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It would be nearly dustproof, and a whole lot warmer, and last longer to boot. But folks around here just havent studied it out, or got no information from the government, or somehow are walking around over and overlooking their own salvation.
Local lumber yards dont advertize mud and straw because you cant find a spot on earth without it, but you see old adobe brick houses almost everywhere that are as old as Hitlers tricks, and still standing, like the Jews.
If I was aiming to preach you a sermon on the subject I would get a good lungful of air and say that man is himself a adobe house, some sort of a streamlined old temple.
But what I want to come around to before the paper runs out is this: We’re scratching our heads about where to raise this $300 and we would furnish the labor and work, and we would write up a note of some kind a telling that this house belonged to somebody else till we could pay it out. . . .
Course the payments would have to run pretty low till we could get strung out and the weather thaw out and the sun take a notion to come out, but it would be a loan and as welcome as a gift.
In this case, a few retakes on the lenders part could shore change a mighty bleak picture into a good one, and maybe an endless One.
Starting in the late 1930s, Guthrie toyed with the idea of writing a panegyric to survivors of the Dust Bowl with adobe as the leitmotif. Because John Steinbeck had stolen his thunder by writing The Grapes of Wrath, about the Okie migration westward from Oklahoma and Texas to California, Guthrie decided to focus instead on his own authentic experience as a survivor of Black Sunday and the great mud blizzard. Also, to his ears, the dialect of Steinbeck’s uprooted Joads fell short of realism. To Guthrie, true-to-life bad grammar was the essential way to capture the spirit of how people really talked on the frontier. Like Joel Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus tales, he was an excellent listener. So House of Earth, in Guthrie’s mind, would be less an adulterated documentation of the meteorological calamities than a pioneering work in capturing Texas-Okie dialects. Steinbeck, like all reporters, focused on the dust cyclones, but Guthrie knew that the frigid winter storms in West Texas during the Dust Bowl era also crippled his fellow plainsmen. Guthrie granted Steinbeck the diploma for documenting the diaspora to California. Nevertheless, he himself claimed for literature those brave and stubborn souls who decided to stay put in the Texas Panhandle. It was one thing for Steinbeck, in The Grapes of Wrath, to feature families who were searching for a land of milk and honey, but Guthrie’s own heart was with those stubborn dirt farmers who remained behind in the Great Plains to stand up to the bankers, lumber barons, and agribusinesses that had desecrated beautiful wild Texas with overgrazing, clear-cutting, strip-mining, and reckless farming practices. The gouged land and the working folks got diddly-squat … nothing … zero … nada … zilch. (For a while Guthrie used the nom de plume Alonzo Zilch.)
While Guthrie’s twenty-five-year-old heart stayed in Texas, his legs would soon be bound for California. Much like Tike Hamlin, the main character in House of Earth, Guthrie paced the floorboards of his hovel at 408 South Russell Street in Pampa during the great mud blizzard of 1937, wondering how to find meaning in the drought-stricken misery of the Depression. His salvation required a choice: to go to California or to build an adobe homestead in Texas. When the character Ella May Hamlin screams, “Why has there got to be always something to knock you down? Why is this country full of things you can’t see, things that beat you down, kick you down, throw you around, and kill out your hope?” the reader feels that Guthrie is expressing his own deep-seated frustration. He decided he would have to try his luck in California if he wanted a steady income. Having learned the Carter Family’s old-style country tunes, and with original songs like “Ramblin’ Round” and “Blowing Down This Old Dusty Road” in his repertoire, he was determined to become a folksinger who mattered. In early 1937—the exact week is unknown, but it was after the snow had thawed—Guthrie packed up his painting supplies, put new strings on his guitar, and bummed a ride in a beer delivery truck to Groom, Texas. Hopping out of the cab and waving good-bye, he started hitching down Highway 66 (what Steinbeck called the “road of flight”), where migrants were begging for food in every flyspeck town, to Los Angeles.
There is an almost biblical sense of trials and tribulations in the obstacles Guthrie would confront in California. Like all the other migrants on Highway 66, he always felt starvation banging on his rib cage. From time to time, he pawned his guitar to buy food. Like the photographer Dorothea Lange, he visited farm camps in California’s San Joaquin Valley, stunned to see so many children suffering from malnutrition. But then Guthrie’s big break came when he landed a job as an entertainer on KFVD radio in Los Angeles, singing “old-time” traditional songs with his partner Maxine Crissman (“Lefty Lou from Mizzou”). His hillbilly demeanor was affecting, and the local airwaves allowed Guthrie to reach fellow workers in migrant camps with his nostalgic songs about life in Oklahoma and Texas. For a while, he broadcast out of the XELO studio from Villa Acuña in the Mexican state of Coahuila; the station’s powerful signal went all over the American Midwest and Canada, unimpeded by topography and unfettered by FCC regulations.
Many radio station owners wanted Guthrie to be a smooth cowboy swing crooner like Bob Wills (“My Adobe Hacienda”) and Gene Autry (“Back in the Saddle Again”). Guthrie, however, had developed a different strategy for folksinging that he clung to uncompromisingly. “I hate a song that makes you think you’re not any good,” he explained. “I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that … songs that run you down or songs that poke fun of you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight those kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.”
When Guthrie became a “hobo reporter” for The Light in 1938, he traveled extensively, reporting on the 1.25 million displaced Americans of the late 1930s. The squalor of the migrant camps angered him. He kept wishing the poor could live in adobe homes. “People living hungrier than rats and dirtier than dogs,” Guthrie wrote, “in the land of sun and a valley of night.” Guthrie came to understand that, contrary to myth, these so-called Dust Bowl refugees hadn’t been chased out of Texas by dusters; nor had they been made obsolete by large farm tractors. They were victims of banks and landlords who had evicted them simply for reasons of greed. These money-grubbers wanted to evict tenant farmers in order to turn a patchwork quilt of little farms into huge cattle conglomerates, and they thereby forced rural folks into poverty. During his travels around California, Guthrie saw migrants living in cardboard boxes, mildewed tents, filthy huts, and orange-crate shanties. Every flimsy structure known to mankind had been built, but adobe homes were nowhere to be found. This rankled Guthrie boundlessly. What would Jesus Christ think of these predatory money changers destroying the family farms of America and forcing good folks to live in wretched lean-tos? “For every farmer who was dusted out or tractored out,” Guthrie said, “another ten were chased out by bankers.”
The Franklin Roosevelt administration tried to help poor farmers through the federal Resettlement Administration (the successor to the Farm Security Administration, famous for collaborating with such artists as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Pare Lorentz) by issuing grants of ten to forty-five dollars a month to the down-and-out; farmers would line up at the Resettlement Administration offices for these grants. President Roosevelt also aimed to help farmers like the Hamlins by ordering the US Forest Service to plant millions of acres of trees and shrubs on farms to serve as shelterbelts (and reduce wind erosion) and by having the Department of Agriculture start digging lakes in Oklahoma and Texas to provide irrigation for the dry iron grass. These noble New Deal efforts helped but didn’t completely solve the crisis.
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The legend of Guthrie as a folksinger is etched in the collective consciousness of America. Compositions like “Deportee,” “Pastures of Plenty,” and “Pretty Boy Floyd” became national treasures, like Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. With the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists” emblazoned on his guitar, Guthrie tramped around the country, a self-styled cowboy-hobo and jack-of-all-trades championing the underdog in his proletarian lyrics. When Guthrie heard Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” sung by Kate Smith ad nauseam in 1939, on radio stations from coast to coast, he decided to strike out against the lyrical rot and false comfort of the patriotic song. Holed up in Hanover House—a low-rent hotel on the corner of Forty-Third Street and Sixth Avenue—Guthrie wrote a rebuttal to “God Bless America” on February 23, 1940. He originally titled the song “God Blessed America” but eventually settled on “This Land Is Your Land.” Because Guthrie saved thousands of his song lyrics in first and final drafts, we’re lucky to still have the fourth and sixth verses of the ballad, pertaining to class inequality:
As I went walking, I saw a sign there,
And on the sign there, it said “no trespassing.” *
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
In the squares of the city, in the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?
Guthrie signed the lyric sheet, “All you can write is what you see, Woody G., N.Y., N.Y., N.Y.” (During that week in Hanover House, the hyperproductive Guthrie also wrote “The Government Road,” “Dirty Overhalls,” “Will Rogers Highway,” and “Hangknot Slipknot.”)
Over the decades, “This Land Is Your Land” has become more a populist manifesto than a popular song. It’s Guthrie’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” a call to arms. There is a hymnlike simplicity to Woody’s signature tune. The lyric is clear and focused. Woody’s art always reflected his political leanings, but that was all part of his esprit. He wasn’t, in the end, a persona. What you heard was real as rain. There was no separation between song and singer.
Everything about a Guthrie song accentuated the positive in people struggling against all odds. He would trumpet hope at every turn. He even once referred to himself as a “hoping machine,” in a letter when he was courting a future wife. Guthrie sought to empower those who had nothing, to uplift those who had lost everything in the Great Depression, and to comfort those who found themselves repeatedly at the mercy of Mother Nature. He could not help raging at the swinish injustice of it all, in the two fierce verses in “This Land Is Your Land” that slammed private property and food shortages—verses that were lost during the period of McCarthy’s “red scare.” A relatively unknown, but very important, verse—“Nobody living can ever stop me … Nobody living can ever make me turn back”—challenges the agents of the authoritarian state who prevent free access to the land that was “made for you and me.” Reading all the verses now, one is impressed by Guthrie’s ability to elucidate such simple, brutal truths in such resolute words.
In many ways, House of Earth—originally handwritten in a steno notebook and then typed by Guthrie himself—is a companion piece to “This Land Is Your Land.” It’s another not-so-subtle paean to the plight of Everyman. After all, in a socialist utopia, once a Great Plains family acquired land, it would need to build a sturdy domicile on the property. The novel is therefore pitched somewhere between rural realism and proletarian protest, with a static narrative but a lovely portrait of the Panhandle and the marginalized people who made a life there in the 1930s. It’s Guthrie addressing the elemental question of how a sharecropper couple, field hands, could best live in a Dust Bowl–prone West Texas. Trapped in adverse economic conditions, unable to pay their bills or earn anything more than a subsistence wage, Guthrie’s main characters dream of a better way. Tike Hamlin—like Guthrie himself—wants to build an adobe home for his family. Wherever Guthrie went, no matter the day or time, he talked about someday having his own adobe home. “I am stubborn as the devil, want to built it my own self,” Guthrie wrote to a friend in 1947, “with my own hands and my own labors out of pisse de terra sod, soil, and rock and clay.”
Before writing House of Earth, he had composed his autobiography, Bound for Glory, in the early 1940s. In that work, Guthrie proved to be a genius at capturing the rural Texas-Oklahoma dialect in realistic prose. Somehow he managed to straddle the line between “outsider” folk art and “insider” high art. Bound for Glory— which was made into a motion picture in 1976—is an impressive first try from an amateur inspired by native radicalism. Guthrie’s great accomplishment was that his sui generis singing voice, his trademark, prospered in his prose.
Another book of Guthrie’s, Seeds of Man—about a silver mine around Big Bend National Park in Texas—was largely a memoir, though fictionalized in parts. There is an authenticity about this book that was—and still is—ennobling. He saw his next prose project—House of Earth—as a heartfelt paean to rural poverty. (Just a month after Guthrie had written “This Land Is Your Land,” he played the guitar and regaled his audience with stories about hard times in the Dust Bowl at a now legendary benefit for migrant workers hosted by the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural Organization.)
What Guthrie wanted to explore in House of Earth was how places like Pampa could be something more than tumbleweed ghost towns, how sharecropping families could put down permanent roots in West Texas. He wanted to tackle such topics as overgrazing and the ecological threats inherent in fragmenting native habitats. He elucidated the need for class warfare in rural Texas, for a pitchfork rebellion of the 99 percent working folks against the 1 percent financiers. His outlook was socialistic. (Bricks to all landlords! Bankruptcy to all timber dealers! Curses on real estate maggots glutting themselves on the poor!) And he unapologetically announces that being a farmer is God’s highest calling.
One of the main attractions of Guthrie’s writing—and of House of Earth in particular—is our awareness that the author has personally experienced the privations he describes. Yet this is different from pure autobiography. Guthrie gets to the essence of poor folks without looking down on them from a higher perch like James Agee or Jacob Riis. His gritty realism is communal, expressing oneness with the subjects. The Hamlins, it seems, have more in common with the pioneers of the Oregon Trail than with a modern-day couple sleeping on rollout beds in Amarillo during the Internet age. Objects such as cowbells, oil stoves, flickering lamps, and orange-crate shelves speak of a bygone era when electricity hadn’t yet made it to rural America. But while the atmosphere of House of Earth places the novel firmly in the Great Depression, the themes that Guthrie ponders—misery, worry, tears, fun, and lonesomeness—are as old as human history. Guthrie’s aim is to remind readers that they are merely specks of dust in the long march forward from the days of the cavemen.
The Hamlins have a hard life in a flimsy wooden shack, yet exist with extreme (and emotionally fraught) vitality. The reader learns at the outset that their home is not up to the function of keeping out the elements. So Tike starts exasperatedly espousing the idealistic gospel of adobe. On the farm, life persists, and the reader is treated to an extended, earthy lovemaking scene. This intimate description serves a purpose: Guthrie elevates the biological act to a representation of Tike and Ella May’s oneness with the land, the farm, and each other. And yet, the land is not the Hamlins’ to do with as they please—and so the building of their adobe house remains painfully out of reach. The narrative then concerns itself with domestic interactions between Tike and Ella May. Despite their great energy and playfulness, dissatisfaction wells up in them. In the closing scenes, in which Ella May gives birth, we learn more about their financial woes and how tenant farmers lived on tenterhooks during the Great Depression when they had no property rights.
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When the folklorist Alan Lomax read the first chapter of House of Earth (“Dry Rosin”), he was bowled over, amazed at how Guthrie expressed the emotions of the downtrodden with such realism and dignity. For months Lomax encouraged Guthrie to finish the book, saying that he’d “considered dropping everything I was doing” just to sell the novel. “It was quite simply,” Lomax wrote, “the best material I’d ever seen written about that section of the country.” House of Earth demonstrates that Guthrie’s social conscience is comparable to Steinbeck’s and that Guthrie, like D. H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was willing to explore raw sexuality.
Guthrie apparently never showed Lomax the other three chapters of the novel: “Termites,” “Auction Block,” and “Hammer Ring.” His hopes for House of Earth lay in Hollywood. He mailed the finished manuscript to the filmmaker Irving Lerner, who had worked on such socially conscious documentaries as One Third of a Nation (1939), Valley Town (1940), and The Land (1941). Guthrie hoped that Lerner would make the novel into a low-budget feature film. This never came to pass. The book languished in obscurity. Only quite recently, when the University of Tulsa started assembling a Woody Guthrie collection, did House of Earth reemerge into the light. The Lerner estate had found the treasure when organizing its own archives in Los Angeles. The manuscript and a cache of letters written by Guthrie and Lerner to each other were promptly shipped to Tulsa’s McFarlin Library for permanent housing. Coincidentally, while hunting down information about Bob Dylan for a Rolling Stone project, we stumbled on the novel. Like Lomax, we grew determined to have House of Earth published properly by a New York house, as Guthrie surely would have wanted.
The question has been asked: Why wasn’t House of Earth published in the late 1940s? Why would Guthrie work so furiously on a novel and then let it die on the vine? There are a few possible answers. Most probably, he was hoping a movie deal might emerge; that took patience. Perhaps Guthrie sensed that some of the content was passé (the fertility cycle trope, for example, was frowned on by critics) or that the sexually provocative language was ahead of its time (graphic sex of the “stiff penis” variety was not yet acceptable in literature during the 1940s). The lovemaking between Tike and Ella May is a brave bit of emotive writing and an able exploration of the psychological dynamics of intercourse. But it’s a scene that, in the age when Tropic of Cancer was banned, would have been misconstrued as pornographic. Another impediment to publication may have been Guthrie’s employment of hillbilly dialect. This perhaps made it difficult for New York literary circles to embrace House of Earth as high art in the 1940s, though the dialect comes across as noble in our own period of linguistic archaeology. Also, left-leaning originality was hard to mass-market in the Truman era, when Soviet communism was public enemy number one. And critics at the time were bound to dismiss the novel’s enthusiasm for southwestern adobe as fetishistic.
Toward the end of House of Earth, Tike rails against the sheeplike mentality of honest folks in Texas and Oklahoma who let low-down capitalist vultures steal from them. Long before Willie Nelson and Neil Young championed “Farm Aid,” a movement of the 1980s to stop industrial agriculture from running amok on rural families, Guthrie worried about middle-class folks who were being robbed by greedy banks. As Tike prepares to make love to Ella May in the barn scene in House of Earth, his head swirls with thoughts of how everything around him—“house, barn, the iron water tank, the windmill, little henhouse, the old Ryckzyck shack, the whole farm, the whole ranch”—was “a part of him, the same as an egg from the farm went into his mouth and down his throat and was a part of him.” Tike is biologically one with even the hay on his leased property.
In 1947, after years of gestation, House of Earth was finished. Shortly thereafter Guthrie’s health started to deteriorate from complications of Huntington’s disease. While disciples like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Pete Seeger popularized his folk repertoire, House of Earth remained among Lerner’s papers. Like a mural by Thomas Hart Benton or a novel by Erskine Caldwell, it was an artifact from a different era: it didn’t fit into any of the standard categories of popular fiction during the Cold War. But, as Guthrie might say, “All good things in due time.” The unerring rightness of southwestern adobe living is now more apparent than ever. Oscar Wilde was right: “Literature always anticipates life.” It’s almost as if Guthrie had written House of Earth prophetically, with global warming in mind.
To read the voice of Guthrie is to hear the many voices of the people, his people, those hardworking Great Plains folks who didn’t have a platform from which their sharp anguish could be heard. His voice was the pure expression of the lost, of the downtrodden, of the forgotten American who scratched out a living from the heartland.
While Guthrie was himself a common man, he was uncommon in his efforts to celebrate the proletariat in his art. He hoped someday Americans could learn how to abolish the laws of debt and repayment. Guthrie wanted to be heard, to count for something. He demanded that his political beliefs be acknowledged, respected, and treated with dignity. As his graphic love scenes demonstrate, he wasn’t scared of anyone. He had no fear. He lived his art. In short, Guthrie inspired not only people of his time, but people of later times enraged by injustice, yearning for truth, searching for that elusive resolution of class inequality.
We consider the publication of House of Earth an integral part of the celebration of the centennial of Woody Guthrie’s birth, a significant cultural event, and a major installment in the corpus of his published work. He wrote the novel as a side project; it was never the focus of his intrepid life of performing his songs from coast to coast. Yet the novel’s intensity guarantees it a place in the ever-growing field of Guthrieana. When we shared Guthrie’s House of Earth with Bob Dylan, he said he was “surprised by the genius” of the engaging prose, a realistic meditation about how poor people search for love and meaning in a corrupt world where the rich have lost their moral compass.
The discovery of House of Earth reinforces Guthrie’s place among the immortal figures of American letters. Guthrie endures as the soul of rural American folk culture in the twentieth century. His music is the soil. His words—lyrics, memoirs, essays, and now fiction—are the adobe bricks. He is of the people, by the people, for the people. Long may his truth be heard by all those who care to listen, all those with hope in their heart and strength in their stride. Guthrie’s proletariat-troubadour legacy is profoundly human, and his work should be forever celebrated. As Steinbeck wrote in tribute, “Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who still listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.”
Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp
Albuquerque, New Mexico
I (#)
DRY ROSIN (#)
The wind of the upper flat plains sung a high lonesome song down across the blades of the dry iron grass. Loose things moved in the wind but the dust lay close to the ground.
It was a clear day. A blue sky. A few puffy, white-looking thunderclouds dragged their shadows like dark sheets across the flat Cap Rock country. The Cap Rock is that big high, crooked cliff of limestone, sandrock, marble, and flint that divides the lower west Texas plains from the upper north panhandle plains. The canyons, dry wash rivers, sandy creek beds, ditches, and gullies that joined up with the Cap Rock cliff form the graveyard of past Indian civilizations, flying and testing grounds of herds of leather-winged bats, drying grounds of monster-size bones and teeth, roosting, nesting, and the breeding place of the bald-headed big brown eagle. Dens of rattlesnakes, lizards, scorpions, spiders, jackrabbit, cottontail, ants, horny butterfly, horned toad, and stinging winds and seasons. These things all were born of the Cap Rock cliff and it was alive and moving with all these and with the mummy skeletons of early settlers of all colors. A world close to the sun, closer to the wind, the cloudbursts, floods, gumbo muds, the dry and dusty things that lose their footing in this world, and blow, and roll, jump wire fences, like the tumbleweed, and take their last earthly leap in the north wind out and down, off the upper north plains, and down onto the sandier cotton plains that commence to take shape west of Clarendon.
A world of big stone twelve-room houses, ten-room wood houses, and a world of shack houses. There are more of the saggy, rotting shack houses than of the nicer wood houses, and the shack houses all look to the larger houses and curse out at them, howl, cry, and ask questions about the rot, the filth, the hurt, the misery, the decay of land and of families. All kinds of fights break out between the smaller houses, the shacks, and the larger houses. And this goes for the town where the houses lean around on one another, and for the farms and ranch lands where the wind sports high, wide, and handsome, and the houses lay far apart. All down across this the wind blows. And the people work hard when the wind blows, and they fight even harder when the wind blows, and this is the canyon womb, the stickery bed, the flat pallet on the floor of the earth where the wind its own self was born.
The rocky lands around the Cap Rock cliff are mostly worn slick from suicide things blowing over it. The cliff itself, canyons that run into it, are banks of clay and layers of sand, deposits of gravel and flint rocks, sandstone, volcanic mixtures of dried-out lavas, and in some places the cliff wears a wig of nice iron grass that lures some buffalo, antelope, or beef steer out for a little bit, then slips out from underfoot, and sends more flesh and blood to the flies and the buzzards, more hot meals down the cliff to the white fangs of the coyote, the lobo, the opossum, coon, and skunk.
Old Grandpa Hamlin dug a cellar for his woman to keep her from the weather and the men. He dug it one half of one mile from the rim of Cap Rock cliff. He loved Della as much as he loved his land. He raised five of his boys and girls in the dugout. They built a yellow six-room house a few yards from the cellar. Four more children came in this yellow six-room house, and he took all of his children several trips down along the cliff rim, and pointed to the sky and said to them, “Them same two old eagles flyin’ an’ circlin’ yonder, they was circlin’ there on th’ mornin’ that I commenced to dig my dugout, an’ no matter what hits you, kids, or no matter what happens to you, don’t git hurried, don’t git worried, ’cause the same two eagles will see us all come an’ see us all go.”
And Grandma Della Hamlin told them, “Get a hold of a piece of earth for yerself. Get a hold of it like this. And then fight. Fight to hold on to it like this. Wood rots. Wood decays. This ain’t th’ country to get a hold of nothin’ made out of wood in. This ain’t th’ country of trees. This ain’t even a country fer brush, ner even fer bushes. In this streak of th’ land here you can’t fight much to hold on to what’s wood, ’cause th’ wind an’ th’ sun, an’ th’ weather here’s just too awful hard on wood. You can’t fight your best unless you got your two feet on th’ earth, an’ fightin’ fer what’s made out of th’ earth.” And walking along the road that ran from the Cap Rock back to the home place, she would tell them, “My worst pain’s always been we didn’t raise up a house of earth ’stead of a house of wood. Our old dugout it was earth and it’s outlived a hundred wood houses.”
Still, the children one by one got married and moved apart. Grandma and Grandpa Hamlin could stand on the front porch of their old home place and see seven houses of their sons and daughters. Two had left the plains. One son moved to California to grow walnuts. A daughter moved to Joplin to live with a lead and zinc miner. Rocking back and forth in her chair on the porch, Della would say, “Hurts me, soul an’ body, to look out acrost here an’ see of my kinds a-livin’ in those old wood houses.” And Pa would smoke his pipe and watch the sun go down and say, “Don’t fret so much about ’em, Del, they just take th’ easy way. Cain’t see thirty years ahead of their noses.”
Tike Hamlin’s real name was Arthur Hamlin. Della and Pa had called him Little Tyke on the day that he was born, and he had been Tike Hamlin ever since. The brand of Arthur was frozen into a long icicle and melted into the sun, gone and forgotten, and not even his own papa and mama thought of Arthur except when some kind of legal papers had to be signed or something like that.
Tike was the only one of the whole Hamlin tribe that was not born up on top of the Cap Rock. There was a little oblong two-room shack down in a washout canyon where his mama had planted several sprigs of wild yellow plum bushes near the doorstep. She dug up the plum roots and chewed on them for snuff sticks, and she used the chewed sticks to brush her teeth. The shack fell down so bad that she got afraid of snakes, lizards, flies, bugs, gnats, and howling coyotes, and argued her husband into building a five-room house on six hundred and forty acres of new wheat land just one mile due north, on a straight line, from the old Pa Hamlin dugout.
Tike was a medium man, medium wise and medium ignorant, wise in the lessons taught by fighting the weather and working the land, wise in the tricks of the men, women, animals, and all of the other things of nature, wise to guess a blizzard, a rainstorm, dry spell, the quick change of the hard wind, wise as to how to make friends, and how to fight enemies. Ignorant as to the things of the schools. He was a wiry, hard-hitting, hardworking sort of a man. There was no extra fat around his belly because he burned it up faster than it could grow there. He was five feet and eight inches tall, square built, but slouchy in his actions, hard of muscle, solid of bone and lungs, but with a good wide streak of laziness somewhere in him. He was of the smiling, friendly, easygoing, good-humored brand, but used his same smile to fool if he hated you, and grinned his same little grin even when he got the best or the worst end of a fistfight. As a young boy, Tike had all kinds of fights over all matters and torn off all kinds of clothes and come home with all kinds of cuts and bruises. But now he was in this thirty-third year, and a married man; his wife, Ella May, had taught him not to fight and tear up five dollars’ worth of clothes unless he had a ten-dollar reason.
His hard work came over him by spells and his lazy dreaming came over him to cure his tired muscles. He was a dreaming man with a dreaming land around him, and a man of ideas and of visions as big, as many, as wild, and as orderly as the stars of the big dark night around him. His hands were large, knotty, and big boned, skin like leather, and the signs of his thirty-three years of salty sweat were carved in his wrinkles and veins. His hands were scarred, covered with old gashes, the calluses, cuts, burns, blisters that come from winning and losing and carrying a heavy load.
Ella May was thirty-three years old, the same age as Tike. She was small, solid of wind and limb, solid on her two feet, and a fast worker. She was a woman to move and to move fast and to always be on the move. Her black hair dropped down below her shoulders and her skin was the color of windburn. She woke Tike up out of his dreams two or three times a day and scolded him to keep moving. She seemed to be made out of the same stuff that movement itself is made of. She was energy going somewhere to work. Power going through the world for her purpose. Her two hands hurt and ached and moved with a nervous pain when there was no work to be done.
Tike ran back from the mailbox waving a brown envelope in the wind. “’S come! Come! Looky! Hey! Elly Mayyy!” He skidded his shoe soles on the hard ground as he ran up into the yard. “Lady!”
The ground around the house was worn down smooth, packed hard from footprints, packed still harder from the rains, and packed still harder from the soapy wash water that had been thrown out from tubs and buckets. A soapy coat of whitish wax was on top of the dirt in the yard, and it had soaked down several inches into the earth at some spots. The strong smell of acids and lyes came up to meet Ella May’s nose as she carried two heavy empty twenty-gallon cream cans across the yard.
“Peeewwweee.” She frowned up toward the sun, then across the cream cans at Tike, then back at the house. “Stinking old hole.”
“Look.” Tike put the envelope into her hand. “Won’t be stinky long.”
“Why? What’s going to change it so quick all at once? Hmmm?” She looked down at the letter. “Hmmmm. United States Department of Agriculture. Mmmmm. Come on. We’ve got four more cream cans to carry from the windmill. I’ve been washing them out.”
“Look inside.” He followed her to the mill and rested his chin on her shoulder. “Inside.”
“Grab yourself two cream cans, big boy.”
“Look at th’ letter.”
“I’m not going to stop my work to read no letter from nobody, especially from no old Department of Agriculture. Besides, my hands are all wet. Get those two cans there and help me to put them over on that old bench close to the kitchen window.”
“Kitchen window? We ain’t even got no kitchen.” Tike caught hold of the handles of two of the cans and carried them along at her side. “Kitchen. Bull shit.”
“I make out like it’s my kitchen.” She bent down at the shoulders under the weight of the cans. “Close as we’ll ever get to one, anyhow.” A little sigh of tired sadness was in her voice. Her words died down and the only sound was that of their shoe soles against the hard earth, and over all a cry that is always in these winds. “Whewww.”
“Heavy? Lady?” He smiled along at her side and kept his eye on the letter in her apron pocket.
The wind was stiff enough to lift her dress up above her knees.
“You quit that looking at me, Mister Man.”
“Ha, ha.”
“You can see that I’ve got my hands full of these old cream cans. I can’t help it. I can’t pull it down.”
“Free show. Free show,” Tike sang out to the whole world as the wind showed him the nakedness of her thighs.
“You mean old thing, you.”
“Hey, cows. Horses. Pugs. Piggeeee. Free show. Hey.”
“Mean. Ornery.”
“Hyeeah, Shep. Hyeah, Ring. Chick, chick, chick, chick, chickeeee. Kitty, kitty, kitty, meeeooowww. Meeeooowww. Blow, Mister Wind! I married me a wife, and she don’t even want me to see her legs! Blow!” He dug his right elbow into her left breast.
“Tike.”
“Blowww!”
“Tike! Stop. Silly. Nitwit.”
“Blowwww!” He rattled his two cans as he lifted them up onto the bench. In order to be polite, he reached to take hers and to set them up for her, but she steered out of his reach.
“You’re downright vulgar. You’re filthy-minded. You’re just about the meanest, orneriest, no-accountest one man that I ever could pick out to marry! Looking at me that a way. Teasing me. That’s just what you are. An old mean teaser. Quit that! I’ll set my own cans on the bench.” She lifted her cans.
“Lady.” The devil of hell was in his grin.
“Don’t. Don’t you try to lady me.” Her face changed from a half smile into a deep and tender hurt, a hurt that was older, and a hurt that was bigger than her own self. “This whole house here is just like that old rotten fell-down bench there. That old screen it’s going to just dry up and blow to smithereens one of these days.”
“Let it blow.” Tike held a dry face.
“The wood in this whole window here is so rotten that it won’t hold a nail anymore.” Tears swept somewhere into her eyes as she bit her upper lip and sobbed, “I tried to tack the screen on better to keep those old biting flies out, and they just kept coming on in, because the wood was so rotten that the tacks fell out in less than twenty minutes.”
Tike’s face was sad for a second, but before she turned her eyes toward him, he slapped himself in the face with the back of his hand, in a way that always made him smile, glad or sad. “Let it be rotten, Lady.” He put his hands on his hips and took a step backward, and stood looking the whole house over. “Guess it’s got a right to be rotten if it wants to be rotten, Lady. Goldern whizzers an’ little jackrabbits! Look how many families of kids that little ole shack has suckled up from pups. I’d be all rickety an’ bowlegged, an’ bent over, an’ sagged down, an’ petered out, an’ swayed in my middle, too, if I’d stood in one little spot like this little ole shack has, an’ stood there for fifty-two years. Let it rot. Rot! Rot down! Fall down! Sway in! Keel over! You little ole rotten piss soaked bastard, you! Fall!” His voice changed from one of good fun into words of raging terror. “Die! Fall! Rot!”
“I just hate it.” She stepped backward and stood close up against him. “I work my hands and fingers down to the bones, Tike, but I can’t make it any cleaner. It gets dirtier every day.”
Tike’s hand felt the nipples of her breast as he kissed her on the neck from behind and chewed her gold earrings between his teeth. His fingers rubbed her breasts, then rubbed her stomach as he pulled the letter out of her apron pocket. “Read th’ little letter?”
“Hmh? Just look at those poor old rotted-out boards. You can actually see them rot and fall day after day.” She leaned back against his belt buckle.
He put his arms around her and squeezed her breasts soft and easy in his hands. He held his chin on her right shoulder and smelled the skin of her neck and her hair as they both stood there and looked.
“Department of Agriculture.” She read on the outside.
“Uh-hmm.”
“Why. A little book. Let’s see. Farmer’s Bulletin Number Seventeen Hundred. And Twenty. Mm-hmm.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The Use of Adobe or Sun Dried Brick for Farm Building.” A smile shone through her tears.
“Yes, Lady.” He felt her breasts warmer under his hands.
“A picture of a house built out of adobe. All covered over with nice colored stucco. Pretty. Well, here’s all kinds of drawings, charts, diagrams, showing just about everything in the world about it.”
“How to build it from th’ cellar up. Free material. Just take a lot of labor an’ backbendin’,” he said. Then a smile was in his soul. “Cost me a whole big nickel, that book did.”
