Free The Collected Stories of William Humphrey by William Humphrey

stood looking at Dan as she would at an old no-good hound dog lolling on the porch, then turned and walked around the house.
    IX
    That three acres of truck was not going to make a stand; they both saw that and so did Mr. Johnson. He hadn’t got it in early enough and hadn’t been able to work it like he should have, it had been too hot and dry or too cold and damp and it never got proper spraying and the bugs got at it and it wasn’t a very good piece of land anyway and if anybody needed any more reason, well, it was his, and that ought to be enough.
    They clung as long as they could, holding out against what they knew without saying was their only alternative. But a day came when the last piece of salt pork spread its weak stain through the last pot of beans, when the flour barrel was turned end up and dusted out on a newspaper, when you could just about see the blue flowers right through the pancakes on your plate, then, as if he had timed it to the last mouthful, Laura’s papa pulled up outside the limp gate in his sway-backed wagon behind his draughty mules and sat up on the high spring seat looking down as though he might have revived things no end just by spitting on that ruined soil and wouldn’t do it—which was a lie; he was so dried up himself he couldn’t have brought up a nourishing spit. His face looked eroded and was covered with a maze of capillaries like exposed roots. On top of this a tangle of dry hair drifted like tumbleweed.
    Behind him, piled among their battered belongings, Laura and Dan rode away without a backward glance.
    He was hard up all right, Laura’s papa, always had been, always would be, but his actual condition was never so low as you’d guess from the meal he gave them that first night. You would have thought he expected a bill collector for company. And he was upset that Laura’s mama had put on such a good expensive-looking dress to welcome her daughter home and he found a way to remark two or three times about it being her only one. What it was was her very best guinea-hen print and she sat puffed up in it all evening as if she had an egg but wouldn’t lay it. As her husband offered the Lord his thanks for this and all His blessings—with a look at Dan—a scandalized look sneaked out of the corner of the old woman’s eye and stole upward. She wanted Him and the others as well to know she hadn’t forgot having had more in her day to thank Him for.
    Dan guessed he’d never had more and they were all, it seemed, anxious to assure him that he never had. It looked as if her family had not only known him all his life but known him better than anyone else, better than he knew himself. They could recall accidents he had had and bring them clearly back to him, things he hadn’t thought of for years, and now he supposed he had deliberately tried to forget them and had run for years from admitting this mark that was set on him, it seemed, the day he was born—and rolled out of his crib and got a knot on his head, the old man swore, and swore not to be mean, but you could tell from the look on his face, in genuine astonishment, it all added together so perfectly.
    So perfectly it left not a minute’s doubt in the mind of any of them that he was an absolute leper. Laura got tired of seeing him take it without any fight, but his time was taken up. Something would poke him awake in the morning, urge him to gulp down his coffee, so he could get started doing nothing and thinking nothing, and the effort of it had him worn out by evening. Everything everybody said or did was meant in some way for him, he felt, but it all had so little to do with him. Sometimes he felt like speaking up and getting in a dig himself at himself when they were all having such a good time running him down.
    Laura believed he wasn’t taking his position seriously enough. Instead of resenting her folks’ charity as she had at first, she had come to