She moved away angrily, muttering.
Eugene lolled about feebly on the floor, kicking one leg out gently as if he had just been decapitated, and fumbling blindly at the neckband of his nightshirt.
A faint clucking sound came at intervals from his wide-open mouth.
They laughed wildly, helplessly, draining into mad laughter all the welled and agglutinated hysteria that had gathered in them, washing out in a moment of fierce surrender all the fear and fatality of their lives, the pain of age and death.
Dying, he walked among them, whining his lament against God’s lidless stare, gauging their laughter cautiously with uneasy prying eyes, a faint tickled grin playing craftily about his wailing mouth.
Roofing the deep tides, swinging in their embrace, rocked Eliza’s life Sargassic, as when, at morning, a breath of kitchen air squirmed through her guarded crack of door, and fanned the pendant clusters of old string in floating rhythm.
She rubbed the sleep gently from her small weak eyes, smiling dimly as she thought, unwakened, of ancient losses.
Her worn fingers still groped softly in the bed beside her, and when she found it vacant, she awoke.
Remembered.
My youngest, my oldest, final bitter fruit, O dark of soul, O far and lonely, where?
Remembered O his face!
Death-son, partner of my peril, last coinage of my flesh, who warmed my flanks and nestled to my back.
Gone?
Cut off from me?
When?
Where?
The screen slammed, the market boy dumped ground sausage on the table, a negress fumbled at the stove.
Awake now.
Ben moved quietly, but not stealthily, about, confessing and denying nothing.
His thin laughter pierced the darkness softly above the droning creak of the wooden porch-swing.
Mrs. Pert laughed gently, comfortingly.
She was forty-three: a large woman of gentle manners, who drank a great deal.
When she was drunk, her voice was soft, low, and fuzzy, she laughed uncertainly, mildly, and walked with careful alcoholic gravity.
She dressed well: she was well fleshed, but not sensual-looking.
She had good features, soft oaken hair, blue eyes, a little bleared.
She laughed with a comfortable, happy chuckle.
They were all very fond of her.
Helen called her
“Fatty.”
Her husband was a drug salesman: he travelled through Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, and returned to Altamont for a fortnight every four months.
Her daughter, Catherine, who was almost Ben’s age, came to Dixieland for a few weeks each summer.
She was a school-teacher in a public school in a Tennessee village.
Ben squired both.
Mrs. Pert chuckled softly when she spoke to him, and called him “Old Ben.”
In the darkness he sat, talking a little, humming a little, laughing occasionally in his thin minor key, quietly, with a cigarette between his forked ivory fingers, drawing deeply.
He would buy a flask of whisky and they would drink it very quietly.
Perhaps they talked a little more.
But they were never riotous.
Occasionally, they would rise at midnight from the swing, and go out into the street, departing under leafy trees.
They would not return during the night.
Eliza, ironing out a great pile of rumpled laundry in the kitchen, would listen.
Presently, she would mount the stairs, peer carefully into Mrs. Pert’s room, and descend, her lips thoughtfully kneaded.
She had to speak these things to Helen.
There was a strange defiant communion between them.
They laughed or were bitter together.
“Why, of course,” said Helen, impatiently,
“I’ve known it all along.”
But she looked beyond the door curiously, her big gold-laced teeth half-shown in her open mouth, the child look of belief, wonder, skepticism, and hurt innocency in her big highboned face.
“Do you suppose he really does?
Oh surely not mama.