Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [23]
Bessie ran down the steps and over the hard white sand of the yard. When she reached the tobacco road, she turned around and looked at the Lesters on the front porch several minutes.
Presently, without waiting to walk, she began running through the deep white sand towards her house two miles away on the bluff above the Savannah.
Bessie’s home, a tenant house of three rooms, and a corn-crib, sat on the edge of the bluff. That was where the country dropped down into the swampy Savannah River Valley. The house, covered with unpainted weatherboards, sat precariously on three piles of thin stones. The fourth pile had fallen down ten or twelve years before, making one end of the house sag to the ground.
“Well,” Jeeter said, “Sister Bessie is up to something, all right. It looks to me like she’s got her head set on marrying Dude, there. I never seen such hugging and rubbing of the other as them two was doing. Something is going to come of it. Something is bound to happen.”
Dude snickered and stood behind a chinaberry tree so nobody could see him. Ellie May watched him from behind the pine stump, smiling because she had heard what Bessie had said.
Jeeter sat looking out over the old field of brown broom-sedge, and wondering if he could borrow a mule somewhere and raise a crop that year. The time for spring plowing had already arrived, and it made him restless. He did not like to sit idly on the porch and let the spring pass, without burning and plowing. He had decided that he could at least burn over the fields, even if he did not yet know how he could get a mule and seed-cotton and guano. He would have gone out then and set the broom-sedge on fire; but he felt comfortable where he was, and the burning of the fields could wait until the next day. There was plenty of time left yet. It would not take him long to put in a crop when once he got started.
Now that he was alone he began to worry all over again about the way he had treated Lov. He wanted to do something to make amends. If he went down to the chute the next morning and told Lov how sorry he was and that he promised never to steal anything from him again, he hoped that Lov would forgive him and not try to hit him with chunks of coal. And while he was about it, he could stop by Lov’s house and speak to Pearl. He would tell her that she had to stop sleeping on a pallet on the floor, and be more considerate of Lov’s wants. It was bad enough, he knew, to have to put up with a woman all day long, and then when night came to be left alone, was even worse.
“Ain’t you going to haul no more wood to Augusta?” Ada demanded. “I ain’t had no new snuff since I don’t know when. And all the meal is gone, and the meat, too. Ain’t nothing in the house to eat.”
“I’m aiming to take a load over there tomorrow or the next day,” Jeeter said. “Don’t hurry me, woman. It takes a heap of time to get ready to make a trip over there. I got my own interests to consider. You keep out of it.”
“You’re just lazy, that’s what’s wrong with you. If you wasn’t lazy you could haul a load every day, and I’d have me some snuff when I wanted it most.”
“I got to be thinking about farming the land,” Jeeter said. “I ain’t no durn woodchopper. I’m a farmer. Them woodchoppers hauling wood to Augusta ain’t got no farming to take up their time, like I has. Why, I expect I’m going to grow near about fifty bales of cotton this year, if I can borrow the mules and get some seed-cotton and guano on credit in Fuller. By God and by Jesus, I’m a farmer. I ain’t no durn woodchopper.”
“That’s the way you talk every year about this time, but you don’t never get started. It’s been seven or eight years since you turned a furrow. I been listening to you talk about taking up farming again so long I don’t believe nothing you say now. It’s a big old whopping lie. All you men is like that. There