Windy McPherson's Son

by Sherwood Anderson

He wished that he might meet another man and could hit him also a swinging blow on the nose as he had hit the amazed shoemaker. He went to his own house and, leaning on the gate, stood looking at it and swearing meaninglessly. Then, turning, he went again through the deserted streets past the railroad station where, the midnight train having come and gone and Jerry Donlin having gone home for the night, all was dark and quiet. He was filled with horror of what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane McPherson’s funeral.

“It is better to be utterly bad than to speak ill of another,” he thought.

For the first time he realised another side of village life. In fancy he saw going past him on the dark road a long file of women, women with coarse unlighted faces and dead eyes. Many of the faces he knew. They were the faces of Caxton wives at whose houses he had delivered papers. He remembered how eagerly they had run out of their houses to get the papers and how they hung day after day over the details of sensational murder cases. Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive and the details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain their curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing the newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and over on their tongues.

In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the thought of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small, unaired, unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and clothes—only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no clean thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in a darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such a yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these women come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat hurriedly and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of utter physical exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in stockinged feet before crawling away to sleep and oblivion.

In these women is no light, no vision. They have instead certain fixed ideas to which they cling with a persistency touching heroism. To the man they have snatched from society they cling also with a tenacity to be measured only by their love of a roof over their heads and the craving for food to put into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the despair of reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put the black dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.” At their worst they are to be seen drunk with emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution or immersed in the secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious persecution. At their best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth coming to them, they throw themselves into garish display of it and flash upon the sight of Newport or Palm Beach. In their native lair in the close little houses, they sleep in the bed of the man who has put clothes upon their backs and food into their mouths because that is the usage of their kind and give him of their bodies grudgingly or willingly as the laws of their physical needs direct. They do not love, they sell, instead, their bodies in the market place and cry out that man shall witness their virtue because they had had the joy of finding one buyer instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce animalism in them makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the days of its softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch again an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy, no longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite. Having passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of emotions and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the eloquence of evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell—the call to the one being brother to the call of the other—crying upon the troubled air of hot little churches, where hope is fighting in the jaws of vulgarity, “The weight of my sins is heavy on my soul.” Along streets they go lifting heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and to get a morsel to roll upon their heavy tongues. Having fallen upon a side light in the life of a Mary Underwood they return to it again and again as a dog to its offal. Something touching the lives of such as walk in the clean air, dream dreams, and have the audacity to be beautiful beyond the beauty of animal youth, maddens them, and they cry out, running from kitchen door to kitchen door and tearing at the prize like a starved beast who has found a carcass. Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it forward to the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the fine emotion of achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having hysteria rather than reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of femininity—and none of it. For the most part they live and die unseen, unknown, eating rank food, sleeping overmuch, and sitting through summer afternoons rocking in chairs and looking at people passing in the street. In the end they die full of faith, hoping for a life to come.

Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making on Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields that lay beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness and he thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that had been marching through his mind. He drew his overcoat about him and shivered as he went on, the mud splashing him and the raw night air aggravating the dreariness of his thoughts. He tried to revert to the assurance of the days before his mother’s illness and to get again the strong belief in his own destiny that had kept him at the money making and saving and had urged him to the efforts to rise above the level of the man who bred him. He didn’t succeed. The feeling of age that had settled upon him in the midst of the people mourning over the body of his mother came back, and, turning, he went along the road toward the town, saying to himself: “I will go and talk to Mary Underwood.”

While he waited on the veranda for Mary to open the door, he decided that after all a marriage with her might lead to happiness. The half spiritual, half physical love of woman that is the glory and mystery of youth was gone from him. He thought that if he could only drive from her presence the fear of the faces that had been coming and going in his own mind he would, for his own part, be content to live his life as a worker and money maker, one without dreams.

Mary Underwood came to the door wearing the same heavy long coat she had worn on that other night and taking her by the hand Sam led her to the edge of the veranda. He looked with content at the pine trees before the house, thinking that some benign influence must have guided the hand that planted them there to stand clothed and decent amid the barrenness of the land at the end of winter.

“What is it, boy?” asked the woman, and her voice was filled with anxiety. The maternal passion again glowing in her had for days coloured all her thoughts, and with all the ardour of an intense nature she had thrown herself into her love of Sam. Thinking of him, she felt in fancy the pangs of birth, and in her bed at night relived with him his boyhood in the town and built again her plans for his future. In the day time she laughed at herself and said tenderly, “You are an old fool.”

Brutally and frankly Sam told her of the thing he had heard on the station platform, looking past her at the pine trees and gripping the veranda rail. From the dead land there came again the smell of the new growth as it had come to him on the road before the revelation at the railroad station.