Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [3]
Lov had by that time moved a few steps nearer the yard and had sat down in the tobacco road with his feet in the drain ditch. He kept one hand gripped tightly around the mouth of the sack where it had been tied together with a piece of twine.
Ellie May continued to peer from behind the china-berry tree, trying to attract Lov’s attention. Each time he glanced in that direction, she jerked her head back so he could not see her.
“What you got in that there croker sack, Lov?” Jeeter shouted across the yard. “I been seeing you come a far piece off with that there croker sack on your back. I sure would like to know what you got on the inside of it. I heard it said that some people has got turnips this year.”
Lov tightened his grip on the mouth of the sack, looking from Jeeter to the next Lester in turn. He saw Ellie May peering at him from behind the chinaberry tree.
“Did you have a hard time getting what you got there in the sack, Lov?” Jeeter said. “You look like you is all out of breath.”
“I want to say something to you, Jeeter,” he said. “It’s about Pearl.”
“What’s that gal done now, Lov? Is she treating you mean some more?”
“It’s just like she’s always done, only I’m getting pretty durn tired of it by this time. I don’t like the way she acts. I never did take to the way she does, but it’s getting worse and worse all the time. All the niggers make fun of me because of the way she treats me.”
“Pearl is just like her Ma,” Jeeter said. “Her Ma used to do the queerest things in her time.”
“Every time I want to have her around me, she runs off and won’t come back when I call her. Now, what I say is, what in hell is the sense in me marrying a wife if I don’t get none of the benefits. God didn’t intend for it to be that way. He don’t want a man to be treated like that. It’s all right for a woman to sort of tease a man into doing what she wants done, but Pearl don’t seem to be aiming after that. She ain’t teasing me, to her way of thinking, but it sure does act that way on me. Right now I feel like I want a woman what ain’t so—”
“What you got in that there croker sack, Lov?” Jeeter said. “I been seeing you for the past hour or longer, ever since you came over the top of that far hill yonder.”
“Turnips, by God,” Lov said, looking at the Lester women.
“Where’d you get turnips, Lov?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know!”
“I was thinking maybe we might fix up some sort of a trade, Lov—me and you. Now, I could go down to your house and sort of tell Pearl she’s got to sleep in the bed with you. That’s what you was aiming to speak to me about, wasn’t it? You want her to sleep in the bed, don’t you?”
“She ain’t never slept in the bed. It’s that durn pallet on the floor that she sleeps on every night. Reckon you could make her stop doing that, Jeeter?”
“I’d be pleased something powerful to make her do what she ain’t doing. That is, if me and you could make a trade with them turnips, Lov.”
“That’s what I came by here for—to speak to you about Pearl. But I ain’t going to let you have none of these turnips, though. I had to pay fifty cents for this many in a sack, and I had to walk all the way to the other side of Fuller and back to fetch them. You’re Pearl’s daddy, and you ought to make her behave for nothing. She don’t pay no attention to nothing I tell her to do.”
“By God and by Jesus, Lov, all the damn-blasted turnips I raised this year is wormy. And I ain’t had a good turnip since a year ago this spring. All my turnips has got them damn-blasted green-gutted worms in them, Lov. What God made turnip-worms for, I can’t make out. It appears to me like He just naturally has got it in good and heavy for a poor man. I worked all the fall last year digging up a patch of ground to grow turnips