Horses and Men: Tales, long and short, from our American life. Sherwood Anderson
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Peter Short’s wife brought hot coffee and tin cups were filled. Jokes went back and forth and the girls giggled.
In spite of the unexpectedness of May’s attitude toward Jerome, a bachelor and quite legitimate game for the unmarried women, no one suspected anything serious would happen. Flirtations were always going on in the berry fields. They came, played themselves out, and passed like the clouds in the June sky. In the evening, when the young men had washed the dirt of the fields away and had put on their Sunday clothes, things were different. Then a girl must look out for herself. When she went to walk in the evening with a young man under the trees or out into country lanes—then anything might happen.
But in the fields, with all the older women about—to have thought anything at all of a young man and a girl working together and blushing and laughing, would have been to misunderstand the whole spirit of the berry picking season.
And it was evident May had misunderstood. Later no one blamed Jerome, at least none of the young fellows did. As the pickers ate lunch May sat a little apart from the others. That was her custom and Jerry lay in the long grass at the edge of the orchard also a little apart. A sudden tenseness crept into the groups under the trees. May had not gone to the pump with the others when she came in from the field but sat with her back braced against a tree and the hand that held the sandwich was black with the soil of her morning labors. It trembled and once the sandwich fell out of her hand.
Suddenly she got to her feet and put her lunch basket into the fork of a tree, and then, with a look of defiance in her eyes, she climbed over a fence and started along a lane past Peter Short’s barn. The lane ran down to a meadow, crossed a bridge and went on beside a waving wheatfield to a wood.
May went a little way along the lane and then stopped to look back and the other pickers stared at her, wondering what was the matter. Then Jerome Hadley got to his feet. He was ashamed and climbed awkwardly over the fence and walked away without looking back.
Everyone was quite sure it had all been arranged. As the girls and women got to their feet and stood watching, May and Jerome went out of the lane and into the wood. The older women shook their heads. “Well, well,” they exclaimed while the boys and young men began slapping each other on the back and prancing grotesquely about.
It was unbelievable. Before they had got out of sight of the others under the tree Jerome had put his arm about May’s waist and she had put her head down on his shoulder. It was as though May Edgley who, as all the older women agreed, had been treated almost as an equal by all of the others had wanted to throw something ugly right in their faces.
Jerome and May stayed for two hours in the wood and then came back together to the field where the others were at work. May’s cheeks were pale and she looked as though she had been crying. She picked alone as before and after a few moments of awkward silence Jerome put on his coat and went off along a road toward town. May made a little mountain of filled berry boxes during that afternoon but two or three times filled boxes dropped out of her hands. The spilled fruit lay red and shining against the brown and black of the soil.
No one saw May in the berry fields after that, and Jerome Hadley had something of which to boast. In the evening when he came among the young fellows he spoke of his adventure at length.
“You couldn’t blame me for taking the chance when I had it,” he said laughing. He explained in detail what had occurred in the wood, while other young men stood about filled with envy. As he talked he grew both proud and a little ashamed of the public attention his adventure was attaining. “It was easy,” he said. “That May Edgley’s the easiest thing that ever lived in this town. A fellow don’t have to ask to get what he wants. That’s how easy it is.”
Chapter II
IN Bidwell, and after she had fairly flung herself against the wall of village convention by going into the wood with Jerome, May lived at home, doing the work her mother had formerly done in the Edgley household. She washed the clothes, cooked the food and made the beds. There was, for the time, something sweet to her in the thoughts of doing lowly tasks and she washed and ironed the dresses in which Lillian and Kate were to array themselves and the heavy overalls worn by her father and brothers with a kind of satisfaction in the task. “It makes me tired and I can sleep and won’t be thinking,” she told herself. As she worked over the washtubs, among the beds soiled by the heavy slumbers of her brothers who on the evening before had perhaps come home drunk, or stood over the hot stove in the kitchen, she kept thinking of her dead mother. “I wonder what she would think,” she asked herself and then added. “If she hadn’t died it wouldn’t have happened. If I had someone, I could go to and talk with, things would be different.”
During the day when the men of the household were gone with their teams and when Lillian was away from town May had the house to herself. It was a two-storied frame building, standing at the edge of a field near the town’s edge, and had once been painted yellow. Now, water washing from the roofs had discolored the paint, and the side walls of the old building were all mottled and streaked. The house stood on a little hill and the land fell sharply away from the kitchen door. There was a creek under the hill and beyond the creek a field that at certain times during the year became a swamp. At the creek’s edge willows and elders grew and often in the afternoon, when there was no one about, May went softly out at the kitchen door, looking to be sure there was no one in the road that ran past the front of the house, and if the coast was clear went down the hill and crept in among the fragrant elders and willows. “I am lost here and no one can see me or find me,” she thought, and the thought gave her intense satisfaction. Her cheeks grew flushed and hot and she pressed the cool green leaves of the willows against them. When a wagon passed in the road or someone walked along the board sidewalk at the road-side she drew herself into a little lump and closed her eyes. The passing sounds seemed far away and to herself it seemed that she had in some way escaped from life. How warm and close it was there, buried amid the dark green shadows of the willows. The gnarled twisted limbs of the trees were like arms but unlike the arms of the man with whom she had lain in the wood they did not grasp her with terrifying convulsive strength. For hours she lay still in the shadows and nothing came to frighten her and her lacerated spirit began to heal a little. “I have made myself an outlaw among people but I am not an outlaw here,” she told herself.
Having heard of the incident with Jerome Hadley, in the berry field, Lillian and Kate Edgley were irritated and angry and one evening when they were both at the house and May was at work in the kitchen they spoke about it. Lillian was very angry and had decided to give May what she spoke of as “a piece of her mind.” “What’d she want to go in the cheap for?” she asked. “It makes me sick when I think of it—a fellow like that Jerome Hadley! If she was going to cut loose what made her want to go on the cheap?”
In the Edgley family it had always been understood that May was of a different clay and old John Edgley and the boys had always paid her a kind of crude respect. They did not swear at her as they sometimes did at Lillian and Kate, and in secret they thought of her as a link between themselves and the more respectable life of the town. Ma Edgley was respectable enough but she was old and tired and never went out of the house and it was in May the family held up its head. The two brothers were proud of their sister because of her record in the town school. They themselves were working men and never expected to be anything else but, they thought, “that sister of ours has shown the town that an Edgley can beat them at their own game. She is smarter than any of them. See how she has forced the town to pay attention to her.”
As for Lillian—before the incident with Jerome Hadley, she continually talked of her sister. In Norwalk, Fremont, Clyde and the other towns she visited she had many friends. Men liked her because, as they often said, she was a woman to be trusted. One could talk to her, say anything, and she would keep her mouth shut and in her presence one felt comfortably free and easy. Among her secret associates were members of churches, lawyers, owners of prosperous businesses, heads of respectable families. To be sure they saw Lillian in secret but she seemed to understand and respect their desire for secrecy. “You don’t need