He turned into the Davis driveway. The dooryard was all bare earth and ice, and in the middle a rusty cultivator had been left out for the winter. A milk can shone silver next to the slanting porch. Plants grew in the kitchen window, olive-colored behind the greasy glass. He stopped, and though the lights were on in the kitchen and parlor, the house was hushed. His feet sounded aggressively heavy on the porch boards. Before he had a chance to knock, the kitchen storm door swung violently open and Sam Davis stood there in undershirt and overalls, a young-looking man with a fuzz of gray on his face, his bare white arms knobbed with short, hard muscles. He seemed ready to jump for Wood’s throat, and his eyes actually glittered in the frosty air.
“Can I come in?” Wood said.
“What! What!” Sam Davis said. He almost fell forward, as though he had meant to jump, and changed his mind just too late.
“You the one called a while back?”
“Yes. I’m Wood Whipple.”
Sam Davis moved back an inch or two, and Wood walked past him into the warm kitchen that smelled of supper and kerosene. A dark-haired woman, he couldn’t tell her age, sat next to the oil stove in a straight chair. She was wrapped in what looked like a gray blanket—all except for her head and her fragile white hands, which flashed and jerked, machinelike, over her knitting.
“Mrs. Davis?” Wood said. The woman didn’t look up at him, but Sam Davis said harshly from behind him, “She ain’t Mrs. Davis.”
Wood turned to find a pump shotgun pointed right at the middle of him, right at his belly. He sucked in his breath involuntarily, and had a quick twinge of nausea. The hole in the end of the barrel looked enormous, and he believed for a second he would be shot.
The rigor of Sam Davis’ face and hands grew, in that second, and his bumpy muscles grew larger. But the shot didn’t come, the blue eyes flickered, and Wood knew that he wasn’t about to do anything so foolish.
“You scared, sonny?” Sam Davis asked triumphantly, not knowing that his voice proved that there would be no shot.
“Yes,” Wood said.
“Hah!” Sam Davis said. “I could kill you legal as hell.”
“You have no reason to shoot me,” Wood said.
“Maybe I’ll just break a few of your bones for you!” Sam Davis put the shotgun in the corner and came back to stand a foot from Wood, his arms akimbo.
Wood looked down into Sam Davis’ rigid, quivering face. Each gray bristle of his week-old beard seemed to point straight at Wood, and the blue eyes were lighter and colder than Susie’s, dangerously flat. The man still looked like pure murder.
“I ought to…” he said without opening his teeth. “I ought to tear your balls off.”
“I don’t see why you ought to do anything,” Wood said. “I mean no harm to you or Susie.”
“What the hell’s your name again?”
“Wood Whipple.”
“You Harvey’s boy?”
“Yes.”
“You the one stole the money?”
“No, that was my brother Horace.”
The danger of pure violence had lessened, as if each word were a counter for its lessening force. The yellow of the walls grew more distinct, and behind Wood the knitting needles clicked on. It occurred to him that he was no longer afraid, but that he should be cautious.
Behind the wall a shallow-well pump began to clunk and hiss. A cow bawled in an outshed or barn. Then a nearer sound—the creak of a stair, and Sam Davis jumped past him into the door to the front hall, where there was violent breath and the hard sound of some thing, some animal, hurt—a short, desperate grunt. He came back pulling the big girl by the arm, and slammed her down in a kitchen chair. Her elbow hit the table like a board, and one of her legs swung away from the chair, a polka-dot pajama leg, bare foot, red toenail polish and calluses. She pulled her leg back and spread her faded blue bathrobe over her lap, then put her head on the table and hid her face in her brown hair. The back of her neck was red. She smelled of damp blankets and pillows—Wood smelled that child smell above the kitchen odors.
Sam Davis stood over her. “Listening, were you? Sneaking around listening? Well, you’re going to hear a lot, and so am I! I didn’t raise no daughter of mine for town pump!”
He turned to Wood. “How many times you had her ass?”
“Never.”
“I bet! I could git you and about ten more in this town for statuary rape, sonny! Clap your ass in jail! You know that? She ain’t at the age of consent! You know that?”
“I’ve never had sexual intercourse with your daughter,” Wood said.
The words seemed to drive Sam Davis mad. Although he didn’t come at Wood, he began to scream. “Sexual intercourse! Sexual intercourse! Sexual intercourse!” banging a chair down against the linoleum floor, picking it up like a post-hole digger and jabbing it down so hard Wood half expected it to go through linoleum, floorboards and all.
It was then Wood understood the man’s powerlessness, and decided to do something. He never knew why he chose that moment to act. In another man’s home, surrounded by that man’s people and possessions, what right had he to take on authority? Why should he get away with it? These thoughts came later, when he and Sam Davis were sitting at the table, drinking hard cider. But perhaps at this moment he did perceive the real power of the phrase “sexual intercourse”—clinical words from a vocabulary Sam Davis had always been led to fear and respect. “Statuary rape,” Sam had said, and Wood thought of Susie as the Venus de Milo, or the Winged Victory of Samothrace. She was as still as a statue all through her father’s destruction of the chair, which came apart in his hands.
What Wood did was to sit down at the table across from Susie. Sam Davis stared, pieces of the back of the chair in his hands.
“Sit down,” Wood said, and the man did sit down in the one remaining chair, his sharp elbows on the table. The sticks of chair back lay on the table between them all, next to the sugar bowl and the salt and pepper shakers, each of these in the shape of a little outhouse. On one was written, “I’m fulla S.,” and on the other, “I’m fulla P.”
In this silence Susie raised her head and looked at them both, quickly, her face swollen and frightened. Then she hid again.
“Where’s her mother?” Wood asked.
“Concord,” Sam Davis said. “She’s over to Concord.” Said this way it meant the state mental institution. “Five years she’s been over to Concord. Christ! How can a man raise a kid with no mother? I done the best I could.”
“Has Susie told you what happened?”
“I got Chief Turtle’s version. He caught the bastards at it.” Sam Davis seemed tired now and sad.
“And you didn’t want to prosecute,” Wood said.
“Bad enough already. What good’s that?”
“But you were about to shoot me, or break my neck, or something.”
Sam Davis looked at him. Now there were tears of self-pity in his eyes. “Christ, you can’t blame a man for getting upset, can you?”
“But you never got Susie’s version of what happened?”
“I couldn’t git any more upset than I am right now.” He wiped his eyes with a hand that seemed oversized on his naked arm.
“Susie,” Wood said. She didn’t move. “Susie?”
She made a raw, bawling sound into her hands, and in between hiccups and noisy breaths, tried to speak. “Mine…brash!” she said, and tried again. “Gordon nid it! Gordon!”
“That’s the son of a bitch she went out with,” Sam Davis said.
“I know,” Wood said.
“Gordon Ward,” Sam Davis said.
“Got me drunk,” Susie said. Then she cried awhile.
“So they ended up in the cemetery behind the Congregational Church,” Sam Davis said, calmly now. “Standing in line.”
“Honest to God I don’t remember!” Susie said clearly.
“Gordon would do that. I know him,” Wood said.
“I loved him.”
“So
you dropped your pants,” Sam Davis said.
Susie raised her disorganized face and shouted, “Drunk! He gave me a Coke, but it was mostly rum! I never—”
“I think that’s the truth,” Wood said.
They sat quietly, hearing only the click of the old woman’s knitting needles and an occasional sniffle from Susie.
“At least she ain’t knocked up,” Sam Davis said.
“I had my period last week.” Susie got up, her face averted, and went to the sink. She stood there, holding a wet dishcloth to her face for a minute. “They hurt me too. I was sore for a long time.”
“Maybe they ought to go to jail,” Wood said.
Sam Davis shrugged. “Oh, shit,” he said. “You want a glass of cider?” Without waiting for Wood’s answer he got a jug from beneath the sink. The dark woman, holding her blanket together with her elbows, got up and silently brought them two tumblers.
“Gordon Ward’s in the Army now, anyways,” Sam Davis said. “There ain’t nothing much to do about it.” He poured the light cider. “Listen. Why’d you come here tonight? What business is it of yours?”
“When I called I thought you were beating her up.”
“No, I never.”
“He never beat me,” Susie said. “Even when he found out, he never beat me.”
“How’d you get the nerve to come over here?”
“I wanted to do what was right,” Wood said.
Sam Davis shook his head. “Well, you’re a wonder,” he said.
They drank from the big tumblers of cider. Wood felt it immediately, and drank slowly, but Sam Davis drank his in three or four gulps.
“I got to hit the hay,” he said suddenly. “I’m glad to of met you, Wood. So I’ll say good night. There’s more cider in the jug if you want some.” He turned to go, and the woman in the gray blanket got up to follow him. Wood never did see her face clearly. At the door Sam Davis turned and said, “Say hello to your Pa for me.” Then the two of them were gone. Wood was astonished by this sudden disappearance, but Susie didn’t seem to find it strange at all.
He sat across the table from her, under the bright overhead light, and she smiled at him. Her face was still puffy from the crying, and plain without lipstick. Her eyes were a deep, dull blue. She looked as though she had been beaten up, and she looked even younger than seventeen.
“Now you know,” she said.
“You loved Gordon?”
“I used to. I don’t any more.” She looked down at the table, at her hands. “I love you.”
He was shocked by these unanswerable words.
“I loved you for a long time before I loved Gordon,” she said seriously. “The only reason I loved Gordon was I gave up on you. You never seemed to notice me. You always went out with that snooty Lois Potter. Do you love her, Wood?”
“I like Lois.”
“But you don’t love her? You don’t? Really?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and she looked worried and unhappy.
“Don’t love her, Wood! Please don’t. She’s not nice. She’s pretty, but she’s not nice. She’s very selfish, did you know that? She’s got a wonderful figure, I know. She’s not fat like me…Do you think I’m fat? I’m not, really, I’m just bigger than her. I’ve got a lot to offer, I mean. I got as good marks in school as her too.”
He didn’t say anything, and she looked at him for a long time, her face as open as the moon. This woman. This girl; he felt her wanting him, a heavy, complicated force in her, convoluted and hot—all below that white face that hid nothing. But he could not understand why this need was so intense; what did he, or any man, have that was needed so badly? Looking deep into her face, he felt that what she wanted must be more than the electric shock, quickly gone, of an orgasm, even as he had experienced them in the deep inside-out thrill of wet dreams. But what was the right thing to do for this girl?
“I love you,” she said, nervous and soft. “I’ll do anything for you. Anything. I love you so much I hurt.”
“Susie—” he said.
“I don’t care if you don’t love me. I’ll do anything you want me to.”
“I’ve got to go, Susie.” He got up and went to the door, and she followed him, now seeming shy, in her bare feet and red toenails. He opened the inner door and turned to say goodbye, but turned into her arms. She had moved so skillfully; it seemed a woman’s knowledge. She was all up against him, and kissed him on the mouth. Her breath was sweet, and she smelled like blankets and pajamas, the moist warmth of sleeping children. Her eyes were shut, and he gently disengaged himself and went away.
5
The next night at supper, just after everyone had prepared his potatoes for gravy, Horace found his plate in his lap. It was right side up, and somehow neither his potatoes nor his carrots had spilled. For a while he sat there with the warm plate in his hands. No one seemed to have noticed that the plate had disappeared from the table, and he tried to figure out how to get it back on the table without anyone noticing. He knew this was impossible.
His father was looking at him. “Horace,” he said, the white fat of his cheeks still, the dark eyes half closed, “are you going to eat out of your lap?”
Horace shook his head; his ears were hot.
“Then why don’t you—carefully, with extreme care—lift your plate out of your lap and place it on the table?”
“Horace needs glasses,” his mother said quickly. “He can’t see the blackboard unless he sits in the front row.”
Horace put his plate back on the table.
“I don’t want to watch him pour the gravy,” his father said.
“I’ve got to squint all the time,” Horace said, grateful to his mother.
“Well, did you make him an appointment?”
“Yes,” his mother said. “At the clinic in Northlee.”
“It just happened this year,” Horace said. “I can’t see the little branches on the trees any more.”
“He found an old pair of spectacles in the attic,” his mother said quickly.
“And I could see the little branches! I could see every little branch!”
In a drawer of the old highboy—the one in the attic hall that led to Kate’s tower—he’d found the leather box. Inside was a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, their lenses as small as nickels. When he looked through them it felt as though his eyes were clamped in a vise, and he looked out one of the round hall windows to see each little tree branch, each shovel cut, each evergreen needle upon the snow. The world outside cut into his brain like little needles and knives.
“Well,” his father said. “Maybe that’s the trouble-”
“Let’s eat supper,” his mother said.
Horace tried to eat, but the potatoes tasted like paper. The gravy had no taste at all, and his arms felt huge and weak. He was afraid to put his hands over the table. He was thirsty, but didn’t dare pick up his water glass. Everyone else seemed to be in a kind of shade—not of shadow, but of focus, and only he was bright and clear, with all his shameful faults exposed to them, like an animal in a cage.
They ate in silence, except for the clink of silverware on plates. Kate went to the kitchen and returned. He felt that he might fall out of his chair. Why not? He would just fall over sideways and crack his head on Wood’s chair and crumple to the floor. Let them pick him up with a shovel.
Then his father looked at Wood and mentioned her name. He hadn’t been listening until he heard her name. Susie Davis.
“What did old Sam do?”
“Nothing much,” Wood said.
“That I find hard to believe.”
“We talked it over. Susie told us what happened.”
“Susie told you and her old man exactly what happened?” Horace watched his father’s face grow long, and his mouth fall open.
“It wasn’t her fault. Gordon Ward got her drunk and she never knew what was going on.”
“Am I supposed to hear this?” Kate said.
“Oh, come off
it,” David said. “Listen to the little innocent.”
“I am innocent,” Kate said.
“As if you don’t know exactly what happened,” David said.
“Well, I’m not sure!” Kate said, getting angry.
“Shut up!” Horace’s father shouted.
“Hush, Harvey,” his mother said.
“I don’t know why he didn’t prefer charges against all of them,” Wood said.
“I’ll tell you why.” Horace recognized his father’s mean voice, the one used for conspiracies, the same voice he used when speaking about President Roosevelt, or the war. “Name off those little hotshots and you’ve named the sons of a lot of people Sam Davis owes his shirt to. Get it? Gordon’s father could foreclose on Sam’s farm tomorrow. Get it? I happen to know he’s five months late on his payments. Someday you’ll find out how the world works, sonny boy!” His father seemed triumphant, happy in this knowledge.
Wood didn’t answer for a while, though his father sat staring at him, savoring his triumph.
“You don’t have to tell me how filthy rotten the world is,” Wood finally said. “I just don’t think it’s so funny. And I don’t have to be that way myself.”
“Hah! High and mighty! Oh, boy! Wait’ll you get kissed by reality! You’ll find yourself crawling around in the filth with the rest of them!”
Horace heard his own voice shouting, “Wood is good!”
“Wood the Good!” his father said, laughing. “Wood the Good! Hah! Hah! Hah! Wood the Sanctimonious!”
Wood looked steadily across the table, and at that moment Horace dropped a piece of carrot from his fork into his water glass. How did his glass get that close to his plate? The piece of carrot sank to the bottom of the glass, and butter scummed the water. If he drank all the water maybe he could drink the piece of carrot out
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