Yonnondio: From the Thirties (13 page)

“The devil is roasting us today; the devil is frying
us, like in hell. For our sins.” Erina’s breath was in Mazie’s face; Mazie saw how
the pus oozed from her eyes, stuck on her eyelashes; weed stickers—maybe lice—in her
hair.
Go away, Erina; it’s so hot and you are wavy like everything else. Last night I was
your body, I was you. Go away
. “Maybe my momma will give a penny.”

“It hurts inside,” Erina said, crying and slobbering. “Hold me so it dont hurt.” She
put her one arm around Mazie, who shuddered violently. “I’m ugly,” Erina sobbed. “God
made me like this.” Crouching down at Mazie’s feet.

(Miss Ugly)
Mazie sank resistless down on the cracked earth beside her; its heat came up in waves
too, like the glassy wave she could see in the air. “Shall I go look for a ice truck
and steal you some ice, Erina?”

“Shall we pray?” asked Erina. “I pray but God dont make me better and Pa and Tammy
sue socks me ’cause it means I was sinnin too bad to get forgiven. Do you sin, little
girl?”

“I’m big,” said Mazie. “I’m going to be nine, almost as old as you, Erina,” and began
to grub in the hot stiff soil at the half-decayed rags in it.

“Watch for my bird,” said Erina, “Watch for its little bones. It was deaded and I
put it in the ground there and blessed it, but when I got back it was on
top half et with worms and crawly things and stinky and I had to cover it back. Bones
now. When you die your soul goes to hell or heaven but your body gets et and stinks.”
Swallowing thirstily and slobbering.

“That’s a song,” said Mazie, a sick-happy feeling to be with Erina, to listen to Erina,
rising in her. “The worms go in and the worms go out and they eat up all of your chin
and mouth.”

“Watch for the little ants,” said Erina. “Dont hurt their houses. They have to hurry
and work so hard and carry heavy things and I sees them carry each other sometime.”

Erina looked really sick; her eyes were like that little girl’s in the painting-picture,
black holes. What Mazie had thought was dirt on her cheek was bad bruises. Was she
going to get a fit? “Erina,” she said gently, “Ginella has lemon cream soda in her
tent. I’ll ask will she give some.”

“Ginella!” said Erina. She smoothed and gentled her little stub arm and it tried to
rise up as if to gentle her back. “When she sees me she says here comes freak show,
stink show, Miss Sewer from shantylice-town.” Her face quivered. “Suffer little children
the Bible says.”

“Rest, Erina. I’ll get you some ice quick, or ice cream or another peach or lemon
cream.”

Ginella and Katie and Char were gone; the tent
and the clinky glittery curtains and the dress-up bag, gone. Erina was gone too, weaving
toward the viaduct under where shantytown was. Mazie wanted to fall and push herself
along on her belly after her. Flat like a caterpillar, not wavy like a worm or jumpy
like a grasshopper. Crawl flat on her belly. Not have to walk. Her head throbbed biggern
the whole world and like all her blood was boiling up into it, percing up into it.
She walked slow as she could, but fell. It was the sole of her shoe come loose and
flapping made her stumble.
I told you Ididnt want to have to wear shoes today, Ma
, taking them off. But the ground frizzled and she put her shoes back on.

She wanted to cry but she did not know what about. She wanted to hear Erina talk—but
not have to look at her. She felt sick and mean and screamy, and sad and mad and bad.
Her throat swallowed and swallowed with nothing in it to swallow, so dry, sticking
together, hurting. Last night she dreamed she swung the Big Dipper round and round
and drank the night with the ice stars in it. She could have told Erina that, Erina
would have listened. Stars are fire, not ice—stars are suns, she reminded herself
scornfully. Old Man Caldwell. Tied to the stake, flames curling round her feet and
up toward her belly, everybody laughing, Miss Ugly. Yes, she was. She sat down on
the curb and looked at her burning feet. She
wanted to go to the catalpa place and sit under that tree; or down to the river where
she had never been and Will got to go; it would be cool with ice like night in God’s
Dipper.

A lady in a car stopping at the corner held a handkerchief to her nose, real delicate.
Mazie picked up a corncob from the gutter and threw it hard at the car.

Right by the house, in the shade, Jimmie and Jeff and Ben were playing. Jeff held
a strange stringed instrument his brothers had made for him, a cigarbox body with
a long slab of wood jutting out; strung on it a dozen kinds of strings and wires.
With it he made a jangling and sang in an unearthly voice. Jimmie sang too, rocking
a half of a Quaker Oats round cereal box cut the long way; in it was a stick wrapped
round with rags in the semblance of a doll. Ben, for all the heat swathed in a blanket,
sat gravely watching and rocking himself in time.

“Fishface,” she heard herself saying in Ginella’s inflections, “why don’t you close
your mouth, Fishface? My cradle,” swooping down, “my own cradle I made.”

“It’s to rock baby,” pleaded Jimmy. “We’re rocking baby to sleep.”

“… playing … house,” Ben explained, breathing loud between each word.

“You never asked could you have it. And there goes your baby,” swinging it out far
as she could into the yard.

“You … hurted … her,” Ben said accusingly, his eyes, bigger than ever with their illness,
filling with tears.

But she was in the kitchen, tears and meanness fighting in her, banging the door after
her right into wailing Jimmie’s face.

“Now what’s the matter?” Anna asked, her head bobbing over the steaming kettles. “Oh
its you. Now what trouble you been up to?”

“She tooked it away, she threw it away,” wailed Jimmie louder and louder.

“Hush, you, hush. Don’t you know Bess is finally sleepin and you mustnt make noise?”
Opening the door to let him in. “
What
did she take away?”

“
My
cradle,” defended Mazie, “the one I made.”

“She took our baby too. She tooked it and threw it far away.”

“By … the cliff.” Ben toiled in. Reproachfully: “You’re bad, Sistie.”

“Did you go hunt for it, Ben?” Anna splashed her spoon in the kettle she was stirring,
“when you knew you arent to move at all, and I just let you out if you’d set still?”
To Mazie: “Miserable child! Look what you’ve done. He wasnt to move.”

“I didnt know he would go lookin for it,”Mazie said. “And it was my cradle, wasnt
it, my very own I made?”

“Wash your hands—it wouldnt hurt your face none either—and get a apron on,” Anna commanded,
wringing a cloth for Ben’s head, taking him on her lap and fanning him. “You knowed
we have to get this cannin done, and I’m gettin no place fast between watchin Jimmie
and tendin Ben and baby. We got to get lunch too.”

“Why is it always me that has to help? How come Will gets to play?”

“Will’s a boy.”

“Why couldn’t
I
get borned a boy?”

“You get to play enough,” Anna said shortly.
(Just seems the devil’s got into her.)
“Don’t you move now,” settling Ben on the couch; shaving the paraffin into a pan
to melt; and going back to stirring the bubbling mass of jelly. If this heat keeps
up, I’ll just melt, she thought, drop and melt all over. They wont know which is paraffin
and which is me…. If only Benjy dont get so bad I have to fetch him to the clinic.

Mazie was yanking her skirt, her face white, in her hand an empty bottle. “Somebody
spillded it,”she shrieked, “somebody spillded my perfume I made. My very own perfume.”

“Shhhhh. It was me. How should I a-known it was supposed to be perfume you wanted
to save? It was dirty-smelly stuff stuck in the cupboard where it didn’t belong.”

“It was perfume. I made it out of flower leaves. You put them in a bottle and cork
it and leave it. It was for Ginella and I never get a nickel to buy her Blue Waltz
and now I haven’t any perfume.”

“Well there’s more makings where that came from. And next time dont keep it where
it dont belong.”

Shrieking again: “I don’t
have
no place. If I’d kept it in the bedroom Jimmie woulda been into it, or maybe Will.”
Violently: “
Why dont I have no place?
”

“Hush, I said. That’s enough outen you. You wake baby and see what you’ll get. Start
to stirrin now … Maybe I can make a place for you on a shelf somewhere soon as I get
some time. Dont see why not.”

But Mazie was gone.

“Come back,” yelled Anna out the screen door, “come back right this minute or you’ll
get a whop-pin.” Now who’s wakin baby? she asked herself. Uncomfortably: She oughtn’t
to be out in that sun without a hat … And she
doesn’t
have a place.

“Ben!” She hears the loud rattling of his breath, turns. He points at the opening
door. Mazie crawls in, puts her arms around her mother’s legs and howls.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” Helping her upright.

“I dont know. My head, Momma. I dont know.”

Falling. Fainting.

“
Sistie!
Maaaaaaa!” begs Ben, baaing like a sheep. He runs with his fan and water.

Overhead the inflamed sun glares in an inflamed sky. Twelve o’clock noon. 106°.

“Slow it,” Kryckszi sends the message to Misho, to Huff, to Ella. “We got to slow
it.”

The fifteen-minute lunch break goes like nothing. Those who (against the rules) had
crowded into the cooler or the chill damp of pork trim to eat their lunch find their
names up on the bulletin board with fines posted against them.
(Who ratted?)
Those who had sluiced themselves down with the hoses in the yards for momentary relief
(also against the rules) suffer other punishment. Their clothes will not dry; cling;
tighten; become portable sweat baths as they work. Aitch-sawyer Crowley, the venerable,
faints. Prostration. By word or gesture or look of the eye, the message goes out in
each department: spell Marsalek; spell Lena; spell Laurett; spell Salvatore: however
possible, spell, protect those known near their limit of endurance.

In casings it is 110°. A steam kettle, thinks Ella, who has a need to put things into
words, a steam kettle,
and in a litany:
steamed, boiled, broiled, fried, cooked; steamed, boiled, broiled, fried, cooked
. Tony, Smoky’s older brother, lugging his hand truck from fire to chill to fire (casings
to cooler to casings), fans the cooler door open for the women as long as he dares.
Each time (the hands never ceasing their motions) even those too far away for relief
turn their heads in unison toward the second’s different air, flare their nostrils,
gulp with open mouths. The stench is vomit-making as never before. The fat and plucks,
the bladders and kidneys and bungs and guts, gone soft and spongy in the heat, perversely
resist being trimmed, separated, deslimed; demand closer concentration than ever,
extra speed. A hysterical, helpless laughter starts up. Indeed they are in hell; indeed
they are the damned.
Steamed boiled broiled fried cooked. Geared, meshed
.

In the hog room, 108°. Kerchiefs, bound around foreheads to keep the salt sweat from
running down into eyes and blinding, become saturated; each works in a rain of stinging
sweat. Almost the steam from the vats seems cloud-cool, pure, by contrast. Marsalek
falls. A heart attack. (Is carried away, docked, charged for the company ambulance.)
Other hearts pound near to bursting. Relentless, the convey paces on.

Slow it, we got to slow it
.

Is it a dream, is it delirium? Arms lifted to their motion
(geared, meshed)
have nothing to move for. The hog has been split, has been stamped—yet still dangles;
the leaf lard, the guts, have been pulled, yet no new carcass is instantly in place
to be worked on. Has life suspended, are they dead? The skull-crush machine still
stomping down, sprays out its bone bits in answer. “Fined, fined for carelessness,”
yells Bull Young. “What jammed the convey?”—turning instinctively toward Kryckszi.

At that moment in casings, as if to demonstrate that there is a mightier heat, a higher
superior heat, the main steam pipe breaks open, and hissing live steam in a magnificent
plume, in a great boiling roll, takes over. Peg and Andra and Philomena and Cleola
directly underneath fall and writhe in their crinkling skins, their sudden juices.
Lena, pregnant, faints. Laurett, trying to run, slips on the slimy platform. Others
tangle over her, try to rise, to help each other up. Ella, already at the work of
calming, of rescue, thinks through her own pain: steamed boiled broiled cooked
scalded
, I forgot
scalded
.

When the door to the hog room, always kept closed against the casings stench, the
casings heat, is flung open, the steam boils in so triumphantly, weds with the hog-vat
vapors to create such vast clouds, such condensation, the running scalded figures
of horror
(human? women?) seem disembodied flickering shadows gesturing mutely back to whence
they have fled. “Stay where you are,” yells Bull. “Carelessness. Nobody’s gettin away
with nothin. You’ll be docked for every second you aint workin. And fined for carelessness.”

Already some are in casings, helping. Carrying Lena out of the scalding fog, Jim sees
plastered onto her swollen belly the safety sign torn from the wall by the first steam
gust.

Three o’clock. 107°.

Old Mrs. Dykstra cries out once into the heavy air, gasps and breathes no more. Overhead,
blown eggshell doves she has made old-country style with wings and tail of white pleated
paper, bob three times—and still.

Will and Smoky turn from the river for the steep climb toward home, their dream of
pockets of jingle money from juicy fishing worms, defeated by the impermeable armor
of the sun-hardened shore. Outside the Palace, they stare at movie, stills. “A crook
picture,” Will says longingly. But nowhere, nowhere that nickel.