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All
through the night as the train rattled along, the grandmother told Tom tales
of Winesburg and of how he would enjoy his life working in the fields and
shooting wild things in the woods there.
She could not believe that the tiny village of fifty years before had
grown into a thriving town in her absence, and in the morning when the train
came to Winesburg did not want to get off.
"It isn't what I thought. It
may be hard for you here," she said, and then the train went on its way
and the two stood confused, not knowing where to turn, in the presence of
Albert Longworth, the Winesburg baggage master.
But
Tom Foster did get along all right. He
was one to get along anywhere. Mrs.
White, the banker's wife, employed his grandmother to work in the kitchen
and he got a place as stable boy in the banker's new brick barn.
In
Winesburg servants were hard to get. The
woman who wanted help in her housework employed a "hired girl" who
insisted on sitting at the table with the family.
Mrs. White was sick of hired girls and snatched at the chance to get
hold of the old city woman. She
furnished a room for the boy Tom upstairs in the barn.
"He can mow the lawn and run errands when the horses do not need
attention," she explained to her husband.
Tom
Foster was rather small for his age and had a large head covered with stiff
black hair that stood straight up. The
hair emphasized the bigness of his head.
His voice was the softest thing imaginable, and he was himself so
gentle and quiet that he slipped into the life of the town without
attracting the least bit of attention.
One
could not help wondering where Tom Foster got his gentleness.
In Cincinnati he had lived in a neighborhood where gangs of tough
boys prowled through the streets, and all through his early formative years
he ran about with tough boys. For a while he was a messenger for a telegraph company and
delivered messages in a neighborhood sprinkled with houses of prostitution.
The women in the houses knew and loved Tom Foster and the tough boys
in the gangs loved him also.
He
never asserted himself. That
was one thing that helped him escape. In
an odd way he stood in the shadow of the wall of life, was meant to stand in
the shadow. He saw the men and
women in the houses of lust, sensed their casual and horrible love affairs,
saw boys fighting and listened to their tales of thieving and drunkenness,
unmoved and strangely unaffected.
Once
Tom did steal. That was while
he still lived in the city. The
grandmother was ill at the time and he himself was out of work. There was nothing to eat in the house, and so he went into a
harness shop on a side street and stole a dollar and seventy-five cents out
of the cash drawer.
The
harness shop was run by an old man with a long mustache.
He saw the boy lurking about and thought nothing of it.
When he went out into the street to talk to a teamster Tom opened the
cash drawer and taking the money walked away.
Later he was caught and his grandmother settled the matter by
offering to come twice a week for a month and scrub the shop.
The boy was ashamed, but he was rather glad, too.
"It is all right to be ashamed and makes me understand new
things," he said to the grandmother, who didn't know what the boy was
talking about but loved him so much that it didn't matter whether she
understood or not.
For
a year Tom Foster lived in the banker's stable and then lost his place
there. He didn't take very good
care of the horses and he was a constant source of irritation to the
banker's wife. She told him to
mow the lawn and he forgot. Then
she sent him to the store or to the post office and he did not come back but
joined a group of men and boys and spent the whole afternoon with them,
standing about, listening and occasionally, when addressed, saying a few
words. As in the city in the houses of prostitution and with the
rowdy boys running through the streets at night, so in Winesburg among its
citizens he had always the power to be a part of and yet distinctly apart
from the life about him.
After
Tom lost his place at Banker White's he did not live with his grandmother,
although often in the evening she came to visit him. He rented a room at the rear of a little frame building
belonging to old Rufus Whiting. The
building was on Duane Street, just off Main Street, and had been used for
years as a law office by the old man, who had become too feeble and
forgetful for the practice of his profession but did not realize his
inefficiency. He liked Tom and let him have the room for a dollar a month.
In the late afternoon when the lawyer had gone home the boy had the
place to himself and spent hours lying on the floor by the stove and
thinking of things. In the
evening the grandmother came and sat in the lawyer's chair to smoke a pipe
while Tom remained silent, as he always, did in the presence of everyone.
Often
the old woman talked with great vigor. Sometimes she was angry about some
happening at the banker's house and scolded away for hours.
Out of her own earnings she bought a mop and regularly scrubbed the
lawyer's office. Then when the
place was spotlessly clean and smelled clean she lighted her clay pipe and
she and Tom had a smoke together. "When you get ready to die then I will die also,"
she said to the boy lying on the floor beside her chair.
Tom
Foster enjoyed life in Winesburg. He
did odd jobs, such as cutting wood for kitchen stoves and mowing the grass
before houses. In late May and
early June he picked strawberries in the fields.
He had time to loaf and he enjoyed loafing. Banker White had given him a cast-off coat which was too
large for him, but his grandmother cut it down, and he had also an overcoat,
got at the same place, that was lined with fur.
The fur was worn away in spots, but the coat was warm and in the
winter Tom slept in it. He
thought his method of getting along good enough and was happy and satisfied
with the way fife in Winesburg had turned out for him.
The
most absurd little things made Tom Foster happy. That, I suppose, was why people loved him. In Hern's Grocery
they would be roasting coffee on Friday afternoon, preparatory to the
Saturday rush of trade, and the rich odor invaded lower Main Street.
Tom Foster appeared and sat on a box at the rear of the store.
For an hour he did not move but sat perfectly still, filling his
being with the spicy odor that made him half drunk with happiness.
"I like it," he said gently.
"It makes me think of things far away, places and things like
that."
One
night Tom Foster got drunk. That
came about in a curious way. He
never had been drunk before, and indeed in all his fife had never taken a
drink of anything intoxicating, but he felt he needed to be drunk that one
time and so went and did it.
In
Cincinnati, when he lived there, Tom had found out many things, things about
ugliness and crime and lust. Indeed,
he knew more of these things than anyone else in Winesburg.
The matter of sex in particular had presented itself to him in a
quite horrible way and had made a deep impression on his mind.
He thought, after what he had seen of the women standing before the
squalid houses on cold nights and the look he had seen in the eyes of the
men who stopped to talk to them, that he would put sex altogether out of his
own life. One of the women of
the neighborhood tempted him once and he went into a room with her.
He never forgot the smell of the room nor the greedy look that came
into the eyes of the woman. It
sickened him and in a very terrible way left a scar on his soul.
He had always before thought of women as quite innocent things, much
like his grandmother, but after that one experience in the room he dismissed
women from his mind. So gentle
was his nature that he could not hate anything and not being able to
understand he decided to forget.
And
Tom did forget until he came to Winesburg. After he had lived there for two
years something began to stir in him. On
all sides he saw youth making love and he was himself a youth.
Before he knew what had happened he was in love also.
He fell in love with Helen White, daughter of the man for whom he had
worked, and found himself thinking of her at night.
That
was a problem for Tom and he settled it in his own way.
He let himself think of Helen White whenever her figure came into his
mind and only concerned himself with the manner of his thoughts. He had a
fight, a quiet determined little fight of his own, to keep his desires in
the channel where he thought they belonged, but on the whole he was
victorious.
And
then came the spring night when he got drunk.
Tom was wild on that night. He
was like an innocent young buck of the forest that has eaten of some
maddening weed. The thing
began, ran its course, and was ended in one night, and you may be sure that
no one in Winesburg was any the worse for Tom's outbreak.
In
the first place, the night was one to make a sensitive nature drunk.
The trees along the residence streets of the town were all newly
clothed in soft green leaves, in the gardens behind the houses men were
puttering about in vegetable gardens, and in the air there was a hush, a
waiting kind of silence very stirring to the blood.
Tom
left his room on Duane Street just as the young night began to make itself
felt. First he walked through
the streets, going softly and quietly along, thinking thoughts that he tried
to put into words. He said that
Helen White was a flame dancing in the air and that he was a little tree
without leaves standing out sharply against the sky.
Then he said that she was a wind, a strong terrible wind, coming out
of the darkness of a stormy sea and that he was a boat left on the shore of
the sea by a fisherman.
That
idea pleased the boy and he sauntered along playing with it.
He went into Main Street and sat on the curbing before Wacker's
tobacco store. For an hour he
lingered about listening to the talk of men, but it did not interest him
much and he slipped away. Then
he decided to get drunk and went into Willy's saloon and bought a bottle of
whiskey. Putting the bottle
into his pocket, he walked out of town, wanting to be alone to think more
thoughts and to drink the whiskey.
Tom
got drunk sitting on a bank of new grass beside the road about a mile north
of town. Before him was a white
road and at his back an apple orchard in full bloom.
He took a drink out of the bottle and then lay down on the grass.
He thought of mornings in Winesburg and of how the stones in the
graveled driveway by Banker White's house were wet with dew and glistened in
the morning light. He thought
of the nights in the barn when it rained and he lay awake hearing the
drumming of the raindrops and smelling the warm smell of horses and of hay.
Then he thought of a storm that had gone roaring through Winesburg
several days before and, his mind going back, he relived the night he had
spent on the train with his grandmother when the two were coming from
Cincinnati. Sharply he
remembered how strange it had seemed to sit quietly in the coach and to feel
the power of the engine hurling the train along through the night.
Tom
got drunk in a very short time. He
kept taking drinks from the bottle as the thoughts visited him and when his
head began to reel got up and walked along the road going away from
Winesburg. There was a bridge on the road that ran out of Winesburg north to
Lake Erie and the drunken boy made his way along the road to the bridge.
There he sat down. He tried to drink again, but when he had taken the cork out
of the bottle he became ill and put it quickly back. His head was rocking back and forth and so he sat on the
stone approach to the bridge and sighed.
His head seemed to be flying about like a pinwheel and then
projecting itself off into space and his arms and legs flopped helplessly
about.
At
eleven o'clock Tom got back into town.
George Willard found him wandering about and took him into the Eagle
printshop. Then he became
afraid that the drunken boy would make a mess on the floor and helped him
into the alleyway.
The
reporter was confused by Tom Foster. The
drunken boy talked of Helen White and said he had been with her on the shore
of a sea and had made love to her. George
had seen Helen White walking in the street with her father during the
evening and decided that Tom was out of his head. A sentiment concerning Helen White that lurked in his own
heart flamed up and he became angry. "Now
you quit that," he said. "I
won't let Helen White's name be dragged into this.
I won't let that happen." He began shaking Tom's shoulder,
trying to make him understand. "You
quit it," he said again.
For
three hours the two young men, thus strangely thrown together, stayed in the
printshop. When he had a little
recovered George took Tom for a walk. They went into the country and sat on
a log near the edge of a wood. Something
in the still night drew them together and when the drunken boy's head began
to clear they talked.
"It
was good to be drunk," Tom Foster said.
"It taught me something. I
won't have to do it again. I
will think more dearly after this. You
see how it is."
George
Willard did not see, but his anger concerning Helen White passed and he felt
drawn toward the pale, shaken boy as he had never before been drawn toward
anyone. With motherly
solicitude, he insisted that Tom get to his feet and walk about. Again they
went back to the printshop and sat in silence in the darkness.
The
reporter could not get the purpose of Tom Foster's action straightened out
in his mind. When Tom spoke
again of Helen White he again grew angry and began to scold.
"You quit that," he said sharply. "You haven't been with her.
What makes you say you have? What makes you keep saying such things?
Now you quit it, do you hear?"
Tom
was hurt. He couldn't quarrel
with George Willard because he was incapable of quarreling, so he got up to
go away. When George Willard
was insistent he put out his hand, laying it on the older boy's arm, and
tried to explain.
"Well,"
he said softly, "I don't know how it was. I was happy.
You see how that was. Helen
White made me happy and the night did too.
I wanted to suffer, to be hurt somehow.
I thought that was what I should do.
I wanted to suffer, you see, because everyone suffers and does wrong.
I thought of a lot of things to do, but they wouldn't work.
They all hurt someone else."
Tom
Foster's voice arose, and for once in his life he became almost excited.
"It was like making love, that's what I mean," he
explained. "Don't you see
how it is? It hurt me to do what I did and made everything strange.
That's why I did it. I'm
glad, too. It taught me something, that's it, that's what I wanted.
Don't you understand? I wanted to learn things, you see.
That's why I did it."
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