DEATH IN THE WOODS
by Sherwood Anderson
She was an old woman and lived on a farm near the town in which I
lived. All country and small-town people have seen such old women,
but no one knows much about them. Such an old woman comes into
town driving an old worn-out horse or she comes afoot carrying a
basket. She may own a few hens and have eggs to sell. She brings
them in a basket and takes them to a grocer. There she trades them
in. She gets some salt pork and some beans. Then she gets a pound
or two of sugar and some flour.
Afterwards she goes to the butcher's and asks for some dog-meat.
She may spend ten or fifteen cents, but when she does she asks for
something. Formerly the butchers gave liver to any one who wanted
to carry it away. In our family we were always having it. Once
one of my brothers got a whole cow's liver at the slaughter-house
near the fairgrounds in our town. We had it until we were sick of
it. It never cost a cent. I have hated the thought of it ever
since.
The old farm woman got some liver and a soup-bone. She never
visited with any one, and as soon as she got what she wanted she
lit out for home. It made quite a load for such an old body. No
one gave her a lift. People drive right down a road and never
notice an old woman like that.
There was such an old woman who used to come into town past our
house one Summer and Fall when I was a young boy and was sick with
what was called inflammatory rheumatism. She went home later
carrying a heavy pack on her back. Two or three large gaunt-
looking dogs followed at her heels.
The old woman was nothing special. She was one of the nameless
ones that hardly any one knows, but she got into my thoughts. I
have just suddenly now, after all these years, remembered her and
what happened. It is a story. Her name was Grimes, and she lived
with her husband and son in a small unpainted house on the bank of
a small creek four miles from town.
The husband and son were a tough lot. Although the son was but
twenty-one, he had already served a term in jail. It was whispered
about that the woman's husband stole horses and ran them off to
some other county. Now and then, when a horse turned up missing,
the man had also disappeared. No one ever caught him. Once, when
I was loafing at Tom Whitehead's livery-barn, the man came there
and sat on the bench in front. Two or three other men were there,
but no one spoke to him. He sat for a few minutes and then got up
and went away. When he was leaving he turned around and stared at
the men. There was a look of defiance in his eyes. "Well, I have
tried to be friendly. You don't want to talk to me. It has been
so wherever I have gone in this town. If, some day, one of your
fine horses turns up missing, well, then what?" He did not say
anything actually. "I'd like to bust one of you on the jaw," was
about what his eyes said. I remember how the look in his eyes made
me shiver.
The old man belonged to a family that had had money once. His name
was Jake Grimes. It all comes back clearly now. His father, John
Grimes, had owned a sawmill when the country was new, and had made
money. Then he got to drinking and running after women. When he
died there wasn't much left.
Jake blew in the rest. Pretty soon there wasn't any more lumber to
cut and his land was nearly all gone.
He got his wife off a German farmer, for whom he went to work one
June day in the wheat harvest. She was a young thing then and
scared to death. You see, the farmer was up to something with the
girl--she was, I think, a bound girl and his wife had her
suspicions. She took it out on the girl when the man wasn't
around. Then, when the wife had to go off to town for supplies,
the farmer got after her. She told young Jake that nothing really
ever happened, but he didn't know whether to believe it or not.
He got her pretty easy himself, the first time he was out with her.
He wouldn't have married her if the German farmer hadn't tried to
tell him where to get off. He got her to go riding with him in his
buggy one night when he was threshing on the place, and then he
came for her the next Sunday night.
She managed to get out of the house without her employer's seeing,
but when she was getting into the buggy he showed up. It was
almost dark, and he just popped up suddenly at the horse's head.
He grabbed the horse by the bridle and Jake got out his buggy-whip.
They had it out all right! The German was a tough one. Maybe he
didn't care whether his wife knew or not. Jake hit him over the
face and shoulders with the buggy-whip, but the horse got to acting
up and he had to get out.
Then the two men went for it. The girl didn't see it. The horse
started to run away and went nearly a mile down the road before the
girl got him stopped. Then she managed to tie him to a tree beside
the road. (I wonder how I know all this. It must have stuck in my
mind from small-town tales when I was a boy.) Jake found her there
after he got through with the German. She was huddled up in the
buggy seat, crying, scared to death. She told Jake a lot of stuff,
how the German had tried to get her, how he chased her once into
the barn, how another time, when they happened to be alone in the
house together, he tore her dress open clear down the front. The
German, she said, might have got her that time if he hadn't heard
his old woman drive in at the gate. She had been off to town for
supplies. Well, she would be putting the horse in the barn. The
German managed to sneak off to the fields without his wife seeing.
He told the girl he would kill her if she told. What could she do?
She told a lie about ripping her dress in the barn when she was
feeding the stock. I remember now that she was a bound girl and
did not know where her father and mother were. Maybe she did not
have any father. You know what I mean.
Such bound children were often enough cruelly treated. They were
children who had no parents, slaves really. There were very few
orphan homes then. They were legally bound into some home. It was
a matter of pure luck how it came out.
II
She married Jake and had a son and daughter, but the daughter died.
Then she settled down to feed stock. That was her job. At the
German's place she had cooked the food for the German and his wife.
The wife was a strong woman with big hips and worked most of the
time in the fields with her husband. She fed them and fed the cows
in the barn, fed the pigs, the horses and the chickens. Every
moment of every day, as a young girl, was spent feeding something.
Then she married Jake Grimes and he had to be fed. She was a
slight thing, and when she had been married for three or four
years, and after the two children were born, her slender shoulders
became stooped.
Jake always had a lot of big dogs around the house, that stood near
the unused sawmill near the creek. He was always trading horses
when he wasn't stealing something and had a lot of poor bony ones
about. Also he kept three or four pigs and a cow. They were all
pastured in the few acres left of the Grimes place and Jake did
little enough work.
He went into debt for a threshing outfit and ran it for several
years, but it did not pay. People did not trust him. They were
afraid he would steal the grain at night. He had to go a long way
off to get work and it cost too much to get there. In the Winter
he hunted and cut a little firewood, to be sold in some nearby
town. When the son grew up he was just like the father. They got
drunk together. If there wasn't anything to eat in the house when
they came home the old man gave his old woman a cut over the head.
She had a few chickens of her own and had to kill one of them in a
hurry. When they were all killed she wouldn't have any eggs to
sell when she went to town, and then what would she do?
She had to scheme all her life about getting things fed, getting
the pigs fed so they would grow fat and could be butchered in the
Fall. When they were butchered her husband took most of the meat
off to town and sold it. If he did not do it first the boy did.
They fought sometimes and when they fought the old woman stood
aside trembling.
She had got the habit of silence anyway--that was fixed.
Sometimes, when she began to look old--she wasn't forty yet--and
when the husband and son were both off, trading horses or drinking
or hunting or stealing, she went around the house and the barnyard
muttering to herself.
How was she going to get everything fed?--that was her problem.
The dogs had to be fed. There wasn't enough hay in the barn for
the horses and the cow. If she didn't feed the chickens how could
they lay eggs? Without eggs to sell how could she get things in
town, things she had to have to keep the life of the farm going?
Thank heaven, she did not have to feed her husband--in a certain
way. That hadn't lasted long after their marriage and after the
babies came. Where he went on his long trips she did not know.
Sometimes he was gone from home for weeks, and after the boy grew
up they went off together.
They left everything at home for her to manage and she had no
money. She knew no one. No one ever talked to her in town. When
it was Winter she had to gather sticks of wood for her fire, had to
try to keep the stock fed with very little grain.
The stock in the barn cried to her hungrily, the dogs followed her
about. In the Winter the hens laid few enough eggs. They huddled
in the corners of the barn and she kept watching them. If a hen
lays an egg in the barn in the Winter and you do not find it, it
freezes and breaks.
One day in Winter the old woman went off to town with a few eggs
and the dogs followed her. She did not get started until nearly
three o'clock and the snow was heavy. She hadn't been feeling very
well for several days and so she went muttering along, scantily
clad, her shoulders stooped. She had an old grain bag in which she
carried her eggs, tucked away down in the bottom. There weren't
many of them, but in Winter the price of eggs is up. She would get
a little meat in exchange for the eggs, some salt pork, a little
sugar, and some coffee perhaps. It might be the butcher would give
her a piece of liver.
When she had got to town and was trading in her eggs the dogs lay
by the door outside. She did pretty well, got the things she
needed, more than she had hoped. Then she went to the butcher and
he gave her some liver and some dog-meat.
It was the first time any one had spoken to her in a friendly way
for a long time. The butcher was alone in his shop when she came
in and was annoyed by the thought of such a sick-looking old woman
out on such a day. It was bitter cold and the snow, that had let
up during the afternoon, was falling again. The butcher said
something about her husband and her son, swore at them, and the old
woman stared at him, a look of mild surprise in her eyes as he
talked. He said that if either the husband or the son were going
to get any of the liver or the heavy bones with scraps of meat
hanging to them that he had put into the grain bag, he'd see him
starve first.
Starve, eh? Well, things had to be fed. Men had to be fed, and
the horses that weren't any good but maybe could be traded off, and
the poor thin cow that hadn't given any milk for three months.
Horses, cows, pigs, dogs, men.
III
The old woman had to get back before darkness came if she could.
The dogs followed at her heels, sniffing at the heavy grain bag she
had fastened on her back. When she got to the edge of town she
stopped by a fence and tied the bag on her back with a piece of
rope she had carried in her dress-pocket for just that purpose.
That was an easier way to carry it. Her arms ached. It was hard
when she had to crawl over fences and once she fell over and landed
in the snow. The dogs went frisking about. She had to struggle to
get to her feet again, but she made it. The point of climbing over
the fences was that there was a short cut over a hill and through a
woods. She might have gone around by the road, but it was a mile
farther that way. She was afraid she couldn't make it. And then,
besides, the stock had to be fed. There was a little hay left and
a little corn. Perhaps her husband and son would bring some home
when they came. They had driven off in the only buggy the Grimes
family had, a rickety thing, a rickety horse hitched to the buggy,
two other rickety horses led by halters. They were going to trade
horses, get a little money if they could. They might come home
drunk. It would be well to have something in the house when they
came back.
The son had an affair on with a woman at the county seat, fifteen
miles away. She was a rough enough woman, a tough one. Once, in
the Summer, the son had brought her to the house. Both she and the
son had been drinking. Jake Grimes was away and the son and his
woman ordered the old woman about like a servant. She didn't mind
much; she was used to it. Whatever happened she never said
anything. That was her way of getting along. She had managed that
way when she was a young girl at the German's and ever since she
had married Jake. That time her son brought his woman to the house
they stayed all night, sleeping together just as though they were
married. It hadn't shocked the old woman, not much. She had got
past being shocked early in life.
With the pack on her back she went painfully along across an open
field, wading in the deep snow, and got into the woods.
There was a path, but it was hard to follow. Just beyond the top
of the hill, where the woods was thickest, there was a small
clearing. Had some one once thought of building a house there?
The clearing was as large as a building lot in town, large enough
for a house and a garden. The path ran along the side of the
clearing, and when she got there the old woman sat down to rest at
the foot of a tree.
It was a foolish thing to do. When she got herself placed, the
pack against the tree's trunk, it was nice, but what about getting
up again? She worried about that for a moment and then quietly
closed her eyes.
She must have slept for a time. When you are about so cold you
can't get any colder. The afternoon grew a little warmer and the
snow came thicker than ever. Then after a time the weather
cleared. The moon even came out.
There were four Grimes dogs that had followed Mrs. Grimes into
town, all tall gaunt fellows. Such men as Jake Grimes and his son
always keep just such dogs. They kick and abuse them, but they
stay. The Grimes dogs, in order to keep from starving, had to do a
lot of foraging for themselves, and they had been at it while the
old woman slept with her back to the tree at the side of the
clearing. They had been chasing rabbits in the woods and in
adjoining fields and in their ranging had picked up three other
farm dogs.
After a time all the dogs came back to the clearing. They were
excited about something. Such nights, cold and clear and with a
moon, do things to dogs. It may be that some old instinct, come
down from the time when they were wolves and ranged the woods in
packs on Winter nights, comes back into them.
The dogs in the clearing, before the old woman, had caught two or
three rabbits and their immediate hunger had been satisfied. They
began to play, running in circles in the clearing. Round and round
they ran, each dog's nose at the tail of the next dog. In the
clearing, under the snow-laden trees and under the wintry moon they
made a strange picture, running thus silently, in a circle their
running had beaten in the soft snow. The dogs made no sound. They
ran around and around in the circle.
It may have been that the old woman saw them doing that before she
died. She may have awakened once or twice and looked at the
strange sight with dim old eyes.
She wouldn't be very cold now, just drowsy. Life hangs on a long
time. Perhaps the old woman was out of her head. She may have
dreamed of her girlhood, at the German's, and before that, when she
was a child and before her mother lit out and left her.
Her dreams couldn't have been very pleasant. Not many pleasant
things had happened to her. Now and then one of the Grimes dogs
left the running circle and came to stand before her. The dog
thrust his face close to her face. His red tongue was hanging out.
The running of the dogs may have been a kind of death ceremony. It
may have been that the primitive instinct of the wolf, having been
aroused in the dogs by the night and the running, made them somehow
afraid.
"Now we are no longer wolves. We are dogs, the servants of men.
Keep alive, man! When man dies we becomes wolves again."
When one of the dogs came to where the old woman sat with her back
against the tree and thrust his nose close to her face he seemed
satisfied and went back to run with the pack. All the Grimes dogs
did it at some time during the evening, before she died. I knew
all about it afterward, when I grew to be a man, because once in a
woods in Illinois, on another Winter night, I saw a pack of dogs
act just like that. The dogs were waiting for me to die as they
had waited for the old woman that night when I was a child, but
when it happened to me I was a young man and had no intention
whatever of dying.
The old woman died softly and quietly. When she was dead and when
one of the Grimes dogs had come to her and had found her dead all
the dogs stopped running. They gathered about her.
Well, she was dead now. She had fed the Grimes dogs when she was
alive, what about now?
There was the pack on her back, the grain bag containing the piece
of salt pork, the liver the butcher had given her, the dog-meat,
the soup bones. The butcher in town, having been suddenly overcome
with a feeling of pity, had loaded her grain bag heavily. It had
been a big haul for the old woman.
It was a big haul for the dogs now.
IV
One of the Grimes dogs sprang suddenly out from among the others
and began worrying the pack on the old woman's back. Had the dogs
really been wolves that one would have been the leader of the pack.
What he did, all the others did.
All of them sank their teeth into the grain bag the old woman had
fastened with ropes to her back.
They dragged the old woman's body out into the open clearing. The
worn-out dress was quickly torn from her shoulders. When she was
found, a day or two later, the dress had been torn from her body
clear to the hips, but the dogs had not touched her body. They had
got the meat out of the grain bag, that was all. Her body was
frozen stiff when it was found, and the shoulders were so narrow
and the body so slight that in death it looked like the body of
some charming young girl.
Such things happened in towns of the Middle West, on farms near
town, when I was a boy. A hunter out after rabbits found the old
woman's body and did not touch it. Something, the beaten round
path in the little snow-covered clearing, the silence of the place,
the place where the dogs had worried the body trying to pull the
grain bag away or tear it open--something startled the man and he
hurried off to town.
I was in Main street with one of my brothers who was town newsboy
and who was taking the afternoon papers to the stores. It was
almost night. The hunter came into a grocery and told his story. Then he went to
a hardware-shop and into a drugstore. Men began to gather on the
sidewalks. Then they started out along the road to the place in
the woods. My brother should have gone on about his business of distributing
papers but he didn't. Every one was going to the woods. The
undertaker went and the town marshal. Several men got on a dray
and rode out to where the path left the road and went into the
woods, but the horses weren't very sharply shod and slid about on
the slippery roads. They made no better time than those of us who
walked. The town marshal was a large man whose leg had been injured in the
Civil War. He carried a heavy cane and limped rapidly along the
road. My brother and I followed at his heels, and as we went other
men and boys joined the crowd.
It had grown dark by the time we got to where the old woman had
left the road but the moon had come out. The marshal was thinking
there might have been a murder. He kept asking the hunter
questions. The hunter went along with his gun across his
shoulders, a dog following at his heels. It isn't often a rabbit
hunter has a chance to be so conspicuous. He was taking full
advantage of it, leading the procession with the town marshal. "I
didn't see any wounds. She was a beautiful young girl. Her face
was buried in the snow. No, I didn't know her." As a matter of
fact, the hunter had not looked closely at the body. He had been
frightened. She might have been murdered and some one might spring
out from behind a tree and murder him. In a woods, in the late
afternoon, when the trees are all bare and there is white snow on
the ground, when all is silent, something creepy steals over the
mind and body. If something strange or uncanny has happened in the
neighborhood all you think about is getting away from there as fast
as you can.
The crowd of men and boys had got to where the old woman had
crossed the field and went, following the marshal and the hunter,
up the slight incline and into the woods.
My brother and I were silent. He had his bundle of papers in a bag
slung across his shoulder. When he got back to town he would have
to go on distributing his papers before he went home to supper. If
I went along, as he had no doubt already determined I should, we
would both be late. Either mother or our older sister would have
to warm our supper.
Well, we would have something to tell. A boy did not get such a
chance very often. It was lucky we just happened to go into the
grocery when the hunter came in. The hunter was a country fellow.
Neither of us had ever seen him before.
Now the crowd of men and boys had got to the clearing. Darkness
comes quickly on such Winter nights, but the full moon made
everything clear. My brother and I stood near the tree, beneath
which the old woman had died.
She did not look old, lying there in that light, frozen and still.
One of the men turned her over in the snow and I saw everything.
My body trembled with some strange mystical feeling and so did my
brother's. It might have been the cold.
Neither of us had ever seen a woman's body before. It may have
been the snow, clinging to the frozen flesh, that made it look so
white and lovely, so like marble. No woman had come with the party
from town; but one of the men, he was the town blacksmith, took off
his overcoat and spread it over her. Then he gathered her into his
arms and started off to town, all the others following silently.
At that time no one knew who she was.
V
I had seen everything, had seen the oval in the snow, like a
miniature race-track, where the dogs had run, had seen how the men
were mystified, had seen the white bare young-looking shoulders,
had heard the whispered comments of the men.
The men were simply mystified. They took the body to the
undertaker's, and when the blacksmith, the hunter, the marshal and
several others had got inside they closed the door. If father had
been there perhaps he could have got in, but we boys couldn't.
I went with my brother to distribute the rest of his papers and
when we got home it was my brother who told the story.
I kept silent and went to bed early. It may have been I was not
satisfied with the way he told it.
Later, in the town, I must have heard other fragments of the old
woman's story. She was recognized the next day and there was an
investigation. The husband and son were found somewhere and brought to town and
there was an attempt to connect them with the woman's death, but it
did not work. They had perfect enough alibis.
However, the town was against them. They had to get out. Where
they went I never heard.
I remember only the picture there in the forest, the men standing
about, the naked girlish-looking figure, face down in the snow, the
tracks made by the running dogs and the clear cold Winter sky
above. White fragments of clouds were drifting across the sky.
They went racing across the little open space among the trees.
The scene in the forest had become for me, without my knowing it,
the foundation for the real story I am now trying to tell. The
fragments, you see, had to be picked up slowly, long afterwards.
Things happened. When I was a young man I worked on the farm of a
German. The hired-girl was afraid of her employer. The farmer's
wife hated her.
I saw things at that place. Once later, I had a half-uncanny,
mystical adventure with dogs in an Illinois forest on a clear, moon-
lit Winter night. When I was a schoolboy, and on a Summer day, I
went with a boy friend out along a creek some miles from town and
came to the house where the old woman had lived. No one had lived
in the house since her death. The doors were broken from the
hinges; the window lights were all broken. As the boy and I stood
in the road outside, two dogs, just roving farm dogs no doubt, came
running around the corner of the house. The dogs were tall, gaunt
fellows and came down to the fence and glared through at us,
standing in the road.
The whole thing, the story of the old woman's death, was to me as I
grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be
picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood.
The woman who died was one destined to feed animal life. Anyway,
that is all she ever did. She was feeding animal life before she
was born, as a child, as a young woman working on the farm of the
German, after she married, when she grew old and when she died.
She fed animal life in cows, in chickens, in pigs, in horses, in
dogs, in men. Her daughter had died in childhood and with her one
son she had no articulate relations. On the night when she died
she was hurrying homeward, bearing on her body food for animal
life.
She died in the clearing in the woods and even after her death continued feeding animal life. You see it is likely that, when my brother told the story, that night when we got home and my mother and sister sat listening, I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I. A thing so complete has its own beauty. I shall not try to emphasize the point. I am only explaining why I was dissatisfied then and have been ever since. I speak of that only that you may understand why I have been impelled to try to tell the simple story over again.
The End