Collected Stories Page 8

  “What did you say?” Cecilia asked sharply. She was just coming back from the kitchen where the casserole had commenced to burn.

  “Nothing!” Catharine gasped, “Only I heard…” She stoppjed, not being quite ready to pin herself down.

  “Oh dear, it’s started raining harder again,” said Cecilia. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “Be composed!” thought Catharine. “He’s coming now!”

  She reached deep into her bones for something that was solid. But now her bones were hollowed out by the running waters of fear. She knew that she couldn’t wait for him any longer. The spring had coiled itself too tight this time. She wouldn’t be able to bear the intolerable moment of his birth in her presence again. That moment would pass, of course, and afterwards she would be able to hold the precious new life it had given her to an unburdened bosom and breath could go on. But she hadn’t the strength for it now. Whatever fortitude her soul had once contained was now gone…

  She pushed herself up from the chair’s clutching cavity.

  “I think I shall have to go up for a moment,” she gasped.

  But Cecilia hadn’t heard those coming sounds through the rain. She got lazily up from the ottoman on which she had sunk. She switched out the milky fringed lamp and the parlor was left to the rain’s green darkness again.

  “Come on up with me!” Catharine called.

  She had already fled to the hall and started up the tall steps toward the haven of darkness above.

  “Come on, Cecilia! Please, come on!” she called again, glancing behind her in terror.

  But already she saw Bud’s tall shadow drawn against the streaming oval glass of the door. She felt herself impaled like a butterfly upon the semi-darkness of the staircase. She could move neither up nor down and her knees seemed ready to sink.

  “Come on!” she called faintly.

  Bud’s shadow had crouched a little toward the keyhole which rasped now with the small noise a mouse first makes in the night when he comes to your room.

  “Come on!” she called despairingly once more to Cecilia. But her voice had shrunk to a whisper and Cecilia, gliding lazily into the hall, had now also caught Bud’s shadow drawn against the wet pane and now also stood stock still, hands raised to her hips in the beginning of a sisterly gesture of reproach.

  “Here he is now!” she called loudly, “Oh, Bud…”

  The door swept all the way open and banged against the hatrack. And there he stood, dripping with rain, his tousled head bare, his shoulders hunched, his face lifted intuitively toward the dark staircase. And all that Catharine could see of him plainly was his eyes: arrowbright: unable to move from her own till some sign set them free, eyes like a possum’s glaring at night from a torch-lit tree with the hounds and the men forming their fatal circle around it.

  His hand lifted slightly before him. He made a guttural sound in his throat. He seemed about to start forward…

  And still Catharine couldn’t move from the middle steps of the staircase. She couldn’t speak the gay words of greeting nor touch the red cherries that trembled on her hat’s brim. She stood with her head held stiffly, like a haughty old dame glaring down the straight line of her nose at some impertinent intruder. Her mind knew only the hard round shape of the banisters and the palpable blaze of his eyes. The moment gathered intensity. Still neither moved. Then it ended with a noiseless splintering like a tree lightning-struck seen falling through a storm. Bud bowed slightly from the waist as though this house were a bathroom which he had inadvertently entered at the wrong moment, finding Catharine there unclothed or in an unfortunate pose. He bowed slightly, stiffly, and with averted eyes he backed noiselessly out of the door and closed it behind him…

  “Well, of all things!” gasped Cecilia.

  But Catharine was already flying up the rest of the stairs, her heart beating like a captured bird against the very top of her throat. She plunged into the misty white bedroom and flung herself down on the bed, crying terribly, achingly, knowing that she could never find him again.

  And now the rain washed softly against the yellow walls of the house, rather apologetically explaining to all who might listen within that there was no deliberate malice in life: that there was in life only a vast obliviousness, a tranquil self-absorption which boded neither evil nor good for those who lived.

  You could almost hear it saying: “Observe our hands, and their gestures, limitless, yes, they are that, timeless, yes, they are that, but whatever they do, it is without thinking or knowing, and so what help can they give you?”

  March 1935 (Not previously published)

  Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton

  It was late in the afternoon. The gin stands were pumping and the pneumatic pipes still sucking. A fine lint of cotton was floating through the sunny air, across the tired gray road and the fields of copper-topped Johnson grass, grown nearly waist-high, and onto the porch where Mrs. Jake Meighan and her guest from the syndicate plantation were seated on the swing. Fifteen wagon-loads of cotton had already been seeded and were being sent on to the compress, a few miles further up the road toward the little Arkansas town, but there was nearly the same number still to go in the slowly creeping line between the scalehouse and the portico of the ginnery. It would be an hour or two after dark, ginning at his maximum rate of three or four bales an hour, before Jake Meighan could get through with the syndicate’s first September picking.

  These twenty-seven wagons full of cotton were a big but not a totally unexpected piece of business for Jake. The syndicate usually did their own ginning. In fact their plant was larger and better equipped than Jake’s. It was not fireproof, however, and when Jake, sitting on his porch last night, saw a flickering red glare on the southern horizon he mysteriously remarked to his wife that it looked like he might be doing a pretty big piece of business tomorrow. He was not mistaken.

  Mrs. Meighan was now doing her level best to entertain the plantation manager while his cotton was being ginned. But the heat had done something to her head. She had lost the stimulating effect of several cokes drunk during the long, blazing afternoon and now she felt utterly numb.

  “You’re beautiful,” the syndicate man remarked to Mrs. Meighan.

  “Naw, I ain’t,” she objected lazily, “I’m too big.”

  “I say you’re beautiful,” he insisted. “I like big women.”

  Out of the corner of her eye Mrs. Meighan could see him licking his lips and looking down at her body. The look in his eyes shocked her a little. But not unpleasantly.

  Feeling a bit faint, she brushed the fuzz of cotton lint from her moist cheeks and leaned back in the swing which she kept lazily in motion with the lopsided heels of her white kid slippers. Her legs were bare. They had been shaved not so long ago but now they needed shaving again. The sweat trickled deviously between the stubbles of dark hair down the bulging calves and lumpy ankles and splashed into little pools underneath the swing. A swarm of flies was buzzing around her. The little man from the syndicate plantation kept brushing them off with his riding crop. Sometimes he struck her bare legs so smartly that it left a small red mark.

  “Quit that switching me!” the woman finally protested.

  “I’m just shooin’ the flies off,” said the man.

  “Leave ‘em be. They don’t hurt nothin’.”

  As a matter of fact she rather liked the tickling sensation that the flies made walking up her legs. She also liked the flicking of the little man’s whip when he didn’t swing it too hard. Altogether she was rather comfortable. But she wished that she hadn’t finished up that case of cokes. She felt so terribly lazy and tired.

  “Cotton, cotton,” she muttered. “I feel like a big lump of cotton m’self!”

  Her eyelids fluttered dreamily shut. But she could feel, it seemed, through the very pores of her skin what the little man’s eyes were doing. She felt their desire trickling over her huge body as warm and liquid as her own trickling sweat. It had a pleasant, soporific
effect. It was like stretching herself out and relaxing all her muscles in a tub of tingling warm water.

  The little man nudged her with his elbow.

  “You’re tired,” he whispered insinuatingly.

  “Sure I’m tired,” she whimpered. “That damned thing over there’d make anybody tired.”

  “You oughta lie down,” the little man whispered.

  She felt her lips curving up in a foolish smile. She tried to force them back down but it was like trying to smash a drop of quicksilver beneath your thumb. She guessed it must be the heat that was getting her like this. It certainly couldn’t be anything else. She never had liked little men, especially when they acted fresh. And this little man from the syndicate plantation was hardly more than half her size. Why it would be just the same as…

  A picture so ludicrous entered her mind that she chuckled out loud.

  “You oughta lie down” the little man whispered again.

  “You gettin’ fresh?” she asked with attempted severity. But the laughter bubbled irresistibly up from her throat. She felt the soft multiple convexities of her chin shaking with it.

  “Aw, I know you big women!”

  “What makes you rub it in so much about me bein’ big? You think I don’t know it? Jake says that I’m the biggest woman in this part of the state!”

  “I never seen one bigger,” said the syndicate man.

  “You’re a shrimp, that’s what you are. You’re no bigger than a flea.”

  The man laughed.

  “You’re no bigger than an elephant. And even elephants have fleas.”

  The woman could not help laughing too. The laughter spluttered uncontrollably up from her throat like water gone down the wrong way.

  “Ticklish?” the man asked.

  “Cut it out!” she screamed.

  The man drew back his hand and glanced nervously across the field.

  “Hell! You don’t need to holler!”

  He gave the floor a savage kick with the heel of his boot. The accelerated motion of the swing sagged her tremendous shoulders toward him. Her fat arm slid against his bony elbow. She let it rest there a moment. The little man’s arm, bare below the rolled sleeve, was hairy and dark as a monkey’s. It burned with a sharp animal heat into her flesh. It stung her almost painfully. And now his fingers were edging up the side of her thigh…

  I oughtn’t to let him touch me like that, she thought. But she was too lazy to move.…And what difference did it make.

  “Hell’s fire but you’re big!” the man grunted.

  She was too tired to say anything this time. She felt her lips falling open and the saliva accumulating thickly inside her mouth.

  The man picked up one of her limp hands from her lap and uncurled the helpless pink fingers. With a calloused, stub-nailed fingertip he traced the lines of her palm.

  “You’re gonna meet a little man who likes you an awful lot. You’re gonna set on the porch swing with him while your husban’ is ginnin’ out his twenty-seven wagons full of cotton. Then you’re gonna get tired. You’re gonna take the little man inside your house. You’re gonna fall for the little man like a ton of bricks…”

  He started laughing again and so did she.

  “Don’t it say nothin’ about me smackin’ a little man for gettin’ too fresh?” she laughed.

  The woman looked vaguely out across the country. The miles of white cotton, voraciously sucking the life from the soil, seemed to have left it desiccated and dull as an old woman at whose bosom children have sucked again and again and on whose body men have lain till her breasts hang dry as locust pods in the summer wind and her emaciated limbs are crumpled beneath her swollen belly. The woman herself was not like the country but like the cotton. She had grown big upon the land. Like the cotton, too, she had reached her September season. She was full and bursting with ripeness…

  The sweat trickled down from her forehead, beaded her lashes and entered her eyes. Everything was shifting and swimming before her like images in a wind-rippled pool. She sank back into a voluptuous passivity, feeling only the afternoon’s limpid heat and the fingers of the little man pressed almost painfully against her throbbing pulse. He had dropped her palm and now he was trying to circle her sweating wrist with his fingers. He couldn’t quite squeeze them around it.

  “Ummm! Ummm!” he grunted. “You are big!”

  “So’s America,” she answered foolishly.

  “Who said anything about America? Did I say anything about America? Hell with America! You’re bigger’n the whole southern hemisphere!”

  “Quit that!” she whimpered shrilly.

  The little man had started twisting her wrist. Now he laughed and struck her smartly with the riding crop.

  “You play too rough!” she groaned.

  Again she leaned back weakly, feeling the slow drip and tickle of his desire over her mountains of sweating flesh. He leaned closer and she felt his hot breath on her neck. What is he going to do next, she wondered. The skittish muscles of her stomach drew tight as, with two fingers, he plucked a bit of cotton lint from the corner of her mouth. His hand cascaded leisurely down the front of her dress and came to rest on her lap.

  “You sure are big!” the man muttered.

  She stole a glance at him from the corner of her barely opened eye and saw his lips drawn back and the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth. She shut her eyes again with a deep, luxurious sigh.

  “Yes, I’m pretty big,” she admitted, “but I guess you like big women.”

  “Never had no use f’r them small ones,” he said.

  Her bosom rocked with helpless laughter. What’s the matter with me, she wondered. I guess it must be the heat.

  “Ticklish? Ticklish?”

  With a frantic squeal she threw herself away from him and clutched hard at the swing’s iron chains to pull herself up to her feet. The brilliant afternoon sunlight swam dizzily in her eyes. She nearly slumped down again on the swing, her body had grown so feeble. But she shoved herself desperately forward. Her feet dragged slowly across the creaking floor.

  “Where you goin’?” the man asked sharply. He had also gotten up from the swing. She looked anxiously back at him. Her eyes were so dim with drowsiness and with the oily lint of cotton that she could barely distinguish the outlines of his figure.

  “Stay where you are!” she commanded. But her voice sounded indistinct and fuzzy as it did when she was drunk.

  “Where you goin’?” he repeated, this time with a slightly menacing tone.

  “In,” she said.

  “What f’r?”

  Slowly she looked out over the coppery fields of Johnson grass, across the tired road and at the hazily shifting outlines of the spidergray ginnery. Its steady throbbing sounded in her ears as her own blood sounded against the pillow at night and she felt as though she were upon the verge of falling asleep. If she called out very loudly, at the top of her voice, perhaps her husband or some of the negroes would hear…

  But she was barely able to open her mouth. Much less utter a cry.

  “What you goin’ in f’r?” the little man demanded still more sharply.

  She shuffled forward a few steps more and leaned exhausted against the screen door. She heard his footsteps advancing but she could see nothing but the watery brilliance of the sun. She turned her great body toward him like a huge, clumsy animal making a last stand against some lighter and more dexterous foe. He stood only a few inches away from her now and he was playfully flicking her with the riding crop. Flicking her playfully across the legs. It didn’t hurt her much. But as her eyes focused a little more clearly on the man’s dark face she had a fantastic notion that he was planning to beat her severely with the whip. She felt that he was planning to force her into the house where he would give her a terrible beating…

  “You stay outside! Hear me?” she gasped.

  The man said nothing. He just smiled and flicked her slightly harder with the riding crop. Already her muscles w
ere flinching beneath an expected flagellation and her lips were trembling upon the verge of tears.

  “I’m just goin’ in t’ make a li’l lemonade,” she whimpered. “You stay out here on the porch, now, an’ watch them ginnin’ out your cotton.”

  “I’ll go in, too,” he said firmly. “I’ll squeeze the lemons.”

  He came forward another step, raised his knee and thrust it against her side. She leaned hard against him a moment, refusing to be pushed inside the door which he had drawn open. Then the riding crop swished through the blindingly brilliant air and came down sharply this time across her flank.

  “Get on in there!” the little man hissed. “Get on inside the door!”

  She felt the hot tears coming into her eyes and constricting her throat. All the resistance flowed out of her flesh like water and she allowed herself to be propelled by the tip of the riding crop through the door and into the darkness of the hall. She heard the screen drawn shut and the latch fastened.

  “It‘ll be night,” the little man whispered, “before they git through.”

  She retreated further into the dark hall, a tremendous, sobbing Persephone, and leaned against the bedroom door as if to conceal it. She felt his hand sliding past her and heard it twisting the knob and the bedroom door coming open. She tottered backwards a step, thrust herself frantically forward and hung onto the little man’s shoulders.

  “Oh, my God, it’s so hot!” she whimpered, her whole body seeming to melt into a helpless mass. “Please, for God’s sake,” she whimpered, “don’t hurt me!”

  1935 (Published 1936)

  Sand

  The old woman lies awake listening to the sound of his breathing. Night after night it is the same. She cannot sleep for listening to that hoarse, painful rasp. Whenever the sound is interrupted she lies tense, waiting, while the excruciating moments gather upon her own nearly motionless chest like weights of iron. Then slowly or quite suddenly the sound of it recommences. He has not stopped breathing. He has awakened for a few minutes only and then gone back to sleep.