"Well, I should think you'd be glad to get clear of this," cried
their visitor. "Florida camps ain't all so bad."
"We've no money to move, ma'am," Grandpa said bluntly. "It took
near all we'd earned to get here, and now no job!"
"This Italian next door says they're advertising for, cotton
pickers in Texas," Daddy said, cradling Sally in one arm while he
held her little clawlike hand in his, feeling its fever.
"We haven't got wings, to fly there," Grandma objected.
Mrs. King looked thoughtfully around the wretched shelter. A few
clothes hung from corner posts; a few tin dishes were piled in a
box cupboard. The children were clean as children could be in
such a place. But the visitor's glance lingered longest on the
clock.
"Your clock and mine are like as two peas," she observed. "Forty
years ago I got mine, on my wedding day."
"Mine was a wedding present, too. And my feather beds that I had
to let go at fifty cents apiece. . . ." Grandma quavered.
"These are queer times." Mrs. King shook her head. "I do wish I
had the means to lend a hand like a real neighbor. There's this,
though--my mister took in a big old auto on a debt, and he'll
leave you have it for what the debt was--fifteen dollars, seems
like."
"You reckon he will?" Grandpa demanded.
"He better!" said Mrs. King.
"Even fifteen dollars won't leave us scarcely enough to eat on,"
Grandpa muttered.
"But we've got to get to a place where there's work," Daddy
reminded him.
They went to see the car, and found it a big, strong old Reo,
with fairly good tires. So they bought it.
Grandma had one piece of jewelry left, besides her wide gold
wedding ring--a cameo brooch. She traded it for a nanny goat.
On the ever useful dump the men found a wrecked trailer and they
mended it so that it would hold the goat, which the children
named Carrie. Later, Grandma thought, they might get some laying
hens, too.
Two days after the Big Storm, they set out for the Texas
cottonfields. Mrs. King stuck a big box of lunch into the car,
and an old tent which she said she couldn't use.
"I hope I'll be forgiven for never paying heed to fruit
tramps--fruit workers--before," she said soberly. "From now on I
aim to. Though I shan't find none like you-all, with a Seth
Thomas clock and suchlike."
[Illustration: Off to the cotton fields]
After the truck ride from Jersey even a fifteen-dollar automobile
was luxury, with its roomy seats and two folding seats that let
down between.
Grandma joked, in her tart way, "I never looked to be touring the
country in my own auto!"
Rose-Ellen jiggled in the back seat. "Peekaneeka, Gramma!" she
said.
When it rained, the children scurried to fasten the side curtains
and then huddled together to keep warm while they played
tick-tack-toe or guessing games. For meals they stopped where
they could milk Carrie and build a small fire. At night they put
up the tent, unless a farmer or a policeman ordered them to move
on.
At first it seemed more of a peekaneeka than any of their
adventures thus far. They met and passed many old cars like
their own, and the children counted the strange things that were
tied on car or trailer tops while Grandma counted license
plates-when Sally was not too fussy. There was always something
new to see, especially when they were passing through Louisiana.
Daddy said Louisiana was the one state in the country that had
parishes instead of counties, and that that was because it had
been French in the early days. Almost everything else about it
seemed as strange to the children--the Spanish moss hanging in
long streamers from the live oak trees; the bayous, or arms of
the river, clogged with water hyacinths; the fields of sugar
cane; and the Negro cabins, with their glassless windows and
their big black kettles boiling in the back yards.
"But the funniest thing I saw," Rose-Ellen said later, "was a cow
lying in the bayou, with purple water hyacinths draped all over
her, as if it was on purpose."
After a few days, though, even this peekaneeka grew wearisome to
the children; while Daddy and Grandpa grew more and more anxious
about an angry spat-spat-spat from the Reo. So they were all
glad to reach the cotton fields they had been steering toward.
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 Dick 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 Dick was
saying, "I ain't going to. Nobody brushes their teeth down here,"
when suddenly the girl appeared, a toothbrush and jelly glass 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 shore 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.
[Illustration: 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 God wasn't the same in Kentucky, some way.
The teachers' God 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
scrapbook 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 shore going back to the
onions next summer."