WHEN DUDE LOOKED UP, he saw that the door had been opened and that Ellie May, Ada, and the grandmother were crowding through it. He did not know what to do, but he tried to motion to them to go away.
He could not see Jeeter, because Jeeter was behind him, standing half-way up in the window with his feet supported on one of the rungs of the ladder. Bessie saw Jeeter, but she could not see the others.
Dude heard his grandmother groan and walk away. He could hear her feet sliding over the pine boards of the hall floor, the horse-collar shoes making an irritating sound as she went towards the front yard. He paid no more attention to the others.
After a while Jeeter cleared his throat and called Bessie. She did not answer him the first time he called, nor the next. Neither she nor Dude wanted to be disturbed.
When she persisted in not answering him, Jeeter climbed through the window and walked across the room to the bed. He shook Dude by the collar until he turned around.
Jeeter, however, did not have anything to say to Dude. It was Bessie he wanted to speak to.
“I been thinking just now about it, Sister Bessie, and the more I think it over in my mind, the more I convince myself that you was right about what we was discussing yesterday on the porch.”
“What you want with me, Jeeter?” she asked.
“Now, about that place in the Bible where it says if a man’s eye offends God he ought to go and take it out.”
“That’s what the Bible says,” she answered.
“I know it does. And that’s what’s worrying my soul so bad right now.”
“But you is a religious man, Jeeter,” she said. “Nothing ought to bother your conscience now. I prayed for you about them turnips you took from Lov. The Lord has forgot all about it now. He ain’t going to hound you none on that account.”
“It ain’t about the turnips. It’s about cutting myself off. Now, I reckon what you said was right. I ought to go and do it.”
Dude turned around and tried to push Jeeter to the floor. Jeeter clung to the bedstead, and would not move away.
“Why you want to do that?” Bessie said.
“I been thinking about all you said so much that right now I know I ought to go ahead and cut myself off, so the Lord won’t let me be tempted no more. I offended Him, and I know I ought to cut myself off so I won’t do it no more. Ain’t that right, Sister Bessie?”
“That’s right,” she said. “That’s what the Bible says a man ought to do when he’s powerful sinful.”
Jeeter looked at Bessie. He pulled back the quilt so he could see her better.
“Maybe I can put it off a little while, though,” he said, after thinking several minutes. “Now, maybe it ain’t so bad as I thought it was. This time of year puts a queer feeling into a man, and he says a lot of things he don’t stop to take into account. Along about when the time to plow the land and put seed in the rows comes around, a man feels like he ain’t got no control over his tongue—and don’t want none. It’s the same way with his actions. I feel that way every late February and early March. No matter how many children a man’s got, he always wants to get more.”
There was a silence in the house for a long time. Ellie May and Ada made no sound in the doorway. Jeeter sat on the bed deep in thought until Dude pushed him to his feet. Dude climbed out behind him.
When all of them were out in the yard again, Dude sat in the automobile and blew the horn. The women were busy wiping off the dust that had settled on the hood and fenders. The grandmother, though, did not come close to the car. She took her place behind a chinaberry tree and watched every movement of the others.
Jeeter sat on his heels beside the chimney, and thought over what Sister Bessie had said in the house. He was more convinced than ever that God expected him to fix himself so he would not have any more sinful thoughts about Bessie.
He decided, however, not to carry out his intentions just then. There was plenty of time left yet, he told himself, when he could go ahead and cut himself off, and so long as he did it before he offended God any more, it would be satisfactory. In the meanwhile, he would have time in which to try to convince himself more thoroughly that he should do it.
There was a little fat-back on rinds left in the kitchen, and Ada had baked some cornbread. The bread had been made with meal, salt, water, and grease.
All of them sat down at the table in the kitchen and ate the fat-back and cornbread with full appetite. It was the first time that day that any of them had had food, and it would probably be the last. After the meat plate had been wiped clean of grease, and after the last of the cornbread was eaten, they went out into the yard again to look at the new automobile. The grandmother had hidden a piece of the bread in her apron pocket, and she put it under the mattress of her bed so she would have something to eat the next day in case Jeeter failed to buy some more meal and meat.
Jeeter wanted to take a ride right away. He told Bessie he wanted to go, and that he was ready.
Bessie had other plans, however. She said she and Dude were going to take a little ride that afternoon all alone, so they could talk over their marriage together without any disturbance. She promised Jeeter she would let him ride when they came back.
She and Dude got in, and Dude drove the car out of the yard and into the tobacco road towards the State highway. Jeeter thought they might be going to Augusta, but before he could ask them if they were, they had gone too far to hear him call.
“That Dude is the luckiest man alive,” he told Ellie May. “Now ain’t he?”
Ellie May started down the road through the cloud of dust to see them leave. She heard Jeeter talking to her, but she was too much interested in seeing the new car go down the road and in hearing Dude blow the horn to listen to what Jeeter said.
“Dude, he has got a brand-new car to ride around in, and he’s got married all at the same time,” Jeeter continued. “There’s not many men who get all that in the same day, I tell you. The new car is a fine piece of goods to own. There ain’t nobody else that I know of between here and the river who has got a brand-new automobile. And there ain’t many men who has a wife as fine-looking as Sister Bessie is at her age, neither. Bessie makes a fine woman for a man—any man, I don’t care where you find him. She might be just a little bit more than Dude can take care of though, I fear. It looked to me like she requires a heap of satisfaction, one way and another, for a little woman no bigger than a gal. I don’t know if Dude is that kind or not, but it won’t take long for Bessie to find out. Now, if it was me, there wouldn’t be no question of it. I’d please Sister Bessie coming and going, right from the start, and keep it up clear to the end.”
Now Ellie May heard what Jeeter was saying, and it interested her. She waited to hear more.
“Now, you, Ellie May, it’s time you was finding yourself a man. All my other children has got married. It’s your time next. It was your time a long while ago, ’way before Pearl and Dude got married, but I make allowances for you on account of your face. I know it’s harder for you to mate up than it is for anybody else, but in this country everybody has got to get mated up. You ought to go out and find yourself a man to marry right away, and not wait no longer. It might be too late pretty soon, and you don’t want that to happen. It ain’t going to get you nowhere fooling around with Lov like you was doing, because you can’t get him that way. He’s already married. It’s the unmarried men you has got to get. There’s a fine lot of boys running that sawmill over at Big Greek. You can walk over that way some day and make them take notice of you. It ain’t hard to do. Women know how to make men take notice of them, and you’re old enough to know all about it at your age. Them boys at the sawmill down there at Big Creek ought to take a liking to you in spite of the way you look in the face. When a man looks at you from behind, he ought to want to mate up with you right there and then. That’s what I heard Lov say one time, and he ought to know, because he’s mated up now. Just don’t show your face too much, and that won’t stop the boys from getting after you.”
When Jeeter looked at Ellie May again, she was crying. It was about the first time he had ever seen her cry since she was a baby. He did not know what to do about it, nor to say about it, because he had never before had the occasion to try to calm a crying woman. Ada never cried. She never did anything.
Before he could ask her what the matter was, she had run off into the old cotton field; she ran towards the woods behind the house, jumping through the brown broom-sedge like a frightened rabbit.
“Now I never seen the likes of that before,” Jeeter said, “I wonder what it was that I could have said that made her carry-on like that?”