Overmire’s beef sandwich and Blaylock’s spare bologna and cheese, forcing himself to think of something else.
The neatly mowed backyard where he’d ransacked the well. Pretty pink flowers blooming in a white enamel kettle sitting on a tree stump by the back door. The sound of a baby crying from inside the house. A clothesline with white sheets and white diapers and white dishtowels and enough blue denim britches that one pair wouldn’t be missed, and a matching number of blue cambric shirts from which he’d nobly taken the one with a hole in the elbow. And a rainbow of towels, from which he’d selected green because somewhere in the recesses of his memory was a woman with green eyes who’d once been kind to him, making him forever prefer green over all other colors.
The green towel was wet now, wrapped around the Ball jar. He folded it aside, unscrewed the zinc lid, drank and forced himself not to grimace. The buttermilk was sickeningly sweet; even the wet towel hadn’t managed to keep it cool.
With his head tilted back against the bole of the pine tree, Parker saw Overmire watching him with beady mustardseed eyes while stretching to his feet. The jar came down slowly. Equally as slowly, Parker backhanded his lips. Overmire strutted over and stopped beside Will’s outstretched feet, his own widespread, firmly planted, his beefy fists akimbo.
Four days Will Parker had been here, only four this time, but he knew the look on the foreman’s face as if the words had already been spoken.
'Parker?' Overmire said it loud, loud enough so all the others could hear.
Will went stiff, slow-motion like, bringing his back away from the tree and setting the fruit jar down by feel.
The foreman pushed back his straw hat, let his forehead wrinkle so all the men could see how there was nothing else he could do. 'Thought you said you was from Dallas.'
Will knew when to keep his mouth shut. He wiped all expression from his face and lifted his eyes to Overmire’s, chewing a piece of sour apple.
'You sayin’ that’s where you’re from?'
Will rolled to one buttock as if to rise. Overmire planted a boot on his crotch and pushed. Hard. 'I’m talkin’ to you, boy!' he snapped, then let his eyes rove over his underlings to make sure none of them missed this.
Parker flattened both palms against the earth at the sudden jolt of pain. 'I been there,' he answered stoically.
'Been in Huntsville, too, haven’t you, boy?'
The strangling sense of subjugation rose like bile in Parker’s throat. Familiar. Degrading. He felt the eyes of the men measuring him above their half-formed, prepotent grins. But he’d learned not to talk back to that tone of superiority, and especially not to the word 'boy.' He felt the cold sweat break out on his chest, the sense of helplessness at the term calculated to make one man look small, another powerful. With Overmire’s boot exerting pressure, Will repressed the awful need to give vent to the loathing he felt, sealing himself in the cocoon of pretended indifference.
'They only put the tough ones in there, ain’t that right, Parker?' Overmire pushed harder but Will refused to wince. Instead, he clamped a hand on the ankle, forcing the dusty boot aside. Without removing his eyes from the foreman, Will rose, picked up his battered Stetson, whacked it on his thigh and settled the brim low over his eyes.
Overmire chuckled, crossed his burly arms, and fixed the ex-convict with his beady eyes. 'Word came down you killed a woman in a Texas whorehouse and you’re fresh out for it. I don’t think we want your kind around here where we got wives and daughters, do we fellows?' He let his eyes flick to the men briefly.
The fellows had quit rummaging through their lunch pails.
'Well, you got anything to say for yourself, boy?'
Will swallowed, felt the apple skin hitting bottom. 'No, sir, except I got three and a half days’ pay comin’.'
'Three,' Overmire corrected. 'We don’t count no half days around here.'
Will worked a piece of apple peel between his front teeth. His jaw protruded and Harley Overmire balled his fists, getting ready. But Will only stared silently from beneath the brim of his sorry-looking cowboy hat. He didn’t need to lower his eyes from Overmire’s face to know what his fists looked like.
'Three,' Will agreed quietly. But he hurled his apple core out beneath the pines with a fierceness that made the men start their rummaging again. Then he scooped up his towel-wrapped jar and followed Overmire into the office.
When he came back out the men were huddled around the time board. He passed among them, sealed within a bubble of dispassion, folding his nine dollars into his breast pocket, staring straight ahead, avoiding their self- righteous expressions.
'Hey, Parker,' one of them called when he’d passed. 'You might try the Widow Dinsmore’s place. She’s so hard up she’d probably even settle for a jailbird like you, ain’t that right, boys?'
Jeering laughter followed, then a second voice. 'Woman like that who’ll put her card up in a sawmill’s bound to take anything she can git.'
And finally, a third voice. 'You shoulda stepped a little harder on his balls, Harley, so the women around here could sleep better nights.'
Will headed off through the pines. But when he saw the remains of someone’s sandwich, left amid the pine needles for the birds, hunger overcame pride. He picked it up between two fingers as if it were a cigarette, and turned with a forced looseness.
'Anybody mind if I eat this?'
'Hell, no,' called Overmire. 'It’s on me.'
More laughter followed, then, 'Listen, Parker, y’all give crazy Elly Dinsmore a try. No tellin’ but what the two of you might hit it off right nice together. Her advertisin’ for a man and you fresh outa the pen. Could be there’s more’n a piece o’ bread in it for y’!'
Will swung away and started walking. But he balled the bread into a hard knot and flung it back into the pine needles. Stalking away, he shut out the pain and transported himself to a place he’d never seen, where smiles were plentiful, and plates full, and people nice to one another. He no longer believed such a place existed, yet he escaped to it more and more often. When it had served its purpose he returned to reality-a dusty pine forest somewhere in northwest Georgia and a strange road ahead.
What now? he thought. Same old bullshit wherever he went. There was no such thing as serving your time; it was never over. Aw, what the hell did he care? He had no ties in this miserable jerkwater burg. Who ever heard of Whitney, Georgia, anyway? It was nothing but a flyspeck on the map and he could as easily move on as stay.
But a mile up the road he passed the same neatly tended farm where he’d stolen the buttermilk, towel and clothes; a sweet yearning pulled at his insides. A woman stood on the back porch, shaking a rug. Her hair was hidden by a dishtowel, knotted at the front. She was young and pretty and wore a pink apron, and the smell of something baking drifted out and made Will’s stomach rumble. She raised a hand and waved and he hid the towel on his left side, smitten with guilt. He had a wrenching urge to walk up the drive, hand her her belongings and apologize. But he reckoned he’d scare the hell out of her if he did. And besides, he could use the towel, and probably the jar, too, if he walked on to the next town. The clothes on his back were the only ones he had.
He left the farm behind, trudging northward on a gravel road the color of fresh rust. The smell of the pines was inviting, and the look of them, all green and crisp against the red clay earth. There were so many rivers here, fast- flowing streams in a hurry to get to the sea. He’d even seen some waterfalls where the waters rushed out of the Blue Ridge foothills toward the coastal plain to the south. And orchards everywhere-peach, apple, quince and pear. Lord, what it must look like when those fruit trees bloomed. Soft pink clouds, and fragrant, too. Will had discovered within himself a deep need to experience the softer things in life since he’d gotten out of that hard place. Things he’d never noticed before-the beginning bloom on the cheek of a peach, the sun caught on a droplet of dew in a spiderweb, a pink apron on a woman with her hair tied in a clean white dishtowel.
He reached the edge of Whitney, scarcely more than a widening in the pines, a mere slip of a town dozing in the afternoon sun with little more moving than the flies about the tips of the chicory blossoms. He passed an ice house on the outskirts, a tiny railroad depot painted the color of a turnip, a wooden platform stacked with empty chicken crates, the smell of their former occupants rejuvenated by the hot sun. There was a deserted house overgrown with morning glory vines behind a seedy picket fence, then a row of occupied houses, some of red brick, others of Savannah gray, but all with verandas and rocking chairs out front, telling how many people lived in each.
