Home Place

by Wright Morris

  “Jenny—” Ivy said, taking her arm, “you remember Clyde, don’t you?”

  “We been talkin’ about him all the way over,” Jenny said.

  “I don’t mean that,” Ivy said. “I mean you remember him to look at?”

  “He’s good to look at,” she said, “if that’s what you mean.”

  Maybe I’d forgotten Potty Warner could be like that. My wife turned to look at me, and I said, “Well, you’re not so bad to look at yourself, Jenny—” which is an example of what flattery will do to a man.

  “We’ve heard so much about you,” Jenny said.

  “Indeed we have,” said Ivy.

  “You’ve heard about me?” I said, feigning surprise. I was really surprised, but I’ve got in the habit, over the years, of feigning it.

  “Jenny’s got it home now,” Ivy said.

  “It—?” said my wife.

  “Your picture,” he said. “She found it in some magazine or other and cut it out.”

  “The open throat one?” my wife said. Jenny nodded. “They all like that one,” my wife said “All of them.”

  “Well, it does look like him,” Jenny said.

  Now I’m not well known at all, but it’s too much trouble to explain to people, honest people, that any dam fool might write a book. It so happens I’m not a dam fool, but that’s even harder to explain, so I end up, on the whole, keeping my mouth shut.

  “Was this in the Times?” my wife said. “There was a nice little piece in the Times.”

  “In the World Herald,” Jenny said, “it was called ‘Creative Native.’”

  When I heard that title I looked over Jenny’s head, at the barn. The old man had stopped to peer in the door. I could hear the kids somewhere in the back, the boy’s feet running across the hayloft, and the giggle Peggy has when she has pulled a fast one on him. Very likely she had trapped him in the loft.

  “Are you teasing your brother?” my wife said, just as the boy began to holler. Then he stopped hollering and said, “I’ll tell Grandpa!” Not his father, nor his mother. He said “I’ll tell Grandpa.”

  The old man chuckled, scratched the back of his head. Sometime during the morning he had shed his coat and exchanged his nautical hat for a moth-eaten felt, with a rakish tilt to the brim. It curled quite a bit like one I used to wear. I had forgotten that the old man used to favor hats. All his other clothes he could hang on one post of the bed, with a bar to spare, but he kept five or six different hats on Clara’s stove. I remember him facing the glass in the cupboard to set one on.

  “Now who’s that little rascal?” the old man said, and looked at the kitten Peggy brought him. “That’s Mike,” he said, “don’t think he likes huggin’ like that too much.”

  “I’d say my best creative work,” I said, as the boy grabbed the old man’s hand, “is the two small volumes you see there in the door of the barn.”

  “Your work?” my wife said, “that’s my work!” which is not so bad if you haven’t heard it too many times before. As it happens I have—every time I’ve said it—but it sounded fairly good there in the yard. We all turned to look at the kids, Peggy with the spotted kitten, and the old man’s hand flat on the boy’s head. Now as I’ve said, the boy doesn’t care for that sort of thing. But he stood there like a post, as if the old man was leaning on him, and my wife slipped her hand in the pocket of my coat. That’s where she keeps her compact, and my own hand happened to be there.

  “My, what a pretty kitty,” my wife said.

  “The pussy gave her to us,” Peggy said.

  “That’s a him,” said the old man. “Mike’s a boy.”

  “The pussy gave him to us,” Peggy repeated, which was odd, in its own way, as I can’t remember her having said us, like that, before. “She gave him to us,” she said, and then waited till the old man’s hand had wiped his mouth, and dragged across his seat, before she reached for it.

  We followed the old man and the kids toward the house. Although his hands were empty there was a curve to his shoulders, and a weight to his walk, as if he were carrying two full pails. Aunt Clara went ahead to open the door, as if she alone knew how to unhook it, then she let it close, with a bang, just as we pulled up.

  “Ivy—” she said, “before I forget, I told Peg here that she and Clyde could have Ed’s house, if they wanted it. They don’t have a thing, and I said you’d want them to have it first.”

  “Now Clara—” I said.

  “You got a place, Ivy,” she said, “and though it’s not just what you want, it’s a place, anyhow, and a roof over your head. Peg here don’t have a thing.”

  “This is Ed’s place?” said Ivy.

  “Ed’s place,” Clara said.

  Ivy fished out a toothpick from the pocket of his shirt. Jenny had been facing Clara and my wife, but she turned and looked at Ivy, who was munching the toothpick, staring over her head. He took the toothpick out and said, “We was more or less plannin’ on it, but if Clyde here needs a house, why then it’s his.” He took off his straw and wiped his hand around the imitation leather band. “Isn’t that what you say, Jenny?” he said.

  “Why yes—” she said.

  In a bad situation I’m calm enough—in others I’m not so calm, and have the habit of plucking my ear, or energetically picking my nose. My wife pulled my hand down and said— “I can’t tell you how much we really need it. We’ve both been nearly crazy with the kids.”

  Pcg’s got into the habit, recently, of using the word frightful in practically every connection with the word house. I was proud of her for not using it. It would have been another one of those subway smells in the yard.

  “We want to thank you very much,” I said, setting a tone for Peg to follow.

  “We really do,” Peg said. I was proud of her.

  “What about Ed?” the old man said, putting his hand on my boy’s head again, “seems to me he’s the one to thank.” He looked gruff, to make clear it was quite a joke. The old man has a dry, scaly humor and as fine a dead pan as Buster Keaton. I laughed, and he said, “Well Ed, says I, have I got to live another five years to get a pretty girl to sit and talk to me? Well Harry, says he, if I was the girl I’d make it ten. Maybe by that time you’d learn how to behave yourself.” He took his hand from the boy’s head, and as we walked into the kitchen he hung his hat on the dipper handle, left it there.

  “You have to leave that hat on the dipper?” Clara said.

  “You can’t stop a chicken from scratchin’,” he said. “You ought to know that,” then he tipped forward to spit on the cobs.

  When I’m in good humor I’m pretty good company. With that housing business off my mind I was willing to listen to the ladies, or the old man, discuss almost anything. The weather, the crops, or myself, for instance. We sat in the living room, where the shades were up, with the ladies on the thin-lipped chairs, facing the light, and the old man in his rocker hitched around to where he could look through the screen. Ivy sat on what had been Viola’s piano stool. The piano was gone, with Viola I suppose, but I could see where it had been in the clean square on the flowered wallpaper. The flowers there had a fresh, artificial look. Over this square, in an oval frame, was the picture of three wild horses, their manes flowing against a dramatic stormy sky. That picture once hung over my bed as Ivy had been very fond of horses, and I shared his room in the summertime. I wondered what he thought of horses now. He was holding my boy between his legs, showing him some jiu-jitsu business, something he had learned in the army, I suppose. It was hard for me to picture him in a uniform. He was one of those easy, loose-jointed men with a nice sense of timing in his hands, but an absent, casual air about his legs. They followed him around, rather than going ahead of him. He sat there, one foot flat on the floor, the other rolled over on its side with the white label of the composition sole staring at me. I could see he had spent some time picking at it. When a farm boy gets around to pants and shoes, and stops finding nice, loose scabs on his knees, he turns to the
label, the gum, or the tar on the soles of his shoes. Five years in the army had not put an end to that. Now any man who could grasp the importance of that would be quite an asset, a Creative Native—but more to the point he might write a book a few natives might read. There’s no doubt in my mind the importance is there. There in the room, in the straight-backed chairs, the flowered paper, the lone wolf under the winter sky, the three wild horses, the oak-veneered table with the doily from Yellowstone National Park, and in the picture of the old man, on his last birthday, with Viola’s five red-headed kids. Stokes, every one of them. It was part of the old man and the old woman, part of the young man and the young woman, the hot afternoon dullness, and for the moment it was part of me. No doubt about it. That accounted for the silly way I felt. That accounted for the fact that Clara Muncy, nee Cropper, staring through the curtains at the field of grain, was carrying on about where it was she thought I was born. A white house with an American flag. She remembered the flag, as when they drove up she had to climb down from the buggy in order to make sure, in her own mind, that was the place. It was. She had brought a basket of Ivy’s diapers for me to wear.

  What was the point of all this? A connection of some kind. My Aunt Clara is not a talkative person, she hasn’t time for abstractions, and she could see, with her own eye, that I was there. But the connection. That was the important thing. It had to be established. I had to be born again. There’s nothing unusual about that story—except the feeling I had, sitting there, that I had never understood it before. The connection, that is. The important thing. Not the mother, nor the child, but the basket of soiled diapers.

  There’s a story in the family, on my mother’s side, that my Grandmother Osborn started west with her man, her Bible, and her cane-seated rocking chair. As things got bad she had to give up both her man and the Bible, and to keep from freezing to death she had to burn the chair. But first she unraveled the cane-bottom seat. She wrapped it around her waist, and when she got to where she was going she unwrapped it, put it in a new chair. Her kids grew up with their bottoms on it. That cane seat was the connection with all of the things, for one reason or another, she had to leave behind. Which was what these women were doing with me now. They were putting a cane seat, an approved one, in my bottomless chair. Making the connection. The rest would follow, naturally.

  Now the trouble with a feeling like that, a sentiment, or whatever you want to call it, is the way you feel when it slips away from you. I’ve readied the point where I spoil a good many fine sensations bccause I know, while I’m having them, that they won’t last. In an hour or two, a day at the most, I would wonder what the hell it was, if anything, that I was connected with. I would fall back on my work, my troubles, my wife and my kids. Real things. All of them. The connection would be on that busy party-line that was too much for our mothers, our fathers, and for ten or twelve million of their kids—like me. Small town expatriates, all of us. The smart thing is to say there is no connection, but you can’t get over the feeling that your Grandma, or the old man, were very much wiser in the matter than you managed to be. That’s the kind of feeling I admire, but after a good deal of experience I find it leaves me unconnected with myself. You have to tinker around the best you can. To make a connection with something, I spread my feet, which are large, and looked at the carpet on the floor. Rural Oriental, a fine Axminster. Under my feet there was a little nap, but where the old man rocked there were strands of burlap, like mop droppings, worn into the floor. Under the rug, however, there was still the floor. That was a connection, of a kind, and I stretched out my legs, as I have to if I want to get into my pants. My pipe was in my pockets somewhere.

  “Watch what you’re doing,” my wife said, “you’re wrinkling her rug.” I pulled my feet in again, smoothed it out. The center of the rug was pretty well worn away. For some reason or other, maybe for no reason at all, I bent over as if I was trying to look at it.

  “If you’re lookin’ for the figure—” Clara said, “you’re just about ten or twelve years too late.”

  “That was a mighty nice rug,” said the old man, “Ax-minister.” He pushed his glasses up and said, “You know, I don’t think I ever looked at it. I never saw it, and here it is too late.” He turned from the rug to look through the screen, at the glare over the road. His eyes were the soft faded blue of his denim bib. “No, come to think I did look at it,” he said. “It was nice.”

  “I got a load of grain,” the old man said, “out there near the barn. Just settin’.” He pushed out of his rocker, stood up, and looked at his watch.

  “It’s set for a week,” Clara said, “another day or two won’t hurt it.”

  “Told Roy’d bring it in.”

  “You have to take it in?” Clara said.

  “No, I don’t have to,” he said. “I could leave it just settin’. I could let it rot.”

  “You have to wait till folks is here you haven’t seen for thirty years, your own people, to run off to town.”

  “You been to town?” the old man said.

  “No—” I said, “we come in from the south.”

  “I should think you’d want to see the town,” he said.

  “It’s been there a good while,” Clara said, “and from the looks of things it’ll stay there.”

  “I remember it pretty well,” I said, and I didn’t particularly want to see it. Not with the old man. He’d like to walk me into the Feed Store and say— “Any you men remember this little fella?”

  “If you’re going in,” my wife said, “you can take Bobby in for a haircut.” She ran her hand through his hair, which wasn’t any too long, but the old man’s hand had pretty well mussed it up.

  “Used to be a man named Cahow,” I said. “Eddie Cahow, next to the bank.”

  “He’s not next the bank,” said the old man.

  “No—”

  “Lee Stacy’s between him and the bank.”

  “But he’s still there?”

  “Was last Saturday morning,” the old man said. He held a match to the stove lid and said, “Gettin’ sixty-five cents now for a haircut.” He felt his head. “Comes down to about a penny a hair.”

  “Peg-GEEE!” said my wife, and we turned to look at my girl, standing in the corner, with a large desk inkwell over her head. She was looking for the price stamp or the Made in so-and-so label. I don’t need to tell you where she picked that up.

  “What’s got into her?” said the old man. Peggy put the inkwell back on the table and scooped up the cat, letting her bottom sag.

  “You like the kitty?” my wife said.

  “That ain’t a kitty, that’s a cat,” said the old man. “An’ he don’t like it. Holdin’ him like that makes him sick.” Peggy put him down on the floor, wiped her hands. The old man put his hand on her head and said, “Used to clip Viola in the summer. It’s cooler. Always clip the dogs.”

  My wife opened her mouth, so I said— “What about Viola, Clara?”

  “She’ll be here,” Clara said, “time you two get back.”

  “She bringin’ Mother Cropper?” Jenny said.

  “It’s a proposition,” Clara said, “to bring her or to leave her. If you bring her she won’t let you buy but one kind of gas.”

  “Time we brought her,” Ivy said, “ran out of gas between here and Clay Center. Nothin’ but Sinclair in Clay Center. Wouldn’t let me put it in.”

  “Think it was Ed—” the old man said, “had to drain his tank. Put in two gallon of Sinclair on top of her Texaco.”

  The story goes that Grandfather Cropper was tight in his breeches, and a railroad man, when boys like myself, any boy, that is, were in Sunday School. In the course of time Grandfather Cropper was a Brakeman on the C.B.&Q., and a Fireman on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. He was killed in the Rockies, near some pass or other, when his boiler blew up. As I remember, he died a hero’s death. All through school I was apt to confuse Grandfather Cropper with all the Greek heroes, who died, as I seemed to gather, in
some kind of pass. I suppose an epic is how you feel about something. The first epic of my life was the last run of Grandfather Cropper, Fireman first class, between Trinidad and Raton. Strangely enough, Grandma hardly said anything. She just happened to say it often, at the right time and place, with a good many looks out the window, as if she had been there. She always began with just what it was she had put in his lunch pail, that evening, and the fact that the apple he preferred was a Macintosh. I gathered that he wouldn’t touch an apple not a Macintosh. That’s a small thing, in its way, but it’s the stuff heroes are made of, and Grandma Cropper knew a hero when she saw one. She had had, on the other hand, no forebodings at all. I felt this was largely because Aunt Clara had been full of forebodings, and Grandma would have nothing to do with such things. Bats in the belfry, as she called them. She sent him off without a foreboding, chicken sandwiches in his lunch pail, a Macintosh apple, and a clean pair of Fireman’s overalls. During the night, though, she did wake up and think of him. As it turned out, that was twenty minutes after the boiler blew off the cab, so it was not, whatever else it was, a fore-boding. As for what it was, that was her own business. When she was asked to go and recognize him—with her fare paid, and three meals in the diner—she knew it was not till that moment that he died. He lived for twenty minutes, that is, which was a good fifteen minutes longer than the Engineer, and the dog they had in the cab. There wasn’t too much to recognize, but anyone that knew him as well as she did, with the mole on his thigh, knew it was Milton Cropper and nobody else. Grandmother wasn’t one to stress anything, but she stamped her right foot, her hand pushing the knee, whenever she spiked that talk of Clara’s about forebodings. She also stamped it when she told a funny story—to make sure I got the point—and as I was usually stretched on the floor I could see her foot. It was small, and she was vain about her feet. Her high shoes were laced tight every day, though it killed her during the summer when it got hot, and her feet tended to swell. As an epic is how you feel about something, it was no mystery to me when all the Croppers, the boys, that is, took to railroading. They were men, and they wanted to lead the hero’s life. I wanted to lead it myself, but the last time I saw Grandma, as I say, was thirty years ago.