Light in August Read Free

thinking   
Yes I do. I know exactly what Martha is going to say
    She sits a little forward, quite still, her profile quite still, her cheek. “It’s a strange thing,” she says.
    “How folks can look at a strange young gal walking the road in your shape and know that her husband has left her?” She does not move. The wagon now has a kind of rhythm, its ungreased and outraged wood one with the slow afternoon, the road, the heat. “And you aim to find him up here.”
    She does not move, apparently watching the slow road between the ears of the mules, the distance perhaps road-carved and definite. “I reckon I’ll find him. It wont be hard. He’ll be where the most folks are gathered together, and the laughing and joking is. He always was a hand for that.”
    Armstid grunts, a sound savage, brusque. “Get up, mules,” he says; he says to himself, between thinking and saying aloud: ‘I reckon she will. I reckon that fellow is fixing to find that he made a bad mistake when he stopped this side of Arkansas, or even Texas.’
    The sun is slanting, an hour above the horizon now, above the swift coming of the summer night. The lane turns from the road, quieter even than the road. “Here we are,” Armstid says.
    The woman moves at once. She reaches down and finds the shoes; apparently she is not even going to delay the wagon long enough to put them on. “I thank you kindly,” she says. “It was a help.”
    The wagon is halted again. The woman is preparing to descend. “Even if you get to Varner’s store before sundown, you’ll still be twelve miles from Jefferson,” Armstid says.
    She holds the shoes, the bundle, the fan awkwardly in one hand, the other free to help her down. “I reckon I better get on,” she says.
    Armstid does not touch her. “You come on and stay the night at my house,” he says; “where womenfolks——where a woman can … if you——You come on, now. I’ll take you on to Varner’s first thing in the morning, and you can get a ride in to town. There will be somebody going, on a Saturday. He aint going to get away on you overnight. If he is in Jefferson at all, he will still be there tomorrow.”
    She sits quite still, her possessions gathered into her hand for dismounting. She is looking ahead, to where the road curves on and away, crossslanted with shadows. “I reckon I got a few days left.”
    “Sho. You got plenty of time yet. Only you are liable to have some company at any time now that cant walk. You come on home with me.” He puts the mules into motion without waiting for a reply. The wagon enters the lane, the dim road. The woman sits back, though she still holds the fan, the bundle, the shoes.
    “I wouldn’t be beholden,” she says. “I wouldn’t trouble.”
    “Sho,” Armstid says. “You come on with me.” For the first time the mules move swiftly of their own accord. “Smelling corn,” Armstid says, thinking ‘But that’s the woman of it. Her own self one of the first ones to cut the ground from under a sister woman, she’ll walk the public country herself without shame because she knows that folks, menfolks, will take care of her. She dont care nothing about womenfolks. It wasn’t any woman that got her into what she dont even call trouble. Yes, sir. You just let one of them getmarried or get into trouble without being married, and right then and there is where she secedes from the woman race and species and spends the balance of her life trying to get joined up with the man race. That’s why they dip snuff and smoke and want to vote.’
    When the wagon passes the house and goes on toward the barnlot, his wife is watching it from the front door. He does not look in that direction; he does not need to look to know that she will be there, is there. ‘Yes,’ he thinks, with sardonic ruefulness, turning the mules into the open gate, ‘I know exactly what she is going to say. I reckon I know exactly.’ He halts the wagon. He does not need to look to