“Come on,” he said, deadly calm now. He moved around to Sewell’s left to keep from jarring the swollen arm, put his arm around Sewell’s waist, and started walking. We don’t dare go across the field, he thought. We got to go in above the levee, through that water, where we can stay in the trees.
They pushed through it in the gray and dismal crying of the rain. In places the water was up to their waists, and Sewell walked falteringly, several times almost falling before Mitch could steady him. Once the sickness came upon him and he bent over, retching, and tried to vomit. He had been sick so many times and for so long there was nothing to the vomiting except the dry and terrible retching.
After what seemed like an hour to Mitch they came to the end of the water and started up the incline going out of the bottom. He guided Sewell away from the trail to where, some hundred yards away, there lay the crown of a big oak he and Cass had felled for stovewood early in the spring. Sewell fell to his knees and lay down back among the branches, out of sight of anyone going along the trail. Mitch sank down beside him and helped him to straighten out. Then he thought of the raincoat.
“Wait a minute,” he said hurriedly. He ran down into the field and came back with the coat, Spreading it across a pair of limbs, he made a sort of tent of it to break the rain. Then he sat down, with his head under the edge of the coat, his face dark and still as if chopped out of walnut.
He looked at the arm. “Moccasin?’’ he asked quietly.
Sewell lay with his head on a small limb, his face deathly white except for the brown splotches of the big freckles, and his body rigidly still save for the hurried and shallow breathing. He shook his head slightly.
“Rattler,” he said.
Oh, God, Mitch thought. It couldn’t have been worse, but now it is. God knows how many hours ago, and a rattler on top of that, instead of a moccasin.
“Where?” he asked, still with that same quietness, as if he held onto his emotions with the same tenacious and indomitable grimness with which he was trying to hold back the thought of his brother’s dying. “When?”
Sewell tried to raise the arm. “Twice,” he said faintly. “Once on the wrist and once on the hand. Little after daylight this morning.”
“Did you get any of the poison out?”
Again there was that faint shake of the head. “I didn’t have a knife to cut it with.”
Mitch sat quietly, avoiding his eyes. “You’ll be all right,” he said, knowing he was lying. There wasn’t one chance in a hundred, even for a specimen like Sewell.
The old sardonic gleam came momentarily into Sewell’s eyes. “Don’t give us that, kid,” he said with the pain showing under his voice. “We ain’t got time for any crap.”
Mitch started to break then, just once. “Look,” he said urgently, his voice very thin and harsh, “a doctor could still fix it. I’ll go up and get a wagon and send one of them goddamned deputies after a doctor.”
Sewell looked at him quietly. “Cut it out, kid.”
“For Christ’s sake, Sewell!”
“Knock it off. In the first place, it’s too late. In the second, if he could fix me up I’d go to the chair. I like it better here.”
Mitch looked down at the mud. He nodded his head slowly.
“You want to stay down here, then?” he asked. “That’s right.”
“All right,” Mitch said quietly.
They were both silent for several minutes, listening to the monotonous tattoo of the rain on the spread raincoat. Then Mitch said, “What about, if—?”
“Not if. When.”
“All right,” Mitch said. He always had to be tougher than anybody else, he thought. I guess being tough was the only religion he ever had. And I reckon it’s as good as any, if it lasts. Got help you, though, if it ever quits on you. “All right, then. When.”
Sewell looked at him. “You still got a shovel on this shirt-tail farm? Or has he sold that too?”
Twenty-one
Mitch nodded his head, and the thing was done.
There had always been a deep and unspoken understanding between them. So unlike in many ways, the one corrupt, professionally violent, and criminal, and the other with his bitter honesty and a sort of harsh and thorn-protected, inarticulate capacity for love, they had always been able to meet on this common ground of a hard and unflinching realism. Courage was a quality each recognized and respected in the other; perhaps it had been passed on to them by their mother as valor is said to be in the breeding of fighting bulls, or perhaps it had been forced upon them by long association with the pitiful contrast of their father’s weakness. At any rate, they understood each other now, and nodded, glad there had to be no further talk.
For Sewell there was in it the final guarantee that he would never be taken alive to go to the electric chair, and the grisly humor of one last supreme victory over the forces of the law he hated. The five-hundred-dollar reward forever unclaimed by any money-hungry deputy and the forever unsolved mystery of his disappearance would constitute the farewell expression of contempt he would leave them. Mitch had enough insight into the working of his brother’s mind to be aware of this, but for him the reasons were different, although they came to the same conclusion.
There was a proud, unbending strain of clannishness in him, clannishness in the true sense of love and loyalty to family, which excluded the law, or at least came first, before the law. If Sewell owed a debt to law and to society for his misdeeds—and Mitch was too honest to deny this—Sewell would have paid it when he died, as surely as if he had paid it on the gallows or in the electric chair, and with the payment of this debt what was left of Sewell or the memory of Sewell was no longer society’s concern. It was strictly a matter for his family. And since, besides himself, the family consisted of a half-demented old man who lived in a dream and a girl too young to understand and too vulnerable to grief, he would accept the full responsibility. Damn the law now that the debt was being paid; it no longer had any concern in the matter. Damn the radio and newspapers, the publicity, the tumult, and the money-hungry scramble for reward. There had been enough of Roman carnival. It could end here in a hidden grave on this remaining and pitiful remnant of the land the Neelys still possessed.
He crouched now, wooden-faced, quiet, unwinking, below the edge of the sheltering raincoat and looked at Sewell, half ashamed of the weakness of his outburst a few minutes ago. There for a moment it had been hard to take, almost too hard, but now it was over and the grief was contained where it should be, below the surface and out of sight.
“How do you feel now?” he asked.
“O.K.,” Sewell replied. They were both aware of the lie.
“Can I get you anything?”
“No. I wish I had a cigarette, but I reckon yours are ruined too.”
“The tobacco’s still dry. It’s in a can. But the papers are wet.”
“It don’t matter.”
“I’ll run up to the house and get some more papers.”
“Never mind,” Sewell said.
“It won’t take a minute.”
He slid backward out of the dead tree and stood up in the rain. For a moment his gaze swung outward over the water backed up below him. What was it doing? Was it still rising, or had it reached the crest and begun to fall? Then he turned away; there was no time for it now. Just for an instant a great bitterness welled up in him. It seemed somehow that for a period of time that went back farther than he could remember—and was actually just since daybreak this morning—he had been caught up in one desperate and inconclusive struggle after another. First there had been the argument with Jessie, which he had had to abandon in a hopeless mess when he ran to fight the rising water trying to engulf the crop, and now in turn that was swallowed up in the larger disaster of Sewell. Maybe the old man’s right, he thought. The thing to do is to find a world of your own. Then he shook it off and started up the hill toward the house.