All Honest Men

by Claude Stanush

  Before I left Imperial the next year, with a full pardon from the Gov’nor, I went to say so long to Frank Holloway. Frank still had a coupla years left to go. “Skinny,” Frank said, and he give me one of them toothy smiles, “I want to warn you about something, my friend. You know those scars on your legs? Well, there’s a scar on your forehead now too. You just can’t see it in the mirror.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “You’re smart, Skinny. What do you think I’m talking about?”

  I didn’t wanta hear no more. I put out my hand. He took it but he didn’t let it go right off. He kept shaking it. “When those gates close behind you over there, Skinny, you’ll be back in what I call the Free World. And in the Free World, that scar on your forehead is gonna shimmer and flicker like it’s on fire.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see about that.” I took my hand back. “You’re gonna have you a forehead problem, too, when you get out. What you gonna do about it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe go up to Tulsa. Or Fort Worth,” Frank said. “I have a lot of friends both places.”

  “All got a forehead problem?” I asked.

  Frank give me another smile.

  “When ex-cons are with ex-cons, the mark of Cain doesn’t show.”

  SEVEN

  The State of Texas was even sorrier’n Pa.

  It worked you to death in them fields, long as it could, and then when it couldn’t no more, it chucked you out like you wasn’t nothing but a bag of garbage. All me and Stone Egbert got when they let us loose from Imperial Prison Farm that third Monday in August in the year nineteen and fourteen was a crumpled-up $5 bill and a even more crumpled-up suit of citizen clothes.

  Stone was a small-time larceny thief. He also had one of the biggest guts I ever seen. He’d been on short rations in the pen, like ever’body else, but he had a body that could turn water into fat: he stood only five foot six and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds. The citizen suit they give him was so small there was six inches of belly between the buttons and the buttonholes. He looked just like one of Ma’s flour dumplings. With me—“Skinny” Newton—it was just the opposite. I stood five foot eleven inches high and weighed one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. My waist was twenty-nine inches around, and my chest was thirty-five. But the State of Texas give me a suit three sizes too big. You could hardly see me for the suit.

  I think they knowed just what they was doing, giving us clothes like that, clothes that fit all wrong. They wanted to shame us. And to make things worse, when Stone set down in the back seat of that prison car, the rear seam of his pants split so loud I thought he’d broke wind. “Piss-dog!” he hollered. (Stone was like Dock when it come to cussing; he hung all kinds of words together that didn’t have no sense to ’em.)

  From the Farm, they drove me and Stone to a little town called Crabb, on the Sante Fe railroad line. They told us to be outa sight by sunset. I sure didn’t want nobody to see me in them godawful clothes. Still, if you ain’t never been in prison, you’ll never know how good it feels to be out, a free man. Free to go wherever you wanta go, east or west or north or south. Free to pick whatever you wanta do, and how you wanta do it, and when you wanta do it.

  I had no idea what the hell I wanted to do. But I felt so free I stood right in the middle of that side street and spun around like a drunk man. Stone just set down on the side of the road to cover up his ass.

  “Look-it, Skinny,” he said. “’Bout fifteen miles up the tracks, there’s a town called Orchard. I been there lots. Little place, but it’s got a big store that sells all kinds of men’s clothes. I say we make us a little visit, snatch us some suits.”

  “We just got out.”

  “Oh, ain’t nothing to worry about. I know that town. They ain’t even got a nighthack. You want the whole world to know we just got sprung? These suits is screaming like they got mouths that we just got sprung.” He was right about that.

  When a freight come through Crabb heading northwest, we hopped into a empty boxcar. I’ll tell you what, the sound of them wheels over that track come up to me like a old song: clickety-clack, clickety-clack. I near forgot where we just come from. But when we got to Orchard, it come back to me. Particularly when we had to hide out in brush outside town ’til it come a good dark.

  “You sure there ain’t no nighthack?”

  “Swear it on my momma’s Bible.”

  Late that night, when even the cur dogs of that town was asleep, we both went into the store. It was easy. Stone found him a sharp rock and pried open a big back window.

  The men’s suits was all hanging on three racks. I didn’t know much about suits them days, which ones was sharp and which ones was doggy. But Stone did, that was his business. He started feeling ’em, and whispering: “This here’s mohair. That ’un, pure silk. Oh, damn twenty sparrows! Here’s some worsteds. Take your pick.”

  I tried on two, fast as I could. The second one fit okay. I couldn’t tell what color it was in the dark, but it was soft as a baby’s cheek.

  It took Stone a lot longer to find hisself one, him being so short and so big around the gut and all. He tried on one suit after another. I started getting jittery. Maybe he was right about no nighthack; maybe he wasn’t. And it took him fifteen minutes before he even found one that come close to fitting. There was still a inch of belly between the buttons and the buttonholes.

  “When your five-spot runs out, Stone, and you ain’t got no more to eat,” I said, “that one’ll fit you fine. Let’s get the hell out.”

  Stone kept it on. Only he wasn’t done yet. I seen his elbows start to fly. He was yanking all kinds of other suits off the rack, and rolling ’em into bundles. “I ain’t gonna let my well run dry, Skinny,” he said. “Or your’s neither.”

  I seen his point.

  Then, through one of the front windows, we seen a light flash up. My heart near stopped.

  “Fish-dung!” Stone whispered. “Down!”

  We both hit the floor.

  In a minute or two, the light’d floated on.

  “Stay low,” Stone whispered. “He’ll poke around a few minutes, then go back home, go back to sleep.”

  I wasn’t trusting nothing that old fool said no more. But what could I do? We both inched ourselves under a rack of suits, and for the next half hour, we was just two pairs of eyes peeping out from some pants legs. But we didn’t see the light no more, and I finally said, “Let’s hit out.” We climbed outa the back window with our bundles, took ’em over to the railroad tracks, and when the next freight come by, we dumped ’em in a empty boxcar.

  When daylight come, I seen that suit I’d snatched outa the store was yellow. A bright awful yellow! But none of the other ones we’d stole was my size, so there was I was, stuck, looking like a egg yoke. When we got to a section stop called Wallis, we hopped off and sold the other suits to railroad workers laying new track. Stone seemed to know all the tricks. The workers paid us eight dollars a suit. That made $56 for Stone, $56 for me.

  But what was I gonna do for a real living?

  That I didn’t know.

  When we was done with selling them suits, we hiked on over to some Southern Pacific tracks and hooked a freight west. But when we cut up a high, rolling prairie and stopped for water at a farm town called Weimar, I shook Stone’s hand and hopped off. One thing I did know: I didn’t wanta go back to work for the Gov’nor and hanging out with a silly old 260-pound petty thief was running up too much of a risk.

  “Good luck to ya, Stone,” I said. “Maybe someday we’ll meet again—down yonder.”

  “You’re crazy, Skinny!” was the last thing Stone said to me. “With me, you could live like a king!”

  You’d a-thought I was crazy by how they looked at me in Weimar when I went hunting for work. It was a busy town, swarming with farm wagons, packed with businesses: implement stores, drug stores, a creamery, a ice plant, banks, grocers, a dry goods store with a sign on it: “Everything here from a toothpick on up!”
Well, I musta asked thirty diff’rent people if they needed a hand. But near all of ’em give long stares at my yellow suit and give me the same answer: “Nothing here. Try the gin.”

  Cotton. I hated like hell to go back to doing anything that had to do with cotton. But it was something to do, something to do ’til I come up with something better to do. Turns out, there wasn’t no jobs at the gin, either. But there was lots of wagons milling around, all loaded high with white puffy cotton. I went over to one that had a fresh coat of green paint and looked well-oiled. That meant the farmer wasn’t no sharecropper.

  “Need a picker?” I asked the driver.

  He was a short, stout man with a round face and a little goat beard, and when he talked, he sounded just like Mister Hermann, the big fat German grocer I knowed in Rising Star.

  The farmer eyeballed me up and down. “Vat’s your name?”

  “Henry,” I said. “Henry Hermann.”

  “Hermann? You a German?”

  “Most of me’s just American, sir. But if I had to pick a part that’s closest to being German, it’s these here.” I held out my hands. “You won’t find a faster picker ’n me. I pick two rows a time. And I ain’t never kneeled once in my life. Don’t goose-tail either. I pick them rows clean, and the cotton’s clean, too.”

  The farmer looked hard at my fingers. I’d picked so much cotton at Imperial that August, the skin around my nails was red and raw. That’s the way your fingers look when you pick clean like I did.

  “You don’t haff a suitcase or a bag?” the farmer asked me.

  “Set it down in town, sir. Some tramp run off with it.”

  “Bad luck. Vel, jump on.”

  I did.

  It was only by accident, mostly the farmer’s good-looking wagon, that I’d asked him for a job. But, to this day, I still don’t know what kinda luck that was. Sometimes I think it’s too bad, you know, that life ain’t like a storybook where you can just sneak a peek down a ways to see how things are gonna come out in the end. Other times I think it’s best we don’t got no choice but to go it page by page. Most folks’d likely get so boogered if they knowed what was coming up that they’d end up standing froze in one spot, and never move.

  The farmer’s name was Bernard Rauss. And his family was good, hard-working German folks. Their house was built of lumber and stone, and it had three bedrooms and a big, tight-wire sleeping porch that wrapped around two sides. And there was a three-seater outhouse out back.

  And they owned the land they was living on.

  The Rauss’ farm was the cleanest, best-stocked farm I ever been on. They had a big red barn and a corn crib and a smokehouse and a chicken house. And six pear trees, two snow-flower peach trees, and a vegetable garden. There was a well and a cistern. And two milk cows and four fat old hogs.

  And all around, in ever’ direction you could see, there was acres and acres of tall, sturdy cotton—cotton as high as your chest.

  In my whole life, I never seen a family that worked so hard as the Rausses: Momma, Poppa, all their kids, and all their kids’ kids. The only Rauss child that was still living at home was a gal named Vela. She was seventeen or eighteen. The rest was married. But they all lived close by, and they all worked on their Poppa’s farm, right down to the youngest grandbaby, Helga. She was only five.

  There wasn’t no question who was Poppa, it was Poppa. He walked with a limp, he’d been bit on the leg by a diamondback three or four years before. But he was still like the king of the family, and he told ever’body exactly what to do. Poppa said when it was time to work, and Poppa said when it was time to stop work. And after lunch, Poppa’d lay down on his bed and take a fifteen-minute nap. And while he was napping, ever’body else but Vela was supposed to nap too.

  “God laid down after He made za vorld,” Poppa told me that first day, “and pickin’ cotton iss harder’n that, He knows it.”

  We rested fifteen minutes exact. No more. No less. Vela had to watch a clock.

  I didn’t mind none of that. Poppa Rauss could bark as loud as any of them mule-faced prison guards at Imperial, but he wasn’t no dirty louse. He was just German. And he knowed how to enjoy life too. The Rausses had one of them big pine eating tables, and Momma’s job was to make that table “sag in za middle.” Every day the food was piled high, but on Sundays, it was like a feast: fat red sausages, fried chicken and pot cheeses, bowls of sauerkraut and hot potato salad, pumpernickel and hard dark rye bread, and pear or peach strudel. And on Sundays there was big glasses of dark beer that Poppa brewed hisself and kept cool in a underground root cellar.

  Most farmers around there picked cotton even on Sundays, they wanted to get it ginned before the storms that come off the Gulf Coast in the fall. But not the Rausses. At 8:30 Sunday morning, and 8:30 on the nose, ever’body piled into the farm wagon, even me, and we drove to a little church about a mile away. The preacher didn’t speak nothing but German and he sounded to me like he was clearing his throat the whole time. I just nodded my head when ever’body else nodded their heads, and I thought about other things. The better part of Sundays come later. We’d have our dinner and drink that beer and then Poppa’d get out his accordion. And Vela would pull back the rug in the living room and the whole family, sometimes neighbors too, would dance.

  It was that first Sunday, during one of them pretty German schottishes, that I got stuck on Vela Ursula Rauss.

  To this day, when I think of that girl, I still get a pain in my heart.

  Vela didn’t wink at me, like Carrie Sikes always did, or wiggle her things, like a lot of girls I knowed. Most of the time, she walked kinda stiff. But godamighty, she was pretty! She was tall, kinda like Ma, only she wasn’t thick around the middle. She had pink cheeks and a long blonde braid. And when Vela danced on them Sunday afternoons, her braid’d swing this-a-way and that-a-way, and most of that stiffness in her just blowed right on outa the room.

  Ever’ now and then, it seemed like she was looking towards me. Even if I was skinny, I knowed I was pretty good-looking. I was taller’n my Pa, with thick brown hair and a straight nose and hard muscles. And when I seen Vela’s eyes start to move in my direction, my heart’d pick up its beat. Other times, she’d walk right past and not even glance sideways, and I’d slump around like a sick cat.

  I knowed I was only a hired hand on the place, and maybe, for her, that’s all I was.

  Something else. There was a neighbor’s boy from two farms over, a husky blonde fella called Emil, that showed up ever’ Sunday afternoon. It was like him and Vela was born to be partners, they could twist and turn and hop so perfect together. I had a suspicion that Emil was sweet on Vela, and maybe even had it in his mind to marry her.

  I wanted to dance with that girl. Damn, I wanted to dance with her! But I didn’t know how. Pa’d always said that shaking your body around was the silliest thing he ever heard of, and Ma’d said it was wicked in God’s eyes. Well, I didn’t have no faith in a God, so that part wasn’t no problem, but I didn’t have no faith in my feet either. So I just watched ’em hop around together, Emil and Vela, like sparrows in the springtime, and I wanted to knock that block-headed Dutchman over on his ear.

  Whatever Vela thought of me, I knowed her old man liked me. Or liked my work, anyhow. Whenever I brung in a sack of cotton, he’d weigh it and then, looking a bunch of times at the number on the scale, he’d hike up them bushy eyebrows. I was picking six hundred pounds a day for that old man.

  “Henry! Henry!” he said to me once. “You haff rocks in zat sack?”

  “Nothing but cotton, Mister Rauss.”

  He pulled out a handful and looked at it careful. “No scraps. Ah, it makes a man’s heart sing, see his cotton so vhite. I gotta think you ’r a German.”

  “No sir. Jus’ American.”

  “Vel, you not za Irish one, I know zat. Lazy, lazy.” He shook his head.

  I didn’t say nothing to that.

  Poppa Rauss went on: “I got zis bad leg, ya. Und zo old, I get. Iff
I haff two or three more pickers like you iss, I vould quit vork.” And he bent over and laughed hisself silly, ’til the tears was running outa his eyes, like quitting work was the biggest joke he could think of.

  “At six bits a hundred,” I said back, “I figure I’ll make enough money offa you to quit work too.” I give a laugh with him. That was even more a joke than Poppa Rauss quitting work. Them days, the idea of a young man not working had to be a joke.

  “Iff only it don’t rain.” That was Momma Rauss.

  I turned around, and there stood Momma Rauss and Vela. They’d brung in their pick sacks and was waiting to get ’em weighed. All you could see of their faces was the tips of their noses, they was both wearing them big old stove-top bonnets, the kind that’s so big and deep you gotta stick your head inside to see who’s in there.

  But even the end of Vela’s nose looked good to me.

  “Yah, yah, yah, iff only it don’t rain.” That was Momma again, and she was shaking her head. “Last year, ve go to pick, yah, it come za rain. Und da cotton gott yellow as Poppa’s beard.”

  “Well, there’s only one thing raining this year,” I said, and I pulled my sweaty handkerchief out and mopped up my forehead. “And it ain’t the sky.”

  This time, it was Momma that laughed. And I could tell by how she looked at me, and then at Vela, and back at me, that she liked me too—maybe was even putting us together in her head. That maybe, for some reason, she liked me better’n Emil, even though he was a German like they was. I couldn’t tell that last part for sure, but the way her nose sticking outa the bonnet was flapping back and forth between me and Vela like it was, that’s what I suspicioned.

  It wasn’t too long before I found out. At night I slept in the hayloft over the barn—a empty spot where they’d give me a pallet and a wash basin. And one evening, just before sunset, I was setting up there, counting out a week’s wages, when a round yellow head come sticking up through the trapdoor. It was Vela. She’d climbed up the ladder and was holding a plate with a big square of Momma’s pear strudel on it.