Temple looked vaguely and stupidly at it as it too shot behind.
Popeye swung back into the sandy ruts.
Yet there was no flight in the action: he performed it with a certain vicious petulance, that was all.
It was a powerful car. Even in the sand it held forty miles an hour, and up the narrow gulch to the highroad, where he turned north.
Sitting beside him, braced against jolts that had already given way to a smooth increasing hiss of gravel, Temple gazed dully forward as the road she had traversed yesterday began to flee backward under the wheels as onto a spool, feeling her blood seeping slowly inside her loins.
She sat limp in the corner of the seat, watching the steady backward rush of the land—pines in opening vistas splashed with fading dogwood; sedge; fields green with new cotton and empty of any movement, peaceful, as though Sunday were a quality of atmosphere, of light and shade—sitting with her legs close together, listening to the hot minute seeping of her blood, saying dully to herself, I’m still bleeding.
I’m still bleeding.
It was a bright, soft day, a wanton morning filled with that unbelievable soft radiance of May, rife with a promise of noon and of heat, with high fat clouds like gobs of whipped cream floating lightly as reflections in a mirror, their shadows scudding sedately across the road.
It had been a lavender spring.
The fruit trees, the white ones, had been in small leaf when the blooms matured; they had never attained that brilliant whiteness of last spring, and the dogwood had come into full bloom after the leaf also, in green retrograde before crescendo.
But lilac and wistaria and red-bud, even the shabby heaven trees, had never been finer, fulgent, with a burning scent blowing for a hundred yards along the vagrant air of April and May.
The bougainvillia against the veranda would be large as basketballs and lightly poised as balloons, and looking vacantly and stupidly at the rushing roadside Temple began to scream.
It started as a wail, rising, cut suddenly off by Popeye’s hand.
With her hands lying on her lap, sitting erect, she screamed, tasting the gritty acridity of his fingers while the car slewed squealing in the gravel, feeling her secret blood.
Then he gripped her by the back of the neck and she sat motionless, her mouth round and open like a small empty cave.
He shook her head.
“Shut it,” he said, “shut it;” gripping her silent.
“Look at yourself.
Here.”
With the other hand he swung the mirror on the windshield around and she looked at her image, at the uptilted hat and her matted hair and her round mouth.
She began to fumble at her coat pockets, looking at her reflection.
He released her and she produced the compact and opened it and peered into the mirror, whimpering a little.
She powdered her face and rouged her mouth and straightened her hat, whimpering into the tiny mirror on her lap while Popeye watched her.
He lit a cigarette.
“Aint you ashamed of yourself?” he said.
“It’s still running,” she whimpered.
“I can feel it.”
With the lipstick poised she looked at him and opened her mouth again.
He gripped her by the back of the neck.
“Stop it, now.
You going to shut it?”
“Yes,” she whimpered.
“See you do, then.
Come on. Get yourself fixed.”
She put the compact away.
He started the car again.
The road began to thicken with pleasure cars Sunday-bent—small, clay-crusted Fords and Chevrolets; an occasional larger car moving swiftly, with swathed women, and dust-covered hampers; trucks filled with wooden-faced country people in garments like a colored wood meticulously carved; now and then a wagon or a buggy.
Before a weathered frame church on a hill the grove was full of tethered teams and battered cars and trucks.
The woods gave away to fields; houses became more frequent.
Low above the skyline, above roofs and a spire or two, smoke hung.
The gravel became asphalt and they entered Dumfries.
Temple began to look about, like one waking from sleep.
“Not here!” she said.
“I cant—”
“Hush it, now,” Popeye said.
“I cant—I might—” she whimpered.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
“I haven’t eaten since.……”
“Ah, you aint hungry.
Wait till we get to town.”