She said,
“Oh.
And you come back to give it to me.
Before them.
And they kidded you.
Well, say.”
“I thought you might have had to pay for it, yourself.
I thought—”
“Well, say.
Can you tie that.
Can you, now.”
They were not looking at one another, standing face to face.
To another they must have looked like two monks met during the hour of contemplation in a garden path.
“I just thought that I …”
“Where do you live?” she said. “In the country?
Well, say.
What’s your name?”
“It’s not McEachern,” he said. “It’s Christmas.”
“Christmas?
Is that your name?
Christmas?
Well, say.”
On the Saturday afternoons during and after adolescence he and the other four or five boys hunted and fished.
He saw girls only at church, on Sunday.
They were associated with Sunday and with church.
So he could not notice them. To do so would be, even to him, a retraction of his religious hatred.
But he and the other boys talked about girls.
Perhaps some of them—the one who arranged with the negro girl that afternoon, for instance—knew.
“They all want to,” he told the others. “But sometimes they can’t.”
The others did not know that.
They did not know that all girls wanted to, let alone that there were times when they could not.
They thought differently.
But to admit that they did not know the latter would be to admit that they had not discovered the former.
So they listened while the boy told them.
“It’s something that happens to them once a month.”
He described his idea of the physical ceremony.
Perhaps he knew.
Anyway he was graphic enough, convincing enough.
If he had tried to describe it as a mental state, something which he only believed, they would not have listened.
But he drew a picture, physical, actual, to be discerned by the sense of smell and even of sight.
It moved them: the temporary and abject helplessness of that which tantalised and frustrated desire; the smooth and superior shape in which volition dwelled doomed to be at stated and inescapable intervals victims of periodical filth.
That was how the boy told it, with the other five listening quietly, looking at one another, questioning and secret.
On the next Saturday Joe did not go hunting with them. McEachern thought that he had already gone, since the gun was missing.
But Joe was hidden in the barn.
He stayed there all that day.
On the Saturday following he did go, but alone, early, before the boys called for him.
But he did not hunt.
He was not three miles from home when in the late afternoon he shot a sheep.
He found the flock in a hidden valley and stalked and killed one with the gun.
Then he knelt, his hands in the yet warm blood of the dying beast, trembling, drymouthed, backglaring.