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The first time Ernetta Ducksworth visited Washington, D.C., she drove up in the truck with Arvin and marched in a crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue, carrying a sign that read "America Whore of Babylon When Will You Stop Your Infant Sacrifice?" Ernetta's wrists ached for two years after carrying that heavy sign. Arvin said it was a blessing to imagine how the Lord felt carrying the cross, but Dr. Spears said "Don't you never, ever do that again, Ernetta. You were not made for that kind of activity. What if you got a blood clot in your leg—with your arteriosclerosis you could go like that." He snapped his fingers.

"But Arvin says if you don't march, you don't really believe what you preach."

"Let Arvin go to the marches, then, but you've got doctor's orders to stay home next time."

This time Ernetta walked into the city alone, with no plans to protest anything and no heavy sign to carry. She'd left the old truck broken down a good way back. It sat in the parking lot of a brand new Burger King, parked between a dumpster and a stack of leftover lumber, with its taillights shining like two red sores. The body was so rusted, you couldn't tell it had ever been blue—a flat, deep blue somebody had once been proud of. Alabama sunlight had cracked the dashboard long ago and now stuffing hung down in the lap of the passenger seat, like the insides of a burst boiled egg.

The breakdown came as no surprise: just this morning, Ernetta had stopped to get a tire patched at a Texaco in the Carolinas, and a red–faced fellow lifted up the hood.

"Gawmighty, you engine belt's cracked."

"What's the engine belt do?"

"Do everything. That belt breaks, you be setting on the side of the road."

"Can you change it for me? How much you charge to fix it?"

He looked her up and down. "Forty–five. That's a good price."

"I ain't got 45 dollars. I still need a tank of gas to get me to Washington."

"You ain't going that far. Other front tire's bad too."

"I'll take this old truck's far as I can," she told him. "Then I'll walk."

She'd pushed on, riding that bad belt and bad tire right up the middle of Virginia, cutting through hills and plains like a surgical knife. The afternoon sun burned her left arm; the warm wind made a hole in her grey–brown hair just above her ear. Through the lower half of the state she listened to a country preacher:

"Dear Beloved, oh my precious ones, our Lord has need of us today. He wants us to go and take the Gospel to the nations. Nations of poor, precious, dying souls. Little children who know Him not. And He calls us, weeping, 'Won't you follow me? Won't you take my Word, my Gospel to the nations? Won't you feed my little ones?' But we do not hear his urgent plea. And souls are dying because we do not hear … "

Past Culpepper, though, all she could find on AM radio was tinny music and a baseball game. Then a sharp–voiced Yankee woman shouting advice at some poor little whimpering pregnant thing:

"Are you listening? My dear, are you listening? Would you close your big mouth for one lousy second of your life and listen to me? The simple answer is to grow up, stop calling radio personalities for advice, and do what you already know is right."

Ernetta gritted her teeth and felt the lingering pain of her oldest, deepest wound. She thought of Arvin out there somewhere in the woods or the city or the backroads or maybe in Mexico planning some kind of something. She knew that she loved Arvin not in the way that a wife usually loves her husband but in the way that a soldier loves his country even though he hates the war. She did not love what he did, but she understood him and she would be true to him. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel of the car and looked from side to side, out each window, as if watching for the enemy. But all she saw was freshly ploughed fields and muddy creeks flying by under faded grey bridges—sometimes a cow standing in the shade of one tree, resting from the sun. The sky overhead was a great, burning blue. It was early April, and already hot.

Around noon, Ernetta stopped at a rest station to drink a ginger ale and buy a sandwich from a vending machine. Pimento looked safer than chicken salad. She unwrapped the sandwich from its wax paper, sniffed it suspiciously, and studied the bits of red pepper in the spread, thinking about her new–planted bell peppers back home in LeCrane. She imagined them ripening and then drying upon the vine, turning from great red suns to wrinkled, weeping knots of purple and black before she ever got near the Alabama–Florida line again. Food for the beetles. She didn't have it in her to grieve, not really, about a few vegetables come to naught (she wasn't a farmer, after all, just a backyard gardener), and yet it did seem a shame that any living thing should come to fruit and then die while still on the vine. And, too, she longed for good food after all this road eating: a sweet tomato, a Vidalia onion, a juicy ear of Silver Queen. Maybe she'd reach home before summer. In the meantime, she'd eat her sandwich and get started again.