—he thought Leander or someone had returned and stepped on some brush, crossing a field—made him spin around but the field and the road were empty and he turned back to the car and saw a fire under the vents of the hood. At the same time the clammy smell of dirty steam and rubber was joined by the smell of heated metal and burning paint and while the hood contained the fire its paint began to blister. Then he seized the dead man’s shoulders and tried to pull him out of the car while the fire crackled with the merriment of a hearth fire in a damp house at the end of the day and began to throw a golden light on the trees. The fear of an explosion that might send Moses to join the dead man made his movements hasty and constrained and while he wanted to get away from the fire he could not leave the man there on his pyre and he pulled and pulled until the body, released, sent them both backward into the field. There was sand there at the edge of the path and now he scooped this up with his hands and threw it onto the fire. The sand checked the fire and now he loaded it onto the hood and then knocked the hood open with a stick and threw sand onto the cylinder head until the fire was out and his fear of an explosion was ended and he was left alone in the field, he thought, with the wrecked car and the dead man. He sat down, exhausted, and saw that all of the windows of the farm across the road were lighted and then heard, north of the four corners, a siren and knew that Leander had got the police. He would sit there and catch his breath and his strength, he thought, until they came, when he heard the girl saying from somewhere in the darkness: I’m hurt, Charlie, I’ve hurt myself. Where are you? I’m hurt, Charlie. For a moment Moses thought: I’ll leave her too; but when she spoke again he pushed himself to his feet and went around the car, looking for her. Charlie, she said, I’ve hurt myself, and then he found her and thinking that Moses was the dead man she said: Charlie, oh Charlie, where are we? and began to cry and he knelt beside her where she lay on the ground. By then the sound of the siren had passed the four corners and was bearing down the road and then he heard, from the darkness, Leander’s voice and the voices of the police and saw their flashlights playing over the field—idly, inquisitively—heard their sighs as their idle, inquisitive lights touched the dead man and heard one of them tell another to go to the house and get a blanket. Then they began, idly, to discuss the fire, and Moses called to them and they brought their inquisitive lights over to where he knelt beside the girl. Now they played their lights on the girl, who kept up a bitter light sobbing and who, with her fair hair, seemed very young. “Don’t move her, don’t touch her,” a policeman said importantly. “She may have sustained some internal injuries.” Then one of them told another to get a stretcher and they put her on the stretcher—she was still sobbing—and carried her past the wrecked car and the dead man who was now covered with a blanket toward the many lights of the house.
Remember that crash on 7B—one of them said, but the question was put nervously and the others didn’t answer. The strangeness of the night, the probing lights, the distant sound of fireworks and the dead man they had left in the field had unsettled them all and had unmanned at least one of them and now they followed closely the one course open to them: to bring the girl into the lighted house. Mrs. Wapshot stood in her door, her face composed in a sorrowful smile—an involuntary choice of expression with which she always confronted the unknown. She assumed that the girl was dead; more than that she assumed that she was the only child of a devoted couple, that she was engaged to marry a splendid man and that she had been standing at the threshold of a rich and useful life. But most of all she thought that the girl had been a child, for whenever Mrs. Wapshot saw a drunkard lying on the street or a whore tapping her windowpane the deep sadness she always felt in her breast lay in the recollection that these unfortunates had once been fragrant children. She was unsettled, but she restored herself with a kind of imperiousness as she spoke to the policemen when they carried the stretcher through the open door.