Teeftallow/Chapter 23

THE forthright removal of Peck Bradley from the scene of his cleverly planned but pernicious activities was considered an unqualified moral triumph in Irontown, and out of the sweet soil of the lynching flowered other blossoms of practical morality. For example, there was Caly Stegall, who advertised soft drinks and sold hard ones. It had been impossible to fix the misdemeanour of bootlegging upon Mr. Stegall, so many loopholes had the law, but about two weeks after Peck Bradley's sudden demise, a group of public-spirited citizens visited Stegall's home at midnight, rode him out of town on a rail and told him to stay out. He did, and that surely was another good riddance.

Then there were certain women in Irontown whose reputations were not the most honest, but every legal tribunal knows how difficult it is to prove such offences positively. These technicalities were cut short by a delegation of citizens waiting on the offenders. One Negro woman was stripped and horse-whipped as an example; the others fled; a commendable result.

Gambling places were raided, oddly enough by the very men who once had whiled away their time in them. In short, Irontown was in the midst of one of those acute moral reforms which sometimes seize upon a town, a county, a state, or even the great American nation as a whole; and it was working great observable good, as it often does.

As party to these reprisals Abner Teeftallow felt certain qualms in helping rid Irontown of bootleggers, gamblers, and women of ill repute, when he remembered that at irregular intervals he had gambled with Linters and had ​bought whisky from Stegall. As for the women, they were passive, shame-faced creatures, the pursued and not the pursuing. Now for the men of Irontown to drive these women out of their homes because they themselves had enjoyed whatever poor gifts the demireps had to offer—there was something grotesque and sardonic about it. It disturbed Abner, as youth must always be disturbed until custom and wont have lent their acquiescence to the odd face of human conduct.

At times the teamster was minded to stay away from these outbursts of village morality, but there was an excitement and go about them which always sucked him in. Then, too, the raids were in perfect consonance with the run of village taste; they were of a stripe with the novels they read, the melodramas produced at the commencement exercises of the village school, with the chromos of Custer's Last Charge and of a woman in a nightgown clinging to a cross in a stormy sea, which decorated the village walls, and with the hymns about the shedding of blood which constantly resounded in the village churches. In brief, they were so exactly of a piece with Irontown culture that the wonder was not that they started but that they had not always been.

It was Abner's fortune, or misfortune, to be sufficiently sensitive to feel this jangle in the village life. At times he tried to make Nessie see his point of view.

"How can it be right," he would argue, "for the boys to buy a man's liquor during the day, not pay him fer it, an' then chase him out of town that night?"

Nessie, notwithstanding her own violation of the village code, still reflected that code with perhaps an unequalled clarity.

"Abner," she replied gravely, "two wrongs don't make a right."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Just because the boys did wrong to buy Stegall's whisky, that doesn't keep 'em from doing right by driving him out ​of town. They can repent, I reckon. After all, nobody would get to Heaven if we couldn't repent." A melancholy tone came into Nessie's voice as she stared out of her window at a rectangular section of the shabby, unrelenting village outside.

Abner knew very well of what she was thinking. Their talk had been liable to these interruptions since the first of their sudden and passionate indiscretions. The most remote subjects brought up the condemnation under which they lived.

"I think the boys ort to of paid Stegall for his whisky before they rode him out of town," stated Abner briefly, and the subject was dropped.

Youth and girl sat silently in the hot little room filled with the same thought but moved by curiously opposed impulses. Abner was a little weary of this rather pointless sitting in the room which they had substituted for the swing on the piazza as less likely to give rise to gossip. Nessie, on the other hand, was nervously anxious for Abner to remain with her. She sat brooding unhappily for several moments and finally said, "I had such a dreadful dream last night; I have it every night."

"The same dream?"

"Nearly the same dream."

Abner felt his first tinge of interest in their afternoon tête-à-tête—dreams touched his hill superstition.

"That must mean somethin'. What kind of a dream was it?"

"Every time I go to sleep it seems like I walk through a big open door, but the minute I get through, the door disappears. I want to go back, but there is no way to get back, the door is gone. That doesn't sound awful, Abner, but oh, it feels awful. It seems to me I would give anything in this whole worl' to get back through that door, but there isn't any door; there simply isn't any. . . ." The girl was painfully moved at the mere recital of her dream.

Abner stared at her with foreboding.

​"What does it mean?"

"My dream book says to dream of a door means a journey or a new acquaintance."

"A journey or a new acquaintance," repeated Abner, touched by man's age-old sense of the mysterious fore-warnings bound up in dreams. "I wonder who it could be, or where you are going?"

Nessie exhaled a long breath. "I don't know. . . ."

They remained silent another space. Abner made an involuntary movement to get up from his chair but controlled it.

"Abner," interrupted the girl in a troubled tone.

"Yes?"

"Do you think"—she lowered her voice—"anybody knows about—us?"

Abner stopped the slight restless movements of his feet and hands and looked at her fixedly.

"No—why?"

"Well . . . I don't know . . . the way folks look at me . . . maybe I imagine it."

"I guess you must. Who?"

"O-oh, ever'body—Zed Parrum for one. He's been in the Grand two or three times lately pretendin' to want to buy ribbin—he keeps lookin' at me—I b'lieve he thinks somethin'. . . ." The girl heaved a deep sigh and searched the face of her lover.

"Zed Parrum," repeated Abner blankly. "What has he got to do with—"

"Abner," interrupted Nessie, "look at me and answer a question as you hope to save your soul. Do you promise?"

Her intensity filled Abner with misgivings.

"Y-es, what is it?"

She lowered her voice to a bare whisper.

"Abner, do I look like a—a—bad woman?"

The question shocked the teamster.

"Why, no! No! Nessie, you look like the dearest, sweetest—"

​The girl gave a little shiver, arose, walked over to her wavering mirror and stood for half a minute perusing her dark-circled eyes. At last she turned away with a shake of her head.

"Well—no matter how I look—"

Abner made a gesture of protest. "Don't say that, don't!" He got up from his chair, went over to her and put his arms about her. He led her back to the chair and drew her down on his lap, snuggling her face under his neck and leaning his cheek on her pale hair.

"Nessie, you know you are not," he protested in a whisper. "You know we love each other. It ain't wrong for us to love each other?"

She whispered sadly in his ear, "You know it is, Abner—we ain't married. . . ."

Abner became still again, holding the girl in his arms, silently agreeing with her. In the eyes of the village, therefore in his own eyes, a marriage ceremony was of far more importance in a bodily union than love. Love and passion, he felt, were dubious things at best; his own for Nessie had faded away as mysteriously as it had arisen. He had reached the centrifugal moment of his honeymoon. The girl in his arms no longer moved his senses, and this brought a feeling of finality as if he could never be attracted to her again. He was aware that one of her elbows was uncomfortably sharp against his side; that she weighed one hundred and thirty pounds; that the room was small and hot; that her cheeks were disagreeably damp from tears . . . he wished he were at the garage.

And this was the moment when the girl most needed him; when she felt friendless and hopeless with the hands of all the village turned against her. She wanted Abner to stay with her at this moment because she could feel his indifference and it terrified her. She was not sure he would come back, once she let him go. Neither felt for the other any mental or artistic sympathy; simply their physical needs; and now that Nessie had assuaged that in her lover, she had lost him. ​And thus together they stamped hill morality as irrevocably right in the hills.

The two lovers, silent and unhappy in this divided embrace, pursued their own thoughts to troubled inconclusions. At last the girl asked, "You didn't tell Zed Parrum, did you, Abner?"

A certain dismay went through Abner and he answered without conviction, "Good Lord, Nessie, you know I wouldn't tell nobody!"

At his tone she sat upright in his lap and looked at him with frightened circled eyes.

"What did you do?" she asked in a whisper.

"Why—nuthin' . . ."

"Yes, you did."

"Well," began Abner unwillingly, "the other day me an' Zed was eatin' our lunches out on the dump and I ast him if Peck Bradley put up a fight when the men went to pull him out of the lock-up. . . ."

"Ye-es?" queried Nessie, studying Abner's face with apprehension.

"He said, wasn't I there. I said no. He ast where I was. I said here at home. He ast whyn't I come. At first I said I forgot it. He laughed and said, 'Forgot hell—you was doin' somethin' else.'"

What little colour there was in the milliner's face vanished, her eyes widened.

"Then you told him!" she gasped.

"Good Lord, no. I spoke up like a man an' told him I stayed at home when I got good an' ready, and it wasn't none of his damn business!"

Nessie drew a breath of horror. "Oh, you told him! You told him! And now he knows! Ever'body knows! O-oh!" She arose in a sort of trance of terror and moved to the middle of the room, conveying a strange impression that she was utterly lost.

"For God's sake, Nessie, don't take on like that!" urged Abner in an anxious but somewhat irritated undertone.

​"Oh me! Oh me!" She pulled her fingers through one another, looking about as if to find a way out of the troubles that encompassed her. Her eyes lighted on the teamster almost as if she had never seen him before. She wet her lips.

"Abner," she whispered, "will you marry me?"

At the expression that came over his face she put up her hands and involuntarily dropped on her knees before him.

"Oh, Abner, Abner, please, ple-e-a-s-e, if you don't, I'm lost, I'm lost. . . ."

At his instinctive step backward her forearms settled on the floor and her head upon them. Her bright hair sagged forward in an awkward manner as she sobbed on her arms. To Abner there was something painful and pitiful, yet profoundly repellent, in the scene. In Nessie's utter ignorance she had selected the most inopportune of all moments to make a plea of marriage to her lover—the moment of satiety.

The teamster mumbled something about not making enough money to get married—two dollars a day—somehow he spent it all as it was. . . .

Nessie got slowly to her feet with tear-stained face, apparently not aware that she had just proposed marriage in utter abasement and had been clumsily rebuffed. Her mind really was not on marriage at all, but was searching fearfully for away out of her threatened exposure. She thought of another plan.

"Abner, you haven't told anybody but Zed, have you?"

"Good God, no!"

"Well, lissen—go to Zed and beg him not to tell, tell him you—you'll give him a—a hunderd dollars never to tell it. I got that much saved up in the bank. Tell him— Oh, but I know he will tell!" She put her hands over her eyes and blindfolded herself in the hot little room.

"Lissen," said Abner hopefully, "all of us fellers, the whole railroad outfit, is agoin' to move out of Arntown an' camp about sixteen miles west o' here—then you'll be shut of Zed."

​Nessie removed her hands and looked at her lover with a ghastly face.

"Oh, Abner, if just one man at the other end of the county knows it, he'll tell ever'body—ever'body. . . ." She shook her head with renewed tears silently running down her cheeks.

This was another truth which Abner knew only too well. The more appalling the injury which the hill folk could inflict on a woman, the more eagerly they bandied such defamation from tongue to tongue. But this injury was inflicted impersonally. It was merely interesting human gossip, and obscene—to their liking. It palliated their own repressions. Out of all the endless tongues that would wag perhaps not a dozen would realize that a woman's life was withering beneath their attacks. They had not imagination enough for that.

After a long pause, Abner could find nothing better than to repeat, "Well, we're goin' to move, an' that's somethin'."

"Are you going too?" she asked lifelessly.

"Why—yes, I guess so."

At the moment this seemed to make little difference to either of them.

"When?"

"Day after t'morrow."

The girl looked at Abner with exhausted eyes.

"Well—I don't know what I'll do. . . . You may go now—to the garage, wherever you want to go. You've been in a fidget to get away ever sence you come in. . . . I don't guess I ort to have kep' you."

She stopped speaking, looking at Abner as a soldier might look upon a battlefield which he has lost. Questions floated painfully before her mind, "if she had done this . . . or that . . . or the other. . . ." But, of course, the profound mistake back of it all was having given herself through impulse, tenderness, passion, and love. She had profoundly transgressed the code of village morals; that is to say, she had placed herself in the position of a vic​tim of sharp practice, of one who gave much and received nothing. And that was something the village could never forgive.

Abner wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say. He turned and went silently out into the hallway, which was slightly cooler than Nessie's own room. Apart from his embarrassment, he was genuinely glad to be away from her. He walked as noiselessly as he could down the hallway and down the stairs.

At the bottom of the steps he saw, with a certain apprehension, Miss Scovell stationed with cap and duster. She had a look of having been standing there for an hour or more. Now she said with a kind of grim solemnity, "You stay up in yore room a good deal, Abner."

Abner was so disconcerted that all he could do was to answer with a bluntness he did not feel, "Well—it's my room."

Miss Scovell disregarded this. "Was you talkin' to somebody up there?—I thought I heard you talkin'."

"I guess I was talkin' to myse'f." Abner was so confused he could hardly continue down the steps past the woman into the street.

In her room above, Nessie listened with a bloodless face to this conversation which floated up the hallway.