by Frank Norris
Vandover was down in the basement filling a barrel with the odds and ends of rubbish left by the previous tenants: broken bottles, old corsets, bones, rusty bedsprings. The dead hen he had taken out first of all, carrying it by one leg. It was a gruesome horror, partly eaten by rats, swollen, abnormally heavy, one side flattened from lying so long upon the floor. He could hardly stand; each time he bent over it seemed as though his backbone was disjointing. After cleaning out the debris he began to sweep. The dust was fearful, choking, blinding, so thick that he could hardly see what he was about. By and by he dimly made out Geary’s figure in the doorway.
“Those people have taken the house,” he called out, “and I promised them you would be through with it by this evening. So you want to stay with it now till you’re finished. I guess there’s not much more to do. Don’t forget the little garden in front.”
“No; I won’t forget!”
Geary went away, and for another hour Vandover kept at his work, stolidly, his mind empty of all thought, knowing only that he was very tired, that his back pained him. He finished with the basement, but as he was pottering about the little garden, picking up the discoloured newspapers with which it was littered, the burnisher’s wife returned, together with her sister and the little boy; the little boy eating a slice of bread and butter. They re-entered the house; Vandover heard their voices, now in one room, now in another. They were looking over their future home again; evidently they lived close by.
Suddenly the burnisher’s wife came out upon the front steps, looking down into the little garden, calling for Vandover. She was not pretty; she had a nose like a man and her chin was broad.
“Say, there,” she called to Vandover, “do you mean to say that you’ve finished inside here?”
“Yes,” answered Vandover, straightening up, nodding his head. “Yes, I’ve finished.”
“Well, just come in here and look at this.”
Vandover followed her into the little parlour. Her sister was there, very fat, smelling somehow of tallow candles and cooked cabbage; nearby stood the little boy still eating his bread and butter.
“Look at that baseboard,” exclaimed the burnisher’s wife. “You never touched that, I’ll bet a hat.” Vandover did not answer; he brought in the pail of water, and soaping his scrubbing brush, went down again on his hands and knees, washing the paint on the baseboard where the burnisher’s wife indicated. The two women stood by, looking on and directing his movements. The little boy watched everything, never speaking a word, slowly eating his bread and butter. Streaks of butter and bread clung to his cheeks, stretching from the corners of his mouth to his ears.
“I don’t see how you come to overlook that,” said the burnisher’s wife to Vandover. “That’s the dirtiest baseboard I ever saw. Oh, my! I just can’t naturally stand dirt! There, you didn’t get that stain off. That’s tobacco juice, I guess. Go back and wash that over again.” Vandover obeyed, holding the brush in one hand, crawling back along the floor upon one palm and his two knees, a pool of soapy, dirty water very cold gathered about him, soaking in through the old “blue pants” and wetting him to the skin, but he slovened through it indifferently. “Put a little more elbow grease to it,” continued the burnisher’s wife. “You have to rub them spots pretty hard to get ’em out. Now scrub all along here near the floor. You see that streak there — that’s all gormed up with something or other. Bugs get in there mighty quick. There, that’ll do, I guess. Now, is everything else all clean? Mister Geary said it was to be done to my satisfaction, and that you were to stay here until everything was all right.”
All at once her voice was interrupted by the prolonged roar of the factory’s whistle, blowing as though it would never stop. It was half-past five. In an instant the faint purring of the machinery dwindled and ceased, leaving an abrupt silence in the air. A moment later the army of operatives began to pour out of the main entrance; men and girls and young boys, all in a great hurry, the men settling their coat collars as they ran down the steps. The usually quiet street was crowded in an instant.
The burnisher’s wife stood on the steps of the vacant house with her sister, watching the throng debouch into the street. All at once the sister exclaimed, “There he is!” and the other began to call, “Oscar, Oscar!” waving her hand to one of the workmen on the other side of the street. It was her husband, the burnisher, and he came across the street, crowding his lunch basket into the pocket of his coat. He was a thin little man with a timid air, his face white and fat and covered with a sparse unshaven stubble of a pale straw colour. An odour as of a harness shop hung about him. Vandover gathered up his broom and pail and soap preparing to go home.
“Well, Oscar, I’ve taken the house!” said his wife to the burnisher as he came up the steps. “But I couldn’t get him to say that he’d let me have it for fifteen, water included. The landlord himself, Mr. Geary, was here to-day and I made the dicker with him. He’s had a man here all day cleaning up.” She explained the bargain, the burnisher approving of everything, nodding his head continually. His wife showed him about the house, her sister and the little boy following in silence. “He’s a good landlord, I guess,” continued the young woman; “anybody in the row will tell you that, and he means to keep his houses in good repair. Now you see, here’s the kitchen. You see how big it is. Here’s our laundry tubs, our iron sink, our boiler, and everything we want. It’s all as clean as a whistle; and get on to this big cubby under the sink where I can stow away things.” She opened its door to show her husband, but all at once straightened up, exclaiming, “Well, dear me suz — did you ever see anything like that?” The cubby under the sink was abominably dirty. Vandover had altogether forgotten it.
The little burnisher himself bent down and peered in.
“Oh, that’ll never do!” he cried. “Has that man gone home yet? He mustn’t; he’s got to clean this out first!” He had a weak, faint voice, small and timid like his figure. He hurried out to the front door and called Vandover back just as he was going down the steps. The two went back into the kitchen and stood in front of the sink. “Look under there!” piped the burnisher. “You can’t leave that, that way.”
“You know,” protested his wife, “that this all was to be done to our satisfaction. Mr. Geary said so. That’s the only way I came to take the house.”
“It’s about six o’clock, though,” observed her fat sister, who smelt of cooked cabbage. “Perhaps he’d want to go home to his dinner.” But at this both the others cried out in one voice, the burnisher exclaiming: “I can’t help that, this has got to be done first,” while his wife protested that she couldn’t naturally stand dirt, adding, “This all was to be done to our satisfaction, and we ain’t satisfied yet by a long shot.” Delighted at this excitement, the little boy forgot to eat into his bread and butter, rolling his eyes wildly from one to the other, still silent.
Meanwhile, without replying, Vandover had gone down upon the floor again, poking about amid the filth under the sink. The four others, the burnisher, his wife, his sister-in-law and his little boy, stood about in a half-circle behind him, seeing to it that he did the work properly, giving orders as to how he should proceed.
“Now, be sure you get everything out that’s under there,” said the burnisher. “Ouf! how it smells! They made a regular dump heap of it.”
“What’s that over in the corner there?” cried the wife, bending down. “I can’t see, it’s so dark under there — something gray; can’t you see, in under there? You’ll have to crawl way in to get at it — go way in!” Vandover obeyed. The sink pipes were so close above him that he was obliged to crouch lower and lower; at length he lay flat upon his stomach. Prone in the filth under the sink, in the sour water, the grease, the refuse, he groped about with his hand searching for the something gray that the burnisher’s wife had seen. He found it and drew it out. It was an old hambone covered with a greenish fuzz.
“Oh, did you ever!” cried the burnisher, holding up his hands. “
Here, don’t drop that on my clean floor; put it in your pail. Now get out the rest of the dirt, and hurry up, it’s late.” Vandover crawled back, half the way under the sink again, this time bringing out a rusty pan half full of some kind of congealed gravy that exhaled a choking, acrid odour; next it was an old stocking, and then an ink bottle, a broken rat-trap, a battered teapot lacking a nozzle, a piece of rubber hose, an old comb choked with a great handful of hair, a torn overshoe, newspapers, and a great quantity of other debris that had accumulated there during the occupancy of the previous tenant.
“Now go over the floor with a rag,” ordered the little burnisher, when the last of these articles had been brought out. “Wipe up all that nasty muck! Look there by your knee to your left! Scrub that big spot there with your brush — looks like grease. That’s the style — scrub it hard!” His wife joined her directions to his. Then it was over here, and over there, now in that corner, now in this, and now with his brush and soap, and now with his dry rag, and hurry up all the time because it was growing late. But the little boy, carried away by the interest of the occasion, suddenly broke silence for the first time, crying out shrilly, his mouth full of bread and butter, “Hey there! Get up, you old lazee-bones!”
The others shouted with laughter. There was a smart little boy for you. Ah, he’d be a man before his mother. It was wonderful how that boy saw everything that went on. He took an interest, that was it. You ought to see, he watched everything, and sometimes he’d plump out with things that were astonishing for a boy of his years. Only four and a half, too, and they reminded each other of the first day he put on knickerbockers; stood in front of the house on the sidewalk all day long with his hands in his pockets. The interest was directed from Vandover, they turned their backs, grouping themselves about the little boy. The burnisher’s sister-in-law felt called upon to tell about her little girl, a matter of family pride. She was going on twelve, and would you suppose that little thing was in next to the last grade in the grammar school? Her teacher had said that she was a real wonder; never had had such a bright pupil. Ah, but one should see how she studied over her books all the time. Next year they were to try to get her into the high school. Of course she was not ready for the high school yet, and it was against the rule to let children in that way, she was too young, but they had a pull, you understand. Oh, yes, for sure they had a pull. They’d work her in all right. The burnisher’s wife was not listening. She wanted to draw the interest back to her own little boy. She bent down and straightened out his little jacket, saying, “Does he like his bread ‘n butter? Well, he could have all he wanted!” But the little boy paid no attention to her. He had made a bon-mot, ambition stirred in him, he had tasted the delights of an appreciative audience. Bread and butter had fallen in his esteem. He wished to repeat his former success, and cried out shriller than ever:
“Hey, there! Get up, you old lazee-bones!”
But his father corrected him — his mother ought not to encourage him to be rude. “That’s not right, Oscar,” he observed, shaking his head. “You must be kind to the poor man.”
Vandover was sitting back on his heels to rest his back, waiting till the others should finish.
“Well, all through?” inquired the burnisher in his thin voice. Vandover nodded. But his wife was not satisfied until she had herself carefully peered into the cubby, while her husband held a lighted match for her. “Ah, that’s something like,” she said finally.
It was nearly seven. Vandover prepared to go home a second time. The little boy stood in front of him, looking down at him as he made his brush and rags and broom into a bundle; the boy slowly eating his bread and butter the while. In one corner of the room an excited whispered conference was going on between the burnisher, his wife, and his fat sister-in-law. From time to time one heard such expressions as “Overtime, you know — not afraid of work — ah! think I’d better, looks as though he needed it.” In a moment the two women went out, calling in vain for the little boy to follow, and the burnisher crossed the room toward Vandover. Vandover was on his knees tying up his bundle with a bit of bale rope.
“I’m sorry,” began the burnisher awkwardly. “We didn’t mean to keep you from your supper — here,” he went on, holding out a quarter to Vandover, “here, you take this, that’s all right — you worked overtime for us, that’s all right. Come along, Oscar; come along, m’son.”
Vandover put the quarter in his vest pocket.
“Thank you, sir,” he said.
The burnisher hurried away, calling back, “Come along, m’son; don’t keep your mama waiting for supper.” But the little boy remained very interested in watching Vandover, still on the floor, tying the last knots. As he finished, he glanced up. For an instant the two remained there motionless, looking into each other’s eyes, Vandover on the floor, one hand twisted into the bale rope about his bundle, the little boy standing before him eating the last mouthful of his bread and butter.
The Shorter Fiction
South Hall, University of California, Berkeley — between 1890 and 1894 Norris attended the university, where he became acquainted with the ideas of human evolution of Darwin and Spencer, which were to be reflected in his later writings. His stories appeared in the undergraduate magazine at Berkeley and in the San Francisco Wave.
A portrait of Frank Norris by the painter Ernest Clifford Peixotto, one of Norris’ oldest friends.
A DEAL IN WHEAT AND OTHER STORIES OF THE NEW AND OLD WEST
A Deal in Wheat, a collection of Norris’ short stories, was published posthumously by Doubleday, Page and Company, in 1903. Though primarily a novelist, Norris supplemented his income by publishing short fiction and non-fiction. He wrote most of the tales in A Deal in Wheat late in his all too brief life. In general, critics were not keenly receptive of his short fiction, noting that Norris was at his best when able to employ a larger panorama. Critic, Frederic Taber Cooper, wrote a typical review in the November 1903 issue of The Bookman:
If Mr. Conrad is an example of an author who always knows his own distance, and gauges his stride accordingly, the late Frank Norris is a good example of an author who lacked that knowledge. Mr. Norris took himself and his work with great seriousness; his ideal in fiction was a lofty one, and he was steadily, persistently, indomitably, working towards it indeed, in the opinion of many of those who best know his work, he had already crossed the threshold of achievement. Yet, whatever place is ultimately assigned him in the history of American letters, this at least is sure — that he was first and last an artist who depended upon bold lines and sweeping brush strokes, and that he could not be true to himself if hampered by a narrow canvas. To look to Frank Norris for short stories is as incongruous as to set a Rodin to carving cherry pits, or a Verestchagin to tinting lantern slides. Yet it does not follow that the recently published collection entitled A Deal in Wheat were not worth preservation. On the contrary, they are full of the keenest interest to all students of contemporary letters. No one but Norris could have written them; every page breathes forth the uncrushable vitality of the man. But to call them short stories is to misname them. They impress one as fragments, rather splendid fragments too, trials of the author’s strength, before he launched forth upon a really serious work.
The reviewer in the April 1904 issue of The Critic was more admiring:
These are not to be ignored because they are short stories while their author was famed as a writer of long ones. They are quite good enough to command attention, independently. Doubtless the title story will be anticipated with most interest by Mr. Norris’ admirers, because of its having been a kind of preliminary sketch written during the preparation of “The Pit.” Yet it is by no means the best in this collection of striking and unhackneyed tales, which are rather the more interesting for not being in the ordinary short-story manner. There is a background of the West in all the stories. strongly and competently sketched in. The characters, too, are set forth with an admirable ease that suggests that their author knew a gre
at deal more about them than he told.
“Mr. Norris liked the unusual and the dramatic. He also liked horrors, which he handled ably, if not always discreetly; and he liked to place them in near and perilous juxtaposition to comedy... The author of ‘The Pit’ is not at his best in writing a love story, but the two included in this collection are to be commended. The faults of Mr. Norris’ novels, faults of structure and of taste, do not appear in this admirable volume which is a most prepossessing medium through which to view a writer who has had no lack of praise.
Famed silent film director, D. W. Griffith based his 1909 short film, A Corner in Wheat, on Norris’ title story, “A Deal in Wheat” along with his novel, The Pit. In 1994, the Library of Congress selected A Corner of Wheat for its National Film Registry. Among other attributes, Griffith used his pioneering technique of “parallel editing” during the wheat suffocating scene, and based the animated scene of the farmer sowing his seeds on Jean-Francois Millet’s famous painting, “The Sower.”
New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. 1903. First Edition
CONTENTS
A DEAL IN WHEAT
CHAPTER I. THE BEAR — WHEAT AT SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER II. THE BULL — WHEAT AT A DOLLAR-TEN
CHAPTER III. THE PIT
CHAPTER IV. THE BELT LINE
CHAPTER V. THE BREAD LINE
THE WIFE OF CHINO
CHAPTER I. CHINO’S WIFE
CHAPTER II. MADNESS
CHAPTER III. CHINO GOES TO TOWN
CHAPTER IV. A DESPATCH FROM THE EXPRESS MESSENGER
CHAPTER V. THE TRAIL
CHAPTER VI. THE DISCOVERY OF FELICE
A BARGAIN WITH PEG-LEG
THE PASSING OF COCK-EYE BLACKLOCK