Town? You think he might of gone back through … No. All right, I’ll—the mute negro laboring in the air with his dark and boney fingers and the squire: The what? The brush-hook? What else? Damn. Goddamn.—and exploding out of the lot with the horse rearing under the reins and the wagon skewing about and then down the drive onto the road at a mad clatter and gone.
The negro returned to the barn and took up the pail from where he had left it, going past the stalls to the corncrib where he seated himself on a milking stool and began to shell corn, his hard hand twisting the kernels loose and them sifting bright and hard down into the pail, ringing like coins.
The squire at midmorning was following a log road, urging the horse on and the horse already faded to a walk, when they came out of the brush behind him. He turned when he heard them and he turned back. They were coming along the road. One of them said something and then one of them said Harmon and then one of them was alongside seizing the horse’s reins. The squire stood in the wagon. Here, he said. What do you think you’re doing. Here now, by God—reaching and taking up the shotgun where it stood leaning against the seat.
THEY CAME across the field attended by a constant circus of grasshoppers catapulting from the sedge and entered the wood deployed in the same ragged phalanx while before them passed solitary over no visible road a horse and a wagon surmounted by a harriedlooking man in a white hat. They altered their course and came upon a log road down which the wagon receded in two thin tracks and upon a burst lizard who dragged his small blue bowels through the dirt, breaking into a trot, a run, the first of them reaching the horse and seizing the reins and turning up to the driver a mindless smile, clutching the horse’s withers and clinging there like some small and vicious anthroparian and the driver rising in remonstration from the wagon box so that when the next one came up behind him sideways in a sort of dance and swung the brush-hook it missed his neck and took him in the small of the back severing his spine and when he fell he fell unhinged sideways and without a cry.
SHE DID NOT know that he had taken the gun. She did not know that the money was gone and she had never known how much there was of it. She went about the house gathering her things, laying out her dress on the bed and examining it before she stripped out of the shift and put it on. She pirouetted slowly in the center of the room like a doll unwinding for just a moment and then took off the dress and scrubbed herself with a rag and cold water as best she could and with a piece of broken comb raked her dead yellow hair. She set out her shoes and dusted them and put them on, and the dress. Of the shift she made a package in which lay rolled her small and derelict possessions and thus equipped she took a final look about to see what had been forgotten. There was nothing. She tucked the package beneath her arm and set forth, shortgaited and stiffly, humming softly to herself and so into the sunshine that washed fitfully with the spring wind over the glade, turning her face up to the sky and bestowing upon it a smile all bland and burdenless as a child’s.
She crossed the river bridge, walking carefully on the illfitted planks, looking down at the water. She nudged pebbles through the cracks and watched them diminish with slow turnings into sudden printed rings upon the river that sucked away like smoke. She went on, resting from time to time quietly by the side of the road and patting the sweat from her brow with the parcel she carried. When she came at last into sight of the crossroads she could see someone coming far down the road and misshapen with heat. She looked about her and then entered the pine woods to her left and climbed a small rise which commanded the road. It was very warm. She sat fanning herself and the gnats that shimmered before her eyes. It was an old woman who came along laden with empty mealsacks and conversing earnestly with herself. Later two boys passed laughing and punching each other. The watcher on the hill fanned and sighed. I wisht he’d come on, she said.
When he did come he looked like a man who has a long way to go. He had the supplies in a sack over his shoulder and he went by slowly with his eyes to the ground. She crouched low while he passed and when he was gone she rose and dusted off her dress and took up her bundle and returned to the road again, walking out his tracks to the crossroads and the store.
The storekeeper was a dark lean German of middle years whose wry humor merely puzzled the occupants of the five hundred square miles of sparse and bitter land he commissaried. He watched her at the screen door until she got it open and entered, diffident, almost disdainful, as if sore put upon to take her trade to such a place.
How do, he said.