Dark Don't Catch Me (6 page)

“Oh,
I
don't know,” she'd answer them; suddenly tired of the game she was playing against herself.
“I
guess he read some of his crazy old poetry.”

He read poetry almost all the time to her, and she to him, reading poems he had selected for her, as though their first meeting when they had read together was to establish the pattern of their future meetings. While she saw him more times than anyone but he or she knew, there was no regularity to those intervals; and they were spaced weeks and often months apart. She would walk purposely to the woods to find him, and at times she would find him; other times, merely sit there in the clearing alone, wondering about him, and wondering what was happening to her because of him.

Never once until the day of their humiliation did Hollis Jordan speak to her of any feeling he might have had other than a friendly one. What she never got used to about Hollis when they were together was the way he would tell her things about herself, which a man to Ada's mind didn't tell a girl unless there was something between them. The third time they were ever together, out in back of his place, when she was watching him mend a fence worn in with the wind, he stopped what he was doing suddenly and said, “You have fine legs. Are you going to college?”

She never knew how to answer him when he said things like that. She even loathed him some, imagining the dirty pictures in his mind. Yet at night sometimes for no reason she would wake up restless and warm; take off her flannel nightgown, and stand naked before the open window in the cold breeze and wish she had a reason to cry….

Hollis and she grew on one another like intertwining vines of ivy along some old, cold wall, without either of them really knowing it. They began to finish sentences for each other, and to laugh too much too easily together. They learned to walk in silence, and to hand one another leaves, or stones, or pine cones, for no reason. Yet when it came time for them to be separated, she told him.

“Well, I'll be going up to Athens next week.”

“I'll miss you, Ada.”

“Athens isn't so far.”

“Still, you'll be meeting new people. You'll have to hit the books too.”

“Where'd you go to college, Hollis? Did you?” “Nope. Athens, Georgia, huh?” “Yes. Dear old Athens.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you come home brilliant, hear?” “I hear, Hollis.”

It was two weeks and twenty letters after she went to the University when she received her first communication from Hollis. The lines scrawled on the postcard were familiar ones:

I wonder if there's a draft in the baby's room … Maybe I'd better close the window?

The Paradise Bigger Band hammers at the piece ambitiously, with Kate Bailey tapping out the rhythm. Doc Sell's wife holds her lips from the tuba to allow Guessie to take her notes on the drum; all of them are in accord, and Ada remembers:

“I didn't mean to laugh back there, Hollis, when you kissed me.

“I know you didn't.”

“I wish I knew how to be more honest with myself.”

“We all have trouble in that department.”

“Hollis, I used to laugh about you to people. I used to tell things we did together like it was a joke, like I didn't even care about any of it, like you were some kind of character.”

“I guess I am.”

“No, don't say that. Don't laugh, Hollis. Do you know something?” She was eager now, suddenly buoyant, possessed of some new feeling of liberation, and the physical too, still. “In Athens, when I'd be out on some silly, tacky beer party, sitting on some boy's blanket on the ground while he was trying to paw me, I used to think what you always said about dirt, about how good it felt in your hands, and how it smelled and tasted. And I'd get this idea, Hollis, that I had to get away from there and go someplace by myself. And I'd miss you so, Hollis. I know we never talk like this — you and I — but Hollis, I'd miss you!”

“All right,” he said, putting his arm around her. “All right, Ada.”

He touched his mouth again to hers, and she leaned deeply into him then, her own mouth warm and alive, no longer passive against his. Her eyes were half shut watching him, and her breath came and went in little quick gasps, drinking his. For a long time he kissed her, until her hair was all shaken down, touching his cheeks and shaking around his face, while the man in him grew; and unbuttoning her; then buttoning her up again, whispering some vague, nearly incoherent something about not wanting to do that to her; but she put his fingers back on the buttons and begged him with that gesture.

When his own hands fumbled clumsily with the clothing he undid, hers hurried the undressing, until he felt the warm bare arms around his neck. He held her in his lap, embracing her nakedness with a trembling strength. And then, before the time of their love, he was compelled to lift her from his lap, to kneel there in the clearing before those young unpendulous breasts, the lithe body clad in its garment of nudity. He knelt, clinging to those ripe white knees in that instant before he would bend them in the act of love —

When, “Ada!” they both heard. “Ada Adams!”

And as any two ever caught near climax by an outsider, they felt immediately ridiculous, rude, and laughingly unattractive.

“Ada! Put your things back on and come along!”

• • •

“No more to it than that?”

“Nope. That's the funny thing about it.”

“But that didn't make Ada the way she is now, you think?”

“The whole story ain't been told, for my cotton!”

“Imagine the bastard getting her to do a regular old striptease up in Awful Dark Woods!”

“Aw, sheet anyway! He's crazy! Didn't even fight in the war!”

• • •

“Very, very good!” Kate Bailey says at the end of “Loch Lomond.” “Now we'll try ‘Turkey In The Straw'!”

Marianne Ficklin hollers over to Ada Pirkle, “Ada, honey? How come you don't take up an instrument? Do you good, honey!”

“ ‘Turkey In The Straw,' “ Kate Bailey says. “Page Six. Ready?”

V
IVIE HOOPER
turns the volume down on the small portable, and leans forward in the rocker to see who is driving up to the pumps outside. Then she gets up: twenty-eight, not too tall, but straight-standing, and quiet and graceful looking, as though her own awareness of her beauty has made her feel some sense of responsibility which must make her express to others an aura of inviolate dignity and stunning, kindly poise.

Her magnificent pitch-black hair spills to her shoulders, the gleaming soft-white-skinned perfectness of them, hidden by the simple black dress with its round Peter Pan collar. The dress is not designed to highlight her voluptuous figure — Thad ordered it for her from Atlanta; a surprise — but almost as if in protest the breasts and hips of her push through the cotton fabric proudly to show themselves. She is long-legged for a girl her height, her ankles curving thinly and exquisitely above the black ballet slippers. Her face is radiant, even now when its expression is solemn; the long black lashes of her deep blue eyes are lowered; the wide lips curving generously, lightly painted rose color; her skin is flawless, like burnished ivory. She has, for someone so vitally beautiful, some sweet and incredible shyness to her make-up; striped with a paradoxical air of calm composure. Her voice is husky, low; its tone, gentle.

Walking to the door and opening it, she calls out, “Hi, Storey! What brings you around this time of afternoon?”

He cuts his motor and grins at her, wiggling over and getting out on the right side of the new light-blue Ford. “Thought you'd be up at the house fixing for the barbecue, Vivs.”

“Hus is doing all the fixing. You know Hus. She hates meddling.”

He stands under the stark black-lettered sign which reads:
Hooper's Place — Gas and Pop,
with the smaller sign attached:
Scuppernongs For Sale
—
50¢ gallon
—
20¢ for all you can eat!

And he thinks as always with wonder upon the fact he, Storey Bailey, made more of himself than Thad Hooper; he, Storey Bailey, head superintendent at the Galverton Mill, with his farm growing a good crop in corn and cotton too, came out the better. For he never would have thought it as a boy — younger than Thad by eight years, beholden to Thad Hooper. He was so very beholden that the night with Vivs, even before Thad and she were officially engaged, had made him vomit afterwards, and swear no other lapse in loyalty to Thad — because even though it was not official between Vivs and Thad, who better but Storey Bailey knew his idol's intentions toward her. And he had forced it out of his mind, rooted it out, married Kate (a really good woman) and paradoxically done better than Thad. He was almost ashamed because he had.

“Hey, girl, how come you're minding the station? Ole Thad got you working now, huh! Whew, hot!” He mops his brow with a large square white handkerchief. The roundness of his face, the ruddiness of it and the tilt to his near-pug nose, coupled with the towhead, gives his countenance a boyish look. His lean, gangling frame, slightly awkward and disconnected in its gait, lends him still more youth; and Kate, older-looking but in fact two years his junior, says always at church supper socials: “Pass the salt to my son, please,” and people in Paradise laugh good-naturedly with her at the remark.

“Today's the anniversary,” Vivie says. “He's taken little Thad and Emily up to the grave.”

“Oh, yes? I saw him earlier out in front of the courthouse. The anniversary today, hmmm? And still having the barbecue?”

“Thad says it's right we should; says she would have wanted it that way, for him to be surrounded by his friends — our friends.”

“Hard to tell, isn't it, how she'd feel about it?” “I guess he grew her up right along with him in his mind, Storey.”

“I guess Thad did … I hardly remember her; just that they were twins and it nearly killed him when she died.”

“Yes. They were twins … I don't remember her either.”

“Seems like we were all but babies when she was living anyway.”

“Come on in and rest. Have some pop. How's Kate?”

Storey follows her into the filling station, a mile down from the Hoopers' house, with the land in between their land; but poor top-soil land, less fertile than Storey's own, with only
a
cotton crop, and none other to speak of save for the scuppernongs.

He says as they go: “She's down rehearsing the band.” “Oh, of course. Tuesday.” “Umm-humm. Every Tuesday.” “You want orange or grape?”

“Grape'll be good.”

“She certainly likes working with the band, doesn't she, Storey?”

“I don't know that she likes it. It's hard, don't let anyone kid you about that, Vivs, but you know it's real worthwhile. I guess everybody in Paradise is crazy about the band.”

“Sure, I know it's hard work.”

“Kate's a good woman,” Storey says. He looks solemnly at Vivian Hooper, swigs his grape soda, and sets it down on the wooden table. He says in a surprisingly sober tone: “Yes, we married ourselves to good people, Vivs. We married ourselves to fine people.”

Vivian Hooper hears little or none of the explanation which follows for having the afternoon off from the mill at Galverton. Her mind harps on that statement, on its insinuation — imagined? — and again as countless times before with Storey, times when his eyes turn away from her own, having come up her body too suddenly to see it fully; yet just that furtively that she imagines he is thinking back in time to that night;
she
remembers it all again too.

• • •

Eleven years ago:

“Vivs? Thad says he's got to stay on and close up the exhibit for his dad. Says that I might as well run you on home.”

At the county fair, the summer Vivian was just seventeen, Storey nineteen, and Thad twenty-seven, the oldest bachelor in Paradise — outside of Hollis Jordan, who was crazy and never would marry a girl in her right mind. It was at that county fair that Thad Hooper's father had set up an educational exhibit based on producing sorghum molasses the old-fashioned way, with an old-time sorghum mill complete with a mule crushing the sorghum cane, and the syrup cooking over the wood fire. And during this the old man had caught the virus, and Thad had taken over most of the duties….

“Why, thank you, Storey,” Vivie had said, “but I don't know that I feel like going
home.”

“We could walk around some and look at the exhibits.”

“Oh, I've seen them all … I don't know … Since Thad got tied up here, we just haven't been anyplace at all but here.”

“Well, you want to drive around or something?”

“Why, thank you, Storey. I guess that might be fun.”

She had always genuinely liked Storey Bailey. They were nearer in age than Thad and she were, and sometimes when she was first going out with Thad, she wondered if she weren't more pleased over the fact that she was dating Storey's idol more than at the fact that she was dating the most eligible bachelor in Paradise. She used to like to tease Storey some.

“I was out with Thad Hooper last night, Storey. He mentioned your name several times.”

“He
did!
Well, what'd he say?”

“I don't know that I rightly remember. Something, though.” “Well, good or bad?”

“I don't remember, Storey. I just remember he mentioned your name several times. He certainly is nice.”

“He's a swell guy, all right — Thad Hooper is. I guess I think he's just about one of the nicest guys around here.”

“I guess you think a lot of him, all right.”