dog,’ and the guy who was hypnotized does it even if no one says Chiclets to him for the next ten years. She
put something in that tea and then told me to do that. That nasty thing.
“I seen why she would, too – an old woman superstitious enough to believe in stump-water cures, and how
you could witch a man into love by putting a little drop of blood from your period onto the heel of his foot
while he was sleeping, and cross-tie walkers, and God alone knows what else … if a woman like that with a
bee in her bonnet about natural fathers could do hypnotism, hypnotizing a woman like me into … well, into
doing what I did … might be just what she would do. Because she would believe it. And I had named him to
her, hadn’t l? Yes indeed.
“It never occurred to me then that I hadn’t remembered hardly anything at all about going to Mama
Delorme’s until after I did what I did in Mr Jefferies’s bedroom. It did that night, though.
“I got through the day all right. I mean, I didn’t cry or scream or carry on or anything like that. My sister
Kissy acted worse the time she was drawing water from the old well round dusk and a bat flew up out of it and
got caught in her hair. There was just that feeling that I was behind a wall of glass, and I figured if that was all,
I could get along with it.
“Then, when I got home, I all at once got thirsty. I was thirstier then ever in my life – felt like a sandstorm was going on in my throat. I started to drink water. It seemed like I just couldn’t drink enough. And I started to spit.
I just spit and spit and spit. Then I started to feel sick to my stomach. I ran down to the bathroom and looked
at myself in the mirror and I run out my tongue, and for just a second or two it looked like it was all white, like
it was still all coated with his … you know.
“Then I vomited. I vomited and vomited until my legs wouldn’t hold me up and I fell down on my knees in
front of the toilet bowl. I was crying and begging God to please forgive me, to let me stop puking before I lost
the baby, if I really did have one. And then I thought of myself standing there in his bedroom, scraping his
squirt off the sheet and eating it, just doing it and not even thinking about what I was doing – I tell you I could see myself doing it, Delores, as if I was looking at myself in a movie. And then I vomited again, and it felt like
my stomach had turned itself right inside out.
“Mrs Parker heard me and came to the door and asked if I was all right. That helped me get hold of myself a
little, and by the time Johnny came in that night, I was over the worst of it. He was drunk, spoiling for a fight.
When I wouldn’t give him one he hit me in the eye anyway and walked out. I was almost glad he hit me,
because it gave me something else to think about.
“The next day when I went into Mr Jefferies’s suite he was sitting in the parlor, still in his pajamas, scribbling
away on one of his yellow legal pads. He always travelled with a bunch of them, held together with a big red
rubber band, right up until the end. When he come to Le Palais that last time and I didn’t see them, I knew he’d
made up his mind to die. I wasn’t sorry, neither.”
Martha looked toward the kitchen window with an expression which held nothing of mercy or forgiveness;
as it was a cold look, a look which reports an utter absence of the heart.
“When I come in the next day and seen him there I was relieved, because it meant I could put off the cleaning.