Pa looked startled. “They said that? Seem like fellas that knowed? Not jus’ blowin’ off?”
“I don’ know,” said Al. “They was just a-talkin’ there, an’ I didn’ let on he’s my brother. I jus’ stood an’ took it in.”
Pa said, “Jesus Christ, I hope that ain’t true! We need Tom. I’ll ask ’im about that. We got trouble enough without they chase the hell out of us. I hope it ain’t true. We got to talk that out in the open.”
Uncle John said, “Tom, he’ll know.”
They fell silent while the truck battered along. The engine was noisy, full of little clashings, and the brake rods banged. There was a wooden creaking from the wheels, and a thin jet of steam escaped through a hole in the top of the radiator cap. The truck pulled a high whirling column of red dust behind it. They rumbled up the last little rise while the sun was still half-face above the horizon, and they bore down on the house as it disappeared. The brakes squealed when they stopped, and the sound printed in Al’s head—no lining left.
Ruthie and Winfield climbed yelling over the side walls and dropped to the ground. They shouted, “Where is he? Where’s Tom?” And then they saw him standing beside the door, and they stopped, embarrassed, and walked slowly toward him and looked shyly at him.
And when he said, “Hello, how you kids doin’?” they replied softly, “Hello! All right.” And they stood apart and watched him secretly, the great brother who had killed a man and been in prison. They remembered how they had played prison in the chicken coop and fought for the right to be prisoner.
Connie Rivers lifted the high tail-gate out of the truck and got down and helped Rose of Sharon to the ground; and she accepted it nobly, smiling her wise, self-satisfied smile, mouth tipped at the corners a little fatuously.
Tom said, “Why, it’s Rosasharn. I didn’ know you was comin’ with them.”
“We was walkin’,” she said. “The truck come by an’ picked us up.” And then she said, “This is Connie, my husband.” And she was grand, saying it.
The two shook hands, sizing each other up, looking deeply into each other; and in a moment each was satisfied, and Tom said, “Well, I see you been busy.”
She looked down. “You do not see, not yet.”
“Ma tol’ me. When’s it gonna be?”
“Oh, not for a long time! Not till nex’ winter.”
Tom laughed. “Gonna get ’im bore in a orange ranch, huh? In one a them white houses with orange trees all aroun’.”
Rose of Sharon felt her stomach with both her hands. “You do not see,” she said, and she smiled her complacent smile and went into the house. The evening was hot, and the thrust of light still flowed up from the western horizon. And without any signal the family gathered by the truck, and the congress, the family government, went into session.
The film of evening light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a stone, a post, a building had greater depth and more solidity than in the daytime light; and these objects were curiously more individual—a post was more essentially a post, set off from the earth it stood in and the field of corn it stood out against. And plants were individuals, not the mass of crop; and the ragged willow tree was itself, standing free of all other willow trees. The earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn perspective of a stereopticon.
The people too were changed in the evening, quieted. They seemed to be a part of an organization of the unconscious. They obeyed impulses which registered only faintly in their thinking minds. Their eyes were inward and quiet, and their eyes, too, were lucent in the evening, lucent in dusty faces.
The family met at the most important place, near the truck. The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle. The ancient Hudson, with bent and scarred radiator screen, with grease in dusty globules at the worn edges of every moving part, with hub caps gone and caps of red dust in their places—this was the new hearth, the living center of the family; half passenger car and half truck, high-sided and clumsy.
Pa walked around the truck, looking at it, and then he squatted down in the dust and found a stick to draw with. One foot was flat to the ground, the other rested on the ball and slightly back, so that one knee was higher than the other. Left forearm rested on the lower, left, knee; the right elbow on the right knee, and the right fist cupped for the chin. Pa squatted there, looking at the truck, his chin in his cupped fist. And Uncle John moved toward him and squatted down beside him. Their eyes were brooding. Grampa came out of the house and saw the two squatting together, and he jerked over and sat on the running board of the truck, facing them. That was the nucleus. Tom and Connie and Noah strolled in and squatted, and the line was a half-circle with Grampa in the opening. And then Ma came out of the house, and Granma with her, and Rose of Sharon behind, walking daintily. They took their places behind the squatting men; they stood up and put their hands on their hips. And the children, Ruthie and Winfield, hopped from foot to foot beside the women; the children squidged their toes in the red dust, but they made no sound. Only the preacher was not there. He, out of delicacy, was sitting on the ground behind the house. He was a good preacher and knew his people.