WHISKY
It was a wet, gusty night and I had a lonely walk home. By taking the river road, though I hated it, I saved two miles, so I sloshed ahead trying not to think at all. Through the barbed wire fence I could see the racing river. Its black swollen body writhed along with extraordinary swiftness, breathlessly silent, only occasionally making a swishing ripple. I did not enjoy looking at it. I was somehow afraid.
And there, at the end of the river road where I swerved off, a figure stood waiting for me, motionless and enigmatic. I had to meet it or turn back.
It was a quite young girl, unknown to me, with a hood over her head, and with large unhappy eyes.
“My father is very ill,” she said without a word of introduction. “The nurse is frightened. Could you come in and help?”
There was a gaunt house set back from the road, on a little slope. I could see a wan light upstairs.
“The nurse is not scared,” the girl corrected, “but she is nervous. I wish you could come.”
“Of course,” and on my very word she turned and led the way in.
The hall was empty. It had nothing in it except a discouraged oil lamp on a dirty kitchen table. The shadowy stairs were bare. On my left on the ground floor a woman with gray hair and rusty face and red-rimmed eyes shuffled back into the shadows at my entry, a sort of ignoble Niobe.
“That’s my mother,” the grave child explained. And to the retreating slatternly figure the child called, “This man has come to help, Mother,” as if men dropped from the sky.