Eleven
In the middle of the afternoon he went out and looked at the river again. It was the third time that day, and now he stood by the old ford where he and Sewell had kept their rowboat tied up and stood watching it with a strange uneasiness. It was too high for this time of year.
There had been no rain for nearly a week and it should have been dropping toward midsummer level and clearing, but instead it was higher than it had been during the rain and had risen another inch since noon. He stood watching it slip past, silt-laden and flecked with foam, critically assaying the amount and size of drift it was carrying. It was still rising, all right.
He had seen it do that twice in his life, keep coming up when there had been no rain, raised by heavy downpours somewhere far upriver, and the last time had been seven years ago when it had almost flooded the bottom fields, the year Sewell had gone away.
He turned and went back out toward the field and looked up at the sky when he got out of the timber. There was something disquieting and strangely uneasy about the whole day. It was too still, for one thing, and sultry, with an oppressive deadness about the air that worried him. It reminded him of the tense and foreboding hush that falls over a group of men when there is about to be a fight. But there were no clouds. The sky was clear and it was perfectly normal weather for late June except for the oppressive stillness.
He was plowing out the middles. Yesterday, he had finished with the cultivator and the field looked much better than it had. He looked with satisfaction at the grass dying in the hot sun. May save it now, he thought. There’s still a lot of grass in the rows that couldn’t be out except by hoeing it again, and it’ll be hard to but it’ll make some cotton. Unless it rains some more, or that river gets on a tear. It ain’t nothing to worry about unless it gets up a lot more than it is now, but somehow I just don’t like the looks of it.
* * *
Up at the house Cass was asleep, with the radio turned off for a short spell to rest the batteries, and Joy was walking up and down in the stifling, dead heat of the bedroom, running her fingers through her hair and pausing now and then to dab at her eyes with a handkerchief.
“I—I just don’t know what to do, Jessie,” she said. “It scares me. I guess it’s silly to get scared now, but I just don’t know what to do. Suppose he does it again?”
Jessie sat on the bed and looked at her sister-in-law with her eyes large and worried. “But, Joy,” she protested unhappily, “he wouldn’t. I just can’t think he’d do a thing like that, even once. Not Mitch.”
“I know, honey,” Joy went on agonizingly. “That’s the awful part of it. That’s the reason I didn’t want to say anything about it. He’s your brother, and I know you think the world of him. I wouldn’t have said anything about it for anything in the world, because I knew how unhappy it would make you. But since you practically caught him at it, there wasn’t any way I could keep you from knowing any longer. If you hadn’t come out there just then, when I was lying there on the ground where I’d fallen, there’s no telling what might have happened. He heard you, and that scared him, I guess.
“I never did say anything about the other times and I wouldn’t have this time because, like I said, you’re so young and he’s your brother, but since you saw it, or part of it—well, you just couldn’t help knowing about it any longer. I tried to get away from him, and I always had been able to before, but this time I tripped when I moved back, and fell. Oh, it was awful.
“It isn’t that I blame him so much, Jessie. You have to learn to make allowances for men. They can’t help being like that, I guess. And when a girl is pretty . . . I guess I still am, a little bit anyway, even if I am getting old and don’t look like I used to. But what I mean is you can’t blame them so much. But still, his own sister-in-law. I mean, I am married to Sewell, and poor Sewell is in such trouble. But please don’t misunderstand me, honey. I’m not mad about it or anything, it’s just that it scares me somehow. What am I going to do, Jessie? What am I going to do?”
She threw herself on her own bed, across from Jessie’s, and put her hands up alongside her face with her fingers reaching up into the golden disarray of her hair, but she was unable to sit still for more than a few seconds and got up and started walking up and down again. Oh, the ugly, stupid, mean-faced sonofabitch, she thought. I could tear his eyes out. I could kill him. Oh, God, I hate him so much it makes my stomach turn over to think about it and I get sick. I’ll throw up right here on the floor if I don’t stop thinking about it. I’ve got to stop. It was almost two days ago and I haven’t stopped thinking about it one minute since then, and I’m going out of my mind. I’m beginning to look like some blowzy old bag who’s been drunk for a week, with my hair a mess and still full of sand and my eyes red from lying awake and from crying, and I can’t eat anything because my stomach turns wrong side out every time I see him and it’s all I can do to sit down at the table without wanting to pick up everything on it and throw it in his face and beat on it, and beat, and beat, and beat.
The thing that kills me is that I wouldn’t have had him for a door prize. I wouldn’t have had him on a bet. You couldn’t have given him to me. No woman in her right mind would even look at him, the ugly, skinny, sweaty, dirty, mean-faced, ignorant bastard with whiskers all over his face and that hideous butter-colored hair stuck down to his head with sweat and those hard little eyes pushed way back in his head like a couple of cold pieces of rock, and he thinks I wanted him. That I did! Oh, my God! And he shoved me.
“Try not to think about it, Joy,” Jessie said, feeling sick at heart. How could Mitch? How could he do such an awful thing? It just wasn’t like Mitch. But still, she had seen it with her own eyes, seen Joy lying there with her head in the sand where she had fallen.
”I am trying not to, honey,” Joy said. “I don’t like to cause a lot of fuss over something that probably isn’t anything, really. I mean, lots of girls have had to fight off men who lose their heads like that. I’ve had to do it before myself, but never— I mean—Well, you know, my own brother-in-law.”
She broke off and smiled wanly at Jessie. “I don’t want you to think I’m such a baby, honey,” she added.
“I don’t, Joy. I think you’re wonderful. And I’ll give that Mitch a piece of my mind he won’t forget.”
“Oh, no, honey,” Joy broke in piteously. “No, don’t do that, whatever you do. Don’t ever mention it to anybody. I wouldn’t ever want to think I’d caused any hard feelings between you and Mitch. I know how much you think of each other, and I know how much Mitch adores you. I couldn’t stand it if I thought I’d done that.”
She’s so sweet, Jessie thought. I hope I can be like that when I grow up. She’s so sort of brave, like women in the movies. I don’t know how Mitch could have done an awful thing like that.
Joy stopped at the window and stood looking out into the yard. “I ought to leave, honey,” she said sadly. “That’s what I ought to do. After all, this is Mitch’s home and I don’t belong here, and if there’s going to be trouble like that I should go. I would, too, even though I’d hate to leave you, we’ve been such good friends and it’s all been so nice except—except, well, for that. Only, there’s something I haven’t told you.”
She turned back from the window, her eyes shining with tears. “I haven’t got any money left, honey. I would have gone except for that. I gave all I had left to poor Sewell, to buy tobacco with, and magazines, and things he’d need up—up there.” Her chin quivered and her face threatened to break up into helpless crying, but she recovered herself bravely and went on.
“I didn’t want to tell you that because it’s so—so humiliating being dependent, sort of, even though I know you don’t mind.”
“Don’t mind! Joy, what a thing to say! You know we love having you here,” Jessie broke in, outraged.
Joy smiled at her bravely. “I know you do, honey. That all of you do. And I don’t think that it had anything to do with Mitch doing—well, you know. I mean, I don’t think he really intended to take advantage of the fact that I was kind of dependent on you. I hope not, don’t you, dear? But what I meant to say was that I wrote to a friend of mine who lives in Houston, a girl named Dorothy who is a model in one of the big stores. We used to work together as models. Anyway, I wrote to her yesterday and asked her if she would lend me some money so I could come down there and look for a job. If the money comes I’ll go, but that may be several days, because I just mailed it yesterday.
“Until it comes, if it does, maybe we’d better kind of stick together, I mean when he’s around. With the two of us together he won’t be so apt to—well, be carried away like that. I mean, you’re his sister, honey, and he has too much respect for you to try anything like that in front of you. I’m sure he has. Nearly any man would. Oh, honey, I hate to be such a big baby, but I’m so scared. It wouldn’t be so much, by itself, but what with not having any money and being sort of dependent, and worrying about Sewell and wondering where he is . . .”
* * *
Mitch came up from the barn at dusk. Jessie was putting supper on the table, and as he sat down she glanced at him distantly and said nothing.
“What’ve we got, Jessie?” he asked. “I’m hungry.”
“Why don’t you look?” she asked coldly, putting a plate in front of Joy.
Now what’s eating her? Mitch thought, and then forgot about it while his mind went back to the river. It had still been rising a little when he knocked off in the field at sundown.
“Still ain’t no news about Sewell,” Cass said, after he had hobbled painfully in from the front room.
“Poor Sewell,” Joy said sadly. “It’s so tragic.”
She picked a hell of a time to find out how tragic it is about poor Sewell, Mitch thought. Where’s she been the past three years?
”You and Sewell were always very close, weren’t you, Mitch? I mean, before he went away. You must think about him a lot.” She smiled wanly at him, and he saw Jessie look toward him once and then quickly away.
It must have just come over her all at once, like something out of the sky, that everything ain’t just exactly all right with Sewell, he thought. Well, better late than never, I reckon. But what the hell’s the matter with Jessie?
When he had finished eating, he went out into the darkness of the yard to smoke a cigarette, and suddenly heard the far-off rumble of thunder in the west. The air was still and oppressively hot, like that in a tightly closed room with the windows sealed. God, he thought, not with that river already up like it is now.
Jessie was starting to wash the dishes. Joy went over and looked in the water bucket and saw with inner satisfaction that it was almost empty. “I’ll get some more water, Jessie,” she said helpfully. “You’ll need some more for rinsing.”
Jessie shook her head. “No, you leave it alone, Joy,” she said. “Mitch will bring some.”
“Oh, I want to help,” Joy said, going toward the door.
Jessie looked at her anxiously, nodding toward the yard. But Joy smiled, shook her head deprecatingly, and went on.
Mitch had his back turned and was looking out over the bottom as she went down toward the well. She drew up a bucket and filled the cedar water pail and started back, walking slowly and watching him standing there just beyond the light streaming from the kitchen door.
He saw her. “Here, I’ll take that,” he said gruffly. If she wanted to do something, why didn’t she help Jessie with the dishes?
“It’s all right, Mitch,” she said, and then suddenly set the water down and bent forward, holding a hand on her back just above the hip.
“What is it?” he asked, stepping quickly to her side.
“I—I think just a catch in my back,” she said faintly, still bent over as if in pain.”Can you stand up?” he asked. He took hold o￡ her arm.
She cried out sharply, the sound cutting across the night, and swayed as if she would fall. He caught her, and as they were blended into one figure in the edge of the light for an instant she could see Jessie standing in the door, drawn by her outcry. She pushed him back violently with her hands, scooped up the bucket, and ran toward the door.