Elma sat up. “You stole that too?”
“Do you know how much the dress factory pays? I prefer to call it ‘souvenir harvesting.’”
“Harvesting!” Elma swatted Sara’s arm. “Well, lucky for us, we got nothing for you to harvest. Nothing but a handful of cotton.”
“Just watch out. I might take me a souvenir baby.”
Elma laughed. Her ears listened for the babies, but all she heard was rain. She knew she should go to them, but she felt frozen in place. Nan was there. Her father wasn’t. Let Nan listen for them. That was what Nan wanted, wasn’t it? Same as Elma. To be mothers to their children. To share them, even! But to be mothers with their whole selves, not to be split into fractions. She allowed herself to imagine it: Nan and Elma living in the big house with Wilson and Winna. Her father gone from the farm. Not gone from the world, like Genus. Just disappeared, like Freddie. Gone! Sara would be there too. In the shack, making dolls for the babies. After doing the doctor’s study in Atlanta, maybe they’d have a little money to live on.
Then, still laughing, she felt the air go out of her lungs. She looked sideways at Sara, thinking how strange it was that you never really knew anyone, that no matter how much your heart warmed to a stranger, she’d always be a stranger to you. She caught her breath. She was dizzy with fear and envy, certain of some unavoidable loss. It wasn’t just her children she feared losing. Harvest was nearly over. Sara and Jim never stayed anywhere long. Soon they’d be gone, their automobile with them.
After their meal, when the rain had quieted to a lazy drizzle, Sara and Elma raised the windows and hung their heads outside. The guineas had come out again, honking nervously through the yard, through the coal black ash of the old shack they liked to nest in. High above the sorghum, a purple martin emerged from a gourd. “That’s a funny scarecrow,” Sara said, pointing. “Instead of scaring the birds away, it gives them shelter.”
“We like those birds,” said Elma. “They catch the skeeters.”
“I’ll tell you something, Elma. They do no such thing.”
Elma studied the gourd tree. Someone—her father?—had removed the length of rope, or it had been blown down in the storm. Looking at it with Sara beside her, it was almost just a gourd tree. “Maybe it’s an old wives’ tale.”
“You Southerners have peculiar ways of keeping some in and others out.”
A lock of Elma’s hair had fallen. She took a pin from her bun and then stabbed it back. “Do we now.”
“It would be one thing,” said Sara, “if it worked.”
NINE TIMES OUT OF TEN IT WAS WOMEN WHO GOT HIM INTO trouble. He had red blood coursing through him like any man.
But the day Juke met the girl who would be his wife, it was String he had his mind set on seeing. He’d been sent by his daddy to the feed and seed in town, and he took their john mule, Lefty. They had a barn full of mules then, mostly spritely young mollys who could plow in their sleep, but Lefty was the only john, and Juke’s favorite. He was near big as a horse and spotted black on white clear through his mane. He’d been George Wilson’s favorite too. It had been George who’d finally taught him to turn right.
It was 1901, just after the Wilsons had built the mill and moved from the farm into town. George Wilson and his brothers had inherited a hill of money from an uncle in the railroad business. In a few years George had grown bored of planting, of buying up land all over Cotton County. He got it into his head to buy rights to the Creek River at the edge of town, where the river and the Straight and the new railroad converged. He borrowed more money from his brothers in north Georgia, one in the turpentine business, another in sawmills. He found builders and then mill hands in the same way, by riding his horse from farm to farm. He needed Juke and Juke’s father at the crossroads farm, but he pulled whole families from cropper cabins five counties around. On the train from Marietta, George’s brother sent cars full of farmers’ daughters in search of work. He sent the sheriff around to the Fourth Quarter to find loose-foot Negroes. The sheriff offered them the chain gang or the picker room. They chose the picker room. All of Florence was mighty proud of that mill.
Juke wanted to see it himself. So, after fetching the three sacks of corn seed, he tied the mule and its cart to a gum tree by the road and walked down to the river to wait for String to walk home from school. It was springtime, the wiregrass along the river wild with cornflower. Juke kicked off his shoes to chase tadpoles. When String came along the railroad and saw him, he let out a yelp of joy. “What in Hades you doing out here?”
The Wilsons’ new house was the biggest house Juke had ever gotten close to, with a porch that wrapped around three sides. From the front porch you could see the cotton mill straight down the hill, three stories of bricks and as long as a freight train. The Creek River rushed rapid out of the woods there, feeding into the new dam that formed a pond at the head of the mill. To the east you could see the three-acre garden Parthenia Wilson had planted for the mill families, and Lefty, still tied to the tree by the Straight. To the west you could see the mill village, where the mill families lived, just a dozen clapboard bungalows then and more rising before Juke’s eyes, houses no bigger than the shacks on the farm, the spaces between them no bigger than each house. And the Wilsons owned all of it. At ten years old, John Jesup—he was not yet called Juke—had traveled no farther than Macon, hopping the freight train with String and his cousins, and that city, with its smokestacks and street trolleys and brick-paved block after block, had left him feeling nauseous with longing and homesickness and the penny candy String’s cousins had stolen from the sweets shop, though they had plenty of pennies in their pockets. There was so much to see he’d had to close his eyes.
That was how Juke felt on the porch of String Wilson’s new house. He wanted, and he didn’t want to want.
String seemed to know not to invite Juke inside. He left his school satchel on the porch and snuck Juke into the mill through the picker room in the basement, where colored men were opening bales, standing up to their knees in clouds of cotton. They paid the boys no mind.
“Looks like they in Heaven,” Juke said to String as they passed through.
String laughed. “This here Heaven is the onliest place you’ll find darkies in the mill. We won’t hire them for nothing more.” Up a narrow staircase, they came to the shop floor, the biggest room Juke had ever been in. A wall of windows, tall as silos, stretched from his elbow all the way up to the ceiling, and down the room, laid out like pews, was row after row of spinning machines, a girl standing at each one. “Look like church,” said Juke.
String laughed again. “If there was only girls.”
“That’s the church for me,” said Juke. “Bout as hot as church too.” He took off his cap and fanned himself with it.
“We hire girls for spinners, mostly. Ain’t nothing to it.” String kept his voice low, and over the sound of the machines, Juke hardly heard him. “Most of the work boys do in the spinning room is sweeping.”
“You sound like you the boss already, tombout all this hiring you doing.”
“My daddy’s learning me on the floor.” String fetched a couple of push brooms hanging from the wall and handed one to Juke. “You know how to sweep?”
“I live on your daddy’s farm, don’t I?”
“Just push it around while we walk about, and Mr. Richard won’t give us no trouble.”
Juke put