Across the Fruited Plain Part 7

But there they did not find what they had hoped for. There were too many workers ahead of them and too little left to do.

Tractors, it seemed, were taking the place of many men, one machine driving out two to five families.

Though the camp was a fairly comfortable one, it proved lonesome for the children for there was no Center, and it did not seem worth while for them to start to school for so short a time. It was doubtful, anyway, whether the school had room for them.

Grandma was too lame to work in the cotton. When she bent over, she could hardly straighten up again; so she stayed home with Jimmie and the baby, and d.i.c.k and Rose-Ellen picked. Rose-Ellen felt superior, because there were children her age picking into small sacks, like pillow-slips, and she used one of the regular long bags, fastened to her belt and trailing on the ground behind.

At first cotton-picking was interesting, the fluffy bolls looking like artificial roses and the stray blossoms strangely shaped and delicately pink. Sometimes a group of Negro pickers would chant in rich voices as they picked. "Da cotton want a-pickin' so ba-ad!" But it was astonishing to the Beechams to find how many aches they had and how few pounds of cotton when the day's picking was weighed.

Tired and achy as they were at night, though, they were glad to find children in the next shack.

"Queer ones," Grandma called them.

"It's their talk I can't get the hang of," Grandpa added. "It may be English, but I have to listen sharp to make it out."

Daddy trotted Sally on his foot and laughed. "It's English all right--English of Shakespeare's time, likely, that they've used for generations. They're Kentucky mountaineers, and as the father says, 'a fur piece from home'."

It was through the eldest girl that the children became acquainted: the girl and her toothbrush.

Rose-Ellen was brushing her teeth at the door, and d.i.c.k was saying, "I ain't going to. n.o.body brushes their teeth down here,"

when suddenly the girl appeared, a toothbrush and jelly gla.s.s in her hand, and a younger brother and sister following her.

"This is the way we brush our teeth," sang the girl and while her toe tapped the time, two brushes popped into two mouths and scrubbed up and down, up and down--"brush our teeth, brush our teeth!"

She spied Rose-Ellen. "Did you-uns larn at the Center, too?" she asked eagerly. "First off, we-uns allowed they was queer little hair-brushes; but them teachers! Them teachers could make 'em fly fast as a sewing machine. We reckoned if them teachers was so smart with such comical contraptions, like enough they knowed other queer doings. And they sure did."

Thus began the friendship between the Beecham children and Cissy, Tom and Mary--with toddling Georgie and the baby thrown in.

Cissy was beautiful, like Grandma's old cameo done in color, with heavy, loose curls of gold-brown hair. Long evening, visits she and Rose-Ellen had, when they were not too tired from cotton-picking.

Little by little Rose-Ellen learned the story of Cissy's past few years. Always she would remember it, spiced with the queer words Cissy used.

They had lived on a branch--a brook--in the Kentucky hills.

Their house was log, said Cissy, with a fireplace where Maw had her kettles and where the whole lot of them could sit when winter nights were cold, and Paw could whittle and Maw weave a coverlet.

"Nary one of us could read," Cissy said dreamily, sitting on the packing-box doorstep with elbows on knees and chin on palms.

"But Paw could tell purty tales and Maw could sing song-ballads that would make you weep. But they wasn't no good huntin' no more, and the kittles was empty. So we come down to the coal mines, and when the mines shut down, we went on into the onions."

These were great marshes, drained like cranberry bogs and planted in onions. Whole families could work there, planting, weeding, pulling, packing.

("I've learned a lot!" thought Rose-Ellen. "I used to ask the grocer for a nickel's worth of dry onions, and I never did guess how they came to be there.")

The first year was dreary. Maw took the baby (Mary, then) and laid her on a blanket at the end of the row she was working, with Tom to watch her. Cissy worked along with the grown folks, or some days stayed home and did the washing and minded Tom and Mary.

"I sh.o.r.e didn't know how to wash good as I do now." She patted her faded dress, pretty clean, though not like the clothes of Grandma's washing.

There was one thing about it, Cissy said; after a day in onions, with the sun shining hot on her sunbonnet and not much to eat, she didn't care if there wasn't any play or fun at night; she was glad enough to drop down on the floor and go to sleep as soon as she'd had corn pone and coffee. Sometimes she was sick from the sun beating down on her head and she had to crawl into the shade of a crate and lie there.

The second year was different. Next summer, early, when the cherries had set their green beads and the laylocks had quit blooming, there came two young ladies. They came of an evening, and talked to Paw and Maw as they sat on the doorsill with their shoes kicked off and their bare toes resting themselves.

First Paw and Maw wouldn't talk to them because why would these pretty young ladies come mixing around with strangers? Paw and Maw allowed they had something up their sleeves. But the ladies patted Georgie, the baby then, and held him; and Cissy crept closer and closer, because they smelled so nice. And then they asked Maw if they couldn't take Cissy in their car and pay her as much as she earned picking. She was to help them invite the children to a place where they could be safe and happy while their grown folks worked.

Cissy couldn't hardly sense it; but Maw let her go, because she was puny. The teachers got an old schoolhouse to use; and church folks came to paint the walls; and P.W.A. workers made chairs and tables; and the church ladies made curtains. The teachers got icebox, stove, and piano from a second-hand store.

Yet, at first, it was hard to get people to send their children even to this beautiful place. They'd rather risk locking them in at home, or keeping them at the end of the onion row. That first morning, the teachers gathered up only nine children. Those nine told what it was like, and next day there were fifteen, and by the end of the summer "upwards of forty-five."

Cissy told about the Center as she might tell about fairyland.

Across one wall were nails, with kits sent by children from the different churches. The kits held tooth brushes, washcloths, combs. Above each nail was a picture by which the child could know his own toilet equipment.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cissy and Tommy at the Center]

"Mine was the purtiest little gal with shiny hair. But it wasn't colored," she added, regretfully. "Tommie's was a yaller automobile."

"Why'd you have pictures?" asked Jimmie.

"I were going on eleven, but I couldn't read," Cissy confessed.

Rose-Ellen patted Jimmie stealthily and didn't tell Cissy that he was going on ten and couldn't read either.

Cissy went on with her tale of the Center. There was toothbrush and wash-up drill. There were clean play-suits that churches had sent from far cities. Every morning there was worship. The children had helped make an altar--a box with a silk scarf across and a picture of Jesus above and a Bible and two candles. They all sang hymns and heard Bible stories and prayed. Oh, yes, Cissy said, back in the mountains they went to meetin'--when there was meetin'--but G.o.d wasn't the same in Kentucky, some way.

The teachers' G.o.d loved them so good that it hurt him to have them steal or lie or be any way dirty or mean. He had to love them a heap to send the Center people to help them the way he did.

After worship came play and study, outdoors and in, with the clean babies comfortably asleep in the clothesbaskets, their stomachs full of milk from shiny bottles. The older ones sat down to the table and prayed, and drank milk through stems, and ate carrots and greens and "samwidges." And after the table was cleared, they lay down on the floor and Teacher maybe played soft music and they went to sleep.

Once they had a real party. They were invited to a near-by church by some of the children of that church. The tables were trimmed with flowers and frilled paper and there were cakes and Jello. The children played games together at the end of the party.

The big girls, when rain kept them from working, learned to cook and sew and take care of babies; and even the little girls learned a heap and made pretties they could keep, besides. From the bottom of their clothes-box, Cissy brought a paper-wrapped sc.r.a.pbook of Bible pictures she had cut and pasted. Tom had made a table out of a crate, but there wasn't room to fetch it.

"I got so fat and strong," boasted Cissy, punching her thin chest with a bony fist. "For breakfast, Maw didn't have no time to give us young-uns nothing but maybe some Koolade to drink, and a slice of store bread; but at the Center us skinny ones got a hull bottle of milk to drink through a stem after worship."

"Are you going back there?" Rose-Ellen asked.

Cissy nodded, her hands folded tight between her knees. "And maybe stay all winter, and me and Tommie go to school. Because Paw and Maw feel like the teachers was kinfolk, since what happened to Georgie."

"What happened to Georgie?"

Six children huddled on the doorstep now, shivering in the chilly dark. "One Sunday night," Cissy said, "Georgie took to yelling, and went all stiff and purple, and we couldn't make out what ailed him. Only that his throat hurt too bad to swallow; so Maw tied up his topknot so tight it near pulled it out: that was to lift his palate, because dropped palates make sore throats.

"Georgie didn't get any better. When the teachers come Monday morning to tote us to the Center, they begged to take Georgie to the doctor. Maw was might' nigh crazy by then, and she got into the Ford without her head combed, Georgie in her lap. Maw said she never had ridden so fast. She thought her last-day was come, with the fences streaking past her lickety-split. And when they come to the doctor he looked Georgie over and said, 'Could this child have got hold of any lye?' And Maw said, real scairt, well, she did have a bottle of lye water, and somebody might have set it on the floor.

"So every day the rest of the summer them teachers toted Georgie to the Center and the doctor cured Georgie up till now he can eat purty good. So that's how come we're sh.o.r.e going back to the onions next summer."

6: AT THE EDGE OF A MEXICAN VILLAGE

Cotton-picking was over, and the Beechams tided themselves over with odd jobs till spring came and they could move on to steadier work. This time they were going up into Colorado to work in the beets.

"And high time!" said Grandma. "We've lived on mush and milk so long we're getting the color of mush ourselves; and our clothes are a caution to snakes."