Home from the Hill (17 page)

Now he heard a door open upstairs. But it was only Mr. Halstead again: he heard the slap of the carpet slippers on the floor.

Mr. Halstead appeared at the head of the stairs, where he paused for a moment, peering over the rims of his spectacles.

“Elizabeth's taken sick,” he said.

“Sick?” said Theron. “Why, what's the matter?”

But all Mr. Halstead would say was that she had taken sick all of a sudden. He came downstairs.

“I hope it's nothing serious,” said Theron.

Mr. Halstead replied evasively. “With a little rest …”

It was something, Theron guessed, a little embarrassing, not quite proper for him to be specific about. But it could not be serious. He was sure he heard her step just that second upstairs.

With his hand on the door, he stole a glance up the stairwell. Then he became aware of the box containing the corsage in his hand. He put it in Mr. Halstead's hand. “Please give her this,” he said. “And would you say I hope she feels better soon. And—” he felt himself color a little—“tell her not to worry about me being disappointed. And that I'll call tomorrow to see how she is.”

“She'll be feeling just the same tomorrow,” said Mr. Halstead.

He felt the corsage box in his hand, and then the door was shut in his face.

23

He stood staring at the door and hearing those slippers pad away, and after their sound had died, still remained staring, dazed and stultified. His mind was still a blank when finally he turned and crossed the porch.

He went down the walk and opened the gate and turned and closed it, all in a kind of shocked stupor. He gazed up at the second-story windows. The shades were drawn, and no shadow fell upon them. He turned and started down the sidewalk.

His mind began to function. Thoughts found words. He had been turned out. Shown the door. He. It was staggering, it was stupendous, it was impossible—and in fact could not be. He stopped, quite certain that it had not happened, that he had made some mistake, that his mind was playing a trick on him. To someone else, maybe—not to him. Not today, of all days.

He re-enacted it in his mind, his feet meanwhile setting themselves going again, hoping to find some flaw in the thing that would discredit the reality of it all. He saw very plainly Mr. Halstead's unwelcoming look, heard his challenging tone, “
Have
you?
Are
you?” and remembering with a shudder for the ignominy of it, the feel of the corsage box returned to his hand, felt it in his hand now, looked down and saw it there, and dropped it as though it burned. The weightless thing fell upon the pavement without sound. He kicked it into the hedge alongside the walk.

Now he wished passionately not to go over the scene in his mind, wished to erase it from his thoughts forever, and now it forced itself upon them in all its details. Especially insistent was Mr. Halstead's teasing question, “And what are you going to teach her?” and suddenly, with a jolt that stopped him cold, that brought the blood pounding to his brain, he knew what it meant. For whose sake, Libby's or his own, his resentment came first, he could not distinguish, but he burned with indignation for them both.

He wheeled about and, clenching his jaw and his fists started back. This, he thought, was the most incredible part of the affront. Even now, when it had been so aspersed, he shrank from preening himself on his honor; yet surely he had a right to feel he deserved such a suspicion as little as anybody. He was not going to take this insult. Maybe it was not his place to point out to the man the respect he owed his daughter, but he would set Mr. Halstead straight damn quick on what he owed him.

He had come three blocks. Now in the middle one on his way back the porch lights of a house up ahead on his side of the street came on. The trees in front of the house started up in the sudden illumination, and he saw a car at the curb that he had passed without noticing before. Now the door was opened and a carpet of brighter light was flung out across the porch and Theron heard laughter and gay words spoken in young voices. A boy and girl came out on the porch, he tugging her by the hand while she, waving back into the house, squealed with pleasure. The girl wore a white evening gown, and at her throat was pinned a dark corsage. They were going to the dance—his dance. They came down the steps and down the walk. He could not brazen out a meeting with them, in these clothes, wave, pretend he was just now on his way to call for his date, perhaps have to refuse an offer of a lift. He recoiled from the headlights that sprang up, into a redbud bush at the edge of the walk. The car leapt away from the curb and sped past. The windows were down, and he heard their bright happy voices with a pang of envy.

When he stepped back onto the pavement, he found that his resolution had vanished. His anger was replaced with utter bewilderment. He stood numbed by the force of it, and for a moment could not even turn his feet about.

But no sooner had he taken a few steps than resentment once more boiled up in him. He stopped again while anger and incredulity strove within him. His head was bent, and as he stood his eye caught a dim glitter on the ground in the shadow of the hedge. It was the cellophane box that he had kicked there. At the same moment he saw that in stepping off the walk he had muddied his new shoes.

His hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, he wandered vaguely in the direction of home, finding only after it was done that he had taken the right turn at the corners. He could not shake from his thoughts the memory of Mr. Halstead's look as they had stood together at the door, a look of disapproval, of mistrust. “It's Theron Hunnicutt,” he had said, and Mr. Halstead had replied, “I see it is.” But how could he have seen it was, and then done what he did? Didn't he know who he was? Had someone been telling him lies about Theron Hunnicutt? Who would do that? Didn't Mr. Halstead know he had been insulting and unfair to the boy whom everybody liked and admired?

“Some people just don't know people as soon as they get dressed up, do they?”

These, as in themselves they showed, were the first words he had heard, the “Hello, Theron,” which had been spoken before having passed as unnoticed as the girl who spoke it or the boy on whose arm she walked. The irony of the remark, his clothes being the mockery they were to him now, made Theron laugh hollowly.

He turned on to his street and plodded up the hill, leaving the lights of town behind. Here the walk was dark with the drip of dew off the overhanging elms and sycamores that were the pride of upper Main Street. His mind was in a welter, between his smouldering sense of injury, his regret and his dismay. He had forgotten the dance. Now he heard jazz music coming down the hill, and looked up and saw the lights of his house. He knew there was nothing to reproach himself for in the matter, that he had been wronged; but he was more ashamed of having endured a wrong than he would have been of inflicting one. He dreaded facing the guests, and his hatred of Mr. Halstead reached its peak when he realized that he would have to repeat Mr. Halstead's lying excuse to save his own face.

The dance was in the den, which had been converted, bared for the occasion; the fishing net hauled down, the hides removed from the walls, the rugs taken away. Now from the rafters instead of duck decoys hung colored tissue-paper lanterns inside which electric bulbs softly burned. In this muted light, colors deepened; a dark luster shone in eyes, a soft sheen on the tossed hair of the dancing girls and on their silk and satin skirts, which, as they swirled, lifted from the floor twinkling amber puffs of powdered wax.

The band had been rounded up in niggertown. The cornetist could not have been more than fifteen, the slide-trombonist not less than seventy. There was also a clarinet, a banjo, drums, and a bass, the leader, whose heavy foot laid down the beat with machine-like regularity, who, just as Theron entered, started a new number with a loudly whispered
Now!
and whose rough, throaty voice could be heard above the music calling chords and keys and bestowing praise on the players, himself included, for a pretty passage, a long-sustained note.

One of the couples on the floor was his mother and father. They danced in his direction, and when he saw him his father gave his mother a gay twirl for Theron's benefit. “Where's your girl?” said his father as they went past.

Fortunately his entrance had not yet been generally noticed, and no one was near to overhear the question. He saw the dancing couples and those not dancing but engaged in conversation as they sat close together on the benches, and the irony of his situation became incredible. That he alone should have no date! And to add to the bitterness, that the one he was to have had—a vivid picture of her sprang now into his mind—was so much prettier than any of these girls.

He was joined by half a dozen of his guests, girls and boys his age. He had to endure their thanks for the party. Then they appeared to be waiting for his date to join him from the powder room. The memory of his ignominious rejection and his refusal to be indebted to Mr. Halstead for an excuse overcame him. On an impulse, despising himself for it and hating Mr. Halstead more than ever, he said, “Well, I hope you all have a good time. I don't dance myself.” Which explained why he had no date.

But when the dance was finished and his mother joined him and asked where Libby was, he said she had suddenly been taken sick. No, nothing serious.

He could see that it did not displease his mother that he was apparently so little disappointed.

24

Rain came on the day's breeze. By midnight the breeze had become a wind, out of the south, and, taking leave on the porch, the older people, all of whose livelihoods depended nearly or remotely on the weather, commented on the clouds piling up. It would rain before morning, all said, and sure enough, the wind swelled, and at a little past two there came a thud on the roof like a tree falling on it. It was the thunderous East Texas floodtide, a deluge of solid water.

Yet at dawn robins and mockingbirds began to warble, and at the first glimmer of daylight jays began to scold the world for oversleeping. That was spring in East Texas, too: seasonal shifts of weather in a matter of minutes. The sun rose rapidly in an immense and spotless sky, and at seven a country man, emboldened by the sunshine, dared invade upper Main Street and disturb the quality's rest so early, his mule clop-clopping on the bois-d'arc bricks and he chanting in a nasal, backwoods, but not unmusical voice, a real turpentine twang:

Ooooh, I got
.…

Fresh tomaters, fresh tomaters, fresh tomaters
.

Yes, ma'am
.…

Fresh tomaters, fresh tomaters, fresh tomaters
…

“Green ez a gourd an bout ez big roun ez yo finger, I'd take a vow,” was Melba's comment, not to Theron, but to herself, as, rolling up her apron and reaching down her kitchen-money crock from off the shelf behind the range, she prepared to sally out and inspect and thump and pinch and shake her head and jew-down, and have herself a marvelous fifteen minutes before returning laden.

Scallions too, an English peas,

Mustard greens
,

Salad greens
,

String beans an redishes
.

Aaaaaaand

Fresh tomaters!

Yes, I got
…

It was the sort of day that brought people out to wash and polish cars, spade the flower beds, pack picnic lunches. And it was Saturday. Saturday is the day of the week in a small Southern town, a kind of pagan sabbath. It feels different from the minute you wake up. There is a hum of activity in the air, and, if it is summer, and there is a good chance it is, since that includes what in other places is spring and fall, a quickening of excitement and expectation in the blood. To be down on the square, that is what you live for, and a feeling comes to you that all over the county people are making preparations or setting out or already on the road, having got up in the dark of the morning and milked the cow and fed the chickens and slopped the hogs and hitched the team or cranked or pushed the jitney and loaded in the kids, the week's eggs and cream, and set out for town, for the square—there to walk round and around and around, perhaps a hundred revolutions, or go to the picture-show and sit through six complete showings of the western and the serial and the pie-throwing comedy while eating a whole week's hoarded appetite for Crackerjack and pink peanut patties. The stores are crowded with farm women converting the egg and cream money into bolt goods, packets of flower seed, new Butterick patterns, until around noon it comes time to go and sit in the car and watch the people go round and around, give the baby titty, and receive visits from ladies from the other parked cars, pay a few such visits themselves. And the men make for the corner of the square to squat and whittle for eight or ten hours, but for a trip or two out to the backalley for a snort, until the picture-show lets out and the biggest boy is sent by his mama to come say it's time to go home again—bringing with them their violent, crude and childlike tales:

“Won't you sit, Thetford?”

“No.”

“Why won't you sit, Thetford?”

“Cause I don't want to, that's why, and mind your own damn business.”

“Hee! I guess he don't want to.” This from Thetford's pa, Clarence. “I guess he don't want to.”

“Aw, shut up, Pa.”

“I guess you all know Miz Missouri Maclntyre,” says Clarence. “With her peculiar ways.”

“Peculiar. Haw.”

“Well, you orter seen Thetford when she lit into him one day last week. Laff, I thought I'd die.”

“I never seen you laffin when she got thoo with me and started in on you.”

“Yawl know Miz Missouri lives all to herself in the old Kitteredge place down on the old Winona road. Now, they's some fair squirrel hunting down there, and one day last week me and Thetford took off and went. Well, we was going towards a stand I had noticed before, where was a good many sign, when we hear this gun go off not very far off. Now it being a little out of season, you know, we didn't much care to be seen ourselves, so we hid us behind a tree. Well, along down the path comes the damndest sight you ever saw. It's Miz Missouri in them tennis shoes and that old man's hat of hers, carrying a shotgun, and right on her heels comes a little nigger boy just slapping high, carrying a three-legged milk stool and a tackhammer. That's what I said: three-legged milk stool and a tackhammer. If they wasn't a pair to come up on in the woods. And you orter seen that shotgun. The barrel was tied on with bailing wire and they was enough black tape wrapped around the grip to go in business with. The stock looked like it'd been hacked out of a stump with a hatchet by a blind man on a drunk. An old single-barrel Long Tom. Well, they was both sneaking along—you know Miz Missouri'll run you near two hundred pound—and tippy-toeing so hard they was jouncing like walking on a spring mattress. Every once in a while she'd turn to the little nigger boy and put her finger to her lips and shoosh him, and he would nod and put his finger to his lips and shoosh her right back. So me and Thetford fell in behind and went along to watch. Pretty soon Miz Missouri stops and the boy stops too. Then she turns and jerks her head for him to come up. So he sneaks up to her and sets his milk stool down right beside her feet and climbs up on it. Miz Missouri puts the gun to her shoulder and points it up a tree and squints down the barrel. Little boy raises his tackhammer. “Now!” says Miz Missouri, and the little boy brings his hammer down and whacks the gun hammer—for, you see, the hammer spring was broke. Blooey! Miz Missouri staggers back and the little boy goes ass-over-teakittle. Then he gets up and grabs his stool and goes over under the tree to look for the squirrel. Damndest funniest sight you ever saw in your life. Laff, I thought I'd die. Me and Thetford was rolling on the ground and trying to hold it in, but at last I just couldn't no more, and as soon as I let out Thetford lets go and starts choking to get his breath. Well, first thing we know there is Miz Missouri standing over us and that little nigger boy with her.