"You're mighty pretty," Mrs. May said, addressing herself to the smallest girl.
There was no answer. They appeared to share one dispassionate expression between them.
"Where's your Mamma?" she asked.
There was no answer to this for some time. Then one of them said something in French. Mrs. May did not speak French.
"Where's your daddy?" she asked.
After a while, one of the boys said, "He ain't hyar neither."
"Ahhhh," Mrs. May said as if something had been proven. "Where's the colored man?"
She waited and decided no one was going to answer. "The cat has six little tongues," she said. "How would you like to come home with me and let me teach you how to talk?" She laughed and her laugh died on the silent air. She felt as if she were on trial for her life, facing a jury of Greenleafs. "I'll go down and see if I can find the colored man," she said.
"You can go if you want to," one of the boys said.
"Well, thank you," she murmured and drove off.
The barn was down the lane from the house. She had not seen it before but Mr. Greenleaf had described it in detail for it had been built according to the latest specifications. It was a milking parlor arrangement where the cows are milked from below. The milk ran in pipes from the machines to the milk house and was never carried in no bucket, Mr. Greenleaf said, by no human hand. "When you gonter get you one?" he had asked.
"Mr. Greenleaf," she had said, "I have to do for myself. I am not assisted hand and foot by the government. It would cost me $20,000 to install a milking parlor. I barely make ends meet as it is."
"My boys done it," Mr. Greenleaf had murmured, and then-"but all boys ain't alike."
"No indeed!" she had said. "I thank God for that!"
"I thank Gawd for ever-thang," Mr. Greenleaf had drawled.
You might as well, she had thought in the fierce silence that followed; you've never done anything for yourself.
She stopped by the side of the barn and honked but no one appeared. For several minutes she sat in the car, observing the various machines parked around, wondering how many of them were paid for. They had a forage harvester and a rotary hay baler. She had those too. She decided that since no one was here, she would get out and have a look at the milking parlor and see if they kept it clean.
She opened the milking room door and stuck her head in and for the first second she felt as if she were going to lose her breath. The spotless white concrete room was filled with sunlight that came from a row of windows head-high along both walls. The metal stanchions gleamed ferociously and she had to squint to be able to look at all. She drew her head out the room quickly and closed the door and leaned against it, frowning. The light outside was not so bright but she was conscious that the sun was directly on top of her head, like a silver bullet ready to drop into her brain.
A Negro carrying a yellow calf-feed bucket appeared from around the corner of the machine shed and came toward her. He was a light yellow boy dressed in the cast-off army clothes of the Greenleaf twins. He stopped at a respectable distance and set the bucket on the ground.
"Where's Mr. O. T. and Mr. E. T.?" she asked.
"Mist O. T. he in town, Mist E. T. he off yonder in the field," the Negro said, pointing first to the left and then to the right as if he were naming the position of two planets.
"Can you remember a message?" she asked, looking as if she thought this doubtful.
"I'll remember it if I don't forget it," he said with a touch of sullenness.
"Well, I'll write it down then," she said. She got in her car and took a stub of pencil from her pocket book and began to write on the back of an empty envelope. The Negro came and stood at the window. "I'm Mrs. May," she said as she wrote. "Their bull is on my place and I want him off today. You can tell them I'm furious about it."
"That bull lef here Sareday," the Negro said, "and none of us ain't seen him since. We ain't knowed where he was."
"Well, you know now," she said, "and you can tell Mr. O. T. and Mr. E. T. that if they don't come get him today, I'm going to have their daddy shoot him the first thing in the morning. I can't have that bull ruining my herd." She handed him the note.
"If I knows Mist O. T. and Mist E. T.," he said, taking it, "they goin to say you go ahead on and shoot him. He done busted up one of our trucks already and we be glad to see the last of him."
She pulled her head back and gave him a look from slightly bleared eyes. "Do they expect me to take my time and my worker to shoot their bull?" she asked. "They don't want him so they just let him loose and expect somebody else to kill him? He's eating my oats and ruining my herd and I'm expected to shoot him too?"
"I speck you is," he said softly. "He done busted up "
She gave him a very sharp look and said, "Well, I'm not surprised. That's just the way some people are," and after a second she asked, "Which is boss, Mr. O. T. or Mr. E. T.?" She had always suspected that they fought between themselves secretly.
"They never quarls," the boy said. "They like one man in two skins."
"Hmp. I expect you just never heard them quarrel."
"Nor nobody else heard them neither," he said, looking away as if this insolence were addressed to someone else.
"Well," she said, "I haven't put up with their father for fifteen years not to know a few things about Greenleafs."
The Negro looked at her suddenly with a gleam of recognition. "Is you my policy man's mother?" he asked.
"I don't know who your policy man is," she said sharply. "You give them that note and tell them if they don't come for that bull today, they'll be making their father shoot it tomorrow," and she drove off.
She stayed at home all afternoon waiting for the Greenleaf twins to come for the bull. They did not come. I might as well be working for them, she thought furiously. They are simply going to use me to the limit. At the supper table, she went over it again for the boys' benefit because she wanted them to see exactly what O. T. and E. T. would do. "They don't want that bull," she said, "-pass the butter-so they simply turn him loose and let somebody else worry about getting rid of him for them. How do you like that? I'm the victim. I've always been the victim."
"Pass the butter to the victim," Wesley said. He was in a worse humor than usual because he had had a flat tire on the way home from the university.
Scofield handed her the butter and said, "Why Mamma, ain't you ashamed to shoot an old bull that ain't done nothing but give you a little scrub strain in your herd? I declare," he said, "with the Mamma I got it's a wonder I turned out to be such a nice boy!"
"You ain't her boy, Son," Wesley said.
She eased back in her chair, her fingertips on the edge of the table.
"All I know is," Scofield said, "I done mighty well to be as nice as I am seeing what I come from."
When they teased her they spoke Greenleaf English but Wesley made his own particular tone come through it like a knife edge. "Well lemme tell you one thang, Brother," he said, leaning over the table, "that if you had half a mind you would already know."
"What's that, Brother?" Scofield asked, his broad face grinning into the thin constricted one across from him.
"That is," Wesley said, "that neither you nor me is her boy ," but he stopped abruptly as she gave a kind of hoarse wheeze like an old horse lashed unexpectedly. She reared up and ran from the room.