“Mama, don’t.”
“Don’t tell me what to do! Do I tell you what to do?”
“I don’t want to argue.”
“I try. God knows. But you have wandered so far. Is it that Fisher boy? They say he’s living like filth at the edge of town. Is that where you’re going—to wallow in his filth? Or have you gone back to Greg Morrow? That foulmouthed trash. A girl is known by the company she keeps. Lie down with pigs and rise up with pigs. If Martin were here—” “I wish he was,” Nancy said. “Why? So that he could see what you’ve made of yourself? My God! Are you proud of it?”
In truth, she remembered her father only dimly. A child’s memories: the smell of pipe tobacco and the rattle of newspapers. But he had been good, and kind, and he had understood when Nancy recoiled from her mother’s absolutism; he had been somebody to go to when she needed to be consoled. She had been almost ten years old the last time she saw him.
“I thank the Lord sometimes,” Nancy’s mother said, “that he is not alive to see this.”
“Mama, stop it. You know he’s not dead.”
“I know no such thing!” Her mother rose up from her straight-backed chair. She had lost weight these last weeks, though she was still immense; her skin hung in flaccid pockets. “He died, of course he died! Why else… why else would he?…”
Why else would he leave me! she meant. But in fact he had not died. Nancy remembered too well the arguments, her mother’s petulant impatience with his drinking, his job, his language: how he had broken at last on the reef of her righteousness; she remembered him saying a secret good-bye to her, hugging her and saying he loved her: “Nancy, girl, this town is too small to contain me.” The trains had carried him off.
She had been tear-stricken but proud. This town, yes, this high-collared and corsetted town (which had previously seemed so huge to her): why, yes, of course, no such town could hold him! She should have known. Heart and soul, he was too big for it.
The memory always brought back the tears. She blinked and said, “All right, Mama. He’s dead. All right. I know.”
“You have to go out?”
“Yes.”
“I shall pray for you.”
“Yes, Mama.”
The money was running out quickly. She stopped by the bakery and calculated whether she ought to buy a loaf of bread to go with the canned goods and the paraffin. Anna did not seem to mind the cold; fortunately, since the switchman’s shack afforded scant protection from it. When it rained, the roof leaked in three places.
Susan Farris was behind the counter at the bakery. Nancy stood at the door, uncertain. Susan had been a year ahead of her in high school and it was Susan who had systematically barred her from the company of the popular girls. Susan’s hatred for her had been in some way instinctive, seemed to spring from nowhere… though it did not help, perhaps, that Susan had already been employed part-time at the bakery under the supervision of Faye Wilcox. Nancy did not imagine that her mother was a particularly kind or forgiving employer.
She turned on her heel. But Susan had caught sight of her and hailed her back. “Well, Nancy.” Her lilting voice concealed a knife-edge of sarcasm. Susan’s eyes were very blue, her hair blond, her broad Scandinavian mouth scarlet with Tangee lipstick. “You want something today?”
“Loaf of bread,” Nancy said. “The day-old.”
“Come down to bakery bread, are we? I thought your mother did her own.”
“We ran short.”
Mechanically, Susan loaded a crusty loaf into a paper bag and rang up the sale on the thick black keys of the cash register. Nancy tendered a dollar bill from her pastille can and took the change from Susan’s perfectly manicured hand. She examined the clutch of coins.
“I’m short a dime,” she said.
Susan turned back to her, squinting. “What’s that?”
“The change. You owe me a dime. You gave me—”
“I gave you change from a dollar, Nancy dear, no more no less. I counted.”
Wearily, Nancy extended her hand. “Count again. You must have—”
But Susan knocked her hand away. The change spilled out over the peeling tiles of the bakery floor; a tarnished quarter ran under the display case. Nancy dived after it. “Goddamn you, Susan Farris!”
“Curse me all you want,” Susan said loftily. “I would be ashamed if I were you.”
“Ashamed—”
“You think nobody knows what you’re doing with this food you buy? It’s no secret. Greg Morrow told me.”
Nancy stood up slowly.
“What did Greg Morrow tell you?”
Susan smiled. “That’s for me to know and—”
“This is not a game!” She was shouting, but she could not restrain herself. She had passed some critical border into a new and strange country. “It’s important!”
Susan’s smile evaporated. “Well, all right! Don’t wake up Mr. Lawrence, please! You want to know what Greg Morrow told me? Only the truth, Nancy dear. That you are still carrying on with that farm-boy, Travis Fisher. That he’s living like a tramp with the other tramps under the railway bridge, and that you bring him food, and that you and him—out there in the mud and the cold—that you, you—”
Nancy nodded curtly. “All right.” No need to force that obscenity past Susan’s sensitive lips. It was a lie, but not a particularly invidious one,- the lie concealed, after all, a far stranger and less comprehensible truth.
Nancy tucked her inadequate coinage back into the tin pastille box. She thought of what Anna Blaise had told her. A different place. Connected to here, but not here. We have always been among you. And she suppressed a surge of hysterical laughter. “Anyway” Susan went on, “I did not shortchange you,” adding, in a paroxysm of petulance: “It was only a lousy dime!”
Nancy took her bread and went to the door. The rain was coming down harder than ever. She tucked the paper bag under her coat. A phrase of her father’s reverberated in her mind. She could not recall when he had said it; perhaps he had not, perhaps it was a false memory. But she could hear his voice quite clearly inside her.
Don’t love anything too much. They’ll take it away from you.
But only if they know, Nancy thought. Only if they know.
Hooded and sopping, she trudged north along The Spur. It had occurred to her to wonder why she was doing this, whether she might be mad to pursue so single-mindedly so strange a thing. She passed a newspaper box and the headline in the Courier leaped out at her: HOBO KILLER STRIKES AGAIN. There were dangers involved, yes.
Tim Norbloom passed her in one of the town’s two police cars. A block ahead he slowed, and when she was abreast of the car he paced her a while. Nancy counted out forty steps and then stood quite still, teeth clenched, staring through the rain-blurred window. Defying him. Norbloom gazed back at her impassively—warm and dry inside there—and then stepped on the gas.
She understood. A pattern was emerging. The Courier, Susan Farris, the police, even her mother: all knitted together. They were the Conestoga wagons, circling, and Nancy had been elected Indian.
Abruptly the sidewalk under her feet was cold, foreign. The storefronts were drab beneath their awnings; the rainwater sang in a minor key in the sewer gratings.
Understanding stabbed like a knife. She thought: J don’t live here anymore.
At 1:15 p.m. Helena Baxter, the acting chairwoman, called to order the meeting of the Baptist Women of Haute Montagne. This was unorthodox: but Faye Wilcox, who should have held the chair, was unconscionably late—even though it was Speech Day.