Light in August - William Faulkner [59]
“Yes,” Joe said. His mouth said it, told the lie. He had not intended to answer at all. He heard his mouth say the word with a kind of shocked astonishment. Then it was too late. “I gave it to her to put away,” he said.
“Ah,” McEachern said. He sighed; it was a sound almost luxurious, of satisfaction and victory. “And you will doubtless say also that it was your fostermother who bought the new suit which I found hid in the loft. You have revealed every other sin of which you are capable: sloth, and ingratitude, and irreverence and blasphemy. And now I have taken you in the remaining two: lying and lechery. What else would you want with a new suit if you were not whoring?” And then he acknowledged that the child whom he had adopted twelve years ago was a man. Facing him, the two of them almost toe to toe, he struck at Joe with his fist.
Joe took the first two blows; perhaps from habit, perhaps from surprise. But. he took them, feeling twice the man’s hard fist crash into his face. Then he sprang back, crouched, licking blood, panting. They faced one another. “Don’t you hit me again,” he said.
Later, lying cold and rigid in his bed in the attic, he heard their voices coming up the cramped stairs from the room beneath.
“I bought it for him!” Mrs. McEachern said. “I did! I bought it with my butter money. You said that I could have—could spend—Simon! Simon!”
“You are a clumsier liar than even he,” the man said. His voice came, measured, harsh, without heat, up the cramped stair to where Joe lay in bed. He was not listening to it. “Kneel down. Kneel down. KNEEL DOWN, WOMAN. Ask grace and pardon of God; not of me.”
She had always tried to be kind to him, from that first December evening twelve years ago. She was waiting on the porch—a patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation at all save the neat screw of graying hair and the skirt—when the buggy drove up. It was as though instead of having been subtly slain and corrupted by the ruthless and bigoted man into something beyond his intending and her knowing, she had been hammered stubbornly thinner and thinner like some passive and dully malleable metal, into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes.
When the buggy stopped she came forward as though she had already planned it, practiced it: how she would lift him down from the seat and carry him into the house. He had never been carried by a woman since he was big enough to walk. He squirmed down and entered the house on his own feet, marched in, small, shapeless in his wrappings. She followed, hovering about him. She made him sit down; it was as though she hovered about with a kind of strained alertness, an air baffled and alert, waiting to spring it again and try to make himself and her act as she had planned for them to act. Kneeling before him she was trying to take off his shoes, until he realised what she wanted. He put her hands away and removed the shoes himself, not setting them onto the floor though. He held to them. She stripped off his stockings and then she fetched a basin of hot water, fetched it so immediately that anyone but a child would have known that she must have had it ready and waiting all day probably. He spoke for the first time, then. “I done washed just yesterday,” he said.
She didn’t answer. She knelt before him while he watched the crown of her head and her hands fumbling a little clumsily about his feet. He didn’t try to help her now. He didn’t know what she was trying to do, not even when he was sitting with his cold feet in the warm water. He didn’t know that that was all, because it felt too good. He was waiting for the rest of it to begin; the part that would not be pleasant, whatever it would be. This had never happened to him before either.
Later she put him to bed. For two years almost he had been dressing and undressing himself, unnoticed and unassisted save by occasional Alices. He was already too tired to go to sleep at once, and now he was puzzled and hence nervous, waiting until she went out so he could sleep. Then she did not go out. Instead she drew a chair up to the bed and sat down. There was no fire in the room; it was cold. She had a shawl now about her shoulders, huddled into the shawl, her breath vaporising as though she were smoking. And he became wide awake now. He was waiting for the part to begin which he would not like, whatever it was; whatever it was that he had done. He didn