THERE WERE ALWAYS three or four old people sitting
on the front porch of the house or puttering about
the garden of the Bentley farm. Three of the old
people were women and sisters to Jesse. They were
a colorless, soft voiced lot. Then there was a silent
old man with thin white hair who was Jesse's uncle.
The farmhouse was built of wood, a board outer-
covering over a framework of logs. It was in reality
not one house but a cluster of houses joined to-
gether in a rather haphazard manner. Inside, the
place was full of surprises. One went up steps from
the living room into the dining room and there were
always steps to be ascended or descended in passing
from one room to another. At meal times the place
was like a beehive. At one moment all was quiet,
then doors began to open, feet clattered on stairs, a
murmur of soft voices arose and people appeared
from a dozen obscure corners.
Besides the old people, already mentioned, many
others lived in the Bentley house. There were four
hired men, a woman named Aunt Callie Beebe, who
was in charge of the housekeeping, a dull-witted girl
named Eliza Stoughton, who made beds and helped
with the milking, a boy who worked in the stables,
and Jesse Bentley himself, the owner and overlord
of it all.
By the time the American Civil War had been over
for twenty years, that part of Northern Ohio where
the Bentley farms lay had begun to emerge from
pioneer life. Jesse then owned machinery for har-
vesting grain. He had built modern barns and most
of his land was drained with carefully laid tile drain,
but in order to understand the man we will have to
go back to an earlier day.
The Bentley family had been in Northern Ohio for
several generations before Jesse's time. They came
from New York State and took up land when the
country was new and land could be had at a low
price. For a long time they, in common with all the
other Middle Western people, were very poor. The
land they had settled upon was heavily wooded and
covered with fallen logs and underbrush. After the
long hard labor of clearing these away and cutting
the timber, there were still the stumps to be reck-
oned with. Plows run through the fields caught on
hidden roots, stones lay all about, on the low places
water gathered, and the young corn turned yellow,
sickened and died.
When Jesse Bentley's father and brothers had
come into their ownership of the place, much of the
harder part of the work of clearing had been done,
but they clung to old traditions and worked like
driven animals. They lived as practically all of the
farming people of the time lived. In the spring and
through most of the winter the highways leading
into the town of Winesburg were a sea of mud. The
four young men of the family worked hard all day
in the fields, they ate heavily of coarse, greasy food,
and at night slept like tired beasts on beds of straw.
Into their lives came little that was not coarse and
brutal and outwardly they were themselves coarse
and brutal. On Saturday afternoons they hitched a
team of horses to a three-seated wagon and went
off to town. In town they stood about the stoves in
the stores talking to other farmers or to the store
keepers. They were dressed in overalls and in the
winter wore heavy coats that were flecked with
mud. Their hands as they stretched them out to the
heat of the stoves were cracked and red. It was dif-
ficult for them to talk and so they for the most part
kept silent. When they had bought meat, flour,
sugar, and salt, they went into one of the Winesburg
saloons and drank beer. Under the influence of
drink the naturally strong lusts of their natures, kept
suppressed by the heroic labor of breaking up new
ground, were released. A kind of crude and animal-
like poetic fervor took possession of them. On the
road home they stood up on the wagon seats and
shouted at the stars. Sometimes they fought long
and bitterly and at other times they broke forth into
songs. Once Enoch Bentley, the older one of the
boys, struck his father, old Tom Bentley, with the
butt of a teamster's whip, and the old man seemed
likely to die. For days Enoch lay hid in the straw in
the loft of the stable ready to flee if the result of his
momentary passion turned out to be murder. He
was kept alive with food brought by his mother,
who also kept him informed of the injured man's
condition. When all turned out well he emerged
from his hiding place and went back to the work of
clearing land as though nothing had happened.
The Civil War brought a sharp turn to the fortunes
of the Bentleys and was responsible for the rise of
the youngest son, Jesse. Enoch, Edward, Harry, and
Will Bentley all enlisted and before the long war
ended they were all killed. For a time after they
went away to the South, old Tom tried to run the
place, but he was not successful. When the last of
the four had been killed he sent word to Jesse that
he would have to come home.
Then the mother, who had not been well for a
year, died suddenly, and the father became alto-
gether discouraged. He talked of selling the farm
and moving into town. All day he went about shak-
ing his head and muttering. The work in the fields
was neglected and weeds grew high in the corn. Old
Tim hired men but he did not use them intelligently.
When they had gone away to the fields in the morn-
ing he wandered into the woods and sat down on
a log. Sometimes he forgot to come home at night
and one of the daughters had to go in search of him.
When Jesse Bentley came home to the farm and
began to take charge of things he was a slight,
sensitive-looking man of twenty-two. At eighteen
he had left home to go to school to become a scholar
and eventually to become a minister of the Presbyte-
rian Church. All through his boyhood he had been
what in our country was called an "odd sheep" and
had not got on with his brothers. Of all the family
only his mother had understood him and she was
now dead. When he came home to take charge of
the farm, that had at that time grown to more than
six hundred acres, everyone on the farms about and
in the nearby town of Winesburg smiled at the idea
of his trying to handle the work that had been done
by his four strong brothers.
There was indeed good cause to smile. By the
standards of his day Jesse did not look like a man
at all. He was small and very slender and womanish
of body and, true to the traditions of young minis-
ters, wore a long black coat and a narrow black
string tie. The neighbors were amused when they
saw him, after the years away, and they were even
more amused when they saw the woman he had
married in the city.
As a matter of fact, Jesse's wife did soon go under.
That was perhaps Jesse's fault. A farm in Northern
Ohio in the hard years after the Civil War was no
place for a delicate woman, and Katherine Bentley
was delicate. Jesse was hard with her as he was with
everybody about him in those days. She tried to do
such work as all the neighbor women about her did
and he let her go on without interference. She
helped to do the milking and did part of the house-
work; she made the beds for the men and prepared
their food. For a year she worked every day from
sunrise until late at night and then after giving birth
to a child she died.
As for Jesse Bentley--although he was a delicately
built man there was something within him that
could not easily be killed. He had brown curly hair
and grey eyes that were at times hard and direct, at
times wavering and uncertain. Not only was he slen-
der but he was also short of stature. His mouth was
like the mouth of a sensitive and very determined
child. Jesse Bentley was a fanatic. He was a man
born out of his time and place and for this he suf-
fered and made others suffer. Never did he succeed
in getting what he wanted out of fife and he did not
know what he wanted. Within a very short time
after he came home to the Bentley farm he made
everyone there a little afraid of him, and his wife,
who should have been close to him as his mother
had been, was afraid also. At the end of two weeks
after his coming, old Tom Bentley made over to him
the entire ownership of the place and retired into
the background. Everyone retired into the back-
ground. In spite of his youth and inexperience, Jesse
had the trick of mastering the souls of his people.
He was so in earnest in everything he did and said
that no one understood him. He made everyone on
the farm work as they had never worked before and
yet there was no joy in the work. If things went well
they went well for Jesse and never for the people
who were his dependents. Like a thousand other
strong men who have come into the world here in
America in these later times, Jesse was but half
strong. He could master others but he could not
master himself. The running of the farm as it had
never been run before was easy for him. When he
came home from Cleveland where he had been in
school, he shut himself off from all of his people
and began to make plans. He thought about the
farm night and day and that made him successful.
Other men on the farms about him worked too hard
and were too fired to think, but to think of the farm
and to be everlastingly making plans for its success
was a relief to Jesse. It partially satisfied something
in his passionate nature. Immediately after he came
home he had a wing built on to the old house and
in a large room facing the west he had windows that
looked into the barnyard and other windows that
looked off across the fields. By the window he sat
down to think. Hour after hour and day after day
he sat and looked over the land and thought out his
new place in life. The passionate burning thing in
his nature flamed up and his eyes became hard. He
wanted to make the farm produce as no farm in his
state had ever produced before and then he wanted
something else. It was the indefinable hunger within
that made his eyes waver and that kept him always
more and more silent before people. He would have
given much to achieve peace and in him was a fear
that peace was the thing he could not achieve.
All over his body Jesse Bentley was alive. In his
small frame was gathered the force of a long line of
strong men. He had always been extraordinarily
alive when he was a small boy on the farm and later
when he was a young man in school. In the school
he had studied and thought of God and the Bible
with his whole mind and heart. As time passed and
he grew to know people better, he began to think
of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart
from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life
a thing of great importance, and as he looked about
at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived
it seemed to him that he could not bear to become
also such a clod. Although in his absorption in him-
self and in his own destiny he was blind to the fact
that his young wife was doing a strong woman's
work even after she had become large with child
and that she was killing herself in his service, he
did not intend to be unkind to her. When his father,
who was old and twisted with toil, made over to
him the ownership of the farm and seemed content
to creep away to a corner and wait for death, he
shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the old man
from his mind.
In the room by the window overlooking the land
that had come down to him sat Jesse thinking of his
own affairs. In the stables he could hear the tramp-
ing of his horses and the restless movement of his
cattle. Away in the fields he could see other cattle
wandering over green hills. The voices of men, his
men who worked for him, came in to him through
the window. From the milkhouse there was the
steady thump, thump of a churn being manipulated
by the half-witted girl, Eliza Stoughton. Jesse's mind
went back to the men of Old Testament days who
had also owned lands and herds. He remembered
how God had come down out of the skies and talked
to these men and he wanted God to notice and to
talk to him also. A kind of feverish boyish eagerness
to in some way achieve in his own life the flavor
of significance that had hung over these men took
possession of him. Being a prayerful man he spoke
of the matter aloud to God and the sound of his
own words strengthened and fed his eagerness.
"I am a new kind of man come into possession of
these fields," he declared. "Look upon me, O God,
and look Thou also upon my neighbors and all the
men who have gone before me here! O God, create
in me another Jesse, like that one of old, to rule over
men and to be the father of sons who shall be rul-
ers!" Jesse grew excited as he talked aloud and
jumping to his feet walked up and down in the
room. In fancy he saw himself living in old times
and among old peoples. The land that lay stretched
out before him became of vast significance, a place
peopled by his fancy with a new race of men sprung
from himself. It seemed to him that in his day as in
those other and older days, kingdoms might be cre-
ated and new impulses given to the lives of men by
the power of God speaking through a chosen ser-
vant. He longed to be such a servant. "It is God's
work I have come to the land to do," he declared
in a loud voice and his short figure straightened and
he thought that something like a halo of Godly ap-
proval hung over him.
It will perhaps be somewhat difficult for the men
and women of a later day to understand Jesse Bent-
ley. In the last fifty years a vast change has taken
place in the lives of our people. A revolution has in
fact taken place. The coming of industrialism, at-
tended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill
cries of millions of new voices that have come
among us from overseas, the going and coming of
trains, the growth of cities, the building of the inter-
urban car lines that weave in and out of towns and
past farmhouses, and now in these later days the
coming of the automobiles has worked a tremen-
dous change in the lives and in the habits of thought
of our people of Mid-America. Books, badly imag-
ined and written though they may be in the hurry
of our times, are in every household, magazines cir-
culate by the millions of copies, newspapers are ev-
erywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove
in the store in his village has his mind filled to over-
flowing with the words of other men. The newspa-
pers and the magazines have pumped him full.
Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also
a kind of beautiful childlike innocence is gone for-
ever. The farmer by the stove is brother to the men
of the cities, and if you listen you will find him
talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city
man of us all.
In Jesse Bentley's time and in the country districts
of the whole Middle West in the years after the Civil
War it was not so. Men labored too hard and were
too tired to read. In them was no desire for words
printed upon paper. As they worked in the fields,
vague, half-formed thoughts took possession of
them. They believed in God and in God's power to
control their lives. In the little Protestant churches
they gathered on Sunday to hear of God and his
works. The churches were the center of the social
and intellectual life of the times. The figure of God
was big in the hearts of men.
And so, having been born an imaginative child
and having within him a great intellectual eagerness,
Jesse Bentley had turned wholeheartedly toward
God. When the war took his brothers away, he saw
the hand of God in that. When his father became ill
and could no longer attend to the running of the
farm, he took that also as a sign from God. In the
city, when the word came to him, he walked about
at night through the streets thinking of the matter
and when he had come home and had got the work
on the farm well under way, he went again at night
to walk through the forests and over the low hills
and to think of God.
As he walked the importance of his own figure in
some divine plan grew in his mind. He grew avari-
cious and was impatient that the farm contained
only six hundred acres. Kneeling in a fence corner
at the edge of some meadow, he sent his voice
abroad into the silence and looking up he saw the
stars shining down at him.
One evening, some months after his father's
death, and when his wife Katherine was expecting
at any moment to be laid abed of childbirth, Jesse
left his house and went for a long walk. The Bentley
farm was situated in a tiny valley watered by Wine
Creek, and Jesse walked along the banks of the
stream to the end of his own land and on through
the fields of his neighbors. As he walked the valley
broadened and then narrowed again. Great open
stretches of field and wood lay before him. The
moon came out from behind clouds, and, climbing
a low hill, he sat down to think.
Jesse thought that as the true servant of God the
entire stretch of country through which he had
walked should have come into his possession. He
thought of his dead brothers and blamed them that
they had not worked harder and achieved more. Be-
fore him in the moonlight the tiny stream ran down
over stones, and he began to think of the men of
old times who like himself had owned flocks and
lands.
A fantastic impulse, half fear, half greediness,
took possession of Jesse Bentley. He remembered
how in the old Bible story the Lord had appeared
to that other Jesse and told him to send his son
David to where Saul and the men of Israel were
fighting the Philistines in the Valley of Elah. Into
Jesse's mind came the conviction that all of the Ohio
farmers who owned land in the valley of Wine Creek
were Philistines and enemies of God. "Suppose,"
he whispered to himself, "there should come from
among them one who, like Goliath the Philistine of
Gath, could defeat me and take from me my posses-
sions." In fancy he felt the sickening dread that he
thought must have lain heavy on the heart of Saul
before the coming of David. Jumping to his feet, he
began to run through the night. As he ran he called
to God. His voice carried far over the low hills.
"Jehovah of Hosts," he cried, "send to me this night
out of the womb of Katherine, a son. Let Thy grace
alight upon me. Send me a son to be called David
who shall help me to pluck at last all of these lands
out of the hands of the Philistines and turn them to
Thy service and to the building of Thy kingdom on
earth."
Read next: GODLINESS A Tale in Four Parts: Part II, also concerning Jesse Bentley
Read previous: NOBODY KNOWS, concerning Louise Trunnion
Table of content of Winesburg, Ohio
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your reviewYour review will be placed after the table of content of this book
