The Egg by Sherwood Anderson
-
The Egg
By Sherwood Anderson
[1876-1941]
From
Sherwood
Anderson's
second
short
story
collection,
The
Triumph
of
the
Egg (New
Y
ork:
Huebsch, 1921), pp 46-63; originally,
Triumph of the
Egg,
in
Dial,
number
68,
March,
1920.
[Project
Gutenberg
has
Winesburg,
Ohio
in
.]
MY
FATHER
was,
I
am
sure,
intended
by
nature
to
be
a
cheerful,
kindly
man.
Until
he was thirty-four
years old
he worked as a farmhand
for
a
man named Thomas
Butterworth
whose place
lay
near
the town
of
Bidwell, Ohio. He
had
then a
horse of
his
own
and
on
Saturday
evenings
drove
into
town
to
spend
a
few
hours
in
social
intercourse
with other
farmhands. In town
he drank
several
glasses of beer and
stood
about
in
Ben
Head's
saloon
--crowded on Saturday
evenings with
visiting
farmhands.
Songs
were
sung
and
glasses
thumped
on
the
bar.
At
ten
o'clock
father
drove
home
along
a
lonely
country
road,
made
his
horse
comfortable
for
the
night
and
himself
went
to bed, quite happy in his position in life. He
had at that time no notion of trying
to
rise in the world.
It was
in the spring of
his thirty-
fifth
year that
father
married
my
mother, then a
country
schoolteacher,
and
in
the
following
spring
I
came
wriggling
and
crying
into
the
world.
Something
happened
to
the
two
people.
They
became
ambitious.
The
American passion for
getting up in the world took possession of them.
It
may have been
that
mother was responsible. Being a
schoolteacher she had
no
doubt
read books and
magazines. She
had, I
presume, read of
how
Garfield,
Lincoln,
and
other
Americans
rose
from
poverty
to
fame
and
greatness
and
as
I
lay
beside
her--in
the
days
of
her
lying-in--
she
may
have
dreamed
that
I
would
someday
rule
men and cities.
At any rate she
induced
father to give
up his place
as a farmhand, sell
his
horse and embark on an
independent enterprise of
his own. She
was a
tall
silent
woman
with a
long nose and
troubled
grey eyes. For herself she
wanted
nothing. For
father and myself she was incurably
ambitious.
The
first
venture
into which
the
two people went turned out
badly
.
They rented
ten acres of poor stony land on
Griggs's Road, eight miles from Bidwell, and
launched
into chicken raising. I grew
into boyhood on the place and got my first
impressions of
life
there.
From
the beginning they were
impressions of disaster and
if,
in
my turn, I
am a
gloomy
man
inclined to
see
the darker side of
life, I
attribute
it
to the
fact that
what
should
have
been
for
me
the
happy
joyous
days
of
childhood
were
spent
on
a
chicken farm.
One
unversed
in
such
matters can
have
no
notion of
the
many and
tragic things
that can
happen to a
chicken. It
is born out of an egg,
lives
for a
few
weeks as a
tiny
fluffy
thing
such
as
you
will
see
pictured
on
Easter
cards,
then
becomes
hideously
naked, eats
quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of
your father's brow, gets
diseases
called pip,
cholera, and other
names, stands
looking
with stupid eyes
at
the
sun, becomes sick and
dies. A few hens and now and then a rooster,
intended to serve
God's
mysterious ends, struggle
through
to
maturity
.
The
hens
lay eggs out of which
come
other
chickens
and
the
dreadful
cycle
is
thus
made
complete.
It
is
all
unbelievably
complex.
Most
philosophers
must
have
been
raised
on
chicken
farms.
One
hopes
for
so
much
from
a
chicken
and
is
so
dreadfully
disillusioned.
Small
chickens, just setting out on the
journey of life, look so bright and alert and they
are in
fact
so
dreadfully
stupid.
They
are
so
much
like
people
they
mix
one
up
in
one's
judgments of
life.
If disease does
not kill
them they wait
until
your expectations
are
thoroughly
aroused
and then walk
under the
wheels of
a wagon--to
go squashed and
dead
back
to
their
maker.
V
ermin
infest
their
youth,
and
fortunes
must
be
spent
for
curative
powders.
In
later
life
I
have
seen
how
a
literature
has
been
built
up
on
the
subject of
fortunes to be
made out of the raising of chickens. It
is
intended to be read
by the
gods who have
just eaten of the tree of the knowledge
of
good and evil. It
is a
hopeful
literature
and
declares
that
much
may
be
done
by
simple
ambitious
people
who own a
few
hens.
Do
not
be
led
astray by
it. It was
not
written
for
you.
Go
hunt
for
gold
on
the
frozen
hills
of
Alaska,
put
your
faith
in
the
honesty
of
a
politician,
believe
if
you
will
that the world
is daily
growing better and
that
good
will
triumph
over evil, but do
not read and believe the
literature
that
is written concerning the
hen.
It was not written for
you.
I,
however,
digress.
My
tale
does
not
primarily
concern
itself
with
the
hen.
If
correctly
told
it will center on the egg. For ten
years
my
father
and
mother
struggled
to
make our chicken
farm pay and then they
gave
up that struggle and began another.
They
moved
into
the town of Bidwell, Ohio and embarked
in the restaurant business.
After ten years of worry with
incubators that did not hatch, and with tiny--and
in their
own
way
lovely--balls
of
fluff
that
passed
on
into
semi-
naked
pullerhood
and
from
that
into
dead
henhood,
we
threw
all
aside
and
packing
our
belongings
on
a
wagon
drove down Griggs's
Road
toward Bidwell, a
tiny
caravan of
hope
looking
for a
new
place
from which to start on our upward journey through
life.
We must have been a
sad looking lot, not, I fancy
, unlike
refugees fleeing from a
battlefield.
Mother and I walked in the road. The wagon that
contained our goods had
been borrowed
for the day
from
Mr.
Albert Griggs, a
neighbor. Out of
its
sides stuck
the
legs
of
cheap
chairs
and
at
the
back
of
the
pile
of
beds,
tables,
and
boxes
filled
with
kitchen utensils was a crate of live chickens, and
on top of that the baby carriage
in
which I
had been
wheeled about
in
my
infancy
. Why
we stuck to the baby carriage
I
don't
know.
It
was
unlikely
other
children
would
be
born
and
the
wheels
were
broken. People who have
few possessions cling tightly to those they have.
That is one
of the facts that make life
so discouraging.
Father
rode on top of the wagon. He was then a bald-
headed man of forty-five, a
little
fat
and
from
long
association
with
mother
and
the
chickens
he
had
become
habitually silent and discouraged. All
during our ten years on the chicken farm he had
worked as
a
laborer on
neighboring
farms and
most of the
money
he
had
earned
had
been spent for
remedies to cure chicken diseases, on Wilmer's
White Wonder Cholera
Cure
or
Professor
Bidlow's
Egg
Producer
or
some
other
preparations
that
mother
found advertised in
the poultry papers. There were two little patches
of hair on father's
head just above
his ears. I remember that as a child I
used to sit
looking
at
him
when
he
had
gone to
sleep
in a chair before the stove on
Sunday afternoons
in the winter. I
had at that rime already begun to read
books and have notions of my own and the bald
path that led over the top of his head
was, I fancied, something like a broad road, such
a road as Caesar
might have
made on which to
lead
his
legions out of Rome and
into
the wonders of an
unknown world. The tufts of hair that grew above
father's ears were,
I thought,
like
forests. I fell
into a half-sleeping, half-waking state
and dreamed I was
a
tiny
thing
going
along
the
road
into
a
far
beautiful
place
where
there
were
no
chicken
farms and where life was a happy eggless affair.
One
might
write
a book concerning our
flight
from the chicken
farm
into town.
Mother and I
walked the
entire eight
miles--she
to be
sure
that
nothing
fell
from
the
wagon and I to
see the
wonders of the
world. On
the seat of the
wagon beside
father
was his greatest treasure. I will tell
you of that.
On a chicken
farm where
hundreds and even
thousands of chickens come out of
eggs, surprising things sometimes
happen.
Grotesques
are born out of eggs
as out
of
people.
The
accident
does
not
often
occur--perhaps
once
in
a
thousand
births.
A
chicken is, you see, born
that has four legs, two pairs of wings, two heads
or what not.
The things do not
live. They
go quickiy back
to the hand of their
maker that
has
for a
moment
trembled.
The
fact
that
the
poor
little
things
could
not
live
was
one
of
the
tragedies
of
life to
father.
He
had some sort of
notion
that
if
he could but bring
into
henhood or roosterhood a
five-legged
hen or a
two-headed
rooster
his
fortune
would
be made.
He dreamed of
taking
the wonder about to county
fairs and of
growing rich
by exhibiting it to other farmhands.
At
any
rate
he
saved
all
the
little
monstrous
things
that
had
been
born
on
our
chicken
farm.
They
were
preserved
in
alcohol
and
put
each
in
its
own
glass
bottle.
These
he
had
carefully put
into a box and on our
journey
into
town
it was carried on
the
wagon
seat
beside
him.
He
drove
the
horses
with
one
hand
and
with
the
other
clung to the box. When we got to our
destination the box was taken down at once and
the
bottles
removed.
All
during
our
days
as
keepers
of
a
restaurant
in
the
town
of
Bidwell,
Ohio,
the
grotesques
in
their
little
glass
bottles
sat
on
a
shelf
back
of
the
counter.
Mother
sometimes
protested
but
father
was
a
rock
on
the
subject
of
his
treasure. The
grotesques were, he declared,
valuable. People,
he said,
liked to
look at
strange and wonderful things.
Did
I
say
that
we
embarked
in
the
restaurant
business
in
the
town
of
Bidwell,
Ohio?
I
exaggerated
a
little.
The
town
itself
lay
at
the
foot
of
a
low
hill
and
on
the
shore of a small river. The railroad
did not run through the town and the station was a
mile away to
the
north at a place called Pickleville.
There
had been a cider
mill and
pickle factory at
the station, but before the time of our coming
they had both gone out
of business. In
the
morning
and
in the evening busses came down to the
station along
a road called
Turner's Pike from the
hotel
on the
main street of
Bidwell. Our
going to
the out-of-the-way place to embark
in the
restaurant business
was
mother's
idea. She
talked of
it
for
a
year and then one day went off and
rented
an empty store
building
opposite
the
railroad
station.
It
was
her
idea
that
the
restaurant
would
be
profitable.
Travelling
men, she said,
would be always waiting around to
take
trains out of town
and
town
people
would
come
to
the
station
to
await
incoming
trains.
They
would
come
to
the
restaurant
to
buy
pieces
of
pie
and
drink
coffee.
Now
that
I
am
older
I
know that
she had another motive in going. She was ambitious
for me. She wanted me
to rise in the
world, to get into a town school and become a man
of the towns.
At
Pickleville
father and
mother
worked
hard as
they always
had done. At
first
there was the
necessity of
putting our place
into shape to be a
restaurant. That took a
month. Father
built a shelf on which
he put tins of
vegetables. He painted
a
sign on
which
he
put
his
name
in
large
red
letters.
Below
his
name
was
the
sharp
command--
T
HERE
was
so
seldom
obeyed.
A
showcase
was
bought
and
filled
with cigars and tobacco. Mother scrubbed the
floor and the walls of the room. I
went
to
school
in
the
town
and
was
glad
to
be
away
from
the
farm
and
from
the
presence of the discouraged, sad-
looking chickens. Still
I was
not very joyous.
In the
evening I walked home from school along
Turner's Pike and remembered the children
I
had
seen
playing
in
the
town
school
yard.
A
troop
of
little
girls
had
gone
hopping
about and singing. I
tried
that. Down along
the
frozen
road
I went
hopping
solemnly
on one leg.
doubtfully about. I was afraid of being
seen
in
my
gay
mood. It
must
have seemed to
me that I was
doing a thing that should not be done by one who,
like myself, had been
raised on a
chicken farm where death was a daily visitor.
Mother
decided
that
our
restaurant
should
remain
open
at
night.
At
ten
in
the
evening
a
passenger
train
went
north
past
our
door
followed
by
a
local
freight.
The
freight
crew
had
switching
to
do
in
Pickleville
and
when
the
work
was
done
they
came to our restaurant
for hot coffee and food. Sometimes one of them
ordered a fried
egg.
In
the
morning
at
four
they
returned
northbound
and
again
visited
us.
A
little
trade began to grow up. Mother slept at
night and during the day tended the restaurant
and fed our boarders while father
slept. He slept in the same bed mother had
occupied
during
the
night and I
went off to the
town of Bidwell and to school. During
the
long
nights,
while
mother and I slept,
father cooked meats that were to go
into sandwiches
for the
lunch baskets of our boarders. Then an idea in
regard to getting up in the world
came
into his head. The American spirit took hold of
him. He also became ambitious.
In
the
long
nights
when
there
was
little
to do
father
had time
to think.
That
was
his undoing. He decided
that
he
had
in
the past been an
unsuccessful
man because
he
had not been cheerful enough and that
in the future he would adopt a cheerful outlook
on life. In the early morning he came
upstairs and got into bed with mother. She woke
and the two talked. From my bed in the
corner I listened.
It
was
father's
idea
that
both
he
and
mother
should
try
to
entertain
the
people
who
came to eat at our restaurant. I cannot
now remember
his
words, but
he
gave the
impression of one
about
to become
in some
obscure
way a kind of public
entertainer.
When
people,
particularly
young
people
from
the
town
of
Bidwell,
came
into
our
place, as on
very
rare
occasions
they did, bright entertaining
conversation was to be
made.
From father's words I gathered that something of
the jolly innkeeper effect was
to
be
sought.
Mother
must
have
been
doubtful
from
the
first,
but
she
said
nothing
discouraging.
It
was
father's
notion
that
a
passion
for
the
company
of
himself
and