He held the receiver, looking at the door through which the vague, troubling wind came. He began to say something out of a book he had read: “Less oft is peace. Less oft is peace,” he said.
The wire answered. “Hello! Hello! Belle?” Horace said.
“Yes?” her voice came back thin and faint. “What is it? Is anything wrong?”
“No, no,” Horace said. “I just wanted to tell you hello and good-night.”
“Tell what? What is it? Who is speaking?” Horace held the receiver, sitting in the dark hall.
“It’s me, Horace. Horace. I just wanted to—”
Over the thin wire there came a scuffling sound; he could hear Little Belle breathe. Then a voice said, a masculine voice: “Hello, Horace; I want you to meet a—”
“Hush!” Little Belle’s voice said, thin and faint; again Horace heard them scuffling; a breathless interval. “Stop it!” Little Belle’s voice said. “It’s Horace! I live with him!” Horace held the receiver to his ear. Little Belle’s voice was breathless, controlled, cool, discreet, detached. “Hello. Horace. Is Mamma all right?”
“Yes. We’re all right. I just wanted to tell you.……”
“Oh. Good-night.”
“Good-night. Are you having a good time?”
“Yes. Yes. I’ll write tomorrow. Didn’t Mamma get my letter today?”
“I dont know. I just—”
“Maybe I forgot to mail it. I wont forget tomorrow, though. I’ll write tomorrow. Was that all you wanted?”
“Yes. Just wanted to tell you.……”
He put the receiver back; he heard the wire die. The light from his wife’s room fell across the hall. “Lock the back door,” she said.
31
While on his way to Pensacola to visit his mother, Popeye was arrested in Birmingham for the murder of a policeman in a small Alabama town on June 17 of that year. He was arrested in August. It was on the night of June 17 that Temple had passed him sitting in the parked car beside the road house on the night when Red had been killed.
Each summer Popeye went to see his mother. She thought he was a night clerk in a Memphis hotel.
His mother was the daughter of a boarding house keeper. His father had been a professional strike breaker hired by the street railway company to break a strike in 1900. His mother at that time was working in a department store downtown. For three nights she rode home on the car beside the motorman’s seat on which Popeye’s father rode. One night the strike breaker got off at her corner with her and walked to her home.
“Wont you get fired?” she said.
“By who?” the strike breaker said. They walked along together. He was well-dressed. “Them others would take me that quick. They know it, too.”
“Who would take you?”
“The strikers. I dont care a damn who is running the car, see. I’ll ride with one as soon as another. Sooner, if I could make this route every night at this time.”
She walked beside him. “You dont mean that,” she said.
“Sure I do.” He took her arm.
“I guess you’d just as soon be married to one as another, the same way.”
“Who told you that?” he said. “Have them bastards been talking about me?”
A month later she told him that they would have to be married.
“How do you mean, have to?” he said.
“I dont dare to tell them. I would have to go away. I dont dare.”
“Well, dont get upset. I’d just as lief. I have to pass here every night anyway.”
They were married. He would pass the corner at night. He would ring the foot-bell. Sometimes he would come home. He would give her money. Her mother liked him; he would come roaring into the house at dinner time on Sunday, calling the other clients, even the old ones, by their first names. Then one day he didn’t come back; he didn’t ring the foot-bell when the trolley passed. The strike was over by then. She had a Christmas card from him; a picture, with a bell and an embossed wreath in gilt, from a Georgia town. It said: “The boys trying to fix it up here. But these folks awful slow. Will maybe move on until we strike a good town ha ha.” The word, strike, was underscored.
Three weeks after her marriage, she had begun to ail. She was pregnant then. She did not go to a doctor, because an old negro woman told her what was wrong. Popeye was born on the Christmas day on which the card was received. At first they thought he was blind. Then they found that he was not blind, though he did not learn to walk and talk until he was about four years old. In the mean time, the second husband of her mother, an undersized, snuffy man with a mild, rich moustache, who pottered about the house; he fixed all the broken steps and leaky drains and such; left home one afternoon with a check signed in blank to pay a twelve dollar butcher’s bill. He never came back. He drew from the bank his wife’s fourteen hundred dollar savings account, and disappeared.
