Free William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice by William Styron Page B

ground. “Thanks.” She turned back to Maudie. She had hardly noticed. His sunny, contented bubble burst and scattered. What the hell, he thought. He got up; passing Maudie, he bent down and stroked her hair.
    She raised her eyes, grave, impassive, as brown and big as those balls that fall from sycamore trees. “Good morning, Papadaddy.”
    “Just Daddy, sweet.”
    “Papadaddy.”
    “O.K.,” he said. He walked up the slope, panting a little, feeling a stitch in his side. The party last night: as usual he had drunk too much: Dolly Bonner … he banished it all from his mind. Sunlight lay brilliant around him. The grass, green and odorous, had been mowed just yesterday; it yielded springily beneath his feet. Small insects darted about, grasshoppers wildly fled his advance, and the house, toward which he turned his eyes, loomed above him freshly painted, substantial, invitingly open to the day. It was a big house, Virginia Colonial in style, an elegant house, although much too large for four people. They had had it built—thanks to Helen’s mother, who had auspiciously died two years ago—at a cost of twenty thousand dollars. An immense surge of pride welled up in his breast as he drew near the house. Shingles on the roof glittered handsomely; a sprig of ivy had begun to climb one rainspout, coiling up from boxwood planted around the basement. Nodding there in the sunlight, this ivy seemed to lend a touch of permanence, possibly even of tradition, to the house. Loftis was filled with sudden elation: the novelty of ownership had not yet worn off.
    He stood in the shadows of the awninged terrace, a bit dizzy from the climb: was that Helen calling behind him? He turned; the landscape, clockwise, swept before his eyes—trees, lawn, a gray streak of water, and Helen standing far below, calling upward.
    “Church!”
    Church? Oh, yes. Hell.
    “No church,” he shouted back. “Just take the girls to Sunday school! Take the car!”
    “What——”
    “No church——” he began again.
    “What——” she seemed to say, but the words were blown back on a gust of wind. He flung his arm toward her, hopelessly, turning. In the living room he poured whisky from the decanter on the sideboard, half a tumbler full. Then he hurried to the kitchen where, bent silently over a table, Ella Swan was peeling potatoes. He struggled with an ice tray in the refrigerator, scraped his thumb, but finally extracted two cubes and dropped them into the whisky, tunefully clinking.
    “Mmm-hh!” Ella said. A sigh of suspicion and reproach, of original sin apprehended and denounced, especially on Sundays. He had heard it before, he would hear it again. A score of them: old nigger cooks and nurses and laundrywomen from birth to death casting up eyes of blame and self-righteousness, in impotent reproach, across Saturday afternoon parlors, through the steam of Sunday stoves. He raised his glass happily, anticipating.
    “Here’s looking at you, Ella,” he said. He took a large swallow, commencing to glow.
    “Hmmph,” Ella said. Downward toward the potatoes she bent her face—black and gnomish, a web of lines and wrinkles. “Ain’t nobody lookin at me,” she snuffled, “leas’wise not today. Know who’s lookin at you, though. Good Lawd’s lookin down, He say, ‘I am de troof and de way and de life,’ good Lawd’s sayin …”
    “All right, Ella,” he said. “That’s fine. That’s fine. No sermons. Leas’wise not today … for Christ’s sake,” he added deliberately, smiling.
    “Dat’s Beezeldebub talkin. See de cloven hooves and de monstern eyes. Should be ashamed of yo’self, praise Jesus sweet name.”
    Leaning against the refrigerator, he took another swallow; contentment enveloped him like a cloak. The kitchen, like all rooms, all scenes, began very slowly a sweet process of transfiguration: table, gleaming stove, Ella, white aseptic walls—all of these, as in some leisurely seraphic progression toward ultimate truth,