Poor White: A Novel

by Sherwood Anderson

CHAPTER XXII

The car driven by Tom Butterworth stopped at a town, and Tom got out to fill his pockets with cigars and incidentally to enjoy the wonder and admiration of the citizens. He was in an exalted mood and words flowed from him. As the motor under its hood purred, so the brain under the graying old head purred and threw forth words. He talked to the idlers before the drug stores in the towns and, when the car started again and they were out in the open country, his voice, pitched in a high key to make itself heard above the purring engine, became shrill. Having struck the shrill tone of the new age the voice went on and on.

But the voice and the swift-moving car did not stir Clara. She tried not to hear the voice, and fixing her eyes on the soft landscape flowing past under the moon, tried to think of other times and places. She thought of nights when she had walked with Kate Chanceller through the streets of Columbus, and of the silent ride she had taken with Hugh that night they were married. Her mind went back into her childhood and she remembered the long days she had spent riding with her father in this same valley, going from farm to farm to haggle and dicker for the purchase of calves and pigs. Her father had not talked then but sometimes, when they had driven far and were homeward bound in the failing light of evening, words did come to him. She remembered one evening in the summer after her mother died and when her father often took her with him on his drives. They had stopped for the evening meal at the house of a farmer and when they got on the road again, the moon came out. Something present in the spirit of the night stirred Tom, and he spoke of his life as a boy in the new country and of his fathers and brothers. “We worked hard, Clara,” he said. “The whole country was new and every acre we planted had to be cleared.” The mind of the prosperous farmer fell into a reminiscent mood and he spoke of little things concerning his life as a boy and young man; the days of cutting wood alone in the silent, white forest when winter came and it was time for getting out firewood and logs for new farm buildings, the log rollings to which neighboring farmers came, when great piles of logs were made and set afire that space might be cleared for planting. In the winter the boy went to school in the village of Bidwell and as he was even then an energetic, pushing youth, already intent on getting on in the world, he set traps in the forest and on the banks of streams and walked the trap line on his way to and from school. In the spring he sent his pelts to the growing town of Cleveland where they were sold. He spoke of the money he got and of how he had finally saved enough to buy a horse of his own.

Tom had talked of many other things on that night, of the spelling-downs at the schoolhouse in town, of huskings and dances held in the barns and of the evening when he went skating on the river and first met his wife. “We took to each other at once,” he said softly. “There was a fire built on the bank of the river and after I had skated with her we went and sat down to warm ourselves.

“We wanted to get married to each other right away,” he told Clara. “I walked home with her after we got tired of skating, and after that I thought of nothing but how to get my own farm and have a home of my own.”

As the daughter sat in the motor listening to the shrill voice of the father, who now talked only of the making of machines and money, that other man talking softly in the moonlight as the horse jogged slowly along the dark road seemed very far away. All such men seemed very far away. “Everything worth while is very far away,” she thought bitterly. “The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”

The motor flew along the roads and Tom thought of his old longing to own and drive fast racing horses. “I used to be half crazy to own fast horses,” he shouted to his son-in-law. “I didn't do it, because owning fast horses meant a waste of money, but it was in my mind all the time. I wanted to go fast: faster than any one else.” In a kind of ecstasy he gave the motor more gas and shot the speed up to fifty miles an hour. The hot, summer air, fanned into a violent wind, whistled past his head. “Where would the damned race horses be now,” he called, “where would your Maud S. or your J.I.C. be, trying to catch up with me in this car?”

Yellow wheat fields and fields of young corn, tall now and in the light breeze that was blowing whispering in the moonlight, flashed past, looking like squares on a checker board made for the amusement of the child of some giant. The car ran through miles of the low farming country, through the main streets of towns, where the people ran out of the stores to stand on the sidewalks and look at the new wonder, through sleeping bits of woodlands—remnants of the great forests in which Tom had worked as a boy—and across wooden bridges over small streams, beside which grew tangled masses of elderberries, now yellow and fragrant with blossoms.

At eleven o'clock having already achieved some ninety miles Tom turned the car back. Running more sedately he again talked of the mechanical triumphs of the age in which he had lived. “I've brought you whizzing along, you and Clara,” he said proudly. “I tell you what, Hugh, Steve Hunter and I have brought you along fast in more ways that one. You've got to give Steve credit for seeing something in you, and you've got to give me credit for putting my money back of your brains. I don't want to take no credit from Steve. There's credit enough for all. All I got to say for myself is that I saw the hole in the doughnut. Yes, sir, I wasn't so blind. I saw the hole in the doughnut.”