Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [48]
“That’s right,” she said. “I ain’t letting it worry me none, because it wasn’t Dude’s fault. He was looking at the big turpentine still alongside the road, and I was too, when the wagon got in our way. The nigger driving it ought to have had enough sense to get out of our way when he heard us coming.”
“Wasn’t you blowing the horn then, Dude?” Jeeter said.
“Not right then I wasn’t, because I was busy looking at the big still. I never saw one that big nowhere before. It was almost as big as a corn-liquor still, only it wasn’t as shiny-looking.”
“It’s a shame to get the new car smashed up so soon already, though,” Bessie said, going back and wiping off the dust. “It was brand new only a short time before noon, and now it’s only sundown.”
“It was that nigger,” Dude said. “If he hadn’t been asleep on the wagon it wouldn’t have happened at all. He was plumb asleep till it woke him up and threw him out in the ditch.”
“He didn’t get hurt much, did he?” Jeeter asked.
“I don’t know about that,” Dude said. “When we drove off again, he was still lying in the ditch. The wagon turned over on him and mashed him. His eyes was wide open all the time, but I couldn’t make him say nothing. He looked like he was dead.”
“Niggers will get killed. Looks like there ain’t no way to stop it.”
The sun had been down nearly half an hour and the chill dampness of an early spring night settled over the ground. The grandmother had already gone into the house and got into bed. Ada went up on the porch, hugging her arms across her chest to keep warm, and Bessie started inside, too.
Dude and Jeeter stood around the car until it was so dark they could not see it any longer, and then they too went inside.
The glare of woods-fire soon began to light the sky on the horizons, and the smell of pine smoke filled the damp evening air. Fires were burning in all directions; some of them had been burning a week or longer, while others had been burning only since that afternoon.
In the spring, the farmers burned over all of their land. They said the fire would kill the boll-weevils. That was the reason they gave for burning the woods and fields, whenever anybody asked why they did not stop burning up young pine seedlings and standing timber. But the real reason was because everybody had always burned the woods and fields each spring, and they saw no cause for abandoning life-long habits. Burning fields and woods seemed to them to be as necessary as drilling guano in the cotton fields to make the plants yield a large crop. If the wood that was burned had been sawn into lumber or cut into firewood, instead of burning to ashes on the ground, there would have been something for them to sell. Boll-weevils were never killed in any great numbers by the fire; the cotton plants had to be sprayed with poison in the summer, anyway. But everybody had always burned over the land each spring, and they continued if only for the reason that their fathers had done it. Jeeter always burned over his land, even though there was no reason in the world why he should do it; he never raised crops any more. This was why the land was bare of everything except broom-sedge and blackjack; the sedge grew anew each year, and the hottest fire could not hurt those tough scrub oaks.
Inside the house the women gathered in the bedroom in the darkness and waited for Jeeter and Dude. The grandmother was already in bed, covered with her ragged quilts. Ellie May had gone out into the broom-sedge and had not yet returned. Bessie and Ada sat on the beds waiting.
The three beds had always held all the Lesters, even when there were sometimes as many as eight or nine of them there. Occasionally, some had slept on pallets on the floor in summer, but in winter it was much warmer for every one in the beds. Now that all of the children had left except Dude and Ellie May, there was just enough room for every one. Bessie had a house of her own, a three-room tenant house on the last sand hill at the river; but the roof was rotten, and the shingles had blown away, and when it rained everything in the three rooms was soaked with water.