Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [53]
The rows of the last crop of cotton were still there, and as the car gathered speed, the bumps tossed Dude and Bessie up and down so suddenly and so often that they could not keep their seats. Dude grasped the steering-wheel tightly and held himself better than Bessie could; Bessie bobbed up and down as the car raced over the old cotton rows and her head hit the top every time there was a bump. They had gone about a quarter of a mile, and were almost at the edge of the grove where the pile of blackjack was, when suddenly there was a jarring crash that stopped the car dead in its tracks.
Dude was thrown against the steering-wheel, and Bessie shot forward off the seat and struck her head against the wind-shield. Where her forehead had hit the glass there were a hundred or more cracks, branching out like a wet spider-web in the sunshine. None of the glass shattered, though, and the wind-shield was still intact. She did not know what had happened.
“Praise the Lord,” Bessie shouted, pulling herself out of her cramped position on the floor-boards. “What’s we done this time, Dude?”
“I reckon we rammed into a stump,” he said. “I clear forgot about them old dead stumps out here in the sedge. I couldn’t see nothing at all for the sedge. It covers everything on the ground.”
Both of them got out and went to the front. A two-foot stump had stopped them.
The blackened pine stump, hidden from view by the four-foot wall of brown broom-sedge, stood squarely in front of the axle. It was partly decayed, and except for the heart of it, the car would have knocked it down and gone ahead without any trouble. As it was, the axle was not badly bent; actually the car was going only fifteen miles an hour, and there had not been enough force to twist the axle out of shape. The wheels had sprung forward a few inches, but aside from that, there was nothing to worry about. The car was still almost as good as new.
Jeeter came running up just then with his hands and arms full of rusty baling wire, which he had found behind the corn-crib.
They did not have to tell him what had happened, because he could see just as well as they did that the front axle had hit the stump and sprung the wheels forward several inches.
“It don’t appear to be hurt much,” he said. “Maybe it ain’t hurt none at all. We has got to haul a load of wood to Augusta to-day, because there ain’t no more meal and chicory in the house to eat.”
Bessie watched Dude start up the engine and back away from the stump. He swung around it, and drove carefully the remaining few yards to the pile of blackjack. Jeeter began picking up the pieces of scrub oak and hurling them like javelins into the back seat.
“I reckon I’d better put the top down,” Dude said. “It won’t hold much unless the top’s down.”
He began unfastening the set screws holding the top to the wind-shield, while Jeeter and Bessie continued to hurl blackjack into the back seat.
“There won’t be no room for Ada to go along, too, will there?” Jeeter said. “She’ll be powerful put out when she sees us drive off to Augusta and not stopping to take her along. The last time me and Dude went up there in my car, she and Ellie May liked to had a fit, but it wasn’t no use, because we needed all the room for wood.”
“Well, I ain’t going to stay at home,” Bessie said. “I’m going just as big as the next one. You can’t make me stay here.”
“I’m going,” Dude said. “Can’t nobody make me stay here. I’m going to drive the car.”
He had thrown the top back and was trying to tie it down. Most of it had been folded up, but some of it hung down as far as the rear axle. He could not find any means of making it stay folded, so he allowed it to hang down behind.
“I sure ain’t going to miss going,” Jeeter said. “It’s my wood I’m taking to sell. I’m going to be the first one to go.”
The scrub oak had been cut into varying lengths the past week when Jeeter and Dude had spent a day in the grove getting a load ready to sell. Some of it was a foot in length, but