Chapter 8

Harvey Wilson chose to go to bed early that night. He wasn’t up when Nathan came wearily through the door. His mother was sitting up, the TV on, but it was turned down too low to hear. When she saw him she stood.

“Dinner is on the stove. Please try not to make too much noise as you clean up. Your clothes and all are right where you left them. Do you need me to get you up?”

He held up the alarm clock in one hand.

“I have this. It’s been getting me up the last week. I’m kind of used to it by now.”

“That’s fine, dear,” said Marian. “I’m going to bed now.” She turned to leave, and then turned back around. “Thank you,” she said.

“What for?”

“Never mind that. You need a bath. You smell like a horse or something.”

“Okay, Mamma,” he said.

He went into the bathroom and began running hot water in the tub. He thought that was strange, since it had been a scorcher that day, but the thought of sinking into hot water almost made him salivate. He wanted that before food, even. He had just dropped the last of his clothing when his sisters pushed the door open and tiptoed in. Looking astonished, he covered his dangling penis.

“What in tarnation...” he started.

“Shhhhhhh” interrupted Bernadette, looking back over her shoulder through the open door. She pushed Hilda Mae into the room and closed the door softly.

“You can’t just come in here when a man is naked!” he whispered.

“Oh, why not, we’ve seen you before,” said Bernadette.

Hilda Mae was staring at him, speechless, he thought. Then she said “Not like this!” softly.

“We had to see you!” whispered Bernadette.

“Well now you’ve seen me, so you can leave,” he said huffily.

“Oh, just get in the tub. We want to hear all about it!”

It was plain they weren’t going to leave, so Nathan did exactly what she suggested. He groaned as he lowered himself into the water slowly. He hadn’t had time to put enough cold water in it. Both his sisters stared at his penis as it slowly vanished under the water.

“Don’t stare at it!” said Nathan.

“Shhhh!“ hushed Bernadette. She looked at the door. “If they catch us in here there’ll be hell to pay!”

“That’s exactly why you should leave!” he croaked. The water felt good, and he lay back in it. Hilda Mae leaned forward, looking down through the water until Bernadette slapped her arm.

He had already told them much of his life away from home, but they peppered him with questions, interested that he had seen their friends, and asking him all about them. When he told them that Johnnie Sue, Luthor, Moses and Jesse had all told him to tell them hello, they giggled excitedly.

“Imagine that,” said Bernadette, “A Negro telling you to say hello to us!”

“I’ve seen a lot,” said Nathan, shaking his head. In just a single week I’ve learned a lot. “I almost don’t think of them that way any more.”

They talked on. Bernadette opened the door to check on things outside and Hilda Mae leaned forward again to peer into the water.

“What are you looking at?” asked Nathan, covering his genitals.

“Nothing,” she piped. She leaned back, looking disappointed. “The water’s too dirty anyway.”

Bernadette was back at the door, a worried look on her face.

“You better come,” she said to Nathan. “I think Daddy’s hurting Mamma!”

Water went everywhere as Nathan bounded out of the tub, his legs rubbery from the heat. No one stared at his flopping penis now, though, as he grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his waist. He found both girls by the door to their parents bedroom. Thumping sounds were coming from the room ... rhythmic thumping sounds, as if someone was raising something heavy and then slamming it down. Nathan had visions of his mother’s lifeless body being slammed against the wall. His hand went for the doorknob, and, just as he touched it, his mother’s voice came clearly through the door.’

“Ohhhh yes! Harvey! Oh, don’t stop ... give it to me baby!”

It was very clear to all of them that what would, in a later generation or two, be called “makeup sex” was going on in that room.

He jerked his hand away from the knob as if it were red hot. His face flushed, and he looked at his sisters, who stood frozen, open mouthed, their own faces turning bright red.

The thumping went on as they stood there, unable to leave. Their father roared and their mother wailed, but all the other sounds stopped.

Nathan broke first, taking a step backward. He froze again as a board creaked under his foot.

“What was that?” came his father’s tired voice.

“Nothing,” came their mother’s voice, dimly through the door. “Suck my on them some more, Harvey, you know that drives me wild.”

The three teens tiptoed carefully back from the door. The girls faces were ashen now. They looked almost ill as they thought about what all those sounds had meant. Hilda Mae’s eyes glanced down, and her hand came up to slap over her mouth, her eyes wide. She pointed at Nathan’s crotch.

He looked down to see that, where the towel gaped slightly open in the front, his erect penis was jutting out, hard as a rock. He heard Bernadette gasp.

That pretty well ended the reunion, at least until the next night. The girls scampered to their room, leaving Nathan to shake his head in disgust. His penis stayed rock hard as he gathered up his clothes and drained the tub. He sopped up the water in the bathroom with the towel and his dirty clothes, and walked naked to his room, as quietly as he could. He put on a pair of jockey shorts, and then backtracked quietly to the kitchen and wolfed down supper before returning to his room. The food was good, but his penis stayed stiff. All he could think about was what was going on in his parents’ bedroom.

He felt guilty for masturbating, but it was the only way his penis would go down. He felt even more guilty because the anonymous woman in his imagination had no face, but her body was his mother’s.

In the girls’ room, Hilda Mae and Bernadette sat on their beds, facing each other.

“Did you see it?” gasped Bernadette.

“Yes!” whispered Hilda Mae excitedly. “It looked huge!“

“It sure looked bigger than when we first went in,” said Bernadette, shaking her head. “How did it get that way?”

“I don’t know,” said Hilda Mae. “I wish I could see it again.”

“Hildy!“ gasped her sister.

“Well, I do,” said Hilda Mae softly. “And I bet you do too. I saw you staring at him.”

“Not like you were!” said Bernadette.

“It made me feel all funny inside,” said Hilda Mae, closing her eyes. “Those noises ... and Mamma screaming like that ... and what did she mean for him to suck on them some more? Suck on what?”

“I don’t know!“ said Bernadette, flushing. “But I do know that we shouldn’t be talking about this!”

Bernadette chased her sister into bed, and they turned out the light. Bernadette had never told her sister about how sometimes, she just felt the urge to touch herself. It felt so nice to stroke here, and pinch there. She felt like that tonight. She knew exactly what Hilda Mae was talking about ... the feeling funny inside part. And, while she wouldn’t admit it to her sister, she at least admitted to herself that that thing sticking out from her brother’s towel had looked so interesting that she’d had to tense up her muscles to keep from reaching for it ... just to see what it felt like, of course. It had looked so soft and flabby at first, but when it stuck out like that it was four or five times bigger. It just looked so ... interesting, somehow.

She wanted to rub ... to feel good. But Hilda Mae was tossing and turning in the bed next to her, still awake. She knew that sometimes she made noises when she rubbed. She couldn’t help it.

Quite suddenly she heard a rhythmic squeaking through the wall in Nathan’s room. It was an even tempo at first, then speeded up until she heard him grunt, and then sigh. It was the same tempo she used to rub herself. In a flash of insight, she knew what he was doing over there. He was rubbing that thing, like she rubbed between her legs.

It took both girls a long time to get to sleep. Both tossed and turned, but neither spoke of it to the other.

Because Harvey Wilson couldn’t take out his frustration on his son, or other members of his family, he took it out in other ways.

He was careful, because the things he did had the potential to make it look like he was making unwise loans. Automation and mechanization in farming was creeping southward, though, and the possibility for increased yields also promised the possibility of increased profits. He gave loans to the trash he hated so much, to purchase tractors, cotton strippers, and the new module system for compacting cotton so it could sit outside in the open and not be spoiled by rain. He knew quite well that some of the farmers he was granting loans to were over-extending themselves. When they couldn’t pay their notes, he foreclosed with glee, selling the equipment, and sometimes the entire farm put up as collateral, to other farmers, who sought other loans, perhaps that they couldn’t repay.

On paper he looked good, though no really great sums of money were coming in. That was because there was a very limited supply of money available in those parts.

That he was putting people out of their homes, and taking farms that had been in their family for generations, he didn’t care about. They were trash, and didn’t deserve to have what they couldn’t hold. Harvey wasn’t a man who believed that man evolved from monkeys, with the possible exception of niggers, but he embraced “survival of the fittest” like a long lost and very wealthy uncle.

With some of his profits, Harvey branched out into real estate. The first thing he bought was the house Flossie Pendergast lived in. It was property of the county, on the books as such, and the price he offered so outstripped the “estimated rental value” on the books that the county commissioners gleefully signed over the deed to him.

He evicted Flossie as soon as he had the papers in his hands.

“I’m going to fix the place up,” he said smoothly, when he handed her the eviction notice. “Rent it out. It’s nothing personal, of course,” he smiled an oily smile. “It’s just business.”

“Perhaps I could rent it,” said Flossie, knowing what he was doing.

Of course the price he set on that was far above the “estimated rental value” on the county books, and far outside her resources.

When the “negotiations” broke down, Harvey smiled again. “I’ve got workmen hired to start right away. You need to be out by tomorrow.” He turned on his heel and left.

She couldn’t move by then, of course, and the men who came simply set her things on the front porch. The electricity was shut off, along with the water. The lock was the first thing they changed. They took the keys with them to lunch. They didn’t come back.

When she approached the town fathers, most of whom were busy with the harvest themselves, and reminded them that they had promised her a place to live as part of her salary, they hemmed and hawed. One man spoke. “Don’t know why we don’t just forget the whole thing. You do own a house in this town, you know.”

What he was referring to was where Flossie had grown up. Her father had never owned anything in his life, except that house, and the only reason he was able to buy it was because it was basically worthless. It was actually a single story barn, when he bought it, back in 1934. But he had a wife and baby, and needed some place to live. The man he worked for didn’t want to pay cash wages, so he gave Jasper Pendergast the barn, in exchange for eighty hours of work per week for the next five years. Jasper couldn’t read, or do math, so he had no idea what that barn was costing him. All he saw was that, in five years, he’d own it. That he had to work extra, and his wife too, to get the cash to buy food and anything else they needed, was just life. After the five years, he had sunk all the extra cash he made into fixing the place up, which meant putting real furniture on the dirt floors, and getting electricity run to the place eventually. He hadn’t been able to put in an indoor toilet until Flossie was seventeen. There was still a hand pump for water in the kitchen. All the work had finally killed him while Flossie was in her last year of college.

Flossie had been overjoyed when she found out a house went with the teaching job, and had tried to get her mother to live with her there. Her mother wouldn’t leave. It was her home, such as it was, and her husband had given his life for it. As it turned out, her mother didn’t last long without her husband. A year after Flossie returned, her mother was dead too, and the “house” sat empty. Flossie had paid the taxes on it, but there was no market for it. She hadn’t known what to do with it until now.

“That house isn’t fit to live in and you all know it,” she retorted to the men grouped in front of her. “And it was part of my contract that a house would be provided.”

In the end, they simply raised her salary by the “estimated rental value” of the house she had just been evicted from - the one on the county books, of course. The only place she had to go was the house that held such unhappy memories for her. At least it was a roof over her head, and some place dry to put her things.

She kept an eye on the house Harvey had bought out from under her. It sat empty and unused for the rest of the summer. It WAS eventually refurbished, by adding another layer of wallpaper to the six that were already on the walls. It was rented to Joe and Melinda Hobbs, a young white couple that got married and had been living with Melinda’s folks. The rent was seven dollars lower than the “estimated rental value” on the county books.

She wasn’t the only person in town who saw what Harvey did, to her and to others. Harvey Wilson became a feared man in Catfish Hollow. He also became a hated man.

Because of the cotton harvest, school started later in Catfish Hollow than in the North. Flossie’s first session didn’t start until mid September, and even then the half day schedule was rigidly adhered to. Both Nathan and Curtis Lee were gone in the afternoons, and Flossie’s only students then were Hilda Mae and Bernadette. They rode their bikes to school every day now, instead of demanding to be driven in the car. Nathan did too, so he could get to work quickly from school.