Home Place

by Wright Morris

  “Arc you absolutely crazy?” my wife said.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “She won’t come.”

  “The least you might do,” she said, “is try to understand how I’m feeling. I wasn’t born out here.” She looked at the stove. “And I don’t like pickled beets.”

  “You’ve never tasted a real pickled beet,” I said, and walked into the front room, where it was cooler.

  “If it’s like her real fried egg,” said my wife—“Why it was vulcanized. I couldn’t cut it.”

  “That will be enough of that,” I said.

  “What makes me so sick,” my wife said, “is that you can’t take it as well as I can. I’m at least polite. I don’t veil at them like a fishwife.”

  “I was not yelling at him,” I said.

  “Well, you raised your voice,” she said.

  “He always makes me raise my voice,” I said, “but I was not veiling at him. He’s not very well informed, and you can’t tell him anything.”

  “You ought to try and tell her something,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you what it is I can’t stand,” she said. “It’s all right for you to share their lives. That’s fine. But they don’t give a dam about yours.”

  I walked through the dining room to the front door that Aunt Clara had always kept locked. It was still locked, as they had never put a porch at the front of the house. If she left it unlocked, the old man, or some stranger, might have killed himself. The old man was forgetful, and sometimes gave the door a try.

  My wife came in and said, “I’m just all nerves from this housing situation. It’s all I can do to just try to be nice—”

  “I’m a little touchy, too,” I said, “but I am trying to do something about it. For one thing,” I said, “I have just driven your babies two thousand miles.”

  “You’re very sweet.”

  “These people think we’re crazy,” I said “—if they think about us at all, but it doesn’t keep them from sharing their own house. They’ll share what they got, including their vulcanized eggs-”

  “I didn’t mean that—” she said, “but I couldn’t cut it—cither.”

  “The old man thinks I’m a total loss, but you notice how he offered me what he smokes?”

  “What is it?” said my wife.

  “Airsuds—” I said. “That’s what it is if it isn’t tobacco.” I walked into the small room at the side, where my wife slept with Peggy, and looked at my face in the bureau mirror.

  “You’re sunburned—” she said, and looked at me in the mirror. “Does it have to be so dark in here?”

  “She’s trying to keep it cool,” I said, “for people like yourself. She used to have a lot of trees, nice big shade trees, but they died in the drouth.”

  We stood there and I could hear the chickens cackling.

  “What about this house?” she said.

  “If you can just keep your mouth shut,” I said, “I think I’ve got my hands on a house.” My wife took out some pins, put them in her mouth, and let down her hair. She ran her fingers through the braid and said—

  “What house?”

  “If I remember correctly,” I said, “Ed’s house has a jolin and running water. He put it in for his mother. I don’t think he married anyone.”

  “Ed who?” she said.

  “Uncle Ed—” I said. “On Clara’s side.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s sick,” I said. Then I cleared my throat and said, “The old man says he’s a goner. In a week or two.”

  “I didn’t come two thousand miles,” my wife said, “to do what they’re doing in New York.”

  “No—?” I said.

  “Well, not exactly,” she said. “I’m not going to budge until he’s really dead.”

  “That’s being really thoughtful,” I said. She didn’t pick that up, so I said, “It’s a small-type house, one floor and an attic,” and I raised the blind a foot or so and looked at the road. There were still a few trees, mulberry and catalpa, but I could see the front of Uncle Ed’s house. I remembered him as the owner of an Edison Gramophone. I liked the horn and the felt-lined case of black cylinders. “Pretty nice for the kids,” I said, “they could spend a noisy day over here, then come home and spend a quiet night with us.”

  My wife came to the window and said, “So it’s conic to this.”

  “You can be dam thankful it has,” I said.

  “I wonder what it’s like inside?”

  “There’s just one floor,” I said. “That window opens on the attic. The thing to remember is the running water and the inside john.”

  “That’s important,” she said, “seeing as how you can’t carry a pail of water.”

  I ignored that and said, “You can’t judge the place on how it looks now. This was some farm,” I said, “thirty years ago. The old man had a five acre orchard with the finest apples in the state; he’s got a trunk full of the ribbons he won at the fair.” That reminded me of something and I said, “I wish you could have seen the old lady. She won all of the jelly and quilting prizes they had around here.”

  “What happened?” she said.

  “You wear out,” I said. “Out here is where people and things wear out. You keep winding it up till one day the ticker stops.”

  “Can’t they get any help?”

  “You can’t get farm help any more,” I said. “Men will do anything rather than work on a farm.”

  “Women, too,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said, “women too.”

  “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “The old man’s an awful dam fool,” I said. “You can’t tell him a thing—but there’s something about him.”

  “There’s always something about an old fool,” my wife said.

  I left her there and walked through the house to the back porch. Aunt Clara and Peggy were coming in from the barn; Clara was tipped away from the bucket I had left near the pump, and Peggy was carrying the Karo can, full of white eggs. I walked back to the folding doors and said, “Well, here she comes.”

  “Ho you have to shout?”

  “If she left you here with her beets, all I’ve got to say is you better be here.”

  “Hmmm—” she said.

  “If you can just control yourself,” I said, “I’ll have you a nice little place in the country. But you leave it to me. Just try and control yourself.” I took a quick look at the stove, to see if anything was burning, then I went upstairs to change my clothes.

  The stairs are right behind the range, in something like a steep chute-one of the reasons you can’t live up there in the summer time. I could feel the heat right through the plaster wall. As a boy I had the room at the head of the stairs, where the ceiling slopes down over the bed, but on hot summer nights I slept on the floor. The windows were low, and there was sometimes a breeze down there. As my own boy is about that age—eight next October—I had an odd feeling when I got to the top of the stairs. Put it this way—for a moment I wondered who I was. Since we left New York, a week ago, I’d been trying to tell my boy, whenever he’d listen, what it was like to live on a farm. You can’t do it. You can’t tell a city kid anything. But I had talked a good deal to myself, and lay awake thinking about it, which might account for the feeling I had. I was Spud Muncy, sometimes known as “the little fart.”

  Whoever I was, I was facing Viola’s room with its flower-cluttered wallpaper, and the handcolored photo of her skinny brother, Ivy. Ivy had been seven that summer, but he was not a little fart, in any respect, so he had been able to wear my clothes. That’s my fauntleroy he’s wearing on the wall. He was also wearing my high button shoes, and my pink Omaha garters, which showed all right, but not in the photograph. I sat in the buggy and thumbed my nose at him. I was wearing his cast-off rompers, with the drop-scat and the dark brown stains, and while thumbing my nose I was smoking licorice cigarettes. A good deal of my spit was there on the buckboard, beside the old man�
�s.

  I was facing Viola’s room, and Ivy, but when I turned on the stairs the door to the old man’s room—their room, that is—stood open. All of the upstairs rooms are dark, as the windows are low, floor level, and the blinds are usually drawn against the heat. All the light was on the floor—I used to lie there and read. Mid-summer nights I would lie near the window and read the Monkey Ward catalogue, the descriptions of watches, long after the old folks had gone to bed. As my father always talked a good deal, in bed, I used to wonder why these people, who went to bed so early, never said a word. Their shoes would drop on the floor, that was all. I would hear the old man puff at the lamp—sometimes he had to whooosh at it—then the dry rattle as he settled back on the cornshuck mattress. Some nights, for quite a little while, he would yawn and burp. Thirty years ago he often complained of what he called a weight in his stomach—a stone at the pit of it, he said. Whenever he complained at supper, he burped at night. My father always said no human could live on a diet of potatoes and pork gravy, but the old man is alive, and my father is dead, now, ten years. I lay awake the night before, thinking of that.

  I suppose after fifty years of marriage there may be things to keep you awake, but not much for you to lie in bed and talk about. If you pile out of bed around a quarter past five, single plow a foot deep with a team of deaf mares, at a quarter past eight the odds are you’ll be ready for sleep. Sometimes I’d hear the old man sit up, and use the potty, or hear Clara tell him, in her high private voice, that it was storming and he had better put the windows down. That was one thing he could do. Would do, that is.

  I went to the window and raised the blind so I could look at the seedy elm, the leaning cob house, and along the untrimmed hedge toward the barn. The chickens had made a spongy pit of the yard. That accounted for a good deal of the wormneck, and the stumbling gait I had seen among the hens, as you can’t let chickens mess around in their own dirt. But you couldn’t tell the old lady that. After a little more than twenty years, four of them at the state Aggie college, Ivy managed to tell the old man a little bit about hybrid corn. Not much, but a little bit. But he could never tell him to move his machines in out of the rain. Or to vaccinate his cows, or his pigs, against the cholera. No, you couldn’t tell him anything. Years ago, when I was in school, I sent the old man a pound can of tobacco, a fine blend I couldn’t afford to smoke myself. I also sent him a French brier, a small bottle of pipe sweetener, and an English-made cleaning tool. He sent everything but the tool back to me. “I thank you for the tool,” he said, “which I got right here in my pocket, but Granger’s the only cut I get any satisfaction from.” No, you couldn’t tell them, show them, or give them anything. They were like the single plow below my window—when the old man had a piece of plowing to do he hitched up his team of mares, and that was what he used. A foot deep and a yard wide, stopping at the end of the furrow to sit on the crossbar and spit on the white grubs at his feet.

  “It’s men like him,” Ivy had said, “who made this goddam dust bowl.”

  True enough—but it was men like him who were still around when the dust blew away. As my wife said, there’s always something about an old fool.

  “Oh, Dearie—!” my wife called.

  “Coming—” I said, and sat down on the edge of the bed to change my shoes.

  Clara was making a place near the range for her basket of cobs. Peggy stood there, with her bucket of eggs, and before I looked at her she said— “The chickies gave them to me, didn’t they, Grandma?”

  “I suppose they did,” Clara said, and picked up a handful of cobs.

  “Don’t just stand there gaping,” my wife said, who was standing there gaping, “do something.” I took the lid holder and raised the stove lid, Clara dropped in her cobs. I raised the lid on the cob bin, to look inside, but it was empty.

  “I don’t use it any more,” Clara said. “With my wrist like it is I can’t lift it.” She took the poker from a hook on the wall, pushed the cobs back in the range.

  “The chickies gave them to me, not to Bobby,” Peggy said.

  “They’re still the chickies’ eggs,” I said, “until Grandma sells them to the grocer. Then they belong to whoever wants to buy his fresh country eggs.”

  Clara put down the poker, “Who in heaven’s name you talking to?”

  “I was talking to Peggy,” I said. That didn’t explain very much so I said, “If she’s going to understand the world she lives in, she’s got to learn about buying and selling. She’s got to learn why it is we pay for things.”

  “Is there anyone that don’t know that?” Clara said.

  “The world is full of people,” my wife said, “who don’t understand the simplest things.”

  “Children are logical—” I said, “if you just take the time to explain things to them.”

  “Just what are you explaining?” Clara said.

  I looked at my wife. “I was explaining—” I said, thinking, “why it was first of all the chickie’s egg. Why it was the chickie’s egg before it was her egg, for instance.”

  “Money is the medium of exchange,” said my wife, “but how many people really know it?”

  “I thought everyone did?” said Clara. “I thought that was the trouble.”

  “Seven out of ten people,” said my wife, “think it’s something else. They think it’s something in itself. The one thing you can say about Russia—” My Aunt Clara had been stooping for cobs. She let them drop, stiffened to her full height. That left her free to look right over my head at my wife, who turned as if someone had walked up at her back.

  “Peggy Muncy—” she said, “you in your right mind?” “Aunt Clara—” I said, and picked up two jars of red beets, “where shall I put them?”

  “Right back where you found them,” she said, and let the lid snap up on her glass eve. When she was upset it was hard to tell which eve it was. They both had a high sparkle, and a hard, clear shine. I put the jars back on the same red rings, fit them, you might say, then I stepped back and wiped the sweat off my face.

  “Peg—” I said, “you mind finding me a handkerchief?” Without waiting to see if she would I stepped out on the porch, drank two dippers of water, then splashed one on my face. I wiped my face on the towel and watched the PILLSBURY stamp come up, slowly darkening, like a print in the developer.

  I stood there, trying to cool off, but it’s either my wife or one of her babies.

  “I want to buy some eggs,” Peggy said. “To buy some fresh country eggs I need some money.” The way we keep our children from asking for money is to keep them supplied with it. I took out two nickels, gave them to her.

  “Ask your Grandma what eggs are worth now,” I said. “Ask her what fresh eggs bring a dozen.”

  “Tell him to ask the chickens,” Clara said, “they’re the chickens’ eggs.”

  “Your Grandma is a very smart woman,” I said, and wagged my head to show I really thought so.

  “She’s not a plain darn fool,” Clara said, and went back to her beets.

  “Suppose we buy our eggs later,” I said, and winked at Peggy, which I do on such occasions, but she didn’t wink back, which was what she usually did. She didn’t press the point, however, about the eggs. “There’s your brother and your Grandpa,” I said, “out there near the barn. I wonder what they’re doing?” She put the pail of eggs down and came out on the porch. “Why don’t you go see what they’re up to?” I said. From what I could see the old man was showing the boy a spotted kitten. “Why, that looks like a little baby kitten,” I said. Peggy pushed on the screen, very slowly, then she walked out near the ragged box elder. She stood there, in the shade, looking at them. She was just like her mother. So damned independent you wanted to scream.

  “Is it such a proposition to raise a child?” Clara said. She turned with the mason jar she was holding to place it, upside down, on the paper. She waited for it to ooze. It didn’t ooze. She tried another one.

  “The world is such a mess, Aunt C
lara,” I said, “you can’t blame people if they want to try something, if they want to raise their kids a different way. They want the world to be different. You can’t blame them,” I said.

  “How do you want it?” she said. “Your powder wet or dry?” She tipped another jar of beets and said, “The world ain’t such a mess it can’t be a worse one.”

  “Some people doubt that,” I said.

  “Then they should know better than to have children. You want to hold this for me?” she said. “It’s my wrist.” I held the jar, and she screwed up the lid.

  “It’s pretty hot weather for canning,” I said.

  “I’ve seen it a good deal hotter,” she said, “and I’ve seen it cooler. I can tell hot and cold.” Maybe I’d forgotten she could be like that. I wiped my hands with the towel and tried to think how to turn that one. I couldn’t.

  “You want to help me here,” she said, “or you busy keepin’ your hands clean?” I put the towel on the rack and took a good grip on the jar.

  “What’s this I hear about Uncle Ed?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “unless you heard he was dying.”

  “That’s what I heard.” She didn’t go on, so I said, “Ed’s lived a long life, guess we can’t live forever.”

  “Nobody has,” she said. That was all.

  “Ed never married, did he?”

  “No, he never married.”

  “I suppose you’ve been wondering,” I said, “just what to do about the place.” She nodded. “If I know Uncle Harry,” I said, “he wouldn’t want a bunch of strangers right across the road. You have to be particular. You wouldn’t want just anybody living over there.”

  “No, not just anybody.”

  “A man living over there would cross the road, naturally, if he had to borrow something. That can be nuisance.”

  “Indeed it can.”