Each day got shorter now. She must sew fast. Get all her squares patched and ready. She’d scarcely have time to draw a long breath for the turn of cooking to be done after they came. Nobody else on the plantation could season victuals to suit them. Zeda helped sometimes, but Zeda didn’t know when ducks were done to a turn and not too done. Zeda was apt to get venison as dry as a chip, and if she as much as looked at a waffle it fell flat.
Uncle Isaac’s wife was the cook before Big Sue. She used to be the finest cook on the whole Neck. Nobody knew how she made things taste so good. She wouldn’t tell. One day she dropped dead. Right in the kitchen. Some people thought she was conjured, but too much rich eating may have done it. After that Uncle Isaac tried to train two or three people to fix the food, for he knew a lot of his wife’s secrets from watching her. Big Sue was a girl then, but she was a natural-born cook. When Uncle Isaac found that out, he let her have her own way. She could beat everybody now. Lord! When she had the right kind of victuals, people gnawed their fingers and bit their tongues just to smell the steam when she lifted the pot lids.
The next moon might bring cold weather. She must hurry and get these quilts pieced and have a quilting. She had quilts enough for herself. These were for Joy. She’d ask all the plantation women to Maum Hannah’s house, where the big room stayed ready for meeting on Wednesday nights, and for quiltings any day in the week. If it turned cold, Sherry would kill enough wild ducks for her to cook for the women to eat with the rice. Wild ducks and rice are fine. If it stayed warm, she’d cook chickens and rice, instead. Make a pilau, with plenty of hard-boiled eggs. Uncle Bill would give her the chickens.
Sherry loved Joy so much he’d get anything she wanted for this quilting! The women could easily quilt ten quilts a day. If they came early and worked fast they could do fifteen, but she’d be satisfied with six, for she wanted hers quilted right. With fine stitches, run in rows close together. Then the cotton batting could never slip, no matter how many times the quilts were washed.
She was piecing a “Monkey wrench” quilt now. She had a “Log-cabin” finished, and a “Primrose” and a “Star of Bethlehem” and a “Wild-goose Chase” and a “Pine-burr.” She had begun a “State-house Steps,” but that was a hard one to do. It couldn’t be worked out in a hurry and look right. She’d wait and finish it next year. Joy could wait for that one.
Some women don’t care how their quilts look. They piece the squares together any sort of way, but she couldn’t stand careless sewing. She wanted her quilts, and Joy’s, made right. Quilts stay a long time after people are gone from this world, and witness about them for good or bad. She wanted people to see, when she was gone, that she’d never been a shiftless or don’t-care woman.
XI
HUNTING ’POSSUMS AND TURKEYS
Breeze learned something new almost every day. He grew taller each week. His skinny muscles were filling out, his arms and legs growing longer and tougher. Big Sue said he’d be useful if he kept on. He fetched all the water they used from the spring, three full buckets at a time, one bucket on his head, one in each hand. He cut all the wood they burned, without fatigue, since Sherry had taught him the trick of swaying his body forward from the hips as he brought the ax down on the wood. Sherry made a game of wood-cutting, and could cut a thick oak log in two with nineteen whacks. Breeze took two or three times as many, but he did it with one or two less each day.
He made up both beds every morning and swept the floor so clean that Big Sue couldn’t find a speck of dust anywhere. He knew how to crack hickory nuts and walnuts so the goodies came out whole for Big Sue to put in sweetened bread. He had helped make soap with ashes, pot-grease and the fat of a lot of spoiled hog-meat April gave Big Sue. He took a sack of corn on his shoulder to mill every Saturday morning, and brought it back, ground fine, and hot from the grinding rocks. He milked the cow, churned the cream, fed the chickens, and the hog in the pen. He could even patch his own clothes.
The regular field-hands drew rations on Saturday, one peck of corn, three pounds of cured hog-meat. The women who had no man living with them, paid rent for their cabins with one day’s work a week. April saw to it that every one paid. He was close and careful. Everybody had to come right up to the notch since he was foreman, but the house of Big Sue was rent free, since she was the cook. Breeze drew rations like a regular field-hand, and by hunting and fishing with Sherry and Uncle Bill he provided many a good potful of meat. With a line tied to the end of a long swamp cane, and a slick wriggly earthworm for bait, he caught strings of perches that made rich morsels when dipped in cornmeal and fried.