He went no further. The next morning he was at work there, an axeman, without even knowing whom he was working for, asking only incidentally of the foreman who hired him and who told him bluntly that he was too small, too light, to swing his end of a cross-cut saw, what his wage would be.
He had never seen convicts’ stripes before either, so it was not with that first light but only after several succeeding ones that he learned where he was — a tract of wild-catted virgin timber in process of being logged by a roaring man of about fifty who was no taller than he was, with strong, short iron-grey hair and a hard prominent belly, who through political influence or bribery or whatever got his convict labour from the State for the price of their board and keep; a widower who had lost his wife years ago at the birth of their first child and now lived openly with a magnificent quadroon woman most of whose teeth were gold and who superintended the kitchen where other convicts did the actual work, in a separate house set among the plank-and-canvas barracks in which the convicts lived.
The woman in the lighted door was that child. She lived in the same house with her father and the quadroon, in a separate wing with an entrance of its own, and her hair was black then — a splendid heavy mane of it which whatever present one out of foremen and armed guards and convict labourers, and himself in his turn, after his summons came and he had long since discovered the reason for the separate entrance, contributed to keep cut almost man-short with razors.
It was strong and short and not fine, either in the glare of that first evening’s lamp or in the next day’s sunlight when, the axe lifted for the stroke, he turned and she was sitting a big, rangy, well-kept horse behind and above him, in overalls, looking at him not brazenly and not speculatively, but intently and boldly, as a bold and successful man would.
That was what he saw: the habit of success — that perfect marriage of will and ability with a single undiffused object — which set her not as a feminine garment but as one as masculine as the overalls and her height and size and the short hair; he saw not a nympholept but the confident lord of a harem.
She did not speak that time. She rode on, and now he discovered that that separate entrance was not used only at night. Sometimes she would ride past on the horse and stop and speak briefly to the foreman and ride on; sometimes the quadroon would appear on the horse and speak a name to the foreman and return, and the foreman would call that name and the man would drop his axe or saw and follow the horse.
Then he, still swinging his axe and not even looking up, would seem to follow and watch that man enter the private door and then watch him emerge later and return to work — the nameless, the identical, highwayman, murderer, thief, among whom there appeared to be no favourites and no jealousy. That was to be his, alone, apparently.
But even before his summons came, he was resigned to the jealousy and cognisant of his fate. He had been bred by generations to believe invincibly that to every man, whatever his past actions, whatever depths he might have reached, there was reserved one virgin, at least for him to marry; one maidenhead, if only for him to deflower and destroy.
Yet he not only saw that he must compete for mere notice with men among whom he saw himself not only as a child but as a child of another race and species, but that when he did approach her at last he would have to tear aside not garments alone but the ghostly embraces of thirty or forty men; and this not only once but each time and hence (he foresaw even then his fate) forever: no room, no darkness, no desert even ever large enough to contain the two of them and the constant stallion-ramp of those inexpugnable shades.
Then his turn, his summons came at last, as he had known it would. He obeyed it with foreknowledge but without regret. He entered not the hot and quenchless bed of a barren and lecherous woman, but the fierce simple cave of a lioness — a tumescence which surrendered nothing and asked no quarter, and which made a monogamist of him forever, as opium and homicide do of those whom they once accept. That was early one afternoon.
The hot sun of July falling through the shadeless and even curtainless windows open to all outdoors, upon a bed made by hand of six-inch unplaned timbers cross-braced with light steel cables, yet which nevertheless would advance in short steady skidding jerks across the floor like a light and ill-balanced rocking-chair. Five months later they were married. They did not plan it. Never at any time afterward did he fail to affirm, even to himself, that the marriage had been no scheme or even intention of hers.
What did it was the collapse of her father’s enterprise, which even he had been able to see was inherent with its own inevitable bankruptcy which the crash of each falling tree brought one stick nearer.
Afterward it seemed to him that that afternoon’s bedding had been the signal for that entire furious edifice of ravished acres and shotgun houses and toiling men and mules which had been erected overnight and founded on nothing, to collapse overnight into nothing, back into the refuse — the sawdust heaps, the lopped dead limbs and tree-butts and all the grief of wood — of its own murdering. He had most of his five months’ pay.
They walked to the nearest county-seat and bought a licence; the Justice of the Peace who sold it to them removed his chew of tobacco and, holding it damp in his hand, called in two passing men and pronounced them man and wife. They returned to his native country, where he rented a small farm on shares. They had a second-hand stove, a shuck mattress on the floor, the razor with which he still kept her hair cut short, and little else.
At that time they needed little else. She said: “I’ve had a hundred men, but I never had a wasp before. That stuff comes out of you is rank poison. It’s too hot. It burns itself and my seed both up. It’ll never make a kid.” But three years afterward it did.
Five years later it had made two; and he would watch them as they approached across whatever sorry field or patch, fetching his cold meagre dinner of the jug of fresh water, or as they played with blocks of wood or rusted harness buckles or threadless and headless plough-bolts which even he could no longer use, in the dust before whatever rented porch he sat on while the sweat cooled out of him, and in a resurgence of the old hot quick invincible fury still as strong and fierce and brief as on the first time, he would think, By God, they better be mine.
Then, quieter, on the pallet bed where she would already be asleep although his own spent body had not yet ceased to jerk and twitch, he would think how, even if they were not, it was the same thing. They served to shackle her too, more irrevocably than he himself was shackled, since on her fate she had even put the seal of a formal acquiescence by letting her hair grow out again and dyeing it.
She came down the walk, running heavily but fast. She reached it before he had finished opening it, flinging both him and the gate back as she ran through it and caught him by the front of his overalls. “No!” she cried, though her voice still whispered: “No! Oh God, what do you mean? You can’t come in here!”
“I can go anywhere I want to,” he said. “Lump said — —” Then he tried to wrench free, but she had already released him and caught his arm and was hurrying, almost dragging him along the fence, away from the light. He wrenched at her grip again, setting his feet. “Wait,” he said.
“You fool!” she said, in that harsh panting whisper: “You fool! Oh, God damn you! God damn you!” He began to struggle, with a cold condensed fury which did not seem quite able or perhaps ready to emerge yet from his body. Then he lashed suddenly out, still not at her but to break her grip.
But she held him, with both hands now, as they faced each other. “Why didn’t you go that night? God, I thought of course you were going to get out as soon as I left!” She shook him savagely, with no more effort than if he were a child. “Why didn’t you? Why in hell didn’t you?”
“On what?” he said. “Where? Lump said — —”
“I know you didn’t have any money, like I know you haven’t had anything to eat except the dust in that barrel. You could have hidden! In the woods — anywhere, until I would have time to — God damn you! God damn you! If they would just let me do the hanging!”
She shook him, her face bent to his, her hard, hot, panting breath on his face. “Not for killing him,
