Part 3

All this time Will stood glowering in the doorway. No one had spoken to him. He seemed uncertain what to do, but as Annie fitted on her thimble and lifted a tiny shirt from the garments in the box, and began to stitch with fine stitches upon it, he turned and banged the door behind him.

“Huh!” Annie laughed, “Will don’t feel right comfortable ’roun’ me no more. He ain’t forgot that piece er my mind I give him----”

“You best not be too hard on him, Annie,” Henry lowered his fiddle.

“If that ain’t jes’ like you, Henry Sherrod! Now you takin’ up for Will!”

“No, I ain’t,” Henry protested.

“It’ll do him good. I notice he’s been stayin’ home pretty regular nights lately.”

“Yes, he has, an’ it’s a good sign----”

“Time’ll tell.”

Annie stitched on in silence. The needle moved methodically in and out. Presently she began to hum under her breath. Then she interrupted herself: “Henry,” she said, “why is it ducks’ eggs don’t bring as much as hens’ eggs, can you tell me that?”

“Seems to me you ought to git more for ’em.”

“Well, you don’t! I got a lot of ’em, too, but they don’t bring much. I believe I’m goin’ to do all my cookin’ with duck eggs and sell every one of them hen eggs----”

“That would be a good thing to do----”

“Tomorro’ I aim to buy a cake of that pink soap to the drug store. It’s real pretty----”

Henry nodded his head at her. He was busy with the fiddle again.

VI

The river was rising. Already the banks were lost by the engulfing water. The fish trap had been hauled high up the slope of the yard out of harm’s way. Myrtle and sassafras drowned, while the topmost branches of the willows, heavy with raindrops, dipped in the ever rising flood. It was a sign of spring.... The river roared through its channel and every day a broader expanse of water covered the swamp bottoms and flowed sullenly outward over the young corn planted in the bottom lands. Wild things sought higher land. The surface of the water bore strange fruit. Here an old log, turning over and over, on its way downstream, and there a young tree, uprooted and swept along, its faint green leaves half submerged in the red flood. A chicken coop rode its strangely dignified way downstream.

Water cut off the Sherrod farm from the highroad. Will had taken the horse and buggy and escaped to town. He gave as his excuse that somebody had to tell Doctor White to come out at the end of the week.

Rain set in again the night Annie’s son was born. It started at supper time. Cold fingers tapped on all the windowpanes. Aunt Julia, the negro midwife, climbed the attic stairs and stuffed rags in all the broken windowpanes. In the intervals when she could draw her breath a little more easily, Annie lay and listened to it. She was afraid. She was horribly afraid the doctor wouldn’t get there in time. She asked continually if they had not heard him drive into the yard. “Jes’ de win’, honey!” the old negro woman would reply, placing her wrinkled brown hand on Annie’s tossed hair. “Yo’ res’ easy, he’ll sho’ be here bimeby.”

Henry sat outside the door and heard her cries. He wrung his soft, helpless hands. Tears ran down and splashed on his clean coat front, the coat Annie had washed for him just a few days before.

The old woman moved about the room, placing basins and folding cloths, she trimmed the lamp and put it close beside the bed where it would be most needed. She tested the water in the big kettle on the hearth, brought in pine logs to feed the ravenous fire, and then eased her rheumatic old body into the low rocker beside Annie.

“Mammy,” Annie reached out and clutched her with straining fingers, “don’t you reckon the doctor will be gittin’ here purtty soon now--Will must er told him how bad I needed him----”

“Yes, honey, he’ll come. Jes’ you res’ easy now. Hole yore breaf when you feels the pains--hole yore breaf and bear down----”

“He ain’t comin’--I know he ain’t!” Annie wailed. “Will ain’t never told him!”

This went on for hours, Annie wailing and begging for the doctor and the old woman comforting her as best she could. Henry alternately dozed and wrung his hands in the cold outside the door. Toward morning Annie suddenly lifted up her voice and called him:

“Yes, Annie. He’s coming--Will sure told him----”

“Henry, you listen to me--I don’t care no more. _I don’t care if he gits here or not_, but I want you to promise me that if ’n’ I dies Will don’t lay hand on this child--you promise?”

“You ain’t goin’ die, Annie----”

“Promise!”

“I--I promise.”

Annie lay down quietly. “I’m goin’ to be all right now--I ain’t goin’ to holler no more----” But even as she spoke the final agony came. “Help!” she cried in a voice that brought Henry to his feet and the old woman scuffling across the room....

VII

The river began to go down the third day after Annie’s son was born. It was a good sign, the old colored woman said, and she said, too, that Annie’s baby was the finest baby in the world. Annie lay and listened to her with a smile. She uncovered the plump little body and saw for herself that it was perfect. She lay smiling as she nursed it at her breast.

This child would live.... She had given it to Henry--God couldn’t let it die like the others....

Will was still in town, and the doctor had not come; there was no need now, Annie and the baby were both doing well. Henry tapped up and down with his stick, a smile always hovering about his soft lips.

“If I just could see him.” He sat with the child in his lap. “If the Lord would just give in once and let me see him, I wouldn’t never ask for nothin’ else.”

Annie raised herself in the bed on one elbow and lay looking at them.

“He’s like you, Henry, mor’n he is like Will.”

“He’s goin’ to be a big man,” Henry said. The child’s curling fingers clung tightly to his thumb. It was night. Aunt Julia nodded in the slat-bottomed rocker before the fireplace....

“I’m goin’ give him pot-licker an’ black-eyed peas--make him grow----” Annie crooned, her fingers poking the baby under the arm. It gurgled and they both laughed. “He called yore name, Henry.” Annie prepared to lie down again in bed.

“I’ll betcher he’s smilin’, ain’t he, Annie?”

“You know he ain’t, he’s too little yit--yessir, his mammy’s goin’ to give this baby pot-licker an’ peas----”

“Hold the lamp here, Aunt Julia,” Henry called. “We got to see what this baby’s doin’.”

The old woman came to herself with a start and rubbed her eyes, “Sho’ is smilin’--it’s de bes’ young un----” She pattered over for the lamp, lifted off the shield of cardboard and brought it close to the bed.

“Look, Annie, ain’t I right?”

Annie raised herself once more. “Hold it closer, Mammy.”

“Gwine burn my chile,” the old woman grumbled as she obeyed.

“No, we ain’t, the idea of such a thing,” Annie half laughed, and then she drew herself quickly higher up in the bed and leaned closer to the baby. “Look, Mammy, what makes him do like that?”

“Do lak whut?”

Annie passed her hand rapidly across the child’s face. “He don’t close his eyes like he ought when I do like that!” There was the beginning of panic in Annie’s voice.

“Bless God Almighty!” The woman put down the lamp and lifted the child from Henry’s lap. It wailed feebly at being so suddenly disturbed.

“What’s the matter with its eyes?” Annie’s voice was shrill with fear. “Tell me! Make her tell--” she appealed to Henry.

Henry struggled to his feet, his knees grown suddenly weak and unresponsive. He clutched at the woman’s shoulder. “What is it? What’s wrong with that baby’s eyes?” he demanded in a choked whisper.

The old colored woman held the child against her breast. She made no effort to avoid Henry’s hand.

“What is it?” Annie cried again.

The woman shook off Henry’s hand and drew herself upright. “Dis chile,” she said with strange dignity, “is bline.”

“Blind!” Annie screamed. “Tain’t so--you’re lying! ’Tain’t so, Henry----”

“No, I ain’t tellin’ no lie. Dis chile is bline----”

As she spoke the child’s thin wails filled the room. She clutched it again to her flat breast, hushing its cries against her.

“No! No! I won’t have it blind----”

“Hush, honey, don’t you carry on so. Yo’ got to git yo’ stren’th back.” She attempted to push Annie down upon the bed.

“I don’t care! I don’t care!” Annie evaded her. She struggled to her knees and sat swaying back and forth, her hands clutching in desperation at the mass of tangled hair that fell about her face.

Henry had fallen back into his chair and now he sat, his fat hands twisting and untwisting about the arms of it, his loose mouth uttering words that died away before they passed his lips. The old woman carried the child across the room. She wrapped it in a piece of blanket and seated herself in the slat-bottomed rocker as before. Slowly she rocked back and forth, patting the little round back with her skinny brown hand. “Hush, chile, go to sleep,” she crooned to it.

Slower and slower went the rocker. Annie’s cries had ceased. Henry’s head had dropped upon his breast ... his hands were still. A log fell apart on the hearth. The old woman did not get up to replace it. The tick of the clock on the mantelpiece was the only sound in the room. They slept.... They slept the peace of exhaustion ... the peace of acceptance.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Copyright, 1925, by The Reviewer. Copyright, 1926, by Sandra Alexander.

THE RETURN[2]

By SHERWOOD ANDERSON

(From _The Century Magazine_)

Eighteen years. Well, he was driving a good car, an expensive roadster, he was well clad, a rather solid fine-looking man, not too heavy. When he had left the Middle-Western town to go live in New York City he was twenty-two, and now, on his way back there, he was forty. He drove toward the town from the east, stopping for lunch at another town ten miles away.

When he went away from Caxton, after his mother died, he used to write letters to friends at home, but after several months the replies began to come with less and less frequency. On the day when he sat eating his lunch at a small hotel in the town ten miles east of Caxton he suddenly thought of the reason, and was ashamed. “Am I going back there on this visit for the same reason I wrote the letters?” he asked himself. For a moment he thought he might not go on. There was still time to turn back.

Outside, in the principal business street of the town, people were walking about. The sun shone warmly. Although he had lived for so many years in New York, he had always kept, buried away in him somewhere, a hankering for his own country. All the day before he had been driving through the eastern Ohio country, crossing many small streams, running down through small valleys, seeing the white farmhouses set back from the road, and the big red barns.

The elders were still in bloom along the fences, boys were swimming in a creek, the wheat had been cut, and now the corn was shoulder-high. Everywhere the drone of bees; in patches of woodland along the road a heavy, mysterious silence.

Now, however, he began thinking of something else. Shame crept over him. “When I first left Caxton, I wrote letters back to my boyhood friends there, but I wrote always of myself. When I had written a letter telling what I was doing in the city, what friends I was making, what my prospects were, I put, at the very end of the letter, perhaps, a little inquiry. ‘I hope you are well. How are things going with you?’ Something of that sort.”

The returning native--his name was John Holden--had grown very uneasy. After eighteen years it seemed to him he could see, lying before him, one of the letters written eighteen years before when he had first come into the strange Eastern city. His mother’s brother, a successful architect in the city, had given him such and such an opportunity: he had been at the theater to see Mansfield as _Brutus_, he had taken the night boat upriver to Albany with his aunt; there were two very handsome girls on the boat.

Everything then must have been in the same tone. His uncle had given him a rare opportunity, and he had taken advantage of it. In time he had also become a successful architect. In New York City there were certain great buildings, two or three skyscrapers, several huge industrial plants, any number of handsome and expensive residences, that were the products of his brain.

When it came down to the scratch, John Holden had to admit that his uncle had not been excessively fond of him. It had just happened that his aunt and uncle had no children of their own. He did his work in the office well and carefully, had developed a certain rather striking knack for design. The aunt had liked him better. She had always tried to think of him as her own son, had treated him as a son. Sometimes she called him son. Once or twice, after his uncle died, he had a notion. His aunt was a good woman, but sometimes he thought she would rather have enjoyed having him, John Holden, go in a bit more for wickedness, go a little on the loose, now and then. He never did anything she had to forgive him for. Perhaps she hungered for the opportunity to forgive.

Odd thoughts, eh? Well, what was a fellow to do? One had but the one life to live. One had to think of oneself.

Botheration! John Holden had rather counted on the trip back to Caxton, had really counted on it more than he realized. It was a bright summer day. He had been driving for days over the mountains of Pennsylvania, through New York State, through eastern Ohio. Gertrude, his wife, had died during the summer before, and his one son, a lad of twelve, had gone away for the summer to a boys’ camp in Vermont.

The idea had just come to him. “I’ll drive the car along slowly through the country, drinking it in. I need a rest, time to think. What I really need is to renew old acquaintances. I’ll go back to Caxton and stay several days. I’ll see Herman and Frank and Joe. Then I’ll go call on Lillian and Kate. What a lot of fun, really!” It might just be that when he got to Caxton, the Caxton ball team would be playing a game, say with a team from Yerington. Lillian might go to the game with him. It was in his mind faintly that Lillian had never married. How did he know that? He had heard nothing from Caxton for many years. The ball game would be in Heffler’s field, and he and Lillian would go out there, walking under the maple trees along Turner Street, past the old stave factory, then in the dust of the road, past where the sawmill used to stand, and on into the field itself. He would be carrying a sunshade over Lillian’s head, and Bob French would be standing at the gate where you went into the field and charging the people twenty-five cents to see the game.

Well, it would not be Bob; his son perhaps. There would be something very nice in the notion of Lillian’s going off to a ball game that way with an old sweetheart. A crowd of boys, women and men, going through a cattle gate into Heffler’s field, tramping through the dust, young men with their sweethearts, a few gray-haired women, mothers of boys who belonged to the team, Lillian and he sitting in the rickety grandstand in the hot sun.

Once it had been--how they had felt, he and Lillian, sitting there together! It had been rather hard to keep the attention centered on the players in the field. One couldn’t ask a neighbor, “Who’s ahead now, Caxton or Yerington?” Lillian’s hands lay in her lap. What white, delicate, expressive hands they were! Once--that was just before he went away to live in the city with his uncle and but a month after his mother died--he and Lillian went to the ball field together at night. His father had died when he was a young lad, and he had no relatives left in the town. Going off to the ball field at night was maybe a risky thing for Lillian to do--risky for her reputation if any one found it out--but she had seemed willing enough. You know how small-town girls of that age are?

Her father owned a retail shoe store in Caxton and was a good, respectable man; but the Holdens--John’s father had been a lawyer.

After they got back from the ball field that night--it must have been after midnight--they went to sit on the front porch before her father’s house. He must have known. A daughter cavorting about half the night with a young man that way! They had clung to each other with a sort of queer, desperate feeling neither understood. She did not go into the house until after three o’clock, and went then only because he insisted. He hadn’t wanted to ruin her reputation. Why, he might have---- She was like a little frightened child at the thought of his going away. He was twenty-two then, and she must have been about eighteen.

Eighteen and twenty-two are forty. John Holden was forty on the day when he sat at lunch at the hotel in the town ten miles from Caxton.

Now, he thought, he might be able to walk through the streets of Caxton to the ball park with Lillian with a certain effect. You know how it is. One has to accept the fact that youth is gone. If there should turn out to be such a ball game and Lillian would go with him, he would leave the car in the garage and ask her to walk. One saw pictures of that sort of thing in the movies--a man coming back to his native village after twenty years; a new beauty taking the place of the beauty of youth--something like that. In the spring the leaves on maple trees are lovely, but they are even more lovely in the fall--a flame of color; manhood and womanhood.

After he had finished his lunch John did not feel very comfortable. The road to Caxton--it used to take nearly three hours to travel the distance with a horse and buggy, but now, and without any effort, the distance could be made in twenty minutes.

He lit a cigar and went for a walk not in the streets of Caxton, but in the streets of the town ten miles away. If he got to Caxton in the evening, just at dusk, say, now----

With an inward pang John realized that he wanted darkness, the kindliness of soft evening lights. Lillian, Joe, Herman, and the rest. It had been eighteen years for the others as well as for himself. Now he had succeeded, a little, in twisting his fear of Caxton into fear for the others, and it made him feel somewhat better; but at once he realized what he was doing and again felt uncomfortable. One had to look out for changes, new people, new buildings, middle-aged people grown old, youth grown middle-aged. At any rate, he was thinking of the other now; he wasn’t, as when he wrote letters home eighteen years before, thinking only of himself. “Am I?” It was a question.

An absurd situation, really. He had sailed along so gaily through upper New York State, through western Pennsylvania, through eastern Ohio. Men were at work in the fields and in the towns, farmers drove into towns in their cars, clouds of dust arose on some distant road, seen across a valley. Once he had stopped his car near a bridge and gone for a walk along the banks of a creek where it wound through a wood.

He was liking people. Well, he had never before given much time to people, to thinking of them and their affairs. “I hadn’t time,” he told himself. He had always realized that, while he was a good enough architect, things move fast in America. New men were coming on. He couldn’t take chances of going on forever on his uncle’s reputation. A man had to be always on the alert. Fortunately, his marriage had been a help. It had made valuable connections for him.

Twice he had picked up people on the road. There was a lad of sixteen from some town of eastern Pennsylvania, working his way westward toward the Pacific coast by picking up rides in cars--a summer’s adventure. John had carried him all of one day and had listened to his talk with keen pleasure. And so this was the younger generation. The boy had nice eyes and an eager, friendly manner. He smoked cigarettes, and once, when they had a puncture, he was very quick and eager about changing the tire. “Now, don’t you soil your hands, Mister; I can do it like a flash,” he said, and he did. The boy said he intended working his way overland to the Pacific coast, where he would try to get a job of some kind on an ocean freighter, and that, if he did, he would go on around the world. “But do you speak any foreign languages?” The boy did not. Across John Holden’s mind flashed pictures of hot Eastern deserts, crowded Asiatic towns, wild half-savage mountain countries. As a young architect, and before his uncle died, he had spent two years in foreign travel, studying building in many countries; but he said nothing of this thought to the boy. Vast plans entered into with eager boyish abandon, a world tour undertaken as he, when a young man, might have undertaken to find his way from his uncle’s house in East Eighty-first Street downtown to the Battery. “How do I know--perhaps he will do it,” John thought. The day in company with the boy had been very pleasant, and he had been on the alert to pick him up again the next morning; but the boy had gone on his way, had caught a ride with some earlier riser. Why hadn’t John invited him to his hotel for the night? The notion hadn’t come to him until too late.

Youth, rather wild and undisciplined, running wild, eh? I wonder why I never did it, never wanted to do it.