows were closed, and there were iron bars on the windows. This was done to prevent thieves from breaking in at night, but it made the building look like the city jail, only much larger. In a while, Tara [will have to] go there to work, and Robert will take care of selling newspapers. The time has almost come.

Tar dreaded the thought of the time when he would become a factory worker. He had strange dreams. Suppose it turned out he wasn't Moorehead at all. He could be the son of a rich man going abroad. The man came to his mother and said, "Here's my child. His mother is dead, and I'll have to go abroad. If I don't return, you can keep him as your own. Never tell him about this. Someday I'll return, and then we'll see what we see."

When he had this dream, Tar looked closely at his mother. He looked at his father, at John, Robert, and Margaret. Well, he tried to imagine that he was different from the others. The dream made him feel a little unfaithful. He felt his nose with his fingers. It wasn't the same shape as John's or Margaret's.

When it finally became known that he belonged to a different lineage, he would never take advantage of others. He would have money, lots of it, and all the Mooreheads would be treated as if they were his equals. Perhaps he would go to his mother and say, "Don't let anyone know. The secret is buried in my chest. It will remain sealed there forever. John will go to college, Margaret will have nice clothes, and Robert will have a bicycle."

Such thoughts made Tar feel very fond of all the other Mooreheads. What wonderful things he would buy for his mother. He had to smile at the thought of Dick Moorehead walking around town, laying down windrows. He could have fashionable vests, a fur coat. He wouldn't have to work; he could just spend his time as the leader of the town band or something like that.

Of course, John and Margaret would have laughed if they knew what was going on in Tar's head, but no one needed to know. Of course, it wasn't true; it was just something he might think about at night after he'd gone to bed, and as he walked through dark alleys on winter evenings with his papers.

Sometimes, when a well-dressed man stepped off the train, Tar almost felt as if his dream was about to come true. If only the man would walk up to him and say, "My son, my son. I am your father. I have traveled abroad and accumulated a vast fortune. Now I have come to make you rich. You will have everything your heart desires." If something like that happened, Tar thought he wouldn't be too surprised. He was prepared for it anyway, he had thought of everything.

Tar's mother and his sister Margaret always had to think about food. Three meals a day for the hungry boys. Things to put away. Sometimes, when Dick was away for long periods of time, he would come home with large quantities of country sausage or pork.

At other times, especially in winter, the Moorheads sank quite low. They ate meat only once a week, no butter, no pies, not even on Sundays. They baked cornmeal into cakes and cabbage soup with chunks of fatty pork floating in it. It could soak bread.

Mary Moorehead took pieces of salt pork and fried the fat in it. Then she made a sauce. It was good with bread. Beans are important. You're making a stew with salt pork. Either way, it's not so bad and it's filling.

Hal Brown and Jim Moore sometimes persuaded Tar to come home with them for a meal. Small town folks do that all the time. Perhaps Tar was helping Hal with chores, and Hal went with him on his paper route. It's okay to visit someone's house occasionally, but if you do it often, you should be able to invite them into yours. Cornmeal or cabbage soup will do in a pinch, but don't ask your guest to sit down to it. If you're poor and needy, you don't want the whole town to know and talk about it.

Beans or cabbage stew, perhaps eaten at the kitchen table by the stove, ah! Sometimes in winter, the Moorheads couldn't afford more than one fire. They had to eat, do homework, undress for bed, and do everything in the kitchen. While they were eating, Mother Tara asked Margaret to bring the food. This was done so the children wouldn't see how shaky her hands were after washing the dishes the day before.

The Browns, when Tar went there, had such abundance. You wouldn't think there was so much in the world. If you took everything you could, no one would notice. Just looking at the table made your eyes hurt.

They had great plates of mashed potatoes, fried chicken with good gravy-maybe little pieces of good meat floating in it-not thin either-a dozen kinds of jams and jellies in glasses-it looked so beautiful, so beautiful, that it was impossible to pick up a spoon and spoil the appearance of it-sweet potatoes baked in brown sugar-the sugar melting and forming a thick candy on them-great bowls full of apples and bananas and oranges, beans baked in a big dish-all brown on top-turkey sometimes, when it wasn't Christmas or Thanksgiving or something like that, three or four kinds of pies, pastries with layers and brown sweets between the layers-white icing on top, sometimes with red candies stuck in it-apple dumplings.

Every time Tar came in, there was a variety of things on the table-lots of them, and always good ones. It's surprising Hal Brown didn't get fatter. He was as thin as Tar.

If Mama Brown wasn't cooking, one of the older Brown girls did. They were all good cooks. Tar was willing to bet Margaret, given the chance, could cook just as well. You have to have everything you can cook, and plenty of it.

No matter how cold it is, after such a feeding you feel completely warm. You can walk down the street with your coat unbuttoned. You're practically sweating, even outside in sub-zero weather.

Hal Brown was Tar's age and lived in the same family where everyone else grew up. The Brown girls-Kate, Sue, Sally, Jane, and Mary-were big, strong girls-five of them-and there was an older brother who worked downtown at the Brown's store. They called him Shorty Brown because he was so tall and big. Well, he was six feet three inches tall. The Brown style of eating, yes, helped him. He could grab Hal's coat collar with one hand and Tar's with the other, and lift them both off the floor with the slightest effort.

Ma Brown wasn't that big. She wasn't as tall as Tar's mother. You could never imagine how she could have a son like Shorty or daughters like her. Tar and Jim Moore sometimes talked about it. "Gee, it seems impossible," Jim said.

Shorty Brown had shoulders like a horse. Maybe it was the food. Maybe Hal would be like that someday. Still, the Moores ate well, and Jim wasn't as tall as Tar, though he was a little fatter. Ma Brown ate the same food as everyone else. Look at her.

Pa Brown and the girls were big. When he was home, Pa Brown-they called him Cal-seldom said a word. The girls were the loudest in the house, along with Shorty, Hal, and their mother. Their mother scolded them constantly, but she didn't mean anything, and no one paid her any attention. The children laughed and made jokes, and sometimes after dinner, all the girls would rush at Shorty and try to wrestle him to the floor. If they broke a dish or two, Ma Brown would scold them, but no one cared. When they did, Hal would try to help his older brother, but he didn't count. It was a sight to behold. If the girls' dresses got torn, it didn't matter. No one got angry.

Cal Brown, after dinner, came into the living room and sat down to read a book. He always read books like Ben Hur, Romola, and The Works of Dickens, and if one of the girls came in and banged on the piano, he would immediately continue.

The kind of man who always has a book in his hand when he's home! He owned the biggest men's clothing store in town. There must have been a thousand suits on the long tables. You could get a suit for five dollars in advance and a dollar a week. That's how Tar, John, and Robert got theirs.

When all hell broke loose in the Brown house after dinner one winter evening, Ma Brown kept yelling and saying, "Now behave yourself. Don't you see your daddy reading?" But no one paid attention. Cal Brown didn't seem to care. "Oh, leave them alone," he'd say whenever he said anything. Most of the time, he didn't even notice.

Tar stood a little to the side, trying to hide. It was nice to come to the Browns' house for meals, but he couldn't do it too often. Having a father like Dick Moorehead and a mother like Mary Moorehead was nothing like being part of a family like the Browns.

He couldn't invite Hal Brown or Jim Moore to come over to the Moorheads' and have cabbage soup.

Well, food isn't the only thing. Jim or Hal might not care. But Mary Moorehead, Tara's older brother John, Margaret would. The Mooreheads were proud of it. In Tara's house, everything was hidden. You'd be lying in bed, and your brother John would be lying next to you in the same bed. Margaret would be sleeping in the next room. She needed her own room. That's because she was a girl.

You lie in bed and think. John might be doing the same, Margaret might be doing the same. Moorehead said nothing at that hour.

Hidden in his corner of the large dining room [at the Browns], Tar watched Hal Brown's father. The man had aged and grayed. There were small wrinkles around his eyes. When he read a book, he wore glasses. The clothing salesman was the son of a prosperous large farmer. He married the daughter of another [prosperous] farmer. Then he came to town and opened a store. When his father died, he inherited the farm, and later his wife inherited the money as well.

These people always lived in one place. There was always plenty of food, clothing, and warm houses. They didn't wander from place to place; they lived in small, squalid houses and suddenly left because the rent was coming due and they couldn't pay it.

They were not proud, they did not need to be proud.

The Browns' house feels warm and safe. Strong, beautiful girls wrestle with their tall brother on the floor. Dresses rip.

The Brown girls knew how to milk cows, cook, do anything. They went to dances with the young men. Sometimes, in the house, in the presence of Tar and their younger brother, they would say things about men, women, and animals that would make Tar blush. If their father was nearby while the girls were frolicking like this, he wouldn't even speak.

He and Tar were the only silent people in the Brown house.

Was it because Tar didn't want any of the Browns to know how happy he was to be in their home, to be so warm, to see all the fun going on, and to be so full of food?

At the table, whenever someone asked him for more, he would always shake his head and say weakly, "No," but Cal Brown, who was serving, didn't pay attention. "Pass his plate," he said to one of the girls, and she returned to Thar with a heaping plate. More fried chicken, more gravy, another huge pile of mashed potatoes, another slice of pie. Big Girls Brown and Shorty Brown looked at each other and smiled.

Sometimes one of the Brown girls would hug and kiss Tar right in front of the others. This happened after they had all left the table and when Tar was trying to hide, huddled in a corner. When he managed to do so, he would remain silent and watch, seeing the wrinkles under Cal Brown's eyes as he read a book. There was always something humorous in [the merchant's] eyes, but he never laughed out loud.

Tar hoped that a wrestling match would break out between Shorty and the girls. Then they would all get carried away and leave him alone.

He couldn't go to the Browns' or Jim Moore's too often because he didn't want to ask them to come to his house and eat even one dish from the kitchen table, the baby might be crying.

When one of the girls tried to kiss him, he couldn't help but blush, which made the others laugh. The big girl, almost a woman, did it to tease him. All the Brown girls had strong arms and huge, motherly breasts. The one teasing him hugged him tightly, then lifted his face and kissed him while he resisted. Hal Brown burst out laughing. They never tried to kiss Hal because he didn't blush. Tar wished he hadn't. He couldn't help it.

Dick Moorehead always went from farmhouse to farmhouse in the winter, pretending to look for work painting and hanging papers. Maybe he did. If a big farmhouse girl, a girl like one of the Brown girls, had tried to kiss him, he would never have blushed. He would have liked it. Dick didn't blush like that. Tar had seen enough to know that.

The Brown girls and Shorty Brown didn't blush as much, but they weren't like Dick.

Dick, who had gone out of town, always had plenty of food. People liked him because he was interesting. Tara was invited to the Moores and Browns. John and Margaret had friends. They were invited too. Mary Moorehead stayed home.

A woman has it the worst when she has children, when her man isn't a very good provider, yes. Tar's mother was as prone to blushing as Tar. When Tar grows up, maybe he'll cope with this. There have never been women like his mother.

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CHAPTER XVIII


THERE WAS _ And the man in town was Hog Hawkins. People called him by that name to his face. He caused the Moorhead boys a lot of trouble.

Cleveland's morning papers were two cents each, but if you had a paper delivered to your home or store, you got it for ten cents for six days. Sunday papers were special and sold for five cents. People at home usually got the evening papers, but the stores, a few lawyers, and others wanted the morning paper. The morning paper arrived at eight o'clock, perfect time to run with papers and get to school. A lot of people came to the train to pick up the papers [there].

Hog Hawkins always did this. He needed a newspaper because he traded pigs, buying them from farmers and shipping them to city markets. He needed to know the city's market prices.

When John was selling newspapers, Hog Hawkins once owed him forty cents, and he claimed to have paid it, even though he hadn't. A quarrel ensued, and he wrote to the local newspaper and tried to take over John's agency. In the letter, he said John was dishonest and insolent.

This caused a lot of problems. John had to get King's lawyer and three or four merchants to write that he had quit. K. It's not a very nice thing to ask. John hated it.

Then John wanted to get even with Hog Hawkins, and he did. The man could have saved two cents a week if he'd been doing well, and everyone knew two cents meant a lot to a man like that, but John made him pay cash every day [after that]. If he'd paid a week in advance, John would have gotten the old debt paid off. Hog Hawkins would never have trusted him with his dime. He knew that better than anyone.

At first, Hog tried not to buy paper at all. They'd picked it up at a barber shop and a hotel, and it was lying around everywhere. He'd go into one of the two places and sit staring at it for a few mornings, but that couldn't last. The old pig buyer had a small, dirty white beard that he never trimmed, and he was bald.

A man like that doesn't have money for a barber. At the barbershop, they started hiding the newspaper when they saw him approaching, and the hotel clerk did the same. No one wanted him around. He felt something terrible.

When John Moorehead got dandruff, he was as unmovable as a brick wall. He said little, but he could stand still. If Hog Hawkins wanted a newspaper, he had to run to the station with two cents in his hand. If he was across the street shouting, John paid no attention. People had to smile when they saw it. The old man always reached for the paper before giving John two cents, but John hid the paper behind his back. Sometimes they would just stand there, looking at each other, and then the old man would give in. When this happened at the station, the baggage handler, the messenger, and the railroad crew would laugh. They would whisper to John when Hog's back was turned. "Don't give in," they said. There wasn't much chance of that.

Soon [almost] everyone was in love with Hog. He cheated a lot of people and was so stingy that he hardly spent a cent. He lived alone in a small brick house on the street behind the cemetery, and almost always had pigs running around in the yard. In hot weather, you could smell the place for half a mile. People tried to arrest him for keeping the place so filthy, but he somehow got away with it. If they passed a law that no one could keep pigs in town, it would deprive many other people of the opportunity to keep [reasonably clean] pigs, and they didn't want that. A pig can be kept as clean as a dog or a cat, but a person like that will never keep anything clean. In his youth, he married a farmer's daughter, but she never had children and died three or four years later. Some said that when his wife was alive, he wasn't so bad.

When Tar began selling newspapers, the feud between Hog Hawkins and the Mooreheads continued.

Tar wasn't as cunning as John. He let Hog enter him for ten cents, and that gave the old man great satisfaction. It was a victory. John's method was always to never say a word. He stood, holding the newspaper behind his back, and waited. "No money, no paper." That was his line.

Tar tried to scold [Hoag] in an attempt to get his dime back, and that gave the old man a chance to laugh [at him]. In John's time, laughter was on the other side of the fence.

[And] then something happened. Spring came, and there was a long, rainy spell. One night, a bridge east of town washed out, and the morning train didn't arrive. The station noted a delay of first three hours, then five. The afternoon train was scheduled to arrive at four-thirty, and on a late March day in Ohio, with rain and low clouds, it was almost dark by five.

At six, Tar went down to check the trains, then went home for dinner. He went again at seven and nine. There were no trains all day. The telegraph operator told him he'd better go home and forget about it, and he went home, thinking he was going to bed, but Margaret attacked her ear.

Tar didn't know what had happened to her. She didn't usually act like she did that night. John came home from work tired and went to bed. Mary Moorehead, pale and ill, went to bed early. It wasn't particularly cold, but it rained steadily, and it was pitch black outside. Perhaps the calendar said it was supposed to be a moonlit night. The electric lights were out throughout the city.

It wasn't that Margaret was trying to tell Tara what to do with his work. She was just nervous and worried for no apparent reason, and said she knew if she went to bed she wouldn't be able to sleep. Girls sometimes got that way. Perhaps it was spring. "Oh, let's sit here until the train comes, and then we'll deliver the papers," she kept saying. They were in the kitchen, and their mother must have gone to her room to sleep. She didn't say a word. Margaret put on John's raincoat and rubber boots. Tara was wearing a ponchon. He could put his papers under it and keep them dry.

That evening they went to the station at ten and again at eleven.

There wasn't a soul on Main Street. Even the night watchman had hidden. [It was a night when even a thief wouldn't leave the house.] The telegraph operator had to stay, but he grumbled. After Tar asked him three or four times about the train, he didn't answer. Well, he wanted to be home in bed. Everyone did, except Margaret. She infected Tar with her nervousness [and excitement].

Arriving at the station at eleven, they decided to stay. "If we go home again, we'll probably wake Mother," Margaret said. At the station, a fat country woman sat on a bench, sleeping with her mouth open. They had left the light on, but it was pretty dim. A woman like that was going to visit her daughter in another town, a daughter who was sick, or about to have a baby, or something like that. Country people don't travel much. Once they make up their minds, they'll endure anything. Start them, and you can't stop them. In the town of Tara, there was a woman who went to Kansas to visit her daughter, took all her food with her, and sat in a day coach the entire way. Tara heard her telling this story one day in the store when she returned home.

The train arrived at half past one. The baggage handler and the ticket collector went home, and the telegraph operator did her job. He had to stay anyway. He thought Tar and his sister were crazy. "Hey, you crazy kids. What difference does it make whether they get a newspaper this evening or not? You should be spanked and sent to bed, both of you. The telegraph operator grumbled that evening [oh well]."

Margaret was fine, and so was Tar. Now that he was in on the action, Tar enjoyed staying awake as much as his sister. On a night like this, you want to sleep so much you think you can't hold out another minute, and then suddenly you don't want to sleep at all. It's like getting a second wind during a race.

The city at night, well after midnight and when it's raining, is different from the city during the day or early evening, when it's dark but everyone's awake. When Tar went out with his papers on ordinary evenings, he always had plenty of shortcuts. Well, he knew where they kept their dogs, and he knew how to save a lot of land. He walked through alleys, climbed fences. Most people didn't care. When the boy went there, he saw a lot of things happening. Tar saw other things besides the time he saw Win Connell and his new wife cut themselves.

That night, he and Margaret wondered whether he would take his usual route or stay on the sidewalk. As if sensing what was going on in his head, Margaret wanted to take the shortest, darkest route.

It was fun to puddle in the rain and in the dark, to approach dark houses, to slip paper under doors or behind blinds. Old Mrs. Stevens lived alone and was afraid of illness. She had little money, and another elderly woman worked for her. She was always afraid of catching a cold, and when winter or cold weather came, she paid Tar an extra five cents a week, and he would take a newspaper from the kitchen and hold it over the stove. When it became warm and dry, the old woman working in the kitchen ran into the hall with him. There was a box by the front door to keep the paper dry in damp weather. Tar told Margaret about this, and she laughed.

The town was filled with all sorts of people, all sorts of ideas, and now they were all asleep. When they reached the house, Margaret was standing outside, and Tar crept up and placed the newspaper in the driest place he could find. He knew most of the dogs [and in any case] that night the ugly ones were inside, out of the rain.

Everyone had taken shelter from the rain except Tar and Margaret, who were curled up in their beds. If you let yourself wander, you can imagine what they looked like. When Tar wandered alone, he often spent time imagining what was going on in the houses. He could pretend the houses had no walls. It was a good way to pass the time.

The walls of the houses could hide nothing from [him] more than such a dark night. When Tar returned to the house with the newspaper and when Margaret waited outside, he couldn't see her. Sometimes she hid behind a tree. He called to her in a loud whisper. Then she came out, and they laughed.

They came to a shortcut that Tar almost never took at night, except when it was warm and clear. It was straight through the cemetery, not from the Farley Thompson side, but in the other direction.

You climbed over a fence and walked between the graves. Then you climbed over another fence, through an orchard, and found yourself on another street.

Tar told Margaret about the shortcut to the cemetery just to tease her. She was so bold, willing to do everything. He simply decided to give her a try and was surprised and a little upset when she took him on.

"Oh, come on. Let's do this," she said. After that, Tar couldn't do anything else.

They found the spot, climbed over the fence, and found themselves right among the graves. They kept tripping over stones, but they were no longer laughing. Margaret regretted her boldness. She crept up to Tar and took his hand. It was getting darker and darker. They couldn't even see the white headstones.

That's where it happened. Hog Hawkins lived. His pigsty adjoined the orchard they had to cross to leave the cemetery.

They were almost through, and Tar was walking forward, holding Margaret's hand and trying to find his way, when they almost fell on Hog, kneeling over the grave.

At first they didn't know who it was. When they were almost on top of it, it groaned, and they stopped. At first they thought it was a ghost. Why they didn't rush and run away, they never found out. They were too scared [perhaps].

They both stood there, trembling, huddled together, and then lightning struck, and Tar saw who it was. It was the only lightning strike that night, and after it passed, there was almost no thunder, only a soft rumble.

A low rumble somewhere in the darkness and the groan of a man kneeling by the grave, almost at Thar's feet. The old pig buyer had been unable to sleep that night and had come to the cemetery, to his wife's grave, to pray. Perhaps he did this every night when he couldn't sleep. Perhaps that's why he lived in a house so close to the cemetery.

A man like that who never loved just one person, never liked just one person. They got married, and then she died. After that, nothing but [loneliness]. It got to the point where he hated people and wanted to die. Well, he was almost sure his wife had gone to Heaven. He would like to go there [too], if he could. If she were in Heaven, she might say a word to him. He was almost sure she would.

Suppose he died one night in his house, and there wasn't a living thing left around except a few pigs. A story happened in town. Everyone was talking about it. A farmer came to town looking for a buyer for his pigs. He met Charlie Darlam, the postmaster, who pointed to the house. "You'll find him there. You can tell him from the pigs because he wears a hat."

The cemetery had become a pig-buyer's church, where he frequented at night. Belonging to a regular church would have meant some kind of understanding with others. He'd have to give money from time to time. Going to the cemetery at night was a piece of cake.

Tar and Margaret quietly emerged from the kneeling man's presence. A single flash of lightning made it dark, but Tar managed to find his way to the fence and get Margaret into the garden. They soon emerged onto another street, shaken and frightened. From the street, the groaning voice of the pig buyer could be heard, coming from the darkness.

They hurried along the rest of Tar's route, sticking to the streets and sidewalks. Margaret wasn't quite as spry now. When they reached the Moorheads' house, she tried to put out the kitchen lamp, and her hands shook. Tar had to take a match and do the job. Margaret was pale. Tar might have laughed at her, but he wasn't sure what he looked like himself. When they went upstairs and went to bed, Tar lay awake for a long time. It was nice to be in bed with John, who had a warm bed and who never woke up.

Tar had something in mind, but decided it was best not to tell John. The battle the Moorheads were waging with Hog Hawkins was John's battle, not his. He was ten cents short, but what's ten cents?

He didn't want the trunk to know, he didn't want the express or any of the people who usually hung around the station when a train came in to know that he had given up.

He decided to talk to Hog Hawkins the next day, and he did. He waited until no one was looking, then walked over to where the man stood waiting.

Tar pulled out a newspaper, and Hog Hawkins snatched it. He was bluffing, fishing in his pockets for pennies, but of course he couldn't find any. He wasn't going to let this chance pass. "Well, well, I forgot the change. You'll have to wait." He chuckled as he said it. He wished none of the station staff had seen what had happened, and how he'd surprised one of the Moorehead boys.

Well, a win is a win.

He walked down the street, clutching a newspaper and chuckling. Tar stood and watched.

If Tar lost two cents a day, three or four times a week, it wouldn't be much. Every now and then, a traveler would get off the train and hand him a nickel, saying, "Keep the change." Two cents a day wasn't much. Tar thought he could handle it. He thought of how Hog Hawkins got his little moments of satisfaction from extorting papers from him, and he decided he'd let him.

[That is,] he would do it, [he thought], when there weren't too many people around.

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CHAPTER XIX


[X OY IS A boy, to figure it all out? What's happening in the city of Tara, as in the whole city.] Now [Tar] has become big, tall and long-legged. When he was a child, people paid less attention to him. He went to ball games, to performances at the opera house.

Beyond the city's borders, life was in full swing. The train carrying papers from the east continued west.

Life in the city was simple. There were no rich people. One summer evening, he saw couples strolling under the trees. They were young men and women, almost adults. Sometimes they kissed. When Tar saw this, he was delighted.

There were no bad women in the city, except perhaps...

To the east are Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Boston, and New York. To the west is Chicago.

A black man, the son of the only black man in town, came to visit his father. He was talking in the barber shop-the livery shed. It was spring, and he had lived all winter in Springfield, Ohio.

During the Civil War, Springfield was one of the stops on the Underground Railroad-abolitionists rounded up blacks. Tara's father knew all about it. Another was Zanesville and Oberlin, near Cleveland.

In all such places there were still blacks, and there were many of them.

In Springfield, there was a place called "the dyke." Mostly black prostitutes. A black man who had come to town to visit his father told me about this at a livery stable. He was a strong young man who wore brightly colored clothes. He spent the entire winter in Springfield, supported by two black women. They went out on the streets, earned money, and brought it back to him.

"It would be better for them. I don't tolerate any stupidity.

"Knock them down. Handle them roughly. That's my way."

The young black man's father was such a respectable old man. Even Dick Moorhead, who maintained a Southern attitude toward blacks his entire life, said, "Old Pete's all right-as long as he's a black man."

The old black man worked hard, as did his small, withered wife. All their children had left and gone traveling to where other blacks lived. They rarely came home to visit the old couple, and when someone did, they didn't stay long.

The flamboyant black guy didn't stay long either. He said so. "There's nothing in this town for a black guy like me. It's a sport, that's who I am."

It's a strange thing-this kind of relationship between a man and a woman-even for black men-women support men in this way. One of the men working in the livery barn said that white men and women sometimes did the same. The men in the barn and some in the barbershop were envious. "A man doesn't have to work. The money comes in."

All sorts of things happen in the towns and cities where the trains come from, and in the cities to which the westbound trains depart.

Old Pete, the father of young Negro sports, whitewashed, worked in the gardens, and his wife did the laundry, just like Mary Moorehead. Almost any day, the old man could be seen walking down Main Street with a whitewash bucket and brushes. He never swore, drank, or stole. He was always cheerful, smiling, and tipping his hat to white people. On Sundays, he and his old wife put on their best clothes and went to Methodist church. They both had white curly hair. From time to time, during prayer, the old man's voice could be heard. "Oh, Lord, save me," he moaned. "Yes, Lord, save me," his wife repeated.

Not at all like his son, that old black man. When he was in town at the time [I bet], the bright young black man never went near any church.

It's Sunday evening in the Methodist church - the girls come out, the young men are waiting to take them home.

"May I see you at home this evening, Miss Smith?" I'm trying to be very polite-I'm speaking quietly and softly.

Sometimes the young man got the girl he wanted, sometimes he didn't. When he failed, the little boys standing nearby called out to him, "Yee! Yee! She wouldn't let you! Yee! Yee!"

Children John's age and Margaret's were in between. They couldn't wait in the dark to yell at the older boys, and they couldn't yet stand up in front of everyone else and ask a girl to let them walk her home if a young man asked.

For Margaret, this could happen soon. Soon, John stood in line outside the church door with other young people.

It is better to be [a child] than between and between.

Sometimes, when the boy shouted, "Yee! Yee!" he got caught. An older boy chased him and caught him on a dark road-everyone else laughed-and hit him on the head. So what? The main thing was to accept it without crying.

Then wait.

When [the older boy] had gone far enough away-and you were almost certain he wouldn't be able to catch you again-you paid him. "Yee! Yee! She wouldn't let you. Gone, didn't he? Yee! Yee!"

Tar didn't want to be "in between" and "between." When he grew up, he wanted to suddenly grow up-to go to bed a boy and wake up a man, big and strong. Sometimes he dreamed about it.

He could have been a pretty good ballplayer if he'd had more time to practice; he could have held second base. The problem was, the big team-his age group-always played on Saturdays. On Saturday afternoons, he was busy selling Sunday newspapers. A Sunday paper cost five cents. You made more money than on other days.

Bill McCarthy came to work at McGovern's stable. He was a professional boxer, an ordinary one, but now he was in decline.

Too much wine and women. He said it himself.

Well, he knew a thing or two. He could teach boys how to box, teach them ring teamwork. He'd once been a sparring partner for Kid McAllister-the Incomparable. It wasn't often a boy got the chance to be around a man like that-not that often in life.

Bill showed up for a lesson. Five lessons cost three dollars, and Tar took it. Bill made all the boys pay in advance. Ten boys showed up. These were supposed to be private lessons, one boy at a time, upstairs in the barn.

They all got the same as Tar. It was a dirty trick. Bill argued with each boy for a while, and then-he pretended to let go of his hand-accidentally.

The boy got a black eye or something on his first lesson. No one came back for more. Tar didn't. For Bill, it was the easy way out. You hit the boy on the head, throw him across the barn floor, and get three dollars-you don't have to worry about the other [four] lessons.

The former fighter who did this and the young, athletic black man who made his living this way at the dam in Springfield came to about the same conclusion with Tar.

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CHAPTER XX


[ALL THINGS MIXED in the boy's mind. What is sin? You hear people talking. Some of the people who talk the most about God are the biggest cheats in the stores and horse trade.] [In Tar Town, many] people, like Lawyer King and Judge Blair, didn't go to church. Dr. Reefy never went. They were in the square. They could be trusted.

During Thar's time, a "bad" woman came to town. Everyone said she was bad. Not a single good woman in town would have anything to do with her.

She lived with a man and wasn't married [to him]. Perhaps he had another wife somewhere. No one knew.

They arrived in town on Saturday, and Tar sold newspapers at the train station. They then went to the hotel and then to the livery barn, where they rented a horse and carriage.

They drove around the city and then rented the Woodhouse house. It was a large, old place, long vacant. All the Woodhouses had died or moved away. Lawyer King was the agent. Of course, he let them have it.

They needed to buy furniture, kitchen items and all that stuff.

Tar didn't know how everyone knew this woman was bad. They just did it.

Of course, all the merchants sold them [quick] things, quickly enough. The man scattered his money. Old Mrs. Crawley worked in their kitchen. She didn't care. When a woman is that old and poor, she doesn't have to be [so] picky.

Tar didn't do it either, and the boy doesn't do it. He heard men talking-at the train station, in the livery, at the barbershop, at the hotel.

The man bought everything the woman wanted and then left. After that, he [only] came on weekends, about twice a month. They bought the morning and afternoon newspapers, as well as the Sunday paper.

What did Taru care? He was tired of the way people spoke.

Even the children, boys and girls, coming home from school, had made this place a kind of shrine. They went there on purpose, and when they approached the house-it was surrounded by a tall hedge-they suddenly fell silent.

It was as if someone had been killed there. Tar immediately entered with papers.

People said she came to town to have a baby. She wasn't married to an older man. He was a city dweller and wealthy. He spent money like a rich man. So did she.

At home-in the town where the man lived-he had a respectable wife and children. Everyone said so. He may have belonged to the church, but every now and then-on weekends-he slipped away to the small town of Tara. He supported a woman.

In any case, she was pretty and lonely.

Old Mrs. Crowley, who worked for her, was not very big. Her husband had been a cab driver and had died. She was one of those grumpy and grumpy old women, but she was a good cook.

The woman-the "bad" woman-began to notice Tar. When he brought the newspaper, she started talking to him. It wasn't because he was anything special. This was her only chance.

She asked him questions about his mother and father, about John, Robert, and the children. She was lonely. Tar sat on the back porch of the Woodhouse house and talked to her. A man named Smokey Pete worked in the yard. Before she came along, he'd never had a steady job, always hanging around saloons, cleaning spittoons-that sort of job.

She paid him as if he were any good. Let's say at the end of the week, when she pays Tar, she owes him twenty-five cents.

She gave him half a dollar. Well, she would have given him a dollar, but she was afraid it would be too much. She was afraid he would be ashamed or his pride would be hurt, and she didn't accept it.

They sat on the back porch of the house and talked. Not a single woman in town came to see her. Everyone said she'd only come to town to have a child with a man she wasn't married to, but even though he kept a close eye on her, Tar saw no sign of them.

"I don't believe it. She's a normal-sized woman, slim, for that matter," he told Hal Brown.

Then she had to get a horse and cart from the livery barn after dinner and take Tar with her. "Do you think your mother will be interested?" she asked. Tar said, "No."

They went to the village and bought flowers, oceans of them. She mostly sat in the buggy, while Tar picked flowers, climbing hillsides and descending into ravines.

When they got home, she gave him a quarter. Sometimes he helped her carry flowers into the house. One day, he came into her bedroom. Such dresses, delicate, delicate things. He stood and looked, wanting to go and touch them, the way he'd always wanted to touch the lace his mother wore on her one good black Sunday dress when he was little. His mother had another dress just as good. The woman-the bad one-saw the look in his eyes and, taking all the dresses out of the big truck, laid them out on the bed. There must have been twenty of them. Tar never thought there could be such beautiful [magnificent] things in the world.

On the day Tar left, the woman kissed him. It was the only time she ever did so.

The bad woman left the city of Tara as suddenly as she had arrived. No one knew where she went. She received a telegram during the day and left on the overnight train. Everyone wanted to know what was in the telegram, but the telegraph operator, Wash Williams, of course, wouldn't tell. What's in the telegram is a secret. You don't dare tell. The operator is forbidden to do so, but Wash Williams was still dissatisfied. He may have leaked a little information, but he liked it when everyone dropped hints and then said nothing.

As for Tar, he received a note from a woman. It was left with Mrs. Crowley, and it contained five dollars.

Tar was very upset when she left like that. All her belongings were supposed to be sent to an address in Cleveland. The note said, "Goodbye, you're a good boy," and nothing more.

Then, a couple of weeks later, a package arrived from the city. It contained some clothes for Margaret, Robert, and Will, as well as a new sweater for himself. Nothing else. The express postage had been paid for in advance.

[A month later, one day, a neighbor came to visit Tar's mother while he was home. There was more "bad" female talk, and Tar overheard it. He was in the next room. The neighbor commented on how bad this strange woman was and blamed Mary Moorehead for allowing Tar to be with her. She said she would never allow her son anywhere near such a person.

[Mary Moorehead, of course, said nothing.

[Conversations like these could go on all summer. Two or three men would try to interrogate Tara. "What is she telling you? What are you talking about?"

["None of your business."

[When he was questioned, he said nothing and hurried away.

[His mother simply changed the subject, steered the conversation to something else. That would have been her way.

[Tar listened for a while, and then tiptoed out of the house.

[He was glad about something, but he didn't know what. Perhaps he was glad that he had the chance to meet a bad woman.

[Perhaps he was just glad that his mother had the good sense to leave him alone.]

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CHAPTER XXI


THE DEATH OF Tara Moorehead's mother was not particularly dramatic. She died at night, and only Dr. Reefy was in the room with her. There was no deathbed scene; her husband and children gathered around, a few last courageous words, the children's cries, a struggle, and then the soul departed. Dr. Reefy had long expected her death and was not surprised. When he was called into the house and the children were sent upstairs to bed, he sat down to talk with the mother.

Words were spoken that Tar, lying awake in the room above, could not hear. Later becoming a writer, he often reconstructed in his mind the scene taking place in the room below. There was a scene in a story by Chekhov-Russky. Readers remember it-the scene in the Russian farmhouse, the anxious village doctor, the dying woman yearning for love before death. Well, there had always been some kind of rapport between Dr. Reefy and his mother. The man never became his own friend, never had a heart-to-heart talk with him, as Judge Blair later did, but he liked to think that the last conversation between man and woman in the small frame house in small Ohio had been meaningful for them both. Later, Tar learned that it is in their close relationships that people thrive. He wanted such a relationship for his mother. In life, she seemed such an isolated figure. Perhaps he underestimated his father. The figure of his mother, as she later lived in his imagination, seemed so delicately balanced, capable of swift outbursts of emotion. If you don't establish a quick and intimate connection with the life unfolding in other people, you don't live at all. It's a difficult task, and it brings about most of life's troubles, but you must keep trying. That's your job, and if you shirk it, you shirk life [entirely].

Later, similar thoughts in Tara, concerning himself, were often transferred to the figure of his mother.

Voices in the downstairs room of a small frame house. Dick Moorehead, the husband, was out of town, working as a painter. What were two adults talking about at such a time? The man and woman in the room below laughed quietly. After the Doctor had been there for a while, Mary Moorehead fell asleep. She died in her sleep.

When she died, the doctor didn't wake the children, but left the house and asked a neighbor to go pick up Dick out of town. He returned and sat down. There were several books there. Several times, during the long winters when Dick was broke, he became a book agent-this allowed him to travel abroad, going from house to house in the villages where he was able to offer hospitality, although he sold only a few books. Naturally, the books he tried to sell were mostly about the Civil War.

There would be a book about a character named "Corporal C. Clegg," who went to war as a green country boy and became a corporal. C. was full of the naiveté of a free-spirited American farm boy who had never before obeyed orders. However, he proved quite courageous. Dick was delighted with the book, and he read it aloud to his children.

There were other books, more technical, also about the war. Was General Grant drunk on the first day of the Battle of Shiloh? Why didn't General Meade pursue Lee after his victory at Gettysburg? Did McClellan really want the South to be licked? Grant's Memoirs.

Mark Twain, the writer, became a publisher and published "Grant's Memoirs." All of Mark Twain's books were sold by door-to-door agents. There was a special agent's copy with blank, lined pages at the front. There, Dick wrote down the names of people who had agreed to take one of the books when it came out. Dick could have sold more books if he hadn't spent so much time on each sale. He often stayed at a farmhouse for a few days. In the evening, the whole family would gather around, and Dick would read aloud. He talked. It was funny to listen to him, if you didn't depend on him for your life.

Dr. Reefy sat in the Moorehead house, the dead woman in the next room reading one of Dick's books. Doctors witness most deaths firsthand. They know that all people must die. The book in his hand, bound in simple cloth, half-Moroccan leather, and even more. You couldn't sell many fancy bindings in a small town. Grant's Memoirs were the easiest to sell. Every family in the North believed they had to have one. As Dick always emphasized, it was a moral duty.

Dr. Reefy sat reading one of his books, and he himself had been in the war. Like Walt Whitman, he was a nurse. He had never shot anyone, never shot anyone. What did the doctor think? Did he think about the war, about Dick, about Mary Moorehead? He had married a young girl when he was almost an old man. There are people you get to know a little in childhood whom you puzzle over all your life and cannot figure out. Writers have a little trick. People think writers take their characters from life. They don't. What they do is find a man or a woman who, for some obscure reason, arouses their interest. Such a man or woman is invaluable to a writer. He takes the few facts he knows and tries to construct a whole life. People become starting points for him, and when he gets there, which is often enough, the results have little or nothing to do with the person with whom he started.

Mary Moorehead died one autumn night. Tar was selling newspapers, and John had gone to the factory. When Tar returned home early that evening, his mother wasn't at the table, and Margaret said she wasn't feeling well. It was raining outside. The children ate in silence, the depression that always accompanied their mother during difficult times hanging over the house. Depression is what feeds the imagination. When the meal was finished, Tar helped Margaret wash the dishes.

The children sat around. Mother said she didn't want anything to eat. John went to bed early, as did Robert, [Will and Joe]. John worked piecework at the factory. Once you get up to speed and can earn a pretty good wage, everything changes in you. Instead of forty cents for polishing a bicycle frame, they reduce the price to thirty-two. What are you planning to do? You [must] have a job.

Neither Tar nor Margaret wanted to sleep. Margaret made the others go quietly upstairs so as not to disturb their mother-if she was sleeping. The two children went to school, then Margaret read a book. It was a new gift the woman who worked at the post office had given her. When you sit like that, it"s best to think about something outside the house. Just that day, Tar had gotten into an argument with Jim Moore and another boy about baseball pitching. [Jim] said that Ike Freer was the best pitcher in town because he had the most speed and the best curve, and Tar said that Harry Green was the best. The two, being members of the city team, of course, hadn"t pitched against each other, so you couldn"t say for sure. You had to judge by what you saw and felt. It"s true that Harry didn"t have that kind of speed, but when he pitched, you felt more confident in something. Well, he had brains. When he realized that he was not so good, he said so and let Ike in, but if Ike was not so good, he would become stubborn, and if he was taken out, he would get hurt.

Tar thought of a lot of arguments to make to Jim Moore when he saw him the next day, and then went and got the dominoes.

Dominoes slid silently across the tabletops. Margaret put her book aside. The two children were in the kitchen, which also served as a dining room, and an oil lamp stood on the table.

You can play a game like dominoes for a long time without thinking about anything in particular.

When Mary Moorehead was going through hard times, she was in a constant state of shock. Her bedroom was next to the kitchen, and at the front of the house was the living room, where the funeral was later held. If you wanted to go upstairs to bed, you had to go straight through your mother's bedroom, but there was a recess in the wall, and if you were careful, you could get up unnoticed. Mary Moorehead's bad times were becoming more and more frequent. The children had almost grown accustomed to them. When Margaret returned home from school, her mother was lying in bed, looking very pale and weak. Margaret wanted to send Robert for a doctor, but her mother said, "Not yet."

Such a grown man and your mother... When they say "no", what will you do?

Tar continued to push dominoes around the table, glancing at his sister every now and then. The thoughts kept coming. "Harry Greene may not have Ike Freer's speed, but he's got a head. A good head will tell you everything, in the end. I like a man who knows what he's doing. I think there are ballplayers in the major leagues who are, sure, boneheads, but that doesn't matter. You take a man who can do a lot with the little he's got. I like one guy.

Dick was in the village, painting the interior of a new house built by Harry Fitzsimmons. He took a contract job. When Dick took a contract job, he almost never made money.

He couldn't understand [a lot].

In any case, it kept him busy.

On a night like this, you're sitting at home playing dominoes with your sister. What difference does it make who wins?

Every now and then, Margaret or Tar would go and put wood in the stove. It would rain outside, and the wind would come in through a crack under the door. The Moorheads' houses always had holes like that. You could throw a cat in them. In the winter, Mother, Tar, and John would go around, nailing down the cracks with strips of wood and pieces of cloth. This kept out the cold.

Time passed, perhaps an hour. It felt longer. The fears Tar had been experiencing for a year were shared by John and Margaret. You keep thinking you're the only one thinking and feeling things, but if you are, you're a fool. Others are thinking the same thoughts. General Grant's "Memoirs" recounts how, when a man asked him if he was afraid before going into battle, he replied, "Yes, but I know the other man is afraid too." Tar remembered little about General Grant, but he remembered this.

Suddenly, on the night Mary Moorehead died, Margaret did something. While they were sitting playing dominoes, they heard their mother's ragged breathing in the next room. The sound was soft and intermittent. Margaret stood up mid-game and tiptoed quietly to the door. She listened for a while, hidden from her mother's view, then returned to the kitchen and signaled to Tara.

She was very excited just sitting there. That's all.

It was raining outside, and her coat and hat were lying upstairs, but she didn't try to get them. Tar wanted her to take his cap, but she refused.

The two children emerged from the house, and Tar immediately realized what was going on. They walked down the street to Dr. Rifi's office without speaking to each other.

Dr. Rifi wasn't there. There was a sign on the door that said, "Back at 10." It might have been there for two or three days. A doctor like that, with little practice and little ambition, is rather careless.

"He might be with Judge Blair," Tar said, and they went there.

At a time when you're afraid something will happen, you should think back to other times when you were scared and everything turned out okay. That's the best way.

So you go to the doctor, and your mother is going to die, though you don't know it yet. The other people you meet on the street act the same as always. You can't blame them.

Tar and Margaret approached Judge Blair's house, both soaking wet, Margaret without a coat or hat. A man was buying something at Tiffany's. Another man walked along with a shovel over his shoulder. What do you think he was digging on such a night? Two men argued in the hallway of City Hall. They went out into the hallway to stay dry. "I said it happened on Easter. He denied it. He doesn't read the Bible."

What did they talk about?

"The reason Harry Greene is a better baseball pitcher than Ike Freer is because he's more of a man. Some men are just born strong. There were great pitchers in the major leagues who didn't have much speed or curve either. They just stood there and ate noodles, and it went on for a long time. They lasted twice as long as those who had nothing but strength."

The best writers [to be found] in the newspapers Tar sold were those who wrote about ballplayers and sports. They had something to say. If you read them every day, you learned something.

Margaret was soaking wet. If her mother knew she was out like this, without a coat or hat, she would be worried. People were walking under umbrellas. It seemed like a long time had passed since Tar had returned home after picking up his papers. Sometimes you get that feeling. Some days fly by. Sometimes so much happens in ten minutes that it feels like hours. It's like two racehorses fighting in the lot, at a ballgame, when someone is at bat, two men out of the game, two men maybe on the bases.

Margaret and Tar arrived at Judge Blair's house, and sure enough, the doctor was there. It was warm and bright inside, but they didn't go in. The judge came to the door, and Margaret said, "Please tell the doctor that mother is ill," and barely had she finished the words when the doctor came out. He walked with the two children, and as they were leaving the judge's house, the judge came up and patted Tar on the back. "You're wet," he said. He never spoke to Margaret at all.

The children took the doctor home with them and then went upstairs. They wanted to pretend to their mother that the doctor had come by chance-to call.

They climbed the stairs as quietly as possible, and when Tar entered the room where he slept with John and Robert, he undressed and put on dry clothes. He put on his Sunday suit. It was the only one he had that was dry.

Downstairs, he heard his mother and the doctor talking. He didn't know the doctor had told his mother about the rainy drive. What happened was this: Dr. Reefy approached the stairs and called him down. No doubt he intended to call both children. He gave a soft whistle, and Margaret emerged from her room, dressed in dry clothes, just like Tar. She, too, had to put on her best clothes. None of the other children heard the doctor's call.

They came down and stood by the bed, and their mother talked for a while. "I'm fine. Nothing will happen. Don't worry," she said. She meant it, too. She must have thought she was fine until the very end. The good thing was that if she had to go, she could do it like this, just slip away while she slept.

She said she wouldn't die, but she did. After she'd spoken a few words to the children, they returned upstairs, but Tar didn't sleep for a long time. Neither did Margaret. Tar never asked her about it after that, but he knew she hadn't done it.

When you're in that state, you can't sleep, what do you do? Some people try one thing, some another. Tar had heard of sheep-counting schemes and sometimes tried that when he was too excited [or upset] to sleep, but he couldn't do it. He tried a lot of other things.

You can imagine yourself growing up and becoming who you'd like to be. You can imagine yourself a major league baseball pitcher, a railroad engineer, or a race car driver. You're an engineer, it's dark and raining, and your locomotive is rocking along the tracks. It's best not to imagine yourself the hero of an accident or something else. Just focus your gaze on the tracks ahead. You cut through the wall of darkness. Now you're among the trees, now in open country. Of course, when you're an engineer like that, you always drive a fast passenger train. You don't want to be messing around with cargo.

You think about this and so much more. That night, Tar heard his mother and the doctor talking from time to time. Sometimes it seemed like they were laughing. He couldn't tell. Perhaps it was just the wind outside the house. One day, he was absolutely sure he heard the doctor running across the kitchen floor. Then he thought he heard the door open and close softly.

Perhaps he heard nothing at all.

The worst part for Tara, Margaret, John, and all of them was the next day, and the next, and the next. A house full of people, a sermon to be preached, a man carrying a coffin, a trip to the cemetery. Margaret came out the best of it. She worked around the house. They couldn't get her to stop. The woman said, "No, let me do it," but Margaret didn't respond. She was white and kept her lips pressed tightly together. She went and did it herself.

People, whole worlds of people, came to the house that Tar had never seen.

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CHAPTER XXII


THE strangest THING What happened the day after the funeral. Tar was walking down the street, returning from school. School let out at four, and the train with the papers didn't come in until five. He walked down the street and passed a vacant lot by Wilder's barn, and there, in the parking lot, some town [boys] were playing ball. Clark Wilder, the Richmond boy, was there, and many others. When your mother dies, you don't play ball for a long time. It's not showing proper respect. Tar knew it. The others knew [too].

Tar stopped. The strange thing was that he'd been playing ball that day as if nothing had happened. Well, not exactly. He'd never intended to play. What he'd done surprised him and the others. They all knew about his mother's death.

The boys were playing "Three Old Cats," and Bob Mann was pitching. He had a pretty good curveball, a good shot, and excellent speed for a twelve-year-old.

Tar climbed the fence, crossed the field, walked right up to the batter, and snatched the bat right out of his hands. Any other time, there would have been a scandal. When you play Three Old Cats, you have to first pitch, then hold base, then pitch and catch the ball before you can hit the ball.

Tara didn't care. He took the bat from Clark Wilder's hands and stood at the plate. He began to taunt Bob Mann. "Let's see how you lay that down. Let's see what you've got. Go ahead. Drive 'em in."

Bob threw one, then another, and Tar hit the second. It was a home run, and when he rounded the bases, he immediately picked up the bat and hit another, even though it wasn't his turn. The others let him. They didn't say a word.

Tar screamed, taunted the others, and acted like a madman, but no one cared. After about five minutes, he left as suddenly as he'd arrived.

After this act, he went to the train station that very day after his mother's funeral. Well, there was no train.

There were several empty freight cars parked on the railroad tracks near Sid Gray's elevator at the station, and Tar climbed into one of the cars.

At first, he thought he'd like to get on one of those machines and fly away, he didn't care where. Then he thought of something else. The machines were supposed to be loaded with grain. They were parked right next to the elevator and next to the barn, where an old blind horse stood, walking in circles to keep the machinery running, lifting the grain to the top of the building.

The grain rose up and then fell through a chute into the machines. They could fill the machine in no time. All they had to do was pull a lever, and the grain fell down.

It would be nice, Tar thought, to stay in the car and be buried under the grain. It wasn't the same as being buried under the cold earth. Grain was a good material, pleasant to hold in your hand. It was a golden-yellow substance, it flowed like rain, burying you deep where you couldn't breathe, and you would die.

Tar lay on the car floor for what seemed like a long time, contemplating such a death for himself, and then, rolling over, saw an old horse in his barn. The horse stared at him with blind eyes.

Tar looked at the horse, and the horse looked back at him. He heard the train carrying his papers approach, but he didn't move. Now he was crying so hard he was almost blind. "It's good," he thought, "to cry where neither the other Moorehead children nor the boys in town can see." All the Moorehead children felt something similar. At a time like this, one shouldn't expose oneself.

Tar lay in the carriage until the train came and went, and then, wiping his eyes, crawled out.

The people who had come out to meet the train were leaving down the street. Now, at the Moorhead house, Margaret would return from school and do chores. John was at the factory. John wasn't particularly happy about it, but he continued to do his work anyway. Business had to go on.

Sometimes you just had to keep going, not knowing why, like a blind old horse lifting grain into a building.

As for the people walking down the street, perhaps some of them will need a newspaper.

The boy, if he was any good, had to do his job well. He needed to get up and hurry. As they waited for the funeral, Margaret didn't want to expose herself, so she pressed her lips tightly together and got to work. It was a good thing Tar couldn't lie shaking in the empty freight car. What he needed to do was bring home all the money he could. God knew they'd need it all. He needed to get to work.

These thoughts were running through Tar Moorehead's head as he grabbed a stack of newspapers and, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, ran down the street.

Although he didn't know it, Tar may have been whisked away from his childhood at that very moment.

END

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Beyond desire


Published in 1932, Beyond Desire draws attention to the plight of workers in the American South, depicting the harsh conditions endured by men, women, and children working in textile factories. The novel has been compared to the works of Henry Roth and John Steinbeck, who similarly highlighted the social and economic inequality that led to dire hardships for the American working class and similarly championed communism as a possible solution to these struggles, particularly in light of the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929.

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Cover of the first edition

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CONTENT

BOOK ONE. YOUTH

1

2

3

BOOK TWO. THE MILL GIRLS

1

2

BOOK THREE. ETHEL

1

2

3

4

5

BOOK FOUR. BEYOND DESIRE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9


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Eleanor Gladys Copenhaver, whom Anderson married in 1933. The film Beyond Desire is dedicated to her.

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TO

ELENOR

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BOOK ONE. YOUTH

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1


N. EIL BRADLEY WROTE letters to his friend Red Oliver. Neil said he was going to marry a woman from Kansas City. She was a revolutionary, and when Neil first met her, he didn't know whether he was one or not. He said:

"Here's the thing, Red. You remember that empty feeling we had when we were in school together. I don't think you liked it when you were here, but I did. I had it all the way through college and after I came home. I can't talk much about it with Mom and Dad. They wouldn't understand. It would hurt them.

"I think," Neil said, "that all of us young men and women who have any life in us have that now."

Neil spoke of God in his letter. "It was a little strange," Red thought, coming from Neil. He must have gotten it from his woman. "We can't hear His voice or feel Him on earth," he said. He thought perhaps the old men and women of America had something he and Red were missing. They had "God," whatever that meant to them. The early New Englanders, who were so intellectually dominant and who so greatly influenced the thinking of the entire country, must have thought they really did have a God.

If they had what they had, Neil and Red would, in a sense, be significantly weakened and washed out. Neil thought so. Religion, he said, was now like old clothes, thinned and with all the colors washed out. People still wore old dresses, but they no longer kept them warm. People needed warmth, Neil thought, they needed romance, and above all, the romance of feelings, the thought of trying to go somewhere.

People, he said, need to hear voices coming from outside.

Science also caused hell, and cheap popular knowledge... or what was called knowledge... now spread everywhere caused even more hell.

There was too much emptiness in affairs, in churches, in government, he said in one of his letters.

The Bradley farm was near Kansas City, and Neil visited the city often. He met the woman he planned to marry. He tried to describe her to Red, but he failed. He described her as full of energy. She was a schoolteacher and had started reading books. She became first a socialist, then a communist. She had ideas.

First, she and Neil should live together for a while before deciding to marry. She thought they should sleep together, get used to each other. So Neil, a young farmer living on his father's farm in Kansas, began living secretly with her. She was small and dark-haired, Red realized. "She feels a little unfair to talk about her to you, to another man... perhaps you'll meet her someday and think about what I've said," he said in one of his letters. "But I feel I must," he said. Neil was one of the more sociable ones. He could be more open and outspoken in letters than Red, and was less shy about sharing his feelings.

He talked about everything. The woman he'd met had moved into a house belonging to some very respectable, fairly wealthy people in town. The man was the treasurer of a small manufacturing company. They'd hired a schoolteacher. She stayed there for the summer, while school was closed. She said, "The first two or three years should show." She wanted to go through them with Neil without marriage.

"Of course, we can't sleep there together," Neil said, referring to the house she lived in. When he arrived in Kansas City-his father's farm was close enough that he could drive there in an hour-Neil went to the treasurer's house. There was something akin to humor in Neil's letters describing such evenings.

There was a woman in that house, small and dark, a true revolutionary. She resembled Neil, the farmer's son who had gone to college in the East, and Red Oliver. She came from a respectable churchgoing family in small-town Kansas. She had graduated from high school and then gone to a public school. "Most young women of that type are rather dull," Neil said, but this one was not. From the very beginning, she sensed that she would have to face not only the problem of the individual woman but also a social problem. From Neil's letters, Red concluded that she was alert and tense. "She has a beautiful little body," he said in a letter to Red. "I admit," he said, "that when I write such words to another person, they mean nothing."

He said he believed any woman's body became beautiful to a man who loved her. He began touching her body, and she allowed him to do so. Modern girls sometimes went quite far with young men. It was a way to educate themselves. Hands on their bodies. That such things happened was almost universally accepted, even among older, more fearful fathers and mothers. A young man tried it with a young woman, and then perhaps abandoned her, and she perhaps tried it a few times, too.

Neil went to the house where a schoolteacher lived in Kansas City. The house was on the outskirts of town, so Neil, who was visiting his wife, didn't have to travel through town. The four of them-he, the schoolteacher, the treasurer, and his wife-sat on the porch for a while.

On rainy nights, they would sit, playing cards or talking-the treasurer with his affairs, and Neil with the farmer's. The treasurer was quite an intellectual man... "of the old kind," Neil said. Such people could even be liberal, very liberal... in their own minds, not in reality. If only they knew it, sometimes after they'd gone to bed... on the porch of the house or inside, on the sofa. "She sits on the edge of the low porch, and I kneel on the grass at the edge of the porch... She's like an open flower."

She told Neil, "I can't begin to live, to think, to know what I want beyond a man until I have a man of my own." Red realized that the small, dark schoolteacher Neil had found belonged to some new world he himself longed to enter. Neil's letters about her... despite the fact that at times they were very personal... Neil even tried to describe the sensation in his fingers when he touched her body, the warmth of her body, her sweetness to him. Red himself longed with all his being to find such a woman, but he never did. Neil's letters made him yearn for some kind of relationship with life that would be sensual and carnal, but go beyond mere flesh. Neil tried to express this in the letters he wrote to his friend.

Red had male friends, too. Men came to him, sometimes even earlier, pouring themselves out to him. Eventually, he realized he himself had never really had a woman.

Whether Neil was on a farm in Kansas or heading into town in the evening to visit his woman, he seemed full of life, rich in life. He worked on his father's farm. His father was getting old. Soon he would die or retire, and the farm would belong to Neil. It was a pleasant farm in a rich and pleasant country. Farmers, like Neil's father and like Neil would be, made little money but lived well. His father managed to send Neil East to college, where he met Red Oliver. The two played on the same college baseball team: Neil at second base and Red at shortstop. Oliver, Bradley, and Smith. Zip! Together they made a good double play.

Red went to a farm in Kansas and stayed there for several weeks. This was before Neil met a schoolteacher in town.

Neil was a radical back then. He had radical thoughts. One day, Red asked him, "Are you going to be a farmer like your father?"

"Yes."

"Would you give up ownership of this?" Red asked. They were standing at the edge of a cornfield that day. Such was the magnificent corn grown on that farm. Neil's father raised cattle. In the fall, he grew corn and stacked it in large cribs. Then he went West and bought steers, which he brought back to the farm to fatten up over the winter. The corn wasn't taken off the farm for sale, but fed to the cattle, and the rich manure that accumulated over the winter was then hauled away and spread on the land. "Would you give up ownership of all this?"

"Yeah, I think so," Neil said. He laughed. "It's true they might have to take it away from me," he said.

Even then, ideas had already occurred to Neil. He wouldn't have openly called himself a communist then, as he later did in letters, under the influence of this woman.

It's not that he was afraid.

But yes, he was afraid. Even after he met the schoolteacher and wrote letters to Red, he was afraid of hurting his parents. Red didn't blame him for that. He remembered Neil's parents as good, honest, and kind people. Neil had an older sister who married a young neighboring farmer. She was a big, strong, and good woman, like her mother, and she loved Neil very much and was proud of him. When Red was in Kansas that summer, she came home with her husband one weekend and talked to Red about Neil. "I'm glad he went to college and got an education," she said. She was also glad that her brother, despite his education, wanted to return home and become a simple farmer like the rest of them. She said she thought Neil was smarter than everyone else and had a broader outlook.

Neil said, speaking of the farm he would someday inherit, "Yeah, I think I'd give it up that way," he said. "I think I'd be a good farmer. I enjoy farming." He said he sometimes dreamed of his father's fields at night. "I'm always planning and planning," he said. He said he planned what he would do with each field years in advance. "I'd give it up because I can't give it up," he said. "People can never leave the land." He meant he intended to be a very capable farmer. "What difference would it make to people like me if the land finally went to the government? They'd need the kind of people I plan to make them."

There were other farmers in the area, not as capable as he was. What did it matter? "It would be wonderful to expand," Neil said. "I wouldn't ask for any payment if they let me do it. All I ask is for my life."

"They wouldn"t let you do that, though," Red said.

"And someday we'll have to force them to let us do it," Neil replied. Neil was probably a communist back then and didn't even know it.

Apparently, the woman he found had given him some information. They'd worked something out together. Neil wrote letters about her and his relationship with her, describing what they'd done. Sometimes, the woman lied to the treasurer and his wife, with whom she lived. She told Neil she wanted to spend the night with him.

Then she made up a story about going home for the night to her town in Kansas. She packed a bag, met Neil in town, got into his car, and they drove to some town. They checked into the same small hotel as the husband and wife. They weren't married yet, Neil said, because they both wanted to make sure. "I don't want this to make you settle, and I don't want to settle myself," she told Neil. She was afraid he might be content with being just a moderately prosperous Midwestern farmer... no better than a merchant... no better than a banker or anyone who was hungry for money, she said. She told Neil she'd tried two other men before she came to him. "All the way?" he asked her. "Of course," she said. "If," she said, "a man were consumed only with the happiness of having the woman he loved, or she was given only to him and having children..."

She became a true Red. She believed there was something beyond desire, but that desire first had to be satisfied, its wonders understood and appreciated. You had to see if it could conquer you, make you forget everything else.

But first you had to find it sweet and know that it was sweet. If you couldn't bear the sweetness of it and move on, you would be useless.

There had to be exceptional people. The woman kept telling Neil this. She thought a new time had arrived. The world was waiting for new people, a new kind of people. She didn't want Neil or herself to be big people. The world, she told him, now needed big little people, lots of them. Such people had always existed, she said, but now they had to start speaking out, asserting themselves.

She gave herself to Neil and watched him, and Red realized he was doing something similar to her. Red learned of this from Neil's letters. They would go to hotels to lie in each other's arms. When their bodies calmed, they would talk. "I think we'll get married," Neil said in a letter to Red Oliver. "Why not?" he asked. He said people had to start preparing. The revolution was coming. When it happened, it would require strong, quiet people willing to work, not just loud, ill-prepared people. He believed that every woman should start by finding her man at any cost, and every man should start by finding his woman.

"This had to be done in a new way," Neil thought, "more fearlessly than the old way." The new men and women who would have to emerge if the world was ever to become sweet again had to learn, above all, to be fearless, even reckless. They had to be lovers of life, ready to bring even life itself into play.

*

The machines in the cotton mill in Langdon, Georgia, made a soft hum. Young Red Oliver worked there. All week long, the sound continued, night and day. At night, the mill was brightly lit. Above the small plateau on which the mill stood lay the town of Langdon, a rather ramshackle place. It wasn't as squalid as it had been before the mill came, when Red Oliver was a little boy, but a boy hardly knows when a town is squalid.

How could he know? If he was a city boy, the city was his world. He knew no other world, made no comparisons. Red Oliver was a rather lonely boy. His father had been a doctor in Langdon, and his grandfather before him had been a doctor there, too, but Red's father hadn't done very well. He had faded, become rather stale, even as a young man. Becoming a doctor wasn't as difficult then as it would be later. Red's father finished his studies and started his own practice. He practiced with his father and lived with him. When his father died-doctors die too-he lived in the old doctor's house he had inherited, a rather bright old frame house with a wide porch in front. The porch was supported by tall wooden columns, originally carved to look like stone. In Red's time, they didn't look like stone. There were large cracks in the old wood, and the house hadn't been painted in a long time. There was what is called in the South a "dog run" through the house, and standing on the street in front, one could, on a summer, spring, or fall day, look straight through the house and across the hot, still cotton fields to see the Georgia Hills in the distance.

The old doctor had a small frame office in the corner of the yard next to the street, but the young doctor gave it up as an office. He had an office upstairs in one of the buildings on Main Street. Now the old office was overgrown with vines and had fallen into disrepair. It was unused, and the door had been removed. An old chair with its bottom turned out stood there. He was visible from the street as he sat there, in the dim light behind the vines.

Red came to Langdon for the summer from the school he attended in the North. At school, he knew a young man named Neil Bradley, who later wrote him letters. That summer, he worked as a laborer in a mill.

His father died the winter Red was a freshman at Northern College.

Red's father was already getting on in years at the time of his death. He didn't marry until middle age, then married a nurse. Word around town, whispers swirled, was that the woman the doctor married, Red's mother, wasn't from a very good family. She was from Atlanta and had come to Langdon, where she met Dr. Oliver on important business. At the time, there were no trained nurses in Langdon. The man, the president of the local bank, the man who would later become president of the Langdon Cotton Mill Company, a young man at the time, had fallen seriously ill. A nurse was sent for, and one came. Dr. Oliver was handling the case. It wasn't his case, but he was called in for consultation. There were only four doctors in the area at the time, and they were all called in.

Dr. Oliver met a nurse, and they got married. The townspeople raised eyebrows. "Was it necessary?" they asked. Apparently it wasn't. Young Red Oliver wasn't born until three years later. It turned out he was supposed to be the only child of the marriage. However, rumors swirled around town. "She must have made him believe it was necessary." Similar stories are whispered on the streets and in the homes of Southern towns, as well as in cities across the East, Midwest, and Far West.

There are always different rumors circulating on the streets and in the homes of Southern cities. Much depends on the family. "What kind of family is she or he?" As everyone knows, there was never much immigration to the Southern states, the old American slave states. Families simply continued and continued.

Many families have fallen into disrepair, broken up. In a surprising number of old Southern settlements, where no industry has sprung up, as has happened in Langdon and many other Southern towns in the last twenty-five or thirty years, there are no men left. It's very likely that such a family will have no one left but two or three strange, fussy old women. A few years ago, they would have talked constantly about the days of the Civil War, or the days before the Civil War, the good old days when the South really was somebody. They would have told you stories of Northern generals who carried off their silver spoons and were otherwise cruel and brutal to them. That kind of old Southern woman is practically extinct now. Those who remain live somewhere in town or in the country, in an old house. It was once a large house, or at least a house that would have been considered grand in the South in the old days. In front of Oliver's house, wooden columns support a porch. Two or three old women live there. No doubt, after the Civil War, the same thing happened to the South as happened to New England. The more energetic young people left. After the Civil War, the people in power in the North, the people who came to power after Lincoln's death and after Andrew Johnson was out of the way, were afraid of losing their power. They passed laws giving blacks the vote, hoping to control them. For a time, they controlled the situation. There was the so-called reconstruction period, which was in fact a time of destruction, more bitter than the war years.

But now anyone who's read American history knows this. Nations live like individuals. Perhaps it's best not to delve too deeply into the lives of most people. Even Andrew Johnson now enjoys the favor of historians. In Knoxville, Tennessee, where he was once hated and ridiculed, a large hotel is now named after him. He is no longer considered simply a drunken traitor, accidentally elected and serving for a few years as president until a real president was appointed.

In the South, too, despite the rather amusing idea of Greek culture, undoubtedly adopted because both Greek and Southern cultures were founded on slavery-a culture that in the South never developed into an art form, as in ancient Greece, but remained merely an empty declaration on the lips of a few solemn Southerners in long coats, and the notion of a special chivalry peculiar to the Southerner probably arose, as Mark Twain once declared, from reading too much Sir Walter Scott... these things have been and are still being talked about in the South. Little stabs are made. It is supposed to be a civilization that places great emphasis on family, and that is the vulnerable spot. "There's a touch of tar pot in such-and-such a family." Heads wag.

They swerved toward young Dr. Oliver, and then toward middle-aged Dr. Oliver, who had suddenly married a nurse. There was a woman of color in Langdon who insisted on having children. Young Oliver was her doctor. He often, for several years, came to her home, a small cabin on a country road behind Oliver's house. Oliver's house once stood on Langdon's best street. It was the last house before the cotton fields began, but later, after the cotton mill was built, after new people began to move in, after new buildings and new stores were erected on Main Street, the best people began to build on the other side of town.

The colored woman, a tall, straight, yellow woman with beautiful shoulders and a straight head, didn't work. People said she was a black man's negress, not a white man's negress. She had once been married to a young black man, but he had disappeared. Perhaps she had driven him away.

The doctor often came to her house. She didn't work. She lived simply, but she lived. The doctor's car was occasionally seen parked on the road in front of her house, even late at night.

Was she sick? People smiled. Southerners don't like to talk about such things, especially when strangers are around. Among themselves... - Well, you know. The words carried. One of the yellow woman's children was almost white. It was a boy who disappeared later, after the time we are now writing about, when Red Oliver was also a little boy. Of all those old shaking heads, both male and female, the whispers of summer nights, the doctor saw him ride out there, even after he had a wife and a son... of all those insinuations, knife-like attacks against his father in the town of Langdon, Red Oliver knew nothing.

Perhaps Dr. Oliver's wife, Red's mother, knew. Perhaps she chose to say nothing. She had a brother in Atlanta who, a year after she married Dr. Oliver, got into trouble. He worked at a bank, stole some money, and went off with a married woman. They caught him later. His name and photo were in the Atlanta newspapers distributed in Langdon. His sister's name, however, was not mentioned. If Dr. Oliver saw the item, he said nothing, and she said nothing. She was a rather taciturn woman by nature, and after her marriage, she became even quieter and more reserved.

Then suddenly she started going to church regularly. She was converted. One evening when Red was in high school, she went to church alone. There was a revivalist in town, a Methodist revivalist. Red always remembered that evening.

It was a late autumn evening, and Red was set to graduate from the city's high school the following spring. That evening, he was invited to a party and was supposed to escort a young woman. He dressed early and followed her. His relationship with this particular young woman had been fleeting and never had any significance. His father was absent. After his marriage, he began drinking.

He was the kind of man who drinks alone. He didn't get helplessly drunk, but when he got so drunk that he was somewhat incoherent and inclined to stumble when he walked, he would carry a bottle with him, drinking secretly, and often remain in this state for a week. In his youth, he had been generally a rather talkative man, careless about his clothes, liked as a person, but not very respected as a doctor, a man of science... who, to be truly successful, perhaps, should always be a little solemn in appearance and a little dull... doctors, to be truly successful, must develop a certain attitude towards the laity from an early age... they should always appear a little mysterious, not talk too much... people like to be a little mocked by doctors... Dr. Oliver didn't do such things. Let's say an incident occurred that puzzled him a little. He went to see a sick man or woman. He went in to see her.

When he emerged, the sick woman's relatives were there. Something was wrong inside. She was in pain, and had a high fever. Her people were worried and upset. God knows what they were hoping for. They may have hoped she would recover, but then again...

There's no point in going into it. People are people. They gathered around the doctor. "What's wrong, doctor? Will she get better? Is she very ill?"

"Yes. Yes." Dr. Oliver might have smiled. He was puzzled. "I don't know what happened to that woman. How the hell should I know?"

Sometimes he even laughed right in the faces of the worried people standing around him. This happened because he was slightly embarrassed. He always laughed or frowned at inappropriate moments. After he got married and started drinking, he even sometimes giggled in the very presence of the sick. He didn't mean to. The doctor wasn't stupid. For example, when talking to laypeople, he didn't call illnesses by their familiar names. He managed to remember the names of even the most common ailments that no one knew about. There are always long, complicated names, usually derived from Latin. He remembered them. He learned them in school.

But even with Dr. Oliver, there were people he got along with very well. Several people in Langdon understood him. After he became increasingly unsuccessful and more often half-drunk, several men and women joined him. However, they were most likely very poor and usually strange. There were even a few men and older women to whom he confided his failure. "I'm no good. I don't understand why anyone hires me," he said. When he said this, he tried to laugh, but it didn't work. "Good God Almighty, did you see that? I almost cried. I'm getting sentimental about myself. I'm filled with self-pity," he sometimes told himself after being with someone he sympathized with; in this way, he let the situation go.

One evening when young Red Oliver, then a schoolboy, went to a party, escorting a young senior, a pretty girl with a long, slender young body... she had soft, fair hair and breasts that were just beginning to blossom, breasts he had just seen unbutton the soft, clinging summer dress she was wearing... her hips were very slender, like a boy's hips... that evening he came down from his room upstairs in Oliver's house, and there was his mother, dressed all in black. He had never seen her dressed like that before. It was a new dress.

There were days when Red's mother, a tall, strong woman with a long, sad face, barely spoke to either her son or her husband. She had a certain look. It was as if she said out loud, "Well, I got myself into this. I came to this town not expecting to stay, and I met this doctor. He was much older than me. I married him.

"My people may not be many. I had a brother who got into trouble and went to prison. Now I have a son.

"I've gotten into this and will now do my job as best I can. I'll try to get back on my feet. I'm not asking anyone for anything."

The soil in Oliver's yard was rather sandy, and little grew in it, but after Dr. Oliver's wife moved in with him, she always tried to grow flowers. Every year she failed, but with the arrival of the new year, she tried again.

Old Doctor Oliver had always belonged to the Presbyterian Church in Langdon, and although the younger man, Red's father, never went to church, if asked about his church connections, he would have called himself a Presbyterian.

"Are you going out, Mom?" Red asked her that evening, coming down from the top floor and seeing her like this. "Yes," she said, "I'm going to church." She didn't ask him to go with her or where he was going. She saw him dressed for the occasion. If she was curious, she suppressed it.

That evening, she went alone to the Methodist church, where a revival was in progress. Red passed by the church with a young woman he'd taken to a party. She was the daughter of one of the town's so-called "real families," a slender young woman and, as already mentioned, quite seductive. Red was thrilled simply to be with her. He wasn't in love and, in fact, never had been with this young woman after that evening. However, he felt something inside him, small fleeting thoughts, half-desires, a budding hunger. Later, when he returned from college to work in a cotton mill in Langdon as a common laborer, after the death of his father and the Oliver family fortune, he hardly expected to be asked to accompany this special young woman to the party. By chance, she turned out to be the daughter of the very man whose illness had brought his mother to Langdon, the very man who later became president of the Langdon Mill, where Red became a laborer. В тот вечер он шел вместе с ней, идя на вечеринку, прождав полчаса на ступеньках перед домом ее отца, пока она в последнюю минуту делала некоторые женские приведения в порядок, и они прошли мимо методистской церкви, где проводилось собрание пробуждения. Там был проповедник, незнакомец из города, привезенный в город для пробуждения, довольно вульгарного вида человек с лысой головой и большими черными усами, и он уже начал проповедовать. Он действительно кричал. Методисты в Лэнгдоне сделали это. Они кричали. "Как негры", - сказала Рэду в тот вечер девушка, с которой он был. Она этого не сказала. "Как негры", - вот что она сказала. "Послушайте их", - сказала она. В ее голосе было презрение. Она не ходила в среднюю школу в Лэнгдоне, а посещала женскую семинарию где-то недалеко от Атланты. Она была дома в гостях, потому что ее мать заболела. Рэд не знал, почему его попросили сопроводить ее на вечеринку. He thought, "I guess I could ask my father to lend me his car." He never asked. The doctor's car was cheap and quite old.

White people in a little frame church on a side street listen to a preacher shouting, "Get God, I tell you, you're lost unless you get God.

"This is your chance. Don't put it off.

"You are miserable. If you don't have God, you are lost. What do you get out of life? Get God, I tell you."

That night, that voice rang in Red's ears. For some unknown reason, he would always later recall the small street in the southern town and the walk to the house where a party was being held that evening. He'd taken a young woman to the party and then walked her home. He later recalled how relieved he was when he emerged from the small street where the Methodist church stood. No other church in town was holding services that evening. His own mother must have been there.

Most of the Methodists at that particular Methodist church in Langdon were poor whites. The men who worked at the cotton mill attended church there. There was no church in the village where the mill was located, but the church stood on mill property, though it was outside the village limits and right next to the mill president's house. The mill contributed most of the money for the church's construction, but townspeople were completely free to attend. The mill even paid half the salary of the regular preacher. Red walked past the church with a girl on Main Street. People talked to Red. The men he passed bowed with great ceremony to the young woman he was with.

Red, already a tall boy and still growing rapidly, wore a new hat and a new suit. He felt awkward and a little ashamed of something. He later recalled this as mixed with a feeling of shame for being ashamed. He continued to pass people he knew. Under the bright lights, a man on a mule rode down Main Street. "Hello, Red," he called. "How absurd," Red thought. "I don't even know this man. I suppose it's some smart guy who saw me playing baseball."

He was shy and timid when tipping his hat to people. His hair was fiery red, and he had let it grow too long. "It needed a haircut," he thought. He had large freckles on his nose and cheeks, the kind of freckles that red-haired young men often have.

Indeed, Red was popular in town, more popular than he thought. He was on the high school baseball team back then, the team's best player. He loved playing baseball, but he hated, as he always did, the fuss people made about baseball when they weren't playing. When he hit a long shot, maybe reaching third base, there would be people nearby, usually fairly quiet people, running up and down the baselines, yelling. He'd stand on third base, and people would even come up and clap him on the shoulder. "Damn fools," he thought. He loved the fuss they made about him, and he hated it.

Just as he enjoyed being with this girl and at the same time wished he couldn't. An awkward feeling arose that truly lasted all evening, until he brought her home from the party safe and sound in her own home. If only a man could touch a girl like that. Red had never done anything like that back then.

Почему его матери вдруг вздумалось пойти в эту церковь? Девушка, с которой он был, презирала людей, которые ходили в церковь. "Они кричат, как негры, не так ли", - сказала она. Они тоже это сделали. Он отчетливо слышал голос проповедника, доносившийся до Мейн-стрит. Мальчика поставили в странное положение. Он не мог презирать собственную мать. Странно было, что она вдруг решила пойти в эту церковь. Возможно, подумал он, она ушла просто из любопытства или потому, что ей вдруг стало одиноко.

*

SHE didn't. Red learned this later that evening. He finally brought the young woman home from a party. It was held at the home of a minor mill official, whose sons and daughters also attended the town high school. Red took the young woman home, and they stood together for a moment at the front door of the man who had once been a banker and was now a successful mill president. It was the most impressive house in Langdon.

There was a large courtyard, shaded by trees and planted with shrubs. The young woman he was with was genuinely pleased with him, but he didn't know it. She thought he was the most handsome young man at the party. He was big and strong.

She wasn't taking him seriously, though. She'd practiced on him a little, as young women do; even his shyness around her was pleasant, she thought. She'd used her eyes. There are certain subtle things a young woman can do with her body. It's allowed. She knows how. You don't have to teach her the art.

Red walked into her father's courtyard and stood next to her for a moment, trying to say goodnight. Finally, he made an awkward speech. Her eyes looked at him. They grew soft.

"That's nonsense. I wouldn't be interested in her," he thought. She wasn't particularly interested. She stood on the bottom step of her father's house, her head thrown back slightly, then lowered, and her gaze met his. Her small, undeveloped breasts protruded. Red rubbed his fingers along the legs of his pants. His hands were big and strong; they could grab a baseball. They could make a ball spin. He would like... with her... right then...

There's no point in thinking about it. "Good night. I had a great time," he said. What a word I used! He didn't have a very good time at all. He went home.

He returned home and went to bed when something happened. Although he didn't know it, his father hadn't returned home yet.

Red quietly entered the house, went upstairs, and undressed, thinking about that girl. After that night, he never thought about her again. After that, other girls and women came to him to do the same to him as she had. She had no intention, at least not consciously, of doing anything to him.

He lay on the bed and suddenly clenched the fingers of his rather large hands into fists. He writhed in the bed. "God, I wish... Who wouldn't..."

She was such a flexible, completely undeveloped creature, this girl. A man could have taken one like her.

"Suppose a man could make a woman out of her. How is that done?

"How absurd, really. Who am I to call myself a man?" Certainly, Red had no such definite thoughts as those expressed here. He lay in bed, quite tense, being a man, being young, being with a young woman with a slender figure in a soft dress... eyes that could suddenly become soft... small, firm breasts protruding.

Red heard his mother's voice. Never before had Oliver's house heard such a sound. She was praying, emitting quiet sobs. Red heard the words.

Getting out of bed, he quietly approached the stairs that led to the floor below, where his father and mother slept. They had slept there together for as long as he could remember. After that night, they stopped . After that, Red's father, like him, slept in the room above. Whether his mother had said to his father after that night, "Go away. I don't want to sleep with you anymore," Red, of course, didn't know.

He walked down the stairs and listened to the voice below. There was no doubt it was his mother's voice. She was crying, sobbing even. She was praying. The words came from her. The words echoed through the quiet house. "He's right. Life is what he says. A woman gets nothing. I won't continue."

"I don't care what they say. I'll join them. They're my people.

"God, You help me. Lord, help me. Jesus, You help me."

These were the words spoken by Red Oliver's mother. She attended this church and converted to religion.

She was ashamed to tell them at church how touched she was. Now she was safe in her own home. She knew her husband hadn't returned home, didn't know Red had arrived, hadn't heard him come in. Her brothers, she went to Sunday school. "Jesus," she said in a low, strained voice, "I know about You. They say You sat with the publicans and sinners. Sit with me.

In fact, there was something Negro about the way Red's mother spoke so familiarly to God.

"Come and sit here with me. I want You, Jesus." The sentences were interrupted by groans and sobs. She continued for a long time, and her son sat in the darkness on the stairs and listened. He was not particularly touched by her words, and even felt ashamed, thinking: "If she wanted to achieve this, why didn't she go to the Presbyterians?" But beyond this feeling, there was another. He was filled with boyish sadness and forgot the young woman who had consumed his thoughts just a few minutes earlier. He thought only of his mother, suddenly falling in love with her. He wanted to go to her.

Sitting barefoot and in his pajamas on Red's steps that evening, he heard his father's car pull up to the street in front of the house. He left it there every night, standing there. He approached the house. Red couldn't see him in the dark, but he could hear him. The doctor was probably a little drunk. He tripped on the steps leading to the porch.

If Red's mother had converted to religion, she would have done the same thing she did when she grew flowers in the sandy soil of the Olivers' front yard. She might not be able to get Jesus to come and sit with her as she asked, but she would keep trying. She was a determined woman. And so it turned out. A revivalist later came to the house and prayed with her, but when he did, Red stepped aside. He saw a man approaching.

That night, he sat for long minutes in the darkness on the stairs, listening. A shudder ran through him. His father opened the front door and stood with the doorknob in his hand. He listened too; the minutes seemed to drag slower and slower. The husband must have been as surprised and shocked as his son. When he opened the door a crack, a little light came in from the street. Red could see his father's figure, dimly outlined down there. Then, after what seemed a long time, the door closed softly. He heard the soft sound of his father's footsteps on the porch. The doctor must have fallen while trying to get down from the porch into the yard. "Damn it," he said. Red heard those words very clearly. His mother continued to pray. He heard his father's car start. He was going somewhere for the night. "God, this is too much for me," he may have thought. Red didn't know. He sat and listened for a moment, his body trembling, and then the voice from his mother's room faded. He silently climbed the stairs again, went to his room, and lay down on his bed. His bare feet made no sound. He no longer thought about the girl he'd been with that evening. He thought instead of his mother. There she was, alone, just like him. A strange, tender feeling filled him. He'd never felt like this before. He really wanted to cry like a little child, but instead he simply lay on his bed, staring into the darkness of his room in Oliver's house.

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2


RED OLIVER HAMEL gained a new sympathy for his mother, and perhaps a new understanding of her. Perhaps working in a factory for the first time helped. His mother had undoubtedly been looked down upon by the people Langdon called "better people," and after she converted to religion and joined a church attended by factory workers, screaming Methodists, moaning Methodists, and Georgia Crackers, who now worked in a mill and lived in a row of rather meaningless houses on the lower plateau below town, her stock hadn't improved.

Red started out as a common laborer at the mill. When he went to the mill president to apply for the job, he seemed pleased. "That's right. Don't be afraid to start at the bottom," he said. He called the mill foreman. "Give this young man a place," he said. The foreman demurred slightly. "But we don't need any men."

"I know. You will find a place for him. You will take him on.

The plant president made a little speech. "Just remember this; after all, he"s a Southern boy." The factory manager, a tall, stooped man who had come to Langdon from a New England state, didn"t quite grasp the significance of this. He may even have said to himself, "So what?" Northerners who come to live in the South get tired of Southern talk. "He"s a Southern boy. What the hell? What difference does it make? I"m running a store. A man is a man. He does his job the way I want it, or he doesn"t. What do I care who his parents were or where he was born?"

"In New England, where I come from, they don't say, 'Be careful with that tender little sprout.'" He's a New Englander.

"In the Middle West, things like that don't get out of hand either. 'His grandfather was such-and-such, or his grandmother was such-and-such.'"

"To hell with his grandparents.

"You're asking me to get results. I've noticed that you Southerners, despite all your big talk, want results. You want profit. Be careful. Don't you dare pit your Southern cousins or other poor relatives against me.

"If you want to hire them, keep them here in your damn office."

The manager of the Langdon store, when Red first started working there, probably thought something like this. As you, the reader, might have guessed, he never said anything of the sort out loud. He was a man with a rather impersonal face, full of enthusiasm. He loved cars, loved them almost dearly. The number of such people in America is growing.

This man had eyes of an unusual, rather dull blue, very similar to the blue cornflowers that grow in abundance along country roads in many American Midwestern states. While on duty at the mill, he walked with his long legs slightly bent and his head thrust forward. He didn't smile and never raised his voice. Later, when Red began working at the mill, he became intrigued by this man and a little frightened of him. You saw a robin standing on a green lawn after the rain. Watch him. His head is slightly turned to the side. Suddenly, he leaps forward. He quickly thrusts his beak into the soft earth. A gnarled worm emerges.

Did he hear a worm moving there, beneath the surface of the earth? It seems impossible.

A corner worm is a soft, wet, slippery thing. Perhaps the worm's movements underground slightly disturbed a few grains of surface soil.

In the Langdon workshop, the mill manager paced back and forth. He was in one of the warehouses, watching cotton being unloaded at the mill gate, then in the spinning room, then in the weaving room. He was standing by the window overlooking the river flowing beneath the mill. Suddenly his head turned. How he looked like a robin now. He darted to a certain part of the room. Some part in some machine had gone wrong. He knew. He flew there.

People apparently didn't matter to him. "Here you are. What's your name?" he would say to a worker, a woman, or a child. There were quite a few children working at this mill. He never noticed it. Over the course of a week, he would ask the same worker's name several times. Sometimes he would fire a man or a woman. "Here you are. You are no longer needed here. Get out." The mill worker knew what that meant. Rumors about the mill were common. The worker quickly left. He hid. Others helped. Soon he returned to his former place. The boss didn't notice, and if he did, he said nothing.

In the evening, when his day's work was finished, he went home. He lived in the largest house in the mill village. Visitors were rare. He sat in an armchair and, putting his stockinged feet on another chair, began talking to his wife. "Where's the paper?" he asked. His wife received it. It was after dinner, and within a few minutes he fell asleep. He got up and went to bed. His mind was still on the mill. It was running. "I wonder what's going on there?" he thought. His wife and children were also afraid of him, although he rarely spoke rudely to them. He rarely spoke at all. "Why waste words?" he perhaps thought.

The mill president had an idea, or so he thought. He was thinking back to Red's father and grandfather. Red's grandfather had been the family doctor when he was a child. He thought, "Few young Southerners with any family would have done what this boy did. He's a good boy." Red had just arrived at the mill office. "Can I get a job, Mr. Shaw?" he said to the mill president after being admitted to Mr. Shaw's office after a ten-minute wait.

"Can I get a job?"

A faint smile flickered across the mill president's face. Who wouldn't want to be a mill president? He could provide jobs.

Every situation has its nuances. Red's father, whom the factory president ultimately knew so well, hadn't achieved success. He was a doctor. Like other people who set out on a journey through life, he had a chance. So he didn't pursue his practice and instead took up drinking. There were rumors about his morality. There was that yellow woman in the village. The factory president had heard rumors about it, too.

And then they said he married a woman beneath him. That's what people in Langdon said. They said she came from a rather lowly background. They said her father was a nobody. He ran a small general store in a working-class suburb of Atlanta, and her brother was in jail for theft.

"Still, there's no point in blaming this boy for everything," thought the plant president. How kind and fair he felt, thinking about it. He smiled. "What do you want to do, young man?" he asked.

"I don't care. I'll do the best I can." That was the right word. It all happened on a hot June day, as it was supposed to be after Red's first year at school up North. Red suddenly came to a decision. "I'll just see if I can find a job," he thought. He didn't consult anyone. He knew that the president of the factory, Thomas Shaw, knew his father. Red's father had died quite recently at the time. He went down to the factory office on a hot morning. The air was heavy and still hung heavy on Main Street when he passed. Moments like these are when you can get pregnant with a boy or a young man. He's going to work for the first time. Watch out, boy. You're starting. How, when, and where will you stop? This moment can be as significant in your life as a birth, a wedding, or a death. Tradespeople and clerks stood in the doorways of the shops on Langdon's main street. Most of them had their shirtsleeves down. Many of the shirts didn't look too clean.

In the summer, the men of Langdon wore light linen clothing. When these clothes got dirty, they had to be washed. Summers in Georgia were so hot that even those walking quickly became covered in sweat. The linen suits they wore soon sagged at the elbows and knees. They quickly became dirty.

It didn't seem to matter to many of Langdon's residents. Some wore the same dirty suit for weeks.

There was a sharp contrast between the scene on Main Street and the mill office. The Langdon mill office wasn't located within the mill itself, but stood separately. It was a new brick building with a green lawn in front and flowering bushes by the front door.

The mill was thoroughly modern. One of the reasons so many Southern mills succeeded, quickly displacing New England mills-so that after the Southern industrial boom, New England experienced a sharp industrial decline-was that the Southern mills, being newly built, installed the latest equipment. In America, when it came to machinery... a machine could be the latest thing, the most efficient, and then... five, ten, or at the latest, twenty years later...

Of course, Red didn't know about such things. He knew something vaguely. He was a child when the mill was built in Langdon. It was an almost semi-religious event. Suddenly, conversations began to erupt on the main street of the small, sleepy Southern town. Conversations were heard on the streets, in churches, even in schools. Red was a small child when it happened, a junior in the town school. He remembered it all, but vaguely. The man who was now president of the mill and who at the time was cashier of a small local bank... his father, John Shaw, was president... the young cashier had started it all.

At that time, he was a physically rather small young man with a frail frame. However, he was capable of displaying enthusiasm and inspiring others. What had happened in the North, and particularly in the great American Midwest, even during those very years of the Civil War, was beginning to happen in the South as well. Young Tom Shaw began running around small Southern towns and talking. "Look," he said, "what's happening all over the South. Look at North Carolina and South Carolina." It's true that something did happen. At that time, there was a man living in Atlanta, the editor of the local newspaper, the Daily Constitution, a man named Grady, who suddenly became the new Moses of the South. He traveled around giving speeches both North and South. He wrote editorials. The South still remembers this man. His statue stands on a public street near the Constitution office in Atlanta. Moreover, if the statue is to be believed, he was a rather short man, with a somewhat frail frame and, like Tom Shaw, a round, plump face.

Young Shaw read his Henry Grady. He began to speak. He immediately won over the churches. "It's not just about money," he continued to tell the people. "Let's forget about money for a while.

"The South is ruined," he declared. It so happened that just as people in Langdon were beginning to talk of building a cotton mill, as other towns across the South were doing, a revivalist arrived in Langdon. Like the revivalist who later converted Red Oliver's mother, he was a Methodist.

He was a man with the authority of a preacher. Like the later revivalist who came when Red was in high school, he was a large man with a mustache and a loud voice. Tow Shaw went to visit him. The two men talked. This entire part of Georgia grew practically nothing but cotton. Before the Civil War, the fields were cultivated for cotton, and they continue to be so. They wore out quickly. "Now look at it," Tom Shaw said, turning to the preacher. "Our people are getting poorer and poorer every year."

Tom Shaw was up North, going to school up North. It happened that the revivalist he was talking to... the two men had spent several days together, locked in a small room at the Langdon Savings Bank, a bank then precariously housed in an old frame building on Main Street... the revivalist preacher he was talking to was a man without an education. He could barely read, but Tom Shaw took it for granted that he wanted what Tom called a full life. "I tell you," he said to the preacher, his face flushed and a kind of holy enthusiasm coursing through him, "I tell you..."

"Have you ever been to the North or the East?"

The preacher said no. He was the son of a poor farmer who was, in fact, a Georgia cracker himself. He told Tom Shaw so. "I'm just a cracker," he said. "I'm not ashamed of it." He was inclined to drop the subject.

At first he had suspected Tom Shaw. These old Southerners. These aristocrats, he thought. What did the banker want with him? The banker had asked him if he had children. Well, he had. He had married young, and since then his wife had given birth to a new child almost every year. He was thirty-five now. He hardly knew how many children he had. A whole bunch of them, thin-legged children, living in a small old frame house in another Georgia town, much like Langdon, a run-down town. So he said. The income of a preacher acting as a revivalist was rather meager. "I have a lot of children," he said.

He didn't say exactly how much, and Tom Shaw didn't press him on it.

He was on his way somewhere. "It's time for us Southerners to get to work," he kept saying in those days. "Let's put an end to all this mourning for the old South. Let's get to work."

If a man, a man like that preacher, a fairly ordinary man... Almost any man, if he had children...

"We must think of the children of the South," Tom always said. Sometimes he got things a little mixed up. "In the children of the South lies the womb of the future," he said.

A man like this preacher might not have very high personal ambitions. He could be satisfied simply walking around and shouting about God to a multitude of poor white people... yet... if the man had children... The preacher's wife came from a family of poor white Southerners, like himself. She had already lost weight and turned yellow.

There was something very pleasant about being a revivalist. A man didn't always have to stay home. He went from place to place. Women crowded around him. Some of the Methodist women were lovely. Some of them were handsome. He was the big man among them.

He knelt beside such a man in prayer. What fervor he put into his prayers!

Tom Shaw and the preacher gathered. A new awakening was raging in the town and in the rural communities around Langdon. Soon the revivalist dropped everything else and, instead of talking about life after death, spoke only of the present... of a vibrant new way of life that already existed in many Eastern and Midwestern cities and that, he said, could also live in the South, in Langdon. As a somewhat cynical Langdon resident later recalled those days, "You"d think the preacher had been a lifelong traveler and had never traveled beyond half a dozen Georgia counties." The preacher began wearing his best clothes and spending more and more time talking to Tom Shaw. "We Southerners must wake up," he cried. He described cities in the East and Midwest. "Citizens," he exclaimed, "you should pay them a visit." Now he was describing a city in Ohio. It was a small, sleepy, obscure place, just like Langdon, Georgia, remains. It was just a small town at a crossroads. A few poor farmers came here to trade, just like they did in Langdon.

Then the railroad was built, and soon a factory appeared. Other factories followed. The situation began to change with incredible speed. "We Southerners don't know what that kind of life is," the preacher declared.

He traveled the county giving speeches; he spoke at the Langdon Courthouse and at churches throughout the city. He declared that cities in the North and East had undergone a transformation. A city in the North, East, or Midwest had been a bit of a sleepy place, and then suddenly factories appeared. People who had been out of work, many people who had never had a cent to their name, were suddenly receiving paychecks.

How quickly everything had changed! "You ought to see this," the preacher exclaimed. He was carried away. Enthusiasm shook his large body. He pounded the pulpits. When he had come to town a few weeks earlier, he had managed to arouse only weak enthusiasm among a few poor Methodists. Now everyone had come to listen. There was great confusion. Although the preacher had a new theme, now speaking of a new heaven into which people could enter, and he did not have to wait for death to enter, he still used the tone of a man delivering a sermon, and as he spoke, he frequently tapped words. He pounded the pulpit and ran back and forth in front of the audience, causing confusion. Shouts and groans arose in the mill meetings, just as in a religious meeting. "Yes, God, it's true," cried a voice. The preacher said that thanks to the wonderful new life the factories had brought to many cities in the East and Midwest, each of them had suddenly become prosperous. Life was filled with new joys. Now, in such cities, any man could own a car. "You should see how people live there. I don't mean rich people, but poor people like me."

"Yes, God," someone in the audience said fervently.

"I want this. I want this. I want this," the female voice screamed. It was a sharp, plaintive voice.

In the northern and western cities the preacher described, everyone, he said, had phonographs; they had automobiles. They could hear the best music in the world. Their homes were filled with music day and night...

"Streets of gold," cried a voice. A stranger arriving in Langdon while the preliminary work for the sale of stock in the new cotton mill was underway might have thought that the voices of the people, responding to the preacher's voice, were actually laughing at him. He would have been mistaken. It was true that there were a few residents of the town, a few old Southern women and one or two old men who said, "We don't want any of this Yankee nonsense," they said, but such voices fell largely unheard.

"They're building new houses and new stores. All the houses have bathrooms.

"There are people, ordinary people like me, not rich people, mind you, who walk on stone floors."

Voice: "Did you say bathroom?"

"Amen!"

"This is a new life. We must build a cotton mill here in Langdon. The South died too long ago.

"There are too many poor people. Our farmers aren't making money. What do we, the poor of the South, get?"

"Amen. Bless God."

"Every man and woman should dig deep into their pockets right now. If you have a little property, go to the bank and borrow some money against it. Buy shares in a factory.

"Yes, God. Save us, God."

"Your children are half-starved. They have rickets. There are no schools for them. They are growing up ignorant."

The preacher in Langdon sometimes grew meek as he spoke. "Look at me," he said to the people. He remembered his wife at home, the woman who, not long ago, had been a beautiful young woman. Now she was a toothless, worn-out old woman. It was no fun to be with her, to be near her. She was always too tired.

At night, when a man approached her...

It was better to preach. "I am an ignorant man myself," he said humbly. "But God has called me to do this work. My people were once a proud people here in the South.

"Now I have many children. I can't educate them. I can't feed them the way they should be fed. I'd gladly put them in a cotton mill."

"Yes, God. It's true. It's true, God."

The Langdon revival campaign was a success. While the preacher spoke publicly, Tom Shaw worked quietly and energetically. The money was raised. The mill in Langdon was built.

It's true that some capital had to be borrowed from the North; equipment had to be purchased on credit; there were dark years when it seemed the mill would collapse. Soon, people no longer prayed for success.

However, the best years have come.

The mill village in Langdon was hastily demolished. Cheap lumber was used. Before the World War, the houses in the mill village remained unpainted. Rows of frame houses stood there, where workers came to live. Mostly poor people from small, dilapidated Georgia farms. They came here when the mill was first built. At first, four or five times as many people came as could be employed. Few houses were built. Initially, money was needed to build better houses. The houses were overcrowded.

But a man like this preacher, with many children, could succeed. Georgia had few laws regarding child labor. The mill worked day and night when it was in operation. Children of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen went to work at the mill. It was easy to lie about your age. The little children in the mill village in Langdon were almost all two years old. "How old are you, my child?"

"What do you mean, my real age or my age?"

"For God's sake, be careful, child. What do you mean, talking like that? We factory workers, we mulatto women... that's what they call us, city folk, you know... don't talk like that." For some strange reason, the golden streets and the beautiful life of the working people, pictured by the preacher before the mill was built in Langdon, did not materialize. The houses remained as they were built: small barns, hot in the summer, and bitterly cold in the winter. Grass did not grow on the front lawns. Behind the houses stood rows of dilapidated outhouses.

However, a man with children could have managed quite well. He often didn't have to work. Before the World War and the Great Boom, the cotton mill village of Langdon had plenty of mill owners, people not unlike a revivalist preacher.

*

The mill in Langdon is closed on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. It began again at midnight on Sunday and continued steadily, day and night, until the following Saturday afternoon.

After becoming an employee at the mill, Red went there one Sunday afternoon. He walked down Langdon's main street toward the mill village.

In Langdon, Main Street was dead and quiet. That morning, Red lay in bed late. The black woman who had lived in the house since Red was a baby brought him breakfast upstairs. She had grown into middle age and was now a large, dark woman with enormous hips and breasts. She was motherly to Red. He could talk more freely with her than with his own mother. "Why do you want to work down there in that mill?" she asked as he left for work. "You're not a poor white man," she said. Red laughed at her. "Your father wouldn't like you doing what you do," she said. In bed, Red lay reading one of the books he had brought home from college. A young English professor he had attracted had filled the old stash with books and offered him summer reading. He didn't dress until his mother left the house for church.

Then he went out. His walk took him past the small church his mother attended, on the outskirts of the mill village. He heard singing there, and heard singing in other churches as he walked through town. How dull, drawn-out, and heavy the singing was! Apparently, the people of Langdon didn't much enjoy their God. They didn't give themselves to God with joy like Negroes. On Main Street, all the stores were closed. Even the drugstores where you could buy Coca-Cola, that universal drink of the South, were closed. The townspeople got their cocaine after church. Then the drugstores would open so they could get drunk. Red passed the town jail, standing behind the courthouse. Young moonshiners from the hills of North Georgia had settled there, and they, too, were singing. They sang a ballad:


Don't you know that I am a wandering man?

God knows I am a wandering man.


Fresh young voices sang the song with delight. In the mill village just outside the corporation limits, several young men and women strolled or sat in groups on the verandas in front of the houses. They were dressed in their Sunday best, the girls in bright colors. Although he worked at the mill, they all knew Red wasn't one of them. There was the mill village, and then the mill with its mill yard. The mill yard was surrounded by a high wire fence. You entered the village through a gate.

There was always a man standing at the gate, an old man with a lame leg, who recognized Red but wouldn't let him into the mill. "Why do you want to go there?" he asked. Red didn't know. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "I was just looking." He had just come out for a walk. Was he fascinated by the mill? Like other young men, he hated the peculiar deadness of American towns on Sundays. He wished the mill team he had joined would have a ball game that day, but he also knew Tom Shaw wouldn't allow it. The mill, when it was running, all the equipment flying, was something special. The man at the gate looked at Red without a smile and left. He walked past the high wire fence around the mill and down to the riverbank. The railroad to Langdon ran alongside the river, and a spur line led to the mill. Red didn't know why he was there. Perhaps he left home because he knew that when his mother returned from church, he would feel guilty for not going with her.

There were several poor white families in town, working-class families who attended the same church as his mother. Uptown, there was another Methodist church and a black Methodist church. Tom Shaw, the mill president, was a Presbyterian.

There was a Presbyterian church and a Baptist church. There were black churches, as well as small black sects. There were no Catholics in Langdon. After the World War, the Ku Klux Klan was strong there.

Some boys from the Langdon factory formed a baseball team. The question arose in town: "Will Red Oliver play with them?" There was a town team. It consisted of the young men of the town, a store clerk, a man who worked at the post office, a young doctor, and others. The young doctor came to Red. "I see," he said, "that you've got a job at the factory. Are you going to play on the factory team?" He smiled as he said it. "I suppose you'll have to if you want to keep your job, huh?" He didn't say that. A new preacher had just arrived in town, a young Presbyterian preacher, who could, if necessary, take Red's place on the town team. The factory team and the town team did not play each other. The factory team played other factory teams from other towns in Georgia and South Carolina where there were factories, and the town team played town teams from nearby towns. For the city team, playing against the "factory boys" was almost like playing against blacks. They wouldn't say it, but they felt it. There was a way they conveyed to Red what they felt. He knew.

This young preacher could have taken Red's place on the town team. He seemed intelligent and attentive. He had gone prematurely bald. He had played baseball in college.

This young man had come to town to become a preacher. Red was curious. He didn't look like the revivalist who had converted Red's mother, or the one who had once helped Tom Shaw sell his factory stock. This one was more like Red himself. He'd gone to college and read books. His goal was to become a cultured young man.

Red didn't know whether he wanted this or not. At the time, he didn't yet know what he wanted. He'd always felt a little lonely and isolated in Langdon, perhaps because of the townspeople's treatment of his mother and father; and after he went to work at the mill, this feeling intensified.

The young preacher intended to infiltrate Langdon's life. Although he disapproved of the Ku Klux Klan, he had never spoken out against it publicly. None of the other preachers in Langdon had. It was rumored that some prominent men in town, prominent in the churches, were Klan members. The young preacher spoke out against it privately with two or three people he knew well. "I believe a man should devote himself to service, not violence," he said. "That's what I want to do." He joined an organization in Langdon called the Kiwanis Club. Tom Shaw belonged to it, though he rarely attended. At Christmas, when gifts were needed for the town's poor children, the young preacher would rush around looking for presents. During Red's first year in the North, while he was attending college, something terrible happened in town. There was a man in town who was a suspect.

He was a young salesman who signed a magazine for Southern women.

It was said that he...

There was a young white girl in town, a common whore, as people said.

The young freelance lawyer, like Red's father, was plied with alcohol. When he drank, he became quarrelsome. At first, it was said he beat his wife while drunk. People heard her crying in her house at night. Then he was reportedly seen walking to the woman's house. The woman with such a bad reputation lived with her mother in a small frame house just off Main Street, in the lower part of town, on the side of town where the cheaper stores and shops patronized by blacks were located. Her mother was said to have sold liquor.

A young lawyer was seen going in and out of the house. He had three children. He went there and then went home to beat his wife. One night, some masked men came and seized him. They also seized the young girl he was with, and they were both taken to a lonely road, several miles outside of town, and tied to trees. They were whipped. The woman was seized, dressed only in a thin dress, and when both people had been thoroughly beaten, the man was released so that he could make his way to town as best he could. The woman, now almost naked, in a torn and tattered thin dress, pale and silent, was taken to the front door of her mother's house and pushed out of the car. How she screamed! "Bitch!" The man accepted this in gloomy silence. There was some fear that the girl might die, but she recovered. Attempts were made to find and whip the mother as well, but she had disappeared. Afterwards, she reappeared and continued selling drinks to the men of the town, while her daughter continued dating men. It was said that more men than ever visited the place. A young lawyer, who owned a car, took his wife and children and left. He didn't even return for his furniture, and no one ever saw him in Langdon again. When this happened, a young Presbyterian preacher had just arrived in town. An Atlanta newspaper picked up the issue. The reporter had come to Langdon to interview several prominent people. Among others, he approached the young preacher.

He spoke to him on the street in front of a drugstore, where several men were standing. "They got what they deserved," said most of Langdon's men. "I wasn't there, but I wish I had been," said the drugstore owner. Someone in the crowd whispered, "There are other people in this town who should have had the same thing happen to them long ago."

"And what about Georges Ricard and that woman of his... you know what I mean." The Atlanta newspaper reporter didn't catch these words. He continued to pester the young preacher. "What do you think?" he asked. "What do you think?"

"I don't think any of the best people in the city could have been there at all," said the preacher.

"But what do you think about the idea behind this? What do you think about it?"

"Wait a minute," said the young preacher. "I'll be right back," he said. He went into a drugstore but didn't come out. He wasn't married and kept his car in a garage down an alley. He got in and drove out of town. That evening, he called the house where he was staying. "I won't be home tonight," he said. He said he'd been with a sick woman and was afraid the sick woman might die during the night. "She might need a spiritual director," he said. He thought he'd better stay the night.

It was a little strange, Red Oliver thought, to find the Langdon mill so quiet on a Sunday. It didn't feel like the same mill. He'd been working at the mill for several weeks that Sunday when he arrived. A young Presbyterian preacher had also asked him about playing on the mill team. This had happened shortly after Red had gone to work at the mill. The preacher knew Red's mother attended a church attended mostly by mill workers. He felt sorry for Red. His own father, from another Southern town, hadn't been considered one of the best. He'd run a small store where blacks shopped. The preacher had done his own schooling. "I'm nothing like you as a player," he told Red. He asked, "Do you join any church?" Red said no. "Well, you can come and worship with us."

The mill boys didn't mention Red playing with them for a week or two after he went to work at the mill, and then, when he knew Red had stopped playing on the town team, the young foreman approached him. "Are you going to play on the team here at the mill?" he asked. The question was tentative. Some of the crew members spoke with the foreman. He was a young man from a mill family who was beginning to climb the corporate ladder. Perhaps a man on the rise should always have a certain amount of respect. This man had a great deal of respect for the best people in Langdon. After all, if Red's father hadn't been such an important figure in town, his grandfather would have been. Everyone respected him.

Old Doctor Oliver had been a surgeon in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He was said to be related to Alexander Stevenson, who had been vice president of the Southern Confederacy. "The boys aren't playing very well," the foreman told Red. Red had been a star player at the town high school and had already attracted the attention of the college freshman team.

"Our guys aren't playing very well."

The young foreman, though Red was just an ordinary worker in the shop under his command... Red had started work at the factory as a sweeper... he swept the floors... the young foreman, of course, was respectful enough. "If you wanted to play... The boys would be grateful. They would appreciate it. It was as if he said, 'You'll be doing them a kindness.' For some reason, something in the man's voice made Red shudder.

"Of course," he said.

However... that time Red went for a walk on Sunday and visited a quiet mill, strolling through the mill village... it was late in the morning... people would soon be coming out of church... they would be going to Sunday dinners.

Being on a baseball team with regular people is one thing. Going to this church with my mother is quite another.

He attended church with his mother a few times. Ultimately, he visited very few places with her. From that time on, after her conversion, whenever he heard her praying in the house, he constantly wished for her something she seemed to lack and never receive in life.

Did she gain anything from religion? After her initial shock when a revivalist minister came to Oliver's house to pray with her, Red never heard herself pray out loud again. She resolutely attended church twice every Sunday and prayer meetings throughout the week. In church, she always sat in the same place. She sat alone. The church members often became agitated during the ceremonies. Quiet, inarticulate words emanated from them. This was especially true during prayers. The minister, a small man with a red face, stood before the people and closed his eyes. He prayed loudly. "Oh, Lord, give us broken hearts. Keep us humble."

Almost all the congregation were elderly people from the mills. Red thought they must be quite humble... "Yes, Lord. Amen. Help us, Lord," said quiet voices. Voices came from the hall. Occasionally, a church member was asked to lead the prayer. Red's mother was not asked. Not a word came from her. She slumped her shoulders and continued to look at the floor. Red, who had come to church with her not because he wanted to go, but because he felt guilty seeing her always go to church alone, thought he saw her shoulders tremble. As for himself, he didn't know what to do. The first time he went with his mother, and when it was time for prayer, he bowed his head like her, and the next time he sat with his head raised. "I have no right to pretend to feel humble or religious when I really don't," he thought.

Red walked past the mill and sat down on the railroad tracks. A steep bank descended to the river, and a few trees grew on the bank. Two black men were fishing, hidden under the steep bank, ready for a Sunday fishing trip. They paid no attention to Red, perhaps not noticing him. Between him and the fishermen was a small tree. He was sitting on the protruding end of a railroad tie.

That day, he didn't go home for dinner. He found himself in a strange position in the city and began to feel it acutely, half cut off from the lives of other young people his age, among whom he had once been so popular, and truly excluded from the lives of the factory workers. Did he want to be one of them?

The factory kids he played baseball with were nice enough. All the factory workers were nice to him, as were the townspeople. "What am I kicking?" he asked himself that Sunday. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons, the factory team would travel by bus to play another factory team in another city, and Red would go with them. When he played well or hit a good ball, the young men on his team would clap their hands and cheer. "Good," they would shout. There was no doubt his presence strengthened the team.

And yet, when they rode home after the game... they left Red sitting alone in the back of the bus they'd hired for the occasion, as his mother sat alone in her church and didn't address him directly. Sometimes, when he walked to the mill early in the morning or left it at night, he'd reach the mill village with a man or a small group of men. They'd converse freely until he joined them, and then suddenly the conversation stopped. The words seemed frozen on the men's lips.

Things were a little better with the mill girls, Red thought. Every now and then, one of them would glance at him. He didn't talk to them much that first summer. "I wonder if going to work at the mill is like my mother joining church?" he thought. He could ask for a job in the mill office. Most of the townspeople who worked at the mill worked in the office. When there was a ball game, they came to watch, but they didn't play. Red didn't want that kind of work. He didn't know why.

Was there always something wrong with the way he was treated in the city because of his mother?

В его отце была какая-то загадка. Рэд не знал этой истории. Когда он играл в мяч в школьной команде, в последний год обучения в старшей школе он соскользнул на вторую базу и случайно порезал шипами игрока противоположной команды. Он был игроком средней школы из соседнего города. Он рассердился. "Это ниггерские штучки", - сердито сказал он Рэду. Он двинулся к Рэду, как будто хотел драться. Рэд пытался извиниться. - Что ты имеешь в виду под "негритянскими штучками"? он спросил.

"Oh, I think you know," the boy said. That was all. Nothing more was said. Some of the other players came running. The incident was forgotten. One day, standing in the store, he heard some men talking about his father. "He's so kind," the voice said, referring to Dr. Oliver.

"He likes the low-grade, low-grade whites and blacks." That was all. Red was just a boy then. The men didn't see him standing in the store, and he left unnoticed. On Sunday, as he sat on the railroad tracks, lost in thought, he remembered a phrase he'd overheard long ago. He remembered how angry he'd been. What did they mean, talking about his father like that? The night after the incident, he'd been thoughtful and rather upset when he went to bed, but later he'd forgotten about it. Now it was back.

Perhaps Red was simply having a fit of sadness. Young men have the blues, just like old men. He hated going home. A freight train pulled in, and he lay down in the tall grass on the slope leading to the creek. Now he was completely hidden. The Negro fishermen had gone, and that afternoon, several young men from the mill village came to the river to swim. Two of them played for a long time. They dressed and left.

It was growing late in the afternoon. What a strange day it had been for Red! A group of young girls, also from the mill village, was walking along the tracks. They were laughing and talking. Two of them were very pretty, Red thought. Many of the older people who had worked at the mill for years were not very strong, and many of the children were frail and sickly. The townspeople said this was because they didn't know how to take care of themselves. "Mothers don't know how to care for their children. They're ignorant," declared the residents of Langdon.

They always talked about the ignorance and stupidity of the factory workers. The girls from the factory Red saw that day didn't look stupid. He liked them. They walked along the path and stopped near where he lay in the tall grass. Among them was the girl Red had noticed at the mill. She was one of the girls, he thought, who had given him his eye. She was small, with a short body and a large head, and Red thought she had beautiful eyes. She had thick lips, almost like a black man's.

She was obviously the leader among the workers. They gathered around her. They stopped just a few feet from where Red lay. "Come on. Teach us that new song you have," one of them said to the thick-lipped girl.

"Clara says you have a new one," one of the girls insisted. "She says it's hot." The thick-lipped girl prepared to sing. "You all have to help. You all have to join the choir," she said.

"It's about the water house," she said. Red smiled, hiding in the grass. He knew the girls at the mill called the toilets "water heaters."

The foreman of the spinning mill, the same young man who asked Red about playing with the ball team, was named Lewis.

On hot days, townspeople were allowed to drive a small cart through the mill. He sold bottles of Coca-Cola and cheap candy. There was one type of cheap candy, a large soft piece of cheap candy, called a "Milky Way."

The song the girls were singing was about life at the mill. Red suddenly remembered hearing Lewis and the other foremen complaining that the girls went to the bathroom too often. When they got tired, on long, hot days, they went there to rest. The girl on the track was singing about that.

"You can hear those dog cleaning hands talking," she sang, throwing her head back.


Give me Coca-Cola and the Milky Way.

Give me Coca-Cola and the Milky Way.

Twice a day.


Give me Coca-Cola and the Milky Way.


The other girls sang with her and laughed.


Give me Coca-Cola and the Milky Way.

We walk across a four by four room,

Facing the water heater door.

Give me Coca-Cola and the Milky Way.

Old Lewis I swear, old Lewis is knocking,

I would like to hit him with a stone.


The girls walked along the rails, screaming with laughter. Red heard them singing for a long time as they walked.


Coca-Cola and the Milky Way.

Pilin in the water tower house.

Get out of the water house.

Into the water heater door.


Apparently, there was a life at the Langdon mill that Red Oliver knew nothing about. With what pleasure that thick-lipped girl sang her song of life at the mill! What feeling she managed to put into those harsh words. There was constant talk in Langdon about the workers' attitude toward Tom Shaw. "Look what he's done for them," people would say. Red had heard such talk on the streets of Langdon all his life.

The mill workers were supposedly grateful to him. And why not? Many of them couldn't read or write when they arrived at the mill. Didn't some of the town's best women travel at night to the village with the mill to teach them to read and write?

They lived in better houses than the ones they had known when they returned to the plains and hills of Georgia. They lived in shacks like these back then.

Now they had medical care. They had everything.

They were obviously unhappy. Something was wrong. Red lay on the grass, thinking about what he'd heard. He stayed there, on the slope by the river, beyond the mill and the railroad tracks, until darkness fell.


Old Lewis I swear, old Lewis is knocking,

I would like to hit him with a stone.


It must have been Lewis, the foreman of the spinning mill, banging on the restroom doors, trying to get the girls to come back to work. There was venom in the girls' voices as they sang the crude lyrics. "I wonder," Red thought, "I wonder if this Lewis has the guts for this." Lewis was very respectful when he talked to Red about playing on a team with the boys from the mill.

*

The long rows of spindles in the mill's spinning room sped along at terrifying speed. How clean and orderly the large rooms were! This was true throughout the entire mill. All the machines, moving so quickly and performing their work with such precision, remained bright and gleaming. The superintendent ensured this. His eyes were always fixed on the machines. The ceilings, walls, and floors of the rooms were spotless. The mill stood in stark contrast to life in the town of Langdon, with life in the houses, streets, and shops. Everything was orderly, everything moved with orderly speed toward one end-the production of cloth.

The machines knew what they were supposed to do. You didn't have to tell them. They didn't stop or hesitate. All day long, humming and humming, they carried out their tasks.

The steel fingers moved. Hundreds of thousands of tiny steel fingers worked in the factory, working with thread, with cotton to make thread, with thread to weave it into fabric. In the factory's vast weaving room, there were yarns of every color. Tiny steel fingers selected the right color thread to create a pattern on the fabric. Red felt a certain excitement in the rooms. He had felt it in the spinning rooms. There, threads danced in the air; in the next room, there were winders and warpers. There were excellent drums. The warping machines fascinated him. Threads descended from hundreds of spools onto a huge skein, each thread in its place. It would be harnessed to the looms from enormous rolls.

At the mill, as never before in his young life, Red sensed the human mind doing something specific and orderly. Enormous machines processed the cotton as it came out of the gins. They combed and caressed the tiny cotton fibers, laying them in straight, parallel lines and twisting them into threads. The cotton emerged from the enormous machines white, a thin, wide veil.

There was something exhilarating about Red working there. Some days, it felt like every nerve in his body was dancing and working with the machinery. Unaware of what was happening to him, he had stumbled onto the path of American genius. Generations before him, America's finest minds had been working on the machines he found in the mill.

There were other marvelous, almost superhuman machines in the large automobile factories, steel mills, canning factories, and steel mills. Red was glad he hadn't applied for a job in the mill's office. Who would want to be a bookkeeper: a buyer or a seller? Without realizing it, Red had struck a blow against America at its best.

Oh, huge bright rooms, singing machines, screaming dancing machines!

Look at them against the skyline of the cities! Look at the machines working at the thousands of mills!

Deep down, Red harbored a great admiration for the mill's daytime superintendent, the man who knew every machine in the plant, knew exactly what it was supposed to do, who tended his machines so meticulously. Why, as his admiration for this man grew, did a certain contempt for Tom Shaw and the mill workers also grow within him? He didn't know Tom Shaw well, but he knew that in some way he was always bragging. He thought he had done what Red was now seeing for the first time. What he saw must have really been done by workers like this superintendent. The mill had machine repairmen, too: men who cleaned the machines and repaired broken ones. On the streets of town, men were always bragging. Every man seemed to be trying to look bigger than everyone else. In the mill, there was no such bragging. Red knew that the tall, stooped mill superintendent would never be a braggart. How could a man who found himself in the presence of such machines be a braggart if he felt the machines?

It must be people like Tom Shaw... Red didn't see Tom Shaw much after he got the job... he rarely came to the factory. "Why am I thinking about him?" Red asked himself. He was in this magnificent, bright, clean place. He helped keep it clean. He became a janitor.

It was true that there was lint in the air. It hung in the air like a fine white dust, barely visible. Flat disks were visible above the ceiling, from which fine white sprays fell. Sometimes the spray was blue. Red thought it must have appeared blue because the ceiling had heavy crossbeams painted blue. The walls of the room were white. There was even a hint of red. The two young girls working in the spinning room wore red cotton dresses.

There was life at the mill. All the girls in the spinning room were young. They had to work fast. They chewed gum. Some of them chewed tobacco. Dark, discolored spots formed at the corners of their mouths. There was the girl with the big mouth and big nose, the one Red had seen with the other girls walking along the railroad tracks, the one who wrote songs. She looked at Red. There was something provocative in her eyes. They challenged. Red couldn't understand why. She wasn't beautiful. As he approached her, a shiver ran through him, and he dreamed of her at night afterward.

These were the young man's feminine dreams. "Why does one of them irritate me so much and the other doesn't?" She was a laughing and talkative girl. If there were ever labor problems among the women in this factory, she would be the leader. Like the others, she ran back and forth between the long rows of machines tying up broken thread. For this purpose, she carried an ingenious little knitting machine on her arm. Red watched the hands of all the girls. "What fine hands these workers have," he thought. The girls' hands completed the small task of tying up broken threads so quickly that the eye couldn't follow them. Sometimes the girls walked slowly back and forth, sometimes they ran. No wonder they got tired and went to the ponds to rest. Red dreamed that he was running back and forth between the rows of machines after the chattering girl. She kept running to the other girls and whispering something to them. She walked around, laughing at him. She had a strong, petite body with a long waist. He could see her firm, young breasts, their curves visible through the thin dress she wore. When he pursued her in his dreams, she was like a bird in her swiftness. Her arms were like wings. He could never catch her.

There was even a certain intimacy between the girls in the spinning mill and the machines they tended, Red thought. At times, they seemed to have become one. The young girls, almost children, who visited the flying machines seemed like little mothers. The machines were children, needing constant attention. In the summer, the air in the room was stifling. The air was kept damp by the spray flying from above. Dark stains appeared on the surface of their thin dresses. All day long, the girls ran restlessly back and forth. Toward the end of Red's first summer as a worker, he was transferred to the night shift. During the day, he could find some relief from the tension that always permeated the mill, the sensation of something flying, flying, flying, the tension in the air. There were windows through which he could look. He could see the mill village or, on the other side of the room, the river and the railroad tracks. Occasionally, a train passed. Outside the window, there was another life. There were forests and rivers. Children played in the bare streets of the nearby mill village.

At night, everything was different. The walls of the mill were closing in on Red. He felt himself sinking, sinking, down, down-into what? He was completely immersed in a strange world of light and movement. His little fingers always seemed to get on his nerves. How long the nights were! At times, he was very tired. It wasn't that he was physically tired. His body was strong. The fatigue came from simply watching the relentless speed of the machines and the movements of those who serviced them. In that room was a young man who played third base for the Millball team and was a doffer. He took the bobbins of thread out of the machine and inserted bare ones. He moved so quickly that at times just watching him tired Red out terribly and at the same time frightened him a little.

There were strange moments of fear. He was going about his work. Suddenly he stopped. He stood and stared at some machine. How incredibly fast it had run! Thousands of spindles were spinning in one room. There were men servicing the machines. The manager walked silently through the rooms. He was younger than the daylight man, and this one also came from the North.

It was hard to sleep during the day after a night at the mill. Red kept waking up suddenly. He sat up in bed. He fell asleep again and in his dreams was immersed in a world of movement. In the dream, there were also flying ribbons, looms dancing, making a rattling noise as they danced. Tiny steel fingers danced on the looms. Bobbins flew in the spinning mill. Tiny steel fingers picked at Red's hair. This, too, was woven into cloth. Often, by the time Red had truly calmed down, it was time to get up and go to the mill again.

What was it like with the girls, women, and young boys who worked year-round, many of whom had worked at the mill their entire lives? Was it the same for them? Red wanted to ask. He was still as shy around them as they were around him.

In every room of the mill there was a foreman. In the rooms where the cotton first began its journey into cloth, in the rooms near the platform where the bales of cotton were taken from the machines, where huge black men handled the bales, where it was broken and cleaned, the dust in the air was thick. Enormous machines processed the cotton in this room. They pulled it from the bales, rolled it, and tumbled it. Black men and women tended the machines. It passed from one huge machine to the next. The dust turned into a cloud. The curly hair of the men and women who worked in this room turned gray. Their faces were gray. Someone told Red that many of the blacks who worked in the cotton mills died young of tuberculosis. They were black. The man who told Red laughed. "What does that mean? So fewer blacks," he said. In all the other rooms, the workers were white.

Red met the night shift supervisor. Somehow, he learned that Red wasn't from the factory town, but from the city, that he'd attended a northern college the previous summer and was planning to return. The night shift supervisor was a young man of about twenty-seven or eight, with a small frame and an unusually large head, covered with thin, short-cropped yellow hair. He came to the plant from the Northern Technical School.

He felt lonely in Langdon. The South puzzled him. Southern civilization is complex. There are all sorts of crosscurrents. Southerners say, "No Northerner can understand. How can he?" There is a strange fact about Negro life, so closely connected with white life, yet so divorced from it. Small quibbles arise and become extremely important. "You mustn't call a Negro 'Mr.' or a Negro woman 'Mrs.' Even newspapers that want Negro circulation must be careful. All sorts of strange tricks are used. Life between brown and white becomes unexpectedly intimate. It diverges sharply over the most unexpected details of everyday life. Confusion arises. In these last years , industry is emerging, and poor whites are suddenly, abruptly, and abruptly drawn into modern industrial life...

The machine makes no distinction.

A white salesman might kneel before a woman of color in a shoe store to sell her a pair of shoes. That's fine. If he asked, "Miss Grayson, do you like the shoes?" he'd use the word "Miss." A white Southerner says, "I'd cut off my hand before I did that."

Money makes no distinction. There are shoes for sale. Men make a living selling shoes.

There are more intimate relationships between men and women. It's better to keep quiet about it.

If only a person could cut back on everything, achieve quality of life... The young mill foreman Red met asked him questions. He was a new man to Red. He was staying at a hotel in the city.

He left the mill at the same hour as Red. When Red started working nights, they left the mill at the same hour in the morning.

"So you're just a common laborer?" He took it for granted that what Red was doing was only temporary. "While you're on vacation, huh?" he said. Red didn't know. "Yeah, I think so," he said. He asked Red what he planned to do with his life, and Red couldn't answer. "I don't know," he said, and the young man stared at him. One day, he invited Red to his hotel room. "Come over this afternoon after you've had enough sleep," he said.

He was like a day superintendent in that cars were an important thing in his life. "What do they mean here in the South when they say such-and-such? What are they getting at?"

Even in the factory president, Tom Shaw, he sensed a strange shyness toward the workers. "Why," asked the young northerner, "does he always talk about 'my people'? What do you mean they're 'his people'? They're men and women, aren't they? Do they do their jobs well or not?"

"Why are colored people working in one room and white people in another?" The young man looked like a daytime superintendent. He was a human machine. When Red was in his room that day, he pulled out a catalog put out by a Northern machine builder. There was a machine he was trying to get the factory to implement. The man had small, rather delicate white fingers. His hair was thin and a pale sandy yellow. It was hot in the small Southern hotel room, and he was wearing his shirtsleeves.

He placed the catalog on the bed and showed it to Red. His white fingers reverently opened the pages. "See," he exclaimed. He had come to South Mill around the time Red had taken over, replacing another man who had died suddenly, and ever since he had arrived, trouble had been brewing among the workers. Red knew little about it. None of the men he played ball with or saw at the mill had mentioned it to him. Wages had been cut ten percent, and there was discontent. The mill foreman knew. The foreman at the mill had told him. There were even a few amateur agitators among the mill workers.

The superintendent showed Red a photograph of a huge, complex machine. His fingers trembled with delight as he pointed to it, trying to explain how it worked. "Look," he said. "It does the work that twenty or thirty people currently do, and it does it automatically."

One morning, Red was walking from the mill to town with a young man from the north. They passed through a village. The men and women of the day shift were already at the mill, and the night shift workers were leaving. Red and the superintendent walked between them. He used words Red couldn't understand. They came to the road. As they walked, the superintendent talked about the people from the mill. "They're pretty stupid, aren't they?" he asked. Perhaps he thought Red was stupid too. Stopping in the road, he pointed at the mill. "That's not half of what it's going to be," he said. He walked and talked as they walked. The president of the mill, he said, had agreed to buy a new machine, a picture of which he showed Red. It was the very one Red had never heard of. There was an attempt to introduce it to the best factories. "Machines will become more and more automatic," he said.

He again brought up the brewing problems among the workers at the factory, which Red hadn't heard about. He said there were attempts to unionize the southern factories. "They'd better give it up," he said.

"They will be lucky very soon if any of them find a job.

"We're going to run factories with fewer and fewer people, using more and more automated equipment. The time will come when every mill will be automated." He assumed Red had a point. "You work in a mill, but you're one of us," his voice and demeanor implied. The workers were nothing to him. He talked about the northern mills where he'd worked. Some of his friends, young technicians like himself, worked in other factories, in auto plants and steel mills.

"In the North," he said, "in Northern factories they know how to handle labor." With the advent of automated machinery, there was always more and more surplus labor. "It's necessary, " he said, "to maintain a sufficient amount of surplus labor. Then you can lower wages whenever you want. You can do what you want," he said.

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3


I N T O MILL there was always a sense of order, of things moving towards an orderly conclusion, and then there was life in Oliver's house.

Oliver's large old house was already in disrepair. Red's grandfather, a Confederate surgeon, had built it, and his father had lived and died there. The great men of the old South built lavishly. The house was too large for Red and his mother. There were many empty rooms. Just behind the house, connected to it by a covered walkway, was a large kitchen. It was big enough for a hotel kitchen. A fat old black woman cooked for the Olivers.

During Red's childhood, there was another Black woman who made the beds and swept the floors in the house. She took care of Red when he was a small child, and her mother was a slave belonging to old Dr. Oliver.

The old doctor had once been a keen reader. In the living room of the house downstairs, rows of old books stood in glass-fronted, now dilapidated bookcases, and in one of the empty rooms stood boxes of books. Red's father never opened a book. For many years after becoming a doctor, he carried a medical journal with him, but rarely removed it from its wrappings. A small stack of these journals lay on the floor upstairs in one of the empty rooms.

Red's mother tried to do something with the old house after marrying a young doctor, but made little progress. The doctor was uninterested in her efforts, and what she tried to do irritated the servants.

She made new curtains for some of the windows. Old chairs, broken or missing their seats and sitting unnoticed in corners since the old doctor's death, were hauled away and repaired. There wasn't much money to spend, but Mrs. Oliver hired an inventive young black man from town to help. He arrived with nails and a hammer. She began trying to get rid of her servants. In the end, she didn't achieve much.

The black woman, already working in the house when the young doctor married, disliked his wife. They were both still young then, although the cook was married. Later, her husband disappeared, and she grew very fat. She slept in a small room next to the kitchen. The two black women despised the new white woman. They wouldn't, didn't dare, say to her, "No. I won't do this." Blacks didn't treat whites that way.

"Yes, indeed. Yes, Miss Susan. Yes, indeed, Miss Susan," they said. A struggle began between the two colored women and the white woman that lasted for several years. The doctor's wife was not directly crossed out. She could not say, "This was done to defeat my purpose." The repaired chairs broke again.

The chair was repaired and put in the living room. Somehow, it ended up in the hallway, and the doctor, coming home late that evening, tripped over it and fell. The chair was broken again. When the white woman complained to her husband, he smiled. He loved blacks; he liked them. "They were here when Mama was alive. Their people belonged to us before the war," he said. Even the child in the house later realized something was up. When the white woman left the house for some reason, the whole atmosphere changed. Black laughter echoed through the house. As a child, Red liked it best when his mother was out. Black women laughed at Red's mother. He didn't know it, he was too young to know. When his mother was out, other black servants from neighboring houses snuck in. Red's mother was a marketer herself. She was one of the few upper-class white women who did so. Sometimes she would walk the streets with a basket of groceries in her hand. The black women gathered in the kitchen. "Where is Miss Susan? Where did she go?" one of the women asked. The woman who spoke had seen Mrs. Oliver leave. She knew. "Isn't she a great lady?" she said. "Young Dr. Oliver certainly did well, didn't he?"

"She went to the market. She went to the store."

The woman who was Red's nurse, the girl upstairs, picked up the basket and walked across the kitchen floor. There was always something defiant about Red's mother's gait. She held her head firmly upright. She frowned slightly, and a tense line formed around her mouth.

The black woman could imitate her walk. All the black women who came were shaking with laughter, and even the child laughed when the young black woman with a basket on her arm and her head so motionless walked back and forth. Red, the child, didn't know why he laughed. He laughed because the others did too. He screamed with delight. For the two black women, Mrs. Oliver was something special. She was Poor White. She was Poor White Trash. The women didn't say this in front of the child. Red's mother hung new white curtains on some of the downstairs windows. One of the curtains burned.

After washing, they ironed it, and a hot iron was on it. It was one of those things that kept happening. A huge hole had been burned into it. It wasn't anyone's fault. Red was left alone on the floor in the hallway. The dog appeared, and he started crying. The cook, who had been ironing, ran to him. It was the perfect explanation for what had happened. The curtain was one of three bought for the dining room. When Red's mother went to buy fabric to replace it, all the fabric was sold.

Sometimes, as a small child, Red would cry at night. There was some childhood affliction. He had a stomach ache. His mother came running upstairs, but before she could reach the child, a colored woman was already standing there, clutching Red to her bosom. "He's all right now," she said. She wouldn't give the child to the mother, and the mother hesitated. Her chest ached with the desire to hold the child and comfort him. The two colored women in the house talked constantly about how things had been in the house when the old doctor and his wife were alive. Of course, they were children themselves. And yet they remembered. Something was implied. "A real Southern woman, a lady, does such and such." Mrs. Oliver left the room and returned to her bed without touching the child.

The child snuggled into the warm brown breast. His small hands reached up and felt the warm brown breast. In his father's time, things might have been just like this. Women in the South, the old South, in the days of old Doctor Oliver, were ladies. Southern white men of the slave-owning class talked about it a lot. "I don't want my wife to get her hands dirty." Women in the old South were expected to remain immaculately white.

The strong, dark woman who had been Red's nurse when he was little pulled back the covers of her bed. She picked up the baby and carried him to her own bed. She bared her breasts. There was no milk, but she let the baby suckle. Her large, warm lips kissed the white body of the white child. This was more than the white woman knew.

There was a lot Susan Oliver never knew. When Red was little, his father was often called out at night. After his father's death, he had a fairly extensive practice for a time. He rode a horse, and in the stable behind the house-a stable that later became a garage-there were three horses. There was a young black man who cared for the horses. He slept in the stable.

The clear, hot Georgia summer nights had arrived. There were no bars on the windows or doors of Oliver's house. The front door of the old house was left open, as was the back door. A hallway ran straight through the house, known as the "dog run." The doors were left open to let in the breeze...whenever there was a breeze.

Stray dogs did indeed run through the house at night. Cats ran past. Strange, frightening sounds were heard from time to time. "What is that?" Red's mother sat up in her room downstairs. The words burst out of her. They rang through the house.

The Negro cook, already beginning to put on weight, sat in her room next to the kitchen. She lay on her back in her bed and laughed. Her room and kitchen were separate from the main house, but a covered corridor led to the dining room, so that in winter or during rainy weather food could be brought in without getting wet. The doors between the main house and the cook's room were open. "What is that?" Red's mother was nervous. She was a nervous woman. The cook had a loud voice. "It's only a dog, Miss Susan. It's only a dog. He was hunting a cat. The white woman wanted to go upstairs and get the child, but for some reason she didn't have the courage. Why did it take courage to go after her own child? She often asked herself this question, but she couldn't answer. She calmed down, but she was still nervous and lay awake for hours, hearing strange sounds and imagining things. She kept asking herself questions about the child. "It's my child. I want it. "Why shouldn't I go for it?" She spoke these words out loud, so that the two black women listening to her often heard the quiet whispers of words from her room. "This is my child. Why not?" She said it again and again.

The black woman upstairs had taken possession of the child. The white woman was afraid of her and the cook. She was afraid of her husband, the white residents of Langdon who had known her husband before his marriage, and her husband's father. She never admitted to herself that she was afraid. Often at night, when Red was a small child, his mother would lie in bed, trembling while the child slept. She would cry softly. Red never knew about it. His father didn't know.

On hot summer nights in Georgia, the song of insects drifted outside and inside the house. The song rose and fell. Enormous moths flew into the rooms. The house was the last one on the street, and beyond it, fields began. Someone walked along the dirt road and suddenly screamed. A dog barked. The sound of horses' hooves in the dust was heard. Red's crib was covered with a white mosquito net. All the beds in the house were made. The adult beds had posts and canopies, and white mosquito netting hung down like curtains.

There were no built-in closets in the house. Almost all old Southern houses were built without closets, and each bedroom had a large mahogany closet against the wall. The closet was enormous, reaching all the way to the ceiling.

A moonlit night had fallen. An external back staircase led to the second floor of the house. Sometimes, when Red was a small child and his father was called away at night and his horse thundered off down the street, a young dark man from the stables would climb the stairs barefoot.

He entered the room where a young dark-skinned woman and a baby lay. He crept under the white awning to the brown-skinned woman. There were sounds. A fight broke out. The brown-skinned woman giggled softly. Twice, Red's mother nearly caught the young man in the room.

She entered the room unannounced. She decided to take the baby to her room downstairs, and when she entered, she pulled Red out of the crib. He started crying. He kept crying.

The dark-skinned woman rose from the bed; her lover lay silently, hidden under the sheets. The child continued to cry until the brown-skinned woman took him from his mother, after which he fell silent. The white woman left.

The next time Red's mother arrived, the black man had already gotten out of bed but hadn't made it to the door leading to the outside stairs. He entered the closet. It was high enough for him to stand upright, and he gently closed the door. He was almost naked, and some of his clothes lay on the floor of the room. Red's mother didn't notice.

The black man was a strong man with broad shoulders. It was he who taught Red to ride a horse. One night, as he lay in bed with the brown-haired woman, an idea occurred to him. He got out of bed and took the child into bed with him and the woman. Red was very young then. After that, he had only vague memories. It was a clear, moonlit night. The black man pulled back the white screen separating the bed from the open window, and streaming moonlight fell on his body and the woman's. Red remembered that night.

Two brown people were playing with a white child. The brown man tossed Red into the air and caught him as he fell. He laughed softly. The black man grabbed Red's small white hands and, with his huge black ones, forced him up her wide, flat brown belly. He let him walk over the woman's body.

The two men began rocking the child back and forth. Red enjoyed the game. He kept begging for it to continue. He found it magnificent. When they tired of playing, he crawled over the two bodies, over the man's broad, tanned shoulders and the dark-skinned woman's chest. His lips sought the woman's rounded, rising breasts. He fell asleep on her chest.

Red remembered those nights the way one recalls a fragment of a dream, caught and held. He remembered the laughter of the two brown people in the moonlight as they played with him, a quiet laughter that couldn't be heard outside the room. They were laughing at his mother. Perhaps they were laughing at the white race. There are times when black people do things like that.

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BOOK TWO. THE MILL GIRLS

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1


D ORIS HOFFMAN, WHO worked in the spinning room of the Langdon Cotton Mill in Langdon, Georgia, and had a vague but constant awareness of a world beyond the cotton mill where she worked and the cotton mill village where she lived with her husband, Ed Hoffman. She remembered automobiles, the passenger trains occasionally glimpsed in the windows as they rushed past the mill (don't waste time on windows now; time-wasters get fired these days), movies, fancy women's clothes, perhaps voices coming from the radio. There was no radio in the Hoffman house. They didn't have one. She was very kind to people. At the mill, she sometimes wanted to play the devil. She would like to play with the other girls in the spinning room, dance with them, sing with them. Come on, let's sing. Let's dance. She was young. Sometimes she wrote songs. She was a smart and quick worker. She liked men. Her husband, Ed Hoffman, wasn't a very strong man. She would have liked a strong young man.

And yet she wouldn't go back to Ed Hoffman, not her. She knew it, and Ed knew it.

Some days Doris couldn't be touched. Ed couldn't touch her. She was closed, quiet, and warm. She was like a tree or a hill, lying motionless in the warm sunlight. She worked completely automatically in the large, bright spinning room of the Langdon Cotton Mill, a room of lights, flying machines, delicate, shifting, floating forms-on those days she couldn't be touched, but she did her job well. She could always do more than her share.

One Saturday in autumn, there was a fair in Langdon. It wasn't near the cotton mill or in town. It was in an empty field by the river, past the cotton mill and the town where cotton textiles were made. People from Langdon, if they went there at all, mostly drove. The fair ran all week, and quite a few people from Langdon came out to see it. The field was lit with electric lights so that performances could be held at night.

This wasn't a horse fair. It was a spectacle fair. There was a Ferris wheel, a carousel, booths selling things, cane-ringing stations, and a free show on a float. There were dancing areas: one for whites, one for blacks. Saturday, the last day of the fair, was a day for mill workers, poor white farmers, and mostly blacks. Almost no one from the town showed up that day. There were almost no fights, drunkenness, or anything else. To attract mill workers, it was decided that the mill baseball team should play a game against a mill team from Wilford, Georgia. The Wilford mill was small, just a small yarn mill. It was perfectly clear that Langdon Mill's team would have an easy time. They were almost certain to win.

All week, Doris Hoffman thought about the fair. Every girl in her room at the mill knew it. The mill in Langdon worked day and night. You worked five ten-hour shifts and one five-hour shift. You had the day off from noon on Saturday until midnight on Sunday, when the night shift began the new week.

Doris was strong. She could go anywhere and do things that her husband, Ed, couldn't-and walk. He was always tired and had to lie down. She went to the fair with three mill girls named Grace, Nell, and Fanny. It would have been easier and shorter to walk along the railroad tracks, but Nell, who was also a strong girl like Doris, said, "Let's go through town," and they all did. Grace, who was weak, had a long way to go; it wasn't as pleasant, but she said nothing. They returned by a shortcut, along the railroad tracks that ran alongside the winding river. They reached Langdon Main Street and turned right. Then they walked through beautiful streets. Then there was a long walk along a dirt road. It was quite dusty.

The river that flowed beneath the mill and the railroad tracks wound around it. You could walk onto Main Street in Langdon, turn right, and come to the road leading to the fair. You'd walk down a street lined with beautiful houses, not all identical, like in a mill village, but all different, with yards, grass, flowers, and girls sitting on their porches, no older than Doris herself, but not married, not with a man and a child and a sick mother-in-law, and you'd emerge onto the plain beside the very river that flowed past the mill.

Grace ate a quick dinner after a day at the mill and quickly cleaned up. When you eat alone, you start eating quickly. You don't care what you eat. She quickly cleaned and washed the dishes. She was tired. She hurried. Then she went out onto the porch and took off her shoes. She liked to lie on her back.

There was no streetlight. That was good. Doris had to clean longer, and she also had to breastfeed the baby and put him to bed. Luckily, the baby was healthy and slept well. That was like Doris. It was naturally powerful. Doris told Grace about her mother-in-law. She always called her "Mrs." Hoffman. She would say, "Mrs. Hoffman is worse today," or "she's better," or "she's bleeding a little."

She didn't like putting the baby in the living room of the four-room house where the four Hoffmans ate and sat on Sundays and where Mrs. Hoffman lay when she went to bed, but she didn't want Mrs. Hoffman to lie where she did. Hoffman knew she didn't want that. It would hurt her feelings. Ed had built a kind of low couch for his mother to lie on. It was comfortable. She could lie down easily and get up easily. Doris didn't like putting her baby there. She was afraid the baby would get infected. She told Grace so. "I'm always afraid he'll figure it out," she told Grace. She put her baby, when he was fed and ready for bed, in the bed she and Ed shared in the other room. Ed slept in the same bed during the day, but when he woke up in the afternoon, he made Doris's bed. Ed was that way. In that sense he was good.

In some ways, Ed was almost like a girl.

Doris had large breasts, while Grace had none at all. Perhaps this was because Doris had a child. No, that's not true. She had large breasts before, even before she got married.

Doris went to Grace's parties. At the mill, she and Grace worked in the same big, bright, long spinning room between the rows of bobbins. They ran back and forth, or walked back and forth, or stopped for a moment to talk. When you work with someone like that all day every day, you can't help but like her. You love her. It's almost like being married. You know when she's tired because you're tired. If your feet hurt, you know she does too. You can't tell just by walking around the place and seeing people working, the way Doris and Grace did. You don't know. You don't feel it.

A man would pass through the spinning mill in the middle of the morning and the middle of the afternoon, selling things. They let him. He sold a large quantity of soft candy called Milky Ways and he sold Coca-Cola. They let him. You spent ten cents. It hurt to blow it, but you did it. You developed a habit, and you did it. It gave you strength. Grace could hardly wait when she worked. She wanted her Milky Ways, she wanted her cocaine. By the time she, Doris, Fanny, and Nell went to the fair, she was fired. Times were hard. A lot of people were fired.

Of course, they always took the weaker ones. They knew everything. They didn't say to the girl, "Do you need this?" They said, "We won't need you for a while." Grace needed it, but not as much as some. Tom Musgrave and her mother worked for her.

So they fired her. These were hard times, not boom times. It was a tougher job. They made Doris's side longer. Next they'll fire Ed. It was hard enough without him.

They cut the pay of Ed, Tom Musgrave and his mother.

That's what they took for the rent of the house and everything else. You had to pay about the same for things. They said you didn't do it, but you did. Around the time she went to the fair with Grace, Fanny, and Nell, there was always a fire of anger burning in Doris. She went mostly because she wanted Grace to go, to have fun, to forget about it, to put it all out of her mind. Grace wouldn't have gone if Doris hadn't gone. She would have gone anywhere Doris went. They hadn't fired Nell and Fanny yet.

When Doris went to Grace, when they were both still working, before the hard times had gotten so bad, before they had lengthened Doris's side so much and given Ed and Tom and Mother Musgrave so many more looms... Ed said it had kept him jumping now, so he couldn't think... he said it had tired him more than ever; and he looked... Doris herself had gone on working, she said, almost twice as fast... before all that, back in the good times, she used to go to Grace's like that at night.

Grace was so tired, lying on the porch. She was especially tired on hot nights. There might have been a few people on the street in the mill village, mill people like themselves, but they were few and far between. There was no streetlight near the Musgrave-Hoffman house.

They would lie in the dark next to each other. Grace was like Ed, Doris's husband. She hardly spoke during the day, but at night, when it was dark and hot, she talked. Ed was like that. Grace wasn't like Doris, who grew up in a mill town. She, her brother Tom, and her mom and dad had grown up on a farm in the hills of north Georgia. "It doesn't look much like a farm," Grace said. "You can hardly lift anything," Grace said, but it was nice. She said they might have stayed there, only her father died. They were in debt, they had to sell the farm, and Tom couldn't find work; so they came to Langdon.

When they had a farm, there was a waterfall of sorts near their farm. "It wasn't really a waterfall," Grace said. It must have been at night, before Grace got fired, when she was so tired at night and lying on the porch. Doris would come to her, sit next to her or lie down, and talk not loudly, but in a whisper.

Grace would take off her shoes. Her dress would be wide open at the neck. "Take off your stockings, Grace," Doris whispered.

There was a fair. It was October 1930. The mill closed at noon. Doris's husband was at home in bed. She left the baby with her mother-in-law. She saw a lot of things. There was a Ferris wheel and a long, street-like place with banners and pictures... a fat woman and a woman with snakes around her neck, a two-headed man and a woman in a tree with curly hair and Nell said, "God knows what else," and a man on a box talked about all this. There were some girls in tights, not very clean. They and the men all shouted, "Yes, yes, yes," to get people to come.

There were a lot of blacks there, it seems, a lot, city blacks and country blacks, it seems there were thousands of them.

There were a lot of country people, white people. They mostly arrived in rickety wagons pulled by mules. The fair lasted all week, but the main day was Saturday. The grass in the big field where the fair was held was completely burnt. This whole part of Georgia, when there was no grass, was red. It was red as blood. Usually this place, in the distance, almost a mile from Langdon's main street and at least a mile and a half from the Langdon Cotton Mill village where Doris, Nell, Grace, and Fanny worked and lived, was filled with tall weeds and grass. Whoever owned it couldn't plant cotton there because the river had risen and flooded it. At any moment, after the rains in the hills north of Langdon, it could flood.

The land was rich. Weeds and grass grew tall and thick. Whoever owned the land leased it to some wonderful people. They came in trucks to bring the fair here. There was a night show and a day show.

There was no admission fee. The day Doris went to the fair with Nell, Grace, and Fanny, there was a free baseball game, and a free performance by performers was scheduled on the stage in the middle of the fair. Doris felt a little guilty when her husband, Ed, couldn't go; he didn't want to, but he kept saying, "Go on, Doris, go with the girls. Keep going with the girls."

Fanny and Nell kept saying, "Oh, never mind." Grace said nothing. She never did that.

Doris felt a motherly love for Grace. Grace was always very tired after a day at the mill. After a day at the mill, when night fell, Grace would say, "I'm so tired." She had dark circles under her eyes. Doris's husband, Ed Hoffman, worked nights at the mill... a fairly intelligent man, but not strong.

So, on ordinary nights, when Doris came home from the mill and when her husband Ed went to work, he worked nights and she worked during the day, so they were together only on Saturday afternoons and evenings, and Sundays and Sunday evenings until twelve. ...they usually went to church on Sunday evenings, taking Ed's mother with them... she went to church when she couldn't muster the strength to go anywhere else...

On ordinary nights, when a long day at the mill was drawing to a close, when Doris had finished all the remaining chores, nursed the baby, and he'd gone to bed, and her mother-in-law was downstairs, she went outside. Her mother-in-law cooked dinner for Ed, and then he left, and Doris came in and ate, and the dishes needed washing. "You're tired," her mother-in-law said, "I'll do them."

"No, you won't," Doris said. She had a way of speaking that made people ignore her words. They did what she told them.

Grace will wait for Doris outside. If the night were hot, she would lie on the porch.

The Hoffman house wasn't really the Hoffman house at all. It was a country mill house. It was a double house. There were forty houses like it on that street in the mill village. Doris, Ed, and Ed's mother, Ma Hoffman, who had contracted tuberculosis and could no longer work, lived on one side, and Grace Musgrave, her brother Tom, and their mother, Ma Musgrave, lived on the other. Tom was unmarried. There was only a thin wall between them. There were two front doors, but only one porch, a narrow one running through the front of the house. Tom Musgrave and Ma Musgrave, like Ed, worked nights. Grace was alone in her half of the house at night. She wasn't afraid. She said to Doris, "I'm not afraid. You're so close. I'm so close." Ma Musgrave ate supper in that house, and then she and Tom Musgrave left. They left enough for Grace. She washed the dishes, as Doris did. They left at the same time as Ed Hoffman. They walked together.

You had to show up on time to register and get ready. When you worked days, you had to stay until you were dismissed, and then clean up. Doris and Grace worked in the spinning room at the mill, and Ed and Tom Musgraves repaired the looms. Ma Musgrave was a weaver.

That night, when Doris had finished her work and nursed the baby, and he was asleep, and Grace had finished hers, Doris went out to Grace. Grace was one of those people who would work and work and never give up, just like Doris.

Only Grace wasn't as strong as Doris. She was frail, with black hair and dark brown eyes that looked unnaturally large in her thin little face, and she had a small mouth. Doris had a big mouth, nose, and head. Her body was long, but her legs were short. They were strong, though. Grace's legs were round and beautiful. They were like a girl's legs, like a man's, while hers were rather small, but they weren't strong. They couldn't stand the noise. "I'm not surprised," Doris said, "they're so small and so pretty." After a day at the mill... on your feet all day, running up and down, your legs hurt. Doris's legs hurt, but not like Grace's. "They hurt so much," Grace said. When she said that, she always meant her legs. "Take off your stockings."


"No, you wait. I'll take them off for you."


Doris took them off for Grace.


- Now you lie quietly.


She rubbed Grace all over. She couldn't quite feel her. Everyone said they knew Doris was a good hand rubber. She had strong, fast hands. They were alive hands. What she did to Grace, she did to Ed, her husband, when he left on Saturday night and they slept together. He needed it all. She rubbed Grace's feet, her legs, her shoulders, her neck, and everywhere else. She started at the top, and then worked her way down. "Now turn over," she said. She rubbed her back for a long time. She did the same to Ed. "How nice," she thought, "to feel people and rub them, hard, but not too hard."

It would be nice if the people you rubbed were nice. Grace was nice, and Ed Hoffman was nice. They didn't feel the same. "I guess two people's bodies don't feel the same," Grace thought. Grace's body was softer, not as sinewy as Ed's.

You rubbed her for a while, and then she spoke. She started talking. Ed always started talking when Doris stroked him like that. They weren't talking about the same things. Ed was a man of ideas. He could read and write, but Doris and Grace couldn't. When he had time to read, he read both newspapers and books. Grace couldn't read or write any more than Doris could. They weren't ready for it. Ed wanted to be a preacher, but he didn't make it. He would have made it if he hadn't been so shy that he couldn't stand up in front of people and talk.

If his father had lived, he might have mustered the courage to survive. His father, when he was alive, wanted him to. He saved him and sent him to school. Doris could have written her name and spoken a few words if she had tried, but Grace couldn't even do that. As Doris stroked Ed with her strong arms, which seemed never to tire, he talked about ideas. He got it into his head that he wanted to be the man who could start a union.

He'd gotten it into his head that people could form a union and go on strike. He'd talk about it. Sometimes, when Doris rubbed him for too long, he'd start laughing, and he'd laugh at himself.

He said, "I'm talking about joining the union." Once, before Doris had met him, he'd been working at a mill in another town where they had a union. They'd had a strike, too, and they'd gotten screwed. Ed said he didn't care. He said those were good times. He'd been a little kid then. This was before Doris met and married him, before he came to Langdon. His father was alive then. He laughed and said, "I have ideas, but I don't have the courage. I'd like to start a union here, but I don't have the courage." He was laughing at himself like that.

Grace, when Doris stroked her at night, when Grace was so tired, when her body became softer and softer, more and more pleasant under Doris's hands, she never talked about ideas.

She loved describing places. Near the farm where she lived before her father died and she, her brother Tom, and her mother moved to Langdon to work at the mill, there was a small waterfall in a small stream with bushes. There wasn't just one waterfall, but many. One was over rocks, then another, and another and another. It was a cool, shady spot with rocks and bushes. There was water there, Grace said, pretending it was alive. "It seemed like it whispered and then spoke," she said. If you walked a little way, it would sound like a horse running. Under each waterfall, she said, there was a small puddle.

She used to go there when she was a child. There were fish in the pools, but if you stayed still, after a while they wouldn't notice. Grace's father died when she and her brother Tom were still children, but they didn't have to sell the farm right away, not for a year or two, so they went there all the time.

It was not far from their house.

It was wonderful to hear Grace talk about it. Doris thought it was the most pleasant thing she'd ever known on a hot night when she herself was tired and her legs ached. In that hot cotton mill town in Georgia, where the nights were so still and warm, when Doris finally got the baby to sleep, she rubbed Grace over and over until Grace said the weariness had completely left her. Her feet, her arms, her legs, the burning, the tension, and all that...

You would never have thought that Grace's brother, Tom Musgrave, who was such a homely, tall man, who had never married, who had all his teeth so black and who had such a big Adam's apple... you would never have thought that such a man, when he was a little boy, would have been so sweet to his little sister.

He took her to swimming pools, waterfalls and fishing.

He was so plain that you would never have thought he could even be Grace's brother.

You would never have thought that a girl like Grace, who was always so easily tired, who was usually so silent, and who, while she was still working in the factory, always looked as if she was about to faint or something... you would never have thought that when you rubbed her and rubbed her, as Doris did, so patiently and pleasantly, with pleasure, you would never have thought that she could talk like that about places and things.

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2


THE FAIR IN LANGDON, GEORGIA, fed Doris Hoffman's awareness of worlds beyond her own, factory-bound world. It was the world of Grace, Ed, Mrs. Hoffman, and Nell, of thread production, flying machines, wages, and talk of the new stretching system introduced at the factory, and always of wages, hours, and the like. It wasn't varied enough. It was too much, always the same. Doris couldn't read. She could tell Ed about the fair later, in bed that evening. Grace, too, was glad to leave. She didn't seem so tired. The fair was crowded, her shoes were dusty, the shows were shabby and noisy, but Doris didn't know that.

Shows, carousels, and Ferris wheels came from some distant, outer world. There were performers shouting in front of tents, and girls in tights who might never have been to a mill but had traveled everywhere. There were men selling jewelry, men with sharp eyes who had the nerve to say something to a body. Perhaps they and their shows had been performed in the North and West, where cowboys lived, and on Broadway, in New York, and everywhere else. Doris knew about all this because she went to the movies quite often.

Being a simple factory worker, born a natural, was like being a prisoner forever. You couldn't help but know it. You were put in, shut up. People, strangers, not factory workers, thought you were different. They looked down on you. They couldn't help it. They couldn't know how you could sometimes explode, hating everyone and everything. When you reached that point, you had to hold on tight and shut up. It was the best way.

The show's participants dispersed. They stayed in Langdon, Georgia, for a week, and then disappeared. Nell, Fanny, and Doris had all thought the same thing that day when they first arrived at the fair and began to look around, but they didn't talk about it. Perhaps Grace didn't feel what the others felt. She had become softer and more tired. She would be a domestic body if some man married her. Doris didn't understand why some man didn't. Maybe the girls from the hula-hula tent show weren't so cute, in their tights and bare legs, but in any case, they weren't manufacturers. Nell was especially rebellious. She almost always was. Nell could swear like a man. She didn't care. "God, I'd like to try it myself," she thought that day when the four of them first arrived at the fair.

Before she had a child, Doris and Ed, her husband, often went to the movies. It was fun and there was plenty to talk about; she loved it, especially Charlie Chaplin and Westerns. She liked movies about con artists and people getting into hard-to-reach places, fighting and shooting. It made her nerves tingle. There were pictures of rich people, how they lived, etc. They wore wonderful dresses.

They went to parties and dances. There were young girls and they went broke. You saw the scene in the movie in the garden. There was a high stone fence with grape vines. There was a moon.

There was beautiful grass, flower beds, and little houses with grape vines and seats inside.

A young girl emerged from the side door of the house with a much older man. She was beautifully dressed. She wore a low-cut dress, the kind you wore to parties among nobles. He spoke to her. He picked her up and kissed her. He had a gray mustache. He led her to a seat in a small open house in the courtyard.

There was a young man who wanted to marry her. He had no money. A rich man got her. He betrayed her. He ruined her. Such plays in the movies gave Doris a strange feeling inside. She walked with Ed home to the mill in the mill village where they lived, and they did not speak. It would be funny if Ed wanted to be rich, even for a while, to live in such a house and ruin such a young girl. If he knew, he did not say so. Doris wished for something. Sometimes, seeing such a sight, she wished for some rich villain to come and ruin her at least once, not forever, but at least once, in such a garden, behind such a house... so quiet and the moon shining... you know that you do not have to get up, have breakfast and hurry to the mill at half past five, in rain or snow, winter or summer... if you had fluffy lingerie and you were beautiful.

Westerns were good. They always featured men riding horses with guns and shooting at each other. They were always fighting over some woman. "Not my type," Doris thought. Even a cowboy wouldn't be such a fool for a mill girl. Doris was curious, something in her was constantly drawn to places and people, wary. "Even if I had money, clothes, underwear, and silk stockings I could wear every day, I don't think I'd be so chic," she thought. She was short and had a firm chest. Her head was large, and so was her mouth. She had a large nose and strong white teeth. Most mill girls had bad teeth. If there was always a hidden sense of beauty that followed her sturdy little figure like a shadow, going with her to the mill every day, returning home, and accompanying her when she went out with the other mill workers, it wasn't very obvious. Not many people saw it.

Suddenly everything became more and more funny to her. It could happen at any moment. She wanted to scream and dance. She had to pull herself together. If you get too cheerful at the mill, leave. Then where are you?

There was Tom Shaw, president of the Langdon mill, the big gun there. He didn't come into the mill often-he stayed in the office-but he did come in from time to time. He'd walk by, watch, or see visitors off. He was such a funny, smug little man that Doris wanted to laugh at him, but she didn't. Before Grace was fired, whenever he passed her, or walked past her, or the foreman or superintendent came by, she always dreaded it. Mostly for Grace. Grace almost never raised her ribs.

If you didn't keep your side straight, if someone came along and stopped too many of your spools...

Thread was wound onto bobbins in the mill's spinning room. A side was one side of a long, narrow corridor between rows of flying spools. Thousands of individual threads descended from above to be wound, each on its own bobbin, and if one broke, the bobbin stopped. You could tell just by looking how many people were stopped at once. The bobbin stood motionless. It waited for you to quickly come and tie the broken thread back together. At one end of your side, four bobbins might be stopped, and at the same time, at the other end, during a long walk, three more might be stopped. The thread, arriving on the bobbins so they could go to the weaving room, kept coming and coming. "If only it would stop for just an hour," Doris thought sometimes, but not often. If only the girl didn't have to watch it coming all day, or if she was on the night shift all night long. It went on all day, all night. It was wound onto bobbins, destined for the loom where Ed, Tom, and Ma Musgrave worked. When the bobbins on your side were full, a man called a "doffer" came and took away the full bobbins. He took out the full bobbins and inserted empty ones. He pushed a small cart in front of him, and it was carted away, loaded with loaded bobbins.

There were millions and millions of spools to fill.

They never ran out of empty bobbins. It seemed like there must be hundreds of millions of them, like stars, or like drops of water in a river, or like grains of sand in a field. The thing was, getting out every now and then to a place like this fair, where there were shows, and people you'd never seen talking, and laughing Negroes, and hundreds of other mill workers like herself, Grace, Nell, and Fanny, not in the mill now, but outside, was a huge relief. Thread and bobbins went out of your mind for a while anyway.

They didn't linger in Doris's mind much when she wasn't working at the factory. They did so in Grace's. Doris wasn't very clear about how things were with Fanny and Nell.

At the fair, a man performed on the trapeze for free. He was funny. Even Grace laughed at him. Nell and Fanny burst into laughter, as did Doris. Nell, since Grace had been fired, took Grace's place at the mill next to Doris. She didn't mean to take Grace's place. She couldn't help it. She was a tall girl with yellow hair and long legs. Men fell in love with her. She could set bees on men. She was still in the square.

Men liked her. The foreman of the spinning mill, a young but bald and married man, really wanted Nell. He wasn't the only one. Even at the fair, the ones who stared most at her were the showmen and others who didn't know the four girls. They cracked her. They had become too clever. Nell could swear like a man. She went to church, but she swore. She didn't care what she said. When Grace was fired, when times were hard, Nell, who had been put at Doris's side, said:

"Those dirty skunks fired Grace." She walked into where Doris worked with her head held high. She always carried it with her... "She's damn lucky she has Tom and her mother working for her," she told Doris. "Maybe she'll survive if Tom and her mother keep working, if they don't get fired," she said.

"She should absolutely not work here. Don"t you think so?" Doris really did think so. She liked Nell and admired her, but not in the same way she admired Grace. She liked that screw-it-all attitude about Nell. "I wish I had that," she thought sometimes. Nell would curse the foreman and the supervisor when they weren"t around, but when they were... of course, she wasn"t stupid. She gave them the eye. They liked it. Her eyes seemed to say to men, "Aren"t you beautiful?" She didn"t mean it that way. Her eyes always seemed to say something to men. "It"s all right. Get me if you can," they said. "I"m available," they said. "If you"re man enough."

Nell wasn't married, but there were a dozen men working at the factory, married and single, who were trying to force themselves on her. Young unmarried men meant marriage. Nell said, "You have to work with them. You have to keep them guessing, but don't give in to them until they force you. Make them think you think they're cool," she said.

"To hell with their souls," she sometimes said.

The young man, unmarried, who had been moved from their side, to Grace and Doris's side, and then to Nell and Doris's after Grace was fired, usually said little when he arrived while Grace was there. He felt sorry for Grace. Grace could never hold her own. Doris always had to leave her side and work on Grace's side to keep Grace out. He knew it. Sometimes he would whisper to Doris: "Poor child," he would say. "If Jim Lewis attacks her, she'll be fired." Jim Lewis was the foreman. He was the one who had a soft spot for Nell. He was a bald man in his thirties, with a wife and two children. When Nell sided with Grace, the young man who had been sent there changed.

He always made fun of Nell when he tried to date her. He called her "legs."

"Hey, legs," he said. "What about it? How about a date? How about a movie tonight?" His nerves.

"Come on," he said, "I"ll take you."

"Not today," she said. "We"ll think about it," she said.

She continued to look at him, not letting go.

"Not tonight. I'm busy tonight." You'd think she had a man to see almost every night of the week. She didn't. She never went out alone with men, didn't walk with them, didn't talk to them outside the mill. She stuck to other girls. "I like them better," she told Doris. "Some of them, a lot of them, are cats, but they've got more guts than men." She'd spoken rather rudely of a young tenant when he had to leave their side and cross to the other side. "Damn little skater," she'd said. "He thinks he can meet me." She laughed, but it wasn't a very pleasant laugh.

There was an open area at the fair, right in the center of the field, where all the dime shows and the free show took place. There was a man and a woman dancing on roller skates and doing tricks, and a little girl in a leotard dancing, and two men tumbling over each other, over chairs, tables, and everything. There was a man standing there; he came out onto the platform. He had a megaphone. "Professor Matthews. Where is Professor Matthews?" he kept calling through the megaphone.

"Professor Matthews. Professor Matthews.

Professor Matthews was supposed to perform on the trapeze. He was supposed to be the best performer in the free show. This was stated in the promotional leaflets they issued.

The wait was long. It was Saturday, and there weren't many Langdon townspeople at the fair, almost none, maybe none at all... Doris didn't think she'd seen anyone like that. If they were there, they'd come earlier in the week. It was Negro Day. It was the day of the mill workers and the many poor farmers with their mules and their families.

The blacks kept to themselves. They usually did. There were separate stands for them to eat. Their laughter and conversation could be heard everywhere. There were fat old black women with their black men, and young black girls in bright dresses, followed by young males.

It was a hot autumn day. There was a crowd of people there. The four girls kept to themselves. It was a hot day.

The field had been overgrown with weeds and tall grass, and now it was all trampled. There were hardly any of them left. It was mostly dust and bare spots, and everything was red. Doris had fallen into one of her moods. She was in a "don't touch me" mood. She fell silent.

Grace clung to her. She remained very close. She didn't much like the presence of Nell and Fanny. Fanny was short and plump, with short, thick fingers.

Nell told her about her-not at the fair, but earlier, at the mill-she said, "Fanny's lucky. She has a man and no children. Doris wasn't sure how she felt about her own child. It was at home with her mother-in-law, Ed's mother.

Ed lay there. He lay there all day. "Go on," he said to Doris when the girls came for her. He'd pick up a newspaper or a book and lie on the bed all day. He'd take off his shirt and shoes. The Hoffmans didn't have any books except the Bible and a few children's books Ed had left behind from his childhood, but he could borrow books from the library. There was a branch of the Langdon Town Library in Mill Village.

There was a man nicknamed "the welfare officer" who worked in the Langdon mills. He had a house on the best street in the village, the street where the day caretaker and several other dignitaries lived. Some of the foremen lived there. The foreman of the spinning mill did just that.

The night watchman was a young man from the North, unmarried. He lived in a hotel in Langdon. Doris had never seen him.

The social worker's name was Mr. Smith. The front room of his house had been converted into a branch library. His wife kept it. After Doris left, Ed would put on his nice clothes and go get a book. He would take the book he'd gotten last week and get another. The social worker's wife would be nice to him. She thought, "He's nice. He cares about higher things." He liked stories about men, people who actually lived and were great. He read about great men like Napoleon Bonaparte, General Lee, Lord Wellington, and Disraeli. All week long, he read books in the afternoons after he woke up. He told Doris about them.

After Doris had gotten into a "don't touch me" mood for a while at the fair that day, the others noticed how she was feeling. Grace was the first to notice, but she didn't say anything. "What the hell happened?" Nell asked. "I'm woozy," Doris said. She wasn't dizzy at all. She wasn't having the blues. It wasn't that.

Sometimes it happens to a person: the place you are in exists, but it doesn't. If you're at a fair, that's exactly it. If you're working in a mill, that's exactly it.

You hear things. You touch things. You don't know.

You do, and you don't. You can't explain. Doris might even be in bed with Ed. They liked to lie awake for a long time on Saturday nights. It was the only night they had. In the morning they could sleep. You were there and you weren't there. Doris wasn't the only one who sometimes acted like this. Ed was sometimes. You talked to him, and he answered, but he was somewhere far away. Maybe it was books with Ed. He could be somewhere with Napoleon Bonaparte, or Lord Wellington, or someone like that. He might be a big bug himself, not just a factory worker. You couldn't tell who he was.

You could smell it; you could taste it; you could see it. It didn't touch you.

There was a Ferris wheel at the fair... ten cents. There was a carousel... ten cents. There were stands selling hot dogs, Coca-Cola, lemonade, and Milky Way.

There were little wheels you could bet on. The mill worker in Langdon, on the day Doris went out with Grace, Nell, and Fanny, lost twenty-seven dollars. He saved it. The girls didn't find out until Monday at the mill. "Damn fool," Nell said to Doris, "doesn't that damn fool know you can't beat them at their own game? If they weren't out to get you, what would they be here for?" she asked. There was a little bright, shiny wheel with an arrow that spun. It stopped on numbers. The mill worker lost a dollar, and then another. He got excited. He threw in ten dollars. He thought, "I'll hold on until I get my revenge."

"Damn fool," said Nell Doris.

Nell's attitude toward this game was, "You can't beat her." Her attitude toward men was, "It's impossible to beat." Doris liked Nell. She thought about her. "If she ever gave in, she'd give in hard," she thought. "It wouldn't be quite like her and her husband, Ed," she thought. Ed asking her. She thought, "I guess I could, too. A woman might as well have a man. If Nell ever gave in to a man, it would be a failure."

*

PROFESSOR MATTHEWS. Professor Matthews. Professor Matthews.

He wasn't there. They couldn't find him. It was Saturday. Maybe he was drunk. "I bet he's drunk somewhere," Fanny said to Nell. Fanny stood next to Nell. All that day, Grace stayed next to Doris. She barely spoke. She was small and pale. As Nell and Fanny walked to the place where the free performance was to take place, a man laughed at them. He laughed at the way Nell and Fanny walked together. He was a showman. "Hello," he said to another man, "that's all." The other man laughed. "Go to hell," Nell said. Four girls stood nearby and watched the trapeze act. "They advertise a free trapeze act and then it's gone," Nell said. "He's drunk," Fanny said. There was a man who had been drugged. He stepped forward from the crowd. He was a man who looked like a farmer. He had red hair and was hatless. He stepped forward from the crowd. He staggered. He could barely stand. He was wearing blue overalls. He had a large Adam's apple. "Isn't your Professor Matthews here?" he managed to ask the man on the platform, the one with the megaphone. "I'm a trapeze artist," he said. The man on the platform laughed. He tucked the megaphone under his arm.

The sky above the fairgrounds in Langdon, Georgia, was blue that day. A pure, light blue. It was hot. All the girls in Doris's gang were wearing thin dresses. "The sky that day was the bluest she'd ever seen," Doris thought.

The drunk man said, "If you can't find your Professor Matthews, I can do it."

"Can you?" The man on the platform's eyes were filled with surprise, amusement, and doubt.

- You're damn right I can. I'm a Yankee, yes.

The man had to hold on to the edge of the platform. He almost fell. He fell backwards and then fell forwards. He could only stand.

"You can?"

"Yes, I can."

- Where did you study?

"I was educated in the North. I am a Yankee. I was educated on an apple tree branch in the North."

"Yankee Doodle," the man shouted. He opened his mouth wide and shouted, "Yankee Doodle."

That's what Yankees were like. Doris had never seen a Yankee before-not knowing he was a Yankee! Nell and Fanny laughed.

Crowds of blacks laughed. Crowds of millworkers stood and watched, laughing. A man on a platform had to lift a drunk man. Once he almost lifted him, then let him fall, just to make him look like a fool. The next time he lifted him, he lifted him. "Like a fool. Just like a fool," Nell said.

In the end, the man performed well. At first, he didn't. He fell and fell. He stood on the trapeze, and then fell onto the platform. He fell on his face, on his neck, on his head, on his back.

People laughed and laughed. Afterwards Nell said, "I broke my damn sides laughing at that damn fool." Fanny laughed out loud, too. Even Grace laughed a little. Doris didn't. This wasn't her day. She felt good, but this wasn't her day. The man on the trapeze kept falling and falling, and then he seemed to sober up. He did well. He did well.

The girls had Coca-Cola. They had Milky Way. They rode the Ferris wheel. It had small seats, so you could sit two at a time. Grace sat with Doris, and Nell with Fanny. Nell would have preferred to be with Doris. She left Grace alone. Grace didn't settle for them like the others: one Coca-Cola, another Milky Way, and a third Ferris wheel ride, like the others did. She couldn't. She was broke. She was fired.

*

There are days when nothing can touch you. If you're just a factory worker in a southern cotton mill, it doesn't matter. There's something inside you that watches and sees. What matters to you? It's strange on days like those. The machines in the factory can sometimes get on your nerves, but on days like those, it's not so. On days like those, you're far away from people, it's strange, sometimes that's when they find you most attractive. They all want to gather close. "Give. Give me. Give me."

"Give what?"

You have nothing. This is exactly who you are. "Here I am. You can't touch me."

Doris was on the Ferris wheel with Grace. Grace was scared. She didn't want to go up, but when she saw Doris getting ready, she got on. She clung to Doris.

The wheel went up and up, then down and down... a big circle. There was a town, a big circle. Doris saw the town of Langdon, the courthouse, a few office buildings, and a Presbyterian church. Over the hillside, she saw the chimney of a mill. She couldn't see the mill village.

Where the town was, she saw trees, lots of trees. There were shade trees in front of the houses in the town, in front of the houses of people who worked not in the mills, but in stores or offices. Or who were doctors, lawyers, or maybe judges. No use for mill people. She saw the river stretching away, skirting the town of Langdon. The river was always yellow. It never seemed to clear up. It was golden yellow. It was golden yellow against the blue sky. It was against the trees and bushes. It was a slow river.

The town of Langdon wasn't on a hill. It was actually on a rise. The river didn't go all the way around. It came from the south.

On the north side, far away, there were hills... It was far, far away, where Grace lived when she was a little girl. Where there were waterfalls.

Doris could see people looking down on them. She could see many people. Their legs moved strangely. They were walking through the fairground.

There were catfish in the river that flowed past Langdon.

They were caught by blacks. They liked it. I doubt anyone else did it. Whites almost never did it.

In Langdon, right in the busiest area, close to the best shops, were the Black Streets. No one but Black people went there. If you were white, you wouldn't go. White people ran the shops on the Black Streets, but white people didn't go there.

Doris would have liked to see the streets of her factory village from up there. She couldn't. The shoulder of the earth made it impossible. The Ferris wheel fell. She thought, "I'd like to see where I live from above."

It's not entirely accurate to say that people like Doris, Nell, Grace, and Fanny lived in their own houses. They lived in the mill. They spent almost all their waking hours at the mill all week.

In winter, they walked when it was dark. They left at night, when it was dark. Their lives were walled up, locked away. How could anyone know who hadn't been caught and held from childhood, through young womanhood, and into womanhood? It was the same with the factory owners. They were special people.

Their lives were lived in rooms. Nell and Doris's life in the Langdon spinning mill was lived in a room. It was a large, bright room.

It wasn't ugly. It was big and bright. It was wonderful.

Their life unfolded in a small, narrow corridor within a large room. The walls of the corridor were machines. Light fell from above. A fine, soft stream of water, actually fog, drifted down from above. This was done to keep the flying thread soft and flexible for the machines.

Flying machines. Singing machines. Machines build the walls of a small living corridor in a large room.

The corridor was narrow. Doris had never measured its width.

You started when you were a child. You stayed there until you got old or tired. The machines went up and up. The thread went down and down. It fluttered. You had to keep it damp. It fluttered. If you didn't keep it damp, it would always break. In the hot summer, the dampness made you sweat more and more. It made you sweat more. It made you sweat more.

Nell said, "Who cares about us? We're just machines ourselves. Who cares about us?" Some days Nell growled. She swore. She said, "We make cloth. Who cares? Some whore will probably buy her a new dress from some rich man. Who cares?" Nell spoke frankly. She swore. She hated.

"What difference does it make, who cares? Who wants to be ignored?"

There was lint in the air, fine floating lint. Some said it was what caused tuberculosis in some people. He could have given it to Ed's mother, Ma Hoffman, who lay on the sofa Ed had made and coughed. She coughed when Doris was around at night, when Ed was around during the day, when he was in bed, when he read about General Lee, General Grant, or Napoleon Bonaparte. Doris hoped her child wouldn't understand.

Nell said, "We work from seeing to not seeing. They've got us. They've attacked us. They know it. They've tied us up. We work from the visible to the invisible." Nell was tall, smug, and rude. Her breasts weren't big like Doris's-almost too big-or like Fanny's, or too small, just okay, a flat spot like a man's, like Grace's. They were just right: not too big and not too small.

If a man ever got Nell, he'd come at her hard. Doris knew it. She felt it. She didn't know how she knew it, but she knew. Nell would fight, and curse, and fight. "No, you don't understand. Damn you. I'm not like that. Go to hell."

When she gave up, she cried like a child.

If a man got her, he would have her. She would be his. She wouldn't say much about it, but... if a man got her, she would be his. Thinking of Nell, Doris almost wished she were the man she could try with.

The girl thought about such things. She had to think about something. All day, every day, thread, thread, thread. Flies, breaks, flies, breaks. Sometimes Doris wanted to swear like Nell. Sometimes she wished she were like Nell, not like her own kind. Grace said that when she worked in the mill on the side where Nell was now, one night after she came home... a hot night... she said...

Doris massaged Grace with her hands, softly and firmly, the best she knew how, not too hard and not too soft. She rubbed her all over. Grace loved it. She was so tired. She could barely wash the dishes that evening. She said, "I have a thread in my brain. Rub it there. I have a thread in my head. She kept thanking Doris for rubbing her. "Thank you. Oh, thank you, Doris," she said.

On the Ferris wheel, Grace was startled when it rose. She clung to Doris and closed her eyes. Doris kept hers wide open. She didn't want to miss anything.

Nell would look into the eyes of Jesus Christ. She would look into the eyes of Napoleon Bonaparte or Robert E. Lee.

Doris's husband thought Doris was like that too, but she wasn't what her husband thought. She knew it. One day, Ed was talking to his mother about Doris. Doris didn't hear it. It was during the day when Ed woke up and Doris was at work. He said, "If she had any thoughts against me, she would have said so. If she had even thought about another man, she would have told me." It wasn't true. If Doris had heard it, she would have laughed. "He misunderstood me," she would have said.

You could be in a room with Doris, and she'd be there, not there. She'd never get on your nerves. Nell said that to Fanny once, and it was true.

She didn't say, "Look. Here I am. I'm Doris. Pay attention to me." She didn't care whether you paid attention or not.

Her husband, Ed, might be in the room. He could be reading there on Sunday. Doris, too, might be lying on the same bed next to Ed. Ed's mother might be lying on the porch on the couch Ed made for her. Ed would have put it out for her to get some air.

Summer can be hot.

The child could play on the porch. He could crawl around. Ed built a small fence to keep him from sliding off the porch. Ed's mother could watch her. The cough kept her awake.

Ed could have been lying on the bed next to Doris. He could have been thinking about the people in the book he was reading. If he had been a writer, he could have been lying on the bed next to Doris and writing his books. There was nothing about her that said, "Look at me. Notice me." It never happened.

Nell said, "She's coming to you. She's warm to you. If Nell were a man, she'd be after Doris. She once said to Fanny, "I'll be after her. I'd like her.

Doris never hated anyone. She never hated anything.

Doris had a knack for warming people. She could massage relaxation into them with her hands. Sometimes, when she stood on her side in the spinning room at the factory, her breasts would ache. After she gave birth to Ed and the baby, she fed the baby early when she woke up. Her baby woke early. Before leaving for work, she gave him another warm drink.

At noon, she went home and fed the baby again. She fed him at night. On Saturday evenings, the baby slept with her and Ed.

Ed had pleasant feelings. Before she married him, when they were planning to get together... they both worked at the mill then too... Ed had a part-time job then... Ed went for walks with her. He sat with her at night in the dark at the house of Doris's mother and father.

Doris worked in the mill, in the spinning mill, from the age of twelve. So did Ed. He worked on the loom from the age of fifteen.

That day when Doris was on the Ferris wheel with Grace... Grace was clinging to her... Grace was closing her eyes because she was afraid... Fanny and Nell were sitting in the next seat downstairs... Fanny was screaming with laughter... Nell screamed.

Doris continued to see different things.

In the distance she saw two fat black women fishing in the river.

She saw cotton fields in the distance.

A man was driving a car on a road between cotton fields. He created red dust.

She saw some of the buildings in the town of Langdon and the smokestack of the cotton mill where she worked.

In a field not far from the fairgrounds, someone was selling patent medicines. Doris saw him. Only black people were gathered around him. He was in the back of a truck. He was selling patent medicines to black people.

She saw a crowd, a growing crowd, on the fairgrounds: blacks and whites, idlers (cotton mill workers) and blacks. Most of the mill workers hated blacks. Doris didn't.

She saw a young man she recognized. He was a strong-looking, red-haired young city dweller who had gotten a job at a factory.

He worked there twice. He came back one summer, and the next summer he came back again. He was a janitor. The girls at the factory said, "I bet he's a spy. What else is he? If he weren't a spy, why would he be here?"

At first, he worked at the mill. Doris wasn't married then. Then he left, and someone said he went to college. The following summer, Doris married Ed.

Then he came back. It was a tough time, with people getting laid off, but he got his job back. They extended the hours, laid people off, and there was talk of a union. "Let's form a union."

"Mister. The show will not tolerate this. The super will not tolerate this.

"I don't care. Let's form a union."

Doris wasn't fired. She had to work the longer side. Ed had to do more. He could hardly do what he did before. When that young man with the red hair... they called him "Red"... when he came back, everyone said he must be a spy.

A woman came to town, a strange woman, and she contacted Nell and told her who to write to about the union, and Nell came to the Hoffman house that night, Saturday night, and said to Doris, "Am I talking to Ed, Doris?" And Doris said, "Yes." She wanted Ed to write to some people to form a union, to send someone. "Hopefully a Communist one," she said. She had heard that was the worst case. She wanted the worst. Ed was afraid. At first, he wouldn't. "These are hard times," he said, "these are Hoover's times." He said he wouldn't at first.

"It's not the time," he said. He was scared. "I'll get fired or I'll be fired," he said, but Doris said, "Oh, come on," and Nell said, "Oh, come on," and he did.

Nell said, "Don't tell anyone. Don't tell a damn thing. It was exciting.

The red-haired young man returned to work at the mill. His Poppy worked as a doctor in Langdon, treating sick people from the mill, but he died. He was in the square.

His son was just a janitor at the mill. He played on the Mill Ball team and was an excellent player. That day, when Doris was at the fair, she saw him on the Ferris wheel. The mill team usually played ball on the mill's ball field, right next to the mill, but that day they were playing right next to the fair. It was an important day for the mill workers.

That evening at the fair, there was to be a dance on a large float-ten cents. Nearby, there were two floats: one for blacks, one for whites. Grace, Nell, and Doris weren't going to stay. Doris couldn't. Fanny stayed. Her husband came, and she stayed.

After the baseball game, there was a fat pig to be caught. They didn't stay for that. After riding the Ferris wheel, they went home.

Nell said, speaking of a young red-headed man from town who played on the Millball team: "I bet he's a spy," she said. "Damn rat," she said, "skunk. I bet he's a spy."

They were forming a union. Ed received letters. He was afraid they would attack him every time he received one. "What's in it?" Doris asked. It was exciting. He received union registration cards. A man came. There was to be a big union meeting, which would become public as soon as enough members had been recruited. It wasn't communist. Nell was wrong about that. It was just a union, and not the worst kind. Nell told Ed, "They can't fire you for this."

"Yes, they can. Hell, they can't." He was scared. Nell said she'd bet young Red Oliver was one hell of a spy. Ed said, "I bet so."

Doris knew it wasn't true. She said it wasn't true.

"How do you know?"

"I just know."

When she worked in the spinning room of the factory, during the day she could see, down the long corridor, lined on both sides with flying spools, a small patch of sky. Somewhere far away, perhaps by the river, was a small piece of wood, a tree branch-you couldn't always see it, only when the wind blew. The wind blew and shook it, and then, if you looked up at that moment, you saw it. She had been watching this since she was twelve. Many times she thought, "When I go outside someday, I'll look and see where that tree is," but when she went outside, she couldn't tell. She had been watching this since she was twelve. Now she was eighteen. There were no threads in her head. There were no threads left in her legs from standing for so long where the thread was made.

This young man, this red-haired young man, was looking at her. Grace, when he was there the first time, didn't know about it, and Nell didn't know. She wasn't married to Ed the first time. Ed didn't know.

He avoided this path whenever he could. He came up and looked at her. She looked at him like this.

When she got ready with Ed, she and Ed didn't do anything that they would later be ashamed of.

She used to let him touch different places in the dark. She let him.

After she married him and had a child, he didn't do it anymore. Perhaps he thought it would be wrong. He didn't say.

Doris's breasts started hurting late in the afternoon while she was at the mill. They had been aching constantly since before she'd even given birth to the baby and hadn't yet weaned him. She'd weaned him, but she hadn't weaned him. When she was at the mill, before she married Ed, and that red-haired young man had come up and looked at her, she'd laughed. Then her breasts had started hurting a little. That day, when she was on the Ferris wheel and saw Red Oliver playing baseball with the mill team, and she watched him, he was at bat, hit the ball hard, and ran.

It was nice to see him running. He was young and strong. He didn't see her, of course. Her chest began to ache. When the Ferris wheel ride ended, they got off, and she told the others she thought she'd have to go home. "I have to go home," she said. "I have to look after the baby."

Nell and Grace went with her. They returned home along the train tracks. It was a shorter route. Fanny started out with them, but she met her husband, and he said, "Let's stay," so she stayed.

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BOOK THREE. ETHEL

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1


ETHEL LONG, OF LANGDON, GEORGIA, WAS definitely not a true Southern woman. She didn't belong to the true tradition of Southern women, at least not the old tradition. Her people were perfectly respectable, her father very respectable. Of course, her father expected his daughter to be something she wasn't. She knew it. She smiled, knowing it, though it wasn't a smile meant for her father to see. At least, he didn't know. She would never upset him more than he already was. "Poor old dad." "Her father had it rough," she thought. "Life was a wild mustang for him." There was a dream of the flawless white Southern woman. She herself had completely shattered that myth. Of course, he didn't know and didn't want to know. Ethel thought she knew where this dream of the flawless white Southern woman came from. She was born in Langdon, Georgia, and at least she thought she'd always had her eyes open. She was cynical about men, especially Southern men. "It's easy enough for them to talk about flawless white femininity, constantly getting what they want the way they get it, usually from brown men, with little risk."

"I would like to show one of them.

"But why the hell should I worry?"

Ethel wasn't thinking about her father when she thought about this. Her father had been a good man. She herself wasn't good. She wasn't moral. She was thinking about the whole attitude of white people in the South today, about how Puritanism had spread to the South after the Civil War. "The Bible Belt," H.R. Mencken called it in Mercury. It contained all sorts of monstrosities: poor whites, blacks, upper-class whites, a little crazy trying to hold on to something they'd lost.

Industrialism is coming in its ugliest form... all this is mixed up in people with religion... pretensions, stupidity... all the same, physically it was a beautiful country.

Whites and blacks in an almost impossible relationship with each other... men and women lie to themselves.

And all this in a warm, sweet land. Ethel didn't really, didn't even understand what the Southern countryside was like... red sand roads, clay roads, pine forests, Georgia peach orchards blooming in the spring. She knew perfectly well that this could have been the sweetest land in all of America, but it wasn't. A rare opportunity that white people had missed during the entire fire-free period in America... in the South... how wonderful it could have been!

Ethel was a modern. That old talk about high, beautiful Southern civilization... creating gentlemen, creating ladies... she didn't want to be a lady herself... "Those old things are no longer relevant," she sometimes told herself, thinking of her father's standards of life, the standards he had so wanted to impose on her. Perhaps he thought he had crushed them. Ethel smiled. The idea was quite firmly rooted in her mind that for a woman like herself, no longer young... she was twenty-nine... that she had better try to develop, if she could, a certain style of life. Better even to be a little tough. "Don't give yourself away too cheaply, whatever you do," she liked to tell herself. There had been times in her before... the mood could return at any moment... she was only twenty-nine, after all, quite a mature age for a living woman... she knew perfectly well that she was far from out of danger... there had been times in her before, a rather wild and insane desire to give.

It's reckless to give it away myself.

What difference does it make who it was?

The act of giving itself would be something. There's a fence I'd like to climb over. What difference does it make what's beyond? Overcoming it is something.

Live recklessly.

"Wait a minute," Ethel told herself. She smiled as she said it. It wasn't as if she hadn't tried this reckless giving. It hadn't worked.

And yet she could try again. "If only he were nice." She felt that in the future, what she considered politeness would be very, very important to her.

Next time he won't give it at all. That would be capitulation. It's either this or nothing.

"To what? To a man?" Ethel asked herself. "I suppose a woman has to cling to something, to the belief that she can get something through a man," she thought. Ethel was twenty-nine. You get into the thirties, and then the forties.

Women who don't give themselves completely dry out. Their lips dry out, and they dry out inside.

If they give in, they will receive sufficient punishment.

"But perhaps we want punishment."

"Hit me. Hit me. Make me feel good. Make me beautiful, even if just for a moment.

"Make me bloom. Make me bloom."

This summer, Ethel found herself interested again. It was quite pleasant. There were two men, one much younger than her, the other much older. What woman wouldn't be pleased to be desired by two men... or, for that matter, three, or a dozen? She was pleased. Life in Langdon without two men wanting her would, after all, be rather dull. It was rather a shame that the younger of the two men she was suddenly interested in, and who were interested in her, was so young, so much younger than herself, truly immature, but there was no doubt she was interested in him. He stirred her. She wanted him near her. "I wish..."

Thoughts float. Thoughts excite. Thoughts are dangerous and pleasant. Sometimes thoughts are like the touch of hands where you want to be touched.

"Touch me, thoughts. Come closer. Come closer."

Thoughts are floating. Thoughts are exciting. A man's thoughts are about a woman.

"Do we want reality?

"If we could solve it, we could solve everything."

Perhaps this is an age of blindness and madness to reality-technology, science. Women like Ethel Long of Langdon, Georgia, read books and think, or try to think, sometimes dreaming of a new freedom, separate from that of men.

The man failed in America, now the women are trying something. Were they real?

After all, Ethel wasn't just a product of Langdon, Georgia. She attended Northern College and mingled with American intellectuals. Southern memories stuck with her.

Brown women and girls' experiences of being a child and growing up into a woman.

White women of the South, growing up, always conscious, in some subtle sense brown women... women with big hips, immoral, big-breasted women, peasant women, dark bodies...

They have something for men, both brown and white...

Constant denial of facts...

Dark women in the fields, working in the fields... dark women in the cities, as servants... in the houses... dark women walking through the streets with heavy baskets on their heads... swaying hips.

Hot south...

Negation. Negation.

"A white woman can be a fool, always reading or thinking." She can't help it.

"But I haven't done much," Ethel said to herself.

The young man she suddenly became interested in was named Oliver, and he had returned to Langdon from up north, where he was also attending college. He hadn't arrived at the beginning of the holidays, but rather late, at the end of July. The local newspaper reported that he had been out West with a school friend and had now returned home. He began coming to the Langdon Public Library, where Ethel worked. She was the librarian at the new Langdon Public Library, which had opened the previous winter.

She thought of young Red Oliver. No doubt she had been excited about him from the moment she first saw him when he returned to Langdon that summer. The excitement took on a new twist for her. Never before had she felt anything like this about a man. "I think I'm starting to show signs of motherhood," she thought. She had made a habit of analyzing her own thoughts and emotions. She liked it. It made her feel mature. "A tough time in the life of such a young man," she thought. At least young Red Oliver wasn't like the other young men in Langdon. He seemed puzzled. And how physically strong he looked! He had been on the western farm for several weeks. He was brown and healthy-looking. He had come home to Langdon to spend some time with his mother before heading off to school again.

"Perhaps I am interested in him because I am a little stale myself," thought Ethel.

"I'm a little greedy. It's like a hard, fresh fruit that you want to bite into."

The young man's mother, in Ethel's opinion, was a rather strange woman. She knew about Red's mother. The whole town knew about her. She knew that when Red had been home the year before, after his first year at North High and the death of his father, Dr. Oliver, he had worked at the Langdon Cotton Mill. Ethel's father knew Red's father and even knew Red's grandfather. At the table in the Longhouse, he spoke of Red's return to town. "I see that young Oliver's house. I hope he looks more like his grandfather than his father or mother."

In the library, when Red went there sometimes in the evening, Ethel would examine him. He was already a strong man. What broad shoulders he had! He had a rather large head, covered in red hair.

He was obviously a young man who took life quite seriously. Ethel thought she liked that kind of guy.

"Maybe so, maybe not." That summer, she became very shy. She didn't like this trait in herself; she wanted to be simpler, even primitive... or pagan.

"Maybe it's because I'm almost thirty." She had gotten it into her head that turning thirty was a turning point for a woman.

This idea could also have come from her reading. George Moore... or Balzac.

The idea... "It's already ripe. It's magnificent, magnificent.

"Pull her out. Bite her. Eat her. Hurt her."

That's not exactly how it was put. It was a concept that was involved. It implied American men who were capable of doing it, who dared to try it.

Dishonest men. Brave men. Courageous men.

"It's all this damn reading... women trying to rise up, take matters into their own hands. Culture, right?

The Old South, Ethel's grandfather and Red Oliver's grandfather, didn't read. They talked about Greece, and there were Greek books in their homes, but they were reliable books. No one read them. Why read when you can ride through the fields and command slaves? You're a prince. Why should a prince read?

The Old South was dead, but it certainly didn't die a royal death. It had once held a deep, princely contempt for northern merchants, moneychangers, and manufacturers, but now it itself was drawn entirely to factories, to money, to shopkeeping.

Hate and imitate. Confused, of course.

"Do I feel better?" Ethel had to ask herself. Apparently, she thought, thinking of the young man, he had a desire to take over life. "God knows, so do I." After Red Oliver returned home and began coming to the library often, and after she had gotten to know him-she had managed to do so herself-it had gotten to the point where he would sometimes scribble on scraps of paper. He wrote poems that he would have been embarrassed to show her if she had asked. She didn't ask. The library was open three evenings a week, and on those evenings he almost always came.

He explained, a little awkwardly, that he wanted to read, but Ethel thought she understood. It was because, like her, he didn't feel a part of the town. In his case, it may have been, at least in part, because of his mother.

"He feels out of place here, and so do I," Ethel thought. She knew he wrote because, one night when he came to the library and took a book from the shelf, he sat down at the table and, without looking at the book, began writing. He brought a writing tablet with him.

Ethel strolled through the library's small reading room. There was a place where she could stand, among the shelves of books, and look over his shoulder. He'd written to a friend in the West, a male friend. He'd tried his hand at poetry. "They weren't very good," Ethel thought. She'd only seen one or two feeble attempts.

When he first returned home that summer-after visiting a friend from the West-a boy who had gone to college with him, Red told her-he talked to her occasionally, shyly, eagerly, with the boyish eagerness of a young man with a woman in whose presence he is touched but feels young and inadequate-a boy who also played on the college baseball team. Red had been working early in the summer on his father's Kansas farm... He returned home to Langdon with his neck and hands burned by the field sun... that was nice, too. Ethel... when he first returned home, he had trouble finding a job. The weather was very hot, but the library was cooler. There was a small restroom in the building. He went in. He and Ethel were alone in the building. She ran and read what he had written.

It was Monday, and he was wandering alone "on Sunday." He wrote a letter. To whom? To no one. "Dear Unknown," he wrote, and Ethel read the words and smiled. Her heart sank. "He wants a woman. I suppose every man does that.

What strange ideas men had-good ones, that is. There were many other kinds. Ethel knew about them, too. This young, sweet creature had yearnings. They were trying to reach out to something. Such a man always felt some kind of inner hunger. He hoped that some woman could satisfy him. If he didn't have a woman, he tried to create one of his own.

Red tried. "Dear Unknown." He told the stranger about his lonely resurrection. Ethel read quickly. To return from the restroom he'd gone into, he'd have to walk down a short corridor. She'd hear his footsteps. She could escape. It was fun, peeking into the boy's life this way. After all, he was just a boy.

He wrote to an unknown person about his day, a day of loneliness; Ethel herself hated Sundays in the Georgia town. She went to church, but she hated going. The preacher was stupid, she thought.

She thought it all over. If only the people who went to church here on Sundays were truly religious, she thought. They weren't. Perhaps it was her father. Her father was a Georgia county judge and taught Sunday school on Sundays. On Saturday nights, he was always busy with Sunday school lessons. He went about it like a boy studying for a test. Ethel had thought a hundred times, There's all this phony religion in the air in this town on Sundays. There was something heavy and cold in the air in this Georgia town on Sundays, especially among white people. She wondered if maybe there was something all right with blacks. Their religion, the American Protestant religion they'd adopted from white people... maybe they'd made something of it.

Not white. Whatever the South once was, with the advent of the cotton mills it became-towns like Langdon, Georgia- Yankee towns. A deal of sorts was struck with God. "Okay, we'll give you one day of the week. We'll go to church. We'll put in enough money to keep the churches going."

"In exchange for this, you give us heaven when we live this life here, this life of running this cotton mill, or this store, or this law office...

"Either be a sheriff, or a deputy sheriff, or be in real estate.

"You give us heaven when we have dealt with all this and we have accomplished our task."

Ethel Long felt there was something in the air of the city on Sundays. It hurt a sensitive person. Ethel thought she was sensitive. "I don't understand how it is that I am still sensitive, but I believe I am," she thought. She felt there was a mustiness in the city on Sundays. It penetrated the walls of the buildings. It invaded the houses. It hurt Ethel, it hurt her.

She had an experience with her father. Once, when he was a young man, he had been quite an energetic person. He read books and wanted others to read books. Suddenly, he stopped reading. It was as if he stopped thinking, didn't want to think. This was one of the ways the South, though Southerners never admitted it, had become closer to the North. Not thinking, instead reading newspapers, going to church regularly... stopping being truly religious... listening to the radio... joining a civic club... a stimulus for growth.

"Don't think... You might start thinking about what it really means."

In the meantime, let the southern soil go into the pot.

"You Southerners are betraying your own Southern fields... the old, half-wild, strange beauty of the land and the cities.

"Don't think. Don't dare think.

"Be like the Yankees, newspaper readers, radio listeners.

"Advertising. Don't think."

Ethel's father insisted that Ethel go to church on Sundays. Well, it wasn't quite insistence. It was a half-bad imitation of insistence. "You better," he said with an air of finality. He always tried to be final. This was because her position as town librarian was semi-governmental. "What will people say if you don't?" That's what her father had in mind.

"Oh, God," she thought. Nevertheless, she went.

She brought home a lot of her books.

When she was younger, her father might have found an intellectual connection with her. He couldn't now. What she knew happened to many American men, perhaps most American men, had happened to him. There came a point in an American's life when he stopped dead in his tracks. For some strange reason, all intellectuality had died within him.

After that, he thought only of making money, or of being respectable, or, if he was a lustful man, of winning women or living in luxury.

Countless books written in America were exactly like this, as were most plays and films. Almost all of them presented some real-life problem, often an interesting one. They got this far, and then stopped dead in their tracks. They presented a problem they wouldn't have encountered themselves, and then suddenly started catching crayfish. They emerged from it suddenly cheerful or optimistic about life, something like that.

Ethel's father was almost certain about Heaven. At least, that's what he wanted. He was determined. Ethel brought home with her, among her other books, a book by George Moore called Kerith Creek.

"This is a story about Christ, a touching and tender story," she thought. It touched her.

Christ was ashamed of what He had done. Christ ascended into the world, and then descended. He began life as a poor shepherd boy, and after that terrible time when he proclaimed himself God, when he went about leading people astray, when he cried out, "Follow me. Follow in my footsteps," after people hung him on a cross to die...

In George Moore's wonderful book, he didn't die. A rich young man fell in love with him and took him down from the cross, still alive but horribly mutilated. The man nursed him back to health, brought him back to life. He crawled away from people and became a shepherd again.

He was ashamed of what he had done. He dimly saw the distant future. Shame shook him. He saw, looking far into the future, what he had started. He saw Langdon, Georgia, Tom Shaw, the mill owner in Langdon, Georgia... he saw wars waged in His name, commercialized churches, churches, like industry, controlled by money, churches turning their backs on ordinary people, turning their backs on labor. He saw how hatred and stupidity had engulfed the world.

"Because of me. I gave humanity this absurd dream of Heaven, turning their eyes away from the earth."

Christ returned and became a simple, unknown shepherd again among the barren hills. He was a good shepherd. The flocks were depleted because there was no good ram, and he went looking for one. To shoot one, to breathe new life into the old mother lambs. What a wonderfully powerful, sweet human story it was. "If only my own imagination could run so wide and free," Ethel thought. One day, when she had just returned home to her father's house after two or three years away and was rereading the book, Ethel suddenly began talking about it to her father. She felt a strange desire to get closer to him. She wanted to tell him this story. She tried.

She wouldn't soon forget this experience. Suddenly, an idea occurred to him. "And the author says He didn't die on the cross."

"Yes. I think there's an old story of this kind told in the East. The writer George Moore, an Irishman, took it and developed it."

"He didn't die and was born again?"

"No, not in the flesh. He was not born again."

Ethel's father rose from his chair. It was evening, and father and daughter were sitting together on the porch of the house. He turned white. "Ethel." His voice was sharp.

"Never speak of it again," he said.

"Why?"

"Why? My God," he said. "There is no hope. If Christ is not resurrected in the flesh, there is no hope."

He meant... of course he didn't think through what he meant... this life of mine that I have lived here on this earth, here in this city, is such a strange, sweet, healing thing that I cannot bear the thought of it going out completely and utterly, like a candle going out.

What staggering egotism, and all the more astonishing that Ethel's father wasn't a selfish man at all. He was truly a modest man, too modest.

So, Red Oliver had a Sunday. Ethel read what he wrote while he was in the library restroom. She read it quickly. He'd simply walked a few miles out of town along the railroad that ran along the river. Then he wrote about it, addressing some purely imaginary woman, because he didn't have a woman. He wanted to tell some woman about it.

He felt the same as she had on Sunday in Langdon. "I couldn't stand the city," he wrote. "Weekdays are better when people are sincere."

So he was a rebel too.

"When they lie to each other and deceive each other, it is better."

He was talking about a big man in town, Tom Shaw, the mill owner. "Mother went to her church, and I felt I should offer to go with her, but I couldn't," he wrote. He waited in bed until she left the house, then went out alone. He saw Tom Shaw and his wife driving to the Presbyterian church in their big car. It was the church to which Ethel's father belonged and where he taught Sunday school. "They say Tom Shaw got rich here on the labor of the poor. It's better to see him plotting to get richer. Better to see him lying to himself about what he does for the people, than to see him like this, going to church."

At least Ethel's father would never have questioned the new gods of the American stage, the newly industrialized stage of South America. He wouldn't have dared, even to himself.

A young man rode out of town along the railroad tracks, turned off the tracks a few miles outside of town, and found himself in a pine forest. He wrote a poem about the forest and the red Georgia soil visible through the trees beyond the pine forest. It was a simple little chapter about a man, a young man, alone with nature on a Sunday when the rest of the town was in church. Ethel was in church. She wished she were with Red.

However, if she were with him... Something stirred in her thoughts about it. She put down the sheets of paper from the cheap pencil tablet he was writing on and returned to her desk. Red had come out of the restroom. He'd been there for five minutes. If she were with him in the pine forest, if that unknown woman he was writing to, the woman who apparently didn't exist, if it were herself. Perhaps she would do it herself. "I could be very, very nice."

Back then, perhaps it wouldn't have been written about. There was no doubt that in the words scrawled on the tablet, he had conveyed some real sense of the place he found himself in.

If she were there with him, lying next to him on the pine needles in the pine forest, he might be touching her with his hands. The thought sent a slight shudder through her. "I wonder if I want him?" she asked herself that day. "It seems a little absurd," she told herself. He was sitting at the table in the writing room again, writing. Every now and then he glanced up in her direction, but her eyes avoided his while he looked. She had her own feminine way of dealing with it. "I'm not ready to tell you anything yet. After all, you've been coming here for less than a week.

If she had him and had him, and she already felt she could have him if she had made up her mind to try, he would not have thought of the trees and the sky and the red fields beyond the trees, nor of Tom Shaw, the cotton-mill millionaire driving to church in his big car and telling himself he was going there to worship the poor and humble Christ.

"He would be thinking of me," Ethel thought. The thought pleased her and, perhaps because he was so much younger than her, amused her as well.

Returning home that summer, Red took a temporary job at a local store. He didn't stay there long. "I don't want to be a clerk," he told himself. He returned to the mill, and even though they didn't need workers, they hired him back.

It was better there. Perhaps they thought at the mill, "In case of trouble, he'll be on the right side." From the window of the library, located in an old brick building just where the shopping district ended, Ethel sometimes saw Red walking down Main Street in the evening. It was a long walk from the mill to Oliver's house. Ethel had already eaten dinner. Red wore overalls. He wore heavy work boots. When the mill team played ball, she wanted to go. He was, she thought, a strange, isolated figure in the town. "Like me," she thought. He was part of the town, but not of it.

There was something pleasant about Red's body. Ethel liked the way it swayed freely. It stayed that way even when he was tired after a day's work. She liked his eyes. She had gotten into the habit of standing by the library window when he returned home from work in the evening. Her eyes assessed the young man walking that way down the hot street of a southern city. Frankly, she thought of his body in relation to her woman's. Maybe this is what I want. If only he were a little older. There was desire in her. Desire invaded her body. She knew the feeling. I haven't handled this kind of thing very well before, she thought. Can I take a chance with him? I can catch him if I go after him. She felt a little ashamed of her calculating mind. If it comes to marriage. Something like that. He's much younger than me. It won't work. It was absurd. He couldn't have been more than twenty, a boy, she thought.

He was almost certain he would eventually find out what she had done to him. 'Just as I might, if I tried.' He went there almost every evening, after work and whenever the library was open. When he began to think of her, it was when he had been working at the factory again for a week... he had another six or eight weeks to stay in town before he went back to school... already, though perhaps he did not quite realize what had been done to him, he was burning with thoughts of her... 'And if I tried?' It was obvious no woman had got him. Ethel knew that for a young, single man like him, there would always be a clever woman. She considered herself quite clever. 'I don't know what it is in my past record that makes me think I'm clever, but I evidently think so,' she thought, standing by the library window as Red Oliver passed, seeing but not seeing. "A woman, if she's any good, can get any man who hasn't already been priced out by another woman." She was half ashamed of her thoughts about the little boy. She was amused by her own thoughts.

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2


E TEL LONG'S EYES were puzzling. They were greenish-blue and hard. Then they were a soft blue. She wasn't particularly sensual. She could be terribly cold. Sometimes she wanted to be soft and compliant. When you saw her in a room, tall, slender, well-built, her hair seemed chestnut. When the light passed through, it turned red. In her youth, she was an awkward boy, a rather excitable and hot-tempered child. As she grew older, she developed a passion for clothes. She always wanted to wear better clothes than she could afford. Sometimes she dreamed of becoming a fashion designer. "I could make it," she thought. Most people were a little afraid of her. If she didn't want them to get close, she had her own way of keeping them at bay. Some of the men she attracted and who didn't make progress thought of her as something of a snake. "She has snake eyes," they thought. If the man she was attracted to was even remotely sensitive, she found it easy to upset him. This, too, irritated her a little. "I think I need a rough man who won't pay attention to my whims," she told herself. Often that summer, after Red Oliver had taken to visiting the library at every opportunity and had begun to think of her in terms of himself, he would catch her looking at him and think that they had invited everyone.

He was out West with a young man, a friend who was working early in the summer on his friend's father's farm in Kansas, and, as is often the case with young people, there was a lot of talk about women. Conversations about women mixed with conversations about what young people should do with their lives. Both young men were touched by modern radicalism. They had gotten that in college.

They were excited. There was one young professor-he was especially fond of Red-who talked a lot. He lent him books-Marxist books, anarchist books. He was an admirer of the American anarchist Emma Goldman. "I met her once," he said.

He described a meeting in a small industrial town in the Middle West, where the local intelligentsia gathered in a small, dark room.

Emma Goldman gave a speech. Afterward, Ben Reitman, a large, brash, and boisterous-looking man, walked through the audience, selling books. The crowd was a little excited, a little intimidated by the woman's bold speeches, her bold ideas. A dark wooden staircase led down to the hall, and someone brought a brick and threw it down.

It rolled down the stairs - boom, boom, and the audience in the small hall...

Men and women in the audience jump to their feet. Pale faces, trembling lips. They thought the hall had been blown up. The professor, then still a student, bought one of Emma Goldman's books and gave it to Red.

"They call you 'Red,' right? It's a significant name. Why don't you become a revolutionary?" he asked. He asked questions like that, and then laughed.

"Our colleges have already turned out too many young bond salesmen, too many lawyers and doctors." When he was told that Red had spent the previous summer working as a laborer in a cotton mill in the South, he was thrilled. He believed that both young men-Red and his friend Neil Bradley, a young Western farmer-should devote themselves to some kind of social reform effort, be outspoken socialists or even communists, and he wanted Red to remain a laborer when he finished school.

"Don't do this because of any benefit you think you can bring to humanity," he said. "There is no such thing as humanity. There are only all these millions of individuals in a strange, inexplicable situation.

"I advise you to be a radical, because being a radical in America is a little dangerous and will become more dangerous. It's an adventure. Life here is too safe. It's too boring."

He learned that Red secretly desired to write. "All right," he said cheerfully, "stay a laborer. It may be the greatest adventure in this great middle-class country-to remain poor, to consciously choose to be an ordinary man, a worker, and not some big bug... a buyer or a seller." The young professor, who had made quite a deep impression on the minds of the two young men, was himself almost girlish in appearance. Perhaps there was something girlish about him, but if it were true, he hid it well. He himself was a poor young man, but he said he had never been strong enough to become a laborer. "I had to be a clerk," he said, "I tried being a laborer. I once got a job digging sewers in a Midwestern town, but I couldn't take it." He admired Red's body and sometimes, in expressing his admiration, put Red in an awkward position. "It's a beauty," he said, touching Red's back. He was referring to Red's body, the unusual depth and breadth of his chest. He himself was small and slender, with sharp, bird-like eyes.

When Red was at Western Farm earlier that summer, he and his friend Neil Bradley, also a ballplayer, would sometimes drive into Kansas City in the evenings. Neil didn't yet have a schoolteacher.

Then he had one, a schoolteacher. He wrote red letters describing his intimacy with her. He made Red think about women, desiring a woman as he never had before. He looked at Ethel Long. How well her head sat on her shoulders! Her shoulders were small, but well formed. Her neck was long and slender, and from her small head a line descended along her neck, disappearing under her dress, and his hand wanted to follow it. She was a little taller than him, as he was inclined to be plump. Red had broad shoulders. From the point of view of male beauty, they were too broad. He didn't think of himself in connection with the concept of male beauty, although that college professor, the one who talked about the beauty of his body, the one who paid special attention to the development of him and his friend Neil Bradley... Perhaps he was a little strange. Neither Red nor Neil ever mentioned it. It seemed he was always about to stroke Red with his hands. Whenever they were alone, he always invited Red to come to his office in the college building. He approached. He was sitting on a chair at his desk, but he stood up. His eyes, previously so birdlike, sharp and impersonal, suddenly, strangely enough, became like a woman's eyes, the eyes of a woman in love. Sometimes, in this man's presence, Red felt a strange sense of insecurity. Nothing happened. Nothing was ever said.

Red began visiting the library in Langdon. That summer, there were many hot, quiet evenings. Sometimes, after working at the mill and eating lunch, he'd rush to practice batting with the mill team, but the mill workers were tired after a long day and couldn't endure the activity for long. So Red, dressed in his baseball uniform, returned to town and went to the library. Three evenings a week, the library stayed open until ten, though few people came. Often, the librarian sat alone.

He knew another man in town, an older man, a lawyer, was pursuing Ethel Long. It worried him, a little frightened him. He thought about the letters Neil Bradley was writing him now. Neil had met an older woman, and almost immediately they had become intimate. "It was something magnificent, something worth living for," Neil said. Was there a chance for him to have another such intimacy with this woman?

The thought infuriated Red. It also frightened him. Although he didn't know it then, since Ethel's mother had died, her older sister had married and moved to another Southern town, and her father had married a second wife, she, like Red, was not entirely comfortable at home.

She wished she hadn't had to live in Langdon, wished she hadn't gone back there. She and her father's second wife were almost the same age.

The Longs' stepmother was a pale, pale blonde. Although Red Oliver didn't know it, Ethel Long was also ready for adventure. When the boy sat in the library some evenings, a little tired, pretending to read or write, stealing glances at her, stealthily dreaming of possessing her, she looked at him.

She was weighing the possibilities of an adventure with a young man who was just a boy to her, and another kind of adventure with a man much older and of a completely different type.

After her marriage, her stepmother wanted to have a child of her own, but she never had one. She blamed her husband, Ethel's father.

She scolded her husband. Sometimes, lying in her bed at night, Ethel would hear her new mother-the idea of her as a mother was absurd-fussing at her father. Sometimes, in the evenings, Ethel would go to her room early. There would be a man and his wife, and the woman would scold. She would bark orders: "Do this... do that."

The father was a tall man with black hair that was now graying. From his first marriage, he had two sons and two daughters, but both sons died: one at home, a grown man, older than Ethel, and the other, the youngest of his children, a soldier, an officer, in the World War.

The elder of the two sons was ill. He was a pale, sensitive man who wanted to be a scientist but, due to illness, never graduated from college. He died suddenly of heart failure. The younger son resembled Ethel, tall and slender. He was his father's pride and joy. His father had a mustache and a small, pointed beard, which, like his hair, was already starting to gray, but he kept it in color, usually dyeing it very well. Sometimes he failed or was careless. One day, people met him on the street, and his mustache had turned gray, but the next day, when they met him, it was black and shiny again.

His wife criticized him for his age. That was her way. "You must remember that you're getting older," she said sharply. Sometimes she said it with a kind face, but he knew, and she knew, that she wasn't being kind. "I need something, and I think you're too old to give it to me," she thought.

"I want to blossom. Here I am, a pale woman, not very healthy. I want to be straightened out, thickened and expanded, if you will, transformed into a real woman. I don't think you can do that to me, damn you. You're not man enough.

She didn't say that. The man wanted something too. By his first wife, who had already died, he had fathered four children, two of whom were sons, but both sons had already died. He wanted another son.

He felt a little intimidated when he brought his new wife home with him and his daughter, Ethel's sister, who was then unmarried. At home, he told his daughter nothing of his plans, and she herself married that same year. One evening, he and the new woman drove away together to another Georgia town, without mentioning any of his plans, and after they were married, he brought her home. His house, like Oliver's, was on the outskirts of town, at the end of the street. There stood a large, old Southern frame house, and behind his house was a gently sloping meadow. He kept a cow in the meadow.

When all this happened, Ethel was away from school. Then she came home for the summer holidays. A strange drama began to unfold in the house.

Ethel and her father's new wife, a young blonde with a sharp voice, several years her senior, seem to have become friends.

Friendship was a pretense. It was a game they played. Ethel knew, and the new wife knew. Four people went together. The youngest sister, the one who had married soon after it all began (or so Ethel thought, struggling through it), didn't understand. It was as if two factions had formed in the house: Ethel, tall, well-groomed, somewhat refined, and the new, pale blonde, her father's wife, in one faction, and the father, her husband, and their youngest daughter in another.


Oh love,

A small naked child with a bow and quiver of arrows.


More than one wise man has laughed at love. "It doesn't exist. It's all nonsense." This has been said by sages, conquerors, emperors, kings, and artists.

Sometimes the four of them went out together. On Sundays, they sometimes all went to the Presbyterian church together, walking the streets together on hot Sunday mornings. The Presbyterian preacher in Langdon was a man with stooped shoulders and large hands. His mind was infinitely dull. When he walked the town streets on weekdays, he stuck his head out and held his hands behind his back. He looked like a man walking against a strong wind. There was no wind. He seemed about to fall forward and sink into deep thought. His sermons were long and very boring. Later, when labor troubles arose in Langdon and two workers in a mill village on the outskirts of town were killed by sheriff's deputies, he said, "No Christian minister should perform their funeral ceremony. They should be buried like dead mules." When the Long family went to church, Ethel walked with her new stepmother, and her younger sister walked with their father. The two women walked ahead of the others, chatting animatedly. "You love walking so much. Your father is glad you're gone," the blonde said.

"After school life, in the city, in Chicago... to come home here... to be so nice to all of us."

Ethel smiled. She half liked the pale, thin woman, her father's new wife. "I wonder why Father wanted her?" Her father was still a strong man. He was a large, tall man.

The new wife was mean. "What a good little hater she is," Ethel thought. At least Ethel wasn't bored with her. She liked it.

All this happened before Red Oliver went to school, when he was still in high school.

Three summers passed after her father's wedding, and then her younger sister's, without Ethel returning home. She worked for two summers, and the third summer she attended summer school. She graduated from the University of Chicago.

She earned a bachelor's degree from the university and then took a course in library science. The town of Langdon was home to a new Carnegie library. There was another old town, but everyone said it was too small and not worthy of a city.

A blonde wife named Blanche egged her husband on about the library.

She continued to pester her husband, pressuring him to speak at meetings of the town's social clubs. Although he no longer read books, he still had a reputation as an intellectual. There was a Kiwanis Club and a Rotary Club. She herself went to the editor of the town weekly and wrote articles for him. Her husband was puzzled. "Why is she so determined?" he asked himself. He didn't understand and even felt ashamed. He knew what she had planned: she had taken a job as a librarian in the new library for his daughter Ethel, and her interest in his daughter, almost her own age, puzzled him. It seemed a little strange to him, even unnatural. Had he dreamed of some quiet home life with his new woman, of an old age consoled by her? He had the illusion that they would become intellectual companions, that she would understand all his thoughts, all his impulses. "We can't do this," he told her, almost a note of despair in his voice.

"We can't do what?" Blanche's pale eyes could be completely impersonal. She spoke to him as if he were a stranger or a servant.

He always had a way of speaking about things with an air of finality that wasn't final. It was a bluff about finality, a hope for a finality that never quite materialized. "We can't work like this, so openly, so obviously, to build this library, asking the city to contribute, asking taxpayers to pay for this great library, and all the while-you see... you yourself suggested that Ethel get this job."

"It will look too much like a finished product."

He wished he'd never gotten involved in the fight for a new library. "What does it matter to me?" he asked himself. His new wife had been guiding and pushing him. For the first time since he'd married her, she'd shown an interest in the city's cultural life.

"We can't do that. It will look like a finished product.

"Yes, my dear, it's already been fixed." Blanche laughed at her husband. Her voice had become sharper since marriage. She had always been a woman without much color on her face, but before marriage she had used rouge.

After marriage, she didn't worry. "What's the point?" she seemed to say. She had rather sweet lips, like a child's, but after marriage, her lips seemed to have become dry. There was something about her whole being after marriage that suggested... as if she belonged not to the animal kingdom, but to the plant kingdom. She had been plucked. She had been carelessly placed aside, in the sun and wind. She was drying out. You felt it.

She felt it too. She didn't want to be what she was, what she was becoming. She didn't want to be unpleasant to her husband. "Do I hate him?" she asked herself. Her husband was a good man, a man of honor in the city and county. He was scrupulously honest, a regular churchgoer, a true believer in God. She watched other women get married. She was a schoolteacher in Langdon and had come there from another town in Georgia to teach. Some of the other schoolteachers had husbands. After they got married, she visited some of them in their homes and kept in touch. They had children, and afterward, their husbands called them "mother." It was a kind of mother-child relationship, a grown child who slept with you. The man went out and hurried. He was making money.

She couldn't do this, couldn't treat her husband like this. He was so much older than her. She continued to proclaim her devotion to her husband's daughter, Ethel. She became increasingly decisive, cold, and resolute. "What do you think I had in mind for this library when I acquired it?" she asked her husband. Her tone frightened and confused him. When she spoke in that tone, his world always seemed to crumble before his ears. "Oh, I know what you're thinking," she said. "You're thinking about your honor, your standing in the eyes of the respectable people of this city. That's because you're Judge Long." That's exactly what he was thinking.

She grew bitter. "To hell with the town." Before he married her, she would never have uttered such a word in his presence. Before their marriage, she had always treated him with great respect. He thought of her as a modest, quiet, gentle little girl. Before their marriage, he had been very worried, although he had said nothing to her about what was on his mind. He was worried about his dignity. He felt that his marriage to a woman much younger than himself would cause gossip. Often he trembled, thinking about it. Men standing in front of the drugstore in Langdon and talking. He thought about the townspeople, about Ed Graves, Tom McKnight, Will Fellowcraft. One of them might lose it at a Rotary Club meeting, say something in public. They always tried to be cheerful and respected guys in the club. A few weeks before the wedding, he did not dare go to the club meeting.

He wanted a son. He had two sons, and both had died. It could have been the death of the younger son and the lingering illness of the older one, an illness that began in childhood and sparked his own deep interest in children. He developed a passion for children, especially boys. This led to his winning a seat on the county school board. The children of the town-that is, the children of the more respectable white families, and especially the sons of such families-all knew and admired him. He knew dozens of boys by name. Several older men who had attended school in Langdon, grown up, and gone to live elsewhere returned to Langdon. Such a man almost always came to see the judge. They called him "The Judge."

"Hello, Judge." Such warmth, such kindness was in the voices. Someone said to him, "Look here," he said, "I want to tell you something."

Perhaps he was talking about what the judge had done for him. "After all, a man wants to be an honorable man."

The man recounted something that happened when he was a schoolboy. "You said such-and-such to me. I tell you, it stuck with me."

The judge may have taken an interest in the boy and sought him out in his time of need, trying to help. That was the judge's best side.

"You won't let me be a fool. Do you remember? I got mad at my father and decided to run away from home. You got it out of me. Remember how you talked?"

The judge didn't remember. He'd always been interested in boys; he'd made boys his hobby. The town fathers knew it. He had quite a reputation. As a young lawyer, before becoming a judge, he'd started a Boy Scout troop. He was a master scout. He'd always been more patient and kinder with other people's sons than with his own; he'd been quite strict with his own. That's what he thought.

"Do you remember when George Gray, Tom Eckles and I got drunk? It was night, and I stole my father's horse and buggy, and we went to Taylorville.

"We got into trouble. I'm still ashamed to think about it. We were almost arrested. We were going to bring us some black girls. We were arrested drunk and noisy. What young animals we were!

"Knowing all this, you didn't go and talk to our fathers, like most men would have. You talked to us. You invited us into your office one by one and talked to us. First of all, I will never forget what you said.

So he pulled them out and hid them.

"You made me feel the seriousness of life. I can almost say that you were more to me than my father.

*

The judge was deeply concerned and annoyed by the question about the new library. "What will the city think?"

The question never left his mind. He made it a point of honor never to put pressure on himself or his family. "After all," he thought, "I'm a Southern gentleman, and a Southern gentleman doesn't do things like that. These women!" He thought of his youngest daughter, now married, and of his deceased wife. The youngest daughter was a quiet and serious woman, like his first wife. She was pretty. After the death of his first wife and until his remarriage, she had been her father's housewife. She married a city man who had known her in high school and who now moved to Atlanta, where he worked in a mercantile firm.

For some reason, though he often looked back with regret on those days spent with her in his home, his second daughter never made much of an impression on him. She was pretty. She was sweet. She never got into trouble. When the judge thought of women, he thought of his eldest daughter, Ethel, and his wife, Blanche. Were most women like this? Were all women, deep down, the same? "Here I've worked and worked, trying to create a library for this town, and now things have turned out this way." He didn't think of Ethel in connection with the library. It was his wife's idea. All the impulse within himself... he'd been thinking about this for years...

There wasn't enough reading in the South. He'd known this since he was a young man. He'd said so. There was little intellectual curiosity among most young men and women. The North seemed far ahead of the South in intellectual development. The judge, though he no longer read, believed in books and reading. "Reading broadens a person's culture," he continued to say. As the need for a new library became clearer, he began talking to merchants and professionals in the city. He spoke at the Rotary Club and was invited to speak at the Kiwanis Club as well. Langdon Mills president Tom Shaw was very helpful. A branch was to be established in the mill village.

Everything was arranged, and the building, a fine old Southern residence, was purchased and remodeled. Above the door was inscribed the name of Mr. Andrew Carnegie.

And his own daughter, Ethel, was appointed town librarian. The committee voted for her. It was Blanche's idea. Blanche was the one who stayed with Ethel to prepare.

Of course, there were certain rumors about the city. "No wonder he was so eager to have a library. It expands a person's culture, right? It expands their wallet. Quite soft, huh? A deceitful scheme."

But Judge Willard Long wasn't subtle. He hated it all, and even began to hate the library. "I'd like to leave it all alone." When his daughter was appointed, he wanted to protest. He spoke to Blanche. "I think she'd better give up her name." Blanche laughed. "You can't be that stupid."

"I won't allow her name to be mentioned."

"Yes, you will. If necessary, I will go down there and install it myself."

The strangest thing about this whole story was that he couldn't believe that his daughter Ethel and his new wife Blanche truly loved each other. Were they simply conspiring against him, to undermine his standing in the town, to make him appear to the town as something he wasn't and didn't want to be?

He became irritable.

You bring into your home what you hope and think will be love, and it turns out to be some new, strange kind of hatred you can't understand. Something has been brought into the house that poisons the air. He wanted to talk to his daughter Ethel about all this when she came home to take up her new position, but she seemed to be withdrawing too. He wanted to take her aside and plead with her. He couldn't. His mind was clouded. He couldn't say to her, "Look, Ethel, I don't want you here." A strange thought formed in his mind. It frightened and disturbed him. Although at one moment it seemed as if the two were conspiring against him, the next they seemed to be preparing for some kind of battle with each other. Perhaps they intended it. Ethel, though she had never had much money, worked as a costume designer. In spite of Mrs. Tom Shaw, the wife of a wealthy town manufacturer, with all her money... she had grown fat... Ethel was evidently the best dressed, most modern and stylish-looking woman in town.

She was twenty-nine, and her father's new wife, Blanche, was thirty-two. Blanche had allowed herself to become quite slovenly. She seemed indifferent; perhaps she wanted to appear ignorant. She wasn't even particularly picky about bathing, and when she came to the table, sometimes even her fingernails were dirty. Small black streaks were visible beneath her untrimmed nails.

*

The father asked his daughter to go with him on a trip out of town. He had been a longtime member of the district school board and had to attend a black school, so he said he would go.

There was trouble because of the black schoolteacher. Someone reported that the unmarried woman was pregnant. He had to go and find out. It was a good chance to have a real conversation with his daughter. Perhaps he would learn something about her and his wife.

"What went wrong? You weren't like this before... so close... so strange. Perhaps she hasn't changed. He thought little of Ethel when his first wife and sons were alive.

Ethel sat next to her father in his car, a cheap roadster. He kept it neat and tidy. She was slim, fairly well-built, and well-groomed. Her eyes told him nothing. Where did she get the money to buy the clothes she wore? He'd sent her to the city, north, to get an education. She must have changed. Now she sat next to him, looking calm and impersonal. "These women," he thought as they drove. It was just after the new library was completed. She had come home to help choose books and take charge. He immediately sensed that something was wrong in his house. "I'm trapped," he thought. "Out of what?" Even if there had been a war going on in his house, it would have been better if he knew what was wrong. A man wanted to maintain his dignity. Was it wrong for a man to try to have a daughter and a wife, almost the same age, in the same house? If it was wrong, why did Blanche want Ethel so much at home? Though he was almost an old man, there was a worried look in his eyes, like a worried boy, and his daughter felt ashamed. I'd better give this up, she thought. Something had to be worked out between her and Blanche. What did he have to do with it, the poor guy? Most men were so tiresome. They understood so little. The man sitting next to her in the car that day drove as they drove along the red roads of Georgia, through the pines, over the low hills... It was spring, and the men were in the fields, plowing for next year's cotton crop, white men and brown men driving mules... there was the smell of freshly plowed earth and pine... the man sitting next to her, her father, was obviously the one who had done this to another woman... ...that woman was now her mother... how absurd... that woman had taken the place of Ethel's mother.

Did her father want her to think of this woman as her mother? "I dare say he doesn't quite know what he wants.

"Men won't face things. How they hate to face things.

"It's impossible to talk to a man in a situation like this when he's your father."

Her own mother, when she was still alive, was... what exactly was she to Ethel? Her mother was something like Ethel's sister. As a young girl, she had married this man, Ethel's father. She had four children.

"That fact must give a woman immense satisfaction," Ethel thought that day. A strange shudder ran through her body at the thought of her mother as a young wife, feeling the baby's movements in her body for the first time. In her mood that day, she could think of her mother, now dead, as just another woman. There was something between all women that few men understood. How could a man understand?

"There might be a man there. He should have become a poet."

Her mother must have known, after she had been married to her father for some time, that the man she had married, though he held an honorable position in the life of the city and county, though he had become a judge, was terribly mature, would never be mature.

He couldn't be mature in the true sense of the word. Ethel wasn't sure what she meant. "If only I could find a man I could look up to, a free man unafraid of his own thoughts. He might bring me something I need."

"He could penetrate me, color all my thoughts, all my feelings. I am a half-thing. I want to turn into a real woman." Ethel had what was also in the woman Blanche.

But Blanche was married to Ethel's father.

And she didn't get it.

What?

There was something to be achieved. Ethel began to dimly understand what was going on. The fact that we were at home, in the house with Blanche, helped.

Two women disliked each other.

They did.

They didn't do it.

There was some understanding. There will always be something in relationships between women that no man will ever understand.

And yet, every woman who truly is a woman will long for this more than anything else in life-true understanding with a man. Had her mother achieved this? That day, Ethel looked at her father intently. He wanted to talk about something and didn't know where to begin. She did nothing to help. If the conversation he had planned had begun, it would have led nowhere. He would have begun: "Now you're home, Ethel... I hope things will be well between you and Blanche. I hope you'll like each other."

"Oh, shut up." You can't say that to your father.

As for herself and the woman Blanche... Nothing of what Ethel was thinking that day was said. - As for me and your Blanche... it doesn't matter to me that you married her. That's a thing beyond me. You've undertaken to do something with her. -

"Do you know this?"

"You don't know what you've done. You've already failed."

American men were such fools. Her father was there. He was a good, noble man. He worked hard all his life. A lot of Southern men... Ethel was born and raised in the South... she knew a lot... a lot of Southern men when they were young... in the South, there were dark girls everywhere. It was easy for a Southern boy to recognize certain physical aspects of life.

The mystery had penetrated. An open door. "It can't be that simple."

If only a woman could find a man, even a rude man, who would stand up for her. Her father had misjudged the woman he chose as his second wife. It was obvious. If he hadn't been so simple-minded, he would have known it all before he married. This woman treated him outrageously. She decided to get him and started working towards a certain goal.

She had become a little dull and tired, and so she perked up. She tried to appear simple, quiet, and childlike.

She, of course, was nothing like that. She was a disappointed woman. Chances are, somewhere out there was a man she really wanted. She ruined everything.

Her father, if only he hadn't been such a noble man. She was quite sure that her father, though a Southerner... in his youth, he hadn't fooled around with dark-skinned girls. "Perhaps it would have been better for him now if he had done that, if only he hadn't been such a noble man."

His new woman needed a good spanking. "I'd give her one if she were mine," Ethel thought.

Perhaps even with her there was a chance. There was a vitality to Blanche, something hidden within her, beneath her pallor, beneath her filth. Ethel's thoughts returned to the day she had driven with her father to visit her own mother. The drive had been fairly quiet. She had managed to get her father to talk about his childhood. He was the son of a Southern plantation owner who owned slaves. Some of his father's acres were still in his name. She had managed to get him to talk about his days as a young farm boy, just after the Civil War, about the struggles of whites and blacks to adjust to their new lives. He wanted to talk about something else, but she wouldn't let him. They were so easily manipulated. While he talked, she thought of her mother as the young woman who had married Willard Long. She had had a good man, an honorable man, a man unlike most Southern men, a man interested in books and who seemed intellectually alive. Actually, that's not true. Her mother must have found out soon after.

To Ethel's mother, the man she had must have seemed above average. He didn't lie. He didn't secretly pursue dark-skinned women.

Brown women were everywhere. Langdon, Georgia, was in the heart of the old slave South. Brown women weren't bad. They were immoral. They didn't have the problems of white women.

They were destined to become more and more like white women, facing the same problems, the same difficulties in life, but...

During her father's time, in her youth.

How did he manage to stand so straight? "I would never do that," Ethel thought.

A man like her father would step up and perform certain functions for a woman. He could be relied upon in this regard.

He couldn't give the woman what she truly wanted. Perhaps no American could. Ethel had just returned from Chicago, where she had attended school and trained to be a librarian. She was thinking about her experiences there... about the young woman's struggles to make her way in the world, about what had happened to her in the few adventures she had undertaken to cling to life.

It was a spring day. It was still winter in the North, in Chicago, where she had lived for four or five years, but in Georgia it was already spring. Her ride with her father to the Negro schoolhouse, a few miles out of town, past the Georgia peach orchards, past the cotton fields, past the little unpainted cabins so thickly scattered over the land... the usual share of the crop was ten acres... past long stretches of emasculated land... a ride during which she thought so much of her father in relation to his new wife... that it made it a kind of key to her own thoughts about men and the possible permanent liaison with some man of her own-her ride took place before two men of town, one very young, the other almost old, took an interest in her. The men were plowing the fields on their mules. There were brown men and white men, the brutal, ignorant poor whites of the South. Not all the forests in this country were pine. Along the river road they were traveling that day, there were stretches of lowland. In places, the red, freshly plowed earth seemed to slope straight down into the dark forest. A dark-skinned man, driving a team of mules, climbed the slope straight into the forest. His mules disappeared into the forest. They entered and exited there. Lonely pine trees seemed to emerge from the mass of trees, as if dancing on the fresh, newly plowed earth. On the riverbank, below the road they were traveling, Ethel's father was now completely immersed in a story about his young childhood on this land, a story she continued to tell, occasionally asking questions: Swamp maples grew along the riverbank. A little while ago, the swamp maple leaves had been blood-red, but now they were green. The dogwoods were in bloom, glowing white against the green of the new shoots. The peach orchards were almost ready to bloom; soon they would explode in a frenzy of blossoms. A cypress tree grew right on the riverbank. Knees were visible sticking out of the brown stagnant water and the red mud on the riverbank.

It was spring. You could feel it in the air. Ethel kept glancing at her father. She was half angry with him. She had to support him, keep his mind occupied with thoughts of his childhood. "What's the use?... He'll never know, he'll never be able to know why his Blanche and I hate each other, why at the same time we want to help each other." Her eyes had a way of turning bright, like a snake's eyes. They were blue, and as thoughts came and went, sometimes they seemed to turn green. They were truly gray when she was cold, gray when warmth came to her.

The intensity broke. She wanted to give up. "I should take him in my arms as if he were still the boy he talks about," she thought. No doubt his first wife, Ethel's mother, had often done that. There could be a man who was still a boy, like her father, but nevertheless knew he was a boy. "Perhaps I could handle that," she thought.

Hatred grew within her. That day, it was within her like a bright green, new spring plant. The woman Blanche knew that hatred was within her. That's why two women could simultaneously hate and respect each other.

If her father had known even a little more than he knew, than he could ever have known.

"Why couldn't he get himself another wife if he was determined to have another wife, if he felt he needed one?..." She vaguely sensed the father's longing for his son... The World War had taken his last one... and yet he could go on, like the eternal child he was, believing the World War was justified... he was one of the leaders in his department, praising the war, helping sell Liberty Bonds... she remembered a silly speech she had heard her father make once, before her mother died, after her son had enlisted in the army. He had talked of war as a healing agent. "It will bind up old wounds here in our country, between the North and the South," he had said then... Ethel sat beside her mother and listened... her mother had turned a little pale... women certainly have to put up with a lot of nonsense from their men... Ethel felt that it was rather absurd, a man's determination in relation to his sons... the vanity that went on and on in men... the desire to reproduce oneself... thinking it was so terribly important....


"Why on earth, if he wanted another son, did he choose Blanche?"

"What man would want to be Blanche's son?"

It was all part of the immaturity of men that made women so tired. Now Blanche was fed up. "What damn children," Ethel thought. Her father was sixty-five. Her thoughts shifted elsewhere. "What do women care whether a man who can do with them what they want is good or not?" She had developed a habit of cursing, even in her thoughts. Perhaps she inherited it from Blanche. She thought she had something for Blanche. She was less tired. She wasn't tired at all. Sometimes she thought, when she was in the mood she was in that day... "I am strong," she thought.

"I can hurt a lot of people before I die."

She could do something-with Blanche. "I could fix her," she thought. "This whole thing about her letting herself go, no matter how dirty and tattered it was... It might be a way to push him away... It wouldn't be my way."

"I could take her away, make her live a little. I wonder if she wants me to do that? I think so. I think that's what she has in mind."

Ethel sat in the car next to her father, smiling a hard, strange smile. Her father had once caught a glimpse of it. It had frightened him. She could still smile softly. She knew it.

There he was, the man, her father, puzzled by the two women he had dragged into his house, his wife and daughter, wanting to ask his daughter, "What happened?" Not daring to ask.

"Things happen to me that I can't understand."

"Yes, boy. You're right about that. Yes, something is going on."

Two or three times during the trip that day, the judge's cheeks flushed. He wanted to establish certain rules. He wanted to become a lawmaker. "Be kind to me and others. Be noble. Be honest."

"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

Ethel's father sometimes pushed her too hard when she was a little girl at home. Back then, she was a wild child, energetic, and easily excitable. At one point, she had a mad desire to play with all the bad boys in town.

She knew which ones were bad. They could be called brave.

They might do something similar to you.

In the South, there was this awful talk about the pure, flawless white woman. It was better to be a black woman.

"For God's sake, come here. Give me some spots. Don't listen to anything I say. If I get scared and scream, ignore me. Do it. Do it."

There must have been some meaning in the strange, half-crazy people of Russia before the revolution who went around convincing people to sin.

"Make God happy. Give Him enough to forgive."

Some of the bad white boys from Langdon, Georgia, could have done it. One or two almost got their chance with Ethel. There was one bad boy who approached her in the barn, another one at night in the field, the field near her father's house where he kept his cow. She herself had crawled out there at night. That day, he told her that when he got home from school, early in the evening, just after dark, he would crawl out into the field, and although she was trembling with fear, she went. There was such a strange look in his boy's eyes, half-frightened, impatient, and defiant.

She got out of the house safely, but her father missed her.

"Damn it. Maybe I learned something."

Blanche had similar memories, too. Of course. She'd been puzzled and puzzled for a long, long time, in childhood, at the beginning of womanhood, just like Ethel had been when Blanche finally took Ethel's father, went after him, and got him.

This good, kind old boy. Oh, sir!

Ethel Long was tough, she sparkled, riding with her father when he went one day to visit a Negro schoolteacher who was indiscreet, riding with him and thinking.

Not to see the dogwood trees that day, shining against the greenery on the riverbank, not to see the white and dark-skinned men driving mules and plowing the southern land for the new cotton harvest. White cotton. Sweet purity.

That night, her father came to the field and found her there. She was standing in the field, shivering. There was a moon. There was too much moon. He didn't see the boy.

The boy approached her across the field as she crawled out of the house. She saw him approaching.

It would be strange if he were as shy and afraid as she was. What chances people risk! Men and women, boys and girls, drawing closer to each other... in search of some dark paradise, for now. "Now! Now! At least we can taste this moment... if this is Paradise."

"We're going so senselessly. Better to go by mistake than not to go at all."

Perhaps the boy sensed it. He had determination. He ran to her and grabbed her. He tore her dress at the neck. She trembled. He was the right one. She had chosen one of the right sorts.

Her father didn't see the boy. When his father emerged from the Longhouse that night, his heavy feet pounding loudly on the wooden steps, the boy fell to the ground and crawled toward the fence. There were bushes near the fence, and he reached them.

It was strange that her father, seeing nothing, still suspected something. He was convinced something was wrong, something terrible for him. Were all men, even good men like Ethel's father, closer to animals than they ever let on? It would be better if they let on. If men dared to realize that women could live more freely, they could lead more enjoyable lives. "In today's world, there are too many people and not enough thoughts. Men need courage, and without it, they are too afraid of women," Ethel thought.

"But why was I given reason? There is too much woman in me and not enough woman."

That night in the field, her father didn't see the boy. If it hadn't been for the moon, she might have left her father and followed the boy into the bushes. There was too much moon. Her father sensed something. "Come here," he said sharply to her that night, approaching her across the pasture. She didn't move. She wasn't afraid of him that night. She hated him. "Come here," he continued to say, walking across the field toward her. Her father then wasn't the meek man he became after he got Blanche. He had a woman then, Ethel's mother, who might even have been afraid of him. She never crossed him. Was she afraid or just tolerating? It would be nice to know. It would be nice to know if it always had to be this way: a woman dominating a man, or a man dominating a woman. The vulgar little boy she had arranged to meet that night was named Ernest, and although his father did not see him that night, a few days later he suddenly asked her, "Do you know a boy named Ernest White?"

"No," she lied. "I want you to stay away from him. Don't you dare have anything to do with him.

So he knew without knowing. He knew all the little boys in town, the bad and the brave, the good and the gentle. Even as a child, Ethel had a keen sense of smell. She knew then, or if not then, later, that dogs, when there was a bitch with desires... the dog raised his nose in the air. He stood alert, at attention. Perhaps a female dog was being sought a few miles away. He ran. Many dogs ran. They gathered in packs, fighting and growling at each other.

After that night in the field, Ethel became angry. She cried and swore that her father had torn her dress. "He attacked me. I didn't do anything. He tore my dress. He hurt me."

"You're up to something, crawling out here like this. What are you up to?"

"Nothing."

She kept crying. She went into the house, sobbing. Suddenly her father, this good man, started talking about his honor. It sounded so meaningless. "Honor. A good man."

"I'd rather see my daughter in the grave than not let her be a good girl."

"But what is a good girl?"

Ethel's mother remained silent. She paled slightly as she listened to her father speak to her daughter, but said nothing. Perhaps she thought, "This is where we need to start. We need to begin to understand men for what they are." Ethel's mother was a good woman. Not a child listening to his father talk about his honor, but the woman the child had become who admired and loved her mother. "We women must learn, too." Someday there might be a good life on earth, but that time was a long, long way off. It implied a new kind of understanding between men and women, an understanding that became more common to all men and all women, a sense of human unity that had not yet been realized.

"I wish I could be like my mother," Ethel thought that day after returning to Langdon to work as a librarian. She doubted her ability to be what she thought she could be while riding in the car with her father and later, sitting in the car in front of the small black schoolhouse, half-lost in the pine forest. Her father had gone to the school to find out if a woman, a black woman, had behaved badly. She wondered if he could ask her, rudely and directly. "Maybe he could. She's black," Ethel thought.

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3


HERE WAS A scene in Ethel's head.

It occurred to her after her father visited a black school, and they were driving home in the warm spring sun, driving along the red roads of Georgia, past freshly plowed fields. She saw little of the fields and didn't ask her father how he ended up at school with a black girl.

Perhaps the woman had acted immodestly. Perhaps she had been caught. Her father had gone there, to the small black school, and she had remained in the car outside. He would have pulled the teacher aside. He couldn't ask her directly, even though she was black. "They say... Is it true?" The judge always found himself in situations. He was supposed to know a lot about how to treat people. Ethel smiled. She was living in the past. On the way home, she brought her father back to the topic of his own childhood. He had hoped to have a serious conversation with her, to learn from her, if possible, what was wrong in his own home, but he hadn't succeeded.

Men plowed red fields. Red roads wound through the low hills of Georgia. Beyond the road ran a river, its banks lined with trees, and white dogwoods peeked out from the bright new green foliage.

Her father wanted to ask her: "What's at home? Tell me. What are you and my wife Blanche up to?"

- So, you want to know?

"Yes. Tell me."

"Damn it, I'll do it. Find out for yourself. You men are so smart. Find out for yourself."

The strange old feud between men and women. Where did it start? Was it necessary? Will it continue forever?

At one moment that day, Ethel wanted to be like her mother, patient and kind to her father, and the next moment...

"If you were my man..

Her thoughts were occupied with the drama of her own life in Chicago, reflecting on it now that it was all in the past, trying to understand it. There was one particular adventure. It happened toward the end of her studies there. One evening she went to dinner with a man. At that time-it was after her father's second marriage, when she had been home on a visit and had returned to Chicago-the plan to make her librarian of the new library in Langdon had already been hatched in Blanche's mind, and, having fallen... Thanks to this, Ethel had managed to get a job at the Chicago Public Library... She was studying at library school. Another young woman, also working at the library, went to dinner with Ethel, a man, and her own man. She was a short, rather plump woman, young and inexperienced in life, whose people-very respectable people, like Ethel's people in Langdon-lived in the Chicago suburbs.

Two women were planning to spend the night, go on an adventure, and the men they were with were married men. It had just happened. Ethel had orchestrated it. She couldn't help but wonder how much the other woman knew, how innocent she was.

There was a man Ethel was supposed to spend the evening with. Yes, he was a strange man, a new type to her. Ethel met him one evening at a party. He intrigued her. Her curiosity about him had something of Ethel, a girl in a field, waiting for a bad little boy from a small town.

When she first met this man, she was at a literary party, and several men and women prominent in the Chicago literary world were present. Edgar Lee Masters was there, and Carl Sandburg, the famous Chicago poet, had also arrived. There were many young writers and several artists. Ethel was picked up by an older woman, who also worked at the public library. The party was held in a large apartment near the lake, on the North Side. The party was hosted by a woman who wrote poetry and was married to a wealthy man. There were several large rooms filled with people.

It was easy enough to tell which of them was famous. The others gathered around, asking questions and listening. Almost all the celebrities were men. A poet named Bodenheim arrived, smoking a corncob pipe. The stench was thick. People kept arriving, and soon the large rooms were filled with people.

So, this was the highest life, the cultural life.

At the party, Ethel, immediately forgotten by the woman who had brought her, wandered aimlessly. She saw several people sitting separately in a small room. They were obviously unknown, like herself, and she walked in with them and sat down. After all, she couldn't help but think, "I'm the best-dressed woman here." She was proud of this fact. There were women in more expensive gowns, but almost without exception, they were missing something. She knew it. She had kept her eyes open since entering the apartment. "So many slobs among literary ladies," she thought. That night, although she was beside herself, not being a famous writer or artist, just a simple employee of the Chicago Public Library and a student, she was full of self-confidence. If no one paid attention to her, everything was fine. People kept coming, crowding the apartment. They were addressed by name. "Hello, Carl."

"Why, Jim, are you here?"

"Hello, Sarah." The small room Ethel found herself in opened onto a corridor that led into a larger, crowded room. The smaller room began to fill up, too.

However, she found herself in a small side stream from the main one. She watched and listened. The woman sitting next to her informed her friend, "This is Mrs. Will Brownlee. She writes poetry. Her poems have been published in Scribner"s, Harper"s, and many other magazines. She is due to publish a book soon. The tall woman with red hair is a sculptor. Small and plain-looking, she writes a column of literary criticism for one of the Chicago daily newspapers.

There were women and men. Most of the people at the party were obviously important in the Chicago literary world. If they hadn't yet achieved national fame, they had hopes.

There was something strange about the position of such people-writers, artists, sculptors, and musicians-in American life. Ethel sensed the plight of such people, especially in Chicago, and was surprised and puzzled. Many people wanted to be writers. Why? Writers always wrote books, which were reviewed in newspapers. There was a brief burst of enthusiasm or condemnation, which quickly faded. Intellectual life was indeed very limited. The great city was sprawling. The distances within the city were vast. For those within, in the city's intellectual circles, there was both admiration and contempt.

They were in a great trading city, lost within it. It was an undisciplined city, magnificent but unformed. It was a changing city, always growing, changing, always getting bigger.

On the side of town facing Lake Michigan, there was a street where the main building of the public library stood. It was a street lined with huge office buildings and hotels, with a lake and a long, narrow park on one side.

It was a windswept street, a magnificent street. Someone had told Ethel it was the most magnificent street in America, and she believed it. For many days it was a sunny, windswept street. A river of motors flowed. There were chic shops and magnificent hotels, and smartly dressed people strolled up and down. Ethel loved the street. She loved to put on a nice dress and stroll there.

Beyond this street, to the west, stretched a network of dark, tunnel-like streets, not making the bizarre and unexpected turns of New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other old American cities, the cities Ethel had visited when she set out on her journey for precisely this purpose, but streets laid out in a grid pattern, running straight west, running north, and running south.

Ethel, while working, was forced to travel west to the Chicago Public Library branch. After graduating from university and training to become a librarian, she lived in a small room on lower Michigan Avenue, below the Loop, and walked every day along Michigan Avenue to Madison, where she caught her car.

That evening, when she went to a party and met the man she would later have dinner with and with whom she would later have an adventure that would profoundly shape her outlook on life, she was in a state of rebellion. She always had such periods. They came and went, and after going through one, she found herself quite amused. The truth was, she had been in a state of rebellion ever since she arrived in Chicago.

There she was, a tall, straight woman, a little masculine. She could easily have become more or less masculine. She attended university for four years, and when not at university, she worked in town or was at home. Her father was far from rich. He had inherited some money from his father, and his first marriage had brought him some money, and he owned some southern farmland, but the land didn't yield much income. His salary was small, and besides Ethel, he had other children to care for.

Ethel was going through one of her periods of rebellion against men.

At the literary evening that evening, when she was sitting rather to the side... not feeling forgotten... she knew only the elderly woman who had brought her to the party... why should this woman worry about her, having got her there... "having done me such a great service," she thought... at the party she also realized that she could have had her own man long ago, even an intelligent man.

There was a man at the university, a young professor who also wrote and published poetry, an energetic young man who was courting her. What a strange spectacle his courtship was! She didn't care for him, but she used him.

At first, upon meeting her, he began asking if he could come and take her place, and then he began helping her with her work. The help was essential. Ethel cared little for some of her activities. They were getting in her way.

You had to choose a certain number of studies. The exams at the university were tough. If you fell behind, you flunked out. If she flunked out, her father would be angry, and she would have to return to Langdon, Georgia, to live. A young instructor helped me. "Listen," he said, when the exam was about to take place, "these are going to be the kind of questions this man will ask." He knew. He had prepared the answers. "You answer them like this. You can handle it." He worked with her for hours before the exam. What a joke four years at the university had been! What a waste of time and money for someone like her!

This was what her father wanted from her. He made sacrifices, went without things, and saved money to enable her to do so. She didn't specifically want to be educated, an intellectual woman. More than anything, she thought, she'd love to be rich. "God," she thought, "if only I had more money."

She had an idea... it might well have been absurd... she might have picked it up from reading novels... most Americans seemed to have a fairly strong idea that happiness could be achieved through wealth... here might be a life in which she could actually function. For a woman like her, with undeniable chic, there might be a place here. Sometimes she even dreamed, influenced by her reading, of some glorious life. In a book about English life, she read about a certain Lady Blessington, who lived in England during Peel's time. This was when Queen Victoria was still a young girl. Lady Blessington began her life as the daughter of an obscure Irishman, who married her off to a rich and unpleasant man.

Then a miracle. Lord Blessington, a very wealthy English nobleman, saw her. There she was, a true beauty, and no doubt, like Ethel, a stylish woman, hidden like that. The noble Englishman took her to England, obtained a divorce, and married her. They went to Italy, accompanied by a young French nobleman who had become Lady Blessington's lover. Her noble master didn't seem to mind. The young man was magnificent. Undoubtedly, the old lord wanted some real adornment for his life. She gave him just that.

The big problem with Ethel was that she wasn't exactly poor. "I'm middle class," she thought. She'd picked up the word somewhere, perhaps from her college professor admirer. His name was Harold Gray.

There she was, just a young middle-class American, lost in the crowds of an American university, and later lost in the crowds of Chicago. She was a woman who always wanted clothes, wanted to wear jewelry, wanted to drive a nice car. No doubt all women were like that, although many would never admit it. This was because they knew they had no chance. She picked up Vogue and other women's magazines filled with photographs of the latest Parisian dresses, dresses clinging to the bodies of tall, slender women, very similar to her. There were photographs of country houses, people pulling up to the doors of country houses in very elegant cars... perhaps from the advertising pages of magazines. How clean, beautiful, and first-class everything seemed! In the pictures she saw in magazines, she was sometimes lying alone in her bed in a small room... it was Sunday morning... pictures that meant that life was entirely possible for all Americans... that is, if they were real Americans and not foreign trash... if they were sincere and hardworking... if they had enough intelligence to make money...

"God, but I'd love to marry a rich man," Ethel thought. "If I had the chance. I wouldn't care who he was." She didn't quite mean it that way.

She was constantly in debt, having to build and build to get the clothes she thought she needed. "I have nothing to cover my nakedness with," she sometimes told other women she met at university. She even had to work hard to learn how to sew, and she was always thinking about money. As a result, she always lived in rather shabby quarters, without many of the simple luxuries other women had. Even as a student, she so wanted to look chic in front of the world and at university. She was greatly admired. None of the other students ever got too close to her.

There were two or three... rather soft little feminine creatures... who fell in love with her. They wrote little notes and sent flowers to her room.

She had a vague idea of what they meant. "Not for me," she told herself.

The magazines she saw, the conversations she overheard, the books she read. Due to occasional bouts of boredom, she began reading novels, which was mistaken for an interest in literature. That summer, when she went home to Langdon, she took a dozen novels with her. Reading them gave Blanche the idea of working as the town librarian.

There were photographs of people, always on glorious summer days, in places frequented only by the rich. The sea and a golf course by the sea were visible in the distance. Beautifully dressed young men strolled down the street. "God, I could have been born into a life like this." The pictures always depicted spring or summer, and if winter came, tall women in expensive furs were engaged in winter sports, accompanied by handsome young men.

Though Ethel was a born Southerner, she had few illusions about life in the American South. "It's miserable," she thought. People from Chicago she met asked her about life in the South. "Isn't there a great deal of charm in your life down there? I've always heard about the charm of life in the South."

"Charm, damn it!" Ethel didn't say it, though she thought so. "No point in making myself unnecessarily unpopular," she thought. To some people such a life might seem quite charming... to people of a certain kind... certainly not to fools, she knew that... she thought her own mother had found life in the South, with her lawyer husband, who understood so little... so full of his bourgeois virtues, so confident in his honesty, his honor, his deeply religious nature... her mother had managed not to be unhappy.

Her mother might have had some of the charm of Southern life, Northern people love to talk like that, Negroes are always around the house and on the streets... Negroes are usually quite clever, they lie, they work for the whites... the long hot dull days of the Southern summer.

Her mother lived her life, deeply immersed in it. Ethel and her mother never really spoke. There had always been a kind of understanding between her and her fair-haired stepmother, as there later would be. Ethel's hatred grew and grew. Was it a male hatred? Quite possibly so. "They're so smug, stuck in the mud," she thought. As for her particular interest in books, the fact that she was an intellectual, that was a joke. Many of the other women she met when she began training to be a librarian seemed interested, even absorbed.

No doubt the people who wrote the hooks thought they were onto something. Some of them really were. Her favorite writer was the Irishman George Moore. "Writers should make life for those of us whose lives are gray, not so gray," she thought. With what joy she read Moore's "Memories of My Dead Life." "This is what love should be like," she thought.

These Moore lovers were at an inn in Oryol; they would set out at night for a small French provincial town to find pajamas, a shopkeeper, a room at the inn that was such a disappointment, and then the delightful room they later found. Don't worry about each other's souls, about sin and its consequences. The writer loved beautiful lingerie on his ladies; he liked soft, graceful, form-fitting dresses that slid gently over the female form. Such lingerie gave the women who wore it a certain elegance, a rich softness and firmness. In most of the books Ethel read, the whole issue of earthiness, in her opinion, was overdone. Who wanted that?

I wish I were a high-class whore. If a woman could only choose her men, it wouldn't be so bad. Ethel thought more women thought that way than men could imagine. She thought men were generally fools. "They're children who want to be pampered their whole lives," she thought. One day, she saw a photograph and read a story about the adventures of a female robber in a Chicago newspaper, and her heart leaped. She imagined herself walking into a bank and holding it, thus receiving thousands of dollars in a matter of minutes. "If I had the chance to meet a truly high-class robber, and he fell in love with me, I'd fall in love with him, all right," she thought. In Ethel's time, when she, quite by chance in her own opinion, got involved, always marginally of course, with the literary world, a great many of the writers who were then attracting the most attention... the really popular ones, the ones she really liked, the ones who were smart enough to write only about the lives of the rich and the successful... the only really interesting lives... a great many of the writers who were just then big names, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and others, were dealing with such low-class people.

"Damn them, they're writing about people like me who were caught off guard."

Or they tell stories about workers and their lives... or about small farmers on poor farms in Ohio, Indiana or Iowa, about people driving Fords, about a hired hand who is in love with some hired girl, going with her into the woods, her sadness and fear after she finds out that she is like that. What difference does it make?

"I can only imagine what a mercenary like that would smell like," she thought. After she graduated from university and got a job at a branch of the Chicago Public Library... it was far out on the West Side... day after day, handing out dirty, dirty books to dirty, dirty people... having fun and acting like you were enjoying it... such tired, worn-out faces were on most of the workers... mostly women came for books...

Or young boys.

The boys liked to read about crime, outlaws, or cowboys in some obscure place known as the "Far West." Ethel didn't blame them. She had to ride home at night on the streetcar. Rainy nights had come. The car sped past the gloomy walls of factories. The car was crowded with workers. How black and dreary the city streets seemed under the streetlights visible from the car windows, and how far away were the people from the Vogue ads-people with country houses, the sea at their doors, sprawling lawns with huge avenues lined with shady trees, those in expensive cars, in rich clothes, going to lunch at some big hotel. Some of the workers in the car must have worn the same clothes day after day, even month after month. The air was heavy with damp. The car stank.

Ethel sat gloomily in the car, her face turning pale at times. A worker, perhaps a young one, stared at her. Neither of them dared sit too close. They had a vague feeling she belonged to some outside world, far removed from theirs. "Who is this woman? How did she get here, to this part of town?" they asked themselves. Even the lowest-paid worker had at some point in his life strolled along certain streets of downtown Chicago, even Michigan Avenue. He'd passed the entrances of large hotels, perhaps feeling awkward and out of place.

He saw women like Ethel emerging from such places. The lifestyles they imagined for the rich and successful were somewhat different from Ethel's. It was an older Chicago. There were grand saloons, all built of marble, with silver dollars on the floor. One worker told another about a Chicago house of prostitution he'd heard about. A friend had been there once. "You were drowning in silk carpets up to your knees. The women there were dressed like queens."

Ethel's photograph was different. She wanted elegance, style, a world of color and movement. A passage she'd read in a book that day echoed in her mind. It described a house in London...


"One could pass through a drawing room decorated with gold and rubies, filled with beautiful amber vases that belonged to the Empress Josephine, and enter a long, narrow library with white walls, on which mirrors alternated with panels of richly bound books. Through a high window at the end, the trees of Hyde Park were visible. Around the room were sofas, ottomans, enamel tables covered with bibelotes, and Lady Marrow in a yellow satin dress, dressed in a blue satin dress with an extremely low neckline..."

"American writers who call themselves real writers write about people like that," Ethel thought, looking up and down the streetcar, her eyes scanning the streetcar filled with Chicago factory workers heading home after a long day's work. Work... God knows what kind of dreary, cramped apartments... screaming, dirty children playing on the floor... she herself, alas, was going somewhere no better... no money in her pockets half the time... she often had to dine in small, cheap cafeterias... she herself had to skimp and eat to earn a little money... writers cared about such lives, such loves, such hopes.

It wasn't that she hated them, the working men and women she saw in Chicago. She tried to make them nonexistent for her. They were like the white people from the mill town on the outskirts of her hometown of Langdon; they were what Black people had always been to people in the South-or, at least, what field Negroes were.

In a sense, she had to read books by writers who wrote about such people. She had to keep up with the times. People were constantly asking questions. After all, she planned to become a librarian.

Sometimes she would pick up such a book and read it to the end. "Well," she said, putting it down, "so what? What do such people matter?"

*

As for the men who were directly interested in Ethel and thought they wanted her.

A good example is the university professor Harold Gray. He wrote letters. It seemed to be his passion. The few men she had fleeting flirtations with were exactly like that. They were all intellectuals. There was something attractive about her, apparently of that sort, and yet, once she got it, she hated him. They were always trying to get into her soul or messing with their own souls. Harold Gray was exactly like that. He tried to psychoanalyze her, and he had rather watery blue eyes hidden behind thick glasses, rather thin hair, carefully combed, narrow shoulders, and not very strong legs. He walked absentmindedly down the street, hurrying. He always had books under his arm.

If she married a man like that... she tried to imagine living with Harold. The truth was probably that she was looking for a certain type of man. Maybe it was all nonsense about wanting beautiful clothes and a certain elegant position in life.

Being someone who didn't relate easily to others, she was very lonely, often alone even in the company of others. Her mind was always focused on the future. There was something masculine about her-or, in her case, only a certain boldness, not very feminine, a quick flight of fancy. She could laugh at herself. She was grateful for it. She saw Harold Gray hurrying down the street. He had a room near the university, and to get to classes, she didn't have to go across the street where she had a room during her university years, but after he began to notice her, he often did. "It's funny that he fell in love with me," she thought. "If only he were physically a little more of a man, if he were a strong, brash man, or a big man, an athlete or something... or if he were rich."

There was something very gentle, hopeful, and at the same time boyishly sad about Harold. He was always rummaging through poets, finding poems for her.

Or he read books about nature. He was a philosophy major at the university, but he told her he really wanted to be a naturalist. He brought her a book by a man named Fabre, something about caterpillars. They, the caterpillars, crawled on the ground or fed on tree leaves. "Let them," Ethel thought. She grew angry. "Damn it. These aren't my trees. Let them strip the trees bare."

For a while, she hung out with a young instructor. He had little money and was working on his doctoral dissertation. She went for walks with him. He didn't have a car, but he took her to dinner at the professors' houses a few times. She let him hire a taxi.

Sometimes in the evenings, he took her on long drives. They went west and south. For every hour spent together, she earned so many dollars and dimes. "I won't give him much for his money," she thought. "I wonder if he'd have the nerve to try to get it if he knew how easy I would be for the right man." She drove as long as she could: "Let's go this way," prolonging the time-out. "He could live for a week on what I'm forcing on him," she thought.

She let him buy her books she didn't want to read. A man who could sit all day and watch the actions of caterpillars, ants, or even dung beetles, day after day, month after month-that was what he admired. "If he really wants me, he'd better have something in mind. If he could sweep me off my feet. If he could. I think that's what I need."

She remembered funny moments. One Sunday, she was on a long drive with him in a rented car. They went to a place called Palos Park. He needed to do something. It began to bother him. "Really," she asked herself that day, "why do I despise him so much?" He tried his best to be nice to her. He always wrote her letters. In his letters, he was much bolder than when he was with her.

He wanted to stop by the woods, on the side of the road. He had to. He shifted nervously in the car seat. "He must really be suffering terribly," she thought. She was pleased. Anger took hold of her. "Why doesn't he say what he wants?"

If it was just that he was too shy to use certain words, surely he could somehow communicate to her what he wanted. "Listen, I need to go into the woods alone. Nature is calling."

He was a hell of a nature enthusiast... bringing her books about caterpillars and dung beetles. Even as he fidgeted nervously in his seat that day, he tried to pass it off as a fascination with nature. He squirmed and squirmed. "Look," he shouted. He pointed to a tree growing by the road. "Isn't it magnificent?"

"You're magnificent just the way you are," she thought. It was a day of light, drifting clouds, and he drew attention to them. "They look like camels crossing the desert."

"You wish you could be alone in the desert yourself," she thought. All he needed was a lonely desert or a tree between him and her.

This was his style: he talked about nature, talked about it all the time, about trees, fields, rivers and flowers.

And ants and caterpillars...

And then to be so damn humble about one simple question.

She let him suffer. Two or three times he almost escaped. She got out of the car with him, and they walked into the woods. He pretended to see something in the distance, among the trees. "Wait here," he said, but she ran after him. "I want to see it too," she said. The joke was that the man who was driving that day, the chauffeur... he was a pretty cool city guy... chewing tobacco and spitting...

He had a small, snub nose, as if it had been broken in a fight, and on his cheek there was a scar, as if from a knife cut.

He knew what was going on. He knew that Ethel knew that he knew.

Ethel finally let the instructor go. She turned and walked down the path toward the car, tired of the game. Harold waited a few minutes before joining her. He'd likely look around, hoping to find a flower to pick.

Pretend that's exactly what he was doing, trying to find a flower for her. The joke was, the driver knew. Maybe he was Irish. By the time she reached the car waiting by the road, he was already out of the driver's seat and standing there. "You let him get lost?" he asked. He knew she knew what he meant. He spat on the ground and grinned as she got in.

*

ETHEL was at a literary party in Chicago. Men and women were smoking cigarettes. There was a small flow of conversation. People disappeared into the apartment's kitchen. Cocktails were being served there. Ethel was sitting in a small room off the hallway when a man approached her. He noticed her and chose her. There was an empty chair next to her; he walked over and sat down. He was upright. "It seems no one here is a celebrity. I'm Fred Wells," he said.

"It means nothing to you. No, I don't write novels or essays. I don't paint or sculpt. I'm not a poet." He laughed. He was a new man for Ethel. He looked at her boldly. His eyes were grayish-blue, cold, like her own. "At least," she thought, "he's bold."

He marked her down. "You'll be of use to me," he might have thought. He was looking for a woman to entertain him.

He was in the same old game. The man wanted to talk about himself. He wanted the woman to listen, to impress, and to seem absorbed when he talked about himself.

It was a man's game, but women were no better. A woman wanted to be admired. She wanted beauty in her personality, and she wanted a man to recognize her beauty. "I can support almost any man if he thinks I'm beautiful," Ethel sometimes thought.

"Look," said the man she'd seen at the party, a man named Fred Wells, "you're not one of them, are you?" He made a quick gesture with his hand toward the others sitting in the small room and toward those in the larger room nearby. "I bet you're not. You don't look it," he said, smiling. "Not that I have anything against those people, especially the men. I suppose they're remarkable people, at least some of them.

The man laughed. He was as lively as a fox terrier.

"I pulled my own strings to get here," he said, laughing. "I don"t really belong. Do you? Do you mold? Lots of women do that. They take it out that way. I"ll bet you don"t." He was a man of about thirty-five, very slim and lively. He kept smiling, but his smile wasn"t very deep. Small smiles followed one after another on his sharp face. He had very clear features, the kind you might see in cigarette or clothing ads. For some reason, he made Ethel think of a fine, purebred dog. The ad... "the best-dressed man in Princeton"... "the man at Harvard most likely to succeed in life, chosen by his class." He had a good tailor. His clothes were not flashy. They were, without a doubt, impeccably right.

He leaned over to whisper something to Ethel, bringing his face close to hers. "I didn't think you were one of them," he said. She hadn't told him anything about herself. It was clear that he harbored a certain intense antagonism toward the celebrities present at the party.

"Look at them. They think they're just trash, don't they?

"To hell with their eyes. They're all strutting around, female celebrities are fawning over male celebrities, and female celebrities are showing off."

He didn't say it right away. It was implied in his manner. He devoted the evening to her, taking her out and introducing her to celebrities. He seemed to know them all. He took things for granted. "Here, Carl, come here," he commanded. It was an order to Carl Sandburg, a large, broad-shouldered man with gray hair. There was something about Fred Wells's manner. He impressed Ethel. "See, I call him by name. I say, 'Come here,' and he comes." He called different people to him: Ben, Joe, and Frank. "I want you to meet this woman."

"She's a Southerner," he said. He'd picked up that from Ethel's speech.

"She's the most beautiful woman here. You have nothing to worry about. She's not some kind of artist. She won't ask you for any favors.

He became familiar and trusting.

- She won't ask you to write a foreword to some collection of poems, nothing like that.

"I'm not playing this game," he told Ethel, "and yet neither am I." He led her into the apartment's kitchen and brought her a cocktail. He lit a cigarette for her.

They stood a little apart, away from the crowd, Ethel found amusing. He explained to her who he was, still smiling. "I suppose I'm the lowest of men," he said cheerfully, but he smiled politely. He had a tiny black mustache, and as he spoke, he stroked it. His speech was oddly reminiscent of the barking of a small dog on the road, a dog barking resolutely at a car on the road, at a car just rounding a bend.

He was a man who had made his money in the patent medicine business, and he explained everything to Ethel in a rush as they stood together. "I dare say you're a woman from a family, being a Southerner. Well, I'm not. I've noticed almost all Southerners have families. I'm from Iowa."

He was obviously a man who lived by his contempt. He spoke of Ethel's Southernness with contempt in his voice, contempt for the fact that he was trying to control himself, as if to say-laughingly: "Don't try to force this on me because you're a Southerner."

"This game won't work with me.

"But look. I'm laughing. I'm not serious.

"Ta! Ta!"

"I wonder if he's like me," Ethel thought. "I wonder if I'm like him."

There are certain people. You don't really like them. You stay around them. They teach you things.

It was as if he'd come to the party solely to find her, and, having found her, was pleased. As soon as he met her, he wanted to leave. "Come on," he said, "let's get out of here. We'll have to work hard to get drinks here. There's nowhere to sit. We can't talk. We don't matter here."

He wanted to be somewhere, in an atmosphere where he could seem more important.

"Let's go downtown, to one of the big hotels. We can have lunch there. I'll take care of the drinks. Watch me." He continued to smile. Ethel didn't care. She had a strange impression of this man from the moment he first came to her. It felt like Mephistopheles. She was surprised. "If he's like that, I'll find out about him," she thought. She went with him to get some capes, and, taking a taxi, they went to a large restaurant in the city center, where he found a seat for her in a quiet corner. He managed the drinks. The bottle was brought.

He seemed eager to explain himself and began telling her about his father. "I'll talk about myself. Do you mind?" She said no. He was born in a county town in Iowa. He explained that his father was in politics and was supposed to be the county treasurer.

After all, this man had a story of his own. He told Ethel about his past.

In Iowa, where he spent his childhood, everything was going well for a long time, but then his father used county funds for some personal speculation and got caught. A period of depression ensued. The stocks his father had bought on margin plummeted. He was caught off guard.

This, Ethel realized, had happened around the time Fred Wells was in high school. "I didn't waste time moping around," he said proudly and quickly. "I came to Chicago."

He explained that he was smart. "I'm a realist," he said. "I'm not mincing words. I'm smart. I'm damn smart.

"I bet I'm smart enough to see right through you," he said to Ethel. "I know who you are. You're an unsatisfied woman." He smiled as he said it.

Ethel didn't like him. She found him fun and interesting. In a way, she even liked him. At least he was a relief after some of the men she'd met in Chicago.

They continued drinking while the man talked and while the dinner he'd ordered was being served, and Ethel loved a drink, though it didn't affect her much. Drinking brought relief. It gave her courage, though getting drunk wasn't exactly fun. She only got drunk once, and when she did, she was alone.

It was the evening before an exam, when she was still at university. Harold Gray was helping her. He left her, and she went to her room. She had a bottle of whiskey there, and she drank it all. Afterward, she fell into bed and felt ill. The whiskey didn't make her drunk. It seemed to excite her nerves, making her mind unusually cool and clear. The illness came afterward. "I won't do it again," she told herself then.

At the restaurant, Fred Wells continued to explain himself. He seemed to feel the need to explain his presence at the literary soiree, as if to say, "I'm not one of them. I don't want to be like that."

"My thoughts are so harmless," Ethel thought. She didn't say it.

He arrived in Chicago as a young man, fresh out of high school, and after a while began to mingle with the artistic and literary world. Undoubtedly, knowing such people gave a man, a man like himself, a certain status. He bought them lunches. He went out with them.

Life is a game. Knowing such people is just one hand in the game.

He became a collector of first editions. "It's a good plan," he told Ethel. "It seems to put you in a certain class, and besides, if you're smart, you can make money at it. So, if you watch your step, there's no reason why you should lose money."

Thus he entered the literary world. They were, he thought, childish, selfish, and sensitive. They amused the man. Most of the women, he thought, were rather soft and frivolous.

He continued to smile and stroke his mustache. He was a specialist in first editions and already had a fine collection. "I'll take you to see them," he said.

"They're in my apartment, but my wife's out of town. Of course, I don't expect you to go there with me tonight.

- I know you're not a fool.

"I'm not such a fool as to think that you can be so easily got, that you can be plucked like a ripe apple from a tree," that's what he thought.

He suggested a party. Ethel could find another woman, and he another man. It would be a nice little get-together. They would have dinner at a restaurant and then go to his apartment to look at his books. "You're not squeamish, are you?" he asked. "You know, there will be another woman and another man there.

- My wife won't be in town for another month.

"No," said Ethel.

He spent that entire first evening at the restaurant explaining himself. "For some people, the smart ones, life is just a game," he explained. "You make the best of it." There were different people who played the game differently. Some, he said, were considered very, very respectable. They, like him, were in business. Well, they didn't sell patent medicines. They sold coal, iron, or machinery. Or they ran factories or mines. It was all the same game. A money game.

"You know," he said to Ethel, "I think you're the same sort as me.

"Nothing special interests you either.

"We are of the same breed."

Ethel didn't feel flattered. She was amused, but also a little hurt.

"If this is true, then I don't want it to be so."

And yet she was interested, perhaps, in his confidence, his courage.

As a boy and young man, he lived in a small town in Iowa. He was the only son in the family, and there were three daughters. His father always seemed to have plenty of money. They lived well, quite lavishly for that town. They had cars, horses, a large house, and money was spent left and right. Each child in the family received an allowance from their father. He never asked how it was spent.

Then there was an accident, and my father went to jail. He didn't live long. Luckily, there was money for the insurance. Mother and daughters, with caution, managed to get along. "I think my sisters will get married. They haven't yet. Neither of them has managed to hook anyone," said Fred Wells.

He wanted to be a newspaperman himself. It was his passion. He came to Chicago and got a job as a reporter at one of the local daily newspapers, but soon gave it up. He said he didn't have enough money.

He regretted it. "I would have been a great newspaperman," he said. "Nothing would have shaken me, nothing would have embarrassed me." He continued to drink, eat, and talk about himself. Perhaps the alcohol he'd consumed had made him bolder in conversation, more reckless. It hadn't made him drunk. "It affects him the same way it does me," Ethel thought.

"Suppose a man or a woman's reputation were to be ruined," he said cheerfully. "Say, through a sex scandal, something of that sort... the kind so repulsive to so many of these literary types I know, so many so-called people of the upper class. 'Aren't they all so pure?' Damned children." It seemed to Ethel that the man before her must hate the people among whom she had found him, the people whose books he collected. He, like her, was a jumble of emotions. He continued to speak cheerfully, smiling, without outward display of emotion.

Writers, he said, even the greatest writers, were also unprincipled. Such a man had an affair with some woman. What happened? After a while, it ended. "In reality, love doesn't exist. It's all nonsense and nonsense," he declared.

"With such a man, a great literary figure, ha! Full of words, like me.

"But he makes so many damn claims about the words he says.

"As if everything in the world really mattered that much. What does he do after it's all over with some woman? He makes literary material out of it.

"He's not fooling anyone. Everyone knows."

He returned to his talk of being a newspaperman and paused. "Suppose the woman, say, is married." He himself was a married man, married to a woman who was the daughter of the man who owned the business he was now in. The man was dead. He controlled the business now. If his own wife... "She better not fool around with me... I certainly won't tolerate that," he said.

Suppose a woman, married and all, were to have an affair with a man other than her husband. He imagined himself as a newspaperman reporting such a story. These were remarkable people. He'd worked as a reporter for a while, but had never gotten his hands on a case like that. He seemed to regret it.

"They're prominent people. They're rich or involved in the arts; big people are involved in the arts, politics, or something like that." The man was successfully launched. "And then a woman tries to manipulate me. Let's say I'm the editor-in-chief of a newspaper. She comes to me. She's crying. 'For God's sake, remember that I have children.'"

- You do, huh? Why didn't you think of that when you got involved in this? Little kids ruining their lives. Fudge! Was my own life ruined because my father died in prison? Perhaps it hurt my sisters. I don't know. They might have a hard time finding a respectable husband. I would tear her right apart. I will have no mercy.

There was a strange, bright, shining hatred in this man. "Is this me? God help me, is this me?" Ethel thought.

He wanted to hurt someone.

Fred Wells, who came to Chicago after his father's death, didn't stay in the newspaper business for long. There wasn't enough money to make. He went into advertising, working for an advertising agency as a copywriter. "I could have been a writer," he declared. In fact, he wrote a few short stories. They were mystical tales. He enjoyed writing them and had no trouble getting them published. He wrote for one of the magazines that published such things. "I also wrote true confessions," he said. He laughed as he told Ethel this. He imagined himself as a young wife with a husband stricken with tuberculosis.

She'd always been an innocent woman, but she didn't particularly want to be one. She took her husband west, to Arizona. Her husband was almost gone, but he lasted two or three years.

It was at this time that the woman in Fred Wells's story betrayed him. There was a man there, a young man she desired, and so she crept out into the desert with him at night.

This story, this confession, gave Fred Wells an opportunity. The magazine's publishers seized on it. He imagined himself as the sick man's wife. There he lay, slowly dying. He imagined his young wife overwhelmed with remorse. Fred Wells sat at a table in the Chicago restaurant with Ethel, stroking his mustache and telling her all this. He described with perfect precision what he said the woman was feeling. At night, she waited for darkness to fall. They were soft, deserted, moonlit nights. The young man she had taken as a lover crept up to the house she shared with her sick husband, a house on the outskirts of town in the desert, and she crept up to him.

One night she returned, and her husband was dead. She never saw her lover again. "I expressed a lot of remorse," Fred Wells said, laughing again. "I made him fat. I got pretty bogged down in it. I suppose all the fun my imaginary woman ever had was out there, with another man, in the moonlit desert, but then I made her ooze a fair amount of remorse."

"You see, I wanted to sell it. I wanted it to be published," he said.

Fred Wells had embarrassed Ethel Long. It was unpleasant. Later, she realized it was her own fault. One day, a week after she'd dined with him, he called her on the phone. "I've got something splendid," he said. There was a man in town, a famous English writer, and Fred was joining him. He proposed a party. Ethel was to find another woman, and Fred was to find an Englishman. "He's in America on a lecture tour, and all the intellectuals are keeping him under control," Fred explained. "We'll give him another party." Did Ethel know of another woman she could get? "Yes," she said.

"Take him alive," he said. "You know."

What did he mean by that? She was confident. "If such a person... if he can set something on me."

She was bored. Why not? There was a woman working at the library who could do it. She was a year younger than Ethel, a petite woman with a passion for writers. The idea of meeting someone as famous as this Englishman would have been thrilling. She was the rather pale daughter of a respectable family in a Chicago suburb and had a vague desire to become a writer.

"Yes, I'll go," she said when Ethel spoke to her. She was the kind of woman who always admired Ethel. The women at university who had crushes on her were exactly like that. She admired Ethel's style and what she considered her courage.

"Do you want to go?"

"Oh, yessss." The woman's voice trembled with excitement.

"Men are married. Do you understand that?

The woman named Helen hesitated for a moment; this was something new for her. Her lips trembled. She seemed to be thinking...

She might have thought... "A woman can't always move forward without ever having adventures." She thought... "In a sophisticated world, you have to accept such things."

Fred Wells as an example of a refined person.

Ethel tried to explain everything perfectly clearly. She didn't. The woman was testing her. She was excited by the thought of meeting a famous English writer.

At that moment, she had no way of understanding Ethel's true attitude, her sense of indifference, her desire to take a risk, perhaps to test herself. "We'll have lunch," she said, "and then we'll go to Mr. Wells's apartment. His wife won't be there. There will be drinks."

"There will only be two men. Aren't you afraid?" Helen asked.

"No." Ethel was in a cheerful and cynical mood. "I can take care of myself."

- Very good, I'll go.

Ethel would never forget that evening with those three men. It was one of the adventures of her life that made her who she is. "I'm not that nice." The thoughts raced through her head the next day as she drove through the Georgia countryside with her father. He was another man bewildered by his own life. She wasn't open and frank with him, any more than she had been with that naive woman, Helen, whom she'd taken to a party with two men that night in Chicago.

The English writer who came to Fred Wells's party was a broad-shouldered, rather wizened man. He seemed curious and interested in what was going on. These are the kind of Englishmen who come to America, where their books sell in large quantities, where they come to lecture and raise money...

There was something about the way people like that treated all Americans. "Americans are such weird kids. My dear, they're amazing."

Something surprising, always a little patronizing. "Lion Cubs." You wanted to say, "Damn your eyes. Go to hell." With him that night in Fred Wells's apartment in Chicago, it might have been simply satisfying curiosity. "I'll see what these Americans are like."

Fred Wells was a spendthrift. He took the others to dinner at an expensive restaurant and then to his apartment. That, too, was expensive. He was proud of it. The Englishman was very attentive to Helen. Was Ethel jealous? "I wish I had him," Ethel thought. She wished the Englishman paid more attention to her. She felt as if she were saying something to him, trying to break his composure.

Helen was clearly too naive. She was worshipping. When they all got to Fred's apartment, Fred continued serving drinks, and almost immediately Helen was half drunk. As she got drunker and drunker and, as Ethel thought, became more and more stupid, the Englishman became alarmed.

He even became noble... a noble Englishman. Blood will tell. "My dear, you must be a gentleman." Was Ethel upset that the man mentally connected her with Fred Wells? "To hell with you," she kept wanting to say. He was like a grown man suddenly finding himself in a room with children who were misbehaving... "God knows what he expects here," Ethel thought.

Helen rose from her chair after a few drinks, walked unsteadily across the room where everyone was sitting, and threw herself on the sofa. Her dress was a mess. Her legs were too bare. She continued to swing them and laugh stupidly. Fred Wells continued to ply her with drinks. "Well, she has nice legs, hasn't she?" said Fred. Fred Wells was too rude. He was truly rotten. Ethel knew it. What outraged her was the thought that the Englishman didn't know that she knew.

The Englishman began to talk to Ethel. "What's the meaning of all this? Why does he intend to get this woman drunk?" He was nervous and obviously regretted not accepting Fred Wells's invitation. He and Ethel sat for some time at a table with drinks in front of them. The Englishman continued to ask her questions about herself, what part of the country she came from, and what she was doing in Chicago. He learned that she was a university student. There was still... something in his manner... a sense of detachment from it all... an English gentleman in America... "too damn impersonal," Ethel thought. Ethel was getting excited.

"These American students are strange, if this is a model, if this is how they spend their evenings," thought the Englishman.

He said nothing of the sort. He continued to try to make conversation. He had gotten himself into something, a situation, he didn't like. Ethel was glad. "How can I gracefully get out of this place and away from these people?" He stood up, no doubt intending to apologize and leave.

But there was Helen, now drunk. A sense of chivalry awakened in the Englishman.

At that moment, Fred Wells appeared and took the Englishman to his library. Fred was a businessman, after all. "I have him here. I have some of his books here. I might as well ask him to autograph them," Fred thought.

Fred was also thinking about something else. Perhaps the Englishman didn't understand what Fred meant. Ethel didn't hear what was said. The two men went to the library together and began talking there. Later, after what happened to her later that evening, Ethel might well have guessed what was said.

Fred simply took it for granted that the Englishman was the same as himself.

The whole tone of the evening suddenly changed. Ethel was frightened. Because she was bored and wanted to be entertained, she became confused. She imagined the conversation between the two men in the next room. Fred Wells speaking... he was not a man like Harold Gray, the university professor... "Here I have this woman for you"... meaning the woman Helen. Fred, there in that room, talking to another man. Ethel wasn't thinking about Helen now. She was thinking about herself. Helen lay half-helpless on the sofa. Would a man want a woman in such a state, a woman half-helpless from drink?

That would be an attack. Perhaps there were men who enjoyed conquering their women in this way. Now she trembled with fear. She had been a fool to allow herself to be at the mercy of a man like Fred Wells. In the next room, two men were talking. She could hear their voices. Fred Wells had a harsh voice. He said something to his guest, the Englishman, and then there was silence.

No doubt he had already arranged for this man to sign his books. He would have signed them. He was making an offer.

"Well, you see, I have a woman for you. There's one for you and one for me. You can take the one lying on the couch.

"You see, I've rendered her completely helpless. There won't be much of a fight.

"You can take her to the bedroom. You won't be disturbed. You can leave the other woman with me.

There must have been something similar that night.

The Englishman was in the room with Fred Wells, then suddenly left. He didn't look at Fred Wells or speak to him again, though he did stare at Ethel. He was judging her. "So you're in on this too?" A hot wave of indignation washed over Ethel. The English writer said nothing, but went into the hallway where his coat was hanging, picked it up, along with the cape the woman, Helen, had been wearing, and returned to the room.

He turned a little pale. He was trying to calm down. He was angry and agitated. Fred Wells returned to the room and stopped in the doorway.

Perhaps the English writer had said something unpleasant to Fred. "I won't let him ruin my party because he's a fool," Fred thought. Ethel herself had to be on Fred's side. Now she knew it. Apparently, the Englishman thought Ethel was just like Fred. He didn't care what happened to her. Ethel's fear passed, and she became angry, ready for a fight.

"It would be funny," Ethel thought quickly, "if the Englishman made a mistake." He's going to save someone who doesn't want to be saved. "She's easier to get than me," she thought proudly. "So that's the kind of man he is. He's one of the virtuous ones."

"Screw him. I gave him this chance. If he doesn't want to take it, that's fine with me." She meant that she gave the man the chance to get to know her if he really wanted to. "What stupidity," she thought afterward. She didn't give this man a single chance.

The Englishman obviously felt responsible for the woman, Helen. After all, she wasn't completely helpless, not completely disappeared. He pulled her to her feet and helped her put on her coat. She clung to him. She began to cry. She raised her hand and stroked his cheek. It was obvious to Ethel that she was ready to give up and that the Englishman didn't want her. "It's all right. I'll take a taxi and we'll go. You'll be all right soon," he said. Earlier in the evening, he had learned some facts about Helen, as well as about Ethel. He knew she was an unmarried woman living somewhere in the suburbs with her parents. She hadn't gone that far, but she would have known the address of her house. Half-carrying the woman in his arms, he led her out of the apartment and down the stairs.

*

ETHEL acted like someone who had been struck. What had happened in the apartment that evening had happened suddenly. She sat, nervously fingering her glass. She was pale. Fred Wells hadn't hesitated. He had stood silently, waiting for the other man and the other woman to leave, and then had walked straight toward her. "And you." Part of him was now taking out his anger at the other man on her. Ethel faced him. There was no longer a smile on his face. Obviously, he was some kind of pervert, perhaps a sadist. She looked at him. In some strange way, she even enjoyed the situation she had found herself in. This was supposed to be a fight. "I'll make sure you don't exhaust me," Fred Wells had said. "If you leave here tonight, you'll walk out naked." He quickly reached out and grabbed her dress at the neck. With a swift movement, he tore the dress. - You'll have to undress if you leave here before I get what I want.

"Do you think so?"

Ethel turned white as a sheet. As already mentioned, in some ways she rather enjoyed the situation. In the ensuing struggle, she didn't scream. Her dress was horribly torn. At one point during the struggle, Fred Wells punched her in the face and knocked her down. She quickly scrambled to her feet. Understanding dawned on her quickly. The man in front of her wouldn't have dared continue the struggle if she had screamed loudly.

There were other people living in the same house. He wanted to conquer her. He didn't want her the way a normal man wants a woman. He got them drunk and attacked them when they were helpless, or infected them with terror.

Two people in an apartment struggled silently. One day, during the struggle, he threw her over a sofa in a room where four people were sitting. This injured her back. At the time, she didn't feel much pain. That came later. Afterward, her back limped for several days.

For a moment, Fred Wells thought he had her. There was a triumphant smile on his face. His eyes were cunning, like the eyes of an animal. She thought-the thought occurred to her-that she was currently lying completely passively on the sofa, and his arms were holding her there. "I wonder if that's how he got his wife," she thought.

Probably not.

He would, such a man would do this with the woman he was going to marry, with the woman who had the money he wanted, her own power, with such a woman he would try to create an impression of masculinity in himself.

He could even talk to her about love. Ethel wanted to laugh. "I love you. You are my darling. You are everything to me." She remembered that the man had children, a small son and a daughter.

He would try to create in his wife's mind the impression of someone he knew he couldn't be and perhaps didn't want to be-a man like the Englishman who had just left the apartment, a "loser," a "noble man," a man he had always courted and yet simultaneously despised. He would try to create such an impression in the mind of one woman, while simultaneously hating her with a vengeance.

Taking it out on other women. Early that evening, as they dined together at a downtown restaurant, he continued to talk to the Englishman about American women. He subtly tried to undermine the man's respect for American women. He kept the conversation at a low level, ready to backtrack and smiling throughout. The Englishman remained curious and puzzled.

The struggle in the apartment didn't last long, and Ethel thought it was a good thing it didn't. The man had proven stronger than her. After all, she might have cried out. The man wouldn't dare hurt her too much. He wanted to break her, to tame her. He was counting on her not wanting it to become known that she had been alone with him in his apartment that night.

If he had succeeded, he might even have paid her money to keep quiet.

"You're not a fool. When you came here, you knew what I wanted.

In a sense, that would be perfectly true. She was a fool.

She managed to free herself with a quick movement. There was a door into the hallway, and she ran down it to the apartment's kitchen. Earlier that evening, Fred Wells had been slicing oranges and adding them to drinks. A large knife lay on the table. She closed the kitchen door behind her, but opened it for Fred Wells to enter, slashing him across the face with the knife, narrowly missing his.

He stepped back. She followed him down the hallway. The hallway was brightly lit. He could see the expression in her eyes. "You're a bitch," he said, stepping away from her. "You're a fucking bitch."

He wasn't afraid. He was careful, watching her. His eyes were shining. "I think you'd do it, you damn bitch," he said and smiled. He was the kind of man who, if he met her on the street next week, would tip his hat and smile. "You got the better of me, but I might have another chance," his smile said.

She grabbed her coat and left the apartment through the back door. There was a door at the back that led to a small balcony, and she walked through it. He made no attempt to follow. Afterward, she descended a small iron staircase onto a small lawn at the rear of the building.

She didn't leave right away. She sat on the stairs for a while. There were people sitting in the apartment below the one Fred Wells occupied. Men and women sat there quietly. Somewhere in that apartment there was a child. She heard it crying.

Men and women were sitting at a card table, and one of the women stood up and walked over to the baby.

She heard voices and laughter. Fred Wells wouldn't have dared follow her there. "That's one kind of man," she told herself that night. "Perhaps there aren't many like him."

She walked through the yard and the gate, into the alley, and finally out onto the street. It was a quiet residential street. She had some money in her coat pocket. The coat partially covered the torn areas of her dress. She had lost her hat. In front of the apartment building was a car, obviously private, with a black driver. She approached the man and thrust a bill into his hand. "I"m in trouble," she said. "Run, call me a cab. You can keep this," she said, handing over the bill.

She was surprised, angry, hurt. Most of all, it was the wrong man, Fred Wells, who hurt her the most.

"I was too confident. I thought the other woman, Helen, was naive.

"I'm naive myself. I'm a fool."

"Are you hurt?" the black man asked. He was a large, middle-aged man. There was blood on her cheeks, and he could see it in the light coming from the entrance to the apartment. One of her eyes was swollen shut. Afterward, it turned black.

She was already thinking about what she would tell when she got to the place where she had her room. An attempted robbery, two men attacked her on the street.

He knocked her down and was quite violent with her. "They grabbed my purse and ran away. I don't want to report this. I don't want my name in the papers." In Chicago, they'll understand and believe that.

She told the colored man a story. She'd had a fight with her husband. He laughed. He understood. He got out of the car and ran to call her a taxi. While he was gone, Ethel stood with her back against the wall of the building, where the shadows were heavier. Fortunately, no one passed by to see her, battered and bruised, standing and waiting.

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4


I T WAS A Summer night, and Ethel lay in bed in her father's house in Langdon. It was late, well past midnight, and the night was hot. She couldn't sleep. There were words in her, little flocks of words, like birds in flight... "A man must make up his mind, make up his mind." What? Thoughts became words. Ethel's lips moved. "It hurts. It hurts. What you do hurts. What you don't do hurts." She came in late and, tired from long thoughts and worries, simply threw off her clothes in the darkness of her room. The clothes fell off her, leaving her naked-as she was. She knew that when she entered, her father's wife, Blanche, was already awake. Ethel and her father slept in the rooms downstairs, but Blanche had moved upstairs. As if she wanted to get as far away from her husband as possible. To get away from a man... for a woman... to escape this.

Ethel threw herself completely naked onto the bed. She sensed the house, the room. Sometimes a room in a house becomes a prison. Its walls close in on you. From time to time, she stirred restlessly. Small waves of emotion coursed through her. When she crept into the house that night, half-ashamed, annoyed with herself for what had happened that evening, she had the feeling that Blanche had been awake and waiting for her return. When Ethel entered, Blanche might even have quietly approached the stairs and looked down. A light was on in the hallway below, and a staircase led up from the hallway. If Blanche had been there, looking down, Ethel wouldn't have been able to see her in the darkness above.

Blanche would have waited, perhaps to laugh, but Ethel wanted to laugh at herself. It takes a woman to laugh at a woman. Women can truly love each other. They dare. Women can hate each other; they can hurt and laugh. They dare. "I could have known it wouldn't work this way," she kept thinking. She thought about her evening. There had been another adventure, with another man. "I did it again." This was her third time. Three attempts to do something with men. Letting them try something-see if they could. Like the others, it hadn't worked. She herself didn't know why.

"He didn't understand me. He didn't understand me."

What did she mean?

What did she need to get? What did she want?

She thought she wanted it. It was the young man, Red Oliver, whom she had seen in the library. She looked at him there. He kept coming. The library was open three evenings a week, and he always came.

He talked to her more and more. The library closed at ten, and after eight they were often alone. People went to the movies. He helped them close up for the night. They had to close the windows, sometimes put away the books.

If only he could really get her. He didn't dare. She caught him.

This happened because he was too shy, too young and too inexperienced.

She herself did not show enough patience. She did not know him.

Maybe she was just using him to find out if she wanted him or not.

"It was unfair, it was unfair."

Find out about another, older man, whether she wants him or not.

At first the younger one, young Red Oliver, who began coming to the library, looking at her with his youthful eyes, exciting her, did not dare offer to go home with her, but left her at the library door. Later he became a little bolder. He wanted to touch her, he wanted to touch her. She knew it. "May I come with you?" he asked rather awkwardly. "Yes. Why not? It will be very pleasant." She behaved quite formally with him. He began to sometimes go home with her at night. Summer evenings in Georgia were long. They were hot. When they approached the house, the judge, her father, was sitting on the porch. Blanche was there. Often the judge fell asleep in his chair. The nights were hot. There was a rocking sofa, and Blanche curled up on it. She lay awake and watched.

When Ethel entered, she spoke, seeing young Oliver leave Ethel at the gate. He lingered there, unwilling to leave. He wanted to be Ethel's lover. She knew it. It was in his eyes now, in his shy, hesitant speech... a young man in love, with an older woman, suddenly passionately in love. She could do with him whatever she wanted.

She could open the gates for him, let him into what he thought would be paradise. It was tempting. "I'll have to do it if it's going to be done. I'll have to say the word, let him know the gates have opened. He's too shy to move forward," Ethel thought.

She didn't think about it specifically. She just thought it. There was a feeling of superiority over the young man. It was cool. It wasn't so pleasant.

"Well," said Blanche. Her voice was quiet, sharp, and questioning. "Well," she said. And "Well," said Ethel. The two women looked at each other, and Blanche laughed. Ethel didn"t laugh. She smiled. There was love between the two women. There was hate.

There was something a person rarely understands. When the judge woke up, both women were silent, and Ethel went straight to her room. She took out a book and, lying in bed, tried to read. The nights that summer were too hot to sleep. The judge had a radio, and sometimes in the evenings he turned it on. It was in the living room of the house downstairs. When he turned it on and filled the house with voices, he sat down next to her and fell asleep. He snored as he slept. Soon Blanche got up and went upstairs. The two women left the judge asleep in a chair near the radio. The noises coming from distant cities, from Chicago, where Ethel lived, from Cincinnati, from St. Louis, did not wake him. Men talked about toothpaste, bands played, men gave speeches, Negro voices sang. White singers from the North persistently and valiantly tried to sing like Negroes. The noises continued for a long time. "WRYK... CK... came to you as a courtesy... to change my underwear... to buy new underwear...

"Brush your teeth. Go see your dentist.

"Courtesy of"

Chicago, St. Louis, New York, Langdon, Georgia.

What do you think is happening in Chicago tonight? Is it hot there?

- The exact time now is ten nineteen.

The judge, suddenly awakened, turned off the machine and went to bed. Another day passed.

"Too many days have passed," Ethel thought. Here she was, in this house, in this city. Now her father was afraid of her. She knew how he felt.

He brought her there. He planned it and saved money. Her going to school and being away for several years cost money. Then, finally, the position arose. She became the city librarian. Did she owe him, the city, anything because of him?

To be respectable... the way he was.

"To hell with it."

She returned to the place where she had lived as a girl and attended high school. When she first came home, her father wanted to talk to her. He even looked forward to her arrival, thinking they could be companions.

"He and I are buddies." The spirit of Rotary. "I make my son a friend. I make friends with my daughter. We are buddies." He was angry and hurt. "She's going to make a fool of me," he thought.

It was because of men. Men were hunting Ethel. He knew it.

She started running around with a simple boy, but that wasn't all. Since returning home, she's attracted another man.

He was an elderly man, much older than her, and his name was Tom Riddle.

He was the town lawyer, a criminal defense attorney, and a moneymaker. He was a vigilant schemer, a Republican, and a politician. He exercised federal patronage in that part of the state. He was no gentleman.

And Ethel attracted him. "Yes," her father thought, "she'll have to go and attract one of those." When she'd been in town for a few weeks, he stopped by her library and approached her boldly. He had none of the shyness of the boy, Red Oliver. "I want to talk to you," he said to Ethel, looking her straight in the eye. He was a tall man of about forty-five, with thin, graying hair, a heavy, pockmarked face, and small, light eyes. He was married, but his wife had died ten years ago. Although he was considered a shrewd man and was not respected by the town's leading figures (such as Ethel's father, who, although a Georgian, was a Democrat and a gentleman), he was the most successful lawyer in town.

He was the most successful criminal defense lawyer in this part of the state. He was lively, cunning, and clever in the courtroom, and the other lawyers and the judge both feared and envied him. It was said he made his money by handing out federal patronage. "He hangs out with blacks and cheap whites," his enemies said, but Tom Riddle didn't seem to care. He laughed. With the advent of Prohibition, his practice expanded enormously. He owned the finest hotel in Langdon, as well as other properties scattered throughout the town.

And this man fell in love with Ethel. "You're right for me," he told her. He invited her to go for a ride in his car, and she did. It was another way to irritate her father, being seen in public with this man. She didn't want it. It wasn't her goal. It seemed inevitable.

And there was Blanche. Was she simply evil? Perhaps she harbored some strange, twisted attraction to Ethel?

Though she herself seemed unconcerned about clothes, she was constantly inquiring about Ethel's attire. "You're going to be with a man. Wear a red dress. There was a strange look in her eyes... hatred... love. If Judge Long hadn't known that Ethel was associating with Tom Riddle and had been seen with him in public, Blanche would have told him.

Tom Riddle didn't try to make love to her. He was patient, shrewd, decisive. "But I don't expect you to fall in love with me," he said one evening as they drove along the red roads of Georgia past a pine forest. The red road went up and down low hills. Tom Riddle stopped the car at the edge of the forest. "You didn't expect me to get sentimental, but sometimes I do," he said, laughing. The sun was setting behind the forest. He mentioned the beauty of the evening. It was a late summer evening, one of those evenings when the library was closed. All the ground in this part of Georgia was red, and the sun was setting in a red haze. It was hot. Tom stopped the car and got out to stretch his legs. He was wearing a white suit, somewhat stained. He lit a cigar and spat on the ground. "Pretty grand, isn't it?" "He said to Ethel, who was sitting in the car, a bright yellow sports roadster with the top down. He paced back and forth, then came and stopped next to the car.

He had a way of speaking from the very beginning... without speaking, without words... his eyes said it... his manner said it... 'We understand each other... we must understand each other.'

It was tempting. It piqued Ethel's interest. He began talking about the South, about his love for it. "I think you know about me," he said. The man was reported to have come from a good Georgia family in a neighboring county. His people had previously owned slaves. They were people of considerable importance. They had been ruined by the Civil War. By the time Tom was born, they had nothing.

He somehow managed to escape the slave trade in that country and gained enough education to become a lawyer. He was now a successful man. He was married, and his wife died.

They had two children, both sons, and they died. One died in infancy, and the other, like Ethel's brother, died in the World War II.

"I got married when I was just a boy," he told Ethel. It was strange to be with him. Despite his rather rough exterior and somewhat harsh approach to life, he possessed a quick and sharp intimacy.

He had to deal with many people. There was something in his manner that said... "I'm not good, not even honest... I'm a person just like you.

"I make things. I practically do what I want.

"Don't come to me expecting to meet some Southern gentleman... like Judge Long... like Clay Barton... like Tom Shaw." It was a manner he used constantly in the courtroom with the jury. The jury was almost always ordinary people. "Well, here we are," he seemed to say to the men he addressed. "Certain legal formalities must be gone through, but we are both men. Such is life. Such and such is the way things are. We must be reasonable about the matter. We ordinary dubbers must stick together." A grin. "That's what I think people like you and me feel. We are reasonable people. We must take life as it comes."

He was married, and his wife died. He told Ethel frankly about it. "I want you to be my wife," he said. "You certainly don't love me. I don't expect that. How could you?" He told her about his marriage. "Frankly, it was an abusive marriage." He laughed. "I was a boy and went to Atlanta, where I was trying to finish school. I met her.

"I guess I was in love with her. I wanted her. The chance came, and I took her.

He knew of Ethel's feelings for a young man, Red Oliver. He was one of those people who knew everything that was going on in the city.

He had challenged the town himself. He always did. "While my wife was alive, I behaved well," he told Ethel. Somehow, without her asking him, without her doing anything to prompt him, he had begun to tell her about his life, without asking her anything. When they were together, he would talk, and she would sit next to him and listen. He had broad shoulders, slightly stooped. Though she was a tall woman, he was almost a head taller.

"So I married this woman. I thought I should marry her. She was in the family circle. He said it the way you might say... "She was a blonde or a brunette." He took it for granted that she wouldn't be shocked. She liked that. "I wanted to marry her. I wanted a woman, needed her. Maybe I was in love. I don't know." The man, Tom Riddle, spoke to Ethel like that. He stood by the car and spat on the ground. He lit a cigar.

He didn't try to touch her. He made her comfortable. He made her want to talk.

"I could tell him everything, all the vile things about myself," she sometimes thought.

"She was the daughter of the man in whose house I had a room. He was a worker. He stoked boilers at some manufacturing plant. She helped her mother take care of the rooms in the flophouse.

"I started to want her. There was something in her eyes. She thought she wanted me. More laughter. Was he laughing at himself or at the woman he married?

"My chance came. One night we were alone in the house, and I brought her to my room."

Tom Riddle laughed. He told Ethel as if they had been close for a long time. It was strange, funny... it was pleasant. After all, in Langdon, Georgia, she was her father's daughter. It would have been impossible for Ethel's father to speak so frankly to a woman in his entire life. He would never, even after years of living with her, have dared to speak so frankly to Ethel's mother or to Blanche, his new wife. To his notion of Southern womanhood-she was, after all, a Southerner from a so-called good family-it would have been a bit of a shock. Ethel wasn't. Tom Riddle knew she wouldn't be. How much did he know about her?

It wasn't that she wanted him... the way a woman is supposed to want a man... a dream... the poetry of existence. To stir, to excite, to awaken Ethel, it was the young man, Red Oliver, who could stir her. She was excited by him.

Although Tom Riddle drove her around in his car dozens of times that summer, he never once offered to make love to her. He didn't try to hold her hand or kiss her. "Why, you're a grown woman. You're not only a woman, you're a person," he seemed to say. It was clear she had no physical desire for him. He knew it. "Not yet." He could be patient. "It's all right. Maybe it will happen. We'll see." He told her about life with his first wife. "She had no talent," he said. "She had no talent, no style, and she couldn't do anything about my house. Yes, she was a good woman. She couldn't do anything about me or the children I had with her.

"I started messing around. I've been doing this for a long time. I think you know I'm tired of it.

All sorts of stories circulated around town. Ever since Tom Riddle arrived in Langdon as a young man and opened a law practice there, he'd always been associated with the rougher elements of the town. He was in the thick of things with them. They were his friends. His buddies from the very beginning of his life in Langdon included gamblers, drunken young Southerners, and politicians.

Back when there were saloons in town, he was always in the saloons. Respectable people in town said he ran his law office out of a saloon. At one point, he was involved with a woman, the wife of a railroad conductor. Her husband was out of town, and she was openly driving around in Tom Riddle's car. The affair was conducted with astonishing boldness. While the husband was in town, Tom Riddle went to his house anyway. He drove there and walked in. The woman had a child, and the townspeople said it was Tom Riddle's child. "It is so," they said.

"Tom Riddle bribed her husband."

This went on for a long time, and then suddenly the conductor was transferred to another unit, and he, his wife and child left the city.

So Tom Riddle was just that kind of man. One hot summer night, Ethel lay in her bed, thinking about him and what he'd said to her. He'd proposed marriage. "Any time you think about it well, O.K."

A grin. He was tall and stooped. He had a strange little habit of shaking his shoulders every now and then, as if to shake off a burden.

"You won't fall in love," he said. "I'm not the type to make a woman fall in love romantically.

"What, with my pockmarked face, with my bald spot?" "Perhaps you'll get tired of living in this house." He meant her father's house. "You might get tired of the woman your father married."

Tom Riddle was quite frank about his reasons for wanting her. "You have style. You would enhance a man's life. It would be useful to earn money for you. I like making money. I like this game. If you decide to come and live with me, then later, when we start living together... Something tells me we are made for each other. He wanted to say something about Ethel's passion for the young man, Red Oliver, but was too perceptive to do so. "He is too young for you, my dear. He is too immature. You have a feeling for him now, but it will pass."

"If you want to experiment with it, go ahead and do it." Could he have thought that?

He didn't say that. One day, he came to pick up Ethel during a ballgame between the Langdon Mill team, the same one Red Oliver played for, and a team from a neighboring town. The Langdon team won, and Red's play was largely responsible for their victory. The game took place on a long summer evening, and Tom Riddle took Ethel in his car. It wasn't just his interest in baseball. She was sure of it. She had come to enjoy being with him, though she didn't feel the immediate physical desire in his presence that she felt with Red Oliver.

That very evening before the ballgame, Red Oliver sat at his desk in the library and ran his hand through his thick hair. Ethel felt a sudden surge of desire. She wanted to run her hand through his hair, to hold him close. She took a step toward him. It would be so easy to sweep him away. He was young and hungry for her. She knew it.

Tom Riddle didn't drive Ethel to the game site, but parked his car on a nearby hill. She sat next to him, wondering. He seemed completely lost in admiration for the young man's play. Was this a bluff?

It was the day Red Oliver played sensationally. Balls flew toward him across the hard clay infield, and he returned them brilliantly. One day, he led his team at bat, striking out three at a crucial moment, and Tom Riddle squirmed in his car seat. "He's the best player we've ever had in this town," Tom said. Could he really be that way, wanting Ethel for himself, knowing her feelings for Red, and could he really have been infatuated with Red's game at the time?

*

Did he want Ethel to experiment? She did. On a hot summer night, lying completely naked on her bed in her room, unable to sleep, nervous and agitated, the windows open, and she heard the noise of the southern night outside, heard her father's steady, heavy snores in the next room, frustrated and angry with herself, that very evening she carried the matter to its conclusion.

She was angry, upset, irritated. "Why did I do this?" It was easy enough. There was a young man, actually a boy in her eyes, walking down the street with her. It was one of those evenings when the library wasn't officially open, but she had returned there. She thought about Tom Riddle and the offer he had made her. Could a woman do this, go live with a man, sleep with him, become his wife... as some kind of bargain? He seemed to think everything would be all right.

"I won't crowd you.

"In the end, a man"s beauty is less than a woman"s figure.

"It"s a question of life, everyday life.

"There is a kind of friendship that is more than just friendship. It is a kind of partnership.

"It's turning into something else."

Tom Riddle was speaking. He seemed to be addressing a jury. His lips were thick, and his face was heavily pockmarked. Sometimes he leaned toward her, speaking seriously. "A man gets tired working alone," he said. He had an idea. He was married. Ethel didn't remember his first wife. Riddle's house was in another part of town. It was a beautiful house on a poor street. It had a large lawn. Tom Riddle had built his house among the homes of the people he associated with. They, of course, were not Langdon's first families.

When his wife was alive, she rarely left the house. She must have been one of those meek, mouse-like creatures who dedicate themselves to housekeeping. When Tom Riddle became successful, he built his house on this street. This had once been a very respectable neighborhood. There was an old house here that belonged to one of the so-called aristocratic families of the old days, before the Civil War. It had a large yard leading to a small stream that flowed into the river below town. The entire yard was overgrown with dense bushes, which he cut down. He always had men working for him. He often took on cases for poor whites or blacks who had run into trouble with the law, and if they couldn't pay him, he allowed them to settle their fees on the spot.

Tom said of his first wife, "Well, I married her. I almost had to. After all, despite all the life he'd led, Tom was still fundamentally an aristocrat. He was contemptuous. He didn't care about the respectability of others, and he didn't go to church. He laughed at churchgoers like Ethel's father, and when the KKK was strong in Langdon, he laughed at it.

He developed a sense of something more northern than southern. It was for this reason that he was a republican. "Some class will always rule," he once told Ethel, discussing his republicanism. "Of course," he said with a cynical laugh, "I make money out of it."

"In the same way, money rules in America these days. The rich crowd in the North, in New York, has chosen the Republican Party. They're banking on it. I'm contacting them.

"Life is a game," he said.

"There are poor white people. To a man, they're Democrats." He laughed. "Do you remember what happened a few years ago?" Ethel did. He told her about a particularly brutal lynching. It happened in a small town near Langdon. Many people from Langdon had driven there to take part. It happened at night, and the people left in cars. A black man, accused of raping a poor white girl, the daughter of a small farmer, was being taken to the county seat by the sheriff. The sheriff had two deputies with him, and a line of cars was moving toward him on the road. The cars were filled with young men from Langdon, tradesmen, and respectable people. There were Fords filled with poor white workers from the Langdon cotton mills. Tom said it was some kind of circus, a public entertainment. "Good, huh!"

Not all the men who attended the lynching actually participated. This happened when Ethel was a student in Chicago. It later emerged that the girl who claimed she had been raped was insane. She was mentally unstable. Many men, both white and black, had already been with her.

The black man was taken from the sheriff and his deputies, hung from a tree, and riddled with bullets. Then they burned his body. "Seems they couldn't leave it alone," Tom said. He laughed a cynical laugh. Many of the best men were gone.

They stood back, watching, and saw the Negro... he was a huge black man... "He could have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds," Tom said, laughing. He spoke as if the Negro were a pig, slaughtered by the crowd as some kind of festive spectacle... respectable people came to watch it being done, standing at the edge of the crowd. Life in Langdon was what it was.

"They look down on me. Let them."

He could put men or women on the stand as witnesses in court, subjecting them to mental torture. It was a game. He enjoyed it. He could twist what they said, make them say things they didn't mean.

The law was a game. All life was a game.

He got his house. He made money. He enjoyed going to New York several times a year.

He needed a woman to enrich his life. He wanted Ethel the way he wanted a good horse.

"Why not? That's life."

Was this an offer of some kind of fornication, some kind of high-class fornication? Ethel was puzzled.

She resisted. That night, she left home because she couldn't stand either her father or Blanche. Blanche, too, had a talent of sorts. She wrote down everything about Ethel: what clothes she wore, her mood. Now her father was afraid of his daughter and what she might do. He took it out silently, sitting at the table in the Longhouse, without saying a word. He knew she was planning to ride with Tom Riddle and stroll the streets with young Red.

Red Oliver became a factory worker, and Tom Riddle became a dubious lawyer.

She was threatening his position in the city, his own dignity.

And there was Blanche, surprised and very pleased, because her husband was dissatisfied. It had come to this with Blanche too. She lived off the disappointment of others.

Ethel left the house with disgust. It was a hot, overcast evening. Her body was tired that evening, and she had to struggle to walk with her usual dignity, to keep her legs from dragging. She walked across Main Street to the library, just off Main Street. Black clouds drifted across the evening sky.

People had gathered on Main Street. That evening, Ethel saw Tom Shaw, the little man who was president of the cotton mill where Red Oliver worked. He was being driven quickly down Main Street. There was a train heading north. He was likely headed to New York. The big car was driven by a black man. Ethel thought of Tom Riddle's words. "There goes the Prince," Tom had said. "Hello, there goes Prince Langdon." In the new South, Tom Shaw was the man who became the prince, the leader.

A woman, a young woman, was walking down Main Street. She had once been Ethel's friend. They had gone to high school together. She had married a young merchant. Now she was hurrying home, pushing a baby carriage. She was round and plump.

He and Ethel had been friends. Now they were acquaintances. They smiled and bowed coldly to each other.

Ethel hurried down the street. On Main Street, near the courthouse, Red Oliver joined her.

- Can I go with you?

"Yes."

- Are you going to the library?

"Yes."

Silence. Thoughts. The young man felt hot as night. "He"s too young, too young. I don"t want him.

She saw Tom Riddle standing with other men in front of the store.

He saw her with the boy. The boy saw him standing there. Thoughts in them. Red Oliver was confused by her silence. He was hurt, he was afraid. He wanted a woman. He thought he wanted her.

Ethel's Thoughts. One night in Chicago. A man... one day in her Chicago flophouse... an ordinary man... a big, strong guy... he had a fight with his wife... he lived there. "Am I ordinary? Am I just dirt?"

It was just such a hot, rainy night. He had a room on the same floor of the building on Lower Michigan Avenue. He was stalking Ethel. Red Oliver was now stalking her.

He caught her. It happened suddenly, unexpectedly.

And Tom Riddle.

That night in Chicago, she was alone on that floor of the building, and he... that other man... just a man, a man, nothing more... and he was there.

Ethel had never understood this about herself. She was tired. She had dined that evening in a noisy, hot dining room, among, it seemed to her, noisy, ugly people. Were they ugly, or was she? For a moment, she felt disgusted with herself, with her life in the city.

She went into her room and didn't lock the door. This man saw her enter. He was sitting in his room with the door open. He was big and strong.

She went into her room and threw herself on the bed. There were moments like these that came to her. She didn't care what happened. She wanted something to happen. He walked in boldly. There was a brief struggle, not at all like the struggle with advertising executive Fred Wells.

She gave in... let it happen. Then he wanted to do something for her: take her to the theater, have dinner. She couldn't bear to see him. It ended as suddenly as it had begun. "I was such a fool to think I could achieve anything this way, as if I were just an animal and nothing more, as if this was exactly what I wanted."

Ethel went into the library and, unlocking the door, entered. She left Red Oliver at the door. "Good night. Thank you," she said. She opened two windows, hoping to get some air, and lit a table lamp over the desk. She sat over the desk, bent over, her head in her hands.

It went on for a long time, thoughts racing through her. Night had fallen, a hot, dark night. She was nervous, like that night in Chicago, that same hot, tired night when she'd kidnapped that man she didn't know... it was a wonder she hadn't gotten into trouble... given birth to a child... was I just a whore?... how many women had been like her, torn apart by life the way she had been... did a woman need a man, some kind of anchor? There was Tom Riddle.

She thought about life in her father's house. Now her father was upset and uncomfortable with her. There was Blanche. Blanche felt genuine hostility toward her husband. There was no openness. Blanche and her father both fired and both missed. "If I take a chance with Tom," Ethel thought.

Blanche had adopted a certain attitude toward herself. She wanted to give Ethel money for clothes. She hinted at this, knowing Ethel's love of clothes. Perhaps she simply let herself go, neglecting her clothes, often not even bothering to tidy herself up, as a way of punishing her husband. She would extract the money from her husband and give it to Ethel. She wanted to.

She wanted to touch Ethel with her hands, her hands with dirty nails. She came up to her. "You look beautiful, darling, in that dress." She smiled a funny, cat-like smile. She made the house unhealthy. It was an unhealthy house.

"What would I do with Tom's house?"

Ethel was tired of thinking. "You think and think, and then you do something. It's very likely that you're making a fool of yourself. It was getting dark outside the library. Lightning flashed occasionally, illuminating the room in which Ethel sat. The light from a small table lamp fell on her head, turning her hair red and making it shine. Occasionally, thunder rumbled.

*

Young Red Oliver watched and waited. He paced restlessly. He wanted to follow Ethel to the library. One early evening, he quietly opened the front door and peered inside. He saw Ethel Long sitting there, her head resting on her hand, near her desk.

He got scared, left, but came back.

He thought about her for days and many nights. After all, he was a boy, a good boy. He was strong and pure. "If only I had seen him when I was young, if only we had been the same age," Ethel sometimes thought.

Sometimes at night, when she couldn't sleep. She hadn't slept well since she'd returned to the Long House. There was something in a house like that. Something gets into the air in the house. It's in the walls, in the wallpaper, in the furniture, in the carpets on the floor. It's in the bed linen you lie on.

It hurts. It makes everything gigantic.

This is hatred, alive, observing, impatient. It is a living being. It is alive.

"Love," Ethel thought. Would she ever find it?

Sometimes, when she was alone in her room at night, when she couldn't sleep... then she thought about young Red Oliver. "Do I want him like this, just to have him, perhaps to comfort myself, like I wanted that man in Chicago?" She was there, in her room, lying awake and tossing restlessly.

She saw young Red Oliver sitting at a table in the library. Sometimes his eyes would look at her hungrily. She was a woman. She could see what was going on inside him without letting him see what was going on inside her. He was trying to read a book.

He'd gone to college up North and had ideas. She could tell from the books he'd read. He'd become a millhand in Langdon; perhaps he was trying to bond with the other workers.

Perhaps he'll even want to fight for their cause, for the workers. There were such young people. They dream of a new world, just as Ethel herself did at certain moments in her life.

Tom Riddle never dreamed of such a thing. He would have scoffed at the idea. "It's pure romanticism," he would have said. "Men are not born equal. Some men are destined to be slaves, some to be masters. If they are not slaves in one sense, they will be slaves in another."

"There are slaves to sex, to what they consider thought, to food and drink.

"Who cares?"

Red Oliver wouldn't have been like that. He was young and impatient. Men put ideas into his head.

But he wasn't all intellect and idealism. He wanted a woman, like Tom Riddle, like Ethel; he thought he had. So she was imprinted on his mind. She knew it. She could tell it from his eyes, the way he looked at her, from his confusion.

He was innocent, happy, and shy. He approached her hesitantly, confused, wanting to touch her, hug her, kiss her. Blanche came to see her sometimes.

Red's arrival, his emotions directed toward her, made Ethel feel quite pleasant, a little excited, and often very excited. At night, when she was restless and unable to sleep, she imagined him as she had seen him playing ball.

He ran madly. He received the ball. His body came into balance. He was like an animal, like a cat.

Or he was standing at bat. He was standing ready. There was something finely tuned, finely calculated about him. "I want that. Am I just a greedy, ugly, greedy woman?" The ball came hurtling toward him. Tom Riddle explained to Ethel how the ball curved as it approached the batsman.

Ethel sat up in bed. Something inside her ached. "Will this hurt him? I wonder." She picked up a book and tried to read. "No, I won't let that happen."

There were older women with boys, Ethel had heard. It was strange, many men believed that women were inherently good. Some of them, at least, were born with blind desires.

Southern, Southern men are always romantic with women... never give them a chance... out of control. Tom Riddle was definitely a relief.

That night in the library, it happened suddenly and quickly, like that time with the strange man in Chicago. It wasn't like that. Perhaps Red Oliver had been standing at the library door for some time.

The library was located in an old house just off Main Street. It belonged to some old slave-owning family from before the Civil War, or perhaps to a wealthy merchant. There was a small flight of stairs.

Rain began and threatened all evening. A heavy summer rain fell, accompanied by a strong wind. It pounded the walls of the library building. Loud peals of thunder and sharp flashes of lightning were heard.

Perhaps Ethel had been struck by a storm that evening. Young Oliver was waiting for her right outside the library door. People passing by would have seen him standing there. He thought... "I'll go home with her."

A young man's dreams. Red Oliver was a young idealist; he had the makings of one within him.

Men like her father started out that way.

More than once, as she sat at the table that night, her head in her hands, the young man quietly opened the door to look inside.

He entered. The rain drove him in. He didn't dare disturb her.

Then Ethel thought that that evening she suddenly became that young girl again-half-girl, half-tomboy-who had once gone into the fields to visit a tough little boy. When the door opened and admitted young Red Oliver into the large main room of the library, a room built by knocking down walls, a strong gust of rain came with him. Rain was already pouring into the room from the two windows Ethel had opened. She looked up and saw him standing there, in the dim light. At first she couldn't see clearly, but then lightning flashed.

She stood up and walked towards him. "So," she thought. "Should I? Yes, I agree."

She was living again as she had lived that night when her father had gone out into the field and suspected her, when he laid hands on her. "He's not here now," she thought. She thought of Tom Riddle. "He's not here. He wants to conquer me, to make me into something I'm not." Now she was rebelling again, doing things not because she wanted to, but to defy something.

Her father... and maybe Tom Riddle too.

She approached Red Oliver, who was standing by the door, looking a little scared. "Is something wrong?" he asked. "Should I close the windows?" She didn't answer. "No," she said. "Am I going to do it?" she asked herself.

"It's going to be like that guy who came into my room in Chicago. No, that won't happen. I'll be the one doing it.

"I want."

She had become very close to the young man. A strange weakness gripped her body. She fought it. She placed her hands on Red Oliver's shoulders and allowed herself to fall halfway forward. "Please," she said.

She was against him.

"What?"

"You know," she said. It was true. She could feel the life bubbling within him. "Here? Now?" He was trembling.

"Yes." The words were not spoken.

"Here? Now?" He finally understood. He could hardly speak, he couldn't believe it. He thought, "I'm lucky. How lucky!" His voice was hoarse. "There's no place. It can't be here.

"Yes." Again, no words needed.

"Should I close the windows, turn off the lights? Someone might see." The rain pounded the walls of the building. The building shook. "Quickly," she said. "I don't care who sees us," she said.

And so it was, and then Ethel sent young Red Oliver away. "Now go," she said. She was even gentle, wanting to be motherly to him. "It wasn"t his fault." She almost wanted to cry. "I must send him away, otherwise I..." There was childish gratitude in him. Once she looked away... while it was happening... there was something in his face... in his eyes... "If only I deserved this"... it all happened on the table in the library, the table at which he was accustomed to sit, reading his books. He had been there the previous afternoon, reading Karl Marx. She had ordered the book especially for him. "I"ll pay out of my own pocket if the library board objects," she thought. Once she looked away and saw a man walking down the street, his head thrust forward. He did not look up. "It would be strange," she thought, "if that were Tom Riddle..."

- Or father.

"There's a lot of Blanche in me," she thought. "I dare say I could very well hate."

She wondered if she could ever truly love. "I don't know," she told herself, leading Red to the door. She was instantly tired of him. He'd said something about love, protesting awkwardly, insistently, as if he were uncertain, as if he'd been rejected. He felt strangely ashamed. She remained silent, confused.

She already felt sorry for him for what she had done. "Well, I did it. I wanted to. I did it." She didn't say it out loud. She kissed Red, a cold, forbidden kiss. A story floated through her mind, a story someone had once told her.

The story was about a prostitute who spotted the man she'd been with the night before on the street. The man bowed to her and spoke pleasantly, but she became angry and indignant, saying to her companion, "Did you see that? Imagine him talking to me here. Just because I was with him last night, what right does he have to talk to me during the day and on the street?"

Ethel smiled, remembering the story. "Maybe I'm a prostitute myself," she thought. "Me." Perhaps all women, somewhere, hidden within themselves, like the marbling of fine flesh, have a tension... (a desire for complete self-forgetfulness?)

"I want to be alone," she said. "I want to go home alone tonight." He walked awkwardly out the door. He was confused... somehow his manhood had been attacked. She knew it.

Now he felt confused, lost, powerless. How could a woman, after what had happened... so suddenly... after so much thought, hopes and dreams on his part... he had even thought about marriage, about proposing to her... if only he could muster the courage... what had happened was her doing... all the courage belonged to her... how could she let him go like that after that?

The summer storm that had loomed all day and had been so fierce quickly passed. Ethel was puzzled by this, but even then she knew she would marry Tom Riddle.

If he wanted her.

*

Ethel didn't know it for sure at that moment, the moment Red left her, after she'd dragged him through the door and was alone. There was a sharp reaction, half shame, half remorse... a small stream of thoughts she didn't want... they came singly, then in small groups... thoughts can be beautiful little winged creatures... they can be sharp, stinging things.

Thoughts... as if a boy were running down a dark night street in Langdon, Georgia, carrying a handful of small pebbles. He stopped on the dark street near the library. The small pebbles were thrown. They hit the window with a sharp thud.

These are my thoughts.

She took a light cloak with her and went and put it on. She was tall. She was slender. She began to do the little trick Tom Riddle did. She squared her shoulders. Beauty has a strange trick with women. It"s a quality. It plays in the penumbra. It suddenly overtakes them, sometimes when they think they were very ugly. She turned off the light above her desk and went to the door. "That"s how it happens," she thought. This desire had been living in her for weeks. The young man, Red Oliver, was nice. He was half scared and impatient. He kissed her greedily, with a half-frightened hunger, her lips, her neck. It was nice. It was not nice. She convinced him. He was not convinced. "I"m a man, and I have a woman. I"m not a man. I didn"t get her.

No, this wasn't good. There was no real surrender in her. All along she knew... "I knew all along what would happen after this happened, if I let it happen," she told herself. Everything was in her own hands.

"I did something bad to him."

People did this to each other all the time. It wasn't just that... two bodies pressed together, trying to do it.

People hurt each other. Her father had done the same to his second wife, Blanche, and now Blanche, in turn, was trying to do the same to her father. How disgusting... Ethel had softened now... There was a softness in her, a regret. She wanted to cry.

"I wish I were a little girl." Little memories. She became a little girl again. She saw herself as a little girl.

Her own mother was alive. She was with her mother. They were walking down the street. Her mother was holding the hand of a girl named Ethel. "Was I ever that child? Why did life do this to me?"

"Don't blame life now. Damn self-pity."

There was a tree, a spring wind, the wind of early April. The leaves on the tree were playing. They were dancing.

She stood in the dark, large library room, near the door, the door through which young Red Oliver had just disappeared. "My lover? No!" She had already forgotten him. She stood and thought about something else. It was very quiet outside. After the rain, the night in Georgia would be cooler, but it would still be hot. Now the heat would be humid and oppressive. Although the rain had passed, there were still occasional flashes of lightning, faint flashes that now came from afar, from the retreating storm. She had ruined her relationship with the young man Langdon, who had been in love with her and passionately desired her. She knew it. Now it could come out of him. Perhaps he no longer had it. She no longer dreamed of him at night-in him... hunger... desire... her.

If for him, in him, for some other woman, now, now. Hadn't she ruined her relationship with the place where she worked? A slight shudder ran through her body, and she quickly walked outside.

It was supposed to be an eventful night in Ethel's life. When she stepped outside, she thought at first that she was alone. At least there was a chance no one would ever know what had happened. Did she care? She didn't care. She didn't care.

When you're in a mess inside, you don't want anyone to know. You square your shoulders. Press into your feet. Press into them. Push. Push.

"Everyone does it. Everyone does it.

"For Christ's sake, have mercy on me, a sinner." The library building was located near Main Street, and on the corner of Main Street stood a tall, old brick building with a clothing store on the ground floor and a hall above. The hall was the meeting place of some lodge, and an open staircase led up. Ethel walked down the street and, approaching the stairs, saw a man standing there, half-hidden in the darkness. He stepped toward her.

It was Tom Riddle.

He was standing there. He was there and approaching.

"Another?

- I could also become a whore with him, take them all.

"Damn it. To hell with them all.

"So," she thought, "he was watching." She wondered how much he saw.

If he had passed by the library during the storm. If he had looked in. It was not at all what she thought of him. "I saw a light in the library, and then I saw it go out," he said simply. He was lying. He saw a young man, Red Oliver, enter the library.

Then he saw the light go out. There was pain in it.

"I have no rights to her. I want her."

His own life wasn't so good. He knew. "We could start. I could even learn to love.

His own thoughts.

A young man, leaving the library, passed right next to him, but did not see him standing in the corridor. He retreated.

"What right do I have to interfere with her? She didn't promise me anything."

There was something. There was light, a street lamp. He saw the face of young Red Oliver. It was not the face of a satisfied lover.

It was the face of a puzzled boy. Joy in a man. A strange, incomprehensible sadness in this man, not for himself, but for someone else.

"I thought you were coming with us," he said to Ethel. Now he walked beside her. He was silent. Thus they crossed Main Street and soon found themselves on the residential street at the end of which Ethel lived.

Now Ethel had a reaction. She even became frightened. "What a fool I've been, what a damn fool! I've ruined everything. I've ruined everything with that boy and that man."

After all, a woman is a woman. She needs a man.

"She can be such a fool, rushing, rushing here and there, so that no man will want her.

"Now don't blame that boy. You did it. You did it."

Perhaps Tom Riddle suspected something. Perhaps this was his test for her. She didn't want to believe it. Somehow this man, this so-called tough man, clearly a realist, if such a thing could exist among Southern men... somehow he had already earned her respect. If she lost him. She didn't want to lose him, because-in her exhaustion and confusion-she was being a fool again.

Tom Riddle walked silently beside her. Though she was tall, he was taller for a woman. In the light of the streetlights they passed, she tried to look him in the face without him noticing that she was looking, that she was worried. Did he know? Was he judging her? Drops of water from the recent heavy rain continued to pitter-patter the shady trees under which they walked. They passed Main Street. It was deserted. There were puddles on the sidewalks, and water, shining and yellow in the light of the corner lamps, flowed through the gutters.

There was one place where the walk was missing. There had been a brick path, but it had been removed. A new cement path was to be laid. They had to walk on wet sand. Something happened. Tom Riddle started to take Ethel's hand, but didn't. There was a small, hesitant, shy movement. It touched something in her.

There was a moment... something fleeting. "If he, this one, is like this, then he can be like this."

It was an idea, faint, flitting through her mind. Some man, older than her, more mature.

To know that she, like any woman, maybe like any man, wanted... wanted nobility, purity.

"If he found out and forgave me, I would hate him.

"There was too much hate. I don't want any more."

Could he, this old man... could he know why she had taken the boy... he really was a boy... Red Oliver... and knowing, could he... not blame... not forgive... not think of himself in the incredibly noble position of being able to forgive?

She despaired. "I wish I hadn"t done this. I wish I hadn"t done this," she thought. She tried something. "Have you ever been in a certain position..." she said to Tom Riddle... "I mean, going ahead and doing something you wanted to do and didn"t want to do... that you knew you didn"t want to do... and didn"t know?"

It was a stupid question. She was terrified by her own words. "If he suspects anything, if he saw that boy leaving the library, I'm only confirming his suspicions."

She was frightened by her own words, but she quickly moved forward. "There was something you were ashamed to do, but you wanted to do it and knew that after you did it, you would be even more ashamed."

"Yes," he said quietly, "a thousand times. I always do." After that, they walked in silence until they reached the Long House. He made no attempt to detain her. She was curious and excited. "If he knows and can take it that way, really wanting me to be his wife, as he says, he is something new in my experience with men." There was a slight warmth. "Is it possible? We are both not good men, do not want to be good." Now she identified with him. At the table in the Long House, sometimes in our days, her father spoke of this man, Tom Riddle. He addressed his remarks not to his daughter, but to Blanche. Blanche echoed this. She mentioned Tom Riddle. "How many loose women has this man had?" When Blanche asked about this, she glanced quickly at Ethel. "I'm only egging him on. He's a fool. I want to see him blow himself up."

Her eyes told Ethel this. "We women understand. Men are just stupid, flighty children." Some question would have been raised: Blanche wanted to put her husband in a certain position vis-à-vis Ethel, wanted to worry Ethel a little... there was a fiction that Ethel's father was unaware of the lawyer's interest in his daughter...

If this man, Tom Riddle, had known about this, he might only have been amused.

"You women, settle this... settle your own kindness, your own anger."

"A man walks, exists, eats, sleeps... is not afraid of men... is not afraid of women.

"There's not much room in it. Every man should have something. You could forgive some.

"Don't expect too much. Life is full of bedfellows. We eat it, sleep it, dream it, breathe it." There was a chance that Tom Riddle held men like her father, the good, respectable men of the town, in his contempt... "As do I," Ethel thought.

Stories were told about this man, about his bold dalliances with loose women, about him being a Republican, cutting deals for federal patronage, consorting with Negro delegates to the Republican National Conventions, associating with gamblers, horsemen... He must have been in all sorts of so-called "unfair political deals," constantly waging a strange battle in the life of this smug, religious, sinister Southern community. In the South, every man considered his ideal to be what he called "being a gentleman." Tom Riddle, if he had been the Tom Riddle Ethel was now beginning to recover, suddenly recovering that night when he walked with her, would have laughed at the idea. "A gentleman, damn it. You should know what I know. Now she could suddenly imagine him saying it without much bitterness, accepting some of the hypocrisy of others as a matter of course... without making it seem too offensive or hurtful. He'd said he wanted her to be his wife, and now she vaguely understood, or suddenly hoped she understood, what he meant.

He even wanted to be gentle with her, to surround her with some kind of elegance. If he suspected... he at least saw Red Oliver leaving the dark library, but a few minutes before she did... since she had seen him earlier that evening on the street.

Was he watching her?

Could he understand something else... that she wanted to try something, to learn something?

He took her to watch this young man play baseball. The name Red Oliver was never mentioned between them. Had he really taken her there just to watch her?... to learn something about her?

"Maybe now you know."

She was offended. The feeling passed. She was not offended.

He implied, or even said, that when he asked her to marry him, he wanted something specific. He wanted her because he thought she had style. "You're sweet. It's nice to walk next to a proud, beautiful woman. You say to yourself, 'She's mine.'"

"It"s nice to see her in my home.

"A man feels more like a man when he has a beautiful woman he can call his woman."

He worked and schemed to earn money. Apparently, his first wife had been something of a slob and rather boring. Now he had a beautiful home, and he wanted a life partner who would maintain his home in a certain style, who understood clothes and knew how to wear them. He wanted people to know...

"Look. This is Tom Riddle's wife.

"She definitely has style, doesn't she? There's some class to it."

Perhaps for the same reason such a man might want to own a stable of racehorses, wanting the best and the fastest. Frankly, that was precisely the proposal. "Let's not get romantic or sentimental. We both want something. I can help you, and you can help me." He didn't use those exact words. They were implied.

If he could feel now, if he even knew what happened that evening, if he could feel... "I haven't caught you yet. You're still free. If we make a deal, I expect you to keep your end of it."

"If only, knowing what happened, if only he knew, he could feel like this."

All these thoughts raced through Ethel's mind as she walked home with Tom Riddle that evening, but he said nothing. She was nervous and worried. Judge Long's house was surrounded by a low picket fence, and he stopped at the gate. It was quite dark. She thought she saw him smile, as if he knew her thoughts. She had made another man feel ineffective, a failure beside her, despite what had happened... despite the fact that a man, any man, was supposed to feel very masculine and strong.

Now she felt useless. That evening at the gate, Tom Riddle had said something. She wondered how much he knew. He knew nothing. What had happened in the library had happened during a heavy downpour. He would have had to sneak through the rain to the window to see. Now she suddenly remembered that as they walked down Main Street, some part of her mind had registered the fact that the cloak he was wearing wasn't particularly wet.

He wasn't the type to sneak up to the window. "Now wait," Ethel told herself that night. "He might even do it if he thought about it, if he had any suspicions, if he wanted to do it."

"I"m not going to start by making him out to be some kind of nobleman.

"After what happened, that would make it impossible for me."

At the same time, it might have been a wonderful test for a man, a man with his realistic outlook on life... to see this... other man and the woman he wanted...

What would he tell himself? What would he think her style, her class, matter, what would it matter then?

"It would have been too much. He couldn't bear it. No man could bear it. If I were a man, I wouldn't.

"We go through pain, slowly learning, fighting for some truth. It seems inevitable."

Tom Riddle was talking to Ethel. "Good night. I can't help but hope you decide to do this. I mean... I'm waiting. I'll wait. I hope it won't be long.

"Come anytime," he said. "I'm ready."

He leaned slightly toward her. Was he going to try to kiss her? She wanted to scream, "Wait. Not yet. I need time to think."

He didn't. If he'd meant to kiss her, he'd changed his mind. His body straightened. There was a strange gesture in it, the straightening of his hunched shoulders, a push... as if against life itself... as if saying, "push... push..." to himself... talking to himself... just like she was. "Good night," he said and walked quickly away.

*

"Here it goes. Will it never end?" Ethel thought so. She entered the house. As soon as she entered, Blanche had a strange feeling that this had been an unpleasant night for her.

Ethel was offended. "In any case, she couldn't have known anything."

"Good night. What I said is true." Tom Riddle's words were also in Ethel's head. It seemed he knew something, suspected something... "I don't care. I hardly know whether I care or not," Ethel thought.

"Yes, it worries me. If he wants to know, I'd better tell him.

"But I'm not close enough to him to tell him things. I don't need a spiritual father.

- Possibly, yes.

Clearly, this was going to be a night of intense self-awareness for her. She went to her room, from the hallway below, where the light was on. Upstairs, where Blanche was now sleeping, it was dark. She quickly stripped off her clothes and threw them on a chair. Completely naked, she threw herself on the bed. A faint light filtered through the transom. She lit a cigarette, but didn't smoke. In the darkness, it seemed stale, and she got out of bed and put it out.

It wasn't quite like that. There was a faint, pale, persistent smell of cigarettes.

"Walk a mile for a camel."

"No coughing in the carriage." It was supposed to be a dark, soft, sticky southern night after rain. She felt tired.

"Women. What are these things! What kind of creature am I!" she thought.

Was it because she knew about Blanche, the other woman in the house, who might now be awake in her room, thinking too? Ethel was trying to think of something herself. Her mind began to work. It wouldn't stop. She was tired and wanted to sleep, wanted to forget the experiences of the night in her dreams, but she knew she couldn't sleep. If her affair with this boy, if it had happened, if that had been what she really wanted... "I might have slept then. I'd have been a contented animal, at least." Why did she now so suddenly remember the other woman in the house, this Blanche? Nothing to her, really, her father's wife; "his problem, thank God, not mine," she thought. Why did she have the feeling that Blanche was awake, that she, too, was thinking, that she had been waiting for him to return home, had seen a man, Tom Riddle, at the gate with Ethel?

Her thoughts... "Where were they in this storm? They don't drive."

"Damn her and her thoughts," Ethel said to herself.

Blanche would have thought that Ethel and Tom Riddle might find themselves in a similar position to the man she found herself in.

Was there something that needed to be sorted out with her, just as there was with the young man, Red Oliver, just as there was still something to be sorted out between her and Tom Riddle? "At least, I hope not today. For God's sake, not today."

"This is the limit. Enough."

And anyway, what was supposed to work out between her and Blanche? "She's a different woman. I'm glad of that." She tried to put Blanche out of her mind.

She thought about the men who were now connected with her life, about her father, about the young man Red Oliver, about Tom Riddle.

One thing she could be absolutely certain of. Her father would never know what was happening to him. He was a man for whom life was divided into broad lines: good and bad. He always made decisions quickly when settling cases in court. "You're guilty. You're not guilty."

For this reason, life, real life, always perplexed him. It must have always been that way. People wouldn't behave the way he thought they would. With Ethel, his daughter, he was lost and confused. He became personal. "Is she trying to punish me? Is life trying to punish me?"

It was because she, the daughter, had problems her father couldn't understand. He never tried to understand. "How the hell does he think this gets through to people, if it does? Does he think some people, good people like himself, are born with this?

"What's wrong with my wife Blanche? Why doesn't she behave like she should?

"Now I have my daughter too. Why is she like this?

There was her father, and there was the young man with whom she suddenly dared to be so intimate, even though she wasn't really intimate at all. She allowed him to make love to her. She practically forced him to make love to her.

There was a sweetness about him, even a purity. He wasn't dirty like she was...

She must have wanted his sweetness, his purity, and seized on it.

- Did I really just manage to get him dirty?

"I know that. I grabbed, but I didn't get what I grabbed."

*

ETHEL was feverish. It was night. She wasn't through with the night yet.

Misfortunes never come alone. She lay on the bed in the dark, hot room. Her long, slender body was stretched out there. There was tension, tiny nerves screaming. The tiny nerves under her knees were tense. She lifted her legs and kicked impatiently. She lay motionless.

She sat up tensely in bed. The door from the hallway opened quietly. Blanche entered the room. She walked halfway across. She was dressed in a white nightgown. She whispered, "Ethel."

"Yes."

Ethel's voice was sharp. She was shocked. All interactions between the two women, ever since Ethel had returned home to Langdon to live and work as the town librarian, had been something of a game. It was half game, half something else. The two women wanted to help each other. What else would happen to Ethel now? She had a premonition. "No. No. Go away." She wanted to cry.

"I did something bad tonight. Now they're going to do something to me." How did she know that?

Blanche always wanted to touch her. She always got up late in the morning, later than Ethel. She had strange habits. In the evening, when Ethel was out, she went upstairs to her room early. What did she do there? She didn't sleep. Sometimes, at two or three in the morning, Ethel would wake up and hear Blanche wandering around the house. She went to the kitchen and got food. In the morning, she heard Ethel getting ready to leave the house and went downstairs.

She looked unkempt. Even her nightgown wasn't very clean. She approached Ethel. "I wanted to see what you were wearing." She had this strange obsession-always knowing what Ethel was wearing. She wanted to give Ethel money to buy clothes. "You know what I'm like. I don't care what I wear," she said. She said this with a slight nod of her head.

She wanted to go up to Ethel and put her hands on her. "It's nice. It's very nice for you," she said. "This fabric is nice." She put her hands on Ethel's dress. "You understand what to wear and how to wear it." As Ethel left the house, Blanche came to the front door. She stood and watched Ethel walk down the street.

Now she was in the room where Ethel lay naked on the bed. She walked quietly across the room. She didn't even put on her slippers. She was barefoot, and her feet made no sound. She was like a cat. She sat on the edge of the bed.

"Ethel."

"Yes." Ethel wanted to get up quickly and put on her pajamas.

"Lie still, Ethel," said Blanche. "I've been waiting for you, waiting for you to come."

Her voice was no longer harsh and sharp. A softness had crept into it. It was a pleading voice. "There was a misunderstanding. We misunderstood each other."

"Blanche said. The room was dimly lit. The sound came through the open transom, from a dim lamp burning in the hallway beyond the door. It was the door through which Blanche had entered. Ethel could hear her father snoring in his bed in the next room.

"It's been a long time. I've waited a long time," Blanche said. It was strange. Tom Riddle had said something similar just an hour ago. "I hope it won't last long," Tom said.

"Now," Blanche said.

Blanche's hand, her small, sharp, bony hand, touched Ethel's shoulder.

She reached out, touching Ethel. Ethel froze. She said nothing. Her body trembled at the touch of her hand. "Tonight I thought... tonight or never. I thought something needed to be decided," Blanche said.

She spoke in a quiet, soft voice, unlike the voice Ethel knew. She spoke as if in a trance. For a moment, Ethel felt relief. "She's sleepwalking. She didn't wake up. The sentence passed quickly.

"I'd known about it all evening. 'There are two men: an older one and a younger one. She'll make her decision,' I thought. I wanted to stop it.

"I don't want you to do this. I don't want you to do this."

She was soft and pleading. Now her hand began to caress Ethel. It slid down her body, over her breasts, over her thighs. Ethel remained firm. She felt cold and weak. "It's coming," she thought.

What happens next?

"Someday you have to make a decision. You have to be something.

"Are you a whore or are you a woman.

"You have to take responsibility."

Strange, garbled sentences flashed through Ethel's mind. It was as if someone, not Blanche, not young Red Oliver, not Tom Riddle, were whispering something to her.

"There is "I" and another "I"."

"A woman is a woman, or she is not a woman.

"A man is a man, or he is not a man."

More and more sentences, clearly disjointed, flashed through Ethel's mind. It was as if something older, something more sophisticated and evil had entered her, like another person, entered with the touch of Blanche's hand... The hand continued to crawl up and down her body, over her breasts, over her hips... "It could be sweet," the voice said. "It could be very, very nice."

"There lived a snake in Eden.

"Do you like snakes?"

Ethel's thoughts, racing thoughts, thoughts she'd never had before. "We have this thing we call individuality. It's a disease. I thought, 'I have to save myself.' That's what I thought. I've always thought that.

"I was a young girl once," Ethel thought suddenly. "I wonder if I was good, if I was born good.

"Maybe I wanted to become someone, a woman?" A strange idea of femininity arose within her, something even noble, something patient, something understanding.

What a mess life can get into! Everyone says to someone, "Save me. Save me."

Sexual distortion of people. It distorted Ethel. She knew it.

"I'm sure you've experimented. You've tried men," Blanche said in her strange new soft voice. "I don't know why, but I'm sure."

"They won't do it. They won't do it.

"I hate them.

"I hate them.

"They ruin everything. I hate them."

Now she brought her face close to Ethel's.

"We allow them. We even go to them.

"There's something about them that we think we need."

"Ethel. Don't you understand? I love you. I've been trying to tell you that."

Blanche brought her face close to Ethel's. For a moment, she remained there. Ethel felt the woman's breath on her cheek. Minutes passed. There was an interval that seemed like hours to Ethel. Blanche's lips touched Ethel's shoulders.

*

THAT was enough. With a convulsive movement, a twist of her body, throwing the woman off her feet, Ethel jumped out of bed. A fight broke out in the room. After that, Ethel never knew how long it lasted.

She knew it was the end of something, the beginning of something.

She was struggling for something. As she leaped up, twisted out of bed, out of Blanche's arms, and stood on her feet, Blanche leaped at her again. Ethel stood up straight next to the bed, and Blanche threw herself at her feet. She wrapped her arms around Ethel's body and clung desperately. Ethel dragged her across the room.

The two women began to wrestle. How strong Blanche was! Now her lips were kissing Ethel's body, her hips, her legs! The kisses didn't touch Ethel. It was as if she were a tree and some strange bird with a long, sharp beak was pecking at her, at some outer part of her. Now she didn't feel sorry for Blanche. She herself had become cruel.

She tangled one hand in Blanche's hair and pulled her face and lips away from her body. She became strong, but Blanche was strong too. Slowly, she pushed Blanche's head away from her. "Never. Never like this," she said.

She didn't say the words out loud. Even then, in that moment, she knew she didn't want her father to know what was happening in his house. "I wouldn't want to hurt him like that." That was something she never wanted any man to know. It would be relatively easy for her to tell Tom Riddle about Red Oliver now... if she decided she wanted Tom Riddle to be her man... what she thought she wanted in a young man, the experiment she'd conducted, the rejection.

"No no!"

"Blanche! Blanche!"

Blanche needed to be brought back from the place she'd ended up in. If Blanche had ruined her life, it was her own mess. She had a desire not to betray Blanche.

She grabbed Blanche by the hair and pulled it. With a sharp movement, she turned Blanche's face towards her and slapped her across the face with her free hand.

She kept hitting. She hit with all her might. She remembered something she'd heard somewhere, somewhere. "If you're a swimmer and you go to save a drowning man or woman, if they resist or struggle, hit them. Knock them out."

She kept hitting and hitting. Now she was dragging Blanche toward the door of the room. It was strange. Blanche didn't seem to mind being hit. She seemed to enjoy it. She didn't try to turn away from the blows.

Ethel flung open the door to the hallway and pulled Blanche out into the hallway. With a final effort, she freed herself from the body clinging to hers. Blanche fell to the floor. There was an expression in her eyes. "Well, I've been licked. At least I tried."

She took back what she lived for - her contempt.

ETHEL returned to her room, closed and locked the door. Inside, she stood with one hand on the handle and the other on the door panel. She was weak.

She listened. Her father woke up. She heard him get out of bed.

He was looking for the light. He was becoming an old man.

He stumbled over a chair. His voice trembled. "Ethel! Blanche! What happened?"

"It will be like this in this house," Ethel thought. "At least I won't be here."

"Ethel! Blanche! What happened?" Her father's voice was the voice of a frightened child. He was growing old. His voice was trembling. He was growing old and never quite growing up. He had always been a child and would remain a child until the end.

"Perhaps this is why women hate and detest men so much."

There was a moment of tense silence, and then Ethel heard Blanche's voice. "Great God," she thought. The voice was the same as it always was when Blanche spoke to her husband. It was sharp, a little firm, clear. "Nothing happened, dear," the voice said. "I was in Ethel's room. We were talking there.

"Go to sleep," said the voice. There was something terrible about the command.

Ethel heard her father's voice. He was grumbling. "I wish you hadn't woken me," the voice said. Ethel heard him fall heavily back into bed.

OceanofPDF.com

5


IT WAS EARLY in the morning. The window of the room in the Long House where Ethel lived looked out onto her father's field, the field that sloped down to the stream, the field where she had gone as a little girl to meet a bad little boy. In the hot summer, the field was almost deserted; it was scorched brown. You looked at it and thought... "A cow won't get much in that field"... you thought. Ethel's father's cow now had a broken horn.

So! The cow's horn is broken.

Mornings, even early mornings, in Langdon, Georgia, are hot. If it rains, it's not so hot. You're born for this. You shouldn't mind.

A lot of things can happen to you, and then... here you are.

You are standing in a room. If you are a woman, you put on a dress. If you are a man, you put on a shirt.

It's funny how men and women don't understand each other better. They should.

"I don't think they care. I don't think they care. They get paid so much they don't care.

"Damn it. Damn it. Noggle is a good word. Lie to me. Cross the room. Get into your pants, your skirt. Put on your coat. Take a walk downtown. Noggle, noggle.

"It's Sunday. Be a man. Go for a walk with your wife."

Ethel was tired... maybe a little crazy. Where had she heard or seen the word "noggle"?

One day in Chicago, a man speaks. It was strange for him to return to Ethel that summer morning in Georgia, after the night, after the sleepless night, after the adventure with Red Oliver, after Blanche. He entered her room and sat down.

How absurd! Only a memory of him came. It's sweet. If you're a woman, memories of a man can come right into your room while you're getting dressed. You're completely naked. What? What difference does it make! "Come in, sit down. Touch me. Don't touch me. Thoughts, touch me."

Let's say this man is crazy. Let's say he's a bald, middle-aged man. Ethel saw him once. She heard him speak. She remembered him. She liked him.

He was talking crazy. Okay. Was he drunk? Could anything be crazier than the Longhouse in Langdon, Georgia? People might pass by the house on the street. How would they know it was a madhouse?

The Man from Chicago. And Ethel was with Harold Gray again. You go through life, gathering people. You're a woman and you interact with a man a lot. Then you're no longer with him. So there he is, still a part of you. He touched you. He walked beside you. Whether you liked him or not. You were cruel to him. You regret it.

His color is in you, a little of your color is in him.

A man is talking at a party in Chicago. It was at another party at the home of one of Harold Gray's friends. This man was a historian, an outsider, a historian...

A man who gathered people around him. He had a good wife, a tall, beautiful, dignified wife.

There was a man in his house, sitting in a room with two young women. Ethel was there, listening. The man was talking about God. Was he drunk? There were drinks.

"So everyone wants God."

This was said by a bald, middle-aged man.

Who started this conversation? It started over dinner. "So, I think everyone wants God."

Someone at the dinner table was talking about Henry Adams, another historian, Mont Saint-Michel, and Chartres. "The White Soul of the Middle Ages." Historians chatting. Everyone wants God.

The man was talking to two women. He was impatient, sweet. "We, the people of the Western world, have been very foolish.

"So we took our religion from the Jews... a multitude of strangers... in a dry, barren land.

"I think they didn't like this land.

"So they placed God in the sky... a mysterious god, far away."

"You read about it... in the Old Testament," the man said. "They couldn't do it. The people kept running away. They went and worshiped the bronze statue, the golden calf. They were right."

"So they came up with a story about Christ. You want to know why? They had to lift it up. Everything gets lost. Make up a story. They had to try to bring him down to earth where people could get him.

"So. So. So.

"And so they stood up for Christ. Good.

"They put this into the immaculate conception? Isn't any normal concept good? I think it is. Sweet."

At that moment, two young women were in the room with this man. They blushed. They listened to him. Ethel didn't participate in the conversation. She listened. Later, she learned that the man present in the historian's house that evening was an artist, a strange bird. Perhaps he was drunk. There were cocktails, lots of cocktails.

He tried to explain something, that, in his opinion, the religion of the Greeks and Romans before the advent of Christianity was better than Christianity, because it was more earthly.

He was telling what he'd done himself. He'd rented a small house outside of town, in a place called Palos Park. It was on the edge of a forest.

"When gold came from Palos to storm the gates of Hercules. Is it true?

He tried to imagine gods there. He tried to be Greek. "I'm failing," he said, "but it's fun to try."

A long story was told. A man was describing to two women, trying to describe how he lived. He was drawing, and then he couldn't draw, he said. He went for a walk.

There was a small stream running along the bank of the creek and some bushes growing there. He walked over there and stopped. "I'm closing my eyes," he said. He laughed. "Perhaps the wind is blowing. Blowing into the bushes.

"I'm trying to convince myself it's not the wind. It's a god or goddess.

"This is a goddess. She came out of the stream. The stream there is good. There is a deep hole.

"There is a low hill there.

"She comes out of the stream, all wet. She comes out of the stream. I have to imagine it. I stand with my eyes closed. The water leaves shiny spots on her skin.

"She has beautiful skin. Every artist wants to paint a nude... against the trees, against the bushes, against the grass. She comes and pushes through the bushes. It's not her. It's the wind blowing.

"It's her. There you are."

That's all Ethel remembered. Perhaps the man was simply playing with two women. Perhaps he was drunk. That time, she went with Harold Gray to the historian's house. Someone approached and spoke to her, and she heard nothing more.

The morning after that strange, confusing night in Langdon, Georgia, perhaps came back to her only because the man had mentioned bushes. That morning, when she stood at the window and looked out, she saw a field. She saw bushes growing by a stream. The overnight rain had turned the bushes bright green.

*

It was a hot, quiet morning in Langdon. Black men and women with their children were already working in the cotton fields near town. The day shift workers at the Langdon cotton mill had been working for an hour. A wagon pulled by two mules passed Judge Long's house on the road. The wagon creaked mournfully. Three Black men and two women rode in the wagon. The street was unpaved. The mules' feet treaded softly and comfortably in the dust.

That morning, while working in the cotton mill, Red Oliver was upset and frustrated. Something had happened to him. He thought he was falling in love. For many nights he lay in his bed at Oliver's house, dreaming of a certain event. "If only it would happen, if only it could happen. If she..."

"This will not happen, this cannot happen.

"I'm too young for her. She doesn't want me.

"There's no point in thinking about it." He thought of this woman, Ethel Long, as the oldest, wiser, and more refined woman he'd ever seen. She must have liked him. Why did she do what she did?

She let it happen there, in the library, in the dark. He never thought it would happen. Even then, now... if she hadn't been brave. She didn't say anything. Some quick, subtle way she let him know it could happen. He was afraid. "I felt awkward. If only I hadn't felt so damn awkward. I acted like I didn't believe it, couldn't believe it."

Afterwards, he felt even more restless than before. He couldn't sleep. The way she fired him after it happened. She made him feel like a boy, not a man. He was angry, hurt, confused.

After leaving her, he walked alone for a long time, wanting to swear. There were the letters he received from his friend Neil Bradley, the son of a western farmer who was now in love with a schoolteacher, and what was happening to them. The letters continued to arrive that summer. Perhaps they had something to do with Red's current state.

A man says to another man, "I have something good."

He begins to think.

Thoughts begin.

Can a woman do this to a man, even a man who is much younger than her, taking him and not taking him, even using him...

It was as if she wanted to try something on herself. "I"ll see if this suits me, if I want this."

Could a person live like this, thinking only: "Do I want this? Will this be good for me?"

There is another person involved in this.

Red-haired Oliver wandered alone in the darkness of a hot southern night after a rain. He came out past the Long House. The house was far away, on the outskirts of town. There were no sidewalks. He stepped off the sidewalk, not wanting to make noise, and walked along the road, through the dirt. He stood in front of the house. A stray dog came. The dog approached, then ran away. Almost a block away, a streetlight was burning. The dog ran up to the streetlight, then turned, stopped, and barked.

"If only a man had courage."

Suppose he could go to the door and knock. "I want to see Ethel Long.

"Come out here. I'm not finished with you yet.

"If a man could be a man."

Red stood in the road, thinking about the woman he was with, the woman he was so close to, but not quite close to. Could it be that the woman had come home and fallen asleep quietly after letting him go? The thought angered him, and he left, cursing. All night and all the next day, trying to get his work done, he rocked back and forth. He blamed himself for what had happened, and then his mood changed. He blamed the woman. "She"s older than me. She should have known what she wanted." Early in the morning, at dawn, he got out of bed. He wrote Ethel a long letter that was never sent, and in it he expressed the strange feeling of defeat she had caused him. He wrote the letter, and then tore it up and wrote another. The second letter expressed nothing but love and longing. He took all the blame on himself. "It was somehow wrong. It was my fault. Please let me come to you again. Please. Please." "Let's try again."

He also tore up this letter.

There was no formal breakfast at the Long House. The judge's new wife had done away with that. In the morning, breakfast was carried to each room on trays. That morning, Ethel's breakfast was brought to her by a colored woman, a tall woman with large hands and feet and thick lips. There was fruit juice, coffee, and toast in a glass. Ethel's father would have had hot bread. He would have demanded hot bread. He was genuinely interested in food, always talking about it as if to say, "I take my stand. This is where I take my stand. I'm a Southerner. This is where I take my stand."

He kept talking about coffee. "This is no good. Why can't I have good coffee?" When he went to lunch at the Rotary Club, he came home and told them about it. "We had good coffee," he said. "We had wonderful coffee."

The bathroom in the Longhouse was on the ground floor, next to Ethel's room, and that morning she got up and took a bath at six. She found it cold. It was wonderful. She dove into the water. It wasn't cold enough.

Her father was already up. He was one of those men who couldn't sleep after dawn. It came very early in the summer in Georgia. "I need the morning air," he said. "It's the best time of day to get out and breathe." He got out of bed and tiptoed through the house. He left the house. He still had the cow and had gone to watch her being milked. The colored man had arrived early in the morning. He had led the cow out of the field, out of the field near the house, out of the field where the judge had once gone in anger looking for his daughter, Ethel, and this time she had gone there to meet the boy. He hadn't seen the boy, but he was sure he was there. He had always thought so.

"But what's the point of thinking? What's the point of trying to make something out of women?"

He could talk to the man who brought the cow. The cow, which he'd owned for two or three years, had developed a condition called hollow tail. There was no veterinarian in Langdon, and the colored man said the tail would have to be cut off. He explained, "You cut the tail lengthwise. Then you put salt and pepper in it. Judge Long laughed, but let the man do it. The cow died.

Now he had another cow, a half-Jersey. She had a broken horn. When her time came, would it be better to breed her to a Jersey bull or some other bull? Half a mile from the village lived a man who had a fine Holstein bull. The colored man thought he would be the best bull. "Holsteins give more milk," he said. There was much to talk about. It was homely and pleasant to talk to a colored man about such things in the morning.

A boy arrived with a copy of the Atlanta Constitution and tossed it onto the porch. He ran across the lawn in front of the judge, leaving his bicycle by the fence, and then threw down the newspaper. It was folded and fell with a clatter. The judge followed him and, putting on his glasses, sat on the porch and read.

It was so beautiful in the yard, early in the morning, not a single one of the judge's disconcerting women, just a colored man. The colored man, who milked and tended the cow, also did other chores around the house and yard. In the winter, he brought wood for the fireplaces in the house, and in the summer, he mowed and sprayed the lawn and flower beds.

He tended the flower beds in the yard, while the judge watched and gave instructions. Judge Long was passionate about flowers and flowering shrubs. He knew about such things. In his youth, he studied birds and knew hundreds of them by sight and song. Only one of his children took an interest in this. It was his son, who died in the World War II.

His wife, Blanche, seemed to have never seen birds or flowers. She wouldn't have noticed if they were all suddenly destroyed.

He ordered manure to be brought and placed under the roots of the bushes. He took a hose and watered the bushes, flowers, and grass while the colored man hung around. They talked. It was cool. The judge had no male friends. If the colored man weren't a colored man...

The judge had never thought about it. The two men saw and felt things the same way. To the judge, the bushes, flowers, and grass were living beings. "He wants a drink, too," the colored man said, pointing to a particular bush. He made some bushes male, some female, as he saw fit. "Give her some, judge." The judge laughed. He liked it. "Now some for him."

Judge Blanche, his wife, never got out of bed before noon. After marrying the judge, she developed the habit of lying in bed in the morning and smoking cigarettes. This habit shocked him. She told Ethel that before her marriage, she had secretly smoked. "I used to sit in my room and smoke late at night and blow the smoke out the window," she said. "In the winter, I blew it into the fireplace. I'd lie on my stomach on the floor and smoke. I didn't dare tell anyone about it, especially your father, who was on the school board. Everyone thought I was a good woman back then."

Blanche burned numerous holes in her bedspread. She didn't care. "To hell with bedspreads," she thought. She didn't read. In the morning, she stayed in bed, smoking cigarettes and looking out the window at the sky. After marriage, and after her husband found out about her smoking, she made a concession. She quit smoking in his presence. "I wouldn't do that, Blanche," he said rather pleadingly.

"Why?"

"People will talk. They won't understand."

- What don't you understand?

"I don't understand that you are a good woman."

"I don't," she said sharply.

She liked to tell Ethel how she had deceived the town and her husband, Ethel's father. Ethel tried to imagine her as she had been then: a young woman or a young girl. "It's all a lie, this image she has of herself," Ethel thought. She might even have been sweet, very sweet, quite cheerful and lively. Ethel imagined a young blonde, slender and pretty, lively, rather bold and unscrupulous. "She would have been terribly impatient then, like myself, ready to take a risk. Nothing was offered that she wanted. She had her eye on the judge. "What should I do, continue being a schoolteacher forever?" she would have asked herself. The judge was on the district school board. She had met him at some event. Once a year, one of the town's civic clubs, the Rotary Club or the Kiwanis Club, hosted a dinner for all the white schoolteachers. She would have her eye on the judge. His wife was dead.

After all, a man is a man. What works for one will work for another. You keep telling an older man how young he looks... not very often, but you throw it in. "You're just a boy. You need someone to take care of you." It works.

She wrote the judge a very sympathetic letter when his son died. They began dating secretly. He was lonely.

There was definitely something between Ethel and Blanche. It was between men. It was between all women.

Blanche had gone too far. She was a fool. And yet there was something touching about the scene in the room the night before Ethel left her father's house forever. It was Blanche's determination, a kind of mad determination. "I'm going to eat something. I'm not going to be completely robbed.

"I'm going to get you."

*

IF Ethel's father had entered the room just as Blanche clung to Ethel... Ethel could have imagined the scene. Blanche rising to her feet. She wouldn't have cared. Even though dawn broke very early in Langdon's summer, Ethel had plenty of time to think before dawn broke on the night she decided to leave the house.

Her father was up early as usual. He was sitting on the porch of his house, reading the newspaper. The colored cook, the janitor's wife, was in the house. She carried the judge's breakfast around the house and placed it on the table next to him. It was his time of day. Two colored men milled about. The judge made little comment on the news. It was 1930. The newspaper was full of reports of the industrial depression that had set in the fall of the previous year. "I never bought a stock in my life," Ethel's father said out loud. "Neither do I," said the Negro from the yard, and the judge laughed. There was the janitor, the Negro who had talked about buying stocks. "And me." It was a joke. The judge gave the Negro some advice. "Well, you leave it alone." His tone was serious... mockingly serious. "Don't you buy stocks on margin?"

- No, sir, no, sir, I won't do that, Judge.

A quiet chuckle was heard from Ethel's father, who was playing with a colored man, actually his friend. The two old colored men felt sorry for the judge. He was caught. He had no chance of escape. They knew it. Blacks may be naive, but they are not fools. The black man knew perfectly well that he was amusing the judge.

Ethel knew something too. That morning, she ate breakfast slowly and dressed slowly. The room she occupied had a huge closet, and her suitcases were in there. They had been put there when she returned home from Chicago. She packed them. "I'll send for them later that day," she thought.

There was no point in telling her father anything. She had already decided what she was going to do. She was going to try to marry Tom Riddle. "I think I will. If he still wants it, I think I will."

It was a strange feeling of comfort. "I don"t care," she told herself. "I"ll even tell him about last night in the library. I"ll see if he can stand it. If he doesn"t want to... I"ll deal with it when I come to it."

"This is the way. 'Take care of things as you come to them.'"

"I can, and I may not."

She walked around her room, paying special attention to her costume.

"What about this hat? It's a little out of shape." She put it on and studied herself in the mirror. "I look pretty good. I don't look too tired." She settled on a red summer dress. It was rather fiery, but it did something nice for her complexion. It brought out the dark olive tone of her skin. "The cheeks could use a little color," she thought.

Normally, after a night like the one she had been through, she would have looked exhausted, but that morning she didn't.

This fact surprised her. She continued to surprise herself.

"What a strange mood I've been in," she said to herself as she crossed the room. After the cook came in with the breakfast tray, she locked the door. Would Blanche the woman be so foolish as to go downstairs and say anything about last night's incident, to try to explain or apologize? Suppose Blanche tried. It would spoil everything. "No," Ethel told herself. "She has too much common sense, too much courage for that. She's not like that." It was a pleasant feeling, almost a liking to Blanche. "She has a right to be what she is," Ethel thought. She developed the thought a little. It explained a lot in life. "Let everyone be what they are. If a man wants to think he's good" (she was thinking of her father), "let him think so. People can even think they're Christians if it does them any good and comforts them."

The thought was a comfort. She tidied up and straightened her hair. She wore a small, tight-fitting red hat with the dress she'd chosen. She slightly intensified the color of her cheeks, and then her lips.

"If this is not the feeling I had for this boy, that hungry longing, rather senseless, that animals have, perhaps it could be something else."

Tom Riddle was a true realist, even a bold one. "Deep down, we're very much alike." How wonderful of him to maintain his self-respect throughout their courtship! He didn't try to touch her or manipulate her emotions. He was frank. "Perhaps we can find common ground," Ethel thought. It would be risky. He would know it was a risky gamble. She remembered the older man's words with gratitude...

"You may not be able to love me. I don't know what love is. I'm not a boy. No one has ever called me a handsome man."

"I'll tell him everything that comes to my mind, everything I think he'd like to know. If he wants me, he can take me today. I don't want to wait. We'll get started.

Did she have confidence in him? "I'll try to do a good job for him. I think I know what he wants."

She heard her father's voice talking to a black man working on the porch outside. She felt hurt and at the same time sorry.

"If only I could tell him something before I go. I can"t. He would be upset when he heard the news of her sudden marriage... if Tom Riddle still wanted to marry her. "He will want it. He will. He will."

She thought again of young Oliver and what she had done to him, testing him as she had before, to make sure that he, and not Tom Riddle, was the one she wanted. A slightly wicked thought occurred to her. From her bedroom window, she could see the cow pasture where her father had come looking for her that night when she was a little girl. The pasture sloped down to a stream, and bushes grew along the stream. The boy had disappeared into the bushes that time. It would have been strange if she had taken young Oliver there, to the pasture, the night before. "If the night had been clear, I would have done it," she thought. She smiled, a little vindictively, softly. "He"ll suit some woman. After all, what I did can"t hurt him. Perhaps he got a little education. In any case, I did it."

It was strange and confusing trying to figure out what education was, what was good and what was bad. She suddenly remembered an incident that had happened in the city when she was a young girl.

She was on the street with her father. A black man was being tried. He was accused of raping a white woman. The white woman, as it turned out later, was no good. She came into town and accused the black man. Afterwards, he was acquitted. He was with some man at work on the road at the very hour when, according to her, it happened.

At first, no one knew about it. There was unrest and talk of lynching. Ethel's father was worried. A group of armed sheriff's deputies stood outside the county jail.

There was another group of men on the street in front of the drugstore. Tom Riddle was there. A man spoke to him. The man was the town merchant. "Are you going to do this, Tom Riddle? Are you going to take this man's case? Are you going to defend him?"


- Yes, and clean it too.

"Well... You... You... The man was excited.

"He wasn't guilty," Tom Riddle said. "If he had been guilty, I would still have taken his case. I would still have defended him.

"As for you..." Ethel remembered the expression on Tom Riddle's face. He had stepped out in front of this man, the merchant. The small group of men standing around fell silent. Did she love Tom Riddle at that moment? What is love?

"As for you, what I know about you," Tom Riddle said to the man, "if I ever bring you to court."

That's all. It was nice when one man stood up to a group of men, challenging them.

Having finished packing, Ethel left the room. The house was quiet. Suddenly, her heart began to pound. "So, I'm leaving this house.

"If Tom Riddle doesn't want me, even though he knows everything about me, if he doesn't want me..."

At first, she didn't see Blanche, who had come downstairs and was in one of the rooms on the first floor. Blanche stepped forward. She wasn't dressed. She was wearing a pair of dirty pajamas. She crossed the small corridor and approached Ethel.

"You look great," she said. "I hope this will be a good day for you."

She stood aside while Ethel emerged from the house and walked down the two or three steps from the porch to the path leading to the gate. Blanche stood inside the house, watching, and Judge Long, who was still reading the morning paper, put it down and also watched.

"Good morning," he said, and "Good morning," Ethel replied.

She felt Blanche's eyes on her. She would go to Ethel's room. She would see Ethel's bags and suitcases. She would understand, but she would say nothing to the judge, to her husband. She would sneak back upstairs and get into bed. She lay in her bed, looking out the window and smoking cigarettes.

*

TOM RIDDLE was nervous and agitated. "She was with that boy last night. They were together in the library. It was dark." He felt a little angry with himself. "Well, I don't blame her. Who am I to blame her?"

"If she needs me, I think she'll tell me. I don't believe she could want him, this boy, not forever."

He was nervous and excited, as always when he thought of Ethel, and went to his office early. He closed the door and began pacing back and forth. He smoked cigarettes.

Many times that summer, standing by his office window, hidden from the street below, Tom watched Ethel walk to the library. He was delighted to see her. In his eagerness, he became a boy.

That morning he saw her. She was crossing the street. She disappeared from sight. He was standing by the window.

There was a sound of footsteps on the stairs leading to his office. Could it be Ethel? Had she made a decision? Had she come to see him?

"Be quiet... Don't be a fool," he told himself. Footsteps sounded on the stairs. They stopped. They came forward again. The outer door of his study opened. Tom Riddle pulled himself together. He stood, trembling, until the door to his inner study opened, and Ethel appeared before him, a little pale, with a strange, determined look in her eyes.

Tom Riddle calmed down. "A woman who intends to give herself to a man doesn't come to him looking like this," he thought. "But why did she come here?"

- Did you come here?

"Yes."

Two people stood facing each other. People don't arrange weddings like this, in a law office, in the morning... a woman approaches a man.

"Could this be?" Ethel asked herself.

"Could this be?" Tom Riddle asked himself.

"Not even a kiss. I never touched her.

A man and a woman stood facing each other. The sounds of the city drifted in from the street, a city going about its daily, rather meaningless business. The office was above the store. It was a simple office with one large room, a large desk with a flat top, and law books in bookcases along the walls. The floor was bare.

There was a sound from below. The store clerk dropped a box on the floor.

"Well," Ethel said. She said it with effort. "You told me last night-you said you were ready... anytime. You said it was O.K. with you."

It was hard, hard for her. "I'll be a damn fool," she thought. She wanted to cry.

- I have to tell you a lot of things...

"I bet he won't take me," she thought.

"Wait," she said quickly, "I'm not who you think I am. I have to tell you. I have to. I have to."

"Nonsense," he said, coming up to her and taking her hand. "Damn it," he said, "leave it. What's the point of talking?"

He stood and looked at her. "Do I dare, do I dare try, do I dare try to pick her up?"

Either way, she knew she liked him, standing there, hesitant and uncertain. "He'll marry me, okay," she thought. At the moment, she wasn't thinking about anything more.

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BOOK FOUR. BEYOND DESIRE

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1


I T WAS IN NOVEMBER 1930.

Red-haired Oliver stirred restlessly in his sleep. He woke, then fell asleep again. Between sleep and wakefulness there is a land-a land filled with grotesque forms-and he was in that land. There, everything changes quickly and strangely. It is a land of peace, and then of horror. The trees in this land grow in size. They become shapeless and elongated. They emerge from the ground and fly into the air. Desires enter the body of the sleeper.

Now you are yourself, but you are not yourself. You are outside of yourself. You see yourself running along the beach... faster, faster, faster. The land you have landed in has become terrible. A black wave rises from the black sea to engulf you.

And then, just as suddenly, all is peaceful again. You're in a meadow, lying under a tree, in the warm sunlight. Cattle are grazing nearby. The air is filled with a warm, rich, milky scent. A woman in a beautiful dress is walking toward you.

She is in purple velvet. She is tall.

It was Ethel Long of Langdon, Georgia, on her way to see Red Oliver. Ethel Long had suddenly become gracious. She was in a soft, feminine mood and was in love with Red.

But no... it wasn't Ethel. It was a strange woman, physically similar to Ethel Long, but at the same time unlike her.

It was Ethel Long, defeated by life, defeated by life. See

...she lost some of her straightforward, proud beauty and became humble. This woman would welcome love-any love that came to her. Her eyes said it now. This was Ethel Long, no longer fighting against life, no longer even wanting to win in life.

Look... even her dress has changed as she walks across the sunlit field toward Red. Dreams. Does a person in a dream always know they're dreaming?

Now the woman in the field was wearing an old, worn cotton dress. Her face looked haggard. She was a farmer, a worker, simply walking across the field to milk a cow.

Under some bushes, two small planks lay on the ground, and Red Oliver lay on them. His body ached and he was cold. It was November, and he was in a brush-covered field near the town of Birchfield, North Carolina. He had tried to sleep fully clothed under a bush on two planks lying on the ground, and the bed he had made for himself from two planks he found nearby was uncomfortable. It was late at night, and he sat up, rubbing his eyes. What was the point of trying to sleep?

"Why am I here? Where am I? What am I doing here?" Life is inexplicably strange. Why did a man like him end up in such a place? Why did he always allow himself to do inexplicable things?

Red emerged from his half-sleep in confusion, and so, first of all, upon waking up, he had to gather his strength.

There was also the physical fact: he was a fairly strong young man... sleep at night was of little importance to him. He was in this new place. How had he gotten there?

Memories and impressions came flooding back. He sat up straight. A woman, older than him, tall, a working woman, a farm woman, quite slender, not unlike Ethel Long from Langdon, Georgia, had led him to where he had been lying on two planks, trying to sleep. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. There was a small tree nearby, and he crawled across the sandy soil to it. He sat on the ground, his back against the small tree trunk. It was similar to the planks he had been trying to sleep on. The tree trunk was rough. If there had been only one plank, wide, smooth, he might have been able to sleep. He had caught one lower cheek between two planks and was pinned. He bent over halfway and rubbed the bruised spot.

He leaned his back against a small tree. The woman he had come with had given him a blanket. She had brought it from a small tent some distance away, and it was already thin. "These people probably don't have much bedding," he thought. The woman might have brought him her own blanket from the tent. She was tall, like Ethel Long, but didn't look much like her. As a woman, she had nothing in common with Ethel's style. Red was glad to wake up. "Sitting here will be more comfortable than trying to sleep on this bed," he thought. He was sitting on the ground, and the ground was damp and cold. He crept over and picked up one of the boards. "He'll sit down anyway," he thought. He looked at the sky. A crescent moon had risen, and gray clouds were drifting by.

Red was at a striking workers' camp in a field near Birchfield, North Carolina. It was a moonlit November night, and quite cold. What a strange chain of events had brought him there!

He had arrived at the camp the previous evening in the dark with the woman who had led him there and left him. They had arrived on foot, making their way through the hills-or rather, half-mountains-walking, not along the road, but along paths that climbed the hills and ran along the edges of fenced fields. Thus, they had walked several miles in the gray evening and the darkness of early night.

For Red Oliver, it was a night when everything about him felt unreal. There had been other such moments in his life. Suddenly, he began to remember other unreal times.

Such times come to every man and every boy. Here is a boy. He is a boy in a house. The house suddenly becomes unreal. He is in a room. Everything in the room is unreal. In the room there are chairs, a chest of drawers, the bed he was lying on. Why do they all suddenly seem strange? Questions are asked. "Is this the house I live in? Is this strange room I am in now the room I slept in last night and the night before?"

We all know these strange times. Do we control our actions, the tone of our lives? How absurd to ask! We don't. We are all stupid. Will there ever come a day when we are free of this stupidity?

To know at least a little about inanimate life. There's that chair... that table. The chair is like a woman. Many men have sat in it. They threw themselves into it, sat softly, tenderly. People sat in it, thinking and suffering. The chair is already old. The scent of many people hovers over it.

Thoughts come quickly and strangely. A man's or a boy's imagination should be asleep most of the time. Suddenly, everything goes wrong.

Why, for example, should a person want to become a poet? What does this achieve?

It would be better to live life simply as an ordinary person, living, eating, and sleeping. The poet longs to tear things apart, to tear away the veil separating him from the unknown. He longs to peer far beyond life, into dim, mysterious places. Why?

There's something he'd like to understand. The words people use every day can perhaps be given new meaning, thoughts-new significance. He'd allowed himself to drift into the unknown. Now he'd like to run back to the familiar, everyday world, carrying something, a sound, a word, from the unknown to the familiar. Why?

Thoughts cluster in the mind of a man or a boy. What is this thing called the mind? Playing deuce with a man or a boy gets out of control.

Red-haired Oliver, finding himself in a strange, cold place at night, thought vaguely about his childhood. When he was a boy, he sometimes went to Sunday school with his mother. He thought about that.

He thought about the story he'd heard there. There was a man named Jesus in a garden with his followers, who were lying on the ground, sleeping. Perhaps followers always sleep. The man was suffering in the garden. Nearby were soldiers, cruel soldiers, who wanted to seize him and crucify him. Why?

"What have I done that I should be led to be crucified?" Why am I here? Parish Fear. A man, a Sunday school teacher, was trying to tell the children in his Sunday school class a story about a night spent in the garden. Why did the memory of this come back to Red Oliver as he sat with his back against a tree in the field?

He came to this place with a woman, a strange woman he'd met almost by chance. They walked through moonlit landscapes, across mountain fields, through dark patches of forest, and back again. The woman Red was with stopped from time to time to talk to him. She was tired from the walk, exhausted.

She talked briefly with Red Oliver, but a shyness had developed between them. As they walked in the darkness, it gradually passed. "It hasn't completely passed," Red thought. Their conversation mostly concerned the path. "Look out. There's a rut. You'll trip." She called a tree root jutting out into the path a "rut." She took it for granted that she knew about Red Oliver. He was something definite to her, something she knew about. He was a young communist, a labor leader, traveling to a town where there were labor problems, and she herself was one of the workers in trouble.

Red felt ashamed that he hadn't stopped her along the way, that he hadn't told her, "I'm not who you think I am."

"Maybe I'd like to be who you think I am. I don't know. At least, I'm not.

"If what you see me as is something bold and beautiful, then I'd like to be that.

"I want this: to be something bold and beautiful. There's too much ugliness in life and in people. I don't want to be ugly."

He didn't tell her.

She thought she knew about him. She kept asking him, "Are you tired? Are you getting tired?"

"No."

As they approached, he pressed himself against her. They passed through dark places along the way, and she stopped breathing. As they climbed steep sections of the trail, he insisted on going ahead and offered her his hand. The moonlight was enough to make out her figure below. "She looks a lot like Ethel Long," he continued to think. She looked most like Ethel when he followed her along the paths, and she walked ahead.

Then he ran ahead of her to help her up the steep slope. "They'll never make you come this way," she said. "They don't know about this route." She thought he was a dangerous man, a communist who had come to her country to fight for her people. He walked ahead and, taking her hand, pulled her up the steep slope. There was a rest area, and they both stopped. He stood and looked at her. She was thin, pale, and exhausted now. "You don't look like Ethel Long anymore," he thought. The darkness of the forests and fields helped overcome the shyness between them. Together they arrived at the place where Red now stood.

Red slipped into the camp undetected. Though it was late at night, he could hear faint sounds. Somewhere nearby, a man or woman stirred, or a child whimpered. There was a peculiar sound. One of the striking workers he had contacted had a baby. The child stirred restlessly in its sleep, and the woman held it to her breast. He could even hear the baby's lips sucking and sipping at the woman's nipples. A man, standing some distance away, crawled through the door of a small plank shack and, rising to his feet, stood, stretching. In the dim light, he seemed enormous-a young man, a young worker. Red pressed his body against the trunk of a small tree, not wanting to be seen, and the man crept away quietly. In the distance, a slightly larger shack with a lantern was visible. The sound of voices came from within the small building.

The man Red had seen stretching walked toward the light.

The camp Red arrived at reminded him of something. It was on a gentle hillside, covered in bushes, some of which had been cleared. There was a small open space with huts that looked like doghouses. There were several tents.

It was like places Red had seen before. In the south, in Red's home country of Georgia, such places were found in fields on the outskirts of town, or in villages on the edge of a pine forest.

These places were called camp meetings, and people came there to worship. They had a religion there. As a child, Red would sometimes ride with his father, a country doctor, and one night, while driving along a country road, they came across such a place.

There was something in the air of this place that night that Red now remembered. He remembered his surprise and his father's disdain. According to his father, the people were religious enthusiasts. His father, a taciturn man, offered little explanation. And yet Red understood, sensed, what was happening.

These places were gathering places for the poor of the South, religious enthusiasts, mostly Methodists and Baptists. These were poor whites from nearby farms.

They set up small tents and huts, like the strike camp Red had just entered. Such religious gatherings among poor whites in the South sometimes lasted for weeks or even months. People came and went. They brought food from their homes.

A trickle occurred. The people were ignorant and illiterate, coming from small tenant farms or, at night, from the mill village. They dressed in their best clothes and walked the red roads of Georgia in the evening: young men and women walking together, older men with their wives, women with babies in their arms, and sometimes men leading children by the hand.

There they were at a camp meeting at night. The sermon continued day and night. Long prayers were offered. There was singing. Poor whites in the South sometimes worshiped like this, as did blacks, but they didn't do it together. In the white camps, as in the black camps, great excitement reigned as night fell.

The sermon continued outdoors under the stars. Trembling voices rang out in song. People suddenly received religion. Men and women were excited. Sometimes a woman, often young, would begin to scream and shout.

"God. God. Give me God," she cried.

Or: "I have him. He's here. He's holding me.

"It's Jesus. I feel his hands touching me.

"I feel his face touching me."

Women, often young and unmarried, would come to these meetings, and sometimes they would become hysterical. There would be a young white woman there, the daughter of some poor white tenant farmer from the South. All her life, she had been shy and afraid of people. She was a little starved, physically and emotionally exhausted, but now, at the meeting, something happened to her.

She arrived with her men. It was night, and she had been working all day in the cotton fields or at the cotton mill in the neighboring town. That day, she had to do ten, twelve, or even fifteen hours of hard labor at the mill or in the fields.

And so she was at the camp meeting.

She could hear the voice of a man, a preacher, shouting under the stars or under the trees. A woman sat, a small, thin, half-starved creature, occasionally gazing through the tree branches at the sky and the stars.

And even for her, poor and starving, there was a moment. Her eyes could see the stars and the sky. Thus, Red Oliver's mother came to religion, not at a camp meeting, but in a poor little church on the outskirts of a factory town.

Surely, Red thought, her life had been one of starvation too. He hadn't thought about it when he was a boy with his father and saw the poor whites at a camp meeting. His father stopped the car on the road. Voices were heard in the grassy area under the trees, and he saw men and women kneeling beneath a torch made from a pine knot. His father smiled, a look of disdain flickering across his face.

At a camp meeting, a voice called to a young woman. "He's there... there... it's Jesus. He wants you." The young woman began to tremble. Something was happening inside her unlike anything she had ever known before. That night, she felt hands touching her body. "Now. Now."

"You. You. I want you."

Could there be someone... God... a strange creature somewhere in the mysterious distances who wanted her?

"Who needs me, with my thin body and the tiredness inside me?" She would be like that little girl named Grace who worked in the cotton mill in Langdon, Georgia, the one Red Oliver saw the first summer he worked in the mill... the one another mill worker named Doris was always trying to protect.

Doris went there at night, caressed her with her hands, tried to relieve her fatigue, tried to breathe life into her.

But you may be a tired, thin young woman, and you don't have a Doris. After all, Dorises are quite rare in this world. You're a poor white girl working in a factory, or toiling all day with your father or mother in the cotton fields. You look at your thin legs and your thin arms. You don't even dare say to yourself, "I wish I were rich or beautiful. I wish I had a man's love." What good would that do?

But at the camp meeting. "It's Jesus."

"White. Wonderful."

"Up there."

"He wants you. He will take you."

It could just be debauchery. Red knew it. He knew his father had thought the same thing about the camp meeting they'd witnessed when Red was a boy. There was this young woman who'd let herself go. She'd screamed. She'd fallen to the ground. She'd moaned. People had gathered around-her people.

"Look, she got it."

She wanted it so much. She didn't know what she wanted.

For this girl, it was an experience, vulgar, but certainly strange. Good people didn't do this. Perhaps that's the problem with good people. Perhaps only the poor, the humble, and the ignorant could afford such things.

*

RED OLIVER sat with his back against a sapling in the work camp. A hushed tension filled the air, a feeling that seemed to settle over him. Perhaps it was the voices coming from the lighted hut. In the darkened spaces, the voices spoke quietly and seriously. There was a pause, then the conversation resumed. Red couldn't make out the words. His nerves were jittery. He woke up. "My God," he thought, "I'm here now, in this place."

"How did I get here? Why did I allow myself to come here?"

This wasn't a camp for religious enthusiasts. He knew that. He knew what it was. "Well, I don't know," he thought. He smiled slightly shyly, sitting under a tree and thinking. "I'm confused," he thought.

He wanted to come to the Communist camp. No, he didn't. Yes, he did. He sat there, quarrelling with himself, as he had been doing for days. "If only I could be sure of myself," he thought. He thought again of his mother practicing religion in the little church on the outskirts of the mill village when he was home, still a schoolboy. He walked for a week, ten days, maybe two weeks, getting closer to where he was now. He wanted to come. He didn't want to come.

He allowed himself to become engrossed in something that perhaps had nothing to do with him. He read newspapers, books, thought, tried to think. The Southern newspapers were full of strange news. They announced the arrival of communism in the South. The newspapers told Red little.

He and Neil Bradley often talked about this, about newspaper lies. They didn't lie outright, Neil said. They were clever. They twisted stories, made things seem like they weren't.

Neil Bradley wanted social revolution, or thought he did. "He probably does," Red thought that night, sitting in camp.

"But why should I think about Nile?"

It was strange to sit here and think that just a few months ago, the very spring he'd graduated from college, he'd been with Neil Bradley on a farm in Kansas. Neil had wanted him to stay there. If he had, how different his summer might have been. He hadn't. He felt guilty about his mother, left alone by his father's death, and after a few weeks, he'd left the Bradley farm and headed home.

He got a job back at the Langdon cotton mill. The mill workers hired him back, even though they didn't need him.

That was strange, too. That summer, the town was full of workers, men with families, who needed any work they could get. The factory knew this, but they hired Red.

"I think they thought... they thought I'd be okay. I think they knew there might be problems with the job, that they'd probably come. Tom Shaw's pretty slick," Red thought.

All summer long, the Langdon factory continued to cut wages. The factory workers forced all the pieceworkers to work longer hours for less money. They also cut Red's wages. He was paid less than he had been paid in his first year at the factory.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Thoughts kept racing through Red Oliver's head. He was agitated by the thoughts. He was thinking about the summer in Langdon. Suddenly, Ethel Long's figure flashed through his thoughts, as if he were trying to fall asleep. Perhaps it was because he had been with a woman that night that he suddenly began thinking about Ethel. He didn't want to think about her. "She did me dirty," he thought. The other woman he had stumbled upon late the night before, the one who had led him to the Communist camp, was the same height as Ethel. "But she doesn't look like Ethel. By God, she doesn't look like her," he thought. A strange stream of thoughts arose in his head. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Thoughts pounded in his head like little hammers. "If only I could let go, like that woman at the camp meeting," he thought, "if only I could start, be a Communist, fight the losers, be something." He tried to laugh at himself. "Ethel Long, yeah. You thought you had her, didn't you? She was playing you. She made a fool of you.

And yet Red couldn't help but remember. He was a young man. He had shared a moment with Ethel, such a delightful moment.

She was such a woman, so gorgeous. His thoughts returned to the night in the library. "What does a man want?" he asked himself.

His friend Neil Bradley had found a woman. Perhaps Neil's letters, which Red received that summer, stirred him up.

And suddenly a chance appeared with Ethel.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, he saw her... in the library that night when the storm began. It took his breath away.

God, women can be strange. She just wanted to know if she wanted him. She found out she didn't.

A man, a young man like Red, was also a strange creature. He wanted a woman-why? Why did he want Ethel Long so much?

She was older than him and didn't think like him. She wanted to have chic clothes so she could act truly chic.

She wanted a man too.

She thought she wanted Red.

"I will test him, I will test him," she thought.

"I couldn't handle her." Red felt uneasy as the thought occurred to him. He shifted restlessly. He was a man who made himself uncomfortable with his own thoughts. He began to justify himself. "She never gave me a chance. Just once. How could she know?"

"I was too shy and scared.

"She let me go-bang. She went and got that other man. Right away-bang-the next day she did it.

"I wonder if he suspected, if she told him?

- I bet not.

"Maybe she did it.

- Ah, enough of this.

There was a workers' strike in a North Carolina factory town, and it wasn't just any strike. It was a communist strike, and rumors of it had been spreading across the South for two or three weeks. "What do you think of this... it's in Birchfield, North Carolina... actually. These communists have come to the South now. It's terrible."

A shudder ran through the South. This was Red's challenge. The strike took place in the town of Birchfield, North Carolina, a river town nestled in the hills deep in North Carolina, not far from the South Carolina line. There was a large cotton mill there... the Birch Mill, they called it... where the strike began.

Before that, there had been a strike at the Langdon factories in Langdon, Georgia, and Red Oliver had been involved. What he'd done there, he felt, wasn't very pleasant. He was ashamed to think about it. His thoughts were like pins pricking him. "I was rotten," he muttered to himself, "rotten."

There were strikes in several southern cotton-processing towns, strikes breaking out suddenly, uprisings from below... Elizabeth Tone, Tennessee, Marion, North Carolina, Danville, Virginia.

Then one in Langdon, Georgia.

Red Oliver was in that strike; he got involved in it.

It happened like a sudden flash - a strange, unexpected thing.

He was in it.

He wasn't there.

He was.

He wasn't.

Now he sat in another place, on the outskirts of another city, in a strikers' camp, leaning his back against a tree, and thought.

Thoughts. Thoughts.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. More thoughts.

"Well, why not let yourself think then? Why not try to come face to face with yourself? I have all night. I have plenty of time to think."

Red wanted the woman he'd brought to camp-a tall, thin woman, half factory worker, half farmer-to wish she'd left him lying on the camp planks and gone to sleep. It would have been nice if she'd been the kind of woman who could talk.

She could stay with him outside the camp, at any rate, for an hour or two. They could stay above the camp on the dark path leading through the hills.

He wished he could be more of a woman's man himself, and for a few minutes he sat again, lost in feminine thoughts. There was a guy in college who said, "You were dating him-he seemed preoccupied-he was witty-he had thoughts about women's desires-he said, 'I had a lot of time to think-I was in bed with a girl. Why did you talk to me? You pulled me out of her bed. God, she was hot.'

Red began to do it. For a moment, he let his imagination go. He'd lost with the Langdon woman, Ethel Long, but he'd won another. He held her, imagining it. He began to kiss her.

His body was pressed against hers. "Stop it," he told himself. When he reached the camp with the new woman he had been with that night, to the outskirts of the camp... they were then on a path in the forest, not far from the field where the camp was set up... ...they stopped together on the path at the edge of the field.

She had already told him who she was, and thought she knew who he was. She had mistaken him a few miles away, over the hills, at the back of a small hut on a side road, when she first saw him.

She thought he was something he wasn't. He let her thoughts continue. He wished he hadn't.

*

She thought he, Red Oliver, was a communist traveling to Birchfield to help with the strike. Red smiled, thinking he'd forgotten the chill of the night and the discomfort of sitting under a tree at the edge of the camp. A paved road ran in front of and below the small camp, and just before the camp, a bridge spanned a fairly wide river. It was a steel bridge, and a paved road crossed it and led into the town of Birchfield.

The Birchfield Mill, where the strike was called, was located across the river from the strikers' camp. Apparently, some sympathizer owned the land and allowed the communists to set up camp there. The soil, being thin and sandy, was of no value for farming.

The mill owners were trying to operate their mill. Red could see long rows of lighted windows. His eyes could discern the outline of a white-painted bridge. Every now and then, a loaded truck would drive along the paved road and cross the bridge, emitting a heavy rumble. The town itself lay beyond the bridge on a rise. He could see the city lights spreading across the river.

His thoughts were on the woman who had brought him to the camp. She worked in a cotton mill in Birchfield and was in the habit of going home to her father's farm on weekends. He had found out. Exhausted from a long week of work at the mill, she nevertheless set out for home on Saturday afternoon, walking through the hills.

Her people were growing old and weak. There, in a small log cabin, hidden in a hollow among the hills, sat a frail old man and an old woman. They were illiterate mountain people. Red caught a glimpse of the old people after the woman stumbled upon him in the forest. He entered a small log barn near the mountain house, and the old mother entered the barn while her daughter was milking a cow. He saw the father sitting on the porch in front of the house. He was a tall, hunched-over old man, his figure very similar to his daughter's.

At home, the two old people's daughter was busy with something over the weekend. Red had the feeling she was flying around, giving the old people a rest. He imagined her cooking, cleaning the house, milking the cow, working in the small back garden, making butter, and keeping everything in order for another week away from home. It was true that much of what Red had learned about her was fictitious. Admiration welled up within him. "What a woman," he thought. After all, she wasn't much older than him. Of course, she wasn't much older than Ethel Long of Langdon.

When she first saw Red, it was late Sunday night. She immediately assumed he was someone he wasn't.

Communist.

Late Sunday evening, she went into the woods above the house to get the family cow. To get it, she had to go through the woods to where the mountain pasture was. She went there. She picked up the cow and walked along an overgrown forest road to where she saw Red. He must have entered the woods after she passed through the first time and before she returned. He was sitting on a log in a small open space. When he saw her, he stood up and faced her.

She wasn't scared.

The thought came to her quickly. "You're not the guy they're looking for, are you?" she asked.

"WHO?"

"The law... the law was here. Aren't you the communist they're looking for on the air?

She had an instinct that, as Red had already discovered, was common to most poor people in America. The law in America was something that could be considered unfair to the poor. You had to follow the law. If you were poor, it got you. It lied about you. If you had problems, it mocked you. The law was your enemy.

Red didn't answer the woman for a moment. He had to think quickly. What did she mean? "Are you a communist?" she asked again, alarmed. "The law is looking for you."

Why did he answer that way?

"A communist?" he asked again, looking at her intently.

And suddenly-in the blink of an eye-he understood, he understood. He made a quick decision.

"It was that man," he thought. That day, a traveling salesman gave him a ride on the road to Birchfield, and something happened.

There was talk. The traveler began talking about the communists leading the strike in Birchfield, and as Red listened, he suddenly became angry.

The man in the car was a fat man, a salesman. He'd picked Red up on the road. He spoke freely, cursing the communist who dared to come to a southern city and lead a strike. They were all, he said, filthy snakes who should be hanged from the nearest tree. They wanted to put blacks on an equal footing with whites. The fat traveler was just such a man: he spoke incoherently, cursing as he did so.

Before getting to the Communist topic, he bragged. Perhaps he chose Red so he would have someone to brag to. The previous Saturday, he said, he'd been in another town down the road, about fifty miles back, another industrial town, a mill town, and gotten drunk with a man. He and a townsman had two women. They were married, he bragged. The husband of the woman he was with was a store clerk. The man had to work late on Saturday night. He couldn't look after his wife, so the clerk and a man he knew in town put her and another woman in a car and drove out of town. The man he was with, he said, was a town merchant. They managed to get half the women drunk. The salesman kept bragging to Red... he said he had found a woman... she tried to scare him away, but he dragged her into the room and closed the door... he made her come to him.... "They can't mess with me," he said... and then suddenly he began cursing the Communists who were leading the strike in Birchfield. "They are nothing but cattle," he said. "They have the nerve to come South. We will straighten them out," he said. He went on talking like this, and then suddenly he became suspicious of Red. Perhaps Red's eyes gave him away. "Tell me," the man suddenly cried out... they were driving at that moment on a paved road and were approaching the town of Birchfield... the road was deserted... "Tell me," said the salesman, suddenly stopping the car. Red began to hate this man. He didn't care what happened. His eyes gave him away. The man in the car asked the same question that the woman with the cow in the woods later asked.

"Aren't you one of them, guys?"

"And what?"

"One of those damned communists."

"Yes." Red said this calmly and quietly enough.

A sudden impulse came to him. It would be so much fun to scare the fat salesman in his car. Trying to stop the car suddenly, he almost drove into a ditch. His hands began to shake violently.

He sat in the car, his thick hands on the steering wheel, and looked at Red.

"What, you're not one of them... you're playing dumb." Red looked at him intently. Little clumps of white drool were gathering on the man's lips. His lips were thick. Red had an almost uncontrollable urge to punch the man in the face. The man's fear grew. After all, Red was young and strong.

"What? What?" The words came out of the man's lips in shaky, choppy bursts.

"Are you airing it out?"

"Yes," Red said again.

He got out of the car slowly. He knew the man wouldn't dare order him to leave. He had a small, worn bag with a rope that he could sling over his shoulder while driving down the road, and it lay on his lap. The fat man in the car was pale now. His hands fumbled, trying to get the car started. It started with a jerk, ran two or three feet, and then stalled. In his anxiety, he killed the engine. The car hung on the edge of the ditch.

Then he started the car, and Red, standing at the edge of the road... an impulse came to him. He had a burning desire to frighten this man even more. There was a stone lying by the road, quite a large one. He picked it up and, dropping his bag, ran toward the man in the car. "Watch out," he shouted. His voice carried across the surrounding fields and along the empty road. The man managed to drive away, the car darting wildly from one side of the road to the other. It disappeared over the hill.

"So," thought Red, standing in the woods with the factory worker, "so it was him, that guy." For two or three hours after leaving the man in the car, he wandered aimlessly along the sandy country road at the foot of the mountain. He left the main road to Birchfield after the salesman had driven away and took a side road. He suddenly remembered that where the side road he was on exited the main road, there was a small, unpainted house. A country woman, the wife of some poor white tenant farmer, sat barefoot on the porch in front of the house. The man he had frightened on the road would surely have driven to Birchfield, crossing the bridge in front of the Communist camp. He would have reported the incident to the police. "God knows what kind of story he'll tell," thought Red. "I bet he'd make himself out to be some kind of hero. He'd brag."

"And so" - as he wandered along a country road... the road followed a winding stream, crossing and crossing it... he was excited about the incident on the road, but the excitement gradually passed... to be sure that he never intended to hit the man in the car with a stone... "and so."

And yet he hated this man with a sudden, new, furious hatred. Afterward, he was exhausted, a strange emotional cyclone passed through him, leaving him, like the salesman in the car, weak and trembling.

He turned off the little road he was following and went into the woods, wandered around there for about an hour, lying on his back under a tree, and then found a deep spot in a stream, in a field of laurel bushes, and, undressing, bathed in the cold water.

Then he put on a clean shirt, walked along the road, and climbed the hillside into the woods, where a woman with a cow found him. The incident on the road happened around three o'clock. It was five or six o'clock when the woman stumbled upon him. The year was drawing to a close, and darkness was falling early, and all this time, while he wandered through the woods looking for a place to swim, he was pursued by the guards. They would have learned from the woman at the crossroads where he had gone. Along the way, they would have asked questions. They would have asked about him-about the crazy Communist who had suddenly gone berserk-about the man who had attacked law-abiding citizens on the highway, about the man who had suddenly become dangerous and resembled a rabid dog. The officers, "the law," as the woman in the woods had called them, would have a story to tell. He, Red, had attacked the man who was giving him a ride. "What do you think about that?" A respectable traveling salesman who picked him up on the road tried to kill the man.

Red, standing at his place near the communist camp, suddenly remembered standing later with a woman driving a cow through the forest, watching her in the dim evening light. While he was bathing in a stream, he heard voices on the nearby road. The spot he'd found for swimming was just off the road, but between the stream and the road grew a thicket of laurels. He was half-dressed, but he dropped to the ground to let a car pass. The men in the car were talking. "Hold your gun. He might be hiding here. He's a dangerous son of a bitch," he heard a man say. He couldn't connect the dots. It was a good thing the men hadn't come into the thicket looking for him. "They would have shot me like a dog." It was a new feeling for Red-being hunted. When the woman with the cow told him that the law had just been at the house where she lived and asked if anyone had seen a man like him nearby, Red suddenly trembled with fear. The officers didn't know she was one of the strikers at the Birchfield mill, that she herself was now being called a communist... these poor cotton mill workers had suddenly become dangerous people. The "law" thought she was a farmer.

The officers drove up to the house, shouting loudly, as the woman was just leaving the house to go up the hill to get her cow. "Did you see such and such?" demanded the rough voices. "Somewhere in this country, there's a red-haired communist son of a bitch roaming around. He tried to kill a man on the highway. I think he wanted to kill him and take his car. He's a dangerous man."

The woman they were talking to had lost some of her compatriot's fear and respect for the law. She had experience. There had been several riots since the Communist-organized strike broke out in Birchfield. Red had seen reports of them in Southern newspapers. He already knew this from his experience in Langdon, Georgia, during the strike there-an experience that had driven him to leave Langdon, wander for a time on the road, upset, really trying to get himself together, to come to his senses, as soon as he realized how he felt about the growing labor difficulties in the South and across America, ashamed of what had happened to him during the Langdon strike... he had already learned something of how striking workers had come to regard the law and the newspaper reports of strikes.

They felt that no matter what happened, lies would be told. Their own story would not be told correctly. They realized they could count on the newspapers to change the news in favor of the employers. In Birchheld, attempts were made to disrupt parades and thwart attempts to hold meetings. Since the leaders of the Birchfield strike were communists, the entire community was in revolt. As the strike continued, the hostility between the townspeople and the strikers grew.

Crowds of temporarily sworn-in sheriff's deputies, mostly tough guys, some brought in from outside, called special detectives, often half-drunk, showed up at the strike meetings. They taunted and threatened the strikers. Speakers were removed from the platforms erected for the meetings. Men and women were beaten.

"Beat the damned Communists if they resist. Kill them." A working woman, a former hill farmer... no doubt very similar to the one who led Red Oliver to the Communist camp... was killed during the Birchfield strike. The woman Red contacted knew her and worked near her at the mill. She knew that the newspapers and the townspeople of Birchfield had not told the true story of what had happened.

The newspapers simply reported that there had been a strike and that a woman had been killed. The former farmer who had become Red's friend knew this. She knew what had happened. There had been no riot.

The murdered woman had a special talent. She was a songwriter. She wrote songs about the lives of poor white people-men, women, and children-who worked in the cotton mills and fields of the South. There were songs she wrote about the machines in the cotton mills, about speeding up the mills, about women and children contracting tuberculosis while working in the cotton mills. She resembled a woman named Doris, whom Red Oliver knew at the Langdon sawmill and whom he once heard singing with other mill workers on a Sunday afternoon while he lay in the tall weeds by the railroad tracks. The songwriter at the Birchfield mill also wrote songs about girls going to the bathroom in the mill.

Or, like the women at Langdon's mills, they waited for the moment when they could rest during the long mornings and days-a Coca-Cola or something like a candy called "Milky Way." The lives of these trapped people depended on such small moments as a woman cheating a little, going to the restroom to rest, the supervisor watching her, trying to catch her in the act.

Or a woman factory worker squeezing enough money from her meager wages to buy cheap candy for five cents.


Twice a day.


Milky Way.


There were such songs. Undoubtedly, in every factory, every group of workers had its own songbook. Little fragments were collected from a meager and difficult life. Lives were made doubly, a hundred times more touching and real, because a woman, a songwriter, being a genius of sorts, could compose a song from such fragments. This happened wherever people gathered in groups and were crowded together. Factories had their own songs, and prisons had their own.

Red learned of the singer's death in Birchfield not from the newspapers, but from a vagrant at a place he was staying with another young man near Atlanta. On the outskirts of town, near the train stations, there was a small grove of trees where he had once gone with another young man he had met in a freight car. This happened two or three days after he escaped from Langdon.

There, in that place, a man, a young man with clouded eyes... still young, but with a face all covered in spots and bruises, probably from drinking cheap moonshine... the man was talking with several others, also vagabonds and workers left without work.

There was a discussion going on. "You can't go to work at Birchfield," the young man said furiously, his eyes clouded. "Yeah, damn it, I've been there. If you go there, they'll take you for a scab," he said. "I thought I'd do it. By God, I did it. I thought I'd become a scab.

The man in the hobo den was a bitter and damaged man. He was a drunk. There he was, sitting in the hobo den, "The Jungle," as they called it. He didn't mind being the guy who bullied hitters in Birchfield. He had no principles. Anyway, he didn't want to work, he said with an unpleasant laugh. He was simply broke. He wanted something to drink.

He described his experience. "I didn't have a cent, and I was just obsessed with it," he said. "You know. I couldn't stand it." Perhaps the man didn't want alcohol. Red guessed as much. He could have been a drug addict. The man's hands twitched as he sat on the jungle floor, talking to other drifters.

Someone told him he could find work in Birchfield, so he went there. He cursed furiously as he told the story. "I'm a bastard, I couldn't do it," he said. He told the story of the singing woman killed in Birchfield. To Red, it was a simple and touching tale. The songwriter, a former hill farmer now working in a mill, resembled the cow-driving woman who found Red in the woods. The two women knew each other, having worked nearby at the mill. Red didn't know this when he heard the bleary-eyed young man tell the story in the jungle of drifters.

This singing and ballad-writing worker was sent along with several other women and girls... they stood together on a truck... they were sent through the streets of Birchfield with instructions to stop on the crowded streets and sing their songs. This scheme was devised by one of the Communist leaders. He managed to get them a truck, a cheap Ford truck belonging to one of the strikers. The Communist leaders were on guard. They knew how to create problems. The Communist leaders devised schemes to keep the strikers busy in the strike camp.

"Beware the enemy, capitalism. Fight it with all your might. Keep it worried. Frighten it. Remember, you are fighting for the minds of the people, for the imagination of the people."

The Communists, in the eyes of people like Red Oliver, were also unscrupulous. They seemed to be willing to send people to their deaths. They were in the South, leading a strike. It was their chance. They seized it. There was something tougher about them, more unprincipled, more determined... they were different from the old American labor leaders.

Red Oliver had a chance to catch a glimpse of the old-style union leaders. One of them had come to Langdon when the strike began. He was in favor of what he called "conferences" with the bosses, discussing everything that was going on. He wanted the strikers to remain peaceful, constantly pleading with them to maintain the peace. He kept talking about labor sitting at the council table with the bosses... "with capitalism," as the communists would say.

Talk. Talk.

Bunk.

Perhaps that was it. Red didn't know. He was a man seeking a new world. The world he had suddenly, almost by accident, found himself immersed in was new and strange. After all, it might be a truly new world, just beginning to emerge in America.

New words, new ideas, were emerging, striking people's consciousness. The very words troubled Red. "Communism, socialism, bourgeoisie, capitalism, Karl Marx." The bitter, long struggle that was about to take place... war... that's what it would be... between those who had and those who couldn't have... was creating new words for itself. Words were flying to America from Europe, from Russia. All sorts of strange new relationships would arise in people's lives... new relationships would be created, they would have to be created. In the end, every man and woman, even children, would have to take one side or the other.

"I won't. I'll stay here, on the sidelines. I'll watch, watch, and listen."

"Ha! You will, won't you? Well, you can't.

"Communists are the only people who understand that war is war," Red sometimes thought. "They'll gain by it. If anything, they'll gain in determination. They'll be real leaders. This is a soft age. Men must stop being soft." As for Red Oliver... he was like thousands of young Americans... he'd been exposed to enough of Communism, to its philosophy, to be frightened. He was frightened and fascinated at the same time. He could give in at any moment and become a Communist. He knew it. His transition from the Langdon strike to the Birchfield strike was like a moth to a flame. He wanted to go. He didn't want to go.

He could see all this as pure, brutal cruelty... for example, the communist leader in Birchfield sent a singing woman out into the streets of Birchfield, knowing how the town felt, at a time when the town was agitated, agitated. ... People were supposed to be most cruel when they were most afraid. Cruelty to man is rooted in this-in fear.

Sending the singing women from the strike camp into town, knowing... as the communist leaders knew... that they might be killed... was that a cruel, needless act of cruelty? One of the women, a singer, was killed. This was the story told by a dazed young man whom Red saw in the wandering jungle and to whom he stood and listened.

A truck carrying singing women left the strikers' camp for the city. It was midday, and the streets were packed. Riots had broken out in the city the day before. The strikers attempted to hold a parade, and a crowd of sheriff's deputies tried to stop them.

Some of the strikers-former mountain men-were armed. There was gunfire. A bleary-eyed man said two or three sheriff's deputies tried to stop a truckload of singing women. Besides their own ballads, they were singing another song taught to them by the Communists. There was no way on earth the women in the truck knew what Communism was, what Communism demanded, what Communists stood for. "Perhaps it's a great healing philosophy," Red Oliver sometimes thought. He began to wonder about it. He didn't know. He was puzzled and uncertain.

Two or three sheriff's deputies run out onto the crowded street to try to stop a truck loaded with singing female workers. The communists have taught them a new song.


Arise, prisoners of hunger,

Arise, wretched of the land,

For justice thunders with condemnation.

A better world is already being born.


No chains of tradition will bind us anymore.

Rise up, slaves, enslaved no more.

The world will rise on new foundations.

You were nothing, you will be everything.


There was no way the singers understood the meaning of the song they were being taught to sing. It contained words they had never heard before-"condemnation"-"tradition"-"chains of tradition"-"enslaved"-"no more enslaved"-but there was more to words than precise meaning. Words have a life of their own. They have relationships with one another. Words are building blocks from which dreams can be constructed. There was dignity in the song the workers sang in the truck. The voices rang out with a new boldness. They echoed through the crowded streets of the North Carolina industrial city. The smell of gasoline, the clatter of truck wheels, honking car horns, the rushing, strangely powerless modern American crowd.

The truck was halfway down the block and continued on its way. The crowd in the streets watched. Lawyers, doctors, merchants, beggars, and thieves stood silently on the streets, their mouths slightly open. A deputy sheriff ran out into the street, accompanied by two other deputy sheriffs. A hand went up.

"Stop."

Another deputy sheriff came running.

"Stop."

The male truck driver-a factory worker, a truck driver-didn't stop. The words flew back and forth. "Go to hell." The truck driver was inspired by the song. He was a simple worker in a cotton mill. The truck stood in the middle of the block. Other cars and trucks moved forward. "I am an American citizen." It was like St. Paul saying, "I am a Roman." What right did he, a deputy sheriff, a big idiot, have to stop an American? "For justice thunders with condemnation," the women continued to sing.

Someone fired a shot. Afterward, the newspapers reported a riot. Perhaps the deputy sheriff simply wanted to scare the truck driver. The shot was heard around the world. Well, not quite. The lead singer, who also happened to be a ballad writer, fell dead in the truck.


Twice a day.

Milky Way.

Twice a day.


Resting in the toilet.

Resting in the toilet.


The tramp Red Oliver had heard in the tramp jungle turned blue with anger. Perhaps, after all, shots like these had been heard here and there, at factory gates, at mine entrances, at factory pickets-deputies-the law-protection of property... perhaps they were echoing.

After that, the tramp never got a job at Birchfield. He said he saw a murder. Perhaps he was lying. He said he was standing on the street, saw a murder, and that it was cold-blooded and premeditated. This gave him a sudden thirst for new, even more obscene words-ugly words that spilled from blue, unshaven lips.

Could such a man, after such a filthy and ugly life, finally find true feeling? "Bastards, dirty sons of bitches," he screamed. "Before I work for them! Stinking horseflies!

The jungle wanderer was still in a half-mad rage when Red overheard him. Perhaps such a man couldn't be trusted-he was filled with anger. Perhaps he simply craved, with a deep, trembling hunger, alcohol or drugs.

OceanofPDF.com

2


T H E WOMAN With a cow on a hill in the woods in North Carolina on a Sunday evening in November received Red Oliver. He was not what the "law" that had just driven up to the house below said he was-a dangerous madman running around the country, wanting to kill people. That day-it was getting dark fast on the hill-she accepted him for who he said he was. He said he was a Communist. It was a lie. She didn't know that. Communist had come to mean something specific to her. When the strike happened in Birchfield, there were Communists there. They appeared suddenly. There were two young men from somewhere in the North and a young woman. The people in Birchfield reported, as the Birchfield newspaper reported, that one of them, the young woman among them, was Jewish, and the others were foreigners and Yankees. At least they weren't foreigners. At least two of the young men were Americans. They arrived in Birchfield just after the strike began and took charge at once.

They knew how. It was something. They organized the disorganized workers, taught them to sing songs, found leaders, songwriters, and courageous men among them. They taught them to march shoulder to shoulder. When strikers were driven out of their homes in the mill village near the mill, the young communist leaders somehow managed to get permission to set up camp on a vacant lot nearby. The land belonged to an old man from Birchfield who knew nothing about communism. He was a stubborn old man. People in Birchfield went and threatened him. He became more stubborn. Driving west out of Birchfield, you went down half a hill past the mill, and then you had to follow the highway across a bridge over the river, and you were at the camp. From the camp, also located on a hill, you could see everything that was happening around the mill and in the mill yard. The young communist leaders somehow managed to deliver a few small tents, and food supplies also appeared. Many poor small farmers from the hills around Birchfield, ignorant of communism, came to the camp at night with provisions. They brought beans and pork. They divided what they had. The young communist leaders managed to organize the strikers into a small army.

There was something else. Many of the workers at the Birchfield mill had been on strike before. They belonged to unions organized in the factories. The union suddenly became powerful. The strike began, and a moment of exaltation arrived. It might last two or three weeks. Then the strike and the union faded away. The workers knew about the old unions. They talked, and the woman Red Oliver met on the hill Sunday evening-her name was Molly Seabright-overheard the conversation.

It was always the same-talk of a sale. A worker paced up and down in front of a group of other workers. He held his hand behind him, palm up, and waved it back and forth. His lips curled unpleasantly. "Unions, unions," he shouted, laughing bitterly. And so it was. The mill workers found that life was pressing harder and harder on them. In good times, they managed to get along, but then, always, after a few years of good times, bad times came.

The factories suddenly slowed down, and the workers began shaking their heads. A worker went home at night. He took his wife aside.

He whispered. "It's coming," he said. What created the good times and the bad times? Molly Seabright didn't know. Workers at the factory began to be laid off. The less strong and vigilant lost their jobs.

There were wage cuts and a speeding up of piecework wages. They were told that "hard times had come."

Maybe you could have survived it. Most of the workers at the Birchfield mill knew hard times. They were born poor. "Hard times," said an elderly woman, Molly Seabright, "when have we ever known good times?"

You saw the men and women laid off at the mill. You knew what it meant to them. Many of the workers had children. A new cruelty seemed to have entered the foreman and the boss. Perhaps they were trying to protect themselves. They had to be cruel. They began to speak to you in a new way. You were ordered around, harshly, sharply. Your job was changed. You were not consulted when you were given a new job. Just a few months ago, when times were good, you and all the other workers were treated differently. The management was even more attentive. There was a different quality in the voices that addressed you. "Well, we need you. There is money to be made from your labor now." Molly Seabright, although she was only twenty-five and had worked at the mill for ten years, noticed many small things. The people of Birchfield, where she sometimes went at night with other girls to see movies, or sometimes just to look at the store windows, thought she and other girls like her were stupid, but she wasn't as stupid as they thought. She had feelings, too, and those feelings penetrated her mind. The mill foremen-often young men who had come from the workforce-would even bother to ask the worker's name in good times. "Miss Molly," they would say. "Miss Molly, do this-or Miss Molly, do that." She, being a good worker, a quick and efficient one, sometimes-in good times, when workers were scarce-she was even called "Miss Seabright." The young foremen smiled when they talked to her.

There was also the story of Miss Molly Seabright. Red Oliver never knew her story. She had once been an eighteen-year-old woman... she had been then a tall, slender, well-developed young woman... once one of the young foremen at the mill...

She herself hardly knew how it had happened. She was working the night shift at the mill. There was something strange, a little strange, about working the night shift. You worked the same number of hours as you did on the day shift. You became more tired and nervous. Molly would never have told anyone clearly what had happened to her.

She'd never had a man, a lover. She didn't know why. There was a kind of reserve in her manner, a quiet dignity. At the mill and in the hills where her father and mother lived, there were two or three young men who began to notice her. They wanted to, but decided against it. Even then, as a young woman just emerging from girlhood, she felt a responsibility to her parents.

There was a young mountain man, a rough fellow, a fighter, who attracted her. For a time, she herself was attracted. He was one of a large family of boys who lived in a mountain hut a mile from her own home, a tall, lean, strong young man with a long jaw.

He didn't like working hard, and he drank heavily. She knew this. He also made and sold liquor. Most of the young mountain men did. He was an excellent hunter and could kill more squirrels and rabbits in a day than any other young man in the mountains. He caught a woodchuck with his hands. The woodchuck was a rough-haired, ferocious little creature about the size of a young dog. The mountain men ate the woodchucks. They were considered a delicacy. If you knew how to remove a certain gland from the woodchuck, a gland that, if left on, gave the meat a bitter taste, the meat would become sweet. The young mountain man brought such delicacies to Molly Sebright's mother. He killed young raccoons and rabbits and brought them to her. He always brought them at the end of the week, when he knew Molly would return from the mill.

He hung around, talking to Molly's father, who didn't like him. The father was afraid of this man. One Sunday evening, Molly went to church with him, and on the way home, suddenly, on a dark road, on a dark stretch of road where there were no houses nearby... he was drinking mountain moonshine... he didn't go with her to the mountain church, but stayed outside with other young men... on the way home, in a lonely place on the road, he suddenly attacked her.

There had been no preliminary lovemaking. Perhaps he thought she... he was a fine young man for animals, both domestic and tame... he might also have thought she was just a small animal. He tried to throw her to the ground, but he had drunk too much. He was strong enough, but not fast enough. The drinks had confused him. If he hadn't been a little drunk... they walked down the road in silence... he wasn't one to talk much... when suddenly he stopped and said to her rudely: "So," he said... "Come on, I'm going."

He jumped on her and put one hand on her shoulder. He tore her dress. He tried to throw her to the ground.

Perhaps he thought she was just another little animal. Molly vaguely understood. If he were a man she cared about enough, he would walk slowly with her.

He could break a young colt practically by himself. He was the best man in the mountains at hunting wild young foals. People said, "Within a week, he could make the wildest colt on the hill follow him like a kitten." Molly saw his face for a moment, pressed against her own, the strange, determined, and terrible look in his eyes.

She managed to escape. She climbed over a low fence. If he hadn't been a little drunk... He fell as he climbed over the fence. She had to run across a field and a stream in her best shoes and her best Sunday dress. She couldn't afford it. She ran through the bushes, through a strip of woods. She didn't know how she managed to escape. She never knew she could run so fast. He was next to her. He didn't say a word. He followed her all the way to the door of her father's house, but she managed to get through the door into the house and close the door in his face again.

She told a lie. Her father and mother were in bed. "What is this?" Molly's mother asked her that evening, sitting up in bed. The small mountain cabin had only one large room downstairs and a small loft upstairs. Molly slept there. To get to her bed, she had to climb a ladder. Her bed was next to a small window under the roof. Her father and mother slept on a bed in the corner of the large room downstairs, where they all ate and sat during the day. Her father was also awake.

"It's all right, Ma," she told her mother that evening. Her mother was almost an old woman. Her father and mother were old people, both married before, living somewhere in another mountain village, and both having lost their first companions. They didn't marry until they were very old, and then moved to a small cabin on the farm where Molly was born. She never saw their other children. Her father liked to joke. He'd tell people, "My wife has four children, I have five children, and together we have ten children. Solve this riddle if you can," he said.

"It's nothing, Mom," Molly Seabright told her mother the night she was attacked by a young mountain man. "I was scared," she said. "Something in the yard scared me."

"I think it was a strange dog." That was her way. She didn"t tell anyone what had happened to her. She went upstairs to her small half-room, shaking all over, and through the window she saw the young man standing in the yard, trying to attack her. He was standing near her father"s bee gum in the yard, looking at the window of her room. The moon had risen, and she could see his face. There was an angry, puzzled look in his eyes that increased her fear. Perhaps she had just imagined it. How could she have seen his eyes down there? She couldn"t understand why she had ever let him walk with her, why she had gone to church with him. She wanted to show the other girls from the mountain community that she, too, could have a man. That must have been why she did it. She would have had problems with him later-she knew it. Just a week after this happened, he got into a fight with another young mountaineer, quarreled over the ownership of a mountain still, shot the man, and was forced to go into hiding. He couldn't return, didn't dare. She never saw him again.

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3


I N A COTTON MILL AT NIGHT. You work there. There is a roar of sound-a continuous roar-now low, now high-big sounds... little sounds. There is singing, shouting, talking. There is whispering. There is laughter. The thread laughs. It whispers. It runs softly and quickly. It jumps. The thread is like a young goat on the moonlit mountains. The thread is like a small hairy snake escaping into a hole. It runs softly and quickly. Steel can laugh. It can scream. The looms in the cotton mill are like baby elephants playing with mother elephants in the forest. Who understands life that is not alive? A river running down a hill, over rocks, through a quiet clearing, can make you love it. Hills and fields can win your love, as can steel turned into a machine. Machines dance. They dance on their iron legs. They sing, whisper, moan, laugh. Sometimes the sight and sound of everything going on at the mill makes your head spin. It's worse at night. It's better at night, wilder and more interesting. It tires you out even more.

The light in the cotton mill at night was a cold blue. Molly Seabright worked in the loom room of the Birchfield mill. She was a weaver. She had been there a long time and could only remember the times before she worked. She remembered, sometimes very vividly, days spent with her father and mother in the fields on the hillsides. She remembered little creatures crawling, crawling, and buzzing in the grass, a squirrel running up a tree trunk. Her father saved bee gum. She remembered the surprise and pain when a bee stung her, her father's ride on the back of a cow (he walked beside the cow holding her), her father's quarrel with a man on the road, a night windy and heavy with rain, her mother sick in bed, a calf suddenly running madly across the field-Molly laughed so awkwardly.

One day, when she was still a child, she came to Birchfield with her mother from over the hills. That year, her father was half ill and unable to work much, and the mountain farm had suffered a drought and crop failure. That year, the mill was thriving and needed workers. The mill sent out small printed brochures throughout the hills, telling the mountain dwellers how wonderful it was to be in the town, in the mill village. The wages offered seemed high to the mountaineers, and the Seabrights' cow died. Then the roof of the house they lived in began to leak. They needed a new roof or repairs.

That spring, the mother, already old, moved over the hills to Birchfield and in the fall sent her daughter to work at the mill. She didn't want to. Mollie was so young then that she had to lie about her age. The mill workers knew she was lying. There were many children at the mill who lied about their ages. It was because of the law. The mother thought, "I won't let her stay." The mother walked past the mill office on her way to work. She had a room with her family in the mill village. She saw stenographers there. She thought, "I'll get my daughter an education. She'll be a stenographer. She'll be a stenographer. She'll be a stenographer." The mother thought, "We'll find some money to buy a new cow and fix the roof, and then we'll go home." The mother went back to the hill farm, and Mollie Seabright stayed behind.

She's already gotten used to life at the mill. The young girl wants to have some money of her own. She wants new dresses and new shoes. She wants silk stockings. There are movies in town.

Being at the mill is a kind of thrill. After a few years, Molly was transferred to the night shift. The looms in the mill's weaving room stood in long rows. They're like that in all factories. All mills are similar in many ways. Some are larger than others and more efficient. Molly's mill was a good one.

It was nice to be at Birchfield Mill. Sometimes Molly thought... her thoughts were vague... sometimes she felt, "How nice to be here."

There were even thoughts of making fabric-good thoughts. Fabric for dresses for many women-shirts for many men. Sheets for beds. Pillowcases for beds. People lie in beds. Lovers lie together in beds. She thought about this and blushed.

Fabric for banners flying in the sky.

Why can't we in America-machine men-machine age-why can't we make it sacred-ceremony-joy in it-laughter in the mills-song in the mills-new churches-new sacred places-cloth made for men to wear?

Molly certainly didn't think such thoughts. None of the mill workers did. And yet the thoughts were there, in the mill rooms, wanting to fly into the people. The thoughts were like birds hovering above the rooms, waiting to land in the people. We must take it. It's ours. It must be ours-us, the workers. Someday we'll have to take it back from the small changers, the cheats, the liars. Someday we will. We will rise-we will sing-we will work-we will sing with the steel-we will sing with the thread-we will sing and dance with the machines-a new day will come-a new religion-a new life will come.

Year after year, as machines in America became more and more efficient, the number of looms a single weaver tended increased. A weaver might have twenty looms, then thirty, the next year forty, then even sixty or seventy. The looms became increasingly automated, increasingly independent of the weavers. They seemed to have a life of their own. The looms were outside the weavers' lives, seeming more and more external with each passing year. It was strange. Sometimes at night, it evoked a strange feeling.

The difficulty was that the looms required workers-at least several workers. The difficulty was that the thread actually broke. If it weren't for the thread's tendency to break, there would be no need for weavers at all. All the ingenuity of the clever people who created the machines was used to develop ever more efficient ways to process the thread, ever faster. To make it more flexible, it was kept slightly damp. From somewhere above, a spray of mist-a fine mist-dropped down over the flying thread.

The long summer nights in North Carolina were hot in the mills. You were sweating. Your clothes were wet. Your hair was wet. The fine lint floating in the air stuck to your hair. Around town, they called you "linthead." They did it to insult you. It was said with contempt. They hated you in town, and you hated them. The nights were long. They seemed endless. A cold blue light from somewhere above filtered through the fine lint floating in the air. Sometimes you got strange headaches. The looms you tended danced more and more madly.

The foreman in the room where Molly worked had an idea. He attached a small colored card to the top of each loom, attached to a wire. The cards were blue, yellow, orange, gold, green, red, white, and black. The little colored cards danced in the air. This was done so that from a distance, you could tell when a thread broke in one of the looms and it stopped. The looms automatically stopped when a thread broke. You didn't dare let them stop. You had to run fast, sometimes far away. Sometimes several looms stopped at once. Several colored cards stopped dancing. You had to run back and forth quickly. You had to quickly tie up the broken threads. You can't let your loom stop for too long. You'll get fired. You'll lose your job.

Here comes the dancing. Watch it closely. Watch. Watch.

Rumble. Rumble. What racket! There's a dance-a mad, jerky dance-a dance on the loom. At night, the light tires the eyes. Molly's eyes are tired from the dancing of the colored cards. It's nice at night in the loom room of the mill. Strange. It makes you feel strange. You're in a world far from any other world. You're in a world of flying lights, flying machines, flying threads, flying colors. Nice. It's terrible.

The looms in the weaving mill had hard iron legs. Inside each loom, shuttles flew back and forth at lightning speed. It was impossible to follow the flight of the flying shuttles with your eyes. The shuttles were like shadows-flying, flying, flying. "What"s wrong with me?" Molly Seabright sometimes said to herself. "I think there are looms in my head." Everything in the room twitched. It was jerky. You have to be careful or the idiots will get you. Molly sometimes got twitches when she tried to sleep during the day-when she worked at night-after a long night at the mill. She woke abruptly when she tried to sleep. The loom in the mill was still in her memory. It was there. She could see it. She felt it.

The thread is the blood flowing through the fabric. The thread is the little nerves running through the fabric. The thread is the thin stream of blood running through the fabric. The fabric creates a little flying stream. When a thread breaks in a loom, the loom is damaged. It stops dancing. It seems to jump off the floor, as if it has been stabbed, stabbed, or shot-like the singing woman shot in a truck on the streets of Birchfield when the strike began. A song, and then suddenly there is no song. The looms at the mill danced at night in the cold blue light. In the mill in Birchfield, they made colorful cloth. There was blue thread, red thread, and white thread. There was always endless movement. Little hands and little fingers worked inside the looms. The thread flew and flew. It flew off small bobbins mounted in cylinders on the looms. In another large room of the factory, bobbins were filled... thread was made and bobbins were filled.

There, a thread came from somewhere above. It was like a long, thin snake. It never stopped. It came out of tanks, out of pipes, out of steel, out of brass, out of iron.

It writhed. It leaped. It flowed out of the tube onto the bobbin. Women and girls in the spinning room were hit in the head with thread. In the weaving room, there were always tiny streams of blood running down the fabric. Sometimes blue, sometimes white, sometimes red again. Eyes grew tired of looking.

The thing was-Molly was learning this slowly, very slowly-that to know, you had to work in a place like that. People outside didn't know. They couldn't. You felt things. People on the outside didn't know what you felt. To know, you had to work there. You had to be there for long hours, day after day, year after year. You had to be there when you were sick, when you had a headache. A woman working in a mill got... well, you should know how she got it. It was her period. Sometimes it came on suddenly. There was nothing you could do about it. Some people felt like hell when it happened, others didn't. Molly did that sometimes. Sometimes she didn't.

But she must hold on.

If you're an outsider, not a worker, you don't know. The bosses don't know how you feel. Sometimes a supervisor or the plant president drops by. The mill president gives visitors a tour of his mill.

The men, women, and children who work at the mill just stand there. Chances are the threads won't break then. It's just luck. "You see, they don't have to work hard," he says. You hear it. You hate him. You hate the mill patrons. You know how they look at you. You know they despise you.

- Okay, smart guy, you don't know... you can't know. You'd like to give up something. How can they know that the threads are always coming and coming, always dancing, the looms are always dancing... the streaming lights... the roar, the roar?

How could they know? They don't work there. Your legs hurt. They've hurt all night. Your head hurts. Your back hurts. It's your time again. You look around. Anyway, you know. There's Kate, Mary, Grace, and Winnie. Now it's Winnie's time, too. Look at the dark places under her eyes. There's Jim, Fred, and Joe. Joe is falling apart-you know it. He has tuberculosis. You see a small movement-a worker's hand moves toward her back, toward her head, covers her eyes for a moment. You know. You know how much it hurts, because it hurts you.

Sometimes it seems as if the looms in the weaving shed are about to embrace each other. They suddenly become alive. A loom seems to make a strange, sudden leap toward another loom. Molly Seabright thought of the young mountain man who leaped toward her one night on the road.

Molly worked for years in the weaving room of the Birchfield mill, her thoughts confined to her own thoughts. She didn't dare think too much. She didn't want to. The main thing was to keep her attention on the looms and never let it waver. She had become a mother, and the looms were her children.

But she wasn't a mother. Sometimes at night, strange things happened in her head. Strange things happened in her body. After a long time, months of nights, even years of nights, her attention would fixate hour after hour, her body gradually synchronizing with the movements of the machines... There were nights when she was lost. There were nights when it seemed as if Molly Seabright didn't exist. Nothing mattered to her. She was in a strange world of movement. Lights glowed through the fog. Colors danced before her eyes. During the day, she tried to sleep, but there was no rest. The dancing machines remained in her dreams. They continued to dance in her sleep.

If you're a woman and still young... But who knows what a woman wants, what a woman is? So many clever words have been written. People say different things. You want something living to jump toward you, like a loom jumps. You want something specific, approaching you, outside of you. You want this.

You don't know. You do.

The days after long nights at the mill in the hot summer become strange. The days are nightmares. You can't sleep. When you sleep, you can't rest. The nights, when you return to work at the mill, become just hours spent in a strange, unreal world. Both days and nights become unreal to you. "If only that young man on the road that night, if only he had approached me more gently, more gently," she sometimes thought. She didn't want to think about him. He hadn't approached her gently. He had frightened her terribly. She hated him for it.

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RED OLIVER HAD to think. He thought he needed to think. He wanted to think-he thought he wanted to think. There is a kind of hunger in youth. "I should like to understand it all-to feel it all," youth says to itself. After working for a few months in a mill in Langdon, Georgia... being quite energetic... Red occasionally tried to write poetry... after a labor strike in Langdon, an unsuccessful strike... he did not do very well at it... he thought... "Now I will be near the workers"... then finally, when a difficult situation came, he did not... after a visit in early summer to the Bradley farm in Kansas... Neal's speech... then at home, reading radical books... he picked up "The New Republic" and "The Nation"... then Neal sent him "The New Masses"... he thought... "Now is the time to try to think... we must do it... we must try... we young American men must try to do it. "the old ones won't."

He thought: "I must start showing courage, even fight, even be ready to be killed for this... for what?"... he was not sure... "All the same," he thought... .

"Let me find out.

"Let me find out.

"Now I'll follow this path at any cost. If it's communism, then fine. I wonder if the communists will want me," he thought.

"Now I'm brave. Forward!"

Maybe he was brave, maybe he wasn't.

"Now I'm scared. There's too much to learn in life." He didn't know how he would be if it came to the test. "Oh well, let it go," he thought. What did it matter to him? He'd read books, studied at college. Shakespeare. Hamlet. "The world's gone to pieces-the evil that I was born to set it right." He laughed... "ha... Oh, hell... I was tried once and I gave up... smarter and better men than me gave up... but what are you going to do... ...be a professional ballplayer?"... Red could have been like that; he'd had an offer when he was in college... he could have started in the minor leagues and worked his way up... he could have gone to New York and become a bond salesman... other kids in college had done the same.

"Stay at the Langdon mill. Be a traitor to the workers at the mill." He met some of the workers at the Langdon mill, felt close to them. In some strange way, he even loved some of them. People, like that new woman he had stumbled upon in his wanderings... the wanderings had begun out of his insecurity, out of shame for what had happened to him in Langdon, Georgia, during the strike there... the new woman he had found and lied to, saying he was a Communist, implying he was something braver and finer than he was... he had begun to look at Communists that way... maybe he was a romantic and sentimental about them... there were people like that woman, Molly Seabright, at the Langdon mill.

"Meet the bosses at the mill. Be a loser. Grow up. Get rich, maybe someday. Get fat, old, rich, and smug."

Even the few months spent at the mill in Langdon, Georgia, that summer and the previous one, had done something to Red. He felt something many Americans don't, and perhaps never will. "Life had been full of strange accidents. There had been a birth accident. Who could explain it?

What child could say when, where and how he or she would be born?

"Is a child born into a wealthy family or into a middle-class family-lower middle class, upper middle class?... in a big white house on a hill above an American city, or in a town house, or in a coal-mining town... the son or daughter of a millionaire... the son or daughter of a Georgia burglar, the son of a thief, even the son of a murderer... are children even born in prisons?... Are you legitimate or illegitimate?"

People are always talking. They say, "Such and such people are good." They mean that his or her people are rich or well-off.

"By what chance was he or she born like this?"

People are always judging others. There was talk, talk, talk. Children of the rich or well-off... Red had seen plenty of them in college... they had never, in their long lives, really known anything about hunger and uncertainty, year after year of weariness, the helplessness that seeps into the very bones, meager food, cheap, shoddy clothes. Why?

If a worker's mother or child fell ill, the question of a doctor arose... Krasny knew about this... his father was a doctor... doctors also worked for money... sometimes workers' children died like flies. Why not?

"In any case, it creates more jobs for other workers.

"What difference does it make? Are workers who always get their necks kicked, who have always gotten their necks kicked, good people throughout human history?

It all seemed strange and mysterious to Red Oliver. After spending some time with the workers, working with them for a while, he thought they were nice. He couldn't stop thinking about it. There was his own mother-she was a worker too-and she had become strangely religious. She was looked down upon by the wealthier people in his hometown of Langdon. He realized it. She was always alone, always silent, always working or praying. His attempts to get close to her had failed. He knew it. When a crisis came in his life, he fled from her and from his hometown. He didn't discuss it with her. He couldn't. She was too shy and silent, and she made him shy and silent. And yet he knew she was sweet, but deep down, she was damn sweet.

"Oh, damn, it's true. The ones who always get their ass kicked are the nicest people. I wonder why."

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ABOUT THE SUMMER WHEN Molly Seabright worked nights at the Birchfield mill... she had just turned twenty... it was a strange summer for her... That summer she had an experience. For some reason, that summer everything in her body and mind seemed drawn out and slow. There was a weariness within her that she couldn't shake.

The painful times were harder for her. They hurt her even more.

That summer, the machines at the mill seemed to her to become more and more alive. On some days, the strange, fantastical dreams of her days, when she was trying to sleep, would creep into her waking hours.

There were strange desires that frightened her. Sometimes she wanted to throw herself into one of the looms. She wanted to stick her hand or arm into one of the looms... the blood of her own body woven into the fabric she was sewing. It was a fantastic idea, a whim. She knew it. She wanted to ask some of the other women and girls working with her in the room, "Have you ever felt such and such?" She didn't ask. It wasn't her way to talk much.

"Too many women and girls," she thought. "I wish there were more men." In the house where she had been given a room lived two elderly women and three young ones, all mill workers. They all worked all day, and during the day she was home alone. A man had once lived in the house... one of the older women had been married, but he had died. Sometimes she wondered... did men at the mill die easier than women? It seemed there were so many old women here, lonely workers who had once had men. Did she yearn for a man of her own? She didn't know.

Then her mother got sick. The days that summer were hot and dry. All summer long, her mother had to go to the doctor. Every night at the mill, she thought about her sick mother at home. All summer long, her mother had to go to the doctor. Doctors cost money.

Molly wanted to leave the mill. She wished she could. She knew she couldn't. She longed to leave. She wished she could go, as Red Oliver had done when his life was at a crisis, wander through unfamiliar places. She didn't want to be herself. I wish I could step out of my body, she thought. She wished she were more beautiful. She had heard stories of girls... they left their families and their jobs... they went out into the world among men... they sold themselves to men. I don't care. I'd do it too, if I had the chance, she thought sometimes. She wasn't beautiful enough. She sometimes wondered, looking at herself in the mirror in her room... the room she rented in the mill house in the mill village... she looked pretty tired...

"What's the point?" she kept telling herself. She couldn't quit her job. Life would never open up for her. "I bet I'll never stop working at this place," she thought. She felt exhausted and tired all the time.

At night she had strange dreams. She kept dreaming about weaving looms.

The looms came to life. They jumped on her. It was as if they were saying, "Here you are. We want you."

Everything became stranger and stranger to her that summer. She looked at herself in the small mirror that stood in her room, both in the morning when she came home from work, and in the afternoon when she got out of bed to make herself dinner before going to the mill. The days became hot. The house was hot. She stood in her room and looked at herself. She was so tired all summer that she thought she couldn"t go on working, but the strange thing was that sometimes... it surprised her... she couldn"t believe it... sometimes she looked normal. She was even beautiful. She had been beautiful all that summer, but she didn"t know it for sure, couldn"t be sure. Every now and then she thought, "I am beautiful." The thought gave her a small wave of happiness, but most of the time she didn"t feel it for sure. She vaguely felt it, vaguely knew it. It gave her a kind of new happiness.

There were people who knew. Every man who saw her that summer might have known. Perhaps every woman has such a time in her life-her own supreme beauty. Every grass, every bush, every tree in the forest has its time to bloom. Men, better than other women, made Molly understand this. The men who worked with her in the weaving room at Birchfield Mill... there were several men there... weavers... sweepers... men passing through the room stared at her.

There was something about her that made them stare. Her time had come. Painfully. She knew without quite knowing, and the men knew without quite knowing.

She knew they knew. It tempted her. It scared her.

There was a man in her room, a young master, married but with a sick wife. He continued walking beside her. He stopped to talk. "Hello," he said. He approached and stopped. He was embarrassed. Sometimes he even touched her body with his. He didn't do this often. It always seemed to happen completely by accident. He stood there. Then he walked past her. His body touched hers.

It was as if she were telling him, "Don't. Be gentle now. No. Be more gentle." He was gentle.

Sometimes she said these words when he wasn't around, when no one else was around. "I must be going a little crazy," she thought. She discovered she wasn't talking to another person like herself, but to one of her looms.

A thread broke on one of the looms, and she ran to fix it and tie it back on. The loom stood silent. It was quiet. It seemed as if it wanted to jump on her.

"Be gentle," she whispered to him. Sometimes she said these words out loud. The room was always filled with noise. No one could hear.

It was absurd. It was stupid. How could a loom, a thing of steel and iron, be gentle? A loom couldn't. It was a human quality. "Sometimes, maybe... even machines... are absurd. Pull yourself together... If only I could get away from here for a while.

She remembered her childhood on her father's farm. Scenes from her childhood came back to her. Nature could sometimes be gentle. There were gentle days, gentle nights. Was she thinking all this? These were feelings, not thoughts.

Perhaps the young foreman in her room didn't mean to do it. He was a man of the church. He tried not to do it. In the corner of the mill's weaving room was a small storage room. They kept extra supplies there. "Go there," he said to her one evening. His voice was hoarse as he spoke. His eyes kept searching hers. His eyes were like the eyes of a wounded animal. "Rest a little," he said. He said this to her sometimes, when she wasn't very tired. "I'm feeling dizzy," she thought. Things like this happened sometimes in factories, in automobile plants, where modern workers worked on fast, flying, modern machines. A factory worker would suddenly, without warning, go into a phantasm. He would start screaming. This happened more often to men than to women. When a worker behaved like this, he was dangerous. He could hit someone with a tool, kill someone. He could start destroying machines. Some factories and mills had special people, big guys sworn into the police force, assigned to handle such cases. It was like a shell shock in war. A worker would be knocked out by a strong man; he had to be carried out of the mill.

At first, when the foreman was in the room, talking so sweetly, so tenderly to Molly... Molly didn't go to the little room to rest, as he told her, but sometimes, later, she went. There were bales and piles of thread and fabric. There were ruined pieces of fabric. She would lie down on the pile of things and close her eyes.

It was very strange. She could rest there, even get a little sleep sometimes that summer, when she couldn't rest or sleep at home, in her room. It was strange-so close to the flying machines. It seemed better to be near them. He put another worker, an extra woman, at the loom in her place, and she went in there. The mill foreman didn't know.

The other girls in the room knew. They didn't know. They might have guessed, but they pretended not to know. They were perfectly respectable. They said nothing.

He didn't follow her there. When he sent her out... it happened a dozen times that summer... he stayed in the big weaving room or went off to some other part of the mill, and Molly always thought afterwards, after what finally happened: that he'd gone off somewhere after sending her off to her room, struggling with himself. She knew it. She knew he was struggling with himself. She liked him. He's my kind, she thought. She never blamed him.

He wanted to and he didn't want to. Finally, he did. You could enter the small storeroom through the door from the weaving room or by the narrow stairs from the room above, and one day, in the half-darkness, with the door to the weaving room half-open, all the other weavers were standing there, in the half-darkness. The work... so close... the dancing loomed in the weaving room so close... he was silent... he could have been one of the looms... the jumping thread... weaving strong, fine cloth... ...weaving fine cloth... Molly felt strangely tired. She couldn't fight anything. She really didn't want to fight. She was pregnant.

Uncaring and at the same time terribly caring.

He is too. "He"s fine," she thought.

If her mother found out. She never did. Molly was grateful for that.

She managed to lose it. No one ever knew. When she returned home the weekend after, her mother was lying in bed. She tried everything. She climbed into the woods above the house alone, where no one could see her, and ran as fast as she could up and down. It was on the same overgrown forest road where she later saw Red Oliver. She jumped and jumped like looms in a mill. She heard something. She took a large amount of quinine.

She was sick for a week when she lost him, but she had no doctor. She and her mother were in the same bed, but when she learned the doctor was coming, she crawled out of bed and hid in the woods. "He's only going to take the pay," she told her mother. "I don't need him," she said. Then she got better, and it never happened again. That fall, the foreman's wife died, and he left and got another job at another mill, in some other town. He was ashamed. After it happened, he was ashamed to approach her. Sometimes she wondered if he would ever marry again. He was nice, she thought. He was never rough and cruel to the workers in the weaving shop, like most foremen, and he wasn't a smart aleck. He never got gay with you. Would he ever marry again? He never knew what she had to go through when she was like this. She never told him she was like this. She couldn't help but wonder if he would find him a new wife in his new place and what his new wife would be like.

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MOLLY SEABRIGHT, who found young Red Oliver in the woods above her father's house, assumed he was a young Communist going to help the workers during the Birchfield strike. She didn't want her father and mother to know about him or his presence on the farm. She didn't try to explain to them the new doctrines she'd been taught at the strike camp. She couldn't. She couldn't understand them herself. She was full of admiration for the men and women who had joined the strikers and now led them, but she understood neither their words nor their ideas.

For one thing, they always used strange words she'd never heard before: proletariat, bourgeoisie. There was this or that that needed to be "liquidated." You went left or right. It was strange language-big, difficult words. She was emotionally aroused. Vague hopes were alive within her. The strike in Birchfield, which had begun over wages and hours, had suddenly morphed into something else. There was talk of creating a new world, of people like her emerging from the shadow of the mills. A new world was to emerge in which workers would play a vital role. Those who grew food for others, who sewed cloth for people to wear, who built houses for people to live in-these people were suddenly to emerge and step forward. The future was to be in their hands. All this was incomprehensible to Molly, but the ideas the communists who'd talked to her at the Birchfield camp had planted in her head, though perhaps unattainable, were enticing. They made you feel big, real, and strong. There was a certain nobility to the ideas, but you couldn't explain them to your parents. Molly wasn't a talkative person.

And then, too, confusion arose among the workers. Sometimes, when the communist leaders weren't around, they would talk among themselves. "This can't be. This can't be. You? Us?" It was amusement. Fear grew. Uncertainty grew. And yet, fear and uncertainty seemed to unite the workers. They felt isolated-a small island of people, separated from the vast continent of other peoples that was America.

"Could there ever be a world like the one these men and this woman are talking about?" Molly Seabright couldn't believe it, but at the same time, something had happened to her. At times, she felt as if she would die for the men and women who suddenly brought new promise to her life and the lives of the other workers. She tried to think. She was like Red Oliver, struggling with himself. The communist woman who had come to Birchfield with the men was small and dark-haired. She could get up before the workers and talk. Molly admired her and envied her. She wished she could be so different... "If only I had an education and weren't so shy, I'd give it a try," she sometimes thought. The Birchfield strike, the first strike she had ever participated in, brought her many new and strange emotions that she didn't quite understand and couldn't explain to others. Listening to the speakers in the camp, she sometimes suddenly felt big and strong. She joined in singing new songs, full of strange words. She believed in the communist leaders. "They were young and full of courage, full of courage," she thought. Sometimes she thought they had too much courage. The whole town of Birchfield was full of threats against them. When the strikers marched through the streets singing, which they sometimes did, the crowd watching them cursed them. There were hisses, curses, shouts of threats. "Sons of bitches, we'll get you." The Birchfield newspaper ran a cartoon on the front page depicting a snake wrapped around an American flag, headlined "Communism." Boys came and threw copies of the newspaper about the strikers' camp.

"I don't care. They're lying."

She felt hatred in the air. It made her fear for the leaders. It made her tremble. The law was looking for such a man, she thought now, as she had chanced upon Red Oliver in the woods. She wanted to protect him, keep him safe, but at the same time she didn't want her father and mother to know. She didn't want them to get into trouble, but as for herself, she felt she didn't care. The law had come to the house below one evening, and now, after asking rough questions-the law was always rough with the poor, she knew that-the law had ridden off up the mountain road, but any minute the law might return and start asking questions again. The law might even discover that she herself had been one of the Birchfield strikers. The law hated strikers. There had already been several semi-riots in Birchfield: the strikers, men and women, on one side, and the strikebreakers who came from outside to take their places, and the townspeople and the factory owners on the other. The law was always against strikers. It would always be like this. The law would welcome the opportunity to harm anyone associated with one of the strikers. She thought so. She believed it. She didn't want her parents to know about Red Oliver's presence. Their hard life could get even harder.

There's no point in making them lie, she thought. Her people were good people. They belonged to the church. They could never be good liars. She didn't want them to be that way. She told Red Oliver to stay in the woods until dark. As she talked to him in the woods, in the semi-darkness, looking through the trees, they could see the house below. There was an opening between the trees, and she pointed. Molly's mother lit the lamp in the kitchen of the house. She would have supper. "Stay here," she said quietly, blushing as she said it. It felt strange to talk to a stranger like that, to care for him, to protect him. Some of the love and admiration she felt for the communist leaders of the strike she also felt for the Reds. He would be like them-certainly an educated man. Men and women like the small, dark-haired Communist woman at the strike camp would make sacrifices to come to the aid of the strikers, the striking poor workers. She already had a vague feeling that these people were somehow better, nobler, more courageous than the men she had always considered good. She had always thought that preachers were supposed to be the best people in the world, but that, too, was strange. The preachers in Birchfield were against the strikers. They shouted against the new leaders the strikers had found. One day, the Communist woman at the camp was talking to the other women. She pointed out to them how the Christ the preachers always talked about supported the poor and humble. He supported people in trouble, people who were oppressed, just like the workers. The Communist woman said that the preacher's behavior was a betrayal not only of the workers but even of their own Christ, and Molly began to understand what she meant and what she was talking about. It was all a mystery, and there were other things that puzzled her, too. One of the workers, one of the strikers at Birchfield, an old woman, a church woman, a good woman, Molly thought, wanted to give a gift to one of the Communist leaders. She wanted to express her love. She thought this man was brave. For the sake of the strikers, he defied the city and the city police, and the police didn't want striking workers. They only liked workers who were always humble, always submissive. The old woman thought and thought, wanting to do something for the man she admired. The incident turned out to be funnier, more tragically funny, than Molly could have imagined. One of the Communist leaders was standing in front of the strikers, talking to them, and the old woman approached him. She made her way through the crowd. She brought him her Bible as a gift. It was the only thing she could give the man she loved and to whom she wanted to express her love with a gift.

There was confusion. That evening, Molly left Red along a forest road half-overgrown with laurels, driving the cow home. Next to the mountain cabin stood a small log barn where the cow needed to be driven for milking. Both the house and the barn were right on the road Red had previously taken. The cow had a young calf, which was kept in a fenced pen near the barn.

Red-haired Oliver thought Molly had beautiful eyes. As she talked to him upstairs that evening, giving him instructions, he thought of another woman, Ethel Long. Perhaps because they were both tall and slender. There was always something cunning in Ethel Long's eyes. They warmed, and then suddenly grew strangely cold. The new woman was like Ethel Long, but at the same time unlike her.

"Women. Women," Red thought a little disdainfully. He wanted to be away from women. He didn't want to think about women. The woman in the forest told him to stay where he was in the forest. "I'll bring you dinner in a little while," she told him quietly and shyly. "Then I'll take you to Birchfield. I go there when it's dark. I'm one of the attackers. I'll lead you safely."

A cow had a young calf in a fenced pen near a barn. She ran along a forest road. She began to cry loudly. When Molly let her through a hole in the fence, she ran screaming toward the calf, and the calf was excited too. It began to scream too. It ran up and down one side of the fence, the cow ran up and down the other, and the woman ran to let the cow get to her calf. The cow began to want to give, and the calf began to cry from hunger. They both wanted to tear down the fence that separated them, and the woman let the cow get to the calf and began to watch. Red Oliver saw all this because he did not listen to the woman's instructions to stay in the woods, but watched her carefully. This was it. She was a woman who looked at him with kindness in her eyes, and he wanted to be near her. He was like most American men. There was a hope, a half-conviction, in him that somehow, someday, he would be able to find a woman who would save him from himself.

Red Oliver followed the woman and the half-mad cow down the hill and through the woods to the farm. She let the cow and her calf into the pen. He wanted to get closer to her, to see everything, to be near her.

"She's a woman. Wait. What? She might love me. That's probably all that's happened to me. After all, all I might need is the love of some woman to make my masculinity real for me.

"Live in love-in a woman. Enter her and leave refreshed. Raise children. Build a house.

"Now you see. This is it. Now you have something to live for. Now you can cheat, scheme, get along, and rise in the world. You see, you're not doing this just for yourself. You're doing it for these others. You're okay."

A small stream flowed along the edge of the barnyard, and bushes grew along it. Red followed the stream, stepping on dimly visible stones. It was dark under the bushes. Sometimes he waded into the water. His feet got wet. He didn't mind.

He saw a cow hurrying toward her calf, and he came so close he could see a woman standing there watching the calf suckle. That scene, the quiet barnyard, the woman standing there watching the calf suckle the cow-the earth, the smell of earth and water and bushes... now ablaze with autumn colors near Red... the impulses that moved a man in life, a man came and went... it would be nice, for example, to be a simple farmhand, isolated from others, perhaps without thinking about others... though you were always poor... what does poverty matter?... Ethel Long... something he wanted from her but did not get.

.. O man, hopeful, dreaming.

.. I always think that somewhere there is a golden key... "Someone has it... give it to me..."

When she thought the calf had had enough, she drove the cow out of the pen and into the barn. The cow was now calm and content. She fed the cow and went into the house.

The redhead wanted to come closer. Vague thoughts were already forming in his head. "If this woman... perhaps... how can a man say that? A strange woman, Molly, perhaps she's the one."

Finding love is also part of youth. Some woman, a strong woman, will suddenly see something in me... a hidden masculinity that I myself cannot yet see and feel. She will suddenly come to me. Open arms.

"Something like that might give me courage." She already thought he was something special. She thought he was a reckless, daring young communist. Suppose, thanks to her, he suddenly became something. Love for such a man might be what he needed, something wonderful. She left the cow and went into the house for a moment, and he emerged from the bushes and ran through the soft darkness to the barn. He glanced around quickly. Above the cow was a small loft filled with hay, and there was a hole through which he could look down. He could stay there quietly and watch her milk the cow. There was another hole, opening onto the yard. The house was not far away, no more than twenty yards.

The cow in the barn was content and quiet. The woman had fed her. Although it was late autumn, the night was not cold. Red could see the stars rising through the hole in the attic. He took a pair of dry stockings from his bag and put them on. He was again visited by the feeling that always haunted him. It was this feeling that had led him to his complicated affair with Ethel Long. It irritated him. He was once again near a woman, and this fact excited him. "Can't I ever be near a woman without feeling this?" he asked himself. Small, angry thoughts came to him.

It was always the same. He wanted and couldn't have it. If he could one day completely merge with another being... the birth of new life... something that would strengthen him... would he finally become human? At that moment, he lay quietly in the hayloft, vividly remembering other times when he had felt just as he did then. It always led to him selling himself out.

He was a homeboy again, walking along the railroad tracks. Downriver, below town, in Langdon, Georgia, as remote from city life as a mill village near a cotton mill, a few poor little wooden shacks had been built. Some of the cabins were made of planks fished out of the creek during high water. Their roofs were covered with flattened tin cans that served as shingles. Tough people lived there. The people living there were criminals, squatters, tough and desperate people from the poor white class of the South. They were people who made cheap whiskey to sell to blacks. They were chicken thieves. A girl lived there, a redhead like him. Red had first seen her one day in town, on Langdon's main street, when he was a schoolboy.

She looked at him in a certain way. "What?

You mean this? People like that? Young girls from families like that. He remembered being surprised by her courage, her bravery. It was still nice. It was cool.

There was a hungry look in her eyes. He couldn't be mistaken. "Hello, come on," her eyes said. He followed her down the street, just a boy, scared and ashamed, keeping his distance from her, stopping in doorways, pretending not to follow.

She knew it just as well. Perhaps she wanted to tease him. She was playing with him. How bold she was. She was small, quite pretty, but not very neat in appearance. Her dress was dirty and torn, and her face was covered in freckles. She wore old shoes, too big for her, and no stockings.

He spent his nights thinking about her, dreaming about her, about this girl. He didn't want to. He went for a walk along the railroad tracks, past where he knew she lived, in one of the poor shacks. He pretended he was there to fish in the Yellow River, which flowed below Langdon. He didn't want to fish. He wanted to be near her. He followed her. That first day, he followed her, staying far behind, half hoping she didn't know. He learned about her and her family. He heard some men talking about her father on Main Street. The father had been arrested for stealing chickens. He was one of those who sold cheap, bootleg whiskey to Negroes. People like that should be destroyed. They and their families should be run out of town. That's how Red wanted her, dreamed about her. He went there, pretending he was going fishing. Was she laughing at him? In any case, he never had the chance to meet her, never even spoke to her. Perhaps she was just laughing at him all the time. Even little girls were like that sometimes. He figured that out.

And if he had the chance to fight her, he knew deep down that he wouldn't have the courage.

Then, when he was already a young man, when he was studying in the North at college, another time came.

He went with three other students like himself after a ball game to a house of prostitution. It was in Boston. They had played baseball with a team from another New England college and were returning through Boston. It was the end of the baseball season, and they were celebrating. They drank and went to a place one of the young men knew about. He had been there before. The others took women. They went upstairs to the rooms of the house with the women. Red didn't go. He pretended not to want to, and so he sat downstairs, in what was called the parlor of the house. It was a "parlor house." They are going out of style. Several women were sitting there, waiting to service the men. Their job was to serve the men.

There was a fat, middle-aged man there who seemed to Red like a businessman. It was odd. Had he really begun to despise the idea of a person spending their life buying and selling? The man in that house that day resembled the traveling salesman he later frightened on the road outside Birchfield. The man sat sleepily in a chair in the living room. Red thought he would never forget the man's face... his ugliness at that moment.

He remembered later-he thought... had he had thoughts at that moment or did they come later?... "Nothing," he thought... "I wouldn't mind seeing a drunk man, if I could sense a drunk man trying to figure something out. A man can be intoxicated... a man can get drunk trying to sow a dream within himself. Perhaps he's even trying to get somewhere this way. If he were that drunk, I bet I'd know it.

There's another kind of drinking. "I think it's a disintegration... of personality. Something's slipping... falling off... everything's loose. I don't like it. I hate it." Red, sitting in that house at the time, could have had his own ugly face. He bought drinks, spent money he couldn't afford-recklessly.

He's lying. "I don't want to," he told the others. It was a lie.

There it is. You dream of something as the most wonderful thing that could ever happen in your life. It might be fucking awful. After you do it, you hate the person you did it to. The hatred is overwhelming.

Although sometimes you want to be ugly - like a dog rolling in garbage... or maybe like a rich man rolling in his wealth.

The others said to Red, "Don't you want to?"

"No," he said. He was lying. The others laughed at him a little, but he kept lying to himself. They thought he lacked courage... which was pretty close to the truth anyway. They were right. Then, when they left there, when they were near that house on the street... they went there early in the evening, when it was still light... when they left, the lights on the street came on. They were illuminated.

The children were playing outside. Red continued to be glad that it hadn't happened, but at the same time, deep down, he thought it was an ugly corner, and he wished he hadn't done it.

Then he began to feel virtuous. This wasn't a very pleasant feeling either. It was a disgusting feeling. "I think I'm better than them." There were many women like the ones in that house-the world teemed with them.

The oldest trade in the world.

My God, Maria! Red simply walked silently along with the others along the illuminated street. The world he walked in seemed strange and alien to him. As if the houses along the street weren't real houses, the people on the street, even some of the children he saw running and screaming weren't real. They were figures on a stage-unreal. The houses and buildings he saw were made of cardboard.

AND SO Red had a reputation as a good boy... a clean boy... a pleasant young man.

.. A good ball player... very keen on his studies.

"Look at this young man. He's fine. He's clean. He's fine.

Red liked it. He hated it. "If only they knew the truth," he thought.

For example, in that other place he ended up, in the barn that night... that woman who found him in the woods... the impulse in her to save him... to whom he lied, saying he was a communist.

She left the house, taking the lantern with her. She milked the cow. The cow was silent now. He was eating some soft porridge she had put in a box. Red was lying by the hole that looked down, and she could hear him moving in the hay. "It's all right," he told her. "I came here. I'm here." His voice had become strangely hoarse. He had to make an effort to control it. "Be quiet," she said.

She sat beside the cow, milking. She sat on a small stool, and by putting his face up to the opening at the top, he could see her, could watch her movements in the light of the lantern. So close to one another again. So far from her. He couldn't help but draw her, at least in his imagination, very close to him. He saw her hands on the cow's udder. The milk poured down, making a sharp sound against the sides of the tin bucket she held between her knees. Her hands, seen thus, in the circle of light below, outlined by the lantern... they were the strong, living hands of a worker... there was a small circle of light there... hands squeezing the teats - milk pouring... the strong, sweet smell of milk, of animals in the barn - barn smells. The hay on which he lay - darkness, and there a circle of light... her hands. Lord, Mary!

It's also embarrassing. There it is. In the darkness below, there was a small circle of light. One day, while she was milking, her mother-a small, bent, gray-haired old woman-came to the barn door and said a few words to her daughter. She left. She was talking about the dinner she was making. It was for Red. He knew it.

He knew his mother didn't know this, but these people were still kind and sweet to him. His daughter wanted to protect him, to take care of him. She would have found some excuse for wanting to take his dinner with her when she left the farm that evening to return to Birchfield. His mother didn't ask too many questions. His mother went into the house.

A soft circle of light there in the barn. A circle of light around a woman's figure... her arms... the swell of her breasts - firm and round... her hands milking a cow... warm, pleasant milk... quick thoughts in red...

He was close to her, the woman. He was very close to her. Once or twice she turned her face to him, but she could not see him in the darkness above. When she raised her face this way, it-her face-was still in the circle of light, but her hair was in the darkness. She had lips like Ethel Long's, and he had kissed Ethel's lips more than once. Ethel was another man's woman now. "Suppose that's all I want... all that any man really wants... this restlessness in me that drove me from home, made me a vagabond, made me a wanderer.

"How do I know that I don't care about people in general, about most people... their suffering... maybe it's all nonsense?"

She didn't speak to him again until she finished milking, then stood beneath him, whispering directions to get out of the barn. He was to wait for her at the small crib near the road. It was a good thing the family didn't have a dog.

It was all nothing but Red... his attempt to progress with himself... to understand something, if he could... an impulse, a feeling that continued all the time he walked with her... behind her... before her, on the narrow path climbing over the mountain and dropping into the ravine... now beside the stream, walking in the dark toward Birchfield. It was strongest in him when he stopped at one place along the way to eat the food she had brought... in a little crevice near the tall trees... quite dark... thinking of her as a woman... who perhaps he could, if he dared to try... satisfy something in himself... as if it would give him what he wanted so much... his manhood... was it? He even argued with himself: "What the hell? Suppose when I had been with those other women in that house in Boston... if I had done that, would it have given me manhood?

- Or if I had that little girl in Langdon, long ago?

After all, he had a woman once. He had Ethel Long. "Good!"

He didn't get anything permanent from it.

"This isn't it. I wouldn't do it even if I could," he told himself. It's time for men to prove themselves in a new way.

And yet-all the time he was with this woman-he was the same as the mill foreman had been with Molly Seabright. In the dark, on the way to Birchfield that night, he kept wanting to touch her with his hands, to touch his body to hers, as the mill foreman had done. Perhaps she didn't know. He hoped she wouldn't. When they approached the Communist camp in the woods-near a clearing with tents and shacks-he asked her not to tell the Communist leaders of his presence there.

He had to give her some explanations. They wouldn't recognize him. They might even think he was some kind of spy. "Wait until morning," he told her. "You'll leave me here," he whispered as they quietly approached the spot where he would later try to sleep. "I'll go and tell them in a little while." He thought vaguely, I'll go to them. I'll ask them to let me do something dangerous here. He felt brave. He wanted to serve, or at least, in that moment, with Molly on the edge of the camp, he thought he wanted to serve.

"What?

"Well, perhaps."

There was something about him that was unclear. She was very, very nice. She went and got him a blanket, perhaps her own, the only one she had. She went into the small tent where she would spend the night with the other workers. "She's good," he thought, "damn, she's good."

"I wish I were something real," he thought.

OceanofPDF.com

7


That night was the passage. Red Oliver was alone. He was in a state of feverish uncertainty. He had reached a place he had been working toward for a long time. It wasn't just a place. Was this a chance to finally motivate his own life? Men want pregnancy just as much as women, right? Something like that. Ever since he left Langdon, Georgia, he had been like a moth hovering around a flame. He wanted to get closer-to what? "This communism-is that the answer?"

Can this be made into a kind of religion?

The religion the Western world practiced was no good. Somehow, it had become corrupted and now useless. Even the preachers knew it. "Look at them-they walk with such dignity?

"You can't bargain like that-the promise of immortality-you'll live again after this life. A truly religious person wants to throw everything away-he doesn't ask for any promises from God.

"Wouldn't it be better-if you could do it-if you could find some way to do it, to sacrifice your life for a better life here, not there?" A flourish-a gesture. "Live as the bird flies. Die as the male bee dies-in mating flight with life, yes?

"There is something worth living for-something worth dying for. Is that what is called communism?"

Red wanted to get closer, to try to surrender to it. He was afraid to approach. He was there, on the edge of the camp. There was still a chance to leave-to fade away. He could slip away unnoticed. No one but Molly Seabright would know. Not even his friend Neil Bradley would know. Sometimes he and Neil had quite serious conversations. He wouldn't even have to tell Neil, "I tried, but it didn't work." He could simply lie low and remain numb.

Something continued to happen, inside and outside of him. When he stopped trying to sleep, he sat up and listened. All his senses seemed unusually alive that night. He heard the quiet voices of people talking in a small, crudely built hut in the middle of the camp. He knew nothing of what was happening. From time to time, he could see dark figures on the narrow camp street.

He was alive. The tree he leaned his back against was outside the camp. The small trees and bushes around the camp had been cleared, but they had regrown on the outskirts. He sat down on one of the planks he'd found, the one he'd tried to sleep on earlier. The blanket Molly had brought was wrapped around his shoulders.

The vision of Molly's woman, his being with her, the feelings that arose, being in the presence of her woman-all of this was just an incident, but at the same time it was important. He felt the night still hanging over the camp, pregnant like a woman. The man was moving toward a specific goal-for example, communism. He was uncertain. He ran forward a little, stopped, turned back, then moved forward again. As long as he didn't cross a certain line that obligated him, he could always turn back.

"Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

"Oh, mighty Caesar.

"Oh, yes!

"I'll be damned. I don't believe there ever was a strong man.

"By God... if there ever was one... world march... boom, boom... the world is about to be on its knees. There's a man.

"Well, it's still not me," thought Red. "Don't start thinking big now," he warned himself.

The only problem was his own boyishness. He was constantly imagining something-some heroic deed he'd done or was about to do... He saw a woman-he thought, "Suppose she suddenly-unexpectedly-falls in love with me." He did it that very night-the co-worker he was with. He smiled, a little sadly, thinking about it.

That was the idea. You'd thought things through. You might even have talked a little to others, like Red Oliver had talked to Neil Bradley-the only close friend he'd made... like he'd tried to talk to the woman he thought he was in love with-Ethel Long.

Red never managed to talk much with Ethel Long, and he couldn't explain his ideas when he was with her. Partly because they were half-formed in his own mind, and partly because he was always excited when he was with her... wanting, wanting, wanting...

- Well... she... she will let me?...

*

There was unrest in the communist camp near Birchfield, across the river from the Birchfield mills. Red sensed it. Voices came from a crude hut where the leading spirits of the strikers were apparently gathering. Shadowy figures hurried through the camp.

Two men left the camp and crossed the bridge leading into the city. Red watched them go. There was a little light from the waning moon. Dawn would soon come. He heard footsteps on the bridge. Two men were heading into the city. They were scouts sent by the strike leaders. Red had assumed as much. He didn't know.

Rumors were circulating in the camp that day, a Sunday when Molly Seabright was absent, and she was home with her men on the weekend. The fighting in Birchfield was between strikers and deputy sheriffs appointed by the sheriff of the North Carolina county in which Birchfield was located. In the local newspaper, the town's mayor had sent a call to the state governor for troops, but the governor was a liberal. He was half-heartedly supportive of labor. There were liberal newspapers in the state. "Even a Communist has some rights in a free country," they said. "A man or woman has a right to be a Communist if they want to."

The governor wanted to be impartial. He was a mill owner himself. He didn't want people to be able to say, "See?" He even secretly wanted to retreat far back, to be known as the most unbiased and liberal governor in the entire Union-"these states," as Walt Whitman put it.

He found he couldn't. The pressure was too great. Now they were saying the state was coming. The soldiers were coming. The strikers were even allowed to picket the factory. They could picket as long as they stayed a certain distance from the mill gates, as long as they stayed away from the mill village. Now everything had to stop. An injunction had been issued. The soldiers were closing in. The strikers had to be rounded up. "Stay in your camp. Rot there." That was the cry now.

But what's the point of a strike if you can't picket? This new move meant, if the rumors were true, that the communists were blocked. Now things would take a new turn. That was the problem with being a communist. You were blocked.

"I'll tell you what-these poor workers-they're being led into a trap," the factory owners began to say. Citizens' committees went to see the governor. Among them were mill owners. "We're not against unions," they began to say. They even praised unions, the right kind of unions. "This communism isn't American," they said. "You see, its goal is to destroy our institutions." One of them took the governor aside. "If something happens, and it will... there have already been riots, people have suffered... the citizens themselves will not tolerate this communism. If several citizens, honest men and women, are killed, you know who will be blamed."

This was the problem with everything that had any success in America. Red Oliver was beginning to understand this. He was one of many thousands of young Americans who were beginning to realize this. "Suppose, for example, you were a person in America who really wanted God-suppose you really wanted to try to be a Christian-a God-man.

"How could you do this? The whole of society will be against you. Even the church couldn't stand it-it couldn't.

"Just as it must have been-once upon a time-when the world was younger, when people were more naive-there must have been pious people willing and prepared enough to die for God. Perhaps they even wanted to."

*

In fact, Red knew quite a lot. He'd experienced his own limitations, and perhaps that experience taught him something. It happened in Langdon.

There was a strike for Langdon, and he was in it and not in it. He was trying to get in. It wasn't a communist strike. Early in the morning, there was a riot in front of the Langdon plant. They were trying to attract new workers, "scabs," as the strikers called them. They were just poor people without jobs. They were flocking to Langdon from the hills. All they knew was that they were being offered work. It was a time when jobs were scarce. There were fights, and Red fought. People he knew slightly-not very well-the men and women at the plant he worked with-were fighting other men and women. There was screaming and crying. A crowd from the city poured into the plant. They drove out in cars. It was early morning, and the people of the city jumped out of their beds, jumped into their cars, and raced there. There were sheriff's deputies there, assigned to guard the plant, and Red got inside.

That morning, he simply went there out of curiosity. The plant had closed a week ago, and word had been sent out that it was going to reopen with new workers. All the old workers were there. Most of them were pale and silent. A man stood with his fists raised and cursed. Many townspeople were in their cars. They were shouting and cursing at the strikers. There were women attacking other women. Dresses were being torn, hair was being pulled out. There was no gunfire, but sheriff's deputies were running around, waving guns and shouting.

Red intervened. He jumped. The most amazing thing about it all... it was really funny... he wanted to cry afterwards when he realized it... was that although he was fighting furiously, in the middle of a crowd of people, fists flying, he himself was taking blows, giving blows, women even attacking men... no one in the town of Langdon knew, and not even the workers knew, that Red Oliver was fighting there on the side of the strikers.

Sometimes life happens like that. Life played such a damn joke on a person.

The thing is, after the fighting was over, after some of the strikers were hauled off to the Langdon jail, after the strikers were defeated and scattered... some of them fought fiercely to the last, while others gave in. ... when it was all over that morning, there was no one, either among the workers or among the townspeople, who even suspected that Red Oliver had fought so fiercely on the workers' side, and then, when everything died down, his nerve gave out.

There was a chance. He didn't leave Langdon right away. A few days later, the arrested strikers appeared in court. There they stood trial. After the riots, they were held in the city jail. The strikers formed a union, but the union leader was like Red. When the test came, he threw up his hands. He declared he didn't want trouble. He gave advice, implored the strikers to remain calm. He lectured them at meetings. He was one of those leaders who wanted to sit down with the employers, but the strikers got out of control. When they saw people taking their places, they couldn't stand it. The union leader left town. The strike was broken.

The people remaining in prison were about to stand trial. Red was going through a curious struggle with himself. The entire town, the people of the town, took it for granted that he was fighting on the side of the town, on the side of property and the factory owners. He had a black eye. Men who met him on the street laughed and patted him on the back. "Good boy," they said, "you get it, don't you?"

The townspeople, most of whom had no interest in the mill, took it all as an adventure. There had been a fight, and they had won. They felt it was a victory. As for the people in jail, who were they, who were they? They were poor factory workers, worthless, poor, dirty-minded white men. They were about to be tried in court. They would undoubtedly receive harsh prison sentences. There were factory workers, like a woman named Doris, who had caught Red's eye, and a blonde named Nell, who had also caught his eye, who were about to be sent to prison. The woman named Doris had a husband and child, and Red wondered about that. If she had to go to prison for a long time, would she take her child with her?

For what? For the right to work, to earn a living. The thought of it sickened Red. The thought of the situation he was in disgusted him. He began to stay away from the city streets. During the day, during that curious period of his life, he was restless, taking walks alone all day in the pine forest near Langdon, and at night he could not sleep. Dozens of times during the week after the strike and before the day arrived when the strikers were to appear in court, he came to a firm decision. He would go to court. He even asked to be arrested and thrown in jail with the strikers. He would say that he fought on their side. What they did, he did. He would not wait for the trial to begin; he would go straight to the judge or the county sheriff and tell the truth. "Arrest me too," he would say. "I was on the side of the workers, I fought on their side." A couple of times Red even got out of bed at night and partially dressed, deciding to go down to town, wake up the sheriff and tell his story.

He didn't do it. He gave up. Most of the time, the idea seemed stupid to him. He would only be playing the heroic role, making himself look like a fool. "Either way, I fought for them. Whether anyone knows it or not, I knew," he told himself. Finally, unable to bear the thought any longer, he left Langdon without even telling his mother where he was going. He didn't know. It was night, he packed a few things into a small bag and left the house. He had some money in his pocket, a few dollars. He left Langdon.

"Where am I going?" he kept asking himself. He bought the newspapers and read about the communist strike in Birchfield. Was he a complete coward? He didn't know. He wanted to test himself. Since leaving Langdon, there had been moments when, if someone had suddenly approached him and asked, "Who are you? What are you worth?" he would have replied,

"Nothing-I'm worth nothing. I'm cheaper than the cheapest man in the world."

Red had another experience he looked back on with shame. It hadn't been that big of an experience, after all. It didn't matter. It was terribly important.

It happened at a hobo camp, the place where he'd heard a bleary-eyed man talk about killing a singing woman on the streets of Birchfield. He was heading toward Birchfield, hitchhiking and riding freight trains. For a while, he lived like hobos, like the unemployed. He met another young man about his age. This pale young man had feverish eyes. Like the bleary-eyed man, he was deeply unholy. Oaths constantly flew from his lips, but Red liked him. The two young men met on the outskirts of a Georgia town and boarded a freight train, which was slowly crawling toward Atlanta.

Red was curious about his companion. The man looked ill. They boarded a freight car. There were at least a dozen other men in the car. Some were white and some were black. The black men stayed at one end of the car, and the white men at the other. However, there was a sense of comradeship. Jokes and conversations flowed back and forth.

Red still had seven dollars left of the money he'd brought from home. He felt guilty about it. He was afraid. "If that crowd found out about this, they'd rob him," he thought. He had the bills hidden in his shoes. "I'll keep quiet about it," he decided. The train moved slowly north and finally stopped in a small town, but not far from the city. It was already evening, and the young man who had joined Red told him they'd better get off there. Everyone else would leave. In southern cities, vagrants and the unemployed were often arrested and sentenced to prison. They put them to work on the Georgia roads. Red and his companion got out of the car, and throughout the train-it was a long one-he could see other men, white and black, jumping to the ground.

The young man he was with clung to Red. As they sat in the car, he whispered, "Do you have any money?" he asked, and Red shook his head. The moment he did, Red felt ashamed. "Still, I better stick to it now," he thought. A small army of people, white in one group and black in another, walked along the tracks and turned across a field. They entered a small pine forest. Among the men were obviously veteran hobos, and they knew what they were doing. They called out to the others, "Come on," they said. This place was a hobo haunt-a jungle. There was a small stream, and inside the forest was an open area covered with pine needles. There were no houses nearby. Some of the men lit fires and began cooking. They took pieces of meat and bread wrapped in old newspapers from their pockets. Crude kitchen utensils and empty vegetable jars, blackened by old fires, lay scattered everywhere. There were small piles of blackened bricks and stones, collected by other travelers.

The man who had become attached to Red pulled him aside. "Come on," he said, "let's get out of here. There's nothing here for us," he said. He walked across the field, cursing, and Red followed him. "I'm tired of these dirty bastards," he declared. They came to the railroad tracks near town, and the young man told Red to wait. He disappeared into the street. "I'll be back soon," he said.

Red sat on the tracks and waited, and soon his companion reappeared. He had a loaf of bread and two dried herrings. "I got it for fifteen cents. That was my stack. I begged it off a fat son of a bitch in town before I met you." He jerked his thumb back along the tracks. "We better eat it here," he said. "There are too many of them in this crowd of dirty bastards." He meant the people in the jungle. Two young men sat on the ties and ate. Shame came over Red again. The bread tasted bitter in his mouth.

He kept thinking about the money in his shoes. Suppose they robbed me. "What of it?" he thought. He wanted to tell the young man, "Look, I have seven dollars." His companion might want to go and get arrested.

He would have liked a drink. Red thought, "I'll make the money go as far as I can." Now it felt like it was burning the flesh inside his boots. His companion continued talking cheerfully, but Red fell silent. When they finished eating, he followed the man back to camp. Shame completely overwhelmed Red. "We got a handout," Red's companion said to the men sitting around the small fires. There were about fifteen people gathered in the camp. Some had food, some didn't. Those who had food were divided.

Red heard the voices of black vagrants in another camp nearby. There was laughter. A black voice began to sing softly, and Red fell into a sweet reverie.

One of the men in the white camp spoke to Red's comrade. He was a tall, middle-aged man. "What the hell is wrong with you?" he asked. "You look terrible," he said.

Red's companion grinned. "I have syphilis," he said, grinning. "It's eating me up."

A general discussion ensued about the man's illness, and Red moved away and sat down, listening. Several men in the camp began sharing stories of their experiences with the same disease and how they had contracted it. The tall man's mind took a practical turn. He jumped up. "I'll tell you something," he said. "I'll tell you how to cure yourself."

"You're going to jail," he said. He wasn't laughing. He meant it. "Now I'll tell you what to do," he continued, pointing toward the train tracks toward Atlanta.

"Well, you go in there. So, here you are. You"re walking down the street." The tall man was something of an actor. He was pacing up and down. "You"ve got a stone in your pocket-look." There was half a burnt brick nearby, and he picked it up, but the brick was hot, and he quickly dropped it. The other men in the camp laughed, but the tall man was absorbed in what was happening. He took out a stone and put it in the side pocket of his tattered coat. "You see," he said. Now he took the stone from his pocket and, with a sweeping motion of his arm, flung it through the bushes into a small stream that flowed near the camp. His sincerity made the other men in the camp smile. He ignored them. "So, you"re walking down a street with shops. You see. You come to a fashionable street. You choose the street where the best shops are. Then you throw a brick or a stone through the window. You don"t run. You stand there. If the shopkeeper comes out, tell him to go to hell." The man had been pacing back and forth. Now he stood as if challenging the crowd. "You might as well break some rich son of a bitch's window," he said.

"So, you see, they arrest you. They put you in jail... see, they treat your syphilis there. It's the best way," he said. "If you're just broke, they won't pay any attention to you. They've got a doctor in the prison. A doctor comes in. It's the best way."

Red slipped away from the hobo camp and his companion, and after walking half a mile down the road, he made his way to the streetcar. The seven dollars in his shoe irritated and hurt him, and he retreated behind some bushes and retrieved them. Some of the people he had been with since becoming a hobo laughed at him for the small bag he carried, but that day there was a man in the crowd carrying something even stranger, and the crowd's attention was focused on him. The man said he was an unemployed newspaper reporter and was going to try to make a name for himself in Atlanta. He had a small portable typewriter. "Look at him," the others in the camp shouted. "Aren't we getting bloated? We're getting high-brow." Red wanted to run back to the camp that evening and give the people gathered there his seven dollars. "What difference does it make to me what they do with it?" he thought. "Suppose they get drunk-what the hell do I care?" He walked some distance from the camp and then hesitantly returned. It would have been easy enough if he had told them earlier that day. He had been with the men for several hours. Some of them were hungry. It would have been just as easy if he had returned and stood before them, taking seven dollars from his pocket: "Here, men... take this."

How stupid!

He would have been deeply ashamed of the young man who had spent his last fifteen cents buying bread and herring. When he reached the edge of the camp again, the people gathered there had fallen silent. They had built a small fire of sticks and were lying around. Many of them were sleeping on pine needles. They huddled in small groups, some talking quietly, while others were already asleep on the ground. It was then that Red heard, from a bleary-eyed man, the story of the death of the singing woman in Birchfield. The young man, ill with syphilis, had disappeared. Red wondered if he had already gone into town to smash a store window and get arrested and sent to jail.

No one spoke to Red when he returned to the edge of camp. He held the money in his hand. No one looked at him. He stood leaning against a tree, holding the money-a small wad of bills. "What should I do?" he thought. Some of the people in camp were veteran drifters, but many were unemployed men, not young men like himself, looking for adventure, trying to learn about themselves, searching for something, but simply older men without jobs, wandering the country, looking for work. "It would be something wonderful," Red thought, "if he had something of the actor in him, like the tall man, if he could stand up before the group around the campfire." He could lie, as he did later when he met Molly Seabright. "Look, I found this money," or "I detained a man." To a robber, this would have sounded grand and wonderful. He would have been admired. But what happened was that he did nothing. He stood leaning against a tree, embarrassed, shaking with shame, and then, not knowing how to do what he wanted, he quietly left. When he entered the city that night, he was still ashamed. He wanted to throw the money to the men and then run away. That night, he settled into a bunk in the YMCA in Atlanta, and when he went to bed, he took the money out of his pocket again and held it in his hand, looking at it. "Damn it," he thought, "men think they want money. It only gets you into trouble. It makes you look like a fool," he decided. And yet, after only a week of walking, he had reached the place where seven dollars seemed almost a fortune. "It doesn"t take much money to make a man pretty cheap," he thought.

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8


HEY - THEY WERE THE SAME BOY, THE SAME YOUNG MAN - that was the strangest thing. They were American young men, and they read the same magazines and newspapers... heard the same talk radio... political conventions... the man who... Amos and Andy... Mr. Hoover of Arlington, Mr. Harding and Mr. Wilson in Arlington... America, the hope of the world... the way the world looks at us... "that rugged individualism." They watched the same talking films. Life goes on moving, too. Stand back and watch it move. Stand back and see the glory of the Lord.

"Have you seen Ford's new car? Charlie Schwab says we're all poor now. Oh yeah!

Naturally, these two young people shared many of the same experiences-childhood love-material for later novels, if they were writers-school-baseball-summer swimming-certainly not in the same stream, river, lake, pond... the economic impulses, currents, shocks that make people-which are so similar to the accidents of life-are they accidents? "The next revolution will be economic, not political." Talk in pharmacies, in courts, on the streets.

That evening, the young man receives his father's car. Ned Sawyer did this more than Red. He was a young man who felt freer and moved more freely in the atmosphere into which he was born.

His mother and father felt more at ease in their own environment-neither of them had ever been poor or working class, like Red Oliver's mother. They were respected and looked up to. They subscribed. Ned's father had never been a drunkard. He had never pursued loose women. His mother spoke softly and tenderly. She was a good church member.

If you're a young man like Ned Sawyer, these days you take the family car in the evening and drive out of town. You pick up a girl. Having a car has certainly changed your life. With some girls, you can indulge in a lot of petting. With others, you can't.

Girls also face the same dilemma-to iron or not to iron. How far is it safe to go? What's the best line?

If you're a young person, you're going through a period of depression. Some young people love reading books. They're intellectuals. They like to go into a room with books and read, and then they go out and chat about books, while other young people are all about action. They need to do something, otherwise they'll go broke. Extroverts and introverts, hello.

Some young men are good with women, while others are not. You can never predict what a woman will get.

The two young people who met so strangely and tragically one morning in the town of Birchfield, North Carolina, had no idea they were so alike. They had never seen or heard of each other before. How could they have known they were so alike?

Were they both ordinary young middle-class American men? Well, you can't blame yourself for being middle-class if you're American. Isn't America the greatest middle-class country on earth? Don't its people have more middle-class comforts than any other nation on earth?

"Certainly."

One young man was named Ned Sawyer, and the other was Red Oliver. One was the son of a lawyer from a small town in North Carolina, and the other was the son of a doctor from a small town in Georgia. One was a stocky, broad-shouldered young man with thick, rather coarse red hair and anxious, questioning gray-blue eyes, while the other was tall and slender. He had yellow hair and gray eyes that sometimes took on a questioning, worried look.

In Ned Sawyer's case, it wasn't about communism. It wasn't that clear-cut. "Damn communism," he would have said. He didn't know about it and didn't want to know about it. He thought of it as something un-American, strange, and ugly. But there were also disturbing things in his life. Something was happening in America at the time, an undercurrent of questions, almost silent, that troubled him. He didn't want to be bothered. "Why can't we in America go on living the way we've always lived?" was what he thought. He'd heard of communism and found it strange and alien to American life. From time to time, he even mentioned it to other young people he knew. He made statements. "It's alien to our way of thinking," he said. "So? You think so? Yes, we believe in individualism here in America. Give everyone a chance and let the devil take the ones who fall behind. That's our way. If we don't like the law in America, we break it and laugh at it. That's our way." Ned was half an intellectual himself. He read Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Self-reliance-that's what I stand for."

"But," the young man's friend said to him. "But?"

One of the two young men mentioned above shot the other. He killed him. It all happened this way...

A single young man named Ned Sawyer joined his town's military company. He was too young to fight in the Great War, just like Red Oliver. It wasn't that he thought he wanted to fight, or to kill, or anything like that. He didn't. There was nothing cruel or savage about Ned. He liked the idea... a group of men strolling down the street or the road, all in uniform, and he himself one of them-the commander.

Wouldn't it be strange if this individualism we Americans love to talk about turned out to be something we don't want after all?

America also has a gang spirit -

Ned Sawyer went to college, like Red Oliver. He also played baseball in college. He was a pitcher, while Red played shortstop and sometimes second base. Ned was a pretty good pitcher. He had a fastball with a bit of a jump and a tantalizing slowball. He was a pretty good, confident pitcher for the curveball.

One summer, while still at university, he went to officer training camp. He loved it. He enjoyed commanding people, and later, when he returned to his hometown, he was elected or appointed senior lieutenant of his city's military company.

It was cool. He liked it.

"Fours - straight in a line."

"Give me the weapon!" Ned had a good voice for that. He could bark-sharply and pleasantly.

It was a good feeling. You took the young men, your gang, the awkward kids-white men from the farms outside town and young men from the city-and trained them up near the school, in the vacant lot up there. You took them with you down Cherry Street toward Main.

They were awkward, and you made them not awkward. "Come on! Try that again! Catch! Catch!"

"One two three four! Count it in your head like this! Do it quickly, now! One two three four!"

It was nice, nice-to take the men out on the street like that on a summer evening. In winter, in the hall of the great town hall, it wasn't all that tasteless. You felt trapped there. You were tired of it. No one was watching you train people.

There you are. You had a beautiful uniform. The officer had bought himself one. He carried a sword, and at night it glittered in the city lights. After all, you know, being an officer-everyone admitted it-was being a gentleman. In the summer, the young women of the city sat in cars parked along the streets where you led your men. The daughters of the city's best men looked at you. The company captain was involved in politics. He had become quite fat. He almost never went out.

"Hands on your shoulders!"

"Time yourself!"

"Company, stop!"

The sound of rifle butts hitting the sidewalk echoed down the town's main street. Ned halted his men in front of a drugstore where a crowd was milling about. The men wore uniforms provided by the state or national government. "Be ready! Be ready!"

"For what?"

"My country, right or wrong, always my country!" I doubt Ned Sawyer ever thought... certainly no one ever mentioned it when he went off to officer training camp... he didn't think about taking his men out and meeting other Americans. There was a cotton mill in his hometown, and some of the boys in his company worked in the cotton mill. They enjoyed the company, he thought. After all, they were cotton mill workers. They were mostly unmarried cotton mill workers. They lived there, in a mill village on the outskirts of town.

Indeed, it must be admitted, these young men were quite detached from city life. They were pleased to have the chance to join a military company. Once a year, in the summer, the men went to camp. They got a wonderful vacation that cost them nothing.

Some of the cotton mill workers were excellent carpenters, and many of them had joined the Ku Klux Klan just a few years earlier. The military company was much better.

In the South, as you understand, first-class white people don't work with their hands. First-class white people don't work with their hands.

"I mean, you know, the people who created the South and the Southern traditions."

Ned Sawyer never made such statements, not even to himself. He'd spent two years at college in the North. The traditions of the Old South were crumbling. He knew it. He would have laughed at the idea of despising a white man forced to work in a factory or on a farm. He often said so. He said there were blacks and Jews who were all right. "I like some of them very much," he said. Ned always wanted to be broad-minded and liberal.

His hometown in North Carolina was called Syntax, and it was home to the Syntax mills. His father was the town's leading attorney. He was the mill's lawyer, and Ned intended to become one. He was three or four years older than Red Oliver, and that year-the year he left with his military company for the town of Birchfield-he had already graduated from college, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and after Christmas of that year he planned to enroll in law school.

But things got a little tough in his family. His father lost a lot of money in the stock market. It was 1930. His father said, "Ned," he said, "I'm a little tense right now." Ned also had a sister who was in school and doing graduate work at Columbia University in New York, and she was a smart woman. She was damn bright. Ned would have said so himself. She was a few years older than Ned, had a master's degree, and was now working on her doctorate. She was much more radical than Ned and hated him going to officer training camp, and later hated him becoming a lieutenant in the local military company. When she got home, she said, "Watch out, Ned." She was going to get a Ph.D. in economics. Women like that get ideas. "There's going to be trouble," she told Ned.

"What do you mean?"

In the summer, they were at home, sitting on the porch of their house. Ned's sister, Louise, would sometimes suddenly snap at him like this.

She predicted the coming struggle in America-a real struggle, she said. She didn't look like Ned, but she was small, like her mother. Like her mother, her hair was prone to premature graying.

Sometimes, when she was home, she would snap at Ned like this, and sometimes at Father. Mother would sit and listen. Mother was the kind of woman who never spoke her mind when men were around. Louise said, either to Ned or to Father, "This can't go on," she said. Father was a Jeffersonian Democrat. He was considered a passionate man in his North Carolina district, and he was even well known in the state. He had once served a term in the State Senate. She said, "Father-or Ned-if only all the people I study with-if only the professors, the people who should know, the people who have dedicated their lives to studying such things-if they are all right, something is going to happen in America-one of these days-perhaps soon-it may, for that matter, happen throughout the Western world. Something is cracking... Something is happening."

"Cracking?" Ned had a strange feeling. It felt like something, maybe the chair he was sitting on, was about to give way. "Cracking?" He glanced around sharply. Louise had such a damn way.

"This is capitalism," she said.

Once, she said, before, what her father believed might have been right. Thomas Jefferson, she thought, might have been all right only in his time. "You see, Dad-or Ned-he didn't count on anything.

"He didn't count on modern technology," she said.

Louise had a lot of that kind of talk. She was a nuisance to the family. There was a kind of tradition... the position of women and girls in America, and especially in the South... but it, too, was beginning to crack. When her father lost most of his money in the stock market, he said nothing to either his daughter or his wife, but when Louise came home, she kept talking. She didn't know how much it hurt. "You see, it's opening," she said, looking pleased. "We'll get it. Middle-class people like us will get it now." Father and son didn't much like being called middle-class. They winced. They both loved and admired Louise.

"There was so much that was good and even great about her," they both thought.

Neither Ned nor her father could understand why Louisa never married. They both thought, "My God, she might have made a good wife with some man." She was a passionate little thing. Of course, neither Ned nor her father allowed this thought to be expressed out loud. The Southern gentleman didn't think-about his sister or his daughter-"She's passionate-she's alive. If you had one like her, what a wonderful mistress she would be!" They didn't think so. But...

Sometimes in the evening, when the family sat on the porch of their house... it was a large old brick house with a wide brick deck out front... you could sit there on summer evenings, looking out at the pine trees, the forests on the low hills in the distance... the house was almost in the center of town, but on a hill... Ned Sawyer's grandfather and great-grandfather lived there. Through the roofs of the other houses, you could peer into the distant hills... The neighbors loved to peer in there in the evenings...

Louisa would sit on the edge of her father's chair, her soft, bare arms wrapped around his shoulders, or she would sit on the edge of her brother Ned's chair. On summer evenings, when he would don his uniform and later head out to the city to train his men, she would look at him and laugh. "You look magnificent in it," she would say, touching his uniform. "If you weren't my brother, I'd fall in love with you, I swear I would."

The problem with Louise, Ned sometimes said, was that she always analyzed everything. He didn't like that. He wished she wouldn't. "I think," she said, "it's us women who fall in love with you men in your uniforms... you men who go out and kill other men... there's something wild and ugly about us, too.

"There should be something brutal in us too."

Louise thought... sometimes she spoke out... she didn't want to... she didn't want to worry her father and mother... she thought and said that if things didn't change quickly in America, "new dreams," she said. "Growing up to take the place of the old, hurtful, individualistic dreams... dreams now completely ruined-by money," she said. She suddenly became serious. "The South will have to pay dearly," she said. Sometimes, when Louise talked like this to her father and brother in the evening, they were both glad there was no one around... no people from the city who could hear her speak...

It's no wonder that men-Southern men, who might be expected to court a woman like Louise-were a little afraid of her. "Men don't like intellectual women. It's true... only with Louise-if only men knew-but no matter what..."

She had strange notions. She had ended up exactly there. Sometimes her father answered her almost sharply. He was half angry. "Louise, you're a damn little redhead," he said. He laughed. Still, he loved her-his own daughter.

"South," she said gravely to Ned or her father, "he will have to pay, and pay bitterly."

"This idea of the old gentleman that you people have built up here - the statesman, the soldier - the man who never works with his hands - and all that...

"Robert E. Lee. There's an attempt at kindness in it. It's pure patronage. It's a feeling built on slavery. You know that, Ned, or Father..."

"It's an idea ingrained in us-sons of good Southern families like Ned." She looked at Ned closely. "Isn't he perfect in his form?" she said. "Such men didn't know how to work with their hands-they didn't dare work with their hands. That would be a shame, wouldn't it, Ned?"

"It will happen," she said, and the others grew serious. Now she was speaking outside her classroom. She was trying to explain it to them. "There's something new in the world now. It's machines. Your Thomas Jefferson, he didn't think of that, did he, Father? If he were alive today, he might say, 'I have an idea,' and quickly enough, the machines have thrown all his thoughts into the scrap heap."

"It'll start slowly," Louise said, "awareness in labor. They'll start to realize more and more that there's no hope for them-looking at people like us."

"Us?" the father asked sharply.

- Do you mean us?

"Yes. You see, we're middle class. You hate that word, don't you, Father?"

Father was as irritated as Ned. "Middle class," he said contemptuously, "if we're not first class, who is?"

"And yet, Father... and Ned... you, Father, are a lawyer, and Ned will be one. You are the lawyer for the factory workers here in this city. Ned hopes so."

Not long before, a strike had broken out in a southern factory town in Virginia. Louise Sawyer went there.

She came as an economics student to see what was going on. She saw something. It was about the city newspaper.

She went with the newspaperman to the strike meeting. Louise moved freely among the men... they trusted her... when she and the newspaperman were leaving the hall where the strike meeting was taking place, a small, agitated, plump worker rushed towards the newspaperman.

The worker was almost in tears, Louise later said, telling her father and brother about it. She clung to the newspaperman, while Louise stood a little to the side and listened. She had a sharp mind-this Louise. She was a new woman for her father and brother. "The future, God knows, may yet belong to our women," her father sometimes said to himself. The thought had occurred to him. He didn't want to think so. Women-at least some of them-had a way of facing facts.

A Virginia woman pleaded with a newspaperman. "Why, oh, why don't you give us a real break? You're here on the Eagle?" The Eagle was the only daily newspaper in Virginia. "Why don't you make us a fair deal?

"We're human, even if we're workers," the newspaper vendor tried to reassure her. "That's what we want to do-that's all we want to do," he said sharply. He pulled away from the agitated little fat woman, but later, when he was on the street with Louise, and Louise asked him directly, frankly, in her usual manner, "Well, are you making a fair deal with them?"

"Hell no," he said and laughed.

"What the hell," he said. "The factory lawyer writes editorials for our newspaper, and we slaves have to sign them." He, too, was an embittered man.

"Now," he said to Louise, "don't yell at me. I'm telling you. I'm going to lose my job."

*

"So you see," Louisa said later, telling her father and Ned about the incident.

"You mean we?" Her father spoke. Ned listened. Father suffered. There was something in the story Louise told that touched Father. You could tell it by looking at his face while Louise spoke.

Ned Sawyer knew. He knew his sister Louise-when she said such things-he knew she meant no harm to him or his father. Sometimes, when they were home, she would start talking like that and then stop. On a hot summer evening, the family might sit on the porch, birds chirping in the trees outside. Over the rooftops of other houses, distant pine-covered hills could be seen. The country roads in this part of North Carolina were red and yellow, like those in Georgia, where Red Oliver lived. There would be a soft nighttime call, bird to bird. Louise would start talking and then stop. It happened one evening when Ned was in uniform. The uniform always seemed to excite Louise, to make her want to talk. She was scared. "Someday, perhaps soon," she thought, "people like us-the middle class, the good people of America-will be plunged into something new and terrible, perhaps... what fools we are not to see it... why can't we see it?"

"We can shoot the workers who hold everything together. Because they are the workers who produce everything and are beginning to want-out of all this American wealth-a new, stronger, perhaps even dominant voice... while upsetting all American thought-all American ideals...

"I think we thought-we Americans really believed-that everyone here had an equal opportunity.

"You keep saying it, thinking it to yourself - year after year - and of course, you start to believe it.

"You are comfortable to believe.

"Although it's a lie." A strange look appeared in Louise's eyes. "The machine was playing a joke," she thought.

These are the thoughts that run through the mind of Louise Sawyer, Ned Sawyer's sister. Sometimes, when she was at home with the family, she would start talking, then suddenly stop. She would get up from her chair and go into the house. One day, Ned followed her. He, too, was worried. She was standing against the wall, crying quietly, and he came over and picked her up. He didn't tell their father.

He said to himself, "After all, she's a woman." Perhaps his father said the same thing to himself. They both loved Louise. That year-1930-when Ned Sawyer postponed law school until Christmas, his father said to him-he laughed as he said it-"Ned," he said, "I'm in a tight spot. I've got a lot of money invested in stocks," he said. "I think we're all right. I think they'll come back."

"You can be sure to bet on America," he said, trying to be cheerful.

"I'll stay here in your office, if you don't mind," Ned said. "I can study here." He thought of Louise. She was supposed to attempt her doctorate that year, and he didn't want her to stop. "I don't agree with everything she thinks, but she has the brains of the whole family," he thought.

"That's it," Ned's father said. "If you don't mind waiting, Ned, I can take Louise to the end."

"I don't see why she should know anything about it," and "Of course not," Ned Sawyer replied.

OceanofPDF.com

9


MARCHING WITH SOLDIERS In the pre-dawn darkness through the streets of Birchfield, Ned Sawyer was interested.

"Atten-shun".

"Forward - lead right."

Tramp. Tramp. Tramp. The shuffling of heavy, unsteady feet could be heard on the sidewalk. Listen to the sound of footsteps on the sidewalks - the feet of soldiers.

Do legs like this, carrying the bodies of people-Americans-to a place where they will have to kill other Americans?

Ordinary soldiers are ordinary people. This can happen more and more often. Come on, feet, hit the pavement hard! My country belongs to you.

Dawn was breaking. Three or four companies of soldiers had been sent to Birchfield, but Ned Sawyer's company was the first to arrive. His captain, ill and indisposed, had not arrived, so Ned was in command. The company disembarked at the train station across town from the Birchfield mill and the strikers' camp, a station well on the outskirts of town, and in the predawn hours the streets were deserted.

In every city, there are always a few people who will be abroad before dawn. "If you sleep late, you'll miss the best part of the day," they say, but no one listens. They are irritated that others don't listen. They talk about the air in the early morning. "It's good," they say. They talk about how the birds sing early in the morning, at dawn in summer. "The air is so good," they continue to say. Virtue is virtue. A man wants praise for what he does. He even wants praise for his habits. "These are good habits, they're mine," he tells himself. "You see, I smoke these cigarettes all the time. I do it to give people jobs in the cigarette factories."

In the town of Birchfield, a resident saw the arrival of soldiers. There was a short, thin man who owned a stationery store on a side street in Birchfield. He was on his feet all day every day, and his legs were sore. That night, they beat him so badly that he couldn't sleep for a long time. He was unmarried and slept on a cot in a small room at the back of his store. He wore heavy glasses that made his eyes appear larger to others. They resembled the eyes of an owl. In the morning, before dawn and after he had slept for a while, his legs began to ache again, so he got up and dressed. He walked down Birchfield's main street and sat on the courthouse steps. Birchfield was the county seat, and the jail was located just behind the courthouse. The jailer also rose early. He was an old man with a short gray beard, and sometimes he would come out of jail to sit with a stationer on the courthouse steps. The stationer told him about his feet. He liked to talk about his feet, and he liked people who listened to him. There was a certain height. It was unusual. No man in town had feet like that. He always saved money for operations, and he had read a lot about feet throughout his life. He studied them. "It"s the most delicate part of the body," he told the jailer. "There are so many little thin bones in the feet." He knew how many. There was something he liked to talk about. "You know, soldiers now," he said. "Well, you take a soldier. He wants to get out of a war or a battle, so he shoots himself in the foot. He"s a damn fool. He doesn"t know what he"s doing. Damn fool, he couldn"t have shot himself in a worse place. The jailer thought so too, even though his legs were fine. "You know," he said, "you know what... if I were a young man and a soldier and I wanted to get out of a war or a battle, I'd say I was a conscientious objector." That was his idea. "That's the best way," he thought. You might get thrown in jail, but so what? He thought prisons were okay, a pretty good place to live. He referred to the men in Birchfield Prison as "my boys." He wanted to talk about prisons, not legs.

There was this man, a stationery salesman, who was awake and overseas early the morning Ned Sawyer led his troops into Birchfield to suppress the Communists there - to pen them in camp - to make them stop trying to picket the Birchfield factories. ...to make them stop trying to march in parades... no more singing in the streets... no more public meetings.

A stationer woke up on the streets of Birchfield, and his friend, the jailer, had not yet been released from jail. The county sheriff woke up. He was at the train station with two deputies to meet the soldiers. Rumors of approaching soldiers were circulating in town, but nothing definite was forthcoming. No time of their arrival was given. The sheriff and his deputies remained silent. The owners of the mill in Birchfield issued an ultimatum. There was a company that owned mills in several towns in North Carolina. The president of the company told the manager of Birchfield to speak harshly to some of the leading citizens of Birchfield... to three bankers in town, to the mayor of the town, and to some others... to some of the most influential people. The merchants were told... "We don't care whether we run our mill in Birchfield or not. We want protection. We don't care. We'll close the mill.

"We don't want any more problems. We can close the plant and leave it closed for five years. We have other mills. You know how things are these days."

When the soldiers arrived, the stationer from Birchfield was awake, and the sheriff and two deputies were at the station. There was another man there, too. He was a tall, old man, a retired farmer who had moved to town and was also up before dawn. With his garden idle... it was late autumn... the year's work in the garden was coming to an end... this man had taken a stroll before breakfast. He walked down Birchfield's main street past the courthouse, but didn't stop to talk to the stationer.

He simply wouldn't. He wasn't a chatterbox. He wasn't very sociable. "Good morning," he said to the stationer sitting on the courthouse steps, and continued walking without stopping. There was something dignified about a man walking down an empty street early in the morning. A vibrant personality! You couldn't go up to such a man, sit with him, talk to him about the pleasures of getting up early, talk to him about how good the air was-what fools, what lying in bed. You couldn't talk to him about his legs, about leg operations, and what fragile things legs were. The stationer hated this man. He was a man filled with a multitude of small, incomprehensible hatreds. His legs hurt. They hurt all the time.

Ned Sawyer liked it. He didn't like it. He had his orders. The only reason the sheriff had met him that morning at the train station in Birchfield was to show him the way to the Birchfield mill and the Communist camp. The state governor had made a decision about the Communists. "We'll lock them up," he thought.

"Let them fry in their own fat," he thought... "the fat won't last long"... and Ned Sawyer, who commanded a company of soldiers that morning, had thoughts too. He thought of his sister Louise and regretted not having enlisted in his state. "Still," he thought, "these soldiers are only boys." Soldiers, the kind of soldiers who belonged to a military company, at a time like this, when they are called out, they whisper to each other. Rumors fly through the ranks. "Silence in the ranks." Ned Sawyer called his company. He shouted the words-he blurted them out sharply. At that moment, he almost hated the men of his company. When he pulled them from the train and forced them to form company line, all of them a little sleepy-eyed, all a little worried, and perhaps a little scared, dawn had broken.

Ned saw something. Near the train station in Birchfield, there was an old warehouse, and he saw two men emerge from the shadows. They had bicycles, and they mounted them and rode away quickly. The sheriff didn't see it. Ned wanted to talk to him about it, but he didn't. "You're driving slowly toward that Communist camp," he told the sheriff, who had arrived in his car. "Drive slowly, and we'll follow," he said. "We'll surround the camp."

"We'll shut them down," he said. At that moment, he also hated the sheriff, a man he didn't know, a rather plump man in a wide-brimmed black hat.

He led his soldiers down the street. They were exhausted. They had rolls of blankets. They had belts filled with loaded cartridges. On Main Street in front of the courthouse, Ned stopped his men and made them fix their bayonets. Some of the soldiers-after all, they were mostly inexperienced boys-continued to whisper among themselves. Their words were little bombs. They frightened each other. "This is Communism. These Communists carry bombs. A bomb could blow up a whole company of people like us. A man doesn"t stand a chance." They saw their young bodies torn apart by a terrible explosion in their midst. Communism was something strange. It was un-American. It was alien.

"These communists are killing everyone. They're foreigners. They're turning women into public property. You should see what they do to women.

"They are against religion. They will kill a person for worshiping God."

"Silence in the ranks," Ned Sawyer shouted again. On Main Street, as he stopped his men to mend their bayonets, he saw a small stationer sitting on the courthouse steps, waiting for his jailer friend, who had not yet arrived.

The stationer jumped to his feet, and when the soldiers left, he followed them out into the street, limping after them. He, too, hated Communists. They must be destroyed, every one of them. They are against God. They are against America, he thought. Ever since the Communists had come to Birchfield, it had been nice to have something to hate in the early morning, before he got out of bed when his feet ached. Communism was some vague, foreign idea. He didn't understand it, he said he didn't understand it, he said he didn't want to understand it, but he hated it, and he hated the Communists. Now the Communists, who had caused such havoc in Birchfield, were going to have it. "God, how good, how good. God, how good," he muttered to himself, limping behind the soldiers. He was the only person in Birchfield, besides the sheriff and his two deputies, who saw what happened that morning, and he was to rejoice in that fact for the rest of his life. He became a fan of Ned Sawyer. "He was as cool as a cucumber," he said later. He had plenty to think about, plenty to talk about. "I saw it. I saw it. He was as cool as a cucumber," he cried.

The two men on bicycles who emerged from the shadow of a warehouse near the train station were scouts from the Communist camp. They rode toward the camp, riding their bicycles at breakneck speed down Main Street, down the sloping road past the mill, and across the bridge to the camp. Several deputy sheriffs were posted at the mill gate, and one of them shouted. "Stop," he shouted, but the two men didn't stop. The deputy drew his revolver and fired into the air. He laughed. The two men quickly crossed the bridge and entered the camp.

There was excitement in the camp. Dawn was breaking. The Communist leaders, suspecting what was coming, had not slept all night. Rumors of the soldiers' coming had reached them too. They had not allowed their scouts in. This was to be a test. "It has come," they said to themselves, as the bicyclists, leaving their wheels on the road below, ran through the camp. Red Oliver saw them arrive. He heard the report of the deputy sheriff's revolver. Men and women were now running up and down the camp street. "Soldiers. Soldiers are coming." The strike in Birchfield was now going to lead to something definite. This was the critical moment, the test. What would the Communist leaders think, the two young men, both now pale, and the little Jewish girl whom Molly Seabright, who had come with them from New York, had so admired-what would they think now? What would they do?

You could fight the sheriff's deputies and the townspeople-a few men, mostly excited and unprepared-but what about the soldiers? Soldiers are the strong arm of the state. Later, people would say of the communist leaders in Birchfield, "Well, you see," people would say, "they got what they wanted. They only wanted to use those poor workers from the Birchfield factory for propaganda. That's what they had in mind."

Hatred of communist leaders grew after the Birchfield affair. In America, liberals, broad-minded people, and the American intelligentsia also blamed communists for this brutality.

The intelligentsia doesn't like bloodshed. They hate it.

"The Communists," they said, "will sacrifice anyone. They kill these poor people. They fire them from their jobs. They stand aside and push others. They take orders from Russia. They get money from Russia.

"I'll tell you this-it's true. People are starving. That's how these communists make money. Kindhearted people give money. Do communists feed the starving? No, you see, they don't. They'll sacrifice anyone. They're crazy egotists. They use any money they get for their propaganda."

As for someone's death, Red Oliver was waiting on the edge of the communist camp. What would he do now? What would happen to him?

During the Langdon strike, he was fighting for the unions, he thought, and then when it came to the subsequent tests-it would mean going to jail-it would mean defying the public opinion of his own city-when the test came, he backed down.

"If only it were just a question of death, a question of how to approach it, simply accept it, accept death," he told himself. He recalled with shame the incident with the seven dollars hidden in his boot in the jungle, and how he lied about the money to a friend he picked up along the way. Thoughts of that moment, or his failure at that moment, haunted him. His thoughts were like wasps flying over his head, stinging him.

At dawn, a buzz of voices and a crowd of people could be heard in the camp. Strikers, men and women, were running excitedly through the streets. In the center of the camp, there was a small open space, and a woman among the communist leaders, a small Jewish woman with loose hair and shining eyes, was trying to address the crowd. Her voice was shrill. The camp bell rang. "Man and woman. Man and woman. Now. Now."

Red-haired Oliver heard her voice. He started to crawl away from the camp, then stopped. He turned back.

"Now. Now."

What a fool this man is!

In any case, no one but Molly Seabright knew of Red's presence in the camp. "A man talks and talks. He listens to conversations. He reads books. He gets into that kind of situation."

The woman's voice continued in the camp. The voice was heard around the world. The shot was heard around the world.

Bunker Hill. Lexington.

Bed. Bunker Hill.

"Now. Now."

Gastonia, North Carolina. Marion, North Carolina. Paterson, New Jersey. Think Ludlow, Colorado.

Is there a George Washington among the communists? No. They are a motley bunch. Scattered across the earth-the workers-who knows anything about them?

"I wonder if I'm a coward? I wonder if I'm a fool."

Talking. Shots. The morning the soldiers arrived in Birchfield, a gray fog lay low over the bridge, and the yellow South River flowed below.

Hills, streams, and fields in America. Millions of acres of fat-rich land.

The Communists said, "There's enough here for everyone to be comfortable... All this talk about men not having jobs is nonsense... Give us a chance... Start building... Build for a new masculinity-build houses-build new cities... Use all this new technology, invented by the human brain, for the benefit of all. Everyone can work here for a hundred years, ensuring a rich and free life for everyone... Now is the end of the old, greedy individualism."

It was true. It was all true.

The communists were brutally logical. They said, "The way to do it is to start doing it. Destroy anyone who gets in the way."

A small group of crazy, motley people.

The floor of the bridge at Birchfield just appeared out of the fog. Perhaps the Communist leaders had a plan. The woman with the disheveled hair and shining eyes stopped trying to persuade the people, and the three leaders began herding them, men and women, out of the camp and onto the bridge. Perhaps they thought, "We'll get there before the soldiers arrive." There was one of the Communist leaders, a thin, tall young man with a large nose-very pale and hatless that morning-he was almost bald-who took command. He thought, "We'll get there. We'll start picketing." It was still too early for the new workers-the so-called "scabs"-who had taken the place of the strikers at the mill to arrive at the mill gates. The Communist leader thought, "We'll get there and take up position."

Like a general. He tried to be like a general.

"Blood?

"We need to pour blood into people's faces."

It was an old saying. A Southerner once said it in Charleston, South Carolina, and sparked the Civil War. "Throw blood in the people's faces." A Communist leader also read history. "Such things will happen again and again."

"The hands of the workers are getting to work." Among the strikers in Birchfield were women holding babies. Another woman, a singer and ballad writer, had already been killed in Birchfield. "Suppose they now kill a woman holding a baby."

Did the communist leaders think through this-a bullet passing through a baby's body, and then through the mother's? It would have served a purpose. It would have been educational. It could have been put to use.

Perhaps the leader had it planned. No one knew. He dropped the strikers off on the bridge-Red Oliver trailing behind them, fascinated by the scene-when the soldiers appeared. They marched down the road, Ned Sawyer leading them. The strikers stopped and stood huddled on the bridge, while the soldiers moved on.

It was daylight now. Silence fell among the strikers. Even the leader fell silent. Ned Sawyer stationed his men across the road near the city entrance to the bridge. "Halt."

Was there something wrong with Ned Sawyer's voice? He was a young man. He was Louise Sawyer's brother. When he'd gone to officer training camp a year or two ago, and then later, when he'd become a local militia officer, he hadn't counted on this. Right now, he was shy and nervous. He didn't want his voice to waver, to tremble. He was afraid it would.

He was angry. That would be helpful. "These communists. Damn it, such crazy people." He thought of something. He had also heard talk about communists. They were like anarchists. They threw bombs. It was strange; he almost wished it would happen.

He wanted to be angry, to hate. "They're against religion." Despite himself, he kept thinking about his sister Louise. "Well, she's all right, but she's a woman. You can't approach such things in a feminine way. His own idea of communism was vague and nebulous. Workers dreaming of taking real power into their own hands. He thought about it all night on the train to Birchfield. Suppose, as his sister Louise said, it was true that everything ultimately depended on the workers and farmers, that all the true values in society rested on them.

"It is impossible to upset the situation with violence."

"Let it happen slowly. Let people get used to it."

Ned once said to his sister... he sometimes argued with her... "Louise," he said, "if you people are after Socialism, go at it slowly. I'd be almost with you if you'd go at it slowly.

That morning on the road by the bridge, Ned's anger grew. He liked it to grow. He wanted to be angry. The anger held him back. If he got angry enough, it would cool too. His voice would be firm. It would not tremble. He had heard somewhere, read that always when a crowd gathers... one cool man standing before the crowd... there was such a figure in Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" - a Southern gentleman... the crowd, the man. "I'll do it myself." He stopped his men on the road facing the bridge and moved them across the road, facing the entrance to the bridge. His plan was to drive the Communists and strikers back into their camp, surround the camp, close them in. He gave the command to his men.

"Ready."

"Load."

He had already made sure the bayonets were fixed to the soldiers' rifles. This had been done on the way to camp. The sheriff and his deputies, who had met him at the station, had retired from their work on the bridge. The crowd on the bridge was now moving forward. "Don't come any further," he said sharply. He was pleased. His voice was normal. He stepped forward in front of his men. "You'll have to go back to your camp," he said sternly. A thought occurred to him. "I'm bluffing them," he thought. "The first one who tries to leave the bridge-"

"I'll shoot him like a dog," he said. He took out a loaded revolver and held it in his hand.

Here it is. This was a test. Was this a test for Red Oliver?

As for the Communist leaders, one of them, the younger of the two, wanted to go forward that morning to accept Ned Sawyer's challenge, but he was stopped. He started to advance, thinking, "I'll call his bluff. I won't let him get away with it," when hands grabbed him, women's hands clasped him. One of the women whose hands reached out and grabbed him was Molly Seabright, who had found Red Oliver in the woods among the hills the previous evening. The younger Communist leader was once again drawn into the mass of strikers.

There was a moment of silence. Was Ned Sawyer bluffing?

One strong man against the crowd. It worked in books and stories. Will it work in real life?

Was it a bluff? Now another striker stepped forward. It was Red Oliver. He was also angry.

He also told himself, "I won't let him get away with this."

*

And so-for Red Oliver-the moment. Did he live for this?

A small stationer from Birchfield, a man with bad legs, followed the soldiers to the bridge. He limped along the road. Red Oliver saw him. He danced in the road behind the soldiers. He was excited and full of hatred. He danced in the road with his hands raised above his head. He clenched his fists. "Shoot. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot that son of a bitch." The road sloped steeply down to the bridge. Red Oliver saw a small figure above the heads of the soldiers. It seemed to dance in the air above their heads.

If Red hadn't taken revenge on the workers back in Langdon... if he hadn't gone weak in the knees then, at what he thought was the defining moment in his life... then later, when he was with the young man who had syphilis - the man he met on the road... he hadn't told them about the seven dollars that time - he had lied about it.

Earlier that morning, he'd tried to sneak out of the communist camp. He folded the blanket Molly Seabright had given him and carefully laid it on the ground near a tree...

And then -

There was unrest in the camp. "This is none of my business," he told himself. He tried to leave. He failed.

He couldn't.

As the crowd of strikers surged toward the bridge, he followed. Again, that strange feeling arose: "I am one of them and yet not one of them..."

...like during the fight at Langdon.

..the man is such a fool...

"...this is not my fight... this is not my funeral...

"... this... this is the struggle of all people... it has come... it is inevitable."

.. This...

"...this is not..."

*

On the bridge, as the young communist leader retreated toward the strikers, Red Oliver moved forward. He made his way through the crowd. Opposite him stood another young man. It was Ned Sawyer.

- ...What right did he have... son of a bitch?

Perhaps a man must do this-at times like these, he must hate before he can act. Red, too, was on fire at that moment. A slight burning sensation suddenly arose within him. He saw the ridiculous little stationery salesman dancing on the road behind the soldiers. Was he imagining something, too?

Langdon was home to people from his town, his compatriots. Perhaps it was the thought of them that compelled him to take a step forward.

He thought -

Ned Sawyer thought: They're not going to do it, Ned Sawyer thought just before Red stepped forward. I've got them, he thought. I've got the nerve. I've got it on them. I've got their goat.

He was in an absurd situation. He knew it. If one of the attackers stepped forward now, from the bridge, he would have to shoot him. It was not a pleasant thing to shoot another man, possibly unarmed. Well, a soldier is a soldier. He had threatened, and the men of his company heard it. A soldier's commander cannot weaken. If one of the attackers did not step forward soon, call his bluff... if it was just a bluff... he would be all right. Ned prayed a little. He wanted to address the strikers. "No. Don't do this." He wanted to cry. He began to tremble a little. Was he ashamed?

It could only last a minute. If he won, they would return to their camp.

None of the attackers, except for the woman, Molly Seabright, knew Red Oliver. He hadn't seen her in the crowd of strikers that morning, but he knew about her. "I bet she's here-searching." She stood in the crowd of strikers, her hand clutching the coat of the Communist leader, who wanted to do what Red Oliver was now doing. As Red Oliver stepped forward, her hands dropped. "God! Look!" she cried.

Red Oliver emerged from the forward line. "Well, damn," he thought. "What the hell," he thought.

"I'm a stupid ass," he thought.

Ned Sawyer thought so too. "What the hell," he thought. "I'm a stupid ass," he thought.

"Why did I get myself into such a hole? I've made a fool of myself.

"No brains. No brains." He could have had his men rush forward-with fixed bayonets, charging at the strikers. He could have overwhelmed them. They would have been forced to give way and return to their camp. "A damn fool, that's what I am," he thought. He wanted to cry. He was furious. His anger calmed him.

"Damn," he thought, raising his revolver. The revolver spoke, and Red Oliver lunged forward. Ned Sawyer looked tough now. A small stationery salesman from Birchfield later said of him: "I'll tell you what," he said, "he was as tough as a cucumber." Red Oliver was killed instantly. There was a moment of silence.

*

A scream came from a woman's lips. It came from Molly Seabright's. The man shot was the same young Communist she had found only hours earlier, sitting quietly in the silent woods far from here. She, along with a crowd of other working men and women, rushed forward. Ned Sawyer was knocked down. He was kicked. He was beaten. It was said afterwards-this was sworn by a stationer in Birchfield and two deputy sheriffs-that the soldier commander did not fire a shot that morning until the Communists attacked. There were other shots... some came from strikers... many of the strikers were mountain men... they had guns too...

The soldiers didn't fire. Ned Sawyer kept his wits. Though he was knocked down and kicked, he got back on his feet. He forced the soldiers to club their weapons. Many of the strikers were knocked down by the soldiers' rapid advance. Some were beaten and bruised. The strikers were driven across the bridge and across the road into camp, and later that morning, all three leaders, along with several strikers, all beaten... some bruised and some foolish enough to stay in camp... many fled into the hills behind camp... were taken from camp and thrown into Birchfield Prison, and later sentenced to prison. Red Oliver's body was sent home to his mother. In his pocket was a letter from his friend Neil Bradley. It was a letter about Neil and his love for a schoolteacher-an immoral letter. That was the end of the Communist strike. A week later, the mill in Birchfield was back in operation. There were no problems attracting a large number of workers.

*

RED OLIVER was buried in Langdon, Georgia. His mother sent his body home from Birchfield, and many Langdon residents attended the funeral. The boy-the young man-was remembered there as such a nice boy-a smart boy-an excellent ballplayer-and he was killed during a Communist revolt? "Why? What?"

Curiosity brought the residents of Langdon to Red's funeral. They were puzzled.

"What, young Red Oliver is a communist? I don't believe it."

Ethel Long of Langdon, now Mrs. Tom Riddle, didn't go to Red's funeral. She stayed home. After their marriage, she and her husband didn't talk about Red or what happened to him in Birchfield, North Carolina, but one night in the summer of 1931, a year after Red's funeral, when a sudden, violent thunderstorm occurred-just like the night Red went to visit Ethel in the Langdon library-Ethel went out in her car. It was late at night, and Tom Riddle was in his office. When he came home, rain was pounding the walls of his house. He sat down to read the newspaper. It was no use turning on the radio. Radios were useless on a night like this-too much static.

It happened-his wife was sitting next to him, reading a book, when she suddenly stood up. She went and got her raincoat. She had her own car now. As she approached the door, Tom Riddle looked up and spoke. "What the hell, Ethel," he said. She turned pale and didn"t answer. Tom followed her to the front door and saw her running across the yard toward Riddle"s garage. The wind whipped the tree branches overhead. It was raining heavily. Suddenly, lightning flashed and thunder rolled. Ethel backed the car out of the garage and drove away. It was a clear day. The top of the car was down. It was a sports car.

Tom Riddle never told his wife what happened that night. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. Ethel drove her car at breakneck speed from the city to the village.

The Roach in Langdon, Georgia, is a sand and clay road. In good weather, these roads are smooth and good, but in wet weather, they are treacherous and unreliable. It's a wonder Ethel wasn't killed. She drove her car furiously for several miles along country roads. The storm continued. The car skidded onto the roadway and off the road. It was in a ditch. It jumped out. One day, she simply couldn't cross a bridge.

A kind of rage gripped her, as if she hated the car. She was soaking wet, and her hair was a mess. Had someone tried to kill her? She didn't know where she was. One night while driving, she saw a man walking along the road carrying a lantern. He yelled at her. "Go to hell!" she screamed. In reality, it was a land of many poor farmhouses, and every now and then, when lightning flashed, she could see a house not far from the road. In the darkness, there were a few distant lights, like stars fallen to earth. In one house near a town ten miles from Langdon, she heard a woman drowning.

She fell silent and returned to her husband's house at three in the morning. Tom Riddle had gone to bed. He was a shrewd and capable man. He woke up but said nothing. He and his wife slept in separate rooms. That evening, he didn't tell her about her trip, and later didn't ask where she had been.

END