Tobacco Road (21 page)

Farmers around Fuller who were undertaking to raise a crop of cotton this year had finished their plowing by the end of the month. With such an early start, there seemed to be no reason why, with plenty of hot weather during the growing season, the land should not yield a bale of cotton to the acre that fall. All farmers would put in as much guano as they could buy, and there was no limit to the number of pounds of cotton an acre would yield if fertilizer could be bought and used with a free hand. A bale to the acre was the goal of every cotton farmer around Fuller; but the boll-weevil and hard summer rains generally cut the crop in half. And on the other hand, if it was a good year for the raising of cotton, the price would probably drop lower than it had before. Not many men felt like working all year for six- or seven-cent cotton in the fall.

Jeeter had lived through the season for burning broom-sedge and pine woods, and through the time for spring plowing, without having done either. It was still not too late to begin, but Jeeter did not have a mule, and he did not have the credit to purchase seed-cotton and guano at the stores. Up until this year, he had lived in the hope that something would happen at the last moment to provide a mule and credit, but now it seemed to him that there was no use hoping for anything any more. He could still look forward to the following year when he could perhaps raise a crop of cotton, but it was an anticipation not so keen as it once had been. He had felt himself sink lower and lower, his condition fall further and further, year after year, until now his trust in God and the land was at the stage where further disappointment might easily cause him to lose his mind and reason. He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him. It was the unsolved mystery of his life.

But, even if he could not raise a crop that year, he could at least make all preparations for one. He could burn over the broom-sedge and the groves of blackjack and the fields of young pine seedlings. He could have the land ready for plowing in case something happened that would let him plant a crop of cotton. He would have the land ready, in case—

It was late afternoon on the first of March. He walked across the old cotton field through the waist-high broom-sedge towards the blackjack grove at the rear of the house; he kicked at the crumbly earth lying exposed between the tufts of sedge, thinking there was still time in which to arrange for credit at the stores in Fuller. He knew the time for burning and plowing had ended the day before, but there still lingered in the warm March air something of the new season. The smell of freshly turned earth and the odor of pine and sedge-smoke hovered over the land even after burning and plowing was done. He breathed deeply of it, filling his body with the invigorating aroma.

“Maybe God will send some way to allow the growing of a crop,” he said. “He puts the land here, and the sun and rain—He ought to furnish the seed and the guano, somehow or other.”

Jeeter firmly believed that something would happen so he would be able to keep his body and soul alive. He still had hope left.

The late afternoon sun was still warm, and the air was balmy. There had been no cold nights for almost a week. People could sit on their front porches in the evening now without feeling the chill night air of February.

The breeze was blowing from the east. The white smoke of the broom-sedge fire coiled upward and was carried away towards the west, away from Jeeter’s view of the house and tobacco road. He stood watching it burn slowly away from him, and at the fire eating along the ground under the brown broom-sedge. There were several hundred acres of the land to burn; the fields that had not been cultivated, some of them for ten or fifteen years, were matted with the dry grass. Beyond the fields lay the woods of yellow pine and blackjack. The fire would probably blaze and smoulder three or four days before it would burn itself out and die along the shores of the creeks farther away.

“If Tom and some of the older boys was here, maybe they could help get some seed-cotton and guano somehow,” he said. “I know where I might could borrow a mule, if I had the seed-cotton and guano to plant. But a mule ain’t no good without the rest of things. Wouldn’t nothing grow in the new rows except broom-sedge and blackjack sprouts.”

He walked back to the house, to sit on the back steps a while before bed-time and watch the long line of yellow fire in the sedge.

It was long after dark before he got up and went into the house. From the rear bedroom window where he stood taking off his heavy shoes, Jeeter watched with fascination the distant fire that had melted into a vivid red with the fall of darkness. Some of the fire had gone far over the hills, and all that could be seen of it was the dull orange glow in the sky above it. Other sections of it had circled around the fields like cornered snakes, and burned on both sides of the house. In the centre, where he had stood that afternoon when he struck the match, there was a deep dark hole in the earth. The ground would remain black until it rained again.

He lay awake a long time after Ada was asleep. It was quiet in the house, now that there was no one else there to keep them company.

Jeeter tossed and turned, smelling the aroma of pine and broom-sedge smoke in the night air. With it came the strong odor of freshly turned earth somewhere a long way off. He looked straight up at the black ceiling, solemnly swearing to get up the next morning and borrow a mule. He was going to plow a patch to raise some cotton on, if he never did anything else as long as he lived.

He went to sleep then, his mind filled with thoughts of the land and its sweet odors, and with a new determination to stir the earth and cultivate plants of cotton.

The fire burned lustily through the night. It went farther and farther towards the west where the young pines grew, and it burned through the groves of blackjack, leaving the scrub-oak trees standing blackened and charred. They would not die, but the young pines would.

The dawn was beginning to break in the east, and the wind shifted to the north, blowing a final night breeze before daylight. The fire in the broom-sedge on each side of the house burst into renewed vigor in the path of the wind, and it burned back towards the center where it had started. When it reached the point where the sedge ended at the rim of blackened ground, it would die out. In the meantime there were the fields on each side of the house to burn. After that, there would remain to be burned only the land far back in the woods and on the hills where the blue smoke and red flames climbed above the tree-tops.

Beside the house, the broom-sedge fire leapt higher in the early morning breeze. It came closer and closer to the house, and only a thin strip of sandy yard separated it from the building. If a brisk wind caught the fire at the moment when it was burning hardest, it would whirl the embers of grass against the house, under it, and onto the roof.

The moment when the sun came up, the wind caught the fire and sent it swirling through the dry grass. Torn by the wind, stems of flaming grass were showered on the house, some dying as they burned out, others leaving a glowing spark imbedded in the dry tinder-like shingles that had covered the house for fifty years or more. There were cracks in the roof where the more rotten shingles had been ripped and blown away by the strong autumnal winds, and in these the embers spread quickly.

Jeeter and Ada usually got up with the sun, and it was that time now. Neither of them came to the windows now, however, nor did either of them open the door. They were both asleep.

The fiery, red flaming roof was a whirling mass of showering embers in a short time. The dry tinder-like shingles, rotted by the autumn and winter rains and scorched by the searing spring and summer sun for two generations, blazed like coals in a forge. The whole roof was in flames in a few seconds, and after that it was only a matter of minutes until the rafters, dry and dripping with pine pitch, fell down upon the floor of the house and upon the beds. Half an hour after the roof had first caught, the house was in black smoking ashes. Ada and Jeeter had not known what had happened.

Several near-by farmers had seen the smoke and flames as they were getting up at sun-rise. Most of them hurried along the tobacco road and across the fields to the Lester place with the intention of helping to save some of the furniture. They had not realized how fast the dry pitch-dripped house had burned to the ground, until they reached it.

There was a crowd of twenty or thirty men standing around the ashes when Lov and Ellie May reached the place, and when Bessie and Dude got there. There was nothing anybody could do then. There was nothing that could be saved. Jeeter’s old automobile was a pile of rust-colored junk.

Some of the men took long blackjack poles and poked around in the mass of ashes, hoping to find the bodies and to take them out before they were burned any more, but the heat of the ashes drove every one back for a while.

“The Lord had a curse on this house,” Bessie said. “He didn’t want it to stand no longer. Praise the Lord!”

Nobody paid any attention to Bessie.

“Jeeter is better off now than he was,” one of the farmers said. “He was near about starved to death half the time and he couldn’t raise no crops. It looks to me like his children ought to have stayed at home and helped him run a farm.”

Lov’s first thought on seeing the smoking ashes was to remember Jeeter’s prayerful plea about the care he wanted taken of his body when he died. Now it did not matter, because there was very little of it left.

After the coals had cooled, the men went into the ashes and carried out the two bodies and laid them down under the chinaberry tree beside the road. The tree’s green limbs had been scorched, but it was too far away from the house to burn. The other chinaberry trees in the yard had been closer to the house, and they had burned almost as quickly as the house.

Preparations were begun at once to dig the grave. The men found two or three charred and broken-handled shovels and a pick behind the scorched and blistered corn-crib, and asked Lov where he wanted the grave dug. They decided to dig it in the blackjack grove, because if some one did decide to farm the land that year or the following ones, there would be no danger of the grave being plowed up so soon.

The men dug the grave, and carried the remains, stretched out on blackjack poles, to the grove. They were lowered into the ground. Some of the men asked Bessie to say a short prayer before the bodies were covered, but she refused to say anything for Jeeter or Ada. There was nothing, then, left to do but to throw the earth in and smooth the mounds with the back of the shovels.

Most of the farmers hurried back to their homes for breakfast. There was nothing else to be done.

Lov sat down by the lone chinaberry tree and looked at the blackened mass of ashes. Bessie and Dude stayed a while, too; they had to wait on Lov. Ellie May hovered in the distance, looking on, but never coming close enough to be noticed by Lov or the others.

“I reckon old Jeeter had the best thing happen to him,” Lov said. “He was killing himself worrying all the time about the raising of a crop. That was all he wanted in this life—growing cotton was better than anything else to him. There ain’t many more like him left, I reckon. Most of the people now don’t care about nothing except getting a job in a cotton mill somewhere. But can’t all of them work in the mills, and they’ll have to stay here like Jeeter until they get taken away too. There ain’t no sense in them raising crops. They can’t make no money at it, not even a living. If they do make some cotton, somebody comes along and cheats them out of it. It looks like the Lord don’t care about crops being raised no more like He used to, or He would be more helpful to the poor. He could make the rich people lend out their money, and stop holding it up. I can’t figure out how they got hold of all the money in the county, anyhow. Looks like it ought to be spread out among everybody.”

Dude poked around in the ashes looking for whatever he could find. There had been nothing of value in the house; but he liked to dig in the ashes and toss out the twisted tin kitchen dishes and china doorknobs. The charred and crusted iron casters of the wooden beds were there, and nails and screws; almost everything else in the house had been made of wood or cloth.

“Old Jeeter had one wish fulfilled,” Lov said. “It wasn’t exactly fulfilled, but it was taken care of, anyhow. He used to tell me he didn’t want me to lock him up in the corn-crib and go off and leave him when he died. That’s what happened to his daddy. When his daddy died, Jeeter and the men who were sitting up with the body locked it in the corn-crib at night while they rode to Fuller for tobacco and drinks. They put it in the crib so nothing would happen to it while they was gone. When they went to bury it the next day, a big crib rat jumped out of the box. It had gnawed into the coffin while it was shut up in the crib, and it had eaten all one side of the older Lester’s face and neck. That was what Jeeter was afraid would happen to him, and he used to make me promise two or three times a day that I wouldn’t lock him up in the crib when he died. There wasn’t no use of him worrying so, because there ain’t been no rats in the crib in many a year, except when they come back sometimes to look around and see if any corn has been put in it.”

“I don’t think the Lord took to Jeeter none too much,” Sister Bessie said. “Jeeter must have been a powerful sinful man in his prime, because the Lord wasn’t good to him like He is to me. The Lord knows us all like that. He knows when we’re good and when the devil is in us.”

“Well, it don’t make no special difference now,” Lov said. “Jeeter’s dead and gone, and he won’t be bothered no more by wanting to grow things in the ground. That’s what he liked to do more than anything else, but somehow he never got a chance to do it much. Jeeter, he would lots rather grow a big crop of cotton than go to heaven.”

“If he’d gone to Augusta and worked in the cotton mills like the rest of them done, he would have been all right. There ain’t no money for a man like him farming all the time when he can’t get no credit.”