“I’ve told all I’m going to tell.
I dont have to clear myself; it’s up to them to hang it on me.”
“Then what do you want with a lawyer?” Benbow said.
“What do you want me to do?”
Goodwin was not looking at him.
“If you’ll just promise to get the kid a good newspaper grift when he’s big enough to make change,” he said.
“Ruby’ll be all right.
Wont you, old gal?”
He put his hand on the woman’s head, scouring her hair with his hand.
She sat on the cot beside him, holding the child on her lap.
It lay in a sort of drugged immobility, like the children which beggars on Paris streets carry, its pinched face slick with faint moisture, its hair a damp whisper of shadow across its gaunt, veined skull, a thin crescent of white showing beneath its lead-colored eyelids.
The woman wore a dress of gray crepe, neatly brushed and skilfully darned by hand.
Parallel with each seam was that faint, narrow, glazed imprint which another woman would recognise at a hundred yards with one glance.
On the shoulder was a purple ornament of the sort that may be bought in ten cent stores or by mail order; on the cot beside her lay a gray hat with a neatly darned veil; looking at it, Benbow could not remember when he had seen one before, when women ceased to wear veils.
He took the woman to his house.
They walked, she carrying the child while Benbow carried a bottle of milk and a few groceries, food in tin cans.
The child still slept.
“Maybe you hold it too much,” he said.
“Suppose we get a nurse for it.”
He left her at the house and returned to town, to a telephone, and he telephoned out to his sister’s, for the car.
The car came for him.
He told his sister and Miss Jenny about the case over the supper table.
“You’re just meddling!” his sister said, her serene face, her voice, furious.
“When you took another man’s wife and child away from him I thought it was dreadful, but I said At least he will not have the face to ever come back here again.
And when you just walked out of the house like a nigger and left her I thought that was dreadful too, but I would not let myself believe you meant to leave her for good.
And then when you insisted without any reason at all on leaving here and opening the house, scrubbing it yourself and all the town looking on and living there like a tramp, refusing to stay here where everybody would expect you to stay and think it funny when you wouldn’t; and now to deliberately mix yourself up with a woman you said yourself was a street-walker, a murderer’s woman.”
“I cant help it.
She has nothing, no one.
In a madeover dress all neatly about five years out of mode, and that child that never has been more than half alive, wrapped in a piece of blanket scrubbed almost cotton-white.
Asking nothing of anyone except to be let alone, trying to make something out of her life when all you sheltered chaste women—”
“Do you mean to say a moonshiner hasn’t got the money to hire the best lawyer in the country?” Miss Jenny said.
“It’s not that,” Horace said.
“I’m sure he could get a better lawyer.
It’s that—”
“Horace,” his sister said.
She had been watching him.
“Where is that woman?”
Miss Jenny was watching him too, sitting a little forward in the wheel chair.
“Did you take that woman into my house?”
“It’s my house too, honey.”
She did not know that for ten years he had been lying to his wife in order to pay interest on a mortgage on the stucco house he had built for her in Kinston, so that his sister might not rent to strangers that other house in Jefferson which his wife did not know he still owned any share in.
“As long as it’s vacant, and with that child—”
“The house where my father and mother and your father and mother, the house where I—I wont have it.
I wont have it.”
“Just for one night, then.
I’ll take her to the hotel in the morning.
Think of her, alone, with that baby.……Suppose it were you and Bory, and your husband accused of a murder you knew he didn’t—”
“I dont want to think about her.
I wish I had never heard of the whole thing.
To think that my brother—Dont you see that you are always having to clean up after yourself?