“Like she’d lost something?” Gertie asked in a choked voice.
“Yes. When I sent the note I only wanted to ask if something …” She turned her head, for a girl was calling:
“Lookut, Miss Huffacre—a genuine orchid I got—lookut. It smells—it ain’t paper.” Miss Huffacre sniffed the outthrust shoulder, smiled, as the girl said: “Remember what a time we had? I never thought I’d learn to read, let alone graduate with a orchid.”
“And soon you’ll graduate from high school,” Miss Huffacre said, adding, “You girls sang beautifully.” She turned slowly back to Gertie, who had never left off staring down at her, an angry stare, and puzzled, too, with her brows pulled together in perplexity.
“How many in yer class?” she asked, her voice harsh.
“Forty-one of mornings; forty of afternoons.”
“Allus?” Gertie asked.
“Not always—part of the time I’ve had only the one class—but during the wars and afterwards, for a little while, there are more children.”
“An you don’t teach em all year.”
Miss Huffacre tried to put some lightness into her voice, take some bleakness from the hurt eyes. “No, as I often say, I am the beginning of the assembly. You know, I only teach them one term—beginning reading.”
Gertie shook her head violently, angrily. “It ain’t like a factory—not a bit—more like th sparrer bird.”
Clovis was pulling her, Miss Huffacre was looking troubled, but still Gertie spoke, yielding to Clovis as she turned. “I’d think God would have a easier time watchen all th sparrers fall than you—with so many little youngens—thinken on one.”
THIRTY-ONE
IT WAS NEAR MID-JULY with a heat wave settled down before the Andersons’ new home was ready; the gadget box, Mrs. Anderson called it, for Homer after looking at a few other houses had settled on the house Mrs. McKeckeran had found and recommended. Judy cried when Mrs. Anderson, wearied with her last-minute chores of moving, came to get her from Gertie. “She knows it’s the end of one thing and the beginning of something else,” Mrs. Anderson said, and Gertie thought she was going to cry.
They stood in Gertie’s yard, bald spotted and dug by children, but dotted with the green of grass, and brightened by borders of flowers just beginning to bloom. Mrs. Anderson’s glance went slowly about the alley, which, as always for anything the least bit out of the ordinary such as a fight or a scout car’s stopping, was crowded with watchers—more grownups than usual, and many like the children, barefoot and scantily clad against the heat, and all sleepy-eyed, for last night had been too hot for sleep in the low, unshaded bedrooms where the top halves of the windows were nailed shut.
Mrs. Anderson looked once at scraggeldy-headed Wheateye dressed in an outgrown bathing suit, strawberries spilling from her cupped hands as she ran down the walk, then turned sharply away. “I wish I’d looked sooner,” she said. “This alley could keep a thousand artists busy a thousand years—and now there’ll never be any time—it takes time to be a pillar of society.”
“You’ll have more room, an mebbe—” Gertie began.
“Room? What do you think you can get in a modern brick house with a two-car garage in a good neighborhood for nineteen thousand—but we couldn’t just couldn’t go in any deeper—Homer has to have a good car.”
“But he’s maken good money—an mebbe you’ll learn to like it,” Gertie comforted.
Mrs. Anderson slapped at a fly with a vicious swing. “That’s what I’m afraid of—and what she hopes—It won’t be enough that I quit painting in the struggle to keep up with the neighbors—I must quit wanting to paint. And always,” she went on, her voice vicious as her hand slapping at the fly, “she will be there, waiting to see if I will ever be anything but the perfect courtier’s wife, but pretty certain that I shall be—that I will always cry, ‘See the emperor’s new clothes,’ that I will always be afraid to try to give her secret away.”
“Mebbe she’s kinda lonesome herself an wants tu be—kinda kind.”
“Kind? Her husband is a Flint vice president; and if God were lonesome he’d order somebody to talk to him. I’m not certain, but it—all this interest in an underling—is more like a bribe to keep shut. Say, I’ve intended to ask you: Homer was wondering—how is the man who was beaten, you know, by thugs? I imagine your husband knows him?”
Gertie’s eyes on her were steady. “My man don’t know him—but seems like one a th youngens was readen in th paper—he lost one eye.”
“Oh.” She turned sharply away. Homer was calling her to come look over the place to see if anything had been forgotten; he had already looked but two pairs of eyes were better than one. He came and took Judy, and told Gertie good-bye, then lingered, waiting for his wife, his frowning glance fixed on the fence so long that Gertie felt ashamed of it, such a raggeldy, taggeldy piece of business it was with its strange shaped posts and crooked stringers.
“It ain’t much, but it’s better’n nothen,” she apologized, and added, hoping he would understand, “I recken everybody wants a little piece a land fenced up an all their own.”
He pondered, then spoke quickly, for Mrs. Anderson was hurrying toward the car. “I wouldn’t say that; not everybody. If people are hungry, that is quite hungry for a long time, they can be satisfied with food, even plain bread.”
They were gone and Mrs. Schultz was laughing. “They got out—maybe there’s a chance for the rest of us.” But Mrs. Daly sighed and shook her head, “Pity du neighbors wot’s gotta put up with Georgie.” Sophronie smiled as if a great burden were gone; but Mrs. Bommarita was troubled for the future, wondering if it would be some family with half a dozen children and the parents given to drunken noise and fighting; while Enoch hoped there would be a lot of new children, none of whom knew the job-hunting game.
Gertie pulled a few weeds from the asters, and said nothing. The shrill voices of the children, rising all around her, made a buzzing in her ears, for the argument between her boys and the Meanwells on one side and the Dalys on the other about the tent they had been trying to build together in the corner formed by her fence and the Meanwell coalhouse, was starting up again. She saw that in their fussing and jarring they had got onto her side of the fence and trampled the petunias; she opened her mouth to protest, then shut it. What else was there for the boys to do; back home now Enoch would be at work and having a better time than he was now. There was a place for playing ball in one corner of the project, but it was across the through street, and the two times Enoch and the Meanwells had tried to play there, bigger boys had chased them away.
She squinched her eyes against the heat waves dancing on the garbage cans, shut her lips tightly against the gassy smell of a passing milk truck, but at last turned wearily back into the kitchen where a bleary-eyed, yellow-faced Clovis in nothing but his underpants sat sweating over a cup of coffee, and from the looks of his plate the only thing he’d touched.
She sighed over the wasted food; he ought to have told her he wasn’t hungry; but he looked so nearly white-eyed and so disgusted with it she had no heart to chide him, and instead said: “Honey, you’ve got tu git some sleep an rest. Why don’t you an Whit an Miller all go off to a park an sleep like you done on them real hot days last week?”
He shook his head wearily. “I cain’t spare th gas an they cain’t neither. An anyhow it warn’t no picnic; they’s allus about a million others a tryen tu do th same thing; ever place else is jist about as noisy as this place; a little cooler mebbe, but in a halfway shady place th mosquiters is worse.”
Gertie wiped her sweat-dripping forehead, and wished for a city with many parks holding picnic places and trees for shade like the children had read about back home. Here, within walking distance and past many through streets, were a few little dusty, sun-baked playgrounds, but the closest park of any size was better than half an hour’s drive away through heavy traffic. The children, especially the boys, were always begging Clovis to buy a black-market stamp and ta
ke them someplace: to the closest big park with trees; the zoo that was for free; or Belle Isle, a place in the river where a body could see boats go by, but so crowded on the two times that Clovis had taken them, a body could hardly find walking room let alone a bench or a picnic table. Gertie had gone on only one such excursion; the crowding, the cigarette stub, popsicle-wrapper-strewn-earth had depressed her as much as the hot drive through the noisy traffic, and if a body tried to sit a moment on the dirty earth under a bit of crowded shade, the mosquitoes settled in biting, buzzing swarms.
“Looks like,” Clovis was saying, lighting a cigarette, “I’ll have plenty a time for sleepen pretty soon.” He told then of a walkout in the paint department after more than twenty had passed out with the heat; not just the heat either: the ventilating system had gone bad and the guys said the place was full of fumes, so full that Bender had got the whole trim department to walk out in protest. The company hadn’t fixed the ventilating system, mended it a little was all; everybody knew it would kill a man to work in such, but a damned steward had come through the parts place where he worked, and reminded them of their no-strike pledge, and said it was just Bender’s talk had caused the walkout in the paint department. “Like men passen out with th heat an th air full a paint spray had nothen to do with it,” Clovis commented bitterly, then added, “That steward must be in company pay; we all oughta go out in sympathy.”
Gertie, gathering up his dishes, looked at him with surprise. “But Clovis, you ain’t hurten none—you been a sayen all th time th place where you work is cooler than this—and they’s a war—What’s the good—”
She was silenced by his blazing eyes. “You’re a thinken jist like old man Flint. Sure, I ain’t a hurten; I work midnights; it’s cooler then; an I ain’t in that trim department. But it’s like Bender says, If th union lets th company git by with all this, what’ll we do when th war’s over an times is mebbe kinda hard? In a union, yu gotta hang together.”
Gertie was silent, wishing she had not spoken; but more short pay checks when they were just getting caught up on their payments; she thought of the money in her pocket she had made from whittling and baby sitting—enough for Cassie’s marker. She felt almost rich, and was able to act interested and pleased when Clovis, after a wary glance toward the screen door where children were so often congregated with inquisitive eyes and noses pushing against the screen, whispered, “I got a surprise fer you, old woman.”
She followed him into the bedroom, after he had turned up the radio to drown the sounds he might make, and watched in silence while he took the contraption he had finished last night, when she was helping Mrs. Anderson pack, and plugged it into the wall socket. She tried not to back away or show her hatred of its noise and ugliness when he set it on a chair, flicked a little lever, and bent above it smiling as he watched the busy little saw and listened to the motor. “Now look,” he whispered, and showed her a piece of thin smooth board on which he had sketched a short-armed cross; he flicked the lever and the saw stopped; he put the board on the flat piece of steel, turned on the saw again, and by turning the board as the blade ate into the wood, he had in a moment a cross exactly to his knife markings.
He held it up for her to see, and whispered: “Look at th time you’ll save. We’re goen to fix some other blades, an already I’ve got a thing to put in that’ll bore holes in jumpen-jack dolls. When you learn to work it right, it’ll cut any pattern you want—a Christ—a fox—anything; they’ll all be flat, a course, but you can round em off with yer knife an they’ll look genuine hand-carved, an’ul take less’n a fifth a th time. But,” he warned, “you’ll hafta be careful an not saw a finger, an not let on to them Dalys what we’re doen—it’s againsa rules to use electricity in these gover’ment places fer anything but household use an they mightn’t—”
He turned quickly to shut off the motor when there was a banging on the kitchen screen, followed at once by the opening of the door; but it was only Enoch and Amos come in to beg popsicle money, for a popsicle bell was ringing only two alleys away now. They both began clamoring for Clovis to run the saw for them so they could see the manner of its working. This time he drew a heart, and cut it quick as cloth with scissors. Enoch nodded in approval. “I bet I could learn to run it,” he said.
Clovis considered, smiling, looking at first Gertie and then the boys. “Tell you what, we’ll start us a factory,” he said. “Yer mom can be th pattern maker; I’ll be toolmaker, tool-an-die man, an repairman; you, Enoch, can be machine operator; Clytie can run th trim department; an Amos—well, on jumpen-jack dolls, fer instance, he can be a ’sembly hand—run the strings through the holes.”
The boys laughed with pleasure. Enoch suggested that they put a sign over the bedroom door, “Nevels’ Wood-working Plant,” then at once wished it wasn’t against the rules and they could put it over the kitchen door for everybody to see; only it would be better to put No. I after the name so that people passing by would think there was more than one Nevels plant.
Gertie let Enoch and Amos each have a nickel; it was so hot and maybe the chunk of colored ice would keep them still until Clovis could drop off to sleep. He had to use ear plugs now with the windows open; they cut the noise, he said, but their strangeness made it harder for him to go to sleep, and sometimes loud noises straining through gave him nightmares.
There was a little time of peace while the children sat in the ever narrowing band of shade by the western wall and sucked their ice. Gertie frowned a moment at the jig saw that Clovis had put on a hall shelf, then turned abruptly away, her hungry fingers opening the knife in her pocket. It had been so long, almost a week ago, and then seemed like she couldn’t leave the fingers of the cupped hand. What did it hold? Was he just getting or just giving away? The answer was not in her head, but something for the knife to find, like the face buried in the wood.
The knife brought out a wrinkle in the knuckle joint of the little finger, but still she heard the crying of Mrs. Schultz’s baby, broken out with heat rash, like all the other babies. Gradually, however, the growing knuckle joint walled away the bedlam of children and machinery—even the shrill quarreling and screaming of a bunch of little girls playing house on Sophronie’s steps, and the screeching whoops of a gang of older ones having a water fight in front of the building across from her.
She worked on, though the Miller radio played mountain music with a loud, nosey twanging that she hated; Mrs. Schultz quarreled shrilly; and only a few feet from her front door, where the scraggeldy maple had finally died and the project office had unloaded sand in which the little ones were supposed to play, two mothers quarreled and seemed ready to fight over some trouble between their children. She glanced once toward the sand pile; most children got spanked if they dug there, since it was the favorite bathroom for all the alley cats and dogs and even some of the very small children; the older ones had tossed in rubble from the alleys and on the rubble had broken jars and bottles so that the place was unsafe for bare feet. Amos was not there, but in the house wall shade with Enoch. She started another wrinkle, and a child, nose pushed against the screen, said, “Whatcha doen, lady?”
“Tryen to whittle out a finger,” she said, but the child, a little boy in nothing but a pair of blue jeans with the legs torn off high above the knees, continued to watch and suck ice cream on a stick; others joined him at times, and then drifted away. She heard soon the hesitant opening of the kitchen door, then bare feet on the linoleum; and looked behind her to see a small one in nothing but his underpants, looking about him in mystification—the rooms, the walls, the furniture were exactly like what he had always known, but still it was not home. Gertie smiled, and the toddler went away. Once, there came low giggles and whispers, and she looked up to see legs dangling from the roof edge, and went and pulled their owner, about the size of Amos, down. “You’ll fall an git hurt, an ruin th roof into th bargain,” she said, and went back to work.
A few moments later Wheateye came screeching enough to wake
the dead, “Miz Nevels, th milkman’s horse has went to th bathroom inu next alley!” and Gertie, less for need of the manure than to quiet the child, got the scrub bucket and the little ash shovel and hurried down the hot alley and got the manure before Mr. Bommerinkoff, one alley over, got it for his flower beds.
She had buried the manure by the hollyhocks, told a picture selling woman she had no money, told a black-robed nun, “No,” when she came knocking, asking if anybody in the household had been baptized in the Catholic faith, and got back to the second knuckle of the little finger when she heard Enoch’s outraged, angry voice: “Naw, yu don’t. I won’t! It’s all a great big lie.”
“Who do yu think you’re calling liar, hillbilly?” a Daly voice asked.
“Don’tcha be a hitten that kid.” Gilbert Meanwell’s command was mixed in with the sound of a slap, followed by a scuffle.
Then all was drowned in Victor’s angry roar, “I gotta sleep.”
A moment later Enoch came banging through the screen door, red-faced and angry, forgetting to tiptoe, and keep his voice low. “Mom, ain’t it all a lie that less’n you wanta burn ferever in hell yu gotta have a priest to pray yer sins away?”
Gertie considered, her knife poised above the wood. Enoch had brought so many questions home, especially since school was out and he spent more time in the alleys; there’d been the words she didn’t know, like “wop” and “kike” and “shine” and “limey”; and why did big Chris Daly say hillbillies worshiped rattlesnakes? He’d never known anybody who worshiped rattlesnakes, and was it the truth that the public schools were never any good, with most of their teachers bad women?