In the field, white and negro pickers worked alternate rows. The white children squatted on their haunches, sliding along from bush to bush. The negroes for the most part bent to their picking, their black arms gathering the beans like swift sickles. The six acres were alive.

Lige worked desperately in and out of the field. The sorting and packing proceeded steadily under Drenna’s quiet authority. The volunteer neighbor help chattered and gossiped, but the work was familiar, and they did it carefully. A negro asked “Captain Gentry” for buckets of drinking water to take to the pickers. The Widow Sellers’ tongue flashed like hail across the work. Her small black eyes watched uneasily the growing spread of finished hampers, stacked up to go to the express office. The picking totalled a hundred and thirty hampers. The neighbors divided up the cull beans and went home.

The third picking ran to nearly two hundred crates. It was the most ample yield the section had produced in seasons. The checks began to arrive. A telegram from the New York commission house preceded the first. Lige’s initial shipment had brought the record price of nine dollars a hamper.

The market price dropped rapidly as other sections came in. Yet his returns were consistently good. The last three checks reached him on one mail. His net for the crop was over fifteen hundred dollars.

He went a little crazy.

III

Lige began his celebration at four o’clock in the afternoon. He hurled himself into the house; changed into Sunday clothes without washing or shaving. He slapped into Drenna’s hands the accumulation of bean checks, keeping out one for fifty dollars. His stiff store collar was already wet with sweat. Tousled hair hung damp in his eyes.

“Drenna, if I ain’t fitten tomorrow, you git the ice-truck to take you to Pondland and go to the bank and put these in it. It’s what they calls openin’ a account.”

“You don’t want I should git the cash-money an’ fetch it back an’ hide it?”

“Now, Drenna, you do like I tell you. That’s the ol’-timey way. Don’t nobody hide their money these days.”

He was bounding down the low steps.

“Lige, what you fixin’ to do?”

“Sugar, I’m fixin’ to git so drunk you’ll be ’shamed for me all year, but I got it to do an’ you got it to put up with.”