Читать книгу House of Earth - Woody Guthrie - Страница 12

The wind of the upper flat plains sung a high lonesome song down across the blades of the dry iron grass. Loose things moved in the wind but the dust lay close to the ground.

It was a clear day. A blue sky. A few puffy, white-looking thunderclouds dragged their shadows like dark sheets across the flat Cap Rock country. The Cap Rock is that big high, crooked cliff of limestone, sandrock, marble, and flint that divides the lower west Texas plains from the upper north panhandle plains. The canyons, dry wash rivers, sandy creek beds, ditches, and gullies that joined up with the Cap Rock cliff form the graveyard of past Indian civilizations, flying and testing grounds of herds of leather-winged bats, drying grounds of monster-size bones and teeth, roosting, nesting, and the breeding place of the bald-headed big brown eagle. Dens of rattlesnakes, lizards, scorpions, spiders, jackrabbit, cottontail, ants, horny butterfly, horned toad, and stinging winds and seasons. These things all were born of the Cap Rock cliff and it was alive and moving with all these and with the mummy skeletons of early settlers of all colors. A world close to the sun, closer to the wind, the cloudbursts, floods, gumbo muds, the dry and dusty things that lose their footing in this world, and blow, and roll, jump wire fences, like the tumbleweed, and take their last earthly leap in the north wind out and down, off the upper north plains, and down onto the sandier cotton plains that commence to take shape west of Clarendon.

A world of big stone twelve-room houses, ten-room wood houses, and a world of shack houses. There are more of the saggy, rotting shack houses than of the nicer wood houses, and the shack houses all look to the larger houses and curse out at them, howl, cry, and ask questions about the rot, the filth, the hurt, the misery, the decay of land and of families. All kinds of fights break out between the smaller houses, the shacks, and the larger houses. And this goes for the town where the houses lean around on one another, and for the farms and ranch lands where the wind sports high, wide, and handsome, and the houses lay far apart. All down across this the wind blows. And the people work hard when the wind blows, and they fight even harder when the wind blows, and this is the canyon womb, the stickery bed, the flat pallet on the floor of the earth where the wind its own self was born.

The rocky lands around the Cap Rock cliff are mostly worn slick from suicide things blowing over it. The cliff itself, canyons that run into it, are banks of clay and layers of sand, deposits of gravel and flint rocks, sandstone, volcanic mixtures of dried-out lavas, and in some places the cliff wears a wig of nice iron grass that lures some buffalo, antelope, or beef steer out for a little bit, then slips out from underfoot, and sends more flesh and blood to the flies and the buzzards, more hot meals down the cliff to the white fangs of the coyote, the lobo, the opossum, coon, and skunk.

Old Grandpa Hamlin dug a cellar for his woman to keep her from the weather and the men. He dug it one half of one mile from the rim of Cap Rock cliff. He loved Della as much as he loved his land. He raised five of his boys and girls in the dugout. They built a yellow six-room house a few yards from the cellar. Four more children came in this yellow six-room house, and he took all of his children several trips down along the cliff rim, and pointed to the sky and said to them, “Them same two old eagles flyin’ an’ circlin’ yonder, they was circlin’ there on th’ mornin’ that I commenced to dig my dugout, an’ no matter what hits you, kids, or no matter what happens to you, don’t git hurried, don’t git worried, ’cause the same two eagles will see us all come an’ see us all go.”

And Grandma Della Hamlin told them, “Get a hold of a piece of earth for yerself. Get a hold of it like this. And then fight. Fight to hold on to it like this. Wood rots. Wood decays. This ain’t th’ country to get a hold of nothin’ made out of wood in. This ain’t th’ country of trees. This ain’t even a country fer brush, ner even fer bushes. In this streak of th’ land here you can’t fight much to hold on to what’s wood, ’cause th’ wind an’ th’ sun, an’ th’ weather here’s just too awful hard on wood. You can’t fight your best unless you got your two feet on th’ earth, an’ fightin’ fer what’s made out of th’ earth.” And walking along the road that ran from the Cap Rock back to the home place, she would tell them, “My worst pain’s always been we didn’t raise up a house of earth ’stead of a house of wood. Our old dugout it was earth and it’s outlived a hundred wood houses.”

Still, the children one by one got married and moved apart. Grandma and Grandpa Hamlin could stand on the front porch of their old home place and see seven houses of their sons and daughters. Two had left the plains. One son moved to California to grow walnuts. A daughter moved to Joplin to live with a lead and zinc miner. Rocking back and forth in her chair on the porch, Della would say, “Hurts me, soul an’ body, to look out acrost here an’ see of my kinds a-livin’ in those old wood houses.” And Pa would smoke his pipe and watch the sun go down and say, “Don’t fret so much about ’em, Del, they just take th’ easy way. Cain’t see thirty years ahead of their noses.”

Tike Hamlin’s real name was Arthur Hamlin. Della and Pa had called him Little Tyke on the day that he was born, and he had been Tike Hamlin ever since. The brand of Arthur was frozen into a long icicle and melted into the sun, gone and forgotten, and not even his own papa and mama thought of Arthur except when some kind of legal papers had to be signed or something like that.

Tike was the only one of the whole Hamlin tribe that was not born up on top of the Cap Rock. There was a little oblong two-room shack down in a washout canyon where his mama had planted several sprigs of wild yellow plum bushes near the doorstep. She dug up the plum roots and chewed on them for snuff sticks, and she used the chewed sticks to brush her teeth. The shack fell down so bad that she got afraid of snakes, lizards, flies, bugs, gnats, and howling coyotes, and argued her husband into building a five-room house on six hundred and forty acres of new wheat land just one mile due north, on a straight line, from the old Pa Hamlin dugout.

Tike was a medium man, medium wise and medium ignorant, wise in the lessons taught by fighting the weather and working the land, wise in the tricks of the men, women, animals, and all of the other things of nature, wise to guess a blizzard, a rainstorm, dry spell, the quick change of the hard wind, wise as to how to make friends, and how to fight enemies. Ignorant as to the things of the schools. He was a wiry, hard-hitting, hardworking sort of a man. There was no extra fat around his belly because he burned it up faster than it could grow there. He was five feet and eight inches tall, square built, but slouchy in his actions, hard of muscle, solid of bone and lungs, but with a good wide streak of laziness somewhere in him. He was of the smiling, friendly, easygoing, good-humored brand, but used his same smile to fool if he hated you, and grinned his same little grin even when he got the best or the worst end of a fistfight. As a young boy, Tike had all kinds of fights over all matters and torn off all kinds of clothes and come home with all kinds of cuts and bruises. But now he was in this thirty-third year, and a married man; his wife, Ella May, had taught him not to fight and tear up five dollars’ worth of clothes unless he had a ten-dollar reason.

His hard work came over him by spells and his lazy dreaming came over him to cure his tired muscles. He was a dreaming man with a dreaming land around him, and a man of ideas and of visions as big, as many, as wild, and as orderly as the stars of the big dark night around him. His hands were large, knotty, and big boned, skin like leather, and the signs of his thirty-three years of salty sweat were carved in his wrinkles and veins. His hands were scarred, covered with old gashes, the calluses, cuts, burns, blisters that come from winning and losing and carrying a heavy load.

Ella May was thirty-three years old, the same age as Tike. She was small, solid of wind and limb, solid on her two feet, and a fast worker. She was a woman to move and to move fast and to always be on the move. Her black hair dropped down below her shoulders and her skin was the color of windburn. She woke Tike up out of his dreams two or three times a day and scolded him to keep moving. She seemed to be made out of the same stuff that movement itself is made of. She was energy going somewhere to work. Power going through the world for her purpose. Her two hands hurt and ached and moved with a nervous pain when there was no work to be done.

Tike ran back from the mailbox waving a brown envelope in the wind. “’S come! Come! Looky! Hey! Elly Mayyy!” He skidded his shoe soles on the hard ground as he ran up into the yard. “Lady!”

The ground around the house was worn down smooth, packed hard from footprints, packed still harder from the rains, and packed still harder from the soapy wash water that had been thrown out from tubs and buckets. A soapy coat of whitish wax was on top of the dirt in the yard, and it had soaked down several inches into the earth at some spots. The strong smell of acids and lyes came up to meet Ella May’s nose as she carried two heavy empty twenty-gallon cream cans across the yard.

“Peeewwweee.” She frowned up toward the sun, then across the cream cans at Tike, then back at the house. “Stinking old hole.”

“Look.” Tike put the envelope into her hand. “Won’t be stinky long.”

“Why? What’s going to change it so quick all at once? Hmmm?” She looked down at the letter. “Hmmmm. United States Department of Agriculture. Mmmmm. Come on. We’ve got four more cream cans to carry from the windmill. I’ve been washing them out.”

“Look inside.” He followed her to the mill and rested his chin on her shoulder. “Inside.”

“Grab yourself two cream cans, big boy.”

“Look at th’ letter.”

“I’m not going to stop my work to read no letter from nobody, especially from no old Department of Agriculture. Besides, my hands are all wet. Get those two cans there and help me to put them over on that old bench close to the kitchen window.”

“Kitchen window? We ain’t even got no kitchen.” Tike caught hold of the handles of two of the cans and carried them along at her side. “Kitchen. Bull shit.”

“I make out like it’s my kitchen.” She bent down at the shoulders under the weight of the cans. “Close as we’ll ever get to one, anyhow.” A little sigh of tired sadness was in her voice. Her words died down and the only sound was that of their shoe soles against the hard earth, and over all a cry that is always in these winds. “Whewww.”

“Heavy? Lady?” He smiled along at her side and kept his eye on the letter in her apron pocket.

The wind was stiff enough to lift her dress up above her knees.

“You quit that looking at me, Mister Man.”

“Ha, ha.”

“You can see that I’ve got my hands full of these old cream cans. I can’t help it. I can’t pull it down.”

“Free show. Free show,” Tike sang out to the whole world as the wind showed him the nakedness of her thighs.

“You mean old thing, you.”

“Hey, cows. Horses. Pugs. Piggeeee. Free show. Hey.”

“Mean. Ornery.”

“Hyeeah, Shep. Hyeah, Ring. Chick, chick, chick, chick, chickeeee. Kitty, kitty, kitty, meeeooowww. Meeeooowww. Blow, Mister Wind! I married me a wife, and she don’t even want me to see her legs! Blow!” He dug his right elbow into her left breast.

“Tike.”

“Blowww!”

“Tike! Stop. Silly. Nitwit.”

“Blowwww!” He rattled his two cans as he lifted them up onto the bench. In order to be polite, he reached to take hers and to set them up for her, but she steered out of his reach.

“You’re downright vulgar. You’re filthy-minded. You’re just about the meanest, orneriest, no-accountest one man that I ever could pick out to marry! Looking at me that a way. Teasing me. That’s just what you are. An old mean teaser. Quit that! I’ll set my own cans on the bench.” She lifted her cans.

“Lady.” The devil of hell was in his grin.

“Don’t. Don’t you try to lady me.” Her face changed from a half smile into a deep and tender hurt, a hurt that was older, and a hurt that was bigger than her own self. “This whole house here is just like that old rotten fell-down bench there. That old screen it’s going to just dry up and blow to smithereens one of these days.”

“Let it blow.” Tike held a dry face.

“The wood in this whole window here is so rotten that it won’t hold a nail anymore.” Tears swept somewhere into her eyes as she bit her upper lip and sobbed, “I tried to tack the screen on better to keep those old biting flies out, and they just kept coming on in, because the wood was so rotten that the tacks fell out in less than twenty minutes.”

Tike’s face was sad for a second, but before she turned her eyes toward him, he slapped himself in the face with the back of his hand, in a way that always made him smile, glad or sad. “Let it be rotten, Lady.” He put his hands on his hips and took a step backward, and stood looking the whole house over. “Guess it’s got a right to be rotten if it wants to be rotten, Lady. Goldern whizzers an’ little jackrabbits! Look how many families of kids that little ole shack has suckled up from pups. I’d be all rickety an’ bowlegged, an’ bent over, an’ sagged down, an’ petered out, an’ swayed in my middle, too, if I’d stood in one little spot like this little ole shack has, an’ stood there for fifty-two years. Let it rot. Rot! Rot down! Fall down! Sway in! Keel over! You little ole rotten piss soaked bastard, you! Fall!” His voice changed from one of good fun into words of raging terror. “Die! Fall! Rot!”

“I just hate it.” She stepped backward and stood close up against him. “I work my hands and fingers down to the bones, Tike, but I can’t make it any cleaner. It gets dirtier every day.”

Tike’s hand felt the nipples of her breast as he kissed her on the neck from behind and chewed her gold earrings between his teeth. His fingers rubbed her breasts, then rubbed her stomach as he pulled the letter out of her apron pocket. “Read th’ little letter?”

“Hmh? Just look at those poor old rotted-out boards. You can actually see them rot and fall day after day.” She leaned back against his belt buckle.

He put his arms around her and squeezed her breasts soft and easy in his hands. He held his chin on her right shoulder and smelled the skin of her neck and her hair as they both stood there and looked.

“Department of Agriculture.” She read on the outside.

“Uh-hmm.”

“Why. A little book. Let’s see. Farmer’s Bulletin Number Seventeen Hundred. And Twenty. Mm-hmm.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“The Use of Adobe or Sun Dried Brick for Farm Building.” A smile shone through her tears.

“Yes, Lady.” He felt her breasts warmer under his hands.

“A picture of a house built out of adobe. All covered over with nice colored stucco. Pretty. Well, here’s all kinds of drawings, charts, diagrams, showing just about everything in the world about it.”

“How to build it from th’ cellar up. Free material. Just take a lot of labor an’ backbendin’,” he said. Then a smile was in his soul. “Cost me a whole big nickel, that book did.”

“Adobe. Or Sun-Dried Brick. For Farm Building.” She flipped into the pages and spoke a few slow words. “It is fireproof. It is sweatproof. It does not take skilled labor. It is windproof. It can’t be eaten up by termites.”

“Wahooo!”

“It is warm in cold weather. It is cool in hot weather. It is easy to keep fresh and clean. Several of the oldest houses in the country are built out of earth.” She looked at the picture of the nice little house and flowers on the front of the book. “All very well. Very, very well. But.”

“But?” he said in a tough way. “But?”

“But. Just one or two buts.” She pooched her lips as her eyes dropped down along the ground. “You see that stuff there, that soil there under your feet?”

“Sure.” Tike looked down. “I see it. ’Bout it?”

“That is the but.”

“The but? Which but? Ain’t no buts to what that book there says. That’s a U.S. Gover’ment book, an’ it’s got th’ seal right there, there in that lower left-hand corner! What’s wrong with this soil here under my foot? It’s as hard as ’dobey already!”

“But. But. But. It just don’t happen to be your land.” She tried hard and took a good bit of time to get her words out. Her voice sounded dry and raspy, nervous. “See, mister?”

Tike’s hand rubbed his eye, then his forehead, then his hair, then the back of his neck, and his fingers pulled at the tip of his ear as he said, “’At’s th’ holdup.”

“A house”—her voice rose—“of earth.”

Tike only listened. His throat was so tight that no words could get out.

“A house of earth. And not an inch of earth to build it on.” There was a quiver, a tremble, and a shake in her body as she scraped her shoe sole against the ground. “Oooo, yes,” she said in a way that made fun of them both, of the whole farm, mocked the old cowshed, shamed the iron water tank, made fun of all the houses that lay within her sight. “Yesssss. We could build us up a mighty nice house of earth, if we could only get our hands on a piece of land. But. Well. That’s where the mule throwed Tony.”

“That’s where th’ mule”—he looked toward the sky, then down at the toe of his shoe—“throwed Tony.”

She turned herself into a preacher, pacing up and down, back and forth, in front of Tike. She held her hands against her breasts, then waved them about, beat her fists in the wind, and spoke in a loud scream. “Why has there got to be always something to knock you down? Why is this country full of things that you can’t see, things that beat you down, kick you down, throw you around, and kill out your hope? Why is it that just as fast as I hope for some little something or other, that some kind of crazy thievery always, always, always cuts me down? I’ll not be treated any such way as this any longer, not one inch longer. Not one ounce longer, not one second longer. I never did in my whole life ask for one whit more than I needed. I never did ask to own, nor to rule, nor to control the lands nor the lives of other people. I never did crave anything except a decent chance to work, and a decent place to live, and a decent, honest life. Why can’t we, Tike? Tell me. Why? Why can’t we own enough land to keep us busy on? Why can’t we own enough land to exist on, to work on, and to live on like human beings? Why can’t we?”

Tike sat down in the sun and crossed his feet under him. He dug into the soapy dishwater dirt and said, “I don’t know, Lady. People are just dog-eat-dog. They lie on one another, cheat one another, run and sneak and hide and count and cheat, and cheat, and then cheat some more. I always did wonder. I don’t know. It’s just dog-eat-dog. That’s all I know.”

She sat down in front of him and put her face down into his lap. And he felt the wet tears again on her cheeks. And she sniffed and asked him, “Why has it just got to be dog-eat-dog? Why can’t we live so as to let other people live? Why can’t we work so as to let other folks work? Dog-eat-dog! Dog-eat-dog! I’m sick and I’m tired, and I’m sick at my belly, and sick in my soul with this dog-eat-dog!”

“No sicker’n me, Lady. But don’t jump on me. I didn’t start it. I cain’t put no stop to it. Not just me by myself.” He held the back of her head in his hands.

“Oh. I know. I don’t really mean that.” She breathed her warm breath against his overalls as she sat facing him.

“Mean what?”

“Mean that you caused everybody to be so thieving and so low-down in their ways. I don’t think that you caused it by yourself. I don’t think that I caused it by myself, either. But I just think that both of us are really to blame for it.”

“Us? Me? You?”

“Yes.” She shook her head as he played with her hair. “I do. I really do.”

“Hmmm.”

“We’re to blame because we let them steal,” she told him.

“Let them? We caused ’em to steal?”

“Yes. We caused them to steal. Penny at a time. Nickel at a time. Dime. A quarter. A dollar. We were easygoing. We were good-natured. We didn’t want money just for the sake of having money. We didn’t want other folks’ money if it meant that they had to do without. We smiled across their counters a penny at a time. We smiled in through their cages a nickel at a time. We handed a quarter out our front door. We handed them money along the street. We signed our names on their old papers. We didn’t want money, so we didn’t steal money, and we spoiled them, we petted them, and we humored them. We let them steal from us. We knew that they were hooking us. We knew it. We knew when they cheated us out of every single little red cent. We knew. We knew when they jacked up their prices. We knew when they cut down on the price of our work. We knew that. We knew they were stealing. We taught them to steal. We let them. We let them think that they could cheat us because we are just plain old common everyday people. They got the habit.”

“They really got the habit,” Tike said.

“Like dope. Like whiskey. Like tobacco. Like snuff. Like morphine or opium or old smoke of some kind. They got the regular habit of taking us for damned old silly fools,” she said.

“You said a cuss word, Elly.”

“I’ll say worse than that before this thing is over with!”

“Naaa. Naaa. No more of that there cussin’ outta you, now. I ain’t goin’ to set here an’ listen to a woman of mine carry on in no such a way when she never did a cuss word in her whole life before.”

“You’ll hear plenty.”

“I don’t know why, Lady, never would know why, I don’t s’pose. But them there cuss words just don’t fit so good into your mouth. Me, it’s all right for me to cuss. My old mouth has a little bit of ever’thing in it, anyhow. But no siree, not you. You’re not goin’ to lose your head an’ start out to fightin’ folks by cuss words. I’ll not let you. I’ll slap your jaws.”

Ella May only shook her curls in his lap.

“You always could fight better by sayin’ nice words, anyhow, Lady. I don’t know how to tell you, but when I lose my nut an’ go to cussin’ out an’ blowin’ my top, seems like my words just get all out somewhere in th’ wind, an’ then they get lost, somehow. But you always did talk with more sense, somehow. Seems like that when you say somethin’, somehow or another, it always makes sense, an’ it always stays said. Cuts ’em deeper th’n my old loose flyin’ cuss words.”

“Cuts who?” She lifted her head and shook her hair back out of her face, and bit her lip as she tried to smile. “Who?”

“I don’t know. All of them cheaters an’ stealers you’re talkin’ about.”

“I’m not talking about just any one certain man or woman, Tike. I’m just talking about greed. Just plain old greed.”

“Yeah. I know. Them greedy ones,” he said.

And she said, “No. No. You know, Tike—ah, it may sound funny. But I think that the people that are greedy, well, they believe that it’s right to be greedy. They’ve got a hope, a dream, a vision, inside of them just like I’ve, ah, we’ve got in us. And in a way it’s pitiful, but it’s not really their fault.”

“Hmm?”

“No more than, say, a bad disease was to break out, like some kind of a fever, or some kind of a plague, and all of us would take it, all of us would get it. Some would have it very light, some would have it sort of, well, sort of medium. Others would have it harder and worse, and some would naturally have it bad. Some of us would lose our heads, and some would lose our hands, and some would lose our senses with the fever.”

“Yeah. But who would be to blame for a plague? Cain’t nobody start no fever nor a thing like a plague. Could they, Lady?”

“Filth causes diseases to eat people up.”

“Yeah.”

“And ignorance is the cause of people’s filth.”

“Yeah—but—”

“Don’t but me. And ignorance is caused by your greed.”

“My greed? You mean, ah, me? My greed? You mean that me, my greed caused this farm to be filthy? I didn’t make it filthy. If it was mine, I’d clean th’ damn thing up slicker’n a new hat.”

She sat for a bit and looked out past his shoulder. “I feel the same way. I don’t know. But you can’t put your heart into anything if it’s not your own.”

“Shore cain’t.”

“I don’t know. I never did know. But it looks like to me that we could get together and pass some laws that would give everybody, everybody enough of a piece of land to raise up a house on.”

“Everybody would just go right straight and sell it to get some money to gamble with or to get drunk on, or to fuck with,” he told her. “Gamble. Drink. Fuck.”

“Should be fixed, though, to where if you went and sold your piece of land, then it went back into the hands of the Government, and not some old mean miserly money counter,” she said.

“If th’ Gover’ment was to pass out pieces of land right today, the banks would have it all back in two months.” He laughed.

“And if that happened”—she tilted her head—“then the Government should take it away from the banks and pass it out all over again. What do we pay them for? Fishing.”

“Fuckin’.” Tike laughed again.

She half shut her eyes to get a good close look at his face and said, “Your mind is certainly on sex today.”

“Ever’day.”

“Every single sensible thing that I’ve said here about your house of earth and your land to build it on, you’ve brought sex into it.”

“What do you think I want a house an’ a piece of land for, to concentrate in?”

“Don’t your mind ever think about anything else except just getting a piece of lay?”

“Not that I recollect.”

“How long has your mind been running thisaway?”

“’Fore I learnt how to walk.”

“Silly.”

“Me silly? How come?”

“Oh.” She looked at him. “I don’t know. I guess you were just born sort of silly. How come you to be born so silly, anyhow? Tikey?”

“How come you to be born so perty? Lady?” Inside his overalls Tike felt the movement of his penis as it grew long and hard. In the way he was sitting there was not room enough for his penis to become stiff. His clothing caused it to bend in the middle in a way that dealt him a throbbing pain. He stood up on the ground and spread his legs apart. He reached inside his overalls with his fingers and put it in an upright position and sighed a breath of comfort. His blood ran warmer and the whole world seemed to be flying from under his feet. His old feeling was coming over him, and his eyes looked around the yard for something to say to Ella May.

She stood up and looked down at the ground where she had been sitting. She picked up the Department of Agriculture book. Her eyes watched Tike as he held his hand inside his overalls. She saw his lips tremble and heard him inhale a deep lungful of air. “What have you caught in there, Tikey, a frog?”

“Snake,” Tike said. “Serpent.”

“You seem to be having quite a scuffle.”

“Fight ’im day an’ night.”

“And he seems to be getting just a little the best of it from what I can see.” She watched him from the corner of her eye.

He was a moment making his reply. He took a step forward and caught hold of her hand. She could measure the heat of his desire by the moisture in the palm of his hand. He tugged at her slow and easy and stepped backward in the path of the cow barn. “Psssst. Lady. Psst. Lady. Wanta see somethin’? Huh?”

“What are you trying to do to me? Mister?” She pulled back until she had spoken, then she gave in and walked along. “Will you please state?”

“Shh. Gonna show you somethin’.”

“Something? Something what?”

“Shh. Just somethin’.” It was funny to her to see him try to creep along without making any noise, when his heavy work shoes made such a grinding and a crushing sound under the soles that he could be heard all over the ranch. “Shh. C’mon.”

And now, what would it be? What on the farm hadn’t he already shown her, yes, in this very same way. What would it be? Would it be a snake trying to swallow a lizard or a lizard swallowing a frog? A nest of cliff hornets that he had captured by plugging up the door to their nest with a corncob? Had he dragged in some more big bones and teeth of the prehistoric reptiles? Would he show her another rib or a shin or a patch of skin to some mummy of a wayfaring ancestor? Three flies doctoring a dead one back to life by licking him with their tongues? Ants rubbing some lice with their whiskers to cause them to have orgasms and to burst out into a sweat of pure honey? A horned toad with his belly full of red ants? Eagle feathers tied together with a string of human skin? A red-and-white marble that he had found? A die with no spots? Maybe just an old empty shoe full of little baby mice. A bumblebee tied to a spool of black thread. What? Of all the places on a six-hundred-acre farm, why had he piled his relics so near and so close to the hay in the cowshed?

“Tell me what it is!” She smelled the syrup odor of cattle cake, manure, and the sweeter smell of the juicy sap in the stems of the hay and the grass. “Tike!”

There was kind of a sad spirit about the little cowshed. It was a magnetic electricity that was there in the stalls, the feed boxes, the V-shaped mangers filled with dry cobs, corn shucks, and hay. It was the radio waves of their old memories. These waves vibrated, danced, and shone in all the wood braces, boards, railings, props, and in the planks and in the shingles. And the smell was not just a bittersweet thing that came to their nostrils. No, the smells brought with them older pictures, and the pictures carried with them the smells, the words, things done in days that some say are gone. The boards were all worn glassy slick by the hair and by the warm skin of cattle that followed crooked paths here just to know the pleasure of Tike and Ella May’s hands on their tits. Still, Ella May’s eyes told her a tale and a story of sad parting as she looked at the fireball sun going down and followed its rays down to where they struck against a smooth round cedar post that helped to hold up the small roof. A hot kind of grief moved in her. She sat there on a bale of hay where Tike had placed her. She felt her memories come through her. She felt a heavy weight of tired weariness come over her. Her first love of life was born in the three walls around her here. Tike had led her here to cover her with the loose hay, loose seeds, loose kisses of his own sort. They had made their separate troubles one trouble here, and all of their little stray scattered desires burned into one single light of craving here. These boards, these nails, pieces of long wire, hay, grain, and manure, all of this was one fiery match that lit the wick of their lamp. Every part and particle of the barn was a part of the one. Every single inch of it had its unknown name. And by the fire of their lamp they could see and feel around the world.

And it did seem to Ella May that her eyes strained to try to follow the rays from the sun around the world. She leaned back against a higher bale of hay and lifted her breasts in her own hands, took a deep breath, let her lips fall apart, and wished that she could see every little hair on every little body in the whole big wide world, like the lamp of the sun does. Like the breath of the wind does. Like the waters wash them all. Her wind went out and over and across and in and around and through the whole farm, and she felt the hurts, aches, pains, sickness, and the misery and all of the gladness of all the things around her. And she felt the skin of her breasts with her hands and her skin felt hot. And there was a layer of sweat over all of her. She moved her heel up and down inside her work shoe and felt the blistered callus rub against the leather. She turned her feet over to the side and pushed down hard against the straw on the dirt floor, and eased her feet out of the shoes. She lay her head back and spread her knees apart. The stir of the breeze felt good against her feet and thighs.

“I cain’t help it when I get to feeling this way, Lady,” he told her through her hair as he stood at her back. “I don’t know, maybe it’s just because I’m a man, or something.”

“Or something.” She put her hand over her shoulder and took hold of his fingers. “Did I ask you to try to help it?”

“No.”

“Grandma used to tell us girls that a woman feels seven times as much passion as a man. But I don’t believe that. I think that you feel this way every time I do, and that I feel it every time you do. I don’t know how to tell you how I feel. I don’t think any woman can tell a man how she feels. She could talk her head off and never say it. Tike, did you take your shirt off? Is that your skin I feel? And your overalls, too? And your jumper? You’ll take down deathly sick.” She stood up and looked at him.

“Used them here for a bed.” He stood before her naked and pointed down.

“You’ll freeze.”

“Sun’s warm. Warm enough. I ain’t cold. But I could stand just a little bit of your huggin’ if you got some to spare.”

She moved against him. He put his arms around her. She held him as she kissed the hairs on his chest and wiggled the end of her nose against his neck. The heat of their bodies soaked her dress with sweat as they stood and kissed. He kissed her eyes, ears, and her hair, the sides of her nose, and down her neck. He put his lips to her lips and she sucked his tongue. She closed her eyes and stood on tiptoe and all she felt was the tip end of his tongue pushing around against her teeth. With one hand he combed his fingers through her hair. With the other hand he rubbed the muscles of her back, shoulder blades, and squeezed her hips. They did not know how long they stood and kissed.

She felt the long hot shape of his penis pressed tight between their stomachs. As she moved her hips from side to side in a slow easy roll she felt his penis grow even warmer and longer. He touched the tip of his tongue to each of her teeth, one at a time and felt the vacant gums in two places where her teeth were out. He moved his tongue over the upper part of her mouth and as he did so he filled his mouth with saliva that she sucked into her mouth and swallowed.

They let themselves fall down onto Tike’s clothes on the hay and kept their lips together for several more minutes. Tike kissed her across the shoulders and the skin of her arms. He touched his tongue to the nipples of her breasts and saw them stand up in the light of the sun. “Is little baby getting his titty milk?” she tried to tease him.

“Milk an’ honey.” He spoke with her left nipple between his lips. “This one’s milk. This one’s honey. This one’s milk. This one’s honey.” He sucked each nipple, the right, and the left, as he talked against her skin.

“Isn’t little Tikey Baby ashamed of himself to throw his mama down here on this old pile of hay just to get his dinner?” She tried to speak in a serious tone, but he held his ear against her heart, and heard her laugh under her breath. He heard a deep gurgling sound somewhere inside her, and the splashing about of waters.

“No.” He used baby talk. “Itty Tikey ain’ty fwaidy.”

Her stomach bounced when she laughed. He felt the muscles of her whole body jerk.

Then he spoke again. “Itty Tikey notty shamey.”

“No? Mmm?”

“You got more water an’ stuff splashin’ aroun’ inside of you than I could suck out in fifty years of hard pullin’! Quit! Shut up. Quit teasin’ me!” He pushed his mouth down harder against her breast and shook his head like a bashful kid. And then he got still and quiet and asked her, “’Smatter? ’Fraid you’ll run dry? You got more joosey magoosey in these tits of yours here than any of our old milk cows.”

“Tike.”

“Yeah.”

“Just hold me. Mmm. That’s it. That’s it. Be my cover. Ohhh. That’s fine. Such a nice warm cover. You’re just about the best blanket I ever had. Hold close, close, close. And for a long, long, long time. I just want to lay here and think. And think. And then think some more.” She opened her legs and spread her knees apart while he moved and laid on her, then she closed her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck. “When you suck my nipples, Tikey, and get them all wet with your spit, and the wind blows on them, they, they, I don’t know, they get real cold and hurt. This is warmer. Gooder this way.”