Charles Williams - Hill Girl

It was down there in the bottom one day in June that I saw Angelina again. I was running the cultivator and when I came out to the end of a row and turned around she was there in the edge of the timber. She had on a long-visored sunbonnet and was carrying a lard pail half filled with dewberries. She was barelegged and I could see where the briars had scratched her legs, little red tracings in the golden tan of her skin.

I stopped the mules and wiped the sweat off my face.

“Hello,” I said.

She looked at me distastefully. I was bareheaded and stripped to the waist, burned black by the sun, and shiny with sweat, and dust was caked on my arms.

“You must think that’s fun,” she said.

“It is.”

“Anybody that’d farm when he didn’t have to is crazy. The sun must have cooked your brains. If you ever had any.”

“Did anybody ever tell you,” I asked, “that what you needed was to have that lovely backside of yours tanned with a razor strap?”

“I guess this is the place for you, all right,” she said spitefully. “You ought to be a farmer.”

“And a farmer is a type of criminal, as far as you’re concerned?”

“No. A type of idiot. I guess Lee was right. Four years in college was just wasted on you.” She realized then what she’d said, but it was too late.

I turned around and got out from between the cultivator handles and started toward her. “Who?” I said. “Who did you say? Where’ve you been seeing Lee?”

She backed away from me. “It’s none of your damn business.”

“I’ll make it my business,” I said. “You goddamned little heifer. Lee’s married. And he’s alive. And he won’t be either one if he gets to fooling around with you.”

She was like an old she-coon at bay. She backed up against a tall ash and held the lard pail like a weapon, ready to hit me if I came nearer.

“Who said I saw him? Maybe I got a letter from him.”

“You got a letter from him, all right. He never wrote a letter in his life.”

“Who told you to run my business for me?”

“You little punk,” I said. “I ought to slap your ears off.”

She gave me a glance full of seething dislike and turned and disappeared down the trail.

During those months I began to think of Jake Hubbard as a man of whalebone and rawhide. The days were never long enough for Jake, and he highballed from sunup to sundown behind a fast pair of mules and he sang as he worked, and once or twice every week he would go “fox-huntin’” and chase around the countryside all night. He hated slow mules and walked behind the cultivator with a bouncing spring in his step, singing and talking to Big Lou and Ladyfingers with loving blasphemy.

“Haw, dammit, mule. Lou, you big ignorant hunk of muleheaded bastard, one more bobble out’n you an’ I’m gonna skin you alive. Ain’t got no time to waste fiddle-faddlin’ around like this. Grass growin’ in the cotton an’ you draggin’ along like an old sow that’s down in the gitalong.”

It was June and the chopping was all finished and Jake and I were running the cultivators in the long twelve-acre bottom field. The sun was halfway down in the west and as hot as it had been at noon. There was a light breeze blowing, just enough to stir the dust we were raising, and it felt good on our sweat-soaked backs when the little puffs came by. The dry-weather locusts were buzzing in the trees up on the hillside between us and the house. I turned around at the end of a row and stopped just as Jake made the end of the tenth or twelfth row over.

“Let’s get a drink, Jake,” I said.

We wrapped the lines about the cultivator handles and walked down toward the little spring branch that ran down past the end of the field. There was shade here and I felt cool in my wet clothes. We lay down on the sand and drank out of the little stream.

We sat down for a minute in the shade and Jake bit the corner off a plug of Brown’s Mule, wiped his face, and grinned.

“She’s a-comin’ along, Bob. That there cotton’s growin’ nice. An’ it’s good an’ clean.”

“Looks good, doesn’t it?” I said. “Where we’ve swept it up, I mean.”

We were silent for a moment, enjoying the sitting down and the coolness. Once or twice Jake seemed on the verge of speaking, as though there were something he wanted to say but didn’t know how to bring it up.

“Say, Bob,” he said.

“What’s on your mind, Jake?”

“I always been a man fer mindin’ my own business. I mean, I got a long nose, but I ain’t one to stick it in other people’s doin’s.”

“That would seem to describe you, Jake,” I said. “Let’s have it, though. What is it?”

“Well, I thought mebbe I ort to tell you this. It ain’t none of my business an’ you can tell me so an’ I’ll shut up. But it’s about your brother. Lee, his name is, ain’t it?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Well, I hear he’s quite a stud around the gals. But that ain’t what I’m drivin’ at. I always figger a man ort to get all he can, an’ where he gits it is his own business. Unless,” he looked up at me and his eyes were suddenly serious, “unless he’s a brother of a good friend of yourn an’ he’s in a fair way of gittin’ hisself kilt. Then mebbe something ort to be said.”

I lit a cigarette and waited. “All right, Jake. Let’s have it.”

“Well, y'know I was huntin’ last night with Sam an’ the Rucker boys over beyond Sam’s place, an’ ‘long around midnight the Rucker boys started home an’ Sam an’ me come on back this way. Well, I was a little in front of Sam when we hit that little lane that runs from his house out to the big road. It was up there on that sand hill in the pines. They was a little moon last night, you recall, an’ jest as I hit the road I seen a car parked there, with its lights off. I was only about a hundred feet from where it was. Jest then Sam’s dog let out a yip an’ the man in the car must ‘a seen me back there because he stepped on his starter an’ gunned the motor an’ started out down the lane like hell after a man. Sam come a-runnin’ up behind me an’ out into the lane, but by that time the car was out of sight around a turn. Sam didn’t see what kind of car it was, but I seen it plain enough. It was a big roadster, an’ it was a Buick. I can tell all kinds of cars, jest by lookin’ at ‘em. It was that car your brother drives, no mistakin’ it. Sam kept askin’ me if I could tell what kind of car it was, but I told him no, an’ he got kinda quiet an’ didn’t talk much more.”

“Just a minute, Jake,” I said. “Did anybody get out of the car before it started?”

“Well,” he said quietly, “I’ll tell you because I know it won’t go no farther. I don’t like to tattle on gals an’ I don’t like to do ‘em no harm, an’ I wouldn’t say nothin’ now only I think you ort to know. They was a gal in there, all right, an’ she popped outta the car when he stepped on the starter. She lit out like a greased shoat into the trees on the other side of the lane. She was outta sight before Sam got there.”

“How far was this from Sam’s house?”

“Less’n a quarter of a mile. Oh, it was that oldest gal of Sam’s, all right. They ain’t another house within two mile, an’ if it’d been some gal from town he’d brought out there she wouldn’t have got out. Anyway, ain’t nobody else in this here country built like that gal. Good Jesus, jest a-seein’ her scootin’ across the road with her pants in her hand, an’ thinkin’ about it, I was so horny I woke up the Old Lady when I got home.”

“Do you think Sam got home before she got back, and caught her going in?”

“No. Not a chanc’t. I walked real slow the rest of the way, like I was awful tar’d, an’ kept him back. She got in ahead of him, all right. This time.” There was a significant emphasis on the last two words and I knew that Jake had said all he intended to say on the subject and considered his obligation at an end.