Evered

by Ben Ames Williams

One of the neighbor women came in that night to sit with Ruth; and Ruth slept a little through the night. John was early abed; he had had no sleep the night before, and he was tired. He sank fathoms deep in slumber; a slumber broken by fitful, unhappy dreams. His own grief for the woman who had been mother to him had been stifled, given no chance for expression, because he had fought to comfort Ruth and to ease his father. The reaction swept over him while he slept; he rested little.

Evered, about nine o’clock, went to the room he and his wife had shared for so many years. He had not, before this, been in the room since she was killed. Some reluctance had held him; he had shunned the spot. But now he was glad to be alone, and when he had shut the door he stood for a moment, looking all about, studying each familiar object, his nerves reacting to faint flicks of pain at the memories that were evoked.

He began to think of what the selectmen had said, of their urgency that he should kill the bull. And he sat down on the edge of the bed and remained there, not moving, for a long time. Once his eye fell on his belt hanging against the wall, with the heavy knife that he used in his butchering in its sheath. He reached out and took down the belt and drew the knife forth and held it in his hands, the same knife that had killed drunken Dave Riggs long ago. A powerful weapon, it would strike a blow like an ax; the handle of bone, the blade heavy and keen and strong. He balanced it between his fingers, and thought of how he had struck it into the neck of Zeke Pitkin’s bull, and how the bull had dropped in midlife and never stirred more. The knife fascinated him; he could not for a long time take his eyes away from it. At the last he reached out and thrust it into its sheath with something like a shudder, strange to see in so strong a man.

Then he undressed and got into bed, the bed he had shared with Mary Evered. He had blown out the lamp; the room was dark. There was a little current of air from the open window. And after a little Evered began to be as lonely as a boy for the first time away from home.

There is in every man, no matter how stern his exterior, a softer side. Sometimes he hides it from all the world; more often his wife gets now and then a glimpse of it. There was a side of Evered which only Mary Evered had known. And she had loved it. When they had come to bed together it always seemed to her that Evered was somehow gentler, kinder. He put away his harshness, as though it were a part he had felt called upon to play before men. The child in him, strong in most men, came to the surface. He was never a man overgiven to caresses, but when they were alone at night together, and he was weary, he would sometimes draw her arm beneath his head as a pillow or take her hand and lift it to rest upon his forehead, while she twined her fingers gently through his hair.

They used to talk together, sometimes far into the night; and though he might have used her bitterly through the day, with caustic tongue and hard, condemning eye, he was never unkind in these moments before they slept. A man the world outside had never seen. It was these nights together which had made life bearable for Mary Evered; and they had been dear to Evered too. How dreadful and appalling, then, was this, his first night alone.

Her shoulder was not there to cradle his sick and weary head; her gentle hand was not there to cool his brow. When he flung an arm across her pillow, where she used to lie, it embraced a gulf of emptiness that seemed immeasurably deep and terrible. After a little, faint perspiration came out upon the man’s forehead. He turned on his right side, in the posture that invited sleep; but at first sleep would not come. His limbs jerked and twitched; his eyelids would not close. He stared sightlessly into the dark. Outside in the night there were faint stirrings and scratchings and movings to and fro; and each one brought him more wide awake than the last. He got up and closed the window to shut them out, and it seemed to him the closed room was filled with her presence. When he lay down again he half fancied he felt her hand upon his hair, and he reached his own hand up to clasp and hold hers, as he had sometimes used to do; but his groping fingers found nothing, and came sickly away again.

How long he lay awake he could not know. When at last he dropped asleep the very act of surrender to sleep seemed to fetch him wide awake again. Waking thus he thought that he held his wife in his arms; he had often wakened in the past to find her there. But as his senses cleared he found that the thing which he held so tenderly against his side was only the pillow on which her head was used to lie.

The man’s nerves jangled and clashed; and he threw the pillow desperately away from him as though he were afraid of it. He sat up in bed; and his pulses pounded and beat till they hurt him like the blows of a hammer. There was no sleep in Evered.

He was still sitting thus, bolt upright, sick and torn and weary, when the gray dawn crept in at last through the window panes.