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was apparently satisfied by the sight of him lying there
just as he had been. I felt a little weak.
We carried him out and put him in the car and he never
stirred a muscle. I went back and got the guns and
whistled for Mike and then just stalled a minute or two. I
wasn t afraid Lee would come out of it any time soon.
I wanted to keep Sam out there for a few minutes so he
wouldn t get in the house and see that damned girl
before she changed her dress and got that wild look out
of her eyes. We talked there at the car for several
minutes, but I have no idea what we talked about. I didn t
hear a word.
I stopped where the road ran close to the little creek
just before we got back on the highway and got a little
water in my hat and washed Lee s face with. it. He didn t
come around for five minutes and when he did he was
Hill Girl  49
still limp and white. I helped him out of the car and he
was sick.
I pulled the birds out of the game pocket of his coat
and they were mashed and beginning to smell. There
were nine of them and I threw them out on the ground.
Mike looked at me questioningly and we both looked at
the birds and I felt like hell.
Big thunderheads were piling up in the west when we
got out on the highway and the sun was just going down
behind them. It looked as if it might rain in the night.
Neither of us said anything as I drove home in the dusk.
Hill Girl  50
Chapter Seven
It was raining the next morning when I looked out, not a
sudden shower with a blue sky behind it, but a slow,
leaden drizzle that could go on for days.
It was very early, and Sunday, and no one else was up.
I went down to the kitchen and drank a cup of coffee with
Rose and then went out to the car. I wanted to go out to
the farm today, and I didn t want to get mixed up in any
Monday-morning rehash of the game yesterday. Lee had
still been limp and very drunk when we got home, and if
he and Mary were going to have an argument about it I
wanted to stay in the clear.
I ate some breakfast at Gordon s café and drove out to
the farm. It lies about seven miles from town, directly
across the Black Creek bottom from the Eilers place,
where Sam lives.
I pulled up in front of the house and sat there a minute
in the car under the sweet-gum trees, looking at the
place. It sat back from the road about a hundred yards,
with a sandy driveway going back to it, and the tenant
house was across the road on a bare sand hill with a big
china-berry tree in the front yard.
The house seemed in better condition than the old
house in town. My grandfather had always taken great
pride in keeping it up and there had been a renter on the
place for three of the four years since he had died. Right
now the place looked dead and empty with the dark
windows staring vacantly out into the rain and I listened
moodily to the sound of water dripping into the barrel at
the end of the front porch.
I ran through the rain and up onto the porch, fumbling
for the key. The hallway was dark and I walked slowly
down it toward the dining room at the rear of the house,
hearing my footsteps echo hollowly and thinking of my
Hill Girl  51
grandfather and grandmother and of the fun I had had
there in my childhood.
The room on the left at the front of the hall was the
parlor and there was a fireplace in it, while the room
across from it was the bedroom that had been mine
during the summers I had lived there. The hall went on
back to the dining room, and the kitchen was to the right
of that, while on the left of it was the back bedroom,
which had another fireplace. I went on to the back
bedroom and kindled a fire to take the chill dampness off
the place.
My grandparents had died within a few months of each
other, my grandmother in April and my grandfather in
the following July. He was past seventy-eight, but I had
never believed old age had anything to do with his death.
They had lived together for more than fifty years and
after she was gone he died of loneliness.
He had left me the farm and some eight thousand
dollars that was variously invested in savings bonds,
timber land, and some lots in town. It had become mine
on my twenty-first birthday, just about a year ago. He
had left it all to me, I guess, because we had always been
so close and I had lived there so long, and because he
knew, of course, that the Major had cut me off entirely
when I had left home.
My father had fought with the Engineers during World [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]