by Frank Yerby
It’s done, and I’m damned to eternal hell-fire, the woman taken in adultery and no sweet Jesus nigh to stave off the flingin’ stones. But, Lord God, it was good—right and natural and good, and this is what a man’s like, a real man, mine!
She said his name, savouring it like a sweet, remembering how it had been, every detail, not even contrasting him with her husband, not even remembering her husband, out of mind, gone, long-lost, forgotten, her body tingling still with the slow, endless, drawn-out, exquisite torment that was pain and pleasure, so inexplicably commingled that at the end the ecstasy was agony, so that she had bitten her lip to keep from crying out, until even the remembering was too much, and she bent her head and flattened his sleeping mouth with her own, cruelly, fiercely, drawing him into wakefulness once more.
They lay in the full glare of the risen sun and talked. There was time for talking now.
“Yes, he’s old,” Sarah said. “Sixty-five, I reckon—maybe more.”
“Why’d you marry him?” Tom said.
“He’s good. Kindest, most gentle man you ever saw. And I was lonely. Maw ‘n’ Paw both died of the cholera in a single night, and I was left all alone. He come to bury them proper, then afterwards he started stopping by right frequent to see after me—a girl eighteen years old and alone in the world; was mighty sweet of him, I thought.”
Tom snorted.
“Horny old bastard like that.”
“No, you’re wrong, Tom. He never said a improper word. Even when he proposed to me, he give me a whole summer to think it over—never even tried to kiss me. We got married last autumn.”
“Then you ain’t but nineteen! Great balls of fire!”
“It’s hard out here, Tom. That’s what makes me look so old.”
“I’d reckoned you to be about twenty-five,” Tom said.
“Don’t matter,” Sarah whispered. “The point is, what we gonna do now, Tom?”
“Do?” Tom yawned and stretched. “Why, we ain’t a-going to do nothing, Sary-gal.”
“But, Tom, he’ll be back in a week—two at most! Take me away from here—I’ll leave him a note, I kin write pretty fair, and, good as he is, he’ll forgive me.”
“Him and his forgiveness!” Tom grinned. “We ain’t going nowheres, Sary. I like it here—”
“But Tom!”
“I’ll deal with him,” Tom said calmly. “Don’t you worry yore pretty head none a-tall.”
But she did worry. In the day-time, while Tom Benton strode the few, pitiful cleared acres and inspected them.
“Yore husband,” he pronounced, “knows about as much about planting as the left side of my hind quarters. Less, ‘cause my hind quarters knows a right smart bit about it.”
“Don’t do no plantin’ in Texas,” Sarah mocked; “that’s cattle country.”
“Sure, honey-child,” Tom laughed; “but I was born and raised in Mississippi, on the prettiest stretch of cotton land yore eyes could ever want to see.”
“If you’re such a planter, why’d you ever leave?”
Tom’s eyes narrowed, then he smiled.
“Had to, Sary-gal. Got myself in a little game of draw-poker with a respected citizen, and found him with one ace too many. I kilt him. Didn’t mean to—didn’t even carry a gun in those days. We fought man to man, but I set him up good and let him have a good ‘un; trouble was, his head hit a rock when he went down—never thought a big head like that could crack like a egg.”
“Oh, Tom!” Sarah whispered.
“Had a bad reputation even then. Old man Benton’s wild Tom, you know. Well, them folks was planning a neck-tie party with me as the guest of honour, so any other place looked good to me—even Texas.”
“What did you do out there?” Sarah said.
Tom looked at her.
“Sary-gal,” he said mildly, “you got a awful bad habit of axin’ too many questions.”
“I’m sorry, Tom,” Sarah said.
But his eyes were gone from her, retreating into a time and place in which she had no part. The buzzards circling above the arroyo, and the dust clouds still hanging, undrifted by any wind. That was what had made him cautious. That cloud was too big for just three horses. He had pulled the roan up, a mile from the arroyo, and made the rest of the way on foot. The last hundred yards he had crawled, making it from mesquite brush to Joshua tree cactus, to outcropping of bare rock, inch by painful inch under a sun that baked the juice out of his body clear down to the bitter bone. Lying there, panting, on the rock shelf above the arroyo, he saw at once there wasn’t a chance.
There were fifteen Vigilantes down there in the arroyo, and in the middle of them Big Steve, and Dave Huntley, and Alvarez, the renegade Mexican. The three of them—the men he had led with rapacious impartiality against the trading posts of the Mexican Government beyond the Rio Grande, against the lumbering postal stages of both Mexico and the Lone Star Republic, against even the ranch-houses of outlying American settlers in Texas, now, since ‘36, free of Mexico and a sovereign state in its own right—were already bound, sitting there on their horses, with the nooses looped about their necks.
Not even the weapon that had given him his ascendancy over them was enough—his beloved Patterson Colt, then in 1842 one of the far less than a thousand revolvers not only in the United States, but in the whole world. Experience had taught him that no hand-gun would carry true over that distance, and even if he made every shot tell, there would still be nine Vigilantes charging him while he went about the slow and painful business of reloading, pouring powder, cutting patches, ramming home ball, and fitting caps. He would be dead, shot and sabred to death, long before the task could be done.
He had taken the gun from the body of an ex-officer veteran of the Seminole wars, one of the fifty or sixty men Sam Colt had persuaded to buy his gun and thus furnish proof it was the best side-arm in the world. It was. But not against fifteen Texas Vigilantes under a hot Texas sun without enough cover to hide an armadillo, let alone a man.
So he lay there on his ledge of stone and watched them die. They didn’t die well. By accident or design, the Vigilantes had made the nooses badly, so that instead of breaking the necks, bringing death in seconds, Big Steve and Dave and Alvarez kicked out their lives slowly, taking from four to eight minutes apiece to die, their faces purpling slowly in the sun-glare, their eyes and tongues bulging out; and he, lying there, watching it, sick to the pit of his soul, cold all over despite the heat, was unable to turn his gaze away from it for a second.
It did something to him. He didn’t even stop to look for the gold, though he had seen at once the Vigilantes hadn’t found it. Riding away from there, he knew at long last and with awful certainty that this was for him both an end and a beginning. He had damaged a part of himself, a thing at once primitive and vital. What it was he had hurt, this core component of his being, did not exist for him in words, remaining actually below the conscious level of thought. Forced to explain it, he would have growled: “Hell, it’s just a feeling I got.”
And so it was, and more. A feeling, a belief, a conviction, a faith—that he, Tom Benton, was somehow different from the common run of men, that he stood taller in his boots and in his pride, that he shot straighter, laughed louder, ate heartier, loved more lustily, fought more fiercely; in short, that he was something special, one of God’s chosen, so that everything—gold, land, women, pleasure—was his by almost divine right. More, having this feeling, he was far more touchy than other men, regarding any hint of opposition, anything remotely resembling an insult, as a kind of blasphemy against one of the elect, at the very least a lèse-majesté; at most a profanation of the temple of his private holy of holies, where rested in all its splendour the divine object of his veneration: himself. And being what he was, a man of vast complications buried deep below the layers of consciousness, and of profound simplicity topping this complexity, hiding it, forcing it down, so that it could never rise to trouble him, he could see nothing wrong with his accustomed pract
ice of playing judge, jury, and executioner, apportioning unto himself the functions of man, society, God.
But the death of his band had broken through the crust, made an exit through which the sensitivity he had all but killed in himself as a boy, all the doubts, confusions, questions that plague the lives of ordinary mortals, could from that day rise up to confound him. He was through with his old life. He was prepared now to go back into the world, to make peace with society, to submit, as far as it was possible for him to submit to anything, to the laws, practices, customs, which governed other men. Not that he thought about it in any such sweeping generalities; it would be years before he would be able to comprehend the existence of an abstraction, much less to think in abstract terms. The thoughts that jogged through his mind, as he rode eastward, held bound in their simplicity all the complexities of life; but he did not know that then. He rode very quietly along, thinking:
No more of that. Aim to die in bed, with a passel of grandchildren brawling around me. Going to be a peaceable citizen, respected, on my own land, with the cotton blowing white as far as the eye can see. Ain’t had no life, really. Money I took all gone, spent on hard liquor and range-town putas. Want a woman now who ain’t there for any man who’s got the price. Want to live where I can see green things growing and smell the earth a-soaking up the rain. Back to the Delta country, to Mississippi?—no. Too many folks there what still remembers. Louisiana—same kind of place, with New Orleans piled on top of all that for a man who wants to bust his traces once in a while.
And now, after all the riding and baking and freezing, he was there. Home. Funny. Things never did fall out on the line the way a man planned. Here were the land and the woman, ahead of time, too damned soon really, before he was ready, and keeping them was going to take some doing, especially since he had to do it without killing. Couldn’t afford that now. Had to get his roots in. And the Louisiana oaks were set up mighty fine for hanging folks on. He glanced up at one of them. Even a buzzard would have to do some tall flying to get to you up there.
His brow furrowed with thinking.
“What’s the matter, Tom?” Sarah said.
“Problems, Sary-gal,” he said. “To do justice to this here spread of land, we ought to have hands. And niggers come mighty dear these days. You got any money?”
“No, Tom,” she whispered. Her voice made a caress, saying his name. “Anyhow . . .”
“It ain’t my land,” he growled. “But it’s going to be, Sary-gal—it’s going to be!”
He had no plan. Can’t rightly make no plans till I see this Bible-pounder she’s married to, he thought. Got to size him up. Might even have to leave here, and take Sary with me. Find land somewheres else. He’s got the jump on me since I can’t kill him, and he sure Lord can kill me. Never heard tell yet of a man being strung up in these parts for letting a little daylight into a hombre what’s been pleasuring himself with his wife. In fact, all this Jesus-talker is got to do is to round up a few of his friends, and they’ll help him do it—still . . .
Still, he couldn’t leave her. Not with what there was between them now. He had lost count long ago of the women he had had; but he knew with bed-rock certainty that there had been no one like Sarah. He’d never give her up; he knew that. He’d give up breathing first. That would be easier.
The waiting was bad. They came together many times. At night. In the mornings. Under a noonday sun. He was walking the fields, for the hundredth time, looking things over, thinking, when he saw Sarah come over a little rise behind him. He stopped and waited, a little frown puckering his forehead, until she came up to him.
“What the devil do you want?” he spat at her.
“You,” Sarah said, the one word coming up out of her throat half-strangled.
The first thing the Reverend Bob Tyler saw when he entered the empty kitchen was the table set for two, with the scraps of food still on the plates, and the stub of Tom Benton’s cigar. His own razor lay open on the washstand, and the soap had dried in the shaving-brush. A hundred things cried out the stranger’s presence; things that a less solitary man might not have noticed, but which struck Bob Tyler one after the other like a rain of blows. He reeled out of the house, death in his eyes, and it was then that he saw them coming down the rise, their arms locked about one another.
He stood there, waiting. Tom Benton studied him, not even bothering to glance at Sarah’s stricken face, deciding at once what it was that must be done, until, coming closer, he dropped his arm from Sarah’s waist, and shoved her towards the door, saying quietly, flatly, no emotion at all in his voice:
“Git in there, Sary-gal, and stay.”
She went, leaving the two big men there, facing each other. They didn’t say anything. Tom’s hand went down to the holster and came out with the Colt. Bob Tyler stared at him without fear and said evenly:
“I am a man of God. I don’t bear arms.”
“I know you don’t,” Tom said. “And I don’t aim to use this-not lessen I hafta. You’re an old man, Rev. You aimed a might further’n you could reach. You’re too old, and you done stayed away too long.”
“What do you mean?” Bob Tyler whispered.
“That I’ve jumped yore claim. I’m here, and I’m stayin’ and Sary’s staying too. ‘Pears to me, about the only smart thing for you to do is git back up on that mule and ride away real quiet-like—just the way you came.”
“And if I don’t?” the Reverend Tyler said.
Tom studied him.
“Then,” he sighed; “I reckon I’m gonna hafta let a li’l’ daylight into you, Rev. I don’t want to. Done enough to you already. But what I done took is mine, ‘cause it never rightly belonged to you. An’ if I hafta kill you to keep Sary, I‘ll kill you. Real sorrowful-like, but I’ll do it.”
Bob Tyler swayed there, death and hell in his eyes, so that Sarah, seeing him from the house, could read his thought, feel almost as if by touch the temptation that beset him.
Oh Lord, Oh Jesus, he’s a-going to force Tom. He wants to die now, easiest thing for him to do—what’s he got left now, what reason is he got to go on livin’?
She came out of the house in a wild rush and hurled herself between them.
“No, Tom!” she got out. “Ain’t gonna be no killin’—not over me! Put up that there gun. You hear me, put it up!”
Slowly Tom let the muzzle of the revolver fall; then he jerked the whole gun upward and slammed it down into the holster. Sarah turned to her husband.
“Reverend Bob,” she whispered, “listen to me. I ain’t got no excuse. There ain’t no excuse what makes any sense. I’m a bad woman, and you’re too good for me. You always was, but I didn’t know it then. So go ‘way, Reverend Bob, and let us be. I’ll find some way to pay you for the land.”
His eyes held hers. She wanted to turn away from them but she couldn’t. She had to stand there and watch it—the death of a man’s spirit, of his pride, his honour, his dignity, of everything there is inside of him, living, that raises him to the level of the angels, that separates him from the beasts. She had to watch it, being unable to turn away her eyes, this crumbling of the human spirit, this anguished splintering of a man’s soul into the distorted planes and angles of pure grief. It was an ugly thing to watch; but she had to.
“All right, Sarah,” he said, his voice so low that she felt rather than heard the sound, “I’ll go.”
He climbed up on to the mule, so feebly that Tom had to help him mount. Then he moved off, his long legs sticking out grotesquely from the sides of the beast, his head bent far over on his chest. And Tom Benton, seeing it, threw back his head and laughed aloud.
Something exploded inside Sarah’s mind at the sound of his laughter. She whirled upon him, her hands curving into talons, raking for his eyes. He moved aside with a dancer’s grace, and his hand came up, palm open, and smashed across her face with a noise like a pistol-shot, sending her down to the earth at his feet.
“Git up,” he said mildly. “You
hadn’t ought to of come out. Then there wouldn’t of been all this trouble.”
Sarah got up.
“You beast!” she whispered. “You mean, low-down, cruel, dirty beast!”
Tom took a step towards her.
“Git away from me!” she screamed. “You beast! You foul, dirty—”
“Beast,” Tom finished for her, grinning, locking his arms about her so tightly she could not breathe. “Yep, reckon you’re kind of right there. I’m a beast-critter all right—but, honey-child, you ain’t no lily yourself. Got your share o’ bitch’n’ bitters, too, as I remember. ‘Take me away, Tom!’ he mimicked; “ ‘take me far away where he won’t never find us.’ ‘Pears to me I heard something like that somewheres.”
“Oh, damn you!” Sarah got out; “I hate you! I hate . . .”
“No, you don’t, Sary-gal,” Tom murmured. “You love me. You love me with every living inch of that smooth ‘n’ silky hide o’ yourn; and you ain’t never gonna git shut o’ me—’cause you can’t!”
Then his big hand came up and caught her chin, imprisoning her face. To Sarah, his face coming down to hers was like night descending, so that there was no more light, not anywhere in the world. Then, as lightly as he would lift a child, Tom picked her up in his arms and carried her into the house, kicking the door shut behind him.
The old negro, Jonas, stole round the house and raced across the yard. They did not hear him. They were already, at that moment, incapable of hearing anything. So Jonas was able to stumble down to the stream a half-mile beyond the house, and it was there he found the Reverend Tyler, kneeling beside a placid pool. Jonas stopped, held his breath, for the preacher had folded his hands and lifted his face towards the sky.
“God!” his voice rasped out, torn through with edges that ripped into the old black’s heart; “I’ve been Thy faithful servant. I’ve tried always to do Thy will . . . and this cup Thou heapest upon me—my wife turned wanton, my land stolen, driven away from my own like a felon.”
His voice broke. From where he stood, ten yards away, Jonas could see his massive shoulders shake.