I— Bad?
Peter— Sure. He’s killed three. But he’s too smart fer ’em. They cant catch him at it. Mamma always asks Imogene howcome she keeps him, but Imogene dont know. That’s the way women are, mamma says.
Steps on the stairs, and here is Peter’s mother, languorous as a handled magnolia petal. She is as light in color as Peter, and a woman passing says:
“Uh huh, I knowed you’d get in trouble. I told you yo’ maw better not ketch you here.”
“All right. Wait until Imogene beats me like she done you when she caught Joe Lee in your room last week. Then I’ll talk some. Tore your hair out, she did.”
“You ought to beat hell out of him, Mable,” said the woman, passing on.
“Peter,” said his mother.
“He’s drawing me in a picture, mamma. He’ll draw you too, if you will stay.”
She came languorous as a decayed lily and looked at the sketch. “Huh,” she said. “You come on with me,” she told Peter.
Peter wept. “But he’s drawing me in a picture,” he told her.
“Haven’t I told you about hanging around down here?”
“But he’s drawing me,” Peter crooking his arm about his face wept from some mature reserve of masculine vanity, seeing his life temporarily disrupted by a woman. But she took his hand and led him up the salmon stairs. At the turn she paused like a languorous damaged lily, and her dark eyes in which was all the despair of a subject race and a thinned blood become sterile except in the knowledge of the ancient sorrows of white and black, as a dog can see and hear things we cant, looked at us a moment. Then she was gone, and Peter’s weeping soon died away.
While Spratling finished his sketch I watched the noon become afternoon, the sunlight change from silver to gold (if I slept and waked, I think I could know afternoon from morning by the color of the sunlight) in spite of art and vice and everything else which makes a world; hearing the broken phrases of a race answering quickly to the compulsions of the flesh and then going away, temporarily freed from the body, to sweat and labor and sing; doomed again to repair to a temporary satisfaction; fleeting, that cannot last. The world: death and despair, hunger and sleep. Hunger that tolls the body along until life becomes tired of the burden.
Spratling finished his sketch and through an ineffable azure corridor, as peaceful as sleep, we passed. Here was spring in a paved street, between walls, and here was Peter, his sorrow forgotten, in a window, saying:
“When you come next time I bet I can spin that top.”
Moonlight
Approached from the rear, his uncle’s house lay blank and lightless under the August moon, because his uncle and aunt had been gone two days now, on their summer vacation. He crossed the lane quartering, at once hurrying and skulking, the bottle of corn whiskey jouncing and burbling inside his shirt. On the opposite side of the lawn (he could see it above the low roofline, stippled solid and heavy and without depth on the sky) was a magnolia tree and there was a mocking bird singing in it now, on the topmost twig probably, high in the moon, as he lurked swiftly through the gate and into the shadow of the trees. Now he could not be seen as he went swiftly now across the dappled and dewdrenched lawn on his rubber soles and reached the sanctuary of the inky and vine-screened veranda. It was not some random and casual passerby so much as a neighbor whom he feared, who might be looking out a side window or even from another shadowed porch—some woman, some old woman who, representing the entire class and caste of mothers, parents, would be his mortal foe by pure instinctive reflex.
But he gained the porch without having been seen. Now there was no one to see him; now he began to believe, for the first time since he received the note, in his own luck. There was a fatality in it—the empty house, the fact that he had gained the veranda unseen. It was as though by gaining the porch unchallenged he had cast the augury, bled the bird, and this was fortune, luck: that instant when desire and circumstance coincide. It was as though they not only coincided, circumstance not only condoned desire, but were actually and suavely coercing it: he thought how, if he should miss out now, if it should not be tonight, if something occurred at this hour to betray and frustrate him, that he would be automatically absolved of all allegiance to conduct, order and even breathing.
There was a french door here, giving into the dark house, locked. From his pocket he produced the broken blade of the kitchen knife, fruit and symbol of the interminable afternoon’s waiting—the periodic dissolution of his entrails into salty water while he waited for dark to come and so anneal the thralled dumb flesh with the bright sweet fires of hope. Leaning to the window, fumbling the knife blade into the crack below the latch, already trembling, he could feel the bottle inside his shirt, between shirt and flesh. When he had put it there it had been cold, chill and heavy between shirt and flesh; flesh flinched from it. But now it was hot and now he did not even feel it at all because again, just with thinking, his inside dissolved, became liquid too: the outside just the dead container like the glass of the bottle which lay against it. It (the bottle) was the emptied and rinsed eight-ounce medicine phial which he had filled from the cask of corn whiskey which his father believed to be hidden in the attic. Crouching in the hot airless attic beneath the close sun-reverberant roof, his eyes stinging and his whole being revolting, recoiling from the sharp smell of the whiskey as he sploshed it clumsily about the small mouth of the bottle, he had thought how it should have been champagne. Of course he should have had a long suave roadster and an evening suit and the Pacific Ocean beyond some eucalyptus trees (they owned a car, and his father had an evening suit, though the chance of his getting the one were about as good as of getting the other, and he had forgot about the ocean and the trees without having even known or speculated on the name of either) but certainly it should have been champagne, which he had never tasted: but then he had never tasted whiskey either but once and he didn’t like it. But there was no place to get champagne; thinking of the whiskey, the homemade fiery liquor to which he was reduced, he thought in a kind of despair, in the throes of that self-doubt, that feeling that it is too good for us which we have when our heart’s (or body’s) desire is dropped without warning into our laps: It’s like I am going to miss out now just because I aint had time to work and get rich.
But that was early in the afternoon. It had to be while his mother was still having her nap and before his father could be coming home from the store. Since then he had had leisure to read and re-read the note a hundred times. It was finer than anything he had ever seen on the screen:
My dear Forgive my gardian he is old he does not realise that I am yours. See Skeet fix it for him to call me for a date tonight you meat us somewhere and I will be yours tonight even if tomorrow not goodbye but farewell forever. Destroy this. S.
He did not destroy it. He had it now, buttoned into his hip pocket, food too for the vampire feeding of the ignominy, the outrage. He wished that Mr Burchett could see it. Fumbling, working the knife blade behind the latch, he thought how, if it were not for Susan, tomorrow he would mail the note to Mr Burchett. He thought of Mr Burchett getting the note and, reading how Susan had referred to him in it not as ‘uncle’ but as ‘guardian’, he would realise his irrevocable mistake in believing that he had children to deal with. That was it: the ignominy, the outrage: not the injury. He knew that Mr and Mrs Burchett didn’t think much of him, but then he didn’t think much of Mr and Mrs Burchett. In fact, he did not think about them at all except when one of them got in his and Susan’s way, and then he thought of them only as he thought about his own parents: as the natural and impeding adjunct to his existence and the inexplicable hazard to what he wished to do. He and Susan were in the hammock on the dark side of Mr Burchett’s lawn. Susan had already said, “I haf to be in by ten-thirty” and they had heard ten strike and they were trying to gauge when thirty minutes would have passed. (He had his watch on, but that will be explained later.) But they—he, anyway—had lost time somewhere in that summer’s d
ark scented with the sweet young smell of invisible girlflesh, somewhere between her lips and the fumbling diffidence of his half-repulsed hands, so that his first intimation was a shocking and terrific blow on his bottom, come upward from beneath the net hammock, which hurled him out of it and onto his hands and knees on the earth from where, looking wildly upward, he saw the angry man, tousleheaded, in a calflength old fashioned nightshirt and carrying a flashlight, ducking nimbly beneath the hammock rope. Mr Burchett kicked him again before he could get up, with the flat on one unlaced shoe; though, and with Susan’s first shriek still ringing in his ears, he outdistanced the elder man easily within the first ten yards. That was the ignominy, the writhing. He never had a pistol, he never even had a stick, he thought. He never even said nothing. He just kicked me like I was a stray dog that come up onto the gallery and wet.
For the next ten hours of excruciating suffering he thought only of revenge. But the only revenge he could visualise was himself kicking Mr Burchett and he knew that he would have to wait at least ten years to be able to do that without he got help. And the only person he could think of whom he could ask for help was Skeet and he knew even before the thought that that was vain. He tried with mathematics to exorcise, not Mr Burchett exactly, but the outrage. Lying in bed, sleepless, writing (it seemed to him that between himself and the bed the actual shoe lay, outrageous and unavoidable, like the symbol of a curse, as though attached to his backside forever like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross, however he turned) he added his and Skeet’s ages—16 and 16. That made 32, and Mr Burchett was at least forty. Then he added his and Skeet’s weights in pounds, and that sounded better. But there was still the unknown quantity of Skeet himself. Or rather, the known, because he asked himself, Suppose Skeet came to you and said, I want you to help me kick Doctor West or Mr Hovis: and he knew that he would have refused. Then the note came, and all this vanished. It fled: Mr Burchett, the kick, the ignominy and all, was exorcised [by] a scrap of cheap scented pink note paper scrawled over with sprawling purple ink; crouching at the dark door, working with the broken blade at the latch, he thought only, again in that despair, of how difficult seduction actually was. Because he was a virgin too. Skeet and most of the others would go down into Nigger Hollow at night sometimes and they would try to make him come, but he never had. He didn’t know why: he just hadn’t. And now it was probably too late. He was like the hunter who finds the game suddenly and at last and then discovers that he has never learned how to load his gun; even the other night, lying in the hammock with Susan, befogged and beclouded in his own easily repulsed ineptitude, he had not thought about it much. But now he did. Maybe I ought to practised up on niggers first, he thought.
The latch slipped, the dark door swung inward; the house, deserted and close and secret, seemed to murmur of a thousand attitudes of love. Because his uncle and aunt were still young. His father and mother, of course, were old. He firmly (and without difficulty) declined to imagine or think of them in bed together. But the uncle and aunt were different, young, besides not being especially kin to him. If I can just get her inside, he thought, where laying has done already took place, maybe just two nights ago, before they left.
He closed the door to where it would open at a touch, then once more he lurked swiftly across the yard and crossed the lane and then turned and followed it, with an air casual and no longer skulking, to its intersection with the street and stood again in the bitten shadow of the August oaks. The mocking bird was still singing in the magnolia; it had never stopped; up and down the street the verandas of the houses contained each its rocking and murmuring blurs. He did not have to wait long. “Hi, horseface,” Skeet said. “Where’s it?”
“Where’s what?”
“You know what.” Skeet touched his shirt, then grasped the bottle through the shirt and with the other hand tried to open the shirt. He struck Skeet’s hand away.
“Get away!” he said. “Go get her first.”
“That aint what you said,” Skeet said. “I aint going to run no man’s gash on a dry stomach.” So they returned down the lane and entered his uncle’s yard again and went around to the magnolia tree, where the mocking bird still sang and beneath which there was a hydrant. “Gimme,” Skeet said.
He passed Skeet the bottle, “Go easy on it now,” he said. “I’m going to need it.” Skeet tilted the bottle. Presently he stooped, bringing Skeet’s blunt head and the tilted bottle into relief against the sky, then he rose and snatched the bottle. “Look out!” he cried. “Didn’t I tell you I am going to need it? Go on and get her; you’re already late.”
“Oke,” Skeet said. He rose from the hydrant, the rust-flavored gout of warmish stale water, and went on across the lawn toward the street.
“Make it snappy,” he called after Skeet.
“What do you reckon I am going to do?” Skeet said without looking back. “Sit around there and jaw with old man Burchett? I got a tail to be kicked the same as you have.”
He waited again, in the thick shade of the magnolia. It should have been easy for him to do now, since he had had the entire afternoon to practise, accustom himself to waiting, in. But it was harder now, standing in the shadow, beneath the silver and senseless and untiring bird; the bottle, again inside his shirt, felt now actually hot since his flesh, his being, now blew suddenly cool, cold—a suspension like water, of amazed and dreamy unbelief that it was actually himself who waited here for her with the cunning door behind him. Automatically he raised his arm to look at the watch on his wrist, knowing that he could not see it even if time had mattered—the watch which his mother had given him last summer when he had passed his first class scouting tests, with the Scout Emblem on the face. It had had a luminous dial then, until one day he forgot and went swimming with it on. It still kept pretty good time now and then, but now you could not see the face nor the hands anymore in the dark. That’s all I want, he thought. I just want to seduce her. I would even marry her afterward, even if I aint a marrying kind of a man.
Then he heard her—the sweet high whinnying reasonless giggling which turned his bowels to water—the pale dress, the body reed-thin as she and Skeet came across the lawn toward the magnolia. “All right, fishface,” Skeet said. “Where’s it?”
“You already had it.”
“You said you would give me one when I brought her back.”
“No I didn’t. I said to wait until then to take the one I said this afternoon I would give you. But you wouldn’t wait.”
“No you didn’t. I said this afternoon if you would give me a drink I would go and get her and you said, all right, and then tonight you said you would give me a drink when I brought her back and so here she is and so where is it?” Again Skeet grasped at the bottle inside his shirt; again he struck Skeet’s hand away. “All right,” Skeet said. “If you aint going to give me one, I aint going to leave.” So once more he squatted, bringing Skeet’s blunt swallowing profile and the tilted bottle into relief against the sky; once more he snatched the bottle away: this time with actual anger.
“Do you want to drink it all?” he cried, hissed, in a thin desperate voice.
“Sure,” Skeet said. “Why not? She dont want none of it. And you dont like it.”
“That’s all right about that,” he said, trembling. “It’s mine, aint it? Aint it mine? What?”
“All right, all right, keep your shirt on.” He looked at them. “You coming to town now?”
“No.”
“Why, I told Aunt Etta I was going to the show,” Susan said.
“No,” he said again. “We aint coming to town. Go on, now. Go on.”
For a moment longer Skeet looked at them. “Oke,” he said at last. They watched him go on across the lawn.
“I guess we better go to the show,” she said. “I told Aunt Etta I was, and somebody might—” He turned toward her; he was trembling now; his hands felt queer and clumsy as they touched her.
“Susan,” he said; “Susan—” Now he held her, h
is hands numb: it was not his hands which told him that she was strained back a little, looking at him curiously.
“What’s the matter with you tonight?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said. He released her and tried to put the bottle into her hand. “Here,” he said. “There’s some water over there, in the hydrant; you can drink out of the hydrant—”
“I dont want it,” she said. “I dont like it.”
“Please, Susan,” he said; “please.” He held her, recoiled and now motionless, her body arched and tense. Then she took the bottle. For an instant he believed that she was going to drink; a fierce hot wave of triumph rushed over him. Then he heard the faint dull sound of the flask when it struck the earth and then he was embracing her—the reed-thin familiar body, the mouth, the cool comfortable unlustful kissing of adolescence, to which he succumbed as usual, floated, swimming without effort on into a cool dark water smelling of spring; for the moment betrayed, Delilah-sheared, though not for long; perhaps it was her voice, what she said:
“Now come on. Let’s go to the show.”
“No. Not the show.” Now he felt her pause in sheer amazement.
“You mean, you wont take me?”
“No,” he said. He was on hands and knees now, hunting the bottle. But there was the need for haste again and he could not find the bottle at once; besides, it did not matter. He rose; his arm about her was trembling; he had a flashing conviction that, because of its numbness and trembling, he might lose her here, at the brink.
“Oh,” she said, “you’re hurting me!”
“All right,” he said. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Just there,” he said. “Just yonder.” He led her on to the steps and onto the dark veranda. She was holding back and even tugging at his arm and fingers but he did not know it because there was no feeling in his arm. He just went on, stumbling a little at the steps, half dragging her up, saying, “I thought I was going to die and then I got the letter. I thought I would have to die and then the letter came” and something else deeper than that, voiceless even: Susan! Susan! Susan! Susan! There was a porch swing in the angle. She tried to stop there; she evidently thought that that was where he was going. When she saw it she even stopped holding back, and when they passed it she came obediently, as though passive now not with amazement but with sheer curiosity as he led her to the french door and pushed it inward. Then she stopped; she began to struggle.