Collected Stories

neck, from torn veins. Her heart shriveled as the teeth went into her thigh, and she couldn’t delay another second but took her kindling hatchet from the nail, strengthened her grip on the smooth wood, and hit the dog. She saw the blow. She saw him die at once. And then in fear and shame she hid the body. And at night she buried him in the yard. Next day she accused Jacamares. On him she laid the blame for the disappearance of her dog.

She stood up; she spoke to herself in silence, as was her habit. God, what shall I do? I have taken life. I have lied. I have borne false witness. I have stalled. And now what shall I do? Nobody will help me.

And suddenly she made up her mind that she should go and do what she had been putting off for weeks, namely, test herself with the car, and she slipped on her shoes and went outside. Lizards ran before her in the thirsty dust. She opened the hot, broad door of the car. She lifted her lame hand onto the wheel. With her right hand she reached far to the left and turned the wheel with all her might. Then she started the motor and tried to drive out of the yard. But she could not release the emergency brake with its rasplike rod. She reached with her good hand, the right, under the steering wheel and pressed her bosom on it and strained. No, she could not shift the gears and steer. She couldn’t even reach down to the hand brake. The sweat broke out on her skin. Her efforts were too much. She was deeply wounded by the pain in her arm. The door of the car fell open again and she turned from the wheel and with her stiff legs hanging from the door she wept. What could she do now? And when she had wept over the ruin of her life she got out of the old car and went back to the house. She took the bourbon from the cupboard and picked up the ink bottle and a pad of paper and sat down to write her will.

“My Will,” she wrote, and sobbed to herself.

Since the death of India she had numberless times asked the question, To Whom? Who will get this when I die? She had unconsciously put people to the test to find out whether they were worthy. It made her more severe than before.

Now she wrote, “I Harriet Simmons Waggoner, being of sound mind and not knowing what may be in store for me at the age of seventy-two (born 1885), living alone at Sego Desert Lake, instruct my lawyer, Harold Claiborne, Paiute County Court Building, to draw my last will and testament upon the following terms.”

She sat perfectly still now to hear from within who would be the lucky one, who would inherit the yellow house. For which she had waited. Yes, waited for India’s death, choking on her bread because she was a rich woman’s servant and whipping girl. But who had done for her, Hattie, what she had done for India? And who, apart from India, had ever held out a hand to her? Kindness, yes. Here and there people had been kind. But the word in her head was not kindness, it was succor. And who had given her that? Succor? Only India. If at least, next best after succor, someone had given her a shake and said, “Stop stalling. Don’t be such a slow, old, procrastinating sit-stiller.” Again, it was only India who had done her good. She had offered her succor. “Het-tie!” said that drunken mask. “Do you know what sloth is? Demn you! poky old demned thing!”

But I was waiting, Hattie realized.I was waiting, thinking, “Youth is terrible, frightening. I will wait it out. And men? Men are cruel and strong. They want things I haven’t got to give.” There were no kids in me, thought Hattie. Not that I wouldn’t have loved them, but such my nature was. And who can blame me for having it? My nature?

She drank from an old-fashioned glass. There was no orange in it, no ice, no bitters or sugar, only the stinging, clear bourbon.

So then, she continued, looking at the dry sun-stamped dust and the last freckled flowers of red wild peach, to live with Angus and his wife? And to have to hear a chapter from the Bible before breakfast? Once more in the house—not of a stranger, perhaps, but not far from it either? In other houses, in someone else’s house, to wait for mealtimes was her lifelong punishment. She always felt it in the throat and stomach. And so she would again, and to the very end. However, she must think of someone to leave the house to.

And first of all she wanted to do right by her family. None of them had ever dreamed that she, Hattie, would ever have something to bequeath. Until a few years ago it had certainly looked as if she would die a pauper. So now she could keep her head up with the proudest of them. And, as this occurred to her, she actually lifted up her face with its broad nose and victorious eyes; if her hair had become shabby as onion roots, if, at the back, her head was round and bald as a newel post, what did that matter? Her heart experienced a childish glory, not yet tired of it after seventy-two years. She, too, had amounted to something. I’ll do some good by going, she thought. Now I believe I should leave it to, to… She returned to the old point of struggle. She had decided many times and many times changed her mind. She tried to think, Who would get the most out of this

yellow house? It was a tearing thing to go through. If it had not been the house but, instead, some brittle thing she could hold in her hand, then her last action would be to throw and smash it, and so the thing and she herself would be demolished together. But it was vain to think such thoughts. To whom should she leave it? Her brothers? Not they. Nephews? One was a submarine commander. The other was a bachelor in the State Department. Then began the roll call of cousins. Merton? He owned an estate in Connecticut. Anna? She had a face like a hot-water bottle. That left Joyce, the orphaned daughter of her cousin Wilfred. Joyce was the most likely heiress. Hattie had already written to her and had her out to the lake at Thanksgiving, two years ago. But this Joyce was another odd one; over thirty, good, yes, but placid, running to fat, a scholar—ten years in Eugene, Oregon, working for her degree. In Hattie’s opinion this was only another form of sloth. Nevertheless, Joyce yet hoped to marry. Whom? Not Dr. Stroud. He wouldn’t. And still Joyce had vague hopes. Hattie knew how that could be. At least have a man she could argue with.

She was now more drunk than at any time since her accident. Again she filled her glass. Have ye eyes and see not? Sleepers awake!

Knees wide apart she sat in the twilight, thinking. Marian? Marian didn’t need another house. Half Pint? She wouldn’t know what to do with it. Brother Louis came up for consideration next. He was an old actor who had a church for the Indians at Athens Canyon. Hollywood stars of the silent days sent him their negligees; he altered them and wore them in the pulpit. The Indians loved his show. But when Billy Shawah blew his brains out after his two-week bender, they still tore his shack down and turned the boards inside out to get rid of his ghost. They had their old religion. No, not Brother Louis. He’d show movies in the yellow house to the tribe or make a nursery out of it for the Indian brats.

And now she began to consider Wicks. When last heard from he was south of Bishop, California, a handyman in a saloon off toward Death Valley. It wasn’t she who heard from him but Pace. Herself, she hadn’t actually seen Wicks since—how low she had sunk then!—she had kept the hamburger stand on Route 158. The little lunchroom had supported them both. Wicks hung around on the end stool, rolling cigarettes (she saw it on the film). Then there was a quarrel. Things had been going from bad to worse. He’d begun to grouse now about this and now about that. He beefed about the food, at last. She saw and heard him. “Hat,” he said, “I’m good and tired of hamburger.”

“Well, what do you think I eat?” she said with that round, defiant movement of her shoulders which she herself recognized as characteristic {me all over, she thought). But he opened the cash register and took out thirty cents and crossed the street to the butcher’s and brought back a steak. He threw it on the griddle. “Fry it,” he said. She did, and watched him eat.

And when he was through she could bear her rage no longer. “Now,” she said, “you’ve had your meat. Get out. Never come back.” She kept a pistol under the counter. She picked it up, cocked it, pointed it at his heart. “If you ever come in that door again, I’ll kill you,” she said.

She saw it all. I couldn’t bear to fall so low, she thought, to be slave to a shifiless cowboy.

Wicks said, “Don’t do that, Hat. Guess I went too far. You’re right.”

“You’ll never have a chance to make it up,” she cried. “Get out!”

On that cry he disappeared, and since then she had never seen him.

“Wicks, dear,” she said. “Please! I’m sorry. Don’t condemn me in your heart. Forgive me. I hurt myself in my evil. I always had a thick idiot head. I was born with a thick head.”

Again she wept, for Wicks. She was too proud. A snob. Now they might have lived together in this house, old friends, simple and plain.

She thought, He really was my good fiend.

But what would Wicks do with a house like this, alone, if he was alive and survived her? He was too wiry for