Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone,
Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all
her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving
like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left
or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow
line down the center of it. She seldom used the other expression
because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement, but
when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost
imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to
be receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though
she might stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of
each other, was no longer there in spirit. As for getting
anything across to her when this was the case, Mrs. Hopewell had given
it up. She might talk her head off. Mrs. Freeman could
never be brought to admit herself wrong to any point. She would
stand there and if she could be brought to say anything, it was
something like, "Well, I wouldn't of said it was and I wouldn't of said
it wasn't" or letting her gaze range over the top kitchen shelf where
there was an assortment of dusty bottles, she might remark, "I see you
ain't ate many of them figs you put up last summer."
They
carried on their most important business in the kitchen at
breakfast. Every morning Mrs. Hopewell got up at seven o'clock
and lit her gas heater and Joy's. Joy was her daughter, a large
blonds girl who had an artificial leg. Mrs. Hopewell thought of
her as a child though she was thirty-two years old and highly
educated. Joy would get up while her mother was eating and lumber
into the bathroom and slam the door, and before long, Mrs. Freeman
would arrive at the back door. Joy would hear her mother call,
"Come on in," and then they would talk for a while in low voices that
were indistinguishable in the bathroom. By the time Joy came in,
they had usually finished the weather report and were on one or the
other of Mrs. Freeman's daughters, Glynese or Carramae. Joy
called them Glycerin and Caramel. Glynese, a redhead, was
eighteen and had many admirers; Carramae, a blonde, was only fifteen
but already married and pregnant. She could not keep anything on
her stomach. Every morning Mrs. Freeman told Mrs. Hopewell how
many times she had vomited since the last report.
Mrs. Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady
and that she was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to
anybody they might meet. Then she would tell how she had happened
to hire the Freemans in the first place and how they were a godsend to
her and how she had had them four years. The reason for her
keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good
country people. She had telephoned the man whose name they had
given as reference and he had told her that Mr. Freeman was a good
farmer but that his wife was the nosiest woman ever to walk the
earth. "She's got to be into everything," the man said. "If
she don't get there before the dust settles, you can bet she's dead,
that's all. She'll want to know all your business. I can
stand him real good," he had said, "but me nor my wife neither could
have stood that woman one more minute on this place." That had
put Mrs. Hopewell off for a few days.
She had hired them in the
end because there were no other applicants but she had made up her mind
beforehand exactly how she would handle the woman. Since she was
the type who had to be into everything, then, Mrs. Hopewell had
decided, she would not only let her be into everything, she would see to it
that she was into everything she would give her the responsibility of
everything, she would put her in charge. Mrs. Hopewell had no bad
qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a
constructive way that she had kept them four years.
Nothing is
perfect. This was one of Mrs. Hopewell's favorite sayings.
Another was: that is life! And still another, the most
important, was: well, other people have their opinions too.
She would make these statements, usually at the table, in a tone of
gentle insistence as if no one held them but her, and the large hulking
Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her
face, would stare just a little to the side of her, her eyes icy blue,
with the look of someone who had achieved blindness by an act of will
and means to keep it.
When Mrs. Hopewell said to Mrs. Freeman
that life was like that, Mrs. Freeman would say, "I always said so
myself." Nothing had been arrived at by anyone that had not first
been arrived at by her. She was quicker than Mr. Freeman.
When Mrs. Hopewell said to her after they had been on the place for a
while, "You know, you're the wheel behind the wheel," and winked, Mrs.
Freeman had said, "I know it. I've always been quick. It's
some that are quicker than others."
"Everybody is different," Mrs. Hopewell said.
"Yes, most people is," Mrs. Freeman said.
"It takes all kinds to make the world."
"I always said it did myself."
The
girl was used to this kind of dialogue for breakfast and more of it for
dinner; sometimes they had it for supper too. When they had no
guest they ate in the kitchen because that was easier. Mrs.
Freeman always managed to arrive at some point during the meal and to
watch them finish it. She would stand in the doorway if it were
summer but in the winter she would stand with one elbow on top of the
refrigerator and look down at them, or she would stand by the gas
heater, lifting the back of her skirt slightly. Occasionally she
would stand against the wall and roll her head from side to side.
At no time was she in any hurry to leave. All this was very
trying on Mrs. Hopewell but she was a woman of great patience.
She realized that nothing is perfect and that in the Freemans she had
good country people and that if, in this day and age, you get good
country people, you had better hang onto them.
She had had
plenty of experience with trash. Before the Freemans she had
averaged one tenant family a year. The wives of these farmers
were not the kind you would want to be around you for very long.
Mrs. Hopewell, who had divorced her husband long ago, needed someone to
walk over the fields with her; and when Joy had to be impressed for
these services, her remarks were usually so ugly and her face so glum
that Mrs. Hopewell would say, "If you can't come pleasantly, I don't
want you at all," to which the girl, standing square and
rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust slightly forward, would reply,
"If you want me, here I am LIKE I AM."
Mrs. Hopewell excused
this attitude because of the leg (which had been shot off in a hunting
accident when Joy was ten). It was hard for Mrs. Hopewell to
realize that her child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty
years she had had only one leg. She thought of her still as a
child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl
in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal
good times. Her name was really Joy but as soon as she was
twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed.
Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she had thought and thought until she
had hit upon the ugliest name in any language. Then she had gone
and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother
until after she had done it. Her legal name was Hulga.
When
Mrs. Hopewell thought the name, Hulga, she thought of the broad blank
hull of a battleship. She would not use it. She continued
to call her Joy to which the girl responded but in a purely mechanical
way.
Hulga had learned to tolerate Mrs. Freeman who saved her
from taking walks with her mother. Even Glynese and Carramae were
useful when they occupied attention that might otherwise have been
directed at her. At first she had thought she could not stand
Mrs. Freeman for she had found it was not possible to be rude to
her. Mrs. Freeman would take on strange resentments and for days
together she would be sullen but the source of her displeasure was
always obscure; a direct attack, a positive leer, blatant ugliness to
her face. These never touched her. And without warning one day,
she began calling her Hulga.
She did not call her that in front
of Mrs. Hopewell who would have been incensed but when she and the girl
happened to be out of the house together, she would say something and
add the name Hulga to the end of it, and the big spectacled Joy-Hulga
would scowl and redden as if her privacy had been intruded upon.
She considered the name her personal affair. She had arrived at
it first purely on the basis of its ugly sound and then the full genius
of its fitness had struck her. She had a vision of the name
working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace and to
whom, presumably, the goddess had to come when called. She saw it
as the name of her highest creative act. One of her major
triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into
Joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself
into Hulga. However, Mrs. Freeman's relish for using the name
only irritated her. It was as if Mrs. Freeman's beady
steel-pointed eyes had penetrated far enough behind her face to reach
some secret fact. Something about her seemed to fascinate Mrs.
Freeman and then one day Hulga realized that it was the artificial
leg. Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of
secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of
diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable. Hulga had
heard Mrs. Hopewell give her the details of the hunting accident, how
the leg had been literally blasted off, how she had never lost
consciousness. Mrs. Freeman could listen to it any time as if it
had happened an hour ago.
When Hulga stumped into the kitchen in
the morning (she could walk without making the awful noise but she made
it, Mrs. Hopewell was certain, because it was ugly-sounding), she
glanced at them and did not speak. Mrs. Hopewell would be in her
red kimono with her hair tied around her head in rags. She would
be sitting at the table, finishing her breakfast and Mrs. Freeman would
be hanging by her elbow outward from the refrigerator, looking down at
the table. Hulga always put her eggs on the stove to boil and
then stood over them with her arms folded, and Mrs. Hopewell would look
at her, a kind of indirect gaze divided between her and Mrs. Freeman,
and would think that if she would only keep herself up a little, she
wouldn,t be so bad looking. There was nothing wrong with her face
that a pleasant expression wouldn,t help. Mrs. Hopewell said that
people who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful even
if they were not.
Whenever she looked at Joy this way, she could
not help but feel that it would have been better if the child had not
taken the Ph.D. It had certainly not brought her out any and now
that she had it, there was no more excuse for her to go to school
again. Mrs. Hopewell thought it was nice for girls to go to
school to have a good time but Joy had gone through. Anyhow,
she would not have been strong enough to go again. The doctors
had told Mrs. Hopewell that with the best of care, Joy might see
forty-five. She had a weak heart. Joy had made it plain
that if it had not been for this condition, she would be far from these
red hills and good country people. She would be in a university
lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about. And Mrs.
Hopewell could very well picture here there, looking like a scarecrow
and lecturing to more of the same. Here she went about all day in
a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a
horse embossed on it. She thought this was funny; Mrs. Hopewell
thought it was idiotic and showed simply that she was still a
child. She was brilliant but she didn,t have a grain of
sense. It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less
like other people and more like herself, bloated, rude, and
squint-eyed. And she said such strange things! To her own
mother she had said, without warning, without excuse, standing up in
the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half full
"Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside
and see what you are not? God!" she had cried sinking
down again and staring at her plate, "Malebranche was
right: we are not our own light. We are not our own
light!" Mrs. Hopewell had no idea to this day what brought that
on. She had only made the remark, hoping Joy would take it in,
that a smile never hurt anyone. The girl had taken the Ph.D. in
philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You
could say, "My daughter is a nurse, or My daughter is a school
teacher, or even, My daughter is a chemical engineer." You
could not say, "My daughter is a philosopher." That was something
that had ended with the Greeks and Romans. All day Joy sat on her
neck in a deep chair, reading. Sometimes she went for walks but
she didn't like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice
young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell
their stupidity.
One day Mrs. Hopewell had picked up one of the
books the girl had just put down and opening it at random, she read,
"Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and
seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with
what-is. Nothing. how can it be for science anything but a
horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands
firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is
after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it
by wishing to know nothing of Nothing." These words had been
underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs. Hopewell like
some evil incantation in gibberish. She shut the book quickly and
went out of the room as if she were having a chill.
This morning
when the girl came in, Mrs. Freeman was on Carramae. "She thrown
up four times after supper," she said, "and was up twict in the night
after three o'clock. Yesterday she didn't do nothing but ramble
in the bureau drawer. All she did. Stand up there and see
what she could run up on."
"She's got to eat," Mrs. Hopewell
muttered, sipping her coffee, while she watched Joy's back at the
stove. She was wondering what the child had said to the Bible
salesman. She could not imagine what kind of a conversation she
could possibly have had with him.
He was a tall gaunt hatless
youth who had called yesterday to sell them a Bible. He had
appeared at the door, carrying a large black suitcase that weighted him
so heavily on one side that he had to brace himself against the door
facing. He seemed on the point of collapse but he said in a
cheerful voice, "Good morning, Mrs. Cedars!" and set the suitcase down
on the mat. He was not a bad-looking young man though he had on a
bright blue suit and yellow socks that were not pulled up far
enough. He had prominent face bones and a streak of
sticky-looking brown hair falling across his forehead.
"I'm Mrs. Hopewell," she said.
"Oh!"
he said, pretending to look puzzled but with his eyes sparkling, "I saw
it said 'The Cedars' on the mailbox so I thought you was Mrs. Cedars!"
and he burst out in a pleasant laugh. He picked up the satchel
and under cover of a pant, he fell forward into her hall. It was
rather as if the suitcase had moved first, jerking him after it.
"Mrs. Hopewell!" he said and grabbed her hand. "I hope you are
well!" and he laughed again and then all at once his face sobered
completely. He paused and gave her a straight earnest look and
said, "Lady, I've come to speak of serious things."
"Well, come
in," she muttered, none too pleased because her dinner was almost
ready. He came into the parlor and sat down on the edge of a
straight chair and put the suitcase between his feet and glanced around
the room as if he were sizing her up by it. Her silver gleamed on
the two sideboards; she decided he had never been in a room as elegant
as this.
"Mrs. Hopewell," he began, using her name in a way that sounded almost intimate, "I know you believe in Chrustian service."
"Well, yes," she murmured.
"I
know," he said and paused, looking very wise with his head cocked on
one side, "that you're a good woman. Friends have told me."
Mrs. Hopewell never liked to be taken for a fool. "What are you selling?" she asked.
"Bibles,"
the young man said and his eye raced around the room before he added,
"I see you have no family Bible in your parlor, I see that is the one
lack you got!"
Mrs. Hopewell could not say, "My daughter is an
atheist and won't let me keep the Bible in the parlor." She said,
stiffening slightly, "I keep my Bible by my bedside." This was
not the truth. It was in the attic somewhere.
"Lady," he said, "the word of God ought to be in the parlor."
"Well, I think that's a matter of taste," she began, "I think"
"Lady,"
he said, "for a Chrustian, the word of God ought to be in every room in
the house besides in his heart. I know you're a Chrustian because
I can see it in every line of your face."
She stood up and said, "Well, young man, I don't want to buy a Bible and I smell my dinner burning."
He
didn't get up. He began to twist his hands and looking down at
them, he said softly, "Well lady, I'll tell you the truth; not many
people want to buy one nowadays and besides, I know I'm real
simple. I don't know how to say a thing but to say it. I'm
just a country boy." He glanced up into her unfriendly
face. "People like you don't like to fool with country people
like me!"
"Why!" she cried, "good country people are the salt of
the earth! Besides, we all have different ways of doing, it takes
all kinds to make the world go 'round. That's life!"
"You said a mouthful," he said.
"Why,
I think there aren't enough good country people in the world!" she
said, stirred. "I think that's what's wrong with it!"
His
face had brightened. "I didn't intraduce myself," he said.
"I'm Manley Pointer from out in the country around Willohobie, not even
from a place, just from near a place."
"You wait a minute," she
said. "I have to see about my dinner." She went out to the
kitchen and found Joy standing near the door where she had been
listening.
"Get rid of the salt of the earth" she said, "and let's eat."
Mrs. Hopewell gave her a pained look and turned the heat down under the vegetables. "I can't be rude to anybody," she murmured and went back into the parlor.
He had opened the suitcase and was sitting with a Bible on each knee.
"I appreciate your honesty," he said. "You don't see any more real honest people unless you go way out in the country."
"I know," she said, "real genuine folks!" Through the crack in the door she heard a groan.
"I
guess a lot of boys come telling you they're working their way through
college," he said, "but I'm not going to tell you that. Somehow,"
he said, "I don't want to go to college. I want to devote my life
to Chrustian service. See," he said, lowering his voice, "I got
this heart condition. I may not live long. When you know
it's something wrong with you and you may not live long, well then,
lady" He paused, with his mouth open, and stared at her.
He
and Joy had the same condition! She knew that her eyes were
filling with tears but she collected herself quickly and murmured,
"Won't you stay for dinner? We'd love to have you!" and was sorry
the instant she heard herself say it.
"Yes mam," he said in an abashed voice. "I would sher love to do that!"
Joy
had given him one look on being introduced to him and then throughout
the meal had not glanced at him again. He had addressed several
remarks to her, which she had pretended not to hear. Mrs.
Hopewell could not understand deliberate rudeness, although she lived
with it, and she felt she had always to overflow with hospitality to
make up for Joy's lack of courtesy. She urged him to talk about
himself and he did. He said he was the seventh child of twelve
and that his father had been crushed under a tree when he himself was
eight years old. He had been crushed very badly, in fact, almost
cut in two and was practically not recognizable. His mother had
got along the best she could by hard working and she had always seen
that her children went to Sunday School and that they read the Bible
every evening. He was now nineteen years old and he had been
selling Bibles for four months. In that time he had sold
seventy-seven Bibles and had the promise of two more sales. He
wanted to become a missionary because he thought that was the way you
could do most for people. "He who losest his life shall find it,"
he said simply and he was so sincere, so genuine and earnest that Mrs.
Hopewell would not for the world have smiled. He prevented his
peas from sliding onto the table by blocking them with a piece of bread
which he later cleaned his plate with. She could see Joy
observing sidewise how he handled his knife and fork and she saw too
that every few minutes, the boy would dart a keen appraising glance at
the girl as if he were trying to attract her attention.
After
dinner Joy cleared the dishes off the table and disappeared and Mrs.
Hopewell was left to talk with him. He told her again about his
childhood and his father's accident and about various things that had
happened to him. Every five minutes or so she would stifle a
yawn. He sat for two hours until finally she told him she must go
because she had an appointment in town. He packed his Bibles and
thanked her and prepared to leave, but in the doorway he stopped and
wring her hand and said that not on any of his trips had he met a lady
as nice as her and he asked if he could come again. She had said
she would always be happy to see him.
Joy had been standing in
the road, apparently looking at something in the distance, when he came
down the steps toward her, bent to the side with his heavy
valise. He stopped where she was standing and confronted her
directly. Mrs. Hopewell could not hear what he said but she
trembled to think what Joy would say to him. She could see that
after a minute Joy said something and that then the boy began to speak
again, making an excited gesture with his free hand. After a
minute Joy said something else at which the boy began to speak once
more. Then to her amazement, Mrs. Hopewell saw the two of them
walk off together, toward the gate. Joy had walked all the way to
the gate with him and Mrs. Hopewell could not imagine what they had
said to each other, and she had not yet dared to ask.
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 round-about 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
association. "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 glasses," 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 Saturday," 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 pass 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 God, 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 God takes care of you."
"No," she said, looking forward and walking fast, "I don't even believe in God."
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 amusement 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 passed 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 damned but
I told you I didn't believe in God."
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
glasses 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 glasses 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
damned," 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 scrapes 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 peacock 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 hoarse 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-spaced row, like one presenting offerings at the
shrine of a goddess. 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 unscrewing 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 cocked 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 crap! 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 snatched up the valise and swung it down the
hole and then stepped through himself. When all of him had passed
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 glass 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."