THE EGG

by Sherwood Anderson

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 farm-hand 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 farm-

hands. In town he drank several glasses of beer and stood about in Ben

Head's saloon--crowded on Saturday evenings with visiting farm-hands.

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 school-teacher, 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 school-teacher

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 some day rule men and cities. At any rate

she induced father to give up his place as a farm-hand, 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. Vermin 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 centre 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

pullethood and from that into dead hen-hood, 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 time 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 quickly 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 farm-hands.

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--"EAT HERE"--that was

so seldom obeyed. A show case 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.

"Hippity Hop To The Barber Shop," I sang shrilly. Then I stopped and

looked 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 north-bound 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 inn-

keeper 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 mother would spring up in the

breasts of the younger people of the town of Bidwell. In the evening

bright happy groups would come singing down Turner's Pike. They would

troop shouting with joy and laughter into our place. There would be

song and festivity. I do not mean to give the impression that father

spoke so elaborately of the matter. He was as I have said an

uncommunicative man. "They want some place to go. I tell you they want

some place to go," he said over and over. That was as far as he got. My

own imagination has filled in the blanks.

For two or three weeks this notion of father's invaded our house. We

did not talk much, but in our daily lives tried earnestly to make

smiles take the place of glum looks. Mother smiled at the boarders and

I, catching the infection, smiled at our cat. Father became a little

feverish in his anxiety to please. There was no doubt, lurking

somewhere in him, a touch of the spirit of the showman. He did not

waste much of his ammunition on the railroad men he served at night but

seemed to be waiting for a young man or woman from Bidwell to come in

to show what he could do. On the counter in the restaurant there was a

wire basket kept always filled with eggs, and it must have been before

his eyes when the idea of being entertaining was born in his brain.

There was something pre-natal about the way eggs kept themselves

connected with the development of his idea. At any rate an egg ruined

his new impulse in life. Late one night I was awakened by a roar of

anger coming from father's throat. Both mother and I sat upright in our

beds. With trembling hands she lighted a lamp that stood on a table by

her head. Downstairs the front door of our restaurant went shut with a

bang and in a few minutes father tramped up the stairs. He held an egg

in his hand and his hand trembled as though he were having a chill.

There was a half insane light in his eyes. As he stood glaring at us I

was sure he intended throwing the egg at either mother or me. Then he

laid it gently on the table beside the lamp and dropped on his knees

beside mother's bed. He began to cry like a boy and I, carried away by

his grief, cried with him. The two of us filled the little upstairs

room with our wailing voices. It is ridiculous, but of the picture we

made I can remember only the fact that mother's hand continually

stroked the bald path that ran across the top of his head. I have

forgotten what mother said to him and how she induced him to tell her

of what had happened downstairs. His explanation also has gone out of

my mind. I remember only my own grief and fright and the shiny path

over father's head glowing in the lamp light as he knelt by the bed.

As to what happened downstairs. For some unexplainable reason I know

the story as well as though I had been a witness to my father's

discomfiture. One in time gets to know many unexplainable things. On

that evening young Joe Kane, son of a merchant of Bidwell, came to

Pickleville to meet his father, who was expected on the ten o'clock

evening train from the South. The train was three hours late and Joe

came into our place to loaf about and to wait for its arrival. The

local freight train came in and the freight crew were fed. Joe was left

alone in the restaurant with father.

From the moment he came into our place the Bidwell young man must have

been puzzled by my father's actions. It was his notion that father was

angry at him for hanging around. He noticed that the restaurant keeper

was apparently disturbed by his presence and he thought of going out.

However, it began to rain and he did not fancy the long walk to town

and back. He bought a five-cent cigar and ordered a cup of coffee. He

had a newspaper in his pocket and took it out and began to read. "I'm

waiting for the evening train. It's late," he said apologetically.

For a long time father, whom Joe Kane had never seen before, remained

silently gazing at his visitor. He was no doubt suffering from an

attack of stage fright. As so often happens in life he had thought so

much and so often of the situation that now confronted him that he was

somewhat nervous in its presence.

For one thing, he did not know what to do with his hands. He thrust one

of them nervously over the counter and shook hands with Joe Kane. "How-

de-do," he said. Joe Kane put his newspaper down and stared at him.

Father's eye lighted on the basket of eggs that sat on the counter and

he began to talk. "Well," he began hesitatingly, "well, you have heard

of Christopher Columbus, eh?" He seemed to be angry. "That Christopher

Columbus was a cheat," he declared emphatically. "He talked of making

an egg stand on its end. He talked, he did, and then he went and broke

the end of the egg."

My father seemed to his visitor to be beside himself at the duplicity

of Christopher Columbus. He muttered and swore. He declared it was

wrong to teach children that Christopher Columbus was a great man when,

after all, he cheated at the critical moment. He had declared he would

make an egg stand on end and then when his bluff had been called he had

done a trick. Still grumbling at Columbus, father took an egg from the

basket on the counter and began to walk up and down. He rolled the egg

between the palms of his hands. He smiled genially. He began to mumble

words regarding the effect to be produced on an egg by the electricity

that comes out of the human body. He declared that without breaking its

shell and by virtue of rolling it back and forth in his hands he could

stand the egg on its end. He explained that the warmth of his hands and

the gentle rolling movement he gave the egg created a new centre of

gravity, and Joe Kane was mildly interested. "I have handled thousands

of eggs," father said. "No one knows more about eggs than I do."

He stood the egg on the counter and it fell on its side. He tried the

trick again and again, each time rolling the egg between the palms of

his hands and saying the words regarding the wonders of electricity and

the laws of gravity. When after a half hour's effort he did succeed in

making the egg stand for a moment he looked up to find that his visitor

was no longer watching. By the time he had succeeded in calling Joe

Kane's attention to the success of his effort the egg had again rolled

over and lay on its side.

Afire with the showman's passion and at the same time a good deal

disconcerted by the failure of his first effort, father now took the

bottles containing the poultry monstrosities down from their place on

the shelf and began to show them to his visitor. "How would you like to

have seven legs and two heads like this fellow?" he asked, exhibiting

the most remarkable of his treasures. A cheerful smile played over his

face. He reached over the counter and tried to slap Joe Kane on the

shoulder as he had seen men do in Ben Head's saloon when he was a young

farm-hand and drove to town on Saturday evenings. His visitor was made

a little ill by the sight of the body of the terribly deformed bird

floating in the alcohol in the bottle and got up to go. Coming from

behind the counter father took hold of the young man's arm and led him

back to his seat. He grew a little angry and for a moment had to turn

his face away and force himself to smile. Then he put the bottles back

on the shelf. In an outburst of generosity he fairly compelled Joe Kane

to have a fresh cup of coffee and another cigar at his expense. Then he

took a pan and filling it with vinegar, taken from a jug that sat

beneath the counter, he declared himself about to do a new trick. "I

will heat this egg in this pan of vinegar," he said. "Then I will put

it through the neck of a bottle without breaking the shell. When the

egg is inside the bottle it will resume its normal shape and the shell

will become hard again. Then I will give the bottle with the egg in it

to you. You can take it about with you wherever you go. People will

want to know how you got the egg in the bottle. Don't tell them. Keep

them guessing. That is the way to have fun with this trick."

Father grinned and winked at his visitor. Joe Kane decided that the man

who confronted him was mildly insane but harmless. He drank the cup of

coffee that had been given him and began to read his paper again. When

the egg had been heated in vinegar father carried it on a spoon to the

counter and going into a back room got an empty bottle. He was angry

because his visitor did not watch him as he began to do his trick, but

nevertheless went cheerfully to work. For a long time he struggled,

trying to get the egg to go through the neck of the bottle. He put the

pan of vinegar back on the stove, intending to reheat the egg, then

picked it up and burned his fingers. After a second bath in the hot

vinegar the shell of the egg had been softened a little but not enough

for his purpose. He worked and worked and a spirit of desperate

determination took possession of him. When he thought that at last the

trick was about to be consummated the delayed train came in at the

station and Joe Kane started to go nonchalantly out at the door. Father

made a last desperate effort to conquer the egg and make it do the

thing that would establish his reputation as one who knew how to

entertain guests who came into his restaurant. He worried the egg. He

attempted to be somewhat rough with it. He swore and the sweat stood

out on his forehead. The egg broke under his hand. When the contents

spurted over his clothes, Joe Kane, who had stopped at the door, turned

and laughed.

A roar of anger rose from my father's throat. He danced and shouted a

string of inarticulate words. Grabbing another egg from the basket on

the counter, he threw it, just missing the head of the young man as he

dodged through the door and escaped.

Father came upstairs to mother and me with an egg in his hand. I do not

know what he intended to do. I imagine he had some idea of destroying

it, of destroying all eggs, and that he intended to let mother and me

see him begin. When, however, he got into the presence of mother

something happened to him. He laid the egg gently on the table and

dropped on his knees by the bed as I have already explained. He later

decided to close the restaurant for the night and to come upstairs and

get into bed. When he did so he blew out the light and after much

muttered conversation both he and mother went to sleep. I suppose I

went to sleep also, but my sleep was troubled.

I awoke at dawn and for a long time looked at the egg that lay on the

table. I wondered why eggs had to be and why from the egg came the hen

who again laid the egg. The question got into my blood. It has stayed

there, I imagine, because I am the son of my father. At any rate, the

problem remains unsolved in my mind. And that, I conclude, is but

another evidence of the complete and final triumph of the egg--at

least as far as my family is concerned.