Free Proud Flesh by William Humphrey Page B

a good rental on it.”
    They did cost a lot of money and the upkeep on them was high. But that would sure fix her wagon. She would find it hard to two-time him with something that looked like a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a firetruck.
    â€œLeft about half of the cotton in the field.”
    â€œHah.”
    â€œAh, well, we’ve seen some changes in our time, you and me, eh, Clar’nce? Seen mules go, and now the nigger’ll go the way of the mule. It’s just a matter of time.”

X
    The shadow of the pear tree contracted like a drying water stain until by noon it lay round and hard-edged directly underneath the branches, and there it stayed, as if seeking shade itself, until well past three o’clock. Then it began venturing slowly away from the trunk on the other side. The fallen and fermenting pears simmered in the sun.
    At first the sound was like the hum a highwire makes when you lay your ear to the pole. The conversation sputtered and died as one by one, like grazing sheep, the men lifted their heads and listened toward the west. It was a car on the county road. They could place it, could clock it by ear. Within moments the volume had swelled to a loud buzz, causing one of the listeners to expel his breath in a low, unformed, dry-lipped whistle. Soon it attained the high fierce snarl of an outboard motor, the lead one in a boat race, and the men beneath the pear tree began unconsciously to lean forward, rising slightly on the balls of their feet. By the time the car neared the corner a mile away where the dirt road to the Renshaw place made a right angle junction with the paved road, the engine had the desperate pitch of a chain saw ripping through a knot. They waited, wincing. It went into the turn with a screech of tires that affected the hearers like a dentist’s drill striking a nerve. Then followed a moment’s silence …
    By tradition, and by law, the right of way on Texas roads belongs at all times to livestock. The driver of a car coming upon a sow and her farrow wallowing in a mudhole or a hen and her brood taking a dustbath is expected to stop and get out and request them to yield. If he should happen to kill one, the Lord help him—the law won’t. No kind of dressed meat comes as high-priced as that slaughtered on a radiator grill. To follow along for two or three miles behind a drove of hogs or a herd of plodding cattle down a dusty shadeless road on a Texas August afternoon can be trying; but the right of way is theirs, and even honking the horn can be risky: they might take fright and stampede and hurt themselves, or at the very least, in that melting heat, run a lot of actionable weight off their valuable carcasses.
    Along the Renshaw road the pace of traffic was often set by a brindled milch cow called Trixie belonging to a widow woman by the name of Shumlin. Since her husband’s death some years back, Mrs. Shumlin, in order to make ends meet, had been obliged to sell off the farmstead piece by piece—it was not very big to start with—until now all she had left was the plot on which her cottage stood and a small kitchen garden, and another plot across the road on which her cowshed stood, or rather leaned. Her land all gone, Mrs. Shumlin had the problem of where to pasture her cow. She solved the problem by staking her out along the roadside to graze the narrow margins owned by the county highway department. These uncultivated roadbanks were capable, however, of producing but one thin crop of grass per year, so that as the season wore on, Trixie ate her way farther and farther from home, by late summer was grazing at a good two miles’ distance. Through July, August and September Mrs. Shumlin had to get up earlier each morning to take Trixie to pasture, and had to set off earlier each afternoon to fetch her home for milking. She had to tote along two heavy pails of water for Trixie to drink when she got thirsty. And often when Mrs.