Читать книгу South Moon Under - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Страница 7

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In the second October after his wife’s death Lantry ran a few quarts of liquor from his cane-skimmings. He was leaning over to put more fire under the wash-pot that formed the cooker of the small still, when he found it suddenly impossible to breathe. Piety discovered him an hour later on the sand, still fighting for air. He had torn open his shirt and was clutching with one desperate hand at his broad hairy breast. She thought her own breath would stop.

The viciousness of the heart attack alarmed Lantry, not for himself, but for her. Lying weakly at rest on his bed while she left him a moment to fire the pot again, so as not to lose the charge, a picture came before him of that scrawny fearless figure marching through the scrub without him. The blood pounded again in his throat. This place of dark hammock, of swift brown river, of impenetrable scrub, became more than ever alien and unfriendly. He saw the vague dangers that had never materialised against him, swallowing her up, as he had seen an alligator seize a fawn at the river’s edge and drag it under. There was nothing he could quite put his finger on, to be afraid of for her, but he could not endure to leave her here alone. She would have to live with Martha, or keep house for widower Zeke. That was no life for a woman.

He saw in a new light the stupid Jacklin boy, Willy—Sylvester’s cousin—who had come half-courting Piety without encouragement from either father or daughter. Willy made a pretense of visiting his cousin, rowing across the river to the scrub. Then he walked up as if by accident to sit mutely with the Lantrys. He was slow and strong, with a black forelock that hung between his eyes.

The next time he came, when Lantry was recovered, the older man welcomed him with unaccustomed hospitality. He talked to him of crops, and finding that the youth had always worked at timbering, turned amiably to a discussion of trees. There was a rumour that a Palatka lumber company might buy cypress rights along the river and put in crews to timber and raft. Lantry brought out the straw-covered demi-john of his last whiskey and asked young Jacklin’s opinion on its flavour.

The youth said, “I ain’t much for it,” but he tipped up the jug and took an obliging swallow. “That’s noble liquor, Mr. Lantry,” he said earnestly.

Lantry took a deep drink, wiped his mouth and beard, set down the jug and started away.

“I’ll jest go on and visit with Marthy and Syl a whiles,” he said. “I figger you young folks don’t want no interferin’.”

Piety’s puzzled eyes followed him as he walked across the yard and out of the gate. When Lantry came home again, the moon rode high over the scrub. The narrow road was a silver ribbon. He was half-way home when he met Piety and Willy. He thought with satisfaction that it was a fine night for courting. Piety turned and walked back with him and Willy went on alone.

When they were out of hearing Lantry said, “That’s a fine young feller. Couldn’t git you no nicer young feller.” The girl did not speak. “Honey, he done said ary thing yit about you marryin’?”

“Nary thing, Pa.” She looked at him astonished.

He took her thin arm and squeezed it playfully.

“He jest been courtin’, that it? Talkin’ sweet? Puttin’ his arm around you, or kissin’, or sich as that?”

Her deep-lidded eyes were round. Willy had spoken two or three times after Lantry’s going, and then only about the saw-mill at Palatka. He had not moved from the spot where Lantry left him, until she had suggested that they walk down the road and meet her father. He had jumped up then like a hound told to come or go.

“Well, I be dogged!” Lantry spat violently into the myrtle bushes. “I jest be dogged.”

He said no more that night. Looking at him in the bright moonlight as they went up the lane to the house, she could not read his eyes. She went to bed in a daze. For the first time she did not understand him. The next morning Lantry paced the breezeway after breakfast and did not go to his work. He waited until she had finished her straightening of the cabin.

“Py-tee! Come here.”

She settled herself on the stoop while he walked back and forth, his hands clasped behind him, his beard sunk on his chest.

“You ever studied on gittin’ married?”

“When Marthy married Syl, I studied some on it. Not lately, I ain’t.”

“Willy’s foolishly fond of you, Py-tee.” He glared at her sternly. “He jest don’t say much, is all ails him, but he’s rarin’ to git you.”

She blinked at him.

“Would you have him, iffen he was to ask you?”

“I dunno. I ain’t studied none on it.”

He paced up and down.

“You like him a’right, Py-tee?”

“I reckon I like him.”

He took a fresh start.

“Honey, you like to be powerful lonesome thouten no young uns. Don’t you fancy a passel o’ the leetle fellers?”

She laughed. “I ain’t much for dandlin’ ’em. Always ’peared to me young uns don’t love to be dandled. Time they gits some size to ’em, I likes ’em a’right.”

The chill thought struck her that Lantry was lonely. Perhaps he intended to move down with Martha, whose family was begun. Perhaps he planned to go back where he had come from, to the strange places where he had learned the tunes he played and the songs he sung. Her throat tightened.

She asked bluntly, “You fixin’ to go off?”

He laid his hands on her shoulders, so that the pulse of his blood warmed them.

He said gently, “Not if I kin he’p it, Py-tee. I don’t aim to leave you long as I has the say. A man cain’t always he’p hisself when hit comes to goin’ or to comin’ or to dyin’.”

She understood. She nodded.

He said, “A man o’ your own’s natural. Seems like ever’thing go along better when you do what’s natural.”

She asked, “What you want I should do?”

“Nothin’ you don’t r’aly want to. But if Willy suits you, I say take him.”

“He suits me good as ary feller, I reckon.”

He held her shoulders an instant longer, then turned abruptly to his work.

Willy came again on Sunday evening, bringing a gift of bass from the river. The older man met him at the gate. They walked together back of the house and began to dress the fish while the scales were moist.

Lantry said, “Willy, mebbe you know, Py-tee thinks right smart o’ you.”

The youth flushed. “I’m shore proud to hear it.”

“I don’t aim to ask you nothin’ you got no fancy for answerin’, but if she was willin’, would you care for marryin’?”

“Yes sir, I’d be mighty proud.”

“Well you jest say to her then, Py-tee, you say, hit’s all fixed we should marry. And you see what she has to say.”

“I’ll do that thing, Mr. Lantry. Much obliged.”

Lantry called towards the house. “Py-tee, fetch a pan for the fish Willy carried you.” He set off for the road. He turned back. “Willy, you be foolishly fond of her, ain’t you? You be rarin’ for her?”

Young Jacklin shuffled his feet in the sand.

“I reckon, sir. Why, sho.”

Lantry’s uneasiness lifted. He went whistling to Martha’s. When he returned, he found the matter arranged.

“Py-tee said, ‘All right, then,’ ” Willy greeted him. He poked an intimate finger in her ribs. “Didn’t you, Py-tee?”

“That’s what I said.”

Lantry said, “That’s fine.”

The three sat in silence on the stoop.

A month later Lantry fetched the preacher from Eureka by rowboat. Piety and Willy Jacklin were married at Martha’s, with a few of the Wilson and Jacklin kin present from across the river. Abner and his wife came, bringing a gift of a quarter of beef and a bolt of unbleached muslin. Abner was doing well with cattle. He and his wife were growing stout and florid with prosperity. Martha had sewed new shifts and nightgowns and aprons for her sister and had cooked a wedding supper of chicken pilau and pound cake, served with elderberry wine. There were no festivities and the group broke up before dark. Willy and Piety walked back up the scrub road to the Lantry cabin. Lantry would stay a few days with Martha.

“Give the young folks a chancet to git acquainted and settle down to their reg’lar ways,” he said. “Let ’em see do they figger on quarrellin’, then I kin come in and say who’s right.”

There was no quarrelling. Willy went slowly about the work of the Lantry place, amiable and silent. Lantry came home a week later, as eager as a lost dog. Piety looked from her father to Willy and back again, as though to understand why Lantry had encouraged his inclusion in the family. She felt a detached affection for her husband, but when he was out of her sight she seldom thought of him. They had moved into the wide bed with the high mosquito bar that her father and mother had occupied. It seemed to her that she was picking up in the middle something that had been interrupted. But if there was a meaning, she could not find it.

Willy had a way of sleeping curled up like a dog, his head deep in his chest, one arm over his face. She awakened one night after Lantry’s return, when the hoot-owls were crying in the moonlight, and looked at the doubled-up figure breathing beside her. She thought that it might just as well be a dog curled up in the bed, for all the difference it made to her, one way or the other. A good dog, that fetched and carried as she told him.

With Willy’s broad stupid back bent easily to the harder tasks, Lantry felt a secret triumph. It was as though, with his back to the wall, he had stood up to the forces that beat against him and had defeated them. A man’s life was not his own, nor the time or manner of his dying. He moved like a cedar chip on the breast of the river; like a chicken feather lifted by a high wind. The man felt, securing this safety for the child for whom he knew such tenderness, stronger than the river or the wind.