• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 5658 0

leave her in the middle of the road. And that if my wife was to hear bout me travelling the country with a goodlooking country gal and a three weeks’ old baby, even if she did claim she was hunting for her husband. Or both husbands now. So we ate and then I said, ‘Well, I got a long road and I reckon I better get started.’ And she never said nothing at all. And when I looked at her I saw that her face was just as quiet and calm as it had ever been. I be dog if she was even surprised or anything. And there I was, not knowing what to do with her, and she done already packed up her things and even swept the truck out with a gum branch before she put in that paper suitcase and made a kind of cushion with the folded blanket at the back end of the truck; and I says to myself, ‘It ain’t any wonder you get along. When they up and run away on you, you just pick up whatever they left and go on.’—‘I reckon I’ll ride back here,’ she says.

“ ‘It’ll be kind of rough on the baby,’ I says.

“ ‘I reckon I can hold him up,’ she says.

“ ‘Suit yourself,’ I says. And we drove off, with me hanging out the seat to look back, hoping that he would show up before we got around the curve. But he never. Talk about a fellow being caught in the depot with a strange baby on his hands. Here I was with a strange woman and a baby too, expecting every car that come up from behind and passed us to be full of husbands and wives too, let alone sheriffs. We were getting close to the Tennessee line then and I had my mind all fixed how I would either burn that new truck up or get to a town big enough to have one of these ladies’ welfare societies in it that I could turn her over to. And now and then I would look back, hoping that maybe he had struck out afoot after us, and I would see her sitting there with her face as calm as church, holding that baby up so it could eat and ride the bumps at the same time. You can’t beat them.” He lies in the bed, laughing. “Yes, sir. I be dog if you can beat them.”

Then what? What did she do then?

Nothing. Just sitting there, riding, looking out like she hadn’t ever seen country—roads and trees and fields and telephone poles—before in her life. She never saw him at all until he come around to the back door of the truck.’ She never had to. All she needed to do was wait. And she knew that.

Him?

Sho. He was standing at the side of the road when we come around the curve. Standing there, face and no face, hangdog and determined and calm too, like he had done desperated himself up for the last time, to take the last chance, and that now he knew he wouldn’t ever have to desperate himself again He continues: “He never looked at me at all. I just stopped the truck and him already running back to go around to the door where she was sitting. And he come around the back of it and he stood there, and her not even surprised. ‘I done come too far now,’ he says. ‘I be dog if I’m going to quit now.’ And her looking at him like she had known all the time what he was going to do before he even knew himself that he was going to, and that whatever he done, he wasn’t going to mean it.

“ ‘Ain’t nobody never said for you to quit,’ she says.” He laughs, lying in the bed, laughing. “Yes, sir. You can’t beat a woman. Because do you know what I think? I think she was just travelling. I don’t think she had any idea of finding whoever it was she was following. I don’t think she had ever aimed to, only she hadn’t told him yet. I reckon this was the first time she had ever been further away from home than she could walk back before sundown in her life. And that she had got along all right this far, with folks taking good care of her. And so I think she had just made up her mind to travel a little further and see as much as she could, since I reckon she knew that when she settled down this time, it would likely be for the rest of her life. That’s what I think. Sitting back there in that truck, with him by her now and the. baby that hadn’t never stopped eating, that had been eating breakfast now for about ten miles, like one of these dining cars on the