68
PARTISAN REVIEW
she. He drove a twig thru her tail and flung her to the hen.
He hadn't gotten drunk in months because of Elsa. He filled
a jug stealthily. He lay in the grass with his cider.
But after harvest, it was no easier. Let him succeed in his
stocking feet to steal
~p
to her room and the door was locked
or she would start from her sleep. "Oh Steve, please, I can get
along." And the only time he could look at her was when the
others were around.
The old man with his toad, bottle, newspapers. Muie on
the saddle of the horserake grown into the ash tree. Elsa squat–
ting softly, her hands in the trough of her lap.
Mud saying, "The boss can blow the best man off this place
easy as soot. vVhy cuss a woman for carrying a jobless fellow
on her neck like a horsecollar? Yesterday I was down with the
milk I see a freight and homeless men on it like a cattlecar. Now
Ed Greener, he's school trustee, he's a hawk. on history. He
says the Revolutionary War, it put us ahead of the world. Sure,
but the Revolutionary ain't stopped one half the world hulling
the other half."
Elsa wiped her hands on her haunches. "It ain't one half,
it ain't even one-fourth, it's the few who got the money."
Murf said sadly, "Yes, the women got to take it, the work–
ing man got to."
Elsa held her hands to her face as if to keep her laughter
from spilling. "They don't."
Steve lay on the ground so he could see Elsa's thighs naked
as flannel plants.
"How you going to stop it? Get together? They got
together against the devil. They had Sunday meetings. Much
good that did. Now some people talk like if you had a bellyache
or a man's disease, for the sake of arguing, have a meeting, get
together. Here's these hawbucks from Gun Hill the boss bats
about. There's sex trouble, as the papers say, sex short for
sexton as dick short for deacon to bury and raise you. Here's
a letter they made the paper print."
So Murf read of the Gun Hill farmers in the north county
'where they milk stumps and hire crows to shell their corn. The
letter by the chairman of the Gun Hill branch of the United
Farmers League which had won electric lights and put Pie
Johnson, electric contractor and rich farmer, into the soup. They
were fighting for the immediate release of Al Robertson, facing
a
10
years' term in the penitentiary. Johnson had hired Robert-
