I just never thought anything about it, except to wonder how a young, strapping gal like her ever come to take up with him.
It wasn’t anything wrong with him.
He looked like a good fellow, the kind that would hold a job steady and work at the same job a long time, without bothering anybody about a raise neither, long as they let him keep on working.
That was what he looked like.
He looked like except when he was at work, he would just be something found.
I just couldn’t imagine anybody, any woman, knowing that they had ever slept with him, let alone having anything to show folks to prove it.”
Ain’t you shamed? his wife says.
Talking that way before a ladyThey are talking in the dark.
Anyway, I can’t see you blushing any he says.
He continues:
“I never thought anything about it until that night when we camped.
She was sitting up on the seat by me, and I was talking to her, like a fellow would, and after a while it begun to come out how they had come from Alabama.
She kept on saying,
‘We come,’ and so I thought she meant her and the fellow in the back.
About how they had been on the road nigh eight weeks now.
‘You ain’t had that chap no eight weeks,’ I says.
‘Not if I know color,’ and she said it was just born three weeks ago, down at Jefferson, and I said, “Oh. Where they lynched that nigger.
You must have been there then,’ and she clammed up.
Like he had done told her not to talk about it.
I knowed that’s what it was.
So we rode on and then it was coming toward night and I said, ‘We’ll be in a town soon.
I ain’t going to sleep in town.
But if you all want to go on with me tomorrow, I’ll come back to the hotel for you in the morning about six o’clock,’ and she sat right still, like she was waiting for him to say, and after a while he says,
“ ‘I reckon with this here truck house you don’t need to worry about hotels,’ and I never said anything and we was coming into the town and he said, ‘Is this here any size town?’
“ ‘I don’t know,’ I says. ‘I reckon they’ll have a boarding house or something here though.’
And he says,
“ ‘I was wondering if they would have a tourist camp.’ And I never said anything and he said, ‘With tents for hire.
These here hotels are high, and with folks that have a long piece to go.’ They hadn’t never yet said where they was going.
It was like they didn’t even know themselves, like they was just waiting to see where they could get to.
But I didn’t know that, then.
But I knowed what he wanted me to say, and that he wasn’t going to come right out and ask me himself.
Like if the Lord aimed for me to say it, I would say it, and if the Lord aimed for him to go to a hotel and pay maybe three dollars for a room, he would do that too.
So I says,
“ ‘Well, it’s a warm night.
And if you folks don’t mind a few mosquitoes and sleeping on them bare boards in the truck.’
And he says,
“ ‘Sho.
It will be fine.
It’ll be mighty fine for you to let her.’ I noticed then how he said her.
And I begun to notice how there was something funny and kind of strained about him.
Like when a man is determined to work himself up to where he will do something he wants to do and that he is scared to do.
I don’t mean it was like he was scared of what might happen to him, but like it was something that he would die before he would even think about doing it if he hadn’t just tried everything else until he was desperate.
That was before I knew.
I just couldn’t understand what in the world it could be then.
And if it hadn’t been for that night and what happened, I reckon I would not have known at all when they left me at Jackson.”
What was it he aimed to do? the wife says.
You wait till I come to that part.
Maybe I’ll show you, too He continues:
“So we stopped in front of the store.
He was already jumping out before the truck had stopped.