“He’s not a bad man,” she whispered.
One morning in early summer, after Helen had returned, Eugene was wakened by scuffling feet and excited cries along the small boardwalk that skirted the house on its upper side and led to the playhouse, a musty little structure of pine with a single big room, which he could almost touch from the sloping roof that flowed about his gabled backroom window. The playhouse was another of the strange extravagancies of Gantian fancy: it had been built for the children when they were young. It had been for many years closed, it was a retreat of delight; its imprisoned air, stale and cool, was scented permanently with old pine boards, cased books, and dusty magazines.
For some weeks now it had been occupied by Mrs. Selborne’s South Carolina cook, Annie, a plump comely negress of thirty-five, with a rich coppery skin. The woman had come into the mountains for the summer: she was a good cook and expected work at hotels or boarding-houses. Helen engaged her for five dollars a week. It was an act of pride.
That morning, Gant had wakened earlier and stared at his ceiling thoughtfully. He had risen, dressed, and wearing his leather slippers, walked softly back, along the boards, to the playhouse. Helen was roused by Annie’s loud protests. Tingling with premonition she came down stairs, and found Gant wringing his hands and moaning as he walked up and down the washroom. Through the open doors she heard the negress complaining loudly to herself as she banged out drawers and slammed her belongings together.
“I ain’t used to no such goins-on. I’se a married woman, I is. I ain’t goin’ to say in dis house anothah minnit.”
Helen turned furiously upon Gant and shook him.
“You rotten old thing, you!” she cried. “How dare you!”
“Merciful God!” he whined, stamping his foot like a child, and pacing up and down. “Why did this have to come upon me in my old age!” He began to sniffle affectedly. “Boo-hoo-hoo! O Jesus, it’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s cruel that you should put this affliction on me.” His contempt for reason was Parnassian. He accused God for exposing him; he wept because he had been caught.
Helen rushed out to the playhouse and with large gesture and hearty entreaty strove to appease outraged Annie.
“Come on, Annie,” she coaxed. “I’ll give you a dollar a week more if you stay. Forget about it!”
“No’m,” said Annie stubbornly. “I cain’t stay heah any longer. I’se afraid of dat man.”
Gant paused in his distracted pacing from time to time long enough to cock an eager ear. At each iteration of Annie’s firm refusals, he fetched out a deep groan and took up his lament again.
Luke, who had descended, had fidgeted about in a nervous prance from one large bare foot to another. Now he went to the door and looked out, bursting suddenly into a large Whah–Whah as he caught sight of the sullen respectability of the negress’ expression. Helen came back into the house with an angry perturbed face.
“She’ll tell this all over town,” she announced.
Gant moaned in lengthy exhalations. Eugene, shocked at first, and frightened, flung madly across the kitchen linoleum in twisting leaps, falling catlike on his bare soles. He squealed ecstatically at Ben who loped in scowling, and began to snicker in short contemptuous fragments.
“And of course she’ll tell Mrs. Selborne all about it, as soon as she goes back to Henderson,” Helen continued.
“O my God!” Gant whined, “why was this put on me —”
“O gotohell! Gotohell!” she said comically, her wrath loosened suddenly by a ribald and exasperated smile. They howled.
“I shall dy-ee.”
Eugene choked in faint hiccoughs and began to slide gently down the kitchen-washroom door jamb.
“Ah! you little idiot!” Ben snarled, lifting his white hand sharply. He turned away quickly with a flickering smile.
At this moment, Annie appeared on the walk outside the door, with a face full of grieved decorum.
Luke looked nervously and gravely from his father to the negress, fidgeting from one big foot to the other.
“I’se a married woman,” said Annie. “I ain’t used to nothin’ like dis. I wants my money.”
Luke blew up in an explosion of wild laughter.
“Whah-whah!” He pronged her larded ribs with scooped fingers. She moved away angrily, muttering.
Eugene lolled about feebly on the floor, kicking one leg out gently as if he had just been decapitated, and fumbling blindly at the neckband of his nightshirt. A faint clucking sound came at intervals from his wide-open mouth.
They laughed wildly, helplessly, draining into mad laughter all the welled and agglutinated hysteria that had gathered in them, washing out in a moment of fierce surrender all the fear and fatality of their lives, the pain of age and death.
Dying, he walked among them, whining his lament against God’s lidless stare, gauging their laughter cautiously with uneasy prying eyes, a faint tickled grin playing craftily about his wailing mouth.
Roofing the deep tides, swinging in their embrace, rocked Eliza’s life Sargassic, as when, at morning, a breath of kitchen air squirmed through her guarded crack of door, and fanned the pendant clusters of old string in floating rhythm. She rubbed the sleep gently from her small weak eyes, smiling dimly as she thought, unwakened, of ancient losses. Her worn fingers still groped softly in the bed beside her, and when she found it vacant, she awoke. Remembered. My youngest, my oldest, final bitter fruit, O dark of soul, O far and lonely, where? Remembered O his face! Death-son, partner of my peril, last coinage of my flesh, who warmed my flanks and nestled to my back. Gone? Cut off from me? When? Where?
The screen slammed, the market boy dumped ground sausage on the table, a negress fumbled at the stove. Awake now.
Ben moved quietly, but not stealthily, about, confessing and denying nothing. His thin laughter pierced the darkness softly above the droning creak of the wooden porch-swing. Mrs. Pert laughed gently, comfortingly. She was forty-three: a large woman of gentle manners, who drank a great deal. When she was drunk, her voice was soft, low, and fuzzy, she laughed uncertainly, mildly, and walked with careful alcoholic gravity. She dressed well: she was well fleshed, but not sensual-looking. She had good features, soft oaken hair, blue eyes, a little bleared. She laughed with a comfortable, happy chuckle. They were all very fond of her. Helen called her “Fatty.”
Her husband was a drug salesman: he travelled through Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, and returned to Altamont for a fortnight every four months. Her daughter, Catherine, who was almost Ben’s age, came to Dixieland for a few weeks each summer. She was a school-teacher in a public school in a Tennessee village. Ben squired both.
Mrs. Pert chuckled softly when she spoke to him, and called him “Old Ben.” In the darkness he sat, talking a little, humming a little, laughing occasionally in his thin minor key, quietly, with a cigarette between his forked ivory fingers, drawing deeply. He would buy a flask of whisky and they would drink it very quietly. Perhaps they talked a little more. But they were never riotous. Occasionally, they would rise at midnight from the swing, and go out into the street, departing under leafy trees. They would not return during the night. Eliza, ironing out a great pile of rumpled laundry in the kitchen, would listen. Presently, she would mount the stairs, peer carefully into Mrs. Pert’s room, and descend, her lips thoughtfully kneaded.
She had to speak these things to Helen. There was a strange defiant communion between them. They laughed or were bitter together.
“Why, of course,” said Helen, impatiently, “I’ve known it all along.” But she looked beyond the door curiously, her big gold-laced teeth half-shown in her open mouth, the child look of belief, wonder, skepticism, and hurt innocency in her big highboned face.
“Do