To Make My Bread

by Grace Lumpkin

  Bonnie, singing “It was good for Paul and Silas,” heard someone speak in her ear. She turned and her cheek brushed against the cheek of a young man. She looked at him. This was one she had never seen before, but in the short glance he gave it was plain that he was not one who might be speaking to her because he was unwanted elsewhere. He was not tall like the men of her family, but she saw blue eyes, and brown silky hair brushed back from a white forehead, which frowned at her coaxingly, as if saying, “Don’t be too hard on me.”

  “I asked if I could talk with you,” he said. “But you didn’t seem to hear.”

  She looked up again, and the flush that had been on her face before came up into her cheeks.

  “You have the prettiest mouth,” he said, “of any girl here.”

  “And you can talk the prettiest,” Bonnie answered him, “of any man here.”

  “I don’t know just how to take that,” he told her.

  “I think I’ll have to be going,” Bonnie said. She felt that she must have spoken the wrong words.

  He reached out and touched her arm. “Don’t go away,” he begged. “I’m a stranger here and need a friend.

  “They’re going to sell the boxes, now,” he added, holding her arm lightly with his fingers. “Wait.” She felt each of his fingers touching her lightly on the arm just above her elbow. They were like bolts that held her to him.

  They watched Mr. Turnipseed, with the help of one of the boys, lift the table loaded with boxes of all colors to the platform. All the other people had gone from the stage, and in the auditorium the onlookers were settling down on the benches around the room preparing for the auction. They passed Bonnie and her new friend, and some of them, knowing Bonnie, looked curiously at her. She did not even see them, and her voice answering questions seemed far away, as if she was in a cloud on a mountain and heard someone speaking far down in the valley.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Bonnie McClure.”

  “Will you tell me what your box is like, Bonnie?”

  “It’s—why, I don’t know whether I should say.”

  “You tell me.”

  “It’s yellow crepe paper with silver stars.”

  “Jim,” one of the young men from the side of the room called out.

  “My name is Jim Calhoun,” Bonnie’s friend said. “And you’re my girl. Don’t forget.” He pressed her arm and went over to those who had called.

  “Come here, Bonnie.” Lessie Hampton made a place on her bench, and Bonnie joined the group of girls who were strong in the confidence that their boxes were already as good as taken.

  “Is he going to buy your box?” Lessie asked her.

  “I don’t know,” Bonnie answered, for she was not yet certain that what was promised would come to pass.

  “Watch out, Bonnie,” another said. “Jim Calhoun has a name for being mighty fickle.”

  Bonnie looked toward the young men and saw Jim Calhoun talking intimately with the others. He had said he was a stranger, but he seemed to know people and they to know him. Somehow it didn’t matter.

  Mr. Turnipseed brought his fist down on the stand. “What am I bid for this beautiful box?” he asked, holding up a box covered with white paper, and decorated with red hearts.

  Someone made a timid bid. Mr. Turnipseed shook the box close to his ear. “Sounds like there’s mighty good things in there,” he said.

  The bidding was slow at first, but it gathered interest with every box sold. Mr. Turnipseed reached for another and then another box. Still Bonnie’s yellow one remained on the table. She almost hoped he would overlook it altogether.

  As soon as a young man bid in a box he opened it to find out the name of his partner for supper. Bonnie had written her name many times before she had made the writing as she wanted it. The slip lay in her box, on top, “Bonnie McClure,” in large round letters.

  Some of the young men frowned when they saw the names in their boxes. And this was what she dreaded, that her name would be frowned upon. She would be glad, almost, for Sam Fellows to get her box, if he would only behave as if he was glad to have it. Sam, who was very greedy, had bid in three already, and had three girls around him: but what was more important to him, there were three boxes from which he could choose his supper.

  “What am I bid,” Mr. Turnipseed said, “for this box, the color of ripe corn silk.”

  Bonnie saw that the box was hers.

  “I can just imagine,” Mr. Turnipseed continued holding the box up high so all could see, “I can just imagine the girl who made this exquisite arrangement of stars and crescents. She must be beautiful as the stars, and good and kind as the moon on a summer’s night. What am I bid?”

  “Ten cents,” a boy from the right of the platform called out and everyone laughed. But Bonnie wished to hide her face because of the laughter, and because it had brought her down from a high place where Mr. Turnipseed’s words had taken her.

  “One dollar,” came from the group of young men. Jim Calhoun was speaking. He stood up and spoke angrily looking in the direction of the boy who had called out “ten cents.”

  Mr. Turnipseed said, “One dollar, one dollar.” He held the box to his nose and sniffed at it. “I seem to smell fried chicken,” he said.

  Sam Fellows looked up from his three girls and three boxes. “One dollar and twenty cents,” he called out very loud.

  “He’s got three. Now he wants more,” the boy from the right said complainingly.

  “I haven’t got one with fried chicken,” Sam Fellows called back.

  “One twenty. One twenty,” Mr. Turnipseed droned.

  Jim Calhoun bid again, and Sam followed him. Some of the other young men, finding that a game was going on, joined in the bidding, until Bonnie’s box sold the highest of any—to Jim Calhoun.

  By this time most of the girls were gone from Bonnie’s group, claimed by the young men who had bid in their boxes. Bonnie sat on the bench, her hands lying loosely in her lap, her face tense with happiness and expectation. When Jim Calhoun came toward her with the box under his arm, while people clapped because the bidding had been so close, she closed her fists together in her lap to keep her hands from going right out to meet him. He was so welcome.

  That night, for the first time in months Granpap and John walked together. All the way on the country road in the dark ahead of them, they heard Bonnie and the young man, Jim Calhoun walking, occasionally stumbling in the ruts, laughing, and going on. They heard the young man’s low, deep talk and Bonnie’s rather high voice answering him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  JIM CALHOUN’S father was killed in a mine accident in Kentucky, and while he was still very young his mother brought him further south to a mill village where she could make enough money to feed and clothe them. They had traveled from village to village to find better wages until Jim’s mother died and he was left alone.

  Bonnie and Jim were married six months after they met at the Christmas Party.

  “I’m a rover,” Jim told Bonnie, “by birth and by life.”

  “I don’t want to rove,” Bonnie answered him. “I want to stay in one place and make something of ourselves.”

  “Anything for you. I’d settle down forever if you want that.”

  They were fine lovers.

  “There are some who are sad, and say life is poor,” Bonnie said to her husband. “It seems to me life is rich so long as people have this.”

  They were in their own room in the farm house, which had new furniture bought on instalment. The floor of the room slanted downwards toward the fireplace, and there were holes between the planks through which the wind came up in winter. But the other rooms were the same.

  “Our young ones will have things better,” Bonnie often thought to herself, and she did not mean to sit down and expect the good things to come. She must work for them. She thought with pity of Emma lying sick in the front room. Emma had wanted good things, but somehow she had not managed right—and neither ha
d Granpap who worked so hard on the farm and got in the end only feebleness and discouragement. She and Jim, young and happy, could do anything.

  Even when Jim left for the war along with many other men of the village, she was sorrowful, but not discouraged. Her baby was coming and with John’s help they could keep Emma and Granpap. She could work in the mill, if she kept well enough, until the last minute. Most of the women did this, and though some of them died, Bonnie never thought of death as her part. She was to live and do great things before death came to her in a fine old age, a time too far off for her to imagine. The older people in the village and the preacher were always speaking of death, and there were so many funerals it was no wonder. Many of them thought in terms of death, and many of them said, “What is there to do, except wait and hope for heaven?” Instead of repeating their words, Bonnie said, not in words but in her feeling and actions, “What has life got for me and mine?”

  With Jim gone, and the four miles to the mill and back too much for Bonnie, they found it necessary to move into the village. And only Granpap was sorry.

  John was glad to go where he might have more company. It was lonely in the evenings, for theirs was the only inhabited place near by. The Phillips house was empty. Robert had gone to war, one of the first, and Mrs. Phillips came one day in a great hurry, packed everything, took her crippled child and left in an automobile on the same day. There was a “For Sale” sign standing in the front yard.

  Even Bonnie could not keep John from loneliness, though he was glad to be with her. Her face shone as if inside she was full of a slow, warm fire at which anyone who was cold might get warm. He did not say much to her but they understood each other.

  They moved into a house near Ora’s in the mill village. John was working as a slubber hand in the carding room. Bonnie had some money from Jim in the army, but she kept at work, because they needed as much as possible for Emma, and because she wanted to save something for the baby.

  The Company doctor was visiting Emma. He was also the owner of a drug store and his visiting bills and drug bills took a great deal of money. Mrs. Phillips’ doctor had said, about Emma, “She needs plenty of good food, and no doctor.” Yet when they moved to the village, with people advising that they get Doctor Foley, and with their own uncertainty, they found it the only thing to do. For they needed confidence that they were doing the right thing by Emma, everything possible that might make her well. The doctor was kind enough to let them run up a bill for drugs at his store, so the bottles on the chair beside Emma’s bed were kept replenished.

  One thing helped. Wages were higher than they had been. People said it was because of the war. But the war also took money from them, for rich people from the town were continually coming to the mill to make what they called drives for money, and all in the mill were expected to give their part toward saving the nation from the enemy.

  Bonnie planned to learn every trade in the mill so she would become indispensable to the management. When Jim came back they must make something of their lives. She spoke to John about this one Sunday afternoon when he sat in the kitchen while she scrubbed out some clothes.

  “What is it you want?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know . . . . Well . . . suppose we had books around the walls here and hit wasn’t hard to make out words like we find it, but we could read together or by ourselves—and could put a shovel of coal on the fire without thinking where is the next coming from—and people could love—like—like Jim and me. Wouldn’t it be a fine sort of life?”

  “I reckon it would. But hit’s not so easy,” John said out of thoughts he had had before. Yet he almost believed with Bonnie that things would be better for them: that something good lay ahead.

  “Maybe it’s not so easy, but I’m a-going t’ try,” Bonnie said.

  To learn the trades in the mill, she went back after supper on the nights when Emma was better, and went through the different departments, watching the night shift work. She visited the mill from top to bottom—from the opening to the finishing room—and watched every process carefully. There was the hopper where cotton from the bale was fed into a great mouth. The lap came out soft and wide, thick as her hand, but so clean and soft she could see through it.

  In the carding room they showed her the machine that divided the lap into thick white strands. It seemed as if the machine was a hand that played delicately with the cotton, combing the lap into strands and winding those gently round and round in the tall cans. At the drawing frame she saw the six strands of card sliver from the other frames gathered together by a machine hand that by alternating the fibers of cotton drew them into a stronger sliver: then in another machine this length was drawn and twisted to make a stronger thread, though this rove was still thick and easily broken.

  In the slubber and speeder frames the rove or thread prepared in the other frames was drawn and twisted into a stronger cotton thread. It was all a process of making that which was weak strong enough to stand the strain of the weaving.

  She stayed in the spinning room, and skipped the spooling room, for that was where she was working at the time. The warp room was the finest looking of them all, and gave her most pleasure to watch. There the threads came from rows of spools lying horizontally on the creel which was a narrow, high rack. The round cylindrical beam was some distance in front of the creel, from which the tiny threads came and wound over the beam, each in its rightful place. The threads came from above, the center, and below, and they were as plentiful as the threads of a new cobweb, yet they stayed apart, and each, as if it knew, took its place on the beam: which, when it was full of threads, would be taken to the drawing-in room where the ends would be harnessed for the looms.

  Each night after hours when it was possible to be in the mills Bonnie went back after supper to learn. And when the time came that she was too tired to go, she sat at home by Emma and let the processes pass before her eyes. Often her thought turned to God and she prayed that he would bless her undertaking: to make herself so skillful that she would make a good life for herself and hers.

  On Sundays she went to church, and Granpap, who was learning to play hymn tunes on his fiddle, went with her. Brother Turnipseed had promised to find him a place in the mill—and toward the end of summer of the second year of the war, when one of the old watchmen died, Granpap was given his place.

  One Sunday there appeared across the front of the church a long cloth sign. Bonnie read the words to Granpap. The large red letters at the top said:

  BLOOD AND FIRE CAMPAIGN

  and underneath in smaller black letters:

  Prepare to meet your God.

  Evangelistic Meeting . . . . Speaker—Cyclone Carter.

  And under that the date and hour of the meeting.

  The revival service came on a week night when Granpap had to work, so Bonnie went alone to the church with a promise from John that he would meet her afterward.

  There had been some meetings to prepare for the revival in people’s houses, and one of them had been held at their own house. The meetings had come on Sunday afternoons, so Granpap had attended, and at each meeting he became more earnest in his attention to what Brother Turnipseed spoke about—life here on earth as preparation for life after death, in heaven. And Granpap began to like the songs that were sung—one especially made him feel that it was written for him. “I’m but a stranger here,” it said. “Heaven is my home. Earth is a desert drear. Heaven is my home.”

  When Bonnie reached church on the night of the revival meeting it was crowded already. People from all denominations had come to hear the well-known Cyclone Carter. Bonnie found a place in the middle of a bench, toward the back.

  There were prayers and songs. She always liked the songs and lifted up her voice earnestly with the others. The evangelist was a tall man who moved around on the rostrum as if he had springs in his shoes. His black eyes were very bright and he was continually searching the congregation with them. In speaking he used his arms, and they, t
oo, when he began to move them in the air, seemed to have springs. He filled the whole rostrum with himself while he talked, moving his legs and long arms about swiftly.

  His whole sermon was about the war. Behind him, draped across the wall, was a large flag. First he read from the Bible. Then he spoke of the duties of those who stayed at home from the war. He said not only were the soldiers in danger of losing their lives by the sword and pestilence, but they were in greater danger of losing their souls through temptations of the flesh. And for the preservation of their souls from hell fire, the prayers of those at home must go up to the Throne.

  Thank God, he said, there were people trying to protect the soldiers from sin. Near the Capital City, he told them, there was a camp preparing young men for war against the foreign beast named in the Book of Revelations.

  “And in that Capital City there was at one time a street of sin, located behind the very building where the legislators gathered to make the laws of the state. Some time after the war had started a committee of Christian men and women, realizing the menace this street was to the boys who were gathered in the camp, had come together and driven the women from this street of sin, and prohibited them from gathering in one place again.”

  The evangelist himself had visited one of the most famous houses. “After,” he said, “of course, after the madam and her foul herd had been driven out.” There were many bedrooms in the house and each had a private bath. On the first floor he saw a long room, where, he was told by members of the committee, scenes of debauchery had been enacted. As he stood there imagining the foul scenes the room had witnessed, he thanked God that, as the world was being made safe for civilization, so that city was being made safe for the boys who had been sent away with pure kisses on their lips.

  At this point something happened that disturbed the congregation. One of the boys who had been listening with intent face while the evangelist spoke of the house in the city, made a sound with his mouth. Perhaps he was trying to imitate a kiss, or perhaps something else. Whatever it was, the sound caused some people near the boy to laugh. There were whispers and glances toward that section of the church. Some people looked with reproach and others moved uneasily. The preacher was not disconcerted. He stopped a moment as if to get his breath, and continued his sermon.