The old man cleared his throat; it was a thick sound, like water in a downspout in a hard rain. “I been meaning to talk to you about her, about why those other fellas I told you about never took her—not that I’d of let some of them: Janie’s the only family I got left. But I ain’t so particular I don’t want to see her married at all—not a bit of it. Why, we wouldn’t of come here if it weren’t for Janie. When her monthly come, I said to myself, she’ll be wantin’ a man, and what’re you goin’ to do way out here? Though the country was gettin’ bad anyway, I must say. If they’d of had real dogs, I believe they would have got us several times.”
He paused, perhaps thinking of those times, the lights in the woods at night and the running, perhaps only trying to order his thoughts. Paul waited, scratching an ankle, and after a few seconds the old man said, “We didn’t want to do this, you know, us Pendeltons. That’s mine and Janie’s name—Pendelton. Janie’s Augusta Jane, and I’m Emmitt J.”
“Paul Gorou,” Paul said.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Gorou. When the time come, they took one whole side of the family. They were the Worthmore Pendeltons; that’s what we always called them, because most of them lived thereabouts. Cousins of mine they was, and second cousins. We was the Evershaw Pendeltons, and they didn’t take none of us. Bad blood, they said—too much wrong to be worth fixing, or too much that mightn’t get fixed right, and then show up again. My ma—she’s alive then—she always swore it was her sister Lillian’s boy that did it to us. The whole side of his head was pushed in. You know what I mean? They used to say a cow’d kicked him when he was small, but it wasn’t so—he’s just born like that. He could talk some—there’s those that set a high value on that—but the slobber’d run out of his mouth. My ma said if it wasn’t for him we’d have got in sure. The only other thing was my sister Clara that was born with a bad eye—blind, you know, and something wrong with the lid of it too. But she was just as sensible as anybody. Smart as a whip. So I would say it’s likely Ma was right. Same thing with your family, I suppose?”
“I think so. I don’t really know.”
“A lot of it was die-beetees. They could fix it, but if there was other things too they just kept them out. Of course when it was over there wasn’t no medicine for them no more, and they died off pretty quick. When I was young, I used to think that was what it meant: die-beetees—you died away. It’s really sweetening of the blood. You heard of it?”
Paul nodded.
“I’d like to taste some sometime, but I never come to think of that while there was still some of them around.”
“If they weren’t masters—”
“Didn’t mean I’d of killed them,” the old man said quickly. “Just got one to gash his arm a trifle so I could taste of it. Back then—that would be twenty aught nine; close to fifty years gone it is now—there was several I knowed that was just my age. . . . What I was meaning to say at the beginning was that us Pendeltons never figured on anythin’ like this. We’d farmed, and we meant to keep on, grow our own truck and breed our own stock. Well, that did for a time, but it wouldn’t keep.”
Paul, who had never considered living off the land, or even realized that it was possible to do so, could only stare at him.
“You take chickens, now. Everybody always said there wasn’t nothing easier than chickens, but that was when there was medicine you could put in the water to keep off the sickness. Well, the time come when you couldn’t get it no more than you could get a can of beans in those stores of theirs that don’t use money or cards or anything a man can understand. My dad had two hundred in the flock when the sickness struck, and it took every hen inside of four days. You wasn’t supposed to eat them that had died sick, but we did it. Plucked ’em and canned ’em—by that time our old locker that plugged in the wall wouldn’t work. When the chickens was all canned, Dad saddled a horse we had then and rode twenty-five miles to a place where the new folks grew chickens to eat themselves. I guess you know what happened to him, though—they wouldn’t sell, and they wouldn’t trade. Finally he begged them. He was a Pendelton, and used to cry when he told of it. He said the harder he begged them the scareder they got. Well, finally he reached out and grabbed one by the leg—he was on his knees to them—and he hit him alongside the face with a book he was carryin’.”
The old man rocked backward and forward in his seat as he spoke, his eyes half-closed. “There wasn’t no more seed but what was saved from last year then, and the corn went so bad the ears wasn’t no longer than a soft dick. No bullets for Dad’s old gun, nowhere to buy new traps when what we had was lost. Then one day just afore Christmas these here machines just started tearing up our fields. They had forgot about us, you see. We threw rocks, but it didn’t do no good, and about midnight one come right through the house. There wasn’t no one living then but Ma and Dad and brother Tom and me and Janie. Janie wasn’t but just a little bit of a thing. The machine got Tom in the leg with a piece of two-by-four—rammed the splintery end into him, you see. The rot got to the wound and he died a week after; it was winter then, and we was living in a place me and Dad built up on the hill out of branches and saplings.”
“About Janie,” Paul said. “I can understand how you might not want to let her go—”
“Are you sayin’ you don’t want her?” The old man shifted in his seat, and Paul saw that his right hand had moved close to the crevice where the horizontal surface joined the vertical. The crevice was a trifle too wide, and Paul thought he knew what was hidden there. He was not afraid of the old man, and it had crossed his mind more than once that if he killed him there would be nothing to prevent his taking Janie.
“I want her,” he said. “I’m not going away without her.” He stood up without knowing why.
“There’s been others said the same thing. I would go, you know, to the meetin’ in the regular way; come back next month, and the fella’d be waitin’.”
The old man was drawing himself to his feet, his jaw outthrust belligerently. “They’d see her,” he said, “and they’d talk a lot, just like you, about how good they’d take care of her, though there wasn’t a one brought a lick to eat when he come to call. Me and Janie, sometimes we ain’t et for three, four days—they never take account of that. Now here, you look at her.”
Bending swiftly, he took his daughter by the arm; she rose gracefully, and he spun her around. “Her ma was a pretty woman,” he said, “but not as pretty as what she is, even if she is so thin. And she’s got sense too—I don’t keer what they say.”
Janie looked at Paul with frightened, animal eyes. He gestured, he hoped gently, for her to come to him, but she only pressed herself against her father.
“You can talk to her. She understands.”
Paul started to speak, then had to stop to clear his throat. At last he said, “Come here, Janie. You’re going to
