“You’d better not talk, Steve, until you get a job and quit bumming around,” she said.
“You’re a fine one to talk, hanging around pool-rooms and drug-stores all day on your wife’s money.
Why, it’s absurd!” she said furiously.
“Oh for God’s sake!” Ben cried irritably, wheeling around.
“What do you want to listen to him for?
Can’t you see he’s crazy?”
As the summer lengthened, Steve began to drink heavily again.
His decayed teeth, neglected for years, began to ache simultaneously: he was wild with pain and cheap whisky.
He felt that Eliza and Margaret were in some way responsible for his woe — he sought them out day after day when they were alone, and screamed at them.
He called them foul names and said they had poisoned his system.
In the early hours of morning, at two or three o’clock, he would waken, and walk through the house weeping and entreating release.
Eliza would send him to Spaugh at the hotel or to McGuire, at his residence, in Eugene’s charge.
The doctors, surly and half-awake, peeled back his shirtsleeve and drove a needle with morphine deep in his upper arm.
After that, he found relief and sleep again.
One night, at the supper hour, he returned to Dixieland, holding his tortured jaws between his hands.
He found Eliza bending over the spitting grease of the red-hot stove.
He cursed her for bearing him, he cursed her for allowing him to have teeth, he cursed her for lack of sympathy, motherly love, human kindliness.
Her white face worked silently above the heat.
“Get out of here,” she said.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.
It’s that accursed licker that makes you so mean.”
She began to weep, brushing at her broad red nose with her hand.
“I never thought I’d live to hear such talk from a son of mine,” she said. She held out her forefinger with the old powerful gesture.
“Now, I want to tell you,” she said,
“I’m not going to put up with you any longer.
If you don’t get out of here at once I’m going to call 38 and let them take you.”
This was the police station.
It awoke unpleasant memories.
He had spent the day in jail on two similar occasions.
He became more violent than before, screamed a vile name at her, and made a motion to strike her.
At this moment, Luke entered; he was on his way to Gant’s.
The antagonism between the boy and his older brother was deep and deadly.
It had lasted for years.
Now, trembling with anger, Luke came to his mother’s defense.
“You m-m-m-miserable d-d-degenerate,” he stuttered, unconsciously falling into the swing of the Gantian rhetoric.
“You ought to b-b-b-be horsewhipped.”
He was a well grown and muscular young fellow of nineteen years, but too sensitive to all the taboos of brotherhood to be prepared for the attack Steve made on him.
Steve drove at him viciously, smashing drunkenly at his face with both hands.
He was driven gasping and blinded across the kitchen.
Wrong forever on the throne.
Somewhere, through fear and fury, Eugene heard Ben’s voice humming unconcernedly, and the slow picked tune on the piano.
“Ben!” he screamed, dancing about and grasping a hammer.
Ben entered like a cat.
Luke was bleeding warmly from the nose.
“Come on, come on, you big bastard,” said Steve, exalted by his success, throwing himself into a fancy boxing posture.
“I’ll take you on now.
You haven’t got a chance, Ben,” he continued, with elaborate pity.
“You haven’t got a chance, boy.
I’ll tear your head off with what I know.”
Ben scowled quietly at him for a moment while he pranced softly about, proposing his fists in Police Gazette attitudes.