Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
gathered the force of a long line of strong men. He had always been
extraordinarily alive when he was a small boy on the farm and later
when he was a young man in school. In the school he had studied and
thought of God and the Bible with his whole mind and heart. As time
passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself
as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted
terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked
about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to
him that he could not bear to become also such a clod. Although in his
absorption in himself and in his own destiny he was blind to the fact
that his young wife was doing a strong woman’s work even after she had
become large with child and that she was killing herself in his
service, he did not intend to be unkind to her. When his father, who
was old and twisted with toil, made over to him the ownership of the
farm and seemed content to creep away to a corner and wait for death,
he shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the old man from his mind.
In the room by the window overlooking the land that had come down to
him sat Jesse thinking of his own affairs. In the stables he could hear
the tramping of his horses and the restless movement of his cattle.
Away in the fields he could see other cattle wandering over green
hills. The voices of men, his men who worked for him, came in to him
through the window. From the milkhouse there was the steady thump,
thump of a churn being manipulated by the half-witted girl, Eliza
Stoughton. Jesse’s mind went back to the men of Old Testament days who
had also owned lands and herds. He remembered how God had come down out
of the skies and talked to these men and he wanted God to notice and to
talk to him also. A kind of feverish boyish eagerness to in some way
achieve in his own life the flavor of significance that had hung over
these men took possession of him. Being a prayerful man he spoke of the
matter aloud to God and the sound of his own words strengthened and fed
his eagerness.
“I am a new kind of man come into possession of these fields,” he
declared. “Look upon me, O God, and look Thou also upon my neighbors
and all the men who have gone before me here! O God, create in me
another Jesse, like that one of old, to rule over men and to be the
father of sons who shall be rulers!” Jesse grew excited as he talked
aloud and jumping to his feet walked up and down in the room. In fancy
he saw himself living in old times and among old peoples. The land that
lay stretched out before him became of vast significance, a place
peopled by his fancy with a new race of men sprung from himself. It
seemed to him that in his day as in those other and older days,
kingdoms might be created and new impulses given to the lives of men by
the power of God speaking through a chosen servant. He longed to be
such a servant. “It is God’s work I have come to the land to do,” he
declared in a loud voice and his short figure straightened and he
thought that something like a halo of Godly approval hung over him.
It will perhaps be somewhat difficult for the men and women of a later
day to understand Jesse Bentley. In the last fifty years a vast change
has taken place in the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact
taken place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and
rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have
come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth
of cities, the building of the inter-urban car lines that weave in and
out of towns and past farmhouses, and now in these later days the
coming of the automobiles has worked a tremendous change in the lives
and in the habits of thought of our people of Mid-America. Books, badly
imagined and written though they may be in the hurry of our times, are
in every household, magazines circulate by the millions of copies,
newspapers are everywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove in
the store in his village has his mind filled to overflowing with the
words of other men. The newspapers and the magazines have pumped him
full. Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind of
beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever. The farmer by the stove
is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find
him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us
all.
In Jesse Bentley’s time and in the country districts of the whole
Middle West in the years after the Civil War it was not so. Men labored
too hard and were too tired to read. In them was no desire for words
printed upon paper. As they worked in the fields, vague, half-formed
thoughts took possession of them. They believed in God and in God’s
power to control their lives. In the little Protestant churches they
gathered on Sunday to hear of God and his works. The churches were the
center of the social and intellectual life of the times. The figure of
God was big in the hearts of men.
And so, having been born an imaginative child and having within him a
great intellectual eagerness, Jesse Bentley had turned wholeheartedly
toward God. When the war took his brothers away, he saw the hand of God
in that. When his father became ill and could no longer attend to the
running of the farm, he took that also as a sign from God. In the city,
when the word came to him, he walked about at night through the streets
thinking of the matter and when he had come home and had got the work
on the farm well under way, he went again at night to walk through the
forests and over the low hills and to think of God.
As he walked the importance of his own figure in some divine plan grew
in his mind. He grew avaricious and was impatient that the farm
contained only six hundred acres. Kneeling in a fence corner at the
edge of some meadow, he sent his voice abroad into the silence and
looking up he saw the stars shining down at him.
One evening, some months after his father’s death, and when his wife
Katherine was expecting at any moment to be laid abed of childbirth,
Jesse left his house and went for a long walk. The Bentley farm was
situated in a tiny valley watered by Wine Creek, and Jesse walked along
the banks of the stream to the end of his own land and on through the
fields of his neighbors. As he walked the valley broadened and then
narrowed again. Great open stretches of field and wood lay before him.
The moon came out from behind clouds, and, climbing a low hill, he sat
down to think.
Jesse thought that as the true servant of God the entire stretch of
country through which he had walked should have come into his
possession. He thought of his dead brothers and blamed them that they
had not worked harder and achieved more. Before him in the moonlight
the tiny stream ran down over stones, and he began to think of the men
of old times who like himself had owned flocks and lands.
A fantastic impulse, half fear, half greediness, took possession of
Jesse Bentley. He remembered how in the old Bible story the Lord had
appeared to that other Jesse and told him to send his son David to
where Saul and the men of Israel were fighting the Philistines in the
Valley of Elah. Into Jesse’s mind came the conviction that all of the
Ohio farmers who owned land in the valley of Wine Creek were
Philistines and enemies of God. “Suppose,” he whispered to himself,
“there should come from among them one who, like Goliath the Philistine
of Gath, could defeat me and take from me my possessions.” In fancy he
felt the sickening dread that he thought must have lain heavy on the
heart of Saul before the coming of David. Jumping to his feet, he began
to run through the night. As he ran he called to God. His voice carried
far over the low hills. “Jehovah of Hosts,” he cried, “send to me this
night out of the womb of Katherine, a son. Let Thy grace alight upon
me. Send me a son to be called David who shall help me to pluck at last
all of these lands out of the hands of the Philistines and turn them to
Thy service and to the building of Thy kingdom on earth.”
GODLINESS
PART TWO
David Hardy of Winesburg, Ohio, was the grandson of Jesse Bentley, the
owner of Bentley farms. When he was twelve years old he went to the old
Bentley place to live. His mother, Louise Bentley, the girl who came
into the world on that night when Jesse ran through the fields crying
to God that he be given a son, had grown to womanhood on the farm and
had married young John Hardy of Winesburg, who became a banker. Louise
and her husband did not live happily together and everyone agreed that
she was to blame. She was a small woman with sharp grey eyes and black
hair. From childhood she had been inclined to fits of temper and when
not angry she was often morose and silent. In Winesburg it was said
that she drank. Her husband, the banker, who was a careful, shrewd man,
tried hard to make her happy. When he began to make money he bought for
her a large brick house on Elm Street in Winesburg and he was the first
man in that town to keep a manservant to drive his wife’s carriage.
But Louise could not be made happy. She flew into half insane fits of
temper during which she was sometimes silent, sometimes noisy and
quarrelsome. She swore and cried out in her anger. She got a knife from
the kitchen and threatened her husband’s life. Once she deliberately
set fire to the house, and often she hid herself away for days in her
own room and would see no one. Her life, lived as a half recluse, gave
rise to all sorts of stories concerning her. It was said that she took
drugs and that she hid herself away from people because she was often
so under the influence of drink that her condition could not be
concealed. Sometimes on summer afternoons she came out of the house and
got into her carriage. Dismissing the driver she took the reins in her
own hands and drove off at top speed through the streets. If a
pedestrian got in her way she drove straight ahead and the frightened
citizen had to escape as best he could. To the people of the town it
seemed as though she wanted to run them down. When she had driven
through several streets, tearing around corners and beating the horses
with the whip, she drove off into the country. On the country roads
after she had gotten out of sight of the houses she let the horses slow
down to a walk and her wild, reckless mood passed. She became
thoughtful and muttered words. Sometimes tears came into her eyes. And
then when she came back into town she again drove furiously through the
quiet streets. But for the influence of her husband and the respect he
inspired in people’s minds she would have been arrested more than once
by the town marshal.
Young David Hardy grew up in the house with this woman and as can well
be imagined there was not much joy in his childhood. He was too young
then to have opinions of his own about people, but at times it was
difficult for him not to have very definite opinions about the woman
who was his mother. David was always a quiet, orderly boy and for a
long time was thought by the people of Winesburg to be something of a
dullard. His eyes were brown and as a child he had a habit of looking
at things and people a long time without appearing to see what he was
looking at. When he heard his mother spoken of harshly or when he
overheard her berating his father, he was frightened and ran away to
hide. Sometimes he could not find a hiding place and that confused him.
Turning his face toward a tree or if he was indoors toward the wall, he
closed his eyes and tried not to think of anything. He had a habit of
talking aloud to himself, and early in life a spirit of quiet sadness
often took possession of him.