Hill girl

by Charles Williams

  “I think we could make a deal,” I said.

  “You got any stock yet? What kind of mules you got?”

  I shook my head. “Haven’t bought any yet. Haven’t had much time to look around, and thought I’d wait until I needed them.”

  “Fine,” he said. “If’n we get together on this, mebbe I can help you pick ‘em out. I know mules like I know myself, an’ we want good mules with a lot of the old Ned in ‘em. None of them old poky bastards that’s dead from the ass both ways.”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” I said.

  He stood up abruptly. “Well, s’pose I come over tomorrow an’ we work it out. I better hightail now before the Old Lady freezes out there.”

  “Good God,” I said. “Is your mother put there? Why didn’t you bring her in?”

  “Not Ma,” he laughed. “My wife. I call her the Old Lady. She was kinda bashful about comin’ in, not knowin’ you an’ all.”

  “Bring her in, man,” I told him. “I’ll warm up some coffee.”

  He went down the hall and I heard him at the front door. “Hey, Old Lady, come on in.” I went out in the kitchen and picked up the coffeepot and brought it back and put it on a bed of coals on the hearth.

  She was bigger than he, a robust girl with dark curly hair and happy black eyes that lit up when they rested on him. She had on an old dress of dark woolen material and lisle stockings and a coat with some kind of reddish fur on the collar, the fur looking moth-eaten and a little shabby. You could see she was destined always to be a big woman and someday she would be fat, but that she didn’t much care, for there was about her face the mark of a sweet and unruffled disposition and the serene content of a healthy woman who is well loved and likes it. There was a scrubbed cleanliness about her and her face was pink-flushed with the cold and possibly a little from embarrassment as she stood in the doorway, looking at me and then at him, and when her eyes were on him I envied him. It was that kind of look.

  “Honey, this is Mr. Crane,” he said. “We jest about to make a dicker.”

  She put out her hand, man-fashion. “I’m proud to know you, Mr. Crane,” she said, smiling a little self-consciously and staying close to Hubbard.

  “I’m sorry we left you out there in the cold,” I said.

  “It wasn’t nothin’,” she laughed deprecatingly. “I don’t mind the cold much. An’ I hadn’t orta come in. Men don’t want no womenfolks around when they’re a-dickerin’.”

  I brought her a chair and she sat down and I poured the coffee.

  “Do you live here all by yourself, Mr. Crane?” she asked wonderingly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Incidentally, my name’s Bob. Couldn’t we drop some of the formality?”

  She said hers was Helen. He never called her that, though. “He jest calls me Old Lady,” she went on, smiling proudly at Jake.

  “Who on earth cooks for you?” she asked then.

  “I do my own,” I said. “It’s pretty bad.”

  “Why, man,” Jake put in, “you cain’t do that an’ handle a crop too. Man’s got to have vittles ready for him when he comes in at night. He’s too tar’d to be putterin’ around cookin’.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “But I don’t know of any answer to it. I don’t know what— Wait! Maybe I do.

  “How does this strike you?” I went on. “I turn over half the land to you to work on the halves, with the usual arrangement, with me to furnish the tools and the seed and stock and so on. But instead of you living over there in the tenant house, why don’t all three of us live in this one? It’s big enough. There’s another bedroom up front. Helen could do the cooking for the three of us and I could pay half your grocery bill. That sound O.K. to you?”

  They smiled enthusiastically. “Say, that sounds good. An’ the Old Lady can shorely cook, too, you jest wait an’ see.” And then the same idea must have hit them both, for they looked at each other and frowned.

  “Well, now, I don’t rightly know,” Jake said. “Sounds like a right smart idea except fer one thing. You see—” He stopped uncertainly.

  “What is it?” I couldn’t imagine what had come over them.

  “Well, it’s jest that we don’t much cotton to the idea of livin’ with anybody in the same house. Oh, it ain’t nothin’ agin you, Bob. But we had to live with kinfolks the first few months we was married an’ it kinda disheartened us. You understand, it ain’t you, personal?” He looked at me earnestly.

  “How long have you been married?” I asked.

  “About six months,” Helen said, blushing.

  I began to see what was troubling them and went on, “Well, if you want it that way, we can still fix up the house across the road and you can live over there. That is, you can sleep there, and we can use the kitchen and dining room here. How’s that?”

  They liked that and we let it stand that way. I found a deck of cards after a while and we played rummy until ten o’clock and Helen made us some more coffee. It was the first good coffee I’d had since I had been out here.

  They both came over early the next morning and we went to work on the house across the road. In two days we had it in good condition, and a week later they moved in.

  The day after they moved in I bought a secondhand crosscut saw and Jake and I went to work on the new ground in earnest. We worked early and late and when we would come back to the house in the cold dusk with the bite of frost and the smell of wood smoke in the air Helen would have supper ready for us.

  * * *

  I saw Angelina in February. I had walked across the bottom with some plow points to see if Sam would shape them up for me in his home blacksmith shop, and found the family butchering a hog. It was a clear day with a cold northwest wind blowing and Sam was cutting up the hog on a table on the south side of the house. Mrs. Harley was helping him, dicing up the flat strips of fat for the lard-rendering kettle. The two little girls, bundled up in heavy coats and with their noses running, were standing around underfoot, and when I came up they backed away and regarded me silently with fright in their brown eyes.

  “Howdy, Bob,” Sam said. Mrs. Harley nodded, a little shyly. She was a big woman, but somehow colorless and beaten-looking, and she always seemed to be trying to stand behind somebody or something when she was talking to you.

  “You’re just in time for some spareribs. You all could use some over there, couldn’t you?” He had met the Hubbards already; Jake was a fellow fox-hunter.

  We talked about the plow points and he said he would do them for me, and when I was ready to go he chopped up the spareribs and said, “Look jest inside the kitchen, Bob. They’s some brown paper to wrap ‘em in.”

  I went around the corner and in the back door. Angelina was sitting at the kitchen table cutting a big sheet of newspaper with a pair of scissors. She had on a heavy blue woolen dress with long sleeves, and it was bigger than that thing she’d had on before, and looser, so she didn’t seem about to burst out of it in so many places. But even as loose as it was and as poorly as it fitted, it couldn’t disguise that figure. Her hair was down over her shoulders in two blonde braids, tied at the bottom with little wisps of pink ribbon. She didn’t look quite so much like a sex crime looking for somebody to happen to, but her eyes were still the same. They regarded me sullenly and she didn’t say anything.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello.”

  “Sam said there was some brown paper here.”

  “Right there.” She nodded curtly to the end of the table. I walked over and picked it up.

  It was warm in there, and the kitchen was clean, the pine boards of the floor gleaming white from long scrubbing, and there was the smell of boiling turnip greens coming from the pot on the cookstove. I could hear the big clock ticking out in the front room and the occasional crackle and pop from the fireplace, and I lingered a moment, glad to be in out of the cold, and feeling again that same unaccountable urge to get her to talk that I had felt before. She always puzzled me.
And, too, she was a girl, and when you’re twenty-two and have lived for four months alone there’s something about even one you don’t like. She ignored me and went on working with the scissors.

  “What’s that you’re cutting out?” I asked. It couldn’t be some clipping she wanted to save, for she was cutting it diagonally across columns and in every direction. “Aren’t you a little old for paper dolls?”

  Her eyes looked up and hated me. “It’s a pattern.”

  “Pattern for what?”

  “A blouse I’m going to make.”

  “What color is it going to be?” Clothes interested me very little, clothes of any kind, and hers not at all, but I wanted strangely to keep the conversation going.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you learn it in school?”

  “Learn what in school?” she asked without looking up.

  “How to make clothes and things.”

  “No.”

  I went out and closed the door. There wasn’t any use in trying to talk to her.

  Nine

  The days are long in April, longer in May, and longer still in June, but they are never long enough. They begin with dew on the grass and the long-legged shadows of sunrise and end with whippoorwills calling in the darkening bottoms and swallows circling and diving at dusk. And all day long, through the hot, sweaty hours, the work goes on.

  I lost weight and grew harder as the weeks went by. I was in better condition than I had ever been in college, even with the football and fighting. I took to leaving my shirt off, a few minutes the first day and increasing the time gradually until I was burned black. I liked the work, as I had liked it when I was a boy, and I liked the dog-tiredness, the peaceful feeling of exhaustion at the end of the day that left the mind pleasantly at rest and made the simple act of stretching out on the dark back porch and listening to Jake and Helen talk a sensation of absolute luxury. And after they had gone across the road to the little house I would go down to the well and draw up a tub of cold water, strip down on the short-cropped grass of the mule lot, and splash myself free of the sweat and caked dust out there in the open with just the privacy of the black June night about me. Then I would go back to the house naked except for shoes, which I would kick off when I sat down, and would stretch out on the clean sheet and wonder if I wanted a cigarette badly enough to stay awake to smoke it. Sometimes I would think of Lee and Mary and wonder what Lee was going to do with himself, but it would be a short thought and I would be asleep in the middle of it without ever getting to Angelina. It was a beautiful feeling of exhaustion.

  It was down there in the bottom one day in June that I saw Angelina again. I was running the cultivator and when I came out to the end of a row and turned around she was there in the edge of the timber. She had on a long-visored sunbonnet and was carrying a lard pail half filled with dewberries. She was barelegged and I could see where the briars had scratched her legs, little red tracings in the golden tan of her skin.

  I stopped the mules and wiped the sweat off my face.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She looked at me distastefully. I was bareheaded and stripped to the waist, burned black by the sun, and shiny with sweat, and dust was caked on my arms.

  “You must think that’s fun,” she said.

  “It is.”

  “Anybody that’d farm when he didn’t have to is crazy. The sun must have cooked your brains. If you ever had any.”

  “Did anybody ever tell you,” I asked, “that what you needed was to have that lovely backside of yours tanned with a razor strap?”

  “I guess this is the place for you, all right,” she said spitefully. “You ought to be a farmer.”

  “And a farmer is a type of criminal, as far as you’re concerned?”

  “No. A type of idiot. I guess Lee was right. Four years in college was just wasted on you.” She realized then what she’d said, but it was too late.

  I turned around and got out from between the cultivator handles and started toward her. “Who?” I said. “Who did you say? Where’ve you been seeing Lee?”

  She backed away from me. “It’s none of your damn business.”

  “I’ll make it my business,” I said. “You goddamned little heifer. Lee’s married. And he’s alive. And he won’t be either one if he gets to fooling around with you.”

  She was like an old she-coon at bay. She backed up against a tall ash and held the lard pail like a weapon, ready to hit me if I came nearer.

  “Who said I saw him? Maybe I got a letter from him.”

  “You got a letter from him, all right. He never wrote a letter in his life.”

  “Who told you to run my business for me?”

  “You little punk,” I said. “I ought to slap your ears off.”

  She gave me a glance full of seething dislike and turned and disappeared down the trail.

  * * *

  During those months I began to think of Jake Hubbard as a man of whalebone and rawhide. The days were never long enough for Jake, and he highballed from sunup to sundown behind a fast pair of mules and he sang as he worked, and once or twice every week he would go “fox-huntin’” and chase around the countryside all night. He hated slow mules and walked behind the cultivator with a bouncing spring in his step, singing and talking to Big Lou and Ladyfingers with loving blasphemy.

  “Haw, dammit, mule. Lou, you big ignorant hunk of muleheaded bastard, one more bobble out’n you an’ I’m gonna skin you alive. Ain’t got no time to waste fiddle-faddlin’ around like this. Grass growin’ in the cotton an’ you draggin’ along like an old sow that’s down in the gitalong.”

  It was June and the chopping was all finished and Jake and I were running the cultivators in the long twelve-acre bottom field. The sun was halfway down in the west and as hot as it had been at noon. There was a light breeze blowing, just enough to stir the dust we were raising, and it felt good on our sweat-soaked backs when the little puffs came by. The dry-weather locusts were buzzing in the trees up on the hillside between us and the house. I turned around at the end of a row and stopped just as Jake made the end of the tenth or twelfth row over.

  “Let’s get a drink, Jake,” I said.

  We wrapped the lines about the cultivator handles and walked down toward the little spring branch that ran down past the end of the field. There was shade here and I felt cool in my wet clothes. We lay down on the sand and drank out of the little stream.

  We sat down for a minute in the shade and Jake bit the corner off a plug of Brown’s Mule, wiped his face, and grinned.

  “She’s a-comin’ along, Bob. That there cotton’s growin’ nice. An’ it’s good an’ clean.”

  “Looks good, doesn’t it?” I said. “Where we’ve swept it up, I mean.”

  We were silent for a moment, enjoying the sitting down and the coolness. Once or twice Jake seemed on the verge of speaking, as though there were something he wanted to say but didn’t know how to bring it up.

  “Say, Bob,” he said.

  “What’s on your mind, Jake?”

  “I always been a man fer mindin’ my own business. I mean, I got a long nose, but I ain’t one to stick it in other people’s doin’s.”

  “That would seem to describe you, Jake,” I said. “Let’s have it, though. What is it?”

  “Well, I thought mebbe I ort to tell you this. It ain’t none of my business an’ you can tell me so an’ I’ll shut up. But it’s about your brother. Lee, his name is, ain’t it?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Well, I hear he’s quite a stud around the gals. But that ain’t what I’m drivin’ at. I always figger a man ort to get all he can, an’ where he gits it is his own business. Unless,” he looked up at me and his eyes were suddenly serious, “unless he’s a brother of a good friend of yourn an’ he’s in a fair way of gittin’ hisself kilt. Then mebbe something ort to be said.”

  I lit a cigarette and waited. “All right, Jake. Let’s have it.”

  �
��Well, y'know I was huntin’ last night with Sam an’ the Rucker boys over beyond Sam’s place, an’ ‘long around midnight the Rucker boys started home an’ Sam an’ me come on back this way. Well, I was a little in front of Sam when we hit that little lane that runs from his house out to the big road. It was up there on that sand hill in the pines. They was a little moon last night, you recall, an’ jest as I hit the road I seen a car parked there, with its lights off. I was only about a hundred feet from where it was. Jest then Sam’s dog let out a yip an’ the man in the car must ‘a seen me back there because he stepped on his starter an’ gunned the motor an’ started out down the lane like hell after a man. Sam come a-runnin’ up behind me an’ out into the lane, but by that time the car was out of sight around a turn. Sam didn’t see what kind of car it was, but I seen it plain enough. It was a big roadster, an’ it was a Buick. I can tell all kinds of cars, jest by lookin’ at ‘em. It was that car your brother drives, no mistakin’ it. Sam kept askin’ me if I could tell what kind of car it was, but I told him no, an’ he got kinda quiet an’ didn’t talk much more.”

  “Just a minute, Jake,” I said. “Did anybody get out of the car before it started?”

  “Well,” he said quietly, “I’ll tell you because I know it won’t go no farther. I don’t like to tattle on gals an’ I don’t like to do ‘em no harm, an’ I wouldn’t say nothin’ now only I think you ort to know. They was a gal in there, all right, an’ she popped outta the car when he stepped on the starter. She lit out like a greased shoat into the trees on the other side of the lane. She was outta sight before Sam got there.”

  “How far was this from Sam’s house?”

  “Less’n a quarter of a mile. Oh, it was that oldest gal of Sam’s, all right. They ain’t another house within two mile, an’ if it’d been some gal from town he’d brought out there she wouldn’t have got out. Anyway, ain’t nobody else in this here country built like that gal. Good Jesus, jest a-seein’ her scootin’ across the road with her pants in her hand, an’ thinkin’ about it, I was so horny I woke up the Old Lady when I got home.”