'I want you to go asleep and mind your own business.'
'You fixing to go out in the woods with Tom Fort again,' accused her sister.
Dorry sniffed contemptuously, tossing back her hair.
'Tom Fort!' she said, applying scorn to the name and suggestion. 'That boy! No, I ain't going to see Tom Fort. I told you I was-'
'Who then?'
Dorry hesitated, trying to see her sister's darkened features. 'Margy, honey,' – dulcetly this time – 'I kin see a boy now and then if'n I want. You got no call to pester me about it. I wouldn't do hit to you.'
'You wouldn't catch me doing the things you do.'
'Oh, hush. Leave me be. The only trouble I'll git in is if you go to opening your big mouth around.' She found her dress and slipped it over her head, smoothing it down on her hips. 'Be sweet, honey. If Pa er Ma should git up, you tell 'em I went out to the privy.'
Dorry went to the window and looked out at the moonflooded yard and distant pasture. 'You'll see when the boys begin to hanker after you,' she whispered.
Margy raised her head like a bass coming at the bait.'Oh? Well, mebbe I know a something about that and you don't. Mebbe I know some boys that do hanker after me.'
Dorry was interested. She looked back at her sister.
'Who? Who you know, Margy?'
'That's my nevermind.'
'You just saying it. Hit don't really go fer truth.'
'It do so!'
'Hush, cain't you? Well, who then?'
Margy hesitated, looking away from the window and her sister's silhouette. She put her lower lip between her teeth thinking of Shad and what he'd said to her earlier in the night, seeing again the cock of his felt hat on his dark head, the slow smile on his thin lips.
'Oh,' she said finally, 'mebbe a somebody like Shad Hark.'
Dorry waited a moment, then came back from the window. Again she tried to see Margy's face but couldn't.
'You're a-lying. Shad don't even know you're alive.'
'That ain't what he said on the porch tonight!'
'What did he say? What, Margy?'
Margy was pleased with herself. She could tell from Dorry's tone that she was bothered by the thought that any good-looking boy would look at Dorry's little sister instead of her. But her sense of euphoria stalled. Well -.
'He said he was thinking on trying me sometime soon,' she said, carefully cutting the part where Shad had added in five or six years.
'Trying you on what?' Dorry said. 'What's that mean?'
'I shorely don't know,' Margy said with feigned indifference. 'Ask him next time you see him. It don't mean corn kernels to me.'
Dorry straightened up, satisfied at last that Margy had overplayed her hand. She was a dirty little liar, and she was merely trying to show off. Dorry almost laughed when she said, 'Mebbe I will –
7
Sam Parks was sitting in the weeds near the whispering river. He'd been out rambling that night, as was his habit, but now he just sat in the dark and felt sorry for himself. Nervous, restless, foot-itchy, he was a little, wiry man with bright snapping ferret eyes. A compulsive little man who had to keep busy, had to be doing something, anything-as long as it wasn't work.
There wasn't anything attractive about Sam, scrawny, weightless, head-hunkered-a bucktooth man; so bad that Jort Camp-his best friend, the one who made more fun of him than the rest, and they made enough-once said that Sam looked like a man who tried to swallow a piano and the keyboard got stuck.
But it wasn't only his looks the girls objected to – there was also a woodsy quality about Sam. Smell, is how they put it, and none too faint. But Sam couldn't help that. He was a woods colt conceived in the woods, gestated in the woods, and born in the woods three axe handles from a turpentine still, and no one, not even his mother, could say who his father was. And Jort Camp said that the reason Sam had remained in the woods all his life was because he was looking for that mysterious father. But what made it hard was that Sam didn't know if the old man would turn out to be a bull-snake with buckteeth or a polecat with dandruff.
Sam sat by the river and put his right fist into his left palm and worked it there, making a thick grime out of the dirt, grease, and sweat. He was used to the jibes and the jeers. He could take that. But the girls now, the juicy round little-he jerked his hands apart and put the left one to the back of his neck, the right one to his upper lip. He massaged his neck for a moment while he pulled at his lip, then he gave that up with a start and put the hands together again. Tucked them in his lap.
The aimless, expressive, can't-keep-'em-still fingers started a quiet little knuckle-snapping war, twisting and turning and pulling-and then the right hand retreated, flashing down to the left ankle to pursue an elusive itch that zig-zagged along a nerve end under his rolled sock and into his shoe.
Sam was miserable. If he'd had a dollar-just one dollar- he'd be all right. But he didn't. Didn't even have a dime.
'Aw hell,' Sam said.
What made it so imperative was he'd stopped by Bell Mears' place in his ramble that night. Not to visit. No one had known of his presence. He'd taken a post (one he'd used numerous times before) by the edge of the spring house, where he could look smack into old Mears' daughters' room.
He'd only caught Margy twice. She hadn't been much to look at then-though he had-but she was hard to catch now she was getting older. She undressed in the dark. Now Dorry-now that was something else again. She always brought a lamp into the room with her, and she never pulled the blind. 'That bitch!' he whispered almost hysterically. 'That dirty little she-bitch!'
He looked up then and froze, seeing a shadow flitting through the thicket. Who would be coming down that way so late at night? And off the main road too. Nothing to go at but the backwater and Mears' old shantyboat.
Sam forgot about his troubles. He crouched and darted low an fast through the weed, heading for the trail. He might look grotesque when sitting or standing with his nervous agitation, but when he prowled he was as quick and silent as a snake slipping across sand. And now he had him a something to look into. There wasn't anything happened in the woods and Sam didn't know about. A cross fox made itself a new lair and Sam was sitting up in a tree marking the crossback's escape holes. An oldtimer set up a moonshine still so far out, so remote and hidden, that he was prompted to chortle and remark, 'By juckies, they ain't nobody on God's hind legs kin find this still, now I tell yer!' and Sam was crouching behind a dead stump taking in the words. The silhouettes of a boy and girl blended into one in the darkness under the titis and Sam was squatting there in the bush, watching, licking his lips. You just never know when somebody's secret might come handy.
It took him fifteen seconds to come within ten feet of where Dorry Mears passed a thicket-break.
Trouble was Sam wasn't a fighter of any sort. Any suggestion of physical violence instantly threw him into a trembling state of hesitant confusion. The fear was so deepseated that even the thought of tangling with a husky girl like Dorry Mears (he guessed she outweighed him by twenty pounds) left him hanging balanced in self-doubt and indecision.
But he knew that for once in his life he was going to have to make a traumatic decision, and make it on the spot.
Take her from behind-but with what?
He wildly looked around in the shadow. Saw a lightwood stick. Snatched it up. Came to a crouch as the girl
