“Well, ouah man didn’ come an’ didn’ come, an’ he were due at two an’ it were after fo’, an’ this un, th’ little un, he commence gittin’ the’ all-ovah fidgits again. He chaw at ol’ straw real rapid. Then he ask me what time is it nigger, an’ ah took me a guess an’ say qwata to five an’ he say does they feed yo’ in th’ army an’ give yo’ money beside, nigger, an’ ah say ah reck’n so, white boy. He don’ say nothin’ fo’ space then; an’ ’en he say suddent-like what time is it nigger, an’ ah tuk me a guess an’ say qwata afta five, white boy. An’ ’en he spit out he straw an’ get up an’ say sort o’ low, ‘Clyde, ’at man ain’t comin’ this day no mo’ an’ yo’ damned well know it all this time—yore a lyin’ little turncoat, Clyde Kilbane, it kill mah soul jest t’ call yo’ kin.”
“’At’s jest what he say—an’ ’en this other boy kep’ layin’ right still fo’ minute like he deep asleep an’ caint hear nothin’ atall; an’ ’en he open one eye jest a mite an’ look up an’ say, ‘Speak out loud why don’ yo’, Homer?’ An’ this un, the little un, say right back, ‘Reckon ah spoke pert ’nough fo’ you-all to hear—th’ man ain’t comin’—so you is a liar on top o’ thievin’ from yo’ pappy.’ ’En this boy, he were layin’ down, he open other eye jest a little too an’ say real siow-hke, ‘We-el, ah nevah figged a Terry Ewe back o’ barn’—an’ ’en he got up so quick ah nevah seen ’im rise an’ they was at it with th’ bigges’ longes’jack-knives ah evah did see—an’ ’en him what jest riz up he were layin’ down agen jes like befo’, an’ ah see he were cut perty bad awright ’cause it keep comin’ down from right undah he arm, an’ this un, the little un, he seen where he cut him an’ he git all white-face an’ kneel down ovah; but ah didn’ know he was cut some his’ef. Ah jest stahted thinkin’ ’bout time ah staht mindin’ mah own bus’ness; an’ so ’at was when ah begun t’ go ’way.
“So’s o’co’se when y’all brung me heah t’ show me this boy plum daid ah just might astonished, folks.” He paused to look at Sheriff Lem Shultz beside him. He was a big youth in a ragged red sweater, and he looked like a Lake Salvador Negro—“An’ that’s all ah kin tell y’all.” He smiled then, a wide sweet white smile.
The second killing of the week occurred four days later, on a Saturday night, when the Negro was dragged through the streets behind an automobile, and burned.
Into the middle of August of 1928 came days hot beyond any in the memory of the town. Every morning the sun rose red as blood, as though intent on scourging every living thing off the earth before it set. The cotton growers along the river saw their crops wither before them in the red heat. In the town none ventured out save him who must; the streets were deserted. On the ranches the cattle sought escape by lying all day in the long shade of the barns. But there was no escape, the great green blood-fat flies of summer tortured the beasts as they lay. On the surrounding ranches dozens of head were lost through the milk fever. The cows’ bags became caked and heavy, and dried up; then their bags had to be amputated to save the animals’ lives.
Every night a foolish small breeze would come skipping and hissing out of the east, running like an evil little buffoon from doorstep to doorstep, as though to tell those within of the coming of rain; but every one knew that the small breeze lied, even the cattle mocked it with lowing. So it would whisper away to the west, like a cat racing out from under a henhouse with feathers in its fur.
Into the limitless yellow sky the steam from the roundhouse rose slowly, slowly; straight up into the air it rose, more like a pillar than the tossing white plume that one always saw there when there were clouds and wind. But there were no clouds, there was no wind—day after day the sky yawped hungrily for them, yellow and threatening.
Watching that white pillar rise against that yellow wall, Cass remembered a proverb the Reverend Benjamin Cody once had spoken:
“There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things that say not, ‘It is enough’: the grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire that saith not, ‘It is enough.’”
So Cass thought, “When the sky is yellow and has no clouds, it is like the earth not filled with water.”
Fires broke out in the town, and on the ranches.
One night during this spell Cass passed the old county jailhouse and paused, for always it held a peculiar kind of dread for him. At the barred window, draped in slant silver moonlight, a sleepless old man stood looking down, his fingers wound whitely and tightly about the bars. An old man—gray, unclean, unshaven, dangling his head out to get a breath of air. His skin was drawn so tightly over his cheek bones that the flesh appeared to have been drawn down and then tied tightly under the chin like a woman’s bonnet-strings, for under the jaw hung long turkey-folds of flesh that left his cheek bones jutting out from beneath his eyes. He saw the boy staring up at him and waved one thin hand down, like a hand waving out of a dark crate. Cass did not wave in return, but he came closer and whispered with head straining up, “Did y’all steal somethin’? Did they get y’all fo’ gittin’ drunk? What y’all do wrong, mister?”
The old man appeared startled. He put his hand over his mouth and stepped back out of sight; Cass heard him coughing. And from behind the bars, in the darkness there, one breath of the oppressive heat of the place came down to Cass as he stood. When the old man came to the window again he looked down and answered. His voice seemed very tired.
“I never did but one thing really wrong in my life, sonny—I was born in Texas with a hungry gut, an’ that was my big mistake. You got no terbacco on you, hev you, sonny?”
Cass had none, and the old man disappeared from the window.
On that same night a boxcar loaded with sheep caught fire while standing on a siding on the Santa Fe. For some reason everyone thought it had been fired deliberately. In the middle of the night the frightened bleating of the trapped beasts and the glow in the sky brought the townsfolk out half-dressed and tousled from sleep; two shirtless men unsealed the doors of the blazing box with pokers. Then, in panic, the foolish animals blocked both escapes with their lunging bodies so that all but half a dozen or so were burned to death. One old ram butted his way out with his fleece on fire. Racing crazily through the dust of Nevada Street, bawling blindly, he thwarted every attempt to throw water on him until he fell and was unable to rise.
Cass saw Luke Gulliday’s wife standing atop the railroad embankment, and he climbed up to ask her whose sheep they were.
“Boone Terry’s,” she told him, and she laughed when she said it. She was a strapping young wench who cuckolded her husband at every opportunity.
“Did you say Boone Terry’s, Beulah?” someone asked her from below, and she called down assurance that she had.
And after that, somehow, a holiday spirit crept into the night, and a strange half-religious air. Cass had the same feeling as he had had once while watching a reunion of Holy Rollers, an air as of something half-supernatural took hold of him. Down on the dust of the street below a living beast was struggling in its own flame, and the fronts of the stores on Main and Nevada were all aglow with the reflected flare of the fire, like pagan temples burning there. The glass of their windows was shimmering in molten green-gold streams; and all about him the panicky bleating and screams of the animals mingled with the hard laughter of mountain men and women.
“Boone Terry’s! Are y’all right sure in the face o’ thet?”
“Saw the seal on the car when they opened the door.”
“Say now, the Jesus-God, wouldn’t ever’one feel downhearted if Boone has let his insurance lapse?”
Boone Terry had a great many enemies in the town, because, although he was the richest rancher in the county, he gave no milk to the charity station. He gave, instead, money to the churches, and the churches though it wiser to save souls with money than to buy milk. He gave to every church in town save the Catholic Church, which was Mexican. To the Mexican Methodists, however, at the iglesia metodista
, he had once given an organ.
From where he stood now Cass could see that the hindquarters of the ram were already burned black. As he stood listening to the beast’s last screams, watching its last convulsive kicks, he became conscious of a tall figure beside him, and he looked up; it was the Reverend Benjamin Cody of the Church of Christ, Campbellite. Cass shied away, for he had not gone to his church for a long time; the tall man did not even notice him. He stood looking down from under bushy brows at the ram struggling in the dame below, and he spoke in such a deep and Biblical voice that the laughter about him died. In the town he was regarded, by the Campbellites, as a prophet of the Lord.
“Behold—the fire and the wood, and also the lamb, for a burnt offering. Did not Abraham say unto Isaac, his son, God will provide the lamb for the burnt offering? And behold, behold—”
A minute of silence followed this; then the tall man turned on his heel and strode away, leaving his silence behind him. He walked the streets all night, people said, and communed with Christ Jesus. Big Beulah Gulliday shattered the odd silence that the preacher had left by calling down to her husband below. Luke was pouring water on the hindquarters of the dying animal, and Beulah shrilled out, “Might as well let ’em burn the whole way now an’ pour the rest down yo’ own arse instead, you Luke, ’cause that need some coolin’ too.”
Luke glanced up and called back in the accents of the Reverend Benjamin Cody, “Woman! Be holed. Be holed.”
Everyone laughed at Beulah and Luke for a minute. Then a Mexican came up from the roundhouse with an ax, and ended the ram’s suffering with one blow; he stood astraddle the animal and with a single swing cleft the skull cleanly in two.
“Don’t take that haid home with yo’, spik,—y’all hev to buy Boone a new ram tomorrow if you do,” Luke Gulliday warned.
When Cass passed the carcass the next day, where it still lay in the road, he saw that out of the unburned flank several steaks had been cut. Before evening the dogs had the rest. And that was high noon when he passed, and so still was the air that he could hear the tapping of someone’s hammer on wood away over on the other side of the arroyo, two miles distant. All things seemed to be standing still, holding breath, everything was waiting for no one knew what; yet nothing dared to move, nothing dared to stir, everything waited . . . and into this calm there burst, with incredible violence, a dry hot wind from the west. Everyone heard it when it was yet miles off, and ran to hide. Then it tore through the town hissing and screaming, tossing sand as high as the rooftops, hurling sand with an insane malice against the windows, smashing panes and whirling in clouds into the rooms where the people hid. And the sky came down so low, that, although it was noon, the day was as dark as a starless night. As a night when a thousand Indian demons whirling in black and yellow robes rush screaming from doorway onto doorway, dashing themselves against the houses, shaking the boards and the beams and the rafters the while they shriek in a red mad rage.
That was the beginning of a whole year of storms. Cass and Nancy sat huddled about the stove in the kitchen all that day. Somewhere outside, they did not know where, their lather walked through the storm. He did not come in till late that night, after the wind had passed. They did not ask him where he had been, for they knew well that no one in town would willingly take him into a house.
In the morning five houses and a dozen windmills had been blown down, and every west-facing windowpane in town had been shattered. The streets were littered with chicken feathers, cinders, cotton, and aged yellow newspapers.
Yet there had been not a drop of rain.
5
ALL OF OCTOBER was cool that year. It rolled into November with pleasant days. But in mid-December winter set in, and there was no coal for the stove.
The windy months were beginning.
Every evening then, so soon as the dark sun had set, there came a tow rising keening over ail the gray prairie, like the crying of many small birds before storm. A million small birds far off, lost in dusk before storm. The low calling would merge slowly, and mount, until it was a single indrawn howl all on one key; the very foundation of the little house trembled with it, the dishes rattled on the shelf. The windmill in the dooryard would flash about, pause tentatively, and then whirl on once more like a toy pinwheel in the blast. Sand rose in torrents. The windy months were beginning, and there was no coal for the stove.
For hours each morning Nancy sat bent above that stove, reading in dimness with moving lips. She sat with her knees propped high toward her chin, reading the Bible. The Bible was all that she ever read now. It was a big book, built for family use; sometimes her hands tired from holding it as she sat. Then she would brace it against a stove-lid or a pot. The stove-lids were cold and the pots were empty. Sometimes she trembled a little; sometimes she twisted her fingers through the auburn coil of her hair.
Cass resented seeing his sister so, but he wasn’t certain just why. It was not that he knew she fought hunger in silence, nor that he knew she was cold as she sat; it was the great book that irked him. He came to think of it as a part of that wall that had risen between himself and Nancy; its covers were large and dark, they seemed like small walls in themselves.
Cass saw the helplessness of his sister.
“Mebbe warm weather come early this year,” she said, on one of the first cold days of November. “Mebbe the wind’d die down early this year.”
“More’n likely another norther’ll hit us t’morrer mo’nin’,” Cass made reply, resenting dimly his sister’s baseless optimism.
“Mebbe, if we could jest move down valley-way, you’n’ me jest, y’all could git work pickin’ oranges or grapefruit aroun’ some packin’ house an’ ah’d find me a job sortin’ ’em or packin’ or somethin’. Anyhow, it’s wa’m down by them towns, they say . . . if we could git down there jest.”
“Ah’d rather stay on here,” Cass answered. “Mebbe, did we even git down thar, we couldn’t find no jobs. What we do then, if that happen? In this place folks knows us, anyhow. Ain’t nobody knows us down valley-way.”
“What good’s it do fo’ us to know folks or fo’ folks to know we? All folks us knows is plum harder up ’an we. Ah ast Beulah Gulliday fo’ few chunks o’ coal, ’cause her Luke got Paw’s ol’ job, but Beulah say she ain’t got a single solitary lump, nor kindlin’ neither, on account Luke’s been buyin’ drinks fo’ the boys uptown agen. What we gonna do fo’ winter’s fuel, brother?”
Cass knew in that moment what he was going to do; but he forebore to say because of the Bible beneath Nance’s hand.
It was almost two years since he and Johnny Portugal had last stolen coal; detectives rode every coal train that came through now, both on the Santa Fe and on the Southern Pacific. But Cass thought he knew where he could get some heavy wood. Down in Boone Terry’s lumber yard he had seen pine logs from the mountain stacked as high as his head.
At the charity station he consulted with Johnny Portugal. After dark they met on the corner of Chihuahua Street under a lamp that looked, in the windy cold, like a bright teardrop from a nose hanging by one dark curved hair.
They walked around the lumber yard twice, casually, but met no one. Then Cass, because he was slightly the taller, boosted his friend over the fence; he followed over, dropped to earth in darkness. “Listen!” he cautioned. But there was no sound.
A tarpaulin had been stretched over the logs and then tied tightly to two rows of stakes in the ground, as a tent would be tied. There was no way of getting a single log out. Johnny would have surrendered the project, but Cass was obdurate.
“Let’s look around,” he whispered. “Let’s look in all Boone’s barr’is. Y’ caint never tell—mought be coai-oll in ’em.”
The boys heaved against a barrei till one end tilted; when it settled back on end they heard a liquid swishing in its depths.
“Mebbe ees keroseen,” Johnny suggested, and he went off in search of a railroad spike and a housebrick; Cass reclimbed the fence, headed down the t
racks to the Santa Fe jungle, and returned with an armful of rusty tomato cans.
“Some of ’em mought leak a mite,” he said, aligning the cans in a rusty row across the frozen earth. “We’ll have to watch it when we spill ’er.”
Johnny wound a cotton bandana about the spike and Cass tapped it tentatively against the iron of the barrel. Despite the cotton rag, the small sound rang clearly in the still night air. The boys waited. Rigid and listening and ready to run, they waited for feet that come swiftly in boots. Feet of the law, coming swiftly to strike.
The last barrel against the fence had a wooden cover. Johnny prepared the spike again, and Cass held it while he tapped. It sank in deeply and softly, like a steel chisel into cheese. When the hole was almost through they heard someone coming across the road on the other side of the fence, and they dodged into shadow. But it was only a half-drunken half-breed rolling by; they heard him singing as he passed:
En la cruz, en la cruz
Do primero vi la luz
Y las manchas de me alma you lavé
Fué alli por la fe do vi a Jesus
Y feliz para siempre seré.
His song was lost around the corner of the iglesias metodista; they returned to their task and in a few minutes the hole was completed; when Cass put an eye to the opening he saw that the barrel was full to its brim. In the night air the stuff was almost odorless. The boys took a firm hold and heaved together again—and when they got it lying flat on its side on the earth, like a beer keg on a bar, the cover came off. It had been loosened by their chiseling and forced by the sudden upsurge behind it. In the flood-freshet that followed both boys were drenched. They were bending over aligning the cans in front of the barrel when it burst like a brief tidal wave over their heads, smashed down the cans and set them to floating, spread over the ground and flowed under the fence—made islands out of groundswells and small lakes out of ruts.
Somebody in Boots Page 9