Mrs. Freeman was insisting upon her attention. She had moved from the refrigerator to the heater so that Mrs. Hopewell had to turn and face her in order to seem to be listening. "Glynese gone out with Harvey Hill again last night," she said. "She had this sty."
"Hill," Mrs. Hopewell said absently, "is that the one who works in the garage?"
"Nome, he"s the one that goes to chiropractor school," Mrs. Freeman said. "She had this sty. Been had it two days. So she says when he brought her in the other night he says, "Lemme get rid of that sty for you," and she says, "How?" and he says, "You just lay yourself down acrost the seat of that car and I"ll show you." So she done it and he popped her neck. Kept on a-popping it several times until she made him quit. This morning," Mrs. Freeman said, "she ain"t got no sty. She ain"t got no traces of a sty."
"I never heard of that before," Mrs. Hopewell said.
"He ast her to marry him before the Ordinary," Mrs. Freeman went on, "and she told him she wasn"t going to be married in no office."
"Well, Glynese is a fine girl," Mrs. Hopewell said. "Glynese and Carramae are both fine girls."
"Carramae said when her and Lyman was married Lyman said it sure felt sacred to him. She said he said he wouldn"t take five hundred dollars for being married by a preacher."
"How much would he take?" the girl asked from the stove.
"He said he wouldn"t take five hundred dollars," Mrs. Freeman repeated.
"Well we all have work to do," Mrs. Hopewell said.
"Lyman said it just felt more sacred to him," Mrs. Freeman said. "The doctor wants Carramae to eat prunes. Says instead of medicine. Says them cramps is coming from pressure. You know where I think it is?"
"She"ll be better in a few weeks," Mrs. Hopewell said.
"In the tube," Mrs. Freeman said. "Else she wouldn"t be as sick as she is."
Hulga had cracked her two eggs into a saucer and was bringing them to the table along with a cup of coffee that she had filled too full. She sat down carefully and began to eat, meaning to keep Mrs. Freeman there by questions if for any reason she showed an inclination to leave. She could perceive her mother"s eye on her. The first roundabout question would be about the Bible salesman and she did not wish to bring it on. "How did he pop her neck?" she asked.
Mrs. Freeman went into a description of how he had popped her neck. She said he owned a "55 Mercury but that Glynese said she would rather marry a man with only a "36 Plymouth who would be married by a preacher. The girl asked what if he had a "32 Plymouth and Mrs. Freeman said what Glynese had said was a "36 Plymouth.
Mrs. Hopewell said there were not many girls with Glynese"s common sense. She said what she admired in those girls was their common sense. She said that reminded her that they had had a nice visitor yesterday, a young man selling Bibles. "Lord," she said, "he bored me to death but he was so sincere and genuine I couldn"t be rude to him. He was just good country people, you know," she said, "-just the salt of the earth."
"I seen him walk up," Mrs. Freeman said, "and then later-I seen him walk off," and Hulga could feel the slight shift in her voice, the slight insinuation, that he had not walked off alone, had he? Her face remained expressionless but the color rose into her neck and she seemed to swallow it down with the next spoonful of egg. Mrs. Freeman was looking at her as if they had a secret together.
"Well, it takes all kinds of people to make the world go "round," Mrs. Hopewell said. "It"s very good we aren"t all alike."
"Some people are more alike than others," Mrs. Freeman said.
Hulga got up and stumped, with about twice the noise that was necessary, into her room and locked the door. She was to meet the Bible salesman at ten o"clock at the gate. She had thought about it half the night. She had started thinking of it as a great joke and then she had begun to see profound implications in it. She had lain in bed imagining dialogues for them that were insane on the surface but that reached below the depths that no Bible salesman would be aware of. Their conversation yesterday had been of this kind.
He had stopped in front of her and had simply stood there. His face was bony and sweaty and bright, with a little pointed nose in the center of it, and his look was different from what it had been at the dinner table. He was gazing at her with open curiosity, with fascination, like a child watching a new fantastic animal at the zoo, and he was breathing as if he had run a great distance to reach her. His gaze seemed somehow familiar but she could not think where she had been regarded with it before. For almost a minute he didn"t say anything. Then on what seemed an insuck of breath, he whispered, "You ever ate a chicken that was two days old?"
The girl looked at him stonily. He might have just put this question up for consideration at the meeting of a philosophical a.s.sociation. "Yes," she presently replied as if she had considered it from all angles.
"It must have been mighty small!" he said triumphantly and shook all over with little nervous giggles, getting very red in the face, and subsiding finally into his gaze of complete admiration, while the girl"s expression remained exactly the same.
"How old are you?" he asked softly.
She waited some time before she answered. Then in a flat voice she said, "Seventeen."
His smiles came in succession like waves breaking on the surface of a little lake. "I see you got a wooden leg," he said. "I think you"re real brave. I think you"re real sweet."
The girl stood blank and solid and silent.
"Walk to the gate with me," he said. "You"re a brave sweet little thing and I liked you the minute I seen you walk in the door."
Hulga began to move forward.
"What"s your name?" he asked, smiling down on the top of her head.
"Hulga," she said.
"Hulga," he murmured, "Hulga. Hulga. I never heard of anybody name Hulga before. You"re shy, aren"t you, Hulga?" he asked.
She nodded, watching his large red hand on the handle of the giant valise.
"I like girls that wear gla.s.ses," he said. "I think a lot. I"m not like these people that a serious thought don"t ever enter their heads. It"s because I may die."
"I may die too," she said suddenly and looked up at him. His eyes were very small and brown, glittering feverishly.
"Listen," he said, "don"t you think some people was meant to meet on account of what all they got in common and all? Like they both think serious thoughts and all?" He shifted the valise to his other hand so that the hand nearest her was free. He caught hold of her elbow and shook it a little. "I don"t work on Sat.u.r.day," he said. "I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing. O"er the hills and far away. Picnics and things. Couldn"t we go on a picnic tomorrow? Say yes, Hulga," he said and gave her a dying look as if he felt his insides about to drop out of him. He had even seemed to sway slightly toward her.
During the night she had imagined that she seduced him. She imagined that the two of them walked on the place until they came to the storage barn beyond the two back fields and there, she imagined, that things came to such a pa.s.s that she very easily seduced him and that then, of course, she had to reckon with his remorse. True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind. She imagined that she took his remorse in hand and changed it into a deeper understanding of life. She took all his shame away and turned it into something useful.
She set off for the gate at exactly ten o"clock, escaping without drawing Mrs. Hopewell"s attention. She didn"t take anything to eat, forgetting that food is usually taken on a picnic. She wore a pair of slacks and a dirty white shirt, and as an afterthought, she had put some Vapex on the collar of it since she did not own any perfume. When she reached the gate no one was there.
She looked up and down the empty highway and had the furious feeling that she had been tricked, that he only meant to make her walk to the gate after the idea of him. Then suddenly he stood up, very tall, from behind a bush on the opposite embankment. Smiling, he lifted his hat which was new and wide-brimmed. He had not worn it yesterday and she wondered if he had bought it for the occasion. It was toast-colored with a red and white band around it and was slightly too large for him. He stepped from behind the bush still carrying the black valise. He had on the same suit and the same yellow socks sucked down in his shoes from walking. He crossed the highway and said, "I knew you"d come!"
The girl wondered acidly how he had known this. She pointed to the valise and asked, "Why did you bring your Bibles?"
He took her elbow, smiling down on her as if he could not stop. "You can never tell when you"ll need the word of G.o.d, Hulga," he said. She had a moment in which she doubted that this was actually happening and then they began to climb the embankment. They went down into the pasture toward the woods. The boy walked lightly by her side, bouncing on his toes. The valise did not seem to be heavy today; he even swung it. They crossed half the pasture without saying anything and then, putting his hand easily on the small of her back, he asked softly, "Where does your wooden leg join on?"
She turned an ugly red and glared at him and for an instant the boy looked abashed. "I didn"t mean you no harm," he said. "I only meant you"re so brave and all. I guess G.o.d takes care of you."
"No," she said, looking forward and walking fast, "I don"t even believe in G.o.d."
At this he stopped and whistled. "No!" he exclaimed as if he were too astonished to say anything else.
She walked on and in a second he was bouncing at her side, fanning with his hat. "That"s very unusual for a girl," he remarked, watching her out of the corner of his eye. When they reached the edge of the wood, he put his hand on her back again and drew her against him without a word and kissed her heavily.
The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain. Even before he released her, her mind, clear and detached and ironic anyway, was regarding him from a great distance, with amus.e.m.e.nt but with pity. She had never been kissed before and she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional experience and all a matter of the mind"s control. Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka. When the boy, looking expectant but uncertain, pushed her gently away, she turned and walked on, saying nothing as if such business, for her, were common enough.
He came along panting at her side, trying to help her when he saw a root that she might trip over. He caught and held back the long swaying blades of thorn vine until she had pa.s.sed beyond them. She led the way and he came breathing heavily behind her. Then they came out on a sunlit hillside, sloping softly into another one a little smaller. Beyond, they could see the rusted top of the old barn where the extra hay was stored.
The hill was sprinkled with small pink weeds. "Then you ain"t saved?" he asked suddenly, stopping.
The girl smiled. It was the first time she had smiled at him at all. "In my economy," she said, "I"m saved and you are d.a.m.ned but I told you I didn"t believe in G.o.d."
Nothing seemed to destroy the boy"s look of admiration. He gazed at her now as if the fantastic animal at the zoo had put its paw through the bars and given him a loving poke. She thought he looked as if he wanted to kiss her again and she walked on before he had the chance.
"Ain"t there somewheres we can sit down sometime?" he murmured, his voice softening toward the end of the sentence.
"In that barn," she said.
They made for it rapidly as if it might slide away like a train. It was a large two-story barn, cook and dark inside. The boy pointed up the ladder that led into the loft and said, "It"s too bad we can"t go up there."
"Why can"t we?" she asked.
"Yer leg," he said reverently.
The girl gave him a contemptuous look and putting both hands on the ladder, she climbed it while he stood below, apparently awestruck. She pulled herself expertly through the opening and then looked down at him and said, "Well, come on if your coming," and he began to climb the ladder, awkwardly bringing the suitcase with him.
"We won"t need the Bible," she observed.
"You never can tell," he said, panting. After he had got into the loft, he was a few seconds catching his breath. She had sat down in a pile of straw. A wide sheath of sunlight, filled with dust particles, slanted over her. She lay back against a bale, her face turned away, looking out the front opening of the barn where hay was thrown from a wagon into the loft. The two pink-speckled hillsides lay back against a dark ridge of woods. The sky was cloudless and cold blue. The boy dropped down by her side and put one arm under her and the other over her and began methodically kissing her face, making little noises like a fish. He did not remove his hat but it was pushed far enough back not to interfere. When her gla.s.ses got in his way, he took them off of her and slipped them into his pocket.
The girl at first did not return any of the kisses but presently she began to and after she had put several on his cheek, she reached his lips and remained there, kissing him again and again as if she were trying to draw all the breath out of him. His breath was clear and sweet like a child"s and the kisses were sticky like a child"s. He mumbled about loving her and about knowing when he first seen her that he loved her, but the mumbling was like the sleepy fretting of a child being put to sleep by his mother. Her mind, throughout this, never stopped or lost itself for a second to her feelings. "You ain"t said you loved me none," he whispered finally, pulling back from her. "You got to say that."
She looked away from him off into the hollow sky and then down at a black ridge and then down farther into what appeared to be two green swelling lakes. She didn"t realize he had taken her gla.s.ses but this landscape could not seem exceptional to her for she seldom paid any close attention to her surroundings.
"You got to say it," he repeated. "You got to say you love me."
She was always careful how she committed herself. "In a sense," she began, "if you use the word loosely, you might say that. But it"s not a word I use. I don"t have illusions. I"m one of those people who see through to nothing."
The boy was frowning. "You got to say it. I said it and you got to say it," he said.
The girl looked at him almost tenderly. "You poor baby," she murmured. "It"s just as well you don"t understand," and she pulled him by the neck, face-down, against her. "We are all d.a.m.ned," she said, "but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there"s nothing to see. It"s a kind of salvation."
The boy"s astonished eyes looked blankly through the ends of her hair. "Okay," he almost whined, "but do you love me or don"tcher?"
"Yes," she said and added, "in a sense. But I must tell you something. There mustn"t be anything dishonest between us." She lifted his head and looked him in the eye. "I am thirty years old," she said. "I have a number of degrees."
The boy"s look was irritated but dogged. "I don"t care," he said. "I don"t care a thing about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me or don"tcher?" and he caught her to him and wildly planted her face with kisses until she said, "Yes, yes."
"Okay then," he said, letting her go. "Prove it."
She smiled, looking dreamily out on the shifty landscape. She had seduced him without even making up her mind to try. "How?" she asked, feeling that he should be delayed a little.
He leaned over and put his lips to her ear. "Show me where your wooden leg joins on," he whispered.
The girl uttered a sharp little cry and her face instantly drained of color. The obscenity of the suggestion was not what shocked her. As a child she had sometimes been subject to feelings of shame but education had removed the last traces of that as a good surgeon sc.r.a.pes for cancer; she would no more have felt it over what he was asking than she would have believed in his Bible. But she was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peac.o.c.k about his tail. No one ever touched it but her. She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away. "No," she said.
"I known it," he muttered, sitting up. "You"re just playing me for a sucker."
"On no no!" she cried. "It joins on at the knee. Only at the knee. Why do you want to see it?"
The boy gave her a long penetrating look. "Because," he said, "it"s what makes you different. You ain"t like anybody else."
She sat staring at him. There was nothing about her face or her round freezing-blue eyes to indicate that this had moved her; but she felt as if her heart had stopped and left her mind to pump her blood. She decided that for the first time in her life she was face to face with real innocence. This boy, with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her. When after a minute, she said in a hoa.r.s.e high voice, "All right," it was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his.
Very gently, he began to roll the slack leg up. The artificial limb, in a white sock and brown flat shoe, was bound in a heavy material like canvas and ended in an ugly jointure where it was attached to the stump. The boy"s face and his voice were entirely reverent as he uncovered it and said, "Now show me how to take it off and on."
She took it off for him and put it back on again and then he took it off himself, handling it as tenderly as if it were a real one. "See!" he said with a delighted child"s face. "Now I can do it myself!"
"Put it back on," she said. She was thinking that she would run away with him and that every night he would take the leg off and every morning put it back on again. "Put it back on," she said.
"Not yet," he murmured, setting it on its foot out of her reach. "Leave it off for awhile. You got me instead."
She gave a little cry of alarm but he pushed her down and began to kiss her again. Without the leg she felt entirely dependent on him. Her brain seemed to have stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other function that it was not very good at. Different expressions raced back and forth over her face. Every now and then the boy, his eyes like two steel spikes, would glance behind him where the leg stood. Finally she pushed him off and said, "Put it back on me now."
"Wait," he said. He leaned the other way and pulled the valise toward him and opened it. It had a pale blue spotted lining and there were only two Bibles in it. He took one of these out and opened the cover of it. It was hollow and contained a pocket flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and a small blue box with printing on it. He laid these out in front of her one at a time in an evenly-s.p.a.ced row, like one presenting offerings at the shrine of a G.o.ddess. He put the blue box in her hand. THIS PRODUCT TO BE USED ONLY FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE, she read, and dropped it. The boy was uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the top of the flask. He stopped and pointed, with a smile, to the deck of cards. It was not an ordinary deck but one with an obscene picture on the back of each card. "Take a swig," he said, offering her the bottle first. He held it in front of her, but like one mesmerized, she did not move.
Her voice when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. "Aren"t you," she murmured, "aren"t you just good country people?"
The boy c.o.c.ked his head. He looked as if he were just beginning to understand that she might be trying to insult him. "Yeah," he said, curling his lip slightly, "but it ain"t held me back none. I"m as good as you any day in the week."
"Give me my leg," she said.
He pushed it farther away with his foot. "Come on now, let"s begin to have us a good time," he said coaxingly. "We ain"t got to know one another good yet."
"Give me my leg!" she screamed and tried to lunge for it but he pushed her down easily.
"What"s the matter with you all of a sudden?" he asked, frowning as he screwed the top on the flask and put it quickly back inside the Bible. "You just a while ago said you didn"t believe in nothing. I thought you was some girl!"
Her face was almost purple. "You"re a Christian!" she hissed. "You"re a fine Christian! You"re just like them all-say one thing and do another. You"re a perfect Christian, you"re..."
The boy"s mouth was set angrily. "I hope you don"t think," he said in a lofty indignant tone, "that I believe in that c.r.a.p! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn"t born yesterday and I know where I"m going!"
"Give me my leg!" she screeched. He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep the cards and the blue box back into the Bible and throw the Bible into the valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and s.n.a.t.c.hed up the valise and swung it down the hole and then stepped through himself. When all of him had pa.s.sed but his head, he turned and regarded her with a look that no longer had any admiration in it. "I"ve gotten a lot of interesting things," he said. "One time I got a woman"s gla.s.s eye this way. And you needn"t to think you"ll catch me because Pointer ain"t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don"t stay nowhere long. And I"ll tell you another thing, Hulga," he said, using the name as if he didn"t think much of it, "you ain"t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!" and then the toast-colored hat disappeared down the hole and the girl was left, sitting on the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her churning face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.
Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who were in the back pasture, digging up onions, saw him emerge a little later from the woods and head across the meadow toward the highway. "Why, that looks like that nice dull young man that tried to sell me a Bible yesterday," Mrs. Hopewell said, squinting. "He must have been selling them to the Negroes back in there. He was so simple," she said, "but I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple."
Mrs. Freeman"s gaze drove forward and just touched him before he disappeared under the hill. Then she returned her attention to the evil-smelling onion shoot she was lifting from the ground. "Some can"t be that simple," she said. "I know I never could."
You Can"t Be Any Poorer Than Dead(1955)
FRANCIS MARION TARWATER"S uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Buford had come along about noon, and when he left at sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had never returned from the still.
The old man had been Tarwater"s great uncle, or said he was, and they had always lived together so far as the child knew. His uncle had said he was seventy years of age at the time he had rescued him and undertaken to bring him up; he was eighty-four when he died. Tarwater figured this made his own age fourteen. His uncle had taught him figures, reading, writing, and historv beginning with Adam expelled from the Garden and going on down through the presidents to Herbert Hoover and on in speculation toward the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment. Besides giving him a good education, he had rescued him from his only other connection, old Tarwater"s nephew, a school teacher who had no child of his own at the time and wanted this one of his dead sister"s to raise according to his own ideas. The old man was in a position to know what his ideas were.
He had lived for three months in the nephew"s house on what he had thought at the time was Charity but what he said he had found out was not Charity or anything like it. All the time he had lived there, the nephew had secretly been making a study of him. The nephew, who had taken him in under the name of Charity, had at the same time been creeping into his soul by the back door, asking him questions that meant more than one thing, planting traps around the house and watching him fall into them, and finally coming up with a written study of him for a school teacher magazine.The stench of his behavior had reached heaven and the Lord Himself had rescued the old man. He had sent him a rage of vision, had told him to fly with the orphan boy to the farthest part of the backwoods and raise him up to justify his Redemption. The Lord had a.s.sured him a long life and he had s.n.a.t.c.hed the child from under the school teacher"s nose and taken him to live in a clearing that he had t.i.tle to for his lifetime.
Eventually Rayber, the school teacher, had discovered where they were and had come out to the clearing to get the boy back. He had had to leave his car on the dirt road and walk a mile through the woods, on a path that appeared and disappeared, before he came to the corn patch with the gaunt two-story shack standing in the middle of it. The old man had been fond of recalling for Tarwater the red, sweating, bitten face of his nephew bobbing up and down through the corn and behind it the pink, flowered hat of a welfare woman he had brought along with him. The corn was planted up to two feet from the porch step, and as the nephew came out of it, the old man appeared in the door with his shotgun and said that he would shoot any foot that touched his step, and the two stood facing each other while the welfare woman bristled out of the corn like a peahen upset on the nest. The old man said if it hadn"t been for the welfare woman his nephew wouldn"t have taken a step, but she stood there waiting, pushing back the wisps of dyed red hair that were plastered on her long forehead. Both their faces were scratched and bleeding from thorn bushes, and the old man recalled a switch of blackberry bush hanging from the sleeve of the welfare woman"s blouse. She only had to let out her breath slowly as if she were releasing the last patience on earth and the nephew lifted his foot and set it down on the step and the old man shot him in the leg. The two of them had scuttled off, making a disappearing rattle in the corn, and the woman had screamed, "You knew he was crazy!"; but when they came out of the corn on the other side, old Tarwater had noted from the upstairs window where he had run that she had her arm around him and was holding him up while he hopped into the woods; and later he learned that he had married her though she was twice his age and he could only possibly get one child out of her. She had never let him come back again.
The morning the old man died, he came down and cooked the breakfast as usual and died before he got the first spoonful to his mouth. The downstairs of their shack was all kitchen, large and dark, with a wood tove in the center of it and a board table drawn up to the stove. Sacks of feed and mash were stacked in the corners, and sc.r.a.p metal, wood shavings, old rope, ladders, and other tinder were wherever he or Tarwater had let them fall. They had slept in the kitchen until a wild cat sprang in the window one night and frightened him into carrying the bed upstairs where there were two empty rooms. He prophesied at the time that the stairsteps would take ten years off his life. At the moment of his death, he had sat down to his breakfast and lifted his knife in one square red hand halfway to his mouth and then, with a look of complete astonishment, he had lowered it until the hand rested on the edge of the plate and tilted it up off the table.