Hill girl

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?”

  “I’ve got something to say to you and I want it to soak in. Maybe I’d better sober you up.”

  He swung at me and landed on the side of my neck, and then threw two more that I didn’t even bother to knock down. I pushed him back and let go his lapel and hit him over the heart with a right. He started to back up and hit the sofa with the backs of his legs and lost his balance and I caught him again, this time by the arm. I could see he was too drunk to hit a clothing-store dummy, so I shoved him back into the kitchen. The girl was screaming by this time.

  He was still trying to hit me and I pushed him hard and he bounced against the wall and sat down. I found a dishpan and stuck it under the faucet in the sink and when it was full I threw it in his face and filled it again. Whenever he got up I hit him and went on with the water treatment.

  The girl was standing in the doorway, still screaming, and she got on my nerves. I took a step toward her with a pan full of water and she went out through the living room and I heard her going down the front steps yelling, “Stop him! Stop him!” without ever seeming to pause for breath.

  In about five minutes the kitchen was drowned and Lee sat hunkered down against the wall, not trying to get up any more. Water ran out of his suit like a spring branch out of a moss bank and his hair was plastered down in his face. I dropped the dishpan on the floor and went over and squatted down on my heels in front of him.

  “You sober?” I asked.

  “I can hear you,” he said.

  “It won’t take long. I don’t want Angelina to have any more trouble with you.”

  He began to be afraid then. I mean, really afraid. There was no doubt now that she’d told me, and maybe before he hadn’t been sure or the liquor had been holding him up. Anyway, he began to look the way he had that night when Sam was after him. He tried to get up and I pinned him down with a hand on his chest.

  “Just stay away from my place from now on. You can remember that, can’t you?”

  “I heard you the first time.”

  “O.K.” I stood up and walked to the door and looked back. He was still scared, but I was glad he didn’t have a gun.

  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 goo
d, 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.

  Twenty-four

  We plodded slowly on up the long grade and down on the other side and crossed the upper reaches of Black Creek on the concrete highway bridge. The sun was down now and the air was chill in the bottom.

  I thought about our not having to leave here now that Lee was gone and I was glad about it, but there was sadness in it too. I wondered where he was going and what he would do and knew that I’d probably never know because he didn't write letters. He would be in touch with the bank and the lawyers over the divorce and property settlement, but he’d never write to me.

  Away from here and in a new place where he wasn’t known he might change. Away from here ... I was just kidding myself and knew it, but there was some kind of happiness in at least trying to believe it.

  Next summer maybe we could get away for a week in Galveston. I remembered again that last night we were there and thought of the bonfire on the beach and the roaring of the surf and of the way she had been when I had kissed her, holding her in my arms there on the robe by the dying fire.

  I was within a mile of the road junction where our country road turned off the highway and up the hill to go past the farm when I saw a Ford coming toward me along the bottom with a roll of red dust boiling up behind it. When it was closer I recognized it as mine. I stopped and Jake climbed over the door and got out. Helen was with him, dressed for town.

  Jake looked from Helen up to me uncertainly. “Me and the Old Lady thought we’d go to the show.”

  “Fine,” I said. I wondered why he was so hesitant about it. He didn’t have to ask me where he could go, and he was always welcome to use the car.

  “If'n you’d rather, I could take the team on in an’ you could drive the car on home.” He didn’t look up.

  “No,” I said. “You’d be late for the show by the time you got the mules home.”

  “I jest thought mebbe you might be in a hurry to git home for supper.”

  “It’ll wait,” I said. He continued to look down at his Sunday shoes, which were getting dusty in the powdery red surface of the road. “Did you see Lee?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. He turned and glanced toward Helen. I couldn’t see her face under the top of the car.

  “He’s leaving,” I said. What the hell does Jake care what he does? I thought. But I had to say something because the silence was becoming awkward.

  “I know.” He nodded. “I seen him a minute or two jest before we drove off.” He stopped.

  I waited. He wanted to say something else but gave it up and turned back toward the car.

  As he started to climb in over the door he paused once more and this time he looked squarely up at me.

  “You sure you wouldn’t like for me to take the team in, Bob? I’d be glad to do it.”

  I got the look in his eyes then and they were worried. I swung a leg over the side of the cotton frames and climbed down. There was no use asking him about it. He wouldn’t talk, but he wanted me to go home.

  Helen got out of the car. “I think I’ll ride along with Jake, if you don’t mind, Bob,” she said. “It’s a pretty night for a hay ride with your best beau.” She tried to laugh at the joke but it didn’t quite come off.

  “When you get in with the team I’ll unharness,” I said. “You can still make the second show.” Nobody said anything. We weren’t thinking about the show any more.

  I backed the car up fast and swung it around and started up the road. The dusk was thickening now and I switched on the lights. When I made the turn off the road and started up the hill I had to go into low and the lights brightened up with the engine speed. Whatever it was that was scaring Jake hadn’t happened yet because he would have told me. It was just something that might happen. At the top of the hill I let the Ford back into high again and pulled the gas lever all the way down.

  When I swung around the last turn I breathed again. There was a light in the kitchen, and somehow there isn’t anything more peaceful and reassuring than light streaming from the window of a farmhouse kitchen. It was dark now and as I made the turn off the road my lights flicked across Lee’s roadster parked in front of the house and for some reason I could not fathom I reached down and cut both lights and motor and let the Ford roll to a stop.

  All sound and motion died with the car and I was alone in the night with only my heartbeat in my ears. I turned and went around the side of the house rather than through it. I don’t know why. Maybe I was afraid of the dark part of it and wanted to go back to where the light was.

  As I stepped up on the back porch I could hear someone talking. It was Lee. I couldn’t make out the words, but he was talking quietly and slowly and didn’t sound as if he were drunk. The tightness across my chest relaxed a little. I opened the door and went in.

  The lamp that was burning was the one with the dark shade and it made a cone of light across the table with the rest of the room in partial shadow. Lee was on one side of the table with his arms resting on it and Angelina sat across from him, deathly quiet and moving only her eyes.

  There was a bottle of whisky in front of him and a glass half empty just beyond his left hand, but he wasn’t very drunk. At least, not as drunk as I have seen him. Except for the eyes as he half turned toward me I would have said he was sober. The eyes were blazing.

  “Sit down, Bob,” he said. “There by the door.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “If you’re leaving, don’t let me keep you.”

  I was still blinking in the light and
then suddenly the cold began to run down across my shoulder blades and into the small of my back. His hands were lying flat down before him on the table in the edge of the shadow beneath the lamp and under the right one was the flat ugly slab of a .45 automatic. It was mine, and I knew it was loaded.

  I sat down—slowly, the way a man would carrying an armful of eggs. There was a delicate balance about the whole thing there under the yellow cone of light and it gave you the feeling the slightest movement one way or the other might tip into chaos. There was something about it that caught you by the throat, even though he wasn’t wild drunk and cursing or waving the gun. Any of those things would have scared me, because you never know about a drunk with a gun, but they wouldn’t have scared me the way this did.

  I kept it out of my voice as well as I could.

  “All right,” I said. “This is all very dramatic. But do you suppose I could have some supper now, or do we go on rehearsing the high-school play?”

  He ignored me. There wasn’t the slightest indication he had heard me or that he even remembered I had come in. He just went on talking. And he was talking to Angelina, or to himself. It was hard to tell which.

  “Your hair is different now that you’ve cut it. But it’s beautiful that way and it still shines the same under lamplight. I wonder why I never did write a popular song about it and call it ‘The Beautiful Bitch with the Lamplight Hair” and maybe be famous all over the country and have a banana split named after me when I’m dead, instead of saving strands of it like a high-school girl or a man that’s sick. Maybe the next thing I’d be saving your discarded clothes, and they have a name for people like that but I can’t think of what it is and I don’t want to think of it and you don’t know and there isn’t any way you can know how much I don’t want to think of it and how much time I spend just not thinking of it.”

  Angelina’s eyes were fixed intently on his face except for the once she glanced swiftly sidewise at me, begging me to be careful. I sat perfectly still, hating it, and hating the quiet the same way I had the night Sam had been here in this same room. It’s always easier to take when there’s more noise. A moth fluttered stupidly about the rim of the lamp chimney with frenzied gray wings and when it fell inside and was scorched Lee looked in through the glass at it for a long minute with grave speculation and then laughed as if at some joke that only he knew. The laugh wasn’t something you’d want to hear often. I could feel a drop of sweat run down my temple and into the corner of my eye and blinked at the salty sting of it.