He did not waken until the freight to Houston roused him; it took all his strength to swing up a ladder. As soon as he found an empty he fell once more to sleep, this time to waken only to change freights in Houston, early in the morning hours. On the outskirts of San Antonio he ate at the same beanery where he had eaten with Clay the week before. for had his name really been Clancy?) That same night he was on his way back to Great-Snake Mountain.
Slouched down in the cool dark of a fruit-car reefer, he smelled thousands of ripening oranges all night. All night long he smelled them. He could see them dimly, stacked high as the roof, only a few feet from his finger-tips. He would have liked to suck on one for a while, but because of the reefer’s steel screening there was no reaching them at all.
He had learned that for him, Cass McKay, there was no escape from brutality. He had learned that, for him, there was no asylum from evil or pain or long loneliness. It might be that for others there was something different; but for him lonely pain and lonely evil were all that there was in the whole wide world. The world was a cruel place, all men went alone in it. Each man went alone, no two went together. Those who were strong beat those who were weak. They who said they loved Jesus wore little spiked boots, and those who kept silent ran swiftly away. There was only one God, and he was a devil; he was everything that there was in the world, for he was all pain and all evil. He was all that was secret and dark and unclean. There were only two kinds of men wherever you went—the men who wore boots, and the men who ran. You must not try to take that which belonged to another unless you were strong enough to keep it when that other found out. Otherwise you would be kicked into a jailhouse. If you could get much you were strong, and therefore good; God gave to the strong and took from the weak. He was on the side of the ones who rode in autos, who lived in white houses: he was as big as County Sheriff Shultz, as rich as Judge Bankhead from Presidio, pious as the Reverend Benjamin Cody, and fierce as the rancher Boone Terry.
He, Cass, was on the other side, because he himself was so weak. He was weak, for his father was poor and his brother was sick, and his sister was ragged and his mother was dead, and he lived in Mexican-town.
Somehow now Cass felt that he was walking in darkness, below a high dark wall, a shadow among many shadows. He didn’t know whose many forms walked before and behind him. They too were crouched in night-dark, below a high dark wall.
The house was silent when he arrived. It was late, and the town slept. In order to avoid waking his sister he lay down in the dooryard, in the long buffalo grass by the fence. The air smelled of punk.
Toward morning he was awakened by the straining of a freight engine; he rose and went to the swing on the garden side to wait until dawn.
Although it was scarcely a week since he had left, yet it seemed many days to Cass.
Above the house the first slant rays of morning touched Great-Snake Mountain. As the light grew there he saw low clouds across the prairie, in a long moving mist crouching toward the green mountain. Slowly the long mist moved toward the high mountain, like a sleek gray cat approaching, then it lunged forward swiftly and ruthlessly, and all the great peak was enwrapped from his sight. As though daws of fog had pierced an earthen heart.
Sitting in the lop-sided tire-swing, Cass thought to himself then that could one but come dose to a shining star it might look much as the great peak did now: just a dim height curtained by roiling cloud, with all the shining vanished away. The peak did not look beautiful to him now. It seldom had. Even after the mist dispersed and Great-Snake Mountain stood up clearly and tall, like a stately woman standing alone robed in purple and gold and green, not even then did it appear even pleasant to him to see. Cass was hungry, and more than anything else it looked to him like a huge and green-streaked heap of ancient horse-dung that had lost most of its odor. To a man who had just eaten well the mountain no doubt would have appeared beautiful; for the sun was on it and the sky was behind it—and humbly now in its high white mist three quiet sheep were grazing. But to Cass they appeared much like himself: just lour somewhat hungry-looking sheep atop a hungry hill, their fleece bitten by frost in the morning air and their heads hanging a little out of too-long loneliness.
He heard movement in the kitchen, went to the back door and tapped like a stranger there. It was Nancy. She came to the door with her hair undone; it cascaded in an auburn torrent halfway down to her waist. She gave a cry half surprise and half joy, and caught him into her arms.
For very emotion Cass could not speak, his affection swelled his heart till his throat felt dry. He could only cling to his sister, and run his hands through her hair, and try not to whimper again. Nancy’s hair held a red-brown sheen; it was tawny in the light. It held the odor of the dooryard lilac that long ago had ceased to bloom.
Being taken unaware by emotion made restraint difficult for Cass. Nancy ran a finger over the cut on his mouth, traced it down from his mouth to his throat. There was guilt in his eyes when she did that, and he winced. He averted his eyes. “That hurts, Nance,” he said, and he took her finger away.
“But Lawd—how’d y’all git cut that away? Look at me.”
He faced her. “Slipped an’ fell on a railroad spike. How y’all been gettin’ on with the charity-folks?”
“Tol’able.”
He saw the raggedness of his sister.
While eating clabber and combread over the kitchen stove he asked, “Where’s Bry’n?” Nancy did not answer for a minute.
“Bry’n’s stayin’ on uptown some’eres,” she hnally replied, “Paw thrashed him so’s he won’t walk all by hisself for a spell. Luke nex’ door tuk him on uptown; so now he’s at Clark Casner’s place, ah s’pose.”
Cass asked for his father only to inquire briefly, “He’ll be home directly, y’ reck’n?”
Nancy did not reply at all this time. They had finished eating and Cass was clearing the dishes when Stubby strode into the kitchen. He tossed his empty tin dinner pail into the sink, and went on into the living room without giving any indication that he had so much as seen Cass. His whole bearing was that of a man either returning from a hard night’s work, or of a man walking in a dream. He went directly to the bed, stretched out on it without removing his boots, and to all appearances fell to sound sleep the moment his head touched the pillow.
The brown boot-toes pointed sharply to the roof.
Cass looked at Nancy in bewilderment. He had never seen his father like this before, and he was frightened. But Nancy would not answer his glance, she would not turn her face to show that she saw. Instead, she turned her face away. Cass saw that she was ashamed of their father.
And in the weeks that followed it seemed to Cass that Nancy never once looked directly at him; she seemed to be forever shifting her eyes or turning her head or walking abruptly away. He could not understand how the week of his absence could have wrought such an irreparable change.
Yet, it had split life in two.
He remembered how often Nancy had waked him out of sleep with low laughter. Yet now she laughed not even when awake. All day now she went about the empty house, puttering, fidgeting, tight-lipped, dry-eyed. Cass had no inkling of the conflict in her heart. After the joy she had evinced at first seeing him she seemed to recoil, so that at times he was reminded in her of his father. She too would walk past him as though not to see. And she never learned how severe a gash he had suffered down the side of his mouth, for he tended it himself, at night, half-secretly. He did not want her to see it, he did not wish now that she tend it: he was ashamed of that wound. He never told her how he had gained it. And a wall began growing between them.
