“Heh! Get your horse outta here! What the hell!”
“How much for the whole barrel?”
“Got any beans? No, don’t want no cauliflower. Beans!”
“Tough!”
“Well, keep ’em. I don’t want ’em.”
“Quarter for the sack.”
“G’wan, them ain’t five-pound heads. Bet they don’t come four pounds to the head.”
“Who says they don’t!”
“Gimme five bushels them.”
Food for Chicago’s millions. In and out of the wagons. Under horses’ hoofs. Bare-footed children, baskets on their arms, snatching bits of fallen vegetables from the cobbles. Gutter Annie, a shawl pinned across her pendulous breasts, scavengering a potato there, an onion fallen to the street, scraps of fruit and green stuff in the ditch. Big Kate buying carrots, parsley, turnips, beets, all slightly wilted and cheap, which she would tie into bunches with her bit of string and sell to the real grocers for soup greens.