Free Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell Page A

been waiting for fifteen years to do. Several times each year he had said he was going to take her to a doctor in Augusta; when he did make an effort to take her there, he usually never got any farther than the store at the crossroad, where something was certain to come up that caused him to change his plans.
    In the course of all those years he had actually reached Augusta two or three times with the sole intention of having the operation performed; but it had always resulted in something coming to his mind at the last minute that he thought he needed more than Ellie May needed an operation. Once it was plow-lines that he could not do without another day, even though he had no mule to use them on; another time it was snuff he had to have, and so he had stopped at the store and spent what little money he had, and they returned home with nothing accomplished.
    Ellie May did not protest. She could not have been made to believe that her harelip could be sewn together in such a way that only the faintest suggestion of a scar would remain. She had become so accustomed to the gaping narrow opening in her mouth that she could not believe that it was possible for her ever to look any different from the way she always had.
    On those very few occasions when Jeeter had made preparations to go to the hospital, and when he had talked to Ellie May about going there, she would stand behind the corner of the house, or behind one of the many chinaberry trees scattered around the house, and grin. The Lesters had spoken so frequently about her harelip that she had come to believe that Jeeter’s proposal to have it operated upon was merely another way of making fun of her appearance. She remained hidden behind the house or a chinaberry tree until the subject of conversation was changed, and only came out where she could be seen when she was certain nothing more would be said about her.
    “It ain’t no sin to look like that, Ellie May,” Jeeter had told her. “You came into the world that way from God, and that’s the way He intended for you to look. Sometimes I think maybe it would be a sin to change it, because that would be doing over something He made.”
    “Well, all I got to say,” Ada had stated, “is that it’s a shame He didn’t make Dude with the slit instead of Ellie May. A gal ain’t got no business looking like that. Women ain’t good for nothing but to marry and work for men, and when one of them has that kind of thing on her, there ain’t no man I ever heard of who’s going to use her. If it was Dude who had the slit, it wouldn’t make no difference at all. Men ain’t noticed so much in the face as women is, noway.”
    Once when Ellie May went to the schoolhouse several years before, to enter the first grade, she returned home before noon and never went back again. The teacher told her she was too old to attend school with little children, but the real reason for sending her home was because the other boys and girls laughed at her harelip so much they could not study their lessons. So Ellie May came back home and never went again. Dude had never attended school, either; Jeeter said he was needed at home to help him do the work.
    But if Jeeter was indifferent towards Ellie May’s need for an operation, there was one thing in his life he tried to do with all the strength in his mind and body. That one thing was the farming of the land. There had been scarcely a moment in his life during the past six or seven years when he was not thinking about it, and trying to discover some way by which he could raise cotton. When Captain John had moved to Augusta seven years before, it seemed to be the end of all farming as far as Jeeter was concerned, but he would not give up the struggle to break the land each spring and plant cotton.
    Jeeter could never think of the loss of his land and goods as anything but a man-made calamity. He sometimes said it was partly his own fault, but he believed steadfastly that his position had