This road?
It goes to Springvale.
You wait here.
There will be a wagon passing soon that will take you as far as it goes. Thinking,
‘And if he is going all the way to Jefferson, I will be riding. within the hearing of Lucas Burch before his seeing. He will hear the wagon, but he won’t know. So there will be one within his hearing before his seeing.
And then he will see me and he will be excited.
And so there will be two within his seeing before his remembering.’
While Armstid and Winterbottom were squatting against the shady wall of Winterbottom’s stable, they saw her pass in the road.
They saw at once that she was young, pregnant, and a stranger.
“I wonder where she got that belly,” Winterbottom said.
“I wonder how far she has brought it afoot,” Armstid said.
“Visiting somebody back down the road, I reckon,” Winterbottom said.
“I reckon not.
Or I would have heard.
And it ain’t nobody up my way, neither.
I would have heard that, too.”
“I reckon she knows where she is going,” Winterbottom said. “She walks like it.”
“She’ll have company, before she goes much further,” Armstid said.
The woman had now gone on, slowly, with her swelling and unmistakable burden.
Neither of them had seen her so much as glance at them when she passed in a shapeless garment of faded blue, carrying a palm leaf fan and a small cloth bundle. “She ain’t come from nowhere close,” Armstid said. “She’s hitting that lick like she’s been at it for a right smart while and had a right smart piece to go yet.”
“She must be visiting around here somewhere,” Winterbottom said.
“I reckon I would have heard about it,” Armstid said.
The woman went on.
She had not looked back.
She went out of sight up the road: swollen, slow, deliberate, unhurried and tireless as augmenting afternoon itself.
She walked out of their talking too; perhaps out of their minds too.
Because after a while Armstid said what he had come to say.
He had already made two previous trips, coming in his wagon five miles and squatting and spitting for three hours beneath the shady wall of Winterbottom’s barn with the timeless unhaste and indirection of his kind, in order to say it.
It was to make Winterbottom an offer for a cultivator which Winterbottom wanted to sell.
At last Armstid looked at the sun and offered the price which he had decided to offer while lying in bed three nights ago. “I know of one in Jefferson I can buy at that figure,” he said.
“I reckon you better buy it,” Winterbottom said. “It sounds like a bargain.”
“Sho,” Armstid said.
He spat.
He looked again at the sun, and rose. “Well, I reckon I better get on toward home.”
He got into his wagon and waked the mules.
That is, he put them into motion, since only a negro can tell when a mule is asleep or awake.
Winterbottom followed him to the fence, leaning his arms on the top rail.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I’d sho buy that cultivator at that figure.
If you don’t take it, I be dog if I ain’t a good mind to buy it, myself, at that price.
I reckon the fellow that owns it ain’t got a span of mules to sell for about five dollars, has he?”
“Sho,” Armstid said.
He drove on, the wagon beginning to fall into its slow and mile-consuming clatter.
Neither does he look back.
Apparently he is not looking ahead either, because he does not see the woman sitting in the ditch beside the road until the wagon has almost reached the top of the hill.
In the instant in which he recognises the blue dress he cannot tell if she has ever seen the wagon at all. And no one could have known that he had ever looked at her either as, without any semblance of progress in either of them, they draw slowly together as the wagon crawls terrifically toward her in its slow palpable aura of somnolence and red dust in which the steady feet of the mules move dreamlike and punctuate by the sparse jingle of harness and the limber bobbing of jackrabbit ears, the mules still neither asleep nor awake as he halts them.
From beneath a sunbonnet of faded blue, weathered now by other than formal soap and water, she looks up at him quietly and pleasantly: young, pleasantfaced, candid, friendly, and alert.
She does not move yet.
Beneath the faded garment of that same weathered blue her body is shapeless and immobile.
The fan and the bundle lie on her lap.
She wears no stockings.