Charles Williams: Hill Girl

We went in and he fished into a dresser drawer and hauled out a whisky bottle.

“Is that the gun?” I asked.

“Pour one in and shut up.” He grinned. “And then hand it to me. There’s the gun over in the corner.”

I took a drink and passed him the bottle and looked at the gun. It was a beauty, a Parker double. I went over and picked it up and the feel of it was just right. It had that sweet balance you can get in a shotgun if you don’t care how much money you spend for it.

“I’ll trade you my old gun for it,” I said.

“You’ll be the next queen of Rumania, too. Say, let’s go hunting tomorrow. We haven’t been out together in a hell of a time.”

“Now you’re talking,” I said. “By the way, I got a bird a while ago.” I told him about meeting Sam Harley.

“Speaking of Sam—” He put the bottle down and made waving motions with his hands and whistled ecstatically. “Jesus, sweet Jesus!”

“Why, I didn’t know you and Sam were like that,” I said.

“Shut up, you ugly bastard, and listen. You remember that oldest girl of his, Angelina?”

“I don’t know. Kind of a thin kid, with brown eyes?”

“Yeah, she’s kind of a thin kid, all right. You’ve been gone two years, you sap. And don’t ask me what color her eyes are. Anybody who could look at her and notice her eyes is dead and just hasn’t found it out.”

“Must be great,” I said. “She’s probably all of fifteen.”

“Fifteen, hell. She’s eighteen if she’s a day. Nothing could be put together like that in fifteen years. I’d give seven hundred dollars and my left leg up to the knee for just one piece of that.”

“Well, don’t get in an uproar. What’re you trying to do, marry me off? This is a swell gun, Lee. How’s to use it some tomorrow?”

He had forgotten about the gun. “What gun? Oh, sure. And don’t worry about me trying to promote you with Angelina. You keep your big hams off her. I saw it first.”

I looked at him. He was grinning, but I didn’t like the expression in his eyes. I think he meant some of it.

“Are you nuts? I somehow gathered the impression you were married. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

He held out the bottle. “Have another snort, Grandma, and forget the lecture. We’re not have chapel today.”

I took another drink and tried to forget it. But it was in my mind and wouldn’t go away. And I knew Sam Harley. Better than he did.

Three

That night at supper he turned to me suddenly.

“Say, Bob, I’ve been meaning to write to you about it ever since the Major died, but I couldn’t think how to put it. He treated you pretty rough in his will, but I want you to know I didn’t know a damn thing about it until the lawyer read it.”

“Forget it,” I said, winking at Mary, who was watching me a little worriedly from across the table. “We educated people don’t worry about money all the time. There are other things.”

He laughed. “You educated people! All you ever learned in four years at college was how to twist some poor bastard’s arm out of its socket in the pile-up when you thought nobody was looking.”

We talked until midnight and I went upstairs to bed feeling happy to be home again. I was pleased with their happiness, the way they seemed to be settling down to married life. Of course, they had been married less than a year, but I had always been a little doubtful that Lee would ever marry, or if he did, that he would make a go of it. Somehow, he didn’t seem to be the type for domestication, although that was exactly what he needed. He needed a wife to give him the stability he somehow lacked, and he needed Mary in particular.

Of course, there was no question of its being a success as far as Mary was concerned. She would have married him any time he asked her as far back as I could remember. There had never been anybody else for her. Lee had had girls by the dozen, but somehow he always seemed to come back to her. She was a refuge and a home port for him, and whenever he got into a jam of any kind it was Mary to whom he turned.

Although I was never really in love with Mary myself, she was my personal nomination for the prettiest girl in town and the finest, and I was always proud that I knew her.

There had been an unhappy experience in her childhood that might have thrown lots of girls, but she had come out of it all right When she was twelve her father had committed suicide, and there had been one of those ugly stories that get started in small towns and never quite the out or come completely out in the open.

John Easterly had been one of the most respected men in town. He was everybody’s friend; not a glad-hander or a back-slapper, but a quiet, sober man, dependable and honest and slow-spoken. He was fairly well-to-do by our standards, which is to say he owned his own business and his home and had security for his family. His wife was well liked and everyone knew she was devoted to him. He went to church regularly in his steady way and was active in its affairs. His was the well-ordered and unspectacular life that millions of men like him have lived and enjoyed. And yet he had gone quietly out to the woodshed behind the house one spring night after Mary and her mother had gone to bed and hanged himself. There was no note, no explanation, no reason.

Of course, the town had been horrified. And then the buzzing started. Those “business trips” of his to Dallas. Hadn’t they been more frequent lately? And then, of course, at the funeral, there had been the inevitable “mysterious woman in black.” Only in this case there actually had been a woman. Not in black, but she was there. Lee and I had gone to the funeral with the Major, and I saw her there in the back. She was young, I remembered. And her face had been white and there was a bitter hopelessness in her eyes as she came in and sat in the last row while the service was going on, looking straight ahead and ignoring the whispering and cautious craning of necks and the faintly hostile glances. She hadn’t been in mourning and she left as soon as the church service was over and nobody ever knew where she came from or where she went.

Mary’s mother had died less than a year after that. The store and the big house had been sold and Mary and her grandmother lived in a small white bungalow on Cherokee Street near the high school. There had been enough money to keep them comfortably and for Mary to go on to college when she was ready and to study music for two years afterward. She loved music. It was as much a part of her as the flaming red hair and the cool gray-green eyes that always seemed to be slightly amused by something.

I grinned a little as I thought of what she must think, with her love and understanding of music, of the family into which she had married. The Cranes were musically illiterate. That was the term she used herself. Since my mother had died there hadn’t been anyone in the family who knew or cared anything about it. Neither Lee nor I could recognize good music when we heard it, and the Major had had nothing but boundless contempt for musicians of any description. “Long-haired bunch of sissy bastards” was the way he disposed of them.

I put on my pajamas and turned out the light and lay there a long time thinking of the days when Lee and I were growing up in this old house. Older and smoother than I, and with that quick charm of his, he had many times helped to lighten for me the consequences of my pigheaded rebelliousness and the Major’s hard rule. For some reason the Major, normally suspicious of everybody, would stretch a point to believe Lee and to see his side of it.

I remembered the time when I was about thirteen and had played hookey from school with another boy and had gone out in the country all day to hunt rabbits with our .22’s. We had, in taking along a recently acquired young setter bitch the Major had penned up in the back yard, committed two unpardonable sins, but we were too young and too careless to know it or to worry about it. I returned home at sunset to find the Major waiting for me on the back porch, his big face dark with wrath.