In the dining room, long tables had been joined to shape a T. Uncle B. was at the upper center, Mrs. Mary Taylor Wheelwright at his right and Mrs. Conklin at his left. Odd was seated between two of the Conklin sisters, one of them Annabel, whose compliments kept him in top condition. My friend had put herself at the foot of the table among the youngest children; according to her, she had chosen the position because it provided quicker access to the kitchen, but of course it was because that was where she wished to be. Queenie, who had somehow got loose, was under the table—trembling and wagging with ecstasy as she skittered between the rows of legs—but nobody seemed to object, probably because they were hypnotized by the uncarved, lusciously glazed turkeys and the excellent aromas rising from dishes of okra and corn, onion fritters and hot mince pies.
My own mouth would have watered if it hadn’t gone bone-dry at the heart-pounding prospect of total revenge. For a second, glancing at Odd Henderson’s suffused face, I experienced a fragmentary regret, but I really had no qualms.
Uncle B. recited grace. Head bowed, eyes shut, calloused hands prayerfully placed, he intoned: “Bless You, O Lord, for the bounty of our table, the varied fruits we can be thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day of a troubled year”—his voice, so infrequently heard, croaked with the hollow imperfections of an old organ in an abandoned church—“Amen.”
Then, as chairs were adjusted and napkins rustled, the necessary pause I’d been listening for arrived. “Someone here is a thief.” I spoke clearly and repeated the accusation in even more measured tones: “Odd Henderson is a thief. He stole Miss Sook’s cameo.”
Napkins gleamed in suspended, immobilized hands. Men coughed, the Conklin sisters gasped in quadruplet unison and little Perk McCloud, Jr., began to hiccup, as very young children will when startled.
My friend, in a voice teetering between reproach and anguish, said, “Buddy doesn’t mean that. He’s only teasing.”
“I do mean it. If you don’t believe me, go look in your box. The cameo isn’t there. Odd Henderson has it in his pocket.”
“Buddy’s had a bad croup,” she murmured. “Don’t blame him, Odd. He hasn’t a notion what he’s saying.”
I said, “Go look in your box. I saw him take it.”
Uncle B., staring at me with an alarming wintriness, took charge. “Maybe you’d better,” he told Miss Sook. “That should settle the matter.”
It was not often that my friend disobeyed her brother; she did not now. But her pallor, the mortified angle of her shoulders, revealed with what distaste she accepted the errand. She was gone only a minute, but her absence seemed an eon. Hostility sprouted and surged around the table like a thorn-encrusted vine growing with uncanny speed—and the victim trapped in its tendrils was not the accused, but his accuser. Stomach sickness gripped me; Odd, on the other hand, seemed calm as a corpse.
Miss Sook returned, smiling. “Shame on you, Buddy,” she chided, shaking a finger. “Playing that kind of joke. My cameo was exactly where I left it.”
Uncle B. said, “Buddy, I want to hear you apologize to our guest.”
“No, he don’t have to do that,” Odd Henderson said, rising. “He was telling the truth.” He dug into his pocket and put the cameo on the table. “I wish I had some excuse to give. But I ain’t got none.” Starting for the door, he said, “You must be a special lady, Miss Sook, to fib for me like that.” And then, damn his soul, he walked right out of there.
So did I. Except I ran. I pushed back my chair, knocking it over. The crash triggered Queenie; she scooted from under the table, barked and bared her teeth. And Miss Sook, as I went past her, tried to stop me: “Buddy!” But I wanted no part of her or Queenie. That dog had snarled at me and my friend had taken Odd Henderson’s side, she’d lied to save his skin, betrayed our friendship, my love: things I’d thought could never happen.
Simpson’s pasture lay below the house, a meadow brilliant with high November gold and russet grass. At the edge of the pasture there were a gray barn, a pig corral, a fenced-in chicken yard and a smokehouse. It was the smokehouse I slipped into, a black chamber cool on even the hottest summer days. It had a dirt floor and a smoke pit that smelled of hickory cinders and creosote; rows of hams hung from rafters. It was a place I’d always been wary of, but now its darkness seemed sheltering. I fell on the ground, my ribs heaving like the gills of a beach-stranded fish; and I didn’t care that I was demolishing my one nice suit, the one with long trousers, by thrashing about on the floor in a messy mixture of earth and ashes and pork grease.
One thing I knew: I was going to quit that house, that town, that night. Hit the road. Hop a freight and head for California. Make my living shining shoes in Hollywood. Fred Astaire’s shoes. Clark Gable’s. Or—maybe I just might become a movie star myself. Look at Jackie Cooper. Oh, they’d be sorry then. When I was rich and famous and refused to answer their letters and even telegrams, probably.
Suddenly I thought of something that would make them even sorrier. The door to the shed was ajar, and a knife of sunshine exposed a shelf supporting several bottles. Dusty bottles with skull-and-crossbone labels. If I drank from one of those, then all of them up there in the dining room, the whole swilling and gobbling caboodle, would know what sorry was. It was worth it, if only to witness Uncle B.’s remorse when they found me cold and stiff on the smokehouse floor; worth it to hear the human wails and Queenie’s howls as my coffin was lowered into cemetery depths.
The only hitch was, I wouldn’t actually be able to see or hear any of this: how could I, being dead? And unless one can observe the guilt and regret of the mourners, surely there is nothing satisfactory about being dead?
Uncle B. must have forbidden Miss Sook to go look for me until the last guest had left the table. It was late afternoon before I heard her voice floating across the pasture; she called my name softly, forlornly as a mourning dove. I stayed where I was and did not answer.
It was Queenie who found me; she came sniffing around the smokehouse and yapped when she caught my scent, then entered and crawled toward me and licked my hand, an ear and a cheek; she knew she had treated me badly.
Presently, the door swung open and the light widened. My friend said, “Come here, Buddy.” And I wanted to go to her. When she saw me, she laughed. “Goodness, boy. You look dipped in tar and all ready for feathering.” But there were no recriminations or references to my ruined suit.
Queenie trotted off to pester some cows; and trailing after her into the pasture, we sat down on a tree stump. “I saved you a drumstick,” she said, handing me a parcel wrapped in waxed paper. “And your favorite piece of turkey. The pulley.”
The hunger that direr sensations had numbed now hit me like a belly-punch. I gnawed the drumstick clean, then stripped the pulley, the sweet part of the turkey around the wishbone.
While I was eating, Miss Sook put her arm around my shoulders. “There’s just this I want to say, Buddy. Two wrongs never made a right. It was wrong of him to take the cameo. But we don’t know why he took it. Maybe he never meant to keep it. Whatever his reason, it can’t have been calculated. Which is why what you did was much worse: you planned to humiliate him. It was deliberate. Now listen to me, Buddy: there is only one unpardonable sin—deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never. Do you understand me, Buddy?”