She began to curse him.
“Do you think you can?
Do you think I’ll let you?
Or any other little slut?”
Motionless, facing one another like the first position of a dance, they stood in a mounting terrific muscular hiatus.
With scarce any movement at all he flung her aside in a complete revolution that fetched her up against the table, her arm flung back for balance, her body bent and her hand fumbling behind her among the soiled dishes, watching him across the inert body of the child.
He walked toward her.
“Stand back,” she said, lifting her hand slightly, bringing the butcher knife into view.
“Stand back.”
He came steadily toward her, then she struck at him with the knife.
He caught her wrist.
She began to struggle.
He plucked the child from her and laid it on the table and caught her other hand as it flicked at his face, and holding both wrists in one hand, he slapped her.
It made a dry, flat sound.
He slapped her again, first on one cheek, then the other, rocking her head from side to side.
“That’s what I do to them,” he said, slapping her.
“See?”
He released her.
She stumbled backward against the table and caught up the child and half crouched between the table and the wall, watching him as he turned and left the room.
She knelt in the corner, holding the child.
It had not stirred.
She laid her palm first on one cheek, then on the other.
She rose and laid the child in the box and took a sunbonnet from a nail and put it on.
From another nail she took a coat trimmed with what had once been white fur, and took up the child and left the room.
Tommy was standing in the barn, beside the crib, looking toward the house.
The old man sat on the front porch, in the sun.
She went down the steps and followed the path to the road and went on without looking back.
When she came to the tree and the wrecked car she turned from the road, into a path.
After a hundred yards or so she reached the spring and sat down beside it, the child on her lap and the hem of her skirt turned back over its sleeping face.
Popeye came out of the bushes, walking gingerly in his muddy shoes, and stood looking down at her across the spring.
His hand flicked to his coat and he fretted and twisted a cigarette and put it into his mouth and snapped a match with his thumb.
“Jesus Christ,” he said,
“I told him about letting them sit around all night, swilling that goddam stuff.
There ought to be a law.”
He looked away in the direction in which the house lay.
Then he looked at the woman, at the top of her sunbonnet.
“Goofy house,” he said.
“That’s what it is.
It’s not four days ago I find a bastard squatting here, asking me if I read books.
Like he would jump me with a book or something.
Take me for a ride with the telephone directory.”
Again he looked off toward the house, jerking his neck forth as if his collar were too tight.
He looked down at the top of the sunbonnet.
“I’m going to town, see?” he said.
“I’m clearing out.
I’ve got enough of this.”
She did not look up.
She adjusted the hem of the skirt above the child’s face.
Popeye went on, with light, finicking sounds in the underbrush.
Then they ceased.