Horses and Men: Tales, long and short, from our American life

by Sherwood Anderson

The crew stopped at another large farm and it was to be their last stop for the season. “When we have finished this job we’ll go home and get our own fall work done,” Bottsford said. Saturday evening came and the thresherman and his sons took the horses and drove away, going to their own home for the Sunday, and leaving Tom alone. “We’ll be back early, on Monday morning,” the thresherman said as they drove away. Sunday alone among the strange farm people brought a sharp experience to Tom and when it had passed he decided he would not wait for the end of the threshing season but a few days off now—but would quit his job and go into the city and surrender to the schools. He remembered his employer’s words, “Find out what the books have to say. You don’t have to believe, when they say things that are lies.”

As he walked in lanes, across meadows and upon the hillsides of the farm, also on the shores of Sandusky Bay, that Sunday morning Tom thought almost constantly of his friend the fat fellow, young Paul Bottsford, who had gone to spend the fall and winter at Bellevue, and wondered what his life there might be like. He had himself lived in such a town, in Bidwell, but had rarely left Harry Whitehead’s stable. What went on in such a town? What happened at night in the houses of the towns? He remembered Paul’s plan for getting into a house alone with a widow and how he was to creep into her room at night, holding her tightly in his arms until she wanted what he wanted. “I wonder if he will have the nerve. Gee, I wonder if he will have the nerve,” he muttered.

For a long time, ever since Paul had gone away and he had no one with whom he could talk, things had taken on a new aspect in Tom’s mind. The rustle of dry leaves underfoot, as he walked in a forest—the playing of shadows over the open face of a field—the murmuring song of insects in the dry grass beside the fences in the lanes—and at night the hushed contented sounds made by the animals in the barns, were no longer so sweet to him. For him no more did the young god Jesus walk beside him, just out of sight behind low hills, or down the dry beds of streams. Something within himself, that had been sleeping was now awakening. When he returned from walking in the fields on the fall evenings and, thinking of Paul Bottsford alone in the house with the widow at Bellevue, half wishing he were in the same position, he felt ashamed in the presence of the gentle old thresherman, and afterward did not lie awake listening to the older man’s prayers. The men who had come from nearby farms to help with the threshing laughed and shouted to each other as they pitched the straw into great stacks or carried the filled bags of grain to the bins, and they had wives and daughters who had come with them and who were now at work in the farmhouse kitchen, from which also laughter came. Girls and women kept coming out at the kitchen door into the barnyard, tall awkward girls, plump red-cheeked girls, women with worn thin faces and sagging breasts. All men and women seemed made for each other.

They all laughed and talked together, understood one another. Only he was alone. He only had no one to whom he could feel warm and close, to whom he could draw close.

On the Sunday when the Bottsfords had all gone away Tom came in from walking all morning in the fields and ate his dinner with many other people in a big farmhouse dining room. In preparation for the threshing days ahead, and the feeding of many people, several women had come to spend the day and to help in preparing food. The farmer’s daughter, who was married and lived in Sandusky, came with her husband, and three other women, neighbors, came from farms in the neighborhood. Tom did not look at them but ate his dinner in silence and as soon as he could manage got out of the house and went to the barns. Going into a long shed he sat on the tongue of a wagon, that from long disuse was covered with dust. Swallows flew back and forth among the rafters overhead and, in an upper corner of the shed where they evidently had a nest, wasps buzzed in the semi-darkness.

The daughter of the farmer, who had come from town, came from the house with a babe in her arms. It was nursing time, and she wanted to escape from the crowded house and, without having seen Tom, she sat on a box near the shed door and opened her dress. Embarrassed and at the same time fascinated by the sight of a woman’s breasts, seen through cracks of the wagon box, Tom drew his legs up and his head down and remained concealed until the woman had gone back to the house. Then he went again to the fields and did not go back to the house for the evening meal.

As he walked on that Sunday afternoon the grandson of the Welsh poet experienced many new sensations. In a way he came to understand that the things Paul had talked of doing and that had, but a short time before, filled him with disgust were now possible to himself also. In the past when he had thought about women there had always been something healthy and animal-like in his lusts but now they took a new form. The passion that could not find expression through his body went up into his mind and he began to see visions. Women became to him something different than anything else in nature, more desirable than anything else in nature, and at the same time everything in nature became woman. The trees, in the apple orchard by the barn, were like the arms of women. The apples on the trees were round like the breasts of women. They were the breasts of women—and when he had got on to a low hill the contour of the fences that marked the confines of the fields fell into the forms of women’s bodies. Even the clouds in the sky did the same thing.

He walked down along a lane to a stream and crossed the stream by a wooden bridge. Then he climbed another hill, the highest place in all that part of the country, and there the fever that possessed him became more active. An odd lassitude crept over him and he lay down in the grass on the hilltop and closed his eyes. For a long time he remained in a hushed, half-sleeping, dreamless state and then opened his eyes again.

Again the forms of women floated before him. To his left the bay was ruffled by a gentle breeze and far over towards the city of Sandusky two sailboats were apparently engaged in a race. The masts of the boats were fully dressed but on the great stretch of water they seemed to stand still. The bay itself, in Tom’s eyes, had taken on the form and shape of a woman’s head and body and the two sailboats were the woman’s eyes looking at him.

The bay was a woman with her head lying where lay the city of Sandusky. Smoke arose from the stacks of steamers docked at the city’s wharves and the smoke formed itself into masses of black hair. Through the farm, where he had come to thresh, ran a stream. It swept down past the foot of the hill on which he lay. The stream was the arm of the woman. Her hand was thrust into the land and the lower part of her body was lost—far down to the north, where the bay became a part of Lake Erie—but her other arm could be seen. It was outlined in the further shore of the bay. Her other arm was drawn up and her hand was pressing against her face. Her form was distorted by pain but at the same time the giant woman smiled at the boy on the hill. There was something in the smile that was like the smile that had come unconsciously to the lips of the woman who had nursed her child in the shed.