It required only one or two questions.
Then, sitting on the top step, the fan and the bundle upon her lap, Lena tells her story again, with that patient and transparent recapitulation of a lying child, the squatting overalled men listening quietly.
“That fellow’s name is Bunch,” Varner says. “He’s been working there at the mill about seven years.
How do you know that Burch is there too?”
She is looking away up the road, in the direction of Jefferson.
Her face is calm, waiting, a little detached without being bemused.
“I reckon he’ll be there.
At that planing mill and all.
Lucas always did like excitement.
He never did like to live quiet.
That’s why it never suited him back at Doane’s Mill.
Why he—we decided to make a change: for money and excitement.”
“For money and excitement,” Varner says.
“Lucas ain’t the first young buck that’s throwed over what he was bred to do and them that depended on him doing it, for money and excitement.”
But she is not listening apparently.
She sits quietly on the top step, watching the road where it curves away, empty and mounting, toward Jefferson.
The squatting men along the wall look at her still and placid face and they think as Armstid thought and as Varner thinks: that she is thinking of a scoundrel who deserted her in trouble and who they believe that she will never see again, save his coattails perhaps already boardflat with running.
‘Or maybe it’s about that Sloane’s or Bone’s Mill she is thinking,’ Varner thinks. ‘I reckon that even a fool gal don’t have to come as far as Mississippi to find out that whatever place she run from ain’t going to be a whole lot different or worse than the place she is at.
Even if it has got a brother in it that objects to his sister’s nightprowling,’ thinking I would have done the same as the brother; the father would have done the same.
She has no mother because fatherblood hates with love and pride, but motherblood with hate loves and cohabits.
She is not thinking about this at all.
She is thinking about the coins knotted in the bundle beneath her hands.
She is remembering breakfast, thinking how she can enter the store this moment and buy cheese and crackers and even sardines if she likes.
At Armstid’s she had had but a cup of coffee and a piece of cornbread: nothing more, though Armstid pressed her.
‘I et polite,’ she thinks, her hands lying upon the bundle, knowing the hidden coins, remembering the single cup of coffee, the decorous morsel of strange bread; thinking with a sort of serene pride:
‘Like a lady I et.
Like a lady travelling.
But now I can buy sardines too if I should so wish.’
So she seems to muse upon the mounting road while the slowspitting and squatting men watch her covertly, believing that she is thinking about the man and the approaching crisis, when in reality she is waging a mild battle with that providential caution of the old earth of and with and by which she lives.
This time she conquers.
She rises and walking a little awkwardly, a little carefully, she traverses the ranked battery of maneyes and enters the store, the clerk following.
‘I’m a-going to do it,’ she thinks, even while ordering the cheese and crackers; ‘I’m a-going to do it,’ saying aloud:
“And a box of sardines.” She calls them sour-deens. “A nickel box.”
“We ain’t got no nickel sardines,” the clerk says. “Sardines is fifteen cents.” He also calls them sour-deens.
She muses.
“What have you got in a can for a nickel?”
“Ain’t got nothing except shoeblacking.
I don’t reckon you want that.
Not to eat, noway.”
“I reckon I’ll take the fifteen cent ones, then.” She unties the bundle and the knotted sack.
It requires some time to solve the knots.
But she unties them patiently, one by one, and pays and knots the sack and the bundle again and takes up her purchase.
When she emerges onto the porch there is a wagon standing at the steps.
A man is on the seat.
“Here’s a wagon going to town,” they tell her. “He will take you in.”
Her face wakes, serene, slow, warm.
“Why, you’re right kind,” she says.
The wagon moves slowly, steadily, as if here within the sunny loneliness of the enormous land it were outside of, beyond all time and all haste.
From Varner’s store to Jefferson it is twelve miles.
“Will we get there before dinner time?” she says.