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

by Sherwood Anderson

After all, the evening meal was over and the children had been put to bed and now the woman downstairs had put the three older children into their bed and was washing the dishes at the kitchen stove. Tom’s father had come upstairs and had prepared for bed by taking off his clothes and putting on a long soiled white nightgown. Then he had gone to the open window at the front of the house and kneeling down had begun praying again.

A kind of cold fury took possession of Tom and without a moment’s hesitation he got silently out of bed. He did not feel ill now but very strong. At the foot of his bed, leaning against the wall, was a whippletree, a round piece of hard wood, shaped something like a baseball bat, but tapering at both ends. At each end there was an iron ring. The whippletree had been left there by his father who was always leaving things about, in odd unexpected places. He leaned a whippletree against the wall in his son’s bedroom and then, on the next day, when he was hitching a horse to a plow and wanted it, he spent hours going nervously about rubbing his fingers through his beard and looking.

Tom took the whippletree in his hand and crept barefooted through the open door into his father’s room. “He wants to be like that fellow in the woods—that’s what he’s always praying about.” There was in Tom’s mind some notion—from the beginning there must have been a great deal of the autocrat in him—well, you see, he wanted to crush out impotence and sloth.

He had quite made up his mind to kill his father with the whippletree and crept silently across the floor, gripping the hardwood stick firmly in his right hand. The sickly looking baby had already been put into the one bed in the room and was asleep. Its little face looked out from above another dirty quilt and the clear cold moonlight streamed into the room and fell upon the bed and upon the kneeling figure on the floor by the window.

Tom had got almost across the room when he noticed something—his father’s bare feet sticking out from beneath the white nightgown. The heels and the little balls of flesh below the toes were black with the dirt of the fields but in the centre of each foot there was a place. It was not black but yellowish white in the moonlight.

Tom crept silently back into his own room and closed softly the door between himself and his father. After all he did not want to kill anyone. His father had not thought it necessary to wash his feet before kneeling to pray to his God, and he had himself come upstairs and had got into bed without washing his own feet.

His hands were trembling now and his body shaking with the chill but he sat on the edge of the bed trying to think. When he was a child and went to church with his father and mother there was a story he had heard told. A man came into a feast, after walking a long time on dusty roads, and sat down at the feast. A woman came and washed his feet. Then she put precious ointments on them and later dried the feet with her hair.

The story had, when he heard it, no special meaning to the boy but now.... He sat on the bed smiling half foolishly. Could one make of one’s own hands a symbol of what the woman’s hands must have meant on that occasion, long ago, could not one make one’s own hands the humble servants to one’s soiled feet, to one’s soiled body?

It was a strange notion, this business of making oneself the keeper of the clean integrity of oneself. When one was ill one got things a little distorted. In Tom’s room there was a tin wash-basin, and a pail of water, he himself brought each morning from the cistern at the back of the house. He had always been one who fancied waiting on himself and perhaps, at that time, he had in him something he afterward lost, or only got hold of again at long intervals, the sense of the worth of his own young body, the feeling that his own body was a temple, as one might put it.

At any rate he must have had some such feeling on that night of his childhood and I shall never forget a kind of illusion I had concerning him that time in the Wells Street place when he told me the tale. At the moment something seemed to spring out of his great hulking body, something young hard clean and white.