MOSELEY
I HAPPENED to look up, and saw her outside the window, looking in. Not
close to the glass, and not looking at anything in particular; just standing there with her head turned this way and her eyes full on me and kind of blank too, like she was waiting for a sign. When I looked up again she was moving toward the door.
She kind of bumbled at the screen door a minute, like they do, and came in.
She had on a stiff-brimmed straw hat setting on the top of her head and she was carrying a package wrapped in newspaper: I thought that she had a quarter or a dollar at the most, and that after she stood around awhile she would maybe buy a cheap comb or a bottle of nigger toilet water, so I never disturbed her for a minute or so except to notice that she was pretty in a kind of sullen, awkward way, and that she looked a sight better in her gingham dress and her own complexion than she would after she bought whatever she would finally decide on. Or tell that she wanted. I knew that she had already decided before she came in. But you have to let them take their time. So I went on with what I was doing, figuring to let Albert wait on her when he caught up at the fountain, when he came back to me.
“That woman,” he said. “You better see what she wants.”
“What does she want?” I said.
“I don’t know. I can’t get anything out of her. You better wait on her.”
So I went around the counter. I saw that she was barefooted, standing with her feet flat and easy on the floor, like she was used to it. She was looking at me, hard, holding the package; I saw she had about as black a pair of eyes as ever I saw, and she was a stranger. I never remembered seeing her in Mottson before. “What can I do for you?” I said.
Still she didn’t say anything. She stared at me without winking. Then she looked back at the folks at the fountain. Then she looked past me, toward the back of the store.
“Do you want to look at some toilet things?” I said. “Or is it medicine you want?”
“That’s it,” she said. She looked quick back at the fountain again. So I thought maybe her ma or somebody had sent her in for some of this female dope and she was ashamed to ask for it. I knew she couldn’t have a complexion like hers and use it herself, let alone not being much more than old enough to barely know what it was for. It’s a shame, the way they poison
themselves with it. But a man’s got to stock it or go out of business in this country.
“Oh,” I said. “What do you use? We have——” She looked at me again, almost like she had said hush, and looked toward the back of the store again.
“I’d liefer go back there,” she said.
“All right,” I said. You have to humour them. You save time by it. I followed her to the back She put her hand on the gate. “There’s nothing back there but the prescription case,” I said. “What do you want?” She stopped and looked at me. It was like she had taken some kind of a lid off her face, her eyes. It was her eyes: kind of dumb and hopeful and sullenly willing to be disappointed all at the same time. But she was in trouble of some sort; I could see that. “What’s your trouble?” I said. “Tell me what it is you want. I’m pretty busy.” I wasn’t meaning to hurry her, but a man just hasn’t got the time they
have out there.
“It’s the female trouble,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Is that all?” I thought maybe she was younger than she looked, and her first one had scared her, or maybe one had been a little abnormal as it will in young women. “Where’s your ma?” I said. “Haven’t you got one?”
“She’s out yonder in the wagon,” she said.
“Why not talk to her about it before you take any medicine,” I said. “Any woman would have told you about it.” She looked at me, and I looked at her
again and said, “How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “I thought maybe you were . . .” She was watching me. But then, in the eyes all of them look like they had no age and knew everything in the world, anyhow. “Are you too regular, or not regular enough?”
She quit looking at me but she didn’t move. “Yes,” she said. “I reckon so.
Yes.”
“Well, which?” I said. “Don’t you know?” It’s a crime and a shame; but after all, they’ll buy it from somebody. She stood there, not looking at me.
“You want something to stop it?” I said. “Is that it?”
“No,” she said. “That’s it. It’s already stopped.”
“Well, what——” Her face was lowered a little, still, like they do in all their dealings with a man so he don’t ever know just where the lightning will strike next. “You are not married, are you?” I said.
“No.”
“Oh,” I said. “And how long has it been since it stopped? about five
months maybe?”
“It ain’t been but two,” she said.
“Well, I haven’t got anything in my store you want to buy,” I said, “unless
it’s a nipple. And I’d advise you to buy that and go back home and tell your pa, if you have one, and let him make somebody buy you a wedding licence. Was that all you wanted?”
But she just stood there, not looking at me.
“I got the money to pay you,” she said.
“Is it your own, or did he act enough of a man to give you the money?”
“He give it to me. Ten dollars. He said that would be enough.”
“A thousand dollars wouldn’t be enough in my store and ten cents wouldn’t be enough,” I said. “You take my advice and go home and tell you pa or your brothers if you have any or the first man you come to in the road.”
But she didn’t move. “Lafe said I could get it at the drug-store. He said to tell you me and him wouldn’t never tell nobody you sold it to us.”
“And I just wish your precious Lafe had come for it himself; that’s what I wish. I don’t know: I’d have had a little respect for him then. And you can go back and tell him I said so—if he ain’t half-way to Texas by now, which I don’t doubt. Me, a respectable druggist, that’s kept store and raised a family and been a church-member for fifty-six years in this town. I’m a good mind to tell your folks myself, if I can just find who they are.”
She looked at me now, her eyes and face kind of blank again like when I first saw her through the window. “I didn’t know,” she said. “He told me I could get something at the drug-store. He said they might not want to sell it to me, but if I had ten dollars and told them I wouldn’t never tell nobody . . .”
“He never said this drug-store,” I said. “If he did or mentioned my name, I defy him to prove it. I defy him to repeat it or I’ll prosecute him to the full extent of the law, and you can tell him so.”
“But maybe another drug-store would,” she said.
“Then I don’t want to know it. Me, that’s——” Then I looked at her. But it’s a hard life they have; sometimes a man . . . if there can ever be any excuse for sin, which it can’t be. And then, life wasn’t made to be easy on folks: they wouldn’t ever have any reason to be good and die. “Look here,” I said. “You get that notion out of your head. The Lord gave you what you have, even if He did use the devil to do it; you let Him take it away from you if it’s His will to do so. You go on back to Lafe and you and him take that ten dollars and get married with it.”
“Lafe said I could get something at the drug-store,” she said.
“Then go and get it,” I said. “You won’t get it here.”
She went out, carrying the package, her feet making a little hissing on the floor. She bumbled again at the door and went out. I could see her through the glass going on down the street.
It was Albert told me about the rest of it. He said the wagon was stopped in front of Grummet’s hardware store, with the ladies all scattering up and down
the street with handkerchief to their noses, and a crowd of hard-nosed men and boys standing around the wagon, listening to the marshal arguing with the man. He was a kind of tall, gaunted man sitting on the wagon, saying it was a public street and he reckoned he had as much right there as anybody, and the marshal telling him he would have to move on; folks couldn’t stand it. It had been dead eight days, Albert said. They came from some place out in Yoknapatawpha county, trying to get to Jefferson with it. It must have been like a piece of rotten cheese coming into an ant-hill, in that ramshackle wagon that Albert said folks were scared would fall all to pieces before they could get it out of town, with that home-made box and another fellow with a broken leg lying on a quilt on top of it, and the father and a little boy sitting on the seat and the marshal trying to make them get out of town.
“It’s a public street,” the man says. “I reckon we can stop to buy something same as airy other man. We got the money to pay for hit, and hit ain’t airy law that says a man can’t spend his money where he wants.”
They had stopped to buy some cement. The other son was in Grummet’s, trying to make Grummet break a sack and let him have ten cents’ worth, and finally Grummet broke the sack to get him out. They wanted the cement to fix the fellow’s broken leg, someway.
“Why, you’ll kill him,” the marshal said. “You’ll cause him to lose his leg.
You take him on to a doctor, and you get this thing buried soon as you can.
Don’t you know you’re liable to jail for endangering the public health?”
“We’re doing the best we can,” the father said. Then he told a long tale about how they had to wait for the wagon to come back and how the bridge was washed away and how they went eight miles to another bridge and it was gone too so they came back and swum the ford and the mules got drowned and how they got another team and found that the road was washed out and they had to come clean around by Mottson, and then the one with the cement came back and told him to shut up.
“We’ll be gone in a minute,” he told the marshal.
“We never aimed to bother nobody,” the father said.
“You take that fellow to a doctor,” the marshal told the one with the
cement.
“I reckon he’s all right,” he said.
“It ain’t that we’re hard-hearted,” the marshal said. “But I reckon you can tell yourself how it is.”
“Sho,” the other said. “We’ll take out soon as Dewey Dell comes back. She went to deliver a package.”
So they stood there with the folks backed off with handkerchiefs to their faces, until in a minute the girl came up with that newspaper package.
“Come on,” the one with the cement said, “we’ve lost too much time.” So
they got in the wagon and went on. And when I went to supper it still seemed like I could smell it. And the next day I met the marshal and I began to sniff
and said,
“Smell anything?”
“I reckon they’re in Jefferson by now,” he said.
“Or in jail. Well, thank the Lord it’s not our jail.”
“That’s a fact,” he said.
