Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [72]
“I don’t think the Lord took to Jeeter none too much,” Sister Bessie said. “Jeeter must have been a powerful sinful man in his prime, because the Lord wasn’t good to him like He is to me. The Lord knows us all like that. He knows when we’re good and when the devil is in us.”
“Well, it don’t make no special difference now,” Lov said. “Jeeter’s dead and gone, and he won’t be bothered no more by wanting to grow things in the ground. That’s what he liked to do more than anything else, but somehow he never got a chance to do it much. Jeeter, he would lots rather grow a big crop of cotton than go to heaven.”
“If he’d gone to Augusta and worked in the cotton mills like the rest of them done, he would have been all right. There ain’t no money for a man like him farming all the time when he can’t get no credit.”
“I reckon Jeeter done right,” Lov contended. “He was a man who liked to grow things in the ground. The mills ain’t no place for a human who’s got that in his bones. The mills is sort of like automobiles—they’re all right to fool around in and have a good time in, but they don’t offer no love like the ground does. The ground sort of looks out after the people who keeps their feet on it. When people stand on planks in buildings all the time, and walk around on hard streets, the ground sort of loses interest in the human.”
Dude came out of the ashes, shaking the black flakes off his shoes and overalls. He sat on the ground and looked on silently. Ellie May still hovered in the distance, as if she were afraid to come any closer to the ashes of the house.
“Ada didn’t get no stylish dress to die in, though,” Lov said. “I sort of hoped she would, too. It’s a pity about that, but it don’t make no difference now. Her old dress was burned off of her in the fire, and she was buried just like God made her. Maybe that was better than having a stylish dress, after all. If she had died of age, or anything like that, she wouldn’t have had no stylish dress, noway. She would have had to be buried in the old one she had. It sort of worked out just right for her. She didn’t know she didn’t have a stylish dress to die in. It didn’t make no difference if it was the right length or not.”
No one mentioned the old grandmother, but Lov was glad she had been killed the day before. He did not feel that it would have been right to bury her body in the same grave with Jeeter and Ada, or even in the same field. They had hated her so much that it would have been taking advantage of her death to put Mother Lester’s body next to theirs. She had lived so long in the house with Jeeter and Ada that she had been considered nothing more than a door-jamb or a length of weather-boarding. But it could be said about her, Lov thought to himself, that she never complained of the treatment she received. Even when she was hungry, or sick, no word had passed her lips. She had lived so long with Ada and Jeeter that she had believed it was useless to try to protest. If she had said anything, Jeeter or Ada would have knocked her down.
Dude was the first to get into the automobile, and Sister Bessie soon followed. They waited for Lov to get in so they could go back to their house and cook breakfast. After he was in, Ellie May came and sat down beside him on the back seat. Dude steered the car out of the yard, and turned down the tobacco road towards the blackened coal chute and the muddy red river.
Almost immediately, Dude began blowing the horn.
When they were going over the first sand hill, Lov looked back through the rear curtain and saw the Lester place. The tall brick chimney standing blackened and tomb-like in the early morning sunlight was the only thing that he could see.
Dude took his hand off the horn-button and looked back at Lov.
“I reckon I’ll get me a mule somewhere and some seed-cotton and guano, and grow me a crop of cotton this year,