A story teller's story

by Sherwood Anderson

And now, from the lips of his old comrade, he was to hear the most fearful tale of all.

A party of northern foragers had come to the southern plantation house on just such another dark, rainy night as the one on which he was taken there as a prisoner. They marched as the confederate troops had marched, along the driveway to the front of the house, and stood on the lawn. A northern officer’s voice called as the southern officer had called on that other night, and again the tall young negro came to the door with a light, followed by that fiery woman of the Southland.

The negro held the light above his head so that, even in the darkness, the blue coats of the hated northern troops could be seen.

The old southern woman came to stand at the edge of the porch. She understood for what purpose the northern men had come, and she had sworn that not a bite of food, raised on that plantation, should ever pass the lips of a Yank.

Now she held a shotgun in her hand and, without a word or without any sort of warning, raised it and fired into the mass of the men.

There was a cry of rage, and then many guns were raised to shoulders. A sudden roar of the guns and a hundred leaden bullets cut through the front of the house. It wiped out all of father’s family—except just himself—and deprived his sons, too, of a proud southern ancestry; for, just in the moment, before the shower of bullets came, father’s young and innocent sister—realizing with that sure instinct that, everyone understands, all women inevitably possess—realizing, I say, that death was about to call her mother—the young girl had rushed panic-stricken out of the door and had thrown her arms about her mother’s body, just in time to meet death with her. And so all that was left of the family—except just father—fell there in a heap. The captain of the northern troops—a German brewer’s son from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, cried when later he looked down into the white silent face of the young girl, and all his life afterward carried in his heart the remembrance of the dead, pleading young eyes; but, as father so philosophically remarked, what was done was done.

And with that fall there was father—a man left to wander forever stricken and forlorn through life. Later he had, to be sure, married and he had children whom he loved and treasured, but was that the same thing? To the heart of a southerner, as every American understands, ancestry means everything.

The purity of a southern woman is unlike any other purity ever known to mankind. It is something special. The man who has been under the influence of it can never afterward quite escape. Father didn’t expect to. He declared always, after he had told the above story, that he did not ever expect to be gay or happy again.

What he expected was that he would go on for the rest of his days doing just what he was doing at the time. Well, he would try to bring a little joy into the hearts of others—he would sing songs, dance a little dance—he would join an old comrade in arms, one whose heart he knew was as true as steel, and give a magic-lantern show. Others, for an hour anyway, would be made to forget that element of sadness and tragedy in life that he, of course, could never quite forget.

On that very night, lying half dead on the field of Gettysburg beside the dead comrade of his youth, he had made up his mind to spend the remaining days of his life bringing what sweetness and joy he could into the lacerated hearts of a nation torn by civil strife. It had been two o’clock in the morning before he was picked up by a squad of men sent out to gather in the wounded, and already the news of the great victory and the triumph of the cause of freedom was sweeping over the northern land. And he had lain looking at the stars and had made his resolution. Others might seek for the applause of the world, but, as for himself, he would go into the dusty highways and byways of life and bring to the lowly and forgotten the joy of a little fun at the schoolhouse.