Mudhoney
Author: Friday Locke
Date: 2013-07-18 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; General
Description: An idiot, alcoholic rapist with a sadistic sex drive, a voluptuous abused wife, a twisted hellfire preacher, a mute prostitute and her dwarf sister are just some of the lurid and grotesque characters in STREETSâ€ˆPAVEDâ€ˆWITHâ€ˆGOLD, a violent blastâ€ˆof pulp southern gothic. First published in 1958, STREETSâ€ˆPAVEDâ€ˆWITHâ€ˆGOLDâ€ˆwas filmed under the title MUDHONEY by Russ Meyer in 1965, resulting in an early classic of the â€œroughieâ€ genre.
Publisher: Elektron Ebooks

credits

MUDHONEY (STREETS PAVED WITH GOLD)

BY FRIDAY LOCKE

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-909923-17-1

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS
www.elektron-ebooks.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

PROLOGUE

“In sickness and in health, for better or for worse, to cleave, one unto the other, until death do you part”

The man was knocking softly. The woman, only half awakened, looked at the locked door.

“What you want?” she asked.

“My belly hurts. I’m sick,” he pleaded.

“You drank too much. What you want me for?”

“Open the door and get me something.”

She paused. “It’s a trick.”

“Hell, no, woman! My gut hurts, I tell you!”

She pushed back the covers and got out of bed, then took the key from her bureau drawer. She stared at it for a moment, hesitating, then unlocked the door. The man went back to his bed and sat down. She lit the small oil lamp and used its feeble glow to see his face.

“Where do you hurt?” she asked.

Wordlessly he reached out with both hands and grabbed for her buttocks.

“I thought you said you was sick.”

“I am sick,” he said. “I’m sick and you come to help me. Didn’t you come to help me, Hannah?”

“Let me go! Sidney! Please, let me go!

“Come on, now, Hannah. It ain’t that bad. You know it ain’t.” Slowly he pulled her down to the bed. She neither pleaded nor protested further. She knew it was useless. The man traced her body with his hands and said some words; her face mirrored her repulsion.

“Not that, Sidney. For God’s sake, not again!”

“Shut up, damnit!” he ordered. “You want to wake up the old man?”

“Than be quiet or I will. Maybe I will anyhow. Maybe he forgot how it’s done,” he giggled.

She struggled, but he rolled her over and slapped her sharply and she stopped, knowing it was futile. Once she had come to him willingly, even eagerly, expecting tenderness and love; from the first she had found only brutality and a wanton lust and her life with him was a continuing repetition of that degrading first night.

She tried to hide her face in her arms but he pulled them away, still giggling. “Come on, kiss me like it means something to you,” he said. “Lemme feel your tongue.”

“I hate you!” she said between clenched teeth.

“A husband’s got his rights. You don’t have to like it. Just act like you do.”

He tried to force his tongue into her mouth and she turned her face to the wall. He reached for her, his grubby fingers digging into the soft flesh of her cheeks.

“You don’t behave, I’m going to gouge your eyes out, Hannah.”

“Why don’t you? There’s worse things than being blind. I’m learning that from you right now.”

“Shut up talking,” he growled. “If you got to use your mouth... there’s other ways.”

He pushed his face at her and she could feel his saliva on her lips. His breath reeked of the cheap whiskey he drank, the same sour odor which clung to him and about his room.

She closed her eyes and prayed he would be through with her soon. How could she ever have married this man. It had been so long, so very long, since she was the young, innocent girl who had plighted her troth to him. But they were married, married before God “until death do you part.” Where was God now? Why did He make her suffer this man? Was there no hope for her? “Until death do you part” – over and over a thousand times she had repeated the vow and had allowed it to still her desire to rebel. Now, there was nothing left but the cold sorrow of submission.

She lay and prayed this would be the last time. Let him have his Maggie Marie... or any woman. Not her again. Please, God, not her again. The man held her tight for a final moment. He bit her neck in his spasm, then, done with her, he turned and rolled to the other side of the bed.

Later he looked around and watched her staring at the ceiling, her eyes moist, her cheeks streaked with team. Suddenly he began to laugh. He roared in crazy mirth a she arranged her clothing to hide her nakedness. Then, placing his foot in the small of her back, he brutally kicked her to the floor.

“Go on, you stupid bitch. Get the hell out of here. And blow out that lamp, too.”

She did his bidding, closing the door softly behind her. She took the key from her pocket and started to lock it. She stared from the key to the door, then, with a hysterical laugh she threw the key at the door and shouted. “Damn you! You hear, in there? Damn you to hell I say! You’re my husband and I say Goddamn you. You bastard!” The violence of her anger spent, she walked across her room, opened the front door and went out into the night. The rain was coming down in torrents. She held out her hands to the dark skies, and as a supplicant, she let the rain wash her face and the wind whip her body.

“Oh God, make it rain harder!” she shouted in the darkness. “Make it rain forever, make it rain like never before. Oh God, make me clean again!”

Thunder crashed through the valley and lightning running rampant from cloud to cloud, blazed the sky in streaks of fury.

She stood in the storm, ripped her bodice wide and let the cool rain spill over her shoulders, then run in rivulets between her breasts.

“Please, make me clean,” she sobbed.

Later she knelt beneath the great elm in the yard and looked for her salvation in the only way she knew. Hands folded before her, her eyes upon the stormy skies, she voiced her simple prayer.

“Our Father, Who art in Heaven ...............

CHAPTER I

He stood in the center of a road so overgrown with weeds it was hardly more than a path. On each side of him the vine covered banks rose to a height of twenty feet and behind him the village had dwindled into the distance. Looking back he could distinguish a single line of stores and the few scattered houses of the town, enclosed by trees, with the late evening sun throwing long shadows across their shingled roofs. Ahead of him the road crawled down into the valley. The man sat down beside the road to rest.

He thought of turning back to the town arid beyond. He wondered if the walk down into the valley would be worthwhile or if it would be as it had been at all the other places. If he would ask, even beg, for work and be told there was no work for him. The rest reminded him of his hunger and he decided that he would try the farm down in the valley.

He got up and began treading his way slowly down the road, walking between the deep ruts made by wagon wheels when the earth was wet and baked by the hot sun into slits in the ground that would remain until the next rain. If he only had a horse, he thought, traveling would be so much easier. The distance from farm to farm would seem so much less.

Here and there, beside the road, a new patch of early spring green was slowly pushing its way through a carpet of rotting leaves. Across the valley the sun was sinking between the two mountains, sending up rays of light like gleaming poles of gold against the dear blue of the early spring sky.

He had walked far that day and he could feel it in his limbs. His arms and legs ached and his mind was growing slowly numb from weariness. He was exhausted from the days, the weeks of walking. Walking and begging, sleeping in barns or haystacks and going for days without a decent meal. Before him the valley stretched out flat like a delta, only to rise suddenly into a surrounding range of sloping hills. The road descended out of the mountain shoulders into the last rays of sunset. Here at the foot of the trail he paused for a moment, looked back up the steep road, and then walked straight for the farm house.

He was afraid. Afraid of being turned away. The way down the rutted, winding road had been long and tiresome for his blistered feet and the blisters had become bleeding sores. He skirted a small marsh covered here and there with early spring water that flashed in the last fires of sunset. He stepped over a crumbling log that lay across the infrequently traveled road, his eyes always on the house. Its weather shingled walls were darkened by time, and the yard was worn bare by the wind and the scraping of many feet.

From the leaning mud chimney a blue wisp of smoke was drifting slowly upward as if to escape the desolation of the valley. Behind the house there was a barn, that was reinforced on one side by logs propped against its sinking wall. Nearer the house there was a woodshed, a smokehouse, and a privy.

He plodded slowly up the rise to the farmhouse. As he walked around the house to the back door a lamp came to life in the kitchen, and a dog sprang from under the porch and, at a distance, began to bark then whine.

At that moment an intense fatigue assailed him. His feet and legs ached and the small carpet bag became heavy, as if it was filled with stones. He felt as if the hands of time had been turned back, and that the barking of the dog and the shadow of the woman in the window were dim visions from his past.

The only feeling that he was conscious of was the physical discomfort of his body.

He climbed the creaking steps to the house and felt the porch floor sag beneath his weight. The door to the kitchen was flung open revealing the outline of a woman, standing tall in the lamplight.

“Evening,” she said in a low voice, as if to speak any louder against the croaking of the mating frogs was useless.

The man stopped but did not answer her immediately. He took his bandanna from his pants pocket and wiped the dust and sweat from his brow.

“Evening. Is this here the Brenshaw place?”

“This is it,” she answered, holding the door open. “Come in.” She turned and walked back into the house. The man followed, bewildered by the wholly unexpected, unquestioning invitation.

A wood stove sat just inside the door where nearby t shelves had been constructed for utensils. Across the room was the kitchen table, several chairs and a cot. An oil lamp stood in the center of the table, where an old man sat wearing only his long-johns and pants. He stopped eating and took his elbows off the table long enough to survey the newcomer with the piercing gaze of the very old. His face was tanned and wrinkled beneath his full head of white hair. He looked the stranger up and down, smiled briefly in greeting and took another bite of cornbread.

“Have you ate yet?” the woman asked, staring at him.

“I ain’t hungry,” he lied, glancing about the room.

The woman, without insisting that he eat, asked him to sit by the stove and returned to her dinner. She wore a faded cotton dress that hugged her body tightly. The front was splattered with grease and the sleeves were rolled up revealing lean, strong arms. Her hair was pulled back into a knot at the nape of her neck and tied with a dirty, stringy ribbon. Her face was white and drawn in the flickering lamplight. She had one of those set, determined faces that are beautiful in a hauntingly proud way.

As her cold blue eyes stared at the stranger, evaluating him, he could see that she had spent too many years on the barren farm. She was young but her beauty had been allowed to fade. He wondered why a woman so young, with features so perfect, would be so careless about her appearance. Her hair, long and curly, had not been combed and there was a black smudge across her forehead. As she stared at him he could see that she had spent too many years on the barren farm. Her eyes had taken on its bare, desolate look.

He had not stated his business nor had he been asked to. In this part of the world a gabby stranger was not too highly regarded. He removed his dusty hat and placed it on his bag beside the bench. He rolled a cigarette and sat smoking, waiting until the end of the meal. He felt the hunger pains in his stomach and tried not to look at the food.

The old man finished his meal and the woman cleared the table. He noticed that her heavy shoes were caked with red clay and dried cow dung. Her slim white ankles were scratched and the hem of her skirt was black with soil.

“Where is it you come from, stranger?” the old man asked.

He was breathing hard, gasping with each breath and the veins stood out in his temples like welts. The young man knew he had asthma. The only road to the farm was the one from the village and it was seldom that anyone, least of all a stranger, bothered to come to the farm, but the woman knew why he had come. She had expected him, or someone.

Both of them stared directly at him and waited for an answer.

He spoke slowly, evading the old man’s question and without looking at either of them.

“I come for the farmhand job,” he said.

“What farmhand job?” the old man asked, staring at the woman.

“I don’t know what job. I was asking for a job in town and some fella told me to come out here – that you was looking for somebody to help with your crop this year.”

“Who was it told you that? I don’t know nothing about it. We need somebody, I guess, but needing them and getting them are two different things. We ain’t got the means to hire nobody,” the old man said.

“I know who told him,” the woman said. “Last week when I was in town I told them if anybody come by looking for a job to send them out here.”

“They told me to see you,” the man said. “Them in the village that told me about it. I just thought I would come and ask about it.”

The old man stared at the woman for a minute. “I hope you know what you’re doing. God knows we need somebody, but you know what he’s going to say about it.”

“I know what he’ll say,” the woman said. “If he ain’t going to help work the land hisself, then I got to get somebody else to take his place with you in the field. There’s too much land to work here for the both of us. Anyway, what he’s got to say, he’ll say to me.”

“He’ll say plenty to him too,” the old man said, nodding toward the newcomer. “I don’t want to tell you no right off, young man, but things ain’t what they ought to be around here. You got to know that the first thing.” The woman didn’t comment. She was still staring at the stranger.

“Where is it you come from?” she asked.

“St. Louis,” he said.

“A city fellow way out here!” The old man looked at the woman. “You’re asking for trouble if you let him stay on, you know that. You best send him packing on his way before Sidney even hears us talking. I wish you’d do that. I got my own peace of mind to think of.”

He stopped and stared at the stranger. “Don’t think I got nothing against you personally, son, but it would be best all around if you didn’t stay here.”

He got up. “Best you mind what I tell you,” he said to the woman and walked out of the room toward the front of the house.

The stranger arose from the bench, dreading the thought of going out into the chilling evening and walking back over the mountain. He wondered if he would find a barn to sleep in.

He picked up his bag and started toward the door but the woman held up her hand to stop his departure. She nodded to the chair at the table that the old man had just vacated. Her prodding blue eyes remained unchanged as she said briefly.

“Put down your bag and set over there.”

He left his hat and bag on the floor and sat down in the chair.

“Ma’am, I don’t want to be causing any trouble like he said I might. I just don’t want any part of any trouble.”

“So you’re from St. Louis?” she asked, looking at him coldly. “That’s a long ways off,” she added as if to herself. “What kind of work did you do, back there in St. Louis?” She asked him questions, not in the inquisitive manner of most women but in pursuit of information. After the man had answered the questions to her satisfaction, she continued.

“It don’t make much difference what you done for a living before. One thing’s for sure, you never done no farming in St. Louis. Leastways, not the kind that’s done hereabouts.” Again the stranger wondered if she was talking to him or to herself. She placed a plate on the table before him and filled it with the remains of supper.

“It ain't much but it'll fill you up,” she said. Then she began to wash the dishes in the pan of water she had heated on the wood stove.

Outside a few stars had appeared in the early darkness. The moon was shining and the mountain crest was sharply defined against the sky beyond the marsh and the barren fields. The woman washed her dishes in silence, dried them with a coarse flour sack, and wiped the oilcloth cover on the table. She filled a bowl with cornbread scraps, covered them with skimmed milk and placed it outside the door for the hound. With the work completed, she stared out the window.

The stranger wondered if she was looking for someone.

Then, without speaking, she took off her apron and sat down across from him, clasping her hands in front of her body.

“We need a man here,” she said, “One who can do any kind of work that needs doing. You ain't never done no farm work, I guess, but that don't make no difference.” She paused, looked directly at him and went on.

“There's just the three of us here,” she said, nodding toward the hallway. “He's my uncle. He works when he's able to but he's got the asthma and it's so bad most of the time he can't work. And my husband...!”

She stopped as if pondering the word husband and looked at her feet. She unclasped her hands and placed them on the table. The man looked at them. She wore no jewelry, no wedding ring. She went on as if she had previously practiced the words.

“He works, too, when he can. He's sick, too. He never done no farming before we come here.”

She stopped suddenly, as if speaking to strangers was an unaccustomed experience.

“We need somebody but we can't pay much.” She spurted the words out as if she was ashamed to say them. Again she paused and stared out the window into the night. After a moment her gaze returned to him.

“We can't keep you on after the harvest.”

The stranger nodded in agreement, and again the woman looked away from him.

“We can't pay much just ten dollars a month and your board.”

He interrupted quickly, with the fast wits of the desperate.

“I'll take the job. I can stay the summer and after the harvest I can move on.”

She looked at him and her face relaxed, softening the harsh lines around her mouth. He raised his eyes and looked into those of the woman. At once the look of gentleness disappeared. A defensive, wary gleam replaced it and her face became hard again.

“I don't care what you done before you come here. There ain't nothing but work here. If you're a thief there ain't nothing you could take here that would be worth your trouble. I don't know why you want this job and I don't want to know. The town people don't have no use for us and we don't go there much. Whoever told you about the job must have told you that. Anyway, that's how we stand.” She paused, almost shameful. “I ain't much of a cook and there ain't much of last year's canning left. Just enough to get us through to gardening time, so don’t expect too much. You can sleep on the cot here in the kitchen and when it’s warmer you move out on the back porch or to the hayloft. There it is – if you still want the job, you got it.”

“If you’re wondering,” he said. “I ain’t running away from the law. I need the job because...”

The woman stood up quickly. “I don’t want to hear why you want the job. I got troubles of my own without hearing about yours. If you’re willing to work here you must have them.

You know where the bed is if you’re sleepy. Come daylight I’ll show you what there is of the place.” The last words were spoken with dread, as if the thought of another daybreak was useless, as if days and nights had become intermingled and they no longer existed. She turned and left the room.

When she returned he was sitting on the cot. She lay a patchwork quilt beside him.

“If there’s anything else you need you’d better tell me. I’m going to bed.”

He stood up slowly, and for the first time he realized that he was only a few inches taller than she. Her cold blue eyes met his and for a moment they stood staring at each other. He held out his hand and the spell was broken.

“My name is Calif. I guess we shake hands on the deal then.” She stood rigid, unmoving. He dropped his hand to his side and avoiding her eyes, added quickly, “I guess it maybe ain’t proper for the lady of the house to shake hands with the new hand.”

She slowly extended her hand. He grasped it and dropped it quickly. The small, unfamiliar hand felt hot and strange in his work-hardened palm. As she bid him goodnight and left the room, he raised his hand and looked at it. He could still feel her touch. He remembered how long it had been since he had touched a woman.

Slowly he sank down on the bed. He took off his worn, dust-coated boots, hung up his damp stockings on them and sat staring at his blistered feet. They were red and sore from the days of walking and again he became aware of his aching body. He removed his jacket and shirt, looked around the room, walked to the table and blew out the lamp. His eyes gradually became accustomed to the darkness of the night, until the table and stove loomed out of the blackness in undefined shapes. Without undressing further, he lay down, drew the quilt over his body and stretched out. Outside the croaking of the frogs grew louder. The first sign of spring, he thought, as he sunk into the deep, dark sleep of the weary.

The frogs croaked and mated. Spring had come to the valley and with it came a stranger.

CHAPTER II

The man awoke with a start as the first morning light began to creep into the kitchen window. He looked around him, bewildered at his surroundings and then he remembered the farm house and the strange woman. He arose and dressed quickly.

Noiselessly he opened the kitchen door and, taking his razor with him, walked out onto the rear porch. A wash basin and an oaken water bucket sat on a small table against the wall.

He emptied the pan of its foul water from the previous night, refilled it and began to shave, squinting into the dirty, cracked mirror. Around him everything shone in the clear light of dawn. Long reaching shadows withdrew from the fields and dew covered branches glistened in the naked spring morning.

The neglected fields appeared even more desolate in the beautiful sunrise.

As he shaved he thought of the woman’s husband whom he had not seen. He wondered where he was. She had said that he was ill. He wondered if he was crazy. He had gathered so last night when she had not mentioned the nature of his illness. There was something strange about the man. He had sensed it yesterday, when they told him in town about the job, and again last night when she talked about him.

He could hear voices in the front of the house, the woman’s and that of a man. The man sounded angry. Calif tried to hear the words but he couldn’t make them out. He wondered if the woman was arguing with her husband about him. In a few minutes a man came around the house. He knew it was the man who had been arguing, her husband. He stopped at the edge of the porch and glared at Calif.

“Hello,” Calif said. The man said nothing. He was short, plump, with a thick head of black hair that had not been combed. He stood scowling at Calif and Calif stared back at him. He had seen faces like this before; the white puffy skin, small deep-set eyes, and the sulking bitter mouth. His short white hands were not calloused and Calif knew that he did no work at all. He stared into the suspicious eyes that kept darting away. He held his razor in his hand, waiting for him to speak.

“What’s your name?” the man asked.

“Calif.”

“What kind of name is that? It don’t make sense like no real name.”

“It stands for California. That’s my real name.”

“That’s a place. It ain’t no real name,” the man said snickering.

“Well, it’s my real name sure enough.”

The man continued to stare at him for some time before he spoke again.

“You’d better get off my porch,” he threatened. “You just better get off my porch and off my land.”

“The woman,” Calif said, “she hired me. I’m the new hand.”

“I know what she done. You don't have to tell me. What she does don't count with me though she ain't nothing but my wife. I say you get your ass off my land. Get on out of here!” He raised his hand threateningly.

Calif didn't move. He continued to stare at the man.

“Don't you need a hand?” he asked.

Jobs were hard, very hard to find, for strangers.

“We don't need nobody. When we do it'll be me to say we do and it'll be me to hire them. What makes you think you can just move in here like this anyhow?”

“I didn't just move in. I come here about a job and I was hired. I wish you folks would make up your minds.”

“I got my mind made up. My mind wants you to get your ass on out of here. Man, get off my back porch!”

“He don't have to,” the woman said. She was standing just inside the screen door. The men turned and looked at her.

“I hired him. You ain't got nothing to say about it,” she said to her husband.

“I want to know what you did it for?” her husband asked.

“Just what for? What I want to know is who you think the boss around here is anyhow?”

“I know who it is,” the woman answered. Her voice was calm.

“Where you from anyhow, boy?” the man asked Calif.

“St. Louis.”

“St. Louis. You hear him say St. Louis, Hannah?” he asked his wife. “Since when is a city fella fit to work on a farm? You just pick up whatever you brought and get your ass on out of here 'cause we ain't hiring nobody, especially you! You hear…”

“Shut up!” The woman cut him off in a clear low voice that filled the air with her loathing.

The man looked at her, the words choked in his throat. He began to sputter and the blood rushed to his face. He looked at both of them with a hatred so profound, so bitter, that Calif knew this man hated everyone and everything. He walked over to the dog, sleeping near the steps, kicked it hard in the ribs and followed it up the road – the dog yelping, the man cursing.

The woman stared alter him. She still wore the same soiled dress and mud covered boots. Her hair had not been combed and another sleepless night had left its mark on her face.

Night upon sleepless night filled with fear and anxiety and days filled with toil and hatred had become an integral part of her and she had resigned herself to it. Now she purposely made herself repulsive by neglecting her bath, by sleeping in her clothing and sometimes going to bed with her feet and legs spattered with dung therefore choosing the lesser of two evils.

Calif followed her into the kitchen. The woman noticed that sleep and the early morning air had erased the fatigue from his face. She saw the grey pallor of his freshly shaven face, his sunken cheeks. His arms were long, lithe and sinewy, his back straight, his hips narrow. He was very thin, too thin, she thought.

He sat down at the table and she placed his breakfast before him.

“I'm sorry if I'm causing you trouble,” he said.

“You ain't. You ain't causing no trouble that weren't here before you come. If it weren't you it would be something else.”

“I mean if I’m going to cause trouble, I can move on. I just don’t want to start nothing.”

“You ain’t, I said.” Then she stopped and looked at him. “But if you’re afraid of something it’s best you do move on.”

She's daring me, he thought. “I ain’t afraid,” he said.

“I didn’t think so,” she said without emotion.

She picked up a milk pail and walked to the door.

“When you finish come on out to the barn.” Calif ate his breakfast staring at the walls of the kitchen. They had never been painted and were black with smoke and dirt.

There were large cracks between the planks of the clean-scrubbed floor. He finished the biscuit that tasted of soda, drank the weak coffee and followed the woman to the barn.

She was sitting in the breezeway waiting for him. She arose when he approached, the empty milk pail in her hand.

“The cows have to be milked,” she said, “but I take care of them.”

“I can milk,” he said. “I learned how once.”

“I do it. I’ve always milked them and they won’t let nobody else come near them. You can take care of the rest of the livestock – what there is of it. All we got’s two mules. Uncle Lute takes care of the chickens and I feed the pigs. All you have to bother with is the mules.”

All the time she talked her eyes were on Calif, as if she was thinking of something else. He wondered about her moods.

The night before she had seemed detached, almost hostile. This morning she was cordial. Her steady gaze made him nervous. He wanted to ask her about her husband, to find out exactly what his illness was. He gathered it was more than the ill temper he had displayed earlier. He returned her gaze and she looked away, to the barn-loft. “There ain’t no hay,” she said. “I see. Didn’t you raise any?” “We raised some but it’s all gone now. We sold some of it, what me and Uncle Lute figured the stock didn’t need, for cash money.” She became bitter again, her mouth hard. “‘Money’s hard to come by around here and what there is has to be held on to.” Calif walked to the stall and looked at the mules. They were thin and looked old. He wondered if the two of them together could pull a plow through new ground. She walked to the stall and stood beside him. “We had another,” the woman said, “but my husband sold her last fall. Now there ain’t enough money to buy one.” Calif stuck his hand through the slats and poked one of the mules in his protruding ribs. He didn’t move. Calif wondered if he was too old, too tired or just too hungry to move. “We’ll have to get by with just them two somehow,” she said as if reading his thoughts. “I best get to my milking,” she added and left him alone.

He walked out behind the barn. Near the gate to the cow pasture he sat down on a felled log. A clean fresh smell was pushing its way up from the soil. From time A immortal the beauty of an early spring morning has drawn men to the earth. This morning Calif could feel the tug at his innards. He reached down and picked up a handful of soil and sifted it slowly through his fingers. Below he could see the fields. Clumps of sweetgum and persimmon sprouts grew between the neglected rows.

Higher, on the slopes of the mountains, there were tall pines and oaks. He could imagine how, in the summer evenings, the foxes would bark and the whippoorwill would cry its melancholy songs as they rushed about in the undergrowth.

Lute, the old man, came out of the house. Calif watched him as he walked through the barn. He looked as if he belonged to the farm, as if he and the farm had grown old together. He envied him. He had always dreamed of a farm, such as this.

The serenity and peace made him feel good inside. Then he remembered the husband and wondered again if this was the place he had dreamed of, if he could find peace here. He doubted it. He decided he would stay that day, work for his meals and board, and move on the next morning. He couldn’t afford trouble, there had already been too much. He was running away from the memory of old trouble. He didn’t dare ask for more.

The old man walked up to him carrying two axes. “We got to cut out the sprouts in the field,” he said and kept walking.

Calif followed him. The old man walked slowly. He was too old to be working in the field. He should spend his days sitting on the porch taking it easy. Calif wondered if he had walked down the lane when he was young.

In the field they began working at once, wordlessly. Calif worked like a man possessed, a man who knows and thinks of nothing but work. He was conscious only of the axe in his hand and the work that had to be done. The work, the first real work he had done in weeks, was like a fast-acting medicine. As he cleared the field of saplings, he cleared his mind of worry.

When the sun had climbed directly overhead the woman brought lunch and with it a pail of water. She placed it at one end of the field and returned to the house.

They cut the saplings and burned them in piles, hooted at the rabbits that ran from beneath their axes and killed a rattlesnake that had crawled down from the slopes. Calif knew the old man was watching, studying him. He wasn’t hostile. At times he was almost friendly. There was a twinkle in his eye, now and then, that denied his air of detachment.

They still had barely spoken. Calif tried to talk to him at first but the old one had answered his questions about farming and offered nothing more. It was in the middle of the afternoon and they were working near the creek that ran through the field. The old man stepped near the edge of the water and would have tumbled into the deep, dark pool if Calif had not grabbed him.

“I thank you, Calif,” he said. “The creek banks are soft this time of year.”

Then they sat down and rested. Calif decided to try to get the old man to talk.

“Are there fish in those pools,” he asked

“Plenty of them if you know how to catch them.”

“You’ve been watching me pretty close, ain’t you?” he asked.

“I been watching you. I wanted to see what kind of man you was before I made up my mind about you.”

“Did you make it up yet?” Calif asked, a little amused at his wariness.

“I made it up some time ago,” he said, “even before you kept me from falling in the crick.”

“Well, what did you decide?”

“‘Fore I tell you, I want to ask you something.”

“What?”

“I don’t want you go taking offense at me asking it and if you ain’t going to tell me the truth don’t tell me nothing. If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s a liar.”

“What is it?” Calif asked.

“What was you in prison for?”

The question caught Calif completely by surprise. “What makes you think I was in prison?” he asked.

“What makes a dog put its tail between its legs? Mind you, I ain’t calling you no dog but you got your tail between your legs. I seen it the minute you walked in that kitchen last night. You been in prison.”

“There must be something more than that to make you know.”

“I was in prison myself once. A Yankee prison in Ohio in sixty-five. A man gets a color about him in prison that he can’t get no place else. And he gets a look in his eyes. That look will stay there for a long time.”

“I was in prison,” Calif said.

“I know that. I asked you what for?”

“For robbery.”

“Did you do it?”

“In a way I did. Somebody else done the robbing but I took the money. They dropped it getting away and I come along and picked it up. I guess I figgered I needed it worse than the bank did. Anyway, I kept it. They said it was the same as if I had done the robbing.”

“How old was you?”

“Sixteen. They give me eight years.”

“That makes you about twenty-four now. You look older but a prison does that to a man. You missed the good years.”

“What makes you say that?” Calif asked.

“If you have to ask, then you missed them. Them’s the years when a man finds out about life. Them’s when he finds women.”

Calif felt his face burn. The old man was right. He had never found a woman, any woman. He wondered if he had seen him looking at his niece before when she was walking up the lane.

He hoped not. He had decided to stay on the farm if he could.

Later, at dusk, he followed the old man back up the lane. A blue wisp of smoke rising from the kitchen stove flue reminded him of his hunger. As he watched, the woman came out of the house and walked to the barn. Her gait was slow and unenthusiastic. Another trip to the barn in a life filled only with trips to the barn mattered little. She walked as if there were a set number of steps allotted to one lifetime and she intended to use her allotment with as little effort as possible.

He wondered for the second time that day how the farm had sunk into such desolation. He felt it needed help – his help.

But he couldn’t help the farm. A man can‘t help a thing. He has to help people. He wondered whom he could help.

Himself? The lonely bitter woman with the unsmiling face who had shut herself away from reality? The husband? He was sure that he would soon hate the husband whom he disliked already. Lute? The old man didn’t need help. He had spent a lifetime without help from outsiders and would refuse it now. But there was something, an air, maybe, about these people that cried out for help.

He and Lute walked into the kitchen which smelled of meat frying.

“Did you kill a chicken?” Lute asked.

“I shot a rabbit,” she said. “Didn’t you hear the shot?”

“You mean that was you?” Calif asked. “You shot a rabbit yourself?” He looked at her in wonder.

“You have got a lot to learn about women,” Lute said and sat down at the table.

The three of them ate in silence. The other man – Calif did not like to think of him as her husband – did not come to the table, but he could hear him moving around in front of the house.

“Is he drinking?” Lute asked, nodding toward the front of the house.

“He come home middle of the afternoon with a bottle. I just don’t know where he gets the money. I know he ain’t buying it on credit.”

“That’s the truth if it was ever spoke,” Lute answered. “His credit ain’t worth a damn.”

The woman looked at the door that led to the front of the house. She pushed a strand of hair back from her face. Calif felt embarrassed. The worried look on her face was too personal for the eyes of a stranger.

After supper Lute went to bed and Calif walked outside. As he sat smoking, he watched the last light of dusk slowly fade away and the first stars of evening appear. There were so many things about these people that caused anxiety in his mind. There was still the husband. Drink couldn’t be the answer, not all of it anyway.

The woman had left the kitchen and again he heard angry voices in the front part of the house. Then he heard the front door slam and, as he peered through the darkness, saw the man walking down the dusty road, toward the village. He returned to the kitchen. The woman had made up his bed.

Besides the quilt, he had been given a pillow and coarse, feed-sack sheets. Sheets were a luxury. His dirty shirt and the stockings he had left beneath the cot that morning had been washed and were folded on a stool nearby. He wondered if this was why she and the man had been fighting. Because she had washed his clothes? He was sure he had caused the fight.

However, he thought no more about it and soon sank into a deep, undisturbed sleep. The little kitchen was home to him now and it was good to stretch out in peace on the narrow cot and dream of good days that were sure to come and forget bad ones of the past.

The next morning he and the old man harnessed the two old mules to the rusty plow and began breaking the field they had cleared the day before. After the warming spring sun had climbed halfway into the sky Calif took off his shoes and felt the damp warmness of the freshly plowed earth on his feet.

It was a good feeling for he had now really started the first work of planting. The sap that was running in the trees at the edge of the field seemed to run in his veins also, and he could feel the exhilaration and glory that was spring.

The next few weeks slipped by quickly. Work completely occupied the long hours between sunrise and sunset. The sagging fences were mended and Calif and the old man finished clearing the fields of bush and broke the land for the crops. This task was slow and tedious with only the rusted plows and the tired old mules with which to work. The woman went to the village and bought seed for the crops.

They worked in the fields from dawn to dusk, and under the blue arch of the sky Calif lost count of time; slowly the days before he had come to the farm slipped from his memory. The streets and buildings of towns were far away and so were people and laughter. Here in the valley, blanketed with tender young grass and newly sprouted flowers, the sour smell of stale rooms filled with sweaty men were soon forgotten and replaced with cleanliness, the peace that he had dreamed of the eight years in prison. Only the memories of pleasant days gone by were retained. The windswept fields and towering hills drew even nearer to him as he roamed the fields and watched the budding countryside.

He and the old man were drawn closer together in the days that followed. They saw little of the woman. She had breakfast waiting for them in the morning before she left to do her milking. She brought their lunch to the field and left it as she had done the first day. It was only at suppertime that she sat down with them and then her eyes avoided Calif's.

Calif seldom saw Sidney, the husband, as he never ate with them. He had learned that Lute hated the man and he felt that he would too. He had not spoken to him since that first day.

The man merely stared at him the few times they were together.

One night Calif awoke with a start. The woman was calling him from the front of the house. He rushed through the inner door, down a narrow, dark hall and entered what had once been the parlor. A few pieces of old furniture had been pushed to one end of the room. At the other end there was a bed and a dresser near the fireplace.

“Help me,” she said. “In here.”

She stood in the doorway of a room next to the parlor. It's only furnishings were a narrow bed and a keyhole desk and on the floor, a hooked rug. Sidney lay on the rug. “Help me get him on the bed,” she said as she began to tug at him.

“What's the matter with him?” Calif asked.

“He's drunk. Drunk and having a fit.”

“A fit?” Calif asked. He stood staring at Sidney.

“Don't just stand there! Help me.”

“Oh.” He grabbed Sidney by the shoulders and they lifted him onto the bed.

“You mean–”

“Yes,” she said. “He has fits. Some kind of fits that come and go where he sees all kinds of things in his mind.” The man was quite heavy and Calif knew why she had needed his help. They left the room and she locked the door from the parlor side. Calif looked at her. He wanted to ask more about the fits but she was crying. A lump came to his throat. He had not seen a woman cry since before he had been sent to prison. He looked at his hands, as if wondering what to do with them. “Goodnight,” he said. He returned to his cot in the kitchen. Sleep was a long time coming.

CHAPTER III

The next morning he ate breakfast alone and went to the barn.

The woman was already there, straining the milk. He watched her for a moment, wondering if he could ask about the fits.

He wondered if the man was dangerous, if he would harm her. Her eyes were circled and red. He decided that it wasn’t any of his business.

“Uncle Lute ain’t feeling too good this morning,” she said.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“I don’t know. Just the heat, I reckon.”

“He ain’t bad of then?”

“Nothing that rest won’t take care of. He’s too old to be working out in the hot sun every day anyhow.”

“I know. I really don’t need him to help in the field. I’m not saying he don’t do his work ‘cause he does but he’s too old to be working so hard. Best you keep him in bed if he’ll stay there.”

“I’ll try but I doubt if it’ll do much good. Calif–” she began.

“What?”

“I – I thank you for the way you see after Uncle Lute.” she said.

“He’s my friend,” Calif said, embarrassed.

“I know. But I thank you anyhow.”

Later, in the field, Calif heard a shout behind him. He turned and saw Sidney walking rapidly down the furrow. He wondered if the old man had taken a spell for the worse. He stopped the mules.

The man came to the center of the field where Calif was plowing. Beads of sweat had popped out on his forehead from the unaccustomed exercise. He sat down and rolled a cigarette. Stuffing the tobacco pouch back into his pocket he looked at Calif.

“I been aiming to talk to you about the planting,” the man said. “We’ve needed help for a long time and I’ve decided that you’re just the man for the job. Now look here, Calif – that’s a funny name for a man – up there by the house where them two apple trees are I’m gonna plant about fifty more. And next to that I’ll plant cotton. There ain’t no use planting corn and hay in these fields. Old Lute’s been doing that for fifty years and he ain’t never made no money. Besides, I’ve decided that I’m going to run things around here the way they ought to be run. Someday I’m gonna buy me some cows the way they do over in Texas and–”

Calif listened to the man’s prattle in surprised silence. He played with the plow lines in his hand and stared at the ground. He had never had dealings with a man of this sort and he didn’t know quite how to act or what to say to him.

Last night he had been in the midst of a fit and today he came to the field for the first time in the weeks that Calif had lived there and suddenly began telling him what to plant and where. He studied him as he talked. Sidney was an ugly, repulsive man. His jaws were slack and loose as he spoke and his head bobbed from side to side beneath his filthy, grease-stained hat. He was fat and his muscles were flabby from lack of use. He is no damn good, Calif thought, almost said aloud. He was only hail listening to the man’s chatter, wishing he would leave so he could get back to work.

“Now that I think of it, I think we’ll plant cotton in this here field.”

“I’m already planting corn here,” Calif said quietly. The man stood with his mouth open as if his face was frozen.

“Who in the hell told you to do that?” he asked finally.

“Lute.”

“Lute, hell! What’s he got to say? Man, you’d better learn who to take orders from if you want to stay around here!” He got to his feet. “Man, the first thing you ought to learn is who to take orders from!”

“I have,” Calif said.

“Goddamn you!” He drew back his arm as if to strike Calif.

Calif let go of the plow stock, waiting. But Sidney changed his mind and dropped his hands to his side. ‘I’ll see to it you do what I tell you to do or else you pack up your satchel and get your ass off my place,” he said, backing away. He turned quickly and walked to the edge of the field, then stopped and shouted back: “If I was a well man I would stomp your ass right now!” He walked a few steps farther and turned again.

“You hear me?” he shouted. “You hear? I'll stomp your ass, that’s what I’ll do if you don’t watch your mouth. First thing you got to learn is how to talk to me!”

Calif watched him walk up the lane to the barn. He wondered if he had been waiting all these weeks, since that first day on the porch, to catch him alone. He was smiling as he returned to his work but he was worried. The man was dangerous.

At noon when Hannah brought his lunch to the field, Calif halted the mules and walked over to her. She sat down and handed him the lunch.

“Your husband was down here,” he said.

“I know. He told me. He told me to get rid of you.”

“Are you going to?”

“I should,” she said after a few minutes. “I should, but Uncle Lute won’t let me even if–” She paused and stared at him.

“We need you, you know that.”

“Your husband–” Calif didn’t know quite how to say it.

“Well, he’s got a lot of crazy ideas, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

She stared across the field into the bright sun. The subject of her husband was difficult and painful to her. She had avoided talking to Calif about him, hoping that things would work out without the need of explanations. She knew that old Lute would never speak to Calif about her husband, at least not the relationship between her and her husband. She brushed her skirt out on the grass and looked at him, clenching her fists tightly. Her hair was loose, hanging to her shoulders. Her face was already tanned from the sun.

“My husband–” she paused and started again. “–he don’t have nothing to say about what goes on around here. It’s best you know it before there’s trouble. This place is just as much yours as his. Maybe more. So don’t pay no mind to none of his orders – ever. Uncle Lute thinks more of you than he does him, and he knows it.”

It was hard for her to talk about her husband to Calif. Though she didn’t love him, there was still a sense of loyalty, a kinship to the man she had married. She had become fond of Calif – she felt guilty because of that fondness. She was afraid of her feelings toward him, that was why she had purposely avoided him as much as possible the past few weeks. She felt ashamed as she spoke.

“My husband says things about things he don’t know nothing about. If he tries to tell you what to do, don’t pay him no mind. His orders mean nothing – nothing to nobody.” She stood up.

“I got to go now,” she said and was gone.

Later that day the old man came to the field. Calif was relieved to see that he was feeling better. He sat in the shade beside him, waiting for an opportunity to ask about the woman.

“Hannah – your niece, did she grow up here?” he asked when the old man had quit dismissing his ills as a little cold.

Lute didn’t answer immediately. A frown crossed his face, then he began, slowly measuring each word carefully and thoughtfully.

“No. No, she didn’t. When my pa and ma died, Amos, my brother, who was Hannah’s pa, he moved to town. He never took much to farming. He give me the farm and he took what money there was and moved to town.”

“What did he do there?” Calif asked, prodding him on.

“He opened up a blacksmith shop and done right well at it, too. He married a pretty girl from town, her name was Hannah, too. This one up at the house, when she come along was called Little Hannah, only God knows she didn’t look the first bit like her ma. More like her grandma. She’s got the same stubborn ways about her, too.” He paused for a moment and then went on.

“Anyhow, my brother and his wife done so well they sent their oldest daughter off to college in Louisiana to be a school teacher. She married some fellow down there and ain’t never come back except for her folks’ burying.” Again he paused and nodded toward the house.

“They planned on sending her, too, but she upped and married Sidney before she was old enough to be out after dark. Then the yellow-dog fever come. It got them both, my brother and his wife. Got my wife and sons, too.” The old man slipped into a silent, melancholy mood. He sat staring sadly at the ground. Calif waited, knowing he would go on.

“Sidney’s folks were a bunch of trash who got rich off the war. Ran the land office, they did. Cheated folks out of their land when they didn’t have money and sold it back double the price later on. They say blood’s thicker than water. His pa got drunk, too – and went into fits just like him. The reform cleaned up the town and run him out of business about the time the fever got his ma.” The old man paused and leaned close to Calif.

“It’s been said that his pa buried his ma in her work dress and chopped her wedding ring off her finger with an axe. She had gotten so fat he had to hack it off. Let her lay in the house for a week before he buried her. The rats ate off her ears and nose. Folks were dying right and left and the law was too busy with robbing and other matters to bother him and others were too busy burying their own dead to see that she got buried.”

“Anyways,” he went on, “it’s been said that he hacked the wedding ring right off her hand and gave it to a gal what worked in the saloon.” He paused again.

“Anyway, the two of them lighted out right after that. He upped and died in Springfield or some such place and the gal took his money and lit out for brighter lights. Don’t guess she’s been heard from since.”

They sat in silence for awhile. The old man was winded after his talk. He sat at the edge of the field and watched Calif work that day and in the days that followed. Sometime later Calif realized that he had not told him anything about Hannah.

CHAPTER IV

Spring aged into summer over the sultry countryside. Newly planted seeds burst into green plants. The soggy barnyard baked into a hard shell and the livestock grew fat on the tender young grass. Weeds sprang up overnight in the farmyard.

The small kitchen, with its one tiny window, was unbearably hot at night, so Calif moved his cot to the back porch. Here he went to sleep watching the stars and evening shadows; listening to the chirping of the crickets. He dreamed of the land beyond the mountains, and a place of his own. They were good, pleasant dreams.

The old man was becoming weaker each day. He never complained about his illness but the slightest exertion winded him. Both Calif and the woman knew that the old man’s body was tired and weak. They begged him to see the doctor in the village, but to no avail. With angry surprise he found that his legs, those loyal servants that had carried him over the farm thousands of times, tired in the few spaces between the house and the barn. He could not work in the fields without continually stopping to rest and he was angry only because he could not help Calif with the work; only because he felt that he was not doing his share.

These days he sat at the edge of the field and fingered a blade of grass, touched the wild flowers, or gazed intently at the trees. He watched Calif work in the rows and whenever he came near they would exchange a few idle words. With Calif he felt a new comfort; his body was borrowing the sap and strength of the younger man. He sometimes felt that one of his sons were alive and near him and the lonely companionless years were forgotten in the comfort of his new friend.

As the heat of the day drew near he would return to the house and sit on the back porch steps until late evening, watching the summer sky and the brilliant sunsets, cursing the chickens that milled around the farmyard as he filed a hoeblade or whittled on an ever-present stick of pine. His faded but keen old eyes were steadfastly watching the fields for a glance of Calif through the trees. In Calif he felt the kinship that he had never found in the woman’s husband. Calif was in the prime of his life, with the flowing strength that only hard work and sweat can bring. He was lean and powerful, broad shouldered and narrow waisted. Hard muscles fought to be free of the faded blue shirt. Watching him, the old man regained vitality; the burden of age was temporarily lifted from his shoulders.

He slowly regained his breath as if he had borrowed it from the younger man.

From Calif the old man had borrowed an Indian summer. He had lived a full and earnest life on his farm and was ready to meet death. He felt no desire to live longer; his time had been spent. He wanted only to see the summer through and another harvest. He felt that then he would leave his farm prepared.

Here, where he had spent all of his life, where he had brought his woman and lain beside her. Now his chilling hotly could still feel the warmth she had given him in those nights long past. His cracked old lips could feel her warm kisses. Soon he would join her and the thought of death was sweet to him; the earth would reclaim him, and the earth was dear, too.

Memories came to him in a tranquil stream as he wandered about the old farm. Death would come, but now was a time to prepare, to gain new strength, for the harvest was many months away. There was much to be done and many steps to be taken; fields to be plowed, crops to be weeded, nursed and harvested, then he would be ready.

He often talked to Calif about the farm, how his father had homesteaded it, built the first house where the road curved to go up the mountain and, later, the present house. He lived happily with his memories of the past.

One day it was unusually hot and the old man had stayed in the house. Calif was in the barn repairing a broken plow stock. He saw Sidney come out of the back door and walk toward the barn. He had not talked to him since that day in the field, in fact, rarely saw him at all for he was gone for days at a time. He crawled through the barn gate, stepped in a pile of fresh cow dung and walked to where Calif was sitting. Calif, continued his work, pretending not to see him for several minutes.

Sidney sat down and pulled a bottle from his shirt.

“You want a drink, Calif?” he asked.

“I don’t drink.”

“Oh.” For a moment he sat silent, then he tried a new approach.

“I like you, Calif,” he said. “You know why I like you, Calif?”

“No – I don’t know why you like me. Why do you?” Calif wondered what he was up to.

“‘Cause you’re a man who says how he feels, that’s why. Now like that day in the field and the other time on the porch. You let me know just how you felt. It’s a admirable thing in a man, to be like that”.

Calif stopped working and looked at him, waiting for him to continue. The man took a drink from his bottle. Then he spoke in a tone both ingratiating and venturous, “Got any money, Calif?”

“I ain’t got no money,” Calif said.

Sidney thrust forward his pallid face and Calif turned away.

He looked yellow in the dim light of the barn and his breath smelled of whisky and rotting teeth.

“No,” he said, “you wouldn’t have any money. If you did you wouldn’t be hanging around here, or is there another reason for you to be staying on?” He paused and then went on, “Is there something else keeping you here?” be asked.

“No,” Calif said, and knew it was a lie. “Nothing, nothing that would make a difference to you.”

“You being here makes a difference to me, you know that, boy? Just your sitting here in my barn makes a difference to me.”

“Your barn?” Calif asked and laughed.

Sidney became angry. He glared at Calif. He was an intruder, a threat to his security. “It’s good as mine,” he said. “You notice old Lute is getting sicker and sicker? You see that, boy? He’s gonna die, boy. You know that. One day pretty soon he’s gonna die. You know what’s going to happen then?” he asked as he stood up.

Calif felt hot. His hands trembled.

“What’s going to happen then?” he asked.

“You wait and see what does,” he said and looked across the barnyard. “See that spotted cow?”

“I see it.”

“You catch it and bring it to town. I’ll meet you at the cow buyers’ about sun down, you hear?”

“I hear you.”

“Then why ain’t you doing it?”

Calif stood up. “Because I ain’t going to. What do you want to sell it for, anyway?”

“I need money. I told you once!”

“What for? Whisky?”

“That ain’t none of your damn business. You ain’t nothing but a hand here. Man, that’s something you got to learn. You just catch that cow like I said for you to do, you hear?”

Calif stared the man directly in the eye. “I ain’t catching nothing,” he said, “not until – not ‘till Lute tells me to.”

“Man, you better get used to taking orders from me. Lute’s gonna die! Lute’s gonna die, you hear?” He backed away and crawled through the gate. “Soon’s he dies, I’ll fix you!” he shouted. “You Goddamn field hand!”

The man walked around the house and down the road.

“You son-of-a-bitch,” Calif said aloud.

CHAPTER V

As summer came to the farm in all its scalding fury, the woman’s husband started his nightly treks into town. To the saloon and then across the back fields to the old house that was the home of old Maggie and her two daughters.

They did not care that he was drunk or subject to sudden fits.

If he had a silver coin in his pants, he was a whole man to them. They shared his bottle and the night. They would listen to his bragging in silence, comfort him when he was sick and laugh with him when he was drunk.

Occasionally he went to the fields. He began clearing new ground for the apple orchard that he boasted would make him rich, and he sat for hours drawing plans in the sand. He burned the stumps on his new ground and cursed Calif because he worked in the fields instead of helping him. He would arise early and work for a few hours in the cool of the morning, then, as the sun grew hot, he would fall in the nearest shade until late afternoon when again he would work for a while. He found excuses for not helping in the fields; there were not enough tools, he didn’t think the work was as important as his new ground. More often he found excuses for not working at all.

In the evenings he would sit silently on the porch, sometimes rising for a drink, sometimes hacking madly with a long stick at the weeds growing around the steps. Always he would gaze toward the road to the village.

One night Calif was awakened by voices and someone pounding on a door. The man had been drunk and Calif knew that she had locked him in his room. He was trying to get out of his prison. He was scratching and kicking at the locked door, whimpering his crude oaths with a voice both pleading and threatening. Then he heard the woman get out of bed and talk to him, her voice tense and angry. Suddenly there was the sounds of a struggle in the parlor and the woman screamed. Calif leaped quickly from his cot on the porch and rushed around to the front of the house. The man was already crossing the yard on his way to the village road, walking very fast. Calif bounded up the front steps and rushed into the woman’s room. She was rising from the floor, her hands holding her belly.

“He kicked me.” She avoided his eyes and walked slowly to the door. Calif followed her outside, a silent rage burning inside him as he watched the woman in her pain.

“Something I can do – get for you?” he asked.

“No. Nothing. Just leave me alone. I – I’m sorry. I just want to be by myself for a while.”

Calif stood looking at her self-consciously for a while, then returned to the rear of the house. He lay on his cot, awake and listening for her to return to her bed. He tried to convince himself that it was none of his business, that it was nothing to him if a man beat his wife. Lots of men did. She had neither asked for nor wanted his help, yet he felt that it was his business, in fact that it concerned him very much. A lingering chill crept into his body and he knew he was afraid for the woman. He lay awake for hours, listening to the violent pounding of his heart.

In the days that followed, when Sidney did not return to the farm, Hannah was obviously uneasy. Several times Calif saw her staring up the road to the village. He could not tell if she was afraid that he would not return to the farm or if she was afraid that he would. But he could not question her. He had learned much about fears and pain from his own experience but he was still a stranger and a stranger could not help. He watched her constantly and longed to comfort her but she was, and wished to be, left alone.

One day Hannah left the farm early in the morning and returned about noon hour with a man whom she identified as a cattle buyer. The cattleman placed a halter on the spotted heifer and led her away. The woman called Calif and the old man to the house. She was sitting at the kitchen table when they entered. She stared intently out the window as she spoke.

“The heifer was mine and I sold her. He’s–” she stopped and looked at the old man. “He’s in jail again. The deputy brought word this morning. I guess you saw him. They want us to come and fetch him.”

“Why don’t you just leave him there?” Lute asked.

“You know I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be decent.” Calif felt embarrassed. He was trying to keep from asking her why not. A man who kicks his wife belongs in jail, he wanted to say.

“I’ll wait for you out in the yard,” he said to Lute and walked out of the house.

“It’s about time you stopped being decent and started thinking of yourself,” Lute said, when Calif was out of the room.

“I can’t do that,” she said. “You know that.”

“Why can’t you? Tell me one damned reason why you can’t?”

“Because I’m married to him. Married to him before God! You know what that means, Uncle Lute. You know it means forever. Until death do us part is what it says. What can I do?” She sat at the table, her voice soft with tears.

“I have to do my duty by him, that’s all,” she said and placed her face in her arms on the table.

“You best–” Lute began and stopped. “I’ll go with Calif,” he said.

“Do you feel like walking?” she asked.

But he was already out the door and didn’t answer.

As they walked toward the mountain and the village the old man was silent. Calif’s thoughts were on Hannah, back at the house. She was beautiful, he thought, in her pride, her distress, her loneliness. Wordlessly she had asked him for help, and he had responded to her call from the depth of his soul. It had nothing to do with her husband. He was not important. He, Calif1 was helping her – that was all that mattered.

Old Lute was winded when they reached the top of the mountain and they stopped to rest. They sat in the same shade where Calif had sought rest that day, many weeks before. He had almost forgotten that the world beyond the mountain existed. After a while the old man spoke.

“I saw the deputy before he left this morning and he told me all about it – but he didn’t tell her. She thinks they locked him up for drinking. That was just part of it. Maggie Marie, what lives over behind the back pass with her two young’uns, two of the oddest looking gals you ever seen, she called the law to him. You ought to see them poor pitiful gals, they ain’t got no teeth and not much hair either. Just snatches of it here and there on their heads. The youngest one’s got a hump on her back and she ain’t no more than about four feet tall.” The old man blushed and turned away as if his next words were shameful to him.

“Some folks say that old Maggie Marie herself don’t know who the daddy of them gals is. Some even say her own brother, what got sent to jail for killing a man, sired one of them.”

“That might make them odd like that,” Calif said. “They say if kin folks – well if they have young’uns they say they’ll be peculiar looking and funny in the head.”

“That’s what they say.”

In a few minutes they got up and continued down the deep-gutted road. Calif shortened his pace. The old man’s breath was coming fast, and he wheezed as he spoke.

“Seems as how he got the notion in his head that he could straighten out the hump in that little gal’s back. He took a plank and layed her down on the floor and went to work on her with it. I guess he just about killed her before they stopped him. Anyway, Maggie Marie locked him in the shed and went for the doctor. She fetched the sheriff back with her too.

Sidney was raving and cussing and carrying on when they got back, so they upped and took him off to jail.” He nodded back towards the house.

“Ain’t nobody going to tell her that was what it was though. Everybody knows that she’s got her hands full with him as it is, without piling this on to her load. Guess she knows he goes to Maggie Marie’s place, but I don’t reckon she pays it no mind. This ain’t the first time he’s pulled something like this.”

As they neared the village a sparkle from his long-past youth seemed to come into the old man’s eyes. The woman had inspired both of them into action. They would do her bidding.

She had asked them, and for that reason alone, would they trouble with Sidney.

Side by side they walked on down the road to the village.

Milling farmers and townspeople stood on the walk and in the street and talked of the crops and of the weather. As they approached the village a few of the older ones rushed out to old Lute, slapping him on the shoulder and inquiring of his health and his crops. Lute introduced Calif to them as proudly as if Calif had been his own son. He stopped to talk with them of times long past and to inquire after their relatives and friends. After a while they went on with the errand, one with the wisdom of the very old and the other with the assurance of the very young. As they neared the clapboard jail, a group of young boys, who had been peeping through the window at Sidney, scattered quickly around the corner.

Calif followed the old man into the building. The sheriff and his deputy were sitting quietly, listening to the sounds from the cell in the rear of the room.

“Well, Abel, we conic to fetch him home,” Lute said.

The sheriff got up and took a ring of keys from a peg on the wall. Sidney quit his whimpering and stared through the cell door. “Lute,” the sheriff said, “You and me been friends through thick and thin for a good many years. I don’t want you to take no offense to what I’m going to say. I hate like hell to go on taking money of yours and hers for his fines, but I don’t make the laws. I’ll tell you this, though – I just ain’t got no use for him back there. He’s crazy, Lute. One more spell like this and we’re going to have to send him off where he can’t hurt nobody. That’s it, Lute! That’s all I got to say about it… but folks around here ain’t going to stand for much more of this – you know that.”

Lute looked at him for a few minutes and then said quietly, “I know it, Abel. I’ll try to see to it that he don’t leave the place no more. Here’s his fine.”

“Keep him away from old Maggie Marie if you can and you’ll keep him out of trouble,” the sheriff said. “Ain’t but two places he can go – that’s over there and here to town. I can keep him out of things here, but what he does over there I can’t help.”

“He just slips off. There ain’t much we can tell him. Not that he’ll listen to anyhow.”

The sheriff unlocked the cell door and walked inside. “They’re here for you,” he said to Sidney who was crouched on the bare cot in a corner of the cell. He had heard the voices, he had seen Calif and Lute and we was waiting. He stood up, his face mean and sullen as he walked out of the cell. He turned to the old man angrily. “It’s about time you and that Goddamn field-hand dragged your asses down here. You think I like to be here? You and him and her – you’d all like it just fine if they sent me off wouldn’t you? I heard this son-of-a-bitch talking about it. A man can’t have no peace around here no more – with damn field-hands and old sons-a-bitches what ought to be dead and in their grave–”

Calif struck suddenly. His calloused fist hit the man with all the strength packed in his bulging biceps and with all the anger he had stored for weeks.

Sidney’s head snapped back. He staggered to the wall and slowly sank to the floor. Calif stood over him, fists still clenched. The others looked from him to Sidney, who was sitting on the floor, dazed and bleeding at the mouth.

Wordlessly, they picked him up and took him outside to the watering trough. Lute grasped him by the neck and pushed his head beneath the moss covered water. When Sidney came to his senses he began screeching and screaming in a demented tirade. He flailed his arms and stamped on the ground. No one had ever struck him before. As he yelled, he flung his puffy fists out around him, shivering and shaking, cursing all of them. The loafers in the street rushed to look at the spectacle and the women hastily grabbed their children and hustled them away. The sheriff dropped his keys to the boardwalk, his mouth open in astonishment.

“What in the hell’s the matter with him? Is he having a fit?” he yelled.

“For the sake of the devil!” cried the town preacher as he rushed to the screaming man. “The devil’s stealing his soul from his body right before our eyes! Everybody pray! Pray for his salvation!” He dropped to his knees and began praying aloud.

Lute pushed Sidney back against the trough. “Sidney!” he shouted. “Shut your fool mouth!”

“Let me alone, you old bastard! Get your fucking hands off me ‘fore I kill you!”

“You ain’t killing nobody,” the sheriff said. “You better cut out this yelling. You’re going to have the whole damn town here in a minute!”

“Son-of-a-goddam bitch!” Sidney roared as he flung his arms about.

“Shut up,” Lute said, “Get going up that road. Ain’t you got no shame about you?” He was sick with anger and felt disgraced by the mad scene played in front of the whole village. Sidney only howled the louder. Suddenly he saw Calif who had backed away from the group in an anguish of disgust, his face white, as be tried to tear his eyes away from the horrifying sight.

“You son-of-a-bitch!” Sidney screamed at him. “You dirty bastard. It’s all your fault. I’ll kill you. Hear me? Hear me, you bastard? I’ll kill you. I’ll do it, Goddamn you, I’ll kill you!”

Lute raised his walking stick and brought it down hard. The fat man slowly collapsed on the dusty street. He lay kicking and scratching at the hard packed earth.

“My God!” the sheriff yelled. “Somebody fetch the doctor.”

“He’s out of town – gone to Huntsville,” one of the men replied.

“Ain’t nothing he could do with him anyhow,” Lute said.

Sidney’s screams became louder, shriller, and finally stuck on a high pitched note, like a beast in pain. Lute prodded him in the ribs with his cane but the screams only increased in volume. The crowd stared, completely fascinated. Only Lute showed any emotion. His face was burning.

Finally the screams became hoarse and gurgled.

“He’s biting his damn tongue!” the sheriff yelled.

“Pray! Everybody pray!” the preacher shouted, still on his knees. “Pray and drive the devil from your presence!”

“Throw some water in his face,” Lute said.

“Better make him stop chewing his tongue before he bites it off,” the sheriff said..

Lute stuck the end of his cane between Sidney’s teeth and held his head between his knees.

“Now don’t let him swallow that cane,” the sheriff said. He filled his hat with water and threw it in Sidney’s face. Two or three of the others followed his example. Finally Sidney stopped struggling and his screams died to a weak girlish whine.

“Just let him lie,” Lute said. “It’ll soon pass.” The townspeople turned and slowly walked away, whispering in clusters, shamefaced at witnessing the man’s degradation.

In a few ugly moments they had seen wiped away the dignity which separates man from an animal, and they were afraid and ashamed.

Sidney quit whining and wiped his face with his mud splattered hand. He slowly got to his feet and staggered down the street. Lute and Calif followed. They looked neither to the right nor to the left as they walked behind him in silence.

Lute’s face was still burning, but he held his tired old back straight. Calif was amazed. He could think of nothing to say.

Behind them the preacher was still on his knees.

CHAPTER VI

Calif knew now what he had surmised all along. Sidney was mad. Not totally insane but mad just the same. He hated the man, yet he felt guilty for hating him. He was an animal, only half a man. Now he knew why there was the look of fear in the woman’s eyes.

He and Lute reached the fork at the foot of the mountain and sat down to wait for Sidney who had lagged behind.

“I reckon he must have stopped up there someplace,” Lute said after a while. He was angry, angry at Sidney for disgracing him before his friends. He had often done it in the past, but it had never been like this. He had never before been shamed by the man’s fits. “We’d better go back up there and get him before he takes off to town again.”

“I’ll go,” Calif said, standing up.

“All right. If you have any trouble with him just sock him again and call me. I guess I’m a little bit tired with all this walking and bothering with him.”

The old man was pale and Calif knew that the excitement had been too much for him.

He found Sidney a few hundred yards back up the road. He was sitting on the grass and staring at his feet.

“My heart’s beating fast,” he whimpered when he saw Calif.

“Mine is too.”

“You’re making fun of me. You ain’t a sick man.”

“I’m getting there pretty quick, looking at you. Why don’t you act like a man?”

“You don’t have to get smart. I’m more of a man than you are. If your heart was beating as fast as mine you couldn’t walk either.”

“You walk with your heart?” Calif asked. Sidney glared at him and made no move to get up.

“I guess, by God, you want me to tote you home don’t you?

Get up!” he yelled.

But Sidney still did not move. Calif walked to him, grabbed him by the hair and pulled him out into the road. Sidney stood up, then he spat on him and backed away.

Calif looked from the spittle on his pants to Sidney who was smiling. He thought of old Lute who had exerted his tired old body for this man. He walked to him and slapped him across the face with the back of his hand. Sidney stared at him for a minute and collapsed with a groan in the dusty road. He began crying and the tears caked the dust on his face. “If I weren’t a sick man you wouldn’t hit me, boy!” he screamed.

“Get up!”

“I can’t get up. I ain’t able to walk. I’m a sick man!”

“If you don’t get up off that ground you’re going to be sicker ‘cause I’m going to stomp the hell out of you.” Sidney looked at the grim and angry face and he knew that he would do as he said. He slowly got to his feet and began stumbling down the road, whining, cursing, and glaring at Calif.

Darkness had fallen when they reached the house. The woman and the dog met them in the front yard. Without speaking she turned and followed them into the house. They took Sidney to his room and laid him on his cot.

“Let’s go tend the stock,” Lute said.

Calif looked at the woman and she quickly looked away. He followed Lute out of the house and to the barn.

The woman brought a pan of water and a cloth from the kitchen and bathed her husband’s mud-caked face. The sobbing, whimpering man lay on the cot. Suddenly he began laughing. He roared with laughter until tears ran down his face in a stream. The woman stood up, dropping the cloth to the floor as she backed away. She put her hands to her ears to drown the sound of the laughter, then ran from the room and locked the door behind her.

She threw herself across her bed. Tears came and she could not stop their flow. She had long lost any love she had had for him. Now she hated him. Someone had once told her that the bonds of hate were stronger than those of love. Was this why she remained married to him she asked herself. Because she hated him, the man who was her husband? No. She hated him, but that had nothing to do with it. It was because it was her duty to stay with him. Her duty as his wife. And she was afraid ... too afraid to break the chains of duty. He was weak, spineless, but she was a coward. There was a way out for her, none for him.

Calif and Lute attended to the stock and returned to the house.

They noticed the woman’s eyes, red and tearstained, and they were silent. The meal was ready on the table. As they ate, the only sound that penetrated the stillness of the kitchen was the chirping of the crickets. Lute stared at Calif, the man who had struck out in his defense that day, the strong young man who had filled the place left empty in his heart at the death of his sons so long before.

Calif was watching the woman cautiously, trying not to let her see his stares. The woman ate silently, her eyes on the table. There was something to be said, much to be said, but only the sounds of the night eased the tension at the table.

They finished the meal and the woman went about her work.

Calif followed old Lute out to the porch. They sat watching the cattle milling in the barnyard and listened to the soft sounds the woman made in the kitchen. She finished her work and went to her room. Calif strained to hear a sound from the front of the house. The silence was unbearable.

“Was he always like this?” he asked Lute suddenly.

“No – I don’t know. Maybe he was. If he was, they kept it hid mighty damn good.”

“Did she know about it when they got married?”

“No. We all thought he acted a little funny even then, but it didn’t seem like nothing to worry about. Like I told you, she weren’t much more than a baby when they got married. It was right after my brother died that they went to Louisiana to see her sister. Then they went up to St. Louis to live. They up and rented a fine house about as big as the whole town of Jason and hired them a bunch of cooks and people to run it. They was living high off the hog. She give him all her pa’s money. She didn’t know nothing about money then. She was just sixteen at the time.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Four – maybe five years ago. Sidney got to drinking and started running around with whores in St. Louis and the more he run around the more he drank. About the time the money give out he was mostly drunk from daybreak on.,’

“Was that when the fits started?” Calif asked.

“That was when. By that time they was hating each other like the yellow-dog fever. Then she brought him here. He’s been just like you’ve seen him ever since. Sometimes a little better and sometimes a little worse.”

Lute went into the house, leaving Calif on the porch Calif stared at the fleeting shadows the clouds made in the moonlight. A fresh wind was blowing across the yard bringing with it the smell of the fields and the barn. A full moon circled by clouds, he thought, sure as hell it will rain before morning. He sat on the steps, looking at the dark hills in the distance. The woman – he tried not to let himself think of the strange, sad woman. For a moment he considered running across the yard, down the road and over the mountain. Running and running and never stopping, leaving this place and these people forever. Out there, somewhere, over the mountains, there were people and lights and happiness. The rains came and he went into the house.

He awoke at dawn the next morning. Flashes of lightning were still dancing across the sky and the roar of thunder could be heard in the distance, but it wasn’t the thunder that had awakened him. He could hear voices in the front of the house.

* * * * * *

Sidney was in Hannah’s room, standing over the bed. She had left his door open when she had brought him his supper.

He stumbled over a chair.

“What do you want?” she said. “Light the lamp.”

“We don’t need the lamp,” he said, giggling.

“No. Sidney, you get back to bed.”

“I’m gonna get in your bed.”

“You ain’t. I ain’t going to! Sidney, you hear? I ain’t, Sidney and that’s all there is to it. You go back to your own bed.” Her voice was high and nervous, almost breaking.

“How come you say you ain’t when you know you are? I want to know why you think you can tell me you ain’t?”

“You know why! I don’t have to tell you.”

“You ain’t let me – since he come here. Since the night before, you know that? I ain’t had it since then.”

“That ain’t got nothing to do with it. I can’t.” She thought fast, trying to think of an excuse that wouldn’t anger him. “I can’t now. You know I can’t.”

“How come you can’t?”

“It ain’t the time to. You know as well as I do there’s times when I – a woman can’t.”

“That don’t make no difference to me.”

“It does. Yes it does and I’m – we’re not – Sidney! That’s all there is to it. I ain’t going to do it.” He lunged and fell across her. She struggled from beneath the covers, fighting him.

“Cut it out!” Sidney shouted. “Damnit, you be still!” She fell to the floor, then bit his hand when he clutched at her nightgown. Free, she ran to the door and out into the night.

“You come back here!” he shouted. “You Goddamn whore!” She walked up the road, listening to the thunder rumble overhead. When it began to rain she remembered the night weeks before when she had walked in the rain. This was different. Then she had been defeated, hoping for, even praying for death. This time she had won. She was proud of escaping him, proud that she had found the strength. She shuddered as she thought of what could have happened if she had weakened.

“Never again,” she swore to the rain, “I’ll kill him first.” She leaned against a fence in the farmyard looking out over the fields until the rain stopped and the first ray of light appeared in the east. Then she walked back to the house and entered quietly. Sidney had gone back to his room. She locked his door, then, in her own room, changed into dry clothing.

Calif could hear her moving about. He had heard them talking and there was a dry, bitter taste in his mouth. His body trembled. He wondered what he would have done if she had not gotten away. If she had not escaped. He had wanted to rush in, to kill the man. He clenched his fists until his hands were sore. When it was light outside he got up and dressed.

The woman entered the kitchen and they stood face to face.

She held her head high. She had grown used to humiliation.

Slowly, as she glanced at his face, the blood began to creep into her cheeks and she turned away. She knew that he had heard. She did not understand her feeling of shame before this man.

Looking at her, Calif forgot for the moment that she was another’s wife. She stood tall and erect before him. The rain had refreshed her sunbrowned face. She was strong and beautiful, not like the sad woman she had been only the evening before.

CHAPTER VII

In the sultry days that followed, Sidney stayed in his room.

He lay on the cot staring at the planked ceiling, watching a dirt-dauber build her nest. Between naps of sluggish sleep or fiendish dream he would call out for Hannah to bring him food and water or to empty his slop bucket. His moods changed from abusive to pleading. When she came into the room he would beg her to stay with him. He was afraid of the dark, obscene shadows of his imaginings, and of the bottomless, black pools of his fits that came often now. He had finished all the whisky in the house; there were moments of total darkness and severe muscular spasms shook his body.

Through his pain he would call her and beg her to do something to help him.

After that night she remained impassive to his pleadings and his pleas again turned to curses. She no longer had any feeling at all toward him, not even pity. She went about her work silently, speaking to Calif and Lute only when necessary, tending to her husband’s needs without assistance from them. She refused their offers of help. He was her struggle. She would not ask them to share this responsibility; but she knew that she would commit murder before she again submitted her body to him. He was her burden. He was a shame, a cancer that ate away at her flesh and her soul, a rampant tumor that swelled up inside to destroy her. She was ashamed of living tied to a man she could never love. For this sin, the sin of marrying him, God had punished her and only death would free her. No one could help her.

As she watched Calif working, every fiber of her body wanted to call out to him, “Help me! Please help me!” and she often glanced at him furtively from the garden where she spent the afternoons carefully tending the rows of vegetables she had planted there.

It was good to be out in the healing sunshine, away from Sidney and the dank air of his illness that hung about the house. Here, in the garden, she could feel and see fresh new life all around her. Greenness was everywhere in the valley and she would stop her work to listen to the birds chattering in the scrub oaks. Across the fields and always in her view was Calif, and this was the sweetest sight of all.

Yet she was ashamed of watching him, staring at him as he pulled the heavy plow from each furrow at the end of a row, and thrilling to the sight of work hardened muscles rippling in his shoulders and back. She was ashamed of knowing that in his arms would be the love she had dreamed of.

Calif watched her too. Watched and waited and wished. At night he lay on his cot on the back porch and thought of her.

He listened to the whippoorwill who sounded her lonely cry, over and over again, as she searched for a bare spot to lay her egg. Even that reminded him of Hannah, for the whippoorwill was constantly on guard against the fox, as Hannah was.

Old Lute no longer attempted any work and Calif was alone in the field. All around him the fruits of his labor were apparent. It was almost laying-by time and his presence in the fields was no longer a daily necessity but more a desire to stay away from the house and Sidney – and the woman.

One day he stopped the mules for water and she was standing at the edge of the field looking at him.

“He’s gone off again,” she said, as he neared.

“Who?” he asked, without thinking.

“You know who. Sidney.” She sat down and waited for him to take a drink.

“I know where he goes,” she said. “Uncle Lute tries to pretend, but I know. I’ve always known.” Calif’s face reddened at the unexpected intimacy. He opened his mouth to reply, then realized there was nothing he could say.

“I don’t care about what he goes there for,” she continued, “I just don’t want him to get into more trouble. If be gets put back in jail, I’m going to leave him there. I’m going to ask them to send him away. Do you think it would be wrong of me to do that?”

“No. I don’t think so. Maybe it would be best for both of you.”

He stared into the woods behind her. He could not tell her that he wanted her to have him sent away, that he was not thinking of what was best for them both.

“Have you ever seen one of them places where they send people – where they’re crazy?”

“No.”

“I ain’t either but I’ve heard about them. They say they’re awful. I’d hate to have it on my record for sending him there. Him or anybody, if they’re as bad as they say.” She stared at him and he looked away.

“Does it bother you? Me talking about it like this?”

“No. I guess I know all about it. With what I seen and what Lute told me.”

“Even he don’t know it all. Nobody does but me. Nobody could and I’ve never told nobody how bad it is, being married to him.”

“I just know what he knows.”

“Calif,” she asked suddenly, “Do you believe in God?”

“Sure I do. Don’t everybody?”

“Sidney don’t. But I do. I don’t believe in Him like that preacher over in town does. He believes in a Living God that tends to things people ought to tend to themselves. I believe in a Looking God that looks at us and then judges us on what he sees.”

“I never thought much about it one way or the other.”

“That’s why I ain’t had him put away before now. Because I believe in God. God’s law says a woman is married to a man until she dies or until he dies, no matter what comes. You’re supposed to honor and obey your husband no matter what.”

“Yes, but–” he began.

She held up her hand. ‘I know,” she said. “I know what you’re going to say – if the husband goes crazy or maybe is crazy when you get married then what? I don’t know how crazy he really is. I don’t know how crazy a man has to be to be crazy.”

“If he’s crazy, he’s crazy – that’s all there is to it.”

“No it’s not. They ain’t put him away yet. If they ain’t put him away then he ain’t crazy by law – not in the eyes of the law and the law believes in a living God. All the people in town do and they’re the law.”

“But if they put him away you’d be free by law. You wouldn’t be married to him no more and there wouldn’t be nobody to blame you for it,” Calif said.

“That would be by law. By the law of man and the living God. I don’t know if that would be by the law of the Looking God. It says until death do you part and a man who is crazy ain’t dead.”

Calif stared at her. It was hopeless. He was beginning to understand why she had stayed with Sidney.

“Did you ever take him to see a doctor about it?” he asked.

“Once. In St. Louis just before we came back here. It didn’t help none. Even the doctor said it was shameful to have fits. Not shameful to think – that part he could help, but shameful to have fits. He can’t help having them unless the drinking causes them. But people that don’t drink have fits. There was a little girl who had them in town. She died.”

“I knew a man where I was before that had them. They said it was bad blood. But he was a God fearing man. He prayed all the time.”

“Sidney tried that some too. That preacher used to come out here all the time but I guess he finally give up. The people in town laugh at him and I guess they laughed at the preacher too for trying to cure him. Anyway he hasn’t been out here since just before you come.”

Calif watched her as she talked. She had cut her hair short against the summer heat and it hung in a wave to her shoulders. His stare fell to the full blown breasts beneath the tight dress. She stopped talk.ng and looked at him. She felt her face began to burn and quickly looked away.

“I’m keeping you from your work,” she said and got up. She hurriedly walked out of the field. He felt a strong desire to run after her. He wanted to take her in his arms, to tell her he would help her. But there was no way out. No way to help.

At the supper table that night old Lute asked him about the work.

“It’s going better than I hoped,” Calif said.

“I feel ashamed – not being no help to you.”

“You can’t help getting sick.”

“That Sidney ought to be down there helping you. If he feels good enough to slip off the first time nobody’s looking, then he feels good enough to work.”

They finished supper in silence. Old Lute stood up to go to his room, then slowly sank to the floor. Hannah screamed and Calif rushed to him. Tenderly, he picked the old man up and sat him in a chair.

“Just a little fainting spell,” he said, “It’ll pass soon. Just let me rest a little while.”

His breath was coming in gasps and the woman saw that it was an effort for him to breathe at all.

“Calif,” she said, “You run to town and see if you can get the doctor.”

Calif took a coat from a peg near the door and threw it over his shoulders. His forehead was creased with worry. Outside, thunder roared its threat of a storm. He opened the door and the woman came to him. She put her hand on his arm and looked into his eyes. “Please hurry,” she. said.

He knew that was not all she meant. He walked swiftly across the yard as it began to rain. Her eyes followed him until he was only a dark shadow in the gloom. She turned back to Lute who had been watching her and helped him to his room and put him in his bed.

“You love him, don’t you, Hannah?” he asked.

She buried her head in the bed covers that lay across his chest. “Yes. Oh God, yes,” she whispered.

Lute smiled and went to sleep. He was tired and his old body was stiff with pain.

She sat by the door, searching the night for Calif and the doctor. The hours seemed like an eternity. “Oh, God, please keep him safe,” she prayed. Then, finally, when she could see their lantern moving cautiously down the mountain, “Thank you, God, thank you!”

CHAPTER VIII

The doctor did what he could for Lute, gave him some foul tasting liquid from a bottle he carried in his bag, then told Hannah what to do if he became worse and returned to the village. Calif had gone directly to the barn to care for the stock.

“What did he say?” he asked Hannah when he returned.

“He said it’s not so bad right now but he’s liable to get worse. He told me before he left that he – he was on his deathbed.”

“Oh!” Calif exclaimed. He sat down at the table abruptly, his eyes lowered. He would miss old Lute but there was nothing he could do. Anyway, he felt that the doctor had underestimated the old man’s gumption.

The rain and the wind pounded at the house. These moments, alone with her in the kitchen, with the kinship of their love for old Lute binding them closer, Calif felt as if the rest of the world had been shut out. Quiet exultation swelled up inside him. He felt his life was complete and he would never again be afraid. He could tell that she, too, felt the warmth and the happiness of this fleeting moment. But then, too soon, he remembered that morning when she had talked about Sidney and the spell was broken. He got up from the chair abruptly and walked to the door to watch the rain. The woman, too, felt the happiness slip away and she began cleaning the kitchen.

In the days that followed, Lute lay in his room in weary silence. He often thought of death but it did not bring fear nor was it repulsive to him. He had long looked upon death as a kindly release from the tribulations of the very old. He would be ready. He had taken care of financial affairs. He had gone to the bank and transferred his money into Calif’s name and left a note saying the money was for Hannah. This way he avoided any possibility that Sidney would get it. Four thousand dollars was a great deal of money, but there were still many other things to be settled. He dreaded the thought of leaving Hannah alone to fend for herself, still burdened with her wretched husband.

The woman cared for him in her gentle, tender way and slowly, he regained some of his spirit if not his strength. Calif went about his work, avoiding her whenever possible. Since the night of Lute’s attack, his evenings were spent talking or reading to Lute.

Sidney passed from a stage of roaming the hills into one of morbid melancholy. In his warped mind he transformed the old man’s illness to his own body and lay in his room, sure that death would come each night. Other times he screamed to be free of his prison, for the woman always kept his door locked.

She was much too busy caring for Lute and her husband to allow her mind to dwell too long on her feelings for Calif.

Her only outlet from the toil of the house was found in the little garden. Here she spent the afternoons, letting her thoughts return to earlier, happier, times. One hot afternoon she was in the garden when Calif came with the mules to plow the few short rows of vegetables. They had not talked to each other all day and had carefully avoided conversation about anything but the farm since that night in the kitchen. He tied the mules to a post at one end of the garden and walked to where she was.

“How is Lute today?” he asked. It was hard for him to talk to her now.

“Much better; he even wanted to get up and about the chores.”

She wiped the sweat from her brow and sat down on the grass at the end of the garden. Calif sat near her and rolled a cigarette.

She looked up into the sky and pointed for him. “There,” she said, “You can see the moon. I used to wonder about that when I was a little girl.”

“It seems like a long time since I was a young’un and wondered about things like that,” Calif said.

“What did you want most then?” she asked, still looking at the sky.

“To go out west. It was a long time ago, seems like. I look back now and I don’t know why I wanted to go. It don’t seem like I’ve been nowhere or done nothing.”

“Where were you born?” she asked.

“Somewhere in Kentucky or Illinois, I don’t rightly know and my folks didn’t either. They used to argue about whether they’d crossed the river yet when I was born in the wagon. Ma and Pa were on their way to California. Pa didn’t think they would ever get there so he named me California and told my Ma that it had come to them. I been called Calif ever since, though. Guess California was just too much for them to spit out twenty times a day.” He smiled and she smiled with him. It had been a long time since he had seen her laugh.

“I wondered how you got that name. I bet there ain’t another person in the world named like that.”

“Never heard of no other one. My Ma used to be right proud of it. When there was strangers about she would call me by my full name, California Davis McKinney.”

They were silent for a while. The ground was warm and fresh smelling, and the soft rustle of tall grass was all around them.

“I wanted to do such a lot of things when I was little,” she said. “I used to say I was going to grow up to be a great lady. I wanted to teach school and marry a rich man and live in a big city. Daddy never laughed at me.” She paused.

“He was good to me – and Mama would tell me about big cities and pretty ladies with fine dresses. After I – we – got married, he took me to the city and I tried to live like one of them ladies but it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t brought up to it. I tried to act like them but they laughed behind my back…”

She stopped and looked at him. He stared into her eyes. She wiped her forehead with her arm and went on.

“Nothing is ever like you dream it is.”

“Yes, it is,” he said. “If you dream about real things, it is.”

“When you were little, were you happy?” she asked.

“Sometimes I was real happy, other times I weren’t at all. He turned away. “My pa wasn’t as good as yours,” he said after a moment. “He used to get drunk and kick me or else slap me in the face and he would beat ma something fierce. I always thought that when I got big enough I would kill him. I never got the chance. One day when I was twelve he didn’t come home from work. Ma went out to look for him but she never found him. Guess he finally went to California. I had to quit school and take care of ma. We was poor and went hungry sometimes but most times I was happy then. I got a job in a harness shop and ma worked cleaning house for people and whatever else she could get. I used to read to her at night when she came home tired. It made her proud – me reading to her. We used to talk about the place we would have someday with good land and cows and a garden.”

“What happened to her?” Hannah asked. The mules stomped restlessly at the end of the garden.

“She took sick. It was the consumption they said. They said she had to quit work and rest.” It was the first time that Calif had spoken of his mother to anyone. The memory was painful, but he continued.

“We didn’t have any money to take care of her. I tried to borrow the money but I couldn’t. I was just barely sixteen. Then one day the land office, next to the harness shop where I worked, was robbed. I run out just in time to see the men running down the alley. I followed them and saw one drop some money. I picked it up and hid it. Later, when I started spending it the sheriff come around and wanted to know where I got it. They said I was lying – that I had been one of the men who held up the lard office. They sent me to jail – for eight years.”

“Is that when your mother died?”

“Three weeks to the day after I left. The trial and all was too much on her. She had to go back to work while I was in jail waiting trial.” The memory was bitter. It brought such pain to his face that the woman looked away.

“The prison wasn’t bad,” he went on. “We worked hard but most of the people were good to us. I did my work and done what I was told to do and never got no beatings. We done farming there. Then they let me out.”

“Was that when you come here?”

“Yes. I started walking when I got out, sometimes get a ride on a wagon but mostly walking. I was headed !or Texas when I heard about this job. I was sick of sleeping in barns and going hungry so I come here.”

I’m – we’re glad you did,” the woman said.

He did not answer her but stared into the distance for a long time. “It’s pretty late,” he said, “I think I’ll wait till morning to plow the garden.”

As he led the mules away, down the road, the woman’s eyes followed him. A sweet pain choked at her throat. He was strong and kind. The bitterness had gone, talking to him for that few minutes. If only – she stopped suddenly. It was wrong to have such thoughts. Still, in spite of herself, her mind kept returning to him. She thought about the child that had been denied her. She picked up her pails and left the garden.

Before going to the house for supper Calif stopped at the creek. He shed his clothing and bathed clean in the cool, clear water. He thought of his mother, the prison and of this woman. She was a strange, lonely person, this woman, and there had been something different about her in the garden.

Kindness became her. For the first time, he let his thoughts run wild as he daydreamed about her, of being with her at another time, in another place. After he finished bathing he stood on the creek bank and let the warm wind dry his body.

It was good to be clean.

When he returned to the house she had supper on the table.

They ate in silence, each stealing glances at the other, knowing that there was more to be said. There was so much that Calif would say to her if only he could.

Later he went in to talk with Lute. He was in his bed and, though his spirits were high, Calif could see that his body was becoming weaker. He told him of the work in the fields and Lute was relieved to know that it was being done even without his help. He no longer felt ashamed of transferring the burden of the farmwork to Calif. He talked much that night. Perhaps he was aware of his age and that there would not be much more illness and suffering and he wanted to enjoy the company of mortal man while there was still the time.

“You know,” he said, “these old legs of mine are tired. I tried to get out of bed today and I was downright shook up.” He smiled and Calif smiled with him.

“Used to be,” he went on, “I could work all day and jig all night. Time was when there was a lot of jigging hereabouts. But that was a long time ago. More people around here now and I don’t guess they’re as hard up for company as we was then. And foxes – man I could go up on that ridge and chase foxes and keep up with the dogs.”

He was quiet for a minute. “Calif–” he began.

“What?”

He looked at the door for a minute and returned his gate to Calif. “You know I once told you I had some money.”

“You didn’t rightly tell me. You hinted at it.”

“Well, I have. It’s some bit of money. I’ve made some over the years and saved most of it. Even Hannah don’t know about it. When they first come here I was going to tell her but then I knew if something happened to me he would get it. I didn’t even tell her when things got rough like they’ve been this last couple of years.”

“What has it got to do with me?” Calif asked.

“It’s yours.”

“What!”

“Not really yours. But if things work out the way I think they will it’s just as good as yours. I went to the bank... you remember the day I went to town? Well, I went to the bank and had it put in your name.”

“What made you want to do a thing like that?”

“To keep that goddamn Sidney from getting his hands on it. In this State what a woman has belongs to her husband. If I left it to her he would get it – so I signed it over to you.”

“Don’t think I don’t appreciate the trust you’re putting in me,” Calif said, “cause I do, but I wish you hadn’t done it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to say. For one thing you’re going to be around a long time yet.”

“I won’t be around as long as you – or her – or him.’ He paused and smiled. “The banker, now he thought I took leave of my senses, but I told him why I wanted to do it and then he thought it was the best thing too. This way, he don’t have to ever know about it.”

“You can depend on me not to tell him. When you–”

“When I die? Don’t be afraid to say it son. I ain’t afraid. You’re afraid of dying – I’m not. I was too, at your age. I used to think about it, lying in bed at night. I would feel my hands and my arms, feeling the life in them. Then I would reach over and touch my wife and feel the life in her. Feel the warm blood rushing through her veins and know that it was all just flesh – that it wasn’t a thing here to stay, like a rock or the ground. I often thought about our flesh that was alive – mine and hers – and how it could know such joy when it was joined together and I knew all the time that it would be lying down there in the ground someday rotting and being ate by the worms.

“It made me sick to think about it. Sicker than hell. I used to think about it so much some nights that I thought I was going to have to get out of bed and puke. But, after she died and I saw there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it, I got to thinking about my soul. That is the important part – the soul. A man’s body will rot in the grave but his soul won’t. Not if he’s lived a proper life. But a soul has to be tended and watered just like crops or else it will dry up and be choked out and rot, even before the body does. No, son, I ain’t afraid. But you are, because you’re still young yet. The blood runs hot in your veins and you’re still thinking about what the body wants.”

“But that’s living. A man’s got to think about it.”

“Yes, but you will think about it less and less as the years pass, and more and more you’ll think about the soul. That’s why a man ought to live a long life, so he has time to think about his soul.”

Sidney was walking about in his room. They listened to him for a few minutes, then Lute went on, “Sidney’s thinking about his body. That’s why he takes sick the minute anybody else does. It scares him. He’s afraid of dying. You know why he’s so scared of dying, Calif?”

“No, why?”

“Because he ain’t got a soul. His soul’s been rotted away for years. He only has his body left and he’s afraid of losing it. He’s so damned afraid that he catches every sickness that comes close to him.”

He was quiet for a few minutes, staring out his window into the darkness. He looked from the window to Calif. “Calif,” he said. “There’s a lot I know about life. I learned a good bit in all these years of living and there’s some I don’t know, but I think I know more than you. You ain’t had the time yet, to learn much.”

“Yes, sir, I know it.”

“About Hannah–”

“What about her?”

“Do you love her?”

Calif’s face reddened. He had not been expecting that. He had no idea that Lute, that anybody, suspected. “I don’t rightly know,” he said, “I really don’t know. I think I do, but I never loved nobody before that way. I just don’t know.”

“If you don’t know then you do.”

“I guess maybe I do.”

‘What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know. What can I do?”

“Like I said, I’ve learned a lot in all this time of living and some of what I’ve learned maybe you’ll never learn. What is right and what is wrong is one of them. I learned what it takes to make things right. What’s right in your heart is right. Even if it’s wrong by law, if it’s right – if something inside you tells you its right, then it is. But be sure it’s right before you do it – make damn sure it’s right because what is not right is wrong. Let the heart talk, not the flesh. You start listening to the throbbing in your loins and you’re going to wind up wrong. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes, sir, I think I do.”

“Calif?”

“Yes, sir?”

“About Hannah – think about it. There’s not much time to decide.”

“Yes, sir. I better get to bed. I got to finish plowing the big field tomorrow.”

“Goodnight – son. Think about what I’ve told you here tonight – all of it.”

Calif lay on his cot staring at the stars far into the night, thinking about what Lute had said. He wasn’t sure it was right yet. There was still a feeling of guilt. Besides he had never touched her. How could he tell if it was right?”

CHAPTER IX

The next morning Hannah was doing her wash. She was washing the clothing in the tubs that sat in the shade beside the house and hanging them on a line that ran to the barn, when she looked up and saw the preacher coming down the road, his hat in one hand and his Bible in the other. She stopped her work and waited for him on the porch. She didn’t like this man, who wore his religion on his shoulder and had the taste of it in his mouth. As he neared the house his steps became brisk, as if on an urgent errant. He was a small man, dressed soberly in black, his face set in stern determination, as though obsessed with the duties of his profession and his church. He walked into the yard without slowing his pace and stopped at the bottom porch step.

“Good morning, Mr. Hanson,” Hannah said. She could not bring herself to address him as “Brother Hanson” as the rest of the community did. The relationship was distasteful to her.

“Didn’t think you were coming back out here,” she said, “it’s been so long. I’m afraid your cure didn’t work on him anyhow. He’s worse than ever as you know.”

“Good morning, Sister Hannah Brenshaw,” he said. “It’s not him I come to see about. I hear that Brother Lute is sick and I come to offer him the salvation of his sinful and wicked soul.” His voice cracked, loudly falsetto. He practiced speaking in that manner for hours each night. He glared at her, waiting for her to ask him inside, daring her not to. He was a powerful man in the community and stood ready to remind her of his power.

“Come on in the house then,” she said. She was somewhat irked at his reference to the status of Lute’s soul.

She showed him into Lute’s room and left the two of them alone. Not bothered by the bland curiosity of most women, she neither wanted to nor anticipated any benefit in listening to the preacher dwell on the glories of the Holy Ghost and the beauty of streets paved with gold. She preferred the soft green grass of her backyard and, at that moment, the freedom from the sermon her washtubs offered.

“You want me to pray for you, Brother Lute?” the preacher asked.

“You pray and I’ll listen,” Lute said, “I ain’t strong enough to get up and run away.”

The preacher took the Bible from his pocket and proceeded to read aloud from it. Lute only half listened as be stared out the window, watching Calif in the field.

Hours later, Hannah came to the door and told them that the noon meal was on the table. Lute was taking his meals in the kitchen now, and he followed the straightbacked intruder to lunch. The three of them sat down at the table. Hannah had already taken Calif’s lunch to the fields. Lute filled his plate and waited for the preacher to finish his lengthy grace. After lunch he returned to his room and the preacher stayed in the kitchen with Hannah.

“I’ve been wasting the Lord’s time this morning,” he said.

“I could have told you that as soon as you got here.”

He ignored her comment and continued, “While I was in that room – reading from my Bible – the Lord, He come to me and He said–”

He stopped dramatically to watch the effect his words had on Hannah. Scepticism was plain on her face. She did not believe in his living God. She was quite sure that the person of his God had not been anywhere near the house that, nor any other, morning.

“The Lord come into that room and He said to me, ‘Brother Hanson,’ he said, ‘Brother Hanson, yonder in the front of the house is the job I sent you out here to do. This is not the job I sent you to do. You are wasting My time here when that poor sinner lies yonder, his soul in the devil’s palm. Go forth and save him from eternal damnation,’ He said.” Seeing the look of complete disbelief on Hannah’s face he stopped talking.

“Are you going to start that mess again?” she asked. “I thought you learned your lesson the last time you come out here getting him all stirred up with that praying. There ain’t no one bit of good you can do him. Why don’t you let him alone?”

“Sister Hannah! I am ashamed to stand here and listen to your sinful words. The Lord will strike you dead with lightning some day if you keep talking against His work like that!”

“I ain’t talking about the Lord’s work. I’m talking about you getting Sidney all stirred up again. He’d be a lot better off if you’d just let him be.”

“Sister Hannah, the Lord’s work is my work and it is never finished. Sometimes we get lazy like I have been these past few weeks and put it off for a while but it is never done and the workers of the Lord never give up.”

“He’d be a lot better off if you just let him alone. You don’t have to live with him like we do after you get him all riled up.”

“You are keeping me from the Lord’s work,” he accused.

“All right. If you’re so blasted sure it’s the Lord’s work, go on in there and start working,” she said. The mere presence of the preacher irked her. “I don’t think he’s going to be none too glad to see you anyhow. He’s been pretty bad lately.”

“He’ll be glad to see me and hear the Lord’s word.”

“Last time you come around here to drive the devil out I think he just about got a bellyful of the Lord’s word. But it’s your time if you want to waste it on him.” She led him to the small room that had become a prison for Sidney and unlocked the door. Sidney recognized the preacher immediately and stood up to return his greetings.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“It’s not what I want, Brother Brenshaw. It’s what the Lord wants that counts. He wants me to bring you His word.” Sidney lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling.

The preacher sat down and opened his Bible and Hannah left them alone.

Sidney decided to let the little preacher stay for a while. His company was better than none at all and he could always throw him out if he got tired. Besides, his crafty mind was already devising a plan, a plan that would strip this holy man of grace and at the same time lend a pleasing sanctity to his own desires.

Hannah went about her work in the kitchen. Outside the birds were playing in the bush and the light of the sun made the earth glisten in summer colors. It was good to be alive. She wanted to think that it was good to be in love but she did not dare. Her body was alive and vigorous. A smile played at the corners of her mouth. Outside she heard the whining of the old hound. Thinking that it was hungry, she prepared a bowl of milk and bread and took it to the porch steps. Under the porch, in the cool of the dust, the old dog lay surrounded by a litter of puppies.

“Old puppy dog, now look what you’ve gone and got yourself into. Guess that’ll teach you to go sneaking off to town in the springtime.”

She picked up one of the puppies and fondled its helpless blind body in her arms. Her laughter turned to quiet tears as she held it. She wept with the sadness of the forbidden, hugging the little warm body to her own. Long before she had had a puppy. When she was a little girl in the house where she lived with her parents. It had been a little black dog. His name was Jackie. He had followed her to the little one-room school each day and waited outside, and after school she would pretend that Jackie was her child and would dress him in her old clothing. Such a lovable little play-child in old rags.

She had dreamed, then, of the day when Jackie would be replaced with a real child. A child of her own to fondle and cuddle. That first year of marriage she had wanted a child desperately. Later she was glad, even thankful, that there had not been one.

She thought of her sister Sarah who had been richly blessed with many children and a husband whom she could love and respect, a husband to wait on when he came home at day’s end, a husband to lie beside at night, content and proud and without fear, a husband with whom she could attend Sunday meetings and hold her head up high.

Later, Hannah left the house and went to the field to help Calif. Here in the quiet field, alone with him, she quickly lost her sadness and forgot Sidney for a while, and the little preacher. Calif’s presence made her feel safe and warm. This man who had come to the farm a stranger was a stranger no more. He belonged here. Without him the weeds would grow high and the corn would wilt and die and she would be alone.

She watched him working beside her and felt his nearness and wanted him and needed him.

And Calif, working swiftly and expertly, felt strong, significant, very much alive. He had been lost in the throngs of a city, wasted in prison. He felt he had not existed before he came to this farm.

She pulled the vines around the waist-high corn and he cut them off at the ground with his hoe. They worked in close harmony, neither speaking. They worked together, each loving the moment, not daring to let the other know of the love.

Later they stopped to rest in the mid-afternoon shade. Around them were the sounds of the still, sultry day. These two, who had known so much loneliness, now found comfort in each other. Neither dared speak of the love and endanger losing the precious companionship. She looked at him, and at his eyes that gazed fixedly across the mountains. How very blue his eyes are, she thought, as blue as the sky.

“Calif?” She spoke softly.

“‘What?” he asked, almost whispering.

“When you leave here, where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully, “maybe Texas. I just don’t know. Even California. There still may be gold out there to be had. But I don’t think I would take to mining. No, not California – just far west where there’s good land and big cattle – somewhere over those mountains.” He stared at the low mountains in the distance. Then he picked up an arrowhead and looked at it,

“Did there use to be Indians here?” he asked.

“There were still a few right here in the valley when Uncle Lute was young. They left and went west to the Indian territory. Uncle Lute said they made these old flints by knocking them together and breaking off chips. They must have wanted to make them pretty bad.”

“We work hard to make things, too,” he said slowly, his gaze still fixed on the distant mountains, “and when we go somebody will find some of what we made.” A little later she left for the house to prepare the evening meal. She tried not to think about the day when it would be time for him to leave. It wouldn’t be long. Two months at the most.

CHAPTER X

The preacher had gone when Hannah reached the house that day but he returned early the next morning. She had barely begun her morning work when she heard him coming down the road singing. She walked out on the porch to meet him.

“Another fine morning, Sister Brenshaw.”

‘It is nice,” she answered matter of factly.

“I had to leave yesterday before you got home from your work in the field. I left your husband sleeping like the lamb in the meadow.”

“Sidney is less like a lamb than anything else in this wide world,” she said, stifling a laugh.

“Nevertheless, the Lord’s work reaped a bountiful harvest yesterday. I made great strides on the devil. I talked to him and prayed and read from the Lord’s book. He listened, giving the Lord both of his ears.”

“I just hope you can keep him out of trouble,” she said. “If you’re going to waste your time on him try to teach him to stay out of mischief.”

“It’s not your husband that does wrong and gets into trouble. It’s the devil in him.”

“He must be full of it then,” she answered, a glint of humor appearing in her eyes.

He did not answer her but walked through the kitchen and into the front of the house. Sidney had not been awake long because he had been out very late the night before. The preacher walked into the room, dropped his Bible and stumbled backwards in shock. “Brother Brenshaw!” he shouted.

Sidney was lying completely nude on the bed. He had been playing with himself. He pulled the covers over his body.

“Who in the hell–” he looked at the preacher in mild surprise,

“Oh, it’s you.”

“I can see that the devil has done got back into your flesh!” he shouted.

“You ought to let me know when you’re coming or knock on the door or something,” Sidney whined.

“You ought to be out of bed this time of day. Get up. We have lots to do.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Chase the devil.” He turned his head as Sidney got up and dressed.

“All right, I’m ready,” he said when he had finished.

“Today, Brother,” he said, “I am going to take you out of the devil’s house.”

Sidney agreed. He didn’t know what the preacher was talking about and he didn’t care. He was a person, another man, one he had not hurt, one that would stand his company.

Later, high up the mountain side, in the shade of the oak, the preacher sat reading his Bible. Sidney lay nearby on the grass, only half-listening. His mind was growing numb from the constant hammering of the little man’s voice but he decided that his company was better than spending the day alone in his room and fell asleep. Lute was in his room watching Calif repair the pasture fence. His tranquil thoughts were on the golden harvest and the young man who would bring it forth.

How very fortunate they had been, he thought, that night last spring when he had come to the door. Hannah entered the room and saw him watching Calif. She stood behind him and looked through the window above his head.

“How long was your agreement with him for?” Lute asked.

“Until harvest.”

“Have you talked to him about it since?”

“Yesterday. He’s planning on heading west when the gathering’s done.”

“Are you going with him?”

She blushed scarlet. “How can I go with him?”

“Ain’t you let him know yet how you feel?”

“No. He’s a man and even if we could – if it was right, it would be up to him to let me know first.”

“Maybe he’ll never let you know.”

“Does he – Do you think He loves me?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I know he’s thinking a lot about it. He’s a man, but he’s a baby in these things. He never even had a woman. Remember, he spent his growing up years in prison. You’re probably the first woman he’s ever been near since he was sixteen. A sixteen-year-old boy don’t know much about women.”

She returned to the kitchen thoughtfully. The time would come soon when Calif would leave, when there would be no excuse for his staying. She dreamed that. he loved her, the way she loved him. But it was impossible. She wouldn’t allow herself to think about running away with him. If nothing else, there was Lute to be tended. She could never leave him alone with Sidney. Besides it was wrong, wrong!

Digging the holes for the new fence posts, Calif was thinking about what Lute had told him that night. That what was in your heart was right. He had never thought about such things before. He had lived each day simply, with no thought of tomorrow, going through each day lonely and alone, leaving nothing behind to show others that he had been. He realized that now, without Hannah, he would always be lonely. He could never take another man’s wife, even if he did feel it was right in his heart.

The preacher and Sidney made their way back to the house.

The preacher walked with a heavy gait and a solemn air of self-satisfaction. Sidney followed, feeling more important than was justified. He walked with a swagger. A smile lit up his face. The preacher came all the way from the village just to see him, not the others, just him. He was the important one, even if it wasn‘t nobody but the preacher. The others would know now that it was him that was important, that they were just flunkies.

The preacher had listened to him brag of the things he had done, the places he had been. Sidney had told him his plans for the farm, how important he was going to be one day. In return he had listened to the preacher read and pray. It was a satisfactory arrangement for them both.

In Sidney the little preacher found needed companionship for the long weekdays. The men of his church worked six days a week and on the seventh they went to church and listened to him willingly, but they preferred not being bothered with salvation and damnation during the week, and the little man had long grown weary of calling on their over-zealous wives.

He could not stand the company of his own pious, bland wife, and his daughter spent her days in school. Now he planned to have company, the company of the only other man in the community who did not toil. As he walked he was thinking of a way to entice Sidney to help him care for the graveyard on Saturdays. That was his only purely physical duty and he detested it. Yes, he thought, he would carry on the Lord’s work with Sidney for five days a week and be paid with Sidney’s labor in the hot graveyard on Saturdays. As they neared the house he saw Calif at work.

“That boy, when did he come here?”

“Last spring. Without a damn penny in his pocket.”

“Where did he come from?”

“St. Louis.”

“That’s a heathen town. Is he a Christian?”

“Most likely not. At least he don’t act like no Christian.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s a smart, mean bastard. He carries on.”

“The devil’s work?”

“Don’t know if it is, but he’s sure warmed up to old Lute. Got him thinking that he’s almost his own son. Both his sons been dead from the yellow-jack too long for him to remember good.”

“Black magic. A tool of the devil.”

“I don’t know if there’s anything magic about it but he’s sure smart as the devil to get old Lute eating out of his hand like I never could.” Sidney was thoughtful for a moment. A cunning smile played at his lips. “He’s been warming up to my wife, too,” he added slyly.

“Adultery!”

“What’s that?”

“Adultery!” The preacher was fascinated. He stared at Calif, his small eyes gleaming with speculation, sure that the devil himself was standing before him. O, he would drive him off with the Lord’s word! He would cast him from his domain with the words of the Lord!

Hannah met them in the back yard. She was tired from her work and greeted them soberly. Sidney continued into the house, his round face shining with a childish smugness.

“Sister Brenshaw,” the preacher said, “It has been a good day. The devil only bothered us one time. He slipped back into Brother Sidney while I was reading the Good Book and put him to sleep.”

Hannah smiled. Knowing Sidney’s fondness for slumber she didn’t wonder that the little preacher was having a hard time keeping him awake.

“But I’m gaining on him,” he continued, “there’s much of the Lord’s work to be done here, but I’m gaining.”

“Glad you’re having such good luck, Mr. Hanson.”

“Oh, but Brother Sidney’s not the only one carrying the devil in his body. There’s others here.”

Hannah stared across the farmyard, completely disinterested.

“There’s you, Sister Hannah, and that young fellow working for you – and Brother Lute has fallen from grace with mingling with the devil’s children.”

Hannah’s practical mind would let her think of herself only as the child of her parents.

“You read all you want to and pray all you want to and you and Sidney do what you want to but leave the rest of us out of this, you hear?” She was suddenly very angry.

The preacher backed away from her. “You are a sinful woman to speak to the Lord’s voice like that. I will condemn you to hell on this spot if you slander me, woman!”

“Condemn all you please!” she shouted. Lute heard her and smiled.

“You’re not a Christian!”

“Not your kind, anyhow.”

“There is only one kind. Those who are not in the fold are angels of the devil. You are a blasphemous woman with the soul of the devil.”

“You go to hell!” Hannah shouted.

The preacher backed away, his mouth open, then he turned and walked quickly up the road.

CHAPTER XI

Sidney left the house soon after the preacher marched up the road fuming. He was gone for several hours and when he returned he carried a bottle in his hand. He went to his room and lay drinking.

He had awakened as if from a long, deep sleep. He had regained a feeling of self importance. He no longer had to spend the days alone in his room. He had been released from his self-prison by the preacher. He no longer called out to Hannah and disturbed her labors. He was grateful to the preacher and he would even work in the graveyard, if he didn’t have to work too hard.

His fits were gone. He had not had one in days, not since the preacher had come to see him. He no longer was filled with impotent rage at the others. He ignored them since the preacher had come.

Now, as he drank more and more from the bottle he thought about them. He could hear them in the kitchen. He got out of bed and staggered into the little back room. They stopped talking and stared at him.

“There sits my wife,” he began, “and there sits Calif and there sits Lute.” He pointed at each of them in turn. Still pointing he went on. “I fixed you, Calif. And I fixed you, Hannah.

Today. I have not fixed you, Lute, but I will.”

“How did you fix them?” Lute asked.

“None of your Goddamn business, but they’ll find out soon enough. And when I fix you, you’ll find out about it, and I will someday, too.” He reeled and sank into a chair. “Do you know why I fixed you, Hannah?”

“Why?”

“Because I have my suspicions about some things, that’s why! I have my suspicions. I ain’t so dumb I don’t know about things. Don’t you think I am, because you don’t know about God and the Bible.”

He looked at Lute. “Old man, do you want me to tell you about God and the Bible? I’m not going to tell you. You know why I ain’t going to tell you?”

“Why?” Lute asked. He was smiling now.

“Because I am saved and you ain’t. You hear that? You ain’t saved. None of you are. I’m saved because Brother Hanson says I’m saved. But ain’t nary one of you are.” He lay his head in his arms on the table and muttered drunkenly. Then he looked at them again.

“Brother Hanson says that I am going to be saved, that’s what he says. He says that when I am saved I will go to heaven and walk on streets paved with gold. You ever walk on streets paved with gold, Calif?” He stared at Calif for a minute before he went on, “Hell, no, you ain’t. Ain’t none of you has. And ain’t none of you going to. Because you ain’t saved, and I am. I am saved to walk on streets paved with gold You know what I’m going to do there?”

“No, what?” Hannah asked.

“I’m going to fill my pockets up with that gold, that’s what I’m going to do. Then I’m going to get me a tow -sack and fill that up, too. Maybe I’ll get me two sacks full of them.”

“You can’t do that,” Lute said.

“Why can’t I? What else has they got all that gold laying around up there for if you can’t fill up a tow-sack with it? Anyway, you don’t know nothing about it ‘cause you ain’t saved. They got precious stones up there, too, instead of grass. I’m going to fill up with them, too.”

“Once you get there you won’t be able to take it,” the old man said again.

“You shut up. You don’t know nothing about it. I’ll take all of it I want if they just got it laying around. And you – and you – and you–” again he pointed at them, “you’ll all go to hell ‘cause Brother Hanson said you would go there on account of you’re sinful and wicked souls. You know what you do there? You burn. It’s a big fire and they throw you in it and you burn forever. All of you will go there ‘cause you ain’t saved like me. More than likely I’ll be able to see you when I’m standing in them streets paved with gold with my pockets full of it.” He threw his head back and laughed uproariously.

“You won’t know about it, though,” he said. “And when I ask Hannah for money to go to town she will give me a two-bit piece and I’ll laugh at you. You hear, Hannah! I’ll laugh at you. Then I’ll take that two-bit piece and throw it in the well and you won’t know I got a tow-sack full of gold hid somewhere and you’ll say I’m crazy. Crazy?” His face became still. He glared at Hannah. “You call me crazy and I’ll kill you!” he screamed. He lurched toward her, swinging blindly. “I’ll kill you!” he shouted over and over, trying to reach her, to grab her throat. Calif sprang to his feet. He grabbed the flaying arms and held them behind Sidney’s back until he became quiet. They took him to his room and Hannah locked the door.

That night it rained hard and it was too wet to work the fields the next day. Calif puttered around the barn until noon. After lunch he took the money Hannah had been paying him, laid it out on the table and counted it slowly.

“I think I’ll go to town,” he said.

“Why?”

“I want to buy me a horse.”

She gave him a list of things she needed arid walked with him to the edge of the yard. She watched until he was out of sight, then returned to the kitchen. Her hands trembled as she busied herself with her work. She knew why he was buying the horse. He would need a horse to travel west.

Sidney came into the kitchen while she was washing the lunch dishes. He sat down at the table. He was rested and sober and he no longer thought about the streets paved with gold. He edged near her as she worked. Nearer and nearer he came until he grabbed her around the waist. She pushed him away.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

“Let me alone and there won’t be nothing the matter with me,” she answered.

He backed away sullenly and sat down on the floor. He stared at her for several minutes, his face flushed and his eyes bright.

“Come on. Hannah,” he begged. “Let me have it.”

“The ‘it’ I’m going to let you have ain’t going to be the ‘it’ you’re asking for if you don’t let me alone.”

“What’s the matter with you, anyhow?”

“Ain’t nothing the matter with me that you getting off of that floor out of my way wouldn’t cure.”

She walked by and he reached out for her, his small hands tugging at the hem of her dress.

“What you got it for, I want to know? What do you think I married you for?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. Get out of my way.”

“Look here, Hannah! Look here!” he shouted as he took down his pants and rolled on the floor.

“You look. I’ve seen it before.”

“You ain’t the only one, you know that?”

“You think I care?”

“Others don’t think it’s so bad.”

“Others can think what they want to.”

“How come you won’t? I ain’t asked you for it for weeks. What’s the matter with you now? It ain’t that bad, is it?”

“Who says it ain’t?” she asked. “How would you know? You ain’t me. You don’t know how bad it is!” He gave up the struggle and pulled up his pants.

“You bitch!” he shouted. “You goddamn bitch of a whore. You hear that, Hannah?”

“I heard you! You shut up that kind of talk – you hear?”

“You shut up that kind of talk, you hear?” he mimicked.

“What you going to do about it if I don’t, you slut! What kind of wife are you? You whorey bitch!”

“What kind of wife do you want me to be?” she asked, shouting.

“One who will give me my rights.”

“Your rights! Your rights! Don’t you think I’ve got any rights?”

“What do you want that you ain’t got?”

“I want things that you ain’t never even thought about – that you don’t even know about.”

“What kind of Goddamn things you want?”

“You wouldn’t know what I was talking about if I told you. It’s beyond your understanding to know about decent things – decent living.”

He glared at her. “I know what you want! I’ve seen it – the way you look at him!”

“That’s a lie!”

“Then if it ain’t him, who is it? Who do You want if it ain’t him or me? You come on in my room and I’ll show you what you want. I’ll show you it’s just the same. There ain’t but one way about it.”

“You shut up! Is that all you can think about?”

“Come on, Hannah,” he begged reaching for her.

“Keep your hands off me!” she shouted. “I’m warning you not to touch me!”

“Not to touch you! Woman, you are my wife. You know what that means? That means I can do what I want with you and you ain’t got nothing to say about it. Don’t go getting none of them Goddamn lady airs with me. You ain’t nothing but a dumb, damn slut who was lucky enough to marry me. You ain’t nothing. What you say don’t mean a damned thing. What makes you think what you got is so precious, anyhow, that you can tell me I can’t have it? What I was willing to give you any other woman would be glad to have. You hear that? I can have any woman I want no matter who she’s married to.”

“Just old Maggie Marie!”

“She’s a lot more woman than you are! She knows how to treat a man. I’ll show you someday who I can get and then you’ll come to me begging for it. I won’t spit on you then, you hear? I won’t spit on your precious ass.”

“What’s all the shouting about?” Old Lute asked, holding to the door.

“You get out of here you old son-of-a-bitch,” Sidney yelled.

“You let him alone,” Hannah said.

“You whore! Don’t you tell me what to do, you whore! I’ll beat the hell out of both of you!”

“You won’t beat nobody!” Hannah said as she picked up the long butcher knife from her work table. “You hit either one of us, and I’ll kill you.”

“You make me want to puke. You won’t do nothing with that knife.” He grabbed a dish from the table and threw it at her.

It crashed against the wall over her head. He rushed past Lute and pushed him against the door. Hannah put the knife on the table. She stared at it, her hands shaking. Old Lute looked at her quietly for a minute and returned to his room without speaking.

As Hannah moved about the room, her mind was numb. She tried to forget the distasteful scene as she walked to the well for water. She looked down into the narrow opening, wondering at the sensation of falling into its dark depths.

She returned to the kitchen, oddly refreshed and de cisive. She would keep her body. She would never again allow him to touch her. Never again would she feel dirty and beg God to wash her clean after her husband was through with her. She was no longer afraid. She would fight him, even kill him, as she had been ready to do that morning. How simple life would be, she thought, if he were dead.

In his room, Sidney removed his clothing and threw himself across the cot. The woman had taken his manhood and turned him into a shell. She was a witch. He snatched the bedding from the cot and threw it on the floor. Someday he would get her in the room and lock the door. When old Lute died and that damned Calif was gone. He would tear her dress from her body as he had done that first night and make her scream.

He remembered their wedding day with an evil pleasure.

How she had cried and pleaded! He had grabbed her dress at the neck and ripped it from her, and she had clung to a small scrap and cowered in shame. What a miserable bitch he had married. Had she been one of the whores he knew in St. Louis, she would have laughed with him and they would have lain together and frolicked in the excitement. She would have kept him a man.

But he had married a witch and she had taken his manhood away from him and denied him the satisfaction of fatherhood.

Not that there wasn’t a possibility that he was a father. He had been sixteen when his father first took him to Maggie Marie’s.

His father had gone to bed with her first and had told him to watch. He remembered it now. Then he had done it, while his father watched. When Maggie’s youngest daughter was born he wondered if it was his daughter or his sister, not that it made any difference. But she had been born at just the right time to be one or the other.

He often thought about it when he saw her.

He thought of that time and, to persuade himself that he was still a man, he caressed his body with both his hands and found gratification. Then he slept, his mouth open, snoring loudly.

Late that afternoon Calif returned to the farm. Hannah heard the hoof-beats and rushed to the back porch. Calif rode up sitting high on his new horse, but his face did not wear the look of pride that she had expected. He dismounted and tied the horse to a porch rail.

“He’s beautiful,” she said.

“It’s not a he, it’s a her,” he said, smiling.

“Did you have to pay too much for her?”

“No, they give me a good buy.”

“What are you going to call her?”

“Shine, I think. She does shine, don’t she?”

“Yes. She’s a real pretty horse.”

“Hannah,” he said. His face was troubled.

“What is it? Is something wrong?”

“It may be. Come on in the house and I’ll tell you about it.” She followed him into the house. She tried to think of what could be wrong. Fear gripped her throat. Maybe he had not been released from prison at all, maybe he had escaped.

He put the cloth sack of supplies on the table.

“We’d better go in Lute’s room. He ought to hear it, too.” Lute was waiting for them. He had heard Calif ride up and heard them talking.

“What’s wrong, son?” he asked.

Calif sat down. He looked at neither of them as he spoke.

“In town,” he said, “in town they’re saying bad things about us. About me and Hannah.”

Hannah gasped and put her hands to her mouth.

“What made something like that get started?” Lute asked.

“I don’t know, but I got a good idea.”

“How?” Hannah asked.

“That preacher. And him,” He pointed to Sidney’s room.

“Yes,” Lute said, “that was what he meant when he said he’d fixed you.”

“That was it,” Calif said.

“How did you find out?” Hannah asked.

“Well, the cattle buyer kept looking at me funny so I finally just come right out and asked him what was wrong. Then he told me. He heard it just this morning. His wife heard it from the school teacher last night.”

“Then it must be all over the county!” Hannah exclaimed.

“It is. I went into the store to buy the supplies and when I walked by a bunch of men they started laughing. I figured there wasn’t no use starting something with the whole bunch of them so I let it go. Then in the store the storekeeper’s wife wouldn’t wait on me. I had to wait for him to come in.”

“It must have been awful.”

“I didn’t much care what they said because not none of it was true. But it made me mad just the same, them talking about you like that. I thought about stopping at that preacher’s house and beating the hell out of him but I didn’t.”

“What are we going to do?” Hannah asked.

“There ain’t nothing you can do about it. Calif, best you stay away from town. Ain’t no use asking for trouble,” Lute said.

They sat silent for awhile, looking at the floor. Then Calif went outside to put his horse in the barn. He was proud of her. The horse was his first possession.

Later, after supper, he gave Hannah the little sack in his pocket. She opened it and took out the red hair ribbon that had resulted in a knowing sneer from the storekeeper when he bought it. Pretty things were few and far between on the farm. She felt a lump in her throat when she thanked him for it. Later, when she tried it on before the mirror in her room her eyes were bright with tears.

CHAPTER XII

The days that followed were hot and humid and they slipped by without a break in the monotonous routine of the farm.

The preacher had not been back and Sidney had only his nightly treks to Maggie Marie’s for diversion. In the daytime he stayed in his room, exhausted by the heat and the stillness of the house. He was too tired to care that his body and the room reeked of his sweat.

In the fields and at the barn Calif worked shirtless, his broad shoulders tapering down to his narrow waist, encased in a wide, black belt at the top of his trousers. The laying-by had been completed and now he, as well as Lute, waited for the harvest. He found work mending the fences and the old barn.

He was always near the house and the woman worked in the comfort of his nearness. She often watched him at work on the barn top; his tanned body, wet with perspiration, glistened in the sun.

The preacher had no qualms about returning to the farm but he had been occupied with a revival at his, church and had not found time to call on Sidney. This August morning he walked briskly in a direct path down the road to the farm. He would call on Brother Sidney this morning and refuel the Lord’s side of the struggle for the possession of his immortal soul. He was sure the devil had made gains in his absence.

As he neared the farm, he saw Calif working on the barn roof, his bare back the symbol of proof of what Sidney had told him and he had told the village.

“As I walk in the shadow–” he began, as he entered the house without knocking.

Hannah was standing by the window, her gaze intent upon the barn roof and Calif. The roof was steep and the footing dangerously sloping.

“Sister Hannah Brenshaw!”

Hannah, startled, turned in surprise. “Mr. Hanson! I didn’t hear you come in!”

“I can see that, Sister. How can you stand here under your husband’s roof and look at that naked man’s body out there?”

“You don’t…” she began. Then her face turned red as she remembered the rumor that he had started.

“You evil minded old bastard!” she shouted. “Go get your friend. Get him and get out of here!”

“Sister,” he threatened, “the devil has you his hand. There is no salvation for you. You will be damned to the eternal fires of hell!”

“I said get out!” she shouted and ran into Lute’s room.

Sidney, hearing the preacher’s voice, rushed into the kitchen.

“Brother Brenshaw,” the preacher said, “I was just warning your wife of the wages of sin. She is a sinful woman.”

“I know it,” Sidney smiled smugly. It made him happy to hear her being scolded.

“We must take our walk in the Lord’s wood now, Brother. Get from the temptations of the devil.”

They left the farmhouse, Sidney following happily, and walked slowly around the ridge into the thick woods They sat down far back of the fields. Sidney’s cunning mind had been hard at work during the long walk.

“Brother Hanson,” he said, “I’m saved. I know it. I feel it inside me. It’s like a light’s been glowing in my innards.”

“Do your arms and legs tingle all over when you think of it?”

“Hell, yes! Yes, sir, I feel happy all over. I feel like goin’ out and tellin’ the world about it. Just tellin’ everybody, no matter who. I want to spread the word.”

“Yea, Brother,” intoned the preacher, “you have surely seen the light. It has come to you like a beacon through the shadows the devil cast on your home.”

Sidney paused, weighing his next words carefully.

“Brother! Do you know old Maggie Marie?”

“I seen the poor devil on the streets.”

“You ever seen her daughters?”

“That woman has children?”

“Yes, sir! One about fourteen and the other about sixteen.”

“The Lord’s burdens are heavy. It saddens me to think of children with a mother like that.”

“Me, too,” Sidney said, sighing gustily.

“Brother Brenshaw, how far does she live from here?”

“About a mile, back through the pass.”

“Why don’t we take the Light to them?”

“Now, that was just what I was thinking. That surely was.”

“It will be a great day for the Lord, saving that woman and her brood.”

They walked through the woods, bent on two entirely different errands.

The house they came to was large and old and squatted high on a hillside encased in a grove of trees. It was flanked on either side by mud chimneys, and through the center ran a wide, open hallway. Two rooms lay off each side of the hall.

The yard was littered and weed-grown and two old hound dogs lay in the shade of the porch.

As they approached, one of the daughters peeked around the corner of the porch; then, as they walked into the yard, she scampered into the house.

Sidney and the preacher were met on the porch by Maggie Marie and her two daughters. Maggie Marie was plump and tall. She towered over both of them and the little preacher, looking up, studied her carefully. She was barefoot and wore a faded, soiled yellow dress. Her bosom was heavy and low and above the open collar of her dress, her neck was red, thick, and ringed with sweat. Her face was framed by lank black hair that hung to her waist. She held her hands clasped in front of her fat belly and stared at the preacher. One of the daughters was tall and thin, with perhaps an inch of sparse, kinky hair. Her face was blank and expressionless. The other was a dwarf with an extraordinarily pretty face.

Maggie Marie spoke, her voice loud and coarse.

“Howdy, Sidney. You back again?” Not expecting an answer she turned to the preacher. “Howdy, Brother Hanson, you at work saving souls today?”

“Yes, Sister, I–”

“Come on in the house. Clara Bell, you run and fetch the menfolk some fresh spring water.”

The taller girl took the oaken bucket from a table at the end of the porch and ran down the hill toward the spring while the others entered the house. The room they entered was much like the outside of the house – old and bare. A large fireplace dominated the center of the room. Several horsehair chairs sat around it. On a table near the wall lay a dust covered Bible and an old cracked toilet ensemble.

“Preacher,” Maggie Marie said, “you see my Bible over there on the table? I read in it most every night.” Sidney giggled. The preacher looked from him to the woman.

“You do, Sister?” he asked.

“Yes I do, and if it weren’t so goddam far to town I’d be bringing my gals to church, too. They ain’t never been in a church house.”

“That would be wonderful. It would be a fine day for the Lord.”

“It’s a good thing,” she said, “religion. Ain’t enough of us people out here in the country got a chance at it.”

“True! Sister, true,” pealed the little preacher.

“It ain’t often we get to see a man o’ God out here, and you always looked too busy to be bothered with the likes of us when I saw you to town.”

“I ain’t never too busy to see them that needs me,” he said.

She mistook his words for a compliment and coyly, lowered her eyes.

“It ain’t that I didn’t want to talk to you, Brother Hanson, but I was afraid I wasn’t good enough to be talking to a preacher.”

“God lives in me, Sister, and before God you’re as good as anybody.”

She thought of the pious, tired looking woman that she knew to be his wife and asked, “Does the Lord think I’m as good as Mrs. Sister Hanson?”

“Why, yes,” he answered weakly.

The taller daughter looked at Sidney and giggled. The younger one stared intently at the preacher.

“What’s their names?” the preacher asked.

“That one looking at Sidney like he’s a piece of candy is Clara Bell and the other one looking at you is Eula.”

“What’s she looking at me like that for?”

“She likes you. When any menfolk come around that she takes a hankering to she just sits there and looks at them. She don’t talk much. She can’t. But it’s been said that she can make some right pretty sounds once you get to know her,” After that she sat rocking for awhile. She decided that possibly his call might not be purely a professional one. She looked at Sidney who had grinned constantly since they’d arrived.

“Is it me or my daughters you come to see?” she asked the preacher.

“You mostly, Sister, but hearing about your daughters from Brother Brenshaw here is what made me come.” She looked at him and smiled and he smiled back.

“You sure don’t look like no tom-cat,” she said, “but if you come out here on account of anything Sidney told you, you sure must be. But I don’t think you ought to go bestowing your favors on my daughters just cause they’re younger than their old ma. Being the lady of the house, I feel I ought to come first.”

He stared at her for a minute, confused. Then he looked at Sidney and back to her. “The Lord will take care of his own,” he said.

“That’s the truth. If the Lord ain’t going to do it, who is? The way some people act, you’d think it was shameful to use what equipment the Lord give us.”

“That’s true, Sister,” the preacher said.

“My lands, Preacher! I never! I ain’t never had no preacher over here before. I never thought I would live to see the day I’d be doing it with one.”

“Doing what, Sister?”

“Well, you ought to know that. Ain’t no use kidding about it.” She stood up. “You just come on across the hail with me,” she said.

“Woman, do I understand you?” he asked, standing up, his face angry.

“Now there ain’t no use you acting that way,” Sidney said. “That daughter of yours weren’t born of no virgin birth like you was talking about yesterday, was she?”

“No–” he said.

“Then what’s the matter with you?” Sidney asked.

“Well, I don’t know. I’m a man of God. It wouldn’t be right.”

“You’re still a man, ain’t you?”

“Yes. Oh yes, I am still just as much a man as the next one.”

“Then come on,” Maggie Marie said, taking him by the hand and leading him across the hall. He looked back at Sidney and giggled.

The dwarf made a gurgling sound as she stared at the preacher then lay down on the floor and started to cry.

“What’s the matter with her?” he asked uneasily.

“She’s jealous,” Maggie Marie answered.

“You mean she wants to–”

“Naw. She don’t like it. She just don’t want me to do it with you ‘cause she likes you.” She put her arm around his waist and led him into the room.

Sidney took the older daughter in his lap. She giggled and they fell to the floor. They were still on the floor, rolling and laughing when the preacher came back into the room followed by Maggie Marie. He stared at the floor, his face flushed crimson with embarrassment. He looked first at Sidney, and then at her.

“What’s the matter?” Sidney asked, sitting up on the floor.

The preacher stared out the window.

“What’s a concubine?” Maggie Marie asked.

“I don’t know. What is it, Brother Hanson?” Sidney asked.

“It’s – it’s what she is!” he said, pointing an accusing linger at Maggie Marie.

“What the hell am I, then?” Maggie Marie asked.

“I know what it is!” Sidney shouted as he jumped up from the floor.

“What?”

“A fancy name for a whore. He told me one day. It’s from the Bible.”

“A whore! A whore!” She glared at the preacher. “You got a lot of gall calling me a whore. You sure got a lot of gall. You don’t even as much as say thank you before you start preaching and calling me a whore!”

“Mama, what’s a whore?” Clara Bell asked.

“You shut up. And you get out of here!” she shouted at the preacher.

She sprang at him, her face dark with anger, and he rushed fugitively out the door, to the screams of the daughters. He ran down the hill, waving his arms and praying loudly for the Lord to bring immediate destruction on the house, Sidney, Maggie Marie and her daughters. The woman, who had chased him to the porch, watched him stumble and fall, get up, and disappear in the woods.

“What happened in there?” Sidney asked.

“What do you think happened?” She asked. “But then, after he got through, he started crying. Sat there and bawled. Then he started calling me a concubine and all them other things.” She stared at the bushes where he had disappeared.

“He shore took tail like lightning out of here, didn’t he? If you ever bring him back I’m going to wring his tail out like a wet bed-sheet, the mealy mouthed little son-of-a-bitch.” Then she and Sidney laughed. She slapped him on the backside and put her arm around his waist. As they reentered the house, Sidney had a sudden pang of guilt. He wondered if the preacher would be back.

The dwarf stood at the door, her finger in her mouth, staring into the woods where the preacher had disappeared.

CHAPTER XIII

Late that night Sidney returned to the farm, drunk from the raw moonshine that Maggie Marie kept in bountiful supply.

He woke Hannah, stumbling through the hall.

“Who is it?” she called, startled.

“Who in hell do you think it is?”

“Oh – you. Go to bed before you wake up the house. We have to work tomorrow. We can’t lay in bed all day the way you do.”

“You shut up. Did Brother Hanson come by here?”

“Where did you lose him?”

“That ain’t none of your business. Did he come by here?”

“No. He ought to know by now that you’re the only one welcomes him around here. Did you take him to Maggie Marie’s?”

“You shut up, I said.”

“You did!” She laughed. “You took him over there and he run off and left you!”

He went into his room and closed the door. Hannah could hear him, after a while, retching on the floor. She shuddered, got up, and locked the door. Back in bed she pulled the sheet over her head, trying to shut out the sounds from his room.

Sidney was so drunk that the room spun around him. He could feel a fit coming on. He was filled with remorse over the treatment of Brother Hanson. The cot would not be stilled so he threw one leg over the side to hold it down. His foot slipped into the retch.

“Goddamnit!” he shouted.

“What’s wrong now?” Hannah asked.

“Come in here and clean up this floor,” he demanded.

“Clean it up yourself.”

“I wish I stayed over at Maggie Marie’s.”

“I wish so, too.”

Damn her, he thought, damn her. He should have stayed at Maggie Marie’s. She was a good woman to be around. She would have bathed his head with cloths. She would have rubbed him and fed him coffee. Sleep was a long time coming as he pitched drunkenly in his bed, thinking about Maggie Marie and worrying about the preacher.

On the back porch, Calif had heard him come in. He had listened to them, waiting. He was ready to spring out of bed at the first sound of trouble, ready to defend her. God, he thought, how he hated him. He lay feeling his muscles ache from the day’s labor. His body was tired but, when the house quieted, his mind was at peace. It was good for a man to labor in the field and become tired from his labors, to stretch out here on the porch and look at the stars overhead, to go to sleep counting them and thinking about the woman, to wake up and find a new day.

The golden days and dark blue nights of late summer flowed into a golden autumn. The scurry of the wood animals’ preparation for winter was apparent on the farm and the man in his murky room became lonely for company. He was completely ignored by the others. By Hannah and Calif, and old Lute lay in his bed, watching and waiting for them.

Sidney took no part in their conversations or their work. He refused to help even now that times were busy. It was their harvest, not his.

He took long walks alone, not content to spend the days in his room as he had done before Brother Hanson came. He would walk to the crest of the mountains and stare longingly down at the village. Sometimes Hannah would give him money, other times he would take it when she was out of the house. He would buy a bottle or a jug from Maggie Marie and sit there on the mountain with it. Some day, he thought, he would be a big man and they would take their hats off to him in the village. Already they were talking about what a sinful woman Hannah was. Some day, when he did something big, he would make her come to his bed. He would make her beg for all the times she had turned him away. Then he would beat her – and he would kill Calif. When old Lute died, he would kill Calif. And later he would kill Hannah too.

Didn’t everybody know that she was an unfaithful wife. The preacher had told him how the folks in the village were shamed by it. They would not blame him for killing her, or both of them. He smiled as he thought about it.

And in the days that followed, his attitude toward the others changed. He was cordial, he even made a few half-hearted attempts at friendliness, as he cunningly laid his plans for their future. He often asked after old Lute’s health and concealed his disappointment because there were no changes for the worse.

One day the little preacher returned. Sidney met him in the yard with his eyes downcast.

“Good morning, Brother Sidney,” said the preacher.

“Good morning, Brother Hanson. Look, Brother Hanson, about that last time–”

“You don’t have to explain to me. I’ve thought it over. The flesh is weak. What I done there that day was a sin. But God understands and he forgives sins of the flesh. That day I runned. I runned until my breath wouldn’t let me run no more. What I done was a sin but it was a sin of the flesh – a little sin. Running was the big sin.”

“You mean Maggie Marie is the devil?”

“The devil is in her. She is one of his angels. I carry the Message and I deserted that day. But I have begged God’s forgiveness and He has forgiven.”

“Has he forgive me?”

“I doubt it. But I have come to give you the comfort of the Lord. And when you are forgiven we will take it to Maggie Marie.”

Sidney smiled and followed him down the road. He was thankful for company again and later as they sat resting up on the ridge he told him how glad he was to have him back.

“When are we going to take the Message to Maggie Marie?” he asked.

“Directly. Don’t be in a hurry. Was she very mad at me for what I said to her that day?”

“Little bit. But she’s likely over it by now.”

CHAPTER XIV

Cool, brisk days replaced the hot, humid summer and it was harvest time. With the coming of cool weather the old man’s spirits rose to heights he had not known in months. Not since the death of his wife had there been such a harvest. The corn was higher than Calif’s head and the hay was golden brown.

He got up and walked around the house and even found strength to walk to the fields and sit in the shade and watch Calif and Hannah at work. They worked from daybreak to twilight, only occasionally pausing to wipe the sweat from their brows.

Here, out in the open, away from the house with its bleak air of desolation and the cold, clammy presence of illness, Lute felt free and at ease. Watching the young people work, he no longer thought of death. They went so fast down the rows of corn, these two in the prime of their lives. It was good to watch them. They talked as they worked but he was too far away to hear them. It was best, he thought, not to hear what they said.

Far down the field. Calif and Hannah had grown silent. It was better this way, Calif thought, without the uneasy conversation. Without words he could reach out to her in his mind and she was there waiting for him, and their thoughts ran in unison. But with the sound of her guarded voice, the chain was broken and he lost the bond with her. She smiled often now. He would speak of pleasant things and she would laugh with him happily. He would talk of the crops and she would listen intently. It was a strange new feeling, being close to her, to have her look at him and listen to him as he spoke.

He had never known the pleasure of a woman’s nearness before. He had never felt the sensation of having a woman brush him lightly on the arm as she worked beside him.

A happiness that intensified each day filled his body. Each day when the sun sank behind the mountains and it was time to return to the house he became sad. He wanted to ask her to stay there with him. To stay and talk and to listen to him talk.

His eyes were constantly on her, watching her hair shining in the sun and the wind caressing her dress. Then his thoughts were calm and he worked hard, content in her nearness.

Life was good to him here, he thought, and he no longer dreamed of Texas and the big plains beyond the mountains.

The emptiness in him had been filled with the woman. And he knew that in his heart it was right.

At supper that night he was looking at her and old Lute saw him. Later when they were alone the old man asked him about it.

“You still making up your mind?” he asked.

“About what?”

“About Hannah. Have you decided it’s right yet? You take enough time to be sure, that I give you credit for.”

“I don’t know yet,” he lied. And Lute knew he was lying.

He lay in his bed that night wondering what he was going to do about it. He wondered if she felt it too. He was afraid to tell her about it, afraid that she did not want to know. He no longer thought of Sidney as her husband. He was just a man who lived here, an obstacle but an unimportant one.

But to Hannah Sidney was not an unimportant obsta cle. She felt Calif’s love too, now, more than ever and she knew that the time was approaching when a decision must be made.

There would be no reason for Calif staying on after another month. And she knew Sidney. She knew he was up to something with his cunning smiles and sudden friendliness.

She waited alone and afraid.

CHAPTER XV

It was a quiet hazy Sunday morning and Hannah was still in the kitchen. Her work had gone slowly that morning and she was hurrying to complete it, to get to the field – and to Calif.

Sidney was still sleeping when Brother Hanson arrived.

“Good morning, Hannah,” he said. He had not called her “Sister Hannah” since that day she told him to go to hell.

“Good morning, Mr. Hanson,” she said coldly.

“Where are the others?” he asked.

“Sidney is in his room sleeping like he always is this time of day.”

“I mean Brother Lute and that man.”

‘Uncle Lute is sleeping. He ain’t feeling so good again.”

“Where is he?”

“Calif is in the fields working just like he is every other day. What do you want to know so much for all of a sudden?”

“In the field! You mean that man is in the field on the Sabbath? The heathen! He’s going to lead you all to doom.”

“He may be a heathen but then so are a lot of what you call your fold. Come harvesting time I can think of a lot of them that do their work on Sunday and if they ain’t doing that they are doing things a lot worse. Anyway how come you ain’t in church preaching if it’s Sunday?”

“This is the fourth Sunday. If you knew the first thing about the church, Hannah Brenshaw, you’d know that this is the Sunday we let the Methodists use the church.”

“How much do they have to pay you for that act of brotherly love?”

“The Lord be with you and your evil ways, Hannah Brenshaw. Of course Brother Sidney is keeping the Sabbath.” Hannah glared at him. “If you mean he ain’t working, you’re right. If you keep the Sabbath by not doing nothing then he’s kept it every blessed day of his life.”

“That wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about anyway. Me and Brother Sidney has talked it over and he’s going to join the church.”

“That figures.”

“Hold your sinful tongue, woman. You’d do a lot better for yourself if you spent some time in the Lord’s house instead of doing the things you do!”

“Exactly what do you mean by that?” she asked, placing her hands on her hips.

“You know what I mean. The whole town knows it. They’re all talking about you and him you got working for you. At least that is all what he’s supposed to be doing for you.”

“And who started that lying dirty rumor?”

“It ain’t no rumor. It’s the truth.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I said it was.”

She glared at him. She wanted to curse him, tell him that he was a liar. She hated him so much she was tempted to attack him with her bare hands. She thought of spitting on him but turned and ran from the house instead. He stared after her and then went to awaken Sidney.

Hannah walked into the hayfield where Calif was working.

Her jaw was set and she gritted her teeth trying to hold back the tears.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“That damned preacher again. He accused me of – of–”

“About us?” he asked and was immediately sorry. He quickly returned to his work. They worked hard in the hot autumn sun, neither of them speaking. At noon Hannah went to the house, fed Lute and returned with their lunch.

They ate sitting on the fresh cut hay. She uncovered the food and handed it to Calif. Her hand brushed his and his cheeks reddened as he looked away quickly, across the fields. They said nothing. They did not talk of the morning’s work as they usually did at lunch.

He turned to her and she quickly looked at the sky.

He watched her eyes, so soft and hazy grey. He remembered how they had looked the night he had first come to the farm.

The bitterness in them had now been replaced with tenderness. She turned to him and a quiver passed through her body; he hastily averted his face. High overhead the first of the geese flying south honked a warning of the coming winter.

They sat thus in silence, the woman staring at the man unashamed and the man gazing into the field, feeling her eyes upon his face. His fingers pulled nervously at the hay beneath his body, and his eyes followed the wind as it rippled across the field. He turned finally and looked at her. He looked at the shining hair and the tanned face. Her shirt was open low at the neck, revealing the whiteness of her breast. She smiled self-consciously and his heart pounded violently.

Her body felt cool and rested in the hot sun and she put her hand to the open collar of her shirt. Still, she could not hold back the nervous smile. He was staring at her, thoughtfully, tenderly. She could not speak and bridge the gap between them. She wanted to reach out and stroke his arm. She wanted to hold him dose to her, to possess him completely.

Calif, too, wanted to touch her, hold her. He wondered if she was looking at him only with friendship. He didn’t think so but he was afraid of what might happen if he was wrong. He wondered if he dare reach out, dare gamble and, perhaps, lose this moment forever.

Hannah spoke, her voice eager but distant, “Ain’t it lonely for you, Calif, being without folks? Without anyone?”

“Sometimes,” he answered, relieved that she had broken the silence. “Sometimes it’s very lonely, but I’ve got the work and Lute and–”

“And what, Calif?”

“I like to think – I mean, we’re friends, too.”

“Yes.” After a moment she went on. “Is that enough for you, Calif? Just having friends? It’s not enough for me – there should be more.”

And he knew there should be more for him. His heart told him it was right to have more. She was looking at him now, directly into his eyes. She was no longer smiling. He wanted to turn away again but he dared not.

“I–” he began, “Do you mind – I mean, do you think it would be right if I kissed you?”

“Did you ever ask a woman if you could kiss her?” Hannah asked.

“I never kissed a woman before,”

“Never? You mean you never have?”

“No,” he said, twisting the hay he held in his hand. He glanced away for a moment and then quickly looked at her again. She got up on her knees and took his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips lightly.

She was so near, staring into his eyes, that he could smell the warmth of her body. He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her to him. His lips sought hers, hard and hungry. He kissed her hard again and again. The weight of his body pushed her back into the hay.

“Oh, God, I’ve wanted…” she whispered.

“Me, too,” he said. “Me, too.”

“I didn’t think you ever would.”

“I was afraid to. I was afraid it would make you mad.”

“Do I act mad now?” she asked.

He put one arm around her waist and stroked her hair with his other hand. “Am I hurting you?” he asked.

“Are you sure? I’m heavy.”

He felt her woman softness beneath his body. At first he was self-conscious, trying to hold his weight off her but as she pulled his head down and kissed him again and again – his lips, his eyes, his chin, the shame disappeared and was replaced by a wonderful dizziness that he had never known before. He grasped her body tightly, feeling the wonder of her nearness. He rubbed his face against her cheeks as he had long dreamed of doing and felt the enticing demand of unsatisfied desire. Her body was warm and alive and all the nights of lying alone on his cot were forgotten.

“I love you,” he whispered.

“I wanted to hear you say it for so long,” she answered, her fingers caressing his back.

He could feel her body under him now, as he traced her breast with his fingers. As he stared into her eyes she held him close.

“Would it be right if we…” he began.

“Yes, oh God, yes,” she whispered hoarsely.

They became lost in each other. In the field they were a part of it, the trees, the hay and the earth. Again he tasted her lips, her neck, and finally, her breast. Her body was warm and alive and he was engulfed in its warmness. He felt her fingers digging into his back.

Later they strolled hand in hand to the creek and bathed together in a pool of its cool, clear water. Now the words came easy where before they had been halting and hard to find. They sat beside the pool and watched the ripples on its surface. She held his big hand in hers and was not afraid anymore. She smiled and he smiled back at her. No thoughts of her husband came to her.

But Calif was thinking about him, still, when they returned to work. Once more he felt as if he were behind bars of a prison. The woman was not his. He could not take her away and he knew that she would never leave old Lute, nor did he want her to. Again he was shackled to a burden that could not be thrown aside. But this time it was not like before. He must think of her first, do what was best for her. He could kill Sidney – and be sent back to jail. Somehow he would find another way.

They worked side by side in the field once again, stopping frequently to hold each other and wonder over their new-found marvel. Later, as the sun sank toward late afternoon, she put aside her rake, looked at the sky and smiled at him.

“Let’s go back to the pool,” he said, and took her hand in his.

At the pool they sat down on the soft moss. He took her in his arms. She pulled his head down and pressed her lips to his. They were not lonely anymore. They would never be lonely again.

CHAPTER XVI

Sidney had gone into town with the preacher in the afternoon.

He returned in high spirits. He had walked with the preacher in the village and the men loitering on the boardwalk had tipped their hats as the pair passed by. It made him feel proud.

He had been taken into the preacher’s house and the wife and the daughter had been kind to him. The wife had asked about his health and the farm. He told her of his plans for making the farm prosperous and she had listened with interest and respect. He would return to the village the next morning and he could hardly contain his happy anticipation of another day in town.

They were all in the kitchen when he arrived, singing. He was intoxicated with self-esteem.

“Where you been?” Hannah asked, as she began putting supper on the table.

“To town.”

“You been to town lots of times,” Lute said, “but you never come home singing before.”

“Today was different. I went to town a Christian, with Brother Hanson.”

“How come that makes it so different?” Lute asked.

“It does because when all them other people seen me they knowed I was a Christian and they took off their hats to me. I’m going back to town tomorrow and be a Christian some more. I am going to help Brother Han.. son work in the graveyard and we will make it real pretty. Then when all them other Christians see how pretty we made it they will be glad to take me in the fold.”

“Damned if he ain’t getting to talk just like that blasted little preacher,” Lute said to the others.

“That’s not all,” he said, “Mrs. Hanson is going to help me with my work when Brother Hanson is too busy saving the heathens.”

The three people at the table looked at each other, but made no comment.

“I ate at Mrs. Hanson’s,” Sidney said, “but all that walking made me hungry again. I’m going to eat here, too.” He sat down at the table smiling. He had a theory about Mrs. Hanson.

Throughout the meal Sidney bubbled with talk of his day. He was too busy bragging to notice the new radiance on the faces of Calif and Hannah. But the wise old eyes of Lute saw and knew the inevitable had happened.

Later he followed Calif to the back porch.

“You all get a lot of work done?” he asked. “When you was working?”

“Yes,” Calif said, “it was a good day.”

“I noticed as much on your faces at the table. By them cow eyes you and her was making at each other.” Calif felt his face burning. “Did Sidney see it, too?” he asked.

“He’s too busy with his own muddled thinking to notice what’s right before his eyes all these months. I’ve known it all along. Even before either one of you did. But it’s best you be careful.”

“What if he finds out? I’d have to kill him.”

“How’s he going to find out unless he catches you at something?”

“Maybe he can tell by just looking at Hannah. Just being around her.”

“Ha. He don’t know Hannah no more. And he don’t know that he don’t. For all he knows she’s the same wife he used to beat. He thinks she’s the same woman that was scared of him. She’s changed but I still know her. I knew this Hannah long before I knew the other one. She’s like she was before she ever got mixed up with him. She’s a strong woman now. You made her strong, son.”

“We’ll just have to be careful until we figure out what to do.”

“That’s the best thing. Go off in the woods when you’re at work and get it out of your system.”

They were quiet for a moment. Then Lute spoke, “Son?”

“What?”

“If you and Hannah want to run off over them mountains you used to talk about, go ahead.”

“We couldn’t ever leave you here with him. Hannah wouldn’t do it, and I wouldn’t let her if she would.”

“You got the money to do it in the bank. Someday if you decide to, just go ahead and do it.”

“She still wouldn’t anyway.”

“Why wouldn’t she?” Lute asked.

“Because of her principles. She’s still a married woman and she don’t think it would be right.”

“Her principles are too damn high where Sidney’s concerned.”

“I know it but you can’t tell her that.”

“If you take a notion to leave just leave. Make her go with you.”

“She wouldn’t ever do it and I don’t know if I’d want her to do it that way.”

“How come? You want Sidney to come with you? If you stay around here you’ve got him to contend with. You’ll just end up having to kill him. That won’t do nothing but get you right back in jail.”

“I know it. But I don’t know what to do,” Calif said sadly. “I just don’t. Give me a few days to think about it and I’ll come up with something.”

“Whatever you come up with I’ll help you as much as I can,” Lute said. “I’d better go to bed now. I ain’t feeling so good today.” He got up and walked to the door.

“Goodnight, son.”

“Goodnight.”

Calif went to bed too, a few minutes later. That night he slept soundly. The tensions of the past month had eased and the dreams that came to him were light and pleasant. Hannah, too, forgot her troubles and did not think of the man sleeping in the next room. It was if he did not exist, as if he had never existed.

The next morning Sidney got up early and returned to the village. He walked swiftly, eager to reach the preacher’s house and the company that awaited him there. He had been thinking about Mrs. Hanson. He laughed as he walked. The little preacher met him in the front yard.

“Good morning, Brother Sidney.”

“Good morning, Brother Hanson.”

“A bearer of sad news called at the Lord’s house this morning.”

“What was that?”

“Sister Hawkins over in Huntsville took real sick in the night and I’ve got to make the Lord’s call on her while there is still time. Brother Hawkins is a deacon in the Lord’s fold.”

“I’ll go with you. I’ll be glad to do that.”

“No, you stay here. Me and Sister Hanson has talked it over and she will carry on the Lord’s work with you.” Pausing, he turned to the house, “Lucy!” he yelled for his wife. “Lucy!”

“Yes?”

“Brother Sidney is here and it’s about time I got started. You go on and carry on the work with him while I’m gone just like I told you to.”

“I’ll be glad to do it,” she said eagerly. She secretly envied her husband’s ability to lead the congregation and felt sure she could do a better job than he did.

“Run in the house and fetch a Bible and you and him can sit out here on the front porch and pray.”

The woman went into the house and came back with the Bible. She sat down in the swing at one end of the porch.

Sidney pulled up a wicker chair and sat watching her. She was a small woman, not bad looking in the face, but skinny.

She wore a dress that covered her body completely except for her face and hands. He leaned back in his chair and daydreamed as he listened to her. He dreamed that he was in St. Louis sitting on the front porch of a large house with pillars. Inside he could hear the sounds of many servants moving about. The woman reading to him was young and beautiful. In a few minutes he was asleep.

In the field, Calif paused to wipe the sweat from his brow and drink from the water jug. He surveyed the work he had been doing that morning. They had already advanced far into the field. His body, awakened from loneliness, tingled with happiness. He could now stare at the woman in open admiration, and she returned his stares with the same ardor.

She walked near and he took her hand in his and fingered it, feeling it strong from work and yet soft. She reached up and ran her fingers through his hair.

He motioned toward the woods and Hannah followed him to the moss covered banks of the pool. They sat beneath the white maple with its golden leaves of autumn, enjoying the brisk, rushing air of the fall. He watched her as she stared into the shallow water. He felt the happy silence of the moment in his chest, his arms, and his legs. His entire body was caught up in the rapture of his first love. He stared at her, almost afraid to reach out and touch her, afraid she might blend into the beautiful colors of the season and vanish.

She turned and smiled and he reached out for her. He pulled her to him abruptly, demanding. He kissed her hard, pressing his lips to hers until she gasped in pain. Then he slowly lowered her to the moss. She was at first frightened at his roughness and then eager to receive him.

At the house that night the looks they stole were tender and unguarded but Sidney did not notice. He did not care to. His thoughts were on Mrs. Hanson. He did not brag of this day to the others as he had the day before. He would keep it to himself and never let them know. He looked forward to morning with the impatience of a child at the slow passing minutes. He hoped the preacher would still be away, that he would have another day with the wife alone. He liked to look at her and think. Soon he would talk to her of the things a woman liked to hear. He decided that the rewards of religion might well be worth while.

That night Sidney heard Hannah arise from her bed and leave the house through the front door. He got up on his elbows and called her name but she did not answer. He lay back down and fell asleep wondering where she had gone.

Calif was waiting for her on the back steps. She sat down beside him and together, in silence, they enjoyed the magic of the star studded sky. The hurrying sounds of the autumn night were all around them. The wind stirred the tall dry grass and the cattle stomped nervously in the barnyard. Calif whispered to her. They got up and walked out behind the barn.

“What are we going to do?” she asked, when they were out of earshot of the house.

“About what?”

“Him. If he ever finds out he’ll kill you or try to – both of us.”

“Maybe that would be good. If he ever tried anything like that I would kill him.”

“Don’t talk like that,” she said as she grasped his hand. “If you killed him they would put you in jail. Then I would be worse off than ever, loving you the way I do and being without you.”

She sat down in the dew covered grass on the little rise that overlooked the fields. Calif lay down and put his head in her lap.

“We could just run off someplace, out west like you want to,” Hannah said as she stroked his face. “I could have Uncle Lute get rid of the farm without letting him know about it and the three of us could just leave one day and he’d never know where we went.”

“No,” Calif answered. “He’d just follow us, if he didn’t find out about it beforehand. Besides I want you for my wife – my own. He ain’t got no right to you. He never had none. We’ll wait for another way. I’ll think of something.”

They were quiet for a while, each searching for a solution to their problems. Hannah still stared down into his face.

“I guess it would always be between us,” she said, “me being married to him. But we have to think of something soon. I don’t think I can stand much more of it.”

“I will. I’ll think of some way. But if he ever tries anything with you or finds out about us, I’ll have to kill him.” Hannah shuddered. “Do – do you mind?” she asked.

“Mind about what?”

“That I been married to him. That you wasn’t the first?”

“I don’t know. I never think about it. It ain’t as if you even loved him – like us.”

She lay down beside him and they fell asleep. It didn’t occur to them that they might be seen. They slept all night on the hard ground in the chilly air, comforted by each others presence. They awoke at the break of day. She rushed to the kitchen and prepared breakfast and Calif began his morning chores in the barn, waiting for her call to come and eat.

Later, at the table, Sidney fixed an unwavering stare at Hannah. He remembered hearing her leave the house the night before and he thought she had not returned. He did not question her but decided to follow her the next time.

CHAPTER XVII

Sister Hawkins did not die during the night as expected and Preacher Hanson was well on his way to Huntsville to visit her when Sidney arrived at his house. Elated at the prospect of spending another day alone with the preacher’s wife, he settled himself comfortably on the porch and waited for her to finish her chores.

Across the street, old Mrs. Smally was sweeping her yard.

When she saw Sidney she put down her broom and walked across the dusty road.

“Hey, boy,” she yelled as she walked. “The preacher ain’t to home.”

Sidney smiled at her absently. “I know,” he answered, “Why don’t you go back to your sweeping like you ought not to quit?”

“Don’t get sassy with me. What are you doing setting on his front porch if you know he ain’t home?”

“Waiting for Sister Hanson.”

“What are you waiting for her for?” she asked, moving nearer.

“She’s took up the Lord’s work with me.”

“You don’t say? Well, I always said that woman would of made a better preacher than what he is. A body can tell by looking at her housework and eating her cooking that she was more than likely cut out to be doing something else. Where is she?”

“In the house – she’s finishing up her work before we get started.”

“How’s old Lute?” she asked.

“All right. Not feeling so good but he’s still living.”

“Now I’m glad to hear he ain’t doing so bad, I really am. When a man gets his age its heartening to hear he’s doing well. You know I lost my mister two years ago come Christmas. I’m the Widow Smally now,” she said proudly.

“I heard about it.”

“I hear you got a young fellow working out there helping you out. Now that’s what you needed all the time. Some help on that big place. Old Lute being too old to work and you–” she caught herself just in time. “Who is this man you got working for you?” she asked.

“A city fellow from St. Louis or somewheres,” Sidney answered.

“Well, it ain’t none of my business but if I was you I wouldn’t be spending so much time away from home from what I’ve heard around.”

“Yes, Mann,” he replied, remembering the night before.

“Of course that’s just on my say. You ought to ask the men folk about it. Some of the things they are saying goes on at your house would burn the hair right oil your head.”

“I’ll ask them,” Sidney said.

“And it’s been said,” she paused and walked nearer, “of course it ain’t none of my business and you know more about it than 1 do, but with all that money old Lute has got stored away and him being so sickly, it’s best you look to your business out there.”

“How much – how much did you hear he had?” Sidney asked quickly.

“I don’t know, but I heard from the banker’s wife it was a heap. She told me he was doing some mighty funny things with it too, down at the bank. Don’t you know about it?”

“I know all about it,” he lied. “What kind of funny things?”

“She didn’t say. Myself, I don’t think she knew. But just the same if I was you I would be watching out for it and my wife. What does Hannah do out there all by herself all day, anyhow?”

“Works.”

“In the field? With that man? Well, I would just be careful if I was you before you lose your wife, which I heard you already done, and the money to boot.”

“I aim to do just that – that’s what I aim to do.”

“Well, if you got your bearings about you, you will and–” She stopped abruptly as the door to the house opened and the preacher’s wife walked out.

“Good morning, Sister Smally,” she said.

“Oh, good morning, Sister Hanson. Well, I got to get back to my yard. Young man, you just be careful about what I told you.”

Sidney spent the day with Mrs. Hanson on her front porch but he didn’t enjoy it as he had the day before. He kept thinking of what Mrs. Smally had said about Hannah and Calif. And he kept thinking about the money. Mostly the money. When the sun set he walked into the village, went directly to the saloon and quickly got drunk.

Towards nightfall the usual crowd of town loiterers came into the saloon. Only a few returned Sidney’s overzealous greeting. One of them, a large burly man with a heavy red beard, slapped him on the back.

“Well, if it ain’t old Sidney. I mean, Brother Brenshaw.” He turned to the group. “You hear that, boys? This here is ‘Brother Brenshaw’ now. He rides shotgun for the preacher!” The crowd laughed and Sidney turned pale. He smiled weakly and, assuming an air of nonchalance, said, “I come to find out what all the talk is about my wife.”

“You hear that boys!” the burly man shouted in glee. “He come to ask us about his wife. Man, from what I heard you ought to be asking about your wife at home. Ain’t none of us here the guilty party!”

The men slapped their thighs and banged their glasses on the bar as they roared their appreciation of this sally. Shaking, impotent with rage at their ridicule, Sidney pushed his way past them and sat down at a table at the far side of the room.

The burly man followed him.

“Now, Hutch Wiemer, you leave me alone!” Sidney yelled. “You hear me?”

“I ain’t gonna bother you. I was just gonna ask how come you got religion all of a sudden?”

“Yeah, how come?” another shouted.

“Your wife kick you out?” Wiemer asked. “From what I seen today, you must be trying to pussyfoot with the preacher’s wife.”

“You shut up!”

“Oh, so first you want our advice and then it's ‘shut up’. That ain’t going to do you no good.”

“You let me alone, Goddamnit!”

“Maggie Marie is wondering why you ain’t been to see her lately!” a man yelled from the bar.

“Bet you ain’t doing good with your wife now that Calif is keeping her out of heat. Man, I’ll bet they’re having some fun right now,” Wiemer said.

“You shut up, you hear!” Sidney was shaking with anger and saliva ran down his chin. Wiemer continued, slyly.

“You ain’t gonna get nothing from Mrs. Hanson. Don’t you know the preacher teached her better than that? Man, you’re just plumb out of luck all around. Maggie Marie says your credit ain’t worth a damn no more and she says you ain’t good enough for her to give it to you for nothing.” This brought howls of laughter from the crowd and Wiemer continued, “If I was you I’d run that city fellow off, that’s what I’d do.”

“Better watch out ‘fore he has a fit,” the man at the bar yelled.

“You gonna have a fit, Crazyloon?” Wiemer asked.

“Let me alone! I’ll show you. You just wait. I’ll show all of you,” he jumped up and ran from the saloon.

Late that night, he came into the house through the front door directly into the parlor. Hannah sat up in bed, pulling the covers up around her neck.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“You know what I want,” he answered sullenly as he walked to the bed and yanked at the blankets.

“Stop that! Want them to hear us fighting about that again?”

“I don’t give a Goddamn what they hear. They can come in here and watch if they’ve got a mind to; it’d do them good. Besides, I got something to ask old Lute anyhow.”

“Go to bed.”

“About the money,” he persisted. “All that money he’s got in the bank.”

“What money?” she asked, surprised.

“You know what money,” he accused. “That money he is doing funny things with.”

“What funny things? What are you talking about? Uncle Lute don’t have no money. If he did, it wouldn’t be nothing to you what he done with it.”

“It’s my business when he starts doing funny things with it. He’s trying to fix it where I can’t get it when he dies. That’s my business.”

“You shut up and go to bed,” she said, “you’re raving drunk.”

“You come in my room with me, if you don’t want them others to hear us. It’s been a long time since you come into my room.”

“I never did come into your room. I was drug in there and I’m not going to be anymore, you hear? Never again.” He grabbed her by the shoulders and she struggled to reach the knife she had hidden under the mattress. She hoped Calif would hear, and yet she was afraid of what would happen if he did.

“Let me alone!”

He held her with one hand and began pulling down his pants with the other. She reached the knife and pulled it out. He froze. Then, slowly he let go of her and backed away.

“Pull up your pants!” she said with disgust.

“I ought to puke on you!” he shouted from the doorway. “You let that Goddamn field hand top you in the bushes like any bitch dog and then you act so high and goody-goody with me. I’m your husband, woman, don’t you know that?”

“I know it. Oh, God, how I know it,” she cried but he was already outside, bound for Maggie Marie’s.

When she looked up Calif was standing at the door.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Sidney, he–”

“Did he try to–”

“Yes. He was drunk but I drove him off with the knife.” He took her in his arms and they sat without speaking, each wondering what they were going to do about Sidney.

“Calif,” Hannah asked suddenly, “Do you know anything about any money? Uncle Lute’s money?”

“No,” he lied. Old Lute had asked him not to tell her until he died. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Sidney was yelling something about some money.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said, Later, Calif lay in his bed and decided he would have to kill Sidney. He didn’t want to, he knew what would happen to him and to Hannah, but there was no other way. He would have to kill Sidney.

In his room, Lute rested comfortably on propped-up pillows and stared at the ceiling. He had been aroused from sleep by the shouting and he had listened to it, but he was beyond caring now. Death was in the room and Lute could feel its waiting presence. A few hours, maybe a few days and then, Lute knew, he would be gone. His life had been well spent and now it was almost over. It is only when death comes to a loved one, Lute thought, that it is frightening. Then we are heavily burdened with our loss and sorrow and fear, too, at the forecast of our own inevitable end.

He took a deep breath and went to sleep.

When he awoke he could smell ham frying in the kitchen.

“I wonder if they’ll have ham where I’m going?” he asked aloud.

“What did you say?” Hannah asked as she entered the room with his breakfast.

“Nothing. I was just talking to myself.”

“Only crazy people do that.”

“Crazy people and smart ones,” he replied cheerfully. “When you talk to yourself you don’t have to watch every damn word you say in fear of it being held against you.” She placed the breakfast on the table near his bed and put pillows behind his back so that he could eat in comfort. She watched him as he ate and returned to the kitchen.

“He looks bad, Calif,” she said, sitting across the table from him. “His spirits are high but he looks pale.”

“I’ll stick around close to the house today. Maybe I can keep him company some of the time.”

The next two or three days old Lute lay in his bed. Hannah cared for him tenderly, and once again Calif spent the long evenings talking to him, discussing at length the struggles and the good times of Lute’s youth, the farm as it used to be and the present crops.

The doctor came frequently and always left shaking his head sadly, sure the old man would die in his sleep before he could be summoned again. Even Sidney, between his daily trips to the preacher’s house, visited the old man and took an interest in his progress, or lack of it. He kept trying to find out about the money.

Lute lay in his bed, knowing he would never leave the room again, never walk the rows of his beloved fields or watch the trees on the hillside change colors. He watched Hannah and Calif with the look of sorrow in their eyes which shadowed the happiness of their love. He watched Sidney and knew he had learned something about the money and was trying to learn more. He thudded to himself.

The day was Sunday. Sidney arose early and left for the preacher’s house. Later in the afternoon Lute shooed Hannah and Calif out of the house. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts.

They sat at the edge of the wood on the mountain side, looking down into the valley. High overhead the arch of the sky formed half of a clear blue ball, brightened by the afternoon sun sinking behind the hills. They faced the sun and dreamed of the land beyond the mountain, of the plains neither of them had seen. Where there was a new land there could be a new life. Calif held Hannah’s hand tightly.

“Over there,” he said, “they take a man and his woman for what they are. They don’t care where they come from. They judge you by your works and your deeds. It’s a good, free place.”

“Someday we’ll go there, Calif, and you’ll work hard on your land and be a big man and I’ll work alongside you and keep your house and have our children. When we cross those mountains we’ll never look back on this place. We’ll start over, like we just met and nothing ever happened to us here before.”

“We’ll go as soon as Lute gets well so’s he can come with us,” he said. “I found out from the doctor that a divorce can be had out there without too much trouble and it’s legal too. It’s legal and right, Hannah, you know it is.”

“Uncle Lute will never go with us. He told me this morning he would never rise out of his bed again.” He held her close and they lay together quietly and it was as if they had become a part of the earth, a part of the stillness of the day. The lay on the land they wanted so desperately to leave and it held them and made a bed for them. Soon they would go, searching out a new life and new soil; new bodies would come and work and walk and sit and lay there where they had lain before on the silent land.

Lute called out for them and waited for an answer that did not come. The pains in his chest were frequent and indicative.

Death was at hand and he was afraid only that it would beckon before the others came and, again and again, he called for Hannah and Calif. Finally, he heard them moving in the kitchen and he called for them again but still no one came.

He realized his calls were hardly more than a whisper. With great effort he pulled himself up in the bed and pushed the bedside table to the floor. They heard the crash and rushed into the room.

“Uncle Lute!” Hannah screamed.

“The time is just about here, daughter.”

“Calif, go get the doctor! Hurry!”

Calif rushed out of the house and saddled his horse with trembling hands.

“It ain’t no use going after the doctor and bringing him way out here for nothing,” Lute said after Calif had gone. “You can’t borrow time from the Lord, no matter how many doctors you get. He gives when He’s a notion and He takes when He wants to but I ain’t never heard of him making no loans on life for money, doctors, or nothing else. It would be sinful for me to want more time anyhow.” Hannah started to interrupt but he held up his gnarled old hand. “Now you be quiet, Hannah. I ain’t got much time and there’s a few things I want to say. You got most of your life ahead of you, so do your talking after I’m gone. Now, first of all, the farm don’t belong to me no more.”

“You sold it? When? To who?”

“To old Cal Kent down at the bank three or four months ago. He didn’t give me but about half of what it’s worth but this way you’ll get that half. Soon as I die you go to see him, you and Calif. I got it all fixed for you.”

“What about Calif?”

“He’s known about the money all the time. I had some of it saved up – the rest come from the farm. It’s all in Calif’s name. I done that so Sidney can’t get his hands on a damn penny of mine to run off somewhere and throw away. He’s going to be so mad he can spit nails.”

“I don’t know what we’ll do about Sidney.”

“I don’t know either. Best thing is for you to go to the Sheriff. He’s a good man. Maybe they can put Sidney away at least until you and the boy is gone. But you’ll have to be careful. Him and that little preacher has got most of the town on their side by now. There ain’t no use just running away. He’d follow you and Calif would have to end up killing him.” He had a seizure of coughing and she squeezed his hand.

“About that preacher, Hannah–” he began. “I know I’ll have to be buried from that church, being as it’s the only one hereabouts. I want to be buried in the graveyard with the rest of my family.”

“I know,” she cried.

“Once that little bastard preacher gets up there over a body’s remains he’s likely to talk his fool head off. All that hogwash about me being in Heaven looking down on all of you. Beats me how he can tell you right to your face the day before you die that you’re going straight to hell and get up there for your burying and rave and rant about you being in Heaven. Maybe I’ll be up there and maybe I won’t. I ain’t never been so sure me and him was talking about the same place when we talked about Heaven anyhow. Once he gets your remains down there in front of him he’s going to jaw until the flies come to you.”

“I’ll ask him to make it short.”

“It ain’t that. I won’t be having to listen to it so I don’t care even if I do take pity on all them others that has to hear what a good life I led. What’s troubling me is that I don’t feel right about any send-off he’s liable to give me, the damned little ignorant two-face. I got a friend who made a preacher out of hisself in later life. He lived over in Springdale last I heard. I want you to send him a letter.”

He stopped, winded, and looked at her.

“Hannah, stop that bawling and listen to what I’m telling you.”

“I’m listening. I can’t help it.”

“You’d better help it. Ain’t nothing worse than having a woman crying over you when you’re trying to get ready to meet your Maker. My friend’s name is Henry Miller. He can read over me when he gets time to come to town. I think I’ll settle better in the soil that way. You write the letter and get it off on the morning stage.” He sank back into his pillows and she held his hand and prayed silently.

“Get me a drink of water, Hannah.”

He drank it slowly. “Nothing like a cool drink of water on this earth,” he said. He handed her the glass and lay back on the pillows, exhausted.

She held his hand until it grew cold.

CHAPTER XVIII

Hannah was still holding his hand when Calif arrived with the doctor. He rushed to the bedside and placed his hand on Lute’s brow. He pulled it away quickly and turned to the doctor, a look of defeat in his eyes.

“We’ve come too late,” he said.

“You can’t outride the Lord,” the doctor answered. “I guess it’s best, him not hanging on. I have a notion this is the way he wanted it.”

Calif gently pulled Hannah away. The doctor bent over the old man’s body for a moment, and then, with a sigh of regret, placed a coin on each of his eyes and pulled the sheet over his face.

“One time,” he said, “A long time ago I didn’t have any money. He gave it to me. I went to medical school on that money. If he hadn’t given it to me I would still be out on one of these hills plowing, still wanting to be a doctor.” He turned to Hannah, took her by the arm and led her into the kitchen, leaving Calif alone with his old friend.

He was stunned by Lute’s death and self-conscious of his grief. Not since the death of his mother had it come so near.

He sat by the bedside, bewildered, not knowing quite what to do. The doctor returned to the room after a few minutes.

“Calif,” he said, “he’d of wanted you to do his duties. I’ll stay with Hannah and heat you some water.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I can. I’ve never done it before.”

“You can. He’d of wanted you to.”

After the doctor left the room Calif picked up the body of the old man and placed it on the floor. He removed his clothing and took the sheets off the bed. Then he took them outside and burned them.

He reentered the house, stopped just inside the door and stared at Hannah sadly. Then he took a pail of water that the doctor had heated and went into Lute’s room. He bathed the old man, shaved him and dressed him in his Sunday suit.

Later he took the body and placed it on Hannah’s bed in the parlor and straightened up the room. Then he walked out the front door into the yard. The stars were shining bright and the night was cool. He sat thinking of old Lute and of his own mother. He smoked and remembered the goodness of the old man. Thinking about how he was not afraid of dying. He remembered how Lute once said that stars were the lights of angels. He looked at the stars and wondered if it was true. If so, one of them could be Lute now. He got up and walked to the door, stopped, turned around and walked around the house. He didn’t want to look at Lute’s body again.

Hannah had coffee on the table when he reached the kitchen.

The three of them sat down and slowly drank it, each staring at the table.

“How long after I left–?” Calif asked after awhile.

“I don’t know. About an hour, I guess. Maybe a little longer. He talked for a long time.”

“I rode as fast as I could.”

“I know,” she said, “there was nothing to be done. It was his time. He talked to me. He didn’t want me to talk – just listen. I’m glad I did. I tried to stop him from talking and make him rest but he knew what he wanted to say and he said it. He knew it was coming and he was ready for it.”

They all spoke in whispers, as if to speak any louder would disturb old Lute’s rest. Each question and each comment went unanswered for a few minutes as they thought about him.

Finally the doctor arose to leave.

“I best be getting back,” he said, “I’ll take care of things in town. When – when do you want the burying to be?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“So soon?”

“That is how he would have wanted it. He would want to be buried early in the morning. That was his best time of day. And he’d of wanted us to get it over with as soon as possible.”

The doctor walked to the door and, without looking back, closed it softly. Hannah went into her room and returned with pencil and paper and began writing.

“What are you doing?” Calif asked.

“Writing for one of his friends who is a preacher to come and say words over his grave. He asked me to. He told me about the money and the farm too, Calif. I’m glad.”

“The money is for you, Hannah. He only put it in my name for safe keeping.”

“I’m glad he trusted you,” she said. “He loved you, Calif.” Calif could not answer. The pain in his throat held back the words. She finished the letter and prepared supper for them.

As they sat eating they heard voices and the rattling of a rig and horses outside. Then they remembered that the doctor had been gone several hours.

Calif went to the door. It was Sidney with the preacher, his wife and child. They all entered the kitchen. The preacher bent on the duty of his profession, followed by his wife who hung behind timidly. Hannah greeted them, then began heating up the coffee.

The wife and daughter sat down at the table and stared around the room.

“Where is he?” the preacher asked in a shrill voice. Hannah did not answer but pointed toward the parlor.

“Come on, Brother Sidney, we’ll go in and pray over the remains of our dear departed.”

Sidney followed the preacher out of the room, trying hard to conceal his elation, but he was a little afraid to look at Lute’s body. He felt that the old man was watching him, that he could see through his thinly veiled pretense of sorrow, as he knew Hannah and Calif had.

In the kitchen Hannah poured coffee for the preacher’s wife and daughter. She looked at the child. She was a small skinny girl somewhat like her father. Hannah had never met the preacher’s wife and was surprised that she was not an ugly woman even if she did wear her air of meekness like a banner.

“I thank you for the trouble,” the preacher’s wife said as she drank the coffee. “It’s cold out and we need the warming up.”

“It ain’t much, Mrs. Hanson but I just didn’t cook enough supper for all of us. I can still cook something though it you all haven’t ate.”

“We ate already at our house,” she answered. “We thought – me and Bertha, here,” she said pointing to the child, “that we’d come along and keep you company. I know how lonesome it can be at a wake for a woman when she’s by herself.”

“Thank you. It was kindly of you.”

“It weren’t no bother. It’s the least we can do, praise the Lord.”

“I feel tired,” Hannah said, “now that it’s all over.”

“I know how you feel. Why don’t you lay down and get some rest. I’ll fix fresh coffee for the men folk.”

“No, I’ll just sit here and rest.”

The preacher’s wife took charge of the household and insisted that Hannah rest on the cot that Calif had brought in from the back porch. The impact of the first shock had worn off and now she felt only loneliness. She lay on Calif’s bed and softly cried herself to sleep.

Calif sat on the porch, watching the stars and thinking of his old friend. Then he took the lanterns from the kitchen and went to the barn. There he began sawing planks, measuring them, and nailing them into a casket.

CHAPTER XIX

Early next morning people began arriving from the village and the nearby farms. Not many came, no more than twenty.

Some were curious, some sorrowful, and others just using the death as an excuse to break their daily routine. A few came just to look at Calif and Hannah and to stand out in back and speculate as to how long Calif would be around.

They passed through the parlor and glanced at the body, and then gathered in little groups and talked of Lute. Some of the older men stared sadly at him and their women folk cried.

Another of their generation had gone, and with the passing of old Lute, they wondered what member of his generation would be next.

The women padded the box that Calif had spent the night in making. They decorated it with scraps of satin and fussed over his body, all the while commenting on how natural he looked in death.

Hannah and Calif were lost in the profusion of milling people. Shortly before noon Hannah went to the barn and found him sitting alone in the breezeway. She walked near and he returned her smile.

“I would be giving you a kiss but some of them might be watching us,” he said.

“I know. Some of them. come just for that.” She pulled the letter from her pocket. “Will you ride into town and get this off on the stage?” she asked. “Then you might as well meet us at the church. They’ll be taking him up there in a few minutes.”

“I hate to see him go. It’s going to be lonely without him.”

“We can’t think of that now,” she said. “We’ve got to think of ourselves.” She started to say more but quickly turned to the house.

“Wait, Hannah–” She turned back and he said softly, “I love you, Hannah.”

“I love you, Calif – a whole lot.” She turned and walked swiftly to the house. Calif watched her disappear, then he saddled his pony and rode into town.

He waited for the stage in front of the sheriff’s office. As he waited, sitting on the boardwalk with his feet in the dust of the road, the sheriff came out.

“Howdy, Calif,” he said.

“Howdy, Abel.”

“Heard about old Lute this morning. I sure was sorry to hear it.”

“Yes, I guess we all were,” Calif answered.

“Son–” the Sheriff began.

“What?”

“About Sidney – there may be trouble. I don’t know if you and Hannah are guilty of what folks are saying or not. If you are that’s your business, except folks around here don’t take much to that sort of thing.”

Calif’s face reddened, but he kept his silence.

“No matter how much they hated Sidney before, they’re on his side now, at least most of the ones who go to church are.

The preacher seen to that. You’d better be careful what you do from now on. Sidney’s a dangerous man, don’t forget it.” The stage drove up then and Calif handed Hannah’s letter to the driver.

“Will you give this to somebody in Springdale and tell them to give it to who it’s addressed?” Calif asked.

“Be obliged to, son,” the driver said.

“Are you going to the burying now?” the sheriff asked Calif.

“Come on. I’ll ride down there with you.” The got on their horses and rode down the street to the little church. A few people were waiting outside for the funeral procession to arrive. The Sheriff joined a group of men milling around in front of the building. Calif did not know any of them so he walked to the cemetery where a grave had been dug for Lute that morning. He stared into it, thinking of his old friend and about what the Sheriff had just said. He walked back and joined the crowd near the door of the little church.

They heard the funeral procession coming up the road long before they saw it. It was led by the preacher’s rig. Brother Hanson, his wife and daughter, and Sidney were singing hymns at the top of their voices. The next wagon contained the body, Hannah, an old man and an old woman. They sat straight-backed and mute.

Calif helped the Sheriff and some of the men tote the pine box into the building. They placed it on two chairs in front of the pulpit. Then they returned to the front yard to await the arrival of more people.

When the wagons pulled up and were hitched to a post or sapling and the occupants climbed down, the women would walk to one side of the churchyard and begin whispering with earlier arrivals. The, men stood on the other side of the yard and talked about crops and the weather.

The children romped every place. Now and then a courageous one would walk to the door and sneak a look at the coffin to the admiring delight of the others. The little girls roamed through the graveyard pointing out the graves of long departed relatives with pride.

The younger men and women stole fleeting glances at each other and giggled. There was a nervous hush over the churchyard. Inside a fly walked back and forth across the coffin.

Time enough elapsed for all the people that were coming to be there and they filed into the church quietly and respectfully. Calif sat down near the door with the Sheriff and the preacher. Hannah was led to a seat in the front row by the preacher’s wife.

Brother Hanson mounted the pulpit and launched into an eulogy that moved even the most hard-hearted of his audience. On and on he talked of the good deeds and of the life of the dead man until, finally, he had to be reminded by one of his congregation of the hour. It was late and they were hungry.

One by one, in steady paced procession, the mourners filed past the open coffin. Hannah, her cheeks stained with her grief, watched them pay their final respects. Then, just before the crude casket was sealed, she looked her last at this old man who had long been her only solace.

Later, standing by the open grave, she fought back her tears, as they laid the dead man to his rest. Neither she, nor Calif stayed to see the pit covered and sodded. Hand in hand they headed for home.

When they reached the house they changed their clothes quickly and went out into the fields. There was no time to waste. The harvest was upon them and they had to rush to escape the first frost.

They worked silently the whole long afternoon, their grief still fresh and strong. When she could no longer contain her emotion she leaned against him and wept bitterly, as if she could never stop.

Sidney had followed them home but not to the field. He was happy as he wandered about the house. He was a man of property once again. He had not dared bring up the subject of the money that morning. There would be time enough for that, besides there was the matter of the farm. He went into old Lute’s room and opened the drawers of his bureau and the trunks, pulling out clothing tossing all on the floor. He was looking for the deed. He must take it to town and have the farm signed over to him and Hannah before he could sell it. He stuck his hand far down into the mattress and found only straw. He stomped ferociously on the floor looking for a loose plank, some place of concealment. After he searched Hannah’s room, he found a bundle of papers but the deed was not among them. Then he remembered. Hannah had been alone with old Lute before he died. He had given the deed to her. He would bide his time until he caught her alone, then he would get it. He thought about the money that Mrs. Smalley had told him about.

He got his jug and sat it on the table and got drunk thinking about the money.

When he drank all the whisky he had in the home he got up and staggered out. Maggie Marie would celebrate his good fortune. High up on the ridge he looked down to the fields where Hannah and Calif were working. He stared at them for a few minutes and then went on. He had decided not to get rid of Calif until the harvesting was done. Somebody had to do it and that was money, too.

CHAPTER XX

Calif and Hannah were alone in the house. Sidney’s empty jug stood on the table and they knew he had gotten himself thoroughly drunk and gone off to Maggie Marie’s. Darkness and a deep quiet settled on the farm as they sat at the table and now, as Hannah cleared after their simple meal, Calif lit a fire in the stove and locked the doors.

They sat side by side on his cot, silently, barely touching each other, almost afraid to touch. And when they did touch, when one hand brushed another, when thighs pressed close, their flesh felt hot through their clothing.

Neither of them could find words. They felt oddly shy with each other, almost as if they were strangers. She leaned back against the wall and opened the top of her dress, but Calif kissed her quickly on the mouth and got up and walked to the window. He looked out into the moonlight. It didn’t seem right, somehow. It was different. Old Lute, who had brought them together in life, stood between them now in death. But what was it he had said? “If you know in your heart it’s right, then it’s right.”

Slowly, thoughtfully, Calif returned to Hannah. He looked down at her somberly for a moment and then sat down on the edge of the cot. Gently he drew her close to him, gently kissed her and pressed her down on the cot. Her eyes filled with tears. It didn’t seem right to be so passionately alive and in love, now that Lute was dead. She cried helplessly.

He stroked her hair with big, tender hands and murmured, “It’s all right, Hannah, it’s all right, it’s all right.” In the darkness he stroked her cheeks, her neck, her shoulders, her breasts, the round gentle curves of her stomach and thighs.

Gradually, his gentle, undemanding touch soothed her and the tears stopped. She lay quietly, following with her mind the soft strokes of his fingers on her body and she could feel her heart pounding violently in response. She drew his face to hers and kissed him fiercely, hungrily, her body arching up to meet his.

He pushed her away roughly. “Got to get these clothes off” he said hoarsely and then, after a brief time of awkward, impatient fumbling, “Oh Hannah, Hannah, Hannah.” She received him with complete abandon and it was better than it had ever been before. His weight was no weight at all.

His mouth was on her lips, her hair, her eyes. The cot beneath her reeled and her heart beat with the rhythm of the room, of the moment.

Calif awoke first the next morning and was startled to see sunlight filtering through the curtains and to see Hannah sleeping beside him. His first thought was of Sidney and he quickly awakened her. They searched outside and through the house and were relieved to find they were alone. After breakfast Calif rushed to the field.

In the kitchen Hannah remembered her fear upon awakening and decided that no price would be too great to pay for this love. The man, Calif, was hers. Seldom, she thought, was a love such as theirs given without struggle. If she had to pay for it by being damned by society then that’s the way it would have to be.

She went about her chores slowly, her thoughts on Calif. It was a lazy day, a day to be enjoyed. Lately, she had noticed a change in her body, in her whole attitude. She wondered at her sudden spirit of vitality and, again, at her spasms of laziness. She had never been lazy before and it was a comfortable feeling. The strong, quiet man had quickened a fire inside her that at times moved her to work harder, and at other times consumed her energy. Each time she thought of him a singing came to her heart and she longed to be near him. She had never been so happy. She rushed through her chores so as to be finished with them, so she could get to the field, and to Calif.

Sidney walked out of the woods on the mountain ridge. He thought of the night he had just spent with Maggie Marie and laughed out loud. Now that he owned the farm and would get all of that money there would be lots of enjoyable nights, drinking, laughing nights with Maggie Marie and others, too, just as it was when they had lived in St. Louis.

He might sell the farm. He would have Calif finish mending the fences and repairing the barn, and then he would buy whitewash and dress up the old house. It ought to bring a good price from some of the new people moving in.

He saw Calif in the field alone and hurried his steps to the house. Hannah was by herself. He would make her give him the deed.

Hannah was scrubbing the kitchen floor with a cornhusk broom. It was hard work, pouring the lye and water on the floor and pushing the heavy broom back and forth until all the water disappeared between the cracks. She stopped working and looked up when Sidney entered. He slammed the door shut and she gripped the broom tightly when she saw his face.

“Where’s the deed?” he asked.

“What deed?”

“You know Goddamn well what deed I mean. The deed to this place.”

“I ain’t got it.”

“Don’t lie to me, woman. Old Lute must have gave it to somebody before he died. That there Calif got it?”

“Of course he ain’t. What do you mean coming in here on my clean floor with your muddy boots anyway, yelling about a deed?”

“Whose clean floor? This is my floor now, woman. You better learn that fast. I’ll muddy it up anytime I want and I’ll tell you to scrub it again and you’ll scrub it again. That’s the way things are going to be around here from now on, hear me? If you ain’t got that deed Calif must have it and you better say which one quick before I run his ass off my place!”

“Calif works here – for me!” Hannah shouted, her face livid.

“I hired him and I asked him to stay and he’s staying just as long as I want him to. And you clean your boots the next time you come into my kitchen! You hear? My kitchen!”

“Shut your mouth before I beat hell out of you!” He stepped toward her and stopped. “This is my place now and you better learn it fast, I’m warning you!”

“It ain’t your place,” she said.

“What do you mean – ain’t my place?” he asked, his voice a mixture of sarcasm and fear. “What do you mean?” he asked again.

“It ain’t my place and it ain’t your place. Uncle Lute sold it to Mr. Kent at the bank.”

“Sold it! Where’s the money then?”

“In the bank. In the bank in a trust for me in Calif’s name!”

“What do you mean, a trust?”

“Uncle Lute signed his money over to Calif. It’s mine. All I have to do is ask Calif for it and it’s mine. By law it’s Calif’s but it’s still mine.”

“It ain’t by law. Ain’t no such thing by law!”

“You just go to town and ask Mr. Kent if it ain’t by law. He’ll tell you what is by law and what ain’t by law!” Sidney’s face was purple with rage as he walked toward her.

“This is my farm, Goddamnit, and the money is mine too. You ain’t nothing but a woman. You can’t tell me what’s mine and what ain’t mine,” he said, with his fist clenched and drawn back.

“If you hit me, so help me God, I’ll kill you,” she said quietly as she drew the heavy scrub broom over her head. He stopped and looked from the broom to her angry face.

“You wouldn’t hit me with that. You know I’d kill you if you did,” he said as he took another step forward. He raised his hand and slapped her across the mouth. Hannah staggered from the blow, then brought the broom down with all her strength. He ducked, and it struck him across the shoulder.

He fell to his knees, holding his shoulder and screaming.

“You whore! You hit me!”

“And I’m going to hit you again if you don’t get up off that floor and get out of here!” she shouted, gloriously released from fear.

Sidney got to his feet and looked at the jagged edge of the broken broom handle in Hannah’s hands which dared any further advances. He turned and walked out the door.

“Goddamn you!” he shouted back at her. “Goddamn you and old Lute, that dead son-of-a-bitch!” He walked down the road toward town.

CHAPTER XXI

Sidney ran up the road toward town until he could run no more. He sat down to rest and stared back down at the farm that had almost been his. He cursed Hannah and Calif and old Lute. He screamed his oaths at the tree tops. Hannah had everything now and he had nothing. He considered sneaking back down to the field and killing Calif and then Hannah.

Then he remembered the money and knew that he would never get it if he killed them.

He got up and walked on, slowly. There was no sign of life at the preacher’s house when he walked by so he did not stop.

He walked down the center of the street until he reached the town saloon. It was empty except for the barkeep.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I want a bottle.”

“You got any money?”

“What do I need money for? I got me a whole farm, ain’t I?”

“Some say you don’t.”

“What you mean, some say I don’t? Who else is got it if I ain’t?”

“Old Lute left it to Hannah, they’re saying.”

“That makes it mine, don’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess it does.”

“Quit guessing and give me that bottle.”

“When you gonna pay for it?”

“When I get some Goddamn money off that place, that’s when.”

“Here,” the barkeep said, placing a bottle on the bar. “Take it with you. I don’t want you drinking in here.”

“How come I can’t drink in here? What the hell’s the matter with me?”

“I just don’t want my customers coming here and seeing you drinking at my bar. Now git on out of here!”

“You son-of-a-bitch,” Sidney said grabbing the bottle from the bar. He slipped it inside his pants and walked out.

When he passed the preacher’s house again Brother Hanson was working in the cemetery. He saw Sidney, dropped his hoe to the ground and rushed to the road.

“Brother Sidney!” he shouted. “Brother Sidney, weren’t that a fine burying I give to Brother Lute–” he stopped suddenly and stared at him. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked, seeing his angry face.

“Me and Hannah had a fight.”

“Bless the Lord. I hope you give that woman the beating she had coming.”

“She hit me with a scrub-broom.”

“I hope you hit her back.”

“I did,” he lied. “I beat her up good.”

“I’m glad you did, Brother. I’m sure glad you did.. It must be a trial living with that woman,” he said. “But now that it’s your place you can beat the evil out of her and straighten her out. We’ll drive the devil out of her soon as we get shed of that Calif.”

“I can’t.”

“How come you can’t?”

“It ain’t my place,” he moaned tearfully. “Old Lute sold it to the banker.”

“You got the money, ain’t you? Remember the Lord’s share–”

“I ain’t got that either.”

“What do you mean – you ain’t got it?”

“He give it to Calif.”

“What?”

“That’s what he done – give it to Calif. Put it in the bank in his name so he could give it to Hannah for the asking.”

“Can he do that? It don’t sound right to me.”

“He done it.”

“Let’s go ask Lucy if it’s by the law. Her pa was a lawyer and she knows the law better than any man in town. Pray it ain’t, Brother. Let’s both pray that it ain’t by the law.” Sidney followed the preacher to the house and for the first time he prayed sincerely. He prayed that the farm would be his and that Hannah and Calif would receive the wrath of the Lord.

“Lucy! Lucy, you come out here!”

Lucy came to the door wiping her hands on her apron. “What do you want?” she asked.

“We want to know some law,” the preacher said.

“What you all want to know?”

“Before Lute died he sold his place to the banker–”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Let me finish it, woman!” he shouted excitedly. “He sold it to Mr. Kent and took the money and put it in the bank in that Calif’s name to hold in a trust for Hannah. Ain’t that what you said it was?” he asked Sidney, “A trust?”

“That’s what she called it. Them very same words.”

“Is it by the law, woman?” the preacher demanded of his wife.

“If it was his place and paid for, it is.”

“It just don’t seem fair to me. It’s a dirty way to handle things, if you ask me, shutting Brother Sidney out like that and keeping the Lord from getting his share.”

“That’s the truth!” Sidney agreed quickly.

“Ain’t nothing you can do about it as far as I can see,” Lucy said.

“Nothing? You mean I can’t fight it in court? That’s what I was aiming to do – fight it in court.”

“I guess you could but I don’t think it’d do you much good.”

“That son-of-a-bitch!” Sidney shouted, looking at the graveyard. “That Goddamn son-of-a-bitch!”

“Brother Sidney!” the preacher’s wife screamed.

“I can see you need the comfort of the Lord,” the preacher said. “I’ll fetch the Bible and you and me will go to the church and seek His comfort.”

“You got a call to make,” Lucy said. “This is the morning you are supposed to speak at the school house. I’ll get a Bible and give Brother Sidney the Lord’s comfort.”

“Will that suit you, Brother Sidney?” the preacher asked.

“It’s all right,” Sidney said without looking up as he fingered the bottle in his pants.

The preacher reached down, patted him on the shoulder, then walked into the house to change into his Sunday suit. Lucy followed him and returned shortly with the Bible.

“You want us to read here on the porch?” she asked, “Or had you rather go to the church?”

Old Mrs. Smalley had stopped sweeping her porch and was staring at them.

“Let’s go to church,” he answered. He followed her down the road staring at the little puffs of dust kicked up by her heels.

At the church he sat watching her as she read the Bible. It was hot and airless in the building and a wasp droned high overhead. Sidney did not hear the words. He was thinking of all he had lost. The more he thought about it the angrier he became. He thought of Hannah – how he wanted to beat her until she begged for mercy. He stifled a laugh.

“What are you smiling at, Brother Sidney?” Lucy asked.

“Nothing.”

“Well listen to the words I’m reading then.”

“I’m trying to but it’s so airless in here. Couldn’t we go down by the creek under God’s trees and read?’

“I don’t know if I ought to do that.”

“How come? Me and Brother Hanson, we used to do it all the time. I always got the most good out of that. Just him and me out there under God’s creations. That sure did do me a lot of good.”

“Well – if Brother Hanson done it I suppose there won’t be no harm in me doing it too.” She sat for a minute more, then stood up. “Well, I guess it’s all right.”

“Sure – it’s all right,” he said. “Come on.” The woman walked out the back door of the church and down the path, and again Sidney followed her. He took his bottle from his pants and quickly guzzled nearly half of it. When they reached the clearing beside a small stream the woman sat down and leaned back against a tree and Sidney seated himself opposite her. She opened the Bible and began to read.

Tall maple trees met and formed a roof overhead and the only sound was that of her voice. But Sidney did not listen to her.

He still thought of Hannah and how he hated her. He stared at Lucy and remembered his theory about her, his theory about all women.

He took the bottle out and drank from it again. She looked up and saw him.

‘Brother Brenshaw!” she shouted in horror. “Where did you get that?”

“At the saloon.”

“Well you throw the vile stuff away. Didn’t Brother Hanson tell you that stuff is the water of the devil? You ought to be ashamed! Here, seeking the comfort of the Lord, and, then bringing the devil with you.”

“It ain’t so bad,” Sidney said, “Once you get the taste for it. Here – you try it.” He got up on his knees and pushed the bottle toward her.

“I will not do no such thing!” she shouted slapping the bottle from his hand. It rolled down toward the stream and Sidney scampered after it.

“You spilled it, Goddamnit!”

He grabbed at the bottle just before it rolled into the water and held it up. There was only about an inch left. He turned and looked at the woman who had gotten to her feet and was backing away.

“Come back here and sit down!” he shouted.

“Brother Brenshaw, you are not acting like a Christian!”

“You shut up and sit down. I want to talk to you.”

“What do you want to talk about?” she asked.

“About us. About you and me. Just about you and me and having a good time,” he added quietly.

“I can’t talk to you about nothing. I got to be getting back to the house. Brother Hanson will be getting home anytime now and–”

“You set down ‘fore I throw this bottle at you!” he demanded as he drew the bottle back.

She slowly sat down and he crawled nearer.

“You ever been to St. Louis?” he asked.

“No. Brother Hanson says it’s a sinful place.”

“It ain’t so awful. Folks there just know how to have a good time, that’s all.”

“I best be getting home–”

“Keep your seat! Me and you, we’re going to St. Louis. You hear? Just you and me.”

She tried to rise again but he grabbed her.

“Brother Sidney, turn me loose.”

“I will in a minute. First let’s have a little ‘drink on when we go to St. Louis.”

“I ain’t! Don’t you touch me with that vile stuff! Let me loose – you hear me?”

“I ain’t going to. Not now. Here,” he said as he stuffed the mouth of the bottle to her lips. She struggled and he twisted her arm.

“Open your mouth!” he shouted as he forced the whisky into her mouth.

She spat it at him and shuddered. “You sinful–” He tried to kiss her and she pushed him away.

“You stop it now! You hear? You stop it! You’re an evil old man!”

“Oh… come on now…” When he tried to kiss her again, she bit his lip. Quickly he let her go and swore.

“Why, Goddamn you to hell” he shouted, “You Goddamn no account bitch!”

She looked at his eyes, glazed and blood streaked, his mouth that was a crimson slit, and she screamed her rage at him.

“Crazy! That’s what you are. Just plain crazy!”

“You shut your face now, woman. Shut up!”

“Crazyloon. Ain’t that what they call you? Ain’t that what folks in town been saying? Crazyloon! Crazyloon! Ain’t you heard them call you that?... ain’t you heard?” She was hysterical in her fright.

He reached for her, as she tried to scream he put his hand over her mouth. She clamped her teeth into his flesh until she tasted his blood. He stopped and stared at his hand, then at her face, as the pain of the bite wrought its havoc.

“You hurt me,” he cried. “Hannah! you hurt me! I told you never to hurt me again. Now I’m going to kill you, Hannah!”

“I’m not Hannah!” the woman shouted through her tears.

“I’m Lucy! I’m Sister Lucy!”

As though he couldn’t hear, he went on. “You know what I’m going to do to you, don’t you, Hannah! I’m going to kill you.

But first I’m doing what I said I was going to do. You know what that is, don’t you Hannah! I’m going to give it to you good.

“I’m going to pound you good,” he screamed. “Good! Hannah, good and hard! I’m gonna give it to you real Goddamn hard… Then I’m goin’ to kill you. First I’m goin’ lay you… then I’m goin’ to kill you!”

The woman, having struggled free during his tirade, turned and ran.

He caught her, nearly halfway up the long, sloping hill and threw her to the ground. Then he hunched down to straddle her, one hand fumbling with his pants while he slapped her with the other. She screamed in an agony of terror. He hit her in the face again and again, shouting, “Hannah! Hannah!” She didn’t stop struggling until he was done with her. She lay motionless as he squatted beside her, surveying her with satisfaction. Then, remembering his wedding night, he grabbed her dress at the neck and ripped it from her unmoving body. His hands shook as he dragged her into the path.

Later, he walked down the road and into the village. He needed a drink. He was somebody now. He had killed Hannah. They would all see that he was a big man now. He had killed her. She had been unfaithful and he killed her. He swaggered into the saloon and loiterers turned to stare.

“Hey,” one of them shouted, “Old Crazyloon is in the middle of one of his fits.”

“Hey, Crazyloon! You gonna lay down in the road and yell for us?”

“Hey, Crazyloon – Hey! Crazyloon!”

“I’m not!” he screamed. “I’m not crazy. I just killed her!” The room became suddenly quiet.

“You killed who?” someone asked.

“I killed her. I killed Hannah! I killed her and I got it just like the night we got married!”

“Where was Calif?” someone asked. “Did you kill him, too?”

“Calif? Calif?” Sidney asked. “Where is Calif?”

“Yea, you know. Calif. The one who’s been carrying on with your wife.”

“I don’t know,” Sidney said, staring blankly. “I don’t know. He weren’t there.”

“Where was he? Man, where did you do this? Somebody better get the Sheriff!”

“Up behind the church,” Sidney said, smiling again. “That’s where I done it, up behind the church!”

“‘What was Hannah doing up at the church?” the men asked each other.

“Sidney, what was Hannah doing at the church?” someone asked him.

“Aw, let him alone,” someone shouted, “Can’t you see he’s crazy?”

“We’d better get to the bottom of this. He may be telling the truth. Sidney, what was Hannah doing behind the church?”

“Hannah’s at home,” he said, “she hit me. She hit me with a scrub-broom.”

“Then who the hell did you kill?”

“Hannah! It was Hannah. I killed Hannah! She run but I caught her and you know what else I done?” He began to dance around the saloon, whirling round and round.

“Somebody catch him!”

“I thought you said you killed her behind the church?” A man yelled as he grabbed for him.

“I did – I did–” He sank to the floor in tears.

They picked him up and took him to the Sheriff’s office.

Between sobs he shouted that he had killed Hannah.

“It was Sister Hanson!” someone shouted. “They just found her up there behind the church!”

“Is she dead?”

“No, but the doctor’s on his way up there. Man, you ought to see what he done to her!”

“Here comes Brother Hanson!”

The preacher was hurrying down the road. He had been home when they found Lucy and then brought her to the house. His face was white with rage as he walked up to the group of men standing in front of the jail.

“You ought to see my Lucy,” he cried. “Beat almost to death by that devil. And her womanhood spoiled forever!”

“Somebody fetch a rope and we’ll hang him.” Inside the jail Sidney could hear them. One minute he was at the window swearing at them and bragging about what he had done and the next lying on the cell floor shouting denial at the top of his voice. Still hysterical, he whimpered and grovelled, his eyes sick with fear, his mouth dribbling as they came for him.

CHAPTER XXII

Hannah and Calif had finished their supper and were sitting on the back steps when the Sheriff’s deputy rode up, dismounted, and asked Calif to come into the yard. In a carefully lowered voice he told him what had happened that day. “The Sheriff wants you in town,” the deputy said.

“There’s a mob at the jailhouse and we need all the help we can get.”

“You saddle up my horse while I get a coat,” Calif said. The deputy walked to the barn and Calif went into the house.

“What happened?” Hannah asked. “It’s Sidney. He’s in real trouble this time.”

“What did he do?”

“He beat up the preacher’s wife – and he–”

“Oh my God!” She sat down. She felt as if it were somehow her fault. She had felt that morning, after he left the house, that something would happen, that he would vent his anger at her on someone. “What will they do to him?” she asked.

“There’s a mob gathering at the church, they’re talking about hanging him. The Sheriff sent for me to help out. They’ll need all the help they can get.”

“No. No, Calif. Something could happen to you and he ain’t worth it. Maybe he’ll be better off if they go ahead and do it.”

“Ain’t nothin’ going to happen to me. They’ll hang him, one way or the other. They just ought to do it by law.”

“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “I just don’t care. I can’t care what they do with him. Maybe I ought to be ashamed but I’m not. I just feel sorry for that poor woman. I know what he’s like. He’s sick and he’s mean. Maybe we should have put him away. I just never had the guts to do it.”

“Whatever happens you can’t be blamed. You did what you had to do. Will you be alright here?”

“Don’t go, Calif. Please don’t go.”

“I got to. You know that.”

“Yes. But please be careful, Calif.”

They embraced for a brief moment then he left the room. The deputy had saddled the horse and was waiting.

Hannah stood on the porch and listened to the fading sounds of hoof beats as they rode away. When they could no longer be heard, she returned to the kitchen. As she busied herself at the stove, she thought of her life with Sidney. What a child she must have been, not to have recognized this man for what he was. Now, he was her husband and she would have to share his disgrace. But, at least Sidney would be gone – they would hang him for certain. Would Calif take to wife the widow of a murderer? Would be accept the scorn of the village?

As Calif and the deputy topped the mountain and started to gallop their horses down the long winding road, they could see far ahead of them the rage of the townspeople. In a twisting, snake like, procession, with torches and lanterns held high, they were dragging Sidney through the streets.

Their lust, like their victim, a savage and terrible thing. As an ironic touch of their justice, they were returning Sidney to the scene of his crime, and there, they would hang him.

When Calif and the deputy reached the church, they became lost in the seething mob. Calif was pushed and tossed until he was in the center. Looking, he realized that every man and boy within miles of the village was there. Then he saw Sidney.

They had tied his hands behind his back and the men were pushing and mauling him. The women spat on him. He fell once, limp with his fear.

“Hang the bastard here!” someone shouted.

“No. Take him to the creek where he done it!”

“What damn difference does it make. We’re gonna kill him, ain’t we?”

“Make the son-of-a-bitch get up!”

“Get up, Goddam you!”

And Sidney was kicked again. Those who had walked ahead now came back to see what was delaying the hanging. Calif was squeezed and shoved. He fought, trying to free himself from the maddened mob. He searched for the Sheriff – tried to find the deputy again – any friendly face. A face that was not a part of this fury. This fury with the power of a moving, living, a thing that was mob.

Sidney, kicked in the groin, lay writhing in pain.

“You goin’ to kick him to death before we get a chance to hang him,” a man shouted.

“What’s the difference how we kill him?”

‘We ought to hang him like a man.”

“He ain’t no man. He’s crazy.” One of them shouted as he kicked him again.

“Don’t kick him there.”

“How come? He ain’t gonna be using it no more anyhow.” And the mob laughed as one. Two of the men grabbed Sidney and dragged him to his feet. Beneath the blood that ran from a cut on his forehead, his face was pale. Tears streamed down his face and saliva ran from his mouth and mixed with the blood.

“I got gold!” he screamed. “I got a pocketful of gold! I can tell you where there’s streets paved with gold! You let me loose, you hear. I’ll tell you where it is if you let me loose. Goddamit, you sons-of-bitches better turn me loose! You hear me!”

“Listen to him! Tell him to have a fit for us! Hey! Crazyloon! Show us a fit and we might let you loose”

“I ain’t done nothing. Honest I ain’t done a thing the last one a you wouldn’t do. I – I killed her. I killed Hannah!” Calif winced and turned away. He didn’t have the stomach for this. Neither could he stand the mob. He searched for the Sheriff and found him and the doctor as the mob reached the clearing. They were both pleading with Hutch Wiemer and the others, trying to turn them back. But their pleas fell on deaf ears as the mob stared with unblinking eyes at the condemned man.

A man climbed the same maple tree the woman had leaned against earlier that afternoon. Here lie tied a rope to a large limb hanging over the creek. “We’ll put it around his neck and push him off the bank!” he shouted from his perch.

Sidney, seeing the rope, screeched in panic. When his screams dissolved to weeping some of the men looked away.

They stood in a circle around him, some men even standing in the water, just to see and hear him beg for his pitiful life.

When Sidney saw Calif in the crowd he suddenly stopped his wailing. Then he shouted, “Hang him! You hang him! It’s all his fault! Hang him. I’ll pay you to do it!”

“You boys want to hang that one, too?”

“Naw, one’s enough. Let him have the old bastard’s lady!”

“It ain’t right!” the Sheriff shouted. “It ain’t by the law!”

“To hell with the law! We’re the law now!” When Sidney begged for his life, he called them by name, one by one, pleading, and when he saw that they were determined to kill him, he fainted. One of the men tried awaking him by kicking him in the face. Then the preacher rushed forward. “Kill him! Kill him! I say kill him!” he shouted.

“You’re supposed to be a man of God,” the doctor said.

“I am a man of God! And I say what are God’s rights here! I say it’s right by God to hang this devil’s disciple and it is right!”

“Does your Bible say it’s right to murder?” the doctor asked.

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – that’s what it says in the Book.”

“This ain’t no time for a sermon!” the man in the tree shouted.

“Let’s get it over with!”

“Yeah, let’s hang the poor son-of-a-bitch!”

“If you hang him, you’ll remember this day for the rest of your lives and you’ll bow your heads in the shame of it!” the Sheriff said.

Calif had backed away from the crowd. He didn’t know any of the men and he was afraid of exciting them more. He hated Sidney, but at this moment he hated the little preacher and the mob even more. The Sheriff walked to where they had dropped Sidney and kneeled over him. “Doc! Come here!” he shouted. “He’s dying!”

“To hell with his tricks, let’s kill the bastard and go home. He can’t go around raping our womenfolk!”

“Cut his balls off and get it over with!”

“Yeah, that’s what I say. Hang that other one too if he don’t step aside.”

Calif backed away. The doctor looked up.

“He’s dead,” be said. “Either you all kicked him to death or else he was just plain scared to death. He needs a burying more than he needs a hanging.”

“Hell, he just fainted.”

“Hang him anyhow.”

“Go ahead and hang him if it’ll give you any pleasure. He’s dead,” the doctor said.

No one spoke. The men looked at each other uneasily. They were individual men again, some ashamed, some uncaring, but they were separate. They were no longer a mob. Wearily, their anger spent, they backed away and whispered to each other in clusters as they returned to the village.

As the mob dispersed, Calif looked at the dead body. Sidney looked peaceful in death. Even Calif’s intense hatred of the man was muted, seeing him like this.

“Best we bury him here,” he said to the Sheriff. “More than likely they won’t want him in the graveyard anyhow.”

“Yes, we’ll not bury him in the Lord’s Cemetery,” intoned the preacher. “Lay him out here.”

Later, when they brought shovels, Calif and the sheriff dug a grave. Here, without shroud, without coffin, and with the angry curses of a mob as final absolution, was laid the poor mutilated body.

This man who dreamed of streets paved with gold, this poor wretch, whose twisted mind had reached for only the flesh, because he knew of nought else.

Long after the others had gone, Calif stood by the unholy sepulchre. He remembered the face caked with blood, the eyes stark with terror, the voice bitter as the man lashed back at him.

“It’s all your fault!”

Then he turned his back on the bier and walked away. Hannah would be waiting; she was his now. This man was dead.

This hank of hair, this paltry edifice of blood and bone, this tortured soul, damned by fate to be reviled. This was still a man. Might he not, save for nature’s mad design, been born a prince, or known a hero’s acclaim and in dying valiant heard read...

“The tumult and the shouting dies;

The Captains and the Kings depart

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!”

Table of Contents

- MUDHONEY (STREETS PAVED WITH GOLD)

- credits
- PROLOGUE
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- CHAPTER IX
- CHAPTER X
- CHAPTER XI
- CHAPTER XII
- CHAPTER XIII
- CHAPTER XIV
- CHAPTER XV
- CHAPTER XVI
- CHAPTER XVII
- CHAPTER XVIII
- CHAPTER XIX
- CHAPTER XX
- CHAPTER XXI
- CHAPTER XXII

- BACK COVER