“Is it that late?”
He looked at his watch. “Bellin two minutes.”
“I didn’t know it was that late.” He was still looking at the watch, his mouth shaping. “I’ll have to hustle. I cant stand another cut. The dean told me last week—” He put the watch back into his pocket. Then I quit talking.
“You’d better slip on your pants and run,” he said. He went out.
I got up and moved about, listening to him through the wall. He entered the sitting-room, toward the door.
“Aren’t you ready yet?”
“Not yet. Run along. I’llmake it.”
He went out. The door closed. His feet went down the corridor. Then I could hear the watch again. I quit moving around and went to the window and drew the curtains aside and watched them running for chapel, the same ones fighting the same heaving coat-sleeves, the same books and flapping collars flushing past like debris on a flood, and Spoade. Calling Shreve my husband. Ah let him alone, Shreve said, if he’s got better sense than to chase after the little dirty sluts, whose business. In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it’s like death, only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn’t matter and he said, That’s what’s so sad about anything: not only virginity, and I said, Why couldn’t it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That’s why that’s sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it, and Shreve said if he’s got better sense than to chase after the little dirty sluts and I said Did you ever have a sister? Did you? Did you?
Spoade was in the middle of themlike a terrapin in a street full of scuttering dead leaves, his collar about his ears, moving at his customary unhurried walk. He was from South Carolina, a senior. It was his club’s boast that he never ran for chapel and had never got there on time and had never been absent in four years and had never made either chapel or first lecture with a shirt on his back and socks on his feet. About ten oclock he’d come in Thompson’s, get two cups of coffee, sit down and take his socks out of his pocket and remove his shoes and put them on while the coffee cooled. About noon you’d see him with a shirt and collar on, like anybody else. The others passed him running, but he never increased his pace at all. After a while the quad was empty.
A sparrow slanted across the sunlight, onto the window ledge, and cocked his head at me. His eye was round and bright. First he’d watch me with one eye, then flick! and it would be the other one, his throat pumping faster than any pulse. The hour began to strike. The sparrow quit swapping eyes and watched me steadily with the same one until the chimes ceased, as if he were listening too. Then he flicked off the ledge and was gone.
It was a while before the last stroke ceased vibrating. It stayed in the air, more felt than heard, for a long time. Like all the bells that ever rang still ringing in the long dying light-rays and Jesus and Saint Francis talking about his sister. Because if it were just to hell; if that were all of it. Finished. If things just finished themselves. Nobody else there but her and me. If we could just have done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us. I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames And when he put Dalton Ames.
Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. When he put the pistolin my hand I didn’t. That’s why I didn’t. He would be there and she would and I would. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That’s sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he said, Ah can you.
And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. Until on the Day when He says Rise only the flat-iron would come floating up. It’s not when you realise that nothing can help you—religion, pride, anything—it’s when you realise that you dont need any aid. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames.
If I could have been his mother lying with open body lifted laughing, holding his father with my hand refraining, seeing, watching himdie before he lived. One minute she was standing in the door I went to the dresser and took up the watch, with the face still down. I tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them into the ashtray and twisted the hands off and put them in the tray. The watch ticked on. I turned the face up, the blank dial with little wheels clicking and clicking behind it, not knowing any better. Jesus walking on Galilee and Washington not telling lies. Father brought back a watch-charm fromthe Saint Louis Fair to Jason: a tiny opera glass into which you squinted with one eye and saw a skyscraper, a ferris wheel all spidery, Niagara Falls on a pinhead. There was a red smear on the dial. When I saw it my thumb began to smart. I put the watch down and went into Shreve’s roomand got the iodine and painted the cut. I cleaned the rest of the glass out of the rimwith the towel.
I laid out two suits of underwear, with socks, shirts, collars and ties, and packed my trunk. I put in everything except my new suit and an old one and two pairs of shoes and two hats, and my books. I carried the books into the sitting-room and stacked them on the table, the ones I had brought fromhome and the ones Father said it used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned and locked the trunk and addressed it. The quarter hour sounded. I stopped and listened to it untilthe chimes ceased.
I bathed and shaved. The water made my finger smart a little, so I painted it again. I put on my new suit and put my watch on and packed the other suit and the accessories and my razor and brushes in my hand bag, and wrapped the trunk key into a sheet of paper and put it in an envelope and addressed it to Father, and wrote the two notes and sealed them.
The shadow hadn’t quite cleared the stoop. I stopped inside the door, watching the shadow move. It moved almost perceptibly, creeping back inside the door, driving the shadow back into the door. Only she was running already when I heard it. In the mirror she was running before I knew what it was. That quick, her train caught up over her arm she ran out of the mirror like a cloud, her veil swirling in long glints her heels brittle and fast clutching her dress onto her shoulder with the other hand, running out of the mirror the smells roses roses the voice that breathed o’er Eden. Then she was across the porch I couldn’t hear her heels then in the moonlight like a cloud, the floating shadow of the veil running across the grass, into the bellowing. She ran out of her dress, clutching her bridal, running into the bellowing where T. P. in the dew Whooey Sassprilluh Benjy under the box bellowing. Father had a V-shaped silver cuirass on his running chest Shreve said, “Well, you didn’t. . . . Is it a wedding or a wake?” “I couldn’t make it,” I said.
“Not with allthat primping. What’s the matter? You think this was Sunday?” “I reckon the police wont get me for wearing my new suit one time,” I said.
“I was thinking about the Square students. Have you got too proud to attend classes too?” “I’mgoing to eat first.” The shadow on the stoop was gone. I stepped into sunlight, finding
my shadow again. I walked down the steps just ahead of it. The half hour went. Then the chimes ceased and died away.
Deacon wasn’t at the postoffice either. I stamped the two envelopes and mailed the one to Father and put Shreve’s in my inside pocket, and then I remembered where I had last seen the Deacon. It was on Decoration Day, in a G. A. R. uniform, in the middle of the parade. If you waited long enough on any corner you would see himin whatever parade came along. The one before was on Columbus’or Garibaldi’s or somebody’s birthday. He was in the Street Sweeper’s section, in a stovepipe hat, carrying a two inch Italian flag, smoking a cigar among the brooms
and scoops. But the last time was the G. A. R. one, because Shreve said: “There now. Just look at what your grandpa did to
