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

by Sherwood Anderson

I suppose I’ll always remember those days, and Tom’s talk at night, and before that in the early September evenings how we sat around in front of the stalls, and Kreymborg sitting on an upturned feed box and pulling at his long black mustache and some times humming a little ditty one couldn’t catch the words of. It was something about a deep well and a little grey squirrel crawling up the sides of it, and he never laughed or smiled much but there was something in his solemn grey eyes, not quite a twinkle, something more delicate than that.

The others talked in low tones and Tom and I sat in silence. He never did his best talking except when he and I were alone.

For his sake—if he ever sees my story—I should mention that at the only big track we ever visited, at Readville, Pennsylvania, we saw old Pop Geers, the great racing driver, himself. His horses were at a place far away across the tracks from where we were stabled. I suppose a man like him was likely to get the choice of all the good places for his horses.

We went over there one evening and stood about and there was Geers himself, sitting before one of the stalls on a box tapping the ground with a riding whip. They called him, around the tracks, “The silent man from Tennessee” and he was silent—that night anyway. All we did was to stand and look at him for maybe a half hour and then we went away and that night Tom talked better than I had ever heard him. He said that the ambition of his life was to wait until Pop Geers died and then write a book about him, and to show in the book that there was at least one American who never went nutty about getting rich or owning a big factory of being any other kind of a hell of a fellow. “He’s satisfied I think to sit around like that and wait until the big moments of his life come, when he heads a fast one into the stretch and then, darn his soul, he can give all of himself to the thing right in front of him,” Tom said, and then he was so worked up he began to blubber. We were walking along the fence on the inside of the tracks and it was dusk and, in some trees nearby, some birds, just sparrows maybe, were making a chirping sound, and you could hear insects singing and, where there was a little light, off to the west between some trees, motes were dancing in the air. Tom said that about Pop Gears, although I think he was thinking most about something he wanted to be himself and wasn’t, and then he went and stood by the fence and sort of blubbered and I began to blubber too, although I didn’t know what about.

But perhaps I did know, after all. I suppose Tom wanted to feel, when he became a writer, like he thought old Pop must feel when his horse swung around the upper turn, and there lay the stretch before him, and if he was going to get his horse home in front he had to do it right then. What Tom said was that any man had something in him that understands about a thing like that but that no woman ever did except up in her brain. He often got off things like that about women but I notice he later married one of them just the same.

But to get back to my knitting. After Tom had left, the stable I was with kept drifting along through nice little Pennsylvania county seat towns. My owner, a strange excitable kind of a man from over in Ohio, who had lost a lot of money on horses but was always thinking he would maybe get it all back in some big killing, had been playing in pretty good luck that year. The horse I had, a tough little gelding, a five year old, had been getting home in front pretty regular and so he took some of his winnings and bought a three years old black pacing stallion named “O, My Man.” My gelding was called “Pick-it-boy” because when he was in a race and had got into the stretch my owner always got half wild with excitement and shouted so you could hear him a mile and a half. “Go, Pick-it-boy, Pick-it-boy, Pick-it-boy,” he kept shouting and so when he had got hold of this good little gelding he had named him that.

The gelding was a fast one, all right. As the boys at the tracks used to say, he “picked ’em up sharp and set ’em down clean,” and he was what we called a natural race horse, right up to all the speed he had, and didn’t require much training. “All you got to do is to drop him down on the track and he’ll go,” was what my owner was always saying to other men, when he was bragging about his horse.

And so you see, after Tom left, I hadn’t much to do evenings and then the new stallion, the three year old, came on with a negro swipe named Burt.

I liked him fine and he liked me but not the same as Tom and me. We got to be friends all right and I suppose Burt would have done things for me, and maybe me for him, that Tom and me wouldn’t have done for each other.

But with a negro you couldn’t be close friends like you can with another white man. There’s some reason you can’t understand but it’s true. There’s been too much talk about the difference between whites and blacks and you’re both shy, and anyway no use trying and I suppose Burt and I both knew it and so I was pretty lonesome.