Two days later Johnny rode to Henrietta and pitched his saddle in the caboose and took the train north. That left me and Molly with the country to ourselves, but I was kinda sorry to see old Johnny go. He was a good buddy even if he was a smart aleck, and I felt lonesome whenever he wasn’t around.
three
I guess Dad had been hoping I’d change my mind and keep the new saddle for myself. When Johnny actually took off and left the country with it, it put Dad in such a bad humor he never got over it for a month. And when he was in a bad humor he could think up a million mean jobs for me to do. I spent the last part of July and the whole damn month of August digging corner postholes and cleaning out sewer lines and cutting devil’s claws and plowing. I hated the plowing the worst. And all the time I was down in the field, eating dust and yanking on the damn contrary mules, Johnny was up on the plains, riding his new saddle and living like a cowboy should. I got so tired of thinking about it that one day I just come right out and told Dad I was pretty much in the notion to go up there too.
“The hell you will,” he said. We were riding one of the River pastures, looking for screwworms, and Dad rode up on a hill and stopped his horse long enough to tell me off.
“You’ll just stay right where you are,” he said. “And if I tell you to plow, by god, you plow.”
“But I ain’t no damn farmer,” I said. “Why don’t you hire your farming done? Why do I have to waste my time doing it?”
“I am hiring it done, and you’re the one I’m hiring,” he said. “Why pay somebody else to do something we can do ourselves? That ain’t no way to get rich.”
“I see a few cattle down toward the southwest corner,” I said. “What makes you think I want to be rich anyway?”
“Because I bred you,” he said. “I know damn well I couldn’t breed a boy with so little sense as to want to be poor. You got enough sense to know it’s better to be rich than poor, ain’t you?”
“That ain’t what the Bible says,” I said.
He just looked at me. “I ain’t responsible for what the Bible says,” he said. “If it says that, it’s wrong. And I never asked you for no preaching, either. I know there’s fools in the world who say poverty is holy, but you let them go without shoes some cold winter, like I did when I was a kid, and then see how holy they think it is. Being poor just makes people little and mean, most of the time. It’s a damn degrading thing.”
“All right,” I said. “Hold your horses. I don’t want to be poor. But you can not want to be poor and still not care whether you’re rich or not.”
“Yes, and them’s the kind of people that never accomplish nothing,” he said. “They’re just damn mediocre. If you’re gonna try at all, you ought to try for something big.”
“Well, I’ll never get nothing big from plowing that worn-out field.”
“You might,” he said. “You might plow up a diamond, you don’t know. I count twenty cattle in that corner.”
“I just counted eighteen. Let’s go get them.”
“I ain’t finished telling you what’s good for you yet. Now you got the itch to go up on the plains and cowboy, just because Johnny McCloud’s up there. Now I’ll tell you about Johnny McCloud. He’s a good cowhand and he ain’t scared of nothing, I’ll admit that. But that’s the limitation of him, right there. He’ll never be nothing but a damn good cowhand. When he dies he’ll own just what he’s got on and what he’s inherited. And that saddle you gave him, if he don’t lose it in a poker game first. He’ll fiddle around his whole life working for wages, and never accomplish a damn thing.”
“That don’t make him bad,” I said.
“Course not. It don’t make him bad at all. I’ve known a lot of fellers like him, and some of them I liked a lot. The point is, you ain’t like that. You’ve got too much of me in you. Punching somebody else’s cows never would satisfy you. But you might waste a lot of time before you figure that out. The man that gets the farthest is the man that wastes the least time and the least energy he possibly can. You ain’t old enough to know that yet, but I am. If you can just learn to listen to me, you’ll save yourself a lot of misery.”
“I guess you know everything in the world, don’t you?” I said. “I don’t guess you was ever known to be wrong, was you?”
“Oh yes, I’ve been wrong. I’ve been wrong more times than most people have been right. But that ain’t no significance. I’ve also done forgot more than most people ever know.
“But anyhow,” he said, “it don’t take much sense to figure out that you and Johnny are two different kinds of people. Let’s go look at them cattle.”
We doctored a few worms, and was riding home down the lane, late in the afternoon. It was close to sundown, and Dad had worn down a little around the edges.
“Gid,” he said, “now there’s no need for you to go around feeling sorry for yourself for two months just because you have to plow an oat field once in a while. Before you’re my age you’ll have had all the cowboying you need. A man that’s training himself to run a ranch has got to be able to do all kinds of things.”
“You can say all you want to,” I said. “I still wish I’d gone to the Panhandle. I ain’t training to be no oat planter. I intend to enjoy my life.”
“If that ain’t a fine ambition,” he said. “Why, any damn fool can enjoy himself. What makes you think life’s supposed to be enjoyed anyhow?”
“Well,” I said, “if you ain’t supposed to enjoy it, what are you supposed to do with it?”
“Fight it. Fight the hell out of it.” And then he got to talking about the cattle and the screwworms, and about how dry it was. He said he’d like to build some new tanks if he thought he’d have the pleasure of living long enough to see them full; we didn’t argue no more. In a way I wanted to go, and in a way I didn’t. Old as Dad was getting, and as much work as there was to do, I wouldn’t have been too happy about going off and leaving him. There would be too many times when I’d have to think about him making the rounds by himself, and that would have spoiled the fun. When it come right down to it, Dad and I got along pretty well. All that time I was in the hospital I kept thinking about him home working, and it bothered me worse than the stuff itself. Johnny and me was different that way. His dad was just as old and had about as much to do, but it never bothered Johnny to go off and leave him. Course Johnny’s mother was still alive, but he just figured his dad could take care of himself.
“If I did stay home it wouldn’t make no difference,” he said. “Daddy would be out working himself to death anyway, only he’d be working me to death along with him. I can’t see no profit in that.”
He was right, I guess. It’s just all in the way you feel about a thing like that. Me being home never slowed Dad down either, but at least if I was there I didn’t have to fight no guilty conscience.
One good thing about having old Johnny out of the country was that I didn’t have to watch Molly so close all the time. I knew there wasn’t nobody besides me and him she cared much about; not unless you wanted to count Eddie White, and I never. Eddie was a shiftless old boy about my age; he worked around the oil patch whenever he felt like working, and when he didn’t he hung around Thalia playing dominos or running his hounds. He was too no-count for a girl like Molly to pay much attention to. I think she just mentioned him once in a while to keep me and Johnny uneasy.
I guess the best time me and her had all the time Johnny was gone was the day I took her fishing. We had shipped a carload of calves to Fort Worth just to try out the market, and Dad had gone with them, to sit around the stockyards a day or two and watch them sell. When Dad took a big vacation like that he always come back wanting to do all the work in sight in the first half-hour, so I thought I better take me a little time off while I had the chance.
It was late September then—a nice warm day, but not too warm. We had had our first little norther about four days before; it cooled things off to where they were just about right. I waited around the house till nin
e or ten o’clock, then caught my horse and rode across the west pasture and up the hill to the Taylor place.
Old Man Taylor was there of course. He was sitting on the cellar, sharpening his pocketknife and drinking his morning whiskey. He was a terrifying sight. Along his cheeks his beard was white, but all of it that was underneath his mouth was a kind of muddy yellow from all the tobacco juice and whiskey he had dripped on it.
“Clean your feet before you come in this yard,” he said. “I don’t want none of your damn cowshit in my yard.”
That would have been funny if he hadn’t said it in such a mean voice. His yard looked like a slaughterhouse anyway. The old man done everything he had to do in the yard, and it showed it: there were bones and chicken heads and empty whiskey jugs and junk iron and baling wire and old shoes and pieces of plank and mule harness and horse turds and slop buckets, and I don’t know what all else scattered everywhere. Molly said she tried to clean the yard up once in a while, but the old man wouldn’t let her: anything that was there, he said, was there because he might need it. The miracle of it was that such a sweet, nice girl like Molly could have grown up in such a nasty place.
I scraped my feet on the fence wire and the old man never said another word to me.
Molly was in the living room, trying to kill a stinging lizard that had run in one of the woodboxes. She was dressed like a boy, in an old shirt and a pair of pants that had belonged to one of her brothers; they had all left home. But she looked like a girl; I wanted to grab her right there and kiss her, but if the old man had come in there would have been hell to pay.
“Let’s go fishing,” I said.
“Guess what?” she said, grinning and looking happy. “I got a postcard from Johnny last week. Want to see it?”
“No, I don’t want to see it,” I said. “I want to go fishing with you. Now do you want to go or don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, “let’s go right now. I just thought you might like to read Johnny’s card. He mentioned you in it too.”
I did want to read it, but I wasn’t going to admit that to Molly. No telling what an idiot like Johnny would write on a postcard.
“Your dad don’t look in too good a humor,” I said.
“Get the poles out of the smokehouse and I’ll wrap up some bait,” she said. “Dad won’t bother us. He likes catfish for supper.”
I got the poles and propped them against the fence and went down and saddled Molly’s horse. The old man was still drinking and sharpening his knife; he never even looked up. In a minute Molly came out with a lunch sack and a bait sack. She went up to the old man and hugged him a little with one arm and whispered to him and kissed him on one cheek and then come on out to me. She really liked that old bugger—it always surprised me to see it. He looked up at the lunch sack, but he didn’t say anything.
“Want to go to a tank or to the River?” I said.
“Let’s go to the big tank,” she said. “South of the hill, in you-’all’s place.”
It was my favorite tank too, but it was better for courting than for fishing. I never caught nothing there. There was a lot of Bermuda grass around it, though, and shade trees and nice places to sit.
Molly was riding a little gray horse her old man had cheated a feller out of two years before. I was riding old Denver; we named him that because his momma come from Colorado. We loped nearly all the way to our fence before we pulled up. I let Molly go in front of me. Her hair was flying all over the place, and her shirttail come out. She rode good though. There wasn’t no cattle around the tank when we got there, and not a ripple on the water, except once in a while when some dragonfly would light on the tank for a minute. We used liver for bait, and I put enough on the hooks to last awhile and stuck the poles in the mud. Molly sat down on the Bermuda grass, in the shade, and I sat down by her and held her hand. We were all set to fish.
It was about a perfect day. The sky was clear, and the sun felt warm like summer while the air felt cool like fall. We lolled around on the Bermuda grass and courted and ate lunch and fished all day. We caught three fish too, two croppies and one nice little cat; I guess we could have caught more if we had tried. We got a lot of nibbles, but Molly was so good to be with that day that I quit paying attention to them. I held her down and told her it was just turtles gnawing at the bait. She knew how inconvenient it was to catch turtles.
Sometime in the early afternoon, when we were over under the big shade trees and not even pretending to fish, I finally asked Molly to marry me for the first time. There wasn’t much grass under the trees, and we were laying on the slicker. We had been kissing a good deal and she seemed to like me so much that I didn’t see why not to ask her. I was crazy about her.
“Molly,” I said, “say, Molly. We’re sweethearts anyway, why don’t we go on and get married? Wouldn’t that be the best thing to do? I sure would like to marry you.”
She kinda grinned to herself and wouldn’t look at me.
“Don’t you want to at all?” I said. “You’re the one for me, I know that for sure.”
“You’re my favorite,” she said, and sat up and kissed me. “Gid-ing-ton. But what in the world would we do married?”
“Why, what everybody else does, I guess. We ain’t so different.”
“Maybe you ain’t,” she said, “but I am. I don’t want to get into all that stuff yet. It ain’t near as much fun as things like we’re doing today.”
“How do you know?” I said. “You ain’t been married. It might be more fun.”
She got kinda mad. “Don’t tell me that,” she said. “I don’t want to marry you or nobody else. Girls who get married just to do a lot of things with boys ain’t very nice. I don’t like it. I’d just as soon do all those things and not be married, and I mean it. I ain’t gonna marry till I have to because of having a baby, and I mean that too. And I wish I didn’t even have to then.”
Well, that shocked me as much as anything I ever heard, Molly saying that. It was just like her though. She never cared what people thought about her. I guess she never thought she was very respectable anyway, growing up with the daddy she had. I knew a lot of people around Thalia who didn’t think she was nice, either, but they didn’t mean anything to me.
“Honey, don’t talk that way,” I said. “I’m crazy about you and I just want you for a wife, that’s all.”
She looked sorry then, but she looked kinda wild, too, and we lay there and hugged one another for a long time before she would talk agin at all.
“I’m crazy about you too, Gid,” she said, hugging my neck. “You’re the best to me of anybody. But I ain’t going to marry, I mean it. I’ll do anything you want me to but that. I’ll do everything else if you want me to right now,” and when I kissed her she was trembling like a leaf. But we never managed it, somehow: it was my fault. I guess I was too surprised at Molly, and I couldn’t quit thinking about it. She practically took her shirt off and that was something, but I couldn’t quit thinking about it, and I knew it wasn’t right, so I made her quit.
“Now we got to quit,” I said. “You know it, Molly. Why can’t we get married?”
Then she got real cool and mad at me, but I was pretty mad too, and I didn’t back down.
“Let’s go swimming, Gid,” she said. “It’s so hot. Then we can talk about it some more.” She was cool as ice when she said that.
“You hush,” I said. “There ain’t no use in you teasing me, and you know it. I ain’t no damn kid. We got nothing to go swimming in, so how can we go?”
“We got skin,” she said. “I didn’t know you was such a scardy-cat. Why do you want to get married if you’re scared of girls?”
“Now listen, Molly,” I said. “I told you to quit teasing me and you better do it before I shake the hell out of you. I’m sorry. But I ain’t scared of you. I just know what’s right and what ain’t, and you ain’t gonna talk me out of it just because you’re mad. And if you don’t like it, you can just stay mad.”
“Don’t ask me to marry you any more,” she said, only she wasn’t mad then, she was kind of quiet. “Get off my shirt, honey. You’re too sober, I never could get along with you. You didn’t know I was like this, did you?”
I grabbed her and made her let me hold her, even if she didn’t want me to.
“I may be too sober,” I said. “I guess I am. But I’m not going to get stampeded into doing something crazy even if we do both want to. You got to be a little careful about some things.”
“Okay,” she said. “You done said that. Shut up about it. Let’s fish or ride or do something. I’m tired of sitting here being so careful. I guess you’re so careful you won’t even want to hold hands with me no more, will you?”
But after a while she got in a good humor again and we walked around the dam and rode horses some and finally went home about five o’clock, just when the shadows were beginning to stretch out. The old man was gone when we got there and I cleaned the fish for her. She cooked them and made biscuits and gravy and we each ate one of the croppie, bones or no bones. We left the catfish for the old man.
After supper we went out on the porch and swung in her porch swing and she was real warm and sweet agin and we kissed all we wanted to. I don’t guess things could have been any nicer, except that I had already begin to feel mad at myself for not taking better advantage of the afternoon. But she acted like she’d forgot about it. She teased me a little about Johnny.
“I know why you don’t come see me as much any more,” she said. “It’s because Johnny’s gone. You don’t really care much about me, do you? You just like to spite Johnny.”
She was wrong about that and we both knew it, but it was true that I got a little extra kick out of being with Molly when Johnny was around to notice it. It would have probably been the same with him if he’d been in my place.