“Five times in the last month I’ve found Mr. Shortley smoking in the barn,” Mrs. McIntyre said. “Five times.”
“And arrre the Negroes any better?”
“They lie and steal and have to be watched all the time,” she said.
“Tsk, tsk,” he said. “Which will you discharge?’
“I’ve decided to give Mr. Shortley his month’s notice tomorrow,” Mrs. McIntyre said.
The priest scarcely seemed to hear her he was so busy wiggling his finger inside the wire. Mrs. Shortley sat down on an open sack of laying mash with a dead thump that sent feed dust clouding up around her. She found herself looking straight ahead at the opposite wall where the gentleman on the calendar was holding up his marvelous discovery but she didn’t see him. She looked ahead as if she saw nothing whatsoever. Then she rose and ran to her house. Her face was an almost volcanic red.
She opened all the drawers and dragged out boxes and old battered suitcases from under the bed. She began to unload the drawers into the boxes, all the time without pause, without taking off the sunhat she had on her head. She set the two girls to doing the same. When Mr. Shortley came in, she did not even look at him but merely pointed one arm at him while she packed with the other. “Bring the car around to the back door,” she said. “You ain’t waiting to be fired!”
Mr. Shortley had never in his life doubted her omniscience. He perceived the entire situation in half a second and, with only a sour scowl, retreated out the door and went to drive the automobile around to the back.
They tied the two iron beds to the top of the car and the two rocking chairs inside the beds and rolled the two mattresses up between the rocking chairs. On top of this they tied a crate of chickens. They loaded the inside of the car with the old suitcases and boxes, leaving a small space for Annie Maude and Sarah Mae. It took them the rest of the afternoon and half the night to do this but Mrs. Shortley was determined that they would leave before four o’clock in the morning, that Mr. Shortley should not adjust another milking machine on this place. All the time she had been working, her face was changing rapidly from red to white and back again.
Just before dawn, as it began to drizzle rain, they were ready to leave. They all got in the car and sat there cramped up between boxes and bundles and rolls of bedding. The square black automobile moved off with more than its customary grinding noises as if it were protesting the load. In the back, the two long bony yellow-haired girls were sitting on a pile of boxes and there was a beagle hound puppy and a cat with two kittens somewhere under the blankets. The car moved slowly, like some overfreighted leaking ark, away from their shack and past the white house where Mrs. McIntyre was sleeping soundly—hardly guessing that her cows would not be milked by Mr. Shortley that morning—and past the Pole’s shack on top of the hill and on down the road to the gate where the two Negroes were walking, one behind the other, on their way to help with the milking. They looked straight at the car and its occupants but even as the dim yellow headlights lit up their faces, they politely did not seem to see anything, or anyhow, to attach significance to what was there. The loaded car might have been passing mist in the early morning half-light. They continued up the road at the same even pace without looking back.
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 guickly 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 gain?” 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 am and here and I’m telling each and everyone 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 Carrits.”
“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.
“No indeed!” she said, sitting down on one of the feed racks and folding her arms, “I’ve made up my mind that I’ve had enough trashy people on this place to last me a lifetime and I’m not going to spend my last years fooling with Shortleys and Ringfields and Collins when the world is full of people who have to work.”
“Howcome they so many extra?” he asked.
“People are selfish,” she said. “They have too many children. There’s no sense in it any more.”
He had picked up the wheelbarrow handles and was backing out the door and he paused, half in the sunlight and half out, and stood there chewing his gums as if he had forgotten which direction he wanted to move in.
“What you colored people don’t realize,” she said, “is that I’m the one around here who holds all the strings together. If you don’t work, I don’t make any money and I can’t pay you. You’re all dependent on me but you each and everyone act like the shoe is on the other foot.”
It was not possible to tell from his face if he heard her. Finally he backed out with the wheelbarrow. “Judge say the devil he know is better than the devil he don’t,” he said in a clear mutter and trundled off.
She got up and followed him, a deep vertical pit appearing suddenly in the center of her forehead, just under the red bangs. “The Judge has long since ceased to pay the bills around here,” she called in a piercing voice.
He was the only one of her Negroes who had known the Judge and he thought this gave him title. He had had a low opinion of Mr. Crooms and Mr. McIntyre, her other husbands, and in his veiled polite way, he had congratulated her after each of her divorces. When he thought it necessary, he would work under a window where he knew she was sitting and talk to himself, a careful roundabout discussion, question and answer and then refrain. Once she had got up silently and slammed the window down so hard that he had fallen backwards off his feet. Or occasionally he spoke with the peacock. The cock would follow him around the place, his steady eye on the ear of corn that stuck up from the old man’s back pocket or he would sit near him and pick himself. Once from the open kitchen door, she had heard him say to the bird, “I remember when it was twenty of you walking about this place and now it’s only you and two hens. Crooms it was twelve. McIntyre it was five. You and two hens now.”
And that time she had stepped out of the door onto the porch and said, “MISTER Crooms and MISTER McIntyre! And I don’t want to hear you call either of them anything else again. And you can understand this: when that peachicken dies there won’t be any replacements.”
She kept the peacock only out of a superstitious fear of annoying the Judge in his grave. He had liked to see them walking around the place for he said they made him feel rich. Of her three husbands, the Judge was the one most present to her although he was the only one she had buried. He was in the family graveyard, a little space fenced in the middle of the back cornfield, with his mother and father and grandfather and three great aunts and two infant cousins. Mr. Crooms, her second, was forty miles away in the state asylum and Mr. McIntyre, her last, was intoxicated, she supposed, in some hotel room in Florida. But the Judge, sunk in the cornfield with his family, was always at home.
She had married him when he was an old man and because of his money but there had been another reason that she would not admit then, even to herself: she had liked him. He was a dirty snuff-dipping Court House figure, famous all over the county for being rich, who wore hightop shoes, a string tie, a gray suit with a black stripe in it, and a yellowed panama hat, winter and summer. His teeth and hair were tobacco-colored ang his face a clay pink pitted and tracked with mysterious prehistoric-looking marks as if he had been unearthed among fossils. There had been a peculiar odor about him of sweaty fondled bills but he never carried money on him or had a nickel to show. She was his secretary for a few months and the old man with his sharp eye had seen at once that here was a woman who admired him for himself. The three years that he lived after they married were the happiest and most prosperous of Mrs. McIntyre’s life, but when he died his estate proved to be bankrupt. He left her a mortgaged house and fifty acres that he had managed to cut the timber off before he died. It was as if, as the final triumph of a successful life, he had been able to take everything with him.
But she had survived. She had survived a succession of tenant farmers and dairymen that the old man himself would have found hard to outdo, and she had been able to meet the constant drain of a tribe of moody unpredictable Negroes, and she had even managed to hold her own against the incidental blood suckers, the cattle dealers and lumber men and the buyers and sellers of anything who drove up in pieced-together trucks and honked in the yard.
She stood slightly reared back with her arms folded under her smock and a satisfied expression on her face as she watched the Displaced Person turn off the hose and disappear inside the barn. She was sorry that the poor man had been chased out of Poland and run across Europe and had had to take up in a tenant shack in a strange country, but she had not been responsible for any of this. She had had a hard time herself. She knew what it was to struggle. People ought to have to struggle. Mr. Guizac had probably had everything given to him all the way across Europe and over here. He had probably not had to struggle enough. She had given him a job. She didn’t know if he was grateful or not. She didn’t know anything about him except that he did the work. The truth was that he was not very real to her yet. He was a kind of miracle that she had seen happen and that she talked about but that she still didn’t believe.
&n
bsp; She watched as he came out at the barn and motioned to Sulk. who was coming around the back of the lot. He gesticulated and then took something out of his pocket and the two of them stood looking at it. She started down the lane toward them. The Negro’s figure was slack and tall and he was craning his rolling head forward in his usual idiotic way. He was a little better than half-witted but when they were like that they were always good workers. The Judge had said always hire you a half-witted nigger because they don’t have sense enough to stop working. The Pole was gesticulating rapidly. He left something with the colored boy and then walked off and before she rounded the turn in the lane, she heard the tractor crank up. He was on his way to the field. The Negro was still hanging there, gaping at whatever he had in his hand.
She entered the lot and walked through the barn, looking with approval at the wet spotless concrete floor. It was only nine-thirty and Mr. Shortley had never got anything washed until eleven. As she came out at the other end, she saw the Negro moving very slowly in a diagonal path across the road in front of her, his eyes still on what Mr. Guizac had given him. He didn’t see her and he paused and dipped his knees and leaned over his hand, his tongue describing little circles. He had a photograph. He lifted one finger and traced it lightly over the surface of the picture. Then he looked up and saw her and seemed to freeze, his mouth in a halfgrin, his finger lifted.
“Why haven’t you gone to the field?” she asked.
He raised one foot and opened his mouth wider while the hand with the photograph edged toward his back pocket.
“What’s that?” she said.
“It ain’t nothing,” he muttered and handed it to her automatically.
It was a photograph of a girl of about twelve in a white dress. She had blond hair with a wreath in it and she looked forward out of light eyes that were bland and composed. “Who is this child?” Mrs. McIntyre asked.
“She his cousin,” the boy said in a high voice.