House of Earth (7 page)

“They really got the habit,” Tike said.

“Like dope. Like whiskey. Like tobacco. Like snuff. Like morphine or opium or old smoke of some kind. They got the regular habit of taking us for damned old silly fools,” she said.

“You said a cuss word, Elly.”

“I'll say worse than that before this thing is over with!”

“Naaa. Naaa. No more of that there cussin' outta you, now. I ain't goin' to set here an' listen to a woman of mine carry on in no such a way when she never did a cuss word in her whole life before.”

“You'll hear plenty.”

“I don't know why, Lady, never would know why, I don't s'pose. But them there cuss words just don't fit so good into your mouth. Me, it's all right for me to cuss. My old mouth has a little bit of ever'thing in it, anyhow. But no siree, not you. You're not goin' to lose your head an' start out to fightin' folks by cuss words. I'll not let you. I'll slap your jaws.”

Ella May only shook her curls in his lap.

“You always could fight better by sayin' nice words, anyhow, Lady. I don't know how to tell you, but when I lose my nut an' go to cussin' out an' blowin' my top, seems like my words just get all out somewhere in th' wind, an' then they get lost, somehow. But you always did talk with more sense, somehow. Seems like that when you say somethin', somehow or another, it always makes sense, an' it always stays said. Cuts 'em deeper th'n my old loose flyin' cuss words.”

“Cuts who?” She lifted her head and shook her hair back out of her face, and bit her lip as she tried to smile. “Who?”

“I don't know. All of them cheaters an' stealers you're talkin' about.”

“I'm not talking about just any one certain man or
woman, Tike. I'm just talking about greed. Just plain old greed.”

“Yeah. I know. Them greedy ones,” he said.

And she said, “No. No. You know, Tike—ah, it may sound funny. But I think that the people that are greedy, well, they believe that it's right to be greedy. They've got a hope, a dream, a vision, inside of them just like I've, ah, we've got in us. And in a way it's pitiful, but it's not really their fault.”

“Hmm?”

“No more than, say, a bad disease was to break out, like some kind of a fever, or some kind of a plague, and all of us would take it, all of us would get it. Some would have it very light, some would have it sort of, well, sort of medium. Others would have it harder and worse, and some would naturally have it bad. Some of us would lose our heads, and some would lose our hands, and some would lose our senses with the fever.”

“Yeah. But who would be to blame for a plague? Cain't nobody start no fever nor a thing like a plague. Could they, Lady?”

“Filth causes diseases to eat people up.”

“Yeah.”

“And ignorance is the cause of people's filth.”

“Yeah—but—”

“Don't
but
me. And ignorance is caused by your greed.”

“My greed? You mean, ah, me? My greed? You mean that me, my greed caused this farm to be filthy? I didn't
make it filthy. If it was mine, I'd clean th' damn thing up slicker'n a new hat.”

She sat for a bit and looked out past his shoulder. “I feel the same way. I don't know. But you can't put your heart into anything if it's not your own.”

“Shore cain't.”

“I don't know. I never did know. But it looks like to me that we could get together and pass some laws that would give everybody, everybody enough of a piece of land to raise up a house on.”

“Everybody would just go right straight and sell it to get some money to gamble with or to get drunk on, or to fuck with,” he told her. “Gamble. Drink. Fuck.”

“Should be fixed, though, to where if you went and sold your piece of land, then it went back into the hands of the Government, and not some old mean miserly money counter,” she said.

“If th' Gover'ment was to pass out pieces of land right today, the banks would have it all back in two months.” He laughed.

“And if that happened”—she tilted her head—“then the Government should take it away from the banks and pass it out all over again. What do we pay them for? Fishing.”

“Fuckin'.” Tike laughed again.

She half shut her eyes to get a good close look at his face and said, “Your mind is certainly on sex today.”

“Ever'day.”

“Every single sensible thing that I've said here about
your house of earth and your land to build it on, you've brought sex into it.”

“What do you think I want a house an' a piece of land for, to concentrate in?”

“Don't your mind ever think about anything else except just getting a piece of lay?”

“Not that I recollect.”

“How long has your mind been running thisaway?”

“'Fore I learnt how to walk.”

“Silly.”

“Me silly? How come?”

“Oh.” She looked at him. “I don't know. I guess you were just born sort of silly. How come you to be born so silly, anyhow? Tikey?”

“How come you to be born so perty? Lady?” Inside his overalls Tike felt the movement of his penis as it grew long and hard. In the way he was sitting there was not room enough for his penis to become stiff. His clothing caused it to bend in the middle in a way that dealt him a throbbing pain. He stood up on the ground and spread his legs apart. He reached inside his overalls with his fingers and put it in an upright position and sighed a breath of comfort. His blood ran warmer and the whole world seemed to be flying from under his feet. His old feeling was coming over him, and his eyes looked around the yard for something to say to Ella May.

She stood up and looked down at the ground where she had been sitting. She picked up the Department of Agriculture
book. Her eyes watched Tike as he held his hand inside his overalls. She saw his lips tremble and heard him inhale a deep lungful of air. “What have you caught in there, Tikey, a frog?”

“Snake,” Tike said. “Serpent.”

“You seem to be having quite a scuffle.”

“Fight 'im day an' night.”

“And he seems to be getting just a little the best of it from what I can see.” She watched him from the corner of her eye.

He was a moment making his reply. He took a step forward and caught hold of her hand. She could measure the heat of his desire by the moisture in the palm of his hand. He tugged at her slow and easy and stepped backward in the path of the cow barn. “Psssst. Lady. Psst. Lady. Wanta see somethin'? Huh?”

“What are you trying to do to me? Mister?” She pulled back until she had spoken, then she gave in and walked along. “Will you please state?”

“Shh. Gonna show you somethin'.”

“Something? Something what?”

“Shh. Just somethin'.” It was funny to her to see him try to creep along without making any noise, when his heavy work shoes made such a grinding and a crushing sound under the soles that he could be heard all over the ranch. “Shh. C'mon.”

And now, what would it be? What on the farm hadn't he already shown her, yes, in this very same way. What
would it be? Would it be a snake trying to swallow a lizard or a lizard swallowing a frog? A nest of cliff hornets that he had captured by plugging up the door to their nest with a corncob? Had he dragged in some more big bones and teeth of the prehistoric reptiles? Would he show her another rib or a shin or a patch of skin to some mummy of a wayfaring ancestor? Three flies doctoring a dead one back to life by licking him with their tongues? Ants rubbing some lice with their whiskers to cause them to have orgasms and to burst out into a sweat of pure honey? A horned toad with his belly full of red ants? Eagle feathers tied together with a string of human skin? A red-and-white marble that he had found? A die with no spots? Maybe just an old empty shoe full of little baby mice. A bumblebee tied to a spool of black thread. What? Of all the places on a six-hundred-acre farm, why had he piled his relics so near and so close to the hay in the cowshed?

“Tell me what it is!” She smelled the syrup odor of cattle cake, manure, and the sweeter smell of the juicy sap in the stems of the hay and the grass. “Tike!”

There was kind of a sad spirit about the little cowshed. It was a magnetic electricity that was there in the stalls, the feed boxes, the V-shaped mangers filled with dry cobs, corn shucks, and hay. It was the radio waves of their old memories. These waves vibrated, danced, and shone in all the wood braces, boards, railings, props, and in the planks and in the shingles. And the smell was not just a bittersweet thing that came to their nostrils. No, the smells brought
with them older pictures, and the pictures carried with them the smells, the words, things done in days that some say are gone. The boards were all worn glassy slick by the hair and by the warm skin of cattle that followed crooked paths here just to know the pleasure of Tike and Ella May's hands on their tits. Still, Ella May's eyes told her a tale and a story of sad parting as she looked at the fireball sun going down and followed its rays down to where they struck against a smooth round cedar post that helped to hold up the small roof. A hot kind of grief moved in her. She sat there on a bale of hay where Tike had placed her. She felt her memories come through her. She felt a heavy weight of tired weariness come over her. Her first love of life was born in the three walls around her here. Tike had led her here to cover her with the loose hay, loose seeds, loose kisses of his own sort. They had made their separate troubles one trouble here, and all of their little stray scattered desires burned into one single light of craving here. These boards, these nails, pieces of long wire, hay, grain, and manure, all of this was one fiery match that lit the wick of their lamp. Every part and particle of the barn was a part of the one. Every single inch of it had its unknown name. And by the fire of their lamp they could see and feel around the world.

And it did seem to Ella May that her eyes strained to try to follow the rays from the sun around the world. She leaned back against a higher bale of hay and lifted her breasts in her own hands, took a deep breath, let her lips fall apart, and
wished that she could see every little hair on every little body in the whole big wide world, like the lamp of the sun does. Like the breath of the wind does. Like the waters wash them all. Her wind went out and over and across and in and around and through the whole farm, and she felt the hurts, aches, pains, sickness, and the misery and all of the gladness of all the things around her. And she felt the skin of her breasts with her hands and her skin felt hot. And there was a layer of sweat over all of her. She moved her heel up and down inside her work shoe and felt the blistered callus rub against the leather. She turned her feet over to the side and pushed down hard against the straw on the dirt floor, and eased her feet out of the shoes. She lay her head back and spread her knees apart. The stir of the breeze felt good against her feet and thighs.

“I cain't help it when I get to feeling this way, Lady,” he told her through her hair as he stood at her back. “I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm a man, or something.”

“Or something.” She put her hand over her shoulder and took hold of his fingers. “Did I ask you to try to help it?”

“No.”

“Grandma used to tell us girls that a woman feels seven times as much passion as a man. But I don't believe that. I think that you feel this way every time I do, and that I feel it every time you do. I don't know how to tell you how I feel. I don't think any woman can tell a man how she feels. She could talk her head off and never say it. Tike, did you take your shirt off? Is that your skin I feel? And your overalls,
too? And your jumper? You'll take down deathly sick.” She stood up and looked at him.

“Used them here for a bed.” He stood before her naked and pointed down.

“You'll freeze.”

“Sun's warm. Warm enough. I ain't cold. But I could stand just a little bit of your huggin' if you got some to spare.”

She moved against him. He put his arms around her. She held him as she kissed the hairs on his chest and wiggled the end of her nose against his neck. The heat of their bodies soaked her dress with sweat as they stood and kissed. He kissed her eyes, ears, and her hair, the sides of her nose, and down her neck. He put his lips to her lips and she sucked his tongue. She closed her eyes and stood on tiptoe and all she felt was the tip end of his tongue pushing around against her teeth. With one hand he combed his fingers through her hair. With the other hand he rubbed the muscles of her back, shoulder blades, and squeezed her hips. They did not know how long they stood and kissed.

She felt the long hot shape of his penis pressed tight between their stomachs. As she moved her hips from side to side in a slow easy roll she felt his penis grow even warmer and longer. He touched the tip of his tongue to each of her teeth, one at a time and felt the vacant gums in two places where her teeth were out. He moved his tongue over the upper part of her mouth and as he did so he filled his mouth with saliva that she sucked into her mouth and swallowed.