‘How about them señoritas?’ Brother gave Dove a nudge that almost knocked him down.
‘Will you stay out of this?’ the sergeant turned on the girl.
‘I got neither mother nor sister, captain,’ Dove found the safest answer.
‘Suppose you had.’
‘Sister would have to go,’ he heard a terrier-whisper.
‘Sister would have to go,’ Dove repeated hopefully.
‘I told you stay out of this,’ the sergeant menaced the fedora and turned back to Dove – ‘Put it this way. Your outfit of one hundred men is surrounded by bloodthirsty Nicaraguan bandits but you can save them all by sacrificing your own life. Which would come first with you? The lives of the ninety-nine others or your own?’
Dove needed no help on that.
‘My own, naturally.’ He beamed.
Dove was a little sorry to see the sergeant shake his head and move off.
‘Wasn’t that the right answer?’ Dove wanted to know.
‘It was the right answer alright,’ she reassured him. ‘How do you feel, Red?’
‘Fairly fainty,’ Dove confessed. The odor of hot soup was swinging his stomach like a bell.
‘Now what did I tell you just before, Red?’
‘I ferget, friend.’
‘I told you don’t do nothin’ you don’t see me doing. Did you see me asking Uncle Whiskers for a new suit? Did you see me showing him my choppers? Did you see me standing still to get measured for a rifle?’
‘Nobody asked you,’ Dove recalled.
‘You could still call him back – and spend the rest of your life doin’ close-order drill down in the banana country instead of riding passenger trains and sleeping in the shade. I won’t stop you.’
Somebody handed Dove something steaming in a bowl just then and all notion of soldiering fled upward with the steam.
When he had finished the bowl he looked up to see his friend’s hardly touched. The girl pushed it to him.
‘Thanks, sis.’ She gave him a look. ‘I mean brother,’ he corrected himself.
‘You’ll thank me for keeping you out of barracks one day too.’
A haunted-looking cracker in a grease-stained apron put a tab of paper between them already so thumb-smirched Dove thought he wanted their prints.
‘Give me a couple phonies, boys,’ he advised them.
‘We didn’t have it in mind to give you good ones,’ the girl told him.
‘We got to keep track of how many feeds we put out,’ the hant apologized. ‘Citizens got a right to know how their money is being spent.’
‘My ignorant brother here went back three times for seconds – What will the citizens say about that?’
‘Directly y’all finish eatin’,’ the cracker invited them both, ‘you might step outside and lend me a hand with a spot of kindling – takes kindlin’ to cook y’all cawnbread y’know.’
‘He has it in mind for us to chop down a tree,’ she explained to Dove.
‘A mighty mannerable feller, and I don’t mind work,’ Dove added, anxious lest he miss a chance to do some.
‘I don’t mind a spot of light labor myself,’ she admitted.
A circle of half a dozen vagrants sitting cross-legged about a sack of charity beans looked like a spot sufficiently light. With a pan and a bucket between them, Dove and the little ’bo trickled beans through their fingers. Bugs, stones, old crockery, weeds and beer-corks were for the bucket and beans were for the pan. Since it was their own supper they were preparing, they trickled with some care. Dove found a chipped agate and pocketed it like a blue treasure.
‘Everybody got to eat. Everybody got to die,’ a white-haired Greek sitting cross-legged told them like it was big news.
A wisp of a creature beside Dove squeaked happily right in his ear – ‘I’m the littlest guy here,’ n the oldest. Wouldn’t be surprised if I was the smartest too. I know I’m the sassiest.’
Dove’s eyes followed his friend’s hands. Such a careful way with the smallest pebble, yet so much quicker than his own.
‘I once growed the biggest crop of these yet seen in Northern Michigan,’ a florid-faced fellow in a frayed sheepskin boasted. ‘Fact is, it was the biggest crop in that part of the state that year if not in the entire state. Done it without help, too. Cooked my own meals. Done my own laundry. Put up my own preserves. Didn’t have no wife. Didn’t need none. Didn’t have a hired hand. Didn’t want one. Biggest cooperative farm in the state, likely biggest in the country, right next door to mine. Fifty able-bodied men workin’ night ’n day with tractors ’n every farm instrument known to modern man. Four professors to study their soil. All I had was a old-fashioned plow my grandpappy made out of a pine tree he felled hisself, and iron he’d worked out of ore he dug hisself. I turned out a crop near to double of theirs – a mite better than double, truth to tell. Didn’t have a hired hand neither. Didn’t need none. Didn’t have a wife. Didn’t want none.’
‘I reckon the sun didn’t hinder none,’ Dove observed.
As soon as one sack was finished, the hant dumped a sack of black-eyed peas, and for some reason this lightened everyone’s spirits, almost as though he had brought in a sack of cherries and told them to eat all they wanted.
Once he came in with a basket of tomatoes and offered them around. Everyone took one or two except Dove. ‘I wouldn’t eat love apples,’ he warned his friend, ‘it’s a poison fruit.’
The careful afternoon trickled through their fingers with less and less care. The big room darkened and dampened, walking wounded came and went. Dove’s thick thigh pressed his friend’s slender one and he felt the pressure lightly returned. Their fingers touched one moment in the sack.
‘You think these times are hard?’ the Michigan farmer was asking. ‘Why compared to times I’ve seen, these are absolutely flush. If you just look at it right, we’re right spang in the middle of the biggest boom this country ever seen. Look at us settin’ here stuffin’ ourselves to bustin’ on cornbread ’n beans!’
‘That’s right,’ Dove agreed, ‘we eat so much it keeps us skinny just carryin’ it around.’
‘Why,’ the farmer went on, ‘when I was a boy in Northern Michigan we didn’t know there was anything else to eat on earth but skim milk ’n wild onions. Drunk branch water ’n et sheep sorrel ’n counted ourselves more fortunate than most. Mother run a highly successful boarding house on them two victuals in fact – biggest boarding house that part of the state. Never seed a toilet till I was seventeen year old. I’d heard of backhouses but never seed one. Never seen a well pump. Full grown man afore I tasted ice cream.’
‘My own folks lived mostly on pawpaws,’ Dove agreed. ‘It were mighty hard sleddin’ when the pawpaws didn’t hit and the wind died down.’
‘I’ll never forget the winter of 1917,’ the farmer went right on. ‘The snow was deeper than the world. Wolves killed my goats, hawks got the chickens, night-riders burned my barn an’ mother run off with a preacher. Made me of half a mind to quit farming and go to work.’
The encircling faces looked like so many tin plates on a shelf. They gave off a faint odor, as of disinfectant with smoke in it. The locked-in and the locked-out lived between the smoke of small wood fires and the odor of jail house disinfectant in 1931.
‘I’m the oldest ’n the littlest,’ the happy mouse introduced himself eagerly to each newcomer. ‘I’m the sassiest too. Wouldn’t be surprised if I were the randiest. How come I be first in everything?’