Summary of "Death in the Woods" by Sherwood Anderson

Summary

Grimes, old woman was so hard worked of the wheat harvest under the domination of a German farmer. So Jake Grimes who belonged to a family that had had money once got his wife off a German farmer.

She married Jake and had a son and daughter, but the daughter died. Then she settled down to feed stock. That was her job. Jake always had a lot of big dogs around the house, that stood near the unused sawmill near the creek. He was always trading horses when he wasn’t stealing something and had a lot of poor bony ones about. He went into for a threshing outfit and ran it for several years, but it did not pay. People did not trust him. When the son grew up he was just like the father. They got drunk together. If here wasn’t anything to eat in the house when they came home the old man gave his old woman a cut over the head. She had a few chickens of her own and had to kill one of them in a hurry. When they were all killed she wouldn’t have any eggs to sell when she went to town, and then what would she do? She had got the habit of silence-that was fixed. How was she going to get everything fed?-that was her problem. The dogs had to be fed. There wasn’t enough hay in the barn for the horses and the cow. They left everything at home for her to manage and she had no money. Also the stock in the barn cried to her hungrily, the dogs followed her about. In the winter the hens laid few enough eggs. One day in winter the old woman went off to town with a few eggs and the dogs followed her. When she had got to town and was trading liver and the heavy bones with a few eggs in the butcher. The old woman had to get back before darkness came if she could. The dogs followed at her heels, sniffing at the heavy grain bag she had fastened on her back. Times so passed and she was tired. With the pack on her back she went painfully along across an open field, wading in the deep snow, and got into the woods. There was a path, but it was hard to follow. The path ran along the side of the clearing, and when she got there the old woman sat down to rest at the foot of a tree. She must have slept for a time. When you are about so cold you can’t get any colder.  There were four Grimes dogs that had followed Mrs. Grimes into town, all tall gaunt fellows. The dogs in the clearing, before the old woman, had caught two or three rabbits and their immediate hunger had been satisfied. They began to play, running in circles in the clearing. Round and round they ran, each dog’s nose at the tail of the next dog. She wouldn’t be very cold now, just drowsy. Life hangs on a long time. The running of the dogs may have been a kind of death ceremony. Time passed the old woman died softly and quietly. When she was dead and when one of the Crimes dogs had come to her and had found her dead all the dogs stopped running. There was the pack on her back, the grain bag containing the piece of salt pork, the liver the butcher had given her, the dog-meat, the soup-bones. It had been a big haul for the old woman. It was a big haul for the dogs now. One of the Grimes dogs sprang suddenly out from among the others and began worrying the pack on the old woman’s back. All of them sank their teeth into the grain bag the old woman had fastened with ropes to her back. They had got the meat out of the grain bag, that was all. Her body was frozen stiff when it was found, and the shoulders were so narrow and the body so slight that in death it looked like the body of some charming young girl.

After the death of this woman, I went that places the woman had died with the blacksmith, the hunter, the marshal and several others. I had seen everything, had seen the oval in the snow, like a miniature race track, where the dogs had run, had seen how the men were mystified, had seen the white bare young-looking shoulders, had heard the whispered comments of the men. The men were simply mystified. The whole thing, the story of the old woman’s death, was to me as I grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood. The woman who died was one destined to feed animal life. Anyway, that is all she ever did. She was feeding animal life before she was born, as a child, as a young woman working on the farm of the German, after she married, when she grew old and when she died. She fed animal life in cows, in chickens, in pigs, in horses, in dogs, in men. Her daughter had died in childhood and with her one son she had no articulate relations. On the night when she died she was hurrying homeward, bearing on her body food for animal life. She died in the clearing in the woods and even after her death continued feeding animal life.

 

Bibliography

Masami Nishikawa., (1958), Modern American Short Stories (Second Series), Tokyo: Kenkyusha(日本語訳:宮本陽吉、1970年、アメリカ短編24、集英社)