Dont think I’m afraid.
I want a drink.”
“You tell him, and I’ll get you one,” Miss Reba said.
Sitting up in the bed, the covers about her shoulders, Temple told him of the night she had spent in the ruined house, from the time she entered the room and tried to wedge the door with the chair, until the woman came to the bed and led her out.
That was the only part of the whole experience which appeared to have left any impression on her at all: the night which she had spent in comparative inviolation.
Now and then Horace would attempt to get her on ahead to the crime itself, but she would elude him and return to herself sitting on the bed, listening to the men on the porch, or lying in the dark while they entered the room and came to the bed and stood there above her.
“Yes; that,” she would say.
“It just happened.
I dont know.
I had been scared so long that I guess I had just gotten used to being.
So I just sat there in those cottonseeds and watched him.
I thought it was the rat at first.
There were two of them there.
One was in one corner looking at me and the other was in the other corner.
I dont know what they lived on, because there wasn’t anything there but corn-cobs and cottonseeds.
Maybe they went to the house to eat.
But there wasn’t any in the house.
I never did hear one in the house.
I thought it might have been a rat when I first heard them, but you can feel people in a dark room: did you know that?
You dont have to see them.
You can feel them like you can in a car when they begin to look for a good place to stop—you know: park for a while.”
She went on like that, in one of those bright, chatty monologues which women can carry on when they realise that they have the center of the stage; suddenly Horace realised that she was recounting the experience with actual pride, a sort of naive and impersonal vanity, as though she were making it up, looking from him to Miss Reba with quick, darting glances like a dog driving two cattle along a lane.
“And so whenever I breathed I’d hear those shucks.
I dont see how anybody ever sleeps on a bed like that.
But maybe you get used to it.
Or maybe they’re tired at night.
Because when I breathed I could hear them, even when I was just sitting on the bed.
I didn’t see how it could be just breathing, so I’d sit as still as I could, but I could still hear them.
That’s because breathing goes down.
You think it goes up, but it doesn’t.
It goes down you, and I’d hear them getting drunk on the porch.
I got to thinking I could see where their heads were leaning back against the wall and I’d say Now this one’s drinking out of the jug.
Now that one’s drinking.
Like the mashed-in place on the pillow after you got up, you know.
“That was when I got to thinking a funny thing.
You know how you do when you’re scared.
I was looking at my legs and I’d try to make like I was a boy.
I was thinking about if I just was a boy and then I tried to make myself into one by thinking.
You know how you do things like that.
Like when you know one problem in class and when they come to that you look at him and think right hard, Call on me.
Call on me.
Call on me.
I’d think about what they tell children, about kissing your elbow, and I tried to.
I actually did.
I was that scared, and I’d wonder if I could tell when it happened.
I mean, before I looked, and I’d think I had and how I’d go out and show them—you know.
I’d strike a match and say Look.
See?
Let me alone, now.
And then I could go back to bed.