Free The Long Home by William Gay Page A

him. “What’s the matter with you? Why do you let him run over us like you do?”
    When his back began to bend like something folding what was left of his life inside it, and the perimeters of where he could go and not go were marked by the dimensions of the bed, he had grown more silent yet. Sometimes he’d come awake from dozing and she’d be a slim, dark presence by the window, watching him, her face as unreadable as his own. And he had no words to say, no deeds to do. Everything seemed said, nothing left but waiting.
    He lay seeped in pain and oblivious of his surroundings like a dying rat preoccupied with the pellet of poison slowly dissolving in his belly. Death by misadventure, a garbage can explored better left alone.
    “He’s coughing up blood again,” she told her mother. Pearl laid aside the dishtowel and went into the near-dark room.
    Hardin shuffled a poker deck and dealt himself a full house, the cards rippling smooth as water. He reshuffled and dealt a jackhigh straight flush, conscious of the sounds from the sickroom, of the door opening. The shiftless shuffle of her houseshoes ceasing. He could feel her behind him, silent and somehow accusatory.
    The she said, “He’s dyin.”
    Bored with straight flushes, Hardin laid the cards aside. “Well,” he said, “there’s no news in that. He’s dyin ever since I knowed him.”
    “He’s bad off.”
    Hardin went to see. Hovington’s flesh was gray and clammy. Hardin’s hand came away moist with cold sweat when he touched the sick man. He wiped his hand on a trouser leg. It seemed to him he could already feel a rigidity seeping into Hovington’s flesh, stealthy, covert, he could already smell the sweet, carrion presence of death.
    “You reckon he needs a doctor?”
    “Undertaker is more like it.” Hardin passed through the door and paused and lit a cigarette. He went on through the house and onto the porch, then sat on the edge of the porch in the sun. Pearl followed him out, the door closing nigh soundless behind her. “Stay with him,” he said. “It’s him in there dyin, not me out here.”
    Pearl was silent awhile. “He’s wantin somethin,” she finally said.
    “I don’t doubt it for a minute,” Hardin said. “In his place I might could think of a thing or two I’d want myself.”
    “He wants that Winer woman brought up here. He wants to talk to her.”
    “Say he does?”
    “That’s what he asked for.”
    “He’s out of his head.”
    “Maybe, but he ain’t never asked for nothin else.”
    “That’s crazy and a waste of time besides.”
    “All these years and he’s never asked for nothin,” she persisted. “Nothin only what a preacher could give him and he never even got that. Just laid there all this time and took what come.”
    “That’s all any of us can do, take what comes.”
    She looked stricken, the flesh of her cheeks folded on itself, her lips trembling. A damp and fearful blue eye. He thought she might cry.
    “Just shut up,” he told her. “Don’t think it’s a bit late in the day for this? He made his bed and by God you made yourn and all you can do now is lay there with the cover pulled up around your chin and rest as best you can.”
    Yet there was a stolid immutability to her he hadn’t known was there, an immovable weight of stubbornness that held her rooted before him as if he were wedded to her, condemned alike to her tardy sense of guilt. He thought suddenly that to move her aside he’d have shove her, cut a path through her with a hawkbill knife. He dropped his cigarette and ground it out with the toe of his boot.
    “Then by God get her. But get her on your own book. I’ve got more to do than run up and down the road.” He stepped off the porch and strode toward the barn. She went back in.
    The girl came out and hurried across the yard, a momentary hand raised to shield the sun. It was early yet, the morning sun resting above the green treeline. A day brimming with incandescent light and