Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories

  If May Edgley, during her girlhood, rose higher than any of the others of the Edgley family she also fell lower. “She had her chance and threw it away,” was the word that went round and surely no one else in that family ever had so completely the town’s sympathy. Lillian Edgley was outside the pale of the town’s life, and Kate was but a lesser edition of her sister. She waited on table at the Fownsby House, and on almost any evening might have been seen walking out with some traveling man. She also took the evening train to neighboring towns but returned to Bidwell later on the same night or at daylight the next morning. She did not prosper as Lillian did and grew tired of the dullness of small town life. At twenty-two she went to live in Cleveland where she got a job as cloak model in a large store. Later she went on the road as an actress, in a burlesque show, and Bidwell heard no more of her.

  As for May Edgley, all through her childhood and until her seventeenth year she was a model of good behavior. Everyone spoke of it. She was, unlike the other Edgleys, small and dark, and unlike her sisters dressed herself in plain neat-fitting clothes. As a young girl in the public school she began to attract attention because of her proficiency in the classes. Both Lillian and Kate Edgley had been slovenly students, who spent their time ogling boys and the men teachers but May looked at no one and as soon as school was dismissed in the afternoon went home to her mother, a tall tired-looking woman who seldom went out of her own house.

  In Bidwell, Tom Means, who later became a soldier and who has recently won high rank in the army because of his proficiency in training recruits for the World War, was the prize pupil in the schools. Tom was working for his appointment to West Point, and did not spend his evenings loafing on the streets, as did other young men. He stayed in his own house, intent on his studies. Tom’s father was a lawyer and his mother was third cousin to a Kentucky woman who had married an English baronet. The son aspired to be a soldier and a gentleman and to live on the intellectual plane, and had a good deal of contempt for the mental capacities of his fellow students, and when one of the Edgley family set up as his rival he was angry and embarrassed and the schoolroom was delighted. Day after day and year after year the contest between him and May Edgley went on and in a sense the whole town of Bidwell got back of the girl. In all such things as history and English literature Tom swept all before him but in spelling, arithmetic, and geography May defeated him without effort. At her desk she sat like a little terrier in the presence of a trap filled with rats. A question was asked or a problem in arithmetic put on the blackboard and like a terrier she jumped. Her hand went up and her sensitive mouth quivered. Fingers were snapped vigorously. “I know,” she said, and the entire class knew she did. When she had answered the question or had gone to the blackboard to solve the problem the half-grown children along the rows of benches laughed and Tom Means stared out through a window. May returned to her seat, half triumphant, half ashamed of her victory.

  The country lying west of Bidwell, like all the Ohio country down that way, is given to small fruit and berry raising, and in June and after school has been dismissed for the year all the younger men, boys, and girls, with most of the women of the town go to work in the fruit harvest. To the fields immediately after breakfast the citizens go trooping away. Lunches are carried in baskets and until the sun goes down everyone stays in the fields.

  And in the berry fields as in the schoolroom May was a notable figure. She did not walk or ride to the work with the other young girls, or join the parties at lunch at the noon hour, but everyone understood that that was because of her family. “I know how she feels, if I came from a family like that I wouldn’t ask or want other people’s attention,” said one of the women, the wife of a carpenter, who trudged along with the others in the dust of the road.

  In a berry field, belonging to a farmer named Peter Short, some thirty women, young men and tall awkward boys crawled over the ground, picking the red fragrant berries. Ahead of them, in a row by herself, went May, the exclusive, the woman who walked by herself. Her hands flitted in and out of the berry vines as the tail of a squirrel disappears among the leaves of a tree when one walks in a wood. The other pickers went slowly, stopping occasionally to eat berries and talk and when one had crawled a little ahead of the others he stopped and waited, sitting on his haunches. The pickers were paid in proportion to the number of quarts picked during the day but, as they often said, “pay was not everything.” The berry picking was in a way a social function, and who were the pickers, wives, sons and daughters of prosperous artisans, to kill themselves for a few paltry dollars?

  With May Edgley they understood it was different. Everyone knew that she and her mother got practically no money from John Edgley, the father—from the boys, Jake, Frank and Will—or from the girls, Lilian and Kate, who spent their takings on clothes for themselves. If she were to be decently dressed, she had to earn the money for the purpose during the vacation time when she could stay out of school. Later it was understood she planned to be a school teacher herself, and to attain to that position it was necessary that she keep herself well dressed and show herself industrious and alert in affairs.

  Tirelessly, therefore, May worked and the boxes of berries, filled by her ever alert fingers, grew into mountains. Peter Short with his son came walking down the rows to gather the filled crates and put them aboard a wagon to be hauled to town. He looked at May with pride in his eyes and the other pickers lumbering slowly along became the target for his scorn. “Ah, you talking women and you big lazy boys, you’re not much good,” he cried. “Ain’t you ashamed of yourselves? Look at you there, Sylvester and Al—letting yourself be beat, twice over, by a girl so little you could almost carry her home in your pocket.”

  It was in the summer of her seventeenth year that May fell down from her high place in the life of the town of Bidwell. Two vital and dramatic events had happened to her that year. Her mother died in April and she graduated from the high school in June, second only in honors to Tom Means. As Tom’s father had been on the school board for years the town shook its head over the decision that placed him ahead of May and in everyone’s eyes May had really walked off with the prize. When she went into the fields, and when they remembered the fact of her mother’s recent death, even the women were ready to forget and forgive the fact of her being a member of the Edgley family. As for May, it seemed to her at that moment that nothing that could happen to her could very much matter.

  And then the unexpected. As more than one Bidwell wife said afterwards to her husband. “It was then that blood showed itself.”

  A man named Jerome Hadley first found out about May. He went that year to Peter Short’s field, as he himself said, “just for fun,” and he found it. Jerome was pitcher for the Bidwell baseball nine and worked as mail clerk on the railroad. After he had returned from a run he had several days’ rest and went to the berry field because the town was deserted. When he saw May working off by herself he winked at the other young men and going to her got down on his knees and began picking at a speed almost as great as her own. “Come on here, little woman,” he said, “I’m a mail clerk and have got my hand in, sorting letters. My fingers can go pretty fast. Come on now, let’s see if you can keep up with me.”

  For an hour Jerome and May went up and down in the rows and then the thing happened that set the town by the ears. The girl, who had never talked to others, began talking to Jerome and the other pickers turned to look and wonder. She no longer picked at lightning speed but loitered along, stopping to rest and put choice berries into her mouth. “Eat that,” she said boldly passing a great red berry across the row to the man. She put a handful of berries into his box. “You won’t make as much as seventy-five cents all day if you don’t get a move on you,” she said, smiling shyly.

  At the noon hour the other pickers found out the truth. The tired workers had gone to the pump by Peter Short’s house and then to a near-by orchard to sit under the trees and rest after the eating of lunches.

  There w
as no doubt something had happened to May. Everyone felt it. It was later understood that she had, during that noon hour in June and quite calmly and deliberately, decided to become like her two sisters and go on the town.

  The berry pickers as usual ate their lunches in groups, the women and girls sitting under one tree and the young men and boys under another. Peter Short’s wife brought hot coffee and tin cups were filled. Jokes went back and forth and the girls giggled.

  In spite of the unexpectedness of May’s attitude toward Jerome, a bachelor and quite legitimate game for the unmarried women, no one suspected anything serious would happen. Flirtations were always going on in the berry fields. They came, played themselves out, and passed like the clouds in the June sky. In the evening, when the young men had washed the dirt of the fields away and had put on their Sunday clothes, things were different. Then a girl must look out for herself. When she went to walk in the evening with a young man under the trees or out into country lanes—then anything might happen.

  But in the fields, with all the older women about—to have thought anything at all of a young man and a girl working together and blushing and laughing, would have been to misunderstand the whole spirit of the berry picking season.

  And it was evident May had misunderstood. Later no one blamed Jerome, at least none of the young fellows did. As the pickers ate lunch May sat a little apart from the others. That was her custom and Jerry lay in the long grass at the edge of the orchard also a little apart. A sudden tenseness crept into the groups under the trees. May had not gone to the pump with the others when she came in from the field but sat with her back braced against a tree and the hand that held the sandwich was black with the soil of her morning labors. It trembled and once the sandwich fell out of her hand.

  Suddenly she got to her feet and put her lunch basket into the fork of a tree, and then, with a look of defiance in her eyes, she climbed over a fence and started along a lane past Peter Short’s barn. The lane ran down to a meadow, crossed a bridge and went on beside a waving wheatfield to a wood.

  May went a little way along the lane and then stopped to look back and the other pickers stared at her, wondering what was the matter. Then Jerome Hadley got to his feet. He was ashamed and climbed awkwardly over the fence and walked away without looking back.

  Everyone was quite sure it had all been arranged. As the girls and women got to their feet and stood watching, May and Jerome went out of the lane and into the wood. The older women shook their heads. “Well, well,” they exclaimed while the boys and young men began slapping each other on the back and prancing grotesquely about.

  It was unbelievable. Before they had got out of sight of the others under the tree Jerome had put his arm about May’s waist and she had put her head down on his shoulder. It was as though May Edgley who, as all the older women agreed, had been treated almost as an equal by all of the others had wanted to throw something ugly right in their faces.

  Jerome and May stayed for two hours in the wood and then came back together to the field where the others were at work. May’s cheeks were pale and she looked as though she had been crying. She picked alone as before and after a few moments of awkward silence Jerome put on his coat and went off along a road toward town. May made a little mountain of filled berry boxes during that afternoon but two or three times filled boxes dropped out of her hands. The spilled fruit lay red and shining against the brown and black of the soil.

  No one saw May in the berry fields after that, and Jerome Hadley had something of which to boast. In the evening when he came among the young fellows he spoke of his adventure at length.

  “You couldn’t blame me for taking the chance when I had it,” he said laughing. He explained in detail what had occurred in the wood, while other young men stood about filled with envy. As he talked he grew both proud and a little ashamed of the public attention his adventure was attaining. “It was easy,” he said. “That May Edgley’s the easiest thing that ever lived in this town. A fellow don’t have to ask to get what he wants. That’s how easy it is.”

  CHAPTER II

  In Bidwell, and after she had fairly flung herself against the wall of village convention by going into the wood with Jerome, May lived at home, doing the work her mother had formerly done in the Edgley household. She washed the clothes, cooked the food and made the beds. There was, for the time, something sweet to her in the thoughts of doing lowly tasks and she washed and ironed the dresses in which Lillian and Kate were to array themselves and the heavy overalls worn by her father and brothers with a kind of satisfaction in the task. “It makes me tired and I can sleep and won’t be thinking,” she told herself. As she worked over the washtubs, among the beds soiled by the heavy slumbers of her brothers who on the evening before had perhaps come home drunk, or stood over the hot stove in the kitchen, she kept thinking of her dead mother. “I wonder what she would think,” she asked herself and then added, “If she hadn’t died it wouldn’t have happened. If I had someone, I could go to and talk with, things would be different.”

  During the day when the men of the household were gone with their teams and when Lillian was away from town May had the house to herself. It was a two-storied frame building, standing at the edge of a field near the town’s edge, and had once been painted yellow. Now, water washing from the roofs had discolored the paint, and the side walls of the old building were all mottled and streaked. The house stood on a little hill and the land fell sharply away from the kitchen door. There was a creek under the hill and beyond the creek a field that at certain times during the year became a swamp. At the creek’s edge willows and elders grew and often in the afternoon, when there was no one about, May went softly out at the kitchen door, looking to be sure there was no one in the road that ran past the front of the house, and if the coast was clear went down the hill and crept in among the fragrant elders and willows. “I am lost here and no one can see me or find me,” she thought, and the thought gave her intense satisfaction. Her cheeks grew flushed and hot and she pressed the cool green leaves of the willows against them. When a wagon passed in the road or someone walked along the board sidewalk at the roadside she drew herself into a little lump and closed her eyes. The passing sounds seemed far away and to herself it seemed that she had in some way escaped from life. How warm and close it was there, buried amid the dark green shadows of the willows. The gnarled twisted limbs of the trees were like arms but unlike the arms of the man with whom she had lain in the wood they did not grasp her with terrifying convulsive strength. For hours she lay still in the shadows and nothing came to frighten her and her lacerated spirit began to heal a little. “I have made myself an outlaw among people but I am not an outlaw here,” she told herself.

  * * *

  Having heard of the incident with Jerome Hadley, in the berry field, Lillian and Kate Edgley were irritated and angry and one evening when they were both at the house and May was at work in the kitchen they spoke about it. Lillian was very angry and had decided to give May what she spoke of as “a piece of her mind.” “What’d she want to go in the cheap for?” she asked. “It makes me sick when I think of it—a fellow like that Jerome Hadley! If she was going to cut loose what made her want to go on the cheap?”

  In the Edgley family it had always been understood that May was of a different clay and old John Edgley and the boys had always paid her a kind of crude respect. They did not swear at her as they sometimes did at Lillian and Kate, and in secret they thought of her as a link between themselves and the more respectable life of the town. Ma Edgley was respectable enough but she was old and tired and never went out of the house and it was in May the family held up its head. The two brothers were proud of their sister because of her record in the town school. They themselves were working men and never expected to be anything else but, they thought, “that sister of ours has shown the town that an Edgley can beat them at their own game. She is smarter than any of them. See how she has forced the town to pay attention to her.”

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