“And? What about right now? Listen! Mister Tike Hamlin!” She turned around and stamped her feet down against the floor and yelled out in a fit of temper, “If you’re going to start throwing my old rich daddy at me anymore, I’m just going to walk right out that door and I’ll stay gone! I’m not going to stand here every day of my life and hear no man of mine whimper and moan and pull all of his hair out and weep both of his eyes out just because I happen to have a father that owns a lot of farms! Yes! He used every trick of money to get your folks’ farm away from them! Just like he used those same tricks to get a dozen other people off their farms! Or to make renters out of them! I already know all of this side of my life ten thousand times better than you, Tike Hamlin, ever will or ever could, even if you beat your brains smack out against that windmill yonder, or this bedpost here every day of your life! For the next thousand years! I kept his books and his dollars and his pennies and his debts and his interests and his mortgages, every nickel, every rotten cent of it, in and out, in and out, for six of the best years of my life! Don’t you lay there like a baby and cry to me about my old rich daddy! Don’t try to tell me where I ought to live! Nor how! Nor anything more about it! For God’s sake! For Christ’s sake! For my sake and for your sake! Tike. You say one more word about me and my family busting up, and I swear to you that I’ll walk right out that door there! And you’ll never see hide nor hair of me in your whole life again!” Her voice broke into a hot, broken scream as she swung her hands in the room, and she breathed hard to try to keep from crying. “God!” She held both of her hands flat against the wallpaper and held her wet cheek against her knuckles as she felt her eyebrow shadow run worse than ever.
Tike had quieted down a bit. He spoke a bit softer, and his words had the sound of coming through a pile of cotton. “It’s bad to be a dirt renter. Low as we could ever fall.”
“Well, then, if that’s all that you have ever been, how is it that you fume and fuss and fret all over the place now, trying to tell me how far you fell?” She kept on holding her face against her hands, and her eyes looked out the north window. There was the light of a sad reflection in her eyes.
“I fell.”
“How on earth could you? You’re a renter now. You have always been one. All of your born days. Where did you fall to? Why all of this falling business all of a sudden?” Her crying tears left the dark stains of her cheeks on the backs of her hands.
“Old Banker Woodridge wouldn’t rent us this farm for another year.”
Ella let her body slide down the wall and onto the floor. She sat with her feet crossed under her dress and blinked her eyes. “No? When did you see old man Woodridge? You didn’t let me know. I didn’t know that our year was up yet.”
He licked the heat of his lips against the quilt. “Up last week.”
She felt weak, nervous, shaky inside. She felt even too dizzy to answer Tike just then. She looked at her stack of old papers and her dishpan of flour paste.
And he said once more, to the wall behind his bed, “Yeahhp. Up last week. I dropped into his office and tried to rent for one more year. He shook his head. No soap. No dice. Nothing doing.”
“Soooooo?”
Tike squeezed his two hands into his hair so tight and so hard the pain brought tears into his own eyes. “So. Ah. Well. That’s just what I was trying to tell you.”
“Soooo. We move, huh?” She sucked her upper lip and looked downward at her lap.
“No. Not moving.”
“Not moving.”
“Huh-uh.”
“Nor not renting again, either one?”
And Tike said, “Huh-uh.”
She felt the wall touch hard against the back of her head as she leaned back, folded her hands down in her lap, and asked through her teardrops, “Not renting? Not leaving? Not this? Not that? Well, my kind friend”—her words came as slow as new tears—“maybe you could make yourself just a little bit plainer. Just what, then, are we doing?”
“Glad you said, ‘we.’” Tike smiled to himself. “I think I like the sound of that word better than any other one that I ever heard anybody say.” He closed his eyes shut and said upward to the wall, “We.”
“We. What?” She didn’t move.
“We’re ten times worse than renters. Hon.”
“How?”
“Just are. Oh. Know why he wouldn’t let us have the place on rent for cash another year?” Tike ground his teeth together.
“Why not?”
“Says he’s about to build a new house on it. Don’t want to rent it out for no whole year at a time. He might even want to move out here and farm his six hundred and live here his own self. Says if it’s rented out for a whole year at a time, he could never put him up no new house on it.”
“Soooo?”
Tike rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, and felt his days-old beard stick to his fingers. “So. Well. He said that the only way he’d let us live on it was, ahh, on the shares.”
That word shares struck a dumb, sour, shaky chord in the brain and in the thoughts of Ella May Hamlin. Her tongue was sticky, covered with a gummy, gluey, sickly spit that flooded her throat and kept her from speaking right at that minute. A tight, twisted pain exploded on her face, and the blood veins in her neck and arms stood up like roots as she finally fought to say, in a beaten, whipped, lost whisper, “Shares?”
Tike got up from the bed and stood with his hands covering both of his eyes. He staggered on his two feet on the floor. He chewed his lips until they were wet, then till they turned a blue, black, purple, and then he snorted again in his paralyzed, insane, mad, and drunken way, and walked up and down the floor, only two or three feet from the hem of Ella’s cotton dress, covered with little white dots. He made a coughing sound as he cleared out his throat, and talked mostly to the winds:
“A farmer is good. It’s as good a job as a man can do. Good as any man or any woman in the whole world can do. It’s good because it’s good and a man can be good. He can do good and he can feel like he’s doing some good. And a farmer. Well, a farmer is good. But then you take a farmer that messes around and gets in debt to some outfit, and then he hits a hard row or two, and some rough and rocky country, or bad winds, or hot times, or dry spells, or washouts, floods, cloudbursts, or like that, and he loses what he’s got a hold of. And then, well, then he falls down, and he gets to be a renter off of somebody else. He’s lost what was a part of his skin and his bones and his heart and his soul, and so his mind and his fighting’s not on his farm no more, not on it no more like it was before. Not on it. Because he’s just a-renting now. He’s not no owner now. Just a renter. And then, for God’s sake, how low down the ladder is he? My good God. He’s down just about as low and as lousy as he’ll ever get, or as he thinks that he’ll ever get. I felt that way. I had some care and some plans and some pep and some piss and some vinegar about me when I used to work on my own folks’ place, but then since I fell down to just being a renter, I don’t know, I don’t know why, I never will know why, but I sort of seemed to lose about half of that old stuff that I had in me, felt in me toward my land and my seeds and my seasons. And then I went and I fell down ten times lower and lower than to be even a renter! For God’s sake in heaven! Elly! Elly! Hon! I’ve lost all of my hold on my whole world! I’ve messed around and let myself fall so low, so damned low, as to end up being just another cropper! Cropping on the shares!” And for a full half minute Tike stood still, listening for Ella to say something, as he looked out the east door toward the cow barn.
Ella May felt a sour belch come from her stomach up into her nostrils, and muddy little tears caused her eyes to shine through the room. She closed her eyes and saw jerks and kinks of her whole life in her mind and in the room. She laid her head back against the wallpaper again and smelled the rot and the filth of the place. Exactly one mile out the window and to the north she saw two cars running past on the 66. Her face felt like a cake of mud to her when she smiled. “Look at those two car
s.”
“Uh-huh.” Tike leaned the back of his head against the door frame. “One runs like a giant. One runs like a dwarf. One runs like a Cadillac, and th’ other’n like an Austin.”
“Little bitty one looks like some kind of a little teeny-bitsy termite or a bug of some kind. Don’t it?” Ella’s tears tasted salty and gritty on her tongue and lips, and a vacant, gummy, far-off feeling was in her words. “Termites. Ha ha ha.”
Tike kept his hands in his hip pockets, his thumbs stuck out. He tapped his left shoe heel against the worm-eaten floor, and with his right shoe he kicked against the edge of a thin, hard, long-gone rim of cheap linoleum. Ella tried to smile. He smiled away toward the highway, over the fences and the fields, over all of the rot and troubles. And he spoke: “Termites. Ha.” And his voice had a wide-open flat tone. And his face smiled with the smile that had made him ten thousand friends and enemies in his thirty-three years. His face smiled. His face smiled with all of the puzzles, the echoes, the visions of every man that followed the plow and the seed and the seasons. His eyes were marbles and they reflected, like radio, like television, all of the earth rays of sorrow. He bent his knees and started to sit down in the doorway, but thought it would make Ella May feel better if he stood up. He made his body stand up tall and straight as he could, then rested his head against the door frame. His eyes looked away through the wind and watched the large car and the small one fade out down the road to the west. His shoes kicked more loose hunks of linoleum off the edge, and he gripped his hands so tight inside his pockets that his fingernails made deep purplish gashes in the palms of his hands.
His face smiled in the same old wind that he had felt, smelled, and known as a thing of life or death all of his life there. The wind was a thing of the weather, and the weather was the life or the death of people and crops. He had always sort of halfway frowned, halfway smiled, into the weather, up into the sun, up to the stars that chase around the big blue bowl. Blue northern blizzards cut grass blades. The noses and ears of all of his animals were frostbitten. Tike had learned to square, to squint, to wrinkle his face up as he walked into the whistling winds of the cold seasons. The right hot fiery sun of the hot spells, its dusts, its sweat, its jumping and dancing heat, he had learned to smile into that, too. And the rain. The wild and senseless, loose, washing, and running rains the same. All of these things had carved, shaped, and polished down his forehead. All of these were on his face, in his squint, were a part of that friendly smile for his people, or that storming sneer of hate that came over him as he talked words about his enemies and the folks that had dealt him hurt. And his sneer, his scowl, his snarl, even his squint, his smile, they all came over him a hundred times a day, and a thousand, and sometimes all of these looks came over his face and these feelings ran through his blood a hundred times, all of them from his hate, to his squint, to his smile, to his laugh, in just one single solitary minute.
“Ella, hon,” he asked her, “just what does folks mean when they say, ‘Termite,’ anyhow?”
“Termite?” Ella’s neck stretched as she took a last look at the two cars through the rusted window screen and the half-open window. “A termite?” She rested her chin on the window ledge.
“Yeah.”
“It’s a little bitty bug, or some kind of a little teeny worm, or a little spider, or something like that.” The rust from the screen caused her to sniff. “Like that, I guess.”
“What’s he do for a livin’?”
“I don’t know. Don’t ask me so many silly things. What do you think I am, your walking bookshelf?” She rubbed her hand on a muscle above her knee and felt the heat of her hand against her skin. She had a pout on her face that told Tike that he should not waste his life away looking out across the pasture to the highway when there were warmer things and closer things. She hoped that he would see the black-and-blue bruised spot on her muscle, and each minute that he looked the other direction caused her to ache and feel lonesome inside herself. She rubbed her thigh faster and harder and slowly moved her hand higher up on her leg so that the bruised spot could be seen easier. For a few moments Tike did not seem to pay her any mind. She felt several lonely years of the winds of the plains blow through her as she said, “Silly.”
“Schoolteacher, ain’t you?” He looked east and saw several of his milk cows standing around the barn, anxious to be milked. “You yap half of your life away tryin’ to knock some sense into them thick skull kids at that old Star Route school. But now I ask you what a little bug is, I mean, what a termite is, an’ you just set there an’ tell me I’m silly.”
“You are silly. Silly. That’s what you are.” She rubbed her bruise still harder. “Old Mister Silly. Old Silly Mister Tike Hamlin. He doesn’t know if he’s going or if he’s coming.”
Tike turned around and looked at her. She leaned back harder against the wall and her mouth opened as she let her eyes look down at her rubbing hand. Tike felt a distant rumbling and a hot trembling come over him as he told her, “Tell me what a termite is. I’m not goin’ to ask you no more.”
“Old Tikey. He don’t know. He doesn’t know if he’s going or coming.”
“I’ll be coming if you don’t stop rubbing your leg that way and pull your dress down. Lord’s little puppy dogs, Honey, how much heat do you think I can take an’ not bust a gut?” He turned his back to her for a second, not knowing what else to do. Then he felt that she would tease him for being bashful or a sissy, and he faced her again with sticky spit on his lips. His breathing sounded like the heavy rushing of a stormy wind. His heart jumped around inside him. He felt a craving to take off her cotton dress and to kiss her all over as she lay on the floor. “What you got there? A black an’ blue mark? Where ’bouts did you get it?”
“A dern long time that you were a-noticing it.” She pouted at him. “I did it when I was carrying the cream cans. You remember? When the wind blew my dress up, and you had such a duck fit about it?”
“Mmm.”
“I would mmm if I was you. I could have torn my whole leg half off, and you’da never noticed it.”
“Pretty bad bruised, ain’t it? Yeah. Here. Lemme give it a nice good rubbin’. I’ll kneel right down here between your feet just about right here, and, here, don’t jump thataway now, an’ I’ll give you the smoothest an’ th’ nicest rubbin’ job that any shemale ever got since Jesus quit paintin’ little red wagons. But my old hands is so rough an’ all cut up an’ blistered an’ warty an’ so full of calluses that you might feel more like you was getting’ runned over by a wild herd o’ mean cattle.” He kissed her kneecap.
“No such of a thing. Feels good. Owwch. Not so hard right on that spot right there, there. Ohhch. Mmm. That’s as nice as even a town girl could want. Leg might not be so pretty as a town girl’s. Think?” She rubbed her hair against the wall as she talked, with her eyes half shut and her lips wet.
“Town gals ain’t even in it.” Tike’s face looked hurt as he examined her blue muscle. “Ain’t even in th’ runoff.”
“Ouch. Easier a teeny little bit. Now I do know you’re a silly.” She spread her feet farther apart. Tike kneeled between them and pushed her legs more apart with his knees. The warmth of his rubbing felt so good that she let her body fall as limber as a towel. “Now I’ll tell you what a termite is,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“A termite is something that eats up houses and makes things all rotten.”
“Huh. All things rotten?”
“No. Just some things. Wood. Tar paper. Linoleum. Houses. Ahh. Gosh dern whiz a mighty gee ohh. Tike, you’ve not got the least idea how good the feel of your hands is to me now.”
“Does he make dogs an’ cats rotten?”
“No. Ohhh. I don’t know.” She half laughed to herself.
“Make people rotten?”
“Nooohhh.”
“Just wood an’ tar paper an’ ’noleum? Huh?”
“Mostly just wood. Wood houses,” she answered. “Most near anyt
hing that’s built out of wood.”
“Huh, mmm. Rub my hair back out of my eyes, will you, Hon? Can’t see half of what I’m rubbin’ here. Can’t ’ford to miss out on none of it.”
“None of what? Sil?”
“None of my leg I’m a-rubbin’.”
“Your leg? Since when is my leg your leg?” Ella May tried her best to act serious. “Please state.”
“Since the first time I ever rubbed it. ’Member?”
“No. And neither do you. Shut up. Keep rubbing.” Ella May knew just how and when to toss her head and to cause her hair to fall down across her shoulders, so that with every rub, Tike’s nose and mouth caught the smell of her hair and her neck, and caused his blood to warm up like a kettle on a cookstove. “Do you remember when it was?”
Tike swallowed a lump in his throat and said, “Strikes me it was one night, ah, that night, you recollect, when your ma and your pa had gone to bed and your three big brothers and your two little ones was all a-hanging around the front room there, keeping warm by the fire, and we held your mama’s old dough board up on our laps and played poker for matches.”
“Ooooooo.” Ella bumped her head back so hard against the wall that the loose dirt sifted from cracks and little humps where the winds had packed the dust as hard and as tight as mud daubers or as hornets, ants, or wasps packing mud. The sifting of the dust down behind the wallpaper caused both Tike and Ella May to open their eyes a slit wider, to stare at nothing, but to listen and to think, and to let their history sift through their brains as the names of their peoples now sifted over the top sod. The only sound that was made was her high whine, “Oooooo.” For that brief short second and space of time, the room was the room of a ghost house, and the spirit named in the winds tossed more and more dust, more and more dirt, into the air, to strike up and down against the house, like spirits of the dead carrying their own dirt, howling, begging, crying somewhere on the upper plains to be born again.
House of Earth Page 8