Three by Cain: Serenade/Love's Lovely Counterfeit/The Butterfly

by James M. Cain

  But there was one thing that could make us all feel good, no matter what had been said, and that was Danny. When Jane brought him out for a little whiff of air before tucking him in for the night, we were laughing and talking to him and me and Wash were taking turns holding him. And then without anybody knowing he was going to do it, he turned to Wash and stead of the goo-goo stuff he’d been saying, he said “Wash,” and laughed. It was the first word he ever said, and it made us all so happy we didn’t look at each other at all, and Kady picked him up and held him close, and pretty soon he said it again, like he was pretty proud of himself. And then we heard a car, and down the road I see the white tow car from the filling station on the state road that the fellow uses now and then to haul passengers up the creek for fifty cents. And it stopped and somebody got out and it went away and we all stood there trying to see who was coming up the path, a little satchel in her hand. And then I could feel my heart sink, because that funny walk, go three steps fast and then shuffle one, couldn’t be but one person. That was Belle.

  “Jess, what is she doing here?”

  “It’s got me buffaloed.”

  When supper was over, Kady and Wash went for a ride, and when Belle went to bed, Jane and I took a walk down the creek. Once Belle got there the party was ruined, because the half dirty Morgan jokes started right away, and the way she dressed made you feel the place had turned into a joint. I don’t know what she did to clothes, but soon as she got them on they weren’t clean any more, and they let you see more than you wanted to see. All she would take for supper was milk, and she kept explaining she had had to see Danny before Wash and Kady went away, though when they were going away, if they were going away, was something that nobody but her seemed to know about. And how much attention she paid to Danny, now at last she could see him once more, was about one look and a wave of the hand. In between, she seemed to be thinking about something, and even the dirty jokes didn’t get the pounding she generally gave them. Belle always told a joke three times, once to tell it, once to tell it over again because maybe you didn’t understand it, and once to holler and whoop at how funny it was. So when Jane fixed her a place to sleep in the front room, and she said she wanted to turn in, nobody put up any argument. Wash was staying at the Black Diamond Hotel in Carbon City, but he and Kady wanted to talk how they would get married, so they went off in his car, and Jane and I took our walk, trying to figure out Belle. “She’s quite a lot thinner, Jane, and don’t look like a fat little wood pigeon any more, but at that she don’t look so bad, considering it’s eighteen years since she went away.”

  “At night she don’t.”

  “Of course candle light is not like sun.”

  “It’s not the light, it’s the fever. In the evening, when she’s running over two degrees, her eyes are bright and her cheeks are red and she really looks pretty. But in the morning, when she’s running below normal, she looks awful. Her face is gray, she coughs all the time, and her eyes have that look they get, like they see something far off.”

  “All this is the consumption?”

  “She’s got it, bad.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But what’s she doing here?”

  “If you ask me, it’s got nothing to do with us, and nothing to do with Danny. Any time you try to figure Belle out, you can begin with Moke and go on from there.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She’s changed, then.”

  “She and Moke haven’t got along since Danny came. Until then she didn’t pay any attention to what Kady and I thought about him, and they got along all right. But soon as Danny came they started to fight, and there’s more to it than they ever let on to anybody but themselves.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  C H A P T E R

  7

  How long it had gone on I don’t know, but it seemed that all my life I had heard it, this voice out there in the night, calling my name and beating on the door of the cabin. I wasn’t in the cabin. I was in the stable, asleep in the bunk I used there, so by the time I got outside, Kady was already coming around from the back door. She lit the carbide lamp we had used in the mine, and when the light cut the darkness, there was Moke, whimpering and wailing and slobbering at the mouth. “Kady, I swear to God I never knew she was nowhere near here. I never even knew it was her till I threw her off me, where she was trying to kill me, and lit a match and seen the blood.”

  “What blood?”

  “From her mouth! It’s pouring out.”

  “You know what to do with her when she gets taken like that. Did you do it, or are you scared so bad you forgot everything?”

  “I left her lay, right on the floor of my shack, just like I’m supposed to do, and come on down here for help. I run all the way. But she’s never had nothing like this before.”

  “It’s her lung, Jess.”

  “I know. I’ll get a doctor.”

  “No, the first thing is to run me up there to his shack or as close as we can get to it. Then you run into Carbon City for a doctor, and the best way is to wake up Wash and have him bring the hotel doctor. But leave that part to him. You get back here right away with the main thing, which is ice, to pack her side in, so it chills the blood, and makes a clot inside, to stop that bleeding. Lots of it. Cracked ice if you can get it, but any kind of ice right away is better than waiting around for them to crack it up for you.”

  We got moving fast, then. She went inside, put on a coat, and went through Belle’s bag for all the medicine that was in it. I went back to where Jane had been listening at the window, and told her she was to stay there with Danny no matter how long we were gone. Then I had her help me move Kady’s bed on the truck, with sheets and all like it was, because in that shack was nothing but a dirt floor, and even if we weren’t allowed to move her she had to have something to lay on. By then Kady was ready and got in and Moke got in. But all that time I had been thinking about what he had said, and the more I thought about it the more it didn’t make any sense. “What’s that you said about her trying to kill you?”

  “You deef and can’t hear me?”

  “I asked you something.”

  “She crept in there while I was asleep. I don’t know where she came from. First thing I knew somebody was slashing at me with a knife.”

  “I don’t see any cuts on you.”

  “You will on the dog.”

  “What dog?”

  “Birdie Blue’s puppydog, that was out when I got home, and that I brung in for company. He was laying close to me, where I was sleeping on the gunny sacks, and he took the first stab and maybe some more. She stabbed like a wild woman, and when she felt the knife go in she thought she had me till I wrestled her off and the blood begun coming out of her mouth.”

  “Why did she do this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, don’t lie to me.”

  “Suppose you ask her.”

  There was no asking her anything, though, by the time we got there. By putting one side of the truck on the path and letting the other side bump, I got pretty close to the shack, and she was still laying on the floor, but two or three people from the hollow were there by that time with lanterns, and they were trying to get her up and move her. So the way Kady explained it to me, that was the worst thing in the world, so we stopped it and had those people carry the bed up, and the door was too small for it, but they began putting it up outside, and used the loose log, the one Wash and I had pushed out of the way, to wedge it up level. Then Kady rolled up a sheet to the middle, and laid it down beside Belle, and shoved the rolled part under her, then unrolled it, and we all helped lift and at last she was off the floor and on a bed. But the blood that was in a puddle on the other side of her, and the dead dog that was laying in the middle of it, you could see all that, and the blood began to run in a stream toward the door, and stunk, and it was a mess. So I told one of those people to take the dog out and bury it, and get
started washing out the blood, but Kady said quit worrying about that, and get started after the ice. So I burned the road to the hotel, and called Wash, and told him to get a doctor out there, and told the man on the desk I wanted some ice, and be quick about it, so he hopped pretty lively. Because the last thing I did when I left the cabin on the way to the hollow was to strap on my .45 that hung across from my rifle, and there’s nothing like having a six-shooter on you to get action when you want it.

  The rest of the night was like a whirl-around dream you have when you’re sick, with the doctor giving her some kind of stuff to inhale, and Kady tearing up sheets to make bags for the ice, and more and more people from the hollow standing around, watching what was going on and giving help whenever it was wanted. What they had heard when Belle and Moke were having it there in the dark, before he came to my place, if they heard anything at all, I don’t know, but by the time Wash got there with the doctor the dog was gone and the knife was gone and nothing was said about anybody trying some killing. All the doctor saw was a woman bleeding from lung trouble, and so far as what was said to him went, that’s all there was. Around daylight he got the bleeding stopped, and went home, but before he went he called Kady off to one side, and Wash and I drifted over to hear what he said to her.

  “You’re Mrs. Tyler’s daughter, miss?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You know what this means?”

  “You think she’s pretty sick?”

  “If I had her in the hospital, where I could force-feed her with what she needs, sock a couple of quarts of blood into her, and then when she’s in shape, collapse that lung for her, I might pull her through for a few more months, or even years. But I can’t do it here, and by the time I got her to town she’d be dead. She’s on the end of the plank. It could come any time now, but she’ll probably last until tonight. Her mouth temperature is down to 97, and I can’t get it up on account of the ice that has to stay there. It’ll slip to 96, and then it’ll take a sudden drop. With that she’ll go in the coma, and then it’s just a matter of when.”

  “We’ve more or less expected it.”

  “Call me, and I’ll sign the papers.”

  “I’ll do it from the filling station on the state road.”

  She was looking up at the trees, and was waxy color from losing the blood, but Kady had combed her hair out nice and put a ribbon in it, and just for a minute, with the sun coming up and the birds starting to sing, she looked like she had when I first saw her, in church one night, just after her father moved to town to work in the mine. She was looking up then too, and singing Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus, and I kept looking at her, and next thing I knew she was looking at me, and winking. We got married the next month, she fourteen, I four years older, just the regular age for a coal camp. It seemed funny, after all that had happened, she was still only thirty-nine years old. After a while she put out her hand and took mine, where I was sitting near by. “Jess, I’m going to die.”

  “We’re doing all we can.”

  “I know, but I’m going to die.”

  “I’m awful sorry, Belle.”

  “I’m not. I made a mess of my life, Jess.”

  “You lived it like you wanted it.”

  “I lived it like I liked it, but not like I wanted it. We could have been happy, you and me, because we loved each other, and that’s enough. But I was born to mess things up, and I began to hold things against you. That you went to church, and believed what you heard there, and took things serious, and never took a drink. I thought that was all a pack of foolishness, and after I got the taste for liquor I couldn’t hardly stand you at all. And I began doing things. I did a lot more than I ever told you, Jess. And then I started up with Moke. Ten of him wasn’t worth what you was, and I knew it, but I couldn’t help how I was going. He sung comical songs at me, and we’d meet by the creek and drink applejack, and when I’d come home I’d be so I could hardly stand up, and have to pretend I was sick after I chewed sassafras root so you wouldn’t smell my breath. And then I went off with him.”

  “If he made you happy, I’m glad.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “More than you think, maybe.”

  “Maybe worse than I could have imagined.”

  She closed her eyes, and I thought there would be more, and at last I would know what she had come up here for, and why she had tried to kill Moke, and why he had stolen Danny, and all the rest of what had been going on the last few days that I didn’t understand. But she just asked if she could see Danny and I ran down in the truck to the cabin, and as soon as Jane could get him ready we brought him up. She looked at him a long time, and talked to him, and took his hand and played with it. All that time I was holding him. I liked that better than anything I had ever had in my life, and she must have seen it because she said: “You love him, don’t you, Jess?”

  “Love’s no word for it.”

  “I want you to.”

  She began to cough then, and sank back on the pillow, and Kady came up in case there was trouble. But what I noticed was Moke, sitting there in the door of the shack, looking at me with such hate in his eyes I don’t think I ever saw in a man before.

  She called for the girls and said good-by to them, and when she talked to Kady she ran her fingers over her face, and looked up at her with an expression that hit me in the throat somewhere, because it was beautiful, and I was glad, because maybe you could understand why things had come between, but they were her daughters, and now she was going, both sides should feel some love.

  And then she called for Moke, and he never even raised his head. “Moke, I want to talk to you.”

  “I got nothing to say to you.”

  “Moke, I’m dying.”

  “Then die.”

  “Moke, I’ve loved you, and there’s something I’ve got to ask of you, and it’s my right to do it, and you’ve got to listen to me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Then, Moke, will you sing to me once?”

  To that he didn’t say anything for a minute, then he came over to her and put his head on her shoulder and let her pat him and whisper in his ear. And if he sang to her I don’t know. The last I saw of them, they were together up there, and I ran down to the cabin and watched Danny with Jane while he had his nap. Then Birdie Blue rode up on a mule, and told us Kady sent word to phone the doctor.

  C H A P T E R

  8

  It was late afternoon when I got to Tulip with the doctor, and Kady was there at the church, and she and I waited while he went up to certify the death or whatever it is they do. In a minute a wagon came up the creek with two men in it, and they had a tool chest from the old drift mouth of the mine. They went on up to a cabin, and pretty soon here came the sound of hammering. “You hear that, Jess?”

  “What are they up to?”

  “They’re making a casket.”

  “Who asked them to?”

  “Moke I guess.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “He’s burying her.”

  “Him and who else?”

  “These women here, these relations of his, they’ve already got her washed, and soon as the doctor gets through they’re going to lay her out.”

  “Funny they didn’t speak to me about it.”

  “Is there any reason they should?”

  “Before the law, she was my wife.”

  “Before God, she was his.”

  “He certainly didn’t act much like it.”

  “They made up their quarrel, whatever it was about. He loved her, even if he is such a poor excuse for a man, and it seems to me you don’t have to get up on your ear and be onry just because you don’t like him.”

  “I loved her once.”

  “This is now.”

  Three boys came down the hill with bunches of laurel, for the funeral, and Kady took them inside the church and showed them where to put it. I knew them all, Lew Cass, Bobby Hunter, and Luke Blue, but I didn’t pay a
ny attention to it till later that not one of them spoke to me.

  In the morning Mr. Rivers, that was doing the preaching, stopped by in his car to take us up to the church. Kady got in, and Jane got in with Danny, and I started to get in. “Hold on, Jess. Nothing was said about you.”

  “Does there have to be?”

  “Well now I don’t know.”

  “I don’t need any special invitation.”

  I got in, and he sat there holding the wheel a minute or two, like he was thinking, then he drove on. In the clearing by the church were some cars and that’s where he parked. The girls got out with the baby and we all started for the church. “Hold on, not so fast.”

  Ed Blue came out with three or four others, and they had rifles. “It’s all right for Kady and Jane and the baby. But Jess, he stays out.”

  “Who says so?”

  “Moke.”

  Kady and Jane looked at each other, and after a while Kady said: “Jess, I think it’s awful of him, and if I could I’d leave with you, right now. But it’s my mother. I can’t just turn my back on her.”

  “That how you feel, Jane?”

  “Yes, Jess.”

  “Then there’s nothing I can do but go, but you’re not taking Danny in there. That runt stole him once, and maybe he takes some other fool notion now. I’m taking him home.”

  “Maybe you better.”

  When I got back to the house with him, walking, Wash was there, in his car, reading the morning paper.

  “Funeral too much for him hey?”