Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [70]
They carried the body by the hands and feet, and put it down in the broom-sedge. Jeeter went to get a shovel from behind the corn-crib.
“You think that over what I said about Ellie May,” Jeeter said. “I’ll send her down to your house in time to cook your supper to-night. Ellie May won’t treat you bad like Pearl done. Ellie May won’t sleep on no durn pallet on the floor.”
Lov started back down the tobacco road towards the coal chute. He shuffled his feet along the road, filling his shoes with sand. He did not look back.
Jeeter went out into the field with the shovel and began digging a grave to put his mother in. He dug in the earth for ten or fifteen minutes, and then called Ellie May. She had been standing in the yard behind a chinaberry tree waiting for Jeeter to tell her to go to Lov’s.
“You wash yourself and go down to Lov’s house and fix up for him,” he told her, leaning wearily on the shovel handle. “He’ll be coming home for supper to-night, and you cook him what he tells you.”
Ellie May dashed into the house before Jeeter could finish giving her his instructions. She could not wait any longer. He dug some more earth out of the ground, making the ditch a little longer.
Ellie May came out of the house in less than five minutes, running towards the road. Jeeter threw down the shovel and ran after her, calling her.
“You come back here in the morning after Lov goes to work and bring some victuals with you, do you hear?” he shouted. “Lov makes a dollar a day at the chute, and he’s got rations for a lot of victuals. Me and your Ma ain’t got nothing up here. We get pretty hungry sometimes. You remember that.”
Ellie May had run all the way across the yard and was racing down the middle of the tobacco road as fast as she could. Before Jeeter could say anything else to her, she was a hundred yards away. He had wanted to tell her to bring him a pair of Lov’s overalls too, the next morning when she brought the cooked food. She looked as if she was in such a great hurry to reach Lov’s house that he let her go. She could make another trip the next day with the overalls.
Chapter XIX
THE TIME FOR SPRING plowing was over. Throughout the last two weeks of February the weather had been dry and the ground crumbly; there had been no finer season for plowing and planting in six or seven years. Usually at that time rains came every few days and kept the earth continually wet and soggy; but this year the season had begun in the middle of February with clearing skies, and a gentle breeze had been drying the moisture in the ground ever since the winter rains had stopped.
Farmers around Fuller who were undertaking to raise a crop of cotton this year had finished their plowing by the end of the month. With such an early start, there seemed to be no reason why, with plenty of hot weather during the growing season, the land should not yield a bale of cotton to the acre that fall. All farmers would put in as much guano as they could buy, and there was no limit to the number of pounds of cotton an acre would yield if fertilizer could be bought and used with a free hand. A bale to the acre was the goal of every cotton farmer around Fuller; but the boll-weevil and hard summer rains generally cut the crop in half. And on the other hand, if it was a good year for the raising of cotton, the price would probably drop lower than it had before. Not many men felt like working all year for six- or seven-cent cotton in the fall.
Jeeter had lived through the season for burning broom-sedge and pine woods, and through the time for spring plowing, without having done either. It was still not too late to begin, but Jeeter did not have a mule, and he did not have the credit to purchase seed-cotton and guano at the stores. Up until this year, he had lived in the hope that something would happen at the last moment to provide a mule and credit, but now it seemed to him that there was no use hoping for anything any more. He could still look forward to the following year when he could perhaps raise a crop