Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [73]
Lov’s first thought on seeing the smoking ashes was to remember Jeeter’s prayerful plea about the care he wanted taken of his body when he died. Now it did not matter, because there was very little of it left.
After the coals had cooled, the men went into the ashes and carried out the two bodies and laid them down under the chinaberry tree beside the road. The tree’s green limbs had been scorched, but it was too far away from the house to burn. The other chinaberry trees in the yard had been closer to the house, and they had burned almost as quickly as the house.
Preparations were begun at once to dig the grave. The men found two or three charred and broken-handled shovels and a pick behind the scorched and blistered corn-crib, and asked Lov where he wanted the grave dug. They decided to dig it in the blackjack grove, because if some one did decide to farm the land that year or the following ones, there would be no danger of the grave being plowed up so soon.
The men dug the grave, and carried the remains, stretched out on blackjack poles, to the grove. They were lowered into the ground. Some of the men asked Bessie to say a short prayer before the bodies were covered, but she refused to say anything for Jeeter or Ada. There was nothing, then, left to do but to throw the earth in and smooth the mounds with the back of the shovels.
Most of the farmers hurried back to their homes for breakfast. There was nothing else to be done.
Lov sat down by the lone chinaberry tree and looked at the blackened mass of ashes. Bessie and Dude stayed a while, too; they had to wait on Lov. Ellie May hovered in the distance, looking on, but never coming close enough to be noticed by Lov or the others.
“I reckon old Jeeter had the best thing happen to him,” Lov said. “He was killing himself worrying all the time about the raising of a crop. That was all he wanted in this life—growing cotton was better than anything else to him. There ain’t many more like him left, I reckon. Most of the people now don’t care about nothing except getting a job in a cotton mill somewhere. But can’t all of them work in the mills, and they’ll have to stay here like Jeeter until they get taken away too. There ain’t no sense in them raising crops. They can’t make no money at it, not even a living. If they do make some cotton, somebody comes along and cheats them out of it. It looks like the Lord don’t care about crops being raised no more like He used to, or He would be more helpful to the poor. He could make the rich people lend out their money, and stop holding it up. I can’t figure out how they got hold of all the money in the county, anyhow. Looks like it ought to be spread out among everybody.”
Dude poked around in the ashes looking for whatever he could find. There had been nothing of value in the house; but he liked to dig in the ashes and toss out the twisted tin kitchen dishes and china doorknobs. The charred and crusted iron casters of the wooden beds were there, and nails and screws; almost everything else in the house had been made of wood or cloth.
“Old Jeeter had one wish fulfilled,” Lov said. “It wasn’t exactly fulfilled, but it was taken care of, anyhow. He used to tell me he didn’t want me to lock him up in the corn-crib and go off and leave him when he died. That’s what happened to his daddy. When his daddy died, Jeeter and the men who were sitting up with the body locked it in the corn-crib at night while they rode to Fuller for tobacco and drinks. They put it in the crib so nothing would happen to it while they was gone. When they went to bury it the next day, a big crib rat jumped out of the box. It had gnawed into the coffin while it was shut up in the crib, and it had eaten all one side of the older Lester’s face and neck. That was what Jeeter was afraid would happen to him, and he used to make me promise two or three times a day that I wouldn’t lock him up in the crib when he died. There wasn’t no use of him worrying so, because there ain’t been no