by Walker Evans
Introit
All the way down from Ricketts’ the wind had been lifting, taking up little spirals of dust among the shaken cotton along our left, twisting and treating them roughly, blowing them to pieces, and by the time we had drawn round the tip of the gravel pit to the left and were taking the car for my first time among the difficulties of that broken little road of which I was to learn each trick, forward and backward, like a piece of music; it was tightened full of clay dust gravel, splinters, twigs, the meager firstlings of the grand impounded rain which slivered horizontals along the blinded windshield, so that all the left flank of the metal car was steadily bombarded with little sharpnesses so rapidly, so intensely, as by electrons. We sank a rooty slope and crossed a branch (whose thin sheet shimmering was shirred all over the road) and opened on the left in a grim olive light a field of corn all slashed one way, the leaves out level in great loudness, the olive light suffused with a dim red gold, which was the substance of the earth; melons like hogs, their dust backs sliced with water; peanut plants twittering as under the scathe of machine-gun fire, or alternate frames cut from a stretch of film; and among woods again, the sanded road resumed in rooted clay, uphill, ravine-like, wrenching a last hump free (the car listing steep as the Vestris), and delivered in suddenness upon wide space of light on torsive clays where stands, first seen to me, your holy house, George, cloven, expectant of storm, the dust sunken about it like sucked-back smoke of magic, the plants released erect and trembling as flesh at end of shock of surgery, the house quiet save one blind creaking, a bull waiting the hammer: for in this last quarter-mile the wind has suddenly sunken as if cut, the dry storm being over, the orchestra arrested of its bullying tutti, and among the quivering flocculence of vegetation, which knows well to expect another blow, no sound as such at all, yet a quality of withdrawal, of tension, which is part smell, part temperature, part sound, a motion of withdrawal as of wide hands armed with cymbals: the exhausting odor that breeds of dynamos, a searching change to coldness, a sound from all the air as of a sizzling fuse, a blind blattering of thunder and brightness, silence again, so steep, and down it, water like trays that bursts four inches wide in a slapping of hands, broad-separate drops; and as we draw up across your yard in rapid second, a new cold rushing in the air, a gray roar that runs out of the woods behind your house and takes the field in a stride to meet us where we stop in such a welter that, in the fifteen feet between the lean-to where we leave the car and the porch we sprint for, the clothing is stuck along shoulders and thighs like tissue paper and we stand on the porch against the wall in a quiet of blockaded wind which feels illegal, and the reeking of rain is so outrageous all round that I can scarcely hear half what Ricketts is saying, though the scare and pleasure of storm has brought his voice into a high shout: and we stand, watching, beneath the field, the embattled trees, which are scarcely visible, all thrashing, yet some struck, each as if singled out for it a great blow across the shoulders and base of the skull that beats it down with an oooooh rather than groan, beaten low among the shoulders of his brethren where, arms stretched, he bruises his forehead among them to weep, and a foam running and skipping as foam on surf along their crests, and a regiment of crests suddenly sprung loose, each leaf a catapult in the bumpy wind, smacking their sheen of water up at a wild angle of which wind shears off the top, and the rigid trunks themselves swaying even from their strong footholds in a strong and vertical oscillation as of wharved masts, and George comes out, to see who is here, not at all exhilarated as we are, yet tense; and is much surprised to see me, and we shake hands; and my natural inclination is to stay and watch the rain, but he is as much ready to draw back into his shell as if we were all standing in it, or as if this were an impropriety he could be courteous but not too patient with; and we go back through the open hall (which frames at its far end a barnyard one emblazoned blizzard), and stepping quickly into the kitchen he takes a lamp from the table, and at the opposite door he knocks; and the door is unbuttoned from inside which had been secured in a thoughtless reflex of fear, and we all hurry in, and he buttons the door to again as promptly as to shut out a following beast, and here in this room we are in a near dead darkness, in which at first I know, only, that it is full of people, whom I do not yet see. Through two walls of this shuttered room and parts of the ceiling daylight is let in short lead slivers; there is the sound of a loud falling trickle and of many assorted paces of dripping water; and even here in this dry and windless place the air is bristly with sieved rain: I begin to see around me a little; George draws out a chair at the fireplace and I sit down; I see there are on the bed and floor a woman and children, none of whom makes a sound or says a word, nor can I yet make out their faces or their eyes; George is scratching a match; it glints and dies; another; dead wet pulp; another, flares; he guards it in his palm, he touches the wick; the dark flame climbs shapeless in braiding of oleaginous smoke; he sets the chimney round it, brings it trim, the flame pales, takes shape, brightens and swells to level, and stands there in glass; I look around me: the sobriety of its fragrant light is spread not quite to the two far walls but on all surfaces of wood more near, details of furniture, bed iron, bodies, faces:
The wood frame of the fireplace is whitewashed. The white wash is scarred with matches. The hearth is full of sweepings and char. Water drops in a steady spatter on the middle of this heap, and the broken black stones of the chimney-back are crawled with its shimmering in the lamp. A small outer hearth of foot smoothed sandstone is let into the floor, one leg of my hickory-bottom chair stands in it The floor is so beautiful in the light of the lamp. The planks are pine; they must be each a foot wide. It is all wood around me, and except for the whitewashing it is all bare and untouched; it is all pine; wide boards of it; held together against a structure of two-by-fours, some of them splintery, some smoothed with planes. The door we entered is of broad pine vertical boards nailed together by a transverse and two horizontals, hung from hinges: a thick wood button latch, its edges softened with a knife, a twenty-penny nail stuck through its center has made upon the wood of the solid wall and swinging door a circular shadow of its usage. ( Later I am to see on much of the wood of this house the arched breath of the saws.) The foot of the bed is iron; dark; the paint is gone from it; and like moist whetstone to the touch: its several rods stand upward to a curving of iron, a little like a lyre, and the head, in darkness, is the same thing taller. The lamp stands on a little table next the fireplace, and this little table is spread with a piece of floursack whose printing is still faint in it and through which the cheapest available kinds of pink and blue shining threads have been drawn in a designing of embroidery which was not completed. The bed is sheeted white, and beyond, more dimly, is another plain of white, and the iron of a somewhat more ornate bed. Between my feet and George’s, at the juncture of outer hearth and floor there is a rapid little splittering of water which I can see falling between our eyesight, a little less swift than a continuous stream. Somewhere behind him a bigger dropping is going on, with the loudness and force exactly of a finger nail struck as hard and rapidly as possible against wood. Back in the darkness there is a folding and glad noise as of a forest brook. By lamplight and by day I see, beneath the door, water slide and spread along the wood floor. A large and slow-collected drop breaks now and then on my right knee. I do not move to avoid it but I shade with my hand so that this foolishness shall not be noticed. I see George’s feet in their bluchered workshoes, planted in the boards of the floor. I watch his eyes while he watches mainly at nothing, and at the fear of waiting in them as he tries to create a saving rhythm against the unpredictable thunder. I watch these others who in the dark are drawn into a rondure: Junior, sitting on the floor, at the foot of the bed, his teeth working at the root of his thumb nail, watching me constantly with his hidden look: Louise, sitting straight upright at the edge of a hickory chair by the bed and near me, holding a baby close yet lightly against her prescient body; watching me: Burt, on the bed, on his side,
his knees drawn tight, his body drawn in a tight curve round the seated hips of his mother, his face jammed against her thin buttock, crying very quietly, twisting his forehead tighter and tighter against her, chewing the cloth of her skirt: you, Annie Mae, whose name I do not yet know, and whom I have never yet seen, and who I gather, are George’s wife (though there has been no foolishness of ‘introductions,’ nor any word spoken, of any such kind): it is you I was first aware of from when first I came into this room, before you were yet a shadow out of the darkness, and you I have had on my mind while we have sat here, and so much cared toward, how from the first you not only never spoke but have not once lifted your face, your head, where you hold it there bowed deep, your sharp elbows on your sharp knees, the heels of the hands clamped to your ears, your eyes I feel sure through the tension of your body so tightly shut they must ache with it. All that I see now is this posture, the sharpness of your bent spine through your dress, the black top of your head locked in your hands and the white broken part down the center of the skull, and a little of your forehead: the wincing, and the narrow moan you yield in each bellowing of thunder: at which time George winces too, not at all ashamed of his fear, studious to hold it in bounds only for the sake of his family, that they may have something to count on, to look toward for their own courage. No one has anything to say in all this absorption in terror and patience of waiting except now and again Ricketts who, since he must always talk most when he fears most, finds this silence an unbearably frightening trial: so that now and again, out of a silence in which he has been breathing quicker and quicker, he darts a loud-voiced and trembling, joking comment, to which George makes little or no answer, almost as if it were obscene in this context, and which I try to ease into silence with a ‘yeah: sure is,’ or a smile or short laugh. He remarks how Annie Mae is all squinched up on the bed like the devil was after her, a-har-har-har-har, devil hisself, and George says yes that she sure is afeared of the thunder and the lightning; Louise tightens her arms round the baby, looking at me: after a little Ricketts says again, look at Annie Mae; skeered like devil hisself was after her, yes sir, devil hisself. No one answers him. Yes sir, all squinched up like devil hisself was on her tracks; never seed a woman so skeered a thunder; and he quiets again. There is a scratching at the door, without whimpering; nothing is done about it It keeps up; pauses; resumes in much more urgency; quits; and is done with. After a minute George says: arn draws lightnin. Arn, and dawgs. I offer them another round of cigarettes. Ricketts as before refuses: he keeps on spitting in the fireplace, stooping forward far in his chair to indicate that he is taking due care in a home not his own and for the same reason spitting quietly and rather delicately. George, as before, takes one with thanks. I realize later that he likes machine-made cigarettes less well than those he rolls for himself, but he is fond of the meaning and distinction which is in their price, and would probably always use them if he could afford them. All this while something very important to me is happening, and this is between me and Louise. She sits squarely and upright in her chair, as I have told, silent, and careful of the child, and apparently no more frightened than I, and scarcely even excited by the storm, watching me, without smiling, whether in her mouth or her eyes: and I come soon to realize that she has not once taken her eyes off me since we entered the room: so that my own are drawn back more and more uncontrollably toward them and into them. From the first they have run chills through me, a sort of beating and ticklish vacuum at the solar plexus, and though already I have frequently met them I cannot look into them long at a time without panic and quick withdrawal, fear, whether for her or for myself I don’t know. Inevitably I smile a little, quietly, whenever I meet her eyes, but that is all. I meditate, but cannot dare a full and open smile, in any degree which presupposes or hopes for an answer, not only because I realize how likely she would be not to ‘return’ it, which, needing her liking so much, I could not bear, but because too I feel she is a long way above any such disrespect, and I want her respect also for myself. There are kinds of friendliness: and of love, and of things a long way beyond them, which are communicable not only without ‘smiling,’ but without anything denominable as ‘warmth’ in the eyes, and after thinking a little about it, endeavoring to bring myself to dare to, and to lose my conscience, I let all these elements, in other words all that I felt about her, all I might be able to tell her in hours if words could tell it at all, collect in my eyes, and turned my head, and stood them into hers, and we sat there, with such a vibration increasing between us as drove me half unconscious, so that I persisted rather than ran as one might in war or round a pylon, blindly and deafly, and gained a second strength wherein I felt as of a new level, a new world, and kept looking at her, and she at me, each ‘coldly,’ ‘expressionlessly,’ I with a qualifying protectiveness toward her from myself, she without fear nor wonder, but with extraordinary serene reception and shining and studiousness, and yielding of no remotest clue, whether of warmth, hatred or mere curiosity; and at length it was she who let her eyes relax away, slowly, with dignity, and gazed down along the flat chest of her dress, and upon her wrist, and I continue to watch her; and after a little, not long at all, she raises her eyes again, and an almost imperceptibly softened face, shy, as if knowledgeable, but the eyes the same as before; and this time it is I who change, to warmth, so that it is as if I were telling her, good god, if I have caused you any harm in this, if I have started within you any harmful change, if I have so much as reached out to touch you in any way you should not be touched, forgive me if you can, despise me if you must, but in god’s name feel no need to feel fear of me; it is as if the look and I had never been, so far as any harm I would touch you with, so far as any way I would not stand shelter to you: and these eyes, receiving this, held neither forgiveness nor unforgiveness, nor heat nor coldness, nor any sign whether she understood me or no, but only this same blank, watchful, effortless excitation; and it was I who looked away.
Every few minutes George would get up and open the door a foot or so, and it showed always the same picture: that end of the hallway mud and under water, where the planks lay flush to the ground: the opposite wall; the open kitchen; blown leaves beyond the kitchen window; a segment of the clay rear yard where rain beat on rain beat on rain beat on rain as would beat out the brains of the earth and stood in a bristling smoky grass of water a foot high; a corner of the henhouse; the palings of the garden; the growth of the garden buffeted; a tree by the palings with shearing of rain through it; open land beyond and beyond that trees in a line; the rain moving along the open land in tall swift columns of smoke, the trees lashing and laboring like rooted waves; and in all this time I have talked of, such steady rave of rain and such breakage of thunder as I shall not try to tell: the thunder, at length, has diminished first, and now after a long time further, the rain too, and now we sit with the door a little ajar and watch it follow itself in a frieze of tall forward-leaning figures on the field, and this smokiness faints slowly out of the air, and the yard dirt is needled, not battered; the thunder is growling well off to the west and the air, though completely clouded, is softly shiny; and there is everywhere such a running and rustling, gargling sound of water as might be heard if the recession of the late parts of a wave were magnified; and in all this I now see Louise’s face in the strange blend of lamp with daylight; and Burt relaxes, and looks for a little while as if asleep; and Ricketts begins talking again more steadily; and now for the first time in all this hour we have sat here, Annie Mae takes her stiff hands from her ears and slowly lifts her beautiful face with a long stripe of tears drawn, vertical, beneath each eye, and looks at us gravely, saying nothing. After a minute she leans across toward her daughter (every line of her body sharp and straight as if drawn by a ruler), and asks, how’s Squinchy? She is really asking for him. Louise knows this, and gives him over to her, and she takes him against her body and gazes carefully into his face, smoothing on his bulged forehead her russet hand. He is asleep, and has been aslee
p in all this time, but now beneath her hand he comes awake, and cries a little, and begins to smile, and much more to comfort herself than her child, she turns away from us, and draws her dress away from her breast, and nurses him.
The shutters are opened. The lamp is drawn down, blown out The room is clear with light and breathes coolness like a lung: it is filled with the odors of the rain on the earth and of wood, pork, bedding, and kerosene, and is cleaned of the exhaustion of our breathing. Our faces are no longer subsumed but are casual and they and I look at each other more casually yet shyly, much more sharply aware than before of the strangeness of my presence here. Our voices and our bodies take shape and loosen, and we get up off our chairs and the bed and the floor, and come out of the room to see what the rain has done. There still are no ‘introductions’; there is no kind of social talk at all, but as if a definite avoidance of any of these issues as too complicated to try to cope with; but quietness, casualness, courtesy, friendliness, of a sort that make me feel at ease, only careful: and I see how they are very careful toward me, puzzled by me, yet glad rather than not to see me, and not troubled by me.