Blood roared in his ears, the way it did when he held his breath too long, swimming underwater, and the weight on his chest was choking him. All the hard ache of all the womanless nights boiled down to a concentration of agony on a pin point of time, this brief and exploding moment out of all time and beyond which nothing mattered. He would have to move his arms so little to possess the end of torment, the sweet and silken oblivion, the dark, wild ecstasy, and at last relief. His arms hurt and his hands were heavy as he moved them. They shook as he put them on her waist, and he could feel the smoothness of her there just beyond the flimsy cloth. He brought them on up with a rush, placed them against her shoulders, and shoved. She shot backward, tripped over a high heel in the sand, and fell sprawling with a pale flash of bare arms and legs in the starlight.
Dry air burned in his throat and his mouth tasted coppery as he stood breathing heavily and looking down at her.
“Can’t you even wait till they kill him?” he asked savagely. Then he turned and walked down the black trail beyond the barn, not knowing or caring which way he went.
She lay crumpled on her side like a long-stemmed and wilted flower with her hair and the side of her face in the dirt. Her dress had flown up about her waist when she fell and she could feel the gritty abrasiveness of sand under her sprawled bare legs, and when she clenched her mouth tightly shut to keep from screaming she could taste the sand and hear the gritty sound of it between her teeth. She rolled her head from side to side in a sickening agony of rage and shame and humiliation, and she put her hand up against her mouth and bit it until she tasted blood while she gave birth to the second great passion of her life. The first had always been love of herself, and the second was hatred of Mitch Neely.
Eleven
In the middle of the afternoon he went out and looked at the river again. It was the third time that day, and now he stood by the old ford where he and Sewell had kept their rowboat tied up and stood watching it with a strange uneasiness. It was too high for this time of year.
There had been no rain for nearly a week and it should have been dropping toward midsummer level and clearing, but instead it was higher than it had been during the rain and had risen another inch since noon. He stood watching it slip past, silt-laden and flecked with foam, critically assaying the amount and size of drift it was carrying. It was still rising, all right.
He had seen it do that twice in his life, keep coming up when there had been no rain, raised by heavy downpours somewhere far upriver, and the last time had been seven years ago when it had almost flooded the bottom fields, the year Sewell had gone away.
He turned and went back out toward the field and looked up at the sky when he got out of the timber. There was something disquieting and strangely uneasy about the whole day. It was too still, for one thing, and sultry, with an oppressive deadness about the air that worried him. It reminded him of the tense and foreboding hush that falls over a group of men when there is about to be a fight. But there were no clouds. The sky was clear and it was perfectly normal weather for late June except for the oppressive stillness.
He was plowing out the middles. Yesterday, he had finished with the cultivator and the field looked much better than it had. He looked with satisfaction at the grass dying in the hot sun. May save it now, he thought. There’s still a lot of grass in the rows that couldn’t be out except by hoeing it again, and it’ll be hard to but it’ll make some cotton. Unless it rains some more, or that river gets on a tear. It ain’t nothing to worry about unless it gets up a lot more than it is now, but somehow I just don’t like the looks of it.
* * *
Up at the house Cass was asleep, with the radio turned off for a short spell to rest the batteries, and Joy was walking up and down in the stifling, dead heat of the bedroom, running her fingers through her hair and pausing now and then to dab at her eyes with a handkerchief.
“I—I just don’t know what to do, Jessie,” she said. “It scares me. I guess it’s silly to get scared now, but I just don’t know what to do. Suppose he does it again?”
Jessie sat on the bed and looked at her sister-in-law with her eyes large and worried. “But, Joy,” she protested unhappily, “he wouldn’t. I just can’t think he’d do a thing like that, even once. Not Mitch.”
“I know, honey,” Joy went on agonizingly. “That’s the awful part of it. That’s the reason I didn’t want to say anything about it. He’s your brother, and I know you think the world of him. I wouldn’t have said anything about it for anything in the world, because I knew how unhappy it would make you. But since you practically caught him at it, there wasn’t any way I could keep you from knowing any longer. If you hadn’t come out there just then, when I was lying there on the ground where I’d fallen, there’s no telling what might have happened. He heard you, and that scared him, I guess.
“I never did say anything about the other times and I wouldn’t have this time because, like I said, you’re so young and he’s your brother, but since you saw it, or part of it—well, you just couldn’t help knowing about it any longer. I tried to get away from him, and I always had been able to before, but this time I tripped when I moved back, and fell. Oh, it was awful.
“It isn’t that I blame him so much, Jessie. You have to learn to make allowances for men. They can’t help being like that, I guess. And when a girl is pretty . . . I guess I still am, a little bit anyway, even if I am getting old and don’t look like I used to. But what I mean is you can’t blame them so much. But still, his own sister-in-law. I mean, I am married to Sewell, and poor Sewell is in such trouble. But please don’t misunderstand me, honey. I’m not mad about it or anything, it’s just that it scares me somehow. What am I going to do, Jessie? What am I going to do?”
She threw herself on her own bed, across from Jessie’s, and put her hands up alongside her face with her fingers reaching up into the golden disarray of her hair, but she was unable to sit still for more than a few seconds and got up and started walking up and down again. Oh, the ugly, stupid, mean-faced sonofabitch, she thought. I could tear his eyes out. I could kill him. Oh, God, I hate him so much it makes my stomach turn over to think about it and I get sick. I’ll throw up right here on the floor if I don’t stop thinking about it. I’ve got to stop. It was almost two days ago and I haven’t stopped thinking about it one minute since then, and I’m going out of my mind. I’m beginning to look like some blowzy old bag who’s been drunk for a week, with my hair a mess and still full of sand and my eyes red from lying awake and from crying, and I can’t eat anything because my stomach turns wrong side out every time I see him and it’s all I can do to sit down at the table without wanting to pick up everything on it and throw it in his face and beat on it, and beat, and beat, and beat.
The thing that kills me is that I wouldn’t have had him for a door prize. I wouldn’t have had him on a bet. You couldn’t have given him to me. No woman in her right mind would even look at him, the ugly, skinny, sweaty, dirty, mean-faced, ignorant bastard with whiskers all over his face and that hideous butter-colored hair stuck down to his head with sweat and those hard little eyes pushed way back in his head like a couple of cold pieces of rock, and he thinks I wanted him. That I did! Oh, my God! And he shoved me.
“Try not to think about it, Joy,” Jessie said, feeling sick at heart. How could Mitch? How could he do such an awful thing? It just wasn’t like Mitch. But still, she had seen it with her own eyes, seen Joy lying there with her head in the sand where she had fallen.