We ate the grapes, and in the evening Rickey showed up with a loaf of bread and a pound of
hamburg and we had a picnic. In a larger tent next to ours lived a whole family of Okie cotton-
pickers; the grandfather sat in a chair all day long, he was too old to work; the son and daughter, and
their children, filed every dawn across the highway to my farmer’s field and went to work. At dawn
the next day I went with them. They said the cotton was heavier at dawn because of the dew and
you could make more money than in the afternoon. Nevertheless they worked all day from dawn to
sundown. The grandfather had come from Nebraska during the great plague of the thirties - that
selfsame dustcloud my Montana cowboy had told me about - with the entire family in a jalopy truck.
They had been in California ever since. They loved to work. In the ten years the old man’s son had
increased his children to the number of four, some of whom were old enough now to pick cotton.
And in that time they had progressed from ragged poverty in Simon Legree fields to a kind of smiling
respectability in better tents, and that Vas all. They were extremely proud of their tent.
.Ever going back to Nebraska?.
.Pshaw, there’s nothing back there. What we want to is buy a trailer..
We bent down and began picking cotton. It was beautiful. Across the field were the tents, and
beyond them the brown cottonfields that stretched out of sight to the brown arroyo foothills and then
the snow-capped Sierras in the morning air. This was so much better than washing dishes South
Main Street. But I knew nothing about picking cotton. I spent too much time disengaging the white
ball from crackly bed; the others did it in one flick. Moreover, fingertips began to bleed; I needed
gloves, or more experience. There was an old Negro couple in the field with They picked cotton
with the same God-blessed patience the grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama; the
moved right along their rows, bent and blue, and their bag increased. My back began to ache. But it
was beautiful kneeling and hiding in that earth. If I felt like resting I did, my face on the pillow of
brown moist earth. Birds an accompaniment. I thought I had found my life’s work. Johnny and Terry
came waving at me across the field in hot lullal noon and pitched in with me. Be damned if lit Johnny
wasn’t faster than I was! - and of course Terry twice as fast. They worked ahead of me and left me
piles clean cotton to add to my bag - Terry workmanlike pile Johnny little childly piles. I stuck them
in with sorrow. What kind of old man was I that couldn’t support his ass, let alone theirs? They spent
all afternoon with me. Wt the sun got red we trudged back together. At the end of field I unloaded
my burden on a scale; it weighed fifty pound and I got a buck fifty. Then I borrowed a bicycle from
of the Okie boys and rode down 99 to a crossroads grocery store where I bought cans of cooked
spaghetti and meatballs, bread, butter, coffee, and cake, and came back with the on the handlebars.
LA-bound traffic zoomed by; Frisco-boy harassed my tail. I swore and swore. I looked up at dark
sky and prayed to God for a better break in life an better chance to do something for the little people
58
I love Nobody was paying any attention to me up there. I shot known better. It was Terry who
brought my soul back; on the tent stove she warmed up the food, and it was one of the greatest
meals of my life, I was so hungry and tired. Sighing like an old Negro cotton-picker, I reclined on the
bed and smoked a cigarette. Dogs barked in the cool night. Rickey and Ponzo had given up calling in
the evenings. I was satisfied with that. Terry curled up beside me, Johnny sat on my chest, and they
drew pictures of animals in my notebook. The light of our tent burned on the frightful plain. The
cowboy music twanged in the roadhouse and carried across the fields, all sadness. It was all right
with me. I kissed my baby and we put out the lights.
In the morning the dew made the tent sag; I got up with my towel and toothbrush and went to the
general motel toilet to wash; then I came back, put on my pants, which were all torn from kneeling in
the earth and had been sewed by Terry in the evening, put on my ragged straw hat, which had
originally served as Johnny’s toy hat, and went across the highway with my canvas cotton-bag.
Every day I earned approximately a dollar and a half. It was just enough to buy groceries in the
evening on the bicycle. The days rolled by. I forgot all about the East and all about Dean and Carlo
and the bloody road. Johnny and I played all the time; he liked me to throw him up in the air and
down in the bed. Terry sat mending clothes. I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I
would be, in Paterson. There was talk that Terry’s husband was back in Sabinal and out for me; I
was ready for him. One night the Okies went mad in the roadhouse and tied a man to a tree and beat
him to a pulp with sticks. I was asleep at the time and only heard about it. From then on I carried a
big stick with me in the tent in case they got the idea we Mexicans were fouling up their trailer camp.
They thought I was a Mexican, of course; and in a way I am.
But now it was October and getting much colder in the nights. The Okie family had a woodstove
and planned to stay for the winter. We had nothing, and besides the rent for the tent was due. Terry
and I bitterly decided we’d have to leave.
.Go back to your family,. I said. .For God’s sake, you can’t be batting around tents with a baby
like Johnny; the poor little tyke is cold.. Terry cried because I was criticizing her motherly instincts; I
meant no such thing. When Ponzo came in the truck one gray afternoon we decided to see her family
about the situation. But I mustn’t be seen and would have to hide in the vineyard. We started for
Sabinal; the truck broke down, and simultaneously it started to rain wildly. We sat in the old truck,
cursing. Ponzo got out and toiled in the rain. He was a good old guy after all. We promised each
other one more big bat. Off we went to a rickety bar in Sabinal Mextown and spent an hour sopping
up the brew. I was through with my chores in the cottonfield. I could feel the pull of my own life
calling me back. I shot my aunt a penny postcard across the land and asked for another fifty.
We drove to Terry’s family’s shack. It was situated on the old road that ran between the
vineyards. It was dark when we got there. They left me off a quarter-mile away and drove to the
door. Light poured out of the door; Terry’s six other brothers were playing their guitars and singing.
The old man was drinking wine. I heard shouts and arguments above the singing. They called her a
whore because she’d left her no-good husband and gone to LA and left Johnny with them. The old
man was yelling. But the sad, fat brown mother prevailed, as she always does among the great
fellahin peoples of the world, and Terry was allowed to come back home. The brothers began to
sing gay songs, fast. I huddled in the cold, rainy wind and watched everything across the sad
vineyards of October in the valley. My mind was filled with that great song .Lover Man. as Billie
Holiday sings it; I had my own concert in the bushes. .Someday we’ll meet, and you’ll dry all my
tears, and whisper sweet, little things in my ear, hugging and a-kissing, oh what we’ve been missing,
Lover Man, oh where can you be . . .. It’s not the words so much as their great harmonic tune and
the way Billie sings it, like a woman stroking her man’s hair in soft lamplight. The winds howled. I got
59
I cold.
Terry and Ponzo came back and we rattled off in the old truck to meet Rickey. Rickey was now
living with Ponzo’s woman, Big Rosey; we tooted the horn for him in rickety alleys. Big Rosey threw
him out. Everything was collapsing. That night we slept in the truck. Terry held me tight, of course,
and told me not to leave. She said she’d work picking grapes and make enough money for both of
us; meanwhile I could live in Farmer Heffelfinger’s barn down the road from her family. I’d have
nothing to do but sit in the grass all day and eat grapes. .You like that?.
In the morning her cousins came to get us in another truck. I suddenly realized thousands of
Mexicans all over the countryside knew about Terry and me and that it must have been a juicy,
romantic topic for them. The cousins were very polite and in fact charming. I stood on the truck,
smiling pleasantries, talking about where we were in the war and what the pitch was. There were five
cousins in all, and every one of them was nice. They seemed to belong to the side of Terry’s family
that didn’t fuss off like her brother. But I loved that wild Rickey. He swore he was coming to New
York to join me. I pictured him in New York, putting off everything till manana. He was drunk in a
field someplace that day.
I got off the truck at the crossroads, and the cousins drove Terry home. They gave me the high
sign from the front of the house; the father and mother weren’t home, they were off picking grapes.
So I had the run of the house for the afternoon. It was a four-room shack; I couldn’t imagine how
the whole family managed to live in there. Flies flew over the sink. There were no screens, just like in
the song, .The window she is broken and the rain she is coming in.. Terry was at home now and
puttering around pots. Her two sisters giggled at me. The little children screamed in the road.
When the sun came out red through the clouds of my last valley afternoon, Terry led me to
Farmer Heffelfinger’s barn. Farmer Heffelfinger had a prosperous farm up the road. We put crates
together, she brought blankets from the house, and I was all set except for a great hairy tarantula that
lurked at the pinpoint top of the barn roof. Terry said it wouldn’t harm me if I didn’t bother it. I lay
on my back and stared at it. I went out to the cemetery and climbed a tree. In the tree I sang .Blue
Skies.. Terry and Johnny sat in the grass; we had grapes. In California you chew the juice out of
grapes and spit the skin away, a real luxury. Nightfall came. Terry went home for supper and came
to the barn at nine o’clock with delicious tortillas and mashed beans. I lit a woodfire on the cement
floor of the barn to make light. We made love on the crates. Terry got up and cut right back to the
shack. Her father was yelling at her.; I could hear him from the barn. She’d left me a cape to keep
warm; I threw it over my shoulder and skulked through the moonlit vineyard to see what was going
on. I crept to the end of a row and knelt in the warm dirt. Her five brothers were singing melodious
songs in Spanish. The stars bent over the little roof; smoke poked from the stovepipe chimney. I
smelled mashed beans and chili. The old man growled. The brothers kept right on yodeling. The
mother was silent. Johnny and the kids were giggling in the bedroom. A California home; I hid in the
grapevines, digging it all. I felt like a million dollars; I was adventuring in the crazy American night.
Terry came out, slamming the door behind her. I accosted her on the dark road. .What’s the
matter?.
.Oh, we fight all the time. He wants me to go to work tomorrow. He says he don’t want me
foolin around. Sallie, I want to go to New York with you..
.But how?.
.I don’t know, honey. I’ll miss you. I love you..
.But I have to leave..
.Yes, yes. We lay down one more time, then you leave.. We went back to the barn; I made love
to her under the tarantula. What was the tarantula doing? We slept awhile on the crates as the fire
60
died. She went back at midnight; her father was drunk; I could hear him roaring; then there was
silence as he fell asleep. The stars folded over the sleeping countryside.
In the morning Farmer Heffelfinger stuck his head through the horse gate and said, .How you
doing, young fella?.
.Fine. I hope it’s all right my staying here..
.Sure thing. You going with that little Mexican floozy?.
.She’s a very nice girl..
.Very pretty too. I think the bull jumped the fence. She’s got blue eyes.. We talked about his
farm.
Terry brought my breakfast. I had my canvas bag all packed and ready to go to New York, as
soon as I picked up my money in Sabinal. I knew it was waiting there for me by now. I told Terry I
was leaving. She had been thinking about it all night and was resigned to it. Emotionlessly she kissed
me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and
looked at each other for the last time.
.See you in New York, Terry,. I said. She was supposed to drive to New York in a month with
her brother. But we both knew she wouldn’t make it. At a hundred feet I turned to look at her. She
just walked on back to the shack, carrying my breakfast plate in one hand. I bowed my head and
watched her. Well, lackadaddy, I was on the road again.
I walked down the highway to Sabinal, eating black walnuts from the walnut tree. I went on the
SP tracks and balanced along the rail. I passed a watertower and a factory. This was the end of
something. I went to the telegraph office of the railroad for my money order from New York. It was
closed. I swore and sat on the steps to wait. The ticket master got back and invited me in. The
money was in; my aunt had saved my lazy butt again. .Who’s going to win the World Series next
year?. said the gaunt old ticket master. I suddenly realized it was fall and that I was going back to
New York.
I walked along the tracks in the long sad October light of the valley, hoping for an SP freight to
come along so I could join the grape-eating hobos and read the funnies with them. It didn’t come. I
got out on the highway and hitched a ride at once. It was the fastest, whoopingest ride of my life. The
driver was a fiddler for a California cowboy band. He had a brand-new car and drove eighty miles
an hour. .I don’t drink when I drive,. he said and handed me a pint. I took a. drink and offered him
one. .What the hail,. he said and drank. We made Sabinal to LA in the amazing time of four hours
flat about 250 miles. He dropped me off right in front of Columbia Pictures in Hollywood; I was just
in time to run in and pick up my rejected original. Then I bought my bus ticket to Pittsburgh. I didn’t
have enough money to go all the way to New York. I figured to worry about that when I got to
Pittsburgh.
With the bus leaving at ten, I had four hours to dig Hollywood alone. First I bought a loaf of
bread and salami and made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country on. I had a dollar left. I sat
on the low cement wall in back of a Hollywood parking lot and made the sandwiches. As I labored
at this absurd task, great Kleig lights of a Hollywood premiere stabbed in the sky, that humming
West Coast sky. All around me were the noises of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was my
Hollywood career - this was my last night in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap in
back of a parking-lot John.
61
14
At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert - Indio, Ely the Salome (where she
danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to
the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall,
.Le Grand Meaulnes. by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we
went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New
Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one
Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in
October. Everybody goes home in October.
We arrived in St. Louis at noon. I took a walk down by the Mississippi River and watched the
logs that came floating from Montana in the north - grand Odyssean logs of our continental dream.
Old steamboats with their scrollwork more scrolled and withered by weathers sat in the mud
inhabited by rats. Great clouds of afternoon overtopped the Mississippi Valley. The bus roared
through Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated the ghostly gathered husks; it was almost
Halloween. I made the acquaintance of a girl and we necked all the way to Indianapolis. She was
nearsighted. When we got off to eat I had to lead her by the hand to the lunch counter. She bought
my meals; my sandwiches were all gone. In exchange I told her long stories. She was coming from
Washington State, where she had spent the summer picking apples. Her home was on an upstate
New York farm. She invited me to come there. We made a date to meet at a New York hotel
anyway. She got off at Columbus, Ohio, and I slept all the way to Pittsburgh. I was wearier than I’d
been for years and years. I had three hundred and sixty-five miles yet to hitchhike to New York, and
a dime in my pocket. I walked five miles to get out of Pittsburgh, and two rides, an apple truck and a
big trailer truck, took me to Harrisburg in the soft Indian-summer rainy night. I cut right along. I
wanted to get home.
It was the night of the Ghost of the Susquehanna. The Ghost was a shriveled little old man with a
paper satchel who claimed he was headed for .Canady.. He walked very fast, commanding me to
follow, and said there was a bridge up ahead we could cross. He was about sixty years old; he
talked incessantly of the meals he had, how much butter they gave him for pancakes, how many
extra slices of bread, how the old men had called him from a porch of a charity home in Maryland
and invited him to stay for the weekend, how he took a nice warm bath before he left; how he found
a brand-new hat by the side of the road in Virginia and that was it on his head; how he hit every Red
Cross in town and showed them his World War I credentials; how the Harris-burg Red Cross was
not worthy of the name; how he managed in this hard world. But as far as I could see he was just a
semi-respectable walking hobo of some kind who covered the entire Eastern Wilderness on foot,
hitting Red Cross offices and sometimes bumming on Main Street corners for a dime. We were
bums together. We walked seven miles along the mournful Susquehanna. It is a terrifying river. It has
bushy cliffs on both sides that lean like hairy ghosts over the unknown waters. Inky night covers all.
Sometimes from the railyards across the river rises a great red locomotive flare that illuminates the
horrid cliffs. The little man said he had a fine belt in his satchel and we stopped for him to fish it out.
.I got me a fine belt here somewheres - got it in Frederick, Maryland. Damn, now did I leave that
thing on the counter at Fredericksburg?.
.You mean Frederick..
.No, no, Fredericksburg, Virginia!. He was always talking about Frederick, Maryland, and
Fredericksburg, Virginia. He walked right in the road in the teeth of advancing traffic and almost got
62
hit several times. I plodded along in the ditch. Any minute I expected the poor little madman to go
flying in the night, dead. We never found that bridge. I left him at a railroad underpass and, because I
was so sweaty from the hike, I changed shirts and put on two sweaters; a roadhouse illuminated my
sad endeavors. A whole family came walking down the dark road and wondered what I was doing.
Strangest thing of all, a tenorman was blowing very fine blues in this Pennsylvania hick house; I
listened and moaned. It began to rain hard. A man gave me a ride back to Harrisburg and told me I
was on the wrong road. I suddenly saw the little hobo standing under a sad streetlamp with his thumb
stuck out -poor forlorn man, poor lost sometime boy, now broken ghost of the penniless wilds. I
told my driver the story and he stopped to tell the old man.
.Look here, fella, you’re on your way west, not east..
.Heh?. said the little ghost. .Can’t tell me I don’t know my way around here. Been walkin this
country for years. I’m headed for Canady..
.But this ain’t the road to Canada, this is the road to Pittsburgh and Chicago.. The little man got
disgusted with us and walked off. The last I saw of him was his bobbing little white bag dissolving in
the darkness of the mournful Alleghenies.
I thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed
me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it’s the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in
the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wild-
buck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the
Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not great
Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and
Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna,
Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy.
That night in Harrisburg I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the station
masters threw me out. Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under
your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and
miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go
shuddering through nightmare life. I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control. All
I could see of the morning was a whiteness like the whiteness of the tomb. I was starving to death.
All I had left in the form of calories were the last of the cough drops I’d bought in Shelton,
Nebraska, months ago; these I sucked for their sugar. I didn’t know how to panhandle. I stumbled
out of town with barely enough strength to reach the city limits. I knew I’d be arrested if I spent
another night in Harrisburg. Cursed city! The ride I proceeded to get was with a skinny, haggard
man who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health. When I told him I was starving to
death as we rolled east he said, .Fine, fine, there’s nothing better for you. I myself haven’t eaten for
three days. I’m going to live to be a hundred and fifty years old.. He was a bag of bones, a floppy
doll, a broken stick, a maniac. I might have gotten a ride with an affluent fat man who’d say, .Let’s
stop at this restaurant and have some pork chops and beans.. No, I had to get a ride that morning
with a maniac who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health. After a hundred miles he
grew lenient and took out bread-and-butter sandwiches from the back of the car. They were hidden
among his salesman samples. He was selling plumbing fixtures around Pennsylvania. I devoured the
bread and butter. Suddenly I began to laugh. I was all alone in the car, waiting for him as he made
business calls in Allentown, and I laughed and laughed. Gad, I was sick and tired of life. But the
madman drove me home to New York.
Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the
American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too,
63
seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its
millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream - grabbing, taking,
giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island
City. The high towers of the land - the other end of the land, the place where Paper America is
born. I stood in a subway doorway, trying to get enough nerve to pick up a beautiful long butt, and
every time I stooped great crowds rushed by and obliterated it from my sight, and finally it was
crushed. I had no money to go home in the bus. Paterson is quite a few miles from Times Square.
Can you picture me walking those last miles through the Lincoln Tunnel or over the Washington
Bridge and into New Jersey? It was dusk. Where was Hassel? I dug the square for Hassel; he
wasn’t there, he was in Riker’s Island, behind bars. Where Dean? Where everybody? Where life? I
had my home to go to, my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I
knew was in there somewhere too. I had to panhandle two bits for the bus. I finally hit a Greek
minister who was standing around the corner. He gave me the quarter with a nervous lookaway. I
rushed immediately to the bus.
When I got home I ate everything in the icebox. My aunt got up and looked at me. .Poor little
Salvatore,. she said in Italian. .You’re thin, you’re thin. Where have you been all this time?. I had
on two shirts and two sweaters; my canvas bag had torn cottonfield pants and the tattered remnants
of my huarache shoes in it. My aunt and I decided to buy a new electric refrigerator with the money I
had sent her from California; it was to be the first one in the family. She went to bed, and late at night
I couldn’t sleep and just smoked in bed. My half-finished manuscript was on the desk. It was
October, home, and work again. The first cold winds rattled the windowpane, and I had made it just
in time. Dean had come to my house, slept several nights there, waiting for me; spent afternoons
talking to my aunt as she worked on a great rag rug woven of all the clothes in my family for years,
which was now finished and spread on my bedroom floor, as complex and as rich as the passage of
time itself; and then he had left, two days before I arrived, crossing my path probably somewhere in
Pennsylvania or Ohio, to go to San Francisco. He had his own life there; Camille had just gotten an
apartment. It had never occurred to me to look her up while I was in Mill City. Now it was too late
and I had also missed Dean.
64
PART TWO
65
1
It was over a year before I saw Dean again. I stayed home all that time, finished my book and
began going to school on the GI Bill of Rights. At Christmas 1948 my aunt and I went down to visit
my brother in Virginia, laden with presents. I had been writing to Dean and he said he was coming
East again; and I told him if so he would find me in Testament, Virginia, between Christmas and New
Year’s. One day when all our Southern relatives were sitting around the parlor in Testament, gaunt
men and women with the old Southern soil in their eyes, talking in low, whining voices about the
weather, the crops, and the general weary recapitulation of who had a baby, who got a new house,
and so on, a mud-spattered ‘49 Hudson drew up in front of the house on the dirt road. I had no idea
who it was. A weary young fellow, muscular and ragged in a T-shirt, unshaven, red-eyed, came to
the porch and rang the bell. I opened the door and suddenly realized it was Dean. He had come all
the way from San Francisco to my brother Rocco’s door in Virginia, and in an amazingly short time,
because I had just written my last letter, telling where I was. In the car I could see two figures
sleeping. .I’ll be goddamned! Dean! Who’s in the car?.
.Hello, hello, man, it’s Marylou. And Ed Dunkel. We gotta have place to wash up immediately,
we’re dog-tired..
.But how did you get here so fast?.
.Ah, man, that Hudson goes!.
.Where did you get it?.
.I bought it with my savings. I’ve been working on the railroad, making four hundred dollars a
month..
There was utter confusion in the following hour. My Southern relatives had no idea what was
going on, or who or what Dean, Marylou, and Ed Dunkel were; they dumbly stared. My aunt and
my brother Rocky went in the kitchen to consult. There were, in all, eleven people in the little
Southern house. Not only that, but my brother had just decided to move from that house, and half his
