Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [46]
“Have it your own way, Jeeter, but you’d better think it over and go to work in the cotton mills. That’s what nearly everybody else around Fuller has done. Some of them is in Augusta and some of them is in Horsecreek Valley, but they’re all working in the cotton mills just the same. You and your wife together could make twenty or twenty-five dollars a week doing that. You ain’t making nothing by staying here. You’ll both have to go and live at the county poor-farm pretty soon if you stay here and try to raise cotton.”
“Then it will be the rich who put us there,” Jeeter had said. “If we has to go to the poor-farm and live, it will be because the rich has got all the money that ought to be spread out among us all and won’t turn it loose and give me some credit to get seed-cotton and guano with.”
“You ain’t got a bit of sense, Jeeter. You ought to know by now that you can’t farm. It takes a rich man to run a farm these days. The poor has got to work in the mills.”
“Maybe I ain’t got much sense, but I know it ain’t intended for me to work in the mills. The land was where I was put at the start, and it’s where I’m going to be at the end.”
“Why, even your children has got more sense than you, Jeeter. They didn’t stay here to starve. They went to work in the mills. Now, there’s Lizzie Belle up there in —
“Maybe some of them did, but that ain’t saying it was right. Dude, he didn’t go, noway. He’s still here. He’s going to farm the land some day, just like all of us ought to be doing.”
“Dude hasn’t got the sense to leave. If he had the sense your other children had, he wouldn’t stay here. He would be able to see how foolish it is to try to farm like things is now. The rich ain’t aiming to turn loose their money for credit. They’re going to hold on to it all the time to run the mills with.”
Jeeter remembered all that had been said, as he sat on his heels by the chimney, leaning against the warm bricks in the late February sun. He had heard men in Fuller say things like that dozens of times, and it always had ended in his walking out and leaving them. None of them understood how he felt about the land when the plowing season came each spring.
The feeling was in him again. This time he felt it more deeply than ever, because in all the past six or seven years when he had wanted to raise a crop he had kept his disappointment from crushing his spirit by looking forward to the year when he could farm again. But this year he felt that if he did not get the seed-cotton and guano in the ground he would never be able to try again. He knew he could not go on forever waiting each year for credit and never receiving it, because he was becoming weaker each day, and soon he would not be able to walk between the plow-handles even if credit were provided for him.
It was because of his discouragement that the odor of wood and sedge smoke and of newly turned earth now filling the air, was so strong and pungent. Farmers everywhere were burning over the woods and the broom-sedge fields, and plowing the earth in the old cotton lands and in the new grounds.
The urge he felt to stir the ground and to plant cotton in it, and after that to sit in the shade during the hot months watching the plants sprout and grow, was even greater than the pains of hunger in his stomach. He could sit calmly and bear the feeling of hunger, but to be compelled to live and look each day at the unplowed fields was an agony he believed he could not stand many more days.
His head dropped forward on his knees, and sleep soon overcame him and brought a peaceful rest to his tired heart and body.
Chapter XIV
DUDE AND SISTER BESSIE came back at sunset. Dude was blowing the horn a mile away, when Jeeter first heard it, and he and Ada ran out to the road to watch them come. The horn made a pretty sound, Jeeter thought, and he liked the way Dude blew it. He was pressing the horn button and taking his finger off every few seconds, like the firemen who blew the engine whistles when they were leaving the coal chute.