Everything was white, and everything looked vast and extensive to them as they walked over the frozen field. White in a shadowed pit, abandoned from summer to summer, the old sorghum mill stood like the machine of a dream, with its long prostrate pole, its blunted axis.
Stooping over the little plants, Jason and Sara touched them and touched the earth. For their own knowledge, by their hands, they found everything to be true—the cold, the Tightness of the warning, the need to act. Over the sticks set in among the plants they laid the quilts one by one, spreading them with a slow ingenuity. Jason took off his coat and laid it over the small tender plants by the side of the house. Then he glanced at Sara, and she reached down and pulled her dress off over her head. Her hair fell down out of its pins, and she began at once to tremble violently. The skirt was luckily long and full, and all the rest of the plants were covered by it.
Then Sara and Jason stood for a moment and stared almost idly at the field and up at the sky.
There was no wind. There was only the intense whiteness of moonlight. Why did this calm cold sink into them like the teeth of a trap? They bent their shoulders and walked silently back into the house.
The room was not much warmer. They had forgotten to shut the door behind them when the whistle was blowing so hard. They sat down to wait for morning.
Then Jason did a rare, strange thing. There long before morning he poured kerosene over some kindling and struck a light to it. Squatting, they got near it, quite gradually they drew together, and sat motionless until it all burned down. Still Sara did not move. Then Jason, in his underwear and long blue trousers, went out and brought in another load, and the big cherry log which of course was meant to be saved for the very last of winter.
The extravagant warmth of the room had sent some kind of agitation over Sara, like her memories of Dexter in the shipping season. She sat huddled in a long brown cotton petticoat, holding on to the string which went around the waist. Her mouse-colored hair, paler at the temples, was hanging loose down to her shoulders, like a child's unbound for a party. She held her knees against her numb, pendulant breasts and stared into the fire, her eyes widening.
On his side of the hearth Jason watched the fire burn too. His breath came gently, quickly, noiselessly, as though for a little time he would conceal or defend his tiredness. He lifted his arms and held out his misshapen hands to the fire.
At last every bit of the wood was gone. Now the cherry log was burned to ashes.
And all of a sudden Jason was on his feet again. Of all things, he was bringing the split-bottomed chair over to the hearth. He knocked it to pieces....It burned well and brightly. Sara never said a word. She did not move....
Then the kitchen table. To think that a solid, steady four-legged table like that, that had stood thirty years in one place, should be consumed in such a little while! Sara stared almost greedily at the waving flames.
Then when that was over, Jason and Sara sat in darkness where their bed had been, and it was colder than ever. The fire the kitchen table had made seemed wonderful to them—as if what they had never said, and what could not be, had its life, too, after all.
But Sara trembled, again pressing her hard knees against her breast. In the return of winter, of the night's cold, something strange, like fright, or dependency, a sensation of complete helplessness, took possession of her. All at once, without turning her head, she spoke.
"Jason..."
A silence. But only for a moment.
"Listen," said her husband's uncertain voice.
They held very still, as before, with bent heads.
Outside, as though it would exact something further from their lives, the whistle continued to blow.
THE HITCH-HIKERS
Tom Harris, a thirty-year-old salesman traveling in office supplies, got out of Victory a little after noon and saw people in Midnight and Louise, but went on toward Memphis. It was a base, and he was thinking he would like to do something that night.
Toward evening, somewhere in the middle of the Delta, he slowed down to pick up two hitch-hikers. One of them stood still by the side of the pavement, with his foot stuck out like an old root, but the other was playing a yellow guitar which caught the late sun as it came in a long straight bar across the fields.
Harris would get sleepy driving. On the road he did some things rather out of a dream. And the recurring sight of hitch-hikers waiting against the sky gave him the flash of a sensation he had known as a child: standing still, with nothing to touch him, feeling tall and having the world come all at once into its round shape underfoot and rush and turn through space and make his stand very precarious and lonely. He opened the car door.
"How do you do?"
"How do you do?"
Harris spoke to hitch-hikers almost formally. Now resuming his speed, he moved over a little in the seat. There was no room in the back for anybody. The man with the guitar was riding with it between his legs. Harris reached over and flicked on the radio.
"Well, music!" said the man with the guitar. Presently he began to smile. "Well, we been there a whole day in that one spot," he said softly. "Seen the sun go clear over. Course, part of the time we laid down under that one tree and taken our ease."
They rode without talking while the sun went down in red clouds and the radio program changed a few times. Harris switched on his lights. Once the man with the guitar started to sing "The One Rose That's Left in My Heart," which came over the air, played by the Aloha Boys. Then in shyness he stopped, but made a streak on the radio dial with his blackly callused finger tip.
"I predate them big 'lectric gittars some have," he said.
"Where are you going?"
"Looks like north."
"It's north," said Harris. "Smoke?"
The other man held out his hand.
"Well ... rarely," said the man with the guitar.
At the use of the unexpected word, Harris's cheek twitched, and he handed over his pack of cigarettes. All three lighted up. The silent man held his cigarette in front of him like a piece of money, between his thumb and forefinger. Harris realized that he wasn't smoking it, but was watching it burn.
"My! gittin' night agin," said the man with the guitar in a voice that could assume any social surprise.
"Anything to eat?" asked Harris.
The man gave a pluck to a low string and glanced at him.
"Dewberries," said the other man. It was his only remark, and it was delivered in a slow and pondering voice.
"Some nice little rabbit come skinnin' by," said the man with the guitar, nudging Harris with a slight punch to his side, "but it run off the way it come."
The other man was so bogged in inarticulate anger that Harris could imagine him running down a cotton row after the rabbit. He smiled but did not look around.
"Now to look out for a place to sleep—is that it?" he remarked doggedly.
A pluck of the strings again, and the man yawned.
There was a little town coming up; the lights showed for twenty miles in the flat land.
"Is that Dulcie?" Harris yawned too.
"I bet you ain't got no idea where all I've slep'," the man said, turning around in his seat and speaking directly to Harris, with laughter in his face that in the light of a road sign appeared strangely teasing.
"I could eat a hamburger," said Harris, swinging out of the road under the sign in some automatic gesture of evasion. He looked out of the window, and a girl in red pants leaped onto the running board.
"Three and three beers?" she asked, smiling, with her head poked in. "Hi," she said to Harris.
"How are you?" said Harris. "That's right."
"My," said the man with the guitar. "Red sailor-boy britches." Harris listened for the guitar note, but it did not come. "But not purty," he said.
The screen door of the joint whined, and a man's voice called, "Come on in, boys, we got girls."
Harris cut off the radio, and they listened to the nickelodeon which was pl
aying inside the joint and turning the window blue, red and green in turn.
"Hi," said the car-hop again as she came out with the tray. "Looks like rain."
They ate the hamburgers rapidly, without talking. A girl came and looked out of the window of the joint, leaning on her hand. The same couple kept dancing by behind her. There was something brassy playing, a swing record of "Love, Oh Love, Oh Careless Love."
"Same songs ever'where," said the man with the guitar softly. "I come down from the hills.... We had us owls for chickens and fox for yard dogs but we sung true."
Nearly every time the man spoke Harris's cheek twitched. He was easily amused. Also, he recognized at once any sort of attempt to confide, and then its certain and hasty retreat. And the more anyone said, the further he was drawn into a willingness to listen. I'll hear him play his guitar yet, he thought. It had got to be a pattern in his days and nights, it was almost automatic, his listening, like the way his hand went to his pocket for money.
"That'n's most the same as a ballat," said the man, licking mustard off his finger, "My ma, she was the one for ballats. Little in the waist as a dirt-dauber, but her voice carried. Had her a whole lot of tunes. Long ago dead an' gone. Pa'd come home from the courthouse drunk as a wheelbarrow, and she'd just pick up an' go sit on the front step facin' the hill an' sing. Ever'thing she knowed, she'd sing. Dead an' gone, an' the house burned down." He gulped at his beer. His foot was patting.
"This," said Harris, touching one of the keys on the guitar. "Couldn't you stop somewhere along here and make money playing this?"
Of course it was by the guitar that he had known at once that they were not mere hitch-hikers. They were tramps. They were full blown, abandoned to this. Both of them were. But when he touched it he knew obscurely that it was the yellow guitar, that bold and gay burden in the tramp's arms, that had caused him to stop and pick them up.
The man hit it flat with the palm of his hand.
"This box? Just play it for myself."
Harris laughed delightedly, but somehow he had a desire to tease him, to make him swear to his freedom.
"You wouldn't stop and play somewhere like this? For them to dance? When you know all the songs?"
Now the fellow laughed out loud. He turned and spoke completely as if the other man could not hear him. "Well, but right now I got him"
"Him?" Harris stared ahead.
"He'd gripe. He don't like foolin' around. He wants to git on. You always git a partner got notions."
The other tramp belched. Harris laid his hand on the horn.
"Hurry back," said the car-hop, opening a heart-shaped pocket over her heart and dropping the tip courteously within.
"Aw river!" sang out the man with the guitar.
As they pulled out into the road again, the other man began to lift a beer bottle, and stared beseechingly, with his mouth full, at the man with the guitar.
"Drive back, mister. Sobby forgot to give her back her bottle. Drive back."
"Too late," said Harris rather firmly, speeding on into Dulcie, thinking, I was about to take directions from him.
Harris stopped the car in front of the Dulcie Hotel on the square.
"'Preciated it," said the man, taking up his guitar.
"Wait here."
They stood on the walk, one lighted by the street light, the other in the shadow of the statue of the Confederate soldier, both caved in and giving out an odor of dust, both sighing with obedience.
Harris went across the yard and up the one step into the hotel.
Mr. Gene, the proprietor, a white-haired man with little dark freckles all over his face and hands, looked up and shoved out his arm at the same time.
"If he ain't back." He grinned. "Been about a month to the day—I was just remarking."
"Mr. Gene, I ought to go on, but I got two fellows out front. O.K., but they've just got nowhere to sleep tonight, and you know that little back porch."
"Why, it's a beautiful night out!" bellowed Mr. Gene, and he laughed silently.
"They'd get fleas in your bed," said Harris, showing the back of his hand. "But you know that old porch. It's not so bad. I slept out there once, I forget how."
The proprietor let his laugh out like a flood. Then he sobered abruptly.
"Sure. O.K.," he said. "Wait a minute—Mike's sick. Come here, Mike, it's just old Harris passin' through."
Mike was an ancient collie dog. He rose from a quilt near the door and moved over the square brown rug, stiffly, like a table walking, and shoved himself between the men, swinging his long head from Mr. Gene's hand to Harris's and bearing down motionless with his jaw in Harris's palm.
"You sick, Mike?" asked Harris.
"Dyin' of old age, that's what he's doin'!" blurted the proprietor as if in anger.
Harris began to stroke the dog, but the familiarity in his hands changed to slowness and hesitancy. Mike looked up out of his eyes.
"His spirit's gone. You see?" said Mr. Gene pleadingly.
"Say, look," said a voice at the front door.
"Come in, Cato, and see poor old Mike," said Mr. Gene.
"I knew that was your car, Mr. Harris," said the boy. He was nervously trying to tuck a Bing Crosby cretonne shirt into his pants like a real shirt. Then he looked up and said, "They was tryin' to take your car, and down the street one of 'em like to bust the other one's head wide op'm with a bottle. Looks like you would 'a' heard the commotion. Everybody's out there. I said, 'That's Mr. Tom Harris's car, look at the out-of-town license and look at all the stuff he all time carries around with him, all bloody.'"
"He's not dead though," said Harris, kneeling on the seat of his car.
It was the man with the guitar. The little ceiling light had been turned on. With blood streaming from his broken head, he was slumped down upon the guitar, his legs bowed around it, his arms at either side, his whole body limp in the posture of a bareback rider. Harris was aware of the other face not a yard away: the man the guitar player had called Sobby was standing on the curb, with two men unnecessarily holding him. He looked more like a bystander than any of the rest, except that he still held the beer bottle in his right hand.
"Looks like if he was fixin' to hit him, he would of hit him with that gittar," said a voice. "That'd be a real good thing to hit somebody with. Whang!"
"The way I figure this thing out is," said a penetrating voice, as if a woman were explaining it all to her husband, "the men was left to 'emselves. So—that 'n' yonder wanted to make off with the car—he's the bad one. So the good one says, 'Naw, that ain't right.'"
Or was it the other way around? thought Harris dreamily.
"So the other one says bam! bam! He whacked him over the head. And so dumb—right where the movie was letting out."
"Who's got my car keys!" Harris kept shouting. He had, without realizing it, kicked away the prop, the guitar; and he had stopped the blood with something.
Nobody had to tell him where the ramshackle little hospital was—he had been there once before, on a Delta trip. With the constable scuttling along after and then riding on the running board, glasses held tenderly in one fist, the handcuffed Sobby dragged alongside by the other, with a long line of little boys in flowered shirts accompanying him on bicycles, riding in and out of the headlight beam, with the rain falling in front of him and with Mr. Gene shouting in a sort of plea from the hotel behind and Mike beginning to echo the barking of the rest of the dogs, Harris drove in all carefulness down the long tree-dark street, with his wet hand pressed on the horn.
The old doctor came down the walk and, joining them in the car, slowly took the guitar player by the shoulders.
"I 'spec' he gonna die though," said a colored child's voice mournfully. "Wonder who goin' to git his box?"
In a room on the second floor of the two-story hotel Harris put on clean clothes, while Mr. Gene lay on the bed with Mike across his stomach.
"Ruined that Christmas tie you came in." The proprietor was talking in short breath
s. "It took it out of Mike, I'm tellin' you." He sighed. "First time he's barked since Bud Milton shot up that Chinese." He lifted his head and took a long swallow of the hotel whisky, and tears appeared in his warm brown eyes. "Suppose they'd done it on the porch."
The phone rang.
"See, everybody knows you're here," said Mr. Gene.
"Ruth?" he said, lifting the receiver, his voice almost contrite.
But it was for the proprietor.
When he had hung up he said, "That little peanut—he ain't ever goin' to learn which end is up. The constable. Got a nigger already in the jail, so he's runnin' round to find a place to put this fella of yours with the bottle, and damned if all he can think of ain't the hotel!"
"Hell, is he going to spend the night with me?"
"Well, the same thing. Across the hall. The other fella may die. Only place in town with a key but the bank, he says."
"What time is it?" asked Harris all at once.
"Oh, it ain't late," said Mr. Gene.
He opened the door for Mike, and the two men followed the dog slowly down the stairs. The light was out on the landing. Harris looked out of the old half-open stained-glass window.
"Is that rain?"
"It's been rainin' since dark, but you don't ever know a thing like that—it's proverbial." At the desk he held up a brown package. "Here. I sent Cato after some Memphis whisky for you. He had to do something."
"Thanks."
"I'll see you. I don't guess you're goin' to get away very shortly in the mornin'. I'm real sorry they did it in your car if they were goin' to do it."
"That's all right," said Harris. "You'd better have a little of this."
"That? It'd kill me," said Mr. Gene.
In a drugstore Harris phoned Ruth, a woman he knew in town, and found her at home having a party.
"Tom Harris! Sent by heaven!" she cried. "I was wondering what I'd do about Carol—this baby!"
"What's the matter with her?"
"No date."
Some other people wanted to say hello from the party. He listened awhile and said he'd be out.