And then, when I had quite made up my mind he had gone the same road I and all the men about me were no doubt going, the road of surrender to ugliness and to dreary meaningless living, something would happen. He would have talked thus, as I have just described, aimlessly, through a long evening, and then, when we parted for the night, he would scribble a few words on a bit of paper and push it awkwardly into my pocket. I watched his lumbering figure go away along a street and going to a street lamp read what he had written.
“I am very weary. I am not the silly ass I seem but I am as tired as a dog, trying to find out what I am,” were the words he had scrawled.
But to return to the evening in the place in Wells Street. When the whiskey came we drank it and sat looking at each other. Then he put his hand on the table and closing the fingers, so that they made a little cup, opened the hand slowly and listlessly. “Once I had life, like that, in my hand, my own life. I could have let go of it as easily as that. Just why I didn’t I’ve never quite figured out. I can’t think why I kept my fingers cupped, instead of opening my hand and letting go,” he said. If, a few minutes before, there had been no integrity in the man there was enough of it now.
He began telling the story of an evening and a night of his youth.
It was when he was still on his father’s farm, a little rented farm down in Southeastern Ohio, and when he was but eighteen years old. That would have been in the fall before he left home and started on his adventures in the world. I knew something of his history.
It was late October and he and his father had been digging potatoes in a field. I suppose they both wore torn shoes as, in telling the story, Tom made a point of the fact that their feet were cold, and that the black dirt had worked into their shoes and discolored their feet.
The day was cold and Tom wasn’t very well and was in a bitter mood. He and his father worked rather desperately and in silence. The father was tall, had a sallow complexion and wore a beard, and in the mental picture I have of him, he is always stopping—as he walks about the farmyard or works in the fields he stops and runs his fingers nervously through his beard.
As for Tom, one gets the notion of him as having been at that time rather nice, one having an inclination toward the nicer things of life without just knowing he had the feeling, and certainly without an opportunity to gratify it.
Tom had something the matter with him, a cold with a bit of fever perhaps and sometimes as he worked his body shook as with a chill and then, after a few minutes, he felt hot all over. The two men had been digging the potatoes all afternoon and as night began to fall over the field, they started to pick up. One picks up the potatoes in baskets and carries them to the ends of the rows where they are put into two-bushel grain bags.
Tom’s step-mother came to the kitchen door and called. “Supper,” she cried in her peculiarly colorless voice. Her husband was a little angry and fretful. Perhaps for a long time he had been feeling very deeply the enmity of his son. “All right,” he called back, “we’ll come pretty soon. We got to get done picking up.” There was something very like a whine in his voice. “You can keep the things hot for a time,” he shouted.