Odd Jobs- We will get back to literature now

In Monterey, at the end of my shift as a bellman, I went back to the front desk to clock out and hang up the monkey suit, and the night auditor (the guy that works the midnight shift and does all the hotel customer accounting so it will be ready when you check out in the morning) was sitting there reading "Light In August" by Bill Faulkner. I said "How's Lena Grove these days?' Eventually, when the guy decided to leave to go back to school, he taught me how to be an accountant. And I became a hotel Night Auditor for a long time and a real day time accountant later. The paper I've handled. The women I've worked for who have handed me the paper.

Lena Grove:

                        Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill behind her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking  although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home then I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old.

                        She had never even been to Doane’s Mill until after her father and mother died, although six or eight times a year she went to town on Saturday, in the wagon, in a mailorder dress and her bare feet flat in the wagon bed and her shoes wrapped in a piece of paper beside her on the seat. She would put on the shoes just before the wagon reached town. 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 not tell her father why she wanted to walk instead of riding. He thought that it was because of the smooth streets, the sidewalks. 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.

                        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 bugswirled kerosene lamp, the naked floor worn smooth as old silver by naked feet. She was youngest living child. Her mother died first. She said, “Take care of paw.” Lena did so. Then one day her father said, “You go to Doane’s Mill with McKinley. You get ready to go, be ready when he comes.” Then he died. McKinley, the brother, arrived in a wagon. They buried the father in a grove behind a country church on afternoon, with a pine headstone. 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. The wagon was borrowed and the brother had promised to return it by nightfall.