They Don't Dance Much: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

the slot machines. Sometimes somebody from Corinth would drive out for a pint of government liquor. There was plenty of corn in Corinth, but we were the only ones that always had government liquor.
    There were a couple of fellows that hung out at our place a lot. One of them was Bert Ford.
    He was about fifty years old, I judge, and was a tall, stooped man. He was a drinking man, but he took his drinking by spells. He’d drink a quart a day for a couple of weeks. Then he’d quit for a month or so.
    About twenty-five years ago Bert was courting a girl in the mill section of Corinth. She got in the family way. I guess Bert thought he was the guilty party, for he left town. But the girl laid it on another boy and the other boy married her.
    In 1932 Bert’s daddy died and willed Bert his farm. He came back to Corinth then and lived in the big two-story house on the farm he inherited. He lived by himself and didn’t even have a dog there with him. He was the last of the line and didn’t have any folks around Corinth.
    I’d always heard that Bert was in Texas most of the time he was gone from Corinth. But later on I found out that he was in the Middle West during that time. It was talked around that he brought a lot of money in here with him when he came back. First he put it in the bank in Corinth, then moved it to the Depositors’ Trust Company in Charlotte. When that bank got shaky he went over there and managed to get it out. I didn’t find out what he did with it after that. Anyway, I always thought that was just nigger talk. If a man lives by himself and doesn’t marry, the niggers all think he’s bound to be a millionaire.
    I never saw Bert Ford dressed up. He always wore striped overalls and blue chambray shirts, and most always a black hat, with a high crown. His face was long, like a hound dog’s, and there were seams running down his cheeks. His skin was about the same color as a ripe winter pear. I reckon his eyes had been green to start with, but drinking so much liquor had made them bloodshot. He had a gold tooth right in the middle of his lower teeth. Sometimes when the sun was shining, and he opened his mouth, the sun would glint on that tooth and it lit up his face. But I never saw him smile.
    He wasn’t married, but he would take a spell of chasing after women now and then. Always when he was on a drunk. He went with women that worked in the cotton mill. Some folks said he had a nigger woman in Shantytown.
    Bert Ford was a strange man to me. His pal, Wilbur Brannon, was just as strange. He turned night into day. I never could figure out what it was that made Wilbur and Bert friends. They were from different classes. Wilbur’s folks used to be big landowners before the Civil War; there’s still a lot of niggers around Corinth named Brannon. But Wilbur’s daddy ran through with the property like fire running through a straw field on a windy day. When he died there was just enough left to send Wilbur through medical school. Wilbur finished his medical course and was a doctor in some town in South Carolina. But they caught him selling morphine and put him in the pen at Atlanta. He went from the pen to the war, and when that was over he came back to Corinth and settled down at the Keystone Hotel. He never practiced medicine in Corinth.
    He was as tall as Bert Ford, but straighter. He was about the same age as Bert was, too, and his hair was white as snow. They said it ran in his family to get white-headed early. His eyes were gray and cold. When he got interested in something they’d sparkle like stars in the winter-time. If it hadn’t been for half his face and forehead being covered with a purple birthmark, he would have been a handsome man.
    Wilbur had a bunch of nigger houses in Charlotte and he lived off the rent he got out of them. He might have had other ways of making money. He always wore clothes that looked like they cost a lot, and he traded cars every fall. Sometimes he’d leave Corinth and