She turned swiftly, raising her hand as if to strike him, crying: “Git away. I allus thought you’d want my money fer a truck—She’d still been alive.”
She dropped upon the bed again; and after a long time of watching, opening his mouth, then closing it, he went away.
She heard his feet, and then the sound was lost in the steel mill, the traffic, the wind, the trains. She wanted to look at the window again, but she was too tired. No, she wasn’t tired; it was just that there was no reason at all why she should turn over and look at the window. The wall so close to her eyes was just as good, almost the color of the window, sooty gray, tinged with green.
She was back on the old Ledbetter place on the ridge top, cleaning up a patch of brush to make a new-ground cornfield. The wind rocked the pines, the creek was aroar from the white rain that had brought the wild plum to full bloom all in one night. Cassie was the baby, but big enough to walk hanging on to Gyp; she couldn’t hear her chatter for the wind, a kind of begging, crying wind, scattering the redbud flowers, but still a voice crying: “How yu comen? I gotta have a dream, kid.”
Gertie opened her eyes. Early-afternoon sun slanted through the window, falling on the dirty, disarrayed bed, the shaving-littered floor, and showing each speck of grime and dirt on the four sides of the window panes. So much ugliness she shut her eyes, and pulled a corner of the quilt over them. She tried to bring back the roaring pines and the redbud flowers, but the voice would not go away. “You’ll smother in this room, kid. Th sun’s took a notion to shine, an considering it’s in Detroit it’s doing pretty good. Yu need a little air.” And Max knelt on the bed and reached across Gertie and after some struggle lifted the inside window, then raised the little board across the three holes in the storm-window sash. She leaned back on her heels, smiling on Gertie, her gum still. “Listen. Yu know what it is.”
Gertie heard Detroit. She awakened more fully, and all the things came back again, and lay like black cats choking her; she pulled the quilt higher; if she could hide from them all.
Max pulled the quilt away, tipping her head toward the three little holes, commanding, “Listen. Yu gotta listen.”
“Where’s Amos?” Gertie asked, starting up.
“Victor’s got him by th hand. Listen,” the girl insisted, and went on, smiling, her eyes soft. “I recollect onct about this time—no, it was earlier—we was on our way back from Texas, an we hadda stop somewheres in Ohio, an them big fields was one big puddle. That night Pop couldn’t sleep for listening; said he counted eight different voices, an th frog eggs he got me hatched in Pittsburgh.”
Gertie had ceased pulling at the covers, for now she heard, now faint, now a swelling chorus, the voices of the frogs—thousands and thousands it seemed like, more frogs than she had ever thought could be. She halfway wanted to listen, but Max was all a jiggle on the bed, laughter in her eyes, laughter in her voice. “It’s spring, kiddo,” she was saying. “Th war’s about over. I said to myself last night: ‘You’re young an alive, kid; quit th crappen an leave this damned alley; you’ll never learn to make them damned Polish dumplings.’ Ugh. Th first time I bit into one a th things at Victor’s mom’s—you know, innocent, not looking for cabbage—it was all I could do to keep from loosing th rest a th junk under th table.”
She bent above Gertie, looking down into her face, “‘And why for because,’ I asked myself, ‘should I spend my life making what will never be no good nohow?’ ‘Who inu hell,’ I said to myself, ‘wants to try to make pies like Mother makes when it’s so much simpler to let Mother make um inu first place?’” She jiggled Gertie’s elbow. “But I gotta, just gotta have a dream. ‘You’re lucky,’ I said to myself th first time I seen yu. You ’re still my luck, but they ain’t much time. We’re buying furniture, an pretty soon we gotta own our own home like Victor’s people. See? Be good an respectable an go to church, an be stingy as hell so’s yucan buy a lotta crap for th house; an a good fur coat like his mom’s got, so’s you’ll hafta wear th same damn’ coat for years and years, an be allatime wearing your wits out, wondering is it keeping good inu summertime. Ain’t that liven? Spend all your days living with that crap you’ve saved like hell to buy—six lamps Victor’s mom’s got in her living room.” The words had come tumbling over Gertie as if she were just a piece of something to catch the tumbling words.
“If I could a lied allatime an kept most a mu tips; but I ain’t no good at lying. See? Not when I thought I loved th guy. He wanted to save, so’s I give him most a what I made; he banked it in both our names. He’s a good honest guy.” She sprang up. “Look, I gotta have a dream.”
Gertie turned her head so that she could see the window; lying flat like this, the whole window was filled with sky—not even a telephone wire across it—blue with white clouds; blue like the wild iris by the creek. But Max didn’t want wild iris or white water. She must give Max what she wanted. The sky was so endless, the white clouds sailing: I saw a ship a sailing; a sailing on the sea. “Sea,” she said, not looking away from the sky, knowing it was what Max had wanted, for Max was taking the dream, carrying it toward the door, crying:
“I gotta go—I’m so late now I’ll hafta call a cab.” She turned for one last glance at Gertie, then stopped, studying her with narrowed eyes as she bent above her sniffing. “Wotta they given you? Goof balls a some kind. They’ll drive you crazy.” She sniffed again. “Pink stuff in water, huh? Quit it. Medicine won’t help what ails you. Mom, they doped her up so to keep her quiet when she learned what had happened to Pop when that drunk colonel run into um that she, well—you know, went like Pop. Yu gotta git outa here. You’ll go nuts.”
“They’s no place to go,” Gertie said, “cept to Cassie, an they won’t let me.”
“Go ask Homer questions; I’ve never had th time. But whatever you do, quit that stuff. It ain’t putten yu to sleep—s’maken yu goofy. Hell, kid,” she said, straightening the bedspread, “we’ve all got holes—an they all gotta be stuffed with something—liquor, like pore Sophronie, or religion an liquor—it takes em both—for Daly; or phenobarbital, like somebody Mrs. Anderson knows. She’s th one give it to yu, ain’t she? She giggled too much ina alley when Joe come yesterday, but Mrs. Bommarita—she’s a hateful smooth-faced bitch, you never tell when you hear people cry—she said Mrs. Anderson cried a lot.”
She remembered the time, and hurried to the door, calling over her shoulder: “I’m comen over tomorrow and clean this room up. An yu’d better hurry up an eat something or I’ll tell Victor’s mom an she’ll bring yu galombkis—ugh—an you’ll hafta eat em while she watches to make certain you enjoy um.”
When Max had gone, Gertie lay and once again forced all her being toward the sky; and the clouds, instead of being ships, were clouds only, and below them in the land she could not see were high pines with wild pansies blooming at their feet, and lower in the foggy valley were sugar maples red with bloom, and the poplars flowering in the coves where the earth was black, pure black, with hundreds of years of fallen leaves, and lower still was the white water; she kept hunting the white water, but the fog and the spray covered it; she couldn’t see it, though it was loud, so loud—
A fast train roared by, and she sat bolt upright. Telephone poles, a row of chimneys, smoke, and an airplane tore apart her sky. She pressed her palms hard against her ears, and rocked her head from side to side to drive the sounds away.
When the train had gone she sat a time and looked at the block of wood. She wanted to work on it, but she was too tired. She was hot and sweaty, but to do anything about it was beyond her. She wanted a drink of water, but the bathroom was too far away. She lay down again; but now the sky was only something above telephone poles and the steel mill. Then, like an onrushing wind, she heard the first wave of home-coming school children—whooping, laughing, kicking tin cans, and soon Enoch’s feet up the steps and the door banging open.
In a moment he was asking from the doorway, “You feelen better, Mom?” and without waiting fo
r her answer rushed on to tell of how the project office was giving grass seed and fertilizer, and loaning rakes and spades so that the project people could grow grass and flowers.
“Flowers—in this place?” Gertie asked.
“Yeah. It’s spring, Mom—or mighty nigh.”
But Gertie could only repeat, “Spring,” and stare vacantly, never so much as looking at Enoch as he rattled on:
“Can I go to th office, Mom, an git some a that stuff for free? Claude Jean an Gilbert’s goen—an Mom, Victor said we gotta have a fence—th kids is punchen his place full a holes.”
“Fence,” she repeated. “You cain’t grow stuff without a fence.”
“Goody,” he said, “that’s what I told um,” and he was gone.
Then Clytie was asking from the doorway, her voice a careful whisper, “You feelen better, Mom?”
And when Gertie nodded, she came on into the room. “Mom, we’re jist about out a everthing. Can I go to th store? My girl friend’s waiten. We’ll take Amos an hold both his hands—but they ain’t nothen to cross.”
Gertie nodded, drowsing, dreaming of fence. “If you don’t have enough—” Her hand went into an imaginary pocket in the old familiar gesture; she awakened, and the hand dropped, loose-fingered, on the bedspread. “I hate fer you to have to wake yer pop—”
“Oh, don’t worry, Mom. Zedke’s been awful good to us. He give me credit when I asked. You an Pop was gone—an we was out a everything.”
She was gone, and Gertie repeated, “Credit; credit.” Something a man had given Clytie, but nothing was for free, and whatever it was it wasn’t a bargain. Debts. She wanted the fog and the white water, and shut her eyes, squeezing them up tighter and tighter, but like last night, or maybe a week ago or forever, other things came unbidden behind her eyes. She saw a rotten box sunk in a pool of black water, half covered with flat, limber, water-soaked leaves; she kept wondering what was in the box and why it was there, and all the time she knew it wasn’t there.
In front of her was an old, old quilt; in it were squares of white calico set with black sprigged flowers from the dresses her grandmother had worn after her grandfather died. The box was gone; in its place was the spring path at home, a little cedar tree, two limestone rocks, and a loose sheepskull rock in between, and the path yellow dusty. It wasn’t there, only the quilt. But she had to follow the path, for it led to her father’s barn, and Callie Lou had run around the barn corner, her red dress and black hair flashing past the corners of her eyes, always just going away, swifter than her eyes.
She opened her eyes wide, and Callie Lou skipped past their corners; she rolled them, turned quickly in bed so that she could see the door, but Callie Lou had just gone through it. If she hurried she might catch her in the kitchen; there was nobody in the house but Callie Lou; it was so still. Gertie ran on tiptoe, the nightgown billowing behind her, her tangled, unbrushed hair scattered over her shoulders and half hiding her face. But hurry as she would, Callie Lou flitted out the kitchen door as she was taking the few steps down the hall. There was so much racket in the alley was why she hadn’t heard the opening and closing of the door.
She opened the inner door, but stopped when she looked through the storm door into the alley. The overflowing trash and garbage cans, the shreds of cardboard dripping from the walls, the gray clothesline poles with their gray sagging ropes, the mud-splattered children, all the debris of the winter—the ugliness clear in the white spring sunlight, for the wind-scoured sky was clean of smoke.
And seemed like she had never known there could be so many children: digging with shovels and spading forks from the project office, laughing, eating, quarreling, crying; but Callie Lou was not among them. She had slipped out of sight, and was waiting, laughing, hiding just around the end of the building. Soon, she would bring her back; like last night she’d hunted her all the way to Cassie’s grave, and then brought her home only after much trouble. Tonight, like last night, she’d have to wait until Clovis was gone. Children’s cries blew through the broken pane. How had it been last night? Someone had followed her, then led her home. She rubbed her eyes hard with a thumb and finger. There was no Callie Lou, only children in the alley.
She was tired, and the bed was far away. She leaned against the doorframe and watched the children. Most were congregated about Gilbert as he struggled to connect a hose to the outside faucet under Max’s bathroom window. But in spite of a great deal of advice and much help, he was unable to screw it on so that it did not leak; little boys were constantly reaching behind him to turn the faucet, and still others opened the hose nozzle so that water squirted here and yonder. More than one child got wetted, and Gertie’s yard became a bedlam of screaming children, most joyful as they threw mud, fought for the hose, or ran in mock terror from its spray.
Supper getting mothers began to glance uneasily from their kitchen doors, and some even called to their own. Claude Jean Meanwell grabbed the hose, turned off the nozzle, and sprang to the top of Gertie’s coalhouse. “Look, kids, we gotta behave; they won’t let us have u hose no more,” he screamed above the uproar. “I know a real good game we can play; yous’ull like it.”
Georgie, hearing the word game, sprang onto the garbage can and began to climb onto the coalshed, screaming: “I’m gonna play. I’m gonna play.”
Claude Jean kicked his hands away. “Everybody’s gotta line up ona ground in front u me. Come on, kids, lotsa fun,” and his voice was enticing, inviting.
Gilbert Meanwell looked up from his tussle with the hose connection; his eyes on his younger brother were for an instant half admiring, half afraid. Then he, too, smiled and began to call the children to come and play a good game.
Francis Daly, older than the others, who had until now been a bystander, watching the water fights over a bottle of pop, began to giggle; but after throwing his emptied bottle into the alley he smothered his giggles enough to cry: “S’u real good game, kids. Lots u fun; butcha gotta line up an push—hard—real hard, like they was a door in front a yu an a fire behind yu.”
The children, especially the younger ones, flattered by an invitation from older boys to play, came flocking. Soon the mass of shoving, giggling, pushing children stretched in a wide band from Gertie’s coalhouse almost to the Meanwells’, with Francis Daly behind them, his arms widespread as if he herded sheep. They were even more eager when Gilbert, by the water throttle, called to Francis: “Yu wanna be old man Flint? We gotta have him inu job-hunten game.”
“Sure, but I gotta be a plant protection man, too,” Francis said. “S’fine game, kids,” he added, talking now to the children, his voice reassuring, for some had begun a backward pushing, eager to get out of the shoving mass. Others, though still pushing toward the coalhouse as directed, looking anxiously up at Claude Jean who was smiling, standing suspiciously near the hose nozzle, though it did not even drip now, for Gilbert kept his hand on the screwed-down valve.
Gilbert gave an uneasy glance toward Mrs. Bommarita, watching suspiciously from her stoop. He screamed to Francis, “We gotta git a playen,” and to Claude Jean who seemed ready to burst with soundless giggles, “Yu gotta git set.”
Francis stretched his neck, made himself as tall as possible. He, then, commanded in a loud, unnaturally deep voice, heavy with anger and authority, its wrath turned on Claude Jean, “Yu gotta send dese men home. Gitum outa du way.”
“But Mr. Flint, dey ain’t done nutten,” Claude Jean answered; and he too tried to make himself tall and deep-voiced, but failed in the face of his giggles. “Daisies jist waiten tu git jobs. Dey been here all night.”
“Dey ain’t no jobs. Daisies inu way. Git um out. Out,” and “Mr. Flint” screamed, waved his arms, jumped up and down, waved his fist, and in general so beguiled the children with his fit of anger that most, looking behind them now at “Mr. Flint,” forgot their suspicions of Claude Jean by the hose. Many were choking with laughter when Wheateye, forever wary of her brothers, saw Gilbert’s quick hand on the valve
, and screamed, “We’ses gonna git drownded—we—”
Her words were cut off by the hard beating stream of water that came with full force through the lawn-sprinkling nozzle that Claude Jean had opened wide. The children set up a mad, squealing, shoving, fighting scramble to get away from the cold hard stream while Gilbert and Francis, bigger than the others, waved their arms, shouting, “Yu gotta go out bydu gate—youses can’t come inu plant.” And they herded the children into the water that Claude Jean, laughing his flat-eyed, soundless laugh, squirted impartially here and there.
Gertie suddenly stiffened, then crouched, and put her face close to the broken-out pane, for above the clamor of the children and the angry screams of the hurrying mothers she heard Wheateye’s shrill screeching: “Callie Lou, Callie Lou; are you okay, honey? Call th rescue squad, quick. Yous’es has put out th fire but my kid’s smothered an drownded. Git me u ambulance, quick.”
Wheateye screamed still more wildly, and sprang into the kindling shed. “Send um back. She’s all right. She started u fire herself a playen wit matches. Oh, yu mean, mean kid,” and Wheateye lifted a knee, and began spanking the long carrot she had been nibbling.
Gertie crouched a moment longer, listening.
TWENTY-NINE
THE WHISPERING WENT OFF and on like the sound of the shoals in the Cumberland when the wind was gusty from the west; she struggled, wanting the wind, but wakening, took the whispering. She saw the window filled with the late spring sunshine, strange sunlight, blurred and moving like rain. She realized it was her tears that made the window move; she mustn’t cry; she hadn’t cried since her mother gave her some of Henley’s money; no, not since the afternoon she’d learned the bigness of the alley, the kindness; big enough and more it would have been for Callie Lou—and maybe Reuben, too, for the alley and the people in it were bigger than Detroit; no, it was another afternoon, that time when she had gone out to bring Callie Lou back from the dead.