Hurrying, she went down to the kitchen and began to eat her own supper.
Their faces came between her face and another. It was their faces which had come pushing in between, long ago, to hide some face that had looked back at her. And now it was hard to remember the way it looked, or the time when she had seen it first. It must have been when she was young. Yes, in a sort of arbour, hadn’t she laughed, leaned forward . . . and that vision of a face – which was a little like all the other faces, the trusting child’s, the innocent old traveller’s, even the greedy barber’s and Lethy’s and the wandering peddlers’ who one by one knocked and went unanswered at the door – and yet different, yet far more – this face had been very close to hers, almost familiar, almost accessible. And then the face of Octavia was thrust between, and at other times the apoplectic face of her father, the face of her brother Gerald and the face of her brother Henry with the bullet hole through the forehead. . . . It was purely for a resemblance to a vision that she examined the secret, mysterious, unrepealed faces she met in the street of Farr’s Gin.
But there was always an interruption. If anyone spoke to her, she fled. If she saw she was going to meet someone on the street, she had been known to dart behind a bush and hold a small branch in front of her face until the person had gone by. When anyone called her by name, she turned first red, then white, and looked somehow, as one of the ladies in the store remarked,
She was becoming more frightened all the time, too. People could tell because she never dressed up any more. For years, every once in a while, she would come out in what was called an “outfit,” all in a hunter’s green, a hat that came down around her face like a bucket, a green silk dress, even green shoes with pointed toes. She would wear the outfit all one day, if it was a pretty day, and then next morning she would be back in the faded jumper with her old hat tied under the chin, as if the outfit had been a dream. It had been a long time now since Clytie had dressed up so that you could see her coming.
Once in a while when a neighbour, trying to be kind or only being curious, would ask her opinion about anything – such as a pattern of crochet – she would not run away; but, giving a thin trapped smile, she would say in a childish voice, “It’s nice.” But, the ladies always added, nothing that came anywhere close to the Farrs’ house was nice for long.
“It’s nice,” said Clytie when the old lady next door showed her the new rosebush she had planted, all in bloom.
But before an hour was gone, she came running out of her house screaming, “My sister Octavia says you take that rosebush up! My sister Octavia says you take that rosebush up and move it away from our fence! If you don’t I’ll kill you! You take it away.”
And on the other side of the Farrs lived a family with a little boy who was always playing in his yard. Octavia’s cat would go under the fence, and he would take it and hold it in his arms. He had a song he sang to the Farrs’ cat. Clytie would come running straight out of the house, flaming with her message from Octavia. “Don’t you do that! Don’t you do that!” she would cry in anguish. “If you do that again, I’ll have to kill you!”
And she would run back to the vegetable patch and begin to curse.
The cursing was new, and she cursed softly, like a singer going over a song for the first time. But it was something she could not stop. Words which at first horrified Clytie poured in a full, light stream from her throat, which soon, nevertheless, felt strangely relaxed and rested. She cursed all alone in the peace of the vegetable garden. Everybody said, in something like deprecation, that she was only imitating her older sister, who used to go out to that same garden and curse in that same way, years ago, but in a remarkably loud, commanding voice that could be heard in the post office.
Sometimes in the middle of her words Clytie glanced up to where Octavia, at her window, looked down at her. When she let the curtain drop at last, Clytie would be left there speechless.
Finally, in a gentleness compounded of fright and exhaustion and love, an overwhelming love, she would wander through the gate and out through the town, gradually beginning to move faster, until her long legs gathered a ridiculous, rushing speed. No one in town could have kept up with Miss Clytie, they said, giving them an even start.
She always ate rapidly, too, all alone in the kitchen, as she was eating now. She bit the meat savagely from the heavy silver fork and gnawed the little chicken bone until it was naked and clean.
Half-way upstairs, she remembered Gerald’s second pot of coffee, and went back for it. After she had carried the other trays down again and washed the dishes, she did not forget to try all the doors and windows to make sure that everything was locked up absolutely tight.
The next morning, Clytie bit into smiling lips as she cooked breakfast. Far out past the secretly opened window a freight train was crossing the bridge in the sunlight. Some Negroes filed down the road going fishing, and Mr Tom Bate’s Boy, who was going along, turned and looked at her through the window.
Gerald had appeared dressed and wearing his spectacles, and announced that he was going to the store to- day. The old Farr furnishing store did little business now, and people hardly missed Gerald when he did not come; in fact, they could hardly tell when he did because of the big boots strung on a wire, which almost hid the cagelike office. A little high-school girl could wait on anybody who came in.
Now Gerald entered the dining-room.
“How are you this morning, Clytie?” he asked.
“Just fine, Gerald; how are you?”
“I’m going to the store,” he said.
He sat down stiffly, and she laid a place on the table before him.
From above, Octavia screamed, “Where in the devil is my thimble, you stole my thimble, Clytie Farr, you carried it away, my little silver thimble!”
“It’s started,” said Gerald intensely. Clytie saw his fine, thin, almost black lips spread in a crooked line. “How can a man live in the house with women? How can he?”
He jumped up, and tore his napkin exactly in two. He walked out of the dining-room without eating the first bite of his breakfast. She heard him going back upstairs into his room.
“My thimble!” screamed Octavia.
She waited one moment. Crouching eagerly, rather like a little squirrel, Clytie ate part of her breakfast over the stove before going up the stairs.
At nine Mr Bobo, the barber, knocked at the front door.
Without waiting, for they never answered the knock, he let himself in and advanced like a small general down the hall. There was the old organ that was never uncovered or played except for funerals, and then nobody was invited. He went ahead, under the arm of the tiptoed male statue and up the dark stairway. There they were, lined up at the head of the stairs, and they all looked at him with repulsion. Mr Bobo was convinced that they were every one mad. Gerald, even, had already been drinking, at nine o’clock in the morning.
Mr Bobo was short and had never been anything but proud of it, until he had started coming to this house once a week. But he did not enjoy looking up from below at the soft, long throats, the cold, repelled, high-reliefed faces of those Farrs. He could only imagine what one of those sisters would do to him if he made one move. (As if he would!) As soon as he arrived upstairs, they all went off and left him. He pushed out his chin and stood with his round legs wide apart, just looking around. The upstairs hall was absolutely bare. There was not even a chair to sit down in.
“Either they sell away their furniture in the dead of night,” said Mr Bobo to the people of Farr’s Gin, “or else they’re just too plumb mean to use it.”
Mr Bobo stood and waited to be summoned, and wished he had never started coming to this house to shave old Mr Farr. But he had been so surprised to get a letter in the mail. The letter was on such old, yellowed paper that at first he thought it must have been written a thousand years ago and never delivered. It was signed “Octavia Farr,” and began without even calling him “Dear Mr Bobo.” What it said was: “Come to this residence at nine o’clock each Friday morning until further notice, where you will shave Mr James Farr.”
He thought he would go one time. And each time after that he thought he would never go back – especially when he never knew when they would pay him anything. Of course, it was something to be the only person in Farr’s Gin allowed inside the house (except for the undertaker, who had gone there when young Henry shot himself, but had never to that day spoken of it). It was not easy to shave a man as bad off as Mr Farr, either – not anything like as easy as to shave a corpse or even a fighting-drunk field hand. Suppose you were like this, Mr Bobo would say: you couldn’t move your face; you couldn’t hold up your chin, or tighten your jaw, or even bat your eyes when the razor came close. The trouble with Mr Farr was his face made no resistance to the razor. His face didn’t hold.
