The People, Yes Read online

  On the passenger and freight cars is the monogram, the initials H. E. W. T.

  And nearly everybody in the territory traversed and the adjacent right of way calls it “Hell Either Way you Take It.”

  The Never Did and Couldn’t railway is the N.D. & C, Newburgh, Duchess and Connecticut.

  The Delay Linger and Wait is the D. L. & W., the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western.

  Come Boys and Quit Railroading ran the slogan of the 1888 engineers’ strike on the C. B. & Q. RR., the Chicago Burlington & Quincy Rail Road.

  The floors of the new horse stables were translucent tile, the drinking fountains of marble, the mangers of mahogany, the feed-boxes furbished with silver trimmings and inlays.

  “Well, gentlemen,” said the proprietor to his inspecting friends, “is there anything you can think of that is lacking?”

  “I can think of nothing,” said an irreverent one, “unless you want to put in a sofa for each horse.”

  62

  Without the daily chores of the people

  the milk trucks would have no milk

  the markets neither meat nor potatoes

  the railroad and bus time tables

  would be on the fritz

  and the shippers saying, “Phooey!”

  And daily the chores are done

  with heavy toil here, light laughter there,

  the chores of the people, yes.

  In a drought year when one dust storm came

  chasing another across a western town

  Out of a Santa Fe day coach a passenger stuck

  his head and queried a citizen

  “What’s the name of this mean measly dirty

  dreary dried-up low-down burg?”

  The citizen responding, “That’s near enough,

  stranger, let it go at that.”

  When the railway stockholder reminded the

  brakeman of orders to call stations in a

  clear tenor voice, the brakeman inquired:

  “What kind of a tenor voice do you expect

  for forty dollars a month?”

  The meat wholesaler took in hand one of his

  salesmen: “You’ve got a bright head and

  your ideas run away with you. Don’t be

  so bright when you tackle a customer. Be

  dumb. Look dumb. They will appreciate

  you better that way.”

  On a Baton Rouge headstone they carved:

  His last words were:

  “I die as I lived—

  a Christian and a Democrat.”

  An Arkansas huckleberry cavalry commander

  got his men into action with:

  “Prepare to git on your creeters—git!”

  “How many of yez down in the pit?”

  “Five.”

  “The half of yez come up and be quick.”

  “Men, will yez fight or will yez run?”

  “We will.”

  “Yez will what?”

  “We will not.”

  “I t’ought yez would.”

  The restaurant cashier glanced at the check

  he handed her and told him: “I am very sorry

  but we have an arrangement with the banks

  that they don’t sell soup and we don’t take

  checks.”

  Phone girl: “I’m sorry I gave you the wrong number.”

  Man: “I’m sorry too, I know it was a perfectly good

  number you gave me but I just couldn’t use it.”

  “I’d hate to be up there in that,” murmured one studying an airplane in a tailspin, another murmuring, “I’d hate to be up there and not be in that.”

  Man going up elevator:

  “We eat, work, sleep, then we die—eh?”

  Elevator boy: “Yeah.”

  The people laugh.

  From a light easy humming

  to the raucous guffaw and the brutal jeer

  the people laugh.

  The decisions of the people

  as to how they shall laugh and when

  and how loud and at whom and how long—

  This is not covered in the vaudevillians saying

  every audience is ninety per cent squirrels

  and ten per cent nuts and the squirrels are

  more to be considered than the nuts; almost

  an axiom comes from the same vaudevillians:

  what in one hour entertains and goes over big

  in another hour starts a riot: the old reliable

  jokes fail: hokum demands a new formula:

  the query runs, “What are they laughing at this year?”

  “We got butter and we got the Kaiser,” taunted the Dutch boy across the border.

  “We got Hitler,” argued the German lad from his side of the fence between the two countries.

  “We got butter, we got the Kaiser,” repeated the Dutch boy, “and we’re going to get Hitler.”

  “Have you a criminal lawyer in this burg?”

  “We think so but we haven’t been able to prove it on him.”

  “What’s become of your two boys that grew up

  since I saw you last?”

  “One is dead and the other is in the real estate

  business in Wichita.”

  “Am I the first girl you ever kissed?”

  “No, but I want you to know I am a lot more

  particular than I used to be.”

  The Kansas City girl out of finishing school: “If you’ve got the right kind of a face and personality you don’t need the education and if you haven’t got the face and personality you can never get education enough.”

  “Yesterday,’’ said the college boy home on vacation, “we autoed to the country club, golfed till dark, bridged a while, and autoed home.”

  “Yesterday,” said the father, “I muled to the cornfield and gee-hawed till sundown, then I suppered till dark, piped till nine, bedsteaded till five, breakfasted and went muling again.”

  A farmhand seeing the letters “P C” in a

  dream asked if it meant “Preach Christ,”

  his pastor counseling, “Perhaps it means

  Plow Corn.”

  Even those who have read books on manners are sometimes a pain in the neck.

  If there is a bedbug in a hotel when I arrive he looks at the register for my room number.

  They invited themselves to the party: “If you are verandah then we are ashcan.”

  The fourth time they threw the unwelcome guest downstairs he dusted himself off and called, “I know why you throw me out, you don’t want me up there.”

  At the third stop out of St. Louis where he was again kicked from the vestibule platform, the traveler picked himself up and told an inquirer, “It’s nothing at all. I’m going to Cincinnati if my pants hold out.”

  He sat on a hot stove and didn’t say a thing except, “Isn’t there something burning?”

  The joker who threw an egg into the electric fan soon was stood on his tin ear.

  One audience may wheeze like a calliope with sore tonsils and another roar like a burning lumber yard.

  Some of them, as you look closer, are slow as molasses in January—or quick as greased lightning.

  Some are noisy as a cook-stove falling downstairs, and others quiet as an eel swimming in oil.

  They have met salesmen and politicians low as a baboon’s forehead, low as a snake’s belt-buckle.

  Sure as a wild goose never laid a tame egg, they understand a crooked tree throws only a crooked shadow.

  They have heard of men trying to keep the sea back with a pitchfork.

  They have seen cutups funny as a barrel of monkeys turn gloomy as a graveyard on a wet Sunday.

  They have seen one limber as an eelskin finally locked in like a fly in amber.

  “Sometimes paying on the installment plan is for all the world like picking feathers out of molasses.”

  “Crooked as the letter Z, so crooked he could hide behind a corkscre
w, so crooked he couldn’t fall down a well, so crooked he can’t lie straight in bed.”

  The poker party ran through Saturday night and Sunday and they came out with eyes like burnt holes in an army blanket.

  Once in a blue moon something happens so they say it is rare as a snowbird in hell.

  There’s nothing to be scared of—unless you’re afraid of a paper tiger.

  The woman who’ll kiss and tell is small as the little end of nothing.

  In the daily labor of the people

  by and through which life goes on

  the people must laugh or go down.

  The slippery roads, icy tools, stalled engines, snowdrifts, hot boxes, cold motors, wet matches, mixed signals, time schedules, washouts,

  The punch-clock, the changes from decent foremen to snarling straw-bosses, the sweltering July sun, the endless pounding of a blizzard, the sore muscles, the sudden backache and the holding on for all the backache,

  The quick thinking in wrecks and breakdowns, the Angers and thumbs clipped off by machines, the machines that behave no better no worse no matter what you call them, the coaxing of a machine and fooling with it till all of a sudden she starts and you’re not sure why,

  A ladder rung breaking and a legbone or armbone with it, layoffs and no paycheck coming, the red diphtheria card on the front door, the price for a child’s burial casket, hearse and cemetery lot,

  The downrun from butter to oleo to lard to sorghum, the gas meter on the blink, the phone taken out, the bills and again bills, for each ten dollars due ten cents to pay with or nothing to pay with only debts and debts,

  The human sardines of the rush hour car and bus, the gnawing fear of defeat till a workman never before licked says now-I’m-licked, the boy who says to-hell-with-work-you-never-got-anywhere-working-and-I’m-going-to-be-a-bum-good-by, the girl who doesn’t know which way to go and has a wild look about it,

  The pleasant surprises of changing weather when the saying passes it’s-a-nice-day-isn’t-it and they-can’t-take-this-away-from-us, the shine of spring sunlight on a new planted onion patch after bright rain, the slow learning of what makes a good workman and the comfort of handling good tools, the joy of working with the right kind of a crew and a foreman who is “one of us,” a foreman who understands,

  The lurking treachery of machinery, good printers cursing “the innate cussedness of inanimate things,” the pouring of molten ore at the right nick and the timing of the clutch of a crane or a lifting derrick or the dump of a steam shovel or the toss of a hawser from boatdeck to dockpost or the slowing to a stop for a red light or the eye on the clock for the deadline of a job marked rush,

  The grades and lines of workmen, how one takes care and puts the job through with the least number of motions and another is careless and never sure what he is doing and another is careful and means well but the gang knows he belongs somewhere else and another is a slouch for work but they are glad to have him for his jokes and clowning.

  The people laugh, yes, the people laugh.

  They have to in order to live and survive under lying politicians, lying labor skates, lying racketeers of business, lying newspapers, lying ads.

  The people laugh even at lies that cost them toil and bloody exactions.

  For a long time the people may laugh, until a day when the laughter changes key and tone and has something it didn’t have.

  Then there is a scurrying and a noise of discussion and an asking of the question what is it the people want.

  Then there is the pretense of giving the people what they want, with jokers, trick clauses, delays and continuances, with lawyers and fixers, playboys and ventriloquists, bigtime promises.

  Time goes by and the gains are small for the years go slow, the people go slow, yet the gains can be counted and the laughter of the people foretokening revolt carries fear to those who wonder how far it will go and where to block it.

  63

  In a winter sunset near Springfield, Illinois

  In the coming on of a winter gloaming,

  A Negro miner with headlamp and dinner bucket,

  A black man explained how it happens

  In some of the mines only white men are hired,

  Only white men can dig out the coal

  Yet he would strike if the strike was right

  And, “For a just cause I’d live in the fields

  on hard com.”

  White man: “You take the crow and I’ll take

  the turkey or I’ll take the turkey and you

  take the crow.”

  Indian: “You don’t talk turkey to me once.”

  In a corn-belt village after a Sunday game

  a fan said to a farmhand second baseman:

  “You play great ball, boy, a little more time

  for practice and you could make the big

  leagues.”

  “Sure, I know it, shoveling cow manure, that’s

  all that holds me back.”

  64

  No matter how thick or how thin you slice it it’s still baloney.

  I would if I could and I could if I would but if I couldn’t how could I, could you?

  I never made a mistake in grammar but once in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.

  He was a good shoveler but I don’t know as I would say he was a fancy shoveler.

  “You’re always talking about liberty, do you want liberty?” “I don’t know as I do and I don’t know as I do.”

  “The train is running easier now.” “Yes, we’re off the track now.”

  The chorus goes, “They take him by the hand, and they lead him to the land, and the farmer is the man who feeds them all.”

  “I hear a burglar in the house.” “Wait, if he finds anything worth stealing we’ll take it away from him.”

  “Did you say the sky is the limit?” “Yes, we won’t go any higher than the sky.”

  “That dwarf ain’t worth ten cents to see—he’s five feet high if he’s a foot.” “Exactly, my good sir, he’s the tallest dwarf in the world.”

  The sea rolls easy and smooth.

  Or the sea roars and goes wild.

  The smell of clams and fish comes

  out of the sea.

  The sea is nothing to look at

  unless you want to know something

  unless you want to know

  where you came from.

  The more things change the more they are the same.

  The worse things are the better they are.

  Things will not get better till they’ve been worse.

  When everyone is wrong then everyone is right.

  Everybody was wrong and nobody was to blame.

  The windjammer drew into harbor after a long cruise

  and they gathered around the captain for a good-by

  and they understood exactly what he meant

  and it seemed like old times to hear him roar:

  “You can all go to hell

  and I’m damned glad to be rid of you.”

  Why did they cheer him unless he was one of them?

  The Mexicans give a toast:

  salud pesetas tiempo para gastarse son,

  health, money, time, what are they for but spending?