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PARTISAN REVIEW
would purse a little, the way women's lips purse when they do a
little something. He would grin to himself in the dark, thinking how
she was tying that ribbon. He always waited till he was sure she had
tied it. For he wanted it tied for him to untie.
Then he would come in the door, and she would look up at
him over the ribbon, for a split second like he had surprised her. Then
her smile would begin, and for another split second it always looked
like the smile of a little girl who didn't know what the world was
like but loved it all because it was so dew-bright and sweet-smelling.
Then that little-girl smile, which was as teeter-y and shy as a lady–
wren balanced on a bent stalk of wild parsnip, and which a thousand
years ago when she wasn't much more than a little girl was what he
had first noticed about Celia Hornby, would be gone. It would be
changed into another kind of smile, the smile of Celia Hornby Har–
rick, a grown woman standing very still in a blue-flowered night–
gown, who might not know all about the world but didn't have to,
and didn't want to, because she knew quite a lot about Jack Harrick
in general and what he had in mind in particular, for her health,
benefit, and instruction, and standing there with the ribbon tied prim
under her chin, she didn't mind a bit. She didn't mind, that is, unless
one of the young ones was croupy or something, or it was a season
with money tight and grub scant.
But he knew, too, what worriment could be, and how it could
put a big black hole right in the middle where a man's thinking and
feeling ought to be, and you felt like you were going to fall into
the hole, forever into black nothing. And he knew that worriment
could come with no reason at all you could figure-just something
that came when it looked like a time of rejoicing.
The time of his own big worriment had come like that, right
when you would have thought jubilation at hand. His first child, the
boy, was just born, and him nigh fifty and hale as hickory, but as
soon as that boy drew breath, he, Jack Harrick, had just run off
wild and blind to Chattanooga to catch the clap and get his head
bloodied with a cop's night-stick, and wind up in jail.
It
was all a
mystery, how it came on him.
But it wasn't too much of a mystery what pulled him back into
shape.
It
was loving Celia Hornby Harrick, who forgave him. No,
she hadn't forgiven him. She hadn't had to. She had simply fallen
on her knees beside the chair he sank into, and hugged his knees and
