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ONE
About 9:30 the next morning he entered the downstairs room which faced the almost painfully blue west and the tall ridge across the little valley, the room which his grandparents had used to call the "sun parlor." He advanced into the room a way and halted, seeming to feel the whole fabric of the house tremulous with his footsteps. And he had paused to consider, well, to think about how much there actually was to consider. The onus of inheritance was already beginning to rub a bit.—The room was famil-iarly musty and the two windows, eyed and wavy, were decent in their gray gauzy curtains. Over the bisected window in the door which opened to the outside, the glass curtain was stretched tight with rods at top and bottom so that the cloth was pulled into stiff ribs, stiff as fingers of the dead. He took another step and again hesitated, hearing the quiet wary rattle of glassware somewhere. Meditating, he shifted his weight forward and back, rocking on the balls of his feet. Had all the floor timbers melted away with dry rot? He couldn't quite bring himself to doubt, staring down frowning at the regular lines of dark oak flooring, board laid solid by board. Even the layer of dust which was spread like cheesecloth about his feet didn't entirely dull the hard polish of the wood. He disliked thinking of these careful rows ripped up, expos-ing the broad rough subflooring; and then that too taken away to get at the flaking bones of the house. But there was probably no preventing it. He sighed, and as he inhaled, agitated atoms of dust pierced his nostrils brightly. Twice he sneezed, and rubbed his nose roundly with his wrist, squeezed his eyebrows in his palm. Had he really heard an echo to his sneeze? The room hardly seemed large enough to give up echoes—it was about twenty feet square with a high ceiling—but it was a room truly made for secondary presences, for reverberations. This wasn't the whole room. Opposite him, double doors, divided into small glass rectangles, closed off what was actually the remainder of this room. In the left door his image stood, hand still over his face, and he was all cut into pieces in the panes. He dropped his pale hand to his side, and in the glass the movement coruscated.
He moved toward the west wall and once again his image, larger now and darker, ac-costed him. His head and torso stood before him, sliced now into the pattern of an oval enclosed in roundish triangles and seemingly stacked in the shelves of the dark old writing cabinet. He shrugged, turned away. The low sofa, piled with fancy pillows and cushions, sat stolid against the opposite wall. The obese horror was draped over with a picture rug, but it was easy enough to guess how it was: covered with a vinous prickly nap and with three huge cushions laid on the springs. The wool picture rug had two fringes of red tassel and displayed a Levantine scene: in the market place the wine seller sits comfortably beneath his awning while the dark and turbaned stranger looms above him on his camel, and behind in the dusty street the woman returns from the well, her water jug shouldered. This tableau splotched with a profu-sion of pillows and cushions, green, red, yellow, gaudy flowers, knowing birds, birds darkly wise. In the center of the sofa were two oblong com-panion pillows, shouldered so closely together that they looked like the Decalogue tablets. They were white, or had been white, and pain-fully stitched upon them with blue thread were companion mottoes, companion pictures. In the left pillow lies a girl, her long blue hair asprawl about her face, her eyes innocently shut, asleep. The motto: I SLEPT AND DREAMED THAT LIFE WAS BEAUTY. But the story continued, and on the next pillow her innocence is all torn away: there she stands, gripping a round broom; her hair now is pinned up severely and behind her sits a disheartening barrel churn. I WOKE AND FOUND THAT LIFE WAS DUTY. The pillows sat, stuffed and stiff as disapproving bishops; they could, he thought, serve as twin tombstones for whole gray generations. It was in no way difficult to imagine the fingers of his grandmother, tough and knobbly, wearily working upon these wearying legends, these most speaking epi-taphs. It was more discouraging still to wonder if perhaps this task hadn't been performed by his grandmother's mother. Even without think-ing he doubted that there was anything in his blood which could now fight back to that bitter use of mind; he just wasn't so tough. … No; no, that wasn't true, either. Slow, wet, easy living hadn't got to his Puritan core, not really. He could hump logs together to make a house; he could plow the long furrow as straight as a kill-ing arrow. It was simply that he didn't have to: the world had got easier, even the sky. All that temper was still in him and not really very hid-den, and it was no strange matter that these two pillows could cause to rise in his mind narrow visions of those stringent decades. He could see his male ancestry as grainy and rough as if they had all been hacked from stone. They didn't drink, didn't smoke; they didn't read, and all books other than the great black one were effi-cient instruments of Sathanas. The only fun they had was what he was living evidence of.—And very probably not.—He could imagine them, his whiskery forefathers, stalking wifeward to beget, stolid, unmoved as men readying them-selves to slaughter hogs. And some hint of that too. The women were no better. Their hands were pained knots, like blighted unopenable buds. Their eyes were stuffed with the opaque ice which had clenched over the fear of their hearts. … And yet, and yet there was always something faintly comforting in thinking upon the gelid principles with which his grandfathers had shored up themselves for duty, military or familial, or for the rich farming business.
He was vaguely bothered, nettled, and he turned away from contemplating the pillows. Across from him was the wide entry to a dark formal dining room, and in the near corner a complacent fat club chair. He turned round and round, feeling the windows slide over his sight and the serrated glitter of the glass doors, and found himself, in a momentary accident, face to face with the wall. It was plaster, and he could discern in its grain the sweep of the maker's trowel and swirled signs of the hair. In the morning silence the wall seemed as vocal as ev-erything else in the room. Illumination, a gilt tin contraption which sported naked light bulbs, hung suspended from the ceiling by a gilt chain, and a thick webby electric cord sidled through the links. Before the piled sofa sat a low table, the wood mahogany-stained, with a glass top which displayed photographs that could dim, but not curl, with age: four rows of gray-and-black squares, instants of frozen miming that he would not examine. More gilt, on the wall above the sofa: a rectangular frame which enclosed a photograph in anemic—"tinted''—colors, the faces of his grandfather and grandmother. Both the progenitors seemed masked for the picture, as severe as if they had plotted beforehand to judge the photographer, to sentence him to a life of hard labor. The eyes of the grandfather were frigid blue, the color of the windwashed March sky reflected in the ice of a puddle. Some-how the tinting process, whatever it was, had made those eyes inviting targets for wishful darts. Set jaws, assured noses, ears which would admit only acquiescent sounds. The eyes of the grandmother were gray and, though doubtless resolute, the gaze was not so personally sta-tioned. In her clear forehead and in the rather distant aiming of her eyes there was not so much of her husband's belligerent certainty; there was a hint of troubled—but still (he had to admit it)—unshaken humanity. But it was an unyielding countenance, and he found himself brushing his hand over his face as if he had just walked through a cobweb. Awkwardly he stepped back, as though he could retreat from his unrealized action or, rather, from whatever vague thought had inspired it. Nor was he delighted to see his mind so often turning upon himself.
He pawed a mass of pillows heavily aside and sat down on the sofa; fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. The odor of the sofa submerged him; it wasn't sour exactly, but rather sweet-and-sour, palpable; musty, of course, but with an aura of times past so striking as almost to give an impression of freshness. The smell betokened what? Voluminous clothes kept with a sachet too old, so that its power had disappeared into the cloth. Or long dutiful Sunday afternoons spent with the Methodist preacher over a box of stale chocolate candies. Or dripping afternoon funerals set up in this room and garnished with flowers which had very recently given up their sickly ghosts. His spirit seemed drowning in the smell of the sofa, in the swift flood of pastness it poured out. He lit the cigarette and sucked the smoke deep, as if protecting himself, almost in fact as if smoking was an act of defiance toward the past. The smoke rose slowly, the lax strands of it parting and hanging almost motionless in the air, seemingly very solid. It was himself, in fact, who seemed flimsy; even his body, whose weight the hard sofa barely accepted, felt vaporous, tenuous: there was not enough real event attached to it to force it to existence. The room was so silent that he could hear his chest rasp against the cloth of his shirt as he breathed, and for one scary moment he imagined that this sound became increasingly faint, was dying away. He dropped the blackened paper match into a silly little ashtray, a tiny china circle with—again—gilt lines and in the center an ugly pink rose. The dead match lay across the face of the rose like a disastrous scar, and he noted it with a twinge of guilty triumph; so that almost reflexively he mashed the new cigarette into the flower, leaving there a raw streak of black ash. The small coals died immediately.
He rose and crossed the room. As he had sus-pected, the desk section of the dark secretary was locked, but through the glass cabinet doors he saw the small brass key lying on the middle shelf. The lock was reluctant, but the section did at last let down, exposing an interior less musty than he had imagined. There were half a dozen tight-ranked drawers and a number of bulging pigeonholes. Letters, photographs, books of check stubs, a bottle in which the ink had dried to a circular black scab, a Waterman pen with a discolored yellow nib. He pulled from one of the pigeonholes a resisting envelope and shook the letter from it. The cheap paper had darkened with dust and the recalcitrant words had been formed with blunt pencil strokes, gray on gray. He held the sheet above his head and turned his back to the window. The words came dimly to his eyes: … guess Jasper's note will be alright anyway for this year and can renew with confi-dance, I guess in the neighborhood of 1500. It would of course be concerned with money. He let it drop unfluttering and wiped his fingers on his trousers leg. From a closed drawer peeped the shiny corner of a snapshot, which he slipped out without opening the drawer. At first he couldn't comprehend what object was pictured, but it was, after all, merely an automobile, a Dodge or a Plymouth of the late '30's, black, hardily at repose before the immaculately vertical lines of a walnut tree. Why this photograph? He stared at it as if it were an urgent but indeci-pherable message, intently personal. The car was not new, had not been photographed on that account. It was perhaps no more than the thoughtless effort to finish up a roll of film so that a brother with his arm about the shoulders of an aunt or a wide-eyed distressed baby cousin might sooner see the light of day in their own white-edged squares. Yet here it was, the car, as bluntly and totally itself as if it had been in-vented for the purpose of perplexing. He tried to slide the snapshot back through the crack in the top of the drawer, but it encountered a hid-den tightness and folded up, the brittle surface suddenly webbed with fine lines like a cracked china plate. He desisted, and let the picture loll out of the front of the desk like an idiot untasting tongue. When he once more glimpsed his darkly reflected face in the cabinet doors, his eyes looked fearful.
He turned again to the panes of glass in the double doors, this time erasing his features by bringing his face directly against one of the panes. He cupped his hands, extending them from his temples as if he were trying to see for a long distance through blinding sunlight. The interior of this room swam forward to meet him. Although there was a row of windows in the opposite wall, they were darkened by a shaggy row of fir bushes growing by the outside wall, so that this room was even dimmer than the one in which he was standing.
When he tried the knob the lock uttered an unnerving scrape, but the right-hand door swung inward easily enough. Here was real mustiness, an odor so stuffed with unmoving time that it seemed strange the pressure of it hadn't burst' the doors and windows. Entering, he left unclear tracks in the dust behind him, and the dust muted his footsteps, seemed to ad-here like cobweb to his shoes. The dust seemed a huge powdery cobweb. A long low comfort-less-looking lounge was pushed against the wall, and the tough ornate wood of the back of it jammed into the window sill. This sofa was un-draped, but the upholstery was decorated with looping broad arabesques which suggested a badly stylized jungle. There were four identical knickknack tables on thin legs; they were cluttered with more of the tiny uninviting ashtrays and with a number of small pale wooden boxes. Against the east wall sat a black upright piano which somehow seemed sagging. He crossed to it and opened it. The keys were discolored, yel-lowish, cracked, and in some cases the ivory was missing almost completely. He punched gin-gerly at middle A, then experimented with a simple triad. Middle C sounded merely a dull thump; the E and A keys produced a dissonance. No doubt the strings had rusted, the whole guts of the instrument diseased and disordered. Again he wiped his fingers on his trousers, trying to wipe away that dust which seemed to seep into the pores of his skin. With his cold hand he brushed his face too, and the back of his neck. Over the top of the piano drooped a big elabo-rately embroidered doily; it looked like a fishnet, a fantastic net to catch—what? Oh, whatever inhabited the surcharged air of this room. Even after he backed away from the in-strument, that acrid chord seemed to hang still in his hearing; it was as if he had written indeli-ble curse words upon something which was sup-posed to remain sacredly blank. He raised and dropped his shoulders in a sigh; he felt almost as if he had been working away in hard physical labor; he had never before felt his will be so ringed about, so much at bay. Never before had he realized so acutely the invalidity of his desires, how they could be so easily canceled, simply marked out, by the impersonal presence of something, a place, an object, anything vehe-menfly and uncaringly itself. … But the past-ness which these two rooms (really, one room divided) enclosed was not simply the imper-sonal weight of dead personality but a willful belligerence, active hostility. Standing still in the center of the first room, he felt the floor stirring faintly beneath his feet, and he was con-vinced that the house was gathering its muscles to do him harm; it was going to spring. But then he heard the sharp-heeled foot-steps which caused the quivering, and then Sheila, his blond pale pretty wife, stuck her head through the hall door.
"Come on outside, Peter," she said. "Come away."
TWO
"I didn't have the faintest idea it was even near lunchtime," he said. Standing out here under the shiny June sky, he felt perfectly at ease to stretch his arms and shoulder muscles, as if he had just awakened from a dreary, unrefreshing sleep. He opened his mouth, tasting the bright air. It was warm; he hadn't realized how cold he had become in the house. Not far away he could hear a bird singing unstintingly, pure filigree of sound. "Here," he said. "Let me take that." He lifted the big wicker basket from his wife's strained hand. "Where are we going?"
Her voice was clear and easy as water. "It's your farm; you tell me. Where is the best place on this magnificent estate to have a picnic?''
"I don't know any more about the place than you do. But maybe we'd better not go too far. They're liable to deliver our stuff today."
Sheila looked at Peter with a secret eye: her tall gangly husband, all bones and corners his body was, had already begun worrying himself. The "stuff" which was to come was mostly books and notebooks and cryptic files of index cards. Already he was concerned about finishing his book—he called it his "study"—in time. They still had about twenty-five hundred dollars left of the amount they had allowed themselves and now this nice quiet place to work, this farm willed to him by his grandparents, had dropped into their laps, and still he was worrying himself. In this warmly glowing landscape his eyes were turned inward. As they went through the sparse front lawn of the house she broke a tall stalk of plaintain off at the top and put the oozy stem end into her mouth.
He swung the basket unrhythmically as he walked. His height and boniness made him seem loping. When they came to the reddish-yellow dirt road which ran northward past the house, he hesitated. "Now which way?" he said. "We can go either way here and still be in our own domain. "
It was true. The big ugly house sat almost in the center of the wide farm, the four hundred acres shaped vaguely like an open hand. It sat among smooth hills, so that if they went very far in any direction they would have to climb.
"Your wish is my command," she said.
"Well…" He gave her a look. Lightness and irony more or less sweet, that was Sheila. He shrugged a shoulder and started toward their car, the old blue Buick parked in the sloping driveway behind the house.
"But let's do walk," she said. "It's a warm lovely day, and walking won't take so terribly much time. It'll be soon enough you're back to your nasty old books and note cards. Surely we're not here just for you to work."
"Still, that's mostly why we're here. At least, I hope it is." But he gave over anyway, and turn-ing suddenly to her took her hand.
As quickly, involuntarily, she almost drew away. His hand on hers was dry and cool, actually cold, and startling in the warm sunlight. "You'll have to get used to walking," she said. "Now that you're in the country, you'll have to do all sorts of rustic things. You'll have to drink fresh milk and rob the honeybees and eat wild flowers. You're going to become a happy child of nature. I'm sure you'll make a great success of it."
"Oh, that's me. A happy child of nature."
In a hundred yards or so the road had climbed, cutting along the side of the hill. A slow dark stream ran in the narrow bottom field below; serpentine, sluggish, it reflected no light through the tall weeds and bushes that crowded to its edges. Sheila pointed toward it. "Maybe we could spread our blanket by the creek down there," she said. "It looks so nice and cool."
"Do you really want to go crawling through those weeds? I bet the whole field is full of snakes and spiders. And the ground down there'll be wet, so close to the stream."
"Weeds won't hurt you," she said. She patted the smooth leg of her pink cotton slacks. "Come on, chicken heart, it'll be very nice, bet you a pretty." She tugged at his hand, drew him to the side of the road.
"Hold on a minute." He shifted the basket to his other hand, and his body tilted perceptibly with the weight. "What in the world did you put in here, anyway? Heavy as lead.
"All kinds of surprises," she said. "Lead ham-burgers, lead rolls, lead mustard…"
They got through the field without much diffi-culty and she was right, here by the stream it was cool. They found a circle of long cool grass, almost free of weeds, and shadowed by a stand of scrubby willow bushes. Sheila wafted a blue tablecloth over the ground and crawled over it on hands and knees to smooth it out. Then she stood and fingered her fine blond hair back from her temples. "Oh, this is lovely." She looked at him, an anxious inquiry. "Isn't it lovely?" The stream lapped intermittently at the banks, the dark water moved slow and dreamy through the shadows; now and again it splashed up a wink of reflected sunlight. Her face gleamed momentarily in a pure reflection of the sun. "We ought to take all our meals down here."
"Not me," he said. "I m not getting out of bed and wallow through weeds and mud for break-fast."
"No, not breakfast. You don't have to be silly about it." She laughed. She began taking paper plates from the basket: held one up and flour-ished it ruefully. "These really ought to be very fine china," she said. "I've decided that we're celebrating."
"If those had been china, I'd never have got here with the basket."
She produced a large brown paper bag and drew a pretty baked hen from it. "Volla!" And there was wine too, a California white wine in a green bottle with a red foil wrapping over the top. And a mixed salad tied up in a little plastic bag. "The plates are just for the salad, anyway. You'll have to be a child of nature and eat the chicken with your own crude hands. And look: I bought some ready-made dressing." She held up a small bottle and began shaking it furiously.
He had been staring at her, awerstruck. "Where did you get all this stuff? The chicken and everything. … What is it we're supposed to be celebrating?"
"There's a little old restaurant in the town. They were just delighted to sell me a nice baked chicken. See—while you were mooning around the house all morning I kept myself busy, plan-ning and preparing these nice things for us. Ev-erything just to make you happy."
He sighed. "And what is it we're celebrat-ing?"
"Our vacation. … Or just being here in this good cool spot by the water. Or anything. Why not?"
"Mmnh." Descending tone of regret. He felt that he had so much yet to do that even to be happy for the opportunity would be in some way to harm it, to jinx the chance for finishing.
"Anything, we're celebrating anything you like. Remnant Pagan Forces in American Puri-tanism."
"A bit prematurely, perhaps." He cut his words short, isolated each of them with brief pauses. He couldn't help it.
She pouted. "Now please don't be a grouch. If you begin now, you'll just be a grouch all sum-mer and neither of us will have a good time, and you won't get any more work done than if you'd been cheerful."
"Sorry," he said. But still the word was clipped.
"Look now…" She leaned carefully from her kneeling position, carefully across the spread ta-blecloth and pulled his ear lobe. "Eat. Drink. Enjoy. Relax. Nothing bad has happened, and nothing bad is going to happen. … And look what I got for you for after lunch." She fumbled in the basket for a moment and took out a fat masculine cigar. "If you don't like it, I'll strangle you," she said. "It was the most expensive one they had."
Finally he relented, or at least his body did; he threw himself back on the grass and laughed. Sunlight spotted his chest and face, spots like shiny yellow eyes.
She was laughing too, a liquid twittering, but suddenly stopped. "I hope you're not laughing at me," she said. She blinked her eyes wide.
He only laughed the harder, laughing at both of them, laughing most of all at the hard core of stodginess in himself that he was afraid of. Unresting shadows poured down his throat, leaf shadows twinkled on his face.
"Oh, you are." She was going to become angry. She looked about for something to throw at his convulsed thin chest.
"I'm not laughing at you." He lifted his hand, smiled at her. "No, really, I'm not. …But you're too much for me. You're simply too much."
"Yes, that's right. You're a happy child of na-ture. Simple. Pure. You can't understand my sophisticated complexity." She dumped salad from the moist plastic bag onto a paper plate. "Here, nature boy, eat. … You're an animal."
"In a lot of ways, that's true," he said, his voice taking an unconsciously serious edge. "I am sim-ple, and you are pretty sophisticated. Anyway, you understand both of us better than I under-stand myself."
She took the wine bottle, peeled away the foil, unscrewed the top and poured. "Here," she said. "Drink this down and shut up. You'll give me a headache with all that psychological talk."
He hushed and they ate in silence. He kept looking at her, at her cool blond hair so spattered with light and shadow, at the way she moved her hands so freely, at the whiteness of her throat. So pretty she was, small and wom-anly, clear-eyed; it was a catch in his breathing. Her emotions were so mobile—she felt and re-sponded to the slightest movement of things about her immediately and without hindrance —that he often forgot the chromium-bright hard mind which shone in the center. She was, after all, possessed of a nice intellect, superior perhaps to his own. In the core of his throat he breathed a wistful sigh, still looking. She colored slightly under his fixed gaze; she had misinter-preted it. Ho-ho-ho: so that was the drift of the breeze, was it? Her careful picnic was really a praeludium to the unaccustomed joy of making love in the open air. "In sight of God and everybody." He leaned back and got out his handker-chief and wiped at his fingers all runny with the juices of the bird. He smiled a slight dark smile.
She moved again, looked away; grew fretful under his stare. "Well, what is it then?" she said. "Do you see something you haven't seen be-fore?"
He grinned, picked up the waxed paper cup and held it toward her, "Let's have another drink."
She mimed drawing away. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe you've had enough already. Maybe too much. You've already got staring drunk." She poured the cup full.
"That's the way, baby," he said. "Lay it on me."
She put down the bottle and flung a chicken bone at him. He sprang at her—the motion ex-aggerated, sudden—caught her shoulder and tumbled her over. She almost wiggled loose, but he caught her forearm and held her. She tugged as hard as she could; her face was hot and scar-let. They rolled wildly over and over in the grasses and tablecloth. Finally she got his shoul-der under a pink-clad knee and held him pinned fast on one side. Her voice took a hoarse false edge. "You idiot."
"Who, me?" He lay still. He touched her breast gently with his forefinger; held it cupped. "Yes, yes indeed," he said.
"You idiot," she said. The hard edge had melted off her voice.
He felt soft and lazy, murmuring, "Yes, yes indeed."
Her hair had come undone; a twig and a few blades of grass were caught in the bright net of it. She loomed above him, as eminent as if she leaned out of the sky. She seemed yielding and fiercely happy. Caught in the top limbs of the undergrowth behind her was a red round flicker he had first took to be a balloon. It bobbed, dis-appeared.
"Stop a minute," he said. He clasped the back of her hand, squeezed it firmly. "Wait…Let me up."
She got off and sat, clasping her knees with her forearms. He rose and the little fat man stepped out of the alder thicket. His face was like a balloon, red as catsup from wind and sun, and his grimy grin was so fixed it might have been painted. Yellowish whisker stubble was smeared on his chin and neck. He came forward in a sort of rolling slouch, his hands balled, stuffed into the pockets of his overalls. Under the overalls he wore no shirt and the fat on his chest moved with a greasy undulation as he breathed; one nipple was not covered by the bib of the overalls and it shone, obese; it was like the breast of a girl just come to puberty. Though he wore no shirt he wore a hat, a misshapen black felt object which looked as if it had been kicked a countless number of times. He must have been in his late fifties.
"Who are you?" Peter asked. Thin and ragged query.
"Well," he said. "I'm Ed Morgan. I live a little ways back over yonder." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder pointing north. "I was just kind of follerin' along the creek here. I've got me some muskrat traps strung out along the creek, and I was just checking up on them. Course it's a little late in the day, but I been busy all morning."
He didn't ask the question he wanted to, but the first one that came to his mind. "Why is it late in the day?"
The fat man gave him a wide ingenuous stare. "Why," he said, "a man ought to get down to his traps first thing in the morning. A mushrat'll just chew off his foot and get away. Or even if he is good and drownded might be an old mongrel dog'll come along and carry him off. I ought to got down here real early, but like I said I been busy this morning."
"Who gave you permission to trap along here?" In the fat man's manner there was a careless oily geniality, an attitude of unmovable self-possession, which irked Peter, made the muscles along his shoulder blades feel as if they might begin to twitch. He gave his question a flat tone.
"Well now, I guess nobody did," he said. "I never have thought about that. I just always have set out my traps here. My daddy did, and I reckon his daddy before him. Tell the truth, I was just getting ready to ask you folks what you was doing here. And then I thought maybe I better not." The dingy grin never left his face, not even when he jerked his head aside to loose a spate of tobacco.
Without moving his body he drew hirnself up stiffly. "I'm Peter Leland," he said. "I own this farm."
For what seemed a long time the old man just looked at him. "Well, I declare," he said finally. "You must be Miz Annie's grandbaby. I don't know how many times I've heard her tell all about you. She set a lot of store by you, you being a preacher and all. Law, she was just as proud of you as a peacock. I don't believe there was ever what you'd call a whole lot of preachers in the Leland family."
He felt the fat man's eyes gauging him, mea-suring his weight, his probable worth. He would probably look at his caught muskrats in the same way. Peter felt nettled to the point of exaspera-tion. "Am I to understand that you live on this farm?"
"Well, honey, I reckon so. Unless you was to take a notion to put me off. As far as I ever heard tell of, us Morgans has always lived right here on the Leland farm, and even before that, back when it was the old Jimson place. And no telling how long before that, no telling how long we might've been here."
His grin broadened slightly, and Peter had the impression that in the measuring of himself he had been found lacking. Not a pleasant impres-sion. He let the muscles of his forearms relax and found, surprised, that since the little man had come he had been stifling the impulse to strike him in the face. This fat old man's assurance bordered upon, without trespassing into, cockiness. Peter sharply resented being called honey.
"No one told me there was a tenant family on the farm. Mr. Phelps didn't say a word about it." Mr. Phelps was the lawyer who had made the title arrangements, had done all the legal work.
Morgan lifted his hat, scratched the back of his head. Atop his head was a perfectly circular bald spot, the size and color of the crown of a large toadstool. "Well I declare I don't know," he said. "I guess maybe we been here so long now that folks just takes us for granted. All I know's we been here a long time." His gaze shifted momentarily. "Is that your pretty little wife?"
Sheila still sat on the grass, her knees caught to her chest. Again her face reddened slightly. She gave Morgan a short jerky nod.
"Yes, this is Mrs. Leland," Peter said. He was unwilling to say it; he felt somehow as if he were giving away an advantage.
"She sure is a pretty little thing," he said. "I reckon she's about the prettiest Leland woman I ever seen."
She pulled a weed, flung it down again, a ges-ture of overt annoyance.
He sharpened his tone, cut through the thread of this subject. "Where do you live then? I suppose you have a house on the farm." He felt that the brunt of her annoyance fell upon him rather than upon Morgan, and this exasperated him; it was unfair.
Again the old man jerked his thumb oyer his flaccid shoulder. "Just right up yonder, across the creek. You could see it from here if it wasn't for this here thicket. You want to come on over, I'll take you around. It ain't much, but it's what we're used to, what we've always had."
"I think maybe I'd better," Peter said. "I'd better see what I've got into." He turned to her. "Do you want to come along, sweetheart?"
She let drop another weed stem from her fingers. "Not this time," she said. She rose and brushed off her slacks with ostentatious care. "I'll go back to the house. There's so much work I have to do."
"I'll be along slortly," he said, turning from her regretfully. Morgan had already started through the underbrush, parting the branches carelessly before him, letting them slap back.
Sheila began to gather the debris of the meal, piling everything into the basket. There was still a quarter bottle of wine. She screwed the cap more tightly, looking at the bottle with ran al-most sorrowful expression.
He followed along clumsily in Morgan's wake. The grass was strident with insects and an occa-sional saw brier clawed at his trousers legs. Once he almost tripped because the earth around the mouth of a muskrat hole crumbled under his foot. A very narrow footlog lay across the stream; the top of it was chipped flat, bore the marks of the hatchet, but worn smooth. Morgan crossed before him, his hands nonchalantly in his pockets, but Peter had to go gingerly, hold-ing out his arms to balance himself. Once through the thicket on the other side of the creek, they could see Morgan's house. It was a low weather-stained cabin, nudged into the side of the hill so that while the east end of the house sat on the ground, the wall and the little porch on the west side were stilted up by six long crooked locust logs. There was a tin roof which didn't shine but seemed to waver, to metamorphose slightly, in the sunny heat. Few windows and dark, and a stringy wisp of smoke from the squat chimney. In a corner of the yard of hard-packed dirt below the house sat a darkened out-house.
"There it is yonder," Morgan said. "I reckon you can tell it ain't much, but it's what we're used to. It'll do for us, I guess."
Before them lay what must once have been a fairly rich field of alfalfa; now it was spotted with big patches of Queen Anne's lace and ragweed, and the alfalfa looked yellow and sickly, its life eaten away at by the dodder parasite. Morgan waded through it cheerfully, obviously compla-cent about the condition of the crop, and Peter kept as much as possible in the fat man's footsteps. He felt that he didn't know what he might step into in that diseased field.
They went over the slack rusty barbed wire that enclosed the yard and went around the house to the low back stoop. There was a famil-iar kitchen clatter inside, but when Morgan stepped up on the wide slick boards all noise from inside ceased suddenly. He turned around, grinning still and even more broadly than be-fore. "Come on in," he said. "We're just folks here."
He entered. At first he couldn't breathe. The air was hot and viscous; it seemed to cling to his hair and his skin. The black wood range was fired and three or four kettles and pans sat on it, steaming away industriously. The ceiling was low, spotted with grease, and all the heat lay like a blanket about his head. The floor was bare, laid with cracked boards, and through the spaces between them he could see the ground beneath the house. There was a small uncertain-looking table before the window on his right, and from the oilcloth which covered it large patches of the red-and-white pattern were rubbed away, showing a dull clay color. From the ceiling hung two streamers of brown flypaper which seemed to be perfectly useless; the snot-sized creatures crawled about everywhere; in an instant his hands and arms were covered with them. And through the steamy smell of whatever unimaginable sort of meal was cooking, the real odor of the house came: not sharp but heavy, a heated odor, oily, distinctly bearing in it something fishlike, sweetly bad-smelling; he had the quick impression of dark vegetation of immense luxuriance blooming up and momentarily rotting away; it was the smell of rank incredibly rich semen.
By the black range stood a woman who looked older than Morgan, her hair yellowish white, raddled here and there with gray streaks. She was huge, fatter even than Morgan, her breadth was at least half the length of the stove. She bulged impossibly in her old printed cotton dress and he shuddered inwardly at the thought of her finally bulging out of it, standing before him naked. In proportion to her great torso her arms and legs were very short and in tending her cooking she made slow short motions; she used her limbs no more than she had to, as if these were more or less irrelevant appendages. What was obviously important was the great fat-ness of her breasts, her belly, her thighs. She gave Peter a slow but only cursory look, turned her unmoved, unmoving gaze to Morgan. When Morgan introduced Peter she didn't acknowl-edge him by so much as a nod.
"This here's my wife Ina," Morrgan said. "And this here's my daughter Mina. She's the only one of our young'uns that's left with us now. The rest has all gone off different places, they couldn't find nothing to stay around here for, I guess. But Mina's stayed on with the old folks."
She sat at the weak-looking table. He couldn't guess her age, maybe fourteen or fifteen or six-teen. She sat playing with a couple of sticky strands of hair as black as onyx. She leaned back in a little creaky wooden chair and gave him a bald stark gaze. He felt enveloped in the stare, which was not a stare but simply an act of the eyes remaining still, those eyes which seemed as large as eggs, so gray they were almost white, reflecting, almost absolutely still. His skin had prickled at first, he had thought she had no nose, it was so small and flat, stretched on her face as smooth as wax. Leaned back in the chair that way, her body, flat and square, seemed as com-placent as stone, all filled with calm waiting; this was her whole attitude. She played listlessly with her hair, looking at him. It was impossible. That body so stubby and that face so flatly ugly—something undeniably fishlike about it—and still, still it exercised upon him immediately an attraction, the fascination he might have in watching a snake uncoil itself lazily and curl along the ground. He couldn't believe it; maybe it was the crazy musky odor of the house, confus-ing all his impressions, his senses. He had to use his whole will to take his eyes off her.
"This here's Pete Leland," Morgan said. "He's the one that owns the place now, the whole farm. He's Miz Annie's grandson, and he's a preacher. He's the only Leland I ever heard of that was a preacher."
Mina gave a soft slow nod, still looking at him, and it was directly to him that she spoke. "You're awful good-looking," she said. "You're so good-looking I could just eat you up. I bet I could just eat you up." Her voice was soft and thick as cotton.
Morgan sniggered. "Don't pay her no mind," he said. "If you pay her any mind she'll drive you crazy, I swear she will."
But it had started and the whole while he walked back to the big brick house—going not the way he came, but following the winding red dirt road along the hillside—her flat dark face hung like a warning lantern in his mind. He couldn't unthink her image.
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