Free Proud Flesh by William Humphrey Page A

thin, only then did he realize that he had had no appetite for weeks. Anybody who didn’t know the facts of the case would have thought he was lovesick. How else could a man diagnose those symptoms when, being a man, he had suffered through them dozens of times in life, beginning when he was only a boy? That heaviness of breath, that pressure on the heart, that listlessness, that loss of interest in things, that ceaseless ache of body and mind, that longing. And how could a man in those periods of self-absorption and absentmindedness hope to disguise the symptoms of his sickness? He remembered how his mother, and even more his sisters, had always known what was ailing him, had sometimes known even before he knew himself. “What’s her name, Clyde?” they would ask. And although he denied everything, they had a way of guessing the girl’s name and soon were teasing him with it mercilessly. Could they still smell out his condition? Could they still guess the woman’s name? Or was it that the yearning to speak the name, to shape his lips around it, taste it on his tongue, had betrayed him into forming it with his lips unconsciously, divulging it to them, as he felt the compulsion to do now? As he wanted now to tell everybody he met about Shug and him? To utter her name, and link it publicly with his own.
    Shee-it. What his sisters saw was what anybody could see, what showed, then as now. They knew where to look for it. That was what they had nudged one another and giggled together over.
    Love: that was the one really dirty four-letter word. He could speak the other ones with no shame, that was the one that stuck in his craw. Love was the word the whole world used for a fig leaf. You could love your mother and your father, your brothers and sisters. A man could love another man and a woman another woman. But let sex come into it and love flew out the window. People spoke of loving couples. He had never seen one, and he had been around. He had seen couples not long married who were still hot for each other: that was called love. When that was gone what remained was mutual relief: that too was called love. He knew what he felt for his woman. He had only to look down to see. Just one thing bothered him. If that was all she was to him, wasn’t he paying too high a price for it? Three billion people on the face of the earth, more than half of them women: was hers the only one he could find?
    â€œCotton’s fine if you can just get you somebody to pick it.”
    â€œClyde, he gets them.”
    Yeah, he got them. How? By making an annual midwinter pilgrimage to Louisiana, sometimes two, to court the gang boss, a bull of a man named Cheney, the color of cast-iron, taking him to New Orleans and there for up to a week wining and dining and wenching him and putting up with his independence and his sass and pleading with him to come back again next year, bringing with him that ex-schoolbus-load of young black bucks in rut.
    â€œSeen one of them mechanical cottonpickers at work one day last week over near Winnsboro.”
    â€œDid you, Leonard. What did it look like?”
    â€œAbout like a cross between a Hoover vacuum cleaner and a hook-and-ladder firetruck. But I’ll say this for it, it out-picked any ten pickers I ever seen. Takes four rows at a time, and that thang went across that field plucking the bolls and spitting out the hulls like a dog shitting peach seeds.”
    They were the coming thing, Clyde knew. Already common in Mississippi and Alabama, and now beginning to reach east Texas. His own pickers told of being turned away at farms where they had worked for years, the planter having rented or bought himself a machine.
    â€œYou got any idea what one of them thangs cost? And they tell me you have to practically keep a fulltime mechanic to tend to it.”
    â€œYes, but you can make it pay for itself by renting it out. Anythang’ll do the work of that many hands you can charge