Rose said, "Mmm," nodding her head slowly. "She probably won't believe him, right? But what-"
"She won't believe him," I said. "Leastways, she'll have some awful strong doubts he's telling the truth. Then, he tells her all the dirty things you said about her, about her and Lennie sleepin' together and so on. And how can she believe that? How can she believe that her very best friend, a perfect lady, would all of a sudden start talking dirty about her?"
"Mmm-hmm," Rose nodded again. "She can't believe that he came out here, in the first place, and she can't believe what he says happened here. The way she sees it, he'll just have made it all up, and he'll probably get his ears boxed for lying. But-"
"Not just lying," I said, "but god-danged dangerous lyin'. The kind that breaks up homes, and gets people killed. And Myra won't want to chance the risk of it happening again. She'll figure he's taken a real bad turn for the worse, and she'll have to put him away somewhere like she's sometimes threatened to."
"Huh!" Rose gave me a startled look. "When did Myra ever do anything like that? Why she can hardly bear to let Lennie out of her sight!"
I said Myra had threatened to put him away a couple times, when she got extra mad at him, and, yeah, she couldn't hardly bear to let Lennie out of sight. "That's why she's never done anything about him, because she'd want to be with him wherever he was and she didn't want to leave Pottsville. Now, though, she's got no choice. He goes and she goes, too."
Rose said she just wasn't sure about it. It sounded good but you couldn't depend on it working out that way. I said that, well, of course we'd have to help things along a little.
"Myra's bound to tell us about it, and naturally, we get pretty blamed worried. And the worrieder we get the worrieder she gets. We're real concerned about what Lennie might do next, you know, like maybe taking a meat axe to people instead of just lying about 'em. Or setting houses on fire. Or chasm' little girls. Or-well, don't you fret about it, honey." I gave her a squeeze, and a pat on the bottom. "Everything's goin' to work out fine, but absolutely fine. I ain't got a doubt in the world about it."
Rose shrugged and said, well, maybe so; I knew Myra better than she did. Then, she snuggled up to me and bit my ear. And I kissed her, and pulled myself away.
"Lennie ain't a real fast walker," I explained. "I aim to cut cross-country and beat him back to town. Just in case, you know."
"Just in case?" Rose frowned. "In case of what?"
"In case we need a clincher. Something that'll sweep the last doubt out of Myra's mind, if she should have a doubt. It ain't even remotely likely that she will have. But when Lennie gets to the courthouse, just pantin' to tell Myra about me bein' out here, ain't it a pretty good idea for me to be sittin' in my office?"
Rose had to admit that it was, much as she hated to have me heave.
I promised we'd get together in a day or so. Then, I beat it out the door before I had to talk any more.
Naturally, I didn't go back to town. I already knew what was going to happen there. What I wanted to see was what was going to happen here, although I already had a pretty good idea, and maybe to help it along a little if it needed helpin'.
I circled around through the fields until I reached the lane that came up from the road. Then, I hunkered down beside it in a clump of scrub mulberries, and waited.
About an hour and a half passed. I started to worry a little, wonderin' if I could have been wrong, and then I heard the squeak of buggy wheels coming on fast.
I parted the bushes and peeked out. Lennie and Myra swept by, Myra clutching the horse's reins, Lennie's head lolling back and forth on his neck. He was carrying something on his lap, a black, box-like thing, and one of his hands clutched something that looked like a stick. I scratched my head, wonderin' what the heck the stuff was-the box and the stick- and then the buggy had rolled past me, up and out of the lane and into the farmyard.
Myra whoa-ed the horse to a stop. She and Lennie climbed down from the buggy, and she trailed the reins over the horse's head to keep it from wandering away. Then, she and Lennie crossed the yard and went up on the porch.
She banged on the door. It opened after a minute, and the lamplight outlined her face, white and purposeful-looking. She started to go in, then she took Lennie by the shoulder and shoved him in ahead of her. And at last I saw what he was carryin'.
It was a camera-a camera and one of them sticks that you explode flash-powder in for taking pictures indoors.
23
I jumped up and started for the house. About the first step I took, my foot caught in a root and I fell sprawling with the wind knocked out of me. For a minute or two, I didn't even have enough breath to groan, and when I finally did manage to pick myself up, I couldn't move very fast. So it was maybe all of five minutes before I got to the house, and found a window where I could hear and see.
Well, sir, it was a funny thing, a funny-terrible thing, a strange crazy thing. Because what caught my attention wasn't what you'd have thought it would be at all. Not Rose, scared and dazed and wonderin' what the heck had gone wrong. Not Lennie and Myra, smilin' and spiteful and enjoyin' theirselves. Not something that was in the room itself. Not somethin' but nothing. The emptiness. The absence of things.
I'd maybe been in that house a hundred times, that one and a hundred others like it. But this was the first time I'd seen what they really were. Not homes, not places for people to live in, not nothin'. Just pine-board walls looking in the emptiness. No pictures, no books-nothing to look at or think about. Just the emptiness that was soakin' in on me here.
And then suddenly it wasn't here, it was everywhere, every place like this one. And suddenly the emptiness was filled with sound and sight, with all the sad terrible things that the emptiness had brought the people to.
There were the helpless little girls, cryin' when their own daddies crawled into bed with 'em. There were the men beating their wives, the women screamin' for mercy. There were the kids wettin' in the beds from fear and nervousness, and their mothers dosin' 'em with red pepper for punishment. There were the haggard faces, drained white from hookworm and blotched with scurvy. There was the near-starvation, the never-bein'-full, the debts that always outrun the credits. There was the how-we-gonna-eat, how-we-gonna-sheep, how-we-gonna-cover-our-poor-bare-asses thinkin'. The kind of thinkin' that when you ain't doing nothing else but that, why you're better off dead. Because that's the emptiness thinkin' and you're already dead inside, and all you'll do is spread the stink and the terror, the weepin' and wailin', the torture, the starvation, the shame of your deadness. Your emptiness.
I shuddered, thinking how wonderful was our Creator to create such downright hideous things in the world, so that something like murder didn't seem at all bad by comparison. Yea, verily, it was indeed merciful and wonderful of Him. And it was up to me to stop brooding, and to pay attention to what was going on right here and now.
So I made an extra hard try, rubbing my eyes and shaking myself, and finally I managed to.