To Make My Bread (38 page)

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.

He was looking down, not into John's face, but at his clothes: and the boy, looking down, saw himself with Basil's eyes. In his hurry he had forgotten that lint still clung to his jeans. He should have dressed for the wedding. The fault was his, for he had not thought of a crowd of people, but only of Basil, and of saying to Emma and Granpap, “I went to Basil's wedding.”

“Come here,” Basil said and took him by the shoulder with tense fingers. They stood in the corner made by the vestibule of the church and the outer wall.

“We planned to have a small wedding,” Basil said in a whisper, and he was panting as if he had hurried from a distance, “with all our kinsfolks present. But Mary's father is a rich man and he insisted on a big wedding. Do you see? Tell Emma we'll come to see her soon. Now you run home. You must be drenched from these bushes. Hurry home now, and get dry, or you'll be sick.”

The hand left John's shoulder, and he saw Basil hurrying up the steps into the lighted vestibule. His brother had said, “Go home,” as if he was an unwelcome dog. But he could not believe it was the end. Surely Basil, who was so powerful, could say to someone, “My brother is here. We must find him the right clothes to wear; I can't have the wedding without him. Though I see little of him, he is really very important to me.”

The organ played very loud music, then quieted down to a soft monotony. People came along the street and stopped to listen. Through the open door of the church they could see the decorations, the flowers and smilax, and knew it was a wedding. Presently there was quite a crowd lining the walk to the church, waiting to see the bride and groom come out. There were some black people, and others who were white. None of them was dressed finely like those in the church, and John began to feel more at home. He pushed between two of them and stood on the walk where he could see and be seen when the others came out.

“Behold the bridegroom cometh,” one of the men near him said in a loud voice, when the music swelled up into a triumphant blast. There was the sound of many voices, especially the higher voices of women. Basil came through the door with a woman dressed in white hanging to his arm. They stood in the door a moment, fine and triumphant. The woman's white veil floated behind her against the wooden wall of the church. Someone gave Basil his hat, and together he and the woman who was his wife ran down the walk and into the automobile that was waiting for them at the curb. The car drove off, and others took its place to take in the people who thronged out of the church.

One of the men who watched from the walk said, “She was the homeliest bride I ever see.” And another one said, “She was ugly as homemade sin.”

The words made John ashamed. But he repeated them to Granpap that evening, when he got into bed, after finding that Emma and Bonnie were asleep.

“Hit's too bad,” Granpap whispered. “With Basil getting along so well for him t' take a wife that's ugly. A pretty wife is God's gracious gift to man, but an ugly one tempts him sorely to stray.”

Later when John thought Granpap had dropped off to sleep, the old man raised up in bed and spoke again.

“You say he didn't see ye?” Granpap asked.

“Who?”

“Basil. You say he didn't see ye?”

“No,” John answered. “I just stood in the dark and watched. He couldn't see me for the darkness.”

Granpap went off to sleep. But John was awake for some time. He was trying to piece some things together. His mind was broken up into parts. In one of them he admired his brother, and in another hated him. The parts would not come together, and he went to sleep at last without having made up his mind. But for several days the resentment against Basil was strong in him.

F
OR
two years more Granpap struggled on the farm, trying to hold on as possible owner. The time came when Mr. Ashley's agent gave him the choice of giving up the farm or becoming a share-cropper.

“I have learned to know what a share-cropper is,” Granpap said to John. “I have talked to some and have watched them around here. Share-cropping is the same as slavery. Hit means food advanced, and seed and other things advanced, and at the end of the year the reckoning comes. What's his share goes to him, and what's my share goes to him, for I must take his word for the price of what is advanced. Hit means ruin.”

He went down to the mill and tried to find a place as watchman. There was none open to him. So he stayed on the farm and looked on what he had lost. That was the hardest part: to stay and see that all the money paid down in the beginning, and that spent on making the place better, though it was not much, and the hard work he had put into the fields—belong to someone else. He had begun to think of the farm as his own.

Emma was known in the mill as a skillful worker, and when she went down and asked for work she got it. Yet during the two years she had found it necessary to go back to bed, and at last had to give up and stay at home.

There, when it was necessary for her to remain in bed, she lay in the front room alone during the day and looked at the treasures she had accumulated during her years of work. There was the picture of Kirk, which was the most precious. It hung above the mantel-piece, and opposite was the record of Births and Deaths that Granpap had bought in the first flush of their making money. John and Bonnie had written names in the spaces. Under the Deaths there were the names of Emma's children who were in the mountains and the name of her husband. Under Marriages was Basil McClure, and there was a name under the word Births, for Basil, after being married a little over a year, had a son named Basil. It was Frank who had brought them this news, and Emma had immediately taken down the record and had Bonnie write the name, Basil McClure, carefully under the word that she had begun to know by its appearance and position on the record. She wondered, lying in her bed, how many more Births would be put down there before she left the earth.

Under Kirk's picture on the mantel there were two vases she had bought at the ten cent store in town. They were bright yellow and when the sun came in the west window it seemed as if lamps were lit in the vases. If Emma was in bed she watched to see this happen. It was something to look for during the day. Later there would be the young ones coming from work, and Bonnie scolding because she had, perhaps, got up to straighten the house, or wash out some clothes.

Bonnie had grown into a young woman in those two years. When she and John first went into the mill they had become thin and pale, and John had remained so. But with some of the mountain freshness in her, Bonnie had grown plumper after she got used to the mill, and now there was plenty of redness in her cheeks.

She was working in the twist room, and often young men passing by her frames, or in the yard at lunch time, spoke to her. She kept her head down when they did this; but after they went on thinking probably that she was unfriendly, she looked after them shyly, and would have called them back if she had dared.

She was full of energy, and made such a feeling of hopefulness get into the farm house, that Granpap got out his fiddle, something he had not done in years, and played. So it happened that Preacher Turnipseed, coming to see Emma one Saturday afternoon, stopped in dismay, as he told Emma afterwards, at hearing the sound of dance tunes coming from the windows of their house.

On Christmas Eve the church was to have a Tree and Box Supper. At these suppers each girl took a box provided with enough food for two people, and the boxes were auctioned off. Some of the girls were very cunning and spent all their money on decorations for the outside of the box, and put only crackers and cheese or sardines inside. So they hoped to win one of the best looking boys for supper.

They had five chickens left, and Emma insisted that Bonnie fry one of them for her box. On the Saturday before Christmas Bonnie went to town and bought a roll of crepe paper for the outside covering of her box. She had already saved up silver paper from chewing gum and what she could find on the floor of the mill from the men's cigarette packages. From this paper, smoothed out very carefully with her thumb, she cut stars and crescents.

Recently Bonnie had grown in stature and this was her first party as a young woman. The night before she sat on the edge of Emma's bed with the yellow crepe paper spread out before her, and the silver laid out on a pillow beside Emma's head where no careless person might disturb it.

“This time to-morrow night,” she said, “I'll be there. I wish you could go.” She spoke to Emma.

“You make Granpap go,” Emma answered. “He never goes from the house except to work in the fields. Hit's time he mixed with people again, for he always liked t' do that. Hit's unnatural for him to stay here all the time, just sitting, like an unfruitful seed.”

On the night of the party John went first. He was dressed in a second hand suit bought at Reskowitz' when he first began working in the mill.

“Now, Granpap, you've just got t' go,” Bonnie said to the old man. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the scars across his cheek.

“No,” Granpap insisted. “I'm an old man.”

“You can be my beau,” Bonnie told him.

“You'll have plenty of beaus with those roses in your cheeks and that light in your eyes. She's real pretty, ain't she, Emma?”

“I think she won't be left in a corner,” Emma said, more casual than she really felt. “I want ye t' go, Granpap,” she said.

“And leave you here alone?”

“I have been left alone before and it never hurt me. Now, Granpap, if ye don't go, I'll get out of bed and go myself.”

It ended with Granpap becoming almost as excited as Bonnie. He washed behind his ears, combed his beard and was ready.

“Do ye reckon I might take the fiddle along?” he asked, and Emma looking at him saw that his eyes were as bright as Bonnie's and she hated to say no to him.