Tobacco Road
Page 11
The loan companies were the sharpest people he had ever had anything to do with. Once he had - secured a two-hundred-dollar loan from one of them, but he swore it was the last time he would ever bind himself to such an agreement. To begin with, they came out to see him two or three times a week; some of them from the company's office would come out to the farm and try to tell him how to plant the cotton and how much guano to put in to the acre. Then on the first day of every month they came back to collect interest on the loan. He could never pay it, and they added the interest to the principal and charged him interest on that, too.
By the time he sold his cotton in the fall, there was only seven dollars coming to him. The interest on the loan amounted to three per cent a month to start with, and at the end of ten months he had been charged thirty per cent, and on top of that another thirty per cent on the unpaid interest. Then to make sure that the loan was fully protected, Jeeter had to pay the sum of fifty dollars. He could never understand why he had to pay that, and the company did not undertake to explain it to him. When he had asked what the fifty dollars was meant to cover, he was told that it was merely the fee for making the loan. When the final settlement was made, Jeeter found that he had paid out more than three hundred dollars and was receiving seven dollars for his share. Seven dollars for a year's labor did not seem to him a fair portion of the proceeds from the cotton, especially as he had done all the work, and had furnished the land and mule, too. He was even then still in debt, because he owed ten dollars for the hire of the mule he had used to raise the cotton. With Lov and Ada's help, he discovered that he had actually lost three dollars. The man who had rented him the mule insisted on being paid, and Jeeter had given him the seven dollars, and he was still trying to get the other three to pay the balance.
Jeeter swore that he would never again have anything to do with the rich people in Augusta. They had hounded him nearly every day, trying to tell him how he should cultivate the cotton, and in the end they came out and took it all away from him, leaving him three dollars in debt. He had done all the work, furnished the mule and land, and yet the loan company had taken all the money the cotton brought, and made him lose three dollars. He told everybody he saw after that, that God was not working in a deal such as that one was. He told the men who represented the finance company the same thing.
"You rich folks in Augusta is just bleeding us poor people to death. You don't work none, but you get all the money us farmers make. Here I is working all the year myself, Dude plowing, and Ada and Ellie May helping to chop the cotton in summer and pick it in the fall, and what do I get out of it? Not a durn thing, except a debt of three dollars. It ain't right, I tell you. God ain't working on your side. He won't stand for such cheating much longer, neither. He ain't so liking of you rich people as you think He is. God, He likes the poor."
The men collecting for the loan company listened to Jeeter talk, and when he had finished, they laughed at him and got in their new automobile and drove back to Augusta.
That was one reason why Jeeter was not certain he could raise a crop that year. But he thought now that if he could get the seed and guano on credit from a man in Fuller, he would not be robbed. The people in Fuller were farmers, just as he was, or as he tried to be, and he did not believe they would cheat him. But every time hehad said something about raising credit in Fuller, the mer-chants had waved him away and would not even listen to him. -
"Ain't no use in talking no more, Jeeter," they had said. "There's farmers coming into Fuller every day from all over the country wanting the same thing. If there's one, there's a hundred been here. But we can't help you people none. Last year we let some of you farmers have seed-cotton and guano on credit, and when fall came there was durn little cotton made, and what there was didn't bring more than seven cents, middling grade. Ain't no sense in farming when things is like that. We cant take no more chances. All of us has just got to wait until the rich give up the money they're holding back."
"But, praise God, me and my folks is starving out there on that tobacco road. We ain't got nothing to eat, and we ain't got nothing to sell that will bring money to get meal and meat. You storekeepers won't let us have no more credit since Captain John left, and what is we going to do? I don't know what's going to happen to me and my folks if the rich don't stop bleeding us. They've got all the money, holding it in the banks, and they won't lend it out unless a man will cut off his arms and leave them there for security."
"The best thing you can do, Jeeter," they had said, "is to move your family up to Augusta, or across the river in South Carolina to Horsecreek Valley, where all the mills is, and go to work in one of them. That's the only thing left for you to do now. Ain't no other way."
"No! By God and by Jesus, no!" Jeeter had said. "That's one thing I ain't going to do! The Lord made the land, and He put me here to raise crops on it. I been doing that, and my daddy before me, for the past fifty years, and that's what's intended. Them durn cotton mills is for the women folks to work in. They ain't no place for a man to be, fooling away with little wheels and strings all day long. I say, it's a hell of a job for a man to spend his time winding strings on spools. No! We was put here on the land where cotton will grow, and it's my place to make it grow. I wouldn't fool with the mills if I could make as much as fifteen dollars a week in them. I'm staying on the land till my time comes to die."
"Have it your own way, Jeeter, but you'd better think it over and go to work in the cotton mills. That's what nearly everybody else around Fuller has done. Some of them is in Augusta and some of them is in Horsecreek Valley, but they're all working in the cotton mills just the same. You and your wife together could make twenty or twenty-five dollars a week doing that. You ain't making nothing by staying here. You'll both have to go and live at the county poor-farm pretty soon if you stay here and try to raise cotton."
"Then it will be the rich who put us there," Jeeter had said. "If we has to go to the poor-farm and live, it will be because the rich has got all the money that ought to be spread out among us all and won't turn it loose and give me some credit to get seed-cotton and guano with."
"You ain't got a bit of sense, Jeeter. You ought to know by now that you can't farm. It takes a rich man to run a farm these days. The poor has got to work in the mills." -
"Maybe I ain't got much sense, but I know it ain't intended for me to work in the mills. The land was where I was put at the start, and it's where I'm going to be at the end."
"Why, even your children has got more sense than you, Jeeter. They didn't stay here to starve. They went to work in the mills. Now, there's Lizzie Belle up there in--"
"Maybe some of them did, but that ain't saying it was right. Dude, he didn't go, noway. He'll still here. He's going to farm the land some day, just like all of us ought to be doing."
"Dude hasn't got the sense to leave. If he had the sense your other children had, he wouldn't stay here. He would be able to see how foolish it is to try to farm like things is now. The rich ain't aiming to turn loose their money for credit. They're going to hold on to it to run the mill with."
Jeèter remembered all that had been said, as he sat on his heels by the chimney, leaning against the warm bricks in the late February sun. He had heard men in Fuller say things like that dozens of times, and it always had ended in his walking out and leaving them. None of them understood how he felt about the land when the plowing season came each spring.
The feeling was in him again. Thi-s time he felt it moredeeply than ever, because in all the past six or seven years when he had wanted to raise a crop he had kept his disappointment from crushing his spirit by looking forward to the year when he could farm -again. But this year he felt that if he did not get the seed-cotton and guano in the ground he would never be able to try again. He knew he could not go on forever waiting each year for credit and never receiving it, because he was becoming weaker each day, and soon he would not be able to walk between the plow-handles even if credit were provided for him.
The urge he felt to stir the ground and to plant cotton in it, and after that to sit in the shade during the hot months watching the plants sprout and grow, was even greater than the pains of hunger in his stomach. He could sit calmly and bear the feeling of hunger, but to be cornpelled to live and look each day at the unplowed fields was an agony he believed he could not stand many more days..
His head drooped forward on his knees, and sleep soon overcame him and brought a peaceful rest to his tired heart and body.
Fourteen
Dude and Sister Bessie came back at sunset. Dude was blowing the horn a mile away, when Jeeter first heard it, and he and Ada ran out to the road to watch them come. The horn made a pretty sound, Jeeter thought, and he liked the way Dude blew it. He was pressing the horn button and taking his finger off every few seconds, like the firemen who blew the engine whistles when they were leaving the coal chute.
"That's Dude blowing the horn," Jeeter said. "Don't he blow it pretty, though? He always liked to blow the horn near about as much as he liked to drive an automobile. He used to cuss a lot because the horn on my car wouldn't make the least bit of a sound. The wires got pulled loose and I never had time to tie them up again."
Ada stood in the road watching the shiny new car come nearer and nearer. It looked like a big black chariot, she said, running away from a cyclone. The dust blown up behind did look like the approach of a cyclone.
"Ain't that the _prettiest_ sight to see?" she said.
"That's Dude driving it, and blowing the horn, too," he said. "It makes a pretty sound when it blows, don't it, Ada?"
Jeeter was proud of his son.
"I wish all my children was here to see it," Ada said. "Lizzie Belle used to like to look at automobiles, and ride in them, too, more than anybody I ever saw. Maybe she's got herself one now. I wish I knowed."
Sister Bessie and Dude drove up slowly, and turned into the yard. Jeeter and Ada ran along beside the car until it stopped beside the chimney of the house. Ellie May saw everything from around the corner of the house.
"How far a piece did you go riding?" Jeeter asked Bessie as she opened the door and stepped out on the ground. "You been gone clear the whole afternoon. Did you go to Augusta?"
Bessie caught up the bottom of her skirt and began wiping off the dust. Ada and Ellie May were already at work on the other side of the car. The grandmother was thirty feet away, standing behind a chinaberry tree and looking around the trunk at the automobile. Dude sat un der the steering-wheel blowing the horn.
"We went and we went till we went clear to McCoy," she said. "We just kept on going till we got there." -
"That's about thirty miles, ain't it?" Jeeter - asked excitedly. "Did you go clear that far and back?"
"That's what we did," Dude said. "I ain't never been that far away from here before. It's a pretty country down that way, too."
"Why didn't you go to Augusta?" Jeeter asked. "You went down to the crossroads and I thought sure you was going to Augusta." -
"We didn't go that way," Dude said, "we went the other way--toward McCoy. And we went clear to McCoy, too."
Jeeter walked to the front of the car and looked at it. Dude climbed out and stopped blowing the horn for a while.
"Praise the Lord," Jeeter said, "what went and done that?"
He pointed to the right front fender and headlight. Everybody stopped dusting and gathered around the radiator. The fender was twisted and crumpled until it looked as if somebody had taken a sledge-hammer and tried to see how completely he could maul it. The right headlight had been knocked off. Only a piece of twisted iron and a small strand of insulated wire remained where it had been. The fender had been mashed back against the hood.
"It was a wagon that done that," Dude said. "We was coming back from McCoy, and I was looking out at a big turpentine still, and then the first thing I knowed we was smashed smack into the back of a two-horse wagon."
Bessie looked at the mashed fender and missing headlight, but she said nothing. She could hardly blame it on the devil this time, as she had been riding in the car herself when the accident occurred, but it seemed to her that God ought to have taken better care of it, especially after she had stopped and prayed about it when she bought the automobile that morning in Fuller.
"It don't hurt the running of it none, though, does it?" Jeeter asked.
"It runs like it was brand new yet," Dude said. "And the horn wasn't hurt none at all. It blows just as pretty as it did this morning."
The fender had been crumpled beyond repair. It was lying against the hood of the car and, except for the jagged edges, it appeared as if it had been removed. Apparently nothing else, with the exception of the headlight, had been damaged; there were no dents in the body, and the wheels and axle seemed to stand straight and in line. The broken spring made the left rear end sag, however.
"That don't hurt it none," Jeeter said. "Don't pay no attention to it, Bessie. Just leave it be, and you'll never know it was any different than it was when you got it brand new."
"That's right," she said. "I ain't letting it worry me none, because it wasn't Dude's fault. He was looking at the big turpentine still alongside the road, and I was too, when the wagon got in our way. The nigger driving it ought to have had enough sense to get out of our way when he heard us coming."
"Wasn't you blowing the horn then, Dude?" Jeeter said.
"Not right then I wasn't, because I was looking at the big still. I never saw one that big nowhere before. It was almost as big as a corn-liquor still, only it wasn't as shiny-looking."
"It's a shame to get the new car smashed up so soon already, though," Bessie said, going back and wiping off the dust. "It was brand new only a short time before noon, and now it's only sun-down."
"It was that nigger," Dude said. "If he hadn't been asleep on the wagon it wouldn't have happened at all. He was plumb asleep till it woke him up and threw him out in the ditch."
"He didn't get hurt much, did he?" Jeeter asked.
"I don't know about that," Dude said. "When we drove off again, he was still lying in the ditch. The wagon turned over on him and mashed him. His eyes was wide open all the time, but I couldn't make him say nothing. He looked like he was dead." - -
"Niggers will get killed. Looks like there ain't no way to stop it."
The sun had been down nearly a half an hour and the chill dampness of an early spring night settled over the ground. The grandmother had already gone into the house and got into bed. Ada went up on the porch, hugging her arms across her chest to keep warm, and Bessie started inside, too.
Dude and Jeeter stood around the car until it was so dark they could not see it any longer, and then they too went inside.
The glare of woods-fire soon began to light the sky on the horizons, and the smell of pine smoke filled the damp evening air. Fires were burning in all directions; some of them had been burning a week or longer, while others had been burning only since that afternoon.
In the springy the farmers burned over all of their land. They said the fire would kill the boll-weevils. That was the reason they gave for burning the woods and fields, whenever anybody asked why they did not stop burning up young pine seedlings and standing timber. But the real reason was because everybody had always burned the woods and fields each spring, and they saw no cause for abandoning life-long habits. Burning fields and woods seemed to them to be as necessary as drilling guano in the cotton fields to make the plants yield a large crop. If the wood that was burned had been sawn into lumber or cut into firewood, instead of burning to ashes on the ground, there would have been something for them to sell. Bollweevils were never killed in any great numbers by the fire; the cotton plants had to be sprayed with poiso
n in the summer, anyway. But everybody had always burned over the land each spring, and they continued if only for the reason that their fathers had done it. Jeeter always burned over his land, even though there was no reason in the world why he should do it; he never raised crops any more. This was why the land was bare of everything except broom-sedge and blackjack; the sedge grew anew each year, and the hottest fire could not hurt those tough scrub oaks.
Inside the house the women gathered in the bedroom in the darkness and waited for Jeeter and Dude. The grandmother was already in bed, covered with her ragged quilts. Ellie May had gone out into the broom-sedge and had not yet returned. Bessie and Ada sat on the beds waiting.
The three beds had always held all the Lesters, even when there were sometimes as many as eight or nine of them there. Occasionally, some had slept on pallets on the floor in summer, but in winter it was much warmer for every one in the beds. Now that all of the children had left except Dude and Ellie May, there was just enough room for every one. Bessie had a house of her own, a three-room tenant house on the last sandhill at the river; but the roof was rotten, and the shingles had blown away, and when it rained everything in the three rooms was soaked with water.
Sometimes in the middle of the night when a storm came up suddenly, Bessie would wake up to find the bed filled with water, every piece of her clothes wet, and more water pouring down through the roof. She had told Ada that she did not want to stay there any more until she could have a new shingle roof put on the house. The building and the land around it belonged to Captain John Harmon; he never came out to the tobacco road any more, and he made no repairs to the buildings. He had told Jeeter and Bessie, and all the other people who lived out there, that they could stay in the houses until the buildings rotted to the ground and that he would never ask for a penny of rent. They understood the arrangement fully; he was not going to make any repairs to the roofs, porches, rotted undersills, or anything about the buildings. If the houses fell down, he said, it would be too bad for them; but if they stood up, then Jeeter, Bessie, and all the others could remain in them as long as they wanted to stay.