“Well, we all got to make a livin’.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “On’y I wisht they was some way to make her ’thout takin’ her away from somebody else.”
The men shifted again. And Pa said, “We’ll get movin’ smart early. Look, mister. We paid. This here fella is part a our folks. Can’t he stay? We paid.”
“Half a dollar a car,” said the proprietor.
“Well, he ain’t got no car. Car’s out in the road.”
“He came in a car,” said the proprietor. “Ever’body’d leave their car out there an’ come in an’ use my place for nothin’.”
Tom said, “We’ll drive along the road. Meet ya in the morning. We’ll watch for ya. Al can stay an’ Uncle John can come with us—” He looked at the proprietor. “That awright with you?”
He made a quick decision, with a concession in it. “If the same number stays that come an’ paid—that’s awright.”
Tom brought out his bag of tobacco, a limp gray rag by now, with a little damp tobacco dust in the bottom of it. He made a lean cigarette and tossed the bag away. “We’ll go along pretty soon,” he said.
Pa spoke generally to the circle. “It’s dirt hard for folks to tear up an’ go. Folks like us that had our place. We ain’t shif’less. Till we got tractored off, we was people with a farm.”