House of Earth (11 page)

As they walked up to the front door on the east, Tike's eyes fell down across the top of the old flat sandstone that had been carried up from the canyons. He laughed in his
way. A way that was very different from Ella May's. His throat simply filled with a low kind of chuckle that echoed all through his lungs and body. He always laughed soft as the lint on the straw, quiet as the skin on the new moon, easier than Ella May, and never as loud, unless he was shouting at her across the yard, or at a friend in town across one of the streets. His face came to life and showed his whole life on it as he laughed, but he just seemed to be laughing inside his own self right back at his own misery. He looked down at the old flat stone steps, the old sandy rock, and said, “And this, Elly, ah, this is, I guess, what you can call our first stepstone to something real.”

She put one foot on the top of the rock and stepped up into the door, and grunted, “Whew. I hope that something we do is a stepping stone to something real.” Her eyes had a young, fiery wildness in them as they looked around the room in hate. The sound of her teeth gritting together came to Tike's ear as he walked in behind her.

“Not very much to look at, is it?” was all that he could say as he fell down on his stomach across their bed. It seemed to his nose that the powdery cloud of dust came up out of the patchwork quilt. He made a snorting sound with his lips and nose.

And Ella May had already learned long before now what was in the thoughts of Tike Hamlin every time that his mouth and nose made this nervous snorting sound. He was mad. Sore. He was getting fed up and disgusted with the whole thing. Tike Hamlin was a man to fight, and she knew
that this snort of his meant that he was mad enough, angry enough, and nervous enough to fight. Her brain boiled as she thought:

“But. Fight what? Fight who? Fight where? When? The wind, or the rain? Fight the moon and the stars? Rip off his clothes and fight the seasons and the clouds? Fight the wind and fight the dust because it came at the wrong time, never at the right time? Fight the Sixty-Six Highway over yonder because it ran in the wrong directions? Go and fight everybody at the Star Route school? Fight all of the neighbors around? Fight the hogs and dogs, chickens, for loafing around under the house? Fight the rooster for chasing after the hen? Fight the old boar hog because he chased and rooted and bit the little baby pigs? Fight the turkey hen because she flew too high up on top of the windmill platform and then screamed like an idiot till she nearly drove the whole farm crazy? Fight what? Fight who? When? Where? Fight the people that come out across the yard to collect all kinds of silly debts? Go fight the state capitol, the city hall, the public toilet? What?” It was all of this. It was more than this. It was something that was so big that it was hard for words to say, and it was something that was mixed up and messed up in every little job that their fingers touched upon, each little step their feet had to take, something that was a burning pain in every chore and every job around the farm, something, something, it was something so little, so little, that it was in everything they went about. And it was just because Tike was filled with all these feelings that Ella May
almost smiled when he snorted a few more times. She lifted her face up toward the ceiling as she slipped her dress up over her head, and laid it down over the back of a cane-bottom chair. In her nose she felt the burn, the little burn, that faraway, dim and distant little burn that the dust from the house had always caused her. She took a deep breath. She felt her tears washing away all of the eye pencil out of her eyebrows. She tried to wipe these away to hide them from Tike on the bed, but the ends of her fingers only smeared the eye shadow on her cheeks, and made her look hollow-cheeked, skinny, scary, something like the shadow on a dried skull just at sundown in the colors.

“Elly.” Tike pushed his nose and mouth down hard against the bedclothes. “Hon.”

“What?” she answered him with her back turned. She kicked her shoes off as easily as she could without disturbing what Tike was about to say. “Huh?”

“Somethin' I got to tell. Eatin' my whole guts out. I got to tell it, tell it, even if you kill me for it. Even if you take up a chopping axe and run me clean off of the place.” His hands clawed into the covers on the mattress and the springs squeaked like a canary bird caught in a corner. “I'm going nuts. Bats. Just can't keep it to myself no longer.”

Ella put her arms and head through the collar of a clean blue cotton dress with round white dots all over it, and as she pulled the cloth down at the bottom and buttoned two buttons at her waist, she answered, “We never did make a
practice of keeping things a secret from one another, did we, Mister?”

“No, but.”

“But what? Sir?”

“This is bad. Mean. Something as big as all of our other worries put together. Something that's bigger than that, even.” Tike pounded the bed with the palm of his hand, and pulled at his hair with his other five fingers. “Even worse than all of them.”

Ella stood and looked at the wallpaper, its cracks, rips, dust, and cobwebs that no earthly woman could ever clean or hope to clean as fast as they came along. Her back was still turned to Tike. “Yes …?”

“You know, you remember last year.”

“Yes. What about last year?”

“Well. Last year we rented this six hundred acres, didn't we?”

“Yes …”

“And we paid down the cash money for it, didn't we?” A hot kind of torture made him sound like he was badly embarrassed.

“Yes.” Her voice rasped, barely above a dry whisper. She felt the dust, dirt, filth, of the whole house in her mouth as she rubbed her face with both hands and swayed on her feet.

“Hon. It's not me, my own self, that I'm worried about, or even thinking about. It's not me. I have always seen the hard side, and lived on the dirty side, and the rotten side
of things; but you've not. You've not ever been any lower down than to be the daughter of a big man that owns lots of land and lots of farms, and you've always lived in a big stone twelve-room house, and had at least a few of the good things in this old world. You're used to them. Your mind and your plans and your thoughts and your hopes, everything about you has always been, well, sort of, sort of way up the ladder above me. I remember how I wanted to be a big man like your dad all my life, and how I itched and craved and burned inside me to be a big owner, or a big man, a big manager, a foreman, a boss of some kind, some kind or another over a big stretch of land just as far in every direction as my eyes could see. But I never was anything, nothing more than just the old hardworking son of, well, a family of folks that lost their land to your very father, that was several years ago.”

“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.