Stories of Erskine Caldwell (41 page)

“What else can he do, Grady?” the youngest of the Hannaford women asked.

“Anything I tell him to do,” Grady said. “I’ve got Blue Boy trained. He does whatever I tell him.”

They looked down at the small, thin, blue-skinned, seventeen-year-old Negro on the floor. His clothes were ragged, and his thick kinky hair was almost as long as a Negro woman’s. He looked the same, except in size, as he did the day, twelve years before, when Grady brought him to the big house from one of the sharecroppers’ cabins. Blue Boy had never become violent, and he obeyed every word of Grady’s. Grady had taught him to do tricks as he would instruct a young puppy to roll over on his back when bidden. Blue Boy always obeyed, but sometimes he was not quick enough to suit Grady, and then Grady flew into him with the leather bellyband that hung on a nail on the back porch.

The Howards and Hannafords had sat down again, but the Negro boy still lay on the floor. Grady had not told him to get up.

“What’s wrong with him, Grady?” Rob Howard asked.

“He ain’t got a grain of sense,” Grady said, laughing a little. “See how he grins all the time? A calf is born with more sense than he’s got right now.”

“Why don’t you send him to the insane asylum, then?”

“What for?” Grady said. “He’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys. I figure he’s worth keeping just for the hell of it. If I sent him off to the asylum, I’d miss my good times with him. I wouldn’t take a hundred dollars for Blue Boy.”

“What else can he do?” Henry Hannaford asked.

“I’ll show you,” Grady said. “Here, Blue Boy, get up and do that monkeyshine dance for the white-folks. Show them what you can do with your feet.”

Blue Boy got up, pushing himself erect with hands and feet. He stood grinning for a while at the men and women in a circle around him.

“Go on, Blue Boy, shake your feet for the white-folks,” Grady told him, pointing at Blue Boy’s feet. “Do the monkeyshine, Blue Boy.”

The boy began to shuffle his shoes on the floor, barely raising them off the surface. Grady started tapping his feet, moving them faster and faster all the time. Blue Boy watched him, and after a while his own feet began going faster. He kept it up until he was dancing so fast his breath began to give out. His eyes were swelling, and it looked as if his balls would pop out of his head any moment. The arteries in his neck got larger and rounder.

“That nigger can do the monkeyshine better than any nigger I ever saw,” Henry Hannaford said.

Blue Boy sank into a heap on the floor, the arteries in his neck pumping and swelling until some of the women in the room covered their faces to keep from seeing them.

It did not take Blue Boy long to get his wind back, but he still lay on the floor. Grady watched him until he thought he had recovered enough to stand up again.

“What else can your trained nigger do, Grady?” Rob Howard asked. “Looks like you would have learned him a heap of tricks in ten or twelve years’ time.”

“If it wasn’t getting so late in the day, I’d tell him to do all he knows,” Grady said. “I’ll let him do one more, anyway.”

Blue Boy had not moved from the floor.

“Get up, Blue Boy,” Grady said. “Get up and stand up on your feet.”

Blue Boy got up grinning. His head turned once more on his rubbery neck, stretching in a semicircle around the room. He grinned at the white faces about him.

“Take out that blacksnake and whip it to a frazzle,” Grady told him. “Take it out, Blue Boy, and show the white-folks what you can do.”

Blue Boy grinned, stretching his rubbery neck until it looked as if it would come loose from his body.

“What’s he going to do now, Grady?” Rob Howard asked.

“You just wait and see, Rob,” Grady said. “All right, Blue Boy, do like I said. Whip that blacksnake.”

The youngest Hannaford woman giggled. Blue Boy turned and stared at her with his round white eyeballs. He grinned until Grady prodded him on.

“Now I reckon you folks know why I didn’t send him off to the insane asylum,” Grady said. “I have a heap more fun out of Blue Boy than I would with anything else you can think of. He can’t hoe cotton, or pick it, and he hasn’t even got enough sense to chop a piece of stove-wood, but he makes up for all that by learning to do the tricks I teach him.”

Once more Blue Boy’s eyes began to pop in the sockets of his skull, and the arteries in his neck began to pump and swell. He dropped to his knees and his once rubbery neck was as rigid as a table leg. The grinning lines on his face had congealed into weltlike scars.

The Howards and Hannafords, who had come from five counties to eat Grady’s New Year’s Day turkey-and-hog dinner, gulped and wheezed at the sight of Blue Boy. He was beginning to droop like a wilting stalk of pigweed. Then he fell from his knees.

With his face pressed against the splintery floor, the grooves in his cheeks began to soften, and his grinning features glistened in the drying perspiration. His breathing became inaudible, and the swollen arteries in his neck were as rigid as taut-drawn ropes.

(First published in
Anvil
)

D
URING THE LATTER
part of summer when the apples were ripening, Roy used to get a team of his father’s horses and a surrey whenever he wanted them and all of us would go out to Quack’s farm and bring back two or three sacks of apples. Then when we got back to town, we would go down into Johnny and Evelyn’s cellar and make cider. The way we made it was like this: Johnny got one of his mother’s sheets and we dumped a sack of apples on it and mashed them with bricks. When they were mashed just right, all of us helped to squeeze out the juice into glasses.

There was a boy whose name was Malcolm Streeter who lived down at the bottom of the hill near the West End school. When he began coming up and playing with us, he was about our size though several years older. Evelyn and Grace talked about him all the time but none of the rest of us liked him at all.

When the Streeter boy came up and drank our cider, we began playing tricks on him whenever we had a chance. Roy threw his cap up in a tree so he would have to climb after it before he could go home. He always got mad and said he was never coming up again, but he always came back in a day or two. We teased him a lot, too. We called him a sissy because he went to parties with girls. Evelyn and Grace were the only ones who liked the Streeter boy. He kept his hair parted all the time, and he gave them chewing gum. Both of them always took up for him whenever we talked about ducking him in the reservoir, or something like that.

“You mustn’t throw him in the water,” Grace and Evelyn begged us. “He doesn’t mean any harm.”

“I’d like to throw him overboard in the river and see what he would do,” Quack said. “I’ll bet he’s a sissy just like a girl. I’ll bet he couldn’t swim out.”

“He’s just as good a swimmer as you are, Quack Hill!” Evelyn said. “I’ll bet you can’t swim across the river.”

“Me! Can’t swim across the river!” Quack said. “I can swim across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping even once.”

Malcolm came up the hill the next afternoon while we were playing baseball in the lot. He stopped at the corner though, and sat on the stone wall around Johnny and Evelyn’s house. We saw him sitting there, but nobody said anything to him.

Evelyn was in the house and Grace had gone downtown with her mother. If they had been there, they would have wanted him to play with us. We were glad they were not there, because the Streeter boy was a sissy.

Quack said something about stoning him; but the rest of us wanted to play baseball and we forgot all about him.

We played another hour and then went down to Johnny’s for some of our apples in his cellar. Johnny and Evelyn kept the apples we brought from the country. When we wanted some to eat, or when we wanted to make cider, we went down into their cellar and got them.

We sat around in the cellar awhile eating apples and then we went upstairs to the kitchen for a drink of water. The cellar had two doors. One was at the side where the coal was brought in and the other was at the top of the steps and opened into the kitchen.

We went up the steps to the kitchen. Quack was in front and he opened the door. The rest of us were behind him. As soon as Quack opened the door all of us saw the same thing. The Streeter boy and Evelyn were lying together on the kitchen floor.

We had made a lot of noise down in the cellar, and a lot more when we went up the steps, but they had not heard us. We backed down the steps and closed the door without either of them hearing us or knowing that we had been there. We sat down in the cellar and ate some more apples. Quack said he wanted some cider, but nobody else wanted to make any. When we had eaten all the apples we could hold, we went out into the yard and sat on the stone wall in front of the house. Quack threw the baseball up in the air and caught it in his glove with one hand. Johnny socked his mitt with his fist and made a good pocket in it for the ball. Joe socked his glove and made a good pocket in it so he would not drop the ball when he ran after a fly in the outfield.

The Streeter boy came out of Johnny and Evelyn’s house about half an hour before their mother came home from downtown. He jumped over the stone wall at the other side of the yard. He saw us sitting on the wall but he did not stop to say anything. He looked at us and put his thumb to his nose and wiggled his fingers at us. I don’t know why we did not throw rocks at him. We usually did stone him when he left the hill and went home. Once we stoned him all the way down to the West End school until he ran up on his front porch. We had to stop throwing then because we would have broken a window. But this time none of us got up. Nobody felt like stoning him any more.

After he had gone Evelyn stayed in the house. Grace had come home with her mother from downtown but she was at home helping to cook supper. All of us sat on the wall until we had to go home. It was getting dark.

Nobody knew why it was, but we never played baseball or made any more cider after that. When school was over in the afternoon, Quack went downtown and stayed until suppertime; and Johnny got a job delivering the afternoon paper on a route in the East End. Grace and Evelyn went riding in the afternoon with boys from the high school and at night went to dances with them. Roy helped his father at the livery stable and drove the horses every afternoon for exercise. He stopped going to school the next year and began training horses. Soon after he stopped school he sold a pair of horses to a circus. He had trained them to stand on barrels and roll them around a ring while keeping time to music.

Nobody ever knew what happened to the Streeter boy. He went away when he was twenty years old and never came back. Evelyn said she didn’t care if she never saw him again.

(First published in
American Earth
)

F
OR FIVE YEARS
before I put on long pants we lived just far enough away from the Mississippi River to be above flood level. Yet even there the creeks would back up after a big storm up the river and flood the pastures and corn lands. But as long as we lived there the Mississippi never touched us.

This was a queer country, all full of deep red gullies and low round hills with never a rock in sight. The earth was dark brown like delta silt, and it grew cornstalks so tall we had to break them down before the crop could be harvested. There were two or three Indian mounds near by, but nobody ever took the trouble to dig into them. People said they were filled with tomahawks and snake teeth and such things.

We lived on a small farm and had a Jersey cow, a big white horse, and a flock of Rhode Island Red chickens. My father got up early every morning and milked the cow and fed the horse six ears of corn before he took me to school. We drove the big white horse to the buggy and I was away until midafternoon. Then my father came for me and we went home. When we got there, we always had a hundred things to do. There was stovewood to chop, hay to throw down from the barn, water to pump, and dozens of other chores that had to be done every day.

We raised corn for the horse and chickens. For the cow we stripped the cornstalks of fodder and carried it to the barn in tight little bundles tied with binding twine. My father and I plowed the corn. The garden, though, was a different matter. We did not have the right kind of implements ourselves; so we hired Mr. Kates to cultivate the garden. Mr. Kates lived over the hill on his own farm. He had a daughter about my own age and her name was Lucy Kates.

Mr. Kates would come over and cultivate the garden and I would plow in the cornfield, while my father walked around to see if everything was going just right. Lucy came over too sometimes, with her father, and watched me plow the corn. She was a big girl with red hair and sunburned neck. She always wore low-necked dresses, and on a hot day in summer her breasts would be as red as fire. I said something to my father about Lucy getting sunburned.

“Why doesn’t Lucy Kates cover up the front of herself as we do?” I asked him. “Why does she want to get sunburned like that?”

“She’s getting to be a woman,” my father said, “and women do all sorts of fool things.”

I did not see that being a woman had anything to do with getting sunburned like a beet, but I never asked about it again.

It was shortly after this that our cow went dry and we were without milk for almost a year. My mother got mad at my father and did not speak to him for several months. The fact is, she did not speak to him until the cow began giving milk again. Just before she stopped speaking to him, she told him all she thought of him for letting our cow go dry. It was my father’s fault. He let the cow go dry.

Going back just before this, Mr. Kates owned a fine bull. The bull was pastured on the creek land next to ours. There was a barbed-wire fence separating the two farms and an old gate that had once been used when both farms belonged to Mr. Kates’ father. My father had bought a hundred-acre tract and built a house on it, and Mr. Kates nailed the gate up tight.

The dryness of our cow was due to trouble between my father and Mr. Kates. It was like this: Mr. Kates wanted twenty-five dollars for the services of his bull and my father thought fifteen dollars was about right. Mr. Kates stood firm at twenty-five.