House of Earth (19 page)

“It feels like a big dust cloud pushing down against the
ground. It's a cramp. Short of wind. Some sharp little pains like muscles stretched. Then, of course, all of the feeling of bearing down. Pulling down. But really this feeling is getting so low down in me now that it feels like a sort of a relief, I mean it feels better than I had been feeling for some time. Why is this?”

“When the baby is high up inside you it does cause more discomfort than it does after it falls lower. The upper pains are gone. The lower pains are on. That is all.”

“Upper plains is gone.” Tike gazed steadier out of his window. Held his head high and his knee between his hands. His back was as straight and stiff as Ella's ironing board. “Where they gone off to?”

“She said pains, not plains.”

Blanche listened.

“That there dagnabbed wind can blow its firebox out an' blow its self smack smooth to death, but it never could blow these upper plains down onto them lower ones.” A dry snap cracked in his words. His eyes wore holes in the window glass as he watched the night get colder and blacker.

“She was telling me about the baby getting down to the lower pains. Shut up. Keep your peepers trimmed out at that window there and keep your yap trap out of our conversation if you just simply will not and cannot act the least bit sensible. Go ahead, Blanche, what were you about to say before the alligators starting bawling over across the holler there?”

Tike made no move to reply. His eyes were still out the
window. He felt his body turn hotter and hotter, like there was too much heat in the room. He looked about the room for some kind of job to fill his itching hands, something that would carry him twenty miles away from this shack and everybody in it. He walked across the floor and opened back the iron door of the heater, looked through its mouth and into its belly full of red-hot blackish coals. As he felt the heat against his lips he licked them damp with his tongue, then shook the coal bucket against the door so loud that the rattle and the noise drowned out the sounds of the women talking, and carried him off down away somewhere into a world of his own along the shale cliffs and the wash canyons of the Cap Rock. He closed the stove door with another loud rattle and then walked seventeen miles across the floor till he come to the wash bench, the buckets, the cans of milk and cream. He stirred among them in a noisy manner, and lifted the big aluminum bowl into its place on the separator. He poured milk into it and then turned the handle, watched the disks till they whirled around at the speed of a thousand times a minute. The steady buzz of the hum of the machine bathed his feelings in the sweetest of waters, set up an orchestra in the halls of his soul, and his creative mind drove a dozen tractors and pulled a thousand plows as he hardened his muscles, and squeezed the wood handle of the crank. The hum was born as a yowling baby in the wheels and the cogs of the machine, and he saw it grow up larger and louder, as large as the whole room and as loud as, then
a good bit louder than, the voices of Blanche and Ella May. His face was a sweet bitter mean smile.

Ella May felt a good bit lighter inside as she heard the separator get to whizzing because she knew that the noise would sweep Tike's thoughts and his terrible pride away into the sound of the machine. They could just go on with their talking and forget him for a while. So the crying of the separator was like a singing in the soul, for the baby could breathe better when Ella's belly muscles were not drawn down so hard and so tight. And so for the baby, the singing bowl of the cream machine was like a worldwide symphony played with the four winds against the strings of smoke, against the holes of smokestacks, against the rosin on leaves and bark.

In the whirl of the separator, Tike kept quiet and let his brain roam on the plains. Ella whispered to Blanche on the side of the bed, “Did you ask old man Ridgewood what I told you?”

“You mean about the one acre of land?” Blanche talked so low that Tike could not hear.

“Yes,” Ella said.

“I told him which acre you wanted to buy. I drew it off for him on a sheet of paper. I said, like this, the acre just to the north of this house. Was that right?”

Ella shook her head yes. She glanced at Tike's hand on the crank of the separator, then lowered her eyes and her voice again. “Yes.”

“He said that I talked like a rabbit in a trash pile. He said that he was going to keep all of his land together. He didn't intend to break it up. I even went so far as to tell him that you folks wanted to dig a cellar on it and put up a house. Then he asked me what sort of house, and I said, Oh, a house, I think, built out of earth of some kind. Then he turned cold all of a sudden and said, absolutely no.”

“Absolutely no.”

“That is what his words were. Absolutely no.”

Ella May felt a dizzy pain all over her body caused by the muscles as they drew tight around her baby. All that she said was, “Ahh. Yes. I see.”

Blanche tried to speak a bit sunnier when she saw how dark Ella May's face had turned. “But he said, ‘However, you'll find me to be just like another businessman. If you want to build a house out of rocks or dirt or whatnot, I will sell you an acre back here on this outer edge of my wheat land.' And he said, ‘That spot of ground that that old wooden house, meaning this one, could be producing wheat, and I intend to tear it down before the year is out.'”

“Do you remember which acre he said he would sell?” Ella asked.

“He said, Anywhere down along the Cap Rock.”

“Anywhere? Cap Rock? Oh. Great Jee horsie face! Why, that old rocky stuff wouldn't grow toothpicks. What on earth does he think we are, anyway, that old bloater?” She felt the taste of sorrow on her tongue, and the skin of
her knees, arms, elbows, crawled like a snakeskin against a weed. She leaned closer to Blanche with red eyes and hot tears, pulled at the loose yarn on the bed quilt. “How much did he say?”

“Two fifty.” Blanche felt her own nose burn and sting. “Said you could not hope to own an acre of this wheat-growing land for less than five, six, eight hundred. And where would you get that?”

Blanche's hair moved in the lamplight as she held her face down and shook her head from side to side. “No. I know,” Ella May said. She sent quick glances across the room toward Tike. She heard him rattle the cream cans, buckets, funnels, containers, with one hand as he refilled the big bowl on top of the separator. She felt that Tike had heard their words, but that he made as much noise as he could just to act as if he did not care what they talked about. She saw his muscles move and roll as he turned the crank and lifted cans. She felt that he tried very hard to make so much noise that he would drown out their conversation. She lifted her voice and spoke louder to see if he would rattle his cans louder. Instead of this, as her words came into his, Tike turned the crank at its fastest speed and sang an old song:

She had heard him sing the song a hundred times before, and he had told her that a Negro chuck wagon cook from Louisiana had sang it for him and had taught it to five or six of the cowmen. His voice sang in a sour chant, long, wailing, and his words floated out through his nose. He sang to make the two women think that he did not care what they talked about in such low words. But Tike had lied to his own self, because as he sang he would have given his last dollar to hear their words.

A few days ago, when Blanche had spent her fourth day with the Hamlins, Ella May had told her about Tike's craving to get out of the old wooden house and to raise up a house of earth. How she had read and read again the pages of the little book from the Department of Agriculture, and how he had worn it thin in his pockets. Not once, not even once, since that book had come in the box had Tike let it get away from him, except to pass it from his own hands to hers. The little book had always been warm with the heat of his hands, the warmth of his pocket, smeared and soaked with his sweat and hers.

Her old daddy had paid her one dollar a day for keeping his lands and accounts in order during her last year at home. He had given her a check written out for “Three Hundred and Sixty Five and No/100 Dollars” several months before she married Tike. Tike had almost caught her several times when she seemed to get money right out of thin air, a few dollars to pay their fuel bill at the co-op filling station on Highway 66. He had been very angry
about it several times, accused her of borrowing money from her daddy, but she figured with a pencil and paper and proved to him every time that she had simply kept a penny here, a nickel here, a dollar here, one yonder, and had hidden the bills away until they “amounted up.” In this way she had spent about one hundred and sixty-some dollars, which left in the Citizens' State Bank two hundred and one, two, or three dollars, she did not know exactly. But Tike had never found it out. If she had explained the whole thing to him on the day they were married, he would have smiled and passed it off with a joke, but she had made the mistake of trying to surprise him with it later, and if she told him now, he would not believe it. There would be one wild man running loose around there for no less than a week or ten days. He would ask, “If ya earned it right an' honest offa yer old daddy, then how come ya kept it hid out alla this time?”

To keep him from having such fits, she made matters worse by keeping her bank account a Q.T. secret.

Three or four times during the last year she had started to go into Ridgewood's office to see about buying one acre of land. She had decided on the acre to the north of the house because they could live in the wood shack and build up the earth one at the same time, time would be saved in going to and from the job, there would be water, tea, coffee to drink, and meals could be fixed on the oil stove. The farm chores had to be done, and the earth house should be as close as possible. Three or four times it had crossed her
mind to walk into Ridgewood's office and see about it. She could get an idea of how much he wanted, make her down payment, come home with her deed of ownership, which would make Tike glad because she was pregnant and the birth was coming on. And yet she had not gone in to see Ridgewood. Every time she had been in town her feet had started and then stopped, turned some other way.

The last three or four weeks she had been afraid to take the trip into town. And now the baby was due to be born at any minute. Tike would have no more allowed her to go than he would have laid his head down across their chopping block and had somebody cut it off. And so she had told Blanche to go see Ridgewood. And tonight Blanche had told her what he had said. “I don't bust up my land. You talk like a crazy woman.”

Ella May held her hand over her left breast as the hurt tightened in her body. She felt the small knot that had come just above her breast that day a year ago that Tike's elbow had bruised her. She leaned her head over Blanche's lap as the muscles drew tighter and the pain worse. The skin under her hand was hot enough to sweat through her dress and onto the palm of her hand. She had not told Blanche. She had not told Tike. She had noticed it a bit every day. She felt the small knot of muscle, no larger than the rubber on a lead pencil, situated barely under skin about an inch above the bulge of her breast. She had said to herself, but never out loud, “Everybody has enough pains of their own without me adding any more onto them.” Then on other days
when she was sure that somebody had noticed her, she had thought that she would just come right out with the whole story and see if it was a serious bruise. And then again she had said under her breath, “Oh, it is such a little spot, such a teensy-weensy little old spot, that I just know it can't stay for long. Why, I've had ten times worse knocks than that and the bruise has always gone away.” Then, right here lately, the thing seemed to hurt her sharper on account of the way that the baby in her stomach pulled down on the muscles of her ribs and shoulders. And here of late she had been a lot more scared about it, because she actually caught herself thinking about it for longer stretches of time. And why she did not break down and let anybody else know was more than she could explain.

Just a little bruise. Such a little spot. No bigger than a good-size wart on a log. No bigger than a titty on a hog. No bigger, not much bigger than the head of a knitting needle, not much bigger than a small green pea, not near as big as the head on a dime. This spot. This one little teensy-weensy spot. Why did she not tell anybody? Why?

She did not know. But it would be better. When the baby gets out and the weight gets off my stomach, she thought, then these aches and pains in all of my muscles will quit and go away. My calves and my feet and my ankles hurt too, but so do my hips and my groin and so do my eyes and my shoulders and my back. It's just because the baby is pulling down on me from all over. When I straighten up it's not quite so miserable, but then it's just almost more than I can
do to sit up straight all of the time. Such a little spot. Little old spot's not as big as I am. I'll lick it and I'll whip it and I'll give it a good beating and make it go away.

“Go away, spot. Go, go, away. Go somewhere and get in somebody like old landlord Ridgewood.” She would say a thousand such things to herself at night in bed, all day at her work, her bending, her lifting, walking.