Читать книгу When the Whipoorwill - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Страница 3

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A tillie-hawk swooped into the top of a dead cypress. The mocking-birds and red-birds that had scurried like wind-buffeted leaves ahead of him stirred uneasily in the live oaks and palmettos where they had concealed themselves. The sky had emptied itself for him of living things. Against the blinding blue of the Florida afternoon hung indolent masses of white cloud. The hawk shifted from one claw to the other, hitching his shoulders like a cripple. There ran a road—a fat chicken snake—a man——

The young man swung his shotgun from his waist to his shoulder in a quick semi-circle. The tillie-hawk exploded into a mass of buff feathers and tumbled to the edge of the road. The girl caught her breath.

“Lige” she reproached him. “You hadn’t orter wasted a shell on a ol’ tillie-hawk.”

A horn sounded behind them and a truck loaded with bean hampers lurched by in the deep ruts of the sand road. Old man Tainter and his negro driver passed without the customary “Hey!” or lift of the hand. The young woman crowded back into the dry dog-fennel. The man no more than stepped aside, unbreaching his gun. He kicked a cloud of sand after the truck.

“His beans ain’t a mite better’n mine. Parts of ’em is plumb sorry-lookin’.”

“They’re earlier, ain’t they?”

“Jest a week. He ain’t no more likely to miss frost than me. Ary time, now it’s a’most November, we’re like to git us one o’ them piddlin’ leetle ol’ frosts don’t mean nothin’. Tonight, mebbe.”

They turned between chinaberries into the Widow Sellers’ gate. Her sharp tongue clicked at them from the porch.

“You Lige Gentry, you, how’ll I ever git my cane cut? I ain’t payin’ you by the week reg’lar to traipse around with your wife.”

He rose to the familiar bait.

“Dog take it, o’ woman, Drenna’s been a-cuttin’ cane with me all evenin’. An’ who’ll pay for it? Not you. I’ll be hornswoggled if you ain’t the meanest white woman in the county.”

He stamped across the porch. Drenna dropped down on the top step, draping her gray percale skirt across her worn shoes. The widow hunched herself on the cowhide seat of her hickory rocker, drawing her shawl around her shoulders against the chill air from the northwest.

“Ain’t you sick o’ keepin’ Drenna hangin’ around where you kin look at her all the day? I ain’t done laughin’, the way you begun a-courtin’ her, like you was huntin’ a squirrel goin’ acrost a oak thicket an’ you tryin’ to keep sight of it. How many years ago was it? Two, three? Anyways, long enough to git you a couple o’ young uns. An’ you ain’t sick o’ lookin’ at her yit!”

Lige towered over her. He shook back the curly sun-bleached hair from his sweaty forehead like an infuriated bull. He plunged roaring into her trap.

“Dog take you! You ain’t fitten to fish the same creek ’long-side of her! Drenna, move offen the stoop away from her! You’d orter study on sayin’, is she sick o’ lookin’ at me! A pore sorry thing like me, to git a woman——”

The Widow Sellers rocked violently in sheer delight. Her little black chinquapin eyes danced. She scratched her white head excitedly with a piece of the okra she was cutting. She shrilled above him.

“Now you said it! Now you and me agrees for onct, Mister Gentry! A pore sorry thing like you! Now you’re talkin’!”

He stopped short.

“Oh, go to the devil,” he said good-naturedly.

Drenna smiled uneasily. The ribald quarrelling of this pair still disturbed her. It was scandalous for two people so dependent on each other to talk so. No other man, black or white, would work so hard for the old woman, at the low wages of six dollars a week. Certainly no other employer would allow Lige time off every afternoon to work his own few acres. They threw these facts at each other at every encounter.

The Widow Sellers was admitting now, “Shore you works hard. Bless Katy, all you know is to work. You don’t know nothin’ else. You got you no sense.”

“You wait ’til my beans gits top price next week. You’ll say I got sense.”

“You got Davis wax, eh? Them new-fangled ones. They’re pretty, but they ain’t got the good flavor. Sellers always planted Wardwell’s. You won’t never make you no crop,” she said comfortably. “Here,” she reached behind her rocker and pushed a pair of worn child’s shoes in his hands. “I had me a box from Janey, in Alabamy. Git along to your sorry bean-patch.”

He hurled the shoes past her head.

“Give your dogged shoes to a nigger young un.”

He spat over the edge of the porch and strode off fiercely.

“Fust crop o’ beans I make,” he called back over his shoulder, “you’ve seed the last o’ me, ol’ woman.”

“You’ll be white-headed as me,” she mocked after him, “an’ still proud to be takin’ my rations money!”

“No need to holler,” he soothed from the gate. “You got you a voice like a limpkin.”

“A limpkin?” she puzzled. “That brownified crane screeches like a wild-cat?”

“Now you said it!” he whooped.

His teeth flashed in his tanned face. He was off at a violent trot for his two acres of beans. The old woman grinned.

“Ain’t he the biggety thing!”

“Hain’t biggety,” the young woman said gently. “Jest turrible prideful.... He shot him a tillie-hawk a ways back, jest account o’ ol’ man Tainter was drivin’ up behind us. He figgers he’s as good as ary man to shoot his shells reckless.”

The old woman nodded and chuckled. She put down her pan of okra and picked up the child shoes, dusting them with her apron. Drenna put them under her arm.

“Thank you, ma’am. They’ll fit one o’ the chappies, shore.”

They walked together to the road. The widow shivered.

“That scamp knows as good as I do we’ll git heavy frost tonight. We cain’t skip it. The whole State o’ Texas is a-breathin’ cold in on us. Floridy don’t make none o’ her own troubles,” she grumbled. “They all comes in from some’eres else. Wind from the south an’ cold from Texas. He better say good bye to them beans today whilst they’re purty.”

She laid a hand on the girl’s arm.

“I was jest a-baitin’ Lige about you. Leave me tell you, when he got you, he got him a saint.”

The chinaberry cast a lacelike shadow across the translucence of the young sharp-chiselled face.

“There’s no harm to neither one of you,” the girl said quietly. “I don’t pay no mind when either one or t’other of you gits to rarin’.”

The three-room rough-pine dwelling a mile from the village was bare and shabby. Drenna’s father, prospering one year in hogs, had given her a small melodeon. It was the sole ornament of the main room. When Lige was not so tired that he tumbled, sometimes in his underwear, sometimes fully dressed, into their bed in the adjoining room, he coaxed her at night to play on it. She sat stiffly upright on the seat and picked out awkward, quavering hymns.

Tonight he sat teetering in his pine-slab chair, smoking his pipe, his blue eyes staring into space. His shaggy hair curled unnoticed into them. Drenna put the drowsy children, the baby and the boy of three, between clean unbleached muslin sheets over a corn-shucks mattress on the hand-made bed opposite the fireplace. When Lige did not make the usual sign, she went hesitantly to the melodeon. He relaxed a little as the notes of “Rock of Ages” wheezed sweetly from it.

“Dog take it, Drenna, that’s purty.”

His voice, with her, was gentle. Men who had grown up with him, gone their few scattered seasons with him to the village school, were still astonished at the taming of his exuberance. Passing the small house at night, they reported, through fire-lit windows, the sight of wild Lige smoking peacefully by the hearth, his eyes wide and hungry on the woman pedalling and playing. Tonight the spell did not hold. Suddenly he stood up and knocked out his pipe into the lighter’d knot fire.

“I cain’t set here an’ let my beans freeze,” he burst out. “Tainter’s firin’. He’s got him smudges all over his field. I don’t figger it’ll do a mite o’ good to burn wood, but I got to try it.”

“What wood you got to use, Lige?”

He ran his big hand across her head.

“I aim to give your winter woodpile the devil, ma’am.”

He went whistling to the field. The full moon had risen, coldly silver, on a night so still he heard the gray fox in the hammock on dry magnolia leaves. The young beans hung thickly on the bushes, slim and faintly yellow in the moonlight. The dark, tangled hammock pressed in on three sides of the clearing. The field was ordered and beautiful. He cursed out loud.

“Jesus! Only three days more’d o’ made them beans——”

He had no hope of his fatwood fires, but building them, he felt better. A line of them blazed along the westerly, higher end. Thick black smoke drifted across the patch to settle in the lower corner. Drenna joined him toward midnight with a paper of cornbread. The cold was tangible. In the stillness it moved in perceptibly, a chill white ghost from Texas. Under the ineffectual blanket of smoke, it closed stiff hands tight about the succulent plants.

At daybreak, a breeze stirred from the southeast. The day, and the days following, would be warm. There would perhaps not be frost again until the next full moon. The frosted leaves were curling. White spots appeared on the beans. Then they turned translucent, like pale yellow icicles. By night they would be mush; the leaves black and shrivelled.

Walking around the wilting field, Lige saw that he had saved the lower end. The smudge had lain across the last few rows. The east line of the hammock protected them from the sun, as deadly on the injured plants as the frost itself. He made a quick estimate. Fifteen or twenty hampers saved——

He was late at the Widow Sellers’, shivering in his thin blue shirt and pin-check pants. She greeted him amiably. Her own crops of okra, squash, peanuts, corn and sweet potatoes were safely harvested.

“Thermometer went to forty at day,” she told him.

“No need to tell me,” he answered wearily. “I been settin’ up nussin’ them forty degrees. I fired. I figger I jest about saved my seed an’ fertilizer. I’m clearin’ more o’ the hammock. Next time I plant late, I’m goin’ to have four acres instid o’ two, all at the lower end. Then if frost ketches me, I got more’ll come thu.”

She stared at him.

“The bigger fool, you. You’d do best to leave off beans an’ work for me full time. I could mebbe pay ten dollars a week,” she said slyly.

“You mind your own business, ol’ woman. I’ll make me a crop o’ beans’ll git me shut o’ you an’ your ten dollars, an’ your six.”

She eyed him dubiously.

“What did you fire with?”

He walked away carelessly.

“A damn good wood-pile an’ a damn good woman.”