Or the grape, say, a mature grape, a little on the oversunned and juiceless side, but at least still intact enough even if only in sapless hull after the spurting ejaculation of the nymphic kiss, to retain at least the flattened semblance of a grape. Except that about then you would have to remember what Ratliff said that time: “No, she ain’t going to marry him. It’s going to be worse than that,” and you would wonder what in the world Helen or her inheritrix could or would want with that emptied sac or flattened hull, and so what in the hell could Ratliff have meant? Or anyway thought he meant? Or at least was afraid he might have meant or mean?
Until it finally occurred to him to do the reasonable and logical thing that anybody else would have thought about doing at first: ask Ratliff himself what he meant or thought he meant or was afraid he meant. So he did. It was summer now, June; McKinley Smith’s cotton was not only up, Essie was pregnant. The whole town knew it; she had made a public announcement in the bank one morning as soon as the doors opened and the first depositors had lined up at the windows; in less than two months she and McKinley had won old Meadowfill’s wheel chair.
“Because this ain’t enough,” Ratliff said.
“Enough what?” Charles said.
“Enough to keep her busy and satisfied. No ships to rivet, and now she’s done run out of coloured folks too for the time being. This here is peace and plenty — the same peace and plenty us old folks like me and your uncle spent four whole years sacrificing sugar and beefsteak and cigarettes all three to keep the young folks like you happy while you was winning it. So much plenty that even the downtrod communist shoe patchers and tinsmiths and Negro children can afford to not need her now. I mean, maybe if she had asked them first they never actively needed her before neither, only they couldn’t afford in simple dollars and cents to say so. Now they can.” He blinked at Charles. “She has done run out of injustice.”
“I didn’t know you could do that,” Charles said.
“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “So she will have to think of something, even if she has to invent it.”
“All right,” Charles said. “Suppose she does. If she was tough enough to stand what we thought up around here, she can certainly stand anything she can invent herself.”
“I ain’t worried about her,” Ratliff said. “She’s all right. She’s jest dangerous. I’m thinking about your uncle.”
“What about him?” Charles said.
“When she finally thinks of something and tells him, he will likely do it,” Ratliff said.
Sixteen
THEY MET THAT morning in the post office, as they often did by complete uncalculation at morning mail time, she dressed as usual in the clothes she seemed to spend most of her time walking about the adjacent countryside in — the expensive English brogues scuffed and scarred but always neatly polished each morning, with wool stockings or socks beneath worn flannel trousers or a skirt or sometimes what looked like a khaki boilersuit under a man’s stained burberry; this in the fall and winter and spring; in the summer it would be cotton — dress or skirt or trousers, her head with its single white plume bare even in the worst weather. Afterward they would go to the coffee shop in the Holston House and drink coffee but this time instead Stevens took the gold-cornered ivory tablet he had given her eight years ago and wrote:
An appointment At the office To see me
“Shouldn’t you make an appointment to see lawyers?” she said.
His next speech of course would be: “So it’s as a lawyer you need me now.” And if they both could have used speech he would have said that, since at the age of fifty-plus talking is no effort. But writing is still an effort at any age, so even a lawyer pauses at the obvious if he has got to use a pen or pencil. So he wrote Tonight after supper At your house
“No,” she said.
He wrote Why
“Your wife will be jealous. I don’t want to hurt Milly.”
His next of course would be: “Melisandre, jealous? Of you and me? After all this, all this time?” Which of course was too long to write on a two-by-three-inch ivory tablet. So he had already begun to write Nonsense when he stopped and erased it with his thumb. Because she was looking at him, and now he knew too. He wrote You want her To be jealous
“She’s your wife,” she said. “She loves you. She would have to be jealous.” He hadn’t erased the tablet yet; he needed only to hold it up before her face until she looked at it again. “Yes,” she said. “Being jealous is part of love too. I want you to have all of it too. I want you to have everything. I want you to be happy.”
“I am happy,” he said. He took one of the unopened envelopes just out of his mailbox and wrote on the back of it I am happy I was given the privilege of meddling with impunity in other people’s affairs without really doing any harm by belonging to that avocation whose acolytes have been absolved in advance for holding justice above truth I have been denied the chance to destroy what I loved by touching it Can you tell me now what it is here or shall I come to your house after supper tonight
“All right,” she said. “After supper then.”
At first his wife’s money was a problem. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the greater hysteria of the war, the lesser hysteria of that much sudden money could have been a serious one. Even four years later Melisandre still tried to make it a problem: on these warm summer evenings the Negro houseman and one of the maids would serve the evening meal on a flagged terrace beneath a wistaria arbor in the back yard, whereupon each time there were guests, even the same guest or guests again, Melisandre would say, “It would be cooler in the dining-room” (in the rebuilt house the dining-room was not quite as large as a basketball court) “and no bugs either. But the dining-room makes Gavin nervous.” Whereupon he would say, as he always did too, even before the same guest or guests again: “Dammit, Milly, nothing can make me nervous because I was already born that way.”
They were sitting there now over the sandwiches and the iced tea. She said, “Why didn’t you invite her out here.” He merely chewed so she said, “But of course you did.” So he merely chewed and she said, “So it must be something serious.” Then she said, “But it can’t be serious or she couldn’t have waited, she would have told you right there in the post office.” So then she said, “What do you suppose it is?” and he wiped his mouth and dropped the napkin, rising, and came around the table and leaned and kissed her.
“I love you,” he said. “Yes. No. I don’t know. Don’t wait up.”
Melisandre had given him a Cadillac roadster for her wedding present to him; this was during the first year of the war and God only knew where she had got a new Cadillac convertible and what she had paid for it. “Unless you really don’t want it,” she said.
“I do,” he said. “I’ve always wanted a Cadillac convertible — provided I can do exactly what I want to with it.”
“Of course you can,” she said. “It’s yours.” So he drove the car back to town and arranged with a garage to store it for ten dollars a month and removed the battery and radio and the tires and the spare wheel and sold them and took the keys and the bill of sale to Snopes’s bank and mortgaged the car for the biggest loan they would make on it.
By that time progress, industrial renascence and rejuvenation had reached even rural Mississippi banks, so Snopes’s bank now had a professional cashier or working vice-president imported from Memphis six months back to give it the New Look, that is, to bring rural banks abreast of the mental condition which accepted, could accept, the automobile as a definite ineradicable part of not only the culture but the economy also; where, as Stevens knew, Snopes alone would not lend God Himself one penny on an automobile.
So Stevens could have got the loan from the imported vice-president on this simple recognisance, not only for the above reason but because the vice-president was a stranger and Stevens represented one of the three oldest families in the county and the vice-president would not have dared to say No to him. But Stevens didn’t do it that way; this was to be, as the saying had it, Snopes’s baby.
He waylaid, ambushed, caught Snopes himself in public, in the lobby of his bank with not only all the staff but the moment’s complement of customers, to explain in detail how he didn’t intend to
