12
The woman stood in the kitchen door, holding the child, until Goodwin emerged from the house. The lobes of his nostrils were quite white against his brown face, and she said: “God, are you drunk too?” He came along the porch. “She’s not here,” the woman said. “You cant find her.” He brushed past her, trailing a reek of whiskey. She turned, watching him. He looked swiftly about the kitchen, then he turned and looked at her standing in the door, blocking it. “You wont find her,” she said. “She’s gone.” He came toward her, lifting his hand. “Dont put your hand on me,” she said. He gripped her arm, slowly. His eyes were a little bloodshot. The lobes of his nostrils looked like wax.
“Take your hand off me,” she said. “Take it off.” Slowly he drew her out of the door. She began to curse him. “Do you think you can? Do you think I’ll let you? Or any other little slut?” Motionless, facing one another like the first position of a dance, they stood in a mounting terrific muscular hiatus.
With scarce any movement at all he flung her aside in a complete revolution that fetched her up against the table, her arm flung back for balance, her body bent and her hand fumbling behind her among the soiled dishes, watching him across the inert body of the child. He walked toward her. “Stand back,” she said, lifting her hand slightly, bringing the butcher knife into view. “Stand back.” He came steadily toward her, then she struck at him with the knife.
He caught her wrist. She began to struggle. He plucked the child from her and laid it on the table and caught her other hand as it flicked at his face, and holding both wrists in one hand, he slapped her. It made a dry, flat sound. He slapped her again, first on one cheek, then the other, rocking her head from side to side. “That’s what I do to them,” he said, slapping her. “See?” He released her. She stumbled backward against the table and caught up the child and half crouched between the table and the wall, watching him as he turned and left the room.
She knelt in the corner, holding the child. It had not stirred. She laid her palm first on one cheek, then on the other. She rose and laid the child in the box and took a sunbonnet from a nail and put it on. From another nail she took a coat trimmed with what had once been white fur, and took up the child and left the room.
Tommy was standing in the barn, beside the crib, looking toward the house. The old man sat on the front porch, in the sun. She went down the steps and followed the path to the road and went on without looking back. When she came to the tree and the wrecked car she turned from the road, into a path. After a hundred yards or so she reached the spring and sat down beside it, the child on her lap and the hem of her skirt turned back over its sleeping face.
Popeye came out of the bushes, walking gingerly in his muddy shoes, and stood looking down at her across the spring. His hand flicked to his coat and he fretted and twisted a cigarette and put it into his mouth and snapped a match with his thumb. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “I told him about letting them sit around all night, swilling that goddam stuff. There ought to be a law.” He looked away in the direction in which the house lay. Then he looked at the woman, at the top of her sunbonnet. “Goofy house,” he said. “That’s what it is. It’s not four days ago I find a bastard squatting here, asking me if I read books. Like he would jump me with a book or something. Take me for a ride with the telephone directory.” Again he looked off toward the house, jerking his neck forth as if his collar were too tight. He looked down at the top of the sunbonnet. “I’m going to town, see?” he said. “I’m clearing out. I’ve got enough of this.” She did not look up. She adjusted the hem of the skirt above the child’s face. Popeye went on, with light, finicking sounds in the underbrush. Then they ceased. Somewhere in the swamp a bird sang.
Before he reached the house Popeye left the road and followed a wooded slope. When he emerged he saw Goodwin standing behind a tree in the orchard, looking toward the barn. Popeye stopped at the edge of the wood and looked at Goodwin’s back. He put another cigarette into his mouth and thrust his fingers into his vest. He went on across the orchard, walking gingerly. Goodwin heard him and looked over his shoulder. Popeye took a match from his vest, flicked it into flame and lit the cigarette. Goodwin looked toward the barn again and Popeye stood at his shoulder, looking toward the barn.
“Who’s down there?” he said. Goodwin said nothing. Popeye jetted smoke from his nostrils. “I’m clearing out,” he said. Goodwin said nothing, watching the barn. “I said, I’m getting out of here,” Popeye said. Without turning his head Goodwin cursed him. Popeye smoked quietly, the cigarette wreathing across his still, soft, black gaze. Then he turned and went toward the house. The old man sat in the sun. Popeye did not enter the house. Instead he went on across the lawn and into the cedars until he was hidden from the house. Then he turned and crossed the garden and the weed-choked lot and entered the barn from the rear.
Tommy squatted on his heels beside the crib door, looking toward the house. Popeye looked at him a while, smoking. Then he snapped the cigarette away and entered a stall quietly. Above the manger was a wooden rack for hay, just under an opening in the loft floor. Popeye climbed into the rack and drew himself silently into the loft, his tight coat strained into thin ridges across his narrow shoulders and back.
13
Tommy was standing in the hallway of the barn when Temple at last got the door of the crib open. When she recognised him she was half spun, leaping back, then she whirled and ran toward him and sprang down, clutching his arm. Then she saw Goodwin standing in the back door of the house and she whirled and leaped back into the crib and turned and leaned her head around the door, her voice making a thin eeeeeeeeeeeeee sound like bubbles in a bottle. She leaned there, scrabbling her hands on the door, trying to pull it to, hearing Tommy’s voice.
“.……Lee says hit wont hurt you none. All you got to do is lay down.……” It was a dry sort of sound, not in her consciousness at all, nor his pale eyes beneath the shaggy thatch. She leaned in the door, wailing, trying to shut it. Then she felt his hand clumsily on her thigh. “.…… says hit wont hurt you none. All you got to do is.……”
She looked at him, his diffident, hard hand on her hip. “Yes,” she said, “all right. Dont you let him in here.”
“You mean fer me not to let none of them in hyer?”
“All right. I’m not scared of rats. You stay there and dont let him in.”
“All right. I’ll fix hit so caint nobody git to you. I’ll be right hyer.”
“All right. Shut the door. Dont let him in here.”
“All right.” He shut the door. She leaned in it, looking toward the house. He pushed her back so he could close the door. “Hit aint goin to hurt you none, Lee says. All you got to do is lay down.”
“All right. I will. Dont you let him in here.” The door closed. She heard him drive the hasp to. Then he shook the door.
“Hit’s fastened,” he said. “Caint nobody git to you now. I’ll be right hyer.”
He squatted on his heels in the chaff, looking at the house. After a while he saw Goodwin come to the back door and look toward him, and squatting, clasping his knees, Tommy’s eyes glowed again, the pale irises appearing for an instant to spin on the pupils like tiny wheels. He squatted there, his lip lifted a little, until Goodwin went back into the house. Then he sighed, expelling his breath, and he looked at the blank door of the crib and again his eyes glowed with a diffident, groping, hungry fire and he began to rub his hands slowly on his shanks, rocking a little from side to side. Then he ceased, became rigid, and watched Goodwin move swiftly across the corner of the house and into the cedars. He squatted rigid, his lip lifted a little upon his ragged teeth.
Sitting in the cottonseed-hulls, in the litter of gnawed corn-cobs, Temple lifted her head suddenly toward the trap at the top of the ladder. She heard Popeye cross the floor of the loft, then his foot appeared, groping gingerly for the step. He descended, watching her over his shoulder.
She sat quite motionless, her mouth open a little. He s
tood looking at her. He began to thrust his chin out in a series of jerks, as though his collar were too tight. He lifted his elbows and brushed them with his palm, and the skirt of his coat, then he crossed her field of vision, moving without a sound, his hand in his coat pocket. He tried the door. Then he shook it.
“Open the door,” he said.
There was no sound. Then Tommy whispered: “Who’s that?”
“Open the door,” Popeye said. The door opened. Tommy looked at Popeye. He blinked.
“I didn’t know you was in hyer,” he said. He made to look past Popeye, into the crib. Popeye laid his hand flat on Tommy’s face and thrust him back and leaned past him and looked up at the house. Then he looked at Tommy.
“Didn’t I tell you about following me?”
“I wasn’t following you,” Tommy said. “I was watching him,” jerking his head toward the house.
“Watch him, then,” Popeye said. Tommy turned his head and looked toward the house and Popeye drew his hand from his coat pocket.
To Temple, sitting in the cottonseed-hulls and the corn-cobs, the sound was no louder than the striking of a match: a short, minor sound shutting down upon the scene, the instant, with a profound finality, completely isolating it, and she sat there, her legs straight before her, her hands limp and palm-up on her lap, looking at Popeye’s tight back and the ridges of his coat across the shoulders as he leaned out the door, the pistol behind him, against his flank, wisping thinly along his leg.
He turned and looked at her. He waggled the pistol slightly and put it back in his coat, then he walked toward her. Moving, he made no sound at all; the released door yawned and clapped against the jamb, but it made no sound either; it was as though sound and silence had become inverted. She could hear silence in a thick rustling as he moved toward her through it, thrusting it aside, and she began to say Something is going to happen to me. She was saying it to the old man with the yellow clots for eyes. “Something is happening to me!” she screamed at him, sitting in his chair in the sunlight, his hands crossed on the top of the stick. “I told you it was!” she screamed, voiding the words like hot silent bubbles into the bright silence about them until he turned his head and the two phlegm-clots above her where she lay tossing and thrashing on the rough, sunny boards. “I told you! I told you all the time!”
14
While she was sitting beside the spring, with the sleeping child upon her knees, the woman discovered that she had forgot its bottle. She sat there for about an hour after Popeye left her. Then she returned to the road and turned back toward the house. When she was about halfway back to the house, carrying the child in her arms, Popeye’s car passed her. She heard it coming and she got out of the road and stood there and watched it come dropping down the hill. Temple and Popeye were in it. Popeye did not make any sign, though Temple looked full at the woman. From beneath her hat Temple looked the woman full in the face, without any sign of recognition whatever. The face did not turn, the eyes did not wake; to the woman beside the road it was like a small, dead-colored mask drawn past her on a string and then away. The car went on, lurching and jolting in the ruts. The woman went on to the house.
The blind man was sitting on the front porch, in the sun. When she entered the hall, she was walking fast. She was not aware of the child’s thin weight. She found Goodwin in their bedroom. He was in the act of putting on a frayed tie; looking at him, she saw that he had just shaved.
“Yes,” she said. “What is it? What is it?”
“I’ve got to walk up to Tull’s and telephone for the sheriff,” he said.
“The sheriff,” she said. “Yes. All right.” She came to the bed and laid the child carefully down. “To Tull’s,” she said. “Yes. He’s got a phone.”
“You’ll have to cook,” Goodwin said. “There’s Pap.”
“You can give him some cold bread. He wont mind. There’s some left in the stove. He wont mind.”
“I’ll go,” Goodwin said. “You stay here.”
“To Tull’s,” she said. “All right.” Tull was the man at whose house Gowan had found a car. It was two miles away. Tull’s family was at dinner. They asked her to stop. “I just want to use the telephone,” she said. The telephone was in the dining-room, where they were eating. She called, with them sitting about the table. She didn’t know the number. “The Sheriff,” she said patiently into the mouthpiece. Then she got the sheriff, with Tull’s family sitting about the table, about the Sunday dinner. “A dead man. You pass Mr Tull’s about a mile and turn off to the right.……Yes, the Old Frenchman place. Yes. This is Mrs Goodwin talking.…Goodwin. Yes.”
15
Benbow reached his sister’s home in the middle of the afternoon. It was four miles from town, Jefferson. He and his sister were born in Jefferson, seven years apart, in a house which they still owned, though his sister had wanted to sell the house when Benbow married the divorced wife of a man named Mitchell and moved to Kinston. Benbow would not agree to sell, though he had built a new bungalow in Kinston on borrowed money upon which he was still paying interest.
When he arrived, there was no one about. He entered the house and he was sitting in the dim parlor behind the closed blinds, when he heard his sister come down the stairs, still unaware of his arrival. He made no sound. She had almost crossed the parlor door and vanished when she paused and looked full at him, without outward surprise, with that serene and stupid impregnability of heroic statuary; she was in white. “Oh, Horace,” she said.
He did not rise. He sat with something of the air of a guilty small boy. “How did you—” he said. “Did Belle—”
“Of course. She wired me Saturday. That you had left, and if you came here, to tell you that she had gone back home to Kentucky and had sent for Little Belle.”
“Ah, damnation,” Benbow said.
“Why?” his sister said. “You want to leave home yourself, but you dont want her to leave.”
He stayed at his sister’s two days. She had never been given to talking, living a life of serene vegetation like perpetual corn or wheat in a sheltered garden instead of a field, and during those two days she came and went about the house with an air of tranquil and faintly ludicrous tragic disapproval.
After supper they sat in Miss Jenny’s room, where Narcissa would read the Memphis paper before taking the boy off to bed. When she went out of the room, Miss Jenny looked at Benbow.
“Go back home, Horace,” she said.
“Not to Kinston,” Benbow said. “I hadn’t intended to stay here, anyway. It wasn’t Narcissa I was running to. I haven’t quit one woman to run to the skirts of another.”
“If you keep on telling yourself that you may believe it, someday,” Miss Jenny said. “Then what’ll you do?”
“You’re right,” Benbow said. “Then I’d have to stay at home.”
His sister returned. She entered the room with a definite air. “Now for it,” Benbow said. His sister had not spoken directly to him all day.
“What are you going to do, Horace?” she said. “You must have business of some sort there in Kinston that should be attended to.”
“Even Horace must have,” Miss Jenny said. “What I want to know is, why he left. Did you find a man under the bed, Horace?”
“No such luck,” Benbow said. “It was Friday, and all of a sudden I knew that I could not go to the station and get that box of shrimp and—”
“But you have been doing that for ten years,” his sister said.
“I know. That’s how I know that I will never learn to like smelling shrimp.”
“Was that why you left Belle?” Miss Jenny said. She looked at him. “It took you a long time to learn that, if a woman dont make a very good wife for one man, she aint likely to for another, didn’t it?”
“But to walk out just like a nigger,” Narcissa said. “And to mix yourself up with moonshiners and street-walkers.”
“Well, he’s gone and left the street-walker too,” Miss Jenny said. “Unless you??
?re going to walk the streets with that orange-stick in your pocket until she comes to town.”
“Yes,” Benbow said. He told again about the three of them, himself and Goodwin and Tommy sitting on the porch, drinking from the jug and talking, and Popeye lurking about the house, coming out from time to time to ask Tommy to light a lantern and go down to the barn with him and Tommy wouldn’t do it and Popeye would curse him, and Tommy sitting on the floor, scouring his bare feet on the boards with a faint, hissing noise, chortling: “Aint he a sight, now?”
“You could feel the pistol on him just like you knew he had a navel,” Benbow said. “He wouldn’t drink, because he said it made him sick to his stomach like a dog; he wouldn’t stay and talk with us; he wouldn’t do anything: just lurking about, smoking his cigarettes, like a sullen and sick child.
“Goodwin and I were both talking. He had been a cavalry sergeant in the Philippines and on the Border, and in an infantry regiment in France; he never told me why he changed, transferred to infantry and lost his rank. He might have killed someone, might have deserted. He was talking about Manila and Mexican girls, and that halfwit chortling and glugging at the jug and shoving it at me: ‘Take some mo’; and then I knew that the woman was just behind the door, listening to us. They are not married. I know that just like I know that that little black man had that flat little pistol in his coat pocket. But she’s out there, doing a nigger’s work, that’s owned diamonds and automobiles too in her day, and bought them with a harder currency than cash. And that blind man, that old man sitting there at the table, waiting for somebody to feed him, with that immobility of blind people, like it was the backs of their eyeballs you looked at while they were hearing music you couldn’t hear; that Goodwin led out of the room and completely off the earth, as far as I know. I never saw him again. I never knew who he was, who he was kin to. Maybe not to anybody. Maybe that old Frenchman that built the house a hundred years ago didn’t want him either and just left him there when he died or moved away.”