Goodwin returned to his chair.
They began to talk again, passing the jug, and Tommy listened.
But soon he began to think about Temple again.
He would feel his feet scouring on the floor and his whole body writhing in an acute discomfort.
“They ought to let that gal alone,” he whispered to Goodwin.
“They ought to quit pesterin her.”
“It’s none of your business,” Goodwin said.
“Let every damned one of them.……”
“They ought to quit pesterin her.”
Popeye came out the door.
He lit a cigarette.
Tommy watched his face flare out between his hands, his cheeks sucking; he followed with his eyes the small comet of the match into the weeds.
Him too, he said.
Two of em; his body writhing slowly.
Pore little crittur.
I be dawg ef I aint a mind to go down to the barn and stay there, I be dawg ef I aint.
He rose, his feet making no sound on the porch. He stepped down into the path and went around the house.
There was a light in the window there.
Dont nobody never use in there, he said, stopping, then he said, That’s where she’ll be stayin, and he went to the window and looked in.
The sash was down. Across a missing pane a sheet of rusted tin was nailed.
Temple was sitting on the bed, her legs tucked under her, erect, her hands lying in her lap, her hat tilted on the back of her head.
She looked quite small, her very attitude an outrage to muscle and tissue of more than seventeen and more compatible with eight or ten, her elbows close to her sides, her face turned toward the door against which a chair was wedged.
There was nothing in the room save the bed, with its faded patchwork quilt, and the chair.
The walls had been plastered once, but the plaster had cracked and fallen in places, exposing the lathing and molded shreds of cloth.
On the wall hung a raincoat and a khaki-covered canteen.
Temple’s head began to move. It turned slowly, as if she were following the passage of someone beyond the wall.
It turned on to an excruciating degree, though no other muscle moved, like one of those papier-mâché Easter toys filled with candy, and became motionless in that reverted position.
Then it turned back, slowly, as though pacing invisible feet beyond the wall, back to the chair against the door and became motionless there for a moment.
Then she faced forward and Tommy watched her take a tiny watch from the top of her stocking and look at it.
With the watch in her hand she lifted her head and looked directly at him, her eyes calm and empty as two holes.
After a while she looked down at the watch again and returned it to her stocking.
She rose from the bed and removed her coat and stood motionless, arrowlike in her scant dress, her head bent, her hands clasped before her.
She sat on the bed again.
She sat with her legs close together, her head bent.
She raised her head and looked about the room.
Tommy could hear the voices from the dark porch.
They rose again, then sank to the steady murmur.
Temple sprang to her feet.
She unfastened her dress, her arms arched thin and high, her shadow anticking her movements.
In a single motion she was out of it, crouching a little, match-thin in her scant undergarments.
Her head emerged facing the chair against the door.
She hurled the dress away, her hand reaching for the coat.
She scrabbled it up and swept it about her, pawing at the sleeves.
Then, the coat clutched to her breast, she whirled and looked straight into Tommy’s eyes and whirled and ran and flung herself upon the chair.
“Durn them fellers,” Tommy whispered, “durn them fellers.”
He could hear them on the front porch and his body began again to writhe slowly in an acute unhappiness.
“Durn them fellers.”
When he looked into the room again Temple was moving toward him, holding the coat about her.
She took the raincoat from the nail and put it on over her own coat and fastened it.
She lifted the canteen down and returned to the bed.