Of Love and Dust by Ernest J. Gaines

Author:Ernest J. Gaines [Gaines, Ernest J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83035-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

30

I didn’t have a girl down the block, but I wasn’t going to sit at that table and watch them play with each other. I wasn’t going to be his pimp—and I wasn’t going to sit in that bar while they laid together in one of deLong’s rooms, either.

I went to another bar a couple blocks away and got myself a beer. I sat at a table by myself. There were other people in the place, laughing and talking—some of them dancing—but I didn’t pay them any mind. I was thinking about Bonbon and Pauline, and I was thinking about Marcus and Louise. And I thought to myself it was the Old Man. He created them. He didn’t create the situation because He knew all the time they would do that themselves. He created them and created me and said, “All right, that’ll be your hell. Look after them.”

“Why me?” I probably said. “Why me? I like doing just what they like doing. Why do I have to give it up and—”

“Shut up,” He probably said.

But maybe it didn’t happen like that at all. Maybe He didn’t care how it went. He had stopped caring long ago. He didn’t even shake his head any more when He saw them doing something they didn’t have any business doing. Just like He didn’t shake His head when He made a bad move playing chess (by Himself); or when He overlooked a play in solitaire. He just took it like it was part of the game.

No, it wasn’t the Old Man. I had put my own self in this predicament. I had come to this plantation myself, when my woman left me for another man in New Orleans and when I was too shame-face to go back home. I had heard that Hebert needed a man who could handle tractors and I had come here for the job. No, it wasn’t the Old Man, it was me. It was me when I showed Bonbon I was good with any machine he had there. Maybe if I hadn’t showed him how good I was he wouldn’t have put so much trust in me. He wouldn’t have treated me different from the way he treated all the others. He wouldn’t have told me things about himself, things about his family—things he never told anybody else. No, I had to show him how good I could handle tractors. And every time I did, he told me a little bit more. But I’m not saying he told me everything. I’m not saying he put all his trust in me—because I don’t think he trusted himself that much. What I’m saying is that he looked to me as somebody he could talk to. He needed to talk to somebody. By the time I came there he had cut himself off from everybody there except Pauline. He went hunting and fishing with his brothers, but he had little to do with the rest of the people. And the reason was Pauline.

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