“She ought not to started praying over me.
She would have been all right if she hadn’t started praying over me.
It was not her fault that she got too old to be any good any more.
But she ought to have had better sense than to pray over me.”
He began to curse her.
He stood beneath the dark window, cursing her with slow and calculated obscenity.
He was not looking at the window.
In the less than halflight he appeared to be watching his body, seeming to watch it turning slow and lascivious in a whispering of gutter filth like a drowned corpse in a thick still black pool of more than water.
He touched himself with his flat hands, hard, drawing his hands hard up his abdomen and chest inside his undergarment.
It was held together by a single button at the top.
Once he had owned garments with intact buttons.
A woman had sewed them on.
That was for a time, during a time.
Then the time passed.
After that he would purloin his own garments from the family wash before she could get to them and replace the missing buttons.
When she foiled him he set himself deliberately to learn and remember which buttons were missing and had been restored.
With his pocket knife and with the cold and bloodless deliberation of a surgeon he would cut off the buttons which she had just replaced.
His right hand slid fast and smooth as the knife blade had ever done, up the opening in the garment.
Edgewise it struck the remaining button a light, swift blow.
The dark air breathed upon him, breathed smoothly as the garment slipped down his legs, the cool mouth of darkness, the soft cool tongue.
Moving again, he could feel the dark air like water; he could feel the dew under his feet as he had never felt dew before.
He passed through the broken gate and stopped beside the road.
The August weeds were thightall.
Upon the leaves and stalks dust of a month of passing wagons lay.
The road ran before him.
It was a little paler than the darkness of trees and earth.
In one direction town lay.
In the other the road rose to a hill.
After a time a light began to grow beyond the hill, defining it.
Then he could hear the car.
He did not move.
He stood with his hands on his hips, naked, thighdeep in the dusty weeds, while the car came over the hill and approached, the lights full upon him.
He watched his body grow white out of the darkness like a Kodak print emerging from the liquid.
He looked straight into the headlights as it shot past.
From it a woman’s shrill voice flew back, shrieking.
“White bastards!” he shouted. “That’s not the first of your bitches that ever saw …” But the car was gone.
There was no one to hear, to listen.
It was gone, sucking its dust and its light with it and behind it, sucking with it the white woman’s fading cry.
He was cold now.
It was as though he had merely come there to be present at a finality, and the finality had now occurred and he was free again.
He returned to the house.
Beneath the dark window he paused and hunted and found his undergarment and put it on.
There was no remaining button at all now and he had to hold it together as he returned to the cabin.
Already he could hear Brown snoring.
He stood for a while at the door, motionless and silent, listening to the long, harsh, uneven suspirations ending each in a choked gurgle.
‘I must have hurt his nose more than I knew,’ he thought. ‘Damn son of a bitch.’
He entered and went to his cot, preparing to lie down.
He was in the act of reclining when he stopped, halted, halfreclining.
Perhaps the thought of himself lying there until daylight, with the drunken man snoring in the darkness and the intervals filled with the myriad voices, was more than he could bear.
Because he sat up and fumbled quietly beneath his cot and found his shoes and slipped them on and took from the cot the single half cotton blanket which composed his bedding, and left the cabin.