The River Widow(48)
Scrawny was an understatement, Adah observed, swallowing back a warm flood of compassion. These men were withering away, shrinking into themselves, as if even the marrow of their bones had been leached. Tall and lean, their faces gaunt, though still young, hair twisted in knots, their clothes threadbare and hanging loosely, they seemed muddled as to what to say. Their faces were stoic, but their eyes remained bright.
Another of the men finally twitched under Buck’s perusal. Buck stood still for a moment and stared at the man, as if daring him to twitch again, taking pleasure in their discomfort.
“You always this jumpy?” Buck asked with a sly smile.
“No, sir,” the man answered.
The one who looked the oldest shifted his weight from one foot to the other and said, “We’s right hard workers, sir.”
Buck took another look over them and rubbed his chin. “That’s still to be determined, now, ain’t it? I bet you ain’t ate a full meal in a month, so I don’t figure any of you’s capable of giving me a full day’s work. I’ll offer you seventy-five cents a day.”
The four men glanced at each other with stunned expressions, and the oldest, still focused on his role as leader, cleared his throat before saying, “We was hoping to get at least a dollar.”
Buck held a twig in his hand and proceeded to pick at his teeth. “I’ll go up to eighty cents. Take it or leave it.”
The leader held still, his eyes awash with a pleading desperation. “But sir, most of these spreads around here is paying a dollar.”
Buck flung the twig to the ground and hitched up his pants, held by suspenders. “Then why aren’t you working one of those spreads? There has to be some reason you ain’t been hired on elsewhere. Probably because you look weak as women.”
“Mr. Branch, I gives you my word. We’s gonna do good work for you.”
A cruel grin spread across Buck’s face, as if he knew he’d won. He spat on the ground. “Eighty-five cents, and that’s my final offer.”
Again, the men glanced at each other, and Adah could read defeat in the set of their shoulders. The oldest, wearing a sorrowful but resigned expression on his face, eventually said, “Alright, sir.”
Buck lifted his arm. “Well, hop to it now. What you standing there for? You got work to do.”
Appalled, Adah sighed with dismay and turned away. Life could be brutal even during the best of times, but for men like those four, every day probably amounted to facing another shameful humiliation and degradation. The Depression had weakened almost everyone, and 1937 had been a year of setbacks, but even those who weren’t directly hurting were usually kind. Many people were trying to help their fellow man. But not Buck Branch. Scruples meant nothing more to him than the gravel in the driveway he kicked as he walked away.
Later, when she overheard him tell Jesse he’d hired the men for only eighty-five cents a day, he laughed. The mad rumbling sound like thunder announcing a coming storm, combined with Jesse’s snortlike laughter, sent a trail of sweat down the center of Adah’s back.
The tractor was hitched to the tobacco planter, and one man drove while two others sat on the back of the planter and set the seedlings eighteen to twenty inches apart, then watered them while a fourth man followed on foot. Adah helped from time to time after doing laundry and trying to do some fun things with Daisy.
But the downside of the warmer weather was doing the laundry in the heat and over a fire. On occasion Adah found herself overcome by the smoke that set off coughing and gulps for fresh air. Often her back was drenched in sweat, and her cotton dress clung to her body like a second set of skin. Sometimes she had to walk away for a while and stretch her back, look to the horizon, and breathe deeply, reminding herself to take care of her health for Daisy’s sake.
After the tobacco plants were in the ground, and after each rain, Buck and Jesse spent all day running harrows down the rows in the fields to turn under weeds and keep them at bay. If the two men weren’t in the fields, they were inside the old log curing barn, or they disappeared into the woods for hours, obviously making more moonshine as the weather warmed. With dirt-cheap labor doing most of the fieldwork, they could give time to their other enterprise. Most of the days, only Adah, Daisy, and Mabel kept to the house, the silence between the two women as loud as a blaring horn.
The conversation with Esther ran through Adah’s mind, in particular Esther’s comment about judgment. Esther had indicated she was interested in Jesse and wanted a proposal, and that could mean that Esther would be moving into the Branch house. Or if they married, would Jesse finally leave home and get a place of his own? Adah thought that unlikely—Jesse was to inherit—so it was altogether possible that Adah and Esther would end up living under the same roof someday.
Their first meeting hadn’t gone well, but it hadn’t been a disaster, either. Adah pledged to herself that she would do better next time. If there was a next time. She also kept thinking that a smart woman such as Esther Heiser would soon come to her senses and lose all interest in Jesse Branch.
As she gazed about, her eyes landed on the livestock barn, and an idea hit her.
She found Mabel in the kitchen cutting a chicken carcass into pieces she would flour and fry later. Adah said to her mother-in-law, “It’s such a nice day, I thought about taking Daisy for a ride around the farm on Miss Socks. What do you think?” She had learned to ask permission for everything, especially if it had to do with Daisy.