Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [33]
Chapter IX
THE SUN HAD BEEN up only half an hour when Bessie reached the Lester house on the morning after her sudden departure. She had said then that she was going home to ask God to let her marry Dude. Jeeter had not expected her to come back for several days.
No one was in sight as she crossed the yard and ran through the front door calling Dude.
“Dude—you Dude! Where is you, Dude?” she called.
Jeeter was just getting out of bed when he first heard her; she ran into the bedroom while he sat on a chair pulling on his shoes.
“What you want with Dude, Bessie?” he asked sleepily. “What you want Dude for?”
Bessie ran around the room looking into the beds. There were three beds in which all the Lesters slept. Ada and Jeeter used one of them, Ellie May and the grandmother another, and Dude slept alone.
Ellie May sat up in bed, awakened by the disturbance, and rubbed her eyes. Bessie jerked back the quilts on Dude’s bed, and ran into the next room where the roof had fallen in. It was the other bedroom, the room where most of the children had formerly slept, and it had been deserted because one section of the roof had rotted away. It was filled with plunder.
Bessie came back and looked under Ada’s bed.
“What you want with Dude this time of day, Bessie?” Jeeter asked.
She still did not stop to answer Jeeter’s questions. She ran through the kitchen calling Dude at the top of her voice.
As soon as he could lace his shoes and put on his jumper, Jeeter followed her out into the backyard. His drooping black felt hat was on his head, because his hat was the first thing he put on in the morning and the last he took off at night.
Dude was drawing a bucket of water at the well, and Bessie reached him before he could tip the bucket and get a drink. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed his face excitedly. Dude fought back at first, but as soon as he saw it was Bessie he smiled at her and put his arms around her waist.
Jeeter went closer and watched them. Presently Bessie took a side-comb from her head and began combing Dude’s stiff black hair and smoothing it down with the palms of her hands. Dude’s hair was coarse and bristly, and it stood straight on its ends no matter how much it was combed and brushed. Sometimes he could manage to make it lie down for a few minutes by sousing his head in a pan of water and then combing it hurriedly; but as soon as the water began to dry, the hair would stand straight up again as if it were attached to springs. Dude’s hair was as wiry as hog-bristles.
“I never seen a woman preacher carry-on over a young sapling like that before,” Jeeter said. “What you want to do that to Dude for, Bessie? You and him is hugging and rubbing of the other just like you was yesterday on the front porch.”
Bessie smiled at Dude and Jeeter. She leaned against the well-stand and tucked up her hair. She had not waited that morning to pin it up.
“Me and Dude is going to get married,” she said. “The Lord told me to do it. I asked Him about it, and he said, ‘Sister Bessie, Dude Lester is the man I want you to mate. Get up early in the morning and go up to the Lester place and marry Dude the first thing.’ That’s what He said to me last night, the very words I heard with my own ears while I was praying about it in bed. So when the sun came up, I got out of bed and ran up here as fast as I could, because the Lord don’t like to be kept waiting for His plans to be carried out. He wants me to marry Dude right now.”
Dude looked around nervously as if he was thinking of trying to run off to the woods and hide. He had forgotten how anxious he had been to go home with Bessie the evening before when she first mentioned marriage.
“You hear that, Dude?” Jeeter said. “What you think about doing it with Sister Bessie?”
“Shucks,” he said. “I couldn’t do that.”
“Why can’t you do that?” Jeeter demanded. “What’s ailing you? Ain’t you man enough yet?”
“Maybe I is, and maybe I ain’t. I’d be scared to do that with her.”
“Why, Dude,” his father said, “that ain’t nothing to be afraid