Bryan tilted forward on his chair in the corner till his shoeless feet found the bare dirt floor.
“Not me, ah’m not afeered o’Jesus. Why, ah’m Jesus little wooly lamb, ah am. Me’n Jesus git along jest like this—” He crossed two fingers, one on top of the other, and thrust them under Cass’s nose. “See, young scapegallers—this is how me’n Christ Jesus git along. Oney the one on the bottom, that’s me every time, an’ him on the top—that’s Christ Jesus.” Then he tittered girlishly, and crossed and recrossed his fingers.
Cass was a sickly thing, and Bryan had left his health in France. But Nancy was strong, her girlhood was happy, she had always been gay.
As a small girl, walking alone in the tiny garden on the mornings of those early days, days as yet undarkened by any shadow, she would laugh at everything she saw, red zinnias and blue morning-glories, tall dahlias and the wild daisy. Of the sweet purple clover she wove herself garlands, she made herself crowns of lilac and rose. Then, dressed like some little brown Mexican flower-girl, anklets of marigold, wristlets of grass, she would dance through the garden singing in sunlight, till she frightened the sparrows and caused them to scold her. For sheer delight she would dance, laughing, leaping and twirling, whirling about with her brown arms stretched wide; then, laughing and gasping, half-dizzied and toppling, she would throw herself down in the long grass of summer; laughing, laughing, weeping with laughter.
In all bright things she took deep joy: in gay-colored birds, in pictures and ribands; in gaudy new dresses, in flowers and songs.
Nance had been mischievous, too, as a child, always fighting with street urchins, chasing the chickens, or stealing white grapes off honest folks’ vines.
All day one day she coveted a great white blossom growing in the yard of neighbor Luther Gulliday. It was a wild chrysanthemum, she had not seen one before in her life; so she begged Luther for it, and he gave her instead—an apple. Nance went off quite humbly—an excellent actress. But when dark came she strolled again toward her flower, saw no one watching, plucked it and ran.
So all her days passed, unreckoned, fast-fleeting. She plucked wild plums, in the sunlight she found them, and her days were like these: she grew in light, unattended.
Sometimes after supper, while undressing for bed, she would press her hands slowly down the white bow of her loins. A great wonder would fill her, she would stand looking down. She would lie still in the darkness, her breasts like twin spears; and she would feel then as though she lay on a pyre whose flames were already beginning beneath her. The girl would be afraid, though she did not know of what. And her face in the dark would change to that of a woman.
Then she would sleep, and in sleep too she laughed. She was three years older than the boy Cass.
So the house stood, and so were the McKays, in the pre–depression years, on the West Texas prairie. Their home stood like a casual box on the border; it was wooden and half-accidental. It had no roots in the soil, it stood without permanence. Although it was old and unpainted and rotting, yet it appeared somehow to have been in its place for but the past few days. So with the people within—Texan-American descendants of pioneer woodsmen—they too had no roots. They too were become half-accidental. Unclaimed now they lived, the years of conquest long past, no longer accessory to hill and plain, no longer possessing place in the world.
They too were rotting.
On the edge of the town grew the jungle. Fathers warned sons not to go near it. Mothers intimidated their six-year-olds with tales of bearded men lying in wait in the long grass down by the Santa Fe tracks. But to a boy like Cass McKay, who was a lonely child, the Santa Fe jungle was not a fearful place. To a boy like Cass, who feared his father and had no mother, the jungle offered companionship.
Boys little older than himself lay idling about in long sun-shadows there, talking, jesting, eating, sleeping, waiting for one train or another. They boiled black coffee in open tins or ate beans with a stick; they rolled cigarettes single-handed and sang songs about far-away places. Cass never listened without wonder, he never watched without admiration.
“Ah’d like to git out of this pesthole some day,” he mused to himself. “Ah’d go to Laredo or Dallas or Tucson—anywhere ah’d take fancy to go. Ah’d git mah right arm tattooed in New Awlins, ah’d ship out f’om Houston or p’raps f’om Port Arthur; ah’d git to know all the tough spots as well as the easy ones. Ah’d always know jest where to go next. Ah’d always be laughin’ an’ larkin’ with folks.”
Cass listened to the boys and older men, and he learned many things:
That Beaumont was tough, but was loosening up. That Greensboro (in the place called Car-line)—that that was a right bad little town to ride into. That Boykin, right below it, was even worse. That toughest of all was any place that was anywhere in Georgia; if you were caught riding there you were put on a gang, and you worked on a pea farm from sunrise till sunset, sweating along in a chain for sixty-one days or until they caught someone else to take your place. But they gave you fifteen cents every week, and a plug of tobacco on Sundays besides. “So that part’s not so bad,” Cass thought.
He was a red-headed shaver in blue overalls and bare feet.
“Stay ’way from Waycross,” an old Wobbly warned him, “less you want to do ninety days in a turp camp.” And a young man sang an old tune for the boy, beating on a tin can in time with his song.
Turp camp down in Gawgia,
Cracker on a stump,
Big bull-whip he carries makes them blizzard-dodgers hump.
Watch ’em flag it out of Gawgia when they’ve done their little bump.
Oh boom the little saxophone, rap the little drums;
We’ll sing a little ditty till the old freight comes.
Southern Texas, but for Beaumont and Sierra Bianca, was simple; the Rio Grande valley was a downright cinch—you could ride blind down there without any penalty just so long as you got off on the side away from the depot when you got into McAllen. You could get through Alabama all right—provided you didn’t stand up on the tops like a tourist, so long as you stayed out of sight at division points, provided you stayed off the A. & W.P. Those A. & W.P. bastards utterly discouraged a man, for they made a point of putting you off at a spot in the woods forty-four miles northeast of Montgomery—a water-tank in the wilderness entitled Chehawee. And you walked to Montgomery then unless you had a fin. You could stay on for a fin, cash down on the barrelhead.
Look out for that town in Mississippi called Flomaton, ’cause that’s Mick Binga’s hole. Binga, even when he had both arms, was plenty-plenty tough. One night he licked two niggers for riding and they came back an hour after and shoved him under the wheels so that he lost his right wing—but he shot and killed both niggers while they were running away. Since then he’s a devil on whites, and death to blacks. Since then he’s killed and crippled so many niggers that even his railroad has lost count. Some say he’s killed twenty. Some say more, some less. Some say that when he gets fifty even he’s going to quit to give his boy the job. His boy is majoring in French philosophy now at Tulane, but everyone knows how well such stuff will pay him.
The roundhouse in Cheyenne is filled every night
With loafers and bummers of most every plight;
On their backs in no clothes, in their pockets no bills,
Each day they keep coming from the dreary black hills.
Look out for Marsh City—that’s Lame Hank Pugh’s. Look out for Greenville—that’s old Seth Healey’s. He’ll be walking the tops and be dressed like a ’bo, so you’ll never know by his looks he’s a bull. But he’ll have a gun on his hip and a hose-length in his hand, and two deputies coming down both the sides; your best bet then is to stay right still. You can’t get away and he’ll pot you if you try. So give him what you got and God help you if you’re broke. When he lifts up that hose-line just cover up your eyes and don’t try any back-fightin’ when it comes down—sww-ish. God help you if you run and God help you if you fight
; God help you if you’re broke and God help you if you’re black.
Old Seth Healey at Greenville—there’s a real bastard for you. Someone ought to kill that old man one of these days. The only way you can tell he’s a bull as welt as a brakie is by his hat. He wears patched blue overalls and keeps his star hid. Lean as Job’s turkey and twice as mean. The hat’s a big floppy affair with three holes in the top, and it’s the only way you can tell that the fellow coming down the tracks is Healey. Sometimes he’s bareheaded, then you can’t tell for sure—till he cracks you over the side of the head with his pistol-butt. Then you’re fairly certain. He once hit a boy in the belly with his fist so hard that the boy died, in the grass by the tracks, half an hour after. A black boy. So look out for Greenville, it’s right above Boykin, and it’s Seth Healey’s town. Look out for Lima, too—that’s in Ohio. And look out for Springfield, the one in Missouri. Look out for Denver and Denver Jack Duncan. Look out for Tulsa, look out for Joplin. Look out for Chicago—look out for Fort Wayne—look out for St Paul, look out for Dallas—look out—look out—look out—LOOK OUT!
Most of the boys felt that they belonged. They were, definitely, underdogs. Between themselves and those above they drew a line for all to see. It was always “We” and “Them.” People who lived ample lives, who always stayed in one place, who always had a roof over their heads—these were “Them.” In judging a man, Cass learned, the larger question was not whether the man was black, white, or brown—it was whether he was a transient or “One of them ‘inside’ folks.” Inside of a house that was to imply.
Cass sensed the strong “we”-feeling among these men and boys. He learned that in jails where the food was inedible, as most often it was, the men bought their own food by levying upon each newcomer to the extent of whatever they could find on him. Kangaroo Court was held whenever a new vagrant was brought in, and assessment was always justified as being a fine imposed for breaking into jail without the consent of the inmates. Oldtimers always paid, if they could, and without hesitation; they understood the fine as a loose form of insurance. A man was assisting those of his own class, and when he himself was down his class would help him. But whether he was able to pay or not, he usually shared in the supplies bought outside the jail.
Kangaroo Court was an institution which pleased county judges and chief deputies, for it enabled them to pocket money which otherwise they might have been forced to spend on supplies. One jail in southern Louisiana had established a treasury with a fund of over two hundred dollars, so that the turnkey and sheriff were dined once a week by the prisoners. At the Grayson county jail in Sherman, Texas, the prisoners printed a weekly paper, The Crossbar Gazette.
All tales seemed strangely wonderful to Cass when he heard them told in the jungle. These men seldom spoke of the terrible hardships they endured. Hardship they most often bore in silence. It was of the infrequent and wholly accidental bits of good fortune they had happened upon of which they spoke: how one had found a new corduroy jacket with a wallet in the pocket when he had climbed down into a reefer one night in Carrizozo; how another had been taken into a Methodist minister’s home one time, and had been fed and clothed for three straight days; how another had come upon a drunken woman in an empty cattle car.
Of the pathetic effort to keep clean, merely to keep clean, they had nothing to say. They were always begrimed with coal dust and cinders, always begging soap from each other; and at every junction they sought water for washing so soon as thirst was quenched. They hung shirts to dry on fence-posts by the tracks or on bushes in the jungles; they put clothes on damp rather than dirty. Most carried combs, and pocket-mirrors and toothbrushes were not uncommon. Sometimes one would reveal a small fetish to Cass that he might not have shown a full-grown man: a woman’s glove or a woman’s handkerchief, found perhaps on a bench in a city park. One showed Cass a photograph of Mary Pickford and said, “Mary’s my aunt.”
Of the darker side Cass could not know, of this they did not speak. Of long cold nights when you walked unlit streets, hungry, ill, alone. When the wind cut so that you gasped with pain, and so tired you were you scarce could stand. When you knew you had either to beg or die; and the hate that is yellow and springs from shame rose within you and made numb your heart till you could think of nothing save how sweet it would be just to kill for the simple pleasure of killing. You felt how easing to your own hurt would be the sight of another man’s blood; you knew then that to vent your own pain you must see another man suffer too. Yes, a freezing marrow could be well warmed just by watching fresh blood flow—this, when you had not a penny for drink, made you forget fierce cold. The escape was called “jack-rolling.” Men fought then for the sheer sake of fighting. Two hungry men in an alley, at night, clasped in each other’s arms amid garbage and ashes, biting, kicking, sweating in terror—so that one could laugh in relief when the other lay senseless; so that one could look down and see dark blood bubbling above torn lips, and know that it was he who had brought the blood up in that throat, and that it was he who had torn those lips. But the men of the jungle never spoke of jack-rolling save in jest. Hunger had taught them silence as well as haste.
Oh I met a man the other day I never met before,
He asked me if I wished a job a-shovelin’ iron ore.
When I asked him how much he would pay, he said twelve cents a load,
I said, go ’long old feller—I’d ruther stay on the road.
“Ah’d like to get out of this pesthole,” Cass thought. “Ah’d like to see Fort Worth an’ Waco.”
Cass was fifteen in 1926. He was lank, like his brother Bryan, red-haired like his sister, and he was already somewhat cave-chested. When Cass walked, he slouched. When he stood stiff he sometimes cocked his head to one side, like a long-legged fighting cock, and then he looked as though he had not laughed four times in all his life. A gaunt and lugubrious lout. He had gone to school long enough to learn how to read and write, but then the school board had hired a teacher who was half-Mexican, and Stub had taken Cass out in protest. The teacher was still in the school, so Cass had never returned.
Cass could feel his body growing, it was groaning and strainng and stretching. There was a great travail within him, a great toiling and laboring, as though an oak were sprouting in his vitals.
Sometimes strength would surge through him in a tide, and then he would run aimlessly and shout at nothing at all.
In his mind, too, was a growing. A sudden light would flash within his brain illuminating earth and sky—a common bush would become a glory, a careless sparrow on a swinging bough a wonder to behold; and then the light would fade and fade, like a slow gray curtain dropping.
Some moments were irretrievable.
One day in March he raised his eyes from play and saw a solitary sapling on a hill, bending before the wind against a solid wall of blue; and it seemed to him that it had not been there before he had looked up and would vanish as soon as he turned. Many times after that time Cass looked at the same slender shoot; never again did he see it so truly.
In a sense it had vanished.
At times he could catch Nancy in one of these strange life-glimpses. One second she would be moving about the kitchen, his sister about her familiar tasks, and the next she would be a total stranger, doing he knew not what. There would be a picture of her in his mind then—not moving, but rigid, tensed with life and still as death. He would be afraid and bewildered.
And then there was the lilac—that spring-time when it bloomed. It grew by day against a fence, and it bloomed at night, in rain. Cass waited each day for its blooming; each night he smelled it from where he slept. Every morning he brushed its buds of soot that trains had left in the night; each day he watered it. He had watched it every day, and he had seen:
That it grew out of dust and yearned toward sky; that it seemed half-asleep in the early morning, but that it became restless as day grew toward night; that when east-wind passed it shuddered in joy as though unseen hands were stroking it
s buds; and that whenever the sun was directly overhead the whole plant, even to its tiniest twigs, seemed bending a little in pain.
And one night Cass awoke, and heard a small rain on the dooryard dust, and he smelled a velvet-dark smell. It came to him on the smell of rain, and he heard the tapping of drops on the roof overhead. Behind a thin curtain he heard his sister’s low breathing; and knew she slept with her hair for a pillow.
Then the velvet smell made a purple image in his brain; his throat seemed to swell with the wild-dark odor. In the yard dust caught between his toes and the light rain flecked his face. Above his head night-clouds hung, heavily brooding. And the smell from the dooryard’s corner drew him as powerfully as though a woman waited him there: he traced the texture of lilac leaves as though touching a young girl’s breasts for the first time. He closed his eyes; his fingers wandered wantonly, to stroke that delicate blooming.
The lilac was blooming in the night.
Cass buried his face deep in lilac-leaf that time, and his heart pained, first trembling a little, then swelling slow.
That was in the springtime when the lilac bloomed, but it never bloomed for him again.
Often in the evenings of that spring and summer he would become uneasy and restless; he would begin to walk because, of a sudden, it would seem hard to stand still. His spindling shanks would start clipping along like a great pair of shears, ever faster and faster, till the walk became a run and the run became a race—then something would give within, and he would be tired, tired. He would return slowly, feeling troubled and strangely dissatisfied. Utterly exhausted, he would climb into bed with his brother.
Then such dreams as he would have! Once he was atop the utmost peak of the highest mountain on earth, clouds and storm winds breaking about him, snow-gales sweeping down. He was naked, and he was laughing—he was not cold among these snows. And everything was so wild and strong that when he woke in the morning he was sickened by the sights and sounds and smells of the house: the stains of Stubby’s spittle and Bryan’s cut-plug tobacco juice dried in brown globs against the wall; the sweaty, yellowish smell of unclean bedclothes beneath him, and the sour smells from the kitchen. The work-a-day world was a sorry place compared to what Cass knew in dreams.
Somebody in Boots Page 3