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“What d’ya mean by that, Willis?” Pa’d come over to see why we’d all stopped picking and now his eyes had fire in ’em. He knowed darned well what I meant. “Sure, McCutcheon’s cotton has got a lotta leaves,” he said, “but down at the gin they don’t pay for leaves.”

  “Hell’s fire, Pa. Ten more minutes and that snake woulda got sunstroke.” I couldn’t help myself. “When one outa three of your seeds don’t even come up …”

  Pa’s cheek was twitching again. “What in damnation d’ya know about planting cotton, Willis?”

  “Even Ila’d know we planted too shallow. Want me to show you some o’ that rotted seed?”

  Wham! I seen it coming. I didn’t even have time to duck. Right across my face. It stung.

  It took ever’thing in me to keep from jumping Pa and throwing him to the ground, making him eat some of that brown sandy dirt. I was strong enough to do it. And I was mad enough to do it. And I’d a-done it too if it’d been anybody else except my old man. Ma didn’t say or do nothing. Only stood there, her shoulders kinda slumped, her breasts big and full as a Jersey cow’s, sagging almost to her waist. She was still nursing Baby Brother. She shoulda weaned him, her nipples was sore and scabby. But the baby was gonna be her last, she told us. Ma knowed I was right about the planting, but maybe she thought I’d gone too far.

  “You’re too smart for your britches, Willis,” Pa said. Now he was pacing back ’n fro. “When we go t’ Scurry County, we’ll make two bales t’ the acre. You never seen such good black land. Black as a Brazos Bottom nigger. If we don’t make two bales t’ the acre I’ll eat this hat.”

  He yanked the straw hat offa his head and held it up. The sweat was rolling down his cheeks.

  Pa was kinda short for a man like Ma was kinda tall for a woman. But he wasn’t bad-looking when his cheek wasn’t twitching. He had thick hair that was gray like iron, and a thick gray mustache and a little bush of a beard below the lip. It was only alongside somebody like Ma that he looked stumpy.

  In the field he always carried a old rag in his back pocket, to wipe the sweat off his face. He pulled it out. The sweat kept a-rolling.

  That night, while I was soaping my face at the wash bucket, Pa come up to me. He didn’t say nothing about the slapping, that he was sorry he done it, but his face looked kinda draggy. “My head’s aching like someone cracked me with a mesquite log,” was all he said.

  I didn’t look up at him. I just kept rubbing yellow lye soap around and around my face in big circles.

  “You could take some calomel for that head.” There was a lot of things Pa coulda done to make things better.

  “Ain’t a mite in the house.”

  No, and not a mite of flour ’r coffee ’r bacon neither. For three weeks we’d been living offa fried squirrels and jackrabbits and even possums and coons that me and the other boys’d shot with our .22s. Ma’d been raising some chickens, but coons and hawks’d got a lot of ’em and the rest we found one morning with their legs up in the air, dead from some kind of sickness.

  Pa went on: “I was gonna ask Mister Pike for a little more credit at the store, but weren’t no use, him talking the way he did. I tell you, Willis, banks is the scourge of the Earth. Land companies, too. I dunno what that war over the niggers did but make us all slaves.”

  “McCutcheon and them,” I said, “they ain’t gonna be chewing too much gristle this year.”

  Pa snorted. “Lucky with that rain, all that was. But what’cha think they gonna have left over when Pike’s done with ’em? Hundred-fifty dollars, I’d say. Maybe hundred-seventy five. Won’t be enough to spit at.”

  I rinsed my face and picked up a towel and looked at my old man outa the corner of my eye.

  “Hey, Pa,” I said, “what’d you think of that automobile?”

  “Show-offy thing. Makes me sick.”

  “Ain’t just show,” I said back, “if it takes that old boy over ten times the ground, half the time. Makes him a lot more money that-a-way.”

  “Lemme tell you what the Bible says about money, Willis.” Pa snorted again. “It’s the root of all evil, what it is. That’s what the Bible says about money.”

  I didn’t see that a’tall. Seemed to me the reason Pa was so down on money, he didn’t have none. “No need pickin’ cotton, then,” I said, “if money’s so plumb evil.”

  “Where’d you get that sass from, Willis?” Pa shot me a look. “You got more sass in you than all your brothers put together, an’ half your sisters, too. You take my word for it—folks’d be a lot better off if they quit messing with money and went back to trading, like when I was a boy. Mister Pike c’n be damned! Come Monday, me and you and Dock ’r going in to Trade Day.”

  I knowed that was coming. “Trade Day” was the first Monday of every month in Rising Star, like in most of the other towns in West Texas. On Trade Day, you took things into town that you didn’t want no more—horses, wagons, chickens, plows, whatever—and traded ’em for things you did want. Or tried to. Pa could get more lathered up over Trade Day than a revival preacher over Glory up yonder, by and by.

  “Yeah, Mister Pike c’n be damned.” Pa said it again. “An’ thank God for Trade Day.”

  What’s he thanking God for?, I thought. He’s already traded off our two best plows, and Ma’s milk cow, and—

  —and what for?

  —for two old buzzard-bait horses.

  “What we got to trade besides them plugs?” I pointed out the window, towards two jug-headed horses standing just outside the yard gate, their ribs sticking out like the slats in a fence. They was such sorry horses they’d hardly lifted their heads when Mister Pike’s machine had come a-roaring and a-rattling down our road. A respectable horse woulda reared or bolted, or both. Pa’s plugs just stood there.

  “They ain’t plugs! Them horses ’r good breeds.” Now Pa was mad all over again. “Trouble with you, Willis, you think you know ever’thing, and you don’t know nothing. Yessir, them horses ’r good breeds. Jus’ look at that one’s withers. All they need is a little corn …”

  A little corn, shit. He poured corn into ’em, trying to make ’em into working horses, when the animals that really did the work—our two poor mules—got nothing but grass and weeds. And no telling how many hours Pa spent with a bacon rind rubbing the skinny asses on them horses, trying to get ’em to shine. But no matter what he did they always stayed hidebound. They was just sorry horses. Pa was the worst horse trader in the whole state of Texas.

  “If you ain’t gonna take in them plugs,” I said, “what’cha gonna trade?”

  “I’ll find something.” Pa’s eyes shifted around. “There’s always something somebody wants.”

  TWO

  Early the next Monday, it was just peeping daylight, me and Dock loaded Ma’s Singer sewing machine into the back of our wagon. Ma stood in the doorway watching us. There wasn’t a tear in her eyes. But her jaw looked tighter even than when Mister Pike come.

  “Pa shoulda been the woman, and I shoulda been the man,” she said to me. “Then maybe we’d a-got somewheres.”

  That sewing machine was Ma’s pride and joy. She’d bought it for two dollars from a traveling salesman, it was used, outa her own egg money. Before Ma had that Singer, she’d sewed ever’thing on her fingers. For two grownups and eleven kids! She’d sit sagged in that old rocking chair, the cloth spread out over her lap, her needle going in.… and.… out, in.… and.… out. When Ma got that machine, it was like the load of a elephant’d been lifted off her back. It had a foot pedal, and when she pumped it up and down, it’d go lickety-split, lickety-split.…

  I was standing right next to Ma that morning when Pa’d told her he was gonna take it in. “If you c’n think of anything else to take, lemme know,” Pa’d said to Ma. “We cain’t give up no more plows, otherwise we gotta give up farming.”

  That was the truth. God’s awful truth.

  “Go ahead and take it.” Ma was kneading dough she’d made from flour she’d walked all the way over
to the McCutcheon’s to borrow. Neighbors was pretty helpful to each other them days, but Ma said she could hardly look ’em in the eyes no more, she was so ashamed about it, always borrowing, always borrowing.

  And then Ma slammed that dough down on that table so hard they musta heard it all the way to Rising Star. “But if you’re gonna take my machine in, Jim,” she said, “you’re gonna take in them two horses. And you bring back another horse, we’re gonna eat it.”

  Pa knowed that Ma meant business. So soon as we loaded up that Singer, we tied both them plug horses behind our wagon.

  Janetta Pecos “Ma” Newton

  Our mules was pokey, and you’d be pokey too if you was a mule and had to pull a wagon and two horses and live on grass and weeds instead of corn. By the time we got to Rising Star, the whole town was a-bustling. Rising Star wasn’t too different from most other small Texas towns back then. The streets was dirt with deep old wagon ruts criss-crossing all over ’em. Horses and mules made little rivers of piss and little hills of dung all over them streets, and when you walked across ’em, you had to watch your step and swish away the flies. There was as many Baptists and Methodists as there was flies in Rising Star, and so there wasn’t no saloons on Main Street. But there was five churches, a couple of livery stables, a small hotel, a couple of blacksmith shops, a barber shop, two banks, and two general merchandise stores that sold ever’thing from oats to coffins to Carter’s Little Liver Pills.

  First place we went to was Hermann’s General Store, and Mister Hermann, a big fat German, oohed and “yah-yahed” over Ma’s sewing machine and give us ten pounds of flour and two pounds of coffee and four pounds of bacon for it. And then Pa went and traded his two plugs for six sacks of corn and, well, one new gimpy horse. My old man couldn’t help hisself. He was horse-crazy. He hated cows, God knows why. Grandma give us a milk cow one time and right away Pa traded her off for a horse. He just couldn’t live without a horse. Only this new wheybelly was even scrawnier’n the last two. Dock shook his head when he seen that horse and whispered to me so Pa couldn’t hear, “That plug’s already dead. He jest won’t lie down.”

  Right before we headed back for home, me and Dock left Pa to trade some wild-bee honey for two jackknives, and Pa left the wagon to jaw with some old boys standing on a corner. Well, don’t you know it, that old horse, he was tied to a wheel on that wagon, he come right on back to life. He raised his head and stretched his neck over the sideboard and ate up half a sack of the corn that Pa’d just bought.

  When we finally got home, and Ma seen that sorry horse, she didn’t say nothing right off. Even after Dock blabbered about the corn. She fed us a good supper and give us fresh-baked biscuits from the flour. Afterwards, like she always did, she told the kids a story from the Bible and then one of her Wild West outlaw tales. Ma read ever’ outlaw story that come along outa them dime magazines that was passed from farm to farm. And being that she had a camera memory, like me, she knowed ’em all by heart, word for word—like about the James boys, or the Kid, or Dirty-Face Charley, or Butcher-Knife Bill. The story that night was about Lee Sage, sometimes knowed as Wampus Cat.

  Jim “Pa” Newton

  But while Ma was telling about Wampus Cat, I seen something strange. Her eyes, which was most times big and round, narrowed down to slits and her voice dropped so low I could hardly make out what she was saying. Then, after all the other kids’d gone off to bed, and it was only me left, she picked up one of them outlaw magazines from offa the floor and set it on top of her mother’s Bible and said something that knocked me square in the chest. “You know, Willis, if I was a man, I guess I’da been a outlaw myself.”

  It was the next day, when we was out picking cotton again and my whole back was aching like somebody’d hammered on it with a plank, I straightened up a little to get the kinks outa my spine, and who should I see riding into our field but Eddie Munson. He was on a bareback mule, a big old gray thing, and he was a-coming on at a jog. Eddie was eighteen, two years older’n me, only he didn’t look much like a man yet. He was a real string bean. His legs was so long and skinny they was swinging to and fro like somebody at the end of a hangman’s rope. And that mule’s ears was a-flopping back and forth with each jog, keeping time with Eddie’s legs.

  I could hardly believe what I was seeing. It wasn’t six weeks before that Eddie’d run off from his Pa’s farm, nobody’d knowed where to.

  “Whoa, Eddie!” I yelled, and I pulled my hat offa my head and waved it in the air. Was he headed home?

  The Munson family lived about five miles to the south of us. They was working somebody else’s land, like us. Except they had better mules and they had a milk cow and their kids went to school. Old Man Munson was a pretty good farmer and this year his cotton’d started a-breaking open like popcorn in late July. Them bolls was big and full, and before Eddie run off, I never seen nobody so happy as Old Man Munson, ’cause to a cotton farmer that’s been working daybreak to nighttime—plowing, planting, chopping ’n cultivating, putting up with too much rain or not enough, fighting ever’ kind of bug and worm you can think of, or setting quiet in his house time and time again while hail storms knocked ever’thing down outside—there ain’t nothing prettier in the whole world than cotton bolls a-popping open, telling him, finally, in spite of ever’thing, he’s got a crop.

  That just goes to show how diff’rent kids think from their folks. All them white bolls made Eddie sick at his stomach. When he seen that big, pretty crop, he knowed there wasn’t gonna be no more fishing, no more swimming, no more hunting. Just hard backbreaking work in that patch. Ever’body in a family back then was expected to pull their share. Ever’body eats, ever’body works. Wasn’t no arguing about it. And that’s how come Eddie run off like he done. But now here he was, clomping right up to me.

  “How’r ya doing, Willis?” He squinted down at my shot-up foot. “What’d you do t’that foot?”

  “Don’t matter,” I said back. “Your old man’s about to skin you for boot leather, Eddie. Where the hell you been?”

  “You tell me what’s wrong with that foot, I’ll tell you where I been.”

  I give him a smile and I told him how the Sweetwater sheriff plugged me after some trouble between my brother Jess and Pa’s brother, Uncle Henry. Jess’d been saying things about one of Uncle Henry’s girls, and Uncle Henry said they was damn lies, and he throwed a stick of cordwood at Jess. That made me throw a big rock at Uncle Henry, and that rock knocked him offa his wagon and when he fell he banged his head on the ground and he got mad and set the sheriff on me.

  “I seen the dirt fly right next to my foot,” I said. “Big lead bullet.”

  Eddie shook his head. He knowed I never did walk if I could run, and he knowed I never let my uncle give hell to my brothers. My brother Jess was two years older’n me, but he was a easy, lazy tumbleweed that hardly ever stood up for hisself. And my Uncle Henry was meaner’n dirt.

  “Okay,” I said, “that’s my story. What’s yours?”

  He didn’t say nothing right off. Just lifted up one skinny leg and crooked it over the mule’s withers like you do when you want to give yourself a rest. That mule looked like it was glad to be resting itsself and not a-jogging in that hot sun, it slumped its back and closed its eyes like it was gonna take a nap. I kept a-looking at Eddie’s face, trying to figure out what he was up to. He had a thin face, with lots of freckles, and a sandy mustache that he was real proud of. His face didn’t tell me a thing.

  “C’mon, Eddie. Where you been?”

  I could tell there wasn’t nothing Eddie wanted more’n to tell me. He seemed kinda tickled with hisself. Only before he said anything, he throwed his eyes this-a-way and that-a-way, like he was scared somebody’d hear him.

  “I been in Abilene,” he said low. “Only now I’m running from the laws. Near killed a man.”

  Near killed a man? Skinny old Eddie?

  “Don’t blow me no windies, Eddie.”

  “Ain’t no windy, Willis.
” He tugged on his mustache and hiked up his eyebrows. “Soon’s I got to Abilene, see, I got me a job at the yards. Shoveling dung. And ever’thing was going fine ’til it come Trade Day. That’s when I run across some brass knucks. Oh, boy, was they pretty! Shiny as ever’thing. I bought ’em. Then it come Saturday night, see. I got to drinking with this old boy from the yards, he went to calling me some things, I ain’t gonna say what, and before I knowed it, them brass knucks’d hopped right on outa my pocket.”

  Eddie punched the air to show me how he socked that old boy.

  “Knocked him cold. Cold! Eee-ah! I never knowed how hard them brass knucks is. Didn’t wait for the law to show up. Jus’ jumped on Julep here and blowed.”

  I shoulda knowed it. Eddie was green when it come to drinking whiskey. That poison can make a man plain stupid.

  “What’cha gonna do now?” I asked.

  “Ain’t going home. ’S’all I know.”

  “Wouldn’t if I was you.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I liked running off from my old man, and I’ll be happy t’stay run-off.”

  Well, that I understood.

  I’d run off before myself, lots of times. Sooner or later, I always come back home. But I loved that feeling, that run-off feeling. I’d sneak out in the middle of the night, hop a freight, go wherever it was going—east, west, north, south, I didn’t care. Lots of times, one of them dirty-rat brakemen’d spot me and try to knock me off with a rock, or hit me with one of them hard oak brake clubs, but soon as I was old enough to have sense, I started packing me a little pistol. They didn’t knock me off after that.

  One of the best times I ever run off, it was the first day of June, and I’d hopped a freight to out near Thurber, forty miles to the northeast, where the soil is clay and cakey and red. It was black as pitch when I hopped offa that train, but pretty soon a thin line of red light begun stretching out to the east and the reddest ball of a sun I ever seen come peeping up over the horizon. Far as I could see, ever’thing went from dead black to red—the red sun, that ball of fire, rising up over a field of red dirt, a-glinting in the first light of day, and, right in front of me, a big mound of dirt chat’d blowed up agin a fence-line. All you could see of that fence was one shiny wire sticking up.