"Maybe you would like to take Ellie May down to your house, Lov?" Jeeter suggested. "She ain't got a man, and it looks like she ain't never going to get one, unless you take a fancy to her. You and Ellie May was hugging and rubbing of the other the first of the week, around at the front of the house. Maybe you would want to do that some more?"
"Reckon if I was to go up to Augusta and find her, she would let me bring her back home to stay?" Lov asked. "Reckon she would, Jeeter?"
"Who--Pearl?" Jeeter asked. "No, I wouldn't recommend that. You'll lose your time down there at the chute while you was looking for her, and it's like I said at the start. Pearl is just like Lizzie Belle and Clara and all the rest of the gals. They was plumb crazy for getting stylish clothes. None of them gals of mine liked to wear the calico and gingham Ada sewed."
"But Pearl--she might get hurt up there in Augusta--"
"Lizzie Belle and Clara took care of themselves all right, didn't they? They didn't get hurt none. Now, as I was saying about Ellie May. You can take her to your house, Lov. Ellie May would be crazy about going down there to stay all the time. She wouldn't be never getting down on no durn pallet on the floor, neither."
"Seeing them long yellow curls hanging down her back used to make me cry sometimes. I'd look at her pretty hair and eyes so long that I thought I'd go crazy if I didn't touch her and see deep down into her eyes. But she wouldn't never let me come close to her, and that's what made the tears fall out of my eyes, I reckon. I been the lonesomest man in the whole country, for the longest time. Pearl was so pretty it was a sin for her to do like she done."
"Ellie May's got to get a man somewhere. She can't stay here all the time. When me and Ada's dead and gone, there won't be nobody to watch after her. If she stayed here at the home by herself the niggers would haul off and come here by the dozens. The niggers would get her in no time, if she was here by herself."
"The last pretty I got for Pearl was some green beads pn a long string. I gave them to her and she put them around her neck, and I swear to God if it didn't make her the prettiest little girl I ever saw or heard about in the whole country."
"If you want to take Ellie May with you now, I'll tell her to wash herself up and get ready to go," Jeeter said.
"I might take Elbe May for a while, and I might not. I don't know what I'm going to do about Pearl, yet. I wish I could get her to come back."
"Ellie May's got--"
"Ellie May's got that ugly-looking face," Lov said. "I don't know as how I would want to look at it all the time."
"You would sort of get used to it, slow-like," Jeeter said. "It don't bother me none now. I got used to looking at the slit and I don't notice it no more."
Lov stood up and leaned against the well. He was silent. for a long time, looking out over the tall brown broomsedge. Jeeter watched him, and whittled on a little stick with his pocket knife.
Ellie May was behind another chinaberry tree then. She had moved from one to another while Lov and Jeeter were busy talking. She had at last come closer so she could hear what was being said.
Presently Lov turned around and looked at Ellie May She jerked her head behind the chinaberry tree before he could see her face.
"I've got to be going back to the chute," he said. "That afternoon freight will be coming along pretty soon flow, and it always empties all the scoops. I got to get back and fill them up before the passenger comes. They raise hell about the scoops being empty, because that makes the train have to wait until I can load them up."
He and Jeeter went around the house to the front yard. Neither of them had thought of Mother Lester again until they saw her lying on the sand. She was procumbent, and her face was mashed on the ground, but she had moved several feet closer to the house.
"What's wrong with her?" Lov said.
"Dude and Bessie backed the new automobile over her when they left. They was trying to get away before I could hit Bessie again, and they ran over her. I got it in good and heavy for that woman preacher now. I ain't letting her set foot on my land another time. She treated me bad about riding in the new automobile. She wouldn't let me go riding with her at all."
Lov walked over to where the old grandmother lay on the hard white sand. She had stopped bleeding, and she made so sound.
"Looks like she's dead," he said. "Is she dead, Jeeter?"
Jeeter looked down and moved one of her arms with his foot.
"She ain't stiff yet, but I don't reckon she'll live. You help me tote her out in the field and I'll dig a ditch to put her in."
They carried the body by the hands and feet, and put it down in the broom-sedge. Jeeter went to get a shovel from behind the corn-crib.
"You think that over what I said about Ellie May," Jeeter said. "I'll send her down to your house in time to cook your supper to-night. Ellie May won't treat you bad like Pearl done. Ellie May won't sleep on no durn pallet on the floor."
Lov started back down the tobacco road towards the coal chute. He shuffled his feet along the road, ifiling his shoes with sand. He did not look back.
Jeeter went out into the field with the shovel and began digging a grave to put his mother in. He dug in the earth for ten or fifteen minutes, and then called Ellie May. She had been standing in the yard behind a chinaberry tree waiting for Jeeter to tell her to go to Lov's.
"You wash yourself and go down to Lov's house and fix up for him," he told her, leaning wearily on the shovel handle. "He'll be coming home for supper tonight, and you cook him what he tells you."
Ellie May dashed into the house before Jeeter could finish giving her his instructions. She could not wait any longer.
He dug some more earth out of the ground, making the ditch a little longer.
Ellie May came out of the house in less than five minutes, running towards the road. Jeeter threw down the shovel and ran after her.
"You come back here m the morning after Lov goes to work and bnng some victuals with you, de you hear?" he shouted. "Lov makes a dollar a day at the chute, and he's got rations for a lot of victuals. Me and your Ma ain't got nothing up here. We get pretty hungry sometimes. You remember that."
Ellie May had run all the way across the yard and was racing down the middle of the tobacco road as fast as she could. Before Jeeter could say anything else to her, she was a hundred yards away. He had wanted to tell her to bnng him a pair of Lov's overalls too, the next when she brought the cooked food. She looked as if she was in such a great hurry to reach Lov's house that he let her go. She could make another trip the next day with the overalls.
Nineteen
The time for spring plowing was over. Throughout the last two weeks of February the weather had been dry and the ground crumbly; there had been no finer season for plowing and planting in six or seven years. Usually at that time rains came every few days and kept the earth continually wet and soggy; but this year the season had begun in the middle of February with clearing skies, and a gentle breeze had been drying the moisture in the ground ever since the winter rains had stopped.
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 n
ot 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 and provide a mule and credit, but now it seemed to him that there was no use hoping for anything any more. He 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 euily 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 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 broomsedge towards the blackjack grove at the rear of the house; he kicked at the crumbly earth lying exposed be.tween 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 creek 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, jf I had the seed-cotton and guano to plant. But a mule ain't no good without the rest of the things. Wouldn't nothing grow in the new rows except broomsedge 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 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 bad 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 longway 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 deter mination 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 centre 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 Jecter 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 pitchdripped 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 chi
ldren 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 the 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.