Thalia Read online

  “Oh, I don’t doubt there’s some that would,” Granddad said. “But that ain’t no way to get out of a tight.”

  “Well, let me tell you somethin’ else,” Hud said. “I’ll tell you what all this has got to do with the feed wagon, you don’t see it yourself. Someday I’m gonna have your land, Mr. Bannon, and right here may be where I get it. You’re the old senile bastard who bought them Mexico cows, and you’re the one better get us out of this jam, if you don’t want to end up working from the shoulders down yourself.”

  “I believe you’re locoed,” Granddad said. “What in hell do you mean?”

  “Oh I ain’t figured it all out perfect yet,” Hud said, “but I can give you an idea. The main thing is you, old man. You’re too old to cut the mustard any more. Ain’t that how the song goes?” He slapped me on the leg suddenly, like we had a big secret between us. “Liquidate or not,” he said. “When this is over you might as well just get you a rockin’ chair, so you’ll be outa my way.”

  Granddad looked at him like he couldn’t believe his ears, and Hud pushed his hat back off his head and went on talking, the old-time wildness in his voice. “I’m gonna have this ranch a yours,” he said. “Someday I am. I’m gonna give the orders on it. I ain’t got it figured out perfect yet, but you can put that much down in your book right now. I may get it now, and I may have to wait a few years, but I’m gonna get it.”

  “How do you figure you could get it now?” Granddad said.

  Hud kinda laughed. “Someway,” he said. “When a man your age goes off an’ buys a bunch a sick cows, it means he’s too old an’ daffy to operate any longer. My mamma’s got an interest here that needs protectin’. You got a lot of this stuff after she married you, and some of it’s hers. You got the incompetence, and hotrod here’s too young to take over. Them lawyers you was atalking about might figure it so I ended up with the power of attorney. I don’t know. But if I don’t get it one way, I’ll get it another.”

  “Why you’re badly mistaken about all this,” Granddad said. “I’ll be the only one runs this ranch while I’m above ground. After that you might get some of it, I don’t know. But you can’t get my power of attorney no way in the world.”

  “Pity I can’t,” Hud said. “You just don’t make no bets on that. What I said was, I was goin’ get your land.”

  “You ain’t even consistent,” Granddad said. He kept looking at Hud like he couldn’t believe his ears.

  “Who gives a shit,” Hud said. “I’m gonna be boss.” A shiny blue Cadillac passed us, and he pounded his fist against the pickup door. “Look at that blond head, would you,” he said, pointing at the dressed-up woman who was driving. “How’d you like to crawl in with that?” he said, slapping my leg. Granddad frowned, and Hud laughed.

  “I guess I better watch my language,” he said. “I don’t want to corrupt no minors.” He chuckled. “But don’t you know, if a man could get her in the back seat she’d make some cat tracks on that ceiling.”

  We drove on, forty miles an hour all the way home. Granddad and Hud got silent, both of them thinking of the times ahead, I guess. When we got to Thalia the sun was low in the west, and it was beginning to get cool. The merchants were closing up their businesses and walking home to supper. Old Man Hurshel Jones was out watering his lawn, and he waved when he saw our pickup go by. He was an old ex-cowboy who put in his days in the domino parlor; he had worked for Granddad at one time. We crossed the railroad tracks and saw the switchman’s little girl out wading in a mud puddle, where the water main had leaked. “Wet plumb up to her Adam’s apple,” Hud said. He drove on out of town, past the junk yard, and past the cotton gin that had never ginned a bale that I could remember. The sun was a big red ball, sitting about a foot above the horizon; it wasn’t hot and white any more. Hank hadn’t got in yet, so we just left the milk cows in his pen and told his wife. We drove across the highway, and up the dirt road between the mesquites. When we hit the cattle guard the dogs came running out to bark at us, and wag their stub tails. No one was on the porch, but there was already a light in the living room. Halmea was in the back yard, wrestling a big rug off the clothesline.

  Hud stopped the pickup by the yard fence. “I got something to do that can’t wait,” he said. “You-all take it from here.” He walked to the fence, put one hand on a post, and jumped over.

  “Oh me,” Granddad said. “I wish I could move like that. I believe I’ll get out too. You can take the pickup on to the barn.”

  He got out, and shut the pickup door carefully. Seeing Hud jump the fence reminded me of the years when he cared to be an athlete. He rodeoed a good deal, and in the summertime he caught for the local ball team. Some of the Thalia sports got enough money together to run a string of lights around the ball field, and for a few years after that, night ball games were big affairs. Hud would catch with just a mask and a glove for protection. Half the time he wouldn’t even use the mask. One night he almost got his thumb torn off by a tip, but he got him a can of kerosene and soaked the thumb between innings and went on catching. He would cuss the batters till they got so mad they’d swing blind. “Stick a fork in him, he’s done,” he used to say.

  I drove on down to the lots and put the pickup in its shed. Jesse was in the horse lot, unsaddling Granddad’s young horse. He had decided to enter him in the cutting horse contest at the rodeo, just for the experience, and he was working him pretty hard. I turned on the water in the big trough, and sat on the iron edge while it filled up, sloshing my hands. I could see the round white moon reflected in the water, with little bits of green moss floating over the reflection like thunderclouds. I dipped one hand and tried to slosh out the moon, but it kept rocking back and forth. Seeing it made me think of Marcia, my cousin. When we were kids we used to float kindling ships back and forth across the tank to one another; I didn’t even know what had become of Marcia. The day had left me tired in a strange way, and I was about in the mood to skip supper and lay down in the short grass and rest, lay there and watch the white moon move across the sky. I bet Marlet had never fiddled around a water tank, sailing boats with a girl like Marcia. I flipped a stick into the tank and watched it bob on the rising water. It made me think of an old hillbilly song by Moon Mulligan, called “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone.” With all the dreams I own. Sail it out across the ocean blue.

  “Better turn that water off,” Jesse said. “It’s sloshin’ over.” He was going to supper, and I walked up to the yard with him, listening to him brag on Granddad’s colt. He seemed real quiet, but friendly, and in a good mood. When we got to the gate we met Hud coming out, dressed in his rodeo clothes.

  “Gimme room,” he said, grinning. “I’m going up to Burk to the rodeo. You honchos wanta go?”

  I was so surprised I didn’t say anything, but Jesse grinned and shook his head. “No thanks for me,” he said. “I’m gonna stay here and scare up a checker game.”

  “I guess that is about your speed,” Hud said. He got into his convertible and left, with us standing there watching him.

  “That’s the first time in my life he ever asked me to go anywhere,” I said. “I wonder why he did it.”

  Jesse took a package of cigarettes out of his pocket. “Lonesome, I imagine,” he said. “Just tryin’ to scare up a little company.”

  “Him lonesome?” I said. “Why he can get more women company than anybody around here.”

  “That ain’t necessarily much,” Jesse said. “It ain’t necessarily company, neither. Women just like to be around something dangerous part of the time. Scott ain’t so mean but what he could get lonesome once in a while.”

  “You shoulda heard him this afternoon,” I said. “You’d think he was mean.” I sat down on the steps and began to clean my boots, and Jesse went on in to wash up for supper. When the time came, I turned out to be hungry after all.

  Seven

  MAYBE IT WAS MARLET, AT THE AUCTION, OR MAYBE IT was Hud’s wild talk on the way home, but whatever it was caused it, I
had the blues that night, and everything I did made them get worse. After supper, Halmea went to her cabin, and I wandered into the living room looking for a new magazine to read. Grandma and Granddad were there, each one sitting by a separate radio. They disagreed over the programs so much that they couldn’t get along with just one. “Fibber an’ Molly’ll be on in a minute,” Granddad said. “Sit down an’ listen.” The wallpaper in the room made the light seem yellow as sulphur. Granddad’s face seemed thinner than it had; he hadn’t shaved, and the short silver whiskers looked ragged against his skin. He wasn’t being as clean about his tobacco chewing as he usually was. Neither one of them paid much attention to me, and I leaned on the mantel and read an old copy of the Cattleman. Grandma was listening to Break the Bank, and the two programs blaring so loud against each other made me want to grit my teeth. It gave me the terrible feeling that things were all out of kilter, all jumbled up. But I couldn’t seem to leave them, the two old ones. I sat down by the mantel, under the picture of my folks, and read through the old magazine. I wished I could get Granddad out on the porch, into the cool night. In a minute he turned the radio dial to another station, but it turned out that Fibber and Molly had gone off the air for the summer, or maybe forever. Granddad kept fiddling with the dial, trying to find a program that suited him, and I got up and left the room, more depressed than ever.

  My room didn’t do much to cheer me up. I read in about half a dozen books, but I couldn’t get interested in any of them, and I finally fished out a couple of old Playboys and went through them, looking at the shiny, naked girls. But whatever I did, that night, I just seemed to get more and more restless; it was like an itch there’s no way to scratch.

  Sometime late in the night I woke up, and for a minute I was all right, cool and fresh. For a while I lay on the bed enjoying the breeze, but then, when I couldn’t slide back into sleep, my restlessness came back, stronger than it had been before. The longer I lay there the worse it got. The house was quiet, but I figured it must be nearly morning. I dressed and went downstairs, meaning to go out to the windmill. But when I was on the back porch I got another idea: I found a flashlight, a twenty-two, and a box of hollow-point shells.

  I decided to go shoot things, shoot anything I could find. About halfway to the barn I stepped off the trail and walked carelessly through the high weeds, not caring how many rattlesnakes I stepped on. I was wishing I had a frog gig, I was in a mood to gig things. You gig things you got them. But I went on through the dark brush anyway. The first thing I did when I came to the tank was step on a big cottonmouth. He slid on by me to the water. I waved the flashlight around till I spotted a big bullfrog, sitting on the bank about twenty feet away. Then I sat down on the Bermuda grass, so I could hold the light on the frog and aim the gun across my knees. I hit him, heard the hollow-point splat into him, but before I could get him he flopped into the water. “Smart aleck,” I said. “Now the turtles eat you.” I shot five or six more frogs, some of them pretty long shots, but they all flopped into the water. Then I shot a turtle and splattered his shell. I missed a moccasin and hit a couple more frogs, and my gun was empty. I felt like shit, like all the bullets had been hitting me. I thought of Marlet, and I wished I could have shot him, the crazy little bastard. A rabbit came hopping up on the dam and I shined my light and blasted him. He kicked and died. “Tonight I may shoot everything,” I said. Then I shot another big frog and got him before he flopped. I held him up by the legs and let him kick. “See what good it does you,” I said. Then I threw him out in the tank. “Feed the turtles,” I said. “Frog a day keeps the doctor away.” I was shaking all over, and I had frog blood on my pants leg where the big one had flopped against me. I went over and picked up the rabbit and threw him as far out in the water as I could. “Eat hearty,” I said to the turtles. “I hope you get rabbit poisoning.” Then I went out in the darkness, the sunflowers and milkweeds up to my chest. A sunflower scraped my wrist and I dropped the flashlight—I went on and left it shining up through the weeds. Then I went back and picked it up. Suddenly the high weeds and the darkness made me feel like Marlet, like I was strangling, “Oh me,” I said. “I wasted all those frogs.”

  I guess the shooting woke Halmea up, because there was a light in her cabin. But before I could get there to calm her down it went out, and I went on to the house and put up the gun. I got scared and sad about what I’d done, especially about walking through all those snaky weeds. I could still hear the bullets plop into the peaceful, sleeping green frogs. The night around me was still and heavy as a blanket, and I knew I didn’t want to lie down beneath it, not then. I felt like you do sometimes in a high fever, when everything goes out of focus and gets far away, and your hands feel the wrong size. I heard the little gray moths tapping against the porch screen, and I went out again. All the stars were lost in cloud. West, behind the barn somewhere, I heard the hot farting roll of thunder. The dogs had dug holes in the cool dirt where the water tank overflowed, and I stepped over them going to the windmill. I knelt by the faucet and laid my cheek against the cool iron of the water pipe. The water ran over my feet, slow at first, then coming out of the pipe in cold white spurts. I made it run slowly; on my hot back and shoulders it felt like ice. In a little while I felt too cool, and I turned it off and started to climb up to the platform. But I stopped halfway up the ladder. It was lonesome on the windmill. The rig lights were far away and dim. I thought of Halmea, of seeing her light on, and I thought how good it would be if she were still awake, so we could sit and talk awhile.

  The thicket of clouds was moving westward, the moon hidden somewhere in it. It was so dark I almost stepped on an old hen that was squatting in the trail. When she squawked I jumped a foot. Then for the second night in a row I stood by Halmea’s window screen and listened to her breathing. But she must not have been sleeping very soundly. When I scratched on the screen and whispered, she came right away awake.

  “What you mean, nigger?” she said.

  “No, it’s me agin,” I said. “I thought you were awake.”

  “Lonnie?” she said. I guess she remembered the night before. “You gettin’ crazy sleepin’ habits.” Then she turned over on the bed and laughed so you could have heard her in Thalia. “You beats a goose,” she said, laughter spilling out around the words. She sounded relieved, and I paid the laughing no mind.

  “Maybe I better stay out here,” I said.

  “Whut fo’?” she said. “Come in here, you wants to talk so bad.” I could barely make out the white of her nightgown as she got out of bed. “If it ain’t dark I don’ know whut it is,” she said.

  She shoved a chair where I could feel my way to it, then went back to the bed. “Set down,” she said. “Nobody gonna swallow you.” The old bedsprings squeaked when she flopped back on them. Now that I was in the room with her, I began to get nervous.

  “You a crazy one,” she said. She seemed tickled about something, but she changed her tune when I told her about the shooting.

  “You done dat?” she said. “Dat scared de livah outa me.”

  “I don’t know why I did it,” I said. “I didn’t have nothin’ else to do, for one thing.”

  “Sheew,” she said, “dat’s no reason. You had de blues about sometin’, I seen dat at suppah.”

  “I’m just sick of all this,” I said.

  Suddenly she clicked on the little lightbulb at the head of her bed, and the yellow light spread over the room, as welcome as the sun. “Sick uv whut, honey?” she said. “Tell me little more.” She looked at me out of her calm black eyes, smiling the least little bit. I got tight and embarrassed when I saw her, I couldn’t help it. Her breasts sagged heavy against the nightgown, her bare legs tucked up under her as she watched me.

  “Things used to be better around here,” I said. “I feel like I want something back.”

  “Pity,” she said. She picked up her pillow and held it in her lap. “You mighty young to be wantin’ things back,” she said.

  “
If Granddad and Hud could get along a little better it would be okay,” I said.

  She grinned a little, and then a solemn look came on her face. “If an’ if an’ if,” she said. “You if yourself crazy. I been ifin’ aroun’ lot longah dan you have, an’ whut it get me? Just whut I eats an’ whut I wears out.”

  We sat quiet for a minute; Halmea had a faraway, solemn look on her face. Her lips were puffed a little. “Ain’t much talk, is it?” she said, and I nodded. Outside, the chickens were squawking, and the chicken house was a shadow in the first gray light. Halmea was picking the flaky brown paint off the bedrail, pursing her lips like she wanted to whistle. It was peaceful and nice for a while: I had quit thinking about anything. She clicked off the lightbulb, and we sat in the dim gray room.

  “I just work while I ifs,” she said. “When I get dat done I works a little mo’.” She stood up, yawned and stretched her back. “My back gonna quit me first,” she said. “Den I guess I just if.” She went to the screen door and looked out into the grayness. “Cloudy,” she said. “Now you get on. You got mo’ kinks in you dan I got in my back.” She stood in the doorway, scratching one leg through the white gown, while I walked up the path in the cool of morning. She would be going to the house, to cook breakfast, but I knew it was almost an hour away, so instead of going up to my room I went quickly to the lots and took my bridle from a nail in the harness shed. Then I went to the oatbin and scooped some yellow oats in a bucket. I took the oats and the bridle and walked back through the dewy grass toward the tank, hoping to meet the horses on the way.

  2.

  They weren’t at the tank, but I stood on the dam and watched them coming out of the brush to the north, trailing to the lots for their morning feed. The fish were making dawn breathings on the gray sheet of the water. When the horses got close enough I shook the oat bucket at them, and they filed over to me one by one. Each one stretched his neck and took a mouthful, afraid of being caught. When Stranger came up I set the bucket on the ground and let him nose it; while his head was down I slipped the reins around his neck. I bridled him, and poured the rest of the oats in little piles for the other horses. A covey of bobwhites whistled behind the dam; I waited a minute and saw them trail down to water. I hung the empty oat bucket on a snag.