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PARTISAN REVIEW
cards had fallen. But he still hadn't been able to figure out the
reason they fell the way they did that night on the mountain. When
her fingers had returned the pressure-or when, in his need, he had
thought they did-he had turned toward her, and grabbed her hand
in both of his, and fallen right on his knees in the dark, on the soft
grass, under the dogwoods. Yes, right on
his
knees, in the way they
said fellows used to propose, the way they showed it in cartoons and
in the funny-paper, some simp kneeling down and an expression on
his face like waiting for castor oil to show the first signs. Long later,
thinking about it, he had had to grin in the dark, at his own expense
and the strangeness of it, to think of Jack Harrick coming down on
his
knees like a stunned beef.
But the funniest part was that when he swung around and
grabbed her hand with both his and cried out and fell to his knees
like the stunned beef, he still didn't really know what woman it
was he was falling down to. It was a light-colored shape there in the
woods-dark, real, yes, but which shape, with what color eyes and
waist-feel and name and address, he would have had to be damned
from hell to bell-time if he had to say that minute. He cried out, or
rather, croaked out, "Marry me-marry mel- You got to marry me!"
She had married him. She had stood there a moment-or a
thousand years-after he croaked his croak, as calm as though she
were alone and listening for somebody to call from way down the
road, or down the valley, while he heard
his
own heart banging,
churning, and sloshing inside him like the stern wheel on the last
river packet with the channel confounded and the night fog-dark
as the inside of a dead bull's belly that had foundered on black silage.
She stood there, in her calmness, and then laid her free hand-her
left hand it would have been-on his thick head of hair, and roughed
the hair just a little, like recognizing a dog or kid that's got its head
against your knee, and said: "Yes, John T. Harrick. Yes, I will
marry you, John T."
Even in that moment, he was aware, below the levels of other,
more urgent awarenesses, of how strange it was to be called "John T."
Nobody had ever called him John T. He was Jack, he was Jack Har–
rick. Hearing that other name, even as it answered his need and
desire, he knew that something was happening to Jack Harrick.
What, he didn't know. He had turned and fallen on his knees and
