“I’ve got four brothers.
Two are lawyers and one’s a newspaper man.
The other’s still in school. At Yale.
My father’s a judge.
Judge Drake of Jackson.”
She thought of her father sitting on the veranda, in a linen suit, a palm leaf fan in his hand, watching the negro mow the lawn.
The woman opened the oven and looked in.
“Nobody asked you to come out here.
I didn’t ask you to stay.
I told you to go while it was daylight.”
“How could I?
I asked him.
Gowan wouldn’t, so I had to ask him.”
The woman closed the oven and turned and looked at Temple, her back to the light.
“How could you?
Do you know how I get my water?
I walk after it.
A mile.
Six times a day.
Add that up.
Not because I am somewhere I am afraid to stay.”
She went to the table and took up a pack of cigarettes and shook one out.
“May I have one?” Temple said.
The woman flipped the pack along the table. She removed the chimney from the lamp and lit hers at the wick.
Temple took up the pack and stood listening to Gowan and the other man go back into the house.
“There are so many of them,” she said in a wailing tone, watching the cigarette crush slowly in her fingers.
“But maybe, with so many of them.……” The woman had gone back to the stove. She turned the meat.
“Gowan kept on getting drunk again.
He got drunk three times today.
He was drunk when I got off the train at Taylor and I am on probation and I told him what would happen and I tried to get him to throw the jar away and when we stopped at that little country store to buy a shirt he got drunk again.
And so we hadn’t eaten and we stopped at Dumfries and he went into the restaurant but I was too worried to eat and I couldn’t find him and then he came up another street and I felt the bottle in his pocket before he knocked my hand away.
He kept on saying I had his lighter and then when he lost it and I told him he had, he swore he never owned one in his life.”
The meat hissed and spluttered in the skillet.
“He got drunk three separate times,” Temple said.
“Three separate times in one day.
Buddy—that’s Hubert, my youngest brother—said that if he ever caught me with a drunk man, he’d beat hell out of me.
And now I’m with one that gets drunk three times in one day.”
Leaning her hip against the table, her hand crushing the cigarette, she began to laugh.
“Dont you think that’s funny?” she said.
Then she quit laughing by holding her breath, and she could hear the faint guttering the lamp made, and the meat in the skillet and the hissing of the kettle on the stove, and the voices, the harsh, abrupt, meaningless masculine sounds from the house.
“And you have to cook for all of them every night.
All those men eating here, the house full of them at night, in the dark.……” She dropped the crushed cigarette.
“May I hold the baby?
I know how; I’ll hold him good.”
She ran to the box, stooping, and lifted the sleeping child.
It opened its eyes, whimpering.
“Now, now; Temple’s got it.”
She rocked it, held high and awkward in her thin arms.
“Listen,” she said, looking at the woman’s back, “will you ask him? your husband, I mean.
He can get a car and take me somewhere.