Teeftallow/Chapter 13

AS ABNER opened his door the girl in the hallway glanced around at him, apparently on the verge of flight. This wrought up the teamster more than ever. He stepped out in the hall, moved by some irrational impulse to pursue her and make her retract something, he scarcely knew what. He called her name in a shaken voice.

Nessie paused, looked around at him, and asked in a tone as disturbed as his own what he wanted. Abner did not know what he wanted or what he meant to ask her to do. He moved her note which he still held in his hand.

"You kain't go to the dance?"

"Abner," she said breathlessly, "I told you in my note I belonged to the church."

The teamster's heart beat so heavily that the girl seemed to shake in little pulses before his eyes.

"But you said you had another engagement."

Nessie nodded almost imperceptibly.

An exaggerated apprehension seized Abner.

"Who with, Nessie?"

The girl flushed abruptly. "You mustn't ast me that."

For her to keep any of her affairs hidden from him seemed almost unbearable to Abner. He moved impulsively toward her.

"But you must tell me, Nessie. . . . Good Lord. . . ."

He seemed so imminent, so wrought upon, that the girl was almost afraid of him. She took a pace back, breathing unevenly.

"Mr. Belshue," she said in a scarcely audible voice.

Abner came to a stricken pause, staring at her.

​"Mr. Belshue!" he repeated, stupefied.

"Y-yes."

"Not—the infidel . . ."

She nodded again with a whitening face and explained unsteadily: "I—I thought I—could help him—maybe."

Abner's mind jumped from the point of religious faith completely.

"Why he—he's—old. . . ."

Nessie took a sharp breath, pressed her lips together, then apparently ceased breathing.

"Why, Nessie!" cried Abner, as much now out of concern for the girl as for his own pain, "you jest kain't go with a man like that! Tell him he kain't come no more—and a infidel!" he stared at her aghast, then suddenly the irony of it struck him and he cried in scorn, "You kain't go to a dance with me on account of bein' a church member, an' stayin' at home to keep comp'ny with a infidel!"

The girl made a piteous gesture and seemed on the verge of tears. "Oh, Abner, you don't understand, I—I kain't jest stop him like that. I—he's been comin' to see me for three seasons. . . ."

Three seasons! This length of time spread before Abner with a devastating inference. He had thought Belshue was interfering in his courtship; now he saw that his own suit was very recent and that he was intruding on Belshue. The teamster was steeped in the hill convention of respecting another man's courtship as religiously as his marital rights. No two hillmen ever went to see the same girl at the same time. Abner himself was at fault. He had trespassed on the jeweller's vested rights.

He stood breathing through his open mouth, moistened his lips with his tongue. "You ought to of told me the first day you saw me settin' on the porch waitin' for you—some kind of a hint—" The hopelessness of his plight filled him with despair. "Do you shore 'nuff like him, Nessie?" he cried piteously.

"I—I don't know whether I do or not," shivered the girl.

​"Do you like him better'n you do me?"

The girl shook her head with the tiniest and briefest of shakes.

"Then, fer God's sake, tell him he kain't come no more!"

"Please! Please! I kain't tell him that! I kain't do it, Abner. He's been so nice to me. Not another soul in town ever spoke to me 'cept him." Her eyes filled with tears. "He—he got me books, if—if it hadn't been for him I guess I'd gone plum crazy!" she broke off, biting her lips to control herself.

Abner felt the justice of this. "So you won't send him off?"

Nessie gave her head a little jerky shake, blinked, and turned away to her room.

Abner stood and watched her go down the hall, filled with that sense of profanation which an old rival always inspires in a young lover. For Belshue to come to see Nessie at all was somehow a monstrous thing. As Nessie turned into her room at the end of the hall she seemed to Abner a sort of human sacrifice offered up to Age.

He went back into his own room with his misery in his face and bearing. Tug Beavers looked up anxiously as his friend entered.

"Do any good?" he queried in a low tone.

Abner shook his head.

"She wouldn't go with you—after that!"

"Nuh-uh."

"Why?"

"She's goin' with somebody else."

Tug was shocked.

"Who?"

"Belshue."

"Belshue!"

Abner nodded.

"Well I—be—damn' . . ." A long pause, and Tug continued, "A infidel—why, Abner, that man'll drag her soul straight down to hell, don't she know that?"

"She thinks she can convert him."

​"Convert hell! Don't she know he's the brainiest man in town? Of all little she-fools!"

After a while Tug came out of his amazement and began to prepare for the dance. He laid out all the appurtenances of a dance: tie, clean shirt, cartridges, buttons, automatic, Sunday suit. . . . It was high time he was setting out for the Meredith place, for no one knew what finesse he would require to get away with Mary Lou. In the midst of these preparations he glanced at Abner, who sat humped over on the bed, hands hanging between knees and staring at the straw mat which more or less covered the floor.

"Ain't you goin'?"

"No-ope."

"What you goin' to do?" he asked with concern.

"Don't know—Shallburger's goin' to have a meetin' to-night."

"A meetin'! Is Shallburger some kind of a preacher?"

"Naw, he says he's figgered out a way fer ever'body to live happy an' not work so much," explained Abner vaguely.

"Hell, if a man don't do nothin' he'd nachelly be happy; say, Ab, be independent, git another gal an' come on to the dance."

The very thought of another girl filled Abner with a sense of physical repulsion. "Good Lord—no," he shuddered.

Presently he got up, found his hat, and moved slowly toward the door.

"I'll jest see what Shallburger says—it'll beat settin' here listenin' to—" He nodded bleakly toward Nessie's room and moved out the door.

After her interview with Abner, Nessie Sutton went back to her bedroom a-quiver in every nerve of her body. She did not know what had happened to her. She entered her bare room with a sensation of being tall and giddily poised. She thought of Abner's face, the tones of his voice, the way he held her note in his hand. Back of these dancing pictures was the unhappy duty she must perform. She entered her ​room, went over to her dresser, and stood with her hands on the cheap scarf—she must dress to receive Mr. Belshue. With a deep sigh she went to her trunk, opened it, and stood thinking which of her two dresses to wear. She had two, a revealing lawn of pale blue, open of throat and with sheer sleeves, and a gray travelling dress. As she looked at the gray dress she was moved to swathe herself in it against Belshue, but that would have been absurd for evening wear. The conventions of women always override any impulse toward modesty which may untowardly arise in a particular member of the sex.

Under the gray dress lay a novel which Nessie had been reading. As she picked this up, the contrast between the pure-hearted heroine and her own ambivalent mood dawned on Nessie for the first time. She herself was pure perhaps, but not single-hearted. She was not perfect, impeccable, as was the heroine of the romance in her hands. The hero of the book was a handsome drunken gambler. It was the sort of fiction which flooded the South during a period just preceding the Civil War. All the heroes of this period were idle young men given to drinking, gambling, and venery. These novels, all written by women, represented the only point of view which a woman could take of such a type and still accept him for a husband. They were written straight out of a defensive complex and contained a bitter veracity beneath their high-flown sentimentalism.

Nessie laid out her blue lawn, and still feeling tall and insecurely poised, began taking down her yellow hair.