House of Earth (10 page)

“There goes that old evil mouth of yours again, Tike Hamlin.”

“Just crost my mind,” he said.

“If the shadow of a hungry boll weevil was to cross that brain of yours, it would blot your thoughts out for the next ten years. Hush up.”

“No. I'm really a awful deep-thinkin' man, Ella.”

“About as deep as the dirt under your fingernails. Which is pretty deep, at that, I suppose.” She dropped her dress down into place again, wrung her rag out several times in the pan, and hid both the pan and the rags back in under the floor. “Did you put your rag in the pan, Tike?”

“Naww. I tossed it up on toppa th' house. I figured it might help to hold some of them shingles from takin' off so fast,” he said as he moved up and down on his toes and fastened the clips of his overall suspenders over their metal buttons. “Goshamighty. You know I feel just like a new man. Feel like I'm all good an' set to go to worryin' myself crazy again. You know, Lady, they said that the Good Lord run Adam an' Eve outta th' garden of Paradise 'cause they done what we just got through doin'.”

“And so? What has Adam and Eve got to do with us out here on this dried-up and blown-away wheat farm living like a couple of Egypt's slaves?”

“I'm just about to decide that th' Lord was dead wrong about what he done to poor old Adam an' Eve. I'm just a-rollin' it over in my mind. But, you know, I swear to God an' little channel cats, Honey, th' more we do that, th' closer to heaven I get. Of course, now, that was a mighty long time back, back when God chased 'em out. I just wonder. You reckon it felt as good an' tasted as good then as it does nowadays?”

“I'm positive that you will just have to go up there in the roost and get down on your hands and knees and ask God himself about that. I wouldn't know, I'm sure,” she said. “If it's like this old house here, it has gotten worse, instead of better, since the year of One.”

“Could be that the houses has got worse. But I'm fairly sure that th' juicin's got lots better.” There was a slow, joking drawl in his speech. “Say. Lady. It's a good thing that
you dropped your dress down just when you did. Know it?”

“What's grazing through your vulgar mind now? Mister Hamlin?” As she talked to him, she walked up and down the yard, taking an armful of clothes off the line. She felt of a dish towel that hung on a nail on the wall to see if it had dried since she put it there. “Pray tell?”

“I could see old Grampaw Hamlin's old eyes just a firin' and a blazin' all of th' way from his front porch over acrost th' field, an' then acrost th' road, an' then away up over th' mailbox, an' right on up acrost that fence, an' right up to where you was a standin' there with your dress all snatched up.” Tike took a seat on the old cellar door that slanted from the ground up to the top of its low pile of dirt that covered the cellar over. “Yes sir. I could see his old eyes just a blazin' blue dynamite.”

“I will certainly look forward to the day when something takes place around this country which will cause your mind to think above your belly. I'm not at all certain just what sort of an event could bring that about, but something has got to, before you run yourself completely screw loose on the subject of naked skin. As far as old Grandpa Hamlin is concerned, and his old eyes seeing my naked rear all the way across his farm and that road and our farm, well, I'm not the least ounce worried. He has stood in the breeze over yonder and washed his legs and his belly clean just as much, just as often, maybe a lot oftener, than we ever did. So what does that add up to? Pooh.” She walked to the west screen door and tossed her armful of clothes in onto the seat of a chair.

“Adds up to Grampaw a pretty clean old crotch, I reckon.” Tike spit down onto the ground and watched it roll up into a small dusty ball. “Must be clean. I cain't smell it from over here. Can you?”

“No.” The screen slammed shut with a rattle that shook the entire house. “Dern it. I keep forgetting that you put that big tight spring on that door. I jerks the thing shut so hard I fear that the whole edifice will just collapse.” As she said the last word,
collapse
, she made a rolling motion of her arms in the air.

“Don't talk so loud. You'll shake th' damn shack down.” Tike laughed as he picked at his warty hand and wiped the blood down against the rotten cellar door. “Take it easy.”

“You're certainly taking it easy over there. You don't ever let yourself get mad enough to pitch in and do some hard honest work, do you?” She held her hands on her hips as she walked past him to put her clothesline pole back in its place. “I'd sure like to see something come along that would just rouse you up right good and fighting mad. I'd get some work out of you then.”

And Tike smeared wart blood down across his thumb and said, “I ain't no fighter, Lady, I'm a hay layer.”

“If you don't jump yourself a rabbit from up there and help me to do this work, you never will roll in any of your old hay with me for your mattress anymore.”

“Sounds threatenin'.” He leaned on his elbow and blinked his eyes across the pasture to the west.

“What was that two-dollar crack?” She stood at his side with her fists doubled up. “Mister?”

“I was just remarkin' that this here weather looks awful threatenin'. Threatenin'.” He raised up his arms to guard his face as though he expected her to slap his ears.

“I know you like a book, Tike Hamlin. You think that I am just kidding with you? You just wait till tonight. In bed.”

“You ain't got nothing I'd want in my bed.”

“You? What? Allll right, sir, mister, just allll right for you. You just wait till night comes. I know you better than you know your own self. I know just exactly what you will say. I already know it. I don't even have to use my brain to know you better than I know my own name. I can read your old empty head a whole lot easier than I can read a first-grade reader.”

“I got a hell of a lot pertier gal than you that I meet ever' day right there in that cowshed. I was down there with 'er less than an hour ago. You cain't threaten me with your dang old wore-out threats. Git. Beat it. Go peddle your manure.” He raised up and stood on his feet at her back.

“Of all the men that I could have married. And to think that I had to pick you out of them all.” She shook her head and turned away from him as he made a step to stand in front of her. Each step that he took, she turned away. He was always at her back. She would not look him in the face. She acted like she was madder than she really was. “I picked you. You.”

Tike put his arms around her and held the nipples of her breasts again in the palms of his hands. He bit the skin of her neck from behind as he hugged her close and said, “Yeahh. Gee. Just think, Hon. If you'd a-married somebody else 'sides me, you coulda had a whole six hundred an' forty acres of th' best land in this whole country with a cement house an' all a th' fancy trimmin's on it. Like your paw wanted. I many times just stand an' wonder, wonder why you're a-standin' here by this ole rotting pile of nothin' with me fer a husban'. Know?”

“I'm standing right here, here. Here. Simply just because I am not standing anywhere else! You silly idiot! You are my husband because I gave that old clerk two dollars and a half of our hard-earned money to marry us! And I'm standing here looking at this old rotten fell-down house because, well, because it's just about the funniest and the most miserable little old thing that I ever did lay my two eyes on! It's lots funnier to me than those old funny papers I'm pasting up on the walls inside! And as for my old rich moneybags daddy, well, he can just pass out his farms and his good houses to the rest of his young'uns that will kneel down in front of him and do what he says. He'll do their thinking, and their eating, and their breathing, and their sleeping for them for all of the rest of the days of their lives, and he'll find their right mate for them and go to bed for them and open up their legs for them and show them everything. And, and, and. Oh. Well. Shut up. That is a silly question to ask a body anyhow. What I'm mainly wondering is about me and you,
us, Tike. How much longer are we going to be caught here in this old jail, anyway?” Her lips touched his arm that was around her.

The sun against the south wall by them was warm, and a cream can made a loud noise expanding in the heat. Thirsty cattle bawled on their trail to the barn. A hen and a rooster rustled under the floor. Several hogs grunted and wallowed in their cool places under the house also. A vibration was set up in the air that shook the wall and caused a thimbleful of powdery rosin, rotten wood dust, to sift from under a window board and down on top of an iron cream can. They gritted their teeth in a look of quick and deathly hate as the sound of the falling wood dust struck their ears. Their lips were so tight against their teeth that no living blood could flow, and in the last few rays of the sundown their faces took on a look of pale, fighting bitterness.

E
lla May started to walk into the house. She held her head down, and pulled Tike along by his hand. She saw loose feathers, fine, whipped straw and grass seeds, wheat hulls, and low dust blow under their feet. She smiled and he smiled. On each face it was a smile that covered up a hurt. The whole farm had a move on today, and as they walked, so slowly, they had to pick out their steps ahead of them, thinking. The house moved along in their eyes as they kept their heads down. It was a bright day. Yes. Away to the north, across the 66 Highway a mile away, on out across Ben Lomond's hog pastures, on for several miles over the black gumbo wheat lands, on to the north toward the upper north plains, away on to the smoky horizon of the carbon black plants, over and above all of this were the blue sky and light clouds of a pretty day. And down to the south, over wheat lands as flat as a floor, as level as a yardstick, and to the Cap Rock cliffs that fell down into the sandy cotton farms around Clarendon, it was a clear day.

Tike and Ella May had ridden the fast bareback ponies
all up and down the Cap Rock cliffs a hundred, a thousand times. They had gone out on foot and walked the hot and the cold miles in every sort of weather, up, down, in, over, under, and across the canyons, washes, ditches, gullies. Holding hands together, they had kicked their feet and skinned their shoes against the flat sandrocks, round flints, and against the roots and trunks of the ironwood bushes, the ironweeds, and the several dozen kinds of cactus and stickers that carry daggers and thorns tipped and dipped in nature's stinging poison. Together they had held their hands against their ears and felt the high wind pull at their hair as the fast-rolling tumbleweeds bounced and jumped out across the flats and they had yelled, “Look at that old tumbleweed! Watch 'er go! Watch it! Watch it roll and jump off from that cliff!”

And the tumbleweeds always lit somewhere down below, somewhere down “on some cotton farmer's place,” as Tike put it. “When old mama nature wants to sweep our good old upper plains off real good and clean, she always uses those lower plains as a place to sweep her trash in!”

And Ella May would laugh. She always laughed. She laughed in a way that was easy for her. She laughed best, most times, when the crops, the winds, the debts, the worries, the fears and doubts of the world, splashed their highest. This laugh was not a laugh that made fun of a slim lady for being slim, a fat lady for being fat, or an ugly person for being ugly, it was not a laugh of this kind, not of the kind that makes fun of you because you are you. It came
across her face, in her throat, from her stomach, her whole body at the same time, and she had a way of doing it in such an easy manner that the whole country just called it “Ella May's laugh.” Other ones tried to add a little bit onto it, and said, “There's that Ella May flying in the wind again.” “Ella May's ticklebox has blowed over.” “Things must be pretty tough over at her house, she's laughing again.” As a little girl, she had used her voice to make herself heard in the face and teeth of high hard winds, sand, gravel, straw, papers, all sorts of dry, brittle, noisy things that fill the air with loud sounds as they get taken into the winds of the plains. More than any kind of a laugh, it was a way that she had of raising, lifting her voice, and saying, “Whooooo,” or “Wheeee,” or “Tiiiikkkee!” Or “Graaannn'paw!” Or “Looookkkyy!” She always shouted out this first word, whatever it was, that she was thinking about, or if she was working all alone with the livestock, chickens, or the tractor, or the harvesting, and then the laugh came, after that, she would all at once remember that other people had heard her, and like she was, in a way, and in the same breath, making a little bit of fun of her own self, and all of her earthly sorrows in one breath. People for a mile on the windward side of her could hear her on her first few words and they strained their ears to hear what was coming next, but naturally they couldn't catch what it was.