Big city girl

by Charles Williams

  Joy’s family had come from Louisiana to claim her body. Sewell’s funeral was done now, and Cass had not come. Maybe he didn’t know, Mitch thought. Wherever he is, maybe he didn’t hear about it.

  He gathered up the lines and prepared to shake the sad-eared and drowsing mules awake when Cal Jimerson walked over from the gathering.

  “Maybe Jessie’d like to ride back with us in the car, Mitch,” he said. “It’s a long ride in the wagon.”

  Mitch turned to her. “You want to, Jessie?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “But thanks, Cal. It was nice of you.”

  “Thanks for offering,” Mitch said. He continued to look down at Cal with his eyes stern, but said nothing.

  The other’s face began to redden under the scrutiny, “I hear you wanted to see me about something,” he said lamely, with a touch of defiance in his voice.

  “That’s right,” Mitch said. “This ain’t the place for it, but I’ll tell you anyway.”

  “All right,” Cal said uncomfortably. “Let’s have it.”

  “Don’t you ever come on my place again when you’re drunk. You boys are always welcome, but I ain’t going to have any prowling around when you’re tanked up coming home from a dance. The next time you pull somebody out of a window it might be me.”

  Cal shifted his feet with embarrassment and his face grew darker. “I reckon I just had a little too much. It happens to people.”

  “Well, it’s past and done. I ain’t going to write no book about it. I just wanted it understood, then we’ll drop it.”

  Cal looked up. “O.K., Mitch,” he said. “It was too bad about Sewell.”

  “Yes,” Mitch said. “But that’s past and done too.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll see you.” Mitch gathered up the lines.

  The mules leaned forward and the wheels turned, cutting the drying clay. Jessie sat very quietly beside him as they swung past the little church and started out toward the road.

  “Mitch.”

  He turned. “What is it, Jessie?” She’s growing up fast, he thought. She looks like a woman now, with her hair combed like that and wearing her Sunday dress.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. And then the dam broke and all of it let go in her at once. He put the lines down in the wagon bed under his foot and held her while she cried. The mules swung out on the road and started toward home without guidance, forgotten while he supported the small, shaking body with his arm until all the storm had passed.

  She straightened up after a while and he held out the clean bandanna. “Here, Jessie,” he said gruffly, feeling the constriction in his throat and all the old inarticulate and thorn-protected love for her he would never be able to express in words. I reckon she knows, though, he thought.

  “I—I guess I believed it, Mitch,” she said hesitantly, “I don’t know why.”

  “It’s all right, Jessie. It don’t make no difference now.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Why do you suppose she did it? Why, Mitch?”

  “I don’t know. But she’s dead now. Let’s don’t talk about it.”

  Her shoulders shook just once more, while she twisted the handkerchief helplessly in her hands and cried out the ending of the whole chapter of Joy, “But she was nice, Mitch! I know better than you do. She tried awful hard. But she never did have a chance!”

  Mitch said nothing. Maybe she’s right, he thought. I guess I don’t know nothing about ‘em. I was worried about Jessie going off with her, but I reckon actually it wouldn’t have made no difference. Jessie was more growed up when she was twelve, I reckon, than Joy was when she died.

  The Jimersons went past, waving, and then the car stopped up ahead. Prentiss got out and they went on. When the wagon came up to where he was waiting beside the road, Mitch stopped the team and looked down at him. The youth was wearing his Sunday suit for the funeral, and now he looked up with the brown eyes slightly abashed as usual.

  “You mind if I ride back with you, Mitch? I’d kind of like to ride in the wagon.”

  Mitch looked at him gravely. I reckon she is growing up, he thought.

  “Sure,” he said. “Go on around and climb in. I reckon we can make room, can’t we, Jessie?”

  * * *

  Cass had not come home. He had run across the yard that tragic afternoon and pushed his way into the departing ambulance and then had disappeared. The funeral had come and gone without the man who had cried out so, piteously in his grief, and now, two days after the funeral, he still had not returned. When Mitch had gone to claim Sewell’s body for burial, he had asked, but no one seemed to know anything about him. Yes, they said, he had come in to town in the ambulance, but as to where he was now, they couldn’t say. Each time, the question had met with a puzzled glance and a quick changing of the subject, as if the person asked had not understood or did not want to say.

  Mitch and Jessie sat on the front porch in the early evening resting after supper and watching the shadows thicken into dusk among the pines. Mitch had been cutting wood all day, waiting for the fields to dry out enough for plowing. The river was back to normal now, but it would be several days before he could do any work in the bottom.

  “Where do you suppose he is, Mitch?” Jessie asked.

  Mitch threw the cigarette into the yard. “I don’t know, Jessie,” he began, then stopped, listening. There was an automobile coming down off the hill, and the sound of it was different from that of the Jimerson car.

  Without a word between them, they both began to know then. They watched with growing horror as it came into the yard and stopped and Cass got out, grinning at them with a sort of lost and foolish happiness. It was an old Buick, a four-door sedan with one crumpled and ironed-out fender, but polished all over until it gleamed and by far the largest and most impressive of all the secondhand cars he had ever brought home.

  “Ain’t she a beauty, Mitch?” he asked with childlike pride. “Got good rubber, too, the man said. Right new tires all around.” He kicked one of them and looked at Mitch and Jessie happily.

  Jessie was staring at him as if she were going to be ill. Mitch touched her arm. “Wait,” he said. “Don’t say nothing.”

  It ain’t that simple this time, he thought. It ain’t like all the land he sold to buy them other seven cars, or when he sold Mexico to buy the radio. It looks almost the same, them five days it would take him to get it squared around in his mind till it would be all right and the only thing to do, but it probably wasn’t that. It probably took him the five days to collect the money. God knows where he had to go to get it.

  Cass went back around to the driver’s side and blew the horn. “Listen to that, Mitch. Got a nice sound, ain’t it? And you ought to hear her growl when she gets in the sand. Got more power’n a truck.”

  We could leave, Mitch thought. I could take Jessie and we could go somewhere else, and I reckon we could get along, but what would become of him? No, we couldn’t ever leave him; he’s living in another world, but he’s got to get his meals in this one. I guess we wouldn’t want to, anyhow. This is home, what there’s left of it, and all you can do is hang tight and keep on trying.

  Cass took a last loving look at the car and came up on the porch with his vacant and happy grin. Jessie drew aside as he passed.

  “Why don’t you take a ride in her, Mitch? You and Jessie. Take a little spin up the road and try her out.”

  He stopped then, the childish pride of possession slowly fading from his face as he gazed at the window of his room. Somewhere he had lost the monstrous and insane hat, and he looked like a forlorn and blankly staring doll in the gathering dusk.

  “I got to listen to the news,” he said. “Ain’t heard nothing in some time.” He walked to the window, bent over like a folding rule, and stepped through it into his room.

  “Mitch, how could he?” Jessie asked in whispered anguish. “How could he?”

  Mitch was silent for a
minute. “I don’t think he really did, Jessie,” he said. “I think he won it on the radio.”

  It was just a prize they gave away in that game he was listening to, he thought. At least, that’s as near as I can figure it. God knows, it might have been better the other way, if he had deliberately sold Sewell for the reward the way he sold all the land and Mexico. I don’t think, the way it is, he even knows that Sewell’s dead. Not all the time, anyway.

  He looked across the yard, seeing all the times in years ahead when he would hear the shout, and turn, waiting patiently in the endless furrow through cotton yet unborn while the same lost figure stumbled down the hill through the ever deepening and unvarying furrow of its own with the frozen arm outstretched and pointing toward the river. “It’s Sewell! It’s Sewell, Mitch! Just come over the radio!”

  Well, he thought, it ain’t no use to run. If running did you any good, he wouldn’t be there himself.