Stories of Erskine Caldwell (30 page)

It was between one and two o’clock in the afternoon. Men and women were coming out of the restaurants on both sides of the street, hurrying back to work. I had a quarter in my pocket, but I had not eaten any lunch. I was hungry for something to eat, but I was saving the quarter. I wanted to get up to Richmond where I was sure I could find a job. Things were quiet in New Orleans, and I had tried Atlanta. Now I wanted to get up to Richmond. It was July, and there were not many jobs anywhere. I had always been lucky in Richmond, though.

The girl on the other side of the street turned the newspaper over and read down another column of the closely printed page. There were several office buildings and a few banks on the street. Everywhere else there were retail stores of some kind. Most of them had displays of women’s wear in the windows. It was hard for a man to find a job there, and not much easier for a woman, especially a girl, unless she were wearing the right kind of clothes.

The girl put the newspaper under her arm and started across the street. I was standing a few steps from the corner. She came across, holding the paper tightly under her arm and looking down at the pavement all the time. When she reached the curb, she turned down the street in my direction. She still did not look up. She was holding her head down all the time as if she were looking at her slippers. The pavement was hot. It was July.

She walked past me, behind. I could hear the gritty sand and dust grind under her shoes. It made a sound like the sandpapering of an iron pipe. Then suddenly the sound stopped. I looked around and saw her standing almost beside me. She was so close I could have touched her with my hand. Her face was pale and her lips were whiter than her forehead. When she looked up at me, she did not raise her head, only her eyes saw me. Her eyes were damp. They were very blue. She did not want me to know that she had been crying.

I turned all the way around and looked at her. I did not know what to do. Until she spoke to me she held her mouth tightly against her teeth, but she could not stop her lips from quivering.

“Can you tell me where No. 67 Forsyth Street is?” she asked me.

I looked down at her. Her hands were clenched so tightly I could see only the backs of her fingers. They were stained as if she had been handling freshly printed newspapers all day. They were not dirty. They were just not clean. A sort of blackish dust had settled on the backs of her hands. Dust is in the air of every city and some people wash their hands five or six times a day to keep them clean. I don’t know, but maybe she had not had a chance to wash her hands for several days. Her face was not soiled, but it looked as if she had tried to keep it clean with a dampened handkerchief and a powdered chamois skin.

She had asked me where No. 67 Forsyth Street was. She had said, “Pardon me —” when she asked me. I knew she would say, “Thank you very much,” when I told her where the address was.

I had to swallow hard before I could say anything at all. I knew where the number was. It was an employment agency. I had been there myself two or three times a day all that week. But there were no jobs there for anybody. It was July. I could look across the street and see the number in large gilt numerals on the door. The door was being constantly opened and closed by people going in and coming out again.

“What?” I asked her. It didn’t sound like that, though, when I said it. When you talk to a girl who is very beautiful you say things differently.

I knew what she had said but I could not remember hearing her say it. I had been looking at her so long I forgot the question she asked.

She opened her pocketbook and put her hand inside, feeling for the crumpled envelope on which she had written the address. Her eyes were staring at me with the same faraway vagueness they had when I saw her for the first time on the other side of the street. She searched for the envelope without once looking at what she was doing. It had fallen to the pavement the moment she unclasped the pocketbook.

I picked up the letter. It was addressed to
Dorothy
— I couldn’t read the last name. It had been sent in care of general delivery at the Atlanta post office from some little town down near the Florida border. It might have been from her mother or sister. It was a woman’s handwriting. She jerked it from me before I could hand it to her. There was something in the way she reached for it that made me wonder about it. Maybe her father had died and she was trying to find a job so she could support her mother — I don’t know. Things like that happen all the time. Or all of her family might have been killed in an accident and she had to leave home to make a living — things like that happen everywhere.

People were turning around to look at us. They walked past us and then turned around and stared. Peachtree Street was only around the corner from where we stood. It was a fashionable section.

I don’t know what made me say what I did. I knew where No. 67 Forsyth Street was. I had been there myself only half an hour before. It was an employment agency. They said come in tomorrow morning. They told everybody the same thing — both men and women. It was the dull season. It was July.

I said, “No. 67 is about three blocks down the street, on the other side of the viaduct.” I pointed down there, my arm over her head. She was very small beside me.

She looked down the street to the other side of the viaduct. There were half a dozen cheap hotels down there. They were the cheapest kind. Everybody has seen them. There are some in every city. They charge fifty cents, seventy-five, and a dollar. I thought I was doing right. There was no money in her pocketbook. Not a cent. I saw everything she had in it. I had a quarter and I would have to go all the way to Richmond before I found a job. There were no jobs across the street at No. 67. It was the dull season. Everybody was out of town for the summer. There were no jobs in July. And she was hungry. She had been trying to sleep in railroad stations at night, too. . . . On the other side of the viaduct there were at least seven or eight hotels. The cheap kind. I had seen women in them, running down the corridors in kimonos after midnight. They always had some money, enough to buy something to eat when they were hungry. Everyone knows what it is to be hungry. A man can stand it for a while — a week, ten days, two weeks — but a woman — if you have ever seen the naked body of a starving woman you’ll know why I thought I was doing right.

She had not moved.

“It’s about three blocks down the street, on the other side of the viaduct,” I told her again. She had heard what I said the first time.

She did not move.

She was standing there, looking at the dirty red-brick buildings. She knew the kind they were. Some of them had signs that could be read across the viaduct.
HOTEL
— 75¢ & $1. She was reading the signs. My hand was in my pocket holding the quarter between the fingers. I don’t know what she could have done with the money. I was ashamed to give it to her — it was only a quarter.

“All right,” she said.

It was as if she was making up her mind about something of great importance, like a decision of life and death. It was as if she had said, “All right, I’ll go.” She was not thanking me for telling her where she could find the number. She knew No. 67 was on this side of the viaduct.

“All right,” she said.

She turned and walked down the street toward the dirty red-brick buildings. The heels of her slippers had worn sideways. She tried to stand erectly on her feet and she had to walk stiffly so her ankles would not turn. If her legs had relaxed for a second she would have sprained her ankles.

She did not look back at me. Her blue flannel skirt was wrinkled far out of shape. It looked as if she had slept in it for several nights, maybe a week. It was covered with specks of dust and lint. Her white silk waist was creased and discolored. The dust had lodged in the folds, and the creases made horizontal smudges across her shoulders. Her hat looked as if it had been in a hard rain for several hours and then dried on a sharp peg of some kind. There was a peak in the crown that drew the whole hat out of shape.

I couldn’t stand there any longer. She had gone almost a block toward the dirty red-brick buildings. I crossed over the street and ran down an alley towards Marietta Street.

I went to a garage on Marietta Street. A mechanic who worked in the garage had told me there was a good chance of getting a ride to Richmond if I would stay around long enough and wait until an automobile came along that was going through.

When I got to the garage, there was a car inside being greased. The man in the garage nodded at me and pointed toward the automobile. It was a big car. I knew it wouldn’t take long to make the trip in a car like that. I asked the man who was driving it if he would take me to Richmond with him. He asked the man in the garage about me. They talked inside the office a while and then he came out and said he would take me up with him. He was leaving right away.

We drove up to Richmond. I started out to find a job somewhere. There’s a wholesale district under the elevated railway tracks between the State Capitol and the river. I had been there before.

But there was something the matter with me. I didn’t have the patience to look up a job. I was nervous. I had to keep moving all the time. I couldn’t stand still.

A few days later I was in Baltimore. I applied for a job in an employment agency. They had plenty of jobs, but they took their time about giving them out. They wanted you to wait a week or two, to see if you would stick. Most everybody went on to Philadelphia. That’s the way it is in summer. Everybody goes up. When the weather begins to get cold they come down again, stopping in Baltimore until the weather catches up, and then they move to the next city. Everybody ends up in New Orleans.

I couldn’t stay in Baltimore. I couldn’t stand still, I went on to Philadelphia like everybody else. From Philadelphia you move over into Jersey. But I didn’t. I stayed in Philadelphia.

Then one day I was standing on Market Street, near the city hall, watching a new skyscraper go up. I saw a young woman on the other side of the street who looked like the girl I had talked to in Atlanta. She was not the same one, of course. But there was a close resemblance.

I could not think about anything else. I stood there all the afternoon thinking about the girl in Atlanta and wondering what I could do. I knew I had to think up some way to get to Atlanta and find her. I had sent her down Forsyth Street, across the viaduct. She knew where she was going, but she would not have gone if it had not been for me. I sent her down there. If I had only pointed across the street to No. 67! She knew where it was. She had been standing in front of it when I first saw her with the folded newspaper, reading the ads. But she knew it would have been useless to go inside. They would have told her to come in again the next morning. That’s what they told everybody. Maybe she thought I would give her some money. I don’t know what she thought, to tell the truth. But she was up against it, just as I was. She was too proud to ask for money to buy something to eat, and yet she thought I might give her some. I had a quarter but I was ashamed to offer it to her, especially after I had sent her down the street toward those hotels. She had tried to find a job somewhere so she could have something to eat and a place to sleep. She knew there was always one way. She knew about Forsyth Street on the other side of the viaduct. Somebody had told her about it. A woman in one of the railroad stations, perhaps. Somebody told her, because she knew all about it.

I didn’t send her there, she would have gone anyway. . . . That’s what I think sometimes — but it’s a lie! I told her to go down the street and cross the viaduct.

(First published in
Scribner’s
)

T
HERE WAS NOBODY
in Rawley who believed that Effie Henderson would ever find a man to marry her, and Effie herself had just about given up hope. But that was before the traveling herb doctor came to town.

Professor Eaton was a tall gaunt-looking man with permanent, sewn-in creases in his trousers and a high celluloid collar around his neck. He may have been ten years older than Effie, or he may have been ten years younger; it was no more easy to judge his age than it was to determine by the accent of his speech from what section of the country he had originally come.

He drove into Rawley one hot dusty morning in mid-August, selling Indian Root Tonic. Indian Root Tonic was a beady, licorice-tasting cure-all in a fancy green-blown bottle. The bottle was wrapped in a black and white label, on which the most prominent feature was the photographic reproduction of a beefy man exhibiting his expanded chest and muscles and his postage-stamp wrestler’s trunks. Professor Eaton declared, and challenged any man alive to deny his statement, that his Indian Root Tonic would cure any ailment known to man, and quite a few known only to women.

Effie Henderson was the first person in town to give him a dollar for a bottle, and the first to come back for the second one.

The stand that Professor Eaton had opened up was the back seat of his mud-spattered touring car. He had paid the mayor ten ragged one-dollar bills for a permit to do business in Rawley, and he had parked his automobile in the middle of the weed-grown vacant lot behind the depot. He sold his medicine over the back seat of his car, lifting the green-blown bottles from a box at his feet as fast as the customers came up and laid down their dollars.

There had been a big crowd standing around in the weed-grown lot the evening before, but there were only a few people standing around him listening to his talk when Effie came back in the morning for her second bottle. Most of the persons there then were Negroes who did not have a dollar among them, but who had been attracted to the lot by the alcoholic fumes around the mud-caked automobile and who were willing to be convinced of Indian Root Tonic’s marvelous curative powers. When Effie came up, the Negroes stepped aside, and stood at a distance watching Professor Eaton get ready to make another sale.

Effie walked up to the folded-down top in front of Professor Eaton and laid down a worn dollar bill that was as limp as a piece of wet cheesecloth.