by Gwen Bristow
The taproom was full of men now, eating and drinking. A few of them were getting rowdy already. One soldier with a Cuban accent pulled her by the arm and tried to make her sit on the bench by him; Dolores laughed stupidly and pretended she didn’t speak Spanish and didn’t know what he wanted. She made her way to the counter and told the waiting-woman she wanted candles. Now that she had slept she felt well enough to chaffer about the price, and got three for what the woman wanted her to pay for one. Some kind of row was going on by the door. The words were English. Dolores turned around and looked, leaning back with her arms stretched along the counter, and reflecting that it was fortunate she had been asleep all afternoon, for it was a good thing not to need much sleep tonight; she’d have to be alert if those tipsy fools found out there was a woman alone in a room behind the bar.
The pock-faced bartender was throwing out a man who couldn’t pay for what he had ordered.
“Hey you, listen,” the man exclaimed. “Is it my fault I ain’t had a job of work all day? Them folks don’t want nothing but nigger slaves on the docks.”
“I said for you to get out,” the bartender repeated loudly. “Ain’t I been trusting you three days for all you done et?”
“I said I’d pay for it soon’s I got a piece of work to do! Look here, I ain’t had a bite since this morning. How can I get work to pay you if I don’t get nothing in my belly?”
Two or three customers, amused by the argument, had come closer to listen. They were apparently hoping for a fight, and it did look as if there might be one. The man from outside would have the advantage, for he was muscular and healthy-looking, and Dolores thought a blow on the jaw might be good for the bartender, but she didn’t want to get caught in a general fracas. She wheeled around and faced the waiting-woman, who was looking on with her under lip stuck out contemptuously.
“Give me a plate of supper,” said Dolores. “Hurry up.”
“What you want?” The query was reluctant; the argument really did look on the verge of a fight, and the woman was loth to return to business.
“Whatever you got. And beer.”
The woman stuck under her nose a plate on which was a pile of rice and another pile of river-shrimp with some greasy sort of gravy poured over both, and a piece of bread. Dolores picked up the plate in one hand and the beer-mug in the other and made her way toward the door.
“Here, mister,” she said. Here’s your supper. Don’t jiggle my arm, you—” this to another man in the group looking on—“do you want to make me spill it?”
The stranger was looking down at her, a slow grin spreading on his face. “What you mean, lady?”
“I mean it’s your supper.” She jerked her head toward the bartender. “You can quit growling. It’s paid for. This here gentleman is a friend of mine.”
The bartender raised his voice. “Say, Lucy, this woman pay for supper?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“All right. I wouldn’t pay him no mind if I was you, lady. He ain’t got a penny.”
Dolores set the plate on the end of the nearest table and pulled at the man’s sleeve.
“You better eat it, mister.”
He was eying the food hungrily. But as he sat down he hesitated, glancing up at her. “Say, ma’am, do I know you?”
“No. But you go on and eat. Be my company.”
He tasted the beer, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and reached up to catch her wrist as she started off.
“Ain’t you gonta stay?”
“Take your hands off me, can’t you?” said Dolores.
He obeyed. “Sorry, ma’am. I just thought—”
“Well, you made a mistake.”
He dug his spoon into the rice and looked up to smile at her again. It wasn’t a leering smile, but a pleasant grateful curiosity. She felt herself smiling back at him.
“I just meant you’re right nice, ma’am, bringing supper to a fellow you ain’t never laid eyes on before, and I sure am thankful. It’s hungry work tramping them docks, specially when you can’t find nothing to do. Just sit down a spell. I ain’t meaning no harm.”
Dolores sat down on the bench opposite, resting her chin on her hands. He was eating so fast that for a few moments he didn’t say anything else. She watched him. He had a big arched nose and a cleft chin, and a broad mouth with beautiful teeth. His hair was brown, bleached on top by the sun. His shirt had once been blue, but the color had faded out except at the seams, and it was torn in two places at the shoulder. She had noticed another tear in his stocking just below the knee. Evidently he didn’t have any woman to attend to him.
He looked up from his plate. His eyes were blue, under thick eyebrows sun-bleached so light that they looked almost white on his tanned face.
“How’d you happen to get me supper, lady?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she murmured. “I reckon you looked kind of lonesome.”
“You had your supper?”
She shook her head. It was the first time she had remembered that she had eaten nothing all day but a banana and a bunch of grapes.
“You better have some.”
“I don’t want any. That’s yours.”
“You better have some. Look here.” He dipped the bread into the beer and passed it across. “You just eat that. It’s good when you ain’t got no appetite.”
She took it, and began to eat. It did taste good.
“Like it?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Them candles you got stuck in your bosom is gonta melt if you don’t take ’em out,” he said.
Dolores laughed and laid the candles on the table. “I was forget about them.”
“What makes you talk so funny?” he inquired.
“I don’t be English.”
“Creole?”
“Yes. Spanish. New Orleans.”
“Been up here long?”
“Not so very.”
“What’s your name?”
“Dolores.” She stopped. Sheramy she dared not say; Bondio caught behind her tongue.
“I’m named Thad Upjohn.” He hesitated, then asked, “What you doing here, Miss Dolores?”
“I just dropped in.”
This did not seem to satisfy him. “Your husband here too?” he asked.
Dolores bit her lip. “I haven’t got a husband.”
“Then how come you wear a wedding ring?”
“Why don’t you use your mouth for eating?” she snapped.
Thad Upjohn dropped his eyes. “Excuse me, ma’am. I didn’t go to start no argument.”
Dolores put her forehead down on her hands and pushed her fingers through her hair. “Oh, I don’t be cross on purpose. But I’ve got such a misery in the heart it makes me mean.”
“Sure, sure,” he said to her gently. “It don’t matter. I’m sorry you feel bad.”
She did not answer or look up. After awhile he said to her,
“Look here, Miss Dolores. I ain’t got nothing to buy it for you, but you’ll feel better if you eat a little something.”
“You reckon?”
“I sure do. You look mighty peaked.”
Dolores reached down into her dress and took out her purse. “All right. You get it. But not that mess of shrimp.”
He came back with some bread and cheese and a mug of beer. “Now you eat this here, ma’am. You’ll feel better.”
She bit into it. “Don’t you want some more beer for yourself?”
“I don’t like letting you buy it, Miss Dolores.”
“I wish you would. I mean—well, as long as you stay here by me nobody pesters me.”
He crossed his arms around his empty plate. “I can sit around without no beer, lady.”
“Lord, but you’re decent,” she said in a tired little voice. “You’re the first man
I’ve met today that hasn’t treated me like trash.”
Thad Upjohn shrugged. “Well, you was right nice to me. It made me feel better.”
“Did you feel as bad as that?” she asked.
“I felt kind of bad. It ain’t so easy getting along these times.”
“I didn’t think,” said Dolores, “that men had such trouble getting along.”
“They do when there ain’t no work for ’em, like now.”
“Why ain’t there no work?”
“Well, it’s hard to say. Some says it’s the war, and not so many boats needing to be loaded as there used to be. Then all the folks with work to be done is buying niggers. There was plenty work when I first came down, but they buys so many niggers these days it ain’t so easy for a white man to find it.”
Dolores frowned thoughtfully at her bread and cheese. Food really was making her feel better. Perhaps she’d been hungry without knowing it.
“But if you’re English,” she ventured, “how come your king didn’t give you some land? Or wasn’t you come down before the rebellion?”
“Oh yes, I been down hereabouts quite a spell,” said Thad Upjohn. “But the king wasn’t giving away no land except to them as had been in that French and Indian War, and I wasn’t in it. I wasn’t but a shaver then—about seventeen, and I didn’t see no call for me to go fighting Indians up in Virginia or Pennsylvania or wherever they was fighting.”
“Where you come from?” she asked with interest.
“Georgia.”
“That on the ocean?”
“Well, yes ma’am, part of it. Only I ain’t never seen the ocean. I come from the back country.”
“I see,” said Dolores, though she didn’t, having never before heard of a geographical item called Georgia. But it was relieving to talk about somebody else’s troubles. It helped her forget her own. And this Mr. Thad Upjohn, though so different from the fine gentlemen she had met on the bluff, was nice. He was friendly without being a pest, and he gave no evidence of the puzzled gentleness that had humiliated her so at Ardeith. To him she was just a girl who for some reason or other was having a misery in the heart and he wasn’t either prying or soothing. He was just letting her alone, and Dolores realized with wordless gratitude that this was the sum total of all she was asking right now of the human race. He wasn’t very clean or very good-looking, though he might look better if he combed his hair and got a shave and if he had a woman to mend his clothes.
A girl standing on the other end of the long table was singing a dirty song, swishing her skirts and shaking her hips while a group of half-tipsy soldiers stamped their feet to keep time. She was singing in Creole French. Thad Upjohn glanced at her now and then, and back at Dolores.
“You talk French?” she asked him, hoping he didn’t.
“Lord no, Miss Dolores, I don’t talk nothing but what I’m talking. Do you?”
“Some.”
“Is it French that fancy female’s bawling over yonder?”
She nodded.
“Say,” he said with admiration, “you’re educated, ain’t you?”
“Not so much. It’s easy to pick up different ways of talking in New Orleans.”
“I bet you can read good, and all like that.”
“I can read Spanish all right. Not French or English. Can’t you read?”
His wide mouth spread in a grin. “No ma’am. I wish I could.”
“I wish you’d get yourself some more beer,” said Dolores.
“Say, Miss Dolores, it ain’t right for me to be making away with your money.”
“Oh, go on, do. I said you was be my company at supper.”
He laughed, and went off for another mug of beer. Dolores was glad of it. She had eaten all her bread and cheese, but she liked to keep on sitting there talking. A patter on the windows told her the rain had started outside.
“They have many niggers where you come from?” she inquired when he came back.
“Not in the back country, they don’t. There’s heaps of them on the coast, around Savannah, but I ain’t never been there. I seen powerful few niggers before I got to Louisiana.”
“What made you come down if you didn’t have some land?” she asked.
“Well ma’am, things wasn’t so good around home. Cutworms got in the corn, and that always makes a bad year. Folks said this here was a new country with lots of easy work for everybody and all like that, so me and my wife just figured we’d pick up and come along.”
“Oh, you got a wife?” She was surprised. His wife didn’t seem to look after him very well.
“No ma’am, not now. She had a baby and died, year after we got here.”
“Where’s the baby?” Dolores asked eagerly.
“It died too, Miss Dolores. Me, I don’t know much about looking out for babies.”
“That’s bad. I’m sorry.”
“Yes ma’am, cut me up, I don’t mind saying.”
Dolores fingered the candles lying by her empty plate. “I got a baby,” she said in a low voice.
“Sure enough? Little girl?”
“No, a little boy.”
“Mine was a little girl,” he said. She did not look up. After a moment he asked, “Your little boy die too?”
“N-no. No, he’s all right. My husband’s got him.”
“But I thought you said—excuse me, Miss Dolores.”
Dolores felt tears coming into her eyes. She bit her lip hard and swallowed. Thad said, “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, ma’am.”
Dolores put her elbows on the table and pressed her fists into her eyes. Somebody down at the other end of the table had started another song and a lot of them were singing it, a nasty song full of words you weren’t a lady if you understood. Dolores felt her tears drying up. She had already cried so much there didn’t seem to be many tears left behind her eyes. She looked up again. Thad Upjohn was watching her with a sober pity.
“You didn’t make me feel bad,” said Dolores. “I just felt bad anyway. I can’t help it. I did have a husband,” she added impulsively, “but he throwed me out. I wasn’t good enough for him.”
“Oh.”
“I wasn’t good enough for him,” said Dolores, “but my baby was good enough for him. That’s how it is. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He’s named Sheramy.”
Thad’s mouth opened with astonishment. “Lordy mercy. You mean them Sheramys that lives at Silverwood Plantation?”
She nodded.
“Well, well, well,” said Thad.
Apparently that was all he could think of to say just then. But after a moment he added, “Say, Miss Dolores, that’s just too bad.” He shook his head.
Suddenly she found herself telling him all about it. She told it without any embellishments, and it was a relief to be talking about herself with complete honesty. As she went on she realized what a strain it had been to live in a cloud of romances and try to remember if what she was saying today fitted what she had said yesterday. Thad listened in silence. Now and then he reached over and patted her hand.
“That’s all,” said Dolores finally. “I stole the money out of the desk and I stole some silver things I thought maybe I could sell. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I was a little bit crazy last night.”
There was a pause. “I reckon you had a pretty good right to be crazy, honey,” said Thad slowly.
“What can I do now?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “Blest if I know, Miss Dolores.”
Dolores twisted her hands together in her lap. It was late. The taproom was close with candle-smoke and tobacco and the fumes of liquor. Two men had started a fight at the other end of the room and everybody else was cheering and taking sides.
“I expect you ought to get out of here, ma’am,” said Thad.
“I guess so.” She
stood up and lit a candle from one burning in a bottle on the table.
He got up too. “I reckon I ought to be getting along. I don’t want to get messed up in no fight and get my head broke.”
She picked up her candles and started out. “You got a place to stay?” Thad asked her.
“I got a room behind this. It’s kind of a hole, but I can lock the door.”
Thad hesitated. “Mind if I come around tomorrow and see how you’re making out?”
“I wish you would.” They were out in the hall. “Where you live?” asked Dolores.
He laughed. “Lord, lady, I don’t live no place. Mostly I sleep on the docks these days. I reckon I can find me a shed to keep the rain off.”
Dolores stopped at her door and reached down into her dress for her key. She looked up at him.
“Mr. Upjohn, you believe in God?”
“Ma’am? Why sure, Miss Dolores, I believe in God. What makes you ask?”
She took a long breath. “If you’ll swear before God to let me alone you can stay in here with me.” She unlocked the door. “It’s pretty awful but at least it’s got a roof. You’ll catch your death in this rain.”
Thad stopped her as she pushed the door open. “Miss Dolores, I ain’t going to bother you. I’ll swear it and mean it, but you got no business believing it. You don’t know me from nobody else.”
Dolores turned to face him. “Oh, I’ll risk it. I want so bad to just once see somebody that’s decent. Come on.”
She went inside. When he came in she was kneeling on the floor, holding the candle sideways to make a pool of soft grease that would support the end.
“You ain’t using that there quilt and pillow on the floor?” Thad Upjohn asked.
“No,” said Dolores without looking up. “They were too dirty.”
“I’ve slept on worse than them. And you better let me fix that candle. You’re gonta set the house afire.”
