this, Jack,” she said after a while. “This afternoon, when I was running—”
“I know. But what can we do?”
“You felt it too, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But maybe not as much. When I had to go up there and hide.”
“It will always be that same way—that same feeling.”
“Yes. I know. We’ve got to go away.”
She told me a little about him that night, about how they happened to be married and how it was before they came to the swamp.
“It was during the war, Jack. I was living in a little town with my father. He’s a minister and we’d always lived in a succession of little towns like that, and during the war they were heartbreaking in a way, they were so lonely. You were probably overseas and don’t know what they were like with all the young men gone. Even the ones who were Four-F went away to work in shipyards and things like that. I was working in the office of a lumberyard and he came to work there. That was the first time I saw him. He was about thirty-five, I guess, and I was only twenty, but I was attracted to him in some way, partly because of the loneliness, I guess, and the fact that I knew he was lonely too. He didn’t look nearly so old then and was rather good-looking. I used to wonder why a man that age and as well educated as he was would be doing common labor around the lumberyard, and I guess I built up quite a mystery about him. Girls do that, you know. After a while we began to go to movies and things like that.
“It was about a week before we were going to be married that it happened. We were sitting in the drugstore drinking a Coke one night after the movies when a man came in, a man I’d never seen around town before and who looked like a sawmill hand or laborer, in overalls, and all of a sudden I noticed how Roger—he had another name then—how Roger was looking at him. And when the man happened to face in our direction Roger turned his head suddenly, pretending to look for something in his coat. That night we left town on the bus. He didn’t explain anything; he just said he was going and that I didn’t have to, he wouldn’t expect it of me. But I went. I was in love with him then. We were married in another town.
“It was that way for years. I knew after the first time that he was running from something, and it wasn’t just that man, because another time it was a different one he saw. It was an awful way to live, worse than the way my father had always moved around from church to church, but I didn’t mind too much. It was only after we moved up here that he began to go to pieces like that and drink. Before that he was always good to me. But now that thing has been preying on his mind so long he’s changed and isn’t like he used to be at all. The way he looks sometimes—almost as if he thinks people are hiding out there in the trees trying to catch up with him.…”
* * *
I went back to town in the early morning, leaving the boat and trailer hidden in the underbrush near the end of the slough because there was no question any more about not going back. Louise hadn’t come home, but there was a letter from her. They were going to stay another week, she said, and couldn’t I send her a hundred dollars? I poured a big drink and sat looking at the letter in the kitchen while it grew light outside and the heat began.
My pay check was in the office and I endorsed it and sent it to her. The drink had made me lightheaded because I hadn’t eaten anything for so long, and I was conscious of the wild thought that if I could keep on sending her enough money maybe she’d never come back. In sickness and in health, I thought, looking out the post-office door at the sun blasting into the street.
Buford said nothing about the money he knew I owed him, the pay-off from Abbie Bell. “I turned that kid loose,” he said. “I told him to get out of town, and if he ever came back we’d throw away the key.”