Windy McPherson's Son

by Sherwood Anderson

At night, under the little tent they had brought, or beneath the blankets under the stars, he slept lightly, awakening often to look at Sue lying beside him. Perhaps the wind had blown a wisp of hair across her face and her breath played with it, tossing it about; perhaps just the quiet of her expressive little face charmed and held him, so that he turned reluctantly to sleep again thinking that he might, with pleasure, go on looking at her all night.

For Sue the days also passed lightly. She also awoke in the night and lay looking at the man sleeping beside her, and once she told Sam that when he awoke she feigned sleep dreading to rob him of the pleasure that she knew these secret love passages gave to both.

They were not alone in those northern woods. Everywhere along the rivers and on the shores of little lakes they found people, to Sam a new kind of people, who dropped all the ordinary things of life, and ran away to the woods and the streams to spend long happy months in the open. He discovered with surprise that these adventurers were men of modest fortunes, small manufacturers, skilled workingmen, retail merchants. One with whom he talked was a grocer from a town in Ohio, and when Sam asked him if the coming to the woods with his family for an eight-weeks stay did not endanger the success of his business he agreed with Sam that it did, nodding his head and laughing.

“But there would be a lot more danger in not leaving it,” he said, “the danger of having my boys grow up to be men without my having any real fun with them.”

Among all of the people they met Sue passed with a sort of happy freedom that confounded Sam, as he had formed a habit of thinking of her always as one shut within herself. Many of the people they saw she knew, and he came to believe that she had chosen the place for their love making because she admired and held in high favour the lives of these people of the out-of-doors and wanted her lover to be in some way like them. Out of the solitude of the woods, along the shores of little lakes, they called to her as she passed, demanding that she come ashore and show her husband, and among them she sat talking of other seasons and of the inroads of the lumber men upon their paradise. “The Burnhams were this year on the shores of Grant Lake, the two school teachers from Pittsburgh would come early in August, the Detroit man with the crippled son was building a cabin on the shores of Bone River.”

Sam sat among them in silence, renewing constantly his admiration for the wonder of Sue’s past life. She, the daughter of Colonel Tom, the woman rich in her own right, to have made her friends among these people; she, who had been pronounced an enigma by the young men of Chicago, to have been secretly all of these years the companion and fellow spirit of these campers by the lakes.

For six weeks they led a wandering, nomadic life in that half wild land, for Sue six weeks of tender love making, and of the expression of every thought and impulse of her fine nature, for Sam six weeks of readjustment and freedom, during which he learned to sail a boat, to shoot, and to get the fine taste of that life into his being.

And then one morning they came again to the little lumber town at the mouth of the river and sat upon the pier waiting for the Chicago boat. They were bound once more into the world, and to that life together that was the foundation of their marriage and that was to be the end and aim of their two lives.

If Sam’s life from boyhood had been, on the whole, barren and empty of many of the sweeter things, his life during the next year was strikingly full and complete. In the office he had ceased being the pushing upstart tramping on the toes of tradition and had become the son of Colonel Tom, the voter of Sue’s big stock holdings, the practical, directing head and genius of the destinies of the company. Jack Prince’s loyalty had been rewarded, and a huge advertising campaign made the name and merits of the Rainey Arms Company’s wares known to all reading Americans. The muzzles of Rainey-Whittaker rifles, revolvers, and shotguns looked threateningly out at one from the pages of the great popular magazines, brown fur-clad hunters did brave deeds before one’s eyes, kneeling upon snow-topped crags preparing to speed winged death to waiting mountain sheep; huge open-mouthed bears rushed down from among the type at the top of the pages and seemed about to devour cool deliberate sportsmen who stood undaunted, swinging their trusty Rainey-Whittakers into place, and presidents, explorers, and Texas gun fighters loudly proclaimed the merits of Rainey-Whittakers to a gun-buying world. It was for Sam and for Colonel Tom a time of big dividends, mechanical progress, and contentment.

Sam stayed diligently at work in the offices and in the shops, but kept within himself a reserve of strength and resolution that might have gone into the work. With Sue he took up golf and morning rides on horseback, and with Sue he sat during the long evenings, reading aloud, absorbing her ideas and her beliefs. Sometimes for days they were like two children, going off together to walk on country roads and to sleep in country hotels. On these walks they went hand in hand or, bantering each other, raced down long hills to lie panting in the grass by the roadside when they were out of breath.