Hammersmith.” It was Wharton I was thinking about, of course, Wharton strangling Dean Stanton with his wrist-chain and bellowing Whoooee, boys! Ain’t this a party, now?
He was looking at me closely now, and smiling a little, incredulous smile that I didn’t care for very much.
“You didn’t come up here to get an idea about whether or not he might have killed some other little girls somewhere else,” he said. “You came up here to see if I think he did it at all. That’s it, isn’t it? ‘Fess up, Edgecombe.”
I swallowed the last of my cold drink, put the bottle down on the little table, and said: “Well? Do you?”
“Kids!” he called down the hill, leaning forward a little in his chair to do it. “Y’all come on up here now n get your cookies!” Then he leaned back in his chair again and looked at me. That little smile – the one I didn’t much care for – had reappeared.
“Tell you something,” he said. “You want to listen close, too, because this might just be something you need to know.”
“I’m listening.”
“We had us a dog named Sir Galahad,” he said, and cocked a thumb at the doghouse. “A good dog. No particular breed, but gentle. Calm. Ready to lick your hand or fetch a stick. There are plenty of mongrel dogs like him, wouldn’t you say?”
I shrugged, nodded.
“In many ways, a good mongrel dog is like your negro,” he said. “You get to know it, and often you grow to love it. It is of no particular use, but you keep it around because you think it loves you. If you’re lucky, Mr. Edgecombe, you never have to find out any different. Cynthia and I, we were not lucky.” He sighed –
a long and somehow skeletal sound, like the wind rummaging through fallen leaves. He pointed toward the doghouse again, and I wondered how I had missed its general air of abandonment earlier, or the fact that many of the turds had grown whitish and powdery at their tops.
“I used to clean up after him,” Hammersmith said, “and keep the roof of his house repaired against the rain. In that way also Sir Galahad was like your Southern negro, who will not do those things for himself.
Now I don’t touch it, I haven’t been near it since the accident – if you can call it an accident. I went over there with my rifle and shot him, but I haven’t been over there since. I can’t bring myself to. I suppose I will, in time. I’ll clean up his messes and tear down his house.”
Here came the kids, and all at once I didn’t want them to come; all at once that was the last thing on earth I wanted. The little girl was all right, but the boy –
They pounded up the steps, looked at me, giggled, then went on toward the kitchen door.
“Caleb,” Hammersmith said. “Come here. Just for a second.”
The little girl – surely his twin, they had to be of an age – went on into the kitchen. The little boy came to his father, looking down at his feet. He knew he was ugly. He was only four, I guess, but four is old enough to know that you’re ugly. His father put two fingers under the boy’s chin and tried to raise his face. At first the boy resisted, but when his father said “Please, son,” in tones of sweetness and calmness and love, he did as he was asked.
A huge, circular scar ran out of his hair, down his forehead, through one dead and indifferently cocked eye, and to the comer of his mouth, which had been disfigured into the knowing leer of a gambler or perhaps a whoremaster. One cheek was smooth and pretty; the other was bunched up like the stump of a tree. I guessed there had been a hole in it, but that, at least, had healed.
“He has the one eye,” Hammersmith said, caressing the boy’s bunched cheek with a lover’s kind fingers.
“I suppose he’s lucky not to be blind. We get down on our knees and thank God for that much, at least.