When the Whippoorwill

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

First published in 1940

This edition published by Reading Essentials

Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

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OTHER BOOKS BY MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS:

The Yearling

South Moon Under

The Soujourner

When the Whippoorwill

by

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

CONTENTS

A Crop of Beans

A tillie-hawk swooped into the top of a dead cypress. The mocking-birds and red-birds that had scurried like wind-buffeted leaves ahead of him stirred uneasily in the live oaks and palmettos where they had concealed themselves. The sky had emptied itself for him of living things. Against the blinding blue of the Florida afternoon hung indolent masses of white cloud. The hawk shifted from one claw to the other, hitching his shoulders like a cripple. There ran a road—a fat chicken snake—a man——

The young man swung his shotgun from his waist to his shoulder in a quick semi-circle. The tillie-hawk exploded into a mass of buff feathers and tumbled to the edge of the road. The girl caught her breath.

“Lige” she reproached him. “You hadn’t orter wasted a shell on a ol’ tillie-hawk.”

A horn sounded behind them and a truck loaded with bean hampers lurched by in the deep ruts of the sand road. Old man Tainter and his negro driver passed without the customary “Hey!” or lift of the hand. The young woman crowded back into the dry dog-fennel. The man no more than stepped aside, unbreaching his gun. He kicked a cloud of sand after the truck.

“His beans ain’t a mite better’n mine. Parts of ’em is plumb sorry-lookin’.”

“They’re earlier, ain’t they?”

“Jest a week. He ain’t no more likely to miss frost than me. Ary time, now it’s a’most November, we’re like to git us one o’ them piddlin’ leetle ol’ frosts don’t mean nothin’. Tonight, mebbe.”

They turned between chinaberries into the Widow Sellers’ gate. Her sharp tongue clicked at them from the porch.

“You Lige Gentry, you, how’ll I ever git my cane cut? I ain’t payin’ you by the week reg’lar to traipse around with your wife.”

He rose to the familiar bait.

“Dog take it, o’ woman, Drenna’s been a-cuttin’ cane with me all evenin’. An’ who’ll pay for it? Not you. I’ll be hornswoggled if you ain’t the meanest white woman in the county.”