Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [43]
Dude stood for several minutes watching Bessie as she tried to pull him across the room. She finally sat down on one of the beds and attempted to make him sit beside her.
“You ain’t going to sleep now, is you?” he asked her. “It ain’t time to go to bed yet. It ain’t no more that noontime now.”
“Just for now,” she said. “We can go out again after a while and take a ride in the automobile.”
Dude ran to the window to look at the car. For the moment, he had completely forgotten about it. When he reached the window, he saw Jeeter and Ellie May holding to the sill with the ends of their fingers and trying to see inside.
“What you doing that for?” he asked Jeeter. “What you want to look at?”
Jeeter turned away and looked out over the brown broom-sedge. Ellie May ran around to the back of the house and tip-toed into the hall through the kitchen.
Bessie came to the window and pulled Dude around until he faced her. Then she made him go back and sit down on the bed.
Suddenly, without knowing how it happened, Dude found himself on the bed with a quilt over him. Bessie had locked her arms around him so tightly that he could not move in any direction.
Outside, he heard a ladder scrape against the weatherboards. Jeeter had found the ladder under the crib and had brought it to the window.
Chapter XII
WHEN DUDE LOOKED UP, he saw that the door had been opened and that Ellie May, Ada, and the grandmother were crowding through it. He did not know what to do, but he tried to motion to them to go away.
He could not see Jeeter, because Jeeter was behind him, standing half-way up in the window with his feet supported on one of the rungs of the ladder. Bessie saw Jeeter, but she could not see the others.
Dude heard his grandmother groan and walk away. He could hear her feet sliding over the pine boards of the hall floor, the horse-collar shoes making an irritating sound as she went towards the front yard. He paid no more attention to the others.
After a while Jeeter cleared his throat and called Bessie. She did not answer him the first time he called, nor the next. Neither she nor Dude wanted to be disturbed.
When she persisted in not answering him, Jeeter climbed through the window and walked across the room to the bed. He shook Dude by the collar until he turned around.
Jeeter, however, did not have anything to say to Dude. It was Bessie he wanted to speak to.
“I been thinking just now about it, Sister Bessie, and the more I think it over in my mind, the more I convince myself that you was right about what we was discussing yesterday on the porch.”
“What you want with me, Jeeter?” she asked.
“Now, about that place in the Bible where it says if a man’s eye offends God he ought to go and take it out.”
“That’s what the Bible says,” she answered.
“I know it does. And that’s what’s worrying my soul so bad right now.”
“But you is a religious man, Jeeter,” she said. “Nothing ought to bother your conscience now. I prayed for you about them turnips you took from Lov. The Lord has forgot all about it now. He ain’t going to hound you none on that account.”
“It ain’t about the turnips. It’s about cutting myself off. Now, I reckon what you said was right. I ought to go and do it.”
Dude turned around and tried to push Jeeter to the floor. Jeeter clung to the bedstead, and would not move away.
“Why you want to do that?” Bessie said.
“I been thinking about all you said so much that right now I know I ought to go ahead and cut myself off, so the Lord won’t let me be tempted no more. I offended Him, and I know I ought to cut myself off so I won’t do it no more. Ain’t that right, Sister Bessie?”
“That’s right,” she said. “That’s what the Bible says a man ought to do when he’s powerful sinful.”
Jeeter looked at Bessie. He pulled back the quilt so he could see her better.
“Maybe I can put it off a little while, though,” he said, after