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something that stopped me absolutely stone still.
    John Woodrow was there, yes he was surely back, justlying there on the cot, lying there propped up on a pillow, smoking a cigarette, and some girl not more than sixteen was prancing up and down in front of him, wearing my nice underwear, modeling for him, wearing those things I’d carried around with me all that time wrapped up in the tissue paper they’d come in, the nice things he’d tried to tear off me on our honeymoon. I’d washed those things and folded them back up and packed them away at the bottom of my bag where I didn’t think he’d find them and ruin them. And there she was with them on. And that’s not the half of it. She had a little baby crawling around on the floor, trying to keep up with her, with a diaper on I could smell from the door. I felt sick to my stomach. He saw me and she saw me and they were both so drunk, or in his case so sorry and so drunk, that they didn’t even rush to cover up. He called out, “Ruby!” But not like he’d been caught, like he wanted me to come on in and join his party. I’d never been so disgusted in my life. I slammed the door and ran out and sat down on the edge of the wheat field. I remember how the wheat felt good to me, sad and angry as I was. And I sat there and said, What am I going to do about this? I wanted to kill him. To tell the truth, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. But I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d taken a life, even a life as worthless as John Woodrow’s. But I said, You can hurt him. You don’t have to kill him but you can surelymake him miserable. Migrant people got cut, shot all the time, well, not all the time, but certainly enough for me to think if I shot John Woodrow in the leg or something that I’d not be called to answer for it the way I would be if we weren’t on the migrant circuit. And I thought if I played my cards right, provoked a fight with him, let some other people along that long row of shacks hear it, I thought if I pushed him far enough he’d explode and try to hurt me and I’d defend myself. Then I’d have no choice but to pack up and go back home. So I bought a pistol from a man and went back to that little shack bound and determined to do some damage to old John Woodrow. And I wasn’t afraid as you’d think I’d be, having only been around guns when I used to go skeet shooting with my brothers. I was only afraid he’d get it away from me before I could use it and that’d be all she wrote.
    When I got back to the house John Woodrow and his girlfriend had cleared out, cleared out and took my lingerie with them. But I said, That’s all right. I’ll wait. And I waited and waited, fell asleep that night with my clothes on, waiting for him to come in, but little did I know I’d seen the last of him.
    I went back to the Hoovers’ when I woke up that next morning, and I left the pistol hidden under my pillow. I didn’t take it with me because having a pistol in a migrant house is one thing, having it on you in the Hoovers’ homewould be another. See, one was society, the other wasn’t. The rules are different, or, there’re rules in one place and none in the other.
    Frances had me clean everything but the light bulbs that day. I’d never had any experience cleaning a bathroom or a kitchen or even dusting a dresser, but you don’t have to know how to clean to clean. I learned that real fast. If you know what clean looks like then you just take a mop or a broom or a rag and go at whatever’s dirty until it’s clean. That’s that. And I knew clean. Sudie Bee could fly through a house, picking up things with one hand and cleaning under them with the other. She and Lester could roll up a rug, hang it outside, beat it, and lay it back down faster than alot of people could vacuum one. She scrubbed our shower doors like they were something alive that had to be beaten back. Yes, I surely knew the meaning of clean.
    When Lonnie