(I am currently writing a novel, of which the following is an excerpt that I have edited out. It's a piece that I hated to cut, but sometimes passages, scenes, characters and even subplots have to go—yes even in erotica there is a plot or at least I believe there should be. As much as you might hate to exorcise them, bits and pieces have to be pruned to make the original idea blossom. This is one of those scenes, but it stuck me so that I couldn't just banish it and allow it to get lost in teh recesses of my computer never tobe seen again. I felt somehow it needed to be shared, and thought of this forum. I hope you like it.)
Jude was nineteen years old. Like many men in the county he hadn't finished school. He'd gone long enough to read and write and then worked when and where he could to support himself. He didn't remember his father at all, and his mother was a hard woman who turned him out on his sixteenth birthday. She meant no harm by it, it's just what folks did in those days.
There wasn't a war going on, so that hell of a salvation wouldn't be there for Jude. Instead he found farm work, what he could, when he could. Spring, summer and fall he worked long hard days, usually being paid a meal and a small wage. Winters he'd live off of whatever he saved, then come Spring find work wherever he could and start all over again.
That year, he found himself in Grayson County, North Carolina. It was bean country and they were just beginning to grow fields and fields of burley tobacco, at that time a high cash crop that would eventually suck most of the nutrients out of the land, cause the bean crops to dwindle and the government and the medical community, rightly so, would kill out the tobacco industry there as well by the mid eighties.
But that year Jude would spend most of he season working for a Mennonite family in the bean fields and the burley they had. The beans were hard enough, but the tobacco was back breaking work. From sun up to sundown, Jude found himself bent over in the hot sun with a hoe, a shovel or just picking beans.
It was fall. the beans were long gone and the tobacco was being cut from the fields and being readied to hang in the barns. Jude had proved to be a dependable hard worker and the family that had hired to asked him to stay through sale time.
They couldn't afford to pay him much, but they offered to keep feeding him and would let him sleep in the grading shed. When the tobacco crop was all tied and ready for sale, in lue of payment they would allow him and the other man they had asked to stay clean up the "trash", sell it and keep the money.
That was a good deal for Jude and he accepted. Jude knew that the tobacco trash brought the most money. Burley was speared onto a stick and hung in barns until it cured. When the fall frosts came, the ice crystals would form on the browned leaves and when the sun came up it would make them pliable. The sticks were then taken down and pulled from the stalks, separated into five different grades, each used for a different type of product, and kept separate for sale.
The trash was the muddy leaves and the stuff swept up off the floors at the end of a days work and cleaned out of the barn. This was used for cigarettes. It was the most potent of all the leaves and only needed to be ground and not rolled or pressed. It brought big money in those days and burley workers saved every scrap they could get.
Mr. Davis told Jude that it would be a couple of weeks before the tobacco would be "in case" but he was welcomed to stay and help him about if he had a mind to. Jude had nowhere to go so he cut wood for winter, helped with the chores and in afternoons would gather pine tips for Mrs. Davis and their four girls to make pine ropes out of. They got paid fifty cents a rope and Mrs. Davis gave Jude a nickel for every one she sold since he gathered all the tips for them.
As the leaves of the mountain trees turned from green to red to gold and fell to the ground, Jude knew that it would soon be time to start grading and tying up the tobacco. It would be long hours, dictated by the weather, but he was glad that no one else they had asked had stayed behind. Most of them had families they had to get back to anyway, and that meant that all the money made from the trash would be his and his alone.
The first frost came along, which meant soon it would be time. Mr. Davis told Jude that a second man would be joining him and sharing the shed. Seems that a man from Washington County, Virginia had fallen on some troubled times and needed the work, so he hoped that Jude wouldn't be mad. He knew he was counting on all the trash money himself, but hoped he'd have a little charity in his heart.
Jude was disappointed but he was from Washington County himself and knew how hard life was there. He told Mr. Davis that he didn't mind at all, even splitting the money he'd still have enough to have a nice Christmas and do well until Spring.
Mr. Davis patted him on the back and told him he was a good man. Jude liked that. He hadn't heard that often. Jude spent the next two days cleaning up the shed and getting ready for the work to be done there.
The grading shed was a little barn usually divided into two rooms. One was on the south end and kept dark and cold, the other had a wood stove and a couple of stands for grading the tobacco. Jude slept in a far corner of the heated room. The nights were getting colder, but he usually didn't light the stove. He would save the wood for when they were working. He didn't want the Davis girls to be cold as they worked.
Mr. Davis and Jude were taking sticks down from the barn when Mrs. Davis came in and told her husband that the other help had just arrived. Jude told him to go on and talk to the man that he could pack what they had brought down while he got the new man situated.
Jude picked up the sticks they hand gathered and began to pull the speared stalks of the wood and lay them in bundles that he would wrap in plastic sheets. He wrapped each sheet tightly to keep the air out. They needed the leaves damp, and air once they were wet would rot the leaves or mold would set in.
He had almost finished enough for the first days work when Mr. Davis came back and told Jude that the man had arrived and his wife was feeding him but he would join them in the shed by the time they got there. They loaded up the pallets on the bed of an old wagon and Mr. Davis geed the old mare and down the mountain they went. The wood pallets of stalk were stored in the south end of the shed. And the first bundles were taken in and layed out for work in the grading shed.
Jude didn't notice the other man at first. The three youngest girls were chatty and excited, standing behind one of the spindles ready to grab handfuls of the reddish brown leaves and start tying. Mrs. Davis and the oldest girl manned the second spindle and the men would naturally carefully pull off the leaves and put them in the proper spindle bins.
Ms. Davis was putting cans of bacon grease down. The workers would dip their fingers in the grease to make it easier to grab the leaves and keep the brown tar from staining the hands and fingers. It was dirty work, but it was also a time for laughter and stories of old. Jude dipped his fingers in the grease and rubbed it in good. He looked at the youngest girl.
"Now Effie, dontcha be lickin on that off yer fingers now." He teased.
"Why, mister Jude, thas jus nasty!" She giggled and hid her hands behind her so he couldn't see that she'd already licked most of it off.
"Jude?" Mrs. Davis said. "This is Titus from over near Lost Mountain."
Jude found himself shaking hands with the man who had bought him ice cream as a child. He couldn't help but brighten up. "Why I declare, Titus Slemp, you ol' dog. How you been?"
Titus smile lit up his face. "Jude? Is that you? My how you've growed. Last time I saw you, you was a pickin yer nose and flickin boogers at Ol Miz Payne."
"Ewww!" the girls all agreed.
"You done growed all up, Jude." He said.
"Yes sir, I reckon I have. I heard you got married and moved to Damascus. What brings you to these parts?"
Titus hung his head. "The pox done took my Lizzie, Jude. Never knowed anyone to go from it in the summer, but it took her bad and quick."
"Sorry to hear that Titus. You got younguns?" he asked as he twisted the tobacco stalk and separated the leaves by color into grades.
"No we wasn't blessed that way, Jude." Titus said as he did the same. "Guess the Lord knowed what he was doing. Just as well."
"The Lord knows well, Titus." Mrs. Davis said as she turned the gathered a handful of leaves by the stem and wrapped a single leaf around the hand and bundled it all together, dropping it to the bin on the floor.
"Yes'm he does..." Titus said. "What about you Jude, you gots a woman?"
"No, been working too much to find one. Mebbe I'll just wait for Miss Becca here to grow up..."
Becca giggled and blushed. Jude knew that the oldest daughter, barely twelve, had been crushing on him all summer. It was a harmless tease. He knew good and well that as nice as the Davis family was they would never allow one of their girls to marry a Baptist and a Melungeon one at that.
It was well into the night when the days work was done. Mrs. Davis had fed them cornbread and onions with warm buttermilk. As the girls swept the floor and put the trash leaves in buckets for Jude and Titus to pack down on a pallet, Mrs. Davis pumped a metal bucket of water and put it on the woodstove.
"This should be good and warm for you to clean up with by the time you get that last of it packed."
"Thank you ma'am." Titus said as he helped Mr. Davis carry one of the pallets of hands into the South room.
"It's gonna be cold tonight, moon's hazed over...could even be a early snow." Becca said as she gazed out the door.
