for his closest friend, “One! Two! Three!”
When their own sack was almost full the boys heaved together and got it over the side—and someone shouted “Jump!” The brakie was coming. Cass saw him running toward them far down the spine of the train. He saw too that there was plenty of time, so he threw one more lump over just for good measure; then he felt the car moving faster under his feet, and jumped. Johnny followed, and stood grinning and pointing at Cass because a thick coat of coal dust filmed Cass’s face. Cass heaved impatiently at his end of the sack. He did not like anyone to laugh at him, especially a half-breed.
“Nancy’ll sho’ feel good to see this,” Cass assured himself as they toiled along under the heavy sack. She couldn’t tell him this time he was sinning—not after they had been without coal for so long;—even his father would have to smile! Why—here was almost enough to last through till March! Think!—Were it filled with potatoes instead, would his sack be then one jot the more precious? Well, could one burn potatoes and keep a house warm with them? And how heavy it was! But how warm they would be! No more going to bed after freezing at supper now! And all because of himself; that was the main thing. In the pride of his exploit the boy’s heart exulted. Why couldn’t every day be just like this one? Why couldn’t something like this happen every day? Johnny Portugal shifted his end of the sack and paused to look down at his feet; a doll buggy lay in a deep rut there, turned upside down with its wheels in the air, wobbly tin wheels turning this way and that like toy windmills in the wind. Beside it lay the Mexican child, her bare arms outspread. The long black shawl was drenched scarlet now, and one finger clutched one dark crumb of coal. She lay on her back, and her head had been severed from her body. The kewpie doll lay in a dark pool beside her, and people began running up to see. “She must of got anxious an’ got up too close,” Luther Gulliday said, “she must of just slipped a little.”
That coal was the last that Cass ever brought home. Before it was gone Stubby had lost his job on the Santa Fe, and this time there was no other job to be found. Stubby had come to be known throughout the county as a “bad hat,” and jobs for “bad hats” were not plentiful in a place where even tame men would work for a pittance. To make matters no easier for Stuart, the man who was taken on in his place by the Santa Fe was little Luther Gulliday. Stuart saw Luke coming home every morning, an empty tin dinner-pail on his arm; Stuart saw him passing down the road toward the roundhouse every night. He never saw without growing white with fury.
Luke was a little man, smaller than Stuart; but in the town he was as well liked as Stubby was hated.
And Stuart’s mind was dark. Within his head inconstant fleeting shadow-shapes passed and repassed, without cessation, all day, all night. All day, all night lights flickered there. He had always been aware of his own darkness; now he began to fear it. The man had had so many cruel tricks played on him in his lifetime, he had hurt so many other men, that sometimes now he became afraid of the darkness growing within him; it too would deal him a scurvy back-handed slap one of these days, he felt, if he didn’t strike out first. Often while he slept he became aware of something that a passing flash, like a brief lightning, had revealed within his brain; had revealed clearly there against the black, yet too briefly to be discerned. So briefly that he saw only that there was a thing there—a thing growing, a thing wholly evil. And sometimes some ancient fancy or some feeling not his own laughed within a cavern in his brain—he knew the laugh because it was mocking. Laughter was mockery, Stuart knew.
Powerful suggestions and willful persuasions of people he could not see clamored within him as he dreamed. Memories of ancient wrongs, cruelties perpetrated otherwhere, some other time, all came thronging to harass him. Sussurant dark whisperings of night, low-muttered half-tales of murder and trickery; always they spoke of trickery. Sometimes he felt that he, too, would like to trick someone or something, sometimes the voices aroused within a desire to kill so that his throat became dry with that desire. Like the craving for strong drink that comes on a man, clutching his throat so that he must drink or fall dead.
Stubby did not understand. Always his thought evaded his mind. He could only go his hard way dumbly and alone, without wonder, without knowledge, with only pain for friend. He could only know a dim feeling as of daily loss, as though all the blood of his body were spilling momently from a broken vein and his eyes had been curtained that he might not find where.
The feeling of having been cheated—of having been cheated—that was it!
And now came the hard West Texas times, the charity-station days and the hungry nights. This was spring of 1927, but to the McKays it was little different than spring of any other year.
For days when the town was troubled by tourists Cass acquired the approach sibilant, the whisper sudden, swift, and clear: “Yo’ like Spanish gal, boss? Fifteen-year ol’ jest stahtin’ business? Come, ah show yo’ where to, she treat jou all right. Not rush, jest take yo’ time. Come, ah show yo’ where to.” Cass’s speech at this time was a curious congeries of West Texas idiom, Southern drawl, and Mexican intonation.
Back of the Mexican pool hall dark girls stood in doorways, waiting. Cass knew Pepita by sight, Teresina and Rosita. Little Pepita sought to tease him whenever she saw him pass: “Look—there go my ugly red-hair boy.” She would raise her voice as he began to run: “Ugly red-hair boy!—you got no dollar for Pepita today?” Once she gave him a five-cent pack of tobacco for showing a tourist to the back door: he took it and fled without so much as a single “Gracias, Senorita Pepita.” He smoked that package out with Nancy in one evening, but he did not tell her how he had earned it. Often after that he came home with fifteen cents or a Mexican quarter in his pocket, and would tell her that he had earned it by shining shoes on the streets.
In May Bryan killed the last of the hens, and for two days they ate meat; after that it was black coffee and okra. Stubby got a few backhouses to clean, but his own privy remained, as ever, a vile hole. Before the summer was out they were on charity.
Fortunately for her own good health, Nance had been reared in happier days. Between 1919 and ’24 Stuart had worked almost regularly. She had not suffered from hunger in her adolescence, as Cass now did. She realized this to the extent of placing on his plate, before they sat down to table, a part of the pitiful daily portion that was hers. Always Cass saw what she had done; secretly, he compared portions at every meal. He always saw, but he never protested; he would pretend that he didn’t perceive his portion to be the larger. He would wolf down his share and stare at what Bryan had left, his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth with hunger. Bryan would push the coffee remaining in his saucer toward him, or shove over a half-eaten crust; then he would smile to see the boy gnawing like a dog, holding the piece in both dirty paws.
“When yo’ gonna grow up to eat like a man?” Bryan would ask. “Yo’ don’t eat like sixteen any more than as if yo’ was nine.”
Once, for five days running, they had nothing to eat but oatmeal: gray, lumpy, utterly tasteless. Then came a day with nothing at all. For the five days following that day it was rice—without milk, without sugar. Oatmeal and rice were all they could get from the relief station. Cheap as milk was, the cattlemen who ran the county feared to make it cheaper by pouring it out to charity. They poured it out to their hogs instead, and thus bolstered falling prices. Their consciences they salved by putting dollar bills in the collection plate of the First Baptist Church on Sunday mornings; and they gained the sanction of every truly patriotic Baptist in the town in the process.
Bryan sat all day in shadowy places or wandered aimlessly about the Mexican streets. If not ordered to do anything he would perform small tasks about the home; but if, openly, Nancy told him to build up the fire or chop up some kindling, or plant a few beans, he would give her a blanket refusal. He had no time for women’s tasks, he would say, and would walk off toward the town. She had learned never to ask anything of him, and by this method sometimes won his help. He would pull a few weeds out of the garden, pare a few potatoes, or begin fussing with a couple of planks and a hammer in the dooryard. Few tasks that he began ever saw completion. He tired easily, he lost patience or thought of a joke that he had to tell Clark Casner right away. Once, while building a small chair, he began drinking in the midst of his work. Despite his wobbling legs he got a back nailed