Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [11]
The old grandmother came hobbling out of the field with the sack of dead twigs on her back. She shuffled her feet through the deep sand of the tobacco road, and scuffed them over the hard sand of the yard, looking neither to the right nor to the left. At the bottom of the front steps she dropped the load from her shoulder and sat down to rest a while before going to the kitchen. Her groans were louder than usual, as she began rubbing her sides. Sitting on the bottom step with her feet in the sand and her chest almost touching her sharp knees, she looked more than ever like a loosely tied bag of soiled black rags. She was unmindful of the people around her, and no one was more than passingly aware that she had been anywhere or had returned. If she had gone to the thicket and had not returned, no one would have known for several days that she was dead.
Jeeter watched Lov from the corners of his eyes while he tried to make another patch stick to the cracked rubber inner-tube. He had noticed that Lov was several yards from the sack of turnips, and he waited patiently while the distance grew more and more each minute. Lov had forgotten how important the safety of the turnips was. So long as Ellie May continued to tousle his hair with her hands he would forget that he had turnips. She had made him forget everything.
“What you reckon they’re going to do next?” Dude said. “Maybe Lov’s going to take her down to the coal chute and keep her there all day.”
Ada, who had been standing on the porch all that time as motionless as one of the uprights, suddenly pulled her dress tighter over her chest. The cool February wind was barely to be felt out in the sun, but on the porch and in the shade it went straight to the bones. Ada had been ill with pellagra for several years, and she had said she was always cold except in midsummer.
“Lov’s going to big her,” Dude said. “He’s getting ready to do it right now, too. Look at him crawl around—he acts like an old stud-horse. He ain’t never let her get that close before. He said he wouldn’t never get close enough to Ellie May to touch her with a stick, because he don’t like the looks of her mouth. But he ain’t paying no mind to it now, is he? I bet he don’t even know she’s got a slit-lip on her. If he does know it, he don’t give a good goddam now.”
Several negroes were coming up the road, walking towards Fuller. They were several hundred feet away when they first noticed the Lesters and Lov in the yard, but it was not until they were almost in front of the house that they noticed what Lov and Ellie May were doing in the farther side near a chinaberry tree. They stopped laughing and talking, and slowed down until they were almost standing still.
Dude hollered at them, calling their names; but none of them spoke. They stopped and watched.
“Howdy, Captain Lov,” one of them said.
Lov did not hear. The Lesters paid no more attention to the negroes. Negroes passing the house were in the habit of looking at the Lesters, but very few of them ever had anything to say. Among themselves they talked about the Lesters, and laughed about them; they spoke to other white people, stopping at their houses to talk. Lov was one of the white persons with whom they liked to talk.
Jeeter screwed the pump hose into the inner-tube valve and tried to work some air inside. The pump was rusty, the stem was bent, and the hose was cracked at the base so badly that air escaped before it ever had a chance to reach the valve. It would take Jeeter a week to pump thirty pounds of air into the tire at that rate. He could have put more air into the tires if he had attempted to blow them up with his mouth.
“It looks like I ain’t going to get started to Augusta with a load of wood before next week,” he said. “I wish I had a mule. I could haul a load there near about every day if I had one. The last time I drove this automobile to Augusta every one of the durn tires went flat before I could get there and back. I reckon about the best thing to do is to fill them all full of hulls and ride that way.