“Cause Mom gets a big dinner,” Tim said with a terrible eagerness. “She don’t say nothin’ neither when we eat. Don’t dast to.”
Clem threw down the fork be was using. “If you’d tell the Aid woman they’re mean to you, maybe she’d put you somewhere else.”
There was silence to this, then Tim spoke. “We’re used to it here. We been here all of us together. Maybe Bump would get somewhere way off, and we’re used to Mamie and Jen, too. They’re scared to go off by theirselves. I promised we wouldn’t never say nawthin’.”
Clem perceived in this a fearful pathos. These homeless and orphaned children had made a sort of family of their own. Within the cruel shell of circumstance they had assumed toward one another the rude simplicities of relationship. Tim, because he was the eldest, was a sort of father, and the others depended on him. Mamie, the older girl, so lifeless, so still, was nevertheless a sort of mother. As the days went on he perceived that this was the shape they made for themselves, even in depravity. The man and woman were outside their life, as unpredictable as evil gods. They suffered under them, they were silent, and they were able to do this because they had within themselves something that stood for father and mother, for brother and sister. Because of the family they had made for themselves out of their own necessity, they preferred anything to separation.
Clem asked no more questions, and judgment died from his heart. Something almost like love began to grow in him toward these children. He wondered how he could join them and whether they would accept him. He had held aloof because they were filthy and unwashed, because their scalps were covered with scales, because they had boils continually. He had thought of leaving them as soon as he could. But as weeks went on he knew he could not leave them — not yet. They were all he had.
He pondered upon their solitude. In China, whence he had come, all people being set in their natural families, there were no solitary children, except perhaps in a time of famine or war when anyone might be killed. If parents died of some catastrophe together, there were always uncles and aunts, and if these died, then there were first cousins and if these died there were second and third and tenth and twentieth cousins, all those of the same surname, and children were treasured and kept within the circle of the surname. But these children had no surname. He had inquired of Tim, and Tim had said after his usual moment of thought, “It’s writ down in the Aid book.”
“But what is it?” Clem had insisted.
“I — disremember,” Tim had said at last.
As the day when the Aid was to come drew near Mom Berger became more irritable. “I gotta get this house cleaned,” she said one morning in the kitchen, when the children stood eating their bread and drinking weak, unsweetened coffee. “The Aid’ll be here come Tuesday week. You girls better git started upstairs this very day. Everything’s gotta be washed — clothes and all.”
From that day until the Tuesday which was dreaded and anticipated there was no peace in the house or in the barn. Even the barn had to be cleaned.
“That Aid woman,” Pop snarled, “she ain’t satisfacted to stay in the house. No, she’s liable to come snoopin’ out here among the cows. I’m goin’ to tell her that’s why I need more help, Clem. I’m goin’ to tell her if I have to clean this yere barn I gotta have another boy. That’s what I’m goin’ to tell her.”
“How often does she come?” Clem asked with purposeful mildness.
“The law claims once in three months. She don’t get round that often though — maybe oncet, twicet a year. Always tells us before she comes. I git a postcard a month or so ahead.”
On the day before, they took baths. The woman heated kettles of hot water and in the woodshed the boys washed one after the other in a tin tub with soft homemade soap.
“You ain’t hardly dirty, Clem,” Tim said with some admiration, staring at Clem’s clean body.
“I wash in the run,” he replied.
“What’ll you do come winter?”
“Break ice — if I’m still here.”
They all glanced at the door at these words. Tim whispered, his eyes still on the latch, “You wouldn’t go an’ leave us, would you?”
Bump paused in the scrubbing of his piteous ribs. “Clem, don’t you go and leave me!”
“I don’t belong here,” Clem said simply.
“You belong to us,” Tim said.
“Do I? How?” Clem felt a starting warmth in the inner desolation of silence.
Tim had one of his long pauses, shivering and naked. His shoulder bones were cavernous, and between his sharp hip bones his belly was a cavity. Pale hairs of adolescence sprouted upon his chest and pelvis. “You ain’t got nobody, neither.”
“That’s so,” Clem said.
Tim made a huge effort of imagination. “Know what?”
“What?”
“Sposin’ we lived by ourselves on this yere farm — You could be the boss, say, like you was our father.”
The woman’s fists pounded on the door. “Git out o’ that, you fellers!” she yelled. “The girls gotta wash.”
They hurried, all except Clem. He took the pail of cold water and doused himself clean of the water in which the others had bathed.
“Maybe I’ll stay,” he said to himself. “Maybe I’d better.”
In the night, in a bed cleaner than he had slept in since he came, he began to think about his strange family. Food was what they needed. He recalled the boys’ bodies as he had seen them today naked, their ribs like barrel staves, their spines as stark as ropes, their hollow necks and lean legs. Food was the most precious thing in the world. Without it people could not be human. They could not think or feel or grow, or if they grew, they grew like sick things, impelled not by health. Everybody ought to have food. Food ought to be free, so that if anybody was hungry, he could simply walk somewhere not very far and get it. Food should be as free as air.
He began to dream about himself grown and a man, rich and independent. When he got rich he would see that everybody would have food. “I won’t depend on God, like Papa did,” he thought.
The Aid came just before noon. They had all been waiting for her through an endless morning. The barn was clean, the house was clean. Whatever had not been washed was hidden away until she was gone. The girls were in almost new dresses which Clem had not seen them wear before. They had on shoes and stockings for the first time. Pop was in his good clothes, but he had taken off his coat, lest it seem that he did not work.
“Put it on when you sit down to table, though,” Mom ordered.
“You don’t have to teach me no manners,” Pop said.
She sat all the time because she too had on shoes and stockings and her feet hurt. The girls had to bring her anything she wanted. She had on a gray cotton dress that was almost clean. Clem had put on his good clothes that the sailors had bought him. They sat about the kitchen smelling the food on the stove, their stomachs aching with hunger.
“Here she comes,” Pop cried suddenly.
Through the open door they all stared. Clem saw a small thin woman in a black dress come down from a buggy, which she drove herself. She tied the horse to the gate and came up the walk carrying a worn black leather bag. Pop hastened to her and Mom got up on her sore feet.
“Well, well!” he shouted. “We didn’t really know when to expect you and we just went about our business. Now we’re just goin’ to set down to eat dinner. I’d ha’ killed a chicken if I’d been shore you was comin’. As it is, we only got pork and greens and potatoes. New potatoes though, I will say, and scullions.”
“That sounds good,” the woman said. She had a dry voice, not unkind, and she stood in the doorway and looked at them all. “Well, how’s everybody?”
“Pretty good,” Mom Berger said. “The children look a little peaky on account of a summer cold. They like to play barefoot in the run, and I hate to tell ’em not to. You know how children are. Come and set down while I dish up.”