Stories of Erskine Caldwell (17 page)

“It’s the Fourth of July, boss,” he said, grinning happily. “Did you forget all about that?”

“No, I didn’t forget,” I said. “And it’s not up to you to remind me at this time of morning, either.”

“I still got one more to shoot off, boss,” Squire said, striking a match and setting the fuse on another giant cracker to spewing.

“Hold your ears!” I shouted to my wife just in time.

The cracker went off while Squire was still running from it. When the report sounded, it caught him by surprise, and he jumped two feet off the ground. Then he stopped and looked around.

“It makes celebrating best when they go off when you ain’t expecting them to, don’t it, boss?” he said, grinning up at the window.

“Maybe,” I said.

Three weeks later, just when we had accustomed ourselves to Squire’s manner of running the house, he came in one morning and said he was sorry to have to do it, but that he had to go away for several days on a business trip.

We were upset by his sudden announcement, and my wife protested vigorously.

“Can’t you postpone your trip for a while, Squire?” she said. “We can’t get anybody to take your place on such short notice.”

“I’m sorry about the notice I didn’t give,” Squire said apologetically, “but the time crept up on me while I wasn’t paying attention.”

“At least,” my wife said, “you can wait a day or two. Maybe by then we —”

“No, ma’am!” he said, emphatically, “I just naturally can’t wait. I’se got to be in Washington by six o’clock this very day.”

“Six o’clock!” I said. “How do you expect to get to Washington by six o’clock!”

“On the plane, boss,” he said. “I’se flying down on the two o’clock plane from New York.”

My wife and I looked at each other helplessly.

“That costs a lot of money, Squire,” she said, hoping to discourage him. “Do you realize what it costs?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Squire said, “but I add it to my expenses.”

“What expenses?” I asked. “What expenses are you talking about?”

“The expenses of doing business,” Squire said.

My wife and I stared at each other bewilderedly.

“What kind of business?” I asked, wondering.

“I kind of forgot to mention it to you, I reckon,” Squire said sheepishly. “I has to go to Washington once every month to collect the rents.”

“What rents?” I asked. “Whose rents?”

“My rents,” he answered. “I’se got twenty-seven families living in my tenaments down there, and I can’t afford to let the rents fall behind. The rents just can’t be collected, not in Washington, noway, if you let them run over. Because the renters will let you get an eviction against them, and after that they have the law on their side. They don’t have to pay the past-due rent at all after that. So that’s why I never let the renters get that far along. I stay just one jump ahead of what they’re thinking in their heads down there while I’m up here.”

My wife and I could only stare at Squire for a long time after he had finished. He began to grin then, his lips rolling back from his straight white teeth.

“Why, that makes you an absentee landlord, Squire,” I said finally, shaking my head.

“It sure does, boss,” he said, his whole face agrin. “That’s why I’m taking the plane this afternoon. I don’t aim to be absent when the rents come due. No, sir, boss!”

Squire bowed, backing toward his shiny black limousine with the silver speaking tube. He grinned broadly as he got in and started the motor. As he rolled away, he stuck an arm out and waved to us.

“Good-by, boss!” he called. “I’ll be right back again as soon as I collect the rents!”

We raised our arms and waved until he was out of sight. After that we turned and stared at each other, wondering what there was to say.

(First published in
Esquire
)

A
BOUT AN HOUR
after sunrise every morning during the cotton-picking season, people began coming towards the Donnie Williams farm from all directions. They came walking over the fields from four and five miles away, following the drain ditches, wading waist-high through the brown broom sedge in the fallow land, and shuffling through the yellow road dust. They came in pairs, in families, and in droves.

There were nearly five hundred acres of cotton to gather, and the Williamses were paying fifty cents a hundred pounds. Besides that, though, there were good-sized watermelons for every man, woman, and child, both white and colored, at dinnertime. Everybody liked to pick cotton at the Donnie Williams place, even though some of the farmers who could not find enough hands were offering seventy-five a hundred pounds, and even up as high as a dollar a hundred. But none of them had free watermelons for everybody.

Even though everyone liked to pick cotton for Donnie Williams, it was unusual to find the same people in the fields for two consecutive days. A man, with his family, would work for Donnie a day, and then stay at home a day to pick his own crop, or to just lie around the house and rest. Then there were the drifters who never stayed at one farm longer than a day. They had no homes to go to at night, so they slept in field houses and went to the next farm the following day. There were always new pickers arriving, and usually there were just as many people coming as there were leaving.

It had become a custom at Donnie Williams’s place for the pickers to work in pairs. Donnie had tried out all kinds of schemes to get his crop gathered as quickly as he could before the price began to fall, and he had found out that people could, and would, pick better if they worked in pairs. Sometimes, otherwise, when there were crowds of twenty and thirty together, all of them would stop picking to laugh at a joke, and stand up to talk with the others. Ten or fifteen minutes wasted of every hour cut down the number of pounds a man could gather in a day, and Donnie was trying to get his crop through the gins as soon as possible.

I sometimes paired off with a Negro boy named Sonny. He and I had a lot to talk about, because he worked as houseboy for Mrs. Williams when he was not needed in the fields, and he knew a lot that I was anxious to hear.

Three or four times I had paired off with a redheaded girl from across the country. Her name was Gertie. She was about fifteen, and she knew more riddles than anybody I ever saw. She used to ask me riddles all the time we were picking, and when I could not answer them and had to give up, she would sit down, lift her calico skirt, and fan her face with it while she laughed at me for not knowing the answers.

Once she asked me if I knew what was the age of consent. I was not certain that I did know.

“Come on and tell me, Gertie,” I begged her.

“You think it over tonight, Harry,” she said, “and if you don’t know by tomorrow, I’ll tell you.”

Gertie had a habit of giggling when she asked me something like that, and now she was giggling again. All that time she was fanning her face with her skirt, drawing the calico higher and higher above her waist while she laughed at me.

“It’s real funny,” she giggled.

There was nothing funny to me about a riddle I could not answer, nor even guess, but no amount of begging would ever make Gertie tell me the answer to that one. She would always sit down on her cotton-bag, cross her slender round legs under her, and fan her face with her skirt while she giggled because I did not know what to say.

It was all right for her to do that if she wished to, but I was never able to pick much cotton and look at her naked from the waist down at the same time. She would sit there and giggle about the riddle, fanning herself furiously, and smile at me. It would even have been all right for her to sit down on her cotton-bag and lift her skirt like that if only she had worn something under the one-piece calico wrapper. As long as I knew Gertie though, she never did.

“Why does an old maid look under the bed at night before she puts out the light, Harry?”

“God damn it, Gertie!” I shouted at her. “Why don’t you keep your dress down where it belongs!”

I could not pick cotton when she did like that, and it made me angry.

“You can make up good riddles, too, can’t you, Harry?” she said.

I was just getting ready to jump over to her row and throw her down when I looked around and saw Donnie Williams walking across the field not far away, and I had to go back to work right away.

After picking with one of the Johnsons for two days, I again paired off one morning with Gertie. We started off at a fast pace, each of us trying his best to get ahead of the other. Gertie had thought up a lot of new riddles to ask me, but we were so busy trying to leave each other behind that she did not have time to say anything to me for several hours.

It was about dinnertime when I heard her whistle to me. I turned around to see what she wished.

“Harry,” she said, straightening up and packing the cotton in her bag with her feet, “do you see that black-haired girl over there with the old woman?”

She pointed over the rows towards them.

“What about her?” I asked.

“She was paired off yesterday with that Dennis boy, and last night she weighed in four hundred pounds, and the boy had only fifty pounds.”

“Hell, Gertie,” I said, “that’s no riddle. Can’t you think up a better one than that? She’s not the first to weight in more than a man. You can see them stripping over in the broom sedge almost any time that Donnie’s not around.”

“I don’t suppose she is,” Gertie said, sitting down and fanning her face with the calico skirt, “because I weighed in three-fifty myself the other night when I was picking with Sonny. He didn’t have much more than forty pounds at quitting time, either.”

That made me angry. I threw off the strap over my shoulder and jumped over the row beside her.

“God damn you, Gertie,” I shouted, grabbing her by the arms, “did you let that damn nigger —”

“Let him do what?” she asked, giggling a little and pulling her skirt above her waist. “Did I let him give me some of his cotton?”

“Yes —”

“Sonny gave me only a hundred pounds, Harry.”

“I’m going to beat hell out of him,” I told her. “He ought to have better sense than to pair off with a white girl. And anyway, he ought to have given you two hundred pounds —”

Gertie twisted her shoulders from side to side and her heavy breasts shook until I thought that they would surely burst.

“I’ve just thought of a good riddle, Harry!” she said, naked again from her waist down. “Listen to this: If Sonny offered me a hundred pounds and you offered me two hundred, which one of you would I rather have take me?”

“Any fool knows that two hundred is twice as much as one hundred, Gertie. And anyway, Sonny is a nigger!”

“When are you ever going to learn how to answer riddles, Harry?” she said, fanning herself faster and faster. “Two hundred is twice as much as one hundred, but you’re not Sonny.”

She had begun to giggle, but before she could laugh at me, I caught her and threw her down, and began stuffing cotton into her mouth.

“That damn nigger, Sonny, won’t ever —”

I said that much, but I never finished saying all I had meant to tell her when I jumped on her. I could see by looking into her eyes that she had thought of a new riddle, and that as soon as I took the cotton from her mouth she would ask me another one that I could not answer.

(First published in
Contempo
)

E
LLEN WAS NICE
enough about it. She said she would never have come over to spend the night with Doris if her family had not suddenly left town for the week end, because she knew Doris and Jim had planned to go swimming that evening. No one could have been more considerate than Ellen.

Finally, she begged them to let her stay at the house while they went without her.

It was late in summer, and it had already turned dark. The street lights had just been switched on, but on the porch a dim twilight still lingered.

“Honest, I’d lots rather stay here,” Ellen insisted.

“Forget it,” Jim said. “Sometimes it takes three to have a good time, anyway. This might be one of those times.”

Under his breath he muttered something. It was the first night in almost a month that he had not had to work, and it would probably be the last time that summer he and Doris could go swimming together. He turned his head from the girl and glared at the street light that twinkled intermittently through the restless, breeze-blown maple leaves.

Jim Gregory did not feel in high spirits anyway. The fellow who worked next to him in the plant had been turned off, and Jim could not help wondering if that were a sign that some of the rest of them would be discharged, too. He had thought about it all the way home, and then he got there and found Ellen with Doris saying that she was afraid to stay by herself while her family was away.

“I’ll find something to read,” Ellen was saying then, “and I’ll have just as good a time right here.”

Doris did not have much to say. She liked Ellen a lot, but she was a little sorry it had to happen on just the one night in the month that Jim had off from work.

“I wouldn’t think of letting you and Jim take me along,” Ellen said for the third or fourth time. “I’d rather stay here.”

Jim started to tell her to stay there, but to hush up about it.

“That’s different,” he said. “If you don’t like our company, we probably wouldn’t like yours, either.”

Ellen jumped off the railing and began tousling Jim’s hair. When he found that he could not push her away, he succeeded in catching her hands and pulling her to the arm of the chair. When he got her there, he was sorry he had touched her. He was on the verge of telling her that she was as sticky as molasses.

“Nothing in the world could make me go along with you now,” Ellen said. “I wouldn’t do anything with a person who talked so mean.”

“How do you know I’d like your company?” he said. She tried to pull away from him. He caught both of her hands in his. Doris got up and moved towards the door.

“Of course you are going with us,” she said with finality. “All three of us are going swimming.”

Doris went into the house to get ready, and Ellen got down from the arm of the chair. Her hands slipped through Jim’s like silk.