I says when I eat bread I'll do it at the table.
I says you always talking about how much you give up for us when you could buy ten new dresses a year on the money you spend for those dam patent medicines.
It's not something to cure it I need it's just an even break not to have to have them but as long as I have to work ten hours a day to support a kitchen full of niggers in the style they're accustomed to and send them to the show where every other nigger in the county, only he was late already.
By the time he got there it would be over.
After a while he got up to the car and when I finally got it through his head if two people in a ford had passed him, he said yes.
So I went on, and when I came to where the wagon road turned off I could see the tire tracks.
Ab Russell was in his lot, but I didn't bother to ask him and I hadn't got out of sight of his barn hardly when I saw the ford. They had tried to hide it.
Done about as well at it as she did at everything else she did.
Like I say it's not that I object to so much; maybe she cant help that, it's because she hasn't even got enough consideration for her own family to have any discretion.
I'm afraid all the time I'll run into them right in the middle of the street or under a wagon on the square, like a couple of dogs.
I parked and got out.
And now I'd have to go way around and cross a plowed field, the only one I had seen since I left town, with every step like somebody was walking along behind me, hitting me on the head with a club.
I kept thinking that when I got across the field at least I'd have something level to walk on, that wouldn't jolt me every step, but when I got into the woods it was full of underbrush and I had to twist around through it, and then I came to a ditch full of briers.
I went along it for a while, but it got thicker and thicker, and all the time Earl probably telephoning home about where I was and getting Mother all upset again.
When I finally got through I had had to wind around so much that I had to stop and figure out just where the car would be.
I knew they wouldn't be far from it, just under the closest bush, so I turned and worked back toward the road.
Then I couldn't tell just how far I was, so I'd have to stop and listen, and then with my legs not using so much blood, it all would go into my head like it would explode any minute, and the sun getting down just to where it could shine straight into my eyes and my ears ringing so I couldn't hear anything.
I went on, trying to move quiet, then I heard a dog or something and I knew that when he scented me he'd have to come helling up, then it would be all off.
I had gotten beggar lice and twigs and stuff all over me, inside my clothes and shoes and all, and then I happened to look around and I had my hand right on a bunch of poison oak.
The only thing I couldn't understand was why it was just poison oak and not a snake or something.
So I didn't even bother to move it.
I just stood there until the dog went away.
Then I went on.
I didn't have any idea where the car was now.
I couldn't think about anything except my head, and I'd just stand in one place and sort of wonder if I had really seen a ford even, and I didn't even care much whether I had or not.
Like I say, let her lay out all day and all night with everthing in town that wears pants, what do I care.
I dont owe anything to anybody that has no more consideration for me, that wouldn't be a dam bit above planting that ford there and making me spend a whole afternoon and Earl taking her back there and showing her the books just because he's too dam virtuous for this world.
I says you'll have one hell of a time in heaven, without anybody's business to meddle in only dont you ever let me catch you at it I says, I close my eyes to it because of your grandmother, but just you let me catch you doing it one time on this place, where my mother lives.
These dam little slick haired squirts, thinking they are raising so much hell, I'll show them something about hell I says, and you too.
I'll make him think that dam red tie is the latch string to hell, if he thinks he can run the woods with my niece.
With the sun and all in my eyes and my blood going so I kept thinking every time my head would go on and burst and get it over with, with briers and things grabbing at me, then I came onto the sand ditch where they had been and I recognised the tree where the car was, and just as I got out of the ditch and started running I heard the car start. It went off fast, blowing the horn.
They kept on blowing it, like it was saying Yah.
Yah.
Yaaahhhhhhhh, going out of sight.
I got to the road just in time to see it go out of sight.
By the time I got up to where my car was, they were clean out of sight, the horn still blowing.
Well, I never thought anything about it except I was saying Run.
Run back to town.
Run home and try to convince Mother that I never saw you in that car.
Try to make her believe that I dont know who he was.
Try to make her believe that I didn't miss ten feet of catching you in that ditch.
Try to make her believe you were standing up, too.
It kept on saying Yahhhhh, Yahhhhh, Yaaahhhhhhhhh, getting fainter and fainter.
Then it quit, and I could hear a cow lowing up at Russell's barn.
And still I never thought.
I went up to the door and opened it and raised my foot.
I kind of thought then that the car was leaning a little more than the slant of the road would be, but I never found it out until I got in and started off.
Well, I just sat there.
It was getting on toward sundown, and town was about five miles.
They never even had guts enough to puncture it, to jab a hole in it.