was preaching from the other side in front of a grocery
store, "These here dem wild boom chasers is tearin' our whole town down!
They don't no more pay 'tention to th' law than if we didn't have laws!"
"You're a damned old liar! You old miserly crab!" a lady yelled out
from the crowd around him. "We're a-buildin' this town up ten dozen times
more'n you ever could of! We do more actual work in a minute than you do
settin' on yore rear a year!"
"If you wuzn't a lady, I'd resent that!"
"Don't let that hold you back, brother!" She knocked four or five
toughs out of her way getting to him. "As far as these laws go, who made
them up? You! And three or four more about like you! We come to this town to
work an' build up an oil field an' make it worth something! Maybe these boys
are a little wild and woolly. You've got to be to work like we work, an'
travel like we travel, an' live like we live!"
I laid down on the load of pipe and stretched my feet out and looked up
where the stars was. My ears still heard the babbling, yelping, swushing
along the streets, wheels rolling, horses straining, kids chasing and babies
screaming. The big trucks tooted their horns in the dark. I wanted to ride
there with my eyes closed, listening. I wanted to ride past the picture
show, gambling hall, whore house, drug store, church house, court house, and
the jail house and just listen to old Okemah growing up.
Okemah. She's a going, blowing oil boom town.
In the summer I played with other kids in the gang house. Our gang
house was built by a week's hard work of about a dozen kids of most every
sort, size, color, brand, trade mark, and style. It started when an old lady
told us a big long story, all about the howls and laughs you could hear if
you went very close to the old haunted house of the Bolewares. So I figured
my whole gang had ought to go spend a night in the old haunted house. I
rounded up about the whole dozen and over we went after it got dark. Nothing
but a stray goat come across the yard and some bats flew in and out of a few
broke windows. Right then we decided to haunt the house our own selves, and
we all moaned and groaned and tromped around in the dark, choking and
gurgling like we was being lynched, and stomping down with all of our weight
on the loose boards of the floor and the attic.
Next, one of us got the bright idea of carrying the loose boards across
town to an old sawed-down peach orchard on a side of the schoolhouse hill,
and put up a gang house to haunt. Every night we'd sneak out from home after
supper, some of us going to bed, creeping out from under covers and out of
windows to get away from our folks. Howls and screams from the Boleware
house caused neighbors to lock and bar their doors and windows; women stayed
in houses in bunches and sewed or knitted all night. As we kept haunting the
old house, rent come down to less than half what it had been on this street.
Dogs hung along under porches and whined with their tails pulled up real
tight between their hind legs. And then nothing but the very worst old
rotten boards were left on the outside of the house, and we'd hauled away
all of the nice inside boards. They went up like a big toadstool on
schoolhouse hill, and neighbors wondered what the hell. Last of all, we
wrote a sign with dim paint that we hung on the front side of the old
Boleware hull: "Haunted House. Stay Out." I heard two ladies walk past it a
month or so later and read the sign. My ears was like an old hound dog's,
and I heard one lady say, "See the sign on the front? 'Haunted House. Stay
Out'?" The other one said, "That landlord is a smart man. Doing that to
scare the kids away." And I thought, "Bull."
Pretty soon we had a regular early Oklahoma township a-going right
there on the lot around that old gang house. It was our City Hall, mail box,
court house, jail, picture show, saloon, gambling hall, church, land office,
restaurant, hotel and general store.
That shack was busier than our town depot. Each kid had a bin. In that
bin he kept his junk, whatever that might run into. Most of the kids would
take a gunny sack and go "junking'' about twice or three times a week. They
would come carrying in big sacks full of rubber inner tubes, brass faucets,
copper wire, light brass gadgets, aluminum pots and pans beat up into a
tight little ball. ThÅ city junk man bought them. That was money in our
pocket. We packed those sacks more than we did school books. We also
gathered up scrap iron, lead, zinc, rags, bottles, hoofs, horns, and old
bones, and you could put your own stuff in your own bin without being afraid
of somebody a-stealing it. We thought it was a mighty bad thing to steal
something somebody else had already stolen.
We had gang money made out of sheets of paper. Every time you brung in
a certain amount of junk, it was judged to be worth so much. You could go to
the bank and the banker would hand you out a school tablet or two cut up in
squares like dollar bills, and a few fancy marks around the edge, and signed
by the captain of the gang. Fifty cents worth of junk was worth Five
Thousand Dollars. You could cash your gang money in any time you wanted to,
and pack your junk down to the city junk yard and sell it for real money.
A kid named Bud run the gambling wheel. It was an old lopsided bicycle
wheel that he had found in the dumps and tried to even up. He paid you ten
to one if you called off the right spoke it would stop on. But there was
sixty spokes.
We rode stick horses, and some of the kids had nine, and all of the
nags named according to how fast they could run. Like if you was riding Old
Bay Tom, and Rex took in after you with a red handkerchief tied over his
face, why you'd switch horses right in the big middle of the road--and get
off of Old Bay Tom, and yell, "Giddyap, Lightnin'!"
We made horse-wrangling trips to the river and back, and gathered the
best of our stick horses, the long, keen straight and springy ones with lots
of fiery sap in them, and worth several hundred dollars each in gang money.
I jig-trotted the seven miles back from the river, with a big bundle of wild
broomtail Indian ponies tied up on both arms; and there was always such a
showing and swapping and training of horses on the side of that hill as
would outclass any horse-trading lot in the State of Oklahoma. A kid buying
a horse would first, of course, want him broke to saddle; and there was four
or five kids that made their whole living by busting bad ponies at ten
dollars a head. Two or three kids grabbed the horse's head and blinded his
eves while the rider mounted to the saddle, and then would holler, "Fan
`im!" The rider and the horse broke away, bucked and jumped all over the
place, beating the weeds to a frazzle, snorting, and nickering, and humping
into the air. Founding and spurring the bronco, the
kid frogged over sticker patches, whammed through can piles, flounced
down the hillside and sidestepped rocks and roots and stumps. Since a horse
was worth more if he was a wild one to break, the buyer would tip you an
extra fifty or maybe even a hundred, if you showed all of the other kids
that this was the snuffiest horse in the whole history of the hill. With
always two or three or four hoss tamers out there busting a mount at the
same time, you can just picture in your own mind how our hill looked--each
kid trying and straining every gut to out-buck, and out-nicker, and out-ride
the others. And then, to make a horse really in the dollar-a-year class, you
had to ride him till he quit bucking, and then run him through all of his
gaits; through the hard ones and easy ones, running as fast as he could
tear, till he slowed into a fast rough gallop, and then down to a slow easy
lope, pace him down the foot path, single-foot across the gang house yard,
fox trot up to the door, and then walk as nice and as easy as an old member
of the family till he was tied at the hitch rack, eating apples and sugar
out of everybody's hand.
And then you got your pay-off and somebody was the proud owner of
another pureblood. And not only did the horse get a good proud name, and
pedigree, and papers, but every little habit, onery streak, nervous spell,
and fear, along with all of his likes and dislikes, was known by his owner,
and there struck up between that stick horse and that kid a friendship,
partnership, and love. Lots of kids had rode their horses, talked their
troubles, winnings and losings, sick spells, and streaks of good luck, over
and over a thousand times--for two or three years.
In a patch of big high weeds, near the gang house, was an old oat
binder. We used it one hour for an airplane, and the next for a submarine.
The World War was on over in France, and the Americans had gone in. We
played war, war, war. We shot down weeds and trampled them into the dust,
and we licked the same weed army every day. We grabbed up sticks, and waded
out into the high weeds, fighting them hand to hand, cussing, sweating,
hacking them down. They surrendered every few minutes. Then they'd do
something mean to us again, and we'd get out and frail them back into the
notion of surrendering all over again. We'd walk up and grab each individual
weed by the coat collar, throw off his helmet, search him for Lugers, chuck
away his rifle, and say, "Surren'er?"
"Surrender!"
In the fall, when our school started, the kids got more excited about
fighting than about books. New kids had to fight to find their place on the
grounds, and the old bullies had new fights to settle who was still who.
Fights had a funny way of always ringing me in. If it was between two kids
that I didn't even know, whoever won, some smart aleck kids would holler,
"Yeah, yeah, I bet ya cain't lick Ïl' Woody Guthrie." And before long I'd be
somewhere out across the playgrounds whaling away and getting whaled, mostly
over something I didn't know a thing about. I went around with some part of
me puffed up all of the time, and the other parts just going down.
There was four of us that more or less respected each other, because we
was the fightingest four around there, not because we wanted to fight, not
because we was brave, or had it in for anybody, but just because the kids in
school had us picked out to entertain them with our broke fists and noses,
and they would carry tales and lies and cuss words back and forth like a
messenger service just to keep the old fires going and the pot boiling and
the skin a-flying.
But Big Jim Robins and Little Jim Whitt was the only two of the
round-town four that fought amongst their selves.
They beat half of the weed patches back into a cloud of hot, white,
cement-looking dust, every school season, and the kids would all gang up and
foller Big Jim and Little Jim home every afternoon when school was out, just
to get them to fighting, which wasn't a hard job, since they never could
agree just who'd got the best of it. Big Jim was a head taller than Little
Jim. I was about the same size as Little Jim. Big Jim was red-headed,
speckle-faced, snaggle-toothed, and broad through the shoulders, with great
big flat feet. His hands was like hog quarters, and his arms was six inches
longer than anybody else's in school, and he walked around in a hunch,
slouched down careless, and he picked up snipes. He was the big Luis Firpo
around that schoolhouse, and depended alone on his main strength and
awkwardness to keep him in the Round Town Four Fist Fighting Association.
His dad was a carpenter, his brother a grocery man. But Big Jim was the
toast of the town, the natural-born comic, the loud-mouth insulter, and
yelled at everybody that come along. His great big size scared the living
daylights right out of most of the little kids. When it come to a fight, Big
Jim seldom won, but he roared so loud, snorted so big, and kicked up so much
dust and fine splinters that the kids would holler and laugh, and cheer for
him, because wherever Big Jim had a fight, there you saw a complete
two-feature show with two comedies and short subjects added on.
Little Jim was mostly the opposite. Light whitish hair that looked like
frog fuzz, a slim, scary face and eyes that blinked and batted at everything
that rustled in the wind. He was famous for going around dirty and slouchy,
and when the kids would tease him, he would blow between his teeth like a
train starting, and kick back dirt with his toes. Little Jim was quiet when
he was left alone, and would walk ten blocks out of his way to keep out of a
fight; but the kids liked to watch him sneer and blow, and so they headed
him off across vacant lots, and pushed him into fights.
One day it was Trades Day, with sermons on the streets, singers in the
saloons, and plotters and politicians lying on every corner. The town was
alive, booming with the mixed voices of Negro farmers, the broke-down,
hungry, dirt farmers, and the talking of the Indians that sometimes took on
a high note, when some buck pointed away out yonder with his hand, and made
a big curving motion, so that you could tell that he was talking about the
whole country, the whole thing, the whole problem and, probably, the whole
people. The white folks talked of this and that, hogs, horses, shoes, hats,
whiskey, dances, women, politics, land, crops, weather and money. Everybody
stood around with a long string of red tickets, for one of the merchants was
aiming to give a new buggy away. It was a-standing out yonder in the middle
of the street right where everybody could see her set there in the dusty sun
and try her best to shine a little. Kids of all three colors, and an
occasional mixture of each, crawled, walked, run, chased loose chickens,
took in after cur dogs, dumb poles, fell across wagon tongues, and slipped
down on the sidewalk with a brand-new pair of shoes on. Ice cream cones was
waving around up and down the streets.
Down about the middle part of town, Big Jim and Little Jim was playing
marbles on a flat, dusty place by the side of the drug store. Already they
had attracted a couple of hundred folks down there to see the big Dominecker
Rooster and the right little Game Cock commence kicking the pants off of
each other.
The crowd mumbled, laughed, roared, and talked, some taking sides with
Big Jim, and some with Little Jim. It was a game of agates up. Agates up was
about as high as you could get in Okfuskee County politics without being an
adult.
Little Jim was shooting, Big Jim watching him like a hawk, and both
hollered every five seconds, "Dobbs!" "Venture Dubbs!" "You go ta hell, you
bastard, you!"
When the fight started, even the few idle wanderers who had tried for
the buggy soon come running down the street to see what was going on. They
spied the big noisy crowd, and they knew it must be an awful good fight. The
dust flew, and the skin, too, and you could see Big Jim's red head bobbing
and weaving in the middle of the crowd. He was taking long haymaker swings
at Little Jim's blond, silken-haired head, and hitting about once out of
every nine swings. Little Jim was faster and surer. He laid it into Big Jim
like a young mule kicking a clumsy old cow, and his fists seldom hit out
without landing in the neighborhood of Big Jim's nose.
He hit straight. But time was passing. Months rolling by. Big Jim was
getting bigger and bigger. He had completely outgrown Little Jim. Head and
shoulders he raised up above his little opponent, and lumbered down like
thunder and slow lightning, crushing when he landed a blow. Little Jim
fought faster. He fought much better. Barefooted in the hot dirty ring, he
pranced around, punching the big hulk of Big Jim, but just naturally not
doing one ounce of damage. He fought long. He got tired. Dust choked him
down. It choked Big Jim and the whole crowd, but Big Jim wasn't having to
spend his energy. It looked as if he couldn't decide what he wanted to do,
so he just made his hands sail around in the air to put on a show for the
people. But after a while, he wore Little Jim down, and gave him the best
beating that he had ever laid onto anybody. He brought blood running out of
Little Jim's nose, thumped his head and ears till they swelled and stung.
Beat his cheeks till you could see blue spots and red bruises. Little Jim
Whitt lost his standing in the fist-fighting game that day, right then and
there.
The town went wild. A decision had been reached. Little Jim had lost.
Two other fights as to which kid had won started out in the crowd among men
betting. But Big Jim was the stud buzzard in our town that day.
The school kids yelled when the fight was over. Their voices hummed so
fast that it sounded like a chant, like a wave swelling out across the
ocean.
"Where's Woody?" "Betcha cain't lick Ïl' Woody!" "Woody ain't here!
Where's Woody? He was down here in town early this mornin'--he's gone!"
Kids took out down the road like traveling preachers, by ones and twos,
and the others lit out through streets and alleys like a couple of dozen
little Paul Reveres. Grown men even strolled off up the hill to hunt me up,
and to give Big Jim time to rest up, and to rig us into a fist fight. Bets
mounted high. The crowd moved around like a big bunch of bugs on top of a
hole of water. It always stayed together, but it moved.
I was across town. I was up on Main Street, climbing the rafters and
braces of a big sign just across the street from the jail house. When a
couple of kids seen me climbing up on top of that signboard, they hollered,
"Hey, here he is! Here he is! Here's Woody! Bring on Big Jim!"
Oklahoma has had runs. Land runs and whiskey runs. But that crowd took
out in such a hard run up that hill that they jammed the streets where they
crossed, shoved each other down the boardwalks, skint their shins on the
concrete curbs, tore off the wooden corner posts of grocery stores, pushed
over stacks of chicken coops, turned the chickens loose, made the feathers
fly, slipped and fell across sacks of horse and mule feed, crawled over
wagons and buggies parked in the road, made the hay fly, lost their kids,
dropped plugs of tobacco, laughed, yelled, whooped, and caused teams to
break and run away.
Like I said, I was getting closer and closer to the top of that
sign-board, and when I heard that big crowd coming up the steep street
raising so much cain, I didn't know what the devil was going to happen. They
was yelling my name, and running full blast. I hit the top of the signboard,
and throwed one leg across, just as the crowd scraped a coat of old paint
off of the corner of the court house, crowding past it, to gather all around
the signboard and yell all kinds of things, like: "Come on down! Lick Big
Jim!" "Little Jim just got beat up!" "Whataya say, boy? Coward?" "Git 'im,
Yallerback!" "Come on down offa there! You ain't no dam eagle!"
Well, I just hunkered over and made myself right real comfortable and
set up there. I knew then what it was all about. Just another one of them
dam fool fights all rigged up and fixed up before you know what it's all
about. I knew how tired Big Jim must be. Just had one fight. Now they wanted
to sic him onto me and see another one. I must of killed a full five minutes
just setting up there. They tried every kind of a trick to get me down. Kids
and men dumb halfway up to where I was. They lured me and baited me. They
promised me dimes. But I didn't come down. Then they fell back onto the one
and only dare that I couldn't stand. They yelled, "Old man Charlie Guthrie's
a fighter! Old Charlie Guthrie would come down to fight!"
Something inside of me went out and something come in. I set there
about two or three seconds, my face went sort of blank, and I gritted my
teeth; and then I slid down off of the frame of the sign, and dumb like a
monkey down through the braces, and the crowd was in an uproar.
The crowd got around me. There was so much noise I couldn't do nothing.
It was just some kind of a roaring ocean rising and falling in my head. I
couldn't see Jim. It was too crowded. I saw every kind of a face but that
big speckled one. The crowd squared off, and they cleared out the usual
three-foot hole in the middle, which was big enough for two kids to knock
off twenty-five square foot of hair and hide in. I couldn't see Jim.
Something hit me right square between the horns. It was a big outfit of
some kind, a team of wild bay mares, or a wagon load of cotton seed--anyway,
it knocked me blind. I shook my head, but I couldn't see. After a minute it
hit me again, Kkkkkkkeeeeeeebblllllooooooom!!!!!!
Sometimes, you know, when you're fighting, it's a funny thing, one lick
will knock you blind, and the next one will knock you to where you can see
again. I could see Big Jim right there in front of me. I was tired and my
head was like a bread pan full of dry dough. I was sick. Couldn't get my
breath good. My face was all numb. I never had been hit that hard, I didn't
know how to fight this way. But I was in a good spot to learn. I didn't know
of but one way to beat Big Jim. I knew that he was tired. He was big and he
was slow. But many more of them piledrivers, and I'd be slower than that.
I'd been still. Big Jim couldn't fight a running fight. I was bigger than
Little Jim, by a pound or two, but not near as big as Big Jim. I had to bust
loose with everything that I ever had or ever hoped to borrow. I had to beat
my fists to pieces over his big red head. I didn't know why. Just had to.
Jim had busted me twice in the face. He didn't know why. Just done it.
I started. I started walking, swinging, ducking, dodging. I couldn't
even quit, not one split second. He wasn't used to that kind of fighting.
Kids usually danced and wasted a little time. Some of them waste all of the
time. I had fought that way some, it was all right then, but it wouldn't
work now. I kept my fists sailing to and from Jim's head without even a
letup. It was a fistic sweatshop. And with low pay. I wasn't mad at Jim. I
was mad at this kind of stuff. Mad at the men that started the fight. At the
kids that had been taught to yell for it. At the women that gossiped about
it, and spread lies about it. I hated fighting my home-town kids. I was
throwing my fists at Big Jim, but I was really fighting these crazy notions
that folks get and keep in their heads.
Jim was going backwards. He didn't have time to haul off and wind up.
He didn't have time to get his big feet to working. He just didn't have time
to do anything. He rained big haymakers down across my back and over my
head, and it was like beating me up with a fire hose. I wasn't doing so good
myself. I fired away like sixty. I got in close, inside Jim's big arms,
inside his reach, and fought like a wild dog drunk on slaughterhouse blood.
I only wanted it to be over.
Jim was stumbling backwards trying to get balanced long enough to break
my whole body with one of his fire-engine arms and fists, but it didn't
work. He stumbled over a wagon tongue. He got up and fell over it again. He
raised up and fell back against the front wheel, and braced his self by
holding onto the spokes.
He was just standing there using one arm to sort of wave and push me
aside with, but I couldn't let him stand there and get his breath and get
the dust wiped out of his eyes, and get rested up. Then he would take good
aim and knock my head to rolling down Main Street. I hit him as fast as I
could and as hard. I really didn't think I had that much power. He caved in
a couple of times, and he laid back against the wagon wheel. He propped his
big shoulders up against the rim. He couldn't fall. He plowed into my face.
I felt it turn numb. My whole jaw was just hanging there. It didn't know
why. All at once and for no good reason that the crowd could see, Big Jim
stopped fighting, he held up both hands. He quit.
I said, "Ya done?"
Jim said, "--can't go."
"Gotta 'nuff?"
"--reckon so--gotta stop."
The crowd hollered and jumped and screeched like a bunch of maniacs.
"Big Jim's hollered calf-rope!"
"He's all in an' down!"
"Downed 'im three times!"
"Whoopee!"
"Tough titty!"
Jim let his body sink down a little bit, rubbed his hair and forehead
with one hand and propped his self up on the wheel with the other. He set
there for a few minutes, but the crowd wouldn't let him rest. I stepped in
close beside him and said once more to make double sure, "Gotta 'nuff, Red?"
"I said I had ta quit. I'll see you later--"
"I don't want it ta be later. I want it ta be settled right here once
an' fer all. I don't want it ta hafta take place ever' Goddam day. You wanta
go some more------er say, let this be th' end of it fer me an' you both?"
"All right--this ends it."
Poor old Jim was fagged completely out, and so was I. "I'm--I've gotta
'nuff," he said.
And I sort of whispered in his ear, "So've I."
Men handed me dimes. Others slipped me two-bits pieces. I got over a
dollar. I run down the street to where Jim was walking along. He looked bad.
I said, "Ice-cream cone, Jim?"
"Naww. You git yore own self one."
"How 'bout you one, too?"
"Naww."
"'C'mon. T' hell with all of 'em. We ain't mad at nobody-- nobody but
them dam guys that keeps us a-fightin' amongst ourselfs."
"Bastards."
"Cream cone, Jim?"
"Yeahhh--might."
What kind did he want.
"Strawberry," he told me, "how much ya git?"
"Lemme see, dollar, fifteen, twenty-five."
He handed me a dime. This wasn't a new thing. We done it everytime we'd
fought before. Split up the money or part of it. He'd raked in a dollar and
a half.
"How much ya got now?" Jim asked me.
"Dollar thirty-five."
"I gotta nickel more'n you."
" 'At's all right."
He held the new-looking buffalo nickel out in the palm of his hand and
the sun hit down against it, and Jim was setting down and thinking on the
ground.
"Know who I'm gonna give that exter nickel to?"
"Huh uh." I shook my head.
"Little Jim."
The fire whistle moaned out across the town like a panther moaning in a
canyon. Dogs whined and run tucktail. The whistle kept blowing and every
time it went low and high I counted the wards on my fingers so I would know
which part of town to run to and see the fire.
That's a funny fire whistle. It just keeps blowing. Okemah hasn't got
that many wards. It's still blowing. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen times.
Looks like everybody is running up South Third Street there. Wagons.
Cars. Buggies. People on horseback. I'll run with this bunch of kids coming
here. "Hey! Where's th' fire at?"
'Foller us!"
"We'll show ya!"
"I don't see no flare in th' sky!"
"It ain't here in town! Look over south yonder, way out of town. See
all of that red?"
"Oil field fire?"
"Yeah! Whole town!"
"Which one?"
"Cromwell! We can see it when we hit th' top of th' hill there!"
Several hundred people crowded up the hill talking and gasping, short
of wind. Little bunches of men and women trotted along and talked. Horses
snorted and jumped all over the road. Dogs barked at weeds and pieces of
paper blowing in the dark. All along in under the locust trees people tore
as hard as they could run.
"There she is!" I heard some guy talking and pointing.
"Whew! Plain as day! That's a mean-lookin' fire!" I was saying to some
kids along the top of the hill.
"Seventeen miles away."
"Flames jumpin' up higher th'n th' tops of th' trees!"
"I know how high them trees is!"
"Me too. I been there a lot of times!"
"Yeah, me, too. I go a-swimmin' right in this side of there all th'
time. Them Cromwell kids is really tough. Wonder how much of th' town's on
fire?"
"Plenty of it," a man was saying.
"Five or six houses all at once, huh?"
"About a hunder houses all at once," the man said.
"Them old flames is really clawin' and' scratchin', ain't they?"
Another man talked up.
"I know a lot of people are clawing and scratching, trying to get out
of there."
"Them little old tar-paper shacks burn up just like paper!'' an Indian
kid was saying.
I walked along the hill listening to the people talk.
"Is it th' oil wells er th' houses?"
"Some of both, I would guess."
"I reckon there are already a couple of hundred people on their way
from Okemah out there to help fight the fire."
"I hope there is. That's a bad blaze."
"Spreading all in through the timber there. Lots of folks losing their
houses in that fire tonight."
"All of their belongings."
"But th' people!" A lady spoke out. "It's the' little kids, an' th'
mothers, an' people sleepin' and sick people in bed, an' everything else in
those shacktowns. I've got a feeling that lots of people are just caught
like moths in a bonfire."
I laid down on the grass and listened to folks talk for an hour or so.
Then, by families, and little bunches, and one at a time, they took their
last long look at the flames and turned around walking and talking and going
home to bed.
I laid there by myself for about another hour. Cromwell was one of the
biggest oil field towns in the whole country. I've seen the boxcar shacks
stripped over with tar paper lots of times, the oak trees and the sandy land
and the fishing creeks and swimming holes.
That night Okemah watched Cromwell crackle and roar and dance in the
wind and fall into a flat bed of red-hot cinders.
Fire is a funny thing. It helps you and it hurts you. It builds a town
up and it eats it down.
What could be left of those little old lumber houses with all of the
boards as dry as powder and running full of rosin?
What could be left of a family caught asleep and choked down in the
smoke? What could be left of a man that lost his family there?
I forgot all about the cold dew and went to sleep on the top rim of the
hill just thinking about it.
Chapter VII
CAIN'T NO GANG WHIP US NOW
A new tribe of boomchasers hit town every day, families with kids, kids
looking for work and play. The gang-house kids made a law that new kids
coming in couldn't have any say-so in how the gang was run, so the new kids
got mad and moved a little farther on down the hill. I was sore at the old
gang and went and hooked up with the new one. And trouble had got so hot
between the two gangs that it looked awful dark.
"Woody, did you write that war letter, like we said last night?" The
captain of our new gang was saluting and nodding to several kids as they
come out for the day's playing.
I read out:
To the Members of the Old Gang:
Dear Captain and Leaders and Members:
We told you why we are fighting this war. It is because of your leaders
mostly. Most of us kids is new here in town and we ain't got no other place
except at your gang house, You made us work but you didn't let us vote or
nothing like that when it was time.
The only way out is to let all of us kids own the gang house together.
We was always fighting the other way. One gang against the other one. It
will always be this a-way unless we change it, and you don't want us to
change it, but we aim to anyhow. Both gangs has got to join up together and
be one gang.
We will come to see you at eight o'clock, and if you still try to keep
us split up, we will start a war.
It will not be a play war. It will take place with sling shots and
flint rocks. It will be a real war and it will last till one side or the
other wins out on top.
The Boom Town Kids,
Thug Warner, Chief.
Woody Guthrie, Messenger.
"Sounds okay."
"Purty fair letter."
"It'll do." Our captain pulled a big dollar watch out of his
overalls pocket. "Fifteen minnits, then war's on!" Then he said, "Okay,
go on, read 'em th' letter."
"Yessir." I touched the bill of my corduroy hunting cap I always wore
in a hard fight. I put a white handkerchief on my arm and went to the old
gang house.
"Git back thar, trater!" I heard a couple of highway flints zoom past
my ears.
"Quit shootin'! I'm a mess'nger! Ya c'n see this white rag on my arm!"
The door opened up and Colonel and Rex stepped out into the open.
Colonel had his early morning chew of scrap tobacco pretty well limbered up,
and spit three or four long squirts while he gritted his teeth and read the
letter.
Rex read over Colonel's shoulder, "A real war ... till one side or the
other wins out on top." He flipped his lip with his fingers and looked up
across the hill. "What chance you fools think you got 'ginst our gang house
shootin' with flint-rock Sling shots?"
"You'll see." I turned my corduroy hat around so the bill protected the
back of my head and neck. "You guys has seen me wear this cap backwards
before, haven't ya? Ya know that means fight, don't ya? I don't feel funny
fightin' on th' new kids' side, 'cause, ya see, men, I jes' happen ta
believe they're right an' you're wrong."
"You an' yore letter, an' yore pack of mangy curs! Boom town rats!"
Colonel tore the war letter up into a hundred little pieces and slung them
into my face like a quick snow.
Rex shut the door and latched it. "Okay, fellas," I heard him tell his
fighters inside, "it's war! Everybody ready? Rocks easy to reach? Keep out
of shootin' range of these open windows!" Then he stuck his head out the
window that had been the jail and yelled at me, "You yeller-bellied quitter!
Git movin'!"
I expected a rock to whack me in the back any time as I run back up the
hill, but nothing hit me. "I guess you seen what happened ta our letter!" I
told the captain.
"Three minnits, boys. Then she's war!" Thug turned to me and winked and
said, "Round up th' men. Bring all of 'em right here in th' alley."
I whistled through my teeth and waved my hand in the air as a signal
for all of the kids on our side to follow me. Everybody stood in the alley
above the trash pile at the top of the hill.
"You four go with Slew." Thug pointed out the squads. "You four foller
Woody through the trash pile. You three fight here in the middle with me.
Git to yer places!"
"Fire away, boys!" some kid yelled out.
"Hold yer fire!" Thug bawled him out. "If we shoot one second ahead of
eight o'clock, they'll go aroun' lyin' that we sneaked up on 'em, an' didn't
give 'em a chance!"
"How long, Thug?"
" 'Bout ten secinds!"
"Places ever'bodyyyy! Gitt reaeeeedyyy!"
We ripped and tore and yelled on our way to our places. Three kids
pulled homemade coaster wagons loaded to the hub with good shaped
sling-shots rocks. The gang house was built on a flat place dug out of the
hill. A patch of weeds about three foot high run along the upper part where
we stood and was the only thing that would hide us from the rock fire of the
fighters in the house. Kids eyed one another, patted the old trusty stocks
and rubbers of their sling shots. Then all eyes centered on Thug.
He looked at his big dollar watch and hollered, "Chaaarrge!"
"Down on yer bellies!" Slew yelled out to the whole line. He was as
good a fighting captain any old day as Thug. "Crawl inta these weeds! Save
your rocks! Keep crawlin' down th' hill! Let's put that guy in th' lockout
tower out of order first!"
Thug was standing on the north end of our line. He drawed back his
rubbers so tight they sung a bugle call in the bard wind, and whizzed a rock
through the jail-house window. Inside some kid with the first punk knot of
the war, hollered, "Ooohhhh!"
Trick doors the size of a cigar box slid open, first here, then there,
all over the front side of the house. Hands of a dozen kids stuck from
underneath and around the edges of the windows, rubbers stretched, and rocks
howled through the air.
"Hot rocks! Red hot! Feel that!" Claude was cussing next to me,
touching the end of his finger to an agate-looking flint that had dug the
grass roots a couple of inches from his head. "Heatin' 'em on that dam stove
they got inside!"
I bit my bottom lip and pasted one into the lookout nest that
splintered a sliding trap door to shavings. A red-hot rock flew back out of
the tower and glanced off of my shoulder blade, leaving a burnt red welt,
about six inches long. Claude heard the thump and felt me roll over against
him moaning.
"Looky here!" Claude pointed to the rock laying between us in the
grass. "Simmerin'. Scorchin' th' grass!" He tried to pick it up and load it
into his sling, but jerked his fingers back saying, "Wowie! Boy! Howdy!
Hotter'n a bitch!"
I put my hand up to my mouth and ducked low and yelled back at our
bunch, "Hot rocks! Watch out! Hot rocks!"
I seen Thug crawling through the weeds toward me, wearing a flop felt
hat a couple of sizes too big, folded full of newspapers, for a helmet. He
jumped to his feet and run through the weeds, pointing at a couple of kids
in charge of our ammunition wagons. "Hey! You two! Git plenty of good
firewood! Them birds'll be awful sorry they ever started this hot-rock
fightin'!"
Before many minutes a new fire was crackling on the side of the hill
behind our lines. The two kids lifted tin buckets from a wagon, each bucket
piled brim full of round flints, and set on a two-foot sheet of corrugated
roofing tin. Papers, sticks, and weed stalks blazed underneath. The fire got
hotter and, before long, there was a tin bucket of the hot rocks within easy
reach of every kid on our side.
"How'dya take a-holt of 'em ta shoot, without blistering yer hands?" I
asked a kid when he set a bucket down between Claude and me. I could feel
the heat from the bucket of rocks striking my skin from two feet away.
"Red-hot mommers!"
The ammunition boy grinned at me and said, "Gotta par o' gloves on ya?"
"I ain't got none here." I dodged a foot to one side and seen a rock
knock a hole the size of a horseshoe track. It buried itself a good inch in
the grass roots and shot sizzling hot steam from the damp ground under the
dead grass. "Kill a man if it'd hit 'im jest right,"
"We got two pairs o' gloves fer our whole bunch. Thirteen of us. So,
here, here's a left-handed glove. Ya gotta load an' shoot real quick, so's
ya don't git burnt." He dropped a glove between me and Claude.
I pulled on the glove, fished a nice juicy roasted rock out of the
bucket, slipped it into the leather of my sling shot, stretched the rubbers
as far as they would go, and felt the heat of the rock burning the tips of
my fingers when I let go. The shot knicked a handful of splinters off of the
side of the house. "Trouble is, ya don't shoot as straight with a glove on."
"Clumsy. Yeah." He finished digging his little hole. "Think we might
oughtta switch back to just plain rocks, an' shoot straighter? More of 'em?"
"We gotta use 'em hot. See, them guys in th' house knows that we cain't
crawl around on our bellies if they lay a lot of heated rocks all over this
weed patch. One of these here rocks'll stay hot fifteen 'er twenty minnits.
Step on 'er, lay down on one, or come down on one with your knee, boy, it'd
dam near it put ya outta commish'n!"
"Halfa our kids is goin' barefooted, too." Claude squinted his eyes up
and said, "See that little window up yonder in that there lookout tower?
Watch it."
"Got 'er kivvered." I heard Claude's rubbers sing like a big airplane
motor. "Like a bat goin' home ta roost," I laughed when the rock clattered
inside the crow's-nest window.
Zuuumm. Another kid from the weeds played a nice little tune in the
wind. Then Zinnng. Sswwiiissshh. Rocks flew like geese headed south in the
winter, lined up in good order, spaced well apart, each man sending his shot
when it come his time, and not one second before. Hot flints in the wind as
heavy as .45 bullets. Thug trotted wide around our lines telling everybody,
"Take yer time, boys. Don't git excited. Shoot when yer time comes." Just
then his head jerked back and his hand flew up to his forehead. He dropped
his sling shot to the ground and staggered across the hill.
"Thug! They cracked 'im!" I could hear one kid yelling.
"Thug, Watch out where you're goin' there! You're gettin' too close to
th' fort!" Ray was Claude's little runt of a brother, the cussingest and
runningest kid in our outfit. He darted from his hideout in the weeds and
made a bee line for Thug. "Thug! Open yore eyes! Watch out!"
Several secret shooting doors slid open on the south side of the house,
and Thug was walking blind within twenty-five foot of them. He made a face
when a rock caught him on the backbone. He stood up and stiffened his
muscles all over as another one glanced off the side of his neck. Blood
splashed on his jaw and he covered his face and eyes with both hands.
"Take my hand!" little runty Ray was telling him. Thug ducked his head
in the palms of his hands and shook the blood all over his shirt. "C'mon!
Back this a-way!" Ray pulled Thug by the arms and pushed him along the
ground. Ray got hit all over his body trying to get Thug back behind our
lines. "Okay!" he told Thug when they'd moved out of range. "Set down over
here out of th' way. I'll run over th' hill an' git a bucket o' water an'
wet a rag!"
"Thug! Need some help?" I yelled up over the weeds.
"Yeah. Best kinda help you c'n gimme is ta keep on puttin' th' hot
pepper inta that lookout!"
"Gotcha, Cap!" I rolled back over in the weeds and laughed at Claude
and raised up on my knees long enough to lay a nice one right in through the
middle of the window. "Bull's-eye!" I yelled at the rest of the kids.
I heard a loud mouth blurt out from up in the piano-box lookout.
"Here's yore answer!" The ground about an inch from my nose popped open and
the damp dirt sizzed against the sides of a slick one. I heard another whine
in the air and felt my ankle crack and sting just above my shoe top. I tried
to wiggle my foot, but it wouldn't work. A cutting pain felt like it was
burning all the way up my leg to my hip bone. "Mmmooohhhh!" I grunted and
rolled through the grass, grabbing my ankle and rubbing it as hard as I
could.
"Gitcha ag'in'?" Claude looked over at me. "Better stay laid down, boy,
low! Leave your head stickin' up above th' weeds like that, an' them boys'll
chop you down just like you was a weed!"
Little Ray trotted down the path by the chicken house, and carried the
water over to where Thug was humped up holding his head in his hands. He
puffed and blowed and pulled out a rag. "Here. Good `n' wet. Hold still!"
Thug grabbed the rag away from Ray and told him, "I'll wipe off my own
blood. You skat back ta yer own place an' keep sailin' 'em."
Ray didn't argue with the captain. He tore out across the hill toward
his fighting partner hid in the grass and yelled what Thug had told him,
"Keep 'em sailin'! Boys! Hot rocks hailin'! Give that buncha gang house
crooks a good, good frailin'!"
A big heavy one whirled through the wind humming and knocked little
Ray's feet up into the air, laying him flat on his back. He didn't say a
word or make a sound.
"Ray went down!" Claude punched me in the ribs. "See?"
"Keep down!" I held Claude by the arms. I happened to be watching the
smoke rolling out of the gang house stove pipe, "Boy, they're really
throwin' th' wood ta that baby, ain't they?"
"You know, a feller could go up there and stick a hat or a gunny sack
or something down in th' end of that stove pipe an' really smoke them birds
outta there!"
"Make their eyes so watery they couldn't see ta shoot straight!" I told
him. "But that lookout ... them kids up there'd drill ten holes in yer skull
while ya was stuffin' th' pipe."
"Hey! Look!" Claude nudged me with his elbow. "What in th' dem livin'
hell is that?"
"Hey, men!" I yelled back to the kids in our line. "Front door! Look!"
That front door was coming open. "Okay! Men! Charge!" The gang ho'ise
captain bawled out from inside.
A big wooden barrel with a hole sawed out in front with a square piece
of heavy-duty screen wire tacked over a peek hole, lumbered out through the
door. Our boys peppered more sizzlers into the open door.
"That's good, men!" Thug was yelling at us, wiping the cut places on
his face and neck. "Shoot inside th' house! Not at th' barrel!" So thirteen
more rocks clattered in at the door.
Inside there was cussing, sniffing, squawling as the hot rocks bounced
against kids and kids stepped on the scorching floor, "Lay 'em in! Keep 'em
sailin'!" Thug was trotting around back of us, wiping his face with his wet
rag. "Pour it on 'em! That war tank they've invented, hell with it, we can
take care of that later! Blast away! Right on through th' door!"
"Charge!" The gang house captain yelled again. A second double-size
barrel waddled out into the yard with a kid walking under it. Thirteen more
cooked rocks flew to roost through the door, and thirteen more cuss words,
both imported and homemade, roared back at us.
"Charge! Tanks!" The captain of the shack yelled the third time, and
the third barrel tank waddled out onto the battlefield.
Already the first tank had come to a bad end. The barefooted kid humped
under it had stepped down on a rock hot
enough to cook hot cakes on, and had squealed like a pig with his head
caught in a slop bucket, turned his barrel over upside down against the
house, and run like a wild man across the hill.
Tank number two had shoes on. Pretty tough. His screen-wire peek hole
was fixed so he could shoot his sling shot and a pair of springs pulled his
screen shield shut before we had a chance to put a rock inside. We bounced
all kinds of rocks off of it, but he kept coming. He come to a standstill
just about five or six feet from where Claude and me was bellied down. A
rock sung out from the barrel and stung Claude on the shoulder. Another one
caught him on the back of the leg. I got hit in the back of the hand. We
jumped up and beat it back through the weeds.
"What's a feller gonna do up aginst a dam reg'ler war tank?" Claude was
rubbing his stings and blowing through his nose.
Tank number three had shoes on, too. He oozed up to the two guys next
in our line. Three or four hot shots spit out from the barrel. Two more of
our men jumped up out of the weeds and come limping into the alley. Tank
number two went to work on our next two men, and they crippled away through
the weeds.
"Run fer th' alley, fellers!" Thug was ordering the men facing the
tanks. "No use ta git shot 'less ya c'n make it pay!'"
The gang house roared and cheered. The whole little house shook with
cries and yelps of victory. Dancing jarred the whole side of the bill. A
chant floated through the walls of the fort:
Hooray fer th' tanks!
Hooray fer th' tanks!
That'll teach a lesson
To th' boom town rats!
"Whattaya wanta do? What's best?" Thug was holding the wet cloth to the
back of his neck to make the blood quit dripping. "Whattaya say?"
"I say fight!"
"Fight!"
"Charge 'em!''
"Okay, boys! Here she comes! Git 'em! By God, charge!'' He led the way,
running fast and jumping through the weeds. "Knock hell outta them tanks,
boys, no matter if ya hafta do it with yer head!"
"Ain't no tank hard as my head!" I was laughing and trying to keep up
with Thug.
"I'll tear that barrel apart, stave from stave!" Claude was running
faster on his club foot than any of the rest of us. He passed me up, and
then went past Thug. "Clear outta my way!"
"Yyyaaaayyyyy-hoooo!"
"Circle 'em, men!"
"Knock 'em out!"
"Hit 'em with yer shoulder!''
About ten or twelve feet before he got to the tank, Claude took good
aim. The last five feet he cleared in one long kick, swatting the side of
the barrel with the triple sole of his crippled foot. There was a cuss from
Claude and a squawl from the barrel. Then the barrel, kid, rocks, sling
shot, and the whole works rolled away, and we all pointed down the hill and
laughed at the kid's feet turning around and around in the open end of the
rolling barrel. It busted in a hundred staves against a rock.
We charged tank number three, and in a few seconds it had got the same
dose as the one before. We joked and laughed, "I'd hate ta be that tank
driver!" "Boys, look at his feet fiyin' around! Look like an airplane
perpeller in th' end of that barrel a rollin'!"
Tank number one got straighted up again. It scooted in after us as we
hid around at our old places in the weeds, and a kid in the barrel yelled
out, "This is ou'rn now! We captur'd it! Don't shoot! Jist gimme a bucket of
them hot rocks, boys, an' I'll roll up an' bounce 'em in at that window so
fast they'll think it's snowin' hot rocks! Ha! Yo!" He got his rocks. The
barrel moved up within five feet of the window and settled down to a spell
of fast, steady shooting.
"Armored soldiers, charge!" We all heard the captain holler in the
house. Out of the door pushed three kids with heavy overcoats and mackinaws
on, thick gloves, and a broom handle apiece. We spotted all of our shots on
the open door again and heard our rocks bouncing from wall to wall. Inside
kids raved and foamed. The first armored man was loaded heavy and wrapped
pretty good, a mackinaw coat on backwards, and the big sheep-skin collar
turned up to hide his face. This made him a dangerous man. He could just
walk up and push our tank over and frail the knob of the driver. Our rocks
rained all around him, hitting his thick coat and he laughed because they
couldn't hurt him. He took just one step toward our tank. But, right off the
bat, the armored man had trouble. A good stingeree bounced and fell down
inside the collar of the thick mackinaw and come to rest against the skin of
his neck. Other kids had buttoned him into the coat, We last seen him airing
it out down the hill, slinging a glove here, and one yonder, slinging cuss
words and tears at the whole human race.
The second armored man walked within five foot of us, and our rocks
bounced off of his overcoat padded with a couple of flannel blankets
underneath. He was out to rush the tank, push it over, beat the driver up
with a broom handle, and capture the whole shebang. As long as he was
walking, he was mean and dangerous. He sneaked up out of range of the tank
and stopped. The tank turned toward him. He moved around. The tank turned
toward him. He moved a step or two in a circle. It looked like a bird
fighting a rattlesnake. The kid in the barrel was sweating. His breathing,
even ten or fifteen feet away, sounded like a steam engine. He shot a rock
out with enough power to down a Jersey bull. It cracked the armored kid on
the shin, and he hopped down the hill rubbing and cussing, his broom handle
laying where he'd been standing. Slew chased out, tackled him while he was
hopping on one foot, and marched the prisoner back of our lines.
In a jiffy or two Slew was strutting up and down, wearing the blankets,
overcoat, a fur hunting cap on backwards with the earflaps down all the way
around, laughing and joking with the kids in the house, and following their
third armored man around and around the house. They went out of sight. Then
armored unit number three backed into plain sight again around the corner
with both hands up in the air. He was wrapped about six times around with
gunny sacking tied around his chest, neck, belly and legs with cotton rope.
Slew ordered the prisoner to keep backing up. When they got to our lines,
the knots in the rope was untied, gunny sacking rolled off, and rolled back
onto another one of our men.
"Hold'er down a few minnits," I told Claude next to me. "Gonna see if I
know them two kids."
I run a wide bend back of our men and come to the place where little
Ray had went down in the weeds a few minutes ago. Ronald Horton, who was the
best whittler in that whole end of town, had stuck right in the weeds with
Ray even when the rest of us had retreated from the tanks. "How's Ray?" I
ducked down in the weeds close to Ronald. "Hurt bad?"
"He bats his eyes a little," Ron told me. "But then he ain't plumb woke
up yet.'' Ron held his hand out and I looked down and seen a steel
ball-bearing the size of the end of your ringer.
"You ain't aimin' ta shoot that!" I grabbed his wrist and took the
steely.
"Somebody in that shack plugged Little Ray with it!" Ron got down more
on his belly. "Better'd duck low, boy, might be more steel balls where
that'n come from."
"I'm go in' over here ta see if I know who these two strange kids is."
I was walking away, hunched down like a monkey dragging his arms in the
dirt. "I'm wonderin' where so many strange kids is comin' from outta that
house."
"Bring me back that bucket of water, if Thug's done with it. We need a
Red Cross gal aroun' here." Ron rolled to one side to dodge a rock. "I wanta
wet a rag an' put it on Little Ray's face."
"Okay." And then I circled through the weeds till I got to where Slew
and his four men was strung out.
I asked one of the prisoners, "You ain't no member of th' gang here at
th' house, are ya?"
"Hell, no." The kid wasn't very scared of us. "I ain't been livin' in
this town but three days. Folks follers th' oil field work."
"How come ya fightin' us kids?''
"Gimme two bits. Cap'n uv that gang house."
"Two bits? You jest a soldier that goes aroun' hirin' out ta fight fer
money, huh?" I looked his old dirty clothes over.
"They said they wuz th' oldist gang in this town. Best fighters." He
rested back on his hands. Wasn't afraid of nobody.
"I'll tell ya one thing, stranger, whoever ya are, th' oldist bunch
ain't always th' best fighters!"
"Which bunch is you guys?" he asked us.
"Most of us is new here in town," Slew spoke up.
"Who's them ginks in th' shack?" he kept asking.
"Home-town kids, biggest part," I told him. "Like me. Born an' raised
here."
"How come you fightin' on th' new side then?" The prisoner give me a
good looking over, with a wise tough look on his face.
"I didn't like th' old laws. Newcomers didn't have no say-so in how th'
joint wuz run." I heard a couple of dozen rocks humming around over the
hill. "Old bunch booted me out. So I went in with the new kids."
"Maybe ya got somethin' there, fellas." He stood back up on his feet
and stuck out his hand. "Here. Put 'er there. Could you sorter count me in
on yore new side?"
"Honist? Fight?" Slew doubted him a little.
He smiled at both of us. Then he looked back over our shoulders at the
gang house. "I won't charge you guys no two bits."
"Did they pay ya yer two bits already?" I asked him.
"Nawww. They c'n keep their Ïl' two bits." He didn't take his eyes off
of the gang house. He whistled the first note of a little tune and went on
saying, "Well take th' whole works."
I shook hands with the prisoner and said, "I think this man'll make us
a good captain one of these days."
"Janiter by trade." The kid shook my hand and told us.
"I'm runnin' fer scavenger nex' lection." Slew stuck out his hand. They
shook on the deal. "Gonna clean out this place from th' bottom up."
I reached inside my shirt and offered the kid a sling shot.
"Nawww. That's too sissy fer me. You guys wanta win this war in a
hurry?"
"How?"
"See that Ïl' stumpy tree up yonder?"
"With th' few old limbs. That 'un?"
"Well, now, boys, if you was ta run home an' git a handsaw, an' if you
was ta saw off that first limb stickin' up, an' that lower limb stickin'
acrost, what would ya have left?"
"It'd be a stump shaped like a V!"
"A V with a handle on it makes what?" he went on.
"A big sling-shot stock!"
"Cannon!"
"Take a whole inner tube! We can git that in two minnits!"
"Some bailin' wire aroun' th' tops!"
"Just take yer pockitknife an' split yore inner tube, see? Rope th'
ends onto th' forks of th' stump. Blim. Blam. Blooey!"
Slew's face lit up like the rising sun. "Rocks this big! We can shoot
rocks as big as yer head!" He started backing away saying, "See you birds in
about two minnits flat!"
He struck across the hill, jumped a deep clay ditch, and was almost out
of sight before I could ask the new kid, "What's your name? Mine's Woody."
"My name's Andy."
"Okay, Andy. Yonder's our captain. Thug. Le's go tell `im about th'
cannon."
Thug met us, saying, "You fellers look awful friendly fer one of ya ta
be a pris'ner."
"Andy's on our side now," I told Thug.
"Yeah. I changed uniforms," Andy laughed.
"Andy jus' now told us how ta saw th' extry forks off of that there old
peach tree stump up yonder. Make a cannon."
"Ya figgered that up, Andy?" Thug started smiling.
''I want th' new side ta come winner on top!" Andy had a look in his
eyes like a trained bulldog itching for a fight.
"Slew's comin' yonder with th' saw an' inner tube! Come on, Andy," I
said. "We'll fix this cannon in about forty-four flat, an' about three good
solid licks will settle this war once and fer all!"
"Pour it on their Ïl' sore backs! After we win, Andy, maybe you'll be
capt'in in my place!" Thug went away waving his hands in the air, making all
kinds of motions at our boys fighting. "Double yer fire, men! Shovel them
rocks onta that house! Pepper it on 'em! Don't give 'em a chance ta breathe!
Shoot th' buckets at 'em if ya run shorta rocks! Wow! Wow!" He was bending
and grunting through the weeds, counting slow like a string of jail birds
chopping on a logging gang. "One! Two! Wow! Wow! Fire! Load! Aim! Fire!"
The dribble of rocks doubled and got twice as loud against the house.
I'd been inside that little old house through a lot of wars and a lot of
hailstorms. I know how it sounded inside now. It was loud, and as mean, only
a hell of a lot hotter than three years of rough weather all added up.
"Tied all right?" I asked Slew and Andy.
"My end's hot an' ready ta ramble!" Slew jerked the last knot in his
rope.
"My fork's sizzlin'!"
"Gonna take two guys!" I couldn't stretch the big inner tube much by
myself. I dug my heels into the hill and throwed my weight against it,
heaving backwards, but it was too tough. "Go gitta couple of kids outta our
lines. Put 'em ta packin' rocks."
Claude come over bringing four or five rocks about the size of brick
bats.
"Keep 'em hailin'!" I was yelling back along our string of kids. I
turned back to Claude and said, "Go take a look at yer bruther Ray, that's
him they're pourin' water yonder in them weeds. Didn't no ice-cream cone
knock 'im out, either! Hell, no! A steely ball!" I turned away from Claude
and said to Andy, "Load 'er up!"
"She's loaded fer war!" Andy hollered. "Let's pull 'er back!"
Andy and me pulled the rock back in the 100-gauge sling shot. It was
all we could do to stretch it back. "One! Two! Three! Fire!" We both turned
loose.
The new hum of the big rock in the air brought a big loud whoop and
holler from up and down our string of kids. "Loooky! Cannon! Hooray fer th'
cannon!"
Everybody watched the big rock.
A low shot. It hit the ground about fifteen feet this side of the fort.
It plowed a bucketful of loose rock and dirt when it hit, and went rolling
into the side of the house. A board screaked and split and the gang house
got as still as a feather floating.
"What th' hell wuz that?" their captain yelled at us.
"It wasn't no steel ball!" Claude hollered from over where they was
pouring water on Little Ray. "It was a cannon!"
"Cannon?" Their captain sounded a little shaky in the throat.
"Yes, cannon! Here she comes ag'in!" I hollered out.
"What kinda cannon?" another kid hollered out from in the house.
"Cannon cannon!" Andy put in.
"No fair usin' cannons!" a kid barked from the house.
"No fair usin' a dam fort! Ha!" one of ours laughed back.
I waited a second or two, then asked, "Like ta give up?"
"Hell, no!"
"Okay, Andy! Load 'er up ag'in! Let's pull 'er back! One! Two! Three!
Fire!"
A zoom in the air like a covey of quails, or like the wind whistling
through an airplane's wings. A bigger board split into forty-nine little
shavers and three or four flew in every direction. We could see the kids'
feet and legs through the hole in the house. Hunkered on boxes, beer cases,
rolls of gunny sacks, and old rags, fidgeting and traipsing the floor, and
standing then as still as a deer.
"Surrender?" our captain yelled again.
"Hell, no!" the gang-house boss howled at us. "What's more, I'll shoot
th' first man in this house that surrenders! I'll shoot you in th' back of
th' head! You hired out to fight `til this war is over! I'm th' boss till
it's over! See!"
Claude caught all of the kids inside looking in the direction of the
cannon. He sneaked up under the eaves of the house and took off his padded
hat and jammed it into the end of the stove pipe.
"Sneak!" The man in the lookout tower drew aim and shot square down on
top of Claude's head. We seen him stumble over against the side of the
house, then slip to the ground, "That'll teach ya ta sneak!" the lookout man
laughed back at all of us.
"Load 'er up, Andy! Pull 'er back! One! Two! Three! Fire!" I watched
the rock leave the sling. We had pulled it back a little harder this time,
and learned how to aim it better.
The lookout tower swayed in the middle, screeched like pulling a
hundred rusty nails, and boards shattered apart, sailing in every direction
and leaving a hole several feet around tore out of one side of the piano
box.
"No more! Don't! God! Surren'er! Stop!" The lookout man jumped down off
of the roof and started walking toward our men with his hands in the air,
snubbing and crying, jerking his head and squawling, "I'm done! I'm done!"
He keeled over to the ground with a little groan.
"You dam right you're done!" The captain of the shack was looking out
the window, putting a new rock into his sling shot. "Well!" He ducked inside
and cussed at all of his kids, "Whattaya standin' there gawkin' at me for?
You cowardly dam snakes! I got lots more rocks where that'n come from!"
"You kids inside! Surren'er?" I asked them again.
No sound. Only the captain sniffing and crying and breathing hard. The
smoke was filling the whole house full of red-eyed, snorting and hissing
kids. Claude's old hat was still in the stove pipe. Two kids took him out
into the weeds where they had just woke his brother up with a bucket of
water. Ray blinked when he seen them carry Claude in. "Had his hat off.
Nicked 'im in th' toppa th' head," they told him.
"Load 'er up!"
Little Ray looked over our way and asked the boys, "Load what up?"
"Cannon."
''Hahhh! Funny's hell! I wuz jis' dreamin' somp'in' 'bout a cannon!"
"Run gitta bucket a water fresh fer Claude's head."
"That ain't no dream, though!" Little Ray's eyes smiled as he trotted
up the hill past the cannon. "Knock 'em plumb offa th' hill! I'll be right
back with Claude's water!"
"Andy! Got 'er loaded?''
"She's jam up!"
Smoke rolled out of the house. Sneezing. Coughing. Snorting of noses.
Mad, fist-slinging kids. The house was darker than night inside. Cusses.
Insults. Bad names. Poking. Everybody cutting back at everybody else. The
captain stood on a chair inside and kept his sling shot drawed on the whole
pack.
"Pull 'er back! Andy, boy!"
"She's back, bruther cap'n!"
"One! Two! Three!"
Then I said, "Wait! Listen!"
The house roared and pitched. Howls and cries of all kinds flew through
the windows and cannon holes. The grumbling, scraping of lots of feet,
grunting and straining, heads and tail ends whamming against the board
walls. House quivering. Fists and feet thumping against kids' heads.
Dragging sounds and the breaking of sticks, old boards, clubs, and clothing
zipped and ripped open. A loud wrestling and clattering at the door. A heavy
board cracked. All got quiet and still. The door came open.
"Don't shoot us!" The first kid stepped out with his hands in the air,
waving a bloody hunk of white cloth.
"We surren'er!"
"I didn' wanta fight you guys in th' first place.''
"Whatcha gon'ta do ta us?"
The kids walked out, one by one. Then every gang-house fighter was
searched. They wiped their faces and pinched their toes where the hot rocks
had blistered them. One by one, our captain sent them over to set down on
the ground.
"What'll we do now, Thug? I don't mean about th' men. I mean about th'
house here," I was saying at his shoulder.
"House? We'll fix it back better'n th' dam thing ever was. We'll have a
votin' match to see who's captain."
Thug looked around at everybody. He thought a minute and then said,
"Well, men. Alla my men. Stand around. What're we gonna do ta these here
guys?"
"Take over!"
"No use ta hurt 'em!"
"Give 'em all a job!"
"Let ever'body have a vote. Say-so."
Thug laughed at the ground covered with rocks still cooling.
"Naw. We ain't gonna beat nobody up." He kept talking along the ground.
"You men wanta be in on th' new gang? If ya don't, why, git up, an' beat it
ta hell offa this hill, an' stay off."
The captain of the gang house got up, rubbing dirty tears back across
his face and walked up over the rim of the hill.
"Anybody else wanta leave?" Thug took a seat on the ground and leaned
back up against the side of the house, putting his sling shot in his hip
pocket. Every little ear and every little dirty eye and every little skint
face was soaking in what Thug was saying. "Well, ain't much use ta make a
big speech. Both gangs is one now. That was what we was fightin' for."
He grinned up into space and wind blew dirt across the blood drying on
his face when he said, "Cain't no gang whip us now."
Chapter VII
FIRE EXTINGUISHERS
One day about three in the afternoon when I was playing out on
Grandma's farm, I heard a long, lonesome whistle blow. It was the fire
whistle. I'd heard it before. It always made me feel funny, wondering where
fire had struck this time, whose new house it was turning into ashes. In
about an hour a car pulled in off the main road in a big fog of dust, and
rolled on up to the house. It was my brother, Roy, looking for me. He was
with another man or two. They said it was our house.
But first they said, "... it's Clara."
"She's burnt awful bad ... might not live ... doctor come ... said for
everybody to get ready...."
They throwed me into the car like a shepherd dog, and I stood up all
the way home, stretching my neck in that direction. I wanted to see if I
could see any sign of the fire away down the road and up on the hills. We
got home and I saw a big crowd around the house. We went in. Everybody was
crying and sobbing. The house smelled full of smoke. It had caught fire and
the fire wagon had come. It was wet here and there, but not much.
Clara had caught fire. She had been ironing that day on an old kerosene
stove, and it had blowed up. She'd filled it with coal oil and cleaned
it--it was on her apron. Then it got to smoking, wouldn't bum, so she opened
the wick to look in, and when the air hit the chamber full of thick oily
smoke, it caught fire, blowed up all over her. She flamed up to the ceiling,
and run through the house screaming, out into the yard and around the house
twice, before she thought to roll in the tall green grass at the side of the
house and smother her clothing out. A boy from the next house saw her and
chased her down. He helped to smother the flying blaze. He carried her into
the house and laid her on her bed. She was laying there when I walked in
through the big crowd of crying friends and kinfolks.
Papa was setting in the front room with his head in his hands, not
saying very much, just once in a while, "Poor little Clara," and his face
was wet and red from crying.
The men and women standing around would tell good things about her.
"She cleaned my house better than I could have...."
"Smart in her books, too."
''She made my little boy a shirt.''
"She caught the measles by going to bed with my daughter."
Her school teacher was there. Clara had stayed out of school to do the
ironing. Mama and her had quarreled a little about it. Mama felt sick. Clara
wanted to get ready for her exams. The school teacher tried to cheer Mama up
by telling her how Clara led the class.
I went in and looked over where Clara was on the bed. She was the
happiest one in the bunch. She called me over to her bed and said, "Hello
there, old Mister Woodly." She always called me that when she wanted to make
me smile.
I said, "Hello."
"Everybody's cryin', Woodly. Papa's in there with his head down
crying...."
"Uhh huhh."
"Mama's in the dining room, crying her eyes out''
"I know."
"Old Roy even cried, and he's just a big old tough boy.''
''I seen `im."
"Woodly, don't you cry. Promise me that you won't ever cry. It don't
help, it just makes everybody feel bad, Woodly. . . ."
"I ain't a-cryin'."
"Don't do it--don't do it. I'm not bad off, Woodly; I'm gonna be up
playing some more in a day or two; just burnt a little; shucks, lots of
folks get hurt a little, and they don't like for everybody to go around
crying about it. I'll feel good, Woodly, if you just promise that you won't
cry."
"I ain't a-cryin', Sis." And I wasn't. And I didn't.
I set there on the side of her bed for a minute or two looking at her
burnt, charred skin hanging in twisted, red, blistered hunks around over her
body, and her face wrinkled and charred, and I felt something go away from
me. But I'd told Sis I wouldn't bawl about it, so I patted her on the hand,
and smiled at her, and got up and said, "You'll be all right, Sis; don't pay
no 'tention to 'em. They don't know. You'll be all right."
I got up and walked out real easy, and went out on the porch. Papa got
up and walked out behind me. He followed me over to a big rocking chair that
was out there, and he set down and called me over to him. He took me up in
his lap and told me over and over how good all of us kids was, and how mean
he had treated us, and that he was going to be good to all of us. This
wasn't true. He had always been good to his kids.
I was out in the yard a few minutes later and cut my hand pretty bad
with an old rusty knife. It bled a lot. Scared me a little. Papa grabbed me
and doctored me all up. He poured it full of iodine. That burnt. I squinched
my face around. Wished he hadn't put it on there. But I'd told Clara I
wouldn't ever cry no more. She laughed when the school teacher told her
about it.
I walked back into the bedroom after a while with my hand all done up
in a big white rag, and we talked a little more. Then Clara turned over to
her school teacher and sort of smiled, and said, "I missed class today,
didn't I, Mrs. Johnston?"
The teacher tried to smile and said, "Yes, but you still get the prize
for being the most regular pupil. Never late, never tardy and never absent."
"But I know my lesson awful good," Clara said.
"You always know your lessons," Mrs. Johnston answered.
"Do you--think--I'll--pass?" And Clara's eyes shut like she was half
asleep, dreaming about everything good. She breathed two or three long, deep
breaths of air, and I saw her whole body get limber and her head fall a
little to one side on her pillow.
The school teacher touched the tips of her fingers to Clara's eyes,
held them closed for a minute, and said, "Yes, you'll pass."
For a while it looked like trouble had made us closer friends with
everybody, had drawn our whole family together and made us know each other
better. But before long it was plainer than ever that it had been the
breaking point for my mother. She got worse, and lost control of the muscles
in her body; and two or three times a day she would have bad spells of
epileptics, first getting angry at things in the house, then arguing at
every stick of furniture in every room until she would be talking so loud
that all of the neighbors heard and wondered about it. I noticed that every
day she would spend a minute or two staring at a lump of melted glass
crystals, a door stop about as big as your two fists, and she told me,
"Before our new six-room house burned down, this was a twenty-dollar
cut-glass casserole. It was a present, and it was as pretty as I used to be.
But now look how it looks, all crazy, all out of shape. It don't reflect
pretty colors any more like it used to--it's all twisted, like everything
pretty gets twisted, like my whole life is twisted. God, I want to die! I
want to die! Now! Now! Now! Now!"
And she broke furniture and dishes to pieces.
She had always been one of the prettiest women in our part of the
country: long black wavy hair that she combed and brushed for several
minutes twice or three times a day medium weight, round and healthy face and
big dark eyes, She rode a one-hundred-dollar sidesaddle on a fast-stepping
black horse; and Papa would ride along beside her on a light-foot pacing
white mare. People said, "In them days ÕÏur pa and ma made a mighty pretty
picture," but there was a look in people's eyes like they was just talking
about a pretty movie that come through town.
Mama had things on her mind. Troubles. She thought about them too much,
or didn't fight back. Maybe she didn't know. Maybe she had faith in
something that you can't see, something that would cause it all to come
back, the house, the lands, the good furniture, the part-time maid, and the
car to drive around the country. She concentrated on her worries until it
got the best of her. The doctor said it would. He said for her to get up and
run away, for us to take her to a place, a land somewhere where there
wouldn't be any worries. She got to where she would shriek at the top of her
voice and talk for hours on end about things that had went wrong. She didn't
know where to put the blame. She turned on Papa. She thought he was to
blame.
The whole town knew about her. She got careless with her appearance.
She let herself run down. She walked around over the town, looking and
thinking and crying. The doctor called it insanity and let it go at that.
She lost control of the muscles of her face. Us kids would stand around in
the house lost in silence, not saying a word for hours, and ashamed"
somehow, to go out down the street and play with the kids, and wanting to
stay there and see how long her spell would last, and if we could help her.
She couldn't control her arms, nor her legs, nor the muscles in her body,
and she would go into spasms and fall on the floor, and wallow around
through the house, and ruin her clothes, and yell till people blocks up the
street could hear her.
She would be all right for a while and treat us kids as good as any
mother, and all at once it would start in--something bad and
awful--something would start coming over her, and it come by slow degrees.
Her face would twitch and her lips would snarl and her teeth would show.
Spit would run out of her mouth and she would start out in a low grumbling
voice and gradually get to talking as loud as her throat could stand it; and
her arms would draw up at her sides, then behind her back, and swing in all
kinds of curves. Her stomach would draw up into a hard ball, and she would
double over into a terrible-looking hunch--and turn into another person, it
looked like, standing right there before Roy and me.
I used to go to sleep at night and have dreams; it seemed like I
dreamed the whole thing out. I dreamed that my mama was just like anybody
else's. I saw her talking, smiling, and working just like other kids' mamas.
But when I woke up it would still be all wrong, all twisted out of shape,
helter-skelter, let go, the house not kept, the cooking skipped, the dishes
not washed. Oh, Roy and me tried, I guess. We would take spells of working
the house over, but I was only about nine years old, Roy about fifteen.
Other things, things that kids of that age do, games they play, places they
go, swimming holes, playing, running, laughing--we drifted into those things
just to try to forget for a minute that a cyclone had hit our home, and how
it was ripping and tearing away our family, and scattering it in the wind.
I hate a hundred times more to describe my own mother in any such words
as these. You hate to read about a mother described in any such words as
these. I know, I understand you. I hope you can understand me, for it must
be broke down and said.
We had to move out of the house. Papa didn't have no money, so he
couldn't pay the rent. He went down fighting, but he went right on down. He
was a lost man in a lost world. Lost everything. Lost every cent. Owed ten
times more than he could ever pay. Never could get caught up again, and get
strung out down the road to success. He didn't know that. He still believed
that he could start out on a peanut hull and fight his way back into the
ten-thousand-dollar oil deals, the farms, and ranchlands, the royalties, and
the leases, changing hands every day. I'll cut it short by saying that he
fought back, but he didn't make the grade. He was down and out. No good to
them. The big boys. They wouldn't back him. He went down and he stayed down.
We didn't want to send Mama away. It would be better some other place.
We'd go off and start all over. So in 1923 we packed up and moved away to
Oklahoma City. We moved in an old ô Model truck. Didn't take much stuff
along. Just wanted to get away somewhere--where we didn't know anybody, and
see if that wouldn't make her better. She was better when we got home. When
we moved into an old house out there on Twenty-eighth Street, she felt
better. She cooked. It tasted good. She talked. It sure sounded good. She
would go for days and days and not have one of her spells. That looked like
the front door of heaven to all of us. We didn't care about our selfs so
much--it was her that we wanted to see get better. She swept the old house
and put out washings, and she even stuck a few little flower seeds down in
the ground and she watched them grow. She tied twine string up to the window
screens, and the sweet peas come up and looked at her in through the window.
Papa got some fire extinguishers and tried to sell them around at the
big buildings. But people thought they had enough stuff to keep them from
burning down, so he didn't sell many. They was one of the best 'kind on the
market. He had to pay for the ones that he used as samples. He sold about
one a month and made about six dollars off of every sale. He walked his self
to a frazzle. We didn't have but one or two sticks of furniture in the
house. An old monkey heater with room for two small pots, one beans, one
coffee; and we fried corn-meal mush and lived mostly on that when we could
get it. Papa gave up the fire-putter-outters because he wasn't a good enough
salesman, didn't look so pretty and nice. Clothes wore out. Shoes run down.
He put new soles on them two or three times, but he walked them right off
again.
I guess he was thinking about Clara, and our first house that burned
up, and all, when he would lug those fire extinguishers around over the big
hot city. And the big cold town.
Papa visited a grocery store and got some food stuffs on credit. They
gave him a job working in the store, helping out around, and driving the
delivery wagon. He got a dollar a day. I carried milk to the store for a
lady that had a cow. She gave me a dollar a week.
But Papa's hands was all busted and broken from the years of fist
fighting. Now somehow or other the muscles in his fingers and hands started
drawing together. They got tighter every day and pulled his fingers down so
that he couldn't open his hands. He had to go to a doctor and have the
little finger on his left hand cut off, because the muscles drawed it down
so hard against the palm of his hand that the fingernail cut a big hole into
his flesh. The rest of the fingers tightened worse than ever. They hurt him
every hour of the day, but he went on working, carrying the trays and
baskets and boxes and sacks of big groceries for the people that had money
to buy at the store. He used to come in for his meals and fall across his
bed fagged out, and I'd see him working his hands together, and nearly
crying with the pain. I would go over and rub them for him. My hands was
young, and I could work with the hard, crackling muscles that had lost all
of their limberness, and were losing all of their use. Big knots on every
joint. Hard like gristle. His palms were long, stringy sinews, standing way
up out of the skin, pulled as tight as they could be. His fist fights had
done most of it. His bones broke easy. When he hit he hit hard. It shattered
his fingers. And now it was the grocery-store work--it looked like that he
got the worst job that he could get for hands like that. But he couldn't
think much about his hands. He was a-thinking about Mama and us kids. He was
going to have them cut again, the muscles cut into, cut loose, so that he
could relax them, so that they wouldn't pull down any more. You could see by
looking at them that they hurt awful bad.
At night he'd lie awake and call over to me, "Rub them, Woody. Rub
them. I can't go to sleep unless you rub them."
I'd hold both of his hands under the covers and rub them, and feel the
gristle on his knuckles, swelled up four times natural size, and the
cemented muscles under each finger, drawing his fists together so tight that
they would never come open again. I forgot how to cry. I wanted to cry and
do a lot of it, but I wanted him to talk on and on.
So I'd keep quiet and he'd say, "What do you want to do when you grow
up to be a big man?"
"Just like you, a good, good fighter."
"Not bad and mean and wrong like me--not a wrong fighter. I've always
lost out--won the little street fights but always lost the big fights."
I'd rub his hands some more, and say, "You done good, Papa. You decided
what was good and you fought every day for it."
We'd been in Oklahoma City almost a year when Leonard, Mama's half
brother, turned up. He was a big, tall, straight, good-looking man, and
always giving me nickels. He'd been in the army now, and he was an expert,
among other things, at riding a motorcycle. So he'd got a good break and was
given the State Agency for a Motorcycle Company which made the new, black,
four-cylinder Ace.
He rode into our front yard one day on one of those black motorcycles,
with a flashy side-car, all trimmed in nickel-plated steel, shining like the
state capitol, and he had good news.
"Well, Charlie, I been a-hearing about your hard luck, you and Nora,
and I'm gonna give you a fine job. You've always been a good office man,
good hand to write letters, handle books, and take care of your business--so
you're appointed the head of all of that for the Ace Motorcycle Co., in the
State of Oklahoma. You'll make around two hundred dollars a month.''
The world got twice as big and four times brighter. Flowers changed
colors, got taller, more of them. The sun talked and the moon sung tenor.
Mountains rubbed bellies, and rivers tore loose to have picnics, and the big
redwood trees held dances every night. Leonard handed me nickels. Candy was
good. I'd play with an orange till it got all soft and juicy, and then I'd
kiss it when I was eating it. Roy smiled and told quiet jokes. Kids ganged
in. I was a man of standing again. They quit jumping on me for two reasons:
I'd beat the hound out of one of them, and the others wanted to ride on that
motorcycle.
The big day come. Papa and Leonard got on the motorcycle and roared out
down the road to go to work. A big crowd of people stood in the street and
watched them. It was a pretty sight.
The next day was Sunday. We didn't have no furniture to speak of, but
had been eating a little better. I don't know how far you'd have to go to
find a family that was any gladder than ours that morning. We cooked and ate
a nice round meal for lunch, and Papa went out and bought the ten-cent
Sunday paper. He came back with a new package of cigarettes, smoking one,
and when he went into the bedroom, he laid down and covered his self up, and
dug into the comics part of the paper, and laughed once in a while. First he
read the funnies. He read the news last.
All at once he swept all of the papers away. He jumped up and looked
around sort of wild like. He had turned into the news section, page two, and
something had knocked him blank like a picture show with no pictures on it.
His face was just white and vacant. He got up. He walked through the house.
He didn't know what to do or say. Read it to us? Keep it quiet? Forget it?
Burn the paper up and throw away the ashes? Kill it? Tear the building down!
Tear the whole world down! Make it over, and make it right! He couldn't
talk.
Roy looked at the paper and he couldn't talk for a minute, and then
Papa said, "Get your mama, get your mama!"
"Mama, come here for a minute. . . ." Roy got her to come in and set
down beside Papa on the old springy bed, and Roy read sort of
soft--something like this:
MOTORCYCLE ACE KILLED IN CRASH
Chicasha, Oklahoma:--Leonard Tanner, Ace Motorcyclist, was killed
instantly in an accident that wrecked a car and a motorcycle at a street
intersection yesterday afternoon. Tanner seemed to be driving about forty
miles per hour, thus breaking the speed limit, when he crashed into the side
of a 1922 model Ford sedan, fracturing his skull. Mr. Tanner was going into
business for himself for the first time when disaster overtook him at the
crossroads in his life.
I walked out in the front yard and stood in the weeds in a daze, and
then all at once about twenty kids chased across . the street, skipping,
waving at each other, and they walked up to me and quieted down.
"Hey. Where's the motersickle ride ya said we're gonna git?" The leader
of the kids was biting on a bitter stick and looking around for the big
black machine.
I chewed down on my tongue. I heard others say, "We come ta ride!"
"Where's th' 'cycle?" "C'mon!"
I run out through the high grass in our back yard, and when I got to
the alley they followed me.
"He ain't even got no uncle what owns no motorsickle!" "Liar!" "Lyin'
bastard!"
I picked up a pocketful of good rocks and sailed them into the whole
crowd.
"Git outta my yard! Say gone! Who's a liar? I hadda uncle with a
motorcycle! I did! But--but--"
Chapter IX
A FAST-RUNNING TRAIN WHISTLES DOWN
I was standing up in the truck with my feet on our old sofa, waving
both hands in the air, when we hit the city limits of Okemah. Leonard's
death had tore down most of the good things growing up in Mama's mind, and
we were coming home. I looked a mile away to the north and saw the old
slaughter pen where wild dogs had chased me across the oat stubble. I looked
to the south and seen the vacant lots I'd fought in a million times. My eyes
knew everything at a glance.
When the old truck crawled past Ninth Street, Roy stuck his head out on
his side of the cab and yelled, "See anything you know, Woodsaw?"
"Yeah!" I guess I sounded pretty washed out. "House where Clara burned
up."
I spotted a couple of kids jumping across a plowed hill, "Hi! Matt!
Nick! Hi! I'm back! See? All of us!"
"Hi! Come play with us!" "Where ya livin'?" They waved back at me.
"Old Jim Cain house! East end!"
They ducked their heads and didn't ask me to come and play with them
any more.
The model-T truck almost had a runaway coming down a steep hill,
frogged across the railroad tracks, and bounced me down on the bed-springs.
The truck was passing the whole town by, it seemed like to me. It was
passing the nice streets and the shady streets where the kids with good
clothes on fought wars in the weeds and raced bareback on high-priced
horses. It was headed now for the east end, where every house is a pile of
junk. Rotten boards soak up good paint and just stay rotten. Rotten dogs
with dishwater and grease in their hair drift across the old sandy roads.
Kids with sores on their heads and snuff rotting their teeth out yip and
yell and hide under mouldy floors of old crazy houses. Horses try to switch
their tails hard enough to beat off the big blue flies that had got harder
lickings than that when they weren't but little maggots. Dust flew up from
under the truck wheels. Hot winds burned the patches of stinging weeds. But
it felt good to me. It was where I come from. Okemah. To me the garbage in
the alleys of my home town was better than being in a big town like Oklahoma
City- where my papa couldn't get a job. If he couldn't he wasn't much use to
nobody, and if he wasn't much use to nobody, we would all unload the old
truck and move into the old Jim Cain house, and try to be of some use to
each other.
"Okay! Work hand!" Roy backed the truck off the main highway and I
piled down from the load.
"So this is it?" Mama got out of the truck and walked through the gate.
The Jim Cain house. Twenty-five years ago somebody had built it. Two
rooms with a little lean-to kitchen, and a front porch. Maybe it had housed
somebody, lots of people, before we come, but it never had got a coat of
paint. The rain rotted the shingles and the ground rotted the bottom boards,
and the middle had just warped and twisted itself into fits trying to hold
together. Decaying boards of all kinds had been nailed over knotholes and
cracks; tin buckets flattened out and nailed up to fight against the
weather. And the whole yard was running wild with weeds and wild flowers,
brittle and sticky and covered with a fine sifting dust that lifted and fell
from the highway.
"This is she." Roy got out and looked over the fence. "Home sweet
home."
"Gosh! Looky at them purty flowers!" I told them. "Look how thick they
are. Like somebody had got out here and threw big handsful of flower seeds
an' then jist let 'em grow wild!"
"Mostly hollyhocks, few zinnias," Mama said. "Just look at that
honeysuckle climbing up the side of the house there."
Roy walked up onto the porch and stomped the boards with his feet.
"Whole piles of dust. I never saw that much dust before."
"We can clean it out. I'm anxious to see the kitchen and the insides."
Mama walked in the door.
Bedroom full of spider webs and rotten papers. Front room full of
spider webs and scattered old tubs full of trash. Somehow or other I looked
around and thought, maybe our old furniture would just about match this
place. This is the kitchen, with the roof almost hitting me on the head and
big holes with rat manure around them rotted through the floor. Dirt
everywhere, a half an inch deep. It was a long, long ways across that floor.
"I smell something dead under this old soggy floor," Roy said. "I guess
it's a dead cat."
"This Ïl' house is all haunted with dead cats," I yowled out. "I don't
like this Ïl' dead-cat house!"
"Maybe all of the old sore-eyed cats come to this house to die." Mama
laughed and took a look out the north kitchen window at the Graveyard Hill.
"All of th' glass is busted. This room. This room. This room." I was
walking around with my hands stretched out dragging my fingers on th' walls.
"Wallpaper all busted aloose. Dirt driftin' in through th' holes bigga 'nuff
fer a dog ta trot through. What makes us hafta live in this ol' bad dead-cat
house, Mama?"
"We'll get something better before long. I just know. I just know."
I carried the first load from the truck into the bedroom. "First load
in our purrrty new house! Hollyhocks! Sunny-hockle vines! Buzzlin' bees!
Picket fence! New wallpapers! We'll git some whitewarsh, white, white,
white, whitewarsh." I skipped all around the house. "Then we'll git some
newer boards an' nail 'em up where th' ol' ones, one ones, ol'
ones, ol' ones is!"
I felt the dust on the flower leaves when I walked and skipped back out
to the truck.
"Give you fifty cents to help unload this thing," Roy was telling a big
fat man walking along with his underwear dropped down around his belt and
his chest and shoulders bare to the sun. "That all right with you?"
"Fine. Fine with me. How long you been away, say?"
"Year exactly." Roy was swinging up onto the truck and dropping a set
of bedsprings over the sides.
I had another armload of loose clothes and pots and pans, "July
Fourteenth is my birthday! I'm twelve! But this of house is seven hunderd
an' twelve! We left Okemah on my birthday, an' come back on it! Today! I'm
gonna plant me a big, big garden out in th' backyard! Sell cucumbers, an'
green beans, an' watermelons, an' shellin' peas!''
"That's my little hard-headed brother," Roy said to the man.
"So you're our little farmer neighbor, huh?" the man asked me. "Say,
where you goin' to sell all of this stuff that you grow?"
"Up in town. Lots of people.''
"That's just what's got me worried." He scratched his head. "Just where
you aim to find all of these people."
"Oil field folks. Gotta eat, ain't they, at grocery stores,
rester'nts?"
"What few's left."
"Whattaya mean, few?"
"Have you been up on the main street today?"
"Jist got back from Oklahoma City. Ain't been on Main Street of Okemah
fer a whole year!"
"You're in for a mighty big surprise."
"I c'n grow stuff."
"You're still in for a big surprise. Oil field's went dead'er than a
doornail."
"I c'n work jist as much's you 'er anybody else. I know th' store men.
I know th' eatin'-joint guys. They'll buy what I take 'em."
"To feed who, did you say?"
"Shucks, they's ten jillion folks runnin' aroun' needs feed-in'!
Streets is full of 'em. You think I don't know all of 'em? You're crazy!"
"Not so smart there, young feller," Roy cut in, "not so smart aleck."
"You hush up!"
"You can grow a garden, all right, little feller; you're as good a
worker as me or your brother here, either one, any day; but when you get all
of this stuff raised and everything-- oh well, why should I tell you? You'll
go up in town. You'll see something that will make your eyes bug out. She'd
one dead town. People has ducked out just like birds in the bushes. Nobody
knows where they went. Okemah's all but a ghost town."
"It ain't! It ain't!" I run past him on the porch. "You're tellin' a
lie!"
I darted out the gate and headed south past piles of rotten boards
called other people's houses. Mean dogs thought I was running from them and
wheeled out behind my heels. "Ain't dead! Ain't dead! Okemah ain't dead!
Okemah is where I was borned at! Cain't no town die! Old Luke yonder beatin'
that same little mule. I see Dad Nixon's mare had a new colt. Here she is.
Good ol' Main Street. Full of people, pushing and trying to get past each
other. They didn't get all of the oil out the ground. They didn't build all
of this country up. They ain't done all of the work yet. They ain't run off.
They're still right here working like the devil. Who said stop? Who said go?
Who said let Okemah die?"
Main Street! I rounded the corner of the depot and skidded across a few
cinders and my feet hit the sidewalk with me trying to come to a stop so I
can look.
Main Street. Main Street? What's so quiet? Lonesome. I felt a cold
bunch of goose pimples bumping up on my skin. First block nothing. All
nailed up. I stood there looking at wild papers drift up and down the
sidewalks and pavement like nobody tried to stop them. Snatches of grass and
dirt along the concrete. A few old cars asleep, and some wired-up wagons and
teams drooped along. I didn't budge from my tracks. I didn't much want to
walk on up Main Street, How come them to all get up and go? It wasn't any
noisier on Main Street than up on top of the Graveyard Hill. All at once a
tough-looking boy with a blue-gray shirt and pants to match, a soggy chew of
tobacco punching his jaw out, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen, with
dirty bare feet, walked out from across by the cotton yards and said, "Hey,
Kid! Stranger here in town?''
"Me? I was borned here. I'm Woody Guthrie."
"I'm Coggy Sanderson. New kid comes ta town, I meet 'im. Give 'im a
good welcome."
Five or six kids knocked up the dust running from in between the
strings of cotton bales by the gin. "Cog's caught a new 'um!" "Le's see th'
fun!" "Welcome!"
I looked around at all of them and said, "Don't none of you guys know
me?"
They just stood there watching Coggy and me. Nobody said a word.
Coggy stuck his foot behind my heels and pushed me down into the dirt.
I hit on my back and knocked some hide off, Then I jumped up and made a run
at Coggy. He stepped to one side and took a long straight jab with his right
hand and knocked my head back on my shoulders. I hit the ground again almost
in the same spot. I got up and his fists met me halfway again, and I
staggered about ten feet batting my eyes. He cracked one up along my temple
that made my head ring like a church bell. Another left crossed over and
knocked me almost down and he cut through with a right haymaker that batted
me back up on my feet again. I ducked my head forward to try to cover up
with my arms and he nailed a couple of uppercuts that whistled like trains
right on my mouth and chin and busted my lips against my own teeth, I turned
around and wiped the blood off with my hands and ducked my head with my back
to him. He booted me in the rear and knocked me a yard or two, and then
grabbed my shirt out of my pants and jerked the tail up over my head. I was
smearing blood and sweat all over my face trying to keep out of his reach.
Then he put his foot up on my hip and pushed me about fifteen feet and I
plowed up the deep dirt with my face.
"Now. Yer an old-timer here." Cog turned around and dusted off his
hands while the other kids laughed and danced up and down in the dust.
"Welcome ta Okemah."
I pulled my shirt back down and stumbled on up the main street holding
my head over and spotting the old sidewalk with big red drops of blood. I
blinked my eyes and stopped over one of the squares in the sidewalk. W.G.
1921. And it was funny to see the blood drip from my face and blot out my
own initials in the cement.
I humped along. Drug along. Maybe that old man was right. I looked in
at the lobby of the Broadway Hotel. Nobody. I looked through the plate glass
of Bill Bailey's pool hall. Just a long row of brass spittoons there by
their self in the dark. I looked in at the Yellow Dog bootleg joint. Shelves
shot all to pieces. I looked in the window of a grocery store at a clerk
with glasses