Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
spaces that lay about him. “I didn’t promise my Minnie anything and Hal
hasn’t made any promise to Nell. I know he hasn’t. She went into the
woods with him because she wanted to go. What he wanted she wanted. Why
should I pay? Why should Hal pay? Why should anyone pay? I don’t want
Hal to become old and worn out. I’ll tell him. I won’t let it go on.
I’ll catch Hal before he gets to town and I’ll tell him.”
Ray ran clumsily and once he stumbled and fell down. “I must catch Hal
and tell him,” he kept thinking, and although his breath came in gasps
he kept running harder and harder. As he ran he thought of things that
hadn’t come into his mind for years—how at the time he married he had
planned to go west to his uncle in Portland, Oregon—how he hadn’t
wanted to be a farm hand, but had thought when he got out West he would
go to sea and be a sailor or get a job on a ranch and ride a horse into
Western towns, shouting and laughing and waking the people in the
houses with his wild cries. Then as he ran he remembered his children
and in fancy felt their hands clutching at him. All of his thoughts of
himself were involved with the thoughts of Hal and he thought the
children were clutching at the younger man also. “They are the
accidents of life, Hal,” he cried. “They are not mine or yours. I had
nothing to do with them.”
Darkness began to spread over the fields as Ray Pearson ran on and on.
His breath came in little sobs. When he came to the fence at the edge
of the road and confronted Hal Winters, all dressed up and smoking a
pipe as he walked jauntily along, he could not have told what he
thought or what he wanted.
Ray Pearson lost his nerve and this is really the end of the story of
what happened to him. It was almost dark when he got to the fence and
he put his hands on the top bar and stood staring. Hal Winters jumped a
ditch and coming up close to Ray put his hands into his pockets and
laughed. He seemed to have lost his own sense of what had happened in
the corn field and when he put up a strong hand and took hold of the
lapel of Ray’s coat he shook the old man as he might have shaken a dog
that had misbehaved.
“You came to tell me, eh?” he said. “Well, never mind telling me
anything. I’m not a coward and I’ve already made up my mind.” He
laughed again and jumped back across the ditch. “Nell ain’t no fool,”
he said. “She didn’t ask me to marry her. I want to marry her. I want
to settle down and have kids.”
Ray Pearson also laughed. He felt like laughing at himself and all the
world.
As the form of Hal Winters disappeared in the dusk that lay over the
road that led to Winesburg, he turned and walked slowly back across the
fields to where he had left his torn overcoat. As he went some memory
of pleasant evenings spent with the thin-legged children in the
tumble-down house by the creek must have come into his mind, for he
muttered words. “It’s just as well. Whatever I told him would have been
a lie,” he said softly, and then his form also disappeared into the
darkness of the fields.
DRINK
Tom Foster came to Winesburg from Cincinnati when he was still young
and could get many new impressions. His grandmother had been raised on
a farm near the town and as a young girl had gone to school there when
Winesburg was a village of twelve or fifteen houses clustered about a
general store on the Trunion Pike.
What a life the old woman had led since she went away from the frontier
settlement and what a strong, capable little old thing she was! She had
been in Kansas, in Canada, and in New York City, traveling about with
her husband, a mechanic, before he died. Later she went to stay with
her daughter, who had also married a mechanic and lived in Covington,
Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati.
Then began the hard years for Tom Foster’s grandmother. First her
son-in-law was killed by a policeman during a strike and then Tom’s
mother became an invalid and died also. The grandmother had saved a
little money, but it was swept away by the illness of the daughter and
by the cost of the two funerals. She became a half worn-out old woman
worker and lived with the grandson above a junk shop on a side street
in Cincinnati. For five years she scrubbed the floors in an office
building and then got a place as dish washer in a restaurant. Her hands
were all twisted out of shape. When she took hold of a mop or a broom
handle the hands looked like the dried stems of an old creeping vine
clinging to a tree.
The old woman came back to Winesburg as soon as she got the chance. One
evening as she was coming home from work she found a pocket-book
containing thirty-seven dollars, and that opened the way. The trip was
a great adventure for the boy. It was past seven o’clock at night when
the grandmother came home with the pocket-book held tightly in her old
hands and she was so excited she could scarcely speak. She insisted on
leaving Cincinnati that night, saying that if they stayed until morning
the owner of the money would be sure to find them out and make trouble.
Tom, who was then sixteen years old, had to go trudging off to the
station with the old woman, bearing all of their earthly belongings
done up in a worn-out blanket and slung across his back. By his side
walked the grandmother urging him forward. Her toothless old mouth
twitched nervously, and when Tom grew weary and wanted to put the pack
down at a street crossing, she snatched it up and if he had not
prevented would have slung it across her own back. When they got into
the train and it had run out of the city she was as delighted as a girl
and talked as the boy had never heard her talk before.
All through the night as the train rattled along, the grandmother told
Tom tales of Winesburg and of how he would enjoy his life working in
the fields and shooting wild things in the woods there. She could not
believe that the tiny village of fifty years before had grown into a
thriving town in her absence, and in the morning when the train came to
Winesburg did not want to get off. “It isn’t what I thought. It may be
hard for you here,” she said, and then the train went on its way and
the two stood confused, not knowing where to turn, in the presence of
Albert Longworth, the Winesburg baggage master.
But Tom Foster did get along all right. He was one to get along
anywhere. Mrs. White, the banker’s wife, employed his grandmother to
work in the kitchen and he got a place as stable boy in the banker’s
new brick barn.
In Winesburg servants were hard to get. The woman who wanted help in
her housework employed a “hired girl” who insisted on sitting at the
table with the family. Mrs. White was sick of hired girls and snatched
at the chance to get hold of the old city woman. She furnished a room
for the boy Tom upstairs in the barn. “He can mow the lawn and run
errands when the horses do not need attention,” she explained to her
husband.
Tom Foster was rather small for his age and had a large head covered
with stiff black hair that stood straight up. The hair emphasized the
bigness of his head. His voice was the softest thing imaginable, and he
was himself so gentle and quiet that he slipped into the life of the
town without attracting the least bit of attention.
One could not help wondering where Tom Foster got his gentleness. In
Cincinnati he had lived in a neighborhood where gangs of tough boys
prowled through the streets, and all through his early formative years
he ran about with tough boys. For a while he was a messenger for a
telegraph company and delivered messages in a neighborhood sprinkled
with houses of prostitution. The women in the houses knew and loved Tom
Foster and the tough boys in the gangs loved him also.
He never asserted himself. That was one thing that helped him escape.
In an odd way he stood in the shadow of the wall of life, was meant to
stand in the shadow. He saw the men and women in the houses of lust,
sensed their casual and horrible love affairs, saw boys fighting and
listened to their tales of thieving and drunkenness, unmoved and
strangely unaffected.
Once Tom did steal. That was while he still lived in the city. The
grandmother was ill at the time and he himself was out of work. There
was nothing to eat in the house, and so he went into a harness shop on
a side street and stole a dollar and seventy-five cents out of the cash
drawer.
The harness shop was run by an old man with a long mustache. He saw the
boy lurking about and thought nothing of it. When he went out into the
street to talk to a teamster Tom opened the cash drawer and taking the
money walked away. Later he was caught and his grandmother settled the
matter by offering to come twice a week for a month and scrub the shop.
The boy was ashamed, but he was rather glad, too. “It is all right to
be ashamed and makes me understand new things,” he said to the
grandmother, who didn’t know what the boy was talking about but loved
him so much that it didn’t matter whether she understood or not.
For a year Tom Foster lived in the banker’s stable and then lost his
place there. He didn’t take very good care of the horses and he was a
constant source of irritation to the banker’s wife. She told him to mow
the lawn and he forgot. Then she sent him to the store or to the post
office and he did not come back but joined a group of men and boys and
spent the whole afternoon with them, standing about, listening and
occasionally, when addressed, saying a few words. As in the city in the
houses of prostitution and with the rowdy boys running through the
streets at night, so in Winesburg among its citizens he had always the
power to be a part of and yet distinctly apart from the life about him.
After Tom lost his place at Banker White’s he did not live with his
grandmother, although often in the evening she came to visit him. He
rented a room at the rear of a little frame building belonging to old
Rufus Whiting. The building was on Duane Street, just off Main Street,
and had been used for years as a law office by the old man, who had
become too feeble and forgetful for the practice of his profession but
did not realize his inefficiency. He liked Tom and let him have the
room for a dollar a month. In the late afternoon when the lawyer had
gone home the boy had the place to himself and spent hours lying on the
floor by the stove and thinking of things. In the evening the
grandmother came and sat in the lawyer’s chair to smoke a pipe while
Tom remained silent, as he always did in the presence of everyone.
Often the old woman talked with great vigor. Sometimes she was angry
about some happening at the banker’s house and scolded away for hours.
Out of her own earnings she bought a mop and regularly scrubbed the
lawyer’s office. Then when the place was spotlessly clean and smelled
clean she lighted her clay pipe and she and Tom had a smoke together.
“When you get ready to die then I will die also,” she said to the boy
lying on the floor beside her chair.
Tom Foster enjoyed life in Winesburg. He did odd jobs, such as cutting
wood for kitchen stoves and mowing the grass before houses. In late May
and early June he picked strawberries in the fields. He had time to
loaf and he enjoyed loafing. Banker White had given him a cast-off coat
which was too large for him, but his grandmother cut it down, and he
had also an overcoat, got at the same place, that was lined with fur.
The fur was worn away in spots, but the coat was warm and in the winter
Tom slept in it. He thought his method of getting along good enough and
was happy and satisfied with the way life in Winesburg had turned out
for him.
The most absurd little things made Tom Foster happy. That, I suppose,
was why people loved him. In Hern’s Grocery they would be roasting