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I cursed the cunning of a drunk with only one thing on his mind. He’d figured that maybe Sam would do just what he had, drive me out to the car and leave him alone there on the place with that girl. Then I knew what it was that had been queer about the way he looked. He’d been lying there with his head over on one side, asleep with his mouth open. And it had been the first time I’d ever seen a drunk sleeping that way without saliva drooling out the corner of his mouth.

The car was doing fifty by the time I shifted out of second and I passed Sam in the old stripdown as if he had a broken axle. I made the sharp, cutback turn off the highway where Sam’s road came in with a long screaming slide and a cloud of dust.

As I blasted through the pines up there on the ridge in that narrow pair of ruts I was praying I wouldn’t meet anybody. If I did, it would be plain murder. The road was clear all the way.

Just before I hit Sam’s place I pressed the horn as hard as I could. As I shot through the gate and slid to a stop in front of the house I got a quick flash of the girl, running to the house from the direction of the corn crib.

I ran past the house without even looking toward her and headed for the crib. As I rounded the corner of it I almost kicked over the bucket of milk she’d left there right in the path. The damned fool, I thought. The damned, stupid, insane little slut. The door was closed, but I could hear Lee moving around inside and cursing.

“Come back here! Come back!” he was yelling at the top of his voice.

I grabbed up the milk and ran toward the house and burst right into the kitchen. She was there on the other side of the oilcloth-covered table, leaning against it, with her hands gripping the edge, breathing hard and glaring at me.

“Here, you little fool!” I said. “And for Christ’s sake pin up that dress or put on another one before Sam sees you. Quick!”

“You go to hell!” she spat at me. Her eyes were hot and smoky and her hair was tangled and there was a long tear right down the front of that tight, sleazy dress, almost to her belly.

I got back to the corn crib just as I heard the Ford pulling up in the lane. Lee had the door open and was weaving around, trying to climb out. I heard Sam stopping in front of the house and I could tell from the way he sounded that he was in a hurry too.

I pushed Lee back inside, not being gentle about it, just shoving him back through the door like a bundle of old rags.

“Where is she? Where is that juicy little bitch? Tell her to come back here!” he kept saying.

I could hear Sam coming around the house, walking fast, and there wasn’t anything else to do or any time to lose. I hit him. I slugged him hard on the side of the jaw and he folded up at the base of the pile of corn. I stretched him out the way he had been when we left.

Sam opened the door and looked in.

“Maybe I better help you with him, Bob,” he said after a hard look at Lee. Whatever he had been thinking, he was apparently satisfied by the sight of him lying there just as he had been. I felt a little weak.

We carried him out and put him in the car and he never stirred a muscle. I went back and got the guns and whistled for Mike and then just stalled a minute or two. I wasn’t afraid Lee would come out of it any time soon.

I wanted to keep Sam out there for a few minutes so he wouldn’t get in the house and see that damned girl before she changed her dress and got that wild look out of her eyes. We talked there at the car for several minutes, but I have no idea what we talked about. I didn’t hear a word.

I stopped where the road ran close to the little creek just before we got back on the highway and got a little water in my hat and washed Lee’s face with. it. He didn’t come around for five minutes and when he did he was still limp and white. I helped him out of the car and he was sick.

I pulled the birds out of the game pocket of his coat and they were mashed and beginning to smell. There were nine of them and I threw them out on the ground. Mike looked at me questioningly and we both looked at the birds and I felt like hell.

Big thunderheads were piling up in the west when we got out on the highway and the sun was just going down behind them. It looked as if it might rain in the night. Neither of us said anything as I drove home in the dusk.

Seven

It was raining the next morning when I looked out, not a sudden shower with a blue sky behind it, but a slow, leaden drizzle that could go on for days.

It was very early, and Sunday, and no one else was up. I went down to the kitchen and drank a cup of coffee with Rose and then went out to the car. I wanted to go out to the farm today, and I didn’t want to get mixed up in any Monday-morning rehash of the game yesterday. Lee had still been limp and very drunk when we got home, and if he and Mary were going to have an argument about it I wanted to stay in the clear.

I ate some breakfast at Gordon’s café and drove out to the farm. It lies about seven miles from town, directly across the Black Creek bottom from the Eiler’s place, where Sam lives.

I pulled up in front of the house and sat there a minute in the car under the sweet-gum trees, looking at the place. It sat back from the road about a hundred yards, with a sandy driveway going back to it, and the tenant house was across the road on a bare sand hill with a big china-berry tree in the front yard.

The house seemed in better condition than the old house in town. My grandfather had always taken great pride in keeping it up and there had been a renter on the place for three of the four years since he had died. Right now the place looked dead and empty with the dark windows staring vacantly out into the rain and I listened moodily to the sound of water dripping into the barrel at the end of the front porch.

I ran through the rain and up onto the porch, fumbling for the key. The hallway was dark and I walked slowly down it toward the dining room at the rear of the house, hearing my footsteps echo hollowly and thinking of my grandfather and grandmother and of the fun I had had there in my childhood.

The room on the left at the front of the hall was the parlor and there was a fireplace in it, while the room across from it was the bedroom that had been mine during the summers I had lived there. The hall went on back to the dining room, and the kitchen was to the right of that, while on the left of it was the back bedroom, which had another fireplace. I went on to the back bedroom and kindled a fire to take the chill dampness off the place.

My grandparents had died within a few months of each other, my grandmother in April and my grandfather in the following July. He was past seventy-eight, but I had never believed old age had anything to do with his death. They had lived together for more than fifty years and after she was gone he died of loneliness.

He had left me the farm and some eight thousand dollars that was variously invested in savings bonds, timber land, and some lots in town. It had become mine on my twenty-first birthday, just about a year ago. He had left it all to me, I guess, because we had always been so close and I had lived there so long, and because he knew, of course, that the Major had cut me off entirely when I had left home.

My father had fought with the Engineers during World War I and had come home a major, and after that he was always called by his rank. It suited him.

The Major had been a headstrong and violent man as long as he lived, and I guess the one love in his life had been as consuming as his other passions. I had always heard, from the few people who knew him well, but never from the Major himself, that he had been utterly devoted to my mother, who was a frail and gentle girl as completely opposed to him in temperament as it was possible to be. She was considerably younger than he, and when she had died so young—when I was born—it had hurt him far worse than he would ever admit. It had added to his legend of callousness and brutality when he had refused to go into any mourning, but had only gone back to work more profane and hard-driving than ever. It was said he had fired two men for loafing on the job the next day after the funeral, and when they had talked back he threatened to shoot them both if they weren’t off his property in five minutes.