“Mind your business,” he said rudely. “You can’t see.”
The landlady continued to chew very slowly. “Do you think, Mr. Motes,” she said hoarsely, “that when you’re dead, you’re blind?”
“I hope so,” he said after a minute.
“Why?” she asked, staring at him.
After a while he said, “If there’s no bottom in your eyes, they hold more.”
The landlady stared for a long time, seeing nothing at all.
She began to fasten all her attention on him, to the neglect of other things. She began to follow him in his walks, meeting him accidentally and accompanying him. He didn’t seem to know she was there, except occasionally when he would slap at his face as if her voice bothered him, like the singing of a mosquito. He had a deep wheezing cough and she began to badger him about his health. “There’s no one,” she would say, “to look after you but me, Mr. Motes. No one that has your interest at heart but me. Nobody would care if I didn’t.” She began to make him tasty dishes and carry them to his room. He would eat what she brought, immediately, with a wry face, and hand back the plate without thanking her, as if all his attention were directed elsewhere and this was an interruption he had to suffer. One morning he told her abruptly that he was going to get his food somewhere else, and named the place, a diner around the corner, run by a foreigner. “And you’ll rue the day!” she said. “You’ll pick up an infection. No sane person eats there. A dark and filthy place. Encrusted! It’s you that can’t see, Mr. Motes.
“Crazy fool,” she muttered when he had walked off. “Wait till winter comes. Where will you eat when winter comes, when the first wind blows the virus into you?”
She didn’t have to wait long. He caught influenza before winter and for a while he was too weak to walk out and she had the satisfaction of bringing his meals to his room. She came earlier than usual one morning and found him asleep, breathing heavily. The old shirt he wore to sleep in was open down the front and showed three strands of barbed wire, wrapped around his chest. She retreated backwards to the door and then she dropped the tray. “Mr. Motes,” she said in a thick voice, “what do you do these things for? It’s not natural.’
He pulled himself up.
“What’s that wire around you for? It’s not natural,” she repeated.
After a second he began to button the shirt. “It’s natural,” he said.
“Well, it’s not normal. It’s like one of them gory stories, it’s something that people have quit doing—like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats,” she said. “There’s no reason for it. People have quit doing it.”
“They ain’t quit doing it as long as I’m doing it,” he said.
“People have quit doing it,” she repeated. “What do you do it for?”
“I’m not clean,” he said.
She stood staring at him, unmindful of the broken dishes at her feet. “I know it,* she said after a minute, “you got blood on that night shirt and on the bed. You ought to get you a washwoman…”
“That’s not the kind of clean,” he said.
“There’s only one kind of clean, Mr. Motes,” she muttered. She looked down and observed the dishes he had made her break and the mess she would have to get up and she left for the hall closet and returned in a minute with the dust pan and broom. “It’s easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes/’ she said in the voice of High Sarcasm. “You must believe in Jesus or you wouldn’t do these foolish things. You must have been lying to me when you named your fine church. I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t some kind of a agent of the pope or got some connection with something funny.”
“I ain’t treatin* with you,” he said and lay back down, coughing.
“You got nobody to take care of you but me/’ she reminded him.
Her first plan had been to marry him and then have him committed to the state institution for the insane, but gradually her plan had become to marry him and keep him. Watching his face had become a habit with her; she wanted to penetrate the darkness behind it and see for herself what was there. She had the sense that she had tarried long enough and that she must get him now while he was weak, or not at all. He was so weak from the influenza that he tottered when he walked; winter had already begun and the wind slashed at the house from every angle, making a sound like sharp knives swirling in the air.
“Nobody in their right mind would like to be out on a day like this,” she said, putting her head suddenly into his room in the middle of the morning on one of the coldest days of the year. “Do you hear that wind, Mr. Motes? It’s fortunate for you that you have this warm place to be and someone to take care of you.” She made her voice more than usually soft. “Every blind and sick man is not so fortunate,” she said, “as to have somebody that cares about him/’ She came in and sat down on the straight chair that was just at the door. She sat on the edge of it, leaning forward with her legs apart and her hands braced on her knees. “Let me tell you, Mr. Motes,” she said, “few men are as fortunate as you but I can’t keep climbing these stairs. It wears me out. I’ve been thinking what we could do about it.”
He had been lying motionless on the bed but he sat up suddenly as if he were listening, almost as if he had been alarmed by the tone of her voice. “I know you wouldn’t want to give up your room here,” she said, and waited for the effect of this. He turned his face toward her; she could tell she had his attention. “I know you like it here and wouldn’t want to leave and you’re a sick man and need somebody to take care of you as well as being blind,” she said and found herself breathless and her heart beginning to flutter. He reached to the foot of the bed and felt for his clothes that were rolled up there. He began to put them on hurriedly over his night shirt. “I been thinking how we could arrange it so you would have a home and somebody to take care of you and I wouldn’t have to climb these stairs, what you dressing for today, Mr. Motes? You don’t want to go out in this weather.
“I been thinking,” she went on, watching him as he went on with what he was doing, “and I see there’s only one thing for you and me to do. Get married. I wouldn’t do it under any ordinary condition but I would do it for a blind man and a sick one. If we don’t help each other, Mr. Motes, there’s nobody to help us,” she said. “Nobody. The world is a empty place.”
The suit that had been glare-blue when it was bought was a softer shade now. The panama hat was wheat- colored. He kept it on the floor by his shoes when he was not wearing it. He reached for it and put it on and then he began to put on his shoes that were still lined with rocks.
