Stories of Erskine Caldwell (73 page)

“Hurry, Drusilla,” I said, “let’s run to the house and put something on it that will stop it from hurting.”

I ran towards the gate, but when I turned around to see if she were coming, I saw her sit down under the tree. I ran back to her.

“What’s the matter, Drusilla? Aren’t you coming to the house?”

“I can’t,” she said, tears dropping down her cheeks. “It hurts too much.”

“But what are we going to do?” I begged her. “It will swell up and hurt more and more if we stay here.”

“Can’t you do something to it, Bob?” she asked, looking up into my eyes. “Can’t you make it stop hurting just a little bit?”

I remembered once when I had been bitten by a snake that an old Negro man sucked the poison out and put tobacco juice on it. I did not have any tobacco, but I knew I could suck the poison out of a bee sting if it were possible.

I got down on my knees beside her and asked her where the bee had stung.

“Right here,” she said, pointing to her shoulder. “Can’t you see where it’s swelling now?”

“You will have to roll up your sleeve,” I said. “I can’t get to it unless you do.”

Instead of rolling up her sleeve she began to unfasten a pin that held her dress together over her chest.

“Here’s the place — see?” she said, pushing back the dress from her shoulder.

I squeezed the flesh between my fingers until I saw the stinger and then I pulled it out. Leaning over her I put my mouth over the swelling and sucked as hard as I could, and then I spat the poison on the ground. I kept that up for almost five minutes before I was certain I had sucked out as much of the poison as I could.

“Does it feel any better now, Drusilla?” I asked her, breathless. “Does it hurt as much as it did before?”

“Oh, it barely hurts at all now,” she said, looking up at me bending over her. “But you had better do that some more. Maybe it will keep from swelling now.”

I bent over her again and sucked as hard as I could. She had fallen backward until she was lying on the ground and my arm was under her head. Then suddenly I forgot all about the bee-sting. I felt my lips tight over her skin and my hands gripping her shoulders. She was lying on her back, and her head had turned sideways against my head. I could not see her face, but I felt her hands holding tightly to me as if she were afraid she would fall if she took them away. I don’t know how long we lay there, but it seemed that the more I sucked the bee sting the less I could think about it. I had forgot to spit out the poison and I was kissing her shoulder far away from the place where the bee had stung her. I knew that she had forgotten all about the sting too, and that she did not feel the pain any more, because her cheeks were tight against my face and she was kissing me. The peach fuzz still clung to her and we both felt it tickle when our faces were close together. And then our lips were pressed together and our arms were around each other as tightly as we could clasp them. After a while it seemed as if we had been there in the orchard a long time together. The sun was setting behind the peach trees and we were already damp with the early dew. The peach fuzz was all over us but neither of us minded it any more.

“We must go now, Bob,” she said. “It’s very late.”

I waited, but she did not move.

“Where do you live, Drusilla?” I asked quickly.

She told me the address. I closed my eyes and repeated the street number over and over to myself until I was certain I would never forget it.

The stars were coming out when we got up and walked across the field to the house. And because it was dark we walked side by side in the narrow path with our arms around each other. When we reached the top of the hill I lifted her in my arms and carried her down to the bottom where the last gate was. She put her arms tightly around my neck and held her face close to mine until we were within sight of the house.

Laura was waiting for us on the front porch. She jumped up and ran to meet us when we went up the steps.

“Where have you been all this time — did something happen?” she asked.

We told her about the bee that had stung Drusilla.

“But it doesn’t hurt now,” Drusilla said.

I went across the porch to the swing and waited until they came.

“I got back from town so late that I decided to wait here for you,” Laura explained. “But if I had known you were going to stay this late I would have come down to the orchard and walked home with you.”

I sat down for a few minutes and then got up to go home. Laura went to the gate with me.

“I’m sorry I ran away like I did this afternoon and made you entertain Drue all day — but she is leaving in the morning and you can come back soon, Bob.”

“Is she going home tomorrow?” I asked quickly. “I’d better tell her good-by, then.”

I ran back to the porch where we had left Drusilla in the swing, but she had gone into the house. I walked back to Laura and asked her to tell Drusilla that I went to tell her good-by but that she had left the porch.

“Good night, Bob,” Laura said, squeezing my hand.

I opened the gate and went out.

“Good night,” I said.

Laura waited several minutes at the gate while I ran down the road towards home. I forgot that I had not kissed her until I had gone into the house.

When I went upstairs to my room I was angry with Laura for having Drusilla down to visit her, and I was just a little angry with Drusilla for making me like her more than I did Laura. I tried not to think about it very much, but I knew I liked Drusilla more than I loved Laura.

As soon as I could find the ink bottle I began writing a letter.

Dearest Drusilla: I am coming to Baltimore to look for a job and I want to see you as soon as I get there, I know I’ll like to live there because I
. . .

I stopped and wondered how I could say everything I wanted to in a letter.

(First published in
American Earth
)

N
OBODY KNEW WHERE
Handy came from, and nobody knew where he would go if he left, but if he had not killed Grandpa Price, he could have stayed another ten years or more.

Grandpa Price was old, and he was peevish, and he did nothing but fuss and find fault all day long. If he had been let alone, he would not have lived much longer, anyway.

But Handy hit Grandpa Price with a windlass, and the old man died that night. Handy had to pack up the little that belonged to him and get ready to go somewhere else to live.

“You ought to have had better sense,” Harry Munford told him.

“It wasn’t sense that had to do with it,” Handy said.

“Just the same, it wasn’t a good thing to do.”

“A man oughtn’t be an out-and-out troublemaker,” Handy said. “People who spend their lives building things don’t have time to find fault with others.”

“Even so,” Harry said, “you shouldn’t have done what you did to Grandpa Price.”

A whole day could be spent counting up the downright troublemaking things Grandpa Price had said and done during the past ten or fifteen years. When he ran out of the ordinary things to find fault with, such as not enough gravy on the chicken or too much sweetening in the custard, he would go around quarreling about the time of day it happened to be. Sometimes when it was morning, he would say it ought to be afternoon, and when it was noon, he would say it ought to be dawn, and then rant and rave if anybody said noon was as good as anything else for it to be. Only a few days before he died, he got after Harry because the chimney might not be in plumb. That made Harry so mad he almost lost his head. “What if it ain’t?” he shouted at the old man. “Because if it ain’t, it ought to be,” Grandpa Price said. Harry was so mad by then that he went for a plumb line and dropped it on the chimney. The chimney was only an eighth of an inch out of plumb. “That ought to make you shut your mouth from now on!” Harry shouted at him. “I won’t shut my mouth, because the chimney is out of plumb and you know it. It ought to be torn down and built up again right,” Grandpa Price said. “Over my dead body,” Harry told him. Grandpa Price fussed about the chimney being out of plumb all the rest of the day, and even through supper until he went to bed that night. He called Harry and all the Munfords lazy, good for nothing, and slipshod. He followed Harry around the place the next day saying anybody who would take up for an out-of-plumb chimney was not a good citizen.

“The more I think about it, Handy, the more I think you shouldn’t have done it,” Harry said. “Any number of times I’ve felt like picking up a brick or a crowbar and doing the thing myself, but a man can’t go around the world hitting old men like that, no matter how provoked he is. The law’s against it.”

“I just couldn’t stand it no longer, Mr. Harry,” Handy said. “I’m sorry about it now, but it just couldn’t be helped at the time.”

Handy had lived there ten or twelve years. When he walked into the front yard for the first time, it was in the middle of the cotton-picking season. He came in and said he was looking for something to do. It was at a time when Harry needed cotton pickers if he ever needed them. He was glad to see anybody who came up and said he wanted a job. Harry was all ready to hire Handy. He told Handy he was paying sixty cents a hundred in the fields.

Handy shook his head as though he knew exactly what he wanted. Cotton picking was not it. “No sirree, bob. I don’t pick no cotton,” Handy said. “I haven’t got any need for anybody else these days,” Harry told him. “The cotton is falling on the ground, going to waste faster every day, and that’s all I’m concerned about now.” “You always got need for something new, or something made of something old.” “What do you mean?” “I make things,” Handy said. “I just take what’s thrown away and make it useful. Sometimes I like to make a thing just because it’s pretty, though.”

He picked up a stick of wood about a foot long and two or three inches thick. Nobody paid much attention to what he was doing, and Harry was sizing him up to be a tramp. He asked Handy if he had ever worked in the fields, and Handy said he had not. He asked him if he had worked on the river steamers, and Handy said, No. In the cotton mills. Not ever. Railroads. No. Harry shook his head. He put Handy down a tramp. Handy scraped the wood with the knife blade and handed it to Harry. It was the smoothest-whittled wooden spoon anybody had ever seen. It looked as if it had been sandpapered and polished with soapstone. It had taken Handy only the length of time he was standing there to do it, too. Harry turned the spoon over and over in his hands, felt of it, and smiled at Handy. Anybody who could do a thing like that deserved a better jackknife than Handy had. Harry took his own out of his pocket and gave it to him.

Nobody said anything more to him about picking cotton in the fields. Handy walked around the yard looking at things for a while, and then he went around to the back of the house and looked inside the barn, the woodshed, the smokehouse, and the chicken run. He looked in all the hen nests, and then he began carving nest eggs out of some blocks of wood he found in the barn. They were smooth and brown, and the laying hens liked them better than any other kind.

After he had made six or eight nest eggs, he found something else to do. He never asked Harry or anybody if it was all right for him to do a thing, or if they wanted something made; he just went ahead and made whatever he felt like doing. The chairs Handy made were the most comfortable in the house, the plowstocks were the strongest on the farm, and the weather vanes were the prettiest in the country.

“The trouble with Grandpa Price, he wasn’t like me and you, Handy,” Harry said. “The reason me and you are alike is that I crave to get things growing in the fields, and you to make things with your hands. Grandpa Price didn’t have that feeling in him. All he wanted was to find fault with what other people grow or make.”

Handy was sad and dejected. He knew it would take him a long time to find another place where the people would let him stay and make things. He would be able to stop along the road now and then, of course, and make a chicken coop for somebody or build a pigpen; but as soon as he finished it, they would give him a leftover meal or a pair of old pants and tell him to go on away. He knew all about the trouble he was going to have finding somebody who would let him stay and just make things. Some of them would offer him a job plowing; in the fields, or working on a river steamer. “I want to make things out of pieces of wood,” Handy said. “I want to build things with my fingers.” The people were going to back away from him; they would shut the door in his face. He could not sit still. His hands began to tremble.

“What’s the matter, Handy?” Harry asked him. “What makes you shake like that? Don’t let what happened to Grandpa Price untie you.”

“It’s not that, it’s something else.”

“What else?”

“I’m going to find it hard not having a place to live where I can make things.”

“I hate like everything to see you go,” Harry said. “Somehow or other it don’t seem right at all.” It hurt him so much to think about Handy’s leaving that he tried not to look at him. “But,” he said, “the sheriff will make it hard for me if I fail to tell him what happened.” It was already the day after Grandpa Price had died, and the sheriff had to be told about it before Grandpa Price could be buried in the cemetery. “But I don’t want to do it, just the same,” Harry said sadly. “It means driving you off, Handy, and I’d drive you off a dozen times before I’d let the sheriff find you here when he comes.”

It hurt Harry so much to think about it he could not sit there and look at Handy. He got up and walked away by himself.

When he came back, Handy was not there. But presently he saw Handy’s head bobbing up and down behind the barn fence, and he was relieved. After a while he went into the house to change into clean overalls and shirt. He had to change before he could go into town, anyway. There was nothing to stop him from taking as much time as he wanted, though. He looked at two or three pairs of overalls before deciding which to put on. He liked to have a person like Handy around, because Handy was always making something, or getting ready to make something. That was what he liked about Handy. He was like the children when they came home from school, or on holidays. They were busy at something, play or work, every minute they were awake. He was afraid, though, that when they grew up they would get to be like Grandpa Price, that they would spend their time finding fault instead of making things.