Free False Entry by Hortense Calisher

wedged on a timber, needed the help of two. But in all the pushing and grinding no human arm appeared, no voice, no driver. It was like watching a fable of cars changed to beetles, turned masters. At the finish, shell ranged by glittering shell, they were all on the other side. Behind them the signal light, some switch tripped or wire crossed, began blinking. Then the lead car struck out alone straight across field, grinding like a tractor over hummock and stubble, making a path for the rear to follow, and in a long, transverse line, single in the starlight, all the cars of Tuscana crawled forward, humming, into the backs.
    When they had gone, Johnny turned to me. Under cover of the noise we had gradually been drawn to our feet, shoulder to shoulder, away from the sheds. The smell of the grass rose again, that meek smell which will inherit the earth. All was quiet now around us except for the signal light, beating on. It went on like a warning pulse, although no train would pass here until dawn.
    “So you come through the backs,” he said. “See anyone there.” It was not a question. Then he knew I had not.
    I shook my head.
    “You fool,” he said. “You poor dumb fool.” But his eyes, shining, looked past me.
    He seized my wrist suddenly and dragged me forward. “Come on! I’ll see you home.”
    He led me north on the lane that met the first streets of the town, and all the way along he hurried me, goading me like a child on its way to be punished. We went almost at a trot down the shrubbed lane, and all the way, as I panted to match my stride with his, I could feel his anger growing, clotting.
    In front of my house we stopped short, both of us winded. He faced me, breathing harder than I. I thought he was going to jump me again—me, or whomever, in his fury, I stood for. This time I held my ground, lifting my chin to look at him eye to eye. Then I saw that his eyes were full of tears.
    “You—you’re such a fool,” he said, choking. “You’d believe anything, wouldn’t you!”
    Suddenly he let out a torrent of curses, words I had never heard him use, and all of them directed at me, for the fool I was. He babbled at me like a fishwife, and always for the same word, the single fault that enraged him.
    “All that stuff I used to tell you about the town,” he said at last, in the creaking voice of someone exhausted by crying. “Up there.” He pointed up to the hill. “And you believed it!”
    It was only two days ago that we had been up there, and he had described for me the latest tracery in his saga of goodness. It concerned the Nellises, and it had no story really, being only an account of how, Semple having sent him there after hours with a package for Nellis, he had walked up the trim lawn, edging his feet away from the borders where the bulbs were beginning, had knocked on the door with the brass plate, so neat, that said Treacher Nellis , and had found them all sitting at table, clean and comely as paper cutouts; mother, father and children, all in their proper family places. And through his dim words, lame pauses, there had come, as always, the moral fragrance of how people really were.
    “Didn’t you!” he said.
    I was silent. I would not answer him as he needed. I could not. The listener is not the friend. Few understand this.
    “We’ll go downtown then,” he said. “Come on.”
    My eyes wavered shut. Too much had been expected of me. I slept standing, a column of sleep between the outer dream and the in. “But the café is closed,” I said.
    He shook me roughly. “We’re not going to the café.”
    I awoke, and followed him.
    Out on the main street, that I still thought of as the High, our doubled footfalls echoed. It had been paved the year before, and there were sidewalks now, one on either side, each broad enough for a man to step aside for another. We had gone on for some paces when I halted, nudged by a queerness, a difference. I was wide awake now, with the special sentience