A good woman

by Louis Bromfield

“I want to see the twins the first thing.”

“I’ll come for you.”

He had resolved that his father was not to come to the stable. He saw that Emma hadn’t even told his father that he wasn’t living with his wife. The stable had suddenly become to him a kind of temple, a place dedicated to that part of him which had escaped. There were things there which his father wouldn’t understand, and could only defile. The stable belonged to him alone. It was apart from all the others—his father, his mother, Naomi, Uncle Elmer and Aunt Mabelle.

Emma was standing before Naomi, holding her coat open, so that she might examine the dress underneath. She was saying, “You must come up some afternoon, Naomi, and I’ll help you make the dress right. It hangs all wrong at the back, and it’s all bunchy around the armholes. You could make it all right, but, as it is, it’s ... it’s sort of funny-looking.”

All the way back to the Flats neither of them spoke at all: Philip, because there was a black anger and rebellion burning in him, and Naomi, because if she had tried to speak, she would have wept. She felt as though she were dead, as if in a world made up of Philip and his father and Emma she no longer had any existence. She was only a burden who annoyed them all. And the dress ... it was only sort of “funny-looking.”

He left Naomi at the door of the flat with an abrupt “good-night.” It was after midnight, and the moon was rising behind the hill crowned by Shane’s Castle, throwing a blue light on the mist that hung above the Flats. In the far distance the mist was all rosy with the light from four new furnaces that had begun once more to work. The strike was slipping slowly into defeat, and he understood that it meant nothing to him any longer. He had almost forgotten Krylenko.

As he passed through the rusted gates of the park, there drifted toward him from among the trunks of the dead trees, a faint, pungent odor that was hauntingly familiar and, as he climbed the drive between the dead trees, it grew stronger and stronger, until at last he recognized, in a sudden flash of memory which brought back all the hot panorama of the lake and the forest at Megambo, that it was the smell of gunpowder, the smell that clung to his rifle when he had stood there by the barricade beside Lady Millicent killing those poor niggers. It was a faint, ghostly smell that sometimes died away altogether and sometimes came in strong waves on a warm breeze filled with the dampness of the melting snow.

At the top of the hill, the big house lay dead and blind, without a sign of life, and, as he turned the corner, he saw that near the stable lay the remnants of a fire which had burnt to a heap of embers. His foot touched something that was wet and slippery. He looked down to discover a great stain of black on the snow. For a moment he stared at the stain, fascinated, and suddenly he knew what it was. It was a great stain of blood.

In the distance, among the trees, he discerned a light, and after a moment he discovered a little group of men ... three or four ... carrying a lantern, which they held high from time to time, as if searching for something. And then, all at once, as he moved forward again, he almost stepped upon a woman who lay in the snow at the entrance to the rotting arbor covered with the vines of the dying wistaria. She lay face down with one arm above her head in a posture that filled him for a moment with a sense of having lived through this same experience before, of having seen this same woman lying face down ... dead ... for she was unmistakably dead. He knelt beside her, and, turning the body on its side, he remembered suddenly. She lay like the black virgin they had found dead across the path in the tall grass at Megambo ... the one they had left to the leopards.

Trembling, he peered at the white face in the moonlight. The woman was young, and across one side of the face there was a little trickle of blood that came from a hole in the temple. She was dressed in rags, and her feet were wrapped in rolls of sacking. She was the wife or daughter of some striker. It occurred to him suddenly that there was something pitifully lonely in the sight of the body left there, forgotten, by the embers in the dead park; it had the strangest effect upon him. He rose and tried to call to the little group of searchers, but no sound came from his throat, and he began suddenly to cry. Leaning against one of the pillars of the arbor, he waited until his body had ceased to tremble. It was a strange, confused feeling, as if the whole spectacle of humanity were suddenly revealed in all its pathos, its meanness, its grandeur, and its cruelty. It was a brilliant flash of understanding, but it passed almost at once, leaving him weak and sick. And then, after a moment, he found his voice again, and shouted. The little party halted, and looked about, and he shouted a second time. Then they came toward him, and he saw that two of them carried shotguns and that one of them was McTavish.