by William Gay
For a time he was torn between the comfort of the upholstery and the tedium of these tales and the indecision was his undoing. By the time he disembarked he was as far north as you can go in Tennessee without wading into the Mississippi River and he was far off any major highway that led east.
There were cotton fields unimaginable, cotton fields that seemed to go on as far as the eye could see, look out the window it was cotton, look out the door it was cotton, he imagined they must see cotton in their sleep. There were little gray clapboard shacks that seemed to be receding back into the earth and the cottonfields came up to their very porches, there were paths wending to the road. As if whoever owned these lands demanded that every foot of it be employed to productive purpose.
He passed these shanties and here and there a country store owned by the selfsame man who owned the land and who paid his hands on Friday and took it back on Saturday for overpriced groceries, as if he had pulled money from his left pocket and placed it in the right, money which had marvelously reproduced itself, the ultimate alchemist. He passed shanties with naked children playing in the dirt and shanties with wilted flowers growing in dissected car casings and Maxwell House coffee cans and once in a while a woman came and threw dishwater into the yard and leant a minute and watched him go.
The people he saw looked to him like survivors of some great natural cataclysm, had not yet come to terms with the way their world had changed. But most of the shanties were empty, choppers were in the field strung out like foraging birds. They moved across the field in a great staggered line and their hoes rose and fell in some vast unconcerted motion that ultimately took on a rhythm of its own.
He set out afoot now the way he’d come, on some nameless back road in Lake County. On his right some sloughs of brackish yellow water sometimes seemed to threaten the road itself and he wondered if the river flooded or if these were just the backwaters of the Mississippi. The sun stood at its zenith and the day had grown progressively hotter and after a while he began to notice how thirsty he was becoming.
There didn’t seem to be any water to drink in this country. To the left of the road stretched vast cornfields of a uniform arsenical green and they went as far as the eye could see and did not end but simply faded out with distance.
He left the road where turgid yellow water had eaten a chunk out of the red chert and went through coarse tall sawgrass following the shore of the slough. Perhaps there was clean water, a spring bleeding in. He gave up after a while and rested beneath the shade of a water oak and studied the opaque yellow surface where water spiders darted and checked and the surface rimpled with arcane life and worked with soft gaseous expulsions of something decayed or some hidden commerce. Crayfish had a veritable community worked into the banks with their gray mud houses, a cottonmouth dropped from a low branch with scarcely a sound and vanished in a diminishing series of esses and the child he’d been shivered within him and his imagination envisioned huge crocodiles broad in the dark hours dragging entire cows sloughward for a midnight feast and he dreamed of legged monsters that clambered up the muddy banks and staggered after him in the wake of his flight.
An old grandfather turtle drowsed on a halfsubmerged cypress. Seven kinds of meat the old folks say. Hunger had dogged him for days, he imagined the turtle alchemized, mutated into a thin hot broth that steamed fragrantly in an enameled kettle, the broth sweetened with baby carrots and tiny green sweet peas and white chunks of potato.
I should go, I should go, but the dying will die unassisted, it’s a skill they’re mastering, even the most inept grow proficient, it’s what the dying do best. And there are worse things to dread than that.
The water he uplifted in his cupped palms stank of dead fish and tiny black hardshell bugs swam in it and he flung it away and wiped his hands on his jeans and spat dryly into the tepid water and went back through the rough grass to the road.
He went past weathered sharecroppers shacks that seemed to sit on the earth without benefit of foundation with rot creeping upward like some malignant fungus and the houses stood like the dried husks of some cultural metamorphosis from other seasons that had cast them off and gone on to better things. He saw no soul about save an old sepia woman who sat unmoving in a willow rocker from the purple shadows of a porch and who gave no recognition that he’d passed. He raised an arm in greeting and let it fall and thought to ask for water but something in her stillness gave him pause. As if he’d gone invisible in the world, become a ghost still haunting a land he could not quit. She sat still as some mockery of sticks and hair and castoff clothing and she looked like nothing so much as some mummified old grandmother swiped from an undertaker’s wares, sitting here as a posting to warn off whatever had decimated this blighted waste. War, plague, madness. He looked once and she hadn’t moved.
He saw brick columns that bookended a porch and a drive that wound through a stand of older trees. A gently rising slope where in a grove of cypress sat a house of improbable size and grandeur, white through a blur of green, brick chimneys rising past a red-tiled roof, but the house had the shimmering quality of a projected image and he perhaps suspected it was a mirage. He went on.
Soon he came upon signs of commerce. The cotton fields had begun to be populated. Workers were strung out with hoes chopping toward the end of the field, childsized workers in straw hats, the more vigorous pulling ahead like contestants in some curious race and the oldfolk bringing up the rear.
A red Diamond T truck was parked in the shade of a cottonwood at the border of the field. There was an enormous watercooler aligned on its edge, a short swarthy man stood before the cooler filling a tin cup.
How about a shot of that water?
Help yourself, good buddy. The man drank and tossed the remainder of the water onto the earth and proffered the cup. He had a broad pleasant face and a nose so miniature it seemed to have been stuck on as an afterthought.
Edgewater filled it and drank. The water was cold and good and he filled the cup twice more before he was through.
Thirsty work, walking, the man said. You looking for somethin else to do?
I’m just passing through.
The man looked comically around, scanned the four points of the compass. Where the hell from?
I got turned around.
You damn sure did if you wound up here. Say, you aint got a cigarette have you?
Edgewater had two the salesman had given him. He handed one to the man and lit his own and passed the matches across. The wail of a distant ambulance sounded like a dream of someone screaming.
Name’s Pugman, the man said through the smoke, Paul, but everybody calls me Pug. I’m no strawboss but I could get you on if you needed a few days’ work.
Two other choppers had come up with their hoes and leaned them against the truckbed. An old crone in black bonnet and long dress like garments of mourning and a young darkhaired girl whose clothes seemed from seasons past so tightly did she fit them. The girl gestured for the crone to drink first and the woman rinsed her mouth from the communal cup and spat a dark amber of snuff and filled the cup to drink her fill, the girl gave Edgewater a cornereyed look of covert interest then glanced abruptly away when he met her eyes. Edgewater hunkered in the shade of the truck.
What’s your name?
She didn’t answer. The crone turned upon Edgewater a sharp vicious look and placed the cup in the girl’s hands. Get it and let’s go, she said.
What’s your name?
Iva Mae, the girl said.
When she’d finished drinking she turned toward him. A small gossamer face, long dark hair parted in the middle. Her eyes had a look that was both shy and at the same time bold and impudent.
What’s yours? she said but the old woman—grandmother, keeper, who knew, fairy godmother—had her by the elbows and was hastening her away.
Edgewater crushed his cigarette out on the earth. What does it pay? he asked.
That old woman watches her like a hawk, Pug grinned. Touch that
biddy and Grandmama’ll flog you to death.
Sometimes you just make the wrong move. There’s a moment when something dreadful is going to happen and maybe half a moment when you can do something to stop it. But if you don’t the dreadful thing happens and once it’s done it’s done forever. She’s dead and there’s no bringing her back, the fingers trail, sliding from your grasp and the waters tear her away and everything has to be paid for, all accounts have to be settled. There is no free lunch and no one gets out alive.
He took a row adjoining them but they pulled easily ahead of him, hoes flashing in the sun, grass and weeds flying and the young cotton thinned and the earth pulled to it just so. Iva Mae had looked back once as they worked down the endless green rows and grinned at him and Edgewater simply abandoned the row and caught up one over and began hoeing alongside them.
The girl was laughing. You can’t do that, the girl laughed.
You skipped ahead, the old woman said. That’ll get you fired.
I’m just trying to be sociable. Where do you all live?
In a house with a top on it, the old woman said viciously. Just do your job and let us be.
Late in the day they broke from the field with the sky already reddening in the west. The choppers who had the farthest to go climbed aboard the bed of the truck their legs dangling over the sides and set off homeward and the folk within walking distance strung out purposefully along the road. Folks forever shortchanged for the night will not replace what the day has stolen. Edgewater had lost sight of the girl and her keeper and was looking about for them when Pug hailed him.
Pug was standing by the roadside with a young woman shorter even than he was. She had a guileless open face with hair coarse as a horse’s mane pulled back in a knot behind her head and she was looking Edgewater up and down, sizing him up as if judging his suitability for some unstated purpose.
I reckon they mean you to bunk tonight with us, she said. That’s what Hobart said and he’s the big dick around here. There ain’t no more empty houses. We eat pretty good when we’re working. Not much on variety but there’s plenty of it. Hobart said they’d make it up to me, slip me a few bucks. Likely what they’ll do is take it out of yourn and pay me with it. They don’t never give nobody an extra nickel here, they take it away from somebody else first.
I don’t want to put you out, Edgewater said.
Hell, don’t worry about it. We got an extra room, we’ll get by.
The woman’s name was Pearl and she was Pug’s wife. She told Edgewater she was from Alabama and she and Pug had met in a cottonfield.
They had started westward along the road. Edgewater wondered where they were going and how far it was but he didn’t ask. His shoulders ached and the palms of his hands felt as if he’d held them to the surface of a hot stove and he was almost too tired to be hungry. He felt vaguely disoriented. Here in the vast flat world a man used to hills and mountains lost all sense of distances, the landscape seemed to be shrinking, drowning in upon itself. Above the western horizon the sky gleamed like polished brass and the clouds shifted through shades of ultramarine to a deep blue and the edges where the sun flared looked hardedged and seemed composed of some curious metal unknown to this world, arcing out of the light like some brimstone byproduct of the conflagration itself. Against the light such trees as there were appeared charred, abruptly tarnished and black and depthless as inklined likenesses of trees, like a paper silhouette with its flat illusion of depth. When the sun finally went it burned beyond the flat horizon like the smoldering remnants of some rumored holocaust.
The house was a mile or so the way Edgewater had been going. It crouched near the road on a treeless and grassless plot of land that Edgewater judged useless of agriculture or anything save tenanting these folks where lives were so marginal they seemed scarcely to exist at all, everything that passed between the paper that proved their birth and the paper that proved their death just rumormongering and hearsay. There was no bathroom, not even an outhouse. But when he saw Pearl come from behind the house unplucking her dress tail from her underwear he guessed calls of nature were to be handled on a case by case basis and depending on where and on circumstances and opportunity.
Edgewater went with a borrowed towel to a longhandled pump in the back yard and filled a blue enamel washpan with water. The water came up slick as if already soaped in the earth and there was a reek to it and when he drank from a cupped hand he swallowed a time or two then spat it onto the dry earth. Goddamn, what’s the matter with this water?
Nothing the matter with it, Pug said. It’s limestone water, sulfur water, somethin, medical water. They say it’s good for you. It ain’t hurt us none.
It does have a mediciny taste to it, Edgewater said. Reckon what it cures?
Whatever you got, what I heard. Shit, we’ll probably come away from this place cured of stuff we hadn’t even had a chance to get yet.
He watched Edgewater at his crude and sorry bath. You travel about as light as any feller I ever seen, he said. I’ve heard about them old bindlestaff hobos they had back in the thirties, but hell you ain’t even got a bindlestaff.
Edgewater was washing his hair, toweling it dry. My bindlestaff was stolen out of a Greyhound bus station in California, Edgewater said. Along with everything else I had.
Money and papers and such?
Everything. A seabag full of clothes. What little money I had left. Luckily I’d already pissed most of it away.
You get done with your toilet there we can walk down to the store. I got a ticket you can use. Get you some dinner and stuff and we’ll settle up Saturday.
Edgewater in a land of novelties. Aisles of tinned foodstuffs, pork and beans already marvelously studded with sliced wieners, sardines in exotic foreign oils, red devil cans with their lithographed salmon that evoked in Edgewater a response so Pavlovian his mouth watered. He bought a quart of milk and drank from that while he scanned the shelves. Binned eggs, crated apples with their smell of childhood past. A cakeroll of cellophaned pastries which he gave a wide berth, a meatcase so bloody and septic-looking and flyspecked and bedecked with unidentifiable cuts of meat so outré they might have been hacked from the bleeding flanks of mythological beasts or carved clandestinely from the roadside dead.
You ain’t got a little drink hid away back there nowhere have ye? Pug asked the storekeep.
Might have, the storekeep said. It’s agin the law to sell it but I might give one away.
Pug drank from the bottle and offered it to Edgewater who moved it away.
I’m drinking this milk, he said, raising it aloft, showing the bottle.
My runnin mate here had all his clothes stole in California, Pug said.
If the storekeep wondered that there were no available clothes between the California coast and the backwaters of west Tennessee he had the grace not to say so. I always heard that was a rough place, he said. I heard them Mexicans out there would just as soon cut a man’s throat as look at him.
A man don’t have to go all the way to California to have that done, Pug said. Or find a Mexican to do it, either.
Edgewater stacked his selections on the worn countertop while the storekeep totaled them up. Tinned Vienna sausages, crackers, the beans and franks. A package of cigarettes, a candy bar, a bar of soap, a razor and a toothbrush. He had an eye for a tube of toothpaste but the price was dear and he was running on Pug’s paper here and guessed the soap would suffice. Edgewater looked at the largess, his holdings in the world had increased marvelously.
The storekeeper’s pencil was busy. You hear about old lady Joplin dyin?
Hell no, said Pug. When’d she die?
Today sometime. They left her all right this morning and come in from the field and found her dead on the front porch in a rockin chair. Had shirt she was patching on her lap nearly finished.
Edgewater thought of the busy needle in the cloth, the halfstitch taken, the still needle, oblivion.
What killed her?
No
body knows, the storekeep said. Hell, she was old, old. She just run out.
She just run out, Edgewater thought, taking up his paper poke, the sand run out.
Pug was an expansive and generous host and he gestured Edgewater toward the steaming food on the kitchen table. There was fried beef liver and onions and fried potatoes and biscuits and Edgewater needed no urging. He piled his plate and fell to eating. Moths kept guttering with a sizzling sound in the kerosene lamp and Edgewater fended the survivors away onehanded from his plate.
Later they went out into the cool of the evening. Full dark had fallen now and the sky lowered itself onto the resting earth and stars shown so generously and haphazardly you could have walked by their light and the earth itself richly suspirious with vapors and the nightcries of birds and the night so quiet and weary Edgewater imagined he could hear the Mississippi River wearing away the channeled earth and bearing it to the gulf. Sitting in the yard smoking he looked up at the sound of wings and watched a white owl pass low and enormous, the stars winding with its passage and reappearing in its wake like some great bird of myth and folklore that could control stars and diminish the heavens themselves.
They sat for a time in a companionable silence. Letting weariness ease away, the cells rebuild themselves. Edgewater’s hands still throbbed and he kept flaring his fingers as if to see would they still bend. After a time Pug arose and walked around the corner of the house. He was gone a time and Edgewater felt the weight of Pearl’s eyes and looked at her. She was grinning at him from the doorstoop where she sat, her dress had ridden up and she’d pulled it up as if to accommodate his eyes and here was a long expanse of starlit thigh and the pale crotch of her underwear.
