Gods Men (15 page)

She was a thick-set woman, her neck as wide as her head, her waist as wide as her shoulders, her ankles as big as her calves. She wore a shapeless dress like a huge pillowcase without a belt. Except sometimes when she went to town with Pop, she was barefoot. Clem had never seen the feet of a woman before. Chinese women always wore shoes on their little bound feet and his mother had worn stockings and shoes. In China it was a disgrace for a woman to show her feet. And so it should be, Clem told himself, avoiding the sight of those fleshy pads upon which Ma Berger moved.

For the first few days he had lived in complete silence toward the children. There was no time for talk, had he been so inclined. Pop took him upstairs into a filthy room where there were a wide bed, a broken chair, some hooks upon the plastered wall. On the hooks hung a few ragged garments. Pop scratched his head as he stared about the room. “Reckon that bed won't hold four of you,” he had rumbled. “You'll have to have a shakedown, I guess. I'll tell Mom.”

He went down the narrow circular stairs and left Clem alone. This was his return. He walked to one of the windows, deep set in the heavy stone wall, and gazed out of it to see the countryside beautiful. Long low hills rolled away toward the horizon and fields lay richly between. He had never seen such trees, but then he had seen very few trees. The northern Chinese landscape was bare of them, except for a few willows and a date tree or two at a village. This was a country fit for dreams, but he knew that whatever had been the dreams once held in this house, there could be no more. He tried to imagine his father, a boy perhaps in this very room, hearing the voice of God bid him go to a far country. Oh, if his father had not listened to God, he, Clem, might have been born here, too, and this would have been his home. Now it could never be that.

He heard heavy panting on the stairs, and Mom Berger's loud voice cried at him.

“Come here, you, boy, and help me with these yere quilts!”

He went to the stair and saw her red face staring at him over an armful of filthy bedding.

“Am I to sleep on this?” he demanded.

“You jes' bet you are,” she retorted. “Lay 'em to suit yourself.”

She threw the quilts down and turned and went downstairs again, and he picked them up and folded them neatly, trying to find the cleanest side for sleep. He would have to sleep in his clothes until he could get away, for of course he would go within the next day or two, as soon as he found the name of a town or of a decent farm.

But he did not go. The misery of the five children held him. He had no family left, and in a strange reasonless sort of way he felt these pull upon him. He would go, but only when he had given them help, had found their families, or had found some good man to whom he could complain of their plight. His wandering and his loneliness made him reliant upon himself. He was not afraid, but if he left them as they were, he would keep remembering them.

In silence on that first day he had made his pallet and put his locked suitcase at the head of it. Into the suitcase he folded his good clothes, and put on instead the ragged blue overalls. Then he went downstairs.

The big kitchen was also the living room. Mom Berger was cooking something in a heavy iron pot, stirring it with a long iron spoon.

“Pop says you're to go out to that field yonder,” she told him, and nodded her head to the door. “They're cuttin' hay.”

He nodded and walked out to a field where he saw them all working in the distance. The sun was hot but not as hot as he had known it in Peking, and so it seemed only pleasant. The smell of the grass and the trees was in his nostrils, a rich green fragrance of the earth. What was hay? He had never seen it. When he got near he saw it was only grass such as the Chinese cut on hillsides for fuel.

He waited a moment until Pop Berger saw him. “Hey you, get to work there! Help Tim on that row!” Clem went to the sandy-haired boy. “You'll have to show me. I've never cut hay.”

“Where'd you come from?” Tim retorted, without wanting to know. “You kin pitch.”

Clem did not answer. He watched while Tim's rough claws grasped a huge fork and pitched hay upon a wagon pulled by two huge gray horses. It looked easy but it was hard. Nevertheless he had continued to pitch doggedly until the sun had set.

From that day on his life had proceeded. The work changed from one crop to another, but the hours were the same, from dawn to dark for them all. The girls worked in the house with the woman.

He became aware, however, of a certain day, dim in the minds of the children when he first came, which became more probable as the month dragged on. They expected a visit from what they called the Aid. What this Aid was Clem could not find out. He put questions to Tim, the eldest and most articulate of the boys. To the girls he did not speak at all. He felt a terror in them so deep, a timidity so rooted, that he thought they would run if he called their names, Mamie or Jen.

“Aid?” Tim had repeated stupidly. They were raking manure out of the barn. “Aid? It's just—Aid. It's a woman.”

“Why is she called Aid?” Tim considered this for a full minute.

“I dunno.”

“Does she help you?”

“Nope—never did. Talks to Pop and Mom.”

“What does she say?”

“Axes things.”

“What things?”

“Different—like does we work good, does the boys and girls sleep in one room—like that.” Tim grinned. “They're scared of her.”

“Why don't you tell her?”

“Tell her what?”

“That you don't get enough to eat—that they hit you.”

Tim's wide pale mouth was always open. “We're only Aid children.”

“What is that?” Clem began all over again.

“I tole you,” Tim said patiently. “We ain't got no folks.”

“You mean you don't know where your parents are?”

Tim shook his head.

“Are they dead?” Clem demanded.

“Bump never had none,” Tim offered.

Bump was the second boy, now bringing the wheelbarrow to fill with manure.

“Bump, haven't you any kin?” Clem asked.

“What's 'at?” Bump asked.

“Uncles and aunts and cousins.”

“I got nawthin',” Bump said. He was spading up the manure that Clem had put into piles.

“Doesn't anybody come and see you?”

“Nobody knows we're here lessen the Aid tells,” Bump said.

“Then why do you all want this Aid woman to come?”

“Cause Mom gets a big dinner,” Tim said with a terrible eagerness. “She don't say nothin' neither when we eat. Don't dast to.”

Clem threw down the fork be was using. “If you'd tell the Aid woman they're mean to you, maybe she'd put you somewhere else.”

There was silence to this, then Tim spoke. “We're used to it here. We been here all of us together. Maybe Bump would get somewhere way off, and we're used to Mamie and Jen, too. They're scared to go off by theirselves. I promised we wouldn't never say nawthin'.”

Clem perceived in this a fearful pathos. These homeless and orphaned children had made a sort of family of their own. Within the cruel shell of circumstance they had assumed toward one another the rude simplicities of relationship. Tim, because he was the eldest, was a sort of father, and the others depended on him. Mamie, the older girl, so lifeless, so still, was nevertheless a sort of mother. As the days went on he perceived that this was the shape they made for themselves, even in depravity. The man and woman were outside their life, as unpredictable as evil gods. They suffered under them, they were silent, and they were able to do this because they had within themselves something that stood for father and mother, for brother and sister. Because of the family they had made for themselves out of their own necessity, they preferred anything to separation.

Clem asked no more questions, and judgment died from his heart. Something almost like love began to grow in him toward these children. He wondered how he could join them and whether they would accept him. He had held aloof because they were filthy and unwashed, because their scalps were covered with scales, because they had boils continually. He had thought of leaving them as soon as he could. But as weeks went on he knew he could not leave them—not yet. They were all he had.

He pondered upon their solitude. In China, whence he had come, all people being set in their natural families, there were no solitary children, except perhaps in a time of famine or war when anyone might be killed. If parents died of some catastrophe together, there were always uncles and aunts, and if these died, then there were first cousins and if these died there were second and third and tenth and twentieth cousins, all those of the same surname, and children were treasured and kept within the circle of the surname. But these children had no surname. He had inquired of Tim, and Tim had said after his usual moment of thought, “It's writ down in the Aid book.”

“But what is it?” Clem had insisted.

“I—disremember,” Tim had said at last.

As the day when the Aid was to come drew near Mom Berger became more irritable. “I gotta get this house cleaned,” she said one morning in the kitchen, when the children stood eating their bread and drinking weak, unsweetened coffee. “The Aid'll be here come Tuesday week. You girls better git started upstairs this very day. Everything's gotta be washed—clothes and all.”

From that day until the Tuesday which was dreaded and anticipated there was no peace in the house or in the barn. Even the barn had to be cleaned.

“That Aid woman,” Pop snarled, “she ain't satisfacted to stay in the house. No, she's liable to come snoopin' out here among the cows. I'm goin' to tell her that's why I need more help, Clem. I'm goin' to tell her if I have to clean this yere barn I gotta have another boy. That's what I'm goin' to tell her.”

“How often does she come?” Clem asked with purposeful mildness.

“The law claims once in three months. She don't get round that often though—maybe oncet, twicet a year. Always tells us before she comes. I git a postcard a month or so ahead.”

On the day before, they took baths. The woman heated kettles of hot water and in the woodshed the boys washed one after the other in a tin tub with soft homemade soap.

“You ain't hardly dirty, Clem,” Tim said with some admiration, staring at Clem's clean body.

“I wash in the run,” he replied.

“What'll you do come winter?”

“Break ice—if I'm still here.”

They all glanced at the door at these words. Tim whispered, his eyes still on the latch, “You wouldn't go an' leave us, would you?”

Bump paused in the scrubbing of his piteous ribs. “Clem, don't you go and leave me!”

“I don't belong here,” Clem said simply.

“You belong to us,” Tim said.

“Do I? How?” Clem felt a starting warmth in the inner desolation of silence.

Tim had one of his long pauses, shivering and naked. His shoulder bones were cavernous, and between his sharp hip bones his belly was a cavity. Pale hairs of adolescence sprouted upon his chest and pelvis. “You ain't got nobody, neither.”

“That's so,” Clem said.

Tim made a huge effort of imagination. “Know what?”

“What?”

“Sposin' we lived by ourselves on this yere farm—You could be the boss, say, like you was our father.”

The woman's fists pounded on the door. “Git out o' that, you fellers!” she yelled. “The girls gotta wash.”

They hurried, all except Clem. He took the pail of cold water and doused himself clean of the water in which the others had bathed.

“Maybe I'll stay,” he said to himself. “Maybe I'd better.”

In the night, in a bed cleaner than he had slept in since he came, he began to think about his strange family. Food was what they needed. He recalled the boys' bodies as he had seen them today naked, their ribs like barrel staves, their spines as stark as ropes, their hollow necks and lean legs. Food was the most precious thing in the world. Without it people could not be human. They could not think or feel or grow, or if they grew, they grew like sick things, impelled not by health. Everybody ought to have food. Food ought to be free, so that if anybody was hungry, he could simply walk somewhere not very far and get it. Food should be as free as air.

He began to dream about himself grown and a man, rich and independent. When he got rich he would see that everybody would have food. “I won't depend on God, like Papa did,” he thought.

The Aid came just before noon. They had all been waiting for her through an endless morning. The barn was clean, the house was clean. Whatever had not been washed was hidden away until she was gone. The girls were in almost new dresses which Clem had not seen them wear before. They had on shoes and stockings for the first time. Pop was in his good clothes, but he had taken off his coat, lest it seem that he did not work.

“Put it on when you sit down to table, though,” Mom ordered.

“You don't have to teach me no manners,” Pop said.

She sat all the time because she too had on shoes and stockings and her feet hurt. The girls had to bring her anything she wanted. She had on a gray cotton dress that was almost clean. Clem had put on his good clothes that the sailors had bought him. They sat about the kitchen smelling the food on the stove, their stomachs aching with hunger.

“Here she comes,” Pop cried suddenly.

Through the open door they all stared. Clem saw a small thin woman in a black dress come down from a buggy, which she drove herself. She tied the horse to the gate and came up the walk carrying a worn black leather bag. Pop hastened to her and Mom got up on her sore feet.

“Well, well!” he shouted. “We didn't really know when to expect you and we just went about our business. Now we're just goin' to set down to eat dinner. I'd ha' killed a chicken if I'd been shore you was comin'. As it is, we only got pork and greens and potatoes. New potatoes though, I will say, and scullions.”