For three days and nights Zilphia sat beside the bed where the gaunt, manlike woman … the moustaches were heavier now and grizzled faintly … lay rigid, the covers drawn to her chin and her eyes closed. Thus it was that Zilphia could never tell if her mother slept or not. Sometimes she could tell by the breathing, then she would search carefully and infinitesimally among the bed clothing for the keys. On the third day she found them. She dressed and left the house.
The inside of the shop was half finished, reeking of turpentine. She opened the window and took her old chair beside it. When she heard his feet at last on the stairs she found that she was sewing, without any recollection of what the garment was or when she had taken it up. With the needle in her hand she sat looking up at him, blinking a little behind the glasses until he removed them.
“I knowed, once them glasses was off,” he said. “I kept looking for you and looking for you. And when she come in here and I was working I could hear her on the steps a long time, a step at a time then stop, until she was in the door yonder, holding to the door and sweating like a nigger. Even after she had done fainted she wouldn’t let go and faint.
She just laid there on the floor sweating and sweating and counting the money out of her purse and telling me to be out of town by sundown.” He stood beside the chair, holding the glasses in his hand. She watched the dark rim of paint under his nails, smelling his odor of turpentine. “I’ll get you out of it. That old woman. That terrible old woman. She’ll kill you yet. I know she is crazy now.
I’ve heard. How she’s done you. I’ve talked to folks. When they told me where you lived at I’d walk past the house. I could feel her watching me. Like she was watching me through the window. No hiding; just standing there looking at me and waiting. One night I come into the yard. After midnight it was.
The house was dark and I could feel her standing there, looking at the dark where I was and waiting. Watching me like when she fainted that day and wouldn’t faint until I was out of town. She just laid there on the floor sweating, with her eyes shut, telling me to leave the job like it was and be out of town by night.
But I’ll get you out of it. Tonight. Now. Not ever again any more.” He stood above her. The dusk was thickening; the final swirl of sparrows swept across the square and into the locust trees about the courthouse. “All the time I was watching you I kept thinking about you wearing glasses, because I used to say I wouldn’t never want a woman that wore glasses.
Then one day you looked at me and all of a sudden I was seeing you without the glasses. It was like the glasses was gone and I knew then that, soon as I saw you once without them, it wouldn’t matter to me if you wore glasses or not.…”
They were married by a justice of the peace in the courthouse. Then Zilphia began to hang back.
“No,” he said; “don’t you see, if you go back now, if you risk her seeing you now.…”
“I’ve got to,” Zilphia said.
“What has she ever done for you? What do you owe her? That terrible old woman. Don’t you see, if we risk going there.… Come on, Zilphy. You belong to me now. You said to the judge you would do like I say, Zilphy. Now we are away, if we go back now.…”
“I’ve got to. She’s my mother. I’ve got to.”
It was full twilight when they entered the gate and went up the walk. She slowed, her hand trembled cold in his. “Don’t leave me!” she said. “Don’t leave me!”
“I won’t ever leave you if you won’t ever leave me. But we ought not to … Come on. It’s time yet. I ain’t scared for me. It’s for you. Zilphy.…” They looked toward the house. Mrs. Gant, dressed, in the black shawl and bonnet, stood in the door with the shotgun.
“Zilphy,” she said.
“Don’t go,” he said. “Zilphy.”
“You, Zilphy,” Mrs. Gant said without raising her voice.
“Zilphy,” he said. “If you go in there … Zilphy.”
Zilphia went on and mounted the steps. She moved stiffly. She seemed to have shrunk into herself, collapsing from inside, to have lost height, become awkward.
“Go in the house,” Mrs. Gant said, without turning her head. Zilphia went on. “Go on,” Mrs. Gant said. “Shut the door.” Zilphia entered and turned, beginning to close the door. She saw four or five people halted along the fence, looking back. “Shut it,” Mrs. Gant said. Zilphia shut the door carefully, fumbling a little at the knob. The house was still; in the cramped hall the shadows of the twilight loomed like a herd of motionless elephants. She could hear her heart faintly, but no other sound, no sound from beyond the door which she had closed upon her husband’s face. She never saw it again.
For the next two days and nights he lay hidden without food in a vacant house across the street. Mrs. Gant locked the door, but instead of going back to bed she seated herself, fully dressed save for the oil cloth apron and the needles, in a chair at the front window, the shotgun leaning at her hand. For three days she sat there, rigid, erect, her eyes closed, sweating slowly. On the third day the painter quitted the vacant house and left town. That night Mrs. Gant died, erect and fully dressed in the chair.
IV
For the first six months she believed that he would hear about it and return for her. She set six months to the day. “He will come before then,” she said. “He will have to come before then, because I am being true to him;” now that she was free she dared not even put into thinking the reasons why she should wait for him. For that reason she left the shop half finished, as he had left it, for a symbol of fidelity. “I have been faithful to you,” she said.
The day came and passed. She saw it accomplish, quietly. “Now,” she said, “that’s finished. Thank God. Thank God.” She realized how terrible the waiting and believing had been, the having to believe. Nothing was worth that. “Nothing,” she said, crying quietly in the dark, feeling tranquil and sad, like a little girl at the spurious funeral of a doll; “nothing.”
She had the painting completed.
At first the odor of turpentine was terrible to her. It seemed to obliterate time as it had the stains of twenty-five years on the walls. Her life seemed to elongate, like rubber: from one time she seemed to see her hands prolonged into another one, fitting and pinning. Then she could think peacefully, since beyond the safe ritual of her fingers Zilphia Gant and her husband were like dolls, furious and tragic but quite dead.
The shop was doing well. Within a year she had a partner, but she lived alone in the house. She took three or four newspapers, thinking that she might some day see his name in print. After a while she was writing guarded significant letters to agony columns, mentioning incidents which only he could recognize. She began to read all the wedding notices, substituting her name for the bride’s and his for that of the groom. Then she would undress and go to bed.
She would have to be careful about getting into sleep. She was much more careful about that than about getting into her clothes. But even then she sometimes slipped. Then she would lie in the dark, the mock orange bush beyond the window filling the silence with its faintest suggestion of turpentine, beginning to toss lightly from side to side like a surf getting up.
She would think about Christ, whispering “Mary did it without a man. She did it;” or, rousing, furious, her hands clenched at her sides, the covers flung back and her opened thighs tossing, she would violate her ineradicable virginity again and again with something evoked out of the darkness immemorial and philoprogenitive: “I will conceive! I’ll make myself conceive!”
One evening she opened the paper and began to read of a wedding in a neighboring state. She made the name substitutions as usual and had already turned the page when she realised that she was smelling turpentine. Then she realized that she had not had to make any substitution for the groom’s name.
She cut the story out. The next day she went to Memphis for two days. A week later she began to receive weekly letters bearing the return address of a private detective agency. She stopped reading the papers; her subscriptions lapsed. Every night she dreamed of the painter. His back was toward her now; only by his elbows could she read the familiar action of the pot and brush. There was someone beyond him in the dream whom she could not see, hidden by that back which was less of man’s than goat’s.
She grew plumper, a flabby plumpness in the wrong places. Her eyes behind the shell-rimmed glasses were a muddy olive, faintly protuberant. Her partner said that she was not hygienically over-fastidious. People called her
