“Joy might, fo’ true,” Big Sue bragged.
Zeda said nothing, but her eyes darted a sharp look at Big Sue, then turned toward the rice-fields where the river crept up without a murmur or a shimmer of light on its surface.
Breeze picked on and on long after his back was tired and his fingers sore from the sharp points of the stiff burrs. The crocus sheets spread out along the road at the side of the field were piled higher and higher with cotton which was heaped up, packed down, running over. The last picking yielded more than anybody expected.
Thank God, the sun was setting at last. Wagons were rattling in the distance, coming to haul the cotton to the big gin-house! This year’s crop was done.
XVI
PLOWING
Breeze was to do his first plowing, but instead of being up and dressed and ready to go to the fields when dawn first streaked the sky he lay sobbing underneath the clean bright quilts, which were all rumpled up over his bed, the big, high, soft feather-bed in the shed-room where Big Sue’s Lijah used to sleep.
He was wretched and lonely and sore from head to heels. The feather-bed hurt wherever it pressed its fat cushiony sides against his naked body, although that feather-bed was made out of the finest down of wild ducks and geese. Big Sue liked to tell how she took years to save so many, for she wanted her Lijah to have the finest feather-bed on the whole plantation. Whenever the hunters brought wild fowls to the kitchen for her to roast in the big oven there, she carefully picked the softest pinless feathers off the breasts, and put them in a bag and kept them until she finally had enough for Lijah’s bed. Lijah liked a soft bed. He was like her.
Joy was different. A feather-bed made Joy hot and unrestful, and she liked to sleep on a mattress filled with cotton tacked tight to keep it firm and hard and in place. Joy and Lijah were different altogether. But Lijah left his feather-bed soon after it was made, and went away to a far country. Big Sue was not sure whether the country was named “Fluridy” or “Kintucky.” Sometimes she called it “Kintucky-Fluridy.”
The fine softness of Lijah’s bed meant little to Breeze, for he was homesick and unhappy. He’d a lot rather go back to his mother’s cabin, on Sandy Island, and sleep on a pallet made out of a ragged quilt spread on the splintery hard floor, than to stay here with Big Sue and sleep in this nest of down feathers that had once warmed and comforted other children with bill and wings and webbed feet.
He turned and twisted and heaved with mute sobs. He felt all alone in the world. He had learned not to cry out loud. Big Sue had taught him that people with manners cry low and easy. Manly boys never cry at all. If Big Sue would only take time to beat him right away when he did wrong, he could somehow bear the pain better, but to be waked up before daylight, and stripped naked, and made to stand still under the cuts of a strap, or a switch, that’s hard.