Stories of Erskine Caldwell (80 page)

“You wouldn’t catch me swatting no flies on no dead man,” Woodrow said.

“Don’t swat them,” Aunt Marty said. “Just shoo them.”

Back the other side of the house they were trying to throw a makeshift coffin together for Dose. They were doing a lot of trying and only a little bit of building. Those lazybones out there just didn’t have their minds on the work at all. The undertaker wouldn’t come and bring one, because he wanted sixty dollars, twenty-five down. Nobody had no sixty dollars, twenty-five down.

Soon as they got the coffin thrown together, they’d go and bury poor old Dose, provided Dose’s jumper was all starched and ironed by then. The jumper was out there swinging on the clothesline, waving in the balmy breeze, when the breeze came that way.

Old Dose Muffin, lying tickle-nosed in the corncrib, was dead and wanted burying as soon as those lazy, big-mouthed, good-for-nothing sawmill hands got the grave dug deep enough. He could have been put in the ground a lot sooner if that jabbering preacher and that mush-mouthed black boy would have laid aside their jawboning long enough to finish the coffin they were trying to throw together. Nobody was in a hurry like he was.

That time-wasting old Marty hadn’t started washing out his jumper till noon, and if he had had his way, she would have got up and started it the break of day that morning. That banjo-playing fool in the house here, Hap Conson, had got everybody’s mind off the burial, and nobody had time to come out to the corncrib and swat that pesky fly on Uncle Dose’s nose and say howdy-do. That skirt-histing high-yellow in there, Goodie, was going to shake the house down, if she didn’t shake off her behind first, and there wasn’t a soul in the world cared enough stop ogling Goodie long enough to come out to the crib to see if any pesky flies needed chasing away.

Poor old Dose died a ragged-pants sawmill hand, and he didn’t have no social standing at all. He had given up the best job he had ever had in his life, when he was porter in the white-folks’ hotel, because he went off chasing a fly to death just because the fly lit on his barbecue sandwich just when he was getting ready to bite into it. He chased that fly eight days all over the country, and the fly wouldn’t have stopped long enough then to let Dose swat him if it hadn’t been starved dizzy. Poor old Dose came back home, but he had to go to work in the sawmill and lost all his social standing.

“You, Woodrow, you!” Aunt Marty said. “How many times does it take to tell you go see if any old flies worrying Dose?”

“I’d be scared to death to go moseying around a dead man, Aunt Marty,” Woodrow said. “Uncle Dose can’t see no flies no way.”

“Dose don’t have to be up and alive like other folks to know about flies,” she said. “Dose sees flies, he dead or alive.”

The jumper was dry, the coffin was thrown together, and the grave was six feet deep. They put the jumper on Dose, stretched him out in the box, and dropped him into the hole in the ground.

That jabbering preacher started praying, picking out the pine splinters he had stuck into his fingers when he and that mush-mouthed black boy were throwing together the coffin. That banjo-playing Hap Gonson squatted on the ground, picking at the thing like it was red-hot coals in a tin pan. Then along came that Goodie misbehaving, shaking everything that wouldn’t be still every time she was around a banjo-plucking.

They slammed the lid on Dose, and drove it down to stay with a couple of rusty twenty-penny nails. They shoveled in a few spades of gravel and sand.

“Hold on there,” Dose said.

Marty was scared enough to run, but she couldn’t. She stayed right there, and before long she opened one eye and squinted over the edge into the hole.

“What’s the matter?” Marty asked, craning her neck to see down into the ground. “What’s the matter with you, Dose?”

The lid flew off, the sand and gravel pelting her in the face, and Dose jumped to his feet, madder than he had ever been when he was living his life.

“I could wring your neck, woman!” Dose shouted at her.

“What don’t please you, Dose?” Marty asked him. “Did I get too much starch in the jumper?”

‘Woman,” Dose said, shaking his fist at her, “you’ve been neglecting your duty something bad. You’re stowing me away in this here ground with a pesky fly inside this here coffin. Now, you get a hump on yourself and bring me a fly swatter. If you think you can nail me up in a box with a fly inside of it, you’ve got another think coming.”

“I always do like you say, Dose,” Marty said. “You just wait till I run get the swatter.”

There wasn’t a sound made anywhere. The shovelers didn’t shovel, Hap didn’t pick a note, and Goodie didn’t shake a thing.

Marty got the swatter fast as she could, because she knew better than to keep Dose waiting, and handed it down to him. Dose stretched out in the splintery pine box and pulled the lid shut.

Pretty soon they could hear a stirring around down in the box.

“Swish!” the fly swatter sounded.

“Just hold on and wait,” Marty said, shaking her head at the shovelers.

“Swish!” it sounded again. “Swat!”

“Dose got him,” Marty said, straightening up. “Now shovel, boys, shovel!”

The dirt and sand and gravel flew in, and the grave filled up. The preacher got his praying done, and most of the splinters out of his fingers. That banjo-playing fool, Hap Conson, started acting like he was going to pick that thing to pieces. And that behind-shaking high-yellow, Goodie, histed her dress and went misbehaving all over the place. Maybe by morning Hap and Goodie would be in their stride. Wouldn’t be too sure about it, though, because the longer it took to get the pitch up, the longer it would last.

(First published in
Mid-Week Pictorial
)

A
LL DAY WE HAD BEEN
sitting in the piano box waiting for the rain to stop. Below us, twenty feet away, the muddy Savannah River oozed past, carrying to the sea the dead pines and rotted mule collars of the uplands.

Overhead, the newly completed Fifth Street Bridge kept us dry. We had stacked piles of brickbats under the corners of the piano box to keep the floor of it dry, and the water that drained from the bridge and red-clay embankment passed under us on its way to the swollen river.

Every once in a while Dave got up on his hands and knees and turned the straw over. It was banana straw, and it was soggy and foul-smelling. There was just enough room for the two of us in the crate, and if the straw was not evenly strewn, it made lumps under our backs and sides that felt as hard as bricks.

Just behind us was a family of four living in a cluster of dry-goods boxes. The boxes had been joined together by means of holes cut in the sides, like those of doghouses, and the mass of packing cases provided four or five rooms. The woman had two Dominique hens. These she kept in the box with her all the time, day and night, stroking their feathers so they would be persuaded to lay eggs for her. There were a dozen or more other crates under the South Carolina side of the bridge; when old men and women, starved and yellow, died in one of them, their bodies were carried down to the river and lowered into the muddy water; when babies were born, people leaned over the railings above and listened to the screams of birth and threw peanut shells over the side.

At dark the rain stopped. The sky looked as if it would not clear before morning, and we knew it would drizzle all night. Dave was restless, and he could not stay in the box any longer.

“Come on, Mike,” he said. “Let’s get out of here and dig up something to eat somewhere.”

I followed him through the red mud up the side of the embankment to the pavement above. We walked through puddles of water, washing the sticky red clay from our feet as we went.

Dave had fifty cents in his pocket and I was determined not to let him buy me anything to eat. He had baled waste paper in a basement factory off and on for two weeks, and when he worked, he made fifty cents a day. He had worked the day before in the basement, and the money had been kept all that time.

When we crossed the river into Georgia, I turned sharply to the right and started running up the levee away from Dave. I had gone fifty yards when he caught me by the sweater and made me stop. Then he took the fist out of his pocket and showed me the fifty-cent piece.

“Don’t worry about me, Dave,” I told him, catching his wrist and forcing his hand back into his pocket. “I’ll get by till tomorrow. I’ve got the promise of a half-day job, and that ought to be good for a dollar — a half, anyway. Go on and buy yourself a good meal, Dave.”

“No,” Dave said, jerking the fist out of his pants. “We’ll split it.”

He pulled me along with him towards the city. We broke through the levee grass and went down the embankment to the pavement. There was a dull orange glow in the low sky ahead of us, and the traffic in the streets sounded like an angry mob fighting for their lives.

We walked along together, splashing through the shallow puddles of rainwater on the pavement, going towards the city. Suddenly Dave stopped squarely in the middle of a sheet of rainwater that had not drained off into the sewers.

“You’re young, Mike,” he said, catching my sweater and shaking it as a dog does a pillow. “I’m old, but you’re young. You can find out what to do, and come back and tell me, and we’ll do it.”

“What’s the matter, Dave?” I asked him. “What are you talking about?”

He waved his arm in an arc that took in most of the world.

“Somewhere there’s people who know what to do about being down and out. If you could find out from them, and come back, we could do it.”

“It’ll take more than two of us, Dave. We’ll have to get a lot more on our side first.”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “As soon as the people know what to do, and how to do it, we can go up and run hell out of those fat bastards who won’t give us our jobs back.”

“Maybe it’s not time yet, Dave.”

“Not time yet! Haven’t I been out of my job two years now? How much time do you want? Now’s the time, before all of us starve to death and get carried feet first down into that mud-slough of a river.”

Before I could say anything, he had turned around and started up the street again. I ran and caught up with him. We splashed through the puddles, dodging the deepest-looking ones.

Dave had had a good job in a fertilizer plant in South Augusta two years before. But they turned him out one day, and they would not take him back. There were seventy men in the crowd that was laid off that time. Dave would never tell me what had happened to the rest of them, but I knew what had happened to Dave. After he had run behind in house rent for six or seven months, the landlord told him to move out. Dave would not do it. He said he was going to stay there until he got back his job in the fertilizer plant in South Augusta. Dave stayed.

Dave stayed in the house for another four months, but long before the end of that time the window sashes and doors of the building had been taken out and carried off by the owner. When winter came, the rain soaked the house until it was as soggy as a log of punkwood. After that, the cold winds of January drove through the dwelling, whistling through the wide slits of the house like a madman breathing through clenched teeth. There was no wood or coal to burn in the fireplaces. There were only two quilts and a blanket for Dave and his wife and three children. Two of the children died before the end of January. In February his wife went. In March there was a special prayer service in one of the churches for Dave and his eleven-year-old daughter, but Dave said all he got out of it was a pair of khaki pants with two holes the size of dinner plates in the seat.

Dave did not know whether his remaining daughter had died, or whether she was being taken care of by charity, or whether she had been taken in to live at a whorehouse. The last time he had seen her was when a policeman came and took her away one morning, leaving Dave sitting in a corner of the windowless house wrapped in the two quilts and a blanket.

We had reached Seventh Street by that time. The Plaza was hidden in fog, and all around it the tall hotels and government buildings rose like century-old tombstones damp and gray.

“Go on and eat, Dave,” I told him again. “When you get through, I’ll meet you here, and we’ll walk back to the river and get in out of the cold.”

“I’m not going a step till you come with me.”

“But I’m not hungry, Dave. I wouldn’t lie to you. I’m not hungry.”

“I’m not going to eat, then,” he said again.

The night was getting colder and more raw all the time. Some drain water in the gutter at our feet lay in a long snakelike stream, and it looked as if it would freeze before much longer. The wind was coming up, blowing the fog down the river and stinging our backs. A moment later it had shifted its course and was stinging our faces.

“Hurry up, Dave,” I begged him. “There’s no sense in our standing here and freezing. I’ll meet you in half an hour,”

Dave caught my sweater and pulled me back. The roar of speeding automobiles and the crashing rumble of motor trucks made such a din in the street that we had to shout to make ourselves heard.

Just as I was about to try again to make him get something to eat for himself, I turned around and saw a black sedan coming around the corner behind us. It was coming fast, more than forty miles an hour, and it was on the inside, cutting the corner.

I pulled at Dave to get him out of the way, because his back was turned to the sedan and he could not see it.

He evidently thought I was trying to make him go to the restaurant alone, because he pulled away from me and stepped backward out of my reach. It was too late then to try to grab him and get him out of the way, and all I could do was to shout at him as loud as I could above the roar in the street. Dave must still have thought I was trying to make him go to the restaurant alone, because he stepped backward again. As he stepped backward the second time, the bumper and right front mudguard on the sedan struck him. He was knocked to the sidewalk like a duckpin.

The man who was driving the big sedan had cut the corner by at least three feet, because the wheels had jumped the curb.