Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
himself because he had been angry and had been half afraid of George
Willard. He decided he would have his talk with the young reporter
before he left town, that he would tell him about things, perhaps
challenge him, challenge all of Winesburg through him.
Aglow with new confidence Elmer went to the office of the New Willard
House and pounded on the door. A sleep-eyed boy slept on a cot in the
office. He received no salary but was fed at the hotel table and bore
with pride the title of “night clerk.” Before the boy Elmer was bold,
insistent. “You ‘wake him up,” he commanded. “You tell him to come down
by the depot. I got to see him and I’m going away on the local. Tell
him to dress and come on down. I ain’t got much time.”
The midnight local had finished its work in Winesburg and the trainsmen
were coupling cars, swinging lanterns and preparing to resume their
flight east. George Willard, rubbing his eyes and again wearing the new
overcoat, ran down to the station platform afire with curiosity. “Well,
here I am. What do you want? You’ve got something to tell me, eh?” he
said.
Elmer tried to explain. He wet his lips with his tongue and looked at
the train that had begun to groan and get under way. “Well, you see,”
he began, and then lost control of his tongue. “I’ll be washed and
ironed. I’ll be washed and ironed and starched,” he muttered half
incoherently.
Elmer Cowley danced with fury beside the groaning train in the darkness
on the station platform. Lights leaped into the air and bobbed up and
down before his eyes. Taking the two ten-dollar bills from his pocket
he thrust them into George Willard’s hand. “Take them,” he cried. “I
don’t want them. Give them to father. I stole them.” With a snarl of
rage he turned and his long arms began to flay the air. Like one
struggling for release from hands that held him he struck out, hitting
George Willard blow after blow on the breast, the neck, the mouth. The
young reporter rolled over on the platform half unconscious, stunned by
the terrific force of the blows. Springing aboard the passing train and
running over the tops of cars, Elmer sprang down to a flat car and
lying on his face looked back, trying to see the fallen man in the
darkness. Pride surged up in him. “I showed him,” he cried. “I guess I
showed him. I ain’t so queer. I guess I showed him I ain’t so queer.”
THE UNTOLD LIE
Ray Pearson and Hal Winters were farm hands employed on a farm three
miles north of Winesburg. On Saturday afternoons they came into town
and wandered about through the streets with other fellows from the
country.
Ray was a quiet, rather nervous man of perhaps fifty with a brown beard
and shoulders rounded by too much and too hard labor. In his nature he
was as unlike Hal Winters as two men can be unlike.
Ray was an altogether serious man and had a little sharp-featured wife
who had also a sharp voice. The two, with half a dozen thin-legged
children, lived in a tumble-down frame house beside a creek at the back
end of the Wills farm where Ray was employed.
Hal Winters, his fellow employee, was a young fellow. He was not of the
Ned Winters family, who were very respectable people in Winesburg, but
was one of the three sons of the old man called Windpeter Winters who
had a sawmill near Unionville, six miles away, and who was looked upon
by everyone in Winesburg as a confirmed old reprobate.
People from the part of Northern Ohio in which Winesburg lies will
remember old Windpeter by his unusual and tragic death. He got drunk
one evening in town and started to drive home to Unionville along the
railroad tracks. Henry Brattenburg, the butcher, who lived out that
way, stopped him at the edge of the town and told him he was sure to
meet the down train but Windpeter slashed at him with his whip and
drove on. When the train struck and killed him and his two horses a
farmer and his wife who were driving home along a nearby road saw the
accident. They said that old Windpeter stood up on the seat of his
wagon, raving and swearing at the onrushing locomotive, and that he
fairly screamed with delight when the team, maddened by his incessant
slashing at them, rushed straight ahead to certain death. Boys like
young George Willard and Seth Richmond will remember the incident quite
vividly because, although everyone in our town said that the old man
would go straight to hell and that the community was better off without
him, they had a secret conviction that he knew what he was doing and
admired his foolish courage. Most boys have seasons of wishing they
could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on
with their humdrum lives.
But this is not the story of Windpeter Winters nor yet of his son Hal
who worked on the Wills farm with Ray Pearson. It is Ray’s story. It
will, however, be necessary to talk a little of young Hal so that you
will get into the spirit of it.
Hal was a bad one. Everyone said that. There were three of the Winters
boys in that family, John, Hal, and Edward, all broad-shouldered big
fellows like old Windpeter himself and all fighters and woman-chasers
and generally all-around bad ones.
Hal was the worst of the lot and always up to some devilment. He once
stole a load of boards from his father’s mill and sold them in
Winesburg. With the money he bought himself a suit of cheap, flashy
clothes. Then he got drunk and when his father came raving into town to
find him, they met and fought with their fists on Main Street and were
arrested and put into jail together.
Hal went to work on the Wills farm because there was a country school
teacher out that way who had taken his fancy. He was only twenty-two
then but had already been in two or three of what were spoken of in
Winesburg as “women scrapes.” Everyone who heard of his infatuation for
the school teacher was sure it would turn out badly. “He’ll only get
her into trouble, you’ll see,” was the word that went around.
And so these two men, Ray and Hal, were at work in a field on a day in
the late October. They were husking corn and occasionally something was
said and they laughed. Then came silence. Ray, who was the more
sensitive and always minded things more, had chapped hands and they
hurt. He put them into his coat pockets and looked away across the
fields. He was in a sad, distracted mood and was affected by the beauty
of the country. If you knew the Winesburg country in the fall and how
the low hills are all splashed with yellows and reds you would
understand his feeling. He began to think of the time, long ago when he
was a young fellow living with his father, then a baker in Winesburg,
and how on such days he had wandered away into the woods to gather
nuts, hunt rabbits, or just to loaf about and smoke his pipe. His
marriage had come about through one of his days of wandering. He had
induced a girl who waited on trade in his father’s shop to go with him
and something had happened. He was thinking of that afternoon and how
it had affected his whole life when a spirit of protest awoke in him.
He had forgotten about Hal and muttered words. “Tricked by Gad, that’s
what I was, tricked by life and made a fool of,” he said in a low
voice.
As though understanding his thoughts, Hal Winters spoke up. “Well, has
it been worth while? What about it, eh? What about marriage and all
that?” he asked and then laughed. Hal tried to keep on laughing but he
too was in an earnest mood. He began to talk earnestly. “Has a fellow
got to do it?” he asked. “Has he got to be harnessed up and driven
through life like a horse?”
Hal didn’t wait for an answer but sprang to his feet and began to walk
back and forth between the corn shocks. He was getting more and more
excited. Bending down suddenly he picked up an ear of the yellow corn
and threw it at the fence. “I’ve got Nell Gunther in trouble,” he said.
“I’m telling you, but you keep your mouth shut.”
Ray Pearson arose and stood staring. He was almost a foot shorter than
Hal, and when the younger man came and put his two hands on the older
man’s shoulders they made a picture. There they stood in the big empty
field with the quiet corn shocks standing in rows behind them and the
red and yellow hills in the distance, and from being just two
indifferent workmen they had become all alive to each other. Hal sensed
it and because that was his way he laughed. “Well, old daddy,” he said
awkwardly, “come on, advise me. I’ve got Nell in trouble. Perhaps
you’ve been in the same fix yourself. I know what everyone would say is
the right thing to do, but what do you say? Shall I marry and settle
down? Shall I put myself into the harness to be worn out like an old
horse? You know me, Ray. There can’t anyone break me but I can break
myself. Shall I do it or shall I tell Nell to go to the devil? Come on,
you tell me. Whatever you say, Ray, I’ll do.”
Ray couldn’t answer. He shook Hal’s hands loose and turning walked
straight away toward the barn. He was a sensitive man and there were
tears in his eyes. He knew there was only one thing to say to Hal
Winters, son of old Windpeter Winters, only one thing that all his own
training and all the beliefs of the people he knew would approve, but
for his life he couldn’t say what he knew he should say.
At half-past four that afternoon Ray was puttering about the barnyard
when his wife came up the lane along the creek and called him. After
the talk with Hal he hadn’t returned to the cornfield but worked about
the barn. He had already done the evening chores and had seen Hal,
dressed and ready for a roistering night in town, come out of the
farmhouse and go into the road. Along the path to his own house he
trudged behind his wife, looking at the ground and thinking. He
couldn’t make out what was wrong. Every time he raised his eyes and saw
the beauty of the country in the failing light he wanted to do
something he had never done before, shout or scream or hit his wife
with his fists or something equally unexpected and terrifying. Along
the path he went scratching his head and trying to make it out. He
looked hard at his wife’s back but she seemed all right.
She only wanted him to go into town for groceries and as soon as she
had told him what she wanted began to scold. “You’re always puttering,”
she said. “Now I want you to hustle. There isn’t anything in the house
for supper and you’ve got to get to town and back in a hurry.”
Ray went into his own house and took an overcoat from a hook back of
the door. It was torn about the pockets and the collar was shiny. His
wife went into the bedroom and presently came out with a soiled cloth
in one hand and three silver dollars in the other. Somewhere in the
house a child wept bitterly and a dog that had been sleeping by the
stove arose and yawned. Again the wife scolded. “The children will cry
and cry. Why are you always puttering?” she asked.
Ray went out of the house and climbed the fence into a field. It was
just growing dark and the scene that lay before him was lovely. All the
low hills were washed with color and even the little clusters of bushes
in the corners of the fences were alive with beauty. The whole world
seemed to Ray Pearson to have become alive with something just as he
and Hal had suddenly become alive when they stood in the corn field
staring into each other’s eyes.
The beauty of the country about Winesburg was too much for Ray on that
fall evening. That is all there was to it. He could not stand it. Of a
sudden he forgot all about being a quiet old farm hand and throwing off
the torn overcoat began to run across the field. As he ran he shouted a
protest against his life, against all life, against everything that
makes life ugly. “There was no promise made,” he cried into the empty