Free Stories of Erskine Caldwell by Erskine Caldwell Page A

come.
    “I’ll leave the lamp for you, Richard, and I’ll wait downstairs for you on the porch. Come as soon as you are ready.”
    She had left before I could offer to carry the light to the stairhead for her to see the way down. By the time I had picked up the lamp, she was out of sight down the stairs.
    I walked back into the room and closed the door and bathed my face and hands, scrubbing the train dust with brush and soap. There was a row of hand-embroidered towels on the rack, and I took one and dried my face and hands. After that I combed my hair, and found a fresh handkerchief in the handbag. Then I opened the door and went downstairs to find Gretchen.
    Her father was on the porch with her. When I walked through the doorway, he got up and gave me a chair between them. Gretchen pulled her chair closer to mine, touching my arm with her hand.
    “Is this the first time you have been up here in the mountains, Richard?” her father asked me, turning in his chair towards me.
    “I’ve never been within a hundred miles of here before, sir. It’s a different country up here, but I suppose you would think the same about the coast, wouldn’t you?”
    “Oh, but Father used to live in Norfolk,” Gretchen said. “Didn’t you, Father?”
    “I lived there for nearly three years.”
    There was something else he would say, and both of us waited for him to continue.
    “Father is a master mechanic,” Gretchen whispered to me. “He works in the railroad shops.”
    “Yes,” he said after a while, “I’ve lived in many places, but here is where I wish to stay.”
    My first thought was to ask him why he preferred the mountains to other sections, but suddenly I was aware that both he and Gretchen were strangely silent. Between them, I sat wondering about it.
    After a while he spoke again, not to me and not to Gretchen, but as though he were speaking to someone else on the porch, a fourth person whom I had failed to see in the darkness. I waited, tense and excited, for him to continue.
    Gretchen moved her chair a few inches closer to mine, her motions gentle and without sound. The warmth of the river came up and covered us like a blanket on a chill night.
    “After Gretchen and the other two girls lost their mother,” he said, almost inaudibly, bending forward over his knees and gazing out across the broad green river, “after we lost their mother, I came back to the mountains to live. I couldn’t stay in Norfolk, and I couldn’t stand it in Baltimore. This was the only place on earth where I could find peace. Gretchen remembers her mother, but neither of you can yet understand how it is with me. Her mother and I were born here in the mountains, and we lived here together for almost twenty years. Then after she left us, I moved away, foolishly believing that I could forget. But I was wrong. Of course I was wrong. A man can’t forget the mother of his children, even though he knows he will never see her again.”
    Gretchen leaned closer to me, and I could not keep my eyes from her darkly framed profile beside me. The river below us made no sound; but the warmth of its vapor would not let me forget that it was still there.
    Her father had bent farther forward in his chair until his arms were resting on his knees, and he seemed to be trying to see someone on the other side of the river, high on the mountain top above it. His eyes strained, and the shaft of light that came through the open doorway fell upon them and glistened there. Tears fell from his face like fragments of stars, burning into his quivering hands until they were out of sight.
    Presently, still in silence, he got up and moved through the doorway. His huge shadow fell upon Gretchen and me as he stood there momentarily before going inside. I turned and looked towards him but, even though he was passing from sight, I could not keep my eyes upon him.
    Gretchen leaned closer against me, squeezing her fingers into the hollow of my hand and touching my shoulder