Then some of the machinery and most of the men who ran it and existed because of and for it would be loaded onto freight cars and moved away. It had been there seven years and in seven years more it would destroy all the timber within its reach. All the men in the village worked in the mill or for it. The wagon was borrowed and the brother had promised to return it by nightfall. The next morning she departed forever, though it is possible that she did not know this at the time, in the wagon with McKinley, for Doane’s Mill. They buried the father in a grove behind a country church one afternoon, with a pine headstone. McKinley, the brother, arrived in a wagon.
You get ready to go, be ready when he comes. Then one day her father said, You go to Doane’s Mill with McKinley. When she was twelve years old her father and mother died in the same summer, in a log house of three rooms and a hall, without screens, in a room lighted by a bug-swirled kerosene lamp, the naked floor worn smooth as old silver by naked feet. But it was because she believed that the people who saw her and whom she passed on foot would believe that she lived in the town too. He thought that it was because of the smooth streets, the sidewalks. She would not tell her father why she wanted to walk in instead of riding. After she got to be a big girl she would ask her father to stop the wagon at the edge of town and she would get down and walk. She would put on the shoes just before the wagon reached town.
She had never even been to Doane’s Mill until after her father and mother died, though six or eight times a year she went to town on Saturday, in the wagon, in a mail order dress and her bare feet flat in the wagon bed and her shoes wrapped in a piece of paper beside her on the seat. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece.
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