“Some, of you all back there get away. Then the rest of us will turn him loose at the same time.”
“Who’s got him? Who is this I’ve got?”
“Here; turn loose. Now wait: here he is. Me and—” Again the mass of them surged, struggled. They held him ,again. “We got him here. You all turn loose and get out. Give us room.”
Two of them rose and backed away, into the door. Then the other two seemed to explode upward out of the earth, the duskfilled shed, already running. Joe struck at them as soon as he was free, but they were already clear. Lying on his back he watched the four of them run on in the dusk, slowing, turning to look back. He rose and emerged from the shed. He stood in the door, brushing himself off, this too purely automatic, while a short distance away they huddled quietly and looked back at him. He did not look at them. He went on, his overalls duskcolored in the dusk. It was late now.. The evening star was rich and heavy as a jasmine bloom. He did not look back once. He went on, fading, phantomlike; the four boys who watched him huddled quietly, their faces small and pale with dusk. From the group a voice spoke suddenly, loud: “Yaaah!” He did not look back. A second voice said quietly, carrying quietly, dear: “See you tomorrow at church, Joe.” He didn’t answer. He went on. Now and then he brushed at his overalls, mechanically, with his hands.
When he came in sight of home all light had departed from the west. In the pasture behind the barn there was a spring: a clump of willows in the darkness smelt and heard but not seen. When he approached the fluting of young frogs ceased like so many strings cut with simultaneous scissors. He knelt; it was too dark to discern even his silhouetted head. He bathed his face, his swollen eye. He went on, crossing the pasture toward the kitchen light. It seemed to watch him, biding and threatful, like an eye.
When he reached the lot fence he stopped, looking at the light in the kitchen window. He stood there for a while, leaning on the fence. The grass was aloud, alive with crickets. Against the dewgray—earth and the dark bands of trees fireflies drifted and faded, erratic and random. A mockingbird sang in a tree beside the house. Behind him, in the woods beyond the spring, two whippoorwills whistled. Beyond them, as though beyond some ultimate horizon of summer, a hound howled. Then he crossed the fence and saw someone sitting quite motionless in the door to the stable in which waited the two cows which he had not yet milked.
He seemed to recognise McEachern without surprise, as if the whole situation were perfectly logical and reasonable and inescapable. Perhaps he was thinking then how he and the man could always count upon one another, depend upon one another; that it was the woman alone who was unpredictable. Perhaps he saw no incongruity at all in the fact that he was about to be punished, who had refrained from what McEachern would consider the cardinal sin which he could commit, exactly the same as if he had committed it. McEachern did not rise. He still sat, stolid and rocklike, his shirt a white blur in the door’s black yawn. “I have milked and fed,” he said. Then he rose, deliberately. Perhaps the boy knew that he already held the strap in his hand. It rose and fell, deliberate, numbered, with deliberate, flat reports. The boy’s body might have been wood or stone; a post or a tower upon which the sentient part of him mused like a hermit, contemplative and remote with ecstasy and selfcrucifixion.
As they approached the kitchen they walked side by side. When the light from the window fell upon them the man stopped and turned, leaning, peering. “Fighting,” he said. “What was it about?”
The boy did not answer. His face was quite still, composed. After a while he answered. His voice was quiet, cold. “Nothing.”
They stood there. “You mean, you can’t tell or you won’t tell?” The boy did not answer. He was not looking down. He was not looking at anything. “Then, if you don’t know you are a fool. And if you won’t tell you have been a knave. Have you been to a woman?”
“No,” the boy said. The man looked at him. When he spoke his tone was musing.
“You have never lied to me. That I know of, that is.” He looked at the boy, at the still profile. “Who were you fighting with?”
“There was more than one.”
“Ah,” the man said. “You left marks on them, I trust?”
“I don’t know. I reckon so.”
“Ah,” the man said. “Go and wash. Supper is ready.”
When he went to bed that night his mind was made up to run away. He felt like an eagle: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong. But that passed, though he did not then know that, like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still a cage.
McEachern did not actually miss the heifer for two days. Then he found the new suit where it was hidden in the barn; on examining it he knew that it had never been worn. He found the suit in the forenoon. But he said nothing about it. That evening he entered the barn where Joe was milking. Sitting on the low stool, his head bent against the cow’s flanks, the boy’s body was now by height at least the body of a man. But McEachern did not see that. If he saw anything at all, it was the child, the orphan of five years who had sat with the still and alert and unrecking passiveness of an animal on the seat of his buggy on that December evening twelve years ago. “I don’t see your heifer,” McEachern said. Joe didn’t answer. He bent above the bucket, above the steady hissing of milk. McEachern stood behind and above him, looking down at him. “I said, your heifer has not come up.”
“I know it,” Joe said. “I reckon she is down at the creek. I’ll look after her, being as she belongs to me.”
“Ah,” McEachern said. His voice was not raised. “The creek at night is no place for a fifty dollar cow.”
“It’ll be my loss, then,” Joe said. “It was my cow.”
“Was?” McEachern said. “Did you say was my cow?”
Joe did not look up. Between his fingers the milk hissed steadily into the pail. Behind him he heard McEachern move. But Joe did not look around until the milk no longer responded. Then he turned. McEachern was sitting on a wooden block in the door. “You had better take the milk on to the house first,” he said.
Joe stood, the pail swinging from his hand. His voice was dogged though quiet. “I’ll find her in the morning.”
“Take the milk on to the house,” McEachern said. “I will wait for you here.”
For a moment longer Joe stood there. Then he moved. He emerged and went on to the kitchen. Mrs. McEachern came in as he was setting the pail onto the table. “Supper is ready,” she said. “Has Mr. McEachern come to the house yet?”
Joe was turning away, back toward the door. “He’ll be in soon,” he said. He could feel the woman watching him. She said, in a tone tentative, anxious:
“You’ll have just time to wash.”
“We’ll be in soon.” He returned to the barn. Mrs. McEachern came to the door and looked after him. It was not yet full dark and she could see her husband standing in the barn door. She did not call. She just stood there and watched the two men meet. She could not hear what they said.
“She will be down at the creek, you say?” McEachern said.
“I said she may be. This is a goodsized pasture.”
“Ah,” McEachern said. Both their voices were quiet. “Where do you think she will be?”
“I don’t know. I ain’t no cow. I don’t know where she might be.”
McEachern moved. “We’ll go see,” he said. They entered the pasture in single file. The creek was a quarter of a mile distant. Against the dark band of trees where it flowed fireflies winked and faded. They reached these trees. The trunks of them were choked with marshy undergrowth, hard to penetrate even by day. “Call her,” McEachern said. Joe did not answer. He did not move. They faced one another.
“She’s my cow,” Joe said. “You gave her to me. I raised her from a calf because you gave her to me to be my own.”
“Yes,” McEachern said. “I gave her to you. To teach you the responsibility of possessing, owning, ownership. The responsibility of the owner to that which he owns under God’s
sufferance. To teach you foresight and aggrandisement. Call her.”
For a while longer they faced one another. Perhaps they were looking at one another. Then Joe turned and went on along the marsh, McEachern following. “Why don’t you call her?” he said. Joe did not answer. He did not seem to be watching the marsh, the creek, at all. On the contrary he was watching the single light which marked the house, looking back now and then as if he were gauging his distance from it. They did not go fast, yet in time they came to the boundary fence which marked the end of the pasture. It was now full dark. When he reached the fence Joe turned and stopped. Now he looked at the other. Again they stood face to face. Then McEachern said: “What have you done with that heifer?”
“I sold her,” Joe said.
“Ah. You sold her. And what did you get for her, might I ask?”
They could not distinguish one another’s face now. They were just shapes, almost of a height, though McEachern was the thicker. Above the white blur of his shirt McEachern’s head resembled one of the marble cannonballs on Civil War monuments. “It was my cow,” Joe said. “If she wasn’t mine, why did you tell me she was? Why did you give her to me?”
“You are quite right. She was your own. I have not yet chidden you for selling her, provided you got a good price. And even if you were beat in the trade, which with a boy of eighteen is more than like to be so, I will not chide you for that. Though you would better have asked the advice of some one older in the ways of the world. But you must learn, as I did. What I ask is, Where have you put the money for safekeeping?” Joe didn’t answer. They faced one another. “You gave it to your fostermother to keep for you, belike?”
“Yes,” Joe said. His mouth said it, told the lie. He had not intended to answer at all. He heard his mouth say the word with a kind of shocked astonishment. Then it was too late. “I gave it to her to put away,” he said.
“Ah,” McEachern said. He sighed; it was a sound almost luxurious, of satisfaction and victory. “And you will doubtless say also that it was your fostermother who bought the new suit which I found hid in the loft. You have revealed every other sin of which you are capable: sloth, and ingratitude, and irreverence and blasphemy. And now I have taken you in the remaining two: lying and lechery. What else would you want with a new suit if you were not whoring?” And then he acknowledged that the child whom he had adopted twelve years ago was a man. Facing him, the two of them almost toe to toe, he struck at Joe with his fist.
Joe took the first two blows; perhaps from habit, perhaps from surprise. But. he took them, feeling twice the man’s hard fist crash into his face. Then he sprang back, crouched, licking blood, panting. They faced one another. “Don’t you hit me again,” he said.
Later, lying cold and rigid in his bed in the attic, he heard their voices coming up the cramped stairs from the room beneath.
“I bought it for him!” Mrs. McEachern said. “I did! I bought it with my butter money. You said that I could have—could spend—Simon! Simon!”
“You are a clumsier liar than even he,” the man said. His voice came, measured, harsh, without heat, up the cramped stair to where Joe lay in bed. He was not listening to it. “Kneel down. Kneel down. KNEEL DOWN, WOMAN. Ask grace and pardon of God; not of me.”
She had always tried to be kind to him, from that first December evening twelve years ago. She was waiting on the porch—a patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation at all save the neat screw of graying hair and the skirt—when the buggy drove up. It was as though instead of having been subtly slain and corrupted by the ruthless and bigoted man into something beyond his intending and her knowing, she had been hammered stubbornly thinner and thinner like some passive and dully malleable metal, into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes.
When the buggy stopped she came forward as though she had already planned it, practiced it: how she would lift him down from the seat and carry him into the house. He had never been carried by a woman since he was big enough to walk. He squirmed down and entered the house on his own feet, marched in, small, shapeless in his wrappings. She followed, hovering about him. She made him sit down; it was as though she hovered about with a kind of strained alertness, an air baffled and alert, waiting to spring it again and try to make himself and her act as she had planned for them to act. Kneeling before him she was trying to take off his shoes, until he realised what she wanted. He put her hands away and removed the shoes himself, not setting them onto the floor though. He held to them. She stripped off his stockings and then she fetched a basin of hot water, fetched it so immediately that anyone but a child would have known that she must have had it ready and waiting all day probably. He spoke for the first time, then. “I done washed just yesterday,” he said.
She didn’t answer. She knelt before him while he watched the crown of her head and her hands fumbling a little clumsily about his feet. He didn’t try to help her now. He didn’t know what she was trying to do, not even when he was sitting with his cold feet in the warm water. He didn’t know that that was all, because it felt too good. He was waiting for the rest of it to begin; the part that would not be pleasant, whatever it would be. This had never happened to him before either.
Later she put him to bed. For two years almost he had been dressing and undressing himself, unnoticed and unassisted save by occasional Alices. He was already too tired to go to sleep at once, and now he was puzzled and hence nervous, waiting until she went out so he could sleep. Then she did not go out. Instead she drew a chair up to the bed and sat down. There was no fire in the room; it was cold. She had a shawl now about her shoulders, huddled into the shawl, her breath vaporising as though she were smoking. And he became wide awake now. He was waiting for the part to begin which he would not like, whatever it was; whatever it was that he had done. He didn’t know that this was all. This had never happened to him before either.
It began on that night. He believed that it was to go on for the rest of his life. At seventeen, looking back he could see now the long series of trivial, clumsy, vain efforts born of frustration and fumbling and dumb instinct: the dishes she would prepare for him in secret and then insist on his accepting and eating them in secret, when he did not want them and he knew that McEachern would not care anyway; the times when, like tonight, she would try to get herself between him and the punishment which, deserved or not, just or unjust, was impersonal, both the man and the boy accepting it as a natural and inescapable fact until she, getting in the way, must give it an odor, an attenuation, and aftertaste.
Sometimes he thought that he would tell her alone, have her who in her helplessness could neither alter it nor ignore it, know it and need to hide it from the man whose immediate and predictable reaction to the knowledge would so obliterate it as a factor in their relations that it would never appear again. To say to her in secret, in secret payment for the secret dishes which he had not wanted: “Listen. He says he has nursed a blasphemer and an ingrate. I dare you to tell him what he has nursed. That he has nursed a nigger beneath his own roof, with his own food at his own table.”
Because she had always been kind to him. The man, the hard, just, ruthless man, merely depended on him to act in a certain way and to receive the as certain reward or punishment, just as he could depend on the man to react in a certain way to his own certain doings and misdoings: It was the woman who, with a woman’s affinity and instinct for secrecy, for casting a faint taint of evil about the most trivial and innocent actions. Behind a loose board in the wall of his attic room she had hidden a small hoard of money in a tin can. The amount was trivial and it was apparently a secret to no one but. her husband, and the boy believed that he would not have cared. But it had never been a secret from him. Even while he was still a child she would take him with her when with all the intense and mysterious caution of a playing child she would creep to the attic and add to the hoard meagre and infrequent and terrific nickels and dimes (fruit of what small chicanery and decept
ions with none anywhere under the sun to say her nay he did not know), putting into the can beneath his round grave eyes coins whose value he did not even recognise. It was she who trusted him, who insisted on trusting him as she insisted on his eating: by conspiracy, in secret, making a secret of the very fact which the act of trusting was supposed to exemplify.
It was not the hard work which he hated, nor the punishment and injustice. He was used to that before he ever saw either of them. He expected no less, and so he was neither outraged nor surprised. It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men. ‘She is trying to make me cry,’ he thought, lying cold and rigid in his bed, his hands beneath his head and the moonlight falling across his body, hearing the steady murmur of the man’s voice as it mounted the stairway on its first heavenward stage; ‘She was trying to make me cry. Then she thinks that they would have had me.”
Chapter 8
MOVING quietly, he took the rope from its hiding place. One end of it was already prepared for making fast inside the window. Now it took him no time at all to reach the ground and to return; now, with more than a year of practice, he could mount the rope hand over hand, without once touching the wall of the house, with the shadowlike agility of a cat. Leaning from the window he let the free end whisper down. In the moonlight it looked not less frail than a spider skein. Then, with his shoes tied together and strung through his belt behind him, he slid down the rope, passing swift as a shadow across the window where the old people slept. The rope hung directly before the window. He drew it tautly aside, flat against the house, and tied it. Then he went on through the moonlight to the stable and mounted to the loft and took the new suit from its hiding place. It was wrapped in paper, carefully. Before unwrapping it he felt with his hands about the folds of the paper. ‘He found it,’ he thought. ‘He knows.’ He said aloud, whispering: “The bastard. The son of a bitch.”
Light in August Page 14
