To Make My Bread

by Grace Lumpkin

  They were sorry for Sally, yet it was somehow satisfying to have her cry like that. It took away some of the loneliness. Her crying woke the young ones, and when the baby added some howls to Sally’s and the others began to join in there was so much to do for a time it was not possible to think of other things. Emma helped Ora get the young ones into the other room. They put Sally and Bonnie in Emma’s bed so that Sally, if she cried again, would not disturb the children.

  Emma stayed in the room. She was ready to get in the bed herself, for it had been a tiring day. Ora hesitated at the door with the lamp in her hand.

  “Do ye want the lamp, Emma?” she asked, for Emma’s lamp was still tied up in some old jeans in her trunk.

  “No,” Emma said. “I’ll just get right in with Sally and Bonnie.”

  Still Ora hesitated in the door, holding the lamp up high, and looking into Emma’s face.

  “What’s a-worrying ye?” she asked. “Is hit something special, or just for Granpap and John?”

  “Granpap’ll care for John,” Emma said as if Ora had said something ugly about Granpap.

  “Well,” Ora was impatient with Emma for wanting to keep hard and angry, “well, I’ll take the lamp back to Frank, then.” Yet she waited longer, but turned her eyes away from Emma.

  “I know Granpap can take care,” Emma said low as if she was speaking to the floor at which she was looking. “Hit’s just that I can’t picture them anywheres. If I could picture them hit would be better. And then—there’s something else. I clean forgot to get that money from Granpap. He’s got all we have in that belt around his waist.”

  This was something real to worry over. It was something so definite that Ora could not keep it out of her mind. And all next day she reassured Emma if for a moment she saw Emma looking as if the worry had come over her again.

  “He knows how much store ye set by hit,” she said.

  “He knows,” Emma answered. Then she added, “Sometimes he forgets.”

  The day was quiet and still, for it was a Sunday. The young ones out in the yard stared back at the children next door on both sides. Sally and Bonnie sat on the front steps and watched the children, and got stared at by all the people who passed. Not that the staring was open, but they could see that eyes were turned their way, especially in the afternoon when people came from other parts of the village to take Sunday walks on the country road. Most of these were couples, young men and women, and Sally looked after them with wishing in her eyes and on her face.

  “If Jesse was here,” she said to Bonnie, “we’d walk down the road like that.”

  “And would ye kiss?” Bonnie asked, half in fun, as the grownups teased Sally.

  “Hit’s what we’d go for,” Sally told her, trying to make what she said sound as if it was a joke. But each couple that came made her arms hurt with wanting Jesse; until she could not bear the sight of them and went inside.

  That night while they were in the kitchen at the supper table the front door opened. The person who opened it came in the door as if he belonged. His boots sounded confidently on the floor as he came through the dark front room toward the light in the kitchen.

  Emma thought, “Hit’s Granpap come back,” and she stood up ready to welcome him. No one else moved. They sat with eyes raised up watching the doorway. “Hit’s Jesse,” Sally said. And sure enough it was Jesse, six feet of real mountain flesh, standing there looking at them—no, he was looking at Sally. It was good to see the way she got into his arms. This was not a coquettish Sally or one holding back for manner or bashfulness.

  No one said anything against it when Jesse told them he had come for Sally, and they must get married the next morning. Only Ora asked if they couldn’t wait until night when all could be there to see them married.

  It was necessary for Jesse to be at work Tuesday morning. The only reason he had been able to follow Sally was that a piece of machinery had gone wrong at the saw mill and his work was put off one day. But he must be there when the Company said, or else lose his place. Too many other people wanted it.

  “Maybe the man at the office would let ye off for the morning,” Emma suggested to Ora and Frank. No one, not Frank and not Ora took up that suggestion.

  “Hit’ll be enough,” Ora thought, “to have to tell them at night about Sally not working.”

  Jesse and Sally left them to think it out. They were anxious to get outside on the porch or the road where there was some friendly darkness.

  Ora looked at the others. She wanted to say, “How can I work when there’ll be nobody here to care for the young ones in the day?” And Frank wanted to speak out, “How can I care for ye all?” Yet they sat without speaking around the table and looked at Sally’s place, and none of them would have thought of saying, “Sally has got to stay,” or, “Let her wait. She’s young.”

  Only Ora spoke out loud as if answering all their secret objections. “Sally is ripe for marriage,” she said.

  And when no one added to this she spoke again, “Hit’s best she’s going now, for she’d go sometime soon.”

  Frank went out to water the steers and came back again.

  “They can take the steers,” he said, “and keep ours.”

  “And leave the sledge,” Ora suggested. “They won’t need hit going up, and can climb faster without. Jesse is young and strong and can make another.”

  At sun-up next morning with the first whistle blowing, Ora, Frank and Emma stood at the bottom steps with Sally on the porch above them. Each of them had lunch done up in a paper.

  Frank said, “I reckon we’ll find ye gone, Sally, when we come back this evening.”

  And Sally said, yes, she reckoned they would find her gone. Then she went back into the kitchen, where she had already said good-by to Ora, to cry.

  She and Bonnie got the young ones up and made them some breakfast. Ora had nursed the baby before she left, and Bonnie knew from taking care of Minnie’s child what to give it to eat, now it could not have Ora’s milk all day.

  Jesse came for Sally at eight. They found a preacher, and went through the proper words that made them man and wife.

  Back at the house Jesse harnessed the steers and drove them without the sledge. Sally walked by his side in her wrinkled calico dress, very proud. They used the country road because Jesse had found that it was a short cut to the road that went up into the mountains.

  Bonnie stood on the steps and watched them go up the road. She would never forget that she had seen them like this, and that she had seen Jesse kiss Sally in the front room. When they were out of sight she clung to the post by the steps and pressed her cheek hard against it. A sound inside the door made her spring away, thinking she heard Young Frank. It was Little Raymond, and he made her remember that for the present she must take Sally’s place.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  GRANPAP and John reached the city in the afternoon. They were tired, and the hard streets of the town did not help the tired feet to get along very fast.

  “We’ve got to find re-union headquarters,’ Granpap told John, for that was what the veteran said must be done as soon as they reached the city.

  Around a sharp corner they entered a long street of brick buildings, some of them six stories high. Stretching his neck backward, John counted the stories, for he could count up to ten, or even more when it was necessary and he was willing to make the great effort. From one of the buildings to another hung streamers of red and white and in the windows were flags. It was a sight for a person to remember, the street white in the sun and clear down its length the red and white bunting and the red flags with some blue and white on them. “Hit’s the stars and bars,” Granpap said. “Hit’s General Lee’s flag.”

  The street was full of people, women and girls in fine clothes and men dressed in gray with white beards or gray ones. And there were young men in caps. Almost at every step they knocked into someone, or a person stepping hastily to get somewhere brushed against them. Granpap caught John’s hand in
his and held it tight. Under the other arm he held the quilt Emma had given them in case they had to sleep out at night. At times people who had brushed past turned round to look. But no one stopped long enough for Granpap to ask, “Where are re-union headquarters?”

  “Just hold out, Son,” Granpap repeated more than once.

  At a corner some people had gathered together. They were watching an old black man. Here, Granpap thought, where people were still he might be able to ask the way. The black man wore a curious sort of uniform. There was a pair of pants with a red stripe down the sides, and a gray coat like the Confederates. On his head was a cap and in his hand he held a broom. Some of the boys who were there called out to him, but the grizzled black man paid no attention to them. He swept the sidewalk carefully over and over in the same spot; then without any reason he suddenly knelt down and aimed at the automobiles that were passing in the street. He yelled, “Boom! boom!” as a child does who is playing that he is hunting wild beasts. Suddenly he jumped to his feet again and swept the sidewalk before the people who were passing.

  A man dressed in Confederate gray asked another, “Who is that?” And the other man said. “He’s an old nigger who used to drive a hack around here. Now he’s crazy and comes up to the main street every day at the same time. He’s harmless so we let him alone.”

  The man in Confederate gray kept on watching. Granpap let go of John’s hand and touched the man. “Can ye tell me,” he asked, “where the re-union headquarters are?”

  The Confederate looked at Granpap and then he looked down at John.

  “Are you a veteran?” he asked of Granpap.

  “Yes, I’m a veteran.”

  The man pointed down the street to a big sign that hung over the front of a building.

  “Go right in there,” he said.

  In the office they asked Granpap some questions—what camp did he belong to? Where had he fought? When it came out that he had walked fifty miles to the reunion, the man behind the desk was very kind. He arranged for them to stay at a certain place. They were sent to this house in an automobile. John and Granpap together rode through the streets in the automobile that took them smoothly up to a fine white house that sat back on a big plot of grass. A woman dressed in the finest silk met them at the door and led them upstairs to a room.

  The room was as large as a house in the village, and in it was a bed big enough to get lost in. A door at one side led into a small room where they found water. Granpap walked around on tiptoe, and even then he left a track from the mud that had dried on his boots. It was a good thing John had had some experience in the station, and that Granpap knew something of what people did in cities. Yet Granpap was not at ease. “It would have been better for us to sleep out,” he kept saying. John did not entirely agree. He wondered if Basil had seen such houses, and if that was why he had said in such a scornful way, “Kirk hadn’t any ambition.” Was it ambition to want and get a house like this and fine food and clothing and perhaps an automobile? For the first time John thought of Basil with respect, as a person who had found something that none of them knew about, a secret of living that not even Kirk had known.

  A Negro girl dressed in black with a white apron came up and said, “Supper is ready.”

  Granpap let John go first. As he walked down John saw the woman who had let them in talking to a young man in the hall below.

  She said, “You must take them.” As if the young man had been saying he didn’t wish to do what she wanted. Then the woman added, “We’ll send them to one of the barracks tomorrow.”

  The young man looked up and saw John leaning over the banisters.

  “All right,” he said, “but I don’t promise to bring them back.”

  The woman met Granpap and John at the foot of the stairs. “We have supper made for you alone,” she said, “because we thought you would like to get to the meeting early.”

  “Hit’s mighty clever of you,” Granpap said, “to take us in.”

  “Why, I’m glad and proud to honor our veterans,” she said very graciously. “Especially one who has walked fifty miles to attend a reunion.”

  After supper eaten by themselves in the huge dining-room, Granpap and John were taken by the young man to a great hall on the main street. He put them in some seats halfway in the middle of the hall, and stopped long enough to tell Granpap the name of the street and the number of his house. Granpap repeated both of them after the young man.

  John was already looking around, making himself familiar with everything in the hall. It was early and there were few people in the place. The seats went up from a platform in the center until they reached far up the sides of the building at the back.

  “Hit feels like we’re sitting all alone on the side of a mountain,” Granpap said. And it was something like a mountain covered with many flowers in the spring, for the whole place above and around was hung with red and white, and there were flags everywhere, crossed and single and in bunches.

  “What was the name of that street now?” Granpap asked John.

  “I don’t know the name.” John tried to remember, but he had not been listening.

  “I do remember the number was Nine O Nine, but the name of the street don’t come to me.” Granpap felt around in his mind. The excitement had made him a little scatterbrained. If he could get hold of a drink it would clear up his head, and bring the scattered brains together.

  “Nine O Nine,” he whispered to himself, and repeated it, trying to make the name come and join itself up to the number.

  “I’ll think of hit later,” he said at last out loud to John. “Hit just escaped me. But I’ll think of hit later.”

  “What?” John looked at Granpap. He had already forgotten about the missing name. There were so many other things to see and think about. People were coming in now. All through the middle of the building there were veterans with gray uniforms. Toward the back, if John strained his neck he could see light dresses of women and the dark clothes of men who were not veterans. But all around him and Granpap, in seat after seat stretching in a wide circle, one above the other were veterans in gray uniforms or veterans with white beards in regular suits or in jeans, but mostly they had the gray uniform so that all that lower part of the hall was made up of rows of gray uniforms and gray beards with some gold braid glistening in the lights that shone down from above. And the sound of talk was over the whole place, a great buzzing like a thousand mosquitoes; and to John the talk had a tune, though it was a tune all on one note or perhaps two, and it was not irritating like the tune of a mosquito, but friendly and natural.

  The platform had been quite empty except for many chairs that sat in rows waiting for people to come and take them. It seemed that these people were waiting purposely until the last. For the place was completely filled when the band that Granpap had pointed out down in front of the platform began to play some music. From the sides of the platform, from behind curtains, came the people meant to sit in the chairs. And they came all at once, as if they had been waiting for the music.

  “Hit’s Dixie,” Granpap said and pulled John to his feet.

  The people who came out on the platform were a fine sight. There were men in gray uniforms with enough gold braid to make a harness and young women dressed in white with wide red ribbons running catacornered across their waists in front. They trailed out and stood together on one side, while the men in gray went to another side.

  As the band finished playing a preacher came out to the front of the platform and everyone bent his head while he blessed them. Then with a great swish, a sound like many skirts being drawn aside, the people sat down.

  A man on the stage who was not a veteran, for he was dressed in dark clothes and had no beard, got up and made a short speech. When he had finished people clapped their hands together. The clapping sounded like rain dropping on a roof.

  One of the veterans in gold braid got up and said he wished to introduce the sponsors and maids of honor. He spoke names and as he sp
oke them two young women would get up and come to the front of the stage and bow. Then people clapped again, and John felt the chill run over him that always meant rain was coming down outside, for the clapping made him feel he was back in the cabin with rain pouring on the roof.

  Next the veteran got up and said the speaker who was coming was one whom they all knew: Congressman Heilman. Granpap leaned down to John. “He’s the same that Hal Swain knows,” he said. “He helped get me out of jail that time.”

  Granpap clapped his hands together when the man came out to the front of the stage. The Congressman was a tall man with gray-black hair brushed back from his face in a pompadour. This made him look taller. He stood waiting for the applause to stop, and there was plenty of it, so he had to wait a long time.

  “My friends,” he began and spoke to the great crowd warmly and confidentially. At one minute he made them laugh, and at another he forced them to silence by his loud whispers. Only toward the back where the other people sat there were some voices that said, “It is shameful!” at some of his words.

  There were times when John could receive the words of another person so that they were carved into his mind as a boy might carve a rabbit or some other figure on a piece of pine bark. Now he leaned forward along with the veterans and received the words of Mister Hellman. He could not understand them all, but what he did not understand he left until another time, as he had left the word ambition that Basil had given him until a time when he could fit it into a place where it belonged.

  The Congressman said, “I have a rough outside, my friends. God did not make me of silken material to bamboozle men, but my heart beats warm for the people.” He said the majority of veterans in the hall were of the people, the farmers and factory workers, and it was to them he wished to speak.

  “He means us,” Granpap whispered, but John scarcely heard. He was listening to the other words that came from the platform.

  Mister Heilman continued, “I am for Race Domination. The Creator in his wisdom made the Caucasian race of finer clay than he made any of the colored people.”