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. ïl' dead-cat house.
ïl' 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 Ïl' 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 Ïn 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!"
'PÁÒÁ 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 Ïl' '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? ï 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 ô÷,
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 ô÷ 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 ô÷ 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. 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