I went on and saw my customers and had dinner, and in the afternoon I went to Stevens’ office. “I see you’ve got a new barber in town,” I said.
“Yes,” Stevens said. He looked at me a while, then he said, “You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?” I said. Then he quit looking at me.
“I got your letter,” he said, “that Hawkshaw had paid off the mortgage and painted the house. Tell me about it.”
So I told him how I got to Division the day after Hawkshaw had left. They were talking about him on the porch of the store, wondering just when those Alabama Starnes would come in. He had painted the house himself, and he had cleaned up the two graves; I dont reckon he wanted to disturb Starnes by cleaning his. I went up to see them. He had even scrubbed the headstones, and he had set out an apple shoot over the girl’s grave.
It was in bloom, and what with the folks all talking about him, I got curious too, to see the inside of that house. The storekeeper had the key, and he said he reckoned it would be all right with Hawkshaw.
It was clean inside as a hospital. The stove was polished and the woodbox filled. The storekeeper told me Hawkshaw did that every year, filled the woodbox before he left. “Those Alabama kinsfolk will appreciate that,” I said. We went on back to the parlor. There was a melodeon in the corner, and a lamp and a Bible on the table.
The lamp was clean, the bowl empty and clean too; you couldn’t even smell oil on it. That wedding license was framed, hanging above the mantel like a picture. It was dated April 4, 1905.
“Here’s where he keeps that mortgage record,” the storekeeper (his name is Bidwell) said. He went to the table and opened the Bible. The front page was the births and deaths, two columns. The girl’s name was Sophie. I found her name in the birth column, and on the death side it was next to the last one. Mrs Starnes had written it. It looked like it might have taken her ten minutes to write it down. It looked like this:
Sofy starnes Dide april 16 th 1905
Hawkshaw wrote the last one himself; it was neat and well written, like a bookkeeper’s hand:
Mrs Will Starnes. April 23, 1916.
“The record will be in the back,” Bidwell said.
We turned to the back. It was there, in a neat column, in Hawkshaw’s hand. It began with April 16, 1917, $200.00. The next one was when he made the next payment at the bank: April 16, 1918, $200.00; and April 16, 1919, $200.00; and April 16, 1920, $200.00; and on to the last one: April 16, 1930, $200.00. Then he had totaled the column and written under it:
“Paid in full. April 16, 1930.”
It looked like a sentence written in a copy book in the old-time business colleges, like it had flourished, the pen had, in spite of him. It didn’t look like it was written boastful; it just flourished somehow, the end of it, like it had run out of the pen somehow before he could stop it.
“So he did what he promised her he would,” Stevens said.
“That’s what I told Bidwell,” I said.
Stevens went on like he wasn’t listening to me much.
“So the old lady could rest quiet. I guess that’s what the pen was trying to say when it ran away from him: that now she could lie quiet. And he’s not much over forty-five. Not so much anyway. Not so much but what, when he wrote ‘Paid in full’ under that column, time and despair rushed as slow and dark under him as under any garlanded boy or crownless and crestless girl.”
“Only the girl went bad on him,” I said. “Forty-five’s pretty late to set out to find another. He’ll be fifty-five at least by then.”
Stevens looked at me then. “I didn’t think you had heard,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “That is, I looked in the barber shop when I passed. But I knew he would be gone. I knew all the time he would move on, once he had that mortgage cleared. Maybe he never knew about the girl, anyway. Or likely he knew and didn’t care.”
“You think he didn’t know about her?”
“I dont see how he could have helped it. But I dont know. What do you think?”
“I dont know. I dont think I want to know. I know something so much better than that.”
“What’s that?” I said. He was looking at me. “You keep on telling me I haven’t heard the news. What is it I haven’t heard?”
“About the girl,” Stevens said. He looked at me.
“On the night Hawkshaw came back from his last vacation, they were married. He took her with him this time.”
The End
