394
PARTISAN REVIEW
strong men, when they met him, they give him the high side of a
hill track and fust on the creek-log, and warn't no woman under
age fer putting on the calico cap didn't swaller sweet spit and look
back over her shouder when she passed him on the big road, her
married or not, and hit Sunday.-Yeah, you Ole Jack's boy?"
And the old fingers would, with an obscure feebleness, pinch
his thigh through the blue-jeans, and the whiskered baby-pink
lips
would peel back from the yellow teeth: "Yeah, a chip off the ole
block-hee-hee
!"
But up
in
his sprawling log house, in the glade, among the big
cedars that had been big when the first Harrick axe rang there a
hundred and fifty years back, now Old Jack Harrick, old heller of
high coves and hoot-owl hollows, cancer-bit and time-tricked now,
sat in his wheel chair and stared out the window at the big white
oak and the piece of rotting rope, at the red and yellow nasturtiums,
yellow and jim-crack as the toy counter of a dime store, and at the
fence, and felt sorry that he had not replaced the bad palings, the
way his wife had asked him, and tears came into his eyes. For he
loved his wife.
That was the awful thing, he loved her right now, as she set
the glass of iced tea on the little table beside him and laid her
cheek against his hair, and murmured his name. God damn it, why
did she have to do that now, for he could love her a lot easier if
she didn't. It would be a lot easier to love her if she were dead and
six feet under like some of those other round-bottomed contraptions
that he hadn't loved but had shore-God taught the meaning of the
word to so they could spell it backwards and forwards for anybody's
benefit afterwards, including their own, and had something to re–
member and think on in the long dark nights in the graveyard.
It would be a lot easier to love Celia Hornby Harrick if every–
thing, and all the honest work he had done on her in a love-way,
were all tidy and tied up in a package for good and the lid clamped
down.
But no, God damn it, she had to be alive. She had to put her
cheek against
his
hair. And not only alive but nigh thirty years
younger than he, than Old Jack Harrick, the cancer-bit heller and
beauty-boy of the wheel chair. Right now, as she leaned her cheek
against
his
chair, he couldn't bear to look round at her.
If
he did
