“Am sorry to see that, Orland,” he said.
“Save your pity for some who are in need of it,” Orland said.
“Well, you’ve got good insurance on it, anyway,” John said. “That will help a lot. When you collect the insurance money, you can go and live in your brick house in style and good comfort.”
“Not going to collect the insurance,” Orland said.
“You’re not! Why won’t you collect it?”
“Because I set fire to the house myself.”
“Set fire to it yourself! Good God, Orland, you must have lost your mind and reason!”
“Had a blamed good reason for doing it.”
John White walked away and turned around and came back where Orland was standing. He looked at Orland and then at the burning house and at Orland again.
Orland began telling John about the old man who had said his name was Phelps. He started at the beginning, when Phelps knocked on the storm door at mealtime. Then he told John about giving the old man permission to spend the night in the house after he had walked in unbidden.
“But I told him to get up in time for breakfast at six-thirty,” Orland said. “I told him that, and the old fool heard me, too. When this morning came, I waited five, ten minutes for him to come and eat. He didn’t even get up out of bed. He just stayed there, sleeping. Then I sat and waited a whole hour for him to get up, but he still just stayed in the spare chamber and slept. Am not the kind to allow the country to get cluttered up with men with no more sense than to start out walking to New Hampshire in dead of winter to peel pulpwood. That old fool said he started out from somewhere in the eastern country to walk over there through the snow and frost, and he hadn’t even got as far as the high mountains. If I hadn’t stopped him here, he’d have gone to some town and couldn’t go further. Then he’d have been a burden on the state, because there’s not a town down-Maine that would have claimed him, not even a town in the eastern country would have given him citizenship.”
Suddenly, Emma screamed and fell down on her back. Orland ran to see what the matter with her was.
While he was away attending to Emma, John White saw something move behind one of the windows in the spare chamber. Before he could go closer to see what it was, the roof over that part of the building fell in, sending up a shower of sparks and fragments of black embers.
Orland came back beside John and stood watching the house as it sank lower and lower to the ground.
“Lived in this town a long time,” John said, “almost any man’s lifetime, I guess, but I never before saw a man burn his house down just for durn meanness. Don’t guess you’d have done it, if it wasn’t for the fact that you own a brick house that’s a lot better shelter than this frame one was.”
“That old fool said he was on his way to New Hampshire to help his brother peel —”
“Well, all I’ve got to say is that it looks to me like you could have asked him just once to get up out of bed and clear out of the house. Doesn’t appear to me like a man ought to set fire to and burn down a good frame house just because a guest won’t get out of bed in time for breakfast.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have done it,” Orland said, “but after I had thought all night about it, there wasn’t any other way to treat him. Why, that old fool who said his name was Phelps opened my door and come in without my bidding, right when I was sitting at the table at mealtime. You don’t guess I’d have gone and asked him to get out of bed, do you, after he had done a thing like that?”
“Guess you would have gone and told him to get up, all right, if you hadn’t been trying for nearly twenty years to find a way to move into your brick house. This frame house was just about worn out, anyway. Orland. Wasn’t no sense in burning him up just to get the house down and out of your way.”
“Couldn’t take the risk,” Orland said. “This house has always been cussed mean. It was just hardheaded enough to have stood in good repair right up to the day I took ill and died.”
(First published in Story)
Blue Boy
TWO HOURS AFTER dinner they were still sitting in the airtight, overheated parlor. A dull haze of tobacco smoke was packed in layers from the table-top to the ceiling, and around the chairs hovered the smell of dried perspiration and stale perfume. The New Year’s Day turkey-and-hog dinner had made the women droopy and dull-eyed; the men were stretched out in their chairs with their legs spread out and their heads thrown back, looking as if around each swollen belly a hundred feet of stuffed sausage-casing had been wound.
Grady Walters sat up, rubbed his red-veined face, and looked at his guests. After a while he went to the door and called for one of his Negro servants. He sent the Negro on the run for Blue Boy.
After he had closed the door tightly, Grady walked back towards his chair, looking at the drowsy men and women through the haze of blue tobacco smoke. It had been more than an hour since anyone had felt like saying anything.
“What time of day is it getting to be, Grady?” Rob Howard asked, rubbing first his eyes and then his belly.
“Time to have a little fun,” Grady said.
Blue Boy came through the back door and shuffled down the hall to the parlor where the people were. He dragged his feet sideways over the floor, making a sound like soy beans being poured into a wooden barrel.
“We been waiting here all afternoon for you to come in here and show the folks some fun, Blue Boy,” Grady said. “All my visitors are just itching to laugh. Reckon you can make them shake their sides, Blue Boy?”
Blue Boy grinned at the roomful of men and women. He dug his hands into his overall pockets and made some kind of unintelligible sound in his throat.
Rob Howard asked Grady what Blue Boy could do. Several of the women sat up and began rubbing powder into the pores of their skin.
The colored boy grinned some more, stretching his neck in a semicircle.
“Blue Boy,” Grady said, “show these white-folks how you caught that shoat the other day and bit him to death. Go on, Blue Boy! Let’s see how you chewed that shoat to death with your teeth.”
For several moments the boy’s lips moved like eyelids a-flutter, and he made a dash for the door. Grady caught him by the shoulder and tossed him back into the center of the room.
“All right, Blue Boy,” Grady shouted at him. “Do what I told you to do. Show the white-folks how you bit that pig to death.”
Blue Boy made deeper sounds in his throat. What he said sounded more unintelligible than Gullah. Nobody but Grady could understand what he was trying to say.
“It don’t make no difference if you ain’t got a shoat here to kill,” Grady answered him. “Go on and show the white-folks how you killed one the other day for me.”
Blue Boy dropped on his hands and knees, making sounds as if he were trying to protest. Grady nudged him with his foot, prodding him on.
The Negro boy suddenly began to snarl and bite, acting as if he himself had been turned into a snarling, biting shoat. He grabbed into the air, throwing his arms around an imaginary young hog, and began to tear its throat with his sharp white teeth. The Howards and Hannafords crowded closer, trying to see the idiot go through the actions of a bloodthirsty maniac.
Down on the floor, Blue Boy’s face was contorted and swollen. His eyes glistened, and his mouth drooled. He was doing all he could to please Grady Walters.
When he had finished, the Howards and Hannafords fell back, fanning their faces and wiping the backs of their hands with their handkerchiefs. Even Grady fanned his flushed face when Blue Boy stopped and rolled over on the floor exhausted.
“What else can he do, Grady?” the youngest of the Hannaford women asked.
“Anything I tell him to do,” Grady said. “I’ve got Blue Boy trained. He does whatever I tell him.”
They looked down at the small, thin, blue-skinned, seventeen-year-old Negro on the floor. His clothes were ragged, and his thick kinky hair was almost as long as a Negro woman’s. He looked the same, exce
pt in size, as he did the day, twelve years before, when Grady brought him to the big house from one of the sharecroppers’ cabins. Blue Boy had never become violent, and he obeyed every word of Grady’s. Grady had taught him to do tricks as he would instruct a young puppy to roll over on his back when bidden. Blue Boy always obeyed, but sometimes he was not quick enough to suit Grady, and then Grady flew into him with the leather bellyband that hung on a nail on the back porch.
The Howards and Hannafords had sat down again, but the Negro boy still lay on the floor. Grady had not told him to get up.
“What’s wrong with him, Grady?” Rob Howard asked.
“He ain’t got a grain of sense,” Grady said, laughing a little. “See how he grins all the time? A calf is born with more sense than he’s got right now.”
“Why don’t you send him to the insane asylum, then?”
“What for?” Grady said. “He’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys. I figure he’s worth keeping just for the hell of it. If I sent him off to the asylum, I’d miss my good times with him. I wouldn’t take a hundred dollars for Blue Boy.”
“What else can he do?” Henry Hannaford asked.
“I’ll show you,” Grady said. “Here, Blue Boy, get up and do that monkeyshine dance for the white-folks. Show them what you can do with your feet.”
Blue Boy got up, pushing himself erect with hands and feet. He stood grinning for a while at the men and women in a circle around him.
“Go on, Blue Boy, shake your feet for the white-folks,” Grady told him, pointing at Blue Boy’s feet. “Do the monkeyshine, Blue Boy.”
The boy began to shuffle his shoes on the floor, barely raising them off the surface. Grady started tapping his feet, moving them faster and faster all the time. Blue Boy watched him, and after a while his own feet began going faster. He kept it up until he was dancing so fast his breath began to give out. His eyes were swelling, and it looked as if his balls would pop out of his head any moment. The arteries in his neck got larger and rounder.
“That nigger can do the monkeyshine better than any nigger I ever saw,” Henry Hannaford said.
Blue Boy sank into a heap on the floor, the arteries in his neck pumping and swelling until some of the women in the room covered their faces to keep from seeing them.
It did not take Blue Boy long to get his wind back, but he still lay on the floor. Grady watched him until he thought he had recovered enough to stand up again.
“What else can your trained nigger do, Grady?” Rob Howard asked. “Looks like you would have learned him a heap of tricks in ten or twelve years’ time.”
“If it wasn’t getting so late in the day, I’d tell him to do all he knows,” Grady said. “I’ll let him do one more, anyway.”
Blue Boy had not moved from the floor.
“Get up, Blue Boy,” Grady said. “Get up and stand up on your feet.”
Blue Boy got up grinning. His head turned once more on his rubbery neck, stretching in a semicircle around the room. He grinned at the white faces about him.
“Take out that blacksnake and whip it to a frazzle,” Grady told him. “Take it out, Blue Boy, and show the white-folks what you can do.”
Blue Boy grinned, stretching his rubbery neck until it looked as if it would come loose from his body.
“What’s he going to do now, Grady?” Rob Howard asked.
“You just wait and see, Rob,” Grady said. “All right, Blue Boy, do like I said. Whip that blacksnake.”
The youngest Hannaford woman giggled. Blue Boy turned and stared at her with his round white eyeballs. He grinned until Grady prodded him on.
“Now I reckon you folks know why I didn’t send him off to the insane asylum,” Grady said. “I have a heap more fun out of Blue Boy than I would with anything else you can think of. He can’t hoe cotton, or pick it, and he hasn’t even got enough sense to chop a piece of stove-wood, but he makes up for all that by learning to do the tricks I teach him.”
Once more Blue Boy’s eyes began to pop in the sockets of his skull, and the arteries in his neck began to pump and swell. He dropped to his knees and his once rubbery neck was as rigid as a table leg. The grinning lines on his face had congealed into weltlike scars.
The Howards and Hannafords, who had come from five counties to eat Grady’s New Year’s Day turkey-and-hog dinner, gulped and wheezed at the sight of Blue Boy. He was beginning to droop like a wilting stalk of pigweed. Then he fell from his knees.
With his face pressed against the splintery floor, the grooves in his cheeks began to soften, and his grinning features glistened in the drying perspiration. His breathing became inaudible, and the swollen arteries in his neck were as rigid as taut-drawn ropes.
(First published in Anvil)
Evelyn and the Rest of Us
DURING THE LATTER part of summer when the apples were ripening, Roy used to get a team of his father’s horses and a surrey whenever he wanted them and all of us would go out to Quack’s farm and bring back two or three sacks of apples. Then when we got back to town, we would go down into Johnny and Evelyn’s cellar and make cider. The way we made it was like this: Johnny got one of his mother’s sheets and we dumped a sack of apples on it and mashed them with bricks. When they were mashed just right, all of us helped to squeeze out the juice into glasses.
There was a boy whose name was Malcolm Streeter who lived down at the bottom of the hill near the West End school. When he began coming up and playing with us, he was about our size though several years older. Evelyn and Grace talked about him all the time but none of the rest of us liked him at all.
When the Streeter boy came up and drank our cider, we began playing tricks on him whenever we had a chance. Roy threw his cap up in a tree so he would have to climb after it before he could go home. He always got mad and said he was never coming up again, but he always came back in a day or two. We teased him a lot, too. We called him a sissy because he went to parties with girls. Evelyn and Grace were the only ones who liked the Streeter boy. He kept his hair parted all the time, and he gave them chewing gum. Both of them always took up for him whenever we talked about ducking him in the reservoir, or something like that.
“You mustn’t throw him in the water,” Grace and Evelyn begged us. “He doesn’t mean any harm.”
“I’d like to throw him overboard in the river and see what he would do,” Quack said. “I’ll bet he’s a sissy just like a girl. I’ll bet he couldn’t swim out.”
“He’s just as good a swimmer as you are, Quack Hill!” Evelyn said. “I’ll bet you can’t swim across the river.”
“Me! Can’t swim across the river!” Quack said. “I can swim across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping even once.”
Malcolm came up the hill the next afternoon while we were playing baseball in the lot. He stopped at the corner though, and sat on the stone wall around Johnny and Evelyn’s house. We saw him sitting there, but nobody said anything to him.
Evelyn was in the house and Grace had gone downtown with her mother. If they had been there, they would have wanted him to play with us. We were glad they were not there, because the Streeter boy was a sissy.
Quack said something about stoning him; but the rest of us wanted to play baseball and we forgot all about him.
We played another hour and then went down to Johnny’s for some of our apples in his cellar. Johnny and Evelyn kept the apples we brought from the country. When we wanted some to eat, or when we wanted to make cider, we went down into their cellar and got them.
We sat around in the cellar awhile eating apples and then we went upstairs to the kitchen for a drink of water. The cellar had two doors. One was at the side where the coal was brought in and the other was at the top of the steps and opened into the kitchen.
We went up the steps to the kitchen. Quack was in front and he opened the door. The rest of us were behind him. As soon as Quack opened the door all of us saw the same thing. The Streeter boy and Evelyn were lying together on the kitchen floor.
> We had made a lot of noise down in the cellar, and a lot more when we went up the steps, but they had not heard us. We backed down the steps and closed the door without either of them hearing us or knowing that we had been there. We sat down in the cellar and ate some more apples. Quack said he wanted some cider, but nobody else wanted to make any. When we had eaten all the apples we could hold, we went out into the yard and sat on the stone wall in front of the house. Quack threw the baseball up in the air and caught it in his glove with one hand. Johnny socked his mitt with his fist and made a good pocket in it for the ball. Joe socked his glove and made a good pocket in it so he would not drop the ball when he ran after a fly in the outfield.
The Streeter boy came out of Johnny and Evelyn’s house about half an hour before their mother came home from downtown. He jumped over the stone wall at the other side of the yard. He saw us sitting on the wall but he did not stop to say anything. He looked at us and put his thumb to his nose and wiggled his fingers at us. I don’t know why we did not throw rocks at him. We usually did stone him when he left the hill and went home. Once we stoned him all the way down to the West End school until he ran up on his front porch. We had to stop throwing then because we would have broken a window. But this time none of us got up. Nobody felt like stoning him any more.
After he had gone Evelyn stayed in the house. Grace had come home with her mother from downtown but she was at home helping to cook supper. All of us sat on the wall until we had to go home. It was getting dark.
Nobody knew why it was, but we never played baseball or made any more cider after that. When school was over in the afternoon, Quack went downtown and stayed until suppertime; and Johnny got a job delivering the afternoon paper on a route in the East End. Grace and Evelyn went riding in the afternoon with boys from the high school and at night went to dances with them. Roy helped his father at the livery stable and drove the horses every afternoon for exercise. He stopped going to school the next year and began training horses. Soon after he stopped school he sold a pair of horses to a circus. He had trained them to stand on barrels and roll them around a ring while keeping time to music.
Stories of Erskine Caldwell Page 32