Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [51]
Chapter XV
JEETER DRANK HIS third cup of chicory and cleared his throat. Dude had already left the kitchen and gone to the yard, and Sister Bessie was on the back porch combing her hair. Jeeter went down the back steps and leaned against the well.
“It would be a pretty smart deal if I was to take a load of wood to Augusta to-day,” he said. “Me and Dude’s got a big pile of it all cut and ready to haul. Now, if we was to pile it in the new automobile it wouldn’t take no time to haul it to the city, would it, Bessie?”
She finished combing her hair, stuck half a dozen pins and the rhinestone comb into it, and walked with Jeeter over to the automobile.
“Maybe it would hold a load,” she said. “There ain’t so much room in the back seat, though.”
“Mine holds a fair load, and it ain’t no bigger than that one. They is the same kind of automobiles. The only difference being that yours is near about a brand-new one now.”
Dude turned on the switch and raced the engine. The motor hummed perfectly. The tightness that had bothered Dude the day before had gone, and the engine was in good running order. He blew the horn several times, grinning at Jeeter.
“I’d sort of like to take a trip to Augusta, all right,” Bessie said. “Me and Dude was going there yesterday, before we changed our mind and went down to McCoy instead.”
“It won’t take long to put a load of wood in the back seat,” Jeeter said. “We can leave pretty soon. Dude—you drive the automobile out across the field yonder to that pile of wood we been cutting the past week. I’ll get some pieces of baling wire to bind the load good and tight so it won’t drop off.”
Bessie got in beside Dude, and they started out across the old cotton field towards the grove of blackjack. The field had grown up into four-foot broom-sedge in the past few years. Once it had been the finest piece of tobacco land on the whole farm.
The rows of the last crop of cotton were still there, and as the car gathered speed, the bumps tossed Dude and Bessie up and down so suddenly and so often that they could not keep their seats. Dude grasped the steering-wheel tightly and held himself better than Bessie could; Bessie bobbed up and down as the car raced over the old cotton rows and her head hit the top every time there was a bump. They had gone about a quarter of a mile, and were almost at the edge of the grove where the pile of blackjack was, when suddenly there was a jarring crash that stopped the car dead in its tracks.
Dude was thrown against the steering-wheel, and Bessie shot forward off the seat and struck her head against the wind-shield. Where her forehead had hit the glass there were a hundred or more cracks, branching out like a wet spider-web in the sunshine. None of the glass shattered, though, and the wind-shield was still intact. She did not know what had happened.
“Praise the Lord,” Bessie shouted, pulling herself out of her cramped position on the floor-boards. “What’s we done this time, Dude?”
“I reckon we rammed into a stump,” he said. “I clear forgot about them old dead stumps out here in the sedge. I couldn’t see nothing at all for the sedge. It covers everything on the ground.”
Both of them got out and went to the front. A two-foot stump had stopped them.
The blackened pine stump, hidden from view by the four-foot wall of brown broom-sedge, stood squarely in front of the axle. It was partly decayed, and except for the heart of it, the car would have knocked it down and gone ahead without any trouble. As it was, the axle was not badly bent; actually the car was going only fifteen miles an hour, and there had not been enough force to twist the axle out of shape. The wheels had sprung forward a few inches, but aside from that, there was nothing to worry about. The car was still almost as good as new.
Jeeter came running up just then with his hands and arms full of rusty baling wire, which he had found behind the corn-crib.
They did not have to tell him what had happened, because he could see just as well as they did that the front axle had hit the stump and sprung the wheels forward several inches.