The driver spits.
“We mought,” he says.
Apparently he has never looked at her, not even when she got into the wagon.
Apparently she has never looked at him, either.
She does not do so now.
“I reckon you go to Jefferson a right smart.”
He says,
“Some.”
The wagon creaks on.
Fields and woods seem to hang in some inescapable middle distance, at once static and fluid, quick, like mirages.
Yet the wagon passes them.
“I reckon you don’t know anybody in Jefferson named Lucas Burch.”
“Burch?”
“I’m looking to meet him there.
He works at the planing mill.”
“No,” the driver says. “I don’t know that I know him.
But likely there is a right smart of folks in Jefferson I don’t know.
Likely he is there.”
“I’ll declare, I hope so.
Travelling is getting right bothersome.”
The driver does not look at her.
“How far have you come, looking for him?”
“From Alabama.
It’s a right far piece.”
He does not look at her.
His voice is quite casual.
“How did your folks come to let you start out, in your shape?”
“My folks are dead.
I live with my brother.
I just decided to come on.”
“I see.
He sent you word to come to Jefferson.”
She does not answer.
He can see beneath the sunbonnet her calm profile.
The wagon goes on, slow, timeless.
The red and unhurried miles unroll beneath the steady feet of the mules, beneath the creaking and clanking wheels.
The sun stands now high overhead; the shadow of the sunbonnet now falls across her lap.
She looks up at the sun.
“I reckon it’s time to eat,” she says.
He watches from the corner of his eye as she opens the cheese and crackers and the sardines and offers them.
“I wouldn’t care for none,” he says.
“I’d take it kind for you to share.”
“I wouldn’t care to.
You go ahead and eat.”
She begins to eat. She eats slowly, steadily, sucking the rich sardine oil from her fingers with slow and complete relish.
Then she stops, not abruptly, yet with utter completeness, her jaw stilled in midchewing, a bitten cracker in her hand and her face lowered a little and her eyes, blank, as if she were listening to something very far away or so near as to be inside her.
Her face has drained of color, of its full, hearty blood, and she sits quite still, hearing and feeling the implacable and immemorial earth, but without fear or alarm.
‘It’s twins at least,’ she says to herself, without lip movement, without sound.
Then the spasm passes.
She eats again.