The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (36 page)

In a husky voice Dobbs said, “Well now, everybody, here we all are, all together, safe and sound. Let's be thankful for that. Now to keep our spirits up let's sing a song. All together now, loud and clear. Ready?” And with him carrying the lead in his quavering nasal tenor, they sang:

“Jesus loves me, this I know,

For the Bible tells me so …”

II

And then there is such a thing as foul-weather friends.

While people who had always been rather distant all went out of their way to be polite after oil was struck on Dobbs's land, all his old acquaintances avoided him. They had all come and bemoaned and comforted him over all the evil the Lord had brought on him, every man giving him a piece of money, taking in and housing the children, chipping in with old clothes after Dobbs's house was blown down; but as soon as his luck turned they would all cross over to the other side of the street to keep from meeting him. At home Dobbs grieved aloud over this. Good riddance, his daughters all said, and wondered that he should any longer want to keep up acquaintance with the Turleys and the Maynards and the Tatums, and other poor whites like that.

“The only difference between you and them pore whites is you ain't pore no more,” said Dobbs. “Which you always was and very likely will be again. Especially if you talk thataway. Now just remember that, and meanwhile thank the Lord.”

The girls clamored to leave the old farmstead and move into town. They wanted to live in the biggest house in town, the old Venable mansion, which along with what was left of the family heirlooms had been on the market for years to settle the estate. You could have pastured a milch cow on the front lawn, the grass so thick you walked on tiptoe for fear of muddying it with your feet. On the lawn stood a life-size cast-iron stag, silver balls on concrete pedestals, a croquet court, a goldfish pond with a water fountain. To tally all the windows in the house would have worn a lead pencil down to a stub. Turrets and towers and cupolas, round, square, and turnip-shaped, rose here, there, and everywhere; it looked like a town. You wanted to go round to the back door with your hat in your hand. Take a while to remember that it was yours.

At the housewarming it turned out that Dobbs and his daughters had invited two separate lists of guests, he by word of mouth, on street corners on Saturday afternoon, in the barber shop, hanging over fence gaps—they by printed invitation. Nobody much from either list showed up. First to arrive were their kin from the country, in pickup trucks and mule-drawn wagons and lurching jitneys alive with kids. The men in suits smelling of mothballs, red in the face from their starched, buttoned, tieless collars, wetted-down hair drying and starting to spring up like horses' manes, all crippled by pointed shoes, licking the cigars which Dobbs passed out up and down before raking matches across the seats of their britches and setting fire to them. The women in dresses printed in jungle flowers, their hair in tight marcelled waves against their skulls. The kids sliding down banisters, tearing through the halls, and skidding across the waxed parquet floors trying to catch and goose one another.

After them came a few of the many old friends and acquaintances Dobbs had invited. Then began to arrive the others, those who knew better than to bring their children, some with colored maids at home to mind them when the folks stepped out, people whom Dobbs had always tipped his hat to, little dreaming he would one day have them to his house, the biggest house in town, some of them the owners of the land on which his kin and the people he had invited sharecropped, so that quicker than cream from milk the two groups separated, he and his finding their way out to the kitchen and the back yard, leaving the girls and theirs to the parlor and the front porch. Then through the mist of pride and pleasure of seeing all those town folks under his roof, Dobbs saw what was going on. All of them laughing up their sleeves at the things they saw, passing remarks about his girls, who would take their part against him if he tried to tell them they were being made fun of by their fine new friends. Poor things, red with pleasure, stretching their long necks like a file of ganders so as to look a little less chinless, their topmost ribs showing like rubboards above the tops of their low-cut dresses. And his wife forgetting about the Negro maid and waiting on the guests herself, passing around the tea cakes and the muffins, then getting a scorching look from one of the girls which she didn't understand but blushing to the roots of her thin hair and sitting down with her big red knobby hands trembling uselessly in her lap. Jumping up to say, “Oh, yawl ain't going already? Why, you just this minute come. Let me get yawl something good to eat. Maybe you'd like to try one of these here olives. Some folks like them. You have to mind out not to bite down on the seed.” And through it all his old mama upstairs in her room, dipping snuff and spitting into her coffee can, refusing to budge, saying she didn't want to put him to shame before his highfalutin new friends, only he might send that sassy nigger wench up with a bite for her, just a dry crust of bread, whatever the guests left, not now, later, she didn't want to put nobody out.

Sight-seeing parties were conducted through the house, the country kin making coarse jokes over the eight flush toilets which made his daughters choke red, though it was certainly not the first time they had heard the very same jokes. Others like Mr. Henry Blankenship saying, “What! Two hundred dollars for that rug? Oh, Chester, I'm afraid they saw you coming. Why oh why”—forgetting that until the day before yesterday they had never in their lives exchanged more than good afternoon—“didn't you come to me? I could have jewed them down fifty per cent at least.”

The party broke up early, leaving mounds of favors; but not before each and every one of the relatives had gotten his corns stepped on. The townspeople went home sniggering with laughter, or fuming with outrage in the name of the vanished Venables. Both groups found excuses for declining future invitations, and in the evenings the big house on the hill heaved with sighs of boredom.

Dobbs continued as before to awake at four o'clock, and could not get back to sleep. The habit of a lifetime is not easily broken. But he could and did lie there smiling to think that he did not have to get up. No cow was waiting for him to milk her, no mule to be harnessed, no field to be plowed or picked of its cotton. Except that once awake Dobbs saw no point in not getting up. In fact, it bored him to lie in bed doing nothing. What was more, it seemed sinful.

He did not want to waste a moment of his leisure. Each day, all day, was his now, to spend as he pleased, according to his whim. Mere loafing was no pleasure to Dobbs; he had to be doing. The list of pastimes known to him was somewhat short. He went hunting with his fine new gun, went fishing with his bright new tackle, went driving in his big new car. One by one he slunk back to his old single-shot with the tape around the stock, with which he was a much better shot, back to his old cane pole, relieved to be rid of his level-wind reel which was always snarling in a knot and that boxful of artificial baits of which he never seemed to be using the right one. Fishing and hunting were not nearly so much fun when the time was not stolen from work. As he sat alone on the bank of a creek enjoying the blessings of unmixed leisure and telling himself how happy he was, Dobbs's hand would steal involuntarily to the nape of his neck where a welt, a rope burn which made it look like the neck of a hanged man, was, though fading now, still visible. It corresponded to the callus rubbed by the hames on the neck of a mule, and had been bitten there by plowlines, beginning at the age of eight. Dobbs rubbed it with a tenderness akin to nostalgia.

Other men were not to be found on the streets of town on a weekday; they were at work, and a lifetime of doing the same had left Dobbs with the feeling that it was wicked and immoral of him to be there at that hour. Those who were on the streets were those who were there at all hours, who often slept there: the town ne'er-do-wells and drunks.

Like all farmers, Dobbs had always lived for Saturday. That had been the day when he slipped the reins and came into town. It was not the rest he enjoyed, though God knew that was sweet, so much as the company. A man can plow a field and plod along for five days at a stretch with nothing to look at but the hind end of a mule and no company but the cawing crows overhead, but then he has to see faces, hear voices. Now that every day was a Saturday Dobbs found himself looking forward to Saturday with a sense of deliverance. But though they did their best to make him welcome in his old spot, squatting among his cronies on the square and whittling away the afternoon, his company obviously embarrassed them. People he had always known began to call him Mister, and many seemed to believe that Dobbs thought they were no longer good enough for him. People still said, as they had always done on taking leave, “Well, yawl come,” and Dobbs said it to them. He meant it more sincerely with each passing day. But nobody came and nobody was going to come. How could they drive up that long raked gravel drive of his in a wagon and team or a homemade pickup truck, traipse in their boots across those pastures of carpet, come calling in overalls and poke bonnets? And how could he draw up before their unhinged gates and their dirt yards in that great long-nosed Pierce-Arrow of his?

Three or four friends Dobbs lost forever by lending them money and expecting them to pay it back. He supposed they felt he would never miss it, but he thought they would despise themselves, as he would have, if they did not repay him. And he lost more by refusing them loans. Some people complained of the way he spent his money, others of the way he hoarded it.

Which last, in fact, he had begun to do. Having done nothing to deserve his sudden wealth, Dobbs feared it might just as suddenly be taken from him. Being a wagon-and-team man himself, he didn't much believe in oil, nor in money which came from it. His bank statements frightened him; he thought not how much he had, but how much it would be to lose! He developed a terror of being poor again. He knew what it was to be poor. So he told his children when they whined at him to buy them this and buy them that. Did they see him throwing money away?

True, he himself lived simply, indeed for a man in his position he lived like a beggar. But though he prided himself on his frugality, the truth was, and he knew it, that after a short while he found he simply did not like (he said he couldn't digest) filet mignon and oven-roasted beef and oysters and other unfamiliar and over-rich foods like those. After thirty years of Duke's Mixture he liked it, preferred it to ready-rolls. And cold greens and black-eyed peas and clabber: these were what he had always called food. Even they tasted less good to him now that he never worked up any appetite, now that they were never sauced with the uncertainty of whether there would be more of them for tomorrow. In fact, he just minced at his food now. Sometimes after dinner, as his girls had begun to call supper, and after everybody was in bed asleep, Dobbs would steal down to the kitchen, about half a mile from his bedroom, and make himself a glass of corn-bread crumbled in sweetmilk or have some leftover cold mashed turnips, but he did not enjoy it and would leave it half finished. The Scriptures say, “Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy face,” and the sad truth is, to a man who always has, bread which does not taste of his own sweat just does not have any taste.

III

In all of Oklahoma no women were found so fair as the daughters of Dobbs; their father gave them equal inheritance among their brothers.

In his days of poverty the problem of marrying off his daughters had weighed on Dobbs's mind like a stone. He had felt beholden to them. For he had only to look in the mirror to see where they got their plainness from. But they were cheerful and uncomplaining, and when boys dressed in their best overalls and carrying bouquets went past their gate on Sunday afternoon as if past a nunnery, they had not seemed to mind. Now the problem was to keep them from marrying the first man who asked them. It was as if all four had come into heat simultaneously, and all day long and all night, too, baying and snapping and snarling at one another, a pack of boys milled about the house and yard. They had given up all hope of ever catching a husband; now sweet words went to their heads like a virgin drink of spirits. “Don't you see that that rascal is just after your money?” Dobbs would say. And they would weep and pout and storm and say, “You mean you're afraid he's after your old money. That's all you ever think about. You don't know Spencer like I do. He loves me! I know he does. He would marry me if I was poor as a church mouse. He told me so. If you send him away you'll break my heart and I'll hate you till the day I die.”

Dobbs even had to buy off one of them. One of the suitors, that is. Pay him to stay away, keep him on a regular monthly salary.

So inflamed did poor Denise get that she eloped with a fellow. Dobbs caught them in Tulsa and brought her home fainting and kicking and screaming. Even after it had been proved to her that he was wanted for passing bad checks from Atlanta to Albuquerque, she still sulked and went on pining for her Everett. The twins, who before had always gotten along together like two drops of water, now decided they each wanted the same boy, though Lord knew there were plenty to go around, and they only patched up their quarrel by turning on their father when he said that only over his dead body would either of them marry that no-good fortune-hunting drugstore cowboy.

One by one they beat him down. For Denise another Everett came along and she told her father she meant to have this one. The old refrain: he's only after your money. “I'm free, white, and twenty-one,” she said, “and seeing as it's my money, I'll spend it on what I please.” Dobbs shook his head and said, “Oh, my poor girl, my poor little girl, you're buying yourself a bushel of heartache.” She replied, “Nonsense. If this one don't work out to suit me I'll get shut of him and get me another one.” And that in fact was how it did work out, not once but four times.