Yonnondio: From the Thirties (7 page)

Outside a wan sunshine lay over the grimy streets, the streets of her dream. She pulled
the blinds down. Will was sitting in the kitchen morose, just home from school, chewing
bread with drippings on it. “Didnt you hear your brother callin?” Anna asked. “Dont
you know he’s sick?” He just looked back at her, not answering. “All right, git in
there with this drink of water afore I skin you alive.” There, her head felt better
now, the splashing water cooling her cheeks.

The little stream on the farm glinted in the sun of her memory, and Mazie was spraying
her with water, laughing. That was gone, it was long ago, it was for-gotten.

“Well, you little horntoad, now what’s the matter, wakin your momma up first chance
today she’s had to get a little rest.”

“I can’t breav, Momma.” (You’d think he’d get used to the smell in two weeks.)

“Sure you can, see you’re breathin now, you’ve been breathin all the time; here, we’ll
make a bundle and prop it under your head.”

“No, Momma, cant breav … Let’s go home, Momma. It smells of vomit here. I had a dream
and Shep was barkin for me, tellin me not to smell vomit no more, and come back to
the farm. It’s so hard to breav. It smells so hot, so awful hot.”

(The farm—why couldnt the kids leave her alone about it?) And what was the matter
with Will? Looking at her face like that and now hitting Ben, shouting, “Shut up,
you crybaby, you big crybaby, shut up or I’ll kill ya.” And she was holding Will and
hitting him. “What did you do that for?” beating him till she sank to her knees, still
drenched in sweat, trembling from nervousness and crying, and Ben was out of bed with
great sober eyes, stroking her cheek, begging, “Dont cry, Momma, don’t cry,” and outside
Will was
shouting to Mazie, “Does too smell like vomit, worse’n vomit, worse’n dead dogs and
garbage, worse’n the crap can. I’m gonna run away to the farm, you come too, Mazie,”
and Mazie was yelling back, “Shut up, we are on the farm, we are on the farm,” and
Will was quiet suddenly, asking of the sky, “What’s the matter with everything anyhow?”
and running, running down the street. And in the front room, Jimmie pounding on the
wall was yelling, “Out, out. Lemme out. Out.”

Into her great physical pain and weariness Anna stumbled and lost herself. Remote,
she fed and clothed the children, scrubbed, gave herself to Jim, clenching her fists
against a pain she had no strength to feel. In the front room Jimmie played and sang
to himself, falling asleep when she didn’t come for him, wetting his overalls when
she forgot. Else worried over her: “Land sake, Anna, what’s the matter with you anyhow?
You useta be strong as a bull, and look at you now. You aint even ornery with the
kids. You take this here tonic now, you hear? It’ll do you good. It says for all female
complaints.’,

“All female complaints, huh?” Anna answered. “Well, I guess I got all of them. But
I never was much of a hand at patent medicines.” On the kitchen shelf, the bottle
mantled in dust.

Bess shrank and yellowed. Anna fussed with food.
“You really think Eagle Brand is good, Mis’ Kryckszi? It oughta be the way they soak
you for it, but you never can tell. And Bess needs perkin up bad. When it’s tomato
season, I’ll try juice, they say that’s awful good. But when I gave her some of what
I had canned from the farm, she spit it right back. And just look how she’s gettin
blue around the mouth and squalls all the time now.”

But she could not really care. Only sometimes, nursing the baby, chafing the little
hands to warm them, old songs would start from her lips and tears well from her eyes,
tears she did not even know she was weeping, till Ben would come in, standing lacerated
till she would notice him and ask, “What’s the matter, Benjy, did you hurt yourself?”
and he could come over to her and say gently, “Mommy, you’re crying.”

The money going drove Jim crazy. “Jesus Christ, woman,” he would shout, “where does
it all go to? God knows we’re eatin worse’n animals, and Bess eatin off you dont cost
no more. You useta be so smart with money—make it stretch like rubber. Now it’s rent
week and not a red cent in the house. I tell you we gotta make what I’m gettin do—they’re
takin off for my waterproofs.”

But she could not heed—the old Anna of sharp words and bitter exaction, and fierce
attempt to
make security for her children was gone, lost in a fog of pain that seemed the only
reality. Will was the only one that really saw—but a lust for the streets was on him,
a lust to hit back, a lust not to care. He had learned how to scramble up and down
the cliff, hanging onto roots and digging his toes into the crumbling clay; he knew
the railroad tracks and the walk and talk of the bindle stiffs hightailing it down
the roadbed; he knew the dump and the kids on his block and strange wild games to
play. And in these, in the quick movements of his body, for a while he anesthetized
himself.

Ben saw too—but in the confused, entangled way of a small child whose mind is a prism
through which the light shatters into a thousand gleams and shadows that can never
come whole. Say rather, a weight, an oppression dragged always in his chest; a darkening
shadow hovered over his days that in moments descended and pierced sharp claws on
his heart. Only he did not know why or how—he but knew there was a darkening where
had been light, he but felt there was a weight where had been lightness.

And Jim? Ah, he knew, but in a half way. He was padded about with weariness, he was
blinded with despair. Coming home with the smell of liquor on his breath, thinking
the remote look reproach, bristling up to say, “All right, havent I got no right to
spend
two bits once in a while to make me feel good? If
you
was workin under icy water all day with your head bustin from bein so far underground,
dancin round like a monkey to keep your footin till your can’s draggin and every nerve
shootin like lightnin” (and, he did not say, come home to disorder and anguish) “you’d
be achin for a snifter too once in a while. Aw hell,
hell.”
Kicking the table leg. “Where’s that Will? Runnin off with my jackknife. I’ll knock
the s--t out of him. And playin with all the furrin scum and niggers around. C’mon
over here JimJim and sing your old pa a song. Sing ‘For I’m a Poor Cowboy and I Know
I Done Wrong.’”

Only Mazie did not see. Still she lived on the farm in June, in early June, when a
voluptuous fragrance lay over the earth. Wooden she moved about, lifting and washing
and eating, and always a scarcely perceptible smile about her mouth. Mazie, a voice
came shrill, you see that tub of diapers? Git to that tub of diapers. Yes, Ma. You
will recite, Mazie. A hushed voice, faltering, that was she. We will have a test.
And her pencil would move over the paper, separate from her guidance and her body.
Sometimes a dingy sky was overhead and a graveled playground underfoot, and her body
made a circle with other bodies. Then the schoolroom or the walls of home would encase
her again. Noise ceaselessly rained blows
upon her, the stink smothered down into her lungs. Enveloped in the full soft dream
of the farm, she was secure. Hollow and unreal the dirty buildings and swarming people
revolved about her, flat like a picture that her hand could smash through and see
the rolling fields and roads of home just beyond.

But terrible moments of waking would come when the world that was about her would
crash into her dream with terrible discordant music. Fear held her limbs there in
the streets where the flats rose a tumble of ruins, and a voice would cry: Run, run,
the next shake the houses’ll fall, run, run.

And every step was pain, every look was pain, those moments of awareness when the
people streamed by her in the streets with their hideous faces that knew her not.
Suddenly she would see before her a monster thing with blind eyes and shaking body
that gave out great guttural sobs, a truck, she would tell herself, just a truck,
but her eyes would try to close and her feet to run; suddenly she would see before
her a woman with her mother’s face grown gaunter, holding a skeleton baby whose stomach
was pushed out like a ball, and behind was a wall like darkness and misshapen furniture.
These had no reality, only the reality of nightmares, for only there had she seen
such grotesqueness and crooked vision. And it would seem that her limbs were crooked
in
sleep and a nightmare sweat was on her, that it would be useless to resist, to cry
out, because it all was a voiceless dream to be endured.

“Just see,” Tracy promised, “just see. I’ll make a kick with that bastard today. Twelve
foot he wants out of us, when ten’s all anything on two legs can manage.”

“All right,” said Jim wearily, tugging off his soggy work pants. “All right.”

“And calling this a dry house,” Tracy muttered. “Give me a cloudburst anytime.”

“Hell, the Mississipp’s a road of concrete and the ocean’s a dry bed.”

“How you two can beef after the day’s work you put in is beyond me,” old man Albright
butted in. “Even my tongue’s laid out.”

“Well, this goddam business of hangin up my work clothes in what they call a dry house
and puttin em on the next morning twice as wet is just gettin under my skin.”

“All right, son, wait’ll you get the rheumatiz. Then you
will
have something under your skin to beef about.”

“You wont see me doin any waitin,” said Tracy. (I guess not, Jim thought, not till
you got a woman and kids hangin around your neck.) “Look at those puckers—
”pointing to his bare feet—“bigger’n on a washboard. Waterproof boots, hell. How you
guys take it is beyond me.”

“O.K.,” said Jim, “put on the low needle and give our ears a vacation. Maybe we got
somethin besides gettin canned up and steppin out a chippie to think about.”

They dressed in silence. “Hey,” Jim warned, “here comes the workingman’s friend.”

The contractor came in, puffed up like a balloon, with a smaller red balloon of a
face wobbling on top. He spat his tobacco juice square into Jim’s empty boot.

“So ten foot is all you women made today, huh? What I want to know is what the hell
you do when you’re on the job, suck titty?”

“Now, boss,” Albright said hurriedly, “we’re doin the best we can. We went like a
redball all day.”

“Ya mean a standstill, dont you? Well, ten’s the footage all right from now on, but
for two of you to manage.”

“Two?”came from all their startled throats.

“Two! A miner and a mucker to a job. Miller’s tried it with his monkeys and they’re
doin it. My crews can do as good.”

“Not and stay human,” Jim said.

Tracy sputtered, “It cant be done.”

“Shut up—I’m the one who says what can and cant get done. Tracy and Holbrook, Marello
and Albright, that’s the lineup.”

“But say—”

“You heard me. There’s plenty good concrete men and muckers with their tongues hangin
out for a job. You’ll make ten or you’re out.”

“Not me,”exploded Tracy. “I’m throwin up this sh---y job.”

“O.K. by me,” the contractor said, “but dont come panhandlin when you’re up against
it … Anybody else feel like the breadline?”

Nobody said anything. Jim clenched his fists. “Dirty rat,” he said in his teeth, “I
hope his guts wither. I hope …” He flung his boots and mackinaw into the locker and
walked out into the dwindling light. There was a darkness in him, a heavy darkness
that wound into a hardness. When the slaughterhouse workers got on before the viaduct,
he pushed his way viciously out of the packed streetcar and walked into a “soft drink”
parlor. “A straight,” he ordered. To himself, “All right for Tracy to talk, he doesnt
have a wife and brats. But no man has any business having ’em that wants to stay a
man. Not unless he knows he’s goin’ to hafta take crap…. Not that they aren’t worth
it though,” thinking of Jimmie, “what else you got?”

The sound of the two bits clamped down on the counter brought harshly the picture
of Anna counting his pay money. “Goddam woman—what’s the matter with her anyhow? Dont
even have a wife that’s a wife anymore—just let her say one word to me and I’ll bash
her head in. Say, give me another.”

He thought he saw Mazie across the street, but he was not sure. No one greeted him
at the gate—the dark walls of the kitchen enclosed him like a smothering grave. Anna
did not raise her head.

In the other room Bess kept squalling and squalling, and Ben was piping an out-of-tune
song to quiet her. There was a sour smell of wet diapers and burned pots in the air.

“Dinner ready?”he asked heavily.

“No, not yet.”

Silence. Not a word from either.

“Say, cant you stop that damn brat’s squallin? A guy wants a little rest once in a
while.”

No answer.

“Aw, this kitchen stinks. I’m going out on the porch. And shut that brat up, she’s
drivin me nuts, you hear?”You hear, he reiterated to himself, stumbling down the steps,
you hear, you hear. Driving me nuts.