From that day on his life had proceeded. The work changed from one crop to another, but the hours were the same, from dawn to dark for them all. The girls worked in the house with the woman.
He became aware, however, of a certain day, dim in the minds of the children when he first came, which became more probable as the month dragged on. They expected a visit from what they called the Aid. What this Aid was Clem could not find out. He put questions to Tim, the eldest and most articulate of the boys. To the girls he did not speak at all. He felt a terror in them so deep, a timidity so rooted, that he thought they would run if he called their names, Mamie or Jen.
“Aid?” Tim had repeated stupidly. They were raking manure out of the barn. “Aid? It’s just—Aid. It’s a woman.”
“Why is she called Aid?” Tim considered this for a full minute.
“I dunno.”
“Does she help you?”
“Nope—never did. Talks to Pop and Mom.”
“What does she say?”
“Axes things.”
“What things?”
“Different—like does we work good, does the boys and girls sleep in one room—like that.” Tim grinned. “They’re scared of her.”
“Why don’t you tell her?”
“Tell her what?”
“That you don’t get enough to eat—that they hit you.”
Tim’s wide pale mouth was always open. “We’re only Aid children.”
“What is that?” Clem began all over again.
“I tole you,” Tim said patiently. “We ain’t got no folks.”
“You mean you don’t know where your parents are?”
Tim shook his head.
“Are they dead?” Clem demanded.
“Bump never had none,” Tim offered.
Bump was the second boy, now bringing the wheelbarrow to fill with manure.
“Bump, haven’t you any kin?” Clem asked.
“What’s ’at?” Bump asked.
“Uncles and aunts and cousins.”
“I got nawthin’,” Bump said. He was spading up the manure that Clem had put into piles.
“Doesn’t anybody come and see you?”
“Nobody knows we’re here lessen the Aid tells,” Bump said.
“Then why do you all want this Aid woman to come?”
“Cause Mom gets a big dinner,” Tim said with a terrible eagerness. “She don’t say nothin’ neither when we eat. Don’t dast to.”
Clem threw down the fork be was using. “If you’d tell the Aid woman they’re mean to you, maybe she’d put you somewhere else.”
There was silence to this, then Tim spoke. “We’re used to it here. We been here all of us together. Maybe Bump would get somewhere way off, and we’re used to Mamie and Jen, too. They’re scared to go off by theirselves. I promised we wouldn’t never say nawthin’.”
Clem perceived in this a fearful pathos. These homeless and orphaned children had made a sort of family of their own. Within the cruel shell of circumstance they had assumed toward one another the rude simplicities of relationship. Tim, because he was the eldest, was a sort of father, and the others depended on him. Mamie, the older girl, so lifeless, so still, was nevertheless a sort of mother. As the days went on he perceived that this was the shape they made for themselves, even in depravity. The man and woman were outside their life, as unpredictable as evil gods. They suffered under them, they were silent, and they were able to do this because they had within themselves something that stood for father and mother, for brother and sister. Because of the family they had made for themselves out of their own necessity, they preferred anything to separation.
Clem asked no more questions, and judgment died from his heart. Something almost like love began to grow in him toward these children. He wondered how he could join them and whether they would accept him. He had held aloof because they were filthy and unwashed, because their scalps were covered with scales, because they had boils continually. He had thought of leaving them as soon as he could. But as weeks went on he knew he could not leave them—not yet. They were all he had.
He pondered upon their solitude. In China, whence he had come, all people being set in their natural families, there were no solitary children, except perhaps in a time of famine or war when anyone might be killed. If parents died of some catastrophe together, there were always uncles and aunts, and if these died, then there were first cousins and if these died there were second and third and tenth and twentieth cousins, all those of the same surname, and children were treasured and kept within the circle of the surname. But these children had no surname. He had inquired of Tim, and Tim had said after his usual moment of thought, “It’s writ down in the Aid book.”
“But what is it?” Clem had insisted.
“I—disremember,” Tim had said at last.
As the day when the Aid was to come drew near Mom Berger became more irritable. “I gotta get this house cleaned,” she said one morning in the kitchen, when the children stood eating their bread and drinking weak, unsweetened coffee. “The Aid’ll be here come Tuesday week. You girls better git started upstairs this very day. Everything’s gotta be washed—clothes and all.”
From that day until the Tuesday which was dreaded and anticipated there was no peace in the house or in the barn. Even the barn had to be cleaned.
“That Aid woman,” Pop snarled, “she ain’t satisfacted to stay in the house. No, she’s liable to come snoopin’ out here among the cows. I’m goin’ to tell her that’s why I need more help, Clem. I’m goin’ to tell her if I have to clean this yere barn I gotta have another boy. That’s what I’m goin’ to tell her.”
“How often does she come?” Clem asked with purposeful mildness.
“The law claims once in three months. She don’t get round that often though—maybe oncet, twicet a year. Always tells us before she comes. I git a postcard a month or so ahead.”
On the day before, they took baths. The woman heated kettles of hot water and in the woodshed the boys washed one after the other in a tin tub with soft homemade soap.
“You ain’t hardly dirty, Clem,” Tim said with some admiration, staring at Clem’s clean body.
“I wash in the run,” he replied.
“What’ll you do come winter?”
“Break ice—if I’m still here.”
They all glanced at the door at these words. Tim whispered, his eyes still on the latch, “You wouldn’t go an’ leave us, would you?”
Bump paused in the scrubbing of his piteous ribs. “Clem, don’t you go and leave me!”
“I don’t belong here,” Clem said simply.
“You belong to us,” Tim said.
“Do I? How?” Clem felt a starting warmth in the inner desolation of silence.
Tim had one of his long pauses, shivering and naked. His shoulder bones were cavernous, and between his sharp hip bones his belly was a cavity. Pale hairs of adolescence sprouted upon his chest and pelvis. “You ain’t got nobody, neither.”
“That’s so,” Clem said.
Tim made a huge effort of imagination. “Know what?”
“What?”
“Sposin’ we lived by ourselves on this yere farm—You could be the boss, say, like you was our father.”
The woman’s fists pounded on the door. “Git out o’ that, you fellers!” she yelled. “The girls gotta wash.”
They hurried, all except Clem. He took the pail of cold water and doused himself clean of the water in which the others had bathed.
“Maybe I’ll stay,” he said to himself. “Maybe I’d better.”
In the night, in a bed cleaner than he had slept in since he came, he began to think about his strange family. Food was what they needed. He recalled the boys’ bodies as he had seen them today naked, their ribs like barrel staves, their spines as stark as ropes, their hollow necks and lean legs. Food was the most precious thing in the world. Without it people could not be human. They could not think or feel or grow, or if they gr
ew, they grew like sick things, impelled not by health. Everybody ought to have food. Food ought to be free, so that if anybody was hungry, he could simply walk somewhere not very far and get it. Food should be as free as air.
He began to dream about himself grown and a man, rich and independent. When he got rich he would see that everybody would have food. “I won’t depend on God, like Papa did,” he thought.
The Aid came just before noon. They had all been waiting for her through an endless morning. The barn was clean, the house was clean. Whatever had not been washed was hidden away until she was gone. The girls were in almost new dresses which Clem had not seen them wear before. They had on shoes and stockings for the first time. Pop was in his good clothes, but he had taken off his coat, lest it seem that he did not work.
“Put it on when you sit down to table, though,” Mom ordered.
“You don’t have to teach me no manners,” Pop said.
She sat all the time because she too had on shoes and stockings and her feet hurt. The girls had to bring her anything she wanted. She had on a gray cotton dress that was almost clean. Clem had put on his good clothes that the sailors had bought him. They sat about the kitchen smelling the food on the stove, their stomachs aching with hunger.
“Here she comes,” Pop cried suddenly.
Through the open door they all stared. Clem saw a small thin woman in a black dress come down from a buggy, which she drove herself. She tied the horse to the gate and came up the walk carrying a worn black leather bag. Pop hastened to her and Mom got up on her sore feet.
“Well, well!” he shouted. “We didn’t really know when to expect you and we just went about our business. Now we’re just goin’ to set down to eat dinner. I’d ha’ killed a chicken if I’d been shore you was comin’. As it is, we only got pork and greens and potatoes. New potatoes though, I will say, and scullions.”
“That sounds good,” the woman said. She had a dry voice, not unkind, and she stood in the doorway and looked at them all. “Well, how’s everybody?”
“Pretty good,” Mom Berger said. “The children look a little peaky on account of a summer cold. They like to play barefoot in the run, and I hate to tell ’em not to. You know how children are. Come and set down while I dish up.”
“It’s been a hot summer,” the Aid woman sighed. She sat down and took off her rusty black hat. “Well, I see they’re growing.”
“That’s another reason for their peakiness,” Ma Berger said. “I keep tryin’ to feed ’em up, but they don’t fatten no matter how I do. Their appetites is good, too. You’ll see how they eat. But I don’t begrudge ’em.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” the Aid said absently. She was searching through some papers in her bag. “I guess I’d better begin checking now. I have to get on right after dinner. The territory is more’n I can manage, really. Let’s see, you have five children. Why—the book says four!”
Pop began hastily. “This yere Clem is a new boy. Just turned up one day and I kep’ him, because he hadn’t nowhere to go. I was goin’ to tell you.”
“Boy, where do you come from?” The Aid was suddenly stern.
“From out West,” Clem said. He was standing, as all the children were. He had told none of them that he came from China. They would know nothing about China and he could not begin to tell them.
“You can’t just come here like that,” the Aid declared. Indignation sparkled in her little black eyes. “You should have stayed where you was. The state can’t take charity cases from other states. It’s going to make a lot of trouble for me.”
“I thought my grandfather was still alive,” Clem said. “He used to live here.”
“Old Charley Miller,” Pop explained. “Him as hanged himself when he got to be sheriff.”
The Aid stared at Clem. “You’re his grandson?” she demanded.
“Yes.”
“Say, ‘yes, ma’am’ to me,” she said sharply. “Where’s your proof?”
“I haven’t any,” Clem said.
“He’s Charley’s grandson all right,” Pop said quickly. “He’s got the same kind of a face and his eyes is just the same color and all. I’ll guarantee him.”
“I don’t know what to do,” the Aid sighed. She had a thin washed-away face and a small wrinkled mouth. Behind her spectacles her eyes were dead when the small flare of anger was gone. There was no wedding ring on her hand. She had never been married and she was tired of other people’s children.
“Why don’t you just mark down five?” Pop coaxed her. “It’ll save you trouble.”
“I could do that,” she mused. “One of the children in the last house died. I could just transfer the money from that one to this one.”
“ ’Twould save you trouble,” he said again.
So it was done. Clem took the place of the dead boy.
They all sat down to dinner. On the table a platter of pork and greens was surrounded by boiled potatoes and by dishes of sweet and sour pickles. There were apple pies to be eaten, too, and the children had milk from a pitcher, all except Clem who took water.
“You must drink milk, boy,” the Aid said. “That’s why it’s so good for children to live on farms.”
“I don’t like milk,” Clem said.
“Say ma’am,” the Aid reminded him. “And it don’t matter what you like. You make him drink it, Mrs. Berger.”
“I certainly will,” Mom promised.
There was no time for any talk. At the table there was only time for eating. The children ate desperately until they could eat no more.
“I see what you mean,” the Aid said. “At this age they just can’t be filled up.”
“I do my best,” Mom said.
When the meal was over the Aid rose and put on her hat. “Everybody looks nice, Mrs. Berger,” she said. “I’m always glad to give you a recommend. I don’t believe I’ll bother to go upstairs. I can go through the barn on my way out, Mr. Berger—though you always—the children are real lucky. Better off than in their own homes. What’s that?”
Some noises coming from Tim stopped her at the door. He looked helplessly at Clem.
“He wants to know what his last name is,” Clem said for him.
The Aid’s empty eyes suddenly lit, and she stepped toward him. “Will you say ma’am when you speak to me?”
Clem did not answer, and Pop broke in quickly. “I’ll shore learn him before you git here next time.”
“Well, I hope so,” the Aid replied with indignation. She forgot Clem’s question and went on briskly toward the barn.
The conscience in Clem’s bosom was as concrete as a jewel and as pure. He felt its weight there day and night. It had grown with his growth and now had facets which were strange to him. Thus while his father’s too simple faith had been its beginning, it had taken on accretion not of faith but of doubt, mingled with suffering, pity and love, first for his father and mother and sisters when they were hungry, and now after their death, pity for hunger wherever he found it. He, too, was hungry here on his dead grandfather’s farm, but his hunger only hastened the growth of his conscience and made it more weighty. If he were hungry, what of these others, these children? For he perceived that Tim, though older than himself and inches taller, was and would always be only a child. Others must feed him as long as he lived and he would always be at the mercy of any man with a measurable brain. Mamie, too, was meek and mild, and Jen was an aspen of a child, trembling always with terror remembered and terror about to loom again. Bump was stolid and silent and he followed Clem like a dog. At night with dumb persistence he insisted upon sleeping beside Clem’s pallet.
How could anyone know what was in any of them? They were obsessed with hunger. They dared not steal bread from the breadbox or leftover bits in the cupboard, but they did steal from the dog. Mom Berger scraped the bottoms of pots and the cracked bones and heaped them upon an old tin pie plate outside the kitchen door. There Clem, coming suddenly from the barn one day, found the four children, as h
e thought of them, waiting for the mongrel dog to eat its fill. They dared not snatch from the beast lest it growl and Mom Berger hear. But they were using wile. Bump, for whom the dog had a fondness, was coaxing him, though in silence, from his plate. When the dog looked up to wag his tail, Tim and Mamie snatched handfuls of the refuse. When they saw Clem’s eyes fixed upon them they shrank back as though he might have been Pop Berger. This caused the conscience in him to burn with the scintillating flame he knew so well, a fire at once cold and consuming. He did not love these ragged children, he was repelled by their filth and their ignorance. The language they spoke was, it seemed to him, the grunting communication of beasts. Nevertheless, they did not deserve to starve.
Seeing them with the dog’s food clutched in their hands, staring at him in fear, he turned and went back to the barn. There he sat down again to his task of husking the last of the corn. Pop Berger lay asleep upon the haymow. Thinking of the work to come, Pop had yawned heavily after the midday meal. “Reckon you kin finish the corn,” he had said and had thrown himself on the hay. Clem had gone to the house after an hour to get a drink. The pork and cabbage they had eaten had been very salty, but he had forgotten his thirst. His mind burned with the determination to escape.
“Of the thirty-six ways of escape,” Mr. Fong had once told Clem, “the best is to run away.” It was an ancient Chinese saying, and it came back to Clem’s mind now. He was Chinese in more ways than he knew. The early wisdom of people who had long learned what was essential had seeped into him from the days when he first began to know that he was alive. Courageous though he was, and with a tough natural courage, he knew that the first wisdom of a wise man is to stay alive. Only the dead must be silent, only the dead are helpless.
His father’s conscience, too, was his inheritance—yes, and his grandfather’s also. There were times when Clem went alone into the barn to stand and gaze at the beam that Pop Berger had pointed out to him.
“That there’s the one he hang himself on.”
Gods Men Page 12