But when was all this? When had she stood by the kitchen door and watched the children? She pondered: yesterday, a week ago, today maybe? Spring it had been, or somebody had said it was spring; no greenness, and the wind she’d sniffed through the kitchen door had been raw and cold as from a field of ice. She called Amos. The whispering came again, and then Clytie’s answer, “He’s a watchen his tadpoles ina kitchen, Mom,” and the whispering started up again, fierce arguing now.
She looked about for her coat; it was gone from the bed. She dropped her head back upon the pillow; it didn’t matter about the coat; the pocket was an empty hole. Everybody had holes, but a body had to live with holes, fill them. The light made her head ache; she closed her eyes; she ought to brush her hair, but what was the use of it? And it was like she had weights on her hands and rubber in her elbows. “Mom, didn’tcha say I could have a fence?”
It was Enoch, run up to her bed, disregarding Clytie’s angry, “I toldcha not to be a waken her.” Clytie turned to her mother for support. “Mom, yu oughta see th mess he’s maken inu yard. Him an th kids has brought junk frum all over—loads an loads a them little sticks frum the scrap wood—”
“They’re pickuts, I tell yu,” Enoch screamed. “We’re goen—”
“You’re not gonna do nothen. You can’t cut up them old wore-out clothesline poles th maintainance man give yu fer free. An Victor won’t hep none.”
“He’s aimen to. He hadda work overtime a heap,” Enoch, almost in tears, said.
“Him an Max, they’re gonna move away soon’s they can find a place,” Clytie reminded him, then turned to Gertie with her tale of Enoch’s foolishness. “He hadda go an buy some seed up at school t’other day; he done it jist cause th other kids was buyen em—a heap a th people around’s a putten out winder boxes, an some in privates has got gardens; an inu project here yu can rent a garden.”
“Pop won’t,” Enoch cried.
“Whit rented him one last year, an th ground was pure sand where they give em gardens, an th dogs an cats nastied up what little stuff he did grow; said he didn’t make back his seed,” Clytie reminded him.
“That’s why we gotta have a fence,” Enoch insisted.
“Silly, Pop’s already said it ud cost too much.”
“But I’m tellen yu that what I’ve spent on seed an fencen. I got myself by goen to the store an sich fer people,” Enoch was screaming again.
Gertie roused enough to make a shush-shushing sound. “Pop ain’t tryen to sleep,” Clytie said, and added quickly when Gertie stared at her, “Thet punch-press division had a little layoff—jist about a day, they think, on account a parts shortage.”
“Why?” Gertie asked, pushing herself up with one hand, swinging her feet to the floor.
“They had a wildcat somewheres where they make um,” Enoch said.
“It’sa teamsters’ union, walked out over seniority; an they couldn’t git um hauled,” Clytie corrected.
“Aw, heck, yu don’t know nothen; th teamsters ain’t got nothen to do with this un; it was another’n,” Enoch argued. He remembered his original quarrel with Clytie, and turned again to Gertie. “Mom, didn’tcha say we’d build a fence—jist yesterday? Me an Victor, we’ll saw them posties,” and he hurried away while she was trying to think up words in which to tell him he couldn’t build a fence.
When the children had gone, she continued to sit on the edge of the bed. She ought to go see what the child was up to, but it didn’t seem worth the trouble. She studied an elbow come since yesterday out of the block of wood, and gradually the night grew in her mind like a quilt block partly put together: they’d quarreled at her because she wouldn’t take the pink medicine; most of the night she’d worked on the block of wood, smothering with the man in the wood the trains and the dangling boot and all the other things that came behind her eyes when she tried to sleep. She touched the top of the head, gently, as if it had been some human to whom she would show gratitude.
She had her hair parted in the neat straight part that made a white line across her head, but was still brushing it when Mrs. Anderson came, pink-cheeked, bright-eyed, and smiling as she held out the glass of pink water. She was playful, shaking her finger. “You’re way behind on your medicine.”
Gertie gave the woman’s too bright eyes a critical glance, then frowned and shook her head.
Mrs. Anderson set the glass on a chair. “You’re better,” she said, still smiling; and when Gertie made no answer, but only nodded under the curtain of her hair, she turned to the block of wood. One side now was no block of wood at all, but the cloth-draped shoulders of someone tired or old, more likely tired, for the shoulders, the sagging head, bespoke a weariness unto death. Mrs. Anderson touched the top of the head, fingered the hair where it fell apart over the bent neck, a strong neck with muscle and bone rising out of a fold of the cloth, careless cloth, as if the wearer were too lost in uneasiness or sorrow to think of cloth, consider its color or quality, only pull it blindly about him and hold it because one must hold to something. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I’ve seen pieces take prizes not half so good. You must finish it—finish it,” she repeated slowly and emphatically, as if the finishing of it were a job that could be done only with great sacrifice and determination.
Gertie looked up at her through the curtain of hair, and spoke slowly, as if the words were stones to be pried one by one from the hard earth. “I aim to—allus I aimed to finish him, but never had th time. But now, seems like, they’s nothen left tu me—but time—an she allus begged me. I wish I’d tuck th time.”
“But how does one take time when—” Mrs. Anderson had stood an instant, her hands clenched by her sides while the bright smile that had seemed ready to burst into giggles slid somehow with no movement of her mouth into a big-teared, soundless crying. She dropped all in a heap on the floor, bent her forehead against a wooden shoulder, and wept fully and completely as her Judy wept when she was hurt.
Gertie watched her a moment, puzzled, then began patting her shoulder and smoothing her down-bent head.
The woman sprang up as suddenly as she had flopped down. “I should cry before you,” she said, her eyes on the man in the wood. “But sometimes I wonder—why raise children? Why give your life up to them—everything—if—if their lives will be as miserable as your own? Why?” The last “why” was a hesitant whisper, as if she were afraid to believe that she had asked such a question.
“Why can’t I be like Mrs. Daly?” she went on, her voice loud and angry now. “When her ninth baby was three days old, her husband sobered up enough to bring her home from the hospital—a cab hired with money borrowed from Zedke—put it on the grocery bill—bringing her ninth child to temporary housing, designed by a space-stingy government—at least for workers’ housing—for four children at the most. And is she happy? She was standing on her steps this morning—it must be all of ten days old—yelling details of its birth to Mrs. Schultz, who’s looking forward to her sixth. A person would think that for twenty years she had prayed to the Blessed Virgin for just this one child. The stupidity of so many children! Homer, on the basis of a fairly good sampling, estimated some time ago—when he was interested in such things—that this project already had roughly twice as many children as it was set up for.”
She stopped for breath, then rushed on: “And what will they all do when the war’s over? Homer used to think about things like that before he tasted the—what is it in the Bible?—my grandfather used to use the expression a lot, but somehow I can’t think so well.”
“The fleshpots of Egypt,” Gertie said, remembering she would try again to read the Bible—seemed like she had tried but the words had blurred—“or else,” she went on, “th birthright fer th mess a pottage. Samuel ginerally preaches on both together, but I never thought he ought—a body can, I recken, taste th fleshpots ’thout sellen their birthright.”
“But not Homer,” Mrs. Anderson said. “Just think, he was just a poor, socially conscious govern
ment worker running a little employment office until he got some workers for Mr. Turbi—the Flint people were of course grateful, for nobody has yet thought up a way to make money without men. They held out the fleshpots for a sniff; Homer claimed he was curious, and snatched and gobbled—but he never sold his birthright—he thinks he’s found it. But he stole mine.”
Gertie pondered, pinning up her hair; the woman thought she was still drunk on the pink stuff. “I guess,” she said, speaking with difficulty, thinking of the Tipton Place with Cassie, “we all sell our own—but allus it’s easier to say somebody stole it.”
Mrs. Anderson walked to the door and back again. “‘Steal’ is perhaps not the right word. What does a woman do? I’m not Max; I have children. Her baby died; now she is free to—” Her thoughts seemed to wander, and she smiled, the homesick smile of Christmas Day. “I wish I’d painted Max. Do you know that all these months I’ve lived here and wandered the alleys after Georgie and collected statistics for Homer, I’ve ached inside to go on with my painting; Indiana fat farms and cattle—and flowers—a sort of Rosa Bonheur—Grant Wood—you know, I rejected modernism, surrealism, Marxism, and all the rest for life in Indiana as I saw it—that is, of course, I rejected everything but Homer.”
Gertie shook her head, not understanding, but Mrs. Anderson rushed on; a cloud had to drop its rain; Mrs. Anderson had to drop her words. “Always I hated it, this alley, the ugliness, the noise—there wasn’t time or quiet in which to paint—and of course nothing to paint only statistics for Homer. I never saw them—the pictures; Wheateye standing on the coal-shed roof with a popsicle in her hand—Homer had wanted airplanes for thesis background, so I set out to count the airplanes going over; many children helped, but especially Wheateye; strange I never saw her then, but I do now; dirty with popsicle juice dribbling down her chin; Sophronie worked overtime a lot last summer and couldn’t give her children much of anything but money; there’d be flies buzzing round, and the gray houses and the dirty trash cans, always spilling, and the black steel-mill smoke, but there she would stand on the coalhouse looking up at the clean, silvery airplanes.”
She shook her head wearily. “But I never saw her, any more than I saw Victor when he came home tired and dirty with goggle marks around his eyes after a double shift in the steel mill, sixteen hours. But he didn’t look, you know, proletarian tired, exploited; he looked happy; Max was pregnant.”
She looked at the pink medicine she had set on a chair. “Are you certain you don’t want this?” She reached before Gertie finished shaking her head, drank it quickly, shivering a little, then stood a moment, staring at the block of wood. She straightened her shoulders at last, and smiled at Gertie. “You’ll have to get well—quick. Somebody has to watch the children while I house hunt.”
“But ain’t you got a house?” Gertie asked, weary of the woman. While she had rattled on, something almost pleasant had come into her head, something she had thought she wanted to do, tired as she was; now it was gone.
“Oh, that thing in Muncie,” and her voice was a mimicry of Homer’s, “we’re selling it, of course. But I thought I’d told you; when a farmer buys cattle he looks them over first. Well, the other evening the great McKeckeran was looking Homer over—and his wife too; that’s me. Two or three days later Mr. McKeckeran called him in—” She stopped, frowning. “He spoke, but somehow I think his wife, that Mrs. McBales, is behind it all—why—but anyway, the great one said, ‘We’ll need well trained men in your field after the war.’”
She smiled at Gertie as she turned toward the door. “The strong-arm, up-from-the-ranks, shirt-sleeve, rough-house stuff is out; everything is smooth, smooth, smooth. Moses had only the Ten Commandments when he came down from his visit with God on the mountain, but Homer after his lunch with McKeckeran had the Promised Land—only, I’m the one has to find the house there.”
Gertie nodded, the last hairpin jabbing firmly down into the great smooth knob. “I’ll watch yer youngens. I’m better, lots better,” and when the woman had gone she began to dress herself and straighten the room. There were long moments when she would sit drooping, or even flop onto the bed, tired to her death, all living useless, wondering why she moved at all. Then she would think of Mrs. Anderson flopping around, weeping over nothing. Once her fumbling fingers found the knife, had opened it, and she had turned to the block of wood before she stopped, frowning—something else tonight.
The children and Clovis had finished supper, and the late spring twilight was red-washed with the steel-mill light, before she was clean and dressed, her bed made, and the room straight. All were overjoyed to see her come walking, calm and neat, into the kitchen. Clovis, hunched over a little contraption on the kitchen table, smiled up at her, and begged her to eat some supper. Amos came running, crying, “Lookee, Mom, lookee,” and pointed to a cake with white thick frosting on a shelf behind the stove, and then brought from under the sink a fruit jar filled with water and half grown tadpoles. Mrs. Schultz, she learned, had sent the cake, and Victor had helped Amos get the tadpoles.
Her knees shook and the floor seemed a weaving slippery hill, but she stood up long enough to rummage through her chunks of seasoned maple wood on the kitchen shelf to find a piece that was suited to her needs—the pleasantness of whittling a little fat doll for the new Daly baby.
She sat by the table, and Clytie, seeing the knife and the wood, was reminded to tell her: “Mom, two or three days ago a girl at school—she didn’t know about Cas—our trouble. Her mom seen th crucifix you’d made fer that Hungarian woman, and her mom wants one, too. She keeps plaguing me to ast you.”
“Yer mom ain’t able to be a doen all that whittlen now,” Clovis put in quickly. “That tool-and-die man an me, we’re riggen her up a contraption. I got this little old vacuum cleaner motor today cheap. It needs new brushes an th wiren’s shot, but soon as I fix it, it’ll be good as new. An th tool-an-die man’s riggen up a saw tu go with it.” Clovis picked up a tiny wrench and bent over the motor again, his washed-out yellow face less tired, his eyes warm with satisfaction as piece by piece he took it apart.
“I could do it now—start it,” Gertie objected, her hands hesitating over the piece of wood, one end already growing into a bald, baby-shaped head. “I could make a cross—quick,” she said.
“You can turn em out by th dozen when I git a saw set up,” Clovis promised.
She stared at it a moment, her brows puckered in a disapproving frown, but she did not shake her head. After a time of working slowly and ever more slowly on the doll, she laid it aside and took instead two short straight lengths of wood that when put together would form a cross. Shaping the pieces exactly alike in width and thickness, and trying to figure in her head just how long the arms should be, were dull and tedious after the baby’s head. There were moments when her hands fumbled, and she seemed to wander on creek banks through wild ginger leaves and above frothing water—it would be nice now to make a wild ginger flower in wood. She realized that all of them, even Enoch by the radio, were watching her, their sneaking, tiptoeing glances touching her face and her hands, the way they had done when they came to the door; and she was silent, going meekly away when Clovis suggested that she go back to bed.
Enoch left Pat McDougall of the FBI and followed her into her room where he lingered to tell her in low tones that Clytie could not hear, of the wonders of his fence. Did she know that he had dug three holes in just a little while? Easy; here in this country of no rocks all a body had to do was screw out the dirt with a thing like a big corkscrew; he’d left some holes undug, and if she got to feeling real good and strong she could see what he meant, but she wouldn’t have to be strong, not real strong; the work was that easy.
He went away, and a little eagerness for the next day stirred within her. She’d look at Enoch’s fence the first thing. She shook her head over the strangeness of her children. Enoch it was who, given the job of sticking the pumpkin seed into the hills of corn, had hidden them instead in a holl
ow stump where they had grown and told of his lazy ways.
She shut her door, and looked hungrily toward the block of wood. But she was still fumbling, determined to work on the cross that would bring in money, when she heard the tool-and-die man in the kitchen. His voice was familiar; seemed like she remembered it through Callie Lou’s running, her dreams, and the trains, saying always much the same things it said now: “How’s everything? I just dropped around to see is there anything I can do.”
Whit came soon, and not long after the two men left together. Clovis, idled by the walkout, went to bed with Amos, as he had been doing lately, she thought, for Enoch seemed always to be in the living room. She struggled with the cross, but the things were moving behind her eyes again, and with the little holes in the storm window open, the sound of the trains came more clearly. There began again that continual reliving of the last few moments of Cassie’s life when over and over she would put the picture together again piece by piece like one methodically laying hot coals on her own body.
She turned at last for comfort to the wood; gradually, her own torture became instead the agony of the bowed head in the block of wood. The arms grew tonight, not fully, but enough she knew the hands would not be reaching out, but holding—holding lightly a thing they could not keep. The head was drooped in sorrow, looking once at the thing it had to give away. Who gave and what gift, she wondered. Jonah with a withered leaf from the gourd vine—Esau his birthright—Lot’s wife looking at some little pretty piece of house plunder she could not carry with her—Job listening to the words of Bildad and wondering what next the Lord would want. And what had Job said?
She got the Bible, and thumbed through it quickly, then read, knowing the words were there; but something forced her to read as it forced her always to remember: “For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. … But man dieth, and is laid low … and the river wasteth and drieth up: so man lieth down, and riseth not.”