Then he told her.
“I got some nigger blood in me.”
Then she lay perfectly still, with a different stillness.
But he did not seem to notice it.
He lay peacefully too, his hand slow up and down her flank.
“You’re what?” she said.
“I think I got some nigger blood in me.” His eyes were closed, his hand slow and unceasing. “I don’t know.
I believe I have.”
She did not move.
She said at once:
“You’re lying.”
“All right,” he said, not moving, his hand not ceasing.
“I don’t believe it,” her voice said in the darkness.
“All right,” he said, his hand not ceasing.
The next Saturday he took another half dollar from Mrs. McEachern’s hiding place and gave it to the waitress.
A day or two later he had reason to believe that Mrs. McEachern had missed the money and that she suspected him of having taken it.
Because she lay in wait for him until he knew that she knew that McEachern would not interrupt them.
Then she said,
“Joe.”
He paused and looked at her, knowing that she would not be looking at him.
She said, not looking at him, her voice flat, level:
“I know how a young man growing up needs money.
More than p—Mr. McEachern gives you. ...”
He looked at her, until her voice ceased and died away.
Apparently he was waiting for it to cease.
Then he said,
“Money?
What do I want with money?”
On the next Saturday he earned two dollars chopping wood for a neighbor.
He lied to McEachern about where he was going and where he had been and what he had done there.
He gave the money to the waitress. McEachern found out about the work.
Perhaps he believed that Joe had hidden the money.
Mrs. McEachern may have told him so.
Perhaps two nights a week Joe and the waitress went to her room.
He did not know at first that anyone else had ever done that.
Perhaps he believed that some peculiar dispensation had been made in his favor, for his sake.
Very likely until the last he still believed that Max and Mame had to be placated, not for the actual fact, but because of his presence there.
But he did not see them again in the house, though he knew that they were there.
But he did not know for certain if they knew that he was there or had ever returned after the night of the candy.
Usually they met outside, went somewhere else or just loitered on the way to where she lived.
Perhaps he believed up to the last that he had suggested it.
Then one night she did not meet him where he waited.
He waited until the clock in the courthouse struck twelve.
Then he went on to where she lived.
He had never done that before, though even then he could not have said that she had ever forbidden him to come there unless she was with him.
But he went there that night, expecting to find the house dark and asleep.
The house was dark, but it was not asleep.
He knew that, that beyond the dark shades of her room people were not asleep and that she was not there alone.
How he knew it he could not have said.
Neither would he admit what he knew.