Big city girl - By Charles Williams Page 0,4

recollect hearing about any coming up any time soon, though.

“Couldn’t she, Mitch?” Jessie pressed warmly. Joy was their guest and she was the prettiest thing, and the way she was all broken up about poor Sewell, the least they could do was to try to cheer her up.

Mitch glanced up briefly, stone-eyed. “How the hell do I know?” he asked of no one in particular.

“Mitch!” Jessie said reproachfully.

Mitch shrugged and returned to the butter beans, vaguely irritated at himself and a little ashamed of speaking that way to Jessie. He was usually very considerate of his sister.

Pig, Joy thought coldly. He’s just a pig. His shirt sticking to him with sweat and he didn’t even comb that horrible butter-colored hair and his face looks like somebody chopped it out of wood with a dull ax.

Well, she wasn’t going to let him worry her. Plenty of other people were nice. She took a drink of water, holding her little finger out from the glass the way she always did when she was drinking coffee, and smiled becomingly at Cass.

“Are you really thinking about buying a radio?” she asked.

Cass cleared his throat. He had combed his hair before he came to the table, carefully pulling as much of his sandy fringe as possible across his bald spot. “Well, of course, you understand, Joy, I’m just kindly turning it over in my mind, you might say. It ain’t something you’d rush into. Man has to be careful, tight as money is these days.”

“But you do think you might? I think that’s nice.”

Mitch looked up again. “Any of you got any idea what you’re going to use for money?” We ain’t got any more land to diddle off, he thought. That’s all gone for them goddamned cars.

“Why, you can get one from Sears, Roebuck for five-dollars down, AC and DC current and batteries and all,” Cass said defensively.

“You got five dollars?” Mitch asked curtly.

“Well, no, not right now. But it don’t seem like such an awful lot to ask for. Man don’t ask for much in this world.”

Mitch turned his stone-chip eyes on Joy. “If you have, you’d better hang onto it.”

“I thank you very much,” she said coldly. “But I guess I can handle my affairs without any advice.” Oh, my God, she thought. How did I ever come to this? Looking right through me with those hard eyes of his as if he knew I didn’t have five dollars, or even one. Just a lousy five dollars. A cheap share-cropper that never had a nickel in his life looking at me like that. At me, and my first husband used to be connected with racing. I guess that’d put him in his place, if I told him what it means to be connected with horse racing.

“And,” she went on, “I had no idea that five dollars was such a big sum of money.”

Mitch wasn’t listening any more. He was hearing thunder rolling nearer through the pregnant hush outside and hating the sound of it, knowing there would be no more work in the fields this day or the next. They had not been able to put in three consecutive days on the cotton during the past two weeks, and he knew how dangerously near they were to having a crop go to grass. And that was not the worst of it. Pests bred in the wetness, and if through some miracle they could save the cotton from being strangled in grass, continued rain would bring the boll weevil and its war of attrition, which would lay the harvest waste before it was born.

Ain’t nothing to do but set and wait for it, he thought savagely. Nothing you can light or get holt of to stop it. You set and watch the rain drown it and turn it yellow and the grass grow up so rank you could get lost in it, and there ain’t even enough left at the end of the year to pay off the credit, let alone buy any mules. Every year is going to be the last one you’ll have to work on the halves, because this time you’ll have something left over to start buying back some tools of your own and some mules, if you can keep the old man from diddling it all off again on yellow shoes and another broken-down car, and then something happens. Too wet, too dry, boll weevils, or the price goes down, or something.

“I was kind of thinking of that