For a while he sat dazed, then he knelt on the floor beside Marian's bed and his hand rested gentle on her buttocks. The dull pulse of desire was prompted by the touch. "Come! I'll take off my clothes. Let's cozy." He waited, but she did not move or answer.
"Come, Baby-love."
"No," she said. But his love was rising and he did not notice her words—his hand trembled and the fingernails were dingy against the white blanket. "No more," she said. "Not ever."
"Please, love. Then afterward we can be at peace and can sleep. Darling, darling, you're all I have. You're the gold in my life!"
Marian pushed his hand away and sat up abruptly. The fear was replaced by a flash of anger, and the blue vein was prominent on her temple. "Gold in your life—" Her voice intended irony but somehow failed. "In any case—I'm your bread and butter."
The insult of the words reached him slowly, then anger leaped as sudden as a flame. "I—I—"
"You think you're the only one who has been disappointed. I married a writer who I thought would become a great writer. I was glad to support you—I thought it would pay off. So I worked at an office while you could sit there—lowering your sights. God, what has happened to us?"
"I—I—" But rage would not yet let him speak.
"Maybe you could have been helped. If you had gone to the doctor when that block started. We've both known for a long time you arc—sick."
Again he saw the expression he had seen before—it was the look that was the only thing he remembered in that awful blackout—the black eyes brilliant with fear and the prominent temple vein. He caught, reflected the same expression, so that their eyes were fixed for a time, blazing with terror.
Unable to stand this, Ken picked up the scissors from the bedside table and held them above his head, his eyes fixed on her temple vein. "Sick!" he said at last. "You mean—crazy. I'll teach you to be afraid that I am crazy. I'll teach you to talk about bread and butter. I'll teach you to think I'm crazy!"
Marian's eyes sparkled with alarm and she tried weakly to move. The vein writhed in her temple. "Don't you move." Then with a great effort he opened his hand and the scissors fell on the carpeted floor. "Sorry," he said. "Excuse me." After a dazed look around the room he saw the typewriter and went to it quickly.
"I'll take the typewriter in the living room. I didn't finish my quota today—you have to be disciplined about things like that."
He sat at the typewriter in the living room, alternating X and R for the sound. After some lines of this he paused and said in an empty voice: "This story is sitting up on its hind legs at last." Then he began to write: The lazy brown fox jumped over the cunning dog. He wrote this a number of times, then leaned back in his chair.
"Dearest Pie," he said urgently. "You know how I love you. You're the only woman I ever thought about. You're my life. Don't you understand, my dearest Pie?"
She didn't answer and the apartment was silent except for the rumble of the radiator pipes.
"Forgive me," he said. "I'm so sorry I picked up the scissors. You know I wouldn't even pinch you too hard. Tell me you forgive me. Please, please tell me."
Still there was no answer.
"I'm going to be a good husband. I'll even get a job in an advertising office. I'll be a Sunday poet—writing only on weekends and holidays. I will, my darling, I will!" he said desperately. "Although I'd much rather fry hot dogs in the morgue."
Was it the snow that made the rooms so silent? He was conscious of his own heart beating and he wrote:
Why am I so afraid
Why am I so afraid
Why am I so afraid???
He got up and in the kitchen opened the icebox door. "Hon, I'm going to fix you something good to eat. What's that dark thing in the saucer in the corner? Why, it's the liver from last Sunday's dinner—you're crazy about chicken liver or would you rather have something piping hot like soup? Which, Hon?"
There was no sound.
"I bet you haven't even eaten a bite of supper. You must be exhausted—with those awful parties and drinking and walking—without a living bite. I have to take care of you. We'll eat and afterward we can cozy."
He stood still, listening. Then, with the grease-jelled chicken liver in his hands, he tiptoed to the bedroom. The room and bath were both empty. Carefully he placed the chicken liver on the white bureau scarf. Then he stood in the doorway, his foot raised to walk and left suspended for some moments. Afterward he opened closets, even the broom closet in the kitchen, looked behind furniture and peered under the bed. Marian was nowhere at all. Finally he realized that the leopard coat and her purse were gone. He was panting when he sat down to telephone.
"Hey, Doctor. Ken Harris speaking. My wife has disappeared. Just walked out while I was writing at the typewriter. Is she with you? Did she phone?" He made squares and wavy lines on the pad. "Hell yes, we quarreled! I picked up the scissors—no, I did not touch her! I wouldn't hurt her little fingernail. No, she's not hurt—how did you get that idea?" Ken listened. "I just want to tell you this. I know you have hypnotized my wife—poisoned her mind against me. If anything happens between my wife and me I'm going to kill you. I'll go up to your nosy Park Avenue office and kill you dead."
Alone in the empty, silent rooms, he felt an undefinable fear that reminded him of his ghost-haunted babyhood. He sat on the bed, his shoes still on, cradling his knees with both arms. A line of poetry came to him. "My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?" He sobbed and bit his trousered knee.
After a while he called the places he thought she might be, accused friends of interfering with their marriage or of hiding Marian ... When he called Mabel Goodley he had forgotten the episode of the early evening and he said he wanted to come around to see her. When she said it was three o'clock and she had to get up in the morning he asked what friends were for if not for times like this. And he accused her of hiding Marian, of interfering with their marriage and of being in cahoots with the evil psychiatrist...
At the end of the night it stopped snowing. The early dawn was pearl gray and the day would be fair and very cold. At sunrise Ken put on his overcoat and went downstairs. At that hour there was no one on the street. The sun dappled the fresh snow with gold, and shadows were cold lavender. His senses searched the frozen radiance of the morning and he was thinking he should have written about such a day—that was what he had really meant to write.
A hunched and haggard figure with luminous, lost eyes, Ken plodded slowly toward the subway. He thought of the wheels of the train and the gritty wind, the roar. He wondered if it was true that in the final moment of death the brain blazes with all the images of the past—the apple trees, the loves, the cadence of lost voices—all fused and vivid in the dying brain. He walked very slowly, his eyes fixed on his solitary footsteps and the blank snow ahead.
A mounted policeman was passing along the curb near him. The horse's breath showed in the still, cold air and his eyes were purple, liquid.
"Hey, Officer. I have something to report. My wife picked up the scissors at me—aiming for that little blue vein. Then she left the apartment. My wife is very sick—crazy. She ought to be helped before something awful happens. She didn't eat a bite of supper—not even the little chicken liver."
Ken plodded on laboriously, and the officer watched him as he went away. Ken's destination was as uncontrollable as the unseen wind and Ken thought only of his footsteps and the unmarked way ahead.
The Ballad of the Sad Café
The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long. On Saturdays the tenants from the nearby farms come in for a day of talk and trade. Otherwise the town is lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world. The nearest train stop is Society City, and the Greyhound and White Bus Lines use the Forks Falls Road which is three miles away. T
he winters here are short and raw, the summers white with glare and fiery hot.
If you walk along the main street on an August afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do. The largest building, in the very center of the town, is boarded up completely and leans so far to the right that it seems bound to collapse at any minute. The house is very old. There is about it a curious, cracked look that is very puzzling until you suddenly realize that at one time, and long ago, the right side of the front porch had been painted, and part of the wall—but the painting was left unfinished and one portion of the house is darker and dingier than the other. The building looks completely deserted. Nevertheless, on the second floor there is one window which is not boarded; sometimes in the late afternoon when the heat is at its worst a hand will slowly open the shutter and a face will look down on the town. It is a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams—sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief. The face lingers at the window for an hour or so, then the shutters are closed once more, and as likely as not there will not be another soul to be seen along the main street. These August afternoons—when your shift is finished there is absolutely nothing to do; you might as well walk down to the Forks Falls Road and listen to the chain gang.
However, here in this very town there was once a café. And this old boarded-up house was unlike any other place for many miles around. There were tables with cloths and paper napkins, colored streamers from the electric fans, great gatherings on Saturday nights. The owner of the place was Miss Amelia Evans. But the person most responsible for the success and gaiety of the place was a hunchback called Cousin Lymon. One other person had a part in the story of this café—he was the former husband of Miss Amelia, a terrible character who returned to the town after a long term in the penitentiary, caused ruin, and then went on his way again. The café has long since been closed, but it is still remembered.
The place was not always a café. Miss Amelia inherited the building from her father, and it was a store that carried mostly feed, guano, and staples such as meal and snuff. Miss Amelia was rich. In addition to the store she operated a still three miles back in the swamp, and ran out the best liquor in the county. She was a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man. Her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead, and there was about her sunburned face a tense, haggard quality. She might have been a handsome woman if, even then, she was not slightly cross-eyed. There were those who would have courted her, but Miss Amelia cared nothing for the love of men and was a solitary person. Her marriage had been unlike any other marriage ever contracted in this county—it was a strange and dangerous marriage, lasting only for ten days, that left the whole town wondering and shocked. Except for this queer marriage Miss Amelia had lived her life alone. Often she spent whole nights back in her shed in the swamp, dressed in overalls and gum boots, silendy guarding the low fire of the still.
With all things which could be made by the hands Miss Amelia prospered. She sold chitterlins and sausage in the town near-by. On fine autumn days she ground sorghum, and the syrup from her vats was dark golden and delicately flavored. She built the brick privy behind her store in only two weeks and was skilled in carpentering.
It was only with people that Miss Amelia was not at ease. People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and changed overnight to something more worth-while and profitable. So that the only use that Miss Amelia had for other people was to make money out of them. And in this she succeeded. Mortgages on crops and property, a sawmill, money in the bank—she was the richest woman for miles around. She would have been rich as a congressman if it were not for her one great failing, and that was her passion for lawsuits and the courts. She would involve herself in long and bitter litigation over just a trifle. It was said that if Miss Amelia so much as stumbled over a rock in the road she would glance around instinctively as though looking for something to sue about it. Aside from these lawsuits she lived a steady life and every day was very much like the day that had gone before. With the exception of her ten-day marriage, nothing happened to change this until the spring of the year that Miss Amelia was thirty years old.
It was toward midnight on a soft quiet evening in April. The sky was the color of a blue swamp iris, the moon clear and bright. The crops that spring promised well and in the past weeks the mill had run a night shift. Down by the creek the square brick factory was yellow with light, and there was the faint, steady hum of the looms. It was such a night when it is good to hear from faraway, across the dark fields, the slow song of a Negro on his way to make love. Or when it is pleasant to sit quietly and pick up a guitar, or simply to rest alone and think of nothing at all. The street that evening was deserted, but Miss Amelia's store was lighted and on the porch outside there were five people. One of these was Stumpy MacPhail, a foreman with a red face and dainty, purplish hands. On the top step were two boys in overalls, the Rainey twins—both of them lanky and slow, with white hair and sleepy green eyes. The other man was Henry Macy, a shy and timid person with gentle manners and nervous ways, who sat on the edge of the bottom step. Miss Amelia herself stood leaning against the side of the open door, her feet crossed in their big swamp boots, patiently untying knots in a rope she had come across. They had not talked for a long time.
One of the twins, who had been looking down the empty road, was the first to speak. "I see something coming," he said.
"A calf got loose," said his brother.
The approaching figure was still too distant to be clearly seen. The moon made dim, twisted shadows of the blossoming peach trees along the side of the road. In the air the odor of blossoms and sweet spring grass mingled with the warm, sour smell of the near-by lagoon.
"No. It's somebody's youngun," said Stumpy MacPhail.
Miss Amelia watched the road in silence. She had put down her rope and was fingering the straps of her overalls with her brown bony hand. She scowled, and a dark lock of hair fell down on her forehead. While they were waiting there, a dog from one of the houses down the road began a wild, hoarse howl that continued until a voice called out and hushed him. It was not until the figure was quite close, within the range of the yellow light from the porch, that they saw clearly what had come.
Hie man was a stranger, and it is rare that a stranger enters the town on foot at that hour. Besides, the man was a hunchback. He was scarcely more than four feet tall and he wore a ragged, dusty coat that reached only to his knees. His crooked little legs seemed too thin to carry the weight of his great warped chest and the hump that sat on his shoulders. He had a very large head, with deep-set blue eyes and a sharp little mouth. His face was both soft and sassy—at the moment his pale skin was yellowed by dust and there were lavender shadows beneath his eyes. He carried a lopsided old suitcase which was tied with a rope.
"Evening," said the hunchback, and he was out of breath.
Miss Amelia and the men on the porch neither answered his greeting nor spoke. They only looked at him.
"I am hunting for Miss Amelia Evans."
Miss Amelia pushed back her hair from her forehead and raised her chin. "How come?"
"Because I am kin to her," the hunchback said.
The twins and Stumpy MacPhail looked up at Miss Amelia.
"That's me," she said. "How do you mean 'kin'?"
"Because—" the hunchback began. He looked uneasy, almost as though he was about to cry. He rested the suitcase on the bottom step, but did not take his hand from the handle. "My mother was Fanny Jesup and she come from Cheehaw. She left Cheehaw some thirty years ago when she married her first husband. I remember hearing her tell how she had a half-sister named Martha. And back in Cheehaw today they tell me that was your mother."
Miss Amelia listened with her head turned slightly aside. She ate her Sunday dinners by herself; her place was never crowded with a flock of relatives, and she claimed kin wit
h no one. She had had a great-aunt who owned the livery stable in Cheehaw, but that aunt was now dead. Aside from her there was only one double first cousin who lived in a town twenty miles away, but this cousin and Miss Amelia did not get on so well, and when they chanced to pass each other they spat on the side of the road. Other people had tried very hard, from time to time, to work out some kind of far-fetched connection with Miss Amelia, but with absolutely no success.
The hunchback went into a long rigmarole, mentioning names and places that were unknown to the listeners on the porch and seemed to have nothing to do with the subject. "So Fanny and Martha Jesup were half-sisters. And I am the son of Fanny's third husband. So that would make you and I—" He bent down and began to unfasten his suitcase. His hands were like dirty sparrow claws and they were trembling. The bag was full of all manner of junk—ragged clothes and odd rubbish that looked like parts out of a sewing machine, or something just as worthless. The hunchback scrambled among these belongings and brought out an old photograph. "This is a picture of my mother and her half-sister."
Miss Amelia did not speak. She was moving her jaw slowly from side to side, and you could tell from her face what she was thinking about. Stumpy MacPhail took the photograph and held it out toward the light. It was a picture of two pale, withered-up little children of about two and three years of age. The faces were tiny white blurs, and it might have been an old picture in anyone's album.
Stumpy MacPhail handed it back with no comment. "Where you come from?" he asked.
The hunchback's voice was uncertain. "I was traveling."
Still Miss Amelia did not speak. She just stood leaning against the side of the door, and looked down at the hunchback. Henry Macy winked nervously and rubbed his hands together. Then quietly he left the bottom step and disappeared. He is a good soul, and the hunchback's situation had touched his heart. Therefore he did not want to wait and watch Miss Amelia chase this newcomer off her property and run him out of town. The hunchback stood with his bag open on the bottom step; he sniffled his nose, and his mouth quivered. Perhaps he began to feel his dismal predicament. Maybe he realized what a miserable thing it was to be a stranger in the town with a suitcase full of junk, and claiming kin with Miss Amelia. At any rate he sat down on the steps and suddenly began to cry.