The last food jars had been given out at the relief center on Dry Creek when Sebe Hammers pushed through the crowd. “I shore want you to git over to my homeseat this day,” he said. “You hain’t never been thar. The other govermint visitor was scairt of my woman. I reckon she is a grain crazy, but she wouldn’t harm a hair.”
Sebe was a short man, firm and heavy, and built close to the ground. He stood there wiping his raw eyes with a handkerchief, a small print square of cloth you could have pitched broomstraws through. It hardly covered his horny palm. The crowd looked at him and at the handkerchief. He held it up, and the red print flowers were bright in the sun. It was a woman’s handkerchief. “I want you to see how rail pore folks live,” he said.
Sebe was afoot. My horse-mule, Sugartop, had a saddle-boil and we couldn’t ride double. I set out walking with Sebe, leaving the nag behind in Sol Jefferson’s stall. We took up Trace Hollow and over the ridge with the sun-ball beating down on our backs. A scope of clouds lay flush with the hills toward Angus Creek, but there was nothing overhead to break the heat.
We stopped under the half-shade of a clump of haws going down yonside of the ridge. Blades of heat strained through the leaves, burning like points of light under a sunglass. “Hit’s shore a hot day,” Sebe said. “I reckon it’s the hottest day ever was.” I wiped the salt sweat from my eyes with my shirttail and lay back upon the steamy ground, resting. Sebe saw I had no handkerchief. He held the damp ball of cloth toward me but I shook my head. He wiped the red rims of his eyelids and spread the scrap of cloth in the sun to dry.
“Reckon you’ve got trachoma?” I asked.
“Hit’s jist a leetle sore-eye I got,” he said. “And I jedge hit catchin’.”
Leaber Flint was waiting at the ridge-foot for us. He had heard our brogans rattling the rocky trail. “We hain’t got a dustin’ o’ meal in the house,” he said. “Me and my woman and chaps is livin’ hard as nails. They hain’t enough grease in the bucket to fry a strip o’ sowbelly. I figger the govermint is bound to do somethin’.”
He led us through a huckleberry thicket to his puncheon slab house set under the hill. An old hen pecked in the yard, and there were three small naked children looking at us through a paling fence. Leaber’s wife came to the door with a baby at her breast. “Them children’s got a dress apiece,” she said, “but hit’s been so hot I let ’em pull ’em off. I heard tell hit does them good to git their hides tanned.”
It was cool in the house, and dark after the bright sunlight. The air was musty and rank. There was one bedstead covered with dirty quilts and a rotting shuck-mattress. The stove was propped on two stacks of flat rocks. Beside it a pile of ashes rose from the floor almost as high as the stove itself. They had been wet down to keep them from scattering. The meal barrel was empty, smelling like a rat’s nest. The grease bucket had a fistful of lard in it.
Leaber followed me through the house, brushing his hands over his scrubby beard. When we went outside again I sat down on the steps, writing a few words in a notebook. I had got overheated. My eyes burned as I followed the lines, and a dull ache, black as a thunderhead, lay behind them.
Leaber talked on as I wrote. “I’m patchin’ me two acres o’ corn but that won’t nigh feed my woman and chaps. I hain’t got no garden. Hit’s been dry as bones. Anyway we et up the seeds in March. Now if I had me some seeds hit’s still too hot. Plants is mighty timid a-comin’ on right now.”
When we had cooled off we walked on down Clabber Creek, staying close under the thin willow shade. My face and hands burned with the prickly heat, the sweat poured from my forehead, and my hair was sobby under the hot vacuum of my hat. A sharp thorn of pain struck backward from my eyes into my brain.
Lim Conners called us in for a drink of springwater. The windowless rooms of his house were clean and the floors yellow-white from scrubbings with a shuck mop. The rope-strung beds were billowing white with ticks filled with chicken feathers. But there were flies swarming about us in the dogtrot. They bit us and we kept busy slapping at them.
Another mile down the creek, John Stoll’s widow called to us to come in and eat a bite. Sebe hollered back that I was going to have a meal with him. As we walked on he told me about the nit-brained child at the Stoll place. “John Stoll ought to a-killed one man afore he died,” Sebe said. “Big Coll Tolbert come to his house drunk while his wife was a fur piece along and scairt her so the girl-child was marked when hit was borned. John was a-layin’ off to spike Big Coll, but he got hisself sawed up at a stave mill afore he got a chanct.”
My head ached fiercely as we walked, the pain wavering before my eyes like the pulsing heat over the stones ahead. My face was no longer wet. It was hot and dry, the heat seeming to boil inside me without being able to get out. Clabber Creek stretched endlessly before us. The water was thick and glassy and seemed not to move at all. As the sun-ball turned overhead we came to the mouth of Short Fork, and to Sebe Hammer’s house. It sat back in an old apple orchard, and we walked up to it through rows of bean poles.
“Don’t you mind my ole woman none,” Sebe said. “She’s puore crazy.”
Two mangy hounds challenged us from the puncheon steps and dived headlong under the house when Sebe threw a chunk at them. Lulu, Sebe’s wife, stood on the porch. She looked at me out of nervous eyes, brown as peach-stones between raw lids, and reached out a moist hand. “Yore furrin to Short Fork,” she said. “We hain’t never seed you afore, but yore a welcome body if you kin put up with pore folks’ ways.” She went back into the dark shade of the house. As we cooled on the porch we could hear her working over the stove, and the hoarse clucking of her voice singing an Old Regular hymn. “My woman is right quietlike this day,” Sebe said.
My head was feeling like a water bucket by now—large, hot, and hollow. In the shade the heat still danced before my eyes. I had come near a sunstroke, I thought. I wanted to sit still, and not to move at all, but presently Sebe took me around the house to the barn. The hip roof had its back broken. The logs were rotten and worm-eaten. There were only shucks and knotty corncobs in the crib. He had no cow. There was a razorback pig with a belly flat as a flitter in a pen. “Hit won’t be meat till first frost,” Sebe said. “I hain’t got a grain o’ nothin’ to feed hit on. I jist pull weeds and feed hit, but they hain’t got enough fleshnin’ to put an aidge on his teeth.”
I asked about his plow-mule. Sebe twisted his face up and laughed. “Thar ain’t a nag on this Short Fork,” he said. “We’ve got a porely lot o’ folks on this creek. We all jist knock out our craps with a hoe. And hit’s pritty hard on the rheumatiz in my jints.”
We sat down under the thick shade of an apple tree and Sebe told me about the folks on Short Fork. “We hain’t right healthy on this fork,” he said. “We air all kinfolks one way or ’nother. I’m squar’ kin to myself and back agin. We don’t git out much, and nobody comes in here. All the land is tuk up. Hit might do right good crappin’ if hit wasn’t standin’ on one end.
“My woman is the only one thet’s crazy, but she hain’t got the breast complaint like some o’ the women. Sometimes I reckon I’m glad hit’s her brains thet’s weak and not her lungs thet’s bein’ et up with consumption. Oh we hain’t a healthy lot here on this fork. I reckon hit’s the fogs, and the damp hollers, and the sun not a-shinin’ in nigh more’n half the day.”
Lulu called and we went in to eat. A table in the shed-room was set for us with two bucket-lid plates. There was a knife beside each plate but no fork or spoon. We scooped the shucky beans up with the broadside of the knife, fighting the flies off with one hand. They could sting like a bee if they lit.
I was sick, and not hungry, but I ate a little and drank three cups of black coffee. The food fell into my stomach like lead. Lulu stood over us, watching every mouthful we ate, and I saw that she had Sebe’s handkerchief. She brushed her face with it, and held it up to see the red print flowers.
After eating we sat on the porch again. “I’ll be puore thankful if the govermint kin do somethin’ for us folks on Short Fork,” Sebe said. “We’re ’bout to piddle out.” His words came as though through a fog. I was dull, and suddenly very sick. My dinner churned uncertainly in my stomach. I told Sebe I had to go, but I sat on with my chair leaned against the wall, and presently I slept.
Lulu’s laughter wakened me. It was shrill and raucous. Sebe was holding her, calm and unmoved as one might hold an angry child, and she struck at him with her bony hands. She was mad, but she laughed. I jumped out of my chair. The floor seemed to swing under my feet.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, and Sebe kept saying, “Hain’t no use to be scairt. She’s jist havin’ a spell. She won’t harm a hair.”
I ran down the path through the beanstalks to the creek bank. I fell down in the hot sand, and my dinner came up in choking gusts. I couldn’t stop to get my breath, but when there was no more I got up and walked on, wavering along the path as it curled through the hot sun. My skin was dry as leather, parched as old poplar leaves.
I thought about my horse-mule in Sol Jefferson’s stall six miles away and wondered if I’d ever make it. From there it was fourteen miles home.
I walked a long time. The earth under my feet seemed to move and flow behind me. Then I was out of the valley and on the mountain, knowing that I had strayed, that I was lost. I knew I’d had a sunstroke, and that I’d have to keep going. To lie down was to die. There on the mountain the buzzards would pick my bones. It might be days before anyone came along this trail. I had to keep going.
When I could walk no longer, I lay down in the middle of the path. If someone came along they would be sure to see me. They could not fail unless it was dark, and then a horse might step in my face. I reached into my pocket and found a handkerchief to wipe my mouth. Brushing it across my lips, I saw red print flowers bright upon the cloth. It was Sebe’s handkerchief. Lulu had put it in my pocket. I threw it down and rolled over to the edge of the path. There a mule or horse coming along the trail might not step on me, might shy away before they reached me. Then I drifted away in unconsciousness, not caring any more about buzzards or the feet of any animal.