Pamela Morsi by Sweetwood Bride

Author:Sweetwood Bride
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-10-20T22:45:22+00:00

13

THE people on the porch had divided into two sets. Clara and Bug remained within the dim shadows of the roof overhang with Rans and the twins beside them, the latter doing most of the talking.

Moss and Eulie were seated on a bench beneath the bright glow of a waning moon. The Pierces sat in chairs nearby. The appropriate greetings had been exchanged. There had been some small talk about crops and a couple of curious questions about the bandage upon Moss’s cheek. That was the extent of the polite discussion. Enoch and Judith Pierce seemed very content to simply sit and listen with avid interest to Little Minnie, who hadn’t ceased her chattering nonsense since the moment they had arrived.

“We had tea,” the child told them. “We practiced our table manners and pretended that we had real spoons and forks, which we don’t have here at all, just old whittled wooden things.”

Judith Pierce was smiling at the girl as if she were the most charming conversationalist that she had ever encountered.

“I didn’t get my dress dirty, not even a little bit,” Minnie went on. “Those twins tried to get me to walk with them through the woods to see Miz Patch. They all gathered field greens, but I didn’t and I won’t. You can sure get dirty doing that kind of work.”

Both the Pierces readily agreed with her. They were dandified people, to Eulie’s mind. If the Tobys were the dregs of Sweetwood society, the Pierces were the heights that could be reached. They dressed as fine on Thursday as they did on Sunday. They always appeared clean and slicked-up and ready to head for town. That was Judith’s doing. She was a peddler’s daughter who’d always had a bit of coin and seen more of the world than most in the Sweetwood. She had high ideas about how to live. And her choice of husband was well-suited to her. Ostensibly, her husband, Enoch, was a farmer. But he was like none other in the Sweetwood He accumulated land. When someone left or someone died, or a farm completely foundered, he was always there with the cash in hand to buy what they didn’t want or couldn’t use. What Pierce owned was sharecropped. Poor farmers, failed farmers, young farmers—there were always people who owned no land and knew only farming as a way to work.

Eulie’s father had sharecropped several places for Enoch Pierce. Of course, even Eulie had to admit, her daddy’s work was no great bargain. When every farmer in the Sweetwood brought in a fine crop, Virgil Toby’s would be only middling. And when times were tough, he’d come with no crop at all. Her father had been sick so much. And he’d drunk a good deal, though it was for medicinal purposes, Eulie was certain. In any case, if it hadn’t been for the efforts of her mother and the hard scrambling she and the youngers had done, they would have never been able to keep food on the table.

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