You see? That was it: the very words
That was the problem. Because the act, the deed itself, was simple enough. Luckily the affair happened late on a Saturday afternoon, which would give my face thirty-six hours anyway before it would have to make a public appearance. (It wouldn’t have needed that long except for the ring he wore—a thing not quite as large as a brass knuckle and not really noticeably unlike gold if you didn’t get too close probably, of a tiger’s head gripping between its jaws what had been—advisedly—a ruby; advisedly because the fact that the stone was missing at the moment was a loss only to my lip.)
Besides, the drugstore meetings were not even a weekly affair, let alone daily, so even a whole week could pass before (1) it would occur to someone that we had not met in over a week, who (2) would immediately assume that we had something to conceal was why we had not met in over a week, and (3) the fact that we had met again after waiting over a week only proved it.
By which time I was even able to shave past my cut lip. So it was very simple; simple indeed in fact, and I the simple one. I had planned it like this: the carefully timed accident which would bring me out the drugstore door, the (say) tin of pipe tobacco still in plain sight on its way to the pocket, at the exact moment when she would pass on her way to school: “Good morning, Linda—” already stepping on past her and then already pausing: “I have another book for you. Meet me here after school this afternoon and we’ll have a Coke over it.”
Which would be all necessary. Because I was the simple one, to whom it had never once occurred that the blow of that ruby-vacant reasonably almost-gold tiger’s head might have marked her too even if it didn’t leave a visible cut; that innocence is innocent not because it rejects but because it accepts; is innocent not because it is impervious and invulnerable to everything, but because it is capable of accepting anything and still remaining innocent; innocent because it foreknows all and therefore doesn’t have to fear and be afraid; the tin of tobacco now in my coat pocket because by this time even it had become noticeable, the last book-burdened stragglers now trotting toward the sound of the first strokes of the school bell and still she had not passed; obviously I had missed her somehow: either taken my post not soon enough or she had taken another route to school or perhaps would not leave home for school at all today, for whatever reasons no part of which were the middle-aged bachelor’s pandering her to Jonson and Herrick and Thomas Campion; crossing—I—the now-unchildrened street at last, mounting the outside stairs since tomorrow was always tomorrow; indeed, I could even use the tobacco tin again, provided I didn’t break the blue stamp for verity, and opened the screen door and entered the office.
She was sitting neither in the revolving chair behind the desk nor in the leather client’s one before it but in a straight hard armless one against the bookcase as though she had fled, been driven until the wall stopped her, and turned then, her back against it, not quite sitting in the chair nor quite huddled in it because although her legs, kneed in ere close and rigid and her hands were clasped tight in her lap, her head was still up watching the door and then me with the eyes the McCarron boy had marked her with which at a distance looked as black as her hair until you saw they were that blue so dark as to be almost violet.
“I thought …” she said. “They—somebody said Matt quit his job and left—went yesterday. I thought you might …”
“Of course,” I said. “I always want to see you,” stopping myself in time from
I had not even released the screen door and so had only to open it again, having also in that time in which she crossed the room, space to discard a thousand frantic indecisions: to remain concealed in the office as though I had not been there at all this morning, and let her leave alone; to follow to the top of the stairs and see her down them, avuncular and fond; to walk her to the school itself and wait to see her through the actual door: the family friend snatching the neighbor’s child from the rife midst of truancy and restoring it to duty—family friend to Flem Snopes who had no more friends than Blackbeard or Pistol, to Eula Varner who no more had friends than man or woman either would have called them that Messalina and Helen had.
So I did all three: waited in the office too long, so that I had to follow down the stairs too fast, and then along the street beside her not far enough either to be unnoticed or forgotten. Then there remained only to suborn my nephew with the dollar bill and the book; I dont remember which one; I dont believe I even noticed.
“Sir?” Chick said. “I meet her in Christian’s drugstore after school and give her the book and tell her you’ll try to get there but not to wait. And buy her a soda. Why dont I just give her the book at school and save time?”
“Certainly,” I said. “Why dont you just give me back the dollar?”
“And buy her a soda,” he said. “Do I have to pay that out of the dollar?”
“All right,” I said. “Twenty-five cents then. If she takes a banana split you can drink water and make a nickel more.”
“Maybe she’ll take a Coke,” he said. “Then I can have one too and still make fifteen cents.”
“All right,” I said.
“Or suppose she dont want anything.”
“Why?” he said. “Father and Ratliff say ‘she dont’ all the time, and so do you when you are talking to them. And Ratliff says ‘taken’ for ‘took’ and ‘drug’ for ‘dragged’ and so do you when you are talking to country people like Ratliff.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“I’ve heard you. So has Ratliff.”
