Sherwood Anderson - Marching Men

On the eminence Beaut and the tall woman sat and looked down into the valley. “I wonder why we don’t go there, mother and I,” he said. “When I see it I’m filled with the notion. I think I want to be a farmer and work in the fields. Instead of that mother and I sit and plan of the city. I’m going to be a lawyer. That’s all we talk about. Then I come up here and it seems as though this is the place for me.”

The tall woman laughed. “I can see you coming home at night from the fields,” she said. “It might be to that white house there with the windmill, You would be a big man and would have dust in your red hair and perhaps a red beard growing on your chin. And a woman with a baby in her arms would come out of the kitchen door to stand leaning on the fence waiting for you. When you came up she would put her arm around your neck and kiss you on the lips. The beard would tickle her cheek. You should have a beard when you grow older. Your mouth is so big.”

A strange new feeling shot through Beaut. He wondered why she had said that and wanted to take hold of her hand and kiss her then and there. He got up and looked at the sun going down behind the hill far away at the other end of the valley. “We’d better be getting along back,” he said.

The woman remained seated on the log. “Sit down,” she said, “I’ll tell you something—something it’s good for you to hear. You’re so big and red you tempt a girl to bother you. First though you tell me why you go along the street looking into the gutter when I stand in the stairway in the evening.”

Beaut sat down again upon the log, and thought of what the black-haired boy had told him of her. “Then it was true—what he said about you?” he asked.

“No! No!” she cried, jumping up in her turn and beginning to pin on her hat. “Let’s be going.”

Beaut sat stolidly on the log. “What’s the use bothering each other,” he said. “Let’s sit here until the sun goes down. We can get home before dark.”

They sat down and she began talking, boasting of herself as he had boasted of his father.

“I’m too old for that boy,” she said; “I’m older than you by a good many years. I know what boys talk about and what they say about women. I do pretty well. I don’t have any one to talk to except father and he sits all evening reading a paper and going to sleep in his chair. If I let boys come and sit with me in the evening or stand talking with me in the stairway it is because I’m lonesome. There isn’t a man in town I’d marry—not one.”

The speech sounded discordant and harsh to Beaut. He wished his father were there rubbing his hands together and muttering rather than this pale woman who stirred him up and then talked harshly like the women at the back doors in Coal Creek. He thought again as he had thought before that he preferred the black-faced miners drunk and silent to their pale talking wives. On an impulse he told her that, saying it crudely so that it hurt.

Their companionship was spoiled. They got up and began to climb the hill, going toward home. Again she put her hand to her side and again he wished to put his hand at her back and push her up the hill. Instead he walked beside her in silence, again hating the town.

Halfway down the hill the tall woman stopped by the road-side. Darkness was coming on and the glow of the coke ovens lighted the sky. “One living up here and never going down there might think it rather grand and big,” he said. Again the hatred came. “They might think the men who live down there knew something instead of being just a lot of cattle.”

A smile came into the face of the tall woman and a gentler look stole into her eyes. “We get at one another,” she said, “we can’t let one another alone. I wish we hadn’t quarrelled. We might be friends if we tried. You have got something in you. You attract women. I’ve heard others say that. Your father was that way. Most of the women here would rather have been the wife of Cracked McGregor ugly as he was than to have stayed with their own husbands. I heard my mother say that to father when they lay quarrelling in bed at night and I lay listening.”

The boy was overcome with the thought of a woman talking to him so frankly. He looked at her and said what was in his mind. “I don’t like the women,” he said, “but I liked you, seeing you standing in the stairway and thinking you had been doing as you pleased. I thought maybe you amounted to something. I don’t know why you should be bothered by what I think. I don’t know why any woman should be bothered by what any man thinks. I should think you would go right on doing what you want to do like mother and me about my being a lawyer.”

He sat on a log beside the road near where he had met her and watched her go down the hill. “I’m quite a fellow to have talked to her all afternoon like that,” he thought and pride in his growing manhood crept over him.

The town of Coal Creek was hideous. People from prosperous towns and cities of the middle west, from Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, going east to New York or Philadelphia, looked out of the car windows and seeing the poor little houses scattered along the hillside thought of books they had read of life in hovels in the old world. In chair-cars men and women leaned back and closed their eyes. They yawned and wished the journey would come to an end. If they thought of the town at all they regretted it mildly and passed it off as a necessity of modern life.

The houses on the hillside and the stores along Main Street belonged to the mining company. In its turn the mining company belonged to the officials of the railroad. The manager of the mine had a brother who was division superintendent. It was the mine manager who had stood by the door of the mine when Cracked McGregor went to his death. He lived in a city some thirty miles away, and went there in the evening on the train. With him went the clerks and even the stenographers from the offices of the mine. After five o’clock in the afternoon no white collars were to be seen upon the streets of Coal Creek.

In the town men lived like brutes. Dumb with toil they drank greedily in the saloon on Main Street and went home to beat their wives. Among them a constant low muttering went on. They felt the injustice of their lot but could not voice it logically and when they thought of the men who owned the mine they swore dumbly, using vile oaths even in their thoughts. Occasionally a strike broke out and Barney Butterlips, a thin little man with a cork leg, stood on a box and made speeches regarding the coming brotherhood of man. Once a troop of cavalry was unloaded from the cars and with a battery paraded the main street. The battery was made up of several men in brown uniforms. They set up a Gatling gun at the end of the street and the strike subsided.

An Italian who lived in a house on the hillside cultivated a garden. His place was the one beauty spot in the valley. With a wheelbarrow he brought earth from the woods at the top of the hill and on Sunday he could be seen going back and forth and whistling merrily. In the winter he sat in his house making a drawing on a bit of paper. In the spring he took the drawing, and by it planted his garden, utilising every inch of his ground. When a strike came on he was told by the mine manager to go on back to work or move out of his house. He thought of the garden and the work he had done and went back to his routine of work in the mine. While he worked the miners marched up the hill and destroyed the garden. The next day the Italian also joined the striking miners.

In a little one-room shack on the hill lived an old woman. She lived alone and was vilely dirty. In her house she had old broken chairs and tables picked up about town and piled in such profusion that she could scarcely move about. On warm days she sat in the sun before the shack chewing on a stick that had been dipped in tobacco. Miners coming up the hill dumped bits of bread and meat-ends out of their dinner-pails into a box nailed to a tree by the road. These the old woman collected and ate. When the soldiers came to town she walked along the street jeering at them. “Pretty boys! Scabs! Dudes! Dry-goods clerks!” she called after them as she walked by the tails of their horses. A young man with glasses on his nose, who was mounted on a grey horse turned and called to his comrades, “Let her alone—it’s old Mother Misery herself.”