“I am not set against her,” Thomas said. “I am set against your making a fool of yourself.”
As soon as he left the table and closed the door of his study on himself, his father took up a squatting position in his mind. The old man had had the countryman’s ability to converse squatting, though he was no countryman but had been born and brought up in the city and only moved to a smaller place later to exploit his talents. With steady skill he had made them think him one of them. In the midst of a conversation on the courthouse lawn, he would squat and his two or three companions would squat with him with no break in the surface of the talk. By gesture he had lived his lie; he had never deigned to tell one.
Let her run over you, he said. You ain’t like me. Not enough to be a man.
Thomas began vigorously to read and presently the image faded. The girl had caused a disturbance in the depths of his being, somewhere out of the reach of his power of analysis. He felt as if he had seen a tornado pass a hundred yards away and had an intimation that it would turn again and head directly for him. He did not get his mind firmly on his work until mid-morning.
Two nights later, his mother and he were sitting in the den after their supper, each reading a section of the evening paper, when the telephone began to ring with the brassy intensity of a fire alarm. Thomas reached for it. As soon as the receiver was in his hand, a shrill female voice screamed into the room, “Come get this girl! Come get her! Drunk! Drunk in my parlor and I won’t have it! Lost her job and come back here drunk! I won’t have it!”
His mother leapt up and snatched the receiver.
The ghost of Thomas’s father rose before him. Call the sheriff, the old man prompted. “Call the sheriff,” Thomas said in a loud voice. “Call the sheriff to go there and pick her up.”
“We’ll be right there,” his mother was saying. “We’ll come and get her right away. Tell her to get her things together.”
“She ain’t in no condition to get nothing together,” the voice screamed. “You shouldn’t have put something like her off on me! My house is repectable!”
“Tell her to call the sheriff,” Thomas shouted.
His mother put the receiver down and looked at him. “I wouldn’t turn a dog over to that man,” she said.
Thomas sat in the chair with his arms folded and looked fixedly at the wall.
“Think of the poor girl, Thomas,” his mother said, “with nothing. Nothing. And we have everything.”
When they arrived, Sarah Ham was slumped spraddle-legged against the banister on the boarding house front-steps. Her tam was down on her forehead where the old woman had slammed it and her clothes were bulging out of her suitcase where the old woman had thrown them in. She was carrying on a drunken conversation with herself in a low personal tone. A streak of lipstick ran up one side of her face. She allowed herself to be guided by his mother to the car and put in the back seat without seeming to know who the rescuer was. “Nothing to talk to all day but a pack of goddamned parakeets,” she said in a furious whisper.
Thomas, who had not got out of the car at all, or looked at her after the first revolted glance, said, “I’m telling you, once and for all, the place to take her is the jail.”
His mother, sitting on the back seat, holding the girl’s hand, did not answer.
“All right, take her to the hotel,” he said.
“I cannot take a drunk girl to a hotel, Thomas,” she said. “You know that.”
“Then take her to a hospital.”
“She doesn’t need a jail or a hotel or a hospital,” his mother said, “she needs a home.”
“She does not need mine,” Thomas said.
“Only for tonight, Thomas,” the old lady sighed. “Only for tonight.”
Since then eight days had passed. The little slut was established in the guest room. Every day his mother set out to find her a job and a place to board, and failed, for the old woman had broadcast a warning. Thomas kept to his room or the den. His home was to him home, workshop, church, as personal as the shell of a turtle and as necessary. He could not believe that it could be violated in this way. His flushed face had a constant look of stunned outrage.
As soon as the girl was up in the morning, her voice throbbed out in a blues song that would rise and waver, then plunge low with insinuations of passion about to be satisfied and Thomas, at his desk, would lunge up and begin frantically stuffing his ears with Kleenex. Each time he started from one room to another, one floor to another, she would be certain to appear. Each time he was half way up or down the stairs, she would either meet him and pass, cringing coyly, or go up or down behind him, breathing small tragic spearmint-flavored sighs. She appeared to adore Thomas’s repugnance to her and to draw it out of him every chance she got as if it added delectably to her martyrdom.
The old man—small, wasp-like, in his yellowed panama hat, his seersucker suit, his pink carefully-soiled shirt, his small string tie—appeared to have taken up his station in Thomas’s mind and from there, usually squatting, he shot out the same rasping suggestion every time the boy paused from his forced studies. Put your foot down. Go to see the sheriff.
The sheriff was another edition of Thomas’s father except that he wore a checkered shirt and a Texas type hat and was ten years younger. He was as easily dishonest, and he had genuinely admired the old man. Thomas, like his mother, would have gone far out of his way to avoid his glassy pale blue gaze. He kept hoping for another solution, for a miracle.
With Sarah Ham in the house, meals were unbearable.
“Tomsee doesn’t like me,” she said the third or fourth night at the supper table and cast her pouting gaze across at the large rigid figure of Thomas, whose face was set with the look of a man trapped by insufferable odors. “He doesn’t want me here. Nobody wants me anywhere.”
“Thomas’s name is Thomas,” his mother interrupted. “Not Tomsee.”
“I made Tomsee up,” she said. “I think it’s cute. He hates me.”
“Thomas does not hate you,” his mother said. “We are not the kind of people who hate,” she added, as if this were an imperfection that had been bred out of them generations ago.
“Oh, I know when I’m not wanted,” Sarah Ham continued. “They didn’t even want me in jail. If I killed myself I wonder would God want me?”
“Try it and see,” Thomas muttered.
The girl screamed with laughter. Then she stopped abruptly, her face puckered and she began to shake. “The best thing to do,” she said, her teeth clattering, “is to kill myself. Then I’ll be out of everybody’s way. I’ll go to hell and be out of God’s way. And even the devil won’t want me. He’ll kick me out of hell, not even in hell…” she wailed.
Thomas rose, picked up his plate and knife and fork and carried them to the den to finish his supper. After that, he had not eaten another meal at the table but had had his mother serve him at his desk. At these meals, the old man was intensely present to him. He appeared to be tipping backwards in his chair, his thumbs beneath his galluses, while he said such things as, She never ran me away from my own table.
A few nights later, Sarah Ham slashed her wrists with a paring knife and had hysterics. From the den where he was closeted after supper, Thomas heard a shriek, then a series of screams, then his mother’s scurrying footsteps through the house. He did not move. His first instant of hope that the girl had cut her throat faded as he realized she could not have done it and continue to scream the way she was doing. He returned to his journal and presently the screams subsided. In a moment his mother burst in with his coat and hat. “We have to take her to the hospital,” she said. “She tried to do away with herself. I have a tourniquet on her arm. Oh Lord, Thomas,” she said, “imagine being so low you’d do a thing like that!”
Thomas rose woodenly and put on his hat and coat. “We will take her to the hospital,” he said, “and we will leave her there.”
“And drive her to despair again?” the old lady cried. “Thomas!”
Standing in the center of his room now, realizing that he had reached the point where action was inevitable, that he must pack, that he must leave, that he must go, Thomas remained immovable.
His fury was directed not at the little slut but at his mother. Even though the doctor had found that she had barely damaged herself and had raised the girl’s wrath by laughing at the tourniquet and putting only a streak of iodine on the cut, his mother could not get over the incident. Some new weight of sorrow seemed to have been thrown across her shoulders, and not only Thomas, but Sarah Ham was infuriated by this, for it appeared to be a general sorrow that would have found another object no matter what good fortune came to either of them. The experience of Sarah Ham had plunged the old lady into mourning for the world.
The morning after the attempted suicide, she had gone through the house and collected all the knives and scissors and locked them in a drawer. She emptied a bottle of rat poison down the toilet and took up the roach tablets from the kitchen floor. Then she came to Thomas’s study and said in a whisper, “Where is that gun of his? I want you to lock it up.”
“The gun is in my drawer,” Thomas roared, “and I will not lock it up. If she shoots herself, so much the better!”
“Thomas,” his mother said, “she’ll hear you!”
“Let her hear me!” Thomas yelled. “Don’t you know she has no intention of killing herself? Don’t you know her kind never kill themselves? Don’t you…”
His mother slipped out the door and closed it to silence him and Sarah Ham’s laugh, quite close in the hall, came rattling into his room. “Tomsee’ll find out. I’ll kill myself and then he’ll be sorry he wasn’t nice to me. I’ll use his own lil gun, his own lil ol’ pearl-handled revol-lervuh!” she shouted and let out a loud tormented-sounding laugh in imitation of a movie monster.
Thomas ground his teeth. He pulled out his desk drawer and felt for the pistol. It was an inheritance from the old man, whose opinion it had been that every house should contain a loaded gun. He had discharged two bullets one night into the side of a prowler, but Thomas had never shot anything. He had no fear that the girl would use the gun on herself and he closed the drawer. Her kind clung tenaciously to life and were able to wrest some histrionic advantage from every moment.
Several ideas for getting rid of her had entered his head but each of these had been suggestions whose moral tone indicated that they had come from a mind akin to his father’s, and Thomas had rejected them. He could not get the girl locked up again until she did something illegal. The old man would have been able with no qualms at all to get her drunk and send her out on the highway in his car, meanwhile notifying the highway patrol of her presence on the road, but Thomas considered this below his moral stature. Suggestions continued to come to him, each more outrageous than the last.
He had not the vaguest hope that the girl would get the gun and shoot herself, but that afternoon when he looked in the drawer, the gun was gone. His study locked from the inside, not the out. He cared nothing about the gun, but the thought of Sarah Ham’s hands sliding among his papers infuriated him. Now even his study was contaminated. The only place left untouched by her was his bedroom.
That night she entered it.
In the morning at breakfast, he did not eat and did not sit down. He stood beside his chair and delivered his ultimatum while his mother sipped her coffee as if she were both alone in the room and in great pain. “I have stood this,” he said, “for as long as I am able. Since I see plainly that you care nothing about me, about my peace or comfort or working conditions, I am about to take the only step open to me. I will give you one more day. If you bring the girl back into this house this afternoon, I leave. You can choose—her or me.” He had more to say but at that point his voice cracked and he left.
At ten o’clock his mother and Sarah Ham left the house.
At four he heard the car wheels on the gravel and rushed to the window. As the car stopped, the dog stood up, alert, shaking.
He seemed unable to take the first step that would set him walking to the closet in the hall to look for the suitcase. He was like a man handed a knife and told to operate on himself if he wished to live. His huge hands clenched helplessly. His expression was a turmoil of indecision and outrage. His pale blue eyes seemed to sweat in his broiling face. He closed them for a moment and on the back of his lids, his father’s image leered at him. Idiot! the old man hissed, idiot! The criminal slut stole your gun! See the sheriff! See the sheriff!
It was a moment before Thomas opened his eyes. He seemed newly stunned. He stood where he was for at least three minutes, then he turned slowly like a large vessel reversing its direction and faced the door. He stood there a moment longer, then he left, his face set to see the ordeal through.
He did not know where he would find the sheriff. The man made his own rules and kept his own hours. Thomas stopped first at the jail where his office was, but he was not in it. He went to the courthouse and was told by a clerk that the sheriff had gone to barber-shop across the street. “Yonder’s the deppity,” the clerk said and pointed out the window to the large figure of a man in a checkered shirt, who was leaning against the side of a police car, looking into space.
“It has to be the sheriff,” Thomas said and left for the barber-shop. As little as he wanted anything to do with the sheriff, he realized that the man was at least intelligent and not simply a mound of sweating flesh.
The barber said the sheriff had just left. Thomas started back to the courthouse and as he stepped on to the sidewalk from the street, he saw a lean, slightly stooped figure gesticulating angrily at the deputy.
Thomas approached with an aggressiveness brought on by nervous agitation. He stopped abruptly three feet away and said in an over-loud voice, “Can I have a word with you?” without adding the sheriff’s name, which was Farebrother.
Farebrother turned his sharp creased face just enough to take Thomas in, and the deputy did likewise, but neither spoke. The sheriff removed a very small piece of cigaret from his lip and dropped it at his feet. “I told you what to do,” he said to the deputy. Then he moved off with a slight nod that indicated Thomas could follow him if he wanted to see him. The deputy slunk around the front of the police car and got inside.
Farebrother, with Thomas following, headed across the courthouse square and stopped beneath a tree that shaded a quarter of the front lawn. He waited, leaning slightly forward, and lit another cigaret.
Thomas began to blurt out his business. As he had not had time to prepare his words, he was barely coherent. By repeating the same thing over several times, he managed at length to get out what he wanted to say. When he finished, the sheriff was still leaning slightly forward, at an angle to him, his eyes on nothing in particular. He remained that way without speaking.
Thomas began again, slower and in a lamer voice, and Farebrother let him continue for some time before he said, “We had her oncet.” He then allowed himself a slow, creased, all-knowing, quarter smile.
“I had nothing to do with that,” Thomas said. “That was my mother.”
Farebrother squatted.
“She was trying to help the girl,” Thomas said. “She didn’t know she couldn’t be helped.”
“Bit off more than she could chew, I reckon,” the voice below him mused.
“She has nothing to do with this,” Thomas said. “She doesn’t know I’m here. The girl is dangerous with that gun.”
“He,” the sheriff said, “never let anything grow under his feet. Particularly nothing a woman planted.”
“She might kill somebody with that gun,” Thomas said weakly, looking down at the round top of the Texas type hat.
There was a long time of silence.
“Where’s she got it?” Farebrother asked.
“I don’t know. She sleeps in the guest room. It must be in there, in her suitcase probably,” Thomas said.
Farebrother lapsed into silence again.
“You could come search
the guest room,” Thomas said in a strained voice. “I can go home and leave the latch off the front door and you can come in quietly and go upstairs and search her room.”
Farebrother turned his head so that his eyes looked boldly at Thomas’s knees. “You seem to know how it ought to be done,” he said. “Want to swap jobs?”
Thomas said nothing because he could not think of anything to say, but he waited doggedly. Farebrother removed the cigaret butt from his lips and dropped it on the grass. Beyond him on the courthouse porch a group of loiterers who had been leaning at the left of the door moved over to the right where a patch of sunlight had settled. From one of the upper windows a crumpled piece of paper blew out and drifted down.
“I’ll come along about six,” Farebrother said. “Leave the latch off the door and keep out of my way—yourself and them two women too.”
Thomas let out a rasping sound of relief meant to be “Thanks,” and struck off across the grass like some one released. The phrase, “them two women,” stuck like a burr in his brain—the subtlety of the insult to his mother hurting him more than any of Farebrother’s references to his own incompetence. As he got into his car, his face suddenly flushed. Had he delivered his mother over to the sheriff—to be a butt for the man’s tongue? Was he betraying her to get rid of the little slut? He saw at once that this was not the case. He was doing what he was doing for her own good, to rid her of a parasite that would ruin their peace. He started his car and drove quickly home but once he had turned in the driveway, he decided it would be better to park some distance from the house and go quietly in by the back door. He parked on the grass and on the grass walked in a circle toward the rear of the house. The sky was lined with mustard-colored streaks. The dog was asleep on the back doormat. At the approach of his master’s step, he opened one yellow eye, took him in, and closed it again.
Thomas let himself into the kitchen. It was empty and the house was quiet enough for him to be aware of the loud ticking of the kitchen clock. It was a quarter to six. He tiptoed hurriedly through the hall to the front door and took the latch off it. Then he stood for a moment listening. From behind the closed parlor door, he heard his mother snoring softly and presumed that she had gone to sleep while reading. On the other side of the hall, not three feet from his study, the little slut’s black coat and red pocketbook were slung on a chair. He heard water running upstairs and decided she was taking a bath.