From where he was sitting he could see past the corner of the house to where three of the old automobile hulks squatted dejectedly in the rain on their naked rims and on old tires flat for years. In the nearest one, the 1928 Chevrolet sedan, three chickens roosted contentedly on the back of the front seat wiping their beaks on the upholstery and enjoying this shelter from the downpour. And now we got to have a radio, he thought. I thought he’d sold everything we had left to sell, but I forgot about the dawg. After he gets rid of Mexico I don’t know what the hell he’ll do when there’s something he just has to have, unless he’s got to the point he can start thinking about selling the house or Jessie. I reckon when a man’s guts start running out of him it’s like water running out of a broken dam, and the more runs out, the bigger the hole gets, till everything’s gone. It’s getting to where you don’t even want to go to town any more, what with people looking at you and probably wondering behind your back how the Neelys are getting along share-cropping on their own land. It ain’t no wonder Sewell went to the bad.
And now we got this Joy, going around half naked and shaking her can in front of them Jimerson boys, and somebody’s going to get hurt over that. If she wants to start chasing around like a bitch in heat the minute they get Sewell put away, that’s her business, but she ain’t going to do it around here in this house, in front of Jessie.
He threw the cigarette out the door in disgust and got up, too restless to face the prospect of sitting there all afternoon watching it rain. He took off his shoes and rolled up the legs of his overalls and took the old army raincoat off the nail. Clapping the floppy straw hat on his head, he stalked out into the rain and turned down the trail going toward the bottom.
The river might be rising with all this rain. There wasn’t too much danger of it, the way the rain had been spaced out, but it couldn’t keep on forever without the river’s starting to come up. Once before, about seven years ago, the river had almost got their bottom cotton, the whole twenty-five acres of it. The levee he and Sewell had built across the upper end of the field had been the only thing that had saved it. He thought about it now, and the picture of that afternoon and night was still vivid in his memory. It had been just a few months before Sewell had fought with Cass and left home.
He padded down the trail on big, calloused bare feet, rain sluicing onto the old hat and making it flop down in front until he could barely see from under it. The trail skirted the fields all the way down the hillside and then cut out through the trees just above the bottom fields, headed for the river. The river swung in close to the field here, coming in a wide bend from the west across the two-mile expanse of timbered bottom and then turning south again a hundred yards or so out from the edge of the cotton and the fence.
The low place that had threatened the fields that year of the high water was a continuation of the river’s eastward bend, probably part of an old channel long since filled in. It came on in and under the upper fence, a swale perhaps a hundred yards wide at the upper end of the field. When the river got up enough for that old channel to start carrying water, it poured right out across the whole bottom field. This happened during the winter floods every two or three years, or had until they had put the dike across the upper end of it, but of course during the winter there was no crop for it to damage.
He went on out and looked at the river. It was somewhat high and roily, with occasional small bits of drift going by, but it was far from high enough to be dangerous.
Driven by a goading restlessness that would not let him be still, he turned and walked down the river, past places he and Sewell had fished together a long time ago before Sewell had gone, remembering some of the big catfish they had taken on their setlines, and the holes where they had caught them. He stopped for several minutes beside the deep hole and the piled log jam where Sewell had stripped one night and gone into the river to free a line fouled below the surface, remembering the guttering light of the pine torch and Sewell following the line down through the black water and the suspense and waiting and then his head coming out and then an arm and then the terrifying big writhing body of the cottonmouth lashing the surface to free itself of the. hook and Sewell holding the line, laughing, and throwing it up on the bank. He thought of it now, hating the waste and saddened by it. Where did a man miss the turn? What poisoned the stream somewhere along its course from youthful recklessness to hot-blooded violence to cold and paid-for violence and professional brutality?
He left the river and walked out to the lower end of the field and went up through it like some lank, soggy-hatted, furiously ambulatory scarecrow, completely oblivious of the rain, looking at the cotton and full of black and helpless anger at the grass in it. He hated grass in a crop. It stank of shiftlessness.
Three
The dike was between two and three feet high and ran across the low ground for a hundred yards or more just inside the upper fence, and whenever he saw it he thought of Sewell and the night they had put it there. He came up along it now with the rain pelting the old coat, remembering the four mules abreast, wet and shining in the night with the lantern light on them, and his driving them, and Sewell filling and dumping the big fresno as another man would handle a garden spade, and all the while Cass puttering around futilely, going out to the river to poke meaningless sticks in the bank to mark its rise and whining endlessly about the Almighty’s will. Sewell was a big man and there was power in him, not awkward or slow-moving or muscle-bound power, but smooth and relaxed and then suddenly explosive, like that of a big cat in its prime. And now, from what they said on the radio, he had the cold deadliness that went with it and was just as dangerous as one.
Mad Dog they called him, illogically, and he knew that was wrong. A rabid dog with its foaming mouth and helpless frenzy was a far different thing from a jungle cat.
Well, he thought, it’s all done now and there ain’t no help for it. The only thing that’s any good about it, now is that the trial is over and they’ll quit making a circus out of it.
He went up through the cotton, going toward the house. We can still save it, he thought, if the damned rain’ll quit in the next day or so. The ground ain’t sour; and it’s growing all right and the color is good even if the grass is choking it. But it can’t wait forever. He stalked through the back yard, across the hard-packed sand, hearing the rain’s tattoo on the metal roof. Mexico looked at him from under the back porch and thumped his tail once against the ground. The Jimerson’s Model A Ford was parked at the side of the house.
When he came around the corner, they were all there on the front porch, talking. Or rather, Joy was talking. Jessie was listening and working on something in the porch swing with a pair of scissors and a needle, and the two Jimerson boys were watching.
“—with your back perfectly straight, like this, and your head up, and don’t slouch. They make you do this for hours, with the book on your head, and then after you’ve learned that they teach you what to do with your arms and hands. But the main thing is walking. You’ll see my toes are pointed and straight ahead, and notice my legs.”
She had on what she called her sun suit, and this admonition was entirely unnecessary as far as the Jimerson boys were concerned. They had been noticing them. Then she turned her head and saw Mitch standing there in the rain like a bleak and hatchet-faced scarecrow under the floppy hat, and the book started to fall.