Tobacco Road (4 page)

At the time Lov had married Pearl, he said he liked Ellie May more than he did her, but that he did not want to have a wife with a harelip. He knew the negroes would laugh at him. That was the summer before; several weeks before he had begun to like Pearl so much that he was doing everything he could think of to make her stop sleeping on a pallet on the floor. Pearl’s long yellow curls hanging down her back, and her pale blue eyes, turned Lov’s head. He thought there was not a more beautiful girl anywhere in the world. And for that matter, no man who had ever had the opportunity of seeing Pearl had ever gone away without thinking the same thing. It would have been impossible for her to dress herself, or even to disfigure herself, in a way that would make her plain or ordinary-looking. She became more beautiful day by day.

But Lov’s wishes were unheeded. Pearl, if it was possible, was more determined than ever by that time to keep away from him. And now that Ellie May had dragged herself all the way across the yard, and was now sitting on his legs, Lov was thinking only of Ellie May. Aside from her harelip, Ellie May was just as desirable as the next girl a man would find in the sand-hill country surrounding the town of Fuller. Lov was fully aware of that. He had tried them all, white girls and black.

“Lov ain’t thinking about no turnips,” Dude said, in reply to his father. “Lov’s wanting to hang up with Ellie May. He don’t care nothing about the way her face looks now—he ain’t aiming to kiss her. Ain’t nobody going to kiss her, but that ain’t saying nobody wouldn’t fool with her. I heard niggers talking about it not long ago down the road at the old sawmill. They said she could get all the men she wanted, if she would keep her face hid.”

“Quit chunking that there ball against that old house,” Jeeter said angrily. “You’ll have the wall worn clear in two, if you don’t stop doing that all the time. The old house ain’t going to stand up much longer, noway. The way you chunk that ball, it’s going to pitch over and fall on the ground some of these days. I declare, I wish you had more sense than you got.”

The old grandmother came hobbling out of the field with the sack of dead twigs on her back. She shuffled her feet through the deep sand of the tobacco road, and scuffed them over the hard sand of the yard, looking neither to the right nor to the left. At the bottom of the front steps she dropped the load from her shoulder and sat down to rest a while before going to the kitchen. Her groans were louder than usual, as she began rubbing her sides. Sitting on the bottom step with her feet in the sand and her chest almost touching her sharp knees, she looked more than ever like a loosely tied bag of soiled black rags. She was unmindful of the people around her, and no one was more than passingly aware that she had been anywhere or had returned. If she had gone to the thicket and had not returned, no one would have known for several days that she was dead.

Jeeter watched Lov from the corners of his eyes while he tried to make another patch stick to the cracked rubber inner-tube. He had noticed that Lov was several yards from the sack of turnips, and he waited patiently while the distance grew more and more each minute. Lov had forgotten how important the safety of the turnips was. So long as Ellie May continued to tousle his hair with her hands he would forget that he had turnips. She had made him forget everything.

“What you reckon they’re going to do next?” Dude said. “Maybe Lov’s going to take her down to the coal chute and keep her there all day.”

Ada, who had been standing on the porch all that time as motionless as one of the uprights, suddenly pulled her dress tighter over her chest. The cool February wind was barely to be felt out in the sun, but on the porch and in the shade it went straight to the bones. Ada had been ill with pellagra for several years, and she had said she was always cold except in midsummer.

“Lov’s going to big her,” Dude said. “He’s getting ready to do it right now, too. Look at him crawl around—he acts like an old stud-horse. He ain’t never let her get that close before. He said he wouldn’t never get close enough to Ellie May to touch her with a stick, because he don’t like the looks of her mouth. But he ain’t paying no mind to it now, is he? I bet he don’t even know she’s got a slit-lip on her. If he does know it, he don’t give a good goddam now.”

Several negroes were coming up the road, walking towards Fuller. They were several hundred feet away when they first noticed the Lesters and Lov in the yard, but it was not until they were almost in front of the house that they noticed what Lov and Ellie May were doing in the farther side near a chinaberry tree. They stopped laughing and talking, and slowed down until they were almost standing still.

Dude hollered at them, calling their names; but none of them spoke. They stopped and watched.

“Howdy, Captain Lov,” one of them said.

Lov did not hear. The Lesters paid no more attention to the negroes. Negroes passing the house were in the habit of looking at the Lesters, but very few of them ever had anything to say. Among themselves they talked about the Lesters, and laughed about them; they spoke to other white people, stopping at their houses to talk. Lov was one of the white persons with whom they liked to talk.

Jeeter screwed the pump hose into the inner-tube valve and tried to work some air inside. The pump was rusty, the stem was bent, and the hose was cracked at the base so badly that air escaped before it ever had a chance to reach the valve. It would take Jeeter a week to pump thirty pounds of air into the tire at that rate. He could have put more air into the tires if he had attempted to blow them up with his mouth.

“It looks like I ain’t going to get started to Augusta with a load of wood before next week,” he said. “I wish I had a mule. I could haul a load there near about every day if I had one. The last time I drove this automobile to Augusta every one of the durn tires went flat before I could get there and back. I reckon about the best thing to do is to fill them all full of hulls and ride that way. That’s what a man told me to do, and I reckon he was just about right. These old inner-tubes and tires ain’t much good no longer.”

The three negroes went a few steps farther down the road and stopped again. They stayed within sight of the yard, waiting to see what Lov was doing. After he had not answered them the first time they spoke, they knew he did not want them to bother him again.

Dude had thrown the baseball aside and had walked closer to Ellie May and Lov. He sat down on the ground close to them, and waited to see what they were going to do next. Lov had stopped eating turnips, and Ellie May had eaten only a part of one.

“Them niggers don’t believe Lov’s going to,” Dude said. “They said down at the old sawmill that wouldn’t nobody fool with Ellie May, unless it was in the nighttime. I reckon Lov would say so himself, afterwards.”

J
EETER CAREFULLY LAID
the pump aside and crept stealthily to the corner of the house. He propped his feet and leaned against the rotten weatherboards to wait. From where he stood, he could see everything. When Jeeter looked straight ahead, Ellie May and Lov were in full view; and if he had wanted to see Ada he could have turned his head slightly and seen her standing on the porch. There was nothing for him to do now but wait. Lov was moving farther and farther away from the sack.

Ada once more rolled the snuff stick to the other corner of her mouth. She had been watching Lov and Ellie May ever since they began getting together, and the closer they crawled to each other, the more calm she became. She was waiting, too, to ask Lov to make Pearl come to see her soon. Pearl had not been there since the day she was married.

Pearl was so much like Ada, in both appearance and behavior, that no one could have mistaken them for other than mother and daughter. When Pearl married Lov, Ada had told her she ought to run away from him before she began bearing children, and go to Augusta and live at the mills. Pearl, however, did not have the courage to run away alone. She was afraid. She did not know what would happen to her in the cotton mills, and she was too young to understand the things she heard about life there. Even though she was between twelve and thirteen years old, she was still afraid of the dark, and she often cried through most of the night as she lay trembling on her pallet on the floor. Lov was in the room, and the doors were closed, but the creep of darkness seemed to bring an unbearable feeling of strangulation. She had never told any one how much she feared the dark nights, and no one had known why she cried so much. Lov thought it was something to do with her mind. Dude did not have very much sense, and neither did one or two of the other children, and it was natural for him to think that Pearl was afflicted in the same way. The truth was, Pearl had far more sense than any of the Lesters; and that, like her hair and eyes, had been inherited from her father. The man who was her father had passed through the country one day, and had never been seen since. He had told Ada that he came from Carolina and was on his way to Texas, and that was all she knew about him.

Lately, however, Pearl was beginning to lose some of her fear. After eight months in the house with Lov she had gradually grown braver, and she had even ventured to think that some day she could run away to Augusta. She did not want to live on the sand ridge. The sight of the muddy Savannah swamps on one side and the dusty black structure of the coal chute on the other was not as beautiful as the things she had once seen in Augusta. She had been to Augusta once with Jeeter and Ada, and had seen with her own eyes girls who were laughing and carefree. She did not know whether they worked in the cotton mills, but it made little difference to her. Down there on the tobacco road no one ever laughed. Down there girls had to chop cotton in the summer, pick it in the fall, and cut fire-wood in winter.

Jeeter pushed himself erect from the corner of the house, and began moving slowly across the yard. He lifted one foot, held it in the air several seconds, and put it on the ground in front of him. He had crept up on rabbits like that many times in the woods and thickets. They would be sitting in a hollow log, or in a hole in a gully, and Jeeter would creep upon them so noiselessly that they never knew how he caught them. Now he was creeping up on Lov.

Half way across the yard Jeeter suddenly broke into a terrific plunge that landed him upon the sack of turnips almost as quickly as the bat of an eye. He could have waited a few minutes longer, and reached it with the same ease with which he caught rabbits; but there was no time to lose now, and he was far more anxious to get the turnips than he had ever been to catch a rabbit.

He hugged the sack desperately in both arms, squeezing it so tight that watery turnip juice squirted through the loosely woven burlap in all directions. The juice squirted into his eyes, almost blinding him; but it was as pleasant to Jeeter as summer rain-water, and far more welcome.

Ada took one step forward, balancing herself against one of the porch uprights; Dude jumped to his feet, holding to the chinaberry tree behind him.

Lov turned around just in time to see Jeeter grab the sack and hug it in his arms. Ellie May tried to hold Lov where he was, but he succeeded in twisting out of her arms and dived for Jeeter and the turnips. Ellie May turned over just in time to clutch wildly at his foot, and he fell sprawling from mid-air to the hard ground.

Each of the Lesters, without a word having been spoken, was prepared for concerted action without delay. Dude dashed across the yard towards his father; Ada ran down the porch steps, and the old grandmother was only a few feet behind her. All of them gathered around Jeeter and the sack, waiting. Ellie May still clung to Lov’s foot, pulling him back each time he succeeded in wiggling his body a few inches closer to Jeeter. The tips of Lov’s fingers never got closer than three feet to the sack.

“I didn’t tell you no lie about Ellie May, did I?” Dude said. “Didn’t I tell you right, Pa?”

“Hush up, you Dude,” Ada scowled. “Can’t you see your Pa ain’t got no time to talk about nothing?”

Jeeter thrust his chin over the top of the sack and looked straight at Lov. Lov’s eyes were bulging and blood-shot. He thought of the seven and a half miles he had walked that morning, all the way to the other side of Fuller and back again, and what he saw now made him sick.

Ellie May was doing her best to pull Lov back where he had been. He was trying to get away so he could protect his turnips and keep the Lesters out of the sack. The very thing he had at first been so careful to guard against when he stopped at the house had happened so quickly he did not know what to think about it. That, however, had been before Ellie May began sliding her bare bottom over the sandy yard towards him. He realized now what a fool he had been—to lose his head, and his turnips, too.

The three negroes were straining their necks to see everything. They had watched Ellie May and Lov with growing enthusiasm until Jeeter suddenly descended upon the sack, and now they were trying to guess what would happen next in the yard.

Ada and the old grandmother found two large and heavy sticks, and tried to pry Lov over on his back so Ellie May could reach him again. Lov was doing everything in his power to protect his sack, because he knew full well that if Jeeter once got twenty steps ahead of him, he would never be able to catch him before all the turnips were eaten. Jeeter was old, but he could run like a rabbit when he had to.

“Don’t be scared of Ellie May, Lov,” Ada said. “Ellie May ain’t going to hurt you. She’s all excited, but she ain’t the rough kind at all. She won’t hurt you.”

Ada prodded him with the stick and made him stop wiggling away from Ellie May. She jabbed him in the ribs as hard as she could, biting her lower lip between her teeth.

“Them niggers look like they is going to come in the yard and help Lov out,” Dude said. “If they come in here, I’ll bust them with a rock. They ain’t got no business helping Lov.”

“They ain’t thinking of coming in here,” Ada said. “Niggers has got more sense than trying to interfere with white-folks’ business. They don’t dare come.”

The colored men did not come any closer. They would have liked to help Lov, because they were friends of his, but they were more interested in waiting to see what Ellie May was going to do than they were in saving the turnips.