Who made Theodosia Bell?
God, I reckon.
Is God a smell or something?
Whose little girl is this?
Luce. Luce Jarvis.
She lives down the street a way.
Her own look had looked back at her out of Charlotte Bell’s look when
Charlotte had spoken to give the answer. To see Charlotte then was to
remember Tennessee Burden and to pluck in mind at the strange fair vapor
that gathered before Charlotte’s darkness and over her sadness, Tennie
Burden, her bright hair easily curled over her head. She would sit in
her door all day, the gallery with its high pillars running close to
the roadway, and she would stop any who passed to talk a little. The
cushions at her feet were soft and warm. She would stop any who passed,
even Moll Peters, even Uncle Nelse, even Stiggins, the small yellow boy
who lived in the livery stable.
Questioning the question, the hour passed and was eaten away entirely
when the march began again. “To the tap of the drum here we come come
come” spread through the entire air now. Luce looked at Theodosia as she
marched and looked into her pride in walking first and her pride again
in the feel of the drumming of the music, her feet set down rightly upon
the rhythm. She looked at her. She was the daughter of Charlotte Bell and
Horace. Her hair was brown with an over-tint of red that showed at the
sides where the rolls were turned up to the light and showed again where
the ends of the braid sprayed out beyond the ribbon below her shoulders
and down her back. She spread a trail of herself down the platform as she
went proudly first, the other girls walking on her steps, setting feet
down where she guided, she leaving a comet-train of herself behind to be
entered, walked into, known by the knower, the chronicler.
* * * * *
The boy who lived in the livery stable was named Stiggins, a yellow boy
who slept somewhere in the stable in the straw. If travelers came long
after night they were obliged to pound on the door and cry out for
admittance for their horses, and then the night man would send Stiggins
down to open the door. The men who worked at the stable gave Stiggins
bits of money from time to time. When there was not much to do the
hostlers would tease Stiggins by locking him into the loft or the old
harness closet or by holding him under the spout of the pump. Or they
would crack a whip under his knees to make him jump up high to avoid the
keen sting of the whip-snapper. Sometimes when the proprietor was gone
all day this sport went on for hours until Stiggins would cry, but if he
cried he was unfailingly locked into the loft or the harness closet. He
seemed happiest on court day when there was a great crowd in town and
many horses to care for. Everybody was busy then, calling him to do this
or to do that, speaking quickly, even cheerily. “Here, Stig, take this
filly and hurry back with fifty-four. Twenty-two wants feed, but sixteen
just a hitch.”
Stiggins was not, in fact, a name; some of the men had given it to him
one day when he was leaping to escape the whip. His mother was Dolly
Brown, a half-witted negress who lived in the alley behind the jail, and
his father had been some white man. Luce saw him going about, a small
boy, as small as herself; and he belonged to the stable. He was not,
she assumed, a real being, and it did not matter what one did to him.
Push him into the stall where the horse manure was thrown, make him pump
all morning at the broken pump, tear a bigger hole in his old ragged
breeches, or make him leap to avoid the whip, it was no matter. He was a
half-wit; he could never learn; he was not real. But Luce was often sorry
for Stig. She had inferred that he was not a real creature, and this
pity which she had was, then, sentimental. Even she felt that it must be
somehow false and unnecessary, pretty in some way, as if one would be
sorry for a hog because it lay in the mire. His mouth was loose and easy
to drip. He would do anything anyone told him to do, or once in a while,
reversed, he would do nothing anyone told him to do. He was not real, was
scarcely there at all, was not a being; but often when he was tormented
until he cried, or when he was locked into the filthy dark of the old
harness closet, or when his clothes were torn anew until he cringed under
some sort of shame that, curiously enough, he seemed to have about him,
Luce would feel the approach of her own tears and a hurt would gather in
her breast and spread as a fog through her members, through the substance
of the earth and the air. She would wander about, unable to discover the
cause, unable to discern the result or resolve it to any meanings. At the
end of her confusion she would think again of Mome with richer ecstasy.
The streets of Mome were the streets of Anneville, running right and
left, in and out, as she knew and saw, but over these—Hill Street, Main
Street, Jackson Street, Simon Street, Tucker Lane, Crabtree Lane—lay the
great city of Mome, reaching out for miles and adding other streets
and avenues, Chester, Dover, Cowslip, Bangor, Elm, Pine, Walnut, Vine,
and many more, running out among fair parks and lovely gardens. Instead
of the low shops on Main Street there arose great office buildings and
spires and towers where people fluttered by, quick in their steps,
beautiful, alert. On Jackson Street in Anneville grew great poplar
trees under which men sat all day telling slow stories they had told
over and over before, old men grown epic with age and fatalism. Their
refrains recurring were, “Ain’t that always the way!... No sooner you
get ... but along comes a place to spend it.... Looks like as soon as a
man gets on his feet.... Always the way....” They spoke without malice,
interspersing their wisdom with long slow happenings. “Did ever you know
hit to fail?... Would a man ever strike hit on his corn and his wheat in
one and the same year?... But of course it had to happen that way....
About the time Luke got outen that-there fix here a note he owed at the
bank fell due, but it so happened that corn turned out right good that
year and he tided over....” These were the leisured and the old setting
a summary on the town. In the square the prisoners from the jail worked
on the rock pile and thus gave a meager drama to the slow scene. But
over this lay Jackson Street in Mome, as one might read in a book, tall
offices and great palaces where courts were held, where the great went
about the great business of the world, the great business of men. Over
the cobbler’s shop stood a palace where some unguessed thing transpired.
Coincident with Rusty Fuller’s harness shop, having its same contours
enhanced and made splendid in size, stood a white tower with a top that
shone high in the sunlight and here some important deed not yet realized
or named had befallen and would continue to befall. Beyond stood the
library, pillars of marble and cupola of gold, and inside one could have
all the books of the world for the asking. Great tiers of books, bound
in brown or gold or blue, stood on shelves, the wonders of all ages and
the knowledge of all time, future and past. One had only to go inside
the wide marble doors and nothing would be denied, the reason for this
or that and the time of all things being there set down in books and
explained, and there were all beautiful stories and songs.
With a swift effort she could take the whole library with all its wisdom
into her heart, a swift ecstasy. She would think of Mome as she worked
indoors, a consolation. Or she would think of Mome again as she hurried
across the pasture among the low weeds, going to gather blackberries on
the hill. The sudden appearance of a tender little sickle moon up in the
western sky—and Mome. A report of a thief, an adventurer, a disaster,
a bold deed, a shame, a carnival, and, enhanced, it enriched itself in
Mome, it grew there to heroic proportions. Turning swiftly in at the
small gate, returning from the well, the day being slow, a duplicate of
days past, when the street was hot and fly-ridden and the trash from the
stores littered the roadway, she could hang her head far to one side and
look down the street toward the court-house and the jail and see a street
in Mome where marble causeways ran up to marble stairs and tall white
walls gave out onto high balconies, cool and fresh in a sweet wind, the
people eager and exact and clear, intent with being.
In Mome there was nothing commonplace and dreary. There time never waited
upon a fly-blown afternoon. Quick sayings flashed on the lips of men
there, true finalities or bright quips—jests with the sudden tilt of
quicksilver.
* * * * *
The people came to the church on Sundays wearing rustling clothes, some
of them riding in carriages that were harnessed to plow horses or to
driving nags or gay well-bred roadsters. In the church the ladies taught
lessons of the regeneration of the elect and the death in Adam, all men
born in a state of sin, of Eve who had eaten the fruit and had given of
it to Adam, that what God did foreknow that he did ordain. The words
would be confused with drowsiness and weariness, and the foreknowledge
of God would settle to the odors of the yarn carpet and the dry
melancholy of the village Sabbath, sin being any want of conformity to or
transgression of the law of God. A savory wooden tray would be passed
about for the collection, a tray smelling of rich cedar wood and varnish.
The savor of the tray being passed and done, the lady would draw the mind
back again to the hard matter of Eden and sin, to the fearful definition
which was heavy with meaningless wordings. Was it for this, these
laborings with odorless words and long unregenerated sayings, that she,
Luce Jarvis, that she, Theodosia Bell, had put on her new white dress and
her silk sash? It was an impenetrable matter. The foreknowledge arose
from the carpet in an aromatic stench, but the desire to cough would not
follow. There was no relief. Want-of-conformity-to took Transgression-of
into a great stale book and closed flat the covers, and in Adam all men
were born in a state of sin. Eve was a woman and a terrible instigator of
Want-of-conformity-to. The lady teacher was severe upon Eve. But Adam,
said the lady, was equal with her in guilt.
Each Sunday came the gayety of putting on the favored dress, the best
muslin. There would be the tying of the sash, an anxious ceremony, a
flutter of petticoats brushing at the knees, the happiness of the Sunday
hat. There would be the sprig of honeysuckle to wear at the breast,
or a rosebud brought in from the garden for Theodosia, brought by her
grandfather and presented, “A morning gift to a little lady, a posy to
set off her pretties.” Then, in the church, the clatter of greetings and
pleasure in one’s coming. “Here’s a seat. Sit here. Glad you came.... How
sweet she looks.... How sweet we all look, all the little folks. This
bright Sabbath morning....”
Then the business of getting settled, the text asked all around. The
hour grew long and time was suppressed. Time lost all elasticity and
became a fixed substance. The seat turned hard like the impenetrable
words; the seat pressed with infinite woodenness at her flattened thighs
and her pointed spine. Adam was equal. Moses had been given the law.
Holy Men taught by the Holy Ghost had written the book. They were all
undiscernible with age, older than the earth, Adam, Eve the woman. Would
she be Mrs. Eve? Or Miss Eve? Who ever heard of a woman named Eve? She
was rejected entirely. The whole hour was sunk, Adam, Moses, Eve, God,
Want-of-conformity, Holy Men, sunk into unyielding time. Men far across
the church were shaking hands, curious persons, playing at living, but
in earnest about it. The foreknowledge continued to arise with Adam,
who was in all equal, and through him we are all born in sin. Once into
the hour flashed a meaning, a clear thought, a sum toward which all was
momentarily moved, the relation never clear but the summary comprehended:
To do good, to act right.
All the little girls were dressed in muslins and some of them were
perfumed. The lady teacher wore tight kid gloves and smelled of some
sweet stuff, her shining shoe just peeping from the edge of her dress.
One little girl would tell of a sin she knew of. Somebody she would not
name had said a book was hers when it was really her sister’s.
“That was very wrong,” the lady said. “That was a lie, and God looks into
our hearts and knows when we lie. You can deceive another person but you
cannot deceive God, for God knows all things.”
“And I knew a boy,” another child said, “and he found a ball and kept it
for his own because he found it.”
“That was wrong too,” the lady said, a hard voice, “for he might have
found the owner of the ball if he had tried. You cannot escape the eye of
God. He sees all we do and looks into every heart. We can never deceive
God, for He knows our inmost thoughts.”
* * * * *
Moll Peters was a friendly person, always kind to a child. She worked
in a house where boarders were kept and where there were two other
servants, a dark thin girl and a man named Berry. Other negroes would
come to the kitchen, two or three men often, for Moll would slip them a
bite of something to eat, a fresh hot pie or a cookie or a piece of bread
dripping with rich hot gravy. They would laugh loud over their stories
and carry forward their jokes from day to day. Or having been reticent
because of the presence of a child, speaking in half-syllables and signs,
they would suddenly flash quick fearful stories they knew.
Moll was trying to win over the young man, Berry, from the dark girl. He
would eat her hot sops and pies and kiss her fat jaws, but in the end he
would go when the dark girl called him, and the dark girl was not afraid.
She would look at Berry with hard gathering eyes or hold out toward him
briefly one dark thin hand whose palm was pale yellow-white, and she
would treat Moll with friendly indifference, bragging on her pies and her
sauces.
Berry would sing a song, throwing into the words an infinity of soft
gliding modulations and quickly-breathed grace-notes, looking meltingly
at Moll as he sang. His song,
I cannot stand to see my baby lose,
I love her from her head down to her shoes,
would burst through the great laughter when he came down from the
dining-room with a tray. The kitchen knew that Horace Bell was the father
of Miss Tennie’s unborn infant. This fact was well known to the pans in
the scullery closet under the sink, to the pans and skillets that were
put away into the secret and ill-odored dark but would come clattering
out in the hurry of their wanting.
“Ol’ big-mouthed devil!” Moll said once with a great laugh, after a great
roll of laughter and a whispered comment. “Him and Miss Tennie! God
knows!”
Known, these, to the pans and pots and skillets, to the spoons and
dippers and colanders, but not to the sauces and syrups and gravies and
roasts that went up to the boarders’ dining-room. A gravy could roll
discreetly out from a skillet and leave all knowledge behind to flavor
the rich scrapings which Moll spooned upon a bit of bread for her own
mouth or for the mouth of some chosen friend.
Miss Nannie Poll and Mr. Trout flavored one of Moll’s sops, a sauce which
was sweet with the grease of knowledge. A white man was the father of
Letty’s youngone, and old Mr. Preacher Benton was, God knew, a feisty old
cuss, after Mag. She, Moll, had nursed old Mrs. Putty in her deliriums
and listened to her talk all night, and the men that woman had had in
her time would fill a prayer-meeting, God knew, if half she said in her
ravings was true. Old Jonas Beatty smelled like a billygoat, and Miss
Jodie Whippleton tried to hide her dead brat in the calf lot but the hogs
got in and rooted it up for her.
Coming down across the kitchen yard with a tilted tray and a burst of
song, Berry would cast a melting, joyful glimmer of eyes toward Moll. Her
poor fat would quiver with pleasure and pain. His lilted words,
I’m proud o’ my black Venus,
No coon can come between us ...
would accent his quick coming steps and he would clatter the dishes from
the tray with cunning small gestures.
“Aw Be’y,” Moll would plead, ready to cry.
My gal, she’s a high-born lady,
She’s dark but not too shady.
Down the line, oh, there we shine,
Me an’ that high-born gal o’ mine....
“Aw, Be’y, go on,” a softly pled distress.
“I just likes to sing,” Berry said, “and someways I’m partial to that old
song.”
“Oh, God knows, if I ain’t let Mr. Preacher Benton’s soft-boiled egg get
as hard as a rock. God knows! Hard as nails!” A wail from a voice that
was near its tears.
“Aw, put a little water in it and stir it up. The preacher, he’ll not
never know the difference,” the dark girl said.
“I’ll not do so. I’m a fool, I am. I won’t send up no such egg to nobody.
I’ll make another one. Poor old Moll. Hand me a egg outen the icebox,
Be’y, whilst I make the water boil again. Poor old Moll.” She was weeping
now.
From the icebox to the stove with the egg shuffled in his hand. The
handsome yellow boy with his melting quiver of eyes and already broken
promise, broken in its borning.
I’ll telegraph my baby,
She’ll send ten or twenty maybe....
“Aw Be’y, go on,” Moll was pleading again, won again and rejected. “Aw,
Be’y.”
* * * * *
At the Seminary, chapel service was held each morning in the chief
assembly hall, the great and the little being required in attendance. The
small children sat on the front seats, huddled together, fearful that
some impossible thing might be demanded of them. On some mornings there
were opening songs, or now and then a girl would walk to the platform
and say a piece in a light, pretty voice, or a large boy would pronounce
an oration. The song, all singing together, would roll out in a great
shaking throb of noise and pain that beat upon sensitive ears and passed
inward to become a pleasure, under the noise running the music.
Land where our fathers died,
Land where the Pilgrims pried....
On the blackboard were the algebraic emblems and geometric designs
belonging to the great boys and girls. Small children who had labored
to keep their efforts at learnings distinct, who had used letters for
spelling words and numbers for making sums, read upon the board of the
assembly hall such dissipated and trivial statements as _a_ - _b_ = 6.
Beyond the lessons of the books and the precepts of the teachers the
young moved in the great flow of the body of human knowledge, learning
slowly from one another. The fruit of knowledge passed downward
perpetually from the older groups, becoming more grotesque as it
descended beyond the reach of its accompanying emotions. The bulging
piano legs on the chapel platform were with child, pregnant. The Pilgrims
were thought of as a prying lot; they were heard of around Thanksgiving
Day. A child had once designated his navel as his birthplace. A small
child in an upper back room, dressing for a pageant, whispered to another
child, “That’s my birthplace.” Word of it was passed about in a whisper;
it was doubtless true; there was such a word; it could be found in the
spelling book. In the assembly a child looked hard at the pregnant piano
leg, trying to distinguish a mark upon it. Another day, and the mark was
there, the birthplace.
Luce had learned to read and was passing well into the body of knowledge.
The games were a delight, and so too were the calisthenics when one
marched on light toes, Theodosia walking first. One day a group gathered
on the playground around a crying child that had fallen on the gravel.
The teacher assured him that the mishap had not hurt him, that it was but
a light scratch, nothing to cry for. The crowd began to spread about.
“What was the matter?” was asked.
“Fell down and scratched his cuticle a little,” the teacher said.
Did she have a cuticle? she wondered. She had never heard anyone say that
she had scratched or bruised or torn or maimed her cuticle. She dared not
ask.
Numbers became rich designs when they passed beyond the commonplace
literalness of addition. A multiplication table was a poem and a song.
The numbers, written and viewed, kept personalities within their shapes
and evoked colors even after they became parts of tables, the number
songs. One, written 1, was whimsical and comical, unserious, too easy
to learn and to write. No child could ever take it heavily, for anyone
could have invented it. 2 was beyond knowing in its infinity of curves
and arcs that melted into an angle and stiffened into a straight line. It
had caused tears in the beginning, and even after it became routine its
forbidding resistance was not forgotten; it was a cruelty. Nine, uttered,
was the cry of a bird. Written 9, it rolled easily from the hand and was
a maker of joy. It was the consummation of numbers, the last of its kind,
the end of the series. After it the numbers were patched together of
those already learned, a poverty of ideas. Its multiplication table was
the most beautiful in song with its receding scheme of backward-counting
adornments that played through the forward-going lilt of rising
quantities.
One day in the assembly the chief professor asked questions, preparing
for a day of patriotism. Only the little children might answer.
“Where was the birthplace of Christopher Columbus?”
* * * * *
Mome is disposed now, it is not a place now, is an actual substance as
it was in the beginning, is become entirely what it always was. It has
lost its delusion. No one ever called it now by a name.
It is the four-arc’d clock of the seasons ticking its tick-tock around
the year, and it is the mid-winter spring song of the joree bird, the
Carolina wren, when he tee-teedle tee-teedle tee-deets on a high bare
bough on a bright morning in January, spring not being here, not being
there, not being anywhere.
It is the will to say, the power never being sufficient, the reach
toward the last word—less than word, half-word, quarter-word, minimum of
a word—that shrinks more inwardly and farthest toward its center when
it is supplicated, that cries back, “Come,” or “Here, here I am,” when
it is unsought. It is the act of looking when the mirror of the earth
looks back into a creature, back into quickened nerves and raw sensitive
feelers that run to the ends of a town, gray and white threads, living
threads, knotted into a net and contrived to catch and to hold pleasure
and pain, chiefly to hold pain.
It is the beauty of the thing itself welling up within itself continually
in a constant rebirth, a resurrection. At any point it partakes of the
whole nature of itself—like an onion.
It is nobody’s useless old cat, having been stoned three times to death
and left by boys in a tin-can heap at the bottom of a gully in Dee
Young’s pasture, arising, one eye hanging by a thread, to cry “meauw” on
a woman’s kitchen doorstep and to drink warm milk from a brown saucer.
It is the wide-opened jaw of a hound blowing hot breath on a little
field beast and crying a howled curse on the perfidy of escape. It is a
wave of hard shadows running over dried grass and winter stubble under
a vast warted sky, the rabbit having taken to the brush heap at the
field’s end. It embraces the new food and the new hunger. It is in part
a man, a farmer, walking across his pasture in mid-summer singing a
song he himself is making as he goes kicking his work shoes through the
grass, singing, “Loo loo lo lo hum bang fi oo,” singing “Old Whosoever
Will is walken on the top of the meadow,” a cattle farmer, a breeder of
Shorthorns, ten years hence or now, singing a mediæval altarpiece over
the heads of his cows and tramping through a field of a here unnamed
community of flowers out of which the great bee eats. It is a farmer,
the same, Caleb Burns, a farmer of fine cattle, a cattle husbandman,
walking among his barns or over his pastures making the beginnings of
songs or butchering a young beef for food: he would, with his men to
help, stab the young beast at the throat and hang it to bleed, one of his
men catching the blood in a bucket, a bucket of blood running out of a
young beef, warm stuff, sickening to the smell, stuff that nice people
fear. Caleb Burns, son of George Burns and Rose Hamilton, an experienced
husbandman knowing foolishness and loss, or a young man beginning his
way, Caleb Burns singing a song.
* * * * *
Of the curbs and the streets, the lamp-posts and the street crossings,
the drama of the court day, all the people kept a sense that these had
been there a very long time, that these were the eternal marks of the
earth and the ways by which man recognized himself in life. The town
was but a little over a hundred years old, and back of that lay the
wilderness; but few of the people knew how recently the town had begun.
“Out of Virginia,” “Away back long ago,” were sayings in their vague
accounts of themselves. The marks they had put upon the wilderness were
older than any of the people could tell or the race remember and had been
brought whole from some other life.
The roads ran out from the town toward other towns, roads known now as
hard streamers of yellow earth and broken stones, inviting going, winding
among the rolling farms and lost in remote regions where unfamiliar hills
came down toward alien fences and gathered here and there a curious tree
or made off toward a distant unmeasured horizon. In the farms Jersey
cattle or Shorthorns grazed, the last the red of the old Patton stock,
brought from Virginia. The farmers came to town and thus brought the
roads back to the streets and the lanes, came driving wagons laden with
tobacco or hay or wheat or corn, and the cattle-men brought steers along
the roads or the traders drove in the sheep, the spring lambs crying all
June through the streets as they were flocked from day to day at the
commons around the shipping pens.
For the people of Hill Street, there was only one season and that was
summer, warm, seasonable, lush with rain, the season of easy living and
song. Against this was set an anti-season, a not-existence, negative,
cruel, hard with poverty and cold and insufficient food—winter. Life then
was suspended. Begetting and bearing went forward through this negative
period because the law was established by which they progressed, but life
which sustained these waited, dull, suffering, and monotonous.
One spring the negroes began to dig long trenches through the streets
to lay water pipes through the town. The white people were having water
hydrants put into their gardens and houses, the water to be pumped from
a reservoir which was being made between two hills far up in the farms
above the town. In the houses bathrooms were erected at the ends of back
porches or upper hallways. There was work for every black laborer in the
building of the dam and the digging of the trenches through the streets
and roads. The negroes at the picks would sing now and then, not in
unison, but each one would cry out his song, a phrase or a rhyme, timed
to the regular throb of the body as it hammered with the tool upon the
beaten earth, the song falling an instant behind the blow of the arm in
half-humorous comment.
Whe-en I me-a-rry the-en I will
Ma-ake my ho-ome in E-evansville....
The song was always heard to the steady fall of the pick or the rise of
the shovel, syncopated so that it set the shovel apart from itself and
but half-owned its rhythms, or rather as if it accepted its confines and
then escaped from them by the witty loophole of a quarter-beat. The men
who worked were the strong men of the town, brown men or yellow, men who
worked as teamsters, handlers of stone, lumber, coal, brick. They were
named Wade Spalding, Ben MacVeigh, Ross, Tom Rusty, and there was a man
called Gluco. Joe Davis was among them, a man prodigious of strength.
Ross was a large man, young at that time, brown-skinned and broad in
shoulders. All of them were willing, if they were paid well and well
watched, to do a day’s work. A song would cry out from beneath the throb
of the picks, escaped from the hard rhythm of the labor.
Chicken in the tree
Nobody there but me....
A wailing minor slurred through infinite intervals from tone to tone,
sliding on the word “there” down four semitones of the scale by
gradations unknown to established song. As a sequel to this some other
voice would offer, after a space with the thud of the picks, the deeply
intoned fatalism, swifter than the last, major, without wailing.
Hounds on my track
Chicken on my back.
Ross was a tall broad young negro, not over-sized, but well-knit and
strong, his weight about one hundred and sixty pounds. He maintained a
rivalry with Wade Spalding at the business of the picks, neither of them
deigning to outdo himself but each taking pride in what he could achieve,
foot by foot, by using as little of his strength as he might. Each negro
used but the cream of his vitality on the labor, working relaxed, saving
himself for life and her uses. A song, called out quickly,
Nigga, nigga, what can you do?
I can line a track,
Pull a jack;
I can pick and shovel too.
Water for bathing was being piped into all the better houses of the town,
but few people would drink water from the pipes. Pump water, water from
cisterns and wells, was better liked. The cisterns were not yet to be
discarded. Wade had cleaned many a cistern and well. He would go down
into the drained reservoir and dip up the sediments of mud to send it
aloft in buckets. He would sop up the last of the water with cloths and
rinse again with fresh water. No one sang at a lonely task such as this.
Song flowed best when the men worked together in a long line, the picks
and shovels rising and falling.
Look down that dirt-road,
Far as I could see.
Saw a jail door....
Look like home to me.