Foxfire (37 page)

Dart stood before the manager and the superintendent, looking down at them with remote contempt. He offered no defense except the monotonous reiteration that he had given the signal and the hoistman had not answered.

It was his word against Riley's, and Tyson, led by Mablett and reinforced by his own questionings of Riley and that young man's excellent record, felt that he had no choice but to believe that Dart lied. That Dart had carried his insubordination to Mablett too far at last, and indulged in a foolhardy, melodramatic attempt to prove his own superiority, and thereby cost the life of a man. Indirectly, it was true—everyone knew of Craddock's poor state of health—but the shock and fear of that moment waiting for the blast had been the death of the old miner.

So Dart left the hill in disgrace. He came home again at noon and Amanda suppressed a frightened cry when she saw his face. It was set in an iron mask, grim, relentless, the lines from his nose grooved to his indrawn mouth. It was, in fact, the face of Tanosay when he set out to avenge injustice. But for Dart, product of a more complicated civilization, there could be no quick release into revenge. There was no object that he knew of to wreak revenge upon. There was no explanation for the circumstance which had made of him a laughingstock.

“Oh, Dart—tell me. Talk about it—” Amanda pleaded, for since he had come home he had sat silent for hours, staring at the floor. She knelt down beside him, looking up into his face. “Please speak to me. Don't shut me out. Maybe I can help.”

“There's nothing to say,” he answered not looking at her. “They think I lied.”

“You've never lied in your life,” she cried hotly. “That much I know about you, though I know so little.”

He moved his bandaged hand and seemed to withdraw from her. He did not speak.

But still she tried again. “Dart—I don't understand it very well—but could you—might you be wrong about giving the signal? Could you have had a sort of a—a hallucination?”

He looked at her then, and his eyes were black as winter ice. “I'm sure of no one else in the world,” he said, “but I
am
sure of myself.”

She got up from the floor, and turned from him. Yes, that's true, she thought, and maybe that's the trouble, too. He needs nobody. He doesn't need me.—But during those moments of terror the night before when she had been in mortal fear for him she had tasted the agony of loss—and love.

Because of this she tried again. “Dart, you saved two lives, the Mexican's and your own, by a great act of courage, and you tried to save Craddock's. Hugh explained that to me. Doesn't the thought of that help?”

He gave a sharp laugh. “They think I staged it all. Leave me alone. I don't want to talk.”

She sighed, baffled and unhappy, then suddenly a memory came to her. Big Ruby's cryptic warning last February—“There's a guy at the mine's got it in for your husband—just put a flea in hubby's ear.”

“You have an enemy, Dart—Mablett—could he have engineered something, something to hurt you?”

Dart shrugged. “I've plenty of enemies, it seems, and Tyson too.” He rose violently. “Leave me alone, I tell you!” He plunged his injured hand through the sleeve of his jacket, and flung open the door.

“Dart, you're not going off like that, not with that hand! Dart, please!” But he was gone.

Amanda threw herself across the bed. No help. No one to turn to. No way to help Dart, either. He would not be helped. And he had no job! This was the realization she had not yet faced. How often had she thought of this with longing, “I wish he
would
lose his job here.” But not like this, not in this way that hurt him more than anything else could have, reflecting on his competence, shaking the deepest structure of his pride.

What could she do for him—for them—and for the baby...?

After a while she got up and washed her face, and she walked out of the house toward town, turning past Bosses' Row down Back Lane. The lane was deserted in the afternoon heat and she knocked on Big Ruby's door.

An angry voice called from inside. “Who's there? What do you want? I'm busy.”

Amanda knocked again.

Ruby's flushed face appeared in the crack of the door. She had been drinking heavily, and she had a client inside, one of the miners from the graveyard shift. “What the hell d'you mean by bothering me?” she shouted.

The girl drew herself up and spoke fast. “My husband's in trouble, no fault of his. I want to know what you meant by telling me there was a man at the mine had it in for him. I want to know who it was. Please....”

“Shut up, you little fool!” Ruby hissed, casting a quick glance behind her. She had already heard the story of the mine accident from her client. “I don't know what you're talking about, except your precious husband's been fired, and good riddance, I guess.”

“But you
said,
when I talked to you last spring...” Amanda began. The door slammed in her face. She heard the sound of a bolt being drawn.

Amanda walked back up the lane. She had no plan. Her mind held no thoughts, she simply walked. She felt no emotion but a formless longing, for what she did not know. For rest, perhaps—for peace, for communion with something. Her mind floated in this longing, and her body continued to walk. It took her without her conscious knowledge to the ghost town and up the avenue of vanished palms to Calise's mansion. And in this state that was close to somnambulism, she knocked on still another door. And this one was, after a little while, opened to her.

“Ma chère enfant!”
cried Calise, shocked out of her preoccupation, when she saw the girl. “What is it?” She came out on to the porch beside Amanda, who shook her head in a dazed way.

“I don't know why I came, Mrs. Cunningham, or just how I got here. But Dart's in trouble. You must have heard the siren last night. Bad trouble. He's been fired from the mine. Something happened, I don't know exactly what. I went to Big Ruby...”

“Wait, child—you went to Big Ruby—who is she?”

“She's one of the crib girls down in town. She knows something, something about a man who had it in for Dart. She won't tell me. Dart's gone off to the mountains, I guess, and he's hurt. He won't let anybody help him. I had to talk to someone. I don't know why I came. I'll go now. I just had to talk.”

And before Calise could speak Amanda turned and walked down the steps.

Calise did not try to stop her. She watched the little figure walk down the trail and disappear around the corner of the opera house, then she herself went back into her sanctuary.

There were two candles lit on the prie-dieu where she had been praying. On the piano there lay open a Bach cantata which she would presently sing in the twilight, releasing her soul in the pure melody untouched by human passion.
Untouched by human passion,
was it not towards this that her whole life was directed? Cleansing herself from human passion into purity. She stood beside her prie-dieu, and the light streamed on her, light that did not come from the candles, and mingling with the light as perfume mingles with the rose, she heard a voice speaking.

She sank to her knees holding her face up to the light; but it brought her no joy, for the light grew terrible and blinding, and it seemed that it asked of her what she could not do.

I cannot, she whispered in her heart, I can stand no more than I already have to bear. Surely at last I am forgiven.

The light faded, leaving her in darkness.

She bowed her head and tears ran down her cheeks, for she felt the dreaded drumming along her nerves, a thickness and a coarsening. Memories began to assault her helpless mind. Raoul's face bent over hers with lust. The smell of the heavy scent she had worn. The smell of blood. Ah, not so soon again! she cried out in terror. What have I done that it should come so soon again....

And faintly beneath the din of her despair a different question chimed. “What have I
NOT
done?” But to this she would not listen.

 

Amanda's pace slowed as she left the ghost town. The energy which had sent her on the two impulsive visits drained away. She became suddenly very tired, and when she reached home again, her feet dragged in the dust, it seemed more than she could manage to get up the steps into the shack. The familiar room had suddenly taken on the menacing quality of a dream not quite nightmare, but removed from it only by a thick veil which deadened sharp perception. She closed her eyes and a sudden sleep fell on her.

It was pain that woke her up, though she did not at first recognize it. She opened her eyes and stared up at the shadows beneath the dim rafters, waiting for a repetition of that strange summons. It was dark now in the room and she wondered vaguely how late it was. She heard the fretful buzzing of some insect in the kitchen, and the distant barking of a dog.

Her attention was pulled downward to her body; a formless ache in her back, which had not reached the first level of her attention, seemed to be gathering insistence. What's that? she thought, still without identification. Did I hurt my back—walked too far—and she turned over onto her side. At once the bed and the room dissolved into a reeling merry-go-round, bitter liquid rose in her mouth and she retched violently. The nausea passed and the pain passed. She sat up on the edge of the bed and groped for the matches. Then she lit the kerosene lamp, and by its yellow flickering light she saw a dark stain on the bed where she had lain.

“Dart!” she called wildly, staring at the stain. “Dart!” She sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, while the pain like a summons from far outside herself came back and called her and ebbed away. “Stop it—” she whispered. “Make it stop—please,” and plain she saw her mother's face bending over her—“Why, it's all right, baby, just a bad dream—my silly baby, to be frightened.”

And for a few minutes Amanda believed this. The incantation had worked. Then the pain came back again, and the nausea.

She tottered to the kitchen sink and vomited. She heard herself whimpering, and the feeble, mindless sound shocked her into full awareness.

She set her jaw and straightened up as best she could. She crept out of the back door, and down the road to the hospital.

There was nobody in the waiting room, where one feeble electric light flickered incessantly.

“Hugh!” cried Amanda, sinking onto the rattan couch, and gasping while a pain seized her. When it passed she was too weak to search further, she slipped off her shoe and hammered with its heel on the floor, then lay panting.

She did not hear shuffling steps approach but she opened her eyes to see Maria peering down at her.

“Whassa matter with you? You sick?” Maria was dressed in a sleazy red satin and rhinestone earrings. Her hair was slick with brilliantine. She had been sneaking out to a baile in Mex town.

“Where's the doctor—” whispered Amanda.

“Doc's pretty drunk.” Maria hunched her shoulder in the direction of Hugh's quarters. “All afternoon he drink mebbe so a bottle of hootch.”

“Get him somehow—make him come to me....”

Maria showed her beautiful teeth in a faintly pitying smile. She enjoyed drama. She particularly enjoyed the abasement of the snooty blonde girl on the couch. Just like everyone else, scared and messy when this happened. “You're having a miss,” she said shrugging. “Doc can't do nothing.”

“Maria—for God's sake!” Amanda struggled up on her elbow. “Get the doctor—I can't—I can't stay here—I——”

Maria was suddenly frightened by the glistening pallor, the dilated staring eyes. She muttered something, and going back to Hugh's bedroom she shook his shoulder violently. “Wake up, Doc! Wake up! Emergency.”

Hugh had taught her to use this word, and it penetrated through his stupor. He got on his feet cursing. He slapped water over his face with a wet towel. His vision cleared, and the formless rage that welled up in him focused on Maria in the red dress—sneaking out again—the bitch—and he lunged for her, his fist clenched.

She side-stepped quickly, and past her through the open door Hugh saw the huddled figure on the couch, heard a long moan.

“God damn it!” he muttered, and he staggered through into the waiting room. “How long has this been going on?” he growled to Amanda, his shaking fingers digging into her pulse.

She looked up at him through the haze of fear and pain. His eyes were bloodshot and half closed, his breath stank of bootleg liquor.

“I don't know—about an hour, I guess. Hugh—help me—make it stop.”

“How the hell can I make it stop! Come on, get upstairs to bed.”

“I can't. I can't walk anymore.”

“I'm certainly not going to carry you. Buck up, Andy.

You're not the first and you won't be the last. —Here, you bitch—” he added to Maria, who had been gaping, fascinated. “Take her arm.”

Hugh took Amanda's other arm, and they dragged her up the stairs and into one of the vacant rooms.

“Dart—” whispered Amanda when she lay on the cot. Her voice rose high and thin, she began to throw herself from side to side. “Dart—Dart, I want Dart!” She felt Maria's rough hands on her shoulders holding her down. “Lay still now—whassa matter with you hollering like that. You'd ought to be shamed.” She heard Hugh's voice thick and angry, swearing about something.

Then she felt the sharp prick of a needle in her arm. Alone, alone—she heard the words tolling like a funeral bell. “Alone—alone on a wide, wide sea, and never a saint took pity on...” Nobody took pity on. There was no answer.

Amanda lost her baby during the dawn hours, and after that she was unconscious from exhaustion and the whiffs of ether Hugh had given her. She did not know that Dart had come in at five, and had sat silently by her bed for an hour while she slept. Then, in response to Hugh's call, he had gone downstairs to the hospital kitchen for coffee.