God's Little Acre (2 page)

“What about the rations for those darkies, Pa?” he asked. “Black Sam said at dinner-time that he’s all out of meat and corn meal at his house, and Uncle Felix said he didn’t have anything at his house this morning to eat for breakfast. They told me to be sure and say something to you about it so they could have something to eat for supper tonight. They both looked a little hollow-eyed to me.”

“Now, son, you know good and well I ain’t got the time to be worrying about darkies eating,” Ty Ty said. “What in the pluperfect hell do you mean by bothering me right when I’m the busiest, and getting ready to go after that all-white man? We’ve got to get down to the swamps and catch that albino before he gets away. You tell Black Sam and Uncle Felix that I’ll try to fix them up with something to cook just as soon as we find that albino and bring him back.”

Shaw still did not leave. He waited for several minutes, glancing at his father.

“Black Sam said he was going to butcher that mule he’s plowing and eat him, if you don’t give him some rations soon. He showed me his belly this morning. It’s flat under his ribs.”

“You go tell Black Sam that if he kills that mule and eats him, I’ll take out after him and run his ass ragged before I quit. I ain’t going to have darkies worrying me about rations at a time like this. You tell Black Sam to shut his mouth and leave that old mule alone and plow that cotton out there.”

“I’ll tell him,” Shaw said, “but he’s liable to eat the mule, anyway. He said he was so hungry he didn’t know what he might take a notion to do next.”

“You go tell him what I said, and I’ll attend to him after we finish roping this albino.”

Shaw shrugged his shoulders and started for the house behind Buck.

Across the field the two Negro men were plowing in the newground. There was very little land remaining under cultivation on the farm then. Fifteen or twenty acres of the place had been potted with holes that were anywhere from ten to thirty feet deep, and twice as wide. The newground had been cleared that spring to raise cotton on, and there was about twenty-five acres of it. Otherwise, there would not have been sufficient land that year for the two share-croppers to work. Year by year the area of cultivated land had diminished as the big holes in the ground increased. By that fall, they would probably have to begin digging in the newground, or else close to the house.

Pluto cut off a fresh chew of tobacco from the long yellow plug he carried in his hip pocket.

“How do you folks know there’s gold in the ground, Ty Ty?” he asked. “You folks have been digging around here for the past fifteen years now, and you ain’t struck a lode yet, have you?”

“It won’t be long now, Pluto. With that all-white man to divine it, it’s going to turn up for sure. I feel it in my bones right now.”

“But how do you know there’s gold in the ground on this farm? You’ve been digging here since ’way back yonder, and you ain’t struck it yet. Everybody between here and the Savannah River talks about finding gold, but I ain’t seen none of it.”

“You’re just hard to convince, Pluto.”

“I ain’t seen it,” Pluto said. “And that’s a fact.”

“Well, I ain’t exactly struck a lode yet,” Ty Ty said, “but we’re getting pretty durn near to it. I feel it in my bones that we’re getting warm. My daddy told me there was gold on this land, and nearly everybody else in Georgia has told me so, and only last Christmas the boys dug up a nugget that was as big as a guinea egg. That proves to my satisfaction that there’s gold under the ground, and I aim to get it out before I die. I ain’t aiming to give up looking for it yet. If we can find that albino and rope him, I know good and well we’re going to strike the lode. The darkies dig for gold all the time, all over the whole country, even up there in Augusta, I hear, and that’s a pretty good sign there’s gold somewhere.”

Pluto screwed up his mouth and spat a stream of golden-yellow tobacco juice at a lizard under a rotten limb ten feet away. His aim was perfect. The scarlet lizard darted out of sight with his eyes stinging from Pluto’s tobacco juice.

“I
DON’T KNOW,”
Pluto said, looking over the tops of his shoes for some other object at which to spit tobacco juice. “I don’t know. Somehow it seems to me like a waste of time to go digging these great big holes in the ground looking for gold. Maybe I’m just lazy, though. If I had the gold-fever like you folks, I reckon I’d be tearing up the patch like the rest. Somehow the gold-fever don’t seem to cling to me like it does to you folks. I can throw it off just by sitting down and thinking about it some.”

“When you get the real honest-to-goodness gold-fever, Pluto, you can’t shake it loose to save your soul. Maybe you ought to be glad you ain’t got the fever. I don’t regret it none myself, now that it’s in my blood, but I reckon I ain’t like you. A man can’t be lazy and have the fever at the same time. It makes a man be up and doing.”

“I haven’t got the time to spend digging in the ground,” Pluto said. “I just can’t spare it.”

“If you had the fever, you wouldn’t have time for nothing else,” Ty Ty said. “It gets a man just like liquor does, or chasing women. When you get a taste for it, you ain’t going to sit still till you get it some more. It just keeps up like that, adding up all the time.”

“I reckon I understand it a little better now,” Pluto said. “But I still ain’t got it.”

“I don’t reckon you’ll be apt to get it, either, till you train down so you can work some.”

“My size don’t hinder me. It gets in my way sometimes, but I get around that.”

Pluto spat haphazardly to the left. The lizard had not come back, and he could find nothing to aim at.

“My only sorrow is that all my children wouldn’t stay here and help,” Ty Ty said slowly. “Buck and Shaw are still here helping me, and Buck’s wife, and Darling Jill, but the other girl went off up to Augusta and got a job in a cotton mill across the river in Horse Creek Valley and married, and I reckon you know about Jim Leslie just as well as I could tell you. He’s a big man up there in the city now, and he’s as rich as the next one to come along.”

“Yes, yes,” Pluto said.

“Something got into Jim Leslie at an early age. He wouldn’t have much to do with the rest of us, and still won’t. Right now, he takes on like he don’t know who I am. Just before his mother died, I took her up to the city one day to see him. She said she wanted to see him just one more time before she died. So I took her up there and went to his big white house on The Hill, and when he saw who it was at the door, he locked it and wouldn’t let us in. I reckon that sort of hastened his mother’s death, his acting that way, because she took sick and died before the week was out. He acted like he was ashamed of us, or something. And he still does. But the other girl is different. She’s just like the rest of us. She’s always pleased to see us when we go over to Horse Creek Valley to pay a call. I’ve always said that Rosamond was a right fine girl. Jim Leslie, though—I can’t say so much for him. He’s always looking the other way when I happen to meet him on the street in the city. He acts like he’s ashamed of me. I can’t see how that ought to be, though, because I’m his father.”

“Yes, yes,” Pluto said.

“I don’t know why my oldest boy should turn out like that. I’ve always been a religious man, all my life I have. I’ve always done the best I could, no matter how much I was provoked, and I’ve tried to get my boys and girls to do the same. You see that piece of ground over yonder, Pluto? Well, that’s God’s little acre. I set aside an acre of my farm for God twenty-seven years ago, when I bought this place, and every year I give the church all that comes off that acre of ground. If it’s cotton, I give the church all the money the cotton brings at market. The same with hogs, when I raised them, and about corn, too, when I plant it. That’s God’s little acre, Pluto. I’m proud to divide what little I have with God.”

“What’s growing on it this year?”

“Growing on it? Nothing, Pluto. Nothing but maybe beggar-lice and cockleburs now. I just couldn’t find the time to plant cotton on it this year. Me and the boys and the darkies have been so busy with other things I just had to let God’s little acre lie fallow for the time being.”

Pluto sat up and looked across the field towards the pine woods. There were such great piles of excavated sand and clay heaped over the ground that it was difficult to see much further than a hundred yards without climbing a tree.

“Where’d you say that acre of land was, Ty Ty?”

“Over there near the woods. You won’t be able to see much of it from here.”

“Why did you put it ‘way over there? Ain’t that a sort of out-of-the-way place for it to be, Ty Ty?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Pluto. It ain’t always been where it is now. I’ve been compelled to shift it around a heap during the past twenty-seven years. When the boys get to discussing where we’ll start digging anew, it seems like it always falls on God’s little acre. I don’t know why that is, either. I’m set against digging on His ground, so I’ve been compelled to shift it around over the farm to keep from digging it up.”

“You ain’t scared of digging on it and striking a lode are you, Ty Ty?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that, but I’d hate to have to see the lode struck on God’s little acre the first thing, and be compelled to turn it all over to the church. That preacher’s getting all he needs like it is. I’d hate something awful to have to give all the gold to him. I couldn’t stand for that, Pluto.”

Ty Ty raised his head and glanced across the field potted with holes. At one place he could see nearly a quarter of a mile away, in a straight line between the mounds of earth. Over there in the newground Black Sam and Uncle Felix were plowing the cotton. Ty Ty always managed to keep an eye on them, because he realized that if they did not raise any cotton and corn, there would be no money and little to eat that fall and winter. The Negroes had to be watched all the time, otherwise they would slip off at the first chance and dig in the holes behind their cabins.

“I’ve got something I’d like to ask you, Ty Ty.”

“Is that what brought you out here in the hot sun?”

“I reckon so. I wanted to ask you.”

“What’s on your mind, Pluto? Go ahead and ask it.”

“Your girl,” Pluto said weakly, swallowing a little tobacco juice accidentally.

“Darling Jill?”

“Sure, that’s why I came.”

“What about her, Pluto?”

Pluto took the chew of tobacco out of his mouth and threw it aside. He coughed a little, trying to get the taste of the yellow tobacco out of his throat.

“I’d like to marry her.”

“You would, Pluto? You mean it?”

“I sure to God would, Ty Ty. I’d go and cut off my right hand to marry her.”

“You’ve taken a liking to her, Pluto?”

“I sure to God have,” he said. “And that’s a fact.”

Ty Ty thought a while, pleased to think that his youngest daughter had attracted a man with serious intentions so early in life.

“No sense in cutting off your hand, Pluto. Just go ahead and marry her when she’s ready for you. I reckon maybe you would consent to let her stay here some and help us dig after you are married, and maybe come yourself and help some. The more we have helping to dig, the quicker we’re going to strike that lode, Pluto. I know you wouldn’t object to digging some, being as how you would be one of the family.”

“I never was one to dig much,” Pluto said. “And that’s a fact.”

“Well, we won’t discuss it any more just now. There’ll be plenty of time to talk about it when you get married.”

Pluto felt the blood running over his face just beneath his skin. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face with it for a long time.

“But there’s one thing about it—”

“What’s that, Pluto?”

“Darling Jill said she didn’t like me with such a fat belly. I can’t help it, Ty Ty.”

“What in the pluperfect hell has your belly got to do with it?” Ty Ty said. “Darling Jill is crazy some, Pluto. Don’t pay no attention to what she says. Just go ahead and marry her and don’t pay it no mind. She’ll be all right after you get her off somewhere for a while. Darling Jill is crazy sometimes, and about nothing.”

“And there was something else,” Pluto said, turning his face away from Ty Ty.

“What is that?”

“I don’t like to bring it up.”

“Just go ahead and say it, Pluto, and after you’ve said it, it’ll be done and can’t be coming back to bother you.”

“I heard that she ain’t so particular about what she does sometimes.”

“Just like what, for example?”

“Well, I heard that she’s been teasing and fooling with a lot of men.”

“Has things been said about my daughter, Pluto?”

“Well, about Darling Jill.”

“What do people say, Pluto?”

“Nothing much, except that she’s been teasing and fooling with a lot of men.”

“I’m tickled to death to hear that. Darling Jill is the baby of the family, and she’s coming along at last. I sure am glad to hear that.”

“She ought to quit it, because I want to marry her.”

“Never mind, Pluto,” Ty Ty said. “Don’t pay no heed to it. Don’t give it no attention. She is careless, to be sure, but she don’t mean no harm. She’s just made that way. It don’t hurt her none, not so that you will notice it, anyway. I reckon a lot of women are like that, a little or more, according to their natures. Darling Jill likes to tease a man some, but she don’t mean no real harm. A pretty girl like Darling Jill has got everything coming her way, anyhow, and she knows it. It’s up to you to satisfy her, Pluto, and make her so pleased she’ll leave off with everybody but you. She’s just been acting that way because she’s come along now and there’s been nobody man enough to hold her down. You’re man enough to keep her satisfied. I can see that in your eyes, Pluto. Don’t let that bother you no more.”

“It’s a pity God can’t make a woman like Darling Jill and then leave off before He goes too far. That’s what He did to her. He didn’t know when He had made enough of a good thing. He just kept on and on—and now look at her! She’s so full of teasing and the rest that I don’t know that I’d ever have a peaceful night’s rest when we get married.”