It scared me because it wouldn’t be impossible for somebody to trace back and find the other girl and get a make on me as the date she had when she left Coulter. Mush took me to his place. It was a mess. Unbelievable. A cave where bears live. He said she had been talking about how the inside of her head was shrinking into a red ball with everything all tangled up inside it so she couldn’t sort it out. Then she’d stopped talking at all.
He had taken her there right from the party, and he’d been balling her for ten days and nights, going out to get food and bring it back. He had scuffed her up pretty bad. He said she hadn’t been eating much of anything. I couldn’t get any reaction out of her. I got more scared. Speed makes a person sexy. For all I knew he had busted her up inside somehow.
So we put her clothes on her and I borrowed a car and Mush carried her out after it was late and the streets were empty and put her in the front seat. I drove out to the school and let her out in front of the dormitory and got the hell out of there.
Funny thing. All the way back I was thinking of how I was going to find Mush and I was going to really pound him right down into the ground. I didn’t find him until three days later, and then I said hello and he said hello, and that was it. I’ve never seen him since. I don’t even know what his name was. Everybody called him Mush. He was close to thirty, getting a little bald. He’d lost his front teeth playing offensive guard. Six three, maybe two forty-five. I was still mad enough to take him, but I didn’t even try.
My name is Ralph Turner. It surprised me when Mabel went ahead and rented the apple stand to the little Ames girl. Mabel usually lets me make the decision on everything concerning money. I thought a single girl might be trouble, but after Mabel took me down to the creek and had me meet Norrie Ames, I decided that Mabel had used good judgment. I hadn’t expected to rent it for the month of May, so it was like finding forty dollars. She seemed like a polite little thing. She took the place on the second day of May.
It is a hard thing for me to tell what happened and how it happened. I certainly would not want Mabel to ever know anything about it. I just can’t understand what it was that happened to me that May. Let me see, I was sixty-one, forty-one long years older than that little dark-haired girl. It was an accident, I suppose.
When a person stands down there in that pretty little valley near the willow pool, there is only one part of my land you can see, other than the little ridges that hem the valley in. And that is a knoll almost a half mile west and a little north of the pool. It is almost on my property line. I left some hardwood on the knoll, some beech and birch, and on the seventh day of May — unseasonably warm it was — I walked up there to see if the wild bees were hiving in the big dead birch stub, thinking that I might get some help and try smoking them and moving them to one of my own hives down in the meadow near the house, and see if they’d take hold and settle in. I tried for a long time to spot some flying in and decided there were no hives on the knoll. I was going to go on back to the house when I remembered that some of the big old granddaddy apple trees down near the willow pool had hollow places a wild swarm might take to. So I walked on over there, and I swear I had forgotten all about the apple-stand cabin being occupied.
It was a hot day, a little before noon. I moved slowly, stopping to listen. The air was so still I thought I might hear the hum of a big hive if it wasn’t too far away from the ground. As I neared the creek I saw something I couldn’t make out for the first half second. As soon as I saw what it was, I eased back one long step so that I was behind the thick old trunk of one of the original trees. It was a girl’s legs, bent sharp at the knee, sticking up out of the grass there near the bank of the creek. The grass was maybe eight inches high but thin enough so I could see the shape of the rest of her sprawled out there in the sunshine.
I should have just moved back in a straight line, keeping the tree in the way. But I looked around the trunk, just as she sat up, looking the other way from me, and then stood up. I guess she’d had a bath in the creek, dried off, and stretched out on a yellow robe in the sunshine to get warm and get some tan.
Two years ago, that was. And I was forty-one years older than that dark-haired girl. My eldest granddaughter is about that same age. Norrie Ames stood up slow and naked not fifteen feet from me. Slim little girl, little nubbin breasts on her, but woman-built down through the slope of her belly, hips swelling out from the waist and tapering, dark-hair smudge on the little plump girl-part of her, all smooth and fine as ivory, her heavy black hair still damp, swinging as she stooped and picked up the towel.
I’ve always liked to look at young girls on the street, walking free, laughing together. They are pretty things and good to look at, like young-blooded horses, like blossoms, like all the free wild things of the world.
I was all ready to yank my head back quick if she started to turn. I told myself I was just looking at a pretty thing in the world. No harm in it. I told myself my granddaughter would look just as pretty in the sunshine standing in the green grass with the blue brook beyond and the apple blossoms all around us.
But it was a sick thing in an old man, because it was more than looking. It was wanting. It was a grinding, aching, terrible kind of wanting, because it was the way a beast wants, the way a brute wants. It made my heart thump so hard I shook with each beat. It made my breath come right off the top of my lungs so fast I had to try hard to keep my breathing quiet.
I had thought I was over that kind of feeling long ago. I had always fought to keep that feeling from rising up inside me, and at last when it stopped happening I was relieved because I did not have to have the sense of evil and shame anymore. It was not fair to Mabel to let that feeling get out of hand. She was and is a good wife to me, but she never took pleasure in the act. Maybe a little in the beginning, but not after the firstborn. I never possessed any other woman but my wife. She never denied me, but I didn’t ever want to abuse the rights of the husband, and in the spring of the year I had the habit of wearing myself down with heavy work on the place so as not to reach over to her side of the bed in the night too often, when it got to be too much for me to control.
It was a terrible thing to have it all come back like that when you think it has finally left you in peace for the rest of your life. It was a frightening thing to know that it could wake up again and be so quick and savage and needful.
She wiped her throat with the towel, and she whacked a bug that lit on the top of her thigh, and she leaned over again and picked up the robe and swung it around her shoulders. She stretched and yawned and went toward the cabin, picking her footsteps carefully because she was barefoot.
When she was gone I went back the way I came. My knees felt weak and trembly, and my body was sweaty under my clothes. I went all the way back to the hardwood knoll and found a place hidden and private and got down on my knees and prayed to the Lord to deliver me from my weakness and my sinful desires and to forgive me for lusting after the flesh of a young girl. But all the time I prayed, thinking of the words and saying them aloud, I had evil pictures in the back of my mind, of myself walking toward her and having her smile at me in a knowing way and lay down for me on the robe in the grass, spread herself for me, and take me in. I knew just how her flesh would feel under my hands, just how her sweet young mouth would taste.
So the praying did no good. I spent too long at it, and Mabel was cross about me being late to the midday meal. I guess I didn’t act like myself. I chewed and swallowed and everything had no taste. When she went over to the stove one time, she stopped behind my chair and put the back of her hand to my forehead to see if I had a fever. A lot of people had the flu that spring.