Stories of Erskine Caldwell

by Erskine Caldwell

  He stopped under the bedroom window when he realized what he had been doing.

  “Now that’s a fool thing for me to be out here doing,” he said, scolding himself. “Pa couldn’t hear it thunder.” He heard a rustling of the bed.

  “He’s been gone long enough to get clear to the crossroads, or more,” Hatty said, calling through the window.

  “Now you lay down and try to get a little sleep, Hatty,” Lonnie told her. “I’ll bring him back in no time.”

  He could hear Nancy scratching fleas under the house, but he knew she was in no condition to help look for Mark. It would be several days before she recovered from the shock of losing her tail.

  “He’s been gone a long time,” Hatty said, unable to keep still.

  “That don’t make no difference,” Lonnie said. “I’ll find him sooner or later. Now you go on to sleep like I told you, Hatty.”

  Lonnie walked towards the barn, listening for some sound. Over at the big house he could hear the hogs grunting and squealing, and he wished they would be quiet so he could hear other sounds. Arch Gunnard’s dogs were howling occasionally, but they were not making any more noise than they usually did at night, and he was accustomed to their howling.

  Lonnie went to the barn, looking inside and out. After walking around the barn, he went into the field as far as the cotton shed. He knew it was useless, but he could not keep from calling his father time after time. “Oh, Pa!” he said, trying to penetrate the darkness. He went farther into the field.

  “Now, what in the world could have become of Pa?” he said, stopping and wondering where to look next.

  After he had gone back to the front yard, be began to feel uneasy for the first time. Mark had not acted any more strangely during the past week than he ordinarily did, but Lonnie knew he was upset over the way Arch Gunnard was giving out short rations. Mark had even said that, at the rate they were being fed, all of them would starve to death inside another three months.

  Lonnie left the yard and went down the road towards the Negro cabins. When he got to Clem’s house, he turned in and walked up the path to the door. He knocked several times and waited. There was no answer, and he rapped louder.

  “Who’s that?” he heard Clem say from bed.

  “It’s me,” Lonnie said. “I’ve got to see you a minute, Clem. I’m out in the front yard.”

  He sat down and waited for Clem to dress and come outside. While he waited, he strained his ears to catch any sound that might be in the air. Over the fields towards the big house he could hear the fattening hogs grunt and squeal.

  Clem came out and shut the door. He stood on the doorsill a moment speaking to his wife in bed, telling her he would be back and not to worry.

  “Who’s that?” Clem said, coming down into the yard. Lonnie got up and met Clem halfway.

  “What’s the trouble?” Clem asked then, buttoning up his overall jumper.

  “Pa’s not in his bed,” Lonnie said, “and Hatty says he’s been gone from the house most all night. I went out in the field, and all around the barn, but I couldn’t find a trace of him anywhere.”

  Clem then finished buttoning his jumper and began rolling a cigarette. He walked slowly down the path to the road. It was still dark, and it would be at least an hour before dawn made it any lighter.

  “Maybe he was too hungry to stay in bed any longer,” Clem said. “When I saw him yesterday, he said he was so shrunk up and weak he didn’t know if he could last much longer. He looked like his skin and bones couldn’t shrivel much more.”

  “I asked Arch last night after suppertime for some rations — just a little piece of sowbelly and some molasses. He said he’d get around to letting me have some the first thing this morning.”

  “Why don’t you tell him to give you full rations or none?” Clem said. “If you knew you wasn’t going to get none at all, you could move away and find a better man to sharecrop for, couldn’t you?”

  “I’ve been loyal to Arch Gunnard for a long time now,” Lonnie said. “I’d hate to haul off and leave him like that.”

  Clem looked at Lonnie, but he did not say anything more just then. They turned up the road towards the driveway that led up to the big house. The fattening hogs were still grunting and squealing in the pen, and one of Arch’s hounds came down a cotton row beside the driveway to smell their shoes.

  “Them fattening hogs always get enough to eat,” Clem said. “There’s not a one of them that don’t weigh seven hundred pounds right now, and they’re getting bigger every day. Besides taking all that’s thrown to them, they make a lot of meals off the chickens that get in there to peck around.”

  Lonnie listened to the grunting of the hogs as they walked up the driveway towards the big house.

  “Reckon we’d better get Arch up to help look for Pa?” Lonnie said. “I’d hate to wake him up, but I’m scared Pa might stray off into the swamp and get lost for good. He couldn’t hear it thunder, even. I never could find him back there in all that tangle if he got into it.”

  Clem said something under his breath and went on towards the barn and hog pen. He reached the pen before Lonnie got there.

  “You’d better come here quick,” Clem said, turning around to see where Lonnie was.

  Lonnie ran to the hog pen. He stopped and climbed halfway up the wooden-and-wire sides of the fence. At first he could see nothing, but gradually he was able to see the moving mass of black fattening hogs on the other side of the pen. They were biting and snarling at each other like a pack of hungry hounds turned loose on a dead rabbit.

  Lonnie scrambled to the top of the fence, but Clem caught him and pulled him back.

  “Don’t go in that hog pen that way,” he said. “Them hogs will tear you to pieces, they’re that wild. They’re fighting over something.”

  Both of them ran around the corner of the pen and got to the side where the hogs were. Down under their feet on the ground Lonnie caught a glimpse of a dark mass splotched with white. He was able to see it for a moment only, because one of the hogs trampled over it.

  Clem opened and closed his mouth several times before he was able to say anything at all. He clutched at Lonnie’s arm, shaking him.

  “That looks like it might be your pa,” he said. “I swear before goodness, Lonnie, it does look like it.”

  Lonnie still could not believe it. He climbed to the top of the fence and began kicking his feet at the hogs, trying to drive them away. They paid no attention to him.

  While Lonnie was perched there, Clem had gone to the wagon shed, and he ran back with two singletrees he had somehow managed to find there in the dark. He handed one to Lonnie, poking it at him until Lonnie’s attention was drawn from the hogs long enough to take it.

  Clem leaped over the fence and began swinging the singletree at the hogs. Lonnie slid down beside him, yelling at them. One hog turned on Lonnie and snapped at him, and Clem struck it over the back of the neck with enough force to drive it off momentarily.

  By then Lonnie was able to realize what had happened. He ran to the mass of hogs, kicking them with his heavy stiff shoes and striking them on their heads with the iron-tipped singletree. Once he felt a stinging sensation, and looked down to see one of the hogs biting the calf of his leg. He had just enough time to hit the hog and drive it away before his leg was torn. He knew most of his overall leg had been ripped away, because he could feel the night air on his bare wet calf.

  Clem had gone ahead and had driven the hogs back. There was no other way to do anything. They were in a snarling circle around them, and both of them had to keep the singletrees swinging back and forth all the time to keep the hogs off. Finally Lonnie reached down and got a grip on Mark’s leg. With Clem helping, Lonnie carried his father to the fence and lifted him over to the other side.

  They were too much out of breath for a while to say anything, or to do anything else. The snarling, fattening hogs were at the fence, biting the wood and wire, and making more noise than ever.

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p; While Lonnie was searching in his pockets for a match, Clem struck one. He held the flame close to Mark Newsome’s head.

  They both stared unbelievingly, and then Clem blew out the match. There was nothing said as they stared at each other in the darkness.

  Clem walked several steps away, and turned and came back beside Lonnie.

  “It’s him, though,” Clem said, sitting down on the ground. “It’s him, all right.”

  “I reckon so,” Lonnie said. He could think of nothing else to say then.

  They sat on the ground, one on each side of Mark, looking at the body. There had been no sign of life in the body beside them since they had first touched it. The face, throat, and stomach had been completely devoured.

  “You’d better go wake up Arch Gunnard,” Clem said after a while.

  “What for?” Lonnie said. “He can’t help none now. It’s too late for help.”

  “Makes no difference,” Clem insisted. “You’d better go wake him up and let him see what there is to see. If you wait till morning, he might take it into his head to say the hogs didn’t do it. Right now is the time to get him up so he can see what his hogs did.”

  Clem turned around and looked at the big house. The dark outline against the dark sky made him hesitate.

  “A man who short-rations tenants ought to have to sit and look at that till it’s buried.”

  Lonnie looked at Clem fearfully. He knew Clem was right, but he was scared to hear a Negro say anything like that about a white man.

  “You oughtn’t talk like that about Arch,” Lonnie said. “He’s in bed asleep. He didn’t have a thing to do with it. He didn’t have no more to do with it than I did.”

  Clem laughed a little, and threw the singletree on the ground between his feet. After letting it lie there a little while, he picked it up and began beating the ground with it.

  Lonnie got to his feet slowly. He had never seen Clem act like that before, and he did not know what to think about it. He left without saying anything and walked stiffly to the house in the darkness to wake up Arch Gunnard.

  III

  Arch was hard to wake up. And even after he was awake, he was in no hurry to get up. Lonnie was standing outside the bedroom window, and Arch was lying in bed six or eight feet away. Lonnie could hear him toss and grumble.

  “Who told you to come and wake me up in the middle of the night?” Arch said.

  “Well, Clem Henry’s out here, and he said maybe you’d like to know about it.”

  Arch tossed around on the bed, flailing the pillow with his fists.

  “You tell Clem Henry I said that one of these days he’s going to find himself turned inside out, like a coat sleeve,”

  Lonnie waited doggedly. He knew Clem was right in insisting that Arch ought to wake up and come out there to see what had happened. Lonnie was afraid to go back to the barnyard and tell Clem that Arch was not coming. He did not know, but he had a feeling that Clem might go into the bedroom and drag Arch out of bed. He did not like to think of anything like that taking place.

  “Are you still out there, Lonnie?” Arch shouted.

  “I’m right here, Mr. Arch. I —”

  “If I wasn’t so sleepy, I’d come out there and take a stick and — I don’t know what I wouldn’t do!”

  Lonnie met Arch at the back step. On the way out to the hog pen Arch did not speak to him. Arch walked heavily ahead, not even waiting to see if Lonnie was coming. The lantern that Arch was carrying cast long flat beams of yellow light over the ground; and when they got to where Clem was waiting beside Mark’s body, the Negro’s face shone in the night like a highly polished plowshare.

  “What was Mark doing in my hog pen at night, anyway?” Arch said, shouting at them both.

  Neither Clem nor Lonnie replied. Arch glared at them for not answering. But no matter how many times he looked at them, his eyes returned each time to stare at the torn body of Mark Newsome on the ground at his feet.

  “There’s nothing to be done now,” Arch said finally. “We’ll just have to wait till daylight and send for the undertaker.” He walked a few steps away. “Looks like you could have waited till morning in the first place. There wasn’t no sense in getting me up.”

  He turned his back and looked sideways at Clem. Clem stood up and looked him straight in the eyes.

  “What do you want, Clem Henry?” he said. “Who told you to be coming around my house in the middle of the night? I don’t want niggers coming here except when I send for them.”

  “I couldn’t stand to see anybody eaten up by the hogs, and not do anything about it,” Clem said.

  “You mind your own business,” Arch told him. “And when you talk to me, take off your hat, or you’ll be sorry for it. It wouldn’t take much to make me do you up the way you belong.”

  Lonnie backed away. There was a feeling of uneasiness around them. That was how trouble between Clem and Arch always began. He had seen it start that way dozens of times before. As long as Clem turned and went away, nothing happened, but sometimes he stayed right where he was and talked up to Arch just as if he had been a white man, too.

  Lonnie hoped it would not happen this time. Arch was already mad enough about being waked up in the middle of the night, and Lonnie knew there was no limit to what Arch would do when he got good and mad at a Negro. Nobody had ever seen him kill a Negro, but he had said he had, and he told people that he was not scared to do it again.

  “I reckon you know how he came to get eaten up by the hogs like that,” Clem said, looking straight at Arch.

  Arch whirled around.

  “Are you talking to me . . .?”

  “I asked you that,” Clem stated.

  “God damn you, yellow-blooded . . .” Arch yelled.

  He swung the lantern at Clem’s head. Clem dodged, but the bottom of it hit his shoulder, and it was smashed to pieces. The oil splattered on the ground, igniting in the air from the flaming wick. Clem was lucky not to have it splash on his face and overalls.

  “Now, look here . . .” Clem said.

  “You yellow-blooded nigger,” Arch said, rushing at him. “I’ll teach you to talk back to me. You’ve got too big for your place for the last time. I’ve been taking too much from you, but I ain’t doing it no more.”

  “Mr. Arch, I . . .” Lonnie said, stepping forward partly between them. No one heard him.

  Arch stood back and watched the kerosene flicker out on the ground. “You know good and well why he got eaten up by the fattening hogs,” Clem said, standing his ground. “He was so hungry he had to get up out of bed in the middle of the night and come up here in the dark trying to find something to eat. Maybe he was trying to find the smokehouse. It makes no difference, either way. He’s been on short rations like everybody else working on your place, and he was so old he didn’t know where else to look for food except in your smokehouse. You know good and well that’s how he got lost up here in the dark and fell in the hog pen.”

  The kerosene had died out completely. In the last faint flare, Arch had reached down and grabbed up the singletree that had been lying on the ground where Lonnie had dropped it.

  Arch raised the singletree over his head and struck with all his might at Clem. Clem dodged, but Arch drew back again quickly and landed a blow on his arm just above the elbow before Clem could dodge it. Clem’s arm dropped to his side, dangling lifelessly.

  “You God-damn yellow-blooded nigger!” Arch shouted. “Now’s your time, you black bastard! I’ve been waiting for the chance to teach you your lesson. And this’s going to be one you won’t never forget.”

  Clem felt the ground with his feet until he had located the other singletree. He stooped down and got it. Raising it, he did not try to hit Arch, but held it in front of him so he could ward off Arch’s blows at his head. He continued to stand his ground, not giving Arch an inch.

  “Drop that singletree,” Arch said.

  “I won’t stand here and let you beat me like that,” Clem protested.


  “By God, that’s all I want to hear,” Arch said, his mouth curling. “Nigger, your time has come, by God!”

  He swung once more at Clem, but Clem turned and ran towards the barn. Arch went after him a few steps and stopped. He threw aside the singletree and turned and ran back to the house.

  Lonnie went to the fence and tried to think what was best for him to do. He knew he could not take sides with a Negro, in the open, even if Clem had helped him, and especially after Clem had talked to Arch in the way he wished he could himself. He was a white man, and to save his life he could not stand to think of turning against Arch, no matter what happened.

  Presently a light burst through one of the windows of the house, and he heard Arch shouting at his wife to wake her up.

  When he saw Arch’s wife go to the telephone, Lonnie realized what was going to happen. She was calling up the neighbors and Arch’s friends. They would not mind getting up in the night when they found out what was going to take place.

  Out behind the barn he could hear Clem calling him. Leaving the yard, Lonnie felt his way out there in the dark.

  “What’s the trouble, Clem?” he said.

  “I reckon my time has come,” Clem said. “Arch Gunnard talks that way when he’s good and mad. He talked just like he did that time he carried Jim Moffin off to the swamp — and Jim never came back.”

  “Arch wouldn’t do anything like that to you, Clem,” Lonnie said excitedly, but he knew better.

  Clem said nothing.

  “Maybe you’d better strike out for the swamps till he changes his mind and cools off some,” Lonnie said. “You might be right, Clem.”

  Lonnie could feel Clem’s eyes burning into him.

  “Wouldn’t be no sense in that, if you’d help me,” Clem said. “Wouldn’t you stand by me?”

  Lonnie trembled as the meaning of Clem’s suggestion became clear to him. His back was to the side of the barn, and he leaned against it while sheets of black and white passed before his eyes.

  “Wouldn’t you stand by me?” Clem asked again.

  “I don’t know what Arch would say to that,” Lonnie told him haltingly.