The girl was blonde and about twenty-five, I guess, and looked as if she knew her way around. She gave me a cold stare and said, “Well, of all the nerve!”
“Beat it,” I said.
“Lee, who the hell is this monstrosity?” she said.
“My knuckleheaded brother,” Lee said. “Don’t you ever knock?” This last was for me. His eyes were bright and I knew he’d had at least enough to be nasty.
“Well, suit yourself,” I told the girl. She seemed to want to stay. Lee got up off the sofa and I hit him. He sat back down and a cut place on his lip began to bleed. What with the black eye he already had, he wasn’t going to look like much in a little while. He got back up and I caught hold of his lapel.
“How drunk are you?” I asked.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?”
“I’ve got something to say to you and I want it to soak in. Maybe I’d better sober you up.”
He swung at me and landed on the side of my neck, and then threw two more that I didn’t even bother to knock down. I pushed him back and let go his lapel and hit him over the heart with a right. He started to back up and hit the sofa with the backs of his legs and lost his balance and I caught him again, this time by the arm. I could see he was too drunk to hit a clothing-store dummy, so I shoved him back into the kitchen. The girl was screaming by this time.
He was still trying to hit me and I pushed him hard and he bounced against the wall and sat down. I found a dishpan and stuck it under the faucet in the sink and when it was full I threw it in his face and filled it again. Whenever he got up I hit him and went on with the water treatment.
The girl was standing in the doorway, still screaming, and she got on my nerves. I took a step toward her with a pan full of water and she went out through the living room and I heard her going down the front steps yelling, “Stop him! Stop him!” without ever seeming to pause for breath.
In about five minutes the kitchen was drowned and Lee sat hunkered down against the wall, not trying to get up any more. Water ran out of his suit like a spring branch out of a moss bank and his hair was plastered down in his face. I dropped the dishpan on the floor and went over and squatted down on my heels in front of him.
“You sober?” I asked.
“I can hear you,” he said.
“It won’t take long. I don’t want Angelina to have any more trouble with you.”
He began to be afraid then. I mean, really afraid. There was no doubt now that she’d told me, and maybe before he hadn’t been sure or the liquor had been holding him up. Anyway, he began to look the way he had that night when Sam was after him. He tried to get up and I pinned him down with a hand on his chest.
“Just stay away from my place from now on. You can remember that, can’t you?”
“I heard you the first time.”
“O.K.” I stood up and walked to the door and looked back. He was still scared, but I was glad he didn’t have a gun.
Twenty-three
I drove slowly going home, taking a long time and doing a lot of thinking, and the thoughts weren’t very good company. No matter how often I went over it and added it up again, it always came out the same. I had been very near to killing my brother, and if it hadn’t been for Angelina I might have done it. It had come out all right— this time. I had warned him, and scared him, and he would leave us alone—for a while, probably, and when he wasn’t drinking. But it would wear off. And just suppose that, instead of the way it had happened, I had come home unexpectedly one of those times he was out there drunk and she was having to stand him off. What then? Nobody knows what he would do under those circumstances, but it’s not a chance you’d like to take.
And nothing had been settled by this business tonight, not a thing. Maybe I had made him think while he was scared and sober, but what about the next time he got drunk?
Angelina and I sat up late on the back porch talking about it. Her idea was the same as the advice Mary had given me weeks ago, advice I hadn’t understood until last night. Why didn’t we move away from this country? It was really the only thing to do if the three of us couldn’t live in the same place without trouble.
“I know you’re right,” I said. “It adds up, and it’s the only thing that does. But it isn’t as simple as that. This farm is really the only home I ever had. Maybe I did just live out here in the summers when school was out and in town the other nine months, but this was home. And I don’t take to the idea of being shoved off it.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “It’s home to me too now. But we’re both young and if we went somewhere else we’d soon get to like it. I know we would.”
In the morning we had to take that bale to the gin. Jake wanted to go into town to get his account straightened out at the store and to buy a connecting rod and some gaskets for his car, which had burned out a bearing a few days before, so I suggested he take my car and go ahead, and I’d take the cotton to the gin.
After breakfast, when I had the team hitched, Angelina came down to the lot and opened the big gate for me to drive through. She blew a kiss up to me and said quietly “Will you think about leaving, Bob? Will you think about it today?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”
I drove out on the road and watched her walk back to the house. It’s funny, I thought, how just watching her walk can be like that.
I thought about leaving. It would be hard to take, but I think I knew all along what the answer would be. It wasn’t as if I had to leave this kind of country and go off to a city and be a bookkeeper or a clerk or something, or even go to a different kind of farming country where it was dry, like west Texas, for instance, where farming was a business and you irrigated and farmed with tractors. No, there was plenty of country like this in the South.
And wasn’t Angelina the only thing that mattered, anyway? It sounded silly and somehow mawkish, like one of those YMCA guys in college, to say, “I want my wife to be happy,” but when you thought about it, it was really just another way of saying you wanted to be happy. You can’t live with a happy woman without being happy yourself.
We could go, all right. It might take a long time to sell the place, but the bank could handle it for us and maybe Jake would stay on until it was sold. Jake was the kind of man you could leave something with. I would miss him, though. And Helen. They were the kind of people you wanted to have around. And we still had enough money to buy another place without having to wait until this one was sold. Or at least enough to make a good down payment on one.
I thought about Lee. There was something saddening, even on a day like this, in thinking of him, because I would always remember the way things were between us when we were children, the way he had always taken up for me and stood as a buffer between the Major and me. But why think about it? It didn’t do any good and just made things worse and sooner or later I would get around to that thing last night when I was so close to killing him. No, the only thing to do was to leave here and forget about him. Whatever was going to happen to him was going to happen, and nobody could do anything about it.
The air was cool in the late afternoon as I drove back from the gin and I knew there might be frost tonight. I looked at the sun; in another hour it would be out of sight and it would be the blue hazy dusk of October by the time I got home. Angelina would have supper ready and she would be happy when I told her about leaving. I thought of the way her eyes looked when she was happy and knew it was worth it.
One of the mules had to stop momentarily, and I grinned as I recalled what had been great wit among the boys I had known when I was living out there on the farm with my grandfather. “Better turn yore mule over, mister. He’s leakin’ on that side.”