House of Earth. Woody Guthrie

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