Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [65]
“What’s he going to preach about Sunday?”
“About men wearing black shirts.”
“Black shirts? What for?”
“You ask him. He knows.”
“Black shirts ain’t nothing to preach about, to my way of thinking. I ain’t never heard of that before.”
“You come to preaching at the schoolhouse Sunday afternoon and find out.”
“Is he going to preach for black shirts, or against black shirts?”
“Against them.”
“What for, Sister Bessie?”
“It ain’t my place to tell you about Dude’s preaching. That’s for you to go to the schoolhouse and hear. Preachers don’t want their secrets spread all over the country beforehand. Wouldn’t nobody take the trouble to go and listen, if they did that.”
“Maybe I don’t know much about preaching, but I ain’t never heard of nobody preaching about men wearing black shirts—against black shirts, at that. I ain’t never seen a man wearing a black shirt, noway.”
“Preachers has got to preach against something. It wouldn’t do them no good to preach for everything. They got to be against something every time.”
“I never looked at it that way before,” Jeeter said, “but there might be a lot in what you say. Though, take for instance, God and heaven—you wouldn’t preach against them, would you, Sister Bessie?”
“Good preachers don’t preach about God and heaven, and things like that. They always preach against something, like hell and the devil. Them is things to be against. It wouldn’t do a preacher no good to preach for God. He’s got to preach against the devil and all wicked and sinful things. That’s what the people like to hear about. They want to hear about the bad things.”
“You sure is a convincing woman, Sister Bessie,” he said. “God must be pretty proud of having a woman preacher like you. I don’t know what He’s going to think about Dude, though. Specially when he starts preaching against men wearing black shirts. I ain’t never seen a man wearing a black shirt, noway, and I don’t believe there’s such things in the country.”
Jeeter bent over and rubbed his hands on the dent in the body of the car. He scraped the surface paint with his fingernails until most of it had peeled off and fallen on the ground.
“Stop doing that to my automobile,” Bessie said. “Ain’t you got no sense at all? You and Ada has near about got all the paint off of it already doing that.”
“You wouldn’t talk to me like that, would you, Bessie?” he asked. “I ain’t hurting the automobile no more than it’s already done.”
“Well, you keep your hands off it, anyhow.”
Jeeter slouched away and leaned against the corner of the house. He looked sharply at Bessie, saying nothing.
“I near about ruined my new automobile letting you fool with it,” she said. “I ought to had better sense than to let you get near it. Hauling that load of blackjack to Augusta tore holes all in the back seat.”
“You ain’t going to take me riding in it none?” he asked, standing erectly by the house.
“No, sir! You ain’t going to ride in my new automobile no more. That’s why I wouldn’t let you go with me to see Tom this morning. I don’t want you around it no more, neither.”
“By God and by Jesus, if that’s what you’re aiming to do, you can get off my land,” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and pulling at the rotten weatherboards behind him. “I ain’t none too pleased to have you around, noway.”
Bessie did not know what to say. She looked around for Dude, but he was not in sight.
“You’re going to make me leave?”
“I done started doing it. I already told you to get off my land.”
“It don’t belong to you. It’s Captain John’s land. He owns it.”
“It’s the old Lester place. Captain John ain’t got no more right to it than nobody else. Them rich people up there in Augusta come down here and take everything a man’s got, but they can’t take the land away from me. By God and by Jesus, my daddy owned it, and his daddy before him, and I ain’t going to get off it while I’m alive. But durned if I can’t run you off it—now git!”
“Me and Dude ain’t got no place to go. The roof is all rotted away at