Her voice sounded downcast, quite empty. “Lemon cocoanut chocolate.”
In proportion to the height from which her voice came, the hands could not be her hands at all. “Yes,” Joe said.
The hands did not move. The voice did not move. “Lemon cocoanut chocolate. Which kind.” To the others they must have looked quite strange. Facing one another across the dark, stained, greasecrusted and frictionsmooth counter, they must have looked a little like they were praying: the youth countryfaced, in clean and Spartan clothing, with an awkwardness which invested him with a quality unworldly and innocent; and the woman opposite him, downcast, still, waiting, who because of her smallness partook likewise of that quality of his, of something beyond flesh. Her face was highboned, gaunt. The flesh was taut across her cheekbones, circled darkly about the eyes; beneath the lowered lids her eyes seemed to be without depth, as if they could not even reflect. Her lower jaw seemed too narrow to contain two rows of teeth.
“Cocoanut,” Joe said. His mouth said it, because immediately he wanted to unsay it. He had only the dime. He had been holding it too hard to have realised yet that it was only a dime. His hand sweated about it, upon it. He believed that the men were watching him and laughing again. He could not hear them and he did not look at them. But he believed that they were. The hands had gone away. Then they returned, setting a plate and a cup before him. He looked at her now, at her face. “How much is pie?” he said.
“Pie is ten cents.” She was just standing there before him, beyond the counter, with her big hands again lying on the dark wood, with that quality spent and waiting. She had; never looked at him. He said, in a faint, desperate voice:
“I reckon I don’t want no coffee.”
For a while she did not move. Then one of the big hands moved and took up the coffee cup; hand and cup vanished. He sat still, downlooking too, waiting. Then it came. It was not the proprietor. It was the woman behind the cigar case. “What’s that?” she said.
“He don’t want the coffee,” the waitress said. Her voice, speaking, moved on, as if she had not paused at the question. Her voice was flat, quiet. The other woman’s voice was quiet too.
“Didn’t he order coffee too?” she said.
“No,” the waitress said, in that level voice that was still in motion, going away. “I misunderstood.”
When he got out, when his spirit wrung with abasement and regret and passionate for hiding scuttled past the cold face of the woman behind the cigar case, he believed that he knew he would and could never see her again. He did not believe that he could bear to see her again, even look at the street, the dingy doorway, even from a distance, again, not thinking yet, It’s terrible to be young. It’s terrible. Terrible. When Saturdays came he found, invented, reasons to decline to go to town, with McEachern watching him, though not with actual suspicion yet. He passed the days by working hard, too hard; McEachern contemplated the work with suspicion. But there was nothing which the man could know, deduce. Working was permitted him. Then he could get the nights passed, since he would be too tired to lie awake. And in time even the despair and the regret and the shame grew less. He did not cease to remember it, to react it. But now it had become wornout, like a gramophone record: familiar only because of the worn threading which blurred the voices. After a while even McEachern accepted a fact. He said:
“I have been watching you lately. And now there is nothing for it but I must misdoubt my own eyes or else believe that at last you are beginning to accept what the Lord has seen fit to allot you. But I will not have you grow vain because I have spoken well of it. You’ll have time and opportunity (and inclination too, I don’t doubt) to make me regret that I have spoken. To fall into sloth and idleness again. However, reward was created for man the same as chastisement. Do you see that heifer yonder? From today that calf is your own. See that I do not later regret it.”
Joe thanked him. Then he could look at the calf and say, aloud: “That belongs to me.” Then he looked at it, and it was again too fast and too complete to be thinking: That is not a gift. It is not even a promise: it is a threat; thinking, ‘I didn’t ask for it. He gave it to me. I didn’t ask for it,’ believing, God knows, I have earned it.
It was a month later. It was Saturday morning. “I thought you did not like town anymore,” McEachern said.
“I reckon one more trip won’t hurt me,” Joe said. He had a half dollar in his pocket. Mrs. McEachern had given it to him. He had asked for a nickel. She insisted that he take the half dollar. He took it, holding it on his palm, cold, contemptuously.
“I suppose not,” McEachern said. “You have worked hard, too. But town is no good habit for a man who has yet to make his way.”
He did not need to escape, though he would have, even by violence perhaps. But McEachern made it easy. He went to the restaurant, fast. He entered without stumbling now. The waitress was not there. Perhaps he saw, noticed that she wasn’t. He stopped at the cigar counter, behind which the woman sat, laying the half dollar on the counter. “I owe a nickel. For a cup of coffee. I said pie and coffee, before I knew that pie was a dime. I owe you a nickel.” He did not look toward the rear. The men were there, in their slanted hats and with their cigarettes. The proprietor was there; waiting, Joe heard him at last, in the dirty apron, speaking past the cigarette:
“What is it? What does he want?”
“He says he owes Bobbie a nickel,” the woman said. “He wants to give Bobbie a nickel.” Her voice was quiet. The proprietor’s voice was quiet.
“Well for Christ’s sake,” he said. To Joe the room was full of listening. He heard, not hearing; he saw, not looking. He was now moving toward the door. The half dollar lay on the glass counter. Even from the rear of the room the proprietor could see it, since he said, “What’s that for?”
“He says he owes for a cup of coffee,” the woman said.
Joe had almost reached the door. “Here, Jack,” the man said. Joe did not stop. “Give him his money,” the man said, flatvoiced, not yet moving. The cigarette smoke would curl still across his face, unwinded by any movement. “Give it back to him,” the man said. “I don’t know what his racket is. But he can’t work it here. Give it back to him. You better go back to the farm, Hiram. Maybe you can make a girl there with a nickel.”
Now he was in the street, sweating the half dollar, the coin sweating his hand, larger than a cartwheel, feeling. He walked in laughter. He had passed through the door upon it, upon the laughing of the men. It swept and carried him along the street; then it began to flow past him, dying away, letting him to earth, pavement. He and the waitress were facing one another. She did not see him at once, walking swiftly, downlooking, in a dark dress and a hat. Again, stopped, she did not even look at him, having already looked at him, allseeing, like when she had set the coffee and the pie on the counter. She said, “Oh. And you come back to give it to me. Before them. And they kidded you. Well, say.”
“I thought you might have had to pay for it, yourself. I thought—”
“Well, say. Can you tie that. Can you, now.”
They were not looking at one another, standing face to face. To another they must have looked like two monks met during the hour of contemplation in a garden path. “I just thought that I …”