Clairey put a clean bandage back over it and put the salve on the chest of drawers for safekeeping. She then busied herself by picking up the old bandaging to be cleaned and tidied the room a bit as she waited for him to finish eating.
“Looks like Fergus done a good job takin’ care of the place,” she commented as she pulled his pant leg down and propped a pillow beneath it to make him more comfortable. “You know, he and Elvira is to have a baby come winter. She tole me when we was in town.”
“A baby?” he said absentmindedly.
“That’s what she says.” She noticed that Ellis hadn’t eaten much of anything. “Somethin’ wrong with the food?”
“No.” But he pushed the plate away to indicate he was finished. It had been hard to ignore his somber mood for the last few days they had spent at the Fielding home, but she had hoped that once he was home, his disposition would improve.
“You ain’t hungry?”
“Not particularly,” he said.
She picked up the plate but didn’t leave, studying him closely instead. “You all right?”
“Fine.”
He wasn’t very convincing, but then she didn’t suppose he was trying to be. She knew something was eating at him, but she wasn’t sure if she should push it or not. Growing up in a home where she asked as few questions as possible had made her wary. Avoidance was the safest route in her experience. “Can I get you somethin’ afore I go on out?”
“No.”
“I’ll come back to feed you again after a while,” she assured. “You need anythin’ afore then, you got your walkin’ stick there. But the doctor, he don’t want you gettin’ up too much, you know.”
He didn’t say anything.
“What’s eatin’ at you?”
“Don’t matter.” He wouldn’t look at her, shifting to turn himself in the other direction.
She immediately felt sick to her stomach. Was he angry with her? Had she done something to bring his displeasure? “You ain’t cross at me, is you?” she asked, nearly holding her breath as she waited for his reply.
“What’d I be cross at you for?” Ellis seemed somewhat put out by her assumption. She could hear the displeasure in his voice. “No, I ain’t cross with you, Claire.”
She felt some reprieve, but then his tone kept her from feeling totally relieved. She stood with his plate, debating whether she should leave him be or stay and get out of him what his angst was over. She opted to stay. “What is it then?”
“I done tole you, it don’t matter.”
“Matters to me,” she replied. “Why won’t you say it?”
He paused. “My leg busted up this a-way, why that terbaccer is gonna rot and die afore I’m up and round. Don’t know what I’ll do. S’pose I’ll have to sell my daddy’s place,” he grumbled.
She didn’t have any words to console him. She thought of the rows and rows of infant plants in their plant beds waiting out near the tree line at the edge of the yard, and she, too, felt the urgency of what he was saying. Ellis had borrowed against that crop, and if he couldn’t tend to it, they were in danger of losing their farm, of losing everything. She was prompted, however, from somewhere deep inside herself to give him comfort. “It’s all gonna turn out right, Ellis.” But even to her, it sounded weak, faltering.
“There’s them that have and them that don’t have, and we gonna spend the rest of our days with them that don’t have. You can fight, claw, tear your way out, and you just gonna get kicked down again. No point in even tryin’ ’cause it’s all worked out afore you even done had a go at it.”
“What ’bout them cattle? They gonna bring a price, ain’t they?” she offered.
“Not near enough. Coy Struthers done tole me he wanted my daddy’s farm, and I’m gonna have to sell it to him.”
“Well, now, it ain’t my place to tell you one way or the other what I think of it, but maybe you ortta rest on it afore you decide for sure,” she suggested softly. “’Cause it might work out some way.” She carried the plate to the other room.
While Clairey washed the dishes, she fretted over what Ellis had said. There had to be some way for him to keep his daddy’s farm. All of that work they had done together—the fields they had plowed, the plants they had tended—only to have it end like that. The tobacco plants wouldn’t last much longer if they weren’t set out, and they would lose all of them.
As she toweled off her hands, her eyes fell on the trunk that Gilda Fielding had sent home with her, and she went to it, opening the lid quietly. Rummaging through it, she found her old dress, tattered and worn to nothing, threadbare and patched, and she pulled it out. When she came out to the barn, she was wearing it again, with determination burning in her chest and a vague game plan rattling around her head. There was no way that she was about to let it all fall apart now, not after all of the work and effort she and Ellis had put into it. She would save that crop, even if it killed her trying.
She took the harness off the peg and opened Katie’s stall door. The old mule came without being prompted, and Clairey slipped the harness over her muzzle. Ellis had a long flatbed wagon that she hooked Katie up to, and then she guided the animal out to the plant beds. A plot of about eight feet by forty feet of cleared out earth comprised their beds, enclosed on all sides by logs for protection and then covered with canvas to shield the little fledgling plants from the sun and elements. This, also, was why they had planted them along the tree line, to offer protection from the sun until they were ready to transplant to the field that she and Ellis had plowed up.
Once they had grown six to eight inches, they were more than ready for relocation. Clairey watered them down until the soil was wet and friable, and then she took ahold of the plant, working it out of the soil by the roots. As she went down the line, pulling up plants, she laid them flat, stacked like cords of wood, on burlap sacks, loading as many of them as she could work with at one time onto the flatbed to haul to the field.
All day, she labored to pull up the tobacco plants, haul them, and then go down the rows of the field, poking holes with a wooden stick so that the bright green baby plants could be set into the ground. As they were situated, she pushed the dirt back over their roots and gave them a cup of water for good measure.
When she had cleared off the wagon, she went back to fill it up again, continuing with her task until it was late in the night and the sun had long since gone to bed. It was tedious, physically demanding work, but she kept at it at an almost inhuman pace.
There were only a few times that she broke away, and that was to get Ellis his midday meal and then again to get him his supper. When she went in at lunchtime, he was dozing, and she left the plate next to the bed. Come suppertime, he was sitting up and wanted to visit. She could see he was nearly bored out of his mind. Here was a man that was always about some business, and to be confined with nothing to keep his idle hands busy was nothing short of torture for him. It left him with nothing to do but think, which was not altogether a good thing, because what he thought about was bringing him down, making him sorry for himself, filling his head with worry.
She told him she had to feed and care for the animals. It was true; she did. But when she had finished, she went back to setting. In the glow of moonlight, with the short tobacco plants appearing white against the dark red dirt, she stood over the field and surveyed her work with a mixture of pride and desperation. Despite her best efforts, she had maybe set an eighth of the furrowed rows, just a fraction of what was required to finish the job. On average, three to four people could set maybe half an acre in one day. She had planted a fourth. But then there was still one and three quarters of an acre left to go. Too weary to fret over it, she willed her body to walk the distance back to the barn, where she put Katie away for the night, and headed back to the house for her own bit of rest.
Clairey was up long before the dawn to begin again. Not wanting Ellis to know what she was up to, she was forced to do a bulk of the work while he slept. Her muscles
cramped, and moving much more slowly than she had been the day before, she set to pulling the tobacco from the seed beds and replanting by setting them in the field. The one thing that kept her going was a song, and she sang it over and over as her hands instinctively did the work.
“I shall not be, I shall not be moved. I shall not be, I shall not be moved. Just like a tree that’s planted by the water, I shall not be moved.” The words of the song became her anthem. When she didn’t feel that she could go any further, she would sing it through her clenched teeth, and she would go on.
Close to a week after returning home, Ellis began hobbling about the place with his cane. In the beginning, it had taken all of his strength and willpower just to get up from the bed. He was in horrible pain, and he felt so weak, so terribly weak, but gradually he was able to do more. He limped from one room back to the other, sweat pouring from him, muscles shaking from the effort of it. Falling into bed, he dozed in cat naps, regained his strength, and tried again.
Time seemed to crawl with nothing to do and no one about. He thought on his daddy’s place and considered what he would ask Coy for it. His mind went over sums, and he added and subtracted and figured out how he would finish in the black next season. The cows, the farm, winter coming on—they tangled themselves in his brain. The more he thought about it, the more his head ached. And yet, he couldn’t let it go as he struggled for some resolution.
Several days more went by of puttering around the house, and Ellis was ready for the sunlight on his face. He ventured out on the back porch, limping down the few steps to the yard, panting to get his breath. The laundry was flapping with a slight snapping sound in the breeze as it hung from the clothesline. With nothing better to do, he approached it, eyeing Clairey’s newly obtained drawers. If anyone else had been about, he might have gone red. He had never seen women’s underwear before, and he was somewhat drawn to them out of curiosity.
He reached his hand out to touch them, to examine them more closely. The cotton was of the finest quality, a material that only grew softer with washing, gauzy and smooth as cream. His fingers ran over it, caressing it, rubbing it between his thumb and fingers, testing it to see how it felt. The flimsy garment slipped from between the clothespins, off of the line, and fluttered gracefully down from its perch there. He grabbed at it frantically, trying to intercept it before it hit the ground, but it seemed to be intentionally avoiding his touch, out of his reach, as it sailed sporadically on the wave of the breeze. He managed to grab it just in time, standing upright and looking around to make sure that no one was there to witness the incident. The last thing he wanted was to get caught handling women’s unmentionables.
Ellis quickly replaced the underwear, eager to be rid of the evidence. It took both hands to put it back on the line with the clothespins securing it, and he had to let go of his walking stick. When he bent to pick it back up, trying to keep his weight off of his injured leg, he nearly fell over. He decided that he would go back into the house where he was safe.
Clairey came in for the midday meal looking haggard and gaunt. She was surprised to see him sitting at the table. “You up and round?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Can’t lay ’bout doin’ nothin’ for the rest of my days.”
“I’s hopin’ you’d stay off that leg till we get back to have the doctor take a look at it,” she said.
“He don’t need to look at it. We can’t afford to pay him no more. We can’t afford to pay him for what he already done.”
“Can or can’t, he’s gotta. Ain’t got but a little salve left. He’s gonna have to get us more,” she scolded him mildly. “’Sides, he done tole me he’d take eggs and milk for your next visit. So you’re not to worry over it none. We got plenty of eggs and milk.”
He was just a little taken aback by her assertive stand. He had never really seen her behave in such a manner before. He narrowed his eyes as he studied her then asked, “Where you been?”
“Out yonder in the garden,” she replied.
“I’s just out there in the back, and I didn’t see you.”
“Musta been in the barn,” she said, avoiding his eyes as she busied herself with making his meal.
“How’s the corn a-lookin’?”
“It’s lookin’ good. Up past my thigh,” she informed him.
He enjoyed the reference to her thigh with a little grin.
“We got us a fox round ’bout here somewheres, though.”
“You seen him?”
“I ain’t. But he got hisself one of them there chicken’s last night, poor thing. Heard it too. Them chickens was makin’ an awful noise.”
“I’m gonna leave the gun by the door there, and if you hear him again, you wake me,” he told her.
“Two of them cows seem to be with calves.”
“That’s good. Extras we wasn’t plannin’ on. We can sell ’em come next spring for a good price. Whatcha fixin’ there?”
“Some biscuits and some ham and some fresh tomaters from the garden. Made them biscuits fresh this mornin’.”
She put a plate in front of Ellis and sat down with him. He sprinkled some salt over the top of the tomatoes and cut into them, chewing thoughtfully. There was nothing like a tomato grown ripe on the vine for taste. He tried the ham, and it was good too. But when he bit into the biscuit, he instinctively spit it out without hesitation, complete with retching and scraping his tongue with his spoon to try to get every last crumb. Something was off with it. He thought it tasted bitter. He quickly took a drink to try to wash the taste from his mouth.
Clairey looked at him in surprise. “What’s wrong with it?” she asked with a hint of defensiveness.
“Don’t know,” he replied. “Don’t taste like they usually do though.”
She tentatively took a bite, testing it on her tongue, and then spit it out too. “I musta put in bakin’ soda ’stead of bakin’ powder,” she lamented. “That’s awful stuff.”
Her forlorn expression made him smile, and then he started to chuckle. He could see her hesitate, caught between embarrassment and seeing the humor in it. But then her face broke into a grin, and she conceded to the funny side of it.
“Them pigs is gonna have good eatin’ today. Come and get it!” he yelled, as if he were calling to the pigs. “Hot biscuits!”
“I don’t think it’s fit even for pigs.”
When she went back to work, he was sad to see her go. She passed him on the way out, and he worried over her and how worn out she seemed. He wanted to tell her to stay, but then he knew that the place would fall apart if not for her. He felt a twinge of guilt over being so helpless and having to rely on her to care for him. She was so frazzled that she had mistaken the baking powder for the baking soda. He hobbled back to bed, propping his leg up to rest it a spell.
One day wore on into another, much the same as the day before. Ellis busied himself with burning the trash in a barrel in the backyard one afternoon. He sat back on the porch in a ladder back chair, a cat running itself along his leg, while he watched the plumes of smoke ascend toward the sky. Clairey found him there at noontime and sat in the empty chair next to his.
Ellis watched her suspiciously. “Why you wearin’ that ole dress again? Why ain’t you wearin’ one of them that was given to you?”
“Didn’t wanna get ’em dirty while I’s workin’.”
“You gettin’ sleep?” He studied her closely, waiting to gauge her response.
“Some,” she said, not willing to expound. Their silence was easy, comfortable. Somehow, they had grown accustomed to one another, and it wasn’t the same discomfited silence that it had been in the beginning. “You’re keepin’ busy, I see,” she observed, motioning to the barrel of burning trash. “That’s good.”
“Every day it’s a little better and a little better,” he informed her. “I figure I can start hepin’ out now.”
“I aim to take you to Doctor Fielding in a day or two. Wait till he sees you and says it’s all right to.”
“Ain’t gonna hurt to water the garden and do some weedin’ and feedin’ of the animals,” he argued.
“You ortta just take it easy, Ellis. No point in ruinin’ your health. You want that leg to heal proper, don’t you?”
“A man ain’t no count that’d let his wife bear all the burden alone. You go round waitin’ on me and a-doin’ all the chores to boot, and I just lay in that there bed up to nothin’. It ain’t right.” He stared at the barrel, at the bright orange flames that leaped above the rim and then disappeared again. He didn’t want to look at her. He was ashamed, and the thought of meeting her eyes was too much.
“A man can’t hep if he done gone and got his leg busted. ’Sides, it says in that there Good Book a wife’s to be a hep mate. Ain’t that what it says?” Her tone was defensive, as if she were protecting him from himself.
Her speech touched him, although it did little to comfort him. “I’m indebted to you. Don’t know what’d have happened if you wasn’t willin’ to pitch in like you done. Don’t know what’s gonna become of us come fall, but this place woulda falled apart if it wasn’t for you.”
He finally looked at her, and what he saw surprised him. Clairey had a small smile on her lips, her eyes tender, full of emotion. “I’m indebted to you for a whole lot more, Ellis Hooper. Don’t know that I can, but I s’pose I’ll spend the rest of my days tryin’ to make it up to you. Maybe I never said it afore, and shame on me for not, but what you done for me…Why, I’m nothin’ but grateful. If you was to tell me to foller you to the ends of the earth and back, I’d do it. ’Cause I owe you that much and more.” She got up from the chair and went into the house, leaving him there to let what she had said sink in.
Nine long days Clairey worked from before dawn and then continued on until long after the sun had gone down. There was a noticeable change in her appearance—her bloodshot eyes, her worn face. She was a woman on the verge of breaking. On the night that she finished setting, a storm blew in, and she finished her work with the rain coming down on her. She allowed herself the luxury of a good cry, figuring that her tears were mingling with the downpour to soak into the soil. It was relief. It was joy. It was the knowledge that she had overcome, and it spilled out with her tears onto the ground that she had toiled with, to become a part of the crop she had planted with her own hands. It had sought to defeat her, and she had prevailed. Now, she was permanently a part of it.
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