Then they returned, setting a plate and a cup before him.
He looked at her now, at her face.
“How much is pie?” he said.
“Pie is ten cents.”
She was just standing there before him, beyond the counter, with her big hands again lying on the dark wood, with that quality spent and waiting.
She had; never looked at him.
He said, in a faint, desperate voice:
“I reckon I don’t want no coffee.”
For a while she did not move.
Then one of the big hands moved and took up the coffee cup; hand and cup vanished.
He sat still, downlooking too, waiting.
Then it came.
It was not the proprietor.
It was the woman behind the cigar case.
“What’s that?” she said.
“He don’t want the coffee,” the waitress said.
Her voice, speaking, moved on, as if she had not paused at the question.
Her voice was flat, quiet.
The other woman’s voice was quiet too.
“Didn’t he order coffee too?” she said.
“No,” the waitress said, in that level voice that was still in motion, going away. “I misunderstood.”
When he got out, when his spirit wrung with abasement and regret and passionate for hiding scuttled past the cold face of the woman behind the cigar case, he believed that he knew he would and could never see her again.
He did not believe that he could bear to see her again, even look at the street, the dingy doorway, even from a distance, again, not thinking yet, It’s terrible to be young. It’s terrible.
Terrible.
When Saturdays came he found, invented, reasons to decline to go to town, with McEachern watching him, though not with actual suspicion yet.
He passed the days by working hard, too hard; McEachern contemplated the work with suspicion.
But there was nothing which the man could know, deduce.
Working was permitted him.
Then he could get the nights passed, since he would be too tired to lie awake. And in time even the despair and the regret and the shame grew less.
He did not cease to remember it, to react it.
But now it had become wornout, like a gramophone record: familiar only because of the worn threading which blurred the voices.
After a while even McEachern accepted a fact.
He said:
“I have been watching you lately.
And now there is nothing for it but I must misdoubt my own eyes or else believe that at last you are beginning to accept what the Lord has seen fit to allot you.
But I will not have you grow vain because I have spoken well of it.
You’ll have time and opportunity (and inclination too, I don’t doubt) to make me regret that I have spoken.
To fall into sloth and idleness again.
However, reward was created for man the same as chastisement.
Do you see that heifer yonder?
From today that calf is your own.
See that I do not later regret it.”
Joe thanked him.
Then he could look at the calf and say, aloud:
“That belongs to me.”
Then he looked at it, and it was again too fast and too complete to be thinking: Thatis not a gift.
It is not even a promise: it is a threat; thinking,
‘I didn’t ask for it.
He gave it to me.
I didn’t ask for it,’ believing, God knows, I have earned it. It was a month later.