When she reached the back porch she saw a man in the door of the barn, looking toward the house.
She crossed the porch in two strides and entered the kitchen, where the woman sat at the table, smoking, the child on her lap.
“He was watching me!” Temple said.
“He was watching me all the time!”
She leaned beside the door, peering out, then she came to the woman, her face small and pale, her eyes like holes burned with a cigar, and laid her hand on the cold stove.
“Who was?” the woman said.
“Yes,” Temple said.
“He was there in the bushes, watching me all the time.”
She looked toward the door, then back at the woman, and saw her hand lying on the stove.
She snatched it up with a wailing shriek, clapping it against her mouth, and turned and ran toward the door.
The woman caught her arm, still carrying the child on the other, and Temple sprang back into the kitchen.
Goodwin was coming toward the house.
He looked once at them and went on into the hall.
Temple began to struggle.
“Let go,” she whispered, “let go!
Let go!”
She surged and plunged, grinding the woman’s hand against the door jamb until she was free.
She sprang from the porch and ran toward the barn and into the hallway and climbed the ladder and scrambled through the trap and to her feet again, running toward the pile of rotting hay.
Then suddenly she ran upside down in a rushing interval; she could see her legs still running in space, and she struck lightly and solidly on her back and lay still, staring up at an oblong yawn that closed with a clattering vibration of loose planks.
Faint dust sifted down across the bars of sunlight.
Her hand moved in the substance in which she lay, then she remembered the rat a second time.
Her whole body surged in an involuted spurning movement that brought her to her feet in the loose hulls, so that she flung her hands out and caught herself upright, a hand on either angle of the corner, her face not twelve inches from the cross beam on which the rat crouched.
For an instant they stared eye to eye, then its eyes glowed suddenly like two tiny electric bulbs and it leaped at her head just as she sprang backward, treading again on something that rolled under her foot.
She fell toward the opposite corner, on her face in the hulls and a few scattered corn-cobs gnawed bone-clean.
Something thudded against the wall and struck her head in ricochet.
The rat was in that corner now, on the floor.
Again their faces were not twelve inches apart, the rat’s eyes glowing and fading as though worked by lungs.
Then it stood erect, its back to the corner, its forepaws curled against its chest, and began to squeak at her in tiny plaintive gasps.
She backed away on hands and knees, watching it.
Then she got to her feet and sprang at the door, hammering at it, watching the rat over her shoulder, her body arched against the door, rasping at the planks with her bare hands.
12
The woman stood in the kitchen door, holding the child, until Goodwin emerged from the house.
The lobes of his nostrils were quite white against his brown face, and she said:
“God, are you drunk too?”
He came along the porch.
“She’s not here,” the woman said.
“You cant find her.”
He brushed past her, trailing a reek of whiskey.
She turned, watching him.
He looked swiftly about the kitchen, then he turned and looked at her standing in the door, blocking it.
“You wont find her,” she said.
“She’s gone.”
He came toward her, lifting his hand.
“Dont put your hand on me,” she said.
He gripped her arm, slowly.
His eyes were a little bloodshot.
The lobes of his nostrils looked like wax.
“Take your hand off me,” she said.
“Take it off.”
Slowly he drew her out of the door.