Horses and Men: Tales, long and short, from our American life. Sherwood Anderson
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the Sunday School teachers were always talking about. There was a gigantic strong old man named Abraham who walked in God’s footsteps. He must have been huge, strong, and good, too. His children were like the sands of the seas for numbers, and was that not a sign of strength. How many children! All the children in the world could not be more than that! The man who had taken hold of her hand and had led her into the store to buy the candy for her was, she imagined just such another. He also must own lands and be the father of innumerable children and no doubt he could ride all day on a fast horse and never get off his own possessions. It was possible he thought her one of his innumerable children.
There was no doubt he was a mighty man. He looked like one and he had admired her. “I’m giving you this candy because my daughter says you are the smartest girl in school,” he said. She remembered that another man stood in the store and that, as she ran away with the bag of candy gripped in her small fingers, the old man, the mighty one, turned to him. He said something to the man. “They are all cattle except her, just cattle,” he had said. Later she had thought out what he meant. He meant her family, the Edgleys.
How many things she had thought out as she went back and forth to school, always alone. There was always plenty of time for thinking things out—in the late afternoons as she helped her mother with the housework and in the long winter evenings when she went to bed early and for a long time did not go to sleep. The old man in the store had admired her quick brain—for that he had forgiven her being an Edgley, one of the cattle. Her thoughts went round and round in circles. Even as a child she had always felt shut in, walled in from life. She struggled to escape out of herself, out into life.
And now she was a woman who had experienced life, tested it, and she stood, silent and attentive on the stairway of the Edgley house or by the stove in the kitchen and with an effort forced herself to quit thinking. On another street, in another house, a door banged. Her sense of hearing was extraordinarily acute, and it seemed to her she could hear every sound made by every man, woman, and child in town. The circle of thoughts began again and again she fought to think, to feel her way out of herself. On another street, in another house a woman was doing housework, just as she had been doing—making beds, washing dishes, cooking food. The woman had just passed from one room of her house to another and a door had shut with a bang. “Well,” May thought, “she is a human being, she feels things as I do, she thinks, eats food, sleeps, dreams, walks about her house.”
It didn’t matter who the woman was. Being or not being an Edgley made no difference. Any woman would do for the purposes of May’s thoughts. All people who lived, lived! Men walked about too, and had thoughts, young girls laughed. She had heard a girl in school, when no one was speaking to her—paying any attention to her—burst suddenly into loud laughter. What was she laughing about?
How cruelly the town had patronized May, setting her apart from the others, calling her smart. They had cared about her because of her smartness. She was smart. Her mind was quick, it reached out. And she was one of the Edgleys—“cattle,” the bearded man in the store had said.
And what of that—what was an Edgley—why were they cattle? An Edgley also slept, ate food, had dreams, walked about. Lillian had said that an Edgley man was like all other men, only less stuck on himself.
May’s mind fought to realize herself in the world of people, she wanted to be a part of all life, to function in life—did not want to be a special thing—smart—patted on the head—smiled at because she was smart.
What was smartness? She could work out problems in school quickly, swiftly, but as each problem was solved she forgot it. It meant nothing to her. A merchant in Egypt wanted to transport goods across the desert and had 370 pounds of tea and such another number of pounds of dried fruits and spices. There was a problem concerning the matter. Camels were to be loaded. How far away? The result of all her quick thinking was some number like twelve or eighteen, arrived at before the others. There was a little trick. It consisted in throwing everything else out of the mind and concentrating on the one thing—and that was smartness.
But what did it matter to her about the loading of camels? It might have meant something could she have seen into the mind, the soul of the man who owned all that merchandise and who was to carry it so far, if she could have understood him, if she could have understood anyone, if anyone could have understood her.
May stood in the kitchen of the Edgley house, quiet, attentive—for ten minutes, a half hour. Once a dish she held in her hand fell to the floor and broke, awakening her suddenly and to awaken was like coming back to the Edgley house after a long journey, during which she had traveled far, over mountains, rivers, seas—it was like coming back to a place she wanted to leave for good.
“And all the time,” she told herself, “life swept on, other people lived, laughed, achieved life.”
And then, through the lie she had told Maud Welliver, May stepped into a new world, a world of boundless release. Through the lie and the telling of it she found out that, if she could not live in the life about her, she could create a life. If she was walled in, shut off from participation in the life of the Ohio town—hated, feared by the town—she could come out of the town. The people would not really look at her, try to understand her and they would not let her look down into themselves.
The lie she had told was the foundation stone, the first of the foundation stones. A tower was to be built, a tall tower on which she could stand, from the ramparts of which she could look down into a world created by herself, by her own mind. If her mind was really what Lillian, the teachers in the school, all the others, had said she would use it, it would become the tool which in her hands, would force stone after stone into its place in her tower.
In the Edgley house May had a room of her own, a tiny room at the back of the house and there was one window looking down into the field, that every spring and fall became a swamp. In the winter sometimes it was covered with ice and boys came there to skate. On the evening she had told Maud Welliver the great lie—recreated the incident in the wood with Jerome Hadley—she hurried home and went up to her room and, pulling a chair to the window, sat down. What a thing she had done! The encounter with Jerome Hadley in the wood had been terrible—she had been unable to think about it, did not dare to think about it, and trying not to think had almost upset her reason.
And now it was gone. The whole thing had really never happened. What had happened was this other thing, or something like that, something no one knew about. There had really been an attempt at murder. May sat by the window and smiled sadly. “I stretched it a little,” she thought. “Of course I stretched it, but what was the use trying to tell what happened. I couldn’t make it understood. I can’t understand it myself.”
All through the weeks that had passed since that day in the wood May had been obsessed by the notion that she was unclean, physically unclean. Doing the housework she wore calico dresses—she had several of them and two or three times a day she changed her dress and the soiled dress she could not leave hanging in a closet until washday but washed the dress at once and hung it on a line in the back yard. The wind blowing through it gave her a comforting feeling.
The Edgleys had no bathroom or bathtub. Few people in towns in her day owned any such luxurious appendages to life. And a washtub was kept in the woodshed by the kitchen door and what baths were taken were taken in the tub. It was a ceremony that did not often occur in the family, and when it did occur the tub was filled from the cistern and set in the sun to warm. Then it was carried into the shed. The candidate for cleanliness went into the shed and closed the door. In the winter the ceremony took place in the kitchen and Ma Edgley came at the last moment and poured a kettle of boiling water into the cold water in the tub. In the summer in the shed that was not necessary. The bather undressed and put his clothes about, on the piles of wood, and there was a great splashing.
During that summer May took a bath every afternoon, but did not bother to put the water out in the sun. How good it felt to have it cold! Often when there was no one about, she filled the tub and got into it again before going to bed. Her small body, dark and strong, sank into the cold water and she took strong soap and scrubbed her legs, her breasts, her neck where Jerome Hadley’s kisses had alighted. Her neck and breasts she wished she could scrub quite away.