Windy McPherson's Son

by Sherwood Anderson

The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed had been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with anger and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and began sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped and Sam could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as the man turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels rose a voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had begun to rain.

“He has got into the wrong street,” thought the boy stupidly.

Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother’s ironing board stood against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering in Sam’s heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of his father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate’s wedding, when Windy had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and the mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house, sick with humiliation.

The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy’s anger. Sam began thinking again of his mother’s life.

The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now seemed utterly fruitless. “I would like to repay him,” he thought, shaken with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him. The cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages on the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol of the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he turned his face and stared at the wall.

He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith’s house. Freedom had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just as to-night he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and just as Sam was shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the stable door had come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy girl of fourteen with the strength of a man and an inclination to burst out of her clothes at unexpected places, they had come charging into the stables to carry Sam off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them on, his voice roaring in the stable so that the horses jumped about in their stalls. Into the house they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of four, sitting astride his back and beating on his head with a woollen cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern and giving an occasional helpful push with his hand.

A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of the big dining room in Freedom’s house came back into the mind of the boy now sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted, badly-cooked food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great dishes heaped with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had always been just enough food for the single meal. The thing was nicely calculated, when you had finished the table was bare.

How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the tomboy girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of the boy.

“My mother never knew anything like that,” he thought.

The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking loudly—some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he talked of the cost of school books.