Teeftallow/Chapter 10

IRONTOWN spent the rest of Sunday afternoon filled with that sense of monotony and endlessness which marked all Sunday afternoons. The villagers walked slowly along the hushed streets in their Sunday clothes; the merchants either slept away the time or sat about in front of their stores, like patient dogs ejected from their kennels awaiting the moment they would be allowed to return. The village girls yawned at home, wishing for beaux, for the telephone to ring, for a bit of scandal—anything.

Abner Teeftallow and the other labourers spent the afternoon in the garage retailing brackish anecdotes and inventing crude rural ironies about Perry Northcutt for breaking up their game. The energy bottled in their strong, dirty bodies moved them to some sort of reprisal for their defeat in baseball. They wanted something lawless, indecent, to set out their contempt for the whole churchly population. Their plans moved inevitably toward what was called, in technical legal phrase, "disturbing public worship." They meant to gather around the church during services that evening and fire pistols outside the house until the congregation became frightened and ran away. This would be exciting and retaliatory.

Abner went to supper at the Scovell House pondering whether or not to join the proposed batteau. The feature that restrained him was that he had no pistol and did not see how he could get one. He thought of going along with the boys and throwing stones at the church, but such pinch-penny methods of disturbing public worship made him ashamed. "No," he thought with decision, "if I kain't disturb 'em like a gentleman, I won't disturb 'em a-tall."

​So it looked as if he would not be in the marauding party until he reached his second-story room and saw Mr. Beavers again preparing his automatic for a call on the Meredith girl. Abner looked longingly at the blued-steel firearm and at last said, "Look here, Tug, d'reckon you'll haff to use that to-night?" Mr. Beavers turned his eyes deliberately toward Abner with an effect of immense courage.

"Don't know, if anybody wants to try me out, this is a free country."

"I knowed you wasn't skeered," explained Abner quickly. "I was thinkin' about somepin else." He halted irresolutely.

"What else?"

"Well, the boys are goin' to run the folks out of church to-night, an' me not havin' no gun . . ."

"You ort to git one."

"Good God, don't I know that!" assented Abner fervently.

"A man goin' around without a gun looks kinder sissy."

"I ain't sissy, Tug; I've been jest dead pore all my life. I ain't had no chanst to fix myse'f up."

There was something plaintive in Abner's tone and position. Tug made inarticulate sounds and continued preparing for his evening call.

"If you wuz shore you wouldn't need yore gun. Tug . . ." resumed Abner hopelessly. "I hate like hell to jest set here till bedtime . . . nothin' to do . . . they don't go to bed here in town till nine or ten noway. . . . "

Now Mr. Beavers had developed a certain sympathy for this poorhouse lad he had picked up on the road to Irontown. He looked at his automatic, pulled his face to one side, scratched his head.

"Ab," he drawled, "I hate like hell to discommode you, but why in the hell ain't you got a gun?"

"I told you already, Tug."

"Oh, hell, here it is, take it along. Know how to work it?"

​"I'm going to git one of my own as soon as I lay by the money, Tug."

"A man's got to git his start in life," admitted Mr. Beavers generously.

Abner had no further preparations to make, and as soon as he could do so without unseemly haste, he got away and hurried to the garage where the hillmen had planned to foregather.

As Abner walked through the darkness, the weight of the pistol in his pocket gave him an exhilarated feeling of being a "bad man." This pleasure was connected in some obscure way with Nessie Sutton. It would be incorrect to say that Abner had set out to disturb a Sunday evening service to impress Nessie Sutton, but if there had been no girls in the congregation there would have been no boys with automatics on the outside.

When Abner reached the garage his gang was setting out in twos and threes for the church. Abner picked Zed Parrum for his companion, and Zed was a satellite of Peck Bradley's. So these three went together, the murderer, the fool, and the innocent.

As quickly as possible the trio deserted the village street and took to the back alleys, in order, as Peck explained, to set up alibis when the matter came up before the next circuit court, as it probably would.

Abner moved just behind his two friends in pitchy darkness. His enterprise gave him much the same sort of exhilaration that he might have received from the ball game that afternoon. His thoughts wandered about and presently reverted to Nessie Sutton; how she would open her blue eyes if she could know he was out with a man indicted for murder. She would certainly think him a hell-bent yaver—and he really was. There could be no doubt of that. He was a hell-bent yaver out of Yaversville!

Zed's pull at his sleeve drew Abner out of his musings.

"Huh, what is it?"

​"Peck here ast if you had a gun." Parrum's voice was full of respect for the slayer of old man Shelton.

"Yeh, I borrowed Tug's automatic."

Mr. Bradley was interested at once. "What's Tug goin' ter use?" he asked in his hard voice.

"He ain't comin' here."

"Skeered?"

"Nope, goin' over to ol' Squire Meredith's to-night."

Came a silence, then Bradley said in a sneering tone, "I God, I see, runnin' after that Meredith gal. All I got to say if he's welcome to her, fur's I'm concerned. I wouldn't wipe my foot on a gal like her. She ain't fitten to be the wife of a sawdust monkey." After this hearty disapproval Mr. Bradley mouched along in the darkness for half a minute and then out of his reflections began a nasal ditty to a melancholy hill tune:

He broke off his own song to say, "Well, here we air," and the next instant he must have lifted a heavy revolver, for six crashing flames spurted into the blackness. This was a signal for a fusillade all around the church. Shots roared in every direction, the flashes winking like fireflies.

Great excitement seized Abner. He got out his own weapon and with a trembling hand fired it at the skies. At every discharge the big automatic leaped in his hand.

The three disturbers came around a turn in a little alley and saw the church looking very large right in front of them. Through three open windows Abner could see the congregation rising in fright. The headiest excitement seized the youth at this milling of the people in the lighted interior. He fired his automatic in a roaring, leaping staccato. He rammed in another clip of cartridges. He was an Indian ambushing settlers; a soldier routing enemies. In reality ​he was a hillman putting on a demonstration of wildness before the possibility of a girl. His pistol roared at the girls inside, "What a wild man I am! Think of such a man as I for a lover!"

Inside the church the young hill women were shrieking, not in terror, for they knew they would not be hurt, but to let the young men outside know they were impressed by their firing and courage, that they were moved by this wild romance. It was a sort of tumultuous courtship; a roaring antiphony of sex.

The men in the church did not take kindly to the demonstration. They came running out, furious as disturbed hornets. Abner did not know the fine points of disturbing public worship. He did not know enough to run at this swarming of the men, but stood firing Tug’s pistol in a kind of ecstasy. He did not realize that the flashes of his automatic were conspicuous in the darkness.

Flashlights blinked here and there. Came cries of "Halt! Stop! Throw up your hands!" The next moment a light was shining directly at him and seemed to be rushing at him at a rapid rate; a voice shouted, "Throw up yore hands, there, you country jake, or I'll shoot ye!"

A shock went through Abner. He whirled automatically and dashed up the lane. The roar of the revolver behind him seemed to shake the world. Bullets whispered by his ear, "Psst! Psst! Psst!"

Abner felt as light as a feather. He seemed to fly along the alley, just touching the ground here and there. Right ahead of him in the faint unsteady light that played over and past him he saw a tall picket fence. Horror swept through him as he dashed toward it. He was in a cul de sac. As he hurtled at the barrier a superhuman tightening went through his legs and chest. He dashed at the ghostly outline of the fence with his whole body screwed up for a terrible effort. Next instant he launched upward. A mighty power in his legs shot him high in air. His flight over the sharp pickets took his breath. He landed inside among the soft ridges of ​a garden. He struck the ground with the wild goose of fear still winging through his heart. He dashed ahead, clambered a fence on the opposite side of the garden, landed in a vacant lot, ran again, came to another fence. As he mounted this he saw ahead of him a twinkling procession of lights. It was the churchgoers on their way home.

A plan to give his pursuers the slip popped into Abner’s head. The next moment he leaped off the fence and went legging it toward the twinkling line of lights. He meant to lose himself in the procession. He went as hard as he could run to within forty or fifty yards of the line, then slackened his pace and tried to control his gasping breath before he merged himself with the others. As he approached one or two flashlights turned on him, but as they did so he stooped as if he were picking up his hat which had somehow blown off in the windless night—that was the trick he had thought of—then he entered the line.

Everybody was talking about the hill billies who had broken up the meeting. Abner moved up the line, passing the marchers uneasily. He felt conspicuous. The angry talk disturbed him. He gained on the line, looking anxiously for a place in it where he could become a unit in the ranks. Now and then he looked behind him for a pursuing flashlight, but there were so many now, it was impossible to tell anything about them. Any of those lights might be an officer. Just then he saw a gap in the procession. A woman, or a girl, was walking alone. The manner in which she walked suggested it was a girl. Had it been a woman Abner could have stepped in beside her simply enough, but a girl was different. However, with a great effort the wild disturber of public worship took his heart in his hands and moved into place beside the young woman, and thus became entirely merged with the home-goers.

No sooner was he in place than he began speculating on how he could get out inconspicuously. It would be noticeable for a man simply to desert his girl companion when he came to the hotel. He thought of saying, "Well, so long. ​I'll see you later," to make those behind think he had been to church, but this did not seem entirely natural.

They were now approaching the Scovell House, where he would have to do something. He could see the spraddling mulberry and the hotel sign illuminated by the lights passing under it. He thought he would simply turn in without a word. Then a wild notion came to him to walk on home with the girl. This might entail explanations at the other end, but it would be a postponement. He decided to risk it. He was nerving himself to pass his hotel, when to Abner’s surprise the girl stopped at the gate. Utterly at sea, Abner opened the rickety gate for her and let her through. The flashlight procession continued on its way unaware that the most dramatic coincidence in the lumpy life of a hillman had just occurred.

The girl evidently was well acquainted with the Scovell House, for she entered the door, walked over and picked up a small kerosene lamp which sat on the newel post of the stairway, and turned up the wick. This low-burning lamp was the amenity which the Scovell House offered belated guests; it was, in fact, the one thing that differentiated the Scovell House from the private residences along the street.

As the girl turned up the wick the two silent companions saw each other for the first time.

Abner looked, then stared in amazement at the colourless oval face, the coils of pale colourless hair, and the large melancholy eyes that looked black in the lamplight. Yet even in the disguise of the yellow light he recognized her and gasped out, "For God's sake, Nessie Sutton, is it you I walked home with!"

The girl's hand trembled so she could hardly hold the lamp.

"Yes, it’s me—I knew you were here the very first day you came, Abner. I knew it was you walking by me just then.” There was a tinge of reproach in her tones.

Abner could not get on with his thinking. He stared at her.

​"Well, I declare! Well, don't that beat a hoss a-flyin'!"

He could not take his eyes off her. He could not realize what had happened. She seemed entirely unlike what he remembered of her in the courthouse yard. Some mysterious change had come over every line and feature, yet through all this variation of memory, she was the same girl who had so held his attention and stirred his pulse at Lanesburg. That meeting seemed ages ago.

Nessie was first to break the long silence of staring.

"You was one of them pistol shooters, wasn't you, Abner?" Her voice carried neither surprise nor reproach.

Abner nodded in silence.

She regarded him solemnly. "Don't you know that's wrong, Abner—on Sunday night, too?"

"Perry Northcutt busted up our ball game; we thought we would bust up his church."

"You know it isn't Perry Northcutt's church—it's God's church."

The girl's tone was level enough, but she breathed as if labouring under some strong excitement; then she turned with the lamp and started upstairs.

Abner followed her in the grip of a growing depression. He felt that the night's enterprise somehow had failed. Nessie, apparently, had not thrilled at his wildness and bravery, although it was a fact the oil lamp shook so in her hands that she could hardly carry it.

They turned together down the long upper hall in the tensely strung silence. Evidently she knew what room he occupied; she paused before his door for him to enter. As he went in she said in her hushed, reproachful tones, "Goodnight, Abner."

The boy returned her good-night gloomily and went inside.

He lighted his own lamp, took out Tug's automatic and laid it on the rickety dresser whose cracked mirror gave him back a travesty of his own image.

He began taking off his shoes and trousers in great de​pression of spirits. Presently he drew a long breath and murmured aloud, "Well, good God Almighty, what does it take to please a damn gal anyway?"

Before Abner got into bed Tug Beavers came in. He, too, was sweating at every pore. Abner asked in surprise, “Was you shootin’ aroun’ the church, too?”

Tug explained amid long breaths that he was not. He had been coming back from Squire Meredith’s place when a form arose apparently out of the road beside him. He had not been afraid, but simply had asked who it was. There was no reply. Tug then walked toward it, but the form floated back from him as if his air had brushed it aside. Tug then picked up a stone and threatened to knock the thing in the head, but no sooner were the words out of his mouth than a pistol fired and a bullet whizzed past Tug’s ear. Then, Tug said, he had come on home.

As Abner sat on the side of the bed looking at his panting, sweating friend, it occurred even to that unsuspicious youth that Tug had eliminated considerable detail in the brief phrase he had "come on home."