me. I didn’t have no clothes on, and he gave me his shirt.”
“Well, I thank you for that, Uncle Riley,” Jones said.
“You welcome, Mr. Jones. Just out gathering these here fishes, and along she come. I put my head down and gave her my shirt.”
“That’s exactly what he did,” Sunset said, and leaned back against the wagon. “I can’t hardly stand. I’m gonna need help up on the porch there.”
Two men eagerly stepped from the crowd to give her a hand. Sunset thought they were holding her just a little too warmly. Their eyes were playing to the front of her shirt where she had misbuttoned it and she knew they were peeking at her breasts. She was too weary to worry about it. Besides those peeks, more men were seeing her freckled legs this day than had seen them when she was a little girl in short pants.
They helped her onto the porch as she used her hands to tug down the back of the shirt and not give a free show.
Jones followed her up the steps, took a look down the front of her shirt himself, said, “What you doing like this? Get hurt in the storm?”
“Something like that.” Sunset turned and called to Uncle Riley. “Thank you for being such a gentleman, Uncle Riley.”
“You welcome, Miss Sunset.”
“I’ll give you your shirt later. For reasons you can see, I got to hang on to it just now.”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s quite all right. You keep it you got a mind to. Reckon I better run along, get these fishes home before they go bad.”
Riley let loose the wheel brake, clucked to the mules, and the crowd parted.
One of the men in the crowd, Don Walker, said to the man next to him, “You can bet that nigger enjoyed him a peek.”
“Just hate it wasn’t me,” said the other, Bill Martin. “Even with her face all beat up like that, I’d take her.”
“Hell, Bill, you’d take a hole in the dirt.”
“Shit, I’d fuck a duck if it winked and bent over.”
“I don’t think you’d care if it winked or not.”
In the Jones house, Sunset sat down in a cane chair next to the radio and watched shadows run down the hill and over the house like spilled oil.
Sunset said, “I shot him.” She held up the gun. “With this gun. His gun. He had me on the floor hitting me. He tried to rape me. He’d raped me before. I couldn’t have it no more.”
When the truth of the matter sank in, Mrs. Jones, a tall, handsome woman with mounded hair skunk-striped with gray, let out a noise so shrill and pitiful, Sunset could feel it in her bones. It made her flex her right foot so hard her shoe came off.
“You shot him?” Jones said. “You shot my boy?”
“Right upside the head.”
“My God,” he said.
“Didn’t have no choice. He was raping me.”
“Man can’t rape his wife,” Jones said.
“Sure seemed like rape to me,” Sunset said.
Jones drew back his hand, and as he did, Sunset lifted the pistol. “I ain’t gonna have no man beat on me again, I can help it.”
“You’re on a spree, that’s what you are,” Jones said. “You and that nigger. A spree.”
“Uncle Riley don’t have nothing to do with it. And if we were on a spree, you think we’d have come here? I didn’t know no other place to go. I come for Karen.”
“But why did you do it?” Jones said.
“Pete come home drunk. Guess one of his girlfriends over in Holiday, probably that whore Jimmie Jo French, didn’t give him what he wanted. So he decided he wanted it from me. Even if I was second, or maybe third, choice. And he wanted it rough. He started beating on me, ripped off my clothes, and the storm come and blew the house away. Just took it out of there like it was made out of newspaper. I got hold of his gun and shot him. Walked off without no clothes on. Just these shoes and a curtain I found. Uncle Riley gave me his shirt.”
“He was your husband, girl,” Jones said.
“Sometimes.”
Mrs. Jones had begun to shriek and run about the house like a chicken being pursued by a fox. She came to one wall, hit it with her palms, turned, ran to the other side, repeated the process.
“I didn’t want to kill him and I didn’t mean to. But I thought he might kill me.”
“My own daughter-in-law. What have we done to you?”
“It’s what your son done to me,” Sunset said. But thought: I still remember your hand patting my bottom more than once when no one was looking.
“He was the constable,” Jones said.
“Ain’t no more,” Sunset said. “Ain’t nothing no more.”
Jones pulled up a chair and sat down. It was as if a great sack filled with potatoes had been tossed onto the chair. He seemed to droop over the sides and shift all over.
Mrs. Jones had finally collapsed to the floor and was pulling her hair. “Pete. Pete. Pete,” she said, as if he might answer. “Goddamn you, Sunset,” Jones said. “A man’s got urges.”
“Where’s Karen?” Sunset asked.
Mrs. Jones wailed and Mr. Jones sat in his chair. Neither responded. Sunset got up, put on her shoe, sat back down.
After a while, Mr. Jones said, “You know for sure he’s dead?”
“He’s dead, all right.”
“Might still be alive.”
“Not unless he’s been resurrected.”
Mrs. Jones let out another screech. This one shook the glass in the windows. She had begun to roll around on the floor.
“Where is he?” Mr. Jones asked.
“At what’s left of our house with his pants down and his ass in the air.”
Jones sat for a while, trying to swallow a lump in his throat. When he managed, he said, “Reckon I got to go over there and get him. You, missy, you’re gonna pay for this. There’s the law, and they’re gonna make you pay.”
“He was the law,” Sunset said, “and he made me pay every day, and I hadn’t even done nothing.”
Jones got up and went out the door. Sunset sat and held the pistol in her lap. She looked at Mrs. Jones, who was lying on the floor heaving.
Slowly her mother-in-law put her feet under her and got up and walked over to Sunset. Sunset knew what was coming, but unlike with Mr. Jones, she didn’t move. She figured she ought to take just a little for what she had done, and if she was going to take it, she’d take it from her mother-in-law, Marilyn Jones. The woman had always treated her good. She could take a slap.
But just one.
Mrs. Jones slapped Sunset with all her strength. So hard it knocked Sunset onto the floor and overturned the chair.
Sunset thought: Maybe I could have skipped that one after all. The slap struck her where Pete had hit her, and it burned like hell.
“You killed my boy,” Marilyn said.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” Sunset said, then started to cry.
Slowly, she got up and righted the chair, pushed the shirt down over herself best she could, sat down again. She still had the revolver in her hand. She held on to it like a drowning man to a straw.
Marilyn stood over her and looked down, her hair loose now and hanging. She drew her hand
