Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [45]
Now Ellie May heard what Jeeter was saying, and it interested her. She waited to hear more.
“Now, you, Ellie May, it’s time you was finding yourself a man. All my other children has got married. It’s your time next. It was your time a long while ago, ’way before Pearl and Dude got married, but I make allowances for you on account of your face. I know it’s harder for you to mate up than it is for anybody else, but in this country everybody has got to get mated up. You ought to go out and find yourself a man to marry right away, and not wait no longer. It might be too late pretty soon, and you don’t want that to happen. It ain’t going to get you nowhere fooling around with Lov like you was doing, because you can’t get him that way. He’s already married. It’s the unmarried men you has got to get. There’s a fine lot of boys running that sawmill over at Big Greek. You can walk over that way some day and make them take notice of you. It ain’t hard to do. Women know how to make men take notice of them, and you’re old enough to know all about it at your age. Them boys at the sawmill down there at Big Creek ought to take a liking to you in spite of the way you look in the face. When a man looks at you from behind, he ought to want to mate up with you right there and then. That’s what I heard Lov say one time, and he ought to know, because he’s mated up now. Just don’t show your face too much, and that won’t stop the boys from getting after you.”
When Jeeter looked at Ellie May again, she was crying. It was about the first time he had ever seen her cry since she was a baby. He did not know what to do about it, nor to say about it, because he had never before had the occasion to try to calm a crying woman. Ada never cried. She never did anything.
Before he could ask her what the matter was, she had run off into the old cotton field; she ran towards the woods behind the house, jumping through the brown broom-sedge like a frightened rabbit.
“Now I never seen the likes of that before,” Jeeter said, “I wonder what it was that I could have said that made her carry-on like that?”
Chapter XIII
JEETER REMAINED SEATED on his heels by the chimney in the yard for half an hour after Ellie May had run away crying. He stared at the tracks left in the yard by the new automobile, amazed at the sharpness of the imprint of the tiretread. The tires of his own car, which was still standing in the yard between the house and the corn-crib, were worn smooth. When they rolled on the sand, they left no track, except two parallel bands of smoothed sand. He was wondering now what he could do about his tires. If he could pump them all up at the same time, he could haul a load of wood to Augusta and sell it. He might even get as much as a dollar for the load.
It was fifteen miles to the city, and after he had bought enough gasoline and oil for the trip there and back, there would not be much left of the dollar. A quarter, possibly, with which he could buy two or three jars of snuff and a peck of cotton-seed meal. Even a quarter would not buy enough corn meal for them to eat. He had already begun buying cotton-seed meal, because corn meal cost too much. Fifteen cents would buy enough cotton-seed meal to last them a whole week.
But Jeeter was not certain whether it was worth the trouble of hauling a load of wood. It would take him nearly half a day to load the car with blackjack, and half a day for the trip to Augusta. And then after he got there he might not be able to find anybody to buy it.
He still planned a crop for that year, though. He had by no means given up his plans to raise one. Ten or fifteen acres of cotton could be raised, if he could get the seed and guano. There was a mule over near Fuller he thought he could borrow, and he had a plow that would do; but it took money or an equal amount of credit to buy seed-cotton and guano. The merchants in Fuller had said they would not let him have anything on credit again, and