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--"
Chapter IX
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 îl' house is all haunted with dead cats," I yowled out. "I don't
like this îl' 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. Îl' dead-cat house.
Îl' 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 îl' 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 în 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!"
'Pàðà 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 îl' '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 int