Young Goodman Brown ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Young Goodman Brown ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem village; but put his head
back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as
the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with
the pink ribbons of her cap while she called to Goodman Brown.
"Dearest heart," whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to his ear,
"prithee put off your journey until sunrise and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is
troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that she's afeard of herself sometimes. Pray tarry
with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year."
"My love and my Faith," replied young Goodman Brown, "of all nights in the year, this one night
must I tarry away from thee. My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again, must needs be
done 'twixt now and sunrise. What, my sweet, pretty wife, dost thou doubt me already, and we
but three months married?"
"Then God bless youe!" said Faith, with the pink ribbons; "and may you find all well whn you
come back."
"Amen!" cried Goodman Brown. "Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no
harm will come to thee."
So they parted; and the young man pursued his way until, being about to turn the corner by the
meeting-house, he looked back and saw the head of Faith still peeping after him with a
melancholy air, in spite of her pink ribbons.
"Poor little Faith!" thought he, for his heart smote him. "What a wretch am I to leave her on such
an errand! She talks of dreams, too. Methought as she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a
dream had warned her what work is to be done tonight. But no, no; 't would kill her to think it.
Well, she's a blessed angel on earth; and after this one night I'll cling to her skirts and follow her
to heaven."
With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more
haste on his present evil purpose. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees
of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed
immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such a
solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the
thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen
multitude.
"There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree," said Goodman Brown to himself; and he
glanced fearfully behind him as he added, "What if the devil himself should be at my very
elbow!"
His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking forward again, beheld
the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. He arose at
Goodman Brown's approach and walked onward side by side with him.
"You are late, Goodman Brown," said he. "The clock of the Old South was striking as I came
through Boston, and that is full fifteen minutes agone."
"Faith kept me back a while," replied the young man, with a tremor in his voice, caused by the
sudden appearance of his companion, though not wholly unexpected.
It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that part of it where these two were
journeying. As nearly as could be discerned, the second traveller was about fifty years old,
apparently in the same rank of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance
to him, though perhaps more in expression than features. Still they might have been taken for
father and son. And yet, though the elder person was as simply clad as the younger, and as
simple in manner too, he had an indescribable air of one who knew the world, and who would
not have felt abashed at the governor's dinner table or in King William's court, were it possible
that his affairs should call him thither. But the only thing about him that could be fixed upon as
remarkable was his staff, which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought
that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent. This, of course, must
have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light.
"Come, Goodman Brown," cried his fellow-traveller, "this is a dull pace for the beginning of a
journey. Take my staff, if you are so soon weary."
"Friend," said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop, "having kept covenant by
meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to return whence I came. I have scruples touching the
matter thou wot'st of."
"Sayest thou so?" replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. "Let us walk on, nevertheless,
reasoning as we go; and if I convince thee not thou shalt turn back. We are but a little way in the
forest yet."
"Too far! too far!" exclaimed the goodman, unconsciously resuming his walk. "My father never
went into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him. We have been a race of honest
men and good Christians since the days of the martyrs; and shall I be the first of the name of
Brown that ever took this path and kept"
"Such company, thou wouldst say," observed the elder person, interpreting his pause. "Well said,
Goodman Brown! I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the
Puritans; and that's no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the
Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I that brought your father a
pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's war.
They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and
returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends with you for their sake."
"If it be as thou sayest," replied Goodman Brown, "I marvel they never spoke of these matters;
or, verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least rumor of the sort would have driven them from New
England. We are a people of prayer, and good works to boot, and abide no such wickedness."
"Wickedness or not," said the traveller with the twisted staff, "I have a very general acquaintance
here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me;
the selectmen of divers towns make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General
Court are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too--But these are state secrets."
"Can this be so?" cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of amazement at his undisturbed
companion. "Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the governor and council; they have their own
ways, and are no rule for a simple husbandman like me. But, were I to go on with thee, how
should I meet the eye of that good old man, our minister, at Salem village? Oh, his voice would
make me tremble both Sabbath day and lecture day."
Thus far the elder traveller had listened with due gravity; but now burst into a fit of irrepressible
mirth, shaking himself so violently that his snake-like staff actually seemed to wriggle in
sympathy.
"Ha! ha! ha!" shouted he again and again; then composing himself, "Well, go on, Goodman
Brown, go on; but, prithee, don't kill me with laughing."
"Well, then, to end the matter at once," said Goodman Brown, considerably nettled, "there is my
wife, Faith. It would break her dear little heart; and I'd rather break my own."
"Nay, if that be the case," answered the other, "e'en go thy ways, Goodman Brown. I would not
for twenty old women like the one hobbling before us that Faith should come to any harm."
As he spoke he pointed his staff at a female figure on the path, in whom Goodman Brown
recognized a very pious and exemplary dame, who had taught him his catechism in youth, and
was still his moral and spiritual adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon Gookin.
"A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness at nightfall," said he. "But
with your leave, friend, I shall take a cut through the woods until we have left this Christian
woman behind. Being a stranger to you, she might ask whom I was consorting with and whither I
was going."
"Be it so," said his fellow-traveller. "Betake you to the woods, and let me keep the path."
Accordingly the young man turned aside, but took care to watch his companion, who advanced
softly along the road until he had come within a staff's length of the old dame. She, meanwhile,
was making the best of her way, with singular speed for so aged a woman, and mumbling some
indistinct words--a prayer, doubtless--as she went. The traveller put forth his staff and touched
her withered neck with what seemed the serpent's tail.
"The devil!" screamed the pious old lady.
"Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend?" observed the traveller, confronting her and leaning
on his writhing stick.
"Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship indeed?" cried the good dame. "Yea, truly is it, and in the
very image of my old gossip, Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is.
But--would your worship believe it?--my broomstick hath strangely disappeared, stolen, as I
suspect, by that unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when I was all anointed with the
juice of smallage, and cinquefoil, and wolf's bane"
"Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe," said the shape of old Goodman
Brown.
"Ah, your worship knows the recipe," cried the old lady, cackling aloud. "So, as I was saying,
being all ready for the meeting, and no horse to ride on, I made up my mind to foot it; for they
tell me there is a nice young man to be taken into communion to-night. But now your good
worship will lend me your arm, and we shall be there in a twinkling."
"That can hardly be," answered her friend. "I may not spare you my arm, Goody Cloyse; but here
is my staff, if you will."
So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed life, being one of the rods
which its owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian magi. Of this fact, however, Goodman Brown
could not take cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in astonishment, and, looking down again,
beheld neither Goody Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his fellow-traveller alone, who waited
for him as calmly as if nothing had happened.
"That old woman taught me my catechism," said the young man; and there was a world of
meaning in this simple comment.
They continued to walk onward, while the elder traveller exhorted his companion to make good
speed and persevere in the path, discoursing so aptly that his arguments seemed rather to spring
up in the bosom of his auditor than to be suggested by himself. As they went, he plucked a
branch of maple to serve for a walking stick, and began to strip it of the twigs and little boughs,
which were wet with evening dew. The moment his fingers touched them they became strangely
withered and dried up as with a week's sunshine. Thus the pair proceeded, at a good free pace,
until suddenly, in a gloomy hollow of the road, Goodman Brown sat himself down on the stump
of a tree and refused to go any farther.
"Friend," said he, stubbornly, "my mind is made up. Not another step will I budge on this errand.
What if a wretched old woman do choose to go to the devil when I thought she was going to
heaven: is that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?"
"You will think better of this by and by," said his acquaintance, composedly. "Sit here and rest
yourself a while; and when you feel like moving again, there is my staff to help you along."
Without more words, he threw his companion the maple stick, and was as speedily out of sight as
if he had vanished into the deepening gloom. The young man sat a few moments by the roadside,
applauding himself greatly, and thinking with how clear a conscience he should meet the
minister in his morning walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old Deacon Gookin. And what
calm sleep would be his that very night, which was to have been spent so wickedly, but so purely
and sweetly now, in the arms of Faith! Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations,
Goodman Brown heard the tramp of horses along the road, and deemed it advisable to conceal
himself within the verge of the forest, conscious of the guilty purpose that had brought him
thither, though now so happily turned from it.
On came the hoof tramps and the voices of the riders, two grave old voices, conversing soberly
as they drew near. These mingled sounds appeared to pass along the road, within a few yards of
the young man's hiding-place; but, owing doubtless to the depth of the gloom at that particular
spot, neither the travellers nor their steeds were visible. Though their figures brushed the small
boughs by the wayside, it could not be seen that they intercepted, even for a moment, the faint
gleam from the strip of bright sky athwart which they must have passed. Goodman Brown
alternately crouched and stood on tiptoe, pulling aside the branches and thrusting forth his head
as far as he durst without discerning so much as a shadow. It vexed him the more, because he
could have sworn, were such a thing possible, that he recognized the voices of the minister and
Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were wont to do, when bound to some ordination
or ecclesiastical council. While yet within hearing, one of the riders stopped to pluck a switch.
"Of the two, reverend sir," said the voice like the deacon's, "I had rather miss an ordination
dinner than to-night's meeting. They tell me that some of our community are to be here from
Falmouth and beyond, and others from Connecticut and Rhode Island, besides several of the
Indian powwows, who, after their fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the best of us.
Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to be taken into communion."
"Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!" replied the solemn old tones of the minister. "Spur up, or we
shall be late. Nothing can be done, you know, until I get on the ground."
The hoofs clattered again; and the voices, talking so strangely in the empty air, passed on
through the forest, where no church had ever been gathered or solitary Christian prayed.
Whither, then, could these holy men be journeying so deep into the heathen wilderness? Young
Goodman Brown caught hold of a tree for support, being ready to sink down on the ground, faint
and overburdened with the heavy sickness of his heart. He looked up to the sky, doubting
whether there really was a heaven above him. Yet there was the blue arch, and the stars
brightening in it.
"With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!" cried Goodman
Brown.
While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of the firmament and had lifted his hands to pray,
a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith and hid the brightening stars. The
blue sky was still visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was sweeping
swiftly northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a confused and
doubtful sound of voices. Once the listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of
towns-people of his own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met
at the communion table, and had seen others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct
were the sounds, he doubted whether he had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest,
whispering without a wind. Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily in the
sunshine at Salem village, but never until now from a cloud of night There was one voice of a
young woman, uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some
favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain; and all the unseen multitude, both saints and
sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.
"Faith!" shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation; and the echoes of the
forest mocked him, crying, "Faith! Faith!" as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through
the wilderness.
The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night, when the unhappy husband held his
breath for a response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices,
fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the clear and silent sky above
Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through the air and caught on the branch
of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.
"My Faith is gone!" cried he, after one stupefied moment. "There is no good on earth; and sin is
but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given."
And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his
staff and set forth again, at such a rate that he seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to
walk or run. The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length,
leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides
mortal man to evil. The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the
trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a
distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were
laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its
other horrors.
"Ha! ha! ha!" roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him.
"Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with your deviltry. Come witch,
come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You
may as well fear him as he fear you."
In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of
Goodman Brown. On he flew among the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied
gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such
laughter as set all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his own
shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his
course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks
and branches of a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at
the hour of midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard
the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance with the weight of many
voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The
verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the
sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried
out, and his cry was lost to his own ear by its unison with the cry of the desert.
In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light glared full upon his eyes. At one
extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some
rude, natural resemblance either to an alter or a pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines,
their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The mass of foliage
that had overgrown the summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and fitfully
illuminating the whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red light
arose and fell, a numerous congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and
again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the solitary woods at once.
"A grave and dark-clad company," quoth Goodman Brown.
In truth they were such. Among them, quivering to and fro between gloom and splendor,
appeared faces that would be seen next day at the council board of the province, and others
which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded
pews, from the holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor was there.
At least there were high dames well known to her, and wives of honored husbands, and widows,
a great multitude, and ancient maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who
trembled lest their mothers should espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light flashing over the
obscure field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a score of the church members of
Salem village famous for their especial sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and
waited at the skirts of that venerable saint, his revered pastor. But, irreverently consorting with
these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy
virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all
mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see that the good
shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints. Scattered also among
their pale-faced enemies were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had often scared their native
forest with more hideous incantations than any known to English witchcraft.
"But where is Faith?" thought Goodman Brown; and, as hope came into his heart, he trembled.
Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as the pious love, but joined
to words which expressed all that our nature can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more.
Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends. Verse after verse was sung; and still the
chorus of the desert swelled between like the deepest tone of a mighty organ; and with the final
peal of that dreadful anthem there came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the
howling beasts, and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness were mingling and
according with the voice of guilty man in homage to the prince of all. The four blazing pines
threw up a loftier flame, and obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on the smoke
wreaths above the impious assembly. At the same moment the fire on the rock shot redly forth
and formed a glowing arch above its base, where now appeared a figure. With reverence be it
spoken, the figure bore no slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the
New England churches.
"Bring forth the converts!" cried a voice that echoed through the field and rolled into the forest.
At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees and approached the
congregation, with whom he felt a loathful brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was wicked
in his heart. He could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his own dead father beckoned him
to advance, looking downward from a smoke wreath, while a woman, with dim features of
despair, threw out her hand to warn him back. Was it his mother? But he had no power to retreat
one step, nor to resist, even in thought, when the minister and good old Deacon Gookin seized
his arms and led him to the blazing rock. Thither came also the slender form of a veiled female,
led between Goody Cloyse, that pious teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, who had
received the devil's promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was she. And there stood the
proselytes beneath the canopy of fire.
"Welcome, my children," said the dark figure, "to the communion of your race. Ye have found
thus young your nature and your destiny. My children, look behind you!"
They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the fiend worshippers were seen;
the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every visage.
"There," resumed the sable form, "are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed
them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of
righteousness and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping
assembly. This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds: how hoary-bearded
elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households; how
many a woman, eager for widows' weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him
sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers'
wealth; and how fair damsels--blush not, sweet ones--have dug little graves in the garden, and
bidden me, the sole guest to an infant's funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye
shall scent out all the places--whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest--where crime
has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty
blood spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of
sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than
human power--than my power at its utmost--can make manifest in deeds. And now, my children,
look upon each other."
They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the wretched man beheld his Faith, and
the wife her husband, trembling before that unhallowed altar.
"Lo, there ye stand, my children," said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad with its
despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race.
"Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now
are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome
again, my children, to the communion of your race."
"Welcome," repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of despair and triumph.
And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet hesitating on the verge of
wickedness in this dark world. A basin was hollowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it contain water,
reddened by the lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame? Herein did the shape
of evil dip his hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism upon their foreheads, that they might
be partakers of the mystery of sin, more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and
thought, than they could now be of their own. The husband cast one look at his pale wife, and
Faith at him. What polluted wretches would the next glance show them to each other, shuddering
alike at what they disclosed and what they saw!
"Faith! Faith!" cried the husband, "look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one."
Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had he spoken when he found himself amid calm
night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind which died heavily away through the forest. He
staggered against the rock, and felt it chill and damp; while a hanging twig, that had been all on
fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew.
The next morning young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of Salem village, staring
around him like a bewildered man. The good old minister was taking a walk along the graveyard
to get an appetite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed,
on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to avoid an anathema. Old Deacon
Gookin was at domestic worship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard through the open
window. "What God doth the wizard pray to?" quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that
excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine at her own lattice, catechizing a little girl who
had brought her a pint of morning's milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child as from the
grasp of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied the head of Faith,
with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of him that she
skipped along the street and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But Goodman
Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without a greeting.
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witchmeeting?
Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a
sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of
that fearful dream. On the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he
could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed
strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his
hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant
deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading
lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, waking
suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the
family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife,
and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse,
followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides
neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was
gloom.
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THE EIGHTY-YARD RUN IRWIN SHAW



THE EIGHTY-YARD RUN

IRWIN SHAW




he pass was high and wide and he jumped for it, feeling it slap flatly against his hands, as he shook his
hips to throw off the halfback who was diving at him. The center floated by, his hands desperately brushing
Darling's knee as Darling picked his feet up high and delicately ran over a blocker and an opposing
linesman in a jumble on the ground near the scrimmage line. He had ten yards in the clear and picked up
speed, breathing easily, feeling his thigh pads rising and falling against his legs, listening to the sound of
cleats behind him, pulling away from them, watching the other backs heading him off toward the sideline,
the whole picture, the men closing in on him, the blockers fighting for position, the ground he had to cross,
all suddenly clear in his head, for the first time in his life not a meaningless confusion of men, sounds,
speed. He smiled a little to himself as he ran, holding the ball lightly in front of him with his two hands, his
knees pumping high, his hips twisting in the almost girlish run of a back in a broken field. The first
halfback came at him and he fed him his leg, then swung at the last moment, took the shock of the man's
shoulders without breaking stride, ran right through him, his cleats biting securely into the turf. There was
only the safety man now, coming warily at him, his arms crooked, hands spread. Darling tucked the ball in,
spurted at him, driving hard, hurling himself along, all two hundred pounds bunched into controlled attack.
He was sure he was going to get past the safety man. Without thought, his arms and legs working
beautifully together, he headed right for the safety man, stiff-armed him, feeling blood spurt
instantaneously from the man's nose onto his hand, seeing his face go awry, head turned, mouth pulled to
one side. He pivoted away, keeping the arm locked, dropping the safety man as he ran easily toward the
goal line, with the drumming of cleats diminishing behind him.
How long ago? It was autumn then, and the ground was getting hard because the nights were cold and
leaves from the maples around the stadium blew across the practice fields in gusts of wind, and the girls
were beginning to put polo coats over their sweaters when they came to watch practice in the afternoon. . . .
Fifteen years. Darling walked slowly over the same ground in the spring twilight, in his neat shoes, a man
of thirty-five dressed in a doublebreasted suit, ten pounds heavier in the fifteen years, but not fat, with the
years between 1925 and 1940 showing in his face.
The coach was smiling quietly to himself and the assistant coaches were looking at each other with
pleasure the way they always did when one of the second stringers suddenly did something fine, bringing
credit to them, making their $2,ooo a year a tiny bit more secure.
Darling trotted back, smiling, breathing deeply but easily, feeling wonderful, not tired, though this was
the tail end of practice and he'd run eighty yards. The sweat poured off his face and soaked his jersey and
he liked the feeling, the warm moistness lubricating his skin like oil. Off in a comer of the field some
players were punting and the smack of leather against the ball came pleasantly through the afternoon air.
The freshmen were running signals on the next field and the quarterback's sharp voice, the pound of the
eleven pairs of cleats, the "Dig, now dig!" of the coaches, the laughter of the players all somehow made
him feel happy as he trotted back to midfield, listening to the applause and shouts of the students along the
sidelines, knowing that after that run the coach would have to start him Saturday against Illinois.
Fifteen years, Darling thought, remembering the shower after the workout, the hot water steaming off his
skin and the deep soapsuds and all the young voices singing with the water streaming down and towels
going and managers running in and out and the sharp sweet smell of oil of wintergreen and everybody
clapping him on the back as he dressed and Packard, the captain, who took being captain very seriously,
coming over to him and shaking his hand and saying, "Darling, you're going to go places in the next two
years."
The assistant manager fussed over him, wiping a cut on his leg with alcohol and iodine, the little sting
making him realize suddenly how fresh and whole and solid his body felt. The manager slapped a piece of
adhesive tape over the cut, and Darling noticed the sharp clean white of the tape against the ruddiness of
the skin, fresh from the shower.
He dressed slowly, the softness of his shirt and the soft warmth of his wool socks and his flannel
trousers a reward against his skin after the harsh pressure of the shoulder harness and thigh and hip pads.
He drank three glasses of cold water, the liquid reaching down coldly inside of him, soothing the harsh dry
places in his throat and belly left by the sweat and running and shouting of practice.
Fifteen years.
The sun had gone down and the sky was green behind the stadium and he laughed quietly to himself as he
looked at the stadium, rearing above the trees, and knew that on Saturday when the
voices roared as
the team came running out onto the field, part of that enormous salute would be for him. He walked slowly,
listening to the gravel crunch satisfactorily under his shoes in the still twilight, feeling his clothes swing
lightly against his skin, breathing the thin evening air, feeling the wind move softly in his damp hair,
wonderfully cool behind his ears and at the nape of his,neck.
Louise was waiting for him at the road, in her car. The top was down and he noticed all over again, as
he always did when he saw her, how pretty she was, the rough blonde hair and the large, inquiring eyes and
the bright mouth, smiling now.
She threw the door open. "Were you good today?" she asked.
"Pretty good," he said. He climbed in, sank luxuriously into the soft leather, stretched his legs far out.
He smiled, thinking of the eighty yards. "Pretty damn good."
She looked at him seriously for a moment, then scrambled around, like a little girl, kneeling on the seat
next to him, grabbed him, her hands along his ears, and kissed him as he sprawled, head back, on the seat
cushion. She let go of him, but kept her head close to his, over his. Darling reached up slowly and rubbed
the back of his hand against her cheek, lit softly by a street lamp a hundred feet away. They looked at each
other, smiling.
Louise drove down to the lake and they sat there silently, watching the moon rise behind the hills on the
other side. Finally he reached over, pulled her gently to him, kissed her. Her lips grew soft, her body sank
into his, tears formed slowly in her eyes. He knew, for the first time, that he could do whatever he wanted
with her.
"Tonight," he said. "I'll call for you at seven-thirty. Can you get out?" She looked at him. She was
smiling, but the tears were still full in her eyes. "All right," she said. "I'll get out. How about you? Won't the
coach raise hell?"
Darling grinned. "I got the coach in the palm of my hand," he said. "Can you wait till seven-thirty?"
She grinned back at him. "No," she said.
They kissed and she started the car and they went back to town for dinner. He sang on the way home.
Christian Darling, thirty-five years old, sat on the frail spring grass, greener now than it ever would be
again on the practice field, looked thoughtfully up at the stadium, a deserted ruin in the twilight. He had
started on the first team that Saturday and every Saturday after that for the next two years, but it had never
been as satisfactory as it should have been. He never had broken away, the longest run he'd ever made was
thirty-five yards, and that in a game that was already won, and then that kid had come up from the third
team, Diederich, a blank-faced German kid from Wisconsin, who ran like a bull, ripping lines to pieces
Saturday after Saturday, plowing through, never getting hurt, never changing his expression, scoring more
points, gaining more ground than all the rest of the team put together, making everybody's AllAmerican,
carrying the ball three times out of four, keeping everybody else out of the headlines. Darling was a good
blocker and he spent his Saturday afternoons working on the big Swedes and Polacks who played tackle
and end for Michigan, Illinois, Purdue, hurling into huge pile-ups, bobbing his head wildly to elude the
great raw hands swinging like meat-cleavers at him as he went charging in to open up holes for Diederich
coming through like a locomotive behind him. Still, it wasn't so bad. Everybody liked him and he did his
job and he was pointed out on the campus and boys always felt important when they introduced their girls
to him at their proms, and Louise loved him and watched him faithfully in the games, even in the mud,
when your own mother wouldn't know you, and drove him around in her car keeping the top down because
she was proud of him and wanted to show everybody that she was Christian Darling's girl. She bought him
crazy presents because her father was rich, watches, pipes, humidors, an icebox for beer for his room,
curtains, wallets, a fifty-dollar dictionary.
"You'll spend every cent your old man owns," Darling protested once when she showed up at his rooms
with seven different packages in her arms and tossed them onto the couch.
"Kiss me," Louise said, "and shut up."
"Do you want to break your poor old man?" "I don't mind. I want to
buy you presents."
"Why.?"
"It makes me feel good. Kiss me. I don't know why. Did you know that you're an important figure?"
"Yes," Darling said gravely.
"When I was waiting for you at the library yesterday two girls saw you coming and one of them said to
the other, `That's Christian Darling. He's an important figure."'
"You're a liar."
"I'm in love with an important figure."
"Still, why the hell did you have to give me a forty-pound dictionary?"
"I wanted to make sure," Louise said, that you had a token of my esteem. I wanted to smother you in
tokens of my esteem."
Fifteen years ago.
They'd married when they got out of college. There'd been other women for him, but all casual and
secret, more for curiosity's sake, and vanity, women who'd thrown themselves at him and flattered him,
a pretty mother at a summer camp for boys, an old girl from his home town who'd suddenly blossomed
into a coquette, a friend of Louise's who had dogged him grimly for six months and had taken
advantage of the two weeks that Louise went home when her mother died. Perhaps Louise had known,
but she'd kept quiet, loving him completely, filling his rooms with presents, religiously watching him
battling with the big Swedes and Polacks on the line of scrimmage on Saturday afternoons, making
plans for marrying him and living with him in New York and going with him there to the night clubs,
the theaters, the good restaurants, being proud of him in advance, tall, white-teethed, smiling, large, yet
moving lightly, with an athlete's grace, dressed in evening clothes, approvingly eyed by magnificently
dressed and famous women in theater lobbies, with Louise adoringly at his side.
Her father, who manufactured inks, set up a New York office for Darling to manage and presented him
with three hundred accounts, and they lived on Beekman Place with a view of the river with fifteen
thousand dollars a year between them, because everybody was buying everything in those days, including
ink. They saw all the shows and went to all the speakeasies and spent their fifteen thousand dollars a year
and in the afternoons Louise went to the art galleries and the matinees of the more serious plays that
Darling didn't like to sit through and Darling slept with a girl who danced in the chorus of and with
the wife of a man who owned three copper mines. Darling played squash three times a week and remained
as solid as a stone barn and Louise never took her eyes off him when they were in the same room together,
watching him with a secret, miser's smile, with a trick of coming over to him in the middle of a crowded
room and saying gravely, in a low voice, "You're the handsomest man I've ever seen in my whole life.
Want a drink?"
Nineteen twenty-nine came to Darling and to his wife and father-in-law, the maker of inks, just as it
came to everyone else. The father-in-law waited until and then blew his brains out and when Darling
went to Chicago to see what the books of the firm looked like he found out all that was left were debts and
three or four gallons of unbought ink.
"Please, Christian," Louise said, sitting in their neat Beekman Place apartment, with a view of the river
and prints of paintings by Dufy and Braque and Picasso on the wall, "please, why do you want to start
drinking at two o'clock in the afternoon?"
"I have nothing else to do," Darling said, putting down his glass, emptied of its fourth drink. "Please
pass the whisky."
Louise filled his glass. "Come take a walk with me," she said. "We'll walk along the river."
"I don't want to walk along the river," Darling said, squinting intensely at the prints of paintings by
Dufy, Braque and Picasso.
"We'll walk along Fifth Avenue."
"I don't want to walk along Fifth Avenue."
"Maybe," Louise said gently, "you'd like to come with me to some art galleries. There's an exhibition by
a man named Klee......
"I don't want to go to any art galleries. I want to sit here and drink Scotch whisky," Darling said. "Who
the hell hung these goddam pictures up on the wall?"
"I did," Louise said. "I hate them."
"I'll take them down," Louise said.
"Leave them there. It gives me something to do in the afternoon. I can hate them." Darling took a long
swallow. "Is that the way people paint these days?"
"Yes, Christian. Please don't drink any more." "Do you like painting like
that?"
"Yes, dear." "Really?" "Really."
Darling looked carefully at the prints once more. "Little Louise Tucker. The middle-western beauty. I
like pictures with horses in them. Why should you like pictures like that?"
"I just happen to have gone to a lot of galleries in the last few years . . ." "Is that what you do in the
afternoon?"
"That's what I do in the afternoon," Louise said. "I drink in the afternoon."
Louise kissed him lightly on the top of his head as he sat there squinting at the pictures on the wall,
the glass of whisky held firmly in his hand. She put on her coat and went out without saying another word.
When she came back in the early evening, she had a job on a woman's fashion magazine.
They moved downtown and Louise went out to work every morning and Darling sat home and drank
and Louise paid the bills as they came up. She made believe she was going to quit work as soon as
Darling found a job, even though she was taking over more responsibility day by day at the magazine,
interviewing authors, picking painters for the illustrations and covers, getting actresses to pose for
pictures, going out for drinks with the right people, making a thousand new friends whom she loyally
introduced to Darling.
"I don't like your hat," Darling said, once, when she came in in the evening and kissed him, her breath
rich with Martinis.
"What's the matter with my hat, Baby?" she asked, running her fingers through his hair. "Everybody
says it's very smart."
"It's too damned smart," he said. "It's not for you. It's for a rich, sophisticated woman of thirty-five with
admirers."
Louise laughed. "I'm practicing to be a rich, sophisticated woman of thirtyfive with admirers," she said.
He stared soberly at her. "Now, don't look so grim, Baby. It's still the same simple little wife under the hat."
She took the hat off, threw it into a comer, sat on his lap. "See? Homebody Number One."
"Your breath could run a train," Darling said, not wanting to be mean, but talking out of boredom, and
sudden shock at seeing his wife curiously a stranger in a new hat, with a new expression in her eyes under
the little brim, secret, confident, knowing.
Louise tucked her head under his chin so he couldn't smell her breath. "I had to take an author out for
cocktails," she said. "He's a boy from the Ozark Mountains and he drinks like a fish. He's a Communist."
"What the hell is a Communist from the Ozarks doing writing for a woman's fashion magazine?"
Louise chuckled. "The magazine business is getting all mixed up these days. The publishers want to have
a foot in every camp. And anyway, you can't find an author under seventy these days who isn't a
Communist."
"I don't think I like you to associate with all those people, Louise," Darling said. "Drinking with them."
"He's a very nice, gentle boy," Louise said. "He reads Emest Dowson." "Who's Emest Dowson?"
Louise patted his arm, stood up, fixed her hair. "He's an English poet." Darling felt that somehow he had
disappointed her. "Am I supposed to know who Emest Dowson is?"
"No, dear. I'd better go in and take a bath."
After she had gone, Darling went over to the comer where the hat was lying and picked it up. It was
nothing, a scrap of straw, a red flower, a veil, meaningless on his big hand, but
his wife's head a signal
of something . . . big city, smart and knowing women drinking and dining with men other than their
husbands, conversation about things a normal man wouldn't know much about, Frenchmen who painted as
though they used their elbows instead of brushes, composers who wrote whole symphonies without a single
melody in them, writers who knew all about politics and women who knew all about writers, the movement
of the proletariat, Marx, somehow mixed up with five-dollar dinners and the best looking women in
America and fairies
who made them laugh and half-sentences immediately understood and secretly hilarious and wives who
called their husbands "Baby." He put the hat down, a scrap of straw and a red flower, and a little veil. He
drank some whisky straight and went into the bathroom where his wife was lying deep in her bath, singing
to herself and smiling from time to time like a little girl, paddling the water gently with her hands, sending
up a slight spicy fragrance from the bath salts she used.
He stood over her, looking down at her. She smiled up at him, her eyes half closed, her body pink and
shimmering in the warm, scented water. All over again, with all the old suddenness, he was hit deep inside
him with the knowledge of how beautiful she was, how much he needed her.
"I came in here," he said, "to tell you I wish you wouldn't call me'Baby."' She looked up at him from the
bath, her eyes quickly full of sorrow, halfunderstanding what he meant. He knelt and put his arms around
her, his sleeves plunged heedlessly in the water, his shirt and jacket soaking wet as he clutched her
wordlessly, holding her crazily tight, crushing her breath from her, kissing her desperately, searchingly,
regretfully.
He got jobs after that, selling real estate and automobiles, but somehow, although he had a desk with his
name on a wooden wedge on it, and he went to the office religiously at nine each morning, he never
managed to sell anything and he never made any money.
Louise was made assistant editor, and the house was always full of strange men and women who talked
fast and got angry on abstract subjects like mural painting, novelists, labor unions. Negro short-story
writers drank Louise's liquor, and a lot of Jews, and big solemn men with scarred faces and knotted hands
who talked slowly but clearly about picket lines and battles with guns and leadpipe at mine-shaft-heads and
in front of factory gates. And Louise moved among them all, confidently, knowing what they were talking
about, with opinions that they listened to and argued about just as though she were a man. She knew
everybody, condescended to no one, devoured books that Darling had never heard of, walked along the
streets of the city, excited, at home, soaking in all the million tides of New York without fear, with constant
wonder.
Her friends liked Darling and sometimes he found a man who wanted to get off in the comer and talk
about the new boy who played fullback for Princeton, and the decline of the double wing-back, or even the
state of the stock market, but for the most part he sat on the edge of things, solid and quiet in the high storm
of words. "The dialectics of the situation . . . The theater has been given over to expert jugglers ... Picasso?
What man has a right to paint old bones and collect ten thousand dollars for them? ... I stand firmly behind
Trotsky ... Poe was the last American critic. When he died they put lilies on the grave of American
criticism. I don't say this because they panned my last book, but . . ."
Once in a while he caught Louise looking soberly and consideringly at him through the cigarette smoke
and the noise and he avoided her eyes and found an excuse to get up and go into the kitchen for more ice or
to open another bottle.
"Come on," Cathal Flaherty was saying, standing at the door with a girl, "you've got to come down and
see this. It's down on Fourteenth Street, in the old Civic Repertory, and you can only see it on Sunday
nights and I guarantee you'll come out of the theater singing." Flaherty was a big young Irishman with a
broken nose who was the lawyer for a longshoreman's union, and he had been hanging around the house for
six months on and off, roaring and shutting everybody else up when he got in an argument. "It's a new play,

 it's about taxi-drivers."
"Odets," the girl with Flaherty said. "It's by a guy named Odets." "I never heard of him,"
Darling said.
"He's a new one," the girl said.
"It's like watching a bombardment," Flaherty said. "I saw it last Sunday night. You've got to see it."
"Come on, Baby," Louise said to Darling, excitement in her eyes already. "We've been sitting in the
Sunday Times all day, this'll be a great change." "I see enough taxi-drivers every day," Darling said, not
because he meant that, but because he didn't like to be around Flaherty, who said things that made Louise
laugh a lot and whose judgment she accepted on almost every subject. "Let's go to the movies."
"You've never seen anything like this before," Flaherty said. "He wrote this play with a baseball bat."
"Come on," Louise coaxed, "I bet it's wonderful."
"He has long hair," the girl with Flaherty said. "Odets. I met him at a party. He's an actor. He didn't say
a goddam thing all night."
"I don't feel like going down to Fourteenth Street," Darling said, wishing Flaherty and his girl would get
out. "It's gloomy."
"Oh, hell!" Louise said loudly. She looked coolly at Darling, as though she'd just been introduced to
him and was making up her mind about him, and not very favorably. He saw her looking at him, knowing
there was something new and dangerous in her face and he wanted to say something, but Flaherty was there
and his damned girl, and anyway, he didn't know what to say.
"I'm going," Louise said, getting her coat. "I don't think Fourteenth Street is gloomy."
"I'm telling you," Flaherty was saying, helping her on with her coat, "it's the Battle of Gettysburg, in
Brooklynese."
"Nobody could get a word out of him," Flaherty's girl was saying as they went through the door. "He
just sat there all night."
The door closed. Louise hadn't said good night to him. Darling walked around the room four times, then
sprawled out on the sofa, on top of the Sunday Times. He lay there for five minutes looking at the ceiling,
thinking of Flaherty walking down the street talking in that booming voice, between the girls, holding their
arms.
Louise had looked wonderful. She'd washed her hair in the afternoon and it had been very soft and light
and clung close to her head as she stood there angrily putting her coat on. Louise was getting prettier every
year, partly because she knew by now how pretty she was, and made the most of it.
"Nuts," Darling said, standing up. "Oh, nuts."
He put on his coat and went down to the nearest bar and had five drinks off by himself in a comer
before his money ran out.
The years since then had been foggy and downhill. Louise had been nice to him, and in a way, loving
and kind, and they'd fought only once, when he said he was going to vote for Landon. ("Oh, Christ," she'd
said, "doesn't anything happen inside your head? Don't you read the papers? The penniless Republican!")
She'd been sorry later and apologized for hurting him, but apologized as she might to a child. He'd tried
hard, had gone grimly to the art galleries, the concert halls, the bookshops, trying to gain on the trail of his
wife, but it was no use. He was bored, and none of what he saw or heard or dutifully read made much sense
to him and finally he gave it up. He had thought, many nights as he ate dinner alone, knowing that Louise
would come home late and drop silently into bed without explanation, of getting a divorce, but he knew the
loneliness, the hopelessness, of not seeing her again would be too much to take. So he was good,
completely devoted, ready at all times to go any place with her, do anything she wanted. He even got a
small job, in a broker's office and paid his own way, bought his own liquor.
Then he'd been offered a job of going from college to college as a tailor's representative. "We want a
man," Mr. Rosenberg had said, "who as soon as you look at him, you say, 'There's a university man."'
Rosenberg had looked approvingly at Darling's broad shoulders and well-kept waist, at his carefully
brushed hair and his honest, wrinkleless face. "Frankly, Mr. Darling, I am willing to make you a
proposition. I have inquired about you, you are favorably known on your old campus. I understand you
were in the backfield with Alfred Diederich."
Darling nodded. "Whatever happened to him?"
"He is walking around in a cast for seven years now. An iron brace. He played professional football and
they broke his neck for him."
Darling smiled. That, at least, had turned out well.
"Our suits are an easy product to sell, Mr. Darling," Rosenberg said. "We have a handsome, custom-made
garment. What has Brooks Brothers got that we haven't got? A name. No more."
"I can make fifty-sixty dollars a week," Darling said to Louise that night. "And expenses. I can save some
money and then come back to New York and really get started here."
"Yes, Baby," Louise said.
"As it is," Darling said carefully, "I can make it back here once a month, and holidays and the summer.
We can see each other often."
"Yes, Baby." He looked at her face, lovelier now at thirty-five than it had ever been before, but fogged
over now as it had been for five years with a kind of patient, kindly, remote boredom.
"What do you say?" he asked. "Should I take it?" Deep within him he hoped fiercely, longingly, for her to
say, "No, Baby, you stay right here," but she said, as he knew she'd say, "I think you'd better take it."
He nodded. He had to get up and stand with his back to her, looking out the window, because there
were things plain on his face that she had never seen in the fifteen years she'd known him. "Fifty dollars is a
lot of money," he said. "I never thought I'd ever see fifty dollars again." He laughed. Louise laughed, too.
Christian Darling sat on the frail green grass of the practice field. The shadow of the stadium had reached
out and covered him. In the distance the lights of the university shone a little mistily in the light haze of
evening. Fifteen years. Flaherty even now was calling for his wife, buying her a drink, filling whatever bar
they were in with that voice of his and that easy laugh. Darling half-closed his eyes, almost saw the boy
fifteen years ago reach for the pass, slip the halfback, go skittering lightly down the field, his knees high
and fast and graceful, smiling to himself because he knew he was going to get past the safety man. That
was the high point, Darling thought, fifteen years ago, on an autumn afternoon, twenty years old and far
from death, with the air coming easily into his lungs, and a deep feeling inside him that he could do
anything, knock over anybody, outrun whatever had to be outrun. And the shower after and the three
glasses of water and the cool night air on his damp head and Louise sitting hatless in the open car with a
smile and the first kiss she ever really meant. The high point, an eighty-yard run in the practice, and a girl's
kiss and everything after that a decline. Darling laughed. He had practiced the wrong thing, perhaps. He
hadn't practiced for 1929 and New York City and a girl who would turn into a woman. Somewhere, he
thought, there must have been a point where she moved up to me, was even with me for a moment, when I
could have held her hand, if I'd known, held tight, gone with her. Well, he'd never known. Here he was on a
playing field that was fifteen years away and his wife was in another city having dinner with another and
better man, speaking with him a different, new language, a language nobody had ever taught him.
Darling stood up, smiled a little, because if he didn't smile he knew the tears would come. He looked
around him. This was the spot. O'Connor's pass had come sliding out just to here ... the high point. Darling
put up his hands, felt all over again the flat slap of the ball. He shook his hips to throw off the halfback, cut
back inside the center, picked his knees high as he ran gracefully over two men jumbled on the ground at
the line of scrimmage, ran easily, gaining speed, for ten yards, holding the ball lightly in his two hands,
swung away from the halfback diving at him, ran, swinging his hips in the almost girlish manner of a back
in a broken field, tore into the safety man, his shoes drumming heavily on the turf, stiff-armed, elbow
locked, pivoted, raced lightly and exultantly for the goal line.
It was only after he had sped over the goal line and slowed to a trot that he saw the boy and girl sitting
together on the turf, looking at him wonderingly. He stopped short, dropping his arms, "I ... " he said,
gasping a little, though his condition was, fine, and the run hadn't winded him. "I-once I played here."
The boy and the girl said nothing. Darling laughed embarrassedly, looked hard at them sitting there, close
to each other, shrugged, turned and went toward his hotel, the sweat breaking out on his face and running
down into his collar.

The Chrysanthemums by John Steinbeck

The Chrysanthemums
by John Steinbeck

The high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot. On the broad, level land floor the gang plows bit deep and left the black earth shining like metal where the shares had cut. On the foothill ranches across the Salinas River, the yellow stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine, but there was no sunshine in the valley now in December. The thick willow scrub along the river flamed with sharp and positive yellow leaves. It was a time of quiet and of waiting. The air was cold and tender. A light wind blew up from the southwest so that the farmers were mildly hopeful of a good rain before long; but fog and rain did not go together. Across the river, on Henry Allen's foothill ranch there was little work to be done, for the hay was cut and stored and the orchards were plowed up to receive the rain deeply when it should come. The cattle on the higher slopes were becoming shaggy and rough-coated. Elisa Allen, working in her flower garden, looked down across the yard and saw Henry, her husband, talking to two men in business suits. The three of them stood by the tractor shed, each man with one foot on the side of the little Fordson. They smoked cigarettes and studied the machine as they talked. Elisa watched them for a moment and then went back to her work. She was thirty-five. Her face was lean and strong and her eyes were as clear as water. Her figure looked blocked and heavy in her gardening costume, a man's black hat pulled low down over her eyes, clod-hopper shoes, a figured print dress almost completely covered by a big corduroy apron with four big pockets to hold the snips, the trowel and scratcher, the seeds and the knife she worked with. She wore heavy leather gloves to protect her hands while she worked. She was cutting down the old year's chrysanthemum stalks with a pair of short and powerful scissors. She looked down toward the men by the tractor shed now and then. Her face was eager and mature and handsome; even her work with the scissors was over-eager, over-powerful. The chrysanthemum stems seemed too small and easy for her energy. She brushed a cloud of hair out of her eyes with the back of her glove, and left a smudge of earth on her cheek in doing it. Behind her stood the neat white farm house with red geraniums close-banked around it as high as the windows. It was a hard-swept looking little house, with hard-polished windows, and a clean mud-mat on the front steps.
Elisa cast another glance toward the tractor shed. The strangers were getting into their Ford coupe. She took off a glove and put her strong fingers down into the forest of new green chrysanthemum sprouts that were growing around the old roots. She spread the leaves and looked down among the close-growing stems. No aphids were there, no sowbugs or snails or cutworms. Her terrier fingers destroyed such pests before they could get started. Elisa started at the sound of her husband's voice. He had come near quietly, and he leaned over the wire fence that protected her flower garden from cattle and dogs and chickens. "At it again," he said. "You've got a strong new crop coming." Elisa straightened her back and pulled on the gardening glove again. "Yes. They'll be strong this coming year." In her tone and on her face there was a little smugness. You've got a gift with things," Henry observed. "Some of those yellow chrysanthemums you had this year were ten inches across. I wish you'd work out in the orchard and raise some apples that big." Her eyes sharpened. "Maybe I could do it, too. I've a gift with things, all right. My mother had it. She could stick anything in the ground and make it grow. She said it was having planters' hands that knew how to do it." "Well, it sure works with flowers," he said. "Henry, who were those men you were talking to?" "Why, sure, that's what I came to tell you. They were from the Western Meat Company. I sold those thirty head of three-year-old steers. Got nearly my own price, too." "Good," she said. "Good for you. "And I thought," he continued, "I thought how it's Saturday afternoon, and we might go into Salinas for dinner at a restaurant, and then to a picture show—to celebrate, you see." "Good," she repeated. "Oh, yes. That will be good." Henry put on his joking tone. "There's fights tonight. How'd you like to go to the fights?" "Oh, no," she said breathlessly. "No, I wouldn't like fights."
"Just fooling, Elisa. We'll go to a movie. Let's see. It's two now. I'm going to take Scotty and bring down those steers from the hill. It'll take us maybe two hours. We'll go in town about five and have dinner at the Cominos Hotel. Like that?" "Of course I'll like it. It's good to eat away from home." "All right, then. I'll go get up a couple of horses." She said, "I'll have plenty of time to transplant some of these sets, I guess." She heard her husband calling Scotty down by the barn. And a little later she saw the two men ride up the pale yellow hillside in search of the steers. There was a little square sandy bed kept for rooting the chrysanthemums. With her trowel she turned the soil over and over, and smoothed it and patted it firm. Then she dug ten parallel trenches to receive the sets. Back at the chrysanthemum bed she pulled out the little crisp shoots, trimmed off the leaves of each one with her scissors and laid it on a small orderly pile. A squeak of wheels and plod of hoofs came from the road. Elisa looked up. The country road ran along the dense bank of willows and cotton-woods that bordered the river, and up this road came a curious vehicle, curiously drawn. It was an old spring-wagon, with a round canvas top on it like the cover of a prairie schooner. It was drawn by an old bay horse and a little grey-and-white burro. A big stubble-bearded man sat between the cover flaps and drove the crawling team. Underneath the wagon, between the hind wheels, a lean and rangy mongrel dog walked sedately. Words were painted on the canvas in clumsy, crooked letters. "Pots, pans, knives, sisors, lawn mores, Fixed." Two rows of articles, and the triumphantly definitive "Fixed" below. The black paint had run down in little sharp points beneath each letter. Elisa, squatting on the ground, watched to see the crazy, loose-jointed wagon pass by. But it didn't pass. It turned into the farm road in front of her house, crooked old wheels skirling and squeaking. The rangy dog darted from between the wheels and ran ahead. Instantly the two ranch shepherds flew out at him. Then all three stopped, and with stiff and quivering tails, with taut straight legs, with ambassadorial dignity, they slowly circled, sniffing daintily. The caravan pulled up to Elisa's wire fence and stopped. Now the newcomer dog, feeling outnumbered, lowered his tail and retired under the wagon with raised hackles and bared teeth. The man on the wagon seat called out, "That's a bad dog in a fight when he gets started." Elisa laughed. "I see he is. How soon does he generally get started?" The man caught up her laughter and echoed it heartily. "Sometimes not for weeks
and weeks," he said. He climbed stiffly down, over the wheel. The horse and the donkey drooped like unwatered flowers. Elisa saw that he was a very big man. Although his hair and beard were graying, he did not look old. His worn black suit was wrinkled and spotted with grease. The laughter had disappeared from his face and eyes the moment his laughing voice ceased. His eyes were dark, and they were full of the brooding that gets in the eyes of teamsters and of sailors. The calloused hands he rested on the wire fence were cracked, and every crack was a black line. He took off his battered hat. "I'm off my general road, ma'am," he said. "Does this dirt road cut over across the river to the Los Angeles highway?" Elisa stood up and shoved the thick scissors in her apron pocket. "Well, yes, it does, but it winds around and then fords the river. I don't think your team could pull through the sand." He replied with some asperity, "It might surprise you what them beasts can pull through." "When they get started?" she asked. He smiled for a second. "Yes. When they get started." "Well," said Elisa, "I think you'll save time if you go back to the Salinas road and pick up the highway there." He drew a big finger down the chicken wire and made it sing. "I ain't in any hurry, ma am. I go from Seattle to San Diego and back every year. Takes all my time. About six months each way. I aim to follow nice weather." Elisa took off her gloves and stuffed them in the apron pocket with the scissors. She touched the under edge of her man's hat, searching for fugitive hairs. "That sounds like a nice kind of a way to live," she said. He leaned confidentially over the fence. "Maybe you noticed the writing on my wagon. I mend pots and sharpen knives and scissors. You got any of them things to do?" "Oh, no," she said quickly. "Nothing like that." Her eyes hardened with resistance. "Scissors is the worst thing," he explained. "Most people just ruin scissors trying to sharpen 'em, but I know how. I got a special tool. It's a little bobbit kind of thing, and patented. But it sure does the trick." "No. My scissors are all sharp."
"All right, then. Take a pot," he continued earnestly, "a bent pot, or a pot with a hole. I can make it like new so you don't have to buy no new ones. That's a saving for you. "No," she said shortly. "I tell you I have nothing like that for you to do." His face fell to an exaggerated sadness. His voice took on a whining undertone. "I ain't had a thing to do today. Maybe I won't have no supper tonight. You see I'm off my regular road. I know folks on the highway clear from Seattle to San Diego. They save their things for me to sharpen up because they know I do it so good and save them money. "I'm sorry," Elisa said irritably. "I haven't anything for you to do." His eyes left her face and fell to searching the ground. They roamed about until they came to the chrysanthemum bed where she had been working. "What's them plants, ma'am?" The irritation and resistance melted from Elisa's face. "Oh, those are chrysanthemums, giant whites and yellows. I raise them every year, bigger than anybody around here." "Kind of a long-stemmed flower? Looks like a quick puff of colored smoke?" he asked. "That's it. What a nice way to describe them." "They smell kind of nasty till you get used to them," he said. "It's a good bitter smell," she retorted, "not nasty at all." He changed his tone quickly. "I like the smell myself." "I had ten-inch blooms this year," she said. The man leaned farther over the fence. "Look. I know a lady down the road a piece, has got the nicest garden you ever seen. Got nearly every kind of flower but no chrysanthemums. Last time I was mending a copper-bottom washtub for her (that's a hard job but I do it good), she said to me, 'If you ever run acrost some nice chrysanthemums I wish you'd try to get me a few seeds.' That's what she told me." Elisa's eyes grew alert and eager. "She couldn't have known much about chrysanthemums. You can raise them from seed, but it's much easier to root the little sprouts you see there."
"Oh," he said. "I s'pose I can't take none to her, then." "Why yes you can," Elisa cried. "I can put some in damp sand, and you can carry them right along with you. They'll take root in the pot if you keep them damp. And then she can transplant them." "She'd sure like to have some, ma'am. You say they're nice ones?" "Beautiful," she said. "Oh, beautiful." Her eyes shone. She tore off the battered hat and shook out her dark pretty hair. "I'll put them in a flower pot, and you can take them right with you. Come into the yard." While the man came through the picket fence Elisa ran excitedly along the geranium-bordered path to the back of the house. And she returned carrying a big red flower pot. The gloves were forgotten now. She kneeled on the ground by the starting bed and dug up the sandy soil with her fingers and scooped it into the bright new flower pot. Then she picked up the little pile of shoots she had prepared. With her strong fingers she pressed them into the sand and tamped around them with her knuckles. The man stood over her. "I'll tell you what to do," she said. "You remember so you can tell the lady." "Yes, I'll try to remember." "Well, look. These will take root in about a month. Then she must set them out, about a foot apart in good rich earth like this, see?" She lifted a handful of dark soil for him to look at. "They'll grow fast and tall. Now remember this. In July tell her to cut them down, about eight inches from the ground." "Before they bloom?" he asked. "Yes, before they bloom." Her face was tight with eagerness. "They'll grow right up again. About the last of September the buds will start." She stopped and seemed perplexed. "It's the budding that takes the most care," she said hesitantlv. "I don't know how to tell you." She looked deep into his eyes, searchingly. Her mouth opened a little, and she seemed to be listening. "I'll try to tell you," she said. "Did you ever hear of planting hands?" "Can't say I have, ma'am." "Well, I can only tell you what it feels like. It's when you're picking off the buds you don't want. Everything goes right down into your fingertips. You watch your fingers work. They do it themselves. You can feel how it is. They pick and pick the buds. They never make a mistake. They're with the plant. Do you see? Your fingers and the plant. You can feel that, right up your arm. They know. They never make a mistake. You can feel it. When you're like that you can't do anything wrong. Do you
see that? Can you understand that?" She was kneeling on the ground looking up at him. Her breast swelled passionately. The man's eyes narrowed. He looked away self-consciously. "Maybe I know," he said. "Sometimes in the night in the wagon there—" Elisa's voice grew husky. She broke in on him. "I've never lived as you do, but I know what you mean. When the night is dark—why, the stars are sharp-pointed, and there's quiet. Why, you rise up and up! Every pointed star gets driven into your body. It's like that. Hot and sharp and—lovely." Kneeling there, her hand went out toward his legs in the greasy black trousers. Her hesitant fingers almost touched the cloth. Then her hand dropped to the ground. She crouched low like a fawning dog. He said, "It's nice, just like you say. Only when you don't have no dinner, it ain't." She stood up then, very straight, and her face was ashamed. She held the flower pot out to him and placed it gently in his arms. "Here. Put it in your wagon, on the seat, where you can watch it. Maybe I can find something for you to do." At the back of the house she dug in the can pile and found two old and battered aluminum saucepans. She carried them back and gave them to him. "Here, maybe you can fix these." His manner changed. He became professional. "Good as new I can fix them." At the back of his wagon he set a little anvil, and out of an oily tool box dug a small machine hammer. Elisa came through the gate to watch him while he pounded out the dents in the kettles. His mouth grew sure and knowing. At a difficult part of the work he sucked his under-lip. "You sleep right in the wagon?" Elisa asked. "Right in the wagon, ma'am. Rain or shine I'm dry as a cow in there." It must be nice," she said. "It must be very nice. I wish women could do such things." "It ain't the right kind of a life for a woman. Her upper lip raised a little, showing her teeth. "How do you know? How can you tell?" she said. "I don't know, ma'am," he protested. "Of course I don't know. Now here's your
kettles, done. You don't have to buy no new ones." "How much?" "Oh, fifty cents'll do. I keep my prices down and my work good. That's why I have all them satisfied customers up and down the highway." Elisa brought him a fifty-cent piece from the house and dropped it in his hand. "You might be surprised to have a rival some time. I can sharpen scissors, too. And I can beat the dents out of little pots. I could show you what a woman might do." He put his hammer back in the oily box and shoved the little anvil out of sight. "It would be a lonely life for a woman, ma'am, and a scarey life, too, with animals creeping under the wagon all night." He climbed over the singletree, steadying himself with a hand on the burro's white rump. He settled himself in the seat, picked up the lines. "Thank you kindly, ma'am," he said. "I'll do like you told me; I'll go back and catch the Salinas road." "Mind," she called, "if you're long in getting there, keep the sand damp." "Sand, ma'am?. .. Sand? Oh, sure. You mean around the chrysanthemums. Sure I will." He clucked his tongue. The beasts leaned luxuriously into their collars. The mongrel dog took his place between the back wheels. The wagon turned and crawled out the entrance road and back the way it had come, along the river. Elisa stood in front of her wire fence watching the slow progress of the caravan. Her shoulders were straight, her head thrown back, her eyes half-closed, so that the scene came vaguely into them. Her lips moved silently, forming the words "Good-bye—good-bye." Then she whispered, "That's a bright direction. There's a glowing there." The sound of her whisper startled her. She shook herself free and looked about to see whether anyone had been listening. Only the dogs had heard. They lifted their heads toward her from their sleeping in the dust, and then stretched out their chins and settled asleep again. Elisa turned and ran hurriedly into the house. In the kitchen she reached behind the stove and felt the water tank. It was full of hot water from the noonday cooking. In the bathroom she tore off her soiled clothes and flung them into the corner. And then she scrubbed herself with a little block of pumice, legs and thighs, loins and chest and arms, until her skin was scratched and red. When she had dried herself she stood in front of a mirror in her bedroom and looked at her body. She tightened her stomach and threw out her chest. She turned and looked over her shoulder at her back. After a while she began to dress, slowly. She put on her newest underclothing and her nicest stockings and the dress which was the symbol of her prettiness. She worked carefully on her hair, pencilled her eyebrows and rouged her lips.
Before she was finished she heard the little thunder of hoofs and the shouts of Henry and his helper as they drove the red steers into the corral. She heard the gate bang shut and set herself for Henry's arrival. His step sounded on the porch. He entered the house calling, "Elisa, where are you?" "In my room, dressing. I'm not ready. There's hot water for your bath. Hurry up. It's getting late." When she heard him splashing in the tub, Elisa laid his dark suit on the bed, and shirt and socks and tie beside it. She stood his polished shoes on the floor beside the bed. Then she went to the porch and sat primly and stiffly down. She looked toward the river road where the willow-line was still yellow with frosted leaves so that under the high grey fog they seemed a thin band of sunshine. This was the only color in the grey afternoon. She sat unmoving for a long time. Her eyes blinked rarely. Henry came banging out of the door, shoving his tie inside his vest as he came. Elisa stiffened and her face grew tight. Henry stopped short and looked at her. "Why—why, Elisa. You look so nice!" "Nice? You think I look nice? What do you mean by 'nice'?" Henry blundered on. "I don't know. I mean you look different, strong and happy." "I am strong? Yes, strong. What do you mean 'strong'?" He looked bewildered. "You're playing some kind of a game," he said helplessly. "It's a kind of a play. You look strong enough to break a calf over your knee, happy enough to eat it like a watermelon." For a second she lost her rigidity. "Henry! Don't talk like that. You didn't know what you said." She grew complete again. "I'm strong," she boasted. "I never knew before how strong." Henry looked down toward the tractor shed, and when he brought his eyes back to her, they were his own again. "I'll get out the car. You can put on your coat while I'm starting." Elisa went into the house. She heard him drive to the gate and idle down his motor, and then she took a long time to put on her hat. She pulled it here and pressed it there. When Henry turned the motor off she slipped into her coat and went out. The little roadster bounced along on the dirt road by the river, raising the birds and driving the rabbits into the brush. Two cranes flapped heavily over the willow-
line and dropped into the river-bed. Far ahead on the road Elisa saw a dark speck. She knew. She tried not to look as they passed it, but her eyes would not obey. She whispered to herself sadly, "He might have thrown them off the road. That wouldn't have been much trouble, not very much. But he kept the pot," she explained. "He had to keep the pot. That's why he couldn't get them off the road." The roadster turned a bend and she saw the caravan ahead. She swung full around toward her husband so she could not see the little covered wagon and the mismatched team as the car passed them. In a moment it was over. The thing was done. She did not look back. She said loudly, to be heard above the motor, "It will be good, tonight, a good dinner." "Now you're changed again," Henry complained. He took one hand from the wheel and patted her knee. "I ought to take you in to dinner oftener. It would be good for both of us. We get so heavy out on the ranch." "Henry," she asked, "could we have wine at dinner?" "Sure we could. Say! That will be fine." She was silent for a while; then she said, "Henry, at those prize fights, do the men hurt each other very much?" "Sometimes a little, not often. Why?" "Well, I've read how they break noses, and blood runs down their chests. I've read how the fighting gloves get heavy and soggy with blood." He looked around at her. "What's the matter, Elisa? I didn't know you read things like that." He brought the car to a stop, then turned to the right over the Salinas River bridge. "Do any women ever go to the fights?" she asked. "Oh, sure, some. What's the matter, Elisa? Do you want to go? I don't think you'd like it, but I'll take you if you really want to go." She relaxed limply in the seat. "Oh, no. No. I don't want to go. I'm sure I don't." Her face was turned away from him. "It will be enough if we can have wine. It will
be plenty." She turned up her coat collar so he could not see that she was crying weakly—like an old woman.

Good Country People By Flannery O'Connor

Good Country People
By Flannery O'Connor
1925-1964

Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she
was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and
reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her
forward expression was steady and driving like the
advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left
or right but turned as the story turned as if they
followed a yellow line down the center of it. She
seldom used the other expression because it was not
often necessary for her to retract a statement, but when she did, her face
came to a complete stop, there was an almost imperceptible movement of
her black eyes, during which they seemed to be receding, and then the
observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there as
real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no longer
there in spirit. As for getting anything across to her when this was the
case, Mrs. Hopewell had given it up. She might talk her head off. Mrs.
Freeman could never be brought to admit herself wrong to any point. She
would stand there and if she could be brought to say anything, it was
something like, “Well, I wouldn’t of said it was and I wouldn’t of said it
wasn’t” or letting her gaze range over the top kitchen shelf where there
was an assortment of dusty bottles, she might remark, “I see you ain’t ate
many of them figs you put up last summer.”
They carried on their most important business in the kitchen at breakfast.
Every morning Mrs. Hopewell got up at seven o’clock and lit her gas
heater and Joy’s. Joy was her daughter, a large blonds girl who had an
artificial leg. Mrs. Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was
thirty-two years old and highly educated. Joy would get up while her
mother was eating and lumber into the bathroom and slam the door, and
before long, Mrs. Freeman would arrive at the back door. Joy would hear
her mother call, “Come on in,” and then they would talk for a while in
low voices that were indistinguishable in the bathroom. By the time Joy
came in, they had usually finished the weather report and were on one or
the other of Mrs. Freeman’s daughters, Glynese or Carramae. Joy called
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them Glycerin and Caramel. Glynese, a redhead, was eighteen and had
many admirers; Carramae, a blonde, was only fifteen but already married
and pregnant. She could not keep anything on her stomach. Every
morning Mrs. Freeman told Mrs. Hopewell how many times she had
vomited since the last report.
Mrs. Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two
of the finest girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she
was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they
might meet. Then she would tell how she had happened to hire the
Freemans in the first place and how they were a godsend to her and how
she had had them four years. The reason for her keeping them so long
was that they were not trash. They were good country people. She had
telephoned the man whose name they had given as reference and he had
told her that Mr. Freeman was a good farmer but that his wife was the
nosiest woman ever to walk the earth. “She’s got to be into everything,”
the man said. “If she don’t get there before the dust settles, you can bet
she’s dead, that’s all. She’ll want to know all your business. I can stand
him real good,” he had said, “but me nor my wife neither could have
stood that woman one more minute on this place.” That had put Mrs.
Hopewell off for a few days.
She had hired them in the end because there were no other applicants but
she had made up her mind beforehand exactly how she would handle the
woman. Since she was the type who had to be into everything, then, Mrs.
Hopewell had decided, she would not only let her be into everything, she
would see to it that she was into everything – she would give her the
responsibility of everything, she would put her in charge. Mrs. Hopewell
had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in
such a constructive way that she had kept them four years.
Nothing is perfect. This was one of Mrs. Hopewell’s favorite sayings.
Another was: that is life! And still another, the most important, was:
well, other people have their opinions too. She would make these
statements, usually at the table, in a tone of gentle insistence as if no one
held them but her, and the large hulking Joy, whose constant outrage had
obliterated every expression from her face, would stare just a little to the
side of her, her eyes icy blue, with the look of someone who had achieved
blindness by an act of will and means to keep it.
When Mrs. Hopewell said to Mrs. Freeman that life was like that, Mrs.
Freeman would say, “I always said so myself.” Nothing had been arrived
at by anyone that had not first been arrived at by her. She was quicker
than Mr. Freeman. When Mrs. Hopewell said to her after they had been
on the place for a while, “You know, you’re the wheel behind the wheel,”
and winked, Mrs. Freeman had said, “I know it. I’ve always been quick.
It’s some that are quicker than others.”
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“Everybody is different,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“Yes, most people is,” Mrs. Freeman said.
“It takes all kinds to make the world.”
“I always said it did myself.”
The girl was used to this kind of dialogue for breakfast and more of it for
dinner; sometimes they had it for supper too. When they had no guest
they ate in the kitchen because that was easier. Mrs. Freeman always
managed to arrive at some point during the meal and to watch them finish
it. She would stand in the doorway if it were summer but in the winter
she would stand with one elbow on top of the refrigerator and look down
at them, or she would stand by the gas heater, lifting the back of her skirt
slightly. Occasionally she would stand against the wall and roll her head
from side to side. At no time was she in any hurry to leave. All this was
very trying on Mrs. Hopewell but she was a woman of great patience. She
realized that nothing is perfect and that in the Freemans she had good
country people and that if, in this day and age, you get good country
people, you had better hang onto them.
She had had plenty of experience with trash. Before the Freemans she had
averaged one tenant family a year. The wives of these farmers were not
the kind you would want to be around you for very long. Mrs. Hopewell,
who had divorced her husband long ago, needed someone to walk over
the fields with her; and when Joy had to be impressed for these services,
her remarks were usually so ugly and her face so glum that Mrs. Hopewell
would say, “If you can’t come pleasantly, I don’t want you at all,” to which
the girl, standing square and rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust
slightly forward, would reply, “If you want me, here I am – LIKE I AM.”
Mrs. Hopewell excused this attitude because of the leg (which had been
shot off in a hunting accident when Joy was ten). It was hard for Mrs.
Hopewell to realize that her child was thirty-two now and that for more
than twenty years she had had only one leg. She thought of her still as a
child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her
thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times. Her
name was really Joy but as soon as she was twenty-one and away from
home, she had had it legally changed. Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she
had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any
language. Then she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed
without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her legal name was
Hulga.
When Mrs. Hopewell thought the name, Hulga, she thought of the broad
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blank hull of a battleship. She would not use it. She continued to call her
Joy to which the girl responded but in a purely mechanical way.
Hulga had learned to tolerate Mrs. Freeman who saved her from taking
walks with her mother. Even Glynese and Carramae were useful when
they occupied attention that might otherwise have been directed at her.
At first she had thought she could not stand Mrs. Freeman for she had
found it was not possible to be rude to her. Mrs. Freeman would take on
strange resentments and for days together she would be sullen but the
source of her displeasure was always obscure; a direct attack, a positive
leer, blatant ugliness to her face – these never touched her. And without
warning one day, she began calling her Hulga.
She did not call her that in front of Mrs. Hopewell who would have been
incensed but when she and the girl happened to be out of the house
together, she would say something and add the name Hulga to the end of
it, and the big spectacled Joy-Hulga would scowl and redden as if her
privacy had been intruded upon. She considered the name her personal
affair. She had arrived at it first purely on the basis of its ugly sound and
then the full genius of its fitness had struck her. She had a vision of the
name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace
and to whom, presumably, the goddess had to come when called. She saw
it as the name of her highest creative act. One of her major triumphs was
that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but the greater
one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga. However,
Mrs. Freeman’s relish for using the name only irritated her. It was as if
Mrs. Freeman’s beady steel-pointed eyes had penetrated far enough
behind her face to reach some secret fact. Something about her seemed to
fascinate Mrs. Freeman and then one day Hulga realized that it was the
artificial leg. Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret
infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she
preferred the lingering or incurable. Hulga had heard Mrs. Hopewell give
her the details of the hunting accident, how the leg had been literally
blasted off, how she had never lost consciousness. Mrs. Freeman could
listen to it any time as if it had happened an hour ago.
When Hulga stumped into the kitchen in the morning (she could walk
without making the awful noise but she made it – Mrs. Hopewell was
certain – because it was ugly-sounding), she glanced at them and did not
speak. Mrs. Hopewell would be in her red kimono with her hair tied
around her head in rags. She would be sitting at the table, finishing her
breakfast and Mrs. Freeman would be hanging by her elbow outward
from the refrigerator, looking down at the table. Hulga always put her
eggs on the stove to boil and then stood over them with her arms folded,
and Mrs. Hopewell would look at her – a kind of indirect gaze divided
between her and Mrs. Freeman – and would think that if she would only
keep herself up a little, she wouldn’t be so bad looking. There was
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nothing wrong with her face that a pleasant expression wouldn’t help.
Mrs. Hopewell said that people who looked on the bright side of things
would be beautiful even if they were not.
Whenever she looked at Joy this way, she could not help but feel that it
would have been better if the child had not taken the Ph.D. It had
certainly not brought her out any and now that she had it, there was no
more excuse for her to go to school again. Mrs. Hopewell thought it was
nice for girls to go to school to have a good time but Joy had “gone
through.” Anyhow, she would not have been strong enough to go again.
The doctors had told Mrs. Hopewell that with the best of care, Joy might
see forty-five. She had a weak heart. Joy had made it plain that if it had
not been for this condition, she would be far from these red hills and good
country people. She would be in a university lecturing to people who
knew what she was talking about. And Mrs. Hopewell could very well
picture here there, looking like a scarecrow and lecturing to more of the
same. Here she went about all day in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow
sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it. She thought
this was funny; Mrs. Hopewell thought it was idiotic and showed simply
that she was still a child. She was brilliant but she didn’t have a grain of
sense. It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less like other
people and more like herself – bloated, rude, and squint-eyed. And she
said such strange things! To her own mother she had said – without
warning, without excuse, standing up in the middle of a meal with her
face purple and her mouth half full – “Woman! Do you ever look inside?
Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!” she had cried
sinking down again and staring at her plate, “Malebranche was right: we
are not our own light. We are not our own light!” Mrs. Hopewell had no
idea to this day what brought that on. She had only made the remark,
hoping Joy would take it in, that a smile never hurt anyone. The girl had
taken the Ph.D. in philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete
loss. You could say, “My daughter is a nurse,” or “My daughter is a school
teacher,” or even, “My daughter is a chemical engineer.” You could not
say, “My daughter is a philosopher.” That was something that had ended
with the Greeks and Romans. All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair,
reading. Sometimes she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or
birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young
men as if she could smell their stupidity.
One day Mrs. Hopewell had picked up one of the books the girl had just
put down and opening it at random, she read, “Science, on the other hand,
has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is
concerned solely with what-is. Nothing – how can it be for science
anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing
stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all
the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to
know nothing of Nothing.” These words had been underlined with a
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blue pencil and they worked on Mrs. Hopewell like some evil incantation
in gibberish. She shut the book quickly and went out of the room as if
she were having a chill.
This morning when the girl came in, Mrs. Freeman was on Carramae.
“She thrown up four times after supper,” she said, “and was up twict in
the night after three o’clock. Yesterday she didn’t do nothing but ramble
in the bureau drawer. All she did. Stand up there and see what she could
run up on.”
“She’s got to eat,” Mrs. Hopewell muttered, sipping her coffee, while she
watched Joy’s back at the stove. She was wondering what the child had
said to the Bible salesman. She could not imagine what kind of a
conversation she could possibly have had with him.
He was a tall gaunt hatless youth who had called yesterday to sell them a
Bible. He had appeared at the door, carrying a large black suitcase that
weighted him so heavily on one side that he had to brace himself against
the door facing. He seemed on the point of collapse but he said in a
cheerful voice, “Good morning, Mrs. Cedars!” and set the suitcase down
on the mat. He was not a bad-looking young man though he had on a
bright blue suit and yellow socks that were not pulled up far enough. He
had prominent face bones and a streak of sticky-looking brown hair
falling across his forehead.
“I’m Mrs. Hopewell,” she said.
“Oh!” he said, pretending to look puzzled but with his eyes sparkling, “I
saw it said ‘The Cedars’ on the mailbox so I thought you was Mrs.
Cedars!” and he burst out in a pleasant laugh. He picked up the satchel
and under cover of a pant, he fell forward into her hall. It was rather as if
the suitcase had moved first, jerking him after it. “Mrs. Hopewell!” he
said and grabbed her hand. “I hope you are well!” and he laughed again
and then all at once his face sobered completely. He paused and gave her
a straight earnest look and said, “Lady, I’ve come to speak of serious
things.”
“Well, come in,” she muttered, none too pleased because her dinner was
almost ready. He came into the parlor and sat down on the edge of a
straight chair and put the suitcase between his feet and glanced around
the room as if he were sizing her up by it. Her silver gleamed on the two
sideboards; she decided he had never been in a room as elegant as this.
“Mrs. Hopewell,” he began, using her name in a way that sounded almost
intimate, “I know you believe in Chrustian service.”
“Well, yes,” she murmured.
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“I know,” he said and paused, looking very wise with his head cocked on
one side, “that you’re a good woman. Friends have told me.”
Mrs. Hopewell never liked to be taken for a fool. “What are you selling?”
she asked.
“Bibles,” the young man said and his eye raced around the room before he
added, “I see you have no family Bible in your parlor, I see that is the one
lack you got!”
Mrs. Hopewell could not say, “My daughter is an atheist and won’t let me
keep the Bible in the parlor.” She said, stiffening slightly, “I keep my
Bible by my bedside.” This was not the truth. It was in the attic
somewhere.
“Lady,” he said, “the word of God ought to be in the parlor.”
“Well, I think that’s a matter of taste,” she began, “I think…”
“Lady,” he said, “for a Chrustian, the word of God ought to be in every
room in the house besides in his heart. I know you’re a Chrustian because
I can see it in every line of your face.”
She stood up and said, “Well, young man, I don’t want to buy a Bible and
I smell my dinner burning.”
He didn’t get up. He began to twist his hands and looking down at them,
he said softly, “Well lady, I’ll tell you the truth – not many people want to
buy one nowadays and besides, I know I’m real simple. I don’t know how
to say a thing but to say it. I’m just a country boy.” He glanced up into
her unfriendly face. “People like you don’t like to fool with country
people like me!”
“Why!” she cried, “good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides,
we all have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world
go ‘round. That’s life!”
“You said a mouthful,” he said.
“Why, I think there aren’t enough good country people in the world!” she
said, stirred. “I think that’s what’s wrong with it!”
His face had brightened. “I didn’t intraduce myself,” he said. “I’m
Manley Pointer from out in the country around Willohobie, not even from
a place, just from near a place.”
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“You wait a minute,” she said. “I have to see about my dinner.” She went
out to the kitchen and found Joy standing near the door where she had
been listening.
“Get rid of the salt of the earth,” she said, “and let’s eat.”
Mrs. Hopewell gave her a pained look and turned the heat down under
the vegetables. “I can’t be rude to anybody,” she murmured and went
back into the parlor.
He had opened the suitcase and was sitting with a Bible on each knee.
“I appreciate your honesty,” he said. “You don’t see any more real honest
people unless you go way out in the country.”
“I know,” she said, “real genuine folks!” Through the crack in the door
she heard a groan.
“I guess a lot of boys come telling you they’re working their way through
college,” he said, “but I’m not going to tell you that. Somehow,” he said,
“I don’t want to go to college. I want to devote my life to Chrustian
service. See,” he said, lowering his voice, “I got this heart condition. I
may not live long. When you know it’s something wrong with you and
you may not live long, well then, lady…” He paused, with his mouth
open, and stared at her.
He and Joy had the same condition! She knew that her eyes were filling
with tears but she collected herself quickly and murmured, “Won’t you
stay for dinner? We’d love to have you!” and was sorry the instant she
heard herself say it.
“Yes mam,” he said in an abashed voice. “I would sher love to do that!”
Joy had given him one look on being introduced to him and then
throughout the meal had not glanced at him again. He had addressed
several remarks to her, which she had pretended not to hear. Mrs.
Hopewell could not understand deliberate rudeness, although she lived
with it, and she felt she had always to overflow with hospitality to make
up for Joy’s lack of courtesy. She urged him to talk about himself and he
did. He said he was the seventh child of twelve and that his father had
been crushed under a tree when he himself was eight years old. He had
been crushed very badly, in fact, almost cut in two and was practically not
recognizable. His mother had got along the best she could by hard
working and she had always seen that her children went to Sunday School
and that they read the Bible every evening. He was now nineteen years
old and he had been selling Bibles for four months. In that time he had
sold seventy-seven Bibles and had the promise of two more sales. He
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wanted to become a missionary because he thought that was the way you
could do most for people. “He who losest his life shall find it,” he said
simply and he was so sincere, so genuine and earnest that Mrs. Hopewell
would not for the world have smiled. He prevented his peas from sliding
onto the table by blocking them with a piece of bread which he later
cleaned his plate with. She could see Joy observing sidewise how he
handled his knife and fork and she saw too that every few minutes, the
boy would dart a keen appraising glance at the girl as if he were trying to
attract her attention.
After dinner Joy cleared the dishes off the table and disappeared and Mrs.
Hopewell was left to talk with him. He told her again about his
childhood and his father’s accident and about various things that had
happened to him. Every five minutes or so she would stifle a yawn. He
sat for two hours until finally she told him she must go because she had
an appointment in town. He packed his Bibles and thanked her and
prepared to leave, but in the doorway he stopped and wring her hand and
said that not on any of his trips had he met a lady as nice as her and he
asked if he could come again. She had said she would always be happy to
see him.
Joy had been standing in the road, apparently looking at something in the
distance, when he came down the steps toward her, bent to the side with
his heavy valise. He stopped where she was standing and confronted her
directly. Mrs. Hopewell could not hear what he said but she trembled to
think what Joy would say to him. She could see that after a minute Joy
said something and that then the boy began to speak again, making an
excited gesture with his free hand. After a minute Joy said something else
at which the boy began to speak once more. Then to her amazement, Mrs.
Hopewell saw the two of them walk off together, toward the gate. Joy had
walked all the way to the gate with him and Mrs. Hopewell could not
imagine what they had said to each other, and she had not yet dared to
ask.
Mrs. Freeman was insisting upon her attention. She had moved from the
refrigerator to the heater so that Mrs. Hopewell had to turn and face her in
order to seem to be listening. “Glynese gone out with Harvey Hill again
last night,” she said. “She had this sty.”
“Hill,” Mrs. Hopewell said absently, “is that the one who works in the
garage?”
“Nome, he’s the one that goes to chiropractor school,” Mrs. Freeman said.
“She had this sty. Been had it two days. So she says when he brought her
in the other night he says, ‘Lemme get rid of that sty for you,’ and she
says, ‘How?’ and he says, ‘You just lay yourself down acrost the seat of
that car and I’ll show you.’ So she done it and he popped her neck. Kept
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on a-popping it several times until she made him quit. This morning,”
Mrs. Freeman said, “she ain’t got no sty. She ain’t got no traces of a sty.”
“I never heard of that before,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“He ast her to marry him before the Ordinary,” Mrs. Freeman went on,
“and she told him she wasn’t going to be married in no office.”
“Well, Glynese is a fine girl,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “Glynese and
Carramae are both fine girls.”
“Carramae said when her and Lyman was married Lyman said it sure felt
sacred to him. She said he said he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars for
being married by a preacher.”
“How much would he take?” the girl asked from the stove.
“He said he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars,” Mrs. Freeman repeated.
“Well we all have work to do,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“Lyman said it just felt more sacred to him,” Mrs. Freeman said. “The
doctor wants Carramae to eat prunes. Says instead of medicine. Says
them cramps is coming from pressure. You know where I think it is?”
“She’ll be better in a few weeks,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“In the tube,” Mrs. Freeman said. “Else she wouldn’t be as sick as she is.”
Hulga had cracked her two eggs into a saucer and was bringing them to
the table along with a cup of coffee that she had filled too full. She sat
down carefully and began to eat, meaning to keep Mrs. Freeman there by
questions if for any reason she showed an inclination to leave. She could
perceive her mother’s eye on her. The first round-about question would
be about the Bible salesman and she did not wish to bring it on. “How
did he pop her neck?” she asked.
Mrs. Freeman went into a description of how he had popped her neck.
She said he owned a ’55 Mercury but that Glynese said she would rather
marry a man with only a ’36 Plymouth who would be married by a
preacher. The girl asked what if he had a ’32 Plymouth and Mrs. Freeman
said what Glynese had said was a ’36 Plymouth.
Mrs. Hopewell said there were not many girls with Glynese’s common
sense. She said what she admired in those girls was their common sense.
She said that reminded her that they had had a nice visitor yesterday, a
young man selling Bibles. “Lord,” she said, “he bored me to death but he
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was so sincere and genuine I couldn’t be rude to him. He was just good
country people, you know,” she said, “—just the salt of the earth.”
“I seen him walk up,” Mrs. Freeman said, “and then later – I seen him
walk off,” and Hulga could feel the slight shift in her voice, the slight
insinuation, that he had not walked off alone, had he? Her face remained
expressionless but the color rose into her neck and she seemed to swallow
it down with the next spoonful of egg. Mrs. Freeman was looking at her
as if they had a secret together.
“Well, it takes all kinds of people to make the world go ‘round,” Mrs.
Hopewell said. “It’s very good we aren’t all alike.”
“Some people are more alike than others,” Mrs. Freeman said.
Hulga got up and stumped, with about twice the noise that was necessary,
into her room and locked the door. She was to meet the Bible salesman at
ten o’clock at the gate. She had thought about it half the night. She had
started thinking of it as a great joke and then she had begun to see
profound implications in it. She had lain in bed imagining dialogues for
them that were insane on the surface but that reached below the depths
that no Bible salesman would be aware of. Their conversation yesterday
had been of this kind.
He had stopped in front of her and had simply stood there. His face was
bony and sweaty and bright, with a little pointed nose in the center of it,
and his look was different from what it had been at the dinner table. He
was gazing at her with open curiosity, with fascination, like a child
watching a new fantastic animal at the zoo, and he was breathing as if he
had run a great distance to reach her. His gaze seemed somehow familiar
but she could not think where she had been regarded with it before. For
almost a minute he didn’t say anything. Then on what seemed an insuck
of breath, he whispered, “You ever ate a chicken that was two days old?”
The girl looked at him stonily. He might have just put this question up
for consideration at the meeting of a philosophical association. “Yes,” she
presently replied as if she had considered it from all angles.
“It must have been mighty small!” he said triumphantly and shook all
over with little nervous giggles, getting very red in the face, and subsiding
finally into his gaze of complete admiration, while the girl’s expression
remained exactly the same.
“How old are you?” he asked softly.
She waited some time before she answered. Then in a flat voice she said,
“Seventeen.”
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His smiles came in succession like waves breaking on the surface of a
little lake. “I see you got a wooden leg,” he said. “I think you’re real
brave. I think you’re real sweet.”
The girl stood blank and solid and silent.
“Walk to the gate with me,” he said. “You’re a brave sweet little thing and
I liked you the minute I seen you walk in the door.”
Hulga began to move forward.
“What’s your name?” he asked, smiling down on the top of her head.
“Hulga,” she said.
“Hulga,” he murmured, “Hulga. Hulga. I never heard of anybody name
Hulga before. You’re shy, aren’t you, Hulga?” he asked.
She nodded, watching his large red hand on the handle of the giant valise.
“I like girls that wear glasses,” he said. “I think a lot. I’m not like these
people that a serious thought don’t ever enter their heads. It’s because I
may die.”
“I may die too,” she said suddenly and looked up at him. His eyes were
very small and brown, glittering feverishly.
“Listen,” he said, “don’t you think some people was meant to meet on
account of what all they got in common and all? Like they both think
serious thoughts and all?” He shifted the valise to his other hand so that
the hand nearest her was free. He caught hold of her elbow and shook it a
little. “I don’t work on Saturday,” he said. “I like to walk in the woods
and see what Mother Nature is wearing. O’er the hills and far away.
Picnics and things. Couldn’t we go on a picnic tomorrow? Say yes,
Hulga,” he said and gave her a dying look as if he felt his insides about to
drop out of him. He had even seemed to sway slightly toward her.
During the night she had imagined that she seduced him. She imagined
that the two of them walked on the place until they came to the storage
barn beyond the two back fields and there, she imagined, that things came
to such a pass that she very easily seduced him and that then, of course,
she had to reckon with his remorse. True genius can get an idea across
even to an inferior mind. She imagined that she took his remorse in hand
and changed it into a deeper understanding of life. She took all his shame
away and turned it into something useful.
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She set off for the gate at exactly ten o’clock, escaping without drawing
Mrs. Hopewell’s attention. She didn’t take anything to eat, forgetting that
food is usually taken on a picnic. She wore a pair of slacks and a dirty
white shirt, and as an afterthought, she had put some Vapex on the collar
of it since she did not own any perfume. When she reached the gate no
one was there.
She looked up and down the empty highway and had the furious feeling
that she had been tricked, that he only meant to make her walk to the gate
after the idea of him. Then suddenly he stood up, very tall, from behind a
bush on the opposite embankment. Smiling, he lifted his hat which was
new and wide-brimmed. He had not worn it yesterday and she wondered
if he had bought it for the occasion. It was toast-colored with a red and
white band around it and was slightly too large for him. He stepped from
behind the bush still carrying the black valise. He had on the same suit
and the same yellow socks sucked down in his shoes from walking. He
crossed the highway and said, “I knew you’d come!”
The girl wondered acidly how he had known this. She pointed to the
valise and asked, “Why did you bring your Bibles?”
He took her elbow, smiling down on her as if he could not stop. “You can
never tell when you’ll need the word of God, Hulga,” he said. She had a
moment in which she doubted that this was actually happening and then
they began to climb the embankment. They went down into the pasture
toward the woods. The boy walked lightly by her side, bouncing on his
toes. The valise did not seem to be heavy today; he even swung it. They
crossed half the pasture without saying anything and then, putting his
hand easily on the small of her back, he asked softly, “Where does your
wooden leg join on?”
She turned an ugly red and glared at him and for an instant the boy
looked abashed. “I didn’t mean you no harm,” he said. “I only meant
you’re so brave and all. I guess God takes care of you.”
“No,” she said, looking forward and walking fast, “I don’t even believe in
God.”
At this he stopped and whistled. “No!” he exclaimed as if he were too
astonished to say anything else.
She walked on and in a second he was bouncing at her side, fanning with
his hat. “That’s very unusual for a girl,” he remarked, watching her out of
the corner of his eye. When they reached the edge of the wood, he put his
hand on her back again and drew her against him without a word and
kissed her heavily.
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The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that
extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk
out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain.
Even before he released her, her mind, clear and detached and ironic
anyway, was regarding him from a great distance, with amusement but
with pity. She had never been kissed before and she was pleased to
discover that it was an unexceptional experience and all a matter of the
mind’s control. Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it
was vodka. When the boy, looking expectant but uncertain, pushed her
gently away, she turned and walked on, saying nothing as if such
business, for her, were common enough.
He came along panting at her side, trying to help her when he saw a root
that she might trip over. He caught and held back the long swaying
blades of thorn vine until she had passed beyond them. She led the way
and he came breathing heavily behind her. Then they came out on a
sunlit hillside, sloping softly into another one a little smaller. Beyond,
they could see the rusted top of the old barn where the extra hay was
stored.
The hill was sprinkled with small pink weeds. “Then you ain’t saved?”
he asked suddenly, stopping.
The girl smiled. It was the first time she had smiled at him at all. “In my
economy,” she said, “I’m saved and you are damned but I told you I didn’t
believe in God.”
Nothing seemed to destroy the boy’s look of admiration. He gazed at her
now as if the fantastic animal at the zoo had put its paw through the bars
and given him a loving poke. She thought he looked as if he wanted to
kiss her again and she walked on before he had the chance.
“Ain’t there somewheres we can sit down sometime?” he murmured, his
voice softening toward the end of the sentence.
“In that barn,” she said.
They made for it rapidly as if it might slide away like a train. It was a
large two-story barn, cook and dark inside. The boy pointed up the ladder
that led into the loft and said, “It’s too bad we can’t go up there.”
“Why can’t we?” she asked.
“Yer leg,” he said reverently.
The girl gave him a contemptuous look and putting both hands on the
ladder, she climbed it while he stood below, apparently awestruck. She
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pulled herself expertly through the opening and then looked down at him
and said, “Well, come on if your coming,” and he began to climb the
ladder, awkwardly bringing the suitcase with him.
“We won’t need the Bible,” she observed.
“You never can tell,” he said, panting. After he had got into the loft, he
was a few seconds catching his breath. She had sat down in a pile of
straw. A wide sheath of sunlight, filled with dust particles, slanted over
her. She lay back against a bale, her face turned away, looking out the
front opening of the barn where hay was thrown from a wagon into the
loft. The two pink-speckled hillsides lay back against a dark ridge of
woods. The sky was cloudless and cold blue. The boy dropped down by
her side and put one arm under her and the other over her and began
methodically kissing her face, making little noises like a fish. He did not
remove his hat but it was pushed far enough back not to interfere. When
her glasses got in his way, he took them off of her and slipped them into
his pocket.
The girl at first did not return any of the kisses but presently she began to
and after she had put several on his cheek, she reached his lips and
remained there, kissing him again and again as if she were trying to draw
all the breath out of him. His breath was clear and sweet like a child’s and
the kisses were sticky like a child’s. He mumbled about loving her and
about knowing when he first seen her that he loved her, but the
mumbling was like the sleepy fretting of a child being put to sleep by his
mother. Her mind, throughout this, never stopped or lost itself for a
second to her feelings. “You ain’t said you loved me none,” he whispered
finally, pulling back from her. “You got to say that.”
She looked away from him off into the hollow sky and then down at a
black ridge and then down farther into what appeared to be two green
swelling lakes. She didn’t realize he had taken her glasses but this
landscape could not seem exceptional to her for she seldom paid any close
attention to her surroundings.
“You got to say it,” he repeated. “You got to say you love me.”
She was always careful how she committed herself. “In a sense,” she
began, “if you use the word loosely, you might say that. But it’s not a
word I use. I don’t have illusions. I’m one of those people who see
through to nothing.”
The boy was frowning. “You got to say it. I said it and you got to say it,”
he said.
The girl looked at him almost tenderly. “You poor baby,” she murmured.
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“It’s just as well you don’t understand,” and she pulled him by the neck,
face-down, against her. “We are all damned,” she said, “but some of us
have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a
kind of salvation.”
The boy’s astonished eyes looked blankly through the ends of her hair.
“Okay,” he almost whined, “but do you love me or don’tcher?”
“Yes,” she said and added, “in a sense. But I must tell you something.
There mustn’t be anything dishonest between us.” She lifted his head
and looked him in the eye. “I am thirty years old,” she said. “I have a
number of degrees.”
The boy’s look was irritated but dogged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t
care a thing about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me
or don’tcher?” and he caught her to him and wildly planted her face with
kisses until she said, “Yes, yes.”
“Okay then,” he said, letting her go. “Prove it.”
She smiled, looking dreamily out on the shifty landscape. She had
seduced him without even making up her mind to try. “How?” she asked,
feeling that he should be delayed a little.
He leaned over and put his lips to her ear. “Show me where your wooden
leg joins on,” he whispered.
The girl uttered a sharp little cry and her face instantly drained of color.
The obscenity of the suggestion was not what shocked her. As a child she
had sometimes been subject to feelings of shame but education had
removed the last traces of that as a good surgeon scrapes for cancer; she
would no more have felt it over what he was asking than she would have
believed in his Bible. But she was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a
peacock about his tail. No one ever touched it but her. She took care of it
as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes
turned away. “No,” she said.
“I known it,” he muttered, sitting up. “You’re just playing me for a
sucker.”
“On no no!” she cried. “It joins on at the knee. Only at the knee. Why do
you want to see it?”
The boy gave her a long penetrating look. “Because,” he said, “it’s what
makes you different. You ain’t like anybody else.”
She sat staring at him. There was nothing about her face or her round
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freezing-blue eyes to indicate that this had moved her; but she felt as if
her heart had stopped and left her mind to pump her blood. She decided
that for the first time in her life she was face to face with real innocence.
This boy, with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched
the truth about her. When after a minute, she said in a hoarse high voice,
“All right,” it was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing
her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his.
Very gently, he began to roll the slack leg up. The artificial limb, in a
white sock and brown flat shoe, was bound in a heavy material like
canvas and ended in an ugly jointure where it was attached to the stump.
The boy’s face and his voice were entirely reverent as he uncovered it and
said, “Now show me how to take it off and on.”
She took it off for him and put it back on again and then he took it off
himself, handling it as tenderly as if it were a real one. “See!” he said
with a delighted child’s face. “Now I can do it myself!”
“Put it back on,” she said. She was thinking that she would run away
with him and that every night he would take the leg off and every
morning put it back on again. “Put it back on,” she said.
“Not yet,” he murmured, setting it on its foot out of her reach. “Leave it
off for awhile. You got me instead.”
She gave a little cry of alarm but he pushed her down and began to kiss
her again. Without the leg she felt entirely dependent on him. Her brain
seemed to have stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other
function that it was not very good at. Different expressions raced back
and forth over her face. Every now and then the boy, his eyes like two
steel spikes, would glance behind him where the leg stood. Finally she
pushed him off and said, “Put it back on me now.”
“Wait,” he said. He leaned the other way and pulled the valise toward
him and opened it. It had a pale blue spotted lining and there were only
two Bibles in it. He took one of these out and opened the cover of it. It
was hollow and contained a pocket flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and
a small blue box with printing on it. He laid these out in front of her one
at a time in an evenly-spaced row, like one presenting offerings at the
shrine of a goddess. He put the blue box in her hand. THIS PRODUCT
TO BE USED ONLY FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE, she read,
and dropped it. The boy was unscrewing the top of the flask. He stopped
and pointed, with a smile, to the deck of cards. It was not an ordinary
deck but one with an obscene picture on the back of each card. “Take a
swig,” he said, offering her the bottle first. He held it in front of her, but
like one mesmerized, she did not move.
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Her voice when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. “Aren’t you,”
she murmured, “aren’t you just good country people?”
The boy cocked his head. He looked as if he were just beginning to
understand that she might be trying to insult him. “Yeah,” he said,
curling his lip slightly, “but it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as
you any day in the week.”
“Give me my leg,” she said.
He pushed it farther away with his foot. “Come on now, let’s begin to
have us a good time,” he said coaxingly. “We ain’t got to know one
another good yet.”
“Give me my leg!” she screamed and tried to lunge for it but he pushed
her down easily.
“What’s the matter with you all of a sudden?” he asked, frowning as he
screwed the top on the flask and put it quickly back inside the Bible.
“You just a while ago said you didn’t believe in nothing. I thought you
was some girl!”
Her face was almost purple. “You’re a Christian!” she hissed. “You’re a
fine Christian! You’re just like them all – say one thing and do another.
You’re a perfect Christian, you’re…”
The boy’s mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think,” he said in a
lofty indignant tone, “that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I
know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m
going!”
“Give me my leg!” she screeched. He jumped up so quickly that she
barely saw him sweep the cards and the blue box back into the Bible and
throw the Bible into the valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she
saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with
a Bible at either side of its opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and
snatched up the valise and swung it down the hole and then stepped
through himself. When all of him had passed but his head, he turned and
regarded her with a look that no longer had any admiration in it. “I’ve
gotten a lot of interesting things,” he said. “One time I got a woman’s
glass eye this way. And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because
Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call
at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga,”
he said, using the name as if he didn’t think much of it, “you ain’t so
smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” and then the
toast-colored hat disappeared down the hole and the girl was left, sitting
on the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her churning face
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toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over
the green speckled lake.
Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who were in the back pasture, digging
up onions, saw him emerge a little later from the woods and head across
the meadow toward the highway. “Why, that looks like that nice dull
young man that tried to sell me a Bible yesterday,” Mrs. Hopewell said,
squinting. “He must have been selling them to the Negroes back in there.
He was so simple,” she said, “but I guess the world would be better off if
we were all that simple.”
Mrs. Freeman’s gaze drove forward and just touched him before he
disappeared under the hill. Then she returned her attention to the evilsmelling
onion shoot she was lifting from the ground. “Some can’t be that
simple,” she said. “I know I never could.”
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