From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [49]
“Thats right,” Prew said. Life did not begin till Monday morning. It could wait till tomorrow. He rolled over on his back and lay staring up into the incredible blue of the Hawaiian sky. “Look off to the west,” he said. “Theres a storm blowing up in the west. Look at the cloud bank.”
“The clouds are beautiful,” Violet said. “So black. And piling higher and higher one on top of the other, like a cliff wall.”
“Thats a line squall,” Prewitt said. “Thats the first beginning of the rainy season.”
“Our roof leaks,” Violet said. She reached for the bottle.
Prew was watching the racking mass of clouds. “But whynt your folks kick you out. If its like that. Bringing me here,” he asked.
Violet looked surprised. “But I’m their daughter,” she said to him.
“Oh,” he said. “Come on. We mights well go on back down. It’ll rain pretty soon.”
The rainstorm came up quickly after it had hurdled the mountains. By suppertime it was raining hard. Prew sat out on the back porch alone while Violet helped her mother fix the meal. Her father sat in the front room, by himself.
The old folks, that was the way he always thought of them, had come home before the rain, chattering Japanese back at the crowded Model T that let them off and then clattered on down the road to the next house. Five families owned the Ford together, just as the whole community had built and owned the miles of water sluices of weathered wood that stuck up all along the little valley like scaffolding that had been used to make the mountains before the dawn of history.
They had rushed through the house to the back porch where Prew and Violet were sitting, and on out to hoe their tidy truck patch that the water sluices emptied into, before the rainstorm came. Prew watched them, stooped and bent, with faces that looked to have been carved from dried and withered apples and he felt a self-righteous indignation at the entire human race for the life these people lived, these who looked to be Violet’s grandparents or great-grandparents, and yet were not yet forty years of age.
Their garden, laid out in immaculate little squares and triangles, utilizing every inch of ground, of radishes and cabbages and lettuce and taro and a little underwater rice patch, plus a half a dozen foreign vegetables, was their life; and it showed the industry that was in them. They worked on in it until the rain began to fall before they stopped and put their hoes away. When they came up on the porch, they neither one spoke to Prew or seemed to know that he was there.
Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man’s lot, sealed up in his bee cell from all the others in the world. But the smell of boiling vegetables and pork reached him from the inside, the aloneness left him for a while. The warm moist smell promised other people lived and were preparing supper.
He listened to the pouring and the thunder rumblings that sounded hollow like they were in a rainbarrel, shared the excitement and the coziness of the buzzing insects that had sought refuge on the porch, and now and then he slapped detachedly at the mosquitoes, making a sharp crack in the pouring buzzing silence. The porch sheltered him from all but the splashes of the drops that hit the floor and their spray touched him with a pleasant chill. And he was secure, because somewhere out beyond the wall of water humanity still existed, and was preparing supper.
Violet called him and he went in, feeling the Army and the strange wild eyes of Warden were very far away, that Monday morning was a bad dream, an age-old racial memory, as cold as the moon and as far away, and sat before the steaming plate of flat-tasting foreign vegetables and chunks of pork, and ate with relish.
After they finished eating, the old man and woman stacked their plates in the sink and padded silently, without a word, into the front room where the garish little altars were, where Prew had never been invited. They had not said a word all through the meal, but he had learned long ago not to try to talk to them. He and Violet sat silently on in the kitchen drinking the aromatic tea, listening to the wind buffet the shack and the rain drumming its nails deafeningly upon the tin corrugated roof. Then he, like Violet, stacked his dishes in the old chipped sink, feeling completely at home here and content. The one thing he lacked was a cup of coffee.
When they went into her bedroom, Violet unconcernedly le