She looks at the other sitting in the chair with her smooth hair and her still hands lying upon her lap and her soft and musing face.
“Like as not, he already sent me the word and it got lost on the way.
It’s a right far piece from here to Alabama even, and I ain’t to Jefferson yet.
I told him I would not expect him to write, being as he ain’t any hand for letters.
‘You just send me your mouthword when you are ready for me,’ I told him.
‘I’ll be waiting.’
It worried me a little at first, after he left, because my name wasn’t Burch yet and my brother and his folks not knowing Lucas as well as I knew him.
How could they?” Into her face there comes slowly an expression of soft and bright surprise, as if she had just thought of something which she had not even been aware that she did not know. “How could they be expected to, you see.
But he had to get settled down first; it was him would have all the trouble of being among strangers, and me with nothing to bother about except to just wait while he had all the bother and trouble.
But after a while I reckon I just got too busy getting this chap up to his time to worry about what my name was or what folks thought.
But me and Lucas don’t need no word promises between us.
It was something unexpected come up, or he even sent the word and it got lost.
So one day I just decided to up and not wait any longer.”
“How did you know which way to go when you started?”
Lena is watching her hands.
They are moving now, plaiting with rapt bemusement a fold of her skirt.
It is not diffidence, shyness.
It is apparently some musing reflex of the hand alone.
“I just kept asking.
With Lucas a lively young fellow that got to know folks easy and quick, I knew that wherever he had been, folks would remember him.
So I kept asking.
And folks was right kind.
And sure enough, I heard two days back on the road that he is in Jefferson, working for the planing mill.”
Mrs. Armstid watches the lowered face.
Her hands are on her hips and she watches the younger woman with an expression of cold and impersonal contempt.
“And you believe that he will be there when you get there.
Granted that he ever was there at all.
That he will hear you are in the same town with him, and still be there when the sun sets.
Lena’s lowered face is grave, quiet.
Her hand has ceased now.
It lies quite still on her lap, as if it had died there.
Her voice is quiet, tranquil, stubborn.
“I reckon a family ought to all be together when a chap comes.
Specially the first one.
I reckon the Lord will see to that.”
“And I reckon He will have to,” Mrs. Armstid says, savagely, harshly.
Armstid is in bed, his head propped up a little, watching her across the footboard as, still dressed, she stoops into the light of the lamp upon the dresser, hunting violently in a drawer.
She produces a metal box and unlocks it with a key suspended about her neck and takes out a cloth sack which she opens and produces a small china effigy of a rooster with a slot in its back.
It jingles with coins as she moves it and upends it and shakes it violently above the top of the dresser, shaking from the slot coins in a meagre dribbling.
Armstid in the bed watches her.
“What are you fixing to do with your eggmoney this time of night?” he says.
“I reckon it’s mine to do with what I like.” She stoops into the lamp, her face harsh, bitter. “God knows it was me sweated over them and nursed them.
You never lifted no hand.”
“Sho,” he says. “I reckon it ain’t any human in this country is going to dispute them hens with you, lessen it’s the possums and the snakes.
That rooster bank, neither,” he says.
Because, stooping suddenly, she jerks off one shoe and strikes the china bank a single shattering blow.
From the bed, reclining, Armstid watches her gather the remaining coins from among the china fragments and drop them with the others into the sack and knot it and reknot it three or four times with savage finality.
“You give that to her,” she says. “And come sunup you hitch up the team and take her away from here.
Take her all the way to Jefferson, if you want.”
“I reckon she can get a ride in from Varner’s store,” he says.