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"It cuts off the end of a penis," Melony said. "Real fast, real easy--just the end."
If the picking crew at York Farm had been a knife-carrying crew, someone might have asked Melony to display the penis knife--just as an object of general appreciation among knife-carrying friends. But no one asked; the story appeared to hold. It allied itself with the other stories attached to Melony and solidified the underlying, uneasy feeling among the workers at York Farm: that Melony was no one to mess with. Around Melony, even the beer drinkers behaved.
The only ill effect of the York Farm picking crew drinking beer while they pressed cider was the frequency of their urinating, which Melony objected to only when they peed too near the cider house.
"Hey, I don't want to hear that!" she'd holler out the window when she could hear anyone pissing. "I don't want to smell it later, either! Get away from the building. What's the matter--you afraid of the dark?"
Sandra and Ma liked Melony for that, and they enjoyed the refrain; whenever they heard someone peeing, they would not fail to holler, in unison, "What's the matter? You afraid of the dark?"
But if everyone tolerated Melony's hardness, or even appreciated her for it, no one liked her reading at night. She was the only one who read anything, and it took a while for her to realize how unfriendly they thought reading was, how insulted they felt when she did it.
When they finished pressing that night and everyone settled into bed, Melony asked, as usual, if her reading light was going to bother anyone.
"The light don't bother nobody," Wednesday said.
There were murmurs of consent, and Rather said, "You all remember Cameron?" There was laughter and Rather explained to Melony that Cameron, who had worked at York Farm for years, had been such a baby that he needed a light on, all night, just to sleep.
"He thought animals was gonna eat him if he shut out the light!" Sammy said.
"What animals?" Melony asked.
"Cameron didn't know," somebody said.
Melony kept reading Jane Eyre, and after a while, Sandra said, "It's not the light that bothers us, Melony."
"Yeah," someone said. Melony didn't get it for a while, but gradually she became aware that they had all rolled toward her in their beds and were watching her sullenly.
"Okay," she said. "So what bothers you?"
"What you readin' about, anyway?" Wednesday asked.
"Yeah," Sammy said. "What's so special 'bout that book?"
"It's just a book," Melony said.
"Pretty big deal that you can read it, huh?" Wednesday asked.
"What?" said Melony.
"Maybe, if you like it so much," Rather said, "we might like it, too."
"You want me to read to you?" Melony asked.
"Somebody read to me, once," Sandra said.
"It wasn't me!" Ma sai
d. "It wasn't your father, either!"
"I never said it was!" Sandra said.
"I never heard nobody read to nobody," Sammy said.
"Yeah," somebody said.
Melony saw that some of the men were propped on their elbows in their beds, waiting. Even Ma turned her great lump around and faced Melony's bed.
"Quiet, everybody," Rather said.
