She didn"t answer. She knelt before him while he watched the crown of her head and her hands fumbling a little clumsily about his feet. He didn"t try to help her now. He didn"t know what she was trying to do, not even when he was sitting with his cold feet in the warm water. He didn"t know that that was all, because it felt too good. He was waiting for the rest of it to begin; the part that would not be pleasant, whatever it would be. This had never happened to him before either.
Later she put him to bed. For two years almost he had been dressing and undressing himself, unnoticed and una.s.sisted save by occasional Alices. He was already too tired to go to sleep at once, and now he was puzzled and hence nervous, waiting until she went out so he could sleep. Then she did not go out. Instead she drew a chair up to the bed and sat down. There was no fire in the room; it was cold. She had a shawl now about her shoulders, huddled into the shawl, her breath vaporising as though she were smoking. And he became wide awake now. He was waiting for the part to begin which he would not like, whatever it was; whatever it was that he had done. He didn"t know that this was all. This had never happened to him before either.
It began on that night. He believed that it was to go on for the rest of his life. At seventeen, looking back he could see now the long series of trivial, clumsy, vain efforts born of frustration and fumbling and dumb instinct: the dishes she would prepare for him in secret and then insist on his accepting and eating them in secret, when he did not want them and he knew that McEachern would not care anyway; the times when, like tonight, she would try to get herself between him and the punishment which, deserved or not, just or unjust, was impersonal, both the man and the boy accepting it as a natural and inescapable fact until she, getting in the way, must give it an odor, an attenuation, and aftertaste.
Sometimes he thought that he would tell her alone, have her who in her helplessness could neither alter it nor ignore it, know it and need to hide it from the man whose immediate and predictable reaction to the knowledge would so obliterate it as a factor in their relations that it would never appear again. To say to her in secret, in secret payment for the secret dishes which he had not wanted: "Listen. He says he has nursed a blasphemer and an ingrate. I dare you to tell him what he has nursed. That he has nursed a n.i.g.g.e.r beneath his own roof, with his own food at his own table."
Because she had always been kind to him. The man, the hard, just, ruthless man, merely depended on him to act in a certain way and to receive the as certain reward or punishment, just as he could depend on the man to react in a certain way to his own certain doings and misdoings: It was the woman who, with a woman"s affinity and instinct for secrecy, for casting a faint taint of evil about the most trivial and innocent actions. Behind a loose board in the wall of his attic room she had hidden a small h.o.a.rd of money in a tin can. The amount was trivial and it was apparently a secret to no one but. her husband, and the boy believed that he would not have cared. But it had never been a secret from him. Even while he was still a child she would take him with her when with all the intense and mysterious caution of a playing child she would creep to the attic and add to the h.o.a.rd meagre and infrequent and terrific nickels and dimes (fruit of what small chicanery and deceptions with none anywhere under the sun to say her nay he did not know), putting into the can beneath his round grave eyes coins whose value he did not even recognise. It was she who trusted him, who insisted on trusting him as she insisted on his eating: by conspiracy, in secret, making a secret of the very fact which the act of trusting was supposed to exemplify.
It was not the hard work which he hated, nor the punishment and injustice. He was used to that before he ever saw either of them. He expected no less, and so he was neither outraged nor surprised. It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men. "She is trying to make me cry," he thought, lying cold and rigid in his bed, his hands beneath his head and the moonlight falling across his body, hearing the steady murmur of the man"s voice as it mounted the stairway on its first heavenward stage; "She was trying to make me cry. Then she thinks that they would have had me."
Chapter 8.
Moving quietly, he took the rope from its hiding place. One end of it was already prepared for making fast inside the window. Now it took him no time at all to reach the ground and to return; now, with more than a year of practice, he could mount the rope hand over hand, without once touching the wall of the house, with the shadowlike agility of a cat. Leaning from the window he let the free end whisper down. In the moonlight it looked not less frail than a spider skein. Then, with his shoes tied together and strung through his belt behind him, he slid down the rope, pa.s.sing swift as a shadow across the window where the old people slept. The rope hung directly before the window. He drew it tautly aside, flat against the house, and tied it. Then he went on through the moonlight to the stable and mounted to the loft and took the new suit from its hiding place. It was wrapped in paper, carefully. Before unwrapping it he felt with his hands about the folds of the paper. "He found it," he thought. "He knows." He said aloud, whispering: "The b.a.s.t.a.r.d. The son of a b.i.t.c.h."
He dressed in the dark, swiftly. He was already late, because he had had to give them time to get to sleep after all the uproar about the heifer, the uproar which the woman had caused by meddling after it was all over, settled for the night, anyway. The bundle included a white shirt and a tie. He put the tie into his pocket, but he put on the coat so that the white shirt would not be so visible in the moonlight. He descended and emerged from the stable. The new cloth, after his soft, oftenwashed overalls, felt rich and harsh. The house squatted in the moonlight, dark, profound, a little treacherous. It was as though in the moonlight the house had acquired personality: threatful, deceptive. He pa.s.sed it and entered the lane. He took from his pocket a dollar watch. He had bought it three days ago, with some of the money. But he had never owned a watch before and so he had forgot to wind it. But he did not need the watch to tell him that he was already late.
The lane went straight beneath the moon, bordered on each side by trees whose shadowed branches lay thick and sharp as black paint upon the mild dust. He walked fast, the house now behind him, himself now not visible from the house. The highroad pa.s.sed the lane a short distance ahead. He expected at any moment to see the car rush past, since he had told her that if he were not waiting at the mouth of the lane, he would meet her at the schoolhouse where the dance was being held. But no car pa.s.sed, and when he reached the highroad he could hear nothing. The road, the night, were empty. "Maybe she has already pa.s.sed," he thought. He took out the dead watch again and looked at it. The watch was dead because he had had no chance to wind it. He had been made late by them who had given him no opportunity to wind the watch and so know if he were late or not. Up the dark lane, in the now invisible house, the woman now lay asleep, since she had done all she could to make him late. He looked that way, up the lane; he stopped in the act of looking and thinking; mind and body as if on the same switch, believing that he had seen movement among the shadows in the lane. Then he thought that he had not, that it might perhaps have been something in his mind projected like a shadow on a wall. "But I hope it is him," he thought. "I wish it was him. I wish he would follow me and see me get into the car. I wish he would try to follow us. I wish he would try to stop me." But he could see nothing in the lane. It was empty, intermittent with treacherous shadows. Then he heard, from far down the road toward town, the sound of the car. Looking, he saw presently the glare of the lights.
She was a waitress in a small, dingy, back street restaurant in town. Even a casual adult glance could tell that she would never see thirty again. But to Joe she probably did not look more than seventeen too, because of her smallness. She was not only not tall, she was slight, almost childlike. But the adult look saw that the smallness was not due to any natural slenderness but to some inner corruption of the spirit itself: a slenderness which had never been young, in not one of whose curves anything youthful had ever lived or lingered. Her hair was dark. Her face was prominently boned, always downlooking, as if her head were set so on her neck, a little out of line. Her eyes were like the b.u.t.ton eyes of a toy animal: a quality beyond even hardness, without being hard.
It was because of her smallness that he ever attempted her, as if her smallness should have or might have protected her from the roving and predatory eyes of most men, leaving his chances better. If she had been a big woman he would not have dared. He would have thought, "It won"t be any use. She will already have a fellow, a man."
It began in the fall when he was seventeen. It was a day in the middle of the week. Usually when they came to town it would be Sat.u.r.day and they would bring food with them-cold dinner in a basket purchased and kept for that purpose-with the intention of spending the day. This time McEachern came to see a lawyer, with the intention of finishing his business and being home again by dinnertime. But it was almost twelve o"clock when he emerged onto the street where Joe waited for him. He came into sight looking at his watch. Then he looked at a munic.i.p.al clock in the courthouse tower and then at the sun, with an expression of exasperation and outrage. He looked at Joe also with that expression, the open watch in his hand, his eyes cold, fretted. He seemed to be examining and weighing for the first time the boy whom he had raised from childhood. Then he turned. "Come," he said. "It can"t be helped now."
The town was a railroad division point. Even in midweek there were many men about the streets. The whole air of the place was masculine, transient: a population even whose husbands were at home only at intervals and on holiday-a population of men who led esoteric lives whose actual scenes were removed and whose intermittent presence was pandered to like that of patrons in a theatre.
Joe had never before seen the place to which McEachern took him. It was a restaurant on a back street-a narrow dingy doorway between two dingy windows. He did not know that it was a restaurant at first. There was no sign outside and he could neither smell nor hear food cooking. What he saw was a long wooden counter lined with backless stools, and a big, blonde woman behind a cigar case near the front and a clump of men at the far end of the counter, not eating, who all turned as one and looked at him and McEachern when they entered, through the smoke of cigarettes. n.o.body said anything at all. They just looked at McEachern and Joe as if breathing had stopped with talking, as if even the cigarette smoke had stopped and now drifted aimlessly of its own weight. The men were not in overalls and they all wore hats, and their faces were all alike: not young and not old; not farmers and not townsmen either. They looked like people who had just got off a train and who would be gone tomorrow and who did not have any address.
Sitting on two of the backless stools at the, counter, McEachern and Joe ate. Joe ate fast because McEachern was eating fast. Beside him the man, even in the act of eating, seemed to sit in a kind of stiffbacked outrage. The food which McEachern ordered was simple: quickly prepared and quickly eaten. But Joe knew that parsimony had no part in this. Parsimony might have brought them here in preference to another place, but he knew that it was a desire to depart quickly that had chosen the food. As soon as he laid down his knife and fork, McEachern said, "Come," already getting down from his stool. At the cigar counter McEachern paid the bra.s.shaired woman. There was about her a quality impervious to time: a belligerent and diamondsurfaced respectability. She had not so much as looked at them, even when they entered and even when McEachern gave her money. Still without looking at them she made the change, correctly and swiftly, sliding the coins onto the gla.s.s counter almost before McEachern had offered the bill; herself somehow definite behind the false glitter of the careful hair, the careful face, like a carved lioness guarding a portal, presenting respectability like a shield behind which the clotted and idle and equivocal men could slant their hats and their thwartfacecurled cigarettes. McEachern counted his change and they went out, into the street. He was looking at Joe again. He said: "I"ll have you remember that place. There are places in this world where a man may go but a boy, a youth of your age, may not. That is one of them. Maybe you should never have gone there. But you must see such so you will know what to avoid and shun. Perhaps it was as well that you saw it with me present to explain and warn you. And the dinner there is cheap."
"What is the matter with it?" Joe said.
"That is the business of the town and not of yours. You will only mark my words: I"ll not have you go there again unless I am with you. Which will not be again. We"ll bring dinner next time, early or no early."
That was what he saw that day while he was eating swiftly beside the unbending and quietly outraged man, the two of them completely isolated at the center of the long counter with at one end of it the bra.s.shaired woman and at the other the group of men, and the waitress with her demure and downlooking face and her big, too big, hands setting the plates and cups, her head rising from beyond the counter at about the height of a tall child. Then he and McEachern departed. He did not expect ever to return. It was not that McEachern had forbidden him. He just did not believe that his life would ever again chance there. It was as if he said to himself, "They are not my people. I can see them but I don"t know what they are doing nor why. I can hear them but I don"t know what they are saying nor why nor to whom. I know that there is something about it beside food, eating. But I don"t know what. And I never will know."
So it pa.s.sed from the surface of thinking. Now and then during the next six months he returned to town, but he did not again even see or pa.s.s the restaurant. He could have. But he didn"t think to. Perhaps he did not need to. More often that he knew perhaps thinking would have suddenly flowed into a picture, shaping, shaped: the long, barren, somehow equivocal counter with the still, coldfaced, violenthaired woman at one end as though guarding it, and at the other men with inwardleaning heads, smoking steadily, lighting and throwing away their constant cigarettes, and the waitress, the woman not much larger than a child going back and forth to the kitchen with her arms overladen with dishes, having to pa.s.s on each journey within touching distance of the men who leaned with their slanted hats and spoke to her through the cigarette smoke, murmured to her somewhere near mirth or exultation, and her face musing, demure, downcast, as if she had not heard. "I don"t even know what they are saying to her," he thought, thinking I don"t even know that what they are saying to her is something that men do not say to a pa.s.sing child; believing, I do not know yet that in the instant of sleep the eyelid closing prisons within the eye"s self her face demure, pensive; tragic, sad, and young; waiting, colored with all the vague and formless magic of young desire. That already there is something for love to feed upon: that sleeping I know now why I struck refraining that negro girl three years ago and that she must know it too and be proud too, with waiting and pride.
So he did not expect to see her again, since love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon. Very likely he was as much surprised by his action and what it inferred and revealed as McEachern would have been. It was on Sat.u.r.day this time, in the spring now. He had turned eighteen. Again McEachern had to see the lawyer. But he was prepared now. "I"ll be there an hour," he said. "You can walk about and see the town." Again he looked at Joe, hard, calculating, again a little fretted, like a just man forced to compromise between justice and judgment. "Here," he said. He opened his purse and took a coin from it. It was a dime. "You might try not to throw it away as soon as you can find someone who will take it. It"s a strange thing," he said fretfully, looking at Joe, "but it seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it. You will be here in one hour."
He took that coin and went straight to the restaurant. He did not even put the coin into his pocket. He did it without plan or design, almost without volition, as if his feet ordered his action and not his head. He carried the dime clutched hot and small in his palm as a child might. He entered the screen door, clumsily, stumbling a little. The blonde woman behind the cigar case (it was as if she had not moved in the six months, not altered one strand of her hard bright bra.s.sridged hair or even her dress) watched him. At the far end of the counter the group of men with their tilted hats and their cigarettes and their odor of barbershops, watched him. The proprietor was among them. He noticed, saw, the proprietor for the first time. Like the other men, the proprietor wore a hat and was smoking. He was not a big man, not much bigger than Joe himself, with a cigarette burning in one corner of his mouth as though to be out of the way of talking. From that face squinted and still behind the curling smoke from the cigarette which was not touched once with hand until it burned down and was spat out and ground beneath a heel, Joe was to acquire one of his own mannerisms. But not yet. That was to come later, when life had begun to go so fast that accepting would take the place of knowing and believing. Now he just looked at the man who leaned upon the counter from the inward side, in a dirty ap.r.o.n which he wore as a footpad might a.s.sume for the moment a false beard. The accepting was to come later, along with the whole sum of entire outrage to credulity: these two people as husband and wife, the establishment as a business for eating, with the successive imported waitresses clumsy with the cheap dishes of simple food as business justified; and himself accepting, taking, during his brief and violent holiday like a young stallion in a state of unbelieving and ecstatic astonishment in a hidden pasture of tired and professional mares, himself in turn victim of nameless and unnumbered men.
But that was not yet. He went to the counter, clutching the dime. He believed that the men had all stopped talking to watch him, because he could hear nothing now save a vicious frying sound from beyond the kitchen door, thinking She"s back there. That"s why I don"t see her. He slid onto a stool. He believed that they were all watching him. He believed that the blonde woman behind the cigar case was looking at him, and the proprietor too, across whose face now the smoke of the cigarette would have become quite still in its lazy vaporing. Then the proprietor spoke a single word. Joe knew that he had not moved nor touched the cigarette. "Bobbie," he said.
A man"s name. It was not thinking. It was too fast, too complete: She"s gone. They have got a man in her place. I have wasted the dime, like he said. He believed that he could not leave now; that if he tried to go out, the blonde woman would stop him. He believed that the men at the back knew this and were laughing at him. So he sat quite still on the stool, looking down, the dime clutched in his palm. He did not see the waitress until the two overlarge hands appeared upon the counter opposite him and into sight. He could see the figured pattern of her dress and the bib of an ap.r.o.n and the two bigknuckled hands lying on the edge of the counter as completely immobile as if they were something she had fetched in from the kitchen. "Coffee and pie," he said.
Her voice sounded downcast, quite empty. "Lemon cocoanut chocolate."
In proportion to the height from which her voice came, the hands could not be her hands at all. "Yes," Joe said.
The hands did not move. The voice did not move. "Lemon cocoanut chocolate. Which kind." To the others they must have looked quite strange. Facing one another across the dark, stained, greasecrusted and frictionsmooth counter, they must have looked a little like they were praying: the youth countryfaced, in clean and Spartan clothing, with an awkwardness which invested him with a quality unworldly and innocent; and the woman opposite him, downcast, still, waiting, who because of her smallness partook likewise of that quality of his, of something beyond flesh. Her face was highboned, gaunt. The flesh was taut across her cheekbones, circled darkly about the eyes; beneath the lowered lids her eyes seemed to be without depth, as if they could not even reflect. Her lower jaw seemed too narrow to contain two rows of teeth.
"Cocoanut," Joe said. His mouth said it, because immediately he wanted to unsay it. He had only the dime. He had been holding it too hard to have realised yet that it was only a dime. His hand sweated about it, upon it. He believed that the men were watching him and laughing again. He could not hear them and he did not look at them. But he believed that they were. The hands had gone away. Then they returned, setting a plate and a cup before him. He looked at her now, at her face. "How much is pie?" he said.
"Pie is ten cents." She was just standing there before him, beyond the counter, with her big hands again lying on the dark wood, with that quality spent and waiting. She had; never looked at him. He said, in a faint, desperate voice: "I reckon I don"t want no coffee."
For a while she did not move. Then one of the big hands moved and took up the coffee cup; hand and cup vanished. He sat still, downlooking too, waiting. Then it came. It was not the proprietor. It was the woman behind the cigar case. "What"s that?" she said.
"He don"t want the coffee," the waitress said. Her voice, speaking, moved on, as if she had not paused at the question. Her voice was flat, quiet. The other woman"s voice was quiet too.
"Didn"t he order coffee too?" she said.
"No," the waitress said, in that level voice that was still in motion, going away. "I misunderstood."
When he got out, when his spirit wrung with abas.e.m.e.nt and regret and pa.s.sionate for hiding scuttled past the cold face of the woman behind the cigar case, he believed that he knew he would and could never see her again. He did not believe that he could bear to see her again, even look at the street, the dingy doorway, even from a distance, again, not thinking yet, It"s terrible to be young. It"s terrible. Terrible. When Sat.u.r.days came he found, invented, reasons to decline to go to town, with McEachern watching him, though not with actual suspicion yet. He pa.s.sed the days by working hard, too hard; McEachern contemplated the work with suspicion. But there was nothing which the man could know, deduce. Working was permitted him. Then he could get the nights pa.s.sed, since he would be too tired to lie awake. And in time even the despair and the regret and the shame grew less. He did not cease to remember it, to react it. But now it had become wornout, like a gramophone record: familiar only because of the worn threading which blurred the voices. After a while even McEachern accepted a fact. He said: "I have been watching you lately. And now there is nothing for it but I must mis...o...b.. my own eyes or else believe that at last you are beginning to accept what the Lord has seen fit to allot you. But I will not have you grow vain because I have spoken well of it. You"ll have time and opportunity (and inclination too, I don"t doubt) to make me regret that I have spoken. To fall into sloth and idleness again. However, reward was created for man the same as chastis.e.m.e.nt. Do you see that heifer yonder? From today that calf is your own. See that I do not later regret it."
Joe thanked him. Then he could look at the calf and say, aloud: "That belongs to me." Then he looked at it, and it was again too fast and too complete to be thinking: That is not a gift. It is not even a promise: it is a threat; thinking, "I didn"t ask for it. He gave it to me. I didn"t ask for it," believing, G.o.d knows, I have earned it.
It was a month later. It was Sat.u.r.day morning. "I thought you did not like town anymore," McEachern said.
"I reckon one more trip won"t hurt me," Joe said. He had a half dollar in his pocket. Mrs. McEachern had given it to him. He had asked for a nickel. She insisted that he take the half dollar. He took it, holding it on his palm, cold, contemptuously.
"I suppose not," McEachern said. "You have worked hard, too. But town is no good habit for a man who has yet to make his way."
He did not need to escape, though he would have, even by violence perhaps. But McEachern made it easy. He went to the restaurant, fast. He entered without stumbling now. The waitress was not there. Perhaps he saw, noticed that she wasn"t. He stopped at the cigar counter, behind which the woman sat, laying the half dollar on the counter. "I owe a nickel. For a cup of coffee. I said pie and coffee, before I knew that pie was a dime. I owe you a nickel." He did not look toward the rear. The men were there, in their slanted hats and with their cigarettes. The proprietor was there; waiting, Joe heard him at last, in the dirty ap.r.o.n, speaking past the cigarette: "What is it? What does he want?"
"He says he owes Bobbie a nickel," the woman said. "He wants to give Bobbie a nickel." Her voice was quiet. The proprietor"s voice was quiet.
"Well for Christ"s sake," he said. To Joe the room was full of listening. He heard, not hearing; he saw, not looking. He was now moving toward the door. The half dollar lay on the gla.s.s counter. Even from the rear of the room the proprietor could see it, since he said, "What"s that for?"
"He says he owes for a cup of coffee," the woman said.
Joe had almost reached the door. "Here, Jack," the man said. Joe did not stop. "Give him his money," the man said, flatvoiced, not yet moving. The cigarette smoke would curl still across his face, unwinded by any movement. "Give it back to him," the man said. "I don"t know what his racket is. But he can"t work it here. Give it back to him. You better go back to the farm, Hiram. Maybe you can make a girl there with a nickel."
Now he was in the street, sweating the half dollar, the coin sweating his hand, larger than a cartwheel, feeling. He walked in laughter. He had pa.s.sed through the door upon it, upon the laughing of the men. It swept and carried him along the street; then it began to flow past him, dying away, letting him to earth, pavement. He and the waitress were facing one another. She did not see him at once, walking swiftly, downlooking, in a dark dress and a hat. Again, stopped, she did not even look at him, having already looked at him, allseeing, like when she had set the coffee and the pie on the counter. She said, "Oh. And you come back to give it to me. Before them. And they kidded you. Well, say."
"I thought you might have had to pay for it, yourself. I thought-"
"Well, say. Can you tie that. Can you, now."
They were not looking at one another, standing face to face. To another they must have looked like two monks met during the hour of contemplation in a garden path. "I just thought that I ..."
"Where do you live?" she said. "In the country? Well, say. What"s your name?"
"It"s not McEachern," he said. "It"s Christmas."
"Christmas? Is that your name? Christmas? Well, say."
On the Sat.u.r.day afternoons during and after adolescence he and the other four or five boys hunted and fished. He saw girls only at church, on Sunday. They were a.s.sociated with Sunday and with church. So he could not notice them. To do so would be, even to him, a retraction of his religious hatred. But he and the other boys talked about girls. Perhaps some of them-the one who arranged with the negro girl that afternoon, for instance-knew. "They all want to," he told the others. "But sometimes they can"t." The others did not know that. They did not know that all girls wanted to, let alone that there were times when they could not. They thought differently. But to admit that they did not know the latter would be to admit that they had not discovered the former. So they listened while the boy told them. "It"s something that happens to them once a month." He described his idea of the physical ceremony. Perhaps he knew. Anyway he was graphic enough, convincing enough. If he had tried to describe it as a mental state, something which he only believed, they would not have listened. But he drew a picture, physical, actual, to be discerned by the sense of smell and even of sight. It moved them: the temporary and abject helplessness of that which tantalised and frustrated desire; the smooth and superior shape in which volition dwelled doomed to be at stated and inescapable intervals victims of periodical filth. That was how the boy told it, with the other five listening quietly, looking at one another, questioning and secret. On the next Sat.u.r.day Joe did not go hunting with them. McEachern thought that he had already gone, since the gun was missing. But Joe was hidden in the barn. He stayed there all that day. On the Sat.u.r.day following he did go, but alone, early, before the boys called for him. But he did not hunt. He was not three miles from home when in the late afternoon he shot a sheep. He found the flock in a hidden valley and stalked and killed one with the gun. Then he knelt, his hands in the yet warm blood of the dying beast, trembling, drymouthed, backglaring. Then he got over it, recovered. He did not forget what the boy had told him. He just accepted it. He found that he could live with it, side by side with it. It was as if he said, illogical and desperately calm, All right. It is so, then. But not to me. Not in my life and my love. Then it was three or four years ago and he had forgotten it, in the sense that a fact is forgotten when it once succ.u.mbs to the mind"s insistence that it be neither true nor false.
He met the waitress on the Monday night following the Sat.u.r.day on which he had tried to pay for the cup of coffee. He did not have the rope then. He climbed from his window and dropped the ten feet to the earth and walked the five miles into town. He did not think at all about how he would get back into his room.
He reached town and went to the corner where she had told him to wait. It was a quiet corner and he was quite early, thinking I will have to remember. To let her show me what to do and how to do it and when. To not let her find out that I don"t know, that I will have to find out from her.
He had been waiting for over an hour when she appeared. He had been that early. She came up on foot. She came and stood before him, small, with that air steadfast, waiting, downlooking, coming up out of the darkness. "Here you are," she said.
"I got here soon as I could. I had to wait for them to go to sleep. I was afraid I would be late."
"Have you been here long? How long?"
"I don"t know. I ran, most of the way. I was afraid I would be late."
"You ran? All them three miles?"
"It"s five miles. It"s not three."
"Well, say." Then they did not talk. They stood there, two shadows facing one another. More than a year later, remembering that night, he said, suddenly knowing, It was like she was waiting for me to hit her. "Well," she said.
He had begun now to tremble a little. He could smelt her, smell the waiting: still, wise, a little weary; thinking She"s waiting for me to start and I don"t know how Even to himself his voice sounded idiotic. "I reckon it"s late."
"Late?"
"I thought maybe they would be waiting for you. Waiting up until you ..."
"Waiting for ... Waiting for ..." Her voice died, ceased. She said, not moving; they stood like two shadows: "I live with Mame and Max. You know. The restaurant. You ought to remember them, trying to pay that nickel ..." She began to laugh. There was no mirth in it, nothing in it. "When I think of that. When I think of you coming in there, with that nickel." Then she stopped laughing. There was no cessation of mirth in that, either. The still, abject, downlooking voice reached him. "I made a mistake tonight. I forgot something." Perhaps she was waiting for him to ask her what it was. But he did not. He just stood there, with a still, downspeaking voice dying somewhere about his ears. He had forgot about the shot sheep. He had lived with the fact which the older boy had told him too long now. With the slain sheep he had bought immunity from it for too long now for it to be alive. So he could not understand at first what she was trying to tell him. They stood at the corner. It was at the edge of town, where the street became a road that ran on beyond the ordered and measured lawns, between small, random houses and barren fields-the small, cheap houses which compose the purlieus of such towns. She said, "Listen. I"m sick tonight." He did not understand. He said nothing. Perhaps he did not need to understand. Perhaps he had already expected some fateful mischance, thinking, "It was too good to be true, anyway"; thinking too fast for even thought: In a moment she will vanish. She will not be. And then I will be back home, in bed, not having left it at all. Her voice went on: "I forgot about the day of the month when I told you Monday night. You surprised me, I guess. There on the street Sat.u.r.day. I forgot what day it was, anyhow. Until after you had gone."
His voice was as quiet as hers. "How sick? Haven"t you got some medicine at home that you can take?"
"Haven"t I got ..." Her voice died. She said, "Well, say." She said suddenly: "It"s late. And you with four miles to walk."
"I"ve already walked it now. I"m here now." His voice was quiet, hopeless, calm. "I reckon it"s getting late," he said. Then something changed. Not looking at him, she sensed something before she heard it in his hard voice: "What kind of sickness have you got?"
She didn"t answer, at once. Then she said, still, downlooking: "You haven"t ever had a sweetheart, yet. I"ll bet you haven"t." He didn"t answer. "Have you?" He didn"t answer. She moved. She touched him for the first time. She came and took his arm, lightly, in both hands. Looking down, he could see the dark shape of the lowered head which appeared to have been set out of line a little on the neck when she was born. She told him, halting, clumsily, using the only words which she knew perhaps. But he had heard it before. He had already fled backward, past the slain sheep, the price paid for immunity, to the afternoon when, sitting on a creek bank, he had been not hurt or astonished so much as outraged. The arm which she held jerked free. She did not believe that he had intended to strike her; she believed otherwise, in fact. But the result was the same. As he faded on down the road, the shape, the shadow, she believed that he was running. She could hear his feet for some time after she could no longer see him. She did not move at once. She stood as he had left her, motionless, downlooking, as though waiting for the blow which she had already received.
He was not running. But he was walking fast, and in a direction that was taking him further yet from home, from the house five miles away which he had left by climbing from a window and which he had not yet planned any way of reentering. He went on down the road fast and turned from it and sprang over a fence, into plowed earth. Something was growing in the furrows. Beyond were woods, trees. He reached the woods and entered, among the hard trunks, the branchshadowed quiet, hardfeeling, hardsmelling, invisible. In the notseeing and the hardknowing as though in a cave he seemed to see a diminishing row of suavely shaped urns in moonlight, blanched. And not one was perfect. Each one was cracked and from each crack there issued something liquid, deathcolored, and foul. He touched a tree, leaning his propped arms against it, seeing the ranked and moonlit urns. He vomited.
On the next Monday night he had the rope. He was waiting at the same corner; he was quite early again. Then he saw her. She came up to where he stood. "I thought maybe you wouldn"t be here," she said.
"Did you?" He took her arm, drawing her on down the road.
"Where are we going?" she said. He didn"t answer, drawing her on. She had to trot to keep up. She trotted clumsily: an animal impeded by that which distinguished her from animals: her heels, her clothes, her smallness. He drew her from the road, toward the fence which he had crossed a week ago. "Wait," she said, the words jolting from her mouth. "The fence-I can"t-"As she stooped to go through, between the strands of wire which he had stepped over, her dress caught. He leaned and jerked it free with a ripping sound.
"I"ll buy you another one," he said. She said nothing. She let herself be half carried and half dragged among the growing plants, the furrows, and into the woods, the trees.
He kept the rope, neatly coiled, behind the same loose board in his attic room where Mrs. McEachern kept her h.o.a.rd of nickels and dimes, with the difference that the rope was thrust further back into the hole than Mrs. McEachern could reach. He had got the idea from her. Sometimes, with the old couple snoring in the room beneath, when he lifted out the silent rope he would think of the paradox. Sometimes he thought about telling her; of showing her where he kept hidden the implement of his sin, having got the idea, learned how and where to hide it, from her. But he knew that she would merely want to help him conceal it; that she would want him to sin in order that she could help him hide it; that she would at last make such a todo of meaningful whispers and signals that McEachern would have to suspect something despite himself.
Thus he began to steal, to take money from the h.o.a.rd. It is very possible that the woman did not suggest it to him, never mentioned money to him. It is possible that he did not even know that he was paying with money for pleasure. It was that he had watched for years Mrs. McEachern hide money in a certain place. Then he himself had something which it was necessary to hide. He put it in the safest place which he knew. Each time he hid or retrieved the rope, he saw the tin can containing money.
The first time he took fifty cents. He debated for some time between fifty cents and a quarter. Then he took the fifty cents because that was the exact sum he needed. With it he bought a stale and flyspecked box of candy from a man who had won it for ten cents on a punching board in a store. He gave it to the waitress. It was the first thing which he had ever given her. He gave it to her as if no one had ever thought of giving her anything before. Her expression was a little strange when she took the tawdry, shabby box into her big hands. She was sitting at the time on her bed in her bedroom in the small house where she lived with the man and woman called Max and Mame. One night about a week before the man came into the room. She was undressing, sitting on the bed while she removed her stockings. He came in and leaned against the bureau, smoking.
"A rich farmer," he said. "John Jacob Astor from the cowshed."
She had covered herself, sitting on the bed, still, downlooking. "He pays me."
"With what? Hasn"t he used up that nickel yet?" He looked at her. "A setup for hayseeds. That"s what I brought you down here from Memphis for. Maybe I"d better start giving away grub too."
"I"m not doing it on your time."
"Sure. I can"t stop you. I just hate to see you. A kid, that never saw a whole dollar at one time in his life. With this town full of guys making good jack, that would treat you right."
"Maybe I like him. Maybe you hadn"t thought of that." He looked at her, at the still and lowered crown of her head as she sat on the bed, her hands on her lap. He leaned against the bureau, smoking. He said, "Mame!" After a while he said again, "Mame! Come in here." The walls were thin. After a while the big blonde woman came up the hall, without haste. They could both hear her. She entered. "Get this," the man said. "She says maybe she likes him best. It"s Romeo and Juliet. For sweet Jesus!"
The blonde woman looked at the dark crown of the waitress" head. "What about that?"
"Nothing. It"s fine. Max Confrey presenting Miss Bobbie Allen, the youth"s companion."
"Go out," the woman said.
"Sure. I just brought her change for a nickel." He went out. The waitress had not moved. The blonde woman went to the bureau and leaned against it, looking at the other"s lowered head.
"Does he ever pay you?" she said.
The waitress did not move. "Yes. He pays me."
The blonde woman looked at her, leaning against the bureau as Max had done. "Coming all the way down here from Memphis. Bringing it all the way down here to give it away.
The waitress did not move. "I"m not hurting Max."
The blonde woman looked at the other"s lowered head. Then she turned and went toward the door. "See that you don"t," she said. "This won"t last forever. These little towns won"t stand for this long. I know. I came from one of them."
Sitting on the bed, holding the cheap, florid candy box in her hands, she sat as she had sat while the blonde woman talked to her. But it was now Joe who leaned against the bureau and looked at her. She began to laugh. She laughed, holding the gaudy box in her bigknuckled hands. Joe watched her. He watched her rise and pa.s.s him, her face lowered. She pa.s.sed through the door and called Max by name. Joe had never seen Max save in the restaurant, in the hat and the dirty ap.r.o.n. When Max entered he was not even smoking. He thrust out his hand. "How are you, Romeo?" he said.
Joe was shaking hands almost before he had recognised the man. "My name"s Joe McEachern," he said. The blonde woman had also entered. It was also the first time he had even seen her save in the restaurant. He saw her enter, watching her, watching the waitress open the box. She extended it.
"Joe brought it to me," she said.
The blonde woman looked at the box, once. She did not even move her hand. "Thanks," she said. The man also looked at the box, without moving his hand.
"Well, well, well," he said. "Sometimes Christmas lasts a good while. Hey, Romeo?" Joe had moved a little away from the bureau. He had never been in the house before. He was looking at the man, with on his face an expression a little placative and baffled though not alarmed, watching the man"s inscrutable and monklike face. But he said nothing. It was the waitress who said, "If you don"t like it, you don"t have to eat it." He watched Max, watching his face, hearing the waitress" voice; the voice downlooking: "Not doing you nor n.o.body else any harm ... Not on his time ..." He was not watching her nor the blonde woman either. He was watching Max, with that expression puzzled, placative, not afraid. The blonde woman now spoke; it was as though they were speaking of him and in his presence and in a tongue which they knew that he did not know.
"Come on out," the blonde woman said.