for the last time.
“But it turned out the last time had already happened. There wasn’t no mark of him on that sheet. And since
I’ve told you all this, I might as well tell you the truth about something else: part of me was almost
disappointed.
‘It was over. Whatever spell that old bruja woman had put on me – and on the writer, too – it was over. That’s
good enough, I thought. I’m gonna have the baby and he’s gonna have the book, and we’re shut of it. And I
don’t care anything about natural fathers as long as Johnny will be a good father to my little chap.”
20
“I told him that same night,” she said, and then added dryly: “He wasn’t too pleased about the idea of
becoming a daddy, as I think I’ve told you.”
“He hit you with a broom and tried to make you drop it, ” Delores said.
“Yes. Hit me more than once. Hit me about five times and then stood over me where I lay crying in the corner
and yelled, ‘What are you, crazy, woman? We ain’t having no kid! We ain’t having no goddamn kid! I think
you out your mind!’ Then he turned around and walked out.
“I laid there for awhile, thinking of the first miscarriage and scared to death the pains would start any minute,
and I’d be on my way to having another one. I thought of my momma writing that I ought to get away from
him before he put me in the hospital, and of Kissy sending me that Greyhound ticket with GO NOW written
on the folder. And when I was sure that I wasn’t going to miscarry the baby, I got up to pack a bag and get the
hell out of there – right away, before he could come back. But I was no more than opening the closet door
when I thought of Mama Delorme again. I remembered telling her I was going to leave Johnny, and what she
said to me: ‘No – he’s going to leave you. You’re going to see him out, is all. Stay around. There be a little
money. You gonna think he hoit the baby but he din’t be doin it.’
“It was like she was right there, telling me what to look for and what to do. I went into the closet, all right, but it wasn’t my own clothes I wanted anymore. I started going through his, and I found a couple of things in that
same damned sport-coat where I’d found the bottle of White Angel. That coat was his favorite, and I guess it
really said everything anyone needed to know about Johnny Rosewall. It was a bright purple niggery-looking
thing. I hated it. Wasn’t no bottle of dope I found this time. Was a straight-razor in one pocket and the cheap
gun he’d bought someplace for the liquor store holdup him and his friends had planned in the other. I took the
gun out and looked at it, and that same feeling came over me that came over me those times in the bedroom of
Mr Jefferies’s suite – like I was doing something just after I woke up from a heavy sleep.
“I walked into the kitchen with the gun in my hand and set it down on the little bit of counter I had beside the
stove. Then I opened the overhead cupboard and felt around in back of the spices and the box of tea. At first
I couldn’t find what she’d given me and this awful stifling panic came over me – I was scared the way you get
scared in dreams. Then my hand happened on that plastic box and I drew it down.
“I opened it and took out the mushroom. It was a repulsive thing, too heavy for its size, and warm, Delores. It
was like holding a lump of flesh that hasn’t quite died. That thing I did over and over again in Mr Jefferies’s
bedroom? That nasty thing? I tell you right now I’d do it again two hundred times over before I’d pick up that
mushroom one more time.