Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels: A Library of America eBook Classic

by Katherine Anne Porter

  Noon Wine

  TIME: 1896–1905

  PLACE: Small South Texas Farm

  THE two grubby small boys with tow-colored hair who were digging among the ragweed in the front yard sat back on their heels and said, “Hello,” when the tall bony man with straw-colored hair turned in at their gate. He did not pause at the gate; it had swung back, conveniently half open, long ago, and was now sunk so firmly on its broken hinges no one thought of trying to close it. He did not even glance at the small boys, much less give them good-day. He just clumped down his big square dusty shoes one after the other steadily, like a man following a plow, as if he knew the place well and knew where he was going and what he would find there. Rounding the right-hand corner of the house under the row of chinaberry trees, he walked up to the side porch where Mr. Thompson was pushing a big swing churn back and forth.

  Mr. Thompson was a tough weather-beaten man with stiff black hair and a week’s growth of black whiskers. He was a noisy proud man who held his neck so straight his whole face stood level with his Adam’s apple, and the whiskers continued down his neck and disappeared into a black thatch under his open collar. The churn rumbled and swished like the belly of a trotting horse, and Mr. Thompson seemed somehow to be driving a horse with one hand, reining it in and urging it forward; and every now and then he turned halfway around and squirted a tremendous spit of tobacco juice out over the steps. The door stones were brown and gleaming with fresh tobacco juice. Mr. Thompson had been churning quite a while and he was tired of it. He was just fetching a mouthful of juice to squirt again when the stranger came around the corner and stopped. Mr. Thompson saw a narrow-chested man with blue eyes so pale they were almost white, looking and not looking at him from a long gaunt face, under white eyebrows. Mr. Thompson judged him to be another of these Irishmen, by his long upper lip.

  “Howdy do, sir,” said Mr. Thompson politely, swinging his churn.

  “I need work,” said the man, clearly enough but with some kind of foreign accent Mr. Thompson couldn’t place. It wasn’t Cajun and it wasn’t Nigger and it wasn’t Dutch, so it had him stumped. “You need a man here?”

  Mr. Thompson gave the churn a great shove and it swung back and forth several times on its own momentum. He sat on the steps, shot his quid into the grass, and said, “Set down. Maybe we can make a deal. I been kinda lookin’ round for somebody. I had two niggers but they got into a cutting scrape up the creek last week, one of ’em dead now and the other in the hoosegow at Cold Springs. Neither one of ’em worth killing, come right down to it. So it looks like I’d better get somebody. Where’d you work last?”

  “North Dakota,” said the man, folding himself down on the other end of the steps, but not as if he were tired. He folded up and settled down as if it would be a long time before he got up again. He never had looked at Mr. Thompson, but there wasn’t anything sneaking in his eye, either. He didn’t seem to be looking anywhere else. His eyes sat in his head and let things pass by them. They didn’t seem to be expecting to see anything worth looking at. Mr. Thompson waited a long time for the man to say something more, but he had gone into a brown study.

  “North Dakota,” said Mr. Thompson, trying to remember where that was. “That’s a right smart distance off, seems to me.”

  “I can do everything on farm,” said the man; “cheap. I need work.”

  Mr. Thompson settled himself to get down to business. “My name’s Thompson, Mr. Royal Earle Thompson,” he said.

  “I’m Mr. Helton,” said the man, “Mr. Olaf Helton.” He did not move.

  “Well, now,” said Mr. Thompson in his most carrying voice, “I guess we’d better talk turkey.”

  When Mr. Thompson expected to drive a bargain he always grew very hearty and jovial. There was nothing wrong with him except that he hated like the devil to pay wages. He said so himself. “You furnish grub and a shack,” he said, “and then you got to pay ’em besides. It ain’t right. Besides the wear and tear on your implements,” he said, “they just let everything go to rack and ruin.” So he began to laugh and shout his way through the deal.

  “Now, what I want to know is, how much you fixing to gouge outa me?” he brayed, slapping his knee. After he had kept it up as long as he could, he quieted down, feeling a little sheepish, and cut himself a chew. Mr. Helton was staring out somewhere between the barn and the orchard, and seemed to be sleeping with his eyes open.

  “I’m good worker,” said Mr. Helton as from the tomb. “I get dollar a day.”

  Mr. Thompson was so shocked he forgot to start laughing again at the top of his voice until it was nearly too late to do any good. “Haw, haw,” he bawled. “Why, for a dollar a day I’d hire out myself. What kinda work is it where they pay you a dollar a day?”

  “Wheatfields, North Dakota,” said Mr. Helton, not even smiling.

  Mr. Thompson stopped laughing. “Well, this ain’t any wheatfield by a long shot. This is more of a dairy farm,” he said, feeling apologetic. “My wife, she was set on a dairy, she seemed to like working around with cows and calves, so I humored her. But it was a mistake,” he said. “I got nearly everything to do, anyhow. My wife ain’t very strong. She’s sick today, that’s a fact. She’s been porely for the last few days. We plant a little feed, and a corn patch, and there’s the orchard, and a few pigs and chickens, but our main hold is the cows. Now just speakin’ as one man to another, there ain’t any money in it. Now I can’t give you no dollar a day because ackshally I don’t make that much out of it. No, sir, we get along on a lot less than a dollar a day, I’d say, if we figger up everything in the long run. Now, I paid seven dollars a month to the two niggers, three-fifty each, and grub, but what I say is, one middlin’-good white man ekals a whole passel of niggers any day in the week, so I’ll give you seven dollars and you eat at the table with us, and you’ll be treated like a white man, as the feller says—”

  “That’s all right,” said Mr. Helton. “I take it.”

  “Well, now I guess we’ll call it a deal, hey?” Mr. Thompson jumped up as if he had remembered important business. “Now, you just take hold of that churn and give it a few swings, will you, while I ride to town on a coupla little errands. I ain’t been able to leave the place all week. I guess you know what to do with butter after you get it, don’t you?”

  “I know,” said Mr. Helton without turning his head. “I know butter business.” He had a strange drawling voice, and even when he spoke only two words his voice waved slowly up and down and the emphasis was in the wrong place. Mr. Thompson wondered what kind of foreigner Mr. Helton could be.

  “Now just where did you say you worked last?” he asked, as if he expected Mr. Helton to contradict himself.

  “North Dakota,” said Mr. Helton.

  “Well, one place is good as another once you get used to it,” said Mr. Thompson, amply. “You’re a forriner, ain’t you?”

  “I’m a Swede,” said Mr. Helton, beginning to swing the churn.

  Mr. Thompson let forth a booming laugh, as if this was the best joke on somebody he’d ever heard. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said at the top of his voice. “A Swede: well, now, I’m afraid you’ll get pretty lonesome around here. I never seen any Swedes in this neck of the woods.”

  “That’s all right,” said Mr. Helton. He went on swinging the churn as if he had been working on the place for years.

  “In fact, I might as well tell you, you’re practically the first Swede I ever laid eyes on.”

  “That’s all right,” said Mr. Helton.

  Mr. Thompson went into the front room where Mrs. Thompson was lying down, with the green shades drawn. She had a bowl of water by her on the table and a wet cloth over her eyes. She took the cloth off at the sound of Mr. Thompson’s boots and said, “What’s all the noise out there? Who is it?”

  “Got a feller out there says he’s a Swede, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson; “says he knows how to make butter.”

  “I hope it turns out to be the truth,” said
Mrs. Thompson. “Looks like my head never will get any better.”

  “Don’t you worry,” said Mr. Thompson. “You fret too much. Now I’m gointa ride into town and get a little order of groceries.”

  “Don’t you linger, now, Mr. Thompson,” said Mrs. Thompson. “Don’t go to the hotel.” She meant the saloon; the proprietor also had rooms for rent upstairs.

  “Just a coupla little toddies,” said Mr. Thompson, laughing loudly, “never hurt anybody.”

  “I never took a dram in my life,” said Mrs. Thompson, “and what’s more I never will.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the womenfolks,” said Mr. Thompson.

  The sound of the swinging churn rocked Mrs. Thompson first into a gentle doze, then a deep drowse from which she waked suddenly knowing that the swinging had stopped a good while ago. She sat up shading her weak eyes from the flat strips of late summer sunlight between the sill and the lowered shades. There she was, thank God, still alive, with supper to cook but no churning on hand, and her head still bewildered, but easy. Slowly she realized she had been hearing a new sound even in her sleep. Somebody was playing a tune on the harmonica, not merely shrilling up and down making a sickening noise, but really playing a pretty tune, merry and sad.

  She went out through the kitchen, stepped off the porch, and stood facing the east, shading her eyes. When her vision cleared and settled, she saw a long, pale-haired man in blue jeans sitting in the doorway of the hired man’s shack, tilted back in a kitchen chair, blowing away at the harmonica with his eyes shut. Mrs. Thompson’s heart fluttered and sank. Heavens, he looked lazy and worthless, he did, now. First a lot of no-count fiddling darkies and then a no-count white man. It was just like Mr. Thompson to take on that kind. She did wish he would be more considerate, and take a little trouble with his business. She wanted to believe in her husband, and there were too many times when she couldn’t. She wanted to believe that tomorrow, or at least the day after, life, such a battle at best, was going to be better.

  She walked past the shack without glancing aside, stepping carefully, bent at the waist because of the nagging pain in her side, and went to the springhouse, trying to harden her mind to speak very plainly to that new hired man if he had not done his work.

  The milk house was only another shack of weather-beaten boards nailed together hastily years before because they needed a milk house; it was meant to be temporary, and it was; already shapeless, leaning this way and that over a perpetual cool trickle of water that fell from a little grot, almost choked with pallid ferns. No one else in the whole countryside had such a spring on his land. Mr. and Mrs. Thompson felt they had a fortune in that spring, if ever they get around to doing anything with it.

  Rickety wooden shelves clung at hazard in the square around the small pool where the larger pails of milk and butter stood, fresh and sweet in the cold water. One hand supporting her flat, pained side, the other shading her eyes, Mrs. Thompson leaned over and peered into the pails. The cream had been skimmed and set aside, there was a rich roll of butter, the wooden molds and shallow pans had been scrubbed and scalded for the first time in who knows when, the barrel was full of buttermilk ready for the pigs and the weanling calves, the hard packed-dirt floor had been swept smooth. Mrs. Thompson straightened up again, smiling tenderly. She had been ready to scold him, a poor man who needed a job, who had just come there and who might not have been expected to do things properly at first. There was nothing she could do to make up for the injustice she had done him in her thoughts but to tell him how she appreciated his good clean work, finished already, in no time at all. She ventured near the door of the shack with her careful steps; Mr. Helton opened his eyes, stopped playing, and brought his chair down straight, but did not look at her, or get up. She was a little frail woman with long thick brown hair in a braid, a suffering patient mouth and diseased eyes which cried easily. She wove her fingers into an eyeshade, thumbs on temples, and, winking her tearful lids, said with a polite little manner, “Howdy do, sir. I’m Miz Thompson, and I wanted to tell you I think you did real well in the milk house. It’s always been a hard place to keep.”

  He said, “That’s all right,” in a slow voice, without moving.

  Mrs. Thompson waited a moment. “That’s a pretty tune you’re playing. Most folks don’t seem to get much music out of a harmonica.”

  Mr. Helton sat humped over, long legs sprawling, his spine in a bow, running his thumb over the square mouth-stops; except for his moving hand he might have been asleep. The harmonica was a big shiny new one, and Mrs. Thompson, her gaze wandering about, counted five others, all good and expensive, standing in a row on the shelf beside his cot. “He must carry them around in his jumper pocket,” she thought, and noted there was not a sign of any other possession lying about. “I see you’re mighty fond of music,” she said. “We used to have an old accordion, and Mr. Thompson could play it right smart, but the little boys broke it up.”

  Mr. Helton stood up rather suddenly, the chair clattered under him, his knees straightened though his shoulders did not, and he looked at the floor as if he were listening carefully. “You know how little boys are,” said Mrs. Thompson. “You’d better set them harmonicas on a high shelf or they’ll be after them. They’re great hands for getting into things. I try to learn ’em, but it don’t do much good.”

  Mr. Helton, in one wide gesture of his long arms, swept his harmonicas up against his chest, and from there transferred them in a row to the ledge where the roof joined to the wall. He pushed them back almost out of sight.

  “That’ll do, maybe,” said Mrs. Thompson. “Now I wonder,” she said, turning and closing her eyes helplessly against the stronger western light, “I wonder what became of them little tads. I can’t keep up with them.” She had a way of speaking about her children as if they were rather troublesome nephews on a prolonged visit.

  “Down by the creek,” said Mr. Helton, in his hollow voice. Mrs. Thompson, pausing confusedly, decided he had answered her question. He stood in silent patience, not exactly waiting for her to go, perhaps, but pretty plainly not waiting for anything else. Mrs. Thompson was perfectly accustomed to all kinds of men full of all kinds of cranky ways. The point was, to find out just how Mr. Helton’s crankiness was different from any other man’s, and then get used to it, and let him feel at home. Her father had been cranky, her brothers and uncles had all been set in their ways and none of them alike; and every hired man she’d ever seen had quirks and crotchets of his own. Now here was Mr. Helton, who was a Swede, who wouldn’t talk, and who played the harmonica besides.

  “They’ll be needing something to eat,” said Mrs. Thompson in a vague friendly way, “pretty soon. Now I wonder what I ought to be thinking about for supper? Now what do you like to eat, Mr. Helton? We always have plenty of good butter and milk and cream, that’s a blessing. Mr. Thompson says we ought to sell all of it, but I say my family comes first.” Her little face went all out of shape in a pained blind smile.

  “I eat anything,” said Mr. Helton, his words wandering up and down.

  He can’t talk, for one thing, thought Mrs. Thompson; it’s a shame to keep at him when he don’t know the language good. She took a slow step away from the shack, looking back over her shoulder. “We usually have cornbread except on Sundays,” she told him. “I suppose in your part of the country you don’t get much good cornbread.”

  Not a word from Mr. Helton. She saw from her eye-corner that he had sat down again, looking at his harmonica, chair tilted. She hoped he would remember it was getting near milking time. As she moved away, he started playing again, the same tune.

  Milking time came and went. Mrs. Thompson saw Mr. Helton going back and forth between the cow barn and the milk house. He swung along in an easy lope, shoulders bent, head hanging, the big buckets balancing like a pair of scales at the ends of his bony arms. Mr. Thompson rode in from town sitting straighter than usual, chin in, a towsack full of supplies swung behind the saddle. After a trip to the barn,
he came into the kitchen full of good will, and gave Mrs. Thompson a hearty smack on the cheek after dusting her face off with his tough whiskers. He had been to the hotel, that was plain. “Took a look around the premises, Ellie,” he shouted. “That Swede sure is grinding out the labor. But he is the closest mouthed feller I ever met up with in all my days. Looks like he’s scared he’ll crack his jaw if he opens his front teeth.”