Big City Girl Charles Williams

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.Too wet, too dry, boll weevils, or the price goes down, or something.“I was kind of thinking of that old Mexico dawg,” Cass was saying.“He ain’t no good to us any more.Nobody ever goes hunting with him any more, and besides, he’s getting awful old.He just sets around and eats his head off, kind of a dead loss, you might say.Now, I know a man over Pinehill way, fella name of Calloway, Bruce Calloway—he’s one of old Eldridge Calloway’s boys, owns the gin over there and raises hunting,dawgs sort of for a pastime—who’ll give me fifteen dollars for him any time I’ll let him go.Told me so many’s the time.”“He would? For an old broken-down flea bag like that?” Joy asked, leaning on her elbows and looking eagerly at Cass.“Why don’t you take him up on it?”Cass avoided looking at Mitch.“It’d take some thought, of course.Man can’t just rush into something like that.But it ain’t as if he was worth anything to us.Just eats his head off.”“But, Papa,” Jessie broke in protestingly.“Mexico was Sewell’s dog.He thought the world of old Mexico.”“Well, now.Baby Doll, you know Sewell ain’t coming back and Mexico ain’t no good to him up there.Besides, it’s been five years or more since he’s even seen the dawg.and I don’t misdoubt but what he’s forgot about him altogether.”“But, Papa, he belonged to Sewell!”“Well, like I say, it’d take some thought,” Cass said placatingly, still avoiding looking in Mitch’s direction.“Wouldn’t want to rush into nothing, but I reckon Sewell wouldn’t begrudge his old daddy a little thing like that if—”Mitch shoved back his chair and got up without a word.Cass stopped in midsentence and the others were silent as he turned his back on them and stalked out the door.The sun was gone now.Lightning shot its jagged brilliance through the gathering blackness overhead, and far out over the river bottom he could see the advancing curtain of rain.It swept on into the fields below and ran toward him up the hillside.He ran across the yard toward the shelter of the shed where he slept.The old shed had been a smokehouse once and there still remained about it a greasy smell of fat salt meat and the thick smoke of winters long past.There was no floor except the hard-packed earth, but he had thrown some planks on the ground beside the cot to stand on when he was undressing for bed.His clothes hung from nails driven into the wall, and there was a box on which to put his can of Prince Albert and cigarette papers, because he often smoked at night.He had been living out here since Joy had moved in with them.She had come down off the hill late one afternoon, walking along the sandy road in her high heels and carrying the imitation leather suitcase, and announced she was Sewell’s wife.There was only one bedroom in the house, besides the big front room where Cass slept, and now Joy and Jessie used that.Before she came Mitch had had the bedroom and Jessie had slept on a small bed in the front room with Cass.He stood in the doorway and watched the onrushing vanguard of the rain go sweeping across the yard, sending the chickens scattering for shelter and drumming on the sheet-metal roof of the house.He sat down and rolled a cigarette and drew a match along the taut canvas underside of the cot to light it.There goes another day shot to hell, he thought, or maybe two, or God knows how many.From where he was sitting he could see past the corner of the house to where three of the old automobile hulks squatted dejectedly in the rain on their naked rims and on old tires flat for years.In the nearest one, the 1928 Chevrolet sedan, three chickens roosted contentedly on the back of the front seat wiping their beaks on the upholstery and enjoying this shelter from the downpour.And now we got to have a radio, he thought.I thought he’d sold everything we had left to sell, but I forgot about the dawg.After he gets rid of Mexico I don’t know what the hell he’ll do when there’s something he just has to have, unless he’s got to the point he can start thinking about selling the house or Jessie.I reckon when a man’s guts start running out of him it’s like water running out of a broken dam, and the more runs out, the bigger the hole gets, till everything’s gone.It’s getting to where you don’t even want to go to town any more, what with people looking at you and probably wondering behind your back how the Neelys are getting along share-cropping on their own land.It ain’t no wonder Sewell went to the bad.And now we got this Joy, going around half naked and shaking her can in front of them Jimerson boys, and somebody’s going to get hurt over that.If she wants to start chasing around like a bitch in heat the minute they get Sewell put away, that’s her business, but she ain’t going to do it around here in this house, in front of Jessie.He threw the cigarette out the door in disgust and got up, too restless to face the prospect of sitting there all afternoon watching it rain.He took off his shoes and rolled up the legs of his overalls and took the old army raincoat off the nail.Clapping the floppy straw hat on his head, he stalked out into the rain and turned down the trail going toward the bottom.The river might be rising with all this rain.There wasn’t too much danger of it, the way the rain had been spaced out, but it couldn’t keep on forever without the river’s starting to come up.Once before, about seven years ago, the river had almost got their bottom cotton, the whole twenty-five acres of it.The levee he and Sewell had built across the upper end of the field had been the only thing that had saved it.He thought about it now, and the picture of that afternoon and night was still vivid in his memory.It had been just a few months before Sewell had fought with Cass and left home.He padded down the trail on big, calloused bare feet, rain sluicing onto the old hat and making it flop down in front until he could barely see from under it.The trail skirted the fields all the way down the hillside and then cut out through the trees just above the bottom fields, headed for the river.The river swung in close to the field here, coming in a wide bend from the west across the two-mile expanse of timbered bottom and then turning south again a hundred yards or so out from the edge of the cotton and the fence.The low place that had threatened the fields that year of the high water was a continuation of the river’s eastward bend, probably part of an old channel long since filled in.It came on in and under the upper fence, a swale perhaps a hundred yards wide at the upper end of the field [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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