Book III: Chapter III

by Sherwood Anderson

　　The funeral of Nance McGregor was an event in Coal Creek. In the mindsof the miners she stood for something. Fearing and hating the husbandand the tall big-fisted son they had yet a tenderness for the motherand wife. "She lost her money handing us out bread," they said as theypounded on the bar in the saloon. Word ran about among them and theyreturned again and again to the subject. The fact that she had losther man twice--once in the mine when the timber fell and clouded hisbrain, and then later when his body lay black and distorted near thedoor to the McCrary cut after the dreadful time of the fire in themine--was perhaps forgotten but the fact that she had once kept astore and that she had lost her money serving them was not forgotten.

　　On the day of the funeral the miners came up out of the mine and stoodin groups in the open street and in the vacant bake shop. The men ofthe night shift had their faces washed and had put white paper collarsabout their necks. The man who owned the saloon locked the front doorand putting the keys into his pocket stood on the side-walk lookingsilently at the windows of Nance McGregor's rooms. Out along therunway from the mines came other miners--men of the day shift. Settingtheir dinner pails on the stone along the front of the saloon andcrossing the railroad they kneeled and washed their blackened faces inthe red stream that flowed at the foot of the embankment The voice ofthe preacher, a slender wasp-like young man with black hair and darkshadows under his eyes, floated out to the listening men. A train ofloaded coke cars rumbled past along the back of the stores.

　　McGregor sat at the head of the coffin dressed in a new black suit. Hestared at the wall back of the head of the preacher, not hearing,thinking his own thoughts.

　　Back of McGregor sat the undertaker's pale daughter. She leanedforward until she touched the back of the chair in front and sat withher face buried in a white handkerchief. Her weeping cut across thevoice of the preacher in the closely crowded little room filled withminers' wives and in the midst of his prayer for the dead she wastaken with a violent fit of coughing and had to get up and hurry outof the room.

　　After the services in the rooms above the bake shop a processionformed on Main Street. Like awkward boys the miners fell into groupsand walked along behind the black hearse and the carriage in which satthe dead woman's son with the minister. The men kept looking at eachother and smiling sheepishly. There had been no arrangement to followthe body to its grave and when they thought of the son and theattitude he had always maintained toward them they wondered whether ornot he wanted them to follow.

　　And McGregor was unconscious of all this. He sat in the carriagebeside the minister and with unseeing eyes stared over the heads ofthe horses. He was thinking of his life in the city and of what heshould do there in the future, of Edith Carson, sitting in the cheapdance hall and of the evenings he had spent with her, of the barber onthe park bench talking of women and of his life with his mother whenhe was a boy in the mining town.

　　As the carriage climbed slowly up the hill followed by the minersMcGregor began to love his mother. For the first time he realised thather life was full of meaning and that in her woman's way she had beenquite as heroic in her years of patient toil as had been her manCracked McGregor when he ran to his death in the burning mine.McGregor's hands began to tremble and his shoulders straightened. Hebecame conscious of the men, the dumb blackened children of toildragging their weary legs up the hill.

　　For what? McGregor stood up in the carriage and turning about lookedat the men. Then he fell upon his knees on the carriage seat andwatched them eagerly, his soul crying out to something he thought mustbe hidden away among the black mass of them, something that was thekeynote of their lives, something for which he had not looked and inwhich he had not believed.

　　McGregor, kneeling in the open carriage at the top of the hill andwatching the marching men slowly toiling upward, had of a sudden oneof those strange awakenings that are the reward of stoutness in stoutsouls. A strong wind lifted the smoke from the coke ovens and blew itup the face of the hill on the farther side of the valley and the windseemed to have lifted also some of the haze that had covered his eyes.At the foot of the hill along the railroad he could see the littlestream, one of the blood red streams of the mine country, and the dullred houses of the miners. The red of the coke ovens, the red sunsetting behind the hills to the west and last of all the red streamflowing like a river of blood down through the valley made a scenethat burned itself into the brain of the miner's son. A lump came intohis throat and for a moment he tried vainly to get back his oldsatisfying hate of the town and the miners but it would not come. Longhe looked down the hill to where the miners of the night shift marchedup the hill after the carriage and the slowly moving hearse. It seemedto him that they like himself were marching up out of the smoke andthe little squalid houses away from the shores of the blood red riverinto something new. What? McGregor shook his head slowly like ananimal in pain. He wanted something for himself, for all these men. Itseemed to him that he would gladly lie dead like Nance McGregor toknow the secret of that want.

　　And then as though in answer to the cry out of his heart the file ofmarching men fell into step. An instantaneous impulse seemed to runthrough the ranks of stooped toiling figures. Perhaps they alsolooking backward had caught the magnificence of the picture scrawledacross the landscape in black and red and had been moved by it so thattheir shoulders straightened and the long subdued song of life beganto sing in their bodies. With a swing the marching men fell into step.Into the mind of McGregor flashed a thought of another day when he hadstood upon this same hill with the half crazed man who stuffed birdsand sat upon a log by the roadside reading the Bible and how he hadhated these men because they did not march with orderly precision likethe soldiers who came to subdue them. In a flash he knew that he whohad hated the miners hated them no more. With Napoleonic insight heread a lesson into the accident of the men's falling into step behindhis carriage. A big grim thought flashed into his brain. "Some day aman will come who will swing all of the workers of the world into steplike that," he thought. "He will make them conquer, not one anotherbut the terrifying disorder of life. If their lives have been wreckedby disorder it is not their fault. They have been betrayed by theambitions of their leaders, all men have betrayed them." McGregorthought that his mind swept down over the men, that the impulses ofhis mind like living things ran among them, crying to them, touchingthem, caressing them. Love invaded his spirit and made his bodytingle. He thought of the workers in the Chicago warehouse and of themillions of others workers who in that great city, in all cities,everywhere, went at the end of the day shuffling off along the streetsto their houses carrying with them no song, no hope, nothing but a fewpaltry dollars with which to buy food and keep the endless hurtfulscheme of things alive. "There is a curse on my country," he cried."Everyone has come here for gain, to grow rich, to achieve. Supposethey should begin to want to live here. Suppose they should quitthinking of gain, leaders and followers of leaders. They are children.Suppose like children they should begin to play a bigger game. Supposethey could just learn to march, nothing else. Suppose they shouldbegin to do with their bodies what their minds are not strong enoughto do--to just learn the one simple thing, to march, whenever two orfour or a thousand of them get together, to march."

　　McGregor's thoughts moved him so that he wanted to yell. Instead hisface grew stern and he tried to command himself. "No, wait," hewhispered. "Train yourself. Here is something to give point to yourlife. Be patient and wait." Again his thoughts swept away, runningdown to the advancing men. Tears came into his eyes. "Men have taughtthem that big lesson only when they wanted to kill. This must bedifferent. Some one must teach them the big lesson just for their ownsakes, that they also may know. They must march fear and disorder andpurposelessness away. That must come first."

　　McGregor turned and compelled himself to sit quietly beside theminister in the carriage. He became bitter against the leaders of men,the figures in old history that had once loomed so big in his mind.

　　"They have half taught them the secret only to betray them," hemuttered. "The men of books and of brains have done the same. Thatloose-jawed fellow in the street last night--there must be thousandsof such, talking until their jaws hang loose like worn-out gates.Words mean nothing but when a man marches with a thousand other menand is not doing it for the glory of some king, then it will meansomething. He will know then that he is a part of something real andhe will catch the rhythm of the mass and glory in the fact that he isa part of the mass and that the mass has meaning. He will begin tofeel great and powerful." McGregor smiled grimly. "That is what thegreat leaders of armies have known," he whispered. "And they have soldmen out. They have used that knowledge to subdue men, to make themserve their own little ends."

　　McGregor continued to look back at the men and in an odd sort of wayto wonder at himself and the thought that had come to him. "It can bedone," he presently said aloud. "It will be done by some one,sometime. Why not by me?"

　　They buried Nance McGregor in the deep hole dug by her son before thelog on the hillside. On the morning of his arrival he had securedpermission of the mining company who owned the land to make this theburial place of the McGregors.

　　When the service over the grave was finished he looked about him atthe miners, standing uncovered along the hill and in the road leadingdown into the valley, and felt that he should like to tell them whatwas in his mind. He had an impulse to jump upon the log beside thegrave and in the presence of the green fields his father loved andacross the grave of Nance McGregor shout to them saying, "Your causeshall be my cause. My brain and strength shall be yours. Your enemiesI shall smite with my naked fist." Instead he walked rapidly past themand topping the hill went down toward the town into the gatheringnight.

　　McGregor could not sleep on that last night he was ever to spend inCoal Creek. When darkness came he went along the street and stood atthe foot of the stairs leading to the home of the undertaker'sdaughter. The emotions that had swept over him during the afternoonhad subdued his spirit and he wanted to be with some one who wouldalso be subdued and quiet. When the woman did not come down the stairsto stand in the hallway as she had done in his boyhood he went up andknocked at her door. Together they went along Main Street and climbedthe hill.

　　The undertaker's daughter walked with difficulty and was compelled tostop and sit upon a stone by the roadside. When she attempted to riseMcGregor gathered her into his arms and when she protested patted herthin shoulder with his big hand and whispered to her. "Be quiet," hesaid. "Do not talk about anything. Just be quiet."

　　The nights in the hills above mining towns are magnificent. The longvalleys, cut and slashed by the railroads and made ugly by the squalidlittle houses of the miners are half lost in the soft blackness. Outof the darkness sounds emerge. Coal cars creak and protest as they arepushed along rails. Voices cry out. With a long reverberating rattleone of the mine cars dumps its load down a metal chute into a carstanding on the railroad tracks. In the winter little fires arestarted along the tracks by the workmen who are employed about thetipple and on summer nights the moon comes out and touches with wildbeauty the banks of black smoke that drift upward from the long rowsof coke ovens.

　　With the sick woman in his arms McGregor sat in silence on thehillside above Coal Creek and let new thoughts and new impulses playwith his spirit. The love for the figure of his mother that had cometo him during the afternoon returned and he took the woman of the minecountry into his arms and held her closely against his breast.

　　The struggling man in the hills of his own country, who was trying toclear his soul of the hatred of men bred in him by the disorder oflife, lifted his head and pressed the body of the undertaker'sdaughter hard against his own body. The woman, understanding his mood,picked with her thin fingers at his coat and wished she might diethere in the darkness in the arms of the man she loved. When he becameconscious of her presence and relaxed the grip of his arms about hershoulders she lay still and waited for him to forget again and againto press her tightly and let her feel in her worn-out body his massivestrength and virility.

　　"It is a job. It is something big I can try to do," he whispered tohimself and in fancy saw the great disorderly city on the westernplains rocked by the swing and rhythm of men, aroused and awakeningwith their bodies a song of new life.