Georgia Boy (13 page)

T
HE DOGS BARKED
at a little before midnight, and Ma got up to look out the window. It was a snowy night about two weeks before Christmas. The wind had died down a little since supper, but not enough to keep it from whistling around the eaves every once in a while. It was just the kind of white winter night when it felt good to be in bed with plenty of covers to keep warm.

The light was burning in the hall, because we always kept one light on all night. Ma did not turn on the light in the room right away. She could see better what was going on outside when the room was dark.

She did not say a word for quite a while. The dogs growled some, and then started in barking again. They were kept chained at the side of the house all night; if they had been allowed to run loose, they would have chewed up a lot of people who came out that way after dark. It was a good thing for my old man, too; they would have chewed him up as quick as they would have somebody they had never smelt before.

“That’s him, all right,” Ma said, tapping the windowsill with the door key. She was no more mad than usual, but that was enough. When she tapped the woodwork with things like the door key, it was the only sign anybody needed to know how she was feeling.

Presently there was a rumble that sounded like a two-horse wagon crossing a plank bridge. Then a jar shook the house like somebody had taken a sledge hammer and knocked most of the foundation from under it.

That was my old man trying out the front steps and porch in the dark to see if they would hold his weight. He was always afraid somebody was going to set a trap for him when he came home, something like loosening the boards on the porch in such a way that he would fall through and have to lie there until Ma could reach him with the broom or something.

“He’s going to come home like this just once too many some of these times,” Ma said. “I’m getting sick and tired of it.”

“I want to get up and see him,” I said. “Please, Ma, let me.”

“You stay right where you are, William, and pull those covers up over your head,” Ma said, tapping some more on the sill with the door key. “When he gets in here, he’s not going to be any fit sight for you to look at.”

I got up on my knees and elbows and pulled the covers over my head. When I thought Ma had stopped looking that way, I pulled the covers back just enough so I could see out.

The front door banged open, almost breaking the glass in the top part. My old man never did act like he cared anything about the glass in the door, or about the furniture, or about anything else in the house. He came home once and picked Ma’s sewing machine to pieces, and Ma had a dickens of a time saving up enough to get it fixed.

I never knew my old man could make so much racket. It sounded like he was out in the hall jumping up and down to see if he could stomp the floor clear through the ground. All the pictures on the wall shook, and some of them turned cockeyed. Even the big one of Grandma Tucker turned sidewise.

Ma turned the light on and went to the fireplace to kindle the fire. There were lots of embers in the ashes that glowed red when she fanned them with a newspaper and laid some kindling over them. As soon as the kindling began to blaze, she put on two or three chunks of wood and sat down on the hearth with her back to the fire to wait for my old man to come into the room.

He was banging around out in the hall all that time, sounding like he was trying to kick all the chairs down to the far end next to the kitchen. In the middle of it he stopped and said something to somebody he had with him.

Ma got up in a hurry and put her bathrobe on. She looked in the mirror a time or two and straightened her hair. It was a big surprise for him to bring somebody home with him like that.

“You cover up your head and go to sleep like I told you, William,” Ma said.

“I want to see him,” I begged her.

“Don’t argue with me, William,” she said, patting her bare foot on the floor. “Go and do like I told you once already.”

I pulled the covers up, but slipped them back enough to see out.

The door to the hall opened a couple of inches. I got up on my knees and elbows again so I could see better. Just then my old man kicked the door open with his foot. It flew back against the wall, knocking loose dust that nobody knew was there before.

“What do you want, Morris Stroup?” Ma said, folding her arms and glaring at him. “What do you want this time?”

“Come on in and make yourself comfortably at home,” my old man said, turning around and jerking somebody into the room by the arm. “Don’t be backward in my own house.”

He pulled a girl about half the size of Ma into the room and pushed her around until they were over against Ma’s sewing machine. Ma turned on her feet, watching them just like she had been a weathervane following the wind.

It was pretty serious to watch my old man drunk and reeling, and to see Ma so mad she could not get a word out of her mouth.

“Say ‘Howdy,’” he told the girl.

She never said a thing.

My old man put his arm around her neck and bent her over. He kept it up, making her bow like that at Ma, and then he got to doing it too, and pretty soon they were keeping time bowing. They did it so much that Ma’s head started bobbing up and down, just like she could not help herself.

I guess I must have snickered out loud, because Ma looked kind of silly for a minute, and then she went and sat down by the fire.

“Who’s she?” Ma asked, acting like she was pretty anxious to find out. She even stopped looking cross for a little while. “Who is she, Morris?”

My old man sat down heavy enough to break the bottom out of the chair.

“She?” he said. “She’s Lucy. She’s my helper nowadays.”

He turned around in the chair and looked over at me on my knees and elbows under the covers.

“Howdy, son,” he said. “How’ve you been?”

“Pretty well,” I said, squeezing down on my knees and trying to think of something to say so I could show him how glad I was to see him.

“Still growing, ain’t you, son?” he said.

“A little, I reckon,” I told him.

“That’s right. That’s the thing to do. Just keep it up, son. Some day you’ll be a man before you know it.”

“Pa, I—”

Ma picked up a piece of kindling and slung it at him. It missed him and hit the wall behind him. My old man jumped up on his feet and danced around like it had hit him instead of the wall. He reeled around like that until he lost his footing, and then he slid down the wall and sat on the floor.

He reached over and got his hands on a straight-back chair. He looked it over carefully, and then he started pulling the rungs out. Every time he got one loose, he pitched it into the fireplace.

When all the rungs and legs were out, he started picking the slats out of the back and throwing them into the fire. Ma never said a word. She just sat and looked at him all the time.

“Let’s go, Morris,” the girl Lucy said. It was the first thing she had said since she got there. Both Ma and me looked at her sort of surprised, and my old man cut his eyes around too, like he had forgotten she was there. “Morris, let’s go,” she said.

Lucy looked all but scared to death, it was easy to see. Everybody had stared at her so much, and Ma was acting so mad, that it was no wonder.

“Sit down and make yourself comfortable,” my old man told her. “Just sit, Lucy.”

She reached for one of the chairs and sat down just like he told her to.

The way she was sitting there, and Ma’s mad streak on, and my old man picking the chair to pieces was a funny sight to see. I guess I must have snickered again out loud, because Ma turned around at me and shook her finger and motioned for me to pull the covers up over my head, and to go to sleep too, I guess. But I could never go to sleep while all that was going on, and Ma must have known it. I just squeezed down on my elbows and knees as much as I could, and kept on looking.

“When you get that chair picked to pieces, Morris Stroup, you can just hand me over seven dollars to pay for a new one,” Ma said, rocking back and forth.

“Shucks, Martha,” my old man said. “Shucks, I don’t believe there’s a chair in the whole world that I’d give more than a dollar, maybe two, for.”

Ma jerked out of her spell like a snapped finger. She jumped up and grabbed the broom from the side of the mantlepiece and started for him. She beat him over the head with it until she saw how much damage she was doing to the broomstraw, and then she stopped. She had beat out so much straw that it was scattered all over the floor. After that she turned the broom around and began poking him with the handle.

My old man got up in a hurry and staggered across the room to the closet, throwing what was left of the chair into the fire as he passed it. He opened the closet door and went inside. He did something to the lock, because no matter how hard Ma tried, she could not make the door open after he had closed it.

By that time Ma was so mad she did not know what she was doing. She sat down on the edge of the bed and pinned her hair up a little.

“This is nice goings-on at this time of night, Morris Stroup!” she yelled at him through the door. “What kind of a child can I raise with things like this going on in the house?”

She did not even wait for my old man to answer her. She just spun around toward Lucy, the girl my old man had brought along with him.

“You can have him,” Ma said, “but you’ve got to keep him away from here.”

“He told me he wasn’t married,” Lucy told Ma. “He said he was a single man all the time.”

“Single man!” Ma yelled.

She got red in the face again and ran to the fireplace for the poker. Our poker was about three feet long and made of thick iron. She jabbed it into the crack of the closet and pried with it.

My old man began to yell and kick in the closet. I never heard such a racket as when the dogs started their barking again. People who heard them must have thought robbers were murdering all of us that night.

About then Lucy jumped up, crying.

“Stop that!” she yelled at Ma. “You’re hurting him in that closet!”

Ma just turned around, swinging her elbow as she went.

“You leave me be!” Ma told her. “I’ll attend to what I’m doing, sister!”

I had to squirm all around to the other side of the bed to keep up with what they were doing at the closet door. I never saw two people carry on so funny before. Both of them were mad, and scared to do much about it. They acted like two young roosters that wanted to fight but did not know how to go about it. They were just flapping around, trying to scare each other.

But Ma was as strong as the next one for her size. All she had to do when she made up her mind was drop the poker, grab Lucy and give her a shove. Lucy sailed across the room and landed up against the sewing machine. She looked scared out of her wits when she found herself there so quick.

Ma picked up the poker again and she pried with all her might and,
bang!
the door sprang open. There was my old man backed up against the closet wall all tangled up in Ma’s clothes, and he looked like he had been taken by surprise and caught red-handed with his fist in the grocer’s cash drawer. I never saw my old man look so sheepish before in all my life.

As soon as Ma got him out of the closet and into the room she went for Lucy.

“I’m going to put you out of my house,” Ma told her, “and put a stop to this running around with my husband. That’s one thing I won’t stand for!”

She grabbed at Lucy, but Lucy ducked out of reach. Then they came back at each other just exactly like two young roosters that had finally got up enough nerve to start pecking. They jumped around on the floor with their arms flapping like wings and Ma’s bathrobe and Lucy’s skirt flying around like loose feathers. They hopped around in a circle for so long that it looked like they were riding on a merry-go-round. About that time they got their hands in each other’s hair and started pulling. I never heard so much screaming before. My old man’s eyes had just about got used to the light again, and he could see them, too, every once in a while. His head kept going around and around, and he missed a lot of it.

Ma and Lucy worked across the room and out the door into the hall. Out there they scuffled some more. While it was going on, my old man stumbled across the room, feeling for another chair. He picked up the first one he could put his hands on. It was Ma’s high-back rocker, the one she sat in all the time when she was sewing and just resting.

By that time Ma and Lucy were scuffling out on the front porch. My old man shut the door to the hall and locked it. That door was a thick, heavy one with a spring thumb lock as well as a keyhole lock.

“No use talking, son,” he said, sitting down on the bed and pulling off his shoes, “there’s nothing else in the world like a couple of females at odds. Sometimes—”

He slung his shoes under the bed and turned out the light. He felt his way around the bed, dragging Ma’s high-back rocker with him. I could hear the wood creak in the chair when he strained on the rungs. He pulled the covers up, then began picking the chair to pieces and throwing them toward the fire. Once in a while one of the pieces hit the mantlepiece; as often as not one of them struck the wall.

By then Ma and Lucy had got the dogs started again. They must have been out in the front yard scuffling by that time, because I could not hear them on the porch.

“Sometimes, son,” my old man said, “sometimes it appears to me like the good Lord ought never put more than one woman in the world at a time.”

I snuggled down under the covers, hugging my knees as tight as I could, and hoping he would stay at home all the time, instead of going off again.

My old man broke the back off the rocker and slung it in the dark toward the fireplace. It hit the ceiling first, and then the mantlepiece. He began picking the seat to pieces next.

It sure felt good being there in the dark with him.

H
ANDSOME
B
ROWN AND
I had been down at Mr. Hawkins’ water-grinding grist mill almost all afternoon, and about an hour before supper time we started home with the sack of corn meal Mr. Hawkins had ground for us. Ma had sent us down to the mill right after dinner with a bushel of the white field corn Pa kept to feed Ida when Ida was behaving herself and not balking in the middle of the street or kicking the boards off her stall in the barn. While Handsome and I were putting the corn into the sack, Ma had told us to hurry back as soon as the meal was ground because she wanted to make some spoon bread for supper that night. Handsome and I were walking along the short cut through the vacant lot where the carnivals pitched their tents when they came to town and arguing about the baseball game the day before when our town team played the firemen’s team from Jessupville over in the next county and which had broken up in the sixth inning when one of the Jessupville firemen hit our town team catcher, Luke Henderson, on the head with a Louisville Slugger bat. Handsome said our town team catcher had scooped up a handful of dust when he thought nobody was looking and had thrown it in the Jessupville batter’s eyes just when the pitcher was winding up to throw the ball. I told Handsome a gust of wind had blown the dust and that Luke Henderson, who worked in the Squeeze-A-Nickel grocery store, did not have anything at all to do with it. We were still arguing over it when we started across the railroad tracks. A Coast Line freight train had stopped down at the Sycamore depot but we did not pay much attention to it except just to glance down there to see how many box cars the engine was backing into the siding beside the cotton gin. While we were standing on the track watching the engine and cars, we noticed that somebody was walking at a fast pace towards us. He was leaping over the crossties two at a time.