Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [35]
Dude had been dropping pebbles into the well for the past few minutes. Suddenly he stopped and looked at Bessie. He looked straight into her face, and the sight of the two cavernous round nostrils brought a smile to his lips. He had looked at her nose before, but this time the holes seemed to be larger and rounder than ever. It was more like looking down into a double-barrel shotgun than ever before. He could not keep from laughing.
“What you laughing at, Dude?” she asked, frowning.
“At them two holes in your nose,” he said. “I ain’t never seen nobody with all the top of her nose gone away like that before.”
Bessie’s face turned white. She hung her head in an effort to hide her exposed nostrils as much as possible. She was sensitive about her appearance, but she knew of no way to remedy her nose. She had been born without a bone in it, and after nearly forty years it had still not developed. She put her hand over her face.
“I’m ashamed of you, Dude,” she said, wiping the tears from the corners of her eyes. “You know I can’t help the way I look. I been like that ever since I can remember. Won’t no nose grow on me, I reckon.”
Dude dug the toes of his shoes in the sand and tried not to laugh. But almost as suddenly as he had first looked at Bessie’s face and broken into a smile, he stopped and scowled meanly at himself. It was the remembrance of the new automobile that made him stop laughing at Bessie. If she was going to buy a brand-new car, he did not care how she looked. It would have been all right with him if she had had a harelip like Ellie May’s, now that he could ride all he wanted to. He had never driven a new motor car, and that was something he wanted to do more than anything else he could think of.
“I didn’t mean no harm,” he said uneasily. “Honest to God, I didn’t. I don’t give a damn how your nose looks.”
Bessie smiled again, and put her arms around his waist. She looked up at him again, her face so close to his that he could feel her breath. He had to stop trying to see down into her nose, because it hurt his eyes, and made them ache, to focus them on an object only a few inches away. Her nostrils were only a dark blur on her face when they were standing so close together.
“Can I drive the new automobile, sure enough?” he asked again, hoping he had not made her change her mind. “Is you going to let me drive it?”
“That’s why I’m getting it, Dude. I’m getting it for you to drive all over the country in. Me and you is going to get married, and we can ride all the time if we want to. I won’t stop you from going somewhere when you want to go. You can ride all the time.”
“Will it have a horn on it?”
“I reckon it will. Don’t all new automobiles come with horns all ready on them?”
“Maybe so,” he said. “You be sure and find out if it’s got one when you buy it, anyway. It won’t be no good at all unless it’s got a horn.”
“Dude is pretty durn lucky,” Jeeter said. “I didn’t get a durn thing when I married Ada, there. She didn’t have nothing but some old dresses of her own, and her people was that durn poor they had to eat meal and fat-back just like we do now. I didn’t get nothing when I married her, except a mess of trouble.”
Ada walked over to Bessie and laid her hand on Bessie’s arm.
“Maybe if you got all that money, Bessie, you and Dude could buy me a jar of snuff in Fuller. Reckon you could do that for Dude’s old Ma? Being that Dude is my boy, you ought to get me just a little jar of snuff, anyway. I’d sure be powerful pleased if you was to get three or four jars while you was about it, though. Snuff drives away the pains in my poor stomach when I can’t get nothing to eat.”
“I been needing a new pair of overalls for the longest time, Bessie,” Jeeter said. “I declare, I’m almost scared to go a far piece from the house any more, because I don’t know but what my clothes will drop right off of me some time when I ain’t noticing. If you could get me a new pair in Fuller, I’d be powerful pleased.”
Bessie led Dude away from the well. They walked around