American Spring Song (by Sherwood Anderson)

1876-1941


American Spring Song
by Sherwood Anderson
from Mid-American Chants  [New York: John Lane Company, 1918]

In the spring, when winds blew and farmers were plowing fields,
It came into my mind to be glad because of my brutality.

Along a street I went and over a bridge.

I went through many streets in my city and over many bridges.

Men and women I struck with my fists and my hands began to bleed.

Under a bridge I crawled and stood trembling with joy
At the river’s edge.

Because it was spring and soft sunlight came through the cracks of the bridge
I tried to understand myself.

Out of the mud at the river’s edge I moulded myself a god,
A grotesque little god with a twisted face,
A god for myself and my men.

You see now, brother, how it was.

I was a man with clothes made by a Jewish tailor,
Cunningly wrought clothes, made for a nameless one.

I wore a white collar and some one had given me a jeweled pin
To wear at my throat.
That amused and hurt me too.

No one knew that I knelt in the mud beneath the bridge
In the city of Chicago.

You see I am whispering my secret to you.

I want you to believe in my insanity and to understand that I love God

That’s want I want.

And then, you see, it was spring
And soft sunlight came through the cracks of the bridge.

I had been long alone in a strange place where no gods came.

Creep, men, and kiss the twisted face of my mud god.
I’ll not hit you with my bleeding fists.

I’m a twisted god myself.

It is spring and love has come to me–
Love has come to me and to my men.

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Senility (by Sherwood Anderson)

Sherwood Anderson, 1876-1941

Senility

He was an old man and he sat on the steps of the railroad station in a small Kentucky town.

A well dressed man, some traveler from the city, approached and stood before him.

The old man became self-conscious.

His smile was like the smile of a very young child. His face was all sunken and wrinkled and he had a huge nose.

“Have you any coughs, colds, consumption or bleeding sickness?” he asked. In his voice there was a pleading quality.

The stranger shook his head. The old man arose.

“The sickness that bleeds is a terrible nuisance,” he said. His tongue protruded from between his teeth and he rattled it about. He put his hand on the stranger’s arm and laughed.

“Bully, pretty,” he exclaimed. “I cure them all–coughs, colds, consumption and the sickness that bleeds. I take warts from the hand–I cannot explain how I do it–it is a mystery–I charge nothing–my name is Tom–do you like me?”

The stranger was cordial. He nodded his head. The old man became reminiscent. “My father was a hard man,” he declared. “He was like me, a blacksmith by trade, but he wore a plug hat. When the corn was high he said to the poor, ‘go into the fields and pick’ but when the war came he made a rich man pay five dollars for a bushel of corn.”

“I married against his will. He came to me and he said, ‘Tom I do not like that girl.'”

“‘But I love her,’ I said.

“‘I don’t,’ he said.

“My father and I sat on a log. He was a pretty man and wore a plug hat. ‘I will get the license,’ I said.

“‘I will give you no money,’ he said.

“My marriage cost me twenty-one dollars–I worked in the corn–it rained and the horses were blind–the clerk said, ‘Are you over twenty- one?’ I said ‘yes’ and she said ‘yes.’ We had chalked it on our shoes. My father said, ‘I give you your freedom.’ We had no money. My marriage cost twenty-one dollars. She is dead.”

The old man looked at the sky. It was evening and the sun had set. The sky was all mottled with grey clouds. “I paint beautiful pictures and give them away,” he declared. “My brother is in the penitentiary. He killed a man who called him an ugly name.”

The decrepit old man held his hands before the face of the stranger. He opened and shut them. They were black with grime. “I pick out warts,” he explained plaintively. “They are as soft as your hands.”

“I play on an accordion. You are thirty-seven years old. I sat beside my brother in the penitentiary. He is a pretty man with pompadour hair. ‘Albert’ I said, ‘are you sorry you killed a man?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am not sorry. I would kill ten, a hundred, a thousand!'”

The old man began to weep and to wipe his hands with a soiled handkerchief. He attempted to take a chew of tobacco and his false teeth became displaced. He covered his mouth with his hands and was ashamed.

“I am old. You are thirty-seven years old but I am older than that,” he whispered.

“My brother is a bad man–he is full of hate–he is pretty and has pompadour hair, but he would kill and kill. I hate old age–I am ashamed that I am old.

“I have a pretty new wife. I wrote her four letters and she replied. She came here and we married–I love to see her walk–O, I buy her pretty clothes.

“Her foot is not straight–it is twisted–my first wife is dead–I pick warts off the hand with my fingers and no blood comes–I cure coughs, colds, consumption and the sickness that bleeds–people can write to me and I answer the letters–if they send me no money it is no matter–all is free.”

Again the old man wept and the stranger tried to comfort him. “You are a happy man?” the stranger asked.

“Yes,” said the old man, “and a good man too. Ask everywhere about me– my name is Tom, a blacksmith–my wife walks prettily although she has a twisted foot–I have bought her a long dress–she is thirty and I am seventy-five–she has many pairs of shoes–I have bought them for her, but her foot is twisted–I buy straight shoes–

“She thinks I do not know–everybody thinks Tom does not know–I have bought her a long dress that comes down to the ground–my name is Tom, a blacksmith–I am seventy-five and I hate old age–I take warts off the hands and no blood comes–people may write to me and I answer the letters–all is free.”

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War (by Sherwood Anderson)

Sherwood Anderson, 1876-1941


War

The story came to me from a woman met on a train. The car was crowded and I took the seat beside her. There was a man in the offing who belonged with her–a slender girlish figure of a man in a heavy brown canvas coat such as teamsters wear in the winter. He moved up and down in the aisle of the car, wanting my place by the woman’s side, but I did not know that at the time.

The woman had a heavy face and a thick nose. Something had happened to her. She had been struck a blow or had a fall. Nature could never have made a nose so broad and thick and ugly. She had talked to me in very good English. I suspect now that she was temporarily weary of the man in the brown canvas coat, that she had travelled with him for days, perhaps weeks, and was glad of the chance to spend a few hours in the company of some one else.

Everyone knows the feeling of a crowded train in the middle of the night. We ran along through western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. It had rained for days and the fields were flooded. In the clear night the moon came out and the scene outside the car-window was strange and in an odd way very beautiful.

You get the feeling: the black bare trees standing up in clusters as they do out in that country, the pools of water with the moon reflected and running quickly as it does when the train hurries along, the rattle of the car-trucks, the lights in isolated farm-houses, and occasionally the clustered lights of a town as the train rushed through it into the west.

The woman had just come out of war-ridden Poland, had got out of that stricken land with her lover by God knows what miracles of effort. She made me feel the war, that woman did, and she told me the tale that I want to tell you.

I do not remember the beginning of our talk, nor can I tell you of how the strangeness of my mood grew to match her mood until the story she told became a part of the mystery of the still night outside the car- window and very pregnant with meaning to me.

There was a company of Polish refugees moving along a road in Poland in charge of a German. The German was a man of perhaps fifty, with a beard. As I got him, he was much such a man as might be professor of foreign languages in a college in our country, say at Des Moines, Iowa, or Springfield, Ohio. He would be sturdy and strong of body and given to the eating of rather rank foods, as such men are. Also he would be a fellow of books and in his thinking inclined toward the ranker philosophies. He was dragged into the war because he was a German, and he had steeped his soul in the German philosophy of might. Faintly, I fancy, there was another notion in his head that kept bothering him, and so to serve his government with a whole heart he read books that would re-establish his feeling for the strong, terrible thing for which he fought. Because he was past fifty he was not on the battle line, but was in charge of the refugees, taking them out of their destroyed village to a camp near a railroad where they could be fed.

The refugees were peasants, all except the woman in the American train with me, her lover and her mother, an old woman of sixty-five. They had been small landowners and the others in their party had worked on their estate.

Along a country road in Poland went this party in charge of the German who tramped heavily along, urging them forward. He was brutal in his insistence, and the old woman of sixty-five, who was a kind of leader of the refugees, was almost equally brutal in her constant refusal to go forward. In the rainy night she stopped in the muddy road and her party gathered about her. Like a stubborn horse she shook her head and muttered Polish words. “I want to be let alone, that’s what I want. All I want in the world is to be let alone,” she said, over and over; and then the German came up and putting his hand on her back pushed her along, so that their progress through the dismal night was a constant repetition of the stopping, her muttered words, and his pushing. They hated each other with whole-hearted hatred, that old Polish woman and the German.

The party came to a clump of trees on the bank of a shallow stream and the German took hold of the old woman’s arm and dragged her through the stream while the others followed. Over and over she said the words: “I want to be let alone. All I want in the world is to be let alone.”

In the clump of trees the German started a fire. With incredible efficiency he had it blazing high in a few minutes, taking the matches and even some bits of dry wood from a little rubber-lined pouch carried in his inside coat pocket. Then he got out tobacco and, sitting down on the protruding root of a tree, smoked and stared at the refugees, clustered about the old woman on the opposite side of the fire.

The German went to sleep. That was what started his trouble. He slept for an hour and when he awoke the refugees were gone. You can imagine him jumping up and tramping heavily back through the shallow stream and along the muddy road to gather his party together again. He would be angry through and through, but he would not be alarmed. It was only a matter, he knew, of going far enough back along the road as one goes back along a road for strayed cattle.

And then, when the German came up to the party, he and the old woman began to fight. She stopped muttering the words about being let alone and sprang at him. One of her old hands gripped his beard and the other buried itself in the thick skin of his neck.

The struggle in the road lasted a long time. The German was tired and not as strong as he looked, and there was that faint thing in him that kept him from hitting the old woman with his fist. He took hold of her thin shoulders and pushed, and she pulled. The struggle was like a man trying to lift himself by his boot straps. The two fought and were full of the determination that will not stop fighting, but they were not very strong physically.

And so their two souls began to struggle. The woman in the train made me understand that quite clearly, although it may be difficult to get the sense of it over to you. I had the night and the mystery of the moving train to help me. It was a physical thing, the fight of the two souls in the dim light of the rainy night on that deserted muddy road. The air was full of the struggle and the refugees gathered about and stood shivering. They shivered with cold and weariness, of course, but also with something else. In the air everywhere about them they could feel the vague something going on. The woman said that she would gladly have given her life to have it stopped, or to have someone strike a light, and that her man felt the same way. It was like two winds struggling, she said, like a soft yielding cloud become hard and trying vainly to push another cloud out of the sky.

Then the struggle ended and the old woman and the German fell down exhausted in the road. The refugees gathered about and waited. They thought something more was going to happen, knew in fact something more would happen. The feeling they had persisted, you see, and they huddled together and perhaps whimpered a little.

What happened is the whole point of the story. The woman in the train explained it very clearly. She said that the two souls, after struggling, went back into the two bodies, but that the soul of the old woman went into the body of the German and the soul of the German into the body of the old woman.

After that, of course, everything was quite simple. The German sat down by the road and began shaking his head and saying he wanted to be let alone, declared that all he wanted in the world was to be let alone, and the Polish woman took papers out of his pocket and began driving her companions back along the road, driving them harshly and brutally along, and when they grew weary pushing them with her hands.

There was more of the story after that. The woman’s lover, who had been a school-teacher, took the papers and got out of the country, taking his sweetheart with him. But my mind has forgotten the details. I only remember the German sitting by the road and muttering that he wanted to be let alone, and the old tired mother-in-Poland saying the harsh words and forcing her weary companions to march through the night back into their own country.

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