“No, I’m not. My landlady only rents to men.”
“You could slip me in, though.”
“What: slip you into my room?”
She nodded.
“Not on your life,” he said.
But he kept driving in the direction of the boardinghouse, because he didn’t know what else to do.
They reached an intersection, and he braked and turned to look at her. Five years, just about, hadn’t changed her in the least; she might still be thirteen. Her face still seemed drawn too tight, as if she didn’t have quite enough skin to go around, and her lips were still thin and colorless. It was as if she had frozen in time the day he left. He didn’t know why he had ever found her attractive. But clearly she couldn’t tell what he was thinking, because she smiled and ducked her chin and looked up at him sideways and said, “I wore those shoes you like so much.”
What shoes could those be? He didn’t remember any shoes. He glanced down at her feet and saw dark, high-heeled pumps with ankle straps, so blocky and oversized that her shins looked as slender as clover stems.
“How did you find out where I was?” he asked her.
She stopped smiling. She straightened and stood her big purse on the tip end of her knees.
“Well,” she said, and she gave a sharp nod. (He’d forgotten how she used to do that. It said, “Down to business.” It said, “Let me handle this.”) “Four days ago was my birthday,” she said. “I’m eighteen years old now.”
“Happy birthday,” he said dully.
“Eighteen, Junie! Legal age!”
“Legal age is twenty-one,” he told her.
“Well, for voting, maybe … and I already had my suitcase packed; I already had my money saved. I earned it picking galax every fall since you left. But I laid low till I was eighteen, so nobody could stop me. Then the day after my birthday, I had Martha Moffat drive me to the Parryville lumberyard and I asked the fellows there if they could say where you’d gone off to.”
“You asked the whole yard?” he said, and she nodded again.
He could just picture how that must have looked.
“And this one fellow, he told me you might could have headed north. He said he remembered you coming in one day, wondering if anyone knew where this carpenter was they called Trouble, on account of his name was Trimble. And they told you Trouble’d gone to Baltimore, so maybe that’s where you went, this fellow said, looking for work. So I got Martha to ride me to Mountain City and I bought a ticket to Baltimore.”
Junior was reminded of those movie cartoons where Bosko or someone steps off a cliff and doesn’t even realize he’s standing on empty space. Had Linnie not grasped the chanciness? He could have moved on years ago. He could be living in Chicago now, or Paris, France.
It seemed to him all at once a kind of failure that he was not; that here he still was, all this time afterward. And that she had somehow known he would be.
“Martha Moffat’s name is Shuford now,” Linnie was saying. “Did you know Martha got married? She married Tommy Shuford, but Mary Moffat’s still single and it’s like to kill her soul, you can tell. She acts mad at Martha all the time about every little thing. But then they never did get along as good as you’d expect.”
“As well,” he said.
“What?”
He gave up.
They were traveling through downtown, with the buildings set cheek to jowl and the streetlights glowing, but Linnie barely glanced out the window. He had thought she would be more impressed.
“When I got off the train in Baltimore,” she said, “I went straight to the public telephone and I looked for you in the book, and when I couldn’t find you I called everybody named Trimble. Or I would have, except Trouble’s first name turned out to be Dean and that came pretty soon in the alphabet. And he said you had looked him up, and he’d told you where you might could find work, but he didn’t know if they’d hired you or not and he couldn’t say where you were living, unless you were still at Mrs. Bess Davies’s where a lot of workingmen board at when they first come north.”
“You should get a job with Pinkerton’s,” Junior said. He wasn’t pleased to hear how easy he’d been to find.
“I worried you had moved by now, found a place of your own or something.”
He frowned. “There’s a depression on,” he said. “Or haven’t you heard?”
“It’s fine with me if you live in a boardinghouse,” she said, and she patted his arm. He jerked away, and for a while after that she was quiet.
When they reached Mrs. Davies’s street he parked some distance from the house, at the darker end of the block. He didn’t want anyone seeing them.
“Are you glad I’m here?” Linnie asked him.
He shut off the engine. He said, “Linnie—”
“But my goodness, we don’t have to go into everything all at once!” Linnie said. “Oh, Junior, I’ve missed you so! I haven’t once looked at a single other fellow since you left.”
“You were thirteen years old,” Junior said.
Meaning, “You’ve spent all the time since you were thirteen never having a boyfriend?”
But Linnie, misunderstanding, beamed at him and said, “I know.”
She picked up his right hand, which was still resting on the gearshift knob, and pressed it between both of hers. Hers were very warm, despite the weather, so that his must have struck her as cold. “Cold hands, warm heart,” she told him. Then she said, “And so here I am, about to spend the first full night with you I’ve ever had in my life.” She seemed to be taking it for granted that he had decided to slip her in after all.
“The first and only night,” he told her. “Then tomorrow you’re going to have to find yourself someplace else. It’s risky enough as it is; if Mrs. Davies caught wind of you, she’d put us both out on the street.”
“I wouldn’t mind that,” Linnie said. “Not if I was with you. It would be romantic.”
Junior withdrew his hand and heaved himself out of the car.
At the foot of the front steps he made her wait, and he opened the front door silently and checked for Mrs. Davies before he signaled Linnie to come on in. Every creak of the stairs as he and Linnie climbed made him pause a moment, filled with dread, but they made it. Arriving on the third floor—the servants’ floor, he’d always figured, on account of its tiny rooms with their low, slanted ceilings—he gave a jab of his chin toward a half-open door and whispered, “Bathroom,” because he didn’t want her popping in and out of his room all night. She wriggled her fingers at him and disappeared inside, while he continued on his way with her suitcase. He left his door cracked a couple of inches, the light threading out onto the hall floorboards, until she slipped inside and shut it behind her. She was carrying her hat in one hand and her hair was damp at the temples, he saw. It was shorter than when he’d first known her. It used to hang all the way down her back, but now it was even with her jaw. She was breathless and laughing slightly. “I didn’t have my soap or a facecloth or towel or anything,” she said. Even though she was whispering, it was a sharp, carrying whisper, and he scowled and said, “Ssh.” In her absence he’d stripped to his long johns. There was a small, squarish armchair in the corner with a mismatched ottoman in front of it—the only furniture besides a narrow cot and a little two-drawer bureau—and he settled into it as best he could and arranged his winter jacket over himself like a blanket. Linnie stood in the middle of the room, watching him with her mouth open. “Junie?” she said.
“I’m tired,” he said. “I have to work tomorrow.” And he turned his face away from her and closed his eyes.
He heard no movement at all, for a time. Then he heard the rustle of her clothing, the snap of two suitcase clasps, more rustling. The louder rustle of bedclothes. The lamp clicked off, and he relaxed his jaw and opened his eyes to stare into the dark.
“Junior?” she said.
He could tell she must be lying on her back. Her voice had an upward-floating quality.
“Junior, are you mad at me? What did I do wrong?”
He closed his eyes.
“What’d I do, Junior?”
But he made his breath very slow and even, and she didn’t ask again.
11
WHAT LINNIE HAD DONE WRONG:
Well, for starters, she’d not told him her age. The first time he saw her she was sitting on a picnic blanket with the Moffat twins, Mary and Martha, both of them seniors in high school, and he had just assumed that she was the same age they were. Stupid of him. He should have realized from her plain, unrouged face, and her hair hanging loose down her back, and the obvious pride she took in her new grown-upness—most especially in her breasts, which she surreptitiously touched with her fingertips from time to time in a testing sort of way. But they were such large breasts, straining against the bodice of her polka-dot dress, and she was wearing big white sandals with high heels. Was it any wonder he had imagined she was older? Nobody aged thirteen wore heels that Junior knew of.
He had come with Tillie Gouge, but only because she’d asked him. He didn’t feel any particular obligation to her. He picked up a molasses lace cookie from the picnic table laden with foods, and he walked over to Linnie Mae. Bending at the waist—which must have looked like bowing—he offered the cookie. “For you,” he said.
She lifted her eyes, which turned out to be the nearly colorless blue of Mason jars. “Oh!” she said, and she blushed and took it from him. The Moffat twins became all attention, sitting up very straight and watching for what came next, but Linnie just lowered her fine pale lashes and nibbled the edge of the cookie. Then, one by one, she licked each of her fingers in turn. Junior’s fingers were sticky too—he should have chosen a gingersnap—and he wiped them on the handkerchief he drew from his pocket, but meanwhile he was looking at her. When he’d finished, he offered her the handkerchief. She took it without meeting his eyes and blotted her fingers and handed it back, and then she bit off another half-moon of cookie.
“Do you belong to Whence Baptist?” he asked. (Because this picnic was a church picnic, given in honor of May Day.)
She nodded, chewing daintily, her eyes downcast.
“I’ve never been here before,” he said. “Want to show me around?”
She nodded again, and for a moment it seemed that that might be the end of it, but then she rose in a flustered, stumbling way—she’d been sitting on the hem of her dress and it snagged briefly on one of her heels—and walked off beside him, not so much as glancing at the Moffat twins. She was still eating her cookie. Where the churchyard met the graveyard she stopped and switched the cookie to her other hand and licked off her fingers again. Once again he offered his handkerchief, and once again she accepted it. He thought, with some amusement, that this could go on indefinitely, but when she’d finished blotting her fingers she placed her cookie on the handkerchief and then folded the handkerchief carefully, like someone wrapping a package, and gave it to him. He stuffed it in his left pocket and they resumed walking.
If he thought back on that scene now, it seemed to him that every detail of it, every gesture, had shouted “Thirteen!” But he could swear it hadn’t even crossed his mind at the time. He was no cradle robber.
Yet he had to admit that the moment when he’d taken notice of her was the moment she had touched her own breasts. At the time it had seemed seductive, but on second thought he supposed it could be read as merely childish. All she’d been doing, perhaps, was marveling at their brand-new existence.
She walked ahead of him through the cemetery, her skinny ankles wobbling in her high-heeled shoes, and she pointed out her daddy’s parents’ headstones—Jonas Inman and Loretta Carroll Inman. So she was one of the Inmans, a family known for their stuck-up ways. “What’s your first name?” he asked her.
“Linnie Mae,” she said, blushing again.
“Well, I am Junior Whitshank.”
“I know.”
He wondered how she knew, what she might have heard about him.
“Tell me, Linnie Mae,” he said, “can I see inside this church of yours?”
“If you want,” she said.
They turned and left the cemetery behind, crossed the packed-earth yard and climbed the front steps of Whence Cometh My Help. The interior was a single dim room with smoke-darkened walls and a potbellied stove, its few rows of wooden chairs facing a table topped with a doily. They came to a stop just inside the door; there was nothing more to see.
“Have you got religion?” he asked her.
She shrugged and said, “Not so much.”
This caused a little hitch in the flow, because it wasn’t what he’d expected. Evidently she was more complicated than he had guessed. He grinned. “A girl after my own heart,” he said.
She met his gaze directly, all at once. The paleness of her eyes startled him all over again.
“Well, I reckon I should go pay some heed to the gal I came here with,” he said, making a joke of it. “But maybe tomorrow evening I could take you to the picture show.”
“All right,” she said.
“Where exactly do you live?”
“I’ll just meet you at the drugstore,” she said.
“Oh,” he said.
He wondered if she was ashamed to show him to her family. Then he figured the hell with it, and he said, “Seven o’clock?”
“All right.”
They stepped back out into the sunlight, and without another glance she left him on the stoop and made a beeline for the Moffat twins. Who were watching, of course, as keen as two sparrows, their sharp little faces pointing in Junior and Linnie’s direction.
They had been seeing each other three weeks before her age came out. Not that she volunteered it; she just happened to mention one night that her older brother would be graduating tomorrow from eighth grade. “Your older brother?” he asked her.
She didn’t get it, for a moment. She was telling him how her younger brother was smart as a whip but her older brother was not, and he was begging to be allowed to drop out now and not go on to the high school in Mountain City the way their parents were expecting him to. “He’s never been one for the books,” she said. “He likes better to hunt and stuff.”
“How old is he?” Junior asked her.
“What? He’s fourteen.”
“Fourteen,” Junior said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“How old are you?” Junior asked.
She realized, then. She colored. She tried to carry it off, though. She said, “I mean he’s older than my other brother.”
“How old are you?” he said again.
She lifted her chin and said, “I’m thirteen.”
He felt he’d been kicked in the gut.
“Thirteen!” he said. “You’re just a … you’re not but half my age!”
“But I’m an old thirteen,” Linnie said.
“Good God in heaven, Linnie Mae!”
Because by now, they were doing it. They’d been doing it since their third date. They didn’t go to movies anymore, didn’t go for ice cream, certainly didn’t meet up with friends. (What friends would those have been, anyhow?) They just headed for the river in his brother-in-law’s truck and flung a quilt any old which way under a tree and rushed to tangle themselves up in each other. One night it poured and it hadn’t stopped them for a minute; they lay spread-eagled when they were finished and let the rain fill their open mouths. But this wasn’t something he had talked her into. It was Linnie who had made the first move, drawing back from him in the parked truck one night and shakily, urgently tearing open her button-front dress.
He could be arrested.
Her father grew burley tobacco, and he owned his land outright. Her mother came from Virginia; everyone knew Virginians thought they were better than other people. They would call the sheriff on him without the least hesitation. Oh, Linnie had been so foolish, so infuriatingly brainless, to meet him like that at the drugstore in the middle of her hometown wearing her dress
-up dress and her high-heeled shoes! Junior lived over near Parry ville, six or eight miles away, so maybe no one who had seen them together in Yarrow knew him, but it couldn’t have escaped their notice that he was a grown man, most often in shabby clothes and old work boots with a day or two’s worth of beard, and it wouldn’t be that hard to find out his name and track him down. He asked Linnie, “Did you tell anybody about us?”
“No, Junior, I swear it.”
“Not the Moffat twins or anyone?”
“No one.”
“Because I could go to jail for this, Linnie.”
“I didn’t tell a soul.”
He made up his mind to stop seeing her, but he didn’t say so right then because she would get all teary and beg him to change his mind. There was something a little bit hanging-on about Linnie. She was always talking about this great romance of theirs, and telling him she loved him even though he never mentioned love himself, and asking him if he thought so-and-so was prettier than she was. It was because it was all so new to her, he guessed. God, he’d saddled himself with an infant. He couldn’t believe he had been so blind.
They folded the quilt and they got in the truck and Junior drove her back to town, not saying a word the whole ride although Linnie Mae chattered nonstop about her brother’s upcoming graduation party. When he drew up in front of the drugstore, he said he couldn’t meet her the following night because he’d promised to help his father with a carpentering job. She didn’t seem to find it odd that he would be carpentering at night. “Night after that, then?” she said.
“We’ll see.”
“But how will I know?”
“I’ll get word to you when I’m free,” he said.
“I’m going to miss you like crazy, Junior!”
And she flung herself on him and wrapped her arms around his neck, but he pulled her arms off him and said, “You’d better go on, now.”
Of course he didn’t get word to her. (He didn’t know how she had thought he would do that, seeing as he’d said they couldn’t tell anyone else.) He stayed strictly within his own territory—two acres of red clay outside Parryville bounded by a rickrack fence, in the three-room cabin he shared with his father and his last unmarried brother.