Her bare feet rest side by side in the shallow ditch.
The pair of dusty, heavy, manlooking shoes beside them are not more inert.
In the halted wagon Armstid sits, humped, bleacheyed.
He sees that the rim of the fan is bound neatly in the same faded blue as the sunbonnet and the dress.
“How far you going?” he says.
“I was trying to get up the road a pieceways before dark,” she says.
She rises and takes up the shoes.
She climbs slowly and deliberately into the road, approaching the wagon.
Armstid does not descend to help her.
He merely holds the team still while she climbs heavily over the wheel and sets the shoes beneath the seat.
Then the wagon moves on.
“I thank you,” she says. “It was right tiring afoot.”
Apparently Armstid has never once looked full at her.
Yet he has already seen that she wears no wedding ring.
He does not look at her now.
Again the wagon settles into its slow clatter.
“How far you come from?” he says.
She expels her breath.
It is not a sigh so much as a peaceful expiration, as though of peaceful astonishment.
“A right good piece, it seems now.
I come from Alabama.”
“Alabama?
In your shape?
Where’s your folks?”
She does not look at him, either.
“I’m looking to meet him up this way.
You might know him.
His name is Lucas Burch.
They told me back yonder a ways that he is in Jefferson, working for the planing mill.”
“Lucas Burch.” Armstid’s tone is almost identical with hers.
They sit side by side on the sagging and brokenspringed seat.
He can see her hands upon her lap and her profile beneath the sunbonnet; from the corner of his eye he sees it.
She seems to be watching the road as it unrolls between the limber ears of the mules. “And you come all the way here, afoot, by yourself, hunting for him?”
She does not answer for a moment.
Then she says:
“Folks have been kind.
They have been right kind.”
“Womenfolks too?” From the corner of his eye he watches her profile, thinking I don’t know what Martha’s going to say thinking,
‘I reckon I do know what Martha’s going to say.
I reckon womenfolks are likely to be good without being very kind.
Men, now, might.
But it’s only a bad woman herself that is likely to be very kind to another woman that needs the kindness’ thinking Yes I do.
I know exactly what Martha is going to say.
She sits a little forward, quite still, her profile quite still, her cheek.
“It’s a strange thing,” she says.
“How folks can look at a strange young gal walking the road in your shape and know that her husband has left her?” She does not move.
The wagon now has a kind of rhythm, its ungreased and outraged wood one with the slow afternoon, the road, the heat.
“And you aim to find him up here.” She does not move, apparently watching the slow road between the ears of the mules, the distance perhaps roadcarved and definite.
“I reckon I’ll find him.
It won’t be hard.