His blood-red banner streams afar—Who follows in his train?
Who best can drink his cup of woe, triumphant over pain?
He lived with two sons and a daughter in a three-room shack in Mexican-town, and most of his neighbors were Mexicans. The shack faced a broad dust-road that led east to the roundhouse and west to the prairie: a road hung with gas lamps leaning askew above lean curs asleep in sun, where brown half-naked children played in ruts that many wheels had made. Within the home, poverty, bleak and blind, sat staring at four barren walls. Ragged dish towels hung, in a low festoon, from the damper of the stove-pipe to a nail above the sink, and the sink was a tin trough salvaged from a dump heap. Unwashed dishes and pans lay in it.
Stuart’s living room was used for both dining and sleeping. In its center stood a table built solely of orange crates—a creation of Bryan McKay’s. It was unsteady, inclined to totter, as Bryan had been the morning he built it. A faded strip of green oilcloth covered it. A smoky and cheerless place, this room, with but one small window. On one wall hung the shack’s sole decoration, a dusty piece of red cardboard bearing the simple legend:
CHRIST
Is the head of this house
THE UNSEEN HOST
At every meal
THE SILENT LISTENER
To every conversation
One room was a mere hole in the wall, a little sloping windowless cavern in which the sister Nancy slept, partitioned off from her men by a strip of dark cheesecloth nailed above the cavern’s opening.
Slantwise behind the home ran the Santa Fe railroad; between the tracks and the house stood a lop-sided privy.
The privy was loathsome within. It stank fulsomely. Scraps of torn paper lay strewn across its floor, flies swarmed in the place, no one had ever cleaned it. Its door hung creaking and half-unhinged, a thousand nameless dark weeds grew about it.
The red dining-room legend one day found its way onto the privy wall. Stubby found it hanging lop-sidedly there, and came back into the house with one suspender unbuttoned. He laid the cardboard on the table, clutched a tuft of his close-cropped scalp with one paw, and rapped the legend fiercely with the knuckles of his other hand. Although he was very angry, yet his voice held a complaining ring that was like a plea beneath a threat.
“Bry’n,” he said, “were you-all a well man today, ah swear ah’d beat yo’ fo’ this.”
Bryan tittered slyly, girlishly, half to himself, and Stubby turned away. He could not bear to hear womanish giggling in a full-grown man. And Bryan would not admit that he had done the thing, although everyone knew that it could have been nobody else. Later on the younger brother asked Bryan if he were not just a little afraid of Christ Jesus.
Bryan tilted forward on his chair in the corner till his shoeless feet found the bare dirt floor.
“Not me, ah’m not afeered o’Jesus. Why, ah’m Jesus little wooly lamb, ah am. Me’n Jesus git along jest like this—” He crossed two fingers, one on top of the other, and thrust them under Cass’s nose. “See, young scapegallers—this is how me’n Christ Jesus git along. Oney the one on the bottom, that’s me every time, an’ him on the top—that’s Christ Jesus.” Then he tittered girlishly, and crossed and recrossed his fingers.
Cass was a sickly thing, and Bryan had left his health in France. But Nancy was strong, her girlhood was happy, she had always been gay.
As a small girl, walking alone in the tiny garden on the mornings of those early days, days as yet undarkened by any shadow, she would laugh at everything she saw, red zinnias and blue morning-glories, tall dahlias and the wild daisy. Of the sweet purple clover she wove herself garlands, she made herself crowns of lilac and rose. Then, dressed like some little brown Mexican flower-girl, anklets of marigold, wristlets of grass, she would dance through the garden singing in sunlight, till she frightened the sparrows and caused them to scold her. For sheer delight she would dance, laughing, leaping and twirling, whirling about with her brown arms stretched wide; then, laughing and gasping, half-dizzied and toppling, she would throw herself down in the long grass of summer; laughing, laughing, weeping with laughter.
In all bright things she took deep joy: in gay-colored birds, in pictures and ribands; in gaudy new dresses, in flowers and songs.
Nance had been mischievous, too, as a child, always fighting with street urchins, chasing the chickens, or stealing white grapes off honest folks’ vines.
All day one day she coveted a great white blossom growing in the yard of neighbor Luther Gulliday. It was a wild chrysanthemum, she had not seen one before in her life; so she begged Luther for it, and he gave her instead—an apple. Nance went off quite humbly—an excellent actress. But when dark came she strolled again toward her flower, saw no one watching, plucked it and ran.
So all her days passed, unreckoned, fast-fleeting. She plucked wild plums, in the sunlight she found them, and her days were like these: she grew in light, unattended.
Sometimes after supper, while undressing for bed, she would press her hands slowly down the white bow of her loins. A great wonder would fill her, she would stand looking down. She would lie still in the darkness, her breasts like twin spears; and she would feel then as though she lay on a pyre whose flames were already beginning beneath her. The girl would be afraid, though she did not know of what. And her face in the dark would change to that of a woman.
Then she would sleep, and in sleep too she laughed. She was three years older than the boy Cass.
So the house stood, and so were the McKays, in the pre–depression years, on the West Texas prairie. Their home stood like a casual box on the border; it was wooden and half-accidental. It had no roots in the soil, it stood without permanence. Although it was old and unpainted and rotting, yet it appeared somehow to have been in its place for but the past few days. So with the people within—Texan-American descendants of pioneer woodsmen—they too had no roots. They too were become half-accidental. Unclaimed now they lived, the years of conquest long past, no longer accessory to hill and plain, no longer possessing place in the world.
They too were rotting.
On the edge of the town grew the jungle. Fathers warned sons not to go near it. Mothers intimidated their six-year-olds with tales of bearded men lying in wait in the long grass down by the Santa Fe tracks. But to a boy like Cass McKay, who was a lonely child, the Santa Fe jungle was not a fearful place. To a boy like Cass, who feared his father and had no mother, the jungle offered companionship.
Boys little older than himself lay idling about in long sun-shadows there, talking, jesting, eating, sleeping, waiting for one train or another. They boiled black coffee in open tins or ate beans with a stick; they rolled cigarettes single-handed and sang songs about far-away places. Cass never listened without wonder, he never watched without admiration.
“Ah’d like to git out of this pesthole some day,” he mused to himself. “Ah’d go to Laredo or Dallas or Tucson—anywhere ah’d take fancy to go. Ah’d git mah right arm tattooed in New Awlins, ah’d ship out f’om Houston or p’raps f’om Port Arthur; ah’d git to know all the tough spots as well as the easy ones. Ah’d always know jest where to go next. Ah’d always be laughin’ an’ larkin’ with folks.”
Cass listened to the boys and older men, and he learned many things:
That
