Mr. Munn did not answer. The two men walked along the edge of the field together until they came to a path that branched off across the pasture. Mr. Grimes hesitated. ‘And hit’ll be a-growen thar when you and me is dead and gone to a better land,’ he declared.

  ‘Good-bye,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘Good-bye,’ Mr. Grimes replied, and started down the path across the pasture. He walked with a high-shouldered, hunching movement, with his small head outthrust. Mr. Munn, when he got to the edge of the barn lot, looked back, and saw that Mr. Grimes was gone. He had reached his shack, which stood by a single big tree on the other side of the pasture, and had gone in.

  When he turned around and started across the barn lot, he saw a negro man approaching him. It was Old Mac. ‘They’s somebody at the house fer you,’ Old Mac announced.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Mr. Bill Christian,’ Old Mac told him, ‘and anuther gemmun.’

  Mr. Munn quickened his pace. ‘You don’t know who?’

  ‘Hit’s a red-headed gemmun,’ Old Mac said. ‘His head, you mought say hit incline to red.’

  Mr. Munn, almost running, went toward the house. He slammed the back door, went through the kitchen, and down the hall, calling out.

  Mr. Christian and Doctor MacDonald stood in the yard under the maple trees. Mr. Munn ran out to them, with his hand stretched out. At the sight of them, as they smiled and advanced toward him, he felt a sudden and unexpected surge of pleasure, of relief, as at hard-won safety.

  ‘By God!’ Mr. Christian shouted, ‘where you been keeping yourself?’

  Mr. Munn hesitated, as though embarrassed. ‘Hanging round the place,’ he answered.

  ‘By God,’ Mr. Christian said, ‘I just figgered I’d come over and see how you was making it. Cap’n Todd’s boy, he’s over courting Sukie so much I just couldn’t stand to watch it. He’s a good boy, but God-a-mighty, the calf eyes he makes, it makes a man want to puke. I just said, hell, I’ll go over and see Perse ——’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Mr. Munn declared, ‘that’s fine!’

  Mr. Christian gestured toward Doctor MacDonald: ‘And I just run into the doc, here, in town — didn’t I, doc? — and I just thought I’d bring him along.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Mr. Munn responded. He’s lying, he thought; they planned to come. But he was glad.

  ‘Sure,’ Doctor MacDonald said.

  ‘You’ll stay to supper,’ Mr. Munn invited, then urgingly, ‘sure, you’ll stay. I’ll tell them to put plates on. May’ — he paused, then gathered himself and continued quickly — ‘she’s not here right now, but you’ll stay.’

  The two men looked at each other, then back at Mr. Munn. ‘Fine,’ Mr. Christian said, and Doctor MacDonald grinned and nodded.

  ‘Finished your cutting?’ Mr. Christian asked, as they walked toward the house.

  Mr. Munn said that he had finished, or just about.

  ‘I’ve finished and started firing,’ Mr. Christian said, ‘and it looks pretty good, for the most part. By God, I’m just gonna set back for a spell now. That’s a fact. I’m gonna do me some hunting this fall if it’s the last thing I do. I durned near missed out last fall. But this fall I ain’t. I seen a passel of birds over on my place, a passel of ’em. You, Perse, you’ll have to come over and hunt some with me. We ain’t done any hunting in a long time. And I got me a couple as good coon dogs as you ever laid eyes on. You just come on over and fix to stay a while ——’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Mr. Munn said, and Mr. Christian laid his heavy hand on his shoulder.

  They sat around the table in the shadowy dining-room and ate the steaming food. They ate fried ham and chicken and mashed potatoes and late snaps and squash, and hot bread, and then pie and coffee. Mr. Christian leaned over his food and his bald head gleamed subduedly in the lamplight. His big jaws worked smoothly and powerfully. He said, ‘Now, Perse, I’m a man as shore-God likes good vittles.’

  After they had finished eating they sat around the table and talked and smoked. ‘Well,’ Doctor MacDonald remarked after a little lull in the conversation, his tone controlled and easy, ‘I saw by the paper this morning they found that fellow Trevelyan.’

  Mr. Munn made a sharp intake of breath. ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Doctor MacDonald answered, and paused to inspect the tamping of tobacco in his pipe. Then he raised his eyes suddenly to gaze straight across at Mr. Munn. ‘Yes,’ he repeated, ‘they found him. Some kids out prowling round with their .22’s looked down in the old quarry. They saw him caught in the cat-tails.’

  Mr. Munn’s hands were gripping the edge of the table.

  ‘They ran all the way to town,’ Doctor MacDonald went on.

  No one spoke for a minute. Doctor MacDonald continued to gaze straight across the lighted area of white tablecloth at Mr. Munn’s face.

  Mr. Christian scraped his chair back a little. ‘Perse,’ he demanded, ‘you got any more coffee?’

  Mr. Munn went to the door to the pantry and called for another cup of coffee. He returned to the table and resumed his seat. The negro woman brought the coffee and, at a gesture from Mr. Munn, set it before Mr. Christian. Mr. Christian took a long draught of it, then set the cup down clatteringly.

  He said: ‘Perse, when you gonna come out and hunt birds with me, huh? You’re coming soon, ain’t you? When the season opens up?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn answered.

  ‘You better come soon, now. Yeah, you come out, and we’ll crack down on them birds, now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that Miss Sukie Perkins I got, she’s shore as smart a coon dog as you ever laid eyes on.’

  Chapter ten

  HE WOULD lie in the big bed in the dark and listen to the obscure night noises or to the distant howling of a hound, or for the creak of one of the old boards under the pressure of a foot, and wait for her to come. The latch on the door would lift slowly, the iron making a small, clean clicking sound when the bar was finally released from its bracket, and the door, white in the shadowy room, would begin to swing stealthily inward. The heavy door moved softly and evenly now, but the first time she came to the room, he had been wakened from a half drowse by the squeal of the hinges as the door swung inward. He had risen up in bed, ready, before seeing the uplifted hand, to call out in his surprise.

  Later, she had oiled the hinges.

  ‘The door didn’t screak tonight, did it?’ she had demanded, putting her head down on his shoulder so that the breath of her whispered utterance was against his ear.

  ‘No, it didn’t,’ he had said, and then remembered that it had made no noise. At the time he had not noticed, being so engrossed with his eagerness, waiting to see if she would appear.

  ‘I fixed it,’ she had told him.

  ‘Don’t blow in my ear, it tickles.’

  ‘I oiled the hinges,’ she had whispered. ‘I put some of papa’s gun oil on them. When you all were out hunting this afternoon. Don’t you think I’m smart?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you thank me? Maybe I saved your life. Maybe papa won’t hear that door now, and shoot you.’

  ‘He probably would,’ he had said.

  ‘Aren’t you going to thank me,’ she had demanded, ‘for fixing it?’

  ‘I’m going to fix you if you don’t stop tickling my ear,’ he had answered. Then she had set her teeth, not gently, in the lobe of his ear. ‘Damn it, Sukie,’ he had said, and holding her hair twisted in his hand so that she could not lift her head from the pillow, had kissed her on the mouth.

  But the hinges worked silently now, not like that first time. The door would swing gently, carefully, open, and she would slip into the room, and stand with one finger to her lips in mock warning while she pushed the door shut and lowered the latch into place. Sometimes, when there was no moon, it would be so dark that he could scarcely make out her shadowy form there against the white blur of the door, but he would know exactly how she would be, standing there, and would smile answeringly as though she could see his face. When the door was latched, she would move quickly across the room toward him, her kimono fluttering with her motion. She would shiver with the chill, for there was rarely a fire in the room, or would pretend to shiver, and standing by the bed to pull off the kimono, would say, ‘Get over, I want the warm place, I’m freezing to death.’ Then she would pull the covers about her, and shiver, and pretend that her teeth were chattering, and thrust her cold feet against his.

  ‘Take them off,’ he would whisper.

  ‘I will not’ — and her teeth would chatter. ‘I freeze to death coming inch by inch down that hall — I almost catch pneumonia — all on account of your baser nature — and you won’t even warm my feet — you dog ——’

  ‘You’ve got a baser nature, yourself.’

  ‘No — no’ — chatteringly — ‘not — right — now.’

  Now she would shut the door and run quickly to the bed, her kimono fluttering, but the first time, having forestalled his half-awake exclamation by her lifted hand and having closed the door upon its creaking hinges, she had moved, almost with an air of deliberation, toward him, and had leaned over and taken his head between her hands and had kissed him. That had been the first time they had ever kissed. Then, standing there by the bed, in the frosty air, she had drawn his head against her, and he had heard her heart knocking strongly and surely under the curved ribs.

  After the first shock of surprise, when he saw her standing inside the door with one hand raised warningly, there was no surprise. But they had never talked about themselves, or their feelings. They had not been together very often. Now and then they had sat before the fire in the living-room, in the evening, with Mr. Christian, and perhaps Benton Todd, engaged in a comfortable, desultory conversation until the time when Benton Todd, looking at his watch, would remark, ‘It’s getting on, I better be going,’ and Mr. Christian, getting to his feet and stretching his big arms upward, would say: ‘Well, boy, I guess I’ll be turning in. You folks, too, I reckon?’ And once she had gone out with them to hunt quail. She had worn a red sweater and an old coat of her father’s, and he had watched her moving slowly through the tall, sun-goldened sage grass behind the careful, eager setters. They had scarcely ever been alone together.

  But that particular afternoon she had brought him out from town in her buggy. Waiting at the corner for Mr. Christian, who was to come back to town the next morning and so could bring him in, he had been surprised to see Lucille Christian drive up. ‘Papa had some things to see about,’ she had explained, ‘and he had to stay out at the place. So I came in to do the errands.’ Then she had added, ‘And get you.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ he had said, climbing into the buggy.

  They had talked briskly and aimlessly while the buggy moved down the streets of Bardsville. After the downtown streets where the stores were, where people walked about, quickly now, for the day was cold, there were the streets with white, wooden houses set well back on lawns now brown, behind the bare, black-trunked maples. Those streets were deserted, except for a few children, well muffled in coats and stocking caps, who ran across the lawns and kicked the brown fallen leaves and uttered shrill cries that had no meaning. Otherwise, life seemed to have withdrawn deeply and secretly within the houses. The window-panes gleamed dully like ice on a pond. They passed the last houses, and were between the open fields.

  Mr. Munn raised his head to scan the sky. ‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘but in town, you know, you don’t notice much what the weather’s like.’

  ‘There’re a lot of things you don’t notice in town,’ she returned.

  He continued to look at the sky, which showed no sun, and at the lead-colored horizon. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh,’ she answered, ‘yourself, for instance.’

  ‘Yourself?’ He looked directly at her, but she did not meet his gaze.

  ‘Yes, yourself.’ She looked up the road, over the horse’s head. Then she continued: ‘Yes, when I was in St. Louis, all that time, I didn’t know a bit what I was like, really. I never noticed myself. I did things, and I never knew why.’

  ‘Not often, any place, a man’s too sure why he’s doing something,’ Mr. Munn said. Then: ‘Not often, but sometimes, by God.’

  ‘I never was,’ she told him, ‘before.’

  ‘Are you now?’

  ‘Surer,’ she replied. ‘Now.’

  They fell silent for a few minutes, looking at the fields and the distant woods. Then she asked, ‘Are you?’

  ‘Am I what?’ He knew what she meant, but like a man who plays for time, he parried the question.

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘I thought you were, always.’

  ‘Why?’ he demanded.

  She paused, then went on: ‘Because you look that way. The way you move. The way you say something. You say it like you were sure. And what you’ve done.’

  ‘What have I done?’

  She continued to look up the road. ‘Oh, nothing, that is, not any one thing,’ she replied, ‘not any one thing. Just everything sort of taken together, you know.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, just everything. And I’m not the only person feels that. Other people do, too. They have the same impression.’

  ‘I reckon nobody’s sure most of the time,’ he rejoined.

  The landscape about them was very empty, and the sky. The bare fields, corn stubble, tobacco stobs, or brown pasture, lay along the road; along the fencerows the trees were leafless now; the woods along the horizon looked blue and smoky. The horse’s hoofs made a hard, chipping sound on the pike. Once or twice they heard a crow cawing from somewhere back in the fencerows. They met no one on the road.

  After a long silence, she said, ‘If you’re chilly, you’ll find a laprobe in the back.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Not really,’ she answered.

  ‘I’m not, either,’ he asserted, ‘or not very.’ But he reached back to get the robe. She lifted the reins, and he spread the robe across her knees and drew it up to her waist. At that moment, she turned her head and looked him directly in the eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  That night she had come to his room, for the first time.

  She was, it seemed to him, two persons. There was the person who came to his room, and stood with one finger to her lips while she gently pushed the shadowy white door shut behind her; and there was the person whom he saw moving about the house in the daytime, talking casually and easily to him or to her father or to Benton Todd, or humming a tune under her breath. The two persons seemed quite distinct to him. With the first were associated all the small night noises, melancholy, exciting, and insidious, which worked upon his consciousness while he lay waiting for her, sometimes in vain, and staring at the door, or while she lay beside him — the sound of a mouse gnawing dryly and minutely in the wall, the hoot of an owl in the woods or the distant barking of a dog, very faint and hollow, the unnamable, hushed creakings of old joists and beams. With that person he talked only in whispers, for if his voice rose she would reach to lay a finger on his lips and say, ‘Shh!’ Once he said to her, ‘You know, you’re almost like two people to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  ‘The one who’s here right now, and that other one I just see around but never really talk to.’

  ‘It’s hard to just be one person,’ she observed. They fell silent for a while, then later, as though there had been no interrupting silence, she said: ‘I love papa, and if he knew about this it would almost kill him, I know. And I love you. You see how it is.’

  He said nothing, listening to her breathing in the stillness and waiting for her to resume. She went on, ‘If everything, everything you were and wanted and owed to people — everything — matched up just once, even for just a minute so you were really one person, completely, then you would be almost too happy to live.’

  ‘I reckon so,’ he said.

  ‘It would be like when you love somebody, and are in their arms, like that very instant, only more.’ Then, after a moment: ‘But, you don’t know you are you then. You just know you are.’

  He said, ‘If everything matched up, completely, maybe it would be the same way, maybe you wouldn’t know you are you, the way it is now.’

  ‘No,’ she replied, ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t know.’

  She seemed to him to be two persons, but sometimes, about the place in the daytime, or when all of them were together, some gesture or inflection or passing expression of her face would suddenly blur the two identities in his mind, and he would look sharply at her. Then, in an instant, the two identities would again be distinct, and there before him would be the girl who was cool and friendly with him and made jokes with her father and moved so casually and competently about the place, running the house, leaning with flushed cheeks over a boiling pot, carrying out a basin of feed for the chickens and calling, ‘Chick! chee — che-che-chick, chick!’ That was the person who belonged to the daytime, to the cheerful, common sound of pans and pots rattling, to the clack of Mr. Christian’s boot heels on the doorsill and to his amiable, demanding bellow, ‘Hey, Sukie, where are you?’ and to Benton Todd.

  Benton Todd was in love with her, very obviously, Mr. Munn could see. Mr. Christian, that day when he had come to the Munn place with Doctor MacDonald, had said he couldn’t stand to hang around and watch Benton Todd’s calf eyes. He had said it made him want to puke. Benton Todd, when he came to the Christian place, would follow Lucille Christian around the house while she was occupied, or pretended to be occupied, with her tasks. She would go out to see that the evening’s milk was properly put away, or that a basket of eggs was ready to be carried in to town early the next morning, or to help with cooking the supper. ‘You can come on,’ she would say to Benton Todd, ‘if you want to,’ and he would follow her. She would give him things to hold, pans or baskets or dish towels, thrusting them suddenly at him and saying cheerfully, ‘Here, Bent, just hold this a minute, will you, please?’ Then, as likely as not, she would go off and leave him standing with the basket of eggs or the damp towel; or he might follow her about, still faithfully carrying the object.