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

by Sherwood Anderson

Then she went to sit on the front porch, to sew or read a book. “What nonsense! You get me a good German girl, strong and pretty good-looking. I’ll send the money and she can come over here and be my wife,” he wrote.

The letter had been sent to a friend of his young manhood, now a small merchant in a German town and after talking the matter over with his wife the merchant decided to send his daughter, a woman of twenty-four. She had been engaged to marry a man who was taken sick and had died while he was serving his term in the army and her father decided she had been mooning about long enough. The merchant called the daughter into a room where he and his wife sat and told her of his decision and, for a long time she sat looking at the floor. Was she about to make a fuss? A prosperous American husband who owned a big farm was not to be sneezed at. The daughter put up her hand and fumbled with her black hair—there was a great mass of it. After all she was a big strong woman. Her husband wouldn’t be cheated. “Yes, I’ll go,” she said quietly, and getting up walked out of the room.

In America the woman had turned out all right but her husband thought her a little too silent. Even though the main purpose in life be to do the work of a house and farm, feed the stock and keep a man’s clothes in order, so that he is not always having to buy new ones, still there are times when something else is in order. As he worked in his fields the farmer sometimes muttered to himself. “Everything in its place. For everything there is a time and a place,” he told himself. One worked and then the time came when one played a little too. Now and then it was nice to have a few friends about, drink beer, eat a good deal of heavy food and then have some fun, in a kind of way. One did not go too far but if there were women in the party someone tickled one of them and she giggled. One made a remark about legs—nothing out of the way. “Legs is legs. On horses or women legs count a good deal.” Everyone laughed. One had a jolly evening, one had some fun.

Often, after his woman came, the farmer, working in his fields, tried to think what was the matter with her. She worked all the time and the house was in order. Well, she fed the stock so that he did not have to bother about that. What a good cook she was. She even made beer, in the old-fashioned German way, at home—and that was fine too.

The whole trouble lay in the fact that she was silent, too silent. When one spoke to her she answered nicely but she herself made no conversation and at night she lay in the bed silently. The German wondered if she would be showing signs of having a child pretty soon. “That might make a difference,” he thought. He stopped working and looked across the fields to where there was a meadow. His cattle were there feeding quietly. “Even cows, and surely cows were quiet and silent enough things, even cows had times. Sometimes the very devil got into a cow. You were leading her along a road or a lane and suddenly she went half insane. If one weren’t careful she would jam her head through fences, knock a man over, do almost anything. She wanted something insanely, with a riotous hunger. Even a cow wasn’t always just passive and quiet.” The German felt cheated. He thought of the friend in Germany who had sent his daughter. “Ugh, the deuce, he might have sent a livelier one,” he thought.

It was June when Tom came to the farm and the harvest was on. The German had planted several large fields to wheat and the yield was good. Another man had been employed to work on the farm all summer but Tom could be used too. He would have to sleep on the hay in the barn but that he did not mind. He went to work at once.

And anyone knowing Tom, and seeing his huge and rather ungainly body, must realize that, in his youth, he might have been unusually strong. For one thing he had not done so much thinking as he must have done later, nor had he been for years seated at a desk. He worked in the fields with the other two men and at the meal time came into the house with them to eat. He and the German’s wife must have been a good deal alike. Tom had in his mind certain things—thoughts concerning his boyhood—and he was thinking a good deal of the future. Well, there he was working his way westward and making a little money all the time as he went, and every cent he made he kept. He had not yet been into an American city, had purposely avoided such places as Springfield, Dayton and Cincinnati and had kept to the smaller places and the farms.

After a time he would have an accumulation of money and would go into cities, study, read books, live. He had then a kind of illusion about American cities. “A city was a great gathering of people who had grown tired of loneliness and isolation. They had come to realize that only by working together could they have the better things of life. Many hands working together might build wonderfully, many minds working together might think clearly, many impulses working together might channel all lives into an expression of something rather fine.”

I am making a mistake if I give you the impression that Tom, the boy from the Ohio farm, had any such definite notions. He had a feeling—of a sort. There was a dumb kind of hope in him. He had even then, I am quite sure, something else, that he later always retained, a kind of almost holy inner modesty. It was his chief attraction as a man but perhaps it stood in the way of his ever achieving the kind of outstanding and assertive manhood we Americans all seem to think we value so highly.

At any rate there he was, and there was that woman, the silent one, now twenty-seven years old. The three men sat at table eating and she waited on them. They ate in the farm kitchen, a large old-fashioned one, and she stood by the stove or went silently about putting more food on the table as it was consumed.