But where? What ambush? What ambush could he want better than here? already seeing her entering the room again tomorrow morning, tranquil, untroubled, not even remembering, carrying the cold potato which at recess she would sit on the sunny steps and eat like one of the unchaste and perhaps even anonymously pregnant immortals eating bread of Paradise on a sunwise slope of Olympus.
So he rose and gathered up the books and papers which, with the clock, he carried to his barren room each afternoon and fetched back the next morning, and put them into the desk drawer and closed it and with his handkerchief he wiped off the desk top, moving without haste yet steadily, his face calm, and wound the clock and set it back on the desk. The overcoat which the football coach had given him six years ago hung on its nail.
He looked at it for a moment, though presently he went and got it and even put it on and left the room, the now deserted room in which there were still and forever would be too many people; in which, from that first day when her brother had brought her into it, there had been too many people, who would make one too many forever after in any room she ever entered and remained in long enough to expel breath.
As soon as he emerged, he saw the roan horse tied to the post before the store. Of course, he thought quietly. Naturally he would not carry a pistol around with him, and it would not do him any good hidden under a pillow at home. Of course. That’s it.
That’s where the pistol will be; telling himself that perhaps the brother even wanted witnesses, as he himself wanted them, his face tragic and calm now, walking on down the road toward the store. That will be proof, he cried silently. Proof in the eyes and beliefs of living men that that happened which did not. Which will be better than nothing, even though I am not here to know men believe it. Which will be fixed in the beliefs of living men forever and ever ineradicable, since one of the two alone who know different will be dead.
It was a grey day, of the colour and texture of iron, one of those windless days of a plastic rigidity too dead to make or release snow even, in which even light did not alter but seemed to appear complete out of nothing at dawn and would expire into darkness without gradation.
The village was lifeless — the shuttered and silent gin and blacksmith shop, the weathered store; the motionless horse alone postulating life and that not because it moved but because it resembled something known to be alive. But they would be inside the store. He could see them — the heavy shoes and boots, the overalls and jumper coats bulging over the massed indiscriminate garments beneath — planted about the box of pocked sand in which the stove, squatting, radiated the strong good heat which had an actual smell, masculine, almost monastic — a winter’s concentration of unwomaned and deliberate tobacco-spittle annealing into the iron flanks.
The good heat: he would enter it, not out of the bleak barren cold but out of life, mounting steps and walking through a door and out of living. The horse raised its head and looked at him as he passed it. But not you, he said to it. You’ve got to stand outside, stand here and remain intact for the blood to contrive to run through. I don’t. He mounted the steps, crossing the heel-gnawed planks of the gallery.
On the closed door was tacked a paper placard advertising a patent medicine, half defaced — the reproduction of a portrait, smug, bearded, successful, living far away and married, with children, in a rich house and beyond the reach of passion and blood’s betrayal and not even needing to be dead to be embalmed with spaced tacks, ubiquitous and immortal in ten thousand fading and tattered effigies on ten thousand weathered and paintless doors and walls and fences in all the weathers of rain and ice and summer’s harsh heat, about the land.
Then, with his hand already on the knob to turn it, he stopped. Once — it was one of the football trips of course, he had never ridden in a train otherwise save on that night visit to Memphis — he had descended onto a bleak station platform.
There was a sudden commotion about a door. He heard a man cursing, shouting, a negro ran out the door, followed by a shouting white man. The negro turned, stooping, and as the onlookers scattered the white man shot the negro in the body with a blunt pistol.
He remembered how the negro, clutching his middle, dropped onto his face then suddenly flopped over onto his back, actually appearing to elongate himself, to add at least a yard to his stature; the cursing white man was overpowered and disarmed, the train whistled once and began to draw away, a uniformed trainman breaking out of the crowd and running to overtake it and still looking back from the moving step.
And he remembered how he shoved himself up, instinctively using his football tactics to make a place, where he looked down upon the negro lying rigid on his back, still clutching his middle, his eyes closed and his face quite peaceful. Then there was a man — a doctor or an officer, he did not know — kneeling over the negro. He was trying to draw the negro’s hands away. There was no outward show of resistance; the forearms and hands at which the doctor or officer was tugging merely seemed to have become iron. The negro’s eyes did not open nor his peaceful expression alter, he merely said: “Look out, white folks.
I awready been shot.” But they unclasped his hands at last, and he remembered the peeling away of the jumper, the overalls, a ragged civilian coat beneath which revealed itself to have been a long overcoat once, the skirts cut away at the hips as with a razor; beneath that a shirt and a pair of civilian trousers. The waist of them was unbuttoned and the bullet rolled out onto the platform, bloodless. He released the doorknob and removed the overcoat and hung it over his arm. At least I won’t make a failure with one of us, he thought, opening the door, entering.
At first he believed the room was empty. He saw the stove in its box of pocked sand, surrounded by the nail kegs and upended boxes; he even smelled the rank scorch of recent spitting. But no one sat there, and when a moment later he saw the brother’s thick humourless surly face staring at him over the desk, for an instant he felt rage and outrage.
He believed that Varner had cleared the room, sent them all away deliberately in order to deny him that last vindication, the ratification of success which he had come to buy with his life; and suddenly he knew a furious disinclination, even a raging refusal, to die at all. He stooped quickly aside, already dodging, scrabbling about him for some weapon as Varner’s face rose still further above the desk top like a bilious moon.
“What in hell are you after?” Varner said. “I told you two days ago that window sash ain’t come yet.”
“Window sash?” Labove said.
“Nail some planks over it,” Varner said. “Do you expect me to make a special trip to town to keep a little fresh air out of your collar?”
Then he remembered it. The panes had been broken out during the Christmas holidays. He had nailed boards over them at the time. He did not remember doing it. But then he did not remember being told about the promised sash two days ago, let alone asking about it. And now he stopped remembering the window at all. He rose quietly and stood, the overcoat over his arm; now he did not even see the surly suspicious face any more. Yes, he thought quietly; Yes. I see.
She never told him at all. She didn’t even forget to. She doesn’t even know anything happened that was worth mentioning. Varner was still talking; apparently someone had answered him:
“Well, what do you want, then?”
“I want a nail,” he said.
“Get it, then.” The face had already disappeared beyond the desk. “Bring the hammer back.”
“I won’t need the hammer,” he said. “I just want a nail.”
The house, the heatless room in which he had lived for six years now with his books and his bright lamp, was between the store and the school. He did not even look toward it when he passed. He returned to the schoolhouse and closed and locked the door. With a fragment of brick he drove the nail into the wall beside the door and hung the key on the nail. The schoolhouse was on the Jefferson road. He already had the overcoat with him.
CHAPTER TWO
1
THROUGH THAT SPRING and through the long succeeding summer of her fourteenth year, the youths of fifteen and sixteen and seventeen who had been in school with her and others who had not, swarmed like wasps about the ripe
