Gods Men (16 page)

“That sounds good,” the woman said. She had a dry voice, not unkind, and she stood in the doorway and looked at them all. “Well, how's everybody?”

“Pretty good,” Mom Berger said. “The children look a little peaky on account of a summer cold. They like to play barefoot in the run, and I hate to tell 'em not to. You know how children are. Come and set down while I dish up.”

“It's been a hot summer,” the Aid woman sighed. She sat down and took off her rusty black hat. “Well, I see they're growing.”

“That's another reason for their peakiness,” Ma Berger said. “I keep tryin' to feed 'em up, but they don't fatten no matter how I do. Their appetites is good, too. You'll see how they eat. But I don't begrudge 'em.”

“I'm sure you don't,” the Aid said absently. She was searching through some papers in her bag. “I guess I'd better begin checking now. I have to get on right after dinner. The territory is more'n I can manage, really. Let's see, you have five children. Why—the book says four!”

Pop began hastily. “This yere Clem is a new boy. Just turned up one day and I kep' him, because he hadn't nowhere to go. I was goin' to tell you.”

“Boy, where do you come from?” The Aid was suddenly stern.

“From out West,” Clem said. He was standing, as all the children were. He had told none of them that he came from China. They would know nothing about China and he could not begin to tell them.

“You can't just come here like that,” the Aid declared. Indignation sparkled in her little black eyes. “You should have stayed where you was. The state can't take charity cases from other states. It's going to make a lot of trouble for me.”

“I thought my grandfather was still alive,” Clem said. “He used to live here.”

“Old Charley Miller,” Pop explained. “Him as hanged himself when he got to be sheriff.”

The Aid stared at Clem. “You're his grandson?” she demanded.

“Yes.”

“Say, ‘yes, ma'am' to me,” she said sharply. “Where's your proof?”

“I haven't any,” Clem said.

“He's Charley's grandson all right,” Pop said quickly. “He's got the same kind of a face and his eyes is just the same color and all. I'll guarantee him.”

“I don't know what to do,” the Aid sighed. She had a thin washed-away face and a small wrinkled mouth. Behind her spectacles her eyes were dead when the small flare of anger was gone. There was no wedding ring on her hand. She had never been married and she was tired of other people's children.

“Why don't you just mark down five?” Pop coaxed her. “It'll save you trouble.”

“I could do that,” she mused. “One of the children in the last house died. I could just transfer the money from that one to this one.”

“ 'Twould save you trouble,” he said again.

So it was done. Clem took the place of the dead boy.

They all sat down to dinner. On the table a platter of pork and greens was surrounded by boiled potatoes and by dishes of sweet and sour pickles. There were apple pies to be eaten, too, and the children had milk from a pitcher, all except Clem who took water.

“You must drink milk, boy,” the Aid said. “That's why it's so good for children to live on farms.”

“I don't like milk,” Clem said.

“Say ma'am,” the Aid reminded him. “And it don't matter what you like. You make him drink it, Mrs. Berger.”

“I certainly will,” Mom promised.

There was no time for any talk. At the table there was only time for eating. The children ate desperately until they could eat no more.

“I see what you mean,” the Aid said. “At this age they just can't be filled up.”

“I do my best,” Mom said.

When the meal was over the Aid rose and put on her hat. “Everybody looks nice, Mrs. Berger,” she said. “I'm always glad to give you a recommend. I don't believe I'll bother to go upstairs. I can go through the barn on my way out, Mr. Berger—though you always—the children are real lucky. Better off than in their own homes. What's that?”

Some noises coming from Tim stopped her at the door. He looked helplessly at Clem.

“He wants to know what his last name is,” Clem said for him.

The Aid's empty eyes suddenly lit, and she stepped toward him. “Will you say ma'am when you speak to me?”

Clem did not answer, and Pop broke in quickly. “I'll shore learn him before you git here next time.”

“Well, I hope so,” the Aid replied with indignation. She forgot Clem's question and went on briskly toward the barn.

The conscience in Clem's bosom was as concrete as a jewel and as pure. He felt its weight there day and night. It had grown with his growth and now had facets which were strange to him. Thus while his father's too simple faith had been its beginning, it had taken on accretion not of faith but of doubt, mingled with suffering, pity and love, first for his father and mother and sisters when they were hungry, and now after their death, pity for hunger wherever he found it. He, too, was hungry here on his dead grandfather's farm, but his hunger only hastened the growth of his conscience and made it more weighty. If he were hungry, what of these others, these children? For he perceived that Tim, though older than himself and inches taller, was and would always be only a child. Others must feed him as long as he lived and he would always be at the mercy of any man with a measurable brain. Mamie, too, was meek and mild, and Jen was an aspen of a child, trembling always with terror remembered and terror about to loom again. Bump was stolid and silent and he followed Clem like a dog. At night with dumb persistence he insisted upon sleeping beside Clem's pallet.

How could anyone know what was in any of them? They were obsessed with hunger. They dared not steal bread from the breadbox or leftover bits in the cupboard, but they did steal from the dog. Mom Berger scraped the bottoms of pots and the cracked bones and heaped them upon an old tin pie plate outside the kitchen door. There Clem, coming suddenly from the barn one day, found the four children, as he thought of them, waiting for the mongrel dog to eat its fill. They dared not snatch from the beast lest it growl and Mom Berger hear. But they were using wile. Bump, for whom the dog had a fondness, was coaxing him, though in silence, from his plate. When the dog looked up to wag his tail, Tim and Mamie snatched handfuls of the refuse. When they saw Clem's eyes fixed upon them they shrank back as though he might have been Pop Berger. This caused the conscience in him to burn with the scintillating flame he knew so well, a fire at once cold and consuming. He did not love these ragged children, he was repelled by their filth and their ignorance. The language they spoke was, it seemed to him, the grunting communication of beasts. Nevertheless, they did not deserve to starve.

Seeing them with the dog's food clutched in their hands, staring at him in fear, he turned and went back to the barn. There he sat down again to his task of husking the last of the corn. Pop Berger lay asleep upon the haymow. Thinking of the work to come, Pop had yawned heavily after the midday meal. “Reckon you kin finish the corn,” he had said and had thrown himself on the hay. Clem had gone to the house after an hour to get a drink. The pork and cabbage they had eaten had been very salty, but he had forgotten his thirst. His mind burned with the determination to escape.

“Of the thirty-six ways of escape,” Mr. Fong had once told Clem, “the best is to run away.” It was an ancient Chinese saying, and it came back to Clem's mind now. He was Chinese in more ways than he knew. The early wisdom of people who had long learned what was essential had seeped into him from the days when he first began to know that he was alive. Courageous though he was, and with a tough natural courage, he knew that the first wisdom of a wise man is to stay alive. Only the dead must be silent, only the dead are helpless.

His father's conscience, too, was his inheritance—yes, and his grandfather's also. There were times when Clem went alone into the barn to stand and gaze at the beam that Pop Berger had pointed out to him.

“That there's the one he hang himself on.”

“Why did he do it?” Clem had once asked.

“Softhearted,” Pop had answered in accusation. He had added details later. “The ole feller took a new rope he'd bought a couple days before to tie up a calf with. He hed some kinda crazy notion if good men could git into the gov'ment they could straighten things out. He didn't want the sheriff's job, though—wanted to give it up right away, but the party boss told him he had to keep it for the sake of the party, like. First thing ole man had to do was close the mortgage on that there farm, yander.” Pop Berger's thick forefinger pointed next door. “He wuz softhearted, like I said. He said he'd ruther die. Nobody took him serious, like. Doggone if the old man didn't mean it. Next day somebuddy found him hangin' dead.”

Clem never answered. Pop Berger could not comprehend the only answer that he could have made. Of course his grandfather would rather die. It had been his way of escape from an intolerable duty. He thought a great deal about his grandfather, searching out about the barn, the house, the farm, the small signs of a conscientious, careful, good old man. The cow stalls, for example, were larger than most. There was room for a cow to lie full length in a stall. Pop fretted at the waste of room. There was a trough outside big enough for all the horses to drink at once. The water ran into it through an iron pipe from the well so that it was always fresh. In the house the step between kitchen and living room had been taken away and made into a gentle slope. His grandmother had gone blind in her old age, Pop told him.

Heir of the conscience of his fathers, Clem could not be hardened by the miseries of his present life. Instead he felt a constant soreness in his breast, an ache of remorse for sins of which he was not guilty. This discomfort he now tried to heal superficially by helping the children to get more food to eat. It was not easy, and after some struggle within himself he decided, remembering the dog's dish, upon simple theft.

After the Aid woman had gone, not to return he knew for many months, even perhaps a year, he was angered to see how instantly the man and woman fell back into their careless cruelty. The meat was put away and the milk was watered. Yet he dared not complain. He, too, was now in the power of these two, and if they saw his courage they could prevent the escape he planned. His Chinese childhood had taught him never to be reckless even in anger, for anger is no weapon. Anger can give energy to the mind but only if it is harnessed and held in control. Therefore he locked his anger behind his teeth and, having decided upon theft, he used a deep cunning. He stole food so cleverly that the man thought the woman had eaten some leftover, and she thought the man had taken it. Neither believed the other and they snarled at each other, while the blank faces of the children told nothing. It comforted Clem to know meanwhile that inside Tim's slack stomach there was a piece of boiled beef or a slice of home-cured ham, and that Jen had a lump of butter on a piece of bread. He was just in giving out his booty, saving nothing for himself. At the table he had courage enough to eat more than the younger ones, and since he worked well and was seemingly obedient, Pop gave him more than he might have given. Milk Clem stole without heed. In the pasture, hidden behind the brow of a hill, the children learned to come to him between meals, and he took a tin can from under a rock and milked a can full from one cow and another, never too much from one. Each child had a can full at least twice a day of the pure milk, warm from the cow's body. When they were strong enough, Clem told himself, they would run away together. It must be before the winter fell again.

When autumn came, he had supposed they would all go to school. Tim had told him that the law said they had to go to free school and even Pop had to obey the law. That would make it easy, Clem planned, for them to run away. They could be a day upon their way before night came and before Pop, finding that they did not come home, could report their escape.

But he had not counted on Pop's cleverness. Pop said one day in the barn, “They ain't no call for you to go to school, Clem. You're too big.”

Clem looked up from the hay chopper. “I want to go to school.”

Pop chuckled. “Yeah? Ain't nobody knows you're even here.” Clem stared in silence, waiting. A frightful comprehension was stealing into his brain.

“See?” Pop said. He was picking his teeth after the noon meal and he leaned against a cow stall. “You jest come here, didn't you? You don't belong nowheres, as I see it. School board don't even know you're alive.”

“I could tell them,” Clem said in a tight voice.

“Just you try,” Pop said.

Clem did not answer. He went on chopping the hay while his mind worked fast. This was the final reason why he had to go at once. He would wait no longer. To grow up in ignorance and loneliness was more than he could do. He had dreamed vaguely of finding people to help him, school teachers whom he could tell of the misery of the children. Perhaps Pop had thought of that, too.

“We dassent tell the teacher anything,” Mamie had said once. “Pop says he'd kill us if we told, and he would, too.”

“Yeah, he would,” Tim agreed.

“Well, ain't you goin' to say nothin'?” Pop inquired now.

“No,” Clem said. “I've never been to school anyway.” He kept his face averted and Pop saw only his bent, subdued body working at the hay chopper, and he sauntered away.

But Clem, whose patience was the long endurance of those who have never known better, had suddenly reached the moment of decision. He would run away on Saturday when the man and woman went to the town to do their marketing. He must leave this desecrated house of his forefathers and he must take the children with him, for his own peace, for without him they would starve. Sooner or later they would sicken one by one, and then they would die because they were already half starved, their frail bodies struggling and scarcely able to live even when they were not ill. Where he would go he did not know, nor what he would do with them. Even though he found work, how could he earn enough to feed them?