Charles Williams - Hill Girl

“Well, I didn’t want you ever to feel about this place the way you did over there.”

“I won’t. Even if you’d made a jail out of it. There’s such a thing as still liking the jailer.”

“Fine,” I said. “All this foolishness stops right now. Tomorrow morning I take your shoes away from you and you go out and hoe cotton.”

“You don’t hoe cotton after it’s laid by, silly. You can’t fool a country girl.”

“You see what I mean, Angelina?” I said. “A few months ago you’d have been as sore as a boil if anybody’d called you a country girl. You’d have thought it was an insult.”

“I’d have scratched their eyes out.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You don’t scratch. You double up your little dukes and start throwing punches like a good bantamweight.”

“I guess that’s the only reason you like me, because I fight like a man instead of a girl.”

It wasn’t all play those two months, even though I neglected a lot of things to be with her. Jake and I cut corn tops and shocked them and sawed a lot of wood for the coming winter. But in addition to the work there were always the swimming down in the bottom and the white perch fishing, and the watermelons to be eaten, and the books to be read on the grass under the towering white oaks, and always the ever increasing fun of just being together. That summer was one I would never forget.

Twenty-two

Early in September we started picking cotton in the upper fields, with just a few pickers at first and increasing as the days went by and the bolls began opening faster under the hot sun. It was still dry and little dust devils chased each other across the fields like miniature cyclones and the drone of the dry-weather locusts went on throughout the dusty, sweaty afternoons.

Lee was released from jail a week after we started picking. We were becoming busier then and I didn’t have time to go to town. Jake was running the wagon, hauling the cotton to the gin, and I was doing the weighing for the pickers in the field.

I heard that he was out, though, and that he had gone back to the big house on North Elm and was living there alone. I sent word to him to come out and see us, not much expecting that he would since he had been so sour and unfriendly the times I had gone to the jail to visit him. So I was surprised to see the big roadster drive up late one Saturday afternoon.

He came down the hall and I noticed first that he was sober and that he was looking well. Apparently sixty days in jail and being at least partially cut off from his liquor supply had been good for him. He was dressed in brown tweeds that fitted him the way all his clothes did, and he was wearing that gravely smiling demeanor that had disarmed so many people in his life.

He lounged in the doorway and looked at me and said smilingly, “Hello, yokel. I hear I’m invited to supper.”

Angelina came in from the kitchen and stopped when she saw him. It was the first time they had met since we came back and I supposed all of us were trying not to think of the last time they’d met. At least, I knew Angelina and I were, but no one was ever sure what Lee was thinking.

He stepped forward with that urbane gravity that reminded me so much of the way he used to be when he wanted to put on an act, and said, “Hello, Angelina,” and they shook hands. He might have been a Supreme Court justice greeting his favorite niece.

Angelina said, “Hello, Lee,” and I was proud of her. I hadn’t known there could be so much simple dignity in an eighteen-year-old.

He was quietly courteous to her throughout the meal, never ostentatiously attentive but on the other hand never asking me a question or saying anything to me without turning to include her and to get her view. I was proud of the way he was behaving and happy to see him like this. They were the two people I loved more than anybody else in the world and I wanted that ugly thing that had been between us buried once and for all, and when he casually mentioned tfiat he was thinking of going back to work I was suddenly satisfied with everything in life.

“You know much about hardwood, Bob?” he asked, finishing his coffee. We had lit the kerosene lamp and he looked handsome as the devil himself with his smooth brown head and dark eyes.

“Not much. Why?” _

“Oh, I was just thinking. You know, just before he finally decided to get rid of both his mills, the Major had been looking into the hardwood business. He never did do anything about it, but he had gathered a lot of figures and had some of the best oak and walnut stands spotted, and I’ve been giving it some serious thought lately. I might try to get one of those mills back and start cutting oak. There’s good money in it if you get into a good stand and know how to run the business.”

“Well, you should know enough about it, all those years with the Major,” I said.

“I may do it. I can’t go on doing nothing all my life.”

He stayed until about ten and we talked a lot and played the phonograph, and the evening was almost perfect. There was one moment when I wasn’t so sure, but afterward I wondered if perhaps I hadn’t imagined it, or at least exaggerated it. It was while I was lighting a cigarette and Angelina had got up to go across the room for something and for a second when he must have thought he was unobserved I saw what was in his eyes as they followed her figure across the room.

When he had gone I said, “Maybe he’ll come out of it yet. Don’t you think so, Angelina?”

“Maybe so, Bob.” She was rather quiet.

“He’s all right when he’s behaving himself, isn’t he? What did you think?”

“He was nice, all right. And he’s the best-looking man I ever saw, even in the movies.”

“Well, I asked for it,” I said, a little sore.

She laughed. “Are you mad because you’re not as pretty as he is, Bob?”

“No. But, Christ, no man wants to sit there and hear his wife—” She kissed me and I shut up and was satisfied.

For the next week or ten days he came to see us often, nearly always coming around suppertime, and often bringing us a steak or some ice cream or something else from town. But I noticed that after each visit Angelina was a little more preoccupied and moody, and one day she asked me if we ought to have him so often.

“Well, we don’t have to,” I said, surprised. “But, after all, he’s my brother. And it seems to help keep him from drinking.”

“Maybe” was all she would say.

Suddenly he didn’t come out any more for supper. A whole week, the last week in September, went by with no visit from him. We were finishing up the cotton in the bottom now and Jake and Helen and I were down there all day long. Angelina wanted to come down and pick with us, but I refused. I wasn’t going to have my wife work like a field hand. Then she wanted to do the weighing or ride the wagon to the gin with Jake. She said she wanted to get away from the house. I thought it was because of the beautiful Indian-summer weather and said I’d think about it.

That same day, late in the afternoon, Jake and I were putting on a bale that was going to the gin the next day. I was passing the cotton up to him in a big woven basket from the pile on the ground near the weighing station and he was dumping it and tramping it down in the bed, going round and round the high cotton-frame sideboards and putting all his weight on one foot and pushing down.

He chuckled suddenly. “Bob, that brother of yourn shore does goose a car, don’t he?”

“Yeah,” I said absently. “Anything under fifty is parking to him.”

“I seen him come out of yore driveway this afternoon an’ make that there sharp turn onto the road an’ I swear they wasn’t only two of his wheels on the ground.”