Stories of Erskine Caldwell Page 8

  “I just got into town on an important trip,” Snacker said huskily, “and I’ve got to find Miss Hampton.”

  “Which Miss Hampton?” the maid asked. “There’s a heap of young Hampton girls in Saunderstown. Don’t none of them live here, but they live in all other directions.”

  Snacker felt around in his pants pocket. He slipped another dime into the Negro girl’s hand when she was not looking. He was down to thirty-five cents.

  “I don’t know her first name,” Snacker said, “but I’ve got an important message for her, anyway. She ought to be the prettiest one of them all.”

  “Most of the young Hampton girls are good-looking,” the Negro maid said. “I don’t know exactly —”

  “The best-looking one there is,” Snacker urged.

  “I’ll bet you mean Miss Sally Hampton,” she said quickly. “She’s mighty pretty.”

  “Where does she live?”

  The maid went to the corner of the porch and pointed down the street. There were about four or five turns to make, and the house was three stories and painted white. Snacker forgot all about the turns to make, but he kept his eyes open for the three-story white house.

  When he got to the one which he was certain the Negro maid had described, he ran up the steps and was about to ring the bell at the door. Before he could ring it, he heard someone at the end of the porch get up and come toward him. The porch was dark, and the street lights were too faint to help much.

  “I’m calling on Miss Sally Hampton,” Snacker said.

  “You are? That’s funny.”

  “Why is it funny?” Snacker asked.

  “Because I’m Sally Hampton. But — but who are you?”

  “Snacker,” he said. “I mean — I mean — Snacker. But my name is — I’m Russell Sherman. I’m — I’m Snacker.”

  “And you came to see me?” the girl asked.

  “All the way from Forrest Grove Academy — I mean — yes. That’s what I came for. I came to see you.”

  “Did you bring a message from somebody I know, or did somebody send you for something, or —?”

  “Not exactly,” Snacker said, peering at her intently in the faint street light. “I just came to see you because some fellows told me you were —”

  “But I don’t know a single person at Forrest Grove,” she said. “You must be mistaken. I know lots of boys at Riverside, but I never met anybody from your school.”

  “We beat them 21 to 0 last week,” Snacker said. “If Chuck Harris hadn’t got knocked out, we would have beat them more than that. I played the last quarter when Chuck got hurt and had to leave the game.”

  “And you came all the way from Forrest Grove to tell me that?” she asked, laughing a little.

  “No, not exactly,” Snacker said. “But it’s got something to do with it. We’re having a banquet tomorrow night, because we always celebrate the end of the football season with a lot to eat.”

  “Are you going to the banquet?” Sally asked him.

  “You bet!” Snacker said. “I mean — well, I’d like to go. Would you?”

  “Me?”

  “Sally Hampton,” he said, nodding his head jerkily, “I thought you might like to go. That’s why I came over to Saunderstown to ask you.”

  “I don’t know,” she said uneasily. “Mother might not like for me to go. And, besides, I don’t know you.”

  “I’m Snacker,” he said. “It would be all right for you to go with me.”

  She laughed.

  “Maybe if you knew someone I know — Mother might let me. Do you know Ralph Carroll at Riverside? He plays on the football team.”

  “Sure, I know him,” Snacker said. “He was in the line against me Thanksgiving Day, in the last quarter.”

  “I’ll go ask Mother,” Sally said. “She might let me go.”

  She went into the house and Snacker sat down in the swing to wait for her to come back and tell him. She was gone a long time. Snacker thought for a while that she had used that as an excuse to get away from him. It was nearly ten minutes before she came back to the porch. He jumped up to meet her.

  “I’ve got a date for tomorrow night,” Sally said.

  “Aw, gee-my-nettie!” Snacker said.

  She sat down in the swing, at one end. Snacker sat down beside her.

  “But I think I’ll break it and go to Forrest Grove,” she said, looking at him a little. “Mother says it will be all right. She’ll take me over, and we’ll stay at the hotel.”

  “Gee-my-nettie!” Snacker said. “Do you mean it?”

  “Of course,” Sally said, rocking the swing.

  “And you’ll go with me to the banquet?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Well,” Snacker said, “I guess I’ll have to be going.”

  “So soon?” she said.

  “It’s getting pretty late for a football player to be up,” he said. “We don’t break training, in earnest, till tomorrow night.”

  She got up and went with him to the steps. She held out her hand.

  “Good night, Mr. —”

  “Snacker,” he said.

  “Good night, Snacker,” she said.

  “I’ll come for you at the hotel at nine o’clock sharp tomorrow night,” he said.

  He backed down the steps. He was trying to see her in the flashes of the street light when she moved. He had backed almost to the gate and still had not seen her plainly.

  It was between nine and ten o’clock when he got back to the depot. A Negro porter was sweeping out the waiting room. The restaurant across the street was still open, and Snacker went over to it and ordered a sliced-chicken sandwich and a glass of milk. When he paid for it, he did not bother to think if he had any money left.

  When he got back to the depot, the lights had been turned off. He went into the waiting room and sat down on a bench. In a few minutes the porter came along and locked the doors. The next train to Forrest Grove would not leave until nine-thirty the next morning.

  After Snacker had taken off his coat and spread it over him, he closed his eyes and, because he was so tired, he dropped off to sleep even before he could think about the football banquet the next night.

  It was late the next afternoon when Snacker got back to Forrest Grove. On his way across the campus to the dormitory he saw Tom and Pete coming across the Yard from the gym. They waved at him and cut across the campus to meet him.

  “Where’ve you been ever since yesterday noon?” Pete asked anxiously. “We were awfully scared something had happened to you. I thought you might have taken it a little too hard — you know, about the banquet tonight in the gym. I sure am glad to see you, Snacker. Are you all right?”

  “Took what too hard?” Snacker said.

  “You know, Snacker,” Pete said; “about the banquet tonight, and getting cut out of going, and all that. All the fellows feel sorry about it. They’d give anything to have you there, but you know how hard it is to get rules changed. But next year we’ll be looking for you.”

  Tom put his arm around Snacker’s shoulder and nodded sympathetically.

  “We’ll be seeing you some other time, Snacker,” he said. “Don’t forget to come out for basketball practice next Monday. Coach has posted the call, and he wants all men out Monday. We ought to have a fine basketball team this year, and I hope you make the squad, Snacker.”

  Before he could say anything to them, they had turned and gone towards the study hall. Snacker started to call them back, but they appeared to be in a hurry to get away. By the way they acted, Snacker was afraid his name had been posted for the doorkeeper to keep him out of the banquet room that night. He went to the notice board, and to the banquet-hall door, but he could not find anything like that posted. He climbed the dormitory stairs to the third floor on a run. He was in a hurry to begin getting ready for the banquet.

  That evening at ten after eight Snacker could not sit still another minute, so he left his room and started to the hotel after Sally Hampton.
When he reached Pete’s room, he saw Pete and Tom brushing their hair and straightening their ties. When he passed, they would not look his way at all.

  Sally and her mother were in the lobby of the hotel when Snacker got there at a few minutes to nine. He had waited outside as long as he could stand it, and then he had rushed into the lobby looking for Sally. There were girls everywhere. Fellows were rushing in and out of the hotel every second or so, trying to find violets, or something or other, at the last minute. Snacker saw Jack Phillips, but both of them were too excited to recognize each other then.

  When Snacker saw Sally for the first time, in full view and in the strong light of the hotel lobby, he was not certain who she was. When she smiled at him, he rushed up to her and tried to recognize her. Then he was certain, and he saw that Tom and Pete and Jack Phillips knew what they were talking about when they had said she was the prettiest girl in the state. The other fellows in the lobby turned around and looked at her, and even when they were talking to their own girls, they could not keep their eyes off her. Nobody appeared to notice Snacker.

  When they got to the banquet hall, the doorkeeper did not even look at Snacker. His eyes followed Sally Hampton as long as she was within sight. Snacker felt better once he was inside the hall.

  It was not until the first course had been served that anybody took his eyes off Sally long enough to recognize Snacker. Pete saw him first. He dropped his spoon into his plate, and the soup splashed all over the front of his clothes. Pete’s girl nudged him with her elbow, but Pete continued to stare first at Snacker and then at Sally. His lips were moving all the time as if he were saying to himself: “For gosh sakes! That’s Snacker!”

  After nearly a quarter of an hour, Pete called across the table to Jack Phillips, and Jack began to stare too. When the other fellows caught on to what had happened, they began to strain their necks to see Snacker and the girl beside him. The other girls fell back into themselves, or something, because most of them kept their heads turned in the other direction. Up at the head of the table, at the captain’s seat, Chuck Harris was glaring down at Snacker. The girl beside him, Frances Harper, nudged him with her elbow every once in a while, but he did not pay any attention to her. He looked for a while as if he might at any moment pick up a plate of something and hurl it down the table at Snacker.

  Sally Hampton was having the best time of all. The fellows all around were trying to talk to her at the same time. Snacker finished up each course as it was laid before him. He did not stop to talk or to look around at anybody at the table until the final course had been served.

  On the way out, when it was after eleven o’clock, Snacker got an awful hard kick in the rear. When he turned around to see who had done it, Chuck Harris and Frances Harper were glaring at him. Snacker wanted to stop and ask Chuck what he had kicked him like that for, but he had to see Sally back to the hotel and he did not want to waste any time.

  He left Sally in the hotel lobby and went back across the campus to the dormitory. It looked as if most of the other fellows had hurried back too, because the doorway and lower hall were jammed. Somebody caught Snacker’s arm and jerked him inside.

  “What’s the matter with you, Froggy?” Snacker asked in surprise.

  Froggy dragged him towards the stairway.

  “What’s the matter!” Froggy repeated. “I want to know what’s the matter with you! You brought the prettiest girl in the state to the banquet and sat there all night without saying a word to her!”

  “Well, gee-my-nettie, Froggy,” Snacker said, “I just had to get something to eat! I played on the scrubs all season, and a full quarter in the Riverside game besides, and I was so hungry I didn’t know what to do. All I’ve had to eat since yesterday morning was two sliced-chicken sandwiches and a couple glasses of milk. I just had to eat, Froggy.”

  Pete took Snacker by the arm and pushed him up the stairway. When they had got away from the crowd downstairs, Pete began slapping Snacker on the back. On the way to Pete’s room, Snacker kept on trying to tell them that he was nearly starved and just had to eat.

  Tom and Jack Phillips were waiting for them at the door. Before any of the other fellows could come up from downstairs to hear Snacker tell how it all had happened, Pete pushed him inside the room with Tom and Jack. They locked the door with the key and shoved the thumb bolt all the way across the slot.

  (First published in Cosmopolitan)

  The Empty Room

  THE FIRST TIME I saw her was something more than a year after they had become married. The funeral was over and all the people had left and we were in the house alone. There was nothing I could say to her, and she had not spoken since the morning before. She and Finley had been married only a little more than a year, and she was still far from being twenty. Her body was in the beauty of girlhood, but she was only a child.

  She had sat by the window, looking out at the gathering dusk until late in the evening, and night was coming. I had not turned on the lights, and she had not moved from her chair for several hours. From where I was, I could see her darkly framed profile motionless against the gray evening like an ebony cameo. It was then that I knew that there could be beauty even in sorrow.

  Finley was the only brother I had ever had, and before his death he was the only kinsman I had left in the world, and now she was his widow.

  Her name was Thomasine, but I had not yet called her by it. I had not become used to it, and there is something about an unfamiliar name that guards itself against a stranger’s thoughtless intrusion. When the time came for me to call her by her name, I knew I would be speaking a sound that was hers alone.

  I was a stranger in the house and we had not yet spoken to each other. Finley had been her husband, and my brother, and I was not then certain what our relationship became thereby. I knew, though, that we could not for long stay in the house alone without an understanding of her place and mine becoming clear.

  The twilight was chill, and the dark room was an expanding void, receding into its wall-less immensity. Her profile was becoming softer as the gray dusk fell away to the obscurity of night. The walls retreated and the room became a place made without them. The room was immense and her profile against the gray dusk melted into the growing darkness of the house.

  While she sat across the room she had not fully realized her loneliness. The curve of her head and shoulders drooped with the enveloping shadows, but she was not thinking of even her own presence. Finley had been dead such a short time.

  When she got up to go, I got up also, and walked across the room towards her. I went to her side and stood at arm’s length from her, but the distance between us could only have been measured by the bounds of the room’s infinite space. I wished to put my arms around her and comfort her as I would have comforted the one I loved, but she was Finley’s widow, and the room with its walls made distance immeasurable. The room in which we stood was hollow and wide, and it swam in the darkness of its vast space. A spark from a flint would have struck us blind with the intensity of its light, and the certain conflagration would have consumed us to ashes.

  Before I came to the house I had given no thought to a girl whose name would be Thomasine, and now she was my brother’s widow.

  Some of the flowers in the room had curled for the night, but petals from the roses fell gently to the floor.

  Suddenly she whispered, turning in the darkness towards me.

  “Did you feed Finley’s rabbits tonight?”

  “Yes, I fed them,” I told her. “I gave them all they can eat. They have everything they want for the night.”

  Her hair had fallen over her shoulders, boiling thickly about her head. Her hair was citrus color, and it strangely matched the darkness of the room and the blackness of her clothes. Its color made her sorrow more uncomfortable, because hers was the head that bowed the deepest in the darkness of the immense room. When I stared at the inky blackness of the walls not within sight, I could somehow see the quickness of her citrus hair tousled
on my brother’s chest while he kissed the smoothness of her profile and caressed the softness of her limbs. The beauty and richness of their year of love was yielding, though slowly, to the expanding darkness. It was in the darkness of the hollow room that I was able to believe in the finality of death, and to believe the sorrow I felt in her heart. Lovers for a year cannot believe the finality of death, and she least among them. I wished to tell her all I knew of it, but my words would have told only the triviality. Her love was not to be confused with death, and she would not have wished to understand it.

  It was then to be the beginning of night.

  I could not see her go, but I felt her leave the chair by the window. I walked behind her, touching the unfamiliar furniture, and guiding myself through the room and around it time after time by the direction of the citrus scent of her hair.

  She stopped then, and I realized that I was in the bedroom. I found myself standing in the doorway knowing only one direction, and that was the fragrant citrus scent which came from her hair. When she went from corner to corner, I stood in the doorway of the room waiting for her to speak, for a word to send me away until morning. If there was anything else she wished, or if there was nothing I could do, she had not told me.

  The lonely walk from corner to corner and back again, and the still coldness of her bed, echoed through the hollow room. I could hear her walk across the floor to the bed, touch it with her fingers, and walk back across the carpeted floor to the window. She stood by the window looking out at the nothing of night, the black nothing, while I waited for her to tell me to close the door and go away and leave her alone.

  Though she was in the room, and I was in the doorway, and the rabbits were just outside the window, the emptiness about us descended upon the house like the stillness of night without stars and the moon. When I reached out my arms, they stretched to regions unknown, and when I looked with my eyes, they seemed to be searching for light in all corners of the dark heavens.

  She knew I was waiting in the doorway for a word to send me away, but she was helpless in her loneliness. She knew she could not bear to be alone in the room whose walls could not be seen at such a great distance. She knew her loneliness could not be dispelled with a word uttered in the hollow darkness, and she knew herself alone could not be propelled from the immensity of the house.