• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3806 0

done. None of them ever was satisfied staying here. They ain’t like me, because I think more of the land than I do about staying in a durn cotton mill. You can’t smell no sedge fire up there, and when it comes time to break the land for planting, you feel sick inside but you don’t know what’s ailing you. People has told me about that spring sickness in the mills, I don’t know how many times. But when a man stays on the land, he don’t get to feeling like that this time of year, because he’s right here to smell the smoke of burning broom-sedge and to feel the wind fresh off the plowed fields going down inside of his body. So instead of feeling sick and not knowing what’s wrong down in his body, as it happens in the durn mills, out here on the land a man feels better than he ever did. The spring-time ain’t going to let you fool it by hiding away inside a durn cotton mill. It knows you got to stay on the land to feel good. That’s because humans made the mills. God made the land, but you don’t see Him building durn cotton mills. That’s how I know better than to go up there like the rest of them. I stay where God made a place for me.”

“Ellie May’s acting like she was Lov’s woman,” Dude said.

Ada shifted the weight of her body from one foot to the other. She was standing in the same place on the porch that she had been when Lov first came into the yard. She had been watching Lov and Ellie May for a long time without looking anywhere else.

“Maybe God intended for it to be such,” Jeeter said. “Maybe He knows more about it than us mortals do. God is a wise old somebody. You can’t fool Him! He takes care of little details us humans never stop to think about. That’s why I ain’t leaving the land and going to Augusta to live in a durn cotton mill. He put me here, and He ain’t never told me to get off and go up there. That’s why I’m staying on the land. If I was to haul off and go to the mills, it might be hell to pay, coming and going. God might get mad because I done it and strike me dead. Or on the other hand, He might let me stay there until my natural death, but hound me all the time with little devilish things. That’s the way He makes His punishment sometimes. He just lets us stay on, slow-like, and hounding us every step, until we wish we was a long time dead and in the ground. That’s why I ain’t going to the mills with a big rush like all them other folks around Fuller did. They got up there and all of them has a mighty pain inside for the land, but they can’t come back. They got to stay now. That’s what God’s done to them for leaving the land. He’s going to hound them every step they take until they die.”

“Look at that horsing Ellie May’s doing!” Dude said. “That’s horsing from way back yonder!”

“By God and by Jesus, Lov,” Jeeter shouted across the yard, “what about them there turnips? Has they got them damn-blasted green-gutted worms in them like mine had? I been wanting some good eating turnips since way back last spring. If Captain John hadn’t sold off all his mules and shut off letting me get guano on his credit, I could have raised me a whopping big mess of turnips this year. But when he sold the mules and moved to Augusta, he said he wasn’t going to ruin himself by letting us tenants break him buying guano on his credit in Fuller. He said there wasn’t no sense in trying to run a farm no more—fifty plows or one plow. He said he could make more money out of farming by not running plows. And that’s why we ain’t got no snuff and rations no more. Ada says she’s just bound to have a little snuff now and then, because it sort of staves off hunger, and it does, at that. Every time I sell a load of wood I get about a dozen jars of snuff, even if I ain’t got the money to buy meal and meat, because snuff is something a man is just bound to have. When I has a sharp pain in the belly, I can take a little snuff and not feel hungry all the rest of the day. Snuff is a powerful help to keep a man living.

“But I couldn’t raise no turnips this year. I didn’t have no mule, and I didn’t have no guano. Oh, I had a few measly little rows