"You shouldn't ort a done a thing like that, Shad. Pore Edgar."
She swished the pan of greasy water outward like a fisherman casting a net. The water plopped on the ground, fanned into a silver shield and fell again.
"Well, now that you're here, you want a cup of morning coffee?"
Shad smiled, nodding. Mrs. Taylor was offering him the coffee so she could get the full story of why he'd hit pore Edgar; he knew that swamp women had to get their entertainment from some source. At least gossip wasn't a cardinal sin.
He followed her into the house, saying, "Got me a fiftycent piece here that I'd purely like to see go fer a breakfast. Grits is fine, if they're handy."
Mrs. Taylor looked at him, the empty pan still in her hand. "Why ain't you et to home, Shad?"
"Ain't living to home, is why. I cleared out last night."
Mrs. Taylor said tsk again, shook her head and said, "My!" Then -"Well, sit, Shad, while I redd up the table."
She was getting more than she'd bargained for and she tried to be offhand about it, as if someone had brought her a gift she'd been expecting and didn't much care about. "Want to tell me about hit, son?"
Shad ducked his smile. "No'm. I'll tell you about Edgar, though."
He ate and she had a cup of coffee with him. And then when he brought out his pack of tailor-mades he didn't know what else to do but offer her one. The way Mr. Culver always did to Iris Culver.
Mrs. Taylor cried. "Shad! Me take a devil stick? Don't you come trotting in any of your hanky-panky tricks on me. What would Rival say?" Then she laughed and flapped her apron. "And me a fat old woman!"
Shad grinned. "Go on," he said. "I was thinking if mebbe you were to tell me what night Rival stays out with the hounds, I'd just come sneak-footing by this way-"
"Whaah!" Mrs. Taylor let out a shout of laughter and put her pudgy hands up to her apple cheeks. "Shad Hark, you are the one! Now you just stop that air teasing. And me old enough to be your ma!"
Shad liked her. He sort of wished she was his ma. She was real, she was a part of the Purpose. Not artificial, useless like Iris Culver – at least useless for practical living. And Dorry? Would she be like Mrs. Taylor someday? He kind of doubted it. Mrs. Taylor would have been a pioneer wife-had there been anything left to pioneer. He looked at her, seeing her unconsciously as the embodiment of oldfashioned home life.
"Why'd you say poor Edgar?" he asked suddenly, sensing that she had answers to things he couldn't understand. "You know he tortures frogs and mice and things."
Mrs. Taylor looked serious. "You cain't really say hit's his fault, Shad. I know cutting up frogs ain't a nice thing to do, but Edgar got a lot of good in him."
"Must have," Shad agreed. "He don't never let none of it out."
"You hush and listen to me. I knowed that pore boy since he was borned. And when he was a little fella he warn't mean. He warn't smart, but not mean. Wasn't till after you other lil' boys come at him all the time he started to change. A-throwing sticks and rocks at him, a-chasing him home and calling him idjut all the time -"
"Not me. I never done those things to him when we was little."
"I know you never, Shad. You always hung away from him, likn you were feered of him. But them othern did. I remember one day-pore lil' fella couldn't ben but eight- they tied cans to his lil' tail and chased him home to his ma. Like a dog, Shad.
"So you see? One day he found out he could catch him little crawly things, things that couldn't fight back, and he started taking some of his hate out on'em. Hate got to come out someways, Shad. It shore God do."
Shad stared at the table, thinking about hate. Then he grunted and stood up. "Mebbe," he said, not wholly convinced. "But I just think he's dangerous as a walleyed bull." From his jeans he dug some of the dollar bills Joel Sutt had given him for change.
"You put that money away, Shad Hark. I ain't setting up no coffee shop here, you know," Mrs. Taylor said crossly.
"What give you the idea hit's fer you?" Shad wanted to know.
He put five of the dollars down on the table, letting them stack crisscross one on the other. "Here. Give 'em to that old fool Toll woman. You don't have to tell her I give 'em to you."
Mrs. Taylor looked at the money. Her eyes turned damp when she smiled, and he thought it was funny the way you could catch some people that way.
"Why, Shad," she said. "You got a soft spot in you wide as a boat-bottom."
"Go on," he snapped. "You gitting foolish along with your other ailments. Bet in another year Rival won't be able to tell the difference 'tween you'n Edgar – if'n Edgar goes to not wearing his pants."
Mrs. Taylor let out another holler of laughter, and her voice followed Shad out the door and onto the porch. "Shad, don't you go to showing all that money of yourn to those girls you always chasing after. They'll take it off you in one night. You hear me, Shad?"
He felt pretty good when he went into the yard.
9
In the great square frame house with the high-peaked roof, in the house that was incongruous to the ratty peppering of shanties and the vivid wilderness, like a little girl's new doll standing alone in the weeded backyard of an abandoned property, Iris Culver moved distractedly across her living room. She passed the long wall of books-her books-Larry read trash – and went to the front window. Her highheels left the rug and the house-stillness seemed to shudder and recoil from the hollow sound of the heels tapping the wooden floor. The soft purr of the air conditioner followed her. It was a faulty old relic that Larry had picked up somewhere on sale.
Outside the air was sun-warmed, flower-scented. It was the day which last night had presaged – early summer, cool in the shadows, glass-clear. The cabbage palms stood tall and separate. The sky, ragged on the horizon, showed itself detached and whole, going on around.
She turned from the window in an abrupt, deliberate pivot, a movement that would have looked awkward, afflicted, from any other but a woman of her kind. Nerves. She went to a fiddletop table-one made by a local swamp billy and Larry had purchased it for five dollars. Iris hated it. From a jade box she took a cigarette. She stood for a moment looking back at the window, through the screened porch, across the saw-grass lawn and road to the lake, seeing the swamp beyond. She tapped the cigarette on her thumb. Where was Shad?
The three-word sentence stood in her mind like a wall, or like the swamp water out there that was just as much a barrier between them. She hated it, hated the tupelo and titi and gator-thunder; hated the sticky heat and mosquitoes, the free wandering hens and pigs, the dirty abysmally ignorant children and the distorted speech of their elders. Hated Shad; herself for needing him.
She crossed the big living room again, passed through a swinging door, pausing to hold it in her hand. Shad had made it for them. Shad had come to the house a year ago to make the swinging door. Larry had hired him because he was young and smart and because his work was cheap. Later she'd laughed at that, later, when Larry was out in his barn typing-and Shad was in her bed.
The view from the kitchen window was partially blocked by a hillside meadow. She opened the door and looked out. From the back porch she could see the meadow ending in a line of trees against the sky. The barn-Larry's Ivory Tower – was midway in the line of trees, like a white ship drifting to its moorings.
He was still up there, she thought. He wouldn't be bothering her for a while. Perhaps this was her lucky day. She might not have to hear his latest deathless chapter until night. The latest trials and good-natured adventures of Tab and Reb, those one hundred per cent red-blooded allAmerican boy rovers.
She slammed the door and click-clacked back through the kitchen, returned to the living room and went to the tall gilt mirror over a maple table holding a vase and flowers. The flowers were wilted.