Psyche noticed that the church door had been closed, and that the small quiet knots of people had nearly all dispersed. Surreptitiously glancing behind her, she saw that the big convertible had gone, too. “Who, me? Why should I mind?”
“No reasonâno reason at all,” Mag told her, but the same memory was in both their minds.
It was not actually raining when Psyche started out along the road, and for a time there were others going in the same direction. But when she turned off into the slag she was completely alone, and a rising wind and leaden-coloured clouds gave warning of an approaching storm. Walking swiftly, her head held high,
she covered the remaining distance to the shack in half an hour, but it was one of the longest half-hours she had ever known, and when at last she saw the shack itself, bleak and unlit in its shallow depression, she broke into a run.
It was not quite seven o'clock, yet when she closed the door behind her, she was in virtual darkness.
“I'll fix the stove an' the lamps afore takin' out the lantern,” she said to herself, and the sound of her own voice was an assurance of normalcy which she found very comforting.
Once the two oil lamps were lit, one set on the golden-oak dresser, the other on the table, she stoked up the still-warm embers in the big stove, adding a few twists of paper and fresh coal. This done, she turned her attention to a dishpan piled high with not only lunch but breakfast dishes. When these were finally finished; when the potatoes had been peeled, and ground beef and onions made ready in a frying pan; when even the table had been cleared and scrubbed and three places neatly set, she could find no other reasonable excuse for deferring her short journey out to the highway.
Taking down a lantern from one of the shelves above the sink, she hesitated, and then reached for a second for her own use although she could have found her way blindfolded across the slag from any direction.
Once definitely committed to a course of action, she was not in the habit of either reconsidering or turning back, and now she worked with a swift efficiency far more characteristic than her behaviour of the previous hour. Quickly she checked the oil in the two lanterns, trimmed wicks, and wiped off clouded glass.
Lightning was flickering across the western sky, and the first heavy drops of a fresh rainfall were beginning to spatter against the still-wet ground, when she stepped out of the shack, the lanterns one in either hand and Butch's old oilskin raincape around her shoulders.
Her mind a determined blank, her two-fold shadow a distorted alter ego in the premature darkness, she climbed and then descended, walked for a space on the level, climbed and descended again, and came to a halt only when she stood beside the wet,
black ribbon of the highway. Setting one of the lanterns down, she stood there for a moment, the motionless, drunken mail-box her sole companion in the windy night.
It was as she turned to retrace her steps that she heard the steady hum of an approaching car. If her fears had been concrete fears, rather than those of association, she would have fled instead of lingering to be caught in the full radiance of powerful headlights.
Her vague hope, that by some miracle, Butch and Mag might have found transportation with a passing stranger, vanished as the car swept by without stopping. Briefly blinded by the lights, she turned away again without having really seen it at all. And when, now guided only by a single fog lamp, it drew up beside the mail-box a few minutes later, she had already forgotten it, was utterly unaware that the lantern she carried to protect her from the ghosts of yesterday was to be her betrayal as she topped the last slope between the highway and the shack. For, without that fleeting signpost, the man, in spite of his vengeful desire for her, might not have attempted a search for the shack on such a night.
Psyche, hanging up the raincape on the back of the door after having carefully hooked the inadequate catch, felt the vibration of thunder rolling close overhead. Rain, suddenly descending in torrents, hissed through the rusty iron chimney into the stove, and darkened a brown stain in cardboard which replaced a broken window-pane.
With nothing to do but wait, she sat down in an old rocker beside the stove, realizing for the first time how much she had come to depend on Mag's constant presence at all times. Mag's large form, flowing over a couch whose springs now almost touched the floor, had been such a fixture there for so many years that the shabby room seemed bare and denuded without her, and the shack itself, unanchored by her great weight, became a flimsy structure likely to disintegrate with each fresh peal of thunder.
Rubbing her hands up and down her arms, although she was not cold, she listened, tense and lonely, to the increasing fury of the storm: the soft menacing rush of water in flood, as the rain channeled through a cleft beneath the worn board floor; the heavy
beat of thunder as it echoed and re-echoed against the low-slung vault of the night; the chattering rattle of ill-fitting casements; the sharp slapping of loose tarpaper as the wind clawed at it. And inside, a false vortex, a small bright square that was too quiet, too static, too empty.
She saw, rather than heard, the door-knob turning. And the tiny click, as the door itself, opening fractionally, caught against the hook, would have been inaudible if she had not known it was coming.
For an instant she did not stir, but rested frozen as she had been when she saw that first, stealthy movement where no movement should have been. Then, almost as if she had been waiting for this thing to happen, she moved with all the split-second swiftness of a young panther, so that when the cheap hook was torn screaming from its socket and the door crashed open against the wall, she was crouched in the far angle of the room behind the stove, a blue-black metal object held steadily in her right hand.
The man, half falling as he burst into the shack, found his balance again with an ease possible only to a trained fighter. And there was something so savagely beautiful in the cruel dark face and the perfectly co-ordinated muscles rippling visibly beneath shirt and trousers rain-plastered against them, that Psyche, if he had rushed her then, would have been physically incapable of shooting him.
Eyes slitted against the sudden light, he paused long enough to get his bearings, and in so doing lost his one opportunity of getting, possibly without even a struggle, what he had come for.
When his eyes did focus directly on her, Psyche, although breathing unevenly, had all her defenses in order again, and the cold barrel of the revolver showed no more promise of wavering than did the stony purity of the set face behind it.
The man smiled, although amusement, in the ordinary sense, was no part of his thoughts. “You little hell-catâwho let you loose with a gun? Put it down before you hurt somebody.” And, as he spoke, he began to edge smoothly, almost imperceptibly, across the room.
The rain, slanting in through the open doorway behind him,
formed an ever-widening pool, and jagged yellow lightning framed his sleek dark head with a fleeting, infernal halo.
Pysche would see him again in dreams as he was then, dreams from which she would wake with reluctance, but her voice when she spoke was cool and emotionless. “You keep on comin', the way you're doin', an' it's you who will get hurtâan' hurt bad.”
In spite of the way she handled her weapon> he did not believe that she really knew how to use it, and her slim apparent fragility coupled with his own conceit led him to the conviction that she would not, when it came to the showdown, have either the courage or the will to fire it.
Without further warning, without any visible preparation or tensing of muscles, he sprang forward and sideways in one incredible leap which, if completed, would have brought him into the gap between stove and wall within reach of her. The bullet smashed into his shoulder before he was midway there. While the explosion still lingered on the shattered air, he crashed to the floor, his head striking the wall as he fall; and the red blood spurted through his shirt.
Moving like an automaton, her face as white as the man's bloodstained shirt, Psyche came out from behind the stove, laid the revolver with precise care on the table, and knelt down beside him. Expressionless, neither regret nor compassion in her remote blue eyes, she turned him over, with some effort for he was heavy, and, without flinching, unbuttoned his shirt and examined the wound. She noted that the free bleeding was already lessening, and that his breathing, though fast, was neither shallow nor noticeably uneven. It was all exactly as Butch had told her it would be if she aimed straight and found her mark; and she had hit this man precisely where she had intended to.
It had not been real when Butch had been teaching her, and it was still not real., A marionette, its strings manipulated by an invisible hand, she continued to go through the well-taught motions of a lesson she no longer comprehended.
She rose, closed the open door, and, going to the dresser, took from the bottom drawer the one piece of cloth in the shack which she knew to be absolutely clean, Mag's highly valued damask
tea cloth. Tearing it into strips, she went back to the wounded man, sat down on the floor, and, making a pad out of the torn linen, placed it gently but firmly over the round, blackened hole where the bullet had gone in. Holding the pad in place with the flat of her hand, she became as still as the sprawled figure beside her.
The storm passed away, leaving in its wake a gentle, persistent rain, but Pysche was unaware of its passing. From time to time the stove contracted audibly as the fire died down, but she did not hear it. The lamp on the dresser flickered uncertainly for several minutes, and then went out, but Psyche, her face a cameo now half in shadow, never moved.
It was thus that Butch and Mag found her nearly an hour later.
Strife, and with it bloodshed, was not new to either of them, but they had already that day gone through what was for them a considerable strain, and so it was Psyche who spoke first, answering the unspoken questions on those two dazed faces.
“He ain't dead,” she said evenly, “an' he ain't gonna die.” A crack appearing in her unnatural composure, she added piteously, “I hadda do it! He bust in here, an' I hadda do it. He was goin' to make meâtoâto”
“You don't have to say no more, kid,” Mag broke in, the story now as clear to her as though it had been explained at length. “You done quite right. Don't never think you didn't.” Crossing the room, dropping her coat on the floor as she came, she helped Psyche, now shaking violently, to her feet. “Butch, you big ape, don't just stand there doin' nothin'! Get some whiskey for the kid, and get it quick!”
“I don't wantâany” Psyche began, her teeth chattering.
“You gotta have somethin',” Mag told her firmly, “an' we ain't got nothin' else. I'll fix you some tea soon's I've looked at him.” She jerked her massive head in the general direction of the man to whom she had so far given no more than a cursory glance. If he had died where he lay, she would have considered it no more than he deserved, but her shrewd mind was already beginning to grasp implications in the situation which neither Psyche, in a state of shock, nor Butch, in his simplicity, as yet understood. When the
doctor came, and he would have to come, it would only be the start of questions which would finally be asked in a court of law.
Her face suddenly drawn and grey, she turned her back on Psyche where she sat, still shaking, on the couch, and spoke to Butch. “We gotta get the kid away from here,” she said heavily. “She's gotta go right away.”
Butch looked at her in blank astonishment. “The kid didn't do nothin' wrong, Mag. It was, like you might say, self-defense.”
All the defeated acceptance of injustice of her kind was in Mag's voice when she replied. “The kid's nobody, an' we ain't nobody neither. He's somebody. They'll take her away an' put her in one of them reform schools, as sure as Christ is the livin' God. Anythin'âanythin' at allâis better'n that. She ain't eighteen yet, tar's we know or can prove, an' we ain't got no papers for her. We couldn't do nothin' for her once they got her away from us. Why, she ain't even got a proper name.”
Butch, his low forehead creased in great ridges, repeated stubbornly, “But she ain't really done nothin' wrong.”
“That ain't the point. If he'd done her harm afore she plugged him, mebbe she'd have a better chance. Mebbe they'd take her away anyway. I dunno. All's I know is I ain't goin' to let nobody put our kid in one of them stinkin' reform schools. I'd as soon see her dead. Go take a look at him, an' see he ain't cold nor bleedin' ârot himâan' gimme a chance to think some.”
She sat down beside Psyche, and put a big, warm arm around her shoulder; something she had not done since Psyche was a small child. In this, the greatest crisis she had ever faced, she felt miserably inadequate. The kid was already lost to her, of that she was quite certain. It was for the kid herself that she must think now. With so little time in which to do this, a matter of a few hours only, how was she to find a place for the kid to go to, a place where she would have at least a fighting chance of a decent life?
“Oh God,” she prayed mutely, “what can I do? She's a good kid, God, You know that. I ain't got nobody nowheres I can send her to, an' how can she go alone, God, without no real learnin', nor trainin', nor nothin'? We ain't got enough cash, Butch an' me,
for her to eat an' sleep proper for more'n a month, God, an' she's got to go a long ways from here, an' go quick. If we was to take her out to the road, God, would You send someone decent to give her a rideâwould You see that she landed up somewheres where she had a chance?”
“Kidââ” She shook Psyche gently to get her attention. “Kid, you gottaâgotta go away for a spell. It ain't noways fair, but what you done to-nightâwell, I'm feared you might get into bad trouble if you was to stay here.”