Horses and Men: Tales, long and short, from our American life. Sherwood Anderson

her body seemed to grow constantly stronger. Her breasts grew larger and her figure changed slightly. It grew less boyish. She was becoming a woman.

      After the telling of the lie, May’s body became for a time no more than a tree growing in a forest through which she walked. It was something through which life made itself manifest; it was a house within which she lived, a house, in which, and in spite of the enmity of the town, life went on. “I’m not dead like those who die while their bodies are still alive,” May thought, and there was intense comfort in the thought.

      She sat by the window of her room in the darkness thinking. Jerome Hadley had tried to commit a murder and how often such attempts must have been made in the history of other men and women—and how often they must have succeeded. The spirit within was killed. Boys and girls grew up full of notions, brave notions too. In Bidwell, as in other towns, they went to schools and Sunday schools. Words were said—they heard many brave words—but within themselves, within their own tiny houses, all life was uncertain, hesitating. They looked abroad and saw men and women, bearded men, kind strong women. How many were dead! How many of the houses were but empty haunted places! Their town was not the town they had thought it and some day they would have to find that out. It was not a place of warm friendly closeness. Feeling instinctively the uncertainty of life, the difficulty of arriving at truth the people did not draw together. They were not humble in the face of the great mystery. The mystery was to be solved with lies, with truth put away. A great noise must be made. Everything was to be covered up. There must be a great noise and bustle, the firing of cannons, the roll of drums, the shouting of many words. The spirit within must be killed. “What liars people are,” May thought breathlessly. It seemed to her that all the people of her town stood before her, were in a way being judged by her, and her own lie, told to defeat a universal lie, now seemed a small, a white innocent thing.

      There was a very tender delicate thing within her, many people had wanted to kill—that was certain. To kill the delicate thing within was a passion that obsessed mankind. All men and women tried to do it. First the man or woman killed the thing within himself, and then tried to kill it in others. Men and women were afraid to let the thing live.

      May sat in the darkness in her room in the Edgley house having such thoughts as had never come to her before and the night seemed alive as no other night of her life had been. For her gods walked abroad in the land. The Edgley house was but a poor little affair of boards—of thin walls—and she looked out, in the dim wavering light of the night, into a field, that at times during the year became a bog where cattle sank in black mud to their knees. Her town was but a dot on the huge map of her country—she knew that. It was not necessary to travel to find out. Had she not been at the top of her class in geography? In her country alone lived some sixty, eighty, a hundred million people—she could not remember the number—it changed yearly. When the country was new millions of buffalo walked up and down on the plains. She was a she-calf among the buffalo but she had found lodgment in a town, in a house made of boards and painted yellow, but the field below the house was dry now and long grass grew there. However, tiny pools remained and frogs lived in them and croaked loudly while crickets sang in the dry grass. Her life was sacred—the house in which she lived, the room in which she sat, became a church, a temple, a tower. The lie she had told had started a new force within her and the new temple, in which she was to live, was now being built.

      Thoughts like giant clouds, seen in a dim night sky, floated through her mind. Tears came to her eyes and her throat seemed to be swelling. She put her head down on the window sill and convulsive sobs shook her.

      That was, she knew, because she had been brave enough and quick-witted enough to tell the lie, to re-establish the romance of existence within herself. The foundation stone for the temple had been laid.

      May did not think anything out clearly, did not try to do that. She felt—she knew her own truth. Words heard, read in books in school, in other books loaned her by the schoolteachers, words said casually, without feeling—by thin-lipped, flat-breasted young women who were teachers at the Sunday school, words that had seemed as nothing to her when said, now made a great sound in her mind. They were repeated to her in stately measure by some force, seemingly outside herself and were like the steady rhythmical tread of an army marching on earth roads. No, they were like rain on the roof over her head, on the roof of the house that was herself. All her life she had lived in a house and the rains had come unheeded—and the words she had heard and now remembered were like rain drops falling on roofs. There was a subtle perfume remaining. “The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner.”

      As the thoughts marched through May’s mind her small shoulders shook with sobs, but she was happy—strangely happy and something within herself was singing. The singing was a song that was always alive somewhere in the world, it was the song of life, the song that crickets sang, the song the frogs croaked hoarsely. It ran away out of her room, out of the darkness into the night, into days, into far lands—it was the old song, the sweet song.

      May kept thinking about buildings and builders. “The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner.” Someone had said that and others had felt what she now felt—they had had the feeling she could not put into words and they had tried putting it into words. She was not alone in the world. It was not a strange path she walked in life, but many had walked it, many were walking it now. Even as she sat in the window, thinking so strangely, many men and women in many places and many lands sat at other windows having the same thoughts. In a world, where many men and women had killed the thing within themselves, the path of the rejected was the true path and how many had walked the path! The trees along the way were marked. Signs had been hung up by those who wanted to show others the way. “The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner.”

      Lillian had said, “men are no good,” and it was clear Lillian had also killed the thing within herself, had let it be killed. She had let some Jerome Hadley kill it, and then she had grown slowly and steadily more and more angry at life, had come to hate life, had thrown it away. And the thing had happened to her mother, too. That was the reason for her life of silence—death walking about. “The dead rise up to strike the dead.”

      The story May had told to Maud Welliver was not a lie—it was the living truth. He had tried to kill and had come near succeeding. May had walked in the valley of the shadow of death. She knew that now. Her own sister, Lillian, had come to her when she walked with Death and wanted Life. “If you are going to go on the turf I’ll get you in with men who have money,” Lillian had said. She had got no closer to understanding than that.

      May decided that after all she would not try to be Maud Welliver’s friend. She would see her and talk to her but, for the present, she would keep herself to herself. The living thing within her had been wounded and needed time to recover. Of all the feelings, the strong emotion, that swept through her on that evening, cleansing her internally, as she had been trying by splashing in the tub in the woodshed to cleanse herself externally, one impulse got itself definitely expressed. “I’ll go it alone, that’s what I’ll do,” she murmured between sobs as she sat by the window with her head in her hands, and heard the sweet song of the insects, singing of life in the darkness of the fields.