from WILL’S BOY
I found a postcard from my uncle in Texas. He was pleased to learn that I had left a school that taught nothing but lies and falsehoods, but he was not accustomed to paying his hired hands in advance. If I was to work for him, he urged me to arrive as soon as possible, or it would be too late. The spring plowing had started. His wife, Agnes, was now taking my place on the tractor.
I found I was short the bus fare to Texas by three dollars. The PO clerk loaned me a dollar, and I pawned the silver-plated initial buckle on my belt that I had given my father the previous Christmas but borrowed to wear to California. After all, we had the same initial. When he wore it, it was always concealed by his vest.
At the Y, where I owed a week’s rent, I left an IOU on the dresser, giving my address as Hereford, Texas. I then went down the fire escape to the second floor, where the last flight of stairs was suspended above the dark alley. I did not weigh enough, even with my suitcase, to lower the stairs to the ground. When I lowered and dropped my bag I was puzzled by the silence of its fall. I then let myself hang, my legs dangling, and let go, falling silently into a mound of fresh garbage. It stuck to my hands and clothes as I groped in it for my bag. I could smell it, all right, but I couldn’t see it until I got into the light at the end of the alley. Smears of grease and gravy, salad greens, chunks of Jell-O, clung to my pants. I took a streetcar to Echo Lake Park, where I sat on the boat pier, my feet in the water, while I cleaned my socks and shoes.
The bus to Hereford, Texas, which proved to be near Amarillo, went through Phoenix and Globe, in Arizona, which were places I had missed on the trip west. The bus went through without stopping, but the drivers changed. I dozed off during the day, but I was usually awake most of the night. In a country with so much to see, it helped to see just a small piece of it under streetlights.
Without the high false fronts on the stores in Hereford I might have gone right through it and not seen it. The sunset burned like a fire in the second-floor windows of the general store. All around it, in every direction, the panhandle was as boundless and bare as the sea. Having seen the sea, I could say that. It even had the sort of dip and swell that the sea has. The man in the general store knew my Uncle Dwight, but there was no way to get in touch with him. His farm was about eight miles southeast, which was a long way to walk carrying a suitcase. But if I left the suitcase with him, I could walk it. He led me into the street, which was almost dark, but the sky was so full of light I blinked to look at it. He pointed out to me the trail I should follow, and the wire poles along it looked no higher than fence posts. The road was little more than smoothed-over grass, and once it got dark it would be hard to see it. What I had to look for, once it got dark, were the lights of his house and his tractor. He kept it going day and night. If I didn’t see it, I would hear the cough of the engine. The light for me to keep my eye on, of course, was the one that stayed in one place. That was the house. If I walked at a good smart clip I could do it in about two hours.
After two days and two nights on the bus it felt good to walk. At one point, where I was on a rise, I could see the lights of Amarillo, like a cluster of stars. I could hear the tractor coughing before I saw it, and it sounded like a plug was missing. Some time later, when it made a turn, the lights came toward me like a locomotive. The last thing I saw was the feeble lampglow at a window of the house. I had never asked myself what he might have as a farm. A farm to me was a big old house, with some barns, and perhaps some trees along one side as a windbreak. What I saw slowly emerging in the milky darkness was a building no larger than my Uncle Harry’s cobshed, set up on concrete blocks. A line of wash, like ghosts, hung to one side, where a machine of some sort was covered with a tarpaulin. Fifty or sixty yards away from the house were two sheds, and still further away was the peaked roof of a privy. The white spots in the yard were Leghorn chickens. Way, way off to the south, where the sky was darkest, the dim lights of the tractor flickered, and it made me so mournful and lonely I wanted to cry. If I had not come so far and was not so tired, I would have turned back. An eerie mauve and crimson afterglow filled the western horizon, like the earth was burning. Until I was right there in the yard, beside the sagging line of wash, the dog under the house neither saw nor heard me. When he came at me barking, he scared me out of my wits. I probably let out a yell. At the door to the house, up three steps from the yard, a woman appeared with a clothes basket. She called off the dog, then said, “You’re Wright?” I said that I was. “I’m Agnes,” she said. “Dwight’s on the tractor.”
With the light behind her I could not see her face.
“Where’s your bag?”
I explained that I had left it in Hereford, since I had to walk.
“Dwight’s not going to like that,” she said. “It means he’s got to go fetch it.” When I said nothing, she added, “I suppose you’re hungry,” and beckoned me to come in.
In the morning I saw nothing but the food on my plate, the slit of light at the window. It was on the horizon, but it might have been attached to the blind. Dawn. Sunrise would not come for another hour. The wind blowing under the house puffed dust between the floorboards, like smoke. There was never any talk. My Uncle would slip off his coveralls, like a flight suit, and eat in his two suits of underwear: one of fine, snug-fitting wool, flecked with gray, like a pigeon; the other of heavy, nubby cotton flannel with the elbows patched with quilting, the fly-seat yawning. The outer suit would come off in the spring, but the inner suit was part of my Uncle. I once saw him plucked like a chicken, standing in a small wash basin of water while Agnes wiped him off with a damp towel. Dust. He was dusted rather than washed.*
Sometime before dawn, the wind rising, I was awakened by the cough of the tractor approaching the house. It went on coughing while I pulled on the clothes Agnes brought me—itchy underwear and socks, two heavy flannel shirts, coveralls still stiff from drying on the wash line, cold as ice.
Agnes had explained to me the night before that I would take over the tractor when Dwight brought it in in the morning, the engine never stopping because it was so hard to start. While I gulped hot biscuits and eggs fried in pork fat I could hear my uncle cursing. What was the trouble? It was just his way of keeping warm, talking to himself. When he came into the house dust caked his face, like the men I had seen in grain elevators. He did not look pleased when he saw me sitting there eating his food. He wore a cap with ear muffs, coveralls like mine, the legs tucked into three-buckle galoshes. I wouldn’t know until Sunday what he really looked like, when I would first see him without his cap on—not because it was the Lord’s day of rest, but my uncle’s day off. His forehead, ears and neck were white as flour, the rest of his face was dark as an Indian’s. Where had I seen him before? He could have been the brother of William S. Hart. He had the same steely, watery-blue eyes and thin-lipped mouth. When he smiled I could see the dirt caked at the roots of his teeth.
He didn’t say who he was, or ask who I was, but came to the table and opened up a biscuit, smeared it in the pork fat, then put it in his mouth. I understood right then that you didn’t talk to him while he was trying to eat. My uncle was a lean wiry man who just naturally stood with his legs flexed, as if he meant to hop. When he burned himself with a swallow of hot coffee he made a face just like I would, with his eyes creased, then he let out a stream of curses. I * followed him out in the yard, where the crack of dawn was right there on the horizon like a knife slit, then we carried between us a milk can full of kerosene to the John Deere tractor. It took both of us to lift it as high as the fuel tank, and pouring it into the funnel I got my gloves and hands soaked. He shouted at me, above the cough of the motor, if I knew how to steer a tractor? I nodded that I did. He rode along behind me, seated on one of the gang plows, letting his hand trail in the loam turned up by the plow blade. His section of land was about 1,800 acres, and I could see only a portion of it at one time. With the tractor running day and night it would take a month or more to get it plowed.
On the west side, headed south, the wind in my face was so cold it made my eyes blur. Headed north, the dust raised by the plows blew over my head like a cloud of smoke. But when he saw I could manage the tractor on the turns he got off the plows and walked back toward the house, his arms raised from his sides as if he carried two pails. In that great empty expanse, the sun just rising, he looked like a bug and hardly seemed to move. When the light in the house turned off I missed it.
I’d been plowing half the morning before I noticed how the big jackrabbits moved just enough to stay clear of the plows. They would wait until the last second, then hop just enough to be clear of the blades. The whole section of land I was on had never before been turned by a plow. Only cattle had grazed it, most of them the white-faced Herefords that stood along the fence to watch me pass. I didn’t know at that point that I was turning topsoil that had been centuries in the making. My uncle knew it, and it was why he had gambled on planting grain where it seldom rained. If it would grow grass, he argued, it would also grow wheat. Just five years before he had leased 1,200 acres, and he and Agnes, working alone, had harvested a crop worth more than $30,000. It hadn’t rained a winter since then, but he was sure that it would.
In the sky around me, maybe twenty miles away, I could see cloud masses forming and drifting. I could even see mauve sheets of rain falling somewhere. A few days of steady rain was all that was needed, then months of hot sun. I thought I would die of hunger before I saw Agnes, followed by the dog, between the plowed land and the house. She brought me my lunch in a syrup pail, with a jar of black coffee. I’d never cared much for coffee, but I got to like it fine. The dog would stay with me, watching me eat, then he would trail in the fresh furrows left by the plows. When a rabbit moved, he tried to head it off and keep it running in the plowed section. He ran like the wind, so low to the ground that a plowed furrow would send him tumbling. It was hard to see the grass-colored rabbits when he chased them, just the crazy zigzagging patterns made by the dog, like he was chasing flies. He was a sort of spitz, mixed with collie, his fur a mat of burrs picked up from the grass. His big stunt was to run straight at the Herefords if he found them all lined up like a wall at the fence. He would go right for them like a streak, and at the last split second they would break and panic, going off with their tails up, bellowing. We both loved it. I would stop the tractor and give him some attention. He was Agnes’ dog. For one reason or another he didn’t like Dwight. I think it was because Dwight would often shoot toward him when the two of them did a little hunting. It was Dwight who gave him the name of Jesus, because of the way a dead-looking rabbit would spring to life when he saw him.
Two hours before dawn we had left the dark house to shoot at what I thought might be cattle rustlers. In the windless pause before my Uncle ran forward hooting like an Indian, I prepared myself to shoot it out with Billy the Kid. When Dwight ran forward, hooting, I shot into the air over his head. I heard a great flapping of wings, but very little honking. I think I managed to fire two or three times. Still dark, we came back to the house where Agnes had coffee perking and a fire going. When the sky was light we went out to see if we had bagged any birds. Just shooting blind into the rising flock we had bagged nine. So we had fresh gamy meat for two weeks and lead shot on my plate in the evening, some of which I kept and used over in a bee-bee gun.*
The John Deere tractor, until I got used to it, sounded like a plug was missing and it was about to stop running. It ran on the cheapest fuel, however, and once you got it started it was hard to stop. To start it up, you had to give the flywheel a spin, which scared the hell out of me because of the way it backfired. The first time it died on me I couldn’t get it restarted, and Dwight knew it right away when the coughing stopped. He could hear that the way he could hear a rise or fall in the wind. He had got out of bed at about seven in the morning and walked the half mile or so to where I was stalled. That gave me plenty of time to watch him coming, his arms high from his sides like a winded chicken. He was so mad he hardly troubled to curse me, and grabbed the flywheel like he meant to tear it off. He didn’t catch it just right, and the loud backfire lifted him off his feet. That made him even madder, and less smart about it, and when he grabbed the wheel it spun him like a top and thumped him hard against one of the wheels. That hurt him so bad, and he was so ashamed, tears came to his eyes. If he had had a club big enough, or an axe, I think he would have chopped the John Deere to pieces. The reason he hated his father the way he did, as Winona had said, was that they were so much alike. They were both hard-driving, ambitious men who were accustomed to putting the harness on others as well as themselves. It almost killed him to have the tractor, right before my eyes, make a fool of him. It frightened me like the devil just to watch him, but when it was over I liked him better, and he was friendlier with me. By the time we got it started we were both so worn out we just got on it and rode it back to the house, where he went back to bed, and I sat in the sun where it warmed the wall. It made a difference between us, not such a big one that my job got to be any softer, but I had become a hired hand and he didn’t have to watch me to know I was working.
As a rule I rode the tractor all day, and he rode it at night. He slept until early afternoon, then he did what needed doing around the place. Agnes raised chickens for the eggs we lived on, and the one she stewed or fried on Sunday. By afternoon the sun would heat up the house, but the way the wind blew around and beneath it, it would soon cool off in the evening. After supper we would sit around the range in the kitchen, with the oven door open. Agnes always had her mending to do, or washing, or the baking of bread she did on Mondays, and she was not a person who liked to talk while she worked. Nor had I ever before lived with a woman who didn’t seem to like me. Not that she disliked me, but at most she felt neutral. In the house she liked me to keep in my place. The year he made a lot of money Dwight had bought a big console radio in Kansas City that required a lot of batteries to run it. He got tired of trying to keep the batteries charged, so all it did was sit there with her sewing on it. In the space on the floor beneath there were two big cartons of Haldemann-Julius Little Blue Books. They sold for five cents each, and my uncle had bought two or three hundred of them. He was a great reader, over the winter, and read the books that he liked several times. Most of the books exposed religious hypocrisy and fakery. There were also books on geology, history and travel, so I didn’t lack for something to read. I often carried one of these books in my pocket and read it when I stopped for lunch. What surprised me was how much my uncle loved to talk. On the day I had off we might sit up till almost midnight doing nothing but talking. A lot of what I said got him to laughing so hard his sides ached, and he could hardly stop. He loved to hear me talk about Pacific Union College, and the stuff they believed. I liked the way his eyes watered when he laughed, and the way they twinkled when he looked at me. The good talk we often had was no reason, however, I shouldn’t be on the tractor at dawn the next morning.
That morning I heard the dawn crack like a whip. A little later I could peer out and see the wind where there was neither dust, lines of wash, nor even grass to blow. The yard was like a table, with a dull, flat gloss where the shoes buffed it toward the privy. Scoured by the wind, the cracks had been picked clean by the chickens. Out there, as nowhere else, I could see the wind. The five minutes in the morning I lay in a stupor listening to Agnes build the fire, I would face the window, the dawn like a slit at the base of a door. In the kitchen Agnes would put fresh cobs on the banked fire. Was it the sparks in the chimney, the crackle in the stove? The cats would hear it, five or six of them. With the first draw of the fire they would start from the grain sheds toward the house, a distance of about one hundred yards. Was that so far? It can be if you crawl. In the dawn light I would see only the white cats, or those that were spotted, moving toward the house like primitive or crippled reptiles. How explain it? The invisible thrust of the wind. The hard peltless yard gave them no hold. Even the chickens, a witless bird, had le
arned never to leave the shelter of the house at the risk of blowing away, like paper bags. A strip of chicken wire, like a net, had been stretched to the windward of the yard to catch them. They would stick like rags, or wads of cotton, till my Aunt would go out and pick them off. The cats and hens were quick to learn that the wind would prevail. My Aunt Agnes knew, but she preferred not to admit it. The last to learn was my Uncle Dwight.*
The way Agnes looked after my Uncle Dwight helped me to see why it was she seemed so neutral toward me. Dwight was hers. She liked him so much she didn’t want to share him with anybody. The way he could talk pleased her, but the pleasure he showed when I talked made her frown and turn to her mending. She was not a pretty woman, her skin darkened by the weather, her hands like those of a man and chapped at the wrists, but I knew that she was a woman my uncle could take pride in. He had found her in Kansas, put her in a buggy and driven southwest till they came to the Pecos River in New Mexico. There he homesteaded a claim and raised sheep. Why didn’t they have children? She would have liked kids of her own better than she liked me. Dwight was so independent in all of his thinking, he might not have wanted to share Agnes with them. He talked to her the way he did to me, but he considered me a better listener. I would come back at him. And he liked that. He said a lot of things just to rile me. I had also read some books that he hadn’t, and that both pleased and shamed him. Sometimes he would put his hands to his face and just think about it for a moment, in silence.
My Uncle Dwight had not had, as he said, much schooling, preferring to educate himself by reading, but he talked in the assured manner of a man who could give a sermon. Words came to him easily, and quickly. His accent was like none I had heard, as if he had lived with strange people. I would hear nothing like it until I heard ballad singers on records. When he listened to me, his head tilted as if for a portrait, I felt in his gaze his admiration for his own kind. Was that what I was? Were we both pieces chipped from the same block? It pleased me to think that we might be, because I felt for him a secret admiration. He was strong. His mind was sharp as the glint of his eye. If the great men I had heard of were gathered together around a stalled tractor on the Texas panhandle, my uncle would prove to be the equal or the superior to most of them. They would listen in silence and admiration as he cursed.