Sewell’s eyes were closed and he lay very still. “I’m getting awful sick,” he said faintly. “I’m afraid of it. I-I thought I could pull through, but I don’t know.”
Mitch stared at him. He must be out of his mind, he thought wildly. A doctor ain’t going to do him no good.
“You want me to get the wagon and take you up to the house?” he asked, leaning very close.
”Yes,” Sewell answered faintly. “It may be too late now. I’m afraid I’m going to die. Mitch, I—” He stopped, as if the effort were too great for him. Mitch waited, hardly breathing. “I—I don’t want to die down here in the rain.”
* * *
They were gone now. They had left hurriedly, running up the hill toward the house to harness the mules and bring the wagon down. Sewell lay very still for a minute, thinking. It’s in my right-hand coat pocket and I got to get it out of there some way and into the left one. I can’t use the right hand at all. I can’t even move it.
So she was up there all the time and I didn’t know it. Well, I ain’t got no time to think about that. I ain’t got much time left for anything. Get it out of the right-hand pocket and into the left one. And then maybe it won’t even shoot. It’s been in the water. But it’s different from a shotgun. Shotgun shells will get wet, but this is solid ammunition, in brass cases, and it might still be dry inside. There ain’t no way to tell till I get there. But I got to move the gun to where I can use it.
He raised his left arm and started swinging the hand across to fumble awkwardly with the coat pocket next to the swollen and immovable right arm, and then he was lying in the sand somewhere on a summer night with the surf running and Joy was just beyond him in the starlight, very lovely in her bathing suit. She turned her head to look at him, and disappeared, and a siren was wailing somewhere behind him while the windshield wipers were going swock-swock, swock-swock, with the wet pavement rushing and swooping endlessly back and past him through the dark-framed tunnel of light.
How long had they been gone? He had come back from somewhere far off and was lying there with his left arm across his chest. I got to hurry, he thought. I may have been out for half an hour. He twisted the hand into the pocket, bumping the right arm once and feeling a nauseating ocean of pain, and then he had hold of the gun and brought it out, I wonder if it’ll shoot, he thought. Well, there’s only one way to find out, and I will if I can hold on that long and don’t blank out.
Twenty-five
Mitch reached the barn first and was feverishly throwing harness on the mules when Cass came puffing up and went on by, bent forward and holding onto the hat as if running into a gale.
“I found Sewell! I found him, I found him! I found my boy!” Mitch could hear him shouting from the depths of his grief or madness as he ran across the yard. Then he-was gone inside the house.
There was instantaneous eruption. Mitch was whirling the team about before the wagon and thinking. What made him change his mind like that? What happened? Then Shaw and Lambeth came running around the side of the house followed closely by Jessie. There was no sign of Joy. Well, she wouldn’t get her hair wet, Mitch thought, in some detached portion of his mind.
“What happened?” Shaw asked with wild excitement, bareheaded and oblivious of the rain. “We can’t make any sense out of what he’s saying.”
I wouldn’t think so. Mitch thought, ducking in behind the mules to fasten the trace chains. He’s got it so mixed up in his own mind, the radio part of it and this part, that’s he’s probably gone in there now to listen to the radio to see if he can get straightened out himself.
He threw the lines into the wagon and turned to face them. “He’s down there in the bottom.” he said harshly. “I’m going after him in the wagon, but I got to have some help to get him in it. And one of you better go out on the highway and phone the damned sheriff’s office and tell ‘em to send an ambulance or a doctor. He’s been snake- bit.”
Jessie had run up now and she cried out in anguished accusation, “He said you had Sewell down there and wouldn’t bring him to the doctor. He said you wouldn’t bring him to the house.”
”You get in out of the rain,” Mitch said curtly.
She gave him a look of horror and turned, running back toward the kitchen. He looked after her once, then ran over to the old smokehouse and came out carrying his cot. He went to the woodpile with it, and with a few savage swings of the ax he chopped the legs off to make a stretcher of it.
Throwing it into the wagon, he nodded to Lambeth and leaped up into it himself, while Shaw ran for the car to get to a telephone. As Mitch swung the team around and they started down the hill, Cass emerged from the kitchen and came after them, shouting frantically.
“Wait!” he called. “Wait for me!”
Mitch stopped the mules and held them, feeling a harsh and grating impatience as the old man climbed aboard. Cass sat down on the rough plank across the wagon bed and faced forward into the rain, staring straight ahead.
“Let’s go,” he said in the dead and bankrupt calm that is beyond frenzy. “I got to bring my boy in.”
The wagon swung downward through the darkening timber. It’s getting late, Mitch thought, aware of a faint surprise that this day might end, might have twilight and then cease to be, like other days. It had run on through the span of a lifetime and he had come to accept it as something eternal that would go on and on as long as he could keep running forward without progress across the endless revolving belt of its hours. It’s getting late and he may be dead when we get there. He’s had that poison in him all day.
What made him get scared all of a sudden like that? Being tough is Sewell’s religion, if he has one, and he’s known all day he’s going to die. It was right after I said she was up here; was that just his way of saying he wanted to see her, to be with her when he died? Or can being tough just quit on you like that when you need it worst?
The water was still backed up, unmoving, below the foot of the hill. He glanced at it once, briefly, read it with only half his mind, and forgot it. The fight to save their crop was a thing long past, almost forgotten, and unimportant now.
He leaped down from the wagon bed and wondered if he were really hanging in the air, unable even to fall toward the ground. Sewell lay as he had, with his eyes closed. He knelt beside the still and white-faced figure, feeling for the pulse. It was still there, rapid, faint, and fluttery, like the heartbeat of a captured bird.
Cass was wailing again, beside him. “I got to take my boy in. I lound him. and I got to take him in!”
“Shut Up,” Mitch said, without anger, without even hope that the noise would cease.
He and Lambeth worked Sewell onto the legless, stretched canvas of the cot, and lifted him into the wagon, being as gentle and careful as they could with the poisoned arm. He grabbed up the sacks and the raincoat and threw them across the box of the wagon to keep off the rain. Then they were going up the hill.
Sewell felt the wagon begin to move, and thought. It ain’t much longer now. The trail goes left, then right on a switchback turn, and there’s an oak the lightning struck, and it runs past the end of the hillside field, going up. I saw a fox there, with a chicken in its mouth, one morning going after the cows. There’s a plum thicket beyond the end of the rows and a long time later, after the fox, the fat girl from somewhere, picking cotton, said, “You know there ain’t no plums in October, you dog,” and laughed, and from there you can see the barn, in winter when the leaves are gone. It’s funny how clear you can remember all of that. I hardly even thought of it for seven years. It ain’t much farther, we already made the second turn, and all I got to do is hold on a little longer. Then he was whirling through darkness and the siren was closer now.
Joy and Jessie were watching from the kitchen door as they made the turn around the barn and came across the yard. I didn’t want her to see it, Mitch thought. It ain’t a pretty sight.
Shaw was back. He came leaping off the front porch as Mitch stopped the team in the front yard and jumped down from the wheel. “I found the phone,” he said. “Ambulance should be here in a few minutes with the sheriff’s men.”
”Don’t touch him,” Mitch said bleakly. “Don’t try to move him. I’ll be back in a minute.”
