“Fuckin’.” Tike laughed again.
She half shut her eyes to get a good close look at his face and said, “Your mind is certainly on sex today.”
“Ever’day.”
“Every single sensible thing that I’ve said here about your house of earth and your land to build it on, you’ve brought sex into it.”
“What do you think I want a house an’ a piece of land for, to concentrate in?”
“Don’t your mind ever think about anything else except just getting a piece of lay?”
“Not that I recollect.”
“How long has your mind been running thisaway?”
“’Fore I learnt how to walk.”
“Silly.”
“Me silly? How come?”
“Oh.” She looked at him. “I don’t know. I guess you were just born sort of silly. How come you to be born so silly, anyhow? Tikey?”
“How come you to be born so perty? Lady?” Inside his overalls Tike felt the movement of his penis as it grew long and hard. In the way he was sitting there was not room enough for his penis to become stiff. His clothing caused it to bend in the middle in a way that dealt him a throbbing pain. He stood up on the ground and spread his legs apart. He reached inside his overalls with his fingers and put it in an upright position and sighed a breath of comfort. His blood ran warmer and the whole world seemed to be flying from under his feet. His old feeling was coming over him, and his eyes looked around the yard for something to say to Ella May.
She stood up and looked down at the ground where she had been sitting. She picked up the Department of Agriculture book. Her eyes watched Tike as he held his hand inside his overalls. She saw his lips tremble and heard him inhale a deep lungful of air. “What have you caught in there, Tikey, a frog?”
“Snake,” Tike said. “Serpent.”
“You seem to be having quite a scuffle.”
“Fight ’im day an’ night.”
“And he seems to be getting just a little the best of it from what I can see.” She watched him from the corner of her eye.
He was a moment making his reply. He took a step forward and caught hold of her hand. She could measure the heat of his desire by the moisture in the palm of his hand. He tugged at her slow and easy and stepped backward in the path of the cow barn. “Psssst. Lady. Psst. Lady. Wanta see somethin’? Huh?”
“What are you trying to do to me? Mister?” She pulled back until she had spoken, then she gave in and walked along. “Will you please state?”
“Shh. Gonna show you somethin’.”
“Something? Something what?”
“Shh. Just somethin’.” It was funny to her to see him try to creep along without making any noise, when his heavy work shoes made such a grinding and a crushing sound under the soles that he could be heard all over the ranch. “Shh. C’mon.”
And now, what would it be? What on the farm hadn’t he already shown her, yes, in this very same way. What would it be? Would it be a snake trying to swallow a lizard or a lizard swallowing a frog? A nest of cliff hornets that he had captured by plugging up the door to their nest with a corncob? Had he dragged in some more big bones and teeth of the prehistoric reptiles? Would he show her another rib or a shin or a patch of skin to some mummy of a wayfaring ancestor? Three flies doctoring a dead one back to life by licking him with their tongues? Ants rubbing some lice with their whiskers to cause them to have orgasms and to burst out into a sweat of pure honey? A horned toad with his belly full of red ants? Eagle feathers tied together with a string of human skin? A red-and-white marble that he had found? A die with no spots? Maybe just an old empty shoe full of little baby mice. A bumblebee tied to a spool of black thread. What? Of all the places on a six-hundred-acre farm, why had he piled his relics so near and so close to the hay in the cowshed?
“Tell me what it is!” She smelled the syrup odor of cattle cake, manure, and the sweeter smell of the juicy sap in the stems of the hay and the grass. “Tike!”
There was kind of a sad spirit about the little cowshed. It was a magnetic electricity that was there in the stalls, the feed boxes, the V-shaped mangers filled with dry cobs, corn shucks, and hay. It was the radio waves of their old memories. These waves vibrated, danced, and shone in all the wood braces, boards, railings, props, and in the planks and in the shingles. And the smell was not just a bittersweet thing that came to their nostrils. No, the smells brought with them older pictures, and the pictures carried with them the smells, the words, things done in days that some say are gone. The boards were all worn glassy slick by the hair and by the warm skin of cattle that followed crooked paths here just to know the pleasure of Tike and Ella May’s hands on their tits. Still, Ella May’s eyes told her a tale and a story of sad parting as she looked at the fireball sun going down and followed its rays down to where they struck against a smooth round cedar post that helped to hold up the small roof. A hot kind of grief moved in her. She sat there on a bale of hay where Tike had placed her. She felt her memories come through her. She felt a heavy weight of tired weariness come over her. Her first love of life was born in the three walls around her here. Tike had led her here to cover her with the loose hay, loose seeds, loose kisses of his own sort. They had made their separate troubles one trouble here, and all of their little stray scattered desires burned into one single light of craving here. These boards, these nails, pieces of long wire, hay, grain, and manure, all of this was one fiery match that lit the wick of their lamp. Every part and particle of the barn was a part of the one. Every single inch of it had its unknown name. And by the fire of their lamp they could see and feel around the world.
And it did seem to Ella May that her eyes strained to try to follow the rays from the sun around the world. She leaned back against a higher bale of hay and lifted her breasts in her own hands, took a deep breath, let her lips fall apart, and wished that she could see every little hair on every little body in the whole big wide world, like the lamp of the sun does. Like the breath of the wind does. Like the waters wash them all. Her wind went out and over and across and in and around and through the whole farm, and she felt the hurts, aches, pains, sickness, and the misery and all of the gladness of all the things around her. And she felt the skin of her breasts with her hands and her skin felt hot. And there was a layer of sweat over all of her. She moved her heel up and down inside her work shoe and felt the blistered callus rub against the leather. She turned her feet over to the side and pushed down hard against the straw on the dirt floor, and eased her feet out of the shoes. She lay her head back and spread her knees apart. The stir of the breeze felt good against her feet and thighs.
“I cain’t help it when I get to feeling this way, Lady,” he told her through her hair as he stood at her back. “I don’t know, maybe it’s just because I’m a man, or something.”
“Or something.” She put her hand over her shoulder and took hold of his fingers. “Did I ask you to try to help it?”
“No.”
“Grandma used to tell us girls that a woman feels seven times as much passion as a man. But I don’t believe that. I think that you feel this way every time I do, and that I feel it every time you do. I don’t know how to tell you how I feel. I don’t think any woman can tell a man how she feels. She could talk her head off and never say it. Tike, did you take your shirt off? Is that your skin I feel? And your overalls, too? And your jumper? You’ll take down deathly sick.” She stood up and looked at him.
“Used them here for a bed.” He stood before her naked and pointed down.
“You’ll freeze.”
“Sun’s warm. Warm enough. I ain’t cold. But I could stand just a little bit of your huggin’ if you got some to spare.”
She moved against him. He put his arms around her. She held him as she kissed the hairs on his chest and wiggled the end of her nose against his neck. The heat of their bodies soaked her dress with sweat as they stood and kissed. He kissed her eyes, ears, and her hair, the sides of her nose, and down her nec
k. He put his lips to her lips and she sucked his tongue. She closed her eyes and stood on tiptoe and all she felt was the tip end of his tongue pushing around against her teeth. With one hand he combed his fingers through her hair. With the other hand he rubbed the muscles of her back, shoulder blades, and squeezed her hips. They did not know how long they stood and kissed.
She felt the long hot shape of his penis pressed tight between their stomachs. As she moved her hips from side to side in a slow easy roll she felt his penis grow even warmer and longer. He touched the tip of his tongue to each of her teeth, one at a time and felt the vacant gums in two places where her teeth were out. He moved his tongue over the upper part of her mouth and as he did so he filled his mouth with saliva that she sucked into her mouth and swallowed.
They let themselves fall down onto Tike’s clothes on the hay and kept their lips together for several more minutes. Tike kissed her across the shoulders and the skin of her arms. He touched his tongue to the nipples of her breasts and saw them stand up in the light of the sun. “Is little baby getting his titty milk?” she tried to tease him.
“Milk an’ honey.” He spoke with her left nipple between his lips. “This one’s milk. This one’s honey. This one’s milk. This one’s honey.” He sucked each nipple, the right, and the left, as he talked against her skin.
“Isn’t little Tikey Baby ashamed of himself to throw his mama down here on this old pile of hay just to get his dinner?” She tried to speak in a serious tone, but he held his ear against her heart, and heard her laugh under her breath. He heard a deep gurgling sound somewhere inside her, and the splashing about of waters.
“No.” He used baby talk. “Itty Tikey ain’ty fwaidy.”
Her stomach bounced when she laughed. He felt the muscles of her whole body jerk.
Then he spoke again. “Itty Tikey notty shamey.”
“No? Mmm?”
“You got more water an’ stuff splashin’ aroun’ inside of you than I could suck out in fifty years of hard pullin’! Quit! Shut up. Quit teasin’ me!” He pushed his mouth down harder against her breast and shook his head like a bashful kid. And then he got still and quiet and asked her, “’Smatter? ’Fraid you’ll run dry? You got more joosey magoosey in these tits of yours here than any of our old milk cows.”
“Tike.”
“Yeah.”
“Just hold me. Mmm. That’s it. That’s it. Be my cover. Ohhh. That’s fine. Such a nice warm cover. You’re just about the best blanket I ever had. Hold close, close, close. And for a long, long, long time. I just want to lay here and think. And think. And then think some more.” She opened her legs and spread her knees apart while he moved and laid on her, then she closed her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck. “When you suck my nipples, Tikey, and get them all wet with your spit, and the wind blows on them, they, they, I don’t know, they get real cold and hurt. This is warmer. Gooder this way.”
“What you want to lay here and think about, Lady?” Tike moved his hips and penis against the hair between her legs.
“Just everything.” She kissed his ear, then let her head fall back and her eyes move about the whole cowshed. “Just sort of about this whole big world so full of hard times, so full of troubles, so full of fun, with a little red fence around it.”
“I wish you’d think up some kind of a way to get us a piece of nice good farmin’ land, with an adobe house on it, an’ a big adobe fence all around it.”
“There’s not but one way. And that is to just keep on working and fighting and fighting and working, and then to work and to save and to save and to fight some more,” she said.
“Fight who?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I’m not just positive that I know. But I think it’s mainly these landlords,” she told him.
“Guys that keep us in debt up to our ass all our life.”
Tike moved against her an inch closer, then he moved away from her for a moment to move his right hand down to feel the hair between her legs. He squeezed and pushed and moved his fingers among the hair.
And she said, “There you go saying bad words again.”
“Goshamighty, woman, you mean to say that ass is a bad word?”
“It’s sure not a nicey-nice one.”
“Yeah. But ever’body’s got an ass. It’s just your rump. Your fanny. What you’re laying on right now.”
Ella did not laugh, sigh, giggle, nor answer right at that moment. She laid her arms back on the hay above her head and held her eyes shut and her face to one side. She bit her bottom lip soft and easy, then her mouth fell open and her lips were damp and wide apart.
The picture of her face, her eyelids, hair, forehead, ears, cheeks, chin, was one of almost complete peace and comfort. Tike saw a trace, a tiny trace, but a trace of ache, pain, and misery there as she licked her lips and breathed. A feeling came over him. A feeling that had always come over him when he saw her look this way. It was a feeling of love, yet a feeling of fight. A love that was made out of fight, the fight that he would fight if any living human hurt or harmed or even spoke low-down or bad words about his Lady. And for a good long time he seemed to get a higher view, somehow, of their life together, their life on this gumbo land in this shack, and even the land and the shack and their cowshed he felt did not really belong to them. No. It all belonged to a man that had never set foot on it. Belonged to somebody that did not give a damn about it. Belonged to someone that didn’t care about the feelings of their cowshed. Somebody somewhere that did not know the fiery seeds of words and of tears and of passions, hopes, split here on this one spot of the earth. Belonged to somebody who did not think that these people were able to think. Belonged to somebody who had their names wrote down on his money list, his sucker list. Belonged to somebody who does not know how quick we can get together and just how fast we can fight. Belongs to a man or a woman somewhere that don’t even know that we’re down here alive. It belongs to a disease that is the worst cancer on the face of this country, and that cancer goes hand in hand with Ku Klux, Jim Crow, and the doctrine and the gospel of race hate, and that disease is the system of slavery known as sharecropping.
Not all of this came into Tike’s brain in these exact same words. No. Not all of it. A feeling came over him like one he’d had when he was a boy, and just about every day or so since then. It is the world’s hardest feeling to say in words, because it is not a feeling of words alone, words only. It is an actual vision. It is a scientific fact, and all of the experts of the brain and of the mind know it very well. It is not a spirit hallucination, nor a vision based on superstition, hoodoo, voodoo, witchcraft, hocus-pocus, nor the world of heaven beyond.
It happened at all times when all Tike’s hopes, wants, cravings, and troubles, accidentally or all on purpose, all came together in one solitary, single thought, usually and quite naturally his one single thought was about the person on earth that he loved most. It had been a dozen girls at the farms and the ranches around. It had come when friends and relatives from towns and from other farms brought their children out for a visit. It had happened when he was thinking about his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters. He had had it a hundred times or more while he was going with Ella May, and he had felt it even plainer, more real, since he had been married to her. The sight of her doing her work about the place would cause him to fall into his vision. When she was away at town or at some of the neighboring farms he thought about her so plain that everything in his world came to him at the same instant. He actually saw a living thread of connection between every thought that he had ever thought, everything that had ever happened to him, and every cell in his brain, every memory, was very plainly connected up one with the other, and another with that, and so on.
The feeling was, roughly, then, that if all of these separated memories, thoughts, ideas, happenings, were all just the one Tike Hamlin, well, then, all of the things around him—house, barn, the iron water tank, the windmill, little henhouse, the old Ryckzyck shack, t
he whole farm, the whole ranch—they were a part of him, the same as an egg from the farm went into his mouth and down his throat and was a part of him.
Religious people, the brush arbor shouters, the holy rollers on their hay, the spiritualists in their trances, the Christian Scientists hunting for their oneness with all things, they would have given the feeling some kind of name and gone around about the country preaching the thing to others. Tike did not look at his feelings nor the ramblings of his brain, nor the work of his hands, as anything to be bought, sold, or preached or taught to others. Maybe it was a mark against him that he did not spread nor share his knowledge with the folks that had lost their hold on this feeling, but his excuse was that he just did not see nor realize nor believe that they were really lost, and he also believed that if somebody did choose to be lost, lost to their own self, lost to the world about them, then all of the hunting and searching that he could do would not help one ounce to find them.
He believed and said, “You help a hand to find a job of work that it likes to do, and that hand will find its own self.”
He closed his eyes. He kissed, then sucked the tips of Ella May’s ears. He kissed her left eye, then her right eye, then down along her nose, then he kissed each corner of her mouth. As he took a lungful of air into his mouth and nose, he held her bottom lip between his teeth and smelled the hay and the barn. He felt a slick juice on the fingers of his hand between her legs, and as she moved her face from side to side and her heels and toes dug into the hay, his kisses turned into little soft, easy bites that nipped her neck and her armpits, her breasts, her stomach, and her whole body.
“Know what kind of a kiss this is here, down across your belly?” he asked her.
“I can’t guess,” she said. “What kind?”
“Shotgun kiss.”
“Why do you call it a shotgun kiss?”
“’Cause. It spreads out all over everywhere, an’ it gets ever’thing in th’ brush.”
House of Earth Page 5