“From Poland.”
“In Pole it ain’t like it is here,” he said. “They got different ways of doing,” and he began to mumble unintelligibly.
“What are you saying?” she said. “If you have anything to say about him, say it and say it aloud.”
He was silent, bending his knees precariously and edging the rake along the underside of the trough.
“If you know anything he’s done that he shouldn’t, I expect you to report it to me,” she said.
“It warn’t like it was what he should ought or oughtn’t,” he muttered. “It was like what nobody else don’t do.”
“You don’t have anything against him,” she said shortly, “and he’s here to stay.”
“We ain’t never had one like him before is all,” he murmured and gave his polite laugh.
“Times are changing,” she said. “Do you know what’s happening to this world? It’s swelling up. It’s getting so full of people that only the smart thrifty energetic ones are going to survive,” and she tapped the words, smart, thrifty, and energetic out on the palm of her hand. Through the far end of the stall she could see down the road to where the Displaced Person was standing in the open barn door with the green hose in his hand. There was a certain stiffness about his figure that seemed to make it necessary for her to approach him slowly, even in her thoughts. She had decided this was because she couldn’t hold an easy conversation with him. Whenever she said anything to him, she found herself shouting and nodding extravagantly and she would be conscious that one of the Negroes was leaning behind the nearest shed, watching.
“No indeed!” she said, sitting down on one of the feed racks and folding her arms, “I’ve made up my mind that I’ve had enough trashy people on this place to last me a lifetime and I’m not going to spend my last years fooling with Shortleys and Ringfields and Collins when the world is full of people who
“Howcome they so many extra?” he asked.
“People are selfish,” she said. “They have too many children. There’s no sense in it any more.”
He had picked up the wheelbarrow handles and was backing out the door and he paused, half in the sunlight and half out, and stood there chewing his gums as if he had forgotten which direction he wanted to move in.
“What you colored people don’t realize,” she said, “is that I’m the one around here who holds all the strings together. If you don’t work, I don’t make any money and I can’t pay you. You’re all dependent on me but you each and every one act like the shoe is on the other foot.”
It was not possible to tell from his face if he heard her. Finally he backed out with the wheelbarrow. “Judge say the devil he know is better than the devil he don’t,” he said in a clear mutter and turned and trundled off.
She got up and followed him, a deep vertical pit appearing suddenly in the center of her forehead, just under the red bangs. “The Judge has long since ceased to pay the bills around here,” she called in a piercing voice.
He was the only one of her Negroes who had known the Judge and he thought this gave him title. He had had a low opinion of Mr. Crooms and Mr. McIntyre, her other husbands, and in his veiled polite way, he had congratulated her after each of her divorces. When he thought it necessary, he would work under a window where he knew she was sitting and talk to himself, a careful roundabout discussion, question and answer and then refrain. Once she had got up silently and slammed the window down so hard that he had fallen backwards off his feet. Or occasionally he spoke with the peacock. The cock would follow him around the place, his steady eye on the ear of corn that stuck up from the old man’s back pocket or he would sit near him and pick himself. Once from the open kitchen door, she had heard him say to the bird, “I remember when it was twenty of you walking about this place and now it’s only you and two hens. Crooms it was twelve. McIntyre it was five. You and two hens now.”
And that time she had stepped out of the door onto the porch and said, “MISTER Crooms and MISTER McIntyre! And I don’t want to hear you call either of them anything else again. And you can understand this: when that peachicken dies there won’t be any replacements.”
She kept the peacock only out of a superstitious fear of annoying the Judge in his grave. He had liked to see them walking around the place for he said they made him feel rich. Of her three husbands, the Judge was the one most present to her although he was the only one she had buried. He was in the family graveyard, a little space fenced in the middle of the back cornfield, with his mother and father and grandfather and three great aunts and two infant cousins. Mr. Crooms, her second, was forty miles away in the state asylum and Mr. McIntyre, her last, was intoxicated, she supposed, in some hotel room in Florida. But the Judge, sunk in the cornfield with his family, was always at home.
She had married him when he was an old man and because of his money but there had been another reason that she would not admit then, even to herself: she had liked him. He was a dirty snuff-dipping Court House figure, famous all over the county for being rich, who wore hightop shoes, a string tie, a gray suit with a black stripe in it, and a yellowed panama hat, winter and summer. His teeth and hair were tobacco-colored and his face a clay pink pitted and tracked with mysterious prehistoric-looking marks as if he had been unearthed among fossils. There had been a peculiar odor about him of sweaty fondled bills but he never carried money on him or had a nickel to show. She was his secretary for a few months and the old man with his sharp eye had seen at once that here was a woman who admired him for himself. The three years that he lived after they married were the happiest and most prosperous of Mrs. McIntyre’s life, but when he died his estate proved to be bankrupt. He left her a mortgaged house and fifty acres that he had managed to cut the timber off before he died. It was as if, as the final triumph of a successful life, he had been able to take everything with him.
But she had survived. She had survived a succession of tenant farmers and dairymen that the old man himself would have found hard to outdo, and she had been able to meet the constant drain of a tribe of moody unpredictable Negroes, and she had even managed to hold her own against the incidental bloodsuckers, the cattle dealers and lumber men and the buyers and sellers of anything who drove up in pieced-together trucks and honked in the yard.
She stood slightly reared back with her arms folded under her smock and a satisfied expression on her face as she watched the Displaced Person turn off the hose and disappear inside the barn. She was sorry that the poor man had been chased out of Poland and run across Europe and had had to take up in a tenant shack in a strange country, but she had not been responsible for any of this. She had had a hard time herself. She knew what it was to struggle. People ought to have to struggle. Mr. Guizac had probably had everything given to him all the way across Europe and over here. He had probably not had to struggle enough. She had given him a job. She didn’t know if he was grateful or not. She didn’t know anything about him except that he did the work. The truth was that he was not very real to her yet. He was a kind of miracle that she had seen happen and that she talked about but that she still didn’t believe.