Читать книгу When the Whipoorwill - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Страница 4

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When a stranger—a Georgia truck driver or a platform buyer—asked Lige his business, he answered with a mustered defiance:

“I’m a bean man!”

It was true. The long hours he gave to the Widow Sellers’ rich farms had no meaning beyond their moment. In mid-afternoon he hurried off to his own field, sweaty and excited, to turn furrows, to plant, to cultivate, to hoe, to harvest.

The quick growth of the crop stirred him. One week, the sandy loam lay golden, its expanse passive for the reception of the seed. The next week, the clearing in the hammock was covered with cotyledons, pale-green and pushing, like twin sails dotting a tawny sea. In forty-eight days the first crop was ready for picking. The emerald bushes crowded one another in the straight rows. The long beans hung like pendants, butter-yellow if they were wax, jade green if Giant Stringless or Red Valentine.

The earth responded to him. When he and the soil were not interfered with, they made beans as fine as old man Tainter, who kept a wagon-load of niggers and bought fertilizer by the carload.

He was betrayed constantly by elements beyond his control. He fared no worse than the other growers, but the common misfortunes struck more implacably. Men who could borrow money for seed and fertilizer and rations, who were free to do other farming or stock raising, made out more or less comfortably until the inevitable time when a good crop sold on a high market. There was a finality about his loss of a crop.

He lost beans from cold or rain or blight three seasons in succession. The fourth season, the second autumn, he made a fair crop. The market dropped so low it scarcely paid to ship. In October he quarrelled violently with the Widow Sellers. The old woman, in a growing security that he would never shake free of her, taunted him.

“You jest as good to say you’re done. You jest as good to say you got no sense for bean-makin’. Drenna’s like to go naked, and you piddlin’ away with beans. Your young uns’d be stark if ’twa’n’t for Janey’s things from Alabamy. You know it. You take me up on steady work at ten dollars, afore I studies you ain’t wuth nothin’.”

If Drenna had been with him, he would not have touched her. He shook the old woman by the shoulders until she screeched for her neighbors. He shouted her down.

“Damn your gizzard! If I figgered like the niggers, I’d say you’d put a cunjur on my bean-field! ’Twon’t be too long ’til you sees the last o’ me. Dogged if I wouldn’t ruther do without rations than take your talk.”

They sputtered fiercely at each other. It did not occur to her to fire him, nor to him to quit.

He was excited when he came home to supper that night. He had forgotten his anger at the widow. He had forgotten his unprofitable season. He was eager with his plans for spring beans. His lunch bucket had contained the usual meal of soda biscuits and syrup, but he sat at the table, scarcely eating. Drenna listened with her grave smile.

“We got to make out on four dollars a week this winter an’ save two. I kin make me a crop o’ beans on that hammock land and I know it. I aim to have six acres ready, come spring. Does the rains come on to drownd ’em, I’ll ditch. Does frost come, I’ll lay me a smudge. And dog take it, Drenna, if they ain’t no rain at all, and them beans goes to swivvellin’, I kin water ’em a gourdful at a time.”

The three-year-old nodded gravely.

“I kin water ’em.”

Drenna smiled at him.

“Tell your Daddy the whole lot of us kin tote water for him.”

“Tainter don’t always make a crop,” he went on, “and I cain’t always lose it.”

“Shore cain’t,” she agreed placidly.

Lige and Drenna planted when the red-bud came in bloom. All the signs were of warmth. Robins and bluebirds were moving north. The cautious chinaberry had put out young leaves. The last of the jasmine perfumed the roadside. Lige strode steadily up and down the long furrows, seeing nothing but the white seed dropping against the golden earth. Drenna stopped now and then to straighten her back. Her gray eyes rested on the rosy flush across the hammock. They picked out the swaying palms, precise and formal against a turquoise sky. When she bent to her work again, the half-smile habitual to her was brighter.

Lige sent her to the house when the end of the planting was in sight.

“Go git me my rations, woman,” he told her. He turned her away from the field. “Git!” He took his hands from her shoulders. “Now shame to me. My hands has smuttied your clean dress.”

“Soap an’ water’s plentiful.”

His eyes followed her across the clearing and into the house.

The March night was chilly. When supper was eaten, he piled the fireplace with blocks of magnolia. The cream-colored wood gave out a sweet odor, like a mild thin spice. As the fire dulled, he threw on pine. He took off his high boots and stretched his bare sandy toes to the fire.

“Wisht I’d takened my boots off in the dark. Look at them feet. Now I got to git up an’ wash ’em afore I goes to bed.”

From the kitchen Drenna brought him a basin of warm water and a towel of flour sacking.

“Whooey, ain’t that fine!”

He dabbled luxuriously, drying his feet with the warm towel.

“Now you been a-waitin’ on me, leave me do somethin’ for you. Leave me play for you.”

They both laughed. His playing was limited to two tunes on the mouth-organ.

“I’ll blow ‘The Tall Pine Tree.’ ”

She sat on a three-legged stool by the fireplace, her smooth head resting against the gray clay, her eyes closed. Lige played his tunes over and over, patting his bare right foot on the pine floor. The children stirred in their low bed, sighing in deep sleep. The magnolia burned into soft gray checks. Drenna nodded.

“Go on to bed, Sugar. I’ll set up a whiles. I’ve wore you out, plantin’ them beans. But Drenna—I got no question. We’ll make us a crop, shore as dogs runs rabbits.”

“Shore will,” she agreed sleepily.

He sat by the fire an hour after she had gone, blowing softly into the harmonica, patting his foot.

Lige saved his beans two weeks later by a scanty margin. He had planted dangerously early, and as the crooks came through, it was plain that heavy frost was moving in. Two nights in succession were increasingly colder. All the beans in the region were slightly nipped. The third night would bring real damage. A smudge would be useless over the young juicy plants.

In the crisp morning he said to Drenna, “Ain’t a reason in the world why I cain’t cover them leetle bean plants with dirt today.”

But when he drove the mule and cultivator between the rows, the earth he turned did not quite cover them.

Drenna, come out to watch him, said, “Kin do it by hand, Lige.”

“Six acres?”

“Well, what we kin git covered is better’n nothin’.”

The work went surprisingly fast. Except for the increasing ache of their backs, it was satisfying to move rapidly down the straight lines, swinging and stooping, ape-fashion, and cup the soft yellow dirt over the tops of the plants with their two hands. The three-year-old was fascinated. He followed like a young monkey, and in his clumsy way, throwing the sand with too-great enthusiasm, imitated them on adjacent rows.

“I can rest tomorrow,” Drenna thought, and after dinner went at it again.

They worked until the night blended plants and earth and hammock and sky into a nothingness as deep and black as a ’gator cave. Drenna brought out kerosene lanterns. They were toiling slowly. The extra labor of moving the lights seemed insupportable. The beans were covered down to a last half-acre at the lower end. They went, stooped, for they could not quite straighten their backs, to their cold bed. They could do nothing more.

The night’s frost wiped out the entire section, including Tainter. Those who had the money were planting again. Those who did not were done for the season. Lige waited two days for the cold to pass. Under a benign March sun, with a neighbor boy hired in the light of his hopes, he carefully fingered the sandy loam away from his beans. The plants emerged a little yellowed, wilted and leathery, but none the worse for their warm burying.

The town was aghast at news of the saving.

The Widow Sellers said to Lige, “Nobody but you’d be fool enough to scratch dirt over six acres o’ beans—and then scratch ’em out again!”

He was generous in his good fortune. He pinched her wrinkled cheek and jumped away before her quick hand fell.

“Ol’ woman, don’t you wisht you’d had you a real man like me, to make you crops when nobody else couldn’t make ’em?”

It became apparent that Lige would have almost the earliest beans in the State. Other sections had been drowned out on the first planting, and he would come in at least two weeks ahead of his neighbors. He ordered fancy hampers, with green and red bands. The small crate factory trusted him for them. His beans were perfection. The bushes were loaded.

His first picking was small. He and Drenna and the neighbor boy managed it without help. The beans ripened rapidly, inexorably. The storekeeper, interested, loaned him money to hire pickers. He brought in a truckload of hands for the second picking. Drenna culled, sorted and packed. The Widow Sellers came over. Other neighbor women dropped in to look at the big crop, and stayed to help with the packing. Drenna cooked a generous dinner of ham and grits and cornbread; made a great kettle of coffee and chicory; opened Mason jars of the past summer’s blueberries and peaches and figs.

In the field, white and negro pickers worked alternate rows. The white children squatted on their haunches, sliding along from bush to bush. The negroes for the most part bent to their picking, their black arms gathering the beans like swift sickles. The six acres were alive.

Lige worked desperately in and out of the field. The sorting and packing proceeded steadily under Drenna’s quiet authority. The volunteer neighbor help chattered and gossiped, but the work was familiar, and they did it carefully. A negro asked “Captain Gentry” for buckets of drinking water to take to the pickers. The Widow Sellers’ tongue flashed like hail across the work. Her small black eyes watched uneasily the growing spread of finished hampers, stacked up to go to the express office. The picking totalled a hundred and thirty hampers. The neighbors divided up the cull beans and went home.

The third picking ran to nearly two hundred crates. It was the most ample yield the section had produced in seasons. The checks began to arrive. A telegram from the New York commission house preceded the first. Lige’s initial shipment had brought the record price of nine dollars a hamper.

The market price dropped rapidly as other sections came in. Yet his returns were consistently good. The last three checks reached him on one mail. His net for the crop was over fifteen hundred dollars.

He went a little crazy.