But she could hear no sound save the voices from the front.
She went on, slowly.
Then she stopped.
On the square of sunlight framed by the door lay the shadow of a man’s head, and she half spun, poised with running.
But the shadow wore no hat, so she turned and on tiptoe she went to the door and peered around it.
A man sat in a splint-bottom chair, in the sunlight, the back of his bald, white-fringed head toward her, his hands crossed on the head of a rough stick.
She emerged onto the back porch.
“Good afternoon,” she said.
The man did not move.
She advanced again, then she glanced quickly over her shoulder.
With the tail of her eye she thought she had seen a thread of smoke drift out the door in the detached room where the porch made an L, but it was gone.
From a line between two posts in front of this door three square cloths hung damp and limp, as though recently washed, and a woman’s undergarment of faded pink silk.
It had been washed until the lace resembled a ragged, fibre-like fraying of the cloth itself.
It bore a patch of pale calico, neatly sewn.
Temple looked at the old man again.
For an instant she thought that his eyes were closed, then she believed that he had no eyes at all, for between the lids two objects like dirty yellowish clay marbles were fixed.
“Gowan,” she whispered, then she wailed
“Gowan!” and turned running, her head reverted, just as a voice spoke beyond the door where she had thought to have seen smoke:
“He cant hear you.
What do you want?”
She whirled again and without a break in her stride and still watching the old man, she ran right off the porch and fetched up on hands and knees in a litter of ashes and tin cans and bleached bones, and saw Popeye watching her from the corner of the house, his hands in his pockets and a slanted cigarette curling across his face.
Still without stopping she scrambled onto the porch and sprang into the kitchen, where a woman sat at a table, a burning cigarette in her hand, watching the door.
6
Popeye went on around the house.
Gowan was leaning over the edge of the porch, dabbing gingerly at his bloody nose.
The barefooted man squatted on his heels against the wall.
“For Christ’s sake,” Popeye said, “why cant you take him out back and wash him off?
Do you want him sitting around here all day looking like a damn hog with its throat cut?”
He snapped the cigarette into the weeds and sat on the top step and began to scrape his muddy shoes with a platinum penknife on the end of his watch chain.
The barefoot man rose.
“You said something about——” Gowan said.
“Pssst!” the other said.
He began to wink and frown at Gowan, jerking his head at Popeye’s back.
“And then you get on back down that road,” Popeye said.
“You hear?”
“I thought you was fixin to watch down ther,” the man said.
“Dont think,” Popeye said, scraping at his trouser-cuffs.
“You’ve got along forty years without it.
You do what I told you.”
When they reached the back porch the barefoot man said:
“He jest caint stand fer nobody——Aint he a cur’ us feller, now?
I be dawg ef he aint better’n a circus to——He wont stand fer nobody drinkin hyer cep Lee.
Wont drink none hisself, and jest let me take one sup and I be dawg ef hit dont look like he’ll have a catfit.”
“He said you were forty years old,” Gowan said.
“ ’Taint that much,” the other said.
“How old are you?
Thirty?”
“I dont know. ’Taint as much as he said, though.”
The old man sat in the chair, in the sun.
“Hit’s jest Pap,” the man said.