“But,” I said wonderingly, “why didn’t you leave?”
She looked at me. “How?” she asked simply.
“Good God, you mean he won’t let you?”
“In a way.”
“But,” I protested, “how could he keep you from it?”
“I said in a way. He won’t take me down to the highway, or let me have any money. Where could I go?”
“But why?” I asked. “Why does he want to keep you here if there’s nothing between you any more except fighting?”
She was silent for a moment. “I’m not sure,” she said at last. “I think I know, but I don’t like to talk about it”
“You have to tell me,” I said.
“As I said, I’m not sure. But I think he suspects I’ll turn him in. I guess it must be the law he’s running from and it has preyed on his mind so long he suspects everybody. Maybe you crack up after just so much of that Anyway, I think that’s what he believes—that if he let me get away from here I’d report him to the police because we’ve fought so much. Especially after he found I was trying to run away. I quit asking him after a while because it always caused trouble between us, and I began to steal from him.”
“Steal?” I said. “How could you steal from you husband?”
“Stealing is what I mean,” she said. “You could call it anything you liked, but I prefer to call it that. When he was drunk, or asleep, I would take money out of his clothes. Not very much, because he never had much, but just a dime now and a quarter the next time so he wouldn’t miss it. One day he found it, where I had it hidden, in a baking-powder can, and knew I was planning to leave someday when he was down the lake. He led me down to the edge of the water and made me watch while he threw the coins out in the lake, one at a time, and then made me throw some, and when I refused at first—” She broke off. “Are you enjoying this?”
I felt sick. “I can stop that,” I said. “I’ll take the—I’ll take him in.”
“No,” she said. “Can’t you see that’s exactly what he’s accusing me of? Not in words, of course, but in his mind. I can’t do that. All I want to do is leave.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Four months. Maybe five. You lose track of time.”
Yes, I thought, I guess you would.
I sat up and got two cigarettes out of my pocket and lit them, passing one down to her. She lay back with her head on the leaves, smoking the cigarette and looking up at me. The shapeless old sack of a dress was pulled down demurely across her knees, giving her an odd aspect of completely defenseless innocence, like a little girl. The bare legs below the hem of the dress extended down past my side, smooth and faintly tanned, and I turned around a little so I could see the feet. Suddenly, for no reason at all, I slid down there and gathered them up in my lap.
They were slender feet, quite small and beautifully formed, but rough and calloused on the soles from going barefoot, and they were dusty from the trail. Very carefully, with my fingers I brushed all the dust from them, as if they were very old pieces of fabulously valuable and very fragile jewelry I had found gathering cobwebs in an attic. Then I turned them slightly inward, pressing the soles together up near the toes, and held them, thinking how small and breakable they looked, like the delicate feet of a china doll, in the big, dark hands. I looked up and she was watching me with a misty softness in her eyes.
“Why are you doing that, Jack?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said.
I looked up again and she was crying, quite silently and without any movement of her face.
* * *
Time came back for us without any warning. It was the sound of a motor.
We sat up. “Jack—” she said.
It was an outboard, a big one, and coming nearer. He must have had it throttled down for it to get that near before we heard it.
“Where is your boat?” she asked in an urgent whisper. “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s hidden. I’ll get off here after dark. But I’ve got to see you again. Tonight. I’ll be down there where I was camped. You’ve got to come.”
“I—I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes were scared. “But I’ve got to go.” We both stood up.
I kissed her. “It’s all right. There’s no hurry.” We heard the motor quit and knew he was drifting up to the landing. “But you have to come. Promise me you will.”
“I will if I can. There’s no way to know.” I had my face down against her cheek, holding her very tightly, not wanting to let her go. I knew what she meant. She would come if he got drunk and passed out. Isn’t that wonderful? I thought. “I—I ought to go, Jack.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I began.
“Oh—oh, God!” She pushed away from me and I could see the terror in her eyes. Then I remembered it too. It was that vine, in its box—sitting right there on the dresser in the front room. It would be the first thing he saw when he walked in the door.
She broke away from me, turning, and ran. I could see the color of the old dress flashing through the trees along the trail. I ran after her until I was near the wall of timber along the edge of the clearing and then stopped, knowing I could go no further. I could feel my heart pounding as I saw her, still running, coming up directly behind the house so he couldn’t see her from in front. He had come out of the trees by the boat landing, carrying a big paper bag in his arm. I saw her go in the back door while he was still a hundred yards away, and felt so weak in the knees I could hardly stand and wanted to sit down there and rest.
So this is the way it is, I thought. I walked through the trees to the upper end of the island, where the slough came back into the lake. It was nearly half a mile, through heavy timber, and I knew he wouldn’t find me up here, but hiding like that gave me an uneasy feeling.
As soon as it was dark I eased back down the slough to where the boat was. I didn’t dare go down past his boat landing, so I took the boat clear around, back up the slough and down the far side of the lake on the other side, pulling it very carefully with the oars and taking care not to bump the oarlocks.
I didn’t like it. But what am I going to do? I thought. To say I won’t come back up here any more to see her is silly. I know I will. There isn’t anything that could keep me from coming back, not the dirty feeling or the uneasiness, or even being actually scared. By the time I get back to town I’ll be counting the hours until I see her again.
Nine
With my back against the trunk of a big oak, I sat waiting in the darkness where I had camped before. A few mosquitoes buzzed, for there was no breeze, and night lay hot and sticky across the swamp. I smoked endless cigarettes, and once I remembered—and immediately forgot—that I hadn’t eaten anything for twenty-four hours. I hadn’t brought anything except an extra pack of cigarettes.
Would she come? For the twentieth time I struck a match to look at my watch. It was eleven-fifteen. It’s about the time she came before, I thought. She’ll come. I just haven’t given her time. She has to. I got up and walked down to the water’s edge and listened. There was nothing, no sound.
I began to imagine things. He had found the plant there. She hadn’t had time too hide it. He had beaten her. Maybe he had killed her. Who knew what he would do? I could see her against the wall in yellow lamplight, being held and struck, the helplessness and terror in her face, and for an instant it was so real I wondered if I were going to be sick. If she doesn’t come before long, I thought, I’m going up there. I won’t go back without knowing. I’ll go up there. And what? I thought. Walk into a man’s house and demand to know if his wife is all right, tell him I have to see her? I threw down the cigarette and ground savagely at the red coal with my heel. I heard her then. I wanted to run out into the water and meet her, but I stood there on the shelving bank and waited. She came up out of the water, wading, and I could see the pale gleam of her face and arms.
“Jack?” she whispered.
“Here,” I said. I picked her
up in my arms, wet bathing suit and all, and carried her up the bank.
“I’ll get your clothes all wet.”
“Hush,” I said. “Hush.” I kissed her, not putting her down.
“We have to talk, Jack,” she whispered urgently.
“Yes,” I said. “In just a minute.”
I put her down, standing still holding her. “We’ve got to talk,” she said.
“I know. I know what you mean. But not right now. I can’t let you go or think of anything right now. I’ve been crazy, sitting here, imagining things. He was beating you.”
“You’re hurting me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, Jack. I don’t mind.”
“It was terrible,” I said. I unfastened the chin strap of the cap and pulled it from her head, loosing the darker-than-night disordered riot of her hair. Everything began to go then, rushing outward in the night, and after a long time the swamp came back and became again the dark, familiar trees, the ground, and stars.
“We can’t do this, Jack,” she said after a while. “This afternoon, when I was running—”
“I know. But what can we do?”
“You felt it too, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But maybe not as much. When I had to go up there and hide.”
“It will always be that same way—that same feeling.”
“Yes. I know. We’ve got to go away.”
She told me a little about him that night, about how they happened to be married and how it was before they came to the swamp.
“It was during the war, Jack. I was living in a little town with my father. He’s a minister and we’d always lived in a succession of little towns like that, and during the war they were heartbreaking in a way, they were so lonely. You were probably overseas and don’t know what they were like with all the young men gone. Even the ones who were Four-F went away to work in shipyards and things like that. I was working in the office of a lumberyard and he came to work there. That was the first time I saw him. He was about thirty-five, I guess, and I was only twenty, but I was attracted to him in some way, partly because of the loneliness, I guess, and the fact that I knew he was lonely too. He didn’t look nearly so old then and was rather good-looking. I used to wonder why a man that age and as well educated as he was would be doing common labor around the lumberyard, and I guess I built up quite a mystery about him. Girls do that, you know. After a while we began to go to movies and things like that.
“It was about a week before we were going to be married that it happened. We were sitting in the drugstore drinking a Coke one night after the movies when a man came in, a man I’d never seen around town before and who looked like a sawmill hand or laborer, in overalls, and all of a sudden I noticed how Roger—he had another name then—how Roger was looking at him. And when the man happened to face in our direction Roger turned his head suddenly, pretending to look for something in his coat. That night we left town on the bus. He didn’t explain anything; he just said he was going and that I didn’t have to, he wouldn’t expect it of me. But I went. I was in love with him then. We were married in another town.
“It was that way for years. I knew after the first time that he was running from something, and it wasn’t just that man, because another time it was a different one he saw. It was an awful way to live, worse than the way my father had always moved around from church to church, but I didn’t mind too much. It was only after we moved up here that he began to go to pieces like that and drink. Before that he was always good to me. But now that thing has been preying on his mind so long he’s changed and isn’t like he used to be at all. The way he looks sometimes—almost as if he thinks people are hiding out there in the trees trying to catch up with him.…”
* * *
I went back to town in the early morning, leaving the boat and trailer hidden in the underbrush near the end of the slough because there was no question any more about not going back. Louise hadn’t come home, but there was a letter from her. They were going to stay another week, she said, and couldn’t I send her a hundred dollars? I poured a big drink and sat looking at the letter in the kitchen while it grew light outside and the heat began.
My pay check was in the office and I endorsed it and sent it to her. The drink had made me lightheaded because I hadn’t eaten anything for so long, and I was conscious of the wild thought that if I could keep on sending her enough money maybe she’d never come back. In sickness and in health, I thought, looking out the post-office door at the sun blasting into the street.
Buford said nothing about the money he knew I owed him, the pay-off from Abbie Bell. “I turned that kid loose,” he said. “I told him to get out of town, and if he ever came back we’d throw away the key.”
“O.K.,” I said. I couldn’t get my mind on anything. With the grand jury coming up we were walking through spilled gasoline with cigarettes in our hands and I couldn’t even think about it. All I could see was an empty flat ocean of time to be crossed before I would see her again. And what do you suppose she goes through, I thought, out there with that crazy bastard and never knowing what he knows or what he’ll do? We’ve got to get away. But how? And using what for money? And if I run now there’ll be an investigation for certain. It would look like guilt; why else would a man run off and leave his wife and home? And if they brought an indictment she’d just be moving around over the country with another fugitive. From what little she’d told me I could see what it had done to him, and I didn’t want any of it.
Thursday I had to go with one of the other deputies to take a prisoner to the state penitentiary, and we didn’t get back until late Friday afternoon. I was jumpy and on edge, and drove like a madman. When I got back in town I found out from Buford that the grand-jury session had been moved back to Monday. After nightfall I slipped out of town and headed for the lake. There was still no moon, but by now I could run the channel in the dark.
There was nothing to do but pray she would come. She did. At eleven or a little after she came swimming down the channel and waded out of the water where I stood waiting for her.
“I almost died, Jack. I thought something had happened when you didn’t come. We can’t go on like this.”
“I know,” I said.
“Can’t we go away tonight?” she whispered. “Now. Just take me away somewhere.”
“In a bathing suit?” I said. “With no money? We can’t.”
“We could go back in your boat and get my clothes, what few things I have.”
I held her tightly, wanting to tell her yes but knowing we had to wait. “I know,” I said. “But it won’t be more than a few days more. I’ve got it all figured out. I can sell my boat and trailer and all the fishing and camping gear. I think I can get two hundred for it. And the old Ford will take us. We’ll go to Nevada; that’s far enough away. I can work at something, and we can get divorces and be married.”
“All right,” she said slowly. “But please make it soon.”
Suddenly, I felt her shiver as if she had a chill. “What is it, baby? Are you cold?”
“No,” she said. “I guess I was just trying to shake off a feeling I keep having, a sort of premonition that we haven’t got much time. It’s like one of those dreams you have—you know, when you’re trying to catch a train and can’t get out of the waiting room because somebody has locked the door. You see the train pulling out and you keep on tugging at the door. ...”
“Don’t do that, honey. It’s going to be all right.”
“Yes. I know. Only—”
“Only what?”
“I keep remembering something that happened a long time ago. I thought of it just then, when I had that chill.”
“What is it?”
It was one of the strangest things I had ever known in my life. I began to know what she meant almost before she told me. She’d hardly said a word before it was all right there before me.
“It’s a silly thing,” she said. “But it’s so plain, ev
en after all these years. I can hear the school bell, and see the street corner in the early morning with the sun shining, and that big woolly-looking dog going by with the newspaper in his mouth—”
“Wait!” I said, wondering. “What dog? Say that again!”
“You made me late for school,” she went on slowly, almost as if to herself. “It was the first time in my life I’d ever been late. But you were carrying my books, and you stopped to chase the dog to get the paper away from him”
“No!” I said. “Let me think. Doris… Doris… And your father was a minister, you said. I know now!”
“Doris Carroll,” she said. “Didn’t you know who I was, Jack? But then, with a different name… And it must have been more than fifteen years ago. I knew you though, as soon as you told me your name.”
“We were in the fifth grade,” I said. “You were the first woman I ever loved. I remember you moved away the next year and I was heartbroken.”
“For a week, anyway?”
“For almost a month,” I said.
We talked about it for a long time that night, and after a while I guess I forgot what it was that had brought it to her mind in the first place. I don’t think she did, though. The last thing she said when we had to go was, “Please, Jack. Get us out of here. And don’t let it be too long.”
I knew what she meant. Don’t make us late again.
* * *
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