Sudie May said, “I reckon she’s got her reasons for doing what she done, the disguise and all. A woman doing such sounds desperate.”
Rae Lynn and Cornelia were now working side by side, each in a separate row still, but close enough to talk, and he could tell they were.
Sudie May said, “Them camps can be horrible. I reckon we was lucky.”
“We were ’cause this place won’t like any of the ones we was at with Pap and Granddaddy. There were some good people, but Cornelia’s husband, Otis, and Crow, they were the worst kind of trouble.”
“How’d you end up there? Last we heard, you were working on some big farm in Clinch County.”
Del rubbed his neck. “I was. Part of what happened was my own fault, I reckon. I done something I shouldn’t’ve done.”
Sudie May narrowed her eyes, and again, he was reminded of his mother, with the same sternness that saw a different meaning behind his words.
She said, “It must’ve been something serious.”
Del crossed his arms, felt his face flush like he was a schoolboy again. “Well.”
“So, what happened?”
“The man who owned the farm tried to make it so I’d have an accident, if you want to call it that. He had me go inside a grain bin to walk down the corn.”
Alarmed, Sudie Mae exclaimed, “You’re lucky you didn’t die in there. People do all the time.”
“Something peculiar happened.”
Sudie May said, “What?”
Del shuffled his feet and didn’t answer.
Sudie May said, “Why’re you looking like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like when we used to try to scare one another telling ghost stories.”
Del nudged her and joked. “You could be talking to a ghost right now.”
Sudie May’s eyes went big and round.
“What’re you talking about?”
“The corn collapsed on me.”
She gasped and said, “Oh, my Lord.”
“It gets more interesting. I guess that’s how I could put it.”
She gave him a curious look. Del stared at his boots while he explained.
“I blacked out, and all of a sudden, I could see everything happening. I’d been working with two other men, saw them shoveling the corn out, trying to get me free. Then, a third man come who’d been working somewhere else. He started shoveling too. Next thing I knew, I was on the grass, choking on dust. When I could talk, I asked where the third man was. They wanted to know how I knew about him since he showed up after I was already buried. When I come to, he’d already gone back to work. Can’t nothing explain that.”
He’d not talked about it for so long, it sounded foolish. Like a dream. He lifted his shoulders and looked away. He was inclined toward thinking it had been intended as some sort a lesson.
Sudie May took it in stride and said, “It must not have been your time.”
“I reckon not.”
She raised an eyebrow toward Rae Lynn. “And . . . ?”
Rae Lynn and Cornelia had separated again, and Rae Lynn was working on a different row.
Del rubbed his chin and shrugged. “And what?”
“What do you reckon she’s running from?”
“Beats me.”
“She’s real pretty.”
“I guess.”
“Have mercy, you blind?”
“I can see perfectly fine. She don’t see me is the problem.”
Sudie May smiled and said, “Ain’t but one reason I can think of makes a woman ignore a man.”
Del tried one of his old jokes. “I’m ugly?”
She laughed and said, “That, or another man.”
He’d wondered about that. Maybe she was married already and, like Cornelia, escaping some jackass who didn’t know what he had. If that was it, he must not have cared much about her, not in the way he would if he had a chance.
Sudie May continued to ponder. “I mean, why else is she acting like she’s hiding from something?”
Del didn’t know what to say. He had no idea. Sudie May watched Rae Lynn, who happened to look their way, as if she sensed their attention on her. From across the way, Del pictured what she might see, the house in the background, the garden filled with good food, the children, a pastureland dotted with cows, the beloved pines. They could have so much together, her and him. He wanted to convey this to her, but just like at Swallow Hill, when the moment came over him, and it was all he could do to keep it to himself, she simply went back to work, and whatever she thought of this place, or of him, was as obvious to her as the air he breathed.