Home from the Hill (26 page)

Quiet deepened like cold as the night crept towards the still, small hours, and despite the heat, Mrs. Hannah began to feel something almost like a chill. It unstrung her nerves to find things no different when her eyes were open from when they were closed. She strained her ears. There was no sound but the buzz of the electric fan, and that had become silence itself. Panic seized her—sourceless, unreasonable and paralyzing. Her heart failed, and over her whole body ran an icy prickling of the skin.

Mrs. Hannah was not religious. Hope of a final reckoning in some phantom hereafter was no compensation for a lifetime of injustice. She relied on her own strength of will; when in moments of fright that strength deserted her, she fell back automatically on scraps and tags of prayer left over from childhood, usually inappropriate to the occasion, mere spells, the words themselves long since meaningless. Handiest of these was The Lord's Prayer, which in desperation, in the same spirit as when lightning struck close by or an unexpected telegram was brought, she now recited. “Our father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” At that point her memory failed her. She tried, growing frantic, to recall the next lines. In her effort she repeated the last for a cue, and realized their import. Oh, she cried in her fright and vexation, was there no justice? Must she be made to feel guilty for having done only what was right? She felt no remorse. She refused to feel any remorse. It was not remorse that lurked in the room ready to spring upon her out of the darkness. She felt only a terrifying loneliness. Why? Now the boy would know the truth, not be abused in his trustfulness. Now at last he could become his own man. She had disburdened herself of her load of resentment and pain, had confided in the one person she loved. They would be completely together, would bear each other up from now on. She had come into her own at last; was it only to find that the taste of triumph was bitterer than the taste of defeat? She had achieved justice, and her revenge clamored for her notice. But it went unheeded. Reason itself was against this fit of despair; but reason was only the voice of what things ought to be. Things were never what they ought to be. Triumph was failure, and the reward of patience and right was emptiness and loneliness.

She gathered strength at last, and it was like pushing something solid off her chest to sit up in the heavy darkness. She sat up, and when she did, the lurking thing, the doubt, the suspicion, the fact, drew near, and as though it had reached out a hand and touched her, she recognized it. She knew then the source of her loneliness and fear, the sense of emptiness and loss. She heard Theron's thrice-spoken words, “I don't believe it.” She had taken it for merely an involuntary ejaculation. Now she knew that he was awake, awake and brooding upon the certainty that his mother had lied to him, his own mother had slandered his beloved father.

She sat on the edge of the bed, and in the empty darkness it was as though she sat on nothing. She seemed to be falling slowly through unending black space. Yet to her torment, her mind kept working. It asked her, what could he think? Hadn't she herself found it impossible to believe at first, and hadn't she herself his whole life long helped make it even more impossible for Theron? Did her son, who was her life, hate her?

A sound—the whisper of the dawn breeze beginning to stir, the flutter of a leaf or a creak of the house settling—something testifying that the world was still there—broke in upon her at last. She felt the floor with her feet. When she stood up, she had the sensation of having tripled her weight.

He was awake, and, it seemed, expecting her. For when she had just reached the door, without any salutation he said, in the strained voice of someone who had not slept, “Oh, why did you wait till
now
to tell me!”

The night was going at last; day, it seemed, was loath to start. She could see the gray square of the window cut out of the black of the wall; but she could not see him, and hearing his voice come out of the darkness was disturbing. Yet she feared to switch on the light, for though she needed desperately to see him to allay her fears, she dreaded the sight of his face for what it might tell her. She crossed the room quickly and sat down on the bed. Even there, so close that she could hear his breathing, she could not see him. She reached out her hand and touched him, his arm. Did he wince? Had he recoiled from her?

“What did you say?” she asked. Then she understood. “There wasn't any reason to,” she said. “And you weren't old enough.” This she wanted to put as delicately as possible, for he was modest and shied at the mention of such things. “You … you wouldn't have understood what it meant,” she said.

She heard something that sounded like him sucking in his breath, a deep, long gasp. After that he was so quiet that in the darkness, the stillness, it was like being alone again. At last in a voice just above a whisper, he said, “Why did you go on living with him?”

“I was married to him,” she said. “I had made my vows.” Then for his sake, though it was probably true as well, she added, “Besides, there are worse men.”

“Oh, God!” he groaned. “Yes, what must the others be really like if he—”

“And he was always a good father to you,” she said.

“You went on living with him for my sake, then.” His voice broke with emotion which she understood to be gratitude. She sat in modest silence.

“And … and everybody knows?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Knows what? Just what, exactly?” There was a new grimness in his tone. He was steeling himself to delve into the ugly details, daring to face the worst of it. Or was he demanding proofs, in the certainty that there were none? Was it defiance, the new note she heard in his voice? Her fear and suspicions, reawakened instantly, made her reckless, bitter, hard. “Oh, he's famous!” she said. “You've told me what an eye he has for squirrels, but they'll all tell you what an eye he has for the girls. That ever-roving eye! You've only seen him hunting in the daytime, but night-hunting, that's really his sport!”

Now she could not even hear his breathing, not even after her own stopped pounding in her ears. She sat in the confining darkness, listening. He made not a sound, not a move. He didn't believe her!

“You don't believe me!” she cried.

“You're my mother,” he said.

She took his hand, and though he did not respond to her pressure, held it.

Her words had brought his father's image vividly to his mind; that was what made them appalling. All the attributes he knew and loved were there in her description. He thought of his stealth and cunning, his—the accuracy of her phrase was unbearable—his ever-roving eye, his patience and perseverance. All these would serve him well in what she called his sport, and there was, beyond that, his charm, his looks. Oh, it was a likeness which, though the opposite of what he had always known, was not essentially different, only reversed, like the reflection in a mirror.

He lay limp and exhausted by emotion and lack of sleep and watched his mother's face take shape out of the darkness. Feeling the pressure of her hand, he shuddered with guilt. She hated his father and did not know that her son was his son in the way she hated him for, was his son more than hers. There was something almost comical in it, it was so violently ironical. For his sake she had lived for twenty years with a man she had hated, for his sake, who had repaid her by doing what he had done tonight. Yet he dared to judge her. For in that stern, puritanical code which he had violated but not lost, it seemed to him that in living with a man she did not love, his mother had been the same as selling herself.

Back again in her bed, she became convinced once more that he disbelieved her. She formed in her fevered mind the determination to give him proof.

She was wrong. He did believe her. To the burden he already bore he could not add the guilt of considering his mother a liar. He pitied her, yet he could not help despising her as both cowardly and disloyal. In that intolerant, youthful idealism to which he clung more earnestly than ever now that he considered himself judged and condemned by it, he believed it ignoble of her not to go on suffering in silence. He was ashamed of her for having made a claim upon his gratitude by revealing her self-sacrifice. Unselfishness, he believed, should blush to be discovered. These things, however, she being all that was left to him now, he might have been able to suppress. Certainly he had the wish to. It was her campaign in the time following to convince him of his father's guilt that taught him at last to hate her.

36

It was late afternoon when Theron awoke from a comatose sleep. The house lay under a silence deeper than the usual afternoon quiet. No doubt his mother had given orders that he was not to be disturbed. He could hear the faint house sounds, the tappings and squeaks and drips that ticked regular as a clock. He could feel his mother's biding presence and he felt that his going downstairs would be like the ringing of an alarm, stirring the house to life.

He groped in his mind for his dreams. He could find none. It was not that he was teased by elusive memories; he had not dreamed. The night was a blank. He felt he would have preferred being haunted by nightmares to this deathly emptiness. It was as if the night had never been, and he was still in the evening before. It was prophetic of his state to come that he felt first his mother's betrayal of his father and only second his own betrayal of Libby. His sense of responsibility for the wrong he had done was not destroyed by that subsequent revelation, but he felt his loss more keenly than he felt his shame. For it was upon that lost ideal that his shame had been founded.

Mrs. Hannah thought she could gauge the impact her disclosure would have on Theron. She did not try to minimize it. She—who better?—knew the respect he had had for his father. She knew too the severity with which he would judge such things as she had disclosed. For it was she who had given him that fine, high moral sense.

But it was not she who had given him his ideal of manhood. The judgment he now passed upon his father derived only partially from his puritanical morality. Mrs. Hannah did not know how despicable he found the kind of man she had revealed his father to be, and could not, not being a man. “Think of his good sides only,” she had said. Narrow as she was, she could say, could sometimes do that. He could not. For Theron there were good men and bad men, and though the good ones might have minor shortcomings and the bad ones exhibit occasionally an uncontrollable good impulse, the classifications remained. They remained, and they depended on his father as their standard. More specifically, for him there were the men who behaved with
noblesse oblige
, with a hunter's honor and courage, and there were the others. The others, represented in his own generation by Dale Latham, were coarse and vulgar, selfish, cruel. Subjected to their own appetites, they were without dignity; their cheap bragging did not disguise their lack of self-respect. They preyed upon weaker creatures who were trusting by nature (for so, in his boyish, his Southern idealism, he thought of women). They were above all cowardly.

He had betrayed his ideal and lost the right to look down upon such fellows. But his mother had destroyed his ideal, to which, though unworthy, he might still have looked up. And just as it would have been better to remember nightmares on awaking than to find the mind empty of dreams, to have to shrink ashamed from the light shed by an ideal was better than to find all light suddenly put out in the world.

He got up and went to the window. The magnolia trees were dark and glassy in the late sun. He stared across the lawn, over the wall and down the street. Men were coming home from work. One was in the next block down. That would be Mr. Brannon, who lived a few houses past. His features formed in Theron's mind. He could see that bland face, the image of his suburban soul, his agreeable smile, his constant little nods of the head, and he asked himself whether even now he would have preferred a Mr. Brannon, Sunday school teacher, Boy Scout master, whose son Henry had never been allowed to own a gun, would he have preferred a father like that, to think of himself becoming like that? That, even now, he knew he would not, seemed to confirm the judgment upon him.

But did he know the real Mr. Brannon, either? Did he know the real anybody whom he had known all his life? If his father's appearance was deceptive, whose was not? If his father was what he had learned he was, what must all the others be like underneath? The answer to that question was quick in coming: worse. Even now, his father was still the best man alive.

He watched Mr. Brannon come down the walk, lighted by the red level rays of the sun, and felt that he saw not only him, but in him saw everybody in the proper light for the first time. The knowledge that Mr. Brannon was unconscious of being watched added to the sense of revelation. And yet Mr. Brannon did nothing to give himself away. That was because all men knew by instinct that they were always being watched. Soon night would fall, and then a man was free to do whatever he desired. Especially if he had made a good name for himself in the daytime. The street was public now and decent; but with the coming of night all out-of-doors would be lawless and free. The decent street seemed to wait impatiently for its release, for the time when under cover of darkness it might join itself in revelry with all the crooked back-alleyways of town.

It was the first chance to sit down for a minute the Captain had had all day. With cotton-picking time upon him he had been going like a cyclone, out before daybreak and on the run all day, grabbing a bite to eat on the run—collard greens and poke salad and underdone salty sidemeat handed out to him on the back steps of shanties because he didn't want to constrain the Negroes by eating at the table with them, fried ham and cornbread and buttermilk or clabber off the company oilcloth in the houses of white workers—then on the go again, burning the car up and stopping at roadside ditches to dip thick muddy water, where there was any to be found, to pour into the boiling radiator, going eighty and more on the highways and God only knew how fast on the backroads where the white sand sometimes reached up to the hubcaps, covering the whole county, hundreds of miles in a day, as he went from one of the farms to another checking on things, seeing that the workers were kept busy, that they were sober, that there were wagons enough, and that the scales were honest and even down to little concerns like whether there were cottonsacks enough to go around—a million trifling essentials that nobody, no matter how much you paid them, seemed ever to think of but himself—and all under that sun that was enough to raise blisters whereever it touched. Now he sat slumped in the deep armchair in the den with his legs that ached in all their length stretched out, with his feet on the bearskin, his shoes thrown off, wriggling his toes inside his sweaty socks, an empty beer bottle forgotten in the hand that dangled over the chair arm.