morning, an empty tin dinner-pail on his arm; Stuart saw him passing down the road toward the roundhouse every night. He never saw without growing white with fury.
Luke was a little man, smaller than Stuart; but in the town he was as well liked as Stubby was hated.
And Stuart’s mind was dark. Within his head inconstant fleeting shadow-shapes passed and repassed, without cessation, all day, all night. All day, all night lights flickered there. He had always been aware of his own darkness; now he began to fear it. The man had had so many cruel tricks played on him in his lifetime, he had hurt so many other men, that sometimes now he became afraid of the darkness growing within him; it too would deal him a scurvy back-handed slap one of these days, he felt, if he didn’t strike out first. Often while he slept he became aware of something that a passing flash, like a brief lightning, had revealed within his brain; had revealed clearly there against the black, yet too briefly to be discerned. So briefly that he saw only that there was a thing there—a thing growing, a thing wholly evil. And sometimes some ancient fancy or some feeling not his own laughed within a cavern in his brain—he knew the laugh because it was mocking. Laughter was mockery, Stuart knew.
Powerful suggestions and willful persuasions of people he could not see clamored within him as he dreamed. Memories of ancient wrongs, cruelties perpetrated otherwhere, some other time, all came thronging to harass him. Sussurant dark whisperings of night, low-muttered half-tales of murder and trickery; always they spoke of trickery. Sometimes he felt that he, too, would like to trick someone or something, sometimes the voices aroused within a desire to kill so that his throat became dry with that desire. Like the craving for strong drink that comes on a man, clutching his throat so that he must drink or fall dead.
Stubby did not understand. Always his thought evaded his mind. He could only go his hard way dumbly and alone, without wonder, without knowledge, with only pain for friend. He could only know a dim feeling as of daily loss, as though all the blood of his body were spilling momently from a broken vein and his eyes had been curtained that he might not find where.
The feeling of having been cheated—of having been cheated—that was it!
And now came the hard West Texas times, the charity-station days and the hungry nights. This was spring of 1927, but to the McKays it was little different than spring of any other year.
For days when the town was troubled by tourists Cass acquired the approach sibilant, the whisper sudden, swift, and clear: “Yo’ like Spanish gal, boss? Fifteen-year ol’ jest stahtin’ business? Come, ah show yo’ where to, she treat jou all right. Not rush, jest take yo’ time. Come, ah show yo’ where to.” Cass’s speech at this time was a curious congeries of West Texas idiom, Southern drawl, and Mexican intonation.
Back of the Mexican pool hall dark girls stood in doorways, waiting. Cass knew Pepita by sight, Teresina and Rosita. Little Pepita sought to tease him whenever she saw him pass: “Look—there go my ugly red-hair boy.” She would raise her voice as he began to run: “Ugly red-hair boy!—you got no dollar for Pepita today?” Once she gave him a five-cent pack of tobacco for showing a tourist to the back door: he took it and fled without so much as a single “Gracias, Senorita Pepita.” He smoked that package out with Nancy in one evening, but he did not tell her how he had earned it. Often after that he came home with fifteen cents or a Mexican quarter in his pocket, and would tell her that he had earned it by shining shoes on the streets.
In May Bryan killed the last of the hens, and for two days they ate meat; after that it was black coffee and okra. Stubby got a few backhouses to clean, but his own privy remained, as ever, a vile hole. Before the summer was out they were on charity.
Fortunately for her own good health, Nance had been reared in happier days. Between 1919 and ’24 Stuart had worked almost regularly. She had not suffered from hunger in her adolescence, as Cass now did. She realized this to the extent of placing on his plate, before they sat down to table, a part of the pitiful daily portion that was hers. Always Cass saw what she had done; secretly, he compared portions at every meal. He always saw, but he never protested; he would pretend that he didn’t perceive his portion to be the larger. He would wolf down his share and stare at what Bryan had left, his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth with hunger. Bryan would push the coffee remaining in his saucer toward him, or shove over a half-eaten crust; then he would smile to see the boy gnawing like a dog, holding the piece in both dirty paws.
“When yo’ gonna grow up to eat like a man?” Bryan would ask. “Yo’ don’t eat like sixteen any more than as if yo’ was nine.”
Once, for five days running, they had nothing to eat but oatmeal: gray, lumpy, utterly tasteless. Then came a day with nothing at all. For the five days following that day it was rice—without milk, without sugar. Oatmeal and rice were all they could get from the relief station. Cheap as milk was, the cattlemen who ran the county feared to make it cheaper by pouring it out to charity. They poured it out to their hogs instead, and thus bolstered falling prices. Their consciences they salved by putting dollar bills in the collection plate of the First Baptist Church on Sunday mornings; and they gained the sanction of every truly patriotic Baptist in the town in the process.
Bryan sat all day in shadowy places or wandered aimlessly about the Mexican streets. If not ordered to do anything he would perform small tasks about the home; but if, openly, Nancy told him to build up the fire or chop up some kindling, or plant a few beans, he would give her a blanket refusal. He had no time for women’s tasks, he would say, and would walk off toward the town. She had learned never to ask anything of him, and by this method sometimes won his help. He would pull a few weeds out of the garden, pare a few potatoes, or begin fussing with a couple of planks and a hammer in the dooryard. Few tasks that he began ever saw completion. He tired easily, he lost patience or thought of a joke that he had to tell Clark Casner right away. Once, while building a small chair, he began drinking in the midst of his work. Despite his wobbling legs he got a back nailed onto the chair, and, after a fashion, three legs. Then he sat down on it, feeling the task well done. It collapsed in a heap, and in the middle of the heap he sat, giggling like a ten-year-old. He had many friends, and they were all roaring boys. Usually when he returned from town he had a pint of tequila on his hip.
He would sit in some dark corner of the house, tippling half-secretly. Often no one would know that he had returned from town till they heard him tittering to himself, or humming through his teeth from some nook. Sometimes, when well in his cups, he would sing. He would wail a half dozen lines over and over again, each time with a different rhythm:
They say I drink whisky; my money is my own,
And them that don’t like me can leave me alone.
Oh whis-key, you vil-lain, you’ve been my down-fall,
You’ve kicked me, you’ve cuffed me,
But I love you for all.
Then he would titter. He had been gassed at St. Mihiel.
Stuart alone remained outwardly unaffected by these days. All day he slept, each meal he ate alone just as though he were still working on the Santa Fe. Promptly at six pm, as ever, he would pull on blue overalls over his boots and leave down the road toward the roundhouse.
Once there he kept to deep night-shadow, he encircled the wide glare of the floodlights, he avoided anyone whom he saw approaching him. Standing concealed behind some dead engine, he watched the man who had taken his job.
Every night Stubby watched Luther Gulliday. Just before dawn he would start back, and Cass would be wakened by the flare of a match in the early dark. Stuart would be bending over the living-room table trying to light the old-fashioned lamp; but the wick had been dry
