Riley sent the girls home; they seemed reluctant to go, but Elizabeth was not used to disobeying her brother. “Lock the doors,” he told her, “and Maude, I’d appreciate it if you’d spend the night at our place: anybody comes by asking for me, say you don’t know where I am.”
I had to help him into the tree, for he’d brought back his gun and a knapsack heavy with provisions—a bottle of rose and raisin wine, oranges, sardines, wieners, rolls from the Katydid Bakery, a jumbo box of animal crackers: each item appearing stepped up our spirits, and Dolly, overcome by the animal crackers, said Riley ought to have a kiss.
But it was with grave face that we listened to his report.
When we’d separated in the woods it was toward the sound of Catherine that he’d run. This had brought him to the grass: he’d been watching when I had my encounter with Big Eddie Stover. I said well why didn’t you help me? “You were doing all right: I don’t figure Big Eddie’s liable to forget you too soon: poor fellow limped along doubled over.” Besides, it occurred to him that no one knew he was one of us, that he’d joined us in the tree: he was right to have stayed hidden, it made it possible for him to follow Catherine and the deputies into town.
They’d stuffed her into the rumble-seat of Big Eddie’s old coupé and driven straight to jail: Riley trailed them in his car. “By the time we reached the jail she seemed to have got quieted down; there was a little crowd hanging around, kids, some old farmers—you would have been proud of Catherine, she walked through them holding her dress together and her head like this.”
He tilted his head at a royal angle. How often I’d seen Catherine do that, especially when anyone criticized her (for hiding puzzle pieces, spreading misinformation, not having her teeth fixed); and Dolly, recognizing it too, had to blow her nose. “But,” said Riley, “as soon as she was inside the jail she kicked up another fuss.” In the jail there are only four cells, two for colored and two for white. Catherine had objected to being put in a colored people’s cell.
The Judge stroked his chin, waved his head. “You didn’t get a chance to speak to her? She ought to have had the comfort of knowing one of us was there.”
“I stood around hoping she’d come to the window. But then I heard the other news.”
Thinking back, I don’t see how Riley could have waited so long to tell us. Because, my God: our friend from Chicago, that hateful Dr. Morris Ritz, had skipped town after rifling Verena’s safe of twelve thousand dollars in negotiable bonds and more than seven hundred dollars in cash: that, as we later learned, was not half his loot. But wouldn’t you know? I realized this was what baby-voiced Will Harris had been recounting to the Sheriff: no wonder Verena had sent a hurry call: her troubles with us must have become quite a side issue. Riley had a few details: he knew that Verena, upon discovering the safe door swung open (this happened in the office she kept above her drygoods store) had whirled around the corner to the Lola Hotel, there to find that Morris Ritz had checked out the previous evening: she fainted: when they revived her she fainted all over again.
Dolly’s soft face hollowed; an urge to go to Verena was rising, at the same moment some sense of self, a deeper will, held her. Regretfully she gazed at me. “It’s better you know it now, Collin; you shouldn’t have to wait until you’re as old as I am: the world is a bad place.”
A change, like a shift of wind, overcame the Judge: he looked at once his age, autumnal, bare, as though he believed that Dolly, by accepting wickedness, had forsaken him. But I knew she had not: he’d called her a spirit, she was really a woman. Uncorking the rose and raisin wine, Riley spilled its topaz color into four glasses; after a moment he filled a fifth, Catherine’s. The Judge, raising the wine to his lips, proposed a toast: “To Catherine, give her trust.” We lifted our glasses, and “Oh Collin,” said Dolly, a sudden stark thought widening her eyes, “you and I, we’re the only ones that can understand a word she says!”
V
THE FOLLOWING DAY, WHICH WAS the first of October, a Wednesday, is one day I won’t forget.
First off, Riley woke me by stepping on my fingers. Dolly, already awake, insisted I apologize for cursing him. Courtesy, she said, is more important in the morning than at any other time: particularly when one is living in such close quarters. The Judge’s watch, still bending the twig like a heavy gold apple, gave the time as six after six. I don’t know whose idea it was, but we breakfasted on oranges and animal crackers and cold hotdogs. The Judge grouched that a body didn’t feel human till he’d had a pot of hot coffee. We agreed that coffee was what we all most missed.
Riley volunteered to drive into town and get some; also, he would have a chance to scout around, find out what was going on. He suggested I come with him: “Nobody’s going to see him, not if he stays down in the seat.” Although the Judge objected, saying he thought it foolhardy, Dolly could tell I wanted to go: I’d yearned so much for a ride in Riley’s car that now the opportunity presented itself nothing, even the prospect that no one might see me, could have thinned my excitement. Dolly said, “I can’t see there’s any harm. But you ought to have a clean shirt: I could plant turnips in the collar of that one.”
The field of grass was without voice, no pheasant rustle, furtive flurry; the pointed leaves were sharp and blood-red as the aftermath arrows of a massacre; their brittleness broke beneath our feet as we waded up the hill into the cemetery. The view from there is very fine: the limitless trembling surface of River Woods, fifty unfolding miles of ploughed, windmilled farmland, far-off the spired courthouse tower, smoking chimneys of town. I stopped by the graves of my mother and father. I had not often visited them, it depressed me, the tomb-cold stone—so unlike what I remembered of them, their aliveness, how she’d cried when he went away to sell his frigidaires, how he’d run naked into the street.
I wanted flowers for the terracotta jars sitting empty on the streaked and muddied marble. Riley helped me; he tore beginning buds off a japonica tree, and watching me arrange them, said: “I’m glad your ma was nice. Bitches, by and large.” I wondered if he meant his own mother, poor Rose Henderson, who used to make him hop around the yard reciting the multiplication table. It did seem to me, though, that he’d made up for those hard days. After all, he had a car that was supposed to have cost three thousand dollars. Second-hand, mind you. It was a foreign car, an Alfa Romeo roadster (Romeo’s Alfa, the joke was) he’d bought in New Orleans from a politician bound for the penitentiary.
As we purred along the unpaved road toward town I kept hoping for a witness: there were certain persons it would have done my heart good to have seen me sailing by in Riley Henderson’s car. But it was too early for anyone much to be about; breakfast was still on the stove, and smoke soared out the chimneys of passing houses. We turned the corner by the church, drove around the square and parked in the dirt lane that runs between Cooper’s Livery and the Katydid Bakery.
There Riley left me with orders to stay put: he wouldn’t be more than an hour. So, stretching out on the seat, I listened to the chicanery of thieving sparrows in the livery stable’s haystacks, breathed the fresh bread, tart as currant odors escaping from the bakery. The couple who owned this bakery, County was their name, Mr. and Mrs. C. C. County, had to begin their day at three in the morning to be ready by opening time, eight o’clock. It was a clean prosperous place. Mrs. County could afford the most expensive clothes at Verena’s drygoods store.
While I lay there smelling the good things, the back door of the bakery opened and Mr. County, broom in hand, swept flour dust into the lane. I guess he was surprised to see Riley’s car, and surprised to find me in it.
“What you up to, Collin?”
“Up to nothing, Mr. County,” I said, and asked myself if he knew about our trouble.
“Sure am happy October’s here,” he said, rubbing the air with his fingers as though the chill woven into it was a material he could feel. “We have a terrible time in the summer: ovens and all make it too hot to live. See here, son, there’s a gingerbread man waiting for you—come on in and run him down.”
Now he was not the kind of man to get me in there and then call the Sheriff.
His wife welcomed me into the spiced heat
