A Painted House (9 page)

I saw the Montgomery twins throwing rocks at the weeds beside the gin, and I joined them. We compared stories about Mexicans and told lies about how much
cotton we’d personally picked. It was dark, and the line of trailers moved slowly.

“My pop says cotton prices are goin’ down,” Dan Montgomery said as he tossed a rock into the darkness. “Says the cotton traders in Memphis are pushin’ down prices ’cause there’s so much cotton.”

“It’s a big crop,” I said. The Montgomery twins wanted to be farmers when they grew up. I felt sorry for them.

When the rains flooded the land and wiped out the crops, the prices went up because the traders in Memphis couldn’t get enough cotton. But the farmers, of course, had nothing to sell. And when the rains cooperated and the crops were huge, the prices went down because the traders in Memphis had too much cotton. The poor people who labored in the fields didn’t make enough to pay their crop loans.

Good crops or bad crops, it didn’t make any difference.

We talked baseball for a while. The Montgomerys did not own a radio, so their knowledge of the Cardinals was limited. Again, I felt sorry for them.

When we left the gin, Pappy had nothing to say. The wrinkles in his forehead were closer together, and his chin was jutting out a bit, so I knew he’d heard bad news. I assumed it had something to do with the price of cotton.

I said nothing as we left Black Oak. When the lights were behind us, I laid my head on the window opening so the wind would hit my face. The air was hot and still, and I wanted Pappy to drive faster so we could cool off.

I would listen more closely for the next few days. I’d give the adults time to whisper among themselves, then I’d ask my mother what was going on.

If it involved bad news about farming, she would eventually tell me.

Chapter 7

Saturday morning. At sunrise, with Mexicans on one side and the Spruills on the other, we were in the trailer moving toward the fields. I kept close to my father, for fear that the monster Hank might come after me again. I hated all the Spruills that morning, perhaps with the exception of Trot, my lone defender. They ignored me. I hoped they were ashamed of themselves.

I tried not to think about the Spruills as we moved through the fields. It was Saturday. A magical day for all the poor souls who toiled the land. On the Chandler farm, we’d work half a day, then head for town to join all the other farmers and their families who went there to buy food and supplies, to mix and mingle along Main Street, to catch the gossip, to escape for a few hours the drudgery of the cotton patch. The Mexicans and the hill people went, too. The men would gather in groups in front of the Tea Shoppe and the Co-op and compare crops and tell stories about floods. The women would pack into Pop and Pearl’s and take forever buying a few groceries. The kids were allowed to roam the sidewalks on Main Street and its neighboring alleys until four o’clock, that wonderful hour when the Dixie opened for the matinee.

When the trailer stopped, we hopped off and found
our cotton sacks. I was half-asleep, not paying attention to anything in particular, when the sweetest voice said, “Good mornin’, Luke.” It was Tally, just standing there smiling at me. It was her way of saying she was sorry for yesterday.

Because I was a Chandler, I was capable of deep stubbornness. I turned my back to her and walked away. I told myself I hated all Spruills. I attacked the first row of cotton as if I might just wipe out forty acres before lunch. After a few minutes, though, I was tired. I was lost in the stalks, in the dark, and I could still hear her voice and see her smile.

She was only ten years older than I was.

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The Saturday bath was a ritual I hated more than all others. It took place after lunch, under the stern supervision of my mother. The tub, hardly big enough for me, was used later in the day by each member of the family. It was kept in a remote corner of the back porch, shielded from view by an old bedsheet.

First, I had to haul the water from the pump to the back porch, where I filled the tub about a third full. This took eight trips with a bucket, and I was exhausted before the bath began. Then I pulled the bedsheet across the porch and stripped naked with remarkable speed. The water was very cold.

With a bar of store-bought soap and a washcloth, I worked furiously to remove dirt and make bubbles and otherwise cloud the water so my mother couldn’t see my privates when she came to direct matters. She appeared first to collect my dirty clothes, then to bring
me a clean change. Then she went straight for the ears and neck. In her hands the washcloth became a weapon. She scraped my tender skin as if the soil I collected working in the fields offended her. Throughout the process, she continued to marvel at how dirty I could get.

When my neck was raw, she attacked my hair as if it were filled with lice and gnats. She poured cold water from the bucket over my head to rinse off the soap. My humiliation was complete when she finished scouring my arms and feet—mercifully, she left the midsection for me.

The water was muddy when I hopped out—a week’s worth of dirt collected from the Arkansas Delta. I pulled the plug and watched it seep through the cracks of the porch as I toweled off and stepped into my clean overalls. I felt fresh and clean and five pounds lighter, and I was ready for town.

Pappy decided that his truck would make only one run to Black Oak. That meant that Gran and my mother would ride in the front with him and my father and I would ride in the back with all ten Mexicans. Getting packed into a box didn’t bother the Mexicans at all, but it sure irritated me.

As we drove away, I watched the Spruills as they knocked down poles and unhitched ropes and hurried about the business of freeing their old truck so they could get to town. Everyone was busy but Hank, who was eating something in the shade.

To prevent the dust from boiling over the fenders and choking us in the back, Pappy drove less than five miles per hour down our road. While it was thoughtful of him, it didn’t help matters much. We were hot and
suffocating. The Saturday bath was a ritual in rural Arkansas. In Mexico, apparently, it was not.

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On Saturday, some farm families arrived in town by noon. Pappy thought it was sinful to spend too much time enjoying Saturday, so we took our time getting there. During the winter, he even threatened to avoid town, except for church on Sunday. My mother said he once went a month without leaving the farm, and this included a boycott of church because the preacher had somehow offended him. It didn’t take much to offend Pappy. But we were lucky. A lot of sharecroppers never left the farm. They didn’t have money for groceries and didn’t have a car to get to town. And there were some renters like us and landowners who seldom went to town. Mr. Clovis Beckly from Caraway hadn’t been to town in fourteen years, according to Gran. And he hadn’t been to church since before the First War. I’d heard folks openly praying for him during revivals.

I loved the traffic and the crowded sidewalks and the uncertainty of whom you might see next. I liked the groups of Mexicans camped under shade trees, eating ice cream and greeting their countrymen from other farms in excited bursts of Spanish. I liked the crowds of strangers, hill people who would be gone before long. Pappy told me once that when he was in St. Louis before the First War, there were half a million other people there and that he got lost just walking down a street.

That would never happen to me. When I walked
down the streets in St. Louis, everybody would know me.

I followed my mother and Gran to Pop and Pearl Watson’s. The men went to the Co-op because that’s where all the farmers went on Saturday afternoon. I could never determine exactly what they did there, besides gripe about the price of cotton and fret over the weather.

Pearl was busy at the cash register. “Hi, Mrs. Watson,” I said when I could get close enough. The store was packed with women and Mexicans.

“Well, hello, Luke,” she said as she winked at me. “How’s the cotton?” she asked. It was the same question you heard over and over.

“Pickin’ well,” I said, as if I’d hauled in a ton.

It took Gran and my mother an hour to buy five pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar, two pounds of coffee, a bottle of vinegar, a pound of table salt, and two bars of soap. The aisles were crowded with women more concerned with saying hello than with buying food. They talked about their gardens and the weather and church the next day, and about who was definitely having a baby and who might be. They prattled on about a funeral here, a revival there, an upcoming wedding.

Not one word about the Cardinals.

My only chore in town was to haul the groceries back to the truck. When this was accomplished, I was free to roam Main Street and its alleys without being supervised. I moved with the languid foot traffic toward the north end of Black Oak, past the Co-op, past the drugstore and the hardware store and the Tea Shoppe. Along the sidewalk, packs of people stood gossiping, with no intention of moving. Telephones
were scarce, and there were only a few televisions in the county, so Saturday was meant for catching up on the latest news and events.

I found my friend Dewayne Pinter trying to convince his mother that he should be free to roam. Dewayne was a year older than I was but still in the second grade. His father let him drive their tractor around the farm, and this elevated his status among all second graders at the Black Oak School. The Pinters were Baptists and Cardinals fans, but for some unknown reason, Pappy still didn’t like them.

“Good afternoon, Luke,” Mrs. Pinter said to me.

“Hello, Mrs. Pinter.”

“Where’s your mother?” she asked, looking behind me.

“I think she’s still at the drugstore. I’m not sure.”

With that, Dewayne was able to tear himself away. If I could be trusted to walk the streets alone, then so could he. As we walked off, Mrs. Pinter was still barking instructions. We went to the Dixie, where the older kids were hanging out and waiting for four o’clock. In my pocket I had a few coins—five cents for the matinee, five cents for a Coca-Cola, three cents for popcorn. My mother had given me the money as an advance against what I would earn picking cotton. I was supposed to pay it back one day, but she and I both knew it would never happen. If Pappy tried to collect it, he would have to step around Mom.

Evidently Dewayne had had a better week with the cotton than I had. He had a pocket full of dimes and couldn’t wait to show them off. His family also rented land, and they owned twenty acres outright, a lot more than the Chandlers.

A freckle-faced girl named Brenda lingered near us, trying to start a conversation with Dewayne. She’d told all of her friends that she wanted to marry him. She was making his life unbearable by following him around at church, shadowing him every Saturday up and down Main Street, and always asking if he would sit by her at the movies.

Dewayne despised her. When a pack of Mexicans walked by, we got lost in the middle of them.

A fight erupted behind the Co-op, a popular spot for the older boys to gather and trade punches. It happened every Saturday, and nothing electrified Black Oak like a good fight. The crowd pushed its way through a wide alley next to the Co-op, and in the rush I heard someone say, “I’ll bet it’s a Sisco.”

My mother had warned me against watching fights behind the Co-op, but it wasn’t a strict prohibition because I knew she wouldn’t be there. No proper female would dare to be caught watching a fight. Dewayne and I snaked our way through the mob, anxious to see some violence.

The Siscos were dirt-poor sharecroppers who lived less than a mile from town. They were always around on Saturday. No one was sure how many kids were in the family, but they could all fight. Their father was a drunk who beat them, and their mother had once whipped a fully armed deputy who was trying to arrest her husband. Broke his arm and his nose. The deputy left town in disgrace. The oldest Sisco was in prison for killing a man in Jonesboro.

The Sisco kids didn’t go to school or church, so I managed to avoid them. Sure enough, when we got
close and peeked through the spectators, there was Jerry Sisco punching a stranger in the face.

“Who’s that?” I asked Dewayne. The crowd was yelling for each fighter to hurry up and maim the other.

“Don’t know,” Dewayne said. “Probably a hillbilly.”

That made sense. With the county full of hill people picking cotton, it was only logical that the Siscos would start a fight with someone who didn’t know them. The locals knew better. The stranger’s face was puffy, and there was blood dripping from his nose. Jerry Sisco ripped a sharp right to his teeth and knocked the man down.

A whole gang of Siscos and their ilk were in one corner, laughing, and probably drinking. They were shaggy and dirty with ragged clothes and only a few had shoes. Their toughness was legendary. They were lean and hungry and fought with every dirty trick in the book. The year before, Billy Sisco had almost killed a Mexican in a fight behind the gin.

On the other side of the makeshift arena was a group of hill people, all yelling for their man—“Doyle,” it turned out—to get up and do something. Doyle was rubbing his chin when he jumped up and made a charge. He managed to ram his head into Jerry Sisco’s stomach, sending both of them to the ground. This brought a cheer from the hill people. The rest of us wanted to cheer, too, but we didn’t want to upset the Siscos. This was their game, and they’d come after anybody.

The two fighters clutched and clawed and rolled around in the dirt like wild animals as the yelling got
louder. Doyle suddenly cocked his right hand and landed a perfect punch in the middle of Jerry Sisco’s face, sending blood everywhere. Jerry was still for a split second, and we were all secretly hoping that perhaps a Sisco had met his match. Doyle was about to land another punch when Billy Sisco abruptly charged from the pack and kicked Doyle square in the back. Doyle shrieked like a wounded dog and rolled to the ground, where both Siscos were immediately on him, kicking and pounding him.