“What’s furthermore,” she said suddenly, “Sledgewig said as soon as her
papa saved the money, he was going to buy him a used car. Once they get them a used car, they’ll leave you.”
“I can’t pay him enough for him to save money,” Mrs. Mclntyre said.
“I’m not worrying about that. Of course,” she said then, “if Mr. Shortley got incapacitated, I would have to use Mr. Guizac in the dairy all the time and I would have to pay him more. He doesn’t smoke,” she said, and it was the fifth time within the week that she had pointed this out.
“It is no man,” Mrs. Shortley said emphatically, “that works as hard as
Chancey, or is as easy with a cow, or is more of a Christian,” and she folded her arms and her gaze pierced the distance. The noise of the tractor and cutter increased and Mr. Guizac appeared coming around the other side of the cane row. “Which can not be said about everybody,” she muttered. She wondered whether, if the Pole found Chancey’s still, he would know what it was. The trouble with these people was, you couldn’t tell what they knew.
Every time Mr. Guizac smiled, Europe stretched out in Mrs. Shortley’s imagination, mysterious and evil, the devil’s experiment station.
The tractor, the cutter, the wagon passed, rattling and rumbling and
grinding before them. “Think how long that would have taken with men and mules to do it,” Mrs. Mclntyre shouted. “We’ll get this whole bottom cut within two days at this rate.”
“Maybe,” Mrs. Shortley muttered, “if don’t no terrible accident occur.”
She thought how the tractor had made mules worthless. Nowadays you couldn’t give away a mule. The next thing to go, she reminded herself, will be niggers.
In the afternoon she explained what was going to happen to them to
Astor and Sulk who were in the cow lot, filling the manure spreader. She sat down next to the block of salt under a small shed, her stomach in her lap, her arms on top of it. “All you colored people better look out,” she said. “You know how much you can get for a mule.”
“Nothing, no indeed,” the old man said, “not one thing.” “Before it was a tractor,” she said, “it could be a mule. And before it was
a Displaced Person, it could be a nigger. The time is going to come,” she prophesied, “when it won’t be no more occasion to speak of a nigger.”
The old man laughed politely. “Yes indeed,” he said. “Ha ha.” The young one didn’t say anything. He only looked sullen but when she
had gone in the house, he said, “Big Belly act like she know everything.”