Stories of Erskine Caldwell (6 page)

Fanny Forbes got more strawberry-slappings than any other girl. All the boys and men liked her and she never became angry. Fanny was good-looking, too.

One day I went to a field where I knew the strawberry crop was good. It was a small field of only two or three acres and few people ever bothered to go there. I decided to go before somebody else did.

When I reached the field, Fanny was finishing the first two rows. She had thought of having the whole field to herself, just as I had thought of doing. We did not mind the other being there as long as no one else came.

“Hello, Fanny,” I said. “What made you think of coming over here to Mr. Gunby’s place today?”

“The same thing that made you think of it, I guess,” she answered, blowing the sand off a handful of berries and putting them into her mouth.

We started off side by side. Fanny was a fast picker and it was all I could do to keep up with her.

About an hour before noon the sun came out hot and the sky became cloudless. The berries were ripening almost as fast as we could gather them. Fanny filled a dozen boxes from her next row. She could pick all day and never have a single piece of vine among her berries. She used only the thumb and the next two fingers, making a kind of triangle that grasped the berry close to the stem and lifted it off. She never mashed a berry like some people were forever doing.

I had never before noticed it in any other field, but today Fanny was barelegged. In the afternoon it was much cooler without stockings, of course, and it was the best way to keep from wearing them out in the knees. She saw me looking at her bare legs and smiled just a little. I wanted to tell her how nice-looking they were but I did not dare to.

The midafternoon was even hotter than it had been at twelve o’clock. The slight breeze we had felt in the morning was gone and the sun hung over us like a burning glass. Fanny’s legs were burned brown.

Before I knew what I was doing I stole up behind Fanny and dropped a great big juicy berry down the open neck of her dress. It frightened her at first. Believing that I was several rows away she thought it was a bug or insect of some kind that had fallen down the opening of her dress. When she jumped up and saw me standing behind her however she laughed and reached down into the bosom of her waist for the berry. I was certain I saw it under her dress. Before she could reach it with her hand I slapped it as hard as I could. I thought surely she would laugh as she had always done when somebody strawberry-slapped her, but this time she did not laugh. She sat down quickly, hugging herself tightly. I then realized something was wrong. She looked up at me and there were tears in her eyes. I fell on my knees beside her. I had slapped her breasts.

“What’s the matter, Fanny?” I begged. “Did I hurt you? I didn’t mean to. Honest, I didn’t mean to.”

“I know you didn’t mean to,” she said, the tears falling on her lap, “but it did hurt. You mustn’t hit me there.”

“I’ll never do it again, Fanny. I promise I won’t.”

“It’s all right now,” she smiled painfully. “It still hurts a little though.”

Her head fell on my shoulder. I put my arms around her. She wiped the tears from her eyes.

“It’s all right now,” she repeated. “It will stop hurting soon.”

She lifted her head and smiled at me. Her large round blue eyes were the shade of the sky when the sun has begun to rise.

“I’ll never strawberry-slap you again as long as I live, Fanny,” I pleaded, hoping she would forgive me.

Fanny unbuttoned the dress down to her waist. The berry was mashed beneath her underclothes. The scarlet stain looked like a morning-glory against the white cloth.

“I’ll have to unfasten this too, to get the berry out,” she said.

“Let me get it,” I urged. “You don’t want the juice all over your fingers.”

She unfastened the undergarment. The berry lay crushed between her breasts. They were milk-white and the center of each was stained like a mashed strawberry. Hardly knowing what I was doing I hugged her tightly in my arms and kissed her lips for a long time. The crushed strawberry fell to the ground beside us.

When we got up, the sun was setting and the earth was becoming cool. We found our boxes and baskets of berries and walked across the fields to the barn. When we got there, Mr. Gunby counted them and paid us the money we had earned.

We went through the barnyard to the front of the house and stood at the gate looking at each other for several minutes. Neither of us said anything. Fanny had once said she had never had a sweetheart. I wish she had been mine.

Fanny turned and went down the road in one direction and I went up the road in another. It was the end of the strawberry season.

(First published in
Pagany
)

U
NCLE
M
ARVIN WAS
worried. He got up from the log and walked toward the river.

“I don’t like the looks of it, boys,” he said, whipping off his hat and wiping his forehead.

The houseboat was drifting downstream at about three miles an hour, and a man in a straw hat and sleeveless undershirt was trying to pole it inshore. The man was wearing cotton pants that had faded from dark brown to light tan.

“It looks bad,” Uncle Marvin said, turning to Jim and me. “I don’t like the looks of it one whit.”

“Maybe they are lost, Uncle Marvin,” Jim said. “Maybe they’ll just stop to find out where they are, and then go on away again.”

“I don’t believe it, son,” he said, shaking his head and wiping the perspiration from his face. “It looks downright bad to me. That kind of a houseboat never has been out for no good since I can remember.”

On a short clothesline that stretched along the starboard side, six or seven pieces of clothing hung waving in the breeze.

“It looks awful bad, son,” he said again, looking down at me. We walked across the mud flat to the river and waited to see what the houseboat was going to do. Uncle Marvin took out his plug and cut off a chew of tobacco with his jackknife. The boat was swinging inshore, and the man with the pole was trying to beach it before the current cut in and carried them back to mid-channel. There was a power launch lying on its side near the stern, and on the launch was a towline that had been used for upstream going.

When the houseboat was two or three lengths from the shore, Uncle Marvin shouted at the man poling it.

“What’s your name, and what do you want here?” he said gruffly, trying to scare the man away from the island.

Instead of answering, the man tossed a rope to us. Jim picked it up and started pulling, but Uncle Marvin told him to drop it. Jim dropped it, and the middle of the rope sank into the yellow water.

“What did you throw my rope in for?” the man on the houseboat shouted. ‘What’s the matter with you?”

Uncle Marvin spat some tobacco juice and glared right back at him. The houseboat was ready to run on the beach.

“My name’s Graham,” the man said. “What’s yours?”

“None of your business,” Uncle Marvin shouted. “Get that raft away from here.”

The houseboat began to beach. Graham dropped the pole on the deck and ran and jumped on the mud flat. He called to somebody inside while he was pulling the rope out of the water.

The stern swung around in the backwash of the current, and Jim grabbed my arm and pointed at the dim lettering on the boat. It said
Mary Jane
, and under that was
St. Louis.

While we stood watching the man pull in the rope, two girls came out on the deck and looked at us. They were very young. Neither of them looked to be over eighteen or nineteen. When they saw Uncle Marvin, they waved at him and began picking up the boxes and bundles to carry off.

“You can’t land that shantyboat on this island,” Uncle Marvin said threateningly. “It won’t do you no good to unload that stuff, because you’ll only have to carry it all back again. No shantyboat’s going to tie up on this island.”

One of the girls leaned over the rail and looked at Uncle Marvin.

“Do you own this island, Captain?” she asked him.

Uncle Marvin was no river captain. He did not even look like one. He was the kind of man you could see plowing cotton on the steep hillsides beyond Reelfoot Lake. Uncle Marvin glanced at Jim and me for a moment, kicking at a gnarled root on the ground, and looked at the girl again.

“No,” he said, pretending to be angry with her. “I don’t own it, and I wouldn’t claim ownership of anything on the Mississippi, this side of the bluffs.”

The other girl came to the rail and leaned over, smiling at Uncle Marvin.

“Hiding out, Captain?” she asked.

Uncle Marvin acted as though he would have had something to say to her if Jim and I had not been there to overhear him. He shook his head at the girl.

Graham began carrying off the boxes and bundles. Both Jim and I wished to help him so we would have a chance to go on board the houseboat, but we knew Uncle Marvin would never let us do that. The boat had been beached on the mud flat, and Graham had tied it up, knotting the rope around a young cypress tree.

When he had finished, he came over to us and held out his hand to Uncle Marvin. Uncle Marvin looked at Graham’s hand, but he would not shake with him.

“My name’s Harry Graham,” he said. “I’m from up the river at Caruthersville. What’s your name?”

“Hutchins,” Uncle Marvin said, looking him straight in the eyes, “and I ain’t hiding out.”

The two girls, the dark one and the light one, were carrying their stuff across the island to the other side where the slough was. The island was only two or three hundred feet wide, but it was nearly half a mile long. It had been a sandbar to begin with, but it was already crowded with trees and bushes. The Mississippi was on the western side, and on the eastern side there was a slough that looked bottomless. The bluffs of the Tennessee shore were only half a mile in that direction.

“We’re just on a little trip over the week end,” Graham said. “The girls thought they would like to come down the river and camp out on an island for a couple of days.”

“Which one is your wife?” Uncle Marvin asked him.

Graham looked at Uncle Marvin a little surprised for a minute. After that he laughed a little, and began kicking the ground with the toe of his shoe.

“I didn’t quite catch what you said,” he told Uncle Marvin.

“I said, which one is your wife?”

‘Well, to tell the truth, neither of them. They’re just good friends of mine, and we thought it would be a nice trip down the river and back for a couple of days. That’s how it is.”

“They’re old enough to get married,” Uncle Marvin told him, nodding at the girls.

“Maybe so,” Graham said. “Come on over and I’ll introduce you to them. They’re Evansville girls, both of them. I used to work in Indiana, and I met them up there. That’s where I got this houseboat, I already had the launch.”

Uncle Marvin looked at the lettering on the
Mary Jane
, spelling out
St. Louis
to himself.

“Just a little fun for the week end,” Graham said, smiling. “The girls like the river.”

Uncle Marvin looked at Jim and me, jerking his head to one side and trying to tell us to go away. We walked down to the edge of the water where the
Mary Jane
was tied up, but we could still hear what they were saying. After a while, Uncle Marvin shook hands with Graham and started along up the shore towards our skiff.

“Come on, son, you and Milt,” he said. “It’s time to look at that taut line again.”

We caught up with Uncle Marvin, and all of us got into the skiff, and Jim and I set the oarlocks. Uncle Marvin turned around so he could watch the people behind us on the island. Graham was carrying the heavy boxes to a clearing, and the two girls were unrolling the bundles and spreading them on the ground to air.

Jim and I rowed to the mouth of the creek and pulled alongside the taut line. Uncle Marvin got out his box of bait and began lifting the hooks and taking off catfish. Every time he found a hook with a catch, he took the cat off, spat over his left shoulder, and dropped it into the bucket and put on a new bait.

There was not much of a catch on the line that morning. After we had rowed across, almost to the current in the middle of the creek mouth, where the outward end of the line had been fastened to a cypress in the water, Uncle Marvin threw the rest of the bait overboard and told us to turn around and row back to Maud Island.

Uncle Marvin was a preacher. Sometimes he preached in the school-house near home, and sometimes he preached in a dwelling. He had never been ordained, and he had never studied for the ministry, and he was not a member of any church. However, he believed in preaching, and he never let his lack of training stop him from delivering a sermon when ever a likely chance offered itself. Back home on the mainland, people called him Preacher Marvin, not so much for the fact that he was a preacher, but because he looked like one. That was one reason why he had begun preaching at the start. People had got into the habit of calling him Preacher Marvin, and before he was forty he had taken up the ministry as a calling. He had never been much of a farmer, anyway — a lot of people said that.

Our camp on Maud Island was the only one on the river for ten or fifteen miles. The island was only half a mile from shore, where we lived in Tennessee, and Uncle Marvin brought us out to spend the week end five or six times during the summer. When we went back and forth between the mainland and the island, we had to make a wide circle, nearly two miles out of the way, in order to keep clear of the slough. The slough was a mass of yellow mud, rotting trees, and whatever drift happened to get caught in it. It was almost impossible to get through it, either on foot or in a flat-bottomed boat, and we kept away from it as far as possible. Sometimes mules and cows started out in it from the mainland to reach the island, but they never got very far before they dropped out of sight. The slough sucked them down and closed over them like quicksand.

Maud Island was a fine place to camp, though. It was the highest ground along the river for ten or fifteen miles, and there was hardly any danger of its being flooded when the high water covered everything else within sight. When the river rose to forty feet, however, the island, like everything else in all directions, was covered with water from the Tennessee bluffs to the Missouri highlands, seven or eight miles apart.