Yonnondio: From the Thirties

by Tillie Olsen

  In her secret place, the shelter under the porch stoop, Ginella hides and is ill. “Too hot,” she whispers, “too hot,” turning her head from side to side as if that would fan coolness. How rosy she is from the heat, how creamy. Droplets of sweat glow like moonstones on her flawless skin.

  “Gertrude,” her mother calls, “Gertrude. I seen you come.” Ugly, the Polish, the foreigner sound of her mother’s voice. Ugly what waits upstairs. Spiders of heat waver through the splintered steps onto her red knuckled hands with their broken fingernails. Spasmodically Ginella folds their shame into her skirt. Ugly. Slender white fingers with talon fingernails float unattainable in the dust mote air. Ugly, I’m ugly.

  “Gertrude,” her mother calls again, “work waiting. You do before you have to go Mirkas or you get whipping. You be late Mirkas, you get whipping. Gertrude!” In an hour she must go to her aunt’s diner, be among thick crowded, guttural-voiced, sweating working men; plunge her hands into scalding reddening water, be the slavey, scrub greasy pots and dishes and counter tops. “Hot, it’s so hot,” fanning her head from side to side. “I’m sick, Ma. I cant do nothin.” Sick with the feverish heat; sick with an older feverish longing, unutterable, to be other than she is; to be otherwhere than she is—places spacious and elegant, idle and served and cool. Slave of Desire. Forbidden Paradise. Not shamed and shameful, not judged and condemned. “Classy, I want to be classy,” she whispers.

  “Gertrude,” her mother yells, “Gertrude Skolnick. Wstawach! Now!” Human Wreckage. She starts up the stairs.

  In the humid kitchen, Anna works on alone. Mazie lies swathed in sweated sleep in the baking bedroom. Jimmie and Jeff sleep under the kitchen table, their exhausted bodies, their hair damp and clinging to their perspiring heads, giving them the look of drowned children. Ben lies in sleep or in a sleep of swoon, his poor heaving chest laboring on at its breathing. Bess has subsided in her basket on a chair where, if she frets, Anna can sprinkle her with water or try to ease the heat rash by sponging. The last batch of jelly is on the stove. Between stirring and skimming, and changing the wet packs on Ben, Anna peels and cuts the canning peaches—two more lugs to go. If only all will sleep awhile. She begins to sing softly—I saw a ship a-sailing, a-sailing on the sea—it clears her head. The drone of fruit flies and Ben’s rusty breathing are very loud in the unmoving, heavy air. Bess begins to fuss again. There, there, Bessie, there, there, stopping to sponge down the oozing sores on the tiny body. There. Skim, stir; sprinkle Bess; pit, peel and cut; sponge; skim, stir. Any second the jelly will be right and must not wait. Shall she wake up Jimmie and ask him to blow a feather to keep Bess quiet? No, he’ll wake cranky, he’s just a baby hisself, let him sleep. Skim, stir; sprinkle; change the wet packs on Ben; pit, peel and cut; sponge. This time it does not soothe—Bess stiffens her body, flails her fists, begins to scream in misery. Just then the jelly begins to boil. There is nothing for it but to take Bess up, jounce her on a hip (there, there) and with her one free hand frantically skim and ladle. There, there. The batch is poured and capped and sealed, all one-handed, jiggling-hipped. There, there, it is done.

  Anna’s knees begin to tremble. No, she dare not sit. You know if you set down you ’11 never make yourself get up again. One of the jelly glasses has burst; the amber drips onto the floor, has to be mopped; and Bess still to be hushed. Hush you, hush, you’ll wake every sleeping one, there, there, transferring her to the other hip and one-handed sponging her again and her own sweating face as well. There, there, poor baby. The tenderness mixes with a compulsion of exhaustion to have done, to put Bess outside in the yard where she can scream and scream outside of hearing and Anna can be free to splash herself with running water, forget the canning and the kids and sink into a chair, lay her forehead on the table and do nothing. There, there, Bessie, there, there, we’ll go out a spell, see what’s outside, fixing a sun shade for the baby out of a soaked dish towel.

  The stink, the stink. What glares so? The air is feverish; it lies in a stagnant swill of heat haze over the river and tracks below. Anna gags, turns to go back in from the stench and swelter, but Bess has quieted, is reaching her arms to the air. Giant cracks have opened in the earth. At her feet she sees her garden is dying; each plant in its own manner, each plant known and dear to her, blackening or curling or shriveling or blotching. “I aint had time, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “The water’s savin for sundown waterin time. And maybe nothin coulda helped. There, there, Bessie. I cant stand here and be shade for you neither,” thinking with bowed head of the dying crops—corn and wheat and tomatoes and beans—and farmers’ families drooping in the miles and miles of baking prairie. “Burning all over, Bessie,” she said, “Kansas and Dakota and Ioway too,” and went to fetch the saved water. The first pail ran off as if off clay, the earth refusing to absorb. The second pail she sloshed slowly, still one-handed (there, there, Bessie), breaking the flow over her grateful feet, red and swollen from the all-day standing. The water sinking into the dried earth seemed to sink into something parched and drought-eaten in her as well. “We have to go in, baby,” she said, “we’ll scorch,” but stood there in the mud-feet coolness and the blister air, making the slenderest shade over the tomato plants. Stinging dust, spitting up suddenly from a quick hot wind, took her by surprise. She covered Bess’s face, saw that great columns of dust-wraiths were swirling across the river and down the street. There, there; Bess’s body relaxed into sleep. The furnace wind was gone as suddenly as it came, though dust still moved through the again stagnant air. Washing her feet in the kitchen, she saw in astonishment a thick dust frosting on the caked mud; dust pitted in every visible pore of her legs and arms. All had settled outside; inside her sleepers slept. She started back on the peaches.

  Five o’clock. Still 107°.

  Mazie half wakes from her sweated sleep; her mother is sponging her, calling her name urgently over and over. “You been sleepin so long I got worried; everytime I looked in on you, you was sleepin. Are you all right? I cant tell is it fever or this heat? Tell me, where is it hurts?…”

  Still the need to slither along the floor; douse, rid herself of her vast billowing head.

  Somehow on the couch in the kitchen beside Ben, head to his feet, feet to his head. The sun is slanting its long last rays through the window. An iridescence floats on her hand, rainbows the wall, shifts in scales of hue here and there in the room. What is it, what is it? The hanging prism? One of the rays, touching it, has cracked open; burst; unfolded the radiance. The others still slant unbroken—straight shafts of light, clear threads of glass. Are the rainbows, the floating pools, the radiance folded into each one of them too? Where kept? How hidden? The wonder dazes her head and she turns her hand to hold the stammering light, unlock its magic, but she grasps shadows, and the iridescence glides onto Ben’s unconscious face.

  Not knowing an every-hued radiance floats on her hair, her mother stands at the sink; her knife seems flying. Fruit flies rise and settle and rise.

  “Momma.”

  “It’s the last batch,”she answers. “Are you all right?” Smiling with the happiness of the worst not having happened. “Benjy’s better too. Wait, I’ll sponge you … Can you drink something or try a little sugar bread?”

  Jim does not stagger nor waddle coming in; it is more a hitching, straight for the sink—turns the water on full force, gulping great draughts, submerging his face, dousing himself. Red, boiled; under the faucet blowing his walrusy spray. Grabbing the watering bucket and splashing it over himself, filling and refilling it, pouring it over his body. Running for a towel to wipe him, a pitcher she can fill and a glass to drink from, some relief she can give him. “Jimmie run to Kryckszis quick and ask ice for poppa.” Anna thinks: The water, the water; hating herself for thinking: The money, the waiting garden, the mess to be cleaned, will it be one more, Jim bad-sick too? and begs: “What happened, Jim? What’s the matter?”

  But Jim lies as if he were drunk, out by the stoop in the evening shadow, sousi
ng himself with sponge and the pail water, and will not speak.

  Seven o’clock. Heat lightning. 106°.

  Jim still lies on his water-soaked pallet below the stoop, but he sleeps now, snoring, twitching his hands.

  Ben shifts around to lie in Mazie’s arms—not too close, for it is so hot. “’Splain to me about bad dreams,” he whispers into her ear, “tell me about boogie mans and scaredies and ghosts and hell.”

  Flies bumble and fry in the lamp; peach and amber jars of jelly and fruit cover every surface. Anna sits at last, holding Bess at the kitchen table, singing with heat-cracked lips “I Saw a Ship a-Sailing,” waiting for Will to come home so that the lights can go out and the trying-to-sleep time can begin again. I Saw a Ship … It is all heat delirium and near suffocation now.

  Bang!

  Bess has been fingering a fruit-jar lid—absently, heedlessly dropped it—aimlessly groping across the table, reclaimed it again. Lightning in her brain. She releases, grabs, releases, grabs. I can do. Bang! I can do. I! A Neanderthal look of concentration is on her face. That noise! In triumphant, astounded joy she clashes the lid down. Bang, slam, whack. Release, grab, slam, bang, bang. Centuries of human drive work in her; human ecstasy of achievment, satisfaction deep and fundamental as sex: I achieve, I use my powers; I! I! Wilder, madder, happier the bangs. The fetid fevered air rings with Anna’s, Mazie’s, Ben’s laughter; Bess’s toothless, triumphant crow. Heat misery, rash misery transcended.

  And Will comes in to the laughter with coils and boxes and a long, long wire. One by one, on the Metzes borrowed crystal set, they hear for the first time the radio sound. From where, from where, thinks Mazie, floating on her pain; like the spectrum in the ray, the magic concealed; and hears in her ear the veering transparent meshes of sound, far sound, human and stellar, pulsing, pulsing….

  Dust blows up and, stinging, flings itself against the house. Anna imagines the great dust wraiths swirling again, goes to wake Jim and urge him in. Trees move in the furnace wind, in the lightning quiver. She yearns to be out into it.

  “Jim, wake up. Come in, come in; this dust…. Bess … Mazie … The cannin’ … The crystal set.”

  He is too dazed to listen.

  “Here, I’ll help you. The air’s changin, Jim. I see for it to end tomorrow, at least get tolerable. Come in and get freshened up.”

  * Beedo: A speed-up system of the 1920’s.

  Reader, it was not to have ended here, but it is nearly forty years since this book had to be set aside, never to come to completion.

  These pages you have read are all that is deemed publishable of it. Only fragments, rough drafts, outlines, scraps remain—telling what might have been.

  Yonnondio! Yonnondio!—unlimn’d they disappear.

  A Note About This Book

  This book, conceived primarily as a novel of the 1930’s, was begun in 1932 in Faribault, Minnesota, when the author was nineteen, and worked on intermittently into 1936 or perhaps 1937 in Omaha, Stockton, Venice (Calif.), Los Angeles and San Francisco. Unfinished, it yet bespeaks the consciousness and roots of that decade, if not its events.

  Thought long since lost or destroyed, some of its pages were found intermixed with other old papers last winter, during the process of searching for another manuscript. A later, more thorough, search turned up additional makings: odd tattered pages, lines in yellowed notebooks, scraps. Other parts, evidently once in existence, seem irrevocably lost.

  The first four chapters, in final or near-final form when fitted together, presented only minor problems. The succeeding pages were increasingly difficult to reclaim. There were usually two to fourteen versions to work from: 38 to 41 year old penciled-over scrawls and fragments to decipher and piece together. Judgment had to be exercised as to which version, revision or draft to choose or combine; decisions made whether to include or omit certain first drafts and notes; and guessing had to be done as to where several scenes belonged. In this sense—the choices and omissions, the combinings and reconstruction—the book ceased to be solely the work of that long ago young writer and, in arduous partnership, became this older one’s as well. But it is all the old manuscripts—no rewriting, no new writing.

  I wish to thank the MacDowell Colony for the solitude and protection which enabled me to work on this during five months of 1972 and into 1973.

  TILLIE OLSEN

  San Francisco, February 1973