by Jim Thompson
Around true-dark, six o’clock or so, Pa turned in the gate from the road. He nodded to me, and I nodded back. He stepped to the kitchen door, told Mary to hurry up the supper and splashed water into the wash basin.
He washed, and sat down on the porch beside me. After a minute or two, he cleared his throat and spoke.
“Didn’t have much luck at the banks, son. Kinda like you said it’d be.”
I didn’t say anything. He hesitated, then cleared his throat again.
“Heard you—uh—There’s talk around that you had some trouble last night.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“You shouldn’t’ve gone up there by yourself, son. You ought to’ve told me what you had in mind and prepared yourself right. I’d’ve been plumb proud to go with you.”
I turned and looked at him, frowning, not getting what he meant. Then it came to me; he thought I’d been aiming to do Matthew Ontime some dirt.
I started to set him straight. But just then Mary called out that supper was ready, so I let it ride. I was hungry, and, after all, what difference did it make to me what he thought?
We all sat down at the table. Pa gulped his food whole, as usual. He finished eating ahead of the rest of us and refilled his coffee cup. I felt him squinting at me over the rim of his saucer; then, without looking, I knew he was staring at Mary. Her fork rattled against her plate and he went on staring. Finally she scooted back her chair and headed for the stove with the biscuit pan.
I looked up at last. He still had his eyes on her. She was standing at the stove, her back to the table—waiting for him to look the other way. In the dim light of the lamp, I could see her shoulders trembling. And yet she was standing straighter, less beat down than she usually did.
Pa lowered his saucer to the table. “What are you doin’ over there?” he said—softly but his voice seemed to ring through the room. “You makin’ them biscuits?”
“No-no, sir.”
“Bring ’em here! You hear me, Mary?”
“Ye-yes, sir.”
She turned around and came slowly toward the table, the pan trembling in her fingers. She started to sit down.
Pa kicked back his chair, grabbed her by the wrist and jerked her erect. I stood up; and he pulled her toward him, staring into her face.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said.
“Nothin’.” She actually tossed her head a little. “What’s the matter with you?”
He gave her a yank that almost jerked her off her feet. She let out a little moan and that was the end of her defiance. She folded up like a weed at sundown.
“I ain’t done nothin’, Pa! Y-you lemme go, now! I…”
“I been watchin’ you,” he said, slowly. “I seen you prissin’ around all through supper, squirmin’ and flauntin’ your backside an’ turnin’ all red an’ rosy like…”
“I ain’t neither!” She ducked her head and began to cry.
“I m-mean—it a-ain’t really like that.”
Pa let go of her arm. He threw it away from him, letting it strike against her breasts. And she moaned again.
“Y-you’re always w-watchin’ me! You get me all upset with y-your watchin’ and then when I do somethin’ outta nervousness, y-you fault me about it!”
“Well”—Pa hesitated, and some of the hardness went out of his face. “Well, maybe.”
“Y-you know you do! I can’t turn around w-without y-you…”
“Maybe,” Pa repeated. “Just maybe. An’ I’m gonna keep right on watchin’, you hear? An’ I better not never see nothin’ like—like I don’t want to see. An’ I don’t want no more of your lip, regardless, you hear?”
She nodded shakily, edging backwards away from him. As scared as she was, it looked like she might back right on through the stove and out the wall.
I stepped between the two of them.
“She hasn’t done anything,” I said. “Why do you keep badgering her?”
“I know what I’m doin’, son.”
“So do I,” I said, “and I don’t like it.”
His eyes widened, blazed for a second. Then the fire died out of them, and he turned slowly and started for the door. “I’m tired,” he said. “Everything’s falling to pieces an’ I can’t put it together again. I’m too old, too tired… I—I think we better talk a little, son.”
“Maybe we had,” I said, and I followed him out of the house.
9
He sat down on the lintel of the woodshed, and I sat down aside of him. Not close; as far away as I could get. He noticed it and sighed heavily, like you sigh when you’re asking for sympathy. He reached behind him and picked up a sliver of kindling. His hand went into his pocket, then came out empty; and he tossed away the sliver. Either he didn’t have a knife with him, or he’d changed his mind about whittling.
“About Mary,” he said. “I reckon you think I’m pretty hard on her?”
I shrugged.
“I got to be hard on her, son. You see… Well, you’ve probably wondered—maybe you’ve wondered about her. How a widower was able to adopt a young girl. Well”—he swallowed and went on doggedly—“I didn’t adopt her. I took her. I just took her out of the place she was in, an’ they didn’t dare put up a fuss about it. An’ she didn’t. They seen the wrath of God was in me, an’ they didn’t stand in my way…”
I waited. He sighed again, but not so fakey as he had the first time.
“Now you’re gonna say that she was awfully young,” he said. “She was young, an’ maybe she was there against her will or she didn’t know no better. But that ain’t the way it was, son. She was doin’ it because she liked to. She was—she was just a—just a hole. That was all she’d ever been from the time she was old enough to walk, an’ that’s what she’d still be if I hadn’t got hold of her an’ put the fear of the Lord in her.”
I still waited. He moved uneasily on the lintel.
“So—so that’s the way it is, son. That’s why I got to keep bearin’ down on her… You”—he paused—“Now maybe you think it’s odd I’d pick up someone like that to look after you; but I knew I could keep her in hand, an’ it was the Lord’s work to take her away from that house of sin. You see that, don’t you?”
“No,” I said. “That isn’t what I see.”
“Well, now…”
“You took her to punish her. She was built with a certain appetite—some women are. And you fixed it so she could never have what she needed to satisfy it. You’ve starved her, punished her, for almost twenty years. Do you want me to tell you why?”
It seemed funny, the way that everything fell into place in a matter of seconds. But I guess it wasn’t really so strange. He’d kept me bowed down as much as he had her. Until the last day or so, I’d never got a good look at him.
“You’re dead wrong, son. Y-you—why would I—?”
“You got her out of a whore house,” I said. “How did you happen to find her? What were you doing there?”
“I—son, you know I never…”
“You never have since, no,” I said. “Because you were punishing her. You held her responsible for something that happened to you, and you’ve made her suffer for it. That’s the way it was, wasn’t it?”
“She—do we got to talk about it, son?”
“You started it,” I said.
“Yeah,” he nodded, heavily. “So I guess… I guess… It was the end of pickin’, Tom, an’ I’d gone into town to get my pay from the gin. An’ I’d got a late start, kinda, because your—because Effie, my wife, was sick an’ I couldn’t find no one to set with her. An’ by the time I got my money from the gin the stores was all closed, and I couldn’t get the needfuls I was s’posed to take home. I—I guess I should have gone home without ’em an’ come back the next day. But it was a long walk, an’ I was afraid of highjackers with all that money, so…”
“What was wrong with your wife?” I said.
“Huh?” he started. “Oh, nothin’. Nothin�
� you’d understand, son. Some kind of female complaint.”
“I see,” I said.
“So, like I was sayin’, I decided to stay the night in town. An’, well, I had had a few drinks. I drank a little in those days. I wasn’t really drunk, you understand, but…”
“Yes,” I said. “You were drunk.”
And he hesitated and said, “Yes, I was drunk. You can fault me for that—for not knowin’ what I was doin’. Because I honest didn’t know, son. I was lookin’ for a boarding-house, some place to sleep. An’ I seen her an’ asked her where there was one, an’ she promised to take me to a place. An’—well, you know where she took me.”
I nodded. “That takes care of the night, when you were drunk. But you were sober the next morning.”
“Yes,” he said. “I was sober.”
“But you didn’t go home?”
“I didn’t go home,” he said. “I couldn’t make myself, somehow. I stayed there for a week, an’ my money was gone, more’n seven hundred dollars. An’ I could’ve kept on stayin’, far as she was concerned, because she’d do it for nothing, being like she was. But the house wouldn’t stand for that, an’—an’ she’d wrung me dry. So I went home. I—son, you just can’t understand! I…”
“Go on,” I said.
“My wife was dead. Been dead for four days. One of the neighbors’d come in an’ was takin’ care of you. But…”
“How old was I?”
“Oh, six-seven months, I reckon, but…”
“No,” I said. “I’d just been born.”
I heard the creak of his jaws as his mouth dropped open. He put his head down in his hands and held it there a moment. And then he raised it again, staring off across the fields toward the twinkling lights in the drilling rigs.
“Well, son?”
“Well?” I said.
“It’s been mighty hard for me, boy, not bein’ able to claim you for my own son. But you see why I couldn’t, don’t you? I couldn’t let you know I’d—that I’d…”
“That you’d let my mother die in childbirth while you slept with a whore for a week?”
“Tom… Try to understand, boy…”
I laughed. “What makes you think I don’t understand? It’s taken me a long time to get around to it, but I understand everything about you, Pa.”
“I don’t…”
“No,” I said, “you don’t. Or you won’t let yourself. You won’t see yourself as you are. You made one big mistake—a bad one. But you can’t come out and admit that you really made it. You’ve got to lay it all on to Mary; you’ve got to make her do the suffering. You’re not actually sorry for what you did, because you’ve never admitted that you did it. It was her fault—yes, and mine. For being born. I was the cause of my mother’s death, and…”
“Son!” He grabbed me by the shoulder. “I don’t think nothin’ like that! That ain’t…”
“Let go of me,” I said.
“But you…”
“Let go of me.”
He let go.
“Maybe you don’t see it quite that way,” I went on. “But I’m not far wrong. You’ve proved that I’m not. You didn’t need to tell me the whole truth to let me know that I was your son. There’s only one reason why you didn’t let me know. Because you could get more out of me, make me feel that I owed my life to you for taking me in.”
“Son”—he shook his head curtly. “You’re makin’ me out to be mighty low-down.”
“Because you are,” I said. “Because I can’t help myself. Every time I’ve slipped a little, wavered a little from what you thought I ought to be, you’ve taken it out on my hide. And I’ve let you get away with it, because I felt that I had to. You’d taken me in out of charity, so I had to take whatever you handed out and be grateful for it.”
He was still shaking his head. He’d been shaking it all the time I was talking.
“I done plenty for you,” he said, “an’ don’t you say I haven’t. Maybe I ain’t been too easy-goin’, but easy-go don’t make the mare run. I’ve made you make somethin’ of yourself.”
“Like what?” I said. “Like getting kicked out of school because I was starved down to eating scraps? Like making me knock a man down who wanted to help me?”
“I done plenty,” he repeated.
“All right,” I said. “You’ve done plenty. But I’m not giving you a chance to do any more.”
I stood up, brushing at the seat of my pants. He stood up, too, bending his head back on his neck to look up at me.
“Now,” he said, “I suppose you’re fixin’ to walk out on me. I try to be honest with you an’ tell you the truth, an’…”
“I was going to do it, anyway,” I said. “You’ve just helped me to make up my mind.”
“Where you figure on goin’?”
“I don’t know.”
“You mean you don’t want to tell me? You’re cuttin’ out of touch with me for all time?”
“I mean I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m cutting clear of you for good, yes.”
“When?”
“In the morning, probably.”
“Don’t go, Tom.”
He raised a hand toward me, then let it drop trembling at his side. “Maybe I been all wrong about everything, but I sure didn’t aim to be. An’ whatever I done it was because I wanted you to be somethin’ better than I was. I…”
“I know,” I said. “I was your redemption. I was your way of squaring yourself with the Lord. I was supposed to be you, what you wanted to be. I wasn’t entitled to have a life of my own.”
“I said, maybe I was wrong, son. B-but”—his voice was begging—“ain’t I done—I still done plenty, Tom. I pointed out the path of the righteous to you, an’ I kept you on it. I…”
“Are you sure,” I said, “about that?”
Years before, right after we’d moved to Oklahoma, Nate and Pete and I had been walking home from school together; and we’d come to a place along the road where the county was putting in a new culvert. And there was a rat crouched back in the angle of a pile of bricks, and we’d got ourselves some sticks and moved in on it.
It’d tried to run between our feet, and we’d driven it back. And it’d darted along one angle of the bricks, then the other; and we’d kept moving in closer. And finally it was squeezed clear back in the corner, with no way of going farther back, and no way out in front. And what happened then, well, it gave me bad dreams for a month afterwards.
It wasn’t a real big rat. But all of a sudden it reared up on its hind legs and it looked as big as a dog. And it seemed to have about a million teeth, and every one of ’em showing. It came out of that corner in a kind of running waltz, waving its front paws, all those teeth chattering against each other. And that was the end of Mr. Cornered Rat; it was us that was cornered from then on. We had the whole world behind us, but it didn’t seem like there was any room at all. We fell all over each other trying to get away. And I think we were lucky to get away without a bad bite.
But—
But that had been a long time ago, and a man forgets things he doesn’t like to remember. Or, remembering, he goes right ahead and does the same thing all over again. He figures he’ll be luckier than he was the first time, or he’s mad and doesn’t care. He thinks he’s got nothing to lose, that he’s been pushed down as far as he can go. And he’s wrong, of course. There’s always something worse that can happen to you.
Pa was reaching for me again. Sticking his hand out toward me, and holding it back at the same time.
“What you mean, son?” he was saying. “What you mean, am I sure about—about…”
“You know,” I said. I grinned at him. “You noticed it at supper. I had her, Pa. Just like you.”
“No!” he said. “No, you didn’t! S-she wouldn’t dare. She knows what I’d do if…”
“But it was me,” I lied. “I made her. Oh, she took to it fast enough after we got started, but I got her started. She didn’t have anything
to do with it, and you can’t fault her for it.”
He wagged his head, moving it slowly from side to side. “That ain’t the truth, son,” he said quietly. “You’re saying it to spite me.”
“How?” I said. “How would that spite you?”
“You want to take all the meanin’ away. You don’t want to leave me nothin’. I ain’t got nothin’ left but that, an’ now—now…”
“Now you haven’t got that,” I said. “Ask Mary. She’ll tell you the same thing I have.” Naturally. She’d be afraid to tell him anything else. “Got anything more on your mind before I turn in?”
“You didn’t do it, son! Say you didn’t do it.”
“I did it,” I said.
He stood blinking at me, his chin wobbling like he was trying to swallow something that wouldn’t go down. Then suddenly he turned his head and spat, drawing the back of his hand across his mouth.
“All right,” he said.
“Just all right?” I grinned. “You don’t want to make something of it? Take the strap or maybe the shotgun to me?”
“No,” he said, and there wasn’t anything in his voice at all. It was like he’d written the word on paper and handed it to me. “No, that wouldn’t be bad enough.”
I laughed, and way off somewhere in the backbrush a loon picked up the laugh and tossed it back across the fields. Hee-ah, whoee!, hee-ah, whoee! And I shivered in spite of myself. And Pa nodded gently.
“The Lord will punish you,” he said.
10
Mary was still in the kitchen when I passed through, but she heard Pa plodding along behind me, so she kept busy at the dishes and didn’t speak. I crossed the breezeway and went into my bedroom.
I took off my shoes, and opened the door a crack. I listened, pretty uneasily, glad of what I’d done to Pa but a little worried about Mary. I told myself that he wouldn’t do anything. I’d taken all the blame. He’d be afraid she might turn on him, like I had, and walk out. And—I thought—if he did give her a tongue-lashing, it wouldn’t scare her any more than she already was and she had it coming. That, and then some. Because I could see now that she’d never really done anything for me. Everything she’d done had been aimed at tying me to her so she could use me as soon as I could be used. She couldn’t help it, I reckoned, any more than a skunk can help stinking. But that didn’t make the smell any better.
