486
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Don'tcher bring me nothing," she said darkly, "because I won't
be here."
"Haw!" he said. "Now you're here, it's nothing for you to do
but wait," and he got out and without paying her any further at–
tention, he entered the dark store where Tilman was waiting for him.
When he came out in half an hour, she was not in the car. Hid–
ing, he decided. He started walking around the store to see if she
was in the back. He looked in the doors of the two sections of the
dance hall and walked on around by the tombstones. Then his eye
roved over the field of sinking automobiles and he realized that she
could be in or behind anyone of two hundred of them. He came
back out in front of the store. A Negro boy, drinking a purple drink,
was sitting on the ground with
his
back against the sweating Ice
cooler.
"Where did ,that little girl go to, boy?" he asked.
"I ain't seen nair little girl," the boy said.
The old man irritably fished in his pocket and handed him a
nickel and said, "A pretty little girl in a yeller cotton dress."
"If
you speakin about a stout chile look lak you," the boy said,
"she gone off in a truck with a white man."
"What kind of a truck, what kind of a white man!" he yelled.
"It were a green pick-up truck," the boy said smacking his lips,
"and a white man she call 'daddy.' They gone thataway some time
ago."
The old man, trembling, got in his car and started home. His
feelings raced back and forth between fury and mortification. She
had never left him before and certainly never for Pitts. Pitts had
ordered her to get in the truck and she was afraid not to. But when
he reached this conclusion he was more furious than ever. What was
the matter with her that she couldn't stand up to Pitts? Why was
there this one flaw in her character when he had trained her so
well in everything else? It was an ugly mystery.
When he reached the house and climbed the front steps, there
she was sitting in the swing, looking glum-faced in front of her across
the field he was going to sell. Her eyes were puffy and pink-rimmed
but he didn't see any red marks on her legs. He sat down in the
swing beside her. He meant to make his voice severe but instead it
