Georgia Boy by Erskine Caldwell Page A

just naturally likes to be around me. I don’t know no other reason why—”
    “As soon as the sun goes down this evening, Morris Stroup, you halter that calf and lead it back to Jim Wade’s pasture where you stole it from. And if you meet anybody along the way, black or white, get into the bushes out of sight until they pass, because I don’t want it ever to be known you stole a calf and brought it home in broad day light.”
    My old man turned and looked at the heifer, and the heifer turned her head and looked up at him. She kept on looking at him, chewing all the while.
    “She sure is a pretty little trick, ain’t she, Martha?” he said, rubbing the calf on her nose and neck. “Pretty Sooky, pretty Sooky.”
    The heifer turned and looked at Ma. After a minute of two, Ma went over to the heifer and stroked her on the nose. The heifer kept on looking at Ma straight in the eyes, and Ma acted as if she couldn’t stop looking at her.
    They stood there a long time looking into each other’s eyes, and my old man drew another bunch of timothy from his shirt.
    “Pretty Sooky,” Ma said, taking the timothy from my old man and holding it for the calf to eat. “It does seem like a shame to take her back out there and make her stay in a pasture all the time. She must get awfully cold at night, and on rainy days.”
    Pa went over and sat down against the chinaberry tree and watched Ma and the calf. He did not look a bit worried any more.
    “Pretty Sooky,” Ma said, stroking her nose and neck. “Pretty Sooky.”

X. Handsome Brown’s Day Off
    M A WENT UP THE STREET to the next corner after breakfast to talk to Mrs. Howard about the Sycamore Ladies’ Improvement Society meeting, and the last thing she said before she left was for Handsome Brown to have the dishes washed and dried and the dishcloths rinsed and hung out to dry in the sun before she got back. It was Handsome’s day off, although he had never had a day off, even though he had worked for us ever since he was eleven years old, because something always seemed to happen that kept him from going away somewhere and loafing for a whole day. Handsome always liked to take his time doing the dishes, no matter whether it was just a regular day like all the others, or whether it was really his day off, because he knew every day always turned out in the end to be the same as any other, anyway; and he generally managed to find a good excuse for not doing the dishes any sooner than he had to. That morning after Ma had gone up to Mrs. Howard’s, he said he was hungry; he went into the kitchen and cooked himself a skilletful of hog-liver scrapple.
    My old man was sprawled on the back porch steps dozing in the sun, just as he did every morning after breakfast when he had the chance, because he said a nap after breakfast always made him feel a lot better for the remainder of the day. Handsome took a long time to eat the scrapple, as he knew he had the dishes to do when he finished, and he was still sitting in a chair hunched over the cook-stove eating out of the skillet when somebody knocked on our front door. Since both Pa and Handsome were busy, I went around to the side of the house to find out who it was.
    When I got to the front yard, I saw a strange-looking girl, about eighteen or twenty years old, standing at the door with her face pressed against the screen trying to see inside. She was carrying a square tan bag made like a small suitcase, and she was bare-headed with long brown hair curled on the ends. I knew right away I’d never seen her anywhere before, and I thought she was a stranger trying to find the house of somebody in town she had come to visit. I watched her until she put her hand on the latch and tried to open the screen door.
    “Who do you want to see?” I asked her, going as far as the bottom step and stopping.
    She turned around as quick as a flash.
    “Hello, sonny,” she said, coming to the edge of the porch. “Is your father at