Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
people’s dirty clothes. In she would come and stand by the table,
rubbing her eyes with her apron that was covered with soap-suds.
“‘Don’t touch it! Don’t you dare touch that money,’ my brother roared,
and then he himself took five or ten dollars and went tramping off to
the saloons. When he had spent what he had taken he came back for more.
He never gave my mother any money at all but stayed about until he had
spent it all, a little at a time. Then he went back to his job with the
painting crew on the railroad. After he had gone things began to arrive
at our house, groceries and such things. Sometimes there would be a
dress for mother or a pair of shoes for me.
“Strange, eh? My mother loved my brother much more than she did me,
although he never said a kind word to either of us and always raved up
and down threatening us if we dared so much as touch the money that
sometimes lay on the table three days.
“We got along pretty well. I studied to be a minister and prayed. I was
a regular ass about saying prayers. You should have heard me. When my
father died I prayed all night, just as I did sometimes when my brother
was in town drinking and going about buying the things for us. In the
evening after supper I knelt by the table where the money lay and
prayed for hours. When no one was looking I stole a dollar or two and
put it in my pocket. That makes me laugh now but then it was terrible.
It was on my mind all the time. I got six dollars a week from my job on
the paper and always took it straight home to mother. The few dollars I
stole from my brother’s pile I spent on myself, you know, for trifles,
candy and cigarettes and such things.
“When my father died at the asylum over at Dayton, I went over there. I
borrowed some money from the man for whom I worked and went on the
train at night. It was raining. In the asylum they treated me as though
I were a king.
“The men who had jobs in the asylum had found out I was a newspaper
reporter. That made them afraid. There had been some negligence, some
carelessness, you see, when father was ill. They thought perhaps I
would write it up in the paper and make a fuss. I never intended to do
anything of the kind.
“Anyway, in I went to the room where my father lay dead and blessed the
dead body. I wonder what put that notion into my head. Wouldn’t my
brother, the painter, have laughed, though. There I stood over the dead
body and spread out my hands. The superintendent of the asylum and some
of his helpers came in and stood about looking sheepish. It was very
amusing. I spread out my hands and said, ‘Let peace brood over this
carcass.’ That’s what I said.”
Jumping to his feet and breaking off the tale, Doctor Parcival began to
walk up and down in the office of the _Winesburg Eagle_ where George
Willard sat listening. He was awkward and, as the office was small,
continually knocked against things. “What a fool I am to be talking,”
he said. “That is not my object in coming here and forcing my
acquaintanceship upon you. I have something else in mind. You are a
reporter just as I was once and you have attracted my attention. You
may end by becoming just such another fool. I want to warn you and keep
on warning you. That’s why I seek you out.”
Doctor Parcival began talking of George Willard’s attitude toward men.
It seemed to the boy that the man had but one object in view, to make
everyone seem despicable. “I want to fill you with hatred and contempt
so that you will be a superior being,” he declared. “Look at my
brother. There was a fellow, eh? He despised everyone, you see. You
have no idea with what contempt he looked upon mother and me. And was
he not our superior? You know he was. You have not seen him and yet I
have made you feel that. I have given you a sense of it. He is dead.
Once when he was drunk he lay down on the tracks and the car in which
he lived with the other painters ran over him.”
One day in August Doctor Parcival had an adventure in Winesburg. For a
month George Willard had been going each morning to spend an hour in
the doctor’s office. The visits came about through a desire on the part
of the doctor to read to the boy from the pages of a book he was in the
process of writing. To write the book Doctor Parcival declared was the
object of his coming to Winesburg to live.
On the morning in August before the coming of the boy, an incident had
happened in the doctor’s office. There had been an accident on Main
Street. A team of horses had been frightened by a train and had run
away. A little girl, the daughter of a farmer, had been thrown from a
buggy and killed.
On Main Street everyone had become excited and a cry for doctors had
gone up. All three of the active practitioners of the town had come
quickly but had found the child dead. From the crowd someone had run to
the office of Doctor Parcival who had bluntly refused to go down out of
his office to the dead child. The useless cruelty of his refusal had
passed unnoticed. Indeed, the man who had come up the stairway to
summon him had hurried away without hearing the refusal.
All of this, Doctor Parcival did not know and when George Willard came
to his office he found the man shaking with terror. “What I have done
will arouse the people of this town,” he declared excitedly. “Do I not
know human nature? Do I not know what will happen? Word of my refusal
will be whispered about. Presently men will get together in groups and
talk of it. They will come here. We will quarrel and there will be talk
of hanging. Then they will come again bearing a rope in their hands.”
Doctor Parcival shook with fright. “I have a presentiment,” he declared
emphatically. “It may be that what I am talking about will not occur
this morning. It may be put off until tonight but I will be hanged.
Everyone will get excited. I will be hanged to a lamp-post on Main
Street.”
Going to the door of his dirty office, Doctor Parcival looked timidly
down the stairway leading to the street. When he returned the fright
that had been in his eyes was beginning to be replaced by doubt. Coming
on tiptoe across the room he tapped George Willard on the shoulder. “If
not now, sometime,” he whispered, shaking his head. “In the end I will
be crucified, uselessly crucified.”
Doctor Parcival began to plead with George Willard. “You must pay
attention to me,” he urged. “If something happens perhaps you will be
able to write the book that I may never get written. The idea is very
simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. It is
this—that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.
That’s what I want to say. Don’t you forget that. Whatever happens,
don’t you dare let yourself forget.”
NOBODY KNOWS
Looking cautiously about, George Willard arose from his desk in the
office of the _Winesburg Eagle_ and went hurriedly out at the back
door. The night was warm and cloudy and although it was not yet eight
o’clock, the alleyway back of the _Eagle_ office was pitch dark. A team
of horses tied to a post somewhere in the darkness stamped on the
hard-baked ground. A cat sprang from under George Willard’s feet and
ran away into the night. The young man was nervous. All day he had gone
about his work like one dazed by a blow. In the alleyway he trembled as
though with fright.
In the darkness George Willard walked along the alleyway, going
carefully and cautiously. The back doors of the Winesburg stores were
open and he could see men sitting about under the store lamps. In
Myerbaum’s Notion Store Mrs. Willy the saloon keeper’s wife stood by
the counter with a basket on her arm. Sid Green the clerk was waiting
on her. He leaned over the counter and talked earnestly.
George Willard crouched and then jumped through the path of light that
came out at the door. He began to run forward in the darkness. Behind
Ed Griffith’s saloon old Jerry Bird the town drunkard lay asleep on the
ground. The runner stumbled over the sprawling legs. He laughed
brokenly.
George Willard had set forth upon an adventure. All day he had been
trying to make up his mind to go through with the adventure and now he
was acting. In the office of the _Winesburg Eagle_ he had been sitting
since six o’clock trying to think.
There had been no decision. He had just jumped to his feet, hurried
past Will Henderson who was reading proof in the printshop and started
to run along the alleyway.
Through street after street went George Willard, avoiding the people
who passed. He crossed and recrossed the road. When he passed a street
lamp he pulled his hat down over his face. He did not dare think. In
his mind there was a fear but it was a new kind of fear. He was afraid
the adventure on which he had set out would be spoiled, that he would
lose courage and turn back.
George Willard found Louise Trunnion in the kitchen of her father’s
house. She was washing dishes by the light of a kerosene lamp. There
she stood behind the screen door in the little shedlike kitchen at the
back of the house. George Willard stopped by a picket fence and tried
to control the shaking of his body. Only a narrow potato patch
separated him from the adventure. Five minutes passed before he felt
sure enough of himself to call to her. “Louise! Oh, Louise!” he called.
The cry stuck in his throat. His voice became a hoarse whisper.
Louise Trunnion came out across the potato patch holding the dish cloth
in her hand. “How do you know I want to go out with you,” she said
sulkily. “What makes you so sure?”
George Willard did not answer. In silence the two stood in the darkness
with the fence between them. “You go on along,” she said. “Pa’s in
there. I’ll come along. You wait by Williams’ barn.”
The young newspaper reporter had received a letter from Louise
Trunnion. It had come that morning to the office of the _Winesburg
Eagle_. The letter was brief. “I’m yours if you want me,” it said. He
thought it annoying that in the darkness by the fence she had pretended
there was nothing between them. “She has a nerve! Well, gracious sakes,
she has a nerve,” he muttered as he went along the street and passed a
row of vacant lots where corn grew. The corn was shoulder high and had
been planted right down to the sidewalk.
When Louise Trunnion came out of the front door of her house she still
wore the gingham dress in which she had been washing dishes. There was
no hat on her head. The boy could see her standing with the doorknob in
her hand talking to someone within, no doubt to old Jake Trunnion, her
father. Old Jake was half deaf and she shouted. The door closed and
everything was dark and silent in the little side street. George
Willard trembled more violently than ever.
In the shadows by Williams’ barn George and Louise stood, not daring to
talk. She was not particularly comely and there was a black smudge on
the side of her nose. George thought she must have rubbed her nose with
her finger after she had been handling some of the kitchen pots.
The young man began to laugh nervously. “It’s warm,” he said. He wanted
to touch her with his hand. “I’m not very bold,” he thought. Just to
touch the folds of the soiled gingham dress would, he decided, be an
exquisite pleasure. She began to quibble. “You think you’re better than
I am. Don’t tell me, I guess I know,” she said drawing closer to him.
A flood of words burst from George Willard. He remembered the look that
had lurked in the girl’s eyes when they had met on the streets and
thought of the note she had written. Doubt left him. The whispered
tales concerning her that had gone about town gave him confidence. He
became wholly the male, bold and aggressive. In his heart there was no
sympathy for her. “Ah, come on, it’ll be all right. There won’t be
anyone know anything. How can they know?” he urged.