VI
Deep in a thicket from which the evening was slowly dissolving a thrush sang four liquid notes. Like the shape of her mouth, he thought, feeling the heat of his pain become cool with the cooling of sunset. The small stream murmured busily like a faint incantation and repeated alder shoots leaned over it Narcissus-like. The thrush, disturbed, flashed a modest streak of brown deeper into the woods, and sang again. Mosquitoes spun about him, unresisted: he seemed to get ease from their sharp irritation. Something else to think about.
I could have made up to her. I would make up to her for everything that ever hurt her, so that when she remembered things that once hurt her she’d say: Was this I? If I could just have told her! Only I couldn’t seem to think of what to say. Me, that talks all the time, being stuck for words. … Aimlessly he followed the stream. Soon it ran among violet shadows, among willows and he heard a louder water. Parting the willows he came upon an old millrace and a small lake calmly repeating the calm sky and the opposite dark trees. He saw fish gleaming dully upon the earth, and the buttocks of a man.
“Lost something?” he asked, watching ripples spread from the man’s submerged arm. The other heaved himself to his hands and knees, looking up over his shoulder.
“Dropped my terbaccer,” he replied, in an unemphatic drawl. “Don’t happen to have none on you, do you?”
“Got a cigarette, if that’ll do you any good.” Gilligan offered his pack and the other, squatting back on his heels, took one.
“Much obliged. Feller likes a little smoke once in a while, don’t he?”
“Fellow likes a lot of little things in this world, once in a while.”
The other guffawed, not comprehending, but suspecting a reference to sex. “Well, I ain’t got any o’ that, but I got the next thing to it.” He rose, lean as a hound, and from beneath a willow clump he extracted a gallon jug. With awkward formality he tendered it. “Allers take a mite with me when I go fishing,” he explained. “Seems to make the fish bite more ’n the muskeeters less.”
Gilligan took the jug awkwardly. What in hell did you do with it? “Here, lemme show you,” his host said, relieving him of it. Crooking his first finger through the handle the man raised the jug with a round backhanded sweep to his horizontal upper arm, craning his neck until his mouth met the mouth of the vessel. Gilligan could see his pumping adam’s apple against the pale sky. He lowered the jug and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. “That’s how she’s done,” he said, handing the thing to Gilligan.
Gilligan tried it with inferior success, feeling the stuff chill upon his chin, sopping the front of his waistcoat. But in his throat it was like fire: it seemed to explode pleasantly as soon as it touched his stomach. He lowered the vessel, coughing.
“Good God, what is it?”
The other laughed hoarsely, slapping his thighs. “Never drunk no corn before, hain’t you? But how does she feel inside? Better’n out, don’t she?”
Gilligan admitted that she did. He could feel all his nerves like electric filaments in a bulb: he was conscious of nothing else. Then it became a warmth and an exhilaration. He raised the jug again and did better.
I’ll go to Atlanta tomorrow and find her, catch her before she takes a train out of there, he promised himself. I will find her: she cannot escape me forever. The other drank again and Gilligan lit a cigarette. He too knew a sense of freedom, of being master of his destiny. I’ll go to Atlanta tomorrow, find her, make her marry me, he repeated. Why did I let her go?
But why not tonight? Sure, why not tonight? I can find her! I know I can. Even in New York. Funny I never thought of that before. His legs and arms had no sensation, his cigarette slipped from his nerveless fingers and reaching for the tiny coal he wavered, finding that he could no longer control his body. Hell, I ain’t that drunk, he thought. But he was forced to admit that he was. “Say, what was that stuff, anyway? I can’t hardly stand up.”
The other guffawed again, flattered. “Ain’t she, though? Make her myself, and she’s good. You’ll git used to it, though. Take another.” He drank it like water, with unction.
“Dam’f I do. I got to get to town.”
“Take a little sup. I’ll put you on the road all right.”
If two drinks make me feel this good I’ll scream if I take another, he thought. But his friend insisted and he drank again. “Let’s go,” he said, returning the jug.
The man carrying “her” circled the lake. Gilligan blundered behind him, among cypress knees, in occasional mud. After a time he regained some control over his body and they came to a break in the willows and a road slashed into the red sandy soil.
“Here you be, friend. Jest keep right to the road. ’Tain’t over a mile.”
“All right. Much obliged to you. You’ve sure got a son-of-a-gun of a drink there.”
“She’s all right, ain’t she?” the other agreed.
“Well, good night.” Gilligan extended his hand and the other grasped it formally and limply and pumped it once from a rigid elbow.
“Take keer of yourself.”
“I’ll try to,” Gilligan promised. The other’s gangling malaria-ridden figure faded again among the willows. The road gashed across the land, stretched silent and empty before him, and below the east was a rumorous promise of moonlight. He trod in dust between dark trees like spilled ink upon the pale clear page of the sky, and soon the moon was more than a promise. He saw the rim of it sharpening the tips of trees, saw soon the whole disc, bland as a saucer. Whippoorwills were like lost coins among the trees and one blundered awkwardly from the dust almost under his feet. The whisky died away in the loneliness, soon his temporarily mislaid despair took its place again.
After a while passing beneath crossed skeletoned arms on a pole he crossed the railroad and followed a lane between negro cabins, smelling the intimate odor of negroes. The cabins were dark but from them came soft meaningless laughter and slow unemphatic voices cheerful yet somehow filled with all the old despairs of time and breath.
Under the moon, quavering with the passion of spring and flesh among whitewashed walls papered inwardly with old newspapers, something pagan using the white man’s conventions as it used his clothing, hushed and powerful not knowing its own power:
“Sweet chariot … comin’ fer to ca’y me home. …”
Three young men passed him, shuffling in the dust, aping their own mute shadows in the dusty road, sharp with the passed sweat of labor: “You may be fas’, but you can’t las’; cause yo’ mommer go’ slow you down.”
He trod on with the moon in his face, seeing the cupolaed clock squatting like a benignant god on the courthouse against the sky, staring across the town with four faces. He passed yet more cabins where sweet mellow voices called from door to door. A dog bayed the moon, clear and sorrowful, and a voice cursed it in soft syllables.
“… sweet chariot, comin’ fer to ca’y me home … yes, Jesus, comin’ fer to ca’y me hoooooome. …”
The church loomed a black shadow with a silver roof and he crossed the lawn, passing beneath slumbrous ivied walls. In the garden the mockingbird that lived in the magnolia rippled the silence, and along the moony wall of the rectory, from ledge to ledge, something crawled shapelessly. What in hell, thought Gilligan, seeing it pause at Emmy’s window.
He leaped flower beds swiftly and noiselessly. Here was a convenient gutter and Jones did not hear him until he had almost reached the window to which the other clung. They regarded each other precariously, the one clinging to the window, the other to the gutter.
“What are you trying to do?” Gilligan asked.
“Climb up here a little further and I’ll show you,” Jones told him snarling his yellow teeth.
“Come away from there, fellow.”
“Damn my soul, if here ain’t the squire of dames again. We all hoped you had gone off with that black woman.”
“Are you coming down, or am I coming up there and throw you down?”
“I don’t know: am I? Or are you?”
For reply Gilligan heaved himself up, grasping the window ledge. Jones, clinging, tried to kick him in the face but Gilligan caught his foot, releasing his grasp on the gutter. For a moment they swung like a great pendulum against the side of the house, then Jones’ hold on the window was torn loose and they plunged together into a bed of tulips. Jones was first on his feet and kicking Gilligan in the side he fled. Gilligan sprang after him and overtook him smartly.
This time it was hyacinths. Jones fought like a woman, kicking, clawing, biting, but Gilligan hauled him to his feet and knocked him down. Jones rose again and was felled once more. This time he crawled and grasping Gilligan’s knees pulled him down. Jones kicked himself free and rising fled anew. Gilligan sat up contemplating pursuit, but gave it up as he watched Jones’ unwieldy body leaping away through the moonlight.
Jones doubled the church at a good speed and let himself out at the gate. He saw no pursuit so his pace slackened to a walk. Beneath quiet elms his breath became easier. Branches motionlessly leafed were still against stars, and mopping his face and neck with his handkerchief he walked along a deserted street. At a corner he stopped to dip his handkerchief in a trough for watering horses, bathing his face and hands. The water reduced the pain of the blows he had received and as he paced fatly on from shadow to moonlight and then to shadow again, dogged by his own skulking and shapeless shadow, the calm still night washed his recent tribulation completely from his mind.
From shadowed porches beyond oaks and maples, elms and magnolias, from beyond screening vines starred with motionless pallid blossoms came snatches of hushed talk and sweet broken laughter. … Male and female created He them, young. Jones was young, too. “Yet ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! / That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should close! / The Nightingale that in the Branches sang, / Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows! …” Wish I had a girl tonight, he sighed.
The moon was serene: “Ah, Moon of my Delight, that knows’t no wane, / The Moon of Heav’n is rising once again: / How oft hereafter rising shall she look / Through this same Garden after me—in vain!” But how spring itself is imminent with autumn, with death: “As autumn and the moon of death draw nigh / The sad long days of summer herein lie / And she too warm in sorrow ’neath the trees / Turns to night and weeps, and longs to die.” And in the magic of spring and youth and moonlight Jones raised his clear sentimental tenor.
“Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart.”
His slow shadow blotted out the pen strokes of iron pickets but when he had passed, the pen strokes were still there upon the dark soft grass. Clumps of petunia and cannas broke the smooth stretch of lawn and above the bronze foliage of magnolias the serene columns of a white house rose more beautiful in simplicity than death.
Jones leaned his elbows on a gate, staring at his lumpy shadow at his feet, smelling cape jasmine, hearing a mockingbird somewhere, somewhere. … Jones sighed. It was a sigh of pure ennui.