“The house where my father and mother and your father and mother, the house where I—I wont have it. I wont have it.”
“Just for one night, then. I’ll take her to the hotel in the morning. Think of her, alone, with that baby.……Suppose it were you and Bory, and your husband accused of a murder you knew he didn’t—”
“I dont want to think about her. I wish I had never heard of the whole thing. To think that my brother—Dont you see that you are always having to clean up after yourself? It’s not that there’s litter left; it’s that you—that—But to bring a street-walker, a murderess, into the house where I was born.”
“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “But, Horace, aint that what the lawyers call collusion? connivance?” Horace looked at her. “It seems to me you’ve already had a little more to do with these folks than the lawyer in the case should have. You were out there where it happened yourself not long ago. Folks might begin to think you know more than you’ve told.”
“That’s so,” Horace said, “Mrs Blackstone. And sometimes I have wondered why I haven’t got rich at the law. Maybe I will, when I get old enough to attend the same law school you did.”
“If I were you,” Miss Jenny said, “I’d drive back to town now and take her to the hotel and get her settled. It’s not late.”
“And go on back to Kinston until the whole thing is over,” Narcissa said. “These people are not your people. Why must you do such things?”
“I cannot stand idly by and see injustice—”
“You wont ever catch up with injustice, Horace,” Miss Jenny said.
“Well, that irony which lurks in events, then.”
“Hmmph,” Miss Jenny said. “It must be because she is one woman you know that dont know anything about that shrimp.”
“Anyway, I’ve talked too much, as usual,” Horace said. “So I’ll have to trust you all—”
“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “Do you think Narcissa’d want anybody to know that any of her folks could know people that would do anything as natural as make love or rob or steal?” There was that quality about his sister. During all the four days between Kinston and Jefferson he had counted on that imperviousness. He hadn’t expected her—any woman—to bother very much over a man she had neither married nor borne when she had one she did bear to cherish and fret over. But he had expected that imperviousness, since she had had it thirty-six years.
When he reached the house in town a light burned in one room. He entered, crossing floors which he had scrubbed himself, revealing at the time no more skill with a mop than he had expected, than he had with the lost hammer with which he nailed the windows down and the shutters to ten years ago, who could not even learn to drive a motor car. But that was ten years ago, the hammer replaced by the new one with which he had drawn the clumsy nails, the windows open upon scrubbed floor spaces still as dead pools within the ghostly embrace of hooded furniture.
The woman was still up, dressed save for the hat. It lay on the bed where the child slept. Lying together there, they lent to the room a quality of transience more unmistakable than the makeshift light, the smug paradox of the made bed in a room otherwise redolent of long unoccupation. It was as though femininity were a current running through a wire along which a certain number of identical bulbs were hung.
“I’ve got some things in the kitchen,” she said. “I wont be but a minute.”
The child lay on the bed, beneath the unshaded light, and he wondered why women, in quitting a house, will remove all the lamp shades even though they touch nothing else; looking down at the child, at its bluish eyelids showing a faint crescent of bluish white against its lead-colored cheeks, the moist shadow of hair capping its skull, its hands uplifted, curl-palmed, sweating too, thinking Good God. Good God.
He was thinking of the first time he had seen it, lying in a wooden box behind the stove in that ruined house twelve miles from town; of Popeye’s black presence lying upon the house like the shadow of something no larger than a match falling monstrous and portentous upon something else otherwise familiar and everyday and twenty times its size; of the two of them—himself and the woman—in the kitchen lighted by a cracked and smutty lamp on a table of clean, spartan dishes and Goodwin and Popeye somewhere in the outer darkness peaceful with insects and frogs yet filled too with Popeye’s presence in black and nameless threat. The woman drew the box out from behind the stove and stood above it, her hands still hidden in her shapeless garment. “I have to keep him in this so the rats cant get to him,” she said.
“Oh,” Horace said, “you have a son.” Then she showed him her hands, flung them out in a gesture at once spontaneous and diffident and self-conscious and proud, and told him he might bring her an orange-stick.
She returned, with something wrapped discreetly in a piece of newspaper. He knew that it was a diaper, freshly washed, even before she said: “I made a fire in the stove. I guess I overstepped.”
“Of course not,” he said. “It’s merely a matter of legal precaution, you see,” he said. “Better to put everybody to a little temporary discomfort than to jeopardise our case.” She did not appear to be listening. She spread the blanket on the bed and lifted the child onto it. “You understand how it is,” Horace said. “If the judge suspected that I knew more about it than the facts would warrant—I mean, we must try to give everybody the idea that holding Lee for that killing is just—”
“Do you live in Jefferson?” she said, wrapping the blanket about the child.
“No. I live in Kinston. I used to—I have practised here, though.”
“You have kinfolks here, though. Women. That used to live in this house.” She lifted the child, tucking the blanket about it. Then she looked at him. “It’s all right. I know how it is. You’ve been kind.”
“Damn it,” he said, “do you think—Come on. Let’s go on to the hotel. You get a good night’s rest, and I’ll be in early in the morning. Let me take it.”
“I’ve got him,” she said. She started to say something else, looking at him quietly for a moment, but she went on. He turned out the light and followed and locked the door. She was already in the car. He got in.
“Hotel, Isom,” he said. “I never did learn to drive one,” he said. “Sometimes, when I think of all the time I have spent not learning to do things.……”
The street was narrow, quiet. It was paved now, though he could remember when, after a rain, it had been a canal of blackish substance half earth, half water, with murmuring gutters in which he and Narcissa paddled and splashed with tucked-up garments and muddy bottoms, after the crudest of whittled boats, or made loblollies by treading and treading in one spot with the intense oblivion of alchemists. He could remember when, innocent of concrete, the street was bordered on either side by paths of red brick tediously and unevenly laid and worn in rich, random maroon mosaic into the black earth which the noon sun never reached; at that moment, pressed into the concrete near the entrance of the drive, were the prints of his and his sister’s naked feet in the artificial stone.
The infrequent lamps mounted to crescendo beneath the arcade of a fillingstation at the corner. The woman leaned suddenly forward. “Stop here, please, boy,” she said. Isom put on the brakes. “I’ll get out here and walk,” she said.
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Horace said. “Go on, Isom.”
“No; wait,” the woman said. “We’ll be passing people that know you. And then the square.”