Hill girl

by Charles Williams

  “You mean, on account of that business? I don’t think it’s necessary. It was pretty rough at first sometimes, but I’ve about got it out of my system now.”

  She gathered up her purse and I picked up the check. “Yes, I know you have. I suspect you of growing up. You’ve got over it. But has Lee?”

  She wouldn’t say any more and she was quiet as I drove her back to her grandmother’s.

  “Good-by, Bob,” she said. “I’ll be out to see you one of these days.”

  August was beautiful. I almost forgot Lee entirely in my preoccupation with Angelina and the task I had undertaken in attempting to teach her to like the country the way I did. I went to see him once a week and took him cigarettes and some books, but he was surly most of the time and didn’t seem to care whether I came or not.

  One afternoon when Angelina and I were swimming down at Black Creek, Sam came up on us, appearing out of the heavy timber with his shotgun. He was hunting squirrels and had two of them, big fox squirrels.

  We hadn’t seen him since our return. Twice we had gone to visit Mrs. Harley and had taken some presents Angelina had brought back from Galveston, but both times he had been away from the house and I was pretty sure she had known he would be.

  He grinned and seemed embarrassed, as though he had caught us undressed or something. “Howdy, Bob,” he said, shifting his gun to the other hand. “Howdy, Angelina.”

  Angelina’s “Hello, Papa,” was as impersonal as death. I asked him how the crops were and how the hunting had been and if he’d been fishing for white perch lately, but Angelina never said another word. I felt sorry for him, the way he was standing there and not wanting to look at her, half naked as she seemed to him in her scanty bathing suit, and still wanting to look at her because she was his oldest daughter and the prettiest one and he loved her. He was talking to me but it was easy to see he was hoping she would say something to him, perhaps some word of our trip, or when she expected to be over to visit them again, or whether she was happy and liked her new home, or some question about his health, or anything at all, but no word came from her.

  “We’ll be over to see you soon, Sam,” I said, as he half turned to go.

  “Yes, you-all do that. We’ll be lookin’ for you. Good-by. Good-by, Angelina.”

  Angelina looked up briefly and said, “Good-by, Papa.”

  When he had gone, I asked, “I haven’t been mean to you in a long time, have I?”

  “Of course not. Why ask such a silly thing?”

  “Don’t let me, ever. I never want to have to listen to you say, ‘Good-by, Bob,’ the way you said that. The poor devil.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help it, I guess.”

  We went to all the dances, the ones in town and the little country dances that were held now and then on Saturday nights in the surrounding communities, and I took her to the movies about twice a week. I had never cared a lot for pictures, but she liked them and we went. A lot of times all this going seemed a little silly and it would have been much more fun to stay at home, but always I guess there was a fear in the back of my mind that she wouldn’t like living out here if there were too much to remind her of her previous unhappiness. I didn’t want her to continue associating that unhappiness with country life when the truth was that the mere fact that her father was a farmer had had nothing to do with it I wanted her to learn that a girl could live on a farm without being imprisoned and cut off from other people her age and having to wear clothes she hated.

  One night after supper, when I suggested a ride into town for a movie, Angelina surprised me by asking if we couldn’t stay at home instead.

  “There’s a full moon tonight,” she said. “Let’s stay here on the back porch and just look at it.”

  I agreed quickly. “Sounds like a lot more fun to me,” I said. We sat down on the top step and she leaned her head against my shoulder. The moon hadn’t come up yet over the timbered ridge to the east across the bottom, but already we could see the glow of it looking like a far-off forest fire.

  “Are you happy, Angelina?” I asked.

  “You know I am. More than there’s any way to say.”

  “You don’t feel that living on a farm is like being in jail any more?”

  “No. I never did, except over there.” She was looking across the bottom toward the glow. “I’ve never felt like that here with you.”

  In a moment she laughed a little and said, “You’re funny, Bob, aren’t you? You’ve courted me so hard ever since we’ve been back here that sometimes I wondered if you’d forgotten we’re already married. Goin’ to movies and dances, and swimmin’. It’s sweet of you, but you don’t have to work so hard at it.”

  “Well, I didn’t want you ever to feel about this place the way you did over there.”

  “I won’t. Even if you’d made a jail out of it. There’s such a thing as still liking the jailer.”

  “Fine,” I said. “All this foolishness stops right now. Tomorrow morning I take your shoes away from you and you go out and hoe cotton.”

  “You don’t hoe cotton after it’s laid by, silly. You can’t fool a country girl.”

  “You see what I mean, Angelina?” I said. “A few months ago you’d have been as sore as a boil if anybody’d called you a country girl. You’d have thought it was an insult.”

  “I’d have scratched their eyes out.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. You don’t scratch. You double up your little dukes and start throwing punches like a good bantamweight.”

  “I guess that’s the only reason you like me, because I fight like a man instead of a girl.”

  It wasn’t all play those two months, even though I neglected a lot of things to be with her. Jake and I cut corn tops and shocked them and sawed a lot of wood for the coming winter. But in addition to the work there were always the swimming down in the bottom and the white perch fishing, and the watermelons to be eaten, and the books to be read on the grass under the towering white oaks, and always the ever increasing fun of just being together. That summer was one I would never forget.

  Twenty-two

  Early in September we started picking cotton in the upper fields, with just a few pickers at first and increasing as the days went by and the bolls began opening faster under the hot sun. It was still dry and little dust devils chased each other across the fields like miniature cyclones and the drone of the dry-weather locusts went on throughout the dusty, sweaty afternoons.

  Lee was released from jail a week after we started picking. We were becoming busier then and I didn’t have time to go to town. Jake was running the wagon, hauling the cotton to the gin, and I was doing the weighing for the pickers in the field.

  I heard that he was out, though, and that he had gone back to the big house on North Elm and was living there alone. I sent word to him to come out and see us, not much expecting that he would since he had been so sour and unfriendly the times I had gone to the jail to visit him. So I was surprised to see the big roadster drive up late one Saturday afternoon.

  He came down the hall and I noticed first that he was sober and that he was looking well. Apparently sixty days in jail and being at least partially cut off from his liquor supply had been good for him. He was dressed in brown tweeds that fitted him the way all his clothes did, and he was wearing that gravely smiling demeanor that had disarmed so many people in his life.

  He lounged in the doorway and looked at me and said smilingly, “Hello, yokel. I hear I’m invited to supper.”

  Angelina came in from the kitchen and stopped when she saw him. It was the first time they had met since we came back and I supposed all of us were trying not to think of the last time they’d met. At least, I knew Angelina and I were, but no one was ever sure what Lee was thinking.

  He stepped forward with that urbane gravity that reminded me so much of the way he used to be when he wanted to put on an act, and said, “Hello, Angelina,” and they shook hands. He might have been a Supreme Court justice
greeting his favorite niece.

  Angelina said, “Hello, Lee,” and I was proud of her. I hadn’t known there could be so much simple dignity in an eighteen-year-old.

  He was quietly courteous to her throughout the meal, never ostentatiously attentive but on the other hand never asking me a question or saying anything to me without turning to include her and to get her view. I was proud of the way he was behaving and happy to see him like this. They were the two people I loved more than anybody else in the world and I wanted that ugly thing that had been between us buried once and for all, and when he casually mentioned tfiat he was thinking of going back to work I was suddenly satisfied with everything in life.

  “You know much about hardwood, Bob?” he asked, finishing his coffee. We had lit the kerosene lamp and he looked handsome as the devil himself with his smooth brown head and dark eyes.

  “Not much. Why?” _

  “Oh, I was just thinking. You know, just before he finally decided to get rid of both his mills, the Major had been looking into the hardwood business. He never did do anything about it, but he had gathered a lot of figures and had some of the best oak and walnut stands spotted, and I’ve been giving it some serious thought lately. I might try to get one of those mills back and start cutting oak. There’s good money in it if you get into a good stand and know how to run the business.”

  “Well, you should know enough about it, all those years with the Major,” I said.

  “I may do it. I can’t go on doing nothing all my life.”

  He stayed until about ten and we talked a lot and played the phonograph, and the evening was almost perfect. There was one moment when I wasn’t so sure, but afterward I wondered if perhaps I hadn’t imagined it, or at least exaggerated it. It was while I was lighting a cigarette and Angelina had got up to go across the room for something and for a second when he must have thought he was unobserved I saw what was in his eyes as they followed her figure across the room.

  When he had gone I said, “Maybe he’ll come out of it yet. Don’t you think so, Angelina?”

  “Maybe so, Bob.” She was rather quiet.

  “He’s all right when he’s behaving himself, isn’t he? What did you think?”

  “He was nice, all right. And he’s the best-looking man I ever saw, even in the movies.”

  “Well, I asked for it,” I said, a little sore.

  She laughed. “Are you mad because you’re not as pretty as he is, Bob?”

  “No. But, Christ, no man wants to sit there and hear his wife—” She kissed me and I shut up and was satisfied.

  For the next week or ten days he came to see us often, nearly always coming around suppertime, and often bringing us a steak or some ice cream or something else from town. But I noticed that after each visit Angelina was a little more preoccupied and moody, and one day she asked me if we ought to have him so often.

  “Well, we don’t have to,” I said, surprised. “But, after all, he’s my brother. And it seems to help keep him from drinking.”

  “Maybe” was all she would say.

  Suddenly he didn’t come out any more for supper. A whole week, the last week in September, went by with no visit from him. We were finishing up the cotton in the bottom now and Jake and Helen and I were down there all day long. Angelina wanted to come down and pick with us, but I refused. I wasn’t going to have my wife work like a field hand. Then she wanted to do the weighing or ride the wagon to the gin with Jake. She said she wanted to get away from the house. I thought it was because of the beautiful Indian-summer weather and said I’d think about it.

  That same day, late in the afternoon, Jake and I were putting on a bale that was going to the gin the next day. I was passing the cotton up to him in a big woven basket from the pile on the ground near the weighing station and he was dumping it and tramping it down in the bed, going round and round the high cotton-frame sideboards and putting all his weight on one foot and pushing down.

  He chuckled suddenly. “Bob, that brother of yourn shore does goose a car, don’t he?”

  “Yeah,” I said absently. “Anything under fifty is parking to him.”

  “I seen him come out of yore driveway this afternoon an’ make that there sharp turn onto the road an’ I swear they wasn’t only two of his wheels on the ground.”

  “That so? I thought he’d forgotten us, he hasn’t been out in so long.”

  “Oh, he comes out every day. I see him on the road out there a lot. I was wonderin’ why you didn’t put him to pickin’. Guess that’s the reason he stays up to the house, though, so you won’t put him to work,” he said, and laughed.

  “Yeah,” I said. I was bent over the pile, pushing cotton down into the basket, and I tried to keep it out of my voice. He was above me and couldn’t see my face and by the time I had the basket packed full I had hold of myself and passed it up expressionlessly.

  We finished loading the wagon and started up the hillside road toward the house with Jake driving. We stopped in the lot next to the barn and I helped unhitch, working mechanically and only half listening to Jake’s chatter. I could have left the unhitching to him, but I didn’t want him to notice anything unusual.

  When we had fed the mules I said, “I’ll see you in the morning, Jake,” and started up to the house.

  Angelina was in the dining room, putting the last of supper on the table. I stopped in the door.

  “Do you still want to come down in the bottom with us tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Sure. Can I, Bob?” she asked eagerly.

  “Every day?” I asked.

  “Yes. Until we’re through down there.”

  “You don’t like to stay up here at the house, do you?”

  “No. I hate it when the weather’s so nice.”

  “Just on account of the weather?”

  She must have noticed something strange about it then, for she looked at me sharply with worry in her eyes.

  I came on into the dining room and walked over to her and caught both her arms. “Now tell me. Why do you want to get away from the house?”

  “I’ve told you.”

  My hands were cutting into her arms and I could hear her indrawn breath as she tried to cover up the pain.

  “Tell me.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you, Bob.” I released her arms and she rubbed them where my hands had been. “But, please, you won’t do anything, will you? Promise me you won’t do anything to him.”

  “Why? Are you in love with him?” I should have known better than to say that but I wasn’t thinking very clearly.

  “What do you think, Bob?” she asked quietly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you. That’s the reason I wanted to come down there with you, so I wouldn’t have to be here. I guess I could have just gone off and hid in the woods all day, but it seemed kind of crazy to do that. He came out here every day, even during the time he was coming out at night to have supper with us. And he was drinking a lot and lots of times I’d have to fight him off. And that’s the reason he hasn’t been out here at night the last week, because one day I hit him real hard in the face and it gave him a black eye. I guess he didn’t want you to see that. There wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t tell you because I knew how you are and I was afraid of what would happen. He kept begging me to go away with him somewhere and hinting that if I didn’t people might find out about that—that thing that happened and why you and I were married. He didn’t say he would tell anybody, but he said that if I didn’t go with him he couldn’t stand it and drank too much and that he might let things fall when he was drunk. Of course, I didn’t mind that part of it because he was just silly and nobody cares what he says or tells—we don’t, do we?—but when he was drunk and I had to fight with him it was bad.”

  When she stopped talking I said, “Is that all?”

  “Just about. Except that sometimes when I watched for the car and saw him coming I wo
uld run and hide and he would look all over the house and barn until he found me.”

  “And he was drunk?”

  “Most of the time. Not always. Bob, can’t we sell this place and go somewhere else? I know you want to live on a farm, the way you told me in Galveston that time, but you could buy one somewhere else, away from him.”

  “You don’t have to leave the country just because a man won’t leave your wife alone,” I said. “Not this country.”

  “Don’t you see that’s the reason I didn’t want to tell you? Can’t you see it, Bob?”

  I started toward the front door and she came after me and caught me in the hall.

  “Don’t go without promising, Bob,” she said. She couldn’t cry, I guess, the way another girl would. All she could do was to look at me in that awful way and keep asking me over and over. I knew then that I didn’t have any right to do what I was doing to her.

  “All right,” I said. “I won’t.”

  I didn’t have any idea where I might find him but thought I would try the house first. It was possible he might be there. It was dark when I turned into the driveway off North Elm.

  I didn’t knock this time. The door was unlocked and I went on in and walked back to the living room and he was there with a girl I didn’t know. They were sitting on the sofa drinking highballs.

  The girl was blonde and about twenty-five, I guess, and looked as if she knew her way around. She gave me a cold stare and said, “Well, of all the nerve!”

  “Beat it,” I said.

  “Lee, who the hell is this monstrosity?” she said.

  “My knuckleheaded brother,” Lee said. “Don’t you ever knock?” This last was for me. His eyes were bright and I knew he’d had at least enough to be nasty.

  “Well, suit yourself,” I told the girl. She seemed to want to stay. Lee got up off the sofa and I hit him. He sat back down and a cut place on his lip began to bleed. What with the black eye he already had, he wasn’t going to look like much in a little while. He got back up and I caught hold of his lapel.

  “How drunk are you?” I asked.