Then I did a funny thing.
I could see myself in the coffin.
I looked sweet—you know: all in white.
I had on a veil like a bride, and I was crying because I was dead or looked sweet or something.
No: it was because they had put shucks in the coffin.
I was crying because they had put shucks in the coffin where I was dead, but all the time I could feel my nose going cold and hot and cold and hot, and I could see all the people sitting around the coffin, saying Dont she look sweet.
Dont she look sweet.
“But I kept on saying Coward!
Coward!
Touch me, coward!
I got mad, because he was so long doing it.
I’d talk to him.
I’d say Do you think I’m going to lie here all night, just waiting on you?
I’d say. Let me tell you what I’ll do, I’d say.
And I’d lie there with the shucks laughing at me and me jerking away in front of his hand and I’d think what I’d say to him. I’d talk to him like the teacher does in school, and then I was a teacher in school and it was a little black thing like a nigger boy, kind of, and I was the teacher.
Because I’d say How old am I? and I’d say I’m forty-five years old.
I had iron-gray hair and spectacles and I was all big up here like women get.
I had on a gray tailored suit, and I never could wear gray.
And I was telling it what I’d do, and it kind of drawing up and drawing up like it could already see the switch.
“Then I said That wont do.
I ought to be a man.
So I was an old man, with a long white beard, and then the little black man got littler and littler and I was saying Now.
You see now.
I’m a man now.
Then I thought about being a man, and as soon as I thought it, it happened.
It made a kind of plopping sound, like blowing a little rubber tube wrong-side outward.
It felt cold, like the inside of your mouth when you hold it open.
I could feel it, and I lay right still to keep from laughing about how surprised he was going to be.
I could feel the jerking going on inside my knickers ahead of his hand and me lying there trying not to laugh about how surprised and mad he was going to be in about a minute.
Then all of a sudden I went to sleep.
I couldn’t even stay awake until his hand got there.
I just went to sleep.
I couldn’t even feel myself jerking in front of his hand, but I could hear the shucks.
I didn’t wake up until that woman came and took me down to the crib.”
As he was leaving the house Miss Reba said:
“I wish you’d get her down there and not let her come back.
I’d find her folks myself, if I knowed how to go about it.
But you know how.…… She’ll be dead, or in the asylum in a year, way him and her go on up there in that room.
There’s something funny about it that I aint found out about yet.
Maybe it’s her.
She wasn’t born for this kind of life.
You have to be born for this like you have to be born a butcher or a barber, I guess.
Wouldn’t anybody be either of them just for money or fun.”
Better for her if she were dead tonight, Horace thought, walking on.
For me, too.
He thought of her, Popeye, the woman, the child, Goodwin, all put into a single chamber, bare, lethal, immediate and profound: a single blotting instant between the indignation and the surprise.
And I too; thinking how that were the only solution.
Removed, cauterised out of the old and tragic flank of the world.
And I, too, now that we’re all isolated; thinking of a gentle dark wind blowing in the long corridors of sleep; of lying beneath a low cozy roof under the long sound of the rain: the evil, the injustice, the tears.
In an alley-mouth two figures stood, face to face, not touching; the man speaking in a low tone unprintable epithet after epithet in a caressing whisper, the woman motionless before him as though in a musing swoon of voluptuous ecstasy.