The Sweet by and By by Todd Johnson Read Free Book Online

harder than any person was ever meant to. Bending
    over pulling tobacco leaves, their hands covered in black gum that wouldn’t come off, under July and August sun that was like a fur- nace planted square on top of their heads. More than a few times, I saw grown men fall over in the field. Daddy insisted that Ardor Lee carry water around to everybody, but the sun was not interested in the frailty of us living down here. Its one purpose was to burn, and an eastern Carolina summer is still proof positive of that. I prayed at night for rain so the workers could have a day out of the fields, but it never rained during those summers, never ever. Daddy only stopped work once that I recall, when one of the primers had a heart attack. Daddy didn’t think the heart attack had anything to do with the heat, but he told everybody to go home anyway, he knew they’d all be thinking that it could have been any of them who died out there.
    We always started before the sun came up. Mother stormed into Callie’s and my room and woke us up at about five because we had to eat something and go with Daddy straight to the fields so he could start the morning out there before coming back at dinnertime and doing his preacher duties later in the day. I never liked to eat anything hot first thing in the morning and I still don’t, but there was no argu- ing with Mother. The smell of breakfast wafted through the house in no time. Mother made her biscuits in a big rectangular pan. Daddy wanted fresh ones at every meal, so she threw the leftovers out three times a day. She wouldn’t give them to Tally our retriever because she said that dog was already too fat to be as young as she was. I could have learned to put the biscuits in the oven by myself, but Mother always stopped me and took some buttermilk on her hands and patted them, all around the pan because it made the tops brown better.
    She said to me, “Maggie, you can’t forget the buttermilk if you want them to be pretty.”
    “What’s pretty about a biscuit?” I answered, and Mother’s face looked like I’d just told her that she was an ugly woman, suddenly sad and faraway. I understand that now. Whatever she was doing at any
    moment was not only the most important thing she could possibly be doing but she did her best to enjoy it and couldn’t understand why other people might not feel the same. Most mornings I’d take a biscuit with some jelly on it for later on, once my stomach started growling. By the time the summer was over I was brown as a chestnut, just from being in the fields. Mother didn’t particularly like us to be so tanned because while we were farmers, she didn’t like the idea of us look- ing like field hands, especially as we got older. By the time she was thirteen, Callie was starting to look more like Mother in her body than like me. She left me behind with my f lat chest and bare feet. She brushed her hair, showed signs of small bumps of breasts, and started wearing underwear on top as well as bottom.
    A mixture of heat, dry dirt, tobacco, and bugs at night sums up all of my summers as a girl. Once in a while there was swimming in the pond if Daddy agreed to watch us because Mother was deathly afraid of water. More than once she warned my father, “Reuben you know exactly how I feel about those girls in that pond and yet you choose to let them swim in it. Lord have mercy on you if anything ever happens to one of them, I swear.”
    “You ought not take the Lord’s name in vain, Sallie,” Daddy an- swered.
    “It’s not in vain, I mean every word of it.”
    That was usually the end of it. We’d go to the pond with Daddy anyway, but what Mother said had definitely made an impression be- cause anytime one of us put her head underwater, Daddy squirmed around on the bank until he saw us come up again, even if it was only a few seconds.
    I have no doubt our parents had as many fights as anybody else, but the only other time I remember was when Daddy brought home