IX
I
Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world. How indissolubly are they associated in us! In youth they lift us out of the flesh, in old age they reduce us again to the flesh; one to fatten us, the other to flay us, for the worm. When are sexual compulsions more readily answered than in war or famine or flood or fire?
Jones, lurking across the street, saw the coast clear at last.
(First, marched a uniformed self-constituted guard, led by a subaltern with three silver V’s on his sleeve and a Boy Scout bugler furnished by the young Baptist minister, a fiery-eyed dervish, who had served in the Y.M.C.A.)
And then fatly arrogant as a cat, Jones let himself through the iron gate.
(The last motorcar trailed slowly up the street and the casuals gathered through curiosity—the town should raise a monument to Donald Mahon, with effigies of Margaret Mahon-Powers and Joe Gilligan for caryatides—and the little blackguard boys, both black and white, and including young Robert Saunders, come to envy the boy bugler, drifted away.)
And still catlike, Jones mounted the steps and entered the deserted house. His yellow goat’s eyes became empty as he paused, listening. Then he moved quietly toward the kitchen.
(The procession moved slowly across the square. Country people, in town to trade, turned to stare vacuously, merchant and doctor and lawyer came to door and window to look; the city fathers, drowsing in the courthouse yard, having successfully circumvented sex, having reached the point where death would look after them instead of they after death, waked and looked and slept again. Into a street, among and between horses and mules tethered to wagons, it passed, into a street bordered by shabby negro stores and shops, and here was Loosh standing stiffly at salute as it passed. “Who dat, Loosh?” “Mist’ Donald Mahon.” “Well, Jesus! we all gwine dat way, some day. All roads leads to de graveyard.”)
Emmy sat at the kitchen table, her head between her hard elbows, her hands clasping behind her in her hair. How long she had sat there she did not know but she had heard them clumsily carrying him from the house and she put her hands over her ears, not to hear. But it seemed as if she could hear in spite of her closed ears those horrible, blundering, utterly unnecessary sounds: the hushed scraping of timid footsteps, the muted thumping of wood against wood, that passing, left behind an unbearable unchastity of stale flowers—as though flowers themselves getting a rumor of death became corrupt—all the excruciating ceremony for disposing of human carrion. So she had not heard Mrs. Mahon until the other touched her shoulder. (I would have cured him! If they had just let me marry him instead of her!) At the touch Emmy raised her swollen, blurred face, swollen because she couldn’t seem to cry. (If I could just cry. You are prettier than me, with your black hair and your painted mouth. That’s the reason.)
“Come, Emmy,” Mrs. Mahon said.
“Let me alone! Go away!” she said, fiercely. “You got him killed: now bury him yourself.”
“He would have wanted you to come, Emmy,” the other woman said, gently.
“Go away, let me alone, I tell you!” She dropped her head to the table again, bumping her forehead. …
There was no sound in the kitchen save a clock. Life. Death. Life. Death. Life. Death. Forever and ever. (If I could only cry!) She could hear the dusty sound of sparrows and she imagined she could see the shadows growing longer across the grass. Soon it will be night, she thought, remembering that night long, long ago, the last time she had seen Donald, her Donald—not that one! and he had said, “Come here, Emmy,” and she had gone to him. Her Donald was dead long, long ago. … The clock went Life. Death. Life. Death. There was something frozen in her chest, like a dishcloth in winter.
(The procession moved beneath arching iron letters. Rest in Peace in cast repetition: Our motto is one for every cemetery, a cemetery for everyone throughout the land. Away, following where fingers of sunlight pointed among cedars, doves were cool, throatily unemphatic among the dead.)
“Go away,” Emmy repeated to another touch on her shoulder, thinking she had dreamed. It was a dream! she thought and the frozen dishrag in her chest melted with unbearable relief, becoming tears. It was Jones who had touched her, but anyone would have been the same and she turned in a passion of weeping, clinging to him.
(I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. …)
Jones’ yellow stare enveloped her like amber, remarking her sunburned hair and her foreshortened thigh, wrung by her turning body into high relief.
(Whosoever believeth in Me, though he were dead. …)
My God, when will she get done weeping? First she wets my pants, then my coat. But this time she’ll dry it for me, or I’ll know the reason why.
(… yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die. …)
Emmy’s sobbing died away: she knew no sensation save that of warmth and languorous contentment, emptiness, even when Jones raised her face and kissed her. “Come, Emmy,” he said, raising her by the armpits. She rose obediently, leaning against him warm and empty, and he led her through the house and up the stairs to her room. Outside the window, afternoon became abruptly rain, without warning, with no flapping of pennons nor sound of trumpet to herald it.
(The sun had gone, had been recalled as quickly as a usurer’s note and the doves fell silent or went away. The Baptist dervish’s Boy Scout lipped his bugle, sounding taps.)
II
“Hi, Bob,” called a familiar voice, that of a compatriot. “Le’s gwup to Miller’s. They’re playing ball up there.”
He looked at his friend, making no reply to the greeting, and his expression was so strange that the other said: “Whatcher looking so funny about? You ain’t sick, are you?”
“I don’t haf to play ball if I don’t want to, do I?” he replied, with sudden heat. He walked on while the other boy stood watching him with open mouth. After a while, he, too, turned and went on, stopping once or twice to look again at his friend become suddenly strange and queer. Then he passed, whooping from sight, forgetting him.
How strange everything looked! This street, these familiar trees—was this his home here, where his mother and father were, where Sis lived, where he ate and slept, lapped closely around with safety and solidity, where darkness was kind and sweet for sleeping? He mounted the steps and entered, wanting his mother. But, of course, she hadn’t got back from—He found himself running suddenly through the hall toward a voice raised in comforting, crooning song. Here was a friend mountainous in blue calico, her elephantine thighs undulating, gracious as the wake of a ferry boat as she moved between table and stove.
She broke off her mellow, passionless song, exclaiming: “Bless yo’ heart, honey, what is it?”
But he did not know. He only clung to her comforting, voluminous skirt in a gust of uncontrollable sorrow, while she wiped biscuit dough from her hands on a towel. Then she picked him up and sat upon a stiff-backed chair, rocking back and forth and holding him against her balloon-like breast until his fit of weeping shuddered away.
Outside the window the afternoon became abruptly rain, without warning, with no flapping of pennons nor sound of trumpet to herald it.
III
There was nothing harsh about this rain. It was gray and quiet as a benediction. The birds did not even cease to sing, and the west was already thinning to a moist and imminent gold.
The rector, bareheaded, walked slowly, unconscious of the rain and the dripping trees, beside his daughter-in-law across the lawn, houseward, and they mounted the steps together, passing beneath the dim and unwashed fanlight. Within the hall he stood while water ran down his face and dripped from his clothing in a series of small sounds. She took his arm and led him into the study and to his chair. He sat obediently and she took his handkerchief from the breast of his coat and wiped the rain from his temples and face. He submitted, fumbling for his pipe.
She watched him as he sprinkled tobacco liberally over the desktop, trying to fill the bowl, then she quietly took it from his hand. “Try this. It is much simpler,” she told him, taking a cigarette from her jacket pocket and putting it in his mouth. “You have never smoked one, have you?”
“Eh? Oh, thank you. Never too old to learn, eh?”
She lit it for him and then she quickly fetched a glass from the pantry. Kneeling beside the desk she drew out drawer after drawer until she found the bottle of whisky. He seemed to have forgotten her until she put the glass in his hand.
Then he looked up at her from a bottomless, grateful anguish and she sat suddenly on the arm of his chair, drawing his head against her breast. His untasted drink in one hand and his slowly burning cigarette lifting an unshaken plume of vapor from the other; and after a while the rain passed away and the dripping eaves but added to the freshened silence, measuring it, spacing it off; and the sun breaking through the west took a last look at the earth before going down.
“So you will not stay,” he said at last, repeating her unspoken decision.
“No,” she said, holding him.
IV
Before her descending, the hill crossed with fireflies. At its foot among dark trees was unseen water and Emmy walked slowly on, feeling the tall wet grass sopping her to the knees, draggling her skirt.
She walked on and soon was among trees that as she moved, moved overhead like dark ships parting the star-filled river of the sky, letting the parted waters join again behind them with never a ripple. The pool lay darkly in the dark: sky and trees above it, trees and sky beneath it. She sat down on the wet earth, seeing through the trees the moon becoming steadily brighter in the darkening sky. A dog saw it also and bayed: a mellow, long sound that slid immaculately down a hill of silence, yet at the same time seemed to linger about her like a rumor of a far despair.
Tree trunks taking light from the moon, streaks of moonlight in the water—she could almost imagine she saw him standing there across the pool with her beside him; leaning above the water she could almost see them darting keen and swift and naked, flashing in the moon.
She could feel earth strike through her clothes against legs and belly and elbows … the dog bayed again, hopeless and sorrowful, dying, dying away. … After a while she rose slowly, feeling her damp clothes, thinking of the long walk home. Tomorrow was washday.
V
“Damn!” said Mrs. Mahon, staring at the bulletin board. Gilligan, setting down her smart leather bags against the station wall, remarked briefly:
“Late?”
“Thirty minutes. What beastly luck!”
“Well, can’t be helped. Wanta go back to the house and wait?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t like these abortive departures. Get my ticket, please.” She gave him her purse and standing on tiptoe to see her reflection in a raised window she did a few deft things to her hat. Then she sauntered along the platform to the admiration of those casuals always to be found around small railway stations anywhere in these United States. And yet Continentals labor under the delusion that we spend all our time working!
Freedom comes with the decision: it does not wait for the act. She felt freer, more at peace with herself than she had felt for months. But I won’t think about that, she decided deliberately. It is best just to be free, not to let it into the conscious mind. To be consciously anything argues a comparison, a bond with antithesis. Live in your dream, do not attain it—else comes satiety. Or sorrow, which is worse, I wonder? Dr. Mahon and his dream: reft, restored, reft again. Funny for someone, I guess. And Donald, with his scar and his stiffened hand quiet in the warm earth, in the warmth and the dark, where the one cannot hurt him and the other he will not need. No dream for him! The ones with whom he now sleeps don’t care what his face looks like. Per ardua ad astra. … And Jones, what dream is his? “Nightmare, I hope,” she said aloud, viciously, and one collarless and spitting tobacco said Ma’am? with interest.
Gilligan reappeared with her ticket.
“You’re a nice boy, Joe,” she told him, receiving her purse.
He ignored her thanks. “Come on, let’s walk a ways.”
“Will my bags be all right there, do you think?”
“Sure.” He looked about, then beckoned to a negro youth reclining miraculously on a steel cable that angled up to a telephone pole. “Here, son.”
The negro said Suh? without moving. “Git up dar, boy. Dat white man talkin’ to you,” said a companion, squatting on his heels against the wall. The lad rose and a coin spun arcing from Gilligan’s hand.
“Keep your eye on them bags till I come back, will you?”
“Awright, cap’m.” The boy slouched over to the bags and became restfully and easily static beside them, going to sleep immediately, like a horse.
“Damn ’em, they do what you say, but they make you feel so—so—”
“Immature, don’t they?” she suggested.
“That’s it. Like you was a kid or something and that they’d look after you even if you don’t know exactly what you want.”
“You are a funny sort, Joe. And nice. Too nice to waste.”
Her profile was sharp, pallid against a doorway darkly opened. “I’m giving you a chance not to waste me.”
“Come on, let’s walk a bit.” She took his arm and moved slowly along the track, conscious that her ankles were being examined. The two threads of steel ran narrowing and curving away beyond trees. If you could see them as far as you can see, farther than you can see. …
“Huh?” asked Gilligan, walking moodily beside her.
“Look at the spring, Joe. See, in the trees: summer is almost here, Joe.”
“Yes, summer is almost here. Funny, ain’t it? I’m always kind of surprised to find that things get on about the same, spite of us. I guess old nature does too much of a wholesale business to ever be surprised at us, let alone worrying if we ain’t quite the fellows we think we ought to of been.”
Holding his arm, walking a rail: “What kind of fellows do we think we ought to have been, Joe?”
“I don’t know what kind of a fel—I mean girl you think you are and I don’t know what kind of a fellow I think I am, but I know you and I tried to help nature make a good job out of a poor one without having no luck at it.”
Flat leaves cupped each a drop of sunlight and the trees seemed coolly on fire with evening. Here was a wooden footbridge crossing a stream and a footpath mounting a hill. “Let’s sit on the rail of the bridge,” she suggested, guiding him toward it. Before he could help her she had turned her back to the rail and her straightening arms raised her easily. She hooked her heels over a lower rail and he mounted beside her. “Let’s have a cigarette.”
She produced a pack from her handbag and he accepted one, scraping a match. “Who has had any luck in this business?” she asked.
“The loot has.”
“No, he hasn’t. When you are married you are either lucky or unlucky, but when you are dead you aren’t either: you aren’t anything.”
“That’s right. He don’t have to bother about his luck any more. … The padre’s lucky, though.”
“How?”
“Well, if you have hard luck and your hard luck passes away, ain’t you lucky?”
“I don’t know. You are too much for me now, Joe.”
“And how about that girl? Fellow’s got money, I hear, and no particular brains. She’s lucky.”
“Do you think she’s satisfied?” Gilligan gazed at her attentively, not replying. “Think how much fun she could have got out of being so romantically widowed, and so young. I’ll bet she’s cursing her luck this minute.”
He regarded her with admiration. “I always thought I’d like to be a buzzard,” he remarked, “but now I think I’d like to be a woman.”
“Good gracious, Joe. Why in the world?”
“Now, long as you’re being one of them sybils, tell me about this bird Jones. He’s lucky.”
“How lucky?”
“Well, he gets what he wants, don’t he?”
“Not the women he wants.”
“Not exactly. Certainly he don’t get all the women he wants. He has failed twice to my knowledge. But failure don’t seem to worry him. That’s what I mean by lucky.” Their cigarettes arced together into the stream, hissing. “I guess brass gets along about as well as anything else with women.”
“You mean stupidity.”
“No, I don’t. Stupidity. That’s the reason I can’t get the one I want.”
She put her hand on his arm. “You aren’t stupid, Joe. And you aren’t bold, either.”
“Yes, I am. Can you imagine me considering anybody else’s feelings when they’s something I want?”
“I can’t imagine you doing anything without considering someone else’s feelings.”
Offended, he became impersonal. “ ’Course you are entitled to your own opinion. I know I ain’t bold like the man in that story. You remember? accosted a woman on the street and her husband was with her and knocked him down. When he got up, brushing himself off, a man says: ‘For heaven’s sake, friend, do you do that often?’ and the bird says: ‘Sure. Of course I get knocked down occasionally, but you’d be surprised.’ I guess he just charged the beating to overhead,” he finished with his old sardonic humor.
She laughed out. Then she said: “Why don’t you try that, Joe?”
He looked at her quietly for a time. She met his gaze unwavering and he slipped to his feet facing her, putting his arm around her. “What does that mean, Margaret?”
She made no reply and he lifted her down. She put her arms over his shoulders. “You don’t mean anything by it,” he told her quietly, touching her mouth with his. His clasp became lax.
“Not like that, Joe.”
“Not like what?” he asked stupidly. For answer she drew his face down to hers and kissed him with slow fire. Then they knew that after all they were strangers to each other. He hastened to fill an uncomfortable interval. “Does that mean you will?”
“I can’t, Joe,” she answered, standing easily in his arms.
“But why not, Margaret? You never give me any reason.”
She was silent in profile against sunshot green. “If I didn’t like you so much, I wouldn’t tell you. But it’s your name, Joe. Gilligan. I couldn’t marry a man named Gilligan.”
He was really hurt. “I’m sorry,” he said dully. She laid her cheek against his. On the crest of the hill tree trunks were a barred grate beyond which the fires of evening were dying away. “I could change it,” he suggested.
Across the evening came a long sound. “There’s your train,” he said.
She thrust herself slightly from him, to see his face. “Joe, forgive me. I didn’t mean that—”
“That’s all right,” he interrupted, patting her back with awkward gentleness. “Come on, let’s get back.”
The locomotive appeared blackly at the curve, plumed with steam like a sinister squat knight and grew larger without seeming to progress. But it was moving and it roared past the station in its own good time, bearing the puny controller of its destiny like a goggled greasy excrescence in its cab. The train jarred to a stop and an eruption of white-jacketed porters.
She put her arms about him again to the edification of the bystanders. “Joe, I didn’t mean that. But don’t you see, I have been married twice already, with damn little luck either time, and I just haven’t the courage to risk it again. But if I could marry anyone, don’t you know it would be you? Kiss me, Joe.” He complied. “Bless your heart, darling. If I married you you’d be dead in a year, Joe. All the men that marry me die, you know.”
“I’ll take the risk,” he told her.
“But I won’t. I’m too young to bury three husbands.” People got off, passed them, other people got on. And above all like an obligato the vocal competition of cabmen. “Joe, does it really hurt you for me to go?” He looked at her dumbly, “Joe!” she exclaimed, and a party passed them. It was Mr. and Mrs. George Farr: they saw Cecily’s stricken face as she melted graceful and fragile and weeping into her father’s arms. And here was Mr. George Farr morose and thunderous behind her. Ignored.
“What did I tell you?” Mrs. Mahon said, clutching Gilligan’s arm.
“You’re right,” he answered, from his own despair. “It’s a sweet honeymoon he’s had, poor devil.”
The party passed on around the station and she looked at Gilligan again. “Joe, come with me.”
“To a minister?” he asked with resurgent hope.
“No, just as we are. Then when we get fed up all we need do is wish each other luck and go our ways.” He stared at her, shocked. “Damn your Presbyterian soul, Joe. Now you think I’m a bad woman.”
“No I don’t, ma’am. But I can’t do that. …”
“Why not?”
“I dunno: I just can’t.”
“But what difference does it make?”
“Why, none, if it was just your body I wanted. But I want—I want—”
“What do you want, Joe?”
“Hell. Come on, let’s get aboard.”
“You are coming, then?”
“You know I ain’t. You knew you were safe when you said that.”
He picked up her bags. A porter ravished them skilfully from him and he helped her into the car. She sat upon green plush and he removed his hat awkwardly, extending his hand. “Well, goodbye.”
Her face pallid and calm beneath her small white and black hat, above her immaculate collar. She ignored his hand.
“Look at me, Joe. Have I ever told you a lie?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Then don’t you know I am not lying now? I meant what I said. Sit down.”
“No, no. I can’t do it that way. You know I can’t.”
“Yes. I can’t even seduce you, Joe. I’m sorry. I’d like to make you happy for a short time, if I could. But I guess it isn’t in the cards, is it?” She raised her face and he kissed her.
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Joe.”
But why not? he thought with cinders under his feet, why not take her this way? I could persuade her in time, perhaps before we reached Atlanta. He turned and sprang back on board the train. He hadn’t much time and when he saw that her seat was empty he rushed through the car in a mounting excitement. She was not in the next car either.
Have I forgotten which car she is in? he thought. But no, that was where he had left her, for there was the negro youth, still motionless opposite the window. He hurried back to take another look at her place. Yes, there were her bags. He ran, blundering into other passengers, the whole length of the train. She was not there.
She has changed her mind and got off, looking for me, he thought, in an agony of futile endeavor. He slammed open a vestibule and leaped to the ground as the train began to move. Careless of how he must look to the station loungers he leaped toward the waiting room. It was empty, a hurried glance up and down the platform did not discover her and he turned despairing to the moving train.
She must be on it! he thought furiously, cursing himself because he had not stayed on it until she reappeared. For now the train was moving too swiftly and all the vestibules were closed. Then the last car slid smoothly past and he saw her standing on the rear platform where she had gone in order to see him again and where he had not thought of looking for her.
“Margaret!” he cried after the arrogant steel thing, running vainly down the track after it, seeing it smoothly distancing him. “Margaret?” he cried again, stretching his arms to her, to the vocal support of the loungers.
“Whup up a little, mister,” a voice advised. “Ten to one on the train,” a sporting one offered. There were no takers.
He stopped at last, actually weeping with anger and despair, watching her figure, in its dark straight dress and white collar and cuffs, become smaller and smaller with the diminishing train that left behind a derisive whistle blast and a trailing fading vapor like an insult, moving along twin threads of steel out of his sight and his life.
… At last he left the track at right angles and climbed a wire fence into woods where spring becoming languorous with summer turned sweetly nightward, though summer had not quite come.
VI
Deep in a thicket from which the evening was slowly dissolving a thrush sang four liquid notes. Like the shape of her mouth, he thought, feeling the heat of his pain become cool with the cooling of sunset. The small stream murmured busily like a faint incantation and repeated alder shoots leaned over it Narcissus-like. The thrush, disturbed, flashed a modest streak of brown deeper into the woods, and sang again. Mosquitoes spun about him, unresisted: he seemed to get ease from their sharp irritation. Something else to think about.
I could have made up to her. I would make up to her for everything that ever hurt her, so that when she remembered things that once hurt her she’d say: Was this I? If I could just have told her! Only I couldn’t seem to think of what to say. Me, that talks all the time, being stuck for words. … Aimlessly he followed the stream. Soon it ran among violet shadows, among willows and he heard a louder water. Parting the willows he came upon an old millrace and a small lake calmly repeating the calm sky and the opposite dark trees. He saw fish gleaming dully upon the earth, and the buttocks of a man.
“Lost something?” he asked, watching ripples spread from the man’s submerged arm. The other heaved himself to his hands and knees, looking up over his shoulder.
“Dropped my terbaccer,” he replied, in an unemphatic drawl. “Don’t happen to have none on you, do you?”
“Got a cigarette, if that’ll do you any good.” Gilligan offered his pack and the other, squatting back on his heels, took one.
“Much obliged. Feller likes a little smoke once in a while, don’t he?”
“Fellow likes a lot of little things in this world, once in a while.”
The other guffawed, not comprehending, but suspecting a reference to sex. “Well, I ain’t got any o’ that, but I got the next thing to it.” He rose, lean as a hound, and from beneath a willow clump he extracted a gallon jug. With awkward formality he tendered it. “Allers take a mite with me when I go fishing,” he explained. “Seems to make the fish bite more ’n the muskeeters less.”
Gilligan took the jug awkwardly. What in hell did you do with it? “Here, lemme show you,” his host said, relieving him of it. Crooking his first finger through the handle the man raised the jug with a round backhanded sweep to his horizontal upper arm, craning his neck until his mouth met the mouth of the vessel. Gilligan could see his pumping adam’s apple against the pale sky. He lowered the jug and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. “That’s how she’s done,” he said, handing the thing to Gilligan.
Gilligan tried it with inferior success, feeling the stuff chill upon his chin, sopping the front of his waistcoat. But in his throat it was like fire: it seemed to explode pleasantly as soon as it touched his stomach. He lowered the vessel, coughing.
“Good God, what is it?”
The other laughed hoarsely, slapping his thighs. “Never drunk no corn before, hain’t you? But how does she feel inside? Better’n out, don’t she?”
Gilligan admitted that she did. He could feel all his nerves like electric filaments in a bulb: he was conscious of nothing else. Then it became a warmth and an exhilaration. He raised the jug again and did better.
I’ll go to Atlanta tomorrow and find her, catch her before she takes a train out of there, he promised himself. I will find her: she cannot escape me forever. The other drank again and Gilligan lit a cigarette. He too knew a sense of freedom, of being master of his destiny. I’ll go to Atlanta tomorrow, find her, make her marry me, he repeated. Why did I let her go?
But why not tonight? Sure, why not tonight? I can find her! I know I can. Even in New York. Funny I never thought of that before. His legs and arms had no sensation, his cigarette slipped from his nerveless fingers and reaching for the tiny coal he wavered, finding that he could no longer control his body. Hell, I ain’t that drunk, he thought. But he was forced to admit that he was. “Say, what was that stuff, anyway? I can’t hardly stand up.”
The other guffawed again, flattered. “Ain’t she, though? Make her myself, and she’s good. You’ll git used to it, though. Take another.” He drank it like water, with unction.
“Dam’f I do. I got to get to town.”
“Take a little sup. I’ll put you on the road all right.”
If two drinks make me feel this good I’ll scream if I take another, he thought. But his friend insisted and he drank again. “Let’s go,” he said, returning the jug.
The man carrying “her” circled the lake. Gilligan blundered behind him, among cypress knees, in occasional mud. After a time he regained some control over his body and they came to a break in the willows and a road slashed into the red sandy soil.
“Here you be, friend. Jest keep right to the road. ’Tain’t over a mile.”
“All right. Much obliged to you. You’ve sure got a son-of-a-gun of a drink there.”
“She’s all right, ain’t she?” the other agreed.
“Well, good night.” Gilligan extended his hand and the other grasped it formally and limply and pumped it once from a rigid elbow.
“Take keer of yourself.”
“I’ll try to,” Gilligan promised. The other’s gangling malaria-ridden figure faded again among the willows. The road gashed across the land, stretched silent and empty before him, and below the east was a rumorous promise of moonlight. He trod in dust between dark trees like spilled ink upon the pale clear page of the sky, and soon the moon was more than a promise. He saw the rim of it sharpening the tips of trees, saw soon the whole disc, bland as a saucer. Whippoorwills were like lost coins among the trees and one blundered awkwardly from the dust almost under his feet. The whisky died away in the loneliness, soon his temporarily mislaid despair took its place again.
After a while passing beneath crossed skeletoned arms on a pole he crossed the railroad and followed a lane between negro cabins, smelling the intimate odor of negroes. The cabins were dark but from them came soft meaningless laughter and slow unemphatic voices cheerful yet somehow filled with all the old despairs of time and breath.
Under the moon, quavering with the passion of spring and flesh among whitewashed walls papered inwardly with old newspapers, something pagan using the white man’s conventions as it used his clothing, hushed and powerful not knowing its own power:
“Sweet chariot … comin’ fer to ca’y me home. …”
Three young men passed him, shuffling in the dust, aping their own mute shadows in the dusty road, sharp with the passed sweat of labor: “You may be fas’, but you can’t las’; cause yo’ mommer go’ slow you down.”
He trod on with the moon in his face, seeing the cupolaed clock squatting like a benignant god on the courthouse against the sky, staring across the town with four faces. He passed yet more cabins where sweet mellow voices called from door to door. A dog bayed the moon, clear and sorrowful, and a voice cursed it in soft syllables.
“… sweet chariot, comin’ fer to ca’y me home … yes, Jesus, comin’ fer to ca’y me hoooooome. …”
The church loomed a black shadow with a silver roof and he crossed the lawn, passing beneath slumbrous ivied walls. In the garden the mockingbird that lived in the magnolia rippled the silence, and along the moony wall of the rectory, from ledge to ledge, something crawled shapelessly. What in hell, thought Gilligan, seeing it pause at Emmy’s window.
He leaped flower beds swiftly and noiselessly. Here was a convenient gutter and Jones did not hear him until he had almost reached the window to which the other clung. They regarded each other precariously, the one clinging to the window, the other to the gutter.
“What are you trying to do?” Gilligan asked.
“Climb up here a little further and I’ll show you,” Jones told him snarling his yellow teeth.
“Come away from there, fellow.”
“Damn my soul, if here ain’t the squire of dames again. We all hoped you had gone off with that black woman.”
“Are you coming down, or am I coming up there and throw you down?”
“I don’t know: am I? Or are you?”
For reply Gilligan heaved himself up, grasping the window ledge. Jones, clinging, tried to kick him in the face but Gilligan caught his foot, releasing his grasp on the gutter. For a moment they swung like a great pendulum against the side of the house, then Jones’ hold on the window was torn loose and they plunged together into a bed of tulips. Jones was first on his feet and kicking Gilligan in the side he fled. Gilligan sprang after him and overtook him smartly.
This time it was hyacinths. Jones fought like a woman, kicking, clawing, biting, but Gilligan hauled him to his feet and knocked him down. Jones rose again and was felled once more. This time he crawled and grasping Gilligan’s knees pulled him down. Jones kicked himself free and rising fled anew. Gilligan sat up contemplating pursuit, but gave it up as he watched Jones’ unwieldy body leaping away through the moonlight.
Jones doubled the church at a good speed and let himself out at the gate. He saw no pursuit so his pace slackened to a walk. Beneath quiet elms his breath became easier. Branches motionlessly leafed were still against stars, and mopping his face and neck with his handkerchief he walked along a deserted street. At a corner he stopped to dip his handkerchief in a trough for watering horses, bathing his face and hands. The water reduced the pain of the blows he had received and as he paced fatly on from shadow to moonlight and then to shadow again, dogged by his own skulking and shapeless shadow, the calm still night washed his recent tribulation completely from his mind.
From shadowed porches beyond oaks and maples, elms and magnolias, from beyond screening vines starred with motionless pallid blossoms came snatches of hushed talk and sweet broken laughter. … Male and female created He them, young. Jones was young, too. “Yet ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! / That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should close! / The Nightingale that in the Branches sang, / Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows! …” Wish I had a girl tonight, he sighed.
The moon was serene: “Ah, Moon of my Delight, that knows’t no wane, / The Moon of Heav’n is rising once again: / How oft hereafter rising shall she look / Through this same Garden after me—in vain!” But how spring itself is imminent with autumn, with death: “As autumn and the moon of death draw nigh / The sad long days of summer herein lie / And she too warm in sorrow ’neath the trees / Turns to night and weeps, and longs to die.” And in the magic of spring and youth and moonlight Jones raised his clear sentimental tenor.
“Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart.”
His slow shadow blotted out the pen strokes of iron pickets but when he had passed, the pen strokes were still there upon the dark soft grass. Clumps of petunia and cannas broke the smooth stretch of lawn and above the bronze foliage of magnolias the serene columns of a white house rose more beautiful in simplicity than death.
Jones leaned his elbows on a gate, staring at his lumpy shadow at his feet, smelling cape jasmine, hearing a mockingbird somewhere, somewhere. … Jones sighed. It was a sigh of pure ennui.
VII
On the rector’s desk was a letter addressed to Mr. Julian Lowe, ⸻ St., San Francisco, Cal., telling him of her marriage and of her husband’s death. It had been returned by the post office department stamped, “Removed. Present address unknown.”
VIII
Gilligan, sitting in the hyacinth bed, watched Jones’ flight. “He ain’t so bad for a fat one,” he admitted, rising. “Emmy’ll sure have to sleep single tonight.” The mockingbird in the magnolia, as though it had waited for hostilities to cease, sang again.
“What in hell have you got to sing about?” Gilligan shook his fist at the tree. The bird ignored him and he brushed dark earth from his clothes. Anyway, he soliloquized, I feel better. Wish I could have held the bastard, though. He passed from the garden with a last look at the ruined hyacinth bed. The rector, looming, met him at the corner of the house, beneath the hushed slumbrous passion of the silver tree.
“That you, Joe? I thought I heard noises in the garden.”
“You did. I was trying to beat hell out of that fat one, but I couldn’t hold the so—I couldn’t hold him. He lit out.”
“Fighting? My dear boy!”
“It wasn’t no fight; he was too busy getting away. It takes two folks to fight, padre.”
“Fighting doesn’t settle anything, Joe. I’m sorry you resorted to it. Was anyone hurt?”
“No, worse luck,” Gilligan replied ruefully, thinking of his soiled clothes and his abortive vengeance.
“I am glad of that. But boys will fight, eh, Joe? Donald fought in his day.”
“You damn right he did, reverend. I bet he was a son-of-a-gun in his day.”
The rector’s heavy lined face took a flared match, between his cupped hands he sucked at his pipe. He walked slowly in the moonlight across the lawn, toward the gate. Gilligan followed. “I feel restless tonight,” he explained. “Shall we walk a while?”
They paced slowly beneath arched and moon-bitten trees, scuffing their feet in shadows of leaves. Under the moon lights in houses were yellow futilities.
“Well, Joe, things are back to normal again. People come and go, but Emmy and I seem to be like the biblical rocks. What are your plans?”
Gilligan lit a cigarette with ostentatiousness, hiding his embarrassment. “Well, padre, to tell the truth, I ain’t got any. If it’s all the same to you I think I’ll stay on with you a while longer.”
“And welcome, dear boy,” the rector answered heartily. Then he stopped and faced the other, keenly. “God bless you, Joe. Was it on my account you decided to stay?”
Gilligan averted his face guiltily. “Well, padre—”
“Not at all. I won’t have it. You have already done all you can. This is no place for a young man, Joe.”
The rector’s bald forehead and his blobby nose were intersecting planes in the moonlight. His eyes were cavernous. Gilligan knew suddenly all the old sorrows of the race, black or yellow or white, and he found himself telling the rector all about her.
“Tut, tut,” the divine said, “this is bad, Joe.” He lowered himself hugely to the edge of the sidewalk and Gilligan sat beside him. “Circumstance moves in marvellous ways, Joe.”
“I thought you’d a said God, reverend.”
“God is circumstance, Joe. God is in this life. We know nothing about the next. That will take care of itself in good time. ‘The Kingdom of God is in man’s own heart,’ the Book says.”
“Ain’t that a kind of funny doctrine for a parson to get off?”
“Remember, I am an old man, Joe. Too old for bickering or bitterness. We make our own heaven or hell in this world. Who knows; perhaps when we die we may not be required to go anywhere nor do anything at all. That would be heaven.”
“Or other people make our heaven and hell for us.”
The divine put his heavy arm across Gilligan’s shoulder. “You are suffering from disappointment. But this will pass away. The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten. How does it go? ‘Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ No, no,” as Gilligan would have interrupted, “I know that is an unbearable belief, but all truth is unbearable. Do we not both suffer at this moment from the facts of division and death?”
Gilligan knew shame. Bothering him now, me with a fancied disappointment! The rector spoke again. “I think it would be a good idea for you to stay, after all, until you make your future plans. So let’s consider it closed, eh? Suppose we walk further—unless you are tired?”
Gilligan rose in effusive negation. After a while the quiet tree-tunnelled street became a winding road, and leaving the town behind them they descended and then mounted a hill. Cresting the hill beneath the moon, seeing the world breaking away from them into dark, moon-silvered ridges above valleys where mist hung slumbrous, they passed a small house, sleeping among climbing roses. Beyond it an orchard slept the night away in symmetrical rows, squatting and pregnant. “Willard has good fruit,” the divine murmured.
The road dropped on again descending between reddish gashes, and across a level moonlit space, broken by a clump of saplings, came a pure quivering chord of music wordless and far away.
“They are holding services. Negroes,” the rector explained. They walked on in the dust, passing neat tidy houses, dark with slumber. An occasional group of negroes passed them, bearing lighted lanterns that jetted vain little flames futilely into the moonlight. “No one knows why they do that,” the divine replied to Gilligan’s question. “Perhaps it is to light their churches with.”
The singing drew nearer and nearer; at last, crouching among a clump of trees beside the road, they saw the shabby church with its canting travesty of a spire. Within it was a soft glow of kerosene serving only to make the darkness and the heat thicker, making thicker the imminence of sex after harsh labor along the mooned land; and from it welled the crooning submerged passion of the dark race. It was nothing, it was everything; then it swelled to an ecstasy, taking the white man’s words as readily as it took his remote God and made a personal Father of Him.
Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. All the longing of mankind for a Oneness with Something, somewhere. Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. … The rector and Gilligan stood side by side in the dusty road. The road went on under the moon, vaguely dissolving without perspective. Worn-out red-gutted fields were now alternate splashes of soft black and silver; trees had each a silver nimbus, save those moonward from them, which were sharp as bronze.
Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. The voices rose full and soft. There was no organ; no organ was needed as above the harmonic passion of bass and baritone soared a clear soprano of women’s voices like a flight of gold and heavenly birds. They stood together in the dust, the rector in his shapeless black, and Gilligan in his new hard serge, listening, seeing the shabby church become beautiful with mellow longing, passionate and sad. Then the singing died, fading away along the mooned land inevitable with tomorrow and sweat, with sex and death and damnation; and they turned townward under the moon, feeling dust in their shoes.