She did not even wait for my old man to answer her. She just spun around toward Lucy, the girl my old man had brought along with him.
“You can have him,” Ma said, “but you’ve got to keep him away from here.”
“He told me he wasn’t married,” Lucy told Ma. “He said he was a single man all the time.”
“Single man!” Ma yelled.
She got red in the face again and ran to the fireplace for the poker. Our poker was about three feet long and made of thick iron. She jabbed it into the crack of the closet and pried with it.
My old man began to yell and kick in the closet. I never heard such a racket as when the dogs started their barking again. People who heard them must have thought robbers were murdering all of us that night.
About then Lucy jumped up, crying.
“Stop that!” she yelled at Ma. “You’re hurting him in that closet!”
Ma just turned around, swinging her elbow as she went.
“You leave me be!” Ma told her. “I’ll attend to what I’m doing, sister!”
I had to squirm all around to the other side of the bed to keep up with what they were doing at the closet door. I never saw two people carry on so funny before. Both of them were mad, and scared to do much about it. They acted like two young roosters that wanted to fight but did not know how to go about it. They were just flapping around, trying to scare each other.
But Ma was as strong as the next one for her size. All she had to do when she made up her mind was drop the poker, grab Lucy and give her a shove. Lucy sailed across the room and landed up against the sewing machine. She looked scared out of her wits when she found herself there so quick.
Ma picked up the poker again and she pried with all her might and, bang! the door sprang open. There was my old man backed up against the closet wall all tangled up in Ma’s clothes, and he looked like he had been taken by surprise and caught red-handed with his fist in the grocer’s cash drawer. I never saw my old man look so sheepish before in all my life.
As soon as Ma got him out of the closet and into the room she went for Lucy.
“I’m going to put you out of my house,” Ma told her, “and put a stop to this running around with my husband. That’s one thing I won’t stand for!”
She grabbed at Lucy, but Lucy ducked out of reach. Then they came back at each other just exactly like two young roosters that had finally got up enough nerve to start pecking. They jumped around on the floor with their arms flapping like wings and Ma’s bathrobe and Lucy’s skirt flying around like loose feathers. They hopped around in a circle for so long that it looked like they were riding on a merry-go-round. About that time they got their hands in each other’s hair and started pulling. I never heard so much screaming before. My old man’s eyes had just about got used to the light again, and he could see them, too, every once in a while. His head kept going around and around, and he missed a lot of it.
Ma and Lucy worked across the room and out the door into the hall. Out there they scuffled some more. While it was going on, my old man stumbled across the room, feeling for another chair. He picked up the first one he could put his hands on. It was Ma’s high-back rocker, the one she sat in all the time when she was sewing and just resting.
By that time Ma and Lucy were scuffling out on the front porch. My old man shut the door to the hall and locked it. That door was a thick, heavy one with a spring thumb lock as well as a keyhole lock.
“No use talking, son,” he said, sitting down on the bed and pulling off his shoes, “there’s nothing else in the world like a couple of females at odds. Sometimes—”
He slung his shoes under the bed and turned out the light. He felt his way around the bed, dragging Ma’s high-back rocker with him. I could hear the wood creak in the chair when he strained on the rungs. He pulled the covers up, then began picking the chair to pieces and throwing them toward the fire. Once in a while one of the pieces hit the mantlepiece; as often as not one of them struck the wall.
By then Ma and Lucy had got the dogs started again. They must have been out in the front yard scuffling by that time, because I could not hear them on the porch.
“Sometimes, son,” my old man said, “sometimes it appears to me like the good Lord ought never put more than one woman in the world at a time.”
I snuggled down under the covers, hugging my knees as tight as I could, and hoping he would stay at home all the time, instead of going off again.
My old man broke the back off the rocker and slung it in the dark toward the fireplace. It hit the ceiling first, and then the mantlepiece. He began picking the seat to pieces next.
It sure felt good being there in the dark with him.
XIII. Uncle Ned’s Short Stay
HANDSOME BROWN AND I had been down at Mr. Hawkins’ water-grinding grist mill almost all afternoon, and about an hour before supper time we started home with the sack of corn meal Mr. Hawkins had ground for us. Ma had sent us down to the mill right after dinner with a bushel of the white field corn Pa kept to feed Ida when Ida was behaving herself and not balking in the middle of the street or kicking the boards off her stall in the barn. While Handsome and I were putting the corn into the sack, Ma had told us to hurry back as soon as the meal was ground because she wanted to make some spoon bread for supper that night. Handsome and I were walking along the short cut through the vacant lot where the carnivals pitched their tents when they came to town and arguing about the baseball game the day before when our town team played the firemen’s team from Jessupville over in the next county and which had broken up in the sixth inning when one of the Jessupville firemen hit our town team catcher, Luke Henderson, on the head with a Louisville Slugger bat. Handsome said our town team catcher had scooped up a handful of dust when he thought nobody was looking and had thrown it in the Jessupville batter’s eyes just when the pitcher was winding up to throw the ball. I told Handsome a gust of wind had blown the dust and that Luke Henderson, who worked in the Squeeze-A-Nickel grocery store, did not have anything at all to do with it. We were still arguing over it when we started across the railroad tracks. A Coast Line freight train had stopped down at the Sycamore depot but we did not pay much attention to it except just to glance down there to see how many box cars the engine was backing into the siding beside the cotton gin. While we were standing on the track watching the engine and cars, we noticed that somebody was walking at a fast pace towards us. He was leaping over the crossties two at a time.
“We’d better hurry ourselves on home with this corn meal for your Ma,” Handsome said, pulling me by the sleeve. “You know what she said about wanting it to make some spoon bread for supper. You’d better obey your Ma.”
“Let’s wait and see who that is coming up the track in such a hurry,” I told him. “He’s waving at us to wait for him.”
“That’s just some old tramp who’ll take this sack of meal away from us if we don’t hurry and get on home like your Ma told us to do.”
Handsome began backing away. He took the sack off his shoulder and hugged it in both arms.
“You’d better listen to me and pay me mind,” Handsome said. “I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen plenty of them old tramps before and they don’t ever do nobody any good. That one coming up here ain’t out for no good, I can tell. You’d better come on home like I tell you.”
I waited where I was and in another minute the man got to where we were standing. He had been hurrying so fast he was all out of breath, and when he stopped, all he could do was just stand there and pant until his breath came back. He was about as old as Pa, but he moved around faster than my old man ever did, and he looked sort of wild-eyed and nervous. He was wearing a pair of old overalls that had a long rip down the front of one of the legs which looked as if it had been there a long time and that he had not had time to get it sewn up. There was a brand-new brown cap on the side of his head that looked as if it had just come out of a store somewhere. His shoes were all run-down, though, and I could see
his little toes sticking through the cracks. The holes were so large that his shoes looked as though each one was made in two pieces. There was a red and yellow bandana tied around his neck the same way brakemen on the Coast Line freights wore them to keep cinders from getting down their necks. He needed a shave worst of all, because his black whiskers were so long and bristly that they stuck out in all directions like the stickers on a cockleburr.
“Son,” he said, looking at me real hard, “ain’t you Morris Stroup’s boy, William?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered right away, wondering how he knew what my name was. “Yes, sir, that’s me.”
“Where’s your Pa?” he asked. “Where’s he at now?”
“Pa went to the country today to do some work at the farm,” I told him. “When he left, he said he wouldn’t be home till late tonight.”
“I’m your Uncle Ned,” he said, reaching out and getting a good hard grip on my shoulder. “Don’t you know me, son?”
“No, sir,” I said, looking at his black whiskers and twisting my shoulder to keep his grip from hurting so much.
“The last time I was here, you were just a little squirt,” he said, letting me go. “Maybe you were too young to remember your Uncle Ned.”
“I reckon I was,” I told him.
He turned and looked up the street towards our house.
“How’s your Ma these days?” he asked.
“She’s pretty well,” I said, still trying to remember ever seeing him before. Pa had a lot of brothers scattered all over the country, and I had never seen even half of them. Ma said most of Pa’s kin were better off staying where they were and that she did not want any of them coming to visit us. Once I had seen Uncle Stet, who worked on a chain gang off and on, but Ma would not let him come inside our house and after sitting on the front steps for about an hour once he got up and left and I never saw him again after that.
“Who’s that shine standing over there?” Uncle Ned asked, nodding his head at Handsome.
“That’s Handsome Brown, our yard boy,” I told him. “Handsome works around the house when there’s anything to do.”
“I’ll bet he ain’t never done enough work, all told, to earn a day’s board and keep,” Uncle Ned said. “Ain’t that right, boy?”
“I—I—I—” Handsome said, stuttering like he always did when he was scared. “I—I—”
“See?” Uncle Ned said. “What did I tell you? He ain’t even got enough energy to lie about it. All the work that shine’s ever done could be counted up and poured into a thimble. Ain’t that the truth, boy?”
“I—I—I—” Handsome said, backing away.
“He knows it ain’t worth the trouble to lie about,” Uncle Ned said, walking off.
He went about a dozen steps and stopped.
“Which way is the house, son?” he asked me.
“Whose house?” I said.
“Why, your Ma and Pa’s house, son,” he laughed. “You don’t reckon I’d come to town like this and not stop in and pay a call on you folks, do you?”
“Maybe I’d better go home first and tell Ma you’re coming,” I told him. “Ma might not like it if I didn’t go and tell her first.”
“No,” he said right away. “Don’t do that. It wouldn’t be a surprise if she knew all about it beforehand. The best way to surprise somebody is just to walk in when they ain’t expecting you. She might think she’d have to go to a lot of extra trouble if she knew I was coming before I got there.”
I started towards home with Uncle Ned right beside me. Handsome stayed behind and did not try to keep up at all. We crossed over the right-of-way and turned up our street. When we got almost there, I stopped and waited for Handsome to catch up with us.
“Handsome,” I called to him, “you go on first and give Ma the corn meal. Then after that, you can tell her Uncle Ned’s here.”
“I’ll give Mis’ Martha the meal,” Handsome said, walking sideways around Uncle Ned, “but I ain’t so sure about that other thing you told me. You’d better tell her your own self. Mis’ Martha might fly off and put the whole blame on me, and I declare I ain’t had nothing at all to do with it. I don’t want to get mixed up in trouble when it ain’t my fault.”
“What you talking about, nigger!” Uncle Ned said, stooping down and picking up a hand-sized rock. “Don’t you never talk back like that as long as you live! One more peep out of you like that again, and I’ll bash your head in with this rock! You hear me, nigger!”
“I—I—I—” Handsome stuttered.
“And quit that stuttering,” Uncle Ned said. “If there’s one thing in the world I can’t stand, it’s a stuttering nigger.”
Handsome backed away and ran through the gate into the backyard. After he had gone, we walked towards the house and Uncle Ned sat down on the front steps. I didn’t know what to do, because I was afraid he would get mad at me the way he had at Handsome if I did anything he didn’t like. I stood in the yard in front of the steps and waited.
“How big a farm has your Pa got in the country?” he asked me.
“It covers just one fair-sized hill,” I told him. “Pa raised a little corn and some peanuts on it last year, and that’s about all. Pa says he doesn’t have time to spend on it. Handsome Brown does some plowing on it once in a while, and that’s about all.”
“Stroups never were much for farming,” he said.
We waited to find out what Ma was going to do. During all that time there was no sound at all in the house, but that was because I figured Handsome still had not got around to telling Ma about Uncle Ned.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Morris,” he spoke up, “but I don’t reckon he’s changed much since the last time I saw him. How about your Ma, son? Is she about the same as ever?”
“I reckon so,” I told him, listening for her to make some sort of noise when Handsome told her about Uncle Ned.
“To sit here like this in the quiet of the evening you wouldn’t think there was a trouble in the whole world,” Uncle Ned said out loud to himself. “It sure is peaceful.”
I heard a door slam shut somewhere inside the house, and I knew Ma was on her way. I backed down the path away from the steps where Uncle Ned was sitting with his elbows propped up on his knees. In barely any time at all the screen door flew open, and Ma came out on the porch.
“Is that you, Ned Stroup!” she yelled.
Uncle Ned leaped off the steps just as if he had been jabbed with a pitchfork. He landed halfway between me and the porch.
“Now, wait a minute, Martha,” he begged, backing towards me and keeping the same distance between himself and Ma. “I just dropped in to pay a brotherly call on you and Morris. You can’t blame a man from honoring his blood-kin, now can you?”
“Don’t you stand there and try to claim any kin with me, Ned Stroup!” Ma shouted.
“Now, Martha, there ain’t no sense in me and you falling out over a little thing like kinship. I’m a changed man. I’ve had a long time to think things over, and I’ve decided I wasn’t always doing the right thing in life. I turned over a new leaf, Martha.”
“You get yourself out of my yard, Ned Stroup. I’m not paying heed to a single thing you say. I’m saddled by law to one Stroup, but there’s no power in heaven or earth strong enough to force me to put up with two of you Stroups. I’ve got my cross to bear as it is, and I’m not going to let it get any heavier.”
Uncle Ned hung his head and looked down at the ground. He wiggled one of his little toes through the crack in his shoe and stood there looking at it for a long time. All the time he was wiggling his toe, Ma just stood and glared at him.
“Maybe out of the kindness of your heart you could see fit to give me a bite to eat before you send me on my way,” he said slowly, glancing up at Ma from beneath his eyebrows and watching how she took it. “I’m a hungry man, Martha. I ain’t had a solitary bite to eat since early yesterday morning. You wouldn’t want to refuse anybody a bite to eat just so they
could stay alive, would you, Martha?”
“When did you get out of the pen this time?” Ma asked quickly.
“Why, only a few days ago,” Uncle Ned said, surprised. “How’d you know I’d been in the pen again, Martha?”
“Where else would anybody in his right mind expect you to be?” she said as quick as that.
Uncle Ned looked down at the ground and wiggled his little toe some more. Ma did not say anything else right away, and all the time she just stood there staring at Uncle Ned. After a while she raised her hand and brushed her eyes when she thought nobody saw what she was doing.
“Come on around to the kitchen door, Ned,” she said. “The Good Lord will never be able to say that I didn’t lend a helping hand, even though I know it’s not the right thing to do. I ought to be calling the town marshal to come and lock you up in the jail.”
She went back inside the house, latching the screen door so Uncle Ned could not follow her through the hall. After she had gone, he got up and walked around the corner of the house to the backyard. When we got there, Handsome was sitting on the kitchen steps; but when he saw Uncle Ned coming towards him, he jumped up and ran across the yard and sat down on the woodpile. I went inside while Ma filled a heaping plate of black-eyed peas and sausage. When it was ready, she handed it to me and nodded towards Uncle Ned outside on the steps.
I took the plate out on the porch and handed it to Uncle Ned. He did not say a word, but he looked up at me the same way Pa did sometimes when he wanted to tell me something but didn’t want to say it in words. I went over to the corner and sat down while he ate the peas and sausage. Presently Ma called me inside and handed me a cup of coffee to give to Uncle Ned.
After I gave him the coffee he took a long sip from the cup and looked up at me again.
“Son,” he said, “always be a good Stroup as long as you live. There’s no finer family in the whole world than us Stroups, and we don’t want nothing to happen that would make folks think we are a common run of humans like everybody else. Us Stroups haven’t got rich like some folks have, and sometimes some of us gets into a little trouble and have to go away for a spell to let things cool off, but taken all in all I don’t believe there’s a finer family anywhere in the country.”