Ten
Cass had left the supper table. Jessie sat down with a plate of peas and some corn bread and went through the motions of eating, paying less and less attention to the food until at last she stopped altogether without even knowing it. It was dark outside now but still very hot in the kitchen. A gray moth fluttered its death dance about the lamp chimney, making a rustling sound with its wings, and down in the bottom they could hear the whippoorwills beginning to call. Mitch looked up from his plate to see Joy watching him.
“How are you getting along with the plowing, Mitch?” she asked.
“Oh. All right,” he said, surprised. It was the first time she had ever asked about the crop, or indicated she even knew they had one. She had on a dress with some kind of big bowknots on the shoulders that came up under the golden waterfall of her hair and made her look like a movie actress or a girl on the cover of a magazine.
“Do you think you’ll get caught up with it?” she asked. She leaned her elbows on the oilcloth and put her chin on her hands and watched him with flattering attention.
“If it don’t rain no more, maybe,” he said. She was very beautiful to look at whether he liked her or not, and he felt the anger in him now that she could disturb him.
“Isn’t he going to help you any more?” Jessie asked.
“I don’t know,” Mitch said. He would never ask help of a man who needed asking.
“Has he really got rheumatism, or is it just the radio that cripples him up?” Joy asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered shortly.
He did know, or was reasonably sure he did, but felt it was a family matter and none of her business. Cass was nothing any more but the wreckage of a man, but he did not want to talk about it to an outsider.
“Well, it’s not fair,” Jessie protested.
”Don’t make no difference,” Mitch shrugged. “All I want is clear weather. I can handle it if it don’t rain no more.”
“What if it starts in again?” Joy asked.
“We’ll lose it,” he said curtly. He didn’t like to think about the rain’s starling again.
Jessie began to scrape up the dishes. He got up and went outside to smoke a cigarette, hoping it would be a little cooler in the yard. Before Cass had brought home the radio he would go sit on the front porch at night for a smoke before going to bed, but now he would not go near it. The sound of the radio’s incessant jabbering came through the open front window and the door and there was no escape from it on the porch. The thought of Sewell was hard enough to bear without hearing the whole brutal mess turned into a circus for the hundreds of thousands who had nothing better to do than listen like ghouls for the sordid and shameful end of a man who could have been something different. And the thought of Cass in there in the dark keeping his macabre vigil before the idiot mouthings of the detested box and waiting along with all the others for the inevitable destruction of his son was a thing to be avoided, and he kept away from it.
He wandered down by the barn and leaned against the rails of the mule lot. There was no moon, but the sky was aflame with stars and he could make out the faintly sway-backed silhouette of Julie standing beyond him by the gate and the solid black mass of Jack lying in the dust where he had rolled. The other two were inside the barn and he could hear the sibilant rasping of their muzzles against the bottom of the feed trough as they searched out random grains of corn left over from their feeding, and when one of them kicked the ground he could hear the thudding impact across the night.
He finished the cigarette and dropped it, grinding out the red coal in the dirt with the toe of his shoe. There was the sound of soft footsteps on the sand behind him and he turned, thinking it was Jessie. The figure was taller than Jessie’s, though, and in the starlight he could see the faintly gleaming cascade of soft blonde hair.
“Is that you, Mitch?” she asked softly. “I thought I saw a cigarette.”
“Yes,” he said. Why couldn’t she stay in the house where she belonged?
“I think I can see you now. My eyes are getting used to the dark.” She came toward him and put out a hand, feeling for the rails of the fence. The hand brushed gently along his arm. “Oh. There you are. I didn’t mean to bump into you.”
He said nothing. She leaned against the rail. “It’s so hot in the house.”
“It ain’t very cool anywhere,” he said.
“It’s a little better out here, though. Don’t you think? And it’s such a beautiful night. I want to look at the stars. Do you know the name of any of them, Milch?”
“No. Only the North Star.”
“Do you know how to locate it? I never can remember.”
“You sight along the two pointers on the Big Dipper.”
“Isn’t it silly? I can’t even find that. Will you point it out for me, Mitch?”
She was standing very near, and he could smell the faint fragrance of the perfume she used. There was a tight band pulling across his chest and he knew if he tried to talk his voice would be thick and unnatural. He said nothing, and swung an arm toward the north, pointing just above the dark line of the trees around the clearing.
“I don’t see it,” she said. “I can’t see where you’re pointing. But wait, Mitch. I’ll sight along your arm.”
She moved in very close to him, with the top of her head just under his chin, and turned her face the way he was pointing. One hand came up and rested lightly on his shoulder to steady herself. Stray tendrils of hair brushed against his throat. Then she tilted her head back and looked up at him with her eyes very wide and the stars reflected in them.
“Why don’t you like me, Mitch?” she asked softly.
Blood roared in his ears, the way it did when he held his breath too long, swimming underwater, and the weight on his chest was choking him. All the hard ache of all the womanless nights boiled down to a concentration of agony on a pin point of time, this brief and exploding moment out of all time and beyond which nothing mattered. He would have to move his arms so little to possess the end of torment, the sweet and silken oblivion, the dark, wild ecstasy, and at last relief. His arms hurt and his hands were heavy as he moved them. They shook as he put them on her waist, and he could feel the smoothness of her there just beyond the flimsy cloth. He brought them on up with a rush, placed them against her shoulders, and shoved. She shot backward, tripped over a high heel in the sand, and fell sprawling with a pale flash of bare arms and legs in the starlight.
Dry air burned in his throat and his mouth tasted coppery as he stood breathing heavily and looking down at her.
“Can’t you even wait till they kill him?” he asked savagely. Then he turned and walked down the black trail beyond the barn, not knowing or caring which way he went.
She lay crumpled on her side like a long-stemmed and wilted flower with her hair and the side of her face in the dirt. Her dress had flown up about her waist when she fell and she could feel the gritty abrasiveness of sand under her sprawled bare legs, and when she clenched her mouth tightly shut to keep from screaming she could taste the sand and hear the gritty sound of it between her teeth. She rolled her head from side to side in a sickening agony of rage and shame and humiliation, and she put her hand up against her mouth and bit it until she tasted blood while she gave birth to the second great passion of her life. The first had always been love of herself, and the second was hatred of Mitch Neely.