Hill Girl

Twenty-three

I drove slowly going home, taking a long time and doing a lot of thinking, and the thoughts weren’t very good company. No matter how often I went over it and added it up again, it always came out the same. I had been very near to killing my brother, and if it hadn’t been for Angelina I might have done it. It had come out all right— this time. I had warned him, and scared him, and he would leave us alone—for a while, probably, and when he wasn’t drinking. But it would wear off. And just suppose that, instead of the way it had happened, I had come home unexpectedly one of those times he was out there drunk and she was having to stand him off. What then? Nobody knows what he would do under those circumstances, but it’s not a chance you’d like to take.

And nothing had been settled by this business tonight, not a thing. Maybe I had made him think while he was scared and sober, but what about the next time he got drunk?

Angelina and I sat up late on the back porch talking about it. Her idea was the same as the advice Mary had given me weeks ago, advice I hadn’t understood until last night. Why didn’t we move away from this country? It was really the only thing to do if the three of us couldn’t live in the same place without trouble.

“I know you’re right,” I said. “It adds up, and it’s the only thing that does. But it isn’t as simple as that. This farm is really the only home I ever had. Maybe I did just live out here in the summers when school was out and in town the other nine months, but this was home. And I don’t take to the idea of being shoved off it.”

“I know what you mean,” she said. “It’s home to me too now. But we’re both young and if we went somewhere else we’d soon get to like it. I know we would.”

In the morning we had to take that bale to the gin. Jake wanted to go into town to get his account straightened out at the store and to buy a connecting rod and some gaskets for his car, which had burned out a bearing a few days before, so I suggested he take my car and go ahead, and I’d take the cotton to the gin.

After breakfast, when I had the team hitched, Angelina came down to the lot and opened the big gate for me to drive through. She blew a kiss up to me and said quietly “Will you think about leaving, Bob? Will you think about it today?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

I drove out on the road and watched her walk back to the house. It’s funny, I thought, how just watching her walk can be like that.

I thought about leaving. It would be hard to take, but I think I knew all along what the answer would be. It wasn’t as if I had to leave this kind of country and go off to a city and be a bookkeeper or a clerk or something, or even go to a different kind of farming country where it was dry, like west Texas, for instance, where farming was a business and you irrigated and farmed with tractors. No, there was plenty of country like this in the South.

And wasn’t Angelina the only thing that mattered, anyway? It sounded silly and somehow mawkish, like one of those YMCA guys in college, to say, “I want my wife to be happy,” but when you thought about it, it was really just another way of saying you wanted to be happy. You can’t live with a happy woman without being happy yourself.

We could go, all right. It might take a long time to sell the place, but the bank could handle it for us and maybe Jake would stay on until it was sold. Jake was the kind of man you could leave something with. I would miss him, though. And Helen. They were the kind of people you wanted to have around. And we still had enough money to buy another place without having to wait until this one was sold. Or at least enough to make a good down payment on one.

I thought about Lee. There was something saddening, even on a day like this, in thinking of him, because I would always remember the way things were between us when we were children, the way he had always taken up for me and stood as a buffer between the Major and me. But why think about it? It didn’t do any good and just made things worse and sooner or later I would get around to that thing last night when I was so close to killing him. No, the only thing to do was to leave here and forget about him. Whatever was going to happen to him was going to happen, and nobody could do anything about it.

The air was cool in the late afternoon as I drove back from the gin and I knew there might be frost tonight. I looked at the sun; in another hour it would be out of sight and it would be the blue hazy dusk of October by the time I got home. Angelina would have supper ready and she would be happy when I told her about leaving. I thought of the way her eyes looked when she was happy and knew it was worth it.

One of the mules had to stop momentarily, and I grinned as I recalled what had been great wit among the boys I had known when I was living out there on the farm with my grandfather. “Better turn yore mule over, mister. He’s leakin’ on that side.”

Somebody came up behind me in a car, going fast, and as it swung out to pass the wagon I saw it was Lee. The top was down and as it went by he looked up and recognized me in the wagon. He slid to a stop a hundred yards or more down the road and backed up until we were side by side, taking up the full width of the road. I stopped the team.

He rested his arms on the wheel and looked up at me. I could see he was sober, but his eyes were like holes burned in a blanket and there was something somber in his face.

“I was just going out to your place,” he said quietly.

“You’ve got a short memory,” I said. He was silent and I went on, “Hoping to find me at home, no doubt?”

“Yes. I was.”

“Well, it’s nice you found me here. It’ll save you the trip.”

I could see the hurt in his face for a second.

“I wanted to see both of you.”

“Never mind both of us.”

He looked moodily down the road. “When a guy gets on your list, he gets on for good, doesn’t he?”

“When he works hard enough at it,” I said.

“Well, I don’t blame you, I guess.”

I lit a cigarette and looked at him. “You wanted to see me. I’m all ears. Let’s have it.”

“I just wanted to say good-by.”

“You did. Last night. Remember?”

“I’m going away.”

“That right? You be gone long?” I asked.

“For good, I think. I turned the house over to Mary this morning and the lawyers can straighten out the rest of the settlement. I won’t be back.”

“Why?”

“After last night? It’d just happen again, with all three of us here. And somebody’d get hurt eventually.”

“Well, you know how to prevent it.”

He looked at me a long time before he answered and I could see he didn’t want to say it. I had never seen him so hopeless or so bitter. “It isn’t that simple. Don’t you think I know enough by this time to leave her alone if I could? But I can’t. I just can’t. Just knowing she’s here . . .”

“You don’t have to pull out,” I said. “We are.”

He shook his head. “No. It’s the only thing for me to do. I’ve just about worn it out around here, some of the things I’ve done. That business last night just put the finishing touches on it. I didn’t sleep any, thinking about it. There’s nothing to keep me here any more.”

I didn’t say anything. He looked up at me and then down at his hands on the wheel, and then took out a cigarette and lit it.

“Well, so long, Bob,” he said.

“So long.”

“I’m sorry about everything.”

“It was just one of those things.”

“I’m going to stop by and apologize to her and say good-by.”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t care. But she won’t want to see you.”

“I know. But I’ll try, anyway. I’ll feel better about it.”

“Suit yourself.”

He shifted into gear, hesitating a little, and looked up at me.

“Well, I won’t see you again, Bob,” he said, still waiting.

I didn’t move except to pick up the lines. “So long.”

He let out the clutch and moved slowly ahead and turned once before he shifted into high and got rolling fast. I watched him until he was out of sight around the bend at the top of a long grade ahead and tried not to think about how it had been between us long ago.