Now there is the sound of something thrown — a chair, a plank? — and of a woodpile or part of a fence giving way. A lot of newly surprised cries, the sound of running, people getting out of the way, and the commotion has come much closer. Almeda can see a figure in a light dress, bent over and running. That will be the woman. She has got hold of something like a stick of wood or a shingle, and she turns and flings it at the darker figure running after her.
“Ah, go get her!” the voices cry. “Go baste her one!”
Many fall back now; just the two figures come on and grapple, and break loose again, and finally fall down against Almeda’s fence. The sound they make becomes very confused — gagging, vomiting, grunting, pounding. Then a long, vibrating, choking sound of pain and self-abasement, self-abandonment, which could come from either or both of them.
Almeda has backed away from the window and sat down on the bed. Is that the sound of murder she has heard? What is to be done, what is she to do? She must light a lantern, she must go downstairs and light a lantern — she must go out into the yard, she must go downstairs. Into the yard. The lantern. She falls over on her bed and pulls the pillow to her face. In a minute. The stairs, the lantern. She sees herself already down there, in the back hall, drawing the bolt of the back door. She falls asleep.
She wakes, startled, in the early light. She thinks there is a big crow sitting on her windowsill, talking in a disapproving but unsurprised way about the events of the night before. “Wake up and move the wheelbarrow!” it says to her, scolding, and she understands that it means something else by “wheelbarrow” — something foul and sorrowful. Then she is awake and sees that there is no such bird. She gets up at once and looks out the window.
Down against her fence there is a pale lump pressed — a body.
Wheelbarrow.
She puts a wrapper over her nightdress and goes downstairs. The front rooms are still shadowy, the blinds down in the kitchen. Something goes plop, plup, in a leisurely, censorious way, reminding her of the conversation of the crow. It’s just the grape juice, straining overnight. She pulls the bolt and goes out the back door. Spiders have draped their webs over the doorway in the night, and the hollyhocks are drooping, heavy with dew. By the fence, she parts the sticky hollyhocks and looks down and she can see.
A woman’s body heaped up there, turned on her side with her face squashed down into the earth. Almeda can’t see her face. But there is a bare breast let loose, brown nipple pulled long like a cow’s teat, and a bare haunch and leg, the haunch showing a bruise as big as a sunflower. The unbruised skin is grayish, like a plucked, raw drumstick. Some kind of nightgown or all-purpose dress she has on. Smelling of vomit. Urine, drink, vomit.
Barefoot, in her nightgown and flimsy wrapper, Almeda runs away. She runs around the side of her house between the apple trees and the veranda; she opens the front gate and flees down Dufferin Street to Jarvis Poulter’s house, which is the nearest to hers. She slaps the flat of her hand many times against the door.
“There is the body of a woman,” she says when Jarvis Poulter appears at last. He is in his dark trousers, held up with braces, and his shirt is half unbuttoned, his face unshaven, his hair standing up on his head. “Mr. Poulter, excuse me. A body of a woman. At my back gate.”
He looks at her fiercely. “Is she dead?”
His breath is dank, his face creased, his eyes bloodshot.
“Yes. I think murdered,” says Almeda. She can see a little of his cheerless front hall. His hat on a chair. “In the night I woke up. I heard a racket down on Pearl Street,” she says, struggling to keep her voice low and sensible. “I could hear this — pair. I could hear a man and a woman fighting.”
He picks up his hat and puts it on his head. He closes and locks the front door, and puts the key in his pocket. They walk along the boardwalk and she sees that she is in her bare feet. She holds back what she feels a need to say next — that she is responsible, she could have run out with a lantern, she could have screamed (but who needed more screams?), she could have beat the man off. She could have run for help then, not now.
They turn down Pearl Street, instead of entering the Roth yard. Of course the body is still there. Hunched up, half bare, the same as before.
Jarvis Poulter doesn’t hurry or halt. He walks straight over to the body and looks down at it, nudges the leg with the toe of his boot, just as you’d nudge a dog or a sow.
“You,” he says, not too loudly but firmly, and nudges again.
Almeda tastes bile at the back of her throat.
“Alive,” says Jarvis Poulter, and the woman confirms this. She stirs, she grunts weakly.
Almeda says, “I will get the doctor.” If she had touched the woman, if she had forced herself to touch her, she would not have made such a mistake.
“Wait,” says Jarvis Poulter. “Wait. Let’s see if she can get up.”
“Get up, now,” he says to the woman. “Come on. Up, now. Up.”
Now a startling thing happens. The body heaves itself onto all fours, the head is lifted — the hair all matted with blood and vomit — and the woman begins to bang this head, hard and rhythmically, against Almeda Roth’s picket fence. As she bangs her head, she finds her voice and lets out an open-mouthed yowl, full of strength and what sounds like an anguished pleasure.
“Far from dead,” says Jarvis Poulter. “And I wouldn’t bother the doctor.”
“There’s blood,” says Almeda as the woman turns her smeared face.
“From her nose,” he says. “Not fresh.” He bends down and catches the horrid hair close to the scalp to stop the head-banging.
“You stop that, now,” he says. “Stop it. Gwan home, now. Gwan home, where you belong.” The sound coming out of the woman’s mouth has stopped. He shakes her head slightly, warning her, before he lets go of her hair. “Gwan home!”
Released, the woman lunges forward, pulls herself to her feet. She can walk. She weaves and stumbles down the street, making intermittent, cautious noises of protest. Jarvis Poulter watches her for a moment to make sure that she’s on her way. Then he finds a large burdock leaf, on which he wipes his hand. He says, “There goes your dead body!”
The back gate being locked, they walk around to the front. The front gate stands open. Almeda still feels sick. Her abdomen is bloated; she is hot and dizzy.
“The front door is locked,” she says faintly. “I came out by the kitchen.” If only he would leave her, she could go straight to the privy. But he follows. He follows her as far as the back door and into the back hall. He speaks to her in a tone of harsh joviality that she has never before heard from him. “No need for alarm,” he says. “It’s only the consequences of drink. A lady oughtn’t to be living alone so close to a bad neighborhood.” He takes hold of her arm just above the elbow. She can’t open her mouth to speak to him, to say thank you. If she opened her mouth, she would retch.
What Jarvis Poulter feels for Almeda Roth at this moment is just what he has not felt during all those circumspect walks and all his own solitary calculations of her probable worth, undoubted respectability, adequate comeliness. He has not been able to imagine her as a wife. Now that is possible. He is sufficiently stirred by her loosened hair — prematurely gray but thick and soft — her flushed face, her light clothing, which nobody but a husband should see. And by her indiscretion, her agitation, her foolishness, her need?