Stories of Erskine Caldwell (83 page)

Lewis sits there on the piano stool looking at me but not saying anything to me. How did you find it out, Lewis — Did someone tell you, or do you just know — I wish you would say something, Lewis. If you will only do that, it will be all over with. I’d never have to come back home once a year at Christmas and sit here like this.

Mamma won’t even ask me what my address is. She acts as though I went upstairs and slept a year, coming down once a year at Christmas. Mamma, I’ve been away from home a whole year. Don’t you care to ask me what I’ve been doing all that time — Go ahead and ask me, Mamma. I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll tell you the perfect truth about myself.

Doesn’t she care about writing to me — doesn’t she care about my writing to her — Mamma, don’t you want my address so you can write to me and tell me how everyone is — Every time I leave they all stand around and look at me and never ask when I’m coming back again. Why don’t they say it — If Mamma would only say it, instead of looking at me like that, it would be better for all of us. I’d never have to come back home again, and they’d never have to sit all day and look at me like that. Why don’t you say something to me, Mamma — For God’s sake, Mamma, don’t sit there all day long and not say a word to me.

Mamma hasn’t even asked me if I am thinking of marrying. I heard her ask Elsie that this morning while I was in the bathroom. Elsie is six years younger than me, and Mamma asks Elsie that but she has never asked me since I went to Birmingham five years ago to study shorthand. They don’t even tell me about the people I used to know in town. They don’t even say good-by when I leave.

If Papa will only say something about it, instead of looking at me like that all the time, I’ll get out and stay out forever. I’ll never come home again as long as I live, if he will only say it. Why doesn’t he ask me if I can find a job for Lewis in Birmingham — Ask me to take him back to Birmingham and look after him to see that he gets along all right from the start, Papa. Ask me that, Papa. Please, Papa, ask me that; ask me something else then, and give me a chance to tell you. Please ask me that and stop sitting there looking at me like that. Don’t you care if Lewis has a job — You don’t want him to stay here and do nothing, do you — You don’t want him to go downtown every night after supper and shoot craps until midnight, do you, Papa — Ask me if I can help Lewis find a job in Birmingham; ask me that, Papa.

I’ve got to tell somebody about myself. You know already, but I’ve got to tell you just the same. I’ve got to tell you so I can leave home and never have to come back once a year at Christmas. I went to Birmingham and took the money to study manicuring. Then I found a job in a barbershop and sat all day long at a little table behind a screen in the rear. A man came in and put his hand down the neck of my dress and squeezed me until I screamed. I went to Nashville, to Memphis, to New Orleans. Every time I sat down at the manicurist’s table in the rear of a barbershop, men came in and put their hands down my dress.

If they would only say something it would be all over with. But they sit and look, and talk about something else all day long. That’s the way it’s been once a year at Christmas for four or five years. It’s been that way ever since I took the money Papa gave me and went to Birmingham to study stenography at the business college. Papa knows I was a manicurist in a barbershop all the time I was there. Papa knows, but Papa won’t say it. Say something, Papa. Please say something, so I can tell you what I do for a living. You know it already, and all the others, too; but I can’t tell you until you say something about it. Mamma, say something; Lewis, say something. Somebody, anybody, say something.

For God’s sake, say something about it this time so I won’t have to come back again next year at Christmas and sit here all day in the parlor while you look at me. Everybody looks at me like that, but nobody ever says it. Mamma makes Elsie stay out of my room while I’m dressing, and Papa sends Lewis downtown every hour or two. If they would only say something, it would be all over with. But they sit all day long in the parlor, and look at me without saying it.

After every meal Mamma takes the dishes I have used and scalds them at the sink. Why don’t they say it, so I’ll never have to come back —

Papa takes a cloth soaked in alcohol and wipes the chair I’ve been sitting in every time I get up and leave the room. Why don’t you go ahead and say it —

Everyone sits in the parlor and looks at me all day long. Elsie and Lewis, Mamma and Papa, they sit on the other side of the room and look at me all day long. Don’t they know I’ll tell them the truth if they would only ask me — Ask me, Papa; I’ll tell you the truth, and never come back again. You can throw away your cloth soaked in alcohol after I’ve gone. So ask me. For God’s sake, say something to me about it.

Once a year at Christmas they sit and look at me, but none of them ever says anything about it. They all sit in the parlor saying to themselves, We are looking at you, Agnes.

(First published in
Clay
)

T
HE SUN OPENED
Roy’s eyes. Through the curtainless window-opening, a four-by-four hole in the side of the house which could be closed by a wooden door in stormy weather, he could see the sun rolling over the top of the sandhill half a mile away. Behind him in the other room of the house he could hear Nora working over the fire in the kitchen stove.

The early morning air was chill and damp. A dull coating of mist had settled on the room, and even the quilt felt moist and watery.

“You awake yet, Roy?” Nora asked through the door in her soft girlish way.

“Just about,” he said, listening for the sound of her bare feet in the room. “The sun looks like it’s going to set the whole world on fire today. Look out the window at it.”

She came out of the kitchen and stood beside the bed, one hand resting on the rattly iron headpiece, looking pale and fragile in the first clear light of the morning. She did not smile when she looked at him, but he could see in her eyes the sparkle that lingered there yet after two years.

“There’s nothing like the sun to stir things awake,” he said, looking neither at her nor away from her. “Every time I see it come up like it did just a while ago — like the world on fire — it does something to me inside.”

Her eyes wandered away as his had done, seeing only their own stare.

“All the fat-bacon is gone,” she said, her lips trembling almost imperceptibly. “I guess we’ll just have to eat the bread without it.”

Roy did not say anything. His eyes turned back toward the sun, which looked like a house on fire in the middle of the night. The red ball was over the crest of the sandhill, moving swiftly over the tops of the stunted pines and scrub oak.

Nora had left before he knew it. He did not know she had gone until he heard the soft tread of her bare feet in the room behind him.

“Maybe Mr. Gene will let us have a little piece of fat-bacon today,” he said, raising his voice for her to hear. “I know it’s early in the week, but you’ve already worked two whole days for him. He ought to let us have a little piece today.”

A little while later he heard her go to the well for a bucket of fresh water. When she came back, he waited for her to say something, but there was no reply. She opened the oven door and looked to see how the corn bread was cooking. When she closed the oven door, she went out on the back porch and threw a pan of dishwater into the yard.

In a few minutes she brought in the plate of hot corn bread and the pot of coffee and set them on the floor beside the bed. Then she sat down and poured him a cupful of coffee.

Roy could manage to hold the cup in his hand once Nora had placed it there. Then by bending his head a little he could sip the coffee whenever he wished to. Nora, though, always watched carefully so he would not spill it. He could have fed himself the corn bread, once it was placed in his hand and his hand placed on his chest, because he could bend his head down far enough to bite it with his teeth. But Nora always sat beside him where she could help him, and she could not keep from feeding him with her own hand every once in a while.

Nora had finished eating and was ready to go. She gave him a second cup of coffee while she was there, and then she went to the back porch to comb her hair again.

“How many more days of hoeing have you got up there in Mr. Gene’s cotton?” he asked her.

“Maybe three, and there might be four. Two of the colored hands didn’t come yesterday. If they don’t come today, it will take us four days to finish the piece.”

“You’ll have six days’ pay coming to you then, won’t you?” he asked. “When you see Mr. Gene today, tell him we’re all out of fat-bacon, Nora. Tell him we’d like to get a little two-pound piece.”

She did not say anything for a while. She went into the kitchen, and came back into the room with him.

“Suppose he won’t let us have it?” she asked.

“But Mr. Gene ought to do that for us,” he told her.

She had left before he realized it. He had closed his eyes for a few moments and, when he opened them again, she was no longer there. He supposed she thought he had dropped off to sleep again, and had gone to hoe cotton without waking him.

He was wide awake. He looked out the window again, but the sun had traveled so far he could not see it any longer.

There was another whole day before him. Until sundown that night he would lie there on his back, unable to move a single limb of his body. He could move his head a little, because his neck was not limp like his arms and legs. But still he could not move out of the position he was in. He had lain there, except for the times when Nora half dragged, half carried him across the room or to the porch, for the past eight months.

It had been eight months, not the eight years it seemed to him, since the bale of cotton had fallen on him when he was helping Mr. Gene and a Negro to store the ginned crop in the shed beside Mr. Gene’s barn. Nobody had ever said whose fault it was that the bale had fallen off the truck and had knocked him flat on the ground, landing on top of him. Roy did not know himself. It might have been an accident, or one of the others might have toppled the bale over just to see what he would do. But whatever the reason was, he had not seen the bale fall until it was too late to get out of the way. It struck him, knocking him flat on the ground, and then fell on him, landing on his back. He had not been able to move a hand or foot since, Mr. Gene had said it was just an act of God, and could not be helped. He had said many times since then that there was nothing he could do about it.

For a while Mr. Gene had wanted him to move off the farm. He told Roy there was nothing he could do any more, and that he needed the house for another tenant to take his place. But Roy and Nora had said they had nowhere else to go, and that since Roy had been paralyzed while working for him, they thought he ought to let them stay. Mr. Gene finally agreed to that, but he told Nora she had to work out the rent, and the bread and meat and coffee. She went to work with the Negroes in the fields, doing the best she could with what little strength she had.

Ever since then Roy had tried to get off his back. The doctor came once, soon after he had got hurt, and said that he would never walk again, much less work, and that he probably would be flat on his back for the rest of his life. If it had not been for Nora, Roy did not know what would have happened to him. There was nobody else to take care of him. He and Nora had been married only two years. She was fifteen when they were married and came there to live, and even at seventeen she was not fully grown. She was still a little girl.

Sometimes the Negroes who lived in the tenant houses farther down the road stopped and talked to him, and most of them brought things from their gardens when they had enough to spare. On rainy days, and sometimes on Sundays, Ernest Mann, who lived with his wife and children in the closest Negro tenant house, came by and stopped to talk a while. Ernest would tell him everything that was happening on the farm, and Roy was glad of that, because there were many things that Nora never got a chance to find out about.

Roy did not know what was going to happen to them. He was afraid that Mr. Gene was going to put them off the place, almost any day. He knew it would happen sooner or later. When it did happen, he did not know what they would do. It was difficult for Nora to earn a living for both of them, even there; if they moved away, he did not know what she could find to do that would bring in enough to pay house rent and buy food and provide clothes now and then. He worried about that all the time; but he could find no answer that seemed to satisfy him. Several times he had told Nora he wanted her to go away and leave him, because he did not wish her to break herself trying to support him. Nora would never let him talk about it when she could stop him.

There did not seem to be much he could do about things. There was nothing much to live for; all he had was his love for Nora, and hers for him.

After all those months in bed he could determine almost to the quarter-hour the time when Nora would come home. He watched the sun’s rays shining through the windows as though they were hands on a clock.

Nora came up on the front steps while he was looking through the door. He had been expecting her any minute. She looked more tired and weary than ever when he saw her. It was painful to see her coming home at night like that. He could not help feeling like somebody who with a whip was forcing a seventeen-year-old girl to go out and do a man’s work in the hot sun for ten and eleven hours every day.

“That’s you, isn’t it, Nora?” he said, trying to see her plainly.

“Yes, Roy,” she answered.

Nora came into the room and sat down on the bed beside him. The old stockings that she wore over her hands to protect them from the sun and to keep the wooden hoe handle from blistering her fingers were in shreds. She took them off and dropped them weakly on the floor at her feet.

“Have you been all right today, Roy?” she asked. A smile broke the corners of her mouth, but she was too tired to let it go any farther across her cheeks. “Are you all right now, Roy?”