Scarlet Sister Mary (1928, Bobbs-Merrill Company)/Chapter 6
The mild autumn days streamed swiftly past, some warm, some cool, most of them fair. All of them were busy for Mary, who went to the cotton-field almost every day and picked a fair weight of cotton, besides keeping house and making a cozy comfortable home for July. Every morning she got up at first fowl crow, cooked his breakfast and fixed his dinner in a bucket for him to take, before she woke him to get up and dress and eat. The early mornings were chilly, but the shining stars made them beautiful, and the cold dew made the earth smell damp and sweet.
When July had eaten and gone she milked the cow and staked her out to graze, fed the chickens and the fattening shoat in the pen and straightened up the house before she went to the field to join the cotton pickers.
Bright-turbaned women, deep-chested, ample-hipped and strong, bent women with withered skin and trembling uncertain fingers, little gay chocolate-colored children who played as they worked, moved in a group up and down the long rows, laughing, talking, picking the white locks of cotton and putting them in the crocus sacks swung from neck or shoulder.
The picking is easy. Nimble fingers move quickly. Every boll is left clean. Eyes glance up to meet other eyes. Musical voices flow into one another. Cotton-picking time is the best of the year. Every work-day is a holiday.
Maum Hannah is old and bending over long makes her painful, but as she works she tells wonderful stories.
She knows all about Africa, that far country over the water. Old Paupa July, her grandfather, and Mudder Charity, her grandmother, were children of chiefs there. They talked a different talk from the people here and they were very wise. They knew signs and how to cast spells and how to take off spells which doctors put on people.
The days ran swiftly and happily. When the afternoon turned, and the sun began to drop, Mary hurried home to fetch water from the spring and get wood for a rousing fire so the cabin would be bright and supper done by the time July came at first dark. July's coming home was the best time of the whole day even when he came in weary and dirty with river mud and sweat. As soon as his feet were washed clean and cocked up on a chair to rest and Mary had put a pan full of good victuals in his lap, she sat on the floor beside him, happy to watch every spoonful he put in his mouth.
Just outside their closed door, the Quarter street might ring with merriment, as the people went to dances or prayer-meetings or hot suppers, but Mary had no interest in any of them so long as July would sit by the fire with her talking, or silent, or nodding with sleepiness. Just to have him in reach, to know he was hers, was enough.
They spent many a happy evening together in front of the fire whose pleasant gleam was bright enough to let them see each other. Mary had been turned out of the church, but when July praised her housekeeping she could hardly have been happier, for July's smiles meant more to her than God or Jesus or any hope of Heaven. The year had been a good one, the crop abundant; they had a barrel of peas picked and dried in the shed room, waiting to be eaten this winter; strings of onions and red peppers hung on the wall; a big bank of sweet potatoes sat in a corner of the vegetable garden where no hog could root into it; the small barn held a nice pile of corn in the shucks, to make meal and food for the cow and pig. She had earned some money picking cotton, and she had carefully buried every extra coin in a secret place under the house to stay until hard times came. She had every reason on earth to rejoice. Blessings were on every side. Her waist was certainly bulging before its time. If she had not danced she would have been turned out when her child was born.
July laughed when he noticed her growth, and warned her to have a boy-child. No girl-child for him. He had a lot of projects to carry out when he got a little money ahead, and he would need a son to help him. Mary laughed back and promised, and happiness filled her heart.
Cinder had gone away to town on the riverboat, not very long after the wedding. A good thing. Not that July would ever look at Cinder again or at any other woman on earth but Mary.
The old roof was broken where some of the shingles had rotted, and every day the sun shone through the cracks and fell in bright streaks on the floor, reminding Mary that the roof ought to be mended before the cold winter rains would beat in. The old door sagged and the window-blinds creaked sadly on their hinges. Their time was out, and they ought to be replaced by strong new ones. But July was busy all the week, and when Saturday came he had to pleasure himself after five days of hard work. Sundays were rest days, and to mend a house then would be the unluckiest thing in the world. June offered to fix it, but Mary would not let him at first. She could wait. The old house would shelter them well enough until the days were longer and July's work lighter.
By Christmas the tide of the year had ebbed very low. The earth lay silent. Buzzards floated aimlessly about in the high still air. Wild ducks filled the marshes with a confusion of quacking and splashing, but the song-birds hopped about sadly, hunting their food and the few notes they sang were low and cheerless. The winds gave the tides little peace but kept the water in the river and the rice-fields ruffled.
Sometimes great, booming, wet gusts came in from the sea, making the trees bend and bow their heads. Icy gales shrieked and howled as they went rushing by, chilling and blighting everything they touched. The willows that bordered the river were bare of leaves and the tall gums and cypresses that towered over everything else in the swamp were stark naked. Winter had come in dead earnest. Mary's fattening pig was taken out of the pen and killed. June did it. July said the sight of so much blood made him sick, and the smell of the raw meat always killed his appetite for the good sausages and hams. June made quick work of it, then he mended the roof of the house so no drop of rain could beat through.
Mary was heavy, but many tasks to be done kept her days filled from morning until night. A woman who is about to bear a child has a strangely good hand for planting seed; something magic in her touch makes the seed sprout quickly and grow fast and mature in half the regular time. Everybody in the Quarters who planted a winter vegetable garden wanted Mary to drop the seed.
Medicines brewed by a woman at such a time have more strength to cure ailments, and her hearth was kept full of pots holding herbs and roots for remedies, the Quarter people kept always on hand. Even Daddy Cudjoe, the old conjure doctor, brought some of his root teas for her to stir.
July did some things that were hard to under stand, but he made a good husband, for she never trusted any woman with him. Not one. The sweet-mouthed ones, the very ones whose mouths would not melt butter, were the very ones July liked best. Mary told him a lot he did not know. One thing was not to trust kind-talking, oily-worded women.
It wasn't that she herself suspected July of wrong-doing, but it did vex her to think he would "want to spend his money or break his night's rest for the hussies that were always watching for a chance to get a hold on any man.
She begged him not to eat anywhere but at home. It would be so easy for some women to trick him or to cast a spell on him by giving him something to eat. She had always heard that the least little thing works with a man. Once Brer Dee's wise old dog left home and followed July because July laid a strip of bacon inside the heel of his shoe, yet that dog had sense. Men are strange things. The best and the strongest are weak as water when a charm gets to working on them.
But July was satisfied to stay at home most nights and he seemed to care less about pleasuring himself. Thank God, he thought more of work than of women now.