Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
On the occasions when David went to visit his grandfather on the
Bentley farm, he was altogether contented and happy. Often he wished
that he would never have to go back to town and once when he had come
home from the farm after a long visit, something happened that had a
lasting effect on his mind.
David had come back into town with one of the hired men. The man was in
a hurry to go about his own affairs and left the boy at the head of the
street in which the Hardy house stood. It was early dusk of a fall
evening and the sky was overcast with clouds. Something happened to
David. He could not bear to go into the house where his mother and
father lived, and on an impulse he decided to run away from home. He
intended to go back to the farm and to his grandfather, but lost his
way and for hours he wandered weeping and frightened on country roads.
It started to rain and lightning flashed in the sky. The boy’s
imagination was excited and he fancied that he could see and hear
strange things in the darkness. Into his mind came the conviction that
he was walking and running in some terrible void where no one had ever
been before. The darkness about him seemed limitless. The sound of the
wind blowing in trees was terrifying. When a team of horses approached
along the road in which he walked he was frightened and climbed a
fence. Through a field he ran until he came into another road and
getting upon his knees felt of the soft ground with his fingers. But
for the figure of his grandfather, whom he was afraid he would never
find in the darkness, he thought the world must be altogether empty.
When his cries were heard by a farmer who was walking home from town
and he was brought back to his father’s house, he was so tired and
excited that he did not know what was happening to him.
By chance David’s father knew that he had disappeared. On the street he
had met the farm hand from the Bentley place and knew of his son’s
return to town. When the boy did not come home an alarm was set up and
John Hardy with several men of the town went to search the country. The
report that David had been kidnapped ran about through the streets of
Winesburg. When he came home there were no lights in the house, but his
mother appeared and clutched him eagerly in her arms. David thought she
had suddenly become another woman. He could not believe that so
delightful a thing had happened. With her own hands Louise Hardy bathed
his tired young body and cooked him food. She would not let him go to
bed but, when he had put on his nightgown, blew out the lights and sat
down in a chair to hold him in her arms. For an hour the woman sat in
the darkness and held her boy. All the time she kept talking in a low
voice. David could not understand what had so changed her. Her
habitually dissatisfied face had become, he thought, the most peaceful
and lovely thing he had ever seen. When he began to weep she held him
more and more tightly. On and on went her voice. It was not harsh or
shrill as when she talked to her husband, but was like rain falling on
trees. Presently men began coming to the door to report that he had not
been found, but she made him hide and be silent until she had sent them
away. He thought it must be a game his mother and the men of the town
were playing with him and laughed joyously. Into his mind came the
thought that his having been lost and frightened in the darkness was an
altogether unimportant matter. He thought that he would have been
willing to go through the frightful experience a thousand times to be
sure of finding at the end of the long black road a thing so lovely as
his mother had suddenly become.
During the last years of young David’s boyhood he saw his mother but
seldom and she became for him just a woman with whom he had once lived.
Still he could not get her figure out of his mind and as he grew older
it became more definite. When he was twelve years old he went to the
Bentley farm to live. Old Jesse came into town and fairly demanded that
he be given charge of the boy. The old man was excited and determined
on having his own way. He talked to John Hardy in the office of the
Winesburg Savings Bank and then the two men went to the house on Elm
Street to talk with Louise. They both expected her to make trouble but
were mistaken. She was very quiet and when Jesse had explained his
mission and had gone on at some length about the advantages to come
through having the boy out of doors and in the quiet atmosphere of the
old farmhouse, she nodded her head in approval. “It is an atmosphere
not corrupted by my presence,” she said sharply. Her shoulders shook
and she seemed about to fly into a fit of temper. “It is a place for a
man child, although it was never a place for me,” she went on. “You
never wanted me there and of course the air of your house did me no
good. It was like poison in my blood but it will be different with
him.”
Louise turned and went out of the room, leaving the two men to sit in
embarrassed silence. As very often happened she later stayed in her
room for days. Even when the boy’s clothes were packed and he was taken
away she did not appear. The loss of her son made a sharp break in her
life and she seemed less inclined to quarrel with her husband. John
Hardy thought it had all turned out very well indeed.
And so young David went to live in the Bentley farmhouse with Jesse.
Two of the old farmer’s sisters were alive and still lived in the
house. They were afraid of Jesse and rarely spoke when he was about.
One of the women who had been noted for her flaming red hair when she
was younger was a born mother and became the boy’s caretaker. Every
night when he had gone to bed she went into his room and sat on the
floor until he fell asleep. When he became drowsy she became bold and
whispered things that he later thought he must have dreamed.
Her soft low voice called him endearing names and he dreamed that his
mother had come to him and that she had changed so that she was always
as she had been that time after he ran away. He also grew bold and
reaching out his hand stroked the face of the woman on the floor so
that she was ecstatically happy. Everyone in the old house became happy
after the boy went there. The hard insistent thing in Jesse Bentley
that had kept the people in the house silent and timid and that had
never been dispelled by the presence of the girl Louise was apparently
swept away by the coming of the boy. It was as though God had relented
and sent a son to the man.
The man who had proclaimed himself the only true servant of God in all
the valley of Wine Creek, and who had wanted God to send him a sign of
approval by way of a son out of the womb of Katherine, began to think
that at last his prayers had been answered. Although he was at that
time only fifty-five years old he looked seventy and was worn out with
much thinking and scheming. The effort he had made to extend his land
holdings had been successful and there were few farms in the valley
that did not belong to him, but until David came he was a bitterly
disappointed man.
There were two influences at work in Jesse Bentley and all his life his
mind had been a battleground for these influences. First there was the
old thing in him. He wanted to be a man of God and a leader among men
of God. His walking in the fields and through the forests at night had
brought him close to nature and there were forces in the passionately
religious man that ran out to the forces in nature. The disappointment
that had come to him when a daughter and not a son had been born to
Katherine had fallen upon him like a blow struck by some unseen hand
and the blow had somewhat softened his egotism. He still believed that
God might at any moment make himself manifest out of the winds or the
clouds, but he no longer demanded such recognition. Instead he prayed
for it. Sometimes he was altogether doubtful and thought God had
deserted the world. He regretted the fate that had not let him live in
a simpler and sweeter time when at the beckoning of some strange cloud
in the sky men left their lands and houses and went forth into the
wilderness to create new races. While he worked night and day to make
his farms more productive and to extend his holdings of land, he
regretted that he could not use his own restless energy in the building
of temples, the slaying of unbelievers and in general in the work of
glorifying God’s name on earth.
That is what Jesse hungered for and then also he hungered for something
else. He had grown into maturity in America in the years after the
Civil War and he, like all men of his time, had been touched by the
deep influences that were at work in the country during those years
when modern industrialism was being born. He began to buy machines that
would permit him to do the work of the farms while employing fewer men
and he sometimes thought that if he were a younger man he would give up
farming altogether and start a factory in Winesburg for the making of
machinery. Jesse formed the habit of reading newspapers and magazines.
He invented a machine for the making of fence out of wire. Faintly he
realized that the atmosphere of old times and places that he had always
cultivated in his own mind was strange and foreign to the thing that
was growing up in the minds of others. The beginning of the most
materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be
fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay
attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the
will to serve and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible
headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions, was
telling its story to Jesse the man of God as it was to the men about
him. The greedy thing in him wanted to make money faster than it could
be made by tilling the land. More than once he went into Winesburg to
talk with his son-in-law John Hardy about it. “You are a banker and you
will have chances I never had,” he said and his eyes shone. “I am
thinking about it all the time. Big things are going to be done in the
country and there will be more money to be made than I ever dreamed of.
You get into it. I wish I were younger and had your chance.” Jesse
Bentley walked up and down in the bank office and grew more and more
excited as he talked. At one time in his life he had been threatened
with paralysis and his left side remained somewhat weakened. As he
talked his left eyelid twitched. Later when he drove back home and when
night came on and the stars came out it was harder to get back the old
feeling of a close and personal God who lived in the sky overhead and
who might at any moment reach out his hand, touch him on the shoulder,
and appoint for him some heroic task to be done. Jesse’s mind was fixed
upon the things read in newspapers and magazines, on fortunes to be
made almost without effort by shrewd men who bought and sold. For him
the coming of the boy David did much to bring back with renewed force
the old faith and it seemed to him that God had at last looked with
favor upon him.
As for the boy on the farm, life began to reveal itself to him in a
thousand new and delightful ways. The kindly attitude of all about him
expanded his quiet nature and he lost the half timid, hesitating manner
he had always had with his people. At night when he went to bed after a
long day of adventures in the stables, in the fields, or driving about
from farm to farm with his grandfather, he wanted to embrace everyone
in the house. If Sherley Bentley, the woman who came each night to sit
on the floor by his bedside, did not appear at once, he went to the
head of the stairs and shouted, his young voice ringing through the
narrow halls where for so long there had been a tradition of silence.