Hill Girl

Twenty-one

The next week Lee was sentenced to sixty days in the county jail for drunk driving. He was going through the square at about forty late one night and crashed into a parked car and almost demolished it. It cost him nearly four hundred dollars to have the two cars repaired and he couldn’t get off with merely a fine this time. He’d been fined and warned too many times. He went to jail for the full two months.

Mary had filed suit for divorce. I went to see her, knowing it wasn’t any of my business and that it wouldn’t do any good. She listened to me patiently and never once told me not to butt in, but her mind was made up. She didn’t seem to blame Lee and she wasn’t bitter about it; it was just that she was through. I tried to get her to go around to the jail with me to see him, but she shook her head.

We were sitting in a booth in Gordon’s café. She toyed with the two straws that came with the Cokes.

“I’m sorry, Bob,” she said. “But what’s the use? The thing is over and done, so why prolong the agony? It just makes me feel bad to see him because I always get to thinking of how it could have been with us. It isn’t a lot of fun to look at him and think what a man he could have been if he’d ever grown up.”

“I guess so,” I said. “I always had hopes that with you he’d settle down and quit raising so much hell, but I guess that never really happens, does it?”

Her eyes were a little amused. “No, I don’t think there’s any such thing as a woman making a man out of anybody. You never heard of a man making a woman out of anybody, did you? She can take a man and make a civilized man—that is, a married one—out of him, but she has to have a man to begin with.”

“Oh, I think he’s man enough to come out of it,” I protested. “I know he’s crazy as hell and wilder than a March hare, but I wouldn’t call him a weakling.”

She shook her head with what seemed like exasperation. “There goes the professional male speaking again. A man is something that has a lot of hair on its chest, isn’t it, and a deep voice that rumbles down in its belly, and goes around trampling on its hairy brothers with cleats.“

“O.K.,” I said. “Maybe you’re right.”

When we got up to go she said something that puzzled me, and it wasn’t until long afterward that I figured it out.

“Bob, why don’t you go away from this country? I don’t think Lee ever will.”

“You mean, on account of that business? I don’t think it’s necessary. It was pretty rough at first sometimes, but I’ve about got it out of my system now.”

She gathered up her purse and I picked up the check. “Yes, I know you have. I suspect you of growing up. You’ve got over it. But has Lee?”

She wouldn’t say any more and she was quiet as I drove her back to her grandmother’s.

“Good-by, Bob,” she said. “I’ll be out to see you one of these days.”

August was beautiful. I almost forgot Lee entirely in my preoccupation with Angelina and the task I had undertaken in attempting to teach her to like the country the way I did. I went to see him once a week and took him cigarettes and some books, but he was surly most of the time and didn’t seem to care whether I came or not.

One afternoon when Angelina and I were swimming down at Black Creek, Sam came up on us, appearing out of the heavy timber with his shotgun. He was hunting squirrels and had two of them, big fox squirrels.

We hadn’t seen him since our return. Twice we had gone to visit Mrs. Harley and had taken some presents Angelina had brought back from Galveston, but both times he had been away from the house and I was pretty sure she had known he would be.

He grinned and seemed embarrassed, as though he had caught us undressed or something. “Howdy, Bob,” he said, shifting his gun to the other hand. “Howdy, Angelina.”

Angelina’s “Hello, Papa,” was as impersonal as death. I asked him how the crops were and how the hunting had been and if he’d been fishing for white perch lately, but Angelina never said another word. I felt sorry for him, the way he was standing there and not wanting to look at her, half naked as she seemed to him in her scanty bathing suit, and still wanting to look at her because she was his oldest daughter and the prettiest one and he loved her. He was talking to me but it was easy to see he was hoping she would say something to him, perhaps some word of our trip, or when she expected to be over to visit them again, or whether she was happy and liked her new home, or some question about his health, or anything at all, but no word came from her.

“We’ll be over to see you soon, Sam,” I said, as he half turned to go.

“Yes, you-all do that. We’ll be lookin’ for you. Good-by. Good-by, Angelina.”

Angelina looked up briefly and said, “Good-by, Papa.”

When he had gone, I asked, “I haven’t been mean to you in a long time, have I?”

“Of course not. Why ask such a silly thing?”

“Don’t let me, ever. I never want to have to listen to you say, ‘Good-by, Bob,’ the way you said that. The poor devil.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help it, I guess.”

We went to all the dances, the ones in town and the little country dances that were held now and then on Saturday nights in the surrounding communities, and I took her to the movies about twice a week. I had never cared a lot for pictures, but she liked them and we went. A lot of times all this going seemed a little silly and it would have been much more fun to stay at home, but always I guess there was a fear in the back of my mind that she wouldn’t like living out here if there were too much to remind her of her previous unhappiness. I didn’t want her to continue associating that unhappiness with country life when the truth was that the mere fact that her father was a farmer had had nothing to do with it I wanted her to learn that a girl could live on a farm without being imprisoned and cut off from other people her age and having to wear clothes she hated.

One night after supper, when I suggested a ride into town for a movie, Angelina surprised me by asking if we couldn’t stay at home instead.

“There’s a full moon tonight,” she said. “Let’s stay here on the back porch and just look at it.”

I agreed quickly. “Sounds like a lot more fun to me,” I said. We sat down on the top step and she leaned her head against my shoulder. The moon hadn’t come up yet over the timbered ridge to the east across the bottom, but already we could see the glow of it looking like a far-off forest fire.

“Are you happy, Angelina?” I asked.

“You know I am. More than there’s any way to say.”

“You don’t feel that living on a farm is like being in jail any more?”

“No. I never did, except over there.” She was looking across the bottom toward the glow. “I’ve never felt like that here with you.”

In a moment she laughed a little and said, “You’re funny, Bob, aren’t you? You’ve courted me so hard ever since we’ve been back here that sometimes I wondered if you’d forgotten we’re already married. Goin’ to movies and dances, and swimmin’. It’s sweet of you, but you don’t have to work so hard at it.”

“Well, I didn’t want you ever to feel about this place the way you did over there.”

“I won’t. Even if you’d made a jail out of it. There’s such a thing as still liking the jailer.”

“Fine,” I said. “All this foolishness stops right now. Tomorrow morning I take your shoes away from you and you go out and hoe cotton.”

“You don’t hoe cotton after it’s laid by, silly. You can’t fool a country girl.”

“You see what I mean, Angelina?” I said. “A few months ago you’d have been as sore as a boil if anybody’d called you a country girl. You’d have thought it was an insult.”

“I’d have scratched their eyes out.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You don’t scratch. You double up your little dukes and start throwing punches like a good bantamweight.”

“I guess that’s the only reason you like me, because I fight like a man instead of a girl.”

It wasn’t all play those two months, even though I neglected a lot of things to be with her. Jake and I cut corn tops and shocked them and sawed a lot of wood for the coming winter. But in addition to the work there were always the swimming down in the bottom and the white perch fishing, and the watermelons to be eaten, and the books to be read on the grass under the towering white oaks, and always the ever increasing fun of just being together. That summer was one I would never forget.