“Did you hear what I said, Jessie?”
“I heard you.” She went right on turning over eggs in the frying pan.
“Are you going to do what I told you?”
Now she put the egg turner down in the pan. “I am not. I’ll wear what I please, and if I wanted to I’d go naked. It wouldn’t be any of your business.”
His face darkened and he took her by the arm, propelling her toward the bedroom. Surprisingly enough, she went without protest. She walked in and sat down on the bed.
“You can get your own breakfast,” she said with sullen defiance.
“Never mind breakfast. Are you going to change those clothes?”
“No. And you might as well get used to doing your own cooking. Joy is leaving in another day or so and I’m going with her. If it’s any of your business.”
He had closed the door to give her a chance to change. Now he yanked it open with furious suddenness. She was still sitting in the same position on the bed.
“You’re what?” he demanded, not believing he had heard her correctly. “What did you say?”
“I said,” she repeated coldly, “that I was going with Joy. We’re going,to live together in Houston. In an apartment.”
“Well, you can just get that idea out of your head right now,” he snapped. “Any time I let you go off with that—” He stopped. For all his outward assurance he was beginning to feel a vague uneasiness. This wasn’t the Jessie he had always known, sunny, high-spirited, and warmly impulsive. Fiercely independent she had always been, but still levelheaded and loving, and when they had had arguments she had always scolded him like an impudent squirrel. But this sullen-eyed, contemptuous mutiny was something new and a little frightening.
“Where’d you get this crazy idea?” he demanded.
“What business is it of yours?”
He made an effort to control his anger. “It’s plenty of my business. Joy is no woman for you to be around. She’s no good.” Characteristically, out of a hundred possible things he could have said, he had chosen the absolute worst.
Instantly she was a bristling porcupine. “You have got the nerve to stand there and say something like that about Joy? You? Will you please get out of this room?”
“Well, you ain’t going off with Joy. I’ll tell you that.”
“And just how are you going to keep me from it?”
His face was bleak. “I’ll take a harness strap to you.”
“And you think that’ll stop me?”
Suddenly he knew it wouldn’t. Punishing her couldn’t keep her from leaving. How could it? The moment his back was turned she would be gone if nothing except the fear of punishment kept her here.
Joy was at the bottom of this, he knew. Where was she? He whirled out of the doorway, and then he heard the porch swing creaking. Forgotten for the moment was the flooding river and the danger to the crop in the bottom. That would have to wait a little while longer.
He went down the hall in three furious strides and emerged harsh-laced onto the porch. She was lolling in the swing with one leg double under her and an arm thrown carelessly along the back. There was a fresh blue ribbon in her hair and she had on a short, frilly summer dress scarcely down to her knees. She wore high-heeled red shoes, with no stockings, and one bare leg pushed idly against the floor to keep the swing moving.
She let her head tilt back to look up at him with a lazy smile.
“Well, it’s Mitch. My, don’t you look mad?”
“What’s this Jessie just told me?” he asked curtly.
She shook her head, still smiling. “Goodness, Mitch, how do I know? What did she tell you?”
“The hell you don’t know. She says she’s going to go with you when you leave.”
“Oh, yes. Isn’t that sweet of her? She wants to go live with me.”
“Well, she’s not,” he said furiously.
“Why, Mitch? Has she changed her mind?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“I’ll change it for her. She’s not going.”
She dropped the bantering pose for a moment and looked at him with the open hatred in her eyes. “What makes you think so?”
“I won’t let her.”
“And just how do you think you’re going to stop her?”
He was up against the same thing again. He began to feel that the top of his head was going to blow off in the maddening fury of his impotence.
“She’s got her back up about something,” he said, forcing himself to be calm. “I want to know what it is.”
She was smiling again now with an infuriating provocativeness. “Oh, that. She’s mad at you because she thinks it was you that tried to pull me out of the window last night and made me fall.”
“Tried to pull you out of the window? What the hell—”
“Oh, haven’t you heard about that, Mitch? Or have you? Why, just look at what you—I mean, whoever it was—did to my poor legs.”
Still watching him with that tantalizing smile, she reached down and pulled the dress halfway up her long, smooth thighs. “Look at the nasty bruises where I hit the window sill. Now, was that a nice thing for somebody to do? Just to get a girl to come out and play?”
“And you told her I did that?” he asked ominously.
“Oh, no. As a matter of fact, I told her I didn’t think it was you. But she wouldn’t believe me. I don’t know who it was. It just seems to me, though, that it was an awful rough way to try to make a girl. Maybe that’s the only way you could, though.”
For a moment he was speechless with the rage that was clotted up inside and choking him. She made no attempt whatever to pull the dress down, and continued to watch him lazily, with that same calculated seductiveness. Deliberately reaching out the long bare leg, she placed the toe of a red shoe against his knee and pushed, setting the swing in motion again.
“But you were talking about Jessie,” she went on. “You don’t have to worry about her, Mitch. A couple of girls can always get by somehow.”
“You lousy tramp!” His arm swung down and across, and the hard flat palm of his hand smacked against the leg with a retort like the slap of a beaver’s tail. The force of it pushed her around in the swing.
She laughed. “You poor, stupid jerk.”
Then they both heard the rapid tattoo of Jessie’s shoes in the hall. Joy huddled in the corner of the swing, the derisive laughter gone now and replaced with a pitiful and abject terror while she put an arm up as if to protect herself against further attack: Jessie hit him from the back like a hurtling terrier, and when he turned she slapped his face.
Contempt in the eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl, he decided, was one of the worst things he had ever faced in his life.
Eighteen
The danger in the river bottom could wait no longer. Mitch left them and ran through the back yard, grabbing up a shovel as he went. He was getting nowhere here, and this would have to wait now.
By the time he reached the bottom the river had overflowed into the low ground where the old channel had been. It was backed up half knee-deep against the levee on the upper side of the field and still rising. There was no current here; that was beyond, where the river made its wide bend, pushing water out over the bottom. But if it got high enough to take the levee out, there would be current, a small river of it going out across the field, knocking the cotton down under the piled driftwood and silt and leaving absolute ruin.
It lay still and dark like an overflowed lake out among the trees beyond the fence, the surface quiet except for the pockmarks of the rain. He had not been a moment too soon. Even as he came out into the field he heard a gurgle of water behind him, and turned swiftly to see it boiling up springlike out of an old gopher hole in the cotton rows six feet behind the levee. Running along the top, he peered down at the water line on the upper side until he found it, a small sucking whirlpool disappearing into the ground. He sprang back and began throwing dirt onto the whirlpool until it stopped, then jumped in to pack it down with his feet. T
hose small holes could be dangerous.
The old levee had been there for seven years and he knew it was crisscrossed and undermined with gopher runs and the burrowings of moles. As the level of the water rose on the other side it would find them and start pouring through, cutting larger and larger with every minute. And there were low places that needed building up, trails worn across by the passing feet of seven years of going to and from the field. He swung the shovel, oblivious of the rain and the passage of time, going up and down the levee building up the low spots and weak places and watching for leaks. The raincoat was too awkward to work in, so he took it off and threw it on the ground, and in a few minutes he was soaked. The waterlogged old straw hat sagged in front of his face, making it difficult for him to see, and he yanked it off and threw it after the coat.
There would be no help, and he expected none. Cass was beyond helping or being helped. It was not so much the physical disability of what had apparently become a permanent affliction of “the miseries” in his legs as it was his almost complete withdrawal from reality. It ain’t like he was even here any more, Mitch thought. It’s more like he wasn’t just sitting in front of that radio now waiting for it to come out to him, but was trying to get in there where it was. He don’t like this world no more because you get beat up so damn much in it, so he’s finding himself another one.
And all the while, below the dark and violent surface of the battle against the river and a disaster that could be recognized as such and fought against with weapons he could hold in his hands, there ran the apprehensive undercurrent of his fear for Jessie. She can’t go away with that no-good slut, he thought. She just can’t. She’d be safer with a rattlesnake. She’d be better off dead. He wanted to throw the shovel down and run all the way to the house and tell her, make her understand. But how? Hadn’t he just told her? And what good had it done? He’d just made it worse.
He couldn’t leave the river, anyway. Water was still piling up beyond the levee, waiting with its dark treachery to find some small leak the moment his back was turned. A trickle somewhere, untended, could take the whole thing out in a matter of minutes, and they would lose the crop. He stood up for a minute with his yellow hair plastered down to his skull by the rain, his face harsh and implacable, and cursed it all, the river, the water above the levee, and the rain. And damn her too, he thought.
The river wanted the crop, and Joy was going to take Jessie away. You could fight the river with a shovel, or with your bare hands if you had to, but what could you fight Joy with? Where did you start? Or was it too late now even to think of starting? God knows Jessie would be better off somewhere else, he thought, away from this long-gone, share-cropping, hungry-gut ruin of a farm that the old man’s let dribble through his fingers, somewhere where she could go to school and have decent clothes like other girls her age, but that wasn’t with Joy. It wouldn’t ever be with that conscienceless and unprincipled round-heeled bitch if he could help it, not with Jessie idolizing her that way and copying everything she did.
What does she want Jessie to go with her for, anyway? he thought, attacking a leak in the levee with bitter fury. You can tell by looking at her she don’t care anything about anybody but herself, and never did, lt just don’t make sense to me that she’d want to be saddled with a fifteen-year-old country girl that hadn’t even been nowhere. The way she looked at me once there in the swing, you almost got an idea of what she was driving at. It was me. She wanted to do something to me. Well, she is, but it ain’t over yet. If she’s got it in for me, she’s perfectly welcome to take it out on me any way she can or wants to, but she ain’t going to take it out on Jessie. God knows, the kid never had much chance to grow up like a girl, as it was, with no mother after she was a year old and only a couple of hard-tailed and knot-headed brothers to look after her while the old man wandered around in a cloud and hardly even noticed whether she was a boy or a girl, but she’s going to have what little chance there is.
But how do you go about it? he thought, full of a gray and hopeless rage. Ordering Jessie to stay here and telling her she ain’t going won’t do any good. She’s got a mind of her own, and I can’t keep her tied up. So far, I’ve just balled things up worse. When I lost my head there on the porch and slapped her damned leg off me, I just made a worse mess out of things. I reckon that was just what she was trying to get me to do and I walked right into it. So now Jessie thinks I was trying to beat her up. Something like that would make a big hit with Jessie, too.
He did not even see Cass until the old man was almost upon him, hurrying down the hill in an old greenish-black felt hat and a useless raincoat ripped up one side almost to the armpit. When he heard the shouts he straightened up and turned around, watching while his father motioned with his arm and yelled again.
“What is it?” he shouted back, throwing another shovelful of dirt on a low spot on the levee. For a man who’s so stove up in the legs he can’t get around, he thought, he’s making pretty good time.
“It’s Sewell,” Cass shouted, reaching the upper end of the levee and puffing on through the rain atop it like a man walking a log. Goddamnit, Mitch thought, does he have to walk up there and tear it down as fast as I get it built up?
Then it hit him. It was as if the levee and the rising water and the desperate urgency of holding up this straining bulwark against disaster, together with the somber and uneasy dread in his thoughts of Jessie, had occupied every corner of his mind to the extent that there was no room for anything else, and it took time for any other idea to filter in and find room for itself.
“Sewell?” he demanded. He stuck the shovel in the ground and looked at his father. “What about Sewell?”
Cass could not come to rest. He slid down off the top of the levee and continued walking up and down past him, holding his hand over his heart and breathing with the difficulty of a wind-broken horse. Taking an old bandanna out of his overalls pocket, he dabbed at his eyes and blew his nose, and then bent over again with his hand over his heart.
“It’s Sewell,” he panted, holding out one arm to point toward the river. “Just come over the radio.”
“What just come over the radio?”, Mitch asked furiously. What’d he come all the way down here for if ain’t going to make no more sense than that?
”He’s in the river. Out yonder in the river somewheres,” the older man gasped, beginning now to get some of his breath back. “He had a fight with the shurf’s men up at the highway bridge and he’s in the river.”
“Well, what in hell is he doing in the river?” Mitch burst out. “Is he shot? Did he fall in? How do they know he’s in it?”
“I’m trying to tell you, as fast as I get my breath, that’s where he is,” Cass rushed on, for some reason still pointing out toward the river as if to keep this incredible fact established. “Three, lour hours ago, along about daylight. They was chasing him in a car and he ran into a whole passel of the shurf’s men on the highway bridge, and they penned him up there where he couldn’t get away in the car, and then there was a gun fight and they shot him once with a rifle, but he jumped off the bridge into the river and every time he’d come up they was ashooting at him.”
“Well, where is he now?” Mitch asked savagely. “What’s the rest of it?”
“He’s in the river somewheres. That’s what I been telling you.”
“Did they hit him? Or did he get away?” Ain’t there any way, he thought, that I can get it out of him?
“That’s what they don’t, know for sure,” Cass said, having to take down the frozen, pointing arm to get the handkerchief out of his pocket again. He put it up to his eyes and started shaking his head from side to side. “They don’t know what happened, because they shot three or four times while he was going down the river, every time his head would come up for air, and the last time they shot just as he was going under and they never did see him come up no more. They went down the river for a mile, looking. The man on the radio said there wasn’t no way he could have
come out, because there was a bunch of ‘em on both sides of the river and they never did even see his head come up no more after the last shot. He’s been shot, or drowned in the river.”
Mitch stood quietly in the rain, holding onto the shovel handle and looking down at his feet in the mud. I been trying to tell him for a long time, he thought, that sooner or later he was going to hear something on that damned radio he didn’t want to hear.
Cass began walking back and forth again. “Well, come on, Mitch. Gather up your stuff and let’s go,” he said wildly.
Mitch stared at him. “Go where?” he asked.
Cass stopped pacing and looked at him blankly, like a bewildered and sodden-hatted kewpie doll left out in the rain.
“Where?” he asked.
“Where? Well, surely you ain’t going to stay down here in the field. Don’t you understand what I been saying? Sewell’s in the river. He’s been shot. You can’t just stay down here and not do nothing.”
“Just what do you expect me to do?” Mitch asked.
“Do? Why—why—” Cass said incredulously, “why, come up to the house. Listen to the radio. To the news.” It was as if the whole course had been perfectly clear in his mind until Mitch had begun asking his stupid questions, and then he had to cast about for the answer himself.