House of Earth

by Woody Guthrie

  “Is that your new tractor that I hear running? Or is that a feather floating through the air?”

  Blanche motioned him back again. He hated her for waving him about in his own house, and a thousand curse words flew onto his tongue. He kept his lips closed as tight as he could and managed to swallow his words. He would remember it, though, and mow her down with them the very first time he caught her out of Ella’s presence.

  “That noise that you hear? That?” He put his hand to his ear and walked to the north window. “That’s them old loud noisy snowflakes out there running into one another. And they’re a-makin’ so much of a damned racket that I cain’t even hear my new tractor run. Lissen. Lissen. Nope. Them goldern snowflakes. Cain’t hear my tractor engine.”

  There was a faint frown on Blanche’s face as she moved her eyes up and down in an effort to get a look into Ella’s eyes. Was this horseplay back and forth between Mr. and Mrs. Hamlin a good or a bad thing for the baby? Well, it had its good parts. Ella had turned quieter, less strained. Tike’s eyes were so filled with the wild lamplight that he looked like a fiery-eyed devil to his own self as he saw the things of the room reflected in the whipped snows out the north window glass. And the feeling that came over him as he saw his eyes shine outside was, “I’m a devil. I’m a devil with nine little devils dancin’ off my prong.” Of course, these were his thoughts, his whole feelings. But his feelings whirled and stirred in with the norther and he went right on being a devil. He blew his hot breath against the cold glass and drew a circle, two dots for eyes, a new moon for a mouth, two new moons for horns, and laughed. “Hey. Blanche. Wanta see th’ baby’s pitcher? Huh?” And when Blanche took a step or two across the floor and looked at his artwork with a cold disgust, Tike slapped his hands against his knees and stood there laughing for a good long time.

  “If I was your wife and I was having a baby and you would make such a picture of it on the window glass, believe me, I would get a broom and wear it out on your head.” And Blanche took a short walk around the room to see if all of the needs of the night were in their proper order. She spoke each word as she looked. “Soap. Water. Cloths. Towels. Washrags. Rubber sheets. Gloves. Chloroform. Cotton. Papers. Tools and scissors.” And then she lifted her fingers toward her black suitcase and nodded at its contents.

  “Hey, Blanche,” Tike said when she came near his window. “I betcha that whenever ya see this here baby, you’ll want one exactly like it. Jist wait.”

  “Hot water. Broom. Mop. Oh. Huh? I will bet. I know that I will just simply go wild to have one. Lots of other proud poppies have told me the same story. But so far they are all mistaken. Matches. Alcohol.”

  “You’ll see. Jist watch.”

  “You are trying to make me a joke. But I really would like to have a baby. I admit.” She looked out into the north.

  “Make ya a big barg’in.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll give ya th’ pertiest baby on all these north an’ south plains if ya’ll come an’ help me build my earth house.”

  “Doesn’t your brain function on any other subject except just this business of making babies?” Blanche blew her own breath on the glass and drew circles with dots for eyes, noses, and mouths.

  Tike touched his finger to the glass and added half-moon devil’s horns to Blanche’s faces and said, “Nope. Nuthin’ else. Makin’ babies. An’ earth houses to raise ’em in.”

  Blanche drew bare trees, sprigs of grass, weeds, all around the edge of the windowpane. In order to keep the upper hand in this situation, she shook her head seriously, slowly, pooched her lips, and said, “I know that you are just fooling me, Tike. I mean, Mister Hamlin. But I really do want a baby. Not just only one baby, but I want several nice boys and several nice girls. And of course I really and truly want a nice big weatherproof house, possibly the earth kind that you keep talking about. And since I must have a man, naturally, before I can have my babies and my house, I will remember you, and I will certainly keep such a great inventor, ahhh, builder of, ahhh, Hamlin tractors in mind. But of course, this country is a free country, and I do feel that you should allow me the full freedom and the full liberty to consider possibly one, maybe two or three, other men for the job. You agree?”

  “Shore. Shore. Ya mean ya might? Might take me up?” Tike’s face in the glass was serious. “Chance, huh?”

  “A chance?” Blanche ridiculed him. “Of course there is a chance. A chance and more than a chance.”

  Tike’s head shook till his neck was tired as he repeated her words. “More’n jist a chance? More’n jist a chance? Huh? Hey. Ha.”

  “After all, you are a man and I am a woman. And the force that draws the man together with the woman is larger and stronger than the powers that drive little tractors to plow and to reap, or that blow little blue northern blizzards down on top of the people’s houses.”

  Tike’s eyes stood open like saucers of milk and his mouth was a cavern filled with bats. “Uh-huh. Yeah. Gosh.”

  “A man and a woman must get together. They must find one another somewhere in these storms of life. They must cling and hold and come together. They must. They just just just just must.”

  “Yep.”

  “And after all, I am a pretty girl when I get my things taken off. There is nothing seriously wrong with my legs, and my waist will not get much larger. I am rosy of cheek and full of breast. I look at myself in the mirror and I think how bad I really do need a man and all of these little babies that you keep talking about. And after all, for you, young, thirty-three, strong, fairly slim, not any too wise, but fiery and windburned. For you, don’t you think that there is more than just a chance?”

  Tike had shaken his head so long and so fast that he could not control it, nor stop it. He tried to say something, but only managed to stammer, stutter out some loose words.

  “There are not more than, well, say, fifteen or sixteen million people out in these midwestern states, and I do not guess that more than six or seven million of them are men. The rest of them are women, and naturally I would not marry any of the women, so it is only the men that I could possibly marry, and here you are, right here, and I know a good bit about you. I am familiar with some of your little ways and I understand you very well. It is just these other six, seven million that I will have to look over and pick from. So the wind is blowing your way, after all. You see? Now when you foolishly asked me a minute ago if there was a chance for you and I to have babies together, earth houses together, you did not see how close you were to hitting the head on the nail, did you?”

  “Huh-uh.” Tike was feeling his legs with his hands down in his pockets. He leaned back against the wall, half drifting out into the piling, blowing snow. “Gosh no. I, ahh, er, didn’t see that I was hittin’ my, ahh, head on no, ahhh, nail.” And then he thought of how silly the whole conversation had sounded, and he dropped his gaze down along the bottom of the window and saw the snow blow in and mix with the dust.

  Ella May grunted and laughed to herself on her bed. Blanche left Tike leaning against his window frame and walked across the floor to Ella’s side. “Did you hear your husband and I talking?” Blanche asked. And Ella May laughed again and said, “No, I just got tickled at the way this little army is fighting for its freedom here in my stomach. Fighting to see the light of day. Or the dust.”

  Tike talked to his own self. He moved his fingers in front of him like a mud-digging machine and said, “Hmmmphh. Hell, I could build ten houses outta earth ’fore I could ever git ta first base with a godblame gal like Blanche is.”

  IV

  HAMMER RING

  The dark had set in early, around six o’clock, and Ella May’s pains had started at almost straight up nine thirty. Blanche kept the water boiling, and everything that she would need was almost at her fingertips. She had changed Ella from her housedress into a clean white cotton nightgown, and the snow outside had managed to catch a foothold and to lie on the ground. The wind carried looser snow in whirl
s and clouds, and the speed of the wind seemed to be faster, louder, lonesomer. And the hours of her first pains had gone past for Ella May as slow and as gay, as dreary, as mixed up, as the snows outside. And now the alarm clock on its orange-crate shelf said that it was half past one on the new morning. Ella’s real birth pains had come over her, and it caused Tike to walk the floor, to rub his hands together, to pull at his nails, rub his cheeks, his neck, and he had pulled at his ears till a soreness shot through both sides of his head.

  In his high nervous temper he said in his mind, “That Blanche is just coldhearted, that’s what she is. She just ain’t got no heart about ’er. That’s why she can mope along and not get all excited about it. She’s got a heart like a marble slab.” But further down in him, he knew that he was making up a lie. He knew that he was only defending his own ignorance. What if he was there alone to help Ella bring this little Tike out into this old world? When the thought hit him, he felt as cold and as stiff as a hitch post frozen in the blizzard. He could think of no way to tell how glad he was that Blanche was there, walking around, talking around, doing things easy, doing things right. His head was in such a storm that he had to sit down on the bottom step and hold it in his hands. He brushed his hair with his fingers, patted out tunes with his feet, and he felt his life rise and fall with Ella May’s moans and sighs.

  Tired of pacing the floor, tired of sitting with his jaws in his hands, tired of trembling like ice on a stem, he stood up and started across the floor to the bed where Blanche watched the pains swell over Ella May. He had taken somewhat less than one step in their direction when Blanche motioned him back with her hand. Just one slight wave of her hand, and not a good healthy wave at that, stopped him dead in his tracks like a buffalo hit between the horns. Just that one little movement of her hand set him burning at the hair roots, fingertips, and toenails. This was the thing that dealt him more misery in one flicker of one short second than all of the other ups and downs of his entire thirty-three years on these plains.

  They call you a trained nurse. Well, you listen to me, Misses Trained Nurse. Listen. You just keep quiet and listen to me. This house ain’t mine, because I didn’t build it. And even if it was mine, I wouldn’t own it. I wouldn’t have the damned thing if it was wrapped up in Vaseline. But I’m a-renting it. Renting it, see? Do you savvy that? And I’m the boss around here till I get to be the boss of some kind of an earth house or something better. And now if you just happen to be going through the process of forming the opinion in that brain of yours that you can just sit over there and wave your hand, or just a finger or two, at me and make me do dog tricks all over the floor here, well, you’re just sadly mistaken.

  But no. Hey. Wait a minute. Don’t run off. I guess I flew off the handle just a shade too quick. After all, I reckon you did go through with a good bit of trouble to get them trained nurse papers. It ain’t like I was letting you be the boss every night of the year. I wouldn’t let no living woman boss me around every night in the year. But since it’s just this one night, and you’re a visitor in one sense of the word, well, mebbe, mebbe, I’ll let you boss me a little.

  Mebbe so. Just a little. After all, when you got company you got to let them have the run of the place for a little while. Else they not company. That’s all company is. Folks that come a-running in and take charge of the whole shooting match. So go on. Wave your finger at me. I got my own ideas of what to do to make my wife feel like having a baby, and I’d like to be right over there by the side of her bed. But, no. No. No. You say I’m full of germs and microbes and varmints and childs that crawl on the earth. Goshamight dern whizzers. I’m bigger’n a dang little old germ, ain’t I? Ain’t I? Look at me? D’ja ever see a deezeeze germ as big as I am? No siree boss you never did, and what’s more you never will. I can lick any germ that walks, flies, runs, or crawls. I ain’t got no more of them germs on me than you got on you, but I don’t wave my finger at you every time you start to take a step toward her bed, do I?

  Wouldn’t never no babies get born if everybody kep a-waving their fingers and keeping all of the parents back away from the side of the bed. Damn my old hard times to samnation anyhow. Wave your hand. I see it. Wave it. Wave it again. Ain’t no earthly feeling on earth feels half as bad as somebody to boss you around with a little old wave of their finger in your own house. It’s my wife, ain’t it? It ain’t your wife. You’re a trained nurse. You never will have a wife as long as you live and breathe.

  Oh God. God of Jerusalem and Horners Corners. God of all the wigglers and jigglers. Ain’t no man a-living can move an inch when a trained nurse in a white uniform shakes her finger at you. It just knocks your props out from under you. Freezes you dead. What in the name of little stepants am I going to do with myself anyhow? Stand up here and walk this floor till I go screwball?

  The babies of the upper north plains are born in the pains of the people waiting.

  Tike was glad when Blanche nodded her head yes and motioned for him to come closer. He nearly tore the room down getting across the floor. And he heard Ella grit her teeth together as loud as a tractor running over broken bottles, heard her groan in a way that shook him from stem to stern. And yet, along with all of his being afraid, he was wishing in a deeper flow of pride to be in on the deal.

  Blanche had to show him what to do with himself. She laughed and thought that he was the one that needed the bed and the treatment and not Ella May.

  He saw Ella May’s body turn hard, stiff, blue and purple, then pale, then for a moment loose and limber again, then tight. Tight and as hardened as the iron in the sledgehammer, as hard and as tight as strings on a fiddle. She moved her toes and feet as if she were swimming on her back in rough water and there was all over her this same appearance, like she was floating in waters so high that she was almost sucked under every second. Arms and hands fought to keep her balanced, and Blanche showed Tike how to assist in keeping her flat on her back with her legs wide apart.

  “Get the broom over there,” Blanche nodded, “and let her hold on to the handle. Occupy her hands.”

  Tike reached into the corner by the radio and put the broom handle into Ella’s hands. He saw Blanche splash a few drops of chloroform on some cotton in a paper funnel, and his nose snorted at the burn of the smell. All he could say was, “Like this?”

  “Get back of her head there and pull against her. Give her plenty to pull against.” Blanche observed the whole thing in much the same manner as a bomber pilot would watch a city below blasted out of its shackles. “Pull. Harder.”

  “Gosh ding a mighty. Boy. She’s got th’ power. Damn near jerkin’ me through this ironworks here.”

  “They get as strong as a tractor, all right.” Blanche held the funnel of cotton under Ella May’s nose for a second or so, then dropped it over onto the eating table. Blanche was well aware of the teasing conflicts that had come between Tike and herself. It was at this moment that she turned into another person entirely. A lady of grace, dignity, seriousness, in absolute command of every move of her entire body. A woman of college in a larger school. All of her fine, precise exactness, her nimble feet, hands, and arms performed with a silent certainty that struck into Tike like lightning in a grove of trees. Her face was not smiling, it was not sad, it was not troubled, and it was not celebrating. It was just her way of moving, her easy come and go. “Strong as a tractor,” she said again.

  “Nothin’ won’t go wrong with ’er? Will it?” Tike asked. He watched close. He wondered and he worried and felt some new and very odd thoughts take shape in the room.

  He saw the whole baby born. The head first, and he fell to pieces with fear because he thought the pressure of Ella May’s muscles would smash it like a cantaloupe.

  He saw the head so slick and red, so much soft, all filled with blue and purple blood veins. And he saw every inch of Ella May’s body squirm and sway in sobs and moans of pains mixed up with laughs that she laughed just to give him ease. And he saw that for every inch that baby moved
Ella May moved in a mile of misery, but a misery that had a smile, a dry joke, a little laugh, even under the chloroform. He felt like Blanche should hold the paper funnel under his own nose and let him sniffle a sniff or two to brace him up. But no. He did not have any bracer of any kind. He was taking the full force of the whole thing head-on, like meeting a truck on the 66. He had saved almost a half pint in a bottle under the house, but it had been knocked down by the hogs and lapped up by the dogs.

  Every minute that he worked he shed a gallon of sweat, in spite of such a blowing blizzard one inch through the wall. He held his broom and pulled backward to give Ella’s hands and arms something solid to grip on to. His shoes against the floor dragged with a heavy noise, and his trail, if it could be untangled and laid straight, would reach from there to Amarillo. It crossed his mind several times that Blanche was an angel that had grown too wise for the walls of heaven and had flown down in some big wind to warm every house on these high flats. He was inwardly proud of his own work and smiled many times toward Blanche to tell her, “I’m doing my part.” The facts were that Blanche smiled even more proud of her own self, as if to say, “I could very easily have tied that broom handle up onto the head of the bed, and allowed you to walk the floor and go out of your mind. I put the broom into your hand to give you something to do, and my, my, just look, you’ve wrestled with it for over an hour now. And it has kept you from under my feet!”

  Tike could see the hooded veil of wet skin over the head, and he thought of the thousands of times he had heard his folks say, “This person will be gifted with powers and knowledge because he was born with a veil over his face.” Or say, “This lady knows the things of the past, present, and the future, and knows what is on your mind because she had a veiled birth.” And hundreds of other things he had heard them say. How much he believed these things he did not know at this moment, but when his eyes saw the veil as clear as day all over the head and the face there, he felt the pride of the plains drift through him like a wind.