Big City Girl (15 page)

It made her feel so wonderful and at the same time so sort of sad. It was tragic about Sewell because she knew he was dying, but everybody had seen it and the touching gesture of his love for her was even snapped into the picture now where she would always have it.

It gave back to her the feeling of being wanted and admired and would drive away for years that terror of her nights, the agonizing hell of doubt and the fear of glowing old and ugly that came to taunt her in the darkness. There was a great uplifting of her spirit, and she didn’t even hate Mitch any more. Yes, I do, she thought, looking at him; nothing could rub that out, but it just doesn’t matter so much now.

She looked at Jessie standing by the door with the box under her arm. I don’t want to take her with me, she thought. What business have I got with a kid like that? I don’t want to be bothered with her; she’d just be in my way. And I couldn’t just go off and leave her somewhere—I guess I’m not bitch enough for that, am I? I’ll tell her. I’ll tell her she can’t go.

Nobody had said anything for a minute. They could hear the car coming quite plainly now, running down the sandy road through the pines just above the yard. It sounded as if there were two cars, and they knew one of them would be the ambulance.

Mitch sat on his heels staring bleakly out at the rain. There ain’t nothing I can do now, he thought. They’ll be gone in a few minutes. I tried, but it was too much for me. I can’t stop it now.

Joy started to get up, but Lambeth motioned to her. “Just one more,” he said. “That’s probably the ambulance now, and we’ve just time tor one more before they get here.”

“All right.” Joy assented graciously.

She had been looking at the four people on the other end of the porch, and now she started to turn her face back and downward toward Sewell. There was a slight movement of the edge of the quilt. Mitch saw it, and Shaw, and even Jessie, before she did, but there was nothing they could do. It was too late.

She bent down and turned her head, and then she was looking into the cold eyes and the round, black, awful end of the gun. Time stopped and all sound ceased, and there was nothing anywhere except Sewell slowly raising himself up on the mattress with his back against the upright post at the edge of the porch, his face sweating with agony but as pitiless as death itself.

“Reach your hand in my coat pocket, baby,” he said softly. “Harve sent you a present.”

She opened her mouth, but no sound came out of it. Mitch and Shaw started to get up to leap toward them, but the gun swung and the cold eyes stopped them where they were. They hung, half crouched and hardly daring to breathe. Jessie’s face was still with horror as she stood there by the door. All of them except Joy could hear the cars coming, very near now and about to turn into the yard.

“Go on,” he said again. “In my pocket. Harve didn’t need it no more, so I brought it back to you.”

No. Joy could feel her mouth forming the word, but there was no word. No! No! No! was a pressure growing greater and more terrible inside her and straining outward toward the vacuum of silence waiting to receive it, trying to escape through that invisible barrier in her throat beyond which nothing would pass.

“Go on, baby. See what your boy friend sent you. Harve, the one-handed joker.”

It was a nightmare across which she moved without volition. Her hand was going into the coat pocket. There was nothing she could do to stop it. It came out holding the photograph and the four people beyond her saw it as they waited, frozen and utterly without motion, while the ambulance and the sheriff’s car turned into the yard.

Sewell could feel the blackness coming for him again, and fought it back. All of them were beginning to swim before his eyes like water going around and around in a great dark eddy on the surface of a river as he tried to steady the gun. Mitch turned his head silently, staring. Men were getting out of the sheriff’s car, men with guns under their coats. They don’t know, he thought. They don’t know. They’ll never get here in time to stop him He came to his feet, springing up and forward.

She was looking down at the picture in her hand with that awful feeling of her mouth going wider and wider without sound. Her eyes shifted and the muzzle of the gun was a black tunnel toward which she was walking in the nightmare, a tunnel that grew larger and then, as she ran into it, suddenly filled with light—a huge, bursting circle of light without end.

Mitch reached her as she wilted and fell forward across Sewell like a gold-petaled flower cut down by the scythe. Sewell was swinging outward into darkness again toward that dark beach and that brief period of time in which he had been happy with this girl now lying dead across his chest in a terrible and irrevocable wedding of the only two things he had ever loved: this same beautiful, lost, unhappy girl, and violence.

Jessie had screamed and then turned to run back down the hall toward the bedroom. Mitch stood on the edge of the porch, an island of immobility, helpless, numb, and lost, in the swirling river of motion going across the porch and into the yard.

The sheriff was cursing, monotonously and with a kind of helpless bitterness. “Not a goddamned one of the whole dumbheaded bunch of idiots with brains enough to look to see if he had a gun. You must have thought he was some Sunday-school kid playing hookey from school. This girl’d have been alive now if any one of you’d had sense enough to come in out of the rain.”

They were putting Joy’s body into the ambulance and then coming back for Sewell. The young doctor squatted beside the mattress, and when he looked up and saw Mitch’s eyes on him he gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head and looked away.

”You got all the pics you need?” Shaw was asking Lambeth. “Let’s roll. My God! Did you ever see anything like it?”

“Shut up,” Lambeth said tonelessly, stowing the camera in its case. Did I kill her? he thought. Was it Harve? Did Neely do it, or was he just the weapon, the instrument, the actual hand on the gun? Was it all of us. each in his way, or if you went back far enough could you say she did it herself? When we get started, I’ll finish that bottle. This is one time I need it.

And then, suddenly, they were all gone. The yard was empty except for the team, standing dejectedly in the diminishing drizzle of the rain. Cass had gone running across the yard and pushed his way into the front seat of the departing ambulance, oblivious of restraint and crying out his unvarying and frenzied lamentation, “I’m his daddy. I found my boy, and I got to take him in.” When the ambulance shot out of the yard he was seated beside the driver, staring straight ahead through the windshield and holding onto the dripping and grotesque hat. The other car, with the sheriff and his two deputies, was right behind it, and in a moment Shaw and Lambeth got into (heir car and left.

Mitch squatted on his heels, staring out into the yard. He’ll be dead before they get to town with him, he thought. I saw that doctor shake his head, and he knew that I knew it. He killed her, and that was all he was holding on for, I reckon, ever since he found out she was up here. All the good the old man did with his crying and taking on was to get that girl killed. God knows, I never had much use for her, but it was an awful thing to happen.

The picture had been forgotten in all the excitement, and now he saw it lying upside down on the edge of the quilt, Reaching out a hand, he turned it over, looked at it  a minute, then turned it back. This is what killed her, he thought. It ain’t nothing but just a picture of her without no clothes on, like them artists’ models, but it killed her. I reckon that deputy had it on him and Sewell found it. And now I got to tell Jessie. I’d rather die right here on the porch, I reckon, than do it. First she lost Sewell, and then Mexico, and now she figures I ain’t no good, so Joy was about all the people she had left. She thought Joy was the only thing there was. It don’t make so much difference, now that Joy’s dead and she can’t go away with her, but still I got to tell her.

I’ve always taken care of her ever since I can remember, and I got to go on doing it until she’s old enough to get married. And I can’t do it if she’s going to go on hating me for whatever she thinks I did to Joy. She’d run away. I just got to do it.

He picked up the picture and put it in his pocket, then got up and went slowly down the hall. It was growing darker inside the house now, and he realized it was almost twilight and he hadn’t been back to the bottom to see if the levee still held. After a while, he thought. Maybe that’s gone too.

He went reluctantly into the bedroom and stood looking down at her. She was lying on the bed with her face to the wall, making no sound of any kind. He knew she was not crying.

“Jessie,” he said quietly, standing still beside the bed and dripping water out of his clothing onto the floor.

She said nothing, and gave no indication she had heard him.

“It ain’t no use to feel so bad about it, Jessie,” he said. “It couldn’t be helped.”

She still made no answer, lying there with her face to the wall as if he were not even in the room. He stood looking at her helplessly, full of pity for her and not knowing what to do. He pulled the picture out of his pocket and looked at it, wanting to cry out, “Look, Jessie, she wasn’t worth anything. She wasn’t worth feeling bad about,” but he could not, and in a minute he went out of the room. I can’t do it, he thought. No matter what she thinks, I can’t do it. He tore the picture up and threw it into the firebox of the stove, then went down the trail toward the bottom.

The river was falling now. It had gone down nearly six inches, and the levee had held. Well, I saved that, anyway. he thought. But I reckon it don’t make much difference now. He stood there for a minute, looking out over the muddy field. Yes, it does too. It always does. You can’t just give up.

It was growing dark as he went back up the hill, and the rain had stopped. As he passed the barn he heard someone moving around inside and talking to the mules, and suddenly he remembered the team forgotten in the front yard.

“Who’s that?” he called out.

“It’s just me.” Prentiss Jimerson came out, looking at him a little uneasily. “I reckon you ain’t still sore at me, are you, Mitch?”

He stopped. “Sore at you? What for?” It must have been years since he had even seen Prentiss.

“You know—about Sewell, on the radio. You got mad at me.”

“Oh,” he said, suddenly remembering. “No. Of course not. It don’t matter now.”

“I saw the team out there, and thought maybe I’d unhitch and feed the stock for you. What with the trouble and all . . .”

Mitch stood still for a moment in the gathering darkness. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks, Prentiss. You had any supper yet?”

“Well, no. I was just on my way home.”

“We’ll see if we can fix something. Did you see Jessie?”

“Just for a minute.” Prentiss stopped, and then went on with an awkward and embarrassed tenderness in his voice, “She’s all tore up about it, Mitch.”

“Yes,” Mitch said. “I know.” They went into the kitchen. Jessie had the lamps lighted and was starting to build a fire in the cookstove. She was putting paper into the firebox and stopped suddenly, reaching into it for the scraps of the picture. Mitch watched her holding them in her hand, and when she looked up and met his gaze he shook his head.

“It ain’t nothing, Jessie,” he said. “Burn it.”

She shook her head slowly and went on fitting the four pieces loosely together in the palm of her left hand. Then, abruptly, she changed her mind and dropped them back into the firebox with an infinite and defeated weariness and put a match to the paper.

Mitch looked at her, so small and beaten there in the lamplight, and felt the twisting of pity inside him. “Don’t take it so hard, Jessie,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”

Then, for the first time, she spoke. “She never had a chance! Nobody ever gave her a chance!” she cried out brokenly. “Sewell didn’t. And you— I hope you feel the way you ought to, after the things you did to her!”

“I didn’t, Jessie! I tell you, I didn’t do anything to her. Maybe she said I did, but you never did ask me!”

“Oh, stop it! When she’s dead now and can’t say anything—”

Mitch stopped, realizing the futility of it. Even if Jessie would believe him, it wasn’t a thing he would want to do.

They ate supper in silence, both the men watching Jessie anxiously but leaving her alone. Cass had not returned.

When Prentiss got up to leave, Mitch asked, “Where’s Cal?”

Prentiss looked embarrassed. “Why, at home, I reckon.”

“You tell him I want to see him.”

“All right,” Prentiss said hesitantly. “I’ll tell him.”

Mitch saw the doubt in his face. “I ain’t going to do anything. I just want to tell him something.”

“All right.”

After Jessie had gone to bed he walked the twelve miles to town in the dark. Sewell had died on the way to town, they said at the hospital, but they let him go in for a minute. Sewell’s face was very white except for the large brown freckles, and it looked peaceful and still now with all the violence gone. After a while he went back out and sat on the courthouse steps all night smoking cigarettes and waiting for morning to find out about claiming the body for burial.

Nobody seemed to know what had become of Cass.

On the clay hillside, drying now and baking in the sun, they lowered the crude box into the ground. Jessie turned away as the first clods fell with their hollow sound, and walked silently through the small scattering of neighbors and the idly curious who had gathered for the funeral.

Mitch swung around and followed her, still-backed and austere in his clean, faded overalls, and helped her climb into the wagon. She said nothing, nor did he as lie climbed up and took the lines. If she’d just cry, he thought. If she’d only cry, it would help her.

Joy’s family had come from Louisiana to claim her body. Sewell’s funeral was done now, and Cass had not come. Maybe he didn’t know, Mitch thought. Wherever he is, maybe he didn’t hear about it.

He gathered up the lines and prepared to shake the sad-eared and drowsing mules awake when Cal Jimerson walked over from the gathering.

“Maybe Jessie’d like to ride back with us in the car, Mitch,” he said. “It’s a long ride in the wagon.”

Mitch turned to her. “You want to, Jessie?”

She shook her head. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “But thanks, Cal. It was nice of you.”

“Thanks for offering,” Mitch said. He continued to look down at Cal with his eyes stern, but said nothing.

The other’s face began to redden under the scrutiny, “I hear you wanted to see me about something,” he said lamely, with a touch of defiance in his voice.

“That’s right,” Mitch said. “This ain’t the place for it, but I’ll tell you anyway.”

“All right,” Cal said uncomfortably. “Let’s have it.”

“Don’t you ever come on my place again when you’re drunk. You boys are always welcome, but I ain’t going to have any prowling around when you’re tanked up coming home from a dance. The next time you pull somebody out of a window it might be me.”

Cal shifted his feet with embarrassment and his face grew darker. “I reckon I just had a little too much. It happens to people.”

“Well, it’s past and done. I ain’t going to write no book about it. I just wanted it understood, then we’ll drop it.”

Cal looked up. “O.K., Mitch,” he said. “It was too bad about Sewell.”

“Yes,” Mitch said. “But that’s past and done too.”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll see you.” Mitch gathered up the lines.

The mules leaned forward and the wheels turned, cutting the drying clay. Jessie sat very quietly beside him as they swung past the little church and started out toward the road.

“Mitch.”

He turned. “What is it, Jessie?” She’s growing up fast, he thought. She looks like a woman now, with her hair combed like that and wearing her Sunday dress.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. And then the dam broke and all of it let go in her at once. He put the lines down in the wagon bed under his foot and held her while she cried. The mules swung out on the road and started toward home without guidance, forgotten while he supported the small, shaking body with his arm until all the storm had passed.

She straightened up after a while and he held out the clean bandanna. “Here, Jessie,” he said gruffly, feeling the constriction in his throat and all the old inarticulate and thorn-protected love for her he would never be able to express in words. I reckon she knows, though, he thought.

“I—I guess I believed it, Mitch,” she said hesitantly, “I don’t know why.”

“It’s all right, Jessie. It don’t make no difference now.”

She was silent for a moment. “Why do you suppose she did it? Why, Mitch?”

“I don’t know. But she’s dead now. Let’s don’t talk about it.”

Her shoulders shook just once more, while she twisted the handkerchief helplessly in her hands and cried out the ending of the whole chapter of Joy, “But she
was
nice, Mitch! I know better than you do. She tried awful hard. But she never did have a chance!”

Mitch said nothing. Maybe she’s right, he thought. I guess I don’t know nothing about ‘em. I was worried about Jessie going off with her, but I reckon actually it wouldn’t have made no difference. Jessie was more growed up when she was twelve, I reckon, than Joy was when she died.

The Jimersons went past, waving, and then the car stopped up ahead. Prentiss got out and they went on. When the wagon came up to where he was waiting beside the road, Mitch stopped the team and looked down at him. The youth was wearing his Sunday suit for the funeral, and now he looked up with the brown eyes slightly abashed as usual.

“You mind if I ride back with you, Mitch? I’d kind of like to ride in the wagon.”

Mitch looked at him gravely. I reckon she is growing up, he thought.

“Sure,” he said. “Go on around and climb in. I reckon we can make room, can’t we, Jessie?”

Cass had not come home. He had run across the yard that tragic afternoon and pushed his way into the departing ambulance and then had disappeared. The funeral had come and gone without the man who had cried out so, piteously in his grief, and now, two days after the funeral, he still had not returned. When Mitch had gone to claim Sewell’s body for burial, he had asked, but no one seemed to know anything about him. Yes, they said, he had come in to town in the ambulance, but as to where he was now, they couldn’t say. Each time, the question had met with a puzzled glance and a quick changing of the subject, as if the person asked had not understood or did not want to say.

Mitch and Jessie sat on the front porch in the early evening resting after supper and watching the shadows thicken into dusk among the pines. Mitch had been cutting wood all day, waiting for the fields to dry out enough for plowing. The river was back to normal now, but it would be several days before he could do any work in the bottom.

“Where do you suppose he is, Mitch?” Jessie asked.

Mitch threw the cigarette into the yard. “I don’t know, Jessie,” he began, then stopped, listening. There was an automobile coming down off the hill, and the sound of it was different from that of the Jimerson car.

Without a word between them, they both began to know then. They watched with growing horror as it came into the yard and stopped and Cass got out, grinning at them with a sort of lost and foolish happiness. It was an old Buick, a four-door sedan with one crumpled and ironed-out fender, but polished all over until it gleamed and by far the largest and most impressive of all the secondhand cars he had ever brought home.

“Ain’t she a beauty, Mitch?” he asked with childlike pride. “Got good rubber, too, the man said. Right new tires all around.” He kicked one of them and looked at Mitch and Jessie happily.

Jessie was staring at him as if she were going to be ill. Mitch touched her arm. “Wait,” he said. “Don’t say nothing.”

It ain’t that simple this time, he thought. It ain’t like all the land he sold to buy them other seven cars, or when he sold Mexico to buy the radio. It looks almost the same, them five days it would take him to get it squared around in his mind till it would be all right and the only thing to do, but it probably wasn’t that. It probably took him the five days to collect the money. God knows where he had to go to get it.

Cass went back around to the driver’s side and blew the horn. “Listen to that, Mitch. Got a nice sound, ain’t it? And you ought to hear her growl when she gets in the sand. Got more power’n a truck.”

We could leave, Mitch thought. I could take Jessie and we could go somewhere else, and I reckon we could get along, but what would become of him? No, we couldn’t ever leave him; he’s living in another world, but he’s got to get his meals in this one. I guess we wouldn’t want to, anyhow. This is home, what there’s left of it, and all you can do is hang tight and keep on trying.

Cass took a last loving look at the car and came up on the porch with his vacant and happy grin. Jessie drew aside as he passed.

“Why don’t you take a ride in her, Mitch? You and Jessie. Take a little spin up the road and try her out.”

He stopped then, the childish pride of possession slowly fading from his face as he gazed at the window of his room. Somewhere he had lost the monstrous and insane hat, and he looked like a forlorn and blankly staring doll in the gathering dusk.

“I got to listen to the news,” he said. “Ain’t heard nothing in some time.” He walked to the window, bent over like a folding rule, and stepped through it into his room.

“Mitch, how could he?” Jessie asked in whispered anguish. “How
could
he?”

Mitch was silent for a minute. “I don’t think he really did, Jessie,” he said. “I think he won it on the radio.”

It was just a prize they gave away in that game he was listening to, he thought. At least, that’s as near as I can figure it. God knows, it might have been better the other way, if he had deliberately sold Sewell for the reward the way he sold all the land and Mexico. I don’t think, the way it is, he even knows that Sewell’s dead. Not all the time, anyway.

He looked across the yard, seeing all the times in years ahead when he would hear the shout, and turn, waiting patiently in the endless furrow through cotton yet unborn while the same lost figure stumbled down the hill through the ever deepening and unvarying furrow of its own with the frozen arm outstretched and pointing toward the river. “It’s Sewell! It’s Sewell, Mitch! Just come over the radio!”

Well, he thought, it ain’t no use to run. If running did you any good, he wouldn’t be there himself.