What's a Man to Do?

I

‘SEEMS like when you’re working for yourself, to git you somewheres,’ Angus called to his wife, ‘work ain’t so hard, no matter what ’t is you have to do.’

Dossie was lying flat on her back digging out borers from a peach tree’s roots. She kept right on twisting and prodding with her short knife as she called back, ‘Uh-huh! You reckon you kin make you a purty crop?’

‘ I aim to — and if a man do the best he kin, the Lord’s bound to be on his side.’

Her shoulders twitched. ‘Maybe — I dunno. Seems like He’s done took a hate to us someway.’

Her husband laughed. Like everything else about him, his laugh was big and lusty. ‘Ain’t you a-feared to talk that-a-way ’bout the Lord, Doss, when He’s just done makin’ you strong ag’in?’

Dossie glanced quickly at the bundle of quilt on the shady side of her tree that was her sleeping baby. Her eyes swept on to her two older boys working together farther down the row. She turned back to her work, but she began to slide her lower jaw, gingerly, against the upper. ‘Angus!’ The phrases came in a set way as though she were accustomed to repeating them over to herself. ‘The doc done told me that not havin’ no cow is what give me that pellagra. Since we got us a cow my teeth is all tightened up in my head ag’in. He done said, too, that Bud’d fatten up, and seems like he is perked up right smart, now me and him’s drinkin’ sweet milk!’ Her voice rose high and clear. ‘ Angus, as long as I got me a cow and kin git me sweet milk to drink, I’m a-goin’ to be a well woman! Ain’t Doc done said so?’

’Sho’, Doss,’ her husband sang back cheerfully. ‘Git to work.’

II

Angus was ‘buzzarding’ Mr. Griswold’s peach orchard. In the North Carolina sand hills, when an owner has given up the idea of making an orchard pay and has turned it over to a sharecropper, it is called buzzarding. The share-cropper makes the best fruit he can without the owner’s having to put up any more money, and at the end of the season the two split whatever it brings.

Angus knew that in taking over a peach orchard the chances were heavy against him. If this were not so, Mr. Griswold would not be buzzarding a place on which had been spent some twenty thousand dollars. But he knew also that back in 1921 and 1922, before peaches became overproduced, orchards such as this had been known to net eight and even ten thousand dollars in a season. On a cotton share crop the best a man can hope for is to make enough to carry him through the next year. With this orchard, if he could make a good crop and the price was even a fraction of what it had been in the golden years of the peach industry, Angus would be, according to his standards, a rich man.

From sunup to sunset he and Dossie and their two boys (Li’l Angly was nine and Jerry eight) put in their day.

The little boys seldom spoke to each other or to their parents. Farm children, they had learned already the seriousness of work. In the field Angus was a foreman first and a father a long time afterward. Like Dossie, they nodded ‘Uh-huh’ when he talked of cropping time and the money he expected to have if he made a good crop and hit a good year. When he insisted, ‘We’ll git enough cash to buy us our own home place,’ they only stared at him with round eyes.

But one day they began giggling and nudging each other.

Angus yelled, ‘Cut hit out, you chaps! Git to work now.’

They scrambled for their knives, but Li’l Angly hesitated. He turned back all at once and called, high and scared, ‘Say, Pop, if you do go make you a big crop, will my own and Jerry’s time come to enough to buy us a goat, d ’ you reckon ? ’

There was a breathless second. Then, ’I reckon,’ Angus called back. ‘Now git to work, ’fore I have to slap you down.’

They did n’t dare speak or even look at each other, but their elbows jogged together. And after a little while Li’l Angly started whistling and Jerry began to hum to himself a long, wordless saga of a goat and a wagon ‘ridin’ all through Jerusalem.’

Last fall it had taken a gang of a dozen giggling Negro girls to get the borers out of the trees. ‘ It was having to put out all that money he done for labor was why Mr. Griswold could n’t never show no profit,’ Angus said. ‘We’ll do the best we kin by ourselves, an’ we’ll be sittin’ purty.’ Working early and late, they had it done by the time frost came and it was the season for pruning.

Pruning is not reckoned hard work for a man, but a woman’s hands are seldom strong enough to handle the shears all day, and children’s hands are, of course, too small to handle them at all.

The boys were left in the cabin to keep up the fire and tend the baby while Angus and Dossie clipped and sawed side by side, day after day, in the orchard. Dossie’s hands first grew sore and then so calloused she could n’t even milk her cow.

She taught Li’l Angly how. He was ‘that handy at it,’ she said, ‘you’d most take him for a girl.’ Li’l Angly threatened to quit, till Angus told him he’d ‘wallop the tar out’n ary son o’ his that would n’t help his mom.’ He added, after Li’l Angly had taken up the bucket, ‘Son, hit all helps to make the crop; and when hit’s done made, you’re goin’ to git you the best goat you ever did see.’

Through the shortening winter days Dossie stuck to her job. Her skirt was kilted up almost to her bony knees. Her nose was red and often running. Her feet sank ankle deep into the sand in dry weather, and the damp seeped up through the soles of her worn shoes after a rain. She and Angus bent their backs to the wind that sweeps the flat sand-hill country.

When noon came they trudged through the sand to the road that led down to the cabin. The boys always had a big fire going and the room was warm. Dossie would pick up the baby and change and cuddle him before she set about to get the dinner. There was a pan of cold sweet potatoes — she baked a batch twice a week in the evening. There were cold corn bread and a jug of blackstrap molasses, and there was the big bucket of milk. They did n’t sit round a table; Angus and Dossie used the two split-bottom chairs, and the children wandered about, stuffing potato into their mouths and chattering in gulpy sentences.

Almost as sure as Angus’s grace, ‘I thank Thee, Almighty Lord, for Thy blessings to us,’ was Dossie’s smile at all of them, and her ‘Ain’t we got us fine vittles though, now we got us a milk cow?’

III

No one man and woman, no matter how hard they keep at it, can hope to prune twenty-five hundred eight-yearold peach trees before spring creeps up on them and the buds begin to open. Most tenant farmers, put in to buzzard an orchard, would not have tried. Mr. Griswold had not expected that Angus would do more than give the trees a lick and a promise — a few suckers clipped away here, a dead limb there.

But Angus had his heart set on a big crop of fine fruit. It seemed to him it was the chance he had been waiting for all his life — the chance to make enough to buy a farm of his own, to free himself forever from the uncertainty of day labor and the hopeless furrow in which the cotton share-cropper walks.

As the spring pushed him close, he hired a darky named Everett and his son, who lived on the farm next to him, to prune by the day. It took all his savings to pay them and he had to let his bill for groceries at the store run.

Then, on the last day of the pruning, something happened to confirm his faith in the Lord’s helping those who do their best. They were all munching their sweet potatoes in the field at noon (now they had hired hands, Dossie and he no longer went down to the cabin for dinner lest a precious moment of the time they were paying for be lost) when the younger darky asked him casually, ‘Say, Mist’ Angus, is you got yo’ war money yet?’

It was the first Angus had heard of the 1931 bonus. He had been a line sergeant in France, and still bore as a reminder a long jagged scar across his back made by a chance bit of shrapnel.

He ran his hand over this scar almost lovingly some weeks later when the rural mail carrier brought him his check. Dossie peered over his shoulder. Her eyes grew wide. She spoke haltingly. ‘Hit seems like hit’d be near enough to git a little farm with hits own self.’

Angus looked up. His round face was radiant. ‘ Look-a-here, woman, this money’s for fertilizer — for gas — spray. I aimed to make a crop of fruit like hit ought to be made, and now I got me the cash to do hit with.’

Dossie stared out at the even rows of trees. ‘If hit should n’t be no price, hit won’t help you none to have purty fruit. I seen Mist’ Griswold’s purty fruit not bring no price afore now.’

Angus’s hand fell on her shoulder — turned her about to face him. ‘ I aim to make a crop, God willin , Doss. You hear that? The Lord’ll fix the price so hit’ll be right when the time comes, just like He helped me out with cash I ain’t even knowed the government owed me.’

Dossie would n’t look at him.

‘I’ll git me a good farm yet.’

Still she would n’t meet his eyes. She tried to jerk her shoulder away, but he held fast.

His voice grew suddenly husky. ‘Cain’t you see I got to make this crop, Doss? Cain’t you see if we hit a price anywhere near right we ’ll be fixed for life? Cain’t you see, Doss?’ She looked at him. ‘Well, — ’ she hesitated, — ’I reckon ’t ain’t nothin’ else for you to do.’

IV

The buds burst. Overnight a mist of pink spread over the pale sand.

Except for Angus, the children, and the two darkies, Dossie had seen nobody all winter. There was the cow tethered in the shed; there was the cabin, the white road that straggled over the hill, Mr. Griswold’s closed and shuttered house, the pine woods that hemmed in the farm, the stark peach trees.

Now that the trees were blooming and there were color and new life, she said to the children, ‘Listen to the li’l birds a-hollerin’ so purty. Seems like hit must be good times is a-comin’ shore ’nough.’

The baby picked a handful of peach blossoms and held them out to her. She slapped his hands so he’d know he was not to pick any more, but she did n’t slap very hard.

Li’l Angly found a piece of rope and began knotting it into harness.

Jerry smiled shyly at his mother. ‘I reckon our goat’s bein’ born ’bout now.’

With the promise of warm weather and harvest, hope had sprung up.

It was a nervous time for Angus. In bloom, peaches are more susceptible to frost than at any other period. He labored early and late gathering armloads of lightwood chips and fagots. The boys could help with this. The rope harness lay tangled in a corner of the cabin. They were kept busy piling little pyramids of chips and fat pine knots all along the north edge of the orchard. Angus knew that hundreds of small fires could only raise the orchard temperature a degree or two and would be in vain if a really hard freeze did set in, but he was leaving nothing undone that might protect his crop.

On the afternoon of the fifteenth of April a north wind sprang up. Angus was cultivating with the tractor. He finished out his row and drove the tractor down to the barn and stabled it. As he ploughed through the sand toward the north edge he saw that Dossie and the boys were already there with kerosene cans.

All night long he sat in the cabin listening to the roar of the wind. Every few minutes he would open the door, lean against it, sheltering his lantern, and read the thermometer.

Then toward morning the mercury dropped. He called Dossie and they trudged out to the north edge. The piles flared up fiercely one after the other. The wind was steady. Smoke and spurts of flame blew into the orchard. Angus and Dossie ran from fire to fire, piling on chips and green branches. The sharp blazes could not last; the wood must be conserved to give out a steady heat till morning.

Angus cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled above the roar of the fires and the wind, ‘Go git the younguns! ’

Li’l Angly and Jerry stumbled into their clothes. Dossie buttoned them up and tied mufflers about their necks. The baby began to whimper and to fight at his eyes with his fists. Dossie quickly rolled him up in a quilt and caught him, wriggling and yelling, into the crook of her arm. It was n’t safe to leave him alone in the cabin with the hearth fire going; her cousin’s child had been burned to death that way.

When daylight came, the piles were smouldering embers. But the wind had dropped and the sun shone. The weather had turned almost to summer time. Angus never knew whether his fruit would have been killed or not, but he was satisfied.

V

The ragged pink petals were scattered across the sand. Bees buzzed. The little long green peaches formed.

The fertilizer, paid for with part of the bonus money, pushed the weeds up to the spring sunshine. Angus drove the tractor from dawn to dark. His eyes were rimmed with red and ran water where the sand bit into them, but pain is negligible when one has hope.

‘I aim to make the purtiest crop ever made on this place,’ he repeated so often and so earnestly that the baby, who was beginning to talk now, made it into a singsong that he crooned to himself as he crawled about building sand houses.

Dossie and the boys bent over double picking up the first drops in the orchard. Drop picking lasts for two months. Mr. Griswold used to hire gangs of darky children for the job, for children don’t have to bend so far down as a woman must. Dossie’s head swam and her back ached most of the time.

When Angus laid the weeds by for a few days and helped, the bending gave him a less pleasant reminder of the war than the bonus had, for the old shrapnel wound in his back began to trouble him again. When dark came he lay down in his clothes by Dossie’s side on the corn-shuck mattress and slept.

But all the signs were good. The rain was a wetting drip-drip through the spring nights, as it should be; the cow dropped a heifer calf; the long thin peaches began to fatten and swell.

One thing worried Dossie. ‘ We ain’t planted us no garden,’ she kept saying, ‘nor yet no taters, nor feed for the cow.’

Angus said, ‘We got us a valuable crop, Doss. We ain’t got no time to fiddle with them things.’

It was true. The work piled up; the hot days pushed them to more cultivating, more drop gathering, more spraying against the curculio and peach moth, more hoeing about the roots of the trees where the Bermuda grass was showing.

Dossie hoed faithfully by Angus’s side, but one day she looked up from the glaring sand and said in a breathless sentence, ‘Gee, s’posin’ they ain’t no price, what we go’n’ eat next winter less’n we got us taters and feed?’

Angus’s hands tightened on the hoe handle. He hesitated, then came out with it: ‘If they ain’t no price, we cain’t stay on here noways.’ He cut viciously at a weed. He was remembering the long string of cotton farms of his boyhood and the end of the year with its heartbreaking reckoning when the landlord came. He could still hear his daddy saying, ‘I reckon we ain’t done so good here,’ and see the family and the household goods piled on the wagon to move to yet another farm.

‘Ain’t I made a fine crop, Doss?' His voice was rough, almost threatening. ‘And don’t the Good Book say if a man do the best he kin the Lord is bound to help him?’

She stared out at the loaded trees. ‘I dunno. Seems like hit ought to be so. But, take Him up one side and down tother, seems like He do ’bout as much harm as He do good.’

Angus hired ten lanky fellows from over in the clay country behind the farm to pick the crop. They were friends or kin of his and would wait for their money until the returns came in. With them, to grade and pack, came their wives and sisters, girls and women with the sturdy legs and red cheeks of clay dwellers.

The fruit hung heavy on the trees, dragging the limbs down to the burning sand. For days Angus had worked with feverish energy propping forked pine branches under the weaker ones. The peaches were smooth red and yellow balls, warm and sweet and somehow radiant, like country girls in the first bloom of their youth.

On an orange box Angus had once seen ‘Sunkissed.’ He said now to Dossie, ‘ I wisht I could have me a sign readin’ “Sunkissed Peaches’’!’ It was the nearest he had ever come to poetry.

They estimated eight carloads, a good big crop for the orchard. Angus put in his order for the first car. The truck stood ready for the hauling. The stamp of the marketing agency Mr. Griswold used was ready to his hand. ‘Like as not ’t won’t bring as much as in ’21 and ’22,’ he said to Dossie, ‘but in them years ’t would be worth near five thousand dollars to us.’

VI

The county agent was a kindly man. He parked his Ford in the shade of a white oak tree and sat in it, his shoulders humped over the wheel, considering for many minutes before he climbed out and, with determination written on his weather-beaten face, strode into the pack shed.

The peaches, in all their flaming beauty, were flowing steadily down the grading table. The girls hardly glanced up from their work. Angus said, in a manner copied as closely as possible from the courthouse storekeeper with whom he dealt, ‘Well, suh, Mist’ MacClain, and what kin I do for you, suh?’

The agent looked hard at him. He hesitated. ‘Mighty party fruit you got, Angus.’

‘Shore is, Mist’ MacClain. Eat a few, suh. Help yourself.’

‘Angus,’ MacClain’s voice dropped, ‘come outside a minute. . . . Don’t you never read the newspapers? Don’t you never see the market quotations?’

Angus answered slowly, ‘No, suh. I cain’t say I do.’

’Well then, Angus, I got to give it to you straight. I hate mightily to have to hurt a man, but Mist’ Griswold wrote me to tell you. I have it to do.’

Angus looked hard at him. ‘Go on, suh.’

'’T ain’t a piece of use in you trying to ship them peaches, Angus. All you’ll get back is a freight bill for hauling them. Down the road south of you the big pack houses are all shut down. It’s worse than last year — worse than ever it’s been before.’

Angus did n’t say anything. He only clenched his big hands.

‘Mist’ Griswold says for you to sell ’em hereabouts for what you can get — not to go putting no more money into shipping them.’

There was suddenly fire in Angus’s blue eyes. ‘Who hereabouts wants ’em? Tell me that, suh! What’s a man to do less’n he ships eight carloads of peaches? ’

The agent said slowly, ‘If’t was me, I reckon I’d let ’em rot on the trees.’

VII

It was very quiet on the farm. The gorgeous orchard lay about the cabin ripe and luscious in the sun.

‘Seems like a peach’d pucker my mouth same as a green ’simmon,’ Dossie said.

Angus sat idle, tilted back in his split-bottom chair, his big hands in his lap. The children tiptoed and lowered their voices when they came near him.

From time to time Dossie spoke to him. ‘Seems like hit’s a real pity not to do nothin’ with ’em,’ she said once. Again, ‘Seems like they’d be some use for ’em somewheres.’ Later, ‘Seems like a man ought to could do somethin’ with ’em.’

It was near the second day of his idleness that she came out with what was on her mind. ‘You been studyin’ a long time, Angus. How you figgerin’ to pay the store bill?’

The front legs of his chair hit the floor with a bang. ‘You know well, Doss. The onliest thing I got I kin sell is your cow.’

Dossie’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘ You — you ain’t meanin’ that? ’

His eyes did n’t meet hers.

‘Angus, you ain’t a-goin’ to sell her? Doc told me if I did n’t git sweet milk that-there pellagra’d come back on me!’ Her voice rose shrill. ‘You ain’t no sort of man, Angus, if you’d take my cow!’

She threw her apron over her head. With a whimper the baby caught hold of her skirt. Li’l Angly and Jerry drew close to each other. Angus stared at the four of them.

His jaw thrust forward; his big fist knotted. But when he spoke his voice was steady. ‘Well — they’s one thing a man kin do with ’em.'

The four of them picked all day, sunny day after sunny day. When dark shut down, Angus got out the truck and Dossie helped him hoist the fifty-pound bushel baskets on to it. He was busy hauling most of the night.

Dossie and he said very little to each other. Once she faltered, ‘Seems like they cain’t be no real harm in hit.’

And he answered, '’T ain’t — less’n you’re caught.’

VIII

The mash was well fermented when the revenue officers raided Angus’s still. They had known of it for a week or more. Even on a lonely country road a truck loaded with peaches running night after night is bound to make gossip. They had held off until there was sure to be fermentation, and therefore evidence and a reward.

Everett, the old darky from the next farm, drove Dossie and the children over to the county seat in his wagon.

Dossie was n’t crying. Li’l Angly was n’t crying either, though once in a while he shut his teeth together and whistled shrill and out of tune. The baby was asleep. But Jerry frankly blubbered.

‘Sh-sh,’ Dossie told him.

‘I want me my goat,’ Jerry gulped. ’Pop said he’d git us a goat if we made a purty crop, and we shore made hit.’

Old Everett chuckled. Dossie said, ‘Sh-sh, Jerry.’

The rickety wagon jogged along with the haggard woman, the freckled little boys, the sleeping baby. Tethered to the tail gate, the well-cared-for milch cow and her calf plodded behind.

Sixty dollars was what they’d told Dossie it would take to get Angus out on bail. For the hundredth time she said to Everett, ‘Seems like she ought to bring sixty dollars easy — don’t you reckon easy, Everett, if I throw in the calf with her?’