House of Earth (21 page)

And the open door of the little room allowed the wind to chase in like a whole stockyard of animals drunk on silo juice. Like the mean and greedy spirits of ten hundred
nickel-begging saints fighting to enter into the little body of the baby, to be born again here tonight, to preach, to beg, to bum dimes to get drunker on. And all of these wayward souls flew straight into the glass globe of the coal oil lamp on the eating table. And the claws of the night demons reached to steal the flame of the fire because they thought that it was the soul of all life, the warmer of all bodies, the strength in all action. The fire in the lamp globe had higher ideas and craved to light the way for the baby to be born, craved, too, just at the right instant, to melt out into the air of the room at the moment that the baby took its first breath, and to be inhaled, sucked in, drawn into the lungs and the blood, the brain and the eyes, the soul of the lamp fire fought the unborn blizzard spirits because if they devoured its flame before it could be breathed into the nose of the baby, then it would take several million years again to get to be a flame of fire again, a flame struck and placed there by the hand of a woman with a baby in her stomach. The room shook, trembled, splashed and foamed, rolled and tossed, pitched and squirmed, with the shadows of the battle that was going on between the flame or fire and the outer winds down inside the lamp globe. The winds howled into all of the private corners of the room, sniffled, smelled, prodded, felt with their deathly fingers, and danced with such a wild passion that they nearly succeeded in stealing the lamplight. The things about the room flashed light and dark like the gunfire from the muzzles of a million freedom cannons.

And the voices of Tike and Blanche lifting, working,
scolding, and coaxing Ella May, these voices drifted into the room and all through the walls and the floor, the ceiling, the stairs, and up in the attic to the roost.

“Kill yer own self an' yer baby like this.”

“And kill both of us with the pneumonia.”

“What did ya ever do it for? Say? Talk? Hold her up by her feet. I got her hands. Talk? Lady?” There was a tender roughness in Tike's voice. “Talk? Lady?”

And Blanche said, “If your baby lives through this, then it will live through everything.” She pushed her way in at the door with one of Ella's feet in each hand. “Why did you ever do such a thing?”

Tike carried her head and shoulders with a hand under each arm. Tike was not a man to get afraid of anything very easily, no matter how big, how little, how ugly, how mean, it was. This was the worst three minutes that he had ever lived through so far. His blood had left his face a dusty white, and the chill of the wind had set his face like a rock and his eyes like marble stones.

Ella had been easy to handle so far. The stingers in the whip of that wind had not really dealt her much bodily damage outside the shock of the thing. She had been easy to carry, but just as she felt Blanche carry her feet through the door she twisted, turned, and set up a nervous fit of kicking. “No. No. No,” were the only words she would speak. It took all of Tike's strength to lift her past the door and to kick it shut behind him. And while they forced her over onto the bed, she screamed out louder, “No NO NOOO!”

The wind knocked the door open again at Tike's back. He kicked it shut with such a bang that the draft of air blew the lamp out.

“See what you have done,” Blanche spoke out in the dark when she sat down on Ella May's bed to keep her from tossing herself onto the floor. “See? Be still.”

“Ya got us all so dadblamed scared that th' light's jumped clean outta th' lamp globe. Why'ncha talk? Make some sense? Darkest dern dark I ever seen in all of my put togethers. Cut it with a knife.” Tike felt about in the room for the orange crate just above the eating table and Blanche sighed with relief when he rattled his fingers in the matchbox. “Matches. There. Whooapp. Dropped 'em. God blame it all ta th' devil nohow. Lady. Look what'cha made me do. Talk up. Come ya ta pull any such a stunt anyway?”

And it was there in the dark that Ella May rolled on the bed and cried into the covers, “Everything made me do it. I don't know.”

There was no shaft, no flicker, no hint of light in the room. The darkness outside joined with the darkness inside and while Tike felt on the tablecloth for the matches that he had dropped, it seemed that for a while the cold and the blizzard and the darkness had won out against his hand, there, hunting for his match.

“See what a bad place th' farm would be, Lady, if th' dark was ta blow th' sun out?”

“Strike a match,” Blanche told Tike.

“Light,” Ella said.

“Be no light in this here house till ya tell me why it was that ya done what ya done. Blizzard.”

And Ella answered there in the dark, “I, I just simply couldn't, I couldn't stand the thought of my baby being born here in this old stink pot of a shack. It wasn't me, Tike, it wasn't me. I had but little to do with it. You must, you must believe this. I am the gladdest woman on these old tumbleweed plains tonight because my baby is your baby, and because we have come this far without letting my old landhog daddy give us any help. And me, me, I, ah, oh, I don't care for my own self, my own comfort, really, Tike, you must see this. I don't know any more why I put on that little frizzledy shawl and ran off out into that blizzard, I don't know why. I never will know why. I saw something in my mind, something like a lot of pictures, all run and melted together, ah, something about people all mixed up with each other. I saw how my finger puts a seed down in the ground and I saw how that was hitched up, or tied up somehow, with a lady at a desk somewhere, a family packing tobacco into a barn, men riding on a ship somewhere. I saw exactly how their work traced back to me and mine to them. And then I looked at this room here and this whole house and I didn't see a house, but I saw some kind of a big big big trap worse than a big big big steel trap or a net. And the trap had long sharp teeth and I saw this whole big trap shut its teeth down around my baby's head and my baby's neck. God. That is all that I remember.”

Tike said only, “Well, I be dog.”

And Blanche rubbed Ella May's forehead in the dark and said, “I believe that is the strangest nightmare that any patient of mine ever had. Did it seem to have a meaning of any kind?”

“Yes.” Ella May spoke with her face burning and her eyes up toward the ceiling. “It did. Did you find the matches, Tike? Hurry up. Light the lamp. This awful dark is pushing down on top of me like a tractor running over me. It makes me see old Dan Platzburgh like I saw him when he cranked his tractor and it was in gear and pushed him over backward and climbed on top of him and the blades on the front wheels cut his two arms off right at the elbows, and the big back wheels stabbed him all through and through with long muddy cleats, and the harrow plow on the back end came along and tore him into a thousand different pieces and scattered him all over our field. And you can't hardly set your foot on an inch of these wheat lands that somebody's meat and bones hasn't been scattered over with. Did you find the box of matches again, Tike?”

Tike had had his fingers on the matchbox where he had dropped it on the table for the past few minutes, but it was under the cover of this dark room that he wanted Ella May to keep talking. Instead of answering her, he simply grunted, muttered under his breath, and tapped his hands about on the tablecloth. “Hmm. Mmm.”

“Any bad pains from your dash up the north pole?” Blanche felt Ella's warm hands touch on her own. “Feel all right?”

“Ohhh. I feel all right.” Ella's words had the sound of drifting in from some mile-away canyon. “I didn't really fall hard out there in the yard. I just ran a little ways and then the cold wind hit me and it brought me down around to my right senses, it seems. I didn't fall hard. Just kneeled down. Just like a sinner in church. I just prayed. I never did pray before, but I know that I prayed out there in that wind.”

“For what?” Blanche asked.

“For some kind of house for my baby. Some house that would keep out all of this dirt and all of this filth and, funny, ha ha ha ha, while I was bent over out there in that wind and those few flickers of fine snow were blowing against my skin, I wasn't to say, what you would call cold. Because, ahhhh, ohhh”—these grunts and strains came with the move of her muscles as she spread her feet apart and rubbed her heels against the sheet—“ahhhh. I was in a house, and it wasn't any old rotten house like this. It wasn't any old windfall, crazy, insane coyote trap like this one. It had walls, walls as thick as this mattress, and rooms just like I marked off on the ground with that stick. Do you remember, Tike?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you strike the light yet? Tike?”

“Still huntin'.”

And Blanche asked, “Did you two really draw your house plans already so soon?” Her eyes saw all of the junky trash in this room even though the lamp was out and the darkness heavier than blankets. “Already?”

“Just with a stick,” Tike told her. “Backyard out there.
Out there just about where she fell down at. Wasn't it, Lady?”

“And I, I, ohhh, mmmmhhhh, I was really inside the house. I felt it. I saw it. And the blizzard ran down like an old locoed cow, and it battered its silly brains out against those walls that we had raised up and the walls were as tough and as hard as the very earth itself and that blizzard, ha ha, just went,
Brrrzzzzztttt
. Fizzled out. Hit my walls and had to turn around me and go on and on and on on on ohhhh.”

Blanche said, “Well. What do you know about that?”

And Tike by his table said something that nobody could understand.

“But. But there was something even still lots funnier than that.” Ella's whole body moved in a regular rhythm, up, over, and back again, then up and over and back again, and Blanche knew that the first pains of the birth were well under way. And Ella kept on, “I opened my eyes and I saw that the whole house, the house of earth, was papered inside, all over the insides with little books from the Government. Little books that tell you how to build your house, how to dig its cellar and keep it nice and clean and dry, and how to stucco it on the outside so that the wind and the sun can't eat it down. How to paint it and roof it and how to put the windows in it, and how to draw your own plans on your own ground and shape it up with your own hands to fit right into your own dream. And all of these little books were pasted flat up against the walls. Everywhere I look I see them. I see them now. Ohhhhh. Uhhh. Here I am now.
This is me again. Me again walking. Ohhhh ahhh. Ughhh. Tike, strike me a match. I want to see our earth house in the good good good light. I don't want little Tikey Junior the Second to even so much as stick his little head out here in this old messy crazy pukey dark.”

Blanche felt the warmth of Ella's face with one hand. With her other hand she touched the leg of Tike's pants in the dark. “I suppose that we had best have some light on this business. Strike your light, Mister Hamlin. I guess that your new house should be well lighted. Was it?”

Tike struck a match against his thumbnail and held it in front of his face while the flame flew upward, then flared its brightest, and then died down to burn along the wood. “Bound to been.” He smiled with a deep, serious grin. “Who'd raise up a house outta earth bricks an' then not run it fulla eee-leck-y-triss-eye-teee?” The match flame carried his words out slow and long and floated them up into the air. “Not us by a dam site.”

“I saw that too. I saw even the dam site where our electricity was made. I don't know where it was, but it was away off somewhere. A whole ocean of water seemed to be on one end of a wire and it milked our cows, churned our butter, lighted our house, and even swept our floors on this end.”

“Ain't a droppa water in ninety mile o' here. An' they ain't no man a livin' can sweep this floor with 'lectricity nohow. An' a six-foot hunk of copper wire would cost twicet as much's this whole blamed house. Ain't nobody gonna build
no wire line o' no kind away out here to this lousy dump.” He lifted the globe and lit the wick of the lamp.

“I think you're right for once in your life.” Blanche shook her head toward Tike. “If you was to nail a copper wire onto this dilapidated antique, it would all fall down.
Booom
. Just that way.” She fanned her hand in the air to show what she meant.

Ella May smiled with a sharp pain, moved from side to side, and said, “But you can nail all of the copper wires you wish to on my new house of earth. And it will just stand there and ask for more. And you can just take and hang it all full of fancy lightbulbs and trinkets and buttons and gadgets and springs and triggers and fuses and the henhouse too, and then the barn to boot, and the cowshed of the earth, and the big earth wall all around the lot and all around the barns and around the yards. You can't break them down with electric wires because they're this thick, and this wide, and you can run ten tractors right into them and not tear them down. And you'll live to see this little old measly stink hole of a dung pile shine out brighter after night than it does now by day. Ohhhh. Goshhhh. Blanche. Mhhhmmm. I'm afraid. Afraid that I feel some armies marching around in my stomach, or else some work gangs building up a power dam in there. I don't know just. Mmmhhhh. Which.” Her tongue was purple between her teeth as she tried to laugh. “Tike, you old silly galoot, you, don't you know that there wasn't a drop of water within three hundred miles of Los
Angeles, but they have got a couple or three lamp bulbs out there that burn on electricity.”