House of Earth (15 page)

This was what was going on in the mind of Tike as he splashed his flour paste on the wall and pasted his papers down flat.

Ella May sat across the table from Tike and watched him eat his supper. She knew that a herd of deep thoughts were traveling through his mind. He looked down at his plate and he looked on through the plate. He looked at the dishes on
the table and on through the dishes. He looked out across the room and his eyes went on through the walls. He looked out through the dark window and his eyes went all over the farm and through the panhandle. He looked across the plains. He spoke only a few words and the words seemed to go out across the country in the dark of the night. He smiled and looked into her eyes, and his eyes went in her and through her and on and on. Most of the time they talked about things at the eating table. There was a feeling of lonesomeness around the table when one of these quiet gazing spells came over Tike. Ella May felt Tike's feelings, though, and she knew that he had just let his troubles get heavier than his lips could carry. It caused her to feel sorry and she kept quiet.

She done the supper dishes while Tike spread more pages of magazines and papers over the walls. She set her pots and pans away in their orange-crate shelves on the south wall, then fixed the dishes on the table, covered them with a linen tablecloth, and said, “In a way, I'm always pretty glad to see the cold snap come, when it comes it kills out all my old bothersome flies.”

“'S right.” Tike had gotten into the motion of flattening the pages against the walls, and he seemed to be angry deep inside him, so that he worked as fast as he could to try to fight back.

“Need a good hand there, brother Tike?”

“Yeah. Use one all right.”

And together they whistled, hummed, sang parts and
pieces of songs, and Ella May held the papers flat while Tike pasted them down with his broom. Together they laughed at the old pictures of sharp-toed 1910 shoes. They hugged and laughed and pointed at square-built, clumsy models of automobiles with brass trimmings, squeeze honkers, and straps and buckles. They doubled over and held their bellies as they looked at the ladies in their hats, bustles, nets, and wigs. A well-dressed man in a white Palm Beach suit and a stiff straw hat caused them to go into laughing fits. They had looked through the papers and the magazines before, because Ella May had been saving them for several years. So their laughter was caused more by the wind outside, more by the shack and the sound of the dirt blowing against the sides, more by their actual hard luck, poverty, more by the debts and the worries, than by the pictures on the pages. They both felt that all of their fears and troubles were still not as silly nor as funny as these things in the papers of twenty years ago. Yes, both of them would have explained their laughing in these words, but the truth of the matter was that this was just one of those minutes, one of those hours, when the hurt of worry had hit its white-hot heat, and had simply melted and burned into laughs. If they had seen a kite in the sky, a cat on a fence, a boot in the alley, a dog with long hair, three trees on a hill, a weed out the window blowing in the night wind, they would have laughed.

O
ne year. And what is a year? A year is something that can be added on, but it can never be taken away. Yes, added on, earmarked and tagged, counted in signs of dollars and cents, written down the income column and across the page with names, and photos can be taken of faces and clipped onto the papers, and the prints of the new baby's feet can be stamped on the papers of the birth, and the print of the thumb going back to work can be stamped onto the papers that say it is a good place to work. And a year is work. A year is that nervous craving to do your good job and to draw down your good pay, and to join your good union.

And a year of work is three hundred and sixty-four, or -five, or -six days of the run, the hurry, the walking, the bouncing, and the jumping up and down, the arguments, fights, the liquor brawls, hangovers, headaches, and all. Work takes in all climates, all things, all rooms, all furrows, all streets, all sidewalks, and all the shoes that tramp on them. The whirl and roll of planets do not make a year a year, nor the breath of the trifling wind, changing from cold
to hot, forming steam back into ice. Oceans of waters that flow down from the tops of the Smokies and roll in the sea, they help some to make a year a year, but they don't make the year.

Tike had said to Ella May once before they were married, “What a year is, is just another round in our big old fight against the whole world.” What he meant was his fight against the weather and against other men, and sometimes against his own self. But in his own words he was very close to right. He had a right, in a way, to say, “Our fight against the whole world,” because it had always looked to him that his little bunch of people out there on the upper plains were fighting against just about everything in the world. He did not mean that, I, Tike Hamlin, am fighting against the world and all that is in it.

But Tike had it thought out to be a fight of an awful funny mixture. In a way, everybody and everything around him worked against him and fought against him. Yet in another way he did not exactly feel that this was so, because he knew that if and when things rose to a head or came to a showdown, his people on all four sides of him would do everything that they could do to help him. Some of them. Yes. Only some of them. To say that all of them would turn a hand to help him would be wrong, because he knew only too well that some of them would not stop to give him a sip of water if they found him lying with his mouth open at the side of some dry road. He had blood relatives that he had had many hot arguments with in the past, who had not spoken
to him nor him to them in twenty years. And each time the calendar rolled another year around, both sides only turned more proud, and more cold, and more silent.

Ella May's most awful pain in this world was to have to ask for help from her people or from Tike's. Her old daddy had smiled and told her that when Tike and his wild ways brought her to the door of starvation, he would help her out with land, with tools, with a loan of money. He had said, “Every year that comes and goes you'll fall down a little lower an' a little lower. Ohhh. I know you young squirts are full of fire an' tarnation, an' you think that you can do all of yer own thinkin' on yer own hook. But I'll just set here on my front porch or somewheres around th' house an' wait till you come a-crawlin' an' a-whinin' back for me to help you. You'll belly down in th' middle of th' floor here like a little whipped puppy dog.” And she had never seen his face since she spit at him and answered, “You and your old farm and your old stony house here will dry up and rot and turn into burnt powder and blow away into thin air before I'll set my foot inside your gate again! I wouldn't let your money bury me if I was dead!”

Tike and Ella May would have given their last spoonful of flour or of sugar or their last stitch of clothes to certain of their people who had always seemed to work, to save, to fight, to really try. Certain others, they knew, would only “blow the money on some fancy duds” or “scatter it by the handfuls in all of the whorehouses” or “get rid of it hangin' around that corner drugstore tryin' to work up a hunk of
nooky,” or worse yet, “go shovel it away on them old cards or dice or dominoes!”

And still it was harder than this to see through. The ways and the laws that people used to judge one another did not lie in any one certain mold. The people knew the other people. They knew the all good, the half good, the three-fourths good, and the nine-tenths good. One would have six faults and no good. Another had three good habits and four bad ones. Another had eleven sins and twelve virtues. This one, two vices and one streak of honesty. The next one, fair in some things and no-account in others. The next one, all right when the wind is in the east. The next one was a good man while his wife done his thinking. Another one was a hard worker but trailed loose women. And others had their own mixtures of the good and the bad and their makeup was as well known to the others as the times to plow and to plant and to cut and to gather. There were a few people around who fought, drank, gambled, fornicated, trifled, told lies, and cheated, but were so outright and so honest about it that Tike and Ella May either one would lend them their last coin or feed them or shelter them at any time, because they paid them back sooner than lots of the ones that claimed to be so holy.

And so the year went around. The wheel of time rolled down the road of troubles. They had the same things hit them day after day. The same cows bawled to be milked every sunset, and bawled to be milked again at every sunrise.

The same cackles of the chickens and the same crowing
of the roosters, and even if the chickens died or were told to be killed, Tike's ear could not tell very much of a difference in their cackling and their crowing. Each grunt of his old mama and papa hogs he knew like a blood relative. Every little sniff and every little squeal of the baby pigs Ella May knew like children in her nursery. The chirps and the squawks, the sounds of little baby turkeys growing up, she knew, because she had carried each on into the house and talked as she kept him down in a box of rags to look him over, to see if he was all right, just to have some company. It was the same with the new dogs, puppies, the older ones running away, the shes that got in heat and lifted their tails, ran, with all of the adult hes chasing after. The same, too, with the young colts, calves, rabbits, dens of baby snakes, ants, nests of naked little newborn mice, and drunk-looking baby birds born somewhere on the flat ground under a weed, and the same way with the families of scratching cats, and kittens that make noises like a waterlogged organ. Jobs to do at the same time every day. Rocks carried and thrown into mudholes. Wire fences patched up and put back together again. Windbreaks for the animals. Fences to stop stickery weeds and fences to cause the snow to drift away from the livestock. The going. The coming. The naked hours somewhere in the sun. Naked nights hit in the bed from the wind. Laughs. Tears. Fun. Worry. Misery. Company. Lonesomeness. The wheeling of the moon and the stars, whirling of planets, howls of the brave coyotes and wolves, and the tracks of cougar, lion, and panther in
the cow pen. Blistered hands. Calluses. Back bending. Back breaking. Aching muscles. Sweat. Toothache. Headache. Stings. Things that hurt and things that feel good. This is how the year went. This is where it went. These things, and not a clock on a wall, make a year.

Ella May washed her supper dishes and threw the pan of dishwater out the west door in the dark. She felt the sting of the bite of the cold wind on her wet hands. “You know, Mister Tike, I'm always glad to see the first cold snap of weather come. It kills out all of my old mean biting flies. Most of them are already gone, I mean the ones outside, but there are still a few smart-aleck ones that live in here by the fire and hang on till the very first freeze.” She rubbed her hands together in a towel to warm them up, and asked him, “Need a good work hand, to help you paste that paper over those old cracks?” She smiled and stood by the table. “Say?”

Tike grunted an answer. His mind had been wandering around the world nine times. “Hmm? Oh. Ahhh. Work hand? Naww. Lady, you set down there on the bed or somewhere and get you some rest. Set down before you fall down.” Then he stood back and looked at the newly pasted pages that he had put on to cover the cracks. “Gad dern my soul to hell, anyhow, and tie up th' tails of forty tomcats! I've put enough flour and water on these walls to feed and raise and fatten six kids to butcher!”

“Only way on earth to ever keep out that old dust and wind, though, at least that I know of.” She started to walk toward him to help him.

“I told you to set down before you fall down!”

“But I can help.”

“You're so big an' round and so fat with that baby in your belly that if you fall down, Lady, you'll get started rolling and I never would be able to catch you. Set down. Make yourself miserable.” He pointed his paste broom at a chair. “You know as well as I know why I'm tellin' you. Set down.”

“But. Tike.”

“Don't But Tike me! You know why. That baby was supposed to of been here four or five days back! It's liable to come jumpin' out across here with a tractor in each hand any minute now! He's comin' so late that he'll be grown up before he's even born! Set down. I don't want your blood on my hands. Not now. Not just when I'm on th' start of gettin' to be a big landowner. Set down. If he falls out there in the middle of th' floor he'll break his head!” Tike wore a faded old blue shirt stuck down into a pair of khaki work pants, and his same pair of heavy work shoes that he had on a year ago, only he had nailed new rubber tread soles onto them and kept them good and full of grease. “Just about through with this contract anyhow. Don't need no work hands. Guess I'll hafta print me a big sign an' put it up: No Work Hands Wanted So Keep To Hell On Traveling!” As he waved his whisk broom in the air he threw drops of the paste, which lit on Ella May's face, on her eyelid, and some in her hair.