JOHNTOWN, TENN.
aware of a strangeness in those words said not as prayer but as if
she were sleep-walking and sleep-talking, and then was aware that
the strangeness was shot through with some excitement like guilt. By
this time she had reached the kitchen, the old part of the house where
the walls were chinked log. She stood in the middle of the floor and
experienced a nameless yearning. She was sick with yearning, as she
whispered again, "I want to hold his hand."
The yearning was so strong she knew it must be guilty. But
why guilty?
She looked around the kitchen to find some extenuation in that
scene of her common life. There was the electric stove, still good,
which he had bought her when TVA came in, to replace the wood
range of his mother. There were the chinked logs which she hadn't
let him cover. There was the big old stone fireplace, with the cooking
crane and pot, which she had made him knock the boards off, say–
ing to him, "No--no, John T.-whatever made you want to
cover that beautiful old fireplace? Why it's just like a magazine,
John
T.!"
And he had grumbled in man-heartiness, out of some
duty to something, then grinned, and pinched her bottom, and
knocked the boards off. And later he had bought an old-timey bear–
grease lamp somewhere, and cleaned it and stuck it in the stone
chimney for her, to make it more like a magazine, he said, if you
had to look like a dum-fool magazine. She had kissed him for thanks,
and he had chased her three times around the kitchen table, like when
they were first married, but she was nimble and got away. She had
always been nimble-footed. And two-twenty is wide on the turns.
She looked now at that grease lamp stuck in the stone, and it
was suddenly as though somebody had hit her back of the knees
with the heavy end, and narrow edge, of a pick-handle. They just gave
down, with no warning. But she managed to get hold of a chair
back, and sit down before the tears came. "It's just because I want
to hold your hand, John T," she was murmuring.
By this time, however, with the sight of the grease lamp and the
rectifying sweetness of tears, she had lost track of why she had wanted
to hold Jack Harrick's hand in the first place. She was simply en–
gulfed in the mysteriousness of the moment.
It
was just that he was going to die. He had lived toward fifty
years before she had ever laid eyes on him-on a bright winter after–
noon, snow on the street, the Ford pick-up slithering in the snow
