Home from the Hill (34 page)

Now he saw her head shake, more a shudder than a shake, and saw on her face a look of pained disbelief, saw tears well in her eyes. It amazed him, shamed him, touched him, almost brought tears to his own. “I'm no good, Libby,” he said. “If I ever was, I'm not now. Don't cry. Oh, don't cry! I'm not worth it. I haven't been true to you. I've done things. With other girls. I—”

He had meant to be brusque, thinking that clean wounds heal quickest. Their love, he thought, was dead. He had expected her to have still a tender spot in her heart which she would think was for him, but which in reality was for what she had done for him. But those tears were for him, tears of love, of grief for their love. She did not hate him. She had loved him. Could she still? Could she forgive him, forgive it all, the worst, teach him self-forgiveness? She opened her mouth and could not speak. She was too full of feeling—for him. Then she spoke his name.

“Oh, Libby, forgive me,” he murmured huskily. “Forgive me!”

His eyes filled with tears and her figure swam. But it was as if he had been blind to her till then. All liquid and shimmering, she seemed to float before him, a vision come in answer to his prayers.

Then his sight cleared and he saw that she was looking not at him but past him, and not looking but staring, wide-eyed, aghast.

“Oh,” said Opal, shifting the baby to her other hip. “Excuse me!” He realized then that it was she, not Libby, who had spoken his name. She turned and flounced back into the house, the picture of slighted woman.

He heard a sound, a kind of delicate crash, and turned. At his feet, in splinters, sparkling as if still trembling from the shock of breakage, lay the compact mirror with which today and that first day she had beckoned him out to her. He looked up and faced the pale accusing fullness of her eyes. It took him a moment to comprehend their stunned surmise.

She was not easily convinced. She had once loved him too well to accept, even now, what would have been evidence enough for anyone else. Still hopeful against hope, she searched his eyes, pleading for denial. It was that indestructible trust which now accused him. He remembered that first time she had come here and the difference between then and now. He was guilty of so much, it seemed he had no right to protest being thought guilty of this one thing of which he was not. Under that pale, pure, injured gaze, he faltered, looked down, saw again the glinting splinters of silver, and so let the moment pass when he might have claimed her. He heard her release her breath. When he looked up, she was halfway across the lawn, running.

47

Absorbed in her thoughts, she did not see the car pass. She did not become aware of it until, a few yards beyond, it screeched to a stop.

“Well, as I live and breathe! Libby Halstead! What are you doing home?”

The bright face, though familiar, seemed to materialize out of her distant past. Yet it was just six months since Fred Shumway had sat beside her at commencement and at the baccalaureate sermon, she groaning over, he quite absorbed in, the preacher's old words, which echoed ironically in her memory now: “You young men and women standing on the threshold of life …”

“Oh, Fred. Hello!” she cried. He was the first “outside” person she had seen since coming home. Being a classmate, he had a certain kind of reality for her that others did not have, for it is his contemporaries one has in mind when he worries over what “people” will think. In a fluster of fear and embarrassment she looked down to see if her condition showed. The senselessness of her alarm then further disconcerted her.

“How've you been?” Fred Shumway said. “How you liking school?”

“Oh, very well,” she said. It did not sound very convincing, she feared. “Fine!” she said. At once she regretted her false enthusiasm. She ought to begin with the first person she met spreading her story. “No, that's not so. The truth is, I didn't like it a bit,” she said, and she thought, that was the truth. “I've quit,” she said. “Come home. To stay.” That was the truth, too, she thought. Yes, she had come to stay.

“Found out you were just a home girl after all, did you? Missed the old place, huh?”

She smiled weakly and nodded.

“I thought of leaving,” said Fred. “But it's like the old song says, ‘Be it ever so humble …'” Then in a tone which set out to be boastful, or at least complacent, but into which crept a note of challenge, defiance, he said, “Well, I'm not sorry I stayed.”

“What are you doing now, Fred?” she asked; she could see that he wanted her to.

“Drummer,” he said. “Bought this car,” he added defiantly.

“Oh, it's a very nice car, Fred. I always knew you'd do well.”

Her words caused an expression of shame for his boastfulness and truculence to flicker across his face. “Well, to tell you the truth, it's not all paid for, Libby,” he said. This admission made him feel better. He smiled broadly and said, “But it will be. Can I take you somewhere? Drop you off at your house?”

“Oh, no, thank you, Fred, I—”

“Going right past there anyhow, Libby,” he said. He was not, of course. But he would be disappointed if she did not have a ride in his new car.

“Well, it's very nice of you. If you're quite sure I won't be taking you out of your way.”

“So you didn't like it up there at college,” he repeated after getting through the gears. Apparently the thought pleased him, confirmed him in some feeling of his own, perhaps reassured him that he had not made a mistake in choosing not to go—or rather, comforted him not having had any choice, Libby thought. She did not find his self-complacency offensive. She did not envy him his lack of troubles, but was grateful for the company of someone who had none. His freckled face, which seemed to radiate pleasure in what he had and determination to go after and get what he did not, helped take her mind from her troubles.

The car began to slow, and looking down the street, she saw that they were nearing her house.

“Oh, I don't want to go home!” she cried. It was involuntary, heartfelt.

He turned a startled and puzzled face to her.

She tried to make it seem a gay whimsey. “How can you spend such a day indoors! Drive on past, Fred. I'll get out down the way and go for a walk.”

“Whatever you say,” he said. And then, “Hey! If you haven't got anything better to do why don't you come with me? I'm just going a little ways out in the country to make a few calls. Be back by afternoon. Be a nice ride for you and company for me. What say?”

But that was not what she wanted, either. The sight of home, the thought of spending the day alone in the house with her mother, of being there when her father came in for his lunch, was too much for her. Later she would be able to face it, she told herself—only not today. But neither did she wish to be all day with someone who did not know of her trouble, to have to listen to and make light talk. She shuddered to think what she and Fred had in common for conversation: school memories, things from her days of innocence and ignorance. And suppose Fred were to take it as an invitation to get gallant once they were out in the country. Oh, no.

Yet the thought of home was intolerable.

What decided her were Fred's next words. “I'm afraid I'll have to leave you alone in the car much of the time, while I'm selling fire extinguishers. But the ride'll be nice.”

“Oh, don't mind me,” she said. “All right. I'll come along for the ride.”

They were soon out of town. She looked at the day whizzing past. “November 4th,” she mused. She had a sense that her life was acquiring its calendar of dates, and this gave her a feeling of what a different year each person lived. It gave her a sense of the irrevocability of her life. It was not so much of the irremediability of it, simply the knowledge that it had passed beyond her power of reliving it, of making not so much better as simply other choices and decisions. Now it seemed that the immediate future had already passed into the past. Another day, more easily forecast, was coming round. She had counted, and from that night to May 9th was exactly nine months. Her calendar was filling rapidly. What would her next day be, and what would the date commemorate? And would all her momentous days, she wondered, be so deceptive in appearance as this? For November 4th was an early June day—one of those warm windless days that November in Texas brings, kept over from June under a glass bell of a sky.

“Fire extinguishers?” she said, shaking herself forcibly out of her thoughts.

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Fire extinguishers. I sell them to farmers. They need them, out here where there's no fire departments and no neighbors very close and not much water of their own and that down a cistern so you have to draw it up by the bucket. Well, but I don't have to sell you one, do I? But I began on something else. Lightning rods. On commission. Then when just about every house and barn in the county had lightning protection I got a deal on safes. You know: storage safes. For your valuables. Hah! Valuables! Most of these blacknecks never had two-bits cash money in their lives, but I convinced them that if they ever did have they'd hate like the dickens to have it stolen. Knowing how they'd have to work ever to have, they agreed. Now it's fire extinguishers, and you ought to see—”

“You appeal to their fears of disaster,” she said, and was almost as astonished as he was by her observation and the uncommon words in which she had expressed it.

He laughed uneasily. “Well, I hadn't thought of it that way,” he said. “I guess you're right. That's the way with these farmers, though—won't spend a nickel on pleasures, only to keep off … disasters.” He used the word uncomfortably, but apparently feared making her feel even more than she must already the oddity of her using it if he avoided it. “They all got four on a mule, but you could sell them a horseshoe for luck, I bet,” he said.

“You could, I'll bet,” she said.

“Watch,” he said. They were approaching a farmhouse. He stopped the car. He got out his little suitcase from the back seat. “You watch,” he said.

The house sat on the edge of the road. A woman answered Fred's knock and gave a thoughtless kick to the cur that was molesting his leg. “I don't want none. Whatever it is I got three of them already. Want to buy one of mine?” she said. Like all farm women, she was glad of a caller, glad to interrupt her housework, to see a face, have a few words. Fred, who also liked to talk, found this both pleasant and profitable.

He said, “Fine! I don't hardly have enough to go around as it is,” and made to depart. He fell easily into the country accent and phrases; he knew their kind of humor.

“Fire extinguishers!” she exclaimed. “Lord, what next! Well, I haven't got no fire.”

“And let us hope you never do,” said Fred. “But—”

The woman had seen her at once; Libby could feel her searching, sidelong glance. Now, raising her voice as Fred bent to rummage in his little satchel, the woman said, “That your wife?”

Fred straightened in surprise and cast a quick glance at Libby. He laughed and began to shake his head. Then, the second thoughts he was having evident upon his face, he said, “Yes.” Astonished for a moment, Libby then realized that he was shielding her reputation, and the terrible sarcasm of his chivalrous little lie brought a lump into her throat.

“How long you been married?” said the woman, then without waiting for an answer, “You got yourself a beauty! Local girl, ain't she? Ain't I seen her in town? I wouldn't forget such a pretty face as that. Ask her to step out. Yawl come in and I'll make coffee.”

Fred said, “Well, that's mighty nice of you, but I … we really don't have time today.”

“Only take a minute. I do love the sight of a young bride!”

“Some other time,” said Fred. “She's not feeling very good today.”

Again the truth of his considerate little fib was bitter. For she was not feeling well. For the last half hour, for the last ten miles over the bumpy back roads, the nausea had been coming on. With each bump her stomach heaved.

“I hope you're not mad … insulted,” he said. “I thought the best thing—”

“Don't apologize,” she said. “It was thoughtful of you.”

His eyes were off the road: they hit a bump: her stomach turned over. He was worried about his car, but would have died sooner than let it be seen that he babied it. He did not reduce speed. They hit another bump.

“I think I'm going to be sick. You'd better stop the car, Fred.”

She did not want his help, but she hadn't the strength to refuse it. She was mortified. Then she was too sick to feel any delicacy and found that she needed his help. Then she was mortified once again. She supposed he was shocked, disgusted. She saw that she was wrong. He had helped her, nursed her, and it flattered him, aroused in him that old male fatuity, made him sentimental over the mysterious frailty of women, their helplessness, their dependence on the stronger sex. He carried a gallon thermos of water in the back seat—“It was a long ways between drinks on these back-country roads sometimes”—and he soaked his handkerchief and bathed her forehead. With the first touch of the cold water she felt restored. But it would have been cruel to deny him the pleasure of being helpful. Besides, fussily absorbed in his ministrations, he left her free to think. Not that she wished to think; her thoughts plunged her in misery. But she could not talk. She had suddenly become conscious of the complications, or perhaps it was of the stark simplicity, of her predicament. His solicitude reminded her of Theron. Or rather, it did not. It reminded her that he should have been Theron. She burst into sobs.

“Just senseless,” she said between gasps. “You know how girls are.”

He liked to be told that he did.

It was not her first attack. But the others, before today, had had their compensation in hope. This spell left behind it, bitterer than the aftertaste of bile, a new and sickening consideration. She had felt bodily fear before, dread of the pain, but it had promised its own reward. Then she had had her lover to dedicate it to. She had no one now but
it
. So far today she had not thought much about
it
. She had thought of herself, of her unhappiness—and with a pitiful little remnant of self-affection, of how pretty and popular she had been only a short time back. Now she thought of the baby, and the hideous word
bastard
made its first appearance in her thoughts.