“Stay an’ eat supper wid us, Joy. You an’ Breeze all two,” Zeda invited cordially.
Breeze looked at Joy and waited for her answer. “You stay, Breeze,” she said. “But don’ stay late.” And she walked on home to April’s cabin.
Sherry slept a good part of each day, but at night the big poison machine hummed over the cotton-fields, puffing out clouds of white poison dust until every stalk was covered, every leaf silvery. The dry weather was a help. No rain came to wash the poison off. Plows kept the middles of the rows stirred and the fallen squares buried. After a week’s rest the poison machine ran all night again. The cotton throve. The stifling nights were perfumed with the honey of cotton blooms. Already bolls were showing, some as large as hickory nuts! April himself could have managed no better than Sherry.
Joy bustled about working hard all day, but she sang at her work and night found her unwearied. Brudge got more and more sullen and surly. He was often impudent to Joy, but she paid him no attention. One night when the supper things were washed and put away she slipped out of the door and walked off in the darkness alone. When the others had gone to bed Brudge barred all the doors so she couldn’t get in. As if she were not April’s wife and the mistress of the house. But even then she laughed and treated it as a joke.
The next day her baby lay on the bed sleeping. Brudge walked up and looked at it and called it an ugly name. Joy heard and before Brudge had time to catch his breath, she grabbed him and gave him such a beating he yelled for mercy.
After that Brudge spied on her all the time, even jumping out of bed to see if anybody came home with her at night. And Joy drove him to his work every day as if he were a lazy mule. They quarreled constantly. The cabin became a wretched place to Breeze, except those times when Joy sat on the steps in the dusk and talked to him and told him how much she thought of him and of the help he had been to her.
With her face wreathed in smiles and her eyes bright with gladness, she’d look up at the stars shining through the tree-tops and Breeze would hold his breath and listen at her voice and sigh with love of her, and forget that life was ever painful or burdensome.
One night Sherry walked home from meeting with Joy, but when they reached April’s house she didn’t ask him in. He stood by the step and rolled a cigarette, lit it and walked away. Brudge watched him with eyes full of cunning and when he was out of hearing laughed: “Sherry t’inks he’s somebody. My Gawd!”
“Sherry is somebody,” Breeze defended. “Sherry is de foreman now.”
“You wait till Pa gits home. You’ll see who de foreman is den. Me an’ Uncle Bill is gwine to town to git Pa befo’ long. I bet a lot o’ t’ings’ll change den. You’ll see it too.”