House of Earth (20 page)

And so as Blanche told her that Ridgewood would sell only the one acre of land over near the Cap Rock, Ella May saw the lamplight and the room whirl in front of her. She saw her life and her world and all of her people spin before her, and inside her brain there was such a foam and such a splash that she could not control her thoughts.

Blanche had not been able to see Ella May's face as she leaned over her, and the rattle and the bang of Tike's work, the humming and moaning of the cream separator, had got louder than ever. Blanche held her hand flat against Ella May's back to brace her a bit in her humped position.

“Feel any pains, Mrs. Hamlin?” Blanche said close to her ear.

And Ella shook her head as her hair fell in long strings down past her eyes. She was crying, sniffling, yet Tike could not hear, nor Blanche either.

“Any pains?” Blanche repeated. A strong soapy clean smell was in Ella May's hair. Blanche held her by the arms and spoke louder, “If you feel any pains, Mrs. Hamlin, you tell me!”

Ella May, instead of saying anything, bit her bottom lip again until it turned blue and black and her forehead and face wrinkled like little dunes of sand that sifted in and settled at several places on the linoleum. She tossed her head and shoulders from side to side and Blanche heard the sounds of her sobbing, but it was not until Blanche's eyes fell down onto Ella's clenched hand on the quilt that Blanche saw the full torture that was in Ella May's body. Ella's blood veins stood out like dark vines against a tree, and her hands clawed into the covers like dry roots reaching for water. “No, no, no, no,” was the only thing that Ella spoke, and this in a hush and a whisper of misery between her teeth.

“Is it bearing down? Tell me? I can't help you unless you talk to me. Tell me. Tell me. Talk. Talk to me.” For a short time Blanche tried to hold on to her arms by wrestling with her on the bed, then she saw that the covers were all being twisted, and that blue marks were forming on Ella's arms. She let go and rose up onto her feet. She took two or three steps backward in order to get a good look at Ella and to study the nature of the pains.

Ella May's stomach moved up and down. Blanche waited to see if the movement was caused by crying or the crying was caused by the movement. Was her heavy breathing making the baby rise and fall or was the rise and fall of the baby the cause of her heavy breathing? Under the loose cotton dress, to the eye of Blanche, all of the motion of her stomach was well known, but the dimness of the lamp and
the shadows of the wrinkles on Ella's dress caused Blanche to have to look a bit closer. She tried with all her skill not to upset Ella nor Tike any worse than need be.

Ella stood with her feet apart on the floor. She put forth all of her strength in order to stand up tall and straight with her face high to the ceiling. And it was the sting of the pain of her bruise above her breast that caused her to let her shoulders fall limber. Her leather work shoes were loose at the ankles, their strings untied dragged around her feet on the floor. Two lightweight pairs of cotton socks of a speckled gray color were enough to keep out the bite of the frost in the wind. And as her shoe soles, which were cut from old truck tires, moved on the linoleum, she stood in her tracks and turned around and around. Her lifted eyes were in the light, the hollows across her face were the same as the shadows of the new-plowed land in the light of the moon. Her dress was not a thing of rags and tatters because Ella May Hamlin would have let you find her dead on the ground before she would have let you catch her in a rotten, holey dress. A few of her good things had gone rotten and got torn to pieces, but they were now rags in her mop, Tike's grease rags for his machinery, or else they had been pushed and punched into the cracks in the walls and floors to keep out the weather. She turned around as slow as a cloud drifting, her eyes saw the room and the things in the room but saw, too, on through the walls and out into the lash and the whip of a fast blizzardy wind.

She seemed to be a frozen icicle, a loose shingle, some kind
of a windmill turning about. She did not turn in complete circles, but only in a half circle, then halfway back around, then the other direction for three-fourths of a turn, and it seemed that forces inside her fought to push her first one way around, then the other. She did not get to finish a turn because another rush of thoughts, feelings, old-time memories, new plans would rip across her, spin her back around, and the expressions on her face changed in the light and shadows as often as more mixtures of feelings took control of her. She held her hands opened wide apart, down at her sides, and she muttered words such as, “I've come this way. Come this way and this is me. Ha ha ha. Yes. This is the little girl you knew. Ha ha. Yes, yes. This is me. This is me here. This is me walking all up and down. Am I not a pretty girl to see? I saw my pretty time and I saw myself in my own looking glass, and I looked and I said, there you are. I know that is you. Ohhh. Yes. That is you. And so now this is me here. Me here walking. Me talking. Almost everybody said that I was the prettiest little lady on the whole upper plains. I guess I was. I must have been. I could have been. It was either me or that Beverly Judison, and I'm sure and certain that it wasn't her. It was me. Me. It is still me. If you please, if you please sir, this is me.”

The words were spoken in time and rhythm with the sway of her body and legs. She seemed to flirt with the bed, wink at the stove, make eyes at the walls and at the papers, and at her bale, the oil stove, the wash bench, the water bucket, the dipper, then at Tike and his separator cans. It
was when she bowed and spoke to Blanche that Blanche tried to get a straight look into her eyes. Ella let her gaze fall down across the floor and did not let Blanche see her straight. Blanche watched her closer than ever to see if she was dancing in delirious pain or merely having fun.

From the east, north, west, and south, Ella took in the strength for the baby inside her, she inhaled her lungs deep and full of the electricity in the room. Like a ship, she charged her own power into her own batteries. Her words had the same sound as a squeaky windmill.

Blanche had seen other women do things like this, things a little bit delirious, in order to gain some kind of strength to let a new baby come into the world. She was not nervous, nor frightened, just cautious, making sure and certain. Buckets of clean water were on the bench, a small suitcase filled with newspapers, strips of cloth, clean washrags. Why worry? The night outside was howling a blizzard, the wind pushing down across the plains harder than a hurricane on the ocean, because the sea rises and falls and forms into waves that are like mountains and valleys to check, slow, and break the wind. The flat lands of the plains were as level as the old linoleum on the floor, and there was nothing to stop the wind for fifteen hundred miles to the north, nothing except a small gully, a canyon, a town, a barbed-wire fence, the house of a landowner, the shack of a renter or sharecropper, and these things did not stop nor hinder that icy wind any more than a wild bull would be stopped by a rabbit track.
It was with all of this in the back of her mind that Blanche watched and studied Ella's funny little dance.

Blanche waited until Ella May had moved to the center of the floor. Then she fixed the pillow, turned the covers down, and said, “You had best come and lay yourself down here in this bed. Let me take care of you for a while. I think you are getting ready for your big push. Come on.” She talked with her back to Ella May, and when she waited for her to reply, there was nothing except Tike's chanting and the whine of the whirling disks in the separator. She patted her hands on the pillows and covers and said again, “Do you not think that it is time for you to stretch your bones out and give that little monkey some rest?” And there was still no reply.

There was only Tike singing, the separator humming. Blanche silent and waiting, touching her fingers to the bed. And this was only for a few short seconds.

But in these few short seconds Ella May took a woolly brown shawl from a nail on the wall, threw it around her shoulders, hugged her stomach in her hands, and walked across the floor to the door. With each step she gritted her teeth and spoke with a hiss of a snake, “No. No no. No. No no no.” Her right hand held the weight of her stomach and her left hand took hold of the doorknob. She swallowed hard to try to keep down the thousand miseries that were eating at her. As her hand turned the knob she saw a vision, a picture before her of several million people all going and coming in and through and inside one another. It
was a message, she thought, and as she thought, the vision came clearer, and she heard words that said, “Here are the people in this room going and coming. They go and they come in and through, in and through one another. And the people of the farms and the ranches around, they go and they come in and through, in and through one another. Like the weeds, the stems, the hay, straws and lints, like the powders, chalks, dusts arise and fall and pass in and through, in and through one another in the winds, the sun. And the people are all born from one and they are really all one. The people are all one, like you and your baby are one, like you and your husband, both of you are one. And all of the upper north plains are one big body being born and reborn in and through one another, and those also of the lower south plains. All of those of the Cap Rock. This is the greatest one single truth of life and takes in all other books of knowing. This is the only one truth of life that takes in all of the other works. And there are a few people that work to hurt, to hold down, to deny, to take from, to cheat, the rest of us. And these few are the thieves of the body, the germs of the disease of greed, they are few but they are loud and strong and your baby must be born well to help kill these few out.”

And nobody in the little room heard these words except Ella May. And she did not hear these words in these very words, but in words that showed her even plainer, much plainer, what her vision had meant. Her vision showed her that all of the people live and move in and through
each other exactly like her baby lived and moved in and through her. And all of the words that she would hear in her life would make the picture plainer.

The frost in the wind of the open door bit Tike on the skin like a little sheepherding dog, and it chewed at Blanche's ankles and caused her to stomp her feet. She chilled up and down the back, her hands drew up in front of her face like claws of the eagle, and for a short space of time it seemed that her entire life and soul flew out at her open mouth. And she whirled, spun around on her heel, and felt the waves of the wind hit her full in the face and chest. She ran her gaze around the room, up the little staircase to the roost, then at the separator, Tike, and all of the buckets and cans. He felt the blizzard wind at the back of his sweaty shirt, but it took him a few short seconds to get his mind to register what was going on. The separator hummed, and he sang his chant:

“Ella May! God!”

“Ella what?” The sound of the separator died down slowly and by its own accord, because of the heavy weight of the steel disk cups that turned at a thousand revolutions a minute. His back was in a tired hunch as he turned about and blinked his eyes at Blanche. “Who?” Before Blanche could make a motion or sound, Tike felt the cold from the open door, and he dived out into the night. “Lady.” He made an attempt to open his mouth but the zero blizzard took his breath away so fast that he could not do any more than sort of bark, “Lady, Lady, where are you at? Holler. Where 'bouts are ya at? Hey. Lady.” And
then he turned his mouth a bit out of the wind and said louder, “LADY!” And then he growled in a madder tone, “Th' good God Jesus oughta take it outa yore ole sore hide f'r pullin' a trick like this! LADY!”

Blanche stepped across the room to take her coat off the wall, but the small strap hung on the nail, and she ripped a long narrow hole from the collar down the back, and after three hard pulls, she flung the coat against the wall, covered her chest with her bare hands and ran out in the storm at Tike's back. “She over there? Whew. This wind cuts through your skin like a branding iron! See her?”

“Naw.” Tike's voice came out of the sheets of dark and wind. “Naw. That ain't her. That's th' water tank. Lady never did pull no such of a monkeyshine as this before since I knowed 'er. LADY. LADY! Talk up!”

“What is that over there?”

“Where 'bouts?”

“There.” Blanche felt her finger freeze as stiff as a stove poker when she took it away from her warm neck to point. “Right there. There on the ground?”

“Ohhh. Yeahhhh. Thank Jesus. Lady, now, honey, mommy, Lady, will you just tell me why in the hell you jumped up and pulled any such a caper as this? Was it on accounta that I'm so no good to ya? Here. Git up. Blanche, help me? Lord Jesus, Lady, you ain't got th' stren'th in ya to stand no such a damn blizzard as this is.”