Hill Girl

Nine

The days are long in April, longer in May, and longer still in June, but they are never long enough. They begin with dew on the grass and the long-legged shadows of sunrise and end with whippoorwills calling in the darkening bottoms and swallows circling and diving at dusk. And all day long, through the hot, sweaty hours, the work goes on.

I lost weight and grew harder as the weeks went by. I was in better condition than I had ever been in college, even with the football and fighting. I took to leaving my shirt off, a few minutes the first day and increasing the time gradually until I was burned black. I liked the work, as I had liked it when I was a boy, and I liked the dog-tiredness, the peaceful feeling of exhaustion at the end of the day that left the mind pleasantly at rest and made the simple act of stretching out on the dark back porch and listening to Jake and Helen talk a sensation of absolute luxury. And after they had gone across the road to the little house I would go down to the well and draw up a tub of cold water, strip down on the short-cropped grass of the mule lot, and splash myself free of the sweat and caked dust out there in the open with just the privacy of the black June night about me. Then I would go back to the house naked except for shoes, which I would kick off when I sat down, and would stretch out on the clean sheet and wonder if I wanted a cigarette badly enough to stay awake to smoke it. Sometimes I would think of Lee and Mary and wonder what Lee was going to do with himself, but it would be a short thought and I would be asleep in the middle of it without ever getting to Angelina. It was a beautiful feeling of exhaustion.

It was down there in the bottom one day in June that I saw Angelina again. I was running the cultivator and when I came out to the end of a row and turned around she was there in the edge of the timber. She had on a long-visored sunbonnet and was carrying a lard pail half filled with dewberries. She was barelegged and I could see where the briars had scratched her legs, little red tracings in the golden tan of her skin.

I stopped the mules and wiped the sweat off my face.

“Hello,” I said.

She looked at me distastefully. I was bareheaded and stripped to the waist, burned black by the sun, and shiny with sweat, and dust was caked on my arms.

“You must think that’s fun,” she said.

“It is.”

“Anybody that’d farm when he didn’t have to is crazy. The sun must have cooked your brains. If you ever had any.”

“Did anybody ever tell you,” I asked, “that what you needed was to have that lovely backside of yours tanned with a razor strap?”

“I guess this is the place for you, all right,” she said spitefully. “You ought to be a farmer.”

“And a farmer is a type of criminal, as far as you’re concerned?”

“No. A type of idiot. I guess Lee was right. Four years in college was just wasted on you.” She realized then what she’d said, but it was too late.

I turned around and got out from between the cultivator handles and started toward her. “Who?” I said. “Who did you say? Where’ve you been seeing Lee?”

She backed away from me. “It’s none of your damn business.”

“I’ll make it my business,” I said. “You goddamned little heifer. Lee’s married. And he’s alive. And he won’t be either one if he gets to fooling around with you.”

She was like an old she-coon at bay. She backed up against a tall ash and held the lard pail like a weapon, ready to hit me if I came nearer.

“Who said I saw him? Maybe I got a letter from him.”

“You got a letter from him, all right. He never wrote a letter in his life.”

“Who told you to run my business for me?”

“You little punk,” I said. “I ought to slap your ears off.”

She gave me a glance full of seething dislike and turned and disappeared down the trail.

During those months I began to think of Jake Hubbard as a man of whalebone and rawhide. The days were never long enough for Jake, and he highballed from sunup to sundown behind a fast pair of mules and he sang as he worked, and once or twice every week he would go “fox-huntin’” and chase around the countryside all night. He hated slow mules and walked behind the cultivator with a bouncing spring in his step, singing and talking to Big Lou and Ladyfingers with loving blasphemy.

“Haw, dammit, mule. Lou, you big ignorant hunk of muleheaded bastard, one more bobble out’n you an’ I’m gonna skin you alive. Ain’t got no time to waste fiddle-faddlin’ around like this. Grass growin’ in the cotton an’ you draggin’ along like an old sow that’s down in the gitalong.”

It was June and the chopping was all finished and Jake and I were running the cultivators in the long twelve-acre bottom field. The sun was halfway down in the west and as hot as it had been at noon. There was a light breeze blowing, just enough to stir the dust we were raising, and it felt good on our sweat-soaked backs when the little puffs came by. The dry-weather locusts were buzzing in the trees up on the hillside between us and the house. I turned around at the end of a row and stopped just as Jake made the end of the tenth or twelfth row over.

“Let’s get a drink, Jake,” I said.

We wrapped the lines about the cultivator handles and walked down toward the little spring branch that ran down past the end of the field. There was shade here and I felt cool in my wet clothes. We lay down on the sand and drank out of the little stream.

We sat down for a minute in the shade and Jake bit the corner off a plug of Brown’s Mule, wiped his face, and grinned.

“She’s a-comin’ along, Bob. That there cotton’s growin’ nice. An’ it’s good an’ clean.”

“Looks good, doesn’t it?” I said. “Where we’ve swept it up, I mean.”

We were silent for a moment, enjoying the sitting down and the coolness. Once or twice Jake seemed on the verge of speaking, as though there were something he wanted to say but didn’t know how to bring it up.

“Say, Bob,” he said.

“What’s on your mind, Jake?”

“I always been a man fer mindin’ my own business. I mean, I got a long nose, but I ain’t one to stick it in other people’s doin’s.”

“That would seem to describe you, Jake,” I said. “Let’s have it, though. What is it?”

“Well, I thought mebbe I ort to tell you this. It ain’t none of my business an’ you can tell me so an’ I’ll shut up. But it’s about your brother. Lee, his name is, ain’t it?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Well, I hear he’s quite a stud around the gals. But that ain’t what I’m drivin’ at. I always figger a man ort to get all he can, an’ where he gits it is his own business. Unless,” he looked up at me and his eyes were suddenly serious, “unless he’s a brother of a good friend of yourn an’ he’s in a fair way of gittin’ hisself kilt. Then mebbe something ort to be said.”

I lit a cigarette and waited. “All right, Jake. Let’s have it.”

“Well, y'know I was huntin’ last night with Sam an’ the Rucker boys over beyond Sam’s place, an’ ‘long around midnight the Rucker boys started home an’ Sam an’ me come on back this way. Well, I was a little in front of Sam when we hit that little lane that runs from his house out to the big road. It was up there on that sand hill in the pines. They was a little moon last night, you recall, an’ jest as I hit the road I seen a car parked there, with its lights off. I was only about a hundred feet from where it was. Jest then Sam’s dog let out a yip an’ the man in the car must ‘a seen me back there because he stepped on his starter an’ gunned the motor an’ started out down the lane like hell after a man. Sam come a-runnin’ up behind me an’ out into the lane, but by that time the car was out of sight around a turn. Sam didn’t see what kind of car it was, but I seen it plain enough. It was a big roadster, an’ it was a Buick. I can tell all kinds of cars, jest by lookin’ at ‘em. It was that car your brother drives, no mistakin’ it. Sam kept askin’ me if I could tell what kind of car it was, but I told him no, an’ he got kinda quiet an’ didn’t talk much more.”

“Just a minute, Jake,” I said. “Did anybody get out of the car before it started?”

“Well,” he said quietly, “I’ll tell you because I know it won’t go no farther. I don’t like to tattle on gals an’ I don’t like to do ‘em no harm, an’ I wouldn’t say nothin’ now only I think you ort to know. They was a gal in there, all right, an’ she popped outta the car when he stepped on the starter. She lit out like a greased shoat into the trees on the other side of the lane. She was outta sight before Sam got there.”

“How far was this from Sam’s house?”

“Less’n a quarter of a mile. Oh, it was that oldest gal of Sam’s, all right. They ain’t another house within two mile, an’ if it’d been some gal from town he’d brought out there she wouldn’t have got out. Anyway, ain’t nobody else in this here country built like that gal. Good Jesus, jest a-seein’ her scootin’ across the road with her pants in her hand, an’ thinkin’ about it, I was so horny I woke up the Old Lady when I got home.”

“Do you think Sam got home before she got back, and caught her going in?”

“No. Not a chanc’t. I walked real slow the rest of the way, like I was awful tar’d, an’ kept him back. She got in ahead of him, all right. This time.” There was a significant emphasis on the last two words and I knew that Jake had said all he intended to say on the subject and considered his obligation at an end.

I finished the cigarette and threw it away and got up. “Thanks, Jake.”

That night after supper I got in the car and drove in to town. Lee wasn’t at home and Mary said she hadn’t seen him since around noon. I finally found him in the back room of Billy Gordon’s café, the second time I went in there. He and Peewee Hines were shooting craps. He was drinking beer, but he wasn’t drunk.

“Well, if it isn’t the old clodhopper himself.” Lee grinned as I walked in. “Have a bottle of beer. It’s bad for your kidneys.”

“Hi, All-American,” Peewee said and grinned at me. He was in high school about the time Lee was and I never did care a lot for him. He always grinned as if he were watching something through a keyhole. He was a little guy with a fresh way of looking at you.

“Excuse us, Peewee,” I said. “I want to talk to Lee a couple of minutes. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all. Go right ahead.” He threw down the dice and sat down at one of the tables, leaned back, and put his feet up.

“It’s private,” I said.

“And this is a public place. Or maybe you own it?”

“Beat it, you little sonofabitch.” I reached for him and he jumped up and made for the door.

Lee looked at me. “You’re going to get yourself killed someday, talking to people that way.”

I sat down. “Well, when I do, it won’t be Peewee Hines. And speaking of getting yourself killed, maybe you know what I’m here for.”

“I have no idea. Maybe you just came in so I could refresh myself looking at your beautiful face. When I’m shooting craps with people, I don’t appreciate having ‘em chased off when I’m four bucks in the hole.”

“Sam Harley damned near caught you with that Angelina the other night,” I said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“No. Except that you must be nuts. I haven’t seen that wench since we were hunting in October.”

“That’s your story?”

“That’s it.”

“Lee,” I said. “Use your head. Stay away from there. Can’t you see he’s going to be laying for you now? What do you think he’s going to do when he catches you? Write a letter to his Congressman?”

“Look, Bob, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And if it’s what I think it is, you’re all wet, and why don’t you mind your own business?”

“O.K.,” I said. I got up and started for the door. I stopped once and looked back at him sitting there and started to try once more.

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, picking up the bottle, “why don’t you learn to knit?”