Darkness began to spread over the fields as Ray Pearson ran on and on.  His breath came in little sobs.  When he came to the fence at the edge of the road and confronted Hal Winters, all dressed up and smoking a pipe as he walked jauntily along, he could not have told what he thought or what he wanted.

Ray Pearson lost his nerve and this is really the end of the story of what happened to him.  It was almost dark when he got to the fence and he put his hands on the top bar and stood staring.  Hal Winters jumped a ditch and coming up close to Ray put his hands into his pockets and laughed.  He seemed to have lost his own sense of what had happened in the corn field and when he put up a strong hand and took hold of the lapel of Ray’s coat he shook the old man as he might have shaken a dog that had misbehaved.

“You came to tell me, eh?” he said.  “Well, never mind telling me anything.  I’m not a coward and I’ve already made up my mind.”  He laughed again and jumped back across the ditch.  “Nell ain’t no fool,” he said.  “She didn’t ask me to marry her.  I want to marry her.  I want to settle down and have kids.”

Ray Pearson also laughed.  He felt like laughing at himself and all the world.

As the form of Hal Winters disappeared in the dusk that lay over the road that led to Winesburg, he turned and walked slowly back across the fields to where he had left his torn overcoat.  As he went some memory of pleasant evenings spent with the thin-legged children in the tumble-down house by the creek must have come into his mind, for he muttered words.  “It’s just as well.  Whatever I told him would have been a lie,” he said softly, and then his form also disappeared into the darkness of the fields.

DRINK

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.