House of Earth by Woody Guthrie Page A

know that our year was up yet.”
    He licked the heat of his lips against the quilt. “Up last week.”
    She felt weak, nervous, shaky inside. She felt even too dizzy to answer Tike just then. She looked at her stack of old papers and her dishpan of flour paste.
    And he said once more, to the wall behind his bed, “Yeahhp. Up last week. I dropped into his office and tried to rent for one more year. He shook his head. No soap. No dice. Nothing doing.”
    â€œSoooooo?”
    Tike squeezed his two hands into his hair so tight and so hard the pain brought tears into his own eyes. “So. Ah. Well. That’s just what I was trying to tell you.”
    â€œSoooo. We move, huh?” She sucked her upper lip and looked downward at her lap.
    â€œNo. Not moving.”
    â€œNot moving.”
    â€œHuh-uh.”
    â€œNor not renting again, either one?”
    And Tike said, “Huh-uh.”
    She felt the wall touch hard against the back of her head as she leaned back, folded her hands down in her lap, and asked through her teardrops, “Not renting? Not leaving? Not this? Not that? Well, my kind friend”—her words came as slow as new tears—“maybe you could make yourself just a little bit plainer. Just what, then, are we doing?”
    â€œGlad you said, ‘we.’” Tike smiled to himself. “I think I like the sound of that word better than any other one that I ever heard anybody say.” He closed his eyes shut and said upward to the wall, “We.”
    â€œWe. What?” She didn’t move.
    â€œWe’re ten times worse than renters. Hon.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œJust are. Oh. Know why he wouldn’t let us have the place on rent for cash another year?” Tike ground his teeth together.
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œSays he’s about to build a new house on it. Don’t want to rent it out for no whole year at a time. He might even want to move out here and farm his six hundred and livehere his own self. Says if it’s rented out for a whole year at a time, he could never put him up no new house on it.”
    â€œSoooo?”
    Tike rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, and felt his days-old beard stick to his fingers. “So. Well. He said that the only way he’d let us live on it was, ahh, on the shares.”
    That word shares struck a dumb, sour, shaky chord in the brain and in the thoughts of Ella May Hamlin. Her tongue was sticky, covered with a gummy, gluey, sickly spit that flooded her throat and kept her from speaking right at that minute. A tight, twisted pain exploded on her face, and the blood veins in her neck and arms stood up like roots as she finally fought to say, in a beaten, whipped, lost whisper, “Shares?”
    Tike got up from the bed and stood with his hands covering both of his eyes. He staggered on his two feet on the floor. He chewed his lips until they were wet, then till they turned a blue, black, purple, and then he snorted again in his paralyzed, insane, mad, and drunken way, and walked up and down the floor, only two or three feet from the hem of Ella’s cotton dress, covered with little white dots. He made a coughing sound as he cleared out his throat, and talked mostly to the winds:
    â€œA farmer is good. It’s as good a job as a man can do. Good as any man or any woman in the whole world can do. It’s good because it’s good and a man can be good. He can dogood and he can feel like he’s doing some good. And a farmer. Well, a farmer is good. But then you take a farmer that messes around and gets in debt to some outfit, and then he hits a hard row or two, and some rough and rocky country, or bad winds, or hot times, or dry spells, or washouts, floods, cloudbursts, or like that, and he loses what he’s got a hold of. And then, well, then he falls down, and he gets to be a renter off of somebody else. He’s lost what was a part of his skin and his bones and