Herma Read online

  At Fourth and Main she clambered confidently on and gave the coin to Mr. O’Garritty when he came around to collect it. Mr. O’Garritty, with his greasy glove and walrus mustache, his broad and mild red face, would surely take care of her if anything untoward happened. So she reasoned, while at the same time she was filled with the secret and sensuous knowledge that the things you were not supposed to do were always more interesting than the things that were approved. She settled into her seat and, carried away by the daring of the adventure, forgot to play her game of drinking wine and smoking her cigar on the private railroad car.

  Her plan was simply to ride to the end of the line at Balboa, buy a vanilla cone from Haroun’s, and come back—her grasp of finances at this time not quite encompassing the fact that, having spent the nickel for the ride on the Yellow Dog, she would no longer have it for the cone. She had not thought this out—perhaps deliberately—although the mathematics of it would not really have been too hard if she had applied her mind to it. But women were not really capable of understanding money—as Papa said, admonishing Mama for having spent too much of the household budget for a mauve party dress from Proctor’s, so that he had to give her more at the end of the month—and Mama, her cheeks coloring, had said nothing, so evidently this was true.

  All went well at first. There were a half-dozen other passengers and no one paid any attention to Herma, one set of adults probably assuming that she belonged to the other, and vice versa. But when the Yellow Dog stopped in Angel Town a sudden and inexplicable impulse struck her. It was something about the smell of chili and fried food, or the bright flowers flaring against the white houses. A pull of the exotic seized her, a strange and inchoate desire for the unknown and foreign. She got up and dashed to the rear, and stepped down off the iron step just as the Yellow Dog lurched into motion again. Mr. O’Garritty had not noticed, and none of the other adults paid any attention. As in a dream she walked away down the shady street.

  The town seemed oddly deserted and quiet. The tiny houses, she now saw, didn’t have lawns like the houses on Ross Street; the front yards were only weeds or bare dirt, but everywhere there were flowers—geraniums, roses, oleanders. Some of the houses had only beaten earth inside for a floor. The rooms inside were at ground level—there were no steps or stoops. Most curious of all was that there were no people, or almost none. Now and then she heard a murmur of voices in the distance, in the odd rhythmic intonation that went up and down like waves.

  She passed a pair of children sitting in a yard with a dog. The dog barked at Herma and the children stared gravely. A little farther on, attracted by a sound as though someone were continuously and tirelessly slapping a child, she looked through a window and saw a woman patting a lump of bright yellow cornmeal between her palms. The lump spread and widened to the size of a dish; the woman turned it over, first one way and then the other, so that it grew perfectly round and as tough, apparently, as a dishcloth. “When it was large enough she flung, it onto the table and took up another lump without breaking the rhythm of her slapping. Herma stared entranced. A rich odor came out of the house, something like bread but tempered with the pungency of oil. At just that moment the woman caught sight of Herma and looked piercingly at her out of two burning shadows of eyes, without ceasing her slapping. She seemed very melancholy, and there was hostility in her expression too. Herma stared back for a long moment, and then she went on down the street.

  There was not much to Angel Town. You soon came out of it into the open country, and here the road took a turn to the left and went off through the fields of sugar beets. The fields were all alike and there were a number of roads. Herma was soon confused—although not exactly lost, since she had no aim in mind and no desire to turn back. There were still a few houses along the road here and there—one with a crazy kind of pepper tree hanging over it like an umbrella, so that it was cool and shady underneath. Behind these small houses were patches of lettuce and celery. There was a pleasant muddy smell of irrigation, the smell of dry dust mingling with water.

  She had come out now onto an unpaved road that ran along a bluff above the river, following its curves and twistings. Ahead there was a cloud of dust rising from the fields, and something happening under it. She stopped and tried to make out what it was. After a while the cloud of dust, drawing nearer, turned into a large crowd of brown men in white clothing approaching along the road in a ragged column. They were in a state of excitement, and flung up arms and emitted yells as they came. Herma climbed up onto a concrete irrigation pipe to let them pass.

  The brown men were all dressed the same, in white cotton trousers and white shirts. Some were barefoot, and others wore dirty shoes made out of crossed leather straps. The only item of clothing they wore that was not white was the handkerchief that some had knotted around their necks. Some of these were blue, others orange or red. Some were bareheaded, others wore straw hats with wide flat brims. They hardly paid any attention to Herma. They yelled, “Huelga, huelga!” and raised their fists into the air. There was indeed a great crowd of them. They stretched along the road as far as Herma could see, and they filled it from side to side. “Huelga!” they cried. And some others, “Compañeros!” or “Lucha!” Still they gave the impression not of being angry, but of being defiant about something and at the same time a little astonished at their own defiance; they glanced sideways from under their hats across the fields, and one who caught Herma’s eye looked away almost as though he were embarrassed. When they cried, “Huelga, huelga!” it was as though they were trying out the sound, rather gingerly, to see what effect it would have on the warm and still air.

  There was another sound in the distance, a rumble or clopping of hooves and a jingle. Coming out on the road from Angel Town, Herma could see, was a column of horsemen riding three or four abreast. They too were all dressed alike, in khaki tunics, Sam Browne belts, and hats with floppy brims. They were exactly like the Rough Riders in the stereoscope views that Papa took out of the cabinet in the parlor on Sunday night, unloading their horses in Havana or charging up San Juan Hill. At their head, too, was a man something like the leader of the Rough Riders, broad-faced and heavyset, with spectacles and a large mustache. They didn’t yell and wave their fists like the brown men, but they came on in an efficient and determined way as though they didn’t intend to stop.

  At the sight of the Rough Riders the brown men faltered. There was another single scratchy cry of “Huelga!” and the parade continued on for a few yards. The Rough Riders down the road broke into a gallop; the ground shook with the rhythmic sound of hooves. The column of brown men began to break up; some turned one way and some another, and a few ran off across the fields. From the horsemen came high-pitched whooping yells. Shots rang out. The riders stormed down the road past Herma, overrunning and mingling with the confused crowd of brown men. Except for their barrel-shaped leader, the Rough Riders were lean and wiry men with pale faces. They rode expertly, at full gallop with revolvers in their hands, steering their mounts with nudges of their knees. One of them yelled in a cracked voice, “Get them goddam Greasers!” and another, “Bully, boys! At ’em!” They went on firing their revolvers, mostly into the air but some level down the road.

  There was a great confusion. The brown men ran every which way, some leaping across the irrigation ditch and fleeing past Herma into the fields. The Rough Riders galloped up and down the road, wheeling around to gallop back the other way, sometimes bumping into each other and cursing. There was a great cloud of dust in which things could be seen only imperfectly. One horse lost its footing and fell; the rider tumbled in an acrobatic roll, got to his feet cursing and kicking the still prostrate horse, and clambered back on when it managed to stand back up again. They rode off, the horse limping and the rider slapping the dust off his uniform.

  It was over in a few minutes. The Rough Riders galloped back toward Angel Town, and the brown men for the most part straggled away in the other direction. Behind them they left a couple of bund
les in the road, like dusty white rags. Near one lay a straw hat. There were spots of red on the rags, and under one a broad pool that spread and widened in the dust.

  Herma stared at these two objects for a moment, and then she turned and ran as fast as she could back into Angel Town. The Rough Riders had disappeared in the distance now and the road was deserted. Even when she came into town there was no one in sight. Not a living creature was stirring; no woman slapping tortillas, no children with their dog. The doors were shut and everything lay in a heavy silence; the insects buzzed in the trees. Panting, she slowed to a walk.

  Then behind her she heard wheels creaking and the slow clop of a horse. She turned. It was Mr. Farkuss in his wagon. There was lumber piled on the back, and a keg of nails. Mr. Farkuss was wearing his dirty overalls with no shirt under them. He was pink and perspiring under his straw hat, but he seemed quite calm.

  “’Lo there. Goin’ for a walk?”

  Herma went on down the road, saying nothing.

  “Come out on the Yellow Dog, I expect.”

  When Herma still said nothing, he inquired, “Got another nickel to get back?”

  She shook her head.

  “Better clammer on then.”

  She got on, sitting on the keg of nails just behind Mr. Farkuss’ shoulder. As usual he radiated a rich medicinal smell. In fact he had a bottle between his knees, holding it carefully to be sure it didn’t fall over with the swaying of the wagon.

  “Y’see,” he told her over his shoulder, “I could give you another nickel for the Yellow Dog. But if I did, y’see, then you’d have to ask your Papa for another nickel to pay me back, and then he’d know all about it, y’see.”

  This seemed like excellent sense to Herma, so she continued to say nothing.

  Mr. Farkuss took a sip from the bottle and replaced it between his knees. “Now I come down this way,” he rambled on, “’cause I’ve got a job of work to do for a fellow in a dance hall. But for somebody like you, it’s not a very good place to take a walk. Them Spaniards, y’see, they don’t mean no harm, but they might run right over a little girl like you, y’see, and not even notice you.”

  It seemed more likely to Herma that the Rough Riders would run over her, but she didn’t say so. Mr. Farkuss took another sip. There was only an inch left in the bottle. He gazed at it, still cheerfully but with a fine calculation.

  “Myself,” he went on, “I’ve got nothin’ against the Spaniards, y’see. Fact the fellow I’m doin’ the job at the dance hall for is a Spaniard. Name is Buena Suerte. You know what that means?”

  “Good luck.”

  “How come a lil girl like you knows Spanish?”

  To her surprise Herma found that she had no idea how to answer this question. She just knew Spanish, that was all. It was as though she had always known it. She went on being silent, which seemed to be a good way to conduct herself with Mr. Farkuss and one that he seemed to find quite natural.

  They came into Santa Ana along Sycamore Street and went on under the cool shade of the trees.

  “If I was you,” he said after a while, “I wouldn’t tell your Papa about none of this.”

  Herma had no intention of doing so. Mr. Farkuss took a final sip, a little longer than the others, and held up the empty bottle to contemplate it with a philosophical resignation. Then he threw it away, in an unexpectedly violent gesture for so mild a man. It shattered, the pieces scattering like diamonds at the side of the road. Mr. Farkuss hummed to himself. His face was still pink and his hat pulled down to his eyes. He gazed out at the world with content, hostile to no one and accepting everything with a vast and encompassing benevolence. He smiled at a brown dog going by. They crossed Fourth Street and he smiled at a motorcar that had to stop to let him pass, while the driver shouted in. He let her off on Ross Street, a block or so away from her house so she could walk the rest of the way. Mr. Farkuss was not only kind, he was wise. Herma scampered home and went in the back door without anybody seeing her. The things she had seen in Angel Town—the melancholy woman staring out the window at her, the two children and their dog, the red-stained bundles of rags lying in the dust—were fixed indelibly in her mind. But her memory dealt with them on two levels. On the surface she soon forgot them, or pretended to herself that the bundles had been only rags. But deeper, in a dark corner of her mind that was safely tucked out of sight, this Day of Bad Things was one that long haunted her in her dreams. As for Mr. Farkuss, she had learned that there was good in evil, that the one could come out of the other; or that the two were so mixed up that sometimes it was impossible to tell which was which.

  7.

  Herma quickly reached that ungainly age when young animals seem all knees and elbows. Her short hair flopped in her eyes, and there seemed to be no curves to her. Yet, even if she shared the awkwardness of children of her age, she made it somehow into her own sort of awkwardness, and an oddly graceful one, like the awkwardness of a young giraffe. She climbed trees, fell out of them sometimes, scratched her knees, was stung by bees, got briars in her hair, and made herself sick by eating green plums. Yet with all this she retained her calm self-possession and her decorum; she was stoic while Mama with a comb tugged the briars out of her hair, and instead of crying she was only angry at the tree she fell out of, so that she turned and threw a rock at it and limped away with queenly dignity, bearing her purple bruises like jewels. She had the usual contempt of girls her age for boys; they were dirty, uncouth, slow-witted, clumsy, cruel, inarticulate, ungrammatical, destructive, and raucous; they were constantly in mindless and violent motion, they took things apart and couldn’t get them together again, and they had no feeling for music. Boys in general couldn’t sing worth two cents. It would be better, Mrs. Opdike said, if their Mamas and Papas didn’t bring them to Meeting at all, because they only sat there in sullen silence like deaf-mutes, or worse, raised their voices in such scratchy and woofing cacophonies that it threw everybody off and nobody else could sing either.

  As for Herma’s own voice, it went on springing up like a weed, just as her body did. Its range was impressive, not to say phenomenal: from below middle C to a point two octaves or more higher, where it had the small but piercing quality of a whistle on a peanut wagon. It was either coloratura or dramatic, Mrs. Opdike said. It could go either way. Herma continued to sing both ways, and she had a repertory now of a dozen or more pieces. She was about ready, Mrs. Opdike said, to be presented to the public.

  This debut, as carefully planned by Mrs. Opdike as though it were the première of a new Diva at the Metropolitan, took place at the Summer Social, an annual event always held on Fourth of July evening. The church itself was not large enough for this event, and it was held in the Oddfellows Meeting Hall, which was upstairs on French Street just around the corner from Fourth. The vast barnlike attic was decked with banners and rubber trees, a platform was contrived out of pallets from the Sunkist packing house, and there were trestle tables for the refreshments. After the obligatory fried chicken and potato salad there was, of course, ice cream. Herma consumed the hemisphere in her glass bowl lasciviously and yet with a studied economy, using exactly the same technique she had for the ice-cream cone at the beach—eating the melting parts first and going round and round the creamy lump with her spoon so that it diminished evenly on all sides and remained, as far as possible, firm and frozen in the center. When she was done there was not a trace of ice cream on her face or hands. And the bowl looked, almost, as though it didn’t need to be washed. As a sensualist Herma had already learned to be neat. Papa hardly knew whether to commend her for this or not. Like many other things Herma did, it seemed unnatural and yet at the same time admirable. Papa himself had to take a napkin and wipe some ice cream out of his mustache. He himself was only human, he reflected, not without a certain admixture—not of malice exactly, since that would not be fatherly, but of something that might be called a metaphysical annoyance, directed not so much at Herma herself as at the general and universal State of T
hings, including not only Herma but himself as well, and the differences between them. Some people, he thought with a glance at Herma, seemed to have escaped the general human curse and to have been born, in some way, before the Fall. He wished that the child would cry, just once, or behave in some way that was identifiably childish. What was going to become of her? Never mind, he told himself, thrusting this thought away—from all evidence she would be able to take care of herself.

  Then, the bowls put away and the trestle tables removed, the Program followed. It began with an invocation by Brother Goff, which droned on a little too long for Herma’s taste. Following this, Mayor Kluckaus, who was not a Baptist but was invited as a courtesy, recited “The Man Without a Country.” He was an accomplished orator and some of his effects were impressive—especially the gestures, defiance, contrition, stern inflexibility, and so on. Next some hands strung up a blanket on a rope, and when it was removed—after a good deal of shufflings and giggles from behind—there were three boys, Benjamin Karp, Arvie Larson, and McAllister J. Mullen, in a tableau of three Revolutionary soldiers marching all bandaged with fife and drum. Artistically and historically speaking, this was not a very great success—Arvie was supposed to keep one foot in the air and could not, and McAllister, who was supposed to be playing the fife, couldn’t stop giggling. The tableau provoked mainly titters, followed by applause, but at least it broke the tension before the musical part that was to follow. Although Herma herself wasn’t the least bit afflicted with stage fright—it was the Fennerman girls sitting next to her, waiting to sing their trio, who were all fidgety and kept swallowing.