She drew the shawl from her shoulders with a grab and a snatch. “You see this thing?” She held it up. “There’s blood on it! It looks like rust now, but it was blood! I never let it be washed. You know whose?”

He turned his horse then and began to walk him away, but when he heard her laughing in a taunting, childish, triumphant way, he turned the puzzled horse again and walked him back to the position they had held before. “Clovis?” he said.

She had stopped laughing surprised at his return. She supported herself against the column.

“Clovis?” he repeated.

Holding tight to the column she said, “Yes—boy?”

He sat and stared at her. The horse shifted his feet nervously. She looked back at Leon. When again he said, “Clovis?” she stumbled and groped her way back into the house.

Leon stayed where he was for a little time, until it began to rain harder, and then he turned up the collar of his coat, pulled his hat down, and rode away, feeling as he went that she was watching him from the window, her eyes held on his back like a pointed gun.

6

He came again, but she did not come out to meet him, although he sat on his horse in her front yard for half an hour, feeling more aimless and foolish by the minute. She watched him all the time from the side shadows of the front window. When he finally pressed his heels into the horse’s sides, and turned his head with the reins, and went down the little road, she felt that she had won something, and then was immediately sorry she had not gone out to speak to him, because such was the tedium of her life that even the unexplained appearance of the man was an event not to be wasted—better than sitting and having nothing happen at all.

One day she found herself waiting for him, for no reason other than the fact that it was four days after his second visit, and that had been four days after the first. He did not appear, and as the day waned, she began to drink more heavily than usual. She ate nothing but drank herself into unconsciousness in the early evening. Turnip dragged her off to her bed when he came in from his work. Puddy was afraid of her when she was drunk and would not go near her unless commanded.