“My hair curls by nature,” said Rosaleen. Dennis almost groaned aloud from his hiding-place.
“For the love of — why, Miz O’Toole, you don’t mean to tell me that! When I first saw that hair, I said to myself, why, it’s so perfect it looks to be artificial! I was just getting ready to ask you how you did it so I could tell my wife. Well, if your hair curls like that, without any vitamins at all, I want to come back and have a look at it after you’ve been cooking in this little pot for two weeks.”
Rosaleen said, “Well, it’s not my looks I’m thinking about. But my husband isn’t up to himself, and that’s the truth, Mr. Pendleton. Ah, it would have done your heart good to see that man in his younger days! Strong as an ox he was, the way no man dared to rouse his anger. I’ve seen my husband, many’s the time, swing on a man with his fist and send him sprawling twenty feet, and that for the least thing, mind you! But Dennis could never hold his grudge for long, and the next instant you’d see him picking the man up and dusting him off like a brother, and saying, ‘Now think no more of that.’ He was too forgiving always. It was his great fault.”
“And look at him, now,” said Mr. Pendleton, sadly.
Dennis felt pretty hot around the ears. He stood forward at the corner of the house, listening. He had never weighed more than one hundred thirty pounds at his most, a tall thin man he had been always, a little proud of his elegant shape, and not since he left school in Bristol had he lifted his hand in anger against a creature, brute or human. “He was a fine man a woman could rely on, Mr. Pendleton,” said Rosaleen, “and quick as a tiger with his fists.”
“I might be dead and mouldering away to dust the way she talks,” thought Dennis, “and there she is throwing away the money as if she was already a gay widow woman.” He tottered out bent on speaking his mind and putting a stop to such foolishness. The salesman turned a floppy smile and shrewd little eyes upon him. “Hello, Mr. O’Toole,” he said, with the manly cordiality he used for husbands. “I’m just leaving you a little birthday present with the Missis here.” “It’s not my birthday,” said Dennis, sour as a lemon. “That’s just a manner of speaking!” interrupted Rosaleen, merrily. “And now many thanks to ye, Mr. Pendleton.”
“Many thanks to you, Miz O’Toole,” answered the salesman, folding away nine dollars of good green money. No more was said except good day, and Rosaleen stood shading her eyes to watch the Ford walloping off down the hummocky lane. “That’s a nice, decent family man,” she told Dennis, as if rebuking his evil thoughts. “He travels out of New York, and he always has the latest thing and the best. He’s full of admiration for ye, too, Dennis. He said he couldn’t call to mind another man of your age as sound as you are.”
“I heard him,” said Dennis. “I know all he said.”
“Well, then,” said Rosaleen, serenely. “There’s no good saying it over.” She hurried to wash potatoes to cook in the pot that made the hair curl.
The winter piled in upon them, and the snow was shot through with blizzards. Dennis couldn’t bear a breath of cold, and all but sat in the oven, rheumy and grunty, with his muffler on. Rosaleen began to feel as if she couldn’t bear the feel of her clothes in the hot kitchen, and when she did the barn work she had one chill after another. She complained that her hands were gnawed to the bone with the cold. Did Dennis realize that now, or was he going to sit like a log all winter, and where was the lad he had promised her to help with the outside work?
Dennis sat wordless under her unreasonableness, thinking she had very little work for a strong-bodied woman, and the truth was she was blaming him for something he couldn’t help. Still she said nothing he could take hold of, only nipping his head off when the kettle dried up or the fire went low. There would come a day when she would say outright, “It’s no life here, I won’t stay here any longer,” and she would drag him back to a flat in New York, or even leave him, maybe. Would she? Would she do such a thing? Such a thought had never occurred to him before. He peered at her as if he watched through a keyhole. He tried to think of something to ease her mind, but no plan came. She would look at some harmless thing around the house, say — the calendar, and suddenly tear it off the wall and stuff it in the fire. “I hate the very sight of it,” she would explain, and she was always hating the very sight of one thing or another, even the cow; almost, but not quite, the cats.
One morning she sat up very tired and forlorn, and began almost before Dennis could get an eye open: “I had a dream in the night that my sister Honora was sick and dying in her bed, and was calling for me.” She bowed her head on her hands and breathed brokenly to her very toes, and said, “It’s only natural I must go to Boston to find out for myself how it is, isn’t it?” Dennis, pulling on the chest protector she had knitted him for Christmas, said, “I suppose so. It looks that way.”
Over the coffee pot she began making her plans. “I could go if only I had a coat. It should be a fur one against this weather. A coat is what I’ve needed all these years. If I had a coat I’d go this very day.”
“You’ve a great coat with fur on it,” said Dennis.
“A rag of a coat!” cried Rosaleen. “And I won’t have Honora see me in it. She was jealous always, Dennis, she’d be glad to see me without a coat.”
“If she’s sick and dying maybe she won’t notice,” said Dennis.
Rosaleen agreed. “And maybe it will be better to buy one there, or in New York — something in the new style.”
“It’s long out of your way by New York,” said Dennis. “There’s shorter ways to Boston than that.”
“It’s by New York I’m going, because the trains are better,” said Rosaleen, “and I want to go that way.” There was a look on her face as if you could put her on the rack and she wouldn’t yield. Dennis kept silence.
When the postman passed she asked him to leave word with the native family up the hill to send their lad down for a few days to help with the chores, at the same pay as before. And tomorrow morning, if it was all the same to him, she’d be driving in with him to the train. All day long, with her hair in curl papers, she worked getting her things together in the lazy old canvas bag. She put a ham on to bake and set bread and filled the closet off the kitchen with firewood. “Maybe there’ll come a message saying Honora’s better and I shan’t have to go,” she said several times, but her eyes were excited and she walked about so briskly the floor shook.
Late in the afternoon Guy Richards knocked, and floundered in stamping his big boots. He was almost sober, but he wasn’t going to be for long. Rosaleen said, “I’ve sad news about my sister, she’s on her deathbed maybe and I’m going to Boston.”
“I hope it’s nothing serious, Missis O’Toole,” said Richards. “Let’s drink her health in this,” and he took out a bottle half full of desperate-looking drink. Dennis said he didn’t mind. Richards said, “Will the lady join us?” and his eyes had the devil in them if Rosaleen had ever seen it. “I will not,” she said. “I’ve something better to do.” While they drank she sat fixing the hem of her dress, and began to tell again about the persons without number she’d known who came back from the dead to bring word about themselves, and Dennis himself would back her up in it. She told again the story of the Billy-cat, her voice warm and broken with the threat of tears.
Dennis swallowed his drink, leaned over and began to fumble with his shoelace, his face sunken to a handful of wrinkles, and thought right out plainly to himself: “There’s not a word of truth in it, not a word. And she’ll go on telling it to the world’s end for God’s truth.” He felt helpless, as if he were involved in some disgraceful fraud. He wanted to speak up once for all and say, “It’s a lie, Rosaleen, it’s something you’ve made up, and now let’s hear no more about it.” But Richards, sitting there with his ears lengthened, stopped the words in Dennis’ throat. The moment passed. Rosaleen said solemnly, “My dreams never renege on me, Mr. Richards. They’re all I have to go by.” “It never happened at all,” said Dennis inside himself, stubbornly. “Only the Billy-cat got caught in a trap and I buried him.” Could this really have been all? He had a nightmarish feeling that somewhere just out of his reach lay the truth about it, he couldn’t swear for certain, yet he was almost willing to swear that this had been all. Richards got up saying he had to be getting on to a shindig at Winston. “I’ll take you to the train tomorrow, Missis O’Toole,” he said. “I love doing a good turn for the ladies.”