A dark yellow sun was beginning to rise in a sky that was the same slick dark gray as the highway. The fields stretched away, stiff and weedy, on either side. “Where we goin?” Mr. Shortley asked for the first time.
Mrs. Shortley sat with one foot on a packing box so that her knee was pushed into her stomach. Mr. Shortley’s elbow was almost under her nose and Sarah Mae’s bare left foot was sticking over the front seat, touching her ear.
“Where we goin?” Mr. Shortley repeated and when she didn’t answer again, he turned and looked at her.
Fierce heat seemed to be swelling slowly and fully into her face as if it were welling up now for a final assault. She was sitting in an erect way in spite of the fact that one leg was twisted under her and one knee was almost into her neck, but there was a peculiar lack of light in her icy blue eyes. All the vision in them might have been turned around, looking inside her. She suddenly grabbed Mr. Shortley’s elbow and Sarah Mae’s foot at the same time and began to tug and pull on them as if she were trying to fit the two extra limbs onto herself.
Mr. Shortley began to curse and quickly stopped the car and Sarah Mae yelled to quit but Mrs. Shortley apparently intended to rearrange the whole car at once. She thrashed forward and backward, clutching at everything she could get her hands on and hugging it to herself, Mr. Shortley’s head, Sarah Mae’s leg, the cat, a wad of white bedding, her own big moon-like knee; then all at once her fierce expression faded into a look of astonishment and her grip on what she had loosened. One of her eyes drew near to the other and seemed to collapse quietly and she was still.
The two girls, who didn’t know what had happened to her, began to say, “Where we goin, Ma? Where we goin?” They thought she was playing a joke and that their father, staring straight ahead at her, was imitating a dead man. They didn’t know that she had had a great experience or ever been displaced in the world from all that belonged to her. They were frightened by the gray slick road before them and they kept repeating in higher and higher voices, “Where we goin, Ma? Where we goin?” while their mother, her huge body rolled back still against the seat and her eyes like blue-painted glass, seemed to contemplate for the first time the tremendous frontiers of her true country.
II
“Well,” Mrs. McIntyre said to the old Negro, “we can get along without them. We’ve seen them come and seen them go—black and white.” She was standing in the calf barn while he cleaned it and she held a rake in her hand and now and then pulled a corn cob from a corner or pointed to a soggy spot that he had missed. When she discovered the Shortleys were gone, she was delighted as it meant she wouldn’t have to fire them. The people she hired always left her—because they were that kind of people. Of all the families she had had, the Shortleys were the best if she didn’t count the Displaced Person. They had been not quite trash; Mrs. Shortley was a good woman, and she would miss her but as the Judge used to say, you couldn’t have your pie and eat it too, and she was satisfied with the D. P. “We’ve seen them come and seen them go,” she repeated with satisfaction.
“And me and you,” the old man said, stooping to drag his hoe under a feed rack, “is still here.”
She caught exactly what he meant her to catch in his tone. Bars of sunlight fell from the cracked ceiling across his back and cut him in three distinct parts. She watched his long hands clenched around the hoe and his crooked old profile pushed close to them. You might have been here before I was, she said to herself, but it’s mighty likely I’ll be here when you’re gone. “I’ve spent half my life fooling with worthless people,” she said in a severe voice, “but now I’m through.”
“Black and white,” he said, “is the same.”
“I am through,” she repeated and gave her dark smock that she had thrown over her shoulders like a cape a quick snatch at the neck. She had on a broad-brimmed black straw hat that had cost her twenty dollars twenty years ago and that she used now for a sunhat. “Money is the root of all evil,” she said. “The Judge said so every day. He said he deplored money. He said the reason you niggers were so uppity was because there was so much money in circulation.”
The old Negro had known the Judge. “Judge say he long for the day when he be too poor to pay a nigger to work,” he said. “Say when that day come, the world be back on its feet.”
She leaned forward, her hands on her hips and her neck stretched and said, “Well that day has almost come around here and I’m telling each and every one of you: you better look sharp. I don’t have to put up with foolishness any more. I have somebody now who has to work!”
The old man knew when to answer and when not. At length he said, “We seen them come and we seen them go.”
“However, the Shortleys were not the worst by far,” she said. “I well remember those Garrits.”
“They was before them Collinses,” he said.
“No, before the Ringfields.”
“Sweet Lord, them Ringfields!” he murmured.
“None of that kind want to work,” she said.
“We seen them come and we seen them go,” he said as if this were a refrain. “But we ain’t never had one before,” he said, bending himself up until he faced her, “like what we got now.” He was cinnamon-colored with eyes that were so blurred with age that they seemed to be hung behind cobwebs.
She gave him an intense stare and held it until, lowering his hands on the hoe, he bent down again and dragged a pile of shavings alongside the wheelbarrow. She said stiffly, “He can wash out that barn in the time it took Mr. Shortley to make up his mind he had to do it.”
“He from Pole,” the old man muttered.
“From Poland.”
“In Pole it ain’t like it is here,” he said. “They got different ways of doing,” and he began to mumble unintelligibly.
“What are you saying?” she said. “If you have anything to say about him, say it and say it aloud.”
He was silent, bending his knees precariously and edging the rake along the underside of the trough.
“If you know anything he’s done that he shouldn’t, I expect you to report it to me,” she said.
“It warn’t like it was what he should ought or oughtn’t,” he muttered. “It was like what nobody else don’t do.”
“You don’t have anything against him,” she said shortly, “and he’s here to stay.”
“We ain’t never had one like him before is all,” he murmured and gave his polite laugh.
“Times are changing,” she said. “Do you know what’s happening to this world? It’s swelling up. It’s getting so full of people that only the smart thrifty energetic ones are going to survive,” and she tapped the words, smart, thrifty, and energetic out on the palm of her hand. Through the far end of the stall she could see down the road to where the Displaced Person was standing in the open barn door with the green hose in his hand. There was a certain stiffness about his figure that seemed to make it necessary for her to approach him slowly, even in her thoughts. She had decided this was because she couldn’t hold an easy conversation with him. Whenever she said anything to him, she found herself shouting and nodding extravagantly and she would be conscious that one of the Negroes was leaning behind the nearest shed, watching.