Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
but when Ebenezer spoke his words only served to reawaken the wrath in
the son and the young man ran out of the store without replying.
Scratching his grey beard with his long dirty fingers, the merchant
looked at his son with the same wavering uncertain stare with which he
had confronted the traveling man. “I’ll be starched,” he said softly.
“Well, well, I’ll be washed and ironed and starched!”
Elmer Cowley went out of Winesburg and along a country road that
paralleled the railroad track. He did not know where he was going or
what he was going to do. In the shelter of a deep cut where the road,
after turning sharply to the right, dipped under the tracks he stopped
and the passion that had been the cause of his outburst in the store
began to again find expression. “I will not be queer—one to be looked
at and listened to,” he declared aloud. “I’ll be like other people.
I’ll show that George Willard. He’ll find out. I’ll show him!”
The distraught young man stood in the middle of the road and glared
back at the town. He did not know the reporter George Willard and had
no special feeling concerning the tall boy who ran about town gathering
the town news. The reporter had merely come, by his presence in the
office and in the printshop of the _Winesburg Eagle_, to stand for
something in the young merchant’s mind. He thought the boy who passed
and repassed Cowley & Son’s store and who stopped to talk to people in
the street must be thinking of him and perhaps laughing at him. George
Willard, he felt, belonged to the town, typified the town, represented
in his person the spirit of the town. Elmer Cowley could not have
believed that George Willard had also his days of unhappiness, that
vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visited also his mind. Did
he not represent public opinion and had not the public opinion of
Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to queerness? Did he not walk whistling
and laughing through Main Street? Might not one by striking his person
strike also the greater enemy—the thing that smiled and went its own
way—the judgment of Winesburg?
Elmer Cowley was extraordinarily tall and his arms were long and
powerful. His hair, his eyebrows, and the downy beard that had begun to
grow upon his chin, were pale almost to whiteness. His teeth protruded
from between his lips and his eyes were blue with the colorless
blueness of the marbles called “aggies” that the boys of Winesburg
carried in their pockets. Elmer had lived in Winesburg for a year and
had made no friends. He was, he felt, one condemned to go through life
without friends and he hated the thought.
Sullenly the tall young man tramped along the road with his hands
stuffed into his trouser pockets. The day was cold with a raw wind, but
presently the sun began to shine and the road became soft and muddy.
The tops of the ridges of frozen mud that formed the road began to melt
and the mud clung to Elmer’s shoes. His feet became cold. When he had
gone several miles he turned off the road, crossed a field and entered
a wood. In the wood he gathered sticks to build a fire, by which he sat
trying to warm himself, miserable in body and in mind.
For two hours he sat on the log by the fire and then, arising and
creeping cautiously through a mass of underbrush, he went to a fence
and looked across fields to a small farmhouse surrounded by low sheds.
A smile came to his lips and he began making motions with his long arms
to a man who was husking corn in one of the fields.
In his hour of misery the young merchant had returned to the farm where
he had lived through boyhood and where there was another human being to
whom he felt he could explain himself. The man on the farm was a
half-witted old fellow named Mook. He had once been employed by
Ebenezer Cowley and had stayed on the farm when it was sold. The old
man lived in one of the unpainted sheds back of the farmhouse and
puttered about all day in the fields.
Mook the half-wit lived happily. With childlike faith he believed in
the intelligence of the animals that lived in the sheds with him, and
when he was lonely held long conversations with the cows, the pigs, and
even with the chickens that ran about the barnyard. He it was who had
put the expression regarding being “laundered” into the mouth of his
former employer. When excited or surprised by anything he smiled
vaguely and muttered: “I’ll be washed and ironed. Well, well, I’ll be
washed and ironed and starched.”
When the half-witted old man left his husking of corn and came into the
wood to meet Elmer Cowley, he was neither surprised nor especially
interested in the sudden appearance of the young man. His feet also
were cold and he sat on the log by the fire, grateful for the warmth
and apparently indifferent to what Elmer had to say.
Elmer talked earnestly and with great freedom, walking up and down and
waving his arms about. “You don’t understand what’s the matter with me
so of course you don’t care,” he declared. “With me it’s different.
Look how it has always been with me. Father is queer and mother was
queer, too. Even the clothes mother used to wear were not like other
people’s clothes, and look at that coat in which father goes about
there in town, thinking he’s dressed up, too. Why don’t he get a new
one? It wouldn’t cost much. I’ll tell you why. Father doesn’t know and
when mother was alive she didn’t know either. Mabel is different. She
knows but she won’t say anything. I will, though. I’m not going to be
stared at any longer. Why look here, Mook, father doesn’t know that his
store there in town is just a queer jumble, that he’ll never sell the
stuff he buys. He knows nothing about it. Sometimes he’s a little
worried that trade doesn’t come and then he goes and buys something
else. In the evenings he sits by the fire upstairs and says trade will
come after a while. He isn’t worried. He’s queer. He doesn’t know
enough to be worried.”
The excited young man became more excited. “He don’t know but I know,”
he shouted, stopping to gaze down into the dumb, unresponsive face of
the half-wit. “I know too well. I can’t stand it. When we lived out
here it was different. I worked and at night I went to bed and slept. I
wasn’t always seeing people and thinking as I am now. In the evening,
there in town, I go to the post office or to the depot to see the train
come in, and no one says anything to me. Everyone stands around and
laughs and they talk but they say nothing to me. Then I feel so queer
that I can’t talk either. I go away. I don’t say anything. I can’t.”
The fury of the young man became uncontrollable. “I won’t stand it,” he
yelled, looking up at the bare branches of the trees. “I’m not made to
stand it.”
Maddened by the dull face of the man on the log by the fire, Elmer
turned and glared at him as he had glared back along the road at the
town of Winesburg. “Go on back to work,” he screamed. “What good does
it do me to talk to you?” A thought came to him and his voice dropped.
“I’m a coward too, eh?” he muttered. “Do you know why I came clear out
here afoot? I had to tell someone and you were the only one I could
tell. I hunted out another queer one, you see. I ran away, that’s what
I did. I couldn’t stand up to someone like that George Willard. I had
to come to you. I ought to tell him and I will.”
Again his voice arose to a shout and his arms flew about. “I will tell
him. I won’t be queer. I don’t care what they think. I won’t stand it.”
Elmer Cowley ran out of the woods leaving the half-wit sitting on the
log before the fire. Presently the old man arose and climbing over the
fence went back to his work in the corn. “I’ll be washed and ironed and
starched,” he declared. “Well, well, I’ll be washed and ironed.” Mook
was interested. He went along a lane to a field where two cows stood
nibbling at a straw stack. “Elmer was here,” he said to the cows.
“Elmer is crazy. You better get behind the stack where he don’t see
you. He’ll hurt someone yet, Elmer will.”
At eight o’clock that evening Elmer Cowley put his head in at the front
door of the office of the _Winesburg Eagle_ where George Willard sat
writing. His cap was pulled down over his eyes and a sullen determined
look was on his face. “You come on outside with me,” he said, stepping
in and closing the door. He kept his hand on the knob as though
prepared to resist anyone else coming in. “You just come along outside.
I want to see you.”
George Willard and Elmer Cowley walked through the main street of
Winesburg. The night was cold and George Willard had on a new overcoat
and looked very spruce and dressed up. He thrust his hands into the
overcoat pockets and looked inquiringly at his companion. He had long
been wanting to make friends with the young merchant and find out what
was in his mind. Now he thought he saw a chance and was delighted. “I
wonder what he’s up to? Perhaps he thinks he has a piece of news for
the paper. It can’t be a fire because I haven’t heard the fire bell and
there isn’t anyone running,” he thought.
In the main street of Winesburg, on the cold November evening, but few
citizens appeared and these hurried along bent on getting to the stove
at the back of some store. The windows of the stores were frosted and
the wind rattled the tin sign that hung over the entrance to the
stairway leading to Doctor Welling’s office. Before Hern’s Grocery a
basket of apples and a rack filled with new brooms stood on the
sidewalk. Elmer Cowley stopped and stood facing George Willard. He
tried to talk and his arms began to pump up and down. His face worked
spasmodically. He seemed about to shout. “Oh, you go on back,” he
cried. “Don’t stay out here with me. I ain’t got anything to tell you.
I don’t want to see you at all.”
For three hours the distracted young merchant wandered through the
resident streets of Winesburg blind with anger, brought on by his
failure to declare his determination not to be queer. Bitterly the
sense of defeat settled upon him and he wanted to weep. After the hours
of futile sputtering at nothingness that had occupied the afternoon and
his failure in the presence of the young reporter, he thought he could
see no hope of a future for himself.
And then a new idea dawned for him. In the darkness that surrounded him
he began to see a light. Going to the now darkened store, where Cowley
& Son had for over a year waited vainly for trade to come, he crept
stealthily in and felt about in a barrel that stood by the stove at the
rear. In the barrel beneath shavings lay a tin box containing Cowley &
Son’s cash. Every evening Ebenezer Cowley put the box in the barrel
when he closed the store and went upstairs to bed. “They wouldn’t never
think of a careless place like that,” he told himself, thinking of
robbers.
Elmer took twenty dollars, two ten-dollar bills, from the little roll
containing perhaps four hundred dollars, the cash left from the sale of
the farm. Then replacing the box beneath the shavings he went quietly
out at the front door and walked again in the streets.
The idea that he thought might put an end to all of his unhappiness was
very simple. “I will get out of here, run away from home,” he told
himself. He knew that a local freight train passed through Winesburg at
midnight and went on to Cleveland, where it arrived at dawn. He would
steal a ride on the local and when he got to Cleveland would lose
himself in the crowds there. He would get work in some shop and become
friends with the other workmen and would be indistinguishable. Then he
could talk and laugh. He would no longer be queer and would make
friends. Life would begin to have warmth and meaning for him as it had
for others.
The tall awkward young man, striding through the streets, laughed at