To Make My Bread

by Grace Lumpkin

  John heard them, but he did not see. He was lying face down on the ground with his mouth in the dirt. A sickness had come on him. Like Job of old he wanted to curse God and die.

  “Twenty-nine, thirty,” Robert said. “Nearer my God to Thee,” he shouted out and laughed. Lying on the ground John heard him, and talked with his mouth in the dirt.

  Robert leaned over him. “What did you say?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” John told him. The sounds had stopped and he sat up. He saw the shadows that were the blackjacks all around him. The light in the camp had been turned down and everything was quiet there, except for the noise that people make when they are lying down and have not yet gone to sleep, but are restless or feverish. Looking over John saw that the guard sat under the light with the gun in his hand. At his feet lay the two hounds. One of them moved in his sleep and the chain clanked gently against the butt of the gun in the hand of the guard.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE weave room was close and hot, for no air that might break the precious threads must come in. Weavers stood at their looms wet through with sweat, and often there would be a stirring of people about some section when one of the women, overcome with the closeness, or perhaps by some kind of sickness, fainted. Frank worked at his looms there, so John, who was put in that room as a filling hauler, pushing the boxes on wheels filled with spools, saw him every day.

  Bonnie worked in the spinning room as a doffer. It was temporary work, for the doffers were usually boys. She learned to breathe in air that was full of lint, and after the first two or three days did not get sick at the smell of oil. Each spinner had a different mark, and though she was bewildered at first, she soon learned to put the right mark for each spinner on the spools she took from the frames. Her work was very important, for each spinner must get the correct number of spools recorded for the pay check. For every cent counted. Bonnie’s head came just to the shelf where the full bobbins lay. She could not see over the long, high frames, and ran from one to another, trying to keep up.

  At night she hurried back the two miles, cooked supper and made Emma comfortable. Every day Ora waited outside the mill to ask her, “How is Emma?” Some days she answered “better” and other days “worse.” It was like the game, “We’ve come to see Miss Jennie Jones, and how is she to-day?”

  Emma was sick, and Bonnie and John were working in the mill. Their working came about in the most natural and reasonable way; yet no one, least of all Emma, had expected them to leave school so soon.

  At the time Emma first became sick several things of special importance at the time, and of later interest, happened to the family.

  She had been ailing for some time and one week-day morning did not get up. On Sunday when Mrs. Phillips learned of Emma’s illness she came over and brought her doctor.

  “She has pellagra,” the doctor told Granpap in the kitchen after he had looked at Emma.

  “Do you think,” Granpap asked, “I’d better get the Company doctor to her regularly?”

  “He would tell you the same thing,” Doctor Ford said. “I was on the Board of Health once, so I’ve seen enough to know. And there’s nothing he could do. Give her plenty of lean meat, milk, and other nourishing food, and she’ll get better.”

  Granpap told him. “I’m having a hard row to hoe right now. I don’t know how I can well do it.”

  The doctor became very angry, angry enough to frighten Bonnie who was in the corner behind the stove, listening.

  “Don’t ask me how,” the doctor said. “A doctor can’t produce decent food for the many that need it. What can I do? Don’t ask me.”

  He went out of the back door hurriedly as if he wanted to shake the dust of the house from his feet. Granpap followed and left Bonnie to ponder on the dreadful word. She knew many children in the village who were afflicted with the disease, and grown up people. Only recently Mrs. Mulkey had become insane. She drove her young ones out of the house. It was said she heard voices talking to her and answered them, and imagined that horrible animals and devils were running around the walls. People said she behaved like a man who is crazy with drink.

  If Emma did not grow better, Bonnie thought, she might become like Mrs. Mulkey. She went to the door of the bedroom and listened to Emma talking with Mrs. Phillips in order to reassure herself that her mother was very sane. Emma’s voice was quiet and just as usual, though she got somewhat excited when Mrs. Phillips told her that one of the girls who worked for her in the city knew Emma. The girl’s name was Minnie—Minnie Hawkins. Minnie had heard Mrs. Phillips and the doctor speaking of Robert and John McClure, and had asked, “Do those McClures come from the mountains, at Swain’s Crossing?” And then she had said, “I know them.”

  The following week Ora and Frank brought Mr. Turnipseed to the farm house. They explained to Emma that the preacher, for whatever money Granpap could give, would sign papers saying that. John was old enough to work in the mill. And since Bonnie was old enough already, Ora and Frank persuaded Emma to let both of them work in the mill. They said the children could go back to school later, when Emma was well enough to go into the mill again. Reluctantly Emma had to consent, for if the young ones did not bring in some ready money, there would be nothing for them or anyone else in the family to eat.

  That day while Frank and Granpap were in the fields, Preacher Turnipseed spoke to John and Bonnie while they were in the front room with Emma and Ora.

  He said, speaking partly to Emma, partly to the children, it was time for them to acknowledge Christ as their Savior. Their mother was sick and how could they pray to God to make her well if they had not professed their belief in Him and His Son.

  Standing at the head of the bed, John felt disturbed and angry. He looked on the bed and saw Emma’s face with the cheeks sunk in. He saw her hands stretched out palms down on the quilt. They were yellow and scrawny like the claws of chickens, and the fingers were bent as if in working they had grown that way. A great many thoughts had come up in him recently, and he was queerly upset and angry at everyone. Standing there, he wanted to ask, “Why did God make her sick in the first place?” To him it seemed a reasonable question, but to say it aloud before Emma was not quite possible. While the preacher talked, Emma reached her hand up along the bed clothes to touch him, and he could feel her hard fingers worrying at the tips of his own as they hung at his side. But he would not say what she wanted him to. It was Bonnie who answered Mr. Turnipseed’s waiting and promised that at the next baptizing she would come into the church.

  Mr. Turnipseed had to be contented with that. He got up to go outside, but left Ora with Emma, after giving her a significant look from the door.

  He came back again, opened the door, and called out, “John, you and Bonnie come and show me the farm.”

  When they hesitated Ora said gently, “Yes, you run along with the preacher.”

  As the door shut she bent over the bed. “I promised the preacher to tell you,” she said to Emma. “I don’t know what’s the right or wrong of it, for you have said Mrs. Phillips has been kind since you have been sick.”

  “She has been kind. Before last week she paid us little or no attention. But she brought her own doctor over.”

  “That’s hit,” Ora said. “That doctor was turned off the Board of Health for not believing in God, and for other things. And Mrs. Phillips,” Ora bent over Emma and whispered, “Mrs. Phillips . . . keeps a . . . bad house . . . in the city.”

  “Is it sure?” Emma gasped.

  “Preacher Turnipseed said hit.”

  “Oh,” Emma said. “Oh. Pore Minnie.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  SOMETIMES John spoke to Frank in the weave room. Frank walked from one loom to another, watching them earnestly, and when a thread broke he inserted his big fingers in the machines to make the threads whole again.

  “My hands are too big for this work,” he said to John. “I aim to get somewheres else where a man’s strength is needed.”

&nbs
p; Most of the time he said nothing, but nodded to John when he passed, for the noise was not a thing that many liked to talk against.

  Young Frank worked in the spool room. After hours he did just about as he pleased. “Sometimes,” Ora complained to Bonnie, “he don’t come home for supper even—and he stays out late at night. Hit ain’t right for a boy of sixteen.”

  Now that Bonnie was working Ora treated her almost as a grown up and confided in her, which made Bonnie feel very proud, and sitting by Emma’s bed at home she often repeated Ora’s words, with a sad, responsible heaviness to her voice as if she felt the burden of them as well as Ora did.

  “And he keeps back more of his wages than he ought,” Ora said. “I wouldn’t mind if I didn’t know he was wasting it in gambling. And hit’s s’ hard to get along. I dread the winters more and more. When spring comes and the young ones can go barefoot, and there’s no coal bill to pay, I get plumb excited from relief.”

  Bonnie and Emma understood well enough Ora’s feelings, for they had saved on shoe leather, and they watched anxiously for spring. There was so little money. The first two weeks while she and John had been learning, they got no pay. Two weeks before the instalment man had taken their kitchen stove, for they had fallen behind on payments—so Bonnie cooked on the fire as they had done in the mountains. But spring meant less fuel.

  Just as the children took off their shoes and stockings and played happily in their bare feet when the first warm weather came, so the poor, when summer made a promise of coming soon, shed the burden of providing coal and warm clothes and covers, and doctors for the winter sicknesses—with joy.

  “Spring is the poor man’s time of hope,” John Stevens said to John. “These machines can do the work of many men, but unlike men they have no winter and no spring. And they can’t reason. Don’t ever let yourself think the machines are bigger than you are. For they aren’t. If for no other reason there’s the reason that you can feel the warm, calm air of spring and say to yourself, ‘This is good.’ ”

  It seemed to John that this man and the other weavers were fine beings because they could manage the great machines and produce yards of cloth. He liked the weave room and sometimes puzzled over the sound there, for somewhere before he had known a sound like it. One day, listening intently to the looms he remembered.

  He had stood outside McDonald’s cabin and heard feet pounding inside to the sound of fiddle and banjo. The feet had come down on the floor rhythmically. They got into his blood. The rhythm had beaten up from the shaking floor into his feet, just as it did in the mill. He thought with pleasure that one day he would be one who controlled those machines.

  Because he was thinking of them an accident happened to him one day which might have been very serious. But it was a fortunate accident, since it made him acquainted with John Stevens.

  The machines must be cleaned on extra time and the workers had to go early or stay late the day before pay day to clean up. During the week the machines dripped oil. If the weavers stopped to wipe off the oil they lost money, and if they wiped the machines while they were moving there was danger of a serious accident. They did this rather than stop, but made one wiping last as long as possible, so oil dripped on the floors and stayed there.

  John was pushing his truck along, listening to the sound of the looms. He did not see the oil spread out on the floor by the weaver’s foot. When he slipped his truck went one way and he another, almost head on into a machine. It was John Stevens who caught him in time to prevent an accident.

  The boy stood up, trying to hide his trembling, for the belt of the machine had been very close.

  “You’d better be careful,” John Stevens said, and gave him a shake to emphasize the importance of what he said.

  “Will you be careful now? I’ve seen you around here. You’re just about as particular as a cat in a bed of catnip, poking your nose in and having a fit over it all. I’ve looked every minute to see you roll over on the floor with joy in the looms.”

  He loosed John and went about his work. And John, ashamed and rather angry, got his truck and went on without a word. Gradually, because John Stevens never failed to notice him, they began to know each other, and sometimes at the lunch hour sat down in the mill yard and ate their bread together.

  John Stevens was a small man, but strong, and in spite of a limp, very active. His hands were small so he was better fitted for weaving than Frank. He had been a weaver all his life, and his father before him. The limp came from a badly set leg he had broken in a fall when he was eight years old and had just begun to work in the mills.

  “It was a slippery floor,” he told John. “That’s why I blew you up sky high that day; though I slipped on soap and water, for then as now they have the floors washed while we are still at the machines.”

  Once John heard him singing at his work, and at lunch asked about the song, and from listening to it on occasions learned the words. While the looms pounded up and down John Stevens sang. His voice came clear under the sound of the looms. Most people shouted trying to make their voices heard above the grinding, but John Stevens knew how to make his clear under the sound, just as people standing on the outside of a waterfall might scream to be heard, but one who stood in a cave underneath could speak with a low voice.

  John Stevens stood in the cave underneath. He spoke to his looms, and knowing each part, spoke of them. He liked his machines.

  “It’s what they do to people,” he said to John one lunch time, “that makes me sick at heart.”

  The song was about factory people, and it was easy to see how John Stevens had made it up while weaving, for his voice, singing it, rose and fell with the rhythm of the looms.

  John wrote the song verse by verse on paper at home and brought it to show to his friend.

  “I’m right glad you liked it that much,” John Stevens said. “I’ve sung it in mill towns in three states and in the North, too, and people have learned it. I feel good sometimes to think I’ve spoken to folks at times when they feel the sorrow of working without much recompense.”

  Once John asked him, “Do you believe in God?” and John Stevens did not answer directly. “It’s best not to ask,” he said. But later in the day when John passed with a truck full of spools, he stopped him.

  “I believe in a Judgment Day,” he said.

  On the same afternoon Frank beckoned to John. He pulled him close and called out into his ear so loud John felt a scorn for Frank who did not know how to talk under the sound.

  “I heard in town,” Frank cried, and had to stop for a moment while he turned away his head to cough. But his hand was still on John’s arm and the boy felt the shaking from the cough pass from Frank’s hand into his arm. “I heard in town,” Frank repeated, “Basil’s getting married to-night.”

  “Where?” John asked.

  “What did you say?”

  “Where?” John stood on tiptoe and reached up to Frank’s ear. They were like two deaf people.

  “At Preacher Warren’s church,” Frank called out with his mouth close to John’s ear.

  When the six o’clock whistle blew John sought out Bonnie. He stood at the left hand doorway of the mill through which she would come. The air was still and damp, for there had been a heavy rain during the afternoon. There was a mud puddle near the door and he watched people step over it or into it as they came out. Then he saw Bonnie’s feet in the new shoes she had bought the Saturday before, because her others had split across the tops.

  She came from the stream of people when he called her.

  “What is it?” she asked him, thinking of Emma.

  “Nothing. I won’t be home to supper.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “I can’t say somewhere to her.”

  “Tell her I’m a-going to the preacher’s.”

  If Emma concluded that he was going to visit Preacher Turnipseed she would have to do so. It might even be best for her to think he had gone
to get straightened out about religion. Bonnie walked off at the end of those who were hurrying home, and John turned the other way.

  It was getting dark when he reached the church. There were lights in every window, and the vestibule door was open so that the pale yellow glow from inside came out over the steps. John stood at one side of the steps in the shadow. People came along the sidewalk. Though he could not see their faces he heard the steps flat along the walk. He felt very much alone, with the steps going past, as if he and the church together were stranded somewhere in a place that people could not reach.

  Presently some began to come up the walk and go into the church. They came on foot and in automobiles, and those who rode left their cars, and walked into the church hastily as if they were expected. The women’s skirts made a sound as if a wind was blowing in a pine forest, making the needles swish against each other. John felt the wet bushes around his legs. The wet seeped into his jeans and made them cling around him, so that he was uncomfortable, and wished to move. But there was nowhere to go. He must wait for his brother. He had a right to be there. Was it not his brother who was to be married in the church? Yet at moments he almost doubted if it was Basil’s marriage all these people were coming to see. Perhaps Frank had been wrong.

  Then he saw Basil step out of an automobile at the curb. He came up the walk with two other men: and all three were dressed in white shirts, black suits, and hats that stood too high above their heads. They wore white gloves as if they were at a funeral expecting to lift the coffin.

  John slipped along the wall and as Basil came up the steps stood in the lights that came from the vestibule. Basil saw him at once. He turned his head quickly to the other two men. “Go on in,” he said. “I’ll join you in a moment.” He stood with his back to them as if shielding John.