Windy McPherson's Son

by Sherwood Anderson

During the six waiting weeks there had been little of love making between Sue and Sam. They had talked instead, or, going into the country or to the parks, had walked under the trees consumed with a curious eager passion of suspense. The idea she had given him in the park grew in Sam’s brain. To live for the young things that would presently come to them, to be simple, direct, and natural, like the trees or the beasts of the field, and then to have the native honesty of such a life illuminated and ennobled by a mutual intelligent purpose to make their young something finer and better than the things in Nature by the intelligent use of their own good minds and bodies. In the shops and on the streets the hurrying men and women took on a new significance to him. He wondered what secret mighty purpose might be in their lives, and read a newspaper report of an engagement or a marriage with a little jump of the heart. He looked at the girls and the women at work over the typewriting machines in the office, with questioning eyes, asking himself why they did not seek marriage openly and determinedly, and saw a healthy single woman as so much wasted material, as a machine for producing healthy new life standing idle and unused in the great workshop of the universe. “Marriage is a port, a beginning, a point of departure, from which men and women go forth upon the real voyage of life,” he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. “All that goes before is but a preparation, a building. The pains and the triumphs of all unmarried people are but the good oak planks being driven into place to make the vessel fit for the real voyage.” Or, again, one night when they were in a rowboat on the lagoon in the park and all about them in the darkness was the plash of oars in the water, the screams of excited girls, and the sound of voices calling, he let the boat float in against the shores of a little island and crept along the boat to kneel, with his head in her lap and whisper, “It is not the love of a woman that grips me, Sue, but the love of life. I have had a peep into the great mystery. This—this is why we are here—this justifies us.”

Now that she sat beside him, her shoulder against his own, being carried away with him into darkness and privacy, the personal side of his love for her ran through Sam like a flame and, turning, he drew her head down upon his shoulder.

“Not yet, Sam,” she whispered, “not with these hundreds of people sleeping and drinking and thinking and going about their affairs almost within touch of our hands.”

They got up and walked along the swaying deck. Out of the north the clean wind called to them, the stars looked down upon them, and in the darkness in the bow of the boat they parted for the night silently, speechless with happiness and with a dear, unmentioned secret between them.

At dawn they landed at a little lumbering town, where boat, blankets, and camping kit had gone before. A river flowed down out of the woods passing the town, going under a bridge and turning the wheel of a sawmill that stood by the shore of the river facing the lake. The clean sweet smell of the new-cut logs, the song of the saws, the roar of the water tumbling over a dam, the cries of the blue-shirted lumbermen working among the floating logs above the dam, filled the morning air, and above the song of the saws sang another song, a breathless, waiting song, the song of love and of life singing in the hearts of husband and wife.

In a little roughly-built lumberman’s hotel they ate breakfast in a room overlooking the river. The proprietor of the hotel, a large red-faced woman in a clean calico dress, was expecting them and, having served the breakfast, went out of the room grinning good naturedly and closing the door behind her. Through the open window they looked at the cold swiftly-flowing river and at a freckled-faced boy who carried packages wrapped in blankets and put them in a long canoe tied to a little wharf beside the hotel. They ate and sat staring at each other like two strange boys, saying nothing. Sam ate little. His heart pounded in his breast.

On the river he sank his paddle deep into the water, pulling against the current. During the six weeks’ waiting in Chicago she had taught him the essentials of the canoeist’s art and, now, as he shot the canoe under the bridge and around a bend of the river out of sight of the town, a superhuman strength seemed in his arms and back. Before him in the prow of the boat sat Sue, her straight muscular little back bending and straightening again. By his side rose towering hills clothed with pine trees, and piles of cut logs lay at the foot of the hills along the shore.

At sunset they landed in a little cleared space at the foot of a hill and on the top of the hill, with the wind blowing across it, they made their first camp. Sam brought boughs and spread them, lapped like feathers in the wings of a bird, and carried blankets up the hill, while Sue, at the foot, near the overturned boat, built a fire and prepared their first cooked meal out of doors. In the failing light, Sue got out her rifle and gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, his awkwardness making the lesson half a jest. And then, in the soft stillness of the young night, with the first stars coming into the sky and the clean cold wind blowing into their faces, they went arm in arm up the hill under the trees to where the tops of the trees rolled and pitched like the stormy waters of a great sea before their eyes, and lay down together for their first long tender embrace.

There is a special kind of fine pleasure in getting one’s first knowledge of the great outdoors in the company of a woman a man loves and to have that woman an expert, with a keen appetite for the life, adds point and flavour to the experience. In his busy striving, nickel-seeking boyhood in the town surrounded by hot cornfields, and in his young manhood of scheming and money hunger in the city, Sam had not thought of vacations and resting places. He had walked on country roads with John Telfer and Mary Underwood, listening to their talk, absorbing their ideas, blind and deaf to the little life in the grass, in the leafy branches of the trees and in the air about him. In clubs, and about hotels and barrooms in the city, he had heard men talk of life in the open, and had said to himself, “When my time comes I will taste these things.”

And now he did taste them, lying on his back on the grass along the river, floating down quiet little side streams in the moonlight, listening to the night call of birds, or watching the flight of frightened wild things as he pushed the canoe into the quiet depths of the great forest about them.