hand from his coat pocket.
To Temple, sitting in the cottonseed-hulls and the corn-cobs, the sound was no louder than the striking of a match: a short, minor sound shutting down upon the scene, the instant, with a profound finality, completely isolating it, and she sat there, her legs straight before her, her hands limp and palm-up on her lap, looking at Popeye’s tight back and the ridges of his coat across the shoulders as he leaned out the door, the pistol behind him, against his flank, wisping thinly along his leg.
He turned and looked at her. He waggled the pistol slightly and put it back in his coat, then he walked toward her. Moving, he made no sound at all; the released door yawned and clapped against the jamb, but it made no sound either; it was as though sound and silence had become inverted. She could hear silence in a thick rustling as he moved toward her through it, thrusting it aside, and she began to say Something is going to happen to me. She was saying it to the old man with the yellow clots for eyes. “Something is happening to me!” she screamed at him, sitting in his chair in the sunlight, his hands crossed on the top of the stick. “I told you it was!” she screamed, voiding the words like hot silent bubbles into the bright silence about them until he turned his head and the two phlegm-clots above her where she lay tossing and thrashing on the rough, sunny boards. “I told you! I told you all the time!”
14
While she was sitting beside the spring, with the sleeping child upon her knees, the woman discovered that she had forgot its bottle. She sat there for about an hour after Popeye left her. Then she returned to the road and turned back toward the house. When she was about halfway back to the house, carrying the child in her arms, Popeye’s car passed her. She heard it coming and she got out of the road and stood there and watched it come dropping down the hill. Temple and Popeye were in it. Popeye did not make any sign, though Temple looked full at the woman. From beneath her hat Temple looked the woman full in the face, without any sign of recognition whatever. The face did not turn, the eyes did not wake; to the woman beside the road it was like a small, dead- colored mask drawn past her on a string and then away. The car went on, lurching and jolting in the ruts. The woman went on to the house.
The blind man was sitting on the front porch, in the sun. When she entered the hall, she was walking fast. She was not aware of the child’s thin weight. She found Goodwin in their bedroom. He was in the act of putting on a frayed tie; looking at him, she saw that he had just shaved.
“Yes,” she said. “What is it? What is it?”
“I’ve got to walk up to Tull’s and telephone for the sheriff,” he said.
“The sheriff,” she said. “Yes. All right.” She came to the bed and laid the child carefully down. “To Tull’s,” she said. “Yes. He’s got a phone.”
“You’ll have to cook,” Goodwin said. “There’s Pap.”
“You can give him some cold bread. He wont mind. There’s some left in the stove. He wont mind.”
“I’ll go,” Goodwin said. “You stay here.”
“To Tull’s,” she said. “All right.” Tull was the man at whose house Gowan had found a car. It was two miles away. Tull’s family was at dinner. They asked her to stop. “I just want to use the telephone,” she said. The telephone was in the dining-room, where they were eating. She called, with them sitting about the table. She didn’t know the number. “The Sheriff,” she said patiently into the mouthpiece. Then she got the sheriff, with Tull’s family sitting about the table, about the Sunday dinner. “A dead man. You pass Mr Tull’s about a mile and turn off to the right.……Yes, the Old Frenchman place. Yes. This is Mrs Goodwin talking.…Goodwin. Yes.”
15
Benbow reached his sister’s home in the middle of the afternoon. It was four miles from town, Jefferson. He and his sister were born in Jefferson, seven years apart, in a house which they still owned, though his sister had wanted to sell the house when Benbow married the divorced wife of a man named Mitchell and moved to Kinston. Benbow would not agree to sell, though he had built a new bungalow in Kinston on borrowed money upon which he was still paying interest.
When he arrived, there was no one about. He entered the house and he was sitting in the dim parlor behind the closed blinds, when he heard his sister come down the stairs, still unaware of his arrival. He made no sound. She had almost crossed the parlor door and vanished when she paused and looked full at him, without outward surprise, with that serene and stupid impregnability of heroic statuary; she was in white. “Oh, Horace,” she said.
He did not rise. He sat with something of the air of a guilty small boy. “How did you—” he said. “Did Belle —”
“Of course. She wired me Saturday. That you had left, and if you came here, to tell you that she had gone back home to Kentucky and had sent for Little Belle.”
“Ah, damnation,” Benbow said.
“Why?” his sister said. “You want to leave home yourself, but you dont want her to leave.”
He stayed at his sister’s two days. She had never been given to talking, living a life of serene vegetation like perpetual corn or wheat in a sheltered garden instead of a field, and during those two days she came and went about the house with an air of tranquil and faintly ludicrous tragic disapproval.
After supper they sat in Miss Jenny’s room, where Narcissa would read the Memphis paper before taking the boy off to bed. When she went out of the room, Miss Jenny looked at Benbow.
“Go back home, Horace,” she said.
“Not to Kinston,” Benbow said. “I hadn’t intended to stay here, anyway. It wasn’t Narcissa I was running to. I haven’t quit one woman to run to the skirts of another.”
“If you keep on telling yourself that you may believe it, someday,” Miss Jenny said. “Then what’ll you do?”
