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

by Sherwood Anderson

And then the unexpected. As more than one Bidwell wife said afterwards to her husband. “It was then that blood showed itself.”

A man named Jerome Hadley first found out about May. He went that year to Peter Short’s field, as he himself said, “just for fun,” and he found it. Jerome was pitcher for the Bidwell baseball nine and worked as mail clerk on the railroad. After he had returned from a run he had several days’ rest and went to the berry field because the town was deserted. When he saw May working off by herself he winked at the other young men and going to her got down on his knees and began picking at a speed almost as great as her own. “Come on here, little woman,” he said, “I’m a mail clerk and have got my hand in, sorting letters. My fingers can go pretty fast. Come on now, let’s see if you can keep up with me.”

For an hour Jerome and May went up and down in the rows and then the thing happened that set the town by the ears. The girl, who had never talked to others, began talking to Jerome and the other pickers turned to look and wonder. She no longer picked at lightning speed but loitered along, stopping to rest and put choice berries into her mouth. “Eat that,” she said boldly passing a great red berry across the row to the man. She put a handful of berries into his box. “You won’t make as much as seventy-five cents all day if you don’t get a move on you,” she said, smiling shyly.

At the noon hour the other pickers found out the truth. The tired workers had gone to the pump by Peter Short’s house and then to a nearby orchard to sit under the trees and rest after the eating of lunches.

There was no doubt something had happened to May. Everyone felt it. It was later understood that she had, during that noon hour in June and quite calmly and deliberately, decided to become like her two sisters and go on the town.

The berry pickers as usual ate their lunches in groups, the women and girls sitting under one tree and the young men and boys under another. 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.