Well, now she came up to my booth in the Greek restaurant with that violent stride which was characteristic of her, and looked down at me, and demanded, "Can I sit with you?"
She sat down before I could reply.
"Or anything else," I replied gallantly, "stand, sit, or lie."
She inspected me critically out of her inky-velvety-black, deep-set eyes, which glittered in the marred face, and shook her head. "No thanks," she said, "I like mine with vitamins."
"You mean you don't think I'm handsome?" I demanded.
"I don't care about anybody being handsome," she said, "but I never did go for anybody that reminded me of a box of spilled spaghetti. All elbows and dry rattle."
"All right," I said. "I withdraw my proposal. With dignity. But tell me something, now that you mention vitamins. You figure your candidate Willie has any vitamins? For the constituency?"
"Oh, God," she whispered, and rolled her eyes to heaven.
"All right," I said. "When are you going to tell the boys back home it's no go?"
"What do you mean, no go? They're planning on a big barbecue and rally at Upton. Duffy told me so."
"Sadie," I said, "you know damned well they'd have to barbecue the great wooly mastodon and use ten-dollar bills instead of lettuce on the buns. Why don't you tell the big boys it's no go?"
"What put that in your head?"
"Listen, Sadie," I said, "we've been pals for a long time and you needn't lie to uncle. I don't put everything I know in the papers, but I know that Willie isn't in this race because you admire his oratory."
"Ain't it awful?" she demanded.
"I know it's a frame-up," I said. "Everybody knows but Willie."
"All right," she admitted.
"When are you going to tell the boys back home it's no go, that they are wasting dough? That Willie couldn't steal a vote from Abe Lincoln in the Cradle of the Confederacy?"
"I ought to done it long ago," she said.
"When are you going to?" I asked.
"Listen," she said, "I told them before this thing ever started it was no go. But they wouldn't listen to Sadie. Those fat-heads–" and she suddenly spewed out a mouthful of cigarette smoke over the rounded, too red, suddenly outcurling and gleaming underlip.
"Why don't you tell them it's no go and get the poor bastard out of his agony?"
"Let them spend their God-damned money," she said fretfully, twitching her head as though to get the cigarette smoke out of her eyes. "I wish they were spending a lot more, the fat-heads. I wish the poor bastard had had enough sense to make them grease him good to take the beating he's in for. Now all he'll get will be the ride. Might as well let him have that. Ignorance is bliss."
The waitress brought a cup of coffee, which Sadie must have ordered when she came in before she spotted me. She took a drag of the coffee, and then a deep drag of the cigarette.
"You know," she said, jabbing out the butt savagely in the cup and looking at it and not at me, "you know, even if somebody told him. Even if he found out he was a sucker, I believe he might keep right on."
"Yeah," I said, "making those speeches."
"God," she said, "aren't they awful?"
"Yeah."
"The sap," she said.
We walked back to the hotel, and I didn't see Sadie again, except once or twice to say howdy-do to, until Upton. Thinks hadn't improved any before Upton. I went back to town and left the candidate to his own devices for a week or so in between, but I heard the news. Then I got the train over to Upton the day before the barbecue.
Upton is way over in the western part of the state, the capital of the cocklebur vote which was suppose to come pelting out of the brush to the barbecue. And just a little way north of Upton there was the coal pocket, where a lot of folks lived in company shacks and prayed for a full week's work. It was a good location to get a sellout house for the barbecue. Thos folks in the shacks were in such a shape they'd be ready to walk fifteen miles for a bait of fresh. If they still had the strength, and it was free.
The local I rode puffed and yanked and stalled and yawed across the cotton country. We'd stop on a siding for half an hour, waiting for something, and I watched the cotton rows converging into the simmering horizon, and a black stub of a burnt tree in the middle distance up out of the cotton rows. Then, late in the afternoon, the train headed into the cut-over pine and sagebrush. We would stop beside some yellow, boxlike station, with the unpainted houses dropped down beyond, and I could see up the alley behind the down-town and then, as the train pulled out again, across the back yards of houses surrounded by board or wire fences as though to keep out the openness of the humped and sage-furred country which seemed ready to slide in and eat up the houses. The houses didn't look as though they belonged there, improvised, flung down, ready to be abandoned. Some washing would be hanging on a line, but the people would go off and leave that too. They wouldn't have time to snatch it off the line. It would be getting dark soon, and they'd better hurry.
But as the train pulls away, a woman comes to the back door of one of the houses–just the figure of a woman, for you cannot make out the face–and she has a pan in her hands and she flings the water out of the pan to make a sudden tattered flash of silver in the light. She goes back into the house. To what is in the house. The floor of the house is thin against the bare ground and the walls and the roof are thin against all of everything which is outside, but you cannot see through the walls to the secret to which the woman has gone in.
The train pulls away, faster now, and the woman is back there in the house, where she is going to say. She'll stat there. And all at once, you think that you are the one who is running away, and who had better run fast to whatever you are going because it will be dark soon. The train is going pretty fast now, but its effort seems to the through a stubborn cloying density of air as though an eel tried to swim in syrup, or the effort seems to be against an increasing and implacable magnetism of earth. You think that if the earth should twitch once, as the hide of a sleeping dog twitches, the train would be jerked over and piled up and the engine would spew and gasp while somewhere a canted-up wheel would revolve once with a massive and dreamlike deliberation.
But nothing happens, and you remember that the woman had not even looked up at the train. You forget her, and the train goes fast and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-light, unriffled glint of the water between the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you feel is taken away from you, too.
You bloody fool, do you think that you want to mild a cow?
You do not want to milk a cow.
Then you are at Upton.
In Upton I went to the hotel, totting my little bag and my typewriter through the gangs of people on the street, people who looked at me with the countryman's slow, full, curious lack of shame, and didn't make room for me to pass until I was charging them down, the way a cow won't get out of the way of your car in a lane until your radiator damned near bats her in the underslung slats. At the hotel I ate a sandwich and went up to my room, and got the fan turned on and a pitcher of ice water sent up and took off my shoes and shirt and propped myself in a chair with a book.
At ten-thirty there was a knock on the door. I yelled, and in came Willie.
"Where you been?" I asked him.
"Been here all afternoon," he said.
"Duffy been dragging you round to shake hands with all the leading citizens?"
"Yeah," he said, glumly.
The glumness in his voice made me look sharply at him. "What's the matter?" I asked. "Don't the boys around here talk nice to you?"