Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories

  But to get back to my knitting. After Tom had left, the stable I was with kept drifting along through nice little Pennsylvania county seat towns. My owner, a strange excitable kind of a man from over in Ohio, who had lost a lot of money on horses but was always thinking he would maybe get it all back in some big killing, had been playing in pretty good luck that year. The horse I had, a tough little gelding, a five year old, had been getting home in front pretty regular and so he took some of his winnings and bought a three years old black pacing stallion named “O, My Man.” My gelding was called “Pick-it-boy” because when he was in a race and had got into the stretch my owner always got half wild with excitement and shouted so you could hear him a mile and a half. “Go, pick it boy, pick it boy, pick it boy,” he kept shouting and so when he had got hold of this good little gelding he had named him that.

  The gelding was a fast one, all right. As the boys at the tracks used to say, he “picked ’em up sharp and set ’em down clean,” and he was what we called a natural race horse, right up to all the speed he had, and didn’t require much training. “All you got to do is to drop him down on the track and he’ll go,” was what my owner was always saying to other men, when he was bragging about his horse.

  And so you see, after Tom left, I hadn’t much to do evenings and then the new stallion, the three year old, came on with a negro swipe named Burt.

  I liked him fine and he liked me but not the same as Tom and me. We got to be friends all right and I suppose Burt would have done things for me, and maybe me for him, that Tom and me wouldn’t have done for each other.

  But with a negro you couldn’t be close friends like you can with another white man. There’s some reason you can’t understand but it’s true. There’s been too much talk about the difference between whites and blacks and you’re both shy, and anyway no use trying and I suppose Burt and I both knew it and so I was pretty lonesome.

  Something happened to me that happened several times, when I was a young fellow, that I have never exactly understood. Sometimes now I think it was all because I had got to be almost a man and had never been with a woman. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I can’t ask a woman. I’ve tried it a good many times in my life but every time I’ve tried the same thing happened.

  Of course, with Jessie now, it’s different, but at the time of which I’m speaking Jessie was a long ways off and a good many things were to happen to me before I got to her.

  Around a race track, as you may suppose, the fellows who are swipes and drivers and strangers in the towns do not go without women. They don’t have to. In any town there are always some fly girls will come around a place like that. I suppose they think they are fooling with men who lead romantic lives. Such girls will come along by the front of the stalls where the race horses are and, if you look all right to them, they will stop and make a fuss over your horse. They rub their little hands over the horse’s nose and then is the time for you—if you aren’t a fellow like me who can’t get up the nerve—then is the time for you to smile and say, “Hello, kid,” and make a date with one of them for that evening up town after supper. I couldn’t do that, although the Lord knows I tried hard enough, often enough. A girl would come along alone, and she would be a little thing and give me the eye, and I would try and try but couldn’t say anything. Both Tom, and Burt afterwards, used to laugh at me about it sometimes but what I think is that, had I been able to speak up to one of them and had managed to make a date with her, nothing would have come of it. We would probably have walked around the town and got off together in the dark somewhere, where the town came to an end, and then she would have had to knock me over with a club before it got any further.

  And so there I was, having got used to Tom and our talks together, and Burt of course had his own friends among the black men. I got lazy and mopey and had a hard time doing my work.

  It was like this. Sometimes I would be sitting, perhaps under a tree in the late afternoon when the races were over for the day and the crowds had gone away. There were always a lot of other men and boys who hadn’t any horses in the races that day and they would be standing or sitting about in front of the stalls and talking.

  I would listen for a time to their talk and then their voices would seem to go far away. The things I was looking at would go far away too. Perhaps there would be a tree, not more than a hundred yards away, and it would just come out of the ground and float away like a thistle. It would get smaller and smaller, away off there in the sky, and then suddenly—bang, it would be back where it belonged, in the ground, and I would begin hearing the voices of the men talking again.

  When Tom was with me that summer the nights were splendid. We usually walked about and talked until pretty late and then I crawled up into my hole and went to sleep. Always out of Tom’s talk I got something that stayed in my mind, after I was off by myself, curled up in my blanket. I suppose he had a way of making pictures as he talked and the pictures stayed by me as Burt was always saying pork chops did by him. “Give me the old pork chops, they stick to the ribs,” Burt was always saying and with the imagination it was always that way about Tom’s talks. He started something inside you that went on and on, and your mind played with it like walking about in a strange town and seeing the sights, and you slipped off to sleep and had splendid dreams and woke up in the morning feeling fine.

  And then he was gone and it wasn’t that way any more and I got into the fix I have described. At night I kept seeing women’s bodies and women’s lips and things in my dreams, and woke up in the morning feeling like the old Harry.

  Burt was pretty good to me. He always helped me cool Pick-it-boy out after a race and he did the things himself that take the most skill and quickness, like getting the bandages on a horse’s leg smooth, and seeing that every strap is setting just right, and every buckle drawn up to just the right hole, before your horse goes out on the track for a heat.

  Burt knew there was something wrong with me and put himself out not to let the boss know. When the boss was around he was always bragging about me. “The brightest kid I’ve ever worked with around the tracks,” he would say and grin, and that at a time when I wasn’t worth my salt.

  When you go out with the horses there is one job that always takes a lot of time. In the late afternoon, after your horse has been in a race and after you have washed him and rubbed him out, he has to be walked slowly, sometimes for hours and hours, so he’ll cool out slowly and won’t get muscle-bound. I got so I did that job for both our horses and Burt did the more important things. It left him free to go talk or shoot dice with the other niggers and I didn’t mind. I rather liked it and after a hard race even the stallion, O My Man, was tame enough, even when there were mares about.

  You walk and walk and walk, around a little circle, and your horse’s head is right by your shoulder, and all around you the life of the place you are in is going on, and in a queer way you get so you aren’t really a part of it at all. Perhaps no one ever gets as I was then, except boys that aren’t quite men yet and who like me have never been with girls or women—to really be with them, up to the hilt, I mean. I used to wonder if young girls got that way too before they married or did what we used to call “go on the town.”

  If I remember it right though, I didn’t do much thinking then. Often I would have forgotten supper if Burt hadn’t shouted at me and reminded me, and sometimes he forgot and went off to town with one of the other niggers and I did forget.

  There I was with the horse, going slow slow slow, around a circle that way. The people were leaving the fair grounds now, some afoot, some driving away to the farms in wagons and fords. Clouds of dust floated in the air and over to the west, where the town was, maybe the sun was going down, a red ball of fire through the dust. Only a few hours before the crowd had been all filled with excitement and everyone shouting. Let us suppose my horse had been in a race that afternoon and I had stood in front of the grandstand with my horse blanket over my shoulder, alongside of Bur
t perhaps, and when they came into the stretch my owner began to call, in that queer high voice of his that seemed to float over the top of all the shouting up in the grandstand. And his voice was saying over and over, “Go, pick it boy, pick it boy, pick it boy,” the way he always did, and my heart was thumping so I could hardly breathe, and Burt was leaning over and snapping his fingers and muttering, “Come, little sweet. Come on home. Your Mama wants you. Come get your ’lasses and bread, little Pick-it-boy.”

  Well, all that was over now and the voices of the people left around were all low. And Pick-it-boy—I was leading him slowly around the little ring, to cool him out slowly, as I’ve said,—he was different too. Maybe he had pretty nearly broken his heart trying to get down to the wire in front, or getting down there in front, and now everything inside him was quiet and tired, as it was nearly all the time those days in me, except in me tired but not quiet.

  You remember I’ve told you we always walked in a circle, round and round and round. I guess something inside me got to going round and round and round too. The sun did sometimes and the trees and the clouds of dust. I had to think sometimes about putting down my feet so they went down in the right place and I didn’t get to staggering like a drunken man.

  And a funny feeling came that it is going to be hard to describe. It had something to do with the life in the horse and in me. Sometimes, these late years, I’ve thought maybe negroes would understand what I’m trying to talk about now better than any white man ever will. I mean something about men and animals, something between them, something that can perhaps only happen to a white man when he has slipped off his base a little, as I suppose I had then. I think maybe a lot of horsey people feel it sometimes though. It’s something like this, maybe—do you suppose it could be that something we whites have got, and think such a lot of, and are so proud about, isn’t much of any good after all?

  It’s something in us that wants to be big and grand and important maybe and won’t let us just be, like a horse or a dog or a bird can. Let’s say Pick-it-boy had won his race that day. He did that pretty often that summer. Well, he was neither proud, like I would have been in his place, or mean in one part of the inside of him either. He was just himself, doing something with a kind of simplicity. That’s what Pick-it-boy was like and I got to feeling it in him as I walked with him slowly in the gathering darkness. I got inside him in some way I can’t explain and he got inside me. Often we would stop walking for no cause and he would put his nose up against my face.

  I wished he was a girl sometimes or that I was a girl and he was a man. It’s an odd thing to say but it’s a fact. Being with him that way, so long, and in such a quiet way, cured something in me a little. Often after an evening like that I slept all right and did not have the kind of dreams I’ve spoken about.

  But I wasn’t cured for very long and couldn’t get cured. My body seemed all right and just as good as ever but there wasn’t no pep in me.

  Then the fall got later and later and we came to the last town we were going to make before my owner laid his horses up for the winter, in his home town over across the State line in Ohio, and the track was up on a hill, or rather in a kind of high plain above the town.

  It wasn’t much of a place and the sheds were rather rickety and the track bad, especially at the turns. As soon as we got to the place and got stabled it began to rain and kept it up all week so the fair had to be put off.

  As the purses weren’t very large a lot of the owners shipped right out but our owner stayed. The fair owners guaranteed expenses, whether the races were held the next week or not.

  And all week there wasn’t much of anything for Burt and me to do but clean manure out of the stalls in the morning, watch for a chance when the rain let up a little to jog the horses around the track in the mud and then clean them off, blanket them and stick them back in their stalls.

  It was the hardest time of all for me. Burt wasn’t so bad off as there were a dozen or two blacks around and in the evening they went off to town, got liquored up a little and came home late, singing and talking, even in the cold rain.

  And then one night I got mixed up in the thing I’m trying to tell you about.

  * * *

  It was a Saturday evening and when I look back at it now it seems to me everyone had left the tracks but just me. In the early evening swipe after swipe came over to my stall and asked me if I was going to stick around. When I said I was he would ask me to keep an eye out for him, that nothing happened to his horse. “Just take a stroll down that way now and then, eh, kid,” one of them would say, “I just want to run up to town for an hour or two.”

  I would say “yes” to be sure, and so pretty soon it was dark as pitch up there in that little ruined fairground and nothing living anywhere around but the horses and me.

  I stood it as long as I could, walking here and there in the mud and rain, and thinking all the time I wished I was someone else and not myself. “If I were someone else,” I thought, “I wouldn’t be here but down there in town with the others.” I saw myself going into saloons and having drinks and later going off to a house maybe and getting myself a woman.

  I got to thinking so much that, as I went stumbling around up there in the darkness, it was as though what was in my mind was actually happening.

  Only I wasn’t with some cheap woman, such as I would have found had I had the nerve to do what I wanted but with such a woman as I thought then I should never find in this world. She was slender and like a flower and with something in her like a race horse too, something in her like Pick-it-boy in the stretch, I guess.

  And I thought about her and thought about her until I couldn’t stand thinking any more. “I’ll do something anyway,” I said to myself.

  So, although I had told all the swipes I would stay and watch their horses, I went out of the fair grounds and down the hill a ways. I went down until I came to a little low saloon, not in the main part of the town itself but half way up the hillside. The saloon had once been a residence, a farmhouse perhaps, but if it was ever a farmhouse I’m sure the farmer who lived there and worked the land on that hillside hadn’t made out very well. The country didn’t look like a farming country, such as one sees all about the other county-seat towns we had been visiting all through the late summer and fall. Everywhere you looked there were stones sticking out of the ground and the trees mostly of the stubby, stunted kind. It looked wild and untidy and ragged, that’s what I mean. On the flat plain, up above, where the fairground was, there were a few fields and pastures, and there were some sheep raised and in the field right next to the tracks, on the furtherest side from town, on the back stretch side, there had once been a slaughter-house, the ruins of which were still standing. It hadn’t been used for quite some time but there were bones of animals lying all about in the field, and there was a smell coming out of the old building that would curl your hair.

  The horses hated the place, just as we swipes did, and in the morning when we were jogging them around the track in the mud, to keep them in racing condition, Pick-it-boy and O My Man both raised old Ned every time we headed them up the back stretch and got near to where the old slaughterhouse stood. They would rear and fight at the bit, and go off their stride and run until they got clear of the rotten smells, and neither Burt nor I could make them stop it. “It’s a hell of a town down there and this is a hell of a track for racing,” Burt kept saying. “If they ever have their danged old fair someone’s going to get spilled and maybe killed back here.” Whether they did or not I don’t know as I didn’t stay for the fair, for reasons I’ll tell you pretty soon, but Burt was speaking sense all right. A race horse isn’t like a human being. He won’t stand for it to have to do his work in any rotten ugly kind of a dump the way a man will, and he won’t stand for the smells a man will either.

  But to get back to my story again. There I was, going down the hillside in the darkness and the cold soaking rain and breaking my word to all the others about staying up above and w
atching the horses. When I got to the little saloon I decided to stop and have a drink or two. I’d found out long before that about two drinks upset me so I was two-thirds piped and couldn’t walk straight, but on that night I didn’t care a tinker’s dam.

  So I went up a kind of path, out of the road, toward the front door of the saloon. It was in what must have been the parlor of the place when it was a farmhouse and there was a little front porch.

  I stopped before I opened the door and looked about a little. From where I stood I could look right down into the main street of the town, like being in a big city, like New York or Chicago, and looking down out of the fifteenth floor of an office building into the street.

  The hillside was mighty steep and the road up had to wind and wind or no one could ever have come up out of the town to their plagued old fair at all.

  It wasn’t much of a town I saw—a main street with a lot of saloons and a few stores, one or two dinky moving-picture places, a few fords, hardly any women or girls in sight and a raft of men. I tried to think of the girl I had been dreaming about, as I walked around in the mud and darkness up at the fair ground, living in the place but I couldn’t make it. It was like trying to think of Pick-it-boy getting himself worked up to the state I was in then, and going into the ugly dump I was going into. It couldn’t be done.

  All the same I knew the town wasn’t all right there in sight. There must have been a good many of the kinds of houses Pennsylvania miners live in back in the hills, or around a turn in the valley in which the main street stood.

  What I suppose is that, it being Saturday night and raining, the women and kids had all stayed at home and only the men were out, intending to get themselves liquored up. I’ve been in some other mining towns since and if I was a miner and had to live in one of them, or in one of the houses they live in with their women and kids, I’d get out and liquor myself up too.