Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) Read Online Free PDF Page A

said, “I bet you miss it, don’t you? The farm, I mean. And the quiet, and the smell of fresh-cut hay and fresh-turned soil, and watchin’ newborn lambs and calves frolic, and...”
    â€œI don’t miss any of that.” Miss Klein shook her head. “I don’t miss drawing well water, either. I will never ever live out in the country again. A man trying to make a decent living on the land? That’s a lot bigger joke than what you do, Mr. Tweedy. Farming is nothing but hard work and high hopes, debt and disappointment.”
    â€œBut I’ll know all the new methods. Farmin’ is a gamble, all right. Still, that’s what keeps it excitin’.”
    â€œI hate excitement. That’s just another word for worry.”
    â€œFarmin’ lets a man work outdoors. I couldn’t stand bein’ cooped up in a store or office the rest of my life. Right now, though, I just want to enlist. Bein’ a county agent won’t mean pea-turkey to the fightin’ men, the ones over here, or over there either.” I itched to pluck that watermelon seed off her cheek. “Want me to give you a for-instance, Miss Klein? Yesterday I was out in the county advisin’ an old fool named Duck Lassiter how to get one row of cotton picked. How’s that go’n hep beat the Kaiser?”
    She looked puzzled. “One row?”
    â€œOld Duck plowed his field in a spiral, like a snail shell, and bragged that it was go’n be the world’s longest goldurn cotton row. His field hands hoed it, and they slopped the stalks with arsenic and molasses to kill the boll weevils, but they don’t want to pick the cotton.” I laughed. “Cotton pickers like to take a row apiece and move down a field together. If they have to space themselves out, that’s lonesome pickin’. And it’ll be heavy totin’ and a lot of wasted time if they have to cut across the spiral to get to the cotton wagon. I told Duck he’d have to make a road across the spiral, but he said that’d mess up his row.”
    Miss Klein was really laughing. She didn’t notice a yellow jacket closing in on her scent.
    â€œNow tomorrow evenin’, I’ll be talkin’ to a dozen or so farmers about crop rotation, which just might hep feed my frat brother. If the war lasts long enough.” I couldn’t resist any longer. I plucked the seed off her cheek and held it out to her. “A souvenir,” I said.
    Her smile was rueful. “I don’t think I want it.”
    â€œThen I do,” said I, and put it in my shirt pocket.
    At that moment, Miss Klein stood up, frantic, waving off the yellow jackets with her hat. Right quick I helped her out of the sidecar and followed her up the back steps. After Miss Klein dodged inside the screen door, I asked if I could take her to church the next Sunday night. “By then,” I said through the screen, “I can tell you if I figured out how to get the world’s longest row of cotton picked without messin’ it up.”
    She hesitated. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tweedy. I’m going over to Jefferson Saturday. It’ll be late when I get back Sunday. I’ll...uh, I will be visiting my sweetheart’s family”
    She hesitated again, then blurted out, “I’ll be meeting them for the first time, Mr. Tweedy, and I’m scared to death!”
    Her perfume of watermelon drifted through the screen, and two yellow jackets crawled across it, looking for a way to get to her—like me. Trying to sound casual, I said, “You go’n marry this feller?”
    â€œI’m...not sure.” My spirits rose. She kind of smiled. “He did ask me one time if I could cook. That seemed encouraging.”
    â€œCan you? Cook?”
    â€œI told him I could make real good mayonnaise and divinity candy. I don’t think he was impressed.”
    â€œI am. Nothin’ in the world better than divinity