He tiptoed across the street behind her, trying not to make a sound. With every step he took, she took one in the same direction. For a while he did not gain a single inch on her. When she stopped a moment to pull up her stocking, Toy went a little faster.
Just when he was within twenty feet of her, one of the foxhounds lat had been asleep under the water-oak tree woke up, scared to death by all the silence around town, and howled.
The girl was as scared as the hound, or Toy, or anyone else. She turned around to see what had happened.
“Don’t shoot, lady,” Toy begged. “Don’t shoot, whatever you do!”
The girl stuck her finger into her ear and fired in Toy’s direction. The bullet zipped through the leaves and branches of the tree over his head.
“I never shot at a lady in all my life,” Toy said, his voice shaking and thin. “And, lady, I sure don’t want to have to do it now.”
He pointed at his marshal’s badge on his shirt without taking his eyes from her.
“Lady,” he said, “whatever you do do, don’t shoot that gun again. It’s against the ordinance to fire off a gun inside the town limits.”
The girl flared up.
“Shut your mouth!” she cried. “Don’t you try to tell me what to do!”
Toy glanced behind him to see if any of the crowd was close enough to have heard what she said to him.
“Lady,” he said, “I’m just telling you that you’re going to have that thing all shot out in another minute or two, and then what are you going to do?”
The girl turned her back on Toy and ran towards the man in front of the drugstore. Toy went after her, hoping to be able to stop a murder, if he could get there in plenty of time.
The man was too scared to move an inch, even to save his life. He looked as if he would have given anything he had to be able to run, but it was easy to see that he could not move his feet an inch in any direction.
The girl leveled the gun at the trembling man’s chest.
“Don’t shoot him!” Toy yelled at her. “Shoot up in the air!”
The girl pointed the gun into the sky and fired the remaining bullets. When the hammer clicked on an empty chamber, she dropped the revolver at her feet.
Toy dashed up and grabbed her around the waist. It looked from the other side of the square as if she sort of swooned in Toy’s arms. He had to hold her up when she gave way all at once.
The man sank to the pavement, beads of perspiration jumping like popcorn on his forehead.
By that time the crowd began pouring out of the stores and running cross the square.
Toy dragged the girl to the wall beside the white-faced man, and set her down gently. She fainted away again with her head on the man’s shoulder.
Somebody ran up and slapped Toy on the back. He jumped to his feet.
“I guess we’ve got a pretty brave marshal, after all,” the fellow said. “There’s not many men who would walk right out in broad daylight and disarm a woman.”
“It wasn’t anything at all,” Toy said, standing back and letting the crowd have a chance to look at him. “It was just as simple as falling off a log.”
The girl began to regain consciousness. She opened her eyes and shrank in fright when she saw the crowd of strange men all around her. She clutched at the fellow beside her, throwing her arms around his neck and squeezing him tightly to her. The fellow swallowed hard.
“Are you hurt, honey?” she asked him, turning his face to hers with her hands.
The fellow swallowed hard again.
Toy pushed his way through the crowd. The men and boys fell back to let him pass through. When he got past them, he ran his thumbs under his suspender straps and threw them off his shoulders.
He knew what was coming, and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop it. Somebody followed him a few steps to the corner.
“You’d better hurry home and rest up awhile now, Toy,” the man said. “I know you must be all wore out after taking a gun away from that thin little girl.”
The crowd broke out in laughter. The men were soon so noisy he could not hear anything more that was said to him. He hurried around the corner as fast as he could.
(First published in Scribner’s)
The Fly in the Coffin
THERE WAS POOR old Dose Muffin, stretched out on the corncrib floor, dead as a frostbitten watermelon vine in November, and a pesky housefly was walking all over his nose.
Let old Dose come alive for just one short minute, maybe two while about it, and you could bet your last sock-toe dollar that pesky fly wouldn’t live to do his ticklish fiddling and stropping on any human’s nose again.
“You, Woodrow, you!” Aunt Marty said. “Go look in that corncrib and take a look if any old flies worrying Dose.”
“Uncle Dose don’t care now,” Woodrow said. “Uncle Dose don’t care about nothing no more.”
“Dead or alive, Dose cares about flies,” Aunt Marty said.
There wasn’t enough room in the house to stretch him out in. The house was full of people, and the people wanted plenty of room to stand around in. There was that banjo-playing fool in there, Hap Conson, and Hap had to have plenty of space when he was around. There was that jigging high-yellow gal everybody called Goodie, and Goodie took all the room there was when she histed up her dress and started shaking things.
Poor old Dose, dead a day and a night, couldn’t say a word: That old fly was crawling all over Dose’s nose, stopping every now and then to strop its wings and fiddle its legs. It had been only a day and a night since Dose had chased a fly right through the buzz saw at the lumber mill. That buzz saw cut Dose just about half in two, and he died mad as heck about the fly getting away all well and alive. It wouldn’t make any difference to Dose, though, if he could wake up for a minute, maybe two while about it. If he could only do that, he would swat that pesky fly so hard there wouldn’t be a flyspeck left.
“You, Woodrow, you!” Aunt Marty said. “Go like I told you do and see if any old flies worrying Dose.”
“You wouldn’t catch me swatting no flies on no dead man,” Woodrow said.
“Don’t swat them,” Aunt Marty said. “Just shoo them.”
Back the other side of the house they were trying to throw a makeshift coffin together for Dose. They were doing a lot of trying and only a little bit of building. Those lazybones out there just didn’t have their minds on the work at all. The undertaker wouldn’t come and bring one, because he wanted sixty dollars, twenty-five down. Nobody had no sixty dollars, twenty-five down.
Soon as they got the coffin thrown together, they’d go and bury poor old Dose, provided Dose’s jumper was all starched and ironed by then. The jumper was out there swinging on the clothesline, waving in the balmy breeze, when the breeze came that way.
Old Dose Muffin, lying tickle-nosed in the corncrib, was dead and wanted burying as soon as those lazy, big-mouthed, good-for-nothing sawmill hands got the grave dug deep enough. He could have been put in the ground a lot sooner if that jabbering preacher and that mush-mouthed black boy would have laid aside their jawboning long enough to finish the coffin they were trying to throw together. Nobody was in a hurry like he was.
That time-wasting old Marty hadn’t started washing out his jumper till noon, and if he had had his way, she would have got up and started it the break of day that morning. That banjo-playing fool in the house here, Hap Conson, had got everybody’s mind off the burial, and nobody had time to come out to the corncrib and swat that pesky fly on Uncle Dose’s nose and say howdy-do. That skirt-histing high-yellow in there, Goodie, was going to shake the house down, if she didn’t shake off her behind first, and there wasn’t a soul in the world cared enough stop ogling Goodie long enough to come out to the crib to see if any pesky flies needed chasing away.
Poor old Dose died a ragged-pants sawmill hand, and he didn’t have no social standing at all. He had given up the best job he had ever had in his life, when he was porter in the white-folks’
hotel, because he went off chasing a fly to death just because the fly lit on his barbecue sandwich just when he was getting ready to bite into it. He chased that fly eight days all over the country, and the fly wouldn’t have stopped long enough then to let Dose swat him if it hadn’t been starved dizzy. Poor old Dose came back home, but he had to go to work in the sawmill and lost all his social standing.
“You, Woodrow, you!” Aunt Marty said. “How many times does it take to tell you go see if any old flies worrying Dose?”
“I’d be scared to death to go moseying around a dead man, Aunt Marty,” Woodrow said. “Uncle Dose can’t see no flies no way.”
“Dose don’t have to be up and alive like other folks to know about flies,” she said. “Dose sees flies, he dead or alive.”
The jumper was dry, the coffin was thrown together, and the grave was six feet deep. They put the jumper on Dose, stretched him out in the box, and dropped him into the hole in the ground.
That jabbering preacher started praying, picking out the pine splinters he had stuck into his fingers when he and that mush-mouthed black boy were throwing together the coffin. That banjo-playing Hap Gonson squatted on the ground, picking at the thing like it was red-hot coals in a tin pan. Then along came that Goodie misbehaving, shaking everything that wouldn’t be still every time she was around a banjo-plucking.
They slammed the lid on Dose, and drove it down to stay with a couple of rusty twenty-penny nails. They shoveled in a few spades of gravel and sand.
“Hold on there,” Dose said.
Marty was scared enough to run, but she couldn’t. She stayed right there, and before long she opened one eye and squinted over the edge into the hole.
“What’s the matter?” Marty asked, craning her neck to see down into the ground. “What’s the matter with you, Dose?”
The lid flew off, the sand and gravel pelting her in the face, and Dose jumped to his feet, madder than he had ever been when he was living his life.
“I could wring your neck, woman!” Dose shouted at her.
“What don’t please you, Dose?” Marty asked him. “Did I get too much starch in the jumper?”
‘Woman,” Dose said, shaking his fist at her, “you’ve been neglecting your duty something bad. You’re stowing me away in this here ground with a pesky fly inside this here coffin. Now, you get a hump on yourself and bring me a fly swatter. If you think you can nail me up in a box with a fly inside of it, you’ve got another think coming.”
“I always do like you say, Dose,” Marty said. “You just wait till I run get the swatter.”
There wasn’t a sound made anywhere. The shovelers didn’t shovel, Hap didn’t pick a note, and Goodie didn’t shake a thing.
Marty got the swatter fast as she could, because she knew better than to keep Dose waiting, and handed it down to him. Dose stretched out in the splintery pine box and pulled the lid shut.
Pretty soon they could hear a stirring around down in the box.
“Swish!” the fly swatter sounded.
“Just hold on and wait,” Marty said, shaking her head at the shovelers.
“Swish!” it sounded again. “Swat!”
“Dose got him,” Marty said, straightening up. “Now shovel, boys, shovel!”
The dirt and sand and gravel flew in, and the grave filled up. The preacher got his praying done, and most of the splinters out of his fingers. That banjo-playing fool, Hap Conson, started acting like he was going to pick that thing to pieces. And that behind-shaking high-yellow, Goodie, histed her dress and went misbehaving all over the place. Maybe by morning Hap and Goodie would be in their stride. Wouldn’t be too sure about it, though, because the longer it took to get the pitch up, the longer it would last.
(First published in Mid-Week Pictorial)
Slow Death
ALL DAY WE HAD BEEN sitting in the piano box waiting for the rain to stop. Below us, twenty feet away, the muddy Savannah River oozed past, carrying to the sea the dead pines and rotted mule collars of the uplands.
Overhead, the newly completed Fifth Street Bridge kept us dry. We had stacked piles of brickbats under the corners of the piano box to keep the floor of it dry, and the water that drained from the bridge and red-clay embankment passed under us on its way to the swollen river.
Every once in a while Dave got up on his hands and knees and turned the straw over. It was banana straw, and it was soggy and foul-smelling. There was just enough room for the two of us in the crate, and if the straw was not evenly strewn, it made lumps under our backs and sides that felt as hard as bricks.
Just behind us was a family of four living in a cluster of dry-goods boxes. The boxes had been joined together by means of holes cut in the sides, like those of doghouses, and the mass of packing cases provided four or five rooms. The woman had two Dominique hens. These she kept in the box with her all the time, day and night, stroking their feathers so they would be persuaded to lay eggs for her. There were a dozen or more other crates under the South Carolina side of the bridge; when old men and women, starved and yellow, died in one of them, their bodies were carried down to the river and lowered into the muddy water; when babies were born, people leaned over the railings above and listened to the screams of birth and threw peanut shells over the side.
At dark the rain stopped. The sky looked as if it would not clear before morning, and we knew it would drizzle all night. Dave was restless, and he could not stay in the box any longer.
“Come on, Mike,” he said. “Let’s get out of here and dig up something to eat somewhere.”
I followed him through the red mud up the side of the embankment to the pavement above. We walked through puddles of water, washing the sticky red clay from our feet as we went.
Dave had fifty cents in his pocket and I was determined not to let him buy me anything to eat. He had baled waste paper in a basement factory off and on for two weeks, and when he worked, he made fifty cents a day. He had worked the day before in the basement, and the money had been kept all that time.
When we crossed the river into Georgia, I turned sharply to the right and started running up the levee away from Dave. I had gone fifty yards when he caught me by the sweater and made me stop. Then he took the fist out of his pocket and showed me the fifty-cent piece.
“Don’t worry about me, Dave,” I told him, catching his wrist and forcing his hand back into his pocket. “I’ll get by till tomorrow. I’ve got the promise of a half-day job, and that ought to be good for a dollar — a half, anyway. Go on and buy yourself a good meal, Dave.”
“No,” Dave said, jerking the fist out of his pants. “We’ll split it.”
He pulled me along with him towards the city. We broke through the levee grass and went down the embankment to the pavement. There was a dull orange glow in the low sky ahead of us, and the traffic in the streets sounded like an angry mob fighting for their lives.
We walked along together, splashing through the shallow puddles of rainwater on the pavement, going towards the city. Suddenly Dave stopped squarely in the middle of a sheet of rainwater that had not drained off into the sewers.
“You’re young, Mike,” he said, catching my sweater and shaking it as a dog does a pillow. “I’m old, but you’re young. You can find out what to do, and come back and tell me, and we’ll do it.”
“What’s the matter, Dave?” I asked him. “What are you talking about?”
He waved his arm in an arc that took in most of the world.
“Somewhere there’s people who know what to do about being down and out. If you could find out from them, and come back, we could do it.”
“It’ll take more than two of us, Dave. We’ll have to get a lot more on our side first.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “As soon as the people know what to do, and how to do it, we can go up and run hell out of those fat bastards who won’t give us our jobs back.”
“Maybe it’s not time yet, Dave.”
“Not time yet! Haven’t I b
een out of my job two years now? How much time do you want? Now’s the time, before all of us starve to death and get carried feet first down into that mud-slough of a river.”
Before I could say anything, he had turned around and started up the street again. I ran and caught up with him. We splashed through the puddles, dodging the deepest-looking ones.
Dave had had a good job in a fertilizer plant in South Augusta two years before. But they turned him out one day, and they would not take him back. There were seventy men in the crowd that was laid off that time. Dave would never tell me what had happened to the rest of them, but I knew what had happened to Dave. After he had run behind in house rent for six or seven months, the landlord told him to move out. Dave would not do it. He said he was going to stay there until he got back his job in the fertilizer plant in South Augusta. Dave stayed.
Dave stayed in the house for another four months, but long before the end of that time the window sashes and doors of the building had been taken out and carried off by the owner. When winter came, the rain soaked the house until it was as soggy as a log of punkwood. After that, the cold winds of January drove through the dwelling, whistling through the wide slits of the house like a madman breathing through clenched teeth. There was no wood or coal to burn in the fireplaces. There were only two quilts and a blanket for Dave and his wife and three children. Two of the children died before the end of January. In February his wife went. In March there was a special prayer service in one of the churches for Dave and his eleven-year-old daughter, but Dave said all he got out of it was a pair of khaki pants with two holes the size of dinner plates in the seat.
Dave did not know whether his remaining daughter had died, or whether she was being taken care of by charity, or whether she had been taken in to live at a whorehouse. The last time he had seen her was when a policeman came and took her away one morning, leaving Dave sitting in a corner of the windowless house wrapped in the two quilts and a blanket.
Stories of Erskine Caldwell Page 63