Tobacco Road (3 page)

“This raft of women and children is all the time bellowing for snuff and rations, too. It don’t make no difference that I ain’t got nothing to buy it with—they want it just the same. I reckon, Lov, I’ll just have to wait for the good Lord to provide. They tell me He takes care of His people, and I’m waiting for Him to take some notice of me. I don’t reckon there’s another man between here and Augusta who’s as bad off as I is. And down the other way, neither, between here and McCoy. It looks like everybody has got goods and credit excepting me. I don’t know why that is, because I always give the good Lord His due. Him and me has always been fair and square with each other. It’s time for Him to take some notice of the fix I’m in. I don’t know nothing else to do, except wait for Him to take notice. It don’t do me no good to try to beg snuff and rations, because ain’t nobody going to give it to me. I’ve tried all over this part of the country, but don’t nobody pay no attention to my requests. They say they ain’t got nothing neither, but I can’t see how that is. It don’t look like everybody ought to be poverty-ridden just because they live on the land instead of going to the mills. If I’ve been a sinful man, I don’t know what it is I’ve done. I don’t seem to remember anything I done powerful sinful. It didn’t used to be like it is now, either. I can recall a short time back when all the merchants in Fuller was tickled to give me credit, and I always had plenty of money to spend then, too. Cotton was selling upwards of thirty cents a pound, and nobody came around to collect debts. Then all of a sudden the merchants in Fuller wouldn’t let me have no more goods on time, and pretty soon the sheriff comes and takes away near about every durn piece of goods I possessed. He took every durn thing I had, excepting that old automobile and the cow. He said the cow wasn’t no good, because she wouldn’t take no freshening, and the automobile tires was all wore out.

“And now I can’t get no credit, I can’t hire out for pay, and nobody wants to take on share-croppers. If the good Lord don’t start bringing me help pretty soon, it will be too late to help me with my troubles.”

Jeeter paused to see if Lov were listening. Lov had his head turned in another direction. He was looking at Ellie May now. She had at last got him to give her some attention.

Ellie May was edging closer and closer to Lov. She was moving across the yard by raising her weight on her hands and feet and sliding herself over the hard white sand. She was smiling at Lov, and trying to make him take more notice of her. She could not wait any longer for him to come to her, so she was going to him. Her harelip was spread open across her upper teeth, making her mouth appear as though she had no upper lip at all. Men usually would have nothing to do with Ellie May; but she was eighteen now, and she was beginning to discover that it should be possible for her to get a man in spite of her appearance.

“Ellie May’s acting like your old hound used to do when he got the itch,” Dude said to Jeeter. “Look at her scrape her bottom on the sand. That old hound used to make the same kind of sound Ellie May’s making, too. It sounds just like a little pig squealing, don’t it?”

“By God and by Jesus, Lov, I want some good eating turnips,” Jeeter said. “I ain’t et nothing all winter but meal and fat-back, and I’m wanting turnips something powerful. All the ones I raised has got them damn-blasted green-gutted worms in them. Where’s you get them turnips at anyhow, Lov? Maybe we could make a trade of some kind or another. I always treated you fair and square. You ought to give them to me, seeing as I ain’t got none. I’ll go down to your house the first thing in the morning and tell Pearl she’s got to stop acting like she does. It’s a durn shame for a gal to do the way she’s treating you—I’ll tell her she’s got to let you have your rights with her. I never heard of a durn gal sleeping on a pallet on the floor when her husband has got a bed for her, nohow. Pearl won’t keep that up after I tell her about it. That ain’t no way to treat a man when he’s gone to the bother of marrying. It’s time she was knowing it, too. I’ll go down there the first thing in the morning and tell her to get in the bed.”

Lov was paying no attention to Jeeter now. He was watching Ellie May slide across the yard towards him. When she came a little closer, he reached in the sack and took out another turnip, and began taking big bites out of it. He did not bother to wipe the sand from it this time.

Ada shifted the snuff stick to the other side of her mouth again, and watched Ellie May and Lov with gaping jaw.

Dude stood watching Ellie May, too.

“Ellie May’s going to get herself full of sand if she don’t stop doing that,” Dude said. “Your old hound used never to keep it up that long at a time. He didn’t squeal all the time neither, like she’s doing.”

“By God and by Jesus, Lov,” Jeeter said, “I’m wanting turnips. I could come near about chewing up a whole croker sack full between now and bedtime to-night.”

J
EETER’S REITERATED AND
insistent plea for turnips was having less and less effect upon Lov. He was not aware that any one was talking to him. He was interested only in Ellie May now.

“Ellie May’s straining for Lov, ain’t she?” Dude said, nudging Jeeter with his foot. “She’s liable to bust a gut if she don’t look out.”

The inner-tube Jeeter was attempting to patch again was on the verge of falling into pieces. The tires themselves were in a condition even more rotten. And the Ford car, fourteen years old that year, appeared as if it would never stand together long enough for Jeeter to put the tire back on the wheel, much less last until it could be loaded with blackjack for a trip to Augusta. The touring-car’s top had been missing for seven or eight years, and the one remaining fender was linked to the body with a piece of rusty baling wire. All the springs and horsehair had disappeared from the upholstery; the children had taken the seats apart to find out what was on the inside, and nobody had made an attempt to put them together again.

The appearance of the automobile had not been improved by the dropping off of the radiator in the road somewhere several years before, and a rusty lard-can with a hole punched in the bottom was wired to the water pipe on top of the engine in its place. The lard-can failed to fill the need for a radiator, but it was much better than nothing. When Jeeter got ready to go somewhere, he filled the lard pail to overflowing, jumped in, and drove until the water splashed out and the engine locked up with heat. He would get out then and look for a creek so he could fill the pail again. The whole car was like that. Chickens had roosted on it, when there were chickens at the Lesters’ to roost, and it was speckled like a guinea-hen. Now that there were no chickens on the place, no one had ever taken the trouble to wash it off. Jeeter had never thought of doing such a thing, and neither had any of the others.

Ellie May had dragged herself from one end of the yard to the opposite side. She was now within reach of Lov where he sat by his sack of turnips. She was bolder, too, than she had ever been before, and she had Lov looking at her and undisturbed by the sight of her harelip. Ellie May’s upper lip had an opening a quarter of an inch wide that divided one side of her mouth into unequal parts; the slit came to an abrupt end almost under her left nostril. The upper gum was low, and because her gums were always fiery red, the opening in her lip made her look as if her mouth were bleeding profusely. Jeeter had been saying for fifteen years that he was going to have Ellie May’s lip sewed together, but he had not yet got around to doing it.

Dude picked up a piece of rotted weatherboard that had been knocked from the house and threw it at his father. He did not take his gaze from Ellie May and Lov, however. Their actions, and Ellie May’s behavior, held him spellbound.

“What you want now, Dude?” Jeeter said. “What’s the matter with you—chunking weatherboarding at me like that?”

“Ellie May’s horsing,” Dude said.

Jeeter glanced across the yard where Lov and Ellie May were sitting close together. The trunk of a china-berry tree partly obscured his view of all that was taking place, but he could see that she was sitting on Lov’s outstretched legs, astride his knees, and that he was offering her a turnip from the sack beside him.

“Ellie May’s horsing, ain’t she, Pa?” Dude said.

“I reckon I done the wrong thing by marrying Pearl to Lov,” Jeeter said. “Pearl just ain’t made up to be Lov’s woman. She don’t take no interest in Lov’s wants, and she don’t give a cuss what nobody thinks about it. She ain’t the kind of gal to be a wife to Lov. She’s queer. I reckon somehow she wants to be going to Augusta, like the other gals done. None of them ever was satisfied staying here. They ain’t like me, because I think more of the land than I do about staying in a durn cotton mill. You can’t smell no sedge fire up there, and when it comes time to break the land for planting, you feel sick inside but you don’t know what’s ailing you. People has told me about that spring sickness in the mills, I don’t know how many times. But when a man stays on the land, he don’t get to feeling like that this time of year, because he’s right here to smell the smoke of burning broom-sedge and to feel the wind fresh off the plowed fields going down inside of his body. So instead of feeling sick and not knowing what’s wrong down in his body, as it happens in the durn mills, out here on the land a man feels better than he ever did. The spring-time ain’t going to let you fool it by hiding away inside a durn cotton mill. It knows you got to stay on the land to feel good. That’s because humans made the mills. God made the land, but you don’t see Him building durn cotton mills. That’s how I know better than to go up there like the rest of them. I stay where God made a place for me.”

“Ellie May’s acting like she was Lov’s woman,” Dude said.

Ada shifted the weight of her body from one foot to the other. She was standing in the same place on the porch that she had been when Lov first came into the yard. She had been watching Lov and Ellie May for a long time without looking anywhere else.

“Maybe God intended for it to be such,” Jeeter said. “Maybe He knows more about it than us mortals do. God is a wise old somebody. You can’t fool Him! He takes care of little details us humans never stop to think about. That’s why I ain’t leaving the land and going to Augusta to live in a durn cotton mill. He put me here, and He ain’t never told me to get off and go up there. That’s why I’m staying on the land. If I was to haul off and go to the mills, it might be hell to pay, coming and going. God might get mad because I done it and strike me dead. Or on the other hand, He might let me stay there until my natural death, but hound me all the time with little devilish things. That’s the way He makes His punishment sometimes. He just lets us stay on, slow-like, and hounding us every step, until we wish we was a long time dead and in the ground. That’s why I ain’t going to the mills with a big rush like all them other folks around Fuller did. They got up there and all of them has a mighty pain inside for the land, but they can’t come back. They got to stay now. That’s what God’s done to them for leaving the land. He’s going to hound them every step they take until they die.”

“Look at that horsing Ellie May’s doing!” Dude said. “That’s horsing from way back yonder!”

“By God and by Jesus, Lov,” Jeeter shouted across the yard, “what about them there turnips? Has they got them damn-blasted green-gutted worms in them like mine had? I been wanting some good eating turnips since way back last spring. If Captain John hadn’t sold off all his mules and shut off letting me get guano on his credit, I could have raised me a whopping big mess of turnips this year. But when he sold the mules and moved to Augusta, he said he wasn’t going to ruin himself by letting us tenants break him buying guano on his credit in Fuller. He said there wasn’t no sense in trying to run a farm no more—fifty plows or one plow. He said he could make more money out of farming by not running plows. And that’s why we ain’t got no snuff and rations no more. Ada says she’s just bound to have a little snuff now and then, because it sort of staves off hunger, and it does, at that. Every time I sell a load of wood I get about a dozen jars of snuff, even if I ain’t got the money to buy meal and meat, because snuff is something a man is just bound to have. When I has a sharp pain in the belly, I can take a little snuff and not feel hungry all the rest of the day. Snuff is a powerful help to keep a man living.

“But I couldn’t raise no turnips this year. I didn’t have no mule, and I didn’t have no guano. Oh, I had a few measly little rows out there in the field, but a man can’t run no farm unless he’s got a mule to plow it with. A hoe ain’t no good except to chop cotton with, and corn. Ain’t no sense in trying to grow turnips with a hoe. I reckon that’s why them damn-blasted green-gutted worms got in them turnips. I didn’t have no mule to cultivate them with. That’s why they was all wormy.

“Have you been paying attention to what I was saying, Lov? You ain’t never answered me about them turnips yet. I got a powerful gnawing in my belly for turnips. I reckon I like winter turnips just about as bad as a nigger likes watermelons. I can’t see no difference between the two ways. Turnips is about the best eating I know about.”

Lov did not look up. He was saying something to Ellie May, and listening to what she was saying.

Lov had always told Jeeter that he would never have anything to do with Ellie May because she had a harelip. At the time he had made a bargain with Jeeter about Pearl, he said he might consider taking Ellie May if Jeeter would take her to Augusta and get a doctor to sew up her mouth. Jeeter had thought the matter over thoroughly, and decided that it would be best to let Lov take Pearl, because the cost of sewing up the harelip would probably amount to more than he was getting out of the arrangement. Letting Lov take Pearl was then all clear profit to Jeeter. Lov had given him some quilts and nearly a gallon of cylinder oil, besides giving him all of a week’s pay, which was seven dollars. The money was what Jeeter wanted more than anything else, but the other things were badly needed, too.

Jeeter had been intending to take Ellie May to a doctor ever since she was three or four years old, so that when a man came to marry her there would be no drawbacks. But with first one thing and then another turning up every now and then, Jeeter had never been able to get around to it. Some day he would take her, though; he told himself that, every time he had occasion to think about it.