Proud Flesh Read Online Free PDF Page A

Be packed and ready to go. Be sure of today and you’re sure of eternity, for none of us can be sure of tomorrow.”
    â€œAmen.”
    â€œAmen.”
    â€œAmen.”

IV
    By August the cottonfields have whitened as if the sun has reduced the earth to ashes. In September come the migrant workers and settle on them in a swarm. Bent black figures in clothes darkened and colorless with sweat, dragging their long bolster-shaped sacks behind them, they eat their way across the fields, white ahead of them, stripped bare and brown in their wake, like some plague of great white-bodied, black-headed caterpillars. Even the little children pick, emptying their towsacks and patched pillowcases into their mothers’ and fathers’ sacks at the end of the row, at the weighing-up.
    They pick from dawn to dark, and while they pick they chant. It is like a broken record left to spin in the same worn groove. When finally a voice is raised in a new tune it is like when the phonograph needle is lifted and advanced beyond the break. After a while another break is reached. They inch along the rows more and more slowly as their sacks swell. Bit by bit black hands and arms, sticky with sweat, turn white from the lint that fills the air, clogs the nostrils, chokes the breath, sprouts white moustaches on sweaty lips, turns hair and eyebrows grizzled; and soon all of them, bent as they are, look hoary and stooped with age.
    Trucks or trailers sit in the field, with extra-tall sideboards or with sides of stretched hogwire, and near each one stands a tripod of poles from which hangs the scale. There the sacks are dragged, doubled and hung by the ends to be weighed, the boss entering the figure in his daybook alongside the picker’s name, and the picker himself, or herself, entering the figure in his sweat-dampened daybook—one of those given away to advertise snuff or farina or patent medicines. On Saturday afternoon after the final weighing-up they are paid their week’s wages. Only on Sunday—and sometimes not then—does that lament of theirs cease, and then stillness settles upon the empty, glaring fields.
    Yet such a stillness fell now, in mid-morning of a weekday, upon the ears of the men squatting in the shade of the pear tree. That chant which was so much a part of the season and the place that the cessation of it was momentarily like a failure of hearing, stopped, voice by voice, like the ending of a roundsong. Clyde had gone down to the fields and told the pickers to quit work in observance of Ma’s condition, and upon the still air the silence throbbed like the tolling of a knell. The wasps droned among the pears, and from somewhere came the sob of a mourning dove:
    coo-oo coo coo coo
    coo-oo coo coo coo

V
    Clyde was the one who, although he lived in town and had to drive out and back every day, ran the farm. Clifford, being the eldest son and the one who had never left home, might have been expected to be the one, but Clifford had done few of the things that were expected of him. He not only never took a wife and raised a family, he had never taken any interest in running the farm or in any other steady employment. It could not be said that Clifford had never worked a day in his life, just that he could never be counted on to work two days in succession. Yet Clifford was not shiftless, and he was anything but extravagant. He was moody and unpredictable, a mixture of boy, backwoodsman and old maid, a mystery even to himself. Never articulate, almost tonguetied in fact, and dangerous when in moments of feeling the words boiled inside him, his leaden tongue like a plug, a stuck safety valve, he would sometimes let days go by without a sound passing his lips, a sullen, half-tamed bear of a man. He did not have any speech defect, did not stammer, he just choked, and then he turned red—purple—apoplectic. Then he took himself off and was gone no one knew where for a week, two weeks, then returned