Big city girl

She shook her head, still smiling. “Goodness, Mitch, how do I know? What did she tell you?”

“The hell you don’t know. She says she’s going to go with you when you leave.”

“Oh, yes. Isn’t that sweet of her? She wants to go live with me.”

“Well, she’s not,” he said furiously.

“Why, Mitch? Has she changed her mind?” she asked, wide-eyed.

“I’ll change it for her. She’s not going.”

She dropped the bantering pose for a moment and looked at him with the open hatred in her eyes. “What makes you think so?”

“I won’t let her.”

“And just how do you think you’re going to stop her?”

He was up against the same thing again. He began to feel that the top of his head was going to blow off in the maddening fury of his impotence.

“She’s got her back up about something,” he said, forcing himself to be calm. “I want to know what it is.”

She was smiling again now with an infuriating provocativeness. “Oh, that. She’s mad at you because she thinks it was you that tried to pull me out of the window last night and made me fall.”

“Tried to pull you out of the window? What the hell—”

“Oh, haven’t you heard about that, Mitch? Or have you? Why, just look at what you—I mean, whoever it was—did to my poor legs.”

Still watching him with that tantalizing smile, she reached down and pulled the dress halfway up her long, smooth thighs. “Look at the nasty bruises where I hit the window sill. Now, was that a nice thing for somebody to do? Just to get a girl to come out and play?”

“And you told her I did that?” he asked ominously.

“Oh, no. As a matter of fact, I told her I didn’t think it was you. But she wouldn’t believe me. I don’t know who it was. It just seems to me, though, that it was an awful rough way to try to make a girl. Maybe that’s the only way you could, though.”

For a moment he was speechless with the rage that was clotted up inside and choking him. She made no attempt whatever to pull the dress down, and continued to watch him lazily, with that same calculated seductiveness. Deliberately reaching out the long bare leg, she placed the toe of a red shoe against his knee and pushed, setting the swing in motion again.

“But you were talking about Jessie,” she went on. “You don’t have to worry about her, Mitch. A couple of girls can always get by somehow.”

“You lousy tramp!” His arm swung down and across, and the hard flat palm of his hand smacked against the leg with a retort like the slap of a beaver’s tail. The force of it pushed her around in the swing.

She laughed. “You poor, stupid jerk.”

Then they both heard the rapid tattoo of Jessie’s shoes in the hall. Joy huddled in the corner of the swing, the derisive laughter gone now and replaced with a pitiful and abject terror while she put an arm up as if to protect herself against further attack: Jessie hit him from the back like a hurtling terrier, and when he turned she slapped his face.

Contempt in the eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl, he decided, was one of the worst things he had ever faced in his life.

Eighteen

The danger in the river bottom could wait no longer. Mitch left them and ran through the back yard, grabbing up a shovel as he went. He was getting nowhere here, and this would have to wait now.

By the time he reached the bottom the river had overflowed into the low ground where the old channel had been. It was backed up half knee-deep against the levee on the upper side of the field and still rising. There was no current here; that was beyond, where the river made its wide bend, pushing water out over the bottom. But if it got high enough to take the levee out, there would be current, a small river of it going out across the field, knocking the cotton down under the piled driftwood and silt and leaving absolute ruin.

It lay still and dark like an overflowed lake out among the trees beyond the fence, the surface quiet except for the pockmarks of the rain. He had not been a moment too soon. Even as he came out into the field he heard a gurgle of water behind him, and turned swiftly to see it boiling up springlike out of an old gopher hole in the cotton rows six feet behind the levee. Running along the top, he peered down at the water line on the upper side until he found it, a small sucking whirlpool disappearing into the ground. He sprang back and began throwing dirt onto the whirlpool until it stopped, then jumped in to pack it down with his feet. Those small holes could be dangerous.

The old levee had been there for seven years and he knew it was crisscrossed and undermined with gopher runs and the burrowings of moles. As the level of the water rose on the other side it would find them and start pouring through, cutting larger and larger with every minute. And there were low places that needed building up, trails worn across by the passing feet of seven years of going to and from the field. He swung the shovel, oblivious of the rain and the passage of time, going up and down the levee building up the low spots and weak places and watching for leaks. The raincoat was too awkward to work in, so he took it off and threw it on the ground, and in a few minutes he was soaked. The waterlogged old straw hat sagged in front of his face, making it difficult for him to see, and he yanked it off and threw it after the coat.

There would be no help, and he expected none. Cass was beyond helping or being helped. It was not so much the physical disability of what had apparently become a permanent affliction of “the miseries” in his legs as it was his almost complete withdrawal from reality. It ain’t like he was even here any more, Mitch thought. It’s more like he wasn’t just sitting in front of that radio now waiting for it to come out to him, but was trying to get in there where it was. He don’t like this world no more because you get beat up so damn much in it, so he’s finding himself another one.

And all the while, below the dark and violent surface of the battle against the river and a disaster that could be recognized as such and fought against with weapons he could hold in his hands, there ran the apprehensive undercurrent of his fear for Jessie. She can’t go away with that no-good slut, he thought. She just can’t. She’d be safer with a rattlesnake. She’d be better off dead. He wanted to throw the shovel down and run all the way to the house and tell her, make her understand. But how? Hadn’t he just told her? And what good had it done? He’d just made it worse.

He couldn’t leave the river, anyway. Water was still piling up beyond the levee, waiting with its dark treachery to find some small leak the moment his back was turned. A trickle somewhere, untended, could take the whole thing out in a matter of minutes, and they would lose the crop. He stood up for a minute with his yellow hair plastered down to his skull by the rain, his face harsh and implacable, and cursed it all, the river, the water above the levee, and the rain. And damn her too, he thought.

The river wanted the crop, and Joy was going to take Jessie away. You could fight the river with a shovel, or with your bare hands if you had to, but what could you fight Joy with? Where did you start? Or was it too late now even to think of starting? God knows Jessie would be better off somewhere else, he thought, away from this long-gone, share-cropping, hungry-gut ruin of a farm that the old man’s let dribble through his fingers, somewhere where she could go to school and have decent clothes like other girls her age, but that wasn’t with Joy. It wouldn’t ever be with that conscienceless and unprincipled round-heeled bitch if he could help it, not with Jessie idolizing her that way and copying everything she did.

What does she want Jessie to go with her for, anyway? he thought, attacking a leak in the levee with bitter fury. You can tell by looking at her she don’t care anything about anybody but herself, and never did, lt just don’t make sense to me that she’d want to be saddled with a fifteen-year-old country girl that hadn’t even been nowhere. The way she looked at me once there in the swing, you almost got an idea of what she was driving at. It was me. She wanted to do something to me. Well, she is, but it ain’t over yet. If she’s got it in for me, she’s perfectly welcome to take it out on me any way she can or wants to, but she ain’t going to take it out on Jessie. God knows, the kid never had much chance to grow up like a girl, as it was, with no mother after she was a year old and only a couple of hard-tailed and knot-headed brothers to look after her while the old man wandered around in a cloud and hardly even noticed whether she was a boy or a girl, but she’s going to have what little chance there is.

But how do you go about it? he thought, full of a gray and hopeless rage. Ordering Jessie to stay here and telling her she ain’t going won’t do any good. She’s got a mind of her own, and I can’t keep her tied up. So far, I’ve just balled things up worse. When I lost my head there on the porch and slapped her damned leg off me, I just made a worse mess out of things. I reckon that was just what she was trying to get me to do and I walked right into it. So now Jessie thinks I was trying to beat her up. Something like that would make a big hit with Jessie, too.

He did not even see Cass until the old man was almost upon him, hurrying down the hill in an old greenish-black felt hat and a useless raincoat ripped up one side almost to the armpit. When he heard the shouts he straightened up and turned around, watching while his father motioned with his arm and yelled again.

“What is it?” he shouted back, throwing another shovelful of dirt on a low spot on the levee. For a man who’s so stove up in the legs he can’t get around, he thought, he’s making pretty good time.

“It’s Sewell,” Cass shouted, reaching the upper end of the levee and puffing on through the rain atop it like a man walking a log. Goddamnit, Mitch thought, does he have to walk up there and tear it down as fast as I get it built up?

Then it hit him. It was as if the levee and the rising water and the desperate urgency of holding up this straining bulwark against disaster, together with the somber and uneasy dread in his thoughts of Jessie, had occupied every corner of his mind to the extent that there was no room for anything else, and it took time for any other idea to filter in and find room for itself.

“Sewell?” he demanded. He stuck the shovel in the ground and looked at his father. “What about Sewell?”

Cass could not come to rest. He slid down off the top of the levee and continued walking up and down past him, holding his hand over his heart and breathing with the difficulty of a wind-broken horse. Taking an old bandanna out of his overalls pocket, he dabbed at his eyes and blew his nose, and then bent over again with his hand over his heart.

“It’s Sewell,” he panted, holding out one arm to point toward the river. “Just come over the radio.”

“What just come over the radio?”, Mitch asked furiously. What’d he come all the way down here for if ain’t going to make no more sense than that?

”He’s in the river. Out yonder in the river somewheres,” the older man gasped, beginning now to get some of his breath back. “He had a fight with the shurf’s men up at the highway bridge and he’s in the river.”

“Well, what in hell is he doing in the river?” Mitch burst out. “Is he shot? Did he fall in? How do they know he’s in it?”

“I’m trying to tell you, as fast as I get my breath, that’s where he is,” Cass rushed on, for some reason still pointing out toward the river as if to keep this incredible fact established. “Three, lour hours ago, along about daylight. They was chasing him in a car and he ran into a whole passel of the shurf’s men on the highway bridge, and they penned him up there where he couldn’t get away in the car, and then there was a gun fight and they shot him once with a rifle, but he jumped off the bridge into the river and every time he’d come up they was ashooting at him.”

“Well, where is he now?” Mitch asked savagely. “What’s the rest of it?”

“He’s in the river somewheres. That’s what I been telling you.”

“Did they hit him? Or did he get away?” Ain’t there any way, he thought, that I can get it out of him?

“That’s what they don’t, know for sure,” Cass said, having to take down the frozen, pointing arm to get the handkerchief out of his pocket again. He put it up to his eyes and started shaking his head from side to side. “They don’t know what happened, because they shot three or four times while he was going down the river, every time his head would come up for air, and the last time they shot just as he was going under and they never did see him come up no more. They went down the river for a mile, looking. The man on the radio said there wasn’t no way he could have come out, because there was a bunch of ‘em on both sides of the river and they never did even see his head come up no more after the last shot. He’s been shot, or drowned in the river.”

Mitch stood quietly in the rain, holding onto the shovel handle and looking down at his feet in the mud. I been trying to tell him for a long time, he thought, that sooner or later he was going to hear something on that damned radio he didn’t want to hear.

Cass began walking back and forth again. “Well, come on, Mitch. Gather up your stuff and let’s go,” he said wildly.

Mitch stared at him. “Go where?” he asked.

Cass stopped pacing and looked at him blankly, like a bewildered and sodden-hatted kewpie doll left out in the rain.

“Where?” he asked.

“Where? Well, surely you ain’t going to stay down here in the field. Don’t you understand what I been saying? Sewell’s in the river. He’s been shot. You can’t just stay down here and not do nothing.”

“Just what do you expect me to do?” Mitch asked.

“Do? Why—why—” Cass said incredulously, “why, come up to the house. Listen to the radio. To the news.” It was as if the whole course had been perfectly clear in his mind until Mitch had begun asking his stupid questions, and then he had to cast about for the answer himself.

Mitch began to comprehend some of it then. Sewell’s been shot on the radio, he thought. He’s in this river down here, but it’s actually the radio river, or he can’t make up his mind which it is, and they’re hunting for him on the radio, and there can’t none of it really happen anywhere except on the radio. He can’t make up his mind whether it’s really Sewell they’re looking for or whether it’s a radio game called Sewell Neely.

“What do I want to listen to the news for?” he asked quietly.

“Why,” Cass sputtered, “to find out what’s happened. To see if he’s been—been—”

“And what,” Mitch asked slowly, “do I do after I find out?”

Nineteen

“Ain’t you going to do anything? Anything a-tall?” Cass cried out piteously.

“Yes,” Mitch replied, still speaking quietly. “I’m going to keep on piling dirt on this levee. You see that water over there?” He pointed with the shovel. Just three or four inches below the top of the levee in places now, it waited, poised, straining, and heavy, the dark surface of it quiet except for the dimpling of the rain. “You know what’s going to happen to that cotton back there if it goes out?”

“Cotton?” Cass repeated blankly. “Cotton? Don’t you understand, Mitch? Ain’t I telling you? Sewell’s shot. Won’t you listen? He’s shot. In the river.”

As he swung his head to look at the cotton whose existence he did not even recognize, water sprayed off the brim of the old greenish-black hat. Reaching up, he removed it and took it in his two hands and began wringing it out as naturally and as unconsciously as some pixie-like old crone of a charwoman wringing out a mop. A discolored stream of water sprayed across his feet.

He began to cry, still twisting the hat. In a moment he unwound it and put a hand inside the crown to open it up again, and then placed it, misshapen and crosswise, upon his head. Mitch heard the sudden gurgle of water and turned to see a small stream gushing from another gopher hole in the levee. Snatching at the shovel handle, he leaped toward it and began throwing dirt across onto the front face of it until it stopped.

Cass bounded after him, bandy-legged, weeping, importunate. “I been bereft,” he cried. “I been berefted by everybody. One of my boys is killed in the river and the other one’s so hardhearted he don’t even care. It’s a judgment. It’s a judgment on me.”

Mitch stopped the fury of his shoveling and turned, a savage impatience in his face, and started to lash out at him to go on back to the house, but he bit the words off and his expression softened as he looked at the hopeless ruin of the man, the futile eyes wet with tears and the faded doll’s face, too weak even for tragedy, lost, hopeless, uncomprehending, under the grotesquely comic misshapen hat. It’s all mixed up for him, he thought. It should have stayed on the radio. As long as it was all on the radio, it was a Sewell Neely game and they gave five hundred dollars to whoever guessed the answer, but now part of it’s got away from him and it’s his own boy that’s lying on the bottom of the river, or at least part of the time it is, and he don’t know what to do about it.

“You go on back to the house, Dad,” he said gently. “Just listen to the radio and wait. That’s all you can do. I’ve got to get to work.”

“It’s the sin of the world,” Cass cried out. “Hard-heartedness is the sin of the world.” He turned away and started to run, going toward the river. One hand came up to clasp the brim of the obscenely comic hat as if a sudden gale had sprung up and he had to hold onto this last of his earthly possessions to keep it from blowing away. Discovering after a dozen bounds that he was going in the wrong direction, he stopped and wheeled about, and then came back, charging past Mitch, unseeing, oblivious, head bent forward as if into a gale and still holding onto the hat. Then he was gone, running up the hill into the edge of the timber, going toward the house.

Mitch looked after him for a moment, then bent to the shovel again.

Noon came and went with the sodden drumming of rain while he fought the rising water with the shovel like some lost soul before the fuel piles of hell. He stopped endless gopher holes and built up all the low places, and then started across building the whole levee higher. When he had gone the full length of it he started back again, still piling up more dirt. Now and then he would stop for a moment to catch his breath and stare bleakly at the water, still rising, but more slowly now beyond the levee. His fingers would be stiff and curved into the form of the shovel handle and would ache when he straightened them. And whenever he paused like this, even for a few seconds, his eyes, after sweeping across the threatening and precariously held wall of water beyond him, would start to swing outward toward the river while his mind turned uncontrollably to the picture of Sewell lying somewhere on its bottom with his face in the mud and the flood rolling over him. It ain’t going to do no good to cry about it, he would think, and I can maybe do some good here. He would tear himself away from it and go back to the endless scoop, lift, and swing of the shovel.

After a while the searchers came down the hill and passed him, going into the bottom, two at first, then one, and later on two more, white-hatted, black-slickered, carrying rifles in the crooks of their arms, and he cursed them bitterly and went on with the work. They would ask the same unvarying, inevitable, and stupid questions and listen without violence—knowing who he was—while he cursed them. He could think of no reason for his bitterness and the bleak-faced tirade of curses other than that they were looking for the dead body of his brother, either for the five-hundred-dollar reward or because they were officers of the law and paid to do it. Maybe, he thought, I’m going crazy too.

Possibly, though, it was because at last they were men, like himself, and capable of accepting and returning violence on a reciprocal plane no higher and no lower than his own, and he wanted to fight them if they would. He had been struggling too long, infuriated, raging, and impotent, against the unconquerable and the intangible, trying to come to grips with and defend himself against an unbeatable and overwhelming river, a half-demented old man, and a bitch.

In the dismal rain of afternoon the straining levee held, while the water grew and waited.

* * *

For no other reason than that you went on living until you had to die, you went on walking until you had to fall for the last time. There was no sense to it; it was utterly without reason. A thousand miles back the world consisted of nausea and retching sickness, unnumbered incalculable millions of identical wet, black, pain-distorted tree trunks, a knee-deep highway of leaf-surfaced unmoving dirty water, and the eternal gray dreariness of rain, and a thousand miles ahead it would be exactly the same. You could fall for the last time here in this spot, or you could stagger on through this agonized and unvarying hell for another mile, and the difference in distance and time would be no more discernible here than the same mile and the same elapsed period of time measured, after you dropped, against all infinity and eternity.

Some critical and still lucid portion of Sewell’s mind examined this phenomenon with curiosity. I was born and raised in this bottom, he thought, and I lived in it for twenty-one years, fishing for catfish and white perch and hunting coons in it, and I know every bit of it, but now it all looks the same. Maybe I’m already dead and don’t know it. Maybe this is hell and I’ll see Harve again and can wait here for Joy. Maybe it’s just that everything looks funny now because of the poison, or the pain. I never knew pin oaks and white oaks to look like that before, all the same and all black, and swollen up like that.

Here’s your picture, I’d have said, Harve don’t need it no more, and maybe when you think about it I reckon he never did because what do you need the picture for if you’ve got the bitch it was took of? It’s too bad you won’t be around long enough to give it to somebody else, which was Harve’s trouble too, but anyway, when they come in here after you begin to stink, and find it stuck in your mouth like that, they can pass it around and show it to their friends, if they got friends. And they ought to have lots of friends, with a picture like that. I guess you made a lot of ‘em with it, and got made by ‘em, till you run into Harve’s trouble. Anyway, you still got both hands, and a picture in your mouth, which is more than Harve’s got.

What the hell am I muttering about? he thought, his mind becoming clear again. I sound like some high-school punk telling what he’d have done if he’d caught up with the other guy. I didn’t find her. I had a whole week and I didn’t find her, so why go on about it? Forget it. Maybe I’d like to have a boat to go down the river in, one of them shiny glassed-in ones like I used to see in Galveston with a guy in a white coat going around serving drinks. I got as much chance of that as I have now of finding her, so why don’t I wish for it too?

The hand and the wrist were badly swollen and darkened now, and he supposed the whole arm was too, but there was no way he could tell inside the coat sleeve. The arm was very painful, and would bend only with difficulty, and it seemed to be swelling out against the sleeve like an inflated inner tube inside a tire. The left arm was growing stiff from the flesh wound through the muscle of the forearm, and the shock had worn off now, leaving it excruciatingly painful. Periodically, the awful chills would sweep over him and leave him drenched in a cold and clammy perspiration, while his heart fluttered like a bird’s. But it was the falling that was worst. Suddenly and without warning he would find the whole river bottom tilting on end and flying up at him like the opening of a cellar door, and he would be wallowing in the muddy and leaf-congested water struggling to rise. After a passage of time that he was never able even to estimate, he would be back on his feet and staggering on. There’ll be one of ‘em pretty soon, he thought, when I won’t get up.

Then he was on the beach at Galveston again with Joy, on their honeymoon, when she still thought he was a big-shot gambler and not a cheap purveyor of hired and professional violence. He would feel the great sea wind blowing and hear the booming of the surf at night, with his face in the fragrant loveliness of her hair.

I wonder if I’ve passed the farm yet, he thought. I seem to be on that side of the river and it’s funny I wouldn’t have recognized it if I’d gone by. Well, it don’t make no difference. I wouldn’t stop there.

Here’s your picture. And this other thing’s a gun. You ought to recognize a gun, but maybe you never saw that end of one before.

Twenty

It was midafternoon. The searching officers had come and gone, on into the bottom, and later Mitch had seen three of them come back out and go up the hill toward the house, where presumably they had left their cars. The other two, he supposed, had gone on up the river and would come out higher up, by the Jimerson place. Looking for a dead man on the bottom of the river, he thought bitterly, like a bunch of hungry turtles.

The river seemed to pause in its attack. For the past half hour the water level on the upper side of the levee had been almost at a standstill, and now it hung, poised, just below the top, like a toy balloon inflated to the bursting point. Was it the crest? Had it reached the peak, or was it merely resting, gathering its force for a new assault? If it’d just drop off a little, even a quarter of an inch, he thought, watching tensely, I’d know I held it. But if it comes up any more it’s gone.

Like Sewell, he thought, the black despair reawakening and moving inside him like something cold but still alive in his stomach. But Sewell’s been dead ever since he killed that deputy and butchered him up like that; he’s just been borrowing time since then. He knew it, and I knew it, and I ought to be used to it by this time.

He turned, looking out across the rain-smeared bottom. Water was backing up into the field on the lower end, but there was no current in it and it was standing quietly in the furrows between the rows of cotton. If the river went back down before too long it would cause little damage.

His eyes swung back, and then suddenly stopped. A man had emerged from the edge of the timber out along the river, beyond the end of the levee, plowing along bareheaded and without a slicker, head down and lurching drunkenly from side to side. That ain’t one of them deputies, lie thought, and then the man fell and struggled weakly in the flood.

Before the man had hit the water he was running. Oh, my God, Mitch thought, lunging across the field. He came to the fence and slid through between the strands of barbed wire, hearing the rip of torn overalls and feeling but not even noticing the wire raking into the flesh of his leg, and then he was splashing through the slowly moving discolored flood toward the weakly floundering man still fifty yards away in the rain. The water came up to his knees, slowing him down. And then Sewell had his head out of the water.

Mitch rushed up to him, panting, and tried to take his arm. Sewell, on his knees with his head down, felt the hands upon him and heard the splashing and tried to pull away. Mitch grabbed the collar of his coat and heaved mightily upward and Sewell came to his feet and stood, facing downriver, not knowing who it was. The gun was in his right-hand coat pocket and he wondered vaguely, with some far-off, detached portion of his mind, whether it would still fire even if he could get it out with the stiff, venom-swollen hand.

Then he turned, and they looked at each other for a long minute, the thin and hard-faced man in drowned overalls and shirt with his butter-colored hair plastered to his skull, and the bigger, heavy-shouldered one in the ruin of his city clothes, and neither of them showed any sign of emotion.

“We can’t stand here in the open,” Mitch said at last. “There’s still some deputies down here looking for you.”

“Not to the house,” Sewell replied, swaying. He seemed to be having trouble keeping Mitch fixed in his gaze.

“No,” Mitch said quietly. “Not to the house.”

“Just in the trees. In the big, black trees. They got bigger since I was here.”

Mitch looked at him piercingly. He’s out of his head, he thought. They got him somewhere. “Where you hit?” he asked, keeping his voice quiet and steady. If I start going to pieces, he thought, I’ll never get him out of here. “Where did they hit you?”

”In this arm,” Sewell said dully. “Didn’t hit the bone.”

The right arm was hanging straight down out of sight beyond him and Mitch did not see it for a moment. He looked at the sickness in his brother’s eyes and the white, ghastly, unhealthy pallor of his face and thought. Being shot through the arm didn’t make him like that. They got him somewhere else he ain’t talking about. But I got to get him out of here. We can’t stand here in the open like a couple of damn fools talking about the crops. I got to get him into the timber. For Christ’s sake, I got to get him moving before somebody sees us or he falls in this water again.

He moved around to the other side of the swaying, precariously upright figure. “Put your arm across my neck,” he said, and started to reach for the wrist to pick it up. Then he saw it, the obscenely swollen balloon-fingered travesty of a hand puffed blackly out of the end of the coat sleeve like an inner tube swelling out of a ruptured tire casing, and he felt his stomach turn over with the sickness of it. Snake, he thought wildly. Half the goddamned police in the state looking for him, and a snake got him. He spent twenty years in this river bottom living with ‘em and then he gets back in it for half a day and one of ‘em gets him. They couldn’t have got him another time, when he could go to a doctor. It had to be today. It had to be now. Of all the dirty . . . But what the hell difference does it make? He couldn’t get out of here no how. I got to stop this. I’m getting as flighty as an old woman. I got to get him into that timber. What’s the matter with me?

It was Sewell who snapped him out of it. “What’s the matter, kid? You getting sick?” he asked, and Mitch stiffened as if he had been sluiced with a pitcher of ice water. He looked at his brother’s face and saw the cold, ferocious grin and the sardonic eyes watching him.

He’s all right again, he thought. His mind was wandering, but it’s all right now. He’s the one with the poison in him and I’m acting like a kid or an old woman.

“Come on,” he said, deadly calm now. He moved around to Sewell’s left to keep from jarring the swollen arm, put his arm around Sewell’s waist, and started walking. We don’t dare go across the field, he thought. We got to go in above the levee, through that water, where we can stay in the trees.

They pushed through it in the gray and dismal crying of the rain. In places the water was up to their waists, and Sewell walked falteringly, several times almost falling before Mitch could steady him. Once the sickness came upon him and he bent over, retching, and tried to vomit. He had been sick so many times and for so long there was nothing to the vomiting except the dry and terrible retching.

After what seemed like an hour to Mitch they came to the end of the water and started up the incline going out of the bottom. He guided Sewell away from the trail to where, some hundred yards away, there lay the crown of a big oak he and Cass had felled for stovewood early in the spring. Sewell fell to his knees and lay down back among the branches, out of sight of anyone going along the trail. Mitch sank down beside him and helped him to straighten out. Then he thought of the raincoat.

“Wait a minute,” he said hurriedly. He ran down into the field and came back with the coat, Spreading it across a pair of limbs, he made a sort of tent of it to break the rain. Then he sat down, with his head under the edge of the coat, his face dark and still as if chopped out of walnut.

He looked at the arm. “Moccasin?’’ he asked quietly.

Sewell lay with his head on a small limb, his face deathly white except for the brown splotches of the big freckles, and his body rigidly still save for the hurried and shallow breathing. He shook his head slightly.

“Rattler,” he said.

Oh, God, Mitch thought. It couldn’t have been worse, but now it is. God knows how many hours ago, and a rattler on top of that, instead of a moccasin.

“Where?” he asked, still with that same quietness, as if he held onto his emotions with the same tenacious and indomitable grimness with which he was trying to hold back the thought of his brother’s dying. “When?”

Sewell tried to raise the arm. “Twice,” he said faintly. “Once on the wrist and once on the hand. Little after daylight this morning.”

“Did you get any of the poison out?”

Again there was that faint shake of the head. “I didn’t have a knife to cut it with.”

Mitch sat quietly, avoiding his eyes. “You’ll be all right,” he said, knowing he was lying. There wasn’t one chance in a hundred, even for a specimen like Sewell.

The old sardonic gleam came momentarily into Sewell’s eyes. “Don’t give us that, kid,” he said with the pain showing under his voice. “We ain’t got time for any crap.”

Mitch started to break then, just once. “Look,” he said urgently, his voice very thin and harsh, “a doctor could still fix it. I’ll go up and get a wagon and send one of them goddamned deputies after a doctor.”

Sewell looked at him quietly. “Cut it out, kid.”

“For Christ’s sake, Sewell!”

“Knock it off. In the first place, it’s too late. In the second, if he could fix me up I’d go to the chair. I like it better here.”

Mitch looked down at the mud. He nodded his head slowly.

“You want to stay down here, then?” he asked. “That’s right.”

“All right,” Mitch said quietly.

They were both silent for several minutes, listening to the monotonous tattoo of the rain on the spread raincoat. Then Mitch said, “What about, if—?”

“Not if. When.”

“All right,” Mitch said. He always had to be tougher than anybody else, he thought. I guess being tough was the only religion he ever had. And I reckon it’s as good as any, if it lasts. Got help you, though, if it ever quits on you. “All right, then. When.”

Sewell looked at him. “You still got a shovel on this shirt-tail farm? Or has he sold that too?”

Twenty-one

Mitch nodded his head, and the thing was done.

There had always been a deep and unspoken understanding between them. So unlike in many ways, the one corrupt, professionally violent, and criminal, and the other with his bitter honesty and a sort of harsh and thorn-protected, inarticulate capacity for love, they had always been able to meet on this common ground of a hard and unflinching realism. Courage was a quality each recognized and respected in the other; perhaps it had been passed on to them by their mother as valor is said to be in the breeding of fighting bulls, or perhaps it had been forced upon them by long association with the pitiful contrast of their father’s weakness. At any rate, they understood each other now, and nodded, glad there had to be no further talk.

For Sewell there was in it the final guarantee that he would never be taken alive to go to the electric chair, and the grisly humor of one last supreme victory over the forces of the law he hated. The five-hundred-dollar reward forever unclaimed by any money-hungry deputy and the forever unsolved mystery of his disappearance would constitute the farewell expression of contempt he would leave them. Mitch had enough insight into the working of his brother’s mind to be aware of this, but for him the reasons were different, although they came to the same conclusion.

There was a proud, unbending strain of clannishness in him, clannishness in the true sense of love and loyalty to family, which excluded the law, or at least came first, before the law. If Sewell owed a debt to law and to society for his misdeeds—and Mitch was too honest to deny this—Sewell would have paid it when he died, as surely as if he had paid it on the gallows or in the electric chair, and with the payment of this debt what was left of Sewell or the memory of Sewell was no longer society’s concern. It was strictly a matter for his family. And since, besides himself, the family consisted of a half-demented old man who lived in a dream and a girl too young to understand and too vulnerable to grief, he would accept the full responsibility. Damn the law now that the debt was being paid; it no longer had any concern in the matter. Damn the radio and newspapers, the publicity, the tumult, and the money-hungry scramble for reward. There had been enough of Roman carnival. It could end here in a hidden grave on this remaining and pitiful remnant of the land the Neelys still possessed.

He crouched now, wooden-faced, quiet, unwinking, below the edge of the sheltering raincoat and looked at Sewell, half ashamed of the weakness of his outburst a few minutes ago. There for a moment it had been hard to take, almost too hard, but now it was over and the grief was contained where it should be, below the surface and out of sight.

“How do you feel now?” he asked.

“O.K.,” Sewell replied. They were both aware of the lie.

“Can I get you anything?”

“No. I wish I had a cigarette, but I reckon yours are ruined too.”

“The tobacco’s still dry. It’s in a can. But the papers are wet.”

“It don’t matter.”

“I’ll run up to the house and get some more papers.”

“Never mind,” Sewell said.

“It won’t take a minute.”

He slid backward out of the dead tree and stood up in the rain. For a moment his gaze swung outward over the water backed up below him. What was it doing? Was it still rising, or had it reached the crest and begun to fall? Then he turned away; there was no time for it now. Just for an instant a great bitterness welled up in him. It seemed somehow that for a period of time that went back farther than he could remember—and was actually just since daybreak this morning—he had been caught up in one desperate and inconclusive struggle after another. First there had been the argument with Jessie, which he had had to abandon in a hopeless mess when he ran to fight the rising water trying to engulf the crop, and now in turn that was swallowed up in the larger disaster of Sewell. Maybe the old man’s right, he thought. The thing to do is to find a world of your own. Then he shook it off and started up the hill toward the house.

* * *

The cars had been arriving and departing since mid-morning. Three of them had come and gone by now, and there was one still parked in the front yard while its two occupants searched the river bottom. As each arrived and began to disgorge its slickered, white-hatted men with rifles, Cass would leap up from beside the radio and run out into the rain in an antic frenzy of lamentation with the burlesque and monstrous hat athwart his head.

“He’s drowned,” he would wail. “It said on the radio He didn’t come up no more. I’m his daddy and I tried to raise him up a Christian, but he’s drowned in the river.”

“We don’t know,” the men would say. “And we don’t believe anything until we see it.”

“But it said so on the radio,” he would cry out, trotting after them as far as the barn and unable to grasp the fact that these men in the field were the ones who fed the information in the first place into radio’s all devouring gut and were uninterested in its digestive rumblings.

And then, as they left him, he would stand for a moment lost and uncertain in the rain and call out after them the repeated theme and password of his incipient madness: “I’m his daddy. He was my boy.” Whether this was a misguided bid for fame or the tortured admission of a sense of guilt they had no way of knowing—if they cared.

Joy sulked in her room and looked with contempt upon all this frenetic exhibitionism. I’m only his wife, she thought. Nobody cares enough to ask me how I feel. The silly old idiot, making a fool of himself like that. I think he’s going nuts. But you’d think somebody might have heard that he had a wife.

The last car, which had a press sticker on the windshield, rolled into the yard in midafternoon carrying two men, neither of whom had raincoats. They got out and ran up on the porch, one of them carrying a bulky camera case. The reporter was a lean-faced young man with closely cropped dark hair and alert gray eyes, and an air of eager impatience about him like a hunting dog on a frosty morning. The photographer was older, around forty, sloppily dressed in an old gray suit with food stains on the vest. The vest itself was closed with only one of its buttons, which was in the wrong buttonhole, causing it to extend down some two inches lower on one side than on the other. He was dark-haired too, but the hair was long, with a few strands of gray, and would never stay combed, springing up wildly on both sides of the part and giving him a perpetual air of having just got out of bed. The face was gaunt, long-jawed, with cavernous eye sockets, and the eyes themselves were gray, with an expression of detached and somewhat cynical boredom. His name was Lambeth, and he was half drunk.

Cass was sitting on the bed in the front room listening to the radio when they arrived. Springing up, he ran into the hall and onto the front porch just as they leaped upon it from out of the rain.

“There’s news coming in.” he said excitedly, pausing only for an instant in his headlong orbit. “Got to listen to the news. I’ll talk to you in a minute.” Then he whirled and was gone, disappearing through the open window back into his room again.

They started, and looked at each other. They could hear the radio’s voice inside the room.

“Looks like one of the listening audience,” Lambeth said, unslinging the camera case and leaning boredly against the wall.

The reporter walked to the window and looked in. Cass was seated on the edge of the bed with his face pushed up in front of the radio, rapt, intent, unmoving, while the comic and improbable hat dripped water onto the floor.

“Are you Mr. Neely?” he asked.

“Can’t talk to you now,” Cass said, frowning.

The reporter withdrew his head, he stood still, listening and could hear the news.

“—no late developments in this sensational man hunt. Police officers at the scene are now almost unanimous in their opinion that Neely is dead, either drowned or killed by a rifle bullet at the time he was swimming down the river. However, the search is being pushed relentlessly and will not be written off as closed until the body is, recovered.”

The reporter looked in again. “There’s nothing new in that,” he said. “I filed it myself less than an hour ago.”

Cass looked at him blankly. “It’s the news,” he said. “Can’t talk to you now.”

“But I tell you,” the reporter said impatiently, “there’s nothing new in it. I wrote it.”

Cass shook his head. “Don’t make no difference.”

The young man withdrew his head from the window and looked helplessly at Lambeth, who was leaning against the wall and wishing he had brought the bottle in from the car.

“Nobody ever believes anything until he hears it on the radio or sees it in the paper,” Lambeth said wearily. “God help the human race.”

“There must be somebody else around here we can talk to,” the reporter said. He started toward the door to look down the hall.

Joy had been in the bedroom engaged in changing into another dress when she heard the car drive up. But instead of going on down into the bottom as the others had done, these men had come up onto the porch. It’s about time somebody remembered he had a wife, she thought angrily. All this fuss and hullabaloo and that old cluck running around like a chicken with its head chopped off, and you’d think there wasn’t anybody else on the place or that had anything to do with Sewell at all. Slipping into a dressing gown, she gave her hair a shake back over her shoulders and went down the hall.

She emerged onto the porch just as the reporter was coming toward the door. He was quite attractive, she thought, and at the same time there was something vaguely familiar about him. She put on her best and warmest smile and started to say something.

Just then Lambeth heard her and turned.

“Well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t Narcissus.”

Twenty-two

“Oh, hello,” the reporter said. “You’re Mrs. Neely, aren’t you? You remember us, I guess. At the trial? We didn’t expect to see you out here, but I’m glad we ran into you.”

Joy smiled at them. “Why, yes,” she said. “I remember you, Mr.—er—”

“Shaw,” the younger man said. “And this is Byron Lambeth.”

“Oh, I know Mr. Lambeth. We’re old friends, aren’t we?”

“Mrs. Neely and I have seen a lot of each other,” Lambeth said gravely.

“Now, what would you like to say, Mrs. Neely?” Shaw asked with professional briskness. “Do you have any idea where your husband was headed when he—uh—”

“Well, I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “I hadn’t heard—”

“Don’t you think he might have been trying to come here?”

“Why, yes. I’ve thought of that. He was coming this way, wasn’t he? I mean, when he— Oh, it’s so awful! You don’t know what it’s been like all day, not knowing.” The idea of Sewell’s coming back to her began to blossom and take shape, and she knew. She just knew. Why hadn’t she realized it before? Why, of course. It really couldn’t have been anything else. He had been headed right this way, hadn’t he?

Forgetting the two men for a moment, she let her mind run unhampered along this delightful and beckoning pathway, seeing herself as the irresistible beauty for whom men would take incalculable risks. It happened all the time in the movies. And then, even as she was beginning to believe in herself as this fatal beauty, all the terrible tragedy of it came rushing in upon her and she fought to hold back the tears as she thought of how near he had been and she had not known. Sewell had been killed while risking everything just to be at her side for one final, beautiful hour, and she hadn’t known it until too late.

“Yes,” she said tragically, her face slightly raised like the pictures of Joan of Arc and a mist of tears in her eyes. “He was coming to see me. I can feel it. It’s something you know deep down inside of you. Oh, poor Sewell! To think how near he was and I didn’t know.”

Shaw broke in eagerly. “That’s it! That’s the way I see it. He must have been coming here. What else would lie have been doing up there on that bridge? We’ll cover it from that angle. And we’ll want some pictures. You won’t mind posing, will you, Mrs. Neely?”

“Mrs. Neely won’t mind posing at all, I’m sure,” Lambeth said with the same deferential and still half-drunken gravity. “Mrs. Neely takes a very good picture.”

“I—I’ll be glad to,” Joy said graciously. She began dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, and looked down appraisingly at the dowdy old kimono. They would catch me in this crummy old rag, she thought. “Oh, but I’ll have to change and fix up a little. I look such a fright. I haven’t even bothered to— I mean, it’s all been so horrible. It won’t take a minute. You won’t mind, will you?” She gave them a wan little smile, and before either of them could answer she had turned and run back down the hall.

Now, where’s that confounded kid? she thought frantically, rushing into the bedroom and over to the suitcase on the old trunk. What’ll I wear? Any other time she’d be underfoot like some idiotic puppy, mooning at me while I brush my hair, and now when I could use her she’s nowhere around. Not a goddamned thing that’s fit to be seen in, and the picture’ll be in all the papers. Not that cheap, lousy print—it’s wrinkled, anyway. A whore wouldn’t be found dead in it. Just think, he was coming to see me. Wasn’t that sweet? He just had to see me: he couldn’t stay away. She threw the kimono on the bed.

She began to grab dresses up wildly until she had them all in her arms, and then threw them back into the suitcase in jumbled confusion. Oh, where the hell is that kid? I’ve got to have the mirror. And my lipstick. And I’ve got to comb my hair. She ran into the center of the room and stared wildly around in a sort of frenzied and helpless indecision. Where could she start? And what could she wear?

She ran out onto the back porch to get the mirror, in her frantic rush forgetting until after she was already out there, in the open, that she had taken off the kimono and had on nothing except her wisps of underthings. Oh, my God, she thought, I’m losing my mind. Snatching the mirror off its nail, she fled headlong back into the room. Suppose they’d seen me, she thought. Not Lambeth, that stew bum. He’s seen me in less than this. But the other one. Shaw, isn’t it? He’s cute. He’d have thought I was an awful hussy.

I hope that crazy Lambeth doesn’t get the pictures mixed up and turn that other one in to the paper. Wouldn’t that be a mess, when the editor saw it? And I wonder what Harve ever did with the one I gave him. I hope he didn’t have it with him when he was—uh—when Sewell—er— Think of them finding it and a lot of strange people passing it around. Suppose Sewell had found it when he— God, that would have been terrible. But he didn’t even know about it.

“Jessie! Jessie! Where are you, dear?” Oh, where is that lousy kid? If she thinks she’s going to Houston with me, she’ll have to be more help than this. What do I want with her, anyway? She’d just be a nuisance. I won’t take her.

What am I talking about? Of course I’ll take her. I don’t care what she does afterward, but I’m going to take her. Didn’t I see his face there this morning, on the porch? That got him, all right. The lousy bastard. That’ll teach him who he can shove like that.

She propped the mirror up against a pillow and sat down on the bed to comb her hair. The mirror fell over, and she put her head in her arms, wanting to cry. Stop it, she thought. Stop it! Stop it! Stop itl I’ve got to get fixed lip. They’re going to take my picture, and it’ll be in all the papers. I’ve just got to look my best. I’ve just got to. I don’t want to look like some old bag. Please! The story will say how he was coming back to see me, and people will look at the picture and say, “What was he going anywhere to see an old frump like that for?” Well. I’m not an old frump, and he was coming to see me. He was. I just know he was. Wasn’t that sweet? All that worrying and stewing I’ve done about nothing, afraid I was losing my looks and getting old, when there wasn’t anything to it at all.

She looked up then and saw Jessie standing in the door. The girl’s childlike face, framed in the aureole of her tousled and rain-dampened hair, was burdened with an overpowering sadness, and the large blue eyes had no spark of their usual spirit and life.

“Oh, there you are, honey,” Joy said, babbling, paying no attention to the other’s heart-wrenching quiet. “Will you help me for a minute? Hold the mirror lot me, will you? And see if you can find my lipstick.”

Jessie came on into the room and took the mirror, her eyes still sad and now a little self-conscious as well, faintly embarrassed as always by the older woman’s near nakedness. “What is it, Joy?” she asked dully.

“Reporters,” Joy rattled on, full of excitement, pulling the comb through her hair in long sweeps back over her shoulders. “From some paper. They’re going to take my picture, and write about us in the paper. Maybe they’ll take yours too. I don’t know what paper it is; I forgot to ask them. Maybe it’s a Houston one. Say, you know what?” She paused in mid-stroke to look up with bubbling inspiration. “If they’re from Houston, maybe they’ll give us a ride. We can go back with them.”

In spite of herself, Jessie began to feel some of Joy’s excitement. “Do you think they’d let us?” she asked.

“Of course, honey. Certainly they would,” Joy rambled on, by now fully convinced that Shaw and Lambeth were from Houston. The whole thing was an actuality, no longer even faintly conjectural. She possessed a great deal of Cass’s happy facility in the art of making facts agree with her and for making up her own if necessary.

“We’ll get a ride with them, and when we get to Houston we can stay with this friend of mine down there, the one named Dorothy, you remember, the one who’s a model, only maybe she isn’t modeling now, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her for a long time. Maybe she isn’t working as a model right at the moment, but that part doesn’t matter. Anyway, we’ll stay with her, she’d love to have us—she’d just love it, we’re such great friends. We’ll stay with her until we get jobs, and then we’ll get our own apartment.”

Jessie had caught onto her excitement for a moment and then had slid back, with the misery returning to her eyes. She tried desperately to listen, to follow every word, and to go along with Joy in appreciation of this enchanting vista, but her mind kept turning back to the brooding theme of her own unhappy thoughts.

“Joy,” she asked now, suddenly, with a quiet and still-laced intensity, “do you think he had time to ask forgiveness?”

What on earth is she mumbling about? Joy thought. Christ, here I’ve been rattling on miles an hour and I thought she was listening. “Who had time to ask what?” she asked absently. “Baby, do you know where my lipstick is? I can’t find my purse.”

“It’s in your suitcase somewhere, I think,” Jessie said.

Let’s see, Joy was thinking. I’ll wear my nylons. I’ve only got one pair without runs, but this is important and if I’m careful they’ll be all right. I’ll have to have them on, it seems to me they always want to get your legs in the picture. I’ll wear that dress with the bows, it’s the only one that’s halfway decent. No. No, I can’t do that, damnit. It’s ruined, it’s all full of sand and it’s wrinkled. The last lousy, stinking thing I had that was fit to be found dead in, and now it’s ruined. That’s the one I had on when that stupid, ugly, mean-faced bastard pushed me. Well, he’s going to pay for that, all right. I’ll wear my white slippers with the French heels and the ankle straps; I think they’re clean. They’ll look nice in a picture, really smart.

Springing up, she ran over to the suitcase and began throwing dresses around again in a sort of despairing frenzy. “Jessie, Jessie, what can I put on? Help me, honey.”

Jessie followed her quietly. “Why not that white summer dress you had on this morning, Joy?”

“It’ll have to do, I guess.” She snatched it up frantically. Oh, why aren’t there any hangers around this awful dump? she thought. It’s all wrinkled. Well, it’s the only one. Hurriedly, she slipped into it, rummaged through the rat-nest confusion of the suitcase until she found her purse, and made up her face. Then there was another explosive upheaval among the powder-sifted brassieres, pants, dresses, handkerchiefs, and stockings while she matched the two remaining unsnagged nylons. She slowed down and put them on, very carefully, and slipped into the white shoes.

At last she was ready. She took one last look in the mirror and shook back her hair. Jessie followed her onto the porch, alternately caught up into the excitement of it and then slipping back into her own gray and lonely sadness.

Joy forgot to introduce the two strange men, and she stood quietly back out of the way. The man with the camera was fussing with its knobs and funny dials and taking light bulbs out of a leather bag. She wondered where he was going to plug them in, and thought with embarrassment of his finding out at the last minute that there wasn’t any electricity.

Maybe God would have forgiven him, Jessie thought, if he’d had time to ask. Maybe he did. Maybe the last thing he did on earth was to pray for forgiveness of his sins. It seemed so important, and she couldn’t understand why Joy didn’t wonder about it too. It must be more important than having your picture taken.

She wished she could ask Mitch about it. She had always consulted him about things like that, but now she couldn’t because she didn’t ever want to speak to him again. It was lonely, though, not having Mitch to ask about things.

Twenty-three

Mitch came up the trail past the barn walking fast in the rain, and went into the old smokehouse. He dried his hands on a shirt hanging on the wall and found the cigarette papers. I’ll roll two or three while I’m here, he thought, and put ‘em in a Prince Albert can with some dry matches. It’ll be easier that way than trying to toll ‘em in the rain.

Trying to force himself to be calm, he sat down on the box and set to work with tobacco and papers. His fingers were still too wet and the paper stuck to them and tore. Cursing, he got up and dried them again, and started over. Water ran out of his rain-soaked hair and spilled across the cigarette. He threw it away and tried again, holding it out and away from him. His fingers were shaking badly and he spilled more than half the tobacco, but he finally got one rolled and kept on until he had three more. Placing them in a can with some matches, he got up, ready to run back down the trail.

He ought to have more over him to keep off the rain than that old raincoat, he thought. Cotton sacks. I’ll take a couple of cotton sacks. I got to have something when— Sick revulsion ran through him and left him weak and shaking, and he put the picture out of his mind. Just to put over him to keep off the rain while he smokes a cigarette, he thought, and ran to the barn. Snatching up two long canvas sacks, he rolled them into a tight bundle. He was ready to go.

He came out the door and then stopped, thinking suddenly of Jessie. I got to talk to her, he thought. I can spare a minute, just one minute, if I can get her away from that yellow-headed slut long enough to get a word in. Wheeling, he ran through the rain toward the house. There was no one in the kitchen and he stopped and looked around, spilling water onto the floor from his saturated clothing. He seemed to be running forever through some horrible dream, trying to catch up with something ahead or eternally fleeing from some disaster behind. He stared at the empty kitchen, aware that it caused him no surprise at all. There was a feeling in him that if everyone in the house had suddenly evaporated like gasoline on a hot day or blown away like smoke there would no longer have been anything strange in it.

Then above the monotonous sound of the rain he could hear the radio in Cass’s room, the soft, insidious, forever-flowing river of its exhortation and admonition as unstoppable as time and unavoidable as death, but knew he could accept this as no evidence the house was still inhabited. It just goes on forever like that river down in the bottom, he thought, and it ain’t no wonder the old man can’t make up his mind which one of ‘em Sewell is drowned in. If you dropped it in a bucket of water it’d keep right on talking. He could see it now in his mind, lying unquenched, eternal, deathless, at the bottom of the bucket, the ceaseless outflowing of its word secretion unhalted and the words flowing up through the water in big bubbles like the balloon-encased conversations of comic strips.

There must be somebody here. Then there was a strange flash of light, or rather the reflection of a flash, sudden, sharp, incredibly fast, and gone. What the hell was that? he thought. Lightning? No. It was like lightning, but it wasn’t. Then he heard voices somewhere in front, and he went down the hall with his leathery feet rasping, shup, shup, shup, against the time-worn pine to emerge upon the porch like some drowned cadaver walking up out of the sea into the midst of a beach party.

It was Joy’s greatest hour. She lay reclined in the swing with her back against one arm and her long silken legs slightly raised and outstretched across it in the classic pose of all calendar art. The hemline of the short and frilly summer dress was carefully arranged across her knees while she awaited word from Lambeth as to whether he wanted more grief this time or more leg, and the reporter stood at the end of the swing taking notes on a small dime-store note pad.

“I won’t even have to wait for authorization, Mrs. Neely,” he was saying excitedly. “It’ll be all right, I know. A hundred dollars. I’ll write the story, under your name, of course. You just furnish the facts and I’ll write it down. It’ll be in the form of a first-person story of your life with Sewell Neely, how much you loved each other, your marriage, all the waiting here while you didn’t know he was trying to come back to you, the tragedy, and all that stuff. And under vour name, of course. By Joyce Neely, it’ll say.”

“A little more leg this lime,” Lambeth said. He was squatted down near the door with camera and flash holder.

Joy looked up and saw Mitch standing there in the door, smiled triumphantly at him. and hiked the hemline of her dress another three inches for his benefit rather than Lambeth’s.

“Hello, Mitch,” she said sweetly. “These gentlemen are from the paper. They’re going to give me and Jessie a lift, when they go back down lo Houston tomorrow night.”

Mitch took in all this grotesque Saturnalia of sickening cheapness in one terrible glance, seeing Jessie quietly watching from the edge of the porch near the step, and his mind swung back to the ballooning and discolored agony of Sewell’s dying down there in the rain. He had no way of knowing that at least part of the sexy and heartless bitchiness of it was an act put on instantly, at this very moment, for his benefit alone, and felt nothing but the black wind blowing inside him as he started toward her. He had taken one step when, unknowingly, the reporter probably saved her life.

Looking up and seeing Mitch, he started forward. “Hello,” he said eagerly. “I guess you’re the brother. Mitchell, isn’t it? Now, I wonder if we could get a statement from you? And a picture or two.”

Mitch hit him in the face and he fell over backward into the swing against Joy’s posed and silken legs while she screamed. A look of ineffable surprise and disbelief spread slowly over his face, and a trickle of blood ran down out of the corner of his mouth. Mitch whirled then on Lambeth, but the photographer had been through too many of these sudden melees to be caught napping and had swung aside, out of reach, with the camera protected against his stomach like the hidden football in a tricky backfield play.

“Stop it! Mitch, stop it!” Jessie cried out, and then he had her by the arm and was pulling her, protesting, after him down the hall.

“I want to talk to you,” he heard himself saying above the roaring in his ears. “You hear me? You hear me?” he seemed to be repeating over and over. How long have I been saying that? he thought. “You listen to me, Jessie! You ain’t going anywhere with that woman, tomorrow or no other day.”

They were in the kitchen and she was beating on his arm with an outraged fist. “Turn me loose, Mitch! You’re hurting my arm. And I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want anything to do with you. I’m going with Joy. You’re acting like a crazy man.”

He released her wrist and moved to take both of her arms in his hands to shake some sense into her, to tell her, to make her understand. Christ, I got to make her see, he thought in some far-off detached portion of his mind that was still calm in the midst of all this madness. I got to make her see. The cotton sacks dropped from under his left arm and unrolled across the floor just as Cass came running out of his room.

“Turn me loose, Mitch!” Jessie screamed.

He felt the hand then upon his own arm and turned to see Cass standing there, and he thought. Does he think he has to keep me from hurting Jessie? Would I hurt Jessie? Am I hurting her? But Cass was paying no attention to Jessie at all. From under the soggy and impossible hat he was looking in a sort of calm bewilderment at the long canvas sacks unrolled across the floor.

“What you doing with them cotton sacks, Mitch? You can’t pick cotton in the rain.”

Mitch stopped then, releasing Jessie, and stepped back to stand stock-still for a minute in the suddenly quiet room where there was no sound now but his own breathing and the drumming monotony of the rain. Oh, my God, he thought, the words going around and around in his mind like a drunken and insanely spinning carousel in a bad dream. You can’t pick cotton in the rain. You can’t pick cotton in the rain. You can’t . . . We got no cotton. It’s June and we haven’t got no cotton and we likely won’t ever have none when the river gets through with it and he just stands there and tells me we can’t pick it in the rain. I got to get out of here. I got to get back to Sewell. What am I standing here for? He had to run, to get out of the kitchen before it closed in on him and strangled him. Snatching up the sacks, he fled out the door and down the trail past the barn.

Cass stood looking after him for a moment until he had gone out of sight around the corner of the barn. Then he went over and sat down at the table. He oughtn’t to be doing that, he thought. “A boy twenty-some-odd years old and raising cotton all his life and with me telling him how to do it all these years ought to know better. You just can’t do it. It’s foolish. It rots it.”

“It rots what?” Jessie asked, staring at him.

He looked around, surprised. He had forgotten she was there, and hadn’t had any idea he was speaking aloud.

“Rots the cotton,” he said with waspish impatience. Even Jessie ought to know that. It was something anybody would know that had ever been anywhere near a cotton farm. “You pick it while it’s wet like that and it rots.”

Jessie continued to stare at him, feeling some of the horror that had taken hold of Mitch.

“He’s not picking cotton,” she cried out. “This is June and there isn’t any cotton.”

“Then what was he doing with cotton sacks?” he asked logically. “That’s what you do with cotton sacks. You put cotton in ‘em. You don’t do nothing else with ‘em. That’s all they’re for.”

But before she could think of any answer he suddenly remembered the terrible thing about Sewell, and the awful knowledge came home to him that nobody had ever told Mitch about it. All this launching around and everybody running around like chickens with their heads chopped off, taking pictures and shaking each other, and nobody had ever said a word about it to Mitch, he thought piteously. That’s the reason he’s going down there in the bottom just going to work like nothing had happened. He don’t even know about it. He don’t know Sewell is drowned in the river. I got to tell him.

He ran out the door, but Mitch was already out of sight. I’ll follow him down in the field, he thought, and tell him. But it seems to me like I was already down there once today. And wasn’t Mitch building a dam? But what would he want cotton sacks for, if he was building a dam?

Twenty-four

Mitch plunged down the trail and cut off to the right toward the old treetop. As he made the turn he swept the backed-up water below him with a quick and searching glance. There was no way of telling whether it was rising now or falling, but the water was still, with no current through it, which meant the levee was still holding. Far out through the trees and the dismal grief of the rain he could see the muddy sweep of the current along the main channel, swinging in the wide bend and pushing water out over the flat and then completing the swing to flow on south past and beyond the edge of the field. It’s holding, he thought. I wish I had a minute to go down there and look at it. I could tell whether it was going up or falling. But there ain’t time. I been gone too long now.

Sewell lay on his back in the same position, unmoving except for the shallow, rapid rise and fall of his breathing. His eyes were closed. When Mitch came up and squatted down to look in under the edge of the raincoat he opened them, but for an instant there was no recognition in them at all. They were sick, and dull with pain, and now he seemed to be trying to move the swollen arm. Mitch had no way of knowing that he was trying to get the gun out of his pocket, the instincts and reflexes of all those years of living with violence and by violence still afloat and surviving even as the body itself was drowning in its sea of pain. Then the eyes cleared a little and a faint touch of the old sardonic humor came back into them.

“Hello, kid,” he said weakly. “You look like a drowned rat. Where you been?”

“I got some cigarettes,” Mitch said. He unrolled the cotton sacks and carefully dried his brother’s face and left hand, not touching the right at all, then laid both sacks across the branches above them for additional shelter.

He squatted down again and reached up to dry his own hands against the underside of the sacks above them Then he shook a cigarette out of the can and placed it in his brother’s mouth, raked a match head with a thumbnail, and lit it.

“Ain’t you going to have one?” Sewell asked, inhaling, and then he moved his left hand up to take the cigarette between his fingers.

Mitch shook his head silently.

“You see any cops up there?” Sewell asked, his mind very clear now. He had no idea how long Mitch had been gone. He had been lying here for days, or maybe it was only minutes; time had no meaning any more, it was crazy and made no sense. It was like a strange and unpredictable river, lingering interminably in some dark and turgid pool where there was no light or movement or flow, and then plunging headlong into the millrace of some sunlit chasm where everything was clear and very sharply seen but going past at incredible speed. For long periods he wouldn’t even be here at all. He would be back in Dorothy’s apartment listening to the motorcycles in the early morning or fleeing endlessly along a darkened highway in the rain with a siren wailing behind him. Then he would come back out of it and Mitch would be here, or he would be gone. Mitch was hard to hold onto.

Mitch shook his head again. “There’s still one car up there. I didn’t see ‘em, though. They’re probably up the river.”

He said nothing about the men from the newspaper. The whole scene up there on the porch, the grotesque cheapness and cruelty of it, made him sick when he thought about it, and he pushed it out of his mind. All she was thinking about was getting her goddamned picture in the paper, he thought, and now she’s going to get a hundred dollars out of it on top of that for some lousy bunch of lies. It’s too bad there ain’t some way she could get the reward money, too, so she could make a good profit while she’s at it. I’m glad, though, that that dude with the notebook stepped up when he did, because I might have killed her if I’d got my hands on her and started. I lost my head, I reckon. The same way I did with Jessie. Or not the same way, either, but I lost my head. I just made things worse again. Every time I try to talk to Jessie I just ball it up worse. I don’t know why the hell I can’t talk to her calm and reasonable, instead of losing my head and starting to shake her or something. I reckon I get too scared thinking about it and then start to go wild. I got to stop that. If it ain’t too late. . . . Tomorrow night, she said. I got to talk to Jessie, but next time I’ll keep my head.

Water started to drip in on them again and he looked up. Them damn sacks are leaking, he thought. I got to straighten ‘em out. He backed out and straightened up, then whirled around in despair as he heard Cass’s voice crying his name.

“Mitch! Mitch, it’s Sewell,” the old man was shouting, turning off the trail and running toward him.

Oh, God, Mitch thought, there ain’t any way I can keep him away from here now. He’s seen me, and the sacks, and he’ll find Sewell, and his yowling and screaming’ll bring every damned cop in the county.

He turned and ran toward Cass, trying to head him off. “What you yelling about?” he demanded.

“It’s Sewell,” Cass said, still stumbling forward through the underbrush, and raising one arm to point outward toward the river. “It’s Sewell. Just come over the radio.”

Mitch stopped, recognizing the identical gesture and the repeated words, the whole thing like the second playing of a phonograph record or a motion-picture reel being rerun. We’re going to go through that whole thing again, he thought with horror. He’s forgot he told me once already and he’s going to do it all over, or else he’s heard it on the radio again on a different station and thinks Sewell drowns all over again every time they say it.

“Stop yelling!” he commanded harshly. I got to shut him up some way, he thought.

Cass came up to him but could not stop, and continued to pace up and down as he had before. If he takes off that silly hat and wrings it out, Mitch thought, I’ll go crazy and jump in the river. I can’t stand no more.

“It’s Sewell,” Cass said wildly. “He’s out there in the river.” And then, suddenly, he stopped, thinking, I done all this before and Mitch was building a dam, but this time he’s got cotton sacks hung up like a tent in that windfall. I done all of this before and Mitch knows about it but he’s so hardhearted he kept right on working on his dam even when he knew my boy was drowned in the river.

He had ceased his pacing and Mitch watched him stare at the cotton sacks and then turn to look at him with that same baffled wonder like an imbecile child lost and forlorn in the rain. “What you got under them sacks, Mitch? What you doing?” he started to say, and then the wildness came into his eyes and he whirled and ran toward the tree, crying out, “Sewell! Sewell!”

He was throwing the sacks back and kneeling blindly in his haste as Mitch leaped after him, very near the border line of panic and shouting now himself.

“Don’t touch him! Goddammit, don’t touch him! Don’t touch his arm. Leave him alone!”

He got his hands on the old man’s shaking body and held him just as Sewell opened his eyes again and looked up at them.

“What’s all this racket?” he asked angrily, not recognizing them at first. Then he saw the weeping Cass held back and restrained just beyond his legs. “What the hell’s he doing here? Is this a party?”

“What’s the matter with his arm, Mitch? What’s happened to his arm?” Cass was asking over and over.

“He’s been snake-bit,” Mitch said roughly. “A rattler bit him.”

“Have you called a doctor? We got to get the wagon and get him out of here. Go get the wagon. Oh, my poor boy!”

“For Christ’s sake, make him shut up,” Sewell said brutally. “He’s making more noise than an old woman. He’ll have the whole county down here.”

Mitch shook him, not wanting to do it, but knowing he had to get the noise stopped some way. “Shut up,” he said savagely. “Shut up! There’s men down here in the bottom looking for him.”

“But he’s been snake-bit,” Cass cried out, struggling. “We got to get him to a doctor.”

Ain’t there no way I can make him understand? Mitch thought with desperation. “We can’t take him to a doctor. It wouldn’t do no good nohow. Do you want Jessie to see him like that? Do you want to turn him over to the law? Ain’t you had enough of that damned circus?”

“Tell him to shut up and mind his own business,” Sewell said coldly.

“You want them money-hungry bastards getting hold of him?” Mitch asked roughly. “You want that woman to go on making a side show out of it, like her husband getting killed was just for her benefit so she could get her picture in the paper?”

“Snake-bit! I tell you he’s been snake-bit,” Cass was still saying wildly, not hearing one word he had said.

Sewell had grown deadly quiet. “What’s that, Mitch? Who did you say?” he asked softly.

“Joy,” Mitch said, his face dark. “I don’t care if she is your wife, she ain’t going to make no circus . . .” Then he stopped, realizing for the first time that Sewell probably didn’t even know she was here. “She’s been here about a month. She’s up there at the house now with them men from the paper, making a circus out of it.”

“We got to get the wagon, Mitch,” Cass cried out again. “Can’t you see—”

“Shut up,” Mitch commanded, feeling sick. It would have been all right, he thought, with just the two of us. We could have stood it. and there wouldn’t have been no fuss to get you started. It would have been all right if he hadn’t come along and started crying. “Shut up! We ain’t going to get no wagon.”

“Mitch, wait a minute,” Sewell said, speaking with great difficulty. “Maybe you better—”

“What?” Mitch asked, puzzled.

Sewell’s eyes were closed and he lay very still. “I’m getting awful sick,” he said faintly. “I’m afraid of it. I-I thought I could pull through, but I don’t know.”

Mitch stared at him. He must be out of his mind, he thought wildly. A doctor ain’t going to do him no good.

“You want me to get the wagon and take you up to the house?” he asked, leaning very close.

”Yes,” Sewell answered faintly. “It may be too late now. I’m afraid I’m going to die. Mitch, I—” He stopped, as if the effort were too great for him. Mitch waited, hardly breathing. “I—I don’t want to die down here in the rain.”

* * *

They were gone now. They had left hurriedly, running up the hill toward the house to harness the mules and bring the wagon down. Sewell lay very still for a minute, thinking. It’s in my right-hand coat pocket and I got to get it out of there some way and into the left one. I can’t use the right hand at all. I can’t even move it.

So she was up there all the time and I didn’t know it. Well, I ain’t got no time to think about that. I ain’t got much time left for anything. Get it out of the right-hand pocket and into the left one. And then maybe it won’t even shoot. It’s been in the water. But it’s different from a shotgun. Shotgun shells will get wet, but this is solid ammunition, in brass cases, and it might still be dry inside. There ain’t no way to tell till I get there. But I got to move the gun to where I can use it.

He raised his left arm and started swinging the hand across to fumble awkwardly with the coat pocket next to the swollen and immovable right arm, and then he was lying in the sand somewhere on a summer night with the surf running and Joy was just beyond him in the starlight, very lovely in her bathing suit. She turned her head to look at him, and disappeared, and a siren was wailing somewhere behind him while the windshield wipers were going swock-swock, swock-swock, with the wet pavement rushing and swooping endlessly back and past him through the dark-framed tunnel of light.

How long had they been gone? He had come back from somewhere far off and was lying there with his left arm across his chest. I got to hurry, he thought. I may have been out for half an hour. He twisted the hand into the pocket, bumping the right arm once and feeling a nauseating ocean of pain, and then he had hold of the gun and brought it out, I wonder if it’ll shoot, he thought. Well, there’s only one way to find out, and I will if I can hold on that long and don’t blank out.

Twenty-five

Mitch reached the barn first and was feverishly throwing harness on the mules when Cass came puffing up and went on by, bent forward and holding onto the hat as if running into a gale.

“I found Sewell! I found him, I found him! I found my boy!” Mitch could hear him shouting from the depths of his grief or madness as he ran across the yard. Then he-was gone inside the house.

There was instantaneous eruption. Mitch was whirling the team about before the wagon and thinking. What made him change his mind like that? What happened? Then Shaw and Lambeth came running around the side of the house followed closely by Jessie. There was no sign of Joy. Well, she wouldn’t get her hair wet, Mitch thought, in some detached portion of his mind.

“What happened?” Shaw asked with wild excitement, bareheaded and oblivious of the rain. “We can’t make any sense out of what he’s saying.”

I wouldn’t think so. Mitch thought, ducking in behind the mules to fasten the trace chains. He’s got it so mixed up in his own mind, the radio part of it and this part, that’s he’s probably gone in there now to listen to the radio to see if he can get straightened out himself.

He threw the lines into the wagon and turned to face them. “He’s down there in the bottom.” he said harshly. “I’m going after him in the wagon, but I got to have some help to get him in it. And one of you better go out on the highway and phone the damned sheriff’s office and tell ‘em to send an ambulance or a doctor. He’s been snake-bit.”

Jessie had run up now and she cried out in anguished accusation, “He said you had Sewell down there and wouldn’t bring him to the doctor. He said you wouldn’t bring him to the house.”

”You get in out of the rain,” Mitch said curtly.

She gave him a look of horror and turned, running back toward the kitchen. He looked after her once, then ran over to the old smokehouse and came out carrying his cot. He went to the woodpile with it, and with a few savage swings of the ax he chopped the legs off to make a stretcher of it.

Throwing it into the wagon, he nodded to Lambeth and leaped up into it himself, while Shaw ran for the car to get to a telephone. As Mitch swung the team around and they started down the hill, Cass emerged from the kitchen and came after them, shouting frantically.

“Wait!” he called. “Wait for me!”

Mitch stopped the mules and held them, feeling a harsh and grating impatience as the old man climbed aboard. Cass sat down on the rough plank across the wagon bed and faced forward into the rain, staring straight ahead.

“Let’s go,” he said in the dead and bankrupt calm that is beyond frenzy. “I got to bring my boy in.”

The wagon swung downward through the darkening timber. It’s getting late, Mitch thought, aware of a faint surprise that this day might end, might have twilight and then cease to be, like other days. It had run on through the span of a lifetime and he had come to accept it as something eternal that would go on and on as long as he could keep running forward without progress across the endless revolving belt of its hours. It’s getting late and he may be dead when we get there. He’s had that poison in him all day.

What made him get scared all of a sudden like that? Being tough is Sewell’s religion, if he has one, and he’s known all day he’s going to die. It was right after I said she was up here; was that just his way of saying he wanted to see her, to be with her when he died? Or can being tough just quit on you like that when you need it worst?

The water was still backed up, unmoving, below the foot of the hill. He glanced at it once, briefly, read it with only half his mind, and forgot it. The fight to save their crop was a thing long past, almost forgotten, and unimportant now.

He leaped down from the wagon bed and wondered if he were really hanging in the air, unable even to fall toward the ground. Sewell lay as he had, with his eyes closed. He knelt beside the still and white-faced figure, feeling for the pulse. It was still there, rapid, faint, and fluttery, like the heartbeat of a captured bird.

Cass was wailing again, beside him. “I got to take my boy in. I lound him. and I got to take him in!”

“Shut Up,” Mitch said, without anger, without even hope that the noise would cease.

He and Lambeth worked Sewell onto the legless, stretched canvas of the cot, and lifted him into the wagon, being as gentle and careful as they could with the poisoned arm. He grabbed up the sacks and the raincoat and threw them across the box of the wagon to keep off the rain. Then they were going up the hill.

Sewell felt the wagon begin to move, and thought. It ain’t much longer now. The trail goes left, then right on a switchback turn, and there’s an oak the lightning struck, and it runs past the end of the hillside field, going up. I saw a fox there, with a chicken in its mouth, one morning going after the cows. There’s a plum thicket beyond the end of the rows and a long time later, after the fox, the fat girl from somewhere, picking cotton, said, “You know there ain’t no plums in October, you dog,” and laughed, and from there you can see the barn, in winter when the leaves are gone. It’s funny how clear you can remember all of that. I hardly even thought of it for seven years. It ain’t much farther, we already made the second turn, and all I got to do is hold on a little longer. Then he was whirling through darkness and the siren was closer now.

Joy and Jessie were watching from the kitchen door as they made the turn around the barn and came across the yard. I didn’t want her to see it, Mitch thought. It ain’t a pretty sight.

Shaw was back. He came leaping off the front porch as Mitch stopped the team in the front yard and jumped down from the wheel. “I found the phone,” he said. “Ambulance should be here in a few minutes with the sheriff’s men.”

”Don’t touch him,” Mitch said bleakly. “Don’t try to move him. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He jumped up on the porch as Jessie came through the door. “You stay inside till I tell you,” he commanded. She stopped, and he turned away from her and went into Cass’s room through the window. Cass had forgotten to turn off the radio, and soft music issued from its loudspeaker. He stared at it silently, for some reason wanting to pick up a chair and smash it, but went on past and began to tear at the bed.

He rolled up the mattress and a quilt and threw them through the window onto the porch in front of the swing. Going back out into the yard, he motioned to Lambeth and Shaw, and the three of them slid the stretcher out of the wagon and carried it to the porch. They slid Sewell carefully off it onto the mattress and pulled the quilt up to his chin. He had not moved or opened his eyes.

I know exactly where I’m lying, Sewell thought, listening for the sound of her voice.

Mitch wanted to quit now, and he had to sit down. Me went back to the end of the porch near the door and squatted down, staring silently at the others. Everything was gone out of him. I’m empty, he thought. I’m just hollow, like a log. There ain’t anything I can do for him now. I can’t even talk to him in front of all these people. Jessie came out of the doorway and went up to Sewell. She knelt beside him for an instant and then got up, going past him quickly and through the door with her face screwed up tight but not crying. She went into the bedroom and he wanted to follow her. I’ll talk to her in a minute, he thought. In a minute, as soon as I can think.

Cass went past crying, “I found him! I found my boy!” and bent forward at right angles like a jackknife to step through the window into his room. Mitch heard the corrugated washboard of sound from the radio as the dial spun and thought. He wants to find out if he really did find Sewell. He won’t believe it till he hears it.

Shaw was talking eagerly to Lambeth, who was drying his hands on a towel and unpacking the camera again. “I phoned it in, when I was out on the highway to call for the ambulance. So here’s what we do now. We want a few more pics, maybe three or four more. One or two of Neely, and then one when the ambulance gets here. And one of Mrs. Neely kneeling down beside her husband. Then we’re going to scram. She’s going with us. I can get the rest of her story while you drive, and we’ll be in town in time for me to write the story and beat the deadline with about thirty seconds to spare. You all set?”

Lambeth nodded. “Where’s Narcissus?”

“She’s packing.”

It broke across Mitch’s numb tiredness like a sea of ice water. He sprang to his feet and started down the hall. They weren’t going tomorrow. They were going today, now, in a few minutes. He met Joy in the hall and she gave him a glance of pure malice as she went by. Going to have her picture took, he thought with contempt, lunging at the door of the bedroom.

Jessie was folding her few dresses and an old sweater and putting them into a cardboard box. She looked up as he came in and the glance swept on past him, unseeing.

He stopped. “Jessie,” he said. His voice sounded very far away.

She gave no sign she had heard him.

“Jessie,” he said again, coming into the room. “Jessie! Listen to me. You ain’t going with that—” He put a hand on her arm and she pulled away with that stony-faced yet almost imperceptible withdrawal that can be one of the most devastating things on earth and compared to which all male violence of blow and insult is utterly harmless.

I won’t lose my head this time, he thought, beginning even then to lose it. The wild anger and the fright were coming up in him and he started to shake her arm. She offered no resistance whatever, merely standing there and looking at him without seeing him, and when he got hold of himself and stopped she picked up the box and went past him out of the room.

He went out onto the porch and Jessie was holding the box and watching still-faced while Lambeth adjusted the camera. I can hold her when they leave, he thought in the blackness of despair, but she’ll just run away later on.

”Now, Mrs. Neely,” Shaw was saying.

“All right,” Joy said. She started toward the mattress where Sewell lay, next to the swing.

Sewell looked so white lying there like that and she was almost afraid. Her grief was not entirely simulated. She was really sorry for him now, and it was so sad to think of how he had been trying so hard to get back to her when she didn’t know it, and to have him get bitten by that awful snake when he was almost here—it was so terrible. She felt a genuine sorrow as she walked toward him; it was just that she was still practical enough to remember camera angles and the way she would look best in the picture at the same time she was so lull of her grief.

It would be best, since Lambeth was on her left, to have most of her hair swing down on the right side of her face as she bent down, with just enough on the left to frame it. And they wouldn’t want any legs in this pose of a wife grieving for her husband; she must be very demure about the legs, with just enough showing so it would be possible to see that they were nice. She halted, and started to kneel beside his shoulders.

I can hear her, Sewell thought. His mind had been going away from him on those long, dark journeys and then swinging back like a pendulum, but it was very clear now with only the pain to bother him and he knew it would all be quite sharp and clean when he opened his eyes. He had his hand on the gun under the quilt and lay quietly listening to her footsteps as she came toward him. I won’t have to open my eyes to know when she’s bending down, he thought. I’ll smell her; you can always smell her when she’s close.

The others had fallen silent, watching the tableau. Jessie looked on with a lump in her throat, thinking how sad it was and how sweet Joy looked in her grief. Mitch watched with contempt and a cold, hard anger, sickened as he had been before by the-cheap, self-seeking heartlessness of it. But still, he thought, why did Sewell change like that when he found out she was up here? If that was what Sewell wanted . . .

Joy bent down. She felt she was going to cry, but remembered to turn her head just a little more to the left. Tendrils of golden blonde hair brushed Sewell’s cheek, and he started to open his eyes and bring the hand with the gun out from under the quilt.

Then it started to go. He fought it but could not hold it off as the blackness came for him again. The sound of the rain on the sheet-metal roof was the running of surf and Joy was leaning over him with her hair a gleaming cascade of loveliness in the starlight.

Just as they heard the sound of the ambulance coming down the sandy ruts of the hill, he brought the hand out from under the quilt, empty, and put it up to touch her.

“Joy,” he said.

She bent down and kissed him and the flash bulb went off. The picture was taken, and she turned her head and smiled at all of them through her tears.

Twenty-six

It made her feel so wonderful and at the same time so sort of sad. It was tragic about Sewell because she knew he was dying, but everybody had seen it and the touching gesture of his love for her was even snapped into the picture now where she would always have it.

It gave back to her the feeling of being wanted and admired and would drive away for years that terror of her nights, the agonizing hell of doubt and the fear of glowing old and ugly that came to taunt her in the darkness. There was a great uplifting of her spirit, and she didn’t even hate Mitch any more. Yes, I do, she thought, looking at him; nothing could rub that out, but it just doesn’t matter so much now.

She looked at Jessie standing by the door with the box under her arm. I don’t want to take her with me, she thought. What business have I got with a kid like that? I don’t want to be bothered with her; she’d just be in my way. And I couldn’t just go off and leave her somewhere—I guess I’m not bitch enough for that, am I? I’ll tell her. I’ll tell her she can’t go.

Nobody had said anything for a minute. They could hear the car coming quite plainly now, running down the sandy road through the pines just above the yard. It sounded as if there were two cars, and they knew one of them would be the ambulance.

Mitch sat on his heels staring bleakly out at the rain. There ain’t nothing I can do now, he thought. They’ll be gone in a few minutes. I tried, but it was too much for me. I can’t stop it now.

Joy started to get up, but Lambeth motioned to her. “Just one more,” he said. “That’s probably the ambulance now, and we’ve just time tor one more before they get here.”

“All right.” Joy assented graciously.

She had been looking at the four people on the other end of the porch, and now she started to turn her face back and downward toward Sewell. There was a slight movement of the edge of the quilt. Mitch saw it, and Shaw, and even Jessie, before she did, but there was nothing they could do. It was too late.

She bent down and turned her head, and then she was looking into the cold eyes and the round, black, awful end of the gun. Time stopped and all sound ceased, and there was nothing anywhere except Sewell slowly raising himself up on the mattress with his back against the upright post at the edge of the porch, his face sweating with agony but as pitiless as death itself.

“Reach your hand in my coat pocket, baby,” he said softly. “Harve sent you a present.”

She opened her mouth, but no sound came out of it. Mitch and Shaw started to get up to leap toward them, but the gun swung and the cold eyes stopped them where they were. They hung, half crouched and hardly daring to breathe. Jessie’s face was still with horror as she stood there by the door. All of them except Joy could hear the cars coming, very near now and about to turn into the yard.

“Go on,” he said again. “In my pocket. Harve didn’t need it no more, so I brought it back to you.”

No. Joy could feel her mouth forming the word, but there was no word. No! No! No! was a pressure growing greater and more terrible inside her and straining outward toward the vacuum of silence waiting to receive it, trying to escape through that invisible barrier in her throat beyond which nothing would pass.

“Go on, baby. See what your boy friend sent you. Harve, the one-handed joker.”

It was a nightmare across which she moved without volition. Her hand was going into the coat pocket. There was nothing she could do to stop it. It came out holding the photograph and the four people beyond her saw it as they waited, frozen and utterly without motion, while the ambulance and the sheriff’s car turned into the yard.

Sewell could feel the blackness coming for him again, and fought it back. All of them were beginning to swim before his eyes like water going around and around in a great dark eddy on the surface of a river as he tried to steady the gun. Mitch turned his head silently, staring. Men were getting out of the sheriff’s car, men with guns under their coats. They don’t know, he thought. They don’t know. They’ll never get here in time to stop him He came to his feet, springing up and forward.

She was looking down at the picture in her hand with that awful feeling of her mouth going wider and wider without sound. Her eyes shifted and the muzzle of the gun was a black tunnel toward which she was walking in the nightmare, a tunnel that grew larger and then, as she ran into it, suddenly filled with light—a huge, bursting circle of light without end.

Mitch reached her as she wilted and fell forward across Sewell like a gold-petaled flower cut down by the scythe. Sewell was swinging outward into darkness again toward that dark beach and that brief period of time in which he had been happy with this girl now lying dead across his chest in a terrible and irrevocable wedding of the only two things he had ever loved: this same beautiful, lost, unhappy girl, and violence.

Jessie had screamed and then turned to run back down the hall toward the bedroom. Mitch stood on the edge of the porch, an island of immobility, helpless, numb, and lost, in the swirling river of motion going across the porch and into the yard.

The sheriff was cursing, monotonously and with a kind of helpless bitterness. “Not a goddamned one of the whole dumbheaded bunch of idiots with brains enough to look to see if he had a gun. You must have thought he was some Sunday-school kid playing hookey from school. This girl’d have been alive now if any one of you’d had sense enough to come in out of the rain.”

They were putting Joy’s body into the ambulance and then coming back for Sewell. The young doctor squatted beside the mattress, and when he looked up and saw Mitch’s eyes on him he gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head and looked away.

”You got all the pics you need?” Shaw was asking Lambeth. “Let’s roll. My God! Did you ever see anything like it?”

“Shut up,” Lambeth said tonelessly, stowing the camera in its case. Did I kill her? he thought. Was it Harve? Did Neely do it, or was he just the weapon, the instrument, the actual hand on the gun? Was it all of us. each in his way, or if you went back far enough could you say she did it herself? When we get started, I’ll finish that bottle. This is one time I need it.

And then, suddenly, they were all gone. The yard was empty except for the team, standing dejectedly in the diminishing drizzle of the rain. Cass had gone running across the yard and pushed his way into the front seat of the departing ambulance, oblivious of restraint and crying out his unvarying and frenzied lamentation, “I’m his daddy. I found my boy, and I got to take him in.” When the ambulance shot out of the yard he was seated beside the driver, staring straight ahead through the windshield and holding onto the dripping and grotesque hat. The other car, with the sheriff and his two deputies, was right behind it, and in a moment Shaw and Lambeth got into (heir car and left.

Mitch squatted on his heels, staring out into the yard. He’ll be dead before they get to town with him, he thought. I saw that doctor shake his head, and he knew that I knew it. He killed her, and that was all he was holding on for, I reckon, ever since he found out she was up here. All the good the old man did with his crying and taking on was to get that girl killed. God knows, I never had much use for her, but it was an awful thing to happen.

The picture had been forgotten in all the excitement, and now he saw it lying upside down on the edge of the quilt, Reaching out a hand, he turned it over, looked at it a minute, then turned it back. This is what killed her, he thought. It ain’t nothing but just a picture of her without no clothes on, like them artists’ models, but it killed her. I reckon that deputy had it on him and Sewell found it. And now I got to tell Jessie. I’d rather die right here on the porch, I reckon, than do it. First she lost Sewell, and then Mexico, and now she figures I ain’t no good, so Joy was about all the people she had left. She thought Joy was the only thing there was. It don’t make so much difference, now that Joy’s dead and she can’t go away with her, but still I got to tell her.

I’ve always taken care of her ever since I can remember, and I got to go on doing it until she’s old enough to get married. And I can’t do it if she’s going to go on hating me for whatever she thinks I did to Joy. She’d run away. I just got to do it.

He picked up the picture and put it in his pocket, then got up and went slowly down the hall. It was growing darker inside the house now, and he realized it was almost twilight and he hadn’t been back to the bottom to see if the levee still held. After a while, he thought. Maybe that’s gone too.

He went reluctantly into the bedroom and stood looking down at her. She was lying on the bed with her face to the wall, making no sound of any kind. He knew she was not crying.

“Jessie,” he said quietly, standing still beside the bed and dripping water out of his clothing onto the floor.

She said nothing, and gave no indication she had heard him.

“It ain’t no use to feel so bad about it, Jessie,” he said. “It couldn’t be helped.”

She still made no answer, lying there with her face to the wall as if he were not even in the room. He stood looking at her helplessly, full of pity for her and not knowing what to do. He pulled the picture out of his pocket and looked at it, wanting to cry out, “Look, Jessie, she wasn’t worth anything. She wasn’t worth feeling bad about,” but he could not, and in a minute he went out of the room. I can’t do it, he thought. No matter what she thinks, I can’t do it. He tore the picture up and threw it into the firebox of the stove, then went down the trail toward the bottom.

The river was falling now. It had gone down nearly six inches, and the levee had held. Well, I saved that, anyway. he thought. But I reckon it don’t make much difference now. He stood there for a minute, looking out over the muddy field. Yes, it does too. It always does. You can’t just give up.

It was growing dark as he went back up the hill, and the rain had stopped. As he passed the barn he heard someone moving around inside and talking to the mules, and suddenly he remembered the team forgotten in the front yard.

“Who’s that?” he called out.

“It’s just me.” Prentiss Jimerson came out, looking at him a little uneasily. “I reckon you ain’t still sore at me, are you, Mitch?”

He stopped. “Sore at you? What for?” It must have been years since he had even seen Prentiss.

“You know—about Sewell, on the radio. You got mad at me.”

“Oh,” he said, suddenly remembering. “No. Of course not. It don’t matter now.”

“I saw the team out there, and thought maybe I’d unhitch and feed the stock for you. What with the trouble and all . . .”

Mitch stood still for a moment in the gathering darkness. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks, Prentiss. You had any supper yet?”

“Well, no. I was just on my way home.”

“We’ll see if we can fix something. Did you see Jessie?”

“Just for a minute.” Prentiss stopped, and then went on with an awkward and embarrassed tenderness in his voice, “She’s all tore up about it, Mitch.”

“Yes,” Mitch said. “I know.” They went into the kitchen. Jessie had the lamps lighted and was starting to build a fire in the cookstove. She was putting paper into the firebox and stopped suddenly, reaching into it for the scraps of the picture. Mitch watched her holding them in her hand, and when she looked up and met his gaze he shook his head.

“It ain’t nothing, Jessie,” he said. “Burn it.”

She shook her head slowly and went on fitting the four pieces loosely together in the palm of her left hand. Then, abruptly, she changed her mind and dropped them back into the firebox with an infinite and defeated weariness and put a match to the paper.

Mitch looked at her, so small and beaten there in the lamplight, and felt the twisting of pity inside him. “Don’t take it so hard, Jessie,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”

Then, for the first time, she spoke. “She never had a chance! Nobody ever gave her a chance!” she cried out brokenly. “Sewell didn’t. And you— I hope you feel the way you ought to, after the things you did to her!”

“I didn’t, Jessie! I tell you, I didn’t do anything to her. Maybe she said I did, but you never did ask me!”

“Oh, stop it! When she’s dead now and can’t say anything—”

Mitch stopped, realizing the futility of it. Even if Jessie would believe him, it wasn’t a thing he would want to do.

They ate supper in silence, both the men watching Jessie anxiously but leaving her alone. Cass had not returned.

When Prentiss got up to leave, Mitch asked, “Where’s Cal?”

Prentiss looked embarrassed. “Why, at home, I reckon.”

“You tell him I want to see him.”

“All right,” Prentiss said hesitantly. “I’ll tell him.”

Mitch saw the doubt in his face. “I ain’t going to do anything. I just want to tell him something.”

“All right.”

After Jessie had gone to bed he walked the twelve miles to town in the dark. Sewell had died on the way to town, they said at the hospital, but they let him go in for a minute. Sewell’s face was very white except for the large brown freckles, and it looked peaceful and still now with all the violence gone. After a while he went back out and sat on the courthouse steps all night smoking cigarettes and waiting for morning to find out about claiming the body for burial.

Nobody seemed to know what had become of Cass.

Twenty-seven

On the clay hillside, drying now and baking in the sun, they lowered the crude box into the ground. Jessie turned away as the first clods fell with their hollow sound, and walked silently through the small scattering of neighbors and the idly curious who had gathered for the funeral.

Mitch swung around and followed her, still-backed and austere in his clean, faded overalls, and helped her climb into the wagon. She said nothing, nor did he as lie climbed up and took the lines. If she’d just cry, he thought. If she’d only cry, it would help her.

Joy’s family had come from Louisiana to claim her body. Sewell’s funeral was done now, and Cass had not come. Maybe he didn’t know, Mitch thought. Wherever he is, maybe he didn’t hear about it.

He gathered up the lines and prepared to shake the sad-eared and drowsing mules awake when Cal Jimerson walked over from the gathering.

“Maybe Jessie’d like to ride back with us in the car, Mitch,” he said. “It’s a long ride in the wagon.”

Mitch turned to her. “You want to, Jessie?”

She shook her head. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “But thanks, Cal. It was nice of you.”

“Thanks for offering,” Mitch said. He continued to look down at Cal with his eyes stern, but said nothing.

The other’s face began to redden under the scrutiny, “I hear you wanted to see me about something,” he said lamely, with a touch of defiance in his voice.

“That’s right,” Mitch said. “This ain’t the place for it, but I’ll tell you anyway.”

“All right,” Cal said uncomfortably. “Let’s have it.”

“Don’t you ever come on my place again when you’re drunk. You boys are always welcome, but I ain’t going to have any prowling around when you’re tanked up coming home from a dance. The next time you pull somebody out of a window it might be me.”

Cal shifted his feet with embarrassment and his face grew darker. “I reckon I just had a little too much. It happens to people.”

“Well, it’s past and done. I ain’t going to write no book about it. I just wanted it understood, then we’ll drop it.”

Cal looked up. “O.K., Mitch,” he said. “It was too bad about Sewell.”

“Yes,” Mitch said. “But that’s past and done too.”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll see you.” Mitch gathered up the lines.

The mules leaned forward and the wheels turned, cutting the drying clay. Jessie sat very quietly beside him as they swung past the little church and started out toward the road.

“Mitch.”

He turned. “What is it, Jessie?” She’s growing up fast, he thought. She looks like a woman now, with her hair combed like that and wearing her Sunday dress.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. And then the dam broke and all of it let go in her at once. He put the lines down in the wagon bed under his foot and held her while she cried. The mules swung out on the road and started toward home without guidance, forgotten while he supported the small, shaking body with his arm until all the storm had passed.

She straightened up after a while and he held out the clean bandanna. “Here, Jessie,” he said gruffly, feeling the constriction in his throat and all the old inarticulate and thorn-protected love for her he would never be able to express in words. I reckon she knows, though, he thought.

“I—I guess I believed it, Mitch,” she said hesitantly, “I don’t know why.”

“It’s all right, Jessie. It don’t make no difference now.”

She was silent for a moment. “Why do you suppose she did it? Why, Mitch?”

“I don’t know. But she’s dead now. Let’s don’t talk about it.”

Her shoulders shook just once more, while she twisted the handkerchief helplessly in her hands and cried out the ending of the whole chapter of Joy, “But she was nice, Mitch! I know better than you do. She tried awful hard. But she never did have a chance!”

Mitch said nothing. Maybe she’s right, he thought. I guess I don’t know nothing about ‘em. I was worried about Jessie going off with her, but I reckon actually it wouldn’t have made no difference. Jessie was more growed up when she was twelve, I reckon, than Joy was when she died.

The Jimersons went past, waving, and then the car stopped up ahead. Prentiss got out and they went on. When the wagon came up to where he was waiting beside the road, Mitch stopped the team and looked down at him. The youth was wearing his Sunday suit for the funeral, and now he looked up with the brown eyes slightly abashed as usual.

“You mind if I ride back with you, Mitch? I’d kind of like to ride in the wagon.”

Mitch looked at him gravely. I reckon she is growing up, he thought.

“Sure,” he said. “Go on around and climb in. I reckon we can make room, can’t we, Jessie?”

* * *

Cass had not come home. He had run across the yard that tragic afternoon and pushed his way into the departing ambulance and then had disappeared. The funeral had come and gone without the man who had cried out so, piteously in his grief, and now, two days after the funeral, he still had not returned. When Mitch had gone to claim Sewell’s body for burial, he had asked, but no one seemed to know anything about him. Yes, they said, he had come in to town in the ambulance, but as to where he was now, they couldn’t say. Each time, the question had met with a puzzled glance and a quick changing of the subject, as if the person asked had not understood or did not want to say.

Mitch and Jessie sat on the front porch in the early evening resting after supper and watching the shadows thicken into dusk among the pines. Mitch had been cutting wood all day, waiting for the fields to dry out enough for plowing. The river was back to normal now, but it would be several days before he could do any work in the bottom.

“Where do you suppose he is, Mitch?” Jessie asked.

Mitch threw the cigarette into the yard. “I don’t know, Jessie,” he began, then stopped, listening. There was an automobile coming down off the hill, and the sound of it was different from that of the Jimerson car.

Without a word between them, they both began to know then. They watched with growing horror as it came into the yard and stopped and Cass got out, grinning at them with a sort of lost and foolish happiness. It was an old Buick, a four-door sedan with one crumpled and ironed-out fender, but polished all over until it gleamed and by far the largest and most impressive of all the secondhand cars he had ever brought home.

“Ain’t she a beauty, Mitch?” he asked with childlike pride. “Got good rubber, too, the man said. Right new tires all around.” He kicked one of them and looked at Mitch and Jessie happily.

Jessie was staring at him as if she were going to be ill. Mitch touched her arm. “Wait,” he said. “Don’t say nothing.”

It ain’t that simple this time, he thought. It ain’t like all the land he sold to buy them other seven cars, or when he sold Mexico to buy the radio. It looks almost the same, them five days it would take him to get it squared around in his mind till it would be all right and the only thing to do, but it probably wasn’t that. It probably took him the five days to collect the money. God knows where he had to go to get it.

Cass went back around to the driver’s side and blew the horn. “Listen to that, Mitch. Got a nice sound, ain’t it? And you ought to hear her growl when she gets in the sand. Got more power’n a truck.”

We could leave, Mitch thought. I could take Jessie and we could go somewhere else, and I reckon we could get along, but what would become of him? No, we couldn’t ever leave him; he’s living in another world, but he’s got to get his meals in this one. I guess we wouldn’t want to, anyhow. This is home, what there’s left of it, and all you can do is hang tight and keep on trying.

Cass took a last loving look at the car and came up on the porch with his vacant and happy grin. Jessie drew aside as he passed.

“Why don’t you take a ride in her, Mitch? You and Jessie. Take a little spin up the road and try her out.”

He stopped then, the childish pride of possession slowly fading from his face as he gazed at the window of his room. Somewhere he had lost the monstrous and insane hat, and he looked like a forlorn and blankly staring doll in the gathering dusk.

“I got to listen to the news,” he said. “Ain’t heard nothing in some time.” He walked to the window, bent over like a folding rule, and stepped through it into his room.

“Mitch, how could he?” Jessie asked in whispered anguish. “How could he?”

Mitch was silent for a minute. “I don’t think he really did, Jessie,” he said. “I think he won it on the radio.”

It was just a prize they gave away in that game he was listening to, he thought. At least, that’s as near as I can figure it. God knows, it might have been better the other way, if he had deliberately sold Sewell for the reward the way he sold all the land and Mexico. I don’t think, the way it is, he even knows that Sewell’s dead. Not all the time, anyway.

He looked across the yard, seeing all the times in years ahead when he would hear the shout, and turn, waiting patiently in the endless furrow through cotton yet unborn while the same lost figure stumbled down the hill through the ever deepening and unvarying furrow of its own with the frozen arm outstretched and pointing toward the river. “It’s Sewell! It’s Sewell, Mitch! Just come over the radio!”

Well, he thought, it ain’t no use to run. If running did you any good, he wouldn’t be there himself.