Life Is Short But Wide (14 page)

So as she pressed his shoulder, she said, “All right. In exchange you can help me clean up after we help the students get their lunch. I’ll throw in your lunch, too. Maybe even breakfast, depending on how good you can work. But I am afraid you will have to get most of your own supplies: paper, pencils.” She smiled, and Herman thought she was the most beautiful lady he had ever seen.

Herman replied, “Tell me where the supply store at, and I c’n go do some work for em, and get what all I needs.”

Rose looked into the earnest eyes, saying, “There must be some other way. Let me talk to the store lady, Ms. Day, and see if she might have something for you to do on a regular basis.
But, first, we have to wash your clothes, clean you up so you will be comfortable, and presentable.”

“I’m alredy comf’table, ma’am.”

In time, Rose clipped his hair as best she could, having practiced on many little heads. Bertha washed his clothes, and made him underwear from some material in Rose’s sewing room. His clothes weren’t always ironed, but they were always clean. He was so proud. His mother cried as she prayed, and thanked God at the kindness of these few people toward her son.

Bertha thanked God that young Herman was the helpful kind of young boy he was. Joseph liked him. He steered little clean-up jobs to Herman, suitable to his size. It was like having a son. Joseph was working pretty steady. Bertha’s heart was just happy Joseph and Juliet had some company besides her. So Herman was a busy young man.

He was doing clean-up work at the lumberyard, also. Joseph helped him get that job. When there was not too much to do at the lumberyard, Herman worked at the automobile garage on Saturdays, and some evenings. He was learning a great deal about cars; how to rebuild small things, clean parts, and stock them. He gave all the money he earned to his mother. Now they had, not a good shack, but a cleaner, better shack that did not leak very much at all.

In the colder seasons he wore secondhand shoes from the barter store. He had so many places to go to do his piecemeal jobs that it was never long before the soles were flapping at the bottom of his feet. When Odessa had no work in the winters, they made do with newspapers in worn shoes. When it stormed or snowed, and there was no newspaper, sometimes he went
barefoot because he was embarrassed to be seen by others at school or work. One day, after it had rained, Mz. Rose saw him come sneaking into the classroom with mud squishing between his toes.

Rose exclaimed, “Oh, Lord!” and went immediately into her house to get an old pair of her father’s boots. As she was leaving the room she said to her small class, “First one laughs will have to clean boards and erasers for a whole week. No laughing at being poor in my class. We are all poor!”

Herman studied the books Rose gave him at school.
Thoroughly. Remembering
his mother’s words, how she always talked of wanting him to go to school. “It gonna be ya only way to somethin! Ya only way.” At first that is why he went. Rut he had a bright, quick mind, and soon he went for the pleasure he found in learning.

By nature he was reserved and serious. He listened hard, then studied intently, and learned quickly. After learning how to read, and understand well, he found all books interesting. He worked two months at the bookshop for a newly published book on auto mechanics. In a year or two he was even loaned some of Tante’s thick books of learning.

As time passed, Rose began to speak to him about college. He put that out of his mind as an impossibility. In the meantime, Rose was excited about being in love and planning her marriage, at that time, to Leroy.

(I have already told you about those times, but we are at the beginning of Herman’s story, and I have to tell it this way so you understand what was happening to them at the same time. It’s my way of telling-, I’m not trying to confuse you, just trying to tell you something.)

Time was moving along; President Roosevelt’s New Deal was working for many people.

(I loved President Roosevelt. Ain’t hardly been another one like him.)

Still, a few people slipped through the cracks, as is always the case. Do not think Herman was making much money; he made little money, but he learned. Sometimes he did grown-man-size jobs; his employers chose to think he was “still a child,” and pay him that way. But he worked, and he learned.

Herman would think, “I have so little to help my mama, besides a little food, and a piece’a roof.” He heard her every night, on her knees praying, and crying when she thought he was asleep. He didn’t know if she was crying for his father, or crying because she was hungry. It gave him a pain in his heart that never left him.

She didn’t eat much, in order for Herman to have more. She was working less, because she was ill, and had been for a long time. She never complained out loud. But it is a terrible, hard thing to hear your mother cry. Tears would slide from his own eyes down his cheeks to the rough mattress, softly, quietly. He didn’t know he was crying for the same reason Odessa was crying; about life. Just life.

Odessa was happy about one thing; Herman was in some school. “It ain’t the big white school that lets coloreds come to it. But if you learn the ABC, it don’t matter where at you learned em!”

She would go by to offer Rose some small offering, but Rose looked at the tired, overworked woman, old before her time, and burdened with the weight she had carried, alone, for so
long. Rose tried to think of something to give Odessa without it appearing to be charity.

She would make a mental note to pick up a decent coat, and some sweaters, at the secondhand store. She thought, “I can pretend they are old things of my mother’s I have been planning to give away for a long time.”

Odessa was beginning to feel mighty low lately. Worse than ever before, and she had suffered many pains doing men’s jobs. She didn’t know why, or what was causing her loss of energy. She didn’t even have any appetite. “I neva did think I wouldn’t be ready to eat anythin. Hungry as I been!”

She had so many ailments acquired over the last, long years doing all kinds of hard work. Of course, she had no money for a doctor. So she just lived, and worked with the pain in her stomach, sides, and back. No good nutrition, no medical attention, and unnecessary worry about her son finally helped the thing growing in her body to take it over, and kill her.

She died when Herman was about eight or ten years old. By that time Herman was working pretty steadily at the several odd jobs he had acquired with Rose and Joseph’s help.

Something ran through Herman’s mind daily now. “I want something that is mine; nobody else’s, just mine. Like my mama was mine. I’ve got’a have something that is mine!”

He wanted to die and lie beside her in the homemade box that was her coffin. Herman had built the coffin of plywood he was allowed on credit at the lumberyard. Odessa was almost tiny by the time of her death. Rose and Bertha had lined the box, quickly, with quilting and a lovely piece of shiny material.

When she was buried, Herman made a simple cross to place at the head of her grave in a potter’s field for the poor. Rose was going to take her out to Wings’s family and have her buried in the beauty of the reservation. But Herman cried it would be too far for him to go see her often enough.

After she was buried Herman went to the graveyard two or three times a week to sit by his mother’s grave until it got too dark and cold. He was quiet and thoughtful during this time of mourning, always staring off into the distance. “I don’t got nobody now. I want something of my own; something belongs to me.”

There was an old, shaggy brown dog that hung around the general area of Herman’s house. He had often given the dog the slim scraps from his own meals, because he liked the friendliness of the dog’s eyes. He called the dog “Buddy,” and took him home with him. The dog, usually wary of young boys, answered his calling, followed him, and slept on the shaggy mattress beside Herman, under his arm. They trusted each other. Both needy hearts had a friend.

Finally Herman had to turn to the only person he thought he could turn to in town, Aunt Peachy. Herman did not want to go to her when his rent was up and due. His mother had suffered the arrows and wounds of hurtful words from Aunt Peachy. But he thought he had no one else. Actually, he had other friends.

Peachy had come to Odessa’s funeral because she said, “I don’t want no talkin goin round this town bout me and kin-folks!” After the brief funeral she had told Herman, “Well, boy, I know you ain’t got no place to go, so if you jes has to, we’ll find some place for you at the house. Ya can work and feed yourself cause I ain’t got much to feed my own family. But come on if you has to. You need to quit that school-goin, and get ya a real job! Ya old enough for somethin!” Herman didn’t want to go to her house then.

Herman held out for a long time. He continued to work, and he saved his money, little as it was. But when winter came he
couldn’t keep sleeping out under a tree or in anything he could find to crawl into. Brokenhearted, feeling like he’d rather die, he went to his Aunt Peachy’s house.

She was sitting at her kitchen table gossiping with a friend as she chewed and sucked on a chicken bone. She looked at Herman, laughed, and said, “Well, boy, I thought ya had done married, and done moved in with somebody or somethin!”

(She was taunting that boy!)

Herman said nothing, just shifted from one foot to another, quietly.

“Well, open ya mouth, boy! Tell me somethin. What ya plannin on doin here? I can’t have no lazybones hangin on me. You workin?”

“Yes’m, a little.”

“We don have no money here, so.” She paused, silent a moment. “Ya see this here room on the back porch? The one your ma used before?” Herman nodded in silence. “Well we gon try to round ya up some bedclothes, and you can make a pallet out there … for awhile. Ya think ya gonna be here long? Cause this house too small for too many peoples. We’s already full, ya can see.” She turned to look at her guest, saying, “Lawd, where is my brother when I needs him.”

(She lied, for nothing. Never had a brother.)

She looked back at Herman. “Go on, boy, go on an look that porch over, see is it alright. And ya ain’t gonna keep no dog here in my house. This a clean house!”

Herman’s heart plummeted to the bottom of his soul, and fell into the pit of tears always waiting there. He took a deep breath, and said, “It’ll be just fine, Aunt Peachy, it’ll be just fine. I’ll move first chance I get.” As he made up his mind at the
same time to try to find some way to keep his dog, Buddy. He thought, “That’s my buddy. How am I gonna let him go away?”

His aunt kept talking. “Quicker than that, son, cause ya got to quit that school ya be goin to, and get ya a real job, like a man!”

“Yes’m.” He went onto the back porch, and sat down on the floor to think. He looked through the torn screen covering the back porch. He sat for a long time, tears filling his eyes, thinking, “I want somethin of my own. Just mine.”

The dog hung around the different neighborhood in spite of the kicks and rocks thrown at him. Buddy learned when, and where, to hide, to stay close to his friend who continued to bring him food scraps he was stealing from his self, and Aunt Peachy.