Free All the Days and Nights by William Maxwell Page A

what he does is just exactly the opposite!” The next time
they
drove out, her intimate friends, to see her, she would have something to tell them that would make them sit up and take notice. It wasn’t enough that Harrison had driven her from the house, forcing her to take refuge out here, in a place with no heat, and fall coming on; that didn’t satisfy him. Now he was going to win the children away from her with expensive gifts, so that in the end he’d have everything and she’d be left stranded, with no place to go and no one to turn to. He’d planned it all out, from the very beginning. That would be his revenge.
    “What you aim to do with them? Send them back?” Adah Belle asked, looking at the two boxes she had carried all the way out from town.
    “Put this on the trash pile and burn, it,” Mildred Geliert said and left the kitchen.
    Outside, under a large oak tree, a little girl of five, her hair in two blond braids, was playing with a strawberry box. She had lined the box with a piece of calico and in it lay a small rubber doll, naked, with a whistle in its stomach. “Now you be quiet,” the little girl said to the doll, “and take your nap or I’ll slap you.”
    From her place under the oak tree she watched the colored woman go out to the trash pile with the flat square box, set a match to the accumulation of paper and garbage, and return to the kitchen. The little girl waited a moment and then got up and ran to the fire. She found a stick, pulled the burning box onto the grass, and blew out the flames that were licking at it. Then she ran back to the oak tree with her prize. Part of the linen handkerchief was charred and fell apart in her hands, but the flames hadn’t reached the lavender butterfly. The little girl hid the handkerchief under the piece of calico and looked around for a place to put the strawberry box.
    When she came into the house, five minutes later, her eyes were blank and innocent. She had learned that much in a year and a half. Her eyes could keep any secret they wanted to. And the box was safe under the porch, where her mother wouldn’t dare look for it, because of the snake.

The Pilgrimage
    I N a rented Renault, with exactly as much luggage as the backseat would hold, Ray and Ellen Ormsby were making a little tour of France. It had so far included Vézelay, the mountain villages of Auvergne, the roses and Roman ruins of Provence, and the gorges of the Tarn. They were now on their way back to Paris by a route that was neither the most direct nor particularly scenic, and that had been chosen with one thing in mind — dinner at the Hôtel du Domino in Périgueux. The Richardsons, who were close friends of the Ormsbys in America, had insisted that they go there. “The best dinner I ever had in my entire life,” Jerry Richardson had said. “Every course was something with truffles.” “And the dessert,” Anne Richardson had said, “was little balls of various kinds of ice cream in a beautiful basket of spun sugar with a spun-sugar bow.” Putting the two statements together, Ray Ormsby had persisted in thinking that the ice cream also had truffles in it, and Ellen had given up trying to correct this impression.
    At seven o’clock, they were still sixty-five kilometers from Périgueux, on a winding back-country road, and beginning to get hungry. The landscape was gilded with the evening light. Ray was driving. Ellen read aloud to him from the
Guide Gastronomique de la France
the paragraph on the Hôtel du Domino:
“Bel et confortable établissement à la renommée bien assise et que Mme. Lasgrezas dirige avec beaucoup de bonheur. Grâce à un maître queux qualifé, vous y ferez un repas de grande classe qui vous sera servi dans une élégante salle à manger ou dans un délicieux jardin d’été.…”
    As they drove through village after village, they saw, in addition to the usual painted Cinzano and Rasurel signs, announcements of the
spécialité
of the restaurant of