Between the Flowers: A Novel

Chapter 16

· 16 · M ARSH WIPED his face and neck with a soggy blue bandanna, and once more turned from his work of gathering melons to look at the southwest where the sky no longer lay white and shimmering, but was gray and cool to the eyes. He thought it had darkened a little in the last hour, but still it was nothing against all that dry white blue. He heaved a watermelon to his shoulder, cradled another in his other arm and started to the wagon, sinking ankle deep in the dry sandy soil. He watched his sinking feet, felt the hot dry soil in his shoes, and was glad that his plowed lands were flat. Hill fields loosened with a plow and stripped by the drought of every plant that might have held a bit of soil would wash to the bone this winter. The winter would most likely be wet, or cold with a good bit of snow. He'd sow the melon fields and maybe some of the pasture to alfalfa -if he could buy the seed. Alfalfa would be good for early pasture next spring-if he could hold on till spring. He put the melons in the wagon, and wished there were a patch of shade for Maude. She was heavy with foal and it was not good for her to stand in the hot sun. He wondered if the foal would be colt or filly, and hoped it would be a good piece ofhorse flesh, something like what he had always wanted, though he knew he ought to have been sensible and let her raise a mule colt. He looked at a dead melon vine by his feet, and knew that Maude and her foal didn't matter. He'd most likely have to sell them both to pull him through the winter. He glanced at the sky again, and thought that somewhere Delph was maybe looking at it, too. She had been peddling since 205 BETWEEN THE FLOWERS full sunrise-sold one wagon load and was back for another before he had enough gathered to fill the wagon. He had asked her how she sold the melons in such a hurry. Her eyes had flashed up at him from her sunbonnet, and she had laughed and answered, "Some fool man thought th' mules were runnin' away, an' yelled, an' all th' mill men came on th' run. They bought th' melons." "You be careful. They could hurt you bad," he had warned, and wished he had paid Sober Creekmore to do the hot back-breaking work of gathering, so that he could have peddled. He thought of her selling to the mill hands, and the thought sickened him. He was her husband, and the mill men were strangers, yet they had as much of her as he had; her presence and her smile-sometimes. He was almost ready to drive to the barn with his load when Perce Higginbottom and Roan Sandusky hailed him from the lane. "I brought Roan here down to look at your melons," Perce explained, and came and leaned his elbows on the wagon side and cleared the melons with a neat stream of tobacco juice, then added, "I picked him up celebratin' in Hawthorne Town." "What over in this God awful weather?" Marsh wanted to know. It was Roan's turn to spit. "High Pockets Armstrong over on th' Little Yellow Branch had joined hands with progress an' built a cow barn, an' nailed cross pieces in his apple trees for chicken roosts," Roan answered a little sadly, for High Pockets had been promising to build a chicken house for the last ten years. Perce slapped him on the shoulder. "Cheer up, my son, we can't all be Samuel Dodson Fairchilds, like that new school teacher said to one a my boys when he couldn't get his interest problems straightlike he had more brains than my youngen." "He was brainy all right," Roan said, and something in his eyes or voice caused Perce to change the conversation. "How's your farm?" he asked. "You ought to live on it one a these days an' raise a little somethin' just to show people you can farm." Roan's face brightened at mention of his land, and the talk then turned to the hundreds of acres of cheap cutover land he owned in the Rockcastle Country; a rough wild place forty miles from a railroad where there were more...