Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [47]
“That’s Dude blowing the horn,” Jeeter said. “Don’t he blow it pretty, though? He always liked to blow the horn near about as much as he liked to drive an automobile. He used to cuss a lot because the horn on my car wouldn’t make the least bit of a sound. The wires got pulled loose and I never had time to tie them up again.”
Ada stood in the road watching the shiny new car come nearer and nearer. It looked like a big black chariot, she said, running away from a cyclone. The dust blown up behind did look like the approach of a cyclone.
“Ain’t that the prettiest sight to see?” she said.
“That’s Dude driving it, and blowing the horn, too,” he said. “It makes a pretty sound when it blows, don’t it, Ada?”
Jeeter was proud of his son.
“I wish all my children was here to see it,” Ada said “Lizzie Belle used to like to look at automobiles, and ride in them, too, more than anybody I ever saw. Maybe she’s got herself one now. I wish I knowed.”
Sister Bessie and Dude drove up slowly, and turned into the yard. Jeeter and Ada ran along beside the car until it stopped beside the chimney of the house. Ellie May saw everything from around the corner of the house.
“How far a piece did you go riding?” Jeeter asked Bessie as she opened the door and stepped out on the ground. “You been gone clear the whole afternoon. Did you go to Augusta?”
Bessie caught up the bottom of her skirt and began wiping off the dust. Ada and Ellie May were already at work on the other side of the car. The grandmother was thirty feet away, standing behind a chinaberry tree and looking around the trunk at the automobile. Dude sat under the steering-wheel blowing the horn.
“We went and we went till we went clear to McCoy,” she said. “We just kept on going till we got there.”
“That’s about thirty miles, ain’t it?” Jeeter asked excitedly. “Did you go clear that far and back?”
“That’s what we did,” Dude said. “I ain’t never been that far away from here before. It’s a pretty country down that way, too.”
“Why didn’t you go to Augusta?” Jeeter asked. “You went down to the crossroads and I thought sure you was going to Augusta.”
“We didn’t go that way,” Dude said, “we went the other way—toward McCoy. And we went clear to McCoy, too.”
Jeeter walked to the front of the car and looked at it. Dude climbed out and stopped blowing the horn for a while.
“Praise the Lord,” Jeeter said, “what went and done that?”
He pointed to the right front fender and headlight. Everybody stopped dusting and gathered around the radiator. The fender was twisted and crumpled until it looked as if somebody had taken a sledge-hammer and tried to see how completely he could maul it. The right headlight had been knocked off. Only a piece of twisted iron and a small strand of insulated wire remained where it had been. The fender had been mashed back against the hood.
“It was a wagon what done that,” Dude said. “We was coming back from McCoy, and I was looking out at a big turpentine still, and then the first thing I knowed we was smashed smack into the back end of a two-horse wagon.”
Bessie looked at the mashed fender and missing headlight, but she said nothing. She could hardly blame it on the devil this time, as she had been riding in the car herself when the accident occurred, but it seemed to her that God ought to have taken better care of it, especially after she had stopped and prayed about it when she bought the automobile that morning in Fuller.
“It don’t hurt the running of it none, though, does it?” Jeeter asked.
“It runs like it was brand new yet,” Dude said. “And the horn wasn’t hurt none at all. It blows just as pretty as it did this morning.”
The fender had been crumpled beyond repair. It was lying against the hood of the car and, except for the jagged edges, it appeared as if it had been removed. Apparently nothing else, with the exception of the headlight, had been damaged; there were no dents in the body, and the wheels and axle seemed to stand straight and in line. The broken spring made the left rear end sag, however. “That don’t hurt it none,” Jeeter said. Don’