Home from the Hill (30 page)

First had been the whiskey, the spirit of which was still strongly with him, though he had lost the substance in a fit of retching. To find the whiskey had been easy. Not so easy, however, had been to buy it. It had not been easy to bear being thought by Hubb Lewis too good a boy to take the downhill path to which he kept the gate. Not easy to bear having to calm Hubb's fear of his father.

Here now he got no lectures. She praised him. Yessir! He knew how! She'd bet he had had plenty of experience! Not so much experience, he said to himself: he just came by it naturally.

The cry of the baby in the house woke him early the next morning. He awoke sick. His slightest movement made his stomach flutter, his head throb. Listening to the distant wail of the child, he stared at the ceiling. Soon the baby's crying ceased. Listening, he could see the scene: Opal unbuttoning her blouse, blushingly offering the baby her heavy, swollen breast. Countrified Opal, crude yet bashful, slatternly, childish Opal, who, assuming she had wanted to, would not have dared resist her father's boss and landlord. And despite himself, in his throbbing brain he then imagined the scene of intimacy between his father and Opal, modeling it upon his own two experiences combined.

He tried to get up, but to move nauseated him. He lay staring at the ceiling. He seemed, after a time, to see through it into the attic overhead. Just over the spot at which he was looking must be the boxes on which he and Libby had sat as they ate lunch together that day. He had not been back up there since then—or rather, since the evening of that day, when he returned to get the core of the apple they had shared, and from which Melba had prophesied happiness for his love. So far as he knew, no one had been in the attic since then; it must be just as they had left it. He turned (though even turning his head caused it to throb, caused his stomach to flutter) to look at the corner of the ceiling. The door of the attic should be just above that spot, and on the floor beside the door, where it had fallen when she threw it at him playfully, must still lie the toy telephone over which he had first, with her encouragement, made love to her.

He sat up. His head swam, his stomach heaved.

He dressed and stole out on the landing and to the door of the attic. He opened the door and smelled the dusty smell, unlike the smell of any other place. He climbed the steps, wondering what drew him there. Did he expect the memory of that innocent day to annihilate all that had intervened, or did he go, with the stain of last night upon him, hoping to defile the place?

The toy phone was where he expected it would be, and, holding the cylinder to his ear, he found still echoing in it the words she had spoken to him that day. The string still seemed to vibrate with her laughter, and when he lowered the phone and stared at the spot where she had stood and then, still holding the carton, walked there as she had drawn him to her that day, he heard again her husky, “Hello.”

The boxes on which they had sat as they shared the lunch he had sneaked up still stood in the aisle into which he had drawn them, and behind hers he found the handkerchief he had lent her for a napkin, and on it the faint pink print of her lips.

He sat in the spot where he had sat then, and he looked at the spot where she had stood beside the fan window. She had turned to him, her eyes sparkling with excitement beneath her dark lashes, her hair still sparkling with raindrops, and he had wanted suddenly to kiss her. He had not. He had not kissed her even later that morning, when she would not have minded if he had. A moment later she had been glad, grateful, that he had not kissed her just then and there. Such things as that had taught her to trust him. He had trusted himself then. He had thought then that that pure-minded, chivalrous Theron Hunnicutt was the real him.

He pressed his head in his palms to still its throbbing, and closed his eyes. When he opened them he saw upon the box on which Libby had sat that day a label inscribed in his mother's hand,
Theron
. He raised the lid. A newspaper covered the contents. He lifted it and saw a collection of his toys. He saw a telegraph template and key, a spur, a roller skate. He removed these things and found a fishing reel, a leather aviator's cap with goggles, a stamp album. Removing these revealed a tobacco sack full of marbles, a dollar watch on a plaited leather chain with a beaded fob, a book, a battered top, a first grade school paper of Spencerian push-ups and whorls. Then he found a diary of his. Below, on the bottom of the box, were relics of his infancy: a baby rattle, a teething ring, and the souvenir of his weaning, his mother's breast pump.

He sat down again and opened the diary. The flyleaf was inscribed, “Merry Christmas to Theron, from Mama with love. Only you will read what you write in this book, but write nothing you would not have everybody read.” He turned to the first page, which was headed
Tuesday, January 1
, 1935, and read his first entry—appropriately enough, a list of New Year's Resolutions:

1.
To keep this diary (and the way Mama says)
.

2.
Chin myself 25 times per day
.

3.
Do my lessons early instead of at the last minute
.

4.
Be thoughtful of others
.

Apparently he had had to study to think of any possible improvements. Had he kept even those undisturbing resolves? He had kept the first, at least—kept it for a time, anyway—for about two months, to be more exact. He had, “Received letter from penpal Roger Duncan in Dundee, Scotland. Very interesting. Went to visit Grandma. Rode Daisy.” Queen had had a litter of seven, and Papa had killed an albino (white) squirrel. There was not much space, not much more than an inch—for it was a five-year diary—allotted to each day; but for those days that had sufficed him. It had been enough to record the receipt of his first rifle, his first hunt, and after that more than enough; after that the pages turned blank. The blank pages were a record, too—more eloquent than the written ones—of days too full and inconsequent to be written up—busy, thoughtless, happy days.

The next New Year, bringing with it another conventional time of spiritual inventory, had reminded him of his diary, and again he had taken resolutions, again rather self-complacently general and vague, rather a variation on the first set, among them one to keep this diary. He had not done much better at that on second try, he thought, shuffling the blank pages which, beginning shortly after, continued to the end.

Flicking the pages, he was stopped by the dateline of one of them towards the end. He turned back to it. A sensation of eeriness tickled his scalp. It was today. The blank page returned his blank stare. He had a sense of being watched, and he glanced furtively behind him. This diary, begun when boyish dreams of grand exploits filled his life, ran up to this very day. When he made those entries in it he had held in his hand the spaces waiting to receive the account of last night, and of that other night. He turned the pages back to that other night—August 31, and stared at its virginal whiteness.

It was one of those diaries with a loop stitched in the back cover and in the loop was a miniature mechanical pencil. Removing the pencil and running out its lead, he wrote:

Which do I hate most—my father for being a reprobate or my mother for telling me tonight that he is—or myself for having just proved that she was right?

He put the pencil back in its loop and closed the book. A cabinet across the room caught his eye. It seemed familiar. In another moment he remembered it. Laying aside the diary, he got up, stepped over the row of cartons, and went to it. Yes, it was the cabinet in which was mounted his old butterfly collection. He drew out the top drawer. Dust lay thick upon the glass cover. He drew out the tray. Once purple, the plush now was greenish. This tray was of Lepidoptera Fritillary, and the first, though dry, brittle, faded, was still recognizable as Argynnis Cybele. This with the fiery-tipped wings was Argynnis Diana, this speckled one Argynnis Idalia. He was pleased to have remembered their names without having to consult the legend on the side of the tray. But not all were recognizable; some were quite ghostly. He bent close over one pale, characterless specimen, and its wings evaporated into dust from his breath, leaving a frail and sapless little skeleton impaled upon the rusty pin.

He drew back in momentary surprise. Then, sweeping his hand across the tray he crumbled all the butterflies to powder.

He returned to the toy box and dumped the things back into it, resolved to burn them.

But on the way downstairs a better plan struck him.

About an hour later Mrs. Hannah came into the den and was horrified, when after a moment she recognized them, to discover Opal's baby sprawled in a clutter of pages torn from a postage stamp album, with one hand banging a rattle, already in a precious state of decay, and with the other banging a watch upon the floor, all Theron's, all of which she had saved, had put into a special box, his old toy box, in the attic. She swooped down upon the loathsome child and wrenched the watch from its hand, and then her horror suddenly took quite a different turn. She stifled the cry of outrage she had been about to loose upon the baby, and her grip upon the watch, the rattle, the book, a top, all of which things she had been gathering to her breast, relaxed. One by one the things fell back upon the floor. She shuddered, rose, straightened herself. A dizziness, quite physical, dimmed her sight for a moment, and her walk as she made her way to the door was suddenly much altered. Suddenly she was no longer herself, but an old woman.

42

Libby was miserable at college, and missing Theron was only one of the reasons. She had never been away from home before, and the guilt she felt over her deception of them made her more homesick for her parents than ever. She did not make friends with other girls easily, at best, and the girls in her dormitory, envious at once of her looks, were piqued by her manner and by her steady refusal of dates with boys who had never asked many of them. She haunted the mail table in the social room; when a letter for her did arrive she disappeared with it. The other girls attributed her privacy to conceit and held it against her that she took no one into her confidence.

Her grades shamed her, but her heart was not in her studies, and to tell herself that her father had sent her there not so much to learn as to get her away from home did not allay the guilt she felt over the waste of his money.

Theron's letters, of which she had just two, were no comfort. Awkward, stiff, embarrassed, formal, with never a breath of what was between them, they were not only unsatisfactory in themselves, but constrained hers in reply, pent up in her the love she needed to lavish upon him. They reawoke the sense that had come to her that night that the whole thing had never happened.

And so, friendless, lonely, homesick, when she discovered that she was pregnant, fear left no place in her thoughts for shame or for anything else. She was panicstricken. Even her roommate noticed and asked what troubled her. Fortunately their intimacy was only a polite pretence, and she felt no call to make her excuses very elaborate. Her impulse was to pack at once and go home. But home was just the place she could not go.

Perhaps she was mistaken. She waited. She attended classes, did her assignments mechanically, received letters from home that in their very inconsequentiality accused her unbearably, and one letter from Theron that in its ignorance irritated and angered her.

But it was Libby's nature to cease fighting a thing as soon as she saw that it was inevitable, to save her strength for things over which there was some chance she might prevail. So that by the time there could no longer be any hope, any doubt, she had already begun to resign herself and to take calmer stock of her situation. Was it so bad, after all? In fact, the initial, instinctive fear past, she wondered what had been wrong with her thinking—in fact, wasn't it the very best thing that could have happened? Now her father would have to drop his objections to Theron. She was truly his now. It was his child she carried, the boy's who loved her, whom she had loved then, loved more than ever now. Be ashamed of that?

She was a woman. She felt superior to the girls in the dorm, the same whose innocence had shamed her only a few days before. School seemed childish, her presence there unreal. She packed and left on the morning train.

On the train she felt that she was coming home to him. She had misgivings, moments when she thought how terribly young they both were for this, moments, even, when she doubted him, moments when remembering that night she imagined herself again lying in the darkness waiting for the words that never came. But it was daylight now, and the old train lumbered on and the landscape became more familiar and the more familiar it became the more steadily her confidence ran.

It was when she reached the foot of her street that she began to waver a little. It had been dark for some time now, and she wished she had phoned ahead—at least had chosen a less dramatic hour of the day to arrive unexpectedly. She had walked from the depot, and her suitcase and portable typewriter had grown heavy. At the foot of her street she set them down to rest her arms, and counted the lights of the houses up the street until she came to the lights of her house. She tried to imagine what her parents were doing at that moment; each possibility conjured up a tranquil domestic scene upon which her sudden descent from out of the night would be a shock. And if her mere coming would be a shock, how much more shocking the reason for her unannounced arrival. She picked up her things and commenced walking, and she began to anticipate the actual scene of confiding her condition to her mother.

In the past few days she had not forgotten that there were obstacles yet to be overcome, and so she had chided herself whenever her daydreaming had got over-detailed. Still it had seemed only sensible to begin a little planning, and she had thought much of her own home, her own family soon to be. Thus she had come to forget the necessity of this first meeting; whenever she had reminded herself of it, the pain had given way to assurance, the shame had disappeared altogether, and she had seen herself as the strong one, lending her mother comfort and strength. And she would be the one to tell her father; she was stronger and could do it better than her mother. But now as she trudged up the old street, familiar even in the dark, along which she had come home from high school, from grammar school, with each step nearer the light she was guided by, the sense of confident young womanhood deserted her and she began to feel herself her parents' daughter again.