JOHNTOWN, TENN.
403
cried out because for that one terrible instant he had felt that he,
Jack Harrick, had been snatched up into darkness like the field
mouse by the hoot owl, that caught in the vertigo of the past he didn't
exist. Now as that hand, whose name he didn't know, but which
was real, drew him back to reality, he wasn't Jack Harrick after all.
He was John T.
That fact brought its own kind of disorientation, if a different
kind. Anyway, it wasn't like being snatched off into blackness by that
metaphysical hoot owl. This kind of disorientation was something that
was happening quietly, inside you, even now as you were on your
knees in the dark grass, shaking a little bit, like a man who had been
saved from something, kissing the wrist above the hand you held
so tight in both yours that there wasn't any soft, sweet-smelling female
hand-hide available to kiss.
So she had married him, him, John T.- who, however, remained
Jack in the salutations of J ohntown and in the tales told, gradually
becoming Old Jack in the tales, but remaining Jack, not John T. or
Old Jack, in his own thoughts, except now and then when, as she
called him John T., some vague half-humorous but discomfiting won–
derment started up as to where Jack Harrick had gone, or worse,
who he had been, after all.
She became Mrs. John T. Harrick, and he called her Celey.
Celey, or Baby, or Honey-Baby or Doll-Baby, Doll-Baby, very pri–
vately, for her smallness, in comparison with him anyway, when he
took her on his knee. In their bed-passages, however, he never, or
practically never, called her anything, anything, that is, when the
water got rough and the picture began to come to sharp focus. Even
if things were just drifting along, especially if the light was out, he
was pretty guarded about that
Celey.
No, to be more precise, as he
observed to himself, with some sense of exculpation, it was not he
himself, Jack Harrick, who was guarded about that
Celey.
For he
loved CeIey, and wasn't boasting or kidding himself when he said
he damned well would run through fire for her.
It
wasn't himself
that put the clamp on that
Celey,
it was something, but God knew
what, inside himself.
And the reason, as he told himself, wasn't simply that he was
afraid of making a slip and hurting her feelings. Sure, it would hurt
any lady's feelings, but with Celia Hornby, with her sureness of self,
