I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.
Newt Hardbine was not my friend, he was just one of the big boys who had failed every grade at least once and so was practi- cally going on twenty in the sixth grade, sitting in the back and flicking little wads of chewed paper into my hair. But the day I saw his daddy up there like some old overalls slung over a fence, I had this feeling about what Newt's whole life was going to HARPER
PERENNIAL
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1988 by Harper & Row, Publishers. THE BEAN TREES. Copyright © 1988 by Barbara Kingsolver. All
HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. First Perennial Library edition published 1989. Reissued in HarperPerennial 1991. Reissued in Perennial 2003 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kingsolver, Barbara. The bean trees. "Perennial Library" I. Title 813:54 87-45633 PS3561.11496B44
1989 ISBN 0-06-091554-4 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-06-091554-4
, 90 89 88 87 86 85 84 83 82 06 07 08 NMS/RRD 2 - THE BEAN TREES amount to, and I felt sorry for him. Before that exact moment I don't believe I had given much thought to the future.
My mama said the Hardbines had kids just about as fast as they could fall down the well and drown. This must not have been entirely true, since they were abundant in Pittman County and many survived to adulthood. But that was the general idea.
Which is not to say that we, me and Mama, were any better than Hardbines or had a dime to our name. If you were to look at the two of us, myself and Newt side by side in the sixth grade, you could have pegged us for brother and sister. And for all I ever knew of my own daddy I can't say we weren't, except for Mama swearing up and down that he was nobody I knew and was long gone besides. But we were cut out of basically the same mud, I suppose, just two more dirty-kneed kids scrapping to beat hell and trying to land on our feet. You couldn't have said, anyway, which one would stay right where he was, and which would be the one to get away.
Missy was what everyone called me, not that it was my name, but because when I was three supposedly I stamped my foot and told my own mother not to call me Marietta but Miss Marietta, as I had to call all the people including children in the houses where she worked Miss this or Mister that, and so she did from that day forward. Miss Marietta and later on just Missy.
The thing you have to understand is, it was just like Mama to do that.