Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [16]
Lov stood in the middle of the road for the next ten or fifteen minutes, looking out over the top of the sagging brown broom-sedge towards the thicket where Jeeter was. After he had waited until he did not know what else to do, he staggered up the road in the direction of his house and the coal chute. Pearl would be at the house when he reached it, but as soon as he walked inside she would run out the back door and stay until he left. Even if she did not leave the room when he entered the house, she would not look at him nor have anything to say. He could look at her long yellow hair hanging down her back, but that was all. She would not allow him to come close enough to look into her eyes; if he tried to do that, she would certainly run off into the broom-sedge.
Ada and Dude watched him until he was out of sight beyond the rise in the ridge, and then they turned their backs and looked at Ellie May in the yard.
Dude went to the pine stump and sat down to watch the red wood-ants crawl over the stomach and breasts of his sister. The muscles of her legs and back twitched nervously for a while, and then slowly the jerking stopped altogether, and she lay still. Her mouth was partly open, and her upper lip looked as if it had been torn wider apart than it naturally was. The perspiration had dried on her forehead and cheeks, and smudges of dirt were streaked over her pale white skin.
For nearly an hour she slept deeply in the warm February sun, and when she awoke, her right arm was lying across her mouth where Dude had placed it when he left the yard to get some of the turnips before his father had eaten them all.
Chapter V
DOWN IN THE THICKET, hidden from the house and road by the four-foot wall of brown broom-sedge, Jeeter’s conscience began to bother him. His hunger had been abated temporarily, and his overalls pockets were filled with turnips, but the slowly formed realization that he had stolen his son-in-law’s food sickened his body and soul. He had stolen food before, food and everything else he had had opportunity to take, but each time, as now, he regretted what he had done until he could convince himself that he had not done anything so terribly wrong. Sometimes he could do this in a few minutes, at other times it was days, and even weeks, before he was satisfied that God had forgiven him and would not punish him too much.
The sound of Dude’s voice behind him in the woods was like the voice of God calling him to punishment. Dude had been crashing through the thicket and beating the underbrush with a blackjack stick for the past half hour trying to find Jeeter before all the turnips had been eaten.
There was a hollow silence in the woods around Jeeter between Dude’s yells, and Jeeter felt humble and penitent. He carefully wiped the blade of the knife with which he had pared the turnips, and thrust it into his pocket. Then he jumped up and ran out of the thicket and into the broom-sedge. He could see the roof of the house and the tops of the chinaberry trees, but he had no way of knowing whether Lov had gone home.
Dude saw him the moment he came out of the underbrush and started through the sedge.
“Hey! Where you running off to now?” Dude shouted at him, running across the field to cut Jeeter off from the house.
Jeeter stopped and waited for Dude to reach him. He took out half a dozen of the smallest turnips and laid them in Dude’s outstretched hands.
“What made you run off and try to eat them all up for, and not give me none?” Dude demanded. “You ain’t the only one what likes turnips. I ain’t had no more to eat this week than you has. You’re as mean as an old snake at times. Why didn’t you want me to have none?”
“The good Lord is against theft,” Jeeter said. “He don’t make no provision for the future for them that steals. They has got to look out for theirselves in the afterlife. Now I got to get right with God and