TOM FOSTER came to Winesburg from Cincinnati
when he was still young and could get many new
impressions. His grandmother had been raised on a
farm near the town and as a young girl had gone to
school there when Winesburg was a village of
twelve or fifteen houses clustered about a general
store on the Trunion Pike.
What a life the old woman had led since she went
away from the frontier settlement and what a
strong, capable little old thing she was! She had
been in Kansas, in Canada, and in New York City,
traveling about with her husband, a mechanic, before he died. Later she went to stay with her
daughter, who had also married a mechanic and
lived in Covington, Kentucky, across the river
from Cincinnati.
Then began the hard years for Tom Foster's
grandmother. First her son-in-law was killed by a
policeman during a strike and then Tom's mother
became an invalid and died also. The grandmother
had saved a little money, but it was swept away by
the illness of the daughter and by the cost of the
two funerals. She became a half worn-out old
woman worker and lived with the grandson above
a junk shop on a side street in Cincinnati. For five
years she scrubbed the floors in an office building
and then got a place as dish washer in a restaurant.
Her hands were all twisted out of shape. When she
took hold of a mop or a broom handle the hands
looked like the dried stems of an old creeping vine
clinging to a tree.
The old woman came back to Winesburg as soon
as she got the chance. One evening as she was coming home from work she found a pocket-book containing thirty-seven dollars, and that opened the
way. The trip was a great adventure for the boy. It
was past seven o'clock at night when the grandmother came home with the pocket-book held tightly
in her old hands and she was so excited she could
scarcely speak. She insisted on leaving Cincinnati
that night, saying that if they stayed until morning
the owner of the money would be sure to find them
out and make trouble. Tom, who was then sixteen
years old, had to go trudging off to the station with
the old woman, bearing all of their earthly belongings done up in a worn-out blanket and slung across
his back. By his side walked the grandmother urging
him forward. Her toothless old mouth twitched nervously, and when Tom grew weary and wanted to
put the pack down at a street crossing, she snatched
it up and if he had not prevented would have slung
it across her own back. When they got into the train
and it had run out of the city she was as delighted
as a girl and talked as the boy had never heard her
talk before.
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."
The Untold Lie