“Come on,” she said, speaking softly. “Hit me. Hit me again.”
It was more than he had bargained for, more than he could bear. It was much the same as it had been, twenty years ago, when he stood on the carriage seat, swinging the book satchel at the upturned faces, and felt the shock of resistance travel up the strap. But this time it was worse; this time it was flesh to flesh, no strap to act as conductor, no Samuel to shout encouragement, no carriage to draw him away, and she was sitting there with the mark of his hand on her cheek, watching him through the parted curtain of hair, her eyes gone tender, her voice soft, loverlike, asking him to hit her again.
This time, however, he did not throw up. He went instead to the bed, lay down across it with his face in the pillow, and wept. Presently Ella got up from the floor and came to him, still walking unsteadily. She began to comfort him, patting his shoulder and saying, “There, there. There, there.” And as he went on weeping, the taste of tears like salt at the back of his mouth, it was as if he were standing outside himself, looking down at the two of them — Hector Sturgis and Ella his wayward wife; he could see them, the man with his face in the pillow, sobbing, and the woman crouched beside him on the bed, stroking his shoulder, fondling the back of his head, comforting him for his inadequacy. “There, there,” she said. “There, there.” Experienced from within, there was something terribly degrading about it; yet seen this way, impersonally, it gave him a strange, vicarious pleasure.
Thus he set the pattern for those future scenes between them, staged in the upstairs bedroom when Ella returned from her hours with other men. Hector would sit there, fully dressed, waiting sometimes until the windows were gray with dawn. Then she would arrive, and the scene that followed always conformed to the pattern already established, leading to a climax like that first one, the night he slapped her. He would fall in a heap, moaning with his face against the carpet, and she would sit beside him on the floor; she would take his head in her lap, stroking his hair and purring to comfort him, until her thighs were damp with his tears. And when, his voice trembling with emotion, he asked why she committed the acts that provoked these scenes, she would cradle his head in her arms, rocking it against her chest, and say: “Now, now, sweetheart, dont you fret. If you want to have your fun this way, you mustnt fuss about how I have mine.”
Sometimes it seemed to him that all this had happened overnight. It had come about so quickly, he was embroiled before he even had time to realize trouble was coming. One day he was riding the streets of Bristol in a yellow-spoked surrey, a bachelor home from college. Then he had seen the immemorial face of repentance. It had snared him, and now he was engaged in a nightmare with no exit, unable to relieve the tension except through hysteria.
“Is this me?” he asked himself; “Is this really me?” — knowing well enough what he had come to, and even perhaps where it was leading him.
He knew the result, but he wanted to know the cause. His mind beat at its barriers and achieved a curious belief. He believed that Ella was trying to provoke him into doing what his father’s father had done. She wanted him to kill her, out of revulsion and despair, and thus fulfill his destiny. It was all a plan that got underway the night she told him the story of what had happened in Ireland between old Barney and the tinker; she had told it by design. His only two experiences with violence, first the day he swung the satchel, second the night he slapped her, had shown him how poorly he was equipped for it. Nevertheless, soon after it occurred to him that their relationship was in truth a contest in this manner, he went down to the hardware store and bought himself an ax. He bought the finest they had, a double-bitted woodsman’s model, razor sharp along both cutting edges, smuggled it into the house in a roll of drawing paper, and hid it behind his dress suit in the chifforobe.
He did not put it there to use — for that was the contest as he saw it: she trying to provoke him into using it, he resisting the provocation. He put it there, rather, as a challenge to himself, a reminder never to relax. In this he believed he was like a master at chess, who draws an opponent along in confidence up to the final moment; “Check!” the challenger cries, so intent on victory that he has forgotten the possibility of defeat; “Checkmate,” the master says. Thus some night he would produce the ax, showing it to her, perhaps even brandishing it. Then, craftily, at the instant when she thought she had succeeded, he would put it aside, smiling, and say, “See? You thought youd won; you thought you could make me use it. But I wont. And never will.” He was really that far gone.
All the traveling men knew her by now. They discussed her on trains and in Memphis hotel lobbies. A drummer on the way out would give an incoming man the tip. “There’s a little married woman down in Bristol, name of Sturgis. Tchk!” He made that sudden clucking sound of approval, bringing his tongue down sharply off the roof of his mouth. “She’s a looker, man. And loves it, too. Her husband dont treat her right, if you see what I mean.”
This continued. Hector was well along with his project of plans for the subdivision by now; he had begun to put in the colors. Across the hall, Mrs Sturgis was biding her time, waiting for the day when she could reclaim her son. And night after night he sat alone in the bedroom, waiting and knowing the ax was in the chifforobe. He did not need to touch it or even look at it; he knew it was there, and for the present that was enough. Later, however, there was an urge to look at it. He would open the chifforobe door and hold the clothes aside and there it would be, as bright as new. Then he would close the door and see the ax in his mind, the two cutting edges like bright identical arcs clipped from a circle of ice. This too continued; he was satisfied, until finally there was a compulsion to touch it, to lift it out of the gloom. Now he began to sit alone in the bedroom with the ax in his lap, waiting. But as soon as he heard Ella’s step on the veranda he would return the ax to its hiding place.
The months merged into years; it was 1910, and one night he sat waiting for the sound of her footfall, when suddenly — as if by the glare of lightning — the windows were bright with daylight. He looked at the bed and Ella was lying in it, asleep. Then he looked down at his lap, and there was the ax. He had fallen asleep in the chair and slept straight through. She had come in and found him asleep with the ax in his lap; she had stood and looked at him, in full knowledge of how he had waited all those nights; and then had gone to bed. He rose, holding the ax with both hands, crossed the room, and stood beside the bed, watching her sleeping. Something troubled her just then; she stirred, making a little moan, and one of her breasts tumbled sideways into the V of her gown with a slow, pouring movement like flowing batter. It looked up at him, the sagged sack of woman-meat, like a blind little face, and he hated her with a fierceness beyond any hate he had ever known.
He could have done it then, he believed: could have wakened her, shown her the ax, said “See: you thought I wasnt man enough,” and killed her. He stood beside the bed, balancing the ax and looking down, leaned slightly forward like a man looking down into an abyss, and for a moment time stood still. Awake or asleep, inhale or exhale, people were frozen in motion all over the world; Time was that unbearable ultimate instant before dynamite goes. Then it flowed on; the paralyzed clock-tick passed, and Hector put the ax back into the chifforobe.
There was no feeling of defeat. It was quite the opposite, in fact. He had made up his mind to kill her, but he would not do it now, in anger at himself because he had fallen asleep and let her catch him with the ax in his lap. He wanted to kill her for her sins, make her the victim of an avenging angel, and he wanted this to be as clear to her as it was to him. In the moment when she saw the ax come down, its twin arcs glinting in the gaslight, he wanted her to understand, to see it as a stroke from Judgment, not from a brain that was sick with shame and self-pity.
Two weeks passed before he got his chance. But that was all right; this was no unusual span between outings. Besides, waiting was easy now that he had made up his mind and could see an end to waiting. It was a night in early
August, a time of heat. Ella left soon after supper, and Hector went into his study to work on his maps. There had been a fire that afternoon, the engine going past with its plunging horses, its clanging bell, children on the sidewalks cheering and half the stray dogs in Bristol running after it. He sketched this scene in full detail and was pleased with the result, particularly the horses and dogs, for they were horizontal creatures and looked best from overhead. Occasionally he glanced up from the drawing board, listening to the quietness of the house. At midnight, when Ella still had not returned, he removed his sleeve protectors, put away the instruments, and went upstairs.
As he climbed he heard the bedsprings creak in his mother’s room, and then her voice: “Son?”
“Yessum?”
“I just wanted to know if it was you.”
“It’s me,” he said. They repeated this scene, word for word, each night when he came upstairs.
“All right. Good night.”
“Good night.”
He went directly to the chifforobe, took out the ax, and sat with it in his lap. The house was quiet. He was utterly sure of himself.
A little less than half an hour later there was a sound of wheels and hoofs on the driveway, a moment of silence, then the squeak of buggy springs and footsteps crossing the veranda. Always before, she had made them let her out at the road; but if she was getting bolder, all the better. He was completely calm. He knew there was no doubt that he would kill her, and he waited for her footstep on the stairs.
Instead there was a rapping at the door.
Hector did not move, but he gripped the ax handle tighter and began to pant a little, thinking: ‘It’s a trick. She guessed what I would do.’
The rapping came again, louder now, insistent. ‘Something’s happened,’ he thought. He went into the hall, then to the head of the stairs. “Son?” he heard his mother say. He did not answer. As he picked his way gingerly down the stairwell, a descent into darkness, the thought returned: ‘It’s a trick. She’s hired someone to kill me.’
But when he opened the door it was the constable, a big man with a walrus mustache. He wore a khaki shirt and a wide-brimmed hat and the revolver at his hip twinkled in the moonlight. “How do,” he said. “I come to see you about Miz Sturgis.”
“She’s upstairs, asleep.”
“Ah? No sir — I mean your wife.”
The constable stopped short and Hector saw that this was because he was looking at the ax, which also glittered in the moonlight, matching the twinkle of the revolver; Hector had forgotten he had it. He leaned it against the jamb and said cautiously, “What about her?”
“Something’s happened, Mr Sturgis. I want you to come with me.”
“Happened?” It occurred to Hector that Ella might be having him arrested. “Whats happened?”
With his bloodhound eyes and drooped mustache, the constable looked quite sad. He hesitated, then spoke, and the last word came like a drumbeat. “Mr Sturgis, I — I think she’s dead.”
There was a full moon, late risen and so bright now that the shadows of trees, cast on the streets which the constable’s buggy followed on its way toward the heart of town, stood out in sharp contrast of black and gold, like filigree, each leaf along the ragged edges as distinct as a saw-tooth. Northwest beyond the river the comet flared, its tail upraised like the tail of a horse on fire, and the stars were spattered thick and hot against the pale gray velvet of the night. Hector had not spoken since the constable told him he thought Ella was dead. They had come down off the veranda, climbed into the buggy from opposite sides, and the constable offered no further information or explanation. Now Hector sat with his hands limp in his lap, gazing straight ahead and listening to the rhythmic clip-clop clip-clop of hoofs on the moon-dappled pavement. The sound had that smooth, effortless quality of something in a dream.
Indeed, there was something dreamlike about this whole affair. The constable had said he thought she was dead. What did that mean? Was she dead or was she not dead? Or had he said that in an attempt to soften the news, to give him some doubt to cling to until he saw for himself? Or was it all a lie, told to make him docile on the way to jail? These questions came fast, one behind another, but Hector made no attempt to answer them. He waited for the illogical to work itself out, the way it always seemed to do in dreams. Meanwhile the shadows flowed over and past them, alternate black and gold. The constable’s nickel-plated revolver twinkled in the moonlight, gleamed in the shadows, and suddenly it occurred to Hector that, though the delta was a widely recognized hunting country, he had never touched a firearm, even a pistol.
This took on an importance in his mind. Like not having learned the names of the stars, it seemed a serious lack. He forgot the questions, forgot even Ella, and concentrated on suppressing a desire to touch the revolver. He told himself that he should not do this, that the constable (his name was Mullins, Pete Mullins, and somewhere Hector had heard that he had killed five men, two of them white) might be alarmed, might even be offended, and any man who had killed five men, two of them white, was no man to offend. The desire, however, was stronger than the fear. He was just reaching out to touch it when the constable reined in the horse. “Here we are, Mr Sturgis,” he said. They were in front of the Bristol Hotel.
A red gig belonging to the fire department was drawn up at the curb. Hector observed that the horse, head down, knees locked in sleep, wore an almost new straw kady, its ears standing stiff and hairy through the holes cut into the brim. Otherwise the street was deserted, stretching long and empty under the drench of moonlight. While the constable waited at the hotel entrance Hector stood in front of the sleeping horse. (“He looked like he was studying it,” the constable said when he told about it later. “Like he was thinking about buying it, maybe, that old swayback nag that ought to been out to pasture years ago. Thats the trouble with having money; you think about buying almost anything you see. Imagine — at a time like that. And mind you I’d already told him his wife was most likely still dead in there.”) After waiting a full minute, which seemed considerably longer, the constable cleared his throat, first tentatively, then louder. When that did no good he said cautiously, “Mr Sturgis—”
Hector looked up, startled. He had been sketching the horse in his mind, planning to put it on the map, asleep with its ears thrust upward through the holes in the brim of the kady. “What?”
“This way,” the constable said.
The lobby was empty when they first came in, as deserted as the street, but the tinkle of the bell on a curved spring above the door brought the night clerk out of a rear passage. Short, narrow shouldered, his flaxen hair so heavily plastered with brilliantine that he seemed to have just emerged from swimming or a heavy shower of rain, he had the bright, darting eyes of the habitually curious and the limber upper lip of the talkative man. Entering, he wore the solicitous mask of the professional greeter, showing the edges of his teeth. When he recognized Hector Sturgis, however, he stopped and sipped his breath; he performed a shallow bow, shaping the words Good Evening with his mouth but making no sound, as if he had considered and decided that it would be indelicate to speak aloud at such a time. Hector returned the bow with a nod, looking doubtful. There was something too decorous about all this, something too like Frenchmen in cartoons.
He followed the constable, the night clerk bringing up the rear, and as they entered the passageway the latter had emerged from, he began to hear a steady, ghostly sighing. It came from the end of the corridor, a series of low moans, suspirant and profound — human yet not-human too, somehow too big for human, as if an elephant lay dying of pneumonia in one of the far rooms. The last door on the left was all the way open, but the others along the passageway were only slightly ajar: held so, Hector saw as he came abreast, by hotel guests wearing nightshirts and standing with the doorknobs in their fists. They all faced the same direction, like alerted sentinels, and their eyes caught the flicker of the gasjets.
“It’s the husband,” they s
aid as he came past. He could hear them murmuring from door to door and from opposite sides of the hallway, their voices touched off in a chain reaction, the whispers reaching him louder than shouts; “It’s the husband.”
Just short of the open door, the last on the left, the constable stopped and turned around, intending to prepare Hector for what he was going to see. All the way out to the Sturgis house in the buggy, then all the way back to the hotel, he had thought about what he would say. Up to now, however, he had not been able to bring himself to say anything, and this was his last chance, just short of the door. He raised one hand, palm forward, facing Hector with the great sad bloodhound eyes and the mustache like a big straw-colored U suspended upside-down beneath his nose. His mouth was set for speech, the words of condolence he had rehearsed to himself in the buggy, but Hector brushed past him; he even jerked his arm away when the constable touched his sleeve. It was as well, for when he reached the doorway and halted at last, looking into the room, he knew that beyond what he had already gathered from hearing the hotel guests whisper down the corridor — “It’s the husband!” — nothing the constable might have said, either in the buggy or in the hall, could have prepared him for what he saw.
Two firemen were in the room, both still wearing gum boots though they had removed their slickers and souwesters and thrown them in a corner. One stood over some kind of machine, turning the crank of what resembled a coffee grinder mounted on a metal cylinder; the other, kneeling on a wide double bed that had been pulled into the center of the room, held the ends of two hoses that ran from the machine. Soft rubber masks were attached to the hoses and the fireman was holding them, one in each hand, over the faces of two people lying crossways on the bed.