Nothing.
Just sitting there, riding, looking out like she hadn’t ever seen country—roads and trees and fields and telephone poles—before in her life.
She never saw him at all until he come around to the back door of the truck.’
She never had to.
All she needed to do was wait.
And she knew that.
Him?
Sho.
He was standing at the side of the road when we come around the curve. Standing there, face and no face, hangdog and determined and calm too, like he had donedesperated himself up for the last time, to take the last chance, and that now he knew he wouldn’t ever have to desperate himself again He continues:
“He never looked at me at all.
I just stopped the truck and him already running back to go around to the door where she was sitting.
And he come around the back of it and he stood there, and her not even surprised.
‘I done come too far now,’ he says. ‘I be dog if I’m going to quit now.’ And her looking at him like she had known all the time what he was going to do before he even knew himself that he was going to, and that whatever he done, he wasn’t going to mean it.
“ ‘Ain’t nobody never said for you to quit,’ she says.”
He laughs, lying in the bed, laughing.
“Yes, sir.
You can’t beat a woman.
Because do you know what I think?
I think she was just travelling.
I don’t think she had any idea of finding whoever it was she was following.
I don’t think she had ever aimed to, only she hadn’t told him yet.
I reckon this was the first time she had ever been further away from home than she could walk back before sundown in her life.
And that she had got along all right this far, with folks taking good care of her.
And so I think she had just made up her mind to travel a little further and see as much as she could, since I reckon she knew that when she settled down this time, it would likely be for the rest of her life.
That’s what I think.
Sitting back there in that truck, with him by her now and the. baby that hadn’t never stopped eating, that had been eating breakfast now for about ten miles, like one of these dining cars on the train, and her looking out and watching the telephone poles and the fences passing like it was a circus parade.
Because after a while I says,
‘Here comes Saulsbury,’ and she says,
“ ‘What?’ and I says,
“ ‘Saulsbury, Tennessee,’ and I looked back and saw her face. And it was like it was already fixed and waiting to be surprised, and that she knew that when the surprise come, she was going to enjoy it.
And it did come and it did suit her.
Because she said,
“ ‘My, my.
A body does get around.
Here we ain’t been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it’s already Tennessee.’ ”