Windy McPherson's Son

by Sherwood Anderson

“And yet,” thought Sam, “he has found strength to whip me, the man of ability. He has taken revenge, absolute and unanswerable, for the slight I put upon the little play world in which he had been king.”

In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed beard sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead, and into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance of a thought he had got from a book of Janet’s or from some talk he had heard, perhaps at his own dinner table.

“It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying dead.”

At such times he hurried along the road like one pursued. People driving past in buggies and seeing him and hearing the stream of talk that issued from his lips, turned and watched him out of sight. And Sam, hurrying and seeking relief from the thoughts in his mind, called to the old commonsense instincts within himself as a captain marshals his forces to withstand an attack.

“I will find work. I will find work. I will seek Truth,” he said.

Sam avoided the larger towns or went hurriedly through them, sleeping night after night at village hotels or at some hospitable farmhouse, and daily he increased the length of his walks, getting real satisfaction from the aching of his legs and from the bruising of his unaccustomed feet on the hard road. Like St. Jerome, he had a wish to beat upon his body and subdue the flesh. In turn he was blown upon by the wind, chilled by the winter frost, wet by the rains, and warmed by the sun. In the spring he swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the cattle grazing in the fields and the white clouds floating across the sky, and constantly his legs became harder and his body more flat and sinewy. Once he slept for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a woods and in the morning was awakened by a farmer’s dog licking his face.

Several times he came up to vagabonds, umbrella menders and other roadsters, and walked with them, but he found in their society no incentive to join in their flights across country on freight trains or on the fronts of passenger trains. Those whom he met and with whom he talked and walked did not interest him greatly. They had no end in life, sought no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them, the romance went out of their wandering life. They were utterly dull and stupid, they were, almost without exception, strikingly unclean, they wanted passionately to get drunk, and they seemed to be forever avoiding life with its problems and responsibilities. They always talked of the big cities, of “Chi” and “Cinci” and “Frisco,” and were bent upon getting to one of these places. They condemned the rich and begged and stole from the poor, talked swaggeringly of their personal courage and ran whimpering and begging before country constables. One of them, a tall, leering youth in a grey cap, who came up to Sam one evening at the edge of a village in Indiana, tried to rob him. Full of his new strength and with the thought of Ed’s wife and the sullen-faced son in his mind, Sam sprang upon him and had revenge for the beating received in the office of Ed’s hotel by beating this fellow in his turn. When the tall youth had partially recovered from the beating and had staggered to his feet, he ran off into the darkness, stopping when well out of reach to hurl a stone that splashed in the mud of the road at Sam’s feet.

Everywhere Sam sought people who would talk to him of themselves. He had a kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of some simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman, with whom he talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana, interested him so that he went into a train with her and travelled all night in the day coach, listening to her talk of her three sons, one of whom had weak lungs and had, with two younger brothers, taken up government land in the west. The woman had been with them for some months, helping them to get a start.

“I was raised on a farm and knew things they could not know,” she told Sam, raising her voice above the rumble of the train and the snoring of fellow passengers.

She had worked with her sons in the field, ploughing and planting, had driven a team across country, carrying boards for the building of a house, and had grown brown and strong at the work.