by James Still
The pickers did not pause. The children of the Martinez family were paid for harvesting any amount over two hundred pounds. It was more game than profit. The best among them, given a daylight-to-dark performance, could top four hundred pounds in thick cotton. There was a rhythm to the picking, like a poem rising, verse to verse.
Night came early, for the sky clouded over. There were no stars. The yellow spot was where the moon was rising. Anson walked around the house to see that everything was battened down. The sparrows, heard chirping sleepily under the eaves at dusk, were quiet. The gloom of the outside came in and hovered just beyond reach of the reolite lamp. We could hear the flame burning the kerosene.
To enliven the somberness of the evening, Anson told us about the latest exploits of the Knuckleheads. He had heard from Ernest that they had for several weeks been living in a rented room and were having their meals next door at the De Rossett Hotel dining room, which served all comers with a loaded table. There were no waitresses. The cook replenished any dish that was half-empty. A diner left a quarter by the plate in payment. In the case of regulars, such as the Knuckleheads, payment was left Saturday evening for the week, placed in an envelope the hotel furnished, the name on the cover. Both Cadillac and Rance had left a one-hundred-dollar Confederate bill with a note, “Keep the change.”
The upshot was that the female manager of the De Rossett was amused by this. She simply laughed and demanded green money, not gray. She also took the occasion to ask them to tone down their hospitality at the table. Let a stranger sit down, and they would begin to ply him with dishes faster than could be taken until the confused diner was surrounded by piled-up bowls. Insisting on ladling soup for a customer, Rance saw to it that a portion landed in the diner's lap by accident. The apology was always profuse. The Knuckleheads had been known to throw biscuits at each other across the table rather than pass the plate.
Lately they had left behind their usual fistfights and had started something even more childish: food fights. Baked potatoes and chunks of cornbread were their weapons. After one particularly messy food fight, the De Rossett manager had ousted them for good, and the landlady next door had removed their plunder to the porch and locked them out. They now lived in a shack that had been located for them by the manager at the ice plant. The shack was near the Katy Railroad station, and there they lived on pork and beans and sardines. “They're not long in Texas,” Ernest had told Anson.
Anson, who had a good head for names and places, told us of the Webb Latin School in Tennessee, where participants in a fight were merely chided. The onlookers were the ones who were punished by lost privileges. Therefore no fights.
Remaining at the supper table long after the dishes were cleared, we sat listening to Anson. Other than his voice, there were no sounds. There was not a breath of air moving. The temperature of the earth and sky had reached equality. The coolness of the afternoon lingered. It was not so much the gloom of the night that oppressed me; it was the remembrances of the moment of terror when I had stood in a room with a picture swinging over my head, when the house lifted, the upper floor and porches ripped away. But maybe it was the homesickness that sometimes gnawed at me, too. Remembering that tornado inevitably made me think of home and my people there. My uneasiness was being gauged by both Anson and Lurie. He said, “Your eyes get bigger at night.”
Both Lurie and Anson sat on the bed beside me after I was ready for bed. They couldn't have missed I was trembling. I fought sleep, staying awake as long as I could. Anson liked to talk in the dark before drifting off. It was mentioned that the penned herd on the leased pasture should be soon visited. Blunt would be taken along to grease the windmill and repair it, if required. They would take me along. And this time of year, carnivals and circuses visited town thereabouts, and we would go when one showed up. And Anson had noticed a poster at the Bluewater Bijou showing Harry Carey, who would be starring in a cowboy motion picture this Saturday coming. Anson could abide movie cowboys only to laugh at their novelty. I slept at last, not hearing him intone his usual goodnight: “Sleep good so you'll be happy in the morning. Sleepy sleep. Sleepy sleep.”
I waked with a start. I was being carried through the dark down the long hall, onto the screened porch outside, where Anson had to bend to force his way through wind that tore at our nightclothes. Lurie followed, holding to his belt for guidance, two pillows squeezed in an arm.
Inside the flower pit, with the slanting door closed, Anson struck a match to get us oriented. We bedded down on the half bed, my arms around Lurie's neck, my head on her breast, Anson's arms encircling us both. I was secure and felt no fear. I had once heard Anson say, “No mattress is too narrow for two people at peace with each other,” and now I knew what he meant, because to be this crowded in such a time felt wonderful.
Morning found me back in my bed, the sun shining, and the pickers were hours in the field already. I jumped out of bed, washed my own face, and put on my clothes and moccasins before it could be done for me. From then on, this was how it was to be.
I don't know why there was such a sudden change in me, but I felt different. I was thirteen years old; I would do for myself. I was not a baby. Both Anson and Lurie stared at me in recognition of my independence, and Anson respected it by day if not entirely by night.
Outside there had been high winds yet little rain. Blunt reported a strip of cotton blown out of the bolls, less than a hundred yards of it. A cyclone had touched down briefly, here and there, and had ripped the roof off one of the cotton storage houses, the one with less than a bale in it. The cotton had blown into the Osage orange row directly in front of it, and where yesterday it was green, it was now white.
“Looks like somebody has some oranges to pick today,” Anson observed. “White ones.”
Portion of the grassland was rich earth, taken over for grazing as the ranch expanded. Here the grass had been sown and cattle stood knee-deep in acres of clover, and there were even copses of trees that furnished them shade. At noon, many lay as if slain under the water oaks, shifting as the shade shifted, the ground appearing as a wall of flesh, heaving now and then, with a sudden rising at times.
Anson, pointing to a cow standing in a stuck pose in the shelter pasture, asked me, “Do you know what she's thinking about?” I didn't.
“She's got her mind on the baby inside her.” And then he asked, “Do you know how come a baby calf is growing inside her? How it got there?”
I shook my head no to the question, but the true answer was yes. After all I was thirteen, had driven cows to the bull on adjoining farms in Alabama, and though short of knowledge about animal obstetrics, I knew that much. I'd never witnessed the actual copulation, being ashamed to be a party to such knowledge and always hiding behind the barn until it was over. Farm boys might be woefully short of insight into human impregnation, but they were privy constantly to the ways of pigs and chickens, and copulation both bovine and equine. Yet there was mystery there, and I had thought and thought about it.
One day I asked, “When cows die do they go to heaven?”
He broke into a laugh and then checked himself. “That's a new one,” he admitted. “Never occurred to me whether they did or not. If they do, we've sent a lot of them there.”
“Do horses?”
Now Anson, whom I was beginning to think of as Dad-o all the time, was serious. His face was grave. “I hope so,” he said. “Why not? I hope my Blue is there when I get there. Or follows me.”
“Dogs?”
“That's a question. Do you want them to?”
“I do. I want my dog Jack that I lost to be there.”
This exchange of views with Dad-o was naturally related to Lurie within my hearing, with Dad-o adding, “Our boy thinks deep about things. He's got a head on him.”
I often questioned Anson about natural things, like why the wind was blowing all the time, at least a slight wafting breeze, when it didn't act like that in Alabama. He had explained to me that it had to do with th
e differences in the temperature of the air and the ground.
Ernest Roughton, bothered by this phenomenon, claimed it gave him a headache, and he said on several occasions, “Damn that headache wind.” But he got used to it, as did we all. There was no other choice.
How would the torrid days of summer be endured without it, though? The moving air became the natural order of things, and what you did notice was that at times it ceased, sometimes inexplicably, and you stopped and tried to make something of it.
Dad-o would say, “Come on, wind. Wake up and get moving.” And pretty soon it would.
So many questions to ask, so many answers to be gained. Why did ticks enjoy burrowing into one's skin?
I was still undergoing the daily tick hunt. It was the storming of my last citadel, the exposure of my entire body, of which I was so protective, so ashamed, but I had finally relented and had my shirt raised and spied under, my breeches stripped down, and my “little fixings” checked for these bearers of Rocky Mountain fever. Not much was known then by folk generally about this dreaded disease, except that the bite of an infected tick was as dangerous as a sidewinder rattlesnake. Though the Winters family didn't know of anybody firsthand who had suffered from this illness, there were tales aplenty about its high fever, its ravages, its ending in a frightful death.
In examining me for ticks, Lurie now limited herself to my head, running her hand through it, eyeing the scalp. And then, sensing of my neck and shoulders and my heaving chest—I always, at first, would begin to breathe rapidly and almost hyperventilate—she'd stop. “Calm down,” Dad-o would say. “We're just a-looking. We're not going to find anything. Just a precaution.” And he put a towel, or a cushion, whatever was handy, over my face. When I couldn't see what they were seeing, I relaxed.
There was a single comment made about my body that sticks in my mind. Not once but many times. Passing his hand over my rear end he would say, “That's the softest skin you'll ever feel. Just like a baby's. Press right here,” he'd say to Lurie. “Softest little but you'll ever touch.” And Lurie did on several occasions, but mostly she would agree with a “Yes.” This was the closest they came to breaking through the invisible protective shield a boy clothes himself in.
So what of bugs? Why did they exist and bother us so? Dad-o knew a great deal about them, and it was he who put it into my head the philosophical question of how life feeds on death. Which brings to mind a large boy teasing a smaller boy at the Buffalo Wallow School, accusing him of “eating dead chicken.” When the smaller one denied it, tears streaming down his cheeks, his tormentor turned the knife in the wound by saying, “Ah, then you eat chicken alive! Run a chicken down and start biting it!”
During his time in college, Dad-o had heard a lot of talk about screwworms and their eradication. And he had to know about Johnson grass, which required drastic measures, and the abomination of chufas—sedge plants that, once they had captured a field, ran like wildfire across it, drinking up the moisture and nutrients in the ground. No known herbicide could stop them.
Chufas were sometimes a plague back home in Alabama. Papa once told us how a man got rich from a cure he guaranteed would solve the problem. In an advertisement in several agricultural journals, the man had guaranteed, money back, that he could rid a man of this herbal pest for only one dollar. Hundreds hurried in their dollars and received the cure: “Move off and leave it.”
I also had questions about tumblebugs. In Alabama, we had had these, too. Tumblebugs were hard-shelled bugs that rolled animal dung, or human dung if available, into balls and deposited their eggs therein. The hatching larvae fed on the feces.
In the barn lot, Anson and I observed such a scene, and when I asked why a creature would choose such a manner of existence that was so appalling to mankind, Dad-o answered the question to a satisfaction that obtains to this day. He said that mankind must not impose on other forms of life human way of thinking, social behavior, or morals. Not Dad-o's words in explaining this to me at the time, but they are mine, addressing the same phenomenon.
Life fed on death. I had observed a half-dozen young opossums feeding on the carcass of a dead cow and observed the buzzards so often circling over the pasture. Then there was that troubling wisdom that the Winters cattle were grown to be later killed and eaten by man, as were hogs and chickens, and even the catfish in the lower pond, which had been stocked by hand for that purpose. So man was that much akin to the lower mammals and the insects.
Once, when I sat down to eat, forgetting to wash my hands first, Dad-o said, “I always thought it curious that even a muskrat washes its hands before eating.”
Sunday.quiet.still.
Dad-o had driven away after breakfast. A telephone call had alerted him to meet at mid-morning a representative of a Dallas packinghouse to work out a contract for next year's feeder calves. Those now being finished off were spring-dropped, had been full-fed during the summer in dry lot, and within the month would be trucked to a Katy Railroad siding. They were under contract before birth.
In the absence of Dad-o, as by premonition, Blunt appeared in the yard to watch after me. Lurie called her sister to come spend the day; Velvet's husband had delivered her and departed. From where I stood by the Osage fence, I could hear their voices though not comprehend their words.
Today I didn't peer into the Osage bushes, which were so thick and interwoven a chicken couldn't penetrate them. This I had done several days past, thinking to see what might be nesting or hiding, and had upset Lurie. There I had spied a pair of toy wheels separated by a spindle. Rusty as they were, the wheels spun when I stroked the rims. When I showed them to Lurie, she threw up her hands.
“Where did you find them?” she asked, obviously disturbed. I told her.
She held them as if they might break. Then, she said, “Don't tell your Dad-o. It will worry him. He wouldn't sleep a wink the whole night.”
I assured her I wouldn't. There was no need to tell me this was from a toy belonging to the child Johnnes. I guessed the fate of the wheels. They were handed to Angelica, who opened the parlor door, deposited them, and locked it again.
Walking along the hedge with a rubber ball in my hands, eyes straight ahead, I wondered if I could hide from Blunt. While I couldn't see him, I knew he had me in sight. Dad-o had told me of his and Jack's efforts to outwit Blunt during boyhood. They had never succeeded.
“You can't hide from an Indian,” was his statement.
With nothing else to do, I wandered about, planning a ruse and a spot wherein to disappear. My ramblings took me to the barn and beyond. I bounced the ball as I walked along. Going into one empty lot and then another, emerging on open ground beyond, I was close enough to the Martinez compound to hear children's voices, and on arriving at the final fence, I could see the corner of a shed.
The compound was the Winters family's term for the cluster of dwellings, shacks, barns, lots, chicken houses, turkey runs, and cowsheds where the Martinez “tribe” lived, along with visiting kin and seasonal workers.
The fence where I drew up was old and served no present purpose. Some of the cedar posts leaned either left or right. I turned full round, searching about, and did not see Blunt. Then I saw the heads of children peer from around a shelter and disappear. One head reappeared, came into the open, and the child advanced toward me. It was Nino, a boy my size if not my age. He had been pointed out to me once by Lurie, who saw him as a possible playmate. But Nino and all the others who could drag a cotton sack down a row worked every day, daylight to dark. Except Sundays.
Nino came up to the fence and stopped. He said nothing. I said nothing, not knowing what to say. I bounced the ball. We stood facing each other and yet could find no words. I threw the ball over, Nino caught it, and threw it back. We exchanged the ball, back and forth, back and forth.
Presently, Nino turned and ran to the shed and came back with the iron rim of a wagon wheel. He swung it over the fence to me. He returned with another for himself. We rolled them abou
t the empty pasture with our hands until Nino showed me how to maneuver the rims with a short stick held in hand. After a half hour, I was speeding the rims hither and yon.
I felt relief—I don't know why—to be beyond Blunt's gaze. If he could see me now, it would be from a distance, a quarter of a mile. I felt as if a cord tied to me had been broken and I was free at last. It was a trait developed then, and to stay with me, to wish to be unobserved.
Again Nino ran away, to the compound, and returned. He came back with a pocketful of marbles—juggies, agates, cat's-eyes, glasses—and divided them with me. We dug the holes in the dry ground and without a word played roly-hole. The roly-hole marbles game was played in Texas the same as in Alabama. In no time, Nino had won all his marbles back. He divided them again with me, gave first go, and won them back. From the compound I heard the cries of children at play, roosters crowing, the patter-acking of guineas. We played soundlessly without spoken words, fully two hours.
Tiring of marbles, Nino devised another game. From the sheds he brought two poles—center poles used for haystacks. We jumped about like kangaroos. Jumping over a bush, and then a taller one, and a taller one still became a challenge. It was not until I lined my pole up to jump the fence that I was halted. One of the fence posts I hadn't noticed had turned into Blunt. He held up a hand and granted “Yh,” his signal for no. But Nino jumped it several times without deterrence.
We heard Velvet's husband drive up and drive away, carrying her back home. And then we heard the purr of Dad-o's motor coming up the lane. Nino dropped his pole and fled home, as if expecting that I would have to return to the big house now that Dad-o had returned.