He breathed noisily. “Let me breathe.
I’ll be quiet.
Let me breathe.”
Christmas slacked his hand but he did not remove it.
Beneath it Brown breathed easier, his breath came and went easier, with less noise.
But Christmas did not remove the hand.
He stood in the darkness above the prone body, with Brown’s breath alternately hot and cold on his fingers, thinking quietly, Something is going to happen to me.
I am going to do something.
Without removing his left hand from Brown’s face he could reach with his right across to his cot, to his pillow beneath which lay his razor with its five inch blade.
But he did not do it.
Perhaps thinking had already gone far enough and dark enough to tell him This is not the right one. Anyway he did not reach for the razor.
After a time he removed his hand from Brown’s face. But he did not go away.
He still stood above the cot, his own breathing so quiet, so calm, as to make no sound even to himself.
Invisible too, Brown breathed quieter now, and after a while Christmas returned and sat upon his cot and fumbled a cigarette and a match from his trousers hanging on the wall.
In the flare of the match Brown was visible.
Before taking the light, Christmas lifted the match and looked at Brown.
Brown lay on his back, sprawled, one arm dangling to the floor.
His mouth was open.
While Christmas watched, he began to snore.
Christmas lit the cigarette and snapped the match toward the open door, watching the flame vanish in midair.
Thin he was listening for the light, trivial sound which the dead match would make when it struck the floor; and then it seemed to him that he heard it.
Then it seemed to him, sitting on the cot in the dark room, that he was hearing a myriad sounds of no greater volume—voices, murmurs, whispers: of trees, darkness, earth; people: his own voice; other voices evocative of names and times and places—which he had been conscious of all his life without knowing it, which were his life, thinking God perhaps and me not knowing that too He could see it like a printed sentence, fullborn and already dead, God loves me too, like the faded and weathered letters on a last year’s billboard, God loves me too.
He smoked the cigarette down without once touching it with his hand.
He snapped it too toward the door.
Unlike the match, it did not vanish in midnight.
He watched it twinkle end over end through the door.
He lay back on the cot, his hands behind his head, as a man lies who does not expect to sleep, thinking I have been in bed now since ten o’clock and I have not gone to sleep.
I do not know what time it is but it is later than midnight and I have not yet been asleep
“It’s because she started praying over me,” he said.
He spoke aloud, his voice sudden and loud in the dark room, above Brown’s drunken snoring.
“That’s it.
Because she started praying over me.”
He rose from the cot.
His bare feet made no sound.
He stood in the darkness, in his underclothes.
On the other cot Brown snored.
For a moment Christmas stood, his head turned toward the sound.
Then he went on toward the door.
In his underclothes and barefoot he left the cabin.
It was a little lighter outdoors.
Overhead the slow constellations wheeled, the stars of which he had been aware for thirty years and not one of which had any name to him or meant anything at all by shape or brightness or position.
Ahead, rising from out a close mass of trees, he could see one chimney and one gable of the house.
The house itself was invisible and dark.
No light shown and no sound came from it when he approached and stood beneath the window of the room where she slept, thinking If she is asleep too.
If she is asleep The doors were never locked, and it used to be that at whatever hour between dark and dawn that the desire took him, he would enter the house and go to her bedroom and take his sure way through the darkness to her bed.
Sometimes she would be awake and waiting and she would speak his name.
At others he would waken her with his hard brutal hand and sometimes take her as hard and as brutally before she was good awake.
That was two years ago, two years behind them now, thinking Perhaps that is where outrage lies.
Perhaps I believe that I have been tricked, fooled.
That she lied to me about her age, about what happens to women at a certain age He said, aloud, solitary, in the darkness beneath the dark window: