But the Gnome said, “I have saved up a month of talk since the last stranger came through.” With ease, with simplicity of word, with I know not how much of guile, he gave fragments of his life: how he had lived in this log house always, how his first wife died, how her children were raised by this second wife and married off, how they now enjoyed this second family.
He showed me the other fragment of the hoe-handle. “I broke that over a horse’s head the last time I was drunk. I always get crazy. When I come to, I do not remember anything about it. The last time I fought with my cousin. When I knocked down his horse he drew his knife. I drew this knife. My wife said I fought like a wild hog. I sliced my cousin pretty bad. He skipped the country, for he cut out one of my lungs and two of my ribs. I lost two buckets of blood. It took the doctor a long time to put my insides back.”
From this hour forward he struggled between the luxury of being even more confidential, and the luxury of being cautious like a lynx. I squirmed. Despite his abandon, he was watching me.
I put one hand in my pocket. I found a diversion, a pair of eyeglasses. I had chanced on them in the bushes at Tallulah. The droop of his eyelids as he put them on was exquisite. He paced the floor. I had a review of his appearance. He was like a thin twist of tobacco. He had been burned out by too-sharp whisky. The babies clapped their hands as he strutted. He was like a third-rate Sunday-school teacher in a frock coat in the presence of the infant class. He was glad to keep the glasses, yet asked questions with a double meaning, implying I had stolen them in Atlanta, and fled these one hundred miles. We were gay rogues, and we knew it.
“Get up! Make some coffee and supper!” he shouted to the figure on the bed in the black corner of the cabin. He kept his jaw tight on his pipe, speaking to her in the gnome language. She replied in kind, snorting and muffling her words, without moving lips or tongue, and keeping her teeth on her snuff-stick. She stumbled up, groaning, with both hands on her head. She had once been a woman. She had lived with this thing too long. All the trappings that make for home had grown stale and weird about her. The scraps of rag-carpet on the floor were rat eaten. The red calico window curtains were vilely dirty from the years of dust and the leak of many rains. The benches were battered, unsteady. The door-latch was gone. The door was held in place by a stone. She stood before me, her hair hanging straight across her face or down her collar, or flying about or tied behind in a dreadful knot. She stood before me, but as long as I was in that house she did not look at me, she did not speak to me.
There was no stove. The Gnome said: “Wife don’t like a stove. She had rather cook the way she learned.” We rolled in the back-log for her and coaxed up the embers. We sat at one side of the hearth. We exchanged boastful adventures. She crawled into the fireplace to nurse the corn-bread and coffee and pork to perfection and place the Dutch oven right.
Have you heard your grandmother speak of the Dutch oven? It is a squat kettle which is set in the embers. When it is hot, the biscuit dough is put in and the lid replaced. Slowly the biscuits become ambrosia. Slowly the watching cook is baked.
The Devil was in my host. By his coaxing hospitality he made it seem natural that a woman deadly sick should serve us. The rest of the family could wait. It did not matter if the tiny one cried and pulled the mother’s skirt. She smote it into silence and fear, then carried it to the black corner where the potato planter herded the rest of the babies, helped by King Log, the walrus-headed.
The Gnome said, “I quit drinking ever since I had that fight I told you about. I don’t dare drink. So I take coffee.”
You should have seen him flooding himself with black coffee, drinking from a yellow bowl. I said to myself: “He will surely turn to the consolation of liquor anon. He will beat his wife again. He will drive his children into the woods. This woman must fight the battle for her offspring till her black-snake hair is white. Or maybe that insane knife will go suddenly into her throat. She may die soon with her hair black,—and red.”