Windy McPherson's Son

by Sherwood Anderson

“It is good sense, after all,” he thought, and realised that even in the days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the fact that Jane McPherson’s long, hard role was just being played out to the end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore was beating upon his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with a flourish. He arose, interrupting the minister’s discourse. Mary Underwood had come in just as the minister began talking and had dropped into an obscure corner near the door leading into the street. Sam crowded past the women who stared and the minister who frowned and the baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands and, dropping the note into her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking and listening with breathless curiosity, “It is from John Telfer. Read it. Even he, hating women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door.”

In the room a wind of whispered comments sprang up. Women, putting their heads together and their hands before their faces, nodded toward the school teacher, and the boy, unconscious of the sensation he had created, went back to his chair and looked again at the floor, waiting until the talk and the singing of songs and the parading through the streets should be ended. Again the minister began reading from the book.

“I have become older than all of these people here,” thought the youth. “They play at life and death, and I have felt it between the fingers of my hand.”

Mary Underwood, lacking Sam’s unconsciousness of the people, looked about with burning cheeks. Seeing the women whispering and putting their heads together, a chill of fear ran through her. Into the room had been thrust the face of an old enemy to her—the scandal of a small town. Picking up the note she slipped out at the door and stole away along the street. The old maternal love for Sam had returned strengthened and ennobled by the terror through which she had passed with him that night in the rain. Going to her house she whistled the collie dog and set out along a country road. At the edge of a grove of trees she stopped, sat down on a log, and read Telfer’s note. From the soft ground into which her feet sank there came the warm pungent smell of the new growth. Tears came into her eyes. She thought that in a few days much had come to her. She had got a boy upon whom she could pour out the mother love in her heart, and she had made a friend of Telfer, whom she had long regarded with fear and doubt.

For a month Sam lingered in Caxton. It seemed to him there was something that wanted doing there. He sat with the men at the back of Wildman’s, and walked aimlessly through the streets and out of the town along the country roads, where men worked all day in the fields behind sweating horses, ploughing the land. The thrill of spring was in the air, and in the evening a song sparrow sang in the apple tree below his bedroom window. Sam walked and loitered in silence, looking at the ground. In his mind was the dread of people. The talk of the men in the store wearied him and when he went alone into the country he found himself accompanied by the voices of all of those he had come out of town to escape. On the street corner the thin-lipped, brown-bearded minister stopped him and talked of the future life as he had stopped and talked to a bare-legged newsboy.

“Your mother,” he said, “has but gone before. It is for you to get into the narrow path and follow her. God has sent this sorrow as a warning to you. He wants you also to get into the way of life and in the end to join her. Begin coming to our church. Join in the work of the Christ. Find truth.”

Sam, who had listened without hearing, shook his head and went on. The minister’s talk seemed no more than a meaningless jumble of words out of which he got but one thought.

“Find truth,” he repeated to himself after the minister, and let his mind play with the idea. “The best men are all trying to do that. They spend their lives at the task. They are all trying to find truth.”

He went along the street, pleased with himself because of the interpretation he had put upon the minister’s words. The terrible moments in the kitchen followed by his mother’s death had put a new look of seriousness into his face and he felt within him a new sense of responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the street and wished him well in the city. News of his leaving had become public. Things in which Freedom Smith was concerned were always public affairs.

“He would take a drum with him to make love to a neighbour’s wife,” said John Telfer.