It was just blustery bawling, Carleton thought. The truck wasn't going anywhere except to a garage. Nobody was going anywhere for overnight at least. Carleton wanted to slam the fat bastard's face, bloody his nose like his eye was bloodied, but knew he had better not, his quick temper had got him fired in the past. He wasn't young like Jack Dempsey had been getting started at sixteen, seventeen fighting in saloons out west, Christ he was thirty, and losing his teeth. Get on a recruiter's blacklist, you were dead meat.
“Hell, Franklin. Your old mother had got to have you, hadn't she?”
This wasn't Carleton talking, it was somebody else. Carleton was drifting back toward the truck. The women had torn off the tarpaulin, and were making a kind of tent there. It was raining harder now. And the red clay shoulder of the highway getting softer. Kids liked to run in the rain like dogs, but not adults. Carleton was shivering. Carleton heard another high-pitched scream. That was Pearl, was it? He said, “It's my fault. I shouldn't of let her come with me. I told her to stay home but she didn't listen.” By home he meant not his and Pearl's own home because they didn't have one, he meant his in-laws, but nobody would know. Carleton was fearful of crying. His lips were moving—“Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.” First time Pearl had had a baby, he'd broke down like a kid. So scared. He was a coward, that was so. He knew, there was danger of infection when a woman had a baby in such filth, everyone knew of babies that had died, and mothers burning up with fever, or hemorrhaging to death. “Carleton, she'll be all right. They're taking care of her. Carleton?” It was a woman named Annie: freckle-faced Irish: big motherly girl, in her late thirties but still a girl, breasts soft against Carleton's arm like they were loose inside her shirt. In the rain Annie looked like a wax doll, smiling at him with her mouth shut so he could not see her teeth. Red was smiling, too. Smiling hard and ghastly. And thumping Carleton's shoulder. Telling him it didn't make any difference to any baby that ever got born, whether it's a hospital or anywhere.
Carleton tried to say yes. “Them hospitals are treacherous,” a man was saying. “Sometimes they cut open the wrong people. Put you to sleep and you don't ever wake up. Ever been in a hospital?”
“Never was, and never will be,” Annie said. “They do things to women, you can bet. When they're doped up and laying there.”
Carleton heard the dog cries again. He was grateful for people close around him, talking to him and about him as if to create a wall of talk to protect him. There was Franklin looking repentant. Handing him a bottle. “Jesus, Walpole. You look like you need this more'n me.”
Carleton thanked him. Carleton raised the bottle to his mouth, and drank. Swallowing the sweet liquid fire he didn't hear Pearl's screams, so he drank more. Jerking his head to one side and then to the other like a horse trying to shake free his collar. “Naw, keep it,” Franklin said. “You need it more'n me.”
Kids were running wild, poking sticks through the slats of the hogs' truck. Hog squeals, and a stink of hog panic. Nothing smelled worse than hog shit, not even skunk. For skunk, at a distance, is not a bad smell at all. Only just close up.
Franklin was saying, “She oughtn't said those hurtful things to me. She oughtn't gotten herself riled up.” But he was sounding repentant, and Carleton could figure he wouldn't drive away and leave them at the side of a country highway in wherever this god-forsaken place was. Arkansas? Aw-kan-saw they pronounced it?
Carleton busied himself with the tow truck after all. Helping with other men to lift the truck out of the ditch, so the tow-truck man could position the hook better, and secure it. Behind, out of sight from this position, where Pearl was lying beneath the tented tarpaulin, thank God there was silence for a while.
And what if she died? And what if, and back home they would say of him He's the one who let his wife die. Died having a baby in a drainage ditch in Aw-kan-saw. Him. He wanted to protest, he had not meant for Pearl to come along with him this time; it was just something that had happened. If she died, he would die, too: he would get hold of a shotgun. Both barrels, you don't know a thing of what hits you. In the mouth, painless. If so he wouldn't have this terrible pressure on him like a tire being pumped up too high. He couldn't remember why he'd had to marry Pearl so bad. Crazy with love for her and she hadn't let him touch her, hardly. That was how she'd been brought up, and Carleton respected it. Vir-gin-ity. He was sure he loved her but love was—it was hard to say what love was— when you were so scared, and your teeth chattering. Maybe he had killed her, pumping himself into her so hard. Like hot molten wax, the stuff that leapt from him. It was an agony to hold it back, he could not hold it back. If God helped them this one more time, Carleton vowed he would quit this job he'd hired on for and return home, maybe not at once because they needed the money but by August possibly, they could return by Greyhound bus. He would work every minute of every day, do anything, he would get them all back home—Pearl, Sharleen, Mike, the new baby—before it was too late and they never knew they had a home.
“Carleton? It's a girl! Baby girl.”
“Carleton, come look!”
“Carle-ton!”
The women rushed at him. He was on his knees bawling. The baby born that day in red-clay Arkansas was a girl: they called her Clara, after Carleton's little sister who had died of scarlet fever at the age of four.
2
Back home in Breathitt County there was a wedding portrait of Carleton Walpole and his bride Pearl: Carleton tall, gangly-limbed yet handsome in his dark serge suit and stiff-collar white shirt, and Pearl standing barely to his shoulder, china-doll-pretty in her white silk-and-lace wedding dress and veil twined about her curled blond hair; both young people gazing intently at the camera as they'd been commanded by the photographer, eyes widened in the effort not to blink. They'd tried so hard, they'd forgotten to smile! The photograph had been taken just after the wedding service, in the anteroom of the church; a harsh winter sunlight had poured through a window, casting them in such clarity Carleton wanted to shield his eyes, looking at it afterward. He was self-conscious about pictures of himself but Pearl was so pretty, he'd liked to look at her. Until one day his mother remarked Butter wouldn't melt in that one's mouth and Carleton felt the sting, his mother hinting he'd married a too-young girl, an immature girl who detracted from his (and the Walpole family's?) dignity.
Carleton had turned on his heel and walked out of the room. You can love and honor your mother, but goddamn if you're going to tolerate any insult to your wife.
The photograph that was framed in a gilt sunburst pattern was still on the wall back home, but Pearl had brought along with them a dozen smaller photos from the wedding, hauled from place to place, month after month and eventually year after year amid her things. She liked to look at these on rainy days, and show them to the kids, telling of how beautiful the wedding had been, her sister and her cousins who were bridesmaids, how Brody relatives had driven from Nitro and West Hamlin, in West Virginia, and her mother's relatives from as far away as Portsmouth, Virginia—“On the Atlantic seaboard.” Pearl pronounced Atlantic seaboard reverently as if she were speaking of someplace far as the Milky Way.
Carleton, thumbing through Pearl's things when she wasn't around, stared at these old photos with scorn. Jesus! Him in a monkey suit. And not knowing better than to open his mouth when he smiled, showing those damn teeth. Yet he'd looked pretty good, considering he was only eighteen at the time and hadn't known his ass from a hole in the ground. Like he was staring into the future down one of those blacktop highways into the distance, and not flinching. But Pearl beside him was leaning into him as the photographer directed, her arm linked through his in a formal way nobody ever stood in real life. “Goddamn bastard.” Carleton meant the photographer, who had his so-called studio in Hazard. Acted like he was a big deal, charging a low fee for hillbillies that couldn't afford “premier” paper stock.
Hell, Carleton wasn't going to cry. Maybe it was sad that the young people in the picture no longer existed, but what reall
y hurt was him, Carleton, not being able to get back to that place: a few miles from his father's farm that was hundreds of miles away from where Carleton was now. At night before he sank into an exhausted sleep like a stone sinking through murky water he had to endure the flash of rows of beans or strawberries or sweet corn that made his fingers twitch before he'd be surprised by a circle of warmly smiling faces, adult faces of his family and relatives when he'd been a boy; and his dream might open up (the walls melting away like in a motion picture) to show him the vegetable garden, and the pear orchard, the barnyard with its old rotting rich-smelling haystack, and the hay barn itself—everything! All he'd lost. And his eyes would ache with the knowledge that he could not push through the density of sleep to get to this place.
He was too shamed to return. He had never repaid the money he owed, only just sending a few dollars at some time like Christmas, then ceasing. For a terrible time—a long season of drought, crops withered in the fields and fruit never matured in the orchards— Carleton and Pearl and the kids had to live in a derelict old hotel in Cincinnati, till at last their luck changed, and the “picking” trucks came in again, and they were saved. For another season at least.
It was a way to get by. You didn't save anything except pennies doing farm-hire work but there it was, and there was a comfort in it, in a way. Like eating the same food each day is a comfort, not only you don't have to think but your teeth, chewing, don't have to think nor your stomach digesting it. And the more kids you had old enough to make themselves useful, the better; not like factory work where some kind of child-labor laws ruled against you.
Early on, when they'd talked all the time of going back home, it was harder. Everything is harder if you compare what is with what was. That first summer in New Jersey they'd had Sharleen, put the infant down at the end of each row wrapped in a blanket in a box, so Pearl could check her and nurse her as they worked. Dusty and hot and the baby had cried in a thin rasping way like a sick cat. The foreman told Pearl to keep that baby in the cabin out of the sun so she'd done so, and one day had a premonition and ran a half-mile out of the tomato field and there was the baby sleeping and fretting in her cardboard box on the bed, and peering right in at her a rat sniffing at the baby's face! Pearl screamed so hard, the rat was out of there in a shot. When Carleton came in, there was Pearl just standing over the box, blinking and biting at her fingers. The baby was awake now, and crying. All Pearl could say was how stiff and pink the rat's tail had been. And its whiskers, so stiff. Carleton tried to suggest there had not been any rat, that was what you did with a high-strung female, but Pearl never forgot.
What Carleton knew of rats, they bred faster than rabbits and they had to tear and chew and grind their teeth because their teeth were growing continuously and would grow into their jaws if they didn't wear them down. Carleton shook his head, wondering. If God made things, He made them strange. It was proof that God was different from man because man would have made things sensible.
All this time Carleton Walpole was a young man. Seemed like being young just went on and on forever. Hard to believe you'd ever get old. (One day Carleton had word that his father, Carleton, Sr., was dead. Another day, that the farm had been sold piecemeal. Another day, the First Bank & Trust of Breathitt had shut its doors, gone bankrupt so none of its customers could collect a penny of their savings. After that Carleton never telephoned any relatives, sick to hear pity in their voices.) Young as he was, and one of the best farmworkers you could ask for, yet there was ever a crop of men younger and more willing. In taverns he fought them, bare-fisted or wrestling or both, except if Carleton was too drunk and had to be shielded by his friends. Wherever it was, he wouldn't recall afterward except they'd crossed the Mississippi River that day, he'd swung at some mush-mouthed southerner with a fox face that wanted breaking, and the guy shoved Carleton back stumbling against his friends saying, “Shit, I ain't gonna hit no old man. Hold that old drunk off me.”
3
Florida. On the day of that night that forever afterward he would think I have blood on my hands, Jesus has shook me off there was little Clara he loved like crazy, his best girl, his little-doll-girl coming up behind him and so carefully placing her cool just-washed hands over his eyes whispering, “Dad-dy got a head-ache?”
And he'd placed his big callused hands over hers and pretended he was a blind man saying he was blind as a bat, and knocking things over until Clara's giggling was becoming scared, and Pearl grunted at them what sounded like Damn fools and slammed down plates on the table for supper.
Five years after Aw-kan-saw. Five years and six days: Clara's fifth birthday, her daddy was mortified he'd forgotten.
Making up for it later, as Carleton Walpole would do.
Christ, was he tired! Hunched at the table spooning whatever it was into his mouth. Couldn't chew too well on the left side of his mouth anymore. Couldn't sit for long on any chair except if it had a pillow, goddamned hemorrhoids driving him crazy. The kids were bickering, Mike was banging his elbows on the table and Pearl was sullen and silent meaning getting ready to explode. Sharleen, his ten-year-old, was passing saucepans and platters. “Honey, thanks. Now set it down.” Steaming mashed potatoes, his favorite kind of potatoes. Never minded the lumps in them, it was a kind of chewing he could do, and enjoy. Pearl objected as Carleton brought a jug of hard cider to the table, not on the table but set on the floor at his feet. “Hell with you. A man has got to live.” Carleton wasn't sure if he'd said this aloud, but it struck him as funny like a wisecrack on the radio.
“Dad-dy forgot to wash!”—they were laughing at the rings of dirt around his neck.
Actually he missed the fields. You got into a rhythm, a way of moving. Mind gone dead. Peppers, cucumbers, squash. Snatch 'em off the vine, place 'em in the basket. Not fussing with getting under the leaves like fucking bush beans, pole beans, wax beans. Fuck onions that were worse, the stems breaking off in your hand if you got impatient.
“Sit still. Sit up. Mind your milk.” Pearl spoke with deceptive quiet to Clara. “Hear me, Clara: Mind your milk.”
For sure, Clara was going to overturn her milk glass. It was a matter of waiting.
Carleton eyed Pearl warning Don't you touch my daughter, I'll break your ass. Trouble was, Pearl didn't catch these signals like she'd used to. Pearl ground her jaws, and picked at the scabs on her face and neck, hummed to herself and even rocked back and forth like some kind of mental case, in such a state she wasn't fearful of Carleton, Christ he was fearful of her.
Five children now, and one of them a seven-month baby. What you call an infant. Nursing, and fretting and crying half through the night. Driving their neighbors crazy, and Carleton couldn't blame them for banging the walls. With each baby Pearl was getting stranger, sometimes Carleton swore her eyes hadn't any pupils, all iris, like a cat's. All she seemed to like were the new babies, but only when she nursed them. Humming and rocking and stroking the baby's soft thin-haired head in a way that repelled Carleton, like something sick and disgusting he couldn't give a name to.
How Pearl got pregnant, damned if he knew. She'd keep him off her with both feet, the soles of her hot little feet, if she caught him in time.
Pale blond hair stiff with grease, and the back of her head balding in patches from the damn ringworm. Still, if she fixed herself up she looked pretty, or almost. In the fields, on the bus (they traveled now by bus, and it wasn't bad), people looked at Pearl in a certain way that drove Carleton wild. Don't you feel sorry for me you assholes. Carleton had his women friends to console him, also he consoled himself, a woman gets a little crazy every time she has a baby and Pearl has had five babies so maybe she will grow out of it.
There's a philosophy that says: No point in preparing for trouble because unexpected things will happen instead.
There's a philosophy credited to Charles Lindbergh that says: No point in preparing for disaster (like a crashed plane) because another kind of disaster (your baby kidnapped) will happen instead.
Carleton lifted his cider jug, and drank.
Sometimes, Pearl was extra-vigilant watching the kids at the table, almost hoping (you could see!) for one of them to knock a glass over, or drop their food from their mouths. Other times, and these were maybe worse times, Pearl was dreamy and not-hearing in their midst. The kids could kick one another under the table and Pearl didn't give a damn so it was left to Carleton, and he had a temper.
“Next month, we're going to Jersey by ourselves.” Carleton was picking his teeth. Making his announcement to Sharleen and Clara, now that Mike had run outside and Pearl was staring at something on the floor. (What? A rat? No rat. Nothing.) Carleton spoke carefully, quietly. It was his Daddy voice. It was not a voice you contested. At night when he was done for the day and he was free of them, spending an hour or two in a tavern or with a woman, his voice was normal as anybody's: he liked to joke, and he liked to laugh. It was a hard youngish harsh voice that nonetheless liked to laugh. But here in the cabin, so hot sweat ran in rivulets down his naked sides, he never spoke in that voice.
“Up there there's no spic bastards. ‘Wetbacks.' ”
Clara was reaching for her milk glass. Carleton caught it just in time.
“Dad-dy? Where is ‘Jer-sey'?” “Up north. Way north. Where there's snow.” “Hell, we ain't gonna see no snow.” Sharleen made her lips swell outward in a way Carleton hated, reminded him of a baboon.
Sharleen was a thin, nervous, sallow child with scabs on her arms and legs. Pesticide burns, Carleton thought they were, or fleabites, except they were hard and thick and she was always picking them off making them bleed to form new scars. She had a rat-quick face, narrow little eyes you couldn't judge were mischievous or malicious.
“Hey, there: that ain't nice, contradictin your daddy.”
Carleton spoke pleasantly. But Sharleen took warning.