He jumped up on the porch as Jessie came through the door. “You stay inside till I tell you,” he commanded. She stopped, and he turned away from her and went into Cass’s room through the window. Cass had forgotten to turn off the radio, and soft music issued from its loudspeaker. He stared at it silently, for some reason wanting to pick up a chair and smash it, but went on past and began to tear at the bed.
He rolled up the mattress and a quilt and threw them through the window onto the porch in front of the swing. Going back out into the yard, he motioned to Lambeth and Shaw, and the three of them slid the stretcher out of the wagon and carried it to the porch. They slid Sewell carefully off it onto the mattress and pulled the quilt up to his chin. He had not moved or opened his eyes.
I know exactly where I’m lying, Sewell thought, listening for the sound of her voice.
Mitch wanted to quit now, and he had to sit down. Me went back to the end of the porch near the door and squatted down, staring silently at the others. Everything was gone out of him. I’m empty, he thought. I’m just hollow, like a log. There ain’t anything I can do for him now. I can’t even talk to him in front of all these people. Jessie came out of the doorway and went up to Sewell. She knelt beside him for an instant and then got up, going past him quickly and through the door with her face screwed up tight but not crying. She went into the bedroom and he wanted to follow her. I’ll talk to her in a minute, he thought. In a minute, as soon as I can think.
Cass went past crying, “I found him! I found my boy!” and bent forward at right angles like a jackknife to step through the window into his room. Mitch heard the corrugated washboard of sound from the radio as the dial spun and thought. He wants to find out if he really did find Sewell. He won’t believe it till he hears it.
Shaw was talking eagerly to Lambeth, who was drying his hands on a towel and unpacking the camera again. “I phoned it in, when I was out on the highway to call for the ambulance. So here’s what we do now. We want a few more pics, maybe three or four more. One or two of Neely, and then one when the ambulance gets here. And one of Mrs. Neely kneeling down beside her husband. Then we’re going to scram. She’s going with us. I can get the rest of her story while you drive, and we’ll be in town in time for me to write the story and beat the deadline with about thirty seconds to spare. You all set?”
Lambeth nodded. “Where’s Narcissus?”
“She’s packing.”
It broke across Mitch’s numb tiredness like a sea of ice water. He sprang to his feet and started down the hall. They weren’t going tomorrow. They were going today, now, in a few minutes. He met Joy in the hall and she gave him a glance of pure malice as she went by. Going to have her picture took, he thought with contempt, lunging at the door of the bedroom.
Jessie was folding her few dresses and an old sweater and putting them into a cardboard box. She looked up as he came in and the glance swept on past him, unseeing.
He stopped. “Jessie,” he said. His voice sounded very far away.
She gave no sign she had heard him.
“Jessie,” he said again, coming into the room. “Jessie! Listen to me. You ain’t going with that—” He put a hand on her arm and she pulled away with that stony-faced yet almost imperceptible withdrawal that can be one of the most devastating things on earth and compared to which all male violence of blow and insult is utterly harmless.
I won’t lose my head this time, he thought, beginning even then to lose it. The wild anger and the fright were coming up in him and he started to shake her arm. She offered no resistance whatever, merely standing there and looking at him without seeing him, and when he got hold of himself and stopped she picked up the box and went past him out of the room.
He went out onto the porch and Jessie was holding the box and watching still-faced while Lambeth adjusted the camera. I can hold her when they leave, he thought in the blackness of despair, but she’ll just run away later on.
”Now, Mrs. Neely,” Shaw was saying.
“All right,” Joy said. She started toward the mattress where Sewell lay, next to the swing.
Sewell looked so white lying there like that and she was almost afraid. Her grief was not entirely simulated. She was really sorry for him now, and it was so sad to think of how he had been trying so hard to get back to her when she didn’t know it, and to have him get bitten by that awful snake when he was almost here—it was so terrible. She felt a genuine sorrow as she walked toward him; it was just that she was still practical enough to remember camera angles and the way she would look best in the picture at the same time she was so lull of her grief.
It would be best, since Lambeth was on her left, to have most of her hair swing down on the right side of her face as she bent down, with just enough on the left to frame it. And they wouldn’t want any legs in this pose of a wife grieving for her husband; she must be very demure about the legs, with just enough showing so it would be possible to see that they
I can hear her, Sewell thought. His mind had been going away from him on those long, dark journeys and then swinging back like a pendulum, but it was very clear now with only the pain to bother him and he knew it would all be quite sharp and clean when he opened his eyes. He had his hand on the gun under the quilt and lay quietly listening to her footsteps as she came toward him. I won’t have to open my eyes to know when she’s bending down, he thought. I’ll smell her; you can always smell her when she’s close.
The others had fallen silent, watching the tableau. Jessie looked on with a lump in her throat, thinking how sad it was and how sweet Joy looked in her grief. Mitch watched with contempt and a cold, hard anger, sickened as he had been before by the-cheap, self-seeking heartlessness of it. But still, he thought, why did Sewell change like that when he found out she was up here? If that was what Sewell wanted . . .
Joy bent down. She felt she was going to cry, but remembered to turn her head just a little more to the left. Tendrils of golden blonde hair brushed Sewell’s cheek, and he started to open his eyes and bring the hand with the gun out from under the quilt.
Then it started to go. He fought it but could not hold it off as the blackness came for him again. The sound of the rain on the sheet-metal roof was the running of surf and Joy was leaning over him with her hair a gleaming cascade of loveliness in the starlight.
Just as they heard the sound of the ambulance coming down the sandy ruts of the hill, he brought the hand out from under the quilt, empty, and put it up to touch her.
“Joy,” he said.
She bent down and kissed him and the flash bulb went off. The picture was taken, and she turned her head and smiled at all of them through her tears.
Twenty-six
It made her feel so wonderful and at the same time so sort of sad. It was tragic about Sewell because she knew he was dying, but everybody had seen it and the touching gesture of his love for her was even snapped into the picture now where she would always have it.
It gave back to her the feeling of being wanted and admired and would drive away for years that terror of her nights, the agonizing hell of doubt and the fear of glowing old and ugly that came to taunt her in the darkness. There was a great uplifting of her spirit, and she didn’t even hate Mitch any more. Yes, I do, she thought, looking at him; nothing could rub that out, but it just doesn’t matter so much now.
She looked at Jessie standing by the door with the box under her arm. I don’t want to take her with me, she thought. What business have I got with a kid like that? I don’t want to be bothered with her; she’d just be in my way. And I couldn’t just go off and leave her somewhere—I guess I’m not bitch enough for that, am I? I’ll tell her. I’ll tell her she can’t go.
Nobody had said anything for a minute. They could hear the car coming quite plainly now, running down the sandy road through the pines just above the yard. It sounded as if there were two cars, and they knew one of them would be the ambulance.
