"Yes," he said, trying to seem no more interested than if Clarence had said he had to replace some part in the manure spreader.
"I wish I knew what's eating her."
"Maybe nothing. Maybe she's just tired or doesn't feel well."
"Maybe."
"In any case, I doubt if she's the only woman in Logan County that's as cross as a bear this morning."
"There's no pleasing her sometimes," Clarence said, and there the conversation ended. But it had opened up vistas of hope, where before there had been none.
Parting the slit in the front of his underwear, he sent his urine in an arch out onto the frozen ground. It glittered in the moonlight. He was in the shadow of the porch roof, where he could not be seen by anybody driving past— though who would be, before daylight? With one knee bent and his foot braced against the porch railing he stood staring off into the darkness where she was. A minute passed, and then another. The first cock crowed, even though the light in the east hadn't changed. At his back a woman's voice said, "Lloyd, what on earth are you doing out there?" and he turned and went into the house.
He thought his secret was safe until one day when he walked into the kitchen and asked, "Where's Clarence?" and she said coldly, "Why do you keep up this pretense of friendship any longer when you don't like us the way you used to?"
He was dumfounded, and started to defend himself, and then broke off. If he didn't say what was on his heart now he might as well crawl into a hole somewhere and die. His life wouldn't be worth living. ...
Out it came. Everything. Pouring out of him. He expected to be driven from the house and instead she looked at him the way she looked at her children when they were upset over something—as if, as a human being, he had a right to his feelings, whatever they were. When he took her in his arms she neither accepted his kiss nor resisted it.
Instinct told him that it would end badly.
For a week they avoided each other and accident kept bringing them face to face when there was nobody else around. Each time, they turned away without saying a word, without even touching each other. And got in deeper and deeper. He knew he should be sorry but he was not. Which didn't keep him from grieving for the best friend he had ever had. As if Clarence had met with an accident.
The flood of feeling that informed his heart was like nothing he had ever experienced. If his wife, lying with her back to him on the far side of the bed, knew he was awake she did not show it. Reassured by the sound of her breathing, he lit a match and looked to see what time it was. He had never before not been able to fall asleep the minute his head hit the pillow. Now hour after hour went by and he felt no need for sleep. He felt as if he had just been born.
He lay on his side for a while and then turned, trying not to produce an upheaval in the bed. If things had been different, if they'd met when they were young, before Clarence had come along and ... He turned again. He was in the habit of going to his father when he had a problem to deal with that was totally beyond his experience. He went to his father now and said What am I going to do? And his father said Stay on this side of the boundary line till you get over it. Good enough advice but if he didn't get over it? This question his father did not seem to want to answer. But he knew also that if his father had come up with a solution he wouldn't have been interested. He turned again so that he was lying on his back, and tears of gratitude ran down his face, past his ears, through the stubble on his jaw, and were soaked up by the pillowcase, which smelled of sunshine. ...
The alarm clock went off and ran all the way down and he didn't move. Sleep, when it finally came, had felled him. His wife shook him awake and he was under the impression that he answered her, but all he did was sit up in bed and reach for the matches and light the lamp to dress by. Shaking the grates in the kitchen stove he was aware, suddenly, of how cut off they now were from everybody. And committed to lying.
There was nothing to be done about it. He didn't want to not love her. It was as simple as that. And with the lantern swinging from his hand he went off into the darkness as on any other morning—as he did on the last morning of his life.
Clarence and the hired man started to carry the full milk pails into the shed where the separator was, and when he didn't follow them Clarence turned and said, "Aren't you coming?"
"Not tonight," he said, only to have his excuses brushed aside.
The memory of making love lay like a bandage across the front of his mind, day and night.
He waited for her to tell him where they would meet, and when. And marveled at the excuses she thought up to get to him. No matter what the excuse was, it always worked. No excuse at all worked equally well. He thought, If Clarence comes in from the fields unexpectedly and she isn't there, and he doesn't wonder where she is or go out looking for us .. . which didn't prevent him from thinking, also, We can't go on doing this to him. He doesn't deserve it.
Pulling the bridle over the horse's nose he wondered if they were already the talk of the neighborhood.
"I caught Cletus looking at us."
"What do you mean?"
"As if we'd turned into strangers."
"You imagine it," she said, and kissed him.
He found notes in his pocket that she had put there without his knowing it, and that Marie might have found when she went through his clothes on washday. Were there others that he didn't discover in time?
He waited for his wife to say something and she didn't.
He meant to warn Fern about the notes and forgot.
There was no limit to the falsehood and deception, the smiles he made himself smile, and even so he was caught off guard. Walking from the barn to the house he felt Clarence's arm draped over his shoulder and before he could stop himself he moved away to avoid the physical contact. Also to escape responding to it, which would have been to tell Clarence and get it over with. When it was too late, he wished he had.
VII
INNOCENT (MORE OR LESS) CREATURES
"Lloyd is preoccupied."
It was the first time Cletus had ever heard the word and apparently it didn't mean what you might think.
"About what?" his mother asked.
"I have no idea," his father said.
She didn't for a minute believe him; his manner and his voice and the look in his eyes all betrayed him. He suspected them. Of how much there was no telling. Of something. Another man would have come out with it. As long as he went on pretending not to know, her hands were tied. Maybe that was his game.
She watched him for two days. On the morning of the third, he asked if there was any more coffee and she said accusingly, "You're not fooling me! I know that you know."
When it turned out that she was mistaken and he didn't know, there was no way she could take the words back. It was as if a hole opened suddenly at their feet and they fell into it.
Over the mirror in the barbershop there is a colored poster, framed, of a woman with a pompadour. Her ample bust emerges from a water lily. She is holding an eyedropper elegantly and advocating Murine for the eyes. On the opposite wall, a whole row of calendars for the year 1921. On the linoleum floor, swatches of straight light brown hair. A minute before, they were part of Cletus Smith. Now they are waiting for the broom. The wall clock says seventeen minutes after two (tick/tock tick/tock) and the odor of bay rum lingers on the air. Sitting in the barber chair, with his head pushed down so that his chin is resting on his collarbone, Cletus can only look sidewise. He sees a shadow fall on the plate-glass window and then withdraw abruptly.
With a wave of his clippers the barber indicates the sidewalk, empty now. "Wasn't that your friend?"
The question is not directed at Cletus but at his father, waiting his turn under the row of calendars. When there is no answer the barber is not offended. People either answered prying questions, in which case you found out something you didn't know before, or they ignored them and if you bided your time you found out the answer anyway. Friend no longer, he remarked to himself. And then
his eyebrows rose because of what he saw in the mirror: the boy was blushing.
Riding on the seat of the cultivator in the field that lay next to the road, Lloyd Wilson did not raise his head when Clarence drove by in the buckboard wagon, with Cletus on the seat beside him.
The two men met once, by accident, at the mailboxes, and after that they saw to it that they didn't meet anywhere. Though they were no longer on speaking terms they couldn't avoid seeing each other at a distance in the fields. And at night the lighted windows of one another's houses, once a comfort, only made them uneasy, since it was a reminder of all the things that were not the way they used to be.
Fred Wilson finished reading the evening paper and took off his glasses in order to rub his eyes. The family resemblance was apparent for a moment. "Weil, tomorrow's another day," he said, and stood up.
"Sleep well, Uncle Fred," Marie Wilson said.
"If I don't, I don't know whose fault it will be but mine," he said cheerfully, and went off to his room back of the kitchen. The children said good night to their mother, and then to their father, and went upstairs to bed. The clock ticked, loudly at times. A piece of wood collapsed in the stove. Lloyd Wilson was aware that the silence in the room was not of the ordinary kind, and braced himself. His wife rolled the sock she had just finished darning into a ball and said, "Has something happened between you and Clarence?" "No."
"You haven't quarreled?" "No."
"Then what is the matter?"
"I don't know."
"You mean you don't know how to tell me?"
He didn't know how to lie. To other people, yes, but not to her. He said slowly, "I guess that's what I do mean." He saw that her face was flushed and her eyes bright with tears. "We-"
"If it's what I think it is, I don't want to hear about it."
"What happened was that we—"
"I told you, I don't want to hear about it."
"—couldn't prevent it."
"And that makes it more comfortable for both of you, I'm sure. But don't ask me to believe it too. From now on you go your way and I'll go mine."
What she meant by this statement he didn't know and it didn't seem like a good time to ask. Their eyes met and with an effort he kept his glance from faltering. The accusing look and the missing front tooth were things he had not bargained for when he stood up before the minister. Or she either, he thought sadly.
Days went by and he had almost come to the conclusion she didn't mean anything by that statement, and that things had settled back into the way they were before, when she announced that she was going to take the children and move in with her sister in town.
He said the first thing that came into his head, which was "But you don't get on with her."
"I know. But she says she'll take us in. Blood being thicker than water."
He sat back and listened while she talked their whole married life out of existence. At no time did he argue with her or deny any statement she made. Finally, when there was nothing more to say, she picked up the lamp and went into the next room, and he followed her, and they undressed and got into bed as if nothing whatever had happened. After a while he said, in the dark, "You can take the girls but not the boys."
There was no answer from the far side of the bed.
He knew that even now he could persuade her to change her mind, but if he did—
"I have never before in my life been happy," he said, "and I will not give it up."
Because there wasn't room for everything in the buggy, they took with them only the baby's paraphernalia and what the rest of them needed for the night, and left the battered suitcases and an old leather trunk for him to bring the next day. Nobody spoke all the way in to town. When he pulled on the reins the little girls were ready and one by one jumped from the metal step of the buggy. Hazel stood waiting for her mother to hand the baby down to her. "Be good girls," he called after them but they were too frightened by what was happening to turn and smile at him. He waited until they had all disappeared into the house and then gave the whip a flick. He hadn't meant for things to go this far, and neither had he thought ahead to what might happen next. Coming back to the farm, his spirits lifted for no reason. Or perhaps because a thing hanging over them for so long had at last happened, clearing the air.
Fred never asked questions. The little boys couldn't understand why their mother wasn't there, and he didn't know what she might have said to them, so he told them to be quiet and eat their supper. In the night he heard Orville crying and got up and brought him into his own bed, where he dropped off instantly. But after that he let them cry themselves to sleep, hoping they'd get over it sooner.
He tried to be both mother and father to them, which wasn't easy. When Saturday night came round, he placed the washtub in the middle of the kitchen floor and filled it with warm water from the stove and they stood in it. He poured soapy water over their thin shoulders, as he had seen their mother do, and examined their ears for dirt, but his hands were not as gentle or as practised as hers and Dean looked at him accusingly and said, "You hurt me!"
"Do it yourself, then," he said. But he was damned if he was going to let them grow up in town, not knowing how to handle an axe or plow a straight furrow.
He heard about a widow woman over toward Harmon Springs who was living with relatives and dependent on them for her keep. She might be a little too old for the work but if he got somebody younger, people would talk. "I'll have to think about it," she said when he told her why he had come. She didn't have to think about it very long. As he was getting back into the buggy the front door flew open and she called out to him to wait while she gathered together a few garments. Settling herself on the seat beside him she said, "Just call me 'Mrs. B.'—everybody does." She meant everybody in Harmon Springs.
What with cataracts in both eyes and dizzy spells that came over her if she got down on her knees and poked with the broom in dark corners, the widow didn't do a great deal about the dust that blew into the house from the plowed fields or notice that the pots and pans had acquired a coating of grease. She loved to stand and talk, and one listener was as good as another. "Stop me if I've told you this before, I don't want to repeat myself," she said, but there was no stopping her, or even getting a word in edgewise.
Though she was grateful not to be living on the charity of cousins once removed who raised their eyebrows if she asked for a second helping of chicken and gravy, still the days were long and she wished that people would drop in more. To some she might appear just an ordinary farm woman, but her family had supplied the State of Tennessee with a congressman and a judge. "Well, ma'am, I know you must be right proud of them," Lloyd Wilson said on his way out the door.
It was more than she could do to keep track of his coming and going. Just when she thought he was going to settle down at last and she could dispose of the things she'd been saving up to tell him, he put his jacket on and left the house —to do what, since it was dark outside and the chores were done, she couldn't imagine.
"Pshaw," she said to the little boys as she went after them with a washrag. "If you expect to grow up a big strong man like your father, you can't object to a little soap."
It is not a crime to ask questions, especially indirect ones, and from Fred Wilson's reluctant answers the widow had no difficulty in putting two and two together. She also questioned the little boys about their mother, and said primly, "I hope I shall have the pleasure of meeting her some day."
They did not like her very much but at least she was a woman, she wore skirts, and so they leaned against her sometimes out of habit or when they missed their mother. They were very good about coming when she called, and the rest of the time they wandered around together as if they were afraid of being separated.
Riding past on his bicycle, Cletus was conscious of the fact that Mrs. Wilson wasn't there—only that old woman. No more slices of bread that was still warm from the oven. If v he saw the little boys or Mr. Wilson he stopped to talk to them. Mr. Wilson ac
ted as though everything was just the same. "Cletus," he said, "you're looking very spry this morning. Do you think we're in for some more rain?" But it wasn't the same, if he never came to their house any more the way he used to. And the Wilson girls weren't going to be at school to see him graduate from seventh grade.
Wayne had a basket of toys that he kept at Aunt Jenny's house, but instead of playing with them he followed her around all morning, talking her leg off-about what she had only a vague idea, for she was only half listening. Finally her patience gave way and she said, "Wayne, honey, be quiet a moment, I can't hear myself think!" And from the way he stood there, looking at her, she realized that he understood perfectly that she was half sick about what was happening out in the country and why his mother was unable to give him her undivided attention, the way she used to. "Not that it matters whether I do or don't hear myself think. You must forgive me, dear heart. I'm not responsible this morning. Now then," and she sat down in a rocking chair and gathered him on her lap and he put his head on her shoulder and they rocked.
After a while he said, "Aunt Jenny, what happens if— what happens if people wake up after they're buried and can't get out?"
"That couldn't happen. They're already in Heaven. And on the Resurrection Day their bodies and their souls are joined and they live happy ever after." Looking at him she could tell that he partly believed what she said and partly didn't believe it, having seen the crows picking at the carcasses of dead animals.