“I know—I understand,” she whispered. She accepted his fear simply and uncritically.
His hand tightened upon hers desperately. “I’m just a coward, honey, just yeller. I’m afraid of the other fellers; they’ll guy the life out of me. I’ll be everybody’s goat, I know it. She said I would, an’ it’s so. Maybe—maybe I can’t stand up to it any better than that Chapin boy. An’ I’m afraid of goin’ over an’ of gettin’ killed. I want for you to know it all—all I am! But—but it ain’t the first time I’ve stood up and made myself do things I was scared of. I’ve got to go. Oh, Lord! Maybe I’ll pull through all right!”
“Why do you have to go?” Julie cried suddenly, violently. Then like the breaking of a dam her words gushed out, tossing aside the mincing phraseology of her mother’s training, and reverting to the tongue of her mountain people. “What’s the world ever give you that you got to stand up now an’ maybe be killed for it? What’s folks ever done for you or for me that we got to please ’em now? Did they ever do anything for you? They never done one thing for me! My mother an’ my father was good to me—but they’re dead. An’ what’s other folks ever done for us? Ain’t they always crowded us out into the cold an’ slammed the door in our faces? They never let us in to life. They never even knowed we was there. Or if they took notice of us, it was just to knock us out er the road, er maybe stamp on us, or wrench us ’round the way they wanted us to go.”
“That’s God’s truth,” he said slowly.
“Ain’t it always been so?” she rushed on. “Did they ever let you be a real person? Wasn’t they always slappin’ you out into the cold? Even when you was a child, did the other children ever let you in, an’ play with you like they did one another? They never did me.”
“They never did me either,” he answered. “I was the outsider. They always picked on me.”
“They tore my paper doll to pieces when I wasn’t doin’ one thing to anybody, an’ all of ’em tramped it into the snow! Oh my God! It’s been that way with both of us, always. All our lives we was pinched an’ strangled, an’ thrown aside. They didn’t let us do any more’n just cling to the edges of life. An’ then we found one another.” She was crying now, and her words were cut in two by her gasping breath. “We found one another—we found one another, an’ then we found life! But now they open the door and say, ‘Come on in.’ Now they got a use for you. Now they’ll let you stand up an’ git killed for ’em. They never opened the door to let you into life, but they’ve opened it up wide for you for death! No,” she cried wildly, “you don’t owe folks nothin’! They never give us life—we’ve found life for ourselves together! An’ now, just as we found it, they’d snatch hit away! You don’t have to go!
“You don’t have to go, do you?” she repeated.
He looked at her, dazzled by the flaming passion of her face. “We—we could go away an’ hide somewheres together,” he ventured, uncertainly.
She stared back at him.