Departure (16 page)

“You stay here, or your old man'll beat your hide off,” Svenson said.

“My old man can go to hell, and you too,” Tom Anderson replied, and with that he shook the mill dust out of his clothes and set out on the dirt road that led north through the wheat fields.

Often enough afterwards, in the years that followed, Tom Anderson thought of that day, and sometimes he regretted that he had walked off that way, with never a word of sweetness or departure to his mother and father. But neither had he ever had a good word from them, only beatings and blows as one of seven children, and turned out to work when he was eleven, and not a day of schooling in his life. Stupid he was, as they told him often enough, and schooling was for those with brains—although he never understood the logic of that. So while he regretted his leave-taking, he did not regret it too much, nor was he given to brooding about it overmuch.

At seventeen, he had three years of work in the lumber camps behind him, and he stood six feet and two inches in his stockings, weighed one hundred and ninety pounds, and could use an ax and a saw as well as the next man. The women he saw, the bad women who lived around the camps, in the little towns near by, thought he was older than he was and considered him very handsome, what with his light blue eyes, his sandy hair, and his broad, even-featured face. But they also thought him stupid, not knowing his age and the fact that he had known no other women before them. The reputation they gave him as a “dumb Swede” spread through the camps, and because Tom Anderson was slow-going and good-natured, it was never seriously contested. There were other factors too. Most of the men spent their spare time reading Western magazines or Nick Carter novels; Tom Anderson could not read, but he was ashamed to admit it to anyone; he bought a corncob pipe, learned to smoke it, and spent hours just sitting and doing nothing in particular, except smoking his pipe. Because he was big and strong, he avoided fights; if prodded into one, he usually did well enough.

Then the work in the lumber camps fell off, and men were laid off right and left. A Wobbly organizer appeared, and some of the men listened to him and others didn't. Tom Anderson didn't. Ever since he had worked in the flour mill and earned four dollars a week, two of which were given over to his father and two of which he paid back for room and board, he had been jealous of the wages he made. Now the Wobblies seemed to threaten his right to work as he pleased, and he talked against them. He had been laid off, but the straw boss hired him back on at five dollars more a month. It was all right for a while, but then a bunch of the men ganged up on him and gave him an awful beating. Strangely enough, he didn't hold the beating against them, nor was that the reason he pulled out. He had never really been very much afraid of anything, and he would not have been afraid to take another beating if he had to. It was just that he was sick and tired of lumbering, and he thought if he were to make a new start somewhere else, maybe people would act differently toward him and he would get away from the business of being a “dumb Swede.”

He caught a string of boxcars south, and for the next five years he drifted from job to job, from Minneapolis to St. Louis to El Paso to San Francisco and Seattle. But everywhere it was the same, and wherever he went, they caught on sooner or later to the fact that he was just a big dumb Swede. Anderson was a good worker, and even if he had money in his pocket, he couldn't stay idle. The need for work, the drive for work was deeply imbedded within him. Almost since he could remember now, the principal avocation and expression of his life was in work with his hands.

He had the large, square, beautiful hands of big-boned, hard-working men. He didn't know it, of course. He met a girl once, just a girl in a house, who looked at his hands and saw a little of what Rodin or Epstein would have seen in them, and her face lit up; but she didn't know how to put it into words and you don't tell a big, blond squarehead that his hands are beautiful. She stared at his hands until he asked her what she was looking at, and then she said:

“Nothing, nothing at all.”

But for a long time afterwards she remembered those hands.

Anderson never became much of a drinker. He didn't like the stuff, and when he had a pile, most of it went on women. Moving from job to job, the steel mills, a cannery, the railroad, the stockyards, reaping, picking fruit, pick and shovel, pouring concrete, a cowcamp—moving along that way, he never met any girls that he could just get to know and go around with. Women lived in a
house;
that was the begining and the end of it for him.

This wasn't good, and one time, working on a right of way in Idaho, he met up with another Swede, Jack Orlaffson, a man of about fifty who had been born in the old country. Tom Anderson never made many friends, because he was the sort of open-handed young fellow who could be taken advantage of too easily, and so many were willing to make a mark of him that there was hardly any opening for someone to make a friend of him. But Orlaffson took a real and sincere liking to him. Anderson was twenty-three years old, and Orlaffson told him that he ought to think of settling down.

“You been a working man,” Orlaffson said to him. “You get a dollar and you spend a dollar. But how many fellows like you I see been working men, been just a bum sooner or later.”

“I never been without a job,” Tom Anderson said.

“Well, you just wait until hard times come. You listen to me, you get a nice girl. Get a family. A man got nothing in world outside a family.”

“Where am I going to find a nice girl?” Tom Anderson wondered.

“Just look around you, I tell you, and you see a nice girl all right. You see one.”

So Tom Anderson looked around him, but since most of the places he was outside of the job were whorehouses, beer halls, and dance halls, he didn't see many nice girls. Then the right of way was finished, and he and Orlaffson went to Butte, where they worked in a mine.

Here again, Tom Anderson ran into the Wobblies. They came into Butte to work on copper, and Anderson's mistrust was shared by Orlaffson. “They got nothing for us,” Orlaffson said. “They're crazy as hell with strike, strike, strike—all the time.” Orlaffson had two children with his mother-in-law in Omaha; a widower, he sent every penny he made there. When the Wobblies sent a deputation of three big Swedes to talk with Anderson and Orlaffson, Orlaffson shook his head stubbornly:

“I never been a union man—I don't be one now.”

“I don't be one,” said Anderson. “I look after myself.” Which was strange, because he was a mark for anyone who was broke two days after pay day, or who had a sob story to tell him.

“Okay,” they said. “Okay—you big dumb Swede. We see you today and tomorrow you'll be out there scabbing.”

But when the strike broke, both Orlaffson and Anderson pulled out and went to Chicago. Neither of them wanted trouble; they just wanted to work and hold down their jobs. But there were bad times in Chicago then, and in the rest of America too. Orlaffson felt it more than Anderson; Anderson was strong as an ox, and he could find certain kinds of work when they turned away anyone past forty, regardless of strength. All that cold, long winter, Anderson gave his friend money. To a degree, he adopted Orlaffson's two children as his own responsibility, and twice he scabbed so that he could earn money for the two children he had never seen. Orlaffson was very grateful, and Tom Anderson was happy that he had found a real friend.

Then Tom Anderson found a steady job in the big harvester plant and he found a girl. Never in this wildest dreams would he have hoped for that kind of girl. She had yellow hair that was like fine, spun-metal wire, and she had beautiful red lips and lovely features. She had a sensuous, full figure, and Tom Anderson considered her the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Her name was Jane Bogan, and she affectionately called Anderson “my big, beautiful dumb Swede.” She was beautiful and she called him beautiful! He met her in a dance hall, and a week later they were married. After that, he introduced her to Orlaffson. The older man was nice to her, but she called him “Pop” and said later to Anderson:

“So that's your friend! Why he's a worse squarehead than you are!”

Anderson tried to explain, but he was not nimble enough with words to say what he felt for Orlaffson. The older man was still not working steadily, but Jane wouldn't hear of giving him money.

“How much does he owe you now?” she asked Anderson.

“I don't know—I don't keep track.”

“You mean you been feeding that squarehead for a year and you didn't keep track of it?”

“That's right,” Anderson said miserably, feeling that she knew, finally and forever, what a complete fool he was. He never blamed her for anything after that, but went around immersed in his own guilt. At first, they had a fine bodily relationship, but that finished after she became pregnant and got some medicine from the druggist to purge herself with. She wouldn't go near him after that, and Anderson was so miserable he couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, and went through his motions at work like an automation. He went to Jack Orlaffson with his troubles, but Orlaffson only shrugged his shoulders. Orlaffson had plenty of his own troubles.

Then Orlaffson went back to Omaha, and that was the last Anderson ever saw of him. It was a real blow to Anderson; he had never had a friend like Jack Orlaffson before; he never hoped to have one again. Orlaffson was the only person who had never called him a dumb Swede, who seemed to understand him; Orlaffson was the only person he had ever been able to talk to.

His wife was pleased. “It's about time you shook that squarehead,” she said.

And for—that he had no answer. He had thought that marriage meant a home and children, but after the second year, Jane didn't bother being home when he arrived. He ate in restaurants or he prepared his own food, and even when some of the men in the plant told him that they had seen his wife here and there, drinking and dancing, he didn't have the heart to talk about it, she was so beautiful and smart, and he such a dumb Swede!

So it went, for three years, and then he came home one night and found a note from her. The note said that she was going away to New York. She liked him, it said, but there was no use remaining together, because they were so obviously unsuited for each other. It took a long while for him to work up enough courage to go next door to the Grahams and ask them to read the note. He was not only ashamed of being illiterate, but he was ashamed and frightened of what he suspected would be in the note.

After he heard the note read, he cried for the first time in many years. All his life he would miss her and go on wondering how he had ever been married to anything so lovely. Yet what she said was true; he didn't hate her either. It was just that they were unsuited to each other. He didn't think of a divorce, because he didn't know much about divorces or how people went about obtaining them; and down underneath he retained a faint hope that she would return to him.

Yet he couldn't go back to randying like a young colt—even if he had wanted to, which he didn't particularly. He stayed on the same job for another six months, and then he drifted on to Cleveland. In Cleveland, he worked at a steel mill, and alongside of him were two Poles who had a sister. They evidently looked upon him as a marriage prospect, taking him home with them, and making it easy for him and the sister to be together. But when they found out subsequently that Tom Anderson was married, they became very angry and threatened to beat the hell out of him.

Anderson couldn't stay still. Cleveland to St. Louis to New Orleans, where he shipped out. It was the time before America's entry into the First World War, when the U-boats were just beginning to operate on a large scale, and there were berths in plenty for men who wanted to ship. Anderson made three trips to Europe before America entered the war, and then for some reason he never quite understood, he enlisted. Maybe it was the parades and the banners and the posters, which pointed such accusing fingers at him. Whatever it was, he went in, and was put in the engineers, where his big hands found work to do. Nothing changed much. He was still the big dumb Swede, and he dug ditches, laid spur lines, and poured concrete. He never got to Europe, and when the war was over, he had eleven dollars in his pocket and an army uniform on his back.

It was at that time that a great longing to see Orlaffson came over him. He had thought first of going to New York City and attempting to find his wife, Jane; but he realized that New York was a big place and he suspected that Jane would have no use for him, even if he found her. During the war, he had been with this woman and that one, and there had even been a nice Croatian girl in Pittsburgh, where he had been stationed for a while, who had wanted to marry him. But no girl actually took the place of Jane, even partly; and he decided he would make his way out to Omaha on the freights and see Orlaffson instead. He wasn't so young any more, and he had a touch of rheumatism in his back when the weather was bad, and the heavy veins on his arms and hands were harder and higher than ever before. He thought that Orlaffson might ask him to stop by for a while and maybe live with him and the children. It didn't occur to him at all that in the years since he had seen Orlaffson the children would have grown up, and that by now Orlaffson, if alive, would have been quite an old man.

To his surprise, he discovered that there were a good many Orlaffsons in Omaha, none of whom had the first name of Jack. That left him nothing else to do but go from door to door, since now that he had come all the way to Omaha, he was determined to find his friend. He spent a whole day in that fashion, a big, broad-shouldered, rawboned Swede with sparse sandy hair, ringing bells and inquiring:

“Please, is there Jack Orlaffson, a friend of mine, living here?”

It was a time when folks were nervous about ex-servicemen, so many of whom didn't have jobs; so they should not be thought of too harshly, those who were short and snappish with Anderson. At the same time, it surprised him to learn that there were Orlaffsons so prosperous and others so poor in Omaha. There was one family in a great, beautiful mansion that looked like the governor's house itself, and there was another in a stick and tar-paper shack down by the yards. But none of them was the Orlaffson he sought.