And then I knew it was the savages.
"— though I wouldn't blame them for stealing it."
He clumped noisily to the back of the house and put his head out of the window and gave a sorrowful laugh.
"They take baths in a bucket. They do their business in that shack. Is that fair? I ask you! And you're wondering why they smell like goats and live in this slop and do unmentionable things that only funny bunnies do?"
I was wondering no such thing. What puzzled me was that Father, who always called them savages and warned me to keep clear of them, knew so much about them. He had driven straight to this house and marched right in, without a fear that one of the savages might be loitering in a closet or wrapped in a blanket, and might fling himself at Father and cut his throat.
I said, "I don't think we should be here."
"They welcome visitors, Charlie. It's an old custom of theirs — from the jungle. Be kind to strangers, they say, because you never know when you might be a stranger yourself — lost in the jungle, out of water, starving, or dying of bites. That's the law of the jungle — charity. It's not the cruelty people think it is. There's a lot to admire in these savages. Sure, they welcome visitors."
"But this isn't the jungle," I said.
"No," Father said, "because no jungle is as murderous and foul as this. They traded green trees for this ruin. It's pathetic. And it makes me mad, because they're going to end up being part of the problem."
He had started out of the house.
"I need air," he said.
But instead of driving away, he unloaded the Worm Tub, his icebox, from the back of the truck. He put it on skids and we towed it into the house. Father set it up in the back room, and lit its wick, and put a tray of water inside.
"They'll see this ice and go bananas," Father said.
"You mean, you're just going to give it to them? What about all the work you did on it?"
"You heard what that runt Polski said. He's got no use for it. And we've got a fridge of our own. These people will appreciate it. It won't cost them anything to run. They'll be able to store their food and save money. They can come back from the fields and have a nice cold drink. It'll take some of the curse off this ruin. That's what matters."
He was kneeling on the floor, adjusting the flame.
"Ice is civilization," he said.
He made an admiring cluck with his tongue and teeth.
I said, "They'll wonder who put this icebox here."
"They won't wonder."
We left the old house and its mattresses and mouse droppings, and I felt I had been introduced to wilderness. It lay very near our own orderly house and yet it was savage. It was apart from us. It was empty and alone. It had frightened me, not because it was dangerous but because it was so shabby and hopeless looking. It had begun badly and gotten worse, and it would stay that way, with all its trash — the tin cans and scribbled walls, the monkey scratches on the wood, the rusty wash bucket, the sink that didn't work, the litter of sweepings, the twisted shoes that made me think of twisted feet.
"It's scary," I said.
"I'm glad you feel that way," Father said.
He drove down the road, sighing as he shifted the gears.
"That's America," he said. "It's a disgrace. Breaks my heart."
***
I was glad, after this, to go into familiar fields and help Father with humdrum jobs. Sweating in the heat, 1 was itchy again from the poison-ivy rash, but I did not complain. And Father did not mention it. He was sure that I had been fooling in the bushes and the rash was my punishment.
Polski had ten greasy sheep and a small herd of cows. We repaired the transformer on the electric fence that separated them, and unblocked the drain at a drinking trough.
Father said, "There used to be scope in this country for a man like me."
Toward noon, we went up to the big windowless cold-storage building. Inside the thick walls it was cool. There was a stutter from the overloaded circuit, a stillness in the air, and the sharp aroma of asparagus ripening in the dark. The spears were taped into three-pound bundles. Because the tips are breakable and delicate, they are hard to store. These were packed as carefully on the shelves as if they were bunches of live ammunition. It was clear that Polski did not have much spare room, but Father said that it was amazing that Polski stored the asparagus at all, since the demand for it was so huge.
"And will you look at that!"
High up on a hook was a mink coat, probably Ma Polski's, put here in the cold to keep it away from the moths. It was dark gold, and every thin hair shone when Father turned his flashlight on it.
That got Father laughing about the state of the world, human beings sleeping on the floor of a broken-down house, and a ton of asparagus and a mink coat in a tidy air-conditioned room that cost a fortune to cool. It was a horrible joke, he said. The stupidity of people! And if the savages knew how they were being cheated, they would go over and cut Polski's head off and dance away in the fur coat.
He found a fuse had blown from the strain on the cooler. Replacing this fuse, he said "The runt was right. He hasn't got an inch of freeboard here, and they're still harvesting. Mark my words, that man is going to pay us a visit soon. He's going to have things on his mind. He won't remember what he said to me this morning. Some people never learn."
In the middle of the afternoon we were working at the roadside, digging out a culvert that had silted up after the March thaw. It was as hot as it had been the previous day, and Father had taken his shirt off. I steadied the wheelbarrow he was filling. Then I heard voices.
Three children on bicycles were coming down the road, returning home from school — Hatfield kids. I crouched down. I did not want them to see me here, laboring in my old clothes, and my father bent over like a ditchdigger. I was ashamed of Father, who didn't care what anyone thought. And I envied him for being so free, and hated myself for feeling ashamed. The children rang their bicycle bells and sang out to catch my attention and make me feel bad. They didn't know that Father had spent months inventing a fire-driven icebox and this morning had given it away, just like that, and picked up his spade like any farmhand.
I could not look at their faces. They called out again as they skidded past. After a while, I looked up and saw them wobbling on the country road.
Father was still hacking at the culvert — or rather, screwing out the silt with a spade of his own invention that looked like a large shoetree.
He said, "Don't feel badly. You've seen some amazing things today, Charlie. And what have those pipsqueaks been doing? Sniffing glue in the schoolyard, boasting about their toys, looking at pictures, raising hell. Watching TV — that's all they do in school. Ruin their eyesight. You don't need that."
5
POLSKI CAME after supper, just as Father had predicted. The twins and Jerry were already in bed, and Mother was swabbing my rash with lotion. Father was describing Ma Polski's fur coat hung in the cold store.
"All that vanity and expense," he said. "And the foolish woman is more conspicuously ugly when she's wearing it! With those teeth and that coat she looks like a demented woodchuck, who'd gnaw your leg off if you looked at her crosseyed. Imagine murdering and skinning twenty pretty animals, so that an unhappy woman—"
Hearing Polski's Jeep clatter into the driveway, Father stood up and said, "Time to hit the hay, Charlie."
Mother took me upstairs, and inside my bedroom she said, "I've been worrying about you the whole day. Why do you look so sad?"
I said, "I think something is going to happen to us."
"What do you mean?"
"Something terrible."