Big city girl

by Charles Williams

  “But you do think you might? I think that’s nice.”

  Mitch looked up again. “Any of you got any idea what you’re going to use for money?” We ain’t got any more land to diddle off, he thought. That’s all gone for them goddamned cars.

  “Why, you can get one from Sears, Roebuck for five-dollars down, AC and DC current and batteries and all,” Cass said defensively.

  “You got five dollars?” Mitch asked curtly.

  “Well, no, not right now. But it don’t seem like such an awful lot to ask for. Man don’t ask for much in this world.”

  Mitch turned his stone-chip eyes on Joy. “If you have, you’d better hang onto it.”

  “I thank you very much,” she said coldly. “But I guess I can handle my affairs without any advice.” Oh, my God, she thought. How did I ever come to this? Looking right through me with those hard eyes of his as if he knew I didn’t have five dollars, or even one. Just a lousy five dollars. A cheap share-cropper that never had a nickel in his life looking at me like that. At me, and my first husband used to be connected with racing. I guess that’d put him in his place, if I told him what it means to be connected with horse racing.

  “And,” she went on, “I had no idea that five dollars was such a big sum of money.”

  Mitch wasn’t listening any more. He was hearing thunder rolling nearer through the pregnant hush outside and hating the sound of it, knowing there would be no more work in the fields this day or the next. They had not been able to put in three consecutive days on the cotton during the past two weeks, and he knew how dangerously near they were to having a crop go to grass. And that was not the worst of it. Pests bred in the wetness, and if through some miracle they could save the cotton from being strangled in grass, continued rain would bring the boll weevil and its war of attrition, which would lay the harvest waste before it was born.

  Ain’t nothing to do but set and wait for it, he thought savagely. Nothing you can light or get holt of to stop it. You set and watch the rain drown it and turn it yellow and the grass grow up so rank you could get lost in it, and there ain’t even enough left at the end of the year to pay off the credit, let alone buy any mules. Every year is going to be the last one you’ll have to work on the halves, because this time you’ll have something left over to start buying back some tools of your own and some mules, if you can keep the old man from diddling it all off again on yellow shoes and another broken-down car, and then something happens. Too wet, too dry, boll weevils, or the price goes down, or something.

  “I was kind of thinking of that old Mexico dawg,” Cass was saying. “He ain’t no good to us any more. Nobody ever goes hunting with him any more, and besides, he’s getting awful old. He just sets around and eats his head off, kind of a dead loss, you might say. Now, I know a man over Pinehill way, fella name of Calloway, Bruce Calloway—he’s one of old Eldridge Calloway’s boys, owns the gin over there and raises hunting,dawgs sort of for a pastime—who’ll give me fifteen dollars for him any time I’ll let him go. Told me so many’s the time.”

  “He would? For an old broken-down flea bag like that?” Joy asked, leaning on her elbows and looking eagerly at Cass. “Why don’t you take him up on it?”

  Cass avoided looking at Mitch. “It’d take some thought, of course. Man can’t just rush into something like that. But it ain’t as if he was worth anything to us. Just eats his head off.”

  “But, Papa,” Jessie broke in protestingly. “Mexico was Sewell’s dog. He thought the world of old Mexico.”

  “Well, now. Baby Doll, you know Sewell ain’t coming back and Mexico ain’t no good to him up there. Besides, it’s been five years or more since he’s even seen the dawg. and I don’t misdoubt but what he’s forgot about him altogether.”

  “But, Papa, he belonged to Sewell!”

  “Well, like I say, it’d take some thought,” Cass said placatingly, still avoiding looking in Mitch’s direction. “Wouldn’t want to rush into nothing, but I reckon Sewell wouldn’t begrudge his old daddy a little thing like that if—”

  Mitch shoved back his chair and got up without a word. Cass stopped in midsentence and the others were silent as he turned his back on them and stalked out the door.

  The sun was gone now. Lightning shot its jagged brilliance through the gathering blackness overhead, and far out over the river bottom he could see the advancing curtain of rain. It swept on into the fields below and ran toward him up the hillside. He ran across the yard toward the shelter of the shed where he slept.

  The old shed had been a smokehouse once and there still remained about it a greasy smell of fat salt meat and the thick smoke of winters long past. There was no floor except the hard-packed earth, but he had thrown some planks on the ground beside the cot to stand on when he was undressing for bed. His clothes hung from nails driven into the wall, and there was a box on which to put his can of Prince Albert and cigarette papers, because he often smoked at night.

  He had been living out here since Joy had moved in with them. She had come down off the hill late one afternoon, walking along the sandy road in her high heels and carrying the imitation leather suitcase, and announced she was Sewell’s wife. There was only one bedroom in the house, besides the big front room where Cass slept, and now Joy and Jessie used that. Before she came Mitch had had the bedroom and Jessie had slept on a small bed in the front room with Cass.

  He stood in the doorway and watched the onrushing vanguard of the rain go sweeping across the yard, sending the chickens scattering for shelter and drumming on the sheet-metal roof of the house. He sat down and rolled a cigarette and drew a match along the taut canvas underside of the cot to light it. There goes another day shot to hell, he thought, or maybe two, or God knows how many.

  From where he was sitting he could see past the corner of the house to where three of the old automobile hulks squatted dejectedly in the rain on their naked rims and on old tires flat for years. In the nearest one, the 1928 Chevrolet sedan, three chickens roosted contentedly on the back of the front seat wiping their beaks on the upholstery and enjoying this shelter from the downpour. And now we got to have a radio, he thought. I thought he’d sold everything we had left to sell, but I forgot about the dawg. After he gets rid of Mexico I don’t know what the hell he’ll do when there’s something he just has to have, unless he’s got to the point he can start thinking about selling the house or Jessie. I reckon when a man’s guts start running out of him it’s like water running out of a broken dam, and the more runs out, the bigger the hole gets, till everything’s gone. It’s getting to where you don’t even want to go to town any more, what with people looking at you and probably wondering behind your back how the Neelys are getting along share-cropping on their own land. It ain’t no wonder Sewell went to the bad.

  And now we got this Joy, going around half naked and shaking her can in front of them Jimerson boys, and somebody’s going to get hurt over that. If she wants to start chasing around like a bitch in heat the minute they get Sewell put away, that’s her business, but she ain’t going to do it around here in this house, in front of Jessie.

  He threw the cigarette out the door in disgust and got up, too restless to face the prospect of sitting there all afternoon watching it rain. He took off his shoes and rolled up the legs of his overalls and took the old army raincoat off the nail. Clapping the floppy straw hat on his head, he stalked out into the rain and turned down the trail going toward the bottom.

  The river might be rising with all this rain. There wasn’t too much danger of it, the way the rain had been spaced out, but it couldn’t keep on forever without the river’s starting to come up. Once before, about seven years ago, the river had almost got their bottom cotton, the whole twenty-five acres of it. The levee he and Sewell had built across the upper end of the field had been the only thing that had saved it. He thought about it now, and the picture of that afternoon and night was still vivid in his memory. It had been just a few months before Sewell had fought with Cass and l
eft home.

  He padded down the trail on big, calloused bare feet, rain sluicing onto the old hat and making it flop down in front until he could barely see from under it. The trail skirted the fields all the way down the hillside and then cut out through the trees just above the bottom fields, headed for the river. The river swung in close to the field here, coming in a wide bend from the west across the two-mile expanse of timbered bottom and then turning south again a hundred yards or so out from the edge of the cotton and the fence.

  The low place that had threatened the fields that year of the high water was a continuation of the river’s eastward bend, probably part of an old channel long since filled in. It came on in and under the upper fence, a swale perhaps a hundred yards wide at the upper end of the field. When the river got up enough for that old channel to start carrying water, it poured right out across the whole bottom field. This happened during the winter floods every two or three years, or had until they had put the dike across the upper end of it, but of course during the winter there was no crop for it to damage.

  He went on out and looked at the river. It was somewhat high and roily, with occasional small bits of drift going by, but it was far from high enough to be dangerous.

  Driven by a goading restlessness that would not let him be still, he turned and walked down the river, past places he and Sewell had fished together a long time ago before Sewell had gone, remembering some of the big catfish they had taken on their setlines, and the holes where they had caught them. He stopped for several minutes beside the deep hole and the piled log jam where Sewell had stripped one night and gone into the river to free a line fouled below the surface, remembering the guttering light of the pine torch and Sewell following the line down through the black water and the suspense and waiting and then his head coming out and then an arm and then the terrifying big writhing body of the cottonmouth lashing the surface to free itself of the. hook and Sewell holding the line, laughing, and throwing it up on the bank. He thought of it now, hating the waste and saddened by it. Where did a man miss the turn? What poisoned the stream somewhere along its course from youthful recklessness to hot-blooded violence to cold and paid-for violence and professional brutality?

  He left the river and walked out to the lower end of the field and went up through it like some lank, soggy-hatted, furiously ambulatory scarecrow, completely oblivious of the rain, looking at the cotton and full of black and helpless anger at the grass in it. He hated grass in a crop. It stank of shiftlessness.

  Three

  The dike was between two and three feet high and ran across the low ground for a hundred yards or more just inside the upper fence, and whenever he saw it he thought of Sewell and the night they had put it there. He came up along it now with the rain pelting the old coat, remembering the four mules abreast, wet and shining in the night with the lantern light on them, and his driving them, and Sewell filling and dumping the big fresno as another man would handle a garden spade, and all the while Cass puttering around futilely, going out to the river to poke meaningless sticks in the bank to mark its rise and whining endlessly about the Almighty’s will. Sewell was a big man and there was power in him, not awkward or slow-moving or muscle-bound power, but smooth and relaxed and then suddenly explosive, like that of a big cat in its prime. And now, from what they said on the radio, he had the cold deadliness that went with it and was just as dangerous as one.

  Mad Dog they called him, illogically, and he knew that was wrong. A rabid dog with its foaming mouth and helpless frenzy was a far different thing from a jungle cat.

  Well, he thought, it’s all done now and there ain’t no help for it. The only thing that’s any good about it, now is that the trial is over and they’ll quit making a circus out of it.

  He went up through the cotton, going toward the house. We can still save it, he thought, if the damned rain’ll quit in the next day or so. The ground ain’t sour; and it’s growing all right and the color is good even if the grass is choking it. But it can’t wait forever. He stalked through the back yard, across the hard-packed sand, hearing the rain’s tattoo on the metal roof. Mexico looked at him from under the back porch and thumped his tail once against the ground. The Jimerson’s Model A Ford was parked at the side of the house.

  When he came around the corner, they were all there on the front porch, talking. Or rather, Joy was talking. Jessie was listening and working on something in the porch swing with a pair of scissors and a needle, and the two Jimerson boys were watching.

  “—with your back perfectly straight, like this, and your head up, and don’t slouch. They make you do this for hours, with the book on your head, and then after you’ve learned that they teach you what to do with your arms and hands. But the main thing is walking. You’ll see my toes are pointed and straight ahead, and notice my legs.”

  She had on what she called her sun suit, and this admonition was entirely unnecessary as far as the Jimerson boys were concerned. They had been noticing them. Then she turned her head and saw Mitch standing there in the rain like a bleak and hatchet-faced scarecrow under the floppy hat, and the book started to fall.

  Jessie looked up from whatever she was doing in the swing and said, “Mitch, for heaven’s sake, get in out of the rain.”

  The two Jimerson boys had been sitting on the edge of the “porch, one on each side of the steps, watching Joy walk up and down with the book on her head, and now they turned.

  “Howdy, Mitch,” Prentiss said. He was the younger one, about twenty, somewhat plump, with a round moon face and rather shy brown eyes and unruly black hair that came down over his forehead. Cal was two or three years older, and his. eyes were black and there was no shyness in them.

  “Howdy,” Cal said. He looked at Mitch with casual insolence and then back to Joy, who was picking up the book.

  “Mitch, Joy is showing us how to be a model like she used to be,” Jessie explained, breaking a piece of thread, with her teeth.

  “ls that a fact?” Mitch said; looking bleakly at Joy and then at the Jimersons. “Mebbe you boys are figuring on entering a beauty contest?”

  “Hadn’t thought none of it,” Cal said easily. “Why?”

  “You seemed to be kind of interested.”

  “Is that right?” Cal asked, and Prentiss looked at both of them a little uneasily.

  Jessie had begun to feel the strange tension in the air and wondered what was wrong. Joy stood with the book in her hand, unnoticed for the moment and furious that Mitch had interrupted. She had been so happy, showing them how a model walked and feeling herself the center of attraction. Of course, she hadn’t really ever been a model or actually attended a school of modeling, but she had intended to for a long time after winning the beauty contest and had read about it and practiced a lot in her room, which was the same thing.

  “Mitch! Get in out of that rain,” Jessie ordered again. She stamped a foot on the floor.

  “I won’t rust,” Mitch said.

  “Well, come and look at the sun suit I’m making,” she said, holding it up.

  “The what?”

  “Sun suit,” she went on eagerly. “Like Joy’s. Only mine’s just made out of an old pair of overalls. See, I cut off the legs.”

  Mitch looked at Joy’s scant garment and her long bare legs and then looked away.

  “All right,” he said shortly. We’ll straighten that out later, he thought. We’ll see about that. But not in front of these nosy bastards with their eyes stuck out on limbs.

  “I’m glad to see you boys are so interested in being models,” he said thinly. “There ought to be a big future in it for you. But ain’t you afraid you’ll miss something on the radio?”

  “No, I reckon not,” Cal said. “Why?”

  “Why, there might be something about Sewell and you’d miss it. Ain’t people depending on you to spread the news as fast as it comes in?”

  Cal got to his feet. “Look,” he began.

  Prentiss stood up hurriedly and moved between
them. ”We better be going, Cal,” he said anxiously. “We got to get to town and back before feeding time. We better get started.” Cal scowled at Mitch, and shrugged.

  They went around the corner and got in the car. Mitch followed them and stood there in the rain outside the window. Cal rolled it down.

  “You know where your old man is right now?” he asked. “He’s up at our house listening to the radio. He likes to hear about it.”

  “You boys are crowding your luck around here,” Mitch said. They drove off and he walked back around to the porch.

  Jessie’s eyes snapped at him indignantly. “What did you talk that way to the Jimersons for, Mitch? You hurt their feelings.”

  Joy sat in a chair next to the door going back into the house. She stared at him frigidly and went on sulking.

  “Now, what’s that you’re making?” he asked Jessie.

  “It’s a sun suit. Like Joy’s.”

  “Well, when you get out in the kitchen you can throw it in the stove and burn it.”

  “I will not! I never heard of such a thing!” She clasped it to her, outraged. “Joy’s got one. Why can’t I?”

  “Burn it,” Mitch said. “I don’t care what Joy’s got.”

  “Well, I don’t see why I can’t wear one if she does.”

  Mitch turned to leave, then he paused and looked at Joy.

  “Joy is married, and her husband is in the pen,” he said. “Mebbe she wears it because she’s in mourning.”

  * * *

  At supper Cass said, “Wasn’t no news about Sewell. I told Jud and Cora, though, that we prob’ly wouldn’t have to depend on their radio much longer, now that Joy’s going to win one in the beauty show.”

  It only takes one day for something to grow into a fact now, Mitch thought. He does it in one day.

  * * *

  It was shortly after nine p.m. when the Chevrolet sedan with the three men in it pulled up at the gasoline pump in front of a country store. It was raining again, and the man called George, who was driving, stopped under the roof that extended out over the driveway between the front of the store and the pump, The wide double doors of the store were open and they could see the piled and disordered jumble of merchandise on the counters and shelves and hear music coming from a juke box somewhere in the rear. The interior of the store was lighted by big unshaded bulbs hanging from the naked rafters, and moths fluttered around the hot lamps in a senseless and suicidal dance that sent shadows jumping along the walls. Light spilled out into the driveway and they could see rain falling through the darkness just beyond the edge of the roof.