d 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. Hå 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!
Me