That was my cue to go inside and purchase a Tootsie Roll, on credit.
I waited on the sidewalk until my grandfather nodded in the direction of the store. But it was Wednesday, and when we got into town, we parked in front of Pop and Pearl Watson's grocery store on Main. Every store, shop, business, church, even the school, faced Main Street, and on Saturdays the traffic inched along, bumper to bumper, as the country folks flocked to town for their weekly shopping. We passed the Black Oak Baptist Church, one of the few times we'd pass without stopping for some type of service. Highway 135 became Main Street for the short stretch it took to negotiate Black Oak. It was pulled by their old Massey Harris tractor, and driven by Frank, the eldest Montgomery boy, who had dropped out of school in the fifth grade and was considered by everyone at church to be headed for serious trouble. We followed the Montgomery trailer until it turned at the cotton gin. Personally, I don't think he cared how the gossip ran. She said people talked about him behind his back, saying he was rude and arrogant. When he drove, he never waved or nodded at folks, and this was, my mother said, because he was afraid to take his hands from the wheel. I waved back, but my grandfather did not. A tarp covered the front half, and the Montgomery twins, who were my age, playfully bounced around in all that cotton until they saw us on the road below them. Near Black Oak, we caught up to a trailer filled to the top with snowy mounds of freshly picked cotton. Pappy didn't believe in passing slower vehicles in front of him. Always twenty minutes, even with little traffic. The distance from our farm to town was fewer than eight miles, but at thirty-seven miles an hour, the trip took twenty minutes. Now that they already had workers in their fields, there was another reason to dislike them. He didn't like the Jordans because they were Methodists-and Cubs fans. They were stooped at the waist, their cotton sacks draped behind them, their hands moving deftly through the stalks, tearing off the bolls. On the right, at the Jordan place, we saw a group of Mexicans working in the field near the road. For my grandfather, though, it was a time of endless worry.
It was time for the harvest, a wonderful season for me because they turned out school for two months. On both sides as far as I could see, the fields were white with cotton. Highway 135 ran straight and flat through the farm country of the Arkansas Delta. He smiled at me as if we both agreed that the truck belonged at that speed. Then I leaned over to check the speedometer: thirty-seven. We turned onto Highway 135, and, as always, I watched Pappy carefully shift the gears-pressing slowly on the clutch, delicately prodding the stick shift on the steering column-until the truck reached its perfect speed. My mother said she suspected he drove much faster when he was alone. But my father rarely drove it, and if I happened to be riding with him, he would level off at thirty-seven, out of respect for Pappy. She also said he and my father had once fought over whether the truck should go faster. My mother said (to me) that it was ridiculous. His theory was that every automobile had a speed at which it ran most efficiently, and through some vaguely defined method he had determined that his old truck should go thirty-seven. Modern sedans were scarce in rural Arkansas. This was no particular problem except when we drove to church and my mother and grandmother were forced to sit snugly together up front in their Sunday best while my father and I rode in the back, engulfed in dust. His truck was a 1939 Ford, and with the exception of our old John Deere tractor, it was our sole means of transportation.
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He never talked when he drove, and this was because, according to my mother, not much of a driver herself, he was afraid of motorized vehicles. This played heavily on his mind as we rode to town. He'd already heard rumors that a farmer over in Lake City was offering $1.60. The previous year, according to him, it was $1.50 per hundred. They were paid for every hundred pounds of cotton they picked. Pappy, my grandfather, was worried about the price for labor when we went searching for the hill people.
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