Stories of Erskine Caldwell (54 page)

For the past year Bony King had been trying to make trouble for him, but Davi had always thought it would die down when Bony saw he could not make Jeanie leave and go to live with him. Davi remembered then that every day for almost three weeks Jeanie had told him of Bony’s coming to old cabin while he was away building new cabin. Bony was a turpentine worker who lived in a shanty on the East Arm of Ogeechichobee Swamp. He had started out by telling Jeanie he was not going to stop trying to get her until she left Davi and came to live with him. Once when Davi was at the store near East Arm, Bony had told him the same thing. Davi had laughed it off then. But for the past few weeks, Bony had been coming to old cabin every day.

During the rest of the night Davi lay awake wondering what he could do about it. He could not move away from the swamp, because that was the only home he and Jeanie had.

Just before daybreak he got up and dressed without waking Jeanie. He went to the kitchen and ate some more of the cold corn bread and sweet potatoes. By then, the sun was coming up. He looked into the next room before leaving, and Jeanie was still asleep. He tiptoed out of the kitchen and started down the path for another day’s work on new cabin, three miles away.

Jeanie did not wake up until almost an hour later. She turned over, first, to see if Davi was awake, and when she found he was gone, she leaped out of bed and ran into the kitchen. When she had reached the front yard, she was awake enough to know that Davi had left and gone to work.

After cooking her breakfast and cleaning the house, she went out into the garden. It was then only in the middle of the morning, and she began digging at the weeds with the blunt-bladed hoe. The vegetables she and Davi had planted nearly a month before were up and thriving in the damp earth and warm sunshine. She dug and chopped with the dull hoe until there was not a single weed left in the first row.

Just before noon, she looked up and saw Bony King sitting on a pine stump at the end of the garden. He did not say a word when she looked at him for the first time, and she had no way of knowing how long he had been sitting on the stump watching her. Jeanie’s first thought was to drop the hoe and run into the kitchen. When she was just about to run, she happened to think that Bony would surely follow her now, no matter where she went. She decided quickly that the best thing to do was to stay where she was.

During the next half hour she did not glance even once in Bony’s direction. She knew he was still sitting on the stump, because she could see his shadow out of the corner of her eye, but she was determined not to look at him, if he stayed there all day.

Finally, she could bear it no longer. Bony had been sitting there for the past hour or more, whittling on a stick and smiling at her. Jeanie dropped the hoe and stared him full in the face.

“What do you want here again today, Bony King?” she cried at him, stamping her feet and beating her fists against her hips.

He did not say a word. He only smiled more broadly at her.

“I wish you would keep away from here and let me and Davi alone,” she said angrily. “We don’t like you one bit!”

“Davi don’t, but you do,” Bony said, shifting his crossed legs. “Now, ain’t that so, Jeanie?”

“That’s a whopping big old lie!” she cried. “You’re just trying to make it hard for me because I married Davi, and wouldn’t you!”

Bony brushed the shavings from his overalls.

“You ought to change over, Jeanie,” he said. “Now’s a pretty good time to do it, too. I’ve already got my new cabin built, and Davi hasn’t.”

“That’s another of your whopping old lies,” Jeanie said. “You even haven’t started to build one yourself, and you know it.”

“How do you know so much about what I do and what I don’t do?” he said.

“Davi tells me.”

“Davi didn’t tell you the truth about that, because I’m starting on mine already.”

Jeanie could not keep from answering him, even though she knew he was saying things like that just to make her talk to him.

“Davi’s got ours pretty near finished, and you haven’t even started on yours, Bony King.”

Bony got up and crossed the garden. He came down the row and stopped at the end of her hoe handle.

“It won’t be finished if Davi slips off the log path through the swamp, some night,” Bony said, nodding his head at her. “It’s pretty dangerous for a man to cross the swamp at night, anyway. If a cloud was to come up all of a quick one of these moonlight nights while a man was halfway through the swamp, he wouldn’t be able to see the rest of the way, especially on that slippery log path. If he was in a hurry, and tried to follow the log path out, he might slip off into one of those mire-holes that’s all covered over with pretty ferns and vines. I’ve seen it get so dark in the middle of the swamp that you couldn’t even follow your hand in front of you.”

Jeanie reached down to pick up the hoe, but Bony set his foot on the handle, and she could not lift it.

“That was no story I was trying to dress up for you,” he said, shaking his head at her. “That’s the truth.”

“Davi will take care of himself,” Jeanie said slowly.

“Not if he was to trip and fall off that chained-log path into a mire-hole, on a pitch-black night,” Bony said, swinging his head from side to side. “I’ve seen it happen before.”

Jeanie closed her eyes for a moment, promising herself to make Davi stop staying at new cabin after dark.

“Some folks won’t learn a lesson till it’s too late,” Bony told her.

He had already taken two or three steps toward her, and before she realized what was happening, he had taken another step and grabbed her. Jeanie tried to jerk away from him, but her dress was so old and worn she was afraid it would be torn if she tried to struggle with Bony. Bony put both arms around her and tried to kiss her.

“You wouldn’t try to do that if Davi was here,” Jeanie said.

“Why wouldn’t I?” he laughed. “What’s he got to do with it now?”

She pulled away from him, holding him off with her elbows stiff, and then she hit him as hard as she could. All he did was laugh at her.

“I like a girl with plenty of fight in her,” Bony said.

He caught her with both hands. Her dress tore like a sheet of newspaper. While she struggled to cover herself she realized how much strength was bound up in a man’s muscles.

“The more you fight, the more you’ll wear yourself out,” he told her, laughing at her while she tried to hold the torn dress together. The dress had been torn down her back to her waist, and she could feel the hot sun burning her bare body. “And more than that,” Bony said, “when you fight, it just naturally makes your dress rip more and more.”

Jeanie stepped closer to Bony. A moment later, she had pushed with all her strength, and he went tumbling backward. The last she saw of him then was when his feet went kicking into the air over his head. He had ruined nearly two whole rows of onions and cabbages.

Running with all her might, and holding her dress behind her, Jeanie reached the safety of the kitchen. She slammed the door shut and pushed the table against it.

Bony walked around the house several times like a dog circling a strange animal he was afraid to strike at. He looked in the windows, first at the front and then at the rear, but he did not try to open them. After a while, he sat down on a stump only half a dozen steps from the front door.

“I could get in if I wanted to,” he shouted at Jeanie. “I could smash open one of these windows with no trouble at all. That’s all I’d have to do to get in, if I wanted to. But I guess I’ll wait awhile.”

Jeanie huddled on the floor beside the bed, shivering and crying. Some time later, she thought she heard a sound of some kind outside the room. She crept on her hands and knees to the window and looked out through the broken shutter. Bony was walking slowly down the path toward the swamp. He did not look back.

With the strength she had left, she crawled back to the bed and fell across it. She cried until she lost consciousness.

It was completely dark when she woke up. Running to the window, she could see by the sky that the sun had set a long time before. Overhead were dark patches of clouds drifting toward the moon.

By then she was fully awake. She went to the door, and back to the window. She did not know how many times she went back and forth, looking. Each time she crossed the room she felt weaker. Then she fell on the floor sobbing and shivering, too weak to get to her knees.

At last Jeanie opened the door and looked searchingly into the moon-swept yard. There was still no sign of Davi out there. At first she ran in circles about the place, trying to make up her mind what to do. Then she turned down the path and ran with all her might toward the swamp. A few yards from the edge of the swamp, where the single log path began, she stopped suddenly. Before her lay the tangled swamp over which Davi had always carried her. She started slowly, testing each step of the footing on the slippery, barkless, chained logs. Before she had gone the length of the first log, she felt herself being lifted off her feet. She could not turn around, but she could feel the strange arms around her waist, and she knew then that it was Bony who had caught her up. She did not cry out when he lifted her off her feet and carried her back to the solid ground at the end of the log.

Bony put her down, turning her around to look into her face. He was smiling at her in the same way he had looked while sitting on the stump in the garden that afternoon.

“You’re up mighty late,” he said.

‘Where’s Davi?” Jeanie cried.

“Davi?” Bony repeated. “I was thinking the same thing myself only a little while ago. To tell the truth exactly, I don’t know where he’s at.”

“You do know, Bony! Where’s Davi?”

He held her more tightly, gripping his fingers around her arms.

“I’ve got an idea, but I wouldn’t swear to it,” he said. “The reason I wouldn’t swear to it is because I didn’t see it with my own eyes. It’s so dark in here every time a cloud passes under the moon that it’s hard to see your own hand in front of you.”

“You tell me where Davi is!” Jeanie cried, beating her hands against him.

“I’d say that maybe Davi started across the swamp and tripped up. It was mighty foolish of him to start across the swamp on a cloudy night. I’d be afraid of falling into one of those mire-holes, if it was me.”

Jeanie tore herself away from Bony. He ran after her, but she managed to slip out of his grasp, and she ran toward the swamp. Bony lost sight of her completely after half a dozen steps. He could hear the sounds she made, but it was almost impossible to tell the true direction they came from.

“Jeanie!” he shouted. “Jeanie! Come back here, you fool! You can’t cross the swamp! Come back here, Jeanie!”

Jeanie did not answer him, and he started treading his way along the first log of the path. He stopped when he found he could not see or feel his way any farther. He listened, and he could not hear anything of Jeanie. In desperation, he got down on his hands and knees and felt his way forward along the slippery logs. Every once in a while he stopped and called to Jeanie, listened for some sound of her, and felt in the mire-holes beside the path.

Towards morning, mud-caked and helpless, Bony reached the firm ground at the end of the path. He sat down to wait for daylight, wondering how long it would take to find some trace of Jeanie, or of Davi.

(First published in
College Humor
)

“I
’M AFRAID,”
A
RLENE
whispered, closing her eyes tightly. “I am so afraid, honey.”

In the next room, Miss McAllister lifted the heavy lid and rattled half a hod of dusty coke into the firebox. The cookstove was already red-hot on top, and the heat from it sang in the stifling air.

Before replacing the lid on the stove, Miss McAllister walked over to the table by the window and picked up a piece of gauze that had been lying there on the white oilcloth ever since she had finished sterilizing the blue and white enameled pan. She carried the cloth to the stove and dropped it into the flame. There was a sizzling sound, a leaping tongue of purple fire, a puff of blackish smoke, and the gauze had been incinerated.

Miss McAllister shook down the ashes for the third time.

“I’m so afraid,” Arlene said again, her lips trembling more than ever. “Honey, don’t — don’t let anything happen to me!”

“It will be all right,” I said, looking away from the eyes that burned through me. “Nothing could ever happen to you, Arlene. He promised nothing would. Everything will have to be all right.”

Her fingers stiffened.

“I told Mamma we were going for a ride into the country this afternoon. I told her we would not be back in time for dinner tonight. I told Mamma not to worry, because I would be with you.”

The heat from the next room was swimming before my eyes. All the doors and windows had been closed tightly, and there was not a breath of fresh air anywhere. Overhead, beads of pitch dropped from the pine ceiling and fell on the bare floor at our feet.

“What did she say?” I asked Arlene. “Did she say anything?”

“She said that would be all right. She said she knew you would bring me home safely.”

“What did you say?”

“What did I say then? Why, I’ve forgotten now. Though I suppose I told her we would be back early. Why?”

Miss McAllister came into the room and looked at us. She stood close to the other door, turning around to look at us. She was wearing a stiffly starched white skirt with broad straps over the shoulders, and white cotton stockings and white canvas shoes with flat heels. The blouse she was wearing was pink georgette, and it was so thin that I could see the brown mole on her skin just above her waist.

“Where is he now?” I asked her.

“He’ll be here any minute now,” Miss McAllister said, looking at Arlene. “He phoned that he was on his way.”

Arlene’s fingers squeezed mine.

“You don’t suppose he will be delayed, do you?” I asked. “Do you think there’ll be anything to make him late? Will he get here in time?”

“Of course he will come,” Miss McAllister said, smoothing the pink georgette over her breasts and laughing deeply within her chest when she looked at Arlene.