He would be at home perhaps a week out of each eight. Mrs. Gant would never know just what day or hour he would return. Often it would be between midnight and dawn. One morning about dawn she was awakened by someone standing in front of the house, shouting “Hello, Hello” at measured intervals. She opened the window and looked out. It was the halfwit.
“Yes?” she said. “What is it?”
“Hello,” the halfwit bawled.
“Hush your yelling,” Mrs. Gant said, “where’s Jim?”
“Jim says to tell you he ain’t coming home no more,” the halfwit bawled. “Him and Mrs. Vinson taken and went off in the waggin. Jim says to tell you not to expect him back.” Mrs. Vinson was the woman at the tavern, and the halfwit stood in the making light while Mrs. Gant in a white cotton nightcap leaned in the window and cursed him with the gross violence of a man. Then she banged the window shut.
“Jim owes me a dollar and six bits,” the halfwit bawled. “He said you would give it to me.” But the window was shut, the house silent again; no light had ever shown. Yet still the halfwit stood before it, shouting “Hello, Hello” at the blank front until the door opened and Mrs. Gant came out in her nightdress, with a shotgun and cursed him again. Then he retreated to the road and stopped again in the dawn, shouting “Hello, Hello” at the blank house until he tired himself at last and went away.
Just after sunup the next morning Mrs. Gant, with the sleeping child wrapped in a quilt, went to a neighbor’s house and asked the woman to keep the child for her. She borrowed a pistol from another neighbor and departed. A passing wagon, bound for Jefferson, took her aboard and she passed slowly from sight that way, sitting erect in a shoddy brown coat, on the creaking seat.
All that day the halfwit told about the dollar and seventy-five cents which Gant had taken from him and told him Mrs. Gant would repay. By noon he had told them all singly, and hoarse, voluble and recapitulant, he would offer to stop them and tell them again as they gathered at the store over the pistol incident. An ancient mariner in faded overalls he pursued them, gesticulant, shock-haired, with a wild eye and drooling a little at the mouth, telling about the dollar and seventy-five cents.
“Jim said for me to git it from her. He said she would give hit to me.”
He was still talking about it when Mrs. Gant returned ten days later. She returned the pistol with no more than thanks. She had not even cleaned it nor removed the two exploded cartridges … a hale, not-old woman with a broad, strong face: she had been accosted more than once during her sojourn in those equivocal purlieus of Memphis, where, with a deadly female intuition, an undeviating conviction for sin (who had never been further away from home than the county seat and who had read no magazines and seen no movies) she sought Gant and the woman with the capability of a man, the pertinacity of a Fate, the serene imperviousness of a vestal out of a violated temple, and then returned to her child, her face cold, satiate and chaste.
The night of her return she was called to the door. It was the halfwit.
“Jim says you would give me that dollar and.…”
She struck him, felled him with a single blow. He lay on the floor, his hands lifted a little, his mouth beginning to open in horror and outrage. Before he could shriek she stooped and struck him again, jerking him up and holding him while she beat him in the face, he bellowing hoarsely. She lifted him bodily and flung him from the porch to the ground and entered the house, where his cries had roused the child. She sat and took it onto her lap, rocking it, her heels clapping hard and rythmic at each thrust, hushing it by singing to it in a voice louder, more powerful, than its own.
Three months later she had sold the house for a good price; and she moved away, taking with her a battered trunk tied with cotton rope and the shotgun and the quilt in which the child slept. They learned later that she had bought a dressmaking shop in Jefferson, the county seat.
II
They told in the town how she and her daughter, Zilphia, lived in a single room twelve feet square for twenty-three years. It was partitioned off from the rear of the shop and it contained a bed, a table, two chairs and an oil stove. The rear window gave upon a vacant lot where farmers tethered their teams on market days and where sparrows whirled in gusty clouds about the horse and mule droppings and the refuse from the grocery store beneath.
The window was barred and in it for the seven years before the county Health Officer forced Mrs. Gant to let Zilphia go to school, the farmers, hitching or unhitching, would see a wan small face watching them, or, holding to the bars, coughing: a weak hacking sound soon blown away along the air, leaving the still pale face as before with something about it of that quality of Christmas wreaths in a forgotten window.
“Who is that?” one asked.
“Gant’s gal. Jim Gant. Used to live out to the Bend.”
“Oh. Jim Gant. I heard about that.” They looked at the face. “Well, I reckon Mrs. Gant ain’t got a whole lot of use for men-folks no more.” They looked at the face. “But she ain’t no more than a child yet.”
“I reckon Mrs. Gant ain’t taking no risk.”
“Hit ain’t her risk. Hit’s whoever’s risk that would chance her.”
“Hit’s a fact. Sho.”
That was before Mrs. Gant came upon Zilphia and the boy lying inside a worn horse-blanket in the woods one day. It was during the time when, every morning and again at one o’clock they would see the two of them going toward the school, and every noon and afternoon returning to the barred room above the vacant lot. At midmorning recess time Mrs. Gant would close the shop and when the dismissal bell rang, she would be standing at the corner of the playground, upright, erect in a shapeless dress of dull black and an oil cloth sewing apron and her bosom festooned with threaded needles; still comely in a harsh way.
Zilphia would cross the playground straight to her and the two of them would sit on the stone coping above the street level, side by side and not talking while the other children ran with random shouts back and forth behind them, until the bell rang again and Zilphia returned to her books and Mrs. Gant to the shop and the seam which she had laid aside.
They told how it was a client of Mrs. Gant’s that got Zilphia in school. One day in the shop she was talking to Zilphia about school; Zilphia was nine then. “All the boys and girls go. You’ll like it.” Her back was to the room. She did not hear the machine cease, she only saw Zilphia’s eyes go suddenly blank and then fill with terror. Mrs. Gant stood over them.
“Go home,” she said. Zilphia … she did not turn and walk away: she seemed to dissolve behind her wan, haunting face and terrified eyes. The client rose. Mrs. Gant was thrusting a wad of cloth into her arms. “Get out of here,” she said.
The client fell back, her hands raised, the half-finished dress cascading to the floor. Mrs. Gant picked it up and thrust it at her again, her hands hard in a series of restrained blows. “Get out of my shop,” she said. “Don’t you never come here again.”
Mrs. Gant went back to the room. Zilphia crouched in the corner, watching the door. Mrs. Gant drew her out by one thin arm. She began to beat Zilphia, striking her about the body with her flat hand while Zilphia’s thin arm appeared to elongate like rubber hose as she silently wrenched and strained. “Bitches!” Mrs. Gant said: “bitches!” She ceased as suddenly and sat on the bed and drew Zilphia toward her. Zilphia resisted. She began to cry and vomit, her eyeballs back-rolling until only the whites showed, shrieking and retching. Mrs. Gant got her to bed and sent for the doctor.
At that time Zilphia was pole-thin, with a wan, haunted face and big, not-quite-conquered eyes, going to and from school at her mother’s side, behind her small tragic mask of a face. In her third year she refused one day to go back to school. She would not tell Mrs. Gant why: that she was ashamed to never be seen on the street without her mother. Mrs. Gant would not let her stop. In the spring she was ill again, from anemia and nervousness and loneliness and actual despair.
She was sick for a long time. The doctor told Mrs. Gant that Zilphia would have to have companionship, to play with children of her own age and out-of-doors. When Zilphia was convalescent Mrs. Gant came in one day with a miniature cook stove. “Now you can have the girls in and you can cook,” she said. “Won’t that be nicer than visiting?” Zilphia lay on the pillow, not less white than it. Her eyes looked like holes thumbed into a piece of blotting paper. “You can have a tea party every day,” Mrs. Gant said. “I’ll make dresses for all the dolls.”
Zilphia began to cry. She
