Poor White: A Novel

by Sherwood Anderson

Behind the house were several great barns for the horses and cattle. Most of Tom Butterworth's farm land lay north of Bidwell, and some of his fields were five miles from his home; but as he did not himself work the land it did not matter. The farms were rented to men who worked them on shares. Beside the business of farming Tom carried on other affairs. He owned two hundred acres of hillside land near his house and, with the exception of a few fields and a strip of forest land, it was devoted to the grazing of sheep and cattle. Milk and cream were delivered each morning to the householders of Bidwell by two wagons driven by his employees. A half mile to the west of his residence there was a slaughter house on a side road and at the edge of a field where cattle were killed for the Bidwell market. Tom owned it and employed the men who did the killing. A creek that came down out of the hills through one of the fields past his house had been dammed, and south of the pond there was an ice house. He also supplied the town with ice. In his orchards beneath the trees stood more than a hundred beehives and every year he shipped honey to Cleveland. The farmer himself was a man who appeared to do nothing, but his shrewd mind was always at work. In the summer throughout the long sleepy afternoons, he drove about over the county buying sheep and cattle, stopping to trade horses with some farmer, dickering for new pieces of land, everlastingly busy. He had one passion. He loved fast trotting horses, but would not humor himself by owning one. “It's a game that only gets you into trouble and debt,” he said to his friend John Clark, the banker. “Let other men own the horses and go broke racing them. I'll go to the races. Every fall I can go to Cleveland to the grand circuit. If I go crazy about a horse I can bet ten dollars he'll win. If he doesn't I'm out ten dollars. If I owned him I would maybe be out hundreds for the expense of training and all that.” The farmer was a tall man with a white beard, broad shoulders, and rather small slender white hands. He chewed tobacco, but in spite of the habit kept both himself and his white beard scrupulously clean. His wife had died while he was yet in the full vigor of life, but he had no eye for women. His mind, he once told one of his friends, was too much occupied with his own affairs and with thoughts of the fine horses he had seen to concern itself with any such nonsense.

For many years the farmer did not appear to pay much attention to his daughter Clara, who was his only child. Throughout her childhood she was under the care of one of his five sisters, all of whom except the one who lived with him and managed his household being comfortably married. His own wife had been a somewhat frail woman, but his daughter had inherited his own physical strength.

When Clara was seventeen, she and her father had a quarrel that eventually destroyed their relationship. The quarrel began late in July. It was a busy summer on the farms and more than a dozen men were employed about the barns, in the delivery of ice and milk to the town, and at the slaughtering pens a half mile away. During that summer something happened to the girl. For hours she sat in her own room in the house reading books, or lay in a hammock in the orchard and looked up through the fluttering leaves of the apple trees at the summer sky. A light, strangely soft and enticing, sometimes came into her eyes. Her figure that had been boyish and strong began to change. As she went about the house she sometimes smiled at nothing. Her aunt hardly noticed what was happening to her, but her father, who all her life had seemed hardly to take account of her existence, was interested. In her presence he began to feel like a young man. As in the days of his courtship of her mother and before the possessive passion in him destroyed his ability to love, he began to feel vaguely that life about him was full of significance. Sometimes in the afternoon when he went for one of his long drives through the country he asked his daughter to accompany him, and although he had little to say a kind of gallantry crept into his attitude toward the awakening girl. While she was in the buggy with him, he did not chew tobacco, and after one or two attempts to indulge in the habit without having the smoke blow in her face, he gave up smoking his pipe during the drives.

Always before that summer Clara had spent the months when there was no school in the company of the farm hands. She rode on wagons, visited the barns, and when she grew weary of the company of older people, went into town to spend an afternoon with one of her friends among the town girls.

In the summer of her seventeenth year she did none of these things. At the table she ate in silence. The Butterworth household was at that time run on the old-fashioned American plan, and the farm hands, the men who drove the ice and milk wagons and even the men who killed and dressed cattle and sheep, ate at the same table with Tom Butterworth, his sister, who was the housekeeper, and his daughter. Three hired girls were employed in the house and after all had been served they also came and took their places at table. The older men among the farmer's employees, many of whom had known her from childhood, had got into the habit of teasing the daughter of the house. They made comments concerning town boys, young fellows who clerked in stores or who were apprenticed to some tradesman and one of whom had perhaps brought the girl home at night from a school party or from one of the affairs called “socials” that were held at the town churches. After they had eaten in the peculiar silent intent way common to hungry laborers, the farm hands leaned back in their chairs and winked at each other. Two of them began an elaborate conversation touching on some incident in the girl's life. One of the older men, who had been on the farm for many years and who had a reputation among the others of being something of a wit, chuckled softly. He began to talk, addressing no one in particular. The man's name was Jim Priest, and although the Civil War had come upon the country when he was past forty, he had been a soldier. In Bidwell he was looked upon as something of a rascal, but his employer was very fond of him. The two men often talked together for hours concerning the merits of well known trotting horses. In the war Jim had been what was called a bounty man, and it was whispered about town that he had also been a deserter and a bounty jumper. He did not go to town with the other men on Saturday afternoons, and had never attempted to get into the Bidwell chapter of the G. A. R. On Saturdays when the other farm hands washed, shaved and dressed themselves in their Sunday clothes preparatory to the weekly flight to town, he called one of them into the barn, slipped a quarter into his hand, and said, “Bring me a half pint and don't you forget it.” On Sunday afternoons he crawled into the hayloft of one of the barns, drank his weekly portion of whisky, got drunk, and sometimes did not appear again until time to go to work on Monday morning. In the fall Jim took his savings and went to spend a week at the grand circuit trotting meeting at Cleveland, where he bought a costly present for his employer's daughter and then bet the rest of his money on the races. When he was lucky he stayed on in Cleveland, drinking and carousing until his winnings were gone.

It was Jim Priest who always led the attacks of teasing at the table, and in the summer of her seventeenth year, when she was no longer in the mood for such horse-play, it was Jim who brought the practice to an end. At the table Jim leaned back in his chair, stroked his red bristly beard, now rapidly graying, looked out of a window over Clara's head, and told a tale concerning an attempt at suicide on the part of a young man in love with Clara. He said the young man, a clerk in a Bidwell store, had taken a pair of trousers from a shelf, tied one leg about his neck and the other to a bracket in the wall. Then he jumped off a counter and had only been saved from death because a town girl, passing the store, had seen him and had rushed in and cut him down. “Now what do you think of that?” he cried. “He was in love with our Clara, I tell you.”

After the telling of the tale, Clara got up from the table and ran out of the room. The farm hands joined by her father laughed heartily. Her aunt shook her finger at Jim Priest, the hero of the occasion. “Why don't you let her alone?” she asked.

“She'll never get married if she stays here where you make fun of every young man who pays her any attention.” At the door Clara stopped and, turning, put out her tongue at Jim Priest. Another roar of laughter arose. Chairs were scraped along the floor and the men filed out of the house to go back to the work in the barns and about the farm.

In the summer when the change came over her Clara sat at the table and did not hear the tales told by Jim Priest. She thought the farm hands who ate so greedily were vulgar, a notion she had never had before, and wished she did not have to eat with them. One afternoon as she lay in the hammock in the orchard, she heard several of the men in a nearby barn discussing the change that had come over her. Jim Priest was explaining what had happened. “Our fun's over with Clara,” he said. “Now we'll have to treat her in a new way. She's no longer a kid. We'll have to let her alone or pretty soon she won't speak to any of us. It's a thing that happens when a girl begins to think about being a woman. The sap has begun to run up the tree.”

The puzzled girl lay in the hammock and looked up at the sky. She thought about Jim Priest's words and tried to understand what he meant. Sadness crept over her and tears came into her eyes. Although she did not know what the old man meant by the words about the sap and the tree, she did, in a detached subconscious way, understand something of the import of the words, and she was grateful for the thoughtfulness that had led to his telling the others to stop trying to tease her at the table. The half worn-out old farm hand, with the bristly beard and the strong old body, became a figure full of significance to her mind. She remembered with gratitude that, in spite of all of his teasing, Jim Priest had never said anything that had in any way hurt her. In the new mood that had come upon her that meant much. A greater hunger for understanding, love, and friendliness took possession of her. She did not think of turning to her father or to her aunt, with whom she had never talked of anything intimate or close to herself, but turned instead to the crude old man. A hundred minor points in the character of Jim Priest she had never thought of before came sharply into her mind. In the barns he had never mistreated the animals as the other farm hands sometimes did. When on Sunday afternoons he was drunk and went staggering through the barns, he did not strike the horses or swear at them. She wondered if it would be possible for her to talk to Jim Priest, to ask him questions about life and people and what he meant by his words regarding the sap and the tree. The farm hand was old and unmarried. She wondered if in his youth he had ever loved a woman. She decided he had. His words about the sap were, she was sure, in some way connected with the idea of love. How strong his hands were. They were gnarled and rough, but there was something beautifully powerful about them. She half wished the old man had been her father. In his youth, in the darkness at night or when he was alone with a girl, perhaps in a quiet wood in the late afternoon when the sun was going down, he had put his hands on her shoulders. He had drawn the girl to him. He had kissed her.