But now this one time when they were waiting for the father to come home and planning all the different things they might be doing to fix something quick and good for him it began to get later and later and they talked a little more to cover it up and then they got quiet and just waited, she was in her wheelchair looking down at her hands, her hands by now were all brown and twisted like cypress. And George he sat in the doorway looking down the cowpath that ran down to the road where the father would have to come. And when it got dark the mother said as bright as she could, “I know! Just shave up that fatback and we’ll fry it up like bacon and have bacon sandwiches and we can boil up a lump of it with the turnip greens and then I think there’s a little beans left too. A whole dinner, and we can have it all ready!” So George got right up out of the doorway, it was beginning to get too dark to see anyway, and he lit the kerosene lamp and shook up the stove and went to the table with the knife and the fatback to shave it up. So that is how he come to have the knife at the time. He did not go for it and he wouldn’t never even thought about it except there it was in his hand.
In walked the father and he was drunk as a hoot-owl and he looked all around the place and said, “Gaw dam dot Polock,” and that was all we needed to know, he had fought with the foreman and got laid off and drew his money and got drunk. And the mother she just couldn’t hold it in, she let out one long wail and threw up her poor crooked hands and said oh, oh again, again, and he run right through the room and punched her one in the nose so hard you could hear it break and the blood squirted out before he could get his hand away. So George clear across the room, he never could remember afterward actually doing it, he threw the knife.
Well it was so quiet in there for so long you wouldn’t believe it. Then the father peeled off his undershirt which was all he was wearing besides pants, it was a hot day, and he looked down at the cut and the blood coming out of it. And the mother was bleeding through her hands and her eyes bulging out over them, looking at the father. And the father pushed George away and got the dishrag and splashed cold water on his chest and wiped it with the dish towel and got his other undershirt from the peg over the bed and a clean rag and put the rag against the cut and pulled the shirt on over it and went out. Nobody had said word one since he said Gaw dam Polock.
Well nothing was ever the same after that. The father still had money when he left and he drank that all up that same night. The next day he got George alone and talked to him, he said he got drunk first because he was so mad about the layoff, and after what happened he got drunk because he was so sorry. It seemed to make a lot of difference to him that George should understand this but George did not understand it and just shrugged his shoulders. And he did not say he was sorry he threw the knife or anything else and the father did not ask him to as a matter of fact he never mentioned the knife or anything else.
But he never again laid a hand on the mother. He spent most of the time just sitting in the open doorway looking down the cowpath. In a day or two all the fatback and turnip greens was gone and the beans and a heel of bread, but still the father sat in the doorway and the mother in her wheelchair with wet cloths to her nose. Nobody wanted to say anything to the father about getting some food in or going to work so the third day George came back from school and he was carrying a big sack of groceries. He walked right past the father and came in and put the bag down. The part of the bag where George had been holding it against his chest was marked in big black grease pencil Morosch which was the name of a white collar guy in the mine office. George quick took everything out of the bag and shoved the bag in the stove to burn up. Then he put everything out of sight, a roasting chicken and two pounds of hamburger and a loaf of stale for stuffing and a loaf of fresh, two quarts of milk, fresh carrots, a whole pound of butter, a jar of strawberry jam, a pound of coffee and some bananas.
The mother probably was too sick to notice, what with her big shut blue black eyes and her nose three times as big. The father came in and looked at the stuff as George put it away out of sight. “Ware ya gat dat?” he wanted to know.
George for once in his life turned and looked the father straight in the eye. “Swiped it, off the Acme store delivery wagon,” and it was the truth. If the father yelled or hit out or said nothing or flew to the moon, just then he did not care.
The father stood for a long time quiet and then made a funny little smile. He said, “Mabbe ya amoont ta schomthing yat, boy.” And you know that made the boy George feel better than anything in his whole life, and that’s crazy. Because if ever he hated anything it was the father. If ever there was a man he didn’t give a damn what he thought, it was the father. But when the father smiled and said that he got all hot in the mirror over the sink he was all pink and to save his soul he couldn’t keep from smiling too.
Well the father went back to work after a while, as a swamper out at the head of the slag-pile where they never could keep a man working for long, who wants to be in hell until he is dead? but the father could get back there any time. And things went on quiet, never another drunk, never much talk and school let out, and the mother sat quieter and quieter. It was like she had quit, she was not going to fight anything any more, him or being ashamed or dirt in the house or anything. She got thin and light as a dead possum, George could easy carry her out to the outhouse and stand her up in there where she would slowly close the door and after a long time he would hear her calling and he would go back and she would be standing there and he would carry her back in to her wheelchair. George made a pass at cleaning up when he thought about it. He felt like hunting almost all the time now but he got stubborn inside and wouldn’t, just hung around her all the time. After the black eyes went away and the nose was only crooked not swole up they sent for the district nurse and she come and looked at the hands and clucked some and said she had ought to go to the hospital over to Mountaindale but the mother said no! real sharp, the first thing she said in a long while. The nurse took the arm and rolled up the sleeve and looked at it, it was like two peeled willow sticks stuck together, she tried easy to bend the arm and straighten it, it wouldn’t go but a little way each way and the mother like gasped and bit on her tongue. So the nurse shrugged again and left some pills for her to take if she was in pain. The mother died about four months after she was hit in the nose. The father went to work that day but George just hung around and hung around and when the wagon came for her he wanted to ride in it and when they wouldn’t let him he ran all the way behind it to the funeral home and hung around there until they chased him away. At night he waited until everyone went away and then got around the back and broke in and said goodbye to her in his own way. He swore they would be together one way or the other no matter what. In the morning he was there outside waiting and he hung around until they finished with her and went out to the graveyard. The father came too. They stood side by side watching the grave get filled in and like someone said they looked as if they did not understand it, and they did not. Nobody cried. Afterward the father went back to the mine and George was supposed to go back to school, but he went hunting. He did not catch anything. That was the bad part.
Life went on, George was hunting a lot of the time and the father working and the funny part of it was the father began to straighten out a little at least as far as the drink went. He worked steady and they gave him a job at the shaft checking tools and if he kept on that way he’d wind up down below making real money for a change. But he did not want that, or anyway he did not try for it. The crazy thing was that for the first time anyone could remember he did things around the house. Not much but the whole time his wife was alive he never set hand to a broom unless to hit somebody with it nor got his hands wet except to wash them. Now when it didn’t make no difference to anybody he would shove the dirt and beer cans out in the yard every day or so and even scrape off the dishes and rinse them. Once he told George he thought a garden where they could grow some corn and radishes and stuff would be nice only he had no hoe, so George swip
ed him one off the sidewalk display in front of Mountain Hardware, and the father took it and cussed and cussed, but wagging his head and grinning, he must have knew George swiped it because where would George get money? but he never asked, he was just pleased and he actually hoed out a patch and George went in the Acme and pretended to be studying the seed pictures and swiped eight packs of seeds, corn and melon and sunflowers and some hot peppers and the father planted them all.
One time at night George was coming home from the old quarry on the other side of town where some big frogs were and right in the middle of town someone came out of an alley and grabbed his arm and he almost hit him but saw it was the father. The father walked along with him and began talking something about we don’t have to live like pigs no more if he didn’t have to spend all his money for food he would have money for maybe a rug for the floor and some more dishes and a tub to wash them in and another lamp and some paint and things. When they reached the corner the father turned George around and they started back, the father still mumbling on and on about this and when they came to the alley he looked up and back and all around and then quick pulled George into the alley. They went halfway down and it was real dark and the father took George’s wrist and pulled his hand down to where it touched one of those slanty cellar doors that comes out the side of some buildings, and the father pulled up on it and it came open a ways and George saw it was not locked. The father lowered it down real quiet and walked off in the dark leaving George standing there. After a while George tried it himself and it opened and he went down the steps. Down there he could not see anything but he could smell the flour and dried prunes and all the other stuff that was there, it was the basement of the Acme market.
The next day he got matches and then in the night he went back and got his pockets full of two cans of milk and a can opener and some tallow candles and best of all a toy flashlight and batteries to fit it, a little tiny thing but all he needed down there. After that he went there every night almost and brought stuff home but he was smart and never took but from open cartons and never left anything around like wrappers or burned matches, and he was always sure to sit quiet under the alley door listening the way he’d do in the woods. The father never said nothing while he slowly filled the whole place up, all the cupboards and under the sink with canned goods and pancake mix and rice and lentils and what all. There was not much said between him and the father but things were better between them than ever before, and sure enough the father did go ahead and spend some money on a little rug for the middle of the floor and some dishes from the five and dime.
So then he found the meat market had a side cellar door too only it was locked. He hung around town a couple of days until the delivery truck came and he helped the man unload cases of bacon and four quarters of beef and four sides of pork, and by the time he made his third trip up and down the stairs he saw where he could jam the spring lock open with a bit of cardboard and he did. That night he went down into the basement and up into the meat market, had a good look up and down the streets outside, then went and opened the walk-in freezer. When he opened the door a big bright light went on inside and scared him so much he slid inside and slammed the door to hide it. As soon as it closed the light went out and when he turned back to the door he couldn’t find any handle to open it with. If it had been a Saturday he sure would of been dead Monday morning. As it was he was alive but stiff as a popsicle when they opened up the next day, and the silly thing about it was the door opened with a foot pedal beside the door so the butcher could come out with his hands full but how was a guy supposed to know that in the pitch dark because he forgot his flashlight?
They put him in the lockup and got him thawed out and a couple days later Judge Manorora sent him up for two years, breaking and entering and attempted burglary. The father was there looking like at the funeral as if he did not understand what was going on and there was some whispering and pointing and nodding heads between the judge and the priest who gave the mother the wheelchair and the district nurse who showed up too. The father just sat there, he probably didn’t catch one word in ten. George didn’t say anything either because after he was thawed out he somehow just didn’t care what happened. So the two years wasn’t such a tough rap after all because it was in a orphanage kind of place instead of a pen. Nobody ever did find out about the stuff from the Acme market.
Now the thing that George wanted to laugh at, but he was so surprised at it he couldn’t laugh, was the one building they put him in first had bars on the windows and no doorknobs just keyholes and a cyclone fence around it with five strands of barbwire on top leaning in and watchtowers at the corners and a small gate in the front with no knob just keyholes and a big gate in the back for trucks, it was a double set so the truck could go in one and get locked in, then they would open the second. The whole time he was there they never did close both sets and he never did see anyone up in the little corner watch-towers, but what was funny was the idea that anyone would want to run away from a place like that.
Everybody had a bed of their own with a clean sheet and a clean blanket and two shelves and a closet with a brown curtain for a door to put things in. Between every bed was a board partition so that except it was open at the end away from the window, once you were in there it was like a little room of your own. In between each two beds, out in the long hallways where the open ends were, was a little wash sink, no kidding, one for each two beds, and hot water as well as cold. For each four beds there was a toilet across the hallway and a stand-up urinal and even if there was no door on it who needs it? At night one guard and two trusties watched each hallway on each floor, six hallways altogether. They had soft rubber shoes but you could hear them coming all the same.
First thing in the morning big bright lights come on and everybody jumps up and puts pants on and comes yammering out to wash the face and brush the teeth and go to the john, with the guards and trusties spaced down the hallway with a pad and pencil to write your number if you horse around or skip the toothbrushing or forget to wash your hands again after you come out of the can. Downstairs you’d go two by two, no running no pushing, and there was like a damn big restaurant but with nothing to pay. You got to your seat and stood there until the matron, that was a fat woman, said grace and you bent your head down and when she was done you sat down and these trusties brought these big platters of scrambled eggs and whole buckets of hot cocoa to ladle into your tin mug. Barbwire? George thought right away it must be to keep people out, not in. Maybe the dried eggs, because that is what they were, did get old after a few months, but how many times did he go to school or off to the woods with no breakfast at all with the father passed out drunk and the mother sick and crying?
Downstairs along with the restaurant place—they could show movies in it too and church and all—there was a barber shop and a first-aid station like a two-room hospital and a whole row of what they called connies which were consultation rooms for when someone wanted to talk to a guy private like a doctor or a priest or a mother or some other stranger, and the kitchens and a row of offices. This was the one building, three stories high, with the fence around it, and that’s where you went first. After a while when they figured you knew your way around they moved you to another building and it was only two stories and it had no fence. They had five like that, all alike. They had no offices in them and only a couple connies and a one-room first-aid station. In each one, one of the connies was made over to a library. Each building had a real piano and its own ball team and like that, with a world series every year. Every day was school from 8 to 12 and then lunch and then school from 2 to 4. Every day half of each building had to work in the fields 4:30 till sundown or 6 in winter. And if you want to know how they got the work done without any dogging-it, each building had its own field and they kept score on how much corn or tomatoes or whatever each one brought in and if you think that world series was fought, boy, you should see them kids pull weeds. There was also shop training for carpentry, el
ectric shop, sheet metal and the bakery.
Now everybody in that place had to gripe because they took you for queer if you did not. But I will bet you the sweat off mine against the sweat off yours that not one in a hundred of those guys lived as good as that where he came from. It was like the fashion to gripe, that’s all. Also to make as much noise as possible about how horny you were and where do they keep the dancing-girls. George wished he had a nickel for every ten thousand times those little punks talked about women, but you had to do it. And somebody was always in trouble for making grabs at the pansies or the ones they thought were pansies or the ones they wished were pansies. Most of them wouldn’t know what to do if a pansy said yes even if they knew they wouldn’t get caught which they would.
Some of Your Blood Page 3
