Home Place

by Wright Morris

  Well, they both stood there, nice as you please, while he ran the mower over their heads, bawling their hearts out, but too sticky and unhappy to move. Fred Purdy stood by and gave us a hand, brushing off the hair as Eddie Cahow clipped it, and in no more time than it takes to shave a peach, the kids were peeled. “Osborn heads, both of them,” Eddie Cahow said, and gazed at them, like at a crystal ball. He closed his eyes and felt the knobs behind the boy’s ears.

  “I see you’re still holdin’ hands,” the old man said, his nose pressed to the screen, and his arms still folded on his chest.

  “Now ain’t that a purty sight to see a boy and his daddy holdin’ hands.” I glowered at him, and he swallowed his chew rather than laugh.

  “If you think you can manage it,” I said, dipping all of our hands into a basin of water, “you might go into the drugstore and get us something.”

  “You like a strawberry cone?” he said. I turned my back to him. “I’d sure like to be a help,” he said, “but right now I got my hands full.”

  I got my hands separated from the kids, and began to rub them with a wet towel. “Now you leave your hands in that water,” I said, and went outside, passed the old man, who was having a confab with another old fool, about the same age. In the drugstore I asked for some cleaning fluid, then I had to ask him to charge it, as I didn’t want to risk putting my hands in my pants.

  “Doin’ a little shoppin’?” the old man said, when I came out. He had pulled one hand free so he could use it to wipe his mouth. As I’ve said, he can’t seem to spit without splashing himself. He followed me back to the shop where he stood at the screen, humphing, while I worked on my fingers with the cleaning fluid. I was so preoccupied I more or less forgot the kids. When I stepped back and looked at Peggy, her head like an Easter egg with a face painted on it, I had to put my hand on the shampoo stand to steady my legs. The boy was a sight too, with his brown face and scalped bumpy nobbin, but there’s nothing in the world like a bald-headed woman or a pretty little girl. I walked to the screen and said, “Do you think you could find me a couple of hats, a couple of straws, or would that be too great a strain on you?”

  “I’m an old man,” he said, “an’ I’ve all but worked myself to death.” he shook his head sadly, then he caught a glimpse of the two kids. Without a word he turned, wiped his hand on his seat, and crossed the street.

  You don’t feel a blow like that right at the time, there’s a wide numb area around it, and you’re inclined to think you’re a good deal tougher than you are. It’s only when you cool down that you see what the damage is. In twelve years I had faced my wife with a nice selection of problems, but nothing in the way of her golden-haired baby with a bald head. I was thinking of this when a tall girl, with a nice rattled way about her, came around the corner, opened the screen, and backed in. She had a three or four weeks old baby in her arms. This little fellow was making a racket like expensive mechanical dolls, or the gadgets they use to make babies cry on the radio. She swooped around a little, looking for Eddie Cahow, and I could hardly get over the feeling that I was in the booth of a radio studio. That’s the way the real thing will strike a good many people nowadays. They won’t eat fresh garden peas till they’ve been frozen or canned.

  “Eddie’s in the back with some kids,” Freddy said, and the girl turned to him, handed him the baby. She held up her arm to look at the damp sleeve of her dress. She was a belle, in a disordered way, and rocked on her Sears & Roebucks pumps quite a bit like Peggy walking around in her mother’s shoes. “You feed him?” Fred said.

  “All you do is feed him,” she said, and took him away, letting him soak her other arm. Fred Purdy let his hands sag, slowly, to rest on his hips. You can judge a man by what he thrills to, whether it’s Humphrey Bogart in a good clean murder, or the feeling in his hands when he passes his first-born back to his wife. They’re both thrills, sensations, and that’s what people seem to like. Just sticking to the idea of the sensation, which is all murder has to stick to, the man with the baby, rather than the blood, on his hands, has the better of it. When a man no longer makes the distinction, and prefers the quick thrill to the long one, something pretty serious, pretty fundamental, has happened to him. It isn’t hard to account for—the hard thing is to admit it. The really hard thing for some men is to admit, in their own hearts, that a good sentiment is just as valid as a bad one. That’s what it comes down to. They’re both just sentiments.

  Nearly fifty years ago Cahow’s shop was a bank, with a lobby at the front where he put his barber chairs, and in the back, behind the grillwork, there was a safety vault. When I was a boy—if I could sit without wiggling—he’d let me stand in the vault, in the dark, with the door closed. That seemed to be where he had gone with my kids. Freddy called, “Oh, Ca-how!” and I saw the vault door swing open, but the old man came into the room alone.

  He grinned at me and said, “Thought they’d like it back there, where it’s cooler,” then he walked over to make eyes at Purdy’s kid. “B-O-Y, Boy!” he said. “Now will you look at that.” He peered over his isinglasses, wiggled his eyebrows up and down. “Gitsy-gitsy-gitsy, twee-twee, gitsy-gitsy-gitsy, ughll-ughll, gotsy.”

  “Doesum likum funny manum?” Fred Purdy said.

  “AHH-ahhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHH!” said Eddie Cahow. “Ah-AHHHHHHHHhhh gitsy-gitsy, gotsy, twee-twee.”

  The screen door slammed and the old man came in with two straw hats. He held the straws between a paper napkin, and another napkin covered his left hand.

  “They’re in the back,” I said, and pointed toward the rear. The old man stood there. “It’s cool back there,” I said

  “Pretty dark, too—” he said. He didn’t seem in any hurry to give them the hats, so I took them, walked through to the back. I opened the vault door and said—

  “Yooo-hoooo?”

  “Yoo-hoo,” said Peggy. I stepped in and felt around over my head for the light. It was red, one of these exit lights with the wire like a trapped glowworm. I could just make out the kids, standing there, holding hands.

  “Here’s a couple nice hats for you,” I said. “Farm hats-for wearing on a farm.” They stood there and let me put them on. They were a little large, but both kids had full Muncy ears. “You can wear a nice farm hat like that anywhere,” I said.

  “Can we wear it inside?” said Peggy.

  “You can wear it anywhere,” I said. “Inside and outside, you can wear a hat like that to bed.” I didn’t think it would hurt them to buck them up a bit. “A real farmer wears it all the time,” I said, “to keep from getting sunburned, sunstroke, and to keep from losing it.” Now I’m not in the habit of talking to the kids like that. We talk to them, as Peg says, as equals, or what she calls little adults, and not a word of any of this baby-talk business. Oddly enough, for some reason, I feel like a bigger sap being adult than I do offering them a fine bill of goods. I have the feeling a fine bill of goods is what they like. “And if I were you,” I said, “inside or outside, I’d keep them on. Tight,” I said, which, from me, is pretty straight talk.

  “OK,” Peggy said, and together we marched into the light.

  The old man was standing near the window, holding Fred Purdy’s kid. The little fellow had stopped yelling, and there was the feeling, the implication, that the old man had had something to do with it. It was his idea. He gave it to you. He was just as dead pan as ever, if that’s what you could call an old fool who was trying to tickle young Purdy’s feet with his moustache. Something about it seemed to tickle the kid. The old man raised his head and gazed absently at the mirror, giving me time, all of us time, to appreciate him. His eyes were blurred, and there was a tight, set line to his lips. It struck me that the old fool somehow fancied himself as a kind of Madonna, and that we had gathered, like so many wise men, to worship him. A manger tableau entitled Grandfather and Son. There we all were, the clean-cut local boy, the farmer’s beautiful unspoiled daughter, the town-character barber, and the old man with the horny hands
of toil. And there I was, knee-deep in the alien corn. The prodigal son with his two bald-headed city-spoiled kids.

  Where did I fit in this picture? I didn’t, that’s the point. I was on the outside—in the control room—looking in. On the one hand I knew that what I saw was unbelievably corny, on the other hand I knew it was one of the finest things I had seen. That ought to tell you quite a bit about me. It told me quite a bit about corn. Corn is the connection between my bottom and the chair. It’s the cane scat Grandmother Osborn stretched between the long, long ago, and what she knew to be the never-never land. The figure in the carpet, if there is a carpet, is corn. Corn, I guess, is the grass that grows wherever the land is—as Whitman put it—and sometimes it grows whether the water is there or not. No, it isn’t the carpet. It’s under the carpet. Corn is the floor.

  I’m prodigal enough, but as I’m still unrepentant I took my two bald-headed kids, their straws propped on their cars, and came out on the street. As we looked pretty silly, we went up the alley and got in the Ford. We’re not accustomed to being together without some kind of talk going on, usually educational, but we sat there without saying a word. I guess we had picked up a thing or two to think about. When I was a boy I did my thinking under the front porch, in the soft, hot dust, or on the small hole in Mr. T. B. Horde’s three-seater privy. From the small hole I had a pretty good view of the town. I could watch the buggies come and go, and on a clear day I’d follow the trains, with their trail of smoke, across the valley to the west. I’d say the privy is the rural chapel, where a man puts his cares in order, or forgets his cares and turns his mind to other things. A good Sears & Roebuck watch, with a fob, or a pair of Monkey Ward green leather shoes. If the watch section happened to be gone a man could reconsider bone-handled knives, ladies’ corsets, or the shadowy teams of horses in their nickel-plated harness, pulling a tassel-fringed gig. Any boy who knew his catalogue—from abdominal belts to zinc—and had a three-seater privy along with it, would find the Arabian Nights, as I found them, pretty dull stuff. What in Arabia could compare with a rubber-tired Irish Mail, a Ranger bike, or your initials on the back of a gold-looking, stem-wind watch? Yours—Carpet or no carpet—for handshelling thirty bushels of popcorn, or by merely subscribing half the people in the county to the Saturday Evening Post. But there were no Sears & Roebuck catalogues on 53rd Street. No privy, with a view of the valley, no unhinged door, no sun on your knees, no slow freights or fast grand-daddy longlegs, no buggies with the whip up, flowering, like a cow’s tail, no prowling cats or curious peering leghorns, no a-loneliness, nothing but the damned tiled privacy. Places to worry, that is, but no place to think. Where did they go, then, two or three million kids? I’ll tell you where they go—where two of them went—they go and hide in a book, which is very elevated and not to be confused with Monkey Ward. They learn to have other silly thoughts instead of their own. When they sense a thought coming on they run for a window, to get rid of it. They run into the living room, brighteyed, and say— “You want to hear about the moron in the bathroom?” and you all put your martinis down, prepare yourself. “Why did he tip-toe past the medicine cabinet?” says your brilliant little girl. You wait, and she says, “Give up?” Then you give up, and she pouts her pretty mouth and waits until her mother has stopped talking. “Because he doesn’t want to wake the sleeping pills,” she says, and nearly everybody laughs, for it really is so funny, and you wonder what the younger generation is coming to. You do, you know, you really do.

  “Is this all one day?” Peggy said.

  “It’s all one day,” I answered, before I had time to think it over, put up my guard. She sighed, like her mother, which meant that she would put up with it. The straw hat was not too good for her ears, and her neck had that raw shaved look, but I had got out of touch with the anxiety I was supposed to feel. I couldn’t keep my mind on the problem of her head. Her mother would drop dead, we would bury her, and that would be that. Before she died I would like to tell her—as formal announcements are read on the gallows—that shaving her head had done her darling a good deal of good. There she sat, her pretty little mouth more or less shut. The only reason she ever shut that mouth was to show you her pretty little pout, which everyone thought made her so kissable. Just before we left she came home with the verse—

  I’m a sweet little girl

  And I’ve got a cute figger

  But stay away boys

  Till I get a little bigger.

  That made me nearly sick, but I was ashamed to mention the fact. After all, wasn’t that the facts of life? Well, bygod, there are some other facts, one of them being that the old man would have tarred my bottom if I had come home with that. My little soul would have been bruised—which is to say the experience would have meant something—as distinguished from a nice ducky chat on the subject of good taste. All this gives a smart kid is a nice sense for the power of dialectics, a flare for public dogma, and private anarchy.

  “Is Grandpa coming?” Bobby said.

  “If I was him, I’d wait till it was dark,” I said. “I’d be ashamed of two kids who didn’t know what flypaper was.” They were.

  “Does he know what DDT is?” Peggy said.

  “He knows it’s airsuds,” I said, “and he knows enough not to put it in his hair, or get his hands into it. Furthermore—” I said, feeling my oats, “if I was you I’d learn to stop, look, and listen, to keep my mouth shut, and my new farmer’s hat tight on my head.”

  Maybe that’s the first time I ever offered them a real piece of advice. It was quite an experience, I could see, for all of us.

  The old man stopped on the corner to take another swallow of water, gossip a bit, and pick at the bits of napkin stuck to his hands. Then he mosied along under the trees, got into the car. Maybe he’d forgotten about the kids as he stopped to stare at them and their hats. Then he said, “Well, I guess we got our hairs cut all right, didn’t we?” They nodded. He switched on the magneto, kicked at the starter, and we were off. As we rattled on the tracks he said, “Dang, looks like I forgot Clara’s flour.”

  “That depended on the grain,” I said. “Didn’t it?”

  “Your daddy’s an awful smart man,” he said. “Seems to me he’s one of the smartest men we seen.” We puttered along and he said, “Thinkin’ of smart men makes me think of Verne. You hear from Verne?”

  “No—” I said, “how is he?”

  “What I’m askin’ you,” the old man said. Then he went on, “My, he was a rascal.” He wagged his head. “That boy was full of devilment.”

  “I liked him,” I said.

  “Who said I didn’t like him?” He switched the match he was chewing to the other side. “He was just about as nice a rascal as you’d expect to find.” He spit out the match. “Never forget him walkin’ along, just as nice as you please, in that Ku-Klux business, the band a-wheezin’ an’ a-tootin’ and him marchin’ as if it was just for him.”

  “Ku-Klux—” I said, “was he a Ku-Kluxer?”

  “Who said anything about him bein’ a Ku-Kluxer? Said he liked to march. Guess he was just beside himself when he heard a band.”

  “Didn’t they have to wear hoods, or something?” I said.

  “Sheet over his head like a kid, with two little round holes for his eyes. Thinks I, it was as nice a Halloween suit as I ever seen.”

  As a kid I thought a lot of Verne, as he was the first black sheep in the family—came back from the War with a strange way of rolling his eyes. He spent a good deal of time sitting on park benches, smoking cigars, and making neat little piles of gold coins on lunch room counters.

  “When you goin’ to ask me,” the old man said, “how it was we knew it was Verne?”

  “I was just getting to it,” I said.

  “Maybe you remember how dogs was always so attached to him? Don’t think he owned a dog, but there was a little dog, black-spotted little bitch, she was, and so attached to him she got so she liked to parade herself. There he was, just a-paradin
’ along, an’ right at his heels was that dam dog. Wasn’t a man in town didn’t know just whose dog it was.”

  “What was the dog’s name?” Peggy said.

  “His name was Moses,” said the old man. That was all. “Yes sir,” he said. “Moses was that dog’s name.”

  There was another Ford in the yard when we turned in. We made a quick pass over the harrow, trimmed the yard side of the hedge, clipped the tails of two leghorns, and stopped astride a hollow log trough. As the motor died he said, “Just remembered I forgot somethin’ else,” but without saying what, he backed out of the scat, went off with the kids. Under the big elm near the house, where we had played croquet every Sunday, the women had set up a picnic table, covered the food with cheese cloth. I could see the chill on a glass pitcher of pale lemonade. When I was a kid we picnicked at the fair grounds, just south of Battle Creek, and sometimes as many as fifty Muncys would be there. Clara always made the pies. As she had to make them a week in advance there was always a green mould on them by Sunday, and it was my job to dampen a rag, wipe it off. Nobody else seemed to mind, but I think it was there that I got a preference for cake over pie. Mother Cropper’s cake had been baked the night before. I was thinking of that when I walked up and stood alongside the table, waving my hand at the army of flies. I didn’t see the old lady at all. I could hear the women in the kitchen, and I more or less took it for granted they were all there, fussing around, and that I was alone. Mother Cropper, as Clara called her, was in the plush satin platform rocker, with a Capper’s Weekly spread over her head, to keep off the flies. The spotted cat in her lap was asleep. She had one hand on the cat, and the first thing I thought of was some kind of lizard, or snapping turtle, half concealed by a rock. On the table beside her was her shoe box, with a small pack of letters, tied with a string, a reading lens, a glass egg for darning, and a bag of horehound drops. Also several postcards, all of them featuring some picture of cats. She was asleep when I first saw her, but when I turned from the shoe box her blurred eyes were open, blinking, and she had picked up her cane. “She can’t see,” Clara had said, “so don’t expect her to recognize you.”