“Why don't you marry Charley Long? He's crazy for you, and he ain't a drinkin' man.”
“I guess he gets outside his share of beer,” Saxon retorted.
“That's right,” her brother supplemented. “An' I know for a fact that he keeps a keg in the house all the time as well.”
“Maybe you've been guzzling from it,” Sarah snapped.
“Maybe I have,” Tom said, wiping his mouth reminiscently with the back of his hand.
“Well, he can afford to keep a keg in the house if he wants to,” she returned to the attack, which now was directed at her husband as well. “He pays his bills, and he certainly makes good money—better than most men, anyway.”
“An' he hasn't a wife an' children to watch out for,” Tom said.
“Nor everlastin' dues to unions that don't do him no good.”
“Oh, yes, he has,” Tom urged genially. “Blamed little he'd work in that shop, or any other shop in Oakland, if he didn't keep in good standing with the Blacksmiths. You don't understand labor conditions, Sarah. The unions have got to stick, if the men aren't to starve to death.”
“Oh, of course not,” Sarah sniffed. “I don't understand anything. I ain't got a mind. I'm a fool, an' you tell me so right before the children.” She turned savagely on her eldest, who startled and shrank away. “Willie, your mother is a fool. Do you get that? Your father says she's a fool—says it right before her face and yourn. She's just a plain fool. Next he'll be sayin' she's crazy an' puttin' her away in the asylum. An' how will you like that, Willie? How will you like to see your mother in a straitjacket an' a padded cell, shut out from the light of the sun an' beaten like a nigger before the war, Willie, beaten an' clubbed like a regular black nigger? That's the kind of a father you've got, Willie. Think of it, Willie, in a padded cell, the mother that bore you, with the lunatics screechin' an' screamin' all around, an' the quick-lime eatin' into the dead bodies of them that's beaten to death by the cruel wardens—”