Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [48]
The feeling was in him again. This time he felt it more deeply than ever, because in all the past six or seven years when he had wanted to raise a crop he had kept his disappointment from crushing his spirit by looking forward to the year when he could farm again. But this year he felt that if he did not get the seed-cotton and guano in the ground he would never be able to try again. He knew he could not go on forever waiting each year for credit and never receiving it, because he was becoming weaker each day, and soon he would not be able to walk between the plow-handles even if credit were provided for him.
It was because of his discouragement that the odor of wood and sedge smoke and of newly turned earth now filling the air, was so strong and pungent. Farmers everywhere were burning over the woods and the broom-sedge fields, and plowing the earth in the old cotton lands and in the new grounds.
The urge he felt to stir the ground and to plant cotton in it, and after that to sit in the shade during the hot months watching the plants sprout and grow, was even greater than the pains of hunger in his stomach. He could sit calmly and bear the feeling of hunger, but to be compelled to live and look each day at the unplowed fields was an agony he believed he could not stand many more days.
His head dropped forward on his knees, and sleep soon overcame him and brought a peaceful rest to his tired heart and body.
Chapter XIV
DUDE AND SISTER BESSIE came back at sunset. Dude was blowing the horn a mile away, when Jeeter first heard it, and he and Ada ran out to the road to watch them come. The horn made a pretty sound, Jeeter thought, and he liked the way Dude blew it. He was pressing the horn button and taking his finger off every few seconds, like the firemen who blew the engine whistles when they were leaving the coal chute.
“That’s Dude blowing the horn,” Jeeter said. “Don’t he blow it pretty, though? He always liked to blow the horn near about as much as he liked to drive an automobile. He used to cuss a lot because the horn on my car wouldn’t make the least bit of a sound. The wires got pulled loose and I never had time to tie them up again.”
Ada stood in the road watching the shiny new car come nearer and nearer. It looked like a big black chariot, she said, running away from a cyclone. The dust blown up behind did look like the approach of a cyclone.
“Ain’t that the prettiest sight to see?” she said.
“That’s Dude driving it, and blowing the horn, too,” he said. “It makes a pretty sound when it blows, don’t it, Ada?”
Jeeter was proud of his son.
“I wish all my children was here to see it,” Ada said “Lizzie Belle used to like to look at automobiles, and ride in them, too, more than anybody I ever saw. Maybe she’s got herself one now. I wish I knowed.”
Sister Bessie and Dude drove up slowly, and turned into the yard. Jeeter and Ada ran along beside the car until it stopped beside the chimney of the house. Ellie May saw everything from around the corner of the house.
“How far a piece did you go riding?” Jeeter asked Bessie as she opened the door and stepped out on the ground. “You been gone clear the whole afternoon. Did you go to Augusta?”
Bessie caught up the bottom of her skirt and began wiping off the dust. Ada and Ellie May were already at work on the other side of the car. The grandmother was thirty feet away, standing behind a chinaberry tree and looking around the trunk at the automobile. Dude sat under the steering-wheel blowing the horn.
“We went and we went till we went clear to McCoy,” she said. “We just kept on going till we got there.”
“That’s about thirty miles, ain’t it?” Jeeter asked excitedly. “Did you go clear that far and back?”
“That’s what we did,” Dude said. “I ain’t never been that far away from here before. It’s a pretty