Stories of Erskine Caldwell Page 13

  All that was before those quick movements when she looked at me once more, and left. It was the last of them all. There was nothing more to come afterward. Everything else had been before, and now it had happened. The rail was before us. Her hands were resting on it, then gripping it tightly, so tightly that the tips of her fingers became white. A tightening of her fingers over the varnished rail was the beginning of it all. Nothing had happened until then. I can’t lie about this thing.

  The lights on the shore were a long way off. They were farther away than ever. There was no background of land, only the dim lights hanging over the foreside like fireflies caught and pinned to the bare limbs of weather-whipped trees.

  She did not say she was going. We knew that. She did not pause to remind me of herself. She did not expect me to think of her as one who was going. That’s all it was. She had been standing beside me this moment, the next she was gone. It was a moment of unhurried simplicity. She leaned over the rail, far over, balancing herself before my eyes. Then with no effort, only the weight of her unbalancing body to carry her, she went over the boatside out of sight.

  I could have stopped her. Of course I could have stopped her. I am not denying that. And lies could be told about that, too. But I can’t lie about it. I did not try to stop her. My hands did not move. But who would have wished to stop her? Is there anyone who would have done that? Only a coward would have grasped her, held her, and called for help. But we do not wish to be cowards, I’m sure of that. And I know. I was there. That’s why I’m so certain about it. Only a coward would have caught her and pulled her away from the rail. But we do not want to be cowards. We try our hardest to keep from it. All of us wish to be brave, and we try our best to be above cowardice. We believe we are brave, and we attempt to act the part.

  I was brave. I let her go. I stood with my arms within reach of her, watching her go. I even had to move my left arm out of the way so she could go. If I had not moved it out of the way, she would have had to exert herself to get past me. So I stood there, brave, watching her go over the boatside. When she had gone, I began to count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven —

  What was it she had said about her husband? Something about his hair. Its color. Blond. His hair was blond. She had told me that. But what was the color of her hair? She had not told me that. I had seen it with my own eyes. What was it? Blond? No. Brown? No. Red? No. Black? No. Then what was it! I don’t know. I can’t remember. I’ve forgotten. But it was her color. That was all it should have been. That is enough.

  I was counting — forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine — fifty! That’s enough. She has gone. Gone!

  What were all those things I could have done? The things I might have done? There were so many I can’t recall most of them now. But it doesn’t matter. But do something! Jump after her? No. Call for help? No. What then? Nothing! I did not want to become a coward. I was not afraid to see a woman die. If she was not afraid to die, why should I be afraid to witness the death? Only the brave can take themselves into death. Life is too precious for the most miserable of us — when we are cowards. Only the brave can walk to death without a blindfold. The cowards fight for the last breath, for the last glimpse, for the final touch. Cowards do not wish to die. But she was not afraid. Then why should I be afraid to witness her death? Am I a coward beside a brave woman? She did not expect me to be a coward. I could not deceive her.

  Oh, I might have done many things. I could first of all have stopped her from going. Then what? Notify the Captain? Report it to the police at the dock? Make an effort to reach her husband through the newspapers? Why? Why should I have done anything? The death of a brave woman could not make me become a coward.

  The time to act was when she had leaned over the rail. Before she went over. But I didn’t. I wanted her to feel her happiness in the act. We are only happy when we can do the thing we desire above all others. I was not afraid to stand and watch her. I was afraid to be a coward in the presence of a brave woman, a woman who was not afraid to be happy for a few moments.

  That was all. And now this doesn’t make much sense. The words are a jumble. The sounds they make are sometimes loud, sometimes soft. None of them is of any importance whatever. Only feeling matters. It is of that which has been told. I have been telling of feeling, the quiver of her heart against my heart.

  (First published in Pagany)

  Squire Dinwiddy

  MY WIFE AND I moved to the country toward the end of June, hopefully looking forward to a long restful summer in the Connecticut hills. But we soon discovered that we had been overly optimistic. It seemed that we were too far back in the hills to interest maids, housemen, or even tree surgeons. Nobody from the agencies wanted to work that distance from Stamford or Bridgeport.

  We had been doing our own housework for a week when we looked up one morning while cooking breakfast to see a big shiny black limousine drive up and stop. A Negro man about thirty years old and wearing what appeared to be the remnants of a ragbag after it had been picked over came around to the kitchen door and knocked lightly.

  “Good morning, boss,” he said, peering through the door. “How you folks making out?”

  My wife was all for sending him away without more ado, but by that time he had opened the screen door and had stepped into the kitchen.

  “Good morning,” I replied civilly. “Lost?”

  “No, sir, boss,” he said, his lips rolling back from two neat rows of the whitest teeth I had ever seen. “I’m right here. I ain’t lost one bit.”

  “What do you want?” my wife asked him.

  “I’se come to take hold,” he said.

  “Take hold of what?” I asked, concerned.

  “Take hold the work, boss,” he answered, grinning.

  “Who sent you?” my wife and I asked simultaneously.

  “Nobody sent me,” he said. “I just heard about it and come.”

  My wife and I looked at each other, each wondering if the other were going to be able to think of something to say. Our attention was drawn back to the Negro when he opened the screen door and shooed a stray fly out of the kitchen.

  “What can you do?” my wife asked at last.

  “Anything you or the boss wants done, Missy,” he said respectfully. “Eating, drinking, clotheses, driving, laundering — anything at all. Now, you folks just go sit down in comfort at the table and make yourself feel at ease, and I’ll have your breakfast in front of you in no time at all. I’ll fix up my extra special omelette and see how you folks take to it.”

  We moved toward the dining room.

  “How much do you want in wages?” I asked.

  “Would it hurt you to pay fifteen a week, boss?”

  “Well,” I said hesitatingly, “maybe we can stand it.”

  “I’ll take thirteen and a half,” he said almost obligingly, “if that’ll help you out any.”

  We backed through the door.

  “What’s your name?” my wife asked.

  “Squire,” he said, grinning until his white teeth gleamed from ear to ear. “Squire Dinwiddy.”

  When my wife and I reached the hall, we stopped and looked at each other questioningly for a moment. All we could do was to nod our heads.

  “Squire,” I called through the door, “now that you’ve got a new job, don’t you think you ought to return that limousine to your former employer —”

  “Boss,” he spoke up proudly, “that there’s my machine. I’se the lawful solitary owner.”

  We backed carefully into the dining room, watching our step.

  All went well until one morning about a week later. It happened to be the Fourth of July. My wife and I had been out late the evening before, and at seven o’clock we were sound asleep. But not for long. There was a terrific explosion on the lawn just outside our window. I rushed from bed, threw open the screen, and looked out. There squatted Squire Dinwiddy, holding a lighted match under the fuse of the biggest firecracker I had ever seen. The fuse began to
spew, and Squire dashed away and got behind a tree. The salute went off, charring the grass and blowing a hole in the earth. My wife screamed.

  “Squire!” I yelled. “What are you doing?”

  Squire stuck his head cautiously around the trunk of the tree and looked up at me in the window.

  “It’s the Fourth of July, boss,” he said, grinning happily. “Did you forget all about that?”

  “No, I didn’t forget,” I said. “And it’s not up to you to remind me at this time of morning, either.”

  “I still got one more to shoot off, boss,” Squire said, striking a match and setting the fuse on another giant cracker to spewing.

  “Hold your ears!” I shouted to my wife just in time.

  The cracker went off while Squire was still running from it. When the report sounded, it caught him by surprise, and he jumped two feet off the ground. Then he stopped and looked around.

  “It makes celebrating best when they go off when you ain’t expecting them to, don’t it, boss?” he said, grinning up at the window.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Three weeks later, just when we had accustomed ourselves to Squire’s manner of running the house, he came in one morning and said he was sorry to have to do it, but that he had to go away for several days on a business trip.

  We were upset by his sudden announcement, and my wife protested vigorously.

  “Can’t you postpone your trip for a while, Squire?” she said. “We can’t get anybody to take your place on such short notice.”

  “I’m sorry about the notice I didn’t give,” Squire said apologetically, “but the time crept up on me while I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “At least,” my wife said, “you can wait a day or two. Maybe by then we —”

  “No, ma’am!” he said, emphatically, “I just naturally can’t wait. I’se got to be in Washington by six o’clock this very day.”

  “Six o’clock!” I said. “How do you expect to get to Washington by six o’clock!”

  “On the plane, boss,” he said. “I’se flying down on the two o’clock plane from New York.”

  My wife and I looked at each other helplessly.

  “That costs a lot of money, Squire,” she said, hoping to discourage him. “Do you realize what it costs?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Squire said, “but I add it to my expenses.”

  “What expenses?” I asked. “What expenses are you talking about?”

  “The expenses of doing business,” Squire said.

  My wife and I stared at each other bewilderedly.

  “What kind of business?” I asked, wondering.

  “I kind of forgot to mention it to you, I reckon,” Squire said sheepishly. “I has to go to Washington once every month to collect the rents.”

  “What rents?” I asked. “Whose rents?”

  “My rents,” he answered. “I’se got twenty-seven families living in my tenaments down there, and I can’t afford to let the rents fall behind. The rents just can’t be collected, not in Washington, noway, if you let them run over. Because the renters will let you get an eviction against them, and after that they have the law on their side. They don’t have to pay the past-due rent at all after that. So that’s why I never let the renters get that far along. I stay just one jump ahead of what they’re thinking in their heads down there while I’m up here.”

  My wife and I could only stare at Squire for a long time after he had finished. He began to grin then, his lips rolling back from his straight white teeth.

  “Why, that makes you an absentee landlord, Squire,” I said finally, shaking my head.

  “It sure does, boss,” he said, his whole face agrin. “That’s why I’m taking the plane this afternoon. I don’t aim to be absent when the rents come due. No, sir, boss!”

  Squire bowed, backing toward his shiny black limousine with the silver speaking tube. He grinned broadly as he got in and started the motor. As he rolled away, he stuck an arm out and waved to us.

  “Good-by, boss!” he called. “I’ll be right back again as soon as I collect the rents!”

  We raised our arms and waved until he was out of sight. After that we turned and stared at each other, wondering what there was to say.

  (First published in Esquire)

  Picking Cotton

  ABOUT AN HOUR after sunrise every morning during the cotton-picking season, people began coming towards the Donnie Williams farm from all directions. They came walking over the fields from four and five miles away, following the drain ditches, wading waist-high through the brown broom sedge in the fallow land, and shuffling through the yellow road dust. They came in pairs, in families, and in droves.

  There were nearly five hundred acres of cotton to gather, and the Williamses were paying fifty cents a hundred pounds. Besides that, though, there were good-sized watermelons for every man, woman, and child, both white and colored, at dinnertime. Everybody liked to pick cotton at the Donnie Williams place, even though some of the farmers who could not find enough hands were offering seventy-five a hundred pounds, and even up as high as a dollar a hundred. But none of them had free watermelons for everybody.

  Even though everyone liked to pick cotton for Donnie Williams, it was unusual to find the same people in the fields for two consecutive days. A man, with his family, would work for Donnie a day, and then stay at home a day to pick his own crop, or to just lie around the house and rest. Then there were the drifters who never stayed at one farm longer than a day. They had no homes to go to at night, so they slept in field houses and went to the next farm the following day. There were always new pickers arriving, and usually there were just as many people coming as there were leaving.

  It had become a custom at Donnie Williams’s place for the pickers to work in pairs. Donnie had tried out all kinds of schemes to get his crop gathered as quickly as he could before the price began to fall, and he had found out that people could, and would, pick better if they worked in pairs. Sometimes, otherwise, when there were crowds of twenty and thirty together, all of them would stop picking to laugh at a joke, and stand up to talk with the others. Ten or fifteen minutes wasted of every hour cut down the number of pounds a man could gather in a day, and Donnie was trying to get his crop through the gins as soon as possible.

  I sometimes paired off with a Negro boy named Sonny. He and I had a lot to talk about, because he worked as houseboy for Mrs. Williams when he was not needed in the fields, and he knew a lot that I was anxious to hear.

  Three or four times I had paired off with a redheaded girl from across the country. Her name was Gertie. She was about fifteen, and she knew more riddles than anybody I ever saw. She used to ask me riddles all the time we were picking, and when I could not answer them and had to give up, she would sit down, lift her calico skirt, and fan her face with it while she laughed at me for not knowing the answers.

  Once she asked me if I knew what was the age of consent. I was not certain that I did know.

  “Come on and tell me, Gertie,” I begged her.

  “You think it over tonight, Harry,” she said, “and if you don’t know by tomorrow, I’ll tell you.”

  Gertie had a habit of giggling when she asked me something like that, and now she was giggling again. All that time she was fanning her face with her skirt, drawing the calico higher and higher above her waist while she laughed at me.

  “It’s real funny,” she giggled.

  There was nothing funny to me about a riddle I could not answer, nor even guess, but no amount of begging would ever make Gertie tell me the answer to that one. She would always sit down on her cotton-bag, cross her slender round legs under her, and fan her face with her skirt while she giggled because I did not know what to say.

  It was all right for her to do that if she wished to, but I was never able to pick much cotton and look at her naked from the waist down at the same time. She would sit there and giggle about the riddle, fanning herself furiously, and smile at me. It would even have been all r
ight for her to sit down on her cotton-bag and lift her skirt like that if only she had worn something under the one-piece calico wrapper. As long as I knew Gertie though, she never did.

  “Why does an old maid look under the bed at night before she puts out the light, Harry?”

  “God damn it, Gertie!” I shouted at her. “Why don’t you keep your dress down where it belongs!”

  I could not pick cotton when she did like that, and it made me angry.

  “You can make up good riddles, too, can’t you, Harry?” she said.

  I was just getting ready to jump over to her row and throw her down when I looked around and saw Donnie Williams walking across the field not far away, and I had to go back to work right away.

  After picking with one of the Johnsons for two days, I again paired off one morning with Gertie. We started off at a fast pace, each of us trying his best to get ahead of the other. Gertie had thought up a lot of new riddles to ask me, but we were so busy trying to leave each other behind that she did not have time to say anything to me for several hours.

  It was about dinnertime when I heard her whistle to me. I turned around to see what she wished.

  “Harry,” she said, straightening up and packing the cotton in her bag with her feet, “do you see that black-haired girl over there with the old woman?”

  She pointed over the rows towards them.

  “What about her?” I asked.

  “She was paired off yesterday with that Dennis boy, and last night she weighed in four hundred pounds, and the boy had only fifty pounds.”

  “Hell, Gertie,” I said, “that’s no riddle. Can’t you think up a better one than that? She’s not the first to weight in more than a man. You can see them stripping over in the broom sedge almost any time that Donnie’s not around.”

  “I don’t suppose she is,” Gertie said, sitting down and fanning her face with the calico skirt, “because I weighed in three-fifty myself the other night when I was picking with Sonny. He didn’t have much more than forty pounds at quitting time, either.”