Of Love and Dust Read Online Free Page A

won’t be any womenfolks watching you out there.”
    “If you trying to buy your way out, you better think about something else,” he said.
    “Uh-huh,” I said. “Listen, I’m going up there to get that tractor. By the time I get back I expect you to be through eating—that’s if you want to eat—and I expect you to be waiting out there at that gate.”
    “Or you go’n put your white boss on me, whitemouth?”
    “I’m trying to keep him off your ass,” I said. “You can take my advice or you can forget it, that’s up to you.”
    I went to the door and looked back at him again. He was still watching me.
    “Clothes and food round the other side—and you be waiting at that gate,” I said. “If I leave you in the quarter and he bring you back there in that truck, you’ll cuss the day your mon brought you in this world. And you might do that before all this is over with.”
    He was still watching me when I left the room.

5
 
    By the time I had lubed Red Hannah and given her enough fuel and water, that sun was slipping up behind the trees. When I came back down the quarter, I saw John and Freddie waiting for me in front of John’s house. John and Freddie were two punks. John was the big punk, Freddie was the little one. Together they pulled more corn than any other two men I had ever seen; in church on Sunday they shouted more than any two women. The funny thing about it, John and Freddie were ushers in church and they were supposed to look after the women when the women started shouting. But it always ended up with everybody else looking after John and Freddie. A couple of good-size women could hold down Freddie when he started shouting, but it always took seven or eight men to hold down big John.
    John and Freddie hopped in the trailer before the tractor had stopped good. Then, as I came farther down the quarter, I saw Playboy Marcus coming out the yard. He had on a short-sleeve green shirt and a pair of brown pants. No hat—not even a handkerchief round his neck. He had on a pair of brown and white dress shoes.
    “Where the hell you think you’re going in that?” I asked him.
    He didn’t answer me; he didn’t even glance my way. He got in the front trailer because John and Freddie were in the other one. John and Freddie, in their big straw hats andkhakis, were looking at him. They wanted to laugh (they were the laughing-est two you ever saw), but you could see they were afraid of him.
    “You better get back in there, boy, and put something else on,” I told Marcus.
    He didn’t move.
    “There’s a hat in my room on that armoire, Marcus,” I said.
    He still didn’t move. I jumped off the tractor and ran inside to get the straw hat because I was already late. While I was in there I got a khaki shirt too and brought it out and threw it in the trailer where he was. He didn’t pick up either one; he didn’t even glance down at them; he just stood there with his arms folded and his back against the side of the trailer.
    I put Red Hannah in gear and started out for the field. The whole quarter was up now. The people who didn’t have to go in the field for Marshall Hebert were getting ready to go out in their own little patches. Besides corn-pulling time, this was the cotton-picking season, too. And most of the women you saw now wore old dresses and big yellow straw hats with a piece of rag or handkerchief under the hat.
    The plantation (or what was left of the plantation now) had all its crop far back in the field. The front land was for the sharecroppers. The Cajuns had the front-est and best land, and the colored people (those who were still hanging on) had the middle and worst land. The plantation land was farther back still, almost to the swamps. We had to pass through three different gates, through a cow pasture (in the early morning the cows were lazy and didn’t want to move out your way), before we got to the patch of corn where we were working today.
    I parked the end-trailer up the