God's Little Acre (25 page)

On the bottom step of the porch. Buck sat with his head dropped over his chest. The shotgun was still lying on the ground where it had fallen from his hands. Ty Ty turned completely around to escape the sight of it.

“Blood on my land.” he muttered.

The farm before him looked desolate. The piles of red clay and yellow sand, the wide red craters between, the red soil without vegetation—the land looked desolate. In the shade of the water-oak tree where he stood, Ty Ty felt completely exhausted. He no longer felt strength in his muscles when he thought of the gold in the earth under his farm. He did not know where the gold was, and he did not know how he was going to be able to dig any longer without his strength. There was gold there though, because several nuggets had been found on the farm; he knew there was gold there, but he did not know whether he would be able to continue his search for it. At that moment he felt that there was no use in ever doing anything again. All his life he had lived with the determination of keeping peace in his family. Now it did not matter; nothing mattered now. Nothing mattered any longer, because blood had been spilled on his land—the blood of one of his children.

He thought himself talking to Buck in the dining-room the evening before.

“The trouble with you boys is that you don’t seem to catch on.”

The glare of the sun in his eyes reminded him of something else.

“Blood on my land,” he repeated. “Blood on my land.”

The three girls in the house were crying through the open doors and windows. While he walked up and down, they came to the porch again, standing there and looking.

“Go get an undertaker or a doctor or something, son.” he told Shaw, nodding his head wearily.

Shaw got into Ty Ty’s car and started to Marion. They stood on the porch watching the cloud of yellow dust left behind to settle over the roadside.

Ty Ty tried to force his eyes upon the floor so he would not lift them to look at his desolate land. He knew if he looked at it again he would feel a sinking sensation in his body. Something out there repelled him. It was no longer as it had been before. The piles of earth had always made him feel excitement; now they made him feel like turning his head away and never looking out there again. The mounds even had a different color now, and the soil of his land was nothing like earth he had ever seen before. There had never been any vegetation out there, but he had never realized the lack of it before. Over on the other side of the farm, where the newground was, there was vegetation, because the top soil in the newground had not been covered with piles of sand and clay in one place, and big yawning holes in others. He wished then that he had the strength to spread out his arms and smooth the land as far as he could see, leveling the ground by filling the holes with the mounds of earth. He realized how impotent he was by his knowledge that he would never be able to do that. He felt heavy at heart.

“Son,” he said to Buck, looking off into the distance, “son, the sheriff—”

Buck raised his head for the first time and looked up into the day. He heard his father speaking to him, and he knew what had been said.

“Oh, Pa!” Rosamond screamed, standing in the door.

Ty Ty waited to hear if she would say anything else. He knew there was nothing else to say. There was no more for him to hear.

He got up and walked from one corner of the house to the other, passing in front of Buck, his lips compressed grimly, his eyes feeble.

“Son,” he said, stopping at the steps, “son, the sheriff will be hearing about it when Shaw gets to town.”

The girls came running down the steps to his side. Rosamond threw her arms around Buck, hugging him with all her might. Griselda was beside him crying.

“The good Lord blessed me with three of the prettiest girls a man ever had in his house. He was good to me that way, because I know I don’t deserve it all.”

Darling Jill had begun to cry audibly. They were all close to Ty Ty, hugging Buck in their arms.

“The good Lord blessed me that way, but He puts sorrow in my heart to pay for it. It looks like a good thing and a bad thing always have to go hand-in-hand. You don’t get the one without the other, ever.”

Griselda held Buck’s head against her breast, stroking his hair and kissing his face. She tried to make Buck speak to her, but he closed his eyes and said nothing.

“There was a mean trick played on us somewhere. God put us in the bodies of animals and tried to make us act like people. That was the beginning of trouble. If He had made us like we are, and not called us people, the last one of us would know how to live. A man can’t live, feeling himself from the inside, and listening to what the preachers say. He can’t do both, but he can do one or the other. He can live like we were made to live, and feel himself on the inside, or he can live like the preachers say, and be dead on the inside. A man has got God in him from the start, and when he is made to live like a preacher says to live, there’s going to be trouble. If the boys had done like I tried to get them to do, there never would have been all this trouble. The girls understand, and they are willing to live like God made them to live; but the boys go off and hear fools talk and they come back here and try to run things counter to God. God made pretty girls and He made men, and there was enough to go around. When you try to take a woman or a man and hold him off all for yourself, there ain’t going to be nothing but trouble and sorrow the rest of your days.”

Buck stood up, straightening his shoulders. He had one arm around Griselda, holding her while she clung to him and kissed him.

“I feel like the end of the world has struck me,” Ty Ty said. “It feels like the bottom has dropped completely out from under me. I feel like I’m sinking and can’t help myself.”

“Don’t talk like that, Pa,” Darling Jill said, hugging him. “It makes me feel so bad when you say that.”

Buck broke Griselda’s grip around him and pushed her hands from him. She ran and threw herself upon him frantically. He could not move with her holding him.

“Son,” Ty Ty said, looking out across the field piled high with earth, “son, the sheriff—”

Buck bent over and kissed Griselda full on the lips, pressing her closely for a long time. Then he pushed her away.

“Buck, where are you going?” she cried.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said.

She fell upon the steps and covered her face. Darling Jill sat beside her, holding her head in her lap.

Buck went out of sight around the corner of the house, and Ty Ty followed him a moment later, walking slowly behind him. Buck climbed the fence on the other side of the well and walked in a straight line across the fields towards the newground on the other side of the farm. Ty Ty stopped at the fence and went no further. He stood there, leaning against it for support, while Buck walked slowly over the field to the newground.

He remembered then that God’s little acre had been brought back to the house, and all the more acutely he realized that Jim Leslie had been killed upon it. But it was Buck that Ty Ty was thinking of at that moment, and he willed that God’s little acre follow Buck, stopping when he did so that he would always be upon it. He watched Buck go towards the new-ground, and he was glad he had thought of God’s little acre in time to have it follow Buck, stopping where Buck stopped so that his son would be upon it no matter where he went.

“Blood on my land,” Ty Ty said aloud. “Blood on my land.”

After a while he could no longer see Buck, and he turned towards the house and walked to the side of the big hole. The moment he looked down into the crater, he felt a consuming desire to go down to the bottom of it and dig. He went down into the hole slowly. His back was a little stiff, and his knees were weak. He was getting to be old, digging in the holes. Soon he would be too old to dig any more.

He picked up Shaw’s shovel and began throwing loose earth over his shoulders. Some of it rolled back, but most of it remained up above. When the platform was full, he would have to climb up there and shovel the earth to the next platform. They were so deep now that the earth had to be handled four or five times before it was finally thrown out at the top. The hole was widening, too. The house would be undermined if some additional supports were not cut in the woods and drawn by the mules. He would have to send Black Sam and Uncle Felix with the mules to draw six or seven large logs the next morning.

Ty Ty did not know how long he had been digging when he heard Griselda calling him from the top of the ground.

“What’s the matter, Griselda?” he asked, leaning wearily against the shovel.

“Where’s that shotgun, Pa?” she asked. “Have you seen it?”

He waited a little while before answering her. He was too tired to speak until he had rested for a few moments.

“No, Griselda,” he said finally. “I haven’t seen it. I haven’t got time to help you look for it now.”

“Where in the world is it then, Pa? It was lying in the yard, and it’s not there now.”

“Griselda,” he said, dropping his head so he would not have to look up at her, “Griselda, when Buck went for a walk, he carried it with him.”

There was no sound above him on the rim of the crater, and presently he looked up to see if Griselda was still looking down at him. She was not within sight, but he distinctly heard the voices of Darling Jill and Rosamond raised in excitement somewhere up there on the top of the ground. He bent over his shovel, kicking the blade into the clay with his foot, and wondering how soon Shaw would come back to help him dig.

Erskine Caldwell (1903–1987) was the author of twenty-five novels, numerous short stories, and a dozen nonfiction titles, most depicting the harsh realities of life in the American South during the Great Depression. His books have sold tens of millions of copies, with
God’s Little Acre
having sold more than fourteen million copies alone. Caldwell’s sometimes graphic realism and unabashedly political themes earned him the scorn of critics and censors early in his career, though by the end of his life he was acknowledged as a giant of American literature.

Caldwell was born in 1903 in Moreland, Georgia. His father was a traveling preacher, and his mother was a teacher. The Caldwell family lived in a number of Southern states throughout Erskine’s childhood. Caldwell’s tour of the South exposed him to cities and rural areas that would eventually serve as backdrops for his novels and stories. After high school, he briefly attended Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina, where he played football but did not earn a degree. He also took classes at the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania. During this time, Caldwell began to develop the political sensibilities that would inform much of his writing. A deep concern for economic and social injustice, also partly influenced by his religious upbringing, would become a hallmark of Caldwell’s writing.

Much of Caldwell’s education came from working. In his twenties he played professional sports for a brief time, and was also a mill worker, cotton picker, and held a number of other blue collar jobs. Caldwell married his college sweetheart and the couple began having children. After the family settled in Maine in 1925, Caldwell began placing stories in magazines, eventually publishing his first story collection after F. Scott Fitzgerald recommended his writing to famed editor Maxwell Perkins.

Two early novels,
Tobacco Road
(1932) and
God’s Little Acre
(1933), made Caldwell famous, but this was not initially due to their literary merit. Both novels depict the South as beset by racism, ignorance, cruelty, and deep social inequalities. They also contain scenes of sex and violence that were graphic for the time. Both books were banned from public libraries and other venues, especially in the South. Caldwell was prosecuted for obscenity, though exonerated.

The 1930s and 1940s were an incredibly productive time for Caldwell. He published a number of novels and nonfiction works that brilliantly captured the tragedy of American life during the Depression years. His novels took an unflinching look at race and murder, as in
Trouble in July
(1940), religious hypocrisy, as in
Journeyman
(1935), and greed, as in
Georgia Boy
(1943). In 1937 he partnered with his second wife, Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer, to produce a nonfiction travelogue of the Depression-era South called
You Have Seen Their Faces
.

Through the decades, Caldwell continued to focus his attention on the dehumanizing force of poverty, whether in the South or overseas. Caldwell’s reputation as a novelist grew even as he pursued journalism and screenwriting for Hollywood. He adapted some of his best-known novels into screenplays, including
God’s Little Acre
and
Tobacco Road
, directed by John Ford. As a journalist, he worked as a war correspondent during World War II and wrote travel pieces from every corner of the globe. In 1965 he traveled through the South and wrote about the racial attitudes he encountered in his heralded
In Search of Bisco
.

Caldwell spent much of his later years traveling and writing while living with his fourth wife, Virginia, in Arizona. A lifelong smoker, Caldwell died of lung cancer in 1987.