“You ought to have more compassion for others. Jessie’s your sister, same as Sewell’s your brother, and you don’t think about neither one of ‘em. All you got time for is tearing into the crop like a man killing snakes. She ought to come and listen to the radio some. It’d get her in a better frame of mind.”
“I wouldn’t wait till she did,” Mitch said.
“You think maybe she’s still upset about the dawg?”
“No,” Mitch said coldly. “The dawg’s only been around here for about nine years, since she was six years old. And he’s been gone for two days now. She’s all over that.”
Cass was silent for a few minutes, then he asked, “You think maybe Sewell will get away from “em?”
“No,” Mitch said. “He won’t get away.”
“Well, they ain’t found no sign of him yet.”
“They will.”
“How can you say that?” Cass complained. “Don’t nobody know. He might.”
“Ain’t nobody can get away from ‘em when they want him bad enough.”
Cass sighed. “Well, it’s easy enough to say if you just don’t care, I reckon.”
Mitch pushed back his chair and got up.
“Sure wish I could get around,” Cass said plaintively, “It’s saddening to a man not to be able to do his part when there’s so much to be done.”
Mitch did not answer. He went on out into the back yard. Jessie was building a fire under the big soot- blackened washpot, fanning the blaze with an old straw hat to get it started.
Mitch stopped and looked down at her. “You ought to eat some breakfast.”
“I didn’t want any.”
“You ought to eat something anyway. It ain’t good for you, doing without.”
“I’m just not hungry, Mitch.”
“You’re going to be sick if you keep this up.”
“I’m all right.”
What can you tell her? he thought. He stood there for a moment looking down at her forlorn pretense of industry with the fire, wishing he could think of something to say that would help, and then he turned and strode down toward the barn.
Eight
Grass was something you could fight. It was an enemy you could see and touch and could come to grips with when the rain stood back and gave you a chance. It was waiting for you there in the cotton, long-leaved and rank and wet with the dew, sucking the food out of the ground and growing fat while it robbed you of your living. It was an arrogant enemy and hard to kill and there never seemed to be any end to it, but at least it was out in the open waiting for you, and when you slid the steel of the heel sweeps under it and turned it roots up to the burning anger of the sun it died and you had won a little something. There was nothing evasive about it and it was no will-o’- the-wisp you were chasing in the dark. It was rooted in the ground, as in a way you were rooted in it, and it would stand there and fight you for the ground and for survival, and when you brought your violence to it it didn’t change shape on you and fade away like water slipping through your fingers.
You saw Sewell going away, and Jessie’s sadness, and when you tried to fight it there was nothing you could hit. You tried to reason with Cass about the crop and about the dog and it was like chasing smoke with a minnow seine. There was nothing solid about any of it that you could get your hands on. You lay awake when you were dead tired and needed the sleep, lying there on the cot in the darkness thinking of hunting squirrels with Sewell and running the setlines at night along the river’s banks with the pine torch blazing and sputtering and throwing your long-legged shadows against the trees, hunting coons with him to the baying of hounds on frosty, starlit winter nights a long time ago before he began to get in trouble, and all the other things you used to do with him and the way you always had to run to keep up with the endless vitality of him. You thought of him then and you thought of him now, and it was like a sickness eating at you from the inside where you couldn’t get at it.
But with the crop, thank God, it was different. You could still lose because the rain could whip you and the boll weevils could whip you and any one of a half-dozen other things could do it too, but at least you were fighting something you could see and when you hit it you could feel something solid under your hand. It was an elemental problem, with nothing fancy about it. The crop was there, and if you didn’t save it you went hungry. It had rained far too much already and there wasn’t much chance now of that big crop you were always going to make next year, that fifteen bales or more when you would come out at the end of the year with money ahead and Jessie could go back to school and you could buy some of your own equipment again and not go on farming on the halves all your life. That was probably just a dream for another year. What you were fighting for now was survival. You had to pay off the credit to get credit for another year to go on eating to make another crop.
The cotton on the hillside fields wasn’t going to amount to anything. It still looked bad. The color was all wrong, too pale and with too much yellow in it. If the rain held off and they could get the grass out of it, it would still take four acres of it to make a bale. He could see that as he went up and down the long, curving hillside rows with the cultivator, fighting to save what he could of it and waiting for the bottom ground to dry. The twenty-five acres in the bottom could still make ten or twelve bales if they could get in there to work it in time, but the grass was terrible in it and time was crowding them. It would be another two or three days before the ground would be dry enough to plow down there, and he watched the skies for signs of weather change as he fought the endless rows along the hill.
From sunup to sundown he urged the mules along with the slap of plowlines across their sweaty backs and the stinging lash of curses when they lagged. The halt at noon was a brief impatient moment of lost time while he bolted unnoticed food and went back out into the field before his sweat-drenched clothes had begun to dry. All day yesterday, today, and then tomorrow, and then another day, and the hillside would be plowed and the bottom dry so he could go on with the battle there in the field where the issue would be lost or won. He came in at night sweaty and sun-blackened and tired clear down to the bone, to eat supper by lamplight and pray for the weather to continue clear. Cass was a complaining voice at the head of the table, bemoaning the miseries in his legs that kept him from the field, and full of the mounting tension of the hunt for Sewell. Jessie was a slender, still-face figure standing silently by the stove and waiting for Cass to leave the table before she would come and eat, and Joy was always there across from him, a blonde head under the lamplight and a hint of fragrance in the still, hot air of night, sliding the silken sheet of bitchery across the shackled and half-sleeping maleness in him while he hated her.
The next day was hot and clear, and then the next while he fought his way down the hillside and started out across the bottom, driving the mules and the cultivator ahead of him like a lank and bitter-faced avenging angel in pursuit of devils. Cass sat by the radio through the long hours drawn by the secret and magic ecstasy of hearing his name broadcast over the air, but they had not found Sewell. Neely has disappeared, the radio said, carrying his name into millions of homes along with Truman’s and Stalin’s.
Neely has disappeared into air.
* * *
In the long, bright afternoon Joy lay on her bed and tried to sleep. Jessie was ironing clothes in the kitchen and she could hear the rattle of irons on the cookstove and on beyond, in the front room, the droning voice of the radio where Cass waited for the news. It was hot in the room and she had taken off her dress and slip and lay there in the brief and fragmentary covering of her under-things with the door out into the kitchen partly open to catch any passing current of air. I hope Cass don’t take a notion to go out in the kitchen, she thought. Oh, to hell with him. I’m not going to lie here and roast in a lot of clothes just because he might be snooping around. Let him look if he wants to. What the hell do I care?
She put an arm up across her face to shut out the light and the barren harshness of the room, but took it away in a minute because it was too hot to touch herself. There was no ceiling, and as she lay on her back with her bare arms and legs stretched out to keep from touching herself she could see the dusty rafters and the hot underside of the corrugated sheet-metal roofing fastened down to the lath with long nails that came through and
