“Catherine. A man asked you to marry him—and you never told one word of it to me?”
Catherine lifted a shoulder. “Well, Dollyheart, what was the Judge saying? You don’t tell anybody everything. Besides, I’ve known a peck of Bills—wouldn’t study marrying any of them. What worries my mind is, which one of the Bills was it wrote that letter? I’d like to know, seeing as it’s the only letter I ever got. It could be the Bill that put the roof on my house; course, by the time the roof was up—my goodness, I have got old, been a long day since I’ve given it two thoughts.
There was Bill that came to plow the garden, spring of 1913 it was; that man sure could plow a straight row. And Bill that built the chicken-coop: went away on a Pullman job; might have been him wrote me that letter. Or Bill—uh uh, his name was Fred—Collin, sugar, this wine is mighty good.”
“I may have a drop more myself,” said Dolly. “I mean, Catherine has given me such a …”
“Hmn,” said Catherine.
“If you spoke more slowly, or chewed less …” The Judge thought Catherine’s cotton was tobacco.
Riley had withdrawn a little from us; slumped over, he stared stilly into the inhabited dark: I, I, I, a bird cried, “I—you’re wrong, Judge,” he said.
“How so, son?”
The caught-up uneasiness that I associated with Riley swamped his face. “I’m not in trouble: I’m nothing—or would you call that my trouble? I lie awake thinking what do I know how to do? hunt, drive a car, fool around; and I get scared when I think maybe that’s all it will ever come to. Another thing, I’ve got no feelings—except for my sisters, which is different. Take for instance, I’ve been going with this girl from Rock City nearly a year, the longest time I’ve stayed with one girl. I guess it was a week ago she flared up and said where’s your heart? said if I didn’t love her she’d as soon die. So I stopped the car on the railroad track; well, I said, let’s just sit here, the Crescent’s due in about twenty minutes. We didn’t take our eyes off each other, and I thought isn’t it mean that I’m looking at you and I don’t feel anything except …”
“Except vanity?” said the Judge.
Riley did not deny it. “And if my sisters were old enough to take care of themselves, I’d have been willing to wait for the Crescent to come down on us.”
It made my stomach hurt to hear him talk like that; I longed to tell him he was all I wanted to be.
“You said before about the one person in the world. Why couldn’t I think of her like that? It’s what I want, I’m no good by myself. Maybe, if I could care for somebody that way, I’d make plans and carry them out: buy that stretch of land past Parson’s Place and build houses on it—I could do it if I got quiet.”
Wind surprised, pealed the leaves, parted night clouds; showers of starlight were let loose: our candle, as though intimidated by the incandescence of the opening, star-stabbed sky, toppled, and we could see, unwrapped above us, a late wayaway wintery moon: it was like a slice of snow, near and far creatures called to it, hunched moon-eyed frogs, a claw-voiced wildcat. Catherine hauled out the rose scrapquilt, insisting Dolly wrap it around herself; then she tucked her arms around me and scratched my head until I let it relax on her bosom—You cold? she said, and I wiggled closer: she was good and warm as the old kitchen.
“Son, I’d say you were going at it the wrong end first,” said the Judge, turning up his coat-collar. “How could you care about one girl? Have you ever cared about one leaf?”
Riley, listening to the wildcat with an itchy hunter’s look, snatched at the leaves blowing about us like midnight butterflies; alive, fluttering as though to escape and fly, one stayed trapped between his fingers.
The Judge, too: he caught a leaf; and it was worth more in his hand than in Riley’s. Pressing it mildly against his cheek, he distantly said, “We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed—begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First, a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I’ve never mastered it—I only know how true it is: that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.”
“Then,” said Dolly with an intake of breath, “I’ve been in love all my life.” She sank down into the quilt. “Well, no,” and her voice fell off, “I guess not. I’ve never loved a,” while she searched for the word wind frolicked her veil, “gentleman. You might say that I’ve never had the opportunity. Except Papa,” she paused, as though she’d said too much. A gauze of starlight wrapped her closely as the quilt; something, the reciting frogs, the string of voices stretching from the field of grass, lured, impelled her: “But I have loved everything else.
Like the color pink; when I was a child I had one colored crayon, and it was pink; I drew pink cats, pink trees—for thirty-four years I lived in a pink room. And the box I kept, it’s somewhere in the attic now, I must ask Verena please to give it to me, it would be nice to see my first loves again: what is there? a dried honeycomb, an empty hornet’s nest, other things, or an orange stuck with cloves and a jaybird’s egg—when I loved those love collected inside me so that it went flying about like a bird in a sunflower field. But it’s best not to show such things, it burdens people and makes them, I don’t know why, unhappy. Verena scolds at me for what she calls hiding in corners, but I’m afraid of scaring people if I show that I care for them.
Like Paul Jimson’s wife; after he got sick and couldn’t deliver the papers any more, remember she took over his route? poor thin little thing just dragging herself with that sack of papers. It was one cold afternoon, she came up on the porch her nose running and tears of cold hanging in her eyes—she put down the paper, and I said wait, hold on, and took my handkerchief to wipe her eyes: I wanted to say, if I could, that I was sorry and that I loved her—my hand grazed her face, she turned with the smallest shout and ran down the steps. Then on, she always tossed the papers from the street, and whenever I heard them hit the porch it sounded in my bones.”
“Paul Jimson’s wife: worrying yourself over trash like that!” said Catherine, rinsing her mouth with the last of the wine. “I’ve got a bowl of goldfish, just ’cause I like them don’t make me love the world. Love a lot of mess, my foot. You can talk what you want, not going to do anything but harm, bringing up what’s best forgot. People ought to keep more things to themselves. The deepdown ownself part of you, that’s the good part: what’s left of a human being that goes around speaking his privates?
The Judge, he say we all up here ’cause of trouble some kind. Shoot! We here for very plain reasons. One is, this our tree-house, and two, That One and the Jew’s trying to steal what belongs to us. Three: you here, every one of you, ’cause you want to be: the deepdown part of you tells you so. This last don’t apply to me. I like a roof over my own head. Dollyheart, give the Judge a portion of that quilt: man’s shivering like was Halloween.”
Shyly Dolly lifted a wing of the quilt and nodded to him; the Judge, not at all shy, slipped under it. The branches of the China tree swayed like immense oars dipping into a sea rolling and chilled by the far far stars. Left alone, Riley sat hunched up in himself like a pitiful orphan. “Snuggle up, hard head: you cold like anybody else,” said Catherine, offering him the position on her right that I occupied on her left. He didn’t seem to want to; maybe he noticed that she smelled like bitterweed, or maybe he thought it was sissy; but I said come on, Riley, Catherine’s good and warm, better than a quilt.
After a while Riley moved over to us. It was quiet for so long I thought everyone had gone to sleep. Then I felt Catherine stiffen. “It’s just come to me who it was sent my letter: Bill Nobody. That One, that’s who. Sure as my name’s Catherine Creek she got some nigger in Miami to mail me a letter, thinking I’d scoot off there never to be heard from again.” Dolly sleepily said hush now hush, shut your eyes: “Nothing to be afraid of; we’ve men here to watch out for us.” A branch swung back, moonlight ignited the tree: I saw the Judge take Dolly’s hand. It was the last thing I saw.
IV
RILEY WAS THE FIRST TO wake, and he wakened me.
