At first he thought she had not heard him, but at the top step she turned and looked back at him and her thin lips stretched in a mirthless smile. “You take those things back to Jack Kelley,” she said, and stood eyeing him. Something in the flush on his face must have reached to her, for she said, “Come and set down, don’t you want to? I’m going to have me a cup of coffee. You’ve been — you’re a right kind young man and it’s a long ways back.”
When she came out again with a pot of coffee in her hand, and cups, Larry had been sitting on the porch steps, thinking of the pine trees. Their airy quiet was a healing and a blessing. He had had a moment of feeling sure that if he could only be still enough himself, hands still, eyes still, heart still, perhaps he would enter into the knowledge of something deep and hidden and wonderful, as if he were standing on the threshold of a slow moment of revelation, a moment for which being had been created. The feeling went when he heard her behind him, and he stretched and looked about him with a feeling of good happiness. The long light of afternoon slanted through brown trunks across the grass of the clearing. Beyond the tossing green of pine tops the sky was glowing with a blue at once misty and intense, and a great cloud mass, as if carved from a soft creamy marble, was lifting up and up into unimaginable free heights, where the great clean wind ran westward from the sea.
She gave him a cup of coffee, and he took it absently, noticing that she had changed her heavy black for a shapeless dress of some gray cotton stuff that made her look thinner and smaller. She sat in a rocking chair at his shoulder and creaked it softly now and then.
“But you must have had a terrible time clearing all this, Mrs. McDevitt. And living here all by yourself. How did you ever do it?”
She creaked reflectively. “I had a six-shooter,” she said, and then stopped again. “And it’s wonderful how you toughen up to using a grubbing hoe. I grubbed all that out myself, after the men cut the trees. I made them leave all those pine trees, though. I didn’t mind being alone here. It got so I didn’t like to be anywhere else. Once when the rains were bad I waded in from Goulds with water up to my waist and a sack of Irish potatoes on my shoulder. Mr. Barnes didn’t want me to go.
“I was up in Miami, waiting on table to make enough money to put grapefruit in. A man come in and said all this part of the country was swept away with a cloudburst, and I couldn’t rest until I’d come to see. My house hadn’t been finished long. But when I got here, sopping wet to my armpits, the house was all high and dry. This land is higher’n anything around here. So I stayed here for a week until the water went down, and worked around and lived on Irish potatoes. I was glad to get back here from town. It was getting too crowded to like it. I finished clearing my half acre and an old nigra that was around here then showed me how to put in sweet potatoes.”
The chair creaked. “That was kind of funny. I wasn’t afraid of much of anything by that time but snakes and McDevitt. Staying out here by myself nights somehow I got to hating him worse and worse, and every once in a while if I’d hear somebody coming up that road I’d think what I’d do if it was him. Well, this morning — just about when my house was finished and the well was dug, it was early in the morning. I always got up at the peak of day, and it wasn’t hardly light when I thought I heard McDevitt stumbling around the well. I don’t know what got into me. I was all of a-tremble, and I went to the door and fired all six shots up in the air over the man I could see down by the well.
“All he did was kind of crouch down, and when I went over to look, it was this old nigra, and he was so scared he was as white as I was. ‘Law, Miss Sarah,’ he says to me. ‘No man’s goin’ to ever steal up on you in the nighttime,’ and he would of run when he got his breath, but I started laughing and I told him he needn’t to be scared. All he wanted was a drink of water, anyway. Uncle Joseph, they used to call him, and when he showed me about the sweet potatoes I put a lot in just over there where the soil’s good, and I sold them to Mr. Barnes in Miami. Then I put in tomatoes for a while, and did right well with them, so I didn’t have to work in town the six months they allow you off your land. I did all the work myself, so it didn’t cost much.”
Larry had leaned back against the post so that he could look up at her and at the soft sky too. The morning and what had happened to Joe McDevitt seemed very far off to him. He thought perhaps they began to seem so to her, too, for suddenly her face wrinkled into a network of silent laughter. Her narrowed eyes were brightly vigorous and all the lines of her face were pleasantly relaxed. Her hands were relaxed on her knee.
“Talk about funny, though. I have to laugh every time I think of it. It shows what a fool I was in those days. When I’d made enough money in Miami to get my house built down here I was crazy to get into it. I wanted my own roof and my own pine trees. Well, it was all done but the front door, and that had to come down from Miami special on a wagon. I’d been sleeping over to the Marshs’, those good neighbors I told you about ten miles up the road, and I’d got my furniture in, a stove and a bedstead and one-two things McDevitt’s mother sent down to me, and I made up my mind I wasn’t going to wait any longer for that front door.
“I was just going ahead and live in my house, anyway. So when night come I put on my six-shooter, with the belt over my nightgown, and I shoved the headboard of the bed right up against the open door. It’s one of those high wooden headboards. I went to sleep and slept like a log, not thinking of anything. Well, ’long about three-four o’clock in the morning I woke up with a jump and lay there listening to how still it was and thinking how far I was from anything and how dark it was, and me all alone in the middle of it. Well, it come over me all of a sudden that anybody could crawl right through that door in the space under the bed. I never thought of that before. And while I was laying there thinking that, something screamed way out in the woods.
“Well, say — scared? I was so scared I was cold and stiff, and I could see things moving in the dark all around me and things crawling and creeping out of the dark under that bed. I didn’t dare to move or creak the bed springs, and there was my six-shooter that had worked around under my hip and was boring a hole right through me. When that thing screamed I thought I’d just die right there. You could hear wild cats sometimes in those days, only then I didn’t know what it was. And the next morning I went over to Marshs’ and stayed there until that door got there, and I had three bolts put on, and you bet I used them. But I can laugh over that now any time I think of it.
“And two days later was the time I shot all the snakes I ever see around here. That was another funny thing. I can’t bear snakes. I was sitting in this chair inside my door, with the door open — that was before this porch was built. I was sewing something and I had my six-shooter in my lap. And all of a sudden I just kind of saw something on the floor out of the tail of my eye, and before I ever turned to see what it was, a kind of cold feeling went all over me and, thinks I, ‘That’s a snake.’ Before I knew exactly what I was doing I grabbed my gun and I shot all six shots at that thing I saw, and it was a rattlesnake as thick as your wrist, and not two feet from my foot.