The woman turned, the fork in her hand. “You bastard,” she said.
“Sure,” Popeye said. “I wont tell them that Ruby Lamar is down in the country, wearing a pair of Lee Goodwin’s throwed-away shoes, chopping her own firewood. No. I’ll tell them Lee Goodwin is big rich.”
“You bastard,” the woman said. “You bastard.”
“Sure,” Popeye said. Then he turned his head. There was a shuffling sound across the porch, then a man entered. He was stooped, in overalls. He was barefoot; it was his bare feet which they had heard. He had a sunburned thatch of hair, matted and foul. He had pale furious eyes, a short soft beard like dirty gold in color.
“I be dawg if he aint a case, now,” he said.
“What do you want?” the woman said. The man in overalls didn’t answer. In passing, he looked at Popeye with a glance at once secret and alert, as though he were ready to laugh at a joke, waiting for the time to laugh. He crossed the kitchen with a shambling, bear-like gait, and still with that air of alert and gleeful secrecy, though in plain sight of them, he removed a loose board in the floor and took out a gallon jug.
Popeye watched him, his forefingers in his vest, the cigarette (he had smoked it down without once touching it with his hand) curling across his face. His expression was savage, perhaps baleful; contemplative, watching the man in overalls recross the floor with a kind of alert diffidence, the jug clumsily concealed below his flank; he was watching Popeye, with that expression alert and ready for mirth, until he left the room. Again they heard his bare feet on the porch.
“Sure,” Popeye said. “I wont tell them on Manuel Street that Ruby Lamar is cooking for a dummy and a feeb too.”
“You bastard,” the woman said. “You bastard.”
II
When the woman entered the dining-room, carrying a platter of meat, Popeye and the man who had fetched the jug from the kitchen and the stranger were already at a table made by nailing three rough planks to two trestles. Coming into the light of the lamp which sat on the table, her face was sullen, not old; her eyes were cold. Watching her, Benbow did not see her look once at him as she set the platter on the table and stood for a moment with that veiled look with which women make a final survey of a table, and went and stooped above an open packing case in a corner of the room and took from it another plate and knife and fork, which she brought to the table and set before Benbow with a kind of abrupt yet unhurried finality, her sleeve brushing his shoulder.
As she was doing that, Goodwin entered. He wore muddy overalls. He had a lean, weathered face, the jaws covered by a black stubble; his hair was gray at the temples. He was leading by the arm an old man with a long white beard stained about the mouth. Benbow watched Goodwin seat the old man in a chair, where he sat obediently with that tentative and abject eagerness of a man who has but one pleasure left and whom the world can reach only through one sense, for he was both blind and deaf: a short man with a bald skull and a round, full-fleshed, rosy face in which his cataracted eyes looked like two clots of phlegm. Benbow watched him take a filthy rag from his pocket and regurgitate into the rag an almost colorless wad of what had once been chewing tobacco, and fold the rag up and put it into his pocket.
The woman served his plate from the dish. The others were already eating, silently and steadily, but the old man sat there, his head bent over his plate, his beard working faintly. He fumbled at the plate with a diffident, shaking hand and found a small piece of meat and began to suck at it until the woman returned and rapped his knuckles. He put the meat back on the plate then and Benbow watched her cut up the food on the plate, meat, bread and all, and then pour sorghum over it. Then Benbow quit looking. When the meal was over, Goodwin led the old man out again. Benbow watched the two of them pass out the door and heard them go up the hall.
The men returned to the porch. The woman cleared the table and carried the dishes to the kitchen. She set them on the table and she went to the box behind the stove and she stood over it for a time. Then she returned and put her own supper on a plate and sat down to the table and ate and lit a cigarette from the lamp and washed the dishes and put them away. Then she went back up the hall. She did not go out onto the porch.
She stood just inside the door, listening to them talking, listening to the stranger talking and to the thick, soft sound of the jug as they passed it among themselves. “That fool,” the woman said. “What does he want. . . .” She listened to the stranger’s voice; a quick, faintly outlandish voice, the voice of a man given to much talk and not much else. “Not to drinking, anyway,” the woman said, quiet inside the door. “He better get on to where he’s going, where his women folks can take care of him.”
She listened to him. “From my window I could see the grape arbor, and in the winter I could see the hammock too. But in the winter it was just the hammock. That’s why we know nature is a she; because of that conspiracy between female flesh and female season. So each spring I could watch the reaffirmation of the old ferment hiding the hammock; the green-snared promise of unease. What blossoms grapes have, this is.
It’s not much: a wild and waxlike bleeding less of bloom than leaf, hiding and hiding the hammock, until along in late May, in the twilight, her—Little Belle’s—voice would be like the murmur of the wild grape itself. She never would say, ‘Horace, this is Louis or Paul or Whoever’ but ‘It’s just Horace.’ Just, you see; in a little white dress in the twilight, the two of them all demure and quite alert and a little impatient. And I couldn’t have felt any more foreign to her flesh if I had begot it myself.
“So this morning—no; that was four days ago; it was Thursday she got home from school and this is Tuesday—I said, ‘Honey, if you found him on the train, he probably belongs to the railroad company. You cant take him from the railroad company; that’s against the law, like the insulators on the poles.’
“ ‘He’s as good as you are. He goes to Tulane.’
“ ‘But on a train, honey,’ I said.
“ ‘I found them in worse places than on the train.’
“ ‘I know,’ I said. ‘So have I. But you dont bring them home, you know. You just step over them and go on. You dont soil your slippers, you know.’
“We were in the living-room then; it was just before dinner; just the two of us in the house then. Belle had gone down town.
“ ‘What business is it of yours who comes to see me? You’re not my father. You’re just—just—’
“ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Just what?’
“ ‘Tell Mother, then! Tell her. That’s what you’re going to do. Tell her!’
“ ‘But on the train, honey,’ I said. ‘If he’d walked into your room in a hotel, I’d just kill him. But on the train, I’m disgusted. Let’s send him along and start all over again.’
“ ‘You’re a fine one to talk about finding things on the train! You’re a fine one! Shrimp! Shrimp!’ ”
“He’s crazy,” the woman said, motionless inside the door. The stranger’s voice went on, tumbling over itself, rapid and diffuse.
“Then she was saying ‘No! No!’ and me holding her and she clinging to me. ‘I didn’t mean that! Horace! Horace!’ And I was smelling the slain flowers, the delicate dead flowers and tears, and then I saw her face in the mirror. There was a mirror behind her and another behind me, and she was watching herself in the one behind me, forgetting about the other one in which I could see her face, see her watching the back of my head with pure dissimulation. That’s why nature is ‘she’ and Progress is ‘he’; nature made the grape arbor, but Progress invented the mirror.”
“He’s crazy,” the woman said inside the door, listening.
“But that wasn’t quite it. I thought that maybe the spring, or maybe being forty-three years old, had upset me. I thought that maybe I would be all right if I just had a hill to lie on for a while—It was that country. Flat and rich and foul, so that the very winds seem to engender money out of it. Like you wouldn’t be surprised to find that you could turn in the leaves off the trees, into the banks for cash. That Delta. Five thousand square miles, without any hill save the bumps of dirt the Indians made to stand on when the River overflowed.
“So I thought it was just a hill I wanted; it wasn’t
