The Last Western (2 page)

The people would roar at these stories, repeating them over and over again all through the summer.

When the letters were read in the sad church, Willie would listen with eager interest.

Every time his father’s name was mentioned, his heart would leap. He could picture his father standing very high in a tall tree, with shiny red fruit bobbing about his head and great blue mountains in the background. His father would be laughing in the clear sunlight.

At the end of each letter, Consuelo, the author of the letter, would say: This week we send you 218 dollars or 253 dollars or 184 dollars—or whatever the men had earned that week.

Then the priest would give the money to Pedro, Miguel and Fidel, the oldest men of Sandstorm.

It would be their job to take the village truck into Delphi, the nearest town with a regular store, and buy food and other supplies the people would need for the week.

In this way the people managed to live through the summer until the workers came home again.

When they came back to Sandstorm in the fall, after the last crops had been harvested, the people would have a fiesta.

There would be a pig roast—the workers would have bought the pig at the last city on their way south.

There would be wine and singing and dancing and sometimes a marriage in the church of Jesus Theelord.

When the feast ended, the families would settle in for the long winter.

The men would have many stories to tell of the places they had seen in the North: fantastic cities with glittering buildings stretching up to the sky, taller even than the mountains in the distance, amazing sights such as circuses and huge outdoor movie houses where people watched the movies while parked in their cars, and great airplanes that seemed to soar to the outer limits of the blue sky.

Willie would sit in his father’s lap and listen to the tales of these wonderful sights of the northern country.

His father would hold him fast and sing to him.

One song he sang over and over again.

It was a simple song that was played on television in the North.

When the song played, Willie’s father said there were beautiful things to be seen on the television: bands playing, parades, wonderful black and white men working together on towering buildings, fathers and sons playing football together.

Neither Willie’s father nor Willie knew what the English for the song meant, but this is what the song said:

You’ve got a lot to live,

And Pepsi’s got a lot to give.

Then one spring the truck pulled away and the men waved at their families and the families waved back and some of the women and children cried a little and Willie ran after the truck, wanting to join his father.

The truck stopped and Willie’s father jumped down.

He gave Willie a great warm hug.

“Willie, Willie, my son, my son, ” he cried. “I love you—but here now—don’t you see? You must remain with your mother and grandmother. Who shall stay here to be brave for them while I am away? You must be strong now. You are almost six—practically a man. You must have courage. Go back now to your mother and pray that the Lord protect you while I am away. “

Then he kissed his boy and got back on the truck.

Two weeks later the priest gathered all the people in the church.

He told them that the truck had plunged off a road near Pontiac, Illinois, and five of the men had been killed.

Willie’s father was one of those men.

The bodies of the men were brought back in a strange truck. Painted on the side of the truck was a huge golden cat holding up a sign that had been lettered in red fruit.

The sign said, JERRY’S CHERRIES ARE THE BERRIES.

The cat smiled on all the people of Sandstorm.

Strange men carried the five pine casket-boxes to the door of the church. Then they went away.

During the funeral the women cried and the old men trembled.

Willie looked at the sad Lord who hung from his cross asking for a drink.

After the Mass the five caskets were carried to the cemetery at the edge of town. There they were lowered into the sandy soil.

Willie and his mother and Cool Dawn went back to their bus-home without a word.

“Papa will never come back?” Willie asked.

“He is happy with the Lord,” said Willie’s mother.

Willie thought of the statue of the Lord in the church. He started to cry.

Cool Dawn put her arms around Willie.

“He has gone to the great Spirit of Love. We will see him again and be happy with him. “

Cool Dawn said this with great conviction and Willie felt better immediately, though when he went back to the cemetery at sunset to see where his father was buried, he began to cry again.

Then he remembered how happy his father had been on the last day he had seen him.

He remembered that his father had told him to be strong and brave.

At the cemetery the sand had already half buried the white cross that marked his father’s grave.

Soon the sand would shift again so that it would be impossible to say who was buried where.

Willie knelt by the grave and put his hand on the place where they had lowered his father’s body into the soil.

Then he sang the song his father loved:

You’ve got a lot to live,

And Pepsi’s got a lot to give.

The song whispered across the sand like a sad sigh and then was lost in the constant mourning of the wind.

The next spring
Willie’s mother and Cool Dawn decided to leave Sandstorm and seek employment in Houston, the great city of Texas.

It was a sad day for Willie.

It meant saying good-bye to all the people he had come to love in Sandstorm.

Good-bye to the old bus that had been home.

Good-bye to the sad Lord in the broken-down church.

Good-bye to the grave of his father.

Willie found that a person becomes attached to sad and painful things and that sometimes even sorrow is hard to give up.

But when the Greyhound bus came into sight of the slick black buildings of Houston, his heart pounded with excitement.

There was a shining busyness about the city—a great adventure was in the air.

There were glittering cars everywhere one turned, handsome stores and office buildings, bright signs that told of magic things people bought and sold to one another.

The two women found a small apartment in an old section of the city.

The apartment was in a five-story tenement of red brick that had been built in the unremembered times. The tenement was called the William McKinley Arms.

One hundred eighty-seven people lived in the William McKinley Arms, most of them black, most of them old, many of them damaged or broken in some way.

The rooms were small, evil-smelling and poorly cared for. They had flaking paint and rattling pipes and floors with holes in them. They were cold in the winter and steaming in the summer.

Many rats had made the William McKinley Arms their year-round residence. No one ever took a census of the rat population of the building, but there were at least two rats for every tenant and then some.

Willie hated and feared the rats, but it was through a rat that he became acquainted with the girl who lived in the flat on the second floor.

One afternoon as he was coming up the stairway from the cement courtyard in back of the tenement, he heard a scream and there was the girl, holding her skinny black arm, bobbing back and forth on the stairs as if she were playing a strange game.

“It bit me!” she cried, and then Willie saw the rat loping down the stairs to the basement, in no particular hurry and certainly not afraid.

There was blood running down the girl’s arm. Willie grabbed her arm and tied his handkerchief around it.

“Where’s your mother?”

“Working,” the girl said, still crying.

“Come with me,” said Willie.

He took her upstairs where Cool Dawn cleaned the bite and gave the girl a glass of milk. Between Cool Dawn’s assurances and Willie’s vow to rid the William McKinley Arms of all rats, she calmed down.

Her name was Carolyn Sage, and her family—father, mother and seven children—had moved into the tenement only last year. She was a tiny girl with thick black hair and wide-set brown eyes, and she was Willie’s exact age.

Carolyn was friendly and cheerful, and she and Willie took to playing together on the cement courtyard in back of the tenement. She was a girl friend rather than a boy friend, which Willie would have preferred then, but she was fun to be with and Willie thought that if he ever had a sister, he would like her to be like Carolyn.

Carolyn’s family had a television set, and that first summer because Willie had never seen television before, he and Carolyn watched hours of television shows.

Willie was fascinated by all that he saw. He could not believe all that was going on in the world. For the first time he saw with his own eyes some of the sights his father had once told him about: the vast cities beyond Houston, the airplanes and the great sea vessels, the animals that lived in different parts of the world, the cars that people owned, the houses they lived in, the clothes they wore, the food they ate, the incredible things they did.

Sometimes the words used on television were hard to understand, and Carolyn would have to explain. Her mother was Mexican, and the Sage family had lived in a Mexican town before moving to Houston, so that Carolyn understood Spanish quite well. Sometimes she and Willie would speak that language rather than English, though Willie’s mother and Cool Dawn objected to this very much.

When they weren’t watching television, Willie and Carolyn explored the tenement, visiting their neighbors.

There was Mrs. Sarto who lived in a room in the basement—a room with walls that were covered with pictures of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She sat in her room all day long, with a cat whose name was Poppino, and prayed her rosary. Sometimes she got Carolyn and Willie to pray with her, but they preferred to play with Poppino.

“What is wrong with you, boy?” Mrs. Sarto asked Willie one day.

“Nothing, ma’am.”

“You are colored wrong,” the old woman said.

Afterwards. Willie asked Carolyn what Mrs. Sarto meant.

Carolyn hesitated a little and then said, “You look different is all.”

“Why?”

“Just different.”

There was Mrs. Morgan who was ninety years old and very deaf and who had a phonograph on which she played a certain song over and over again. It was a song from the unremembered times sung by a singer of the older days named F. Sinatra.

The song was called
Come Fly with Me
.

Carolyn and Willie used to sing the song, stretching out their arms like the singers they had seen on old-time TV movies, until they shrieked with laughter. Mrs. Sarto said that the song Mrs. Morgan played was
Ave Maria
, a song of praise to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that it was not right to laugh at holy songs, and she blamed their laughing on Willie’s color.

“They made you up,” Mrs. Sarto said to him. “It is a trick to frighten me. To color someone that way—it isn’t fair.”

There was Mr. Pitt, a black man of about fifty, who had lost his hands in some war. He read
True Horror Comics
all day, turning the pages with strange hook devices that he had for hands, and he would nod his head and mumble strange things that could not be understood.

Sometimes Willie and Carolyn would ask Mr. Pitt to show them the Purple Heart Medal he had won in combat.

With his hooks Mr. Pitt would pull the medal out of his shirt pocket—he carried it with him always—and dangle it before them.

“It’s very pretty,” Carolyn would say, or, “It is a nice thing to have.”

“Proof,” Mr. Pitt would reply. “Proof positive.”

Willie and Carolyn did not know what proof it was Mr. Pitt was talking about and were afraid to ask.

But one afternoon Mr. Pitt, having shown them the medal, said, “Now this is justice and justification that the Lord has given me—in case I am questioned.”

“What is the question?” Willie asked.

Mr. Pitt’s eyes narrowed, the veins of his forehead stood out, his mouth opened and closed several times. Then he said, “If your hand scandalizeth thee, what do you do, boy?”

Willie did not know.

Mr. Pitt’s eyes burned with a strange light; his voice became high and shaky.

“Cut it off!” he said.

“Let’s go,” said Carolyn.

“Good-bye, Mr. Pitt.”

Mr. Pitt held up his hooks, looking at them as if they belonged to another person.

“Now there can be no scandal.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Pitt.”

“Good-bye—Good-bye, Mr. Pitt.”

Outside in the courtyard Carolyn said that Mr. Pitt was crazy. But Willie believed that Mr. Pitt was a special person who understood secrets about the world that other people didn’t know anything about.

*  *  *

Willie loved to get up early in the morning before anyone else was out of bed and go out into the cement courtyard and watch the sun come up.

Early one morning he came out to the courtyard and found a dead bird lying there.

He picked up the bird and studied it, feeling sorry for it and wondering where it had come from.

It was a brown and black bird with a speckled gray breast and a white beak.

It did not seem to have a wound of any kind, but it was dead all the same.

Willie tried to find a place to bury the light feathery thing which he thought to be most beautiful. But there was nothing but cement in the courtyard, and he could not make a grave in the cement.

He went around to the front of the William McKinley Arms where there were two narrow rectangles of grass between the walk and the street.

He got a soup spoon from the kitchen and dug a small grave for the bird and was about to put the bird in the grave when he spotted another bird lying on the walk.

This bird had an orange breast and a black-hooded head and was larger than the first bird and even more beautiful.

When he picked it up, the bird’s head lolled back and there was no doubt he was dead too, without a wound or any visible damage.