“Now, now,” I says. “You’re upset.”
“Don’t you touch me!” she says. “Don’t you touch me!”
A man can’t tell nothing about them. I lived with the same one fifteen years and I be durn if I can. And I imagined a lot of things coming up between us, but I be durn if I ever thought it would be a body four days dead and that a woman. But they make life hard on them not taking it as it comes up, like a man does.
So I laid there, hearing it commence to rain, thinking about them down there, squatting around the wagon and the rain on the roof, and thinking about Rachel crying there until after a while it was like I could still hear her crying even after she was asleep, and smelling it even when I knowed I couldn’t. I couldn’t decide even then whether I could or not, or if it wasn’t just knowing it was what it was.
So next morning I never went down there. I heard them hitching up and then when I knowed they must be about ready to take out, I went out the front and went down the road toward the bridge until I heard the wagon come out of the lot and go back toward New Hope. And then when I come back to the house, Rachel jumped on me because I wasn’t there to make them come in to breakfast. You can’t tell about them. Just about when you decide they mean one thing, I be durn if you not only haven’t got to change your mind, like as not you got to take a raw-hiding for thinking they meant it.
But it was still like I could smell it. And so I decided then that it wasn’t smelling it, but it was just knowing it was there, like you will get fooled now and then. But when I went to the barn I knew different. When I walked into the hallway I saw something. It kind of hunkered up when I