He had first seen her one morning when his truck broke down on the highway. He had had other women but he had planned never to get himself tied up legally. This ugly woman Parker married was his first wife. The tractor had broken down the second day Parker was on it and she had set him at once to cutting bushes, saying out of the side of her mouth to the nigger, “Everything he touches, he breaks.” She also asked him to wear his shirt when he worked Parker had removed it even though the day was not sultry he put it back on reluctantly. Not that an old woman didn’t sometimes get an interest in a young man, particularly if he was as attractive as Parker felt he was, but this old woman looked at him the same way she looked at her old tractor-as if she had to put up with it because it was all she had. He had told her that the woman was a hefty young blonde in fact she was nearly seventy years old and too dried up to have an interest in anything except getting as much work out of him as she could. If he had been certain she was jealous of the woman he worked for he would have been pleased, but more likely she was concerned with the sin that would result if he and the woman took a liking to each other.
“Aw, shut your mouth for a change,” Parker muttered. She turned her head in his direction and said, “It’s no reason you can’t work for a man. He could account for her one way or another it was himself he could not understand. At other times he had a suspicion that she actually liked everything she said she didn’t. Sometimes he supposed that she had married him because she meant to save him. Her being against color, it was the more remarkable she had married him. She did not smoke, dip, drink whiskey, use bad language or paint her face, and God knew some paint would have improved it, Parker thought. In addition to her other bad qualities, she was forever sniffing up sin. One of the things she did not approve of was automobiles.
SARAH PARKER GIRLS WITH MUSCLE FULL
At intervals a car would shoot past below and his wife’s eyes would swerve suspiciously after the sound of it and then come back to rest on the newspaper full of beans in her lap. The house they rented sat alone save for a single tall pecan tree on a high embankment overlooking a highway. Nevertheless he stayed as if she had him conjured. She was pregnant and pregnant women were not his favorite kind. Parker understood why he had married her-he couldn’t have got her any other way- but he couldn’t understand why he stayed with her now.
SARAH PARKER GIRLS WITH MUSCLE SKIN
The skin on her face was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion and her eyes were grey and sharp like the points of two ice picks. Parker was sitting on the step, some distance away, watching her sullenly. Parker’s wife was sitting on the front porch floor, snapping beans.
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