Halley (5 page)

“Wanna bet?” said Gid in a low voice.

They were halfway home when the skies opened up.

5. Picking Cotton

“I seen Buck on the train,” Robbie announced at supper Monday night. “His head was hanging out the window. I could tell he knew me.”

“So that’s where you was after dinner, instead of being here to help me paint my Jesus signs,” said Pa Franklin.

Fortunately for Robbie, painting a new batch of signs had put the old man in a good mood, so he didn’t assign punishment.

“The rain last night worked out good,” Pa Franklin declared. “Damp cotton will weigh heavier than dry. I’m hoping for a week of picking at Samson’s before Calvin’s cotton comes in and loses us our ride. If we can get a week of picking, I’m figuring I’ll have half the money for my first
big
Jesus message.”

Halley asked the question everyone else at the table was likely wondering. “Big Jesus message? What’s that?”

Pa Franklin smiled. “On the way home yesterday in the rain, the Holy Spirit revealed something to me.”

Gid laughed. “What—that you was wet?”

“Don’t you crack jokes about the Holy Spirit!” warned Pa Franklin. “I seen I ain’t been thinking big enough. I need to make my signs bigger. Lots bigger. Maybe paint ’em on the sides of barns and houses, roofs.”

Gid shook his head. “Ain’t nobody going to allow you to do that.”

“Bet they would if I paid ’em a little bit.”

Gid rolled his eyes heavenward. “Don’t you think the Holy Spirit might druther you use that money to hire somebody to do the washing so your poor old wife don’t have to kill herself bending over a scrub board?”

“Watch your tongue,” said Pa Franklin.

Now that she knew what the cotton earnings would go toward, Halley was praying for more rain. Lots more. Her prayers were not answered, however, so they got up even earlier than usual on Tuesday so they could do the chores before heading to the Calvin place.

At breakfast Gid ruined his father’s good spirits by announcing that he would be working for Ellis Cochran all week.

Pa Franklin was furious. “What?” he said. “Gid, I told you plain that we’d be picking for the Samsons.”

“And I told
you
plain that I wasn’t going to do it. I know exactly why you and Ma want me over there, and it ain’t got much to do with picking cotton.”

“I already give my word.”

Gid pushed back his chair. “Well, I ain’t give mine. I’m a grown man, and I figure I got the right to say where I’m going to work and where I ain’t going to work. I put in five-and-a-half days a week here at home, and when I get an outside job, I give you and Ma near about ever’ cent I earn. If that ain’t good enough for you, maybe I need to move out.”

Ma Franklin spoke up quickly. “Nobody said we don’t appreciate what you do around here, Gid. Fact is, I don’t know how we’d make it without you.”

Gid wasn’t going to be soothed or swayed. He grabbed his lunch pail, threw some biscuits in it, and left.

There was an awkward silence while his footsteps faded away. Even though he’d brought the whole thing on himself, Halley almost pitied her grandfather. It would be embarrassing to explain Gid’s absence to the Calvins, who were giving them a ride to the Samson place.

Kate stood and began clearing the table. “Fix our lunch pails,” she said to Halley.

“Don’t bother with dishes,” Ma Franklin said. “You need to get going. Daylight ain’t far off, and the Calvins will go on without you if you’re late.”

Pa Franklin, Kate, Halley, and Robbie set out walking, each carrying their own lunch. Kate and Halley both wore long sleeves and had sunbonnets dangling on their backs. In addition, Kate wore a pair of Gid’s pants to protect her legs. Halley refused to do this. “I’ll be hot enough the way it is,” she said.

“You’ll be as tanned and scratched as a field hand,” Kate warned.

“Why not?” asked Halley, dodging a mud puddle she was barely able to make out in the breaking daylight. “I
am
a field hand.”

The Calvins were getting into the truck when Pa Franklin and the Owenbys arrived. Halley only had time to scrape the worst of the mud off her shoes before getting into the back of the truck with Robbie and the Calvin siblings. Robbie stood, leaning against the cab with Dooley and Steve. Halley sat nearby on a pile of pick sacks next to Clarice.

“I thought Gid was coming,” Clarice said when the truck started moving.

Halley became very absorbed in grabbing for Robbie. “I think he promised somebody else.”

There was an awkward silence, and then Clarice replied in a cool voice, “Well, I don’t think nobody’s begging him to come. I know
I
ain’t. And you can tell ’im that.”

“Homer Russell’s been asking her to go to the picture show with him,” Lacey confided, “but Clarice has been putting him off, hoping . . .”

Clarice gave her sister an elbow and a frown. “Leave the boy alone, Halley,” she said as the truck hit a series of bumps and Halley grabbed one more time for Robbie. “You worry as much as an old maid school teacher. You couldn’t throw that young’un off this truck if you tried.”

They came to a paved road and soon they reached the beginning of Samson land. It was easy to recognize—it was the best and flattest land in the county. Much of it was rich bottomland next to the river. Long ago it had been a slave plantation, and many people said the Samsons still ran it like one.

In the early morning light Halley had a glimpse of the Samson mansion when they passed the gate. They took the next dirt road to the right and stopped at the edge of a huge cotton field, where other hands, both colored and white, had already begun picking. Across a ravine and up a little rise to the right stood the mansion. To the left, the field eventually ended at a large pasture. Straight ahead, the field sloped gradually downward to a distant line of trees marking the bank of the Coosa River. This was only one of many cotton fields the Samsons owned.

They got out of the truck and stood in the tall dewy grass along the edge of the field. Halley’s dress was soon wet and slapping against her legs. Two empty cotton wagons were parked next to the road just waiting for the bags of picked cotton, and at the nearest one a sour faced man was setting up a scale.

“The foreman,” Clarice whispered. “Mr. Huff.”

“Where’s that piano music coming from?” asked Robbie.

Trust Robbie to notice that. Halley had to listen hard to make it out. It
was
piano music, though no tune she’d ever heard.

“Get your mind off music, boy,” Pa Franklin said. “You’re here to work.”

“I’m not certain I’d call that there music,” said Huff. “Mr. Samson’s daughter, Amelia, is home from New York, France, and all them other places she goes. She don’t play ever’day stuff. She plays stuff us ordinary folks don’t know a thing in the world about—and don’t
want
to know. Give me the Grand Ole Opry anytime.”

Suddenly he looked around and scowled. “Tarnation! There’s that poodle dog of her’n again. She can’t keep ahold of it for ten minutes straight, but let it get chewed up by a real dog, and who’ll get blamed?”

He ran to pick up a small white dog bedecked with ribbons on ears and tail. The dog’s hair was trimmed nearly bare in some places and left in big puffs in others. It was the ugliest dog Halley had ever seen.

The man turned to Robbie. “Son, take this so-called dog up to the big house and knock on the door where the woman is playing the piano.” He looked at Robbie’s wet and dirty feet and legs. “Don’t go inside—just wait at the door for Miss Amelia to come get the dog.”

“Yes sir.” Robbie took the dog and headed toward the mansion.

“Boy, you hurry back!” Pa Franklin called after him before turning to help Mr. Calvin distribute pick sacks. Halley and Kate each got a seven-footer to hook over their shoulder. Halley took Robbie’s sack to hold for him. It was only four feet long, but it would not be easy for him to fill. She had picked enough to know that this first cotton would be the hardest because it grew low on the plant. You had to bend and almost squat to get it. Later, the cotton would be higher and the picking easier.

Mr. Huff decided that Dooley Calvin would be the water boy for the white workers, taking buckets of water to the different pickers about every half hour. “Here’s the bucket and the dipper. You know where the spring is at, don’t you?”

Naturally, Pa Franklin had to give Halley instructions before heading out on his first rows. “Leave the lunch buckets in the truck,” he said, as if he’d caught her trying to snatch one. “Dinner is for dinnertime. As for the cotton, pick clean. Don’t take two rows until you can do a good job on one. Don’t leave tags of cotton. Get all the cotton in one grab. Do what I say, and you’ll get to be a good cotton hand.”

“Robbie and I have both picked before,” Halley reminded him. She could have saved her breath.

“I’m expecting you to pick your weight—or more,” he went on as if she had not spoken.

Clarice rescued her. “Let’s get started, Halley. The day ain’t getting no younger. You can share a row with me. Eva and Lacey are picking together, and when he gets back, Robbie can share a row with Steve.”

As Halley followed Clarice through the wet grass, she saw her grandfather already moving between his two rows, his hands busy. There was no wasted motion, no pauses. She supposed that’s why he was so fast.

Down the field a good distance off, she saw the colored pickers. Halley stared at them curiously, especially a girl about her own age wearing a pink dress. The girl was moving down the row almost as quickly and efficiently as Pa Franklin.

“That’s Opal Gowder,” Clarice said. “The one with a gift.”

“A gift?” asked Halley.

“She’s a child who never did see her father so she can heal people, they say. I don’t know how the Gowders manage to get here so early. They must come the day before and camp out in the field.”

“Maybe they’re kin to some of the people that work on the Samson place year-round,” Eva suggested. “Could be, they stay with them during cotton picking.”

Halley began to pick with energy, trying not to notice her wet skirt slapping against her legs, trying to ignore the cotton boll burrs pricking her hands. She didn’t want to be shamed when the bags were weighed.

The sun came out, and the grass and cotton began drying. Dooley came with the water bucket, and Halley thought of Robbie. She looked toward the big house, and, sure enough, there he was, strolling slowly back as if there was no work to be done. Halley let out an irritated puff of air.

“Leave ’im be,” said Clarice. “How’s the boy ever going to learn if you spend all your time saving him?”

Forcing her eyes from Robbie, Halley went back to picking. As time passed, she found she could talk and pick at the same time. She paused from her work only when Dooley showed up with water.

“Are you and your sisters going to school this year?” she asked Clarice after she drank her fill. She had been thinking on this. If one of the Calvin girls went to the high school in Belton, then Halley would have at least one friend, and she could endure the stuck-up girls like those she’d seen in Belton the day of the move.

“Just Lacey. She says she’s going to go ahead and finish eighth grade at the Springplace school before she quits. Me and Eva already quit. Mama said she couldn’t see no sense in walking to school at Belton.”

“I’m sorry,” Halley said.

Clarice shrugged. “I’m not. Country girls don’t fit in there at the town school, from what I hear. And what would I do with more schooling? Lord knows, I don’t want to be a schoolteacher, which is the only thing I could do with all that learning. I sure wouldn’t want to get me a camera and travel the country taking pictures like that woman people keep seeing in Belton and round about. No, thanks! I want to get married and have me a baby.”

“I want to do something else before I get married,” Halley said. “I want to finish high school, maybe go to college. Maybe be a teacher or a nurse or a doctor.”

Clarice was astounded. “People
talk
about nurses. I guess they’d talk about a woman doctor, too.”

“Do you ever wish you lived in a place where people didn’t talk so blamed much?”

Clarice laughed. “There ain’t no such place, Halley, unless it’s heaven, and I ain’t ready to go there yet.”

Finally it was dinnertime. When they weighed up and emptied their their sacks, Halley found she had sixty pounds. It was almost as much as Kate had picked, so Halley was pleased until her grandfather spoke.

“You can do better,” he said, and then, with the help of Mr. Huff, he lifted his bag and caught it on the hook of the scale. Mr. Huff actually smiled. “Two hundred and two pounds,” he announced. “How do you do it, Preacher Franklin?”

Pa Franklin was happy to explain. As Halley grabbed her lunch pail and headed off to a shady place near the ravine, she heard him telling how to pick with two hands.

The Calvin girls had ham in their biscuits and fried apple pies to finish off with. They insisted that they had brought extra, so Halley finally took one biscuit and a pie. Her mother, who was sitting quietly nearby, refused.

All too soon Mr. Huff bellowed, “Time to go back to work,” and all the pickers trudged back into the field. The rows of cotton were shimmering in the heat. The humidity in the air grew heavier as they neared the river, but Halley’s throat soon felt parched. At last she saw Dooley coming with the water bucket, and she took off her pick sack to stretch.

“Time to get back to work, girl,” yelled her grandfather.

The sun was going down when they weighed up for the last time. Halley’s legs felt too heavy to move, and her shoulder ached from the burden of the cotton sack.

“I’ll be collecting the pay for my daughter and my grandchildren along with mine,” Pa Franklin told Mr. Huff.

They couldn’t even be trusted to have the money in their pockets until they got home, Halley thought.

On the way back to the Calvin place Robbie again stood, leaning over the cab. His fingers were dancing over the metal, playing imaginary music.

Mr. Calvin took pity on them and drove on to the Franklin house.

“Git the mail, girl!” Pa Franklin called out the window when Mr. Calvin slowed to take the turn-off to the Franklin house.