THE PAWN
He chased the pigs away from the door.
He whipped Chester out-of-doors. Montague saw him do it, heard
Chester's whimpers and screams, and was as savagely hurt as if his
own breast had been ripped up, his bare heart exposed and whipped.
Only Willie and Delia were parents and knew the right. Chester was
ele~en
years old. He did not bleed any longer as Montague bled to
see it.
In the windy blasts of March, Willie tilled the open fields with
a borrowed mule, or, when no mule was to be borrowed, a hand plow.
Wind nibbled him, and he marched behind the plow blind and drunk
with the bitter Southern cold. The com he raised was spectral and
parched in the summers. Rains spoiled the potatoes. Bugs got into
the peanut plants. The squash rotted. The watermelon vines bore a
few little albino embryos, pale with malnutrition. Willie had a wild
laugh.
As
he sat in the evenings in the door of his shack and stroked
the little protruding cranium and the long stiff nape of his dog, he
had a hundred stories to regale himself.
"Bow at time I see at ole houn dawg git up on he hine laigs n
wawk oah tub duh doah, n I say tmah sef, Bawi, you see dat ole
houn dawg wawkin on he two hine fee lak uh man? You crazy?" Etc.
One summer day it went off to die. Willie whistled for it until
he was blue. Then in the sunny morning, when all the lacquered leaves
were bright in this desert, he saw buzzards out over the low bush,
the Pharioh's chickens. That was his hound dog.
There were two ruts which led across a wide empty field from
the highway. Every year or so the white Mr. Crooker brought them
a bushel basket full of old clothes and such delectables as dated mo–
tion picture magazines, empty and cheap perfume bottles, old clocks
with ·immobile hands, and broken chairs. The front yard of the
shack began to look like a junk yard.
One of Montague's earliest consolidate memories was of standing
in the doorway, the sunlight wrinkling his embryonic brown face,
while the white man talked to Willie and Delia about trying cucum–
bers. The white man sat behind the steering wheel of
his
Model T.
His wife and children sat enthroned in the back seat. Willie and
Delia stood like children down from them and out from the auto–
mobile.
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