In the afternoon she explained what was going to happen to them to Astor and Sulk who were in the cow lot, filling the manure spreader. She sat down next to the block of salt under a small shed, her stomach in her lap, her arms on top of it. “All you colored people better look out,” she said. “You know how much you can get for a mule.”
“Nothing, no indeed,” the old man said, “not one thing.”
“Before it was a tractor,” she said, “it could be a mule. And before it was a Displaced Person, it could be a nigger. The time is going to come,” she prophesied, “when it won’t be no more occasion to speak of a nigger.”
The old man laughed politely. “Yes indeed,” he said. “Ha ha.”
The young one didn’t say anything. He only looked sullen but when she had gone in the house, he said, “Big Belly act like she know everything.”
“Never mind,” the old man said, “your place too low for anybody to dispute with you for it.”
She didn’t tell her fears about the still to Mr. Shortley until he was back on the job in the dairy. Then one night after they were in bed, she said, “That man prowls.”
Mr. Shortley folded his hands on his bony chest and pretended he was a corpse.
“Prowls,” she continued and gave him a sharp kick in the side with her knee. “Who’s to say what they know and don’t know? Who’s to say if he found it he wouldn’t go right to her and tell? How you know they don’t make liquor in Europe? They drive tractors. They got them all kinds of machinery. Answer me.”
“Don’t worry me now,” Mr. Shortley said. “I’m a dead man.”
“It’s them little eyes of his that’s foreign,” she muttered. “And that way he’s got of shrugging.” She drew her shoulders up and shrugged several times. “Howcome he’s got anything to shrug about?” she asked.
“If everybody was as dead as I am, nobody would have no trouble,” Mr. Shortley said.
“That priest,” she muttered and was silent for a minute. Then she said, “In Europe they probably got some different way to make liquor but I reckon they know all the ways. They’re full of crooked ways. They never have advanced or reformed. They got the same religion as a thousand years ago. It could only be the devil responsible for that. Always fighting amongst each other. Disputing. And then get us into it. Ain’t they got us into it twict already and we ain’t got no more sense than to go over there and settle it for them and then they come on back over here and snoop around and find your still and go straight to her. And liable to kiss her hand any minute. Do you hear me?”
“No,” Mr. Shortley said.
“And I’ll tell you another thing,” she said. “I wouldn’t be a tall surprised if he don’t know everything you say, whether it be in English or not.”
“I don’t speak no other language,” Mr. Shortley murmured.
“I suspect,” she said, “that before long there won’t be no more niggers on this place. And I tell you what. I’d rather have niggers than them Poles. And what’s furthermore, I aim to take up for the niggers when the time comes. When Gobblehook first come here, you recollect how he shook their hands, like he didn’t know the difference, like he might have been as black as them, but when it come to finding out Sulk was taking turkeys, he gone on and told her. I known he was taking turkeys. I could have told her myself.”
Mr. Shortley was breathing softly as if he were asleep.
“A nigger don’t know when he has a friend,” she said. “And I’ll tell you another thing. I get a heap out of Sledgewig. Sledgewig said that in Poland they lived in a brick house and one night a man come and told them to get out of it before daylight. Do you believe they ever lived in a brick house?
“Airs,” she said. “That’s just airs. A wooden house is good enough for me. Chancey,” she said, “turn thisaway. I hate to see niggers mistreated and run out. I have a heap of pity for niggers and poor folks. Ain’t I always had?” she asked. “I say ain’t I always been a friend to niggers and poor folks?
“When the time comes,” she said, “I’ll stand up for the niggers and that’s that. I ain’t going to see that priest drive out all the niggers.”
Mrs. McIntyre bought a new drag harrow and a tractor with a power lift because she said, for the first time, she had someone who could handle machinery. She and Mrs. Shortley had driven to the back field to inspect what he had harrowed the day before. “That’s been done beautifully!” Mrs. McIntyre said, looking out over the red undulating ground.
Mrs. McIntyre had changed since the Displaced Person had been working for her and Mrs. Shortley had observed the change very closely: she had begun to act like somebody who was getting rich secretly and she didn’t confide in Mrs. Shortley the way she used to. Mrs. Shortley suspected that the priest was at the bottom of the change. They were very slick. First he would get her into his Church and then he would get his hand in her pocketbook. Well, Mrs. Shortley thought, the more fool she! Mrs. Shortley had a secret herself. She knew something the Displaced Person was doing that would floor Mrs. McIntyre. “I still say he ain’t going to work forever for seventy dollars a month,” she murmured. She intended to keep her secret to herself and Mr. Shortley.
“Well,” Mrs. McIntyre said, “I may have to get rid of some of this other help so I can pay him more.”
Mrs. Shortley nodded to indicate she had known this for some time. “I’m not saying those niggers ain’t had it coming,” she said. “But they do the best they know how. You can always tell a nigger what to do and stand by until he does it.”
“That’s what the Judge said,” Mrs. McIntyre said and looked at her with approval. The Judge was her first husband, the one who had left her the place. Mrs. Shortley had heard that she had married him when she was thirty and he was seventy-five, thinking she would be rich as soon as he died, but the old man was a scoundrel and when his estate was settled, they found he didn’t have a nickel. All he left her were the fifty acres and the house. But she always spoke of him in a reverent way and quoted his sayings, such as, “One fellow’s misery is the other fellow’s gain,” and “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.”
“However,” Mrs. Shortley remarked, “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” and she had to turn away so that Mrs. McIntyre would not see her smile. She had found out what the Displaced Person was up to through the old man, Astor, and she had not told anybody but Mr. Shortley. Mr. Shortley had risen straight up in bed like Lazarus from the tomb.
“Shut your mouth!” he had said.
“Yes,” she had said.
“Naw!” Mr. Shortley had said.
“Yes,” she had said.
Mr. Shortley had fallen back flat.
“The Pole don’t know any better,” Mrs. Shortley had said. “I reckon that priest is putting him up to it is all. I blame the priest.”
The priest came frequently to see the Guizacs and he would always stop in and visit Mrs. McIntyre too and they would walk around the place and she would point out her improvements and listen to his rattling talk. It suddenly came to Mrs. Shortley that he was trying to persuade her to bring another Polish family onto the place. With two of them here, there would be almost nothing spoken but Polish! The Negroes would be gone and there would be the two families against Mr. Shortley and herself! She began to imagine a war of words, to see the Polish words and the English words coming at each other, stalking forward, not sentences, just words, gabble gabble gabble, flung out high and shrill and stalking forward and then grappling with each other. She saw the Polish words, dirty and all-knowing and unreformed, flinging mud on the clean English words until everything was equally dirty. She saw them all piled up in a room, all the dead dirty words, theirs and hers too, piled up like the naked bodies in the newsreel. God save me! she cried silently, from the stinking power of Satan I And she started from that day to read her Bible with a new attention. She poured over the Apocalypse and began to quote from the Prophets and before long she had come to a deeper understanding of her existence. She saw plainly that the meaning of the world was a mystery that had been planned and she was not surprised to suspect that she had a special part in the plan because she was strong. She saw that the Lord God Almighty had created the strong people to do what had to be done and she felt that she would be ready when she was called. Right now she felt that her business was to watch the priest.