Home from the Hill (29 page)

If she was not quite that late this morning, it was not because she had had a better night. On the contrary, she had had an unusually bad night. Wade had come in early, but his face had not satisfied her curiosity about his encounter with Mr. Halstead. Theron had not come in until 2 a.m., and from the noise he made she feared he had been drinking.

She was waiting now for him to come down, lingering over her breakfast. Just outside the dining room ran a walk leading from the front of the house to the back door. Mrs. Hannah, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, opened them to see tottering down the walk a young woman carrying a baby and a suitcase.

She was hardly more than a girl. She was a country girl, her complexion something between the country girl's outdoors brown and the country woman's indoors pallor. It was a pretty face, though over-painted. She wore a flowered cotton dress and a string of red beads and—the reason for her totter—like every country girl, the most impractical shoes she could find: open-toed, with ankle straps, spike heels and platform soles. Mrs. Hannah was able to observe all these details because just outside the window the girl stopped and set down her suitcase. She cast a glance both ways and then came to the window. She peered in, but it was a big window, and Mrs. Hannah's end of it was not in shadow like the other, but glaring with reflection. Satisfied that nobody was there, the girl stood back from the window and looked at herself in it. She shifted the baby to her hip with a gesture that practically told the child's age, a motion already wearily familiar to her, and then stuck out her tongue, licked her fingertip, and scrubbed her nose with it. She licked it again and scrubbed her forehead, again and smoothed down her eyebrows. Then, shifting the baby to her other hip, she licked a finger of the hand thus freed and repeated the operation on the other side of her face. She studied her reflection critically for a moment; then her lips parted in a smile. Then her face assumed a woeful—but still pretty—expression and she said aloud, “You seen what I had to put up with from him!” She looked attentive for a moment, then said gravely, “Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir. No, sir.” Then casting her eyes down to the baby and looking soulfully up from under her brows, “I knowed you'd help me—us—Captain, sir.”

She stepped back, picked up her suitcase, and confidently resumed her walk, and in another moment Mrs. Hannah heard her knock at the kitchen door. She heard Melba stir herself, then heard her say:

“Whut you want?”

“I want to see Captain Hunnicutt, if you please.”

“Whut you want him fer?”

“It's personal.”

“Melba,” Mrs. Hannah called, “what is it?” and she heard Melba say, “You wait right here,” and say loudly to herself, “Pusnal!”

Mrs. Hannah got up and went out to the kitchen, much to Melba's annoyance. “Good morning,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“I come to see Captain Hunnicutt, if you please, ma'am.”

“I'm Mrs. Hunnicutt.”

“Yessum, I know.”

“You do?”

“Yes, ma'am. I'm Ollie Jessup's girl.”

“But I don't know Ollie Jessup,” said Mrs. Hannah.

“You ain't missed nothing. Oh, excuse me, ma'am. He rents from yawl. Always has. He's my daddy, but I ain't proud.”

“Come in,” said Mrs. Hannah. “Have you had your breakfast?”

“Oh, Lard, yessum!” she said, both scandalized and amused. “Dinner too.”

“Then maybe you'd like a cup of coffee?”

She hesitated, then grinned, nodded. A child, thought Mrs. Hannah, a veritable child! Why she gave the words such bitter force in her mind, she herself was not yet prepared to acknowledge. “Have you come a long ways?” she said.

The girl seemed to take fright. She looked down at herself in alarm. “Not that you don't look fresh,” said Mrs. Hannah. “Fresh as a daisy.”

That won her. She smiled secretly to herself. She said, “Yes, ma'am. Quite a ways. I hitched.”

They went into the dining room. Melba served the newcomer, making no effort to conceal her disapproval. The girl stashed the child in the crook of her elbow, drank daintily, put down her cup, and said, “I guess I shocked you, didn't I?”

“Shocked me?” said Mrs. Hannah.

“Saying I wasn't proud of my daddy. Well, I ain't! You wouldn't be shocked, Mizzus, if you knew.”

“Tell me.”

“What would you say of a daddy that turns his own daughter away when she comes home from a husband that mistreated her!”

“I'd say,” said Mrs. Hannah, “that he didn't deserve to live.”

Which was more corroboration than Opal had even hoped for. “Well,” she said uncertainly, “I don't know as I'd go quite that far myself, but it sure shows he ain't worth much.”

“You haven't told me your name,” said Mrs. Hannah.

“Opal.”

“Opal. Opal … Jessup?”

She drew herself up and drew her baby up with her. “Opal Luttrell!” she said indignantly. Then, with equal but different indignation, “But it ain't gonna be for long!”

“What do you mean? Are you going to get a divorce?”

“Nome! No divorce! What I want,” she said, lowering her voice, only then to raise it for the next: “is a nullment!” From the way her eyes shone as she uttered the word you would have thought it was a process by which virginity was restored.

“And so you've come to get my husband's help,” said Mrs. Hannah.

Opal blushed. She was reminded of the scene yesterday in which for the last time Verne had uttered the Captain's name.

“Tell me,” said Mrs. Hannah. “What makes you think he will help you?”

“He knows what I had to put up with from Verne,” she said. And then she thought at last of a way of changing the subject: under the blanket she gave the baby a pinch. It groaned. “Oh, mama's little man! Mama forgot all about him. Oh, my, my, my.” She rocked him against her breast.

“He's very quiet, isn't he?” said Mrs. Hannah.

“Yessum, he's a real good little baby,” she said, and again she blushed. Talk about babies always reminded her of how they came, and her own was especially delicate that way.

“May I see him?” said Mrs. Hannah. “Which does he favor, you or his daddy?”

Again Opal blushed, this time because there was a certain small area of uncertainty in her mind as to just whom he would have to favor to favor his daddy. “Me,” she said. She drew aside the blanket and pulled back the bonnet.

The little seamy-faced creature did favor Opal, because it favored mass humanity, and of that Opal was assuredly a child herself. But to Mrs. Hannah there was another resemblance. Satisfied, she tucked the covers back around the little face.

“What you're after takes time,” she said. “If you won't go back to your husband and can't go back home to your father, what do you mean to do?”

“How long does it take?”

“Weeks, I should imagine.”

“Oh.”

“Have you any relatives, any friends here in town?”

Relatives, friends, in
town
? Her? She could not even imagine it. She shook her head.

“Perhaps I could use you around the house.”

“You could?”

“I've taken a fancy to you. I like you, Opal.”

“You wouldn't if you knowed what Verne said,” she said, and could have bit her tongue.

Mrs. Hannah smiled. What simplicity! “About me?” she said. And then she thought again, a child, a veritable child, absolutely defenceless.

“Oh, nome!” said Opal, coloring. “I mean … I mean what he said about me.”

About you and my husband, said Mrs. Hannah to herself. Aloud she said, “Well, you needn't worry any more about what Verne says. You've come to the right place.”

40

It was a family custom, a rite, so rigidly observed that only physical indisposition was allowed to keep one away, to gather in the drawing room a quarter hour before dinner. Even in these late days, when none of them had anything to say, when each would rather have avoided the others, they all came glumly together. It was for this occasion that Mrs. Hannah, who believed she had to defend herself against Theron's suspicions that she had lied about his father, saved Opal.

Because each of them would have preferred not to see either of the other two, each saw to it that both of the others were there before putting in an appearance. Thus at the same moment Theron descended the stairs, the Captain emerged from the den, and Mrs. Hannah, with Opal, came from the kitchen.

“Opal, you know my husband,” she said. “This is my son, Theron.”

“We've met,” said Theron in astonishment—to which Opal nodded bashfully. He remembered their meeting. He remembered her husband's wondering aloud whether he was the father of her child. He remembered her taunting him about it. He remembered her hiding behind his father and he remembered his father's displeasure, uneasiness. He remembered the long, dawning look on Verne's face as he stared at his wife and at his boss. Most of all he remembered the unexpected lack of chivalry his father had shown in sitting unmoved at the table, as if he had not even noticed, when Verne knocked his wife sprawling and sat down and again stared at him, daring him to interfere.

Involuntarily he looked at his father now. Memory of all this was apparent in his face too. Guilt and shame were apparent on his face, too, and Theron quickly looked away. It seemed a long time since anyone had spoken. He said, “You … you've had your baby,” hardly knowing what he said. For Opal, for this presentation, had diked the baby out in his complete best, though her backwardness made her now wish she had not, made her hold him back, almost hide him.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hannah in a loud unnatural voice, “Opal has had a baby.”

There was, thought Theron, something in her words and in her tone meant for him, some meaning he was meant to catch. He refused to. “Boy or girl?” he said.

“A boy,” said Mrs. Hannah. “Yes, Opal? A big bouncing boy.”

“How is Verne?” said the Captain, and to anyone his tone would have seemed to demand to know what on earth she was doing here.

“Opal has left Verne,” said Mrs. Hannah. “Verne was not good to her. Opal has not said this, but I suspect he was not good to the baby either. So she has left him and has come to you, Wade.” She saw him jump slightly at that, and she felt a thrill of triumph. “She says you know what she had to put up with from him. And her daddy won't take her back. So she has turned to you. Yes, Opal?”

The facts were right, but, remembering her husband's insane suspicions of the Captain, Opal found in Mrs. Hannah's arrangement of them something that hindered her assent. If she only knew what Verne had said, and how that made what she had just said sound! Assent, after a moment, Opal did, but her thoughts colored her face with a deep blush.

“Opal is the daughter of Ollie Jessup, Theron,” said his mother. “One of your father's tenants.”

He knew Ollie Jessup. A craven, whining creature, and the thought came to him that Ollie would have taken anything sooner than complain of his boss, that he might have taken a little money for not complaining. He was sick with disgust—sick most at the disgusting thoughts of which his mind was capable.

“So naturally she turns to him when she's in trouble,” Mrs. Hannah was saying. “Yes, Opal?”

“Verne too,” said Opal, and her unfortunate backwardness brought another suffusion of red to her face.

“Pardon?” said Mrs. Hannah.

“Verne too,” said Opal. “Captain Wade found me and Verne a place too.” And she thought of the cause of their need for a place and how urgent the need was and of the deception she was not sure but what she was practicing upon Verne, and she thought that if he was deceived it was not entirely, and all these things dyed her scarlet from her collar to the roots of her hair. And then from under her brows she looked for the first time at the Captain, and a fresh wave of red followed the one just ebbing from her face when she saw his scowl.

“Ah,” said Mrs. Hannah.

“What is it you want me to do?” said the Captain, and he, for the first time in his life, blushed.

Opal was too tongue-tied to utter a word.

Mrs. Hannah allowed the silence to steep for a moment, then said, “Opal wants you to help her get ‘a nullment.'”

“I'll see what I can do for you,” the Captain muttered, and Mrs. Hannah rejoiced at the hatred in his voice.

“I told her she could count on you,” said Mrs. Hannah. Turning to the girl, she said, “All, Opal, if only you had gotten a husband like mine!” and she had the satisfaction of seeing her glow like a stovelid. Turning back to her husband she said, “I know you will approve what I've done. Since Opal has nowhere to go I have taken her in. She will stay with us while you're getting her decree for her—she and the baby, of course.”

The Captain's mind went back years, to that period when she had made a practice of taking up with every woman who took his fancy. He had thought then, and had continued to think until this moment, that she had been not only blind but downright dense. Now he knew that he had never fooled her. Like Albert Halstead, she knew all about him. He was so surprised that he almost forgot he was innocent in this case.

Mrs. Hannah was saying, “Opal, show them the baby. She says it doesn't favor Verne. Of course I don't know Verne. You know Verne, Theron,” she said, and turned. But Theron was not there.

41

She was busy, she said, with a dingy flash of teeth and a roll of reddened eyeballs, standing in the doorway in a bright red chenille robe, through the opening of which with indifferent pride she allowed one soft white thigh to show. In the yellow light of the lamp inside, through his drunken haze he saw a dimly lighted doorway in the rear. The room sent forth a hot, rank, rutty smell. Wait, she said.

He waited his turn, wondering who the man was inside, half relishing the imminent meeting with him. Apparently, however, when finished you left by the back door—no doubt an arrangement to spare the customers, the paid and the prospective, that moment of recognition he had been anticipating—for after a while she reappeared, and smiling around the doorjamb, said, “Awrighty. Who's next?”