‘Don’t,’ said Evelyn softly when Alicia tried to lift her head. Alicia set it back gently and knelt and took her hands and squeezed them together. ‘Evelyn, oh, what happened?’
‘Father hit me,’ Evelyn said calmly. ‘I’m going to go to sleep.’
Alicia whimpered.
Evelyn said, ‘What is it called when a person needs a… person… when you want to be touched and the… two are like one thing and there isn’t anything else at all anywhere?’
Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. ‘Love,’ she said at length. She swallowed. ‘It’s a madness. It’s bad.’
Evelyn’s quiet face was suffused with a kind of wisdom. ‘It isn’t bad,’ she said. ‘I had it.’
‘You have to get back to the house.’
‘I’ll sleep here,’ said Evelyn. She looked up at her sister and smiled. ‘It’s all right… Alicia?’
‘Yes.’
‘I won’t ever wake up,’ she said with that strange wisdom. ‘I wanted to do something and now I can’t. Will you do it for me?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Alicia whispered.
‘For me,’ Evelyn insisted. ‘You won’t want to.”
‘I’ll do it.’
‘When the sun is bright,’ Evelyn said, ‘take a bath in it. There’s more, wait.’ She closed her eyes. A little furrow came and went on her brow. ‘Be in the sun like that. Move, run. Run and… jump high. Make a wind with running and moving. I so wanted that. I didn’t know until now that I wanted it and now, I… oh, Alicia!’
‘What is it, what is it?’
‘There it is, there it is, can’t you see? The love, with the sun on its body!’
The soft wise eyes were wide, looking at the darkling sky. Alicia looked up and saw nothing. When she looked down again, she knew that Evelyn was also seeing nothing. Not any more.
Far off, in the woods beyond the fence, there was a rush of weeping.
Alicia stayed there listening to it and at last put out her hand and closed Evelyn’s eyes. She rose and went towards the house and the weeping followed her and followed her, almost until she reached the door. And even then it seemed to go on inside her.
When Mrs Prodd heard the hoof thuds in the yard, she muttered under her breath and peered out between the dimity kitchen curtains. By a combination of starlight and deep familiarity with the yard itself, she discerned the horse and stoneboat, with her husband plodding beside it, coming through the gate. He’ll get what for, she mumbled, off to the woods so long and letting her burn dinner.
He didn’t get what for, though. One look at his broad face precluded it. ‘What is it, Prodd?’ she asked, alarmed.
‘Gimme a blanket.’
‘Why on earth—’
‘Hurry now. Feller bad hurt. Picked him up in the woods. Looks like a bear chewed him. Got the clo’es ripped off him.’
She brought the blanket, running, and he snatched it and went out. In a moment he was back, carrying a man.’ Here,’ said Mrs Prodd. She flung open the door to Jack’s room. When Prodd hesitated, the long limp body dangling in his arms, she said, ‘Go on, go on, never mind the spread. It’ll wash.’
‘Get a rag, hot water,’ he grunted. She went out and he gently lifted off the blanket. ‘Oh my God.’
He stopped her at the door. ‘He won’t last the night. Maybe we shouldn’t plague him with that.’ He indicated the steaming basin she carried.
‘We got to try.’ She went in. She stopped and he deftly took the basin from her as she stood, white-faced, her eyes closed. ‘Ma—‘
‘Come,’ she said softly. She went to the bed and began to clean the tattered body.
He lasted the night. He lasted the week too, and it was only then that the Prodds began to have hope for him. He lay motionless in the room called Jack’s room, interested in nothing, aware of nothing except perhaps the light as it came and went at the window. He would stare out as he lay, perhaps seeing, perhaps watching, perhaps not. There was little to be seen out there. A distant mountain, a few of Prodd’s sparse acres; occasionally Prodd himself, a doll in the distance, scratching the stubborn soil with a broken harrow, stooping for weed-shoots. His inner self was encysted and silent in sorrow. His outer self seemed shrunken, unreachable also. When Mrs Prodd brought food—eggs and warm sweet milk, home-cured ham and johnny-cake—he would eat if she urged him, ignore both her and the food if she did not.
In the evenings, ‘He say anything yet?’ Prodd would ask, and his wife would shake her head. After ten days he had a thought; after two weeks he voiced it. ‘You don’t suppose he’s tetched, do you, Ma?’
She was unaccountably angry. ‘How do you mean tetched?’
He gestured. ‘You know. Like feeble-minded. I mean, maybe he don’t talk because he can’t.’
‘No!’ she said positively. She looked up to see the question in Prodd’s face. She said, ‘You ever look in his eyes? He’s no idiot.’
He had noticed the eyes. They disturbed him; that was all he could say of them. ‘Well, I wish he’d say something.’
She touched a thick coffee cup. ‘You know Grace.’
‘Well, you told me. Your cousin that lost her little ones.’
‘Yes. Well, after the fire, Grace was almost like that, lying quiet all day. Talk to her, it was like she didn’t hear. Show her something, she might’ve been blind. Had to spoon-feed her, wash her face.’
‘Maybe it’s that then,’ he allowed. ‘That feller, he sure walked into something worth forgetting, up there… Grace, she got better, didn’t she?’
‘Well, she was never the same,’ said his wife. ‘But she got over it. I guess sometimes the world’s too much to live with and a body sort of has to turn away from it to rest.’
The weeks went by and broken tissues knit and the wide flat body soaked up nourishment like a cactus absorbing moisture. Never in his life had he had rest and food and… She sat with him, talked to him. She sang songs, ‘Flow Gently, Sweet Afton’ and ‘Home on the Range’. She was a little brown woman with colourless hair and bleached eyes, and there was about her a hunger very like one he had felt. She told the moveless, silent face all about the folks back East and second grade and the time Prodd had come courting in his boss’s Model T and him not even knowing how to drive it yet. She told him all the little things that would never be altogether in the past for her: the dress she wore to her confirmation, with a bow here and little gores here and here, and the time Grace’s husband came home drunk with his Sunday pants all tore and a live pig under his arm, squealing to wake the dead. She read to him from the prayer book and told him Bible stories. She chattered out everything that was in her mind, except about Jack.
He never smiled nor answered, and the only difference it made in him was that he kept his eyes on her face when she was in the room and patiently on the door when she was not. What a profound difference this was, she could not know; but the flat starved body tissues were not all that were slowly filling out.
A day came at last when the Prodds were at lunch—’dinner’, they called it—and there was a fumbling at the inside of the door of Jack’s room. Prodd exchanged a glance with his wife, then rose and opened it.
‘Here, now, you can’t come out like that.’ He called, ‘Ma, throw in my other overalls.’
He was weak and very uncertain, but he was on his feet. They helped him to the table and he slumped there, his eyes cloaked and stupid, ignoring the food until Mrs Prodd tantalized his nostrils with a spoonful. Then he took the spoon in his broad fist and got his mouth on it and looked past his hand at her. She patted his shoulder and told him it was just wonderful, how well he did.
‘Well, Ma, you don’t have to treat him like a two-year-old,’ said Prodd. Perhaps it was the eyes, but he was troubled again.