Вуди Гасри. Bound for glory (engl)
First Plume Printing, September, 1983
Copyright © 1943 by E. P. Dutton
Renewed copyright © 1971 by Marjorie M. Guthrie
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA:
Guthrie, Woody, 1912-1967.
Bound for glory.
Reprint. Originally published: New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943.
Scan, OCR & proofreadin': T.A.G. a.k.a. Copper Kettle, November
2002, Ekaterinburg
Орфография сохранена. Все грамматические ошибки - автора. Рисунки -
тоже.
Просьба не исправлять. Наслаждайтесь - это одна из лучших книг из тех,
что я прочел..
SO LONG, WOODY,
IT`S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YA
Woody Guthrie, 1912-1967
One of Woody Guthrie's last songs, written a year after he entered the
hospital, was titled
I Ain't Dead Yet.
The doctors told him he had
Huntington's chorea, probably inherited, a progressive degeneration of the
nervous system for which there was no cure known. For thirteen more years he
hung on, refusing to give up. Finally he could no longer walk nor talk nor
focus his eyes nor feed himself, and his great will to live was not enough
and his heart stopped beating.
The news reached me while I was on tour in Japan. All I could think of
at first was, "Woody will never die, as long as there are people who like to
sing his songs." Dozens of these are known by guitar pickers across the
U.S.A., and one of them has become loved by tens of millions of Americans:
This land is your land, this land is my land,
From California to the New York island,
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters,
This land was made for you and me.
He was a short, wiry guy with a mop of curly hair under a cowboy hat,
as I first saw him. He'd stand with his guitar slung on his back, spinning
out stones like Will Rogers, with a faint, wry grin. Then he'd hitch his
guitar around and sing the longest long outlaw ballad you ever heard, or
some Rabelaisian fantasy he'd concocted the day before and might never sing
again.
His songs are deceptively simple. Only after they have become part of
your life do you realize how great they are. Any damn fool can get
complicated. It takes genius to attain simplicity. Woody's songs for
children are now sung in many languages:
Why can't a dish break a hammer?
Why, oh why, oh why?
Because a hammer's got a pretty hard head.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
His music stayed rooted in the blues, ballads and breakdowns he'd been
raised on in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. Like Scotland's Robert Bums and the
Ukraine's Taras Shevchenko, Woody was a national folk poet Like them, he
came of a small-town background, knew poverty, had a burning curiosity to
learn. Like them, his talent brought him to the city, where he was lionized
by the literati but from whom he declared his independence and remained his
own profane, radical, ornery self.
This honesty also eventually estranged him from his old Oklahoma
cronies. Like many an Oklahoma farmer, he had long taken a dim view of
bankers. In the desperate early Depression years he developed a religious
view of Christ the Great Revolutionary. In the cities he threw in his lot
with the labor movement:
There once was a Union maid.
She never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks
And the deputy sheriff that made the raids.
He broadened his feeling to include the working people of all the
world, and it may come as a surprise to some readers to know that the author
of
This Land Is Your Land
was in 1940 a columnist for the small newspaper he
euphemistically called
The Sabbath Employee.
It was
The Sunday Worker,
weekend edition of the Communist
Daily Worker.
Woody never argued theory
much, but you can be quite sure that today he would have poured his fiercest
scorn on the criminal fools who sucked America into the Vietnam mess:
Why do your warships sail on my waters?
Why do your bombs drop down from my sky?
Why do you burn my towns and cities?
I want to know why, yes, I want to know why.
But Woody always did more than condemn. His song
Pastures of Plenty
described the life of the migrant fruit pickers, but ends on a note of
shining affirmation:
It's always we've rambled, that river and I.
All along your green valley I'll work till I die.
My land I'll defend with my life if it be,
For my Pastures of Plenty must always be free.
A generation of songwriters have learned from him--Bob Dylan, Tom
Paxton, Phil Ochs and I guess many more to come.
As we scatter his ashes over the waters I can hear Woody hollering back
to us, "Take it easy--but take it!"
PETE SEEGER
A TRIBUTE TO WOODY GUTHRIE
The Secretary of the Interior
Washington
April 6, 1966
Dear Mr. Guthrie,
It gives me great pleasure to present you the Department of the
Interior's Conservation Service Award. In conjunction with this award we are
also naming a Bonneville Power Administration substation in your honor. It
will be known hereafter as the Woody Guthrie Substation in recognition of
the fine work you have done to make our people aware of their heritage and
the land.
You sang that "this land belongs to you and me," and you sang from the
heart of America that feels this about its land. You have articulated, in
your songs, the sense of identification that each citizen of our country
feels toward this land and the wonders which it holds. You brought to your
songs a heart as big as all outdoors, and we are fortunate to have music
which expresses the love and affection each of us feels, though we are
unable to express it so eloquently, toward this land . . . "from California
to the New York Island-- from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters."
Yours was not a passing comment on the beauties of nature, but a
living, breathing, singing force in our struggle to use our land and save it
too. The greatness of this land is that people such as you, with creative
talent, worked on it and that you told about that work--told about the power
of the Bonneville Dam and the men who harnessed it, about the length of the
Lincoln Highway and the men who laid it out. You have summarized the
struggles and the deeply held convictions of all those who love our land and
fight to protect it.
Sincerely yours,
(Signed)
Stewart L. Udall
Secretary of the Interior
Mr. Woodrow W. Guthrie
Brooklyn State Hospital
681 Clarkson Avenue
Brooklyn, New York
CONTENTS
foreword:
"So Long, Woody, It's Been Good To Know Ya"
by Pete Seeger
vii
a tribute to woody guthrie by Stewart L. Udall, Secretary of the
Interior
xi
I
soldiers in the dust
19
II
empty snuff cans
37
III
i ain't mad at nobody
57
IV
new kittens
74
V
mister cyclome
82
VI
boomchasers
93
VII
cain't no gang whip us now
116
VIII
fire extinguishers
133
IX
a fast-running train whistles down
142
X
the junking sack
158
XI
boy in search of something
162
XII
trouble busting
179
XIII
off to california
191
XIV
the house on the hill
231
XV
the telegram that never came
245
XVI
stormy night
256
XVII
extra selects
270
XVIII
crossroads
290
XIX
train bound for glory
309
Postscript
320
BOUND FOR GLORY
Chapter I
SOLDIERS IN THE DUST
I could see men of all colors bouncing along in the boxcar. We stood
up. We laid down. We piled around on each other. We used each other for
pillows. I could smell the sour and bitter sweat soaking through my own
khaki shirt and britches, and the work clothes, overhauls and saggy, dirty
suits of the other guys. My mouth was full of some kind of gray mineral dust
that was about an inch deep all over the floor. We looked like a gang of
lost corpses heading back to the boneyard. Hot in the September heat, tired,
mean and mad, cussing and sweating, raving and preaching. Part of us waved
our hands in the cloud of dust and hollered out to the whole crowd. Others
was too weak, too sick, too hungry or too drunk even to stand up. The train
was a highball and had the right of way. Our car was a rough rider, called
by hoboes a "flat wheeler." I was riding in the tail end where I got more
dust, but less heat. The wheels were clipping it off at sixty miles an hour.
About all I could hear above the raving and cussing and the roar of the car
was the jingle and clink on the under side every time the wheels went over a
rail joint.
I guess ten or fifteen of us guys was singing:
This train don't carry no gamblers,
Liars, thieves and big-shot ramblers;
This train is bound for glory,
This train!
"We would hafta git th' only goddam flat wheeler on th' whole dam
train!" A heavy-set boy with a big-city accent was rocking along beside me
and fishing through his overhauls for his tobacco sack.
"Beats walkin'!" I was setting down beside him. "Bother you fer my
guitar handle ta stick up here in yer face?"
"Naw. Just long as yuh keep up th' music. Kinda songs ya sing? Juke-box
stuff?"
"Much oblige, just smoked." I shook my head. "No. I'm 'fraid that there
soap-box music ain't th' kind ta win a war on!"
"Little too sissy?" He licked up the side of his cigaret. "Wisecracky,
huh?"
"Hell yes." I pulled my guitar up on my lap and told him, "Gonna take
somethin' more'n a dam bunch of silly wisecracks ta ever win this war! Gonna
take work!"
"You don't look like you ever broke your neck at no work, bud!" He
snorted some fumes out of his nose and mashed the match down into the dust
with his foot. "What th' hell do you know 'bout work?"
"By God, mister, I work just as hard as you er th' next guy!" I held
the ends of my fingers up in his face. "An` I got th' blisters ta prove it!"
"How come you ain't drafted?"
"I never did get by those medical gents. Doctors and me don't see eye
to eye."
A blond-headed man about forty nudged me in the ribs with his elbow on
my left side and said, "You boys talkin' about a war. I got a feelin' you're
goin" to see a little spell of war right here in just a few minutes."
"Makes ya think so?" I looked around all over the car.
"Boy!" He stretched out his feet to prop his self back up against the
wall and I noticed he was wearing an iron brace on his leg. "They call me
Cripple Whitey, th' Fight Spotter!"
"Fight spotter?"
"Yeah. I can spot a fist fight on the streets three blocks before I
come to it. I can spot a gang fight an hour before it breaks out. I tip off
the boys. Then they know how to lay their bets."
"Ya got a fight spotted now?"
"I smell a big one. One hell of a big one. Be some blood spilt. Be
about ten minutes yet."
"Hey! Heavy!" I elbowed the big boy on my right. "Whitey here says he
smells a big fight cookin'!"
"Awwww. Don't pay no 'tention to that crippled rat. He's just full of
paregoric. In Chicago we call 'im P. G. Whitey'! I don't know what they call
him here in Minnesota!"
"You're a goddam lyin' rat!" The cripple got up and swayed around on
the floor in front of us. "Get up! I'll cave your lousy dam head in! I'll
throw you out inta one of these lakes!"
"Easy, boy, easy." Heavy put the sole of his shoe in Whitey's belly and
held him back. "I don't wanta hit no cripple!"
"You guys watch out! Don't you stumble an' fall on my guitar!" I eased
over a little. "Yeah! You're some fight spotter! If you spot a fight an'
then it don't happen just when you said, why, you just pitch in and start
one yer self!"
"I'll crack that box over your dam curly head!" The cripple made a step
toward me, laughing and smearing cement dust down across his face. Then he
sneered and told me, "Goddam right! Hell yes! I'm a bum! I gotta right ta
be. Look at that gone leg. Withered away! You're too dam low down an'
sneakin' to make an honest livin' by hard work. Sonofabitch. So you go into
a saloon where th' workin' stiffs hang out, an' you put down your kitty box
an' play for your dam tips!"
I told him, "Go jump in one of these lakes!"
"I'm settin' right there!" He pointed at my guitar in my lap. "Right,
by God, on top of you!"
I grabbed my guitar and rolled over three or four other fellows' feet
and got out of Whitey's way just as he turned around and piled down
backwards yelling and screaming at the top of his lungs. I stumbled through
the car trying to keep my balance and hold onto my guitar. I fell up against
an old man slumped with his face rubbing up against the wall. I heard him
groan and say, "This is th' roughest bastardly boxcar that I ever swung
into."
"Why doncha lay down?" I had to lean up against the wall to keep from
falling. "How come ya standin' up this a way?"
"Rupture. It rides a little easier standin' up."
Five or six guys dressed like timberjacks brushed past us cussing and
raving. "I can't stand this dust no longer!" "Out of our way, men!" "Let us
by! We want to get to the other end of the car!"
"You birds won't be no better off in th' other end!" I hollered at
them. The dust stung the roof of my mouth. "I tried it!"
A big husky gent with high boots and red wool socks rolled back on a
pair of logger's britches stopped and looked' me over and asked me, "Who in
the hell are you? Don't you think I know how to ride a boxcar, sonny? I'm
gettin' out of this wind!"
"Go ahead on, mister, but I'm tellin' ya, ya'll burn up back in that
other end!" I turned again to the old man and asked him, "Anything I can do
ta help ya?"
"Guess not, son." I could see by the look on his face that the rupture
was tying him up in knots. "I was hopin' ta ride this freight on in home
tonight. Chicago. Plumber there. But looks like I'll have ta get off at the
next stop an' hit the highway."
"Purty bad. Well, it ain't a dam bit lonesome in here, is it?"
"I counted sixty-nine men in this car." He squinted his eyes and
gritted his teeth and doubled over a little farther. "Might be, I counted
wrong. Missed some of th' ones layin' down or counted some of them twice.
Pretty close ta sixty-nine though."
"Jest like a car load of sheep headed fer th' packin` house." I let my
knees bend in the joints a little bit to keep the car from shaking me to
jelly.
A long tall Negro boy walked up and asked us, "You men know what's
makin' our noses burn?" He was wearing a pair of work shoes that looked like
they had seen Civil War service. "Eyes, too?"
"What?" I asked him.
"Cement dust. This heah cah wuz loaded down wid sack cement!"
"Shore 'nuff?"
"I bet I done sucked in three sacks of th' damn stuff!" He screwed his
face up and mopped across his lips with his hands.
"I've breathed in more'n that! Hell, friend! You're talkin' to a
livin', breathin' stretch of concrete highway!"
"Close as we is jammed an' packed in heah, we'z all gonna be stuck 'n'
cemented together time we git outta dis hot box."
"Boys," the old man told both of us, "I hope we don't have no trouble
while I'm in here. If somebody was ta fall on me or push me around, this
rupture, I know, it would kill me."
"I'll he'p see to it dat nobody don't push nobody on toppa you,
mistah."
"I'll break 'em of th' habit," I told both of them.
"What time of day is it? Must be fightin' time?" I looked around at the
two.
"Mus' be 'roun' about two or three o'clock," the Negro boy told me,
"jedgin' from that sun shinin' in th' door. Say! What's them two boys doin'
yondah?" He craned his neck.
"Pourin` somethin' out of a bottle," I said, "right by that old colored
man's feet. What is it?"
"Wettin` th' cement dust wid it. Strikin` a match now."
"Gasoline!"
"Ol` man's 'sleep. They's givin' 'im de hot foot!"
The flame rose up and burned in a little spot about the size of a
silver dollar. In a few seconds the old man clawed at the strings of his
bundle where he was resting his head. He kicked his feet in the dust and
knocked little balls of fire onto two or three other men playing some poker
along the back wall. They fought the fire off their clothes and laughed and
bawled the kids and the old man both out.
"Hey! You old bastard! Quit bustin' up our card game!"
I saw one of the men draw back to hit the old man. Another player was
grinning and laughing out to the whole crowd, "That wuz th' funniest dam
sight I ever seen!"
The two boys, both dressed in overhauls, walked back through the crowd,
one holding out the half-pint bottle. ''Drinka likker, men? Who wantsa
drinka good likker?" The boy with the bottle shoved it up under my nose
saying, "Here, mister music man! Take a little snort! Then play somethin'
good an' hot!"
"I been a needin' a little drink ta ease me on down ta Chicago." I
wiped my hand across my face and smiled around at everybody. "I shore thank
ya fer thinkin' 'bout me." I took the bottle and smelled of the gasoline.
Then I sailed the bottle over a dozen men's heads and out of the door.
"Say, stud! Who daya t'ink youse are? Dat bottle was mine, see?" He was
a boy about twenty-five, wearing a flop hat soaked through with some kind of
dime-store hair oil. He braced his self on his feet in front of me and said
again, "Dat bottle was mine!"
"Go git it." I looked him straight in the eye.
"Whattaya tryin' ta pull?"
"Well, since yer so interested, I'll jest tell ya. See, I might wanta
lay down after while an' git a little sleep. I don't wanta wake up with my
feet blistered. 'Cause then, dam yer hide, I'd hafta throw ya outta this
door!"
"We was gonna use dat gas ta start a fire ta cook wid."
"Ya mean ta git us all in jail with."
"I said cook an' I mean cook!"
Then my colored friend looked the two boys over and said, "You boys,
how long you been goin' 'roun' cookin' people's feet?"
"Keep outta dis! Stepinfetchit!"
"You cain't call me dat an' git by wid it, white boy!"
I put my shoulder against the colored boy and my hand against the white
boy's arm, and told them, "Listen, guys! Goddamit! No matter who's mad at
who, we jest cain't start a fight of no kind on this freight! These big
Burlington dicks'll jail th' whole bunch of us!"
"Yaaa. Skeerd!"
"You're a dam liar! I ain't afraid of you ner twenty more like ya! But
do you know what would of happened if these railroad bulls shook us down ta
look at our draft cards, an` found you with that bottle of gasoline on ya?
It'd be th' lockup fer you an' me an' all of th' rest of us!"
The old man with the rupture bit his lips and asked me, "Son, do you
suppose you could get one of the men to move up out of the door and let me
try to get a little breath of that fresh air? I feel like I've just got to
get a little air."
The colored boy held the old man up while I walked over to the door and
tapped a nice healthy-looking boy on the back. "Would you mind lettin' this
old man ride in yer place there in th' door fer a little while? Sick.
Rupture trouble."
"Not at all." The boy got up and set down back where the old man had
been standing. He acted friendly and hollered at us, "I think it's about
time we took turns ridin' in the doors. Let everybody have a whiff of that
fresh air!"
Almost everybody in the car rolled over or stood up and yelled, "Hell
yes!" "Turn about!" "I'm ready." "Too late, boys, I been dead an' buried in
solid cement for two hours!" "Gimme air!" "Trot out yer frash airr!"
Everybody mumbled and talked, and fifteen or twenty men pushed their way
through the others to stand close to the doors, hoping to be first.
Heavy walked through a bunch of them saying, "Watch out. Men, let this
Negro boy through with this old man. He's sick. He's needin' air. Back up a
little. Make room."
"Who'n th' hell are you? Tubba lard! Dictater 'round here?" one old boy
popped off.
Heavy started for the man, but he slipped back in through the crowd.
"All of you men get up! Let a new bunch get cooled off! Where's the old man
that the boys put the hot foot on a few minutes ago? There you are! Hey!
Come on! Grab yourself a hunk of this nice, fresh, cool climate! Set right
there! Now, who's to be next?"
A red-eyed vino drunkard took a man by the feet and pulled him along
the deck to the door. "My buddy. Ain't said a word since I loaded 'im in
last night in Duluth. Bummed th' main stem fer two bits, then he scooped his
flue."
A Mexican boy rubbed his head and got up from somewhere along the wall.
He drank half of a quart vinegar jug of water and then sailed the bottle out
the door. Then he set down and hung his feet out the door and rode along
holding his head in his hands vomiting into the wind. In each door there was
room for five men. The first ten being sick and weakly, we let them ride for
about half an hour. Then they got up and ten more men took their seat for
only fifteen minutes.
I was watching a bunch of men hold their fingers to their lips and
shush each other to keep quiet. Every one of them haw-hawing and tittering
under their breath and pointing to a kid asleep on the floor. He was about
twenty. Little white cap from the ten-cent store, a pair of old blue
washed-out pants, shirt to match, a set of dirty heels caked over with the
dust of many railroads, and a run-over pair of low-cut shoes. He was hugging
his bed roll and moving his lips against the wool blanket. I saw him dig his
toes in the dust and kiss the bundle.
I walked over and put my foot in the middle of his back and said, "Wake
up, stranger. Git ya some fresh air there in th' door!"
The men cackled and rolled in the dirt. They rared back and forth
slapping their hands against their legs. "Ddrrreeeeeeeaaaammming of youuuu
with your eyes so bluue!" One man was grinning like an ape and singing worse
than that.
"
What's th' boy dreamin' about so purty, music man?" another
big guy asked me with his tongue in his cheek and eyes rolling.
"Leave th' boy alone," I told him back. "What th' hell do you dream
about, freight trains?"
I set down with my back against the wall looking all through the
troubled, tangled, messed-up men. Traveling the hard way. Dressed the hard
way. Hitting the long old lonesome go.
Rougher than a cob. Wilder than a woodchuck. Hotter than a depot stove.
Madder than nine hundred dollars. Arguing worse than a tree full of crows.
Messed up. Mixed-up, screwed-up people. A crazy boxcar on a wild track.
Headed sixty miles an hour in a big cloud of poison dust due straight to
nowhere.
I saw ten men getting up out of the door and I took my guitar over and
set down and stuck my feet out. The cold air felt good whipping up my pants
leg. I pulled my shirt open to cool off across my waist and chest. My Negro
friend took a seat by my side and told me, "I reckon we's 'bout due some
frash air, looks like."
"Jest be careful ya don't use it all up," I kidded back at him.
I held my head in the wind and looked out along the lake shoreline with
my ear cocked listening to the men in the car.
"You're a lyin' skunk!" one was saying. "I'm just as hard a worker as
you are, any old day!"
"You're a big slobbery loafin' heel!"
"I'm th' best dadgum blacksmith in Logan County!"
"You mean you use ta was! You look like a lousy tramp ta me!"
"I c'n put out more manly labor in a minnit then you kin in a month!"
"Hay, there, you sot! Quit spittin' on my bed roll!"
"Yeah! Yeah! I know! I'm woikin' stiff, too, see? But I ain't no good
here! Yeah! I woiked thirteen years in th' same weave room! Breakout fixer
on th' looms! Poil Harbor comes along. Big comp'ny gits alla de war orders.
My place is a little place, so what happens? Just like dat! She closes down.
An' I'm out on de freights. But I ain't nuttin' when I hit th' freights.
Takes it all outta me. Nuttin`. But a lousy, dirty tramp!"
"If you're such a good weaver, mister, you can come back here and sew
up my drawers! Ha! Ha! Ha!"
"Fancy pants! Whoooeee!"
"I plowed th' straightest row of corn in Missouri three year ago!"
"Yaaa! But, mister big shot, dey don't grown no corn in dese here
boxcars, see! Yaaa! Dat's de last bitta woik yez ever done!"
"No Swede cut much timber as me, Big Swede! I cutta 'nuff of that white
pine ta build up da whole town!"
"Quiet down! You dam bunch of liars, you! Blowin' off at yer head what
all you can do! I hear this talk all up and down these railroads! You had a
good job somewhere once or twice in your life, then you go around blabbin'
off at your mouth for fifteen years! Tellin' people what all kinds of
wonders you done! Look at you! Look at your clothes! All of the clothes in
this car ain't worth three dollars! Look at your hands! Look at your faces!
Drunk! Sick! Hungry! Dirty! Mean! Onery! I won't lie like you rats! An` I
got on the best suit of clothes in this car! Work? Me work? Hell, no! I see
somethin' I want, an' I just up an' take it!"
Looking back over my shoulder, I saw a little man, skinny, puny,
shaking like he had a machine gun in his hands, raise up on his knees from
the other end of the car and sail a brown quart bottle through the air.
Glass shattered against the back of the well-dressed man's head. Red port
wine rained all over me and my guitar and twenty other men that tried to
duck. The man in the suit of clothes keeled over and hit the floor like a
dead cow.
"I got my papers! I got my job already signed up!" The guy that slung
the bottle was tromping through the car patting his chest and preaching. "I
had a brother in Pearl Harbor! I'm on my way right this minute to Chicago to
go to work rollin' steel to lick this Hitler bunch! I hope the gent with the
nice suit on is restin` comfortable! But I ain't apologizing to none of you!
I throwed that bottle! Want to make anythin' out of it?" He shook both fists
and stood there looking at all of us.
I wiped my hands around over me where the wine was spilled. I saw
everybody else was picking chips of glass out of their clothes and mumbling
amongst themselves. "Crazy lunatic." "Hadn't ought ta done that." "Might of
missed 'im, hit one of us."
The mumble got loud and broke into a crack like zigzag lightning.
Little bunches of men circled around arguing. A few guys walked from bunch
to bunch preaching over other fellows' shoulders. At the side of me a
husky-looking man got up and said, "What all he says about Pearl Harbor and
all is okay, men, but still he hadn't ought to have thrown that wine bottle.
I'm going to walk back there and kick his rear good and proper just to teach
him a lesson!"
Then from somewhere at my back a half-breed Indian boy dove out and
tackled the husky man around the ankles and they tangled into a knot and
rolled around over the floor, beating, scratching, and clawing. Their feet
kicked other men in the face and other men kicked them back and jumped into
the fight.
"You're not gonna hurt that little fella!"
"I'll kill you, Indian!"
"Hey! Watch who th' hell you're kickin'!"
Heavy split through the car knocking men out of his way hollering,
"Hey! Cut it! Cut!"
"You fat pimp, keep outta dis!" A dirty-looking, dark-complected man
was pulling a little oily cap down over his eyes and making for Heavy.
Heavy grabbed him by the throat and busted the back of his head up
against the wall about a dozen times cussing, "I'll teach you that you
cain't call no decent man a pimp! You snaky-looking hustler!"
All down the line it started and spread, "You said I wouldn't work fer
my livin', huh? I'll bat your eyes out!"
"Who wuz it yez called da loafer?"
Shirts and pants ripped and it sounded like everybody was getting their
duds tore off them.
"I didn't lak ya dam looks frum da very start!"
Five and then ten other couples dove in.
"Where's that low-life bastid that called me a bum?"
Men walked up and down the car pushing other men off of their feet,
heaving others to one side, looking at the few that was still riding along
on the floor.
"They're goin' an' blowin'!"
'There ye air, ye foul-mouth cur, you!"
I saw six or eight reaching down and grabbing others by their shirt
collars, jerking them to the middle of the floor. Fists sailing in the air
so fast I couldn't see which fist was whose.
"I knowed you was nuthin' but a lousy chiselin' snake when I first seen
yuh climb on this train! Fight! Goddam yuh! Fight!"
Shoe soles cracked all around over the car and heads banged against the
walls. Dust flew up in the air as if somebody was dumping it in with trucks.
'I'm a tramp, am I?"
Men's heads bobbed around in the dust like balloons floating on the
ocean. Most everybody shut their eyes and gritted their teeth and swung wild
haymakers up from the cement and men flattened out on the floor. Water
bottles flew through the air and I could see a few flashes that I knew was
pocketknife blades. Lots of the men jerked other men's coats up over their
heads to where they couldn't see nor use their arms, and they fought the air
like windmills, blind as bats. A hard fist knocked a fellow stumbling
through the dust. He waved his hands trying to keep balanced, then fell,
spilling all kinds of junk and trash out of his pockets over five or six
other men trying to keep out of the fight. For every man who got knocked
down, three more jumped up and roared through the mob taking sidelicks at
any head that popped up.
"Boy!" My colored friend was shaking his head and looking worried. "You
sho' as hell bettah not git yo' music box mixed up in dis!"
"I've got kicked in th' back about nine times. 'Nother good poke an'
I'll sail plumb out this door inta one of them there lakes!" I was fighting
to get myself braced again. "Here, let's me an' you hook our arms together
so we can hold each other in th' dam car!" I clamped my hands together in
front of me holding the guitar on my lap. "Be hell of a thing if a feller
was ta git knocked outta this dern boxcar goin' this pace, wouldn't it? Roll
a week. Hey! Look! Tram's slowin' down."
"Believe she is at that." He squinted his eyes up and looked down the
track. "She's slowin' down ta make a switch."
"I been lookin' fer you, mister music maker!" I heard somebody talking
behind me. I felt a knee poking me in my back, each time hard enough to
scoot me a little more out the door. "So уa thought I'd forgot about da
bottla gas, huh? I t'ink I'll jist boot yez offa dis train!"
I tried to hold onto the colored boy's arm. "Watch out there, ya silly
dam fool! What're уa tryin' ta do? Kick me out? I'll git up from here an'
frail yore knob! Don't ya kick me again!"
He put his foot flat up against my shoulder blade and kicked me out the
door. I swung onto the Negro's arms with both hands, and the leather strap
of my guitar slipped out of my hold. I was holding both feet clear of the
cinders down on the ground. When my guitar fell, I had to turn loose with
one hand and grab it by the handle. The Negro had to hold onto the side of
the door to hold his own self in the car. I seen him bend backwards as far
as he could and lay down flat on the floor. This pulled me up within an inch
or so of the edge of the door again, and I was about to get one arm inside.
I knew he could pull me back in if I could make it that far. I looked down
at the ground going past under me. The train was slowing down. The Negro and
me made one more hard pull together to swing me back inside the door.
"Ноl' on! Boy!" he was grunting.
"No ya don't!" The young fellow bent down into a squatting position,
heaving at the Negro's shoulders with both hands. "I'll jist kick da pair of
yez out!"
The colored man yelled and screamed, "Hhhaaaayyy! Hheeelllpp!"
"Goddam it, donnn't!" I was about to lose all of my strength in the
left arm locked around the Negro's, which was the only thing between me and
the six-by-three grave.
"Dis is where da both of yez hits de cinders! Good-bye! An' go ta
hell!" He stuck his tongue out between his teeth and throwed every ounce of
his weight against the colored man's shoulders.
Slowing down, the train jammed its air brakes and jarred every man in
the boxcar off his feet. Men stumbled against each other, missed their
licks, clawing and swinging their fists through the air. Two dozen hit the
floor and knocked hide and hair and all off each other's heads. Blood flew
and spattered everybody. Splinters dug into hands and faces of men tromped
on the floor. Guys dove on their faces on top of strangers and grabbed
handfuls of loose skin in their fingernails, and twisted until the blood
caked into the dust. They rolled across the floor and busted their heads
against the walls, knocked blind by the jar, with lungs and eyes and ears
and teeth full of the cement. They stepped on the sick ones, ruptured the
brave ones, walked on top of each other with loggers' and railroaders' spike
shoes. I felt myself falling out of the Negro's hand hold.
Another tap on the brakes jerked a kink in the train and knocked the
boy loose from his hold on the Negro's shoulders. The jar sent him jumping
like a frog from where he was squatting, over me and the Negro both, and
over the slope of the steep cinder grading, rolling, knocking and plowing
cinders twenty feet to each side till like a wild, rolling truck tire he
chugged into the water of the lake.
I pulled the Negro friend over the edge with me and both of us lit
running with our feet on the cinders. I stumbled and took a little spill,
but the colored boy run and managed to stay on his feet.
I made a run for the door of the same boxcar again, and put my hand
down on an iron bolt and tried to run along with the train and swing myself
up again. Men's hands reached out the door trying to grab me and help me in,
but my guitar was going wild and I had to drop my hold on the bolt and trot
off to the edge of the cinders. I was giving up all hopes of getting back
in, when I looked behind me and saw my colored partner gripping onto the
iron ladder on the end of the car. Holding the ladder with one hand, he was
waving his other one in the air and yelling, "Pass me yo' guitah!"
As he went by me I got a running start on the cinders and held the
guitar up to him. He caught it by the neck and clumb up onto the roof of the
car. I swung the ladder and went over the top just at his heels.
"Hurry on up heah! You wanta see dat fella in th' lake?"
He pointed back down along the string of cars picking up speed again.
"Off at d' side of dat little clump of trees there, there! Wadin' out
yondah? See 'im? See! Boy, I bet you dat dip sobered i'm up!"
Both of us was standing side by side propping each other up. The roof
of the car moved and bounced rougher than the floor inside.
The Negro friend grinned over at me with the sun in his eyes. He still
hadn't lost his little greasy brown cap and was holding it down on his head
while the wind made a few grabs at it.
"Whoooee! Dat wuz a close one! Boy, you set fo' a good fas' ride on
top? Sho' ain't no way gettin' back down inside dat cah when this roller
gits ridin' ag'in!"
I squatted down cross-legged and took hold of the boards on the runwalk
on top of the car. He laid down with his hands folded back of his head. We
laughed at the way our faces looked with the cement all over them, and our
eyes watering. The black coal dust from the locomotive made us look like
white ghosts with black eyes. Lips chapped and cracked from the long ride in
the hot sun and hard wind.
"Smell dat cool aih?"
"Smells clean. Don't it? Healthy!"
"Me 'n' you's sho' in fo' a soakin', ourselves!"
"Makes ya think?"
"I knows. Boy, up heah in dis lake country, it c'n cloud up an' rain in
two seconds flush!"
"Ain't no rain cloud I can see!"
"Funny thing 'bout dese Minnesoty rain clouds. Evah cloud's a rain
cloud!"
"Gonna go hard on my guitar." I played a few little notes without
really noticing what I was doing. The air turned off cooler as we rolled
along. A second later I looked up and saw two kids crawl from an open-top
car just behind us: a tall skinny one about fifteen, and a little scrawny
runt that couldn't be over ten or eleven. They had on Boy Scout looking
clothes. The older one carried a pack on his back, and the little kid had a
sweater with the sleeves tied together slung around his neck.
"Hiyez, men?" The tall one saluted and dumped his pack down a couple of
feet from us.
The little feller hunched down and set picking his teeth with a rusty
pocket knife, talking, "Been wid 'er long?"
I'd seen a thousand kids just like them. They seem to come from homes
somewhere that they've run away from. They seem to come to take the place of
the old stiffs that slip on a wet board, miss a ladder, fail out a door, or
just dry up and shrivel away riding the mean freights; the old souls that
groan somewhere in the darkest corner of a boxcar, moan about a twisted life
half lived and nine tenths wasted, cry as their souls hit the highball for
heaven, die and pass out of this world like the echo of a foggy whistle.
"Evenin', gentulmen, evenin'." The Negro boy raised up to a sitting
position. "You gents is a little shade yo'ng t' be out siftin' th' cinders,
ain't you?"
"C'n we help how old we are?" The biggest kid spit away into the wind
without even looking where it would land.
"Me ole man's fault. Oughtta been bornt sooner," the little runt piped
up.
The big one didn't change the expression on his face, because if he'd
of looked any tougher, something would have busted. "Pipe down, squoit!" He
turned toward us. "Yez hittin' fer de slaughter-house er Wall Street?"
"I don't git ya." I looked over at him.
"Chi? Er N'Yok?"
I tried to keep from busting out laughing in the kid's face. And I
could see the colored boy turning his head the other way to hide a snicker.
"Me," I answered the kid, "me, I'm headed fer Wall Street, I reckin." Then I
thought for a minute and asked him, " 'Bouts you boys goin'?"
"Chi."
"On da fly."
"Kin ya really beat it out on dat jitter box dere, mister?"
"I make a rattlin' noise."
"Sing on toppa dat?"
"No. Not on top of it. I stand up and hold it with this leather strap
around my shoulder, or else I set down and play it in my lap like this,
see?"
"Make anyt'ing wid it?"
"I've come purty close ta starvin' a couple of times, boys, but never
faded plumb out of th' picture yet so far."
"Yeah?"
"Dat's bad."
I come down on some running notes and threw in a few sliding blues
notes, and the kids stuck their ears almost down to the sound-hole,
listening.
"Say ya hit da boog on dere, don'tcha?"
"Better boog all yez wants, sarg," the older kid said. "I dunno how dat
box'll sound fulla wadder, but we gon'ta be swimmin' on toppa dis train here
in about a minnit."
The Negro boy turned his head around toward the engine and whiffed of
the damp air. "About one minnit's right!"
"Will it wreck dat music box?" The biggest kid stood up and threw his
pack on his back. The coal dust had covered his face over in the days when
this railroad was first laid, and a few drops of the spit and moisture from
the lower streets of a lot of towns had been smeared like brushmarks in
every direction around his mouth, nose and eyes. Water and sweat had run
down his neck and dried there in long strings. He said it again: "Will de
rain wreck dat rackit box?"
I stood up and looked ahead at the black smoke rolling out of the
engine. The air was cool and heavy and held the big coil of smoke low to the
ground along the side of the train. It boiled and turned, mixed in with the
patches of heavy fog, and spun into all kinds of shapes. The picture in the
weeds and bushes alongside the tracks was like ten thousand drunkards
rolling in the weeds with the bellyache. When the first three or four splats
of rain hit me in the face I said to the kids, "This water won't exactly do
this guitar any good!"
"Take dis ole sweater," the smallest kid yelled at me, " 'S all I got!
Wrap it aroun' yer music! Help a little!" I blinked the water out of my eyes
and waited a jiffy for him to pull the sweater from around his neck where he
had tied the sleeves. His face looked like a quick little picture, blackish
tobacco brown colors, that somebody was wiping from a window glass with a
dirty rag.
"Yeah," I told him, "much oblige! Keep out a few drops, won't it?" I
slipped the sweater over the guitar like a man putting clothes on a dummy in
a window. Then I skint out of my new khaki shirt and put it on the guitar,
and buttoned the buttons up, and tied the sleeves around the neck. Everybody
laughed. Then we all squatted down in a little half circle with our backs to
the rain and wind. "I don't give a dam how drippin' I git, boys, but I gotta
keep my meal ticket dry!"
The wind struck against our boxcar and the rain beat itself to pieces
and blew over our heads like a spray from a fire hose shooting sixty miles
an hour. Every drop that blew against my skin stung and burned.
The colored rider was laughing and saying, "Man! Man! When th' good
Lord was workin' makin' Minnesoty, He couldn' make up His mind whethah ta
make anothah ocean or some mo' land, so He just got 'bout half done an' then
He quit an' went home! Wowie!" He ducked his head and shook it and kept
laughing, and at the same time, almost without me noticing what he was
doing, he had slipped his blue work shirt off and jammed it over into my
hands."One mo' shirt might keep yo' meal ticket a little bettah!"
"Don't you need a shirt to keep dry?"
I don't know why I asked him that. I was already dressing the guitar up
in the shirt. He squared his shoulders back into the wind and rubbed the
palms of his hands across his chest and shoulders, still laughing and
talking, "You think dat little ole two-bit shirt's gonna keep out this
cloudbu'st?"
When I looked back around at my guitar on my lap, I seen one more
little filthy shirt piled up on top of it. I don't know exactly how I felt
when my hands come down and touched this shirt. I looked around at the
little tough guys and saw them humped up with their naked backs splitting
the wind and the rain glancing six feet in the air off their shoulders. I
didn't say a word. The little kid pooched his lips out so the water would
run down into his mouth like a trough, and every little bit he'd save up a
mouthful and spit it out in a long thin spray between his teeth. When he saw
that I was keeping my eyes nailed on him, he spit the last of his rainwater
out and said, "I ain't t'oisty."
'I'll wrap this one around the handle an' the strings will keep dry
that way. If they get wet, you know, they rust out." I wound the last shirt
around and around the neck of the guitar handle. Then I pulled the guitar
over to where I was laying down. I tied the leather strap around a plank in
the boardwalk, ducked my head down behind the guitar and tapped the runty
kid on the shoulder.
"Hey, squirt!"
"Whaddaya want?"
"Not much of a windbreak, but it at least knocks a little of th'
blister out of that rain! Roll yer head over here an' keep it ducked down
behind this music box!"
"Yeeehh." He flipped over like a little frog and smiled all over his
face and said, "Music's good fer somethin', ain't it?"
Both of us stretched out full length. I was laying on my back looking
straight up into the sky all gray and tormented and blowing with low clouds
that whined when they got sucked under the wheels. The wind whistled funeral
songs for the railroad riders. Lightning struck and crackled in the air and
sparks of electricity done little dances for us on the iron beams and
fixtures. The flash of the lightning knocked the clouds full of holes and
the rain hit down on us harder than before. "On th' desert, I use this here
guitar fer a sun shade! Now I'm usin' the' dam thing fer a umbreller!"
'"Pink I could eva' play one uv dem?" The little kid was shaking and
trembling all over, and I could hear his lips and nose blow the rain away,
and his teeth chatter like a jack-hammer. He scooted his body closer to me,
and I laid an arm down so he could rest his head. I asked him, "How's that
fer a pillow?"
"Dat's betta." He trembled all over and moved a time or two. Then he
got still and I didn't hear him say anything else. Both of us were soaked to
the skin a hundred times. The wind and the rain was running a race to see
which could whip us the hardest. I felt the roof of the car pounding me in
the back of the head. I could stand a little of it, but not long at a time.
The guitar hit against the raindrops and sounded like a nest of machine guns
spitting out lead.
The force of the wind pushed the sound box against the tops of our
heads, and the car jerked and buckled through the clouds like a coffin over
a cliff.
I looked at the runt's head resting on my arm, and thought to myself,
"Yeah, that's a little better."
My own head ached and pained inside. My brain felt like a crazy cloud
of grasshoppers jumping over one another across a field. I held my neck
stiff so my head was about two inches clear of the roof; but that didn't
work. I got cold and cramped and a dozen kinks tied my whole body in a knot.
The only way I could rest was to let my head and neck go limp; and when I
did this, the jolt of the roof pounded the back of my head. The cloudbursts
got madder and splashed through all of the lakes, laughing and singing, and
then a wail in the wind would get a low start and cry in the timber like the
cry for freedom of a conquered people.
Through the roof, down inside the car, I heard the voices of the
sixty-six hoboes. There had been sixty-nine, the old man said, if he counted
right. One threw his own self into the lake. He pushed two more out the door
with him, but they lit easy and caught onto the ladder again. Then the two
little windburnt, sunbaked brats had mounted the top of our car and were
caught in the cloudburst like drowned rats. Men fighting against men. Color
against color. Kin against kin. Race pushing against race. And all of us
battling against the wind and the rain and that bright crackling lightning
that booms and zooms, that bathes his eyes in the white sky, wrestles a
river to a standstill, and spends the night drunk in a whorehouse.
What's that hitting me on the back of the head? Just bumping my head
against the roof of the car. Hey! Goddam you! Who th' hell do you think
you're a hittin', mister? What are you, anyhow, a dam bully? You cain't push
that woman around! What's all of these folks in jail for? Believing in
people? Where'd all of us come from? What did we do wrong? You low-down cur,
if you hit me again, I'll tear your head off!
My eyes closed tight, quivering till they exploded like the rain when
the lightning dumped a truckload of thunder down along the train. I was
whirling and floating and hugging the little runt around the belly, and my
brain felt like a pot of hot lead bubbling over a flame. Who's all of these
crazy men down there howling out at each other like hyenas? Are these men?
Who am I? How come them here? How the hell come me here? What am I supposed
to do here?
My ear flat against the tin roof soaked up some music and singing
coming from down inside of the car:
This train don't carry no rustlers,
Whores, pimps, or side-street hustlers;
This train is bound for glory, This train.
Can I remember? Remember back to where I was this morning? St. Paul.
Yes. The morning before? Bismarck, North Dakota. And the morning before
that? Miles City, Montana. Week ago, I was a piano player in Seattle.
Who's this kid? Where's he from and where's he headed for? Will he be
me when he grows up? Was I like him when I was just his size? Let me
remember. Let me go back. Let me get up and walk back down the road I come.
This old hard rambling and hard graveling. This old chuck-luck traveling. My
head ain't working right.
Where was I?
Where in the hell was I?
Where was I when I was a kid? Just as far, far, far back, on back, as I
can remember?
Strike, lightning, strike!
Strike, Goddam you, strike!
There's lots of folks that you cain't hurt!
Strike, lightning!
See if I care! .
Roar and rumble, twist and turn, the sky ain't never as crazy as the
world.
Bound for glory? This train? Ha!
I wonder just where in the hell we're bound.
Rain on, little rain, rain on!
Blow on, little wind, keep blowin'!
'Cause them guys is a singin' that this train is bound for glory, an'
I'm gonna hug her breast till I find out where she's bound.
EMPTY SNUFF CANS
Okemah, in Creek Indian, means 'Town on a Hill," but our busiest hill
was our Graveyard Hill, and just about the only hill in the country that you
could rest on. West of town, the wagon roads petered themselves out chasing
through some brushy sand hills. Then south, the country just slipped away
and turned into a lot of hard-hit farms, trying to make an honest living in
amongst the scatterings of scrub oak, black jack, sumac, sycamore, and
cottonwood that lay on the edges of the tough hay meadows and stickery
pasture lands.
Okemah was an Oklahoma farming town since the early days, and it had
about an equal number of Indians, Negroes, and Whites doing their trading
there. It had a railroad called the Fort Smith and Western--and there was no
guarantee that you'd get any certain place any certain time by riding it.
Our most famous railroad man was called "Boomer Swenson," and every time
Boomer come to a spot along the rails where he'd run over somebody, he'd
pull down on his whistle cord and blow the longest, moaningest, saddest
whistle that ever blew on any man's railroad.
Ours was just another one of those little towns, I guess, about a
thousand or so people, where everybody knows everybody else; and on your way
to the post office, you'd nod and speak to so many friends that your neck
would be rubbed raw when you went in to get your mail if there was any. It
took you just about an hour to get up through town, say hello, talk over the
late news, family gossip, sickness, weather, crops and lousy politics.
Everybody had something to say about something, or somebody, and you usually
knew almost word for word what it was going to be about before you heard
them say it, as we had well-known and highly expert talkers on all subjects
in and out of this world.
Old Windy Tom usually shot off at his mouth about the weather. He not
only could tell you the exact break in the exact cloud, but just when and
where it would rain, blow, sleet or snow; and for yesterday, today, and
tomorrow, by recalling to your mind the very least and finest details of the
weather for these very days last year, two years, or forty years ago. When
Windy Tom got to blowing it covered more square blocks than any one single
cyclone. But he was our most hard-working weather man--Okemah's Prophet--and
we would of fought to back him up.
I was what you'd call just a home-town kid and carved my initials on
most everything that would stand still and let me, W. G. Okemah Boy. Born
1912. That was the year, I think, when Woodrow Wilson was named to be the
president and my papa and mama got all worked up about good and bad politics
and named me Woodrow Wilson too. I don't remember this any too clear.
I wasn't much more than two years old when we built our seven-room
house over in the good part of Okemah. This was our new house, and Mama was
awful glad and proud of it. I remember a bright yellow outside--a blurred
haze of a dark inside--some vines looking in through windows.
Sometimes, I seem to remember trying to follow my big sister off to
school. I'd gather up all of the loose books I could find around the house
and start out through the gate and down the sidewalk, going to get myself a
schoolhouse education, but Mama would ran out and catch me and drag me back
into the house kicking and bawling. When Mama would hide the books I'd walk
back to the front porch, afraid to run away, but I'd use the porch for my
stage, and the grass, flowers, and pickets along our fence would be my crowd
of people; and I made up my first song right there:
Listen to the music,
Music, music;
Listen to the music,
Music band.
These days our family seemed to be getting along all right. People rode
down our street in buggies and sarries, all dressed up, and they'd look over
at our house and say, "Charlie and Nora Guthrie's place." "Right new."
Clara was somewhere between nine and ten, but she seemed like an awful
big sister to me. She was always bending and whirling around, dancing away
to school and singing her way back home; and she had long curls that swung
in the wind and brushed in my face when she wrestled me across the floor.
Roy was along in there between seven and eight. Quiet about everything.
Walked so slow and thought so deep that I always wondered what was going on
in his head. I watched him biff the tough kids on the noodle over the fence,
and then he would just come on in home, and think and think about it. I
wondered how he could fight so good and keep so quiet.
I guess I was going on three then.
Peace, pretty weather. Spring turning things green. Summer staining it
all brown. Fall made everything redder, browner, and brittler. And winter
was white and gray and the color of bare trees. Papa went to town and made
real-estate deals with other people, and he brought their money home. Mama
could sign a check for any amount, buy every little thing that her eyes
liked the looks of. Roy and Clara could stop off in any store in Okemah and
buy new clothes to fit the weather, new things to eat to make you healthy,
and Papa was proud because we could all have anything we saw. Our house was
packed full of things Mama liked, Roy liked, Clara liked, and that was what
Papa liked. I remember his leather law books, Blackstone and others. He
smoked a pipe and good tobacco and I wondered if this helped him to stretch
out in his big easy-riding chair and try to think up some kind of a deal or
swap to get some more money.
But those were fighting days in Oklahoma. If even the little newskids
fought along the streets for corroded pennies, it's not hard to see that
Papa had to outwit, outsmart, and outrun a pretty long string of people to
have everything so nice. It kept Mama scared and nervous. She always had
been a serious person with deep-running thoughts in her head; and the old
songs and ballads that she sung over and over every day told me just about
what she was thinking about. And they told Papa, but he didn't listen. She
used to say to us kids, "We love your Papa, and if anything tries to hurt
him and make him bad and mean, we'll fight it, won't we?" And Roy would jump
up and pound his fist on his chest and say, "I'll fight!" Mama knew how
dangerous the landtrading business was, and she wanted Papa to drop out of
the fighting and the pushing, and settle down to some kind of a better life
of growing things and helping other people to grow. But Papa was a man of
brimstone and hot fire, in his mind and in his fists, and was known all over
that section of the state as the champion of all the fist fighters. He used
his fists on sharks and fakers, and all to give his family nice things. Mama
was that kind of a woman who always looked at a pretty thing and wondered,
"Who had to work to make it? Who owned it and loved it before?"
So our family was sort of divided up into two sides: Mama taught us
kids to sing the old songs and told us long stories about each ballad; and
in her own way she told us over and over to always try and see the world
from the other fellow's side. Meanwhile Papa bought us all kinds of
exercising rods and stretchers, and kept piles of kids boxing and wrestling
out in the front yard; and taught us never and never to allow any earthly
human to scare us, bully us, or run it over us.
Then more settlers trickled West, they said in search of elbow room on
the ground, room to farm the rich topsoil; but, hushed and quiet, they dug
into the private heart of the earth to find the lead, the soft coal, the
good zinc. While the town of people only seventeen miles east of us danced
on their roped-off streets and held solid weeks of loud celebrating called
the King Koal Karnival, only the early roadrunners, the smart oil men, knew
that in a year or two King Koal would die and his body would be burned to
ashes and his long twisting grave would be left dank and dark and empty
under the ground--that a new King would be dancing into the sky, gushing and
spraying the entire country around with the slick black blood of industry's
veins, the oil--King Oil--a hundred times more powerful and wild and rich
and fiery than King Timber, King Steel, King Cotton, or even King Koal.
The wise traders come to our town first, and they were the traders who
had won their prizes at out-trading thousands of others back where they come
from: oil slickers, oil fakers, oil stakers, and oil takers. Papa met them.
He stood up and swapped and traded, bought and sold, got bigger, spread out,
and made more money.
And this was to get us the nice things. And we all liked the prettiest
and best things in the store windows, and anything in the store was Clara's
just for signing her name, Roy's just for signing his name, or Mama's just
for signing her name-- and I knew how proud I felt of our name, that just to
write it on a piece of paper would bring more good things home to us. This
wasn't because there was oil in the wind, nor gushers thrashing against the
sky, no--it was because my dad was the man that owned the land--and whatever
was under that land was ours. The oil was a whisper in the dark, a rumor, a
gamble. No derricks standing up for your eye to see. It was a whole bunch of
people chasing a year or two ahead of a wild dream. Oil was the thing that
made other people treat you like a human, like a burro, or like a dog.
Mama thought we had enough to buy a farm and work it ourselves, or at
least get into some kind of a business that was a little quieter. Almost
every day when Papa rode home he showed the signs and bruises of a new fist
fight, and Mama seemed to get quieter than any of us had ever seen her. She
laid in the bedroom and I watched her cry on her pillow.
And all of this had give us our nice seven-room house.
One day, nobody ever knew how or why, a fire broke out somewhere in the
house. Neighbors packed water. Everybody made a run to help. But the flames
outsmarted the people, and all that we had left, in an hour or two, was a
cement foundation piled full of red-hot ashes and cinders.
How did it break out? Where'bouts did it get started? Anybody know?
Hey, did they tell you anything? Me? No. I don't know. Hey, John, did you
happen to see how it got on afire? No, not me. Nobody seems to know. Where
was Charlie Guthrie? Out trading? Kids at school? Where was Mrs. Guthrie and
the baby? Nobody knows a thing. It just busted loose and it jumped all
through the bedrooms and the dining room and the front room--nobody knows a
thing.
Where's th' Guthrie folks at? Neighbors' house? All of them all right?
None hurt. Wonder what'll happen to 'em now? Oh, Charlie Guthrie will jist
go out here an' make about two swaps some mornin' before breakfast an' he'll
make enough money to build a whole lot better place than that. . . . No
insurance. ... They say this broke him flat. ... Well, I'm waitin' ta see
where they'll move to next.
I remember our next house pretty plain. We called it the old London
House, because a family named London used to live there. The walls were
built up out of square sandstone rocks. The two big rooms on the ground
floor were dug into the side of a rocky hill. The walls inside felt cold,
like a cellar, and holes were dug out between the rocks big enough to put
your two hands in. And the old empty snuff cans of the London family were
lined up in rows along the rafters.
I liked the high porch along the top story, for it was the highest
porch in all of the whole town. Some kids lived in houses back along the top
of the hill, but they had thick trees all around their back porches, and
couldn't stand there and look way out across the first street at the bottom
of the hill, across the second road about a quarter on east, out over the
willow trees that grew along a sewer creek, to see the white strings of new
cotton bales and a whole lot of men and women and kids riding into town on
wagons piled double-sideboard-full of cotton, driving under the funny shed
at the gin, driving back home again on loads of cotton seed.
I stood there looking at all of this, which was just the tail-end
section of Okemah. And then, I remember, there was a long train blew a
wild-sounding whistle and throwed a cloud of steam out on both sides of its
engine wheels, and lots of black smoke come jumping out of the smokestack.
The train pulled a long string of boxcars along behind it, and when it got
to the depot it cut its engine loose from the rest of the cars, and the
engine trotted all around up and down the railroad tracks, grabbing onto
cars and tugging them here and yonder, taking some and leaving some. But I
was tickled best when I saw the engine take a car and run and run till it
got up the right speed, and then stop and let the car go coasting and
rolling all by its own self, down where the man wanted it to be. I knew I
could go and get in good with any bunch of kids in the neighborhood just by
telling them about my big high lookout porch, and all of the horses and
cotton wagons, and the trains.
Papa hired a man and a truck to haul some more furniture over to our
old London House; and Roy and Clara carried all kinds of heavy things,
bedsteads, springs, bed irons, parts for stoves, some chairs, quilts that
didn't smell right to me, tables and extra leaves, a boxful of silverware
which I was glad to see was the same set we had always used. A few of the
things had come out of the other house before the fire got out of hand. The
rest of the furniture was all funny looking. Somebody else had used it in
their house, and Papa had bought it second hand.
Clara would say, "I'll be glad when we get to live in another house
that we own; then Mama can get a lot of new things."
Roy talked the same way. "Yeah, this stuff is so old and ugly, it'll
scare me just to have to eat, and sleep, and live around it."
"It won't be like our good house, Roy," Clara said. "I liked for kids
to come over and play in our yard then, and drink out of our pretty water
glasses and see our pretty flower beds, but I'm gonna just run any kid off
that comes to see us now, 'cause I don't want anybody to think that anybody
has got to live with such old mean, ugly chairs, and cook on an old nasty
stove, and even to sleep on these filthy beds, and. . . ." Then Clara set
down a chair she was carrying inside of the kitchen and looked all around at
the cold concrete walls, and down at the rock floor. She picked up a water
glass that was spun half full of fine spider webs with a couple of flies
wrapped like mummies and she said, "... And ask anybody to drink out of
these old spidery glasses."
Roy and Clara cooked the first meal on the rusty stove. It was a good
meal of beefsteak, thickened flour gravy, okra roiled in corn meal and fried
in hot grease, hot biscuits with plenty of butter melted in between, and at
the last, Clara danced around over the floor, grabbed a can opener out of
the cupboard drawer, and cut a can of sliced peaches open for us. The
weather outside was the early part of fall, and there was a good wood-smoke
smell in the air along towards sundown and supper time, and families
everywhere were warming up a little. The big stove heated the rock walls and
Papa asked Mama, "Well, Nora, how do you like your new house?"
She had her back to the cook stove and faced the east window, and
looked out over Papa's shoulder, and not in his face, and held a hot cup of
coffee in both of her hands, and everybody got quiet. But for a long time
she didn't answer. Then she finally said, "I guess it's all right. I guess
it'll have to do till we can get a better place. I guess we won't be here
very long." She run her fingers through her hair, set her coffee down to
cool, and the look on her face twisted and trembled and it scared everybody.
Her eyes didn't look to see anything or anybody in that house, but she had
pretty dark eyes and the gray light from the east window was about all that
was shining in her mind.
"How long we gonna stay, I mean live here, Papa?" Roy spoke up.
Papa looked around at everybody at the table and then he said, "You
mean you don't like it here?" His face looked funny and his eyes run around
over the kitchen.
Clara cleared away a handful of dirty plates off of the table and said,
"Are we supposed to like it here?"
"Where it's so dirty," Roy went on to say, "an' spooky lookin' you
can't even bring any kids around your own home?"
Mama didn't say a word.
"Why," Papa told Roy, "this is a good house, solid rock all over, good
new shingle roof, new rafters. Go take a look at that upper attic. Lots of
room up there where you can store trunks and things. You can fix a nice
playhouse up in that attic and invite all of the kids in the whole country
to come down here on cold winter days, and play dolls, and all kinds of
games up in there. You kids just don't know a good house when you see one.
And, one thing, it won't ever catch afire and burn down."
Roy just ducked his head and looked down at his plate and didn't say
any more. Mama's cup of hot coffee had turned cold. Clara poured a dishpan
of hot water, slushed her finger around to whip up the suds, cooled it down
just right with a dipper of cold water, and told Papa, "As for me, I don't
like this old nasty place. 'Cause it's got old cold dingy walls, that's why.
'Cause I don't like to sleep up there in that old stinky bedroom where you
can smell the snuff spit of the London family for the last nine kids. 'Cause
you know what kinds of stories everybody tells about this old house, you
know as well as I know. Kids swelled up in that old bedroom and died. Broke
out all over with old yellow, running sores. Not a kid, not in this whole
town, not a single girl I used to play with will ever, ever play with me
again as long as we live in this town, if we let them find out we've got the
London House seven-year itch!" Clara turned her head away from the rest of
us.
Papa wasn't saying much, just sipped his coffee and listened to the
others talk. Then he said, "I've got something to tell you all. I don't
know, I don't know how you're going to take it. Well, I'm afraid we're going
to have to live in this house for a long time. I bought this place for a
thousand dollars yesterday."
"You mean . . ." Mama talked up. "Charlie, are you trying to sit there
and tell me that you actually ... ?"
". . . Bought this place?" Clara said.
"A thousan' dollars for this old dump?" Roy asked him.
"I'm afraid so." Papa went ahead drinking his coffee and leaving the
rest of his dinner setting in front of him to get cold. "We'll pitch in and
fix it all up real nice, new plaster, and cement all inside. New paint all
over the woodwork."
Clara dried her hands on her apron and then pushed her curls back out
of her face and stepped over to the west back door, opened the door and
walked out onto the hill.
Roy got up and pushed the door shut behind her.
Papa said, "Tell your sister to come on in here out of this night air,
she'll take down sick after standing over that hot stove."
And Roy said, "Th' hot stove an' th' night air don't hurt us as...."
"Bad as what?" Papa asked Roy. And Roy said, "Bad's what Clara was
tellin' you about, that's what."
"Roy, you mind what I tell you to do! I told you to open up that door
and call Clara back in this house. You do it!" Papa gave his orders, and his
voice was half rough and tough, but halfway hurt.
"Call 'er in if you want 'er in," Roy told Papa, and then Roy made a
run around Papa's elbow and through the front room, and he mounted the
stairs outside and chased up to his bedroom and pulled the covers all up
over his head.
Papa rose up from his chair and walked over and opened up the kitchen
door and walked out to find Clara. He called her name a few times and she
didn't answer back. But somewhere he could hear her crying and he called her
again, "Clara, Clara! Where are you? Talk!"
"I'm over here," Clara spoke up, and when Papa turned around he saw
that he had walked right past her skirt on his way out the door. She was
leaning back against the wall of the house.
"You know your old Papa don't want anything to happen to you, because,
well, I get mean sometimes, and I treat all of you bad, but sometimes it's
just because I want to treat you so good that I'd.... Come on, let me carry
you back in the house. I'm your old mean Papa. You can call me that if you
want to." He reached down and took Clara by the arm, and gave her a little
pull. She let her body just go limp and limber, and kept crying for a
minute.
Then Papa went on talking, "I might be mean. I guess I am. I might not
stop often enough trying to work and make a lot of money to buy all of you
some nice things. Maybe I've got to be so mean trading, and trying to make
the money, that I don't know how to quit when I come in home where you are,
where Roy is, and where Mama's at."
Clara snubbed a little, folded her arm over her face, and then she
wiped the tears away from her eyes with the wrong end of her fist and said,
"Not either."
"Not either, what?" Papa asked her.
"Not mean."
"Why? I thought I was."
"Not either."
"Why ain't I?"
"It's something else that's mean."
"What else?"
"I don't know."
"What is it that's mean to my little girl? You just tell me what it is
that's even one little frog hair mean to my little girl, and your old mean
dad'll roll up his sleeves, and double up his fists and go and knock the
sound out of somebody."
"This old house is mean."
"House?"
"It's mean."
"How can a house be mean?"
"It's mean to be in it."
"Oh," Papa told Clara, "now, I see what you're driving at. You know how
mean I am?"
"Not mean."
"I'm just big and mean enough to pick you up just like a big sack of
sugar and put on my shoulder, like this, and like this, and then like this,
and ... see ... I can carry you all of the way in through this back door,
and all of the way in through this big, nice, warm kitchen, and all of the
way..." Papa carried Clara laughing and giggling under her curly hair back
into the kitchen. When he was even with the stove, he looked up and saw Mama
washing the dishes and piling them on a little oilcloth table to drain.
Clara kicked in the air and said, "Oh! Let me down! Let me down! I'm
not crying now! And besides, look what's happening! Look!" She squirmed out
of Papa's hold around her, and slid to the floor, and she sailed over into a
corner, brought out a mop, and started mopping up all around Mama's feet,
talking a blue streak.
"Mama, look! You're draining the dishes without a drain pan! The
water's dripping like a great big ... river ... down ..."
And then Clara looked over the hot-water reservoir on the wood stove
and nobody in the house saw what she saw. Her eyes flared open when she seen
that her mama wasn't listening, just washing the dishes clean in the
scalding water; and when her mama set still another plate on its edge on the
little table, Clara kept her quiet, and Papa took a deep breath, and bit his
lip, and turned around and walked away into the front room.
I found a new way to spend my time these days. I went across the alley
on top of the hill and strutted up and down in front of a bunch of kids that
spent most of their time making up games to play on top of their cellars.
Almost every house up and down the street had a dugout of some kind or
another full of fresh canned fruit, string beans, pickled beets, onions. I
snuck into one cellar after another with one kid after another, and saw how
dark, how chilly and damp it was down in there. I smelled the cankery dank
rotten logs along the ceiling of one cellar, and the hemmed-up feeling made
me want to get back out into the open air again, but the good denned-up
feeling sort of made me want to stay down in there.
The kid next door had a cellar full of jars and the jars were full of
pickled beets, long green cucumbers, and big round slices of onions and
peaches as big as your hat. So we pulled us up a wooden box, and took down a
big fruit jar of peaches. I twisted the lid. The other kid took a twist. But
the jar was sealed too tight. We commenced getting hungry. "Ain't that juice
larepin'?" "Yeah, boy, it is," I told him, "but what's larepin'?" So he
says, "Anything you like real good an' ain't got fer a long time, an' then
you git it, that's larepin'."
All of our hard wrestling and cussing didn't coax the lid off. So we
sneaked over behind the barn. The other kid squeezed his self in between a
couple of loose boards, stayed in the barn a minute, and came back out with
a claw hammer and a two-gallon feed bucket. "Good bucket," he told me. I
glanced into it, seen a few loose horse hairs, but he must have had a pretty
hungry horse, because the bucket had been licked as clean as a new dime.
I held the jar as tight as I could over the bucket, and he took a few
little love taps on the shoulder of the jar with his hammer. He saw he
wasn't hitting the glass hard enough, so he got a little harder each lick.
Then he come down a good one on it, and the glass broke into a thousand
pieces; the pewter lid and the red rubber seal fell first, then a whole big
goo of loose peaches, skinned and cut in halves slopped out into the bottom
of the bucket; and then the neck of the jar with a lot of mean-looking
jagged edges sticking up, and the bottom of the jar that scared us to look
at it. "Good peaches," he told me.
"Good juice," I told him.
We fingered in around the slivers of glass and looked each peach over
good before we downed it, pushing little sharp chips off through the oozy
juice; and the warm sun made the specks of glass shine up like diamonds.
"Reckon how much a really diamond sparks?" he said to me."
"I don't know," I said to him.
Then he said, "My mama's got one she wears on her finger."
And I said, "My mama ain't ... jest a big wide gold'un. Some glass on
yer peach, flip it."
"Funny 'bout yer mama not havin' 'cept jest one ring. Need a diamond
one too ta be really, really married ta each other."
'What makes that?"
"Diamonds is what ya put in a ring, an' when ya see a girl ya jest put
th' diamond ring on 'er finger; an' then next ya git a gold ring, an ya put
th' gold one on 'er finger; an' next-- well, then ya c'n kiss'er all ya want
to."
"Perty good."
"Know what else ya c'n do?"
"Huh uh, what?"
"Sleep with her."
"Sleep?"
"Yes sir, sleep right with 'er, under th' cover."
"She sleep, too?"
"I don't know. I never put no diamond on no girl."
"Me neither."
"Never did sleep with no girl, 'cept my cousin."
"She sleep, too?" I asked.
"Shore. Cousins they jest mostly sleep. We told crazy stories an'
laffed so loud my dad whopped us ta git us to go ta sleep."
"What makes yore dad wanta sleep unner th' covers with a diamond ring
an' a gold one on yer mama's hand?"
"That's what mamas an' daddies are for."
"Is it?"
"'At's what makes a mama a mama, an' a papa a papa."
"What about workin' together, like cleanin' up around th' yard, an'
cleanin' up th' house, an' eatin' together; how about talkin' together, an'
goin' off somewheres together, don't that make nobody a mama an' a papa?"
"Naww, might help some."
" 'S awful funny, ain't it?"
"My mama an
'
dad won't tell me nothin' about what makes you
a dad or a mama," he told me.
"They won't?"
"Naww. Sceered. But, I keep my eyes open wide, wide open; an' I stay
awake on my bed, an' I listen over onto their bed. An' I know one thing."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"What?"
"I know one main thing."
"What main thing?"
"That's where little babies come from."
"From mamas an' papas?"
"Yen."
"Ain't no way they could.''
"Yes they is."
"You got to go somewhere to a store, or down to see a doctor, or make a
doctor come an' bring a little baby."
"No, 'tain't ever' time that way. I hear my mama an' I hear my dad, an'
they said they slept together too much, an' got too many kids out from under
th' cover."
"You don't find little babies under covers."
"Yes you do. Once in a while you find one, an' he's a little boy or a
little girl. Then this little baby grows up big, an
'
you find
another'n."
"What's the next one?"
"Like you, or like me."
"I ain't no little baby."
"You ain't but four years old."
"But I ain't no little cryin' baby."
"No, but you was when they first found you."
"Heck."
" 'S purty bad, all right, but maybe that's why my mama or dad won't
tell me nothin' about th' covers. 'Fraid I might find some more little
babies in under there, an' mama cries a lot an' says we done already got too
many."
"If your mama didn't want 'em, why don't she just put 'em back in under
th' sheet?"
"Naww, I don't know, I don't think you can put 'em back."
"How come your papa don't want so many?"
"Cain't feed an' clothes us."
"That's bad. I'll get you somethin' to eat over at my house. We ain't
got so many covers, I mean, so many kids as you got."
"You know th' reason, don't you?"
"No, why?"
"Jest 'cause your mama ain't got no two rings, one gold one, an' one
diamond one."
"Maybe she did used to have a diamunt ring; an' maybe she got it burnt
up when our pretty big house caught afire an' burnt down."
"I remember about that. I seen th' people runnin' up that way that day.
I seen th' smoke. How big was you then?"
"I was just fresh out from under th' cover."
"Say, if I ask you a favor, will you tell me it?"
"Might, what?"
"Kids say your mama got mad an' set her brand-new house on fire, an'
burnt ever'thin' plumb up. Did she?"
I didn't say anything back to him. I sat there up against the warm barn
for about a minute, hung my head down a little, and then I reached out and
kicked his bucket as far as I could kick it; and a million flies that had
been eating the peachy juice, flew out of the bucket, and wondered what had
hit them. I jumped up, and started to throw a handful of manure on him, but
then I let my fingers go limber, and the manure fell to the ground. I didn't
look him in the face. I didn't look anywhere special. I didn't want him to
see my face, so I turned my head the other way, and walked past the pile of
manure.
I played around our yard some and talked to the fence posts, sung songs
and made the weeds sing, and found all of the snuff cans the London folks
had throwed out into the high weeds around the house for the last ten or
fifteen years. I found a flat board, and loaded the cans onto it, and
crawled on my hands and knees, pushing it like a big wagon, in and out and
all along under the weeds, and it made a road everywhere it went. I come to
deep sandy places where the horses had to pull hard and I cussed out, "Hit
'em up, Judie! Git in there, Rhodie! Judie! Dam yore muley hide! Hit 'em in
easy! Now take it together! Judie! Rhodie!" I was the world's best team
skinner with the world's best team and the world's best wagon.
Then I made out like I delivered my load, got my money, turned all of
my horses and mules out onto their pasture, and was going to see some of my
people. I slipped on loose rocks lying around the corner of our house, made
the white dust foam up when I stomped through our ash pile, and when I got
to the top of the hill, I saw the boy next door standing on top of his
manure pile watching more flies get fat on the slice of peach. When he seen
me be made a hard run down off of the pile, jumped up onto a sawhorse and
yelled, "This is my army horse!"
I dumb up in a broke-down wheelbarrow and hollered back at him, "This
is my big war tank!"
Then he sailed down off his sawhorse and tore up on top of his manure
pile, and said, "This is my big battleship!"
"War tanks can whip ole battleships!" I told him. "War tanks has got
fast, fast machine guns! Battleships cain't go less they're in water! I can
chase Germans on land!"
"But you cain't shoot but just a hunderd Germans! Yer оl' war tank,
ain't got as many bullets as my big battleship!"
"I can hide in my war tank, behind a rock, an' when ya start ta git off
of yore ship, I can kill ya, an' ya'll die!"
He ripped down off of the manure pile, darted behind his barn, and
after a little while, he poked his head out of the hayloading door up in the
top door. Then he hollered, "This is my big fort! I got my cannons an' my
ship tied up down here under me! Yer ol' war tank cain't even hurt me! Ya!
Ya!"
"Ya! Yerself! Yer ole fort ain't nothin'!" I pulled myself up out of
the wheelbarrow and dumb up onto the first limb of a big walnut tree. "Now I
got my airplane, an' ya don't even know what I can do to ya!"
"Cain't do nuthin'! Yore оl' airplane ain't even as high as my fort!"
"I can git up higher!"
"I'm still higher in my fort than yore оl' airplane! Cain't drop no
bumbs on me!"
I looked up above me and saw that I'd come to the high top of the tree.
The limbs was already swaying around so much that the ground below me seemed
like it was a rough ocean. But I had to get up higher. "I c'n git up as high
as I wanta! Then I c'n dump out a big bomb on toppa yer оl' crazy fort, an'
it'll blow ya all ta pieces, knock yer head off, an' yer arms off, an' yer
both legs off, an' ya'll be dead!"
The few limbs in the top of the tree weren't as big as a broomstick,
and the wind was whirling me around up there like I was the last big walnut
of the season.
Mama slammed our back door and I kept real quiet so she wouldn't see me
up in the tree. The kid's mama walked out of her back door with a bushel
basket full of old cans and papers, and my mama said, "Say, wonder where our
little stray youngins are?"
And his mama said, "I heard them hollering just a minute ago!"
They stood under my tree and asked each other little questions. "Ain't
these brats a fright?"
"I tell you, it's a shame to the dogs the way a woman's got to run and
chase and wear her wits out to keep a big long string of kids from starving
to death."
I looked down through the shady limbs and seen the tops of the women's
heads, one tying a hair ribbon a little tighter in the wind, the other one
holding her hair by the big handfuls. The sun shot down through my tree, the
light places hit down the back and shoulders of my mama, and the forehead
and dress of his mama, and the whole thing was traveling. I felt the sun
humming down hot and heavy on my head. It was a crazy feeling. The thing was
whirling, moving all around, and I couldn't get it to slow down or stop. I
grabbed a better grip on the little limber limbs, and ducked my head down
and closed my eyes as tight as I could, and I bit my tongue and lip to keep
from crying out loud. It was dark all over then, but my head was splitting
open, and everything in me was jumping and pounding like wild horses running
away with a big wagon with only one or two loose potatoes rumbling around in
it.
I yowled out, "Mama!" She looked all around over the lot. "Where 'bouts
are you?"
"Up here. Up in th' tree."
Both of the women caught their breath and I heard them say, "Oh! For
heaven's sakes! Hurry! Run! Go get somebody! Get somebody to do something!"
"Can't you just climb down?" Mama asked me.
"No," I told her. "I'm sick."
"Sick? For God's sake! Hold on tight!" Mama got up on the wheelbarrow
and tried to climb up to the first limb. She couldn't make it any higher.
She looked up where I was sticking like a 'possum in the forks, and said,
"It's a good twenty-five feet up to where he is! Oh, Lord,'goodness, God, I
wish somebody would come along! Wait! There's a bunch of kids yonder along
the road at the bottom of the hill! You stay here and talk to him. Tell him
anything, anything, but don't let him get scared. Just talk. Hey! You kids
down there! Wait a minute! Yes, you! Come here! Want a dime each one of
you?"
Five or six mixed colors of kids run up the hill to meet her, and every
kid was saying, "Dime? Golly, gosh, yes! Whataya want done? Work? Whole
dime?"
"I'll show you, here, down this alley. Now, I wanta know something. Do
you see that little boy hanging up yonder in the top of that tall tree?"
"Yen."
"Gosh."
"Shoot a monkey!"
"Cain't he get back down?"
"No," my mama told them, "he's hung up there or something. He's getting
sicker and sicker, and is going to fall any minute, unless we do something
to get him down."
"I can climb that tree after him."
"Me, too."
"Yeah, but you can't do no good; them little old weak limbs won't hold
nobody else."
Mama was pulling her hair. "You see, you see, you kids, don't you? You
see how much gray hairs and worry you pile on to your old mothers' backs!
Don't you ever sneak off and pull no such a stunt as this!"
"No ma'am."
"No'm."
"Yes'm."
"I wouldn't."
"I never would chase my folks up no tree."
"Shut up, ijiot, she didn't say that."
"Shh. What'd she say?"
"She said don't get hung up in no tree."
"I been hung up in every tree in this end of town."
"Shut up, she don't know that."
"Hey, guys! These lowest limbs is stout enough to hold us up! See here!
You just got to watch out and keep your feet in real close to th' top of th'
tree, an' not out on the limbs when you hit a fork! Okay, Slew, you're the
littlest, skin up in there far's you can; climb right up next to him!
Sawdust, you're next littlest! Flag it up in there and stop right under
Slew!"
Slew and Sawdust skint up into that tree. The little one's head was up
as high as my belly, and the next kid was right under him.
"We're up here! Whatta you wanta do next?"
"Buckeye, you got long arms and legs; you stand yonder a-straddle of
them two wide limbs!"
"I'm here 'fore you got it said."
"Thug, you set yourself down right here low to the ground. All of you
watch; maybe if he falls, you can at least make a grab and try to ketch
him'."
"What's th' rest of us gonna do?"
"Rabbit, an' you, Star Navy, you too, Jake--you three run yonder to
that lady's wellhouse, an' take yer pockit-knife an' cut that rope, an' git
back here in nuthin' flat!"
Three kids aired out over the hill, come out lugging a long piece of
rope.
"Okay, here, Thug, you hand this on up to Buckeye. Buck, you shoot it
on up to Saw, an' Sawdust, you wheel'er on in to Slew! Got a good holt on
'er, Slew?"
"Yeah! Whattaya want me ta do with it? Tie it around his belly?"
"Yeah! But, first, you'd better'd put the end, th' knot end, up over
that fork there where he's hung! That's her! Throw loop around his belly
now!"
"Okay! He's looped so's he never could git loose, even if he's ta try!"
Then the main foreman of the gang took off a little dirty white
flour-sack cap, and rubbed the dirt and sweat back off of his head and told
Mama and the other lady, "All right, ladies. Yore worryin' days is over.
Keep yer britches on. That kid'll live ta be a flat hunderd."
"The rope won't slip or break?" Mama asked him.
"Good wet rope." The kid was watching every move that the other kids
made.
"Okay! V'e're all set!" one kid yelled down out of the tree.
"We're ridin' high, an' settin' purty!" another one talked up.
Then the ramrod said, "Rabbit, Star, Jake, you three guys take th' tail
end of this rope, an' back off out across down th' hill yonder with it. Pull
it good an' straight. 'At's her. Okay!"
"She's straighter'n a preacher's dream."
"Thug, you, up there! Hold onto th' main rope! You grab 'er, Saw, you
too, Slew! Now, let me git a grip on 'er down here on th' ground! You three
kids down the hill there brace yer feet, dig yer heels, dig 'em in! You
wimmen folks jist rare back, take a big dip of snuff, an' tell some funny
stories! We ain't never dropped a kid yit, an' this is th' first time we
ever got paid a dime fer not droppin' one!"
"Look what you're doing."
"Okay! Worry Wart, you, Slew! Now! Lift his legs up loose from the
forks! Hey, help make him help you. Lift 'im plumb up! 'At'saboy! Jist let
'im hang down there!"
"Man's unhung much's he can be unhung!"
"You guys down th' hill! His weight's on this rope now! You let it git
tight, real slow, then as I feed th' rope through my hands, why, you three
birds come a-walkin' up th' hill, see? Like this, see, an' she slips a
little, an' you walk a little, an' she oozes a little bit more, an' you walk
up a little closter!"
"We're wheelin'!"
"An' a-dealin'!"
"Just walk along slow, keep a tight rope, take it easy. Okay, Slew,
he's down out of yore reach! Sawdust, keep th' rope stretched under th' pit
of yore one arm, an' guide th' gent down past you with the other arm!"
"He's slidin'! Easy ridin'!"
"Keep 'im slidin'! Easy on th' ridin'! Guide 'im on down ta where we
git th' six dimes! You ladies can be goin' to th' house ta git out yore
pockitbooks."
Mama said, "No, thank you, sir, I'll stay right here, if you don't
mind, and see to it that you get him down right. Are they hurting you,
Woody?"
"Not me!" I told her back. "This is lotsa fun. Got lotsa kids ta play
with now!"
"You hold on tight to that rope, mister fun-haver!" the other lady was
saying.
"I will!" I said to her. "Mama, do I get a dime, too?"
I come down past the last kid on the last limb and when I got both feet
on the ground, I forgot all about my headache and sun-stroke. I laughed and
talked with everybody like I was a famous sailor just back from sea. " 'At
wuz fun! Hey! I wanta do it all over agin'!"
Mama grabbed me by the shirt collar and pulled me home. I was fighting
every step of the way and yelling back, "Hey! Kids! Come an' play with me!
Come an' see my wagon road! I wanta dime, too, Mama!"
"I'll dime you!" she told me.
"You kids wait right there. I'll get your six dimes for you.''
"I wanta dime! I want some candy!" I was letting it out.
"We'll save ya a piece out of our candy an' stuff!" the head captain of
the kids yelled.
"An' we'll bring it over in a sack all by itself, first thing in th'
mornin'!"
Another kid said, "It was yore tree!"
"It's yore yard!"
"Yeah, an' it was even yer mama's dimes!''
And just as our back door flew shut with me halfway caught with my neck
sticking out, Mama grabbed a better handful of me, and I yelled, "It was my
sore head, it was my dizzy head!" And Mama jammed the door shut, and I
didn't see any more of the big bunch of awful good smart kids. Regular tree
unhangers.
Mama took my shirt and overhalls off, stripped me down to my bare hide
and spent about an hour giving me a bath.
"Come on, young sprout, I'm putting you off to bed. Come on,"
"I'm comin'; I feel good an' warm in my new clean unnerwear."
"Do you?"
"You know, Mama, I never do like for you ta do anything to me, like
make me mind, or make me stay home, or make me drink milk, or take a bath,
but I hate most of all to have you put a new pair of unnerwear on me. Then,
after ya do it, I like you a whole lot better."
"Mama knows every little thing that's taking place in that little old
curly head of yours. You're my newest, and my hardest-headed youngin."
"Mama, what's a hard head?"
"It means you go and do what you want to."
"Is my head a hard one?"
"You bet it is."
"What's a youngin?" I asked Mama. "Am I a youngin?"
And Mama told me, "Well, it means you're not very old."
She pulled the covers up around my neck and tucked me down into the bed
good.
"When I get up to be real big, will I still be a youngin?"
"No. You'll be a big man then."
"Are you a youngin?"
"No, I'm a big woman. I'm a grown lady. I'm your mama." I started
getting drowsy and my eyes felt like they was both full of dry dirt.
I asked Mama, "Wuz you good when you wuz first a little baby?"
And she rubbed my face with the palm of her hand and said, "I was
pretty good. I believe I minded my mama better than you mind yours."
"Wuz you just a little tiny baby, this big?"
"Just about."
"An' Gramma an' Grampa found you in under their covers?"
Mama's face looked like she was trying to figure out a hard puzzle of
some kind. "Covers?"
"That boy that clumb up on his barn door, he tol' me all about married
rings, an' all about where you go an find little babies. Youngins."
"What did you say?"
"All 'bout married rings."
"This ring is pure gold," Mama told me, holding up her hand for me to
see it. "See these little flower buds? They were real plain when your papa
and me first got married.... But why don't you ever go to sleep, little
feller?"
"You know who I'd marry if I wuz gonna marry, Mama?"
"I haven't got the least inkling," she said. "Who?"
"You."
"Me?"
"Uh huh."
"You couldn't marry me if you wanted to. I'm already married to your
papa."
"Cain't I marry you, too?"
"Certainly not,"
"Why?"
"I told you why. You can't marry your own mama. You'll just have to
look around for another girl, young man."
"Mama."
"Yes."
"Mama."
"Yes."
"Mama, do you know somethin'?"
"No, what?"
"Well, like, say, like what that little ole mean kid acrost th' alley
asked me?"
"What?"
"Well, he asked me how many married rings you had on.
'
"And then?"
"So I told him, told him you didn't have but one gold one. No diamunt
glass one."
"And?"
"And he said ever'body in town would git awful, awful mad at you for
losin' yore diamunt 'un."
"Did he?"
"An' he said, 'Where did you lose yore diamunt `un at?' An' so, I told
him maybe it got lost in our big house fire."
Mama just kept listening and didn't say a word.
Then I went on, "An' he asked me how come it, our big perty house got
burnt up. An' then he asked me if--if you struck a match an' set it on
fire...."
Mama didn't answer me. She just looked up away from me. She looked a
hole through the wall, and then she looked out through my bedroom window up
over the hill. She rubbed my forehead with her fingers and then she got up
off the edge of my bed, and walked out into the kitchen. I laid there
listening. I could hear her feet walking around over the kitchen floor. I
could hear the water splash in the drinking dipper. I heard everything get
quiet. Then I drifted off to sleep, and didn't hear a sound.
I AIN'T MAD AT NOBODY
It was an Indian summer morning and it was crispy and clear, and I
stuck my nose up into the air and whiffed my lungs full of good weather. I
stood on the side of the street in the alley crossing and saw Clara drift
almost out of sight toward the schoolhouse. I turned around and ran like a
herd of wild buffaloes back down the hill, around the house, and come to our
front yard, skidding to a stop. I hollered in at the window to where Mama
was finishing up the breakfast dishes and said, 'Where's Gramma at?"
Mama slid the window up and looked out at me and said, "This is
Grandma's day to come all right, how'd you know?"
"Clara told me," I told Mama.
"And why're you so fussed up about Grandma coming, young sprout?" Mama
said to me.
"Clara said Gramma'd take me with her to trade her eggs."
"Who is she, might I ask you?"
"She's my big sister. She's bigga 'nuff ta tell me where all I can go,
ain't she?"
"And I'm your Mama. Could you tell me what I'm suppose to be able to
tell you?"
"You can tell me I can go with Gramma, too."
"Oh! Well, I'll tell you, you've been having a hard time getting used
to living in this old house. So I'll tell you what. If you'll come in and
wash your face and neck and ears real good, and get both of your hands clean
enough for Grandma to see your skin, maybe I'll be right real good to you
and let you go out and stay a few days with her! Hurry!"
"Is my ears clean?"
Mama took a good look at both of my ears and told me, "This first one
will do in a pinch."
"How long's Gramma been yore wife?" I asked Mama.
"T told you a thousand times Grandma is not my wife. She's your
Grandpa's wife."
"Has Grampa gotta husban', too?"
"No. No. No. Grandpa is a husband already, Grandma's husband."
"Nobody ain't my husban', is there?" I asked her.
Mama grabbed the washrag away from me and rubbed my hide to a cherry
red. "Listen, you little question box, don't ask me anything else about who
is kin to who; you've absolutely got my head whirling around like a
windmill."
"Mama. Know somethin'?"
"What?"
"I ain't never gonna git real mad at you."
"Well, that is good news. Why? Whatever made you say that?"
"I jist ain't."
"You're being awful, awful good for some reason or another. Nickel.
Dime. What?"
"Not really, really mad."
"You certainly will have to change your ways a lot. You get mad at your
old mama just about every day about something. You get awful riled up
sometimes."
"That ain't worst mad."
"What kind of mad do you mean?"
"Mad that stays mad. 'At's th' kind I'm tell in' ya about. You won't
ever git mad at me if I won't ever git mad at you, will ya?"
"Never in your whole life, young feller." Mama patted my naked hide
where the cakes of dirt had just been washed off and told me, "That's the
best thing that could ever happen to all of us. Your little old head has got
it all thrashed out."
"Thrashed where? What's thrashed mean?"
"Thrash. Thrash. Means when you whip something and beat it, and well,
like Grandpa does his oats."
"I got oats in my head! Oats in my head! Yumpity yay! Yumpity yay! I
got oats in my head! Git outta my way! Git outta my way!" I made a hard run
around the kitchen.
"You crazy little monkey. Go ahead, have a good time. Just go ahead and
tear this old house down. You're my littlest baby. You're going out and stay
a long, long time with your grandma, and I won't have no little boy to drive
me crazy! Have a good time. Let's see you! Run! Holler! Loud! I'm gonna
gitcha! Gonna gitcha! Run!"
We chased all around over the front room and back through the kitchen.
She grabbed me up off the floor and swung me around and around till my feet
stuck straight out. She was laughing and I felt hot tears salty on the side
of her face. When she let me down on the floor, she knelt down on her knees
and held me up real warm, and I said, "Mama, I'll tell ya. I like ta have ya
chase me. Play. Stuff like that. Talk ta each other. Hug on each other. But
I don't like fer ya ta call me secha little boy all th' time."
"Oh, I thought so. I was looking for you to say that most any day now,"
she told me, holding me off at arm's length and looking me up and down.
"You're getting to be a mighty awful big man."
"Bigger'n I usta wuz?"
"Bigger than you used to be."
"Usta wuz. Cain't stay still."
"I know," Mama said to me, and she set down on the floor and pulled me
down in her lap, "You grow."
"Up."
"Up this way. Out this way. Across this way."
"Big."
"You can't stay still," she went on.
"Gotta hurry. Grow."
"Tell me, mister grower, this. Now, when you was just a little boy with
curly hair a little over four years old, you said to me that you never would
get mad and stay mad at me anymore. Will you still say that while you're
growing up so big so fast?"
"Fast as I grow a little, I'll tell you it again."
"You promise? You cross your heart and hope to die?"
"Cross. Double cross."
"Fine. Now look right out through that window there and tell me what
you see coming down the road?"
"Gra-mma"
"Grandma's right!"
"Hey! Hey! Gramma! Gramma!"
I snorted out the front door running to meet the buggy, waving my hands
about my head like I was signaling a battleship. When I got about halfway
down the hill, I struck my big toe against a sharp rock, and it tumbled me
so bad the tears started down my cheeks; but I started running that much
faster, for my only chance to get a free ride was to catch the buggy while
she was on the level, because once she got headed up the steep hill to our
house she wouldn't stop to pick me up.
I had tears on my face and dirt on the tears when I got to the road,
but I was there ahead of the buggy. I jumped up and down at the side of the
road and I made all kinds of signals with my hands, but Grandma just kept
looking straight ahead. I yelled, "Gramma! Hey! Gramma!" But she didn't even
as much as glance over my way.
I trotted along a ragweed ditch full of fine washed sand, and kept
hollering, "It's me! Hey! It's me! Gramma! Me!" And she just kept old White
Tom and Red Bess trotting right along, throwing more dust, straw, and chalky
manure dirt back in my face.
About six foot this side of where the level road took off up the hill
toward our house, the buggy stopped, and I made one long, sailing jump, in
between the wheels, and up into the seat beside Grandma, and she was
bouncing the whole buggy up and down laughing and saying, "Why, was that
you? Back yonder? I saw a little old dirty-faced boy standing back there,
and I says to myself, "No, that's not Woody, not my Woodsaw.'"
Sweat was in little bumps on Grandma's face, because she was so hot and
her whole face was bouncing with the buggy because she was so fat. A black
hat with some flowers on top and a big pin that always made me wonder if it
wasn't sticking right on through her hair and head from one ear to the
other. Gray hair commencing to make a stand that had come from hoeing' and
working a crop of worries for about fifty years.
"I was clean when I seen ya comin'. Then I started a runnin', an'
stumped my big toe on an оl' rock. Hurt. Real bad. Gimme th
'
lines."
She put one arm around me and handed me the long leather reins, and
told me, "Yes, you look like my little grandson now. I can tell by the shape
of your head that's my Woodchuck."
I stood up on the floorboards and held both of the big reins in one
hand. It was more than a handful, but I managed to wave at Mama. "Hi! Hi! I
got 'em! I got 'em! Hi! Lookit me! See me drive?"
I jumped out of the buggy in front of our house and Grandma met me
coming around the horses. She put both of her hands on her hips and
straightened her corsets up a little and smiled at me, and said, "Well, you
are a smart feller. Already know how to tie a slipknot on a buggy wheel."
I spent the next few minutes looking at the knot I'd tied on the buggy
spoke, tracing the reins up over the horses' backs, and up to the bits in
their mouths. I handled the loose bit and the steel shined in the sun. When
I rubbed Tom's bald spot between his eyes, Bess looked over at me kind of
lonesome like, so I rubbed her, too. I walked around and around the buggy,
and it smelled like strong paint and hot leather. At the back were seven or
eight gallon buckets, all full of milk and cream and clabber to take around
to folks in town.
I could hear Mama and Grandma talking through the kitchen window.
Grandma was saying, "You're not looking any too good, Nora. You're
working too hard. Straining yourself. Something. I don't know. What is it?"
"Why, I feel all right; do I look bad? Just everyday housework. Nothing
else."
"Something else, too, young lady. Something else. This old house.
That's what it is. This old house is so old and rotten and so awful hard to
keep clean."
Grandma was leaning back in a big wide chair that just about fit her,
sizing Mama up and down. A few gray hairs had got loose from her hairpins,
and she was pressing them back with her hands, and pinning them down where
they belonged.
"We're about to get all straight again," Mama said.
"Here. Something's wrong around here. Tell me the truth before I go. I
just got to know."
Mama rubbed her hair back out of her eyes and said, "I feel good, I
feel good all over. I work hard and feel good, but I don't know. Just seems
like right in through my head some way or another, something. Little dizzy
spells."
"I thought so," Grandma told her, "I thought so. I could tell. You
can't fool an old fooler, you know. Might fool your own self a little. But
not me. Not your old Mama. If it was one of your own kids sick, you'd be
able to tell it a mile away. I'm the same way about my flock of kids. I know
when one of them is out of kilter. I put diapers on you and I washed your
ears a million times and I sent you off to school in dresses we made
together, and if you just so much as blink one eye crossways, I can tell it.
You promise to get the doctor down here and let him look you over!"
"Milk will sour in the buggy."
"Oh, to the dickens with milk and butter, Nora! I'm talking sense.
Promise me you'll get the doctor down. Have him come down every few days for
a while. He can keep up with you, and do you some good."
"Your eggs will hatch out. Well, all right, all right. I'll get the
doctor. Here, kiss me good-bye." Mama kissed Grandma on the forehead.
Grandma crawled back into the buggy seat and found me perched up beside
her. "What about this young jaybird going home with me? Is it all right with
you? Will you miss his hard-working hands around the place here?"
Mama was standing in the yard waving. "I will! 'Bye! I'll tell Papa
you're gone. He'll miss you!"
The team knocked dust up between their legs and it was good because the
little biting flies couldn't bother their ankles. Grandma was letting me
hold the reins.
She told me, "Stop here a minute or two." I pulled the team to a stop.
"Get three pounds of butter out of the back and take it up to Mrs. Tatum's
door. Get the money. Don't squeeze the butter too hard, it'll have your
finger marks on it."
I knocked on the door and handed a lady three pounds of butter and got
a dollar bill and a twenty-five-cent piece in the palm of my hand. It felt
like some kind of magic sheet of paper and a magic piece of silver. I handed
it up to Grandma and she yelled, "Thank you, Mrs. Tatum! Mighty fine
weather! Thank you!'' And Mrs. Tatum yelled back, "I can just smell a blue
norther on top of these pretty days!"
We drifted on down the road a few more blocks, passing a lot of
scattered houses, and I held the reins again, being awful careful to hold
them up plenty high in the air so the people all along the road could see I
was ramrodding this driving business. Grandma just sort of smiled and said,
"Turn here to your right. Which a way's my right? North. Cold up there.
Hurry and make your turn. Stop over there in front of that little white
house. Get out and take Mrs. Warner three pounds of butter. Then come back
and take three buckets of milk. That family of hers is getting bigger and
hungrier all of the time. I don't think her boy is working anymore down at
the gin."
"Howdy do," I said to Mrs. Warner, and she said, "Why, Mrs, Tanner's
got a mighty good little boy working for her now. Isn't three big heavy
pounds of butter a little too heavy for you?"
"Nope." I ran back to the buggy and piled in again.
"Now, do you see that little old broke-down shack over there in under
that black walnut tree?"
"Yeah, I see it. Say, Gramma, why didn't Mrs. Warner gimme no dollar
an' no quarter? I see th' shack."
"Mrs. Warner does a charge account with me. Sews. Fixes clothes for my
whole family. Now this next lady's name is Mrs. Walters. Take two pounds of
butter to her. Then come back and take three buckets of milk."
I walked up to the little shack and tried to keep my feet on a rotten
plank that was used as a boardwalk. It was too rickety and caused me to lose
my balance. I stumbled and dropped one of the pound squares of butter and I
felt like one of Oklahoma's worst outlaws when I saw the wet cloth unroll,
and the butter roll out across the ground, picking up little dark rocks and
a solid coat of hard dust. I was standing there with tears in my eyes, and
more coming all of the time, when I heard somebody talking in my ear.
"I was watchin' you frum th' kitchen window. My, my. What a nice little
boy yo' gran'ma's got to go 'roun
'
an' carry her buttah an' milk.
I oughtta knowed you couldn' make it ovah that оl' trippy boardwalk. Lordy,
me! Jes' lookit that nice big yeller poun' о buttah all layin' theah in my
ol' dirty, filthy yard! Oh, well don' you git no gray head 'bout it, little
'livery man. I can use it all right. See heah? I can jes' scrape, scrape,
scrape, an' then they won' be too much wasted."
I finally got up strength enough to mumble out, "Stumped my toe agin'."
"Is he all right, Matilda?"
"Sho', sho'! He's all right. Jes' a little toe stump. Shoot a 'possum,
I goes 'roun' heah all barefoot jes' like you do. See my ol bare foot, how
tuff 'tis? Come right on in through th' front room heah, that's right. I bet
you this is th' firs' time you evah wuz in a black niggah's house. Is it?"
"Yes ma'am."
"I don' hafta tell you no mo' than what yo' eyes can already see, do
I?"
"No ma'am."
"You leas'ways sez, yas ma'am an' no ma'am, don' you?"
"Yes'm."
"An' me jes' an ol black niggah. Hmmm. Sho' do soun' good."
"Are you a nigger lady?"
"Whatta I look like, honey?"
"Are you a nigger 'cause you're black?"
"What folks all says."
"What do people call you a nigger for?"
" 'Cause they jes' don' know no bettah. Don' know what 'niggah' means.
Don' know how bad makes ya feel."
"You called your own self that," I told her.
"When I calls my own se'f a niggah, I knows I don' mean it. An' even
anothah niggah calls me a 'niggah,' I don' min', 'cause I knows it's most
jes' fun. But when a white pusson calls me 'niggah,' it's like a whip cuts
through my ol' hide."
"I gotta go bring you in some milk," I told Matilda.
"Did you speak 'milk'?" She got a big smile all over her face.
"My gramma's got you three buckets."
"Some weeks it's buttah. Some weeks eggs. An' now you speaks out
somethin' 'bout milk. Lawd God, little rattlesnakes! C'mon, I'll he'p you."
I went running through the house chasing her and said, "I'm driver 'n
d'livery boy!"
We got back to the buggy and Grandma said, "Did you tell the lady you
were sorry that you dropped her butter?"
I looked down at the dusty road and didn't say anything.
Matilda cut in and said, "Missy Tanner, any little boy that does work
fo' you's jes' mortally gotta be good. You gives me th` buttah an' th' sweet
milk, an' he 'livers it to me. My оl' man's a-gonna chomp down on that same
ol' co'nbread, an' 'stead o
r
it a-bein' all so dry an' gritty it
sticks in yo' throat an' cuts through yo' belly, it's a-gonna be all slick
an' greasy with good ol' runnin' buttah. An' it'll go down his oozle
magoozler so slick an' easy it won't have time ta scrape his neck 'er belly
neither one. An' my kids'll git greasy all over an' wipe it off on their
ovahalls, but po' little fellas, I ain't even a-gonna cuss 'em out 'bout it
if they do; 'cause they'll be jes' like me, so hongery fo' buttah on
co'nbread, an' sweet milk, they'll jes' think they's oozin' ovah inta th'
sho' 'nuff promised lan'."
Grandma said, "I try not to ever just clean forget you."
"I knows ya do," Matilda told Grandma.
"I just wish it could be more of it more often," Grandma went on to
say.
"I wishes I could he'p you out mo' an' mo' often, too. You knows that,
don't ya, Missy Tanner?" When she looked in under the back lid of the buggy,
Matilda went on, 'I'll see if I can see any of mah own kids aroun'. Pack in
two of these heah big gallion buckets. Tuckah! Tuckah!''
"Yes'm. Heah I is! Watcha wan'?"
"Undo yo'self, Tuckah Boy, undo yo'self! Come out heah an' see with yo'
own big eyes what all's a-gonna grease dat belly o' yo's! Sweet milk! 'Nuff
ta fatten an' raise fo' hogs ta butchah!"
Tucker flew out from behind a patch of weeds, and then I saw three or
four other little heads shoot out and stand up and look and think and
listen.
Grandma smiled and said, "Hi, Tuck! Still playing in that old patch of
gimpson weeds, I see."
"Howdy do, Miss Tanner."
Matilda handed me a gallon bucket and then she handed Tuck one. Then
she said, "Tuck, this is Mistah Woodpile. Mistah Woodpile, dis heah is my
boy, Tuckah."
I shook hands with Tuck and we said, "Glad ta know ya."
Then he laughed at the top of his voice and grabbed a bucket of milk
between his two hands, bent over it with his face almost touching the top of
the milk, his breath blowing rings out across it, saying, "Good оl', good
оl', good ol' milk! Good ol', good ol', good ol' milk!"
For the first two or three miles we just trotted along west down the
Ozark Trail Half a mile west past the Buckeye schoolhouse, we saw two saddle
horses tied to the fence, the Black Joker, wild and mean, that Grandma's
oldest boy, Warren, rode; and an old tame family horse that the two younger
kids, Lawrence and Leonard, rode double.
"I see Warren's sneaked out that Black Joker horse and rode him to
school again. That fool horse is loco."
I set there in the seat all loose and limber, both knees under my chin,
sort of thinking, and then I told Grandma, "Mama'll need me home."
Grandma looked down at me and she put her arm around me and pulled me
over close to her in the buggy seat, and I held one rein in each hand and
let both hands fall down across her lap. "You're worried, too. You're a
worried little man, that's what you are, a worried little man."
"Gramma."
"Yes."
''You know somethin', Gramma? My mama don't never go out an' visit th'
other people acrost th' alley."
"Why not?"
"She jest stays an' stays an' stays home in that ole Lon'on House."
"Do any of the neighbor ladies ever come around to visit and talk with
Nora?" Grandma asked me.
"Huh uh. Never nobody."
"What does she do? Read a book?"
"Jest sets. Looks. Holds a book in 'er lap mosta th' time, but she
don't look where th' book's at. Jest out across th' whole room, an' whole
house an' ever'wheres."
"Is that right?"
"If Papa tells Mama somethin' she forgot, she gits so mad she goes off
up in th' top bedroom an' cries an' cries all day long. What makes it?" I
asked Grandma.
"Your mama is awful bad sick, Woody, awful bad. And she knows she's
awful bad sick. And it's so bad that she don't want any of you to know about
it ... because it's going to get a whole lot worse."
It was a minute or two that Grandma didn't say a word, and neither did
I. I stared along the side of the little old road. The rain had come and the
waters had run, and the road had wrinkled up like an old man's skin. Over
across the tops of the weeds I saw Grandma's big high cornfield.
"Gramma," I finally spoke up, "is Tom an' Bess trottin' fast 'cause
they wanta git home quicker?"
She didn't move or change the blank look on her face much. She said, "I
suppose they do."
"Is one horse a girl?"
"Bess."
"One's a boy horse?"
"Tom."
"They live together, don't they?"
"Same barn, yes. Same pasture. I don't know just exactly what you're
getting at."
"Can horses marry each other?"
"Can they do what?"
"Horses marry?"
"Well, now there you go again with your dang fool infernal questions. I
don't know whether horses get married or not."
"I wuz jest askin' у a."
"You're always asking, asking, asking something. And half of the time I
can't tell you the answer."
"Horses work, don't they?"
"You know they work. I wouldn't even have a cat or a dog or a chicken
on my place that didn't do his share of the work. Yes, even my old cat does
a lot of work. That reminds me, you know old Maltese Mother?"
"Оl', оl' one? Yeah. She knows me, too. Ever' time she sees me, she
comes over to where I am."
"She's got a whole bunch, seven of the nicest soft, fuzzy little
kittens that you ever saw."
"Seven? How many fingers is seven?"
"Like this. Here. All of the fingers on this hand and two fingers on
this hand. That's right."
"Are they good little kittens?"
"Now, what could a little kitten do, anyway, to be mean? They're the
best little fellers you ever saw. Sleepers. You never saw anything sleep
like these little baby cats."
"Where did ole Mother Maltese go to come back with this many little
baby kittens?"
"Out in the trees somewhere, somewhere out in the grass. She found one
little kitten here, and one little kitten over there, and one or two back
across yonder, and that's how she got all seven."
"Is it?"
"Certainly is."
"Why couldn't old Mama Maltese go and find all seven of 'em in jes' one
place?"
"Listen, young man, you'll just have to ask the mama cat. Watch your
horses there, straighten yourself up. You remember we're coming to the gate?
You jump out and open it."
I saw the old barb-wire gate coming and said, "Me? Shore! Shore! I know
ever'thing ya gotta do ta open a gate!"
The gate was tough. I put one arm around the post that was set in the
ground, and the other arm around the loose gatepole, and got sort of a
headlock on them both. I heard Grandma holler out, "I see the boys riding
down the road yonder! Come on!"
Then I heard a bunch of horses' hoofs coming down the road, and I
looked up and saw just a big white-looking cloud of dust coming at me. Out
of the dust I could hear the three boys whooping and barking, "Wwaaahoooo!
Yip! Yip! Уууууiiiррреее! Looky ooouuuttt! Woodrow! Looky outttt!" The
thought of getting tromped under the horses' feet caused my eyes to fly open
like a goggle-eyed bee, and my two ears stood straight out from the sides of
my head.
My first thought was to drop the gatepole and run off into the weeds to
get clear of the horses. The boys were still coming straight at me and
yelling, "Gonna git run oovver! Run overr! Looky outtt, Woodrow! Gonna git
run over an' killed!"
The boys and the horses were within ten foot of me, when I decided that
I'd just hold the gate shut. I happened to take one last look back at the
little wire loop on top, and it had slipped into the notch where I'd been
trying to put it. The gate was shut good as she ever was. I fell down off of
the brace post backwards and scrambled up to my feet again, and made the
worst face I could, and yelled back at the boys, "Ya! Ya! Ya! Thought you
wuz smart! Thought you'z smart!"
Both horses run keeeblamm into the gate. Warren, riding the Black
Joker, was traveling too fast to turn or stop, or even slow down. Lawrence
and Leonard had figured on the gate being open, and their own dust had
blinded them. Their horse stopped so quick that the boys slid right about a
couple of feet up onto the horse's neck; the horse waved his head a time or
two and threw both kids down amongst the wires where Warren was rolling
around.
All of this time I mostly just run about three times as fast as the
wild horses, till I come to Grandma's buggy. I mounted the back of it, set
there all humped up, and watched the crazy rodeo back at the gate. There was
the Black Joker stamping around still crying and squeeling a little, over
yonder in the west corner of the cotton field; and over there in the east
corner, in a few wild weeds, just on the edge of the cotton patch, there was
the horse without a name; and yonder in the middle of the whole thing there
was a cloud of Oklahoma's very best dust, that looked about like where you'd
heaved a hand grenade; you might not believe it to stand back off and look
at it, but somewhere in that dust I knowed there was three awful tough boys.
You couldn't see the boys. Just the dust fogging up. But you could see a few
slivers of barb wire wiggling in the sun.
"Warren! Lawrence! Leonard!
'
' Grandma was just about to yell
her yeller out. "You boys! Where! Wait! Are you hurt!"
She waded into the dust and was fanning both arms, reaching in around
the loose wires and fishing for mean boys. Then all I saw was her hat
bobbing up and down as she bent over and stood up, and bent over again,
hunting for kids. In a few minutes the dust crawled off of its own accord,
like a big animal of some kind, away from the gate, across the little rutty
road.
"Pore ol 'Gran'ma! Leonard's got killed, an' Warren's got killed, an'
Lawrence got killed." I was setting on the back end of the buggy, looking.
Tears the size of teacups was oozing down my cheeks and I could taste the
slick salt when the tears run down to the corner of my mouth.
"Warren! Warren!" Grandma called. "What are you doing over here in this
old ditch! Are you hurt bad?"
Warren got up and tried to brush the dirt off of his self; but his
school clothes was so full of holes and rips that every time he brushed, he
tore a bigger hole somewhere. He was sobbing and his whole body was jerking,
and he told Grandma, "It was that little ornery runt, Woodrow, done it! I'm
gonna cave his head in for 'im!"
"Now, you just hold yourself, Mister Rough Rider," Grandma told Warren.
"Woodrow was doing the best he could. He was closing that gate for me. You
bigger boys had no reason to come ridin' down the road yelling and trying to
scare a little kid to death. I don't care if it did skin you up a little,
you need it." Then she got to looking around for another boy, and she found
one laying flat of his belly out in a clump of sumac bushes, and it was
Leonard puffing and blowing like he'd been shell-shocked in four wars.
"Leonard! You dead?" Grandma said to him.
Leonard jumped up so quick that it would have made a mountain lion look
slow, and he started running toward the buggy as hard as he could tear,
squawling out, "I'm goin' ta beat that little skunk inta th' ground. Goin'
ta tear him up just like he tore me up!" And he kept coming for the buggy.
I was breathing pretty hard, and sometimes not at all. I knew what he'd
do. I let myself just sort of slide over the back of the buggy seat and down
onto the cushion, and held the reins as tight as I could and bit my tongue,
and looked out over the horses' backs toward the house.
Grandma found Lawrence in the same patch of weeds, skint up just about
like the other two, some hide and some duds and some hair missing. Leonard
was climbing up on the buggy seat beside me. He drew his hand back and made
a pass at my head, and I ducked to one side and let the lick fly past. He
hit the back of the buggy seat with his hand and that made him a whole lot
madder. The next lick he swung, he caught me square on the side of the head,
and my ears rung like a steam саlliope. I fell down on the seat with my
hands covering my head, and he rung two or three harder ones around over my
skull. I squeezed out of his grip, but I banged my head on the sharp corner
of a heavy wooden box in the bottom of the buggy, and when I touched my hand
to the knot that raised up just above my ear, and seen blood all over my
fingers, I let out a scream that rattled pecans in trees for a mile around.
The horses heard me, and jumped like they'd been blistered with a
lightning whip. They jerked the loose reins out of my hand. Tom made a lunge
in his harness, a leather strap broke; then Bess got scared and jumped
sideways, and snapped a hitching chain; and then both horses started
snorting, laying their ears back, and running for the barn just like a
cyclone. Leonard fell back on the cushion of the buggy seat. I was still
doubled up in a ball rolling around with the wooden box on the floor boards.
Neither of us could get a chance to jump. The horses kept loping faster and
after they got the buggy in motion, they broke out into their hardest run.
Leonard got madder than ever, and every time the horses' hoofs hit the
ground, or the wheels went around, he would give me a good kick in the back.
He was barefooted and he didn't hurt me much, but when he saw he wasn't, he
decided just to put both of his feet on my neck and try to choke me. The
buggy wheels bounced against rocks, hit roots, and jolted both of us out of
our wits.
Grandma was within three feet of the buggy when the horses broke and
run away, and I could hear her hollering, "Whoa! Whoa! Tom! Bess! Stop them
horses! God Almighty! There's a hundred sticks of dynamite in that buggy!"
I heard the horses grunt, and heard the water in their bellies jostle
around, heard the air snorting through their nostrils, and their hoofs
beating against the ground.
"That box you're leanin' up against is fulla dynamite!" Leonard
hollered.
"I don't care!" I yelled at him.
"If this buggy turns over, we're gonners!" he told me.
I told him, "I cain't stop 'em!"
"I'm goin't' jump! Leave you with it!" he bellered.
"Jump! See if I care!" I told him.
Leonard got up and stood with his feet in the seat, and the first time
he got his chance, he piled over the side, and hit rolling through a patch
of bullhead sticker weeds. All I saw was the seat of his britches as he flew
over the wheels. And that left me banging all around over the floor of the
buggy with nothing but a box of dynamite, and TNT caps, to keep me company.
The post of the gate swung past, and I let out my breath when we missed it
by about an inch; but I looked ahead of the horses and saw that the whole
barn lot was standing full of things that we couldn't miss. Straight ahead
was a steam tractor, and beside that was a couple of wagons with their
tongues propped up on their singletrees. Here was a hog-oiling machine. A
pile of corn cobs was in our path. I could picture Grandpa's barn, barn lot,
all of his plows, tools, and machinery, blowing up over the tree tops; but
the old horses knew more about this place than I did, and they made a big
horseshoe bend around the thrasher, cut in real quick to shave the tractor,
sidestepped a little to pass the pile of cobs, and then curved wide again.
But when they made a run for the barn door, I told myself good-bye. The
whole barn was stacked full of more wagons, machinery and plows, and there
was a concrete slab running across the ground just as you went in the door,
which I knew was enough of a hump to throw that box of dynamite plumb out of
the buggy. With my ear against the box, I could hear the big sticks thumping
about inside.
But, all at once, the horses come to the door. They wheeled sideways
again and stopped; horses aiming one direction, and the buggy another.
For a minute I just laid there hugging the box. Then I made a quick
high dive over the seat, and lit on the ground. Warren and Leonard come
riding up and jumped off of their horse.
"You little devil, you! You've caused us enough trouble!"
Warren made a run and grabbed me by the neck. "Come on, Leonard! I got
'im for ya! Here th' little bastard is! Beat th' livin' hell out of 'im!"
"Hold `im!" Leonard was saying. "Hold 'im till I can get my belt loose!
I'm gonna whop blisters on yore little hide that a dollar bill won't cover!
Yore whole dam family ain't nuthin' but bad luck! Hold `im, Warren!"
Leonard took a few seconds to unloose his belt buckle and get it pulled
out of the loops. I was kicking and crying, not loud. I didn't want Grandma
to think I was bellering so's she could hear me; but I was fighting. I was
using every cuss word that ever was or ever will be.
Your old blisters won't hurt me. Your old stropping belt won't hurt
long. Your old arm will give out. You don't know. You think you're scaring
me. You think you're takin
'
some of my fight out of me. You'll
whip me now, and I'll look like I'm cryin', but I won't really be cryin'.
I'll be havin' tears in my eyes because I'm mad at you. My family can't help
what happened to them. My mama can't help what happened.
You used to be friendly and nice to my mama when she was pretty and
healthy, and people was nice to you because you was my mama's brothers. But
then, when she had some bad things happen to her, and lost her pretty house,
and got sick, and needed you to treat her 'nice, you stand off and how'l and
bark like a crazy bunch of coyotes, and laugh and poke fun at us. It makes
me tough enough to stand here and let you whack me acrost the back and the
neck and ears, and blister my shoulders with that little old flimsy leather
strop, and I don't even feel it.
I was thinking these things, but I only said, "Cowards! Two on one!"
"Here's one across yer bare legs, you little runt, just to remember
that you caused us a lot of trouble!" And Leonard wrapped the belt around my
legs.
"Hurts, don't it? I want yuh to feel it plumb down to yer bones! I want
it to hurt! Does it?"
"Don't," I told him.
"What? You mean I ain't comin' down hard enough on this here belt?"
Leonard doubled the strap up in his hands and said, "I can make you say,
'hurt'! I'll give it to you doubled up an' double hard! I'll make you crawl
up to me on yer hands and knees and say, 'hurt'!" He was beating me one lick
after another one, all over my body, stinging, raising ridges, making
bruises and welts. I was fighting Warren, trying to get loose from his grip.
"Lemme loose! I want loose! I'll stand right here!" I told him.
"Say, 'hurt'!" Leonard brought down another hard one around my bare
legs.
"Turn me loose! I won't run!" I told them.
And then Warren loosened his hold on my arms, and said, "I'll just see
if you've got nerve enough to stand up like a man and take your beatin'!" He
let go of me, and I stood there looking at Leonard while he drew back to
give me some more of the strap.
"Say it hurts!" Leonard said. "I want to know I ain't been wastin' my
time! Say it hurts!"
Warren warned me from behind, "Better say what he wants you to say.
It'll be over quicker. Go ahead. Say it's hurtin'!"
"Won't," I said back at him.
"You little hard-headed, hard-luck sonofabitch! I'll make you say what
I want, or I'll beat you into the ground!" Leonard started striking first
from one side, and then the other, without even taking time to say a word or
to breathe in between. 'Talk like I tell yuh ta talk!"
"Ain't," I told him.
Then Grandma spoke up right behind Leonard's back and said, "No, you
don't, you young Kaiser Bill! You're too dang mean to be a living son of
mine! Give it here!" Almost before he knew it, she yanked the belt out of
his hand, and Leonard ran about twenty feet away and stood there shivering.
He knew that Grandma was hell on wheels when she got her dander riled up.
Warren was talking up for Leonard. "That dam little old stinkin'
Woodrow was the cause of the whole thing, Ma."
"Hush your trap!" Grandma turned to Warren and said, "You're just as
much in on this as your mean brother is! And you're running your old ma
crazy, both of you together!" She wadded the belt up into a little ball in
her two hands. Lawrence stood beside Grandma, not saying much, just looking
at first one of us and then the other.
"I don't know," she said, standing there with big tears rolling down
her cheeks, "I don't know what to do. I just don't know what to try next!''
The three boys were wiggling their feet and toes around, ducking their
heads, looking at the ground, but not saying a word.
"Any of you young studs got anything to say for yourselves?"
Leonard talked out and said, "What good's he doin' us by comin' around?
We don't wanta hafta play with `im. We ain't a-gonna let 'im foller us! He's
just ol' Nora's little ol' sickly runt. I don't like 'im, an' I hate his
guts!"
Grandma made about four quick steps and grabbed Leonard by the shirt
collar. She wound her hand around a time or two in his shirt till she had a
good hold on him, and then she started pushing him backwards, taking big
long steps, and he was falling back, listening to her say, "I've told you
this a dozen times before, young buck! Nora is just as much my little girl
as you are my little boy, get that? Nora's dad was just as good, and some
ways a whole lot better than your dad! He was my first husband! Nora was our
only child!" She jammed him back up against the side of the barn and every
time she'd tell him a word, she'd push him back a little harder, trying to
jar him into thinking. "No. Nora's not like you. No. I remember how Nora
was, even away back when she was just your age. She went to my little
schoolhouse where I taught, over on the Deep Fork River, and she read her
books and got her lessons, and she helped me mark and grade the papers. She
liked pretty music and she sung songs and played her own chords on the
piano; and she learned just about everything pretty that she got a half a
chance, just half a chance to! She made herself at home everywhere she went,
and people liked her; and I was always proud of her because ... she ..." and
Grandma turned her head away from the boy up against the barn; and her hand
fell open and the belt fell down onto the ground, and she said, "Leonard,
there's your belt. There. Laying on the ground, there. Pick it up. Put it
back in your britches. They're falling off. Come on. Come over here by the
wagon. I'm going to set myself down there on the tongue. Here, now, come on
over here, all of you boys, and your ma's going to hug all of you. And I
want you to put your arms around me, too, just like you always did. Just
like everything was all right."
Grandma rested herself by sitting down on the wagon tongue, and the
boys looked out of the corners of their eyes at each other, and walked over,
a little slow, but they walked, and put their arms around her; loose at
first, and she used her own hands to take hold of their arms and make them
tighter around her neck and shoulders. When she did, the boys hugged her
tighter, and she closed her eyes, and moved her head from one side to the
other, first brushing the bosom of one kid, and then the shirt, and the
shoulder of another.
She kept her eyes closed and said, "Woodrow, don't stand away over
there by yourself. You belong in my lap here. Come on and crawl up. That's
it. You belong with your little old curly head snuggled right close up, just
like that. God, this is good! Yes, all of you are my boys, doing the best
you've been taught. All of you will make mistakes, but, Lord, I can't make
any difference between you!"
There wasn't a sound out of any of the boys. I was holding my head up
under Grandma's mouth, listening to her talk real slow and long and soft;
and my eyes dripped tears down across the front of her bosom and faded her
town dress. The other three boys moved their heads, kept their eyes down.
"I'm sorry, Ma."
"Me, too, Ma."
"Don't cry, Maw."
"Gramma, I ain't mad at nobody."
NEW KITTENS
Up at the house an hour later, Warren and Leonard had poured water and
washed their cuts clean, and drifted off into the house getting on some
clean clothes. Grandma talked a little to herself, getting some coffee
ground for supper. Lawrence trotted out into the yard in a few minutes and I
set on the stone steps of the porch and watched him. He pranked around under
the two big oak trees and then walked around the corner of the house.
I followed him. He was the littlest one of Grandma's boys. He was more
my size. I was about five and he was eight. I followed him back to a
rosebush where he pointed to old Mother Maltese and her new little bunch of
kittens. He was telling me all there is to know about cats.
First, we just rubbed the old mama cat on the head, and he told me she
was older than either one of us. "Cat's been here longer'n me even."
"How old is оl' mama cat?" I asked Lawrence.
"Ten."
"An' you're jest eight?" I said.
"Yeah."
"She's all ten fingers old. You ain't but jest this many fingers old,"
I went on.
"She's two older'n me," he said.
"Wonder how come you th' biggest?"
"Cause, crazy, I'm a boy, an' she's a cat!"
"Feel how warm an' smooth she is," I told him.
"Yeah," he said, "perty slick, all right; but th' little 'ums is th'
slickest. But ol' mama cat don't like for strangers ta come out here an'
stick yore han' down in her box an' feel on her little babies.''
"I been out here 'fore this," I told him, "so that makes me not no
stranger."
"Yeah," he told me back, "I know that; but then, you went back ta town
ag'in, see, an' course, that makes you part of a stranger."
"How much stranger am I? I ain't no plumb whole stranger; mama cat
knowed me when I wuz jest a little teeny weeny baby; jest this long;
an
'
my mama had ta keep me all nice an' warm jest like them
little baby cats, so's I wouldn't freeze, so's nuthin' wouldn't git me." I
was still stroking the old cat's head, and feeling of her with my fingers.
She was holding her eyes shut real tight, and purring almost loud
enough for Grandma to hear her in the house. Lawrence and me kept watching
and listening. The old mama cat purred louder and louder.
Then I asked Lawrence, "What makes 'er sound that a-way in 'er head?"
And he told me, "Purrin', that's what she's doin'."
"Makes 'er purr?" I asked him.
"She does it 'way back inside 'er head some way," Lawrence was telling
me.
"Sounds like a car motor," I said.
"She ain't got no car motor in 'er," he said.
"Might," I said.
"I don't much think she has, though."
"Might have a little 'un, kinda like a cat motor; I mean a regler
little motor fer cats," I said.
"What'd she be wantin' with a cat motor?"
"Lotsa things is got motors in 'em. Motors is engines. Engines makes
things go. Makes noise jest like ol' mama cat. Motor makes wheels go 'round,
so cats might have a real little motor ta make legs go, an' tail go, an'
feet move, an' nose go, an' ears wiggle, an' eyes go 'round, an' mouth fly
open, an' mebbe her stomach is' er gas tank." I was running my hand along
over the old mama cat's fur, feeling of each part as I talked, head, tail,
legs, mouth, eyes, and stomach; and the old cat had a big smile on her face.
"Wanta see if she's really got a motor inside of 'er? I'll go an' git
Ma's butcher knife, an' you hold 'er legs, an' I'll cut er belly open; an'
if she's got a motor in 'er, by jacks, I wanta see it! Want me to?" Lawrence
asked me.
"Cut 'er belly open?" I asked him. "Ya might'n find 'er motor when ya
got cut in there!"
"I c'n find it, if she's got one down in there! I helped Pa cut rabbits
an' squirrels an' fishes open, an' I never did see no motor in them!"
"No, but did you ever hear a rabbit er a squirrel either one, or a fish
make a noise like mama cat makes?"
"No. Never did."
"Well, mebbe that's why they ain't got no motor. Mebbe they gotta
differnt kinda motor. Don't make no kind of a noise."
"Might be. An' some of th' time mama cat don't make no noise either;
'cause some of th' time ya cain't even hear no motor in 'er belly. What
then?"
"Maybe she's just got th' key turned off!"
"Turned off?" Lawrence asked me.
"Might be. My papa's gotta car. His car's gotta key. Ya turn th' key
on, an' th' car goes like a cat. Ya turn th' key off, an' it quits."
'There yore hand goes ag'in! Didn' I tell you not ta touch them little
baby kittens? They ain't got no eyes open ta see with yet; you cain't put
yore hands on' em!" He cut his eyes around at me.
"Ohhhhhppppp! All right. I'm awful, awful sorry, mama cat; an' I'm
awful, awful sorry, little baby cats!" And I let my hand fall back down on
the old mama cat's back.
"That's all right ta pat 'er all you want, but she'll reach up an" take
'er claws, an' rip yore hand plumb wide open if you make one of her little
cats cry!" he told me.
"Know somethin', Lawrence, know somethin'?"
"What about?" he asked me.
"People says when I wuz a baby, jest like one of these here little baby
cats, only a little bit bigger, mebbe, my mama got awful bad sick when I wuz
borned under th' covers."
"I heard Ma an' them talk about her," he told me.
"What did they talk about?" I asked him.
"Oohhh, I dunno, she wuz purty bad off.''
"What made 'er bad off?"
"Yer dad."
"My papa did?"
"What people says."
"He's good ta me. Good ta my mama. What makes people say he made my
mama git sick?"
"Politics."
"What's them?''
"I dunno what politics is. Just a good way to make some money. But you
always have troubles. Have fights. Carry two guns ever' day. Yore dad likes
lots of money. So he got some people ta vote fer 'im, so then he got 'im two
guns an' went around c'lectin' money. Yore ma didn't like yore dad ta always
be pokin' guns, shootin', fightin', an' so, well, she just worried an'
worried, till she got sick at it--an' that was when you was borned a baby
not much bigger'n one of these here little cats, I reckon.'' Lawrence was
digging his fingernails into the soft white pine of the box, looking at the
nest of cats. "Funny thing 'bout cats. All of 'em's got one ma, an' all of
'ems differnt colors. Which is yore pet color? Mine's this 'un, an' this
'un, an' this 'un."
"I like all colors cats. Say, Lawrence, what does crazy mean?"
"Means you ain't got good sense.''
"Worried?"
"Crazy's more'n just worry."
"Worse'n worryin'?"
"Shore. Worry starts, an' you do that fer a long, long time, an' then
maybe you git sick 'er somethin', an' ya go all, well, you just git all
mixed up 'bout ever'thing."
"Is ever'body sick like my mama?"
"I don't guess."
"Reckin could all of our folks cure my mama?"
"Might. Wonder how?"
"If ever single livin' one of 'em would all git together an' git rid of
them ol' mean, bad politics, they'd all feel lots better, an' wouldn't fight
each other so much, an' that'd make my mama feel better."
Lawrence looked out through the leaves of the bushes. "Wonder where
Warren's headin', goin' off down toward th' barn? Be right still; he's
walkin' past us. He'll hear us talkin'."
I whispered real low and asked Lawrence, "Whatcha bein' so still for?
'Fraida Warren?"
And Lawrence told me, "Hushhh. Naw. 'Fraid fer th' cats."
"Why 'bоut th' cats?"
"Warren don't like cats."
"Why?" I was still whispering.
"Just don't. Be still. Ssshhh."
"Why?" I went on.
"Sez cats ain't no good. Warren kills all th' new little baby cats that
gits born'd on th' place. I had these hid out under th' barn. Don't let 'im
know we're here...."
Warren got within about twenty feet of us, and we could see his long
shadow falling over our rosebush; and then for a little time we couldn't see
him, and the rosebush blocked out of sight of him. Still, we could hear his
new sharp-toed leather shoes screaking every time he took a step. Lawrence
tapped me on the shoulder. I looked around and he was motioning for me to
grab up one side of the white pine box. I got a hold and he grabbed the
other side. We skidded the box up close to the rock foundation of the house,
and partly in behind the rosebush.
Lawrence held his breath and I held my hand over my mouth. Warren's
screaky shoes was the only sound I could hear. Lawrence laid his body down
over the box of cats. I laid down to hide the other half of the box, and the
screak, screak, screak got louder. I whiffed my nose and smelled the loud
whang of hair tonic on Warren's hair. His white silk shirt threw flashes of
white light through the limbs of the roses, and Lawrence moved his lips so
as to barely say, "Montgomery girl." I didn't catch him the first time, so
he puckered his lips to tell me again, and when he bent over my way, he
stuck a thorn into his shoulder, and talked out too loud:
"Montgomery--"
The screak of Warren's shoes stopped by the side of the bush. He looked
all around, and took a step back, then one forward. And he had us trapped.
I didn't have the guts to look up at him. I heard his shoes screak and
I knew that he was rocking from one foot to the other one, standing with his
hands on his hips, looking down on the ground at Lawrence and me. I shivered
and could feel Lawrence quiver under his shirt. Then I turned my head over
and looked out from under Lawrence's arm, both of us still hugging the box,
and heard Warren say, "What was that you boys was a-sayin'?"
"Tellin' Woody about somebody," Lawrence told Warren.
"Somebody? Who?" Warren didn't seem to be in any big rush.
"Somebody. Somebody you know," Lawrence said.
"Who do I know?" Warren asked him.
"Th' Mon'gom'ry folks,'' Lawrence said.
"You're a couple of dirty little low-down liars! All you know how to do
is to hide off in under some Goddamed bush, an' say silly things about other
decent people!" Warren told us.
"We wuzn't makin' no fun, swear ta God," Lawrence told him.
"What in the hell was you layin' under there talkin' about? Somethin'
your're tryin' to hide! Talk out!"
"I seen you was all nice an' warshed up clean, an' told Woody you was
goin' over ta Mon'gom'ry's place.''
"What else?"
"Nuthin else. 'At's all I said, swear ta God, all I told you, wasn't
it, Woody?"
" 'S all I heard ya say," I told him.
"Now ain't you a pair of little old yappin' pups? You know dam good an'
well you was teasin' me from behind 'bout Lola Montgomery! How come you two
hidin' here in th' first place? Just to see me walk past you with all of my
clean clothes on? See them new low-cut shoes? See how sharp th' toes are?
Feel with your finger, both of you, feel! That's it! See how sharp? I'd
ought to just take that sharp toe and kick both of your little rears."
"Quit! Quit that pushin' me!" Lawrence was yelling as loud as he could,
hoping Grandma would hear. Warren pushed him on the shoulder with the bottom
of his shoe, and tried to roll Lawrence over across the ground. Lawrence
swung onto his box of cats so tight that Warren had to kick as hard as he
could, and push Lawrence off the box.
The only thing I could think of to do was jump on top of the box and
cover it up. Lawrence was yelling as loud as he could yell. Warren was
laughing. I wasn't saying anything.
"Whut's that box you're a holdin' onto there so tight?" Warren asked
me.
"Jest a plain ol' box!" Lawrence was crying and talking.
"Jest a plain wooden box," I told Warren.
"What's on th' inside of it, runts?"
"Nuthin's in it!"
"Jist a ol' empty one!"
And Warren put his shoe sole on my back and pushed me over beside
Lawrence. "I'll just take me a look! You two seems mighty interested in
what's inside of that box!"
"You оl' mean outfit, you! God, I hate you! You go on over an' see yore
ol' 'Gomery girl, an' leave us alone! We ain't a-hurtin' you!" Lawrence was
jumping up. He started to draw back and fight Warren, but Warren just took
his open hand and pushed Lawrence about fifteen feet backwards, and he fell
flat, screaming.
Warren put his foot on my shoulder and give me another shove. I went
about three feet. I tried to hold onto the box, but the whole works turned
over. The old mama cat jumped out and made a circle around us, meowing first
at Warren, and then at me and the little baby kittens cried in the split
cotton seed.
"Cat lovers!" Warren told us.
"You g'wan, an' let us be! Don't you tech them cats! Ma! Ma! Warr'n's
gonna hurt our cats!" Lawrence squawled out.
Warren kicked the loose cotton seed apart. "Just like
tearin
'
up a bird's nest!" he said. He put the sharp toe of his
shoe under the belly of the first little cat, and threw it up against the
rock foundation. "Meoww! Meoww! You little chicken killers! Egg stealers!"
He picked the second kitten up in the grip of his hand, and squeezed till
his muscles bulged up. He swung the kitten around and around, something like
a Ferris wheel, as fast as he could turn his arm, and the blood and entrails
of the kitten splashed across the ground, and the side of the house. Then he
held the little body out toward Lawrence and me. We looked at it, and it was
just like an empty hide. He threw it away out over the fence.
Warren took the second kitten, squeezed it, swung it over his head and
over the top wire of the fence. The third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and
seventh.
The poor old mama cat was running backwards, crossways, and all around
over the yard with her back humped up, begging against Warren's legs, and
trying to jump up and climb up his body to help her babies. He boxed her
away and she came back. He kicked her thirty feet. She moaned along the
rocks, smelling of her babies' blood and insides. She scratched dirt and dug
grass roots; then she made a screaming noise that chilled my blood and
jumped six feet, clawing at Warren's arm. He kicked her in the air and her
sides were broke and caved in. He booted her up against the side of the
house, and she laid there wagging her tail and meowing; and Warren grabbed
the box and splintered it against the rocks and the mama cat's head. He
grabbed up two rocks and hit her in the stomach both shots. He looked at me
and Lawrence, spit on us, threw the loose cotton seed into our faces, and
said, "Cat-lovin' bastards!" And he started walking on away toward the barn.
"You ain't no flesh an' blood of mine!" Lawrence cried after him.
"Hell with you, baby britches! Hell with you. I don't even want to be
yore dam brother!" Warren said over his shoulder.
"You ain't my uncle, neither," I told him, "not even my mama's half
brother! You ain't even nobody's halfway brother! I'm glad my mama ain't no
kin ta you! I'm glad I ain't!" I told him.
"Awwww. Whattaya know, whattaya know, you half-starved little runt?"
Warren was turned around, standing in the late sun with his shirt white and
pretty in the wind. "You done run yore mama crazy just bein' born! You
little old hard-luck bringer! You dam little old insane-asylum baby!" And
Warren walked away on down to the barn.
Then Lawrence rolled up onto his feet off of the grass and tore around
the side of the house hollering and telling Grandma what all Warren had done
to the cats.
I scrambled up over the fence and dropped down into the short-weed
patch. The old mama cat was twisting and moaning and squeezing through at
the bottom of the wire, and making her way out where Warren had slung her
little babies.
I saw the old mama walk around and around her first kitten in the
weeds, and sniffle, and smell, and lick the little hairs; then she took the
dead baby in her teeth, carried it through the weeds, the rag weeds,
gypsums, and cuckle burrs that are a part of all of Oklahoma.
She laid the baby down when she come to the edge of a little trickling
creek, and held up her own broken feet when she walked around the kitten
again, circling, looking down at it, and back up at me.
I got down on my hands and knees and tried to reach out and pet her.
She was so broke up and hurting that she couldn't stand still, and she
pounded the damp ground there with her tail as she walked a whole circle all
around me. I took my hand and dug a little hole in the sandy creek bank and
laid the dead baby in, and covered it up with a mound like a grave.
When I seen the old Mama Maltese holding her eyes shut with the lids
quivering and smell away into the air, I knew she was on the scent of her
second one.
When she brought it in, I dug the second little grave.
I was listening to her moan and choke in the weeds, dragging her belly
along the ground, with her two back legs limber behind her, pulling her body
with her front feet, and throwing her head first to one side and then to the
other.
And I was thinking: Is that what crazy is?
Chapter V
MISTER CYCLOME
"Here I am, Papa!" I ripped out the east door and went running down to
where Papa was. "Here I am! I wanta help shoot!"
"Get back away from that hole! Dynamite!" He hadn't noticed me as I
trotted out.
"Where 'bouts?" I was standing not more than three feet away from the
hole he'd been drilling through a rock' "Where?"
"Run! This way!" He grabbed me in his arms, covered me over with his
jacket and fell down flat against the ground, "Lay still! Down!"
The whole hill jarred. Rocks howled out over our heads.
"I wanna see!" I was trying to fight my way out from under him. "Lemme
out!"
"Keep down!" He hugged his jacket around me that much tighter. "Those
rocks just went up. They'll be down in a jiffy!"
I felt him duck his head down against mine. The rocks thumped all
around us and several peppered the jacket. The cloth was stretched tight. It
sounded like a war drum. "Wowie!" I said to Papa.
"You'll think, Wowie!" Papa laughed when he got up. He brushed his
clothes off good. "One of those rocks hit you on the head, and you wouldn't
think anything for a long time!"
"Le's go blow another'n up!" I was pacing around like a cat wanting
milk.
"All right! Come on! You can take the little hoe and dig a nice
ten-foot hole!"
"Goshamighty! How deep?"
"Teen feet."
"Lickety split! Lickety split!" I was chopping out a hole with the
little hoe. "Is this 'teen feet deep?"
"Keep on with your work!" Papa acted like a chain-gang boss. "Whew! I
don't believe I ever did see it get so hot this late in the stimmer. But I
guess we'll have to keep digging without air! We've just got to get this old
London Place fixed up. Then we can sell it to somebody and get some money
and buy us another better place. You like that?"
"I don't like nuthin' bad. I wanta move. Mama wants ta move, too. So
does Roy an' Clara, an' ever'body else."
"Yes, little boy, I know, I know."
'
Papa knocked the blue
rock smoke out of the hole every time his crowbar come down. "I like
everything that's good, don't you?"
"Mama had a piano an' lotsa good things when she was a little kid,
didn't she?" I kept leaning on the handle of my hoe. "An" now she ain't got
no nice things."
"Yes. She always loved the good things." Papa pulled a red bandana out
of his hip pocket and wiped the sweat from his face. "You know, Woody boy,
I'm afraid."
"'Fraida what?"
"This infernal heat. It's got me guessing." Papa looked all around in
every direction, sniffed in the air. "Don't know exactly. But it feels like
to me there's not a single breath of air stirring."
"Purty still, all right. I'm sweatin'!"
"Not a leaf. Not a blade of grass. Not a feather. Not a spider-web
stirring." He turned his face away to the north. A quick, fast breath of
cool air drifted across the hill.
"Good оl' cool wind!" I was puffing my lungs full of the new air
stirring. "Good ol', good оl', cool, cool wind!"
"Yes, I feel the cool wind." He stayed down on his hands, looking
everywhere, listening to every little sound. "And I don't like it!" He
yelled at me. "And you hadn't ought to say that you like it, either!"
"Papa, what'sa matter, huh?" I laid on my belly as close up beside Papa
as I could get, and looked everywhere that he did. "Papers an' leafs an'
feathers blowin'. You ain't really scared, are ya, Papa?"
Papa's voice sounded shaky and worried. "What do you know about
cyclones? You've never even seen one yet! Quit popping off at your mouth!
Everything that I've been working and fighting for in my whole life is tied
up right here in this old London Place!"
I never thought that I would see my dad so afraid of anything.
" 'Taint no good!"
"Shut your little mouth before I shut it for you!"
" 'Tain't no good!"
"Don't you dare talk back to your papa!"
" 'Tain't no good!"
"Woody, I'll split you hide!" Then he let his head drop down till his
chin touched the bib of his overhalls and his tears wet the watch pocket.
"What makes you say it's not any good, Woody?"
"Mama said it." I rolled a foot or two away from him. An' Mama cries
alla th' time, too!"
The wind rustled against the limbs of the locust trees across the road
running up the hill. The walnut trees frisked their heads in the air and
snorted at the wind getting harder. I heard a low whining sound everywhere
in the air as the spider webs, feathers, old flying papers, and dark clouds
swept along the ground, picking up the dust, and blocking out the sky.
Everything fought and pushed against the wind, and the wind fought
everything in its way.
"Woody, little boy, come over here."
"I'm a-gonna run." I stood up and looked toward the house.
"No, don't run." I had to stand extra still and quiet to hear Papa talk
in the wind. "Don't run. Don't ever run. Come on over here and let me hold
you on my lap."
I felt a feeling of some kind come over me like the chilly winds coming
over the hot hill. I turned nervous and scared and almost sick inside. I
fell down into Papa's lap, hugging him around the neck so tight his whiskers
rubbed my face nearly raw. I could feel his heart beating fast and I knew he
was afraid.
"Le's run!"
"You know, I'm not ever going to run any more, Woody, Not from people.
Not from my own self. Not from a cyclone."
"Not even from a lightnin' rod?"
"You mean a bolt of lightning? No. Not even from a streak of
lightning!"
"Thunner? `Tater wagon?"
"Not from thunder. Not from my own fear.''
"Skeerd?"
"Yes. I'm scared. I'm shaking right this minute."
"I felt ya shakin' when th' cyclome first come."
"Cyclone may miss us, little curly block. Then again, it may hit right
square on top of us. I just want to ask you a question. What if this cyclone
was to reach down with its mean tail and suck away everything we've got here
on this hill? Would you still like your old Papa? Would you still come over
and sit on my lap and hold me this tight around the neck?"
"I'd hug tighter."
"That's all I want to know." He straightened up a little and put both
arms around me so that when the wind blew colder I felt warmer. "Let's let
the wind get harder. Let's let the straw and the feathers fly! Let the old
wind go crazy and pound us over the head! And when the straight winds pass
over and the twisting winds crawl in the air like a rattlesnake in boiling
water, let's you and me holler back at it and laugh it back to where it come
from! Let's stand up on our hind legs, and shake our fists back into the
whole crazy mess, and holler and cuss and rave and laugh and say, 'Old
Cyclone, go ahead! Beat your bloody brains out against my old tough hide!
Rave on! Blow! Beat! Go crazy! Cyclone! You and I are friends! Good old
Cyclone!' "
I jumped up to my feet and hollered, "Blow! Ha! Ha! Blow, wind! Blow!
I'm a Cyclome! Ha! I'm a Cyclome!"
Papa jumped up and danced in the dirt. He circled his pile of tools,
patted me on the head, and laughed out, "Come on, Cyclone, let 'er ripple!"
"Chhaaarrrliee!" Mama's voice cut through all of the laughing and
dancing and the howling of the wind across the whole hill. "Where are you?"
"We're down here fighting with a Cyclone!" "Chasin' storms an' hittin'
'em!" I put in.
"Whhaaattt?"
Papa and me snickered at each other.
"Wrestling a Cyclone!"
"Tell 'er I am, too," I told Papa.
Grandma and Mama walked through the trash blowing in the wind and found
me and Papa patting our hands together and dancing all around the dynamite
and tools. "What on earth has come over you two?"
"Huh?"
"You're crazy!" Grandma looked around her.
The wind was filling the whole sky with a blur of dry grass, tumbling
weeds, and scooting gravel, fine dust, and sailing leaves. Hot rain began to
whip us.
"We're heading for a storm cellar, and you're coming with us. Here's a
raincoat."
"Who will carry this Sawhorse?" Papa asked them.
"I wanta wade th' water!" I said.
"No you won't. I'll carry you myself!" Mama said. "Give him to me!"
Papa joked at Mama. "Put him right up here on my shoulders! Now the raincoat
around him. We'll splash every mudhole dry between here and Oklahoma City!
We're Cyclone Fighters! Did you know that, Nora?"
The wind staggered Papa along the path. Grandma grunted and throwed her
weight against the storm. Mama was buttoning up a slicker and bogging in the
slick clay in the path.
"This rain is like a river cutting loose!" Papa was saying under my
coat. He poked his face out between two buttons and took two steps up and
slid one step back.
At the top of the hill the water was deeper, and in the dear alley the
wind hit us harder.
"Charlie! Help Grandma, there! She's fell down!'' Mama said.
Papa turned around and took Grandma by the hand and pulled her to her
feet. "I'm all right! Now! Head on for the cellar!"
I felt the wind drive against me so hard that I had to hug onto Papa's
neck as tight as I could. The wind hit us again and drove us twenty feet
down the alley in the wrong direction. Papa's shoes went over their tops in
mud and he stood spraddle-legged and panted for air. "You're choking my wind
off! Hold on around my head!"
The wind rolled tubs and spun planks of ripped lumber through the air.
Trash piles and bushel baskets sailed against clothes-line. Barn doors
banged open and shut and splintered into a hundred pieces. Rain shot like a
solid wall of water and Papa braced his feet in the soggy manure, and
yelled, "You all right, Wood?" I told him, "I'm all right! You?"
A wild push of wind whined for a minute like a puppy under a box and
then roared down the alley, squealing like a hundred mad elephants. My coat
ripped apart and turned wrongside out over my head and I grabbed a tight
hold around Papa's forehead. We staggered twenty or thirty more feet down
the alley and fell flat in some deep cow tracks behind a chicken pen.
"Charlie! Are you and Woodrow all right?" I heard Mama yelling down the
alley. I couldn't see ten feet in her direction.
"You take Grandma on to the cellar!" Papa was yelling out from under
the rubber raincoat. "We'll be there in a minute! Go on! Get in!"
I was laying at first with my feet in a hole of manurey water, but I
twisted and squirmed and finally got my head above it. "Lemme loose!"
"You keep your head down!" Papa ducked me again in the hole of watery
manure. "Stay where you are!"
"Yer drownin' me in cow manure!" I finally managed to gurgle.
"Keep down there!"
"Papa?"
"Yes. What?" He was choking for air.
"Are you and me still Cyclome Fighters?"
"We lost this first round, didn't we?" Papa laughed under the raincoat
till cellars heard him ten blocks around. "But well make it! Just as soon's
I get a little whiff of fresh air. Well make 'er here in a minute! Won't we,
manure head?"
"Mama an' Grandma's better Cyclome Fighters than we are!" I laughed and
snorted into the slush pool under my nose. "They done got to th' storm
cellar, an' left us in a 'nure hole! Ha!"
Phone wires whistled and went with the wind. Packing boxes from the
stores down in town raised from their alleys and flew above the trees.
Timbers from barns and houses clattered through windows, and cows bawled and
mooed in the yards, tangled their horns in chicken-wire fences and
clotheslines. Soggy dogs streaked and beat it for home. Ditches and streets
turned into rivers and backyards into lakes. Bales of hay splitting apart
blew through the sky like pop-corn sacks. The rain burned hot. Everything in
the world was fighting against everything in the sky. This was the hard
straight pushing that levels the towns before it and lays the path low for
the twisting, sucking, whirling tail of the cyclone to rip to shreds.
Papa wrapped me in the raincoat and hugged me as tight as he could. We
crawled behind a cow barn to duck the wind, but the cow barn screamed like a
woman run down in the streets, tumbled over on its side, and the first whisk
of the wind caught the open underside and booted the whole barn fifty feet
in the air. We fell six feet forward. I hugged around Papa's neck. He turned
me loose with both hands and swung onto a clothesline, slipping his hands
along the wires, pushing off sacks, mops, hay and rubbish of all kinds till
we got to the back of the first house. He edged his way to the next house
and felt along their clothesline. In a minute or two we come to within
fifteen feet of the cellar door where Grandma and Mama had gone with the
neighbors. Papa crawled along the ground, dragging me underneath him.
"Nora! Nora!" Papa banged against the slanting cellar door with his
fists hard enough to compete with the twister. "Let us in! It's Charlie!"
"An' meee!" I let out from under the coat.
The door opened and Papa wedged his shoulder against it. Five or six
neighbor men and women heaved against the door to push it back against the
wind.
I was just as wet as any catfish in any creek ever was or ever will be
when Papa finally got into the cellar.
Mama grabbed me up into her lap where she was setting down on a case of
canned fruit. A lantern or two shot a little gleam of light through the
shadows of ten or fifteen people packed into the cellar.
"Boy! You know, Mama, me an' Papa is really Cyclome Fighters!" I
jabbered off and shook my head around at everybody.
"How's your papa? Charlie! Are you all right?"
"Just wet with cow manure!"
Everybody laughed and hollered under the ground.
"Sing to me," I whispered to Mama.
She had already been rocking me back and forth, humming the tune to an
old song. "What do you want me to sing?"
"That. That song."
"The name of that song is 'The Sherman Cyclone.'"
"Sing that."
And so she sang it:
You could see the storm approaching
And its cloud looked deathlike black
And it was through
Our little city
That it left
Its deathly track.
And I drifted off to sleep thinking about all of the people in the
world that have worked hard and had somebody else come along and take their
life away from them.
The door was opened back and the man in a slicker was saying, "The
worst of it's gone!"
Papa yelled up the steps, "How do things look out there?"
"Pretty bad! Done a lot of damage!" I could see the man's big pair of
rubber boots sogging around in the mudhole by the door. "She passed off to
the south yonder! Hurry out, and you can still see the tail whipping!"
I jumped loose from Mama and slid down off her lap. "I'm a-gonna see it
gitt a-whippin'!" I was talking to Papa and following him out the door.
"Out south yonder. See?" The man pointed. "Still whipping!"
"I see it! I see it! That big ole long whip! I see it!" I waded out
into the holes of water barefooted and squirted mud between my toes. "I hate
you, оl' Cyclome! Git outta here!"
The clouds in the west rolled away to the south and the sun struck down
like a clear Sunday morning across town. Screen doors slammed and cellar
doors swung open. People walked out in little lines like the Lord had rung a
dinner bell. A high wind still whipped across the town. Wet hunks of trash
waved on telephone poles and wires. Scattered hay and junk of every calibre
covered the ground for as far as my eyes could travel. Kids tore out looking
for treasures. Boys and girls loped across yards and pointed and screamed at
the barns and houses wrecked. Ladies in cotton dresses splashed across
little roads to kiss each other. I watched for a block or two around and
listened to some people laugh and some people cry.
Mama walked along in front of Grandma. She didn't say much. "I'm
anxious to see over the rim of that hill," she told us "What's over it?" I
asked her.
"Nora! Grandma! Hurry up!" Papa waved from the alley where we bad been
blown off of our feet in the storm. "Here comes Roy and Clara!"
"Roy and Clara!" Grandma hustled up a little faster. "Where have they
been during all of this?"
"In th' school cellar, I suppose." Mama looked up the alley and seen
them splashing mudholes dry coming toward us.
"Why did ya stay in that оl' school cellar?" I bawled them out when
they walked up. "Me an' Papa had a fight with a cyclome twister all by
ourselfs! Ya!"
"Nora." Papa talked the quietest I had ever heard him. "Grandma. Come
here. Look. Look at the house."
We walked in a little bunch to the top rim of the hill. He pointed down
the clay path we had come up to the cellar. The sun made everything as clear
as a crystal. The air had been thrashed and had a good bath in the rain.
There we saw our old London House. Papa almost whispered, "What's left of
it."
The London House stood there without a roof. It looked like a fort that
had lost a hard battle. Rock walls partly caved in by flying wreckage and by
the push of the twister. Our back screen door jerked off of its hinges and
wrapped around the trunk of my walnut tree.
Papa got to the back door first and busted into the kitchen.
"Hello, kitchen." Mama shook her head and looked all around. "Well,
we've got a nice large sky for a roof, anyway." She saw very little of her
own furniture in the kitchen. Every single window glass was gone. Water and
mud on the floor come above our shoe tops. She turned around and picked me
up and lifted me up on the eating table, telling me, "You stay up here,
little waterbug."
"I wanta wade in th' water!" I was setting on the edge of the table
kicking my bare feet at the water in the floor. "I wanta git my feet wet!"
"There's all kinds of glass and sharp things on this floor. You might
cut your feet. Just look at that cupboard!" Mama waded across the kitchen.
The cupboard was face down and half under water. Dishes smashed in a
thousand pieces laid all around. Joints of stove pipe, brooms, mops, flour
sacks half full, aprons, coats, and pots, and pans, hay, weeds, roots, bark,
bowls with a few bites of food still in them. She pointed to a big blue
speckled pot and said, "Mister Cyclone didn't wash my pots any too clean."
"You don't seem to care much." Papa was nervous and breathing hard. He
sloshed all around the room, touching everything with his fingers and
caressing the mess of wet trash like it was a prize-winning bull, sick and
down with the colic. "Jesus! Look at everything! Look! This is the last
straw. This is our good-bye!"
"Good-bye to what?" Mama kept her eyes looking around over the house.
"What?"
Clara backed up to the eating table. "Hey, Woodblock," she said, "climb
up on my back. I'll take you for a horseback ride to the front room!''
"You children hadn't ought to be joking and playing around, not at a
time like this!" Papa cried and the tears wet his face like a baby.
"Gitty up!" I kicked Clara easy with my heels and waved my hands in the
air above her head. "Swim this big оl' kinoodlin' river! Gitty up!" I hugged
on around her neck as tight as I could while she pitched a few times and
splashed her feet in the water. Then I yelled back, "C'mon, Papa! Let's swim
th' big river, an' fight th' mean оl' hoodlum leeegion!"
"I'm coming to help fight! Wait for me!" Mama cut in splashing the
water ahead of us. She jumped up and down and splattered slush and wet flour
and mud and sooty water all over her dress and two feet or three up on the
rock walls of the kitchen. "Splash across the river! Whoopie! Splash across
the quicksand! Here we come! All of us movie stars, to fight the crooks and
stealers! Whoopie!"
"Ha! Ha! Look at Mama fightin'!" I hollered at everybody.
"Mama's a good Cyclone Fighter, too, ha?" Clara was laughing and
kicking slushy filth all over the place. "Come on, Papa! We got to go and
keep fighting this cyclone!''
Mama slid her feet through the water, sending long ripples and waves
busting against the walls. "Charlie, come on here! Look at this next room!"
Clara rode me on her back once around the whole front room. Sofa upside
down in the middle of the floor, its hair and springs scattered for fifty
feet out the south window. Papers, envelopes, pencils floated on top of the
water on the floor. The big easy chair in the corner was dropped on its side
like a fighter stopped in his tracks. Big square sandrocks from the tops of
the four walls had crashed through the upper ceiling and smashed Mama's
sewing machine against the wall. Spools of colored thread bobbed around on
top of the water like barrels and cables on the ocean.
''It didn't miss anything." Grandma looked the room over. ''I know an
Indian, Billy Bear, that swears a cyclone stole his best work horse while he
was plowing his field. He walked home mad and swearing at the world. And
when he got borne, he found the cyclone had been so good as to leave the
harness, $6.50, and a gallon crock jug of whiskey on his front doorstep!"
Everybody busted out laughing, but Papa kept quiet. "Nora, I can't
stand this any longer!" he yelled out all at once. "This funny business!
This tee-heeing. This joking! Why do all of you have to turn against me like
a pack of hounds? Isn't this, this wrecked home, this home turned into a
pile of slush and filth, this home wiped out, isn't this enough to bring you
to your senses?"
"Yes," Mama was talking low and quiet, "it has brought me to my
senses."
"You don't seem to be sorry to see the place go!"
"I'm glad." Mama stood in her tracks and breathed the fresh air down
deep in her lungs. "Yes, I feel like a new baby."
"Hey, ever'body! Ever'body! C'mere!" I walked out a bare window and
stood on the ground pointing up into the air.
"What is it?" Mama was the only one to follow me out into the yard.
"What are you pointing at?"
"Mister Cyclome broke th' top outta my walnut tree!"
"That's the one you got hung up in." Mama patted me on the head. "I
think old Mister Cyclone broke the top out of that walnut tree so you won't
get hung up there any more!"
And I held onto Mama's hand, looking at her gold wedding ring, and
telling her, "Ha! I think оl' Mister Cyclome tore down this оl' mean Lon'on
House ta keep it from hurtin' my mama!"
Chapter VI
BOOMCHASERS
We picked up and moved across town to a lot better house in a nice
neighborhood on North Ninth Street, and Papa got to buying and selling all
kinds of lands and property and making good money.
People had been slinking around corners and ducking behind bushes,
whispering and talking, and running like wild to swap and trade for
land--because tests had showed that there was a whole big ocean of oil
laying under our country. And then, one day, almost out of a clear sky, it
broke. A car shot dust in the air along the Ozark Trail. A man piled out and
waved his hands up and down Main Street running for the land office. "Oil!
She's blowed 'er top! Gusher!" And then, before long--there was a black hot
fever hit our town-- and it brought with it several whole armies, each
running the streets, and each hollering, "Oil! Flipped 'er lid! Gusher!"
They found more oil around town along the river and the creek bottoms,
and oil derricks jumped up like new groves of tall timber. Thick and black
and flying with steam, in the pastures, and above the trees, and standing in
the slushy mud of the boggy rivers, and on the rocky sides of the useless
hills, oil derricks, the wood legs and braces gummed and soaked with dusty
black blood.
Pretty soon the creeks around Okemah was filled with black scum, and
the rivers flowed with it, so that it looked like a stream of
rainbow-colored gold drifting hot along the waters. The oily film looked
pretty from the river banks and from on the bridges, and I was a right young
kid, but I remember how it came in whirls and currents, and swelled up as it
slid along down the river. It reflected every color when the sun hit just
right on it, and in the hot dry weather that is called Dog Days the fumes
rose up and you could smell them for miles and miles in every direction. It
was something big and it sort of give you a good feeling. You felt like it
was bringing some work, and some trade, and some money to everybody, and
that people everywhere, even way back up in the Eastern States was using
that oil and that gas.
Oil laid tight and close on the top of the water, and the fish couldn't
get the air they needed. They died by the wagon loads along the banks. The
weeds turned gray and tan, and never growed there any more. The tender weeds
and grass went away and all that you could see for several feet around the
edge of the oily water hole was the red dirt. The tough iron weeds and the
hard woodbrush stayed longer. They were there for several years, dead, just
standing there like they was trying to hold their breath and tough it out
till the river would get pure again, and the oil would go, and things could
breathe again. But the oil didn't go. It stayed. The grass and the trees and
the tanglewood died. The wild grape vine shriveled up and its tree died, and
the farmers pulled it down.
The Negro sharecroppers went out with their bread balls and liver for
bait. You saw them setting around the banks and on the tangled drifts, in
the middle of the day, or along about sundown--great big bunches of Negro
farmers trying to get a nibble. They worked hard. But the oil had come, and
it looked like the fish had gone. It had been an even swap.
Trains whistled into our town a hundred coaches long. Men drove their
heavy wagons by the score down to pull up alongside of the cars, and skidded
the big engines, the thick-painted, new and shiny machinery, and some old
and rusty machines from other oil fields. They unloaded the railroad cars,
and loaded and tugged a blue jillion different kinds of funny-looking
gadgets out into the fields. And then it seemed like all on one day, the
solid-tired trucks come into the country, making such a roar that it made
your back teeth rattle. Everybody was holding down one awful hard job and
two or three ordinary ones.
People told jokes:
Birds flew into town by the big long clouds, lasting two or three hours
at a time, because it was rumored around up in the sky that you could wallow
in the dust of the oiled roads and it would kill all kinds of flees and body
lice.
Dogs cured their mange, or else got it worse. Oil on their hair made
them hotter in hot weather and colder in cold weather.
Ants dug their holes deeper, but wouldn't talk any secrets about the
oil formation under the ground.
Snakes and lizards complained that wiggling through so many oil pools
made the hot sun blister their backs worse. But on the other hand they could
slide on their belly through the grass a lot easier. So it come out about
even.
Oil was more than gold ever was or ever will be, because you can't make
any hair salve or perfume, TNT, or roofing material or drive a car with just
gold. You сап`t pipe that gold back East and run them big factories, either.
The religion of the oil field, guys said, was to get all you can, and
spend all you can as quick as you can, and then end up in the can.
I'd go down to the yards and climb around over the cars loaded down
with more tools. And the sun was peppering down on all of the steel so hot,
it kept me prancing along the loads like a football player running. I heard
the tough men cuss and swear and learned more good cuss words to use to get
work done.
My head was full of pictures like a movie--different from movies I'd
been sneaking into. The faked ones about outlaws, rich girls, playboys,
cowboys and Indians, and shooting scrapes, killings, and a pretty man
kissing a pretty girl on a pretty spot on a pretty day. It takes a lot more
guts, I thought, to work and heave and cuss and sweat and laugh and talk
like the oil field workers. Every man gritted every tooth in his head, and
stretched every muscle in his whole body--not trying to get rich or rare
back and loaf, because I'd hear one beller out, "Okay, you dam guys, hit 'er
up, or else git down out of a workin' man's way, an' let me put in a Goddam
oil field!"
A block and tackle man showed me how to lift all kinds of heavy stuff
with the double pulleys, "Ride 'em down! Grab 'em down! When th
'
chain goes 'round, somethin's leavin' th' ground!" There was a twenty-foot
slush bucket used for getting mud and slush out of the hole, and it looked
so heavy in a railroad car that you never could lift it out; but you'd hear
a man on a handle of a crank yell out, 'Tong bucker, tong bucker! Mister
hooker man! Grab a root, boy! Grab a root!" The man on the hooks would yell
back, "Gimme slack! Gimme slack!" Some of the cable men would guide the big
hook over to the hooker man and yell out, "Give 'im slack! Give 'im slack!"
"Take it back! Take it back! Won't do one thing you don't like!" "Take yer
slack! Bring it back!" "Ridin' with ya! Got yer grab!" "Got my grab!" "Grab
a root an' growl! Grab a root an' growl!" "Take yore grab! Take 'er home!"
The men took in all of the slack on the chain or cable and it would get as
tight as a fiddle string, and the joint of bailing bucket would raise up off
of the floor of the car and one man would yell, "She was a good gal, but she
lost her footin'!"
I piled on top a wagon every day and set on a gunny sack stuck full of
hay, by the side of a teamskinner that told me all kinds of tales and yarns
about the other ten dozen oil fields he, personally, had put down. I picked
up five or ten books full of the cuss words the mule drivers use to talk to
each other, which are somewhat worse than the ones they use to cuss their
teams into pulling harder.
Out in the fields, I walked from derrick to derrick through the trees,
and hung around each place till the driller or the tool dresser would spot
me and yell, "Git th' hell outta here, son! Too dangerous!" The bull wheels
spun and the cable unrolled as they dropped the mud buckets down into the
hole; the boiler shot steam and danced on its foundation; the derrick shook
and trembled, and strained every nail and every joint when the mud bucket,
full again, would stick in the bottom of the hole, and the cable would pull
as tight as it possibly could, trying to pull the bucket out. The rig and
derrick would creak and crack, and whole swarms of men would work like ants.
The slush ponds were full of the gray-looking shale and a film of slick oil
reflected the clouds and the sky, and lots of times I'd take a stick and
reach out and fish out some kind of a bird that had mistook the oil pool for
the real sky, and flew into the slush. The whole country was alive with men
working, men running, men sweating, and signs everywhere saying: Men Wanted.
I felt good to think that some day I'd grow up and be a man wanted; but I
was a kid--and I had to go around asking the men for a job; and then hear
them say, "Git th' hell outta here! Too dangerous!"
The first people to hit town was the rig builders, cement men,
carpenters, teamskinners, wild tribes of horse traders and gypsy wagons
loaded full, and wheels breaking down; crooked gamblers, pimps, whores, dope
fiends, and peddlers, stray musicians and street singers, preachers cussing
about love and begging for tips on the street comers, Indians in duty loud
clothes chanting along the sidewalks with their kids crawling and playing in
the filth and grime underfoot. People elbowed up and down the streets like a
flood on the Canadian, and us kids would run and jump right in big middle of
the crowds, and let them just sort of push us along a block or so, and play
like we was floating down stream. Thousands of folks come to town to work,
eat, sleep, celebrate, pray, cry, sing, talk, argue, and fight with the old
settlers.
And this was a pretty mixed-up mess, but it was always three or four
times worse on election day. I used to follow the different speakers around
and see who got beat up for voting for who. I would stay out late at night
to see the election returns come in, and see them count the votes. Lots of
kids stayed out that night. They knew that it wasn't any too safe down on
the streets on account of the men fighting and throwing bottles and
stuff--so we would climb up the cast-iron sewer pipes, up to the tops of
buildings, and we'd watch the votes counted from up there.
A board was all lit up, and the different names of the men that was
running for office was painted on it. One column would be, say, "Frank Smith
for Sheriff," and the next, "John Wilkes." One column would say, "Fist
Fights," and another column would read, "Gangfights." A man would come out
every hour during the night and write: "Precinct Number Two, for Sheriff,
Frank Smith, three votes, Johnny Wilkes, four. Fist fights four. Gangfights,
none."
In another hour he'd come out with his rag and chalk, and write,
"Precinct Number Three just heard from. For Sheriff, Frank Smith, Seven
votes, John Wilkes, Nine; Fist fights: Four. Gangfights, Three." Wilkes won
the Sheriff's office by eleven odd votes. The fights added up: Fist Fights,
Thirteen. Gangfights, Five.
I remember one particular gangfight. The men had banged into one
another and was really going at it. They spent as much time getting up and
down as they had working on their pieces of land for the past three months.
Some swung, missed, and fell. They each brought down two more. Others got
knocked down and only brung down one or so. Others just naturally went down
and stayed down. I got interested in one big old boy from out around Sand
Creek; he was in there for all it was worth, and I wanted to crawl down off
of the building and ooze in a little closer to where he was standing
fighting. I edged through the crowd with fists of all sorts and sizes going
past my head, barely missing, and I got right up
behind him. He took pretty good aim at a cotton farmer from Slick City,
drawed back with his fist, hit me under the chin with his elbow, hit the
cotton farmer from Slick City, on the chin with his fist, knocked me a
double handspring backwards one direction, and the cotton farmer from Slick
City a twin loop the other.
I was down on my hands and knees, and all of the well-known feet in
that county was in the small of my back. Men fell over me, and got mad at me
for tripping them. Every time I started to get up, they would all push in my
direction, and down I'd go again. My head was in the dirt. I had mud in my
teeth, oil in my hair, and water on the brain.
Right after the oil boom got under way, I found me a job walking the
streets and selling newspapers. I stuck my head into every door, not so much
to sell a paper, but to just try to figure out where in the devil so many
loud-yelling people had struck from. The tough kids, one or two of them new
in town, had glommed onto the very best-selling corners, and so I walked
from building to building, because I knew most of the landlords and the
other kids didn't.
Our Main Street was about eight blocks long. And Saturday was the day
that all of the farmers come to town to jump in with the several thousand
rambling, gambling oil field chasers. Folks called them boom chasers. A
great big rolling army of hard-hitting men and their hard-hitting families.
Stores throwed their keys away and stayed open twenty-four hours a day. When
one army jumped out of bed another army jumped in. When one army marched out
of a cafe, another one marched in. As fast as one army went broke at the
slot machines in the girly houses, it was pushed out and another army pushed
in.
I walked into a pool hall and poker room that had big pictures of naked
women hung along the walls. Every table was going with from two to six men
yelling, jumping up and down, whooping around worse than wild Indians,
cussing the jinx and praying to the god of good luck. Cue balls jumped
tables and shot like cannon balls across the hall. Eight tables in line and
a whole pow-wow and war dance going on around each table. "Watch out fer yer
Goddam elbow, there, brother!"
Poker tables wheeling and dealing. Five or six little oilcloth tables,
five or six mulers, hustlers, lead men, standing around winking and making
signs in back of every table. And behind them, five or six more hard-working
onlookers, laughing and watching five or six of the boys with a new paysack
getting the screws and trimmings put to them. A guy or two slamming in and
out through the back door, picking pints of rotgut liquor out of trash
piles, and sliding them out of their shirts to the boys losing their money
around the tables. "Whitey's gettin' perty well stewed. Gonna bet wild here
in a minute, an' lose his hat."
Along the sides of the walls was mostly where the old and the sick
would come to set for a few hours and keep track of the robbing and the
fights; the old bleary-eyed bar-flies and drunks that rattled in the lungs
with asthma and ТВ and coughed corruption all day and seldom hit a cuspidor
on the floor, I walked around saying, "Paper, mister? Five cents." But kids
like me wasn't allowed on the inside of dives like this, unless we knew the
boss, and then the bouncer kept his eye peeled on me and seen to it that I
kept moving.
"Boys! That gal there on th' Goddam wall has got breasts like a feather
pillow! Nipples like a little red cherry! Th' day I run onto somethin' like
that, I'm gonna give up my good оl' ruff an' rowdy ways! Whoooeee!" "Ya dam
sex-minded roustabout, you, c'mon, it's yore next shot!"
I very seldom sold a paper in the joints like this. The men were too
wild. Too worked up. Too hot under the collar to read a paper and think
about it. The old dice, the cards, the dominoes, the steer men for the pimps
and gamblers, the drinking and climbing the old spitty steps that lead to
the girly houses, maybe the wild spinning of all of these things had the men
whipped up to a fever heat, jumpy, jittery, wild and reckless. A two-hundred
pounder would raise up from a poker table broke, and stumble through the
crowd yelling, "You think I'm down! You think you got me down! You think I'm
drunk! Well, maybe I am drunk. Maybe I am drunk. But I'll tell you low-life
cheating rats one thing for sure! You never did hit an honest days work in
your whole life. You follow the boom towns around! I've seen you! Seen your
faces in a thousand towns. Cards. Dice. Dominoes. Snooker. Pool. Flabbery
ass whores. Rollers. I'm an honest hard-working man! I help put up every oil
field from Wheeler Ridge to Smackover! What the hell have you done? Rob.
Roll, Steal. Beat. Kill. Your kind is coming to a bad end! Do you hear me?
All of you! Listen!"
"Little too much noise there, buddy," a copy would walk up and take the
man by the arm. "Walk along with me till you cool off."
In front of the picture show a handful of old batty electric lights hit
down on a couple of hundred men, women and kids, everybody blocking the
sidewalks, pushing, talking, arguing, and trying to read what was on at the
show. Wax dummies in steel cages showed "The Cruel And Terrible Facts Of The
Two Most Famous Outlaws In The History Of The Human Race, Billy The Kid, and
Jesse James. And Also The Doomed Life Of The Most Famous Lady Outlaw Of All
Time, The One And Only Belle Starr. See Why Crime Does Not Pay On Our
Screen. Today. Adults Fifty Cents. Children Ten Cents. Please Do Not Spit On
The Floor. To Do So May Spread Disease.''
I sauntered along singing out, "Read all about it! Late night paper.
Ten men drowned in a dust storm!"
"Can't read, sonny, sorry, I've got horseshoe nails in my eyes! Ha! Ha!
Ha!" A whole circle of men would bust out laughing at me. And another one
would smile at me and pat me on the head and say, "Here, Sonny Boy. You
ain't nobody's fool. I cain't read yer paper, neither, but here's a dime."
I watched the crowds sweat and mop their faces walking along, the young
boys and girls all dressed up in shirts and dresses as clean as the morning
sky.
"The day of th' comin' of th' Lord is near! Jesus Christ of Nazareth
will come down out of the clouds in all of His purity, all of His glory, and
all of His power! Are you ready, brother and sister? Are you saved and
sanctified and baptized in the spirit of the Holy Ghost? Are your garments
spotless? Is your soul as white as the drifted snow?"
I leaned back against the bank window and listened to the people talk
as they walked along. "Is your snow spotless?" "Souls saved. Two bits a
lick." "I ain't wantin' t' be saved if it makes ye stand around th' street
corners an' rave like a dam maniac!" "Yes, I'm goin' to join th' church one
of these days before I die." "Me too, but I wanta have some fun an' live
first!"
I walked across the street in the dark in front of the drugstore and
found a drunk man coming out. "Hey, mister, wanta good job?"
"Yeah. Where'sh a job at?"
"Sellin' papers. Make a lotta money."
"How'sh it done?"
"You gimme a nickel apiece fer these twenty papers. You walk up an'
down th' streets yellin' about th' headlines. Then you sell all of th'
papers, see, an' you git yer money all back."
"Ish that th' truth? Here'sh a doller. Gimme th' papersh. Shay. What
doesh th' headlines shay?"
'' 'Corn liquor found to be good medicine!' "
"Corn likker ish found t' be good medishin."
"Yeah. Got that?"
"Yesh. But, hell fire, shonny, if I wash t' holler that, th'
bootleggersh would kill me."
"Why would they kill ya?"
"Cause. Jusht would. Ever'body'd quit drinkin' 'fore mornin'!"
"Just holler, 'Paper! Latest tissue!'"
" 'Latest tissue!' Okay! Here I go! Mucha 'blige.'' And he walked off
down the street yelling, "Papersh! Latest tissue!"
I spent sixty cents for twenty more papers at the drugstore. "Listen,"
the paper man was telling me, "th' sheriff is gettin' mighty sore at you.
Every night there's three or four drunks walkin' up and down th' streets
with about twenty papers yelling out some goofy headline!"
"Business is business."
I hopped up on top of a big high load of oil-field pipe and rode along
listening to the teamskinner rave and cuss. He didn't even know I was on his
load. I looked up the street and seen twenty other wagons oozing along in
the dark with men cracking their twenty-foot leather reins like shotguns in
the night, knocking blisters on the hips of their tired horses. Cars,
buggies and wagons full of people waiting their chance to pull out between
the big wagons loaded down with machinery.
So this is my old Okemah. All of this fast pushing and loud talking and
cussing. Yonder's twenty men piling onto the bed of a big truck waving their
gloves and lunch pails in the air and yelling, "Trot out yer oil field that
needs buildin'!" "See ya later, wimmen, when I git my bank roll!" "You be
careful out there on that night shift in that timber!" a woman called out at
her man. "I'll take care of myself!" Men riding along by the truckloads.
Pounding each other on the backs, swaying and talking so fast and so loud
you could hear them for a mile and a quarter.
I like all of this crowd running and working and making a racket. Old
Okemah is getting built up. Yonder's a crowd around a fist fight in front of
the pawnshop. Papa beat a man up there at that cafe last night for charging
him ninety cents for a forty-cent steak.
I never did think I'd see no such a mob on the streets of this town.
The whole air is just sort of full of a roar and a buzz and a feeling that
runs up and down your back and makes the roots of your hair tingle. Like
electricity of some kind.
Yonder is the bus caller. "It's a fine ride in a fine roller! Th'
quickest, easiest, most comfortable way to the fields! Get your bus tickets
here to all points! Sand Springs. Slick City. Oilton. Bow Legs. Coyote Hill.
Cromwell. Bearden. A big easy ride with a whiskey driver!"
"You write 'em up! An' sign 'em up! Best wages paid!
Hey, men! It's men wanted here! Skilled and unskilled! Killed and
unkilled! Brain jobs! Desk jobs! Settin'-down jobs! Jobs standing up! Jobs
bending over! Jobs for the drunk men, jobs for the sober! Oil field workers
wanted! You sign a card and hit it hard! Pay and a half for overtime! Double
on Sunday! Right here! Fifteen thousand men wanted! Roughnecks! Roustabouts!
Tong buckers! Boiler men! Dirt movers! Horse and mule drivers! Let's go!
Men! Work cards right here!"
There was old Riley the auctioneer standing in front of his hiring
office, pointing in at the door with a walking cane. Gangs of men pushing in
and out, signing up for field work. "Rig builders! It's carpenters! We need
your manly strength, your broad shoulders, and your big broad smiles, men,
to get this oil field built! Anything from nail drivers, screw drivers,
truck drivers, to slave drivers! Wimmen! Drive your husbands here! Yes,
madame, we'll sober him up, wash him up, clean him up, feed him up, fill him
up, rest him up, build him up, and straighten him up! You'll have a big fat
bank roll and a new man when we send him back off of this job! Write your
name and win your fame! Men wanted!"
An old timer was preaching from the other side in front of a grocery
store, "These here dem wild boom chasers is tearin' our whole town down!
They don't no more pay 'tention to th' law than if we didn't have laws!"
"You're a damned old liar! You old miserly crab!" a lady yelled out
from the crowd around him. "We're a-buildin' this town up ten dozen times
more'n you ever could of! We do more actual work in a minute than you do
settin' on yore rear a year!"
"If you wuzn't a lady, I'd resent that!"
"Don't let that hold you back, brother!" She knocked four or five
toughs out of her way getting to him. "As far as these laws go, who made
them up? You! And three or four more about like you! We come to this town to
work an' build up an oil field an' make it worth something! Maybe these boys
are a little wild and woolly. You've got to be to work like we work, an'
travel like we travel, an' live like we live!"
I laid down on the load of pipe and stretched my feet out and looked up
where the stars was. My ears still heard the babbling, yelping, swushing
along the streets, wheels rolling, horses straining, kids chasing and babies
screaming. The big trucks tooted their horns in the dark. I wanted to ride
there with my eyes closed, listening. I wanted to ride past the picture
show, gambling hall, whore house, drug store, church house, court house, and
the jail house and just listen to old Okemah growing up.
Okemah. She's a going, blowing oil boom town.
In the summer I played with other kids in the gang house. Our gang
house was built by a week's hard work of about a dozen kids of most every
sort, size, color, brand, trade mark, and style. It started when an old lady
told us a big long story, all about the howls and laughs you could hear if
you went very close to the old haunted house of the Bolewares. So I figured
my whole gang had ought to go spend a night in the old haunted house. I
rounded up about the whole dozen and over we went after it got dark. Nothing
but a stray goat come across the yard and some bats flew in and out of a few
broke windows. Right then we decided to haunt the house our own selves, and
we all moaned and groaned and tromped around in the dark, choking and
gurgling like we was being lynched, and stomping down with all of our weight
on the loose boards of the floor and the attic.
Next, one of us got the bright idea of carrying the loose boards across
town to an old sawed-down peach orchard on a side of the schoolhouse hill,
and put up a gang house to haunt. Every night we'd sneak out from home after
supper, some of us going to bed, creeping out from under covers and out of
windows to get away from our folks. Howls and screams from the Boleware
house caused neighbors to lock and bar their doors and windows; women stayed
in houses in bunches and sewed or knitted all night. As we kept haunting the
old house, rent come down to less than half what it had been on this street.
Dogs hung along under porches and whined with their tails pulled up real
tight between their hind legs. And then nothing but the very worst old
rotten boards were left on the outside of the house, and we'd hauled away
all of the nice inside boards. They went up like a big toadstool on
schoolhouse hill, and neighbors wondered what the hell. Last of all, we
wrote a sign with dim paint that we hung on the front side of the old
Boleware hull: "Haunted House. Stay Out." I heard two ladies walk past it a
month or so later and read the sign. My ears was like an old hound dog's,
and I heard one lady say, "See the sign on the front? 'Haunted House. Stay
Out'?" The other one said, "That landlord is a smart man. Doing that to
scare the kids away." And I thought, "Bull."
Pretty soon we had a regular early Oklahoma township a-going right
there on the lot around that old gang house. It was our City Hall, mail box,
court house, jail, picture show, saloon, gambling hall, church, land office,
restaurant, hotel and general store.
That shack was busier than our town depot. Each kid had a bin. In that
bin he kept his junk, whatever that might run into. Most of the kids would
take a gunny sack and go "junking'' about twice or three times a week. They
would come carrying in big sacks full of rubber inner tubes, brass faucets,
copper wire, light brass gadgets, aluminum pots and pans beat up into a
tight little ball. Thе city junk man bought them. That was money in our
pocket. We packed those sacks more than we did school books. We also
gathered up scrap iron, lead, zinc, rags, bottles, hoofs, horns, and old
bones, and you could put your own stuff in your own bin without being afraid
of somebody a-stealing it. We thought it was a mighty bad thing to steal
something somebody else had already stolen.
We had gang money made out of sheets of paper. Every time you brung in
a certain amount of junk, it was judged to be worth so much. You could go to
the bank and the banker would hand you out a school tablet or two cut up in
squares like dollar bills, and a few fancy marks around the edge, and signed
by the captain of the gang. Fifty cents worth of junk was worth Five
Thousand Dollars. You could cash your gang money in any time you wanted to,
and pack your junk down to the city junk yard and sell it for real money.
A kid named Bud run the gambling wheel. It was an old lopsided bicycle
wheel that he had found in the dumps and tried to even up. He paid you ten
to one if you called off the right spoke it would stop on. But there was
sixty spokes.
We rode stick horses, and some of the kids had nine, and all of the
nags named according to how fast they could run. Like if you was riding Old
Bay Tom, and Rex took in after you with a red handkerchief tied over his
face, why you'd switch horses right in the big middle of the road--and get
off of Old Bay Tom, and yell, "Giddyap, Lightnin'!"
We made horse-wrangling trips to the river and back, and gathered the
best of our stick horses, the long, keen straight and springy ones with lots
of fiery sap in them, and worth several hundred dollars each in gang money.
I jig-trotted the seven miles back from the river, with a big bundle of wild
broomtail Indian ponies tied up on both arms; and there was always such a
showing and swapping and training of horses on the side of that hill as
would outclass any horse-trading lot in the State of Oklahoma. A kid buying
a horse would first, of course, want him broke to saddle; and there was four
or five kids that made their whole living by busting bad ponies at ten
dollars a head. Two or three kids grabbed the horse's head and blinded his
eves while the rider mounted to the saddle, and then would holler, "Fan
`im!" The rider and the horse broke away, bucked and jumped all over the
place, beating the weeds to a frazzle, snorting, and nickering, and humping
into the air. Founding and spurring the bronco, the
kid frogged over sticker patches, whammed through can piles, flounced
down the hillside and sidestepped rocks and roots and stumps. Since a horse
was worth more if he was a wild one to break, the buyer would tip you an
extra fifty or maybe even a hundred, if you showed all of the other kids
that this was the snuffiest horse in the whole history of the hill. With
always two or three or four hoss tamers out there busting a mount at the
same time, you can just picture in your own mind how our hill looked--each
kid trying and straining every gut to out-buck, and out-nicker, and out-ride
the others. And then, to make a horse really in the dollar-a-year class, you
had to ride him till he quit bucking, and then run him through all of his
gaits; through the hard ones and easy ones, running as fast as he could
tear, till he slowed into a fast rough gallop, and then down to a slow easy
lope, pace him down the foot path, single-foot across the gang house yard,
fox trot up to the door, and then walk as nice and as easy as an old member
of the family till he was tied at the hitch rack, eating apples and sugar
out of everybody's hand.
And then you got your pay-off and somebody was the proud owner of
another pureblood. And not only did the horse get a good proud name, and
pedigree, and papers, but every little habit, onery streak, nervous spell,
and fear, along with all of his likes and dislikes, was known by his owner,
and there struck up between that stick horse and that kid a friendship,
partnership, and love. Lots of kids had rode their horses, talked their
troubles, winnings and losings, sick spells, and streaks of good luck, over
and over a thousand times--for two or three years.
In a patch of big high weeds, near the gang house, was an old oat
binder. We used it one hour for an airplane, and the next for a submarine.
The World War was on over in France, and the Americans had gone in. We
played war, war, war. We shot down weeds and trampled them into the dust,
and we licked the same weed army every day. We grabbed up sticks, and waded
out into the high weeds, fighting them hand to hand, cussing, sweating,
hacking them down. They surrendered every few minutes. Then they'd do
something mean to us again, and we'd get out and frail them back into the
notion of surrendering all over again. We'd walk up and grab each individual
weed by the coat collar, throw off his helmet, search him for Lugers, chuck
away his rifle, and say, "Surren'er?"
"Surrender!"
In the fall, when our school started, the kids got more excited about
fighting than about books. New kids had to fight to find their place on the
grounds, and the old bullies had new fights to settle who was still who.
Fights had a funny way of always ringing me in. If it was between two kids
that I didn't even know, whoever won, some smart aleck kids would holler,
"Yeah, yeah, I bet ya cain't lick оl' Woody Guthrie." And before long I'd be
somewhere out across the playgrounds whaling away and getting whaled, mostly
over something I didn't know a thing about. I went around with some part of
me puffed up all of the time, and the other parts just going down.
There was four of us that more or less respected each other, because we
was the fightingest four around there, not because we wanted to fight, not
because we was brave, or had it in for anybody, but just because the kids in
school had us picked out to entertain them with our broke fists and noses,
and they would carry tales and lies and cuss words back and forth like a
messenger service just to keep the old fires going and the pot boiling and
the skin a-flying.
But Big Jim Robins and Little Jim Whitt was the only two of the
round-town four that fought amongst their selves.
They beat half of the weed patches back into a cloud of hot, white,
cement-looking dust, every school season, and the kids would all gang up and
foller Big Jim and Little Jim home every afternoon when school was out, just
to get them to fighting, which wasn't a hard job, since they never could
agree just who'd got the best of it. Big Jim was a head taller than Little
Jim. I was about the same size as Little Jim. Big Jim was red-headed,
speckle-faced, snaggle-toothed, and broad through the shoulders, with great
big flat feet. His hands was like hog quarters, and his arms was six inches
longer than anybody else's in school, and he walked around in a hunch,
slouched down careless, and he picked up snipes. He was the big Luis Firpo
around that schoolhouse, and depended alone on his main strength and
awkwardness to keep him in the Round Town Four Fist Fighting Association.
His dad was a carpenter, his brother a grocery man. But Big Jim was the
toast of the town, the natural-born comic, the loud-mouth insulter, and
yelled at everybody that come along. His great big size scared the living
daylights right out of most of the little kids. When it come to a fight, Big
Jim seldom won, but he roared so loud, snorted so big, and kicked up so much
dust and fine splinters that the kids would holler and laugh, and cheer for
him, because wherever Big Jim had a fight, there you saw a complete
two-feature show with two comedies and short subjects added on.
Little Jim was mostly the opposite. Light whitish hair that looked like
frog fuzz, a slim, scary face and eyes that blinked and batted at everything
that rustled in the wind. He was famous for going around dirty and slouchy,
and when the kids would tease him, he would blow between his teeth like a
train starting, and kick back dirt with his toes. Little Jim was quiet when
he was left alone, and would walk ten blocks out of his way to keep out of a
fight; but the kids liked to watch him sneer and blow, and so they headed
him off across vacant lots, and pushed him into fights.
One day it was Trades Day, with sermons on the streets, singers in the
saloons, and plotters and politicians lying on every corner. The town was
alive, booming with the mixed voices of Negro farmers, the broke-down,
hungry, dirt farmers, and the talking of the Indians that sometimes took on
a high note, when some buck pointed away out yonder with his hand, and made
a big curving motion, so that you could tell that he was talking about the
whole country, the whole thing, the whole problem and, probably, the whole
people. The white folks talked of this and that, hogs, horses, shoes, hats,
whiskey, dances, women, politics, land, crops, weather and money. Everybody
stood around with a long string of red tickets, for one of the merchants was
aiming to give a new buggy away. It was a-standing out yonder in the middle
of the street right where everybody could see her set there in the dusty sun
and try her best to shine a little. Kids of all three colors, and an
occasional mixture of each, crawled, walked, run, chased loose chickens,
took in after cur dogs, dumb poles, fell across wagon tongues, and slipped
down on the sidewalk with a brand-new pair of shoes on. Ice cream cones was
waving around up and down the streets.
Down about the middle part of town, Big Jim and Little Jim was playing
marbles on a flat, dusty place by the side of the drug store. Already they
had attracted a couple of hundred folks down there to see the big Dominecker
Rooster and the right little Game Cock commence kicking the pants off of
each other.
The crowd mumbled, laughed, roared, and talked, some taking sides with
Big Jim, and some with Little Jim. It was a game of agates up. Agates up was
about as high as you could get in Okfuskee County politics without being an
adult.
Little Jim was shooting, Big Jim watching him like a hawk, and both
hollered every five seconds, "Dobbs!" "Venture Dubbs!" "You go ta hell, you
bastard, you!"
When the fight started, even the few idle wanderers who had tried for
the buggy soon come running down the street to see what was going on. They
spied the big noisy crowd, and they knew it must be an awful good fight. The
dust flew, and the skin, too, and you could see Big Jim's red head bobbing
and weaving in the middle of the crowd. He was taking long haymaker swings
at Little Jim's blond, silken-haired head, and hitting about once out of
every nine swings. Little Jim was faster and surer. He laid it into Big Jim
like a young mule kicking a clumsy old cow, and his fists seldom hit out
without landing in the neighborhood of Big Jim's nose.
He hit straight. But time was passing. Months rolling by. Big Jim was
getting bigger and bigger. He had completely outgrown Little Jim. Head and
shoulders he raised up above his little opponent, and lumbered down like
thunder and slow lightning, crushing when he landed a blow. Little Jim
fought faster. He fought much better. Barefooted in the hot dirty ring, he
pranced around, punching the big hulk of Big Jim, but just naturally not
doing one ounce of damage. He fought long. He got tired. Dust choked him
down. It choked Big Jim and the whole crowd, but Big Jim wasn't having to
spend his energy. It looked as if he couldn't decide what he wanted to do,
so he just made his hands sail around in the air to put on a show for the
people. But after a while, he wore Little Jim down, and gave him the best
beating that he had ever laid onto anybody. He brought blood running out of
Little Jim's nose, thumped his head and ears till they swelled and stung.
Beat his cheeks till you could see blue spots and red bruises. Little Jim
Whitt lost his standing in the fist-fighting game that day, right then and
there.
The town went wild. A decision had been reached. Little Jim had lost.
Two other fights as to which kid had won started out in the crowd among men
betting. But Big Jim was the stud buzzard in our town that day.
The school kids yelled when the fight was over. Their voices hummed so
fast that it sounded like a chant, like a wave swelling out across the
ocean.
"Where's Woody?" "Betcha cain't lick оl' Woody!" "Woody ain't here!
Where's Woody? He was down here in town early this mornin'--he's gone!"
Kids took out down the road like traveling preachers, by ones and twos,
and the others lit out through streets and alleys like a couple of dozen
little Paul Reveres. Grown men even strolled off up the hill to hunt me up,
and to give Big Jim time to rest up, and to rig us into a fist fight. Bets
mounted high. The crowd moved around like a big bunch of bugs on top of a
hole of water. It always stayed together, but it moved.
I was across town. I was up on Main Street, climbing the rafters and
braces of a big sign just across the street from the jail house. When a
couple of kids seen me climbing up on top of that signboard, they hollered,
"Hey, here he is! Here he is! Here's Woody! Bring on Big Jim!"
Oklahoma has had runs. Land runs and whiskey runs. But that crowd took
out in such a hard run up that hill that they jammed the streets where they
crossed, shoved each other down the boardwalks, skint their shins on the
concrete curbs, tore off the wooden corner posts of grocery stores, pushed
over stacks of chicken coops, turned the chickens loose, made the feathers
fly, slipped and fell across sacks of horse and mule feed, crawled over
wagons and buggies parked in the road, made the hay fly, lost their kids,
dropped plugs of tobacco, laughed, yelled, whooped, and caused teams to
break and run away.
Like I said, I was getting closer and closer to the top of that
sign-board, and when I heard that big crowd coming up the steep street
raising so much cain, I didn't know what the devil was going to happen. They
was yelling my name, and running full blast. I hit the top of the signboard,
and throwed one leg across, just as the crowd scraped a coat of old paint
off of the corner of the court house, crowding past it, to gather all around
the signboard and yell all kinds of things, like: "Come on down! Lick Big
Jim!" "Little Jim just got beat up!" "Whataya say, boy? Coward?" "Git 'im,
Yallerback!" "Come on down offa there! You ain't no dam eagle!"
Well, I just hunkered over and made myself right real comfortable and
set up there. I knew then what it was all about. Just another one of them
dam fool fights all rigged up and fixed up before you know what it's all
about. I knew how tired Big Jim must be. Just had one fight. Now they wanted
to sic him onto me and see another one. I must of killed a full five minutes
just setting up there. They tried every kind of a trick to get me down. Kids
and men dumb halfway up to where I was. They lured me and baited me. They
promised me dimes. But I didn't come down. Then they fell back onto the one
and only dare that I couldn't stand. They yelled, "Old man Charlie Guthrie's
a fighter! Old Charlie Guthrie would come down to fight!"
Something inside of me went out and something come in. I set there
about two or three seconds, my face went sort of blank, and I gritted my
teeth; and then I slid down off of the frame of the sign, and dumb like a
monkey down through the braces, and the crowd was in an uproar.
The crowd got around me. There was so much noise I couldn't do nothing.
It was just some kind of a roaring ocean rising and falling in my head. I
couldn't see Jim. It was too crowded. I saw every kind of a face but that
big speckled one. The crowd squared off, and they cleared out the usual
three-foot hole in the middle, which was big enough for two kids to knock
off twenty-five square foot of hair and hide in. I couldn't see Jim.
Something hit me right square between the horns. It was a big outfit of
some kind, a team of wild bay mares, or a wagon load of cotton seed--anyway,
it knocked me blind. I shook my head, but I couldn't see. After a minute it
hit me again, Kkkkkkkeeeeeeebblllllooooooom!!!!!!
Sometimes, you know, when you're fighting, it's a funny thing, one lick
will knock you blind, and the next one will knock you to where you can see
again. I could see Big Jim right there in front of me. I was tired and my
head was like a bread pan full of dry dough. I was sick. Couldn't get my
breath good. My face was all numb. I never had been hit that hard, I didn't
know how to fight this way. But I was in a good spot to learn. I didn't know
of but one way to beat Big Jim. I knew that he was tired. He was big and he
was slow. But many more of them piledrivers, and I'd be slower than that.
I'd been still. Big Jim couldn't fight a running fight. I was bigger than
Little Jim, by a pound or two, but not near as big as Big Jim. I had to bust
loose with everything that I ever had or ever hoped to borrow. I had to beat
my fists to pieces over his big red head. I didn't know why. Just had to.
Jim had busted me twice in the face. He didn't know why. Just done it.
I started. I started walking, swinging, ducking, dodging. I couldn't
even quit, not one split second. He wasn't used to that kind of fighting.
Kids usually danced and wasted a little time. Some of them waste all of the
time. I had fought that way some, it was all right then, but it wouldn't
work now. I kept my fists sailing to and from Jim's head without even a
letup. It was a fistic sweatshop. And with low pay. I wasn't mad at Jim. I
was mad at this kind of stuff. Mad at the men that started the fight. At the
kids that had been taught to yell for it. At the women that gossiped about
it, and spread lies about it. I hated fighting my home-town kids. I was
throwing my fists at Big Jim, but I was really fighting these crazy notions
that folks get and keep in their heads.
Jim was going backwards. He didn't have time to haul off and wind up.
He didn't have time to get his big feet to working. He just didn't have time
to do anything. He rained big haymakers down across my back and over my
head, and it was like beating me up with a fire hose. I wasn't doing so good
myself. I fired away like sixty. I got in close, inside Jim's big arms,
inside his reach, and fought like a wild dog drunk on slaughterhouse blood.
I only wanted it to be over.
Jim was stumbling backwards trying to get balanced long enough to break
my whole body with one of his fire-engine arms and fists, but it didn't
work. He stumbled over a wagon tongue. He got up and fell over it again. He
raised up and fell back against the front wheel, and braced his self by
holding onto the spokes.
He was just standing there using one arm to sort of wave and push me
aside with, but I couldn't let him stand there and get his breath and get
the dust wiped out of his eyes, and get rested up. Then he would take good
aim and knock my head to rolling down Main Street. I hit him as fast as I
could and as hard. I really didn't think I had that much power. He caved in
a couple of times, and he laid back against the wagon wheel. He propped his
big shoulders up against the rim. He couldn't fall. He plowed into my face.
I felt it turn numb. My whole jaw was just hanging there. It didn't know
why. All at once and for no good reason that the crowd could see, Big Jim
stopped fighting, he held up both hands. He quit.
I said, "Ya done?"
Jim said, "--can't go."
"Gotta 'nuff?"
"--reckon so--gotta stop."
The crowd hollered and jumped and screeched like a bunch of maniacs.
"Big Jim's hollered calf-rope!"
"He's all in an' down!"
"Downed 'im three times!"
"Whoopee!"
"Tough titty!"
Jim let his body sink down a little bit, rubbed his hair and forehead
with one hand and propped his self up on the wheel with the other. He set
there for a few minutes, but the crowd wouldn't let him rest. I stepped in
close beside him and said once more to make double sure, "Gotta 'nuff, Red?"
"I said I had ta quit. I'll see you later--"
"I don't want it ta be later. I want it ta be settled right here once
an' fer all. I don't want it ta hafta take place ever' Goddam day. You wanta
go some more------er say, let this be th' end of it fer me an' you both?"
"All right--this ends it."
Poor old Jim was fagged completely out, and so was I. "I'm--I've gotta
'nuff," he said.
And I sort of whispered in his ear, "So've I."
Men handed me dimes. Others slipped me two-bits pieces. I got over a
dollar. I run down the street to where Jim was walking along. He looked bad.
I said, "Ice-cream cone, Jim?"
"Naww. You git yore own self one."
"How 'bout you one, too?"
"Naww."
"'C'mon. T' hell with all of 'em. We ain't mad at nobody-- nobody but
them dam guys that keeps us a-fightin' amongst ourselfs."
"Bastards."
"Cream cone, Jim?"
"Yeahhh--might."
What kind did he want.
"Strawberry," he told me, "how much ya git?"
"Lemme see, dollar, fifteen, twenty-five."
He handed me a dime. This wasn't a new thing. We done it everytime we'd
fought before. Split up the money or part of it. He'd raked in a dollar and
a half.
"How much ya got now?" Jim asked me.
"Dollar thirty-five."
"I gotta nickel more'n you."
" 'At's all right."
He held the new-looking buffalo nickel out in the palm of his hand and
the sun hit down against it, and Jim was setting down and thinking on the
ground.
"Know who I'm gonna give that exter nickel to?"
"Huh uh." I shook my head.
"Little Jim."
The fire whistle moaned out across the town like a panther moaning in a
canyon. Dogs whined and run tucktail. The whistle kept blowing and every
time it went low and high I counted the wards on my fingers so I would know
which part of town to run to and see the fire.
That's a funny fire whistle. It just keeps blowing. Okemah hasn't got
that many wards. It's still blowing. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen times.
Looks like everybody is running up South Third Street there. Wagons.
Cars. Buggies. People on horseback. I'll run with this bunch of kids coming
here. "Hey! Where's th' fire at?"
'Foller us!"
"We'll show ya!"
"I don't see no flare in th' sky!"
"It ain't here in town! Look over south yonder, way out of town. See
all of that red?"
"Oil field fire?"
"Yeah! Whole town!"
"Which one?"
"Cromwell! We can see it when we hit th' top of th' hill there!"
Several hundred people crowded up the hill talking and gasping, short
of wind. Little bunches of men and women trotted along and talked. Horses
snorted and jumped all over the road. Dogs barked at weeds and pieces of
paper blowing in the dark. All along in under the locust trees people tore
as hard as they could run.
"There she is!" I heard some guy talking and pointing.
"Whew! Plain as day! That's a mean-lookin' fire!" I was saying to some
kids along the top of the hill.
"Seventeen miles away."
"Flames jumpin' up higher th'n th' tops of th' trees!"
"I know how high them trees is!"
"Me too. I been there a lot of times!"
"Yeah, me, too. I go a-swimmin' right in this side of there all th'
time. Them Cromwell kids is really tough. Wonder how much of th' town's on
fire?"
"Plenty of it," a man was saying.
"Five or six houses all at once, huh?"
"About a hunder houses all at once," the man said.
"Them old flames is really clawin' and' scratchin', ain't they?"
Another man talked up.
"I know a lot of people are clawing and scratching, trying to get out
of there."
"Them little old tar-paper shacks burn up just like paper!'' an Indian
kid was saying.
I walked along the hill listening to the people talk.
"Is it th' oil wells er th' houses?"
"Some of both, I would guess."
"I reckon there are already a couple of hundred people on their way
from Okemah out there to help fight the fire."
"I hope there is. That's a bad blaze."
"Spreading all in through the timber there. Lots of folks losing their
houses in that fire tonight."
"All of their belongings."
"But th' people!" A lady spoke out. "It's the' little kids, an' th'
mothers, an' people sleepin' and sick people in bed, an' everything else in
those shacktowns. I've got a feeling that lots of people are just caught
like moths in a bonfire."
I laid down on the grass and listened to folks talk for an hour or so.
Then, by families, and little bunches, and one at a time, they took their
last long look at the flames and turned around walking and talking and going
home to bed.
I laid there by myself for about another hour. Cromwell was one of the
biggest oil field towns in the whole country. I've seen the boxcar shacks
stripped over with tar paper lots of times, the oak trees and the sandy land
and the fishing creeks and swimming holes.
That night Okemah watched Cromwell crackle and roar and dance in the
wind and fall into a flat bed of red-hot cinders.
Fire is a funny thing. It helps you and it hurts you. It builds a town
up and it eats it down.
What could be left of those little old lumber houses with all of the
boards as dry as powder and running full of rosin?
What could be left of a family caught asleep and choked down in the
smoke? What could be left of a man that lost his family there?
I forgot all about the cold dew and went to sleep on the top rim of the
hill just thinking about it.
Chapter VII
CAIN'T NO GANG WHIP US NOW
A new tribe of boomchasers hit town every day, families with kids, kids
looking for work and play. The gang-house kids made a law that new kids
coming in couldn't have any say-so in how the gang was run, so the new kids
got mad and moved a little farther on down the hill. I was sore at the old
gang and went and hooked up with the new one. And trouble had got so hot
between the two gangs that it looked awful dark.
"Woody, did you write that war letter, like we said last night?" The
captain of our new gang was saluting and nodding to several kids as they
come out for the day's playing.
I read out:
To the Members of the Old Gang:
Dear Captain and Leaders and Members:
We told you why we are fighting this war. It is because of your leaders
mostly. Most of us kids is new here in town and we ain't got no other place
except at your gang house, You made us work but you didn't let us vote or
nothing like that when it was time.
The only way out is to let all of us kids own the gang house together.
We was always fighting the other way. One gang against the other one. It
will always be this a-way unless we change it, and you don't want us to
change it, but we aim to anyhow. Both gangs has got to join up together and
be one gang.
We will come to see you at eight o'clock, and if you still try to keep
us split up, we will start a war.
It will not be a play war. It will take place with sling shots and
flint rocks. It will be a real war and it will last till one side or the
other wins out on top.
The Boom Town Kids,
Thug Warner, Chief.
Woody Guthrie, Messenger.
"Sounds okay."
"Purty fair letter."
"It'll do." Our captain pulled a big dollar watch out of his
overalls pocket. "Fifteen minnits, then war's on!" Then he said, "Okay,
go on, read 'em th' letter."
"Yessir." I touched the bill of my corduroy hunting cap I always wore
in a hard fight. I put a white handkerchief on my arm and went to the old
gang house.
"Git back thar, trater!" I heard a couple of highway flints zoom past
my ears.
"Quit shootin'! I'm a mess'nger! Ya c'n see this white rag on my arm!"
The door opened up and Colonel and Rex stepped out into the open.
Colonel had his early morning chew of scrap tobacco pretty well limbered up,
and spit three or four long squirts while he gritted his teeth and read the
letter.
Rex read over Colonel's shoulder, "A real war ... till one side or the
other wins out on top." He flipped his lip with his fingers and looked up
across the hill. "What chance you fools think you got 'ginst our gang house
shootin' with flint-rock Sling shots?"
"You'll see." I turned my corduroy hat around so the bill protected the
back of my head and neck. "You guys has seen me wear this cap backwards
before, haven't ya? Ya know that means fight, don't ya? I don't feel funny
fightin' on th' new kids' side, 'cause, ya see, men, I jes' happen ta
believe they're right an' you're wrong."
"You an' yore letter, an' yore pack of mangy curs! Boom town rats!"
Colonel tore the war letter up into a hundred little pieces and slung them
into my face like a quick snow.
Rex shut the door and latched it. "Okay, fellas," I heard him tell his
fighters inside, "it's war! Everybody ready? Rocks easy to reach? Keep out
of shootin' range of these open windows!" Then he stuck his head out the
window that had been the jail and yelled at me, "You yeller-bellied quitter!
Git movin'!"
I expected a rock to whack me in the back any time as I run back up the
hill, but nothing hit me. "I guess you seen what happened ta our letter!" I
told the captain.
"Three minnits, boys. Then she's war!" Thug turned to me and winked and
said, "Round up th' men. Bring all of 'em right here in th' alley."
I whistled through my teeth and waved my hand in the air as a signal
for all of the kids on our side to follow me. Everybody stood in the alley
above the trash pile at the top of the hill.
"You four go with Slew." Thug pointed out the squads. "You four foller
Woody through the trash pile. You three fight here in the middle with me.
Git to yer places!"
"Fire away, boys!" some kid yelled out.
"Hold yer fire!" Thug bawled him out. "If we shoot one second ahead of
eight o'clock, they'll go aroun' lyin' that we sneaked up on 'em, an' didn't
give 'em a chance!"
"How long, Thug?"
" 'Bout ten secinds!"
"Places ever'bodyyyy! Gitt reaeeeedyyy!"
We ripped and tore and yelled on our way to our places. Three kids
pulled homemade coaster wagons loaded to the hub with good shaped
sling-shots rocks. The gang house was built on a flat place dug out of the
hill. A patch of weeds about three foot high run along the upper part where
we stood and was the only thing that would hide us from the rock fire of the
fighters in the house. Kids eyed one another, patted the old trusty stocks
and rubbers of their sling shots. Then all eyes centered on Thug.
He looked at his big dollar watch and hollered, "Chaaarrge!"
"Down on yer bellies!" Slew yelled out to the whole line. He was as
good a fighting captain any old day as Thug. "Crawl inta these weeds! Save
your rocks! Keep crawlin' down th' hill! Let's put that guy in th' lockout
tower out of order first!"
Thug was standing on the north end of our line. He drawed back his
rubbers so tight they sung a bugle call in the bard wind, and whizzed a rock
through the jail-house window. Inside some kid with the first punk knot of
the war, hollered, "Ooohhhh!"
Trick doors the size of a cigar box slid open, first here, then there,
all over the front side of the house. Hands of a dozen kids stuck from
underneath and around the edges of the windows, rubbers stretched, and rocks
howled through the air.
"Hot rocks! Red hot! Feel that!" Claude was cussing next to me,
touching the end of his finger to an agate-looking flint that had dug the
grass roots a couple of inches from his head. "Heatin' 'em on that dam stove
they got inside!"
I bit my bottom lip and pasted one into the lookout nest that
splintered a sliding trap door to shavings. A red-hot rock flew back out of
the tower and glanced off of my shoulder blade, leaving a burnt red welt,
about six inches long. Claude heard the thump and felt me roll over against
him moaning.
"Looky here!" Claude pointed to the rock laying between us in the
grass. "Simmerin'. Scorchin' th' grass!" He tried to pick it up and load it
into his sling, but jerked his fingers back saying, "Wowie! Boy! Howdy!
Hotter'n a bitch!"
I put my hand up to my mouth and ducked low and yelled back at our
bunch, "Hot rocks! Watch out! Hot rocks!"
I seen Thug crawling through the weeds toward me, wearing a flop felt
hat a couple of sizes too big, folded full of newspapers, for a helmet. He
jumped to his feet and run through the weeds, pointing at a couple of kids
in charge of our ammunition wagons. "Hey! You two! Git plenty of good
firewood! Them birds'll be awful sorry they ever started this hot-rock
fightin'!"
Before many minutes a new fire was crackling on the side of the hill
behind our lines. The two kids lifted tin buckets from a wagon, each bucket
piled brim full of round flints, and set on a two-foot sheet of corrugated
roofing tin. Papers, sticks, and weed stalks blazed underneath. The fire got
hotter and, before long, there was a tin bucket of the hot rocks within easy
reach of every kid on our side.
"How'dya take a-holt of 'em ta shoot, without blistering yer hands?" I
asked a kid when he set a bucket down between Claude and me. I could feel
the heat from the bucket of rocks striking my skin from two feet away.
"Red-hot mommers!"
The ammunition boy grinned at me and said, "Gotta par o' gloves on ya?"
"I ain't got none here." I dodged a foot to one side and seen a rock
knock a hole the size of a horseshoe track. It buried itself a good inch in
the grass roots and shot sizzling hot steam from the damp ground under the
dead grass. "Kill a man if it'd hit 'im jest right,"
"We got two pairs o' gloves fer our whole bunch. Thirteen of us. So,
here, here's a left-handed glove. Ya gotta load an' shoot real quick, so's
ya don't git burnt." He dropped a glove between me and Claude.
I pulled on the glove, fished a nice juicy roasted rock out of the
bucket, slipped it into the leather of my sling shot, stretched the rubbers
as far as they would go, and felt the heat of the rock burning the tips of
my fingers when I let go. The shot knicked a handful of splinters off of the
side of the house. "Trouble is, ya don't shoot as straight with a glove on."
"Clumsy. Yeah." He finished digging his little hole. "Think we might
oughtta switch back to just plain rocks, an' shoot straighter? More of 'em?"
"We gotta use 'em hot. See, them guys in th' house knows that we cain't
crawl around on our bellies if they lay a lot of heated rocks all over this
weed patch. One of these here rocks'll stay hot fifteen 'er twenty minnits.
Step on 'er, lay down on one, or come down on one with your knee, boy, it'd
dam near it put ya outta commish'n!"
"Halfa our kids is goin' barefooted, too." Claude squinted his eyes up
and said, "See that little window up yonder in that there lookout tower?
Watch it."
"Got 'er kivvered." I heard Claude's rubbers sing like a big airplane
motor. "Like a bat goin' home ta roost," I laughed when the rock clattered
inside the crow's-nest window.
Zuuumm. Another kid from the weeds played a nice little tune in the
wind. Then Zinnng. Sswwiiissshh. Rocks flew like geese headed south in the
winter, lined up in good order, spaced well apart, each man sending his shot
when it come his time, and not one second before. Hot flints in the wind as
heavy as .45 bullets. Thug trotted wide around our lines telling everybody,
"Take yer time, boys. Don't git excited. Shoot when yer time comes." Just
then his head jerked back and his hand flew up to his forehead. He dropped
his sling shot to the ground and staggered across the hill.
"Thug! They cracked 'im!" I could hear one kid yelling.
"Thug, Watch out where you're goin' there! You're gettin' too close to
th' fort!" Ray was Claude's little runt of a brother, the cussingest and
runningest kid in our outfit. He darted from his hideout in the weeds and
made a bee line for Thug. "Thug! Open yore eyes! Watch out!"
Several secret shooting doors slid open on the south side of the house,
and Thug was walking blind within twenty-five foot of them. He made a face
when a rock caught him on the backbone. He stood up and stiffened his
muscles all over as another one glanced off the side of his neck. Blood
splashed on his jaw and he covered his face and eyes with both hands.
"Take my hand!" little runty Ray was telling him. Thug ducked his head
in the palms of his hands and shook the blood all over his shirt. "C'mon!
Back this a-way!" Ray pulled Thug by the arms and pushed him along the
ground. Ray got hit all over his body trying to get Thug back behind our
lines. "Okay!" he told Thug when they'd moved out of range. "Set down over
here out of th' way. I'll run over th' hill an' git a bucket o' water an'
wet a rag!"
"Thug! Need some help?" I yelled up over the weeds.
"Yeah. Best kinda help you c'n gimme is ta keep on puttin' th' hot
pepper inta that lookout!"
"Gotcha, Cap!" I rolled back over in the weeds and laughed at Claude
and raised up on my knees long enough to lay a nice one right in through the
middle of the window. "Bull's-eye!" I yelled at the rest of the kids.
I heard a loud mouth blurt out from up in the piano-box lookout.
"Here's yore answer!" The ground about an inch from my nose popped open and
the damp dirt sizzed against the sides of a slick one. I heard another whine
in the air and felt my ankle crack and sting just above my shoe top. I tried
to wiggle my foot, but it wouldn't work. A cutting pain felt like it was
burning all the way up my leg to my hip bone. "Mmmooohhhh!" I grunted and
rolled through the grass, grabbing my ankle and rubbing it as hard as I
could.
"Gitcha ag'in'?" Claude looked over at me. "Better stay laid down, boy,
low! Leave your head stickin' up above th' weeds like that, an' them boys'll
chop you down just like you was a weed!"
Little Ray trotted down the path by the chicken house, and carried the
water over to where Thug was humped up holding his head in his hands. He
puffed and blowed and pulled out a rag. "Here. Good `n' wet. Hold still!"
Thug grabbed the rag away from Ray and told him, "I'll wipe off my own
blood. You skat back ta yer own place an' keep sailin' 'em."
Ray didn't argue with the captain. He tore out across the hill toward
his fighting partner hid in the grass and yelled what Thug had told him,
"Keep 'em sailin'! Boys! Hot rocks hailin'! Give that buncha gang house
crooks a good, good frailin'!"
A big heavy one whirled through the wind humming and knocked little
Ray's feet up into the air, laying him flat on his back. He didn't say a
word or make a sound.
"Ray went down!" Claude punched me in the ribs. "See?"
"Keep down!" I held Claude by the arms. I happened to be watching the
smoke rolling out of the gang house stove pipe, "Boy, they're really
throwin' th' wood ta that baby, ain't they?"
"You know, a feller could go up there and stick a hat or a gunny sack
or something down in th' end of that stove pipe an' really smoke them birds
outta there!"
"Make their eyes so watery they couldn't see ta shoot straight!" I told
him. "But that lookout ... them kids up there'd drill ten holes in yer skull
while ya was stuffin' th' pipe."
"Hey! Look!" Claude nudged me with his elbow. "What in th' dem livin'
hell is that?"
"Hey, men!" I yelled back to the kids in our line. "Front door! Look!"
That front door was coming open. "Okay! Men! Charge!" The gang ho'ise
captain bawled out from inside.
A big wooden barrel with a hole sawed out in front with a square piece
of heavy-duty screen wire tacked over a peek hole, lumbered out through the
door. Our boys peppered more sizzlers into the open door.
"That's good, men!" Thug was yelling at us, wiping the cut places on
his face and neck. "Shoot inside th' house! Not at th' barrel!" So thirteen
more rocks clattered in at the door.
Inside there was cussing, sniffing, squawling as the hot rocks bounced
against kids and kids stepped on the scorching floor, "Lay 'em in! Keep 'em
sailin'!" Thug was trotting around back of us, wiping his face with his wet
rag. "Pour it on 'em! That war tank they've invented, hell with it, we can
take care of that later! Blast away! Right on through th' door!"
"Charge!" The gang house captain yelled again. A second double-size
barrel waddled out into the yard with a kid walking under it. Thirteen more
cooked rocks flew to roost through the door, and thirteen more cuss words,
both imported and homemade, roared back at us.
"Charge! Tanks!" The captain of the shack yelled the third time, and
the third barrel tank waddled out onto the battlefield.
Already the first tank had come to a bad end. The barefooted kid humped
under it had stepped down on a rock hot
enough to cook hot cakes on, and had squealed like a pig with his head
caught in a slop bucket, turned his barrel over upside down against the
house, and run like a wild man across the hill.
Tank number two had shoes on. Pretty tough. His screen-wire peek hole
was fixed so he could shoot his sling shot and a pair of springs pulled his
screen shield shut before we had a chance to put a rock inside. We bounced
all kinds of rocks off of it, but he kept coming. He come to a standstill
just about five or six feet from where Claude and me was bellied down. A
rock sung out from the barrel and stung Claude on the shoulder. Another one
caught him on the back of the leg. I got hit in the back of the hand. We
jumped up and beat it back through the weeds.
"What's a feller gonna do up aginst a dam reg'ler war tank?" Claude was
rubbing his stings and blowing through his nose.
Tank number three had shoes on, too. He oozed up to the two guys next
in our line. Three or four hot shots spit out from the barrel. Two more of
our men jumped up out of the weeds and come limping into the alley. Tank
number two went to work on our next two men, and they crippled away through
the weeds.
"Run fer th' alley, fellers!" Thug was ordering the men facing the
tanks. "No use ta git shot 'less ya c'n make it pay!'"
The gang house roared and cheered. The whole little house shook with
cries and yelps of victory. Dancing jarred the whole side of the bill. A
chant floated through the walls of the fort:
Hooray fer th' tanks!
Hooray fer th' tanks!
That'll teach a lesson
To th' boom town rats!
"Whattaya wanta do? What's best?" Thug was holding the wet cloth to the
back of his neck to make the blood quit dripping. "Whattaya say?"
"I say fight!"
"Fight!"
"Charge 'em!''
"Okay, boys! Here she comes! Git 'em! By God, charge!'' He led the way,
running fast and jumping through the weeds. "Knock hell outta them tanks,
boys, no matter if ya hafta do it with yer head!"
"Ain't no tank hard as my head!" I was laughing and trying to keep up
with Thug.
"I'll tear that barrel apart, stave from stave!" Claude was running
faster on his club foot than any of the rest of us. He passed me up, and
then went past Thug. "Clear outta my way!"
"Yyyaaaayyyyy-hoooo!"
"Circle 'em, men!"
"Knock 'em out!"
"Hit 'em with yer shoulder!''
About ten or twelve feet before he got to the tank, Claude took good
aim. The last five feet he cleared in one long kick, swatting the side of
the barrel with the triple sole of his crippled foot. There was a cuss from
Claude and a squawl from the barrel. Then the barrel, kid, rocks, sling
shot, and the whole works rolled away, and we all pointed down the hill and
laughed at the kid's feet turning around and around in the open end of the
rolling barrel. It busted in a hundred staves against a rock.
We charged tank number three, and in a few seconds it had got the same
dose as the one before. We joked and laughed, "I'd hate ta be that tank
driver!" "Boys, look at his feet fiyin' around! Look like an airplane
perpeller in th' end of that barrel a rollin'!"
Tank number one got straighted up again. It scooted in after us as we
hid around at our old places in the weeds, and a kid in the barrel yelled
out, "This is ou'rn now! We captur'd it! Don't shoot! Jist gimme a bucket of
them hot rocks, boys, an' I'll roll up an' bounce 'em in at that window so
fast they'll think it's snowin' hot rocks! Ha! Yo!" He got his rocks. The
barrel moved up within five feet of the window and settled down to a spell
of fast, steady shooting.
"Armored soldiers, charge!" We all heard the captain holler in the
house. Out of the door pushed three kids with heavy overcoats and mackinaws
on, thick gloves, and a broom handle apiece. We spotted all of our shots on
the open door again and heard our rocks bouncing from wall to wall. Inside
kids raved and foamed. The first armored man was loaded heavy and wrapped
pretty good, a mackinaw coat on backwards, and the big sheep-skin collar
turned up to hide his face. This made him a dangerous man. He could just
walk up and push our tank over and frail the knob of the driver. Our rocks
rained all around him, hitting his thick coat and he laughed because they
couldn't hurt him. He took just one step toward our tank. But, right off the
bat, the armored man had trouble. A good stingeree bounced and fell down
inside the collar of the thick mackinaw and come to rest against the skin of
his neck. Other kids had buttoned him into the coat, We last seen him airing
it out down the hill, slinging a glove here, and one yonder, slinging cuss
words and tears at the whole human race.
The second armored man walked within five foot of us, and our rocks
bounced off of his overcoat padded with a couple of flannel blankets
underneath. He was out to rush the tank, push it over, beat the driver up
with a broom handle, and capture the whole shebang. As long as he was
walking, he was mean and dangerous. He sneaked up out of range of the tank
and stopped. The tank turned toward him. He moved around. The tank turned
toward him. He moved a step or two in a circle. It looked like a bird
fighting a rattlesnake. The kid in the barrel was sweating. His breathing,
even ten or fifteen feet away, sounded like a steam engine. He shot a rock
out with enough power to down a Jersey bull. It cracked the armored kid on
the shin, and he hopped down the hill rubbing and cussing, his broom handle
laying where he'd been standing. Slew chased out, tackled him while he was
hopping on one foot, and marched the prisoner back of our lines.
In a jiffy or two Slew was strutting up and down, wearing the blankets,
overcoat, a fur hunting cap on backwards with the earflaps down all the way
around, laughing and joking with the kids in the house, and following their
third armored man around and around the house. They went out of sight. Then
armored unit number three backed into plain sight again around the corner
with both hands up in the air. He was wrapped about six times around with
gunny sacking tied around his chest, neck, belly and legs with cotton rope.
Slew ordered the prisoner to keep backing up. When they got to our lines,
the knots in the rope was untied, gunny sacking rolled off, and rolled back
onto another one of our men.
"Hold'er down a few minnits," I told Claude next to me. "Gonna see if I
know them two kids."
I run a wide bend back of our men and come to the place where little
Ray had went down in the weeds a few minutes ago. Ronald Horton, who was the
best whittler in that whole end of town, had stuck right in the weeds with
Ray even when the rest of us had retreated from the tanks. "How's Ray?" I
ducked down in the weeds close to Ronald. "Hurt bad?"
"He bats his eyes a little," Ron told me. "But then he ain't plumb woke
up yet.'' Ron held his hand out and I looked down and seen a steel
ball-bearing the size of the end of your ringer.
"You ain't aimin' ta shoot that!" I grabbed his wrist and took the
steely.
"Somebody in that shack plugged Little Ray with it!" Ron got down more
on his belly. "Better'd duck low, boy, might be more steel balls where
that'n come from."
"I'm go in' over here ta see if I know who these two strange kids is."
I was walking away, hunched down like a monkey dragging his arms in the
dirt. "I'm wonderin' where so many strange kids is comin' from outta that
house."
"Bring me back that bucket of water, if Thug's done with it. We need a
Red Cross gal aroun' here." Ron rolled to one side to dodge a rock. "I wanta
wet a rag an' put it on Little Ray's face."
"Okay." And then I circled through the weeds till I got to where Slew
and his four men was strung out.
I asked one of the prisoners, "You ain't no member of th' gang here at
th' house, are ya?"
"Hell, no." The kid wasn't very scared of us. "I ain't been livin' in
this town but three days. Folks follers th' oil field work."
"How come ya fightin' us kids?''
"Gimme two bits. Cap'n uv that gang house."
"Two bits? You jest a soldier that goes aroun' hirin' out ta fight fer
money, huh?" I looked his old dirty clothes over.
"They said they wuz th' oldist gang in this town. Best fighters." He
rested back on his hands. Wasn't afraid of nobody.
"I'll tell ya one thing, stranger, whoever ya are, th' oldist bunch
ain't always th' best fighters!"
"Which bunch is you guys?" he asked us.
"Most of us is new here in town," Slew spoke up.
"Who's them ginks in th' shack?" he kept asking.
"Home-town kids, biggest part," I told him. "Like me. Born an' raised
here."
"How come you fightin' on th' new side then?" The prisoner give me a
good looking over, with a wise tough look on his face.
"I didn't like th' old laws. Newcomers didn't have no say-so in how th'
joint wuz run." I heard a couple of dozen rocks humming around over the
hill. "Old bunch booted me out. So I went in with the new kids."
"Maybe ya got somethin' there, fellas." He stood back up on his feet
and stuck out his hand. "Here. Put 'er there. Could you sorter count me in
on yore new side?"
"Honist? Fight?" Slew doubted him a little.
He smiled at both of us. Then he looked back over our shoulders at the
gang house. "I won't charge you guys no two bits."
"Did they pay ya yer two bits already?" I asked him.
"Nawww. They c'n keep their оl' two bits." He didn't take his eyes off
of the gang house. He whistled the first note of a little tune and went on
saying, "Well take th' whole works."
I shook hands with the prisoner and said, "I think this man'll make us
a good captain one of these days."
"Janiter by trade." The kid shook my hand and told us.
"I'm runnin' fer scavenger nex' lection." Slew stuck out his hand. They
shook on the deal. "Gonna clean out this place from th' bottom up."
I reached inside my shirt and offered the kid a sling shot.
"Nawww. That's too sissy fer me. You guys wanta win this war in a
hurry?"
"How?"
"See that оl' stumpy tree up yonder?"
"With th' few old limbs. That 'un?"
"Well, now, boys, if you was ta run home an' git a handsaw, an' if you
was ta saw off that first limb stickin' up, an' that lower limb stickin'
acrost, what would ya have left?"
"It'd be a stump shaped like a V!"
"A V with a handle on it makes what?" he went on.
"A big sling-shot stock!"
"Cannon!"
"Take a whole inner tube! We can git that in two minnits!"
"Some bailin' wire aroun' th' tops!"
"Just take yer pockitknife an' split yore inner tube, see? Rope th'
ends onto th' forks of th' stump. Blim. Blam. Blooey!"
Slew's face lit up like the rising sun. "Rocks this big! We can shoot
rocks as big as yer head!" He started backing away saying, "See you birds in
about two minnits flat!"
He struck across the hill, jumped a deep clay ditch, and was almost out
of sight before I could ask the new kid, "What's your name? Mine's Woody."
"My name's Andy."
"Okay, Andy. Yonder's our captain. Thug. Le's go tell `im about th'
cannon."
Thug met us, saying, "You fellers look awful friendly fer one of ya ta
be a pris'ner."
"Andy's on our side now," I told Thug.
"Yeah. I changed uniforms," Andy laughed.
"Andy jus' now told us how ta saw th' extry forks off of that there old
peach tree stump up yonder. Make a cannon."
"Ya figgered that up, Andy?" Thug started smiling.
''I want th' new side ta come winner on top!" Andy had a look in his
eyes like a trained bulldog itching for a fight.
"Slew's comin' yonder with th' saw an' inner tube! Come on, Andy," I
said. "We'll fix this cannon in about forty-four flat, an' about three good
solid licks will settle this war once and fer all!"
"Pour it on their оl' sore backs! After we win, Andy, maybe you'll be
capt'in in my place!" Thug went away waving his hands in the air, making all
kinds of motions at our boys fighting. "Double yer fire, men! Shovel them
rocks onta that house! Pepper it on 'em! Don't give 'em a chance ta breathe!
Shoot th' buckets at 'em if ya run shorta rocks! Wow! Wow!" He was bending
and grunting through the weeds, counting slow like a string of jail birds
chopping on a logging gang. "One! Two! Wow! Wow! Fire! Load! Aim! Fire!"
The dribble of rocks doubled and got twice as loud against the house.
I'd been inside that little old house through a lot of wars and a lot of
hailstorms. I know how it sounded inside now. It was loud, and as mean, only
a hell of a lot hotter than three years of rough weather all added up.
"Tied all right?" I asked Slew and Andy.
"My end's hot an' ready ta ramble!" Slew jerked the last knot in his
rope.
"My fork's sizzlin'!"
"Gonna take two guys!" I couldn't stretch the big inner tube much by
myself. I dug my heels into the hill and throwed my weight against it,
heaving backwards, but it was too tough. "Go gitta couple of kids outta our
lines. Put 'em ta packin' rocks."
Claude come over bringing four or five rocks about the size of brick
bats.
"Keep 'em hailin'!" I was yelling back along our string of kids. I
turned back to Claude and said, "Go take a look at yer bruther Ray, that's
him they're pourin' water yonder in them weeds. Didn't no ice-cream cone
knock 'im out, either! Hell, no! A steely ball!" I turned away from Claude
and said to Andy, "Load 'er up!"
"She's loaded fer war!" Andy hollered. "Let's pull 'er back!"
Andy and me pulled the rock back in the 100-gauge sling shot. It was
all we could do to stretch it back. "One! Two! Three! Fire!" We both turned
loose.
The new hum of the big rock in the air brought a big loud whoop and
holler from up and down our string of kids. "Loooky! Cannon! Hooray fer th'
cannon!"
Everybody watched the big rock.
A low shot. It hit the ground about fifteen feet this side of the fort.
It plowed a bucketful of loose rock and dirt when it hit, and went rolling
into the side of the house. A board screaked and split and the gang house
got as still as a feather floating.
"What th' hell wuz that?" their captain yelled at us.
"It wasn't no steel ball!" Claude hollered from over where they was
pouring water on Little Ray. "It was a cannon!"
"Cannon?" Their captain sounded a little shaky in the throat.
"Yes, cannon! Here she comes ag'in!" I hollered out.
"What kinda cannon?" another kid hollered out from in the house.
"Cannon cannon!" Andy put in.
"No fair usin' cannons!" a kid barked from the house.
"No fair usin' a dam fort! Ha!" one of ours laughed back.
I waited a second or two, then asked, "Like ta give up?"
"Hell, no!"
"Okay, Andy! Load 'er up ag'in! Let's pull 'er back! One! Two! Three!
Fire!"
A zoom in the air like a covey of quails, or like the wind whistling
through an airplane's wings. A bigger board split into forty-nine little
shavers and three or four flew in every direction. We could see the kids'
feet and legs through the hole in the house. Hunkered on boxes, beer cases,
rolls of gunny sacks, and old rags, fidgeting and traipsing the floor, and
standing then as still as a deer.
"Surrender?" our captain yelled again.
"Hell, no!" the gang-house boss howled at us. "What's more, I'll shoot
th' first man in this house that surrenders! I'll shoot you in th' back of
th' head! You hired out to fight `til this war is over! I'm th' boss till
it's over! See!"
Claude caught all of the kids inside looking in the direction of the
cannon. He sneaked up under the eaves of the house and took off his padded
hat and jammed it into the end of the stove pipe.
"Sneak!" The man in the lookout tower drew aim and shot square down on
top of Claude's head. We seen him stumble over against the side of the
house, then slip to the ground, "That'll teach ya ta sneak!" the lookout man
laughed back at all of us.
"Load 'er up, Andy! Pull 'er back! One! Two! Three! Fire!" I watched
the rock leave the sling. We had pulled it back a little harder this time,
and learned how to aim it better.
The lookout tower swayed in the middle, screeched like pulling a
hundred rusty nails, and boards shattered apart, sailing in every direction
and leaving a hole several feet around tore out of one side of the piano
box.
"No more! Don't! God! Surren'er! Stop!" The lookout man jumped down off
of the roof and started walking toward our men with his hands in the air,
snubbing and crying, jerking his head and squawling, "I'm done! I'm done!"
He keeled over to the ground with a little groan.
"You dam right you're done!" The captain of the shack was looking out
the window, putting a new rock into his sling shot. "Well!" He ducked inside
and cussed at all of his kids, "Whattaya standin' there gawkin' at me for?
You cowardly dam snakes! I got lots more rocks where that'n come from!"
"You kids inside! Surren'er?" I asked them again.
No sound. Only the captain sniffing and crying and breathing hard. The
smoke was filling the whole house full of red-eyed, snorting and hissing
kids. Claude's old hat was still in the stove pipe. Two kids took him out
into the weeds where they had just woke his brother up with a bucket of
water. Ray blinked when he seen them carry Claude in. "Had his hat off.
Nicked 'im in th' toppa th' head," they told him.
"Load 'er up!"
Little Ray looked over our way and asked the boys, "Load what up?"
"Cannon."
''Hahhh! Funny's hell! I wuz jis' dreamin' somp'in' 'bout a cannon!"
"Run gitta bucket a water fresh fer Claude's head."
"That ain't no dream, though!" Little Ray's eyes smiled as he trotted
up the hill past the cannon. "Knock 'em plumb offa th' hill! I'll be right
back with Claude's water!"
"Andy! Got 'er loaded?''
"She's jam up!"
Smoke rolled out of the house. Sneezing. Coughing. Snorting of noses.
Mad, fist-slinging kids. The house was darker than night inside. Cusses.
Insults. Bad names. Poking. Everybody cutting back at everybody else. The
captain stood on a chair inside and kept his sling shot drawed on the whole
pack.
"Pull 'er back! Andy, boy!"
"She's back, bruther cap'n!"
"One! Two! Three!"
Then I said, "Wait! Listen!"
The house roared and pitched. Howls and cries of all kinds flew through
the windows and cannon holes. The grumbling, scraping of lots of feet,
grunting and straining, heads and tail ends whamming against the board
walls. House quivering. Fists and feet thumping against kids' heads.
Dragging sounds and the breaking of sticks, old boards, clubs, and clothing
zipped and ripped open. A loud wrestling and clattering at the door. A heavy
board cracked. All got quiet and still. The door came open.
"Don't shoot us!" The first kid stepped out with his hands in the air,
waving a bloody hunk of white cloth.
"We surren'er!"
"I didn' wanta fight you guys in th' first place.''
"Whatcha gon'ta do ta us?"
The kids walked out, one by one. Then every gang-house fighter was
searched. They wiped their faces and pinched their toes where the hot rocks
had blistered them. One by one, our captain sent them over to set down on
the ground.
"What'll we do now, Thug? I don't mean about th' men. I mean about th'
house here," I was saying at his shoulder.
"House? We'll fix it back better'n th' dam thing ever was. We'll have a
votin' match to see who's captain."
Thug looked around at everybody. He thought a minute and then said,
"Well, men. Alla my men. Stand around. What're we gonna do ta these here
guys?"
"Take over!"
"No use ta hurt 'em!
"
"Give 'em all a job!"
"Let ever'body have a vote. Say-so."
Thug laughed at the ground covered with rocks still cooling.
"Naw. We ain't gonna beat nobody up." He kept talking along the ground.
"You men wanta be in on th' new gang? If ya don't, why, git up, an' beat it
ta hell offa this hill, an' stay off."
The captain of the gang house got up, rubbing dirty tears back across
his face and walked up over the rim of the hill.
"Anybody else wanta leave?" Thug took a seat on the ground and leaned
back up against the side of the house, putting his sling shot in his hip
pocket. Every little ear and every little dirty eye and every little skint
face was soaking in what Thug was saying. "Well, ain't much use ta make a
big speech. Both gangs is one now. That was what we was fightin' for."
He grinned up into space and wind blew dirt across the blood drying on
his face when he said, "Cain't no gang whip us now."
Chapter VII
FIRE EXTINGUISHERS
One day about three in the afternoon when I was playing out on
Grandma's farm, I heard a long, lonesome whistle blow. It was the fire
whistle. I'd heard it before. It always made me feel funny, wondering where
fire had struck this time, whose new house it was turning into ashes. In
about an hour a car pulled in off the main road in a big fog of dust, and
rolled on up to the house. It was my brother, Roy, looking for me. He was
with another man or two. They said it was our house.
But first they said, "... it's Clara."
"She's burnt awful bad ... might not live ... doctor come ... said for
everybody to get ready...."
They throwed me into the car like a shepherd dog, and I stood up all
the way home, stretching my neck in that direction. I wanted to see if I
could see any sign of the fire away down the road and up on the hills. We
got home and I saw a big crowd around the house. We went in. Everybody was
crying and sobbing. The house smelled full of smoke. It had caught fire and
the fire wagon had come. It was wet here and there, but not much.
Clara had caught fire. She had been ironing that day on an old kerosene
stove, and it had blowed up. She'd filled it with coal oil and cleaned
it--it was on her apron. Then it got to smoking, wouldn't bum, so she opened
the wick to look in, and when the air hit the chamber full of thick oily
smoke, it caught fire, blowed up all over her. She flamed up to the ceiling,
and run through the house screaming, out into the yard and around the house
twice, before she thought to roll in the tall green grass at the side of the
house and smother her clothing out. A boy from the next house saw her and
chased her down. He helped to smother the flying blaze. He carried her into
the house and laid her on her bed. She was laying there when I walked in
through the big crowd of crying friends and kinfolks.
Papa was setting in the front room with his head in his hands, not
saying very much, just once in a while, "Poor little Clara," and his face
was wet and red from crying.
The men and women standing around would tell good things about her.
"She cleaned my house better than I could have...."
"Smart in her books, too."
''She made my little boy a shirt.''
"She caught the measles by going to bed with my daughter."
Her school teacher was there. Clara had stayed out of school to do the
ironing. Mama and her had quarreled a little about it. Mama felt sick. Clara
wanted to get ready for her exams. The school teacher tried to cheer Mama up
by telling her how Clara led the class.
I went in and looked over where Clara was on the bed. She was the
happiest one in the bunch. She called me over to her bed and said, "Hello
there, old Mister Woodly." She always called me that when she wanted to make
me smile.
I said, "Hello."
"Everybody's cryin', Woodly. Papa's in there with his head down
crying...."
"Uhh huhh."
"Mama's in the dining room, crying her eyes out''
"I know."
"Old Roy even cried, and he's just a big old tough boy.''
''I seen `im."
"Woodly, don't you cry. Promise me that you won't ever cry.
It
don't
help, it just makes everybody feel bad, Woodly. . . ."
"I ain't a-cryin'."
"Don't do it--don't do it. I'm not bad off, Woodly; I'm gonna be up
playing some more in a day or two; just burnt a little; shucks, lots of
folks get hurt a little, and they don't like for everybody to go around
crying about it. I'll feel good, Woodly, if you just promise that you won't
cry."
"I ain't a-cryin', Sis." And I wasn't. And I didn't.
I set there on the side of her bed for a minute or two looking at her
burnt, charred skin hanging in twisted, red, blistered hunks around over her
body, and her face wrinkled and charred, and I felt something go away from
me. But I'd told Sis I wouldn't bawl about it, so I patted her on the hand,
and smiled at her, and got up and said, "You'll be all right, Sis; don't pay
no 'tention to 'em. They don't know. You'll be all right."
I got up and walked out real easy, and went out on the porch. Papa got
up and walked out behind me. He followed me over to a big rocking chair that
was out there, and he set down and called me over to him. He took me up in
his lap and told me over and over how good all of us kids was, and how mean
he had treated us, and that he was going to be good to all of us. This
wasn't true. He had always been good to his kids.
I was out in the yard a few minutes later and cut my hand pretty bad
with an old rusty knife. It bled a lot. Scared me a little. Papa grabbed me
and doctored me all up. He poured it full of iodine. That burnt. I squinched
my face around. Wished he hadn't put it on there. But I'd told Clara I
wouldn't ever cry no more. She laughed when the school teacher told her
about it.
I walked back into the bedroom after a while with my hand all done up
in a big white rag, and we talked a little more. Then Clara turned over to
her school teacher and sort of smiled, and said, "I missed class today,
didn't I, Mrs. Johnston?"
The teacher tried to smile and said, "Yes, but you still get the prize
for being the most regular pupil. Never late, never tardy and never absent."
"But I know my lesson awful good," Clara said.
"You always know your lessons," Mrs. Johnston answered.
"Do you--think--I'll--pass?" And Clara's eyes shut like she was half
asleep, dreaming about everything good. She breathed two or three long, deep
breaths of air, and I saw her whole body get limber and her head fall a
little to one side on her pillow.
The school teacher touched the tips of her fingers to Clara's eyes,
held them closed for a minute, and said, "Yes, you'll pass."
For a while it looked like trouble had made us closer friends with
everybody, had drawn our whole family together and made us know each other
better. But before long it was plainer than ever that it had been the
breaking point for my mother. She got worse, and lost control of the muscles
in her body; and two or three times a day she would have bad spells of
epileptics, first getting angry at things in the house, then arguing at
every stick of furniture in every room until she would be talking so loud
that all of the neighbors heard and wondered about it. I noticed that every
day she would spend a minute or two staring at a lump of melted glass
crystals, a door stop about as big as your two fists, and she told me,
"Before our new six-room house burned down, this was a twenty-dollar
cut-glass casserole. It was a present, and it was as pretty as I used to be.
But now look how it looks, all crazy, all out of shape. It don't reflect
pretty colors any more like it used to--it's all twisted, like everything
pretty gets twisted, like my whole life is twisted. God, I want to die! I
want to die! Now! Now! Now! Now!"
And she broke furniture and dishes to pieces.
She had always been one of the prettiest women in our part of the
country: long black wavy hair that she combed and brushed for several
minutes twice or three times a day medium weight, round and healthy face and
big dark eyes, She rode a one-hundred-dollar sidesaddle on a fast-stepping
black horse; and Papa would ride along beside her on a light-foot pacing
white mare. People said, "In them days уоur pa and ma made a mighty pretty
picture," but there was a look in people's eyes like they was just talking
about a pretty movie that come through town.
Mama had things on her mind. Troubles. She thought about them too much,
or didn't fight back. Maybe she didn't know. Maybe she had faith in
something that you can't see, something that would cause it all to come
back, the house, the lands, the good furniture, the part-time maid, and the
car to drive around the country. She concentrated on her worries until it
got the best of her. The doctor said it would. He said for her to get up and
run away, for us to take her to a place, a land somewhere where there
wouldn't be any worries. She got to where she would shriek at the top of her
voice and talk for hours on end about things that had went wrong. She didn't
know where to put the blame. She turned on Papa. She thought he was to
blame.
The whole town knew about her. She got careless with her appearance.
She let herself run down. She walked around over the town, looking and
thinking and crying. The doctor called it insanity and let it go at that.
She lost control of the muscles of her face. Us kids would stand around in
the house lost in silence, not saying a word for hours, and ashamed"
somehow, to go out down the street and play with the kids, and wanting to
stay there and see how long her spell would last, and if we could help her.
She couldn't control her arms, nor her legs, nor the muscles in her body,
and she would go into spasms and fall on the floor, and wallow around
through the house, and ruin her clothes, and yell till people blocks up the
street could hear her.
She would be all right for a while and treat us kids as good as any
mother, and all at once it would start in--something bad and
awful--something would start coming over her, and it come by slow degrees.
Her face would twitch and her lips would snarl and her teeth would show.
Spit would run out of her mouth and she would start out in a low grumbling
voice and gradually get to talking as loud as her throat could stand it; and
her arms would draw up at her sides, then behind her back, and swing in all
kinds of curves. Her stomach would draw up into a hard ball, and she would
double over into a terrible-looking hunch--and turn into another person, it
looked like, standing right there before Roy and me.
I used to go to sleep at night and have dreams; it seemed like I
dreamed the whole thing out. I dreamed that my mama was just like anybody
else's. I saw her talking, smiling, and working just like other kids' mamas.
But when I woke up it would still be all wrong, all twisted out of shape,
helter-skelter, let go, the house not kept, the cooking skipped, the dishes
not washed. Oh, Roy and me tried, I guess. We would take spells of working
the house over, but I was only about nine years old, Roy about fifteen.
Other things, things that kids of that age do, games they play, places they
go, swimming holes, playing, running, laughing--we drifted into those things
just to try to forget for a minute that a cyclone had hit our home, and how
it was ripping and tearing away our family, and scattering it in the wind.
I hate a hundred times more to describe my own mother in any such words
as these. You hate to read about a mother described in any such words as
these. I know, I understand you. I hope you can understand me, for it must
be broke down and said.
We had to move out of the house. Papa didn't have no money, so he
couldn't pay the rent. He went down fighting, but he went right on down. He
was a lost man in a lost world. Lost everything. Lost every cent. Owed ten
times more than he could ever pay. Never could get caught up again, and get
strung out down the road to success. He didn't know that. He still believed
that he could start out on a peanut hull and fight his way back into the
ten-thousand-dollar oil deals, the farms, and ranchlands, the royalties, and
the leases, changing hands every day. I'll cut it short by saying that he
fought back, but he didn't make the grade. He was down and out. No good to
them. The big boys. They wouldn't back him. He went down and he stayed down.
We didn't want to send Mama away. It would be better some other place.
We'd go off and start all over. So in 1923 we packed up and moved away to
Oklahoma City. We moved in an old Т Model truck. Didn't take much stuff
along. Just wanted to get away somewhere--where we didn't know anybody, and
see if that wouldn't make her better. She was better when we got home. When
we moved into an old house out there on Twenty-eighth Street, she felt
better. She cooked. It tasted good. She talked. It sure sounded good. She
would go for days and days and not have one of her spells. That looked like
the front door of heaven to all of us. We didn't care about our selfs so
much--it was her that we wanted to see get better. She swept the old house
and put out washings, and she even stuck a few little flower seeds down in
the ground and she watched them grow. She tied twine string up to the window
screens, and the sweet peas come up and looked at her in through the window.
Papa got some fire extinguishers and tried to sell them around at the
big buildings. But people thought they had enough stuff to keep them from
burning down, so he didn't sell many. They was one of the best 'kind on the
market. He had to pay for the ones that he used as samples. He sold about
one a month and made about six dollars off of every sale. He walked his self
to a frazzle. We didn't have but one or two sticks of furniture in the
house. An old monkey heater with room for two small pots, one beans, one
coffee; and we fried corn-meal mush and lived mostly on that when we could
get it. Papa gave up the fire-putter-outters because he wasn't a good enough
salesman, didn't look so pretty and nice. Clothes wore out. Shoes run down.
He put new soles on them two or three times, but he walked them right off
again.
I guess he was thinking about Clara, and our first house that burned
up, and all, when he would lug those fire extinguishers around over the big
hot city. And the big cold town.
Papa visited a grocery store and got some food stuffs on credit. They
gave him a job working in the store, helping out around, and driving the
delivery wagon. He got a dollar a day. I carried milk to the store for a
lady that had a cow. She gave me a dollar a week.
But Papa's hands was all busted and broken from the years of fist
fighting. Now somehow or other the muscles in his fingers and hands started
drawing together. They got tighter every day and pulled his fingers down so
that he couldn't open his hands. He had to go to a doctor and have the
little finger on his left hand cut off, because the muscles drawed it down
so hard against the palm of his hand that the fingernail cut a big hole into
his flesh. The rest of the fingers tightened worse than ever. They hurt him
every hour of the day, but he went on working, carrying the trays and
baskets and boxes and sacks of big groceries for the people that had money
to buy at the store. He used to come in for his meals and fall across his
bed fagged out, and I'd see him working his hands together, and nearly
crying with the pain. I would go over and rub them for him. My hands was
young, and I could work with the hard, crackling muscles that had lost all
of their limberness, and were losing all of their use. Big knots on every
joint. Hard like gristle. His palms were long, stringy sinews, standing way
up out of the skin, pulled as tight as they could be. His fist fights had
done most of it. His bones broke easy. When he hit he hit hard. It shattered
his fingers. And now it was the grocery-store work--it looked like that he
got the worst job that he could get for hands like that. But he couldn't
think much about his hands. He was a-thinking about Mama and us kids. He was
going to have them cut again, the muscles cut into, cut loose, so that he
could relax them, so that they wouldn't pull down any more. You could see by
looking at them that they hurt awful bad.
At night he'd lie awake and call over to me, "Rub them, Woody. Rub
them. I can't go to sleep unless you rub them."
I'd hold both of his hands under the covers and rub them, and feel the
gristle on his knuckles, swelled up four times natural size, and the
cemented muscles under each finger, drawing his fists together so tight that
they would never come open again. I forgot how to cry. I wanted to cry and
do a lot of it, but I wanted him to talk on and on.
So I'd keep quiet and he'd say, "What do you want to do when you grow
up to be a big man?"
"Just like you, a good, good fighter."
"Not bad and mean and wrong like me--not a wrong fighter. I've always
lost out--won the little street fights but always lost the big fights."
I'd rub his hands some more, and say, "You done good, Papa. You decided
what was good and you fought every day for it."
We'd been in Oklahoma City almost a year when Leonard, Mama's half
brother, turned up. He was a big, tall, straight, good-looking man, and
always giving me nickels. He'd been in the army now, and he was an expert,
among other things, at riding a motorcycle. So he'd got a good break and was
given the State Agency for a Motorcycle Company which made the new, black,
four-cylinder Ace.
He rode into our front yard one day on one of those black motorcycles,
with a flashy side-car, all trimmed in nickel-plated steel, shining like the
state capitol, and he had good news.
"Well, Charlie, I been a-hearing about your hard luck, you and Nora,
and I'm gonna give you a fine job. You've always been a good office man,
good hand to write letters, handle books, and take care of your business--so
you're appointed the head of all of that for the Ace Motorcycle Co., in the
State of Oklahoma. You'll make around two hundred dollars a month.''
The world got twice as big and four times brighter. Flowers changed
colors, got taller, more of them. The sun talked and the moon sung tenor.
Mountains rubbed bellies, and rivers tore loose to have picnics, and the big
redwood trees held dances every night. Leonard handed me nickels. Candy was
good. I'd play with an orange till it got all soft and juicy, and then I'd
kiss it when I was eating it. Roy smiled and told quiet jokes. Kids ganged
in. I was a man of standing again. They quit jumping on me for two reasons:
I'd beat the hound out of one of them, and the others wanted to ride on that
motorcycle.
The big day come. Papa and Leonard got on the motorcycle and roared out
down the road to go to work. A big crowd of people stood in the street and
watched them. It was a pretty sight.
The next day was Sunday. We didn't have no furniture to speak of, but
had been eating a little better. I don't know how far you'd have to go to
find a family that was any gladder than ours that morning. We cooked and ate
a nice round meal for lunch, and Papa went out and bought the ten-cent
Sunday paper. He came back with a new package of cigarettes, smoking one,
and when he went into the bedroom, he laid down and covered his self up, and
dug into the comics part of the paper, and laughed once in a while. First he
read the funnies. He read the news last.
All at once he swept all of the papers away. He jumped up and looked
around sort of wild like. He had turned into the news section, page two, and
something had knocked him blank like a picture show with no pictures on it.
His face was just white and vacant. He got up. He walked through the house.
He didn't know what to do or say. Read it to us? Keep it quiet? Forget it?
Burn the paper up and throw away the ashes? Kill it? Tear the building down!
Tear the whole world down! Make it over, and make it right! He couldn't
talk.
Roy looked at the paper and he couldn't talk for a minute, and then
Papa said, "Get your mama, get your mama!"
"Mama, come here for a minute. . . ." Roy got her to come in and set
down beside Papa on the old springy bed, and Roy read sort of
soft--something like this:
MOTORCYCLE ACE KILLED IN CRASH
Chicasha, Oklahoma:--Leonard Tanner, Ace Motorcyclist, was killed
instantly in an accident that wrecked a car and a motorcycle at a street
intersection yesterday afternoon. Tanner seemed to be driving about forty
miles per hour, thus breaking the speed limit, when he crashed into the side
of a 1922 model Ford sedan, fracturing his skull. Mr. Tanner was going into
business for himself for the first time when disaster overtook him at the
crossroads in his life.
I walked out in the front yard and stood in the weeds in a daze, and
then all at once about twenty kids chased across . the street, skipping,
waving at each other, and they walked up to me and quieted down.
"Hey. Where's the motersickle ride ya said we're gonna git?" The leader
of the kids was biting on a bitter stick and looking around for the big
black machine.
I chewed down on my tongue. I heard others say, "We come ta ride!"
"Where's th' 'cycle?" "C'mon!"
I run out through the high grass in our back yard, and when I got to
the alley they followed me.
"He ain't even got no uncle what owns no motorsickle!" "Liar!" "Lyin'
bastard!"
I picked up a pocketful of good rocks and sailed them into the whole
crowd.
"Git outta my yard! Say gone! Who's a liar? I hadda uncle with a
motorcycle! I did! But--but--"
A FAST-RUNNING TRAIN WHISTLES DOWN
I was standing up in the truck with my feet on our old sofa, waving
both hands in the air, when we hit the city limits of Okemah. Leonard's
death had tore down most of the good things growing up in Mama's mind, and
we were coming home. I looked a mile away to the north and saw the old
slaughter pen where wild dogs had chased me across the oat stubble. I looked
to the south and seen the vacant lots I'd fought in a million times. My eyes
knew everything at a glance.
When the old truck crawled past Ninth Street, Roy stuck his head out on
his side of the cab and yelled, "See anything you know, Woodsaw?"
"Yeah!" I guess I sounded pretty washed out. "House where Clara burned
up."
I spotted a couple of kids jumping across a plowed hill, "Hi! Matt!
Nick! Hi! I'm back! See? All of us!"
"Hi! Come play with us!" "Where ya livin'?" They waved back at me.
"Old Jim Cain house! East end!"
They ducked their heads and didn't ask me to come and play with them
any more.
The model-T truck almost had a runaway coming down a steep hill,
frogged across the railroad tracks, and bounced me down on the bed-springs.
The truck was passing the whole town by, it seemed like to me. It was
passing the nice streets and the shady streets where the kids with good
clothes on fought wars in the weeds and raced bareback on high-priced
horses. It was headed now for the east end, where every house is a pile of
junk. Rotten boards soak up good paint and just stay rotten. Rotten dogs
with dishwater and grease in their hair drift across the old sandy roads.
Kids with sores on their heads and snuff rotting their teeth out yip and
yell and hide under mouldy floors of old crazy houses. Horses try to switch
their tails hard enough to beat off the big blue flies that had got harder
lickings than that when they weren't but little maggots. Dust flew up from
under the truck wheels. Hot winds burned the patches of stinging weeds. But
it felt good to me. It was where I come from. Okemah. To me the garbage in
the alleys of my home town was better than being in a big town like Oklahoma
City- where my papa couldn't get a job. If he couldn't he wasn't much use to
nobody, and if he wasn't much use to nobody, we would all unload the old
truck and move into the old Jim Cain house, and try to be of some use to
each other.
"Okay! Work hand!" Roy backed the truck off the main highway and I
piled down from the load.
"So this is it?" Mama got out of the truck and walked through the gate.
The Jim Cain house. Twenty-five years ago somebody had built it. Two
rooms with a little lean-to kitchen, and a front porch. Maybe it had housed
somebody, lots of people, before we come, but it never had got a coat of
paint. The rain rotted the shingles and the ground rotted the bottom boards,
and the middle had just warped and twisted itself into fits trying to hold
together. Decaying boards of all kinds had been nailed over knotholes and
cracks; tin buckets flattened out and nailed up to fight against the
weather. And the whole yard was running wild with weeds and wild flowers,
brittle and sticky and covered with a fine sifting dust that lifted and fell
from the highway.
"This is she." Roy got out and looked over the fence. "Home sweet
home."
"Gosh! Looky at them purty flowers!" I told them. "Look how thick they
are. Like somebody had got out here and threw big handsful of flower seeds
an' then jist let 'em grow wild!"
"Mostly hollyhocks, few zinnias," Mama said. "Just look at that
honeysuckle climbing up the side of the house there."
Roy walked up onto the porch and stomped the boards with his feet.
"Whole piles of dust. I never saw that much dust before."
"We can clean it out. I'm anxious to see the kitchen and the insides."
Mama walked in the door.
Bedroom full of spider webs and rotten papers. Front room full of
spider webs and scattered old tubs full of trash. Somehow or other I looked
around and thought, maybe our old furniture would just about match this
place. This is the kitchen, with the roof almost hitting me on the head and
big holes with rat manure around them rotted through the floor. Dirt
everywhere, a half an inch deep. It was a long, long ways across that floor.
"I smell something dead under this old soggy floor," Roy said. "I guess
it's a dead cat."
"This оl' house is all haunted with dead cats," I yowled out. "I don't
like this оl' dead-cat house!"
"Maybe all of the old sore-eyed cats come to this house to die." Mama
laughed and took a look out the north kitchen window at the Graveyard Hill.
"All of th' glass is busted. This room. This room. This room." I was
walking around with my hands stretched out dragging my fingers on th' walls.
"Wallpaper all busted aloose. Dirt driftin' in through th' holes bigga 'nuff
fer a dog ta trot through. What makes us hafta live in this ol' bad dead-cat
house, Mama?"
"We'll get something better before long. I just know. I just know."
I carried the first load from the truck into the bedroom. "First load
in our purrrty new house! Hollyhocks! Sunny-hockle vines! Buzzlin' bees!
Picket fence! New wallpapers! We'll git some whitewarsh, white, white,
white, whitewarsh." I skipped all around the house. "Then we'll git some
newer boards an' nail 'em up where th' ol
'
ones, one ones, ol'
ones, ol' ones is!"
I felt the dust on the flower leaves when I walked and skipped back out
to the truck.
"Give you fifty cents to help unload this thing," Roy was telling a big
fat man walking along with his underwear dropped down around his belt and
his chest and shoulders bare to the sun. "That all right with you?"
"Fine. Fine with me. How long you been away, say?"
"Year exactly." Roy was swinging up onto the truck and dropping a set
of bedsprings over the sides.
I had another armload of loose clothes and pots and pans, "July
Fourteenth is my birthday! I'm twelve! But this of house is seven hunderd
an' twelve! We left Okemah on my birthday, an' come back on it! Today! I'm
gonna plant me a big, big garden out in th' backyard! Sell cucumbers, an'
green beans, an' watermelons, an' shellin' peas!''
"That's my little hard-headed brother," Roy said to the man.
"So you're our little farmer neighbor, huh?" the man asked me. "Say,
where you goin' to sell all of this stuff that you grow?"
"Up in town. Lots of people.''
"That's just what's got me worried." He scratched his head. "Just where
you aim to find all of these people."
"Oil field folks. Gotta eat, ain't they, at grocery stores,
rester'nts?"
"What few's left."
"Whattaya mean, few?"
"Have you been up on the main street today?"
"Jist got back from Oklahoma City. Ain't been on Main Street of Okemah
fer a whole year!"
"You're in for a mighty big surprise."
"I c'n grow stuff."
"You're still in for a big surprise. Oil field's went dead'er than a
doornail."
"I c'n work jist as much's you 'er anybody else. I know th' store men.
I know th' eatin'-joint guys. They'll buy what I take 'em."
"To feed who, did you say?"
"Shucks, they's ten jillion folks runnin' aroun' needs feed-in'!
Streets is full of 'em. You think I don't know all of 'em? You're crazy!"
"Not so smart there, young feller," Roy cut in, "not so smart aleck."
"You hush up!"
"You can grow a garden, all right, little feller; you're as good a
worker as me or your brother here, either one, any day; but when you get all
of this stuff raised and everything-- oh well, why should I tell you? You'll
go up in town. You'll see something that will make your eyes bug out. She'd
one dead town. People has ducked out just like birds in the bushes. Nobody
knows where they went. Okemah's all but a ghost town."
"It ain't! It ain't!" I run past him on the porch. "You're tellin' a
lie!"
I darted out the gate and headed south past piles of rotten boards
called other people's houses. Mean dogs thought I was running from them and
wheeled out behind my heels. "Ain't dead! Ain't dead! Okemah ain't dead!
Okemah is where I was borned at! Cain't no town die! Old Luke yonder beatin'
that same little mule. I see Dad Nixon's mare had a new colt. Here she is.
Good ol' Main Street. Full of people, pushing and trying to get past each
other. They didn't get all of the oil out the ground. They didn't build all
of this country up. They ain't done all of the work yet. They ain't run off.
They're still right here working like the devil. Who said stop? Who said go?
Who said let Okemah die?"
Main Street! I rounded the corner of the depot and skidded across a few
cinders and my feet hit the sidewalk with me trying to come to a stop so I
can look.
Main Street. Main Street? What's so quiet? Lonesome. I felt a cold
bunch of goose pimples bumping up on my skin. First block nothing. All
nailed up. I stood there looking at wild papers drift up and down the
sidewalks and pavement like nobody tried to stop them. Snatches of grass and
dirt along the concrete. A few old cars asleep, and some wired-up wagons and
teams drooped along. I didn't budge from my tracks. I didn't much want to
walk on up Main Street, How come them to all get up and go? It wasn't any
noisier on Main Street than up on top of the Graveyard Hill. All at once a
tough-looking boy with a blue-gray shirt and pants to match, a soggy chew of
tobacco punching his jaw out, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen, with
dirty bare feet, walked out from across by the cotton yards and said, "Hey,
Kid! Stranger here in town?''
"Me? I was borned here. I'm Woody Guthrie."
"I'm Coggy Sanderson. New kid comes ta town, I meet 'im. Give 'im a
good welcome."
Five or six kids knocked up the dust running from in between the
strings of cotton bales by the gin. "Cog's caught a new 'um!" "Le's see th'
fun!" "Welcome!"
I looked around at all of them and said, "Don't none of you guys know
me?"
They just stood there watching Coggy and me. Nobody said a word.
Coggy stuck his foot behind my heels and pushed me down into the dirt.
I hit on my back and knocked some hide off, Then I jumped up and made a run
at Coggy. He stepped to one side and took a long straight jab with his right
hand and knocked my head back on my shoulders. I hit the ground again almost
in the same spot. I got up and his fists met me halfway again, and I
staggered about ten feet batting my eyes. He cracked one up along my temple
that made my head ring like a church bell. Another left crossed over and
knocked me almost down and he cut through with a right haymaker that batted
me back up on my feet again. I ducked my head forward to try to cover up
with my arms and he nailed a couple of uppercuts that whistled like trains
right on my mouth and chin and busted my lips against my own teeth, I turned
around and wiped the blood off with my hands and ducked my head with my back
to him. He booted me in the rear and knocked me a yard or two, and then
grabbed my shirt out of my pants and jerked the tail up over my head. I was
smearing blood and sweat all over my face trying to keep out of his reach.
Then he put his foot up on my hip and pushed me about fifteen feet and I
plowed up the deep dirt with my face.
"Now. Yer an old-timer here." Cog turned around and dusted off his
hands while the other kids laughed and danced up and down in the dust.
"Welcome ta Okemah."
I pulled my shirt back down and stumbled on up the main street holding
my head over and spotting the old sidewalk with big red drops of blood. I
blinked my eyes and stopped over one of the squares in the sidewalk.
W.G.
1921.
And it was funny to see the blood drip from my face and blot out my
own initials in the cement.
I humped along. Drug along. Maybe that old man was right. I looked in
at the lobby of the Broadway Hotel. Nobody. I looked through the plate glass
of Bill Bailey's pool hall. Just a long row of brass spittoons there by
their self in the dark. I looked in at the Yellow Dog bootleg joint. Shelves
shot all to pieces. I looked in the window of a grocery store at a clerk
with glasses on playing a fast game of solitaire. Weeds and grass in the
door of this garage? Always was a big bunch of men hanging around there.
Nobody running in and out of the Monkey Oil Drug Store. They even took the
monkey and the cage from out in front. Benches, benches, benches. All
whittled and cut to pieces. Men must not have much to do but just hump
around and whittle on benches. Nobody even sweeps up the shavings. Chewed
matches piled along the curb. Quids of tobacco. No cars or wagons to run
over you. Four dogs trotting along with their tongues dripping spit,
following a little bitch that draws her back up in a knot like she's scared
to death and glad of it.
I walked down the other side of the street. It was the same thing.
Grass in the dirt crack along the cement. I stood there at the top of the
hill in front of the court house and it looked like there never had been an
Indian lose his million dollars in there. A pair of sleepy-looking mules
pulled a wagon up through town. No kids. No hell-raising. No running and
stumbling. No pushing and yelling. No town growing up. No houses banging
with hammers all around. No guys knocked you down running late to work. No
ham and stew smoke sifting through the screens of the cafes; and no wild
herds of men cussing and laughing, piling up onto big oil field trucks,
waving their dinner boxes back at their women. No fiddle music and yodeling
floating out of the pool halls and gambling dens. No gals hustling along the
streets in their short skirts and red paint. No dogs fighting in the middle
of the streets. No crowds ganged around a pair of little boys banging each
other's heads to pieces.
I could look in the dark plate-glass window there and see myself. Hello
there, me. What the hell are you walking along so slow for? Who are you?
Woody Who? Huh. You've walked along looking at yourself in these windows
when they was all lit up with bright lights and hung full of pretty things
for pretty women, tough stuff for tough men, fighting clothes for fighting
people. And now look. Look, you lonesome outfit. Don't you seem lost
flogging along there in that glass window? You thought Okemah never would
quit getting better? Hah.
I felt almost as empty and vacant and drifting as the town. I wasn't
thinking straight. I didn't want to go back down there and help unload that
old truck and that old furniture into that old house. Оl' dead-cat house.
Оl' long-gone Main Street. Who's gonna buy what I grow? I don't wanta burn
nobody for my nickels. I wanta grow me a garden. But, gosh, who'd eat it?
Few people driftin' across th' streets now an' then, but most of them look
like they ain't eatin' very much. He's right. That оl' fat man was right.
Okemah's gone an' died.
The chickens argued with the turkeys and ducks all along the sides of
the road when I walked back down through the old east end toward home. I saw
a light in our house that looked about like the whole world was going down
with the sun. It would be the same old thing when I got home. Mama would
feel worse to know the town was dead, and Roy would feel bad, too. Maybe I
wouldn't tell them how Main Street really did look. Maybe I'd walk in and
say something funny and try to make them all feel as good as I could. What
could I think of funny?
I opened the gate trying to think up something, and when I walked in
the front door I hadn't thought of it yet.
I was surprised to see Mama carrying a couple of coffee cups off a
little reading table in the middle of the front room floor, humming one of
her songs. I looked all around. Beds all up. Dirt and trash cleaned out.
Three straight chairs and the reading table in the front room, and our sofa
back against the east wall. Roy must have just said something pretty glad,
because he was rearing back in one of the chairs with his foot up on the
table, looking awful well pleased оn his face.
"Howdy, Mister Sawmill." Roy waved his hand in the air by the lamp.
"Well, by God, I got some good news!"
"I'm hungry. What news?" I asked him as I walked past him into the
kitchen where Mama was.
"I'll tell you!" Mama was frisking all around over the kitchen.
"I'll--"
"I said I'd tell you!" Roy joked and tried to jump up out of his chair,
but he bent backwards too far and fell all over the floor. "I'll
tell--whoooaaapp!"
The three of us laughed so much for a minute that nobody could talk.
But then Mama managed to get her stomach quieted down and she said, "Well,
your papa has got a good new job!"
'Pара workin'?"
"For th
'
State!" Roy was picking up a few things that had
fell out of his pockets. "Steady!"
"What?" I asked.
"Bet you couldn't guess if you tried a thousand years!" Mama went back
to her work in the kitchen.
"Tell me!" I told them.
"Selling automobile licenses!" Roy said.
And Mama said, "Car tags."
I danced all around the room, singing and swaying my head. "Yay! Hay!
Hooray! Really? Per th' who? Per th' State? Ever' day? I mean, it ain't no
little few-day job?"
Roy acted like he was skipping around with me joking, "Best part is, it
gives me a job, too. Writin' on a typewriter! Papa gets so much for each set
of tags he sells!"
"Both gonna work? Gosh, ever' kid in Okfuskee County'll be wishin' you
was their brother an' papa! Sellin' real car tags? Wheee!"
Mama didn't say anything for a little bit, and Roy and me got quieted
down. He took a book from a box on the wall and set down to the table to
read by the lamp. "Take my girl to th' show, now," he told us.
"You can take me, too, Mister Smart," Mama said.
"Gosh," I said, "I wuz gittin' tired of jest оl' 'taters `n' flour
gravy. Be glad we c'n have somethin' ta eat better." I took a seat in the
middle of the floor. "Deeesssert!"
"I'll see to it that you boys and your papa get plenty of good meals.
And with good dessert, too." Mama held her eyes squinted almost shut,
picturing the good things she was talking about in the light of the lamp.
"Mama," I asked, "what does it mean when ya got a job fer th' State?
Mean ya'll always have work, huh? Git money?"
"It's better than working for some one man." Mama smiled at me like she
was feeling a new light coming back.
"Gosh! Will you'n Papa be like cops, er somethin'?"
"No," Roy said over his shoulder at me, "we're just agents. Just
auto-license agents, and get anywhere from a half a dollar or more for
writing out papers."
"Woody. You look all fussed up." Mama caught sight of my black eye and
scratches. "Come over here. Is this blood in your hair?"
I said, "He wuz bigger'n me. It's quit hurtin'." Her hand tangling in
with the curls of my hair felt like olden times again.
Roy and me kept quiet, him soaking up what was in the book, and me
soaking up a game I was playing on the floor. I heard Mama say, "Woody, have
you got that box of matches again?"
"Yes'um. Jist playin' with 'em.''
"What are you playing?"
"War."
"I thought you were too big to play little games like that. You're
twelve years old."
"Ya don't git too old ta play war."
"You can just have a war, then, with something else,'' Mama got down on
the floor putting my rows of matches back in the box. "So matches are your
soldiers, huh?"
"Fire soldiers." I helped her to pick them up.
"Isn't that another match lying in yonder on the front room floor?"
Mama was putting the matches on their shelf and pointing back into the front
room.
"I don't see none. Where 'bouts?"
I got down on my hands and knees looking around over the cracks and
splinters on the boards in the floor. Mama put her hand on the back of my
head and pushed my nose down close to the floor. She got down on her knees
and I jerked loose and rolled over laughing. "I don't see no match."
"In that crack there? Now do you see?" She picked the match out of the
crack and held it up. "See that, Fire Bug?"
"Ha! I seen it all th
'
time!"
"Old mean Woody. Mean to his mama. Teasing me because I'm so nervous
about matches. Hhmmm. Little Woodshaver, maybe you don't know, maybe your
little eyes haven't seen. Maybe you don't even halfway guess the misery that
goes through my mind every time I hold a match in my hand."
"Hadn' oughtta be skeerd."
Mama got up with the match in her hand. She struck the match on the
floor and held it up between her eyes and mine, and it lit up both of our
thoughts and reflected in both of our minds, and struck a million memories
and ten million secrets that fire had turned into ashes between us. "I
know," she said. "I'm not afraid. I'm not scared of anybody or anything on
the face of this earth. We're not the scared people, Woody!"
Next morning I jumped into my overhalls when the sun shot through the
window. I seen a few grasshoppers and butterflies in the yard, birds out
there whistling and trying to sneak kisses in our mulberry trees. It looked
like a mighty pretty day. I busted out the back door and noticed the whole
yard was hanging full of fresh washed, drippy clothes, shirts, sheets,
overhalls, dresses. And this made me feel a whole light brighter in the
morning, because this was the first time in more than two months that I had
seen Mama put out a washing.
"You out of bed, Mister Mattress-Presser?" I heard her scrubbing on the
rub board out under the mulberry tree. "Wash your face and hands good and
clean, and then go in the kitchen and you'll find some breakfast fixed."
"I'm hungery as a great big alligater! Yom. Yom. Yom." I washed my
hands and face and looked around for the eats. "Where's Roy an' Papa at?"
"Selling automobile tags!''
"Oh, gosh, I fergot. Thought I jist drempt that."
"No, you certainly didn't dream it. They're down there on the job now!
Hurry and eat!"
"I'm a-gonna go down an' git me a set of tags fer my four big long red
racers!"
"You can get me some for my steamboat!" she told me.
"Yacht. Yacht. Some fer my bran'-new airplane, too! Them's good
scrammeled eggs!"
"Them is, or them are, or they are?"
"They wuz."
"Now that you've got a good meal under your belt, Mister Farmer," she
smiled at me, "you'll find your shovel right there under the house. By the
back door. Awaiting your gentle and manly touch."
I took my shovel out near the back fence and sunk it about a foot deep
in the ground. That good ground looked so fine to me that I got down on my
hands and knees and broke the dirt apart from the roots and little rocks. A
worm about six inches long was all bloody and cut in two pieces. Both halves
pulled back into the dirt. I got the half that was in the loose clod and
held it in my hands. "Ya hadn't oughtta got in th' way of my shovel, worm.
I'll coverya up in this here new dirt. Ya'll be all right. Ya'll heal up in
a few days, then ya'll be two worms. Ya might think I'm a purty bad feller.
But when ya git ta be two worms, why gosh, you'll have another worm ta run
around with, an' ya know, talk to, an' stuff like that. I'll pat this dirt
down on top of ya good. Too tight under there? Can ya git yer breath? I know
it might hurt a little right this minnit, but ya jist wait an' see, when ya
git ta be two worms, ya'll like me so good ya'll be a sendin' all th
'
other worms 'round ta me."
Roy come home at noon bringing some fumigators with him to smoke out
the house. "Look at this guy work!" he said to me when he walked through the
gate. "You've got the old back yard looking like a fresh-plowed farm!"
"Good dirt! Lotsa worms!"
"I'll say one thing, you've knocked under a pretty big spot of ground
for a man your size."
"Hah! I'm workin' outta doors on my farm! Gittin' tough!"
"I made three dollars already this morning. How's that?"
"Three how much?"
"Three dollars."
"Didn't neither. Gosh!"
"What are you goshing about?''
"Be a long time 'fore I make any money on my garden,''
"All of you farmers will just make barrels of money if everything goes
just right."
"Yeah, I s'pose we will. But I wuz jist thinkin', ya know, mebbe
ever'thing won't go jist right."
"If it don't, you can always go down and have a talk with Big Fat Nick
the Banker. Just tell him you know me, and hell hand you a big bundle of
money out through the window."
"Well, I wuz rollin' it over in my mind. Ya know, 'course, I'm purty
busy these days a-gittin' my land all turned under. Jist don't git much of a
chance ta run inta town to th' bank. Mebbe it'd be a lot easier if ya sorta
let me have th' money ahead of time, an' then 'course I could always pay ya
back when my crop comes in."
"I'm not personally in the money-lending business. It would be against
the law for me to lend you money without letting the governor know it."
"Th' gov'ner? Shucks, me 'n' th' gov'ner's always goin'
aroun' with our hands in each other's pockits. Big friends."
"Besides, my motor boat is coming in on the train in the morning, and
I'll be needing what few thousand I've got in my pockets for gasoline and
oil and I'm having them send me a part of the ocean to run my boat on. So I
couldn't be letting any money go out."
"No. Don't see how ya could."
"How much would it take to carry you over?''
"Nickel. Dime, mebbe."
And when Roy turned around and went walking across the yard to the back
door, I saw a new dime looking up at me out of the fresh dirt.
I was shoveling as hard and fast as I could, trying to finish out my
row, when Mama called, "Woody, come on here and eat! You won't be able to
once we get this house full of fumigator smoke!"
"And I've got to get back to my job," Roy said.
I was humming and singing when I set down to my plate:
Well, I gotta brother
With purty clothes on
Yes, I gotta brother
With purty clothes on
Got an inside job
In a place up in town
Where th' purty little girls
Go walkin' around.
Roy kept on eating and not looking at me. He started singing a little
song:
Well, I gotta little brother
With overhauls on
Yes, I've gotta little brother
With overhauls on
He's got a job on a farm
And he works pretty hard
But he can't make money
In his own back yard.
"My song's better'n yores!" I argued at him.
"Mine's the best!" he shot back at me.
"Mine!"
"Mine!"
When the fumigators got all lit up and Roy had gone on back to work,
Mama took me by my hand and walked me out under the mulberry tree. I set up
on the wash bench trying to look back in at the door and see the fireworks.
Mama took a shovel from against the tree and started digging where I had
left off.
For a few seconds I was looking at the house, then when I looked around
and seen her digging in my dirt there was a feeling in me that I had been
hunting for the bigger part of my life. A wide-open feeling that she was
just like any other boy's mama.
"Come on here. Go to work. Let's see who can turn under the most dirt!"
"Awww. But yer jest a woman. ..."
"I can shovel more dirt in a minute than you can in an hour, little
man! Look at the worms, wouldn't you?"
"Full of 'em."
"That's a sure sign this is good soil."
"Yeah."
"Hurry up! Why, look how far you've dropped behind! I thought you said
something about me being a woman!"
"I guess ya had ta be."
"I had to be. I wanted to be--so I could be your mama.''
"I guess I wanted ta be yore boy!" And I suppose that when I told her
this, I felt just about the closest to this stuff that is called happiness
as I have ever struck. She seemed so all right. Common everyday, just like
almost any other woman out working with her boy and both of them sweating,
getting somewhere, getting something done.
After about half an hour we dropped our shovels on the ground and took
a little rest. "How ya feel? Good?" I asked Mama.
"I feel better than I've felt in years. How do you feel?"
"Fine." I watched the fumigator fumes puffing out the cracks of the
house.
"Work is a funny thing. It's the best thing in the world. It's the only
religion that's worth a pinch of snuff. Good work and good rest."
"We shore been takin' lotsa medicine this mornin', ain't we?"
"We? Medicine?"
"I mean work's makin' us weller."
"Look. Look at the house. You can see the smoke boiling out between the
cracks in those old thin walls."
"Yeah, man. Looks like it's on fire!"
Mama didn't say anything back.
"You know somethin', Mama? Papa feels better, an' Roy feels better, an'
it makes me even feel better when all of us sees you feel better. Makes me
really feel like workin'."
Mama still didn't say anything back. Just set there with her elbow on
her knee and her chin in her hand, looking. Thinking. Rolling things over in
her mind while the smoke rolled out through the cracks.
"Harder I work now, better I'm gonna like it. Boy, yip, yip, I feel
like really workin' hard an' havin' me a big new garden all growed up out
here this evenin' when Papa an' Roy comes home. I bet they'd be su'prised ta
see me out here pickin' stuff an
'
sellin' it, an' all."
Mama rubbed a fly or two off of her arm and kept quiet.
"You know how it is, I guess. After all, you're th' only mama we got.
We cain't jist go down ta no store an' buy us a new mama. You're th' mama in
this whole family."
No answer from Mama. She had her eyes on the house, Looking and opening
her eyes wider, and her mouth and face changing into a stare that was still
and cold and stiff. I didn't see her move a single part of her face.
Then I saw her raise up to her knees, staring like she was hypnotized
at the house with the smoke leaking out of it.
I let the spade drop out of my hand and my heart felt like a cake of
ice inside of me. Fire and flames seemed to crawl across the picture screen
of my mind, and everything was scorched out, except the sight I was seeing
in front of me. I was popping out with smoky sweat and my eyes saw hopes
piled like silky pictures on celluloid film curling away into some kind of a
fiery hole that turns everything into nothing.
Mama got up and started taking long steps in the direction of the
house. I tore out in front of her and tried to hold her back. She was
walking with a strength and a power that I had seen her use before in her
bad spells, and an ordinary person's strength wasn't any sort of match for
hers. I held out my hands to try to stop her, and she brushed me over
against the fence like I was a paper doll she had played with and was now
tossing into the wind.
I sailed across the yard, left down the alley, right along a dirt road
three blocks, running with every ounce that my lungs could pull and my heart
could pound and my blood could give me. A pain hit me low down in the belly,
but I speeded up just that much faster. My eyes didn't see the dogs nor the
hungry people nor the shabby shacks along the East End Road, nor my nose
didn't smell the dead horse rotting in the weeds, nor my feet didn't ache
and hurt getting hit against the rocks that had bruised a thousand other
kids running near as wild as me down that same old road before. That look.
That long-lost, faraway, fiery, smoke glare that cracked in her eyes and
reflected on the sweat on her face. That look. That same old look. Houses
and barns and vacant lots and trees whizzed past me like I was riding down
the road on a runaway motorcycle.
I blammed into Papa's office, knocking people out of my way with their
papers saying something about somebody needing some license tags. I shoved
across Papa's desk, and puffed and gasped for air, saying, "Run! Quick!
Mama!"
Papa and Roy left their typewriters with papers rolled into them and
people looking sideways at one another. They busted out the door and met
Warren just starting in to buy Grandma some car tags.
"Take that kid back home with you! Keep him tonight!" Papa ran up the
street to the truck. Roy yelled back over his shoulder, "Get Grandma! Come
back in the morning!"
Warren took me up into the seat of his car and I was screaming, "I
wanta go home where Mama is! I don't wanta stay all night with you! You ol'
cat-killer!"
And it was cussing and mad that Warren drove me the seven miles out to
Grandma's, and crying and bawling that I walked into their house.
That night at Grandma's I laid awake and watched a hundred moving
pictures go through my mind, but I didn't have to make them up, because they
was snapping and cracking and flashing all around me. The crickets chirped
like they was calling for their lovers, but halfway scared their own voice
would cause them to get stepped on. The frogs down around the banks of the
pond seemed to laugh. I laid there in a puddle of cold late-summer sweat,
and my body cramped in knots and I didn't move an arm or a leg. I rolled my
head on my pillow once to look out the night window, and beyond a turtle
dove hay meadow I could see a yellow prairie fire that had broke loose
across a slope of dry grass, five or six miles away to the south; and I was
glad it wasn't to the east, toward home. I guess Grandpa is asleep and
getting ready to go to work with Lawrence in the morning, cutting wood on
the hill. Warren is asleep, too; I can hear him snoring here beside me,
worried mostly about his own self. But I know that in the next bedroom
Grandma, too, like me, is laying there with her eyes stinging and her face
salty and wet, having crazy dreams that float across the night winds and
twist and turn and roll and coil and jump and fight and burn themselves out,
like the meadow fire over across the wind yonder, like the dry hay.
Warren drove Grandma and me back to town when morning came. We walked
through the yard gate and in at the back door of the old Jim Cain house.
Windows smashed and glass laughing in the sun on the floor. Kitchen upside
down and dishes and pots and pans slung across the room and floor. Front
room, a handful of torn books and old letters, chairs laying over on their
sides, and a coal-oil lamp smashed where the oil soaked the wallpaper and
then run down the north wall. Little bedroom, both beds full of wild strewn
clothes that almost looked like people that had died in their dreams. Warren
and me followed Grandma from the bedroom, through the front room, and back
into the kitchen. I didn't hear anybody say a single word. The second-handed
oil stove was smashed in the corner and the new kerosene smelled strong,
soaking in the floors and walls. Charred wallpaper run up the wall behind
the stove, some of the boards black and smoked and scorched with flames that
had been beat out with a wet gunny sack at my feet.
Roy walked in from the back porch and I noticed that he was all dirty,
messy, and needed a shave; his new shirt and pants tore in several places;
his hair was in his eyes and his eyes had a beat-down look. He let his eyes
drift around the room without looking us in the face, and then he looked at
the oil stove and said, "Oil stove exploded. Papa's in the hospital. Pretty
bad burns."
'' 'S funny," I said, "I was afraid yesterday when ya started ta
fumigate th' house. `Fraid this coal oil would ketch afire. So I took th'
oil tank off th' stove an' set it out in th' back 'yard under th' mulberry
tree. I cain't figger out how it blowed up." I was looking at the oil tank
piled in the corner with the oil soaked out across the floor. "Jist cain't
see how."
"Shut you mouth!" Roy doubled up both fists and raved back at me, and
his eyes blazed wildfire. "You little rat!"
I set down close to the stove against the wall and heard Grandma say,
"Where--how is Nora!''
Warren was listening, swallowing hard.
"She's on the westbound passenger train." Roy slid down on the floor
beside me and fumbled with a burner on the wreck of a stove.
"On her way to the insane asylum."
Nobody said very much.
Away off somewheres we heard a long gone howl of a fast-running train
whistling down.
Chapter X
THE JUNKING SACK
With Mama gone, Papa went to West Texas to live with my aunt in Pampa
till he could get over his burns. Roy and me hung on for a while and lived
in the old Jim Cain house. When daylight come to our house and I woke up out
of bed, there wasn't no warm breakfast, and there wasn't a clean bed. It was
a dirty house. A house that had old dirty clothes throwed around here and
yonder, or a tub of water, soap suds and soppy pants on the bench out in
back, that had set there now for two or three weeks, waiting for Roy or me
to wash them. I don't know. That house, that old, old, big mulberry tree,
those dried-up flowers in the front yard, the kitchen so sour and
lonesome--it seemed like everything in the world echoed in there, but you
couldn't hear it. Yon could stand still and cock your ear to one side, but
you couldn't hear anything. I know how I felt about it, I only had one
feeling toward it: I wanted to get the hell out of it when daytime come and
it got light outside.
Then Roy stumbled onto a job at the Okemah Wholesale House. The day we
moved out of the Jim Cain house, I helped him haul and store all of our
belongings in the hayloft of the rottenest barn in town. He asked me to come
across town and stay with him in his new three-dollar room, but I told him
"no," that I wanted to shuck out on my own.
Every day I combed the alleys and the dump grounds with my gunny sacks
blistering my shoulders, digging like a mole into everybody's trash heaps to
see if I couldn't make a little something out of nothing. Ten or fifteen
miles walking a day, with my sack weighing up to fifty pounds, to weigh in
and sell my load to the city junk man along about sundown.
The refuse heaps and trash piles didn't turn my stomach. I was baptized
into ten or fifteen different junking crews by getting splashed, kicked,
squirted on, throwed down, heaped over and covered under in every earthly
article of garbage and junk known to man. I'd come back to the gang house
laughing and scare the kids with wild tales about the half-kids and
half-rats, half-coyotes, and half-men.
When I told Roy good-bye I had brought an old quilt and blanket over to
the gang-house shack and made it my hotel.
It had rained and turned hot, rained and turned hot, so many times
lately that the whole gang house hill simmered and steamed. The weeds turned
into a jungle where spiders golfed the ladybugs and wasps dive-bombed the
spiders. A world where the new babies of one came from the dead bodies of
others. The sun was hot as fire on the henhouse, and the chicken manure had
carried its lice across the hill in the rains. A smothery vapor covered the
place with the smell and the poison of cankering wood.
The waters oozed from the hill above and kept the floor of the house
soggy and wet. My quilt and blanket soured and molded. I woke up every
morning in my bed on the floor, feeling as if the matter that rotted in the
night had soaked into my brain and filled my body with a blind fever. The
sun, fermenting the dew in the piles of trash, put out some kind of a gas
that made me laugh and lay down in the path in the sun and dream about dying
and moldering.
When the kids had gone home on these nights, I'd lay on my back on my
damp blanket and whirl away to a land of bloody, cutthroat dreams, and fight
and wallow in corruption and slime all night, chased and trampled under the
feet of demons and monsters, wound up in the coils of a boa constrictor
crawling in the city cesspool. I'd wake up bug-eyed. The sun coming up
brought the smell from the weeds again, and the vapor from the hill choked
me down.
For several mornings now I'd been too weak to hang my blankets out to
air and sun while I was junking. My first thought every morning was to crawl
out on the side of the hill and lay in the sun in the path. I felt the rays
cut through my whole body and I knew the sun was good medicine. One morning
I was so crazy and dizzy I crawled to the top of the hill and pulled myself
a block to the school grounds. I flopped down on a bench by a fountain. The
world was hot and I was cold. Then the world turned cold and I was hot. I
used my gunny sack for a pillow. It felt like lightning was cracking through
my head. My teeth chattered.
The next thing I knew somebody was shaking my shoulder and saying,
"Hey, Woody, wake up! What's the matter?"
I looked up and saw Roy. "Howdy, brother. How come you ta be passin' by
here?"
"How come you piled up here sick?" Roy asked me.
"I ain't sick! Little woozie."
"Where are you living these days? Hanging out up at that little old
gang house of a night?"
"I be all right."
"What's this old dirty sack under you head?"
"Junkin' sack."
"Still crawling through the dumps, huh? Listen, young sprout, I've got
a good room. You know where Mrs. Hutchinson lives over there in that big
white two-story house yonder? You go over there. I'll send a doctor up to
look you over pretty quick. See you about six o'clock. Get up! Here's the
key!"
"I c'n take care of my own self!"
"Listen, brat, I mean brother! Take this key."
"Go onta work!" I got up and pushed Roy down the sidewalk, "Shore, I'll
go sleep in yer room. Send me yer good docter! An' go onta work!" I was
pushing Roy in the back and laughing at the same time. Then I got so dizzy I
caved in, and Roy caught me and held me up, and give me a little shove to
get me started off toward his room.
I come to the big two-story white house and clumb the stairs to room
number ten. My junking sack was soaking wet with the morning dew, so I
struck a match to a gas heating stove and set down in the floor, spreading
out the sack to dry. I felt a cold chill crawling over me. I took off my
shirt on the floor and let the warmth from the gas heater bake me. It felt
so good I stretched out in front of it, put my hands between my knees and
shivered a little while, and laid there chilling and wet with dew, getting
warm through my overhalls, and thinking about other times I'd been in hard
spots and somebody had always come along. Junk was bringing more money. I
guess they want brass. Copper's good. Aluminum's what's best. That old junk
man's a Jew. Some folks around town don't like Jews 'cause they're Jews,
Niggers 'cause they're black; me 'cause I'm a dam little junk boy, but I
don't care 'bout all of that. This old floor's good an' warm. What's that?
Fire whistle? О God, no! Not a fire whistle! Not no fire whistle! Fire
whistles has run me nuts' Fire! Fire! Put it out! Fire!
"Get up! Wake up! Move!" A lady rolled me over out of the way; then she
trampled and danced up and down in front of the stove. Smoke all over the
place. She drew a pitcher of water from the sink, poured it along in front
of the stove' and a big cloud of white smoke shot up and filled the whole
room. "Wake up! You'll burn up! You'll blister!"
You'll blister. You'll blister. You will blister. Wait and see. Hot tar
and hot feathers and you'll blister. Kloo Kluxx Klam. Wake up. Wake up an'
crawl on your belly.
The lady yelled at me. She took me by the hand and pulled me up off of
the floor. I walked to the bed and crawled in between the covers with my
overhalls on. "Looks like you'd at least take off your overhauls, boy! What
do you mean spreading that old greasy sack out here on the floor in front of
this fire, and then going off to sleep any such a way? You ought to have
your little hind end blistered!"
You low-down lousy sneakin' Kluck Klucks! Git th' hell outta my house!
Ol' ghosty robes! Wound up in a windin' sheet! Windin' sheet! Windin' sheet!
The lady pushed her hair back out of her face and walked
to
the edge of
the bed. "Why, you're having a fever!' She touched her hand to my forehead.
"Your face is simply blistered!"
Tar me an' feather me! I hate ya! Hoodlum....
I made a dive for her and missed, and went down to the floor. I
scrambled around trying to get up. Everything blacked out. ...
"Feel better now? This nice cool rag on your forehead?" She smiled and
looked into my face like my mama used to look at me a long, long time ago.
"It burned a hole or two in my old rug, but you'll have to go out and hunt
in the alleys and find you a brand-new gunny sack. Don't worry about my old
rug. Do you know when I first bursted into this room and found the smoke and
the sack blazing on the floor, and I saw you mere asleep on the floor, I
wasn't mad. Nooo. Here. Eat this oatmeal. And drink this warm milk down.
Good? Sugar enough? I took your overhalls off. You ought to wear some
underwear, little tousle-head."
I looked out through the screened window across the old school grounds
and thought of a million friends arid a million faces, a million brawls and
fights, and a whole town full of just as good a people as you'll ever find
anywhere. The lady still knelt down at the side of my bed.
She put her hand on my head and said, "Go to sleep?''
"Back of my head. Hurts. Jumps."
"You roll over and lay on your tummy. That's a good boy. I'll rub the
back of your head for you. Does this feel good?'' She rubbed and petted, and
rubbed and petted.
"Is it rainin'?" I snuggled down under the covers deeper.
"Why, no. Why?" She patted the back of my neck.
"I'm all wet an' cold."
"You're dreaming!" She rubbed and petted some more.
"Is this train runnin' away?"
"Go to sleep."
"Ever'thing's funny, ain't it? I c'n hear it rainin'."
"Does this rubbing feel better?" She patted me again.
" 'At's better."
"Quit your talking and go to sleep.''
" 'At's better."
"Want anything?"
"Yup."
"What?"
"New junkin' sack.''
Chapter XI
BOY IN SEARCH OF SOMETHING
I was thirteen when I went to live with a family of thirteen people in
a two-room house. I was going on fifteen when I got me a job shining shoes,
washing spittoons, meeting the night trains in a hotel up in town. I was a
little past sixteen when I first hit the highway and took a trip down around
the Gulf of Mexico, hoeing figs, watering strawberries, picking mustang
grapes, helping carpenters and well drillers, cleaning yards, chopping
weeds, and moving garbage cans. Then I got tired of being a stranger, so I
stuck my thumb in the air again and landed back in the old home town,
Okemah.
I found me a job at five dollars a week in a push-button service
station. I got a letter twice a week as regular as a clock from Papa out on
the Texas plains. I told him everything I thought and he told me everything
he was hoping. Then, one day, he wrote that his bums had healed up enough
for him to go to work, and he'd got him a job managing a whole block of
property in Pampa, Texas.
In three days I was standing in the little office shaking his hand,
talking old times, and all about my job with him as general handyman around
the property. I was just past my seventeenth birthday.
Pampa was a Texas oil boom town and wilder than a woodchuck. It
traveled fast and traveled light. Oil boom towns come that way and they go
that way. Houses aren't built to last very long, because the big majority of
the. working folks will walk into town, work like a horse for a while, put
the oil wells in, drill the holes down fifteen thousand feet, bring in the
black gushers, case off the hot flow, cap the high pressure, put valves on
them, get the oil to flowing steady and easy into the rich people's tanks,
and then the field, a big thick forest of drilling rigs, just sets there
pumping oil all over the world to run limousines, factories, war machines,
and fast trains. There's not much work left to do in the oil fields once the
boys have developed it by hard work and hot sweat, and so they move along
down the road, as broke, as down and out, as tough, as hard hitting, as hard
working, as the day they come to town.
The town was mainly a scattering of little old shacks. They was built
to last a few months; built out of old rotten boards, flattened oil barrels,
buckets, sheet iron, crates of all kinds, and gunny sacks. Some were lucky
enough to have a floor, Others just the dusty old dirt. The rent was high on
these shacks. A common price was five dollars a week for a three roomer.
That meant one room cut three ways.
Women folks worked hard trying to make their little shacks look like
something, but with the dry weather, hot sun, high wind, and the dust piling
in, they could clean and wipe and mop and scrub their shanty twenty-four
hours a day and never get caught up. Their floors always was warped and
crooked. The old linoleum rugs had raised six families and put eighteen kids
through school. The walls were made out thin boards, one inch thick and
covered over with whatever the women could nail on them: old blue wallpaper,
wrapping paper from the boxcars along the tracks, once in a while a layer of
beaver board painted with whitewash, or some haywire color ranging from
deep-sea blue through all of the midnight blues to a blazing red that would
drive a Jersey bull crazy. Each family usually nailed together some sort of
a chair or bench out of junk materials and left it in the house when they
moved away, so that after an even thirty-five cents worth of hand-made wash
benches, or an old chair, or table had been left behind, the landlord hired
a sign painter to write the word "Furnished" on the "For Rent" sign.
Lots of folks in the oil fields come in from the country. They heard
about the high wages and the great number of jobs. The old farm has dried up
and blowed away. The chickens are gone dry and the cows have quit laying.
The wind has got high and the sky is black with dust. Blow flies are taking
the place over, licking off the milk pails, falling into the cream, getting
hung up in the molasses. Besides that, they ain't no more work to do on the
farm; can't buy no seed for planting, nor feed for the horses and cows.
Hell, I can work. I like to work. Born working. Raised working. Married
working. What kind of work do they want done in this oil boom town? If work
is what they want done, plowing or digging or carrying something, I can do
that. If they want a cellar dug or some dirt moved, I can do that. If they
want some rock hauled and some cement shoveled, I can do that. If they want
some boards sawed and some nails drove, hell's bells, I can do that. If they
want a tank truck drove, I can do that, too, or if they want some steel
towers bolted up, give me a day's practice, and I can do that. I could get
pretty good at it. And I wouldn't quit. Even if I could, I wouldn't want to.
Hell with this whole dam layout! I'm a-gonna git up an' hump up, an'
walk off of this cussed dam place! Farm, toodle-do. Here I come, oil town!
Hundred mile down that big wide road.
Papa's new job was the handling of an old ramshackle rooming house,
right on the main street, built out of corrugated iron on a framework of two
by four scantlings, and cut up into little stalls called rooms. You couldn't
hardly lay down to sleep in your room without your head scraping the wall at
one end and your feet sticking out in the hall. You could hear what was
taking place in the six stalls all around you, and it was a pretty hard
matter to keep your mind on your own business for trying to listen in on the
rooms on each side of you. The beds made so much racket it sounded like some
kind of a factory screaking. But there was a rhythm and a song in the
scraping and the oil boom chasers called it "the rusty bedspring blues." I
got so good at this particular song that I could rent a flop in a boom-town
hotel, and go to my room and just set there and listen a minute, and then
guess within three pounds of the other roomers
'
weight, just by
the squeek of the springs.
My dad run one of these houses. He tended to a block of property where
girls rented rooms: the girls that follow the booms. They'd come in to look
for work, and they'd hit the rooming house so as to set up a home, and
straighten out their citizenship papers with the pimps, the McGimps, the
other girls, and the old satchels that acted as mothers of the flock. One of
Papa's boarders, for instance, was an old lady with gray hair dyed as red as
the side of a brick barn, and her name was Old Rose. Only there never was a
rose that old. She'd been in all of the booms, Smackover, Arkansas,
Cromwell, Oklahoma, Bristow, Drumright, Sand Springs, Bow Legs, and on to
East Texas, Kilgore, Longview, Henderson, then west to Burke-Burnett,
Wichita Falls, Electra, and farther west, out on the windy plains, around
Panhandle, Amarillo, and Pampa. It was a thriving business, boom chasing;
and this old rusty sheet-iron rooming house could have been in any of these
towns, and so could Old Rose.
Come to think of it, I've been in every one of these towns. I might of
slept in this old rooming house a dozen times around over the country, and
it was awful high-priced sleeping. I might of paid out a lot of them sheets
of iron. And the girls that stayed here, they might of paid out a truck load
or two of them two by fours. The usual price is about five dollars a week.
If a girl is working, that is not so much, but if she's out of job, it's a
lot of money. She knows that the officers might grab her by the arm any time
for "Vag," for it's a jail house offense to be a-loafing in a boom town.
I remember one little girl that come in from the country.
She blowed into town one day from some thriving little church
community, and she wasn't what you'd call a good-looking girl, but she
wasn't ugly. Sort of plump, but she wasn't a bit fat. She'd worked hard at
washing milk buckets, doing housework, washing the family's clothes. She
could milk an old Jersey cow. Her face and her hands looked like work. Her
room in the rooming house wasn't big enough to spank a cat in. She moved in,
straightened it up, and gave it a sweeping and a dusting that is headline
news in a oil boom town. Then she washed the old faded window curtains,
changed the bed and dresser around every way to see how it looked best, and
tacked pretty pictures on her wall.
She didn't have any extra clothes with her. I wondered why; something
went haywire at home, maybe. Maybe she left home in a hurry. Guess that's
what she done. She just thought she'd come into town and go to work in a
cafe or hotel or in somebody's house, and then when she got her first week's
pay, she'd get what things she needed, and add to them as she went along.
She wasn't a town girl. You could tell that. Everything about her looked
like the farm, and the outhouses and barns, and the pastures, and wide-open
spaces, and the cattle grazing, and the herds of sheep, or like looking out
across the plains and seeing a hard-working cowhand rolling down across the
country on a fat bay mare. Some way or another, her way of talking and the
words that she knew just didn't seem to connect up with this oil-smeared,
gasoline-soaked, whiskey-flavored, wild and fast-moving boom town. No
cattle; no milk buckets. Nothing about raising an early garden, or putting
on a big-brim straw hat and driving a speckled mare and a black hoss to a
hay rake. I guess she was just a little bit lost. The other girls flocked in
to see her, walking on high-heel shoes, with a bottle or two of fingernail
paint, some cigarets, different flavors of lipstick, and a half a pint of
pale corn whiskey. They jabbered and talked a blue streak. They giggled and
snickered, and hollered, Oh, Kid, this, and Oh, Kid, that. Everything they
said was funny and new, and she would set, listen, soak it all in, but she
didn't talk much. She didn't know much to talk about. Didn't smoke, and
didn't know how to use that fingernail paint. Hadn't seen the picture show
lately. Once in a great while she'd get up and walk across the floor and
straighten up something that had got pushed over, or remark that she had to
scrape the grease and dirt off of her two-burner hot plate.
When the girls had gone off to their rooms, she'd take a good look
around over her room to see if it was neat enough, and if it was she'd
sometimes take a little walk down the old dark hall, out into the back yard
that stood about ankle deep in junk and garbage. You'd run onto her every
once in a while out there. You'd catch her with a handful of old sacks and
papers, carrying them in a high north wind out to the alley to put them in
the trash box. Sometimes she'd smile at you and say, "I just thought I'd
pick up a few of these papers."
She's thinking it's over a week now since I paid my room rent. Wonder
what the landlord will do? Wonder if I'd grab the broom and pitch in and
sweep out the hall, and go and carry a few buckets of water and mop it,
wonder if he'd care? Maybe it'll get under his skin, and he might give me a
job of keeping it up.
She'd come to the office where Papa was, and she'd set down and turn
through the magazines and papers, looking at all of the pictures. She liked
to look at pictures of the mountains. Sometimes she'd look at a picture for
two or three minutes. And then she'd say, "I'd like to be there."
She'd stand up and look out the window. The building was just one
story. It was all right down on the ground. The sidewalk went past the door,
and all of the oil field boys would crowd up and down the street, talking,
staggering, in their work clothes, khaki pants and shirts smeared with crude
oil, blue overhalls soaked with grease and covered with thick dust, salted
and flavored with sweat. They made good money. The drillers drawed as high
as twenty-five dollars a day. Boy, that was a lot of money. They wasted most
of it. Whooped it off on slot machines and whiskey. Fights broke out every
few minutes up and down the street. She could see the mob gang up. She could
see a couple of heads bobbing up and down and going around in the middle.
Pretty soon everybody would be beating the hound out of everybody else,
choked, wet with blood and hot sweat. You could hear them breathing and
cussing a block away. Then the fight would bust up and the men would come
down the sidewalk, their clothes tore all to pieces, hats lost, hair full of
mud and dirt, whiskey broke.
She was new in town, I knew that because she held back a little when a
fist fight broke out. She just didn't much want to jump into that crazy
river of oil field fist fighters. She might have liked it if she'd known the
people better, but she didn't know anybody well enough to call them friend.
It was plumb dangerous for a strange girl even to go from one joint to the
other looking for a job, so she waited till her money was all gone and her
room rent was about two weeks behind. Then she went to a few places and
asked for work. They didn't need her. She wasn't experienced. She went back
several times. They still didn't need her. She was flat.
She got acquainted with a one-eyed girl. The one-eyed girl introduced
her to a truck driver. The truck driver said he might find her a job. He
would come in every day from the fields with a yarn about a job that he was
trying to get her. The first few days they usually met in the office or hall
and he would tell her all about it. But he'd have to wait another day or two
to see for sure. The day come along when they didn't happen to meet in the
office or hall, so he had to go to her room to tell her about something else
that looked like a job for her. He made this a regular habit for about a
week and she turned up at the office one day with seven dollars and fifty
cents to pay on her rent. This was a big surprise to my dad, so he got
curious. In fact he stayed curious. So he thought he would do a little
eavesdropping around over the hotel to see what was going on. On day he saw
her go off uptown with the one-eyed girl. In about an hour they come back
with their hats in their hands, brushing their hair back out of their eyes,
talking and saying that they was awful tired. The one-eyed girl took her
down the hall and they went into a room. Papa tiptoed down to the door and
looked through the keyhole. He could see everything that was going on. The
one-eyed girl took out a teaspoon and put something in it. He knew then what
it was. The girl struck a match and held it under the spoon, and heated it
real hot. That's one way of fixing a shot of dope--morphine. Sometimes you
use a needle, sometimes you sniff it, sometimes you eat it, sometimes you
drink it. The main idea seems to be any old way to get it into your system.
He pushed the door open and run in while they was trying to take the
dope. He grabbed the works away from the one-eyed girl and bawled both of
them out good and proper, telling how terrible it was to get on the stuff.
They cried and bawled and talked like a couple of little babies, and swore
up and down that neither of them used it regular, they didn't have the
habit. They just bought it for fun. They didn't know. The girl from the
country never tasted it. She swore that she never would. They all talked and
cried some more and promised never to touch the junk again.
But I stayed around there. I noticed how that girl with the one eye
would come and go, and come and go, feeling one minute like she was the
queen of the whole wide world, all smiles, laughing and joking; and then
she'd go and come again, and she'd be all fagged out, tired and footsore,
broke, hungry, lonesome, blue, and her eyes sunk way back, her hair tangled.
This kept up after Dad took away her morphine apparatus, and after all of
her big promises to lay off the stuff. The farm girl never showed the least
signs of being on dope, but the truck driver brought a little bottle of
whiskey along with him after he got to knowing her better, and through the
partition I heard them drinking.
Mister truck driver ate his meals in a little greasy wall restaurant
right next door. He introduced her to the boss of the joint, a man with ТВ,
about six foot four inches tall, skinny and humped as a spider. He had
studied to be a preacher, read most of the books on the subject, and was
bootlegging liquor in his eating place.
He gave the girl a job in the kitchen of this place, where she done all
of her work, his work, and run over two or three swampers and helpers trying
to keep the place from falling down, and all of the boards on the roof, and
all of the meals cooked and served. It was so hot I don't see how she stood
it. I more or less went into and out of these places because Papa was
looking after them. Personally, I never have been able to figure out how
anybody ate, slept, or lived around in this whole firetrap.
He give her one dollar a day to hang around there. He didn't call it a
job, so he didn't have to pay her much. But he said if she wanted to hang
around, he'd pitch her a dollar every night just to show her that his heart
was on the right side.
The whole rooming house had been added onto a little at a time by
moving old odd shacks onto the lot, till it had about fifty stalls. None of
them were ever painted. Like a bunch of match-boxes strung along; and some
of them housed whole families with gangs of kids, and others sheltered
several men in one room where there was fifteen or twenty cots in a one-bed
space, dirty, beg-buggy, slick, slimy, and otherwise not fit to live in or
around.
It was my job to show folks to their rooms, and show the rooms to the
people, and try to convince them that they was really rooms. One day when I
was out bungling around with a mattress and a set of rusty bed springs, I
chanced to hear a couple having more or less of a two-cylinder celebration
in one of the rooms. I knew that the room was supposed to be vacant. Nobody
was registered in there. The door was shut and the thumb-latch was throwed,
I had a sneaking idea of what was up.
Through a knothole in the shack, I saw a half a pint of hot whiskey
setting up on the old dirty dresser, and it was about eighty-nine percent
drunk up. The bed didn't have a sheet on it, or any kind of covers, just the
bare mattress. It was a faded pink mixed with a running brownish green,
trimmed around with a bed-bug tan color soaked into the cloth. The ТВ boss
of the little cafe and the bootleg store was setting on the side of the bed
with the country girl. Both of them had had a few out of the bottle. He was
talking to her, and what he said had been said too often before by other men
like him to put into quotes. You've had lots of trouble lately, haven't you?
You look kinda sad. Even when you smile or laugh, it stays in your eyes. It
never goes away. I've noticed it a lot since you've been around me lately.
You're a good girl. I've read lots of books and studied about people. I
know.
She said she liked to work.
He told her that she had a pretty face.
You got pretty eyes, even if they are sad. They're blue. Sad and blue.
She said she wasn't feeling so bad now since she had a job.
He said he wished that he could pay her more than a dollar. He said she
made a good hand. He didn't feel like working very hard. It was too hot for
him in his condition with the low roof.
I could hear him breathe and could hear the rattling in his lungs. His
face was pale and when he rubbed his hand over his chin the red blood would
show through his skin. He said, I feel better when I got you around.
She said that she was going to buy a few little things.
Where do your folks live at? Must have run away from home once. Tell me
what caused it.
Her family lived thirty-five miles away in Mobeetie. Thirty-five or
forty miles. She never did know just how far. Times got hard. And the farm
gets awful lonesome when the sun comes up or when it goes down. A family
argument got started and she got mad at her folks. So she bought a bus
ticket. Hit the oil fields. Heard lots about oil fields. Said they paid good
wages and always was needing somebody to work in them.
You've got a job right where you are. Just as long as you want it. I
know you'll learn as you keep working. I don't think my dollar is entirely
wasted. This fall is going to be good, and you'll know my business better,
and I'll pay you better. We'll get an old man to be dishwasher. It's too
much for you when business get rushing.
Her hand was resting on the mattress and he looked down at it and said,
It looks nice and clean, and I don't want the strong lye soap and the hot
dishwater to make it all red and dry the skin out. Cause it to chap. Break
open. Bleed. He put his hand on hers and give it a good friendly squeeze. He
rubbed real slow up and down her arm with the back of his hand just barely
touching her skin, and they stopped talking. Then he took her hand and
folded his fingers between hers and pulled her hand from the mattress and
took the weight from her arm in such a way that she fell back across the bed
He held her hand and he bent over and kissed her. And then he kissed her
again. They kept their mouths together for a long time. He rolled over
against her, and she rolled up against him. She had good firm muscles on her
shoulders and her back, and he felt each one of them, going from one to the
other. Her green cafe uniform was fresh washed and ironed so that it shined
where the light struck it, and where it curved to fit her body. Several
times he rubbed across the belt that tied in a big bow knot above her hips
and he pulled the sash and the knot came loose. The uniform started coming
open a little at the front and by the touch of his hand he laid it half open
almost without her knowing it. His hands was long and his fingers was slim
and he'd turned the pages of lots of books, and he took the first two long
fingers of his right hand and caught the thickness of the uniform between
them, and with a twist of his wrist he turned the rest of the dress back. He
played and felt of both of her breasts, his fingers walking from first one
and then the other like some kind of a big white spider. His ТВ caused him
to make a loud spitry noise when he breathed in and out, and he was
breathing faster all of the time.
I heard the sound of somebody's feet walking down the old boardwalk,
and I took a quick glance down and out of the door, and saw somebody's
shadow coming. I was standing on the steel frame of an iron folding cot, and
I jumped down from my lookout for a minute. It was my dad. He said he had to
go to the bank and for me to come and watch the office. There was a couple
there to look at a room and the room had to be fixed up before they moved
in. Needed linens. I stood there for about ten seconds not saying a thing.
My dad looked sort of funny at me. I didn't let on. Just stood there
straining my ears through that wall, and wondering what I was a-missing.
But, shucks, I knew. Yeah, I knew, it was just exactly like all of the rest
of them, and I wasn't a-missing out on nothing.
About thirty minutes later and along about dark, after the couple had
been well rented and well roomed, and the linens had been put on for them, I
took a flying high dive back out to the old board wall and knothole and
climbed up and took a last look. But they had left. Nothing left to tell the
tale but the prints of her hips sunk 'way down deep in the mattress.
I'll never feel as funny as the day I walked into the office and found
Papa behind the flowery curtain, setting on the edge of the bed holding his
face in his hands.
"Matter?" I asked him.
His finger pointed to the top of the dresser, and I found a check made
out to me for a dollar and fifty cents.
At first I grinned and said, "Guess mebbe it's some o' my oil money
a-rollin' in."
My blood turned to cold slush oil when my eyes saw on the corner of the
check the name and address of the Insane Asylum in Norman, Oklahoma.
I set down by the side of Papa and put my arm around him.
The letter said that Nora B. Guthrie had died some days ago. Her death
was a natural death. Because she only knew my address in Okemah, they were
sending me the balance of her cash account.
Papa was wiping his eyes red with his knuckles, trying to quit crying.
I patted him on the back and held the check down between my knees, reading
it again.
I walked over across the tracks, uptown to the bank, not wanting to
cash the check in our neighborhood. The man in the bank window could tell by
my face that I was nervous and scared, and everybody standing in line was
anxious for me to move on out of their way. I seen their hands full of
checks, pink, tan, yellow and blue ones. My face turned a pale and sickly
color, and my throat was just a wadding of dry cotton, and my eyes got hazy,
and my whole life went through my head. It took every muscle in my body to
pick up that dollar bill and fifty-cent piece. Somewhere on the outskirts of
town, a high whining fire whistle seemed to be blowing.
I got a job selling root beer. It was just a big barrel with a coil
running around inside of it, and it cost you a nickel for me to pull the
handle, unless you was a personal friend of mine, in which case I'd draw you
off a mug free.
Prohibition was on and folks seemed like they were dry. The first day
that I was there, the boss come around and said, "Oh, here's your day's pay.
We pay every day here, because we may have to close up any day. Business is
rushing and good right now, but nobody can tell.
"Another thing I want to show you is about this little door right down
here under the counter. You see this little door? Well, you push this
trigger right here, just like that, and then you see the door comes open.
Then you see inside. There's some little shelves. On these little shelves,
as I suppose you see, are some little bottles. These little bottles are two
ounces. They are fifty cents a bottle. They are a patented medicine, I
think, and it's called Jamaica Ginger, or plain Jake--a mixture of ginger
and alcohol. The alcohol is about ninety-nine percent. So now, in case
anybody comes in with their thumbnail busted or ankle sprung, or is snake
bit, or has got ancestors, or the hoof and mouth disease, or is otherwise
sick and has got fifty cents cash money on him, get the fifty cents and then
reach down here and give him one of these little bottles of Jake. Be sure to
put the money in the register."
While I worked there only about a month, I saved up four dollars, and
to boot I got an inside view of what the human race was drinking.
You couldn't tell any more about the rot-gut called whiskey than you
could about the Jake. It was just about as poison. Lots of people fell over
dead and was found scattered here and yonder with different kinds of whiskey
poisoning. I hated prohibition on that account. I hated it because it was
killing people, paralyzing them, and causing them to die like flies. I've
seen men set around and squeeze that old pink canned heat through an old
dirty rag, get the alcohol drained out of it, and then drink it down. The
papers carried tales about the men that drunk radiator alcohol and died from
rust poisoning. Others came down with the beer head. That's where your head
starts swelling up and it just don't quit. Usually you take the beer head
from drinking home brew that ain't made right, or is fermented in old rusty
cans, like garbage cans, oil drums, gasoline barrels, and slop buckets. It
caused some of the people to die. They even had a kind of beer called Old
Chock that was made by throwing everything under the sun into an old barrel,
adding the yeast and sugar and water to it, and letting her go. Biscuit
heels, corn-bread scraps, potato leavings, and all sorts of table scraps
went into this beer. It is a whitish, milky, slicky-looking bunch of crap.
But especially down in Oklahoma I've seen men drive fifteen miles out in the
country just to get a hold of a few bottles of it. The name Chock come from
the Choctaw Indians. I guess they just naturally wanted to celebrate some
way or another, and thought a little drink would fire them up so's they'd
break loose, forget their worries, and have a good time.
When I was behind the counter, men would come in and purchase bay rum,
and I'd get a look into their puffy, red-speckled faces, and their bleary,
batty eyes, that looked but didn't see, and that went shut, but never slept,
that closed, but never rested, and dreamed but never arrived at a
conclusion. I would see a man come in and buy a bottle of rubbing alcohol,
and then buy a bottle of coke and go out and mix it half and half, hold his
breath, wheeze for a few seconds, and then waddle on away.
One day my curiosity licked me. I said that I was going to taste a
bottle of that Jake for myself. Man ought to be interested. I drawed up
about a half a mug of root beer. It was cold and nice, and I popped the
little stopper out of one of the Jake bottles, and poured the Jake into the
root beer. When that Jake hit that beer, it commenced to cook it, and there
was seven civil wars and two revolutions broke out inside of that mug. The
beer was trying to tame the Jake down and the Jake was trying to eat the
beer up. They sizzled and boiled and sounded about like bacon frying. The
Jake was chasing the little bubbles and the little bubbles was chasing the
Jake, and the beer spun like a whirlpool in a big swift river. It went
around and around so fast that it made a little funnel right in the middle.
I waited about twenty minutes for it to settle down. Finally it was about
the color of a new tan saddle, and about as quiet as it would get. So I bent
over it and stuck my ear down over the mug. It was spewing and crackling
like a machine gun, but I thought I'd best to drink it before it turned into
a waterspout or a dust storm. I took it up and took it down, and it was hot
and dry and gingery and spicy, and cloudy, and smooth, and windy and cold,
and threatening rain or snow. I took another big swallow and my shirt come
unbuttoned and my insides burnt like I was pouring myself full of home-made
soapy dishwater. I drank it all down, and when I woke up I was out of a job.
And then a couple of months wheeled past, and I found myself walking
all around with my head down, still out of a job, and asking other folks why
they had their heads down. But most people was tough, and they still kept
their heads up.
I wanted to he my own boss. Have my own job of work whatever it was,
and be on my own hook. I walked the streets in the drift of the dust and
wondered where was I bound for, where was I going, what was I going to do?
My whole life turned into one big question mark. And I was the only living
person that could answer it. I went to the town library and scratched around
in the books. I carried them home by the dozens and by the armloads, on any
subject, I didn't care which. I wanted to look into everything a little bit,
and pick out something, something that would turn me into a human being of
some kind--free to work for my own self, and free to work for everybody.
My head was mixed up. I looked into every kind of an "ology," "osis,"
"itis," and "ism" there was. It seemed like it all turned to nothing.
I read the first chapter in a big leather law book. But, no, I didn't
want to memorize all of them laws. So I got the bug that I wanted to be a
preacher and yell from the street corners as loud as the law allows. But
that faded away.
Then I wanted to be a doctor. A lot of folks were sick and I wanted to
do something to make them well. I went up to the town library and carried
home a big book about all kinds of germs, varmints, cells, and plasms.
Them plasms are humdingers.
They ain't got much shape to brag about, but they can really get
around. Some of them, I forgot what bunch it is, just take a notion to go
somewhere, and so they start out turning wagon-wheels and handsprings till
they get there. And every time they turn a cartwheel they come up a
different shape. Some of them they call amebas. They're made out of a jelly
that really ain't nothing to speak of. It's about as near to nothing as you
could get without fading plumb out. You can see right through these here
amebas. But they don't care. They just want to turn handsprings around in
your drinking water, and a few flip-flops in your blood.
One day I was unusually lucky. I run onto a hole of the very rottenest
and oldest water you ever saw. I took the water up to the doctor's office
and he lighted up his microscope for me. He was an old doctor, there around
town for s long time, long enough not to have many customers. Since his
office was usually empty, he would let me use his microscope. One particular
drop of extra live and rotten water was stagnant and full of a green scum.
Under the microscope, the scum looked like long green stems of sugar cane.
They were long and tangled, and you could see animules of every kind out in
there running around.
One was a little black gent. He was double tough. He was a hard fighter
and a fast traveler. This little dark-complected gent was coming down across
the country, and so I took out after him, just sailing along above him and
watching him. He had to fight three or four times in one of his days. I
don't know how long he calls a day. But there isn't a minute that he's free
to fold up his hands, close his eyes, and dream. He circles the block and he
looks all around. Some kind of a white bug meets him. They both square off,
and look the other one over. They circle each other and watch. They lick
their chops and smack their lips. The lips may be on the side or back or
around under their belly somewhere, but wherever they are, they are lips,
and so they smack them. They measure their blows. The white one tries a
light left hook, not intending to down the black one, but just to get the
distance marked. He sticks out his left again, and taps the air twice. The
black has got both arms moving like a clock. The white puts out a long arm
that stretches twice its ordinary length. The dark one is buffaloed. He
looks for an umpire. Is this in the rules? The white grabs the black by the
neck with the long arm and then by stretching his other one out he frails
the black's knob good and hard; but the black is solid and somehow the blows
ain't fatal. He throws his shoulders into a hump that hides his chin. He is
taking the licks, but they are hurting. It looks bad for Mister Black, but
he's got his eye skint under that hump, and he hasn't had a chance yet to
turn loose and fight. He doesn't like this arm-stretching. Don't know what
to do. He can't get in close enough to match blows with the long-armed
boxer, but he isn't out by a long shot.
The long-arm holds him with one hand and keeps on jabbing him with the
other in such a way that it turns the black one about. He lets himself drift
with the weight of the blows and he keeps his hands and arms limber and
relaxed, but holds them up.
All at once it happens. The black spins on his toe, round and round; he
spins in close with so much speed that his arms stick out whirling like a
propeller. He gets inside the long reach of the white. He sticks out his
arms stiff, and the rights and the lefts crack the white so fast that he
thinks he's been lightning struck. He pulls his long arms back in. He tries
to use them when they are pulled in short, but finds he is too clumsy. His
outlook changes. He wants to wire his Congressman, but it looks bad. He
catches three hundred and forty five more hard lefts and rights. He lets his
body go limp so as to drift with the blows, but the little black boxer
circles his whole body, spinning and whirling, trailing every inch of the
way around. The pale one loosens up, a mass of plasm. He makes one wild stab
at the black that is peppering him with dynamite. He throws both of his
clumsy arms high into the air, and exposes his head, chest, and diaphragm.
The black is the king now. He wants to play with his groceries. He spins the
white around slow like, and the white goes into a last coma. The black spot
fondles him carefully, finding his face, his eyes, and his throat, and rips
his throat open before his jelly can jell. He sticks there for a little
while sucking the warm life out of the pale carcass. When he gets full, he
spins fast, spins away from his kill, and comes walking in Fifth Avenue
fashion down toward another patch of the same green cane.
Now in the canebrakes there lives some sort of an animule that is
neither here nor there. I mean he isn't white and he isn't black. He's a
middle brown. I run onto him just by accident while I was flying over the
most stagnant part of the water, and he looked like a hard worker. The other
little black speck was skipping through the morning dew, full of pep, and
just had had a good warm meal and everything. He wasn't exactly looking
where he was going. He thought he'd just won a battle. He was whistling and
singing, and when he got within earshot of the cane patch, why the
cane-patch dweller spotted him. The speck in the cane patch hadn't caught
his breakfast as yet that day, and he commenced to vibrating like a little
electric motor when he saw the other one cavorting in the cane. The brown
one in the cane patch was at home there. He grabbed hold of a good solid
stalk of cane and waited. When the other one trotted by, he reached out and
grabbed him by the coat collar, yanked him bodily into the patch, and the
two of them made the heavy cane leaves rattle for forty acres around. This
was a real fight.
At first, the little black one was doing pretty well for hisself. He
had two arms stuck out and was spinning and dodging and hitting hard and
fast; in and out, quick as electricity shocking, he'd sock the boy in the
canebrakes. He won the first two rounds hands down, but he wasn't at home in
the cane. He tripped and stumbled around over the stalks, and he would get
his two big strong arms all tangled up in the cane, and would have to come
to a complete rest, untangle himself, and start out spinning all over again.
This seemed to make him mighty tired. The other one was some bigger and he
didn't work very bard at first. He just weaved around a little. He had about
forty hands, short and sharp like hooks, but not very deadly. Hе used them
sort of two or three at a time and never wore his self out. When two arms
would get tired, why, he'd just turn around a few notches, grab some kind of
a new handhold on the cane, and fight with a brand-new set of arms and
fists. He didn't smoke hump cigarets. He had good wind. He was at home in
the brush. He just, so to say, let Mister Black Speck fight and fan the air
till he was so tired he couldn't go any more. When he stopped, the bigger
boy set in on him with all forty arms and fists. He whim-whammed him. He
dynamited his face, torpedoed his heart, and beat the little black fellow
into a pulp. He took him gently and sweetly in the hug of his forty arms,
and sucked the blood out of him, along with the blood that the black one had
just lately sucked out of somebody else. Then when he had his fill, he
chunked the dead body over among the tall cane stalks, walked his way slowly
into the patch, coiled up and went off to sleep. His belly was full. He was
lazy. He'd won because he'd been hungry.
For the next few months I took a spell of spending all of the money I
could rake and scrape for brushes, hunks of canvas, and all kinds of oil
paints. Whole days would go by and I wouldn't know where they'd went. I put
my whole mind and every single thought to the business of painting pictures,
mostly people.
I made copies of Whistler's "Mother," "The Song of the Lark," "The
Angelus," and lots of babies and boys and dogs, snow and green trees, birds
singing on all kinds of limbs, and pictures of the dust across the oil
fields and wheat country. I made a couple of dozen heads of Christ, and the
cops that killed Him.
Things was starting to stack up in my head and I just felt like I was
going out of my wits if I didn't find some way of saying what I was
thinking. The world didn't mean any more than a smear to me if I couldn't
find ways of putting it down on something. I painted cheap signs and
pictures on store windows, warehouses, barns and hotels, hock shops, funeral
parlors and blacksmith shops, and I spent the money I made for more tubes of
oil colors. "I'll make 'em good an' tough," I said to myself, "so's they'll
last a thousand years."
But canvas is too high priced, and so is paint and costly oils, and
brushes that you've got to chase a camel or a seal or a Russian red sable
forty miles to get.
An uncle of mine taught me to play the guitar and I got to going out a
couple of nights a week to the cow ranches around to play for the square
dances. I made up new words to old tunes and sung them everywhere I'd go. I
had to give my pictures away to get anybody to hang them on their wall, but
for singing a song, or a few songs at a country dance, they paid me as high
as three dollars a night. A picture--you buy it once, and it bothers you for
forty years; but with a song, you sing it out, and it soaks in people's ears
and they all jump up and down and sing it with you, and then when you quit
singing it, it's gone, and you get a job singing it again. On top of that,
you can sing out what you think. You can tell tales of all kinds to put your
idea across to the other fellow.
And there on the Texas plains right in the dead center of the dust
bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working
people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills,
sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen there was plenty to make up
songs about.
Some people liked me, hated me, walked with me, walked over me, jeered
me, cheered me, rooted me and hooted me, and before long I was invited in
and booted out of every public place of entertainment in that country. But I
decided that songs was a music and a language of all tongues.
I never did make up many songs about the cow trails or the moon
skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs of what all's
wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and
made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right,
songs that said what everybody in that country was thinking.
And this has held me ever since.
Chapter XII
TROUBLE BUSTING
My dad married a mail-order wife. She come to Pampa from Los Angeles,
and after two or three wedding celebrations most of the relatives went on
back to their farms, and Papa and his new wife, Betty Jane, settled down in
a shack in a tourist court.
She put an ad in the paper and started telling fortunes. Her trade
started out pretty slow at first, then it grew so fast that the customers
overflowed her shack.
Oil field dying out, the boom chasers trickled out down the road in
long strings of high-loaded cars. The dust crawled down from the north and
the banks pushed the farmers off their land. The big flat lakes dried away
and left hollow places across the plains full of this hard, dry, crackled,
gumbo mud. There isn't a healthier country than West Texas when it wants to
be, but when the dust kept whistling down the line blacker and more of it,
there was plenty of everything sick, and mad, and mean, and worried.
People hunted for some kind of an answer. The banker didn't give it to
them. The sheriff never told anybody the answer. The chamber of commerce was
trying to make more money, and they was too busy to tell people the answer
to their troubles. So the people asked the preacher, and still didn't learn
much where to go or what to do. They even come to the door of the fortune
teller.
I was about twenty-four years old at this time and living in a worse
shack than Betty Jane and Papa. It had cost me twenty-five dollars on the
payment plan a few months before. Oil workers don't build mansions when they
open up a new boom town. The work peters out. The workers bundle up and
cripple off down the same old road they hit town on. Their shacks are left.
Dirty, filthy, and all shot to pieces, and warped, and humped, swaying in
every direction like a herd of cattle hit with a plague, these little shacks
lean around over the plains.
"Your name Guthrie?" A tough-looking man had just knocked so hard on my
door that the whole little house shook. "I'm lookin' for Guthrie!"
"Yessir, my name, all right." I looked out the door. "Come in?"
"No! I won't come in! I've been spending most of my time for the last
few months going around to people of your kind. Trying to get some decent
advice!'' He shook his hands in the wind and preached at me like he was
fixing to pass the plate, "I ain't goin' to pay out another red cent! Four
bits here. A dollar there. Two bits yonder. It keeps me broke!"
"Mighty bad shape ta be in."
"I'll come in! I'll set myself down! If you can tell me what I want to
know, you'll get fifty cents! If you don't, I won't give you a penny! I'm
worried!"
"Come on in."
"Okay. I'll sit right here on this chair and listen. But I'm not going
to tell you one single word why I'm here. You've got to tell me! Now, Mister
Trouble Buster, let's see you strut your stuff!"
"Dust's gittin' party bad out there."
"Start talkin'!"
"You 'fraid of that dust?"
"I'm not th' least bit afraid of that dust."
"You must not have an outside job, then. You're not no farmer. You
ain't no oil field roustabout. If you had a store of any kind, you'd be
afraid that dust was drivin' all of yer customers away. So, You know,
Mister, you've got the wrong Guthrie."
"Keep talking!"
"My dad married a fortune teller, but I never did claim ta be one, but,
I'd like ta just see if I c'n tell ya what ya come here for, an' what ya
wanta know."
"Four bits in it if you do."
"You're a inside man. You work in a oil refinery. Good payin' job."
"Right. How did you know?"
"Well, these farmers an' ordinary workin' people aroun'' here ain't got
enuff money ta throw off four bits here, an a dollar there fer a fortune
teller. So yore work is high class. Yer mighty serious about yer work. Ya
really take a pride in yer machinery. Ya like to work. Ya like ta see th'
most turned out in th' shortest time. Always thinkin' about inventin'
somethin' new ta make machinery run better an' faster. Ya tinker with this,
even when yer off of yer job an' at home."
"Seventy-five cents. Keep talking."
"That new invention you've got is gonna make ya some money one of these
here days. There's a big concern already on yer trail. Wantin' ta buy it.
They'll try ta steal it cheap as they can. Don't trust anybody but yer wife
with th' secret. She's waitin' out there in yer car. Ya gotta lotta faith in
yer own self, an' in her, too. That's mighty good. Keep on with yer
inventin'. Keep workin' all time. Ya won't git what ya want outta this big
company fer yer invention, but ya'll git enuff ta put ya up in shape ta
where ya c'n keep up yer work."
"Make it an even dollar. Go on."
"Yer mind is full of inventions, an' th' world's full of folks that
needs 'em bad. Ya jest gotta keep yer mind all clear, like a farm, so's more
inventions c'n grow up there. Th' only way ya c'n do this is ta help out th'
pore workin' folks all ya can."
"Here's the dollar. What next?"
"That's all. Jest think over what I told ya. Good-bye."
"You are the only fortune teller that I've found that don't claim to
tell anything, and tells everything!"
"I don't claim ta be no mind reader. I don't make no charge fer jest
talkin'."
"You're just modest. I consider that dollar well spent. Yes, well
spent. And I've got lots of friends all over these oil fields. I'll tell all
of them to come down here and talk to you! Good-day!"
So there it was. I stood there looking at both sides of the dollar
bill, the picture on the gray side, and the big building on the green side.
The first dollar I'd made in over a week. Just a man mixed up in his head.
Smart guy, too. Hard worker.
The gravels knocked splinters off of the side of the house. And the
dust blew and the wind come down. In a couple of days the dollar was almost
gone.
Somebody knocked at my front door. I got up and said, "Hello" to three
ladies. "Come in, ladies."
"We ain't got no money ner no time to waste neither!"
"This lady has a awful funny thing wrong with her. She can't talk. Lost
her voice. And she can't swallow any water. Hasn't had a drink of water in
almost a week. We took her to several doctors. They don't know what to do
about it. She's just starving."
"But--ladies--I ain't no doctor."
"Some fortune tellers can heal things like this. It's the gift of
healing. There are seven gifts--healing, prophecy, faith, wisdom, tongues,
interpretation of tongues, and discerning of spirits. You've just got to
help her! Poor thing. She can't just die away!"
"Set down right here in this here chair," I told the lady. "Do you have
faith that you'll git cured?"
She smiled and choked trying to talk, and nodded her head yes.
"Do you b'lieve yer mind is th' boss of yer whole body?"
She nodded yes at me again.
"You b'lieve yer mind is boss over yer nerves? All yer muscles? Back?
Legs? Arms? Your neck?"
She nodded her head again.
I walked to the water bucket and took the dipper and poured a glassful.
I handed it to her and said, "Yore husbans' wants you ta talk to 'im, don't
he? An' yore kids, ta boot? No two ways about it! You say you ain't got no
money fer a doctor?"
She shook her head no.
"You'd better quit this monkey bizness, then, an' swig this water down
you! Drink it! Drink it! Then tell me how good if feels ta be able ta talk
ag'in!"
She held the glass in her fingers, and I could see the skin was so dry
it was wrinkling and cracking. She looked around and smiled at me and the
other two ladies.
She turned the glass up and drunk the water down.
We all held our mouths open and didn't breathe a breath.
"G-g-l-l-o-o-dd."
"It's what?"
"Good. Water. Water. Good."
"You ladies g'wan back home an' spend th' next three et four days
carryin' buckets of good clear fresh drinkin' water ta this lady. Have a
water-drinkin' contest. Talk about ever'-thing. You don't owe me nuthin'."
And so there ain't no tellin' where the wind will blow or what will
come up out of the weeds. This was the start of one of the best, worst,
funniest and saddest parts of my whole life. They thought I was a mind
reader. I didn't claim to be, so some of them called me a fortune teller and
a healer. But I never claimed to be different from you or anybody else. Does
the truth help to heal you when you hear it? Does a clear mind make a sick
body well? Sometimes. Sometimes nervous spells cause people to be sick, and
worry causes the nervous spells. Yes, I could talk. Did that make them get
well? What are words, anyway? If you tell a lie with words, you cause all
kinds of people to get sick. If you tell people the real truth, they get
together and they get well. Was that it?
I remember a German rancher that would come to my house every time the
stock market went up a penny or down a penny. He would ask me, "Vat do de
spirits sez aboudt my fadder's cattles?"
"Spirits ain't got nuthin' ta do with yer father's cattle,'' I would
tell him. "What you call spirits ain't nuthin'--nuthin" but th' thoughts ya
think in yer head."
"My fadder iss dead. Vat hass he got to tell me aboudt raising and
selling his catties?" he would say.
"Yer father would like fer ya ta do jist what he did fer forty-five
years out here on these plains, Mister. Raise 'em young, buy 'em cheap, feed
'em good, an' sell 'em high!" I'd tell him.
He woke me up at all hours of the night. He traveled more than
twenty-five miles to my place. And not a week rolled past but what he made
the trip and asked the same old question.
An engineer on the Rock Island Railroad spur that runs from Shamrock up
north to Pampa used to ride along in his engine and look out at some new oil
land. He wanted me to shut my eyes and see a vision for him. "Where had I
ought to buy oil land?"
"I see an old oil field, with black oily derricks. It's good oil land
because it's an old proven field, an' it's still perducin'. In th' middle of
this field of black derricks, I see a white derrick, painted with silver
paint an' shinin' in th' sun."
"I see that same derrick every day when I pass that field on my run!
I've been wondering if I should try to buy some land around that field."
"I see a lot of oil under this land, because this derrick is in th'
middle of a whole big forest of black oily rigs. When ya buy yer new oil
land, buy it as close to that center derrick as ya can. But don't pay too
much fer th' deal."
"You've helped me to solve my whole problem!" he told me as he got up.
"You've took a big load off of my mind. How did you know about this silver
rig in this bunch of old oily ones?"
And I said, "You're an engineer on this Shamrock spur line, ain't ya? I
just guessed that you'd been savin' yer money ta buy--well, some land that
ya seen ever' day on yer run. I know this oil field awful well, an' it looks
awful purty from a boxcar door--an' I s'pose it looks awful purty from up in
an engine cab--'long toward quittin' time, when yer thinkin' 'bout gettin'
home to yer wife an' family, an' tryin' ta think of how ta invest yer money
so's it'll bring yer folks th' most good. I wuz jist guessin' an' talkin'--I
don't know, really, where you'd oughtta buy yer oil land."
"Here's a dollar. I think you saved me several thousand."
"How's that?"
"You told me something I'd never thought of: to buy my land closest to
the middle of the biggest field. But an acre of that land would take my
life's earnings. And while you had your eyes closed there, talking, I felt
afraid to spend my money away off on some new wildcat land that didn't have
any oil derricks on it; and so I just got to thinking, maybe the best hole I
could put my money in would be the Postal Savings Window of the United
States Government. You earned this dollar, take it." And then he walked away
and I never did see him any more.
A little girl six years old had big running sores all over her scalp.
Her mama took her to the doctor and he treated her for over six months. The
sores still stayed. The barber cut her hair all off like a convict on a
chain gang. The mother finally brought her over to my place and told me,
"Jist wanta see what'cher a-doin' over here."
''Do ya keep 'er head good an' clean?" I asked the lady.
"Yeh. But she bawls an' squawls an
'
throws wall-eyed fits
when she has ta go ta school!'' her mama said.
"The old mean kids make fun of me because my head looks like an old
jailbird," the little girl told us.
"Take th' white of an egg in a saucer an' rub it into 'er head good
ever' night. Let it soak in all night. Then ya can wash 'er head with clear
water ever
'
mornin' 'fore she goes off ta school. Ya won't even
hafta bring 'er back over here no more ta see me. Ya'll have a purtier head
of hair than any of them old mean teasin' kids."
"How long'll it take?" the little girl asked.
"Ya'll have it by th' day school ends," I told her.
"That'll be nice, won't it?" Her Mama looked at both of us.
"But you--ya quit yer scarin' this girl! Ya quit makin' 'er play by her
self. Quit makin' 'er stay inside th' house when all of th' other kids is
out whoopin' an' runnin'," I told the mother.
"How'd you know this?" she asked me.
"Quit makin' 'er wear that old dirty hat all of th
'
time," I
kept on. "Quit scrubbin' 'er head with that old strong lye soap! Give it a
little rest, it'll heal of its own accord."
"How come you so smart, mister?" The little girl laughed and took hold
of my hand. "My mama does everything just like you said."
"Shut yer mouth! Yer talkin' boutcher Ma, ya know!"
"I knowed all of this, because I can look at yer Mama's hands, and tell
that she makes her own lye soap. I know she keeps ya in th' house too much,
'cause ya haven't been gittin
'
no sunshine on yer head. I know
you'll have a big long set of purty curls by th' last day of school.
Good-bye. Come to see me with yer curls!"
I watched the little girl skip twenty or thirty feet ahead as they went
down the road toward shacktown.
The little shack was swaying in the dust one dark winter night, and a
man of two hundred and ninety pounds banged in at the door, and brought the
weather in with him. "I don't know if you know it or not," he talked in a
low, soft voice, "but you're looking at an insane man."
"Off yer coat, hawa seat." Then I happened to notice that he wasn't
wearing any coat, but several shirts, sweaters, ducking jumpers, and two or
three pairs of overhauls. He more than filled the north half of my little
room.
"I'm really insane." He watched me like a hawk watching a chicken. I
set down in my chair and listened to him. "Really."
"So am I," I told him.
"I've already been to the insane asylum twice."
"Ya'll soon be a-runnin' that place."
"I wasn't crazy when they sent me there, but they kept me shot full of
some kind of crap! Run me out of my wits! Made my nerves and muscles go
wild. I beat up a couple of guards
out in the pea patch and run off. Now I'm here. I reckin they'll git me
purty quick. I see news reels in my head."
"News reels?"
"Yes. They get started and I see them going all of the time. It's like
sitting all alone in a big dark theater. I see lots of them and have seen
them ever since I was a kid. Farm Mama always told me I was crazy. I guess I
always was. Only trouble with these news reels is--they never stop."
"What's th' news lately?"
"Everybody's going to leave this country. Boom is over. Wheat blowing
out. Dust storms getting darker and darker. Everybody running and shooting
and killing. Everybody fighting everybody else. These little old shacks like
this, they're bad, no good for nobody. Lots of kids sick. Old folks. They
won't need us working stiffs around this oil field. People will have to hit
the road in all of this bad, bad weather. Everything like that."
"Ain't nuthin' wrong with your head!"
"Don't you think all of us ought to get together and do something about
all of this? I see stuff like that in this news reel, too. You know, the way
everybody ought to do something about it."
"Need you fer Mayor 'round this town."
"I see all kinds of shapes and designs in my head, too. All kinds you
could ever think of. They bust into my head like a big flying snowstorm, and
every one of those shapes means something. How to fix a road better. How to
fix up a whole oil field better. How to make work easier. Even how to build
these big oil refineries,"
"Who was it said you was crazy?"
"Officers. Folks. They threw me in that jail about a hundred times
apiece."
"Oughtta been jist th' other way 'round."
"No. I guess I needed it. I'm awful bad to drink and fight on the
streets. Guys tease me and I light in and beat the hell out of them; cops
jump in to get me, and I throw them around. Always something haywire."
"Work all time?"
"No, work a few days, and then lay off a few weeks. Always owing
somebody something."
"I guess this town is jist naturally dryin' up an' blowin" away. You
need some kind of steady work."
"Did you paint these pictures of Christ up here on the wall?" He looked
around the room and his eyes stayed on each picture for a long time. " 'Song
of the Lark.' Good copy."
I said yes, I painted them.
"I always did think maybe I'd like to paint some of this stuff I see in
my head. I wish you would teach me a little of what you know. That'd be a
good kind of work for me. I could travel and paint pictures in saloons."
I got up and rustled through an orange crate full of old paints and
brushes, and wrapped up a good bunch in an old shirt. "Here, go paint."
And so Heavy Chandler took the paints and went home. During the next
month he lost over sixty pounds. Every day he made a trip to my house. He
carried a new picture painted on slats and boards from apple crates, old
hunks of cardboard, and plywood, and I was surprised to see how good he got.
Wild blinding snow scenes. Log cabins smoking in the hills. Mountain rivers
banging down through green valleys. Desert sands and dreary bones. Cactus.
The tumbleweed drifting--rolling through life. Good pictures. He bucked
wind, rain, sleet, and terrible bad dust storms to get there. And every day
I would ask him if he'd been drunk, and he'd tell me yes or no. He smiled
out of his face and eyes one day and said, "I slept good all this week.
First solid sleep I've had in six years. The news reel still runs, but I
know how to turn it off and on now when I want to. I feel just as sane as
the next one."
Then one day he didn't show up. The deputy sheriff drove down to the
shack and told me they had Heavy locked up in the jail house for being
drunk. "Boy, that was some fight," the officer told me. "Six deputies and
Heavy. God, he slung deputy sheriffs all over the south side of town! Nobody
could get him inside that patrol car. It was worse than a circus tent full
of wild men! Then I says to Heavy, 'Heavy, do you know Woody Guthrie?'
Heavy--he puffed and blowed and said, 'Yes.' Then I took him by the arm and
says, 'Heavy, Woody wouldn't want you to beat up on all of these deputies,
would he, if he knew about it?' And then old Heavy says to me, 'No--where
did you find out about Woody Guthrie?' And I says, 'Oh, he's a real good
friend of mine!' And, sir, you know, Old Heavy calmed down, tamed right
down, got just as sober and nice as anybody in about a minute flat, and
smiled out of the side of his eyes and says, Take me an' lock me up, Mister
Jailer. If you're a friend of Woody's, then you're a friend of mine!' "
"Whattaya s'pose they'll do with Heavy up there in jail?" I asked the
deputy.
"Well, 'course you know Heavy was an escaped inmate from the insane
asylum, didn't you?"
"Yeah--but--"
"Oh, sure, sure, we knew it, too. We knew where he was all of the time.
We knew we could pick him up any minute we wanted him. But we hoped he would
get better and come out of it. I don't know what happened to Heavy. But
something funny. He got just as sane as you or me or anybody else. Then he
was learning how to paint or some dam thing, somebody said, I don't know
very much about it. But he's on the train now, headed back down to Wichita
Falls."
"Did Heavy tell you to tell me anything?"
"Oh, yes. That is why I made the trip down here. Almost forgot. He told
me to tell you that he just wishes to God that you could tell all of those
thirty-five hundred inmates down there what you told him. I don't know what
it was you told him."
"Naww. I don't reckin ya do," I told the officer; "I don't guess you
know. Well, anyway, thanks. See ya again. 'Bye."
And the car drove away with the deputy. And I went back in and fell
down across my bed, rubbing the coat of fine dust on the quilt, and thinking
about the message that old Heavy had sent me. And I never did see him any
more after that.
Several hundred asked me, "Where can I go to get a job of work?"
Farmers heard about me and asked, "Is this dust th' end of th' world?"
Business people asked me, "Everybody is on the move, and I've lost
everything I ever had; what'll happen next?" A boom town dance-hall chaser
barged in on me and asked me, "I'm tryin' to learn how to play th' fiddle;
do you think I can get to be elected Sheriff?"
All kinds of cars were parked around my little old shack. People lost.
People sick. People wondering. People hungry. People wanting work. People
trying to get together and do something.
A bunch of ten, twenty oil field workers and farmers filled the whole
room and stood around most of my front yard. Their leader asked me, "What do
you think about this feller, Hitler, an' Mussolini? Are they out to kill off
all of th' Jews an' niggers?"
I told them, "Hitler an' Mussolini is out ta make a chaingang slave
outta you, outta me, an' outta ever'body else! An
'
kill ever'body
that gits in their road! Try ta make us hate each other on accounta what
Goddam color our skin is! Bible says ta love yer neighbor! Don't say any
certain color!"
The bunch milled around, talking and arguing. And the leader talked up
and told me, "This old world's in a bad condition! Comin' to a mighty bad
end!"
"Mebbe th' old one is," I yelled at the whole bunch, "but a new one's
in th' mail!"
"This Spanish war's a sign," he kept raving on. "This is th' final
battle! Battle of Armagaddeon! This dust, blowin' so thick ya cain't
breathe, cain't see th' sky, that's th' scourge over th' face of th' earth!
Men too greedy for land an' for money an' for th' power to make slaves out
of his feller men! Man has cursed th' very land itself!"
"Now you tell us somethin', Mister Fortune Teller!"
"Hell yes, that's what we come here for! Tell us a vision `bout all of
this stuff!"
I walked out through the door past five or six big husky guys dressed
in all kinds of work clothes, whittling, playing with warts on their hands,
chewing tobacco, rolling smokes. Everybody in the room walked out in the
yard. I stood there on an old rotten board step, and everybody hooted and
laughed and cracked some kind of a joke. And then somebody else said, "Tell
our fortune."
I looked down at the ground and said, "Well sir, men, I ain't no
fortune teller. No more than you are. But I'll tell ya what I see in my own
head. Then ya can call it any name ya like."
Everybody stood as still as a bunch of mice.
"We gotta all git together an' find out some way ta build this country
up. Make all of this here dust quit blowin'. We gotta find a job an' put
ever' single livin' one of us ta work. Better houses 'stead of these here
little old sickly shacks. Better carbon-black plants. Better oil refineries.
Gotta build up more big oil fields. Pipe lines runnin' from here plumb ta
Pittsburgh, Chicago, an' New York. Oil an' gas fer fact'ries ever'where.
Gotta keep an' eye peeled on ever' single inch of this whole country an' see
to it that none of Hitler's Goddam stooges don't lay a hand on it."
"How we gonna do all of this? Just walk to John D. an' tell 'm we're
ready to go to work?" The whole bunch laughed and started milling around
again.
"You ain't no prophet!" one big boy yelled. "Hell, any of us coulda say
that same thing! You're a dam fake!"
"An' you're a Goddam fool!" I hollered out at him. "I told ya I didn't
claim ta be nothin' fancy! Yer own dam head's jist as good as mine! Hell,
yes!"
The mob of men snickered and fussed amongst their selves, and made
motions with their hands like a baseball umpire saying "out." They shuffled
around on their feet, and then broke up into little bunches and started to
drift out of the yard. All talking. Above them, the big boy yelled back at
me, "Look out who're you're callin' a fool, there, bud!"
"Men! Hey! Listen! I know we all see this same thing--like news reels
in our mind. Alla th' work that needs ta be done--better highways, better
buildin's, better houses. Ever'-thing needs ta be fixed up better! But,
Goddamit, I ain't no master mind! All I know is we gotta git together an'
stick together! This country won't ever git much better as long as it's dog
eat dog, ever' man fer his own self, an' ta hell with th' rest of th' world.
We gotta all git together, dam it all, an' make somebody give us a job
somewhere doin' somethin'!"
But the whole crowd walked off down toward Main Street, laughing and
talking and throwing their hands. I leaned back up against the side of the
shack and watched the gravel and dust cutting down the last of the
hollyhocks.
"News reels in my head," I was looking and thinking to myself, and I
was thinking of old Heavy gone. "News reels in my head. By God, mebbe we all
gotta learn how ta see them there news reels in our heads. Mebbe so."
Chapter ХШ
OFF TO CALIFORNIA
I rolled my sign-painting brushes up inside an old shirt and stuck them
down in my rear pants pocket. On the floor of the shack I was reading a
letter and thinking to myself. It said:
". . . when Texas is so dusty and bad, California is so green and
pretty. You must be twenty-five by now, Woody. I know I can get you a job
here in Sonora. Why don't you come? Your aunt Laura."
Yes, I'll go, I was thinking. This is a right nice day for hittin' th'
road. 'Bout three o'clock in th' afternoon.
I pulled the crooked door shut as best I could, and walked one block
south to the main highway leading west. I turned west and walked along a few
blocks, across a railroad track, past a carbon-block warehouse. "Good old
Pampa. I hit here in 1926. Worked my tail off 'round this here town. But it
didn't give me anything. Town had growed up, strung itself all out across
these plains. Just a little old low-built cattle town to start with; jumped
up big when the oil boom hit. Now eleven years later it had up and died."
A three- or four-ton beer truck blowed its air brakes and I heard the
driver talking, "By God! I thought that looked like you, Woody! Where ya
headin'? Amarilla? Hustlin' signs?" We got off to a jumpy start while he was
spitting out his window.
"Cal'fornia," I said. "Hustlin' outta this dam dust!"
"Fer piece down th' road, ain't it?"
"Enda this dam highway! Ain't a-lookin' back!"
"Aww, ain'tcha gonna take one more good look at good ol
'
Pampa?"
I looked out my window and seen it go by. It was just shacks all along
this side of town, tired and lonesome-looking, and lots of us wasn't needed
here no more. Oil derricks running up to the city limits on three sides;
silvery refineries that first smelled good, then bad; and off along the rim
of the horizon, the big carbon-black plants throwing smoke worse than ten
volcanoes, the fine black powder covering the iron grass and the early green
wheat that pushes up just in time to kiss this March wind. Oil cars and
stock cars lined up like herds of cattle. Sun so clear and so bright
that I felt like I was leaving one of the prettiest and ugliest spots
I'd ever seen. "They tell me this town has fell down ta somethin' like
sixteen thousan' people," I said.
"She's really goin' with th' dust!" the driver told me. Then we hit
another railroad crossing that jarred him into saying, "I seen th' day when
there was more folks than that goin' to th' picture shows! She's really
shrivelin' up!"
"I ain't much a-likin' th' looks o' that bad-lookin' cloud a-hangin'
off ta th' north yonder," I told him.
"Bad time uv year fer them right blue northers! Come up awful fast
sometimes. Any money on ya?"
"Nope."
"How ya aimin' ta eat?"
"Signs."
"How's it come ya ain't packin' yer music box with уа?
"
"Hocked it last week."
"How ya gon'ta paint signs in a dam blue norther with th' temperture
hangin' plumb out th' bottom? Here. Fer's I go.''
"This'll gimme a good start at least. Mucha 'blige!
"
I
slammed the door and backed off onto the gravel and watched the track leave
the main highway, bounce over a rough bridge, and head north across a cow
pasture. The driver hadn't said good-bye or anything. I thought that was
funny. That's a bad cloud. Five miles back to town, though. No use of me
thinking about going back. What the hell's this thing stuck here in my shirt
pocket? I be dam. Well, I be dam. A greenback dollar bill. No wonder he just
chewed his gum. Truck drivers can do a hell of a lot of talking sometimes
without even saying a word.
I walked on down the highway bucking into the wind. It got so hard I
had to really duck my head and push. Yes. I know this old flat country up
here on the caprock plains. Gumbo mud. Hard crust sod. Iron grass for tough
cattle and hard-hitting cowboys that work for the ranchers. These old houses
that sweep with the country and look like they're crying in the dust. I know
who's in there. I know. I've stuck my head in a million. Drove tractors,
cleaned plows and harrows, greased discs and pulled the tumbleweeds out from
under the machinery. That wind is getting harder. Whoooooo! The wind along
the oily weeds sounded like a truck climbing a mountain in second gear.
Every step I took to the west, the wind pushed me back harder from the
north, like it was trying to tell me, for God's sake, boy, go to the south
country, be smart, go where they sleep out every night. Don't split this
blue blizzard west, because the country gets higher, and flatter, and
windier, and dustier, and you'll get colder and colder. But I thought,
somewhere west there's more room. Maybe the west country needs me out there.
It's so big and I'm so little. It needs me to help fill it up and I need it
to grow up in. I've got to keep bucking this wind, even if it gets colder.
The storm poured in over the wheat country, and the powdery snow was
like talcum, or dried paste, blowing along with the grinding bits of dust.
The snow was dry. The dust was cold. The sky was dark and the wind was
changing the whole world into an awful funny-looking, whistling and whining
place. Flat fields and grazing lands got smothery and close. It was about
three more miles on to the little town of Kings Mill.
I walked about two of the miles in the blowing storm and got a ride
with a truck load of worried cattle, and a bundled-up driver, smoking loose
tobacco that blew as wild as the dust and the snow, and stung like acid when
it lit in my eyes.
We
hollered the usual hollers back and forth at each other during the
last mile that I rode with him. He said that he was turning north off of the
main road at Kings Mill. I said, Let me out at the post office and I'll
stand around in there by the stove and try to get another ride.
In the general store, I bought a nickel's worth of postal cards and
wrote all five of them back to the folks in Pampa, saying, "Greetings from
the Land of Sunshine and just plenty of Good Fresh Air. Having wonderful
tour. Yrs. trly. Wdy."
Pretty soon another cattle man offered me a ride on to the next cattle
town. He smoked a pipe which had took up more of his time in the last twenty
years than wife, kids, or his cow ranching. He told me, "This old Panhandle
country can be one mighty nice place when it's purty, but hell on wheels
when she gits riled up!" His truck was governed down to fifteen or twenty
miles an hour. It was a windy, brittle hour before we crept the fifteen
miles from Kings Mill over to White Deer. I was so cold when we got there
that I couldn't hardly get out of the truck. The flying heat from the engine
had kept me a degree or two above freezing, but stepping out into that wind
head-on was worse. I walked another mile or two on down the side of the road
and, as long as I walked, kept fairly loose and limber. A time or two I
stopped alongside the concrete, and stood and waited with my head ducked
into the wind--and it seemed like none of the drivers could see me. When I
started to walk some more, I noticed that the muscles in the upper part of
my legs were drawn up, and hurt every time I took a step, and that it took
me a few hundred yards' walking to get full control over them. This scared
me so much that I decided to keep walking or else.
After three or four miles had went under my feet, a big new model
Lincoln Zephyr stopped, and I got in the back seat. I saw two people in the
front seat. They asked me a few silly questions. I mean they were good
questions, but I only gave them silly answers. Why was I out on the highways
at any such a time as this? I was just there. Where was I going? I was going
to California. What for? Oh, just to see if I couldn't do a little better.
They let me out on the streets of Amarillo, sixty miles away from
Pampa. I walked through town, and it got colder. Tumbleweeds, loose gravel,
and dirt and beaten snow crawled along the streets and vacant lots, and the
dust rolled in on a high wind, and fell on down across the upper plains. I
got across town and waited on a bend for a ride. After an hour, I hadn't got
one. I didn't want to walk any more down the road to keep warm, because it
was getting dark, and nobody could see anything out there on a night like
that. I walked twenty-five or thirty blocks back to the main part of
Amarillo. A sign on a board said, Population, 50,000, Welcome. I went into a
picture show to get warm and bought a hot sack of good, salty popcorn. I
figured on staying in the cheap show all I could, but they didn't stay open
after midnight in Amarillo, so I was back on the streets pretty soon, just
sort of walking up and down, looking at the jewelry and duds in the windows.
I got a nickel sack of smoking, and tried rolling a cigaret on every part of
Polk Street, and the wind blew the sack away, a whiff at a time. I remember
how funny it was. If I did succeed in getting one rolled and licked down and
into my mouth, I'd strike up all of the matches in the country trying to get
it lit; and as quick as I got it lit, the wind would blow so hard on the
lighted end that it would burn up like a Roman candle, too fast to get a
good draw off, and in the meantime throwing flaked-off red-hot ashes all
over my coat.
I went down to the railroad yards, and asked about the freights. The
boys were hanging out in two or three all-night coffee joints, and there was
no lead as to where you could get a free flop. I spent my last four-bit
piece on a little two-by-four room, and slept in a good warm bed. If it had
cockroaches, alligators or snapping turtles in it, I was too sleepy to stay
awake and argue with them.
I hit the streets next morning in a bluster of gray, smoky-looking snow
that had managed to get a toehold during the night. It covered the whole
country, and the highway was there somewhere--if you could only find it.
This side of Clovis, fifteen or twenty miles, I met an A Model Ford with
three young boys in it. They stopped and let me in. I rode with them toward
New Mexico all day long. When they came to the state line, they acted funny,
talking and whispering among themselves, and wondering if the cops at the
port of entry would notice anything odd about us. I heard them say that the
car was borrowed, no ownership papers, bill of sale, driver's license--just
borrowed off of the streets. We talked it over. Decided just to act as blank
as possible, and trust to our luck that we could get across. We drove over
the line. The cops waved us past. The sign read: Trucks and Busses Stop For
Inspection. Tourists Welcome to New Mexico.
The three boys were wearing old patched overhalls and khaki work pants
and shirts that looked like they'd stand a couple or three good washings
without coming any too clean. I looked at their hair, and it was dry,
wind-blown, gritty, and full of the dust out of the storm, and not any
certain wave or color--just the color of the whole country. I had seen
thousands of men that looked just the same way, and could usually tell by
the color of the dirt where they were from. I guessed these boys to be from
the oil-field country back up around Borger, and asked them if that was a
good guess. They said that we could ride together better if we asked each
other less questions.
We rolled along, slow, boiling up the higher country, and cooling off
coasting down--until we hit the mountains on this side of Alamagordo. We
stopped once or twice to let the engine cool off. Finally we hit the top of
the mountain ridge, and traveled along a high, straight road that stuck to
the middle part of a flat, covered on both sides by evergreen pine, tall,
thin-bodied, and straight as an arrow, branching out, about thirty or forty
feet up the trunk; and the undergrowth was mostly a mixture of brown scrubby
oak, and here and yonder, bunches of green, tough cedar. The air was so
light that it made our heads feel funny. We laughed and joked about how it
felt.
I noticed that the driver was speeding up and then throwing the clutch
in, letting the car slip into neutral, and coasting as far as he could. I
mentioned this to the driver, and he said that he was running on his last
teacupful of gas, and it was twenty-five miles to the next town. I kept
quiet from then on, doing just what the other three were, just gulping and
thinking.
For five or six miles we held our breath. We were four guys out, trying
to get somewhere in the world, and the roar of that little engine, rattly,
knocky and fumy as it was, had a good sound to our ears. It was the only
motor we had. We wanted more than anything else in the world to hear it purr
along, and we didn't care how people laughed as they went around us, and
throwed their clouds of red dust back into our faces. Just take us into
town, little motor, and we'll get you some more gas.
A mile or two of up-grade, and the tank was empty. The driver throwed
the clutch in, shifted her into neutral, and kept wheeling. The speed read,
thirty, twenty, fifteen--and then fell down to five, three, four, three,
four, five, seven, ten, fifteen, twenty-five, and we all yelled and hollered
as loud and as long as our guts could pump air. Hooopeee! Made 'er! Over the
Goddam hump! Yippeee! It's all down hill from here to Alamagordo! To hell
with the oil companies! For the next half an hour we won't be needing you,
John D.! We laughed and told all kinds of good jokes going down the
piny-covered mountain--some of the best, wildest, prettiest fresh-smelling
country you could ever hope to find. And it was a free ride for us. Twenty
miles of coasting.
At the bottom we found Alamagordo, a nice little town scattered along a
trickling creek or two that chases down from out of the mountains around.
There you see the tall, gray-looking cottonwood sticking along the watered
places. Brown adobe shacks and houses of sun-dried brick, covered over with
plaster and homemade stucco of every color. The adobe houses of the Mexican
workers have stood there, some of them, for sixty, seventy-five, and over a
hundred years, flat. And the workers, a lot of them, the same way.
On the north side of town we coasted into a homey-looking service
station.
The man finally got around to coming out. One of the boys said, "We
want to swap you a good wrench for five gallons of gas, worth twice that
much. Good shape. Runs true, holds tight, good teeth, never been broke."
The service man took a long, interested, hungry look at the wrench.
Good tool. No junky wrench. He was really wanting to make the swap.
"Got as much as fifty cents cash money?" he asked.
"No ..." the boy answered him. Both forgot all about everything,
keeping quiet for a whole minute or more, and turning the wrench over and
over. One boy slid out of the door and walked through the shop toward the
men's rest room.
"Two bits cash ... ?" the mechanic asked without looking up.
"No ... no cash ..." the boy told him.
"Okay ... get your gas cap off; I'll swap with you boys just to show
you that my heart is in the right place."
The gas cap was turned, laid up on a fender, and the gas man held the
long brass nozzle down in the empty hole, and listened to the five gallons
flow into the tank; and the five gallons sounded lonesome and sad, and the
trade was made.
"Okay, Mister, you got the best of this deal. But that's what you're in
business for, I reckon; thanks," a boy said, and the old starter turned over
a few wheels that were gradually getting toothless, and the motor went over
quick, slow, and then a blue cloud of engine smoke puffed up under the
floorboards, and the good smell of burning oil told you that you weren't
quite walking--yet. Everybody heaved a sigh of relief. The man stood with
his good costly wrench in his hands, pitching it up and down, and smiling a
little-- nodding as we drove away.
My eyes fell for a short minute away from the healthy countryside, and
my gaze came upon an old tire tool on the floor of the car, a flat rusty
tire iron, an old pump--and a nice wrench, almost exactly like the one that
we'd just traded for gas; and I remembered the boy that went to the rest
room.
Uptown in Alamagordo, we stopped at the high, west end of the main
street. It was dinner time, but no money. Everybody was hungry and that went
without asking. I told the boys that I'd get out and hustle the town for
some quick signs, signs to paint on windows which I could paint in thirty
minutes or an hour, and we'd surely get enough to buy some day-old bakery
goods and milk to take out on the side of the road and eat. I felt like I
owed them something for my fare. I felt full of pep, rested and relieved,
now that there were five gallons of gas splashing around inside of our tank.
They agreed to let me hustle for a quick job, but it must not take too long.
I jumped out in a big rush, and started off down the street. I heard
one of them holler, "Meet you right here at this spot in an hour and no
later."
I yelled back, "Okie doke! Hour! No later." And I walked down through
the town. I peeled my eyes for an old sign that needed repainting, or a new
one to put on. I stuck my head into ten or fifteen places and got a job at a
shoe store, putting a picture of a man's shoe, a lady's shoe, and: Shoe
Repairing Guaranteed. Cowboy Boots a Specialty.
I had left my brushes in the seat of the car, so I made a hard run up
the main street. I got to the spot, puffing, grinning, and blowing like a
little horse, and looked around-- but no boys, and no car.
I trotted up and down the main street again, thinking that they might
have decided to come on down to where I was. But there wasn't the old Model
A that I'd learned to know and admire, not for being a champion at anything
but as a car that really tried. It was gone. So were my pardners. So were
all of my paint brushes. Just a little rag wound around some old brushes,
but they were Russian Red Sable, the best that money could buy, and about
twenty bucks of hard-earned money to me. They were my meal ticket.
Pulling from Alamagordo over to Las Cruces was one of the hardest times
I'd ever had. The valley highway turned into a dry, bare stretch of
low-lying foothills, too little to be mountains, and too hilly to be flat
desert. The hills fooled me completely. Running out from the high mountains,
they looked small and easy to walk over, but the highway bent and curled
around and got lost a half a dozen times on each little hill. You could see
the road ahead shining like a string of tinfoil flattened out, and then
you'd lose sight of it again and walk for hours and hours, and more hours,
and without ever coming to the part that you'd been looking at ahead for so
long.
I was always a big hand to walk along and look at the things along the
side of the road. Too curious to stand and wait for a ride. Too nervous to
set down and rest. Too struck with the traveling fever to wait. While the
other long strings of hitch-hikers was taking it easy in the shade back in
the town, I'd be tugging and walking myself to death over the curves,
wondering what was just around the next bend; walking to see some distant
object, which turned out to be just a big rock, or knoll, from which you
could see and wonder about other distant objects. Blisters on your feet,
shoes hot as a horse's hide. Still tearing along. I covered about fifteen
miles of country, and finally got so tired that I walked out to one side of
the road, laid down in the sun, and went off to sleep. I woke up every time
a car slid down the highway, and listened to the hot tires sing off a song,
and wondered if I didn't miss a good, easy, cool ride all of the way into
California. I couldn't rest.
Back on the road, I hung a ride to Las Cruces and was told that you
couldn't catch a freight there till the next day. I didn't want to lay over,
so I lit out walking toward Deming. Deming was the only town within a
hundred miles where you could catch one of them fast ones setting long
enough to get on it. I walked a long stretch on the way to Deming. It must
have been close to twenty miles. I walked until past midnight. A farmer
drove up and stopped and said that he would carry me ten miles. I took him
up, and that put me within about fifteen miles of Deming. Next morning I was
walking a couple of hours before sunup, and along about ten o'clock, got a
ride with a whole truckload of hitch-hikers. Most every man on the truck was
going to catch a freight at Deming. We found a whole bunch walking around
the yards and streets in Deming waiting to snag out. Deming is a good town
and a going town, but it's a good town to keep quiet in. Us free riders said
it was best not to go around spouting off at your mouth too much, or the
cops would pull you in just to show the taxpayers that they are earning
their salaries.
The train out of Deming was a fast one. I got to Tucson without doing
anything much, without even eating for a couple of days.
In the yards at Tucson, I didn't know where to go or what to do. The
train rolled in with us after midnight. The cars all banged, and the brake
shoes set down tight, and everything wheeled to a standstill.
I was hanging onto her, because she was a red-hot one, and had been
fast so far, and other trains had given her the right-of-way. I didn't want
to get off now, just for a cup of coffee or something. Besides, I didn't
have the nickel. I crawled down in a reefer hole--a hole in the top of a
fruit car where ice is packed--and smoked the makings with two men whose
faces I hadn't seen.
It was cold there in Tucson that night. We laid low for about a couple
of hours. After a while, a dark head and shoulders could be seen in the
square hole, set against the bright, icy moonlight night. Whoever it was,
said, "Boys, you c'n come on out--we're ditched on a siding. She ain't gonna
take these cars on no further."
"Ya mean we lost our train?"
"Yeah, we just missed 'er, that's all.''
And as the head and shoulders went out of sight above us, you could
hear men scrambling down the sides, hanging onto the shiny iron ladders, and
falling out by the tens and dozens all up and down the cinder track.
"Ditched. ..."
"Shore'n hell. ..."
"Coulda got'er if we'd of knowed it in time. I had this happen to me
before, right here in Tucson."
"Tucson's a bitch, boys, Tucson's a bitch."
"Why?"
"Oh--just is. Hell, I don't know why!"
"Just another town, ain't it?"
" Tain't no town, 'tain't no city. Not fer guys like you an' me. You'll
find out soon enough...."
"What's funny about Tucson?"
Men ganged around the black cars, and talked in low, grumbling voices
that seemed to be as rough as they sounded honest. Cigarets flared in the
dark. A little lantern started coming down the tracks toward where we were
ganged around talking. Flashlights flittered along the ground, and you could
see the funny shadows of the walking feet and legs of men, and the
underparts of the brake drums, air hoses, and couplings of the big, fast
cars.
"Checkers."
"Car knockers."
"Boys--scatter out!"
"Beat it!"
"And--remember--take an old 'bo's word for it, and stay th' hell out of
the city limits of Tucson."
"What kind of a dam town is this, anyhow?"
'Tucson--she's a rich man's bitch, that's what she is, and nothin' else
but."
Morning. Men are scattered and gone. A hundred men and more, rolled in
on that train last night, and it was cold. Now it's come morning, and men
seem to be gone. They've learned how to keep out of the way. They've learned
how to meet and talk about their hard traveling, and smoke each other's
snipes in the moonlight, or boil a pot of coffee among the weeds like
rabbits--hundreds of them, and when the sun comes out bright, they seem to
be gone.
Looking out across a low place, growing with the first sprigs of
something green and good to eat, I saw the men, and I knew who they were,
and what they were doing. They were knocking on doors, talking to
housewives, offering to work to earn a little piece of bread and meat, or
some cold biscuits, or potatoes and bread and a slice of strong onion;
something to stick to your ribs till you could get on down the line to where
you knew people, where you had friends who would put you up till you could
try to find some work. I felt a funny feeling come over me standing there.
I had always played music, painted signs, and managed to do some kind
of work to get a hold of a piece of money, with which I could walk in to
town legal, and buy anything I wanted to eat or drink. I'd always felt that
satisfied feeling of hearing a coin jingle across the counter, or at least,
doing some kind of work to pay for my meals. I'd missed whole days without a
meal. But I'd been pretty proud about bumming. I still hoped that I could
find some kind of short job to earn me something to eat. This was the
longest I had ever gone without anything to eat. More than two whole days
and nights.
This was a strange town, with a funny feeling hanging over it, a
feeling like there were lots of people in it--the Mexican workers, and the
white workers, and the travelers of all skins and colors of eyes, caught
hungry, hunting for some kind of work to do. I was too proud to go out like
the other men and knock at the doors.
I kept getting weaker and emptier. I got so nervous that I commenced
shaking, and couldn't hold myself still. I could smell a piece of bacon or
corncake frying at a half a mile away. The very thought of fruit made me
lick my hot lips. I kept shaking and looking blanker and blanker. My brain
didn't work as good as usual. I couldn't think. Just got into a stupor of
some kind, and sat there on the main line of the fast railroad, forgetting
about even being there... and thinking of homes, with ice boxes, cook
stoves, tables, hot meals, cold lunches, with hot coffee, ice-cold beer,
homemade wine--and friends and relatives. And I swore to pay more attention
to the hungry people that I would meet from there on down the line.
Pretty soon, a wiry-looking man came walking up across the low green
patch, with a brown paper sack wadded mp under his arm. He walked in my
direction until he was about fifteen feet away, and I could see the brown
stain of good tasting grease soaking through his sack. I even sniffed, and
stuck my nose up in the air, and swung my head in his direction as he got
closer; and I could smell, by real instinct, the good homemade bread, onion,
and salty pork that was in the sack. He sat down not more than fifty feet
away, under the heavy squared timbers of the under-rigging of a water tank,
and opened his sack and ate his meal, with me looking on.
He finished it slowly, taking his good easy time. He licked the ends of
his fingers, and turned his head sideways to keep from spilling any of the
drippings.
After he'd cleaned the sack out, he wadded it up properly and threw it
over his shoulder. I wondered if there was any crumbs in it. When he left, I
says to myself, I'll go and open it up and eat the crumbs. They'll put me on
to the next town. The man walked over to where I sat and said, "What the
hell are you doing settin' here on the main line ... ?"
"Waitin' fer a train," I said.
"You don't want one on top of you, do you?" he asked me.
"Nope,'' I says, "but I don't see none coming... .'' "How could you
with your back to it?" "Back?"
"Hell, yes, I seen guys end up like 'burger meat for just sueh
carelessness as that...."
"Pretty mornin'," I said to him. "You hungry?" he asked me.
"Mister, I'm just as empty as one of them automobile cars there, headed
back East to Detroit."
"How long you been this way?"
"More than two days."
"You're a dam fool-----Hit any houses for grub?"
"No--don't know which a way to strike out."
"Hell, you are a dam fool, for sure."
"I guess so."
"Guess, hell, I know so." He turned his eyes toward the better section
of town. "Don't go up in the fine part of town to try to work for a meal.
You'll starve to death, and they'll throw you in jail just for dying on the
streets. But see them little shacks and houses over yonder? That's where the
railroad workers live. You'll get a feed at the first house you go to, that
is, if you're honest, willing to work for it, and ain't afraid to tell it
just like it is." I nodded my head up and down, but I was listening.
Before he quit talking, one of the last things that he said, was, "I
been on the bum like this for a long time. I could have split my sack of
eats with you right here, but you wouldn't have got any good out of it that
way. Wouldn't learn you a dam thing. I had to learn it the hard way. I went
to the rich part of town, and I learnt what it was like; and then I went to
the working folks' end of town and seen what it was like. And now it's up to
you to go out for yourself and get you some grub when your belly's empty."
I thanked him two or three times, and we sat for a minute or two not
saying much. Just looking around. And then he got up sort of slow and easy,
and wishing me good luck, he walked away down the side of the rails.
I don't quite know what was going on inside my head. I got up in a
little while and looked around. First, to the north of me, then to the south
of me; and, if I'd been using what you call horse sense, I would have gone
to the north toward the shacks that belong to the railroad and farm workers.
But a curious feeling was fermenting in me, and my brain wasn't operating on
what you'd call pure sanity. I looked in the direction that my good sense
told me to go, and started walking in the direction that would lead me to
even less to eat, drink, less of a job of work, less friends and more hard
walking and sweating, that is, in the direction of the so-called "good" part
of town, where the "moneyed" folks live.
The time of day must have been pretty close to nine o'clock. There were
signs of people rustling around, moving and working, over around the shack
town; but, in the part of town that I was going toward, there was a dead
lull of heavy sleep and morning dreams.
You could look ahead and see a steeple sticking up out of the trees. It
comes up from a quiet little church house, A badly painted sign, crackling
from the desert heat and crisp nights, says something about the Brethren,
and so, feeling like a Brethren, you walk over and size the place up. There
in the morning sun so early, the yellow and brown leaves are wiggling on the
splattered sidewalk, like humping worms measuring off their humps, and the
sun is speckling the driveway that takes you to the minister's door. Under
the trees it gets colder and shadier till you come to the back door, and
climbing three rotted steps, knock a little knock.
Nothing happens. While you're listening through all of the rooms and
floors and halls of the old house, everything gets so quiet that the soft
Whoo Whoo of a switch engine back down in the yards seems to jar you.
Finally, after a minute or two of waiting, threatening to walk off, thinking
of the noise that your feet would make smashing the beans and seeds that had
fallen from the locust trees on to the driveway, you decide to stick at the
door, and knock again.
You hear somebody walking inside the house. It sounds padded, and
quiet, and far away. Like a leather-footed mountain lion walking in a cave.
And then it swishes through the kitchen, across the cold linoleum, and a
door clicks open, and a maid walks out onto the back porch, scooting along
in a blue-checkered house dress and tan apron, with a big pocket poked full
of dust rags of various kinds, a little tam jerked down over her ear, and
her hair jumping out into the morning breeze. She walks up to the screen
door, but doesn't open it.
"Ah--er--good morning, lady," you say to her.
She says to you, "What do you want?"
You say back to her, "Why, you see, I'm hunting for a job of work."
"Yeah?"
"Yes, I'm wondering if you've got a job of work that I could do to earn
a bite to eat, little snack of some kind. Grass cut. Scrape leaves. Trim
some hedge. Anything like that."
"Listen, young man," she tells you, straining her words through the
minister's screen, "there's a dozen of you people that come around here
every day knocking on this door. I don't want to make you feel bad, or
anything like that, but if the minister starts out to feed one of you,
you'll go off and tell a dozen others about it, and then they'll all be down
here wanting something to eat. You better get on out away from here, before
you wake him up, or he'll tell you worst than I'm telling you."
"Yes'm. Thank you, ma'am." And you're off down the driveway and on the
scent of another steeple.
I walked past another church. This one is made out of sandy-looking
rocks, slowly but surely wearing away, and going out of style. There are two
houses, one on each side, so I stood there for a minute wondering which one
belongs to the minister. It was a tough choice. But, on closer looks, I saw
that one house was sleepier than the other one, and I went to the sleepy
one. I was right. It belonged to the minister. I knocked at the back door. A
mean-tempered cat ran out from under the back porch and scampered through a
naked hedge. Here nothing happened. For five minutes I knocked; still nobody
woke up. So feeling ashamed of myself for even being there, I tiptoed out on
to the swaying sidewalk and sneaked off across town.
Then I come to a business street. Stores just stretching and yawning,
but not wide awake. I moseyed along looking in at the glass windows, warm
duds too high in price, and hot, sugary-smelling bakery goods piled up for
the delivery man.
A big cop, walking along behind me for half a block, looking over my
shoulder, finding out what I was up to. When I turned around, he was smiling
at me.
He said, "Good morning."
I said the same back to him.
He asked me, "Going to work?"
"Naw, just looking for work. Like to find a job, and hang around this
town for a while."
He looked over my head, and down the street as an early morning driver
ran a stop sign, and told me, "No work around here this time of the year."
"I'm generally pretty lucky at gittin' me a job. I'm a good clerk,
grocery store, drug store--paint signs to boot."
He talked out into thin air, and says, "You'll starve to death around
here. Or make the can."
"Can?"
"That's what I said, can."
"You mean, git in trouble?"
He nodded his head, yes. He meant trouble.
"What kinda trouble? I'm a good hand ta keep outta trouble," I went on
to say.
"Listen, boy, when you're not working in this town, you're already in
trouble, see? And there ain't no work for you, see? So you're in trouble
already." He nodded at a barber jingling his keys at a door.
I decided that the best play I could make was to cut loose from the
copper, and go on about my door knocking. So I acted like I was going
somewhere. I asked him, "Say, what time of the day is it, by the way?" I
tried to crowd a serious look onto my face.
He blowed some foggy breath out past a cigaret hanging limber on his
lip, and looked everywhere, except at me and said, "Time for you to get
going. Get off of these streets."
I kept quiet.
"Merchants gonna be coming down to open up their stores in about a
minute, and they don't want to think that I let a bird like you hang around
on the streets all night. Get going. Don't even look back."
And he watched me walk away, each of us knowing just about why the
other one acted like he did.
Rounding a warm corner, I met a man, that, to all looks, was a traveler
suffering from lack of funds. His clothes had been riding the freights, and
I was pretty certain that he was riding with them. Floppy hat, greasy
through the headband.
A crop of whiskers just about right for getting into jail. He was on
his way out of town.
I said, "Howdy. Good-morning."
"What'd the dick say to you?" He got right to the main subject.
"He was telling me how to clear Tucson of myself in five minutes flat,"
I told the man.
"Tough sonsaguns here, them flatfeet. Rich place. Big tourists get sick
and come here for to lay around," he said, spitting off of the sidewalk, out
into the street. "Mighty tough town." He talked slow and friendly, and
looked at me most of the time, ducking his head, a little bit ashamed of the
way he looked. "I was doing all right till I hung a high ball. Engine pulled
out and left my car settin' here." Then he nodded a quick nod and ran his
eyes over his dirty clothes, two shirts, wadded down inside a tough pair of
whipcord cotton pants, and said, "That's how come me to be so dam filthy.
Couldn't find a clean hole to ride in."
"Hell," I said, "man, you ain't half as bad off as I am as far as dirt
goes. Look at me." And I looked down at my own clothes.
For the first time I stood there and thought to myself just what a
funny-looking thing I was--that is, to other people walking along the
streets.
He turned around, took off his hat and ran his hand through his
straight hair, making it lay down on his head; he moved over a foot or two,
and looked at his reflection in the big plate-glass window of a store.
Then he said, "They got a County Garden here that's a dude." His voice
was sandy and broken up in little pieces. Lots of things went through your
mind when he talked-- wheat stems and empty cotton stalks, burnt corn, and
eroded farm land. The sound was as quiet as a change in the weather, and
yet, it was as strong as he needed. If I was a soldier, I would fight
quicker for his talking to me, than for the cop. As I followed his talk, he
added, "I been out on that pea patch a couple of shots; I know."
I told him that I'd been hitting the preachers up for a meal.
He said, "That ain't a very smart trick; quickest way to jail's by
messing around the nice parts. Qughtta get out on the edge of town. That's
best."
The sun was warm on the corner, and Tucson's nice houses jumped up
pretty and clean, pale colors of pink and yellow. "Mighty purty sight to
see. Make anybody want to come out here to live, wouldn't it?" he asked me.
"Looks like it would," I told him. We both stood and soaked our systems
full of the whole thing. Yes, it is a sight to see the early morning sun get
warm in Tucson.
" Tain't fer fellers like me'n you, though," he said.
"Just something pretty to look at," I said to him. "At least, we know
it's here, towns like this to live in, and the only thing we got to do is to
learn how to do some kind of work, you know, to make a living here," I said,
watching the blue shadows chase around the buildings, under the trees, and
fall over the adobe fences that were like regular walls around some of the
buildings.
"Hot sun's good for sick folks. Lungers. ТВ. Consumptives come here all
shot to hell, half dead from no sunshine 'er fresh air; hang around here for
a few months, takin' it easy, an', by God, leave out of here as sound and
well as the day they crippled in," he told me.
I cut in on him and said, "You mean, as well as they ever was. You
don't mean they go out as well as the day they come in sick."
He shuffled his feet and laughed at his mistake. " 'At's right, I meant
to say that. I meant to say, too, that you can come in here with a little
piece of money that you saved up, 'er sold your farm or place of business to
get a holt of, an' it don't last till the sun can get up good," He was
smiling and moving his head.
I asked him how about the broke people that was lungers.
He said that they hung around on the outsides of the town, and lived as
cheap as they could, and worked around in the crops, panned gold, or any old
thing to make a living, in order to hang around the place till they could
get healed up. Thousands of folks with their lungs shot to the devil. Every
other person, he told me, was a case of some kind of ТВ.
"Lots of different brands of lungers, huh?" I asked him.
"Hell's bells, thousand different kinds of it. Mostly 'cording to where
'bouts you ketch it, like in a mine, or a cement factory, or saw mill. Dust
ТВ, chemical ТВ from paint factories, rosin ТВ from the saw mills."
"Boy howdy, that's hell, ain't it?" I asked him.
"If they is a hell," he told me, "I reckon that's it. To be down with
some kind of a trouble, disease, that you get while you're workin', an' it
fixes you to where you cain't work no more." He looked down at the ground,
ran his hands down into his pockets, and I guessed that he, hisself, was a
lunger.
"Yeah, I can see just how it is. Kinda messes a person up all th' way
around. But, hell, you don't look so bad off to me; you can still put out
plenty of work, I bet; that is, if you could find some to do." I tried to
make him feel a little better.
He cleared his throat as quiet as he could, but there was the old
give-away, the little dry rattle, like the ticking of a worn-out clock.
He rolled himself a smoke, and from his sack I rolled one. We both lit
up from the same match, and blew smoke in the air. He thought to himself for
a minute, and didn't say a word. I didn't know whether to talk any more
about it or not. There is something in most men that don't like petting or
pity.
What he said to me next took care of the whole thing, " 'Tain't so
terr'ble a thing. I keep quiet about it mostly on account of I don't want
nobody looking at me, or treating me like I was a dying calf, or an old
wore-out horse with a broke leg. All I aim to do is to stay out here in this
high, dry country--stay out of doors all I can, and get all the work I can.
I'll come out from under it."
I could have stood there and talked to this man for a half a day, but
my stomach just wasn't willing to wait much longer; and the two of us being
in Tucson together would have been a matter of explaining more things to
more cops. We wished each other good luck, and shook hands, and he said,
"Well, maybe we'll both be millionaires' sons next time that we run onto
each other. Hope so, anyhow."
The last glimpse I got of him was when I turned around for a minute,
and looked back down his direction. He was walking along with his hands in
his pockets, head ducked a little, and kicking in the dust with the toe of
his shoe. I couldn't help but think, how friendly most people are that have
all of the hard luck.
There was one more church that I had to make, the biggest one in town.
A big mission, cathedral, or something. It was a great big, pretty building,
with a tower, and lots of fancy rock carving on the high places. Heavy vines
clumb around, holding onto the rough face of the rocks, and since it was a
fairly new church, everything was just getting off to a good start.
Not familiar with the rules, I didn't know just how to go about things.
I seen a young lady dressed in a sad, black robe, so I walked down a
mis-matched stone walk and asked her if there was any kind of work around
the place that a man could do to earn a meal.
She brushed the robe back out of her face and seemed to be a very
polite and friendly person. She talked quiet and seemed to feel very sorry
for me since I was so hungry.
"I just sort of heard people talkin' up in town there, an' they said
that you folks would always give a stranger a chance to work fer a meal, you
know, just sorta on th' road to California. ..." I was too hungry to quit
talking.
Then she took a few steps and walked up onto a low rock porch. "Sit
down here where it is cooler," she told me, "and I'll go and find the
Sister. She'll be able to help you, I'm sure." She was a nice-looking lady.
Before she could walk away, I felt like I'd ought to say something
else, so I said, "Mighty cool porch ya got here."
She turned around, just touching her hand to a doorknob that led
somewhere through a garden. We both smiled without making any noise.
She stayed gone about ten minutes. The ten minutes went pretty slow and
hungry.
Sister Rosa (I will call her that for a name) appeared, to my surprise,
not through the door where the first lady had gone, but through a cluster of
tough vines that swung close to a little arched gate cutting through a stone
wall. She was a little bit older. She was just as nice, and she listened to
me while I told her why I was there. "I tried lots of other places, and this
is sort of a last chance."
"I see! Well, I know that, on certain days, we have made it a practice
to fix hot meals for the transient workers. Now, unless I am badly mistaken,
we are not prepared to give meals out today; and I'm not just exactly
certain when it will be free-ration day again. I know that you are sincere
in your coming here, and I can plainly see that you are not one of the kind
that travels through the country eating free meals when you can get work. I
will take the responsibility onto my shoulders, and go and find Father
Francisco for you, tell him your whole predicament, and let the judgment of
the matter be up to him. As far as all of the sisters and nuns are
concerned, we love to prepare the meals when the proper authority is given
to us. I, personally, pray that Father Francisco will understand the great
faith shown by your presence here, and that he will be led to extend to you
the very fullest courtesy and helping hand." And Sister Rosa walked in
through the same door that the first lady had walked in at.
I set there and waited ten more minutes, getting a good bit more
anxious to get a meal inside of me, and I counted the leaves on a couple of
waving vines. Then counted them over again according to dark green or pale
green. I was just getting ready to count them according to light green, dark
yellow green, and dark green, when the first young lady stepped around
through a door at my back, and tapped me on the shoulder and said that if I
would go around to the front door, main entrance, Father Francisco would
meet me there, and we would discuss the matter until we arrived at some
definite conclusion.
I got up shaking like the leaves and held onto the wall like the vines
till I got myself under way, and then I walked pretty straight to the main
gate.
I knocked on the door, and in about three minutes the door swung open,
and there was an old man with white hair, a keen shaved face, and a clean,
stiff white collar that fit him right up around his neck. He was friendly
and warm. He wore a black suit of clothes which was made out of good
material. He said, "How do you do?"
I stuck out my hand to shake, grabbed his and squeezed as friendly as I
knew how and said, "Mister Sanfrancisco, Frizsansco, Frisco, I'm glad to
know you! Guthrie's my name. Texas. Panhandle country. Cattle. You know. Oil
boom. That's what--fine day."
In a deep, quiet-sounding voice that somehow matched in with the halls
of the church, he said that it was a fine day, and that he was very glad to
meet me. I assured him again that I was glad to meet him, but would be
somewhat gladder if I could also work for a meal. "Two days. No eats," I
told him.
And then, soft and friendly as ever, his eyes shining out from the dark
hall, his voice spoke up again and said, "Son, I have been in this service
all my life. I have seen to it that thousands of men just like you got to
work for a meal. But, right at this moment, there is no kind of work to do
here, no kind of work at all; and therefore, it would be just a case of pure
charity. Charity here is like charity everywhere; it helps for a moment, and
then it helps no more. It is part of our policy to be charitable, for to
give is better than to receive. You seem still to retain a good measure of
your pride and dignity. You do not beg outright for food, but you offer to
do hard labor in order to earn your meal. That is the best spirit in this
world. To work for yourself is to help others, and to help others is to help
yourself. But you have asked a certain question; and I must answer that
question in your own words to satisfy your own thinking. You asked if there
is work that you can do to earn a meal. My answer is this: There is no work
around here that you can do, and therefore, you cannot earn a meal. And, as
for charity, God knows, we live on charity ourselves."
The big, heavy door closed without making even a slight sound.
I walked a half a mile trembling past the yards, down to the shacks of
the railroad workers, the Mexicanos, the Negroes, and the whites, and
knocked on the first door. It was a little brown wooden house, costing,
alltogether, less than one single rock in the church. A lady opened the
door. She said that she didn't have anything for me to do; she acted crabby
and fussy, chewing the rag, and talking sour to herself. She went back in
the house again, still talking.
"Young men, old men, all kinds of men; walking, walking, all of the
time walking, piling off of the freights, making a run across my tomato
garden, and knocking on my door; men out gallivantin' around over the
country; be better off if you'd of stayed at home; young boys taking all
kinds of crazy chances, going hungry, thirsty, getting all dirty and ugly,
ruining your clothes, maybe getting run over and killed by a truck or a
train--who knows? Yes. Yes. Yes. Don't you dare run away, young nitwit. I'm
a fixing you a plate of the best I got. Which is all I got. Blame fools."
(Mumbling) "Ought to be at home with your family; that's where you'd ought
to be. Here." (Opening the door again, coming out on the porch.) "Here, eat
this. It'll at least stick to your ribs. You look like an old hungry hound
dog. I'd be ashamed to ever let the world beat me down any such a way. Here.
Eat every bite of this. I'll go and fix you a glass of good milk. Crazy
world these days. Everybody's cutting loose and hitting the road."
Down the street, I stopped at another house. I walked up to the front
door, and knocked. I could hear somebody moving around on the inside, but
nobody come to the door. After a few more knocks, and five minutes of
waiting, a little woman opened the door back a ways, took a peek out, but
wouldn't open up all of the way.
She looked me over good. It was so dark in her house that I couldn't
tell much about her. Just some messed-up hair, and her hand on the door. It
was clean, and reddish, like she'd been in the dishwater, or putting out
some clothes. Mexican or white, you couldn't tell which. She asked me in a
whisper, "What, what do you want?"
"Lady, I'm headin' ta California lookin' fer work. I just wondered if
you had a job of work of some kind that a man could do to earn a lunch. Sack
with somethin' in it ta carry along."
She gave me the feeling that she was afraid of something. "No, I
haven't any kind of work. Sshhh. Don't talk so loud. And I haven't got
anything in the house--that is--anything fit to pack for you to eat."
"I just got a meal off of th' lady down th street here, an' just
thought maybe--you know, thought maybe a little sack of somethin' might come
in purty handy after a day or two out on the desert--any old thing. Not very
hard ta please," I told her.
"My husband is sleeping. Don't talk so loud. I'm a little ashamed of
what I've got left over here. Pretty poor when you need a good meal. But, if
you're not too particular about it, you're welcome to take it with you. Wait
here a minute."
I stood there looking back up across the tomato patch to the railroad
yards. A switch engine was trotting loose cars up and down the track and I
knew that our freight was making up.
She stuck her hand out through an old green screen door, and said,
"Sshhh," and I tried to whisper "thank you," but she just kept motioning,
nodding her head.
I was wearing a black slip-over sweater and I pulled the loose neck
open, and pushed the sack down into the bosom. She'd put something good and
warm from the warming-oven into the sack, because already I could feel the
good hot feeling against my belly.
Trains were limbering up their big whistles, and there was a long
string of cars made up and raring to step. A hundred and ten cars meant
pretty certain that she was a hot one with the right-of-way to the next
division.
A tired-looking Negro boy trotted down the cinders, looking at the new
train to spot him a reefer car to crawl into. He seen that he had a spare
second or two, and he stopped alongside of me.
"Ketchin' 'er out?" I asked him.
"Yeah. I'm switchin' ovah pretty fas'. Jes' got in. Didn' even have no
time ta hustle me up a feed. I guess I c'n eat when I gets to wheah I'm
headed." His pale khaki work clothes were soaked with salty sweat. Loose
coal soot, oil smoke, and colored dust was smeared all over him. He made a
quick trip over to a clear puddle of water and laid flat of his belly to
suck up all of the water he could hold. He blowed out his breath, and came
back wiping his face with a bandana handkerchief as dirty as the railroad
itself, and then the handkerchief being cool and wet, he tied it around his
forehead, with a hard knot on the back of his head. He looked up at me, and
shook his head sideways and said, "Keeps th' sweat from runnin' down so
bad."
It was an old hobo trick. I knew it, but didn't have any kind of a
handkerchief. The heat of the day was getting to be pretty hard to take. I
asked him, "When's th' last time ya had anything to eat?"
"El Paso," he told me. "Coupl'a days back."
My hand didn't ask me anything about it, but it was okay with me
anyhow, and I slid the sack out of my sweater and banded it over to him.
Still warm. I knew just about how good it felt when he got his hands on that
warm greasy sack. He bit into a peanut-butter sandwich together with a hunk
of salty pork between two slices of bread. He looked toward the water hole
again, but the train jarred the cars a few feet, and we both made for the
side of the high yellow cars.
We got split up a few yards, and had to hang separate cars, and I
thought maybe he wouldn't make it. I looked down from the top of mine, and
saw him trotting easy along the ground, jumping an iron switchpost or two,
and holding his sandwich and sack in both hands. He crammed the sandwich
down into the sack, rolled the top edge of the sack over a couple of twists,
and stuck the sack into his teeth, letting both of his hands free to use to
climb up the side of the car. On the top, he crawled along the blistered tin
roof until he set facing me, me on the end of my car, and him on the end of
his. It was getting windier as the train got her speed up, and we waved our
hats "good-bye and good luck and Lord bless you" to the old town of Tucson.
I looked at the lids of my two reefer holes, and both was down so tight
that you couldn't budge them with a team of horses. I looked over at my
partner again, and seen that he'd got his lid open. He braced the heavy lid
open, using the lock-bar for a wedge, so that it couldn't fly shut in the
high wind. I seen him crawl down inside, examine the ice hole, and then he
stuck his head out, and motioned for me to come on over and ride. I got up
and jumped the space between the two cars, and clumb down out of the hot
winds; and he finished his lunch without saying a word in the wind.
Our car was an easy rider. No flat wheels to speak of. This is not true
of many cars on an empty train, because loaded, a train rides smoother than
when empty. Before long, a couple of other riders stuck their heads down
into the hole and hollered, "Anybody down in this hole?"
We yelled back, 'Two! Room fer two more! Throw yer stuff down! C'mon
down!"
A bundle hit the floor, and with it come an old blue serge coat, from a
good suit of clothes, no doubt, during one of the earlier wars. Then one man
clumb through each of the holes, and grabbed the coarse net of wire that
lined the ice compartment. They settled down into a good position for riding
and looked around.
"Howdy. I'm Jack."
The Negro boy nodded his head, "Wheeler." He put the last bite into his
mouth, swallowed it down, and said, "Plenty dry."
The second stranger struck a match to relight a spitty cigaret, and
mumbled, "Schwartz, my name. Goddam this bull tobaccer!"
The country outside, I knew, was pretty, sunny, and clear, with patches
of green farming country sticking like moss along the sandy banks of the
little dry desert creeks. Yes, and I would like to climb out on top and take
a look at it. I told the other three men, "Believe I'll roll me one of them
fags, if ya don't mind, an' then git out on top an' watch th' tourists go
past."
The owner of the tobacco handed me the sweaty little sack, and I licked
one together. Lighting it up, I thanked him, and then I dumb up on top, and
soaked up the scenery by ten million square miles. The fast whistling train
put up a pretty stiff wind. It caused my cigaret to burn up like a flare of
some kind, and then a wide current tore the paper from around the tobacco,
and it flew in a million directions, including my own face. Fighting with
the cigaret, I tilted my head in the wrong direction, and my hat sailed
fifty feet up into the air, rolled out across the sand, and hung on a
sticker bush. That was the last I seen of it.
One of the men down on the hole hollered out, "Havin
'
quite
a time up there, ain't you, mister?"
"Quite a blow, quite a blow!" I yelled back into the hole.
"Seein' much up there?" another one asked me.
"Yeah, I see enuff sunshine an' fresh air ta cure all th' trouble in
th' world!" I told them.
"How fast we travelin'?"
"I'd jedge about forty or forty-five.''
The land changed from a farming country into a weather-beaten,
crumbling, and wasted stretch, with gully washes traveling in every way,
brownish, hot rocks piled into canyons, and low humps topped with irony
weeds and long-eared rabbits loping like army mules to get away from the
red-hot train. The hills were deep bright colors, reddish sand, yellow
clays, and always, to the distance, there stood up the high, flat-top
cliffs, breaking again into the washing, drifting, windy face of the desert.
We followed a highway, and once in a while a car coasted past, full of
people going somewhere, and we'd wave and yell at one another.
"Must be th' first time you ever crossed this country," the colored boy
hollered up at me.
"Yeah it is." I blinked my eyes to try to wash the powdery dust out of
them. "First time."
"I been over this road so many times I ought to tell the conductor how
to go," he said. "We'll be headin' down through the low country before very
long. You'll run a hundred miles below sea level and look up all at once,
and see snow on the mountains and then you'll start over the hump right up
to the snow. And you'll freeze yourself coming up out of all of this heat."
"Mighty funny thing."
"You can stay down in this hole and keep pretty warm. If all of us
huddle up and cuddle up and put our hand in each others' pockets, our
heat'll keep us from freezing."
The coal dust and the heat finally got too tough for me, so I clumb
down. The low pounding of the wheels under us, and the swaying and quivering
of the train, got so tiresome that we drifted right off to sleep, and
covered the miles that would put us across the California line. Night got
dark, and we got closer together to keep warm.
There is a little railroad station just east of Yuma where you stop to
take on water. It is still at desert altitude, so you climb down and start
walking around to limber up a little. The moon here is the fullest and
brightest that you ever saw. The medium-size palm plants and fern-looking
trees are waving real easy in the moonlight, and the brush on the face of
the desert throws black shapes and shadows out across the sand. The sand
looks as smooth as a slick pool of crude oil, and shines up yellow and white
all around. The clear-cut cactus shapes, the brush, and the silky sand makes
one of the prettiest pictures that you ever hope to see.
All of the riders, seeing how pretty the night was, walked, trotted,
stretched their legs and arms around, moved their shoulders, and took
exercise to get their blood to running right again. Matches flare up as the
boys light their smokes, and I could get a quick look at their sunburnt,
windburnt faces. Flop hats, caps, or just bareheaded, they looked like the
pioneers that got to knowing the feel and the smell of the roots and leaves
across the early days of the desert, and it makes me want to sort of hang
around there.
Voices talked and said everything.
"Hello."
"Match on yuh?"
"Yeah--shorts on that smoke."
"Headin'?"
" 'Frisco--ship out if I can."
"How's crops in South California?"
"Crops--or cops?"
"Crops. Celery. Fruit. Avacados."
"Work's easy ta git a holt of, but money's hard as hell.''
"Hell, Nelly, I wuz borned a-workin', an' I ain't quit yit!"
"Workin', er lookin' fer work?"
There was a big mixture of people here. I could hear the fast accents
of men from the big Eastern joints. You heard the slow, easy-going voices of
Southern swamp dwellers, and the people from the Southern hills and
mountains. Then another one would talk up, and it would be the dry, nosy
twang of the folks from the flat wheat plains; or the dialect of people that
come from other countries, whose parents talked another tongue. Then you
would hear the slow, outdoor voices of the men from Arizona, riding a short
hop to get a job, see a girl, or to throw a little celebration. There was
the deep, thick voices of two or three Negroes,. It sounded mighty good to
my ears.
All at once the men hushed up. Somebody nudged somebody else, and said,
"Quiet."
Then everybody ducked their heads, turned around and whispered,
"Scatter out. Lay low. Hey! You! Get rid of that cigaret! Bulls a-comin'!"
Three men, dressed in hard-wearing railroad suits, walked up to us
before we could get gone.
Flashing bright lanterns and flashlights on us, we heard them holler,
"Hey! What's goin' on here?"
We didn't say anything back.
"Where you birds headed for?"
Still silence.
"What's wrong? Buncha dam dumb-dumbs? Can't none of you men say
nuthin
'
?" The three men carried guns where it was plain to see,
and hard to overlook. Their hands resting on the butts, shuffling their
lights around in their hands. They rounded us up. The desert is a good place
to look at, but not so easy to hide on. One or two men ducked between cars.
A dozen or so stepped out across the desert, and slid down out of sight
behind little bushes. The cops herded the rest of us into a crowd.
Men kept scattering, taking a chance of going against the cops' orders
to "halt." The few that stood still were asked several questions. "Where yuh
headed?"
"Yuma."
"That'll be th' price of a ticket to Yuma. Step right into the office
there and buy your ticket--hurry up."
"Hell, fellers, you know I ain't got th' price of no ticket; I wouldn't
be ridin' this freight if I had th' money fer a ticket."
"Search `im,"
Each man was shook down, jackets, jumpers, coats, britches and
suspenders, pants legs, shoes. As the searching went on, most of us managed
to make a quick run for it, and get away from the bulls. Trotting around the
end of the train, thinking that we'd give them the dodge, we run head-on
into their spotlights, and was face to face with them. We stopped and stood
still. One by one, they went through our pockets looking for money. If they
found any money, whatever it was, the man was herded into the little house
to buy a ticket as far down the line as his money would carry him. Lots of
the boys had a few bucks on them. They felt pretty silly, with nothing to
eat on, being pushed into buying "tickets" to some town they said they were
heading for.
"Find anything on you?" a man asked me.
"Huh uh." I didn't have any for them to find.
"Listen, see that old boy right in front of you? Pinch 'im. Make 'im
listen to what I'm tellin' him. Ppsssst!"
I punched the man right in front of me. He waited a minute, and then
looked around sideways. "Listen," I said to him.
The other rider commenced to talk, "I just found out"-- then he went
down into a whisper "that this train is gonna pull out. Gonna try ta ditch
us. When I holler, we're all gonna make a break an' swing 'er. This is a
hell of a place to get ditched."
We shook our heads. We all kept extra still, and passed the word along.
Then the train moved backwards a foot or two--and the racket roared all
out across the desert--jarring itself into the notion of traveling again,
and all at once the man at my side hollered as loud as the high-ball whistle
itself, "Go, boy!"
His voice rung out across the cactus.
"Jack rabbit, run!"
Men jumped out from everywhere, from between the cars they'd been
hanging onto, and out from behind the clumps of cactus weeds, and the cops,
nervous, and looking in every direction, stuttered, yelled, and cussed and
snorted, but when the moon looked down at the train steaming out, it saw all
of us sticking on the sides, and on the top, waving, cussing, and thumbing
our noses back in the faces of the "ticket" sellers.
Then it got morning. A cold draft of wind was sucking in around the
sides of the reefer lid. I'd asked the boys during the night how about
closing the lid all of the way down. They told me that you had to keep it
wedged open a little with the handle of the lock, to keep from getting
locked inside. We stuck close together, using each other for sofas and
pillows, and hoped for the sun to get warmer.
I asked them, "Wonder how heavy that big оl' lid is, anyhow?"
"Weighs close to a hunderd pound," the Negro boy said. He was piled in
the corner, stretched out, and his whole body was shaking with the movement
of the train.
"Be a hell of a note if a feller wuz ta git up there, an' start ta
climb out, an' that big lid wuz ta fly down an' ketch his head," another
fellow said. He screwed his face up just thinking about it.
"I knew a boy that lost a arm that way."
"I know a boy that used ta travel around on these dam freights," I
said, "harvestin', an' ramblin' around; an' he was shipped back to his folks
in about a hundred pieces. I seen his face. Wheel had run right across it,
from his ear, across his mouth, over to his other ear. And I don't know, but
every day, ridin' these rattlers, I ketch myself thinkin' about that boy."
" 'Bout as bad a thing as I can think of, is th' two boys they found
starved to death, locked up inside of one of these here ice cars. Figgered
they'd been in there dead 'bout a week or two when they found 'em. One of
'em wasn't more'n twelve or thirteen years old. Jist a little squirt. They
crawled in through the main door, an' pulled it to. First thing they knew, a
brakeman come along, locked th' door, dropped a bolt in th' lock, an' there
they was. Nobody even knew where they's from, or nuthin'. Just as well been
one of your folks or mine." He shook his head, thinking.
The heat got worse as the train sailed along. "Git out on top, an' you
c'n see Old Mexico," somebody said.
"Might as well ta git yer money's worth," I told him, and in a minute
I'd scrambled up the wire net again, and pushed the heavy lid back. The wind
was getting hotter. I could feel the dry, burning sting that let me know
that I was getting a windburn. I peeled off my sweater, and shirt, and
dropped them onto the hot sheet iron, and hooked my arm around an iron
brace, and laid stretched out flat of my back, getting a good Mexican border
sunburn along with my Uncle Sam windburn. I get dark awful quick in the sun
and wind. My skin likes it, and so do I.
The Negro boy clumb up and set down beside me. His greasy cap whipped
in the wind, but he held the bill tight, and it didn't blow off. He turned
the cap around backwards, bill down the back of his neck, and there was no
more danger of losing it. "Some country!" he told me, rolling his eyes
across the sand, cactus, and crooked little bushes, "I guess every part of
th' country's good for somethin', if you c'n jist only find out what!"
"Yeah," I said; "Wonder what this is good for?"
"Rabbits, rattlesnakes, gila monsters, tarantulars, childs of the
earth, scorpions, lizards, coyotes, wild cats, bob cats, grasshoppers,
beetles, bugs, bears, bulls, buffaloes, beef," he said.
"All of that out there?" I asked him.
"No, I was jist runnin' off at th' mouth," he laughed. I knew that he
had learned a lot about the country somewhere, and guessed that he'd beat
this trail more times than one. He moved his shoulders and squared his self
on top of the train. I saw big strong muscles and heavy blood vessels, and
tough, calloused palms of his hands; and I knew that for the most part he
was an honest working man.
"Lookit that ol' rabbit go!" I poked him in the ribs, and pointed
across a ditch.
"Rascal really moves!" he said, keeping up with the jack.
"Watch 'im pick up speed," I said.
"Sonofa bitch. See him clear dat fence?" He shook his head, and smiled
a little bit.
Three or four more rabbits began showing their ears above the black
weeds. Big grayish brown ears lolling along as loose and limber as could be.
"Whole dam family's out!" he told me. "Looks like it! Ma an' pa an' th'
whole fam damly!" I said. 'Purty outfits, ain't they? Rabbits."
He eyed the herd and nodded his head. He was a deep-thinking man. I
knew just about what he was thinking about, too.
"How come you ta come out on top ta ride?" I asked my friend.
"Why not?"
"Oh, I dunno. Said somebody had ta go."
"How'd it come up?" I asked him.
"Well, I sort of asked him for a cigaret, and he said that he wasn't
panhandlin' for nickels to get tobacco for boys like me. I don't want to
have no trouble."
"Boys like you?"
"Yeah, I dunno. Difference 'tween you an' me. He'd let you have
tobacco, 'cause you an' him's th' same color."
"What in th' Goddam hell has that got ta do with ridin' together?" I
asked him.
"He said it was gettin' pretty hot down in th' hatch, you know, said
ever'body was sweatin' a lot. He told me th' further away from each other
that we stay th' better we're gonna get along, but I knew what he meant by
if'
"Wuz that all?"
"Yeah."
"This is one hell of a place ta go ta bringin' up that kinda dam talk,"
I said.
The train drew into El Centre, and stooped and filled her belly,
panting and sweating. The riders could be seen hitting the ground for a walk
and a stretch.
Schwartz, the man with the sack of smoking, come out of his hole,
grumbling and cussing under his breath. "Worst Goddam hole on the train, and
I had to get caught down in it all night!" he told me, climbing past me on
his way to the ground.
"Best ridin' car on th' rail," I said. I was right, too.
"It's th' worst in my book, boy," Schwartz said.
The fourth man from our end of the car crawled out and dropped down to
the cinders. All during the ride, he hadn't mentioned his name. He was a
smiling man, even walking along by his self. When he walked up behind us, he
heard Schwartz say something else about how bad our riding hole was, and he
said in a friendly way, " 'Bout th' easiest riding car I've hung in a many a
day."
"Like hell it is," Schwartz spoke up, stopping, and looking the fellow
in the face. The man looked down mostly at Schwartz's feet and listened to
see what Schwartz would say next. Then Schwartz went on talking at the
mouth, "It might ride easy, but th' Goddam thing stinks--see?"
"Stinks?" The man looked at him funny.
"I said stink, didn't I?" Schwartz ran his hand down in his pocket.
This is a pretty bad thing to do amongst strangers, talking in this tone of
voice and running your hand in your pocket. "You don't have to be afraid,
Stranger, I ain't got no barlow knife," Schwartz told him.
And then the other man looked along the cinders and smiled and said,
"Listen, mister, I wouldn't be the least bit afraid of a whole car load of
fellows just like you, with a knife in each pocket and two in each hand."
"Tough about it, huh?" Schwartz frowned the best he could.
"Ain't nothing tough about me, sort of--but I don't make a practice of
bein' afraid of you nor anybody else." He settled his self a little more
solid on his feet.
It looked like a good fist fight was coming off. Schwartz looked
around, up and down the track. "I bet you a dollar that most of the fellows
riding this train feel just about like I do about riding in a hole with a
dam nigger!"
The Negro boy made a walk toward Schwartz. The smiling man stepped in
between them. The Negro said, "Nobody don't hafta take my part, I can take
up for myself. Ain't nobody gonna call me--"
"Take it easy, Wheeler, take it easy," the other man said. "This guy
wants something to happen. Just likes to hear his guts crawl."
I took the Negro boy by the arm, and we walked along talking it over.
"Nobody else thinks like that goof. Hell, let 'im go an' find another car.
Let 'im go. They'll run him out of every hole on th' train. Don't worry. Ya
cain't help what ya cain't help."
"You know, that's right," Wheeler told me.
He pulled his arm away from me, and straightened his button-up sweater
a little. We turned around and looked back at our friend and Schwartz. Just
like you would shoo a fly or a chicken down the road, our friend was waving
his arms, and shooing Schwartz along. We could hear him awful faint,
yelling, "Go on, you old bastard! Get your gripey ass out of here! And if
you so much as even open your trap to make trouble for anybody riding this
train, I'll ram my fist down your throat!" It was a funny thing. I felt a
little sorry for the old boy, but he needed somebody to teach him a lesson,
and evidently he was in the hands of a pretty good teacher.
We waited till the dust had settled again, and men our teacher friend
trotted up to where we stood. He was waving at bunches of men, and laughing
deep down in his lungs.
'That's that, I reckon," he was saying when he got up to us.
The colored boy said, "I'm gonna run over across th' highway an' buy a
package of smokes. Be back in a minute--" He left us and ran like a desert
rabbit.
There was a faucet dripping water beside a yellow railroad building. We
stopped and drank all we could hold. Washed our hands and faces, and combed
our heads. There was a long line of men waiting to use the water. While we
walked away, holding our faces to the slight breath of air that was moving
across the yards, he asked me, "Say your name was?"
I said, "Woody."
"Mine's Brown. Glad ta meet you, Woody. You know I've run onto this
skin trouble before." He walked along on the cinders.
"Skin trouble. That's a dam good name for it." I walked along beside
him.
"Hard to cure it after it gets started, too. I was born and raised in a
country that's got all kinds of diseases, and this skin trouble is the worst
one of the lot," he told me.
"Bad," I answered him.
"I got sick and tired of that kind of stuff when I was just a kid
growing up at home. You know. God, I had hell with some of my folks about
things like that. But, seems like, little at a time, I'd sort of convince
them, you know; lots of folks I never could convince. They're kinda like the
old bellyache fellow, they cause a lot of trouble to a hundred people, and
then to a thousand people, all on account of just some silly, crazy notion.
Like you can help what color you are. Goddam' it all. Goddamit all. Why
don't they spend that same amount of time and trouble doing something good,
like painting their Goddam barns, or building some new roads?"
The four-time whistle blew, and the train bounced back a little. That
was our sign. Guys walked and ran along the side of the cars, mumbling and
talking, swinging onto their iron ladders, and mounting the top of the
string. Wheeler hadn't come back with the cigarets. I went over the top, and
when I got set down, I commenced yanking my shirt off again, being a big
hand for sunshine. I felt it burning my hide. The train was going too fast
now for anybody to catch it. If Wheeler was on the ground, he's just
naturally going to have a little stay over in El Centre. I looked over the
other edge of the car, and saw his head coming over the rim, and I saw that
he was smiling. Smoke flew like a rain cloud from a new tailor-made cigaret
in his mouth. He scooted over beside me, and flipped ashes into the breeze.
"You get anything to eat?" he said.
I said, "No," that I hadn't got anything.
He reached under his sweater and under his belt and pulled out a brown
paper sack, wet, dripping with ice water, and held it up to me and said,
"Cold pop. I brung a couple. Wait. Here's something to gnaw on with it," and
he handed me a milk candy bar.
"Candy's meal," I told him.
"Sure is; last you all day. That was my last four bits."
"Four bits more'n I got," I joked.
We chewed and drank and talked very little then for a long time.
Wheeler said that he was turning the train back to the railroad company at
Indio. That's the town coming up.
"I know just where to go," Wheeler told me, when the train come to a
quick stop. "Don't you worry 'bout me, boy." Then before I could talk, he
went on saying, "Now listen, I know this track. See? Now, don't you hang on
'er till she gets to Los Angeles, but you leave 'er up here at Colton.
You'll be just about fifty miles from L.A. If you stay on till you come to
L.A., them big dicks'll throw you so far back in that Lincoln Heights jail,
you never will see daylight again. So remember, get off at Colton, hitch on
in to Pasadena, and head out north through Burbank, San Fernando, and stay
right on that 99 to Turlock." Wheeler was climbing over the side. He stuck
out his hand and we shook.
I said, "Good luck, boy, take it easy, but take it."
He said, "Same to you, boy, and I always take it easy, and I always
take it!"
Then be stood still for a few seconds, bending his body over the edge
of the car, and looked at me and said, "Been good to know you!"
Indio to Edom, rich farm lands. Edom to Banning, with the trees popping
up everywhere. Banning to Beaumont, with the fruit hanging all over the
trees, and groceries all over the ground, and people all over everything.
Beaumont to Redlands, the world turned into such a thick green garden of
fruits and vegetables that I didn't know if I was dreaming or not. Coming
out of the dustbowl, the colors so bright and smells so thick all around,
that it seemed almost too good to be true.
Redlands to Colton, A railroad and farming town, full of people that
are wheeling and dealing. Hitch-hikers are standing around thicker than
citizens. The 99 looks friendly, heading west to the coast. I'll see the
Pacific Ocean, go swimming, and flop on the beach. I'll go down to Chinatown
and look around. I'll see the Mexican section. I'll see the whole works.
But, no, I don't know. Los Angeles is too big for me. I'm too little for Los
Angeles. I'll duck Los Angeles and go north by Pasadena, out through
Burbank, like Wheeler told me. I'm against the law, they tell me.
Sign says: "Fruit, see, but don't pick it." Another one reads:
"Fruit--beat it." Another one: "Trespassers prosecuted. Keep Out. Get away
from Here."
Fruit is on the ground, and it looks like the trees have been just too
glad to grow it, and give it to you. The tree likes to grow and you like to
eat it; and there is a sign between you and the tree saying: "Beware The
Mean Dog's Master."
Fruit is rotting on the ground all around me. Just what in the hell has
gone wrong here, anyhow? I'm not a very smart man. Maybe it ought to be this
way, with the crops laying all around over the ground. Maybe they couldn't
get no pickers just when they wanted them, and they just let the fruit go to
the bad. There's enough here on the ground to feed every hungry kid from
Maine to Florida, and from there to Seattle.
A Twenty-nine Ford coupe stops and a Japanese boy gives me a ride. He
is friendly, and tells me all about the country, the crops and vineyards.
"All you have got to do out in this country is to just pour water
around some roots, and yell, 'Grapes!' and next morning the leaves are full
grown, and the grapes are hanging in big bunches, all nice and ready to
pick!"
The little car traveled right along. A haze was running around the
trees, and the colors were different than any that I'd ever seen in my life.
The knotty little oak and iron brush that I'd been used to seeing rolling
with the Oklahoma hills and looking smoky in the hollers, had been home to
my eyes for a long time. My eyes had got sort of used to Oklahoma's beat-up
look, but here, with this sight of fertile, rich, damp, sweet soil that
smelled like the dew of a jungle, I was learning to love another, greener,
part of life. I've tried to keep loving it ever since I first seen it.
The Japanese boy said, "Which way do you plan to go through Los
Angeles?"
"Pasadena? That how ya say if? Then north through Burbank, out that
a-way!"
"If you want to stay with me, you'll be right in the middle of Los
Angeles, but you'll be on a big main highway full of trucks and cars out of
town. Road forks here. Make up your mind quick."
"Keep a-drivin'," I said, craning my neck back to watch the Pasadena
road disappear under the palm trees to the north of us.
We rounded a few hills and knolls, curving in our little jitney, and
all at once, coming over a high place, the lights of Los Angeles jumped up,
running from north to south as far as I could see, and hanging around on the
hills and mountains just as if it was level ground. Red and green neon
flickering for eats, sleeps, sprees, salvation, money made, lent, blowed,
spent. There was an electric sign for dirty clothes, clean clothes, honky
tonky tonks, no clothes, floor shows, gyp-joints, furniture in and out of
homes. The fog was trying to get a headlock on the houses along the high
places, Patches of damp clouds whiffed along the paving in crazy,
disorganized little bunches, hunting some more clouds to work with. Los
Angeles was lost in its own pretty lights and trying to hold out against the
big fog that rolls in from that ocean, and the people that roll in just as
reckless, and rambling, from the country as big as the ocean back East.
It was about seven or eight o'clock when I shook hands with my Japanese
friend, and we wished each other luck. I got out on the pavement at the
Mission Plaza, a block from everything in the world, and listened to the
rumbling of people and smoking of cars pouring fumes out across the streets
and alleys.
"Hungry?" the boy asked me.
"Pretty empty. Just about like an old empty tub,'
'
I laughed
at him. If he'd offered me a nickel or a dime, I would of took it, I'd of
spent it on a bus to get the hell out of that town. I was empty. But not
starved yet, and more than something to eat, I felt like I wanted to get
outside of the city limits.
"Good luck! Sony I haven't any money on me!" he hollered as he circled
and wheeled away into the big traffic.
I walked along a rough, paved street. To my left, the shimmy old houses
ran up a steep hill, and tried to pretend that they were keeping families of
people in out of the wind and the weather. To my right there was the noise
of the grinding, banging, clanging, and swishing of the dirty railroad
yards. Behind me, south, the big middle of Los Angeles, chasing hamburgers.
Ahead of me, north, the highway ached on, blinking its red and green eyes
and groaning under the heavy load of traffic that it had to carry. Trains
hooted in the low yards close under my right elbow, and scared me out of my
wits.
"How'd ya git outta this town?" I asked a copper.
He looked me over good, and said, "Just follow your nose, boy. You can
read signs. Just keep traveling!''
I walked along the east side of the yards. There was lots of little
restaurants beside the road, where the tourists, truck drivers, and
railroaders dropped in for a meal. Hot coffee steamed up from the cups along
the counters, and the smell of meat frying leaked out through the doors. It
was a cold night. Drops of steamy moisture formed on the windows, and it
blurred out the sight of the people eating and drinking.
I stopped into a little, sawed-off place, and the only person in sight,
away back, was an old Chinaman. He looked up at me with his gray beard, but
didn't say a single word.
I stood there a minute, enjoying the warmth. Then I walked back to
where he was, and asked him, "Have ya got anything left over that a man
could do some work for?"
He set right still, reading his paper, and then looked up and said, "I
work. Hard all day. Every day. I got big bunch people to feed. We eat things
left over. We do work."
"No job?" I asked him.
"No job. We do job. Self."
I hit the breeze again and tried two or three other places along the
road. Finally, I found an old gray-headed couple humped up in front of a
loop-legged radio, listening to some of the hollering being done by a lady
name Amy Semple Temple, or something like that. I woke the old pair up out
of their sermon on hell fire and hot women, and asked them if they had some
work to do for a meal. They told me to grab some scalding hot water and mop
the place down. After three times over the floors, tables, kitchen, and
dishes, I was wrapping myself around a big chicken dinner, with all of the
trimmings.
The old lady handed me a lunch and said, "Here's some-thing extra to
take with you--don't let John know about it."
And as I walked out the door again, listening to the whistle of the
trains getting ready to whang out, John walked over and handed me a quarter
and said, "Here's somethin' ta he'p ya on down th' road. Don't let th' оl'
lady know."
A man dressed in an engineer's cap and striped overhalls told me that a
train was making up right at that point, and would pull out along about four
in the morning. It was now about midnight, so I dropped into a coffee joint
and took an hour sipping at a cup. I bought a pint of pretty fair red port
wine with the change, and stayed behind a signboard, drinking wine to keep
warm.
A Mexican boy walked up on me and said, "Pretty cold iss it not? Do you
want a smoke?"
I lit up one of his cigarets, and slipped him the remains of the wine
jug. He took about half of the leavings, and looked at me between gulps,
"Ahhhh! Warms you up, no?"
"Kill it. I done had my tankful," I told him, and heard the bubbles
play a little song that quit when the wine was all downed.
"Time's she gittin' ta be? Know?" I said to him. "Four o'clock or
after," he said. "When does that Fresno freight run?" I asked him. ''Right
now," he said.
I ran out into the yards, jumping dark rails, heavy switches, and
darting among the blind cars. A string of black ones were moving backwards
in the wrong direction. I mounted the side and went over the top, and down
the other side, and took a risk on scrambling between another string at the
hitch. I could just barely see, it was so dark. The cars were so blended
into the night. But, all at once, I looked up within about a foot of my
face, and saw a blur, and a light, and a blur, and a light, and I knew that
here was one going my way. I watched the light come along between the cars,
and finally spotted an open top car, which was easier to see; and grabbed
the ladder, and jumped over into a load of heavy cast-iron machinery. I laid
down in the end of the car, and rested.
The train pulled along slow for a while. I ducked as close up behind
the head end of the car as I could to break the wind. Pretty soon the old
string got the kinks jerked out of her, and whistled through a lot of little
towns. Then we hit a good fifty for about an hour, and started up some
pretty tough grade. It got colder higher up. The fog turned into a drizzle,
and the drizzle into a slow rain.
I imagined a million things bouncing along in the dark. A quick tap of
the air brakes to slow the train down, and the hundred tons of heavy
machinery would shift its weight all over me, I felt so soft and little. I
had felt so tough and big just a few minutes ago.
The lonesome whip of the wind sounded even more lonesome when the big
engine joined in on the whistling. The wheels hummed a song, and the weather
got colder. We started gaining altitude almost like an airplane. I pulled
myself up into a little ball and shook till my bones ached all over. The
weather didn't pay any more attention to my clothes than if I didn't have
them on. My muscles drew up into hard, leathery strings that hurt. I kept a
little warmer by remembering people I'd known, how they looked, faces and
all, and all about the warm desert, and cactus and sunshine growing
everywhere; picturing in my mind something friendly and free, something to
sort of blot out the wind and the freezing train.
On a big slope, that went direct into Bakersfield, we stopped on a
siding to let the mail go by. I got off and walked ten or fifteen cars down
the track, creaking like an eighty-year-old rocking chair. I had to walk
slow along the steep cinder bank, gradually getting the use of myself back
again.
I was past the train when the engineer turned the brakes loose, give
her the gun, and started off.
I'd never seen a train start up this fast before. Most trains take a
little time chugging, getting the load swung into motion. But, setting on
this long straight slope, she just lit out. Running along the side, I just
barely managed to catch it. I had to take a different car as mine was
somewhere down the line. In a few minutes the train was making forty miles
an hour, then fifty, then sixty, down across the strip of country where the
mountains meet the desert south of Bakersfield. The wind blew and the
morning was frosty and cold. Between the two cars, it was freezing. I
managed to mount to the top, and pull a reefer lid open. I looked in, and
saw the hole was filled with fine chips of new ice.
I held on with all of my strength, and crawled over and opened up
another lid. It was packed with chipped ice, too. I was too near froze to
try the jump from one car to the next, so I crawled down the ladder between
two cars--sort of a wind-break--and held on.
My hands froze stiff around the handle of the ladder, but they were
getting too cold and weak to hold on much longer. I listened below to five
or six hundred railroad wheels, clipping the rails through the morning
frost, and felt the windy ice from the refrigerator car that I was hanging
onto.
The fingers of one hand slipped from around the handle. I spent twenty
minutes or so trying to fish an old rag out of my pocket Finally I got it
wound around my hands and, by blowing my breath inside the cloth for a few
minutes, seemed to be getting them a little warmer.
The weather gained on me, though, and my breath turned into thick
frosty ice all over my handkerchief, and my hands started freezing worse
than ever. My finger slid loose again, and I remembered the tales of the
railroaders, people found along the tracks, no way of telling who they were.
If I missed my hold here, one thing was sure, I'd never know what hit
me, and I'd never slide my feet under that good eating table full of hot
square meals at the big marble house of my rich aunt.
The sun looked warmer as it came up, but the desert is cold when it is
clear early in the morning, and the train fanned such a breeze that the sun
didn't make much difference.
That was the closest to the 6x3 that I've ever been. My mind ran back
to millions of things--my whole life was brought up to date, and all of the
people I knew, and all that they meant to me. And, no doubt, my line of
politics took on quite a change right then and there, even though I didn't
know I was getting educated at the time.
The last twenty miles into the Bakersfield yards was the hardest work,
and worst pain, that I ever run onto; that is, of this particular brand.
There are pains and work of different sorts, but this was a job that my life
depended on, and I didn't have even one ounce to say about it. I was just a
little animal of some kind swinging on for my life, and the pain was not
being able to do anything about it.
I left the train long before it stopped, and hit the ground running and
stumbling. My legs worked more like toys than like my real ones. But the sun
was warm in Bakersfield, and I drank all of the good water I could soak up
from a faucet outside, and walked over to an old shack that was out of use
in the yards, and keeled over on the cinders in the sun. I woke up several
hours later, and my train had gone on without me.
Two men said that another train was due out in a few minutes, so I kept
an eye run along the tracks, and caught it when it pulled out. The sun was
warm now, and there were fifty men lined up along the top of the train,
smoking, talking, waving at the folks in cars on the highway, and keeping
quiet.
Bakersfield on into Fresno. Just this side of Fresno, the men piled off
and walked through the yards, planning to meet the train again when it come
out the north end. We took off by ones and twos and tried to get hold of
something to eat. Some of the men had a few nickels, some a dollar or two
hid on them, and others made the alleys knocking on the back doors of
bakeries, greasy-spoon joints, vegetable stands. The meal added up to a
couple or three bites apiece, after we'd all pitched ours in. It was
something to fill your guts.
I saw a sign tacked up in the Fresno yards that said: Free Meal &
Nights Lodging. Rescue Mission.
Men looked at the sign and asked us, "Anybody here need ta be rescued?"
"From what?" somebody hollered.
"All ya got ta do is ta go down there an' kneel down an' say yer
prayers, an' ya git a free meal an' a flop!" somebody explained.
"Yeah? Prayers? Which one o' youse boys knows any t'ing about any
prayers?" an Eastern-sounding man yelled out.
"I'd do it, if I wuz just hungery 'nuff! I'd say 'em some prayers!"
"I don't hafta do no prayin' ta get fed!" a hard looker laughed out. He
was poking a raw onion whole into his mouth, tears trickling down his jaws.
"Oh, I don't know," a quieter man answered him, "I sometimes believe in
prayin'. Lots of folks believes in prayin' before they go out to work, an'
others pray before they go out to fight. An' even if you don't believe in a
God up on a cloud, still, prayin's a pretty good way to get your mind
cleared up, or to get the nerve that it takes to do anything. People pray
because it makes them think serious about things, and, God or no God, it's
all that most of them know how to do." He was a friendly man with whitish
hair, and his easy temper sounded in his voice. It was a thinking voice.
" 'Course," a big Swede told us, "we justa kid along. These monkeys
dun't mean about halfa what they say. Now, like, you take me, Swede, I
prayed long time ago. Usta believe in it strong. Then, whoof, an' a lot of
other things happen that knock my prop out from under me, make me a railroad
bum, an'--I just forget how to pray an' go church."
A guy that talked more and faster said, "I think it's dam crooks that
cause folks like us to be down and out and hungry, worried about finding
jobs, worried about our folks, and them a-worrying about us."
"Last two or three years, I been sorta thinkin' long them lines--an' it
looks like I keep believin' in somethin'; I don't know exactly, but it's in
me, an' in you, an' in ever' dam one of us." This talker was a young man
with a smooth face, thick hair that was bushy, and a fairly honest look
somewhere about him. "An' if we c'n jist find out how ta make good use of
it, we'll find out who's causin' us alla th' trouble in the' world, like
this Hitler rat, an' git ridda them, an' then not let anybody be outta work,
or beat down an' wonderin' where their next meal's a comin' from, by God,
with alla these crops an' orchards bubblin' up around here!"
"If God was ta do what's right," a heavy man said, "he'd give all of
these here peaches an' cherries, an' oranges, an
'
grapes, an'
stuff to eat, to th' folks that are hungry. An' for a hungry man to pray an'
try to tell God how to run his business, looks sort of backwards, plumb
silly to me. Hell, a man's got two hands an' a mind of his own, an' feet an'
legs to take him where he wants to go; an' if he sees something wrong with
the world, he'd ought to get a lot of people together, an' look up in th'
air an' say, Hey, up there, God, I'm--I mean, we're goin' to fix this!"
Then I put my three cents worth in, saying, "I believe that when ya
pray, you're tryin' ta get yer thinkin' straight, tryin
'
ta see
what's wrong with th' world, an' who's ta blame fer it. Part of it is
crooks, crooked laws, an' jist dam greedy people, people that's afraid of
this an
'
afraid of that. Part of it's all of this, an' part of
it's jist dam shore our own fault."
"Hell, from what you say, you think we're to blame for everybody here
being on the freights?" This young traveler reared his head back and laughed
to himself, chewing a mouthful of sticky bread.
"I dunno, fellers, just to be right real frank with you. But
it
'
s our own fault, all right, hell yes. It's our own personal
fault if we don't talk up, 'er speak out, 'er somethin'--I ain't any too
clear on it."
An old white-headed man spoke close to me and said, "Well, boys, I was
on the bum, I suppose, before any of you was born into this world."
Everybody looked around mostly because he was talking so quiet, interrupting
his eating. "All of this talking about what's up in the sky, or down in
hell, for that matter, isn't half as important as what's right here, right
now, right in front of your eyes. Things are tough. Folks broke. Kids
hungry. Sick. Everything. And people has just got to have more faith in one
another, believe in each other. There's a spirit of some kind we've all got.
That's got to draw us all together."
Heads nodded. Faces watched the old man. He didn't say any more.
Toothless for years, he was a little bit slow finishing up his piece of old
bread.
THE HOUSE
O
N THE HILL
"Hey! Hey! Train's pullin' out in about ten minnits! This a way!
Ever'body!"
We got rolling again. The high peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains
jumped up their heads in the east. Snow patches white in the sun. There was
the green valley of the San Joaquin River, rich, good-smelling; hay meadows
waving with thick, juicy feed that is life; people working, walking bending
down, carrying heavy loads. Cars from farms waited at the cross-roads, some
loaded down with wooden crates, and boxes, and some with tall tin cans of
cow's milk. The air was as sweet as could be, and like the faint smell of
blossom honey.
Before long we hit a heavy rain. A lot of us crawled into an empty car.
Wet and yelling, we hollered and sung till the sun went down, and it got
wetter and dark. New riders swung into our car. We curled up on strips of
tough brown wrapping paper, pulling it over us like blankets, and using our
sweaters and coats for pillows.
Somebody pulled the doors shut, and we rambled on through the night.
When I woke up again, the train had stopped, and everything was in a wild
hustle and a bustle. Guys snaking me, and saying in my ear, "Hey! Wake up!
Tough town! Boy! This is far's she goes!"
"Tough bulls! Gotta git th' hell outta here. C'mon, wake up."
I rousted myself out, pulling my wet sweater over my head. The train
was falling heavy as about twenty-five or thirty of us ganged up in front of
a Chinese bean joint; and when a certain big, black patrol car wheeled
around a corner, and shot its bright spotlight into our faces, we brushed
our clothing, straightened our hats and neck ties, and in order to act like
legal citizens, we marched into the Chinaman's bean joint.
Inside, it was warm. The joint contained seven warped stools. And two
level-headed Chinese proprietors, "Chili bean! Two chili bean! Seven chili
bean!" I heard one say through the hole in the wall to the cook in the back.
And from the kitchen, "Me gotcha! All chili bean!"
I was going through the process, not only of starving, but also of
being too hot and too cold about fifty times in the last forty-eight hours.
I felt dizzy and empty and sick. The peppery smell of the hot chili and
beans made me feel worse.
I waited about an hour and a half, until ten minutes before the
Chinaman locked the door, and then I said, "Say, friend, will you gimme a
bowl of yer chili an' beans fer this green sweater? Good sweater."
"You let me slee sletee."
"Okay--here--feel. Part of it's all wool."
"Chili bean you want this sletee for?"
"Yeah. Cuppa coffee, too."
"Price. You go up."
"Okay. No coffee."
"No. No chili bean."
"Good sweater," I told him.
"Okay. You keep. You see, I got plentee sletee. You think good sletee,
you keep sletee. My keep chili bean.''
I set there on the stool, hating to go out into the cold night and
leave that good warm stove. I made a start for the door, and went past three
men finishing off their first or second bowl of chili and beans. The last
man was a long, tall, irony-looking Negro. He kept eating as I walked past,
never turned his face toward me, but told me, "Let me see yo sweatah. Heah's
yo dime. Lay th' sweatah down theah on th' stool. Bettah hurry an' ordah yo'
chili. Joint'll shut down heah in a minute."
I dropped the sweater in a roll on the stool, and parked myself on the
next stool, and a bowl of red-hot, extra hot, double hot chili beans slid
down the counter and under my nose.
It was long about two o'clock when I stepped out onto the sidewalk, and
the rain was getting harder, meaner, and colder, and blowing stiffer down
the line. A friendly looking cop, wearing a warm overcoat, walked around the
corner. Three or four of the boys stood along under the porch, so as to keep
out of the drift of the rain. The cop said, "Howdy, howdy, boys. Time to
call it a night." He smiled like a man doing an awful good job.
"What time yuh got?" a Southern boy asked him, dripping wet.
"Bed time."
"Oh."
"Say, mister," I said to him, "listen, we're jist a bunch of guys on
th' road, tryin' ta git somewhere where ther's a job of work of some kind.
Come in on that there freight. Rainin', an' we ain't got no place ta sleep
in outta th' weather. I wuz jist wonderin' if you'd let us sleep here in yer
jail house--jist fer tonight."
"You might," he said, smiling, tickling all of the boys.
"Where's yer jail at?" I asked him.
"It's over across town," he answered.
Then I said, "Reckon ya could put us up?"
And he said, "I certainly can."
"Boy, man, you're a pretty good feller. We're ready, ain't we, guys?"
"I'm ready."
"Git inside out of this bad night."
"Me, too."
The same answer came from everybody.
"Then, see," I said to the cop, "if anything happens, they'd, you'd
know it wuzn't us done it."
And then he looked at us like a politician making a speech, and said,
"You boys know what'd happen if you went over there to that jail to sleep
tonight?"
We said, "Huh uh." "No." "What?"
"Well, they'd let you in, all right, not for just one night, but for
thirty nights and thirty days. Give you an awful good chance to rest up out
on the County Farm, and dry your clothes by a steam radiator every night.
They'd like you men so much, they'd just refuse to let you go. Just keep you
for company over there." He had a cold, sour smile across his face by now.
"Let's go, fella." Somebody back of me jerked my arm.
Without talking back, I savvied, and walked away. Most of the men had
left. Only six or eight of us in a little bunch. "Where we gonna sleep,
anybody know?" I asked them.
"Just keep quiet and follow us."
The cop walked away around the corner.
"And don't ever let a smiling cop fool yuh," a voice in back of me told
us. "That wasn't no real smile. Tell by his face an' his eyes."
"Okay, I learnt somethin' new," I said, "But where are we gonna sleep
at?"
"We gotta good warm bed, don't you worry. Main thing is just to walk,
an' don't talk.''
Across a boggy road, rutty, and full of mudholes, over a sharp
barb-wire fence, through a splashing patch of weeds that soaked our clothes
with cold water, down some crunching cinders, we followed the shiny rails
again in the rain about a half a mile. This led us to a little green shack,
built low to the ground like a doghouse. We piled in at a square window, and
lit on a pile of sand.
"Godamighty!"
"Boy, howdy!"
"Ain't this fine?"
"Warmer'n hell."
"Lemme dig a hole. I wanta dig a hole, an' jist bury myself. I ain't no
live man. I'm dead. I been dead a long, long time. I'm gonna jist dig me a
grave, an' crawl off in it, an' pull my sand in on top of me. Gonna sleep
like old Rip Van Twinkle, twenty, thirty, or fifty dam years. An' when I
wake up, I want things ta be changed around better. When I wake up in th'
mornin'--" And I was tired and wet, covering up in the sand, talking. I
drifted off to sleep. Loose and limber, I felt everything in the world just
slipping out from under me and fading away. I woke up before long with my
feet burning and stinging. Everything was sailing and mixed up backwards,
but when they got straight I saw a man in a black suit bending over me with
a big heavy club. He was beating the bottoms of my feet.
"You birds get up, and get your ass out of here! Get up. Goddam you!"
There were three men in black suits, and the black Western hats that
told you so plain that you was dealing with a railroad deputy.
They had come in through a little narrow door and were herding us out
the same. "Get out of here, and don't you come back! If you show your head
back in this sandhouse, you'll go to the judge! Ninety days on that pea farm
would do you loafers good!"
Grabbing shoes, hats, little dirty bundles, the migratory workers were
chased out of their bed of clean sand. Back outside, the rain was keeping
up, and in the V-shaped beam of the spotlights from the patrol car you could
see that even the rain was having trouble.
"Git on outta town there!" "Keep travelin'!" "Don't you even look
back!" "Start walkin'!" We heard low, grumbling voices coming from the car
behind us. Heard, too, the quiet motor start up and the gears shifted as the
car rolled along back of us. It followed us about a half a mile, rain and
mud. It drove us across a cow pasture.
From the car, one of the watchmen yelled, "Don't you show up in Tracy
again tonight! You'll be dam good an' sorry if you do! Keep walking!"
The car lights cut a wide, rippling circle in the dark, and we knew
that they had turned around and went back to town. The roar of their exhaust
purred and died away.
We'd marched out across the cow pasture, smiling and yelling, "Hep!
Hep! Whattaya say, men? Hep! Hep! Hep!"
Now we stood in the rain and cackled like chickens, absolutely lost and
buffaloed. Never before had I had anything quite so dam silly happen to me.
Our clothes were on crooked and twisted; shoes full of mud and gravel. Hair
soaking wet, and water running down our faces. It was a funny sight to see
human beings in any such a shape. Wet as we could get, dirty and muddy as
the ground, we danced up and down through puddles, ran around in wide
circles and laughed our heads off. There is a stage of hard luck that turns
into fun, and a stage of poverty that turns into pride, and a place in
laughing that turns into fight.
"Okay. Hey, fellers! C'mere. Tell ya what we're gonna do. We're a-gonna
all git together, see, an' go walkin' right back into town, an' go back to
sleep in that sandhouse ag'in. What say? Who's with me?" a tall, slippery,
stoop-shouldered boy was telling us.
"Me!"
"Me."
"Same fer me!"
"Whatever you guys does, I'll stick."
"Hell, I c'n give that carload of bulls a machine gun apiece, an' whip
th' whole outfit with my bare hands!" an older man said.
"But, no. We don't aim ta cause no trouble. Ain't gonna be no
fightin'."
"I'd just like to get one good poke at that fat belly."
"Get that outta your head, mister."
Just walking back toward town, talking.
"Hey. How many of us here?"
'Two. Four. Six. Eight."
"Mebbe we'd better split up in twos. Too plain to see a whole big
bunch. We'll go into town by pairs. If you make it back to the old
blacksmith shop right there by the old Chinese bean joint, whistle once,
real long. This way, if two gets caught, the rest'll get away."
"What'll we do if we get caught an' run in jail?"
"Whistle twice, real short," and under his breath he showed us how to
whistle.
"Can everybody here whistle?"
"I can."
Four of us said yes. So one whistler and one expert listener was put
into each pair.
"Now, remember, if you see the patrol car's gonna ketch yuh, stop
before it gits yuh, an' whistle twice, real short an' sweet."
"Okay. First pair take that street yonder. Second pair, drop over a
block. Third couple, down the paved highway; and us, last pair, will walk
back down this same cow trail that we got run out of town on. Remember,
don't start no trouble with them coppers. Loaded dice, boys; you cain't win.
Just got to try to outsmart 'em a little."
Back through the slick mud, walking different ways, we cussed and
laughed. In a few minutes, there came a long, low whistle, and we knew the
first pair had made it to the blacksmith shop. Then, in a minute or so,
another long one. We came in third, and I let out a whistle that was one of
California's best. The last pair walked in and we stood under the wide eaves
of the shop, watching the water drip off of the roof, missing our noses by
about three inches. We had to stand up straight against the wall to stay out
of the rain.
The sandhouse was just across the street and up a few steps.
"Lay low."
"Duck."
"Car."
"Hey! Ho! Got us ag'in!"
The new model black sedan coasted down a side street, out over in our
direction real quick, and turned two spots on us. We held our hands up to
keep the lights from blinding us. Nobody moved. We thought maybe they'd made
a mistake. But, as the car rolled up to within about fifty feet of us, we
knew that we were caught, and got ready to be cussed out, and took to the
can.
A deputy opened his front door, turned off one spotlight, and shot his
good flashlight into our faces. One at a time, he looked us over. We blinked
back at him, like a herd of young deer, but nobody was to say afraid.
"Come here, you--" he said in a hard, imitation voice.
The light was in my face. I thought it was shining in everybody's, so I
didn't move.
"Hey, mister. Come over here, please." He was a big heavy man, and his
voice had a nice clank to it, like cocking back the hammer of a rifle.
I shook the light out of my eyes and said, "Who?"
"You."
I turned around to the men with me and told them loud enough for the
cops to hear it, "Be right back, fellers."
I heard the patrol man turn around to the other cops and kid them about
something, and as I walked up they were all laughing and saying, "Yeah. He's
th' one. He's one. One of them things."
The radio in the car was turned on a Hollywood station, and a lady's
voice was singing, telling what all of the pretty girls were thinking about
the war situation.
"I'm a what?" I asked the cop.
"You know, one of them 'things.' "
"Well, boys, ya got me there. I don't even know what one of them
'things' is."
"We know what you are."
"Well," I scratched my head in the rain, "maybe you're smarter than I
am; 'cause I never did know jist what I am."
"We do."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"What am I then?"
"One of them labor boys."
"Labor?"
"Yeah, labor."
"I think I know what labor is--" I smiled a little.
"What is it?"
"Labor's work."
"Maybe, you're one of them trouble causers."
"Listen, fellers, I jist rolled inta this town from Oklahoma, I mean
Texas, an' I'm on my way to Sonora to stay with my relatives."
"Relatives?"
"Yeah," I said. "Aunt. Cousins. Whole bunch. Well off."
"You're going to stay in Sonora when you get there, aren't you?" A
different, higher-sounding voice wheezed out from the back seat.
"I'm gonna settle down up there in them mountains, an' try ta go ta
work."
"Kinda work, sonny?"
"Painter. Signs. Pictures. Houses. Anything needs paintin'."
"So you don't go around causing trouble, then?"
"I'm runnin' inta a right smart of it. I don't always cause it."
"You don't like trouble, do you, mister painter?"
"Oh, I ain't so 'fraid no more. Sorta broke in by this time."
"Ever talk to anybody about working?"
"Train loads of 'em. That's what ever'body's talkin' 'bout, an' ridin'
in all of this bad weather for. Shore, we ain'ta 'fraid of work. We ain't
panhandlers, ner stemwinders, jest a bunch of guys out tryin' ta do th' best
we can, an' had a little streak of hard luck, that's all."
"Eyer talk to the boys about wages?"
"Wages? Oh, I talk to ever'body about somethin'. Religion. Weather.
Picture shows. Girls. Wages."
"Well, mister painter, it's been good to get acquainted with you. It
seems like you are looking for work and anxious to get on up the road toward
Sonora. We'll show you the road and see that you get out onto the main
highway."
"Boy, that'll be mighty fine."
"Yes. We try to treat an honest working man right when he comes through
our little town here, either by accident or on purpose. We're just a little,
what you'd call, 'cautious,' you understand, because there is trouble going
around, and you never know who's causing it, until you ask. We will have to
ask you to get out in front of this car and start walking down this highway.
And don't look back--"
All of the cops were laughing and joking as their car drove along
behind me. I heard a lot of lousy jokes. I walked with my head ducked into
the rain, and heard cars of other people pass. They yelled smart cracks at
me in the rain.
After about a mile, they yelled for me to halt. I stopped and didn't
even turn around. "You run a lot of risk tonight, breaking our orders."
"Muddy out there!"
"You know, we tried to treat you nice. Turned you loose. Gave you a
chance. Then you broke orders."
"Yeah, I guess I did."
"What made you do it?"
"Well, ta be right, real truthful with you guys, we got pastures just
about like these back in Oklahoma, but we let the cows go out there and eat.
If people wants to go out there in the cow pasture, we let them go, but if
it's rainin' an' a cold night like this, we don't drive or herd anybody out
there."
Cop said, "Keep travelin'."
I said, "I wuz born travelin'. Good-bye!"
The car and the lights whirled around in the road, and the tail light
and the radio music blacked out down the road in the rain.
I walked a few steps and seen it was too rainy and bad to see in the
fog, so I went to thinking about some kind of a place to lay down out of the
weather and go to sleep. I walked up to the headstones of a long cement
bridge that bent across a running river. And down under the bridge I found a
couple of dozen other people curled up, grinding their teeth in the mist and
already dreaming. The ground was loose dirt and was awful cold and damp, but
not wet or muddy, as the rain couldn't hit us under the concrete. I seen men
paired up snoring together, some rolled in newspapers and brown wrapping
paper, others in a chilled blanket, one or two here and yonder all snoozed
up in some mighty warm-looking bedrolls. And for a minute, I thought, I'm a
dam fool not to carry my own bedroll; but then again, in the hot daytime a
heavy bedroll is clumsy, no good, and in the way, and besides, people won't
give you a ride if you're lugging an old dirty bundle. So here in the
moisture of the wind whiffing under the bridge, I scanned around for
something to use for a mattress, for a pillow, and for a virgin wool
blanket. I found a soaked piece of wrapping paper which I shook the water
off of, and spread on the dirt for my easy-rider mattress; but I didn't find
a pillow, nor anything to use as a blanket. I drew my muscles down into just
a little pile of meat and bones, and shivered on the paper for about an
hour. My breath swishing, and teeth hitting together, woke a big
square-built man up off his bedroll. He listened at me for a minute, and
then asked me, "Don't you know your shiverin's keepin' everybody awake?" I
said, "Y-y-y-es-s-s, I sup-p-pose it is; I ain't gettin' no sleep, on
account of it." Then he said, "You sound like a snare drum rattlin' that
paper; c'mon over here an' den up with me."
I rolled across the ground and peeled off my wet clothes, my gobby
shoes, and stacked them up in a pile; and then he turned his wool blankets
back and said, "Hurry, jump in before the covers get wet!" I was still
shivering and shaking so hard it jerked my whole body into kinks, and
cramped me all over so that I couldn't move my lips to say a word. I scooted
my feet down inside and then pulled the itchy covers all up over my head.
"You feel like a bucket of cold frogs,'' the man told me. "Where've you
been?"
I kept on shaking, without saying a word.
"Cops walk you?" he asked me. And I just nodded my head with my back to
him.
"I'm not minding this weather very much; I'm on my way to where it will
be a hell of a lot colder than this. I don't know about the cops, but, I'll
be in Vancouver by this time next week; and I know it'll freeze the horns
off of a brass bulldog up 'there. Lumberjack. Timber. I guess you're too
cold to talk much, huh?" And his last words blotted and soaked out across
the swampy river bottom and faded away somewhere in the fog horn and red and
green lights on a little boat that pounded down the waters.
It was hard for me to walk next morning early on account of my legs
being drawn like torn leather. My thighs felt like the gristle was tore
loose from my bones, and my knees ached and jittered in the joints. I shook
hands with the lumberjack and we went our opposite ways. I never did get a
real close look at him in the clouds; and when he walked away, his head and
shoulders just sort of swum away in the fog of the morning. I had made
another friend I couldn't see. And I walked along thinking, Well, now, I
don't know if I'll ever see that man again or not, but I'll see a lot of men
a lot of places and I'll wonder if that could be him.
Before long the sun and the fog had fought and flounced around so long
on the river banks the highway run along that it didn't seem like there was
enough room in the trees and reeds and canebrakes for the sun or the clouds,
either one, to really win out; so the clouds from the ground got mad and
raised up off of the earth to grab a-hold of the sunrays, and fight it out
higher up in the air. I caught a ride on a truckload of grape stakes and
heard a hard-looking truck driver cuss the narrow, bad roads that cause you
to get killed so quick; and then found myself wheeling along with a deaf
farmer for an hour or two, an Italian grape grower in debt all of the time,
a couple of cowboys trying to beat their way to a new rodeo; and before the
day was wore very slick, I was walking down the streets of Sonora, the queen
of the gold towns, in the upper foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Sonera's crooked, narrow streets bent and run about as wild as some of
the prospectors and their burros, and I thought as I pushed my way along the
tight alleys called streets, that maybe the whole town had been laid out by
just following the tracks of a runaway prospector. Little houses poking
their bellies out over the curbs and sidewalks, and streets so steep I had
to throw myself in low gear to pull them. Down again so steep, I figured,
that most of Sonora's citizens come and went by way of parachutes. Creeks
and rocky rivers guggling along under the streets, where the gambling dives
and dram joints flush their mistakes down the drains, where, on down the
creek a-ways, the waters are planned by hungry gold-bugs.
I walked along with my address in my hand, seeing herds of cowboys,
miners, timber men, and hard-working, pioneer-looking women and kids from
the mountains around; and saw, too, the fake cowboys, the drug-store
calibre, blazing shirts of all bright colors along the streets, and
crippling along bowlegged in boots never meant to be worn on the hard
concrete. And the honest working people stand along in bunches and laugh
under their breath when the fake dudes buckle past.
In the smell of the high pines and the ripple of the nugget creeks,
Sonora, an old town now, is rated as California's second richest person.
Pasadena is first, and looks it, but what fools you in Sonora is that it
looks like one of the poorest. I walked up the main street loaded to the
brim with horses, hay, children playing, jallopy cars of the ranchers and
working folks around, buggies of the Indians, wagons loaded with groceries
for grubstake, town cars, limousines, sporty jobs, the big V-16's and the
V-Twelves. The main street crooks pretty sharp right in the business end,
and crooks another time or two trying to get out of the first crook. The
street is so narrow that people sneeze on the right-hand side and apologize
to the ones on the left.
I asked a fireman asleep on a bench, "Could you tell me where bouts
this address is?"
He disturbed, without scaring, a fly on his eyelid, and told me, 'It's
that big rock house right yonder up that hill. No danger of missing it, it
covers the whole hill."
I thanked him and started walking up a three-block flight of rock steps
thinking, Boy, I'm as dirty an' ragged an' messed up as one feller can git.
Knees outta my britches. My face needs about a half a dozen shaves. Hands
all smeary. Coal dust an' soot all over me. I don't know if I'd even know
myself in a lookin-glass. Shirt all tore to hell, an' my shoes stinkin' with
sweat. That's a hell of a big rock house up there. Musta took a mighty lot
of work ta build it. I'd go back down in town to a fillin' station an' wash
an' clean up, but gosh, I'm so empty an' hungry, so tremblin' weak, I don't
know, I couldn't pull it back up these long steps again. I'll go on up.
A black iron fence and a cedar hedge fenced the whole yard off. I stood
at the gate with the letter in my hand, looking up and down, back down at
the town and the people, and then through the irons at the mansion. I wiped
the sweat off of my face on the arm of my shirt, and unlocked the gate and
walked through. Wide green grass lawn that made me think of golf courses I'd
caddied on. Mowed and petted and smoothed and kept, the yard had a look like
it had just got back from a barber shop. The whiff of the scrub cedar and
middle-size pine, on top of the flowers that jumped up all around, made it
smell good and healthy, like a home for crippled children. But the whole
place was so still and so hushed and quiet, that I was thinking maybe
everybody was gone off somewhere. When I walked the rock walk a little more,
the whole house got plainer to see: gray native stones from the hills
around, flagstone porches and sandrock columns holding up the roof; windows
so high and wide that the sun got lost trying to find a way to shine through
all of them big thick drapes and curtains. Iron braces in the windows built
to keep the nice, good, healthy sunshine out for a long, long time. Big
double doors with iron cross braces, handles like the entrance to a funeral
parlor, locks bigger and stouter than any jail I'd ever slept in.
I'll walk quieter now, because this porch makes a lot of noise, and a
little noise, I bet, would scare all of these trees and flowers to death.
This place is so quiet. I hope I don't scare nobody when I knock on this
door. How in the dickens do you operate this knocker, anyhow? Oh. Pick it
up. Let it just fall. It knocks. Gosh. Reckon it'll bring any watchdogs out
on me? Hope not. Dern. I don't know. I'm just thinking. This old rambling's
pretty bad in some places, but, I don
'
t know, I never did see it
get this quiet and this lonesome.
Reckon I rung that door knocker right? Guess I did. Things so still
here on this porch, I can hear my blood run, and my thoughts grazing around
in my head.
The door opened back.
My breath went away in the tips of the pines where the cones hang on as
long as they can, and then fall down to the ground to get covered up in the
loose dirt and some day make a new tree.
"How do you do," a man said.
"Ah, yeah, good day." I was gulping for air.
"May I do something for you?"
"Me? No. Nope. I wuz jist lookin' fer a certain party by this name." I
handed him the envelope.
He was wearing a nice suit of clothes. An old man, thin-faced, and
straight shoulders, gray hair, white cuffs, black tie. The air from the
house sifted past him on its way out the door, and there was a smell that
made me know that the air had been hemmed up inside that house for a long
time. Hemmed up. Walled in. Covered away from the moon and out of the reach
of the sun. Cut away from the drift of the leaves and the wash of the
waters. Hid out from the going and the coming of the people, cut loose from
the thoughts of the crowds on the streets. Lazy in there, sleepy in there,
cool and pale and shady in there, dark and dreary in the book case there,
and the wind under the beds hadn't been disturbed in twenty-three years. I
know, I know, I'm on the right hill, but I'm at the wrong house. This wasn't
what I hung that boxcar for, nor hugged that iron ladder for, nor bellied
down on top of that high rolling freight train for. The train was laughing
and cussing and alive with human people. The cops was alive and pushing me
down the road in the rain. The bridge was alive with friends under it. The
river was alive and arguing with the fog and the fog was wrestling the wind
and boxing the sun.
I remember a frog they found in Okemah, once when they tore the old
bank building down. He'd been sealed up in solid concrete for thirty-two
years, and had almost turned to jelly. Jelly. Blubbery. Soft and oozy.
Slicky and wiggly. I don't want to turn to no jelly. My belly is hard from
hard traveling, and I want more than anything else for my belly to stay hard
and stay wound up tight and stay alive.
"Yes. You are at the right house. This is the place you are looking
for." The little butler stood aside and motioned for me to walk in.
"I--er--ah--think, mebbe I made a mistake--"
"Oh, no." He was talking just about the nicest I'd ever heard anybody
talk, like maybe he'd been practicing. 'This is the place you're looking
for."
"I don't--ah--think--I think, maybe I made a little mistake. You
know--mistake--"
"I'm positive that you are at the right address."
"Yeah? Well, mister, I shore thank ya; but I'm purty shore." I backed
down off of the slate-rock steps, looking down at my feet, then up at the
house and the door, and said, "Purty shore, I'm at th' wrong address. Sorry
I woke ya, I mean bothered ya. Be seein' ya."
When I stood there on top of the hill and listened to that iron gate
snap locked behind me, and looked all down across the roofs and church
steeples and chimneys and steep houses of Sonora, I smelled the drift of the
pine rosin in the air and watched a cloud whiff past me over my head, and I
was alive again.
Chapter XV
THE TELEGRAM THAT NEVER CAME
In a bend of the Sacramento is the town of Redding, California. The
word had scattered out that twenty-five hundred workers was needed to build
the Kenneth Dam, and already eight thousand work hands had come to do the
job. Redding was like a wild ant den. A mile to the north in a railroad bend
had sprung up another camp, a thriving nest of two thousand people, which we
just called by the name of the "jungle." In that summer of 1938, I learned a
few little things about the folks in Redding, but a whole lot more, some
way, down there by that big jungle where the people lived as close to
nature, and as far from everything natural, as human beings can.
I landed in Redding early one morning on a long freight train full of
wore-out people. I fell off of the freight with my guitar over my shoulder
and asked a guy when the work was going to start. He said it was supposed to
get going last month. Telegram hadn't come from Washington yet.
"Last month, hell," another old boy said, over his shoulder. "We've
been camped right here up and down this slough for over three months,
hearin' it would git started any day now!"
I looked down the train and seen about a hundred men dropping off with
their sleeping rolls and bundles of all kinds. The guy I was talking with
was a big hard looker with a brown flannel shirt on. He said, "They's that
many rollin' in on ever' train that runs!"
"Where are all of these here people from?" I asked him.
"Some of them are just louses," he said. "Pimps an' gamblers, whores,
an' fakes of all kinds. Yes, but they ain't so many of that kind. You talk
around to twenty men an' you'll find out that nineteen of them are just as
willing and able to work as anybody, just as good a hand, knows just as
much, been all over everywhere tryin' ta git onto some kind of a regular job
an' bring his whole family, wife, kids, everything, out here an' settle
down."
It was a blistering hot day, and some of the men walked across a vacant
lot over to the main street. But the biggest part of them looked too dirty
and too beat-down and ragged to spend much time on the streets. They didn't
walk into town to sign up at no hotel, not even at a twenty-cent cot house,
not even somebody's green grass lawn, but walked out slowly across the
little hill to the jungle camp. They asked other people already stranded
there, Where's the water hole? Where's there a trash pile of pretty good tin
cans for cookin'; where's the fish biting in the river? Any of you folks got
a razor you ain't using?
I stood there on a railroad platform looking at my old wore-out shirt.
I was thinking, Well now, I don't know, there might be a merchant's daughter
around this town that's a little bit afraid of all of these other tough
lookers, but now, if I was to go an' rustle me up a couple of dollars an'
buy me a clean layout, she might spend a little time talking to me. Makes
you feel better when you get all slicked up, walking out onto the streets,
cops even nod and smile at you, and with your sleeves rolled up and
everything, sun and wind sorta brushing your skin, you feel like a new
dollar watch. And you think to yourself, Boy, I hope I can meet her
before my clothes get all dirty again. Maybe this little Army and Navy
store down the street has got a water hydrant in the rest room; and when I
put on my new shirt and pants, maybe I can wash up a little. I can pull out
my razor and shave while I'm washing, keep an eye skint for the store man,
not let him see me. And I'll come walkin' out from that little old store
looking like a man that's all bought and paid for.
I heard all kinds of singing and playing through the wide-open doors of
the saloons along the street, and dropped in at all of them and tried to
draw a hand. I'd play my guitar and sing the longest, oldest, and saddest
songs and ballads I knew; I'd nod and smile and say thank you every time
somebody dropped a penny or a nickel into my cigar box.
A plump Mexican lady wearing a sweated-out black dress, walked over and
dropped three pennies in my box and said, "Now I'm broke. All I'm waiting
forr iss thiss beeg dam to start. For somebody to come running down the
street saying, "Work hass opened up! Hiring men! Hiring everybody!' "
I made enough money to run down and buy me the new shirt and pair of
pants, but they was all sweat-soaked and covered with loose dust before I
had a chance to get in good with the merchant's daughter. I was counting my
change on the curb and had twenty some odd cents. A bareheaded Indian with
warts along his nose looked over in my hand and said, "Twenty-two cent. Huh.
Too much for chili. Not enough for beef stew. Too much for sleeping outside,
and not enough for sleeping inside. Too much to be broke and not enough to
pay a loafing fine. Too much to eat all by yourself, but not enough to feed
some other boomer." And I looked at the money and said, "I reckin one of th'
unhandiest dam sums of money a feller c'n have is twenty some-odd cents." So
I walked around with it jingling loose in my pockets, out across the street,
through a vacant lot, down a cinder dump onto a railroad track, till I come
to a little grassy trail that led into the jungle camp.
I followed the trail out over the hill through the sun and the weeds.
The camp was bigger than the town itself. People had dragged old car fenders
up from the dumps, wired them from the limbs of oak trees a few feet off of
the ground and this was a roof for some of them. Others had taken old canvas
sacks or wagon sheets, stretched the canvas over little limbs cut so the
forks braced each other, and that was a house for those folks. I heard two
brothers standing back looking at their house saying, "I ain't lost my hand
as a carpenter, yet." "My old eyes can still see to hit a nail," They'd
carried buckets and tin cans out of the heap, flattened them on the ground,
then nailed the tin onto crooked boards, and that was a mansion for them.
Lots of people, families mostly, had some bedclothes with them, and I could
see the old stinky, gummy quilts and blankets hung up like tents, and two or
three kids of all ages playing around underneath. There was scatterings of
cardboard shacks, where the people had lugged cartons, cases, packing boxes
out from town and tacked them into a house. They was easy to build, but the
first rain that hit them, they was goners.
Then about every few feet down the jungle hill you'd walk past a shack
just sort of made out of everything in general-- old strips of asphalt tar
paper, double gunny sacks, an old dress, shirt, pair of overhalls, stretched
up to cover half a side of a wall; bumpy corrugated iron, cement sacks,
orange and apple crates took apart and nailed together with old rusty burnt
nails from the cinder piles. Through a little square window on the side of a
house, I'd hear bedsprings creaking and people talking. Men played cards,
whittled, and women talked about work they'd struck and work they were
hunting for. Dirt was on the floor of the house, and all kinds and colors of
crawling and flying bugs come and went like they were getting paid for it.
There were the big green blow-flies, the noisy little street flies, manure
and lot flies, caterpillars and gnats from other dam jobs, bed bugs, fleas,
and ticks sucking blood, while mosquitoes of all army and navy types,
hummers, bombers, fighters, sung some good mosquito songs. In most cases,
though, the families didn't even have a roof or shelter, but just got
together once or twice every day and, squatting sort of Indian fashion
around their fire, spaded a few bites of thickened flour gravy, old bread,
or a thin watery stew. Gunny sacks, old clothes, hay and straw, fermenting
bedclothes, are usually piled full of kids playing, or grown-ups resting and
waiting for the word "work" to come.
The sun's shining through lots of places, other patches pretty shady,
and right here at my elbow a couple of families are squatting down on an old
slick piece of canvas; three or four quiet men, whittling, breaking grass
stems, poking holes in leaves, digging into the hard ground; and the women
rocking back and forth laughing out at something somebody'd said. A little
baby sucks at a wind-burnt breast that nursed the four other kids that crawl
about the fire. Cold rusty cans are their china cups and aluminum ware, and
the hot still bucket of river water is as warm and clear as the air around.
I watch a lot of little circles waving out from the middle of the water
where a measuring worm has dropped from the limb of a tree and flips and
flops for his very life. And I see a man with a forked stick reach the forks
over into the bucket, smile, and go on talking about the work he's done; and
in a moment, when the little worm clamps his feet around the forks of the
stick, the man will lift him out, pull him up close to his face and look him
over, then tap the stick over the rim of the bucket. When the little worm
flips to the ground and goes humping away through the twigs and ashes, the
whole bunch of people will smile and say, "Pretty close shave, mister worm.
What do you think you are, a parshoot jumper?"
You've seen a million people like this already. Maybe you saw them down
on the crowded side of your big city; the back side, that's jammed and
packed, the hard section to drive through. Maybe you wondered where so many
of them come from, how they eat, stay alive, what good they do, what makes
them live like this? These people have had a house and a home just about
like your own, settled down and had a job of work just about like you. Then
something hit them and they lost all of that. They've been pushed out into
the high lonesone highway, and they've gone down it, from coast to coast,
from Canada to Mexico, looking for that home again. Now they're looking, for
a while, in your town. Ain't much difference between you and them. If you
was to walk out into this big tangled jungle camp and stand there with the
other two thousand, somebody would just walk up and shake hands with you and
ask you, What kind of work do you do, pardner?
Then maybe, farther out on the ragged edge of your town you've seen
these people after they've hit the road: the people that are called
strangers, the people that follow the sun and the seasons to your country,
follow the buds and the early leaves and come when the fruit and crops are
ready to gather, and leave when the work is done. What kind of crops? Oil
fields, power dams, pipe lines, canals, highways and hard-rock tunnels,
skyscrapers, ships, are their crops. These are migrants now. They don't just
set along in the sun--they go by the sun, and it lights up the country that
they know is theirs.
If you'd go looking for social problems, you'd find just a good
friendly bunch of people getting a lot of laughing and talking done, and
some of it pretty good sense.
I listened to the talk in the tanglewood of the migratory jungle.
"What'll be here to keep these people going," a man with baggy overhalls and
a set of stickery whiskers is saying, "when this dam job is over? Nothing?
No, mister, you're wrong as hell. What do you think we're putting in this
dam for, anyhow? To catch water to irrigate new land, and water all of this
desert-looking country here. And when a little drop of water hits the ground
anywhere out across here--a crop, a bush, sometimes even a big tall tree
comes jumping out of the dirt. Thousands and thousands of whole families are
going to have all the good land they need, and I'm a-going to be on one of
them little twenty acres!"
"Water, water," a young man about twenty or so, wearing a pair of
handmade cowboy shoes, talks up. "You think water's gonna be th' best part?
Well, you're just about half right, friend. Did you ever stop to think that
th' most, th' best part of it all is th' electric power this dam's gonna
turn out? I can just lay here on this old, rotten jungle hill with all of
these half-starved people waiting to go to work, and you know, I don't so
much see all of this filth and dirt. But I do see--just try to picture in my
head, like--what's gonna be
here. Th' big factories makin' all kinds of things from fertilizer to
bombin' planes. Power lines, steel towers runnin' out acrost these old
clumpy hills--most of all, people at work all of th' time on little farms,
and whole bunches and bunches of people at work in th' big new factories."
"It's th' gifts of th' Lord, that's what 'tis." A little nervous man,
about half Indian, is pulling up grass stems and talking. "Th' Lord gives
you a mind to vision all of this, an' th' power to build it. He gives when
He wants to. Then when He wants to, He takes it away--if we don't use it
right."
"If we all get together, social like, and build something, say, like a
big ship, any kind of a factory, railroad, big dam--that's social work,
ain't it?" This is a young man with shell-rimmed glasses, a gray felt hat,
blue work shirt with a fountain pen stuck with a notebook in his pocket, and
his voice had the sound of books in it when he talked. "That's what 'social'
means, me and you and you working on something together and owning it
together. What the hell's wrong with this, anybody--speak up! If Jesus
Christ was sitting right here, right now, he'd say this very same dam thing.
You just ask Jesus how the hell come a couple of thousand of us living out
here in this jungle camp like a bunch of wild animals. You just ask Jesus
how many million of other folks are living the same way? Sharecroppers down
South, big city people that work in factories and live like rats in the
slimy slums. You know what Jesus'll say back to you? He'll tell you we all
just mortally got to work together, build things together, fix up old things
together, clean out old filth together, put up new buildings, schools and
churches, banks and factories together, and own everything together. Sure,
they'll call it a bad ism. Jesus don't care if you call it socialism or
communism, or just me and you."
When night come down, everything got a little stiller, and you could
walk around from one bunch of people to the other one and talk about the
weather. Although the weather wasn't such an асе-high subject to talk about,
because around Redding for nine months hand running the weather don't change
(it's hot and dry, hot and dry, and tomorrow it's still going to be hot and
dry), you can hear little bunches of folks getting acquainted with each
other, saying, "Really hot, ain't it?" "Yeah, dry too." "Mighty dry."
I run onto a few young people of twelve to twenty-five, mostly kids
with their families, who picked the banjo or guitar, and sung songs. Two of
these people drew quite a bunch every evening along toward sundown and it
always took place just about the same way. An old bed was under a tree in
their yard, and a baby boy romped around on it when the shade got cool,
because in the early parts of the day the flies and bugs nearly packed him
off. So this was his ripping and romping time, and it was the job of his two
sisters, one around twelve and the other one around fourteen, to watch him
and keep him from falling off onto the ground. Their dad parked his self
back on an old car cushion. He throwed his eyes out over the rims of some
two-bit specks just about every line or two on his reading matter, and run
his Adam's apple up and down; and his wife nearby was singing what all the
Lord had done for her, while the right young baby stood up for his first
time, and jumped up and down, bouncing toward the edge of the mattress. The
old man puckered up his face and sprayed a tree with tobacco juice, and
said, "Girls. You girls. Go in the house and get your music box, and set
there on the bed and play with the baby, so's he won't fall off."
One of the sisters tuned a string or two, then chorded a little. People
walked from all over the camp and gathered, and the kid, mama, and dad, and
all of the visitors, kept as still as day Light while the girls sang:
Takes a worried man to sing a worried song
Takes a worried man to sing a worried song
Takes a worried man to sing a worried song
I'm worried nowwww
But I won't be worried long.
I heard these two girls from a-ways away where I was leaning back up
against an old watering trough. I could hear their words just as plain as
day, floating all around in the trees and down across the low places. I hung
my guitar up on a stub of a limb, went down and stretched myself out on some
dry grass, and listened to the girls for a long time. The baby kicked and
bucked like a regular army mule whenever they'd quit their singing; but, as
quick as they struck their first note or two on the next song, the kid would
throw his wrist in his mouth, the slobbers would drip down onto his sister's
lap, and the baby would kick both feet, but easy, keeping pretty good time
to the guitar.
I don't know why I didn't tell them I had a guitar up yonder hanging on
that tree. I just reared back and soaked in every note and every word of
their singing. It was so clear and honest sounding, no Hollywood put-on, no
fake wiggling. It was better to me than the loud squalling and bawling
you've got to do to make yourself heard in the old mobbed saloons. And,
instead of getting you all riled up mentally, morally and sexually--no, it
done something a lot better, something that's harder to do, something you
need ten times more. It cleared your head up, that's what it done, caused
you to fall back and let your draggy bones rest and your muscles go limber
like a cat's.
Two little girls were making two thousand working people feel like I
felt, rest like I rested. And when I say two thousand, take a look down off
across these three little hills. You'll see a hat or two bobbing up above
the brush. Somebody is going, somebody is coming, somebody is kneeling down
drinking from the spring of water trickling out of the west hill. Five men
are shaving before the same crooked hunk of old looking-glass, using tin
cans for their water. A woman right up close to you wrings out a tough work
shirt, saves the water for four more. You skim your eye out around the south
hill, and not less than a hundred women are doing the same thing, washing,
wringing, hanging out shirts, taking them down dry to iron. Not a one of
them is talking above a whisper, and the one that is whispering almost feels
guilty because she knows that ninety-nine out of every hundred are tired,
weary, have felt sad, joked and laughed to keep from crying. But these two
little girls are telling about all of that trouble, and everybody knows it's
helping. These songs say something about our hard traveling, something about
our hard luck, our hard get-by, but the songs say well come through all of
these in pretty good shape, and we'll be all right, we'll work, make ourself
useful, if only the telegram to build the dam would come in from Washington.
I thought I could act a little bashful and shy, and not rush the people
to get to knowing them, but something inside of me just sort of talked out
and said, "Awful good singing. What's your name?"
The two little girls talked slow and quiet but it was not nervous, and
it wasn't jittery, just plain. They told me their names.
I said, "I like the way you play that guitar with your fingers! Sounds
soft, and you can hear it a long ways off. All of these three hills was just
ringing out with your guitar, and all of these people was listening to you
sing."
"I saw them listening," one sister said.
"I saw them too," the other sister said.
"I play with a flat celluloid pick. I've got to be loud, because I play
in saloons and, well, I just make it my job to make more noise than they
make, and they're sorry for me and give me nickels and pennies."
"I don't like old saloons," one little girl said.
"Me neither," the other little girl said.
I looked over at their daddy, and he sort of looked crossways out my
side of his specks, pouched his lips up a little, winked at me, and said,
"I'm against bars myself."
His wife talked up louder, "Yes, you're against bars! Right square up
against them!"
Both of the sisters looked awful sober and serious at their dad.
Everybody in the crowd laughed, and took on a new listening position,
leaning back up against trees, squatting on smoky buckets turned upside
down, stretched out in the grass, patting down places to lay in the short
weeds.
I got up and strolled away and took my guitar down off of the sawed-off
limb, and thought while I was walking back to where the crowd was, Boy
howdy, old guitar, you been a lot of places, seen a lot of faces, but don't
you go to actin' up too wild and reckless, 'cause these Little girls and
their mama don't like saloons.
I got back to where everybody was, and the two little sisters was
singing "Columbus Stockade":
Way down in Columbus stockade
Where my gally went back on me;
Way down in Columbus stockade,
I'd ruther be back in Tennessee.
"Columbus Stockade" was always one of my first picks, so I let them run
along for a little while, twisted my guitar up in tune with theirs, holding
my ear down against the sounding box, and when I heard it was in tune with
them I started picking out the tune, sort of note for note, letting their
guitar play the bass chords and second parts. They both smiled when they
heard me because two guitars being played this way is what's called the real
article, and millions of little kids are raised on this kind of music. If
you think of something new to say, if a cyclone comes, or a flood wrecks the
country, or a bus load of school children freeze to death along the road, if
a big ship goes down, and an airplane falls in your neighborhood, an outlaw
shoots it out with the deputies, or the working people go out to win a war,
yes, you'll find a train load of things you can set down and make up a song
about. You'll hear people singing your words around over the country, and
you'll sing their songs everywhere you travel or everywhere you live; and
these are the only kind of songs my head or my memory or my guitar has got
any room for.
So these two little girls and me sung together till the crowd had got
bigger and it was dark under the trees where the moon couldn't hit us.
Takes a ten-dollar shoe to fit my feet
Takes a ten-dollar shoe to fit my feet
Takes a ten-dollar shoe to fit my feet, Lord God!
And I ain't a-gonna be treated this a-way!
When the night got late and the men in the saloons in town lost their
few pennies playing framed-up poker, they drifted out to sleep the night in
the jungle camp. We saw a bunch of twenty-five or thirty of them come
running over the rim of the hill from town, yelling, cussing, kicking tin
buckets and coffee pots thirty feet, and hollering like panthers.
And when the wild bunch run down the little trail to where we was
singing--it was then that the whole drunk mess of them stood there reeling
and listening in the dark, and then shushed each other to keep quiet and set
down on the ground to listen. Everybody got so still that it almost crackled
in the air. Men took seats and leaned their heads back against tree trunks
and listened to the lightning bugs turn their lights on and off. And the
lightning bugs must of been hushing each other, because the old jungle camp
was getting a lot of good rest there listening to the little girls' song
drift out across the dark wind.
Chapter XVI
STORMY NIGHT
I set my hat on the back of my head and walked out west from Redding
through the Redwood forests along the coast, and strolled from town to town,
my guitar slung over my shoulder, and sung along the boweries of forty-two
states; Reno Avenue in Oklahoma City, Lower Pike Street in Seattle, the jury
table in Santa Fe; the Hooversvilles on the flea-bit rims of your city's
garbage dump. I sung in the camps called "Little Mexico," on the dirty edge
of California's green pastures. I sung on the gravel barges of the East
Coast and along New York's Bowery watching the cops chase the bay-rum
drinkers. I curved along the bend of the Gulf of Mexico and sung with the
tars and salts in Port Arthur, the oilers and greasers in Texas City, the
marijuana smokers in the flop town in Houston. I trailed the fairs and
rodeos all over Northern California, Grass Valley, Nevada City; I trailed
the apricots and peaches around Marysville and the winy-grape sand hills of
Auburn, drinking the good homemade vino from the jugs of friendly grape
farmers.
Everywhere I went I throwed my hat down in the floor and sung for my
tips.
Sometimes I was lucky and found me a good job. I sung on the radio
waves in Los Angeles, and I got a job from Uncle Samuel to come to the
valley of the Columbia River and I made up and recorded twenty-six songs
about the Grand Coulee Dam. I made two albums of records called "Dust Bowl
Ballads" for the Victor people. I hit the road again and crossed the
continent twice by way of highway and freights. Folks heard me on the
nationwide radio programs CBS and NBC, and thought I was rich and famous,
and I didn't have a nickel to my name, when I was hitting the hard way
again.
The months flew fast and the people faster, and one day the coast wind
blew me out of San Francisco, through San Jose's wide streets, and over the
hump to Los Angeles. Month of December, down along old Fifth and Main, Skid
Row, one of the skiddiest of all Skid Rows. God, what a wet and windy night!
And the clouds swung low and split up like herds of wild horses in the
canyons of the street.
I run onto a guitar-playing partner standing on a bad corner, and he
called his self the Cisco Kid. He was a
long-legged guy that walked like he was on a rolling ship, a good
singer and yodeler, and had sailed the seas a lot of times, busted labels in
a lot of ports, and had really been around in his twenty-six years. He
banged on the guitar pretty good, and like me, come rain or sun, or cold or
heat, he always walked along with his guitar slung over his shoulder from a
leather strap.
We moved along the Skid looking in at the bars and taverns, listening
to neon signs sputter and crackle, and on the lookout for a gang of live
ones. The old splotchy plate-glass windows looked too dirty for the hard
rain ever to wash clean. Old doors and dumps and cubbyholes had a sickly
pale color about them, and men and women bosses and work-hands humped around
inside and talked back and forth to each other. Some soggy-smelling news
stands tried to keep their fronts open and sell horse-race tips and sheets
to the people ducking head-down in the rain, and pool halls stunk to high
heaven with tobacco smoke, spit and piles of dirty men yelling over their
bets. Hock-shop windows all piled and hanging full of every article known to
man, and hocked there by the men that needed them most; tools, shovels,
carpenter kits, paint sets, compasses, brass faucets, plumbers tools, saws,
axes, big watches that hadn't run since the last war, and canvas tents and
bedrolls taken from the fruit tramps. Coffee joints, slippery stool dives,
hash counters with open fronts was lined with men swallowing and chewing and
hoping the rain would wash something like a job down along the Skid. The
garbage is along the street stones and the curbing, a shale and a slush that
washes down the hill from the nicer parts of town, the papers crumpled and
rotten, the straw, manure, and silt, that comes down from the high places,
like the Cisco Kid and me, and like several thousand other rounders, to land
and to clog, and to get caught along the Skid Row.
This is where the working people come to try to squeeze a little fun
and rest out of a buffalo nickel; these three or four blocks of old wobbling
flop houses and buildings.
I know you people I see here on the Skid. The hats pulled down over the
faces I can't see. You know my name and you call me a guitar busker, a joint
hopper, tip canary, kittybox man.
Movie people, boss wranglers, dead enders, stew bums; stealers,
dealers, sidewalk spielers; con men, sly flies, flat foots, reefer riders;
dopers, smokers, boiler stokers; sailors, whalers, bar flies, brass railers;
spittoon tuners, fruit-tree pruners; cobbers, spiders, three-way riders;
honest people, fakes, vamps and bleeders; saviors, saved, and side-street
singers; whore-house hunters, door-bell ringers; footloosers, rod riders,
caboosers, outsiders; honky tonk and whiskey setters, tight-wads,
spendthrifts, race-horse betters; blackmailers, gin soaks, comers, goers;
good girls, bad girls, teasers, whores; buskers, com huskers, dust bowlers,
dust panners; waddlers, toddlers, dose packers, syph carriers; money men,
honey men, sad men, funny men; ramblers, gamblers, highway anklers; cowards,
brave guys, stools and snitches; nice people, bastards, sonsabitches; fair,
square, and honest folks; low, sneaking greedy people; and somewhere, in
amongst all of these Skid Row skidders--Cisco and me sung for our chips.
This December night was bad for singing from joint to joint. The rain
had washed some of the trash along the streets, but had chased most of the
cash customers on home. Our system was to walk into a saloon and ask the
regular musicians if they would like to rest a few minutes, and they usually
was glad to stretch their legs and grab a coffee or a burger. Then we took
their places on the little platform and sung our songs and asked the
customers what they would like to hear next. Each joint was good for thirty
or forty cents, if things went just right, and we usually hit five or six
bars every night. But this was an off night. Men and women filled the
booths, talking about Hitler and Japan and the Russian Red Army. A few
soldiers and sailors and men in uniform scattered along the bar nodding to
longshoremen, and tanker men, and freighter men, and dock workers, and
factory men, and talking about the war. Cops ducking in and out of the rain
stood around and took a good look to see if there was any trouble cooking.
The Cisco Kid was saying, "It looks like most of these old buildings
had ought to be jacked up and a new one run under them." He was on the go
from door to door, trying to keep his guitar out of the rain.
"Purty old, all right, some of these flop houses. I think th' Spaniards
found 'em here when they first chased th' Indians outta this country." I
dodged along behind him.
"Wanta drop in here at th' Ace High?"
I followed him in the door. "It'll be a cinch ta git ta play here, I
don't know about makin' any money."
The Ace High crowd looked pretty low. We nodded at Charlie the Chinaman
and he nodded back toward the music platform. The whole joint was painted a
light funny blue that sort of made your head spin whether you was drinking
or not. All kinds of ropes and corks and big fishing nets hung around over
the walls and down from the ceiling. Cisco turned a nickel machine around
with its face to the wall, while I flipped the strings of his guitar hanging
on his back and tuned mine up to his. Then I waved at Charlie the Chinaman
and he reached above the bar and turned on the loud speaker. I pulled the
mike up to where it would be level with our mouths and we started in
singing:
Well, I come here, to work, I didn't come to hang around
Yes, I come here to work, I didn't come to hang around
And if I don't find me a woman, I'll just roll on out of town.
"Hey there, slim boy," a fast-talking little bald-headed man wearing a
right new suit of gray clothes told us, handing Cisco a phone book at the
same time, "turn in here and find me a name and a number to call."
"Which number?" Cisco asked him.
"Just any number," he said; "just read one off. I never could read
those phone numbers very good."
I listened to Cisco call out a number. The man handed Cisco a dime and
then Cisco and me heard him talking.
"Miss Sue Perfalus? How are you? I'm Mister Upjohn Smith, with the
Happy Hearth and Home Roofing Company. I was fixing your next-door
neighbor's roof today. While I was on top of her house, I looked over on top
of your house. The rainy season is here, you know. Your roof is in a
terrible condition. I wouldn't be surprised to see the whole thing go any
minute. The water will cause the plaster to fall off your laths and ruin
your piano and your furniture. It might fail down and hit you in the face
some night while you're in bed. What? Sure? Sure, I'm sure! I got your phone
number, didn't I? The price? Oh, I'm afraid it's going to run you somewhere
around two hundred dollars. What's that? Oh, I see. You haven't got a roof?
Apartment house? Oh, I see. Well, goodbye, lady."
"Wrong number?" I asked him when he hung up.
"No. Here, you take this phone book and try calling me off one." He
took the book from Cisco and handed it to me.
"Who is this? Oh, Judge V. A. Grant? Your plaster is falling off your
roof. This is the Happy Hearth and Home Roofing Company. Sure? Sure, I'm
sure! The plaster might fall on your wife while she's in bed. Sure, I can
fix it. That's my business. Price? Oh, it's going to run you right at three
hundred dollars. Fine. Come around in the morning? I'll be there with bells
on!" He took his phone book and handed me another dime and walked out.
Cisco laughed and said, "People do any dam thing under th' sun these
days ta make a livin'! Huckle an' buck!"
"Git ta singin'. There's some live ones comin' in th' door. Boy howdy,
this is our first catch tonight. I hope we can git three more dimes out of
this Navy bunch. Sail on, sailor boys, sail on! Step up an' give us yer
request!"
"Let's sing 'em one first," Cisco told me, "so they'll know it ain't
juke-box stuff. What'Il we sing? Sailor boys are really wet. Got caught out
in the rain."
I nodded and started singing:
Well, it's rainin' on th' Skid Row
Stormin' down in Birmin'ham
Rainin' on th' Skid Row
Stormin' down in Birmin' ham
But there ain't no stormy weather
Gonna stop these boys of Uncle Sam!
"You tell 'em, back there, bud!"
"Let 'er reel! Let 'em ramble!"
"Hey! Hey!"
Lord, it's stormy on that ocean
Windy on th' deep blue sea
Boys, it's stormy on the ocean
Windy on th' deep blue sea
I'm gonna bake them Nazis a chicken
Loaded full of TNT!
"Hey, Bud! I ain't got no money, 'cept just a little here to get me a
'burger an' a beer. I'd give you a dime if I had it. But just keep on
singing that song, huh?" A big broad sailor was leaning his head over my
guitar, talking.
"He's just now makin' that song up, aren't you, friend?
"
I woke up this mornin'
Seen what the papers said
Yes, boys, I woke up this mornin',
Seen what the papers said
Them Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor
And war had been declared.
I didn't boil myself no coffee
I didn't boil no tea
I didn't boil myself no coffee
I didn't boil no tea
I made a run for that recruitin' office
Uncle Sam, make room for me!
We stopped singing and the whole bunch of sailors got around the
platform. They all leaned on the rail and listened.
"You boys ought to sing those two verses first every time,'' one sailor
told us.
"Anybody know the latest news from Pearl Harbor?" I asked them.
They all talked at the same time. "It's worse than we figured." "Japs
done a lot of damage." "First I heard it was twelve hundred," "Yeah, but
they say now it's closer to fifteen." "I'm just askin' one dam thing, boys,
an' that's a Goddam close crack at them Jap bastards'" "Why, th' sneak-in'
skunk buzzards to hell, anyway, I hope to God that Uncle Sam puts me where I
can do those Japs the most damage!"
A lone soldier walked in through the door and yelled, "Well, sailors,
I'll be on a troopship the first thing in the morning! And you'll be out
there keeping me company! C'mon! Beer's on me!"
"Hi, soldier! Come on back here! Charlie will send us some beer. Five
of us! Oh, seven! Two of th' best Goddam singers you ever did cock your ear
at! On your way to camp?"
"Gotta be there in about an hour," the soldier said. "Knock me off a
tune! This is my last greenback! Seven dam beers, there, Charlie!" He waved
the dollar bill.
Five or six couples walked in the door and took seats m some booths.
A lady waved a handkerchief from a booth and said, "Hey boys! Sing some
more!"
"You jingle a nickel there on th' platform, lady," Cisco told her,
"that'll sound like back where I come from!"
A nickel hit the platform. A sailor or two laughed and said, "Sing one
about th
'
war. Got any?"
I scratched my head and told him, "Well, not to brag about. We've
scribbled one or two."
"Le's hear 'em.
'
'
"Ain't learnt 'em so good yet." I pulled a piece of paper out of my
pocket and handed it to one of the men. "You be my music rack. Hold this up
in th' light where I can see it. I don't even know if I can read my own
writin' or not."
Our planes will down these buzzards
Before this war has past,
For they have fired the first, folks,
But we will fire the last!
Charlie laughed out from behind the bar, "Plenty quick! Song come
fast!"
The people in the booths clapped their hands, and the sailors and
soldier boy reached across the rail and slapped us on the shoulders.
"Whew! That's gittin' songs out fast!" The soldier drained his beer
glass.
"You guys oughtta move up to th' Circle Bar! You'd pick up some real
tips up there!" A wild-looking cowboy turned around from the bar and told
us.
"Keep mouth shut!" Charlie hollered and waved a slick glass. "These boy
know Cholly Chinee. Like Cholly Chinee! Girly! Take two beer back to sing
man."
"I'd set 'em up again, if I could, guys," the soldier said, "but that
was my last lone dollar."
"Cholly!" I yelled. "Did you say two free beers fer us?"
"Yes. I say girly bring. Two free beer," he said.
"Make it seven!" I told him.
"Seven free beer?"
"If ya don't, we're gonna move th' singin' up to th' Circle Bar!" Cisco
put in.
"Seven?" Charlie looked up quick. Then he held up his finger and said,
"Cholly good man. Cholly bring."
"By God, we gotta treat our soldiers an' sailors like earls an' dukes
from here on out," Cisco laughed. We'd both tried that morning to ship
aboard a freighter headed for Murmansk. They'd turned us down for some damn
health reason and now Cisco and me was hot and crazy and laughing and mad
clear through.
"Well, men!" One of the sailors held up his new glass of beer off of
Charlie's tray. "I got th
'
prettiest gal in Los Angeles. Got a
good uniform on. Got a free glass of beer. Got some real honest music. Got a
great big war to fight I'm satisfied. I'm ready. So here's to beatin' th'
Japs!" He drained his glass at one pull.
"Beat 'em down!" another one said.
"And quick!"
"I'm in!"
"Gimme a ship!"
"I ain't no talker. I'm a fighter! Wow!"
One of the biggest and toughest of the civilian bunch downed a double
drink of hard cold liquor and washed it down with a glass of beer, then he
stood right in the middle of the floor and said, "Well, people! Soldier's!
Sailors! Wimmen an' gals! I'm not physical fit ta be in th' navy er th'
army, but I'll promise ya I'll beat th' livin' hell outta ever' Goddam
livin' Jap in this town!"
"If you ain't got no more sense than that, big shot, you just better
pull your head in your hole and keep it there!" a long, tall sailor yelled
back at him. "None of your wild talk in here!"
"Cholly got plentee good friend. Japonee. You say more, Cholly bust
bottle. Your head!" The boss was shaking a towel over the bar.
"We no fight Japonee people!" Charlie's waitress talked up at the far
end of the bar by the door. "We fight big-shot Japonee crook. Big lie! Big
steal! You not got no good sense! Try start Japonee fight here! Me China
girl. Plentee Japonee friend!"
The soldier boy walked across the floor with his fists doubled up,
shoving his glass empty along the counter, and saying in the tough boy's
face, "Beat it, mister. Start walkin'. We ain't fightin' these Japs just
because they happen to be Japs."
The big man backed out through the door into a crowd of fifteen or
twenty people. He ducked off up the street in the dark.
"Hell!" The soldier walked back through the saloon saying, "That guy
won't last a dam week talking that kind of stuff.
"Far as that goes," Cisco was bending over, talking in my ear, "this
Imperial Saloon right next door here is run by a whole family of Japanese
folks. I know all of them. Sung in there a hundred times. They always help
me to get tips. They're just as good as I am!" He started a song on his
guitar.
"Music! Play, boys, play!" The sailors grabbed each other and danced
around in the floor, doing the jitterbug, sticking their fingers up in the
air, making all sorts of goofy faces. and yelling, "Yippee! Cut th' rug!"
Most of the girls got up out of the booths and walked across the floor
smiling and saying, "No two men allowed to dance together in this place
tonight." "No sailors are allowed to dance unless it's with an awful pretty
girl." And a sailor cracked back when he danced his girl around, "It never
was this a-way back home! Yow!"
Somebody else yelled, "I hope it stays this a-way fer th' doorashun!
Yeah, man!"
Cisco and me played a whipped-up version of the old One Dime Blues,
fast enough to keep up with the jitterbugs. Everybody was wheeling and
whirling, waving their hands and shuffling along like a gang of circus
clowns dancing in the sawdust.
"Mama, don't treat yore daughter mean!" I joked over the loud speaker.
"Meanest thing that a man most ever seen!" Cisco threw in.
The music rolled from the sound holes of the guitars and floated out
through the loud speaker. Everybody at the bar tapped their glasses in time
with the music. One man was tapping a nickel against the rim of his beer
glass and grinning at his face in the big looking-glass. The joint boomed
with music and dancing. Charlie stood behind the bar and smiled like a full
moon. Music turned a pretty bad old night outside into a good, friendly,
warm shindig on the inside. Sailors bowed their necks and humped their backs
and made goo-goo eyes and clown faces. Girls slung their hair through the
air and spun like tops. Whoops and hollers. "Spin 'er!'
'
"That
sailor ain't no slouch!" "Hold 'er, boy!" "Hey! Hey! I thought I had 'er,
but she got away!"
And then just out on the street there came a clattering of glass
breaking on the sidewalk. I quit the music and listened. People were running
past the door, darting around in big bunches, cussing and hollering.
The girls and the sailors stopped dancing and walked to the door.
"What is it?" I spoke over the microphone.
"Big fight! Looks like!" the fat sailor was saying.
"Let's go see, boys!" another sailor said. He pushed off out the door.
"All time fight. Me not bother." Charlie kept swabbing the bar down
with a wet rag. "Me got work."
I slung my guitar across my shoulder and run out the door with Cisco
right in after me saying, "Must be a young war!"
A bunch of men that had the looks of being pool-hall gamblers and
horse-race bookies stood on the curb across the street hooting and heaving
and cussing and pointing. The sailors and working men from our saloon
stepped out and walked in front of the Imperial Bar next door. Already plate
glass lay at our feet in the dark. Out of all of the milling and loud
talking something whizzed over our heads and smashed a second window. Glass
flew like chipped ice all around us. A slice cracked one of Cisco's guitar
strings, and the music bonged.
"Who throwed that can of corn?" a lady yelled from right at my elbow.
"Was that a can of corn?" I asked her.
"Yes. Two cans," she told me. "Who throwed them two cans of corn, and
broke them windows? I've a good notion to bust my parasol over his head when
I find out!"
Two men in the middle of the street argued and pushed each other all
around.
"You're th' man I want, all right!" the biggest one said.
"You won't want me very long!"
A soldier with a brown overcoat on was pushing the big man back to the
curb. I elbowed near and saw it was the same soldier that had just bought us
the seven beers. I looked a little closer in the night and seen the face of
the big pug-ugly that had said he was going to beat hell out of all of the
Japs in Los Angeles.
About ten of his thug friends chewed on old cigars, smoked snipe
cigarets, and backed him up with tough talk when he said anything. "We come
ta git 'em, an' dam me, we're gonna git 'em! Japs is Japs!" "I'm da guy wot
t'rew dat corn, lady, whataya gonna do wid me?"
"I'll show you, you big bully!" She waved the can in the air to throw
it at him, and her man right behind her said, "No, don't. We don't want to
start no trouble. What's this all about, anyhow?" He took the can of corn
away from her in the air.
"We're at war with them yeller-belly Japs! An' we come down ta git our
share of 'em!" A big man with a lost voice was talking on the curb. "We're
'Meric'ns!"
"You ain't nuthin', but th' worst dam scum of th Skid Row! Two-bit
gambler!" A big half-Indian truck driver was trying to push his way across
the street to get the man.
"Jap rats!" another tough one said.
"Spies! They tipped off th' Goddam Jap army! These yeller snakes knew
to a split second when Pearl Harbor was gonna be blowed up. Git 'em! Jail
'em! Kill 'em!" He started to cross from the other side of the street.
A couple of sailors edged their way toward him saying, "You're not
going to hurt anybody, Mister Blowoff!"
"Where is th' cops?" a girl was asking her boy friend.
"I guess they're on th' way," Cisco told her.
"Cops ain'ta gonna put no stop ta us, neither!" one of the mob yelled
across at us.
"But, brother, we are!" I answered him back.
"You mangy little honky-tonk guitar-playin' sot, I'll come over there
an' bust that music box over yore bastardly head!"
'I'll furnish th' guitar, mister," I talked back, "but you'll hafta
furnish th' head!"
Everybody squeezed around me and laughed back at the rioters. Cursing
flew in the air and fists waved above the crowd in the rain and in the dark.
The people on our side of the street formed two or three lines in front of
the Imperial's door. Several Japanese men and women stood inside picking up
glass from the floor. "That's it, folks," Cisco told everybody, "squeeze
together. Stand right where you are. Don't let that crazy mob get through!"
"Wonder why they threw two cans of corn?" I was looking around asking
people.
Then I listened across the street and a wild man mounted the running
board of a car and hollered out, "Listen people! I know! Why, just this
morning, right here in this neighborhood, a housewife went into a Japanese
grocery store. She asked him how much for a can of corn. He told her it was
fifteen cents. Then she said that was too much. And so he said when his
Goddam country took th' U.S.A. over, that she would be doing the work in the
store, and the corn would cost her thirty-five cents! She hit him over the
head with that can of corn! Ha! A good patriotic American mother! That's why
we smashed that Goddam window with th' cans of corn! Nobody can stop us,
men! Go on, fight! Get 'em!"
"Listen, folks," Cisco climbed up on the wheel of a little vegetable
cart at our curb. "These little Japanese farmers that you see up and down
the country here, and these Japanese people that run the little old cafes
and gin joints, they can't help it because they happen to be Japanese.
Nine-tenths of them hate their Rising Sun robbers just as much as I do, or
you do."
"Lyin' coward! Git down from dere!" a guy with hairs sticking out from
his shirt collar bawled at Cisco.
"Pipe down, brother. l'll take care of you later. But this dam story
about the can of corn is a rotten, black and dirty lie! Made up to be used
by killers that never hit a day's honest work in their whole life. I know
it's a lie, this can-of-corn story, because even two years ago, I heard this
same tale, word for word! Somebody right here in our country is spreading
all kinds of just such lies to keep us battling against each other!" Cisco
said.
"Rave on, you silly galoon!"
"You're righter than hell, boy! Pour it on!"
"You're a sneakin' fifth column sonofabitch! Tryin' ta pertect them
skunk Japs agin' native-borned American citizens!"
The crowd started slow across from the other side. We stood there ready
to keep them back. The whole air was full of a funny, still feeling, like
all of hell's angels was just about to break loose.
Just then an electric train, loaded down with men and railroad tools,
pulled past in front of them. The railroad workers hollered a few cracks at
the two sides. "What goes on here?" "Gangfight?" "Keep back there, ya'll git
run over!" "Listen ta these ratheads bark!"
Cisco dropped down fast off of the hub of the wheel. "Me, I'm going to
stand right here," he hollered, "right here on this curb. I just ain't
moving."
"I'm with yuh, brother!" A lady walked up with a big black purse and a
gallon jug of wine, ready to be broke over somebody's head.
"I ain't a-movin', neither!" A little old skinny man was flipping his
belt buckle. "Let 'em come!"
As the last two or three flat cars of men rolled down the street and
kept the wild mob back for a minute, I grabbed my guitar up and started
singing:
We will fight together
We shall not be moved
We will fight together
We shall not be moved
Just like a tree
That's planted by the water
We
Shall not
Be moved.
"Everybody sing!" Cisco grabbed his guitar and hollered out.
"All together! Sing! Give it all ya got!" I told them.
So as the last car of the train went on down the middle or the street,
everybody was singing like church bells ringing up and down the grand canyon
of the old Skid Row:
Just like
A treeeee
Standing by
The waterrr
We
Shall not
Be
Moooooved!
The whole bunch of thugs made a big run at us sailing cuss words of a
million filthy, low-down, ratty kind. Gritting their teeth and biting their
cigar butts and frothing at the mouth. Everybody on our side kept singing.
They made a dive to bust into our line. Everyone stood there singing as loud
and as clear and as rough-sounding as a war factory hammering.
Sailors threw out their chests and sung it out. Soldiers drifted in.
Truck drivers laid their heads back and cotton pickers slung their arms
along with the cowboys and ranch hands and bartenders from other saloons
around.
The rain come down harder and we all got wetter than wharf rats. Our
singing hit the mob of rioters like a cyclone tearing into a haystack. They
stopped--fell back on their heels like you had poked them in the teeth with
a ball bat. Fumbled for words. Spewed between their teeth and rubbed their
fingers across their eyes. Scratched their heads and smeared rainwater down
across their cheeks. I saw three or four in the front row coming toward us
that grinned like monkeys up a grapevine. The bunch backing them up split
off and stopped there in the rain for a little bit, then mostly slunk off in
twos and threes in different directions. Four or five walked like gorillas
and waved their arms and fists in the faces of the soldiers and sailors
standing along the curb singing. I thought for a minute that the battle was
on, but nobody touched each other.
And then, after some howling and screeching that didn't halfway match
with our singing, there whined through the clouds that old familiar siren
that tinhorn pimps, horse betters, and gamblers get to knowing so good, the
moan of the police patrol wagon a block away. In a second, the toughs bent
over and skidded away in between the cars, and got lost in the crowds along
the walk, and hit the alleys and disappeared.
A big long black hoodlum wagon drove up and fifteen or twenty big cops
fell out with all of the guns and sticks and clubs it would take to win a
war. They made a step or two at us, and then stopped and listened to the
raindrops and the wind in the sky and the singing echoing around over the
old skiddy row. They shook their heads, looked at their address books,
flashed searchlights around.
"The chief said this was where the riot was." A cop pointed his
flashlight onto his address sheet.
"Jest a buncha people singnin'." Another big copper shook his head.
"Hhmmmm."
"Sing with us, officer?" Cisco laughed out in the crowd.
"How does it go?" the big chief asked him back.
"Listen."
"Yeah. Dat's it. Tum. Tum. Tum. Tum. Dat's planted by de water, we
shall not--be--moved!"
All of the cops stood around smiling and swinging their clubs. The
patted their feet and hands. They watched and hummed and they listened.
"Okay! Dat's all!" the head officer told them. "Back on da wagon, men!
Back on!"
And when it drove off down the street-car tracks to fade away into the
night rain, that old patrol wagon was singing:
Just like a treeee
Planted by th' waterrr
We
Shall not
Be
Mooooved!
EXTRY SELECTS
"You look like one of these here pretty boys that tries to get out of
all th' hard work you can!" a nice pretty girl, about eighteen, was saying
to me as we rode along.
It was about a 1929 sedan, the kind of used car salesmen call lemons.
No two wires quite connected like they ought to; there was a gap of daylight
between every two moving parts, and every part was moving.
''I got jest as many callouses on my hands as you!" I hollered at her
above the racket. "Take a look at th' ends of my fingers!"
She set her eyes on the ends of my guitar fingers. Then she told me,
"Well, I reckon I was wrong."
"That's about th' only place ya get stuck pickin' cotton, too!" I told
her. I pulled my hand back. I sung a little song and made my old guitar talk
about it, too:
I worked in your farm
I worked in your town
My hands is blistered
From the elbows down
Ride around little doggies
Ride around them slow
They're fiery, they're snuffy,
And rarin' to go.
A middle-size lady in the front seat, with streaks of gray hair sailing
in the wind, grinned at her husband beside her and said, "Well, I don't know
if that guitar boy back there hits any of th' heavy work or not, but he can
dang shore sing about it!"
"Mighty near make work sound like fun, cain't he?" Her husband kept his
eyes running along the road ahead, and all I seen of him was just an old
slouch hat jammed on the back of his head.
"Long ye been runnin' around playin' an' singin'?" the mama asked me.
"Round about eight years," I said.
"That's a pretty good little spell" she told me. She was watching out
the broke window at the scenery jumping past.
"California's mortally loaded down with stuff to ride along an' look
at, ain't it?"
"Long on climate out here! But still, It costs ya like th' devil ta
soak up any of it!" the boy who was driving said.
"All you folks one family?" I asked them.
"All one family. This is me'n my husband, an' these is all th' kids we
got left! Four of us now. Used to be eight "
"Where's th' other four?" I asked her. The trees got so thick and green
along the river bottom that the leaves blotted out the sunlight.
"They just went," I heard the lady say.
The girl in the back seat with me said, "You know where they go," and
she didn't take her eyes off of the loaded orchard all along out through the
window. She had gray eyes and her black hair sort of curled down to her
shoulders
"Yeah," I told her, "I know all right."
And just about that time there was a big racket and a tire right under
where I was setting went out, Keeeeblam! The car got out of gallop with the
trailer and jumped along like a sick frog. I could feel the tire tearing
itself to pieces between the iron rim and the pavement, and we all had to
hold what we had till everything bounced to a stop.
"Good-bye, little trailer hitch!" The driver boy was talking to his
self as he piled out of the front door and trotted around to the back.
"Shot to hell," the papa said.
"Tire ration's on, top of all this," the mama was telling us.
"Rubber's rubber, old 'er new. Uncle Sammy says, 'Gotta save that
rubber ta haul soldiers 'n' guns, 'n' cannons." The driver was talking while
he wired some old wire around the bolt that kept up the friendship between
the car and trailer.
"I'd shore hate to see a soldier ridin' aroun' with a hungry gut,
myself." The old man was running a couple of fingers down over his chin and
smacking his lips over the fence at the orchard.
"Now, Mister Papa, just tell me, what has this old rotten tire got to
do with a hungry soldier?" the girl asked her dad.
"Well, if we could git on down th' country just a little bit further,
'y God, I could pick enuff fruit an' stuff ta feed three er four soldiers,
heavy eaters." I seen a light strike fire in the old man's eyes. '' 'Bout
all I'm good fer, I reckon. I can pick more fruit with both hands over my
eyes than most of these new pickers fioodin' out here."
"Don't go to braggin'," the old lady told him. "You was th' best
blacksmith back in Johnson County, all right, but I ain't seen you break no
pickin' records yet. That's one mighty fine-lookin' orchard right in through
there. Wonder what it is?"
"Apercots," the girl spoke up.
"Nice even rows," the old man told us; "trees all just 'bout th' same
size. Limbs just achin' full wantin' us to come over that old fence an' pick
'em clean. I suppose a soldier wouldn't smack his goozler over a good big
hot apercot pie right about now!"
"How we gonna get another tire?" I asked the bunch, "Anybody got any
money in their clothes?"
"Ain't a-packin' nothin' that jingles," one of them said.
" 'Er folds either," another one talked up.
I heard the slick drone of an easy motor oozing down the line. Before I
could center my eyes on it good, there was a Ssssss Swish. And a
Zzooommmm--a blue gray sedan lit up in the sun like a truckload of diamonds
sailing past. The heavy tread on the new tires sung a sad-sounding song off
down the highway.
A truck come angling down the highway, no two wheels running in the
same direction. This truck just wasn't quite politically clear. But it had a
big bunch of men, women, and kids on it, and stopped on the shoulder just
ahead of us. Five or six people yelled back, but one big raw-boned lady
drowned most of the others out. "Need some help, or just lost?"
"Both!" the mama of our little bunch hollered back.
"Tire blowed off!"
"Can't you fix it up?" the big lady asked us.
"Not this 'un! It'd take th' Badyear Rubber Outfit three months to make
this thing ever hold air again!" the lady in our bunch said.
'Tire ration got us!"
"Wanta pick?" the lady asked us.
"Pickin' around here? Where 'bouts? What?"
"We ain't got no time to waste! But if ya wanta work, foller us! First
gate here! Crank up and roll on that bad tire! Ya cain't hurt it no worse!"
Our bunch piled back into the seats. I was riding right on top of the
bad tire and the girl asked me, "What kind of a song would you make up now,
to sing about this?" I let out with:
Tell me, mama, is your tread thin as mine?
Hey! Hey! Woman, is your tread thin as mine?
Work and roll, is your tread thin as mine?
Every old tire's gonna blow its side sometime!
'Wheel 'em an' deal 'em!" the driver laughed out.
Say, Lord Godamighty, roll them wheels around!
Hey! Good gal, you gotta roll them wheels around!
Workin' woman, roll your wheels around!
I'll find me a job or roll California down!
"Where 'bouts ye hear that ther song? 'At's a mighty good 'un," the old
man asked me from the front seat.
'That ain't even no song. I just made it up," I told him. There was a
big orchard passing us up on both sides.
The young girl by me in the back seat said, "Boy, you sure can sing
about work, whether you get any done or not."
'Time ya sing six hours or eight or ten, right straight hand runnin',
in some of these saloons or places, like I do, you'll say music runs inta
work!" I told her.
"Sing that long every night?" she asked.
"General thing. Get started out about eight o'clock, sing till 'bout
two or three, sometimes daylight in th' mornin'."
"Make how much?" she asked.
"Dollar, dollar an' a half," I said.
"Just about an orchard day." She glanced out the window at a stinging
bee trying to carry a big load of honey and keep up with our car. "Looky!
This poor little old bee. He's a havin' a hard time tryin' to fly with too
much honey!"
"Looks like even that little old bee's all lined up workin
'
fer Uncle Sam Deeefense!" her papa said, bending his neck and head
around to see the bee.
" Tain't deefense!" she told him.
"Deeefense. Beeeefense. Some kind of a fence,'' the old man said.
She screwed her eyes up a little bit and told him, " 'Tain't deefense.
Not no more, it ain't!"
"What is it?"
"War."
"Same thing, war's defense, ain't it?" her papa asked her.
''Not by a dam sight!" the girl talked back at him.
"What's th' diff'rence?"
"If Hitler made a run at me with a big club, an' I took a step
backwards to get fixed, that'd be defense," she said.
"So what?"
"Then if I reached and got me a hell of a lot bigger club," she made a
grab for the tire pump on the floor, "that'd be changin' my belt line!"
"Yeah?"
'Then when I hauled off an' beat old Hitler plumb into th' ground,
that'd be war!"
" 'Y God, 'at's right, sis," the old man backed her up. "Only you don't
hafta swing that there pump aroun' so much here in th' car. You don't want
to konk none of yer own soldiers out, do you?"
"No." She smiled a little and dropped the pump back down onto the
floorboards. "Gotta not hurt none of my own soldiers here.''
The mama spit out her front window and said, "Reckon all of us is
soldiers these days. Look like th' gate where we turn."
The car turned through a big swinging gate into an orchard of trees set
out in a deep sandy land.
"Truck stopped on ahead yonder," I heard the old man say.
People piled down off th' truck bed, men in their overhalls and khaki
britches, shirts two or three colors where a new patch had been sewed, and
the blue and brownish color sweated out a lot of times. Some tied
handkerchiefs around their necks and slipped on their gloves. Tobacco cans
flew out and men rolled the makin's. You could see a snuff can shine like it
was polished in the sun. Hoppers and bugs and all kinds of critters with
wings wheeled through the air, and spider webs ran from tree limbs to the
clods of orchard dirt.
The tall lady from the truck jumped on our running board and said,
"Keep drivin'. Careful, don't run over none of our pickers. Lucky to get 'em
these days to come out in the fields with this gas and rubber cut down like
it is." I could see her arm and hand stuck through the window, holding onto
the door handle inside. She had fair skin with light freckles and I took her
to be a Swedish lady. "See that bunch of cars and trailers through yonder?
Pull on ahead!"
The Swedish lady stepped down on the ground and the car stopped. I got
out and brushed some of the dust out of my duds, and everybody was standing
there waiting for her to tell us something about something.
"You folks pick for a living?"
"Yes'm." Everybody nodded.
"Know about apricots then, I suppose?"
We all nodded that we knew.
"Do you know how we grade the apricots?"
"Grade 'em?"
"No'm."
"I don't reckon."
"Three grades of apricots, you know. Just plain ones. Then, next best
are called Selects. Very best, Extra Selects."
"Plain ones."
"Selects."
"Extry Seelects."
We nodded our heads up and down.
"Now, the plain ones ripen last in the warm weather; anybody can pick
the plain ones. Pay so much a box. Selects ripen earlier. Better taste,
better shape, less of them. You get a little more money for picking them,
about twice as much a box as the plain ones."
"Is th' Seelects on now?" the old man in our bunch asked her.
"No," the lady said to us. "Too early. The Extra Selects are on now."
The young girl nodded her head. "Oh, yes ma'm. They're th' very
earliest ones, aren't they?" The sun was hitting down in her face and I saw
her hair was going to curl up awful pretty when she washed the dirt out in
river water.
"First to ripen. Moneyed folks want the very best they can get, and the
best is the Extra Selects. Now, here, I'll give you an idea how you pick
them, so when the orchard boss gets here in a minute, you'll already know
the answers. See those limbs over there?"
"Loaded plumb down."
"Man alive, look at them apercots!"
'Trees got a lot of patience, ain't they?"
"Oooooooozin' in juice."
"You've got to be able to tell an Extra Select when you run onto one,"
the Swede lady told us. "Here's one. See? Clear bright color. Nice gold
look."
"Makes my mouth run water," the old man said.
"I won't even have time to dip my snuff, I'll be eatin' so many of them
there yeller outfits." The old lady was laughing and winking at all of us.
"I'm sure we see what you mean," the young girl told the lady. "We've
picked lots of other fruit where they graded them just about the same way.
They're pretty, aren't they?"
"One little thing," the lady talked so quiet I had to step closer to
hear, "I'll tell you to save the field boss from tangling horns with you. If
he catches you eating the Extra Selects, he takes it out of your day's pay,
so don't say I didn't warn you. He's walking over toward us now. You'll make
out all right. He's short-handed around here, needs you pretty bad. Don't
ever let him back you down. I think he was born tough, and just naturally
likes to see everything tough."
"New pickers?" He hollered out about fifty feet before he got to us. He
was holding the top wire of a fence, spraddling it, and he was sort of a
chunky built, low-set man. You could tell he had to grunt and stretch to
make it over the fence. "New hands?"
The mother said, "Well, I ain't so new no more." She smiled at the
boss, then she looked down at the deep dirt.
"I mean you're new around here, ain't you?" He was yanking at his belt
trying to poke his two or three shirts down inside his pants. Everything
about him seemed to be greasy, and bagging down to the ground.
"New here," the mother said. Everybody else was standing there waiting
for him or the belt, one or the other, to come out winner. "Just blowed in
on a bad tire."
"Know yer Exter Selecks pretty well?"
"We don't fool around with no thin' but the very best," I told him.
"Well, far's that goes, I hope I don't ketch you foolin' around in this
orchard when the order comes in."
"Order comes where?" the girl asked him.
"Cann'ry order. Ain't come yet. Due today. Very latest tomorrow. Well,
get your stuff all unpacked over yonder under those trees." He was looking
at the old car steaming at the mouth. Then he turned around and started
walking away.
I took a couple of steps behind him and said, "Say, boss, I don't think
these people quite understand all of this order business. If we're goin' to
even eat, we gotta get some work 'cause we ain't got no money. Cain't wait
even another day."
He stopped and turned around to me, and told me, "Listen, I don't know
who you are, but you drive in here with a bunch of pickers. You wanta work,
don't you?" He waved his hands around in the air so much that he worked his
shirt out from under his belt again and fought with his britches to try to
keep them from falling down. "You don't act like you ever picked an apricot
before! Or did you?" He eyed me up and down the front.
"No, I never picked an apricot before, except to eat. I play music for
a livin'. I don't have to pick your dam apricots for my livin'! Just these
other people. That's their only way of eatin'! They've got a busted tire,
mister. This is far as they can get. No work, no eat!" I told him.
"Come on down. Sign up."
"Sign up? Where?" I asked him.
"Store. Can't you see that fillin
'
station, big as it is?
And store?" He was pointing ahead of himself and walking away.
I took several steps alongside of him and then told him, "I'm not with
these people, I cain't sign up for them. What is it we got to sign?"
"Register book," he told me. Then he stopped real quick and asked me,
"You ain't with these folks? How come?" He was giving me the real combing
down with his eyes. "How come you so interested in my business?"
"I was just hitchin'. These people let me ride. I sing in saloons for a
livin'," I told him.
"I guess I won't need you to work for me, then. You can take your
ukelelaydeehoo and beat it."
"Well, I ain't in no awful big rush," I said to the man. "I thought I
might hang around till they get their tire fixed." Then I turned around and
hollered to the people, "Say! Somebody's got to come down to th' store an'
sign some-thin'!"
"Sign which?" I heard somebody say.
"Register up! Sign somethin' or other!" I told them.
"You better go, honey," I heard the old man say to the young girl. "You
got good eyes. See better'n me. An' you write a better hand than yer
brother's."
So the girl and me walked along kicking clods apart in under the
apricot trees. She was trying to fix her hair back over her ear some way and
saying, "I've signed a lot of these register books. Just to keep track of
who's working, and how much you've got coming, and all how many's in your
family and stuff like that. You can sign up, too."
" 'Fraid I won't," I told her.
"Not going to work?" she asked me.
"Not pickin' apercots."
"I was just thinking how much fun we'd have picking together. We'd get
a lot more picked, even if you didn't pick a single apricot."
"Hows that? Now?"
"You play your guitar and sing for us out in the orchard, and we'll
work just that much easier and better. See, mister singin' man?"
"You know, you're an awful, awful smart girl. You know what I'm gonna
do?"
"What?"
"I'm gonna get you a real good job. Best job in th' whole state of
California!"
"Movie star?"
"Hell, no. Gov'nor!"
"Me be gov'nor?"
"We can tell everybody that you're gonna win this war quick!"
"Lady be gov'nor, hey?"
'Tell ever'body you're gonna take all th' pretty red an' green neon
signs an' all th' pretty lit-up nickel phonographs out of th' road houses,
an' cat houses, an' joints, an' put 'em around in th' factories an' in th'
shops an' in th
'
fields!"
"What's a cat house?"
"Skip it."
"Home for little cats?"
"Some of 'em ain't so little. Anyway, then, instead of drawin'
ever'body from out on th' job down to th' saloon, see, it'd draw ever'body
from th' saloon out on to th' job. An' we'd all have such a good time
workin' that we'd work 'bout three times harder."
''And win the war! Here's the sign-'em-up store,'' she said, and I held
her hand till she could jump across a puddle of oil on the ground close to
the porch. We slammed in through an old screen door. "So dark in here I
won't be able to make out where to sign my name. Say, mister boss man, do
you hang around this old dark hole much of your time?" she asked the owner.
"How much of my time I spend inside my own place of business is my own
affair, little lady. Here. I suppose you can at least write your name!" He
growled and his belly ached because he was such an old growler. "Sign th'
name of every member of your family an' put a cross by th' ones that'll be
pickin'. Right down this list here."
I watched her write the names of all four members of her family. "Four.
Used to be eight," she told herself almost, I guessed, by force of habit.
"Who owns your car an
'
trailer?
'
' the storekeeper
asked her.
She looked up at him. "My father. Why?"
"Be needin' some things to cook an' eat, won't you?" He glanced over
his specks at her.
"Yes, I guess so."
"Take this security note down to your old man. Tell `im to sign it an'
bring it back an' you're good for twenty-five dollars worth of credit here
at th' store. Just a little piece of paper we all sign."
I'd been walking around over the store, taking a look at the price
tags. "Eagle Milk, two bits a can?" I asked him. "Goshamighty, never did see
Eagle Milk cost more'n eighteen cents, even in all of th' Texas an' Oklahoma
oil booms!''
"If you don't want it, leave it on th' shelf!" He cut his eyes over at
me.
She let the pencil drop. "Things are so awful high. I just don't quite
hardly see how we can even afford to eat anything." She took me by the hand
and looked like she was sorry the boss had heard her.
"Me, I wouldn't sign th' dam thing if I starved plum to death," I said
to her. "But you folks, 'course, there's your whole family; bad tire; sorta
stuck here."
The girl carried the slip back to her folks and we had to shake hands
with twenty-five or thirty other people around in the bunch before we got a
chance to talk about the credit business. Gray-looking clothes and old
floppy sacks and rags everywhere. Broke-down cars and homemade trailers.
People smiled and pointed to their own, bragging, "Built 'er jist like I
wanted 'er, my own way." "Yes sir, took me right onto six months of hard old
pinchin' an' savin' ta git th' money ta throw this'n together." "Our'n looks
like th' Los Angeles junk heap headin' down th' highways, but them slick
purty cars duck off ta one side ta let us pass!" We'd all laugh when
somebody told a good one on their jaloppy or trailer. "Mine wants ta run so
fast I gotta keep it loaded fulla rocks ta keep it from jist takin' off like
a big bird!"
"I just don't know. I just don't know," the old man was saying, rubbing
his hand around over his face at the same time. "Mama, what do you think,
what you got to say about this here Goddem credit?" He looked around for his
wife, but she wasn't in the crowd. Then he asked his boy, "I dam me, if I
know, what do you think? Run a big risk a-losin th' whole business." He
looked at the rest of his family. "You helped me, you helped me build th'
whole works. You got somethin' to say in th' way things is got an' got rid
of." Then he asked another man there, "Hay, mister, do you know a dam thing
about this dam infernal credit slip?"
"Do I know?" A tall gangling man thumbed his overhall suspenders and
told the old man, "See this slip of mine? Just exactly like yours. I advise
you not sign nothin' for nobody."
"Much ablige," the old man said. "I wish to hell an' little santypedes
I could find my wife! Runs off 'n' hides. Cain't find 'er high ner low!
Lory! Lorrry! Where'n th' hell are you hidin' at?" He was calling through
his hands.
"Go ahead and sign that thing, Pa." His wife was laying stretched out
on an old slice of gray canvas, looking up through the limbs of a
wild-looking tree of some kind, talking between the leaves, right on out
into the open bright sky. "You know you'll sign it, anyhow. You'll think of
ten thousand mean things to say about the store man. You'll think of five
thousand things wrong with this orchard here. You'll say there's a blue
jillion things wrong with how th' country's run; but you'll sign it. You'll
cuss old mister Hitler an' Mussolini and Kaiser Bill an' Father Coffin; an'
then you'll think about th' soldiers fightin' Hitler, an' you'll say you
just got to pick th' fruit for 'em; an' you'll think about yer own little
hungry youngins, an' you'll sign it. ... If it said bring your left eye an'
yer right arm down to that old store when you went to buy somethin', you'd
sign it I know what's in back of that old head of your'n. Th' whole world's
fightin' to keep from bein' hungry. Yore own little family's standin' around
with their bellies crawlin'. Hand my man an endelible pencil, somebody. He's
goin' to write his name on a slip. Gonna lose all we got here. He's thinkin'
'bout all of them soldiers out yonder shootin' an' he's gonna write his name
down on a Comp'ny Credit slip. ..."
The sun went down on everybody. You could hear the jingle of the
four-for-a-nickel knives and forks. "Smells like ever'body's a-eatin' 'bout
th' same supper 'roun' here," the father was saying.
"Sow bosom and beans!" The girl laughed at my elbow and her hair
touched my face when she took the tin plates away. "But when you've worked
real hard and are good and hungry, it smells good, don't it?"
A lady from a car across from our trailer walked over with a tin bucket
in each hand and said, "I brung ye these rag buckits, bugs 'n' skeeters, `n'
all kindsa bitin', stingin', 'n' jist arguin' vermits is a gonna make a big
land rush f'r this place quick's we light these lanterns. Ye jist strike a
match to these here rags, see, an' push 'em right back down inta th' buckit
real tight, an' leave 'em smolder along. Makes a cloud of smoke almost's bad
as them fellers that usta sling tear gas at us 'fore th' war come along an'
we quit our strikin'."
"I'm one that's shore glad we quit that strikin'," the mother said, "
'cause just ain't right for one buncha people to up an' quit work, an'
another bunch to drive down an' shoot you full of that old tear gas, crops
of all kinds a-goin' to waste all around. That's a right friendly lady,
ain't she? Just walked off 'fore any of us had a chance to thank her for
them buckets.''
Her daughter eased around in the dark and I felt her take a good warm
seat beside me on the beer case, and I took her by the hand and said, "Yep
siree, you've got an awful honest hard-workin' set of hands on you."
She squeezed mine a little and said, "Could I, do you think, learn how
to play the guitar?''
"If ya try, ya would. Want ta take lessons? Shucks, I could show ya th'
easy part in a little o' no time."
"You two quit'cher flirtin' an' sing us a song. Happ'n ta know th'
Talkin' Blues?"
"I'll teach ya after th' dishes an' stuffs all put away." I was just
catching part of what the person talking was saying, "Huh? Th' Talkin'
Blues? I know a few verses."
"While you're doing your Talking Blues," the girl told me, "I'll try
not to make any noise, but I've just got to put these dishes back into their
boxes."
"Okay," I said, then started playing and talking:
If you wanta get to heaven,
Let me tell you what to do,
Just grease your feet in a mutton stew,
Just slide out of the devil's hand
And ooze over into the Promised Land!
Take it easy. An' go greasy.
Down in the hen house on my knees
I thought I heard a chicken sneeze;
Nothin' but a rooster a-sayin' his prayers,
An' givin' out thanks fer th' hens upstairs.
Rooster preachin'. Hens a-singin'.
Little young chickens jest a-hopin'.
Now I been here an' I been there,
Rambled aroun' most everywhere,
Purtiest little gal that I ever did see
A-walkin' up an' down by th' side of me.
Mouth wide open. Catchin' flies.
Knows I'm crazy.
Everybody would snigger and laugh between verses. I played the guitar
while several other folks added verses they'd picked up somewhere. A woman
with a blue bonnet on held her chin in one hand and fanned the insects of
all kinds off her baby asleep at her feet on a old sack; she sung:
Down in th' holler settin' on a log,
Hand on my trigger an' my eye on a hog;
Pulled that trigger, th' gun went 'zip';
Grabbed mister hog with all of my grip.
Cain't eat hog eyes. But I need greasin'.
"Well, this singing is fine and dandy!" The girl talked up at her work
with the dishes. "But this isn't getting these dishes clean! Mister guitar
picker, come on here, help me carry up a bucket of water from the river!"
As I followed her along I heard somebody in the crowd laugh out, "He
shore didn't hafta be coaxed none!"
"You know I never did ask you yer name yet." I was talking and
following her along a path under the trees down to the banks of the river.
"I s'pose ya got one, ain't ya?"
"Ruth. I already know yours; I'll call you Curley. Lordy, I wonder how
deep this water runs along in here. It's pretty and clear. You can almost
see the fish swimming around.'' She waded out barefooted and left her shoes
kicked off on the bank. She dipped up two buckets of water and made an awful
pretty picture standing there reflecting upside-down with all of the trees
and banks. "Pretty cold," she was trying to put her wet feet back into her
sandals.
"Dry yer feet 'fore ya put 'em back in yer shoes!" I took the buckets
and set them on the ground a few feet from the path, and held her hand while
we walked back into the underbrush. We both dropped down on some leaves and
I dried her feet one at a time with my handkerchief.
"Feels good to have somebody kneel down and dry my feet!"
"Makes 'em warmer. Yeah. It feels fine."
"But how do you know how it feels, it's me that's getting my feet
dried."
"Yeah, but it's me that's doin' th' dryin'."
"My skin is ail sunburned and rough-looking. I'm always going without
stockings and scratching the hide off on twigs and bushes. They look
terrible."
"Look all right to me. You got 'em wet plumb up above yer knees."
"You mind?"
"Naw, I don't mind. Fact, I was just thinkin', I sort of wish you'd
waded out deeper."
"Teach me a guitar lesson."
"Right now?"
"Show me something real easy to do."
I put both arms around her and made a pillow with my hand out of the
leaves; then I picked up a handful of leaves and dropped them in her hair
and said, "This is easy to do." And I kissed her four times and said, "And
this is easy, and this is easy, and this, and this." I put my face against
her neck and felt her put her arms around mine, felt her cheek warm up and
she told me, "Is this your first guitar lesson?"
"This is what you call the first and easy steps."
"You're warm and I'm all cold from wading the water."
"If you had ice-cicles hangin' in yer hair, you'd feel warm ta me."
"Teach me the next lesson."
"Next lesson is mostly learning how ta use yer hands an' fingers.
Gettin' th' feel of th' instrument. Gettin' use ta th' strings that're
attached."
"Strings attached?"
"A few."
"What?"
"I want me 'n' you ta be tied t'gether, sort of b'long ta one another,
an' be like this all th' time. Jest like we are now. An' you c'n be
gov'nor."
"Who's Governor?"
"My gov'nor."
"Teach me lessons on the guitar? Buy me penny candy twice a week?"
"Penny candy, twice a week."
"I'm thinkin' about it.''
"You look mighty purty layin' here thinkin' 'bout it."
"And you look good, too. Tell me all about yourself. Tell me all about
where you've been. All about your guitar. I'll bet if it could talk it could
tell a lot."
"It does talk."
"Guitar talks? What does it say?"
"Said it liked you. A whole big bunch."
"All o' these tree limbs full, an' that river full, an' two buckets
over. That enuf?"
"Gosh. Nobody ever did love me that much before!"
"I did, but I jest didn't see ya till now. I been a-lookin' fer you up
an' down a lotta roads--jest now locatin' ya. I know. Tell it by lookin' in
yer eyes there, all over yer face, even behind yer ears there."
"How does it happen that you've got to play in saloons? I don't like
for you to sing in old liquor joints."
"Oh, I dunno, goin' 'crost th' country, ya know, saloons is handy on
th' side of th' road, make a nickel er two, an' light out ag'in."
"Going where? Hunting what?"
"This."
"Maybe some day you'll find better places to play. huh? Sing? Oh, like
on the stage or radio or something like that?"
"I like ta go where th' big work jobs are, like buildin' dams, an' oil
fields, an' harvestin' th' crops. Might find a steady job if you'd push me
jest a little."
We were silent for a while.
"No," she said in my ear, "don't look. Don't watch the sun go down.
Don't watch it get dark. Don't tell me any story about a sheet of paper
called a marriage license, no, don't tell me anything like that, just stay
here and don't make big promises; you're right here right now; tomorrow
you'll be up and gone; I know that; but for now, just say you'll think about
me, and wherever you ramble off to, when you get tired of rambling, just
think about this, huh?"
"Okay." And I heard her heart beat under my ear when I laid my head on
her breast. "I'm sorry I ain't no very good talker. Cain't think of much
worth sayin' right now. You talk awhile, I'll do th' listenin'."
"Let's both just lay here and listen and think."
Her skin felt warm to the touch of my hands and my fingers combed her
hair through the scattered leaves. Her lips were moist like damp earth under
the leaves there. She was a warmth and a movement and a life that no man can
live good without. I blinked my eyelashes in her ear, but she just smiled
and kept her eyes closed like she was dreaming something.
We lugged the buckets of water up to the camp and I was walking behind
her, brushing leaves and twigs out of her hair. We poured water and washed
pots and pans together, and listened to the others. Pretty good crowd
around.
"Hey, mister!" a boy about fifteen was saying above the others, "ever
find that indelible pencil you was lookin' for?"
"No, never did. Why? You got one?" The father of our bunch told the
boy. "Thank ye."
Then a big fellow, wearing a patched and re-patched shirt with a quick
sharp sound in his voice, spoke up, "Say, old man, want me to tell you all
there is to know about these slips?"
"Wis't somebody would."
"Okay." He put his foot up on an apple crate and pointed his pipe out
into the dark, and while he was talking the only three things that lit up in
the night was his pipe, a white button on his shirt, and the light from the
fires of the ragpots shining in his eyes. "You're gonna think it over. This
fruit will be set back a week or ten days on account of one dam thing or
another. Cannery order. Weather. Market. What the hell. Anyway, you'll sign
that credit slip tonight. You'll take it down in the morning to buy your
stuff and go to work. You'll get a bill of goods and find out the crops have
been held up a few days. So you'll buy a few more days. You'll buy shy.
Skimp. Do without a lot of things you need. Try to keep your bill down."
When this fellow talked I looked him over; he was wearing rags, hit hard,
stuck down. He kept smoking his pipe and resting his wore-out boot on the
box.
"I'd buy light. We'd try ta go easy. Wouldn't we, kids? Mama?" Their
papa was holding his yellow slip in his hand on his knee, squatted down
cross-legged, and every time he said a word he pointed his indelible pencil
around at everybody.
"You'll get about ten days or two weeks behind at the store. Might be a
few scattered 'cots to pick, but not half enough to feed and keep your
bunch. Then the weather will warm up and force the boss to pick the 'cots.
You'll go to work. Make enough to live on while you're working."
"We c'n make that, all right, cain't we, Mama?"
"You'll just barely make enough to keep you going while you work. But
you won't make enough to be able to pay the ten days' bill you owe. You'll
just be ten days behind the world. Twenty dollars, twenty-five. Ten days!
Behind the world!"
The crowd drifted away to bed, everybody going his own way thinking.
Ruth and me set on the steps of the trailer and talked for an hour or two.
Early next morning by the rising sun I was bending over washing my face
with water out of the filling station hose, thinking I'd get something off
of the store boss even if it was just free water. I saw the old man come
walking all by his self, slow across the orchard. I was drying my face on
the tail of my shirt when he walked up behind me and said, "Ain't you th'
guitar man?"
I smiled up at him and said I was.
"Early mornin' sun's right good on a man, ain't it?" he asked me. Then,
trying to hold the little yellow slip behind his back so I couldn't see it,
he spit over into a little puddle of used oil and said, "I gotta step inside
of th' store here a minnit."
I was thinking to myself that old man had come down a hard road, then I
heard someone say, "Good-morning, Governor." I turned around and there was
Ruth standing behind a little bush on the sunny side of the store,
"What're ya hidin' in th' flower beds about?" I asked her.
"Eavesdroppin' on yer old man, huh?"
She was digging four holes with her shoe heels in the dirt of the
flower bed, and saying, "No. I don't have to sneak around and eavesdrop on
that old man of mine to know what he's going to do. He'll just hand the
Company man his credit slip, and won't say much. Maybe how pretty the
morning is. I'll tell you a secret if you'll not tell." She got her fourth
hole dug and looked around to see if anybody was looking. "I stole four of
these big pretty yellow apricots. I had them for breakfast. And now I'm
planting them back here by the side of this old store. Grow up some day.
Then I can rest easy knowing I paid him back."
I lifted her head up and kissed her and said, "Didja make a wish for
each one ya planted?"
She shook her head "yes."
"Any of 'em about you 'n' me?"
"Yes." She patted the ground with her foot where she had planted the
fourth seed. "First, I hope you go on with your rambling. Second, I hope you
get enough of it, and find out you don't like it. Third, I hope you keep on
with your music and singing, because you've got it in you, and you think
you're some kind of a preacher or a doctor going around to saloons listening
to people's troubles, and you think you can lift their spirits a little,
make somebody feel a little better. Fourth, I want to give you this mailing
address; it's a family of my kinfolks, they always keep pretty close track
of us and send all of our mail."
We stood in the sun out of sight behind a bush and held each other
close again, and I kissed her eyelids while she said, "Both of us have been
looking for this very thing for a long time. Both of us have thought we
found it somewhere before."
"And somethin' happened an' busted it all up. I hoped a lot when I was
a kid. Jest fast as one hope got tore up, I had all kindsa fun jest a-hopin'
somethin' new. But lately, I guess, my hopin' machine's been a little on th'
blink. I think if you loved me much's I love you, we could sleep under a
railroad bridge an' be all right."
"You're one kind of a liar.'
'
"Liar?"
"Yes. You've had better things. I can tell. So have I. Ten dozen times.
Then they go. You hit the road and stumble around from town to town, and all
along, you see pretty farms, pretty cars, pretty people, pretty towns, and
you don't think you can ever make enough money with your guitar and singing
to have all of this, so you lie, you lie to your ownself, and you say
'Everybody else in the whole world is all haywire, all wrong, I hate their
pretty world, because I can't find a hole to break into it!' And every
breath you're a liar. Maybe a good guy, and maybe I love you, but still a
liar." She put her face on my shoulder.
We sat down out of sight between a tall bush and the side of the store
building, and for another hour talked low and thought together.
"Yesterday, last night, I pot my handkerchief all wet dryin' yer legs
off; now, this mornin' I b'lieve ya got more water in yer eyes th'n there is
in th' river down yonder. Feel bad?"
"Oh, no." She tried to smile. "You don't mind me calling you a liar? We
all lie some. I lie, too."
"Yeah. I know. I am a liar. I know th' real things I'm a-lookin' fer.
Workin'. Makin' money. Buildin' up somethin'. Little house with ever'thing
in it. An' you there. I knew what I wanted. But I couldn't have none of it
if I didn't find my work. I wanted ta pick out my own kinda work. I'll work
like a Goddam dog, but I aim ta pick out my work. I coulda got a job pushin'
a truck er a tractor, wheelin' a wheelbarrow, pullin' a cross-cut saw,
paintin' signs, er even doin' picture work; but while I was singin' on th'
radio in Los Angeles I got more'n fifteen thousan' letters tellin' me ta
keep on singin' them good оl' songs, makin' up new ones, tellin' tall tales,
jokes, an' singin' ta a whole ocean fulla folks I couldn't see. Letters from
guys on ships at sea; letters from farm families, folks that trail around
pickin' crops; fact'ry workers all over th' country; desert rats pannin' fer
gold; even widders up in Reno there a gettin' on a beeline fer their fourth
husban'. People yell, an' laff, an' cry, hug me, kiss me, cuss me, take
swings at me, in saloons an' likker joints. An' still, th' big shots that
owns them radio stations says I ain't got what folks wants. Ya see, I happ'n
ta know. An' I swore a long time ago I'd stick ta my guitar an' my singin'.
But most radio stations, they won't let ya sing th' real songs. They want ya
ta sing pure оl' bull manure an' nothin' else. So I cain't never git ahold
of money an' stuff it'd take ta keep you an' me in a house an' home--so I
been a-lyin' ta my own self now fer a good long time, sayin' I didn't want
no little house an' alla that.
"But, Ruth, I think I know. I'm hittin' th' road ag'in. Right now.
Right this minute. Don't know how far I'll hafta go till I find out where I
c'n sing what I want ta sing an' my brain's hangin' jest as fulla new ideas
fer songs as a tree on а hill full of all colors o'blossoms. I'll sing
anywheres they 'll stand an' listen. An' they'll see to it I don't starve
out. They 'll see to it that me an' you c'n be together."
Her lips felt like butterflies lighting on mу face. The people from the
trailers and cars walked in twos and threes, kicking up the morning dust and
gathering all around the store, forty or fifty all told, stomping from one
foot to the other one, whittling or digging under finger nails with long
keen knives. "Man, howdy! Am I just fairly itchin' to grab that fruit off'n
them old heavy limbs!"
"I did`nt come out hyere t' Californiooo f'r no Goddam sunbath!"
'Trot out yore work, mister!''
"Hurry out here, mister orchard boss, read that tellygram that says for
me to exert my manly muscles in th' art of snatchin' apercots!"
"I done had my ham `n' eggs, `n' or'nge joose! My veins is runnin' full
a vitaphones!"
When one would blast loose with a wisecrack, the whole crowd would
laugh and a little rumble would run through them like an earthquake.
"Hey! Guitar man!" One old boy seen me and Ruth walk up from the side
of the store. "Could you turn loose of that purty gal this mornin' long
enough to sing us a little song?"
I said I reckoned as to how I could.
"Play us somethin' 'bout all of us standin' 'roun' here waitin' to go
to work!"
So I flipped a few strings to see if the box was in tune, and I smiled
a little at Ruth watching me:
I work in your orchards of peaches and prunes
Sleep on the ground 'neath the light of the moon
On the edge of your city you see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind.
Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground
From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters come down
Every state in this Union us migrants has been
We will work in your fight and we'll fight till we win!
They just kept quiet till I got done. Then every single person seemed
like they took a deep breath, started to say something, maybe; but I heard a
screen door slam behind me, and when I looked around, I saw Ruth's old dad
walk out onto the little porch, and the orchard boss walked out with him.
The boss carried a piece of paper in his hand, and he waved it in the air,
meaning for all of us get quiet.
"Quiet, everybody. Listen. Hhhhmmmmm. Won't bother to read all of this
order.
'dear sirs: due to cold weather of THE PAST THIRTY DAYS, THE APRICOT
CROP WILL NOT BE RIPE ENOUGH TO BE SUITABLE FOR CANNING. THERE WILL BE A TEN
DAY WAITING PERIOD TO ALLOW THE FRUIT TO MATURE. PICKERS MAY STAND BY AND
AWAIT ORDERS, AS THE WEATHER MAY TAKE A WARM CHANGE AND RIPEN THE FRUIT
SOONER. USUAL CREDIT SLIPS MAY BE OBTAINED BY MAKING THE PROPER ARRANGEMENTS
at the company store'
.... Hhhhmmm. Yes. Anybody want to ask any questions?" He looked out
over the bunch.
I believe this was the quietest crowd I was ever in. A kid about
fifteen asked his mama, "What're we alla gonna do now, Mama? Jes' be
useless?" I heard a little girl not more than nine crying, "Papa, why don't
we get in our car 'n
'
leave this оl' place?" And her daddy told
her, "We ain't got no gas, honey. We sent it all to th' soldiers to fight
that old mean Hitler man with." Everybody talked so quiet the orchard boss
never heard a word. He thought we was all scattering out without a sound,
like a herd of lost sheep.
Ruth squeezed my hand.
"Why don't ye come on back down to th' camp an' sing us ten days worth
of them there good songs?" Her dad was asking at my back. "We got ten days'
credit. Ye'll eat. Stay?"
"Mighty nice of ya." I put my guitar back over my shoulder, then told
him, "Guess I'd better hit th' road. Keep goin'. Lookin'. I hope you folks
come outta this hard spot."
"I don't mind the spots getting hard!" Ruth leaned up against the gas
pump. "War ain't fought with powder puffs." She was blinking her eyes fast.
"I'd kind of like ta stay here, spend some time. I feel like half of
me's stayin' an' half of me's goin'. Kinda funny," I told her.
"Remember the four seeds I planted and the four hopes I hoped?" Ruth
looked me up and down. "I'm hoping another hope, we can get some work to
help win this war."
I shook the old man's hand. Then Ruth's. And as I walked off down the
road, the old man hollered out to my back:
"I'm mailin' all my gas 'n' tires on to my son! Drives one of them
there
jeeps!"
CROSSROADS
There was big drops of sweat standing out on my forehead and my fingers
didn't feel like they was mine. I was floating in high finances, sixty-five
stories above the ground, leaning my elbow on a stiff-looking tablecloth as
white as a runaway ghost, and tapping my finger on the side of a big
fishbowl. The bowl was full of clear water with a bright red rose as wide as
your hand sunk down in the water, which made the rose look bigger and redder
and the leaves greener than they actually was. But everything else in the
room looked this same way when you looked through the rose bowls of water on
the other twenty-five or thirty tables. Each row of tables was in a
horseshoe curve, and each curve a little higher than the one below. I was at
the lowest. The price of the table for the night was twenty-five dollars.
Sixty-five stories back to the world. Quite a little elevator ride down
to where the human race was being run. The name of the place, the Rainbow
Room, in the city called New York, in the building called Rockefeller's
Center, where the shrimps are boiled in Standard Oil. I was waiting to take
an audition to see about getting a job singing there. Classiest joint I'd
ever seen. I looked all around at the deep rugs like a grassy lawn, and the
wavy drapes bellied back from the windows, and laughed to myself as I heard
the other performers crack jokes at the whole works.
"This must be th' ravin' ward, th' way they got things all padded up."
A sissy-looking little man in a long tail coat was waiting for his time to
try out.
"I just don't think they mowed th' upholst'ry yet this year," some lady
with a accordion folded acrost her lap was whispering.
"An' them tables," I almost laughed, saying, "is jest like this here
buildin, th' higher up ya git, th' colder it gits.''
The man that had been our guide and got us up there in the first place,
walked across the rug with his nose in the air like a trained seal, grinned
up at us waiting to take our tryouts, and said, "Sssshhh. Quiet, everybody!"
Everybody slumped down and straightened up and set tight and got awful
quiet while three or four men, and a lady or two dressed to match the
fixtures, walked in through a high arch door from the main terrace and took
seats at one of the tables.
"Main boss?" I said behind the back of my hand to the others at our
table.
Heads shook up and down, "yes.'' I noticed that everybody put on a
different face, like wax people almost, tilting their heads in the breeze,
grinning into the late afternoon sun that fell across the floor, and smiling
like they'd never missed a meal. This look is the look that most show folks
learn pretty early in the game; they paint it on their faces, or sort of
mold it on, so it will always smile like a monkey through his bars, so
nobody will know their rent ain't paid up yet, or they ain't had no job this
season or last, and that they just finished a sensational, whirlwind run of
five flops in a row. The performers looked like rich customers shining in
the sun, and the head boss with his table full of middle-size bosses looked
like they'd been shot at and missed. Through the water in the rose-bowls
everything in the place had an upside-down look; the floor looked like the
ceiling and the halls looked like the walls, and the hungry looked like they
was rich, and the rich looked like they was hungry.
Finally somebody must of made a motion or give a signal, because a girl
in a gunny-sack dress got up and sung a song that told how she was already
going on thirteen, and was getting pretty hot under the collar, tired of
waiting and afraid of being an old maid, and wanting to be a hillbilly
bride. Heads shook up and down and the big boss and middle-size bosses and
agents and handlers smiled across the empty tables. I hear somebody whisper,
"She's hired."
"Next! Woody Guthrie!" a snazzy-looking gent was saying over the mike.
"Reckin that's me," I was mumbling under my chin, talking to myself,
and looking out the window, thinking. I reached in my pocket and spun a thin
dime out acrost the tablecloth and watched it whirl around and around, first
heads, then tails, and said to myself, "Some difference 'tween that there
apercot orchard las' June where th' folks wuz stuck down along th' river
bottom, an' this here Rainbow Room on an August afternoon. Gosh, I come a
long ways in th' last few months. Ain't made no money ta speak about, but
I've stuck my head in a lot of plain an' fancy places. Some good, some just
barely fair, an' some awful bad. I wrote up a lot of songs for union folks,
sung 'em all over ever'where, wherever folks got together an' talked an'
sung, from Madison Square Garden to a Cuban Cigar Makers' tavern in Spanish
Harlem an hour later; from th' padded studios of CBS an' NBC to th
'
wild back country in th' raggedy Ghetto. In some places I was put on
display as a freak, and others as a hero, an' in th' tough joints around th'
Battery Park, I wuz jes' another shadow blund'rin' along with th' rest. It
had been like this here little ol' dime spinnin', a whirl of heads an'
tails. I'd liked mostly th' union workers, an' th' soldiers an' th' men in
fightin' clothes, shootin' clothes, shippin' clothes, or farmin' clothes,
'cause singing with them made me friends with them, an' I felt like I was
somehow in on their work. But this coin spinnin', that's my las' dime--an'
this Rainbow Room job, well, rumors are it'll pay as much as seventy-five a
week, an' seventy-five a week is dam shore seventy-five a week."
"Woody Guthrie!"
"Comin'!" I walked up to the microphone, gulping and trying to think of
something to sing about. I was a little blank in the head or something, and
no matter how dam hard I tried, I just couldn't think up any kind of a song
to sing--just empty.
'What will be your first selection, Mister Guthrie?''
"Little tune, I guess, call'd New York City." And so I forked the
announcer out of the way with the wiry end of my guitar handle and made up
these words as I sung:
This Rainbow Room she's mighty fine
You can spit from here to th' Texas line!
In New York City
Lord, New York City
This is New York City, an' I really gotta know my
line!
This Rainbow Room is up so high
That John D.'s spirit comes a-driftin' by
This is New York City
She's New York City
I'm in New York City an' I really gotta know my
line!
New York town's on a great big boom
Got me a-singin' in the Rainbow Room
That's New York City
That's New York City
She's old New York City
Where I really gotta know my line!
I took the tune to church, took it holy roller, shot in a few split
notes, oozed in a fake one, come down barrel house, hit off a good old
cross-country lonesome note or two, trying to get that old guitar to help
me, to talk with me, talk for me and say what I was thinking, just this one
time.
Well this Rainbow Room's a funny place ta play
Its a long way's from here to th' U.S.A.
An' back ta New York City
God! New York City
Hey! New York City
Where I really gotta know my line!
The microphone man come running out and waved me to a stop, asking me,
"Hhhhmmm, where does this particular song end, sir?"
"End?" I looked over at him. "Jest a-gettin' strung out good, mister!'
"The number is most amusing. Exciting. Extremely colorful. But I'm
wondering if it would be suited to the customers. Ahemm. To our customers.
Just a couple of questions. How do you get out to the microphone and back
again?"
"Walk, as a rule."
"That won't do. Let's see you trot in through that arch doorway there,
sidestep when you come to that flat platform, prance pretty lively when you
go down those three stairs, and then spring up to the microphone on the
balls of your feet throwing your weight on the joints of your ankles." And
before I could say anything he had run out and trotted back, showing me
exactly what he was talking about.
Another one of the bosses from the table at the back wall yelled, "As
far as his entrance is concerned, I think we can rehearse it a week or two
and get it ironed out!"
"Yes! Of course, his microphoning has got to be tested and lights
adjusted to his size, but that can come later. I'm thinking about his
make-up. What kind of make-up do you use, young man?" Another boss was
talking from his table.
"Ain't been a-usin' none," I talked into the mike. I felt the faraway
rattling and rumbling of freight trains and transfer trucks calling to me. I
bit my tongue and listened.
"Under the lights, you know, your natural skin would look too pale and
too dead. You wouldn't mind putting on some kind of make-up just to liven
you up, would you?
"Naww. Don't 'spose." Why was I thinking one thing in my head and
saying something different with my mouth?
"Fine!" A lady nodded her head from the boss's table. "Now, oh yes,
now, what kind of a costume shall I get for him?"
"Which?" I said, but nobody heard me.
She folded her hands together under her chin and clicked her wax
eyelashes together like loose shingles in a high wind, "I can just imagine a
hay wagon piled high with singing field hands, and this carefree character
following along in the dust behind the wagon, singing after the day's work
is done! That's it. A French peasant garb!"
"Or--no--wait! I see him as a Louisiana swamp dweller, half asleep on
the flat top of a gum stump, his feet dangling in the mud, and his gun
leaning near his head! Ah! What a follow-up for the gunny-sack girl singing,
'Hillbilly Bride'!" A man losing a wrestling match with a four-bit cigar was
arguing with the lady.
"I have it! Listen! I have it!" The lady rose up from her table with a
look on her face like she was in a trance of some kind, and she walked over
across the carpet to where I was standing, saying, "I have it! Pierrot! We
shall dress him in a Pierrot costume! One of those darling clown suits! It
will bring out the life and the pep and the giddy humor of his period! Isn't
that a simply swell idea?" She folded her hands under her chin again and
swayed over against my shoulder as I sidestepped to miss her. "Imagine! What
the proper costuming will bring out in these people! Their carefree life!
Open skies! The quaint simplicity. Pierrot! Pierrot!" She was dragging me
across the floor by the arm, and we left the room with everybody talking at
once. Some taking tryouts said, "Gosh! Gon'ta catch on!"
Outside, on a high glass porch of some kind, where wild tangled green
things growed all along the floor by the windows, she shoved me down in a
leather chair by a plastic table and sighed and puffed like she'd done an
honest day's work. "Now, let me see, oh yes, now, my impression of the
slight sample of your work is a bit, so to say, incomplete, that is, as far
as the cultural traditions represented and the exchange and
interrelationships and overlappings of these same cultural patterns are
concerned, especially here in America, where we have, well, such a mixing
bowl of culture, such a stew-pot of shades and colors. But, nevertheless, I
think the clown costume will represent a large portion of the humorous
spirit of all of them--and--"
I let my ears bend away from her talking and I let my eyes drift out
the window and down sixty-five stories where the town of old New York was
standing up living and breathing and cussing and laughing down yonder acrost
that long island.
I begun to pace back and forth, keeping my gaze out the window, way
down, watching the diapers and underwear blow from fire escapes and clothes
lines on the back sides of the buildings; seeing the smoke whip itself into
a hazy blur that smeared across the sky and mixed in with all of the other
smoke that tried to hide the town. Limp papers whipped and beat upwards,
rose into the air and fell head over heels, curving over backwards and
sideways, over and over, loose sheets of newspaper with pictures of people
and stories of people printed somewhere on them, turning loops in the air.
And it was blow little paper, blow! Twist and turn and stay up as long as
you can, and when you come down, come down on a pent-house porch, come down
easy so's not to hurt your self. Come down and lay there in the rain and the
wind and the soot and smoke and the grit that gets in your eyes in the big
city--and lay there in the sun and get faded and rotten. But keep on trying
to tell your message, and keep on trying to be a picture of a man, because
without that story and without that message printed on you there, you
wouldn't be much. Remember, it's just maybe, some day, sometime, somebody
will pick you up and look at your picture and read your message, and carry
you in his pocket, and lay you on his shelf, and burn you in his stove. But
he'll have your message in his head and he'll talk it and it'll get around.
I'm blowing, and just as wild and whirling as you are, and lots of times
I've been picked up, throwed down, and picked up; but my eyes has been my
camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been messages that I
tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire
escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls.
Still going like a Nineteen Hundred and Ten talking machine, my lady
friend had said a whole raft of stuff that I'd not heard a single word of.
I'm afraid my ears had been running somewhere down along the streets. I
heard her say, "So, the interest manifest by the manager is not at all a
personal thing, not at all, not at all; but there is another reason why you
are so certain to satisfy the desires of his customers; and I always say,
don't you always say, 'What the customer says is what we all have to say'?"
Her teeth shined and her eyes snapped different colors. "Don't you?'
"Don't I? What? Oh, 'scuse me jest a minute, huh? Be right back." I
took one good long look all up and down the red leather seats and the
plastic tables in the glassed-in room, and grabbed lmу guitar by the neck
and said to a boy in uniform, "Rest room?" And I followed where he pointed,
except that when I got within a couple of feet of the sign that said "Men,"
I took a quick dodge down a little hallway that said "Elevator."
The lady shook her head and nodded with her back turned to me. And I
asked the elevator man, "Goin' down? Okay. Groun' floor. Quickest way's too
slow!" When we hit bottom I walked out onto the slick marble floor whanging
as hard as I could on the guitar and singing:
Ever' good man gits in hard luck sometime
Ever' good man gits in hard luck sometime
Gits down an' out
Dead broke
Ain't gotta dime!
I never heard my guitar ring so loud and so long and so clear as it did
there in them high-polished marble halls. Every note was ten times as loud,
and so was my singing. I filled myself full of free air and sung as loud as
the building would stand. I wanted the poodle dogs leading the ladies around
to stick up their noses and wonder what in the hell had struck that joint.
People had walked hushed up and too nice and quiet through these tiled
floors too long. I decided that for this minute, for this one snap of their
lives, they'd see a human walking through that place, not singing because he
was hired and told what to sing, but just walking through there thinking
about the world and singing about it.
She mortally echoed around and glanced across the murals painted on the
walls. And folks in herds and family groups stopped looking in the fancy
lit-up shop windows along the corridors and listened to me telling the
world:
Old John Dee he ain't no friend of mine
Old John Dee he ain't no friend of mine
I'm a-sayin' Did John Dee shore ain't no friend of
mine
Takes all th' purty wimmen
An' leaves us men behind!
Little boys and girls trotted up alongside of me, jerking out from
their parents' hands, and kept their ears and noses rubbing against my
guitar's sounding board. While I was beating the blues chords and not
singing, I heard side remarks:
"What is he advertising?"
"Isn't he a card?"
"Quaint."
"A Westerner. Possibly lost in a subway.''
"Children! Come back here!"
I heard a cop say, "Cut it! Hey! Yez cain't pull dat stuff in here!"
But before he could get at me, I'd whirled through a spinning door and
fought my way across some avenues packed with traffic, and was lighting out
along some sidewalks and not even paying much attention to where I was
heading. A few hours could of went by. Or days. I wasn't noticing. But I was
'dodging walking people, playing kids, and rusting iron fences, rotting
doorsteps, and my head was buzzing, trying to think up some reason why I'd
darted out away from the sixty-fifth story of that big high building back
yonder. But something in me must of knowed why. Because in a little while I
found myself walking along New York's Ninth Avenue, and cutting over another
long cement block to come to the waterfront. I seen mothers perched on high
rock steps and out along the curbs on cane-bottom chairs, some in the shade,
some in the sun, talking, talking, talking. Their gift of the spirit was
talking, talking to the mother or to the lady next to them, about the wind,
the weather, the curbs, the sidewalks, the rooms, roaches, bugs, rent, and
the landlord, and managing to keep one eye on all of the hundreds and
hundreds of kids playing in the open street. As I walked along, no matter
what they'd been talking about, I heard them first to one side and then to
the other, saying, "music man!" "Heyyy! Playa for ussa th' song!" "Hi! Le's
hear ya tromp it!" "Would you geeve to us a museek?" "Play!" "Ser'nade me!"
And so, not half caring, there in the last few patches of the setting sun, I
walked along winding my way through the women and young boys and girls, and
singing:
What does the deep sea say?
Tell me, what does the deep sea say?
Well, it moans and it groans,
It swells and it foams
And it rolls on its weary way!
I walked along, the day just leaving out over the tops of the tall
buildings, and sifting through the old scarred chimneys sticking up. Thank
the good Lord, everybody, everything ain't all slicked up, and starched and
imitation. Thank God, everybody ain't afraid. Afraid in the skyscrapers, and
afraid in the red tape offices, and afraid in the tick of the little machine
that never explodes, stock market tickers, that scare how many to death,
ticking off deaths, marriages and divorces, friends and enemies; tickers
connected and plugged in like juke boxes, playing the false and corny lies
that are sung in the wild canyons of Wall Street; songs wept by the families
that lose, songs jingled on the silver spurs of the men that win. Here on
the slummy edges, people are crammed down on the curbs, the sidewalks and
the fireplugs, and cars and trucks and kids and rubber balls are bouncing
through the streets. I was thinking, "This is what I call bein' borned an'
a-livin'; I don't know what I call that big high building back yonder that I
left.''
I'd noticed a quiet-faced young Mexican seaman following along behind
my shoulder. He was of a small build, almost like a kid, and the sea and the
sun had kept his hair oily and his smile smooth. After a block or two we'd
got to knowing each other and he'd told me, "My name iss Carlos, call me
Carl." Outside of that Carl didn't say much; we just almost knew that we was
buddies without making lectures on the subject. So for about an hour I
walked along singing, while this man walked beside me, smiling right on down
through the wind, not telling me no big tall tale of submarines and
torpedoes, no hero stories.
A little girl and boy clattered on roller skates, and told me to sing
louder so's they could hear me above the noise. Other kids quit swatting
each other and walked along listening. Mamas called in a hundred tongues,
"Kids, come back here!" The kids would usually follow along humming and
singing with me for about a block, and then stand on the curb when I crossed
the street and look for a long time. In each block a new gang formed and
herded along, feeling of the wood of the guitar, and getting their hands on
the strap, the strings. Older kids tittered and flirted in dark doorways and
pushed each other around in front of soda fountains and penny-candy
hangouts, and I managed to sing them at least a little snatch, a few words
of the songs they'd ask to hear. At times I stopped for a minute and papas
and mamas and kids of all ages stood around as quiet as they could, but the
whamming and banging of big trucks, busses, vans, and cars made us stand
jammed together real tight to be heard.
It got to be night, the kind of summer night that pitches on the wind
and dips in the white clouds and makes buildings look like all kinds of
freighters creaking along. Dark swarms of us sprawled out along stone steps
and iron railings, and I felt that old feeling coming back to me. When I
reached the water front, the song I was singing over and over was:
It was early in the spring
Of nineteen forty-two
She was queen of the seas
And the wide ocean blue
Her smoke filled the sky
In that Hudson River's tide
And she rolled on her side
When that good ship went down
Oh, the
Normandie
was her name
And great was her fame
And great was her shame
When that good ship went down
Folks joined in like one voice in the dark. I could vision on the
screen of fog rolling down a picture of myself singing back yonder on the
sixty-fifth floor of Rockefeller's Center, singing a couple of songs and
ducking back into a dressing room to smoke and play cards for two more hours
until the next show, then more smoke and cards until the next show. And I
knew that I was glad to be loose from that sentimental and dreamy trash, and
gladder to be edging on my way along here singing with the people, singing
something with fight and guts and belly laughs and power and dynamite to it.
When Carl touched me on the arm we was throwing on our brakes in the
green shiver of a neon sign that said, "Anchor Bar." We stood outside on the
curb and he grinned and told me, "This iss a nice place; always a good bunch
here." By now we had a whole crew around us waving their heads in the wind,
singing:
Oh, the
Normandie
was her name
And great was her fame
And great was her shame
When that good ship went down
I sung out by myself:
So remember her sorrow
And remember her name
We will all work together
And she'll soon sail again
All kinds of hats, caps, sweaters, and dresses stood around tapping
shoes against the concrete, patting hands, like getting new hope out of old
religion; and when my eyes got a plainer look at the crowd, I seen lots of
uniforms and sailor caps of all kinds. Light sifted through the open door
and big windows of the bar, and hit against our backs and faces.
"More!"
"Sing!"
"Crank up!"
A funny little gang of us there on that curb.
"Where'd ja pick up such songs at?" one lady asked me
"Ohh," I told her, "jest bummin' aroun', see stuff, make up a little
song about it."
"Buy ya a drink if ya want it!" a man said.
"Mister, I'll take уa up in jest a minute! Cain't stop right now ta buy
no drink! I'd lose my crowd!"
"What th' hell you doin'?" he said back in the crowd "Runnin' f'r
office with that whang-danger music box?"
"Back in Oklahoma," I kidded him, "I know one Negro boy that blows a
mouth organ, an' he's elected our las' four gov'nors!"
There was a little laugh run through the listeners, and you could see a
pile of smoke rising out of our huddle from cigarets and cigars and
ocean-going pipes the people was pulling on. In the flare of the smoking, I
got looks at their faces, and when I seen how hard and tough they was, I
thought I must be in just about the best of company.
A tall man pushed through the rest, with both hands stuck down in his
overcoat pockets, and said, "By God an' by Jesus! Howya makin' out?" It was
my old friend, Will Geer, an actor playing the lead part of Jeeter Lester in
the play,
Tobacco Road.
Will was a big tall cuss, head and shoulders over
the most of us, and I rocked considerably when he whooped me down across the
back and shoulders with his open hand. "You оl' dog! Howya been?"
"Hi! Will! Dam yer hide! Lay yer head back, boy, an' sing!"
"Go right on. Don't let me stop you." Will's voice had a dry crackle to
it that sounded like a stick in the fire. "Mighta knew who 'twas when I saw
this big crowd here singin'! Keep it up!"
"Carl, shake han's with Will there."
"Meester Will? I am glad to know you."
"Hey! Ever'body! Here's another frienda mine! Name's Will!"
He stood with his long chin and square jaw set against the dampness of
the fog, and folded his hands together and waved them above our heads.
Behind him the doorway of the Anchor Bar was filled with three people on
their way out, the bartender leading a lady and a man by the arm. She was
about fifty, little and slight, leathery skin like wet canvas full of
pulling wind, coarse black hair all tangled up with the atmosphere and
scenery, and a voice like sand washing back into the ocean, "I don't need
your help! I wanta buy another drink!" Then she looked up at the crowd and
said, "Cain't insult a lady this-a way!"
"Lady," the bartender was pushing the pair onto the sidewalk, "I know
you're a lady, an' we all know you're a lady; but Mayor La Gad-about says no
drinks after closin' time, an' it's after closin' time now!"
"Honey, sweet thing," I could hear her husband talking, "don't hurt th'
man, don't, he just only works here."
"Who ask'd you f'r advice?" She marched out onto the sidewalk beside
us.
"Put'cher coat on! Here, hold still!" He was tip-toeing around her
trying to get the coat untangled. First he held it upside down with the
sleeves dragging the sidewalk; then he got hold of the sleeves, but he had
the lining on the wrong side; and after a couple of minutes, they had one
sleeve plumb on, but she was still running her fist through the air feeling
for the last sleeve. She had a look on her face like she was searching the
waterfront for a man because she knew he had one sleeve of her coat, and he
was working in the wind with a serious look in his eye, but always, just
about a foot or two south of where she was holding her arm up, fishing.
Will walked over and took her fist and jammed it through the sleeve,
and except for some mumbling and grumbling in the crowd nobody laughed. Will
lit up some kind of a long cigaret and took the pair by the arms and brought
them over to the bunch. "Meet ever'body!" He was smiling and saying, "All of
you, here, meet Somebody!"
"Ever'body, gladta knowya!"
"Somebody, hello! Join up!"
"Don' mind gittin' booted outa that joint! We're a-havin' a lot th'
bes' time out here!"
"Welcome ta our mists! Wahooo!"
"What yez a-doin'? Sangin'? Oh! Lord Godamighty! I mortally luv ta hear
good sangin'! Sang! Make some racket!" The lady was standing at my elbow in
the middle of the crowd. We sung our song about the
Normandie
all over
again, and her and her man both shook the wax out of their ears in a minute
and started singing, and their voices sounded good, like coal being dumped
down into a cellar.
I took a look over the heads of the crowd and seen the bartender
standing just outside the door talking to a copper, and I knew our singing
had cut off about three fourths of his trade for the night, so I started
walking with my eyes up toward the stars, and the little mob followed me
along, filling the Hudson River's tide and the hulls of the warehouses, the
markets, loading buildings, and all of the docks, and all of the ocean, with
good husky voices. Some rasping, some gasping, some growling and some
rattling with whiskey, rum, beer, gin, tobacco, but singing all the same.
We'd walked for about a block when we heard a tough talker behind us
yell, "Hey, sailor!"
We walked a few more steps singing, then it come again.
"Hey, sailor!"
"Keep on with th' singin'." A sailor was ducking at my ear saying, "Law
says he's got ta yell 'hey sailor' three times!"
"Go on! Sing!" a second sailor said.
"Keep it up!" a third one put in.
Then it was,
"Heyyyy, sailor!"
And a dead still spell come over our whole gang. The Military Policeman
had yelled his third time. The sailors stopped and stood at attention,
"Yessir, Off'cer."
"Go to your stations, sailors!"
"Aye, aye, Off'cer!''
"At once, sailor!"
"Goin', off'cer!"
And the sailors walked away in good order, rubbing their eyes and faces
in the night air, shaking their heads clear of tobacco smoke, and the dregs
of beer. There in a few steps, they seemed to turn into somebody else,
straightening up, fixing each other's shirts, blouses, ties, getting rigging
in order. Low talk, laughs, thanks, and pats on the back was about all they
give me, but as they slipped off in their different directions for their
ships, some French, some British, some American, some Everything Else, I was
thinking, There goes th' best fellers I ever seen.
"How'dya like ta be in th' Navy, Carl?" Will said.
"I would like to be in the Navy just fine," Carl said, "but I don't
guess I ever can."
"Reason?" I asked Carl.
"I have a leetle something the matter with my lungs. Rosin. ТВ. I
worked on a shingle-saw a few years. I'm in 4-F." His eyes followed the
sailors away in the dark, and then he said, "The Navy, yes, it would be
fine."
A Military Policeman swung his club around doing tricks and said to us,
"Go ahead with y'r party, by God, ya gotta perty dam good song there--'bout
that there
Norm'ndie"
Another cop turned around and walked away saying, "It's jus' that we
gotta git our sailors ta werk on time. Those songs was doin' them men a lot
o' good!"
One or two of the bunch that was left took off in different directions
and then three or four shook my hand and told me, "Well, we had a dam good
time." "Be seem' ya." "Saved us money, too!" And all that was left was me
and Carl and Will and the lady and her husband, standing there on the curb,
looking out toward the waterfront, out across the big dark mountains moving
up and down at their docks, bigger than buildings, more alive than the
hills, sloshing at the portholes and waterlines, floating still and quiet
like three women, the living
Queen Elizabeth,
the breathing
Queen Mary,
and
the sleeping
Normandie
on her side.
"Fellers game ta go home with me?" the lady asked us. "Got a great,
great big bottle, nearly almost half full."
Her husband held his hands in his pockets and shook his head after
every word his wife said, his little hat rocking back and forth on his head
when he nodded.
"Take us!" Will told her, winking around at us. "I haven't even had a
drink tonight!"
We walked along just keeping our eyes on the red glare of her cigaret,
first bright, then dull, in the dark. The old hard cobblestones was lit up
with the filtered neon light that leaks somehow or other, some strange way,
down into all of the big town's dirtiest corners, and shines like
million-dollar jewelry, even on the spitty, foggy stones.
I seen the big hump-backs of five or six flat barges loaded full to the
brim. Heavy highway gravel. The tie ropes bucking and stretching, the waters
lapping and swelling and falling in the river with the up and down of the
ocean's roll.
"Fair warnin'!" I heard the lady holler ahead of us. "Walk careful!
Don't want hafta waste my time fishin' no land wallopers outa this slimy
warsh!"
I followed the others across some narrow planks and I held my breath
when I looked down under me at all of the moving, slurping water licking its
mouth under my feet. Finally, after crossing over more whitish loads of
gravel and rocks, we come to a little two-by-scantling shanty built on the
head end of a creaking, heavy barge.
"So this is your homestead, huh?" Will asked her.
"I ain't so graceful out there much on that there solid groun'." She
was fumbling with a lock at the door, and walked into the shack saying, "But
they ain't a gal in th' show business c'n foller aroun' over these here
river boats!"
She lit the lantern, lit the oil stove, and set a half a gallon coffee
pot on the flame. We all found chairs on boxes and big lard cans; then she
said, "Why not sing me a song about somethin' perty? While this here
coffee's a-comin' ta a boirl? Likker goes a lot longer ways when ya mix it
with scaldin' hot coffee."
"I'll make ya up one 'bout yer barge house here. Lemme think."
My bottle it will soon be empty
And I myself won't have a dime
But I've hauled my freight from here to yonder
A many, and a many, and a many a time
While fishing under her tin-topped cupboard she chanted and sung almost
under her breath:
I pulled this package from here ta Albanyyyyy
From there ta Uticayyyyy
From there ta Schenectadyyyyyy
It's a many, an' a many, an' a many a time
Ohhh yes
A many, an' a many, an' a many a time
The only thing that broke up her singing was the coffee pot spewing
over the sides and the fire barking at the steam. Then she said, "Never did
ask me my name. Dam that stove ta hell, anyhow! Boirl all o' my coffee
away!" She grabbed a few cups from nails over the sink and poured one half
full in front of every one of us. Then she popped a stopper out of a
mean-looking bottle and poured the cups the rest of the way full. "McElroy.
That's me! But don't tell me your names," she said to all of us, " 'cause I
can't remember names none too good noway. I'll just call you Mr.
Broadshoulders, an' you there, lemme see, I'll name you Eel Foot! Mister Eel
Foot; an' next, you there with th' music doin's, I'll name you--le's
see--Curley."
She jammed the red-hot coffee pot down on the table under my nose, and
a half a cupful sloshed out like melted lead and soaked the front part of my
britches. I jumped to the floor and fought and fanned the spots where the
coffee was scalding me, but she was laughing as loud as the barge would
stand it, and yelling, while she downed her hot drink, "Whheeeww! Yipppeee!
Flappin' salmon! What's th' matter, Hot Pants? Scorch you?" Her face turned
against the lantern light and it was the first time I'd got a real look at
her. Weather-whipped and wind-blistered, salt-soaked and frostbit ten
thousand times just like the skim that shines across the humps and the
swells of the tidewaters. "Mister Hot Pants! Yah! Yah! Yah!" she laughed
while I fanned my legs to cool the hot spots.
Her husband in the deal got up and stumbled ten or fifteen feet through
a little partition, heaving like a sick horse, and I heard him fall down
across some kind of a couch. I watched her drain her cup into her mouth, and
men she stuck out her tongue and made a witchy-looking face out through the
window at the moon splashing along on the clouds. Will and Carl and me
tipped our cups together, held our breath, shut our eyes, and sloshed our
mouths full of the fiery mixture.
While she was waiting for us to fall over on the floor, we lit up some
smokes, and I sung her another made-up verse:
I've freighted and barged it from New York and up
I drunk my hard likker from a blistering cup
And who was the pride of the brave river boys?
A lass by the name of Miss McElroy.
"Now ain't that perty? Ain't that a slippery shame?'' She only had two
teeth in her head, one low and on the left, one high and on the right, but
she put a look on her lace like she was a Freshman in a girls' school. "You
mighty rum-com-a-tootin'! I wuz th' only female she womern up an down this
Goddern slimy warsh! I wuzn't no dam house cat! No flower pot! an' if I wuz
jus' twenty-five years younger tonight, I'd give you gents a honest ta God
run fer yer marbles!" Then she run the end of her tongue out over her pair
of mismated teeth, and tapped the oilcloth of the table, and laughed; and
the whole string of barges rocked in the ooze and the bellies of the old
rafts pushed against each other, and the waterfront groaned and foamed
around the edges.
Songs rippled across the loads of highway rock and dripped off down
across the edges, and such songs and such yarns and lies and windy tales as
we pulled out of our minds for the next hour or two was never before or
since topped by the humans on this planet.
She said she'd had six children, that being pregnant so much had caused
her teeth to fall out. Four boys. Three alive. Two girls, both up and gone.
She showed us picture post cards of the places one daughter had worked as a
taxi-dancer. The other girl lived across the river and come to see her on
Sundays. One son used to send picture cards, but he was a merchant seaman,
and she hadn't heard from him for over eight months. One son got in jail
four or five times for little rackets; then he went out West to work in the
mines, and he never wrote much anyhow. Him and his pa was always a-scrappin'
when they'd get together, because the old man did believe in being honest as
the law allows. They'd of killed each other if the boy hadn'ta left. She was
glad he was gone.
"What's this leave you with?" Will asked her.
"Well," she smiled around at all of us just a speck and let her eyes
fall away to one side, "let me see. Thirty years o' river freightin',
twenty-six years o' married ta th' same man, if ya wanta call 'im a man.
This old rotten barge here. Three nice gent visitors, if ya call 'em
gentlemen; an' well, a little less th'n a halfa bottle o' perty pore
whiskey. Plenty o' hot scaldin' coffee f'r th' nights run, an' ta boot, ta
boot, ya might add, I liv'd ta see th' day that by God, I gotta song wrote
up about me!"
Will and me excused ourselves and walked out the door. We stood on the
edge on the next-door barge, and listened to the water trickle into the
Hudson River. The moon was pretty and scared-looking and the clouds chased
across the sky like early morning newskids. I could feel a sticky veil of
fog settle over the wood and the strings of my guitar, and when I played it,
the tone was soft and damp and muffled along the waters. I kept picking off
a little tune.
"Been doin' last few days?" Will asked me walking along.
"Awww, nuthin' very much. Singin' 'roun'."
"Chances for any jobs?"
"Yeah, few."
" 'Bouts?"
"Night clubs, mostly.''
"Get on?"
"Well, I, ah, that is, er, ah--I hadda big try-out ta day.
Rockefeller's Center."
"Rockefeller Center! Wow! Come out all right?"
"I come
out,
all right."
"Walk out on 'em?"
"Goddammit! I jes' had ta walk out, Will! Couldn't take that stuff!"
"Goin' ta keep pullin' them one-man walkouts till you've ruined all of
y'r chances here in New York. Better watch y'r step."
"Will, you know me. You know dam good an' well I'd play fer my beans
an' cornbread, an' drink branch water, 'er anything else ta play an' sing
fer folks that likes it, folks that knows it, an' lives what I'm a singin'
'bout. I'm all screwed up in my head. They try ta tell me if I wanta eat an'
stay alive, I gotta sing their dam old phony junk!"
"You'd just naturally explode up in that high society, wouldn't you?
But, money's what it takes, Woody."
"Yeah. I know." I was thinking of a girl named Ruth. ''Damit all ta
hell, anyhow! Mebbe I jest ain't got brains 'nuf in my head ta see that. But
after alla th' hard luck I had, Will, I seen money come, an' money go, ever
since I was jest a kid, an' I never thought 'bout nuthin' else, 'sides jest
passin' out my songs."
"Takes money, boy. You want to make any kind of a name f'r yourself,
well, takes all kinds of money. An' if you want to donate to poor folks all
over th' country, that takes money." '
"Cain't I jest sorta donate my own self, sort of?''
Will grunted. "Can't you go back to the Rainbow Room? Not too late, is
it?"
I said, "No, not too late, I guess I could go back. I guess I
could!"
I looked up at the big tall building. The silence around us seemed to
be hollering at me--all right, whatcha gonna do? Come on, runt, make up your
mind. This is it! Christ, boy,
this is it!
A little tugbout throwing smoke plowed out from ahead of us, and I
looked at it working in the smeared water like a black bug kicking up dust.
"This barge a-movin'?" I asked Will.
"Blieve 'tis." He walked a few feet along the back end, made a jump
clearing a two-foot gap, and landed back on the McElroy barge. "That barge
you're on's gettin' hauled out by that tug! Better throw me y'r guitar!
Jump!"
I didn't say anything right then. Will walked alongside where I was
moving along and I stalled for a little time, saying, "Looks like it really
is a-movin'."
"Jump! Jump quick! I'll catch your guitar! Jump!" He was trotting now
at a pretty fair gait. "Jump!"
I set myself down on the hind-end of the moving load of gravel, and lit
up a cigaret and blowed the smoke up toward tile long, tall Rockefeller
Building. Will had a great big grin in his face there by the light of the
moon, and he said, "Got any money on ya?"
I flipped a rock into the water and said, "Mornin
'
comes,
I'll feel in my pockets an' see!"
"But, where'll ya be?"
"I dunno."
My old friend was left behind, panting and all out of breath. I drug my
thumb down acrost the strings of the guitar. In the river waters at my feet,
I could see the reflection of fire and kids fighting their gang wars and a
right young kid up a tree and a mama cat hunting the squeezed-out bodies of
her kittens. Clara didn't look burnt and Mama didn't look crazy in that
river water, but kind of pretty. I seen the oil on the river and it might
have come from somewhere down in my old country, West Texas maybe, Pampa, or
Okemah. I seen the Redding jungle camp reflected there too, and the saloons
along Skid Row except that they looked awful clean. But mostly I saw a girl
in an orchard and how she danced along the mud bank of a river.
Sail on, little barge, heave on, little tug, pound your guts out, work,
dig in, plow this river all to hell.
It'll heal over.
Chapter XIX
TRAIN BOUND FOR GLORY
The wind howled all around me. Rain blistered my skin. Beating down
against the iron roof of the car, the sheets of rain sounded like some kind
of a high-pressure fire hose trying to drill holes. The night was as pitch
black as a night can get, and it was only when the bolts of lightning
knocked holes in the clouds that you could see the square shape of the train
rumbling along in the thunder.
"Jeez!" the kid was laying up as close to me as he could get, talking
with his face the other way, "I tink she's slowin' up."
"I'm ready ta stop any old time," I was laying on my side with my left
arm around his belly. "I'd like ta git cleaned up 'fore I git ta Chicago."
I listened in the dark and heard somebody yelling, "Hey, you guys! Been
asleep?"
'That you, John?" I yelled back at my Negro riding pardner.
"Dis is me, all right! Been asleep?''
"I been about half knocked out!"
''Me, too!" I heard the older kid yell out.
"Youse boids is softies!" the kid I was holding grunted. "How's yo'
music box?" "Still wrapped up in them shirts! I'm 'fraid ta even think about
it!"
"She's clackin' 'er gait! We'll be stoppin' heah in a few minnits!"
"Hope so! Is this purty close to Chicago?" I was yelling loud as I
could.
The little kid put in, "Naaa. Dis ain't ennywheres near Chucago. Dis is
Freeport. Tink.
"
"Illinois?" I asked him.
"Yaaa. Illinoy."
"Son, is yore face got as much dirt an' cinders an coal dust on it as
mine's got?"
"How can I tell? I cain't even see yer mug. Too dark."
"I'd give a dollar fer a good smoke."
"Come ta Chi, I'll git youse a smoke from me brudder."
"Wonder if them guys got finished with their fightin` inside th' car?"
"Shucks, man! Dey might of done et each othah up!" John slapped his
hand against the back of the kid he was holding.
"I benna listinin' to 'em down through da rooof."
"Shore 'nuff? What're they doin'?"
"Banged aroun' a long time. Cuss'n. Been kinda quiet last few miles."
"Sho' been still! Man, I bet dey jes' natchilly cut one `nothah ta
pieces!"
"I'm jest wonderin' how many we're gonna find that-away when this dam
train stops. These is good guys. Just outta work. You know how a feller is."
John oozed along on his belly from the end of the car where he had been
riding with his head to the wind. I felt him lay down at my side and hold
his arm across my ribs to hang onto a plank in the boardwalk. "Seems like
dis heah rain jus' holds alla dis train smoke right down on toppa th' train,
don' it? I seen 'em befo'. Take a buncha th' bes' workin' fellas in th'
worl'. Let 'em jus' git down an' out. No kinda steady job. Jus' makes ya
mean's all hell."
"Me ol' man wuz datta way." I could hear the oldest kid talking while
he crawled up and laid down alongside of the little one. "He was okay, okay.
Man gits outta woik, tho', goes off on a Goddam blink. Wuz two diff'rent
fellas. I go upstate now an' visit me maw when he ain't around. Slugged me
'bout a month ago. Ain't seen 'em since." His voice sounded slow and dry in
the banging and the rain.
"None a ya mushy talk."
"By gosh, little squirt, ya know, I believe that you talk tougher than
that whole boxcar fulla railroad rounders."
"Sho' do."
"I say what I t'ink, see!"
"Okay. Whatta yez men a-gonna do? Dere's de air brakes!"
I lifted my head up and looked over the top of my guitar. I saw the
crazy red glares from neon lights cutting against the clouds. Bushes and
hedges whizzing past with nice warm smears of electric lights from the
windows of houses. Spotlights and headlights from other locomotives shot
around in the rain. Chug holes and vacant lots standing full of water shined
like new money when the lightning cracked. I tried to keep the buckets of
water wiped out of my face long enough to see. "Edge of some town."
"Freeport. Ain't I done told yez oncet?" The runty kid snorted rain out
of his nose poking his head over the guitar. "I put da bum on alla dese
happy homes. Freeport."
All four of us got up on our hands and knees and listened to the
screaking and jamming of the brakes against the wheels. A red-hot switch
engine pounded past us. Heat flew from the fire box and every single one of
us set down and held our hands out to warm a little. The rain was falling
harder. Our car was wobbling along like a crippled elephant. Red and green
switch lights looked like melted globs of Christmas candy. A purplish white
glare was coming from a danger flare stabbed into a cross tie across the
yards to the right. To the left there I could make out a lonesome dull red
electric light blinking out through the windows of a burger joint.
Headlights from fast cars danced along the highway past the chili places.
Our train slowed down to a slow crawl, on both sides nothing but dirty
strings of every crazy kind of a railroad car.
"Alla dem bright lites up ahead, dat's de highway crossin'. Bull
hangout." The little kid was poking me and pointing.
"Shore 'nuf ? This a tough town?''
"Worse'n dat."
"Hay, dere, Pee Wee. You'n me'd betta unload." The tall kid kept down
on his belly and crawled over the end of the roof. "We left our packs in
this open machinery car," he explained to me.
"Wid ya." The little kid slipped along and followed him down the
ladder.
I eased along on my hands and knees and looked over the end of the roof
between the two cars. "Take it easy." I was holding my breath and watching
them slip down the slick ladder. The rain and the clouds made it so dark I
couldn't see the ground below him. "Watch out fer them wheels, big shot! All
right?"
"Made 'er!" I heard him tell me. Then I saw his head and shoulders drop
down into the end of the carload of machinery. Just then a bright streak of
light shot up along the car. Both kids kept ducked down out of sight, but a
man trotted along on the cinders and kept his flashlight beamed on them.
"Hey! Hey!" I heard him bellering out. He mounted the steps of the low
car and shot his light over the edge. "Stand up! Stand up! Stand up there,
you! Well! I be Goddamed! Where do you senators think you're going?''
The pair of kids' heads raised up between the machinery and the end of
the car. Wet. Dirty with coal soot. Hats gone. Hair tangled. Sheets of rain
pouring down on them in the bright glare of the cop's light. They blinked
and frowned and wiped their hands across their faces.
"Mornin', Cap'n," the little one saluted.
'Tryin' ta git home," the big one was slipping his canvas pack on his
back.
The little one grinned up into the flashlight and said, "Little rainy."
"That's a dam dangerous place to ride! Don't you know wet weather makes
these loads skid? Beat it! Skat! Hit th' ground!" He motioned with his
light.
Both kids slipped over the wall of the car and I rolled across the roof
to the right-hand side and waved my guitar over the side at them. "Hey, want
yer shirts back?" I swung down the ladder where the cop couldn't see me and
hissed at the kids as they walked along beside our train. "Shirts? Shirts?"
Both kids pulled up their britches, laughed a little, and said, "Naaa!"
I swung there on the ladder for a bit watching the little fellers just
sort of fade out. Rain. Smoke. All kinds of clouds. Night just darker than
hell. I felt a little funny, I guess. Then they was gone. I pulled myself
back up on top of the car and said, "Well, John, there goes our ridin'
pardners."
"Sho' gone, all right. You still got dem shirts wrapped 'round yo'
music box! Keep it dry?"
"Naw." I patted my guitar on the sides. "Couldn't be wetter. They
wanted to give 'em to me, so I just took 'em."
"Little tramps some day."
"Well, one thing they gotta teach soldiers is how ta tramp."
"I sho
'
wish't I could fine me a good fast job of truck
drivin'. I'd sho' as hell quit dis trampin'."
"Quiet! Duck down!"
As we oozed across the highway, a high-power spotlight shot its beams
from a black sedan under a street light. The train pulled clear of the
highway and then stopped. The sedan rolled up at the side of our car, a low
siren sounded like a mean tomcat under a barrel. About a dozen harness cops
wheeled the boxcar door wide open. Flashlights played around over the
sixty-six men while three or four of the patrol cops crawled in the door.
"Wake up!"
"Okay! Pile out."
"Git movin', you!"
"Yes, sir."
"One at a time!"
"Who're you? Where's your draft card?"
"Whitaker's my name. Blacksmith. Here's my draft number."
"Next! Dam! What's been going on in this car? Civil war? How come
everybody all tied up? Wrapped up?"
"Greenleaf is my name. Truck mechanic. Well, see, mister officer,
we
was havin' a sort of a picnic an' a dance in th' car here. Th' engineer hit
his air brakes a little too quick. So quite a bunch of us got throwed down.
Bumped our heads up against th' walls. On th' floor. Ah. Right here, My
draft card. That's it, ain't it? I cain't see with this rag over me eye."
"I don't believe a word of it! Been some trouble in this car! What was
it? Next! You!"
"Here's my card. Dynamite man. Lebeque. I broke my fist all to pieces
when I stumbled."
"Draft card, bud! What is this? Car load of drunks? All of you smell
like liquor!"
"Picolla. There's my number. Oil field driller. Somebody poured a
bottle of wine down my back while I was asleep!"
"Asleep. Yeah! I see they left the chipped glass all over your shirt
collar, too! Draft cards, men! Move faster!"
"My name's Mickey the Slick, see! I won't lie to yez! I'm a gambler. Da
best. I wear good clothes an' I spent good money! I was lookin' all right,
new suit, an' ever'ting. Den sombudy popped me with a quart wine bottle.
Cracked my head. Ruint my suit! Here's my number, officer!"
"Whoever cracked this man, I wish to congratulate him! Move on! Fall
out the door, there! Line op over there by that patrol car with the rest of
them!"
'Tommy Bear. Quarter-breed Indian. Mechanic."
"Hey, Cap! Some of these birds are all beat up! Trouble of some kind!
Every single one of them has got a busted ear, or a black eye, or a broken
fist, or their clothes ripped dam near off! Been a hell of a fight in this
car! About fifty of them!"
"Herd 'em out! All in a bunch!" The captain stuck his head in the door.
"Match 'em out there under that street light! We'll make 'em talk! Any dead
ones?"
"I don't know!" The sarg shot his light around over the car. "I see a
few that don't seem to be able to get up!"
"Load 'em out! Git along, you guys! Walk! All of you! Right here under
this light! Line 'em up! Finding any dead ones back there?"
"Three or four knocked out! Don't think they're dead! Well pull them
out in this rain and wake them up! Load that one right out through the door.
Shake him a little. He looks like he's still flickering. How is this one?
His eyes are still batting a little around the edges. Stick his face up to
the rain. Bring them other two, boys. Help them along. Shake them good.
Looks like they might be salvaged. God, they really must have had a
knockdown dragout! Hold them up a litlle.
"This boid's okay. Rain brought 'im aroun'."
"March him on over yonder to where the captain is. What's the matter
with you dam fool men, anyway? Is this all you've got to do? Fight! Beat the
hell out of each other! Why, dam me, I didn't think any of you had that much
spunk left in you! Why in the hell don't you spend that much energy working?
Walk along, there, stud horse! Walk! Here's these four, Cap. That's all of
them."
"They look like a bunch of dam corpses!" The captain looked the crowd
over. Then he turned toward the boxcar and hollered, "Any more in there?
Look for guns an' knives around on th' floor!"
"Here's a pair!" A big tough looker stood up on top of the car behind
John and me. "Duckin' outta sight, huh? Git movin' down dat ladder! Now.
Watcha got wrapped up dere, mister?"
"This thing?"
"Dat ting. Corpse a some kind?''
"Guitar."
"Aha. Yodel lay dee hoo stuff, eh?"
"My meal ticket."
"Where you headin', black boy?"
''Anywhere I c'n find some work."
"Woik, eh? Where 'bouts is yer shoit?"
"On his guitar."
"Jeez! Christamighty. Do yez think more 'bout dat music box den yer own
back?"
"Mah back c'n take it"
"Drop down dere on de groun'. Now git movin'. Over dere where yez see
de whole gang 'round dat street light."
I walked along, shaking the water out of my hair.
John said, "Sho' some bad ol' stormy night,"
"Here's de pair I caught up on toppa de car, capt'n."
"You two line up. Where's your shirt?"
"Ah done tole him, Dis boy heah got it wrapped 'roun' his music box.
Rainin'."
"You tryin' to tell me? It's raining! Men! Did you know that? It's
raining! Any of you get wet?"
The sarg was shooting his light in our faces and saying, "Wash some of
the blood off of this bloody bunch. What was the trouble, fellows? Who
started it all? Who beat up who? Out with it Talk!"
The last two officers trotted from the boxcar over to the gang. "Here's
their artillery," one of them said. He dumped a double handful of knives and
the necks of three wine bottles, "No guns."
"No guns?" The captain looked the knives over. "You could cut a man all
to pieces with the neck of one of these broken bottles. How many drunks
among them?"
"Smell and see."
"I don't think you could tell by smelling, chief. Some bird broke a
whole quart over another one's head. Then two or three other jugs got broke
over other's heads. Everybody smells like liquor."
We passed by in double file, the cops guiding us, watching us. The sarg
looked at one string of draft cards. The big chief looked at another string.
"You two boys. No draft card? It's th' jail if you haven't got 'em.
Huh?" the chief said.
"Too young. Sixteen," one boy said.
"Seventeen," the next one nodded.
"All look okay, chief?"
"You, there! What you got wrapped up there--a baby?" The chief asked
me,
"Guitar."
"Ohhh. Well. Why not take it out and plunk us offa ditty? Like this.
Dum tee dum. Dum tee dum. Tra la la la la! Yodel layyy dee whooooo! Ha! Ha!"
He flumped his coat sleeve and danced around.
"Too wet to play," I told him.
"What th' hell do you bring it out in this stormy weather for, then?"
he asked me.
"I didn't order this stormy weather.''
"What's this all over you fellows?" the sarg asked us.
"Cement dust," John talked up by my elbow.
"With all of this rain," the chief asked us, "what's gonna happen to
all of you?"
I said, "Gonna turn inta statues. You can set us around in yer streets
an' parks, so rich ladies can see how purty we are."
"No, men. I ain't holdin' you for nothin'." The chief looked us over.
"I could jail you if I wanted to. But I don't know. Vag. Disturbing th'
peace. Fighting. Lots of things."
"Riding the freights," the sarg put in.
"Or just bein' here," I said.
"Tell you one thing, by God. I never did see such a dirty, messy,
bloody, beat-up bunch of people in my whole life, and I've been a copper for
twenty years. I could toss you men in the jug if I wanted to. I don't know.
You see, men...."
A big eight-wheel driver locomotive pounded across the road, throwing
steam a hundred feet on each side, easing along, ringing its bell, snorting
and letting out a four-time toot on its whistle, and drowned out the chief's
talking.
"Westbound," John was telling me over my shoulder. "She's sho' a daisy,
ain't she?"
"Mighty purty," I told him.
An old gray-headed hobo trotted past us in the dark, swinging his
bundle up onto his back, splashing through the mudholes and not even
noticing the patrol men. He got a glimpse of all of us guys there under the
light and yelled, "Plenty o' work! Buildin' ships! War's on! Goddam that
thunder an' lightnin' to hell! Work, boys, work! I gotta letter right
hyere!" He bogged on a few yards past us, waving a white sheet of paper in
the dark.
"Work?" One guy broke and trotted hi after the old man.
"Job? Where 'bouts?" Another man swung his bundle under his arm and
started off.
"Letter?"
"Lemme see it!"
"Where'd he say?"
"Hey! Old man! Wait!"
"Don't let dat stuff fool yez, men. Tain't nuttin' but justa dam hobo,
wid a dam sheeta paper!"
"Seattle ! Seattle!" I heard the old man holler back through the rain.
"Work, worrrrrk!"
"Crazy."
"Yuh know, men, they ain't no work out at Seattle. Hell's bells, that's
more'n fifteen hundred miles west uv here!"
"Out toward Japan!"
"Th' old man had th' letter right there in his hand!"
"Reckin he's right?"
Three more men tore loose through the dark.
"I know them Seattle people. You cain't beat 'em. Mighty purty women.
An', by God, 'they don't write letters, less they mean what they say!"
"I slep' under ever' bridge in Seattle! That's a workin' town!"
"You men going entirely nuts?" a cop asked us.
"I want as close ta Japan as I kin git!" Another man drifted off in the
dark.
"Ah wants a crack at that Horehouse Heato man own se'f!"
"Pahdon me, mistah poleese. Is dat train headin
'
to'd wheah
them Japs is fightin'?"
Men sloshed holes of water dry, and bogged off through the spray of
wind and rain. Cops stood behind us in the street light, scratching and
laughing. I snuffed my nose and squinched my eyes to keep the water from
getting me.
"Risin' sun! Wahooo!"
"See ya latah, offisssahh!"
"Rain on, little storm, rain on!"
More men charged after the moving rain. It creaked along, the wet
enamel flicking the dim light from the telephone pole where the cops stood
around. Big iron wheels groaning along on the shiny rails. Slick ladders.
Slippery tin roofs, bucking first to one side, then the other, and the black
shapes of the men sticking like waterbugs, sucking on like snails, swaying
with the cars, everybody mumbling and talking and cracking jokes back at the
storm.
"Did Mr. A. Hitler say we was a nation of sissies?"
Four more men sidled off down and caught onto a boxcar right beside me.
Six more slushed along behind them. Eight swung up the ladder at their
heels. Whole boxcars littered with men talking and going to fight.
"Read that letter, old man! Yippeee!"
Ten more come up the ladder. Twenty behind them.
I told the cop next to me, "Those boys are shore gonna need some music!
Let her rain!" And I shinnied up the iron ladder of the next car.
I hunkered down on top of the car, with John setting right beside me.
"Thunder! Let 'er crack!" An older man was waving his arms like a monk
praying on top of a mountain.
"Ain't you th' dam guy I split in th' mouth? I'm sorry, man!"
"You broke a wine bottle over my head? We won' break de nex' wine! By
God, we'll drink it! Yah!"
Men rolled around and laughed. Rocked back and forth as the train
picked up speed. Smoke rolled back down along the tops of the cars, blotting
them almost out. I looked back at the dozen cops standing around under the
street light.
"Too bad we cain't ride inside!" I was yelling around at the night
riders. "Gonna git wetter'n holy hell!"
"Let 'er ripple! What th' hell d'ya want in a war, boy, a big soft ass
cushion? Ha! Ha! Ha!"
"Trot me out a ship needs a buildin'!"
"Whooofff!"
I was having a hard time standing up, blinking my eyes to try to get
some cinders out. I looked around with my head ducked down into the wind and
smoke.
And in that one blink of my one eye I got another look along the train.
Men. A mixed-up bunch of blurred shadows and train smoke. Heard about work.
Just heard about it.
"I'm da wattah boy!"
I looked down at my elbow.
"How. How'n th' hell come you two on this here train? I thought you was
a long time gone!"
"Nawww. Nuttin' like dat," the little runt spit out into the rain.
"Nuttin' like dat."
"This train's a-goin' ta Seattle! Fifteen hundred miles!"
"Yeaaaa."
John was riding at my feet, setting down with his bare back to the
wind, talking. "Gonna be one mighty bad ol' night, boys. Rainy."
"Yaaaa."
"Stormy."
"So whattt?"
"We're goin' out ta th' West Coast ta build ships an' stuff ta fight
them Japs with, if this rain don't wash us out before we get there!"
"Wid ya. Wid ya."
"Hell! We're fightin' a war!"
"Cut de mushy stuff."
I listened back along the train and my ears picked some low singing
starting up. I strained in the storm to hear what the song was. The
whoof-whoof of the big engine hitting her
speed drowned the singing out for a minute, and the rattle and creaking
of the cars smothered it under; but as I listened as close as I could, I
heard the song coming my way and getting louder, and I joined with the rest
of the men singing:
This train don't carry no smoker,
Lyin' tongues or two-bit jokers;
This train is bound for glory
This train!
Wet wind curled in the drift of the train and cinders stung against my
eyelids, and I held them closed and sung out at the top of my voice. Then I
opened my eyes just a little slit, and a great big cloud of black engine
smoke pushed down over the whole string of cars, like a blanket for the men
through the storm.
Bound for Glory
was first published in 1943. Since that time Woody
Guthrie and his songs have traveled from one end of America to the other.
Woody Guthrie wrote more than 1,000 songs between 1936 and 1954, when
he became hospitalized, a victim of Huntington's Disease (chorea).
The songs and ballads of Woody Guthrie have continued to grow in
popularity. His songs have become as much a part of America as its rivers,
its forests, its prairies, and the people whom Guthrie chronicled in them:
'This Land Is Your Land," "Reuben James," "Tom Joad," "Pastures of Plenty,"
"Hard Traveling," "So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh," "Union Maid,"
"Pretty Boy Floyd," "Roll On, Columbia," "Dust Bowl Refugee," "Blowing Down
This Old Dusty Road," and 'This Train Is Bound for Glory."
These songs and dozens more have been recorded by Guthrie and other
folk singers. Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, The Weavers, Peter, Paul
and Mary, Judy Collins, Odetta, and Jack Elliott are among those who have
expressed their love and admiration through their loyalty to Guthrie and the
songs he wrote.
Woody's songs and his guitar made him a spokesman for the downtrodden
everywhere, but he also sang of the beauty of America, a beauty he viewed
from the open doors of boxcars as they sped across the country. He saw
America from the open road, and he knew its people firsthand.
In 1943 he and his old friend the late folk singer Cisco Houston joined
the merchant marine and Woody saw war and the world beyond the oceans.
After the war he briefly rejoined the Almanac Singers, a group that
included Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, and others. He wrote a
second book,
American Folksong,
a collection of thirty songs and sketches. A
collection of prose and poems by him,
Born to Win,
'edited by Robert
Shelton, appeared in 1965. He was a member of People's Songs, also with Hays
and Seeger. This group was described as a "new union of progressive
songwriters."
In the early thirties Woody Guthrie married the former Mary Esta
Jennings and in 1942 the former Marjorie Mazia Greenblatt. Woody died on
October 3, 1967. He is survived by five children.
Last-modified: Sun, 15 Dec 2002 23:06:45 GMT
Полезные ссылки:
 Крупнейшая электронная библиотека Беларуси
 Либмонстр - читай и публикуй!
 Любовь по-белорусски (знакомства в Минске, Гомеле и других городах РБ)
|
