Powerful suggestions and willful persuasions of people he could not see clamored within him as he dreamed. Memories of ancient wrongs, cruelties perpetrated otherwhere, some other time, all came thronging to harass him. Sussurant dark whisperings of night, low-muttered half-tales of murder and trickery; always they spoke of trickery. Sometimes he felt that he, too, would like to trick someone or something, sometimes the voices aroused within a desire to kill so that his throat became dry with that desire. Like the craving for strong drink that comes on a man, clutching his throat so that he must drink or fall dead.
Stubby did not understand. Always his thought evaded his mind. He could only go his hard way dumbly and alone, without wonder, without knowledge, with only pain for friend. He could only know a dim feeling as of daily loss, as though all the blood of his body were spilling momently from a broken vein and his eyes had been curtained that he might not find where.
The feeling of having been cheated—of having been cheated—that was it!
And now came the hard West Texas times, the charity-station days and the hungry nights. This was spring of 1927, but to the McKays it was little different than spring of any other year.
For days when the town was troubled by tourists Cass acquired the approach sibilant, the whisper sudden, swift, and clear: “Yo’ like Spanish gal, boss? Fifteen-year ol’ jest stahtin’ business? Come, ah show yo’ where to, she treat jou all right. Not rush, jest take yo’ time. Come, ah show yo’ where to.” Cass’s speech at this time was a curious congeries of West Texas idiom, Southern drawl, and Mexican intonation.
Back of the Mexican pool hall dark girls stood in doorways, waiting. Cass knew Pepita by sight, Teresina and Rosita. Little Pepita sought to tease him whenever she saw him pass: “Look—there go my ugly red-hair boy.” She would raise her voice as he began to run: “Ugly red-hair boy!—you got no dollar for Pepita today?” Once she gave him a five-cent pack of tobacco for showing a tourist to the back door: he took it and fled without so much as a single “Gracias, Senorita Pepita.” He smoked that package out with Nancy in one evening, but he did not tell her how he had earned it. Often after that he came home with fifteen cents or a Mexican quarter in his pocket, and would tell her that he had earned it by shining shoes on the streets.
In May Bryan killed the last of the hens, and for two days they ate meat; after that it was black coffee and okra. Stubby got a few backhouses to clean, but his own privy remained, as ever, a vile hole. Before the summer was out they were on charity.
Fortunately for her own good health, Nance had been reared in happier days. Between 1919 and ’24 Stuart had worked almost regularly. She had not suffered from hunger in her adolescence, as Cass now did. She realized this to the extent of placing on his plate, before they sat down to table, a part of the pitiful daily portion that was hers. Always Cass saw what she had done; secretly, he compared portions at every meal. He always saw, but he never protested; he would pretend that he didn’t perceive his portion to be the larger. He would wolf down his share and stare at what Bryan had left, his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth with hunger. Bryan would push the coffee remaining in his saucer toward him, or shove over a half-eaten crust; then he would smile to see the boy gnawing like a dog, holding the piece in both dirty paws.
“When yo’ gonna grow up to eat like a man?” Bryan would ask. “Yo’ don’t eat like sixteen any more than as if yo’ was nine.”
Once, for five days running, they had nothing to eat but oatmeal: gray, lumpy, utterly tasteless. Then came a day with nothing at all. For the five days following that day it was rice—without milk, without sugar. Oatmeal and rice were all they could get from the relief station. Cheap as milk was, the cattlemen who ran the county feared to make it cheaper by pouring it out to charity. They poured it out to their hogs instead, and thus bolstered falling prices. Their consciences they salved by putting dollar bills in the collection plate of the First Baptist Church on Sunday mornings; and they gained the sanction of every truly patriotic Baptist in the town in the process.
Bryan sat all day in shadowy places or wandered aimlessly about the Mexican streets. If not ordered to do anything he would perform small tasks about the home; but if, openly, Nancy told him to build up the fire or chop up some kindling, or plant a few beans, he would give her a blanket refusal. He had no time for women’s tasks, he would say, and would walk off toward the town. She had learned never to ask anything of him, and by this method sometimes won his help. He would pull a few weeds out of the garden, pare a few potatoes, or begin fussing with a couple of planks and a hammer in the dooryard. Few tasks that he began ever saw completion. He tired easily, he lost patience or thought of a joke that he had to tell Clark Casner right away. Once, while building a small chair, he began drinking in the midst of his work. Despite his wobbling legs he got a back nailed onto the chair, and, after a fashion, three legs. Then he sat down on it, feeling the task well done. It collapsed in a heap, and in the middle of the heap he sat, giggling like a ten-year-old. He had many friends, and they were all roaring boys. Usually when he returned from town he had a pint of tequila on his hip.
He would sit in some dark corner of the house, tippling half-secretly. Often no one would know that he had returned from town till they heard him tittering to himself, or humming through his teeth from some nook. Sometimes, when well in his cups, he would sing. He would wail a half dozen lines over and over again, each time with a different rhythm:
They say I drink whisky; my money is my own,
And them that don’t like me can leave me alone.
Oh whis-key, you vil-lain, you’ve been my down-fall,
You’ve kicked me, you’ve cuffed me,
But I love you for all.
Then he would titter. He had been gassed at St. Mihiel.
Stuart alone remained outwardly unaffected by these days. All day he slept, each meal he ate alone just as though he were still working on the Santa Fe. Promptly at six pm, as ever, he would pull on blue overalls over his boots and leave down the road toward the roundhouse.
Once there he kept to deep night-shadow, he encircled the wide glare of the floodlights, he avoided anyone whom he saw approaching him. Standing concealed behind some dead engine, he watched the man who had taken his job.
Every night Stubby watched Luther Gulliday. Just before dawn he would start back, and Cass would be wakened by the flare of a match in the early dark. Stuart would be bending over the living-room table trying to light the old-fashioned lamp; but the wick had been dry for a long time, it would never light, the match would burn out on the bare dirt floor. Every morning Stubby tried to light the lamp, he never seemed to remember that it was dry; he seemed unable to understand why the wick would never flare. And Cass would see the fierce gash of his father’s mouth in the match’s glow, the straight line of the lips and the long jaw below it; the flickering flower of fire on Stubby’s high cheek bones made the face look like a yellowing death’s head, suspended in space.
“How ugly my father is!” the boy would think then, wondering whether he himself had a face that looked as long as a small horse’s, all bespattered with freckles and soot.
With Nancy there was more than hunger. There was shame, and a growing despair at the meanness of her daily tasks, unrelieved by little save hymning on Sunday nights, or by small gossip with some other ragged girl after the pans and pots had been cleaned. On the streets she became so bitterly conscious of her outworn dress and her run-down heels and her stockingless legs that she ceased altogether to go into the American quarter of town. Only rarely would she leave the house to go farther than the dooryard.
Even to go to the relief station for supplies she disliked to leave the house. It became Cass’s duty to go there because of her dislike for the task. Bryan had friends in the town to feed him, and he cared little whether Nancy ate or not. But once, when black-eyed peas were being distributed by the charity station, Cass became stubborn and refused to go. He said that it was now Bryan’s
turn, and said it so peremptorily that, at the last, Bryan made a pretense of going. He returned very shortly, empty-handed, saying that the agent had refused to help them any longer. Cass became uneasy and went to inquire, and so learned that Bryan had not been to the station.
Cass used to wonder about Bryan, watching him. He wondered how it would feel to be Bryan just for one day. Was there no way to learn how someone else felt? What was it that went on inside of heads all the time? Cass watched people, wondering about all of them. Could no one else know how he himself was inside, what went on inside his head? Sometimes in the morning when he arose he was sick almost. For was there never anything else but killing and cursing, sleeping and eating, drinking and fighting and working and cheating, day after day, for all men? Was this all that poor peopie did? Did everyone, everything, cats and hawks and men and women—did all of these live only to eat, fight and die? Even if no one chased them, kicked them or wrenched off their heads—did all of these die just the same? And when would he himself come to death? All through his boyhood Cass was never quite free of a sense of imminent death. All his boyhood he asked himself, “What else is there? Why?” It seemed to him then that in being a man there might be something more.
“Ah’d like to get out of this pesthole,” he thought. “Ah’d like to see New Awlins.”
And there came a morning in late October that Cass never forgot. Above the roof the sky was gray, and clouds like hands were pressing down. Stuart was sitting on the back porch when Cass got up that morning. Bryan had not come home the night before-hand Stubby was watching the road for him. He had not been to bed yet, and he had not eaten his morning oatmeal. Sometimes as he sat he would look down at the toes of his boots, then he would scuffle the toes together, regard their scarred leather a minute, and raise his eyes toward the road once more.
Cass was eating bread and rice when he heard Nancy’s whisper: “When y’all git through eatin’, go awn up the road a space an’ head off yo’ brother, do y’ see he’s again cornin’ weavin’-like.”
Cass toyed with the water in his coffee cup, and arranged crumbs in a pattern about the rice-bowl. Then he heard the porch door slam, and he thought that his father had left—till he heard his voice. And because his father’s voice held a strangely complaining ring, Cass knew that he spoke to Bryan.
“Now where y’ git it this time, eh? Ah tell’n thet Luke twicet now not to give it yo’ any mo’. Who give it yo’, eh? Give me over thet devil bottle.” Cass heard his brother bawling, “Ah’ll eat when ah’m hongry, ah’ll drink when ah’m dry”—and the song was broken by the tinkling of glass breaking against a stove-lid. They were both in the kitchen then.
“Ah’ve right t’ drink, ah have. Ah needs drink. Ah’m a sick man an’ ah works fo’ mah whiskey.”
Cass didn’t know what Bryan meant when he said he worked to get whiskey. And when Stuart spoke it was as though he did not realize that Bryan was drunk at all.
“Yo’ elegant lyin’ son-of-a-bitch, y’ ain’t done lick o’ toil goin’ on eight year. Ah knowed yo’ was wuthiess first time ah seed yo’, yo’ weren’t never nachrai. Yo’ was bo’n with a caui an’ been off plum evah since.”
Bryan chuckled warmly, as though he and Stuart were sharing some excellent jest together. Bryan felt joyous inside, he was bubbling there, he felt as though he and his father ought to laugh over something together. He walked into the living room, flopped down on the chair in the corner and tilted leisurely against the wall.
Stubby followed, and Cass sat frozen over the careful pattern of brown crumbs on the faded green oilcloth.
“Ah ast yo’ what yo’ mean—yo’ works?”
Bryan laughed boyishly up. Then he put his hand in his pocket and withdrew a dollar bill and a quarter. He wagged the bill under Stubby’s nose, and tossed the quarter at Cass, and laughed so unrestrainedly that Cass had to raise his eyes.
He saw how smoky it was in the house. Smoky and dark. A dry wind whimpered about the east corner, like a child whimpering in sleep. Cass remembered being wakened in the night by the sound of low sobbing. He heard Nancy come into the doorway behind him, heard her feet pause there, knew that she too was afraid for her brother.
Bryan tilted forward in his chair and went to the center of the room on legs that knocked against each other like a pair of bone clacking-sticks. Stubby stood with legs spread wide, following Bryan now only with his eyes. Bryan leaned against the table with one hand and waved his dollar with the other, cheering it as though it were a flag; then his supporting hand slipped an inch, and the water in Cass’s coffee cup slopped over the cup’s brim onto the table.
As though seeing his father for the first time, Bryan began trying to focus his eyes upon him, wagging his head foolishly from side to side in the effort.
“W-well h-hell-oooo there,” he stammered,—“Ol’ nigger-finger.” He extended the dollar to Stuart.
“Heah, Mex. Go git yo’se’f a gypsy whore.”
Cass saw all the blood of his father’s face drain out, he heard his father’s breathing. He saw that Stubby was swaying a little, as though he too were drunk. Stubby’s eyes were almost closed, and his mouth hung wider than it did in sleep. Suddenly he seemed a big man, a tall man, bigger and taller than Bryan, even though Bryan was really inches the taller. He put a hand on Bryan’s shoulder so slowly that one might have thought he was going to speak to Bryan in friendly reproof—had it not been for his eyes being almost closed that way, and for the odd way that his mouth was hanging open. Stubby shook Bryan back and forth a little at first then, just a little at first; he didn’t want to hurt Bryan, he just wanted to shake him a little—Cass could see that by the way he was doing it. He just wanted to shake Bryan a little, for being drunk all the time.
Yet, just for a minute, Cass was so afraid for his brother that he thought he was going to cry. Then Bryan began giggling while Stuart was shaking him, and Cass saw how really funny it looked to see a person going back and forth through the air like that, in and out of a loose blue coat—back and forth through the air like a white-faced jack-in-the-box in a ten-gallon hat. Up and down, back and forth, in and out of a flopping blue coat.
Outside the wind came muling down.
Perhaps it was the laughter, the fool’s giggling that did it, for Stuart could not bear Bryan’s unmanly laughter. Smash between the eyes with his fist like a hammer he hit him, and Bryan only said “Ooof-oof.”
Cass smelled the terrible life-smelt of warm blood flowing; he faced around and saw Bryan’s features running together like water. Bryan wasn’t chuckling to himself anymore. He was just standing there with his nose squashed in, and with his back to the table, while Nancy tried to get in front of him before Stuart struck again. But Stuart shoved her away with his right hand and hit Bryan again with his left.
Stuart didn’t hit Bryan every time after that; his fists seemed to scrape and glance as though he could no longer see clearly. And Bryan just stood there trying to walk backwards like a crawdad, and one eye was closed and one white piece of tooth showed obliquely through his lower lip; blood came bubbling over that lip, and he couldn’t go any farther back because of the table behind him that wouldn’t quite fall over, so he dangled his wrists in front of his face as though thinking that this might keep Stuart from hitting him between the eyes like that again. Cass couldn’t hear a sound come out of Bryan’s mouth; it looked to him like a fish’s mouth, opening and closing. He saw Nancy trying to hold her father’s fist, and he saw that she was saying something to Stubby; but Cass couldn’t hear her words. Then Stuart hit Bryan twenty times ah at once; for just a moment after Bryan kept dangling his wrists in front of his face. Then the table slid slowly from under him, and he went over backward as it slid.
Cass saw him fall. He fell with the back of his head against a crate that had a faded picture of an orange on it. Cass saw this yet heard no sound. He saw Bryan struggling to rise and perceived that the left lapel of Bryan’s coat had been burned, sometime in the pas
t, directly beneath the collar. The label bore a little round brown hole there, the kind of a burn that is most often made by a cigar or a cigarette stub.
And suddenly now his brother looked so terrible, Hopping in drunken helplessness there on the earthen floor, that Cass could bear to look no longer. Yet for one minute he could not tear his eyes away, for Stuart was not finished. He kicked Bryan in the groin with the toe of his boot. The flesh ripped, and tore. Cass saw it. Bryan lay with his head lolling against the sunkist orange, his knees bent and his legs wide. Between them Stuart’s boot had torn the cloth of the suit so that Cass saw clearly what Stuart had done. Stuart did not see. He kept kicking, kicking mechanically.
Cass’s mind went black and blank; he never remembered leaving the house.
When his senses collected he was walking slowly toward the S. P. water-tank with a resolution already reached in his mind never to go back. Even before he realized precisely where he was he had determined not to return. He had had enough of fighting and blood. He had had enough of cruelty. Always the sight of blood, or the mere thought of inflicting pain on another had revoked him. And now to see one man beating another, that man his own father, to see a helpless one beaten unmercifully, that one his own brother—this was beyond bearing. He was going somewhere now where men were somehow fess cruel. Some place where he would never see human blood helplessly spilling. He feared all blood; he dreaded men who spilled it.
Somebody in Boots Page 5
