Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [1]
“Sometimes I think it’s just the old devil in her,” Lov had said several times. “To my way of thinking, she ain’t got a scratch of religion in her. She’s going to hell-fire when she dies, sure as day comes.”
“Now, maybe she ain’t pleased with her married life,” Jeeter had suggested. “Maybe she ain’t satisfied with what you provide her with.”
“I done everything I can think of to make her satisfied and contented. Every week I go to Fuller on pay-day and buy her a pretty. I get her snuff, but she won’t take none; I get her a little piece of calico, but she won’t sew it. Looks like she wants something I ain’t got and can’t get her. I wish I knowed what it was. She’s such a pretty little girl—all them long yellow curls hanging down her back sort of gets me all crazy sometimes. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I’ve got the need of Pearl for a wife as bad as any man ever had.”
“I expect she’s too young yet to appreciate things,” Jeeter had said. “She ain’t grown up yet like Ellie May and Lizzie Belle and Clara and the other gals. Pearl ain’t nothing but a little gal yet. She don’t even look like a woman, so far.”
“If I had knowed she was going to be like she is, maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to marry her so bad. I could have married me a woman what wants to be married to me. But I don’t want Pearl to go now, though. I sort of got used to her around, and I’d sure miss seeing them long yellow curls hanging down her back. They make a man feel kind of lonesome some way. She sure is a pretty little girl, no matter if she does act like she does all the time.”
Lov had gone back home that time and told Pearl what Jeeter said about her, but she sat in the chair and made no sign of answering him. Lov did not know what to do about her after that. But he had realized from that time on that she was still a little girl. During the eight months they had been married she had grown three or four inches in height, and she weighed about fifteen pounds more now than she had at the beginning. She still did not weigh much more than a hundred pounds, though she was gaining in weight and height every day.
What Lov wanted to speak to Jeeter about now in particular was the way Pearl had of refusing to sleep with him. They had been married almost a year, and still she slept by herself, as she had done since the first. She slept by herself on a pallet on the floor, refusing even to let Lov kiss her or touch her in any way. Lov had told her that cows were not any good until they had been freshened, and that the reason he married her was because he wanted to kiss her and feel her long yellow curls and sleep with her; but Pearl had not even indicated that she heard him or knew what he was talking about. Next to wanting to kiss her and talk to her, Lov wanted to see her eyes. Yet even this pleasure she denied him; her pale blue eyes were always looking off into another direction when he came and stood in front of her.
Lov still stood in the middle of the road looking at Jeeter and the other Lesters in the yard. They were waiting for him to make the first move; friendly or hostile, it mattered little to them so long as there were turnips in the sack.
Jeeter was wondering where Lov had got the turnips. It did not occur to him that Lov had bought them with money; Jeeter had long before come to the conclusion that the only possible way a quantity of food could be obtained was by theft. But he had not been able to locate a turnip patch that year anywhere within five or six miles. There had been planted a two-acre field the year before over at the Peabody place, but the Peabody men had kept people out of the field with shotguns then, and this year they had not even planted turnips.
“Why don’t you come