I et this mornin.
This mornin. Out of somebody’s garden most likely.
I got money, Holme said.
I won’t ast ye where you come by it. You married?
No. I ain’t married. He looked up at the squire. Their shadows canted upon the whitewashed brick of the kitchen shed in a pantomime of static violence in which the squire reeled backward and he leaned upon him in headlong assault. It ain’t no crime to be poor, he said.
No, it ain’t. It ain’t a crime. I hope you’ve not got a family. It’s a sacred thing, a family. A sacred obligation. Afore God. The squire had been looking away and now he turned to Holme again. It ain’t no crime to be poor, he said. That’s right. But shiftlessness is a sin, I would judge. Wouldn’t you?
I reckon, he said.
Yes. The bible reckons. What I got I earned. They’s not a man in this county will tell ye different. I’ve never knowed nothin but hard work. I’ve been many a time in the field at daybreak waitin for the sun to come up to commence work and I was there when it went down again. Daybreak to backbreak for a Godgiven dollar. They ain’t a man in this county will dispute it.
Holme was looking down, one hand crossed over the back of the other the way men stand in church. There was a commotion of hens from beyond the barn, a hog’s squeal, ceasing again into the tranquillity of birdcalls and cicadas.
All right, Holme, the squire said. I ain’t goin to ast you no more of your business. He had out a small leather purse now which he unsnapped and lightened by the weight of a half-dollar. Here, he said. And your supper. Supper’s at six-thirty. In the kitchen. You can wash up now if you’ve a mind to.
He took the coin, holding it in his hand as if he had no place to put it. All right, he said.
After he had washed he sat in the shade of the toolshed and pared idly at the sole of his shoe with the knife he carried. He watched the negro cross from the barn to the house. In a few minutes he came from the kitchen door and returned across the yard again, a small figure scuttling from shadow to shadow with laborious ill-grace, carrying in one hand the squire’s boots and disappearing into the barn.
The squire was an early riser and it was not yet good light when he went to the barn. You Holme, he called up the chaffdusted ladder and into the dark hatchway of the loft. No one answered. The negro was coming through the far end of the barn carrying a bucket.
Where’s he at, the squire said. Is he gone?
The negro nodded his head.
He sure is a early bird. When did he skedaddle?
The negro slid the bucket up onto his wrist and made a motion with his hands.
Well, the squire said. He looked about him uncertainly, like a man who has forgotten something. Then he said: Where’s them boots?
The negro had started toward the corncrib and now he stopped and looked around, his face already shining with grease or sweat, whatever it was, like wet obsidian. He did not even motion with his hands. They stood looking at each other for just a minute and then the squire said Goddamn. I will be purely goddamned. That ingrate son of a bitch. You never should of left … Hitch up for me while I get the shotgun. Turning and wheeling out of the barn, the negro following him with that same poverty of motion and taking up harness gear from where it hung on the wall as he went. In a few minutes the squire was back with the shotgun and a white hat jammed onto his head, leaping up into the wagon and sitting there in furious immobility and then leaping down again to fumble with the harness while the negro led the horse forth from the stall, not telling him to hurry or anything so useless and finally waiting in a throb of violent constraint while the negro backed the horse between the wagon shafts and while he hitched it and until he stepped back and then raising up the reins and slapping them across the horse’s rump, lifting two ribbons of rank dust out of its hide and starting and then as suddenly drawing up again and leaning down:
Town? You think he might of gone back through … No. All right, I’ll — the mute negro laboring in the air with his dark and boney fingers and the squire: The what? The brush-hook? What else? Damn. Goddamn. — and exploding out of the lot with the horse rearing under the reins and the wagon skewing about and then down the drive onto the road at a mad clatter and gone.
The negro returned to the barn and took up the pail from where he had left it, going past the stalls to the corncrib where he seated himself on a milking stool and began to shell corn, his hard hand twisting the kernels loose and them sifting bright and hard down into the pail, ringing like coins.
The squire at midmorning was following a log road, urging the horse on and the horse already faded to a walk, when they came out of the brush behind him. He turned when he heard them and he turned back. They were coming along the road. One of them said something and then one of them said Harmon and then one of them was alongside seizing the horse’s reins. The squire stood in the wagon. Here, he said. What do you think you’re doing. Here now, by God — reaching and taking up the shotgun where it stood leaning against the seat.
THEY CAME across the field attended by a constant circus of grasshoppers catapulting from the sedge and entered the wood deployed in the same ragged phalanx while before them passed solitary over no visible road a horse and a wagon surmounted by a harriedlooking man in a white hat. They altered their course and came upon a log road down which the wagon receded in two thin tracks and upon a burst lizard who dragged his small blue bowels through the dirt, breaking into a trot, a run, the first of them reaching the horse and seizing the reins and turning up to the driver a mindless smile, clutching the horse’s withers and clinging there like some small and vicious anthroparian and the driver rising in remonstration from the wagon box so that when the next one came up behind him sideways in a sort of dance and swung the brush-hook it missed his neck and took him in the small of the back severing his spine and when he fell he fell unhinged sideways and without a cry.
SHE DID NOT know that he had taken the gun. She did not know that the money was gone and she had never known how much there was of it. She went about the house gathering her things, laying out her dress on the bed and examining it before she stripped out of the shift and put it on. She pirouetted slowly in the center of the room like a doll unwinding for just a moment and then took off the dress and scrubbed herself with a rag and cold water as best she could and with a piece of broken comb raked her dead yellow hair. She set out her shoes and dusted them and put them on, and the dress. Of the shift she made a package in which lay rolled her small and derelict possessions and thus equipped she took a final look about to see what had been forgotten. There was nothing. She tucked the package beneath her arm and set forth, shortgaited and stiffly, humming softly to herself and so into the sunshine that washed fitfully with the spring wind over the glade, turning her face up to the sky and bestowing upon it a smile all bland and burdenless as a child’s.
She crossed the river bridge, walking carefully on the illfitted planks, looking down at the water. She nudged pebbles through the cracks and watched them diminish with slow turnings into sudden printed rings upon the river that sucked away like smoke. She went on, resting from time to time quietly by the side of the road and patting the sweat from her brow with the parcel she carried. When she came at last into sight of the crossroads she could see someone coming far down the road and misshapen with heat. She looked about her and then entered the pine woods to her left and climbed a small rise which commanded the road. It was very warm. She sat fanning herself and the gnats that shimmered before her eyes. It was an old woman who came along laden with empty mealsacks and conversing earnestly with herself. Later two boys passed laughing and punching each other. The watcher on the hill fanned and sighed. I wisht he’d come on, she said.