“Son,” Gertie began, unable to hold her conniving silence longer.
“Why, Mom,” Enoch spoke with conviction, “they’re all full a nail holes an—well, kinda splintered, yu know,” and he looked at her, his face smooth as half melted butter, then turned and ran toward the spot to which he had pointed.
The man looked after him an instant, then turned to Gertie. “Smart kid, yu got. Kindlen wood he bought off me—sold it fer fence pickuts.” He waved toward a pile of wood topped by a sign. “No more,” he said.
Gertie considered the sign, Fence Pickuts Cheep 10¢ a Piece. It was the same kindling wood they had bought last winter, paying twenty-five cents for the red wagon heaped full—that much now would be a dollar—worth more now because the people needed them to build little fences that would hold babies out of the alleys or dogs away from flower beds. She remembered now that seemed like back when she was sick, Enoch had had a lot of money to spend on the fence and that he had been gone a lot with the wagon. “But you buy em fer scrap still,” she said, looking hard at the man, “an th youngen thought it up hissef.”
He smiled and shook his head. “I don’t buy nothen; I git paid fu trucken u stuff outa du plants; you gotta git it out—fire laws.” He squinted one eye at the wagon, and said: “That wagon full a whatcha kid wants—one dollar. S’good wood—gover’mint grain bins—solid maple, boards morticed, glued; corners screwed. Splintered? Naw.” He smiled faintly. “Maple fudu army horses—cardboard fudu gover’mint workers—u wagon load, one dollar. An I don’t loan hammers er screwdrivers.”
Gertie nodded, smiling a little. “Okay,” she said, and took the wagon to the pile. He came to watch, and his face continued expressionless as she after a survey of the grain bins, which were in truth of solid maple, or morticed and glued boards, screwed at the corners, but so big that one would have more than filled the wagon, took her knife; and using the little blade loosened screws until the boys could turn them with their fingers. The boards, being truly sawed and straightly seasoned, stacked well. She continued to take the boxes apart until they were stacked on the wagon as high as Amos’s head, stopping then only because she was afraid the wagon might break down.
They were hardly off the through street before children came flocking around to know why they hauled so much kindling wood in the summertime; and Gertie, though she hated herself, kept silent when Enoch explained that they had just happened to find a good bargain in boards that his mother liked to keep handy to mend the fence or make “hand-carved” dolls. Once home, Enoch couldn’t wait to try out the jig saw on the new boards, and kept teasing Gertie to draw some pattern—a doll, a chicken, or a Christ, anything to try out the jig saw.
Gertie, more for amusement than anything, carried the scissors, some newspapers, and a pencil out to the kitchen stoop, shaded now in the late afternoon. There, with a slab of government grain bin across her knees, she set to work on a pattern, but at once a child came begging to borrow the scissors, another wanted the pencil, and one, a small stranger, pulled and tore the newspapers until she must send Enoch for more. All the while there were at least a dozen bigger ones, barefooted, hair plastered, dripping from play with the hose, swarming round her, asking questions, trampling the flowers, jiggling her hands, her knees, their hot wriggling bodies pressed against her shoulders when they tried to see what it was she did; for an instant the longing for silence and aloneness made her forget what it was she had tried to do.
She could think only of what she would do after supper, when there were no delivery trucks and few cars about so that the children could play in the alleys with less danger; she would then walk up to Cassie, a short way on up the through street and across another railroad. She would be alone, but even then there would be people, the strange people who ever added to her loneliness, for the living crowded round the ever more crowded dead.
She roused; somewhere a child cried, a lonesome cry, frightened; maybe another lost one; lost children were always wandering by her door. She saw him then, all alone on her coalhouse roof, a fat, white-headed, black-eyed child, his sun-bleached hair so much lighter than the rest of his fat sun-burned body that in spite of his weeping he made her feel that a jumping-jack doll patterned after him would make a baby laugh.
She sent Enoch and Mike Turbovitch away with him to find his home, which Mike was certain was four alleys over, then went to work on a pattern fashioned in his likeness, trying as she worked to answer at least a few of the questions. “Whatcha gonna do? Yu gonna whittle?” “Lemme see yu knife. Yu gonna make a cross?” while somewhere a little boy wailed, “Please, lady, lemme go tuyu bathroom. I just gotta.”
Clovis gave up trying to sleep, for with the sun beating in from the west the house was like a bake oven, and he like most of the other night workers was covered with sweat and bleary-eyed. He tried lolling on a pallet in the shade of the house wall, but the children, the noise, the flies, and mosquitoes drove him within doors. He lingered behind the screen door and watched her attempts at pattern making, reminding her there was no need for a lot of pieces; joints at the knees and elbows maybe, and even the waist, but no need to make a floppy head and hands as in the ones she had whittled; oh, yes, and she mustn’t make a lot of little fingers, for the saw wasn’t fine enough for such work. He said no more, for Enoch, returned from taking the child home, made a great hissing, and Clovis remembered he mustn’t speak of the saw before the children.
She’d wanted to work more on the pattern; it didn’t look a bit like the child, but Enoch in his eagerness rushed with it to Clovis for sawing when she had to stop work to get supper. Clovis took the saw and wood into the bedroom, turned up the radio until recordings of Bing Nolan flooded the alley. Bing Nolan was still not finished when Enoch, with Clovis behind him, came with the doll, sawed, bored with holes, strung, and jumping on a shoestring.
Gertie cried out at its ugliness, but when she saw how hurt Clovis was by her hard words she tried to make him feel better. “When I git his face an his hands an his body kinda whittled out, he won’t look so bad.”
“Law, Law, Gert,” Clovis said, too pleased that the contraption had worked to be real quarrelsome, “you jist want somethen you can make ina hurry an sell cheap; they could be money in sich. Sell em, say, around Christmas; that hand carven takes too long ever to make much; I’d say about all this needs is to git that ole paint off an put on some more—real bright.”
“Paint?” Gertie cried. “Cover up that pretty wood?” and she put the forkful of salmon salad she had lifted to her mouth back onto her plate.
Nobody noticed. At mention of the word “paint,” Enoch had gone into an animated discussion with Clovis on the various colors of paint they would buy and use. Then Clovis remembered they couldn’t get paint at the grocery store and it would take cash. “I can mebbe make some more money pretty soon—if I can think up somethen like th pickets; but I bet Mom’s got a little cash,” Enoch said.
“Mebbe,” Gertie answered, “they’ll be a little bit left frum Cassie’s marker.”
A silence fell on them all, and Enoch spread his elbows on the table as if noticing that, from having once been crowded, there was a whole side for each tonight; but he would, by widening himself, hide the emptiness from his mother. All were glad when Clytie came, running up the steps, pleased because she’d earned four dollars baby sitting for a woman whose little boy, in the hospital with rheumatic fever, was so sick the nurses let her stay with him all day. Clytie was full of talk about the home, a private in the same neighborhood as Iva Dean’s and with the prettiest yard. The woman had given her a great bunch of blue delphinium and red columbine, and Clytie before she sat down fixed a bouquet for the kitchen table.
Amos complained that it took up too much room, and Clytie chided him, “Yu need flowers worse in a little ole smelly place like this than in a big pretty place; that’s what Mrs. Schultz says.” She turned to her mother. “Mom, it’s too late now, but next year could’ntcha fix up some window boxes like Mrs.
Schultz; it keeps u flowers away frum u kids. An when her window’s open it’s like haven um right inu house.”
Gertie nodded. “I been thinken on it.” She added, smiling a little: “Mebbe I’ll have a garden. They’s a woman two alleys over’s got little tiny onions.”
“Chives,” Clytie corrected.
“An some lettuce an some curledy stuff.”
“Parsley,” Clytie explained. “But still, I wanna put th garden in front u th bathroom an flowers fer th kitchen.”
“An where’ll we have th corn crop?” Clovis asked, smiling in spite of the sweat running into his eyes.
“Under th west winder so’s it’ll shade us,” Enoch said, and they all laughed a little.
THIRTY-TWO
THE STICKY HEAT WORE on, and tempers grew even shorter. Riot weather, Mr. Schultz the fireman called it; for with most people unable to sleep or even stay in their stifling, overcrowded homes, streets and parks, like the alleys, were continually crowded with weary, sleepy, trigger-tempered men, women, and children. Quarrels, and even fights, were constantly flaring up between the grownups as well as the children. Gertie’s own boys quarreled, cried, and fought; more than one mother screeched at her in hysterical scolding for some wrongdoing of her children, usually about some little thing that in a cooler, calmer time would have passed unnoticed.
Still, Gertie, like many of the others, minded the heat, the fights, the never ceasing noise of the children less than the silence of the forever patrolling policemen who in the “riot weather” watched the people more closely. They drove more slowly and more often through the alleys now, never speaking, not even nodding to any one save Mr. Daly and Casimir the iceman; but always watching, hunting with their hard, unsmiling eyes.
Late one hot afternoon, when all the children were in the alleys, two cops in a scout car, patrolling an alley not far from Gertie’s, had to stop the car so that one could get out and move a tricycle left in the middle of the alley. The cop in his anger hurled the toy over a fence; it landed in a marigold bed, and barely missed a baby in a pen, or so all who saw it said; two women—the tricycle owner and the baby’s mother—rushed from their stoops and bawled out the cops. The racket had caused a small dog, a little harmless, flop-eared thing that Gertie had fed more times than one, to come barking from still another unit. The dog had been so noisy and so little that the children, coming in an ever growing swarm, had laughed to see it take the part of the women against the big, surly cops.
In front of the laughing children, one of the cops had fired three shots into the dog, but by then so many children had gathered he wouldn’t shoot any more; a vicious dog, both cops had answered to the enraged and sorrowful outcries. They had driven away, and left the dog to die all through the long hot afternoon; it had at first run round and round, dragging its fly-covered intestines and spreading blood, lying still only when its legs could no longer hold it up—but always it had whined and cried. And all around were the watching children, many crying like the dying dog; others cursing the cops, the black words flying up in loud boldness, the speakers knowing that no mother would chide now for dirty talk.
Nobody had had the heart to kill the little dog in front of the children; and as always, in the crowding and the heat, it was the children who got hurt the worst. In the heat everybody fussed at them; nobody wanted a gang of kids close by with a ball to break windows or a hose to wet babies, and no matter what they did their noise was always awakening babies and night-shift workers.
Gertie grew to look forward to the long twilights, when there was usually a bit of coolness outside; and during the lingering half-darkness, when there were no delivery trucks and fewer passing cars, the children played more freely. All, even big girls like Clytie and Maggie, joined in great games of hide and seek or kick the can, while their elders, with the babies, sat on the stoop steps or, like Gertie, worked among their flowers.
The children’s tumult of calling and laughter drowned all other sounds but those of the trains and the loudest airplanes, dying only after the long twilights had thickened into darkness, and hurrying mothers and fathers with worried voices had gone up and down the alleys calling—Mary, Joseph, Rudolph, Casimir, Rita, Teddy, Herman, Josephine, Jesse, Sharon, David, Julius, Geraldine, Zigmund, Waleria, Theresa, Emil, and a Zygmunt forever answering from the next alley on.
It was Zygmunt’s mother who, one twilight when Gertie was watering the asters, lingered after listening to the answer of her son, and said, with a little headshake, “Ain’t ut awful, dut atom bomb?”
Gertie nodded, vaguely remembering family talk of news on the radio and in the paper; but in spite of the bomb and the heat and the swarming children and the watching policemen, she’d been lost for most of the day in the block of wood. She was working now on the empty hand, the one held palm downward above the other; the slow cogitations on how the fingers of the empty hand should be, followed her always, and were with her now among the flowers. She roused enough at last to wonder, but the woman had gone on, hunting her child.
A few minutes later Wheateye stood on the coalshed and took a paper sack of water, colored red and mixed with Jell-O to make it stick, and dropped it on a little Miller’s head; and when he ran screaming home, uncertain himself that the gooey red stuff streaming over him wasn’t blood, Wheateye called after him: “Don’t cry, honey; don’t cry. You’ve been hit by u atom bomb.”
Gilbert, pulling the Schultz baby in an orange crate, sneered, “When yu’ve been hit by u atom bomb, silly, yu don’t cry.”
But Enoch, swinging on the wire that braced the telephone pole, thought differently. “Why, yu know they’d be some wot cried. I figger that ole bomb jist kills th ones real close right away; them on u edge gits bad burnt an crawls around awhile—Mom, recollect back home when we’d git rid a th tater bugs by knocken um off into a can with coal oil in it, then when we’d git a lot we’d drop a lighted paper inu can? You allus wanted u big fire an burn em all up right quick; but no matter how big a fire we’d have they’d be some that’d jist git scorched, an they’d crawl like crazy ever which away till they died. They’d be bad swinged, but they couldn’t die—not right away. Now, I figger them Japs around u atom bomb is kinda like them bugs.”
“Mebbe so,” Gertie said, and though she had meant to water Victor’s flowers she shut off the hose and went to the block of wood.
There was another atom bomb; then a few days later the train bells rang again and the car horns blew for the ending of the war. Gertie was sitting on her stoop taking the old paint off the leg of a jumping-jack doll sawed from a piece of government grain bin; she paused a moment, startled by the noise, then, understanding, she tried to work more swiftly. She’d need dolls to sell, now; Clovis most likely wouldn’t have a job tonight; but job or no, the hands would still come reaching, this week, next week, and all the weeks after. The Tipton Place was waiting still. If only she had stayed and held out against her mother for these few months only, Clovis would be coming back to them—back to all of them—Cassie maybe the first to go running to meet him, with Reuben as always lagging behind, but even he, hurrying a little, to see the new truck, a good secondhand truck, paid for with all the money they’d saved; and the farm all their own, and—
She could not be still, and remembering only to call Amos, she walked blindly through the alleys, the sawed doll’s leg gripped in her sweaty hand. She walked a long time, took many turnings, and seldom answered the children. “Yu maken a doll, Lady?” “Some time, Lady, make me a horsy.” “Yu gotcha man finished, Lady?”
Many grownups spoke to her. A few said: “Well, wotta yu know? It’s over,” and often they mentioned by name some friend or kin who would be home; others sighed, and also spoke a name, but said, “It come too late for him.” Most, however, had thought only for the future, asking, “Recken everting’ull shut down now?” or, “When u soldiers all come back tudu rightful jobs, somebody’s gonna be laid off.” The woman with the cactus, her husband behind her on the stoop, ba
ndages still on his eyes, said, “I don’t guess a woman can ever find a job, now”; and in her voice, as in all the other voices, Gertie could hear no rejoicing, no lifting of the heart that all the planned killing and wounding of men were finished. Rather it was as if the people had lived on blood, and now that the bleeding was ended, they were worried about their future food.
Dust and heat and weariness turned her homeward at last. As she went into her own alley she saw a little knot of women congregated by her gate, and walking on, she heard Mrs. Daly’s shrill but troubled whisper, “Don’t youse be laughing and carrying on; it’ll make her feel worse.”
Gertie hesitated, stiffened; she had ever hated pity; she didn’t want it now—let them be joyful; it could not darken her sorrow. She went slowly on up to the women as Mrs. Schultz, some sewing in her hands, one foot moving the carriage with the whimpering baby, said: “Butcha know she’s glad it’s over; things will maybe get cheaper now and a down payment won’t have to be so big on a house—and won’t they let her go home now? I’ve heard they had a place in California.”
“No, I live in—” Gertie was beginning, when Mrs. Daly turned to her.
“I wonder,” the little woman said, “wouldju mind to give me some flowers—a bouquet—fu her?” and she jerked her head backward toward the unit next her own where Mrs. Saito lived.
“But wouldn’t they make it—well, you know, seem like a funeral—flowers?” Mrs. Schultz asked, whispering like the others.
Mrs. Daly firmly shook her head. “I tink she’d like um. Her kid said something once about flowers back home in California.”
Mrs. Schultz looked at her baby, and gave a little shiver. “I wonder if her people—got the bomb, or was she just—well, crying for them all.”
“Watsa difference?” Mrs. Daly asked. “T’other night when u first bomb fell, an I wasn’t right certain her was crying—that is, I wasn’t certain right away—I got tu thinking—that is, when I was certain. I ain’t never seen mu mudder’s country, onie what she’d tell to me, but—”