“Jess?”
“Come in, Kady.”
“I made out I couldn’t sleep.”
I flipped back the blanket for her to come in with me, but she shook her head and sat on the edge of the bunk looking out the window over my head. After a while she said:
“Jess, what am I going to do about Danny?”
“You could eat him. He’s sweet enough.”
“I don’t want to be around him.”
“You ought to make up your mind.”
“It’s not like it was before. I hated him then. Now I see how cute he is, and understand why you’re so crazy about him, and Jane is, and—why I was, for a little while. But I can’t help it. I’ve got something in me. Every time I look at him I see Wash, and I can’t forget what Wash did to me. I don’t want to be around him.”
“He’s not Wash.”
“I know it. I’m so ashamed.”
“He’s just a sweet, friendly little boy that’s laughing at you all the time and sticking out his hand to touch your face and showing you how good he can kick and you ought to be thankful all day long that you’ve got him.”
“I ought to, but I’m not.”
What she did about him was try to swallow down how she felt, and play with him, and help Jane take care of him, and drink. She told Jane it was Coca-Cola, but all the time she was spiking it with the stuff we had made, that was hidden all over the place, and when she had a load of it she’d get a look in her eye, and I would almost explode from wanting her. Every night she’d slip down to me, and bring me some stuff, and we’d drink it together, and there was no end to how much we wanted each other. But Jane would get worried, and go out looking for her, and once she almost caught us, and that meant we had to do something. “Jess, we’ve got to have a hide-out.”
“Yeah, but where?”
“Have you forgotten our mine?”
Now the mine, after what I’d done with Moke, was about the last place on earth I wanted to be. “I thought we were done with all that stuff.”
“What stuff? We don’t have to run the still.”
“It’ll be there just the same.”
“It doesn’t have to be. I can take it down and put it away if that’s all that’s bothering you. But it’s secret. It’s like we used to say. Anything in the world could be happening up there and nobody would ever know.”
“You used to say it.”
“And you used to think it.”
She would borrow the truck after that and pretend she was going to Carbon City for stuff that we needed, and maybe she did go, I don’t know. But one of those times I had a look around, and found it parked in a place that could only mean she had gone up the mountain. And then one day she came out to where Jane and I were giving Danny his lunch with a basket on her arm. “Want to carry this for me, Jess, while I get some of those grapes up there in the woods, so we can have us some jelly?”
“You lost an arm or something?”
“It takes two hands for grapes.”
“I never noticed it.”
“First you got to find them, then you got to lift the vine up, where it hangs down over them, and then you got to cut the bunches off with a knife, so you don’t mash them up trying to break them. And I want company. Wild grapes take a long time.”
“Go along with her, Jess.”
So we went, up the same old path, her a little ahead, humming a little, in between catching her breath. When we got to the timbered drift she went past it, then stopped.
“Would you like to see the little nook I’ve made in there?”
“Some other time, maybe.”
“Not now? You sure?”
She half closed her eyes, and I don’t know which was worse, the way my stomach was fluttering over Moke, or the way my heart was pounding over her.
“It’ll only take a minute. Come on.”
We went in, and got lamps out of the tool chest, and got as far as the entry where I’d buried Moke. “This old tunnel caved in since we were here, but that blocked the draft that used to blow through it, so of course that makes it a nice place to sit and pass the time.”
In the tunnel mouth she had hung some candlewick quilts like they sell on the way to town, and had fixed a seat. “But of course we can’t have carbide, not romantic people like us.”
Near the seat was a galvanized iron can we had used for water, with holes knocked in the bottom, and she held her lamp to one of them. It began to burn inside, and I saw it was half full of charcoal. “And with that good old Tyler corn and Coca-Cola, I thought we might cook ourselves something to eat.”
She lifted the cover of the basket, and inside was a picked chicken. By then I wouldn’t have left there if Moke had come right through the rock at me, so while she chased outside to grab some grapes quick, I went to the shaft mouth to grab some Coca-Cola we always kept in the spring water, and some corn. I was trembling so bad I never noticed that all the smell was gone, where she had emptied all that mash out, and put things in apple-pie order. I came back with the bottles, then went to the tool chest for a miner’s needle, that I cleaned in the fire and ran through the chicken. I was almost done broiling it, trying not to think of her, when I jumped at the sound of music.
It was the radio, and she came in swinging her hips, and red fire shining up in her face, and looking right straight at me. That was one dance she never finished.
C H A P T E R
13
One morning, couple of months after that, there came a rap on the door and when I went out there it was Ed Blue. He wanted to know if I had seen anything of his rifle. I had my own rifle in reach, and after all that had happened I wouldn’t have asked much to tell him to get the hell out and stay out or I’d plug him where he stood. But I thought I better see what he was up to. Because I knew where his rifle was all right. But at the same time I knew why he didn’t have it. The way things were between him and Moke, Moke wouldn’t have taken his rifle without him knowing it. And the way things were between me and Moke, Ed couldn’t have helped knowing what Moke figured to do with it, even if Moke had said nothing about it, which wouldn’t be like Moke. So when he began talking, I thought he was pretending rifle, but he really meant Moke. But after a while I saw that it was really his rifle he was after, and as well as I could tell, he had thought about it since Moke left him, and put it together something like this: Moke hadn’t killed me, so something must have gone wrong with it. I hadn’t killed Moke, or so far as he knew I hadn’t, so what had happened? He probably said to himself, I’d run into Moke and maybe run him off the creek. But if I had I certainly wasn’t letting Moke keep the gun. So why not come around, ask me about it, and watch my eyes?
I told him nothing, and he went off with a lot of talk about how he’s a peaceable man, and sure would hate it if somebody got hurt by a gun that belonged to him, and by ganny he hopes he don’t get sued. What anybody would get out of it if he did get sued he didn’t say. But a couple of nights later, when the girls had gone to a picture show and taken Danny with them, and I had taken a walk by the creek to think things over and figure out where I was at with my life if I was anywhere at all, I started back to the cabin, and from down the road a ways I saw a light inside. I crept up on it, and there in the front room, shooting the light all around, was Ed. After he finished looking there he went on back and shot the light at the girls’ clothes and under the bed. I waited till he was doing the same in the lean- to before I tiptoed inside, took my six-shooter down, and threw on him from the doorway of the front room.
“Put ’em up, Ed.”
He had no gun, and he was reaching before he even turned around. I went over and took the light from him so it wouldn’t burn down the house. “Now you goddam lop-eared cross-eyed good-for-nothing rat, for the last time what are you doing in my place and what do you want?”
“Jess, I’m only looking for my gun.”
“You think I steal guns?”
“No—no, Jess, it ain’t that. It’s just that
after what happened that day, when I done what Moke made me do at the funeral, I thought maybe you’d come up there and tooken it, just to be safe. That’s all, I hope Christ may kill me.”
“I didn’t. You got that?”
“I got it, Jess.”
“If I shot, you know, if I said a man was back there in my house and I shot him because I was afraid he would kill me, the law would uphold me. You know that?”
“I sure do know it, Jess.”
“Suppose I let you go?”
“Anything you say, Jess.”
“Cut out your snooping around.”
I never said anything to her about it. I never said anything to her or anybody that would lead around to Moke. But it made me nervous. So of course she thought I was nervous on account of her, and that was how she liked it so she could laugh at me and sit in my lap and tickle my chin and say stop being so solemn. And then one day we were up there, behind the quilt that kind of cut us off from the timbered tunnel, and had had some drinks and stuff she had brought to eat, and the music was turned down soft, and she was dancing in front of me with not a stitch on. And then, from the other side of the quilt, I heard something no miner could ever mistake. It was the whisper that comes out of a carbide lamp when the flame has been cut but the water is still making gas.
I motioned her to keep on like she was, and hit the quilt with everything I had. Something went down, but so did the quilt, and it fell over the brazier, so the place went so black you couldn’t see your hand. I hit, and landed. I hit again, and got one back in the jaw. I hit again, and just touched a shirt going away. Then there were steps, shuffling down the track. Then she screamed, and all of a sudden the place was full of light, where she had tried to get the quilt off the brazier, and red coals were all over, and the quilt was burning, and so were her clothes, where she had dropped them on the seat. When we put out the fire with water the place was full of steam. “Jess, who was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did they want?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think they saw anything?”
“I don’t know that either.”
But in my heart I knew it was Ed Blue, still snooping around after his rifle. And sure enough, next morning, when I was out back chopping apples for the cider press, Jane came out of the house and went running to a big tree on the other side of the barn, grabbed a boy that was hiding there, and slapped his face. When she came back she was white, the only time I ever saw her get mad. “The idea, talking like that!”
“What did he say to you?”
“It was to Kady. Calling her pappy-lover.”
Kady came out, and listened, and didn’t look at her or me. All morning I could hear Jane going on about it, but if Kady said anything I didn’t hear it. Then in the afternoon she came to me, where I was up on the press turning it down, and said: “Jess, I’m going away.”
“You’re—what?”
“Going away. To Washington maybe. Some place.”
“You mean you’re leaving me?”
“I’m leaving you, and I’m taking Jane and Danny.”
“But why?”
“You heard what happened this morning, and you saw how Jane carried on about it. I can’t have any more of that. Maybe I’ve gone to hell, Jess, but I won’t have her finding it out, and if she stays one more day on this creek she will. Somebody saw us, and somebody’s spreading it.”
“Maybe I won’t let you go.”
“I wasn’t asking you.”
“Maybe you forgot you’re my wife.”
“For God’s sake, be your age.”
I climbed down there to tell her the truth, but her eyes were just two slits in her face, and she looked cold. It came to me it wouldn’t do any good to tell her. She wouldn’t believe me, and there was no way in the world I could prove it.
“We’re leaving today.”
“You’re in quite a hurry.”
“I’m taking them away on the six o’clock bus out of Carbon City, and I’ll thank you to drive us in there.”
“Then all right.”
Jane came to me just before we started, and she didn’t have any idea what was going on, but she was unhappy about leaving me and tried to tell how much she thought of me. I felt that way too, and tried to figure some way I could keep on with Kady and square it up somehow with Jane. So I said maybe if I could sell the place I would go east myself, and she put her arms around me and said that would be wonderful. And whether I meant to take them to town I don’t know, but I think I was going to have a breakdown on the state road, to stall it for one night, and in that time I might be able to think of something. But while we were still on the dirt road that runs beside the creek, we met a car coming up. It had two men in it, and when they saw us one of them raised his hand for me to stop.
“Are you Jess Tyler?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Sheriffs deputy.”
He showed a badge and I said I wasn’t saying who I was and if he wanted to know he had to find out some other way. “Well, there’s a simple way to find out, Mr. Tyler. I just look at you and then I remember you from the time I made out papers on you once before. When you pretty near killed a man. Remember?”
“What do you want?”
“Serve a warrant for your arrest.”
“What for?”
“Incest, this says.”
“That’s a lie.”
“If it’s a lie, then all you got to do is prove it to the court. My job is to serve papers. Is this your daughter Kady?”
“I told you, find out for yourself.”
“Miss Tyler, I remember you too, and I have a court order here for your detention as a material witness. Now then, how shall we do about the truck? Mr. Tyler, do you want me to drive in to Carbon with you, or would you and your daughters prefer to ride with the other deputy while I take your truck wherever you want it or have you got some idea of your own?”
“My other daughter will drive it.”
“Then we’re set.”
Kady and I got out and got in the other car and neither of us said anything to Jane at all. But out of the corner of my eye I could see her sitting there in the sun, the baby on her lap, staring at us.
C H A P T E R
14
When the deputy brought me to court, Jane was waiting, with Danny on her shoulder, trying to keep him quiet where he was crying because it was away past his bedtime. A whole bunch of people were there, because the Carbon City radio had put out about the arrest on the seven o’clock broadcast, and half the people in town came running over to the courthouse for the hearing. My case hadn’t been called yet, and while I was standing in the hall with the deputy, Jane came running over. “How could you do this to her, Jess?”
The deputy cut in to remind her that anything that was said could be used against me, but she didn’t pay any attention to him.
“You knew all along what it had done to her, Wash walking out like he did. You knew she was drinking. You knew she wasn’t herself, that she’d do almost anything that anybody told her to. And yet you would take advantage of her in the way you did.”
“You sure I did?”
“If you didn’t, wouldn’t she tell me? She don’t lie to me. If she won’t look at me and won’t say anything to me, that means you did just what they say you did.”
“There might be more to it than that.”
The jail warden’s wife came in about that time with Kady, and Jane left me and went over to her. A minute or two later Ed Blue came in, with every man, woman, and child from Tulip, and I knew what I was in for.
It was the same old judge and he watched us line up and asked the deputies a few things, like did I have a lawyer, and kept looking at me like I was some kind of a toad frog he was afraid would give him warts if he wasn’t careful. Then he began talking to me: “Jess Tyler, you stand before me accused of the crime of incest, consisting of sexual misconduct with your daughter, Kady Tyler,
and of corrupting the morals of a minor, Kady Tyler. How do you plead?”
“What’s plead?”
“You plead when you enter a plea, declaring yourself guilty or not guilty. If you plead guilty, it will be my duty to set bail, and pending its deposit, to hold you for sentence by the circuit court. If you plead not guilty, or elect not to plead at this hearing, as you have the right to do, it will be my duty to hear the evidence against you, and if in my judgment, it is competent, material, and substantial, to hold you for action by the grand jury, set bail, and pending its deposit, to turn you over to the custody of the sheriff.”
“And what do you do to her?”
“Your daughter is not under charges.”
“She’s arrested just the same.”
“As a material witness, entitled to bail.”
“What I’m getting at, it looks to me like if I plead guilty and you hold me, then you wouldn’t need a witness any more and she could go home. But I’m not doing it without I make sure.”
“Mr. Prosecutor?”
A young fellow standing with Ed Blue spoke up and said: “Your honor, the only charge made against this girl was a complaint sworn out by the sheriff’s office which charges her with indecent exposure, but as it describes an act not committed in a public place it sets up no violation of the statute and I am accordingly quashing it. Otherwise, unless evidence not now known to me comes to light, if this man chooses to save the state the expense of a trial and avoid further scandal, he’s quite right. On his plea of guilty I won’t need the witness, and while the higher court may want to question her before passing sentence, I wouldn’t ask this court to require bail. To clear up our general attitude in cases of this kind, though not in any way binding myself or entering into a bargain of any kind, we rarely ask commitment to reform school, or penological steps of any kind, for a girl who is at the same time the mother of a young child, unless circumstances exist which compel us to. Does that answer you, Tyler?”