Horses and Men: Tales, long and short, from our American life. Sherwood Anderson
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heavy,” he said heartily. “I might as well make myself useful and help you unload.” Taking off his coat Walter Wills voluntarily helped at the task that belonged to Will Edgley, the drayman.
If May Edgley, during her girlhood, rose higher than any of the others of the Edgley family she also fell lower. “She had her chance and threw it away,” was the word that went round and surely no one else in that family ever had so completely the town’s sympathy. Lillian Edgley was outside the pale of the town’s life, and Kate was but a lesser edition of her sister. She waited on table at the Fownsby House, and on almost any evening might have been seen walking out with some traveling man. She also took the evening train to neighboring towns but returned to Bidwell later on the same night or at daylight the next morning. She did not prosper as Lillian did and grew tired of the dullness of small town life. At twenty-two she went to live in Cleveland where she got a job as cloak model in a large store. Later she went on the road as an actress, in a burlesque show, and Bidwell heard no more of her.
As for May Edgley, all through her childhood and until her seventeenth year she was a model of good behavior. Everyone spoke of it. She was, unlike the other Edgleys, small and dark, and unlike her sisters dressed herself in plain neat-fitting clothes. As a young girl in the public school she began to attract attention because of her proficiency in the classes. Both Lillian and Kate Edgley had been slovenly students, who spent their time ogling boys and the men teachers but May looked at no one and as soon as school was dismissed in the afternoon went home to her mother, a tall tired-looking woman who seldom went out of her own house.
In Bidwell, Tom Means, who later became a soldier and who has recently won high rank in the army because of his proficiency in training recruits for the World War, was the prize pupil in the schools. Tom was working for his appointment to West Point, and did not spend his evenings loafing on the streets, as did other young men. He stayed in his own house, intent on his studies. Tom’s father was a lawyer and his mother was third cousin to a Kentucky woman who had married an English baronet. The son aspired to be a soldier and a gentleman and to live on the intellectual plane, and had a good deal of contempt for the mental capacities of his fellow students, and when one of the Edgley family set up as his rival he was angry and embarrassed and the schoolroom was delighted. Day after day and year after year the contest between him and May Edgley went on and in a sense the whole town of Bidwell got back of the girl. In all such things as history and English literature Tom swept all before him but in spelling, arithmetic, and geography May defeated him without effort. At her desk she sat like a little terrier in the presence of a trap filled with rats. A question was asked or a problem in arithmetic put on the blackboard and like a terrier she jumped. Her hand went up and her sensitive mouth quivered. Fingers were snapped vigorously. “I know,” she said, and the entire class knew she did. When she had answered the question or had gone to the blackboard to solve the problem the half-grown children along the rows of benches laughed and Tom Means stared out through a window. May returned to her seat, half triumphant, half ashamed of her victory.
The country lying west of Bidwell, like all the Ohio country down that way, is given to small fruit and berry raising, and in June and after school has been dismissed for the year all the younger men, boys, and girls, with most of the women of the town go to work in the fruit harvest. To the fields immediately after breakfast the citizens go trooping away. Lunches are carried in baskets and until the sun goes down everyone stays in the fields.
And in the berry fields as in the schoolroom May was a notable figure. She did not walk or ride to the work with the other young girls, or join the parties at lunch at the noon hour, but everyone understood that that was because of her family. “I know how she feels, if I came from a family like that I wouldn’t ask or want other people’s attention,” said one of the women, the wife of a carpenter, who trudged along with the others in the dust of the road.
In a berry field, belonging to a farmer named Peter Short, some thirty women, young men and tall awkward boys crawled over the ground, picking the red fragrant berries. Ahead of them, in a row by herself, went May, the exclusive, the woman who walked by herself. Her hands flitted in and out of the berry vines as the tail of a squirrel disappears among the leaves of a tree when one walks in a wood. The other pickers went slowly, stopping occasionally to eat berries and talk and when one had crawled a little ahead of the others he stopped and waited, sitting on his haunches. The pickers were paid in proportion to the number of quarts picked during the day but, as they often said, “pay was not everything.” The berry picking was in a way a social function, and who were the pickers, wives, sons and daughters of prosperous artisans, to kill themselves for a few paltry dollars?
With May Edgley they understood it was different. Everyone knew that she and her mother got practically no money from John Edgley, the father—from the boys, Jake, Frank and Will—or from the girls, Lillian and Kate, who spent their takings on clothes for themselves. If she were to be decently dressed, she had to earn the money for the purpose during the vacation time when she could stay out of school. Later it was understood she planned to be a school teacher herself, and to attain to that position it was necessary that she keep herself well dressed and show herself industrious and alert in affairs.
Tirelessly, therefore, May worked and the boxes of berries, filled by her ever alert fingers, grew into mountains. Peter Short with his son came walking down the rows to gather the filled crates and put them aboard a wagon to be hauled to town. He looked at May with pride in his eyes and the other pickers lumbering slowly along became the target for his scorn. “Ah, you talking women and you big lazy boys, you’re not much good,” he cried. “Ain’t you ashamed of yourselves? Look at you there, Sylvester and Al—letting yourself be beat, twice over, by a girl so little you could almost carry her home in your pocket.”
It was in the summer of her seventeenth year that May fell down from her high place in the life of the town of Bidwell. Two vital and dramatic events had happened to her that year. Her mother died in April and she graduated from the high school in June, second only in honors to Tom Means. As Tom’s father had been on the school board for years the town shook its head over the decision that placed him ahead of May and in everyone’s eyes May had really walked off with the prize. When she went into the fields, and when they remembered the fact of her mother’s recent death, even the women were ready to forget and forgive the fact of her being a member of the Edgley family. As for May, it seemed to her at that moment that nothing that could happen to her could very much matter.
And then the unexpected. As more than one Bidwell wife said afterwards to her husband. “It was then that blood showed itself.”
A man named Jerome Hadley first found out about May. He went that year to Peter Short’s field, as he himself said, “just for fun,” and he found it. Jerome was pitcher for the Bidwell baseball nine and worked as mail clerk on the railroad. After he had returned from a run he had several days’ rest and went to the berry field because the town was deserted. When he saw May working off by herself he winked at the other young men and going to her got down on his knees and began picking at a speed almost as great as her own. “Come on here, little woman,” he said, “I’m a mail clerk and have got my hand in, sorting letters. My fingers can go pretty fast. Come on now, let’s see if you can keep up with me.”
For an hour Jerome and May went up and down in the rows and then the thing happened that set the town by the ears. The girl, who had never talked to others, began talking to Jerome and the other pickers turned to look and wonder. She no longer picked at lightning speed but loitered along, stopping to rest and put choice berries into her mouth. “Eat that,” she said boldly passing a great red berry across the row to the man. She put a handful of berries into his box. “You won’t make as much as seventy-five cents all day if you don’t get a move on you,” she said, smiling shyly.
At the noon hour the other pickers found out the truth. The tired workers had gone to the pump by Peter Short’s house and then to a nearby orchard to sit under the trees and rest after the eating of lunches.
There was no doubt something had happened to May. Everyone felt it. It was later understood that she had, during that noon hour in June and quite calmly and deliberately, decided to become like her two sisters and go on the town.
The berry pickers as usual ate their lunches