Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories

  “What?” Ted said. “Gee, I guess maybe I saved you from drowning,” he added.

  “Sure you did,” said Mary. “I told her to let you alone.” She grew suddenly fierce. “They’ve all got to—they’ve got to let you alone,” she said.

  There was a bond. Ted did his share. He was imaginative and could think of plenty of risky things to do. Perhaps the mother spoke to the father and to Don, the older brother. There was a new inclination in the family to keep hands off the pair, and the fact seemed to give the two children new room in life. Something seemed to open out. There was a little inner world created, always, every day, being re-created, and in it there was a kind of new security. It seemed to the two children—they could not have put their feeling into words—that, being in their own created world, feeling a new security there, they could suddenly look out at the outside world and see, in a new way, what was going on out there in the world that belonged also to others.

  It was a world to be thought about, looked at, a world of drama too, the drama of human relations, outside their own world, in a family, on a farm, in a farmhouse. . . . On a farm, calves and yearling steers arriving to be fattened, great heavy steers going off to market, colts being broken to work or to saddle, lambs born in the late Winter. The human side of life was more difficult, to a child often incomprehensible, but after the speech to the mother, on the porch of the house that day when it rained, it seemed to Mary almost as though she and Ted had set up a new family. Everything about the farm, the house and the barns got nicer. There was a new freedom. The two children walked along a country road, returning to the farm from school in the late afternoon. There were other children in the road but they managed to fall behind or they got ahead. There were plans made. “I’m going to be a nurse when I grow up,” Mary said. She may have remembered dimly the woman nurse, from the county-seat town, who had come to stay in the house when Ted was so ill. Ted said that as soon as he could—it would be when he was younger yet than Don was now—he intended to leave and go out West . . . far out, he said. He wanted to be a cowboy or a bronco-buster or something, and, that failing, he thought he would be a railroad engineer. The railroad that went down through the Rich Valley crossed a corner of the Grey farm, and, from the road in the afternoon, they could sometimes see trains, quite far away, the smoke rolling up. There was a faint rumbling noise, and, on clear days they could see the flying piston rods of the engines.

  * * *

  As for the two stumps in the field near the house, they were what was left of two oak trees. The children had known the trees. They were cut one day in the early Fall.

  There was a back porch to the Grey house—the house that had once been the seat of the Aspinwahl family—and from the porch steps a path led down to a stone spring house. A spring came out of the ground just there, and there was a tiny stream that went along the edge of a field, past two large barns and out across a meadow to a creek—called a “branch” in Virginia, and the two trees stood close together beyond the spring house and the fence.

  They were lusty trees, their roots down in the rich, always damp soil, and one of them had a great limb that came down near the ground, so that Ted and Mary could climb into it and out another limb into its brother tree, and in the Fall, when other trees, at the front and side of the house, had shed their leaves, blood-red leaves still clung to the two oaks. They were like dry blood on gray days, but on other days, when the sun came out, the trees flamed against distant hills. The leaves clung, whispering and talking when the wind blew, so that the trees themselves seemed carrying on a conversation.

  John Grey had decided he would have the trees cut. At first it was not a very definite decision. “I think I’ll have them cut,” he announced.

  “But why?” his wife asked. The trees meant a good deal to her. They had been planted, just in that spot, by her grandfather, she said, having in mind just a certain effect. “You see how, in the Fall, when you stand on the back porch, they are so nice against the hills.” She spoke of the trees, already quite large, having been brought from a distant woods. Her mother had often spoken of it. The man, her grandfather, had a special feeling for trees. “An Aspinwahl would do that,” John Grey said. “There is enough yard, here about the house, and enough trees. They do not shade the house or the yard. An Aspinwahl would go to all that trouble for trees and then plant them where grass might be growing.” He had suddenly determined, a half-formed determination in him suddenly hardening. He had perhaps heard too much of the Aspinwahls and their ways. The conversation regarding the trees took place at the table, at the noon hour, and Mary and Ted heard it all.

  It began at the table and was carried on afterwards out of doors, in the yard back of the house. The wife had followed her husband out. He always left the table suddenly and silently, getting quickly up and going out heavily, shutting doors with a bang as he went. “Don’t, John,” the wife said, standing on the porch and calling to her husband. It was a cold day but the sun was out and the trees were like great bonfires against gray distant fields and hills. The older son of the family, young Don, the one so physically like the father and apparently so like him in every way, had come out of the house with the mother, followed by the two children, Ted and Mary, and at first Don said nothing, but, when the father did not answer the mother’s protest but started toward the barn, he also spoke. What he said was obviously the determining thing, hardening the father.

  To the two other children—they had walked a little aside and stood together watching and listening—there was something. There was their own child’s world. “Let us alone and we’ll let you alone.” It wasn’t as definite as that. Most of the definite thoughts about what happened in the yard that afternoon came to Mary Grey long afterwards, when she was a grown woman. At the moment there was merely a sudden sharpening of the feeling of isolation, a wall between herself and Ted and the others. The father, even then perhaps, seen in a new light, Don and the mother seen in a new light.

  There was something, a driving destructive thing in life, in all relationships between people. All of this felt dimly that day—she always believed both by herself and Ted—but only thought out long afterwards, after Ted was dead. There was the farm her father had won from the Aspinwahls—greater persistence, greater shrewdness. In a family, little remarks dropped from time to time, an impression slowly built up. The father, John Grey, was a successful man. He had acquired. He owned. He was the commander, the one having power to do his will. And the power had run out and covered, not only other human lives, impulses in others, wishes, hungers in others . . . he himself might not have, might not even understand . . . but it went far out beyond that. It was, curiously, the power also of life and death. Did Mary Grey think such thoughts at that moment? . . . ? She couldn’t have. . . . Still there was her own peculiar situation, her relationship with her brother Ted, who was to die.

  Ownership that gave curious rights, dominances—fathers over children, men and women over lands, houses, factories in cities, fields. “I will have the trees in that orchard cut. They produce apples but not of the right sort. There is no money in apples of that sort any more.”

  “But, Sir . . . you see . . . look . . . the trees there against that hill, against the sky.”

  “Nonsense. Sentimentality.”

  Confusion.

  It would have been such nonsense to think of the father of Mary Grey as a man without feeling. He had struggled hard all his life, perhaps, as a young man, gone without things wanted, deeply hungered for. Some one has to manage things in this life. Possessions mean power, the right to say, “do this” or “do that.” If you struggle long and hard for a thing it becomes infinitely sweet to you.

  Was there a kind of hatred between the father and the older son of the Grey family? “You are one also who has this thing—the impulse to power, so like my own. Now you are young and I am growing old.” Admiration mixed with fear. If you would retain power it will not do to admit fear.

  The young Don was
so curiously like the father. There were the same lines about the jaws, the same eyes. They were both heavy men. Already the young man walked like the father, slammed doors as did the father. There was the same curious lack of delicacy of thought and touch—the heaviness that plows through, gets things done. When John Grey had married Louise Aspinwahl he was already a mature man, on his way to success. Such men do not marry young and recklessly. Now he was nearing sixty and there was the son—so like himself, having the same kind of strength.

  Both land lovers, possession lovers. “It is my farm, my house, my horses, cattle, sheep.” Soon now, another ten years, fifteen at the most, and the father would be ready for death. “See, already my hand slips a little. All of this to go out of my grasp.” He, John Grey, had not got all of these possessions so easily. It had taken much patience, much persistence. No one but himself would ever quite know. Five, ten, fifteen years of work and saving, getting the Aspinwahl farm piece by piece. “The fools!” They had liked to think of themselves as aristocrats, throwing the land away, now twenty acres, now thirty, now fifty.

  Raising horses that could never plow an acre of land.

  And they had robbed the land too, had never put anything back, doing nothing to enrich it, build it up. Such a one thinking: “I’m an Aspinwahl, a gentleman. I do not soil my hands at the plow.

  “Fools who do not know the meaning of land owned, possessions, money—responsibility. It is they who are second-rate men.”

  He had got an Aspinwahl for a wife and, as it had turned out, she was the best, the smartest and, in the end, the best-looking one of the lot.

  And now there was his son, standing at the moment near the mother. They had both come down off the porch. It would be natural and right for this one—he being what he already was, what he would become—for him, in his turn, to come into possession, to take command.

  There would be, of course, the rights of the other children. If you have the stuff in you (John Grey felt that his son Don had) there is a way to manage. You buy the others out, make arrangements. There was Ted—he wouldn’t be alive—and Mary and the two younger children. “The better for you if you have to struggle.”

  All of this, the implication of the moment of sudden struggle between a father and son, coming slowly afterwards to the man’s daughter, as yet little more than a child. Does the drama take place when the seed is put into the ground or afterwards when the plant has pushed out of the ground and the bud breaks open, or still later, when the fruit ripens? There were the Greys with their ability—slow, saving, able, determined, patient. Why had they superseded the Aspinwahls in the Rich Valley? Aspinwahl blood also in the two children, Mary and Ted.

  There was an Aspinwahl man—called “Uncle Fred,” a brother to Louise Grey—who came sometimes to the farm. He was a rather striking-looking, tall old man with a gray Vandyke beard and a mustache, somewhat shabbily dressed but always with an indefinable air of class. He came from the county-seat town, where he lived now with a daughter who had married a merchant, a polite courtly old man who always froze into a queer silence in the presence of his sister’s husband.

  The son Don was standing near the mother on the day in the Fall, and the two children, Mary and Ted, stood apart.

  “Don’t, John,” Louise Grey said again. The father, who had started away toward the barns, stopped.

  “Well, I guess I will.”

  “No, you won’t,” said young Don, speaking suddenly. There was a queer fixed look in his eyes. It had flashed into life—something that was between the two men: “I possess” . . . “I will possess.” The father wheeled and looked sharply at the son and then ignored him.

  For a moment the mother continued pleading.

  “But why, why?”

  “They make too much shade. The grass does not grow.”

  “But there is so much grass, so many acres of grass.”

  John Grey was answering his wife, but now again he looked at his son. There were unspoken words flying back and forth.

  “I possess. I am in command here. What do you mean by telling me that I won’t?”

  “Ha! So! You possess now but soon I will possess.”

  “I’ll see you in hell first.”

  “You fool! Not yet! Not yet!”

  None of the words, set down above, was spoken at the moment, and afterwards the daughter Mary never did remember the exact words that had passed between the two men. There was a sudden quick flash of determination in Don—even perhaps sudden determination to stand by the mother—even perhaps something else—a feeling in the young Don out of the Aspinwahl blood in him—for the moment tree love superseding grass love—grass that would fatten steers. . . .

  Winner of 4H Club prizes, champion young corn-raiser, judge of steers, land lover, possession lover.

  “You won’t,” Don said again.

  “Won’t what?”

  “Won’t cut those trees.”

  The father said nothing more at the moment but walked away from the little group toward the barns. The sun was still shining brightly. There was a sharp cold little wind. The two trees were like bonfires lighted against distant hills.

  It was the noon hour and there were two men, both young, employees on the farm, who lived in a small tenant house beyond the barns. One of them, a man with a harelip, was married and the other, a rather handsome silent young man, boarded with him. They had just come from the midday meal and were going toward one of the barns. It was the beginning of the Fall corn-cutting time and they would be going together to a distant field to cut corn.

  The father went to the barn and returned with the two men. They brought axes and a long crosscut saw. “I want you to cut those two trees.” There was something, a blind, even stupid determination in the man, John Grey. And at that moment his wife, the mother of his children . . . There was no way any of the children could ever know how many moments of the sort she had been through. She had married John Grey. He was her man.

  “If you do, Father . . .” Don Grey said coldly.

  “Do as I tell you! Cut those two trees!” This addressed to the two workmen. The one who had a harelip laughed. His laughter was like the bray of a donkey.

  “Don’t,” said Louise Grey, but she was not addressing her husband this time. She stepped to her son and put a hand on his arm.

  “Don’t.

  “Don’t cross him. Don’t cross my man.” Could a child like Mary Grey comprehend? It takes time to understand things that happen in life. Life unfolds slowly to the mind. Mary was standing with Ted, whose young face was white and tense. Death at his elbow. At any moment. At any moment.

  “I have been through this a hundred times. That is the way this man I married has succeeded. Nothing stops him. I married him; I have had my children by him.

  “We women choose to submit.

  “This is my affair, more than yours, Don, my son.”

  A woman hanging onto her thing—the family, created about her.

  The son not seeing things with her eyes. He shook off his mother’s hand, lying on his arm. Louise Grey was younger than her husband, but, if he was now nearing sixty, she was drawing near fifty. At the moment she looked very delicate and fragile. There was something, at the moment, in her bearing. . . . Was there, after all, something in blood, the Aspinwahl blood?

  In a dim way perhaps, at the moment, the child Mary did comprehend. Women and their men. For her then, at that time, there was but one male, the child Ted. Afterwards she remembered how he looked at that moment, the curiously serious old look on his young face. There was even, she thought later, a kind of contempt for both the father and brother, as though he might have been saying to himself—he couldn’t really have been saying it—he was too young: “Well, we’ll see. This is something. These foolish ones—my father and my brother. I myself haven’t long to live. I’ll see what I can, while I do live.”

  The brother Don stepped over near to where his father stood.

  “If you do, Father . . . he said a
gain.

  “Well?”

  “I’ll walk off this farm and I’ll never come back.”

  “All right. Go then.”

  The father began directing the two men who had begun cutting the trees, each man taking a tree. The young man with the harelip kept laughing, the laughter like the bray of a donkey. “Stop that,” the father said sharply, and the sound ceased abruptly. The son Don walked away, going rather aimlessly toward the barn. He approached one of the barns and then stopped. The mother, white now, half ran into the house.

  The son returned toward the house, passing the two younger children without looking at them, but did not enter. The father did not look at him. He went hesitatingly along a path at the front of the house and through a gate and into a road. The road ran for several miles down through the valley and then, turning, went over a mountain to the county-seat town.

  * * *

  As it happened, only Mary saw the son Don when he returned to the farm. There were three or four tense days. Perhaps, all the time, the mother and son had been secretly in touch. There was a telephone in the house. The father stayed all day in the fields, and when he was in the house was silent.

  Mary was in one of the barns on the day when Don came back and when the father and son met. It was an odd meeting.

  The son came, Mary always afterwards thought, rather sheepishly. The father came out of a horse’s stall. He had been throwing corn to work horses. Neither the father nor son saw Mary. There was a car parked in the barn and she had crawled into the driver’s seat, her hands on the steering wheel, pretending she was driving.

  “Well,” the father said. If he felt triumphant, he did not show his feeling.

  “Well,” said the son, “I have come back.”

  “Yes, I see,” the father said. “They are cutting corn.” He walked toward the barn door and then stopped. “It will be yours soon now,” he said. “You can be boss then.”