“Why, yes. I’ve thought of that. He was coming this
way, wasn’t he? I mean, when he— Oh, it’s so awful!
You don’t know what it’s been like all day, not
knowing.” The idea of Sewell’s coming back to her
Big City Girl — 142
began to blossom and take shape, and she knew. She
just knew. Why hadn’t she realized it before? Why, of
course. It really couldn’t have been anything else. He
had been headed right this way, hadn’t he?
Forgetting the two men for a moment, she let her
mind run unhampered along this delightful and
beckoning pathway, seeing herself as the irresistible
beauty for whom men would take incalculable risks. It
happened all the time in the movies. And then, even
as she was beginning to believe in herself as this fatal
beauty, all the terrible tragedy of it came rushing in
upon her and she fought to hold back the tears as she
thought of how near he had been and she had not
known. Sewell had been killed while risking
everything just to be at her side for one final,
beautiful hour, and she hadn’t known it until too late.
“Yes,” she said tragically, her face slightly raised
like the pictures of Joan of Arc and a mist of tears in
her eyes. “He was coming to see me. I can feel it. It’s
something you know deep down inside of you. Oh,
poor Sewell! To think how near he was and I didn’t
know.”
Shaw broke in eagerly. “That’s it! That’s the way I
see it. He must have been coming here. What else
would lie have been doing up there on that bridge?
We’ll cover it from that angle. And we’ll want some
pictures. You won’t mind posing, will you, Mrs.
Neely?”
“Mrs. Neely won’t mind posing at all, I’m sure,”
Lambeth said with the same deferential and still halfdrunken
gravity. “Mrs. Neely takes a very good
picture.”
“I—I’ll be glad to,” Joy said graciously. She began
dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, and looked
down appraisingly at the dowdy old kimono. They
would catch me in this crummy old rag, she thought.
“Oh, but I’ll have to change and fix up a little. I look
such a fright. I haven’t even bothered to— I mean, it’s
all been so horrible. It won’t take a minute. You won’t
mind, will you?” She gave them a wan little smile, and
Big City Girl — 143
before either of them could answer she had turned
and run back down the hall.
Now, where’s that confounded kid? she thought
frantically, rushing into the bedroom and over to the
suitcase on the old trunk. What’ll I wear? Any other
time she’d be underfoot like some idiotic puppy,
mooning at me while I brush my hair, and now when I
could use her she’s nowhere around. Not a
goddamned thing that’s fit to be seen in, and the
picture’ll be in all the papers. Not that cheap, lousy
print—it’s wrinkled, anyway. A whore wouldn’t be
found dead in it. Just think, he was coming to see me.
Wasn’t that sweet? He just had to see me: he couldn’t
stay away. She threw the kimono on the bed.
She began to grab dresses up wildly until she had
them all in her arms, and then threw them back into
the suitcase in jumbled confusion. Oh, where the hell
is that kid? I’ve got to have the mirror. And my
lipstick. And I’ve got to comb my hair. She ran into
the center of the room and stared wildly around in a
sort of frenzied and helpless indecision. Where could
she start? And what could she wear?
She ran out onto the back porch to get the mirror,
in her frantic rush forgetting until after she was
already out there, in the open, that she had taken off
the kimono and had on nothing except her wisps of
underthings. Oh, my God, she thought, I’m losing my
mind. Snatching the mirror off its nail, she fled
headlong back into the room. Suppose they’d seen
me, she thought. Not Lambeth, that stew bum. He’s
seen me in less than this. But the other one. Shaw,
isn’t it? He’s cute. He’d have thought I was an awful
hussy.
I hope that crazy Lambeth doesn’t get the pictures
mixed up and turn that other one in to the paper.
Wouldn’t that be a mess, when the editor saw it? And
I wonder what Harve ever did with the one I gave
him. I hope he didn’t have it with him when he was—
uh—when Sewell—er— Think of them finding it and a
lot of strange people passing it around. Suppose
Sewell had found it when he— God, that would have
been terrible. But he didn’t even know about it.
Big City Girl — 144
“Jessie! Jessie! Where are you, dear?” Oh, where is
that lousy kid? If she thinks she’s going to Houston
with me, she’ll have to be more help than this. What
do I want with her, anyway? She’d just be a nuisance.
I won’t take her.
What am I talking about? Of course I’ll take her. I
don’t care what she does afterward, but I’m going to
take her. Didn’t I see his face there this morning, on
the porch? That got him, all right. The lousy bastard.
That’ll teach him who he can shove like that.
She propped the mirror up against a pillow and sat
down on the bed to comb her hair. The mirror fell
over, and she put her head in her arms, wanting to
cry. Stop it, she thought. Stop it! Stop it! Stop itl I’ve
got to get fixed lip. They’re going to take my picture,
and it’ll be in all the papers. I’ve just got to look my
best. I’ve just got to. I don’t want to look like some old
bag. Please! The story will say how he was coming
back to see me, and people will look at the picture
and say, “What was he going anywhere to see an old
frump like that for?” Well. I’m not an old frump, and
he was coming to see me. He was. I just know he was.
Wasn’t that sweet? All that worrying and stewing I’ve
done about nothing, afraid I was losing my looks and
getting old, when there wasn’t anything to it at all.
She looked up then and saw Jessie standing in the
door. The girl’s childlike face, framed in the aureole
of her tousled and rain-dampened hair, was burdened
with an overpowering sadness, and the large blue
eyes had no spark of their usual spirit and life.
“Oh, there you are, honey,” Joy said, babbling,
paying no attention to the other’s heart-wrenching
quiet. “Will you help me for a minute? Hold the mirror
lot me, will you? And see if you can find my lipstick.”
Jessie came on into the room and took the mirror,
her eyes still sad and now a little self-conscious as
well, faintly embarrassed as always by the older
woman’s near nakedness. “What is it, Joy?” she asked
dully.
“Reporters,” Joy rattled on, full of excitement,
pulling the comb through her hair in long sweeps
Big City Girl — 145
back over her shoulders. “From some paper. They’re
going to take my picture, and write about us in the
paper. Maybe they’ll take yours too. I don’t know
what paper it is; I forgot to ask them. Maybe it’s a
Houston one. Say, you know what?” She paused in
mid-stroke to look up with bubbling inspiration. “If
they’re from Houston, maybe they’ll give us a ride.
We can go back with them.”
In spite of herself, Jessie began to feel some of Joy’s
excitement. “Do you think they’d let us?” she asked.
“Of course, honey. Certainly they would,” Joy
rambled on, by now fully convinced that Shaw and
Lambeth were from Houston. The whole thing was an
actuality, no longer even faintly conjectural. She
possessed a great deal of Cass’s happy facility in the
art of making facts agree with her and for making up
her own if necessary.
“We’ll get a ride with them, and when we get to
Houston we can stay with this friend of mine down
there, the one named Dorothy, you remember, the
one who’s a model, only maybe she isn’t modeling
now, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her for a long
time. Maybe she isn’t working as a model right at the
moment, but that part doesn’t matter. Anyway, we’ll
stay with her, she’d love to have us—she’d just love it,
we’re such great friends. We’ll stay with her until we
get jobs, and then we’ll get our own apartment.”
Jessie had caught onto her excitement for a moment
and then had slid back, with the misery returning to
her eyes. She tried desperately to listen, to follow
every word, and to go along with Joy in appreciation
of this enchanting vista, but her mind kept turning
back to the brooding theme of her own unhappy
thoughts.
“Joy,” she asked now, suddenly, with a quiet and
still-laced intensity, “do you think he had time to ask
forgiveness?”
What on earth is she mumbling about? Joy thought.
Christ, here I’ve been rattling on miles an hour and I
thought she was listening. “Who had time to ask
Big City Girl — 146
what?” she asked absently. “Baby, do you know where
my lipstick is? I can’t find my purse.”
“It’s in your suitcase somewhere, I think,” Jessie
said.
Let’s see, Joy was thinking. I’ll wear my nylons. I’ve
only got one pair without runs, but this is important
and if I’m careful they’ll be all right. I’ll have to have
them on, it seems to me they always want to get your
legs in the picture. I’ll wear that dress with the bows,
it’s the only one that’s halfway decent. No. No, I can’t
do that, damnit. It’s ruined, it’s all full of sand and it’s
wrinkled. The last lousy, stinking thing I had that was
fit to be found dead in, and now it’s ruined. That’s the
one I had on when that stupid, ugly, mean-faced
bastard pushed me. Well, he’s going to pay for that,
all right. I’ll wear my white slippers with the French
heels and the ankle straps; I think they’re clean.
They’ll look nice in a picture, really smart.
Springing up, she ran over to the suitcase and
began throwing dresses around again in a sort of
despairing frenzy. “Jessie, Jessie, what can I put on?
Help me, honey.”
Jessie followed her quietly. “Why not that white
summer dress you had on this morning, Joy?”
“It’ll have to do, I guess.” She snatched it up
frantically. Oh, why aren’t there any hangers around
this awful dump? she thought. It’s all wrinkled. Well,
it’s the only one. Hurriedly, she slipped into it,
rummaged through the rat-nest confusion of the
suitcase until she found her purse, and made up her
face. Then there was another explosive upheaval
among the powder-sifted brassieres, pants, dresses,
handkerchiefs, and stockings while she matched the
two remaining unsnagged nylons. She slowed down
and put them on, very carefully, and slipped into the
white shoes.
At last she was ready. She took one last look in the
mirror and shook back her hair. Jessie followed her
onto the porch, alternately caught up into the
excitement of it and then slipping back into her own
gray and lonely sadness.
Big City Girl — 147
Joy forgot to introduce the two strange men, and
she stood quietly back out of the way. The man with
the camera was fussing with its knobs and funny dials
and taking light bulbs out of a leather bag. She
wondered where he was going to plug them in, and
thought with embarrassment of his finding out at the
last minute that there wasn’t any electricity.
Maybe God would have forgiven him, Jessie
thought, if he’d had time to ask. Maybe he did. Maybe
the last thing he did on earth was to pray for
forgiveness of his sins. It seemed so important, and
she couldn’t understand why Joy didn’t wonder about
it too. It must be more important than having your
picture taken.
She wished she could ask Mitch about it. She had
always consulted him about things like that, but now
she couldn’t because she didn’t ever want to speak to
him again. It was lonely, though, not having Mitch to
ask about things.
Big City Girl — 148
Twenty-three
Mitch came up the trail past the barn walking fast in
the rain, and went into the old smokehouse. He dried
his hands on a shirt hanging on the wall and found
the cigarette papers. I’ll roll two or three while I’m
here, he thought, and put ‘em in a Prince Albert can
with some dry matches. It’ll be easier that way than
trying to toll ‘em in the rain.
Trying to force himself to be calm, he sat down on
the box and set to work with tobacco and papers. His
fingers were still too wet and the paper stuck to them
and tore. Cursing, he got up and dried them again,
and started over. Water ran out of his rain-soaked
hair and spilled across the cigarette. He threw it
away and tried again, holding it out and away from
him. His fingers were shaking badly and he spilled
more than half the tobacco, but he finally got one
rolled and kept on until he had three more. Placing
them in a can with some matches, he got up, ready to
run back down the trail.
He ought to have more over him to keep off the rain
than that old raincoat, he thought. Cotton sacks. I’ll
take a couple of cotton sacks. I got to have something
when— Sick revulsion ran through him and left him
weak and shaking, and he put the picture out of his
mind. Just to put over him to keep off the rain while
Big City Girl — 149
he smokes a cigarette, he thought, and ran to the
barn. Snatching up two long canvas sacks, he rolled
them into a tight bundle. He was ready to go.
He came out the door and then stopped, thinking
suddenly of Jessie. I got to talk to her, he thought. I
can spare a minute, just one minute, if I can get her
away from that yellow-headed slut long enough to get
a word in. Wheeling, he ran through the rain toward
the house. There was no one in the kitchen and he
stopped and looked around, spilling water onto the
floor from his saturated clothing. He seemed to be
running forever through some horrible dream, trying
to catch up with something ahead or eternally fleeing
from some disaster behind. He stared at the empty
kitchen, aware that it caused him no surprise at all.
There was a feeling in him that if everyone in the
house had suddenly evaporated like gasoline on a hot
day or blown away like smoke there would no longer
have been anything strange in it.
Then above the monotonous sound of the rain he
could hear the radio in Cass’s room, the soft,
insidious, forever-flowing river of its exhortation and
admonition as unstoppable as time and unavoidable
as death, but knew he could accept this as no
evidence the house was still inhabited. It just goes on
forever like that river down in the bottom, he thought,
and it ain’t no wonder the old man can’t make up his
mind which one of ‘em Sewell is drowned in. If you
dropped it in a bucket of water it’d keep right on
talking. He could see it now in his mind, lying
unquenched, eternal, deathless, at the bottom of the
bucket, the ceaseless outflowing of its word secretion
unhalted and the words flowing up through the water
in big bubbles like the balloon-encased conversations
of comic strips.
There must be somebody here. Then there was a
strange flash of light, or rather the reflection of a
flash, sudden, sharp, incredibly fast, and gone. What
the hell was that? he thought. Lightning? No. It was
like lightning, but it wasn’t. Then he heard voices
somewhere in front, and he went down the hall with
his leathery feet rasping, shup, shup, shup, against
Big City Girl — 150
the time-worn pine to emerge upon the porch like
some drowned cadaver walking up out of the sea into
the midst of a beach party.
It was Joy’s greatest hour. She lay reclined in the
swing with her back against one arm and her long
silken legs slightly raised and outstretched across it
in the classic pose of all calendar art. The hemline of
the short and frilly summer dress was carefully
arranged across her knees while she awaited word
from Lambeth as to whether he wanted more grief
this time or more leg, and the reporter stood at the
end of the swing taking notes on a small dime-store
note pad.
“I won’t even have to wait for authorization, Mrs.
Neely,” he was saying excitedly. “It’ll be all right, I
know. A hundred dollars. I’ll write the story, under
your name, of course. You just furnish the facts and
I’ll write it down. It’ll be in the form of a first-person
story of your life with Sewell Neely, how much you
loved each other, your marriage, all the waiting here
while you didn’t know he was trying to come back to
you, the tragedy, and all that stuff. And under vour
name, of course. By Joyce Neely, it’ll say.”
“A little more leg this lime,” Lambeth said. He was
squatted down near the door with camera and flash
holder.
Joy looked up and saw Mitch standing there in the
door, smiled triumphantly at him. and hiked the
hemline of her dress another three inches for his
benefit rather than Lambeth’s.
“Hello, Mitch,” she said sweetly. “These gentlemen
are from the paper. They’re going to give me and
Jessie a lift, when they go back down lo Houston
tomorrow night.”
Mitch took in all this grotesque Saturnalia of
sickening cheapness in one terrible glance, seeing
Jessie quietly watching from the edge of the porch
near the step, and his mind swung back to the
ballooning and discolored agony of Sewell’s dying
down there in the rain. He had no way of knowing
that at least part of the sexy and heartless bitchiness
Big City Girl — 151
of it was an act put on instantly, at this very moment,
for his benefit alone, and felt nothing but the black
wind blowing inside him as he started toward her. He
had taken one step when, unknowingly, the reporter
probably saved her life.
Looking up and seeing Mitch, he started forward.
“Hello,” he said eagerly. “I guess you’re the brother.
Mitchell, isn’t it? Now, I wonder if we could get a
statement from you? And a picture or two.”
Mitch hit him in the face and he fell over backward
into the swing against Joy’s posed and silken legs
while she screamed. A look of ineffable surprise and
disbelief spread slowly over his face, and a trickle of
blood ran down out of the corner of his mouth. Mitch
whirled then on Lambeth, but the photographer had
been through too many of these sudden melees to be
caught napping and had swung aside, out of reach,
with the camera protected against his stomach like
the hidden football in a tricky backfield play.
“Stop it! Mitch, stop it!” Jessie cried out, and then
he had her by the arm and was pulling her,
protesting, after him down the hall.
“I want to talk to you,” he heard himself saying
above the roaring in his ears. “You hear me? You hear
me?” he seemed to be repeating over and over. How
long have I been saying that? he thought. “You listen
to me, Jessie! You ain’t going anywhere with that
woman, tomorrow or no other day.”
They were in the kitchen and she was beating on his
arm with an outraged fist. “Turn me loose, Mitch!
You’re hurting my arm. And I don’t want to talk to
you. I don’t want anything to do with you. I’m going
with Joy. You’re acting like a crazy man.”
He released her wrist and moved to take both of her
arms in his hands to shake some sense into her, to tell
her, to make her understand. Christ, I got to make
her see, he thought in some far-off detached portion
of his mind that was still calm in the midst of all this
madness. I got to make her see. The cotton sacks
dropped from under his left arm and unrolled across
the floor just as Cass came running out of his room.
Big City Girl — 152
“Turn me loose, Mitch!” Jessie screamed.
He felt the hand then upon his own arm and turned
to see Cass standing there, and he thought. Does he
think he has to keep me from hurting Jessie? Would I
hurt Jessie? Am I hurting her? But Cass was paying no
attention to Jessie at all. From under the soggy and
impossible hat he was looking in a sort of calm
bewilderment at the long canvas sacks unrolled
across the floor.
“What you doing with them cotton sacks, Mitch?
You can’t pick cotton in the rain.”
Mitch stopped then, releasing Jessie, and stepped
back to stand stock-still for a minute in the suddenly
quiet room where there was no sound now but his
own breathing and the drumming monotony of the
rain. Oh, my God, he thought, the words going around
and around in his mind like a drunken and insanely
spinning carousel in a bad dream. You can’t pick
cotton in the rain. You can’t pick cotton in the rain.
You can’t . . . We got no cotton. It’s June and we
haven’t got no cotton and we likely won’t ever have
none when the river gets through with it and he just
stands there and tells me we can’t pick it in the rain. I
got to get out of here. I got to get back to Sewell.
What am I standing here for? He had to run, to get
out of the kitchen before it closed in on him and
strangled him. Snatching up the sacks, he fled out the
door and down the trail past the barn.
Cass stood looking after him for a moment until he
had gone out of sight around the corner of the barn.
Then he went over and sat down at the table. He
oughtn’t to be doing that, he thought. “A boy twentysome-
odd years old and raising cotton all his life and
with me telling him how to do it all these years ought
to know better. You just can’t do it. It’s foolish. It rots
it.”
“It rots what?” Jessie asked, staring at him.
He looked around, surprised. He had forgotten she
was there, and hadn’t had any idea he was speaking
aloud.
Big City Girl — 153
“Rots the cotton,” he said with waspish impatience.
Even Jessie ought to know that. It was something
anybody would know that had ever been anywhere
near a cotton farm. “You pick it while it’s wet like that
and it rots.”
Jessie continued to stare at him, feeling some of the
horror that had taken hold of Mitch.
“He’s not picking cotton,” she cried out. “This is
June and there isn’t any cotton.”
“Then what was he doing with cotton sacks?” he
asked logically. “That’s what you do with cotton
sacks. You put cotton in ‘em. You don’t do nothing
else with ‘em. That’s all they’re for.”
But before she could think of any answer he
suddenly remembered the terrible thing about Sewell,
and the awful knowledge came home to him that
nobody had ever told Mitch about it. All this
launching around and everybody running around like
chickens with their heads chopped off, taking pictures
and shaking each other, and nobody had ever said a
word about it to Mitch, he thought piteously. That’s
the reason he’s going down there in the bottom just
going to work like nothing had happened. He don’t
even know about it. He don’t know Sewell is drowned
in the river. I got to tell him.
He ran out the door, but Mitch was already out of
sight. I’ll follow him down in the field, he thought, and
tell him. But it seems to me like I was already down
there once today. And wasn’t Mitch building a dam?
But what would he want cotton sacks for, if he was
building a dam?
Big City Girl — 154
Twenty-four
Mitch plunged down the trail and cut off to the right
toward the old treetop. As he made the turn he swept
the backed-up water below him with a quick and
searching glance. There was no way of telling
whether it was rising now or falling, but the water
was still, with no current through it, which meant the
levee was still holding. Far out through the trees and
the dismal grief of the rain he could see the muddy
sweep of the current along the main channel,
swinging in the wide bend and pushing water out
over the flat and then completing the swing to flow on
south past and beyond the edge of the field. It’s
holding, he thought. I wish I had a minute to go down
there and look at it. I could tell whether it was going
up or falling. But there ain’t time. I been gone too
long now.
Sewell lay on his back in the same position,
unmoving except for the shallow, rapid rise and fall of
his breathing. His eyes were closed. When Mitch
came up and squatted down to look in under the edge
of the raincoat he opened them, but for an instant
there was no recognition in them at all. They were
sick, and dull with pain, and now he seemed to be
trying to move the swollen arm. Mitch had no way of
knowing that he was trying to get the gun out of his
Big City Girl — 155
pocket, the instincts and reflexes of all those years of
living with violence and by violence still afloat and
surviving even as the body itself was drowning in its
sea of pain. Then the eyes cleared a little and a faint
touch of the old sardonic humor came back into them.
“Hello, kid,” he said weakly. “You look like a
drowned rat. Where you been?”
“I got some cigarettes,” Mitch said. He unrolled the
cotton sacks and carefully dried his brother’s face and
left hand, not touching the right at all, then laid both
sacks across the branches above them for additional
shelter.
He squatted down again and reached up to dry his
own hands against the underside of the sacks above
them Then he shook a cigarette out of the can and
placed it in his brother’s mouth, raked a match head
with a thumbnail, and lit it.
“Ain’t you going to have one?” Sewell asked,
inhaling, and then he moved his left hand up to take
the cigarette between his fingers.
Mitch shook his head silently.
“You see any cops up there?” Sewell asked, his
mind very clear now. He had no idea how long Mitch
had been gone. He had been lying here for days, or
maybe it was only minutes; time had no meaning any
more, it was crazy and made no sense. It was like a
strange and unpredictable river, lingering
interminably in some dark and turgid pool where
there was no light or movement or flow, and then
plunging headlong into the millrace of some sunlit
chasm where everything was clear and very sharply
seen but going past at incredible speed. For long
periods he wouldn’t even be here at all. He would be
back in Dorothy’s apartment listening to the
motorcycles in the early morning or fleeing endlessly
along a darkened highway in the rain with a siren
wailing behind him. Then he would come back out of
it and Mitch would be here, or he would be gone.
Mitch was hard to hold onto.
Big City Girl — 156
Mitch shook his head again. “There’s still one car
up there. I didn’t see ‘em, though. They’re probably
up the river.”
He said nothing about the men from the newspaper.
The whole scene up there on the porch, the grotesque
cheapness and cruelty of it, made him sick when he
thought about it, and he pushed it out of his mind. All
she was thinking about was getting her goddamned
picture in the paper, he thought, and now she’s going
to get a hundred dollars out of it on top of that for
some lousy bunch of lies. It’s too bad there ain’t some
way she could get the reward money, too, so she
could make a good profit while she’s at it. I’m glad,
though, that that dude with the notebook stepped up
when he did, because I might have killed her if I’d got
my hands on her and started. I lost my head, I reckon.
The same way I did with Jessie. Or not the same way,
either, but I lost my head. I just made things worse
again. Every time I try to talk to Jessie I just ball it up
worse. I don’t know why the hell I can’t talk to her
calm and reasonable, instead of losing my head and
starting to shake her or something. I reckon I get too
scared thinking about it and then start to go wild. I
got to stop that. If it ain’t too late. . . . Tomorrow
night, she said. I got to talk to Jessie, but next time I’ll
keep my head.
Water started to drip in on them again and he
looked up. Them damn sacks are leaking, he thought.
I got to straighten ‘em out. He backed out and
straightened up, then whirled around in despair as he
heard Cass’s voice crying his name.
“Mitch! Mitch, it’s Sewell,” the old man was
shouting, turning off the trail and running toward
him.
Oh, God, Mitch thought, there ain’t any way I can
keep him away from here now. He’s seen me, and the
sacks, and he’ll find Sewell, and his yowling and
screaming’ll bring every damned cop in the county.
He turned and ran toward Cass, trying to head him
off. “What you yelling about?” he demanded.
Big City Girl — 157
“It’s Sewell,” Cass said, still stumbling forward
through the underbrush, and raising one arm to point
outward toward the river. “It’s Sewell. Just come over
the radio.”
Mitch stopped, recognizing the identical gesture
and the repeated words, the whole thing like the
second playing of a phonograph record or a motionpicture
reel being rerun. We’re going to go through
that whole thing again, he thought with horror. He’s
forgot he told me once already and he’s going to do it
all over, or else he’s heard it on the radio again on a
different station and thinks Sewell drowns all over
again every time they say it.
“Stop yelling!” he commanded harshly. I got to shut
him up some way, he thought.
Cass came up to him but could not stop, and
continued to pace up and down as he had before. If he
takes off that silly hat and wrings it out, Mitch
thought, I’ll go crazy and jump in the river. I can’t
stand no more.
“It’s Sewell,” Cass said wildly. “He’s out there in
the river.” And then, suddenly, he stopped, thinking, I
done all this before and Mitch was building a dam,
but this time he’s got cotton sacks hung up like a tent
in that windfall. I done all of this before and Mitch
knows about it but he’s so hardhearted he kept right
on working on his dam even when he knew my boy
was drowned in the river.
He had ceased his pacing and Mitch watched him
stare at the cotton sacks and then turn to look at him
with that same baffled wonder like an imbecile child
lost and forlorn in the rain. “What you got under them
sacks, Mitch? What you doing?” he started to say, and
then the wildness came into his eyes and he whirled
and ran toward the tree, crying out, “Sewell! Sewell!”
He was throwing the sacks back and kneeling
blindly in his haste as Mitch leaped after him, very
near the border line of panic and shouting now
himself.
“Don’t touch him! Goddammit, don’t touch him!
Don’t touch his arm. Leave him alone!”
Big City Girl — 158
He got his hands on the old man’s shaking body and
held him just as Sewell opened his eyes again and
looked up at them.
“What’s all this racket?” he asked angrily, not
recognizing them at first. Then he saw the weeping
Cass held back and restrained just beyond his legs.
“What the hell’s he doing here? Is this a party?”
“What’s the matter with his arm, Mitch? What’s
happened to his arm?” Cass was asking over and
over.
“He’s been snake-bit,” Mitch said roughly. “A
rattler bit him.”
“Have you called a doctor? We got to get the wagon
and get him out of here. Go get the wagon. Oh, my
poor boy!”
“For Christ’s sake, make him shut up,” Sewell said
brutally. “He’s making more noise than an old
woman. He’ll have the whole county down here.”
Mitch shook him, not wanting to do it, but knowing
he had to get the noise stopped some way. “Shut up,”
he said savagely. “Shut up! There’s men down here in
the bottom looking for him.”
“But he’s been snake-bit,” Cass cried out,
struggling. “We got to get him to a doctor.”
Ain’t there no way I can make him understand?
Mitch thought with desperation. “We can’t take him
to a doctor. It wouldn’t do no good nohow. Do you
want Jessie to see him like that? Do you want to turn
him over to the law? Ain’t you had enough of that
damned circus?”
“Tell him to shut up and mind his own business,”
Sewell said coldly.
“You want them money-hungry bastards getting
hold of him?” Mitch asked roughly. “You want that
woman to go on making a side show out of it, like her
husband getting killed was just for her benefit so she
could get her picture in the paper?”
“Snake-bit! I tell you he’s been snake-bit,” Cass was
still saying wildly, not hearing one word he had said.
Big City Girl — 159
Sewell had grown deadly quiet. “What’s that,
Mitch? Who did you say?” he asked softly.
“Joy,” Mitch said, his face dark. “I don’t care if she
is your wife, she ain’t going to make no circus . . .”
Then he stopped, realizing for the first time that
Sewell probably didn’t even know she was here.
“She’s been here about a month. She’s up there at the
house now with them men from the paper, making a
circus out of it.”
“We got to get the wagon, Mitch,” Cass cried out
again. “Can’t you see—”
“Shut up,” Mitch commanded, feeling sick. It would
have been all right, he thought, with just the two of
us. We could have stood it. and there wouldn’t have
been no fuss to get you started. It would have been all
right if he hadn’t come along and started crying.
“Shut up! We ain’t going to get no wagon.”
“Mitch, wait a minute,” Sewell said, speaking with
great difficulty. “Maybe you better—”
“What?” Mitch asked, puzzled.
Sewell’s eyes were closed and he lay very still. “I’m
getting awful sick,” he said faintly. “I’m afraid of it. I-I
thought I could pull through, but I don’t know.”
Mitch stared at him. He must be out of his mind, he
thought wildly. A doctor ain’t going to do him no
good.
“You want me to get the wagon and take you up to
the house?” he asked, leaning very close.
”Yes,” Sewell answered faintly. “It may be too late
now. I’m afraid I’m going to die. Mitch, I—” He
stopped, as if the effort were too great for him. Mitch
waited, hardly breathing. “I—I don’t want to die down
here in the rain.”
* * *
They were gone now. They had left hurriedly, running
up the hill toward the house to harness the mules and
bring the wagon down. Sewell lay very still for a
minute, thinking. It’s in my right-hand coat pocket
and I got to get it out of there some way and into the
Big City Girl — 160
left one. I can’t use the right hand at all. I can’t even
move it.
So she was up there all the time and I didn’t know
it. Well, I ain’t got no time to think about that. I ain’t
got much time left for anything. Get it out of the
right-hand pocket and into the left one. And then
maybe it won’t even shoot. It’s been in the water. But
it’s different from a shotgun. Shotgun shells will get
wet, but this is solid ammunition, in brass cases, and
it might still be dry inside. There ain’t no way to tell
till I get there. But I got to move the gun to where I
can use it.
He raised his left arm and started swinging the
hand across to fumble awkwardly with the coat
pocket next to the swollen and immovable right arm,
and then he was lying in the sand somewhere on a
summer night with the surf running and Joy was just
beyond him in the starlight, very lovely in her bathing
suit. She turned her head to look at him, and
disappeared, and a siren was wailing somewhere
behind him while the windshield wipers were going
swock-swock, swock-swock, with the wet pavement
rushing and swooping endlessly back and past him
through the dark-framed tunnel of light.
How long had they been gone? He had come back
from somewhere far off and was lying there with his
left arm across his chest. I got to hurry, he thought. I
may have been out for half an hour. He twisted the
hand into the pocket, bumping the right arm once and
feeling a nauseating ocean of pain, and then he had
hold of the gun and brought it out, I wonder if it’ll
shoot, he thought. Well, there’s only one way to find
out, and I will if I can hold on that long and don’t
blank out.
Big City Girl — 161
Twenty-five
Mitch reached the barn first and was feverishly
throwing harness on the mules when Cass came
puffing up and went on by, bent forward and holding
onto the hat as if running into a gale.
“I found Sewell! I found him, I found him! I found
my boy!” Mitch could hear him shouting from the
depths of his grief or madness as he ran across the
yard. Then he-was gone inside the house.
There was instantaneous eruption. Mitch was
whirling the team about before the wagon and
thinking. What made him change his mind like that?
What happened? Then Shaw and Lambeth came
running around the side of the house followed closely
by Jessie. There was no sign of Joy. Well, she wouldn’t
get her hair wet, Mitch thought, in some detached
portion of his mind.
“What happened?” Shaw asked with wild
excitement, bareheaded and oblivious of the rain. “We
can’t make any sense out of what he’s saying.”
I wouldn’t think so. Mitch thought, ducking in
behind the mules to fasten the trace chains. He’s got
it so mixed up in his own mind, the radio part of it
and this part, that’s he’s probably gone in there now
to listen to the radio to see if he can get straightened
out himself.
Big City Girl — 162
He threw the lines into the wagon and turned to
face them. “He’s down there in the bottom.” he said
harshly. “I’m going after him in the wagon, but I got
to have some help to get him in it. And one of you
better go out on the highway and phone the damned
sheriff’s office and tell ‘em to send an ambulance or a
doctor. He’s been snake-bit.”
Jessie had run up now and she cried out in
anguished accusation, “He said you had Sewell down
there and wouldn’t bring him to the doctor. He said
you wouldn’t bring him to the house.”
”You get in out of the rain,” Mitch said curtly.
She gave him a look of horror and turned, running
back toward the kitchen. He looked after her once,
then ran over to the old smokehouse and came out
carrying his cot. He went to the woodpile with it, and
with a few savage swings of the ax he chopped the
legs off to make a stretcher of it.
Throwing it into the wagon, he nodded to Lambeth
and leaped up into it himself, while Shaw ran for the
car to get to a telephone. As Mitch swung the team
around and they started down the hill, Cass emerged
from the kitchen and came after them, shouting
frantically.
“Wait!” he called. “Wait for me!”
Mitch stopped the mules and held them, feeling a
harsh and grating impatience as the old man climbed
aboard. Cass sat down on the rough plank across the
wagon bed and faced forward into the rain, staring
straight ahead.
“Let’s go,” he said in the dead and bankrupt calm
that is beyond frenzy. “I got to bring my boy in.”
The wagon swung downward through the darkening
timber. It’s getting late, Mitch thought, aware of a
faint surprise that this day might end, might have
twilight and then cease to be, like other days. It had
run on through the span of a lifetime and he had
come to accept it as something eternal that would go
on and on as long as he could keep running forward
without progress across the endless revolving belt of
Big City Girl — 163
its hours. It’s getting late and he may be dead when
we get there. He’s had that poison in him all day.
What made him get scared all of a sudden like that?
Being tough is Sewell’s religion, if he has one, and
he’s known all day he’s going to die. It was right after
I said she was up here; was that just his way of saying
he wanted to see her, to be with her when he died? Or
can being tough just quit on you like that when you
need it worst?
The water was still backed up, unmoving, below the
foot of the hill. He glanced at it once, briefly, read it
with only half his mind, and forgot it. The fight to save
their crop was a thing long past, almost forgotten,
and unimportant now.
He leaped down from the wagon bed and wondered
if he were really hanging in the air, unable even to
fall toward the ground. Sewell lay as he had, with his
eyes closed. He knelt beside the still and white-faced
figure, feeling for the pulse. It was still there, rapid,
faint, and fluttery, like the heartbeat of a captured
bird.
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