All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [46]
Upton is way over in the western part of the state, the capital of the cocklebur vote which was suppose to come pelting out of the brush to the barbecue. And just a little way north of Upton there was the coal pocket, where a lot of folks lived in company shacks and prayed for a full week’s work. It was a good location to get a sellout house for the barbecue. Thos folks in the shacks were in such a shape they’d be ready to walk fifteen miles for a bait of fresh. If they still had the strength, and it was free.
The local I rode puffed and yanked and stalled and yawed across the cotton country. We’d stop on a siding for half an hour, waiting for something, and I watched the cotton rows converging into the simmering horizon, and a black stub of a burnt tree in the middle distance up out of the cotton rows. Then, late in the afternoon, the train headed into the cut-over pine and sagebrush. We would stop beside some yellow, boxlike station, with the unpainted houses dropped down beyond, and I could see up the alley behind the down-town and then, as the train pulled out again, across the back yards of houses surrounded by board or wire fences as though to keep out the openness of the humped and sage-furred country which seemed ready to slide in and eat up the houses. The houses didn’t look as though they belonged there, improvised, flung down, ready to be abandoned. Some washing would be hanging on a line, but the people would go off and leave that too. They wouldn’t have time to snatch it off the line. It would be getting dark soon, and they’d better hurry.
But as the train pulls away, a woman comes to the back door of one of the houses–just the figure of a woman, for you cannot make out the face–and she has a pan in her hands and she flings the water out of the pan to make a sudden tattered flash of silver in the light. She goes back into the house. To what is in the house. The floor of the house is thin against the bare ground and the walls and the roof are thin against all of everything which is outside, but you cannot see through the walls to the secret to which the woman has gone in.
The train pulls away, faster now, and the woman is back there in the house, where she is going to say. She’ll stat there. And all at once, you think that you are the one who is running away, and who had better run fast to whatever you are going because it will be dark soon. The train is going pretty fast now, but its effort seems to the through a stubborn cloying density of air as though an eel tried to swim in syrup, or the effort seems to be against an increasing and implacable magnetism of earth. You think that if the earth should twitch once, as the hide of a sleeping dog twitches, the train would be jerked over and piled up and the engine would spew and gasp while somewhere a canted-up wheel would revolve once with a massive and dreamlike deliberation.
But nothing happens, and you remember that the woman had not even looked up at the train. You forget her, and the train goes fast and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-light, unriffled glint of the water between the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you feel is taken away from you, too.
You bloody fool, do you think that you want to mild a cow?
You do not want to milk a cow.
Then you are at Upton.
In Upton I went to the hotel, totting my little bag and my typewriter through the gangs of people on the street, people who looked at me with the countryman’s slow, full, curious lack of shame, and didn’t make room for me to pass until I was charging them down, the way a cow won’t get out of the way of your car in a lane until your radiator damned near bats her in the underslung slats. At the hotel I ate a sandwich and went up to my room, and got the fan turned on and a pitcher of ice water sent up and took off my shoes and shirt and propped myself in a chair with a book.