The Saints of Swallow Hill(2)

He dipped his head toward his house, winked, and said, “She’s in there awaiting on me. I’d betcha ten to one.”

Scraggly, pint-size Ollie Tuttle grunted in agreement, oily hair hanging in his face.

He said, “It ain’t good for one’s constitution, being that clean and such. You can give yourself the pneumony.”

He sniffed his armpit, grimaced, and bobbed his head in affirmation the odor was as it should be as he bounced baby Jack on his knees and cooed at him.

He concluded, “Smell like a polecat, but I got me a wife, and she give me two sons.” He nudged the colored man next to him, while gesturing at Del. “Our new man here, he’s right purty, ain’t he?”

The colored man, Juniper Jones, had no reaction, but that wasn’t unusual. Del got the sense he didn’t share his views on white folks and their business. He liked to kid around, and did sometimes, but turned back to serious pretty quick. He was most intent on making sure there was food on his table. Del learned him and his wife, Mercy, had been with Moe Sutton the longest and all told could outwork any of these “young whippersnappers.”

Delwood Reese let them have their fun. Inwardly, he smiled at the fact he’d already become pleasantly acquainted with Baker’s and Tuttle’s wives. Del, as he liked to be called, considered how Juniper’s wife, Mercy, kept mostly to herself, although he suspected she had to know there was some hanky-panky going on. He’d always wondered how it might be with a colored woman. Best as he could tell, she was a lot younger than ole Juniper. For all his luck with the opposite sex, he’d yet to have such an encounter, but he dreamed of it. Now, with them other two, it had started off innocent enough. He’d come here after the farm he’d worked at for a couple years failed and the family was forced to move in with relatives somewhere in Virginia. Since the big crash back in ’29, farms were going bust all over the countryside with crop prices dropping so it was near about impossible for anyone to make a living, much less pay their bills.

Del had come to Sutton’s farm with two dollars, the clothes on his back, a couple cans of Vienna sausages, his rifle, and Melody, the harmonica that had been his granddaddy’s. He’d bundled all of it together using his extra pants and shirt, with a stick stuck through the tied knot, a real hobo-looking getup. He didn’t need much nohow. He was a man of simple means, always had been. Besides, he was glad, considering the times, he didn’t have a family to provide for. Moe Sutton grew acres upon acres of tobacco, alongside vast cornfields. Del had gazed across the fields, saw the sharecropper shacks and the sharecropper wives tending their small kitchen gardens, hanging out the Monday wash, caring for a passel of young’uns running around barefoot, and thought maybe he could stay here awhile. It was peaceful enough, the scenery not so bad. Moe Sutton seemed like he was doing all right despite the country’s circumstances. Maybe it would work out fine.

It wasn’t long after he’d been hired on, a day or two at the most, Baker’s wife, Sarah, smiled kindly at him and invited him to eat after seeing him sitting in the doorway of his little abode, all by his lonesome, puffing a soft sweet tune on Melody. The Bakers were right beside him, each family taking one of the shanty houses set in a row facing the cornfields.

Sarah said, “Come have some supper.”

It was the standard poor man’s meal—fried potatoes, hot dogs, and biscuits—but they also had some fresh corn and tomatoes. She served the food on mismatched, chipped dishes, and when she set a plate in front of him, she turned it to hide the imperfection. She sure was easy on the eyes. Her fingertips brushed Del’s as she passed what was meant to be butter, but they all knew was really lard tinted yellow with salt added. Sarah Baker had a pouty mouth and large breasts that jiggled without the benefit of an undergarment beneath the flour sack material of her homespun dress. He caught her staring at him several times, always dropping her eyes when he glanced her way. The two children, a boy of four, and another baby boy, gawked at him with big blue orbs clear as the summer sky. Del winked, and the older boy giggled.

Next day he’d seen Tuttle’s wife, Bertice. She was fine-boned, quite timid in nature. A thin woman with a thin mouth. She carried a baby boy about on her hips while another child, a boy too, clung to her apron.

She poured Tuttle a cup of chicory coffee out on the porch, and as Del made his way by, Tuttle called out, “Come have you a cup, Del.”

“Thankee kindly.”

He climbed the steps and sat across from the man who constantly held a toothpick in the corner of his mouth and had a tendency to make odd pt, pt, pt sounds like he was trying to spit something out. Bertice generally kept her eyes averted, but her reserved nature didn’t last long, not when Del began to work his charm, because if there was any woman anywhere within eyesight of him, it was as if he couldn’t help himself. He had to know, what was she like?

Soon, she was inviting him over as often as Sarah, because, as she put it, “A man ought not have to eat alone.”

It went on from there, insignificant, innocent conversations he’d have with one or the other that became more animated, more flirty, and then there came timid touching, progressing to brave banter and greedy grabbing. Del thought of it as a naturally occurring thing, that next step. If they were willing, well, so was he. He never went after them. He eased himself into their lives and let the chips fall where they may. If it happened, it happened. If not, it wasn’t of any consequence. More often than not opportunistic moments came, and he snatched them up along with the faithfulness of their husbands. Swift couplings over kitchen tables while the man of the house went to use the privy. The shooing of older kids outside to play, babies nestled in a drawer bed with a sugar tit, chubby little hands waving freely while their mamas hastened to push aside the dishes. There among the scent of ham, biscuits, string beans simmering, sweaty effort lingered on in the crude, dusty shacks outside the cornfields.