"She says it"s ten million more like them, Displaced Persons, she says that there priest can get her all she wants."
"She better quit messin with that there priest," Mr. Shortley said.
"He don"t look smart," Mrs. Shortley said, "kind of foolish."
"I ain"t going to have the Pope of Rome tell me how to run no dairy," Mr. Shortley said.
"They ain"t Eye-talians, they"re Poles," she said. "From Poland where all them bodies were stacked up at. You remember all them bodies?"
"I give them three weeks here," Mr. Shortley said.
Three weeks later Mrs. McIntyre and Mrs. Shortley drove to the cane bottom to see Mr. Guizac start to operate the silage cutter, a new machine that Mrs. McIntyre had just bought because she said, for the first time, she had somebody who could operate it. Mr. Guizac could drive a tractor, use the rotary hay-baler, the silage cutter, the combine, the letz mill, or any other machine she had on the place. He was an expert mechanic, a carpenter, and a mason. He was thrifty and energetic. Mrs. McIntyre said she figured he would save her twenty dollars a month on repair bills alone. She said getting him was the best day"s work she had ever done in her life. He could work milking machines and he was scrupulously clean. He did not smoke.
She parked her car on the edge of the cane field and they got out. Sulk, the young Negro, was attaching the wagon to the cutter and Mr. Guizac was attaching the cutter to the tractor. He finished first and pushed the colored boy out of the way and attached the wagon to the cutter himself, gesticulating with a bright angry face when he wanted the hammer or the screwdriver. Nothing was done quick enough to suit him. The Negroes made him nervous.
The week before, he had come upon Sulk at the dinner hour, sneaking with a croker sack into the pen where the young turkeys were. He had watched him take a frying-size turkey from the lot and thrust it in the sack and put the sack under his coat. Then he had followed him around the barn, jumped on him, dragged him to Mrs. McIntyre"s back door and had acted out the entire scene for her, while the Negro muttered and grumbled and said G.o.d might strike him dead if he had been stealing any turkey, he had only been taking it to put some black shoe polish on its head because it had the sorehead. G.o.d might strike him dead if that was not the truth before Jesus. Mrs. McIntyre told him to go put the turkey back and then she was a long time explaining to the Pole that all Negroes would steal. She finally had to call Rudolph and tell him in English and have him tell his father in Polish, and Mr. Guizac had gone off with a startled disappointed face.
Mrs. Shortley stood by hoping there would be trouble with the silage machine but there was none. All of Mr. Guizac"s motions were quick and accurate. He jumped on the tractor like a monkey and maneuvered the big orange cutter into the cane; in a second the silage was spurting in a green jet out of the pipe into the wagon. He went jolting down the row until he disappeared from sight and the noise became remote.
Mrs. McIntyre sighed with pleasure. "At last," she said, "I"ve got somebody I can depend on. For years I"ve been fooling with sorry people. Sorry people. Poor white trash and n.i.g.g.e.rs," she muttered. "They"ve drained me dry. Before you all came I had Ringfields and Collins and Jarrells and Perkins and Pinkins and Herrins and G.o.d knows what all else and not a one of them left without taking something off this place that didn"t belong to them. Not a one!"
Mrs. Shortley could listen to this with composure because she knew that if Mrs. McIntyre had considered her trash, they couldn"t have talked about trashy people together. Neither of them approved of trash. Mrs. McIntyre continued with the monologue that Mrs. Shortley had heard oftentimes before. "I"ve been running this place for thirty years," she said, looking with a deep frown out over the field, "and always just barely making it. People think you"re made of money. I have the taxes to pay. I have the insurance to keep up. I have the repair bills. I have the feed bills." It all gathered up and she stood with her chest lifted and her small hands gripped around her elbows. "Ever since the Judge died," she said, "I"ve barely been making ends meet and they all take something when they leave. The n.i.g.g.e.rs don"t leavea"they stay and steal. A n.i.g.g.e.r thinks anybody is rich he can steal from and that white trash thinks anybody is rich who can afford to hire people as sorry as they are. And all I"ve got is the dirt under my feet!"
You hire and fire, Mrs. Shortley thought, but she didn"t always say what she thought. She stood by and let Mrs. McIntyre say it all out to the end but this time it didn"t end as usual. "But at last I"m saved!" Mrs. McIntyre said. "One fellow"s misery is the other fellow"s gain. That man there," and she pointed where the Displaced Person had disappeared, "a"he has to work! He wants to work!" She turned to Mrs. Shortley with her bright wrinkled face. "That man is my salvation!" she said.
Mrs. Shortley looked straight ahead as if her vision penetrated the cane and the hill and pierced through to the other side. "I would suspicion salvation got from the devil," she said in a slow detached way.
"Now what do you mean by that?" Mrs. McIntyre asked, looking at her sharply.
Mrs. Shortley wagged her head but would not say anything else. The fact was she had nothing else to say for this intuition had only at that instant come to her. She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn"t have the brains to avoid evil without it. For people like herself, for people of gumption, it was a social occasion providing the opportunity to sing; but if she had ever given it much thought, she would have considered the devil the head of it and G.o.d the hanger-on. With the coming of these displaced people, she was obliged to give new thought to a good many things.
"I know what Sledgewig told Annie Maude," she said, and when Mrs. McIntyre carefully did not ask her what but reached down and broke off a sprig of sa.s.safras to chew, she continued in a way to indicate she was not telling all, "that they wouldn"t be able to live long, the four of them, on seventy dollars a month."
"He"s worth raising," Mrs. McIntyre said. "He saves me money."
This was as much as to say that Chancey had never saved her money. Chancey got up at four in the morning to milk her cows, in winter wind and summer heat, and he had been doing it for the last two years. They had been with her the longest she had ever had anybody. The grat.i.tude they got was these hints that she hadn"t been saved any money.
"Is Mr. Shortley feeling better today?" Mrs. McIntyre asked.
Mrs. Shortley thought it was about time she was asking that question. Mr. Shortley had been in bed two days with an attack. Mr. Guizac had taken his place in the dairy in addition to doing his own work, "No he ain"t," she said. "That doctor said he was suffering from over-exhaustion."
"If Mr. Shortley is over-exhausted," Mrs. McIntyre said, "then he must have a second job on the side," and she looked at Mrs. Shortley with almost closed eyes as if she were examining the bottom of a milk can.
Mrs. Shortley did not say a word but her dark suspicion grew like a black thunder cloud. The fact was that Mr. Shortley did have a second job on the side and that, in a free country, this was none of Mrs. McIntyre"s business. Mr. Shortley made whisky. He had a small still back in the farthest reaches of the place, on Mrs. McIntyre"s land to be sure, but on land that she only owned and did not cultivate, on idle land that was not doing anybody any good. Mr. Shortley was not afraid of work. He got up at four in the morning and milked her cows and in the middle of the day when he was supposed to be resting, he was off attending to his still. Not every man would work like that. The Negroes knew about his still but he knew about theirs so there had never been any disagreeableness between them. But with foreigners on the place, with people who were all eyes and no understanding, who had come from a place continually fighting, where the religion had not been reformeda"with this kind of people, you had to be on the lookout every minute. She thought there ought to be a law against them. There was no reason they couldn"t stay over there and take the places of some of the people who had been killed in their wars and butcherings.
"What"s furthermore," she said suddenly, "Sledgewig said as soon as her papa saved the money, he was going to buy him a used car. Once they get them a used car, they"ll leave you."
"I can"t pay him enough for him to save money," Mrs. McIntyre said. "I"m not worrying about that. Of course," she said then, "if Mr. Shortley got incapacitated, I would have to use Mr. Guizac in the dairy all the time and I would have to pay him more. He doesn"t smoke," she said, and it was the fifth time within the week that she had pointed this out.
"It is no man," Mrs. Shortley said emphatically, "that works as hard as Chancey, or is as easy with a cow, or is more of a Christian," and she folded her arms and her gaze pierced the distance. The noise of the tractor and cutter increased and Mr. Guizac appeared coming around the other side of the cane row. "Which can not be said about everybody," she muttered. She wondered whether, if the Pole found Chancey"s still, he would know what it was. The trouble with these people was, you couldn"t tell what they knew. Every time Mr. Guizac smiled, Europe stretched out in Mrs. Shortley"s imagination, mysterious and evil, the devil"s experiment station.
The tractor, the cutter, the wagon pa.s.sed, rattling and rumbling and grinding before them. "Think how long that would have taken with men and mules to do it," Mrs. McIntyre shouted. "We"ll get this whole bottom cut within two days at this rate."
"Maybe," Mrs. Shortley muttered, "if don"t no terrible accident occur." She thought how the tractor had made mules worthless. Nowadays you couldn"t give away a mule. The next thing to go, she reminded herself, will be n.i.g.g.e.rs.
In the afternoon she explained what was going to happen to them to Astor and Sulk who were in the cow lot, filling the manure spreader. She sat down next to the block of salt under a small shed, her stomach in her lap, her arms on top of it. "All you colored people better look out," she said. "You know how much you can get for a mule."
"Nothing, no indeed," the old man said, "not one thing."
"Before it was a tractor," she said, "it could be a mule. And before it was a Displaced Person, it could be a n.i.g.g.e.r. The time is going to come," she prophesied, "when it won"t be no more occasion to speak of a n.i.g.g.e.r."
The old man laughed politely. "Yes indeed," he said. "Ha ha."
The young one didn"t say anything. He only looked sullen but when she had gone in the house, he said, "Big Belly act like she know everything."
"Never mind," the old man said, "your place too low for anybody to dispute with you for it."
She didn"t tell her fears about the still to Mr. Shortley until he was back on the job in the dairy. Then one night after they were in bed, she said, "That man prowls."
Mr. Shortley folded his hands on his bony chest and pretended he was a corpse.
"Prowls," she continued and gave him a sharp kick in the side with her knee. "Who"s to say what they know and don"t know? Who"s to say if he found it he wouldn"t go right to her and tell? How you know they don"t make liquor in Europe? They drive tractors. They got them all kinds of machinery. Answer me."
"Don"t worry me now," Mr. Shortley said. "I"m a dead man."
"It"s them little eyes of his that"s foreign," she muttered. "And that way he"s got of shrugging." She drew her shoulders up and shrugged several times. "Howcome he"s got anything to shrug about?" she asked.
"If everybody was as dead as I am, n.o.body would have no trouble," Mr. Shortley said.
"That priest," she muttered and was silent for a minute. Then she said, "In Europe they probably got some different way to make liquor but I reckon they know all the ways. They"re full of crooked ways. They never have advanced or reformed. They got the same religion as a thousand years ago. It could only be the devil responsible for that. Always fighting amongst each other. Disputing. And then get us into it. Ain"t they got us into it twict already and we ain"t got no more sense than to go over there and settle it for them and then they come on back over here and snoop around and find your still and go straight to her. And liable to kiss her hand any minute. Do you hear me?"
"No," Mr. Shortley said.
"And I"ll tell you another thing," she said. "I wouldn"t be a tall surprised if he don"t know everything you say, whether it be in English or not."
"I don"t speak no other language," Mr. Shortley murmured.
"I suspect," she said, "that before long there won"t be no more n.i.g.g.e.rs on this place. And I tell you what. I"d rather have n.i.g.g.e.rs than them Poles. And what"s furthermore, I aim to take up for the n.i.g.g.e.rs when the time comes. When Gobblehook first come here, you recollect how he shook their hands, like he didn"t know the difference, like he might have been as black as them, but when it come to finding out Sulk was taking turkeys, he gone on and told her. I known he was taking turkeys. I could have told her myself."
Mr. Shortley was breathing softly as if he were asleep.
"A n.i.g.g.e.r don"t know when he has a friend," she said. "And I"ll tell you another thing. I get a heap out of Sledgewig. Sledgewig said that in Poland they lived in a brick house and one night a man come and told them to get out of it before daylight. Do you believe they ever lived in a brick house?
"Airs," she said. "That"s just airs. A wooden house is good enough for me. Chancey," she said, "turn thisaway. I hate to see n.i.g.g.e.rs mistreated and run out. I have a heap of pity for n.i.g.g.e.rs and poor folks. Ain"t I always had?" she asked. "I say ain"t I always been a friend to n.i.g.g.e.rs and poor folks?
"When the time comes," she said, "I"ll stand up for the n.i.g.g.e.rs and that"s that. I ain"t going to see that priest drive out all the n.i.g.g.e.rs."
Mrs. McIntyre bought a new drag harrow and a tractor with a power lift because she said, for the first time, she had someone who could handle machinery. She and Mrs. Shortley had driven to the back field to inspect what he had harrowed the day before. "That"s been done beautifully!" Mrs. McIntyre said, looking out over the red undulating ground.
Mrs. McIntyre had changed since the Displaced Person had been working for her and Mrs. Shortley had observed the change very closely: she had begun to act like somebody who was getting rich secretly and she didn"t confide in Mrs. Shortley the way she used to. Mrs. Shortley suspected that the priest was at the bottom of the change. They were very slick. First he would get her into his Church and then he would get his hand in her pocketbook. Well, Mrs. Shortley thought, the more fool she! Mrs. Shortley had a secret herself. She knew something the Displaced Person was doing that would floor Mrs. McIntyre. "I still say he ain"t going to work forever for seventy dollars a month," she murmured. She intended to keep her secret to herself and Mr. Shortley.
"Well," Mrs. McIntyre said, "I may have to get rid of some of this other help so I can pay him more."
Mrs. Shortley nodded to indicate she had known this for some time. "I"m not saying those n.i.g.g.e.rs ain"t had it coming," she said. "But they do the best they know how. You can always tell a n.i.g.g.e.r what to do and stand by until he does it."
"That"s what the Judge said," Mrs. McIntyre said and looked at her with approval. The Judge was her first husband, the one who had left her the place. Mrs. Shortley had heard that she had married him when she was thirty and he was seventy-five, thinking she would be rich as soon as he died, but the old man was a scoundrel and when his estate was settled, they found he didn"t have a nickel. All he left her were the fifty acres and the house. But she always spoke of him in a reverent way and quoted his sayings, such as, "One fellow"s misery is the other fellow"s gain," and "The devil you know is better than the devil you don"t."
"However," Mrs. Shortley remarked, "the devil you know is better than the devil you don"t," and she had to turn away so that Mrs. McIntyre would not see her smile. She had found out what the Displaced Person was up to through the old man, Astor, and she had not told anybody but Mr. Shortley. Mr. Shortley had risen straight up in bed like Lazarus from the tomb.
"Shut your mouth!" he had said.
"Yes," she had said.
"Naw!" Mr. Shortley had said.
"Yes," she had said.
Mr. Shortley had fallen back flat.
"The Pole don"t know any better," Mrs. Shortley had said. "I reckon that priest is putting him up to it is all. I blame the priest."
The priest came frequently to see the Guizacs and he would always stop in and visit Mrs. McIntyre too and they would walk around the place and she would point out her improvements and listen to his rattling talk. It suddenly came to Mrs. Shortley that he was trying to persuade her to bring another Polish family onto the place. With two of them here, there would be almost nothing spoken but Polish! The Negroes would be gone and there would be the two families against Mr. Shortley and herself! She began to imagine a war of words, to see the Polish words and the English words coming at each other, stalking forward, not sentences, just words, gabble gabble gabble, flung out high and shrill and stalking forward and then grappling with each other. She saw the Polish words, dirty and all-knowing and unreformed, flinging mud on the clean English words until everything was equally dirty. She saw them all piled up in a room, all the dead dirty words, theirs and hers too, piled up like the naked bodies in the newsreel. G.o.d save me! she cried silently, from the stinking power of Satan I And she started from that day to read her Bible with a new attention. She poured over the Apocalypse and began to quote from the Prophets and before long she had come to a deeper understanding of her existence. She saw plainly that the meaning of the world was a mystery that had been planned and she was not surprised to suspect that she had a special part in the plan because she was strong. She saw that the Lord G.o.d Almighty had created the strong people to do what had to be done and she felt that she would be ready when she was called. Right now she felt that her business was to watch the priest.
His visits irked her more and more. On the last one, he went about picking up feathers off the ground. He found two peac.o.c.k feathers and four or five turkey feathers and an old brown hen feather and took them off with him like a bouquet. This foolish-acting did not deceive Mrs. Shortley any. Here he was: leading foreigners over in h.o.a.rds to places that were not theirs, to cause disputes, to uproot n.i.g.g.e.rs, to plant the Wh.o.r.e of Babylon in the midst of the righteousl Whenever he came on the place, she hid herself behind something and watched until he left.
It was on a Sunday afternoon that she had her vision. She had gone to drive in the cows for Mr. Shortley who had a pain in his knee and she was walking slowly through the pasture, her arms folded, her eyes on the distant low-lying clouds that looked like rows and rows of white fish washed up on a great blue beach. She paused after an incline to heave a sigh of exhaustion for she had an immense weight to carry around and she was not as young as she used to be. At times she could feel her heart, like a child"s fist, clenching and unclenching inside her chest, and when the feeling came, it stopped her thought altogether and she would go about like a large hull of herself, moving for no reason; but she gained this incline without a tremor and stood at the top of it, pleased with herself. Suddenly while she watched, the sky folded back in two pieces like the curtain to a stage and a gigantic figure stood facing her. It was the color of the sun in the early afternoon, white-gold. It was of no definite shape but there were fiery wheels with fierce dark eyes in them, spinning rapidly all around it. She was not able to tell if the figure was going forward or backward because its magnificence was so great. She shut her eyes in order to look at it and it turned blood-red and the wheels turned white. A voice, very resonant, said the one word, "Prophesy!"
She stood there, tottering slightly but still upright, her eyes shut tight and her fists clenched and her straw sun hat low on her forehead. "The children of wicked nations will be butchered," she said in a loud voice. "Legs where arms should be, foot to face, ear in the palm of hand. Who will remain whole? Who will remain whole? Who?"
Presently she opened her eyes. The sky was full of white fish carried lazily on their sides by some invisible current and pieces of the sun, submerged some distance beyond them, appeared from time to time as if they were being washed in the opposite direction. Woodenly she planted one foot in front of the other until she had crossed the pasture and reached the lot. She walked through the barn like one in a daze and did not speak to Mr. Shortley. She continued up the road until she saw the priest"s car parked in front of Mrs. McIntyre"s house. "Here again," she muttered. "Come to destroy."
Mrs. McIntyre and the priest were walking in the yard. In order not to meet them face to face, she turned to the left and entered the feed house, a single-room shack piled on one side with flowered sacks of scratch feed. There were spilled oyster sh.e.l.ls in one corner and a few old dirty calendars on the wall, advertising calf feed and various patent medicine remedies. One showed a bearded gentleman in a frock coat, holding up a bottle, and beneath his feet was the inscription, "I have been made regular by this marvelous disco very!" Mrs. Shortley had always felt close to this man as if he were some distinguished person she was acquainted with but now her mind was on nothing but the dangerous presence of the priest. She stationed herself at a crack between two boards where she could look out and see him and Mrs. McIntyre strolling toward the turkey brooder, which was placed just outside the feed house.
"Arrrrr!" he said as they approached the brooder. "Look at the little biddies!" and he stooped and squinted through the wire.
Mrs. Shortley"s mouth twisted.
"Do you think the Guizacs will want to leave me?" Mrs. McIntyre asked. "Do you think they"ll go to Chicago or some place like that?"
"And why should they do that now?" asked the priest, wiggling his finger at a turkey, his big nose close to the wire.
"Money," Mrs. McIntyre said.
"Arrrr, give them some morrre then," he said indifferently. "They have to get along."
"So do I," Mrs. McIntyre muttered. "It means I"m going to have to get rid o some of these others."
"And arrre the Shortleys satisfactory?" he inquired, paying more attention to the turkeys than to her.
"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 s.p.a.ce 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 soundlya"hardly guessing that her cows would not be milked by Mr. Shortley that morninga"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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sault. 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 gla.s.s, 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 goa"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 hera"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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs 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 n.i.g.g.e.r to work," he said. "Say when that day come, the world be back on its feet."