Buddy wasn’t there any more. The only partnership Luther had left to offer me was in the station. Had he offered me half-ownership of a Southern Pacific roundhouse I wouldn’t have turned it down. I’d always wanted more responsibility.
For I already knew that though wages were fine, spunk was better—and Sheer Grit was best of all. That was the stuff that enabled a young fellow to get himself a foothold on the Ladder of Success. There were deer in the chaparral and frogs in the ditch, if you didn’t work for nothing you’d never get rich, I shelled on.
A Sinclair agent drove up with papers assigning responsibility for the hundred gallons of gas the company had let us have on credit. The man didn’t pretend to think we could sell gas on that dreadful stretch. His suspicion was that we planned to set up a still in the brush. But keeping the station open made him look like a go-getter with his front office.
“It don’t matter which one of you signs,” he told us.
“Ah caint handwrite proper,” Luther admitted humbly to the agent while handing me the papers, “but this lad here got more knowance ’n I’ll ever have.”
I signed the papers. Luther looked down at me from his six-and-a-half-foot height with a smile that drained cold glee. “You’ll be the Filling-Station King of the Valley,” he told me, like a reward.
I could hardly have been more proud.
Selling produce was THE PLAN. Every morning Luther boggled off in a beat-up Studebaker and returned each evening with a fresh load of black-eyed peas in the back seat, and a five-gallon jug of fresh water.
A store manager in Harlingen had told him that, if black-eyed peas were shelled and bottled, housewives would compete to buy them. Pointing out a Mason jar of peas, on display in the store window, that I personally had shelled and bottled, Luther rewarded me once more:
“You’ll be the Blackeye-Pea King of the Valley.”
I was shelling my way to fame.
In a land that seemed like an empty room furnished with fixtures of another day; when nobody knows where the old tenant has gone nor who the new tenant will be.
Nor what changes he’ll make in the fixtures.
The land no longer knew what it was; so the men and women moving across it no longer knew who they were.
The youth with the outfielder’s mitt on his hip, begging soap from housewives in backyards along the route of the Southern Railroad, thought he belonged to the Tallahassee Grays because he had a signed contract in his pocket. When he reached Tallahassee he’d learn that the league in which the Grays played had been dissolved. So all he belonged to was backyards along the route of the Southern Railroad.
The woman whose green years had been wasted in the tumult and din of a hundred speakeasies, now sat before a whiskey glass with a false bottom saying, “Don’t get the wrong idea, Mister, I’m no whoo-er. But at the moment I don’t have a place to sleep.” And the tumult and din of nights without end kept dying slowly away.
I was a day-editor, night-editor, sports columnist, foreign correspondent, feature-writer and editorialist. At the moment, however, I was shelling peas.
Between a past receding like a wave just spent and an incoming tide, in a time-between-times, multitudes were caught in the slough of the waters. To be hurled, if they were young, strong and lucky, high onto the sands; others were carried topsy-turvy and didn’t come up till they were far out to sea. Some were swept under never to rise.
There were snakes among the field stumps and lizards on the stones. Once a field of black butterflies came out of the sun, fluttered one moment and were gone: fled, like a dream of black butterflies.
I shelled on.
Huey Long was clamoring for redistribution of the wealth of those who were richer than himself in 1931, and the D.A.R. was demanding that all unemployed aliens be deported immediately. A cardinal was announcing, with contentment, that the nation’s economic collapse was a spiritual triumph, because it brought multitudes closer to the poverty of Christ: the cardinal hadn’t missed a meal in his life. Al Capone, on his way to the Atlanta Penitentiary, denounced Bolshevism. Herbert Hoover wanted somebody to paint his portrait. Huey Long threatened to vote Farmer-Labor rather than with the “Baruch-Morgan-Rockefeller Democrats.” Alexander Meiklejohn observed that “American Statesmanship has come to a dead stop.”
So had the cardinals, the rabbis, the ministers, the businessmen, the politicians, the bankers, the editorialists, the educators, the generals, the industrialists and the philosophers. Only the poets, the poets alone, saw what was building far out to sea.
Under the palaces, the marble and the granite of banks
Among the great columns based in sunless slime
The anonymous bearers of sorrows
Toil in their ancient march.
They look like men.
They look like men.
Whence do they come? How endure?
How spring from dragon’s teeth in gutters of death?
Full-armed and numerous, where do they go?
To gather red lilies sprung from seas of blood.
They look like men.
They look like men.
They look like men of war.1
American statesmanship had come to a dead stop; and yet I kept on shelling.
It had been Herbert Hoover’s land of Every-Man-For-Himself. It had also been Walt Whitman’s land, saying, “If you tire, give me both burdens.” Between the shelling of one sack and the next, I had had this flash notion: to show what had happened to a single descendant of that wild and hardy tribe that had given Jackson and Lincoln birth.
I had seen them riding the manifests and shilling at county fairs; whose forebears had been the hunters of Kentucky.
Where had the hunters of Kentucky gone when all the hunting was done? These were the slaveless yeomen who had never cared for slaves or land. They had never belonged to the plantations: they had seen the great landowner idling his hours while the blacks worked his cotton. So they’d put their own backs up against their own cabin walls and idled away their hours too: a cabin and a jug was all a man needed. If he had a fiddle and could fiddle a tune he was rich: Burns was their poet.
They had been as contemptuous of white mill hands as of black cotton pickers and for the same reason: they held all men in contempt who were dependent upon any owner. Nobody owned a man who owned a gun along the wild frontier. But, now that the frontier had vanished, where did the man go whose only skills were those of the frontier?
The struggle to preserve the great plantations was not their struggle, they knew: nor had they felt that “Mr. Lincoln’s war” was their own. Putting a plague on both houses, they became hiders-out between armies who began moving southwest after Shiloh. Forced down to the border by the spread of great cities, their final frontier became the dry bed of the Rio Grande.
I
