Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [4]
Lov dragged the sack of turnips across the drain ditch and sat down again. Jeeter laid aside the rotten inner-tube and waited.
Chapter II
LOV OPENED THE SACK, selected a large turnip, wiping it clean with his hands, and took three big bites one after the other. The Lester women stood in the yard and on the porch looking at Lov eat. Ellie May came from behind the chinaberry tree and sat down not far from Lov on a pine stump. Ada and the old grandmother were on the porch watching the turnip in Lov’s hand become smaller and smaller with each bite.
“Now, if Pearl was anything like Ellie May, she wouldn’t act like she does,” Lov said. “I’d have taken Ellie May at the start if it wasn’t for that face of hers. But I knowed I couldn’t sleep with no peace of mind at night with her in the bed with me, and knowing how it looked in the daylight. Pearl looks pretty, and she’s a right smart piece to want to sleep with, but I just can’t make her stay off of that durn pallet on the floor when night comes. You got to come down there and make her do like she ought to act, Jeeter. I been married to her near on to a whole year, and all that time I could just as well been shovelling coal at the chute night and day without ever going to my house. That ain’t the way it was intended for it to be. A man has the right to want his wife to get in the bed when dark comes. I ain’t never heard of a woman wanting to sleep on a durn pallet on the floor every night in the whole year. Pearl is queer that way.”
“By God and by Jesus, Dude,” Jeeter said, “ain’t you never going to stop bouncing that there ball against that there old house? You’ve clear about got all the weatherboards knocked off already. The durned old house is going to pitch over and fall on the ground some of these days if you don’t stop doing that.”
Jeeter picked up the inner-tube again, and tried to make the patch stick to the rubber. The old automobile against which he was sitting was the last of his possessions. The year before, the cow had died, leaving him with the car. Up until that time he had had a way of boasting about his goods, but when the cow went, he did not even mention the car any more. He had begun to think that he was indeed a poor man. No longer was there anything he could mortgage when the time came each spring to buy seed-cotton and guano; the automobile had been turned down at the junk yard in Augusta. But he still had wood to sell; it was the wiry blackjack that grew behind the house. He was trying now to patch the inner-tube so he could haul a load of it to Augusta some time that week. Ada said all the meal was gone, and the meat, too. They had been living off of fat-back rinds several days already, and after they were gone, there would be nothing for them to eat. A load of blackjack would bring fifty or seventy-five cents in Augusta, if he could find a man who would buy it. When the old cow had died, Jeeter hauled the carcass to the fertilizer plant in Augusta and received two dollars and a quarter for it. After that, there was nothing left to sell but blackjack.
“Quit chunking that durn ball at them there weatherboards, Dude,” he said. “You don’t never stop doing what I tell you. That ain’t no way to treat your old Pa,