Table Of ContentAnother Part of The House. by Winston M. Estes
Another Part of the House
Winston M. Estes
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
Philadelphia / New York
Copyright 1970 by Winston M. Estes All rights reserved
First edition
Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card
Number 7O-91674
For Sarah, Dick and Rizzie.Another Part of the House. 1.
Cora came on Mondays to do the washing and help with the cleaning, but it
didn’t do any good. Not if it was a summer day when a dust storm blew in before
she finished hanging the clothes on the line or just after she had vacuumed the
rugs. Sometimes the dust clouds crouched across the river, low and threatening
like a bully, and waited until she had finished altogether, but scarcely giving her
time to gather up her paper sacks and bundles and go padding off toward the
Addition, where she lived. Then the clouds would turn three shades darker, boil
up and explode, and come charging in from the north, sweeping up the flat,
scraggly land and churning it all over the sky, blowing it past Tolbert’s Crossing,
past the cemetery, past the Fort Worth & Denver railroad tracks, and on into
town, turning Wordsworth’s air into a swirling, whipping, dirty brown mass with
no top, no bottom and no edges.
Mama would let out a scream and go racing through the house slamming down
windows and stuffing towels and old rags under the doors and along window
windows and stuffing towels and old rags under the doors and along window
sills, hollering at me to run grab the washing off the clothesline or to see if the
windows across the back of the house were closed tight. The next day she would
make me help her clean house all over again, which made Cora’s work seem
pretty pointless, especially if I could find a more worthwhile way to spend my
time, and I always could. Anybody with one eye and half sense could find
something better to do than clean house.
Mama didn’t complain much, but maybe that was because I complained enough
for both of us and didn’t leave her anything to say. You’d have to be pretty
weak-minded not to complain if you were slaving away on Saturday morning
with the sneaky feeling that you were cheating Cora out of her regular work only
two measly little days away.
“It seems kinda dumb to clean house today when Cora can do it Monday,” I
grumbled. We were shoving the sofa back against the wall.
Mama threw up her hands. “Gracious! And sit around in this dust all day
Sunday?”
“Is there anything in the Bible that says dust can’t be two inches deep on
Sunday?”
She laughed and stood back from the sofa to measure it against the picture that
hung above it. “Maybe not in the King James Version, but there is in mine” she
said brightly as though she were actually enjoying herself. “Here—let’s push it
this way just a wee bit. The picture’s not in the middle.”
“Why can’t we move the picture?” I suggested, but the sofa was already pushed
and squared away before I finished saying it.
She patted the cushions into place, then went on with her sweeping, wiping and
dusting, stopping only long enough to fuss at me for printing “Larry Morrison”
with my finger tip in the coat of dust that covered the sideboard. She made me
wipe it off and polish the whole thing with O’Cedar.
“I notice Tad never has to do any of this work,” I said.
“He would if he was here,” she replied. “He can’t be here and at the Drug Store
“He would if he was here,” she replied. “He can’t be here and at the Drug Store
at the same time.”
“I’d be at the Drug Store, too, if Papa would pay me four dollars a week like he
pays Tad.”
“When you’re fifteen, maybe he will.” “Tad’s got the easiest job in the world,” I
went on. “All he
does is make Cokes and sodas and malted milks. If Papa ever makes him clean
up dust like you make me, they keep it a deep, dark secret.”
“Well, now—how do you think it gets cleaned up?” She untied a curtain and
watched it unwrinkle itself. “I imagine that at this very minute Tad and Ollie
Tabor are wiping off the shelves and dusting the stock.”
Mama had an explanation for everything. An explanation and a smile. I wished
that she wouldn’t, but she did. She was one of those people who sparkled all
over. Her dancing brown eyes and the bright expression on her face seemed
ready to burst into a wide smile or happy laughter at any minute, so it’s just
possible that I thought she was smiling sometimes when she actually wasn’t. She
took things in her stride, even the gritty dust, which is the only way you could
take it unless you wanted to lose your mind, and I don’t guess that would have
helped matters. It certainly wouldn’t have stopped the dust. Tad said that any
time the dust got as far as Amarillo, you could bet your bottom dollar it would
come on to Wordsworth, because there was nothing in between to stop it—no
hills, no trees, except a few mesquites, if you can call them trees; not even
W’ordsworth itself, with its low, squat buildings and its flat, wide, straight
streets cutting across the earth like lines drawn in the dirt with a stick, could
head off a single grain of blowing sand.
“How about Uncle Calvin, then?” I came back at her. “I never caught him doing
any work around here.”
“Now don’t start in on him,” she said, without looking up from straightening the
curtain tiebacks.
“Well, he just shows up out of nowhere and parks himself out on the front porch
like he lives here. All he ever does is snooze, roll cigarettes and stare across the
like he lives here. All he ever does is snooze, roll cigarettes and stare across the
vacant lot at mr Schmidt’s house. I bet he’s memorized every shingle on mr
Schmidt’s roof.”
I poured a good healthy dose of O’Cedar onto the old undershirt she had given
me for a polish cloth, but it was
too healthy. It soaked the cloth and dripped over to make a heavy puddle on the
rich, dark surface of the sideboard.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Mama said. “He won’t be staying long. Your daddy
has uncovered a good prospect for him down at Merkel, and he says—Larry!
Please! You don’t have to use a whole bottle of polish on the sideboard! We
might need some for the other furniture sometime.”
“You say that every time,” I said, straightening out the puddle of O’Cedar just as
it spread to the edge and was about to trickle down the side. “The last time he
came you said he’d probably stay a few days, and he ended up staying a whole
month. He’s already been here two weeks this time.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s been quite that long,” she said. Then she thought about it.
“Has it?”
“Seems like two years to me, the way he stays in my room like it was his, I went
in there the other day to get my knife, and he chased me out. Out of my own
room! He said he was trying to take a nap, and I was making enough noise to
wake the dead.”
“Larry!” Mama was standing behind me now, looking over my shoulder. “Put
the cap back on the bottle before you turn it over.” She spoke sharply, and I had
no trouble this time knowing whether or not she was smiling. She wasn’t.
“But I’ll tell you one thing,” I went on, replacing the cap. “I’d rather be Tad by a
long shot than Uncle Calvin. I don’t care if Uncle Calvin made four million
dollars a week.”
“Heavens to Betsy! That cloth’s got enough polish on it for every stick of
furniture in the house!”
“Well, I mean it! All he ever does is get in the way and poke his nose in—”
“Well, I mean it! All he ever does is get in the way and poke his nose in—”
“Run get a dry cloth,” she said. “You’ll be rubbing all day like that.”
I felt like I already had. I went into the bathroom and got another undershirt out
of the rag bag. When I returned, Mama was untying the faded blue bandana
handkerchief that she wore around her head when she cleaned house. She fluffed
out her soft brown hair and puffed it up with her hands. That
was a sign we were through. At least, she was. I still had to wipe up all that
O’Cedar and shake the throw rugs.
“Goodness!” she exclaimed. “I must look a sight!”
Of course, she didn’t. mrs Castlebeny, who lived across the street on the side,
was always saying Mama could come in out of a dust storm looking as if she had
just walked out of the Marvella Beauty Shop. She might have been right, but I
couldn’t say for sure, seeing her so much every day and all.
“He was out there a while ago making fun because I was doing housework like a
girl,” I continued. ” “You got housemaid’s knee yet?” he said, and I said, “That’s
for me to know and for you to find out,” and he went on and on with a lot of
stupid things like that. If I told you how tired I got of listening to him, you
wouldn’t believe it. He tried to get me to…”
My voice trailed off, mainly because I was running out of breath from all the
polishing, but also because iMama had gone into the kitchen and wasn’t
listening any longer. My arm nearly broke off at the elbow. I barely had enough
strength left over to go into the bathroom afterwards and look at my muscles in
the mirror. Not that it mattered, for they didn’t seem to have grown at all.
On the way out of the house to shake the throw rugs, I was surprised to hear the
clock strike ten. Or it could have been eleven, depending on whether I started
counting on the first stroke or the second. I could have sworn it was much later,
considering the great amount of work I had done and all. Across the street on the
vacant lot, smoke curled up from the old stovepipe that stuck up through the
broom weed You didn’t need to be too smart to figure out that all the kids were
sitting around in the cave smoking and vomiting, with sweat pouring off them by
the gallons. Everybody, that is, except P. R. Burns, and he was at home
the gallons. Everybody, that is, except P. R. Burns, and he was at home
telephoning me—three times already—to come down to his house and help him
work on our secret formula that he claimed wouldn’t work, which wasn’t
surprising, when you consider that it was P. R. Burns working on it. He couldn’t
make a doorknob work without me helping him.
I stopped inside the front door to cool off and catch my breath from all that
furniture polishing. The hall was the coolest place in the house. Splitting the
house in half, it tied the front door to the back like a wide, high-ceilinged tunnel.
The breeze swept across the long, deep front porch and pushed through the door
and on out the back as fresh and cooling as a tall frosty glass of iced tea.
Sometimes on a hot, sweaty night when everybody was rolling and tossing and
couldn’t sleep, Mama would make me a pallet on the floor in the hall, and by
morning when Papa stepped over me to go outside for the paper, I would be
covered up to my ears and wadded into a tight little ball. That’s how cool it
could get in our hall.
I stood listening to the glass chimes—Chinese, I think they were—trying to
patch together a tune from their icy tinkling. Hanging in the living-room door,
just to the right of the hall as you go in, they rustled, dainty and fragile, on the
edge of the breeze. From the kitchen came the soft strains of Mama’s singing:
“There is a fountain filled with blood Drawn from Immanuel’s veins….”
I held my breath to see if she would leave out the line about sinners plunging
beneath the flood. She did.
“… lose all their guilty sta aaa-ins,
Lose all their guilty stains.”
Silently I filled in the missing line for her and opened the screen door a crack to
see if Uncle Calvin was still on the front porch. Naturally, he was. Tilted back in
the battered old cane-bottomed chair that Mama was always returning to the
back porch where nobody could see it, he sat with his heels hooked in the front
rung and his head resting against the side of the house. I pushed the door open
wide and went outside, pretending not to see him. I draped the throw rugs over
the banister, side by side.
“They won’t get shook hanging there,” he said.
“What business is it of yours?”
I looked around at him without intending to, for to my great sorrow, I already
knew exactly what he looked like, and he certainly didn’t look like Papa’s
brother, I’m happy to say. His tobacco-stained teeth showed yellow and ugly
between his thin lips, which were stretched into a mean grin.
He gave a nasty little chuckle and turned his head the other way toward
Castleberrys’ end for a moment.
“That’s too bad,” he said, turning back. “Too bad that all the other kids’ll be at
the picture show while you’re still at home doing girl work and shaking rugs.”
I went back to pretending not to see him, but he wouldn’t shut up.
“It’s gonna be dinnertime before you know it,” he said.
“What if it is?”
“You’ll have to eat dinner, and you won’t have time to finish all your girl work
before time to go to the picture show.”
He cackled gleefully.
To tell the truth, I would have already shaken those rugs and gone back in the
house if it hadn’t been for his smart aleck remarks. But just so he wouldn’t the
idea that he could boss me around, I wandered down to the other end of the
porch—Greggs’ end—and plopped down in the swing as though I had nothing to
do for the next ten years but swing.
He pretended to ignore me, but I could tell by the squint in his dead gray eyes
that he was keeping track of every move I made. His thin, bony face, topped by
iron-gray hair that was plastered too tightly across his head with too much
brilliantine, was as still as death, except for an occasional twitch at the corner of
his thin, tight lips. His hands were clasped behind his head now. The sleeves of
his old white shirt were rolled above his elbows to reveal his knotty biceps and
the slick white of his forearms, on one of which was tattooed a slimy purple
the slick white of his forearms, on one of which was tattooed a slimy purple
snake, coiled and ready to strike.
I rocked in the swing without actually swinging until I
heard Mama’s footsteps coming through the house. Mama’s footsteps always
sounded determined. They were never without purpose. I could tell as well as if I
had been looking at her that she was headed for the front door. I got to my feet
and climbed onto the banister and balanced myself carefully, crouching low and
ready to leap. That second crack in the sidewalk looked as far away as ever. Tad
claimed he could jump past it when he was nine years old, but I think he was
mixed up and was really remembering when he was twelve or thirteen. If not, he
must have been the tallest nine-year-old person in Wordsworth’s history.
With a whoop, I sprang like a kangaroo, landed on one foot and fell backwards.
My head hit the ground with a thud.
“Ouch!”
I wanted to bite my tongue off. I didn’t dare look at Uncle Calvin.
Not until I tried to get up did I realize that I had twisted my leg beneath me. I
sank back to the ground.
“Ha! You got smart and twisted your ankle, didn’t you?” he gloated.
“What do you care if I broke it?”
“You don’t know how to land. You gotta land square on both feet—one foot
ain’t enough to support the weight of your body when you land full force like
that.”
“I’ll land on my head if I get good and ready!”
I stood up and hopped back to the porch on my good leg so as not to give him
the pleasure of seeing me limp.
“Now ain’t that too bad?” he mimicked in a screeching thin voice. “Hee-heel
Here you’re all crippled up and cain’t go to the picture show! I’ll swan—if that
ain’t too bad I don’t know what is.”
ain’t too bad I don’t know what is.”
I got so mad I forgot about my twisted leg and grabbed a rug off the banister and
shook it wildly, creating a junior sized dust storm.
“Hey! Turn that thing the other way!” he yelled.
I moved a step in his direction and shook the rug again aiming it directly at him.
“Watch out there—”
I shook it again. The front legs of his chair hit the floor, and he came up
coughing and sputtering.
I gave the rug another shake and did a little coughing and sputtering of my own.
“Why, you little-”
“I hope it chokes you!” I shouted.
“Larry!”
It was Mama standing inside the front door.
“But Mama-”
“Just watch your tongue!”
“But Mama—he just sits up there and tries to tell me—”
“That’ll be enough out of you, young man!”
She came out to the edge of the porch and stood looking from me to Uncle
Calvin with disapproval. The sparkle in her eyes this time was the wrong kind.
“Now stop all this bickering—people can hear you all over this end of town.”
“Well, make him leave me alone!”
“I said that’s enough]” She tried to keep her voice low. It was loud enough to be
stern, though, and firm enough to shut me up—but good.
stern, though, and firm enough to shut me up—but good.
Turning back into the house, she glanced darkly at Uncle Calvin, who had
settled down again and sat smugly, pinching a twisted roll of Bull Durham
between his fingers. He examined it for a moment, then rolled it around on his
tongue, stuck one end of it in his mouth and lighted it. The loose paper flared up
and died down. He tilted his chair back against the house again and looked at me
with a sneering little grin. He puffed two streams of smoke through his flat nose,
and of all the sorry-looking sights in this world, the sorriest-looking of all was
Uncle Calvin blowing smoke streams through his nose like a dragon. I looked
the other way
to keep from throwing up and went back to my rug shaking. I shook the last rug
faintly in his direction and took all of them back into the house.
When I returned Uncle Calvin had vamoosed. I didn’t do him the honor of
wondering where he went.
mrs Jernigan appeared from around the corner, her brown leather purse dangling
from her arm, taking short little steps and looking down at the sidewalk as if she
were dodging holes. She was older than Mama and Papa put together and lived
on Eleventh Street back of us, in the second house from the corner. As she
minced past, she looked up and saw me.
“Morning, Larry,” she called out.
“Hi, mrs Jernigan. You going to the store?”
It was a silly question. She went to the store over on the highway a thousand
times a day. Mama said that mrs Jernigan never bought a whole sack of
groceries at one time in her life.
“I ran out of bread and have to pick up a loaf for dinner,” she said. “You glad
school’s out?”
“If I was any gladder, I’d bust wide open.”
“Oh my! Don’t do that!” she said happily and moved on.
