Journeyman

by Erskine Caldwell

  No one else was to be heard. Dene was sound asleep on her side of the bed, and she looked so exalted that he did not wake her. He slipped on his shirt and overalls, tied his shoelaces, and went out on the back porch to get a drink of water.

  He knew at the instant he went to the railing and dipped some water from the bucket that everything was not as it should have been. At first he could not determine what the trouble was. He scanned as much of the yard as he could with a sweep of his eyes, and ran down the steps towards the barn trying to find out what it was that had told him something was wrong.

  “I’ll be doggone,” he said, staring at the shed.

  The car that had always stood under the shed beside the barn was not there. He remembered distinctly that it had been driven under the shed the night before. But now it was not there.

  He turned and ran around the corner of the house. Without pausing to look closely, he could see fresh tire tracks on the sand. There had been a shower of rain some time between midnight and daybreak, and the new tracks on the sand were as clear and distinct as foot-prints in newly laid concrete. Clay went as far as the front yard, and there he stopped.

  “I’ll be doggone, if I won’t,” he muttered, looking down the big road towards McGuffin.

  Slowly he turned and dragged himself to the front steps. His body bending, he sank to the next to the bottom tread. His arms lay extended over his sharp knees, his elbows bending, and they hung half suspended there.

  Down at the cabins Hardy came out of his kitchen door, his right arm in a sling around his neck, and walked to the wood-pile. He bent down and picked up chips, tossing them into a handleless bucket.

  Semon’s old car still stood under the magnolia tree in front of the house. It had not been moved an inch since the day Semon had arrived. From where Clay sat on the steps he could see that three of the tires were flat, and that the fourth one would soon be down.

  There was behind him in the house a muffled stir. He supposed it was Dene getting up to cook breakfast. He made no effort to stop her; Sugar was back, and she could come to the house to cook, but Clay remained silent and allowed nothing to disturb him.

  Hearing a step in the hall behind him, he turned around to tell Dene that Sugar and Hardy had come back. But when he looked, he saw Lorene instead. She was dressed in the clothes she had worn when she came several days before, and she had on her hat. She even had her handbag with her.

  “You ain’t leaving, are you, Lorene?” he said.

  “Where is he?” she asked, running out on the porch.

  “Where’s who?”

  “Semon.”

  Clay turned around in order to see her better.

  “Well, I’ll be doggone!” he said. “Did you get up to go off with him?”

  She nodded, running to the steps and looking in all directions for Semon.

  “You might just as well go back in the house and eat breakfast,” he said, “because Semon Dye’s more than likely twenty miles on the other side of McGuffin by this time. He made away with an early start.”

  Lorene dropped her handbag to the porch.

  “The low-down son of a bitch,” she said, speaking through flat lips. “He told me he’d take me back to Jacksonville with him.”

  “He did?” Clay said. “Well, I’ll be doggone!”

  Lorene sat down in a chair, glaring down the road in the direction Semon had gone sometime during the night. She took off her hat, flinging it to the porch floor.

  She was saying something inaudible through clenched teeth.

  “I reckon I could call him some names, too,” Clay told her, “if I only knew what to say. It was a dirty shame for him to go off like that, leaving everybody high and dry like this.”

  They both sat silent for a while, each looking down the road towards McGuffin. Clay felt weak over the loss of his car, but he would not have felt so badly if Semon had not gone away as he had. He had hoped to have the satisfaction of seeing Semon drive out of the yard and out of sight down the road. He felt cheated now.

  While they were sitting there, Dene ran out on the porch. She did not see either of them until she was almost at the steps. When she saw Clay and Lorene, she stopped quickly.

  “What’s—!”

  She could not finish. She stepped backward.

  “What makes you so wild-eyed, Dene?” Clay said, looking at her closely. “You act like the house was on fire.”

  Dene was not dressed for travel, but she had on her best slippers and her new frock.

  “I’ll be doggone if you don’t look like you don’t know what to do, Dene,” he said.

  He saw her glance quickly at Lorene and at the hat on the floor.

  “Lorene was aiming to ride back to Jacksonville with Semon, but Semon hot-footed it away and left her behind.”

  “Has Semon left, sure enough?” Dene asked excitedly.

  Lorene shrugged her shoulders and cursed under her breath. She gave no other reply to Dene’s question.

  “It don’t look like you folks ought to be so wrought up about Semon going off,” Clay said, “because he didn’t take nothing that belonged to you. Looks like I ought to be the one to do all the swearing at him. Semon rode off in my automobile. I reckon maybe he had a right to it, but it don’t look like he’d ride off in the night. He could act like a white man about it. I wasn’t aiming to stop him. I just wanted to see him go.”

  Dene sat down on the edge of a chair and gazed down the road towards McGuffin. After several minutes she glanced hurriedly at Lorene once more. Lorene looked at no one; she stared grimly at the porch floor.

  A smile passed over Clay’s face.

  “Semon didn’t tell you he’d take you with him, too, did he, Dene?”

  A moment later he turned and glared angrily at the ground in front of him.

  “By God,” he said to himself, I never thought of that before.”

  Down at Sugar and Hardy’s cabin the blind at the kitchen window was thrown open. Sugar could be seen standing in the window looking at the house.

  “I reckon I’d better go down and tell Sugar to come and start breakfast,” he said. “The sun’s way up there in the sky, and I’m getting as hungry as a dog.”

  He made no effort then to move from the steps.

  Behind him he thought he heard a suppressed sob in someone’s throat. He did not turn around to see who was crying. He knew it was not Lorene, though; if Lorene was doing anything, she was swearing under her breath.

  “Somehow I sort of hate to see Semon go away now and leave us. It makes me feel left high and dry. I’m going to miss having him around here for a while to come. It makes me feel lonesome, not hearing him talk and not seeing him sitting on the porch, waiting for Sunday to come.”

  He paused for a moment.

  “Sunday has come and gone.”

  A chair scraped on the floor behind him, and someone ran sobbing into the house. He did not turn around to see who it was.

  “Semon was a sort of low-down scoundrel, taking all in all, but he had a way with him just the same. I couldn’t put up with a rascal like him very long, because I’d sooner or later go get my shotgun and blast away at him. But it does sort of leave a hollow feeling inside of me to know he aint here no longer. I feel left high and dry, like a turtle on its back that can’t turn over.”

  He was not surprised to see a car appear out of the still morning. It was racing down the road, coming from the direction of the schoolhouse. When it got to the cabins where Vearl and the pickaninnies were playing, it slowed down a little.

  When the car came closer, he could see Tom Rhodes twisting and steering from side to side. He did not get up to meet him.

  “Up early, Tom,” he said. “Something the matter up your way?”

  Tom ran up the walk, carrying a gallon jug of his corn whisky.

  “Where’s the preacher? Aint he up yet?”

  “He’s up, all right,” Clay said.

  “I’ve got something here for him. I thought I�
��d like to bring him a drink for pulling me through last night in the schoolhouse. And, too, I thought maybe you and him would like to go back home with me and we could sit in the shed and look through the crack some.”

  Tom pulled the stopper and offered the jug to Clay. After swallowing several mouthfuls, Clay handed the jug back, wiping his lips with the back of his hand and licking it.

  “I hope you aint easily disappointed, Tom,” he said. “I got bad news for you.”

  “What’s it about?” Tom asked, drinking from the jug.

  “Semon Dye’s up and gone, Tom. He pulled up stakes and left before any of us was up. I reckon he’s way on the other side of McGuffin by now, headed south. I don’t reckon we’ll ever see him again this side of heaven —or hell, which’s more like it.”

  “Gone?” Tom said, shaking his head. “You don’t mean to say Semon’s gone, Clay! Ain’t the preacher here now!”

  “That’s right. He’s gone.”

  Tom set the jug heavily on the porch and looked at it. He glanced at Lorene in the chair by the window.

  “That makes me feel real sad,” he said, sitting down beside Clay. He picked up the jug and held it in his arms. “I feel so sad I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Maybe me and you could take the jug and go back to your place and sit in the shed,” Clay suggested. “I sure would like to sit there once more and look through the crack some. It’s one pretty sight for sore eyes.”

  Tom pulled the stopper and handed the jug to Clay. When it was returned to him, he looked down through the hole at the colorless liquor and blew his breath into it. It made a sound like wind at night blowing through a gourd tied to a fence post.

  Clay reached to the ground for a handful of pebbles. He shook them in his hand, sifting the sand through his fingers. When they were free of sand, he took them one by one, and shot them across the yard like marbles. Tom watched, moving his head back and forth each time one of the little round stones was flicked down the path.

  Neither of them turned around to look at Lorene when she got up and walked heavily across the porch and into the hall.

  “God help the people at the next place Semon picks out to stop and preach,” Clay said. He flung the remaining pebbles on the ground. “But I reckon they’ll be just as tickled to have him around as I was.”

  He got up and walked slowly down the path. When he reached the gate, he stopped for a moment to gaze at the old automobile under the shade of the magnolia tree. Then he went down the road through the hot white sand to tell Sugar to come to the house and start breakfast.

  THE END

  A Biography of Erskine Caldwell

  Erskine Caldwell (1903–1987) was the author of twenty-five novels, numerous short stories, and a dozen nonfiction titles, most depicting the harsh realities of life in the American South during the Great Depression. His books have sold tens of millions of copies, with God’s Little Acre having sold more than fourteen million copies alone. Caldwell’s sometimes graphic realism and unabashedly political themes earned him the scorn of critics and censors early in his career, though by the end of his life he was acknowledged as a giant of American literature.

  Caldwell was born in 1903 in Moreland, Georgia. His father was a traveling preacher, and his mother was a teacher. The Caldwell family lived in a number of Southern states throughout Erskine’s childhood. Caldwell’s tour of the South exposed him to cities and rural areas that would eventually serve as backdrops for his novels and stories. After high school, he briefly attended Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina, where he played football but did not earn a degree. He also took classes at the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania. During this time, Caldwell began to develop the political sensibilities that would inform much of his writing. A deep concern for economic and social injustice, also partly influenced by his religious upbringing, would become a hallmark of Caldwell’s writing.

  Much of Caldwell’s education came from working. In his twenties he played professional sports for a brief time, and was also a mill worker, cotton picker, and held a number of other blue collar jobs. Caldwell married his college sweetheart and the couple began having children. After the family settled in Maine in 1925, Caldwell began placing stories in magazines, eventually publishing his first story collection after F. Scott Fitzgerald recommended his writing to famed editor Maxwell Perkins.

  Two early novels, Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933), made Caldwell famous, but this was not initially due to their literary merit. Both novels depict the South as beset by racism, ignorance, cruelty, and deep social inequalities. They also contain scenes of sex and violence that were graphic for the time. Both books were banned from public libraries and other venues, especially in the South. Caldwell was prosecuted for obscenity, though exonerated.

  The 1930s and 1940s were an incredibly productive time for Caldwell. He published a number of novels and nonfiction works that brilliantly captured the tragedy of American life during the Depression years. His novels took an unflinching look at race and murder, as in Trouble in July (1940), religious hypocrisy, as in Journeyman (1935), and greed, as in Georgia Boy (1943). In 1937 he partnered with his second wife, Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer, to produce a nonfiction travelogue of the Depression-era South called You Have Seen Their Faces.

  Through the decades, Caldwell continued to focus his attention on the dehumanizing force of poverty, whether in the South or overseas. Caldwell’s reputation as a novelist grew even as he pursued journalism and screenwriting for Hollywood. He adapted some of his best-known novels into screenplays, including God’s Little Acre and Tobacco Road, directed by John Ford. As a journalist, he worked as a war correspondent during World War II and wrote travel pieces from every corner of the globe. In 1965 he traveled through the South and wrote about the racial attitudes he encountered in his heralded In Search of Bisco.

  Caldwell spent much of his later years traveling and writing while living with his fourth wife, Virginia, in Arizona. A lifelong smoker, Caldwell died of lung cancer in 1987.

  A baby portrait of Erskine Caldwell. Born December 17, 1903, in White Oak, Georgia, to a Presbyterian minister and a schoolteacher, Caldwell would later describe his childhood home as “an isolated farm deep in the piney-woods country of the red clay hills of Coweta County, in middle Georgia.” (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)

  Erskine Caldwell as a child. With a minister father, Caldwell spent many of his early years traveling the South’s numerous tobacco roads. During these years, he observed firsthand the trials of isolated rural life and the poverty of tenant farmers—themes he would later engage with in his novels. (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)

  Caldwell’s early novels linked him forever to the Tobacco Road region of the South. This photograph, taken by Caldwell’s second wife, photographer Margaret Bourke-White, references the title of his most famous work, Tobacco Road. Published under legendary editor Maxwell Perkins in 1932, the novel was adapted by Jack Kirkland for Broadway, where the play ran for 3,182 performances from 1933–1941, making it the longest-running play in history at that time, and earning Caldwell royalties of $2,000 a week for nearly eight years. (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)

  Publisher Kurt Enoch (left) presenting Erskine Caldwell with the Signet paperback edition of God’s Little Acre, published in 1934, the year following its hardcover publication with Viking. Enoch would reprint God’s Little Acre fifty-seven times by 1961. The novel was not without controversy: The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice fought to have God’s Little Acre declared obscene, leading to Caldwell’s arrest and trial. Caldwell was exonerated, and God’s Little Acre went on to sell more than fourteen million copies and see life as a film adaptation in 1958. (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)

  Erskine Caldwell’s passport photo from 1946 to 1950. His occupation on this heavily stamped passport identifies him as a journalist, and he traveled extensively a
s a reporter throughout his adult life. During World War II, he had received special permission from the U.S.S.R. to travel to the Ukraine, reporting on the war effort there. (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)

  An accomplished reporter, novelist, and short story writer, Caldwell also spent five years writing Hollywood scripts. This is the first page of a first draft shooting script he wrote for Thomas Wolfe’s beloved Southern bildungsroman, Look Homeward, Angel. A contemporary of Wolfe’s, Caldwell rejected being included as part of the “Southern tradition” in which critics attempted to place him. (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)

  Pictured here in Rome, Erskine Caldwell and his fourth wife, Virginia, traveled the world together. Caldwell was an avid traveler throughout his later life—visiting Japan, South America, and a multitude of other locales. His notebooks from these trips are kept in the Erskine Caldwell Birthplace and Museum in Moreland, Georgia, where the house in which he was born has been moved and preserved. (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)

  The last photo of Erskine Caldwell, taken March 19, 1987. He passed away from lung cancer in Paradise Valley, Arizona, on April 11, 1987, survived by his wife, Virginia, and four children. (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)

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