The lie she had told was the foundation stone, the first of the foundation stones. A tower was to be built, a tall tower on which she could stand, from the ramparts of which she could look down into a world created by herself, by her own mind. If her mind was really what Lillian, the teachers in the school, all the others, had said she would use it, it would become the tool which in her hands, would force stone after stone into its place in her tower.
In the Edgley house May had a room of her own, a tiny room at the back of the house and there was one window looking down into the field, that every spring and fall became a swamp. In the winter sometimes it was covered with ice and boys came there to skate. On the evening she had told Maud Welliver the great lie—recreated the incident in the wood with Jerome Hadley—she hurried home and went up to her room and, pulling a chair to the window, sat down. What a thing she had done! The encounter with Jerome Hadley in the wood had been terrible—she had been unable to think about it, did not dare to think about it, and trying not to think had almost upset her reason.
And now it was gone. The whole thing had really never happened. What had happened was this other thing, or something like that, something no one knew about. There had really been an attempt at murder. May sat by the window and smiled sadly. “I stretched it a little,” she thought. “Of course I stretched it, but what was the use trying to tell what happened. I couldn’t make it understood. I can’t understand it myself.”
All through the weeks that had passed since that day in the wood May had been obsessed by the notion that she was unclean, physically unclean. Doing the housework she wore calico dresses—she had several of them and two or three times a day she changed her dress and the soiled dress she could not leave hanging in a closet until washday but washed the dress at once and hung it on a line in the back yard. The wind blowing through it gave her a comforting feeling.
The Edgleys had no bathroom or bathtub. Few people in towns in her day owned any such luxurious appendages to life. And a washtub was kept in the woodshed by the kitchen door and what baths were taken were taken in the tub. It was a ceremony that did not often occur in the family, and when it did occur the tub was filled from the cistern and set in the sun to warm. Then it was carried into the shed. The candidate for cleanliness went into the shed and closed the door. In the winter the ceremony took place in the kitchen and Ma Edgley came at the last moment and poured a kettle of boiling water into the cold water in the tub. In the summer in the shed that was not necessary. The bather undressed and put his clothes about, on the piles of wood, and there was a great splashing.
During that summer May took a bath every afternoon, but did not bother to put the water out in the sun. How good it felt to have it cold! Often when there was no one about, she filled the tub and got into it again before going to bed. Her small body, dark and strong, sank into the cold water and she took strong soap and scrubbed her legs, her breasts, her neck where Jerome Hadley’s kisses had alighted. Her neck and breasts she wished she could scrub quite away.
Her body was strong and wiry. All the Edgleys, even Ma Edgley, had been strong. They were all, except May, large people and in her the family strength seemed to have concentrated. She was never physically weary and after the time of her intensive thinking began, and when she often slept little at night her body seemed to grow constantly stronger. Her breasts grew larger and her figure changed slightly. It grew less boyish. She was becoming a woman.
After the telling of the lie, May’s body became for a time no more than a tree growing in a forest through which she walked. It was something through which life made itself manifest; it was a house within which she lived, a house, in which, and in spite of the enmity of the town, life went on. “I’m not dead like those who die while their bodies are still alive,” May thought, and there was intense comfort in the thought.