God's Little Acre (18 page)

“Well, I’m not,” she said. “And that’s a fact, too.” Will got up, laughing at Pluto, and went into the house to get ready to leave. Pluto put his arm around Darling Jill and hugged her. He knew he was going to drive them to Scottsville, because he would have done anything in the world Darling Jill asked. She sat close to him, submissive, while he squeezed her in his arms. She liked him, she knew she did. She thought she loved him, too, and in spite of his protruding stomach and his laziness. When the time came, she would marry him. She had already settled that much. What she did not know, was when the time would be.

Sitting so close to him then, she wished to tell him that she was sorry she had treated him so meanly at times, and had called him such vulgar names. When she turned to speak to him, however, she was afraid to say anything. She began to wonder of the wisdom of telling Pluto she was sorry she had been free with Will and Dave and with all the others while refusing him. She decided in that moment not to say anything about it, because it would not matter to him that she did not say it. She loved Pluto too much to see him hurt needlessly.

“Maybe next week we can get married, Darling Jill?”

“I don’t know, Pluto. I’ll tell you when I’m ready.”

“I can’t keep on waiting all the time,” he said. “And that’s a fact.”

“But if you know you are going to marry me, you can wait a little while longer.”

“That would be all right, maybe,” he agreed, “if it wasn’t that I’m scared somebody is going to come along and take you off some day.”

“If I do go away with somebody, Pluto, I’ll come back in time to marry you.”

Pluto hugged her with both arms, trying to hold her so tightly that the impression of her body against his would be in his memory forever. She at last freed herself and stood up.

“It’s time to leave, Pluto. I’ll go get Will and Rosamond. Griselda ought to be ready by now.”

Pluto walked out toward his car in the shade. He turned just in time to see Buck crawl out of the big hole and walk around the corner of the house. He met Griselda as she ran out the front door.

“Where are you going?” he demanded.

“Darling Jill and I are going to ride over to Scottsville with Pluto,” she said, trembling. “We’ll be back soon.”

“I’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch,” he said, running up the steps.

Buck was angry and hot. His clay-soiled clothes and his perspiration-matted hair gave him the appearance of a man suddenly become desperate.

“Please, Buck,” she begged.

“Where is he now?”

She tried to talk to Buck, but he would not listen to her. Just then Ty Ty came out of the house and took Buck by the arm.

“You’d better leave me alone, now,” he told Ty Ty.

“Let the girls go for the ride, Buck. There ain’t no harm in that.”

“You’d better turn me loose, now.”

“It’s all right, Buck,” Ty Ty argued. “Darling Jill and Rosamond will be along, and Pluto in the car, too. Let the girls go along for the ride. Can’t no harm come of that.”

“I’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch, now,” Buck said unchanged. He was not impressed by his father’s assurance of Griselda’s safety.

“Buck,” Griselda begged, “please don’t be angry. There’s nothing to talk like that about.”

Ty Ty led him down the steps into the yard and tried to talk with him.

“You’d better leave me alone, now,” he said again.

They began walking up and down in the yard, Ty Ty leading him by the arm. After a while, Buck pulled away and went back to the crater beside the house. He was not so angry as he had been, and not nearly so hot, and he was willing to go back to work and let Griselda go in the car to Scottsville. He went back where Shaw and Dave and the two colored men were without saying another word.

When they were certain Buck had gone to the crater to stay, Darling Jill and Rosamond stopped holding Will in the house and allowed him to come out and get into the car.

T
HEY REACHED
S
COTTSVILLE
in the upper end of the Valley two hours later.

Will had jumped out of the car when they stopped in front of the house and had run down the street, shouting back over his shoulder for them to stay until he came home. That had been in the middle of the afternoon, and at six he had not returned.

Pluto was anxious to get back to Georgia, and Griselda was frantic. She did not know what Buck might do to her for not returning home immediately, and it frightened her to think about it. She was glad to stay as long as she could, though, because it was the first time she had ever been in Horse Creek Valley, and the feeling of the company town gave her a pleasure she had never before experienced. The rows of yellow company houses, all looking alike to the eye, were individual homes to her now. She could look into the yellow company house next door and almost hear the exact words the people were saying. There was nothing like that in Marion. The houses in Marion were buildings with closed doors and uninviting windows. Here in Scottsville there was a murmuring mass of humanity, always on the verge of filling the air with a concerted shout.

Pluto and Darling Jill had made a freezer of ice cream while they were waiting for Will to come home. At dark when he still had not returned, they ate the cream with graham crackers for the evening meal. Pluto was still restless, wishing to get back to Georgia. He felt uncomfortable in Horse Creek Valley and he did not like to think too much of the probability of being there long after dark. For some reason he was suspicious of cotton mill towns, and firmly believed that after dark people came out of hiding and preyed upon strangers, robbing them and beating them if not actually murdering them.

“I really believe Pluto is scared to go out of the house after dark,” Darling Jill said.

Pluto trembled at the suggestion, clutching his chair. He was afraid, and if one of them asked him to go to a store down the street on an errand he would refuse to leave the house. At home in Marion he was afraid of nothing; the darkness of night had never cowed him before in all his life. But here in the Valley he trembled with acute fear; he did not know at what minute somebody would run through the unlocked door and strike him dead in his tracks.

“Will can’t possibly stay out much longer,” Rosamond said. “He always comes home for supper at night.”

“I wish we could go, anyway,” Griselda said. “Buck will be wild.”

“Both of you are scared to death,” Darling Jill laughed. “There’s nothing to be scared of here, is there, Rosamond?”

Rosamond laughed. “Of course not.”

Through the open windows the soft summer night floated into the room. It was a soft night, and it was warm; but with the evening air there was something else that excited Griselda. She could hear sounds, voices, murmurs that were like none she had ever heard before. A woman’s laughter, a child’s excited cry, and the faint gurgle of a waterfall somewhere below all came into the room together; there was a feeling in the air of living people just like herself, and this she had never felt before. The new knowledge that all those people out there, all those sounds, were as real as she herself was made her heart beat faster. Never had the noises of Augusta sounded like these; in the city there were other sounds of another race of people. Here in Scottsville the people were as real as she herself was at that moment.

Will came in then, surprising her, and walked as noiselessly as a soft-toed animal. Griselda felt like running to him and throwing her arms around his neck when she first saw him. He was one of the persons she had felt in the night air.

He stood in the door of the room looking at them.

There was a look on Will’s face that forced Griselda to suppress a cry that rose to her throat. She had never seen an expression on anyone’s face such as he had. There was a painful plea in his eyes, a look that she had seen wounded animals have. And the lines of his face, the position of his head on his shoulders, something, whatever it was, was horrifying to look upon.

He seemed to be trying to say something. He looked as if he were bursting with words that he could not turn loose. All the things she had ever heard Rosamond say about the cotton mill down there below were written on his face more plainly than human words could express.

Will was speaking to Rosamond. His lips moved in the form of words long before she heard them. It was like looking through a pair of binoculars at a man speaking afar off, and seeing his lips move before the sound reached her ears. She looked at him wild-eyed.

“We had the meeting,” he told Rosamond. “But they wouldn’t listen to Harry and me. They voted to arbitrate. You know what that means.”

“Yes,” Rosamond said simply.

Will turned and looked at Griselda and the others.

“So we’re going ahead and do it anyway. To hell with the damn local. They draw pay for arguing with us. To hell with them. We’re going to turn the power on.”

“Yes,” Rosamond said.

“I’ll be damned if I sit still and see them starve us with a dollar-ten, and charging rent on what we live in. There are enough of us to get in there and turn the power on. We can run the damn mill. We can run it better than anybody else. We’re going down there in the morning and turn it on.”

“Yes, Will,” his wife said.

A light was switched on in one of the rooms of the yellow company house next door.

“We’re going to turn the power on, and I’m man enough to do it. You’ll see. I’m as strong as God Almighty Himself is now. You’ll hear about the power being turned on tomorrow. Everybody will hear about it.”

He sat down in silence and buried his head in his hands. No one spoke. He was the one to speak, if anyone did.

A darkness enveloped everything. For a while the whole memory of his life passed across his eyes. He squeezed the lids over the eyeballs, straining to forget the memory. But he could not forget. He could see, dimly at first, the mills in the Valley. And while he looked, everything was as bright as day. He could see, since the time he could first remember, the faces of the wild-eyed girls like morning-glories in the mill windows. They stood there looking out at him, their bodies firm and their breasts erect, year after year since he could first remember being alive. And out in the streets in front of the mills stood bloody-lipped men, his friends and brothers, spitting their lungs into the yellow-dust of Carolina. Up and down the Valley he could see them, count them, call them by their names. He knew them; he had always known them. The men stood in the streets watching the ivy-covered mills. Some of them were running night and day, under blinding blue lights; some of them were closed, barred against the people who starved in the yellow company houses. And then the whole Valley was filled with the people who suddenly sprang up. There again were the girls with eyes like morning-glories and breasts so erect, running into the ivy-covered mills; and out in the street, day and night, stood his friends and brothers, looking, and spitting their lungs into the yellow dust at their feet. Somebody turned to speak to him, and through his parted lips issued blood instead of words.

Will shook his head, hitting the sides of it with the heel of his hands, and looked around him in the room. Pluto and Darling Jill, Griselda and Rosamond, were looking at him. He drew the back of his hand over his mouth, wiping away the dried blood and the warm blood he thought he felt on his lips.

“I told you to stay till I got back, didn’t I?” he said, looking steadily at Griselda.

“Yes, Will.”

“And you stayed. Thank God for that.”

She nodded.

“We’re going to turn the power on the first thing in the morning. That’s settled. We’re going to do that, no matter what happens.”

Rosamond looked at him anxiously. She believed for a moment that he was out of his mind. It was something in the way he spoke, something that sounded strange in his voice; she had never heard him talk like that before.

“Are you all right, Will?” she asked.

“Oh, God, yes,” he said.

“Try not to think so much about the mill tonight. It will make you so restless you won’t be able to go to sleep.”

Murmurs passed through the company streets of the company town, coming in rhythmic tread through the windows of the company house. It was alive, stirring, moving, and speaking like a real person. Griselda felt her heart ache with sharp pain.

“You’ve never worked in a spinning mill, have you, Pluto?” he asked suddenly, turning upon Pluto.

“No,” he answered weakly. “I’ve got to be getting back home right away.”

“You don’t know what a company town is like, then. But I’ll tell you. Have you ever shot a rabbit, and gone and picked him up, and when you lifted him in your hand, felt his heart pounding like—like, God, I don’t know what! Have you?”

Pluto stirred uneasily in his chair. He turned to look at Griselda beside him and saw a convulsive shiver envelop her.

“I don’t know,” Pluto said.

“God!” Will murmured hoarsely.

They looked at him, trembling, all of them. Somehow, they had felt exactly what he had meant when he said that. They were frightened by the revelation.

A new murmur passed through the company house, floating softly through row after row of other yellow company houses.

“You think I’m drunk, don’t you?” he asked.

Rosamond shook her head. She knew he was not.

“No, I’m not drunk. I’ve never been as sober as I am now. You think I’m drunk because I talk like that. But I’m sober, as sober as a stick of wood.”

Rosamond said something to him, something tenderly soft and understanding.

“Back there in Georgia, out there in the middle of all those damn holes and piles of dirt, you think I’m nothing but a dead sapling sticking up in the ground. Well, maybe I am, over there. But over here in the Valley, I’m Will Thompson. You come over here and look at me in this yellow company house and think that I’m nothing but a piece of company property. And you’re wrong about that, too. I’m Will Thompson. I’m as strong as God Almighty Himself now, and I can show you how strong I am. Just wait till tomorrow morning and walk down the street there and stand in front of the mill. I’m going up to that door and rip it to pieces just like it was a window shade. You’ll see how strong I am. Maybe you’ll go back to those God damn pot holes in Marion and think a little different after tomorrow.”