Collected Stories

I

I WALKED right through the anteroom without stopping.

Miss West says, “He’s in conference now,” but I didn’t stop.

I didn’t knock, either. They were talking and he quit and looked up across the desk at me.

“How much notice do you want to write me off?” I said.

“Write you off?” he said.

“I’m quitting,” I said. “Will one day be notice enough?”

He looked at me, frog-eyed. “Isn’t our car good enough for you to demonstrate?” he said. His hand lay on the desk, holding the cigar. He’s got a ruby ring the size of a tail-light.

“You’ve been with us three weeks,” he says. “Not long enough to learn what that word on the door means.”

He don’t know it, but three weeks is pretty good; it’s within two days of the record. And if three weeks is a record with him, he could have shaken hands with the new champion without moving.

The trouble is, I had never learned to do anything. You know how it was in those days, with even the college campuses full of British and French uniforms, and us all scared to death it would be over before we could get in and swank a pair of pilot’s wings ourselves. And then to get in and find something that suited you right down to the ground, you see.

So after the Armistice I stayed in for a couple of years as a test pilot. That was when I took up wing-walking, to relieve the monotony. A fellow named Waldrip and I used to hide out at about three thousand on a Nine while I muscled around on top of it. Because Army life is pretty dull in peacetime: nothing to do but lay around and lie your head off all day and play poker all night. And isolation is bad for poker.

You lose on tick, and on tick you always plunge.

There was a fellow named White lost a thousand one night. He kept on losing and I wanted to quit but I was winner and he wanted to play on, plunging and losing every pot. He gave me a check and I told him it wasn’t any rush, to forget it, because he had a wife out in California. Then the next night he wanted to play again. I tried to talk him out of it, but he got mad. Called me yellow. So he lost fifteen hundred more that night.

Then I said I’d cut him, double or quit, one time. He cut a queen. So I said, “Well, that beats me. I won’t even cut.”

And I flipped his cut over and riffled them and we saw a gob of face cards and three of the aces. But he insisted, and I said, “What’s the use? The percentage would be against me, even with a full deck.” But he insisted. I cut the case ace. I would have paid to lose. I offered again to tear up the checks, but he sat there and cursed me. I left him sitting at the table, in his shirt sleeves and his collar open, looking at the ace.

The next day we had the job, the speed ship. I had done everything I could. I couldn’t offer him the checks again. I will let a man who is worked up curse me once. But I won’t let him twice. So we had the job, the speed ship. I wouldn’t touch it. He took it up five thousand feet and dived the wings off at two thousand with a full gun.

So I was out again after four years, a civ again. And while I was still drifting around, that was when I first tried selling automobiles. I met Jack, and he told me about a bird that wanted a wingwalker for his barn-storming circus. And that was how I met her.

II

JACK he gave me a note to Rogers told me about what a good pilot Rogers was, and about her, how they said she was unhappy with him.

“So is your old man,” I said.

“That’s what they say,” Jack said. So when I saw Rogers and handed him the note, he was one of these lean, quiet-looking birds. I said to myself he was just the kind that would marry one of these flighty, passionate, good-looking women they used to catch during the war with a set of wings, and have her run out on him the first chance. So I felt safe. I knew she’d not have had to wait any three years for one like me.

So I expected to find one of these long, dark, snake-like women surrounded by ostrich plumes and Woolworth incense, smoking cigarettes on the divan while Rogers ran out to the corner delicatessen for sliced ham and potato salad on paper plates. But I was wrong. She came in with an apron on over one of these little pale squashy dresses, with flour or something on her arms, without apologizing or flurrying around or anything. She said Howard, that was Rogers, had told her about me and I said, “What did he tell you?”

But she just said: “I expect you’ll find this pretty dull for spending the evening, having to help cook your own dinner. I imagine you’d rather go out to dance with a couple of bottles of gin.”

“Why do you think that?” I said. “Don’t I look like I could do anything else?”

“Oh, don’t you?” she said.

We had washed the dishes then and we were sitting in the firelight, with the lights off, with her on a cushion on the floor, her back against Rogers’ knees, smoking and talking, and she said, “I know you had a dull time. Howard suggested that we go out for dinner and to dance somewhere. But I told him you’d just have to take us as we are, first as well as later. Are you sorry?”

She could look about sixteen, especially in the apron. By that time she had bought one for me to wear, and the three of us would all go back to the kitchen and cook dinner. “We don’t expect you to enjoy doing this any more than we do,” she said. “It’s because we are so poor. We’re just an aviator.”

“Well, Howard can fly well enough for two people,” I said. “So that’s all right, too.”

“When he told me you were just a flyer too, I said, ‘My Lord, a wing-walker? When you were choosing a family friend,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you choose a man we could invite to dinner a week ahead and not only count on his being there, but on his taking us out and spending his money on us?’ But he had to choose one that is as poor as we are.” And once she said to Rogers: “We’ll have to find Buck a girl, too. He’s going to get tired of just us some day.” You know how they say things like that: things that sound like they meant something until you look at them and find their eyes perfectly blank, until you wonder if they were even thinking about you, let alone talking about you.

Or maybe I’d have them out to dinner and a show. “Only I didn’t mean that like it sounded,” she said. “That wasn’t a hint to take us out.”

“Did you mean that about getting me a girl too?” I said.

Then she looked at me with that wide, blank, innocent look. That was when I would take them by my place for a cocktail. Rogers didn’t drink, himself, and when I would come in that night I’d find traces of powder on my dresser or maybe her handkerchief or something, and I’d go to bed with the room smelling like she was still there. She said: “Do you want us to find you one?” But nothing more was ever said about it, and after a while, when there was a high step or any of those little things which men do for women that means touching them, she’d turn to me like it was me was her husband and not him; and one night a storm caught us downtown and we went to my place and she and Rogers slept in my bed and I slept in a chair in the sitting-room.

One evening I was dressing to go out there when the ’phone rang. It was Rogers. “I am…” he said, then something cut him off. It was like somebody had put a hand on his mouth, and I could hear them talking, murmuring: her, rather. “Well, what…” Rogers says. Then I could hear her breathing into the mouth-piece, and she said my name.

“Don’t forget you’re to come out to-night,” she said.

“I hadn’t,” I said. “Or did I get the date wrong? If this is not the night ”

“You come on out,” she said. “Goodbye.”

When I got there he met me. His face looked like it always did, but I didn’t go in. “Come on in,” he said.

“Maybe I got the date wrong,” I said. “So if you’ll just…”

He swung the door back. “Come on in,” he said.

She was lying on the divan, crying. I don’t know what; something about money. “I just can’t stick it,” she said. “I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I just can’t stand it.”

“You know what my insurance rates are,” he said. “If something happened, where would you be?”

“Where am I, anyway? What tenement woman hasn’t got more than I have?” She hadn’t looked up, lying there on her face, with the apron twisted under her. “Why don’t you quit and do something that you can get a decent insurance rate, like other men?”

“I must be getting along,” I said. I didn’t belong there. I just got out. He came down to the door with me, and then we were both looking back up the stairs toward the door where she was lying on her face on the couch.

“I’ve got a little stake,” I said. “I guess because I’ve eaten so much of your grub I haven’t had time to spend it. So if it’s anything urgent…” We stood there, he holding the door open. “Of course, I wouldn’t try to muscle in where I don’t…”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” he said. He opened the door. “See you at the field tomorrow.”

“Sure,” I said. “See you at the field.”

I didn’t see her for almost a week, didn’t hear from her.

I saw him every day, and at last I said, “How’s Mildred these days?”

“She’s on a visit,” he said. “At her mother’s.”

For the next two weeks I was with him every day. When I was out on top I’d look back at his face behind the goggles.

But we never mentioned her name, until one day he told me she was home again and that I was invited out to dinner that night.

It was in the afternoon. He was busy all that day hopping passengers, so I was doing nothing, just killing time waiting for evening and thinking about her, wondering some, but mostly just thinking about her being home again, breathing the same smoke and soot I was breathing, when all of a sudden I decided to go out there. It was plain as a voice saying, “Go out there. Now, at once.” So I went. I didn’t even wait to change. She was alone, reading before the fire. It was like gasoline from a broken line blazing up around you.

III

IT WAS FUNNY. When I’d be out on top I’d look back at his face behind the windscreen, wondering what he knew. He must have known almost at once. Why, say, she didn’t have any discretion at all. She’d say and do things, you know: insist on sitting close to me; touching me in that different way from when you hold an umbrella or a raincoat over them, and such that any man can tell at one look, when she thought he might not see: not when she knew he couldn’t, but when she thought maybe he wouldn’t. And when I’d unfasten my belt and crawl out I’d look back at his face and wonder what he was thinking, how much he knew or suspected.

I’d go out there in the afternoon when he was busy. I’d stall around until I saw that he would be lined up for the rest of the day, then I’d give some excuse and beat it. One afternoon I was all ready to go, waiting for him to take off, when he cut the gun and leaned out and beckoned me. “Don’t go off,” he said. “I want to see you.”

So I knew he knew then, and I waited until he made the last hop and was taking off his monkey suit in the office. He looked at me and I looked at him. “Come out to dinner,” he said.

When I came in they were waiting. She had on one of those little squashy dresses and she came and put her arms around me and kissed me with him watching.

“I’m going with you,” she said. “We’ve talked it over and have both agreed that we couldn’t love one another any more after this and that this is the only sensible thing to do. Then he can find a woman he can love, a woman that’s not bad like I am.”

He was looking at me, and she running her hands over my face and making a little moaning sound against my neck, and me like a stone or something. Do you know what I was thinking? I wasn’t thinking about her at all. I was thinking that he and I were upstairs and me out on top and I had just found that he had thrown the stick away and was flying her on the rudder alone and that he knew that I knew the stick was gone and so it was all right now, whatever happened.

So it was like a piece of wood with another piece of wood leaning against it, and she held back and looked at my face.

“Don’t you love me any more?” she said, watching my face. “If you love me, say so. I have told him everything.”

I wanted to be out of there. I wanted to run. I wasn’t scared. It was because it was all kind of hot and dirty. I wanted to be away from her a little while, for Rogers and me to be out where it was cold and hard and quiet, to settle things.

“What do you want to do?” I said. “Will you give her a divorce?”

She was watching my face very closely. Then she let me go and she ran to the mantel and put her face into the bend of her arm, crying.

“You were lying to me,” she said. “You didn’t mean what you said. Oh God, what have I done?”

You know how it is. Like there is a right time for everything. Like nobody is anything in himself: like a woman, even when you love her, is a woman to you just a part of the time and the rest of the time she is just a person that don’t look at things the same way a man has learned to. Don’t have the same ideas about what is decent and what is not.

So I went over and stood with my arms about her, thinking, “God damn it, if you’ll just keep out of this for a little while! We’re both trying our best to take care of you, so it won’t hurt you.”

Because I loved her, you see. Nothing can marry two people closer than a mutual sin in the world’s eyes. And he had had his chance. If it had been me that knew her first and married her and he had been me, I would have had my chance. But it was him that had had it, so when she said, “Then say what you tell me when we are alone. I tell you I have told him everything,” I said, “Everything? Have you told him everything?” He was watching us. “Has she told you everything?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Do you want her?” Then before I could speak, he said: “Do you love her? Will you be good to her?”

His face was gray-looking, like when you see a man again after a long time and you say, “Good God, is that Rogers?”

When I finally got away the divorce was all settled.

IV

SO THE NEXT MORNING when I reached the field, Harris, the man who owned the flying circus, told me about the special job; I had forgotten it, I suppose. Anyway, he said he had told me about it. Finally I said I wouldn’t fly with Rogers.

“Why not?” Harris said.

“Ask him,” I said.

“If he agrees to fly you, will you go up?”

So I said yes. And then Rogers came out; he said that he would fly me. And so I believed that he had known about the job all the time and had laid for me, sucked me in. We waited until Harris went out. “So this is why you were so mealy-mouthed last night,” I said. I cursed him. “You’ve got me now, haven’t you?”

“Take the stick yourself,” he said. “I’ll do your trick.”

“Have you ever done any work like this before?”

“No. But I can, as long as you fly her properly.”

I cursed him. “You feel good,” I said. “You’ve got me. Come on; grin on the outside of your face. Come on!”

He turned and went to the crate and began to get into the front seat. I went and caught his shoulder and jerked him back. We looked at one another.

“I won’t hit you now,” he said, “if that’s what you want. Wait till we get down again.”

“No,” I said. “Because I want to hit back once!”

We looked at one another; Harris was watching us from the office.

“All right,” Rogers said. “Let me have your shoes, will you? I haven’t got any rubber soles out here.”

“Take your seat,” I said. “What the hell does it matter? I guess I’d do the same thing in your place.”

The job was over an amusement park, a carnival. There must have been twenty-five thousand of them down there, like colored ants. I took chances that day that I had never taken, chances you can’t see from the ground. But every time the ship was right under me, balancing me against side pressure and all, like he and I were using the same mind. I thought he was playing with me, you see. I’d look back at his face, yelling at him: “Come on; now you’ve got me. Where are your guts?”

I was a little crazy, I guess. Anyway, when I think of the two of us up there, yelling back and forth at one another, and all the little bugs watching and waiting for the big show, the loop. He could hear me, but I couldn’t hear him; I could just see his lips moving. “Come on,” I’d yell; “shake the wing a little; I’ll go off easy, see?”

I was a little crazy. You know how it is, how you want to rush into something you know is going to happen, no matter what it is. I guess lovers and suicides both know that feeling.

I’d yell back at him: “You want it to look all right, eh? And to lose me off the level ship wouldn’t look so good, would it? All right,” I yelled, “let’s go.” I went back to the center section and cast the rope loose where it loops around the forward jury struts and I got set against it and looked back at him and gave him the signal. I was a little crazy. I was still yelling at him; I don’t know what I was yelling. I thought maybe I had already fallen off and was dead and didn’t know it. The wires began to whine and I was looking straight down at the ground and the little colored dots. Then the wires were whistling proper and he gunned her and the ground began to slide back under the nose. I waited until it was gone and the horizon had slid back under too and I couldn’t see anything but sky. Then I let go one end of the rope and jerked it out and threw it back at his head and held my arms out as she zoomed into the loop.

I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I wasn’t thinking about myself. I was thinking about him. Trying to show him up like he had shown me up. Give him something he must fail at like he had given me something I failed at. I was trying to break him.

We were over the loop before he lost me. The ground had come back, with the little colored dots, and then the pressure went off my soles and I was falling. I made a half somersault and was just going into the first turn of a flat spin, with my face to the sky, when something banged me in the back. It knocked the wind out of me, and for a second I must have been completely out. Then I opened my eyes and I was lying on my back on the top wing, with my head hanging over the back edge.

I was too far down the slope of the camber to bend my knees over the leading edge, and I could feel the wing creeping under me. I didn’t dare move. I knew that if I tried to sit up against the slip stream, I would go off backward. I could see by the tail and the horizon that we were upside now, in a shallow dive, and I could see Rogers standing up in his cockpit, unfastening his belt, and I could turn my head a little more and see that when I went off I would miss the fuselage altogether, or maybe hit it with my shoulder.

So I lay there with the wing creeping under me, feeling my shoulders beginning to hang over space, counting my backbones as they crept over the edge, watching Rogers crawl forward along the fuselage toward the front seat. I watched him for a long time, inching himself along against the pressure, his trouser-legs whipping. After a while I saw his legs slide into the front cockpit and then I felt his hands on me.

There was a fellow in my squadron. I didn’t like him and he hated my guts. All right. One day he got me out of a tight jam when I was caught ten miles over the lines with a blowing valve. When we were down he said, “Don’t think I was just digging you out. I was getting a Hun, and I got him.” He cursed me, with his goggles cocked up and his hands on his hips, cursing me like he was smiling. But that’s all right. You’re each on a Camel; if you go out, that’s too bad; if he goes out, it’s just too bad. Not like when you’re on the center section and he’s at the stick, and just by stalling her for a second or ruddering her a little at the top of the loop.

But I was young, then. Good Lord, I used to be young!

I remember Armistice night in ’18, and me chasing all over Amiens with a lousy prisoner we had brought down that morning on an Albatross, trying to keep the frog M. P.’s from getting him. He was a good guy, and those damned infantrymen wanting to stick him in a pen full of S. O. S. and ginned-up cooks and such. I felt sorry for the bastard, being so far from home and licked and all. I was sure young.

We were all young. I remember an Indian, a prince, an Oxford man, with his turban and his trick major’s pips, that said we were all dead that fought in the war. “You will not know it,” he said, “but you are all dead. With this difference: those out there,” jerking his arm toward where the front was, “do not care, and you do not know it.” And something else he said, about breathing for a long time yet, some kind of walking funerals; catafalques and tombs and epitaphs of men that died on the fourth of August, 1914, without knowing that they had died, he said. He was a card, queer. A good little guy, too.

But I wasn’t quite dead while I was lying on the top wing of that Standard and counting my backbones as they crawled over the edge like a string of ants, until Rogers grabbed me.

And when he came to the station that night to say goodbye, he brought me a letter from her, the first I ever had. The handwriting looked exactly like her; I could almost smell the scent she used and feel her hands touching me. I tore it in two without opening it and threw the pieces down. But he picked them up and gave them back to me. “Don’t be a fool,” he said.

And that’s all. They’ve got a kid now, a boy of six. Rogers wrote me; about six months afterward the letter caught up with me. I’m his godfather. Funny to have a godfather that’s never seen you and that you’ll never see, isn’t it?

So I said to Reinhardt: “Will one day be enough notice?”

“One minute will be enough,” he said. He pressed the buzzer. Miss West came in. She is a good kid. Now and then, when I’d just have to blow off some steam, she and I would have lunch at the dairy place across the street, and I could tell her about them, about the women. They are the worst.

You know; you get a call for a demonstration, and there’ll be a whole car full of them waiting on the porch and we’d pile in and all go shopping. Me dodging around in the traffic, hunting a place to park, and her saying, “Jim insisted that I try this car. But what I tell him, it’s foolish to buy a car that is as difficult to find parking space for as this one appears to be.”

And them watching the back of my head with that bright, hard, suspicious way. God knows what they thought we had; maybe one that would fold up like a deck chair and lean against a fire plug. But hell, I couldn’t sell hair straightener to the widow of a nigger railroad accident.

So Miss West comes in; she is a good kid, only somebody told her I had had three or four other jobs in a year without sticking, and that I used to be a war pilot, and she’d keep on after me about why I quit flying and why I didn’t go back to it, now that crates were more general, since I wasn’t much good at selling automobiles or at anything else, like women will. You know: urgent and sympathetic, and you can’t shut them up like you could a man; she came in and Reinhardt says, “We are letting Mr. Monaghan go. Send him to the cashier.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Keep it to buy yourself a hoop with.”

I

THEY SEEMED to bring with them the smell of the snow falling in Seventh Avenue. Or perhaps the other people who had entered before them had done it, bringing it with them in their lungs and exhaling it, filling the arcade with a stale chill like that which might lie unwinded and spent upon the cold plains of infinity itself. In it the bright and serried shopwindows had a fixed and insomniac glare like the eyes of people drugged with coffee, sitting up with a strange corpse.

In the rotunda, where the people appeared as small and intent as ants, the smell and sense of snow still lingered, though high now among the steel girders, spent and vitiated too and filled here with a weary and ceaseless murmuring, like the voices of pilgrims upon the infinite plain, like the voices of all the travelers who had ever passed through it quiring and ceaseless as lost children.

They went on toward the smoking room. It was the old man who looked in the door. “All right,” he said. He looked sixty, though he was probably some age like forty-eight or fifty-two or fifty-eight. He wore a long overcoat with a collar which had once been fur, and a cap with earflaps like the caricature of an up-State farmer. His shoes were not mates.

“There ain’t many here yet. It will be some time now.”

While they stood there three other men came and looked into the smoking room with that same air not quite diffident and not quite furtive, with faces and garments that seemed to give off that same effluvium of soup kitchens and Salvation Army homes. They entered; the old man led the way toward the rear of the room, among the heavy, solid benches on which still more men of all ages sat in attitudes of thought or repose and looking as transient as scarecrows blown by a departed wind upon a series of rock ledges. The old man chose a bench and sat down, making room for the young man beside him. “I used to think that if you sat somewhere about the middle, he might skip you. But I found out that it don’t make much difference where you sit.”

“Nor where you lie, either,” the young man said. He wore an army overcoat, new, and a pair of yellow army brogans of the sort that can be bought from so-called army stores for a dollar or so. He had not shaved in some time. “And it don’t make a hell of a lot of difference whether you are breathing or not while you are lying there. I wish I had a cigarette. I have got used to not eating but be damned if I don’t hate to get used to not smoking.”

“Sure now,” the old man said. “I wish I had a cigarette to give you. I ain’t used tobacco myself since I went to Florida. That was funny: I hadn’t smoked in ten years, yet as soon as I got back to New York, that was the first thing I thought about. Isn’t that funny?”

“Yes,” the young man said. “Especially if you never had any tobacco when you thought about wanting it again.”

“Wanting it and not having it couldn’t have worried me then,” the old man said. “I was all right then. Until I…” He settled himself. Into his face came that rapt expression of the talkative old, without heat or bewilderment or rancor.

“What confused me was I thought all the time that the burying money was all right. As soon as I found out about Danny’s trouble I come right back to New York.”

“Who is this Danny, anyway?” the young man said.

“Didn’t I tell you? He’s Sister’s boy. There wasn’t any of us left but Sister and Danny and me. Yet I was the weakly one. The one they all thought wouldn’t live. I was give up to die twice before I was fifteen, yet I outlived them all. Outlived all eight of them when Sister died three years ago. That was why I went to Florida to live. Because I thought I couldn’t stand the winters here. Yet I have stood three of them now since Sister died. But sometimes it looks like a man can stand just about anything if he don’t believe he can stand it. Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know,” the young man said. “Which trouble was this?”

“Which?”

“Which trouble was Danny in now?”

“Don’t get me wrong about Danny. He wasn’t bad; just wild, like any young fellow. But not bad.”

“All right,” the young man said. “It wasn’t any trouble then.”

“No. He’s a good boy. He’s in Chicago now. Got a good job now. The lawyer in Jacksonville got it for him right after I come back to New York. I didn’t know he had it until I tried to wire him that Sister was dead. Then I found that he was in Chicago, with a good job. He sent Sister a wreath of flowers that must have cost two hundred dollars.

Sent it by air; that cost something, too. He couldn’t come himself because he had just got the job and his boss was out of town and he couldn’t get away. He was a good boy. That was why when that trouble come up about that woman on the floor below that accused him of stealing the clothes off her clothes-line, that I told Sister I would send him the railroad fare to Jacksonville, where I could look after him. Get him clean away from them low-life boys around the saloons and such. I come all the way from Florida to see about him.

That was how I happened to go with Sister to see Mr. Pinckski, before she ever begun to pay on the coffin. She wanted me to go with her. Because you know how an old woman is. Only she wasn’t old, even if her and me had outlived all the other seven. But you know how an old woman seems to get comfort out of knowing she will be buried right in case there isn’t any of her kin there to ’tend to it. I guess maybe that keeps a lot of them going.”

“And especially with Danny already too busy to see if she was buried at all, himself.”

The old man, his mouth already shaped for further speech, paused and looked at the young man. “What?”

“I say, if getting into the ground at last don’t keep some of them going, I don’t know what it is that does.”

“Oh. Maybe so. That ain’t never worried me. I guess because I was already give up to die twice before I was fifteen. Like now every time a winter gets through, I just say to myself, ‘Well, I’ll declare. Here I am again.’ That was why I went to Florida: because of the winters here. I hadn’t been back until I got Sister’s letter about Danny, and I didn’t stay long then. And if I hadn’t got the letter about Danny, maybe I wouldn’t ever have come back. But I come back, and that was when she took me with her to see Mr. Pinckski before she begun to pay on the coffin, for me to see if it was all right like Mr. Pinckski said. He told her how the insurance companies would charge her interest all the time. He showed us with the pencil and paper how if she paid her money to the insurance companies it would be the same as if she worked six minutes longer every night and give the money for the extra six minutes to the insurance company.

But Sister said she wouldn’t mind that, just six minutes, because at three or four o’clock in the morning six minutes wouldn’t…”

“Three or four o’clock in the morning?”

“She scrubbed in them tall buildings down about Wall Street somewhere. Her and some other ladies. They would help one another night about, so they could get done at the same time and come home on the subway together. So Mr. Pinckski showed us with the pencil and paper how if she lived fifteen years longer say for instance Mr. Pinckski said, it would be the same as if she worked three years and eighty-five days without getting any pay for it. Like for three years and eighty-five days she would be working for the insurance companies for nothing. Like instead of living fifteen years, she would actually live only eleven years and two hundred and eight days. Sister stood there for a while, holding her purse under her shawl. Then she said, ‘If I was paying the insurance companies to bury me instead of you, I would have to live three years and eighty-five days more before I could afford to die?’

“‘Well,’ Mr. Pinckski said, like he didn’t know what to say. ‘Why, yes. Put it that way, then. You would work for the insurance companies three years and eighty-five days and not get any pay for it.’

“‘It ain’t the work I mind,’ Sister said. ‘It ain’t the working.’ Then she took the first half a dollar out of her purse and put it down on Mr. Pinckski’s desk.”

II

NOW AND THEN, with a long and fading reverberation, a subway train passed under their feet. Perhaps they thought momentarily of two green eyes tunneling violently through the earth without apparent propulsion or guidance, as though of their own unparalleled violence creating, like spaced beads on a string, lighted niches in whose wan and fleeting glare human figures like corpses set momentarily on end in a violated grave yard leaned in one streaming and rigid direction and flicked away.

“Because I was a weak child. They give me up to die twice before I was fifteen. There was an insurance agent sold me a policy once, worried at me until I said all right, I would take it. Then they examined me and the only policy they would give me was a thousand dollars at the rate of fifty years old. And me just twenty-seven then. I was the third one of eight, yet when Sister died three years ago I had outlived them all. So when we got that trouble of Danny’s about the woman that said he stole the clothes fixed up, Sister could… ”

“How did you get it fixed up?”

“We paid the money to the man that his job was to look after the boys that Danny run with. The alderman knew Danny and the other boys. It was all right then. So Sister could go on paying the fifty cents to Mr. Pinckski every week. Because we fixed it up for me to send the railroad fare for Danny as soon as I could, so he could be in Florida where I could look out for him. And I went back to Jacksonville and Sister could pay Mr. Pinckski the fifty cents without worrying. Each Sunday morning when her and the other ladies got through, they would go home by Mr, Pinckski’s and wake him up and Sister would give him the fifty cents.

“He never minded what time it was because Sister was a good customer. He told her it would be all right, whatever time she got there, to wake him up and pay him. So sometimes it would be as late as four o’clock, especially if they had had a parade or something and the buildings messed up with confetti and maybe flags. Maybe four times a year the lady that lived next door to Sister would write me a letter telling me how much Sister had paid to Mr. Pinckski and that Danny was getting along fine, behaving and not running around with them tough boys any more. So when I could I sent Danny the railroad fare to Florida. I never expected to hear about the money.

“That was what confused me. Sister could read some. She could read the church weekly fine that the priest gave her, but she never was much for writing. She said if she could just happen to find a pencil the size of a broom handle that she could use both hands on, that she could write fine. But regular pencils were too small for her. She said she couldn’t feel like she had anything in her hand. So I never expected to hear about the money. I just sent it and then I fixed up with the landlady where I was living for a place for Danny, just thinking that some day soon Danny would just come walking in with his suit-case. The landlady kept the room a week for me, and then a man come in to rent it, so there wasn’t anything she could do but give me the refusal of it.

“That wasn’t no more than fair, after she had already kept it open a week for me. So I begun to pay for the room and when Danny didn’t come I thought maybe something had come up, with the hard winter and all, and Sister needed the money worse than to send Danny to Florida on it, or maybe she thought he was too young yet. So after three months I let the room go. Every three or four months I would get the letter from the lady next door to Sister, about how every Sunday morning Sister and the other ladies would go to Mr. Pinckski and pay him the fifty cents. After fifty-two weeks, Mr. Pinckski set the coffin aside, with her name cut on a steel plate and nailed onto the coffin, her full name: Mrs. Margaret Noonan Gihon.

“It was a cheap coffin at first, just a wooden box, but after she had paid the second fifty-two half a dollars he took the name plate off of it and nailed it onto a better coffin, letting her pick it out herself in case she died that year. And after the third fifty-two half a dollars he let her pick out a still finer one, and the next year one with gold handles on it. He would let her come in and look at it whenever she wanted and bring whoever she wanted with her, to see the coffin and her name cut in the steel plate and nailed onto it. Even at four o’clock in the morning he would come down in his night-shirt and unlock the door and turn the light on for Sister and the other ladies to go back and look at the coffin.

“Each year it got to be a better coffin, with Mr. Pinckski showing the other ladies with the pencil and paper how Sister would have the coffin paid out soon and then she would just be paying on the gold handles and the lining. He let her pick out the lining too that she wanted and when the lady next door wrote me the next letter, Sister sent me a sample of the lining and a picture of the handles. Sister drew the picture, but she never could use a pencil because she always said the handle was too small for her to hold, though she could read the church weekly the priest gave her, because she said the Lord illuminated it for her.”

“Is that so?” the young man said. “Jesus, I wish I either had a smoke or I would quit thinking about it.”

“Yes. And a sample of the lining. But I couldn’t tell much about it except that it suited Sister and that she liked it how Mr. Pinckski would let her bring in the other ladies to look at the trimmings and help her make up her mind. Because Mr. Pinckski said he would trust her because he didn’t believe she would go and die on him to hurt his business like some did, and him not charging her a cent of interest like the insurance companies would charge. All she had to do was just to stop there every Sunday morning and pay him the half a dollar.”

“Is that so?” the young man said, “He must be in the poor-house now.”

“What?” The old man looked at the young man, his expression fixed. “Who in the poor-house now?”

III

“WHERE WAS Danny all this time? Still doing his settlement work?”

“Yes. He worked whenever he could get a job. But a high-spirited young fellow, without nobody but a widow woman mother, without no father to learn him how you have to give and take in this world. That was why I wanted him down in Florida with me.”

Now his arrested expression faded; he went easily into narration again with a kind of physical and unlistening joy, like a checked and long-broken horse slacked off again.

“That was what got me confused. I had already sent the money for him to come to Jacksonville on and when I never heard about it I just thought maybe Sister needed it with the hard winter and all or maybe she thought Danny was too young, like women will. And then about eight months after I let the room go I had a funny letter from the lady that lived next door to Sister. It said how Mr. Pinckski had moved the plate onto the next coffin and it said how glad Sister was that Danny was doing so well and she knew I would take good care of him because he was a good boy, besides being all Sister had. Like Danny was already in Florida, all the time.

“But I never knew he was there until I got the wire from him. It come from Augustine, not any piece away; I never found out until Sister died how Mrs. Zilich, that’s the lady next door to her, that wrote the letters for Sister, had written me that Danny was coming to Florida the day he left, the day after the money come. Mrs. Zilich told how she had written the letter for Sister and give it to Danny himself to mail the night before he left. I never got it. I reckon Danny never mailed it. I reckon, being a young, high-spirited boy, he decided he wanted to strike out himself and show us what he could do without any help from us, like I did when I come to Florida.

“Mrs. Zilich said she thought of course Danny was with me and that she thought at the time it was funny that when I would write to Sister I never mentioned Danny. So when she would read the letters to Sister she would put in something about Danny was all right and doing fine. So when I got the wire from Danny in Augustine I telephoned Mrs. Zilich in New York. It cost eleven dollars. I told her that Danny was in a little trouble, not serious, and for her to not tell Sister it was serious trouble, to just tell her that we would need some money. Because I had sent money for Danny to come to Florida on and I had paid the three months for the room and I had just paid the premium on my insurance, and so the lawyer looked at Danny and Danny sitting there on the cot in the cell without no collar on and Danny said, ‘Where would I get any money,’ only it was jack he called it.

“And the lawyer said, ‘Where would you get it?’ and Danny said, ‘Just set me down back home for ten minutes. I’ll show you.’

’Seventy-five bucks,’ he says, telling me that was all of it. Then the lawyer says that was neither here nor there and so I telephoned to Mrs. Zilich and told her to tell Sister to go to Mr. Pinckski and ask him to let her take back some of the coffin money; he could put the name plate back on the coffin she had last year or maybe the year before, and as soon as I could get some money on my insurance policy I would pay Mr. Pinckski back and some interest too. I telephoned from the jail, but I didn’t say where I was telephoning from; I just said we would need some money quick.”

“What was he in for this time?” the young man said.

“He wasn’t in jail the other time, about them clothes off that line. That woman was lying about him. After we paid the money, she admitted she was probably mistaken.”

“All right,” the young man said. “What was he in for?”

“They called it grand larceny and killing a policeman. They framed him, them others did that didn’t like him. He was just wild. That was all. He was a good boy. When Sister died he couldn’t come to the funeral. But he sent a wreath that must have cost $200 if it cost a cent. By air mail, with the high postage in the…”

His voice died away; he looked at the young man with a kind of pleased astonishment. “I’ll declare I made a joke. But I didn’t mean ”

“Sure. I know you didn’t mean to make a joke. What about the jail?”

“The lawyer was already there when I got there. Some friends had sent the lawyer to help him. And he swore to me on his mother’s name that he wasn’t even there when the cop got shot. He was in Orlando at the time. He showed me a ticket from Orlando to Waycross that he had bought and missed the train; that was how he happened to have it with him. It had the date punched in it, the same night the policeman got killed, showing that Danny wasn’t even there and that them other boys had framed him. He was mad. The lawyer said how he would see the friends that had sent him to help Danny and get them to help. ‘By God, they better,’ Danny said. ‘If they think I’m going to take this laying down they better.’

“Then the lawyer got him quiet again, like he did when Danny was talking about that money the man he worked for or something had held out on him back in New York. And so I telephoned Mrs. Zilich, so as not to worry Sister, and told her to go to Mr. Pinckski. Two days later I got the telegram from Mrs. Zilich. I guess Mrs. Zilich hadn’t never sent a telegram before and so she didn’t know she had ten words without counting the address because it just said You and Danny come home quick Mrs. Sophie Zilich New York.

“I couldn’t make nothing out of it and we talked it over and the lawyer said I better go and see, that he would take care of Danny till I got back. So we fixed up a letter from Danny to Sister, for Mrs. Zilich to read to her, about how Danny was all right and getting along fine.”

IV

AT THAT moment there entered the room a man in the uniform of the railway company. As he entered, from about him somewhere behind, above a voice came. Though it spoke human speech it did not sound like a human voice, since it was too big to have emerged from known man and it had a quality at once booming, cold, and forlorn, as though it were not interested in nor listening to what it said.

“There,” the old man said.

He and the young man turned and looked back across the benches, as most of the other heads had done, as though they were all dummies moved by a single wire. The man in uniform advanced slowly into the room, moving along the first bench. As he did so the men on that bench and on the others began to rise and depart, passing the man in uniform as though he were not there; he too moving on into the room as if it were empty. “I guess we’ll have to move.”

“Hell,” the young man said. “Let him come in and ask for them. They pay him to do it.”

“He caught me the other night. The second time, too.”

“What about that? This time won’t make but three. What did you do then?”

“Oh, yes,” the old man said. “I knew that was the only thing to do, after that telegram. Mrs. Zilich wouldn’t have spent the money to telegraph without good reason. I didn’t know what she had told Sister. I just knew that Mrs. Zilich thought there wasn’t time to write a letter and that she was trying to save money on the telegram, not knowing she had ten words and the man at the telegraph office not telling her better. So I didn’t know what was wrong. I never suspicioned it at all. That was what confused me, you see.”

He turned and looked back again toward the man in uniform moving from bench to bench while just before him the men in mismated garments, with that identical neatness of indigence, with that identical air of patient and indomitable forlornness, rose and moved toward the exit in a monstrous and outrageous analogy to flying fish before the advancing prow of a ship.

“What confused you?” the young man said.

“Mrs. Zilich told me. I left Danny in the jail. (Them friends that sent him the lawyer got him out the next day. When I heard from him again, he was already in Chicago, with a good job; he sent that wreath. I didn’t know he was even gone from the jail until I tried to get word to him about Sister), and I come on to New York. I had just enough money for that, and Mrs. Zilich met me at the station and told me. At this station right here. It was snowing that night, too. She was waiting at the top of the steps.

“‘Where’s Sister?’ I said. ‘She didn’t come with you?’

“‘What is it now?’ Mrs. Zilich said. ‘You don’t need to tell me he is just sick.’

“‘Did you tell Sister he ain’t just sick?’ I said. ‘I didn’t have to,’ Mrs. Zilich said. ‘I didn’t have time to, even if I would have.’ She told about how it was cold that night and so she waited up for Sister, keeping the fire going and a pot of coffee ready, and how she waited till Sister had took off her coat and shawl and was beginning to get warm, setting there with a cup of coffee; then Mrs. Zilich said, ‘Your brother telephoned from Florida.’ That’s all she had time to say. She never even had to tell Sister how I said for her to go to Mr. Pinckski, because Sister said right off, ‘He will want that money.’ Just what I had said, you see.

“Mrs. Zilich noticed it too. ‘Maybe it’s because you are kin, both kin to that…’ Then she stopped and said, ‘Oh, I ain’t going to say anything about him. Don’t worry. The time to do that is past now.’ Then she told me how she said to Sister, ‘You can stop there on the way down this afternoon and see Mr. Pinckski.’ But Sister was already putting on her coat and shawl again and her not an hour home from work and it snowing. She wouldn’t wait.”

“She had to take back the coffin money, did she?” the young man said.

“Yes. Mrs. Zilich said that her and Sister went to Mr. Pinckski and woke him up. And he told them that Sister had already taken the money back.”

“What?” the young man said. “Already?”

“Yes. He said how Danny had come to him about a year back, with a note from Sister saying to give Danny the money that she had paid in to Mr. Pinckski and that Mr. Pinckski did it. And Sister standing there with her hands inside her shawl, not looking at anything until Mrs. Zilich said, ‘A note? Mrs. Gihon never sent you a note because she can’t write,’ and Mr. Pinckski said, ‘Should I know if she can’t write or not when her own son brings me a note signed with her name?’ and Mrs. Zilich says, ‘Let’s see it.’

“Sister hadn’t said anything at all, like she wasn’t even there, and Mr. Pinckski showed them the note. I saw it too. It said, ‘Received of Mr. Pinckski a hundred and thirty dollars being the full amount deposited with him less interest. Mrs. Margaret N. Gihon.’ And Mrs. Zilich said how she thought about that hundred and thirty dollars and she thought how Sister had paid twenty-six dollars a year for five years and seven months, and she said, ‘Interest? What interest?’ and Mr. Pinckski said, ‘For taking the name off the coffin,’ because that made the coffin second-handed. And Mrs. Zilich said that Sister turned and went toward the door. ‘Wait,’ Mrs. Zilich said. ‘We’re going to stay right here until you get that money. There’s something funny about this because you can’t write to sign a note.’ But Sister just went on toward the door until Mrs. Zilich said, ‘Wait, Margaret.’ And then Sister said, ‘I signed it.’”

V

THE VOICE of the man in uniform could be heard now as he worked slowly toward them: “Tickets. Tickets. Show your tickets.”

“I guess it’s hard enough to know what a single woman will do,” the old man said. “But a widow woman with just one child. I didn’t know she could write, either. I guess she picked it up cleaning up them offices every night. Anyway, Mr. Pinckski showed me the note, how she admitted she signed it, and he explained to me how the difference was; that he had to charge to protect himself in case the coffins ever were refused and become second-hand; that some folks was mighty particular about having a brand new coffin.

“He had put the plate with Sister’s name on it back onto the cheap coffin that she started off with, so she was still all right for a coffin, even if it never had any handles and lining.

I never said anything about that; that twenty-six dollars she had paid in since she give the money to Danny wouldn’t have helped any; I had already spent that much getting back to see about the money, and anyway, Sister still had a coffin ”

The voice of the man in uniform was quite near now, with a quality methodical, monotonous, and implacable: “Tickets. Tickets. Show your tickets. All without railroad tickets.”

The young man rose. “I’ll be seeing you,” he said. The old man rose too. Beyond the man in uniform the room was almost empty.

“I guess it’s about time,” the old man said. He followed the young man into the rotunda. There was an airplane in it, motionless, squatting, with a still, beetling look like a huge bug preserved in alcohol. There was a placard beside it, about how it had flown over mountains and vast wastes of snow.

“They might have tried it over New York,” the young man said. “It would have been closer.”

“Yes,” the old man said. “It costs more, though. But I guess that’s fair, since it is faster. When Sister died, Danny sent a wreath of flowers by air. It must have cost two hundred dollars. The wreath did, I mean. I don’t know what it cost to send it by air.”

Then they both looked up the ramp and through the arcade, toward the doors on Seventh Avenue. Beyond the doors lay a thick, moribund light that seemed to fill the arcade with the smell of snow and of cold, so that for a while longer they seemed to stand in the grip of a dreadful reluctance and inertia.

“So they went on back home,” the old man said. “Mrs. Zilich said how Sister was already shaking and she got Sister to bed. And that night Sister had a fever and Mrs. Zilich sent for the doctor and the doctor looked at Sister and told Mrs. Zilich she had better telegraph if there was anybody to telegraph to. When I got home Sister didn’t know me. The priest was already there, and we never could tell if she knew anything or not, not even when we read the letter from Danny that we had fixed up in the jail, about how he was all right. The priest read it to her, but we couldn’t tell if she heard him or not. That night she died.”

“Is that so?” The young man said, looking up the ramp.

He moved. “I’m going to the Grand Central.”

Again the old man moved, with that same unwearying alacrity. “I guess that’s the best thing to do. We might have a good while there.” He looked up at the clock; he said with pleased surprise: “Half past one already. And a half an hour to get there. And if we’re lucky, we’ll have two hours before he comes along. Maybe three. That’ll be five o’clock. Then it will be only two hours more till daylight.”

I

THE TELEPHONE waked him. He waked already hurrying, fumbling in the dark for robe and slippers, because he knew before waking that the bed beside his own was still empty, and the instrument was downstairs just opposite the door beyond which his mother had lain propped upright in bed for five years, and he knew on waking that he would be too late because she would already have heard it, just as she heard everything that happened at any hour in the house.

She was a widow, he the only child. When he went away to college she went with him; she kept a house in Charlottesville, Virginia, for four years while he graduated. She was the daughter of a well-to-do merchant. Her husband had been a travelling man who came one summer to the town with letters of introduction: one to a minister, the other to her father. Three months later the travelling man and the daughter were married. His name was Boyd. He resigned his position within the year and moved into his wife’s house and spent his days sitting in front of the hotel with the lawyers and the cotton-planters: a dark man with a gallant swaggering way of removing his hat to ladies. In the second year, the son was born. Six months later, Boyd departed.

He just went away, leaving a note to his wife in which he told her that he could no longer bear to lie in bed at night and watch her rolling onto empty spools the string saved from parcels from the stores. His wife never heard of him again, though she refused to let her father have the marriage annulled and change the son’s name.

Then the merchant died, leaving all his property to the daughter and the grandson who, though he, had been out of Fauntleroy suits since he was seven or eight, at twelve wore even on weekdays clothes which made him look not like a child but like a midget; he probably could not have long associated with other children even if his mother had let him. In due time the mother found a boys’ school where the boy could wear a round jacket and a man’s hard hat with impunity, though by the time the two of them removed to Charlottesville for these next four years, the son did not look like a midget. He looked now like a character out of Dante: a man a little slighter than his father but with something of his father’s dark handsomeness, who hurried with averted head, even when his mother was not with him, past the young girls on the streets not only of Charlottesville but of the little lost Mississippi hamlet to which they presently returned, with an expression of face like the young monks or angels in fifteenth-century allegories. Then his mother had her stroke, and presently the mother’s friends brought to her bed reports of almost exactly the sort of girl which perhaps even the mother might have expected the son to become not only involved with but to marry.

Her name was Amy, daughter of a railroad conductor who had been killed in a wreck. She lived now with an aunt who kept a boarding-house: a vivid, daring girl whose later reputation was due more to folly and the caste handicap of the little Southern town than to badness and which at the last was doubtless more smoke than fire; whose name, though she always had invitations to the more public dances, was a light word, especially among the older women, daughters of decaying old houses like this in which her future husband had been born.

So presently the son had acquired some skill in entering the house and passing the door beyond which his mother lay propped in bed, and mounting the stairs in the dark to his own room. But one night he failed to do so. When he entered the house the transom above his mother’s door was dark, as usual, and even if it had not been he could not have known that this was the afternoon on which the mother’s friends had called and told her about Amy, and that his mother had lain for five hours, propped bolt upright, in the darkness, watching the invisible door. He entered quietly as usual, his shoes in his hand, yet he had not even closed the front door when she called his name. Her voice was not raised. She called his name once: “Howard.”

He opened the door. As he did so the lamp beside her bed came on. It sat on a table beside the bed; beside it sat a clock with a dead face; to stop it had been the first act of his mother when she could move her hands two years ago. He approached the bed from which she watched him: a thick woman with a face the color of tallow and dark eyes apparently both pupil-less and iris-less beneath perfectly white hair. “What?” he said. “Are you sick?”

“Come closer,” she said. He came nearer. They looked at one another. Then he seemed to know; perhaps he had been expecting it.

“I know who’s been talking to you,” he said. “Those damned old buzzards.”

“I’m glad to hear it’s carrion,” she said. “Now I can rest easy that you won’t bring it into our house.”

“Go on. Say, your house.”

“Not necessary. Any house where a lady lives.” They looked at one another in the steady lamp which possessed that stale glow of sickroom lights. “You are a man. I don’t reproach you. I am not even surprised. I just want to warn you before you make yourself ridiculous. Don’t confuse the house with the stable.”

“With the Hah!” he said. He stepped back and jerked the door open with something of his father’s swaggering theatricalism. “With your permission,” he said. He did not close the door. She lay bolt upright on the pillows and looked into the dark hall and listened to him go to the telephone, call the girl, and ask her to marry him tomorrow.

Then he reappeared at the door. “With your permission,” he said again, with that swaggering reminiscence of his father, closing the door. After a while the mother turned the light off. It was daylight in the room then.

They were not married the next day, however. “I’m scared to,” Amy said. “I’m scared of your mother. What does she say about me?”

“I don’t know. I never talk to her about you.”

“You don’t even tell her you love me?”

“What does it matter? Let’s get married.”

“And live there with her?” They looked at one another.

“Will you go to work, get us a house of our own?”

“What for? I have enough money. And it’s a big house.”

“Her house. Her money.”

“It’ll be mine ours some day. Please.”

“Come on. Let’s try to dance again.” This was in the parlor of the boarding-house, where she was trying to teach him to dance, but without success. The music meant nothing to him; the noise of it or perhaps the touch of her body destroyed what little co-ordination he could have had. But he took her to the Country Club dances; they were known to be engaged. Yet she still staid out dances with other men, in the parked cars about the dark lawn. He tried to argue with her about it, and about drinking.

“Sit out and drink with me, then,” he said.

“We’re engaged. It’s no fun with you.”

“Yes,” he said, with the docility with which he accepted each refusal; then he stopped suddenly and faced her.

“What’s no fun with me?” She fell back a little as he gripped her shoulder. “What’s no fun with me?”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re hurting me!”

“I know it. What’s no fun with me?”

Then another couple came up and he let her go. Then an hour later, during an intermission, he dragged her, screaming and struggling, out of a dark car and across the dance floor, empty now and lined with chaperones like a theater audience, and drew out a chair and took her across his lap and spanked her. By daylight they had driven twenty miles to another town and were married.

That morning Amy called Mrs. Boyd “Mother” for the first and (except one, and that perhaps shocked out of her by surprise or perhaps by exultation) last time, though the same day Mrs. Boyd formally presented Amy with the brooch: an ancient, clumsy thing, yet valuable. Amy carried it back to their room, and he watched her stand looking at it, perfectly cold, perfectly inscrutable. Then she put it into a drawer. She held it over the open drawer with two fingers and released it and then drew the two fingers across her thigh.

“You will have to wear it sometimes,” Howard said.

“Oh, I will. I’ll show my gratitude. Don’t worry.” Presently it seemed to him that she took pleasure in wearing it.

That is, she began to wear it quite often. Then he realized that it was not pleasure but vindictive incongruity; she wore it for an entire week once on the bosom of a gingham house dress, an apron. But she always wore it where Mrs. Boyd would see it, always when she and Howard had dressed to go out and would stop in the mother’s room to say good night.

They lived upstairs, where, a year later, their child was born. They took the child down for Mrs. Boyd to see it.

She turned her head on the pillows and looked at the child once. “Ah,” she said. “I never saw Amy’s father, that I know of. But then, I never travelled on a train a great deal.”

“The old, the old…” Amy cried, shuddering and clinging to Howard. “Why does she hate me so? What have I ever done to her? Let’s move. You can work.”

“No. She won’t live always.”

“Yes, she will. She’ll live forever, just to hate me.”

“No,” Howard said. In the next year the child died. Again Amy tried to get him to move.

“Anywhere. I won’t care how we have to live.”

“No. I can’t leave her helpless on her back. You will have to start going out again. Dance. Then it won’t be so bad.”

“Yes,” she said, quieter. “I’ll have to. I can’t stand this.”

One said “you,” the other, “I.” Neither of them said “we.” So, on Saturday nights Amy would dress and Howard would put on scarf and overcoat, sometimes over his shirtsleeves, and they would descend the stairs and stop at Mrs. Boyd’s door and then Howard would put Amy into the car and watch her drive away. Then he would re-enter the house and with his shoes in his hand return up the stairs, as he had used to do before they married, slipping past the lighted transom. Just before midnight, in the overcoat and scarf again, he would slip back down the stairs and past the still lighted transom and be waiting on the porch when Amy drove up. Then they would enter the house and look into Mrs. Boyd’s room and say good night.

One night it was one o’clock before she returned. He had been waiting for an hour in slippers and pajamas on the porch; it was November. The transom above Mrs. Boyd’s door was dark and they did not stop.

“Some jelly beans set the clock back,” she said. She did not look at him, dragging her clothes off, flinging the brooch along with her other jewelry onto the dressing table. “I had hoped you wouldn’t be fool enough to stand out there and wait for me.”

“Maybe next time they set the clock back I won’t.”

She stopped, suddenly and perfectly still, looking at him over her shoulder. “Do you mean that?” she said. He was not looking at her; he heard, felt, her approach and stand beside him. Then she touched his shoulder. “Howard?” she said. He didn’t move. Then she was clinging to him, flung onto his lap, crying wildly: “What’s happening to us?” striking herself against him with a wild abandon: “What is it? What is it?” He held her quiet, though after they were each in their beds (they already had two of them) he heard and then felt her cross the intervening gap and fling herself against him again with that wild terrified abandon not of a woman but of a child in the dark, enveloping him, whispering: “You don’t have to trust me, Howard! You can! You can! You don’t have to!”

“Yes,” he said. “I know. It’s all right. It’s all right.” So after that, just before twelve, he would put on the overcoat and scarf, creep down the stairs and past the lighted transom, open and close the front door noisily, and then open his mother’s door where the mother would be propped high on the pillows, the book open and face down on her knees.

“Back already?” Mrs. Boyd would say.

“Yes. Amy’s gone on up. Do you want anything?”

“No. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Then he would go up and go to bed, and after a time (sometimes) to sleep. But before this sometimes, taking it sometimes into sleep with him, he would think, tell himself with that quiet and fatalistic pessimism of the impotent intelligent: But this cannot go on forever. Some night something is going to happen; she is going to catch Amy. And I know what she is going to do. But what am I going to do?

He believed that he did know. That is, the top of his mind assured him that it knew, but he discounted this; the intelligence again: not to bury it, flee from it: just discounting it, the intelligence speaking out of the impotence: Because no man ever knows what he will do in any given situation, set of circumstances: the wise, others perhaps, drawing conclusions, but never himsetf. The next morning Amy would be in the other bed, and then, in the light of day, it would be gone. But now and then, even by daylight, it returned and he from the detachment of his cerebration contemplating his life, that faulty whole whose third the two of them had produced yet whose lack the two of them could not fill, telling himself, Yes. I know what she will do and I know what Amy will ask me to do and I know that I will not do that.

But what will I do? but not for long, telling himself now that it had not happened so far, and that anyway it was six long days until Saturday: the impotence now, not even the intellect.

II

SO IT was that when he waked to the bell’s shrilling he already knew that the bed beside his own was still empty, just as he knew that, no matter how quickly he reached the telephone, it would already be too late. He did not even wait for his slippers; he ran down the now icy stairs, seeing the transom above his mother’s door come alight as he passed it and went to the phone and took the receiver down: “Oh, Howard, I’m so sorry this is Martha Ross so sorry to disturb you, but I knew that Amy would be anxious about it. I found it in the car, tell her, when we got back home.”

“Yes,” he said. “In the car.”

“In our car. After she lost her switch key and we brought her home, to the corner. We tried to get her to come on home with us and have some ham and eggs, but she…”

Then the voice died away. He held the cold receiver to his ear and heard the other end of the wire, the silence, fill with a sort of consternation like an in-drawn breath: something instinctive and feminine and self-protective. But the pause itself was hardly a pause; almost immediately the voice went on, though completely changed now, blank, smooth, reserved: “Amy’s in bed, I suppose!”

“Yes. She’s in bed.”

“Oh. So sorry I bothered you, got you up. But I knew she would be anxious about it, since it was your mother’s, the family piece. But of course, if she hasn’t missed it yet, you won’t need to bother her.” The wire hummed, tense, “That I called or anything.” The wire hummed. “Hello. Howard?”

“No,” he said. “I won’t bother her tonight. You can call her in the morning.”

“Yes, I will. So sorry I bothered you. I hope I didn’t wake your mother.”

He put the receiver back. He was cold. He could feel his bare toes curling back from the ice-like floor as he stood looking at the blank door beyond which his mother would be sitting, high-propped on the pillows, with her tallow face and dark inscrutable eyes and the hair which Amy said resembled weathered cotton, beside the clock whose hands she had stopped herself at ten minutes to four on the afternoon five years ago when she first moved again. When he opened the door his picture had been exact, almost to the position of the hands even.

“She is not in this house,” Mrs. Boyd said.

“Yes. She’s in bed. You know when we came in. She just left one of her rings with Martha Ross tonight and Martha telephoned.”

But apparently she had not even listened to him. “So you swear she is in this house this minute.”

“Yes. Of course she is. She’s asleep, I tell you.”

“Then send her down here to say good night to me.”

“Nonsense. Of course I won’t.”

They looked at one another across the bed’s footboard.

“You refuse?”

“Yes.”

They looked at one another a moment longer. Then he began to turn away; he could feel her watching him. “Then tell me something else. It was the brooch she lost.”

He did not answer this either. He just looked at her again as he closed the door: the two of them curiously similar, mortal and implacable foes in the fierce close antipathy of blood. He went out.

He returned to the bedroom and turned on the light and found his slippers and went to the fire and put some coal on the embers and punched and prodded it into flame. The clock on the mantel said twenty minutes to one. Presently he had a fair blaze; he had quit shivering. He went back to bed and turned off the light, leaving only the firelight pulsing and gleaming on the furniture and among the phials and mirrors of the dressing table, and in the smaller mirror above his own chest of drawers, upon which sat the three silver photograph frames, the two larger ones containing himself and Amy, the smaller one between them empty. He just lay. He was not thinking at all. He had just thought once, quietly, So that’s that. So now I suppose I will know, find out what I am going to do and then no more, not even thinking that again.

The house seemed still to be filled with the shrill sound of the telephone like a stubborn echo. Then he began to hear the clock on the mantel, reiterant, cold, not loud. He turned on the light and took up the book face down and open from the table beside his pillow, but he found that he could not keep his mind on the words for the sound which the clock made, so he rose and went to the mantel. The hands were now at half past two. He stopped the clock and turned its face to the wall and brought his book to the fire and found that he could now keep his mind on the words, the sense, reading on now untroubled by time. So he could not have said just when it was that he found he had ceased to read, had jerked his head up. He had heard no sound, yet he knew that Amy was in the house. He did not know how he knew: he just sat holding his breath, immobile, the peaceful book raised and motionless, waiting. Then he heard Amy say, “It’s me, Mother.”

She said “Mother” he thought, not moving yet. She called her “Mother” again. He moved now, putting the book carefully down, his place marked, but as he crossed the room he walked naturally, not trying to deaden his footsteps, to the door and opened it and saw Amy just emerging from Mrs. Boyd’s room. She began to mount the stairs, walking naturally too, her hard heels sharp and unnaturally loud in the nightbound house. She must have stooped when Mother called her and put her slippers on again, he thought. She had not seen him yet, mounting steadily, her face in the dim hall light vague and petal-like against the collar of her fur coat, projecting already ahead of her to where he waited a sort of rosy and crystal fragrance of the frozen night out of which she had just emerged. Then she saw him at the head of the stairs. For just a second, an instant, she stopped dead still, though she was moving again before it could have been called pause, already speaking as she passed him where he stood aside, and entered the bedroom: “Is it very late? I was with the Rosses. They just let me out at the corner; I lost my car key out at the club. Maybe it was the car that waked her.”

“No. She was already awake. It was the telephone.”

She went on to the fire and spread her hands to it, still in her coat; she did not seem to have heard him, her face rosy in the firelight, her presence emanating that smell of cold, that frosty fragrance which had preceded her up the stairs: “I suppose so. Her light was already on. I knew as soon as I opened the front door that we were sunk. I hadn’t even got in the house good when she said ‘Amy’ and I said ‘It’s me, Mother’ and she said, ‘Come in here, please,’ and there she was with those eyes that haven’t got any edges to them and that hair that looks like somebody pulled it out of the middle of a last year’s cotton bale, and she said, ‘Of course you understand that you will have to leave this house at once. Good night.’”

“Yes,” he said. “She has been awake since about half past twelve. But there wasn’t anything to do but insist that you were already in bed asleep and trust to luck.”

“You mean, she hasn’t been asleep at all?”

“No. It was the telephone, like I told you. About half past twelve.”

With her hands still spread to the fire she glanced at him over her furred shoulder, her face rosy, her eyes at once bright and heavy, like a woman’s eyes after pleasure, with a kind of inattentive conspiratorial commiseration. “Telephone? Here? At half past twelve? What absolutely putrid… But no matter.” She turned now, facing him, as if she had only been waiting until she became warm, the rich coat open upon the fragile glitter of her dress; there was a quality actually beautiful about her now not of the face whose impeccable replica looks out from the covers of a thousand magazines each month, nor of the figure, the shape of deliberately epicene provocation into which the miles of celluloid film have constricted the female body of an entire race; but a quality completely female in the old eternal fashion, primitive, assured and ruthless as she approached him, already raising her arms. “Yes! I say luck too!” she said, putting her arms around him, her upper body leaned back to look into his face, her own face triumphant, the smell now warm woman-odor where the frosty fragrance had thawed. “She said at once, now. So we can go. You see? Do you understand? We can leave now. Give her the money, let her have it all. We won’t care. You can find work; I won’t care how and where we will have to live. You don’t have to stay here now, with her now. She has what do you call it? absolved you herself. Only I have lost the car key. But no matter: we can walk. Yes, walk; with nothing, taking nothing of hers, like we came here.”

“Now?” he said. “Tonight?”

“Yes! She said at once. So it will have to be tonight.”

“No,” he said. That was all, no indication of which question he had answered, which denied. But then, he did not need to because she still held him; it was only the expression of her face that changed. It did not die yet nor even become terrified yet: it just became unbelieving, like a child’s incredulity. “You mean, you still won’t go? You still won’t leave her? That you would just take me to the hotel for tonight and that you will come back here tomorrow? Or do you mean you won’t even stay at the hotel with me tonight? That you will take me there and leave me and then you…” She held him, staring at him; she began to say, “Wait, wait. There must be some reason, something. Wait,” she cried; “wait! You said, telephone. At half past twelve.” She still stared at him, her hands hard, her pupils like pinpoints, her face ferocious. “That’s it. That’s the reason. Who was it that telephoned here about me? Tell me! I defy you to! I will explain it. Tell me!”

“It was Martha Ross. She said she had just let you out at the corner!”

“She lied!” she cried at once, immediately, scarce waiting to hear the name. “She lied! They did bring me home then but it was still early and so I decided to go on with them to their house and have some ham and eggs. So I called to Frank before he got turned around and I went with them. Frank will prove it! She lied! They just this minute put me out at the corner!”

She looked at him. They stared at one another for a full immobile moment. Then he said, “Then where is the brooch?”

“The brooch?” she said. “What brooch?” But already he had seen her hand move upward beneath the coat; besides, he could see her face and watch it gape like that of a child which has lost its breath before she began to cry with a wild yet immobile abandon, so that she spoke through the weeping in the choked gasping of a child, with complete and despairing surrender: “Oh, Howard! I wouldn’t have done that to you! I wouldn’t have! I wouldn’t have!”

“All right,” he said. “Hush, now. Hush, Amy. She will hear you.”

“All right. I’m trying to.” But she still faced him with that wrung and curiously rigid face beneath its incredible flow of moisture, as though not the eyes but all the pores had sprung at once; now she too spoke directly out of thinking, without mention of subject or circumstance, nothing more of defiance or denial: “Would you have gone with me if you hadn’t found out?”

“No. Not even then. I won’t leave her. I will not, until she is dead. Or this house. I won’t. I can’t. I…” They looked at one another, she staring at him as if she saw reflected in his pupils not herself but the parchment-colored face below stairs, the piled dirty white hair, the fierce implacable eyes, her own image blanked out by something beyond mere blindness: by a quality determined, invincible, and crucified.

“Yes,” she said. From somewhere she produced a scrap of chiffon and began to dab at her eyes, delicately, even now by instinct careful of the streaked mascara. “She beat us. She lay there in that bed and beat us.” She turned and went to the closet and drew out an overnight bag and put the crystal objects from the dressing-table into it and opened a drawer. “I can’t take everything tonight. I will have to…”

He moved also; from the chest of drawers where the small empty photograph frame sat he took his wallet and removed the bills from it and returned and put the money into her hand. “I don’t think there is very much here. But you won’t need money until tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she said. “You can send the rest of my things then, too.”

“Yes,” he said. She folded and smoothed the notes in her fingers; she was not looking at him. He did not know what she was looking at except it was not at the money. “Haven’t you got a purse or something to carry it in?”

“Yes,” she said. But she did not stop folding and smoothing the bills, still not looking at them, apparently not aware of them, as if they had no value and she had merely picked them idly up without being aware of it. “Yes,” she said.

“She beat us. She lay there in that bed she will never move from until they come in and carry her out some day, and took that brooch and beat us both.” Then she began to cry.

It was as quiet now as the way she had spoken. “My little baby,” she said. “My dear little baby.”

He didn’t even say Hush now. He just waited until she dried her eyes again, almost briskly, rousing, looking at him with an expression almost like smiling, her face, the make-up, the careful evening face haggard and streaked and filled with the weary and peaceful aftermath of tears. “Well,” she said. “It’s late.” She stooped, but he anticipated her and took the bag; they descended the stairs together; they could see the lighted transom above Mrs. Boyd’s door.

“It’s too bad you haven’t got the car,” he said.

“Yes. I lost the key at the club. But I telephoned the garage. They will bring it in in the morning.”

They stopped in the hall while he telephoned for a cab.

Then they waited, talking quietly now and then. “You had better go straight to bed.”

“Yes. I’m tired. I danced a good deal.”

“What was the music? Was it good?”

“Yes. I don’t know. I suppose so. When you are dancing yourself, you don’t usually notice whether the music is or isn’t.”

“Yes, I guess that’s so.” Then the car came. They went out to it, he in pajamas and robe; the earth was frozen and iron-hard, the sky bitter and brilliant. He helped her in.

“Now you run back into the house,” she said. “You didn’t even put on your overcoat.”

“Yes. I’ll get your things to the hotel early.”

“Not too early. Run, now.” She had already sat back, the coat close about her. He had already remarked how sometime, at some moment back in the bedroom, the warm woman-odor had congealed again and that she now emanated once more that faint frosty fragrance, fragile, impermanent and forlorn; the car moved away, he did not look back. As he was closing the front door his mother called his name. But he did not pause or even glance toward the door.

He just mounted the stairs, out of the dead, level, unsleeping, peremptory voice. The fire had burned down: a strong rosy glow, peaceful and quiet and warmly reflected from mirror and polished wood. The book still lay, face down and open, in the chair. He took it up and went to the table between the two beds and sought and found the cellophane envelope which had once contained pipe cleaners, which he used for a bookmark, and marked his place and put the book down.

It was the coat-pocket size, Modern Library Green Mansions. He had discovered the book during adolescence; he had read it ever since. During that period he read only the part about the journey of the three people in search of the Riolama which did not exist, seeking this part out and reading it in secret as the normal boy would have normal and conventional erotica or obscenity, mounting the barren mountain with Rima toward the cave, not knowing then that it was the cave-symbol which he sought, escaping it at last through the same desire and need to flee and escape which Rima had, following her on past the cave to where she poised, not even waiting for him, impermanent as a match flame and as weak, in the cold and ungrieving moon.

In his innocence then he believed, with a sort of urgent and despairing joy, that the mystery about her was not mystery since it was physical: that she was corporeally impenetrable, incomplete; with peaceful despair justifying, vindicating, what he was through (so he believed) no fault of his own, with what he read in books, as the young do. But after his marriage he did not read the book again until the child died and the Saturday nights began. And then he avoided the journey to Riolama as he had used to seek it out. Now he read only where Abel (the one man on earth who knew that he was alone) wandered in the impervious and interdict forest filled with the sound of birds. Then he went to the chest and opened again the drawer where he kept the wallet and stood for a moment, his hand still lying on the edge of the drawer. “Yes,” he said quietly, aloud: “it seems to have been right all the time about what I will do.”

The bathroom was at the end of the hall, built onto the house later, warm too where he had left the electric heater on for Amy and they had forgot it. It was here that he kept his whiskey also. He had begun to drink after his mother’s stroke, in the beginning of what he had believed to be his freedom, and since the death of the child he had begun to keep a two-gallon keg of corn whiskey in the bathroom.

Although it was detached from the house proper and the whole depth of it from his mother’s room, he nevertheless stuffed towels carefully about and beneath the door, and then removed them and returned to the bedroom and took the down coverlet from Amy’s bed and returned and stuffed the door again and then hung the coverlet before it. But even then he was not satisfied. He stood there, thoughtful, musing, a little pudgy (he had never taken any exercise since he gave up trying to learn to dance, and now what with the steady drinking, there was little of the young Italian novice about his figure any more), the pistol hanging from his hand. He began to look about. His glance fell upon the bath mat folded over the edge of the tub. He wrapped his hand, pistol and all, in the mat and pointed it toward the rear wall and fired it, the report muffled and jarring though not loud. Yet even now he stood and listened as if he expected to hear from this distance. But he heard nothing; even when, the door freed again, he moved quietly down the hall and then down the steps to where he could see clearly the dark transom above his mother’s door. But again he did not pause. He returned up the stairs, quietly, hearing the cold and impotent ratiocination without listening to it: Like your father, you cannot seem to live with either of them, but unlike your father you cannot seem to live without them; telling himself quietly, “Yes, it seems that it was right. It seems to have known us better than I did,” and he shut the bathroom door again and stuffed the towels carefully about and beneath it. But he did not hang the coverlet this time. He drew it over himself, squatting, huddling into it, the muzzle of the pistol between his teeth like a pipe, wadding the thick soft coverlet about his head, hurrying, moving swiftly now because he was already beginning to suffocate.

I

IT WOULD BE right after supper, before we had left the table.

At first, beginning with the day the news came that the Yankees had taken Memphis, we did it three nights in succession. But after that, as we got better and better and faster and faster, once a week suited Granny. Then after Cousin Melisandre finally got out of Memphis and came to live with us, it would be just once a month, and when the regiment in Virginia voted Father out of the colonelcy and he came home and stayed three months while he made a crop and got over his mad and organized his cavalry troop for General Forrest’s command, we quit doing it at all. That is, we did it one time with Father there too, watching, and that night Ringo and I heard him laughing in the library, the first time he had laughed since he came home, until in about a half a minute Granny came out already holding her skirts up and went sailing up the stairs. So we didn’t do it any more until Father had organized his troop and was gone again.

Granny would fold her napkin beside her plate. She would speak to Ringo standing behind her chair without even turning her head: “Go call Joby and Lucius.”

And Ringo would go back through the kitchen without stopping. He would just say, “All right. Look out,” at Louvinia’s back and go to the cabin and come back with not only Joby and Lucius and the lighted lantern but Philadelphia too, even though Philadelphia wasn’t going to do anything but stand and watch and then follow to the orchard and back to the house until Granny said we were done for that time and she and Lucius could go back home to bed. And we would bring down from the attic the big trunk (we had done it so many times by now that we didn’t even need the lantern any more to go to the attic and get the trunk) whose lock it was my job to oil every Monday morning with a feather dipped in chicken fat, and Louvinia would come in from the kitchen with the unwashed silver from supper in a dishpan under one arm and the kitchen clock under the other and set the clock and the dishpan on the table and take from her apron pocket a pair of Granny’s rolled-up stockings and hand them to Granny and Granny would unroll the stockings and take from the toe of one of them a wadded rag and open the rag and take out the key to the trunk and unpin her watch from her bosom and fold it into the rag and put the rag back into the stocking and roll the stockings back into a ball and put the ball into the trunk. Then with Cousin Melisandre and Philadelphia watching, and Father too on that one time when he was there, Granny would stand facing the clock, her hands raised and about eight inches apart and her neck bowed so she could watch the clock-face over her spectacles, until the big hand reached the nearest hour-mark.

The rest of us watched her hands. She wouldn’t speak again. She didn’t need to. There would be just the single light loud pop of her palms when the hand came to the nearest hour-mark; sometimes we would be already moving, even before her hands came together, all of us that is except Philadelphia. Granny wouldn’t let her help at all, because of Lucius, even though Lucius had done nearly all the digging of the pit and did most of the carrying of the trunk each time.

But Philadelphia had to be there. Granny didn’t have to tell her but once. “I want the wives of all the free men here too,” Granny said. “I want all of you free folks to watch what the rest of us that ain’t free have to do to keep that way.”

That began about eight months ago. One day even I realized that something had happened to Lucius. Then I knew that Ringo had already seen it and that he knew what it was, so that when at last Louvinia came and told Granny, it was not as if Lucius had dared his mother to tell her but as if he had actually forced somebody, he didn’t care who, to tell her. He had said it more than once, in the cabin one night probably for the first time, then after that in other places and to other people, to Negroes from other plantations even. Memphis was already gone then, and New Orleans, and all we had left of the River was Vicksburg and although we didn’t believe it then, we wouldn’t have that long. Then one morning Louvinia came in where Granny was cutting down the worn-out uniform pants Father had worn home from Virginia so they would fit me, and told Granny how Lucius was saying that soon the Yankees would have all of Mississippi and Yoknapatawpha County too and all the niggers would be free and that when that happened, he was going to be long gone. Lucius was working in the garden that morning. Granny went out to the back gallery, still carrying the pants and the needle. She didn’t even push her spectacles up. She said, “You, Lucius,” just once, and Lucius came out of the garden with the hoe and Granny stood looking down at him over the spectacles as she looked over them at everything she did, from reading or sewing to watching the clock-face until the instant came to start burying the silver.

“You can go now,” she said. “You needn’t wait on the Yankees.”

“Go?” Lucius said. “I ain’t free.”

“You’ve been free for almost three minutes,” Granny said. “Go on.”

Lucius blinked his eyes while you could have counted about ten. “Go where?” he said.

“I can’t tell you,” Granny said. “I ain’t free. I would imagine you will have all Yankeedom to move around in.”

Lucius blinked his eyes. He didn’t look at Granny now.

“Was that all you wanted?” he said.

“Yes,” Granny said. So he went back to the garden. And that was the last we heard about being free from him. That is, it quit showing in the way he acted, and if he talked any more of it, even Louvinia never thought it was worth bothering Granny with. It was Granny who would do the reminding of it, especially to Philadelphia, especially on the nights when we would stand like race-horses at the barrier, watching Granny’s hands until they clapped together.

Each one of us knew exactly what he was to do. I would go upstairs for Granny’s gold hatpin and her silver-headed umbrella and her plumed Sunday hat because she had already sent her ear-rings and brooch to Richmond a long time ago, and to Father’s room for his silver-backed brushes and to Cousin Melisandre’s room after she came to live with us for her things because the one time Granny let Cousin Melisandre try to help too, Cousin Melisandre brought all her dresses down. Ringo would go to the parlor for the candlesticks and Granny’s dulcimer and the medallion of Father’s mother back in Carolina. And we would run back to the dining-room where Louvinia and Lucius would have the sideboard almost cleared, and Granny still standing there and watching the clock-face and the trunk both now with her hands ready to pop again and they would pop and Ringo and I would stop at the cellar door just long enough to snatch up the shovels and run on to the orchard and snatch the brush and grass and the criss-crossed sticks away and have the pit open and ready by the time we saw them coming: first Louvinia with the lantern, then Joby and Lucius with the trunk and Granny walking beside it and Cousin Melisandre and Philadelphia (and on that one time Father, walking along and laughing) following behind. And on that first night, the kitchen clock wasn’t in the trunk. Granny was carrying it, while Louvinia held the lantern so that Granny could watch the hand, Granny made us put the trunk into the pit and shovel the dirt back and smooth it off and lay the brush and grass back over it again and then dig up the trunk and carry it back to the house. And one night, it seemed like we had been bringing the trunk down from the attic and putting the silver into it and carrying it out to the pit and uncovering the pit and then covering the pit again and turning around and carrying the trunk back to the house and taking the silver out and putting it back where we got it from all winter and all summer too; that night, and I don’t know who thought of it first, maybe it was all of us at once. But anyway the clock-hand had passed four hour-marks before Granny’s hands even popped for Ringo and me to run and open the pit. And they came with the trunk and Ringo and I hadn’t even put down the last armful of brush and sticks, to save having to stoop to pick it up again, and Lucius hadn’t even put down his end of the trunk for the same reason and I reckon Louvinia was the only one that knew what was coming next because Ringo and I didn’t know that the kitchen clock was still sitting on the dining-room table. Then Granny spoke. It was the first time we had ever heard her speak between when she would tell Ringo, “Go call Joby and Lucius,” and then tell us both about thirty minutes later: “Wash your feet and go to bed.” It was not loud and not long, just two words: “Bury it.” And we lowered the trunk into the pit and Joby and Lucius threw the dirt back in and even then Ringo and I didn’t move with the brush until Granny spoke again, not loud this time either: “Go on. Hide the pit.” And we put the brush back and Granny said, “Dig it up.” And we dug up the trunk and carried it back into the house and put the things back where we got them from and that was when I saw the kitchen clock still sitting on the dining-room table.

And we all stood there watching Granny’s hands until they popped together and that time we filled the trunk and carried it out to the orchard and lowered it into the pit quicker than we had ever done before.

II

AND THEN when the time came to really bury the silver, it was too late. After it was all over and Cousin Melisandre and Cousin Philip were finally married and Father had got done laughing, Father said that always happened when a heterogeneous collection of people who were cohered simply by an uncomplex will for freedom engaged with a tyrannous machine. He said they would always lose the first battles, and if they were outnumbered and outweighed enough, it would seem to an outsider that they were going to lose them all. But they would not. They could not be defeated; if they just willed that freedom strongly and completely enough to sacrifice all else for it: ease and comfort and fatness of spirit and all, until whatever it was they had left would be enough, no matter how little it was that very freedom itself would finally conquer the machine as a negative force like drouth or flood could strangle it. And later still, after two more years and we knew we were going to lose the war, he was still saying that. He said, “I won’t see it, but you will. You will see it in the next war, and in all the wars Americans will have to fight from then on. There will be men from the South in the forefront of all the battles, even leading some of them, helping those who conquered us defend that same freedom which they believed they had taken from us.” And that happened: thirty years later, and General Wheeler, whom Father would have called apostate, commanding in Cuba, and whom old General Early did call apostate and matricide too in the office of the Richmond editor when he said: “I would like to have lived so that when my time comes, I will see Robert Lee again. But since I haven’t, I’m certainly going to enjoy watching the devil burn that blue coat off Joe Wheeler.”

We didn’t have time. We didn’t even know there were any Yankees in Jefferson, let alone within a mile of Sartoris.

There never had been many. There was no railroad then and no river big enough for big boats and nothing in Jefferson they would have wanted even if they had come, since this was before Father had had time to worry them enough for General Grant to issue a general order with a reward for his capture. So we had got used to the war. We thought of it as being definitely fixed and established as a railroad or a river is, moving east along the railroad from Memphis and south along the River toward Vicksburg. We had heard tales of Yankee pillage and most of the people around Jefferson stayed ready to bury their silver fast too, though I don’t reckon any of them practiced doing it like we did. But nobody we knew was even kin to anyone who had been pillaged, and so I don’t think that even Lucius really expected any Yankees until that morning.

It was about eleven o’clock. The table was already set for dinner and everybody was beginning to kind of ease up so we would be sure to hear when Louvinia went out to the back gallery and rang the bell, when Ab Snopes came in at a dead run, on a strange horse as usual. He was a member of Father’s troop. Not a fighting member; he called himself father’s horse-captain, whatever he meant by it, though we had a pretty good idea, and none of us at least knew what he was doing in Jefferson when the troop was supposed to be up in Tennessee with General Bragg, and probably nobody anywhere knew the actual truth about how he got the horse, galloping across the yard and right through one of Granny’s flower beds because I reckon he figured that carrying a message he could risk it, and on around to the back because he knew that, message or no message, he better not come to Granny’s front door hollering that way, sitting that strange blown horse with a U. S. army brand on it you could read three hundred yards and yelling up at Granny that General Forrest was in Jefferson but there was a whole regiment of Yankee cavalry not a half a mile down the road.

So we never had time. Afterward Father admitted that Granny’s error was not in strategy nor tactics either, even though she had copied from someone else. Because he said it had been a long time now since originality had been a component of military success. It just happened too fast. I went for Joby and Lucius and Philadelphia because Granny had already sent Ringo down to the road with a cup towel to wave when they came in sight. Then she sent me to the front window where I could watch Ringo. When Ab Snopes came back from hiding his new Yankee horse, he offered to go upstairs to get the things there. Granny had told us a long time ago never to let Ab Snopes go anywhere about the house unless somebody was with him. She said she would rather have Yankees in the house any day because at least Yankees would have more delicacy, even if it wasn’t anything but good sense, than to steal a spoon or candlestick and then try to sell it to one of her own neighbors, as Ab Snopes would probably do. She didn’t even answer him. She just said, “Stand over there by that door and be quiet.” So Cousin Melisandre went upstairs after all and Granny and Philadelphia went to the parlor for the candlesticks and the medallion and the dulcimer, Philadelphia not only helping this time, free or not, but Granny wasn’t even using the clock.

It just all happened at once. One second Ringo was sitting on the gate-post, looking up the road. The next second he was standing on it and waving the cup towel and then I was running and hollering, back to the dining-room, and I remember the whites of Joby’s and Lucius’s and Philadelphia’s eyes and I remembered Cousin Melisandre’s eyes where she leaned against the sideboard with the back of her hand against her mouth, and Granny and Louvinia and Ab Snopes glaring at one another across the trunk and I could hear Louvinia’s voice even louder than mine: “Miz Cawmpson! Miz Cawmpson!”

“What?” Granny cried. “What? Mrs. Compson?” Then we all remembered. It was when the first Yankee scouting patrol entered Jefferson over a year ago. The war was new then and I suppose General Compson was the only Jefferson soldier they had heard of yet. Anyway, the officer asked someone in the Square where General Compson lived and old Doctor Holston sent his Negro boy by back alleys and across lots to warn Mrs. Compson in time, and the story was how the Yankee officer sent some of his men through the empty house and himself rode around to the back where old Aunt Roxanne was standing in front of the outhouse behind the closed door of which Mrs. Compson was sitting, fully dressed even to her hat and parasol, on the wicker hamper containing her plate and silver. “Miss in dar,” Roxanne said. “Stop where you is.” And the story told how the Yankee officer said, “Excuse me,” and raised his hat and even backed the horse a few steps before he turned and called his men and rode away.

“The privy!” Granny cried.

“Hell fire, Miz Millard!” Ab Snopes said. And Granny never said anything. It wasn’t like she didn’t hear, because she was looking right at him. It was like she didn’t care; that she might have even said it herself. And that shows how things were then: we just never had time for anything. “Hell fire,” Ab Snopes said, “all north Missippi has done heard about that! There ain’t a white lady between here and Memphis that ain’t setting in the back house on a grip full of silver right this minute.”

“Then we’re already late,” Granny said. “Hurry.”

“Wait!” Ab Snopes said. “Wait! Even them Yankees have done caught onto that by now!”

“Then let’s hope these are different Yankees,” Granny said. “Hurry.”

“But Miz Millard!” Ab Snopes cried. “Wait! Wait!”

But then we could hear Ringo yelling down at the gate and I remember Joby and Lucius and Philadelphia and Louvinia and the balloon-like swaying of Cousin Melisandre’s skirts as they ran across the back yard, the trunk somewhere among them; I remember how Joby and Lucius tumbled the trunk into the little tall narrow flimsy sentry-box and Louvinia thrust Cousin Melisandre in and slammed the door and we could hear Ringo yelling good now, almost to the house, and then I was back at the front window and I saw them just as they swept around the house in a kind of straggling-clump six men in blue, riding fast yet with something curious in the action of the horses, as if they were not only yoked together in spans but were hitched to a single wagon-tongue, then Ringo on foot running and not yelling now, and last of all the seventh rider, bareheaded and standing in his stirrups and with a sabre over his head. Then I was on the back gallery again, standing beside Granny above that moil of horses and men in the yard, and she was wrong. It was as if these were not only the same ones who had been at Mrs. Compson’s last year, but somebody had even told them exactly where our outhouse was. The horses were yoked in pairs, but it was not a wagon-tongue, it was a pole, almost a log, twenty feet long, slung from saddle to saddle between the three span; and I remember the faces, unshaven and wan and not so much peering as frantically gleeful, glaring up at us for an instant before the men leaped down and unslung the pole and jerked the horses aside and picked up the pole, three to a side, and began to run across the yard with it as the last rider came around the house, in gray (an officer: it was Cousin Philip, though of course we didn’t know that then, and there was going to be a considerable more uproar and confusion before he finally became Cousin Philip and of course we didn’t know that either), the sabre still lifted and not only standing in the stirrups but almost lying down along the horse’s neck. The six Yankees never saw him. And we used to watch Father drilling his troop in the pasture, changing them from column to troop front at full gallop, and you could hear his voice even above the sound of the galloping hooves but it wasn’t a bit louder than Granny’s. “There’s a lady in there!” she said. But the Yankees never heard her any more than they had seen Cousin Philip yet, the whole mass of them, the six men running with the pole and Cousin Philip on the horse, leaning out above them with a lifted sabre, rushing on across the yard until the end of the pole struck the outhouse door. It didn’t just overturn, it exploded. One second it stood there, tall and narrow and flimsy; the next second it was gone and there was a boil of yelling men in blue coats darting and dodging around under Cousin Philip’s horse and the flashing sabre until they could find a chance to turn and run. Then there was a scatter of planks and shingles and Cousin Melisandre sitting beside the trunk in the middle of it, in the spread of her hoops, her eyes shut and her mouth open, still screaming, and after a while a feeble popping of pistol-shots from down along the creek that didn’t sound any more like war than a boy with firecrackers.

“I tried to tell you to wait!” Ab Snopes said behind us, “I tried to tell you them Yankees had done caught on!”

After Joby and Lucius and Ringo and I finished burying the trunk in the pit and hiding the shovel-marks, I found Cousin Philip in the summer house. His sabre and belt were propped against the wall but I don’t reckon even he knew what had become of his hat. He had his coat off too and was wiping it with his handkerchief and watching the house with one eye around the edge of the door. When I came in he straightened up and I thought at first he was looking at me.

Then I don’t know what he was looking at. “That beautiful girl,” he said. “Fetch me a comb.”

“They’re waiting for you in the house,” I said. “Granny wants to know what’s the matter.” Cousin Melisandre was all right now. It took Louvinia and Philadelphia both and finally Granny to get her into the house but Louvinia brought the elder-flower wine before Granny had time to send her after it and now Cousin Melisandre and Granny were waiting in the parlor.

“Your sister,” Cousin Philip said. “And a hand-mirror.”

“No, Sir,” I said. “She’s just our cousin. From Memphis.”

Granny says ” Because he didn’t know Granny. It was pretty good for her to wait any time for anybody. But he didn’t even let me finish.”

“That beautiful, tender girl,” he said. “And send a nigger with a basin of water and a towel.” I went back toward the house. This time when I looked back I couldn’t see his eye around the door-edge. “And a clothes brush,” he said.

Granny wasn’t waiting very much. She was at the front door. “Now what?” she said. I told her. “Does the man think we are giving a ball here in the middle of the day? Tell him I said to come on in and wash on the back gallery like we do. Louvinia’s putting dinner on, and we’re already late.” But Granny didn’t know Cousin Philip either. I told her again.

She looked at me. “What did he say?” she said.

“He didn’t say anything,” I said. “Just that beautiful girl.”

“That’s all he said to me too,” Ringo said. I hadn’t heard him come in. “‘Sides the soap and water. Just that beautiful girl.”

“Was he looking at you either when he said it?” I said.

“No,” Ringo said. “I just thought for a minute he was.”

Now Granny looked at Ringo and me both. “Hah,” she said, and afterward when I was older I found out that Granny already knew Cousin Philip too, that she could look at one of them and know all the other Cousin Melisandres and Cousin Philips both without having to see them. “I sometimes think that bullets are just about the least fatal things that fly, especially in war. All right,” she said. “Take him his soap and water. But hurry.”

We did. This time he didn’t say “that beautiful girl.” He said it twice. He took off his coat and handed it to Ringo.

“Brush it good,” he said. “Your sister, I heard you say.”

“No, you didn’t,” I said.

“No matter,” he said. “I want a nosegay. To carry in my hand.”

“Those flowers are Granny’s,” I said.

“No matter,” he said. He rolled up his sleeves and began to wash. “A small one. About a dozen blooms. Get something pink.”

I went and got the flowers. I don’t know whether Granny was still at the front door or not. Maybe she wasn’t. At least she never said anything. So I picked the ones Ab Snope’s new Yankee horse had already trampled down and wiped the dirt off of them and straightened them out and went back to the summer house where Ringo was holding the hand-glass while Cousin Philip combed his hair. Then he put on his coat and buckled on his sabre again and held his feet out one at a time for Ringo to wipe his boots off with the towel, and Ringo saw it. I wouldn’t have spoken at all because we were already later for dinner than ever now, even if there hadn’t never been a Yankee on the place. “You tore your britches on them Yankees,” Ringo said.

So I went back to the house. Granny was standing in the hall. This time she just said, “Yes?” It was almost quiet.

“He tore his britches,” I said. And she knew more about Cousin Philip than even Ringo could find out by looking at him. She had the needle already threaded in the bosom of her dress. And I went back to the summer house and then we came back to the house and up to the front door and I waited for him to go into the hall but he didn’t, he just stood there holding the nosegay in one hand and his hat in the other, not very old, looking at that moment anyway not very much older than Ringo and me for all his braid and sash and sabre and boots and spurs, and even after just two years looking like all our soldiers and most of the other people too did: as if it had been so long now since he had had all he wanted to eat at one time that even his memory and palate had forgotten it and only his body remembered, standing there with his nosegay and that beautiful-girl look in his face like he couldn’t have seen anything even if he had been looking at it.

“No,” he said. “Announce me. It should be your nigger. But no matter.” He said his full name, all three of them, twice, as if he thought I might forget them before I could reach the parlor.

“Go on in,” I said. “They’re waiting for you. They had already been waiting for you even before you found your pants were torn.”

“Announce me,” he said. He said his name again. “Of Tennessee. Lieutenant, Savage’s Battalion, Forrest’s Command, Provisional Army, Department of the West.”

So I did. We crossed the hall to the parlor, where Granny stood between Cousin Melisandre’s chair and the table where the decanter of elder-flower wine and three fresh glasses and even a plate of the tea cakes Louvinia had learned to make from cornmeal and molasses were sitting, and he stopped again at that door too and I know he couldn’t even see Cousin Melisandre for a minute, even though he never had looked at anything else but her. “Lieutenant Philip St-Just Backhouse,” I said. I said it loud, because he had repeated it to me three times so I would be sure to get it right and I wanted to say it to suit him too since even if he had made us a good hour late for dinner, at least he had saved the silver. “Of Tennessee,” I said. “Savage’s Battalion, Forrest’s Command, Provisional Army, Department of the West.”

While you could count maybe five, there wasn’t anything at all. Then Cousin Melisandre screamed. She sat bolt upright on the chair like she had sat beside the trunk in the litter of planks and shingles in the back yard this morning, with her eyes shut and her mouth open again, screaming.

III

SO WE were still another half an hour late for dinner. Though this time it never needed anybody but Cousin Philip to get Cousin Melisandre upstairs. All he needed to do was to try to speak to her again. Then Granny came back down and said, “Well, if we don’t want to just quit and start calling it supper, we’d better walk in and eat it within the next hour and a half at least.” So we walked in. Ab Snopes was already waiting in the dining-room. I reckon he had been waiting longer than anybody, because after all Cousin Melisandre wasn’t any kin to him. Ringo drew Granny’s chair and we sat down. Some of it was cold. The rest of it had been on the stove so long now that when you ate it it didn’t matter whether it was cold or not. But Cousin Philip didn’t seem to mind. And maybe it didn’t take his memory very long to remember again what it was like to have all he wanted to eat, but I don’t think his palate ever tasted any of it. He would sit there eating like he hadn’t seen any food of any kind in at least a week, and like he was expecting what was even already on his fork to vanish before he could get it into his mouth. Then he would stop with the fork halfway to his mouth and sit there looking at Cousin Melisandre’s empty place, laughing. That is, I don’t know what else to call it but laughing. Until at last I said, “Why don’t you change your name?”

Then Granny quit eating too. She looked at me over her spectacles. Then she took both hands and lifted the spectacles up her nose until she could look at me through them. Then she even pushed the spectacles up into her front hair and looked at me. “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard said on this place since eleven o’clock this morning,” she said.

“It’s so sensible and simple that I reckon only a child could have thought of it.” She looked at him. “Why don’t you?” He laughed some more. That is, his face did the same way and he made the same sound again. “My grandfather was at King’s Mountain, with Marion all through Carolina. My uncle was defeated for Governor of Tennessee by a corrupt and traitorous cabal of tavern-keepers and Republican Abolitionists, and my father died at Chapultepec. After that, the name they bore is not mine to change. Even my life is not mine so long as my country lies bleeding and ravished beneath an invader’s iron heel.” Then he stopped laughing, or whatever it was. Then his face looked surprised. Then it quit looking surprised, the surprise fading out of it steady at first and gradually faster but not very much faster like the heat fades out of a piece of iron on a blacksmith’s anvil until his face just looked amazed and quiet and almost peaceful. “Unless I lose it in battle,” he said.

“You can’t very well do that sitting here,” Granny said.

“No,” he said. But I don’t think he even heard her except with his ears. He stood up. Even Ab Snopes was watching him now, his knife stopped halfway to his mouth with a wad of greens on the end of the blade. “Yes,” Cousin Philip said.

His face even had the beautiful-girl look on it again. “Yes,” he said. He thanked Granny for his dinner. That is, I reckon that’s what he had told his mouth to say. It didn’t make much sense to us, but I don’t think he was paying any attention to it at all. He bowed. He wasn’t looking at Granny nor at anything else. He said “Yes,” again. Then he went out. Ringo and I followed to the front door and watched him mount his horse and sit there for a minute, bare-headed, looking up at the upstairs windows. It was Granny’s room he was looking at, with mine and Ringo’s room next to it. But Cousin Melisandre couldn’t have seen him even if she had been in either one of them, since she was in bed on the other side of the house with Philadelphia probably still wringing the cloths out in cold water to lay on her head. He sat the horse well. He rode it well too: light and easy and back in the saddle and toes in and perpendicular from ankle to knee as Father had taught me. It was a good horse too.

“It’s a damn good horse,” I said.

“Git the soap,” Ringo said.

But even then I looked quick back down the hall, even if I could hear Granny talking to Ab Snopes in the diningroom. “She’s still in there,” I said.

“Hah,” Ringo said. “I done tasted soap in my mouth for a cuss I thought was a heap further off than that.”

Then Cousin Philip spurred the horse and was gone. Or so Ringo and I thouglit. Two hours ago none of us had ever even heard of him; Cousin Melisandre had seen him twice and sat with her eyes shut screaming both times. But after we were older, Ringo and I realized that Cousin Philip was probably the only one in the whole lot of us that really believed even for one moment that he had said goodbye forever, that not only Granny and Louvinia knew better but Cousin Melisandre did too, no matter what his last name had the bad luck to be.

We went back to the dining-room. Then I realized that Ab Snopes had been waiting for us to come back. Then we both knew he was going to ask Granny something because nobody wanted to be alone when they had to ask Granny something even when they didn’t know they were going to have trouble with it. We had known Ab for over a year now. I should have known what it was like. Granny already did. He stood up. “Well, Miz Millard,” he said. “I figger you’ll be safe all right from now on, with Bed Forrest and his boys right there in Jefferson. But until things quiet down a mite more, I’ll just leave the horses in your lot for a day or two.”

“What horses?” Granny said. She and Ab didn’t just look at one another. They watched one another.

“Them fresh-captured horses from this morning,” Ab said.

“What horses?” Granny said. Then Ab said it.

“My horses.” Ab watched her.

“Why?” Granny said. But Ab knew what she meant.

“I’m the only grown man here,” he said. Then he said, “I seen them first. They were chasing me before…” Then he said, talking fast now; his eyes had gone kind of glazed for a second but now they were bright again, looking in the stubbly dirt-colored fuzz on his face like two chips of broken plate in a worn-out door-mat: “Spoils of war! I brought them here! I tolled them in here: a military and-bush! And as the only and ranking Confedrit military soldier present…”

“You ain’t a soldier,” Granny said. “You stipulated that to Colonel Sartoris yourself while I was listening. You told him yourself you would be his independent horse-captain but nothing more.”

“Ain’t that just exactly what I am trying to be?” he said.

“Didn’t I bring all six of them horses in here in my own possession, the same as if I was leading them on a rope?”

“Hah,” Granny said. “A spoil of war or any other kind of spoil don’t belong to a man or a woman either until they can take it home and put it down and turn their back on it. You never had time to get home with even the one you were riding. You ran in the first open gate you came to, no matter whose gate it was.”

“Except it was the wrong one,” he said. His eyes quit looking like china. They didn’t look like anything. But I reckon his face would still look like an old door-mat even after he had turned all the way white. “So I reckon I got to even walk back to town,” he said. “The woman that would…” His voice stopped. He and Granny looked at one another.

“Don’t you say it,” Granny said.

“Nome,” he said. He didn’t say it. “… a man of seven horses ain’t likely to lend him a mule.”

“No,” Granny said. “But you won’t have to walk.”

We all went out to the lot. I don’t reckon that even Ab knew until then that Granny had already found where he thought he had hidden the first horse and had it brought up to the lot with the other six. But at least he already had his saddle and bridle with him. But it was too late. Six of the horses moved about loose in the lot. The seventh one was tied just inside the gate with a piece of plow-line. It wasn’t the horse Ab had come on because that horse had a blaze. Ab had known Granny long enough too. He should have known.

Maybe he did. But at least he tried. He opened the gate.

“Well,” he said, “it ain’t getting no earlier. I reckon I better…”

“Wait,” Granny said. Then we looked at the horse which was tied to the fence. At first glance it looked the best one of the seven. You had to see it just right to tell its near leg was sprung a little, maybe from being worked too hard too young under too much weight. “Take that one,” Granny said.

“That ain’t mine,” Ab said. “That’s one of yourn. I’ll just…”

“Take that one,” Granny said. Ab looked at her. You could have counted at least ten.

“Hell fire, Miz Millard,” he said.

“I’ve told you before about cursing on this place,” Granny said.

“Yessum,” Ab said. Then he said it again: “Hell fire.” He went into the lot and rammed the bit into the tied horse’s mouth and clapped the saddle on and snatched the piece of plow-line off and threw it over the fence and got up and Granny stood there until he had ridden out of the lot and Ringo closed the gate and that was the first time I noticed the chain and padlock from the smokehouse door and Ringo locked it and handed Granny the key and Ab sat for a minute, looking down at her. “Well, good-day,” he said. “I just hope for the sake of the Confedricy that Bed Forrest don’t never tangle with you with all the horses he’s got.” Then he said it again, maybe worse this time because now he was already on a horse pointed toward the gate: “Or you’ll damn shore leave him just one more passel of infantry before he can spit twice.”

Then he was gone too. Except for hearing Cousin Melisandre now and then, and those six horses with U. S. branded on their hips standing in the lot, it might never have happened. At least Ringo and I thought that was all of it. Every now and then Philadelphia would come downstairs with the pitcher and draw some more cold water for Cousin Melisandre’s cloths but we thought that after a while even that would just wear out and quit. Then Philadelphia came down again and came in to where Granny was cutting down a pair of Yankee pants that Father had worn home last time so they would fit Ringo. She didn’t say anything. She just stood in the door until Granny said. “All right. What now?”

“She want the banjo,” Philadelphia said.

“What?” Granny said. “My dulcimer? She can’t play it. Go back upstairs.”

But Philadelphia didn’t move. “Could I ax Mammy to come help me?”

“No,” Granny said. “Louvinia’s resting. She’s had about as much of this as I want her to stand. Go back upstairs. Give her some more wine if you can’t think of anything else.” And she told Ringo and me to go somewhere else, anywhere else, but even in the yard you could still hear Cousin Melisandre talking to Philadelphia. And once we even heard Granny though it was still mostly Cousin Melisandre telling Granny that she had already forgiven her, that nothing whatever had happened and that all she wanted now was peace. And after a while Louvinia came up from the cabin without even being sent for and went upstairs and then it began to look like we were going to be late for supper too. But Philadelphia finally came down and cooked it and carried Cousin Melisandre’s tray up and then we quit eating; we could hear Louvinia overhead, in Granny’s room now, and she came down and set the untasted tray on the table and stood beside Granny’s chair with the key to the trunk in her hand.

“All right,” Granny said. “Go call Joby and Lucius.” We got the lantern and the shovels. We went to the orchard and removed the brush and dug up the trunk and got the dulcimer and buried the trunk and put the brush back and brought the key in to Granny. And Ringo and I could hear her from our room and Granny was right. We heard her for a long time and Granny was surely right; she just never said but half of it. The moon came up after a while and we could look down from our window into the garden, at Cousin Melisandre sitting on the bench with the moonlight glinting on the pearl inlay of the dulcimer, and Philadelphia squatting on the sill of the gate with her apron over her head. Maybe she was asleep. It was already late. But I don’t see how.

So we didn’t hear Granny until she was already in the room, her shawl over her nightgown and carrying a candle.

“In a minute I’m going to have about all of this I aim to stand too,” she said. “Go wake Lucius and tell him to saddle the mule,” she told Ringo. “Bring me the pen and ink and a sheet of paper.” I fetched them. She didn’t sit down. She stood at the bureau while I held the candle, writing even and steady and not very much, and signed her name and let the paper lie open to dry until Lucius came in. “Ab Snopes said that Mr. Forrest is in Jefferson,” she told Lucius. “Find him. Tell him I will expect him here for breakfast in the morning and to bring that boy.” She used to know General Forrest in Memphis before he got to be a general. He used to trade with Grandfather Millard’s supply house and sometimes he would come out to sit with Grandfather on the front gallery and sometimes he would eat with them. “You can tell him I have six captured horses for him,” she said. “And never mind patter-rollers or soldiers either. Haven’t you got my signature on that paper?”

“I ain’t worrying about them,” Lucius said. “But suppose them Yankees…”

“I see,” Granny said. “Hah. I forgot. You’ve been waiting for Yankees, haven’t you? But those this morning seemed to be too busy trying to stay free to have much time to talk about it, didn’t they? Get along,” she said. “Do you think any Yankee is going to dare ignore what a Southern soldier or even a patter-roller wouldn’t? And you go to bed,” she said.

We lay down, both of us on Ringo’s pallet. We heard the mule when Lucius left. Then we heard the mule and at first we didn’t know we had been asleep, the mule coming back now and the moon had started down the west and Cousin Melisandre and Philadelphia were gone from the garden, to where Philadelphia at least could sleep better than sitting on a square sill with an apron over her head, or at least where it was quieter. And we heard Lucius fumbling up the stairs but we never heard Granny at all because she was already at the top of the stairs, talking down at the noise Lucius was trying not to make. “Speak up,” she said. “I ain’t asleep but I ain’t a lip-reader either. Not in the dark.”

“Genl Fawhrest say he respectful compliments,” Lucius said, “and he can’t come to breakfast this morning because he gonter to be whuppin Genl Smith at Tallahatchie Crossing about that time. But providin he ain’t too fur away in the wrong direction when him and Genl Smith git done, he be proud to accept your invitation next time he in the neighborhood. And he say ‘whut boy’.”

While you could count about five, Granny didn’t say anything. Then she said, “What?”

“He say ‘whut boy’,” Lucius said.

Then you could have counted ten. All we could hear was Lucius breathing. Then Granny said: “Did you wipe the mule down?”

“Yessum,” Lucius said.

“Did you turn her back into the pasture?”

“Yessum,” Lucius said.

“Then go to bed,” Granny said. “And you too,” she said.

General Forrest found out what boy. This time we didn’t know we had been asleep either, and it was no one mule now.

The sun was just rising. When we heard Granny and scrambled to the window, yesterday wasn’t a patch on it. There were at least fifty of them now, in gray; the whole outdoors was full of men on horses, with Cousin Philip out in front of them, sitting his horse in almost exactly the same spot where he had been yesterday, looking up at Granny’s window and not seeing it or anything else this time either. He had a hat now. He was holding it clamped over his heart and he hadn’t shaved and yesterday he had looked younger than Ringo because Ringo always had looked about ten years older than me. But now, with the first sun-ray making a little soft fuzz in the gold-colored stubble on his face, he looked even younger than I did, and gaunt and worn in the face like he hadn’t slept any last night and something else in his face too: like he not only hadn’t slept last night but by godfrey he wasn’t going to sleep tonight either as long as he had anything to do with it. “Goodbye,” he said. “Goodbye,” and whirled his horse, spurring, and raised the new hat over his head like he had carried the sabre yesterday and the whole mass of them went piling back across flower beds and lawns and all and back down the drive toward the gate while Granny still stood at her window in her nightgown, her voice louder than any man’s anywhere, I don’t care who he is or what he would be doing: “Backhouse! Backhouse! You, Backhouse!”

So we ate breakfast early. Granny sent Ringo in his nightshirt to wake Louvinia and Lucius both. So Lucius had the mule saddled before Louvinia even got the fire lit. This time Granny didn’t write a note. “Go to Tallahatchie Crossing,” she told Lucius. “Sit there and wait for him if necessary.”

“Suppose they done already started the battle?” Lucius said.

“Suppose they have?” Granny said. “What business is that of yours or mine either? You find Bedford Forrest. Tell him this is important; it won’t take long. But don’t you show your face here again without him.”

Lucius rode away. He was gone four days. He didn’t even get back in time for the wedding, coming back up the drive about sundown on the fourth day with two soldiers in one of General Forrest’s forage wagons with the mule tied to the tailgate. He didn’t know where he had been and he never did catch up with the battle. “I never even heard it,” he told Joby and Lucius and Louvinia and Philadelphia and Ringo and me. “If wars always moves that far and that fast, I don’t see how they ever have time to fight.”

But it was all over then. It was the second day, the day after Lucius left. It was just after dinner this time and by now we were used to soldiers. But these were different, just five of them, and we never had seen just that few of them before and we had come to think of soldiers as either jumping on and off horses in the yard or going back and forth through Granny’s flower beds at full gallop. These were all officers and I reckon maybe I hadn’t seen so many soldiers after all because I never saw this much braid before. They came up the drive at a trot, like people just taking a ride, and stopped without trompling even one flower bed and General Forrest got down and came up the walk toward where Granny waited on the front gallery: a big, dusty man with a big beard so black it looked almost blue and eyes like a sleepy owl, already taking off his hat. “Well, Miss Rosie,” he said.

“Don’t call me Rosie,” Granny said. “Come in. Ask your gentlemen to alight and come in.”

“They’ll wait there,” General Forrest said. “We are a little rushed. My plans have…” Then we were in the library. He wouldn’t sit down. He looked tired all right, but there was something else a good deal livelier than just tired. “Well, Miss Rosie,” he said. “I…”

“Don’t call me Rosie,” Granny said. “Can’t you even say Rosa?”

“Yessum,” he said. But he couldn’t. At least, he never did, “I reckon we both have had about enough of this. That boy…”

“Hah,” Granny said. “Night before last you were saying what boy. Where is he? I sent you word to bring him with you.”

“Under arrest,” General Forrest said. It was a considerable more than just tired. “I spent four days getting Smith just where I wanted him. After that, this boy here could have fought the battle.” He said ‘fit’ for fought just as he said ‘druv’ for drove and ‘drug’ for dragged. But maybe when you fought battles like he did, even Granny didn’t mind how you talked. “I won’t bother you with details. He didn’t know them either. All he had to do was exactly what I told him. I did everything but draw a diagram on his coat-tail of exactly what he was to do, no more and no less, from the time he left me until he saw me again: which was to make contact and then fall back. I gave him just exactly the right number of men so that he couldn’t do anything else but that. I told him exactly how fast to fall back and how much racket to make doing it and even how to make the racket. But what do you think he did?”

“I can tell you,” Granny said. “He sat on his horse at five o’clock yesterday morning, with my whole yard full of men behind him, yelling goodbye at my window.”

“He divided his men and sent half of them into the bushes to make a noise and took the other half who were the nearest to complete fools and led a sabre charge on that outpost. He didn’t fire a shot. He drove it clean back with sabres onto Smith’s main body and scared Smith so that he threw out all his cavalry and pulled out behind it and now I don’t know whether I’m about to catch him or he’s about to catch me. My provost finally caught the boy last night. He had come back and got the other thirty men of his company and was twenty miles ahead again, trying to find something to lead another charge against. ‘Do you want to be killed?’ I said. ‘Not especially,’ he said. ‘That is, I don’t especially care one way or the other.’ ‘Then neither do I,’ I said. ‘But you risked a whole company of my men.’ ‘Ain’t that what they enlisted for?’ he said. ‘They enlisted into a military establishment the purpose of which is to expend each man only at a profit. Or maybe you don’t consider me a shrewd enough trader in human meat?’ ‘I can’t say,’ he said. ‘Since day before yesterday I ain’t thought very much about how you or anybody else runs this war.’ ‘And just what were you doing day before yesterday that changed your ideas and habits?’ I said. ‘Fighting some of it,’ he said. ‘Dispersing the enemy.’ ‘Where?’ I said. ‘At a lady’s house a few miles from Jefferson,’ he said. ‘One of the niggers called her Granny like the white boy did. The others called her Miss Rosie.’” This time Granny didn’t say anything. She just waited.

“Go on,” she said.

“I’m still trying to win battles, even if since day before yesterday you ain’t,’ I said. I’ll send you down to Johnston at Jackson,’ I said. ‘He’ll put you inside Vicksburg, where you can lead private charges day and night too if you want.’ ‘Like hell you will,’ he said. And I said excuse me ‘Like hell I won’t.’” And Granny didn’t say anything. It was like day before yesterday with Ab Snopes: not like she hadn’t heard but as if right now it didn’t matter, that this was no time either to bother with such.

“And did you?” she said.

“I can’t. He knows it. You can’t punish a man for routing an enemy four times his weight. What would I say back there in Tennessee, where we both live, let alone that uncle of his, the one they licked for Governor six years ago, on Bragg’s personal staff now, with his face over Bragg’s shoulder every time Bragg opens a dispatch or picks up a pen. And I’m still trying to win battles. But I can’t. Because of a girl, one single lone young female girl that ain’t got anything under the sun against him except that, since it was his misfortune to save her from a passel of raiding enemy in a situation that everybody but her is trying to forget, she can’t seem to bear to hear his last name. Yet because of that, every battle I plan from now on will be at the mercy of a twenty-two-year-old shavetail excuse me again who might decide to lead a private charge any time he can holler at least two men in gray coats into moving in the same direction.” He stopped.

He looked at Granny. “Well?” he said.

“So now you’ve got to it,” Granny said. “Well what, Mr. Forrest?”

“Why, just have done with this foolishness. I told you I’ve got that boy, in close arrest, with a guard with a bayonet. But there won’t be any trouble there. I figured even yesterday morning that he had already lost his mind. But I reckon he’s recovered enough of it since the Provost took him last night to comprehend that I still consider myself his commander even if he don’t. So all necessary now is for you to put your foot down. Put it down hard. Now. You’re her grandma. She lives in your home. And it looks like she is going to live in it a good while yet before she gets back to Memphis to that uncle or whoever it is that calls himself her guardian. So just put your foot down. Make her. Mr. Millard would have already done that if he had been here. And I know when. It would have been two days ago by now.”

Granny waited until he got done. She stood with her arms crossed, holding each elbow in the other. “Is that all I’m to do?” she said.

“Yes,” General Forrest said. “If she don’t want to listen to you right at first, maybe as his commander…”

Granny didn’t even say “Hah.” She didn’t even send me.

She didn’t even stop in the hall and call. She went upstairs herself and we stood there and I thought maybe she was going to bring the dulcimer too and I thought how if I was General Forrest I would go back and get Cousin Philip and make him sit in the library until about supper-time while Cousin Melisandre played the dulcimer and sang. Then he could take Cousin Philip on back and then he could finish the war without worrying.

She didn’t have the dulcimer. She just had Cousin Melisandre. They came in and Granny stood to one side again with her arms crossed, holding her elbows. “Here she is,” she said. “Say it. This is Mr. Bedford Forrest,” she told Cousin Melisandre. “Say it,” she told General Forrest.

He didn’t have time. When Cousin Melisandre first came, she tried to read aloud to Ringo and me. It wasn’t much. That is, what she insisted on reading to us wasn’t so bad, even if it was mostly about ladies looking out windows and playing on something (maybe they were dulcimers too) while somebody else was off somewhere fighting. It was the way she read it. When Granny said this is Mister Forrest, Cousin Melisandre’s face looked exactly like her voice would sound when she read to us. She took two steps into the library and curtsied, spreading her hoops back, and stood up. “General Forrest,” she said. “I am acquainted with an associate of his. Will the General please give him the sincerest wishes for triumph in war and success in love, from one who will never see him again?” Then she curtsied again and spread her hoops backward and stood up and took two steps backward and turned and went out.

After a while Granny said, “Well, Mr. Forrest?”

General Forrest began to cough. He lifted his coat-tail with one hand and reached the other into his hip pocket like he was going to pull at least a musket out of it and got his handkerchief and coughed into it a while. It wasn’t very clean. It looked about like the one Cousin Philip was trying to wipe his coat off with in the summer house day before yesterday.

Then he put the handkerchief back. He didn’t say “Hah” either. “Can I reach the Holly Branch road without having to go through Jefferson?” he said.

Then Granny moved. “Open the desk,” she said. “Lay out a sheet of note-paper.” I did. And I remember how I stood at one side of the desk and General Forrest at the other, and watched Granny’s hand move the pen steady and not very slow and not very long across the paper because it never did take her very long to say anything, no matter what it was, whether she was talking it or writing it. Though I didn’t see it then, but only later, when it hung framed under glass above Cousin Melisandre’s and Cousin Philip’s mantel: the fine steady slant of Granny’s hand and General Forrest’s sprawling signatures below it that looked itself a good deal like a charge of massed cavalry: Lieutenant P. S. Backhouse, Company D, Tennessee Cavalry, was this day raised to the honorary rank of Brevet Major General killed while engaging the enemy. Vice whom Philip St-Just Backus is hereby appointed Lieutenant, Company D, Tennessee Cavalry.

I didn’t see it then. General Forrest picked it up. “Now I’ve got to have a battle,” he said. “Another sheet, son.” I laid that one out on the desk.

“A battle?” Granny said.

“To give Johnston,” he said. “Confound it, Miss Rosie, can’t you understand either that I’m just a fallible mortal man trying to run a military command according to certain fixed and inviolable rules, no matter how foolish the business looks to superior outside folks?”

“All right,” Granny said. “You had one. I was looking at it.”

“So I did,” General Forrest said. “Hah,” he said. “The battle of Sartoris.”

“No,” Granny said. “Not at my house.”

“They did all the shooting down at the creek,” I said.

“What creek?” he said.

So I told him. It ran through the pasture. Its name was Hurricane Creek but not even the white people called it hurricane except Granny. General Forrest didn’t either when he sat down at the desk and wrote the report to General Johnston at Jackson: A unit of my command on detached duty engaged a body of the enemy drove him from the field dispersed him this day 28th ult. April 1862 at Harrykin Creek. With loss of one man.

I saw that. I watched him write it. Then he got up and folded the sheets into his pocket and was already going toward the table where his hat was.

“Wait,” Granny said. “Lay out another sheet,” she said. “Come back here.”

General Forrest stopped and turned. “Another one?”

“Yes!” Granny said. “A furlough, pass, whatever you busy military establishments call them! So John Sartoris can come home long enough to…” and she said it herself, she looked straight at me and even backed up and said some of it over as though to make sure there wouldn’t be any mistake: ” can come back home and give away that damn bride!”

IV

AND THAT was all. The day came and Granny waked Ringo and me before sunup and we ate what breakfast we had from two plates on the back steps. And we dug up the trunk and brought it into the house and polished the silver and Ringo and I brought dogwood and redbud branches from the pasture and Granny cut the flowers, all of them, cutting them herself with Cousin Melisandre and Philadelphia just carrying the baskets; so many of them until the house was so full that Ringo and I would believe we smelled them even across the pasture each time we came up. Though of course we could, it was just the food: the last ham from the smokehouse and the chickens and the flour which Granny had been saving and the last of the sugar which she had been saving along with the bottle of champagne for the day when the North surrendered which Louvinia had been cooking for two days now, to remind us each time we approached the house of what was going on and that the flowers were there. As if we could have forgotten about the food. And they dressed Cousin Melisandre and Ringo in his new blue pants and I in my gray ones which were not so new, we stood in the late afternoon on the gallery. Granny and Cousin Melisandre and Louvinia and Philadelphia and Ringo and I and watched them enter the gate. General Forrest was not one. Ringo and I had thought maybe he might be, if only to bring Cousin Philip. Then we thought that maybe, since Father was coming anyway, General Forrest would let Father bring him, with Cousin Philip maybe handcuffed to Father and the soldier with the bayonet following, or maybe still just handcuffed to the soldier until he and Cousin Melisandre were married and Father unlocked him.

But General Forrest wasn’t one, and Cousin Philip wasn’t handcuffed to anybody and there was no bayonet and not even a soldier because these were all officers too. And we stood in the parlor while the home-made candles burnt in the last of sunset in the bright candlesticks which Philadelphia and Ringo and I had polished with the rest of the silver because Granny and Louvinia were both busy cooking and even Cousin Melisandre polished a little of it although Louvinia could pick out the ones she polished without hardly looking and hand them to Philadelphia to polish again: Cousin Melisandre in the dress which hadn’t needed to be altered for her at all because Mother wasn’t much older than Cousin Melisandre even when she died, and which would still button on Granny too just like it did the day she married in it, and the chaplain and Father and Cousin Philip and the four others in their gray and braid and sabres and Cousin Melisandre’s face was all right now and Cousin Philip’s was too because it just had the beautiful-girl look on it and none of us had ever seen him look any other way. Then we ate, and Ringo and I anyway had been waiting on that for three days and then we did it and then it was over too, fading just a little each day until the palate no longer remembered and only our mouths would run a little water as we would name the dishes aloud to one another, until even the water would run less and less and less and it would take something we just hoped to eat some day if they ever got done fighting, to make it run at all.

And that was all. The last sound of wheel and hoof died away, Philadelphia came in from the parlor carrying the candlesticks and blowing out the candles as she came, and Louvinia set the kitchen clock on the table and gathered the last of soiled silver from supper into the dishpan and it might never have even been. “Well,” Granny said. She didn’t move, leaning her forearms on the table a little and we had never seen that before. She spoke to Ringo without turning her head: “Go call Joby and Lucius.” And even when we brought the trunk in and set it against the wall and opened back the lid, she didn’t move. She didn’t even look at Louvinia either. “Put the clock in too!” she said. “I don’t think we’ll bother to time ourselves tonight.”

I

IF HE had been thirty, he would not have needed the two aspirin tablets and the half glass of raw gin before he could bear the shower’s needling on his body and steady his hands to shave. But then when he had been thirty neither could he have afforded to drink as much each evening as he now drank; certainly he would not have done it in the company of the men and the women in which, at forty-eight, he did each evening, even though knowing during the very final hours filled with the breaking of glass and the shrill cries of drunken women above the drums and saxophones the hours during which he carried a little better than his weight both in the amount of liquor consumed and in the number and sum of checks paid that six or eight hours later he would rouse from what had not been sleep at all but instead that dreamless stupefaction of alcohol out of which last night’s turgid and licensed uproar would die, as though without any interval for rest or recuperation, into the familiar shape of his bedroom, the bed’s foot silhouetted by the morning light which entered the bougainvillaea-bound windows beyond which his painful and almost unbearable eyes could see the view which might be called the monument to almost twenty-five years of industry and desire, of shrewdness and luck and even fortitude: the opposite canyon-flank dotted with the white villas half hidden in imported olive groves or friezed by the sombre spaced columns of cypress like the facades of eastern temples, whose owners’ names and faces and even voices were glib and familiar in back corners of the United States and of America and of the world where those of Einstein and Rousseau and Esculapius had never sounded.

He didn’t waken sick. He never wakened ill nor became ill from drinking, not only because he had drunk too long and too steadily for that, but because he was too tough even after the thirty soft years; he came from too tough stock, on that day thirty-four years ago when at fourteen he had fled, on the brake-beam of a west-bound freight, the little lost Nebraska town named for, permeated with, his father’s history and existence, a town to be sure, but only in the sense that any shadow is larger than the object which casts it. It was still frontier even as he remembered it at five and six: the projected and increased shadow of a small outpost of sod-roofed dugouts on the immense desolation of the plains where his father, Ira Ewing too, had been first to essay to wring wheat during the six days between those when, outdoors in spring and summer and in the fetid half dark of a snowbound dugout in the winter and fall, he preached. The second Ira Ewing had come a long way since then, from that barren and treeless village which he had fled by a night freight to where he now lay in a hundred-thousand-dollar house, waiting until he knew that he could rise and go to the bath and put the two aspirin tablets into his mouth.

They, his mother and father, had tried to explain it to him, something about fortitude, the will to endure. At fourteen he could neither answer them with logic and reason nor explain what he wanted: he could only flee. Nor was he fleeing his father’s harshness and wrath. He was fleeing the scene itself, the treeless immensity in the lost center of which he seemed to see the sum of his father’s and mother’s dead youth and bartered lives as a tiny forlorn spot which nature permitted to green into brief and niggard wheat for a season’s moment before blotting it all with the primal and invincible snow as though (not even promise, not even threat) in grim and almost playful augury of the final doom of all life. And it was not even this that he was fleeing because he was not fleeing: it was only that absence, removal, was the only argument which fourteen knew how to employ against adults with any hope of success. He spent the next ten years half tramp half casual laborer as he drifted down the Pacific Coast to Los Angeles; at thirty he was married, to a Los Angeles girl, daughter of a carpenter, and father of a son and a daughter and with a foothold in real estate; at forty-eight he spent fifty thousand dollars a year, owning a business which he had built up unaided and preserved intact through nineteen-twenty-nine; he had given to his children luxuries and advantages which his own father not only could not have conceived in fact, but would have condemned completely in theory as it proved, as the paper which the Filipino chauffeur, who each morning carried him into the house and undressed him and put him to bed, had removed from the pocket of his topcoat and laid on the reading table proved, with reason. On the death of his father twenty years ago he had returned to Nebraska, for the first time, and fetched his mother back with him, and she was now established in a home of her own only the less sumptuous because she refused (with a kind of abashed and thoughtful unshakability which he did not remark) anything finer or more elaborate. It was the house in which they had all lived at first, though he and his wife and children had moved within the year. Three years ago they had moved again, into the house where he now waked in a select residential section of Beverley Hills, but not once in the nineteen years had he failed to stop (not even during the last five, when to move at all in the mornings required a terrific drain on that character or strength which the elder Ira had bequeathed him, which had enabled the other Ira to pause on the Nebraska plain and dig a hole for his wife to bear children in while he planted wheat) on his way to the office (twenty miles out of his way to the office) and spend ten minutes with her. She lived in as complete physical ease and peace as he could devise. He had arranged her affairs so that she did not even need to bother with money, cash, in order to live; he had arranged credit for her with a neighboring market and butcher so that the Japanese gardener who came each day to water and tend the flowers could do her shopping for her; she never even saw the bills. And the only reason she had no servant was that even at seventy she apparently clung stubbornly to the old habit of doing her own cooking and housework. So it would seem that he had been right. Perhaps there were times when, lying in bed like this and waiting for the will to rise and take the aspirin and the gin (mornings perhaps following evenings when he had drunk more than ordinarily and when even the six or seven hours of oblivion had not been sufficient to enable him to distinguish between reality and illusion) something of the old strong harsh Campbellite blood which the elder Ira must have bequeathed him might have caused him to see or feel or imagine his father looking down from somewhere upon him, the prodigal, and what he had accomplished. If this were so, then surely the elder Ira, looking down for the last two mornings upon the two tabloid papers which the Filipino removed from his master’s topcoat and laid on the reading table, might have taken advantage of that old blood and taken his revenge, not just for that afternoon thirty-four years ago but for the entire thirty-four years.

When he gathered himself, his will, his body, at last and rose from the bed he struck the paper so that it fell to the floor and lay open at his feet, but he did not look at it. He just stood so, tall, in silk pajamas, thin where his father had been gaunt with the years of hard work and unceasing struggle with the unpredictable and implacable earth (even now, despite the life which he had led, he had very little paunch) looking at nothing while at his feet the black headline flared above the row of five or six tabloid photographs from which his daughter alternately stared back or flaunted long pale shins: APRIL LALEAR BARES ORGY SECRETS. When he moved at last he stepped on the paper, walking on his bare feet into the bath; now it was his trembling and jerking hands that he watched as he shook the two tablets onto the glass shelf and set the tumbler into the rack and unstoppered the gin bottle and braced his knuckles against the wall in order to pour into the tumbler. But he did not look at the paper, not even when, shaved, he re-entered the bedroom and went to the bed beside which his slippers sat and shoved the paper aside with his foot in order to step into them. Perhaps, doubtless, he did not need to. The trial was but entering its third tabloidal day now, and so for two days his daughter’s face had sprung out at him, hard, blonde and inscrutable, from every paper he opened; doubtless he had never forgot her while he slept even, that he had waked into thinking about remembering her as he had waked into the dying drunken uproar of the evening eight hours behind him without any interval between for rest or forgetting.

Nevertheless as, dressed in a burnt orange turtleneck sweater beneath his gray flannels, he descended the Spanish staircase, he was outwardly calm and possessed. The delicate iron balustrade and the marble steps coiled down to the tile-floored and barn-like living room beyond which he could hear his wife and son talking on the breakfast terrace. The son’s name was Voyd. He and his wife had named the two children by what might have been called mutual contemptuous armistice: his wife called the boy Voyd, for what reason he never knew; he in his turn named the girl (the child whose woman’s face had met him from every paper he touched for two days now beneath or above the name, April Lalear) Samantha, after his own mother. He could hear them talking: the wife between whom and himself there had been nothing save civility, and not always a great deal of that, for ten years now; and the son who one afternoon two years ago had been delivered at the door drunk and insensible by a car whose occupants he did not see and, it devolving upon him to undress the son and put him to bed, whom he discovered to be wearing, in place of underclothes, a woman’s brassiere and step-ins. A few minutes later, hearing the blows perhaps, Voyd’s mother ran in and found her husband beating the still unconscious son with a series of towels which a servant was steeping in rotation in a basin of ice-water. He was beating the son hard, with grim and deliberate fury. Whether he was trying to sober the son up or was merely beating him, possibly he himself did not know.

His wife though jumped to the latter conclusion. In his raging disillusionment he tried to tell her about the woman’s garments but she refused to listen; she assailed him in turn with virago fury. Since that day the son had contrived to see his father only in his mother’s presence (which neither the son nor the mother found very difficult, by the way) and at which times the son treated his father with a blend of cringing spite and vindictive insolence half a cat’s and half a woman’s.

He emerged onto the terrace; the voices ceased. The sun, strained by the vague high soft almost nebulous California haze, fell upon the terrace with a kind of treacherous unbrightness. The terrace, the sun-drenched terra cotta tiles, butted into a rough and savage shear of canyon-wall bare yet without dust, on or against which a solid mat of flowers bloomed in fierce lush myriad-colored paradox as though in place of being rooted into and drawing from the soil they lived upon air alone and had been merely leaned intact against the sustenanceless lava-wall by someone who would later return and take them away. The son, Voyd, apparently naked save for a pair of straw-colored shorts, his body brown with sun and scented faintly by the depilatory which he used on arms, chest and legs, lay in a wicker chair, his feet in straw beach shoes, an open newspaper across his brown legs. The paper was the highest class one of the city, yet there was a black headline across half of it too, and even without pausing, without even being aware that he had looked, Ira saw there too the name which he recognized.

He went on to his place; the Filipino who put him to bed each night, in a white service jacket now, drew his chair.

Beside the glass of orange juice and the waiting cup lay a neat pile of mail topped by a telegram. He sat down and took up the telegram; he had not glanced at his wife until she spoke: “Mrs. Ewing telephoned. She says for you to stop in there on your way to town.”

He stopped; his hands opening the telegram stopped. Still blinking a little against the sun he looked at the face opposite him across the table the smooth dead makeup, the thin lips and the thin nostrils and the pale blue unforgiving eyes, the meticulous platinum hair which looked as though it had been transferred to her skull with a brush from a book of silver leaf such as window painters use. “What?” he said. “Telephoned? Here?”

“Why not? Have I ever objected to any of your women telephoning you here?”

The unopened telegram crumpled suddenly in his hand.

“You know what I mean,” he said harshly. “She never telephoned me in her life. She don’t have to. Not that message. When have I ever failed to go by there on my way to town?”

“How do I know?” she said. “Or are you the same model son you have been a husband and seem to be a father?” Her voice was not shrill yet, nor even very loud, and none could have told how fast her breathing was because she sat so still, rigid beneath the impeccable and unbelievable hair, looking at him with that pale and outraged unforgiveness. They both looked at each other across the luxurious table: the two people who at one time twenty years ago would have turned as immediately and naturally and unthinkingly to one another in trouble, who even ten years ago might have done so.

“You know what I mean,” he said, harshly again, holding himself too against the trembling which he doubtless believed was from last night’s drinking, from the spent alcohol. “She don’t read papers. She never even sees one. Did you send it to her?”

“I?” she said. “Send what?”

“Damnation!” he cried. “A paper! Did you send it to her? Don’t lie to me.”

“What if I did?” she cried. “Who is she, that she must not know about it? Who is she, that you should shield her from knowing it? Did you make any effort to keep me from knowing it? Did you make any effort to keep it from happening? Why didn’t you think about that all those years while you were too drunk, too besotted with drink, to know or notice or care what Samantha was?”

“Miss April Lalear of the cinema, if you please,” Voyd said. They paid no attention to him; they glared at one another across the table.

“Ah,” he said, quiet and rigid, his lips scarcely moving. “So I am to blame for this too, am I? I made my daughter a bitch, did I? Maybe you will tell me next that I made my son a f…”

“Stop!” she cried. She was panting now; they glared at one another across the suave table, across the five feet of irrevocable division.

“Now, now,” Voyd said. “Don’t interfere with the girl’s career. After all these years, when at last she seems to have found a part that she can…” He ceased; his father had turned and was looking at him. Voyd lay in his chair, looking at his father with that veiled insolence that was almost feminine. Suddenly it became completely feminine; with a muffled half-scream he swung his legs out to spring up and flee but it was too late; Ira stood above him, gripping him not by the throat but by the face with one hand, so that Voyd’s mouth puckered and slobbered in his father’s hard, shaking hand. Then the mother sprang forward and tried to break Ira’s grip but he flung her away and then caught and held her, struggling too, with the other hand when she sprang in again.

“Go on,” he said. “Say it.” But Voyd could say nothing because of his father’s hand gripping his jaws open, or more than likely because of terror. His body was free of the chair now, writhing and thrashing while he made his slobbering, moaning sound of terror while his father held him with one hand and held his screaming mother with the other one.

Then Ira flung Voyd free, onto the terrace; Voyd rolled once and came onto his feet, crouching, retreating toward the French windows with one arm flung up before his face while he cursed his father. Then he was gone. Ira faced his wife, holding her quiet too at last, panting too, the skillful map of makeup standing into relief now like a paper mask trimmed smoothly and pasted onto her skull. He released her.

“You sot,” she said. “You drunken sot. And yet you wonder why your children…”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “All right. That’s not the question. That’s all done. The question is, what to do about it. My father would have known. He did it once.” He spoke in a dry light pleasant voice: so much so that she stood, panting still but quiet, watching him. “I remember. I was about ten. We had rats in the barn. We tried everything. Terriers. Poison. Then one day father said, ‘Come.’ We went to the barn and stopped all the cracks, the holes. Then we set fire to it. What do you think of that?” Then she was gone too.

He stood for a moment, blinking a little, his eyeballs beating faintly and steadily in his skull with the impact of the soft unchanging sunlight, the fierce innocent mass of the flowers.

“Philip!” he called. The Filipino appeared, brownfaced, impassive, with a pot of hot coffee, and set it beside the empty cup and the ice-bedded glass of orange juice. “Get me a drink,” Ira said. The Filipino glanced at him, then he became busy at the table, shifting the cup and setting the pot down and shifting the cup again while Ira watched him.

“Did you hear me?” Ira said. The Filipino stood erect and looked at him.

“You told me not to give it to you until you had your orange juice and coffee.”

“Will you or won’t you get me a drink?” Ira shouted.

“Very good, sir,” the Filipino said. He went out. Ira looked after him; this had happened before: he knew well that the brandy would not appear until he had finished the orange juice and the coffee, though just where the Filipino lurked to watch him he never knew. He sat again and opened the crumpled telegram and read it, the glass of orange juice in the other hand. It was from his secretary: MADE SETUP BEFORE I BROKE STORY LAST NIGHT STOP THIRTY PERCENT FRONT PAGE STOP MADE APPOINTMENT FOR YOU COURTHOUSE THIS P. M. STOP WILL YOU COME TO OFFICE OR CALL ME. He read the telegram again, the glass of orange juice still poised. Then he put both down and rose and went and lifted the paper from the terrace where Voyd had flung it, and read the half headline: LALEAR WOMAN DAUGHTER OF PROMINENT LOCAL FAMILY. Admits Real Name Is Samantha Ewing, Daughter of Ira Ewing, Local Realtor. He read it quietly; he said quietly, aloud: “It was that Jap that showed her the paper. It was that damned gardener.” He returned to the table. After a while the Filipino came, with the brandy-and-soda, and wearing now a jacket of bright imitation tweed, telling him that the car was ready.

II

HIS MOTHER lived in Glendale; it was the house which he had taken when he married and later bought, in which his son and daughter had been born a bungalow in a cul-desac of pepper trees and flowering shrubs and vines which the Japanese tended, backed into a barren foothill combed and curried into a cypress-and-marble cemetery dramatic as a stage set and topped by an electric sign in red bulbs which, in the San Fernando valley fog, glared in broad sourceless ruby as though just beyond the crest lay not heaven but hell. The length of his sports model car in which the Filipino sat reading a paper dwarfed it. But she would have no other, just as she would have neither servant, car, nor telephone: a gaunt spare slightly stooped woman upon whom even California and ease had put no flesh, sitting in one of the chairs which she had insisted on bringing all the way from Nebraska. At first she had been content to allow the Nebraska furniture to remain in storage, since it had not been needed (when Ira moved his wife and family out of the house and into the second one, the intermediate one, they had bought new furniture too, leaving the first house furnished complete for his mother) but one day, he could not recall just when, he discovered that she had taken the one chair out of storage and was using it in the house. Later, after he began to sense that quality of unrest in her, he had suggested that she let him clear the house of its present furniture and take all of hers out of storage but she declined, apparently preferring or desiring to leave the Nebraska furniture where it was. Sitting so, a knitted shawl about her shoulders, she looked less like she lived in or belonged to the house, the room, than the son with his beach burn and his faintly theatrical gray temples and his bright expensive suavely antiphonal garments did. She had changed hardly at all in the thirty-four years; she and the older Ira Ewing too, as the son remembered him, who, dead, had suffered as little of alteration as while he had been alive. As the sod Nebraska outpost had grown into a village and then into a town, his father’s aura alone had increased, growing into the proportions of a giant who at some irrevocable yet recent time had engaged barehanded in some titanic struggle with the pitiless earth and endured and in a sense conquered it too, like the town, a shadow out of all proportion to the gaunt gnarled figure of the actual man. And the actual woman too as the son remembered them back in that time.

Two people who drank air and who required to eat and sleep as he did and who had brought him into the world, yet were strangers as though of another race, who stood side by side in an irrevocable loneliness as though strayed from another planet, not as husband and wife but as blood brother and sister, even twins, of the same travail because they had gained a strange peace through fortitude and the will and strength to endure.

“Tell me again what it is,” she said. “I’ll try to understand.”

“So it was Kazimura that showed you the damned paper,” he said. She didn’t answer this; she was not looking at him.

“You tell me she has been in the pictures before, for two years. That that was why she had to change her name, that they all have to change their names.”

“Yes. They call them extra parts. For about two years, God knows why.”

“And then you tell me that this that all this was so she could get into the pictures ”

He started to speak, then he caught himself back out of some quick impatience, some impatience perhaps of grief or despair or at least rage, holding his voice, his tone, quiet: “I said that that was one possible reason. All I know is that the, man has something to do with pictures, giving out the parts. And that the police caught him and Samantha and the other girl in an apartment with the doors all locked and that Samantha and the other woman were naked. They say that he was naked too and he says he was not. He says in the trial that he was framed, tricked; that they were trying to blackmail him into giving them parts in a picture; that they fooled him into coming there and arranged for the police to break in just after they had taken off their clothes; that one of them made a signal from the window. Maybe so. Or maybe they were all just having a good time and were innocently caught.” Unmoving, rigid, his face broke, wrung with faint bitter smiling as though with indomitable and impassive suffering, or maybe just smiling, just rage. Still his mother did not look at him.

“But you told me she was already in the pictures. That that was why she had to change her…”

“I said, extra parts,” he said. He had to catch himself again, out of his jangled and outraged nerves, back from the fierce fury of the impatience. “Can’t you understand that you don’t get into the pictures just by changing your name? and that you don’t even stay there when you get in? that you can’t even stay there by being female? that they come here in droves on every train, girls younger and prettier than Samantha and who will do anything to get into the pictures? So will she, apparently; but who know or are willing to learn to do more things than even she seems to have thought of? But let’s don’t talk about it. She has made her bed; all I can do is to help her up: I can’t wash the sheets. Nobody can. I must go, anyway; I’m late.” He rose, looking down at her. “They said you telephoned me this morning. Is this what it was?”

“No,” she said. Now she looked up at him; now her gnarled hands began to pick faintly at one another. “You offered me a servant once.”

“Yes. I thought fifteen years ago that you ought to have one. Have you changed your mind? Do you want me to…”

Now she stopped looking at him again, though her hands did not cease. “That was fifteen years ago. It would have cost at least five hundred dollars a year. That would be…”

He laughed, short and harsh. “I’d like to see the Los Angeles servant you could get for five hundred dollars a year. But what…” He stopped laughing, looking down at her.

“That would be at least five thousand dollars,” she said.

He looked down at her. After a while he said, “Are you asking me again for money?” She didn’t answer nor move, her hands picking slowly and quietly at one another. “Ah,” he said. “You want to go away. You want to run from it. So do I!” he cried, before he could catch himself this time; “so do I! But you did not choose me when you elected a child; neither did I choose my two. But I shall have to bear them and you will have to bear all of us. There is no help for it.” He caught himself now, panting, quieting himself by will as when he would rise from bed, though his voice was still harsh: “Where would you go? Where would you hide from it?”

“Home,” she said.

“Home?” he repeated; he repeated in a kind of amazement: “home?” before he understood. “You would go back there? with those winters, that snow and all? Why, you wouldn’t live to see the first Christmas: don’t you know that?” She didn’t move nor look up at him. “Nonsense,” he said. “This will blow over. In a month there will be two others and nobody except us will even remember it. And you don’t need money. You have been asking me for money for years, but you don’t need it. I had to worry about money so much at one time myself that I swore that the least I could do was to arrange your affairs so you would never even have to look at the stuff. I must go; there is something at the office today. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

It was already one o’clock. “Courthouse,” he told the Filipino, settling back into the car. “My God, I want a drink.” He rode with his eyes closed against the sun; the secretary had already sprung onto the runningboard before he realized that they had reached the courthouse. The secretary, bareheaded too, wore a jacket of authentic tweed; his turtleneck sweater was dead black, his hair was black too, varnished smooth to his skull; he spread before Ira a dummy newspaper page laid out to embrace the blank space for the photograph beneath the caption: APRIL LALEAR’S FATHER. Beneath the space was the legend: IRA EWING, PRESIDENT OF THE EWING REALTY CO., WILSHIRE BOULEVARD, BEVERLY HILLS.

“Is thirty percent all you could get?” Ira said. The secretary was young; he glared at Ira for an instant in vague impatient fury.

“Jesus, thirty percent is thirty percent. They are going to print a thousand extra copies and use our mailing list. It will be spread all up and down the Coast and as far East as Reno. What do you want? We can’t expect them to put under your picture, ‘Turn to page fourteen for halfpage ad,’ can we?” Ira sat again with his eyes closed, waiting for his head to stop.

“All right,” he said. “Are they ready now?”

“All set. You will have to go inside. They insisted it be inside, so everybody that sees it will know it is the courthouse.”

“All right,” Ira said. He got out; with his eyes half closed and the secretary at his elbow he mounted the steps and entered the courthouse. The reporter and the photographer were waiting but he did not see them yet; he was aware only of being enclosed in a gaping crowd which he knew would be mostly women, hearing the secretary and a policeman clearing the way in the corridor outside the courtroom door.

“This is O. K.,” the secretary said. Ira stopped; the darkness was easier on his eyes though he did not open them yet; he just stood, hearing the secretary and the policeman herding the women, the faces, back; someone took him by the arm and turned him; he stood obediently; the magnesium flashed and glared, striking against his painful eyeballs like blows; he had a vision of wan faces craned to look at him from either side of a narrow human lane; with his eyes shut tight now he turned, blundering until the reporter in charge spoke to him: “Just a minute, chief. We better get another one just in case.” This time his eyes were tightly closed; the magnesium flashed, washed over them; in the thin acrid smell of it he turned and with the secretary again at his elbow he moved blindly back and into the sunlight and into his car. He gave no order this time, he just said, “Get me a drink.” He rode with his eyes closed again while the car cleared the downtown traffic and then began to move quiet, powerful and fast under him; he rode so for a long while before he felt the car swing into the palm-bordered drive, slowing. It stopped; the doorman opened the door for him, speaking to him by name. The elevator boy called him by name too, stopping at the right floor without direction; he followed the corridor and knocked at a door and was fumbling for the key when the door opened upon a woman in a bathing suit beneath a loose beach cloak, a woman with treated hair also and brown eyes, who swung the door back for him to enter and then to behind him, looking at him with the quick bright faint serene smiling which only a woman nearing forty can give to a man to whom she is not married and from whom she has had no secrets physical and few mental over a long time of pleasant and absolute intimacy. She had been married though and divorced; she had a child, a daughter of fourteen, whom he was now keeping in boarding school. He looked at her, blinking, as she closed the door.

“You saw the papers,” he said. She kissed him, not suddenly, without heat, in a continuation of the movement which closed the door, with a sort of warm envelopment; suddenly he cried, “I can’t understand it! After all the advantages that… after all I tried to do for them ”

“Hush,” she said. “Hush, now. Get into your trunks; I’ll have a drink ready for you when you have changed. Will you eat some lunch if I have it sent up?”

“No. I don’t want any lunch. After all I have tried to give—”

“Hush, now. Get into your trunks while I fix you a drink. It’s going to be swell at the beach.” In the bedroom his bathing trunks and robe were laid out on the bed. He changed, hanging his suit in the closet where her clothes hung, where there hung already another suit of his and clothes for the evening. When he returned to the sitting room she had fixed the drink for him; she held the match to his cigarette and watched him sit down and take up the glass, watching him still with that serene impersonal smiling.

Now he watched her slip off the cape and kneel at the cellarette, filling a silver flask, in the bathing costume of the moment, such as ten thousand wax female dummies wore in ten thousand shop windows that summer, such as a hundred thousand young girls wore on California beaches; he looked at her, kneeling back, buttocks and flanks trim enough, even firm enough (so firm in fact as to be a little on the muscular side, what with unremitting and perhaps even rigorous care) but still those of forty. But I don’t want a young girl, he thought. Would to God that all young girls, all young female flesh, were removed, blasted even, from the earth. He finished the drink before she had filled the flask.

“I want another one,” he said.

“All right,” she said. “As soon as we get to the beach.”

“No. Now.”

“Let’s go on to the beach first. It’s almost three o’clock. Won’t that be better?”

“Just so you are not trying to tell me I can’t have another drink now.”

“Of course not,” she said, slipping the flask into the cape’s pocket and looking at him again with that warm, faint, inscrutable smiling. “I just want to have a dip before the water gets too cold.” They went down to the car; the Filipino knew this too: he held the door for her to slip under the wheel, then he got himself into the back. The car moved on; she drove well. “Why not lean back and shut your eyes,” she told Ira, “and rest until we get to the beach? Then we will have a dip and a drink.”

“I don’t want to rest,” he said. “I’m all right.” But he did close his eyes again and again the car ran powerful, smooth, and fast beneath him, performing its afternoon’s jaunt over the incredible distances of which the city was composed; from time to time, had he looked, he could have seen the city in the bright soft vague hazy sunlight, random, scattered about the arid earth like so many gay scraps of paper blown without order, with its curious air of being rootless, of houses bright beautiful and gay, without basements or foundations, lightly attached to a few inches of light penetrable earth, lighter even than dust and laid lightly in turn upon the profound and primeval lava, which one good hard rain would wash forever from the sight and memory of man as a firehose flushes down a gutter that city of almost incalculable wealth whose queerly appropriate fate it is to be erected upon a few spools of a substance whose value is computed in billions and which may be completely destroyed in that second’s instant of a careless match between the moment of striking and the moment when the striker might have sprung and stamped it out.

“You saw your mother today,” she said. “Has she…”

“Yes.” He didn’t open his eyes. “That damned Jap gave it to her. She asked me for money again. I found out what she wants with it. She wants to run, to go back to Nebraska. I told her, so did I… If she went back there, she would not live until Christmas. The first month of winter would kill her. Maybe it wouldn’t even take winter to do it.”

She still drove, she still watched the road, yet somehow she had contrived to become completely immobile. “So that’s what it is,” she said.

He did not open his eyes. “What what is?”

“The reason she has been after you all this time to give her money, cash. Why, even when you won’t do it, every now and then she asks you again.”

“What what…” He opened his eyes, looking at her profile; he sat up suddenly. “You mean, she’s been wanting to go back there all the time? That all these years she has been asking me for money, that that was what she wanted with it?”

She glanced at him swiftly, then back to the road. “What else can it be? What else could she use money for?”

“Back there?” he said. “To those winters, that town, that way of living, where she’s bound to know that the first winter would… You’d almost think she wanted to die, wouldn’t you?”

“Hush,” she said quickly. “Shhhhh. Don’t say that. Don’t say that about anybody.” Already they could smell the sea; now they swung down toward it; the bright salt wind blew upon them, with the long-spaced sound of the rollers; now they could see it: the dark blue of water creaming into the blanched curve of beach dotted with bathers. “We won’t go through the club,” she said. “I’ll park in here and we can go straight to the water.” They left the Filipino in the car and descended to the beach. It was already crowded, bright and gay with movement. She chose a vacant space and spread her cape.

“Now that drink,” he said.

“Have your dip first,” she said. He looked at her. Then he slipped his robe off slowly; she took it and spread it beside her own; he looked down at her.

“Which is it? Will you always be too clever for me, or is it that every time I will always believe you again?”

She looked at him, bright, warm, fond and inscrutable.

“Maybe both. Maybe neither. Have your dip; I will have the flask and a cigarette ready when you come out.” When he came back from the water, wet, panting, his heart a little too hard and fast, she had the towel ready, and she lit the cigarette and uncapped the flask as he lay on the spread robes.

She lay too, lifted to one elbow, smiling down at him, smoothing the water from his hair with the towel while he panted, waiting for his heart to slow and quiet. Steadily between them and the water, and as far up and down the beach as they could see, the bathers passed: young people, young men in trunks, and young girls in little more, with bronzed, unselfconscious bodies. Lying so, they seemed to him to walk along the rim of the world as though they and their kind alone inhabited it, and he with his forty-eight years were the forgotten last survivor of another race and kind, and they in turn precursors of a new race not yet seen on the earth: of men and women without age, beautiful as gods and goddesses, and with the minds of infants. He turned quickly and looked at the woman beside him, at the quiet face, the wise, smiling eyes, the grained skin and temples, the hair-roots showing where the dye had grown out, the legs veined faint and blue and myriad beneath the skin. “You look better than any of them!” he cried. “You look better to me than any of them!”

III

THE JAPANESE GARDENER, with his hat on, stood tapping on the glass and beckoning and grimacing until old Mrs. Ewing went out to him. He had the afternoon’s paper with its black headline: LALEAR WOMAN CREATES SCENE IN COURTROOM. “You take,” the Japanese said. “Read while I catch water.” But she declined; she just stood in the soft halcyon sunlight, surrounded by the myriad and almost fierce blooming of flowers, and looked quietly at the headline without even taking the paper, and that was all.

“I guess I won’t look at the paper today,” she said. “Thank you just the same.” She returned to the living room. Save for the chair, it was exactly as it had been when she first saw it that day when her son brought her into it and told her that it was now her home and that her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren were now her family. It had changed very little, and that which had altered was the part which her son knew nothing about, and that too had changed not at all in so long that she could not even remember now when she had added the last coin to the hoard. This was in a china vase on the mantel. She knew what was in it to the penny; nevertheless, she took it down and sat in the chair which she had brought all the way from Nebraska and emptied the coins and the worn timetable into her lap. The timetable was folded back at the page on which she had folded it the day she walked downtown to the ticket office and got it fifteen years ago, though that was so long ago now that the pencil circle about the name of the nearest junction point to Ewing, Nebraska, had faded away. But she did not need that either; she knew the distance to the exact half mile, just as she knew the fare to the penny, and back in the early twenties when the railroads began to become worried and passenger fares began to drop, no broker ever watched the grain and utilities market any closer than she watched the railroad advertisements and quotations.

Then at last the fares became stabilized with the fare back to Ewing thirteen dollars more than she had been able to save, and at a time when her source of income had ceased.

This was the two grandchildren. When she entered the house that day twenty years ago and looked at the two babies for the first time, it was with diffidence and eagerness both. She would be dependent for the rest of her life, but she would give something in return for it. It was not that she would attempt to make another Ira and Samantha Ewing of them; she had made that mistake with her own son and had driven him from home. She was wiser now; she saw now that it was not the repetition of hardship: she would merely take what had been of value in hers and her husband’s hard lives that which they had learned through hardship and endurance of honor and courage and pride and transmit it to the children without their having to suffer the hardship at all, the travail and the despairs. She had expected that there would be some friction between her and the young daughter-in-law, but she had believed that her son, the actual Ewing, would be her ally; she had even reconciled herself after a year to waiting, since the children were still but babies; she was not alarmed, since they were Ewings too: after she had looked that first searching time at the two puttysoft little faces feature by feature, she had said it was because they were babies yet and so looked like no one. So she was content to bide and wait; she did not even know that her son was planning to move until he told her that the other house was bought and that the present one was to be hers until she died. She watched them go; she said nothing; it was not to begin then. It did not begin for five years, during which she watched her son making money faster and faster and easier and easier, gaining with apparent contemptible and contemptuous ease that substance for which in niggard amounts her husband had striven while still clinging with undeviating incorruptibility to honor and dignity and pride, and spending it, squandering it, in the same way. By that time she had given up the son and she had long since learned that she and her daughter-in-law were irrevocable and implacable moral enemies. It was in the fifth year. One day in her son’s home she saw the two children take money from their mother’s purse lying on a table. The mother did not even know how much she had in the purse; when the grandmother told her about it she became angry and dared the older woman to put it to the test.

The grandmother accused the children, who denied the whole affair with perfectly straight faces. That was the actual break between herself and her son’s family; after that she saw the two children only when the son would bring them with him occasionally on his unfailing daily visits. She had a few broken dollars which she had brought from Nebraska and had kept intact for five years, since she had no need for money here; one day she planted one of the coins while the children were there, and when she went back to look, it was gone too. The next morning she tried to talk to her son about the children, remembering her experience with the daughter-in-law and approaching the matter indirectly, speaking generally of money. “Yes,” the son said. “I’m making money. I’m making it fast while I can. I’m going to make a lot of it. I’m going to give my children luxuries and advantages that my father never dreamed a child might have.”

“That’s it,” she said. “You make money too easy. This whole country is too easy for us Ewings. It may be all right for them that have been born here for generations; I don’t know about that. But not for us.”

“But these children were born here.”

“Just one generation. The generation before that they were born in a sodroofed dugout on the Nebraska wheat frontier. And the one before that in a log house in Missouri. And the one before that in a Kentucky blockhouse with Indians around it. This world has never been easy for Ewings. Maybe the Lord never intended it to be.”

“But it is from now on,” he said; he spoke with a kind of triumph. “For you and me too. But mostly for them.”

And that was all. When he was gone she sat quietly in the single Nebraska chair which she had taken out of storage, the first chair which the older Ira Ewing had bought for her after he built a house and in which she had rocked the younger Ira to sleep before he could walk, while the older Ira himself sat in the chair which he had made out of a flour barrel, grim, quiet and incorruptible, taking his earned twilight ease between a day and a day telling herself quietly that that was all. Her next move was curiously direct; there was something in it of the actual pioneer’s opportunism, of taking immediate and cold advantage of Spartan circumstance; it was as though for the first time in her life she was able to use something, anything, which she had gained by bartering her youth and strong maturity against the Nebraska immensity, and this not in order to live further but in order to die; apparently she saw neither paradox in it nor dishonesty. She began to make candy and cake of the materials which her son bought for her on credit, and to sell them to the two grandchildren for the coins which their father gave them or which they perhaps purloined also from their mother’s purse, hiding the coins in the vase with the timetable, watching the niggard hoard grow. But after a few years the children outgrew candy and cake, and then she had watched railroad fares go down and down and then stop thirteen dollars away. But she did not give up, even then. Her son had tried to give her a servant years ago and she had refused; she believed that when the time came, the right moment, he would not refuse to give her at least thirteen dollars of the money which she had saved him.

Then this had failed. “Maybe it wasn’t the right time,” she thought. “Maybe I tried it too quick. I was surprised into it,” she told herself, looking down at the heap of small coins in her lap. “Or maybe he was surprised into saying No. Maybe when he has had time…” She roused; she put the coins back into the vase and set it on the mantel again, looking at the clock as she did so. It was just four, two hours yet until time to start supper. The sun was high; she could see the water from the sprinkler flashing and glinting in it as she went to the window. It was still high, still afternoon; the mountains stood serene and drab against it; the city, the land, lay sprawled and myriad beneath it the land, the earth which spawned a thousand new faiths, nostrums and cures each year but no disease to even disprove them on beneath the golden days unmarred by rain or weather, the changeless monotonous beautiful days without end, countless out of the halcyon past and endless into the halcyon future.

“I will stay here and live forever,” she said to herself.

I

ELNORA entered the back yard, coming up from her cabin.

In the long afternoon the huge, square house, the premises, lay somnolent, peaceful, as they had lain for almost a hundred years, since John Sartoris had come from Carolina and built it. And he had died in it and his son Bayard had died in it, and Bayard’s son John and John’s son Bayard in turn had been buried from it even though the last Bayard didn’t die there.

So the quiet was now the quiet of women-folks. As Elnora crossed the back yard toward the kitchen door she remembered how ten years ago at this hour old Bayard, who was her half-brother (though possibly but not probably neither of them knew it, including Bayard’s father), would be tramping up and down the back porch, shouting stableward for the Negro men and for his saddle mare. But he was dead now, and his grandson Bayard was also dead at twenty-six years old, and the Negro men were gone: Simon, Elnora’s mother’s husband, in the graveyard too, and Caspey, Elnora’s husband, in the penitentiary for stealing, and Joby, her son, gone to Memphis to wear fine clothes on Beale Street. So there were left in the house only the first John Sartoris’ sister, Virginia, who was ninety years old and who lived in a wheel chair beside a window above the flower garden, and Narcissa, young Bayard’s widow, and her son. Virginia Du Pre had come out to Mississippi in ’69, the last of the Carolina family, bringing with her the clothes in which she stood and a basket containing a few panes of colored glass from a Carolina window and a few flower cuttings and two bottles of port. She had seen her brother die and then her nephew and then her great-nephew and then her two great-great-nephews, and now she lived in the unmanned house with her great-greatnephew’s wife and his son, Benbow, whom she persisted in calling Johnny after his uncle, who was killed in France. And for Negroes there were Elnora who cooked, and her son Isom who tended the grounds, and her daughter Saddie who slept on a cot beside Virginia Du Pre’s bed and tended her as though she were a baby.

But that was all right. “I can take care of her,” Elnora thought, crossing the back yard. “I don’t need no help,” she said aloud, to no one, a tall, coffee-colored woman with a small, high, fine head. “Because it’s a Sartoris job. Gunnel knowed that when he died and tole me to take care of her. Tole me. Not no outsiders from town.” She was thinking of what had caused her to come up to the house an hour before it was necessary. This was that, while busy in her cabin, she had seen Narcissa, young Bayard’s wife, and the ten-year-old boy going down across the pasture in the middle of the afternoon. She had come to her door and watched them the boy and the big young woman in white going through the hot afternoon, down across the pasture toward the creek. She had not wondered where they were going, nor why, as a white woman would have wondered. But she was half black, and she just watched the white woman with that expression of quiet and grave contempt with which she contemplated or listened to the orders of the wife of the house’s heir even while he was alive. Just as she had listened two days ago when Narcissa had informed her that she was going to Memphis for a day or so and that Elnora would have to take care of the old aunt alone. “Like I ain’t always done it,” Elnora thought. “It’s little you done for anybody since you come out here. We never needed you. Don’t you never think it.”

But she didn’t say this. She just thought it, and she helped Narcissa prepare for the trip and watched the carriage roll away toward town and the station without comment. “And you needn’t to come back,” she thought, watching the carriage disappear. But this morning Narcissa had returned, without offering to explain the sudden journey or the sudden return, and in the early afternoon Elnora from her cabin door had watched the woman and the boy go down across the pasture in the hot June sunlight.

“Well, it’s her business where she going,” Elnora said aloud, mounting the kitchen steps. “Same as it her business how come she went off to Memphis, leaving Miss Jenny setting yonder in her chair without nobody but niggers to look after her,” she added, aloud still, with brooding inconsistency. “I ain’t surprised she went. I just surprised she come back. No. I ain’t even that. She ain’t going to leave this place, now she done got in here.” Then she said quietly, aloud, without rancor, without heat: “Trash. Town trash.”

She entered the kitchen. Her daughter Saddie sat at the table, eating from a dish of cold turnip greens and looking at a thumbed and soiled fashion magazine. “What you doing back here?” she said. “Why ain’t you up yonder where you can hear Miss Jenny if she call you?”

“Miss Jenny ain’t need nothing,” Saddie said. “She setting there by the window.”

“Where did Miss Narcissa go?”

“I don’t know’m,” Saddie said. “Her and Bory went off somewhere. Ain’t come back yet.”

Elnora grunted. Her shoes were not laced, and she stepped out of them in two motions and left the kitchen and went up the quiet, high-ceiled hall filled with scent from the garden and with the drowsing and myriad sounds of the June afternoon, to the open library door. Beside the window (the sash was raised now, with its narrow border of colored Carolina glass which in the winter framed her head and bust like a hung portrait) an old woman sat in a wheel chair. She sat erect; a thin, upright woman with a delicate nose and hair the color of a whitewashed wall. About her shoulders lay a shawl of white wool, no whiter than her hair against her black dress. She was looking out the window; in profile her face was high-arched, motionless. When Elnora entered she turned her head and looked at the Negress with an expression immediate and interrogative.

“They ain’t come in the back way, have they?” she said.

“Nome,” Elnora said. She approached the chair.

The old woman looked out the window again. “I must say I don’t understand this at all. Miss Narcissa’s doing a mighty lot of traipsing around all of a sudden. Picking up and…”

Elnora came to the chair. “A right smart,” she said in her cold, quiet voice, “for a woman lazy as her.”

“Picking up…” the old woman said. She ceased. “You stop talking that way about her.”

“I ain’t said nothing but the truth,” Elnora said.

“Then you keep it to yourself. She’s Bayard’s wife. A Sartoris woman, now.”

“She won’t never be a Sartoris woman,” Elnora said.

The other was looking out the window. “Picking up all of a sudden two days ago and going to Memphis to spend two nights, that hadn’t spent a night away from that boy since he was born. Leaving him for two whole nights, mind you, without giving any reason, and then coming home and taking him off to walk in the woods in the middle of the day. Not that he missed her. Do you think he missed her at all while she was gone?”

“Nome,” Elnora said. “Ain’t no Sartoris man never missed nobody.”

“Of course he didn’t.” The old woman looked out the window. Elnora stood a little behind the chair. “Did they go on across the pasture?”

“I don’t know. They went out of sight, still going. Toward the creek.”

“Toward the creek? What in the world for?”

Elnora didn’t answer. She stood a little behind the chair, erect, still as an Indian. The afternoon was drawing on. The sun was now falling level across the garden below the window, and soon the jasmine in the garden began to smell with evening, coming into the room in slow waves almost palpable; thick, sweet, oversweet. The two women were motionless in the window: the one leaning a little forward in the wheel chair, the Negress a little behind the chair, motionless too and erect as a caryatid.

The light in the garden was beginning to turn copper-colored when the woman and the boy entered the garden and approached the house. The old woman in the chair leaned suddenly forward. To Elnora it seemed as if the old woman in the wheel chair had in that motion escaped her helpless body like a bird and crossed the garden to meet the child; moving forward a little herself Elnora could see on the other’s face an expression fond, immediate, and oblivious. So the two people had crossed the garden and were almost to the house when the old woman sat suddenly and sharply back. “Why, they’re wet!” she said. “Look at their clothes.

They have been in the creek with their clothes on!”

“I reckon I better go and get supper started,” Elnora said.

II

IN THE kitchen Elnora prepared the lettuce and the tomatoes, and sliced the bread (not honest cornbread, not even biscuit) which the woman whose very name she did not speak unless it was absolutely necessary, had taught her to bake. Isom and Saddie sat in two chairs against the wall. “I got nothing against her,” Elnora said. “I nigger and she white. But my black children got more blood than she got. More behavior.”

“You and Miss Jenny both think ain’t nobody been born since Miss Jenny,” Isom said.

“Who is been?” Elnora said.

“Miss Jenny get along all right with Miss Narcissa,” Isom said. “Seem to me like she the one to say. I ain’t heard her say nothing about it.”

“Because Miss Jenny quality,” Elnora said. “That’s why. And that’s something you don’t know nothing about, because you born too late to see any of it except her.”

“Look to me like Miss Narcissa good quality as anybody else,” Isom said. “I don’t see no difference.”

Elnora moved suddenly from the table. Isom as suddenly sprang up and moved his chair out of his mother’s path. But she only went to the cupboard and took a platter from it and returned to the table, to the tomatoes. “Born Sartoris or born quality of any kind ain’t is, it’s does.” She talked in a level, inflectionless voice above her limber, brown, deft hands. When she spoke of the two women she used “she” indiscriminately, putting the least inflection on the one which referred to Miss Jenny. “Come all the way here by Herself, and the country still full of Yankees. All the way from Cal-lina, with Her folks all killed and dead except old Marse John, and him two hundred miles away in Missippi ”

“It’s moren two hundred miles from here to Cal-lina,” Isom said. “Learnt that in school. It’s nigher two thousand.”

Elnora’s hands did not cease. She did not seem to have heard him. “With the Yankees done killed Her paw and Her husband and burned the Cal-lina house over Her and Her mammy’s head, and She come all the way to Missippi by Herself, to the only kin She had left. Getting here in the dead of winter without nothing in this world of God’s but a basket with some flower seeds and two bottles of wine and them colored window panes old Marse John put in the library window so She could look through it like it was Callina. She got here at dusk-dark on Christmas Day and old Marse John and the chillen and my mammy waiting on the porch, and Her setting high-headed in the wagon for old Marse John to lift Her down. They never even kissed then, out where folks could see them. Old Marse John just said, ‘Well, Jenny,’ and she just said, ‘Well, Johnny,’ and they walked into the house, him leading Her by the hand, until they was inside the house where the commonalty couldn’t spy on them. Then She begun to cry, and old Marse John holding Her, after all them four thousand miles ”

“It ain’t four thousand miles from here to Cal-lina,” Isom said. “Ain’t but two thousand. What the book say in school.”

Elnora paid no attention to him at all; her hands did not cease. “It took Her hard, the crying did. ‘It’s because I ain’t used to crying,’ she said. ‘I got out of the habit of it. I never had the time. Them goddamn Yankees,’ she said. ‘Them goddamn Yankees.’” Elnora moved again, to the cupboard. It was as though she walked out of the sound of her voice on her silent, naked feet, leaving it to fill the quiet kitchen though the voice itself had ceased. She took another platter down and returned to the table, her hands busy again among the tomatoes and lettuce, the food which she herself could not eat. “And that’s how it is that she” (she was now speaking of Narcissa; the two Negroes knew it) “thinks she can pick up and go to Memphis and frolic, and leave Her alone in this house for two nights without nobody but niggers to look after Her. Move out here under a Sartoris roof and eat Sartoris food for ten years, and then pick up and go to Memphis same as a nigger on a excursion, without even telling why she was going.”

“I thought you said Miss Jenny never needed nobody but you to take care of her,” Isom said. “I thought you said yesterday you never cared if she come back or not.”

Elnora made a sound, harsh, disparaging, not loud. “Her not come back? When she worked for five years to get herself married to Bayard? Working on Miss Jenny all the time Bayard was off to that war? I watched her. Coming out here two or three times a week, with Miss Jenny thinking she was just coming out to visit like quality. But I knowed. I knowed what she was up to all the time. Because I knows trash. I knows the way trash goes about working in with quality. Quality can’t see that, because it quality. But I can.”

“Then Bory must be trash, too,” Isom said.

Elnora turned now. But Isom was already out of his chair before she spoke. “You shut your mouth and get yourself ready to serve supper.” She watched him go to the sink and prepare to wash his hands. Then she turned back to the table, her long hands brown and deft among the red tomatoes and the pale absinth-green of the lettuce. “Needings,” she said.

“It ain’t Bory’s needings and it ain’t Her needings. It’s dead folks’ needings. Old Marse John’s and Gunnel’s and Mister John’s and Bayard’s that’s dead and can’t do nothing about it. That’s where the needings is. That’s what I’m talking about. And not nobody to see to it except Her yonder in that chair, and me, a nigger, back here in this kitchen. I ain’t got nothing against her. I just say to let quality consort with quality, and unquality do the same thing. You get that coat on, now. This here is all ready.”

III

IT WAS the boy who told her. She leaned forward in the wheel chair and watched through the window as the woman and the child crossed the garden and passed out of sight beyond the angle of the house. Still leaning forward and looking down into the garden, she heard them enter the house and pass the library door and mount the stairs. She did not move, nor look toward the door. She continued to look down into the garden, at the now stout shrubs which she had fetched from Carolina as shoots not much bigger than matches. It was in the garden that she and the younger woman who was to marry her nephew and bear a son, had become acquainted. That was back in 1918, and young Bayard and his brother John were still in France. It was before John was killed, and two or three times a week Narcissa would come out from town to visit her while she worked among the flowers. “And she engaged to Bayard all the time and not telling me,” the old woman thought. “But it was little she ever told me about anything,” she thought, looking down into the garden which was beginning to fill with twilight and which she had not entered in five years. “Little enough about anything. Sometimes I wonder how she ever got herself engaged to Bayard, talking so little. Maybe she did it by just being, filling some space, like she got that letter.” That was one day shortly before Bayard returned home. Narcissa came out and stayed for two hours, then just before she left she showed the letter. It was anonymous and obscene; it sounded mad, and at the time she had tried to get Narcissa to let her show the letter to Bayard’s grandfather and have him make some effort to find the man and punish him, but Narcissa refused. “I’ll just burn it and forget about it,” Narcissa said. “Well, that’s your business,” the older woman said.

“But that should not be permitted. A lady should not be at the mercy of a man like that, even by mail. Any gentleman will believe that, act upon it. Besides, if you don’t do something about it, he’ll write you again.”

“Then I’ll show it to Colonel Sartoris,” Narcissa said. She was an orphan, her brother also in France. “But can’t you see I just can’t have any man know that anybody thought such things about me.”

“Well, I’d rather have the whole world know that somebody thought that way about me once and got horsewhipped for it, than to have him keep on thinking that way about me, unpunished. But it’s your affair.”

“I’ll just burn it and forget about it,” Narcissa said. Then Bayard returned, and shortly afterward he and Narcissa were married and Narcissa came out to the house to live. Then she was pregnant, and before the child was born Bayard was killed in an airplane, and his grandfather, old Bayard, was dead and the child came, and it was two years before she thought to ask her niece if any more letters had come; and Narcissa told her no.

So they had lived quietly then, their women’s life in the big house without men. Now and then she had urged Narcissa to marry again. But the other had refused, quietly, and they had gone on so for years, the two of them and the child whom she persisted in calling after his dead uncle. Then one evening a week ago, Narcissa had a guest for supper; when she learned that the guest was to be a man, she sat quite still in her chair for a time. “Ah,” she thought, quietly. “It’s come. Well. But it had to; she is young. And to live out here alone with a bedridden old woman. Well. But I wouldn’t have her do as I did. Would not expect it of her. After all, she is not a Sartoris. She is no kin to them, to a lot of fool proud ghosts.”

The guest came. She did not see him until she was wheeled in to the supper table. Then she saw a bald, youngish man with a clever face and a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain. The key she did not recognize, but she knew at once that he was a Jew, and when he spoke to her her outrage became fury and she jerked back in the chair like a striking snake, the motion strong enough to thrust the chair back from the table. “Narcissa,” she said, “what is this Yankee doing here?”

There they were, about the candle-lit table, the three rigid people. Then the man spoke: “Madam,” he said, “there’d be no Yankees left if your sex had ever taken the field against us.”

“You don’t have to tell me that, young man,” she said.

“You can thank your stars it was just men your grandfather fought.” Then she had called Isom and had herself wheeled from the table, taking no supper. And even in her bedroom she would not let them turn on the light, and she refused the tray which Narcissa sent up. She sat beside her dark window until the stranger was gone.

Then three days later Narcissa made her sudden and mysterious trip to Memphis and stayed two nights, who had never before been separated overnight from her son since he was born. She had gone without explanation and returned without explanation, and now the old woman had just watched her and the boy cross the garden, their garments still damp upon them, as though they had been in the creek.

It was the boy who told her. He came into the room in fresh clothes, his hair still damp, though neatly combed now.

She said no word as he entered and came to her chair. “We been in the creek,” he said. “Not swimming, though. Just sitting in the water. She wanted me to show her the swimming hole. But we didn’t swim. I don’t reckon she can. We just sat in the water with our clothes on. All evening. She wanted to do it.”

“Ah,” the old woman said. “Oh. Well. That must have been fun. Is she coming down soon?”

“Yessum. When she gets dressed.”

“Well… You’ll have time to go outdoors a while before supper, if you want to.”

“I just as soon stay in here with you, if you want me to.”

“No. You go outdoors. I’ll be all right until Saddie comes.”

“All right.” He left the room.

The window faded slowly as the sunset died. The old woman’s silver head faded too, like something motionless on a sideboard. The sparse colored panes which framed the window dreamed, rich and hushed. She sat there and presently she heard her nephew’s wife descending the stairs. She sat quietly, watching the door, until the young woman entered.

She wore white: a large woman in her thirties, within the twilight something about her of that heroic quality of statuary. “Do you want the light?” she said.

“No,” the old woman said. “No. Not yet.” She sat erect in the wheel chair, motionless, watching the young woman cross the room, her white dress flowing slowly, heroic, like a caryatid from a temple facade come to life. She sat down, “It was those let…” she said.

’Wait,” the old woman said. “Before you begin. The jasmine. Do you smell it?”

“Yes. It was those ”

“Wait. Always about this time of day it begins. It has begun about this time of day in June for fifty-seven years this summer. I brought them from Carolina, in a basket. I remember how that first March I sat up all one night, burning newspapers about the roots. Do you smell it?”

“Yes.”

“If it’s marriage, I told you. I told you five years ago that I wouldn’t blame you. A young woman, a widow. Even though you have a child, I told you that a child would not be enough. I told you I would not blame you for not doing as I had done. Didn’t I?”

“Yes. But it’s not that bad.”

“Not? Not how bad?” The old woman sat erect, her head back a little, her thin face fading into the twilight with a profound quality. “I won’t blame you. I told you that. You are not to consider me. My life is done; I need little; nothing the Negroes can’t do. Don’t you mind me, do you hear?”

The other said nothing, motionless too, serene; their voices seemed to materialize in the dusk between them, unsourced of either mouth, either still and fading face. “You’ll have to tell me, then,” the old woman said.

“It was those letters. Thirteen years ago: don’t you remember? Before Bayard came back from France, before you even knew that we were engaged. I showed you one of them and you wanted to give it to Colonel Sartoris and let him find out who sent it and I wouldn’t do it and you said that no lady would permit herself to receive anonymous love letters, no matter how badly she wanted to.”

“Yes. I said it was better for the world to know that a lady had received a letter like that, than to have one man in secret thinking such things about her, unpunished. You told me you burned it.”

“I lied. I kept it. And I got ten more of them. I didn’t tell you because of what you said about a lady.”

“Ah,” the old woman said.

“Yes. I kept them all. I thought I had them hidden where nobody could ever find them.”

“And you read them again. You would take them out now and then and read them again.”

“I thought I had them hidden. Then you remember that night after Bayard and I were married when somebody broke into our house in town; the same night that book-keeper in Colonel Sartoris’ bank stole that money and ran away? The next morning the letters were gone, and then I knew who had sent them.”

“Yes,” the old woman said. She had not moved, her fading head like something inanimate in silver.

“So they were out in the world. They were somewhere. I was crazy for a while. I thought of people, men, reading them, seeing not only my name on them, but the marks of my eyes where I had read them again and again. I was wild. When Bayard and I were on our honeymoon, I was wild. I couldn’t even think about him alone. It was like I was having to sleep with all the men in the world at the same time.

“Then it was almost twelve years ago, and I had Bory, and I supposed I had got over it. Got used to having them out in the world. Maybe I had begun to think that they were gone, destroyed, and I was safe. Now and then I would remember them, but it was like somehow that Bory was protecting me, that they couldn’t pass him to reach me. As though if I just stayed out here and was good to Bory and you And then, one afternoon, after twelve years, that man came out to see me, that Jew. The one who stayed to supper that night.”

“Ah,” the old woman said. “Yes.”

“He was a Federal agent. They were still trying to catch the man who had robbed the bank, and the agent had got hold of my letters. Found them where the book-keeper had lost them or thrown them away that night while he was running away, and the agent had had them twelve years, working on the case. At last he came out to see me, trying to find out where the man had gone, thinking I must know, since the man had written me letters like that. You remember him: how you looked at him and you said, ‘Narcissa, who is this Yankee?’”

“Yes. I remember.”

“That man had my letters. He had had them for twelve years. He…”

“Had had?” the old woman said. “Had had?”

“Yes. I have them now. He hadn’t sent them to Washington yet, so nobody had read them except him. And now nobody will ever read them.” She ceased; she breathed quietly, tranquil. “You don’t understand yet, do you? He had all the information the letters could give him, but he would have to turn them in to the Department anyway and I asked him for them but he said he would have to turn them in and I asked him if he would make his final decision in Memphis and he said why Memphis and I told him why. I knew I couldn’t buy them from him with money, you see. That’s why I had to go to Memphis. I had that much regard for Bory and you, to go somewhere else. And that’s all. Men are all about the same, with their ideas of good and bad. Fools.” She breathed quietly. Then she yawned, deep, with utter relaxation. Then she stopped yawning. She looked again at the rigid, fading silver head opposite her. “Don’t you understand yet?” she said. “I had to do it. They were mine; I had to get them back. That was the only way I could do it. But I would have done more than that. So I got them. And now they are burned up. Nobody will ever see them. Because he can’t tell, you see. It would ruin him to ever tell that they even existed. They might even put him in the penitentiary. And now they are burned up.”

“Yes,” the old woman said. “And so you came back home and you took Johnny so you and he could sit together in the creek, the running water. In Jordan. Yes, Jordan at the back of a country pasture in Missippi.”

“I had to get them back. Don’t you see that?”

“Yes,” the old woman said. “Yes.” She sat bolt upright in the wheel chair. “Well, my Lord. Us poor, fool women Johnny!” Her voice was sharp, peremptory.

“What?” the young woman said. “Do you want something?”

“No,” the other said. “Call Johnny. I want my hat.” The young woman rose. “I’ll get it.”

“No. I want Johnny to do it.”

The young woman stood looking down at the other, the old woman erect in the wheel chair beneath the fading silver crown of her hair. Then she left the room. The old woman did not move. She sat there in the dusk until the boy entered, carrying a small black bonnet of an ancient shape.

Now and then, when the old woman became upset, they would fetch her the hat and she would place it on the exact top of her head and sit there by the window. He brought the bonnet to her. His mother was with him. It was full dusk now; the old woman was invisible save for her hair.

“Do you want the light now?” the young woman said.

“No,” the old woman said. She set the bonnet on the top of her head. “You all go on to supper and let me rest awhile. Go on, all of you.” They obeyed, leaving her sitting there: a slender, erect figure indicated only by the single gleam of her hair, in the wheel chair beside the window framed by the sparse and defunctive Carolina glass.

IV

SINCE THE BOY’S eighth birthday, he had had his dead grandfather’s place at the end of the table. Tonight however his mother rearranged things. “With just the two of us,” she said. “You come and sit by me.” The boy hesitated. “Please. Won’t you? I got so lonesome for you last night in Memphis. Weren’t you lonesome for me?”

“I slept with Aunt Jenny,” the boy said. “We had a good time.”

“Please.”

“All right,” he said. He took the chair beside hers.

“Closer,” she said. She drew the chair closer. “But we won’t ever again, ever. Will we?” She leaned toward him, taking his hand.

“What? Sit in the creek?”

“Not ever leave one another again.”

“I didn’t get lonesome. We had a good time.”

“Promise. Promise, Bory.” His name was Benhow, her family name.

“All right.”

Isom, in a duck jacket, served them and returned to the kitchen.

“She ain’t coming to supper?” Elnora said.

“Nome,” Isom said. “Setting yonder by the window, in the dark. She say she don’t want no supper.”

Elnora looked at Saddie. “What was they doing last time you went to the library?”

“Her and Miss Narcissa talking.”

“They was still talking when I went to ’nounce supper,”

Isom said. “I tole you that.”

“I know,” Elnora said. Her voice was not sharp. Neither was it gentle. It was just peremptory, soft, cold. “What were they talking about?”

“I don’t know’m,” Isom said. “You the one taught me not to listen to white folks.”

“What were they talking about, Isom?” Elnora said. She was looking at him, grave, intent, commanding.

“‘Bout somebody getting married. Miss Jenny say ‘I tole you long time ago I ain’t blame you. A young woman like you. I want you to marry. Not do like I done,’ what she say.”

“I bet she fixing to marry, too,” Saddie said.

“Who marry?” Elnora said. “Her marry? What for? Give up what she got here? That ain’t what it is. I wished I knowed what been going on here this last week…” Her voice ceased; she turned her head toward the door as though she were listening for something. From the dining-room came the sound of the young woman’s voice. But Elnora appeared to listen to something beyond this. Then she left the room. She did not go hurriedly, yet her long silent stride carried her from sight with an abruptness like that of an inanimate figure drawn on wheels, off a stage.

She went quietly up the dark hall, passing the dining-room door unremarked by the two people at the table. They sat close. The woman was talking, leaning toward the boy.

Elnora went on without a sound: a converging of shadows upon which her lighter face seemed to float without body, her eyeballs faintly white. Then she stopped suddenly. She had not reached the library door, yet she stopped, invisible, soundless, her eyes suddenly quite luminous in her almost-vanished face, and she began to chant in faint sing-song: “Oh, Lawd; oh, Lawd,” not loud. Then she moved, went swiftly on to the library door and looked into the room where beside the dead window the old woman sat motionless, indicated only by that faint single gleam of white hair, as though for ninety years life had died slowly up her spare, erect frame, to linger for a twilit instant about her head before going out, though life itself had ceased. Elnora looked for only an instant into the room. Then she turned and retraced her swift and silent steps to the dining-room door.

The woman still leaned toward the boy, talking. They did not remark Elnora at once. She stood in the doorway, tall, not touching the jamb on either side. Her face was blank; she did not appear to be looking at, speaking to, any one.

“You better come quick, I reckon!” she said in that soft, cold, peremptory voice.

I

THROUGH THE CABIN WINDOW the five people watched the cavalcade toil up the muddy trail and halt at the gate. First came a man on foot, leading a horse. He wore a broad hat low on his face, his body shapeless in a weathered gray cloak from which his left hand emerged, holding the reins.

The bridle was silver-mounted, the horse a gaunt, mud-splashed, thoroughbred bay, wearing in place of saddle a navy blue army blanket bound on it by a piece of rope. The second horse was a short-bodied, big-headed, scrub sorrel, also mud-splashed. It wore a bridle contrived of rope and wire, and an army saddle in which, perched high above the dangling stirrups, crouched a shapeless something larger than a child, which at that distance appeared to wear no garment or garments known to man.

One of the three men at the cabin window left it quickly.

The others, without turning, heard him cross the room swiftly and then return, carrying a long rifle.

“No, you don’t,” the older man said.

“Don’t you see that cloak?” the younger said. “That rebel cloak?”

“I won’t have it,” the other said. “They have surrendered. They have said they are whipped.”

Through the window they watched the horses stop at the gate. The gate was of sagging hickory, in a rock fence which straggled down a gaunt slope sharp in relief against the valley and a still further range of mountains dissolving into the low, dissolving sky.

They watched the creature on the second horse descend and hand his reins also into the same left hand of the man in gray that held the reins of the thoroughbred. They watched the creature enter the gate and mount the path and disappear beyond the angle of the window. Then they heard it cross the porch and knock at the door. They stood there and heard it knock again.

After a while the older man said, without turning his head, “Go and see.”

One of the women, the older one, turned from the window, her feet making no sound on the floor, since they were bare. She went to the front door and opened it. The chill, wet light of the dying April afternoon fell in upon her upon a small woman with a gnarled expressionless face, in a gray shapeless garment. Facing her across the sill was a creature a little larger than a large monkey, dressed in a voluminous blue overcoat of a private in the Federal army, with, tied tentlike over his head and falling about his shoulders, a piece of oilcloth which might have been cut square from the hood of a sutler’s wagon; within the orifice the woman could see nothing whatever save the whites of two eyes, momentary and phantomlike, as with a single glance the Negro examined the woman standing barefoot in her faded calico garment, and took in the bleak and barren interior of the cabin hall.

“Marster Major Soshay Weddel send he compliments en say he wishful fo sleeping room fo heself en boy en two hawses,” he said in a pompous, parrot-like voice. The woman looked at him. Her face was like a spent mask. “We been up yonder a ways, fighting dem Yankees,” the Negro said. “Done quit now. Gwine back home.”

The woman seemed to speak from somewhere behind her face, as though behind an effigy or a painted screen: “I’ll ask him.”

“We gwy pay you,” the Negro said.

“Pay?” Pausing, she seemed to muse upon him. “Hit ain’t near a ho-tel on the mou-tin.”

The Negro made a large gesture. “Don’t make no diff unce. We done stayed de night in worse places den whut dis is. You just tell um it Marse Soshay Weddel.” Then he saw that the woman was looking past him. He turned and saw the man in the worn gray cloak already halfway up the path from the gate. He came on and mounted the porch, removing with his left hand the broad slouched hat bearing the tarnished wreath of a Confederate field officer. He had a dark face, with dark eyes and black hair, his face at once thick yet gaunt, and arrogant. He was not tall, yet he topped the Negro by five or six inches. The cloak was weathered, faded about the shoulders where the light fell strongest. The skirts were bedraggled, frayed, mudsplashed: the garment had been patched again and again, and brushed again and again; the nap was completely gone.

“Goodday, madam,” he said. “Have you stableroom for my horses and shelter for myself and my boy for the night?”

The woman looked at him with a static, musing quality, as though she had seen without alarm an apparition.

“I’ll have to see,” she said.

“I shall pay,” the man said. “I know the times.”

“I’ll have to ask him,” the woman said. She turned, then stopped. The older man entered the hall behind her. He was big, in jean clothes, with a shock of iron-gray hair and pale eyes.

“I am Saucier Weddel,” the man in gray said. “I am on my way home to Mississippi from Virginia. I am in Tennessee now?”

“You are in Tennessee,” the other said. “Come in.”

Weddel turned to the Negro. “Take the horses on to the stable,” he said.

The Negro returned to the gate, shapeless in the oilcloth cape and the big overcoat, with that swaggering arrogance which he had assumed as soon as he saw the woman’s bare feet and the meagre, barren interior of the cabin. He took up the two bridle reins and began to shout at the horses with needless and officious vociferation, to which the two horses paid no heed, as though they were long accustomed to him.

It was as if the Negro himself paid no attention to his cries, as though the shouting were merely concomitant to the action of leading the horses out of sight of the door, like an effluvium by both horses and Negro accepted and relegated in the same instant.

II

THROUGH THE KITCHEN WALL the girl could hear the voices of the men in the room from which her father had driven her when the stranger approached the house. She was about twenty: a big girl with smooth, simple hair and big, smooth hands, standing barefoot in a single garment made out of flour sacks. She stood close to the wall, motionless, her head bent a little, her eyes wide and still and empty like a sleepwalker’s, listening to her father and the guest enter the room beyond it.

The kitchen was a plank lean-to built against the log wall of the cabin proper. From between the logs beside her the clay chinking, dried to chalk by the heat of the stove, had fallen away in places. Stooping, the movement slow and lush and soundless as the whispering of her bare feet on the floor, she leaned her eye to one of these cracks. She could see a bare table on which sat an earthenware jug and a box of musket cartridges stenciled U. S. Army. At the table her two brothers sat in splint chairs, though it was only the younger one, the boy, who looked toward the door, though she knew, could hear now, that the stranger was in the room. The older brother was taking the cartridges one by one from the box and crimping them and setting them upright at his hand like a mimic parade of troops, his back to the door where she knew the stranger was now standing. She breathed quietly.

“Vatch would have shot him,” she said, breathed, to herself, stooping. “I reckon he will yet.”

Then she heard feet again and her mother came toward the door to the kitchen, crossing and for a moment blotting the orifice. Yet she did not move, not even when her mother entered the kitchen. She stooped to the crack, her breathing regular and placid, hearing her mother clattering the stovelids behind her. Then she saw the stranger for the first time and then she was holding her breath quietly, not even aware that she had ceased to breathe. She saw him standing beside the table in his shabby cloak, with his hat in his left hand.

Vatch did not look up.

“My name is Saucier Weddel,” the stranger said.

“Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed into the dry chinking, the crumbled and powdery wall. She could see him at full length, in his stained and patched and brushed cloak, with his head lifted a little and his face worn, almost gaunt, stamped with a kind of indomitable weariness and yet arrogant too, like a creature from another world with other air to breathe and another kind of blood to warm the veins.

“Soshay Weddel,” she breathed.

“Take some whiskey,” Vatch said without moving.

Then suddenly, as it had been with the suspended breathing, she was not listening to the words at all, as though it were no longer necessary for her to hear, as though curiosity too had no place in the atmosphere in which the stranger dwelled and in which she too dwelled for the moment as she watched the stranger standing beside the table, looking at Vatch, and Vatch now turned in his chair, a cartridge in his hand, looking up at the stranger. She breathed quietly into the crack through which the voices came now without heat or significance out of that dark and smoldering and violent and childlike vanity of men: “I reckon you know these when you see them, then?”

“Why not? We used them too. We never always had the time nor the powder to stop and make our own. So we had to use yours now and then. Especially during the last.”

“Maybe you would know them better if one exploded in your face.”

“Vatch.” She now looked at her father, because he had spoken. Her younger brother was raised a little in his chair, leaning a little forward, his mouth open a little. He was seventeen. Yet still the stranger stood looking quietly down at Vatch, his hat clutched against his worn cloak, with on his face that expression arrogant and weary and a little quizzical.

“You can show your other hand too,” Vatch said. “Don’t be afraid to leave your pistol go.”

“No,” the stranger said. “I am not afraid to show it.”

“Take some whiskey, then,” Vatch said, pushing the jug forward with a motion slighting and contemptuous.

“I am obliged infinitely,” the stranger said. “It’s my stomach. For three years of war I have had to apologize to my stomach; now, with peace, I must apologize for it. But if I might have a glass for my boy? Even after four years, he cannot stand cold.”

“Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed into the crumbled dust beyond which the voices came, not yet raised yet forever irreconcilable and already doomed, the one blind victim, the other blind executioner: “Or maybe behind your back you would know it better.”

“You, Vatch”

“Stop, sir. If he was in the army for as long as one year, he has run too, once. Perhaps oftener, if he faced the Army of Northern Virginia.”

“Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed, stooping. Now she saw Weddel, walking apparently straight toward her, a thick tumbler in his left hand and his hat crumpled beneath the same arm.

“Not that way,” Vatch said. The stranger paused and looked back at Vatch. “Where are you aiming to go?”

“To take this out to my boy,” the stranger said. “Out to the stable. I thought perhaps this door…” His face was in profile now, worn, haughty, wasted, the eyebrows lifted with quizzical and arrogant interrogation. Without rising Vatch jerked his head back and aside. “Come away from that door.” But the stranger did not stir. Only his head moved a little, as though he had merely changed the direction of his eyes.

“He’s looking at paw,” the girl breathed. “He’s waiting for paw to tell him. He ain’t skeered of Vatch. I knowed it.”

“Come away from that door,” Vatch said. “You damn nigra.”

“So it’s my face and not my uniform,” the stranger said.

“And you fought four years to free us, I understand.”

Then she heard her father speak again. “Go out the front way and around the house, stranger,” he said.

“Soshay Weddel,” the girl said. Behind her her mother clattered at the stove. “Soshay Weddel,” she said. She did not say it aloud. She breathed again, deep and quiet and without haste. “It’s like a music. It’s like a singing.”

III

THE NEGRO was squatting in the hallway of the barn, the sagging and broken stalls of which were empty save for the two horses. Beside him was a worn rucksack, open. He was engaged in polishing a pair of thin dancing slippers with a cloth and a tin of paste, empty save for a thin rim of polish about the circumference of the tin. Beside him on a piece of plank sat one finished shoe. The upper was cracked; it had a crude sole nailed recently and crudely on by a clumsy hand.

“Thank de Lawd folks can’t see de bottoms of yo feets,” the Negro said. “Thank de Lawd it’s just dese hyer mountain trash. I’d even hate fo Yankees to see yo feets in dese things.” He rubbed the shoe, squinted at it, breathed upon it, rubbed it again upon his squatting flank.

“Here,” Weddel said, extending the tumbler. It contained a liquid as colorless as water.

The Negro stopped, the shoe and the cloth suspended.

“Which?” he said. He looked at the glass. “Whut’s dat?”

“Drink it,” Weddei said.

“Dat’s water. Whut you bringing me water fer?”

“Take it,” Weddel said. “It’s not water.”

The Negro took the glass gingerly. He held it as if it contained nitroglycerin. He looked at it, blinking, bringing the glass slowly under his nose. He blinked. “Where’d you git dis hyer?” Weddel didn’t answer. He had taken up the finished slipper, looking at it. The Negro held the glass under his nose. “It smell kind of like it ought to,” he said. “But I be dawg ef it look like anything. Dese folks fixing to pizen you.”

He tipped the glass and sipped gingerly, and lowered the glass, blinking.

“I didn’t drink any of it,” Weddel said. He set the slipper down.

“You better hadn’t,” the Negro said. “When here I done been fo years trying to take care of you en git you back home like whut Mistis tole me to do, and here you sleeping in folks’ barns at night like a tramp, like a pater-roller nigger.”

He put the glass to his lips, tilting it and his head in a single jerk. He lowered the glass, empty; his eyes were closed; he said, “Whuf!” shaking his head with a violent, shuddering motion. “It smells right, and it act right. But I be dawg ef it look right. I reckon you better let it alone, like you started out. When dey try to make you drink it you send um to me. I done already stood so much I reckon I can stand a little mo fer Mistis’ sake.”

He took up the shoe and the cloth again. Weddel stooped above the rucksack. “I want my pistol,” he said.

Again the Negro ceased, the shoe and the cloth poised.

“Whut fer?” He leaned and looked up the muddy slope toward the cabin. “Is dese folks Yankees?” he said in a whisper.

“No,” Weddel said, digging in the rucksack with his left hand. The Negro did not seem to hear him.

“In Tennessee? You tole me we was in Tennessee, where Memphis is, even if you never tole me it was all disyer up-and-down land in de Memphis country. I know I never seed none of um when I went to Memphis wid yo paw dat time. But you says so. And now you telling me dem Memphis folks is Yankees?”

“Where is the pistol?” Weddel said.

“I done tole you,” the Negro said. “Acting like you does. Letting dese folks see you come walking up de road, leading Caesar caze you think he tired; making me ride whilst you walks when I can outwalk you any day you ever lived and you knows it, even if I is fawty en you twenty-eight. I gwy tell yo maw. I gwy tell um.”

Weddel rose, in his hand a heavy cap-and-ball revolver.

He chuckled it in his single hand, drawing the hammer back, letting it down again. The Negro watched him, crouched like an ape in the blue Union army overcoat. “You put dat thing back,” he said. “De war done wid now. Dey tole us back dar at Ferginny it was done wid. You don’t need no pistol now. You put it back, you hear me?”

“I’m going to bathe,” Weddel said. “Is my shirt…”

“Bathe where? In whut? Dese folks ain’t never seed a bathtub.”

“Bathe at the well. Is my shirt ready?”

“Whut dey is of it… You put dat pistol back, Marse Soshay. I gwy tell yo maw on you. I gwy tell um. I just wish Marster was here.”

“Go to the kitchen,” Weddel said. “Tell them I wish to bathe in the well house. Ask them to draw the curtain on that window there.” The pistol had vanished beneath the grey cloak. He went to the stall where the thoroughbred was.

The horse nuzzled at him, its eyes rolling soft and wild. He patted its nose with his left hand. It whickered, not loud, its breath sweet and warm.

IV

THE NEGRO entered the kitchen from the rear. He had removed the oilcloth tent and he now wore a blue forage cap which, like the overcoat, was much too large for him, resting upon the top of his head in such a way that the unsupported brim oscillated faintly when he moved as though with a life of its own. He was completely invisible save for his face between cap and collar like a dried Dyak trophy and almost as small and dusted lightly over as with a thin pallor of wood ashes by the cold. The older woman was at the stove on which frying food now hissed and sputtered; she did not look up when the Negro entered. The girl was standing in the middle of the room, doing nothing at all. She looked at the Negro, watching him with a slow, grave, secret, unwinking gaze as he crossed the kitchen with that air of swaggering caricatured assurance, and up-ended a block of wood beside the stove and sat upon it.

“If disyer is de kind of weather yawl has up here all de time,” he said, “I don’t care ef de Yankees does has dis country.” He opened the overcoat, revealing his legs and feet as being wrapped, shapeless and huge, in some muddy and anonymous substance resembling fur, giving them the appearance of two muddy beasts the size of halfgrown dogs lying on the floor; moving a little nearer the girl, the girl thought quietly His fur. He taken and cut up a fur coat to wrap his feet in “Yes, suh,” the Negro said. “Just yawl let me git home again, en de Yankees kin have all de rest of it.”

“Where do you-uns live?” the girl said.

The Negro looked at her. “In Miss’ippi. On de Domain. Ain’t you never hyeard tell of Countymaison?”

“Countymaison?”

“Dat’s it. His grandpappy named it Countymaison caze it’s bigger den a county to ride over. You can’t ride across it on a mule betwixt sunup and sundown. Dat’s how come.” He rubbed his hands slowly on his thighs. His face was now turned toward the stove; he snuffed loudly. Already the ashy overlay on his skin had disappeared, leaving his face dead black, wizened, his mouth a little loose, as though the muscles had become slack with usage, like rubber bands: not the eating muscles, the talking ones. “I reckon we is gittin nigh home, after all. Leastways dat hawg meat smell like it do down whar folks lives.”

“Countymaison,” the girl said in a rapt, bemused tone, looking at the Negro with her grave, unwinking regard.

Then she turned her head and looked at the wall, her face perfectly serene, perfectly inscrutable, without haste, with a profound and absorbed deliberation.

“Dat’s it,” the Negro said. “Even Yankees is heard tell of Weddel’s Countymaison en erbout Marster Francis Weddel. Maybe yawl seed um pass in de carriage dat time he went to Washn’ton to tell yawl’s president how he ain’t like de way yawl’s president wuz treating de people. He rid all de way to Washn’ton in de carriage, wid two niggers to drive en to heat de bricks to kept he foots warm, en de man done gone on ahead wid de wagon en de fresh hawses. He carried yawl’s president two whole dressed bears en eight sides of smoked deer venison. He must a passed right out dar in front yawl’s house. I reckon yo pappy or maybe his pappy seed um pass.”

He talked on, voluble, in soporific singsong, his face beginning to glisten, to shine a little with the rich warmth, while the mother bent over the stove and the girl, motionless, static, her bare feet cupped smooth and close to the rough puncheons, her big, smooth, young body cupped soft and richly mammalian to the rough garment, watching the Negro with her ineffable and unwinking gaze, her mouth open a little.

The Negro talked on, his eyes closed, his voice interminable, boastful, his air lazily intolerant, as if he were still at home and there had been no war and no harsh rumors of freedom and of change, and he (a stableman, in the domestic hierarchy a man of horses) were spending the evening in the quarters among field hands, until the older woman dished the food and left the room, closing the door behind her. He opened his eyes at the sound and looked toward the door and then back to the girl. She was looking at the wall, at the closed door through which her mother had vanished. “Don’t dey lets you eat at de table wid um?” he said.

The girl looked at the Negro, unwinking. “Countymaison,” she said. “Vatch says he is a nigra too.”

“Who? Him? A nigger? Marse Soshay Weddel? Which un is Vatch?” The girl looked at him. “It’s caze yawl ain’t never been nowhere. Ain’t never seed nothing. Living up here on a nekkid hill whar you can’t even see smoke. Him a nigger? I wish his maw could hear you say dat.” He looked about the kitchen, wizened, his eyeballs rolling white, ceaseless, this way and that. The girl watched him.

“Do the girls there wear shoes all the time?” she said.

The Negro looked about the kitchen, “Where does yawl keep dat ere Tennessee spring water? Back here somewhere?”

“Spring water?”

The Negro blinked slowly. “Dat ere light-drinking kahysene.”

“Kahysene?”

“Dat ere light colored lamp oil whut yawl drinks. Ain’t you got a little of it hid back here somewhere?”

“Oh,” the girl said. “You mean corn.” She went to a corner and lifted a loose plank in the floor, the Negro watching her, and drew forth another earthen jug. She filled another thick tumbler and gave it to the Negro and watched him jerk it down his throat, his eyes closed. Again he said, “Whuf!” and drew his back hand across his mouth.

“Whut wuz dat you axed me?” he said.

“Do the girls down there at Countymaison wear shoes?”

“De ladies does. If dey didn’t have none, Marse Soshay could sell a hun’ed niggers en buy um some… Which un is it say Marse Soshay a nigger?”

The girl watched him. “Is he married?”

“Who married? Marse Soshay?” The girl watched him.

“How he have time to git married, wid us fighting de Yankees for fo years? Ain’t been home in fo years now where no ladies to marry is.” He looked at the girl, his eye-whites a little bloodshot, his skin shining in faint and steady highlights. Thawing, he seemed to have increased in size a little too. “Whut’s it ter you, if he married or no?”

They looked at each other. The Negro could hear her breathing. Then she was not looking at him at all, though she had not yet even blinked nor turned her head. “I don’t reckon he’d have any time for a girl that didn’t have any shoes.” she said. She went to the wall and stooped again to the crack. The Negro watched her. The older woman entered and took another dish from the stove and departed without having looked at either of them.

V

THE FOUR MEN, the three men and the boy, sat about the supper table. The broken meal lay on thick plates. The knives and forks were iron. On the table the jug still sat. Weddel was now cloakless. He was shaven, his still damp hair combed back. Upon his bosom the ruffles of the shirt frothed in the lamplight, the right sleeve, empty, pinned across his breast with a thin gold pin. Under the table the frail and mended dancing slippers rested among the brogans of the two men and the bare splayed feet of the boy.

“Vatch says you are a nigra,” the father said.

Weddel was leaning a little back in his chair. “So that explains it,” he said. “I was thinking that he was just congenitally ill-tempered. And having to be a victor, too.”

“Are you a nigra?” the father said.

“No,” Weddel said. He was looking at the boy, his weathered and wasted face a little quizzical. Across the back of his neck his hair, long, had been cut roughly as though with a knife or perhaps a bayonet. The boy watched him in complete and rapt immobility. As if I might be an apparition he thought. A hant. Maybe I am. “No,” he said. “I am not a Negro.”

“Who are you?” the father said.

Weddel sat a little sideways in his chair, his hand lying on the table. “Do you ask guests who they are in Tennessee?” he said. Vatch was filling a tumbler from the jug. His face was lowered, his hands big and hard. His face was hard.

Weddel looked at him. “I think I know how you feel,” he said. “I expect I felt that way once. But it’s hard to keep on feeling any way for four years. Even feeling at all.”

Vatch said something, sudden and harsh. He clapped the tumbler on to the table, splashing some of the liquor out. It looked like water, with a violent, dynamic odor. It seemed to possess an inherent volatility which carried a splash of it across the table and on to the foam of frayed yet immaculate linen on Weddel’s breast, striking sudden and chill through the cloth against his flesh.

“Vatch!” the father said.

Weddel did not move; his expression arrogant, quizzical, and weary, did not change. “He did not mean to do that,” he said.

“When I do,” Vatch said, “it will not look like an accident.”

Weddel was looking at Vatch. “I think I told you once,” he said. “My name is Saucier Weddel. I am a Mississippian. I live at a place named Countymaison. My father built it and named it. He was a Choctaw chief named Francis Weddel, of whom you have probably not heard. He was the son of a Choctaw woman and a French emigre of New Orleans, a general of Napoleon’s and a knight of the Legion of Honor. His name was Francois Vidal. My father drove to Washington once in his carriage to remonstrate with President Jackson about the Government’s treatment of his people, sending on ahead a wagon of provender and gifts and also fresh horses for the carriage, in charge of the man, the native overseer, who was a full blood Choctaw and my father’s cousin. In the old days The Man was the hereditary title of the head of our clan; but after we became Europeanised like the white people, we lost the title to the branch which refused to become polluted, though we kept the slaves and the land. The Man now lives in a house a little larger than the cabins of the Negroes, an upper servant. It was in Washington that my father met and married my mother. He was killed in the Mexican War. My mother died two years ago, in ’63, of a complication of pneumonia acquired while superintending the burying of some silver on a wet night when Federal troops entered the county, and of unsuitable food; though my boy refuses to believe that she is dead. He refuses to believe that the country would have permitted the North to deprive her of the imported Martinique coffee and the beaten biscuit which she had each Sunday noon and Wednesday night. He believes that the country would have risen in arms first. But then, he is only a Negro, member of an oppressed race burdened with freedom. He has a daily list of my misdoings which he is going to tell her on me when we reach home. I went to school in France, but not very hard. Until two weeks ago I was a major of Mississippi infantry in the corps of a man named Longstreet, of whom you may have heard.”

“So you were a major,” Vatch said.

“That appears to be my indictment; yes.”

“I have seen a rebel major before,” Vatch said. “Do you want me to tell you where I saw him?”

“Tell me,” Weddel said.

“He was lying by a tree. We had to stop there and lie down, and he was lying by the tree, asking for water. ‘Have you any water, friend?’ he said. ‘Yes. I have water,’ I said. ‘I have plenty of water.’ I had to crawl; I couldn’t stand up. I crawled over to him and I lifted him so that his head would be propped against the tree. I fixed his face to the front.”

“Didn’t you have a bayonet?” Weddel said. “But I forgot; you couldn’t stand up.”

“Then I crawled back. I had to crawl back a hundred yards, where…”

“Back?”

“It was too close. Who can do decent shooting that close? I had to crawl back, and then the damned musket…”

“Damn musket?” Weddel sat a little sideways in his chair, his hand on the table, his face quizzical and sardonic, contained.

“I missed, the first shot. I had his face propped up and turned, and his eyes open watching me, and then I missed. I hit him in the throat and I had to shoot again because of the damned musket.”

“Vatch,” the father said.

Vatch’s hands were on the table. His head, his face, were like his father’s, though without the father’s deliberation. His face was furious, still, unpredictable. “It was that damn musket. I had to shoot three times. Then he had three eyes, in a row across his face propped against the tree, all three of them open, like he was watching me with three eyes. I gave him another eye, to see better with. But I had to shoot twice because of the damn musket.”

“You, Vatch,” the father said. He stood now, his hands on the table, propping his gaunt body. “Don’t you mind Vatch, stranger. The War is over now.”

“I don’t mind him,” Weddel said. His hands went to his bosom, disappearing into the foam of linen while he watched Vatch steadily with his alert, quizzical, sardonic gaze. “I have seen too many of him for too long a time to mind one of him any more.”

“Take some whiskey,” Vatch said.

“Are you just making a point?”

“Damn the pistol,” Vatch said. “Take some whiskey.”

Weddel laid his hand again on the table. But instead of pouring, Vatch held the jug poised over the tumbler. He was looking past Weddel’s shoulder. Weddel turned. The girl was in the room, standing in the doorway with her mother just behind her. The mother said as if she were speaking to the floor under her feet: “I tried to keep her back, like you said. I tried to. But she is strong as a man; hard-headed like a man.”

“You go back,” the father said.

“Me to go back?” the mother said to the floor.

The father spoke a name; Weddel did not catch it; he did not even know that he had missed it. “You go back.”

The girl moved. She was not looking at any of them. She came to the chair on which lay Weddel’s worn and mended cloak and opened it, revealing the four ragged slashes where the sable lining had been cut out as though with a knife. She was looking at the cloak when Vatch grasped her by the shoulder, but it was at Weddel that she looked. “You cut hit out and gave hit to that nigra to wrap his feet in,” she said.

Then the father grasped Vatch in turn. Weddel had not stirred, his face turned over his shoulder; beside him the boy was upraised out of his chair by his arms, his young, slacked face leaned forward into the lamp. But save for the breathing of Vatch and the father there was no sound in the room.

“I am stronger than you are, still,” the father said. “I am a better man still, or as good.”

“You won’t be always,” Vatch said.

The father looked back over his shoulder at the girl. “Go back,” he said. She turned and went back toward the hall, her feet silent as rubber feet. Again the father called that name which Weddel had not caught; again he did not catch it and was not aware again that he had not. She went out the door. The father looked at Weddel. Weddel’s attitude was unchanged, save that once more his hand was hidden inside his bosom. They looked at one another the cold, Nordic face and the half Gallic half Mongol face, thin and worn like a bronze casting, with eyes like those of the dead, in which only vision has ceased and not sight. “Take your horses, and go,” the father said.

VI

IT WAS dark in the hall, and cold, with the black chill of the mountain April coming up through the floor about her bare legs and her body in the single coarse garment. “He cut the lining outen his cloak to wrap that nigra’s feet in,” she said.

“He done hit for a nigra.” The door behind her opened.

Against the lamplight a man loomed, then the door shut behind him. “Is it Vatch or paw?” she said. Then something struck her across the back: a leather strap. “I was afeared it would be Vatch,” she said. The blow fell again.

“Go to bed,” the father said.

“You can whip me, but you can’t whip him,” she said.

The blow fell again: a thick, flat, soft sound upon her immediate flesh beneath the coarse sacking.

VII

IN THE deserted kitchen the Negro sat for a moment longer on the upturned block beside the stove, looking at the door.

Then he rose carefully, one hand on the wall.

“Whuf!” he said. “Wish us had a spring on de Domain whut run dat. Stock would git trompled to death, sho mon.”

He blinked at the door, listening, then he moved, letting himself carefully along the wall, stopping now and then to look toward the door and listen, his air cunning, unsteady, and alert. He reached the corner and lifted the loose plank, stooping carefully, bracing himself against the wall. He lifted the jug out, whereupon he lost his balance and sprawled on his face, his face ludicrous and earnest with astonishment. He got up and sat flat on the floor, carefully, the jug between his knees, and lifted the jug and drank. He drank a long time.

“Whuf!” he said. “On de Domain we’d give disyer stuff to de hawgs. But deseyer ign’unt mountain trash…” He drank again; then with the jug poised there came into his face an expression of concern and then consternation. He set the jug down and tried to get up, sprawling above the jug, gaining his feet at last, stooped, swaying, drooling, with that expression of outraged consternation on his face. Then he fell headlong to the floor, overturning the jug.

VIII

THEY STOOPED above the Negro, talking quietly to one another Weddel in his frothed shirt, the father and the boy.

“We’ll have to tote him,” the father said.

They lifted the Negro. With his single hand Weddel jerked the Negro’s head up, shaking him. “Jubal,” he said.

The Negro struck out, clumsily, with one arm. “Le’m be,” he muttered. “Le’m go.”

“Jubal!” Weddel said.

The Negro thrashed, sudden and violent. “You le’m be,” he said. “I gwy tell de Man. I gwy tell um.” He ceased, muttering: “Field hands. Field niggers.”

“We’ll have to tote him,” the father said.

“Yes,” Weddel said. “I’m sorry for this. I should have warned you. But I didn’t think there was another jug he could have gained access to.” He stooped, getting his single hand under the Negro’s shoulders.

“Get away,” the father said. “Me and Hule can do it.” He and the boy picked the Negro up. Weddel opened the door.

They emerged into the high black cold. Below them the barn loomed. They carried the Negro down the slope. “Get them horses out, Hule,” the father said.

“Horses?” Weddel said. “He can’t ride now. He can’t stay on a horse.”

They looked at one another, each toward the other voice, in the cold, the icy silence.

“You won’t go now?” the father said.

“I am sorry. You see I cannot depart now. I will have to stay until daylight, until he is sober. We will go then.”

“Leave him here. Leave him one horse, and you ride on. He is nothing but a nigra.”

“I am sorry. Not after four years.” His voice was quizzical, whimsical almost, yet with that quality of indomitable weariness. “I’ve worried with him this far; I reckon I will get him on home.”

“I have warned you,” the father said.

“I am obliged. We will move at daylight. If Hule will be kind enough to help me get him into the loft.”

The father had stepped back. “Put that nigra down, Hule,” he said.

“He will freeze here,” Weddel said. “I must get him into the loft.” He hauled the Negro up and propped him against the wall and stooped to hunch the Negro’s lax body onto his shoulder. The weight rose easily, though he did not understand why until the father spoke again: “Hule. Come away from there.”

“Yes; go,” Weddel said quietly. “I can get him up the ladder.” He could hear the boy’s breathing, fast, young, swift with excitement perhaps. Weddel did not pause to speculate, nor at the faintly hysterical tone of the boy’s voice: “I’ll help you.”

Weddel didn’t object again. He slapped the Negro awake and they set his feet on the ladder rungs, pushing him upward. Halfway up he stopped; again he thrashed out at them.

“I gwy tell um. I gwy tell de Man. I gwy tell Mistis. Field hands. Field niggers.”

IX

THEY LAY side by side in the loft, beneath the cloak and the two saddle blankets. There was no hay. The Negro snored, his breath reeking and harsh, thick. Below, in its stall, the Thoroughbred stamped now and then. Weddel lay on his back, his arm across his chest, the hand clutching the stub of the other arm. Overhead, through the cracks in the roof the sky showed the thick chill, black sky which would rain again tomorrow and on every tomorrow until they left the mountains. “If I leave the mountains,” he said quietly, motionless on his back beside the snoring Negro, staring upward. “I was concerned. I had thought that it was exhausted; that I had lost the privilege of being afraid. But I have not. And so I am happy. Quite happy.” He lay rigid on his back in the cold darkness, thinking of home. “Countymaison. Our lives are summed up in sounds and made significant. Victory. Defeat. Peace. Home. That’s why we must do so much to invent meanings for the sounds, so damned much. Especially if you are unfortunate enough to be victorious: so damned much. It’s nice to be whipped; quiet to be whipped. To be whipped and to lie under a broken roof, thinking of home.”

The Negro snored. “So damned much"; seeming to watch the words shape quietly in the darkness above his mouth.

“What would happen, say, a man in the lobby of the Gayoso, in Memphis, laughing suddenly aloud. But I am quite happy…” Then he heard the sound. He lay utterly still then, his hand clutching the butt of the pistol warm beneath the stub of his right arm, hearing the quiet, almost infinitesimal sound as it mounted the ladder. But he made no move until he saw the dim orifice of the trap door blotted out. “Stop where you are,” he said.

“It’s me,” the voice said; the voice of the boy, again with that swift, breathless quality which even now Weddel did not pause to designate as excitement or even to remark at all.

The boy came on his hands and knees across the dry, sibilant chaff which dusted the floor. “Go ahead and shoot,” he said.

On his hands and knees he loomed above Weddel with his panting breath. “I wish I was dead. I so wish hit. I wish we was both dead. I could wish like Vatch wishes. Why did you uns have to stop here?”

Weddel had not moved. “Why does Vatch wish I was dead?”

“Because he can still hear you uns yelling. I used to sleep with him and he wakes up at night and once paw had to keep him from choking me to death before he waked up and him sweating, hearing you uns yelling still. Without nothing but unloaded guns, yelling, Vatch said, like scarecrows across a cornpatch, running.” He was crying now, not aloud. “Damn you! Damn you to hell!”

“Yes,” Weddel said. “I have heard them, myself. But why do you wish you were dead?”

“Because she was trying to come, herself. Only she had to”

“Who? She? Your sister?”

“…had to go through the room to get out. Paw was awake. He said, ‘If you go out that door, don’t you never come back.’ And she said, ‘I don’t aim to,’ And Vatch was awake too and he said, ‘Make him marry you quick because you are going to be a widow at daylight.’ And she come back and told me. But I was awake too. She told me to tell you.”

“Tell me what?” Weddel said. The boy cried quietly, with a kind of patient and utter despair.

“I told her if you was a nigra, and if she done that I told her that I…”

“What? If she did what? What does she want you to tell me?”

“About the window into the attic where her and me sleep. There is a foot ladder I made to come back from hunting at night for you to get in. But I told her if you was a nigra and if she done that I would…”

“Now then,” Weddel said sharply; “pull yourself together now. Don’t you remember? I never even saw her but that one time when she came in the room and your father sent her out.”

“But you saw her then. And she saw you.”

“No,” Weddel said.

The boy ceased to cry. He was quite still above Weddel.

“No what?”

“I won’t do it. Climb up your ladder.”

For a while the boy seemed to muse above him, motionless, breathing slow and quiet now; he spoke now in a musing, almost dreamy tone: “I could kill you easy. You ain’t got but one arm, even if you are older…” Suddenly he moved, with almost unbelievable quickness; Weddel’s first intimation was when the boy’s hard, overlarge hands took him by the throat. Weddel did not move. “I could kill you easy. And wouldn’t none mind.”

“Shhhhhh,” Weddel said. “Not so loud.”

“Wouldn’t none care.” He held Weddel’s throat with hard, awkward restraint. Weddel could feel the choking and the shaking expend itself somewhere about the boy’s forearms before it reached his hands, as though the connection between brain and hands was incomplete. “Wouldn’t none care. Except Vatch would be mad.”

“I have a pistol,” Weddel said.

“Then shoot me with it. Go on.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“I told you before.”

“You swear you won’t do it? Do you swear?”

“Listen a moment,” Weddel said; he spoke now with a sort of soothing patience, as though he spoke one-syllable words to a child: “I just want to go home. That’s all. I have been away from home for four years. All I want is to go home. don’t you see? I want to see what I have left there, after four years.”

“What do you do there?” The boy’s hands were loose and hard about Weddel’s throat, his arms still, rigid. “Do you hunt all day, and all night too if you want, with a horse to ride and nigras to wait on you, to shine your boots and saddle the horse, and you setting on the gallery, eating, until time to go hunting again?”

“I hope so. I haven’t been home in four years, you see. So I don’t know any more.”

“Take me with you.”

“I don’t know what’s there, you see. There may not be anything there: no horses to ride and nothing to hunt. The Yankees were there, and my mother died right afterward, and I don’t know what we would find there, until I can go and see.”

“I’ll work. We’ll both work. You can get married in Mayesfield. It’s not far.”

“Married? Oh. Your… I see. How do you know I am not already married?” Now the boy’s hands shut on his throat, shaking him. “Stop it!” he said.

“If you say you have got a wife, I will kill you,” the boy said.

“No,” Weddel said. “I am not married.”

“And you don’t aim to climb up that foot ladder?”

“No. I never saw her but once. I might not even know her if I saw her again.”

“She says different. I don’t believe you. You are lying.”

“No,” Weddel said.

“Is it because you are afraid to?”

“Yes. That’s it.”

“Of Vatch?”

“Not Vatch. I’m just afraid. I think my luck has given out. I know that it has lasted too long; I am afraid that I shall find that I have forgot how to be afraid. So I can’t risk it. I can’t risk finding that I have lost touch with truth. Not like Jubal here. He believes that I still belong to him; he will not believe that I have been freed. He won’t even let me tell him so. He does not need to bother about truth, you see.”

“We would work. She might not look like the Miss’ippi women that wear shoes all the time. But we would learn. We would not shame you before them.”

“No,” Weddel said. “I cannot.”

“Then you go away. Now.”

“How can I? You see that he cannot ride, cannot stay on a horse.” The boy did not answer at once; an instant later Weddel could almost feel the tenseness, the utter immobility though he himself had heard no sound; he knew that the boy, crouching, not breathing, was looking toward the ladder.

“Which one is it?” Weddel whispered.

“It’s paw.”

“I’ll go down. You stay here. You keep my pistol for me.”

X

THE DARK AIR was high, chill, cold. In the vast invisible darkness the valley lay, the opposite cold and invisible range black on the black sky. Clutching the stub of his missing arm across his chest, he shivered slowly and steadily.

“Go,” the father said.

“The war is over,” Weddel said. “Vatch’s victory is not my trouble.”

“Take your horses and nigra, and ride on.”

“If you mean your daughter, I never saw her but once and I never expect to see her again.”

“Ride on,” the father said. “Take what is yours, and ride on.”

“I cannot.” They faced one another in the darkness. “After four years I have bought immunity from running.”

“You have till daylight.”

“I have had less than that in Virginia for four years. And this is just Tennessee.” But the other had turned; he dissolved into the black slope. Weddel entered the stable and mounted the ladder. Motionless above the snoring Negro the boy squatted.

“Leave him here,” the boy said. “He ain’t nothing but a nigra. Leave him, and go.”

“No,” Weddel said.

The boy squatted above the snoring Negro. He was not looking at Weddel, yet there was between them, quiet and soundless, the copse, the sharp dry report, the abrupt wild thunder of upreared horse, the wisping smoke. “I can show you a short cut down to the valley. You will be out of the mountains in two hours. By daybreak you will be ten miles away.”

“I can’t. He wants to go home too. I must get him home too.” He stooped; with his single hand he spread the cloak awkwardly, covering the Negro closer with it. He heard the boy creep away, but he did not look. After a while he shook the Negro. “Jubal,” he said. The Negro groaned; he turned heavily, sleeping again. Weddel squatted above him as the boy had done. “I thought that I had lost it for good,” he said.

“ The peace and the quiet; the power to be afraid again.”

XI

THE CABIN was gaunt and bleak in the thick cold dawn when the two horses passed out the sagging gate and into the churned road, the Negro on the Thoroughbred, Weddel on the sorrel. The Negro was shivering. He sat hunched and high, with updrawn knees, his face almost invisible in the oilcloth hood.

“I tole you dey wuz fixing to pizen us wid dat stuff,” he said. “I tole you. Hillbilly rednecks. En you not only let um pizen me, you fotch me de pizen wid yo own hand. O Lawd, O Lawd! If we ever does git home.”

Weddel looked back at the cabin, at the weathered, blank house where there was no sign of any life, not even smoke.

“She has a young man, I suppose a beau.” He spoke aloud, musing, quizzical. “And that boy. Hule. He said to come within sight of a laurel copse where the road disappears, and take a path to the left. He said we must not pass that copse.”

“Who says which?” the Negro said. “I ain’t going nowhere. I going back to dat loft en lay down.”

“All right,” Weddel said. “Get down.”

“Git down?”

“I’ll need both horses. You can walk on when you are through sleeping.”

“I gwy tell yo maw,” the Negro said. “I gwy tell um. Gwy tell how after four years you ain’t got no more sense than to not know a Yankee when you seed um. To stay de night wid Yankees en let um pizen one of Mistis’ niggers. I gwy tell um.”

“I thought you were going to stay here,” Weddel said. He was shivering too. “Yet I am not cold,” he said. “I am not cold.”

“Stay here? Me? How in de world you ever git home widout me? Whut I tell Mistis when I come in widout you en she ax me whar you is?”

“Come,” Weddel said. He lifted the sorrel into motion.

He looked quietly back at the house, then rode on. Behind him on the Thoroughbred the Negro muttered and mumbled to himself in woebegone singsong. The road, the long hill which yesterday they had toiled up, descended now. It was muddy, rock-churned, scarred across the barren and rocky land beneath the dissolving sky, jolting downward to where the pines and laurel began. After a while the cabin had disappeared.

“And so I am running away,” Weddel said. “When I get home I shall not be very proud of this. Yes, I will. It means that I am still alive. Still alive, since I still know fear and desire. Since life is an affirmation of the past and a promise to the future. So I am still alive. Ah.” It was the laurel copse.

About three hundred yards ahead it seemed to have sprung motionless and darkly secret in the air which of itself was mostly water. He drew rein sharply, the Negro, hunched, moaning, his face completely hidden, overriding him unawares until the Thoroughbred stopped of its own accord.

“But I don’t see any path…” Weddel said; then a figure emerged from the copse, running toward them. Weddel thrust the reins beneath his groin and withdrew his hand inside his cloak. Then he saw that it was the boy. He came up trotting. His face was white, strained, his eyes quite grave.

“It’s right yonder,” he said.

“Thank you,” Weddel said. “It was kind of you to come and show us, though we could have found it, I imagine.”

“Yes,” the boy said as though he had not heard. He had already taken the sorrel’s bridle. “Right tother of the brush. You can’t see hit until you are in hit.”

“In whut?” the Negro said. “I gwy tell um. After four years you ain’t got no more sense…”

“Hush,” Weddel said. He said to the boy, “I am obliged to you. You’ll have to take that in lieu of anything better. And now you get on back home. We can find the path. We will be all right now.”

“They know the path too,” the boy said. He drew the sorrel forward. “Come on.”

“Wait,” Weddel said, drawing the sorrel up. The boy still tugged at the bridle, looking on ahead toward the copse. “So we have one guess and they have one guess. Is that it?”

“Damn you to hell, come on!” the boy said, in a kind of thin frenzy. “I am sick of hit. Sick of hit.”

“Well,” Weddel said. He looked about, quizzical, sardonic, with his gaunt, weary, wasted face. “But I must move. I can’t stay here, not even if I had a house, a roof to live under. So I have to choose between three things. That’s what throws a man off that extra alternative. Just when he has come to realize that living consists in choosing wrongly between two alternatives, to have to choose among three. You go back home.”

The boy turned and looked up at him. “We’d work. We could go back to the house now, since paw and Vatch are … We could ride down the mou-tin, two on one horse and two on tother. We could go back to the valley and get married at Mayesfield. We would not shame you.”

“But she has a young man, hasn’t she? Somebody that waits for her at church on Sunday and walks home and takes Sunday dinner, and maybe fights the other young men because of her?”

“You won’t take us, then?”

“No. You go back home.”

For a while the boy stood, holding the bridle, his face lowered. Then he turned; he said quietly: “Come on, then. We got to hurry.”

“Wait,” Weddel said; “what are you going to do?”

“I’m going a piece with you. Come on.” He dragged the sorrel forward, toward the roadside.

“Here,” Weddel said, “you go on back home. The war is over now. Vatch knows that.”

The boy did not answer. He led the sorrel into the underbrush. The Thoroughbred hung back. “Whoa, you Caesar!” the Negro said. “Wait, Marse Soshay. I ain’t gwine ride down no…”

The boy looked over his shoulder without stopping. “You keep back there,” he said. “You keep where you are.”

The path was a faint scar, doubling and twisting among the brush. “I see it now,” Weddel said. “You go back.”

“I’ll go a piece with you,” the boy said; so quietly that Weddel discovered that he had been holding his breath, in a taut, strained alertness. He breathed again, while the sorrel jolted stiffly downward beneath him. “Nonsense,” he thought. “He will have me playing Indian also in five minutes more. I had wanted to recover the power to be afraid, but I seem to have outdone myself.” The path widened; the Thoroughbred came alongside, the boy walking between them; again he looked at the Negro.

“You keep back, I tell you,” he said.

“Why back?” Weddel said. He looked at the boy’s wan, strained face; he thought swiftly, “I don’t know whether I am playing Indian or not.” He said aloud: “Why must he keep back?”

The boy looked at Weddel; he stopped, pulling the sorrel up. “We’d work,” he said. “We wouldn’t shame you.”

Weddel’s face was now as sober as the boy’s. They looked at one another. “Do you think we have guessed wrong? We had to guess. We had to guess one out of three.”

Again it was as if the boy had not heard him. “You won’t think hit is me? You swear hit?”

“Yes. I swear it.” He spoke quietly, watching the boy; they spoke now as two men or two children. “What do you think we ought to do?”

“Turn back. They will be gone now. We could…” He drew back on the bridle; again the Thoroughbred came abreast and forged ahead.

“You mean, it could be along here?” Weddel said. Suddenly he spurred the sorrel, jerking the clinging boy forward. “Let go,” he said. The boy held onto the bridle, swept forward until the two horses were again abreast. On the Thoroughbred the Negro perched, high-kneed, his mouth still talking, flobbed down with ready speech, easy and worn with talk like an old shoe with walking.

“I done tole him en tole him,” the Negro said.

“Let go!” Weddel said, spurring the sorrel, forcing its shoulder into the boy. “Let go!”

“You won’t turn back?” the boy said. “You won’t?”

“Let go!” Weddel said. His teeth showed a little beneath his mustache; he lifted the sorrel bodily with the spurs. The boy let go of the bridle and ducked beneath the Thoroughbred’s neck; Weddel, glancing back as the sorrel leaped, saw the boy surge upward and on to the Thoroughbred’s back, shoving the Negro back along its spine until he vanished.

“They think you will be riding the good horse,” the boy said in a thin, panting voice; “I told them you would be riding… Down the mou-tin!” he cried as the Thoroughbred swept past; “the horse can make hit! Git outen the path! Git outen the…” Weddel spurred the sorrel; almost abreast the two horses reached the bend where the path doubled back upon itself and into a matted shoulder of laurel and rhododendron. The boy looked back over his shoulder.

“Keep back!” he cried. “Git outen the path!” Weddel rowelled the sorrel. On his face was a thin grimace of exasperation and anger almost like smiling.

It was still on his dead face when he struck the earth, his foot still fast in the stirrup. The sorrel leaped at the sound and dragged Weddel to the path side and halted and whirled and snorted once, and began to graze. The Thoroughbred however rushed on past the curve and whirled and rushed back, the blanket twisted under its belly and its eyes rolling, springing over the boy’s body where it lay in the path, the face wrenched sideways against a stone, the arms back-sprawled, open-palmed, like a woman with lifted skirts springing across a puddle. Then it whirled and stood above Weddel’s body, whinnying, with tossing head, watching the laurel copse and the fading gout of black powder smoke as it faded away.

The Negro was on his hands and knees when the two men emerged from the copse. One of them was running. The Negro watched him run forward, crying monotonously, “The durned fool! The durned fool! The durned fool!” and then stop suddenly and drop the gun; squatting, the Negro saw him become stone still above the fallen gun, looking down at the boy’s body with an expression of shock and amazement like he was waking from a dream. Then the Negro saw the other man. In the act of stopping, the second man swung the rifle up and began to reload it. The Negro did not move. On his hands and knees he watched the two white men, his irises rushing and wild in the bloodshot whites. Then he too moved and, still on hands and knees, he turned and scuttled to where Weddel lay beneath the sorrel and crouched over Weddel and looked again and watched the second man backing slowly away up the path, loading the rifle. He watched the man stop; he did not close his eyes nor look away. He watched the rifle elongate and then rise and diminish slowly and become a round spot against the white shape of Vatch’s face like a period on a page. Crouching, the Negro’s eyes rushed wild and steady and red, like those of a cornered animal.