The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (35 page)

Still, there were nine mouths to feed. Big husky hard-working boys who devoured a pan of biscuits with their eyes alone, and where were they to find work when men with families were standing idle on the street corners in town, and in the gang working on the highway you saw former storekeepers and even young beginning lawyers swinging picks and sledge hammers for a dollar a day and glad to get it? By night around the kitchen table the whole family shelled pecans with raw fingers; the earnings, after coal oil for the lamp, would just about keep you in shoelaces, assuming you had shoes.

On top of this a dry spell set in that seemed like it would never break. In the ground that was like ashes the seed lay unsprouting. Finally enough of a sprinkle fell to bring them up, then the sun swooped down and singed the seedlings like pinfeathers on a fowl. Stock ponds dried up into scabs, wells went dry, folks were hauling drinking water. The boll weevils came. The corn bleached and the leaves hung limp and tattered with worm holes. The next year it was the same all over again only worse.

It got so bad at last a rainmaker was called in. He pitched his tent where the medicine shows were always held, built a big smoky bonfire, set off Roman candles, firecrackers, sent up rubber balloons filled with gas and popped them with a .22 rifle, set out washtubs filled with ice water. Folks came from far and near to watch, stood around all day gawking at the sky and sun-burning the roofs of their mouths, went home with a crick in their necks saying, I told you it'd never work. Church attendance picked up and the preachers prayed mightily for rain, but could not compete with the tent revivalist who came to town, pitched his tabernacle where the rainmaker had been, a real tongue-lasher who told them this drought was punishment for all their sins, bunch of whiskey drinkers and fornicators and dancers and picture-show-goers and non-keepers of the Sabbath and takers of the Lord's name in vain, and if they thought they'd seen the worst of it, just to wait, the good Lord had only been warming up on them so far. About this time word spread that on the second Tuesday in August the world was going to come to an end. Some folks pshawed but that Tuesday they took to their storm cellars the same as the rest. Towards milking time they began to poke their noses up, and felt pretty foolish finding the old world still there. The first ones up had a shivaree going around stomping on other folks' cellar doors and ringing cowbells and banging pots and pans. Afterwards when you threw it up to the fellow who'd told you, he said he'd got it from old So-and-so. Whoever started it nobody ever did find out.

One day the following spring an angel fell from heaven in the form of the county agricultural agent and landed at Dobbs's gate with the news that the government was ready to pay him, actually pay him, not to grow anything on twenty-five of his fifty acres.

What was the catch?

No catch. It was a new law, out of Washington. He didn't need to be told that cotton prices were down. Well, to raise them the government was taking this step to lower production. The old law of supply and demand. They would pay him as much not to grow anything on half of his land as he would have made off of the cotton off of it. It sounded too good to be true. Something for nothing? From the government? And if true then there was something about it that sounded, well, a trifle shady, underhanded. Besides, what would he do?

“What would you do?”

“Yes. If I was to leave half of my land standing idle what would I do with myself half the day?”

“Hell, set on your ass half the time. Hire yourself out.”

“Hire myself out? Who'll be hiring if they all go cutting back their acreage fifty per cent?”

That was his problem. Now, did he have any spring shoats?

Did he! His old sow had farrowed like you never seen before. Thirteen she had throwed! Hungry as they all were, at hog-killing time this fall the Dobbses would have pigs to sell. And what pigs! Would he like to see them? Cross between Berkshire and razor-back, with the lard of the one and the bacon of the other. Finest-looking litter of pigs you ever—well, see for yourself!

He had asked because the government was out to raise the price of pork, too, and would pay so and so much for every shoat not fattened for market. The government would buy them right now, pay him for them as if they were grown.

“Why? What's the government going to do with all them pigs?”

“Get shut of them. Shoot them.”

“What are they doing with all that meat?”

“Getting shut of it. Getting it off the market. That's the idea. So prices can—”

“Just throwing it out, you mean? With people going hungry? Just take and throw it away? Good clean hog meat?”

“Now look a-here. What difference does it make to you what they do with them, as long as you get your money? You won't have the feeding of them, and the ones you have left will be worth more.”

“That ain't so good.”

“How come it ain't?”

“The ones I have left I'll have to eat—the expensive ones. I won't be able to afford to eat them. Say, are you getting any takers on this offer?”

“Any takers! Why, man, you can't hardly buy a suckling pig these days, people are grabbing them up so, to sell to old Uncle Sam.”

“No!”

“I'm telling you. And buying up cheap land on this other deal. Land you couldn't grow a bull nettle on if you tried, then getting paid not to grow nothing on it.”

“What is the world coming to! Hmm. I reckon my land and me could both use a little rest. But taking money without working for it? Naw, sir, that sound I hear is my old daddy turning over in his grave. As for them shoats there, well, when the frost is in the air, in November, and I get to thinking of sausage meat and backbone with sweet potatoes and cracklin' bread, why then I can climb into a pen and stick a hog as well as the next fellow. Then it's me or that hog. But when it comes to shooting little suckling pigs, like drownding a litter of kittens, no sir, include me out. And if this is what voting straight Democratic all your life gets you, then next time around I'll go Republican, though God should strike me dead in my tracks at the polling booth!”

The next thing was, the winds began to blow and the dust to rise. Some mornings you didn't know whether to get out of bed or not. It came in through the cracks in the wall and the floor and gritted between your teeth every bite you ate. You'd just better drop the reins and hightail it for home and the storm cellar the minute a breeze sprang up, because within five minutes more it was black as night and even if you could have stood to open your eyes you couldn't see to blow your nose. You tied a bandana over your face but still it felt like you had inhaled on a cigar. Within a month after the storms started you could no longer see out of your windowlights, they were frosted like the glass in a lawyer's office door, that was how hard the wind drove the dirt and the sand. Sometimes you holed up in the house for two or three days—nights, rather: there was no day—at a stretch. And when you had dug your way out, coughing, eyes stinging, and took a look around, you just felt like turning right around and going back in the house again. The corn lay flat, dry roots clutching the air. And the land, with the subsoil showing, looked red and raw as something skinned.

Then Faye, the oldest boy, who had been bringing in a little money finding day work in the countryside roundabout, came home one afternoon and announced he'd signed up to join the Navy. Feeling guilty, he brought it out surlily. And it was a blow. But his father couldn't blame him. Poor boy, he couldn't stand any more, he wanted to get far away from all this, out to sea where there was neither dust nor dung, and where he might be sure of three square meals a day. Trouble always comes in pairs, and one night not long afterwards Faye's little brother, Dwight, too young to volunteer, was taken over in Antlers with a pair of buddies breaking into a diner. He was let off with a suspended sentence, but only after his father had spent an arm and a leg to pay the lawyer his fee.

Then the Dobbses went on relief. Standing on line with your friends, none of you able to look another in the face, to get your handout of cornmeal and a dab of lard, pinto beans, a slab of salt-white sowbelly. And first lone, because being the mother she scrimped herself at table on the sly, then Chester, and pretty soon all of them commenced to break out on the wrists and the hands and around the ankles and up the arms and shins and around the waist with red spots, sores, the skin cracking open. Pellagra.

A man can take just so much. And squatting on the corner of the square in town on Saturday afternoon, without a nickel for a sack of Durham, without so much as a matchstick of his own to chew on, Dobbs said to his friends, “What's it all for, will somebody please tell me? What have I done to deserve this? I've worked hard all my life. I've always paid my bills. I've never diced nor gambled, never dranked, never chased after the women. I've always honored my old mama and daddy. I've done the best I could to provide for my wife and family, and tried to bring my children up decent and God-fearing. I've went to church regular. I've kept my nose out of other folkses' affairs and minded my own business. I've never knowingly done another man dirt. Whenever the hat was passed around to help out some poor woman left a widow with orphan children I've give what little I could. And what have I got to show for it? Look at me. Look at them hands. If I'd kicked over the traces and misbehaved myself I'd say, all right, I've had my fling and I've got caught and now I'm going to get what's coming to me, and I'd take my punishment like a man. But I ain't never once stepped out of line, not that I know of. So what's it all for, can any of yawl tell me? I'll be much obliged to you if you will.”

“Well, just hang on awhile longer, Chester. Maybe them fellows will strike oil out there on your land,” said Lyman Turley.

“Like they have on yourn,” said Cecil Bates. “And mine.”

“Lyman, you and me been friends a long time,” said Dobbs. “I never thought you would make fun of me when I was down and out.”

“Hellfire, we're all in the same boat,” said Lyman. “What good does it do to bellyache?”

“None. Only how can you keep from it?” asked Dobbs. “And we're not all in the same boat. I know men and so do you, right here in this county, that are driving around in big-model automobiles and sit down every night of their lives to a Kansas City T-bone steak, and wouldn't give a poor man the time of day. Are they in the same boat?”

“Their day of reckoning will come,” said O. J. Carter. “And on that same day, if you've been as good as you say you have, you'll get your reward. Don't you believe that the wicked are punished and the good rewarded?”

“Search me if I know what I believe anymore. When I look around me and see little children that don't know right from wrong going naked and hungry, men ready and willing to do an honest day's work being driven to steal to keep from starving to death while other men get fat off of their misery, then I don't know what I believe anymore.”

“Well, you can't take it with you,” said Cecil.

“I don't want to take it with me,” said Dobbs. “I won't need it in the sweet by-and-by. I'd just like to have a little of it in the mean old here and now.”

A breeze had sprung up, hot, like somebody blowing his breath in your face, and to the south the sky was rapidly darkening over.

“Looks like rain,” said Cecil.

“Looks like something,” said O.J.

“Well, men, yawl can sit here and jaw if you want to, and I hope it does you lots of good,” said Lyman. “Me, I'm going to the wagon. I'd like to get home while I can still see to find my way there.”

“I reckon that's what we better all of us do,” said Dobbs.

The sky closed down like a lid. Smells sharpened, and from off the low ceiling of clouds distant noises, such as the moan of a locomotive on the far horizon, the smoke from its stack bent down, broke startlingly close and clear. The telegraph wires along the road sagged with perching birds. They were in for something worse than just another dust storm.

To the southwest lightning began to flicker and thunder to growl. The breeze quickened and trees appeared to burst aflame as the leaves showed their undersides. Suddenly as the Dobbses came in sight of home the air was all sucked away, a vacuum fell, ears popped, lungs gasped for breath: it was as if they were drowning. Then the wind returned with a roar, and like the drops of a breaking wave, a peppering of hailstones fell, rattling in the wagonbed, bouncing off the mules' heads. A second wave followed, bigger, the size of marbles. Again silence, and the hailstones hissed and steamed on the hot dry soil. In the black cloud to the west a rent appeared, funnel-shaped, white, like smoke from a chimney by night, its point stationary, the cone gently fanning first this way then that way, as though stirred by contrary breezes. Shortly it began to blacken. Then it resembled a great gathering swarm of bees. Out of the sky fell leaves, straws, twigs, great hailstones, huge unnatural raindrops. The team balked, reared, began scrambling backwards.

“Cyclone!” Dobbs shouted. “Run for it, everybody! To the storm cellar!”

The boys helped their mother down the steps, pushed their sisters down, then tumbled in themselves while Dobbs stood holding the flapping door. He started down. As he was pulling the door shut upon his head there came an explosion. He thought at first they had been struck by lightning. Turning, he saw his house fly apart as though blown into splinters by a charge of dynamite. The chimney wobbled for a moment, then righted itself. Then the door was slammed down upon his head and Dobbs was entombed.

Hands helped him to his feet. His head hit the low ceiling. He sat down on the bench beside a shivering body, a trembling cold wet hand clutched his. God's punishment for that wild talk of his, that was what this was. Dobbs reckoned he had it coming to him. He had brought it upon himself. He had also brought it upon his innocent family. Down in the dank and moldy darkness, where he could hear his wife and children panting but could not see their faces, and where overhead through the thick roof of sod he could hear the storm stamping its mighty feet. Dobbs sat alternately wishing he was dead and shivering with dread lest his impious wish be granted and his family left without support. Someone sobbed, one of the girls, and frightened by the sound of her own voice, began to wail.