A prim reply to this salutation. Disapproval writ large on the farm-wife’s flushed face.
“Hello, Cornelia!”
A pretended start, notable for its bad acting. “Oh, is it you, Mrs. DeJong! Sun’s in my eyes. I couldn’t think it was you like that.”
Women’s eyes, hostile, cold, peering.
Five o’clock. Six. The boy climbed over the wheel, filled a tin pail with water at a farmhouse well. They ate and drank as they rode along, for there was no time to lose. Bread and meat and pickles and pie. There were vegetables in the wagon, ripe for eating. There were other varieties that Selina might have cooked at home in preparation for this meal—German celery root boiled tender and soaked in vinegar; red beets, pickled; onions; coleslaw; beans. They would have regarded these with an apathetic eye all too familiar with the sight of them. Selina knew now why the Pools’ table, in her school-teacher days, had been so lacking in the green stuff she had craved. The thought of cooking the spinach which she had planted, weeded, spaded, tended, picked, washed, bunched, filled her with a nausea of distaste such as she might have experienced at the contemplation of cannibalism.
The boy had started out bravely enough in the heat of the day, sitting up very straight beside his mother, calling to the horses, shrieking and waving his arms at chickens that flew squawking across the road. Now he began to droop. Evening was coming on. A cool blanket of air from the lake on the east enveloped them with the suddenness characteristic of the region, and the mist began to drift across the prairie, softening the autumn stubble, cooling the dusty road, misting the parched willows by the roadside, hazing the shabby squat farmhouses.
She brushed away the crumbs, packed the remaining bread and meat thriftily into the basket and covered it with a napkin against the boy’s future hunger should he waken in the night.
“Sleepy, Sobig?”
“No. Should say not.” His lids were heavy. His face and body, relaxed, took on the soft baby contours that come with weariness. The sun was low. Sunset gloried the west in a final flare of orange and crimson. Dusk. The boy drooped against her heavy, sagging. She wrapped the old black fascinator about him. He opened his eyes, tugged at the wrapping about his shoulders. “Don’t want the old thing . . . fas’nator . . . like a girl . . .” drooped again with a sigh and found the soft curve where her side just cushioned his head. In the twilight the dust gleamed white on weeds, and brush, and grass. The far-off mellow sonance of a cowbell. Horses’ hoofs clopping up behind them, a wagon passing in a cloud of dust, a curious backward glance, or a greeting exchanged.
One of the Ooms boys, or Jakob Boomsma. “You’re never going to market, Mis’ DeJong!” staring with china-blue eyes at her load.