Big city girl - By Charles Williams Page 0,2

shiftlessness and bad management and a perennially wistful fondness for secondhand automobiles. And now the deteriorating carcasses of seven of the defunct cars squatted about the sandy yard around the house wherever they had wheezed their last, giving it the appearance of a junk yard.

He leaned against the plow handles now and waited for the other man. Mitch Neely was several rows up the hill, coming in the same direction and making his mule step along fast. Just like a hawg going to war, Cass thought. God didn’t make the days long enough for him and he walks his mule to death, and I reckon he’d work his own daddy into the grave if I was crazy enough to try to keep up with him.

When Mitch came out to the end and turned his mule around, Cass left his plow and walked across the intervening rows. Mitch watched him with impatience. He was twenty-three, with a thin, bony face and deep-set, rather small eyes like chips of flint, and the face was burned dark by the sun except at the temples, where he had recently had a close haircut. There was a tall, very spare angularity about him, with long thin legs and no great width anywhere, but he had a kind of whiplike toughness and repressed fury of movement that spoke of more power than the lank frame would indicate.

“It ain’t no use sweeping out these here middles, Mitch,” Cass said querulously. “The ground’s too wet, like I been telling you all the morning. We ain’t doing nothing but just moving that there crap grass from one place to another. It’ll take root again before we go to dinner.”

Mitch kicked at a bunch of grass to shake the moist soil from its roots. “Some of it’ll die if it don’t rain again tonight,” he said stubbornly. “And we got to do something. It sure as hell ain’t going to commit suicide.”

Cass waved toward the west. “Just going to rain some more. And it ain’t more’n a few hours away.”

Mitch glared in the direction of the thunderheads. “Well, can I stop it?”

“Ain’t nobody can stop it but the Almighty,” Cass said. “But just the same, ain’t no sense tearing around the fields like a high-lifed shoat, plowing up grass that’s just going to take holt again as soon as it rains.”

“Well, I ain’t going to tell the Almighty how to run His business,” Mitch said bleakly. “But I’m going to keep turning this crap grass over till I wear it out, if I cant kill it no other way.”

He turned back between the plow handles and slapped the mule with a line. The mule, expecting to be unhitched, was slow in starting, and Mitch swung the rein harder this time and cursed. They went off up the row with long, loose-legged strides.

Ain’t no sense arguing with him, Cass thought. He’s mule-headed enough to keep right on working if it was to come a regular gully-washer, and if it floated him and the mule away he’d still be plowing when they went down the river. I never seen a man cared less for the Almighty’s will.

He went slowly back to his own mule and turned him around, sighing at the foolishness of it. Removing his hat, he ran a forefinger across his forehead to throw off the sweat, and looked at the sun to gauge the time. It was eleven-thirty, anyway. They ought to unhitch and start back to the house. Jessie would have dinner on the table by the time they got there—that is, if she didn’t get to listening to Joy and forget about dinner altogether. He sighed again and shook his head. Sometimes a man just felt like giving up.

He was still standing there when Mitch returned. Milch looked at him and then at the sun and whirled his mule about to unhitch. We might as well quit for dinner, he thought. He’ll stand there till he takes root if we don’t.

They uncoupled the trace chains and looped them over the hames. Cass climbed on the gray mule to ride back to the house, while Mitch walked ahead, leading his.

“If it rains this evening and we can’t work, I might go over to the Jimersons’ and see if they heard any more about Sewell over the radio,” Cass said, raising his voice above the rattle of trace chains. He rode sidewise, with both legs hanging off the same side of the mule. When Mitch made no reply, he