Tobacco Road (13 page)

“You hold one end, Dude, and I’ll hold the other.”

“What you going to do?”

“Marry us, Dude,” she said.

“Didn’t you get that all done at the courthouse in Fuller?”

“That wasn’t all. I’m doing the balance now.”

“When is we going to take a ride?” he asked.

“It won’t be so very long now. We want to stay here a little while first. We got plenty of time to ride around, Dude.”

“You going to let me drive it all the time?”

“Sure, you can drive it all the time. I don’t know how to drive it, noway.”

“You ain’t going to let nobody else drive it, is you?”

“You is the only one who can drive it, Dude,” she said. “But we got to hurry and finish marrying. You hold your end of the license while I pray.”

Dude stood beside her, waiting for the prayer to be finished. She prayed silently for several minutes while he stood in front of her.

“I marry us man and wife. So be it. That’s all, God. Amen.”

There was a long silence while they looked at each other.

“When is we going for a ride?” Dude said.

“We is married now, Dude. We is finished being married. Ain’t you glad of it?”

“When is we going for a ride?”

“I got to pray now,” she said. “You kneel down on the floor while I make a little prayer.”

They knelt down to pray. Dude got down on all fours, looking straight into Bessie’s nose while her eyes were closed.

“Dear God, Dude and me is married now. We is wife and husband. Dude, he is an innocent young boy, unused to the sinful ways of the country, and I am a woman preacher of the gospel. You ought to make Dude a preacher, too, and let us use our new automobile in taking trips all over the country to pray for sinners. You ought to learn him how to be a fine preacher so we can make all the goats into sheep. That’s all this time. We’re in a hurry now. Save us from the devil and make a place for us in heaven. Amen.”

There was a rustle of skirts as Sister Bessie jumped to her feet and began running excitedly around the room. She came back and pulled at Dude, making him put his arms around her waist.

Outside in the yard, Jeeter and Ellie May had been standing on their toes looking in through the window to see what Dude and Bessie were doing. There were no curtains over the windows, and the board blinds had had to be opened so there would be light in the room.

Dude stood for several minutes watching Bessie as she tried to pull him across the room. She finally sat down on one of the beds and attempted to make him sit beside her.

“You ain’t going to sleep now, is you?” he asked her. “It ain’t time to go to bed yet. It ain’t no more that noontime now.”

“Just for now,” she said. “We can go out again after a while and take a ride in the automobile.”

Dude ran to the window to look at the car. For the moment, he had completely forgotten about it. When he reached the window, he saw Jeeter and Ellie May holding to the sill with the ends of their fingers and trying to see inside.

“What you doing that for?” he asked Jeeter. “What you want to look at?”

Jeeter turned away and looked out over the brown broom-sedge. Ellie May ran around to the back of the house and tip-toed into the hall through the kitchen.

Bessie came to the window and pulled Dude around until he faced her. Then she made him go back and sit down on the bed.

Suddenly, without knowing how it happened, Dude found himself on the bed with a quilt over him. Bessie had locked her arms around him so tightly that he could not move in any direction.

Outside, he heard a ladder scrape against the weatherboards. Jeeter had found the ladder under the crib and had brought it to the window.

W
HEN
D
UDE LOOKED UP,
he saw that the door had been opened and that Ellie May, Ada, and the grandmother were crowding through it. He did not know what to do, but he tried to motion to them to go away.

He could not see Jeeter, because Jeeter was behind him, standing half-way up in the window with his feet supported on one of the rungs of the ladder. Bessie saw Jeeter, but she could not see the others.

Dude heard his grandmother groan and walk away. He could hear her feet sliding over the pine boards of the hall floor, the horse-collar shoes making an irritating sound as she went towards the front yard. He paid no more attention to the others.

After a while Jeeter cleared his throat and called Bessie. She did not answer him the first time he called, nor the next. Neither she nor Dude wanted to be disturbed.

When she persisted in not answering him, Jeeter climbed through the window and walked across the room to the bed. He shook Dude by the collar until he turned around.

Jeeter, however, did not have anything to say to Dude. It was Bessie he wanted to speak to.

“I been thinking just now about it, Sister Bessie, and the more I think it over in my mind, the more I convince myself that you was right about what we was discussing yesterday on the porch.”

“What you want with me, Jeeter?” she asked.

“Now, about that place in the Bible where it says if a man’s eye offends God he ought to go and take it out.”

“That’s what the Bible says,” she answered.

“I know it does. And that’s what’s worrying my soul so bad right now.”

“But you is a religious man, Jeeter,” she said. “Nothing ought to bother your conscience now. I prayed for you about them turnips you took from Lov. The Lord has forgot all about it now. He ain’t going to hound you none on that account.”

“It ain’t about the turnips. It’s about cutting myself off. Now, I reckon what you said was right. I ought to go and do it.”

Dude turned around and tried to push Jeeter to the floor. Jeeter clung to the bedstead, and would not move away.

“Why you want to do that?” Bessie said.

“I been thinking about all you said so much that right now I know I ought to go ahead and cut myself off, so the Lord won’t let me be tempted no more. I offended Him, and I know I ought to cut myself off so I won’t do it no more. Ain’t that right, Sister Bessie?”

“That’s right,” she said. “That’s what the Bible says a man ought to do when he’s powerful sinful.”

Jeeter looked at Bessie. He pulled back the quilt so he could see her better.

“Maybe I can put it off a little while, though,” he said, after thinking several minutes. “Now, maybe it ain’t so bad as I thought it was. This time of year puts a queer feeling into a man, and he says a lot of things he don’t stop to take into account. Along about when the time to plow the land and put seed in the rows comes around, a man feels like he ain’t got no control over his tongue—and don’t want none. It’s the same way with his actions. I feel that way every late February and early March. No matter how many children a man’s got, he always wants to get more.”

There was a silence in the house for a long time. Ellie May and Ada made no sound in the doorway. Jeeter sat on the bed deep in thought until Dude pushed him to his feet. Dude climbed out behind him.

When all of them were out in the yard again, Dude sat in the automobile and blew the horn. The women were busy wiping off the dust that had settled on the hood and fenders. The grandmother, though, did not come close to the car. She took her place behind a chinaberry tree and watched every movement of the others.

Jeeter sat on his heels beside the chimney, and thought over what Sister Bessie had said in the house. He was more convinced than ever that God expected him to fix himself so he would not have any more sinful thoughts about Bessie.

He decided, however, not to carry out his intentions just then. There was plenty of time left yet, he told himself, when he could go ahead and cut himself off, and so long as he did it before he offended God any more, it would be satisfactory. In the meanwhile, he would have time in which to try to convince himself more thoroughly that he should do it.

There was a little fat-back on rinds left in the kitchen, and Ada had baked some cornbread. The bread had been made with meal, salt, water, and grease.

All of them sat down at the table in the kitchen and ate the fat-back and cornbread with full appetite. It was the first time that day that any of them had had food, and it would probably be the last. After the meat plate had been wiped clean of grease, and after the last of the cornbread was eaten, they went out into the yard again to look at the new automobile. The grandmother had hidden a piece of the bread in her apron pocket, and she put it under the mattress of her bed so she would have something to eat the next day in case Jeeter failed to buy some more meal and meat.

Jeeter wanted to take a ride right away. He told Bessie he wanted to go, and that he was ready.

Bessie had other plans, however. She said she and Dude were going to take a little ride that afternoon all alone, so they could talk over their marriage together without any disturbance. She promised Jeeter she would let him ride when they came back.

She and Dude got in, and Dude drove the car out of the yard and into the tobacco road towards the State highway. Jeeter thought they might be going to Augusta, but before he could ask them if they were, they had gone too far to hear him call.

“That Dude is the luckiest man alive,” he told Ellie May. “Now ain’t he?”

Ellie May started down the road through the cloud of dust to see them leave. She heard Jeeter talking to her, but she was too much interested in seeing the new car go down the road and in hearing Dude blow the horn to listen to what Jeeter said.

“Dude, he has got a brand-new car to ride around in, and he’s got married all at the same time,” Jeeter continued. “There’s not many men who get all that in the same day, I tell you. The new car is a fine piece of goods to own. There ain’t nobody else that I know of between here and the river who has got a brand-new automobile. And there ain’t many men who has a wife as fine-looking as Sister Bessie is at her age, neither. Bessie makes a fine woman for a man—any man, I don’t care where you find him. She might be just a little bit more than Dude can take care of though, I fear. It looked to me like she requires a heap of satisfaction, one way and another, for a little woman no bigger than a gal. I don’t know if Dude is that kind or not, but it won’t take long for Bessie to find out. Now, if it was me, there wouldn’t be no question of it. I’d please Sister Bessie coming and going, right from the start, and keep it up clear to the end.”

Now Ellie May heard what Jeeter was saying, and it interested her. She waited to hear more.

“Now, you, Ellie May, it’s time you was finding yourself a man. All my other children has got married. It’s your time next. It was your time a long while ago, ’way before Pearl and Dude got married, but I make allowances for you on account of your face. I know it’s harder for you to mate up than it is for anybody else, but in this country everybody has got to get mated up. You ought to go out and find yourself a man to marry right away, and not wait no longer. It might be too late pretty soon, and you don’t want that to happen. It ain’t going to get you nowhere fooling around with Lov like you was doing, because you can’t get him that way. He’s already married. It’s the unmarried men you has got to get. There’s a fine lot of boys running that sawmill over at Big Greek. You can walk over that way some day and make them take notice of you. It ain’t hard to do. Women know how to make men take notice of them, and you’re old enough to know all about it at your age. Them boys at the sawmill down there at Big Creek ought to take a liking to you in spite of the way you look in the face. When a man looks at you from behind, he ought to want to mate up with you right there and then. That’s what I heard Lov say one time, and he ought to know, because he’s mated up now. Just don’t show your face too much, and that won’t stop the boys from getting after you.”

When Jeeter looked at Ellie May again, she was crying. It was about the first time he had ever seen her cry since she was a baby. He did not know what to do about it, nor to say about it, because he had never before had the occasion to try to calm a crying woman. Ada never cried. She never did anything.

Before he could ask her what the matter was, she had run off into the old cotton field; she ran towards the woods behind the house, jumping through the brown broom-sedge like a frightened rabbit.

“Now I never seen the likes of that before,” Jeeter said, “I wonder what it was that I could have said that made her carry-on like that?”

J
EETER REMAINED SEATED
on his heels by the chimney in the yard for half an hour after Ellie May had run away crying. He stared at the tracks left in the yard by the new automobile, amazed at the sharpness of the imprint of the tiretread. The tires of his own car, which was still standing in the yard between the house and the corn-crib, were worn smooth. When they rolled on the sand, they left no track, except two parallel bands of smoothed sand. He was wondering now what he could do about his tires. If he could pump them all up at the same time, he could haul a load of wood to Augusta and sell it. He might even get as much as a dollar for the load.

It was fifteen miles to the city, and after he had bought enough gasoline and oil for the trip there and back, there would not be much left of the dollar. A quarter, possibly, with which he could buy two or three jars of snuff and a peck of cotton-seed meal. Even a quarter would not buy enough corn meal for them to eat. He had already begun buying cotton-seed meal, because corn meal cost too much. Fifteen cents would buy enough cotton-seed meal to last them a whole week.

But Jeeter was not certain whether it was worth the trouble of hauling a load of wood. It would take him nearly half a day to load the car with blackjack, and half a day for the trip to Augusta. And then after he got there he might not be able to find anybody to buy it.

He still planned a crop for that year, though. He had by no means given up his plans to raise one. Ten or fifteen acres of cotton could be raised, if he could get the seed and guano. There was a mule over near Fuller he thought he could borrow, and he had a plow that would do; but it took money or an equal amount of credit to buy seed-cotton and guano. The merchants in Fuller had said they would not let him have anything on credit again, and it was useless to try to raise a loan in a bank in Augusta. He had tried to do that three or four times already, but the first thing they asked him was whom did he have to sign his notes, and what collateral had he to put up. Right there was where the deal fell through every time. Nobody would sign his notes, and he had nothing to put up for security. The men in the bank had told Jeeter to try a loan company.