Then I went back into the dining room and sat down in the candlelight and they brought me the food and I ate some of it.
After dinner Jo-Belle came to tell me that she had carried a tray up to my mother's room but she wouldn't take it. She hadn't even opened the door at the knock. She had just called to say she didn't want anything.
I sat on the gallery a long time while the sounds died out back in the kitchen. Then the light went out back there. The rectangle of green in the middle of blackness where the light of the window fell on the grass was suddenly black, too.
After a while I went upstairs and stood outside the door of my mother's room. Once or twice I almost knock to go in. But I decided that even if I went in, there wouldn't be anything to say. There isn't ever anything to say to somebody who has found out the truth about himself, whether it is good or bad.
So I went back down and stood in the garden among the black magnolia trees and the myrtles, and thought how by killing my father I had saved my mother's soul. Then I thought how all knowledge that is worth anything is maybe paid for by blood. Maybe that is the only way you can tell that a certain piece of knowledge is worth anything: it has cost some blood.
My mother left the next day. She was going to Reno. I drove her down to the station, and arranged all her nice, slick matched bags and valises and cases and hatboxes in a nice row on the cement of the platform to wait for the train. The day was hot and bright, and the cement was hot and gritty under our feet as we stood there in that vacuity which belongs to the period just before parting at a railway station.
We stood there quite a while, looking up the track for the first smudge of smoke on the heat-tingling horizon beyond the tide flat and the clumps of pines. Then my mother suddenly said. "Jack, I want to tell you something."
"Yes?"
"I am letting Theodore have the house."
That took me so by surprise I couldn't say anything. I thought of all the years she ahd been cramming the place with furniture and silver and glass till it was a museum and she was God' gift to the antique dealers of New Orleans, New York, and London. I was surprised anything could pry her loose from it.
"You see," she said, hurrying on in the tone of explanation, misreading my silence, "it isn't really Theodore's fault and you know how crazy he is about the place and about living on the Row and all that. And I didn't think you'd want it. You see–I thought–I thought you had Monty's place and if you ever Lived at the Landing you'd prefer that because–because–"
"Because he was my father," I finished for her, a little grimly.
"Yes," she said, simply. "Because he was your father. So I decided to–"
"Damn it," I burst out, "it is your house and you can do whatever you want to with it. I wouldn't have it. As soon as I get my bag out of there this afternoon I'll never set foot in it again, and that is a fact. I don't want it and I don't care what you do with it or with your money. I don't want that either. I've always told you that."
"There won't be any too much money to worry about," she said. "You know what the last six or seven years have been like."
"You aren't broke?" I asked. "Look here, if you're broke, I'll–"
"I'm not broke," she said. "I'll have enough to get on with. If I go somewhere quiet and am careful. At first I thought I might go to Europe, then I–"
"You better stay out of Europe," I said. "All hell is going to break loose over there and not long either."
"Oh, I'm not going. I'm going to some quiet, cheap place. I don't know where. I'll have to think."
"Well," I said, "don't worry about me and the house. You can be plenty sure I'll never set foot in it again."
She looked up the tracks, east, where there wasn't any smoke yet beyond the pines and the tidelands. She mused for a couple of minute on the emptiness off there. Then said, as though just picking up my own words. "I ought never set foot in it. I married and I came to it and he was a good man. But I ought to have stayed where I was. I ought never come."
I couldn't very well argue that point with her one way or the other, and so I kept quiet.
But as she stood there in the silence, she seemed to be arguing it with herself, for suddenly she lifted up her head and looked straight at me and said, "Well, I did it. And now I know." And she squared her trim shoulders under her trim blue linen suit and held her face up in the old way like it was a damned expensive present she was making to the world and the world had better appreciate it.
Well, she knew now. As she stood there on the hot cement in the dazzle, she seemed to be musing on what she knew.
But it was on what she didn't know. For after a while she turned to me and said, "Son, tell me something."
"What?"
"It's something I've got to know, Son."
"What is it?"
"When–when it happened–when you went to see Monty–"
That was it. I knew that was it. And in the midst of the dazzle and the heat shimmering off the cement, I was cold as ice and my nerves crawled cold inside me.
"–did he–was there–" she was looking away from me.
"You mean," I said, "Had he got into a jam and had to shoot himself? Is that it?"
She nodded, then looked straight at me and waited for what was coming.
I looked into her face and studied. The light wasn't any too kind to it. Light would never be kind to it again. But she held it up and looked straight at me and waited.
"No," I said, "he wasn't in any jam. We had a little argument about politics. Nothing serious. But he talked about his health. About feeling bad. That was it. He said good-bye to me. I can see now he meant it as the real thing. That was all."
She sagged a little. She didn't have to brace up so stiff any longer.
"Is that the truth?" she demanded.
"Yes," I said. "I swear to God it is."
"Oh," she said softly and let her breath escape in an almost soundless sigh.
So we waited again. There wasn't anything else to say. She had finally, at the last minute, asked what she had been waiting to ask and had been afraid to ask all the time.
Then, after a while, there was the smoke on the horizon. Then we could see, far off, the black smoke moving toward us along the edge of the bright water. Then with the great grinding and tramping and hissing and the wreaths of steam, the engine had pulled past us to a stop. A white-coated porter began to gather up the nice matched bags and boxes.
My mother turned to me and took me by the arm. "Good-bye, Son," she said.
"Good-bye," I said.
She stepped toward me and I put my arm around her.
"Write to me, Son," she said. "Write to me. You are all I've got."
I nodded. "Let me know how you make out," I said.
"Yes," she said, "yes."
Then I kissed her good-bye, and as I did so I saw the conductor who was beyond her look at his watch and flick it into his pocket with that contemptuous motion a conductor on a crack train has when he is getting ready to wind up the ninety-second stop at a hick town. I knew he was that very instant going to call, "All aboard!" But it seemed a long time coming. It was like looking at a man across a wide valley and seeing the puff of smoke from his gun and then waiting God knows how long for the tiny report, or like seeing the lightning way off and waiting for the thunder. I stood there with my arm around my mother's shoulder and her cheek against mine (her cheek was wet, I discovered) and waited for the conductor to call, "All aboard!"
Then it came, and she stepped back from me and mounted the steps and turned to wave as the train drew away and the porter slammed the vestibule door.
I looked after the dwindling train was carrying my mother away until it was nothing but the smudge of smoke to the west, and thought how I had lied to her. Well, I had given that lie to her as a going-away present. Or a kind of wedding present, I thought.