in his hands.
“Oh. I know. I don’t really mean that.” She breathed her warm breath against his overalls as she sat facing him.
“Mean what?”
“Mean that you caused everybody to be so thieving and so low-down in their ways. I don’t think that you caused it by yourself. I don’t think that I caused it by myself, either. But I just think that both of us are really to blame for it.”
“Us? Me? You?”
“Yes.” She shook her head as he played with her hair. “I do. I really do.”
“Hmmm.”
“We’re to blame because we let them steal,” she told him.
“Let them? We caused ’em to steal?”
“Yes. We caused them to steal. Penny at a time. Nickel at a time. Dime. A quarter. A dollar. We were easygoing. We were good-natured. We didn’t want money just for the sake of having money. We didn’t want other folks’ money if it meant that they had to do without. We smiled across their counters a penny at a time. We smiled in through their cages a nickel at a time. We handed a quarter out our front door. We handed them money along the street. We signed our names on their old papers. We didn’t want money, so we didn’t steal money, and we spoiled them, we petted them, and we humored them. We let them steal from us. We knew that they were hooking us. We knew it. We knew when they cheated us out of every single little red cent. We knew. We knew when they jacked up their prices. We knew when they cut down on the price of our work. We knew that. We knew they were stealing. We taught them to steal. We let them. We let them think that they could cheat us because we are just plain old common everyday people. They got the habit.”
“They really got the habit,” Tike said.
“Like dope. Like whiskey. Like tobacco. Like snuff. Like morphine or opium or old smoke of some kind. They got the regular habit of taking us for damned old silly fools,” she said.
“You said a cuss word, Elly.”
“I’ll say worse than that before this thing is over with!”
“Naaa. Naaa. No more of that there cussin’ outta you, now. I ain’t goin’ to set here an’ listen to a woman of mine carry on in no such a way when she never did a cuss word in her whole life before.”
“You’ll hear plenty.”
“I don’t know why, Lady, never would know why, I don’t s’pose. But them there cuss words just don’t fit so good into your mouth. Me, it’s all right for me to cuss. My old mouth has a little bit of ever’thing in it, anyhow. But no siree, not you. You’re not goin’ to lose your head an’ start out to fightin’ folks by cuss words. I’ll not let you. I’ll slap your jaws.”
Ella May only shook her curls in his lap.
“You always could fight better by sayin’ nice words, anyhow, Lady. I don’t know how to tell you, but when I lose my nut an’ go to cussin’ out an’ blowin’ my top, seems like my words just get all out somewhere in th’ wind, an’ then they get lost, somehow. But you always did talk with more sense, somehow. Seems like that when you say somethin’, somehow or another, it always makes sense, an’ it always stays said. Cuts ’em deeper th’n my old loose flyin’ cuss words.”
“Cuts who?” She lifted her head and shook her hair back out of her face, and bit her lip as she tried to smile. “Who?”
“I don’t know. All of them cheaters an’ stealers you’re talkin’ about.”
“I’m not talking about just any one certain man or woman, Tike. I’m just talking about greed. Just plain old greed.”
“Yeah. I know. Them greedy ones,” he said.
And she said, “No. No. You know, Tike—ah, it may sound funny. But I think that the people that are greedy, well, they believe that it’s right to be greedy. They’ve got a hope, a dream, a vision, inside of them just like I’ve, ah, we’ve got in us. And in a way it’s pitiful, but it’s not really their fault.”
“Hmm?”
“No more than, say, a bad disease was to break out, like some kind of a fever, or some kind of a plague, and all of us would take it, all of us would get it. Some would have it very light, some would have it sort of, well, sort of medium. Others would have it harder and worse, and some would naturally have it bad. Some of us would lose our heads, and some would lose our hands, and some would lose our senses with the fever.”
“Yeah. But who would be to blame for a plague? Cain’t nobody start no fever nor a thing like a plague. Could they, Lady?”
“Filth causes diseases to eat people up.”
“Yeah.”
“And ignorance is the cause of people’s filth.”
“Yeah—but—”
“Don’t but me. And ignorance is caused by your greed.”
“My greed? You mean, ah, me? My greed? You mean that me, my greed caused this farm to be filthy? I didn’t make it filthy. If it was mine, I’d clean th’ damn thing up slicker’n a new hat.”
She sat for a bit and looked out past his shoulder. “I feel the same way. I don’t know. But you can’t put your heart into anything if it’s not your own.”
“Shore cain’t.”
“I don’t know. I never did know. But it looks like to me that we could get together and pass some laws that would give everybody, everybody enough of a piece of land to raise up a house on.”
“Everybody would just go right straight and sell it to get some money to gamble with or to get drunk on, or to fuck with,” he told her. “Gamble. Drink. Fuck.”
“Should be fixed, though, to where if you went and sold your piece of land, then it went back into the hands of the Government, and not some old mean miserly money counter,” she said.
“If th’ Gover’ment was to pass out pieces of land right today, the banks would have it all back in two months.” He laughed.
“And if that happened”—she tilted her head—“then the Government should take it away from the banks and pass it out all over again. What do we pay them for? Fishing.”
“Fuckin’.” Tike laughed again.
She half shut her eyes to get a good close look at his face and said, “Your mind is certainly on sex today.”
“Ever’day.”
“Every single sensible thing that I’ve said here about your house of earth and your land to build it on, you’ve brought sex into it.”
“What do you think I want a house an’ a piece of land for, to concentrate in?”
“Don’t your mind ever think about anything else except just getting a piece of lay?”
“Not
