Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [15]
Lov was too breathless to say anything.
“Why don’t you burn coal in your house, instead of wood, Lov? Nobody would know about it. I ain’t going to tell on you, if you want to do that. It’s a lot easier than cutting wood every day.”
Mother Lester, the old grandmother, sitting beside her bag of dead twigs, began groaning again and rubbing her sides with her fists. Presently she got up, lifted the bag over her shoulder, and went into the house towards the kitchen. She made a fire in the cook-stove and sat down beside it to wait until the twigs burned out. She was certain Jeeter would not bring any of the turnips back for her to eat. He would stay in the thicket and eat every one of them himself. While she waited for the fire to die down, she looked into the snuff jar on the shelf, but it was still empty. There had been no snuff in it for nearly a week, and Ada would not tell her where the full jar was hidden. The only time she ever had any snuff was when she accidently found the jar hidden away somewhere, and took some before anybody could stop her. Jeeter had knocked her down several times about doing that, and he had said he would kill her if he ever caught her stealing snuff again. There were times when she would have been willing to die, if she could only have for once all the snuff she wanted.
“Why don’t the firemen blow the whistles more than they do, Lov?” Dude said. “They hardly blow the whistles at all. If I was a fireman I’d pull the whistle cord near about all the time. They make a noise about as pretty as an automobile horn does.”
Dude sat on the pine stump until Lov got up and staggered across the yard towards the tobacco road. Lov looked all around in every direction, hoping he might see Jeeter hiding somewhere close. He was sure that Jeeter had gone to the pine woods beyond the old cotton field though, and he knew it would be a waste of time trying to find him and catch him. It was too late to stop him now.
Ellie May lay where she was; stretched out flat on the ground, on her back. Perspiration had matted her hair against her forehead and neck, and her pink gingham dress was twisted under her shoulders and head in such a way that it made a pillow for her to lie on. Her mouth looked as if it had been torn; her flaming red upper gum looked like a bleeding, painful wound under her left nostril. Her divided lip quivered, and her body trembled.
“You ought to give me them overalls when you’re done with them,” Dude said. “I ain’t had a new pair of overalls since I can remember. Pa says he’s going to buy me and him both some one of these days when he sells a lot of wood, but I ain’t putting none too much trust in what he says. He ain’t going to sell no wood, not more than a load at a time, noway. He tells more lies than any man I ever heard of. I reckon he’d rather lie about it than haul wood to Augusta. He’s that lazy he won’t get up off the ground sometimes when he stumbles. I’ve seen him stay there near about an hour before he got up. He’s the laziest son of a bitch I ever seen.”
Lov went to the middle of the road and stood there uncertainly, his legs wide apart to keep his balance, and his body swaying backward and forward like a drunken man’s. He began brushing the sand off of his clothes, and shaking it out of his hair. Sand was in his pockets and shoes, and even his ears were full of it.
“When is you going to buy yourself an automobile, Lov?” Dude asked. “You make a heap of a lot of money at the chute—you ought to buy yourself a great big car, like the ones the rich people in Augusta has got. I’ll show you how to run it. I know all about automobiles. Pa’s old Ford ain’t much to look at now, but when it was in good running order I used to run the wheels off