Nineteen
“Ain’t you going to do anything? Anything a-tall?” Cass cried out piteously.
“Yes,” Mitch replied, still speaking quietly. “I’m going to keep on piling dirt on this levee. You see that water over there?” He pointed with the shovel. Just three or four inches below the top of the levee in places now, it waited, poised, straining, and heavy, the dark surface of it quiet except for the dimpling of the rain. “You know what’s going to happen to that cotton back there if it goes out?”
“Cotton?” Cass repeated blankly. “Cotton? Don’t you understand, Mitch? Ain’t I telling you? Sewell’s shot. Won’t you listen? He’s shot. In the river.”
As he swung his head to look at the cotton whose existence he did not even recognize, water sprayed off the brim of the old greenish-black hat. Reaching up, he removed it and took it in his two hands and began wringing it out as naturally and as unconsciously as some pixie-like old crone of a charwoman wringing out a mop. A discolored stream of water sprayed across his feet.
He began to cry, still twisting the hat. In a moment he unwound it and put a hand inside the crown to open it up again, and then placed it, misshapen and crosswise, upon his head. Mitch heard the sudden gurgle of water and turned to see a small stream gushing from another gopher hole in the levee. Snatching at the shovel handle, he leaped toward it and began throwing dirt across onto the front face of it until it stopped.
Cass bounded after him, bandy-legged, weeping, importunate. “I been bereft,” he cried. “I been berefted by everybody. One of my boys is killed in the river and the other one’s so hardhearted he don’t even care. It’s a judgment. It’s a judgment on me.”
Mitch stopped the fury of his shoveling and turned, a savage impatience in his face, and started to lash out at him to go on back to the house, but he bit the words off and his expression softened as he looked at the hopeless ruin of the man, the futile eyes wet with tears and the faded doll’s face, too weak even for tragedy, lost, hopeless, uncomprehending, under the grotesquely comic misshapen hat. It’s all mixed up for him, he thought. It should have stayed on the radio. As long as it was all on the radio, it was a Sewell Neely game and they gave five hundred dollars to whoever guessed the answer, but now part of it’s got away from him and it’s his own boy that’s lying on the bottom of the river, or at least part of the time it is, and he don’t know what to do about it.
“You go on back to the house, Dad,” he said gently. “Just listen to the radio and wait. That’s all you can do. I’ve got to get to work.”
“It’s the sin of the world,” Cass cried out. “Hard-heartedness is the sin of the world.” He turned away and started to run, going toward the river. One hand came up to clasp the brim of the obscenely comic hat as if a sudden gale had sprung up and he had to hold onto this last of his earthly possessions to keep it from blowing away. Discovering after a dozen bounds that he was going in the wrong direction, he stopped and wheeled about, and then came back, charging past Mitch, unseeing, oblivious, head bent forward as if into a gale and still holding onto the hat. Then he was gone, running up the hill into the edge of the timber, going toward the house.
Mitch looked after him for a moment, then bent to the shovel again.
Noon came and went with the sodden drumming of rain while he fought the rising water with the shovel like some lost soul before the fuel piles of hell. He stopped endless gopher holes and built up all the low places, and then started across building the whole levee higher. When he had gone the full length of it he started back again, still piling up more dirt. Now and then he would stop for a moment to catch his breath and stare bleakly at the water, still rising, but more slowly now beyond the levee. His fingers would be stiff and curved into the form of the shovel handle and would ache when he straightened them. And whenever he paused like this, even for a few seconds, his eyes, after sweeping across the threatening and precariously held wall of water beyond him, would start to swing outward toward the river while his mind turned uncontrollably to the picture of Sewell lying somewhere on its bottom with his face in the mud and the flood rolling over him. It ain’t going to do no good to cry about it, he would think, and I can maybe do some good here. He would tear himself away from it and go back to the endless scoop, lift, and swing of the shovel.
After a while the searchers came down the hill and passed him, going into the bottom, two at first, then one, and later on two more, white-hatted, black-slickered, carrying rifles in the crooks of their arms, and he cursed them bitterly and went on with the work. They would ask the same unvarying, inevitable, and stupid questions and listen without violence—knowing who he was—while he cursed them. He could think of no reason for his bitterness and the bleak-faced tirade of curses other than that they were looking for the dead body of his brother, either for the five-hundred-dollar reward or because they were officers of the law and paid to do it. Maybe, he thought, I’m going crazy too.
Possibly, though, it was because at last they were men, like himself, and capable of accepting and returning violence on a reciprocal plane no higher and no lower than his own, and he wanted to fight them if they would. He had been struggling too long, infuriated, raging, and impotent, against the unconquerable and the intangible, trying to come to grips with and defend himself against an unbeatable and overwhelming river, a half-demented old man, and a bitch.
In the dismal rain of afternoon the straining levee held, while the water grew and waited.
* * *
For no other reason than that you went on living until you had to die, you went on walking until you had to fall for the last time. There was no sense to it; it was utterly without reason. A thousand miles back the world consisted of nausea and retching sickness, unnumbered incalculable millions of identical wet, black, pain-distorted tree trunks, a knee-deep highway of leaf-surfaced unmoving dirty water, and the eternal gray dreariness of rain, and a thousand miles ahead it would be exactly the same. You could fall for the last time here in this spot, or you could stagger on through this agonized and unvarying hell for another mile, and the difference in distance and time would be no more discernible here than the same mile and the same elapsed period of time measured, after you dropped, against all infinity and eternity.
Some critical and still lucid portion of Sewell’s mind examined this phenomenon with curiosity. I was born and raised in this bottom, he thought, and I lived in it for twenty-one years, fishing for catfish and white perch and hunting coons in it, and I know every bit of it, but now it all looks the same. Maybe I’m already dead and don’t know it. Maybe this is hell and I’ll see Harve again and can wait here for Joy. Maybe it’s just that everything looks funny now because of the poison, or the pain. I never knew pin oaks and white oaks to look like that before, all the same and all black, and swollen up like that.
Here’s your picture, I’d have said, Harve don’t need it no more, and maybe when you think about it I reckon he never did because what do you need the picture for if you’ve got the bitch it was took of? It’s too bad you won’t be around long enough to give it to somebody else, which was Harve’s trouble too, but anyway, when they come in here after you begin to stink, and find it stuck in your mouth like that, they can pass it around and show it to their friends, if they got friends. And they ought to have lots of friends, with a picture like that. I guess you made a lot of ‘em with it, and got made by ‘em, till you run into Harve’s trouble. Anyway, you still got both hands, and a picture in your mouth, which is more than Harve’s got.
What the hell am I muttering about? he thought, his mind becoming clear again. I sound like some high-school punk telling what he’d have done if he’d caught up with the other guy. I didn’t find her. I had a whole week and I didn’t find her, so why go on about it? Forget it. Maybe I’d like to have a boat to go down the river in, one of them shiny glassed-in ones like I used to see in Galveston with a guy in a white coat going around serving drinks. I got as much chance of that as I have now of finding her, so why don’t I wish for it too?
The hand and the wrist were badly swollen and darkened now, and he supposed the whole arm was too, but there was no way he could tell inside the coat sleeve. The arm was very painful, and would bend only with difficulty, and it seemed to be swelling out against the sleeve like an inflated inner tube inside a tire. The left arm was growing stiff from the flesh wound through the muscle of the forearm, and the shock had worn off now, leaving it excruciatingly painful. Periodically, the awful chills would sweep over him and leave him drenched in a cold and clammy perspiration, while his heart fluttered like a bird’s. But it was the falling that was worst. Suddenly and without warning he would find the whole river bottom tilting on end and flying up at him like the opening of a cellar door, and he would be wallowing in the muddy and leaf-congested water struggling to rise. After a passage of time that he was never able even to estimate, he would be back on his feet and staggering on. There’ll be one of ‘em pretty soon, he thought, when I won’t get up.
Then he was on the beach at Galveston again with Joy, on their honeymoon, when she still thought he was a big-shot gambler and not a cheap purveyor of hired and professional violence. He would feel the great sea wind blowing and hear the booming of the surf at night, with his face in the fragrant loveliness of her hair.
I wonder if I’ve passed the farm yet, he thought. I seem to be on that side of the river and it’s funny I wouldn’t have recognized it if I’d gone by. Well, it don’t make no difference. I wouldn’t stop there.
Here’s your picture. And this other thing’s a gun. You ought to recognize a gun, but maybe you never saw that end of one before.