House of Earth (12 page)

Ella May felt a sour belch come from her stomach up into her nostrils, and muddy little tears caused her eyes to shine through the room. She closed her eyes and saw jerks and kinks of her whole life in her mind and in the room. She laid her head back against the wallpaper again and smelled the rot and the filth of the place. Exactly one mile out the window and to the north she saw two cars running past on the 66. Her face felt like a cake of mud to her when she smiled. “Look at those two cars.”

“Uh-huh.” Tike leaned the back of his head against the door frame. “One runs like a giant. One runs like a dwarf. One runs like a Cadillac, and th' other'n like an Austin.”

“Little bitty one looks like some kind of a little teeny-bitsy termite or a bug of some kind. Don't it?” Ella's tears tasted salty and gritty on her tongue and lips, and a vacant, gummy, far-off feeling was in her words. “Termites. Ha ha ha.”

Tike kept his hands in his hip pockets, his thumbs stuck out. He tapped his left shoe heel against the worm-eaten floor, and with his right shoe he kicked against the edge of a thin, hard, long-gone rim of cheap linoleum. Ella tried to smile. He smiled away toward the highway, over the fences and the fields, over all of the rot and troubles. And he spoke: “Termites. Ha.” And his voice had a wide-open flat tone. And his face smiled with the smile that had made him ten thousand friends and enemies in his thirty-three years.
His face smiled. His face smiled with all of the puzzles, the echoes, the visions of every man that followed the plow and the seed and the seasons. His eyes were marbles and they reflected, like radio, like television, all of the earth rays of sorrow. He bent his knees and started to sit down in the doorway, but thought it would make Ella May feel better if he stood up. He made his body stand up tall and straight as he could, then rested his head against the door frame. His eyes looked away through the wind and watched the large car and the small one fade out down the road to the west. His shoes kicked more loose hunks of linoleum off the edge, and he gripped his hands so tight inside his pockets that his fingernails made deep purplish gashes in the palms of his hands.

His face smiled in the same old wind that he had felt, smelled, and known as a thing of life or death all of his life there. The wind was a thing of the weather, and the weather was the life or the death of people and crops. He had always sort of halfway frowned, halfway smiled, into the weather, up into the sun, up to the stars that chase around the big blue bowl. Blue northern blizzards cut grass blades. The noses and ears of all of his animals were frostbitten. Tike had learned to square, to squint, to wrinkle his face up as he walked into the whistling winds of the cold seasons. The right hot fiery sun of the hot spells, its dusts, its sweat, its jumping and dancing heat, he had learned to smile into that, too. And the rain. The wild and senseless, loose, washing, and running rains the same. All of these
things had carved, shaped, and polished down his forehead. All of these were on his face, in his squint, were a part of that friendly smile for his people, or that storming sneer of hate that came over him as he talked words about his enemies and the folks that had dealt him hurt. And his sneer, his scowl, his snarl, even his squint, his smile, they all came over him a hundred times a day, and a thousand, and sometimes all of these looks came over his face and these feelings ran through his blood a hundred times, all of them from his hate, to his squint, to his smile, to his laugh, in just one single solitary minute.

“Ella, hon,” he asked her, “just what does folks mean when they say, ‘Termite,' anyhow?”

“Termite?” Ella's neck stretched as she took a last look at the two cars through the rusted window screen and the half-open window. “A termite?” She rested her chin on the window ledge.

“Yeah.”

“It's a little bitty bug, or some kind of a little teeny worm, or a little spider, or something like that.” The rust from the screen caused her to sniff. “Like that, I guess.”

“What's he do for a livin'?”

“I don't know. Don't ask me so many silly things. What do you think I am, your walking bookshelf?” She rubbed her hand on a muscle above her knee and felt the heat of her hand against her skin. She had a pout on her face that told Tike that he should not waste his life away looking out
across the pasture to the highway when there were warmer things and closer things. She hoped that he would see the black-and-blue bruised spot on her muscle, and each minute that he looked the other direction caused her to ache and feel lonesome inside herself. She rubbed her thigh faster and harder and slowly moved her hand higher up on her leg so that the bruised spot could be seen easier. For a few moments Tike did not seem to pay her any mind. She felt several lonely years of the winds of the plains blow through her as she said, “Silly.”

“Schoolteacher, ain't you?” He looked east and saw several of his milk cows standing around the barn, anxious to be milked. “You yap half of your life away tryin' to knock some sense into them thick skull kids at that old Star Route school. But now I ask you what a little bug is, I mean, what a termite is, an' you just set there an' tell me I'm silly.”

“You are silly. Silly. That's what you are.” She rubbed her bruise still harder. “Old Mister Silly. Old Silly Mister Tike Hamlin. He doesn't know if he's going or if he's coming.”

Tike turned around and looked at her. She leaned back harder against the wall and her mouth opened as she let her eyes look down at her rubbing hand. Tike felt a distant rumbling and a hot trembling come over him as he told her, “Tell me what a termite is. I'm not goin' to ask you no more.”

“Old Tikey. He don't know. He doesn't know if he's going or coming.”

“I'll be coming if you don't stop rubbing your leg that way and pull your dress down. Lord's little puppy dogs, Honey, how much heat do you think I can take an' not bust a gut?” He turned his back to her for a second, not knowing what else to do. Then he felt that she would tease him for being bashful or a sissy, and he faced her again with sticky spit on his lips. His breathing sounded like the heavy rushing of a stormy wind. His heart jumped around inside him. He felt a craving to take off her cotton dress and to kiss her all over as she lay on the floor. “What you got there? A black an' blue mark? Where 'bouts did you get it?”

“A dern long time that you were a-noticing it.” She pouted at him. “I did it when I was carrying the cream cans. You remember? When the wind blew my dress up, and you had such a duck fit about it?”

“Mmm.”

“I would mmm if I was you. I could have torn my whole leg half off, and you'da never noticed it.”

“Pretty bad bruised, ain't it? Yeah. Here. Lemme give it a nice good rubbin'. I'll kneel right down here between your feet just about right here, and, here, don't jump thataway now, an' I'll give you the smoothest an' th' nicest rubbin' job that any shemale ever got since Jesus quit paintin' little red wagons. But my old hands is so rough an' all cut up an' blistered an' warty an' so full of calluses that you might feel more like you was getting' runned over by a wild herd o' mean cattle.” He kissed her kneecap.

“No such of a thing. Feels good. Owwch. Not so hard
right on that spot right there, there. Ohhch. Mmm. That's as nice as even a town girl could want. Leg might not be so pretty as a town girl's. Think?” She rubbed her hair against the wall as she talked, with her eyes half shut and her lips wet.

“Town gals ain't even in it.” Tike's face looked hurt as he examined her blue muscle. “Ain't even in th' runoff.”

“Ouch. Easier a teeny little bit. Now I do know you're a silly.” She spread her feet farther apart. Tike kneeled between them and pushed her legs more apart with his knees. The warmth of his rubbing felt so good that she let her body fall as limber as a towel. “Now I'll tell you what a termite is,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“A termite is something that eats up houses and makes things all rotten.”

“Huh. All things rotten?”

“No. Just some things. Wood. Tar paper. Linoleum. Houses. Ahh. Gosh dern whiz a mighty gee ohh. Tike, you've not got the least idea how good the feel of your hands is to me now.”

“Does he make dogs an' cats rotten?”

“No. Ohhh. I don't know.” She half laughed to herself.

“Make people rotten?”

“Nooohhh.”

“Just wood an' tar paper an' 'noleum? Huh?”

“Mostly just wood. Wood houses,” she answered. “Most near anything that's built out of wood.”

“Huh, mmm. Rub my hair back out of my eyes, will you, Hon? Can't see half of what I'm rubbin' here. Can't 'ford to miss out on none of it.”

“None of what? Sil?”

“None of my leg I'm a-rubbin'.”

“Your leg? Since when is my leg your leg?” Ella May tried her best to act serious. “Please state.”

“Since the first time I ever rubbed it. 'Member?”

“No. And neither do you. Shut up. Keep rubbing.” Ella May knew just how and when to toss her head and to cause her hair to fall down across her shoulders, so that with every rub, Tike's nose and mouth caught the smell of her hair and her neck, and caused his blood to warm up like a kettle on a cookstove. “Do you remember when it was?”

Tike swallowed a lump in his throat and said, “Strikes me it was one night, ah, that night, you recollect, when your ma and your pa had gone to bed and your three big brothers and your two little ones was all a-hanging around the front room there, keeping warm by the fire, and we held your mama's old dough board up on our laps and played poker for matches.”

“Ooooooo.” Ella bumped her head back so hard against the wall that the loose dirt sifted from cracks and little humps where the winds had packed the dust as hard and as tight as mud daubers or as hornets, ants, or wasps packing mud. The sifting of the dust down behind the wallpaper caused both Tike and Ella May to open their eyes a slit
wider, to stare at nothing, but to listen and to think, and to let their history sift through their brains as the names of their peoples now sifted over the top sod. The only sound that was made was her high whine, “Oooooo.” For that brief short second and space of time, the room was the room of a ghost house, and the spirit named in the winds tossed more and more dust, more and more dirt, into the air, to strike up and down against the house, like spirits of the dead carrying their own dirt, howling, begging, crying somewhere on the upper plains to be born again.

“I'd like to stay right here and rub your cuts an' burns an' bruises all night long, Lady, but I hear somethin'”—his face tilted up toward the ceiling—“I think I hear an awful funny sound out there in that wind.” He kissed the bruise on her leg and said, “Plant, plant. Dig dig. Cover up, cover up. Now my seed's all planted an' dug down good an' deep for th' winter.” He scratched her thigh muscle with one finger as if he were digging, then he made a movement with his hands as if he were covering it over.

As a rule every afternoon a few minutes before the sun went down, Tike struck out and fed his two hogs, milked his six cows, fed his four horses, and tossed a bucketful of mixed feed to his chickens while Ella May separated her cream, made biscuits and milk gravy, fried pork ham, and boiled a pot of coffee.

But she told Tike, “Methinks me hears me an awful strange note of kinda funny music in that wind meself.
Here. Jump up. Close that old no-account door before this house just fills up with air and blows off across the country like a balloon. Close it tight. Here. Throw on this heavy shirt and this jumper. Wait till I get on my Fifth Avenue rag coat here, and I'll help you do the outside chores, then, what say, huh, you help me get the cream separated and the supper fixed and then the dishes washed and all of the cracks chinked full of rags, huh? What say, huh?”

As they ducked their heads down and crossed the yard, Tike snarled and shook his head and said, “Whew. Grab a tit an' growl.”

And Ella May scolded him, “I do wish that you would try to use better language.”

All of the time that they worked at their jobs, Tike cursed, spit, cracked jokes, whooped and hollered, and made different sounds like the chickens, ducks, dogs, turkeys, geese, horses, cattle, and sheep. “Only lingo I ever could talk.” He laughed at Ella.

He jumped his barbed-wire fence and threw a bucket of seeds out onto the ground, and while the chickens pecked it up in a thankful way, Tike flapped his arms and crowed like a rooster. The horses lifted their heads in the air and snorted, both at the wild yells and at the wilder winds in the distance. There was a wall-eyed worried look on the cattle's faces, and he bowed his neck, hunched his shoulders, and swung his head back and forth, as sad, as pitiful, and as worried as any of the cows. He drove them into their stalls while Ella May poured buckets of feed into their
boxes. She scolded at him again, “You could learn how to be something else besides a lunkhead. You could if you'd only put out the energy to try. But the trouble with you is, you won't even try.”

“Try ta what?” he teased her as he milked his first cow.

“Oh.” She milked her first one at the side of him, so that her back was only an inch or so from his. “Try to be a man, talk like a man.”