The 42nd Parallel

The Camera Eye (21)

that August it never rained a drop and it had hardly rained in July the truck garden was in a terrible state and all through the Northern Neck of Virginia it was no use pulling cornfodder because the lower leaves were all withered and curled up at the edges only the tomatoes gave a crop

when they weren’t using Rattler on the farm you’d ride him (he was a gelding sorrel threeyear old and stumbled) through the tall woods of white pine and the sandbed roads on fire with trumpetvine and through swamps dry and cracked crisscross like alligator hide

past the Morris’s house where all the Morris children looked dry and dusty and brown

and round along the rivershore past Harmony Hall where Sydnor a big sixfoot-six barefoot man with a long face and a long nose with a big wart on his nose ’ud be ashamblin’ around and not knowin’ what to do on account of the drought and his wife sick and ready to have another baby and the children with hoopin’ cough and his stomach trouble

and past Sandy Pint agin past the big pine

and Miss Emily ’ud be alookin’ over the fence astandin’ beside the crapemyrtle (Miss Emily wore poke bonnets and always had a few flowers and a couple of broilers for sale and the best blood in the south flowed in her veins Tancheford that’s how we spell it but we pronounce it Tofford if only the boys warnt so so noaccount always drinkin’ an’ carryin’ on down by the rivershoa an’ runnin’ whisky over from Mar’land instead o’ fishin’ an’ agoin’ out blind drunk and gettin’ the trapnets cut up or lost Miss Emily took a drop herself now and then but she always put a good face on things lookin’ over the picket fence astandin’ by the crapemyrtle bush visitin’ with the people passin’ along the road)

then down to Lynch’s Pint where old Bowie Franklin was (he warn’t much account neither looked like a bantam rooster Bowie Franklin did with his long scrawny neck an’ his ruptured walk couldn’t do much work and he didn’t have money to spend on liquor so he just fed his gray fowls that warn’t much account and looked just like Bowie did and hung round the wharf and sometimes when the boat was in or there were some fisherman in the crick on account of it blowin’ so hard down the bay somebody’d slip him a drink o’ whisky an’ he’d be a whole day asleepin’ it off)

Rattler sweat somethin’ awful on account o’ bein’ fed corn in this hot weather and the old saddle stank and the horsedoctors buzzed round his flanks and it was time for supper and you’d ride slowly home hating the goddam exhausted land and the drought that wouldn’t let the garden grow and the katydids and the dryflies jeering out of the sapling gums and persimmons ghostly with dust along the road and the sickleshaped beach where the seanettles stung you when you tried to swim out and the chiggers and the little scraps of talk about what was going on up to the Hague or Warsaw or Pekatone and the phone down at the cottage that kept ringing whenever any farmer’s wife along the line took up the receiver to talk to any other farmer’s wife and all down the line you could hear the receivers click as they all ran to the receiver to listen to what was said

and the land between the rivers was flat drained of all strength by tobacco in the early Walter Raleigh Captain John Smith Pocahontas days but what was it before the war that drained out the men and women?

and I rode Rattler the threeyearold sorrel gelding who stumbled so much and I hated the suncaked hardpan and the clay subsoil and the soughing pines and the noaccount gums and persimmonbushes and the brambles

there was only the bay you could like sparkling to the horizon and the southeast wind that freshened every afternoon and the white sails of bugeyes