THE NEW ENGLANDER
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
About the print version
The New Englander
The Dial, Volume 70, Number 2
Sherwood Anderson pp. 143-158
The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.
New York
February, 1921
Published: 1921
HER name was Elsie Leander and her girlhood was spent on her father's farm
in Vermont. For several generations the Leanders had all lived on the same farm
and had all married thin women, and so she was thin. The farm lay in the shadow
of a mountain and the soil was not very rich. From the beginning and for several
generations there had been a great many sons and few daughters in the family.
The sons had gone west or to New York City and the daughters had stayed at home
and thought such thoughts as come to New England women who see the sons of their
father's neighbours slipping, away, one by one, into the West.
Her father's house was a small white frame affair, and when you went out at
the back door, past a small barn and a chicken house, you got into a path that
ran up the side of a hill and into an orchard. The trees were all old and
gnarled. At the back of the orchard the hill dropped away and bare rocks showed.
Inside the fence a large grey rock stuck high up out of the ground. As Elsie
sat with her back to the rock, with a mangled hillside at her feet, she could
see several large mountains, apparently but a short distance away, and between
herself and the mountains lay many tiny fields surrounded by neatly built stone
walls. Everywhere rocks appeared. Large ones, too heavy to be moved, stuck out
of the ground in the centre of the fields. The fields were like cups filled with
a green liquid that turned grey in the fall and white in the winter. The
mountains, far off but apparently near at hand, were like giants ready at any
moment to reach out their hands and take the cups one by one and drink off the
green liquid. The large rocks in the fields were like the thumbs of the giants.
Elsie had three brothers, born ahead of her, but they had all gone away. Two
of them had gone to live with her uncle in the West and her elder brother had
gone to New York City where he had married and prospered. All through his youth
and manhood her father had worked hard and had lived a hard life, but his son in
New York City had begun to send money home, and after that things went better. He still worked every day about the barn or in the fields
but he did not worry about the future. Elsie's mother did house work in the
mornings and in the afternoons sat in a rocking chair in her tiny living room
and thought of her sons while she crocheted table covers and tidies for the
backs of chairs. She was a silent woman, very thin and with very thin bony
hands. She did not ease herself into a rocking chair but sat down and got up
suddenly, and when she crocheted her back was as straight as the back of a drill
sergeant.
The mother rarely spoke to the daughter. Sometimes in the afternoons as the
younger woman went up the hillside to her place by the rock at the back of the
orchard, her father came out of the barn and stopped her. He put a hand on her
shoulder and asked where she was going. "To the rock," she said and her father
laughed. His laughter was like the creaking of a rusty barn door hinge and the
hand he had laid on her shoulder was thin like her own hands and like her
mother's hands. The father went into the barn shaking his head. "She's like her
mother. She is herself like a rock," he thought. At the head of the path that
led from the house to the orchard there was a great cluster of bayberry bushes.
The New England farmer came out of his barn to watch his daughter go along the
path, but she had disappeared behind the bushes. He looked away past his house
to the fields and to the mountains in the distance. He also saw the green
cup-like fields and the grim mountains. There was an almost imperceptible
tightening of the muscles of his half worn-out old body. For a long time he
stood in silence and then, knowing from long experience the danger of having
thoughts, he went back into the barn and busied himself with the mending of an
agricultural tool that had been mended many times before.
The son of the Leanders who went to live in New York City was the father of
one son, a thin sensitive boy who looked like Elsie. The son died when he was
twenty-three years old and some years later the father died and left his money
to the old people on the New England farm. The two Leanders who had gone west
had lived there with their father's brother, a farmer, until they grew into
manhood. Then Will, the younger, got a job on a railroad. He was killed one
winter morning. It was a cold snowy day and when the freight train he was in
charge of as conductor left the city of Des Moines, he started to run over the tops of
the cars. His feet slipped and he shot down into space. That was the end of him.
Of the new generation there was only Elsie and her brother Tom, whom she had
never seen, left alive. Her father and mother talked of going west to Tom for
two years before they came to a decision. Then it took another year to dispose
of the farm and make preparations. During the whole time Elsie did not think
much about the change about to take place in her life.
The trip west on the railroad train jolted Elsie out of herself. In spite of
her detached attitude toward life she became excited. Her mother sat up very
straight and stiff in the seat in the sleeping car and her father walked up and
down in the aisle. After a night when the younger of the two women did not sleep
but lay awake with red burning cheeks and with her thin fingers incessantly
picking at the bed-clothes in her berth while the train went through towns and
cities, crawled up the sides of hills and fell down into forest-clad valleys,
she got up and dressed to sit all day looking at a new kind of land. The train
ran for a day and through another sleepless night in a flat land where every
field was as large as a farm in her own country. Towns appeared and disappeared
in a continual procession. The whole land was so unlike anything she had ever
known that she began to feel unlike herself. In the valley where she had been
born and where she had lived all her days everything had an air of finality.
Nothing could be changed. The tiny fields were chained to the earth. They were
fixed in their places and surrounded by aged stone walls. The fields like the
mountains that looked down at them were as unchangeable as the passing days. She
had a feeling they had always been so, would always be so.
Elsie sat like her mother upright in the car seat and with a back like the
back of a drill sergeant. The train ran swiftly along through Ohio and Indiana.
Her thin hands like her mother's hands were crossed and locked. One passing
casually through the car might have thought both women prisoners handcuffed and
bound to their seats. Night came on and she again got into her berth Again she
lay awake and her thin checks became flushed, but she thought new thoughts. Her
hands were no longer gripped together and she did not pick at the bed clothes.
Twice during the night she stretched herself and yawned, a thing she had never in her life
done before. The train stopped at a town on the prairies, and as there was
something the matter with one of the wheels of the car in which she lay the
trainsmen came with flaming torches to tinker it. There was a great pounding and
shouting. When the train went on its way she wanted to get out of her berth and
run up and down in the aisle of the car. The fancy had come to her that the men
tinkering with the car wheel were new men out of the new land who had broken
with strong hammers the doors of her prison away. They had destroyed for ever
the programme she had made for her ...
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