Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [62]
“I don’t reckon that makes no difference to Tom now,” she said. “He’s looking after his own self.”
“I wish I had my young age back again. I wouldn’t beg of no man, not even my own son. But Tom ain’t like he used to be. Looks like he would send me and his old Ma a little bit of money.”
“Tom said to tell you to go to hell, too,” Dude told Jeeter.
Bessie jumped forward, clutching Dude by the neck, and shook him until it looked as if his head would twist off and fall on the ground. She continued to shake him until he succeeded in escaping from her grasp.
“You shouldn’t have told Jeeter that,” she shouted at Dude. “That’s a wicked thing to say. I don’t know nothing more sinful. The devil is trying to take you away from me so I can’t make a preacher out of you.”
“Christ Almighty!” he shouted at her. “You come near about killing me! I didn’t say that—Tom said it. I was just telling him what Tom said. I didn’t say it! You ought to keep off me. I didn’t do nothing to you.”
“Praise the Lord,” Bessie said. “You ain’t never going to make a preacher if you talk like that. I thought you said you was going to stop your cussing. Why don’t you quit it?”
“I ain’t going to say that no more,” Dude pleaded. He remembered that the automobile belonged to her. “I wouldn’t have said it that time if you hadn’t hurt my neck shaking me so hard.”
Jeeter walked around the automobile, trying to recover from the shock of hearing what they told him Tom had said. He could not believe that Tom had developed into a man who would tell his father to go to hell. He knew Tom must have changed a great deal since he knew him.
He stopped at the rear of the automobile and was looking at the rack where the spare tire and extra wheel had been, when he saw the great dent in the body. He stared at it until Dude and Bessie stopped talking.
“You won’t be fit to preach a sermon next Sunday if you cuss like that,” she was saying. “Good folks don’t want to have God send them sermons by cussing preachers.”
“I ain’t going to say it no more. I ain’t never going to cuss no more.”
Jeeter motioned to them to come to the back of the car. He pointed to the dent in the body. The centre of it had been knocked in about ten or twelve inches, dividing the body into two almost equal halves.
“What done that?” he asked, still pointing.
“We was backing out from the cross-tie camp and ran smack into a big pine tree,” Bessie said hesitantly. “I don’t know what made it happen. Looks like everything has tried to ruin my new automobile. Ain’t nothing like it was when I paid eight hundred dollars for it in Fuller the first of the week.”
Dude ran his hands over the dent. The cracked paint dropped to the white sand. He tried to make the dent look smaller by rubbing it.
“It ain’t hurt the running of it none, though, has it?” Jeeter said. “That’s only the body smashed in. It runs good yet, don’t it?”
“I reckon so,” Bessie said, “but it does make a powerful lot of noise when it’s running down hill—and up hill, too.”
Ada came over and looked at the dent in the back of the car. She rubbed her hands over it until more of the cracked black paint dropped off and fell on the white sand at her feet.
“What does Tom look like now?” Ada asked Bessie. “I reckon he don’t look like he used to, no more.”
“He looks a lot like Jeeter,” she said. “There ain’t much resemblance in him and you.”
“Humph!” Ada said. “There was a time when I’d declared it was the other way around.”
Jeeter looked at Ada, and then at Bessie. He could not understand what Ada was talking about.
“What did Tom say when you told him you and Dude was married now?” Jeeter said.
“He didn’t say nothing much. Looked to me like he didn’t care one way or the other.”
“Tom said she used to be a two-bit slut when he knowed her a long time back,” Dude said. “He told it right to her, but she didn’t say nothing. I reckon he knowed what he was talking about, because she didn