IN Bidwell, and after she had fairly flung herself against the wall of
village convention by going into the wood with Jerome, May lived at
home, doing the work her mother had formerly done in the Edgley
household. She washed the clothes, cooked the food and made the beds.
There was, for the time, something sweet to her in the thoughts of doing
lowly tasks and she washed and ironed the dresses in which Lillian and
Kate were to array themselves and the heavy overalls worn by her father
and brothers with a kind of satisfaction in the task. “It makes me tired
and I can sleep and won’t be thinking,” she told herself. As she worked
over the washtubs, among the beds soiled by the heavy slumbers of her
brothers who on the evening before had perhaps come home drunk, or stood
over the hot stove in the kitchen, she kept thinking of her dead mother.
“I wonder what she would think,” she asked herself and then added. “If
she hadn’t died it wouldn’t have happened. If I had someone, I could go
to and talk with, things would be different.”
During the day when the men of the household were gone with their teams
and when Lillian was away from town May had the house to herself. It was
a two-storied frame building, standing at the edge of a field near the
town’s edge, and had once been painted yellow. Now, water washing from
the roofs had discolored the paint, and the side walls of the old
building were all mottled and streaked. The house stood on a little hill
and the land fell sharply away from the kitchen door. There was a creek
under the hill and beyond the creek a field that at certain times during
the year became a swamp. At the creek’s edge willows and elders grew and
often in the afternoon, when there was no one about, May went softly out
at the kitchen door, looking to be sure there was no one in the road
that ran past the front of the house, and if the coast was clear went
down the hill and crept in among the fragrant elders and willows. “I am
lost here and no one can see me or find me,” she thought, and the
thought gave her intense satisfaction. Her cheeks grew flushed and hot
and she pressed the cool green leaves of the willows against them. When
a wagon passed in the road or someone walked along the board sidewalk at
the road-side she drew herself into a little lump and closed her eyes.
The passing sounds seemed far away and to herself it seemed that she had
in some way escaped from life. How warm and close it was there, buried
amid the dark green shadows of the willows. The gnarled twisted limbs of
the trees were like arms but unlike the arms of the man with whom she
had lain in the wood they did not grasp her with terrifying convulsive
strength. For hours she lay still in the shadows and nothing came to
frighten her and her lacerated spirit began to heal a little. “I have
made myself an outlaw among people but I am not an outlaw here,” she
told herself.
* * * * *
Having heard of the incident with Jerome Hadley, in the berry field,
Lillian and Kate Edgley were irritated and angry and one evening when
they were both at the house and May was at work in the kitchen they
spoke about it. Lillian was very angry and had decided to give May what
she spoke of as “a piece of her mind.” “What’d she want to go in the
cheap for?” she asked. “It makes me sick when I think of it—a fellow
like that Jerome Hadley! If she was going to cut loose what made her
want to go on the cheap?”
In the Edgley family it had always been understood that May was of a
different clay and old John Edgley and the boys had always paid her a
kind of crude respect. They did not swear at her as they sometimes did
at Lillian and Kate, and in secret they thought of her as a link between
themselves and the more respectable life of the town. Ma Edgley was
respectable enough but she was old and tired and never went out of the
house and it was in May the family held up its head. The two brothers
were proud of their sister because of her record in the town school.
They themselves were working men and never expected to be anything else
but, they thought, “that sister of ours has shown the town that an
Edgley can beat them at their own game. She is smarter than any of them.
See how she has forced the town to pay attention to her.”
As for Lillian—before the incident with Jerome Hadley, she continually
talked of her sister. In Norwalk, Fremont, Clyde and the other towns she
visited she had many friends. Men liked her because, as they often said,
she was a woman to be trusted. One could talk to her, say anything, and
she would keep her mouth shut and in her presence one felt comfortably
free and easy. Among her secret associates were members of churches,
lawyers, owners of prosperous businesses, heads of respectable families.
To be sure they saw Lillian in secret but she seemed to understand and
respect their desire for secrecy. “You don’t need to make no bones about
it with me. I know you got to be careful,” she said.
On a summer evening, in one of the towns she was in the habit of
visiting, an arrangement was made. The man with whom she was to spend
the evening waited until darkness had come and then, hiring a horse at a
livery stable, drove to an appointed place. Side curtains were put on
the buggy and the pair set forth into the darkness and loneliness of
country roads. As the evening advanced and the more ardent mood of the
occasion passed, a sudden sense of freedom swept over the man. “It is
better not to fool around with a young girl or with some other man’s
wife. With Lillian one does not get found out and get into trouble,” he
thought.
The horse went slowly, along out of the way roads—bars were let down and
the couple drove into a field. For hours they sat in the buggy and
talked. The men talked to Lillian as they could talk to no other woman
they had ever known. She was shrewd and in her own way capable and often
the men spoke of their affairs, asking her advice. “Now what do you
think, Lil’—if you were me would you buy or sell?” one of them asked.
Other and more intimate things crept into the conversations. “Well,
Lil’, my wife and I are all right. We get along well enough, but we
ain’t what you might speak of as lovers,” Lillian’s temporary intimate
said. “She jaws me a lot when I smoke too much or when I don’t want to
go to church. And then, you see, we’re worried about the kids. My oldest
girl is running around a lot with young Harry Garvner and I keep asking
myself, ‘Is he any good?’ I can’t make up my mind. You’ve seen him
around, Lil’, what do you think?”
Having taken part in many such conversations Lillian had come to depend
on her sister May to furnish her with a topic of conversation. “I know
how you feel. I feel that way about May,” she said. More than a hundred
times she had explained that May was different from the rest of the
Edgleys. “She’s smart,” she explained. “I tell you what, she’s the
smartest girl that ever went to the high school in Bidwell.”
Having so often used May as an example of what an Edgley could be
Lillian was shocked when she heard of the affair in the berry field. For
several weeks she said nothing and then one evening in July when the two
were alone in the house together she spoke. She had intended to be
motherly, direct and kind—if firm, but when the words came her voice
trembled and she grew angry. “I hear, May, you been fooling with a man,”
she began as they sat together on the front porch of the house. It was a
hot evening and dark and a thunder storm threatened and for a long time
after Lillian had spoken there was silence and then May put her head
into her hands and leaning forward began to cry softly. Her body rocked
back and forth and occasionally a dry broken sob broke the silence.
“Well,” Lillian added sharply, being determined to terminate her remarks
before she also broke into tears, “well, May, you’ve made a darn fool of
yourself. I didn’t think it of you. I didn’t think you’d turn out a
fool.”
In the attempt to control her own unhappiness and to conceal it, Lillian
became more and more angry. Her voice continued to tremble and to regain
control of it she got up and went inside the house. When she came out
again May still sat in the chair at the edge of the porch with her head
held in her hands. Lillian was moved to pity. “Well, don’t break your
heart about it, kid. I’m only an old fool after all. Don’t pay too much
attention to me. I guess Kate and I haven’t set you such a good
example,” she said softly.
Lillian sat on the edge of the porch and put her hand on May’s knee and
when she felt the trembling of the younger woman’s body a sharp mother
feeling awakened within her. “I say, kid,” she began again, “a girl gets
notions into her head. I’ve had them myself. A girl thinks she’ll find a
man that’s all right. She kinda dreams of a man that doesn’t exist. She
wants to be good and at the same time she wants to be something else. I
guess I know how you felt but, believe me, kid, it’s bunk. Take it from
me, kid, I know what I’m talking about. I been with men enough. I ought
to know something.”
Intent now on giving advice and having for the first time definitely
accepted her sister as a comrade Lillian did not realize that what she
now had to say would hurt May more than her anger. “I’ve often wondered
about mother,” she said reminiscently. “She was always so glum and
silent. When Kate and I went on the turf she never had nothing to say
and even when I was a kid and began running around with men evenings,
she kept still. I remember the first time I went over to Fremont with a
man and stayed out all night. I was ashamed to come home. ‘I’ll catch
hell,’ I thought but she never said nothing at all and it was the same
way with Kate. She never said nothing to her. I guess Kate and I thought
she was like the rest of the family—she was banking on you.”
“To Ballyhack with Dad and the boys,” Lillian added sharply. “They’re
men and don’t care about anything but getting filled up with booze and
when they’re tired sleeping like dogs. They’re like all the other men
only not so much stuck on themselves.”
Lillian became angry again. “I was pretty proud of you, May, and now I
don’t know what to think,” she said. “I’ve bragged about you a thousand
times and I suppose Kate has. It makes me sore to think of it, you an
Edgley and being as smart as you are, to fall for a cheap one like that
Jerome Hadley. I bet he didn’t even give you any money or promise to
marry you either.”
May arose from her chair, her whole body trembling as with a chill, and
Lillian arose and stood beside her. The older woman got down to the
kernel of what she wanted to say. “You ain’t that way are you, sis—you
ain’t going to have a kid?” she asked. May stood by the door, leaning
against the door jamb and the rain that had been threatening began to
fall. “No, Lillian,” she said. Like a child begging for mercy she held
out her hand. Her face was white and in a flash of lightning Lillian
could see it plainly. It seemed to leap out of the darkness toward her.
“Don’t talk about it any more, Lillian, please don’t. I won’t ever do it
again,” she pleaded.
Lillian was determined. When May went indoors and up the stairway to her
room above she followed to the foot of the stairs and finished what she
felt she had to say. “I don’t want you to do it, May,” she said, “I
don’t want you to do it. I want to see there be one Edgley that goes
straight but if you intend to go crooked don’t be a fool. Don’t take up
with a cheap one, like Jerome Hadley, who just give you soft talk. If
you are going to do it anyway you just come to me. I’ll get you in with
men who have money and I’ll fix it so you don’t have no trouble. If
you’re going to go on the turf, like Kate and I did, don’t be a fool.
You just come to me.”
* * * * *
In all her life May had never achieved a friendship with another woman,
although often she had dreamed of such a possibility. When she was still
a school girl she saw other girls going homeward in the evening. They
loitered along, their arms linked, and how much they had to say to each
other. When they came to a corner, where their ways parted, they could
not bear to leave each other. “You go a piece with me tonight and
tomorrow night I’ll go a piece with you,” one of them said.
May hurried homeward alone, her heart filled with envy, and after she
had finished her time in the school and, more than ever after the
incident in the berry field—always spoken of by Lillian as the time of
her troubles—the dream of a possible friendship with some other woman
grew more intense.
During the summer of that last year of her life in Bidwell a young woman
from another town moved into a house on her street. Her father had a job
on the Nickel Plate Railroad and Bidwell was at the end of a section of
that road. The railroad man was seldom at home, his wife had died a few
months before and his daughter, whose name was Maud, was not well and
did not go about town with the other young women. Every afternoon and
evening she sat on the front porch of her father’s house, and May, who
was sometimes compelled to go to one of the stores, often saw her
sitting there. The newcomer in Bidwell was tall and slender and looked
like an invalid. Her cheeks were pale and she looked tired. During the
year before she had been operated upon and some part of her internal
machinery had been taken away and her paleness and the look of weariness
on her face, touched May’s heart. “She looks as though she might be
wanting company,” she thought hopefully.
After his wife’s death an unmarried sister had become the railroad man’s
housekeeper. She was a short strongly built woman with hard grey eyes
and a determined jaw and sometimes she sat with the new girl. Then May
hurried past without looking, but, when Maud sat alone, she went slowly,
looking slyly at the pale face and drooped figure in the rocking chair.
One day she smiled and the smile was returned. May lingered a moment.
“It’s hot,” she said leaning over the fence, but before a conversation
could be started she grew alarmed and hurried away.
When the evening’s work was done on that evening and when the Edgley men
had gone up town, May went into the street. Lillian was away from home
and the sidewalk further up the street was deserted. The Edgley house
was the last one on the street, and in the direction of town and on the
same side of the street, there was—first a vacant lot, then a shed that
had once been used as a blacksmith shop but that was now deserted, and
after that the house where the new girl had come to live.
When the soft darkness of the summer evening came May went a little way
along the street and stopped by the deserted shed. The girl in the
rocking chair on the porch saw her there, and seemed to understand May’s
fear of her aunt. Arising she opened the door and peered into the house
to be sure she was unobserved and then came down a brick walk to the
gate and along the street to May, occasionally looking back to be sure
she had escaped unnoticed. A large stone lay at the edge of the sidewalk
before the shed and May urged the new girl to sit down beside her and
rest herself.
May was flushed with excitement. “I wonder if she knows? I wonder if she
knows about me?” she thought.
“I saw you wanted to be friendly and I thought I’d come and talk,” the
new girl said. She was filled with a vague curiosity. “I heard something
about you but I know it ain’t true,” she said.
May’s heart jumped and her hands trembled. “I’ve let myself in for
something,” she thought. The impulse to jump to her feet and run away
along the sidewalk, to escape at once from the situation her hunger for
companionship had created, almost overcame her and she half arose from
the stone and then sat down again. She became suddenly angry and when
she spoke her voice was firm, filled with indignation. “I know what you
mean,” she said sharply, “you mean the fool story about me and Jerome
Hadley in the woods?” The new girl nodded. “I don’t believe it,” she
said. “My aunt heard it from a woman.”
Now that Maud had boldly mentioned the affair, that had, May knew, made
her an outlaw in the town’s life May felt suddenly free, bold, capable
of meeting any situation that might arise and was lost in wonder at her
own display of courage. Well, she had wanted to love the new girl, take
her as a friend, but now that impulse was lost in another passion that
swept through her. She wanted to conquer, to come out of a bad situation
with flying colors. With the boldness of another Lillian she began to
speak, to tell lies. “It just shows what happens,” she said quickly. A
re-creation of the incident in the wood with Jerome had come to her
swiftly, like a flash of sunlight on a dark day. “I went into the woods
with Jerome Hadley—why? You won’t believe it when I tell you, maybe,”
she added.
May began laying the foundation of her lie. “He said he was in trouble
and wanted to speak with me, off somewhere where no one could hear, in
some secret place,” she explained. “I said, ‘If you’re in trouble let’s
go over into the woods at noon.’ It was my idea, our going off together
that way. When he told me he was in trouble his eyes looked so hurt I
never thought of reputation or nothing. I just said I’d go and I been
paid for it. A girl always has to pay if she’s good to a man I suppose.”
May tried to look and talk like a wise woman, as she imagined Lillian
would have talked under the circumstances. “I’ve got a notion to tell
what that Jerome Hadley talked to me about all the time when we were in
there—in the woods—but I won’t,” she declared. “He lied about me
afterwards because I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to, but I’ll keep my
word. I won’t tell you any names but I’ll tell you this much—I know
enough to have Jerome Hadley sent to jail if I wanted to do it.”
May watched her companion. To Maud, whose life had always been a dull
affair, the evening was like going to a theatre. It was better than
that. It was like going to the theatre where the star is your friend,
where you sit among strangers and have the sense of superiority that
comes with knowing, as a person much like yourself, the hero in the
velvet gown with the sword clanking at his side. “Oh, do tell me all you
dare. I want to know,” she said.
“It was about a woman he was in trouble,” May answered. “One of these
days maybe the whole town will find out what I alone know.” She leaned
forward and touched Maud’s arm. The lie she was telling made her feel
glad and free. As on a dark day, when the sun suddenly breaks through
clouds, everything in life now seemed bright and glowing and her
imagination took a great leap forward. She had been inventing a tale to
save herself but went on for the joy of seeing what she could do with
the story that had come suddenly, unexpectedly, to her lips. As when she
was a girl in school her mind worked swiftly, eagerly. “Listen,” she
said impressively, “and don’t you never tell no one. Jerome Hadley
wanted to kill a man here in this town, because he was in love with the
man’s woman. He had got poison and intended to give it to the woman. She
is married and rich too. Her husband is a big man here in Bidwell.
Jerome was to give the poison to the woman and she was to put it in her
husband’s coffee and, when the man died, the woman was to marry Jerome.
I put a stop to it. I prevented the murder. Now do you understand why I
went into the woods with that man?”
The fever of excitement that had taken possession of May was transmitted
to her companion. It drew them closer together and now Maud put her arm
about May’s waist. “The nerve of him,” May said boldly, “he wanted me to
take the stuff to the woman’s house and he offered me money too. He said
the rich woman would give me a thousand dollars, but I laughed at him.
‘If anything happens to that man I’ll tell and you’ll get hung for
murder,’ that’s what I said to him.”
May described the scene that had taken place there in the deep dark
forest with the man, intent upon murder. They fought, she said, for more
than two hours and the man tried to kill her. She would have had him
arrested at once, she explained, but to do so involved telling the story
of the poison plot and she had given her word to save him, and if he
reformed, she would not tell. After a long time, when the man saw she
was not to be moved and would neither take part in the plot or allow it
to be carried out, he grew quieter. Then, as they were coming out of the
woods, he sprang upon her again and tried to choke her. Some berry
pickers in a field, among whom she had been working during the morning,
saw the struggle.
“They went and told lies about me,” May said emphatically. “They saw us
struggling and they went and said he was making love to me. A girl
there, who was in love with Jerome herself and was jealous when she saw
us together, started the story. It spread all over town and now I’m so
ashamed I hardly dare to show my face.”
With an air of helpless annoyance May arose. “Well,” she said, “I
promised him I wouldn’t tell the name of the man he was going to murder
or nothing about it and I won’t. I’ve told you too much as it is but you
gave me your word you wouldn’t tell. It’s got to be a secret between
us.” She started off along the sidewalk toward the Edgley house and then
turned and ran back to the new girl, who had got almost to her own gate.
“You keep still,” May whispered dramatically. “If you go talking now
remember you may get a man hung.”
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