The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (38 page)

III

If I should tire out and become a burden on him he was to leave me off at my father's shop on one of our trips through the square: with this parting instruction to Finus my mother left me in his care and drove away. I experienced a moment's homesickness then and wished I had not come.

I had never been inside a Negro's house before, and through the dark opening of Finus's doorway I passed as through a wall. The house consisted of just one room, most of it devoted to the manufacture of hot tamales. A big black cast-iron wood range, heavily scrolled and garlanded, squatted on its paws against one wall. In the center of the room stood a long wooden table, its top as scarred as a butcher's block and bleached colorless from scrubbing, on which was heaped a mound of finely shredded cooked chicken meat. From nails on the walls hung clusters of dried and shriveled red peppers and bunches of dried herbs. In one corner stood Finus's cot. Beside it stood a washstand on which sat a basin and ewer. The bare simplicity of Finus's way of living made it seem to me like play, and this combined with my sense of strangeness at being inside a Negro's house to remind me of the time I had timidly knocked at the door of a clubhouse built of scrap lumber and belonging to a gang of older boys and had snatched one tantalizing glimpse of the snug interior before being told that members only were allowed inside, scram! Finus's house was like but better than that clubhouse, and I had been invited in.

The chickens for his hot tamales, Finus explained, were always killed and partly cooked the night before. Now into one of the two huge caldrons steaming on the range he emptied a sack of cornmeal. In with the meal then went the meat, stirred in with an ax handle which from long usage had been boiled white as a bone. Into the other caldron went an armload of dry cornshucks. For poking these down so that more could be added as they softened in the hot water Finus had another ax handle, like the first whitened by boiling. After the meat and the mush had cooked together for a while Finus opened a large jar filled with a red powder and poured in about half the contents, and the air of the room sharpened suddenly with the odor of hot chili peppers.

Then the limp wet shucks were spread out in rows on the tabletop like a game of solitaire and the pot of mush brought steaming to the table. A spoonful of it on a shuck, a lengthwise roll, a fold at each end: and there you were. Between us we made two hundred hot tamales. I made three and Finus made the other hundred and ninety-seven. Next to his mine looked like roll-your-own cigarettes next to ready-rolls. I was promised my three for my dinner. Two hundred hot tamales on weekdays, twice as many on Saturdays … somebody had once worked it out for him, and it came to nearly two million tamales that Finus had made in his time. And while chicken feed had gone up to two dollars a sack and cornmeal to four dollars a barrel, he still charged the same as always: “Two for a nickel, two bits a dozen!”

IV

Actually to be making his rounds with him when Finus rumbled “Molly ot! Hot tamales!” filled me with such pride that my face ached from grinning.

“Got yourself a helper today, I see, Finus,” said housewives who came out to buy from us.

“Yes, ma'am, that's right, I've taken me on a partner here,” Finus solemnly replied; and I observed that even when Finus meant to agree, and repeated what had been said to him, his voice made it sound rather as though he were correcting the person.

When children came to buy and Finus let me fill their orders from out of his box and collect their nickels I swelled so with self-importance I could scarcely contain myself. And the best was yet to come. Before we had gone far, just as we were entering a new street, Finus said, “You want to holler ‘Hot tamales'? Go ahead.” I nearly tore my lungs loose trying to make it sound loud and grand like Finus's cry. Thereafter, for as long as my voice held out, sometimes I hollered, sometimes Finus, sometimes we hollered both together. It must have sounded like a tuba accompanied by a piccolo.

Certain streets down which we went I knew, or I recognized as those on which lived playmates of mine to whose houses I had been brought to spend an afternoon. Other streets were entirely new to me, and leading off these were dozens more. I wondered how people could speak of our town as a small town. Finus, who knew it better than anyone else, who traversed its length and breadth daily, estimated it to be five miles long east to west, only a little less north to south. That was plenty big enough, we agreed. It was the county seat, with a population of three thousand. A person could live there and believe just about anything and find somebody to agree with him—and a lot more to disagree with him: there were (Finus had counted them) nineteen churches, white and colored, scattered around town. The dog population Finus put at eight hundred and seventy, most of them known to him personally by name.

We crossed the square for the first time and went out by the street running behind the post office. This brought us to the cotton compress and the cottonseed mill, which always smelled so good. There we turned and went skirting along the railroad tracks until we came to the depot. We came back down Depot Street, then turned into Negrotown, where the paved streets gave out and became dirt streets. Clotis, who did our wash, came out and bought half a dozen tamales from me. We came out between the courthouse and the jail, crossed Market Square, and passed through the public square for the second time. Finus asked was I tired and would I like to stop and stay with my father. I spurned the suggestion and we continued on.

It pleased Finus to stop and ask, “Know where you're at now?” I would have to say no. Shortly I began, so great was my pleasure in this game, so confident was I of the next turn it would take, almost to shout with glee, “No! Where, Finus?” For when he had turned me around and around and had me completely lost, precisely then would Finus take my hand in his, lead me around a corner, and there we were before some dear familiar landmark of the town: the courthouse tower, the steeple of one of the churches, one of the bridges over the creek, or most frequently, and always with the greatest surprise, the keenest joy, the bright, busy square, heart and center of my world, scene of my Saturdays.

I began that day to acquire a sense of the relation of these places one to another, of the overall plan of my town. As in those puzzles in which one draws lines between dots until suddenly a recognizable creature or object emerges, I was drawing lines between what before had been disconnected dots forming no pattern or design. It was doubly delightful because it was both new and familiar.

Nor could I, in getting to know my fellow townsmen, have found a better guide than my friend Finus, the hot-tamale vendor. Cliff Allen, the livery-stable owner; Mr. Kirkup, the blacksmith; Mr. Green, the garage mechanic; the firemen at the fire-house: all the most interesting people liked hot tamales. Even among the housewives the ones who came to their doors in answer to Finus's cry were those unsoured by dyspepsia, the jolly young spice-loving ones. In Market Square the farmers at their wagons bought from us, and the prisoners in the jailhouse, hearing our cry, called down from their barred windows and sent the deputy sheriff, a handsome, stern-looking man with a stag-handled pistol in a holster on his hip, out to buy theirs for them.

When Finus, having ridden me down on the lid of his box from the top of our street, as usual, set me down at my door that afternoon, exhausted, hoarse from yelling, and deliriously happy, I was a different boy from the one who had left home only that morning. The world had been revealed to me much bigger and much more exciting than I had dreamed. With much of it I was now acquainted, much of it I had yet to explore. For both this knowledge and this promise I had Finus to thank, and as I heard his voice swell up from the bottom of the street my heart swelled with gratitude and affection for my friend, my guide.

V

On Saturdays, as I have said, Finus did not make his rounds; instead he stood with his box, or rather two boxes, on the northwest corner of the square, lifting his cry from time to time above the din. For in Blossom Prairie nobody stayed at home on Saturday unless forced to; all who could possibly get there spent the day downtown. The population doubled—in ginning season tripled—as country folks poured in by the car, the truck, and the wagonload. The square was a carnival. The storefronts were decked with streamers offering prizes and free toys. From the open window of its projection room, above the whirr of the machine, the picture-show discharged the thump of the overture to
William Tell
and “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” and laid down along the sidewalk beneath the marquee the odors of hot buttered popcorn and heated celluloid. Children out of school with their allowances burning their hands and grown-ups with their weekly paychecks in their pockets thronged the walks, window-gazing. All the air was spiced with the odors of holiday foods from the busy cafés, the confectionery, the street vendors, like my friend Finus, of hot tamales and hotdogs, parched peanuts, doughnuts, watermelon. Town folks met their country kin on the square that day, and country folks met their friends from other parts of the county. In the evening after work and after an early supper families drove down and parked their cars against the curbs and watched the promenaders stroll past, took a few turns themselves; then the men gathered for talk on the corners, the children played games around the Confederate monument in the center plaza, and the women exchanged visits with one another in the cars.

From the time I was born I was taken regularly each week to join that festive crowd; but not until after my tour of the town with Finus, and then not at once but only after much wheedling, did my mother consent to let me go down on the square “all by myself.” When she did I felt I could begin to think of myself as a big boy, though still a dozen
dont's
—enough to make a person wonder whether the world was a safe place to live in—were repeated to me each time I set off from home, the one above all being not to go into any of the alleyways that enclosed the square like a moat on four sides. It was in their shadowy depths, at the back doors of the domino parlors and the poolhalls and the cafés, that the bootleg whiskey flowed on Saturdays, the dice games were played, the fistfights fought. But I am getting ahead of myself. Of that side of life in my home town I knew nothing until one day in my tenth year. After that nothing was ever the same for me again.

Say that the first scene I saw was at four o'clock in the afternoon, then the drama began at three fifty-five when from out of one of those back alleys where he had drunk too much whiskey and gambled away too much money this Jewel Purdom returned to his car parked against the south-side curb to find his young though already large brood quarrelsome and hungry and sent one of them, his boy Gilbert, across the square to buy a dozen of Finus's hot tamales.

Afterwards nobody could be found who had seen the boy make his purchase. Nobody could be found who had seen anything of all that happened, despite the fact that it was a Saturday in early fall when crops were in and farmers idle and with money for their wives to spend and on all four corners of the square the crowds stood elbow to elbow. I was playing around the monument in the plaza at the time; however, I can relate how it went as surely as if I had been present on the spot, for Finus had a little routine with children: I have seen it many times and it never varied.

“Put your hands together and hold them like this,” he always said, kneeling and putting his hands together, the polished yellow palms opened upwards. Upon the child's hands he laid a pad of three or four sheets of newspaper. He then raised the lid of his box, releasing that mouth-watering aroma. When the child was one the age of Gilbert Purdom, Finus gave him a lesson in how to count, speaking the numbers slowly and enunciating with ponderous care in that deep voice of his and encouraging the child to repeat after him as with his tongs he stacked the tamales on the paper. “And twelve makes a dozen,” he concluded. Then he added one more.

Gilbert Purdom thought when he was given that extra hot tamale that he was getting preferential treatment. He did not know that Finus always gave thirteen to the dozen. He reasoned that his father and mother and his brothers and sisters were not expecting an extra free tamale either. So as soon as he had gotten among the crowd Gilbert popped that tamale in his mouth. It went down so quick that before he knew it he had eaten another. Gilbert may have been surprised then but he was not alarmed. He had that one coming to him. The first one nobody would know to miss, the second one was his share. What did it matter when he chose to eat it, now or together with the family? Still, Gilbert quickened his pace so as to put temptation behind him. But in front of him, right under his nose, Gilbert had eleven spicy hot tamales—or rather, ten. And now as he dodged among the crowd Gilbert's short thin legs were pumping as fast as he could urge them and he was panting, not so much from exertion as from fear—fear of the devil that had gotten into him.

Gilbert was across the square and back at the car within two minutes after leaving Finus. Yet all he got back with were eight tamales. And already Gilbert was beginning to wish he had not done what he had done for more reasons than one.

Gilbert had not thought up any trick to save himself from the resentment of his brothers and sisters and the anger of his father. He had not had time to think. Besides, his crime was so gross that he despaired of escaping punishment. He had given himself up for lost with the eating of that third tamale. So as not to add insult to injury he had wiped the grease off his mouth, but he did not even attempt an alibi, just held out the package with a blank look on his face that passed for innocence. Gilbert would have lied, though he knew the truth was bound to come out sooner or later, for by then he was as heedless of the consequences of being caught in a lie as he was of being caught stealing when that fourth tamale, now beginning to cause him such different sensations, was just melting in his mouth; only he could not think of any lie. What saved Gilbert was not native cunning or sudden inspiration, it was sheer luck. It was his father's saying, “Is these here all that nigger give you for your money?”