The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

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      Harvest went on. In the evening, there was celebration, but in the daylight hours, the fields had a way of keeping your mind on the ground. The seeds grew, no matter what was happening in the big house. They managed to keep the weevil away, but that year there were army worms. If you sat dead quiet on the porch, you could hear the shush of their chewing through the fields. Juke used all of Elma’s good flour to make an arsenic paste, and early one morning while the dew was still on the cotton he and Jim crept into the field and lay the poison down. Then when you sat on the porch the only sounds were the cricket frogs and your own lonesome breath.

      For a time it seemed that a new season had come. The floorboards were cool in the morning. The gnats were gone. In the yard, the guineas squawked; the one Elma had named Herbert did his rain dance. All year long they’d prayed for rain along with him, but at picking time, they prayed it stayed away, at least until they’d plucked all the cotton from the fields. The second week of October, though, brought a steady storm, not strong enough to lay the cotton flat, but long enough to keep them indoors for three days. When the rain stopped, they’d have to rush to empty the west field of cotton, if it wasn’t ruined already. For now, there was nothing to do but stay indoors. While Winna and Wilson took their morning nap and Nan started on the churning, Elma packed a basket with hoecakes and dashed through the rain to Sara and Jim’s shack. Juke and Jim were out at the still, and Sara was sewing something she held behind her back while she opened the door.

      “I brought dinner,” said Elma, shaking the rain out of her hair.

      “Aren’t you sweet,” Sara said. She held up her sewing: a doll. “You caught me. It’s for Winna Jean.”

      Elma took it from her. “Ain’t you sweet!” She couldn’t help it. It was no guano sack rag baby. It was made with what looked like flax cloth, and it was wearing a yellow rose-print dress with a flax cloth apron and black felt Mary Jane shoes.

      “It’s not finished,” Sara said, taking it back. “She’s got to have button eyes.”

      “She’s pretty as a picture,” Elma said.

      “Well, I’ll tell you the secret. It’s the cotton she’s stuffed with. Finest cotton in all of Georgia, from what I hear.”

      “Oh, yes! I bet it is.”

      “Your daddy won’t mind I took some?”

      Elma waved her hand. “Daddy’s got so much cotton he won’t miss a doll’s worth.”

      “But it’s not his, exactly, is it?” Sara placed the doll against her pillow and sat down beside it on the cot, and Elma put the basket on the table.

      “Might as well be. It’s George Wilson’s field, but he ain’t set foot in it but once a season.”

      Sara nodded knowingly. “He doesn’t want to get dung on his trousers.”

      “Fine by me. Better than coming over every day to complain about this or that. The Cousins, down the road? They don’t have barely a minute of peace. They all live in shacks, a whole mess of kin on that farm. The planter, he’s brother to one of the wives, he’s always out on the porch of his house pointing his finger, saying do this or do that, and in what order. He once made little Lucy Cousins take out all the stitches in his socks and put them back again. Least Mr. Wilson stays out of the way.”

      She didn’t say that he’d stayed away for some time, that he and her daddy had fallen out. When the weevil came and so much cotton was lost, when he seemed to be one of only a few landowners with any money left, George Wilson had bought up farm after farm. Before long, he didn’t have time for the crossroads. When there was business to be done, Juke had gone into town, to visit with him at the mill. And then the babies were born, and Genus was killed, and as far as Elma could tell, her father stopped going to the mill at all. She had seen nothing of the Wilsons.

      “You like that,” said Sara. “For people to stay out of your way.”

      “Not you!”

      “Well, maybe that’s because I haven’t asked you about the twins yet.”

      Elma sat down in one of the wooden chairs. Then, remembering for the first time where she was, she stood up again. She could still smell the smoky char of the fire that had nearly burned the shack down. “What about them?”

      “How they look so different. I mean—”

      “I know they look different,” Elma said sharply. She busied her hands in the basket. Then, more gently, feeling her tongue go loose, she said, “I didn’t ask for two babies.” She had thought that sentence hour after hour, it had lived silent in her head, and there it was now, out on the table. She laid the hoecakes side by side. They were heavy as rocks, made with the low-grade flour left in the back of the pantry, and Elma wished she’d made something else instead. “They have two different daddies, is how come. They’re twins, grown up inside me at the same time, but they ain’t all the way kin.”

      “That’s something,” Sara said, wide-eyed.

      “Alls I’ll say,” Elma said, but she’d already said more than she ever had, even more than she’d said to the newspaperman—when had she ever had a real friend to talk to, who could talk back!—“Alls I’ll say is one of the daddies is Freddie Wilson. The landlord’s his granddaddy. More like a daddy.”

      “The one that owns the farm?”

      “He ain’t no more than a dog. Freddie, that is. Granddaddy too, I reckon. Folks look down they noses at the baby for his skin, well! The Wilsons ain’t no better! They don’t even take up for they own.”

      “You sure these Wilsons don’t have mulatto blood, and that’s how come Wilson’s dark? It’s the uppity white folks, the ones with the slaves in the family—”

      “Oh, no!” Elma shook her head. “Not the Wilsons. They’re pure as cotton. No. No. They’re two daddies. That’s alls I’ll say. Nature has its own ideas, I reckon.”

      “I reckon it does,” Sara said, trying on the word.

      “You think a mare ever thought she could mate with a donkey?”

      Sara considered it. “I reckon she mates with whoever she pleases.”

      “Well, the first mare that gave birth to a mule ought to have been as surprised as me. But you think she’d have loved him any more if he’d been a horse?”

      “I reckon not.”

      “They’re both gone now, the daddies. One is dead and one might as well be.” Elma fingered the envelope in the pocket of her apron. “That’s alls I’m like to say about that.”

      Sara crossed the room and touched her hand to Elma’s shoulder. “Thank you for the lunch.” She took a hoecake from the table. They both took bites. The rain tapped against the tar paper roof.

      “You ain’t spent much time near livestock,” Elma asked her, “have you?”

      “Can’t say I have.”

      “A mare don’t mate with whoever she pleases. She mates with whatever ass is penned in with her.”

      Sara СКАЧАТЬ