House of Earth (8 page)

They let themselves fall down onto Tike's clothes on the hay and kept their lips together for several more minutes. Tike kissed her across the shoulders and the skin of her arms. He touched his tongue to the nipples of her breasts and saw them stand up in the light of the sun. “Is little baby getting his titty milk?” she tried to tease him.

“Milk an' honey.” He spoke with her left nipple between his lips. “This one's milk. This one's honey. This one's milk. This one's honey.” He sucked each nipple, the right, and the left, as he talked against her skin.

“Isn't little Tikey Baby ashamed of himself to throw his mama down here on this old pile of hay just to get his dinner?” She tried to speak in a serious tone, but he held his ear against her heart, and heard her laugh under her breath. He heard a deep gurgling sound somewhere inside her, and the splashing about of waters.

“No.” He used baby talk. “Itty Tikey ain'ty fwaidy.”

Her stomach bounced when she laughed. He felt the muscles of her whole body jerk.

Then he spoke again. “Itty Tikey notty shamey.”

“No? Mmm?”

“You got more water an' stuff splashin' aroun' inside of you than I could suck out in fifty years of hard pullin'! Quit! Shut up. Quit teasin' me!” He pushed his mouth down harder against her breast and shook his head like a bashful kid. And then he got still and quiet and asked her, “'Smatter? 'Fraid you'll run dry? You got more joosey magoosey in these tits of yours here than any of our old milk cows.”

“Tike.”

“Yeah.”

“Just hold me. Mmm. That's it. That's it. Be my cover. Ohhh. That's fine. Such a nice warm cover. You're just about the best blanket I ever had. Hold close, close, close. And for a long, long, long time. I just want to lay here and think. And think. And then think some more.” She opened her legs and spread her knees apart while he moved and laid on her, then she closed her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck. “When you suck my nipples, Tikey, and get them all wet with your spit, and the wind blows on them, they, they, I don't know, they get real cold and hurt. This is warmer. Gooder this way.”

“What you want to lay here and think about, Lady?” Tike moved his hips and penis against the hair between her legs.

“Just everything.” She kissed his ear, then let her head fall back and her eyes move about the whole cowshed. “Just sort of about this whole big world so full of hard times, so full of troubles, so full of fun, with a little red fence around it.”

“I wish you'd think up some kind of a way to get us a piece of nice good farmin' land, with an adobe house on it, an' a big adobe fence all around it.”

“There's not but one way. And that is to just keep on working and fighting and fighting and working, and then to work and to save and to save and to fight some more,” she said.

“Fight who?” he asked.

“I don't know. I'm not just positive that I know. But I think it's mainly these landlords,” she told him.

“Guys that keep us in debt up to our ass all our life.”

Tike moved against her an inch closer, then he moved away from her for a moment to move his right hand down to feel the hair between her legs. He squeezed and pushed and moved his fingers among the hair.

And she said, “There you go saying bad words again.”

“Goshamighty, woman, you mean to say that ass is a bad word?”

“It's sure not a nicey-nice one.”

“Yeah. But ever'body's got an ass. It's just your rump. Your fanny. What you're laying on right now.”

Ella did not laugh, sigh, giggle, nor answer right at that moment. She laid her arms back on the hay above her head and held her eyes shut and her face to one side. She bit her bottom lip soft and easy, then her mouth fell open and her lips were damp and wide apart.

The picture of her face, her eyelids, hair, forehead, ears, cheeks, chin, was one of almost complete peace and comfort. Tike saw a trace, a tiny trace, but a trace of ache, pain, and misery there as she licked her lips and breathed. A feeling came over him. A feeling that had always come over him when he saw her look this way. It was a feeling of love, yet a feeling of fight. A love that was made out of fight, the fight that he would fight if any living human hurt or harmed or
even spoke low-down or bad words about his Lady. And for a good long time he seemed to get a higher view, somehow, of their life together, their life on this gumbo land in this shack, and even the land and the shack and their cowshed he felt did not really belong to them. No. It all belonged to a man that had never set foot on it. Belonged to somebody that did not give a damn about it. Belonged to someone that didn't care about the feelings of their cowshed. Somebody somewhere that did not know the fiery seeds of words and of tears and of passions, hopes, split here on this one spot of the earth. Belonged to somebody who did not think that these people were able to think. Belonged to somebody who had their names wrote down on his money list, his sucker list. Belonged to somebody who does not know how quick we can get together and just how fast we can fight. Belongs to a man or a woman somewhere that don't even know that we're down here alive. It belongs to a disease that is the worst cancer on the face of this country, and that cancer goes hand in hand with Ku Klux, Jim Crow, and the doctrine and the gospel of race hate, and that disease is the system of slavery known as sharecropping.

Not all of this came into Tike's brain in these exact same words. No. Not all of it. A feeling came over him like one he'd had when he was a boy, and just about every day or so since then. It is the world's hardest feeling to say in words, because it is not a feeling of words alone, words only. It is an actual vision. It is a scientific fact, and all of the experts of the brain and of the mind know it very well. It is not a spirit
hallucination, nor a vision based on superstition, hoodoo, voodoo, witchcraft, hocus-pocus, nor the world of heaven beyond.

It happened at all times when all Tike's hopes, wants, cravings, and troubles, accidentally or all on purpose, all came together in one solitary, single thought, usually and quite naturally his one single thought was about the person on earth that he loved most. It had been a dozen girls at the farms and the ranches around. It had come when friends and relatives from towns and from other farms brought their children out for a visit. It had happened when he was thinking about his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters. He had had it a hundred times or more while he was going with Ella May, and he had felt it even plainer, more real, since he had been married to her. The sight of her doing her work about the place would cause him to fall into his vision. When she was away at town or at some of the neighboring farms he thought about her so plain that everything in his world came to him at the same instant. He actually saw a living thread of connection between every thought that he had ever thought, everything that had ever happened to him, and every cell in his brain, every memory, was very plainly connected up one with the other, and another with that, and so on.

The feeling was, roughly, then, that if all of these separated memories, thoughts, ideas, happenings, were all just the one Tike Hamlin, well, then, all of the things around him—house, barn, the iron water tank, the windmill, little henhouse, the old Ryckzyck shack, the
whole farm, the whole ranch—they were a part of him, the same as an egg from the farm went into his mouth and down his throat and was a part of him.

Religious people, the brush arbor shouters, the holy rollers on their hay, the spiritualists in their trances, the Christian Scientists hunting for their oneness with all things, they would have given the feeling some kind of name and gone around about the country preaching the thing to others. Tike did not look at his feelings nor the ramblings of his brain, nor the work of his hands, as anything to be bought, sold, or preached or taught to others. Maybe it was a mark against him that he did not spread nor share his knowledge with the folks that had lost their hold on this feeling, but his excuse was that he just did not see nor realize nor believe that they were really lost, and he also believed that if somebody did choose to be lost, lost to their own self, lost to the world about them, then all of the hunting and searching that he could do would not help one ounce to find them.

He believed and said, “You help a hand to find a job of work that it likes to do, and that hand will find its own self.”

He closed his eyes. He kissed, then sucked the tips of Ella May's ears. He kissed her left eye, then her right eye, then down along her nose, then he kissed each corner of her mouth. As he took a lungful of air into his mouth and nose, he held her bottom lip between his teeth and smelled the hay and the barn. He felt a slick juice on the fingers of his hand between her legs, and as she moved her face from side to side and her heels and toes dug into the hay, his kisses
turned into little soft, easy bites that nipped her neck and her armpits, her breasts, her stomach, and her whole body.

“Know what kind of a kiss this is here, down across your belly?” he asked her.

“I can't guess,” she said. “What kind?”

“Shotgun kiss.”

“Why do you call it a shotgun kiss?”

“'Cause. It spreads out all over everywhere, an' it gets ever'thing in th' brush.”

“Tike.”

“Yes, Miss Lady.”

“Isn't it about time that the little man came in out of this awful bad weather?”

“This weather bad?”

“Ohh. Mmm. It's something terrible. Just something terrible.”

“Ha ha ha. Mebbe so. Mebbe so.”

“Where is he?”

“Here he is. Don't you recognize 'im?”

“Ohhh. Easy. Tike. Baby. Ohhmm. Tike. Honey. Easy, Tikey.”

“Hurt?”

“Teeny-weensy bit.”

“Now? Lady?”

“Noooo. It's. No. It's all right now. Just don't. Push too. Too hard. Too. Fassst.”

“Hurt now?”

“Huh-unh. Here. Lay down and hold me and be my
good warm blanket if you please again. And. Let's stay here a long, long, long time, what say, Tikey? You know I'm just thinking about something.”

“Yeah. What?”

“Ohh. About how nice our earth house is going to be.”

“Yeah. Me too. When we get it.”

“Yes. When we do get it. I wonder how long it will take?” She moved under him and talked with her eyes on the shingle roof. “How long?”

“How long to build one?”

“Yes.”

“I don't know. Gover'ment book tells. Where's th' book at? Didn't mess aroun' an' lose it already, did you?”

“No. It's here. Right here at my elbow. I had it stuck in my apron pocket and it fell out.”

He looked at the book at her elbow. “It's fell out there, yeahh. It's okay. Ahh. It's turned to page five. Ain't no readin' on th' page. Just some pictures. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven pictures. Guys a makin' th' bricks. Gosh. Look what big ones. We could have our walls two feet thick if we just wanted to. Whew.”

“Wind certainly couldn't blow any dust and dirt through a wall that thick, could it? Hmmm? Ohh. Tike, honey, baby, sweetie pie, sugar dumpling, gosh, I love you. Did you know that? Or did I ever tell you? Did I, honey, ever, ever, ever, ever, tell you how much? Gosh.”

“Mixin' th' soil. Fillin' th' brick forms. Smoothin' down th' top. Takin' off th' forms. Washin' out th' forms. Layin'
th' bricks out to dry. Stackin' up th' bricks to let 'em cure out good. Big stacks an' stacks of 'em with big flat boards on top. I guess that's to what? What?”

“Why, I don't know. But I would just suppose that they were covered over with boards to keep the rain from washing your bricks apart. Move closer. Move a little closer, Tikey Ikey. Is that a good name? Like it? Tikey Ikey. Tacky Wacky. Huhh?”

And he rubbed his chin against her forehead and laughed as he said, “Lissen, Miss Lady. Let me put you sorta wise to a thing or two. Just a little thing or two. Ahh. Just as long as you let me be your blanket like this, an' keep you all warm an' ever'thing like this, I don't care what name you call me by. So far, you called me some kind of a different name ever' time. So I'm a gettin' to where I just don't know what name hardly to answer to anymore.”

She laughed under her breath and he felt her muscles jerk into tight knots, then get loose, and relax again. “I just call you those names to show you how much I love you, you silly old outfit.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“An', so now, it's Mister Wacky Ikey, or Tikey Wikey, or Woozeldy Goozeldy or somethin'. Or Mister Blanket. What'll I call you by? Miss Blanket? Nope. What? Ah. I know. I'll have to start callin' you Misses Mattress. Ha.”

“Misses Mattress. Ha ha ha ha.”

“Don't laugh so much.”

“I'll laugh if I want to laugh. You can't stop me. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”

“I just don't want to fire my shot till you fire yours, Lady, I mean, Misses Blanket. But when you laugh thataway, it jerks my pecker around in your belly, and it feels so good that it makes me want to come. Lay still. I don't want to come away ahead of you, Misses Blanket. I mean, Misses Mattress.”