Stories of Erskine Caldwell (75 page)

“You got me into all this trouble,” Amos swore at him. “You said two jugs would make her marry me, and now she’s had me arrested for assault.”

“Well, it’s too bad you’ve got to go to jail and lose all that time here at the mill, Amos, but it was all your own fault.”

“How was it my fault?”

“It’s like this, Amos. There are three kinds of women. There are one-jug, two-jug, and three-jug women. You should have told me at the start that Esther was a three-jug woman. If you had done that, I could have told you to take her three jugs of cider instead of only two.”

(First published in
This Quarter
)

M
IDDLE-AGED
B
EN
H
ACKETT
and the team, Cromwell and Julia, were haying to beat hell when the thunderstorm broke on the east ridge. Ben knew it was coming, because all morning the thunder had rumbled up and down the river; but Ben did not want the storm to break until he had drawn the hay to the barn, and when the deluge was over he felt like killing somebody. Ben had been sweating-hot before the storm came and now he was mad. The rainwater cooled him and took some of the anger out of him. But he still swore at the thunderstorm for ruining his first-crop hay.

The storm had passed over and the sun came out again as hot as ever, but just the same he had to throw off the load of hay he had on the rack. Swearing and sweating, Ben unloaded and drove Cromwell and Julia across the hayfield into the lane. Ben filled his pipe and climbed up on the hayrack. Clucking like a hen with a new brood of chicks, Ben urged the team toward the highroad half a mile away. The sun was out, and it was hot again. But the hay was wet. Damn it all!

“If God knows all about making hay in this kind of weather, He ought to come down and get it in Himself, by Jesus,” Ben told Cromwell and Julia.

Cromwell swished his horsehairs in Ben’s face and Julia snorted some thistledown out of her nose.

Glaring up at the sky and sucking on his pipe, Ben was almost thrown to the ground between the team when Cromwell and Julia suddenly came to a standstill.

“Get along there, Cromwell!” Ben growled at the horse. “What’s ailing you, Julia!”

The horse and mare moved a pace and again halted. Ben stood up, balancing himself on the hayrack.

“By Jesus!” he grunted, staring down the lane.

An automobile, unoccupied, blocked the narrow trail.

Ben climbed down, swearing to Cromwell and Julia. He paced around the automobile uncertainly, inspecting it belligerently. No person was in sight.

“Damn a man who’d stand his auto ablocking the lane,” Ben grumbled, glancing at Cromwell and Julia for confirmation. “I guess I’ll have to push the thing out of the way myself. By Jesus, if whoever left it here was here I’d tell him something he wouldn’t forget soon. Not by a damn sight!”

But Ben could not move the car. It creaked and groaned when he pushed and when he pulled, but it would not budge a single inch. Knocking out his pipe and wiping his face, Ben led the team around the automobile through the undergrowth. When he got back into the lane, he stopped the horses and went back to the car. He glanced inside for the first time.

“By Jesus!” Ben exclaimed high-pitched.

Hastily glancing up the lane and down, he opened the door and pulled out a pair of silk stockings.

Ben was too excited to say anything, or to do anything. Still fingering the stockings he presently looked in the driver’s seat, and there, to his surprise, under the steering wheel sat a gallon jug of cider almost empty. Ben immediately pulled the cork to smell if it was hard. It was. He jabbed his thumb through the handle hole and threw the jug in his elbow. It was hard all right, but there was very little of it left.

“Cromwell,” he announced, smacking his lips with satisfaction, “that’s Hetty good cider, for a windfall.”

As he carefully replaced the jug under the steering wheel, Ben saw a garment lying on the floor. It was entangled with the do-funnys that operated the car. Carefully he pulled the garment out and held it before his eyes. He could not figure out just what it was, yet he knew it was something women wore. It was pinkish and it was silkish and it looked pretty. And there was very little of it. Ben stared openmouthed and wild-eyed.

“By Jesus, Cromwell,” Ben licked his mustache lip, “what do you know about that!”

Cromwell and the mare nibbled at the road grass, unconcerned.

Ben fingered the drawers a little more intimately. He turned them slowly around.

“It’s a female thing, all right, Cromwell.” Ben danced excitedly. “It’s a female thing, all right!”

Holding the garment high in his hands, Ben climbed on the hayrack and drove down the lane into the highroad. The garment was nice and soft in his hands, and it smelled good, too.

He rode down the road thinking about the drawers. They filled him with the urge to do something out of the ordinary but he didn’t know what he could do. When he reached Fred Williams’s place, he drew up the team. Fred’s wife was stooping over in the garden. Ben pushed the garment carefully into his pants pocket.

“Nice day, today, Mrs. Williams,” he called airily, his voice breaking foolishly. “Where’s Fred?”

“Fred’s gone to the village,” she answered, looking around bent over her knees.

Ben’s hand stole into the pocket feeling the garment. Even in his pocket out of sight it made him feel different today.

Hitching the team to the horse rack, Ben went into the garden with Fred’s wife. She was picking peas for supper. She wasn’t bad-looking. Not by a damn sight!

Watching her while she pulled the peas from the vines, Ben strode around her in a circle, putting his hand into the pocket where the pink drawers were. The woman did not say much, and Ben said nothing at all. He was getting so now he could feel the drawers without even touching them with his hands.

Suddenly Ben threw his arms around her waist and squeezed her excitedly.

“Help!” she yelled at the top of her voice, diving forward. “Help!” she cried. “Help!”

When she dived forward, both of them fell on the pea vines, tearing them and uprooting them. She yelled and scratched, but Ben was determined, and he held her with all his strength. They rolled in the dirt and on the pea vines. Ben jerked out the pink drawers. They rolled over and over tearing up more of the pea vines. Ben struggled to pull the drawers over her feet. He got one foot through one drawers leg. They rolled down to the end of the row tearing up all the pea vines. Fred would raise hell about his pea vines when he came home.

Ben was panting and blowing like a horse at a horse-pulling, but he could not get the other drawers leg over the other foot. They rolled up against the fence and Fred’s wife stopped struggling. She sat up, looking down at Ben in the dirt. Both of them were brown with the garden soil and Ben was sweating through his mask.

“Ben Hackett, what are you trying to do?” she sputtered through the earth on her face.

Ben released her legs and looked up at her. He did not say anything. She stood up, putting her foot in the empty leg, pulling the drawers up under her skirt. That was where he had been trying all this time to put them. Damn it!

Ben got up dusting his clothes. He followed her across the garden into the front yard.

“Wait here,” she told him.

When she returned, she carried a basin of water and a towel.

“Wash the dirt off your face and hands, Ben Hackett,” she directed, standing over him, wearing the pink drawers.

Ben did as he was told to do. When he finished washing his face and hands, he slapped some of the dirt out of his pants.

“It was mighty nice of you to bring the towel and water,” he thanked her.

“You are halfway fit to go home now,” she approved, pinning up her hair.

“Good day,” Ben said.

“Good day,” said Fred’s wife.

(First published in
Transition
)

W
HEN
T
UFFY
W
EBB
woke up that morning, the first thing he saw was his new straw hat hanging on the back of the cane-bottomed chair beside the bed. The red, orange, and blue silk band around the hat looked as bright in the sunshine as the decorations in the store windows in town on circus day. He reached out and felt the rough crown and brim, running his fingers over the stiff brown straw. He would never have to step aside for anybody, in a hat like that. That was all he needed, to get the world by the tail.

“Maybe that won’t knock a few eyes out!” Tuffy said, throwing off the covers and leaping to the floor. “They’ll all be cross-eyed from looking at it.”

He placed the hat carefully on his head and walked over to the mirror on the wall. The new straw hat looked even finer Sunday morning than it had Saturday night, when he tried it on in the store.

“When Nancy sees this lid, she’ll come tumbling,” Tuffy said, stepping back and tilting the hat a little on one side of his head and winking at himself under the brim.

He walked past the mirror several times, free and easy in his loose knee-length nightshirt, turning his eyes to see himself in passing. It was easy to get up courage in a hat like that.

“I could have all the girls after me now if I wanted them,” he said to himself.

Tuffy got dressed in a hurry and made a fire in the cookstove. He pulled the hat down carefully over his head so it would not fall off and hit the floor while he was cooking breakfast.

During all the time he was in the kitchen he kept thinking to himself that he would not have to keep bach much longer after that, not after Nancy saw him in his new hat. She would be tickled to death to marry him now, the first time she saw him walking up to her house with the straw sailor tilted over one ear, sort of like a cock’s comb that always looked like it was going to fall off but never did.

After breakfast Tuffy had to drive the cows to the pasture on the other side of the creek because it had become time for them to have a change of feed, and the Johnson grass over there was ready for grazing.

He started off with his hat on his head, but he got to thinking about it and finally decided he ought to leave it at the house. Sometimes a yearling took to heels and bolted off into a thicket, and he did not like to think of taking any chances of having the hat fall off into the briers and mud, and maybe being trampled by the cows. Now that he was thinking about it, he remembered seeing a cow chew up a straw hat once and swallow it.

He hurried back to the house and hung the hat on the cane-bottomed chair beside the bed.

Tuffy got back from the pasture at about eleven o’clock, and he changed his clothes right away, putting on his coat and the hat. After hat he still had almost an hour to wait before he could leave home, because he did not wish to get to the Millers’ while they were eating dinner. If he did that, one of the Millers would be certain to say that he had got there then to get something to eat.

He walked out on the porch and leaned against the railing for a while. The sun was almost directly overhead, and there was not a cloud in sight. He knew he could not have chosen a finer day to go calling on Nancy in a new straw hat. There was not a single drop of rain in the whole sky above.

“This would be a dandy time to speak to Nancy about us getting married,” he said, going out into the yard and walking first around the chinaberry tree and then around the willow. “All I’d have to do would be to ask her, and I know already what Nancy’ll say. She’s just as willing as I am, and she knows it. It wouldn’t do her any good to try to show otherwise.”

Tuffy leaned against the willow, picking at the bark with his thumbnail.

“If I go right up to her and say, ‘Nancy, how about me and you hitching up together?’ she’ll say, ‘When, Tuffy?’ and I’ll say, ‘The sooner the better suits me.’ Then she’ll say, ‘Nothing would please me more.’ That’s all there will be to it, and it’ll be all planned and settled. All I’ll have to do is get a preacher to marry us, and then me and Nancy’ll be married for a fare-you-well. Getting married wouldn’t take long, maybe no longer than tomorrow noon. We’ll probably start right in tomorrow some time. That’s none too soon for me, and I know it won’t be none too soon for Nancy.”

Tuffy went over and sat on the woodpile.

“I’ll go over there to old Berry Miller’s and walk right up to where they’re all sitting on the porch and lose no time about it. Berry’ll probably want to know what I came for, all dressed up like this in a coat and a new straw hat, and I’ll soon tell him, too. ‘Well,’ I’ll say, ‘I came to marry Nancy, Berry. How do you like that? Me and her are getting married right off.’ He won’t scare me a bit, no matter what he says. He might have some little fault to find to begin with, but there’s no objection I know about that’s good enough to stop me from going ahead and getting married to Nancy. I’ll walk right up to where she’s sitting on the porch and put my arm around her and show those Millers I mean business and don’t mean maybe.”

Tuffy picked up a piece of stovewood and began tearing splinters out of it with his fingernails. He piled the splinters in a little stack between his feet.

“If old Berry Miller makes any show of getting his bristles up, I’ll reach right down and kiss her in front of all the Millers, and then pick her up and walk off with her without so much as looking back at them even once. That’ll show Berry that when I set out to get married, I don’t let nothing in the whole wide world stop me. Those Millers can’t put the scare into me.”

He hurled the stick of stovewood across the yard. It narrowly missed hitting one of his hens asleep in a dust hole under the chinaberry tree. The hen woke up and ran squawking for her life. The other chickens got scared and followed her under the house.

Tuffy took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweatband of his new straw hat. It was a scorching hot day, especially out in the sun at midday, and the heavy wool coat had never felt so tight before.

“If I had thought to get the license yesterday, me and Nancy could have got married today,” he said disgustedly, kicking at the ground. “Now, why didn’t I think about that yesterday? I’ll have to wait till tomorrow before I can go to the courthouse now.”