The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (37 page)

She had the biggest wedding the town had ever seen. Dobbs spared no expense. At the wedding reception in his own house he was a stranger; he knew no one there. Then the twins were married in a lavish double ceremony. People said you couldn't tell the girls apart; what Dobbs couldn't tell one from the other were their two husbands. Emmagine was not long behind them, and her wedding put theirs in the shade, for she had married a Lubbock of the Oklahoma City Lubbocks. This time there were two wedding receptions, one at Dobbs's, the other at the home of his son-in-law's people. Dobbs attended only the one, though he paid the bills for both. In fact, the day after the ceremony he began to receive unpaid bills from his son-in-law's creditors, some dated as far back as ten years.

Then Ernest, the middle boy, brought home a bride. Mickey her name was. She had hair like cotton candy, wore fishnet stockings, bathed in perfume. Thinking she might have caught cold from going around so lightly dressed, Mrs. Dobbs recommended a cure for her quinsy. But there was nothing the matter with her throat; that was her natural speaking voice. She and her sisters-in-law backed off at each other like cats. The family seldom saw Ernest after he left home. The checks his father sent him came back cashed by banks in faraway places. He wrote that he was interested in many schemes; he was always on the verge of a really big deal. To swing it he needed just this amount of cash. When he returned once every year to discuss finances with his father he came alone. His mother hinted that she would have liked to see her daughter-in-law and her grandson; as luck would have it, one or the other was always not feeling up to the trip. Once the boy was sent alone to spend a month with his grandparents. Instead of one month he was left for four. To his shame Dobbs was glad to see the boy go. When Ernest came to fetch him home he took the occasion to ask for an increase in his allowance. He and his brother quarreled; thereafter he stayed away from home for even longer stretches.

Back from his hitch in the Navy, and back from his last cruise parched with thirst and rutting like a goat, came Faye. Feeling beholden to the boy for the hard life he had had on the farm and on shipboard, Dobbs lavished money on him. When he was brought home drunk and unconscious, battered and bruised from some barroom brawl, Dobbs held his tongue. To hints that he think of his future he turned deaf. The contempt he felt for work was shown in the foul nicknames he had for men who practiced each and every trade and profession. Once to Dobbs's house came a poor young girl, obviously pregnant. She claimed the child was Faye's. He hardly bothered to deny it. When his father asked if he meant to marry the girl he snorted with laughter. He suggested that she would be happy to be bought off. Shrinking with shame, Dobbs offered her money; when she took it he felt ashamed of the whole human race. He told his son that he was breaking his mother's heart. He said there would always be money to support him but that it was time he settled down and took a wife. The one he got persuaded him that while he was away in the Navy his sisters and brothers had connived to cheat him of his share of the money. He had been cheated of something, he somehow felt; maybe that was it. To have a little peace of mind, his father gave him more; whatever the amount, Faye always felt sure it was less than he had coming to him. He quarreled with his sisters. Family reunions, rare at best, grew more and more infrequent because of the bad feelings between the children.

It was Dwight, his youngest son and always his favorite child, on whom his father placed his hopes. Totally reformed after that one scrape with the law, he never drank, never even smoked, never went near a poolhall nor a honky-tonk. Most important of all, girls did not interest him in the least. He was in love with the internal combustion engine. His time was spent hanging around garages, stock-car racetracks, out at the local cowpasture with the wind sock and the disused haybarn which was hopefully spoken of as the hangar. He worshiped indiscriminately automobiles, motorcycles, airplanes, whatever was driven by gasoline. The smell of hot lubricating oil intoxicated him. Exhaust fumes were his native air. Silence and sitting still drove him distracted. He loved having to shout above the roar of motors. He spoke a language which his father could only marvel at, as if he had raised a child who had mastered a foreign tongue, speaking of valve compression ratio, torque, drop-head suspension, and of little else.

Dwight had known the ache, the hopeless adoration worlds removed from envy, too humble even to be called longing, of the plowboy for cars that pass the field, stopping the mule at the sound of the approaching motor and gazing trancelike long after it has disappeared in a swirl of dust, then awakening and resettling the reins about his neck and pointing the plowshare down again and saying to the mule, “Come up, mule.” Now he saw no reason why he shouldn't have one of his own. He was sixteen years old and his old man had money to burn. Car or motorcycle, he would have settled for either; the mere mention of a motorcycle scared his father into buying him a car. He was not going to kill himself on one of them damned motorsickles, Dobbs said, words which just two months later came back to haunt him for the rest of his life.

It was a Ford, one of the new V-8's. No sooner was it bought than it disappeared from sight. He was working on it, said Dwight. Working on it? A brand-new car? If something was the matter with it why not take it back? All that was the matter with it was that it was a Detroit car, off the assembly line. He was improving it.

“You call that improving it!” said Dobbs on seeing it rolled out of the old Venable coach house a week later. It looked as if it had been wrecked. The body all stripped down. The entrails hanging out of the hood. Paint job spoilt, flames painted sweeping back from the nose and along the side panels in tongues of red, orange, and yellow. Dwight said he had added a supercharger, a second carburetor, advanced the timer, stripped the rear end. Well, just drive careful, that's all. Two months later the boy was brought home dead. Coming home from the funeral Dobbs's wife said, “This would never happened if we had stayed down on the farm where we belonged. Sometimes I wish we had never struck oil.”

The same thought had crossed Dobbs's mind, frightening him with its ingratitude. “Ssh!” he said. “Don't talk like that.”

With the death of Dwight, Dobbs and his wife were left alone in the big house with only Dobbs's old mother for company. She threatened to leave with every breath. She could see well enough where she wasn't wanted. She would not be a burden. If she wasn't good enough for her own flesh and blood just say so and she would pack her bag. The visits home of Faye and Ernest all but ceased. As for the girls, they were never mentioned. Both Dobbs and his wife knew that they were ashamed of their parents.

And so the Lord blessed the latter end of Dobbs more than his beginning. For in addition to his oil wells, he had (he never did come to trust oil, and old country boy that he was, converted much of it into livestock) fourteen thousand head of whiteface cattle and five thousand Poland China hogs.

He also had two sons and four daughters. And he gave them equal inheritance, though there was not one who didn't believe that the rest had all been favored over him.

After this lived Dobbs not very long. Just long enough to see his sons' sons, and despair.

So Dobbs died, being old before his time, and having had his fill of days.

Mouth of Brass

I

“M
OLLY OT
! Hot tamales!”

Down from the top of our street each weekday afternoon that cry, in a voice deeper than any I have ever heard in all the years since, used to come rumbling like thunder.

“Finus! Here comes Finus!” I would run shouting to my mother.

Shaking her head, my mother would declare, “Boy, you're going to ruin your digestion eating those things. Going to just burn the lining of your insides right out. Wait and see.” However, she always ended by saying, “All right. Go find me my purse.” For it was true, hot spices kept a child purged of worms. And often instead of a nickel my mother would give me a dime, saying, “Might as well get me a couple too while you're at it.” They were so delicious the way Finus made them that afterwards we used to suck dry the cornshucks they came wrapped in.

Meanwhile his cry, nearer now, would roll out again, sonorous as a chord drawn from the deepest pipes of a church organ. And if outside our house he should loose another, the chimes of our doorbell shuddered softly and teacups rattled on their saucers.

No matter what Finus said it came out sounding proud and mighty; so he said as little as he could without risk of seeming impolite. In another place, or at some later period perhaps, his voice might have made Finus's fortune; but in Blossom Prairie, in east Texas, in 1930, to be answered by a Negro in that powerful bass brought the blood to some men's cheeks quick as a slap. His size alone was a standing challenge, the silence in which he took refuge easily misinterpreted as surliness; add to these provocations the sound that came out of him whenever he did speak, and Finus was often in trouble of the kind I myself had witnessed one Saturday afternoon on the town square when a sailor knocked him down, saying, “I'll teach you to talk back to a white man in that tone of voice.” From where he lay amid the cornshucks from his tamales strewn on the pavement Finus said, and the weariness of his tone deepened it further still, “I speak to everybody in the voice God give me.” He was born loud as surely as he was born black: his name will tell us so. For although he was called, and called himself, Finus, to rhyme with minus, this is doubtless a corruption of Phineas, and that, as someone knew who heard the infant utter his first wail, means in Hebrew “mouth of brass.”

II

His last name was Watson, though there were probably not a dozen people in Blossom Prairie who ever knew it, despite the fact that he had been there long enough to have become a fixture of the place. To sell his hot tamales “Finus” sufficed him. He made his daily rounds and cried his wares; otherwise, being black, he passed unnoticed, except from time to time when somebody, most often a man from out in the country, unused to our stentorian Negro, took exception to his attitude—mistaking his voice for his attitude.

He lived all alone in a shanty down behind the Catholic church, across town from the section along the creek north of the jailhouse where the other Negroes all lived. There in a series of old packing crates Finus raised the chickens that went into his hot tamales, and on a small plot of ground grew the red peppers and the herbs with which they were seasoned. He was said to have Mexican blood, and in a certain light could be seen a dark gleam on his high cheekbones as of copper beneath a coat of soot. To this drop of Mexican in him was attributed his independence—his “impudence,” some called it—the reserve with which he held himself aloof from the other Negroes of the place, and the flavor of his tamales, the inimitable tang of his barbecue sauce. This last he produced at Fourth of July celebrations, for which he was always in demand as cook, and on Juneteenth—June the nineteenth, observed by our Negroes as the day in 1863 when, six months late, news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached Texas. At the time I first knew him Finus was in his late forties or early fifties—long a familiar figure in my home town. Into every quarter of it his fixed round brought him daily, Saturdays and Sundays excepted; and it was said that so punctual was his appearance in each of the streets along his route the people there all set their clocks by the sound of his booming voice.

Our street, which he reached just at four, lay towards the end of Finus's route. After he and I became friends I used to meet him at the top of our street every afternoon and he would give me a ride down to my house on the lid of his box, which hung by a strap from his shoulder. This box was a marvel of Finus's own making. Sitting on it one felt no heat at all, but when it was opened heat burst from it as from an oven. An oven, in fact, it was: inside it burnt a smokeless charcoal fire, and on cold days when Finus raised the lid he would be momentarily enveloped in a cloud of spicy steam.

When Finus knelt and opened his box to sell me my tamales I could see that it was nearly empty. Yes, he said, he was heading for home now. But in the morning when he set out, his box was full to the top—too heavy for him to give a boy a ride on it. I questioned him about his route, and when he told me he went as far as the ice house and the railway depot, the cotton compress and the courthouse, that he crossed the public square not once but four times every day, I listened in wonder and longing, as one who has never left home listens to the tales of a traveler. I had myself seen those same sights, to be sure; but usually from a back window of the car, and even so, not very many times.

“How would you like to come with me one day?” asked Finus.

I knew that “one day.” It meant when you are big. It meant never.

But not when Finus said it. “All right, you ask your mama,” he said. “If she says you can go, then you pick the day and I'll take you with me.”

I started to ask my mother at once, as soon as Finus had set me down at our door. But I checked myself. I feared that should she say no Finus might take it as a rebuff. Instead I waited until I heard his voice come up from below as, turning the corner, he proclaimed his advent in the next street.

“Well, wasn't that nice of Finus,” said my mother. But before saying whether or not I could accept his invitation she would first have to talk it over with my father. I coaxed from her a promise to speak to him that evening. In bed that night I awaited his decision anxiously. I sensed in my father a reservation about my friendship with Finus. It was not that he frowned at it exactly; he seemed rather to smile at it somehow. When my mother came to kiss me goodnight she said I could go. When I told Finus the following afternoon he proposed that we make it the very next day. What was more, I was to come early to his place and help him make his tamales.