Yonnondio: From the Thirties

by Tillie Olsen

  Throw your arms round me, feel my heart break

  a fifth voice, pure, ethereal, veiled over the rest. Mazie saw it was Jimmie, crouched at the pedals of the piano. “Ma,” she said after the song was done, “it’s Jimmie, JimJim was singin too.” Incredulous, they made him sing it over with them and over and over. His words were a blur, a shadow of the real words, but the melody came true and clear.

  And then it was over. Else, the same chirp, the dearie and honey, the perspiration rings under her arm, Alex laughing too loud, and Jim trying too hard to laugh, and Anna sitting shrunken and ill, her arm tenderly around Jimmie.

  The weariness. The ghastly nausea in her belly (in all their bellies) from the stench. Ben feverish in bed with it. And her banner of defiance—up the first day—the clean cheesecloth curtains, yellowing, browning. All that scrubbing to make a whiteness inside—and the stubborn walls and floors only a deeper smoke color. Even the cardboard tacked for a carpet in the front room so Jimmie crawling around would cease to be a graveyard for splinters—even that was damp and soggy and would have to be ripped up again. How the house resisted her.

  Anna sat in the armless chair, Bess tugging at her breast and pulling away and tugging again and giving out small frantic cries. “Guzzle, kitten, guzzle, dont make such a fuss.” All that scrubbing and she was always so tired nowadays. So awfully tired. “C’mon, Bessie, hold still and eat.” Well, she’d try washing soda in the scrubbing water next time. Maybe that might do the trick.

  A fine joke on Jim to be back in the earth again, sewering. He should’ve known the stockyards job couldn’t pan out in spring when they were laying off. How they’d manage on what he was getting with the rent high as it was and the children needin this and that. Awful to be sendin them to school looking like they did. And Will wouldn’t mind anymore, as if he knew …

  A familiar faintness dizzied her. With Bess still crying and tugging she sank to the bed, thinking: I oughta see what Jimmie’s doin and set him down on the hopper. But she was wandering through old childhood streets. Bess lay in the scrub pail, under water. And Jim was fleeing, shrinking to a tiny dot on the lurid sky. A speck of dust floated from where he had gone, growing larger. And now the gaunt haggard house towered above. Where were the children? MazieWillBen she cried, but a smell was filling her mouth so no words could come. “It’ll fall,” she tried desperately to warn, beating it away with her broom. Right in front of her, right to the house, Will danced. “It’ll crash,” she screamed. It crashed. “Momma, Momma,” someone was calling. “Yes, Ben,” she managed to answer, “I’m coming.” She had to steady herself against the wall, her body drenched with sweat and fear. The dizziness was still there. Funny how Bess was sleeping, still sucking away as if she had the nipple in her mouth.

  Outside a wan sunshine lay over the grimy streets, the streets of her dream. She pulled the blinds down. Will was sitting in the kitchen morose, just home from school, chewing bread with drippings on it. “Didnt you hear your brother callin?” Anna asked. “Dont you know he’s sick?” He just looked back at her, not answering. “All right, git in there with this drink of water afore I skin you alive.” There, her head felt better now, the splashing water cooling her cheeks.

  The little stream on the farm glinted in the sun of her memory, and Mazie was spraying her with water, laughing. That was gone, it was long ago, it was for-gotten.

  “Well, you little horntoad, now what’s the matter, wakin your momma up first chance today she’s had to get a little rest.”

  “I can’t breav, Momma.” (You’d think he’d get used to the smell in two weeks.)

  “Sure you can, see you’re breathin now, you’ve been breathin all the time; here, we’ll make a bundle and prop it under your head.”

  “No, Momma, cant breav … Let’s go home, Momma. It smells of vomit here. I had a dream and Shep was barkin for me, tellin me not to smell vomit no more, and come back to the farm. It’s so hard to breav. It smells so hot, so awful hot.”

  (The farm—why couldnt the kids leave her alone about it?) And what was the matter with Will? Looking at her face like that and now hitting Ben, shouting, “Shut up, you crybaby, you big crybaby, shut up or I’ll kill ya.” And she was holding Will and hitting him. “What did you do that for?” beating him till she sank to her knees, still drenched in sweat, trembling from nervousness and crying, and Ben was out of bed with great sober eyes, stroking her cheek, begging, “Dont cry, Momma, don’t cry,” and outside Will was shouting to Mazie, “Does too smell like vomit, worse’n vomit, worse’n dead dogs and garbage, worse’n the crap can. I’m gonna run away to the farm, you come too, Mazie,” and Mazie was yelling back, “Shut up, we are on the farm, we are on the farm,” and Will was quiet suddenly, asking of the sky, “What’s the matter with everything anyhow?” and running, running down the street. And in the front room, Jimmie pounding on the wall was yelling, “Out, out. Lemme out. Out.”

  Into her great physical pain and weariness Anna stumbled and lost herself. Remote, she fed and clothed the children, scrubbed, gave herself to Jim, clenching her fists against a pain she had no strength to feel. In the front room Jimmie played and sang to himself, falling asleep when she didn’t come for him, wetting his overalls when she forgot. Else worried over her: “Land sake, Anna, what’s the matter with you anyhow? You useta be strong as a bull, and look at you now. You aint even ornery with the kids. You take this here tonic now, you hear? It’ll do you good. It says for all female complaints.’,

  “All female complaints, huh?” Anna answered. “Well, I guess I got all of them. But I never was much of a hand at patent medicines.” On the kitchen shelf, the bottle mantled in dust.

  Bess shrank and yellowed. Anna fussed with food. “You really think Eagle Brand is good, Mis’ Kryckszi? It oughta be the way they soak you for it, but you never can tell. And Bess needs perkin up bad. When it’s tomato season, I’ll try juice, they say that’s awful good. But when I gave her some of what I had canned from the farm, she spit it right back. And just look how she’s gettin blue around the mouth and squalls all the time now.”

  But she could not really care. Only sometimes, nursing the baby, chafing the little hands to warm them, old songs would start from her lips and tears well from her eyes, tears she did not even know she was weeping, till Ben would come in, standing lacerated till she would notice him and ask, “What’s the matter, Benjy, did you hurt yourself?” and he could come over to her and say gently, “Mommy, you’re crying.”

  The money going drove Jim crazy. “Jesus Christ, woman,” he would shout, “where does it all go to? God knows we’re eatin worse’n animals, and Bess eatin off you dont cost no more. You useta be so smart with money—make it stretch like rubber. Now it’s rent week and not a red cent in the house. I tell you we gotta make what I’m gettin do—they’re takin off for my waterproofs.”

  But she could not heed—the old Anna of sharp words and bitter exaction, and fierce attempt to make security for her children was gone, lost in a fog of pain that seemed the only reality. Will was the only one that really saw—but a lust for the streets was on him, a lust to hit back, a lust not to care. He had learned how to scramble up and down the cliff, hanging onto roots and digging his toes into the crumbling clay; he knew the railroad tracks and the walk and talk of the bindle stiffs hightailing it down the roadbed; he knew the dump and the kids on his block and strange wild games to play. And in these, in the quick movements of his body, for a while he anesthetized himself.

  Ben saw too—but in the confused, entangled way of a small child whose mind is a prism through which the light shatters into a thousand gleams and shadows that can never come whole. Say rather, a weight, an oppression dragged always in his chest; a darkening shadow hovered over his days that in moments descended and pierced sharp claws on his heart. Only he did not know why or how—he but knew there was a darkening where had been light, he but felt there was a weight where had been lightness.

  And Jim? Ah, he knew, but in a
half way. He was padded about with weariness, he was blinded with despair. Coming home with the smell of liquor on his breath, thinking the remote look reproach, bristling up to say, “All right, havent I got no right to spend two bits once in a while to make me feel good? If you was workin under icy water all day with your head bustin from bein so far underground, dancin round like a monkey to keep your footin till your can’s draggin and every nerve shootin like lightnin” (and, he did not say, come home to disorder and anguish) “you’d be achin for a snifter too once in a while. Aw hell, hell.” Kicking the table leg. “Where’s that Will? Runnin off with my jackknife. I’ll knock the s--t out of him. And playin with all the furrin scum and niggers around. C’mon over here JimJim and sing your old pa a song. Sing ‘For I’m a Poor Cowboy and I Know I Done Wrong.’”

  Only Mazie did not see. Still she lived on the farm in June, in early June, when a voluptuous fragrance lay over the earth. Wooden she moved about, lifting and washing and eating, and always a scarcely perceptible smile about her mouth. Mazie, a voice came shrill, you see that tub of diapers? Git to that tub of diapers. Yes, Ma. You will recite, Mazie. A hushed voice, faltering, that was she. We will have a test. And her pencil would move over the paper, separate from her guidance and her body. Sometimes a dingy sky was overhead and a graveled playground underfoot, and her body made a circle with other bodies. Then the schoolroom or the walls of home would encase her again. Noise ceaselessly rained blows upon her, the stink smothered down into her lungs. Enveloped in the full soft dream of the farm, she was secure. Hollow and unreal the dirty buildings and swarming people revolved about her, flat like a picture that her hand could smash through and see the rolling fields and roads of home just beyond.

  But terrible moments of waking would come when the world that was about her would crash into her dream with terrible discordant music. Fear held her limbs there in the streets where the flats rose a tumble of ruins, and a voice would cry: Run, run, the next shake the houses’ll fall, run, run.

  And every step was pain, every look was pain, those moments of awareness when the people streamed by her in the streets with their hideous faces that knew her not. Suddenly she would see before her a monster thing with blind eyes and shaking body that gave out great guttural sobs, a truck, she would tell herself, just a truck, but her eyes would try to close and her feet to run; suddenly she would see before her a woman with her mother’s face grown gaunter, holding a skeleton baby whose stomach was pushed out like a ball, and behind was a wall like darkness and misshapen furniture. These had no reality, only the reality of nightmares, for only there had she seen such grotesqueness and crooked vision. And it would seem that her limbs were crooked in sleep and a nightmare sweat was on her, that it would be useless to resist, to cry out, because it all was a voiceless dream to be endured.

  “Just see,” Tracy promised, “just see. I’ll make a kick with that bastard today. Twelve foot he wants out of us, when ten’s all anything on two legs can manage.”

  “All right,” said Jim wearily, tugging off his soggy work pants. “All right.”

  “And calling this a dry house,” Tracy muttered. “Give me a cloudburst anytime.”

  “Hell, the Mississipp’s a road of concrete and the ocean’s a dry bed.”

  “How you two can beef after the day’s work you put in is beyond me,” old man Albright butted in. “Even my tongue’s laid out.”

  “Well, this goddam business of hangin up my work clothes in what they call a dry house and puttin em on the next morning twice as wet is just gettin under my skin.”

  “All right, son, wait’ll you get the rheumatiz. Then you will have something under your skin to beef about.”

  “You wont see me doin any waitin,” said Tracy. (I guess not, Jim thought, not till you got a woman and kids hangin around your neck.) “Look at those puckers—”pointing to his bare feet—“bigger’n on a washboard. Waterproof boots, hell. How you guys take it is beyond me.”

  “O.K.,” said Jim, “put on the low needle and give our ears a vacation. Maybe we got somethin besides gettin canned up and steppin out a chippie to think about.”

  They dressed in silence. “Hey,” Jim warned, “here comes the workingman’s friend.”

  The contractor came in, puffed up like a balloon, with a smaller red balloon of a face wobbling on top. He spat his tobacco juice square into Jim’s empty boot.

  “So ten foot is all you women made today, huh? What I want to know is what the hell you do when you’re on the job, suck titty?”

  “Now, boss,” Albright said hurriedly, “we’re doin the best we can. We went like a redball all day.”

  “Ya mean a standstill, dont you? Well, ten’s the footage all right from now on, but for two of you to manage.”

  “Two?”came from all their startled throats.

  “Two! A miner and a mucker to a job. Miller’s tried it with his monkeys and they’re doin it. My crews can do as good.”

  “Not and stay human,” Jim said.

  Tracy sputtered, “It cant be done.”

  “Shut up—I’m the one who says what can and cant get done. Tracy and Holbrook, Marello and Albright, that’s the lineup.”

  “But say—”

  “You heard me. There’s plenty good concrete men and muckers with their tongues hangin out for a job. You’ll make ten or you’re out.”

  “Not me,”exploded Tracy. “I’m throwin up this sh---y job.”

  “O.K. by me,” the contractor said, “but dont come panhandlin when you’re up against it … Anybody else feel like the breadline?”

  Nobody said anything. Jim clenched his fists. “Dirty rat,” he said in his teeth, “I hope his guts wither. I hope …” He flung his boots and mackinaw into the locker and walked out into the dwindling light. There was a darkness in him, a heavy darkness that wound into a hardness. When the slaughterhouse workers got on before the viaduct, he pushed his way viciously out of the packed streetcar and walked into a “soft drink” parlor. “A straight,” he ordered. To himself, “All right for Tracy to talk, he doesnt have a wife and brats. But no man has any business having ’em that wants to stay a man. Not unless he knows he’s goin’ to hafta take crap…. Not that they aren’t worth it though,” thinking of Jimmie, “what else you got?”

  The sound of the two bits clamped down on the counter brought harshly the picture of Anna counting his pay money. “Goddam woman—what’s the matter with her anyhow? Dont even have a wife that’s a wife anymore—just let her say one word to me and I’ll bash her head in. Say, give me another.”

  He thought he saw Mazie across the street, but he was not sure. No one greeted him at the gate—the dark walls of the kitchen enclosed him like a smothering grave. Anna did not raise her head.

  In the other room Bess kept squalling and squalling, and Ben was piping an out-of-tune song to quiet her. There was a sour smell of wet diapers and burned pots in the air.

  “Dinner ready?”he asked heavily.

  “No, not yet.”

  Silence. Not a word from either.

  “Say, cant you stop that damn brat’s squallin? A guy wants a little rest once in a while.”

  No answer.

  “Aw, this kitchen stinks. I’m going out on the porch. And shut that brat up, she’s drivin me nuts, you hear?”You hear, he reiterated to himself, stumbling down the steps, you hear, you hear. Driving me nuts.

  All right for Tracy to talk, all right, he didn’t have a wife and kids hangin round his neck like an anchor. All right for him to talk, all right with nothin more important to worry about than gettin canned up and steppin out a floosie.

  And Tracy was young, just twenty, still wet behind the ears, and the old blinders were on him so he couldn’t really see what was around and he believed the bull about freedomofopportunity and a chancetorise and ifyoureallywanttoworkyoucanalwaysfindajob and ruggedindividualism and something about a pursuit of happiness.

  He didn’t know, so the big sap threw it up, he threw up his job
, thinking he was flinging his challenge into the teeth of life, proclaiming I’m a man, and I’m not taking crap offn anybody, I’m goin to live like a man. There’s more to life than workin everything you got to live with outa you in order to keep a job, taking things no man should stand for to keep a job. So he threw it up, the big sap, not yet knowing a job was a straw and every man (having nothing to sell but his labor power) was the drowning man who had no choice but to hang onto it for notsodear life.

  So he threw it up, not yet knowing a job was God, and praying wasn’t enough, you had to live for It, produce for It, prostrate yourself, take anything from It, for was it not God and what came was it not by Its Divine Providence, and nothing to do but bow to It and thank It for Its mercifulness to you, a poor sinner who has nothing to sell but your labor power. So he threw it up, the big sap (not knowing), he renounced God, he became an atheist and suffered the tortures of the damned, and God Job (being full up that generation) never took him back into the fold only a few days at a time, and he learned all right what it meant to be an infidel, he learned:

  the little things gone: shoeshine and tailor-mades, tickets to a baseball game, and a girl, a girl to love up, whiskey down your gullet, and laughter, the happy belch of a full stomach, and walking with your shoulders back, tall and proud.

  He learned all right, the tortures of the damned:

  feet slapping the pavement, digging humbly into carpets, squatting wide apart in front of chairs and the nojobnojob nothingdointoday buzzing in his ears; hugging the coffee—and, shuffling along, buddy (they made a song out of it) can you spare a dime, and the freights north east south west, getting vagged, keep movin, keep movin (the bulls dont need to tell ya, your own belly yells it out, your own idle hands), sing a song of hunger the weather four below holes in your pockets and nowhere to go, the flophouses, the slophouses, a bowl of misery and a last month’s cruller and the crabs having a good time spreading and spreading (you didnt know hell would be this bad, did you?).