“If it comes back.” But he suspected nothing, though later it seemed incredible to him that he had not, even though at the time he could not have said why he should have suspected, on what evidence. But he did not. Then one day about a week before the ore train was due there was a knock and he opened the door upon a man with a mountain face and a pack and a pair of slung snow shoes on his back.
“You Wilbourne?” he said. “Got a letter for you.” He produced it—a pencilled envelope smudged with handling and three weeks old.
“Thanks,” Wilbourne said. “Come in and eat.”
But the other declined. “One of them big airplanes fell somewhere back in yonder just before Christmas. You hear or see anything about that time?”
“I wasn’t here then,” Wilbourne said. “You better eat first.”
“There’s a reward for it. I guess I wont stop.”
The letter was from Buckner. It said Everything O K Buck. Charlotte took it from him and stood looking at it. “That’s what you said. You said it was simple, didn’t you. Now you feel all right about it.”
“Yes,” Wilbourne said. “I am relieved.”
Charlotte looked at the letter, the four words, counting O and K as two. “Just one in ten thousand. All you have to do is be reasonably careful, isn’t it? Boil the tools and so forth. Does it matter who you do it on?”
“They have to be fe—” Then he stopped. He looked at her, he thought swiftly, Something is about to happen to me. Wait. Wait. “Do it on?”
She looked at the letter. “That was foolish, wasn’t it. Maybe I was mixed up with incest.” Now it did happen to him. He began to tremble, he was trembling even before he grasped her shoulder and jerked her about to face him.
“Do it on?”
She looked at him, still holding the cheap ruled sheet with its heavy pencilling—the sober intent gaze with that greenish cast which the snow gave her eyes. She spoke in short brutal sentences like out of a primer. “That night. That first night alone. When we couldn’t wait to cook supper. When the stove went out my douche bag was hanging behind it. It froze and when we lit the stove again I forgot it and it burst.”
“And every time since then you didn’t—”
“I should have known better. I always did take it easy. Too easy. I remember somebody telling me once, I was young then, that when people loved, hard, really loved each other, they didn’t have children, the seed got burned up in the love, the passion. Maybe I believed it. Wanted to believe it because I didn’t have a douche bag any more. Or maybe I just hoped. Anyway it’s done.”
“When?” he said, shaking her, trembling. “How long since you missed? Are you sure?”
“Sure that I missed? Yes. Sixteen days.”
“But you’re not sure,” he said, rapidly, knowing he was talking only to himself: “You cant be sure yet. Sometimes they miss, any woman. You can never be sure until two—”
“Do you believe that?” she said quietly. “That’s just when you want a child. And I dont and you dont because we cant. I can starve and you can starve but not it. So we must, Harry.”
“No!” he cried. “No!”
“You said it was simple. We have proof it is, that it’s nothing, no more than clipping an ingrowing toenail. I’m strong and healthy as she is. Dont you believe that?”
“Ah,” he cried, “So you tried it on her first. That was it. You wanted to see if she would die or not. That’s why you were so bent on selling me the idea when I had already said no—”
“The stove went out the night after they left, Harry. But yes, I did wait to hear from her first. She would have done the same if it had been me first. I would have wanted her to. I would have wanted her to live whether I did or not just as she would want me to live whether she did or not, just as I want to live.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know. I didn’t mean that. But you—you—”
“So it’s all right. It’s simple. You know that now by your own hand.”
“No! No!”
“All right,” she said quietly. “Maybe we can find a doctor to do it when we go out next week.”
“No!” he cried, shouted, gripping her shoulder, shaking her. “Do you hear me?”
“You mean no one else shall do it, and you wont?”
“Yes! That’s what I mean! That’s exactly what I mean!”
“Are you that afraid?”
“Yes!” he said. “Yes!”
The next week passed. He took to walking, slogging and plunging in the waist-deep drifts, not to not see her; it’s because I cant breathe in there, he told himself; once he went up to the mine even, the deserted gallery dark now of the extravagant and unneeded bulbs though it still seemed to him that he could hear the voices, the blind birds, the echoes of that frenzied and incomprehensible human speech which still remained, hanging batlike and perhaps head-down about the dead corridors until his presence startled them into flight. But sooner or later the cold—something—would drive him back to the cabin and they did not quarrel simply because she refused to be drawn into one and again he would think, She is not only a better man and a better gentleman than I am, she is a better everything than I will ever be.
They ate together, went through the day’s routine, they slept together to keep from freezing; now and then he took her (and she accepted him) in a kind of frenzy of immolation, saying, crying, “At least it doesn’t matter now; at least you wont have to get up in the cold.” Then it would be day again; he would refill the tank when the stove burned out; he would carry out and throw into the snow the cans which they had opened for the last meal, and there would be nothing else for him to do, nothing else under the sun for him to do. So he would walk (there was a pair of snow shoes in the cabin but he never tried to use them) among but mostly into the drifts which he had not yet learned to distinguish in time to avoid, wallowing and plunging, thinking, talking to himself aloud, weighing a thousand expedients: A kind of pill, he thought—this, a trained doctor: whores use them, they are supposed to work, they must work, something must; it cant be this difficult, this much of a price, and not believing it, knowing that he would never be able to make himself believe it, thinking, And this is the price of the twenty-six years, the two thousand dollars I stretched over four of them by not smoking, by keeping my virginity until it damn near spoiled on me, the dollar and two dollars a week or a month my sister could not afford to send: that I should have deprived myself of all hope forever of anesthesia from either pills or pamphlets. And now anything else is completely out.
“So there’s just one thing left,” he said, aloud, in a kind of calm like that which follows the deliberate ridding of the stomach of a source of nausea. “Just one thing left. We’ll go where it is warm, where it wont cost so much to live, where I can find work and we can afford a baby and if no work, charity wards, orphanages, doorsteps anyway. No, no, not orphanage; not doorstep. We can do it, we must do it; I will find something, anything.—Yes!” he thought, cried aloud into the immaculate desolation, with harsh and terrible sardonicism, “I will set up as a professional abortionist.” Then he would return to the cabin and still they did not quarrel simply because she would not, this not through any forbearance feigned or real nor because she herself was subdued and afraid but simply because (and he knew this too and he cursed himself for this too in the snow) she knew that one of them must keep some sort of head and she knew beforehand it would not be he.
Then the ore train came. He had packed the remaining provisions out of Buckner’s theoretical hundred dollars into a box. They loaded this and the two bags with which they had left New Orleans almost exactly a year ago and themselves into the toy caboose. At the mainline junction he sold the cans of beans and salmon and lard, the sacks of sugar and coffee and flour, to a small storekeeper for twenty-one dollars. They rode two nights and a day in day coaches and left the snow behind and found buses now, cheaper now, her head tilted back against the machine-made doily, her face in profile against the dark fleeing snow-free countryside and the little lost towns, the neon, the lunch rooms with broad strong Western girls got up out of Hollywood magazines (Hollywood which is no longer in Hollywood but is stippled by a billion feet of burning colored gas across the face of the American earth) to resemble Joan Crawford, asleep or not he could not tell.
They reached San Antonio, Texas, with a hundred and fifty-two dollars and a few cents. It was warm here, it was almost like New Orleans; the pepper trees had been green all winter and the oleander and mimosa and lantana were already in bloom and cabbage palms exploded shabbily in the mild air as in Louisiana. They had a single room with
