House of Earth

by Woody Guthrie

  “And so? What has Adam and Eve got to do with us out here on this dried-up and blown-away wheat farm living like a couple of Egypt’s slaves?”

  “I’m just about to decide that th’ Lord was dead wrong about what he done to poor old Adam an’ Eve. I’m just a-rollin’ it over in my mind. But, you know, I swear to God an’ little channel cats, Honey, th’ more we do that, th’ closer to heaven I get. Of course, now, that was a mighty long time back, back when God chased ’em out. I just wonder. You reckon it felt as good an’ tasted as good then as it does nowadays?”

  “I’m positive that you will just have to go up there in the roost and get down on your hands and knees and ask God himself about that. I wouldn’t know, I’m sure,” she said. “If it’s like this old house here, it has gotten worse, instead of better, since the year of One.”

  “Could be that the houses has got worse. But I’m fairly sure that th’ juicin’s got lots better.” There was a slow, joking drawl in his speech. “Say. Lady. It’s a good thing that you dropped your dress down just when you did. Know it?”

  “What’s grazing through your vulgar mind now? Mister Hamlin?” As she talked to him, she walked up and down the yard, taking an armful of clothes off the line. She felt of a dish towel that hung on a nail on the wall to see if it had dried since she put it there. “Pray tell?”

  “I could see old Grampaw Hamlin’s old eyes just a firin’ and a blazin’ all of th’ way from his front porch over acrost th’ field, an’ then acrost th’ road, an’ then away up over th’ mailbox, an’ right on up acrost that fence, an’ right up to where you was a standin’ there with your dress all snatched up.” Tike took a seat on the old cellar door that slanted from the ground up to the top of its low pile of dirt that covered the cellar over. “Yes sir. I could see his old eyes just a blazin’ blue dynamite.”

  “I will certainly look forward to the day when something takes place around this country which will cause your mind to think above your belly. I’m not at all certain just what sort of an event could bring that about, but something has got to, before you run yourself completely screw loose on the subject of naked skin. As far as old Grandpa Hamlin is concerned, and his old eyes seeing my naked rear all the way across his farm and that road and our farm, well, I’m not the least ounce worried. He has stood in the breeze over yonder and washed his legs and his belly clean just as much, just as often, maybe a lot oftener, than we ever did. So what does that add up to? Pooh.” She walked to the west screen door and tossed her armful of clothes in onto the seat of a chair.

  “Adds up to Grampaw a pretty clean old crotch, I reckon.” Tike spit down onto the ground and watched it roll up into a small dusty ball. “Must be clean. I cain’t smell it from over here. Can you?”

  “No.” The screen slammed shut with a rattle that shook the entire house. “Dern it. I keep forgetting that you put that big tight spring on that door. I jerks the thing shut so hard I fear that the whole edifice will just collapse.” As she said the last word, collapse, she made a rolling motion of her arms in the air.

  “Don’t talk so loud. You’ll shake th’ damn shack down.” Tike laughed as he picked at his warty hand and wiped the blood down against the rotten cellar door. “Take it easy.”

  “You’re certainly taking it easy over there. You don’t ever let yourself get mad enough to pitch in and do some hard honest work, do you?” She held her hands on her hips as she walked past him to put her clothesline pole back in its place. “I’d sure like to see something come along that would just rouse you up right good and fighting mad. I’d get some work out of you then.”

  And Tike smeared wart blood down across his thumb and said, “I ain’t no fighter, Lady, I’m a hay layer.”

  “If you don’t jump yourself a rabbit from up there and help me to do this work, you never will roll in any of your old hay with me for your mattress anymore.”

  “Sounds threatenin’.” He leaned on his elbow and blinked his eyes across the pasture to the west.

  “What was that two-dollar crack?” She stood at his side with her fists doubled up. “Mister?”

  “I was just remarkin’ that this here weather looks awful threatenin’. Threatenin’.” He raised up his arms to guard his face as though he expected her to slap his ears.

  “I know you like a book, Tike Hamlin. You think that I am just kidding with you? You just wait till tonight. In bed.”

  “You ain’t got nothing I’d want in my bed.”

  “You? What? Allll right, sir, mister, just allll right for you. You just wait till night comes. I know you better than you know your own self. I know just exactly what you will say. I already know it. I don’t even have to use my brain to know you better than I know my own name. I can read your old empty head a whole lot easier than I can read a first-grade reader.”

  “I got a hell of a lot pertier gal than you that I meet ever’ day right there in that cowshed. I was down there with ’er less than an hour ago. You cain’t threaten me with your dang old wore-out threats. Git. Beat it. Go peddle your manure.” He raised up and stood on his feet at her back.

  “Of all the men that I could have married. And to think that I had to pick you out of them all.” She shook her head and turned away from him as he made a step to stand in front of her. Each step that he took, she turned away. He was always at her back. She would not look him in the face. She acted like she was madder than she really was. “I picked you. You.”

  Tike put his arms around her and held the nipples of her breasts again in the palms of his hands. He bit the skin of her neck from behind as he hugged her close and said, “Yeahh. Gee. Just think, Hon. If you’d a-married somebody else ’sides me, you coulda had a whole six hundred an’ forty acres of th’ best land in this whole country with a cement house an’ all a th’ fancy trimmin’s on it. Like your paw wanted. I many times just stand an’ wonder, wonder why you’re a-standin’ here by this ole rotting pile of nothin’ with me fer a husban’. Know?”

  “I’m standing right here, here. Here. Simply just because I am not standing anywhere else! You silly idiot! You are my husband because I gave that old clerk two dollars and a half of our hard-earned money to marry us! And I’m standing here looking at this old rotten fell-down house because, well, because it’s just about the funniest and the most miserable little old thing that I ever did lay my two eyes on! It’s lots funnier to me than those old funny papers I’m pasting up on the walls inside! And as for my old rich moneybags daddy, well, he can just pass out his farms and his good houses to the rest of his young’uns that will kneel down in front of him and do what he says. He’ll do their thinking, and their eating, and their breathing, and their sleeping for them for all of the rest of the days of their lives, and he’ll find their right mate for them and go to bed for them and open up their legs for them and show them everything. And, and, and. Oh. Well. Shut up. That is a silly question to ask a body anyhow. What I’m mainly wondering is about me and you, us, Tike. How much longer are we going to be caught here in this old jail, anyway?” Her lips touched his arm that was around her.

  The sun against the south wall by them was warm, and a cream can made a loud noise expanding in the heat. Thirsty cattle bawled on their trail to the barn. A hen and a rooster rustled under the floor. Several hogs grunted and wallowed in their cool places under the house also. A vibration was set up in the air that shook the wall and caused a thimbleful of powdery rosin, rotten wood dust, to sift from under a window board and down on top of an iron cream can. They gritted their teeth in a look of quick and deathly hate as the sound of the falling wood dust struck their ears. Their lips were so tight against their teeth that no living blood could flow, and in the last few rays of the sundown their faces took on a look of pale, fighting bitterness.

  II

  TERMITES

  Ella May started to walk into the house. She held her head down, and pulled Tike along by his hand. She saw loose feathers, fine, whipped straw and grass seeds, wheat hulls, and l
ow dust blow under their feet. She smiled and he smiled. On each face it was a smile that covered up a hurt. The whole farm had a move on today, and as they walked, so slowly, they had to pick out their steps ahead of them, thinking. The house moved along in their eyes as they kept their heads down. It was a bright day. Yes. Away to the north, across the 66 Highway a mile away, on out across Ben Lomond’s hog pastures, on for several miles over the black gumbo wheat lands, on to the north toward the upper north plains, away on to the smoky horizon of the carbon black plants, over and above all of this were the blue sky and light clouds of a pretty day. And down to the south, over wheat lands as flat as a floor, as level as a yardstick, and to the Cap Rock cliffs that fell down into the sandy cotton farms around Clarendon, it was a clear day.

  Tike and Ella May had ridden the fast bareback ponies all up and down the Cap Rock cliffs a hundred, a thousand times. They had gone out on foot and walked the hot and the cold miles in every sort of weather, up, down, in, over, under, and across the canyons, washes, ditches, gullies. Holding hands together, they had kicked their feet and skinned their shoes against the flat sandrocks, round flints, and against the roots and trunks of the ironwood bushes, the ironweeds, and the several dozen kinds of cactus and stickers that carry daggers and thorns tipped and dipped in nature’s stinging poison. Together they had held their hands against their ears and felt the high wind pull at their hair as the fast-rolling tumbleweeds bounced and jumped out across the flats and they had yelled, “Look at that old tumbleweed! Watch ’er go! Watch it! Watch it roll and jump off from that cliff!”

  And the tumbleweeds always lit somewhere down below, somewhere down “on some cotton farmer’s place,” as Tike put it. “When old mama nature wants to sweep our good old upper plains off real good and clean, she always uses those lower plains as a place to sweep her trash in!”

  And Ella May would laugh. She always laughed. She laughed in a way that was easy for her. She laughed best, most times, when the crops, the winds, the debts, the worries, the fears and doubts of the world, splashed their highest. This laugh was not a laugh that made fun of a slim lady for being slim, a fat lady for being fat, or an ugly person for being ugly, it was not a laugh of this kind, not of the kind that makes fun of you because you are you. It came across her face, in her throat, from her stomach, her whole body at the same time, and she had a way of doing it in such an easy manner that the whole country just called it “Ella May’s laugh.” Other ones tried to add a little bit onto it, and said, “There’s that Ella May flying in the wind again.” “Ella May’s ticklebox has blowed over.” “Things must be pretty tough over at her house, she’s laughing again.” As a little girl, she had used her voice to make herself heard in the face and teeth of high hard winds, sand, gravel, straw, papers, all sorts of dry, brittle, noisy things that fill the air with loud sounds as they get taken into the winds of the plains. More than any kind of a laugh, it was a way that she had of raising, lifting her voice, and saying, “Whooooo,” or “Wheeee,” or “Tiiiikkkee!” Or “Graaannn’paw!” Or “Looookkkyy!” She always shouted out this first word, whatever it was, that she was thinking about, or if she was working all alone with the livestock, chickens, or the tractor, or the harvesting, and then the laugh came, after that, she would all at once remember that other people had heard her, and like she was, in a way, and in the same breath, making a little bit of fun of her own self, and all of her earthly sorrows in one breath. People for a mile on the windward side of her could hear her on her first few words and they strained their ears to hear what was coming next, but naturally they couldn’t catch what it was.

  As they walked up to the front door on the east, Tike’s eyes fell down across the top of the old flat sandstone that had been carried up from the canyons. He laughed in his way. A way that was very different from Ella May’s. His throat simply filled with a low kind of chuckle that echoed all through his lungs and body. He always laughed soft as the lint on the straw, quiet as the skin on the new moon, easier than Ella May, and never as loud, unless he was shouting at her across the yard, or at a friend in town across one of the streets. His face came to life and showed his whole life on it as he laughed, but he just seemed to be laughing inside his own self right back at his own misery. He looked down at the old flat stone steps, the old sandy rock, and said, “And this, Elly, ah, this is, I guess, what you can call our first stepstone to something real.”

  She put one foot on the top of the rock and stepped up into the door, and grunted, “Whew. I hope that something we do is a stepping stone to something real.” Her eyes had a young, fiery wildness in them as they looked around the room in hate. The sound of her teeth gritting together came to Tike’s ear as he walked in behind her.

  “Not very much to look at, is it?” was all that he could say as he fell down on his stomach across their bed. It seemed to his nose that the powdery cloud of dust came up out of the patchwork quilt. He made a snorting sound with his lips and nose.

  And Ella May had already learned long before now what was in the thoughts of Tike Hamlin every time that his mouth and nose made this nervous snorting sound. He was mad. Sore. He was getting fed up and disgusted with the whole thing. Tike Hamlin was a man to fight, and she knew that this snort of his meant that he was mad enough, angry enough, and nervous enough to fight. Her brain boiled as she thought:

  “But. Fight what? Fight who? Fight where? When? The wind, or the rain? Fight the moon and the stars? Rip off his clothes and fight the seasons and the clouds? Fight the wind and fight the dust because it came at the wrong time, never at the right time? Fight the Sixty-Six Highway over yonder because it ran in the wrong directions? Go and fight everybody at the Star Route school? Fight all of the neighbors around? Fight the hogs and dogs, chickens, for loafing around under the house? Fight the rooster for chasing after the hen? Fight the old boar hog because he chased and rooted and bit the little baby pigs? Fight the turkey hen because she flew too high up on top of the windmill platform and then screamed like an idiot till she nearly drove the whole farm crazy? Fight what? Fight who? When? Where? Fight the people that come out across the yard to collect all kinds of silly debts? Go fight the state capitol, the city hall, the public toilet? What?” It was all of this. It was more than this. It was something that was so big that it was hard for words to say, and it was something that was mixed up and messed up in every little job that their fingers touched upon, each little step their feet had to take, something that was a burning pain in every chore and every job around the farm, something, something, it was something so little, so little, that it was in everything they went about. And it was just because Tike was filled with all these feelings that Ella May almost smiled when he snorted a few more times. She lifted her face up toward the ceiling as she slipped her dress up over her head, and laid it down over the back of a cane-bottom chair. In her nose she felt the burn, the little burn, that faraway, dim and distant little burn that the dust from the house had always caused her. She took a deep breath. She felt her tears washing away all of the eye pencil out of her eyebrows. She tried to wipe these away to hide them from Tike on the bed, but the ends of her fingers only smeared the eye shadow on her cheeks, and made her look hollow-cheeked, skinny, scary, something like the shadow on a dried skull just at sundown in the colors.

  “Elly.” Tike pushed his nose and mouth down hard against the bedclothes. “Hon.”

  “What?” she answered him with her back turned. She kicked her shoes off as easily as she could without disturbing what Tike was about to say. “Huh?”

  “Somethin’ I got to tell. Eatin’ my whole guts out. I got to tell it, tell it, even if you kill me for it. Even if you take up a chopping axe and run me clean off of the place.” His hands clawed into the covers on the mattress and the springs squeaked like a canary bird caught in a corner. “I’m going nuts. Bats. Just can’t keep it to myself no longer.”

  Ella put her arms and head through the collar of a clean blue cotton dress with round white dots all
over it, and as she pulled the cloth down at the bottom and buttoned two buttons at her waist, she answered, “We never did make a practice of keeping things a secret from one another, did we, Mister?”

  “No, but.”

  “But what? Sir?”

  “This is bad. Mean. Something as big as all of our other worries put together. Something that’s bigger than that, even.” Tike pounded the bed with the palm of his hand, and pulled at his hair with his other five fingers. “Even worse than all of them.”

  Ella stood and looked at the wallpaper, its cracks, rips, dust, and cobwebs that no earthly woman could ever clean or hope to clean as fast as they came along. Her back was still turned to Tike. “Yes …?”

  “You know, you remember last year.”

  “Yes. What about last year?”

  “Well. Last year we rented this six hundred acres, didn’t we?”

  “Yes …”

  “And we paid down the cash money for it, didn’t we?” A hot kind of torture made him sound like he was badly embarrassed.

  “Yes.” Her voice rasped, barely above a dry whisper. She felt the dust, dirt, filth, of the whole house in her mouth as she rubbed her face with both hands and swayed on her feet.

  “Hon. It’s not me, my own self, that I’m worried about, or even thinking about. It’s not me. I have always seen the hard side, and lived on the dirty side, and the rotten side of things; but you’ve not. You’ve not ever been any lower down than to be the daughter of a big man that owns lots of land and lots of farms, and you’ve always lived in a big stone twelve-room house, and had at least a few of the good things in this old world. You’re used to them. Your mind and your plans and your thoughts and your hopes, everything about you has always been, well, sort of, sort of way up the ladder above me. I remember how I wanted to be a big man like your dad all my life, and how I itched and craved and burned inside me to be a big owner, or a big man, a big manager, a foreman, a boss of some kind, some kind or another over a big stretch of land just as far in every direction as my eyes could see. But I never was anything, nothing more than just the old hardworking son of, well, a family of folks that lost their land to your very father, that was several years ago.”