“Two fifty.” Blanche felt her own nose burn and sting. “Said you could not hope to own an acre of this wheat-growing land for less than five, six, eight hundred. And where would you get that?”
Blanche’s hair moved in the lamplight as she held her face down and shook her head from side to side. “No. I know,” Ella May said. She sent quick glances across the room toward Tike. She heard him rattle the cream cans, buckets, funnels, containers, with one hand as he refilled the big bowl on top of the separator. She felt that Tike had heard their words, but that he made as much noise as he could just to act as if he did not care what they talked about. She saw his muscles move and roll as he turned the crank and lifted cans. She felt that he tried very hard to make so much noise that he would drown out their conversation. She lifted her voice and spoke louder to see if he would rattle his cans louder. Instead of this, as her words came into his, Tike turned the crank at its fastest speed and sang an old song:
Well, they don’t grow no more cane along the river!
No, the cutting plow don’t run here any more!
But this dirt had oughta be mighty rich, boys,
There’s a man dead in the middle of each row!
She had heard him sing the song a hundred times before, and he had told her that a Negro chuck wagon cook from Louisiana had sang it for him and had taught it to five or six of the cowmen. His voice sang in a sour chant, long, wailing, and his words floated out through his nose. He sang to make the two women think that he did not care what they talked about in such low words. But Tike had lied to his own self, because as he sang he would have given his last dollar to hear their words.
A few days ago, when Blanche had spent her fourth day with the Hamlins, Ella May had told her about Tike’s craving to get out of the old wooden house and to raise up a house of earth. How she had read and read again the pages of the little book from the Department of Agriculture, and how he had worn it thin in his pockets. Not once, not even once, since that book had come in the box had Tike let it get away from him, except to pass it from his own hands to hers. The little book had always been warm with the heat of his hands, the warmth of his pocket, smeared and soaked with his sweat and hers.
Her old daddy had paid her one dollar a day for keeping his lands and accounts in order during her last year at home. He had given her a check written out for “Three Hundred and Sixty Five and No/100 Dollars” several months before she married Tike. Tike had almost caught her several times when she seemed to get money right out of thin air, a few dollars to pay their fuel bill at the co-op filling station on Highway 66. He had been very angry about it several times, accused her of borrowing money from her daddy, but she figured with a pencil and paper and proved to him every time that she had simply kept a penny here, a nickel here, a dollar here, one yonder, and had hidden the bills away until they “amounted up.” In this way she had spent about one hundred and sixty-some dollars, which left in the Citizens’ State Bank two hundred and one, two, or three dollars, she did not know exactly. But Tike had never found it out. If she had explained the whole thing to him on the day they were married, he would have smiled and passed it off with a joke, but she had made the mistake of trying to surprise him with it later, and if she told him now, he would not believe it. There would be one wild man running loose around there for no less than a week or ten days. He would ask, “If ya earned it right an’ honest offa yer old daddy, then how come ya kept it hid out alla this time?”
To keep him from having such fits, she made matters worse by keeping her bank account a Q.T. secret.
Three or four times during the last year she had started to go into Ridgewood’s office to see about buying one acre of land. She had decided on the acre to the north of the house because they could live in the wood shack and build up the earth one at the same time, time would be saved in going to and from the job, there would be water, tea, coffee to drink, and meals could be fixed on the oil stove. The farm chores had to be done, and the earth house should be as close as possible. Three or four times it had crossed her mind to walk into Ridgewood’s office and see about it. She could get an idea of how much he wanted, make her down payment, come home with her deed of ownership, which would make Tike glad because she was pregnant and the birth was coming on. And yet she had not gone in to see Ridgewood. Every time she had been in town her feet had started and then stopped, turned some other way.
The last three or four weeks she had been afraid to take the trip into town. And now the baby was due to be born at any minute. Tike would have no more allowed her to go than he would have laid his head down across their chopping block and had somebody cut it off. And so she had told Blanche to go see Ridgewood. And tonight Blanche had told her what he had said. “I don’t bust up my land. You talk like a crazy woman.”
Ella May held her hand over her left breast as the hurt tightened in her body. She felt the small knot that had come just above her breast that day a year ago that Tike’s elbow had bruised her. She leaned her head over Blanche’s lap as the muscles drew tighter and the pain worse. The skin under her hand was hot enough to sweat through her dress and onto the palm of her hand. She had not told Blanche. She had not told Tike. She had noticed it a bit every day. She felt the small knot of muscle, no larger than the rubber on a lead pencil, situated barely under skin about an inch above the bulge of her breast. She had said to herself, but never out loud, “Everybody has enough pains of their own without me adding any more onto them.” Then on other days when she was sure that somebody had noticed her, she had thought that she would just come right out with the whole story and see if it was a serious bruise. And then again she had said under her breath, “Oh, it is such a little spot, such a teensy-weensy little old spot, that I just know it can’t stay for long. Why, I’ve had ten times worse knocks than that and the bruise has always gone away.” Then, right here lately, the thing seemed to hurt her sharper on account of the way that the baby in her stomach pulled down on the muscles of her ribs and shoulders. And here of late she had been a lot more scared about it, because she actually caught herself thinking about it for longer stretches of time. And why she did not break down and let anybody else know was more than she could explain.
Just a little bruise. Such a little spot. No bigger than a good-size wart on a log. No bigger than a titty on a hog. No bigger, not much bigger than the head of a knitting needle, not much bigger than a small green pea, not near as big as the head on a dime. This spot. This one little teensy-weensy spot. Why did she not tell anybody? Why?
She did not know. But it would be better. When the baby gets out and the weight gets off my stomach, she thought, then these aches and pains in all of my muscles will quit and go away. My calves and my feet and my ankles hurt too, but so do my hips and my groin and so do my eyes and my shoulders and my back. It’s just because the baby is pulling down on me from all over. When I straighten up it’s not quite so miserable, but then it’s just almost more than I can do to sit up straight all of the time. Such a little spot. Little old spot’s not as big as I am. I’ll lick it and I’ll whip it and I’ll give it a good beating and make it go away.
“Go away, spot. Go, go, away. Go somewhere and get in somebody like old landlord Ridgewood.” She would say a thousand such things to herself at night in bed, all day at her work, her bending, her lifting, walking.
And so as Blanche told her that Ridgewood would sell only the one acre of land over near the Cap Rock, Ella May saw the lamplight and the room whirl in front of her. She saw her life and her world and all of her people spin before her, and inside her brain there was such a foam and such a splash that she could not control her thoughts.
Blanche had not been able to see Ella May’s face as she leaned over her, and the rattle and the bang of Tike’s work, the humming and moaning of the cream separator, had got louder than ever. Blanche held her hand flat against Ella May’s back to brace her a bit in her humped position.
“Feel any pains, Mrs. Hamlin?” Blanche said clos
e to her ear.
And Ella shook her head as her hair fell in long strings down past her eyes. She was crying, sniffling, yet Tike could not hear, nor Blanche either.
“Any pains?” Blanche repeated. A strong soapy clean smell was in Ella May’s hair. Blanche held her by the arms and spoke louder, “If you feel any pains, Mrs. Hamlin, you tell me!”
Ella May, instead of saying anything, bit her bottom lip again until it turned blue and black and her forehead and face wrinkled like little dunes of sand that sifted in and settled at several places on the linoleum. She tossed her head and shoulders from side to side and Blanche heard the sounds of her sobbing, but it was not until Blanche’s eyes fell down onto Ella’s clenched hand on the quilt that Blanche saw the full torture that was in Ella May’s body. Ella’s blood veins stood out like dark vines against a tree, and her hands clawed into the covers like dry roots reaching for water. “No, no, no, no,” was the only thing that Ella spoke, and this in a hush and a whisper of misery between her teeth.
“Is it bearing down? Tell me? I can’t help you unless you talk to me. Tell me. Tell me. Talk. Talk to me.” For a short time Blanche tried to hold on to her arms by wrestling with her on the bed, then she saw that the covers were all being twisted, and that blue marks were forming on Ella’s arms. She let go and rose up onto her feet. She took two or three steps backward in order to get a good look at Ella and to study the nature of the pains.
Ella May’s stomach moved up and down. Blanche waited to see if the movement was caused by crying or the crying was caused by the movement. Was her heavy breathing making the baby rise and fall or was the rise and fall of the baby the cause of her heavy breathing? Under the loose cotton dress, to the eye of Blanche, all of the motion of her stomach was well known, but the dimness of the lamp and the shadows of the wrinkles on Ella’s dress caused Blanche to have to look a bit closer. She tried with all her skill not to upset Ella nor Tike any worse than need be.
Ella stood with her feet apart on the floor. She put forth all of her strength in order to stand up tall and straight with her face high to the ceiling. And it was the sting of the pain of her bruise above her breast that caused her to let her shoulders fall limber. Her leather work shoes were loose at the ankles, their strings untied dragged around her feet on the floor. Two lightweight pairs of cotton socks of a speckled gray color were enough to keep out the bite of the frost in the wind. And as her shoe soles, which were cut from old truck tires, moved on the linoleum, she stood in her tracks and turned around and around. Her lifted eyes were in the light, the hollows across her face were the same as the shadows of the new-plowed land in the light of the moon. Her dress was not a thing of rags and tatters because Ella May Hamlin would have let you find her dead on the ground before she would have let you catch her in a rotten, holey dress. A few of her good things had gone rotten and got torn to pieces, but they were now rags in her mop, Tike’s grease rags for his machinery, or else they had been pushed and punched into the cracks in the walls and floors to keep out the weather. She turned around as slow as a cloud drifting, her eyes saw the room and the things in the room but saw, too, on through the walls and out into the lash and the whip of a fast blizzardy wind.
She seemed to be a frozen icicle, a loose shingle, some kind of a windmill turning about. She did not turn in complete circles, but only in a half circle, then halfway back around, then the other direction for three-fourths of a turn, and it seemed that forces inside her fought to push her first one way around, then the other. She did not get to finish a turn because another rush of thoughts, feelings, old-time memories, new plans would rip across her, spin her back around, and the expressions on her face changed in the light and shadows as often as more mixtures of feelings took control of her. She held her hands opened wide apart, down at her sides, and she muttered words such as, “I’ve come this way. Come this way and this is me. Ha ha ha. Yes. This is the little girl you knew. Ha ha. Yes, yes. This is me. This is me here. This is me walking all up and down. Am I not a pretty girl to see? I saw my pretty time and I saw myself in my own looking glass, and I looked and I said, there you are. I know that is you. Ohhh. Yes. That is you. And so now this is me here. Me here walking. Me talking. Almost everybody said that I was the prettiest little lady on the whole upper plains. I guess I was. I must have been. I could have been. It was either me or that Beverly Judison, and I’m sure and certain that it wasn’t her. It was me. Me. It is still me. If you please, if you please sir, this is me.”
The words were spoken in time and rhythm with the sway of her body and legs. She seemed to flirt with the bed, wink at the stove, make eyes at the walls and at the papers, and at her bale, the oil stove, the wash bench, the water bucket, the dipper, then at Tike and his separator cans. It was when she bowed and spoke to Blanche that Blanche tried to get a straight look into her eyes. Ella let her gaze fall down across the floor and did not let Blanche see her straight. Blanche watched her closer than ever to see if she was dancing in delirious pain or merely having fun.
From the east, north, west, and south, Ella took in the strength for the baby inside her, she inhaled her lungs deep and full of the electricity in the room. Like a ship, she charged her own power into her own batteries. Her words had the same sound as a squeaky windmill.
Blanche had seen other women do things like this, things a little bit delirious, in order to gain some kind of strength to let a new baby come into the world. She was not nervous, nor frightened, just cautious, making sure and certain. Buckets of clean water were on the bench, a small suitcase filled with newspapers, strips of cloth, clean washrags. Why worry? The night outside was howling a blizzard, the wind pushing down across the plains harder than a hurricane on the ocean, because the sea rises and falls and forms into waves that are like mountains and valleys to check, slow, and break the wind. The flat lands of the plains were as level as the old linoleum on the floor, and there was nothing to stop the wind for fifteen hundred miles to the north, nothing except a small gully, a canyon, a town, a barbed-wire fence, the house of a landowner, the shack of a renter or sharecropper, and these things did not stop nor hinder that icy wind any more than a wild bull would be stopped by a rabbit track. It was with all of this in the back of her mind that Blanche watched and studied Ella’s funny little dance.
Blanche waited until Ella May had moved to the center of the floor. Then she fixed the pillow, turned the covers down, and said, “You had best come and lay yourself down here in this bed. Let me take care of you for a while. I think you are getting ready for your big push. Come on.” She talked with her back to Ella May, and when she waited for her to reply, there was nothing except Tike’s chanting and the whine of the whirling disks in the separator. She patted her hands on the pillows and covers and said again, “Do you not think that it is time for you to stretch your bones out and give that little monkey some rest?” And there was still no reply.
There was only Tike singing, the separator humming. Blanche silent and waiting, touching her fingers to the bed. And this was only for a few short seconds.
But in these few short seconds Ella May took a woolly brown shawl from a nail on the wall, threw it around her shoulders, hugged her stomach in her hands, and walked across the floor to the door. With each step she gritted her teeth and spoke with a hiss of a snake, “No. No no. No. No no no.” Her right hand held the weight of her stomach and her left hand took hold of the doorknob. She swallowed hard to try to keep down the thousand miseries that were eating at her. As her hand turned the knob she saw a vision, a picture before her of several million people all going and coming in and through and inside one another. It was a message, she thought, and as she thought, the vision came clearer, and she heard words that said, “Here are the people in this room going and coming. They go and they come in and through, in and through one another. And the people of the farms and the ranches around, they go and they come in and through, in and through one another. Like the weeds, the stems, the hay, straws and lints, like the p
owders, chalks, dusts arise and fall and pass in and through, in and through one another in the winds, the sun. And the people are all born from one and they are really all one. The people are all one, like you and your baby are one, like you and your husband, both of you are one. And all of the upper north plains are one big body being born and reborn in and through one another, and those also of the lower south plains. All of those of the Cap Rock. This is the greatest one single truth of life and takes in all other books of knowing. This is the only one truth of life that takes in all of the other works. And there are a few people that work to hurt, to hold down, to deny, to take from, to cheat, the rest of us. And these few are the thieves of the body, the germs of the disease of greed, they are few but they are loud and strong and your baby must be born well to help kill these few out.”
And nobody in the little room heard these words except Ella May. And she did not hear these words in these very words, but in words that showed her even plainer, much plainer, what her vision had meant. Her vision showed her that all of the people live and move in and through each other exactly like her baby lived and moved in and through her. And all of the words that she would hear in her life would make the picture plainer.
The frost in the wind of the open door bit Tike on the skin like a little sheepherding dog, and it chewed at Blanche’s ankles and caused her to stomp her feet. She chilled up and down the back, her hands drew up in front of her face like claws of the eagle, and for a short space of time it seemed that her entire life and soul flew out at her open mouth. And she whirled, spun around on her heel, and felt the waves of the wind hit her full in the face and chest. She ran her gaze around the room, up the little staircase to the roost, then at the separator, Tike, and all of the buckets and cans. He felt the blizzard wind at the back of his sweaty shirt, but it took him a few short seconds to get his mind to register what was going on. The separator hummed, and he sang his chant:
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