Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [23]
“Say, Sister Bessie,” Jeeter said, leaning forward and squinting his eyes under his heavy black brows, “what in hell is you and Dude doing there? You and him has been squatting there, hugging and rubbing of the other, for near about half an hour.”
Dude hoped she would not make him get up, because he liked to feel her pull him tight to her breast and squeeze him in her arms.
Bessie tried to stand up, but Dude would not let her. She sat down again beside him on the floor, running her fingers through his hair.
“Durn if I ever saw a woman preacher take on like that before,” Jeeter said, shaking his head. “Looks to me like you ain’t going to do no more praying to-day. You and Dude is hugging and rubbing of the other, ain’t you? By God and by Jesus, if it ain’t so!”
Bessie got up and sat down in the chair. She tried to make Dude go away, but he stood in front of her, waiting for her to touch him.
“The Lord was speaking to me,” she said. “He was telling me I ought to marry a new husband. I can’t get around much by myself, and if I was to get married to a man, maybe I could do more preaching and praying. The Lord would turn him into a preacher too, and both of us could travel around spreading the gospel.”
“He didn’t tell you to marry Dude, did He? Dude ain’t no preacher. He ain’t got sense enough to be one. He wouldn’t know what to preach about when the time came to get up and say something.”
“Dude would make a fine preacher,” she interrupted. “Dude would be just about as good at preaching and praying as my former husband was, maybe better. The Lord and me could show him how to do. It ain’t hard at all after you catch on to it.”
“I wish I was in my younger days. If I was, I could maybe do it myself with you. I could do it yet, only Ada, there, has got so she don’t want me fooling with the women-folks no more. I know I could do as fine preaching and praying as the next one. It ain’t that what’s holding me back—it’s Ada, there. She’s got a queer notion that I might take to fooling with the women-folks. Well, I ain’t saying I wouldn’t if I had half a chance, neither.”
“It would require a younger man for me to be satisfied,” Bessie said. “Dude there is just suitable for preaching and living with me. Ain’t you, Dude?”
“You want me to go home with you now?” he said.
“I got to pray over it first, Dude,” she said. “When I come back by here the next time, I’ll let you know. You’ll have to wait until I can ask the Lord if you’ll do. He’s sometimes particular about his male preachers, especially if they is going to marry women preachers.”
Bessie ran down the steps and over the hard white sand of the yard. When she reached the tobacco road, she turned around and looked at the Lesters on the front porch several minutes.
Presently, without waiting to walk, she began running through the deep white sand towards her house two miles away on the bluff above the Savannah.
Bessie’s home, a tenant house of three rooms, and a corn-crib, sat on the edge of the bluff. That was where the country dropped down into the swampy Savannah River Valley. The house, covered with unpainted weatherboards, sat precariously on three piles of thin stones. The fourth pile had fallen down ten or twelve years before, making one end of the house sag to the ground.
“Well,” Jeeter said, “Sister Bessie is up to something, all right. It looks to me like she’s got her head set on marrying Dude, there. I never seen such hugging and rubbing of the other as them two was doing. Something is going to come of it. Something is bound to happen.”
Dude snickered and stood behind a chinaberry tree so nobody could see him. Ellie May watched him from behind the pine stump, smiling because she had heard what Bessie had said.
Jeeter sat looking out over the old field of brown broom-sedge, and wondering if he could borrow a mule somewhere and raise a crop that year. The time for spring plowing had already arrived, and it made him restless. He did not like to sit idly on the porch and let