His first impulse would be to not go.
He believed that he dared not go.
Then he knew that he dared not fail to go.
He would not change his clothes now.
In his sweatstained overalls he would traverse the late twilight of May and enter the kitchen.
The table was never set with food for him now.
Sometimes he would look at it as he passed and he would think,
‘My God.
When have I sat down in peace to eat.’
And he could not remember.
He would go on into the house and mount the stairs.
Already he would be hearing her voice.
It would increase as he mounted and until he reached the door to the bedroom.
The door would be shut, locked; from beyond it the monotonous steady voice came.
He could not distinguish the words; only the ceaseless monotone.
He dared not try to distinguish the words. He did not dare let himself know what she was at.
So he would stand there and wait, and after a while the voice would cease and she would open the door and he would enter.
As he passed the bed he would look down at the floor beside it and it would seem to him that he could distinguish the prints of knees and he would jerk his eyes away as if it were death that they had looked at.
Likely the lamp would not yet be lighted.
They did not sit down.
Again they stood to talk, as they used to do two years ago; standing in the dusk while her voice repeated its tale: “… not to school, then, if you don’t want to go ...
Do without that ...
Your soul.
Expiation of …” And he waiting, cold, still, until she had finished: “... hell ... forever and ever and ever …”
“No,” he said.
And she would listen as quietly, and he knew that she was not convinced and she knew that he was not.
Yet neither surrendered; worse: they would not let one another alone; he would not even go away.
And they would stand for a while longer in the quiet dusk peopled, as though from their loins, by a myriad ghosts of dead sins and delights, looking at one another’s still and fading face, weary, spent, and indomitable.
Then he would leave.
And before the door had shut and the bolt had shot to behind him, he would hear the voice again, monotonous, calm, and despairing, saying what and to what or whom he dared not learn nor suspect.
And as he sat in the shadows of the ruined garden on that August night three months later and heard the clock in the courthouse two miles away strike ten and then eleven, he believed with calm paradox that he was the volitionless servant of the fatality in which he believed that he did not believe.
He was saying to himself I had to do it already in the past tense; I had to do it.
She said so herself.
She had said it two nights ago.
He found the note and went to her.
As he mounted the stairs the monotonous voice grew louder, sounded louder and clearer than usual.
When he reached the top of the stairs he saw why.
The door was open this time, and she did not rise from where she knelt beside the bed when he entered.
She did not stir; her voice did not cease.
Her head was not bowed.
Her face was lifted, almost with pride, her attitude of formal abjectness a part of the pride, her voice calm and tranquil and abnegant in the twilight. She did not seem to be aware that he had entered until she finished a period.
Then she turned her head.
“Kneel with me,” she said.
“No,” he said.
“Kneel,” she said. “You won’t even need to speak to Him yourself. just kneel.
Just make the first move.”
“No,” he said. “I’m going.”
She didn’t move, looking back and up at him.
“Joe,” she said, “will you stay?
Will you do that much?”