Home from the Hill (23 page)

“
He
didn't ask what color gown I was wearing,” she said, though she seemed not to be talking to him.

“I'll bring it up,” he said.

“They have such a heavy smell,” she said. “I think I'd rather not have it in the room just now.”

“They don't keep,” he said. “Too bad. Well, call if you need anything.”

“Papa. There's something I've been wanting to tell you.” Something told her that this was not the time, but she could not quiet herself.

“Yes?”

“I've decided I don't want to go to college after all.”

He had no definite suspicions. Those he repulsed as soon as ever they made their advent. Definite suspicions were just too unsettling to be allowed to set up housekeeping in his mind. He had vague misgivings, general qualms. However, she was not well. “We'll talk about it tomorrow,” he said.

This sounded like the preamble to opposition. “No, Papa. Now. I've made up my mind. I've decided I want to—”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “You're not feeling well now.”

“I'll be feeling just the same tomorrow,” she said. “My mind is made up.”

Something echoed vaguely, unpleasantly in his mind. “Is it?” he said. “Well, so is mine. You're going, miss, whether you like it or not.”

32

So there hung over them then the misery of approaching separation. She was by nature lighter of heart, more able to take the pleasure of the moment, but the pain was always there. And then one day in July she told him she would have to stop spending the night out with girl friends. She was afraid her father had suspicions. He seemed to live for the fall, when she would be sent away. And it was not to be SMU, not Dallas. He would not tell her where, but it was sure to be farther away; maybe State, in Austin. For the first time Theron regretted quitting school.

It became almost impossible for them to meet.

Then in the last week of August she managed to get away for an entire afternoon and evening. They bought groceries and packed a picnic supper. They drove out to Silver Lake and rented a boat and went fishing.

But he could no longer even pretend to throw himself wholeheartedly into pleasures of the moment; moments of pleasure passed, he knew now, bringing hours of separation and pain. Misery was a constant state with him now; often he wondered how it ever came to be that love affairs of people their age were the subject of jokes. It had got so that pastimes brought to his mind nothing so much as the thought that they must pass, and now he was seldom gloomier then when actually on one of the rare holidays from his loneliness and hurt. He was moody now, and the day together that both had yearned for was not turning out a success.

Because she had been seeing Theron secretly, Libby had started no quarrels with her father, but her mother must have guessed, and as much she dared, she took Libby's side. For just that week, after long silence on the subject, there had been a scene which Libby had overheard, a scene brought about apparently by her mother, when, at the very end of his patience with a matter he considered past and closed, her father had said he did not want that kind of boy around his daughter. This was being specific: “that kind” of boy or “that kind” of girl meant just one thing. She dutifully kept the thought at some distance, but it seemed to Libby that her father had a dirty mind. The irony of the accusation stupefied her. How well she knew him now! If ever there was a boy not at all “that kind,” it was Theron, she thought, remembering tenderly and with a touch of loving amusement, his old-fashioned respect, amounting almost to an awe, of women, his impeccable manners and decorous expressions, his stiff, almost comical propriety. But her father had been adamant. He had refused to hear a word in Theron's defence. Ordinarily he was not a particularly obdurate man, but this did not make Libby believe he had any evidence for his charge. She resented the accusation, and tried to be especially tender towards Theron that afternoon.

But, alone and untouchable in his melancholy, he seemed almost to repel her advances. The very sight of her seemed to cause him no pleasure, but only pain; any attempt she made at conviviality or tenderness to make him withdraw still further into himself. Surely he did not suspect her of disloyalty, of beginning to listen to her father's complaints against him? What more could she do than she had done to prove her love to him?

She sat in the prow, he in the stern of the still boat. Though the sun was getting low, the brilliant heat rained down. She wore an old straw hat of his, and the sun came through the cracks in the brim, freckling her face. His bare head was reddish-black in the dying sunlight. The boat was motionless on the water, which seemed to have jelled, so still that even the bobbers, little red and white bubbles, set as though in a solid. Then she saw his jig, bob, jig again, bob under. She looked up and around and saw that though his eyes were fastened on it he did not see it. It went under and popped up again, went deep under and the line began to saw the water alongside. She hesitated to speak; a whisper in such silence would have been a shout, and she wished to spare him the embarrassment of having been detected in such self-absorption. It seemed terrible, impossible, that their common trouble, instead of drawing them together, should divorce them. Yet if she made up to him from either side it failed; instead of cheering him she disgusted him if she tried to make light of their problem; she depressed him if she condoled with him. She sat watching the agitated line in the water in a numb ache of heart and mind, feeling that she had reached the end of all her little loving devices.

The imminence of separation had aroused in Theron feelings of which he was not proud. The prospect of impending loneliness had brought him to a mood of petulance. He complained against Libby in his thoughts. He believed she cared less than he. She might think she cared as much, but it was impossible that her thoughts had not sometimes stolen ahead to the future with some anticipation. For she was going among new people in a new world she could not help but find exciting. She was going so far away he would never see her except when she came home on holidays; but before long the distance separating her notion of herself, when she returned a sophisticated young college woman, from the quaint old things of home, would be greater than the miles separating them during the term. He was left with the same old people, the same old place.

Unfair to her and unworthy of himself as these thoughts were, they were far from the worst with which he had now to struggle. Into his mind shameful longings had insinuated themselves, and now, securely ensconced, resisted every attack of his conscience. In the spirit of a sulky child, he ached for the final proof of her love, proof that she took his side against her father, that she would not forget him when she went away. He yearned to put his mark upon her, so that other boys could never have her.

“Oh, I've got a bite!” he cried, then, “Oh, he got away. Ah well, we have enough. Want to go in now?”

“If you do.”

His back was towards her, and in the small boat as he leaned backwards on the oars his head almost reached her lap and she remembered times before when he had dropped it there and laughed at her upside down, his white teeth gleaming in his dark face, his black hair in her lap. She sighed. The sun was dipping to the pointed tops of the pines and the water turning purple in the glancing rays. The day was slipping away. How long would it be until their next? It had gone so quickly, and had not even been sped by happiness. August was burning itself out, September almost here—school registration time almost here. You could be sent away to college in the state and yet be a thousand miles from home. This might be the last time they would meet until—until who knew when?

They tied the boat up at the dock and showed the bearded old keeper their string of bream. They went through the deserted picnic area and down a sandy road that skirted the lake through the black-green pines to a spot on the south shore that had memories for them, where they had picnicked late in the spring and early in the summer before the time of their worst troubles began, and where in a needle-padded clearing among the pines that ran down to the water's edge they had built a stone fireplace all their own, where, cooking the fish he caught, spreading their table-on-the-ground, serving their food, eating by his side, it had been almost like being married—where at the end of each trip, she thought—seeing the one there now, an old pile now, rain-bleached and barkless—they had made a little ritual of laying up a stack of firewood as a vow that nothing could prevent a next and a next and a lifetime of such days together.

While he brought the groceries from the car, she started the fire and spread the old blanket, and while he went down to the waterside and scaled and cleaned the fish, she put the skillet on to heat and spread the table-on-the-ground. Once she looked up from her work, and the sight of him bent over at his chore, against the backdrop of the darkening water, made her personal hurt drop away on the instant, vanish in an impulse of pity for his, the harder part to bear, the lonely endurance which the code of manhood forced upon him.

It had been settled in their gayer days that he, with his camp experience, was the cook of the “family.” He rolled the wet fish in the cornmeal and dropped them spluttering into the skillet of hot grease. While they fried, he brought the back seat cushion from the car. She sat on it and watched as he stirred the potatoes amongst the ashes and coals. She felt the darkness close in around them while the light of the fire created a room of their own, and she indulged in her favorite fantasy: that there was nothing outside the warm space they occupied together, that they were the only two people in the world. Oh, it might be their very last time, she cried within herself. Why did he waste it moping? Why not take what moments they could steal?

They built the fire up high while they ate and pine knots burst with a bang in the heat, each time making her more aware of the silence between them, unbroken, it seemed to her, even by what words did pass: forced attempts to praise the food, to urge more on one another.

Afterwards they had coffee, sitting miles apart side by side on the car seat, staring into the fire, listening to the croak of the bullfrogs, hearing occasionally the flop of a heavy fish on the rise out in the lake.

He finished his cup and flung the dregs into the fire and standing up with a sigh said, well, they'd might as well go. Her father would be coming home.

Her father would not be coming home until midnight. It pained her to think he was willing to give up a part of their precious day, their last day, and, stung, she looked at him reproachfully. But she could not harbor a reproach against him. He avoided her eyes. She did not get up, but sat staring into the fire, the heat of which made the skin of her face feel tight. The day could not end like this. Something had to happen. They could not part like this, perhaps for months, perhaps for longer. She passed her hand over her hot, drawn face, and on a sudden impulse got quickly to her feet.

He was bending to pick up the water bucket, meaning to douse their fire. She touched his arm lightly, and there was something in that touch that reached him at last. He straightened. His face too was drawn and his eyes were pained. She did not wait for him, but, her heart pounding and her breath coming short, took him into her arms—and into her kiss put, she hoped, something he had not found there before. He respected her so much, was so naive, so unsuspecting in such matters. Would she have to throw aside all modesty before he got the idea? She was frightened at herself, but love steadied her intention. Only, the preservation of her self-respect made it necessary, while directing things, to manipulate so he would think the urge, the advance, his own—her part, though not unwillingly, a yielding.

Even in the darkness she could sense that behind his gratitude, his love, there lurked another feeling. She blushed to put the question to herself even in the dark, but wondered if in her own inexperience she had not known how to please. Or had she failed to lead him to think it was his own passion that had swayed her, and was he shocked; did he, in his high and hard righteousness, despise her for her frailty? She waited in the darkness for the words to which her answer would have been that he needn't apologize; she waited then for any word, waited just to be noticed, until, listening to the pines sigh in the breeze as before, the frogs croak just the same, a terrifying sensation that it had not happened at all began to creep over her.

Staring into the darkness, appalled, he thought: I am just what I took such offense at being suspected of. Her breathing now had calmed and subsided, and now he could not hear it at all. Was she holding her breath? What was she thinking? The croak of the frogs was maddening. Why didn't she speak? The fire was dying. There was some protection in darkness; how would he be able to face her in the light? How would he ever be able to face anyone, her father, his mother, his father, face even the trusting eyes of his dogs? The fire was dead. He could see nothing, except, through the pine-framed clearing overhead, the stars that seemed to look down like a thousand winking eyes.

33

If it was mild weather, so that the windows were raised, and if it was a still evening and you yourself were still and in one of the upstairs rooms of the Hunnicutt house, you could hear the courthouse clock, until midnight, chiming four for the quarter hour, eight for the half, twelve for the quarter-of and sixteen before the hour, the volume swelling as the town went to sleep, or seeming to as you yourself did not.

Twelve midnight was the last hour the clock struck; after that everyone was expected to be asleep. Mrs. Hannah was often still awake to hear the bells commence a new day at six. This was beginning like one of those nights.

The quarter-hourly chimes had a heavily accented beat and a sort of tune, and years before, in that still hot summer of her pregnancy, as she lay awake gasping for breath under the pressure of her burden, thinking that she was one of three somewhere in town lying awake, a set of words had begun to sound to that tune in Mrs. Hannah's mind. Once at a quarter past the hour, twice at half past, three times at a quarter of and four on the hour the bells sang:
He's still not home
.