Of course that meant the girls of the same age as well, and they got to inviting me to their birthday parties and such, to which I’d come with a smirk and make sarcastic remarks even to their parents as they officiated, and by God if I didn’t hear more than one mother remark favorably on what a gentleman I was directly after I had to my mind insulted her.
So the winter passed, and Mrs. Pendrake I reckon continued to visit the back of the ice-cream parlor though I never followed her again, on the grounds my heart would never stand it. For I tell you I loved her. If anything, I loved her more than ever after looking through that shutter. I hated her, but I loved her for making me hate her. I was imitating Kane because she loved him. I was running to the whores because I loved her.
I love her still, for if you know anything about that kind of feeling, you know how close it is connected to hopelessness and thus is about the only thing in civilization that don’t degenerate with time.
Spring came. It might have been April, for I recall a good deal of rain fell the night before, but the following day was clear and bright and the magnolia tree in the Pendrakes’ front yard had sprung all its pink cups.
At around two in the afternoon a little scrawny fellow went into the soda-water place, drug that Kane outside to the street, and beat him half to death with a horsewhip.
No, it wasn’t me. The man what did it was named John Weatherby, who owned a livery stable. He stood about five-five, was bald and forty, and had a sixteen-year-old daughter I knowed slightly. It turned out Kane had knowed this girl too, only in the carnal way, and had give her the start of a family of her very own.
Kane never tried to defend himself, just covered up his face—I reckon he didn’t want his sneer spoiled—and took his hiding. I understand that frock coat of his was cut to ribbons. I didn’t see the incident myself, but Luke English did and probably lied some in relating it. (Kane might have been yellow, but I can’t see him going down on his knees and sobbing like a child.) I do know Kane shortly married the Weatherby girl, closed up his establishment, and moved to St. Louie. And then within another month or so, about the time she begun to swell, back she come, for he had give her the slip once in the big city.
“I believe that Kane would of screwed a snake if somebody’d held its head,” Luke observed. “Though I never realized that about him while he was here, didjoo? I wonder who else’s wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters he was—”
“Who cares,” says I and changed the subject. Luke’s mother and sisters was the ugliest women in town.
I hankered to see the effects the new development would have on Mrs. P. They wasn’t visible, except she started staying home more in the afternoons again. She was sweetly sad as always, not I think because of this particular disappointment but rather at the general nature of living. I guess it didn’t measure up to what that judge, her Pa, led her to expect, which wouldn’t be the first time a lawyer give somebody a bum steer. Or maybe she did too much reading. She might have been happy with cross-eyes or buck teeth.
But the kind of fool I was, I went right back to my imaginary romance with her, forgot and forgave, read Mr. Pope again, and so on. I stopped visiting Mrs. Lizzie’s. When the warm weather come, the Reverend suddenly grew aware of me as if I had been absent all winter, and allowed as how we should go fishing again. But by being vague about it until the notion passed from his mind, I managed to elude that. So it was perfect and the month of May. All my life since, May has retained the signification it acquired then though I never spent another in that fashion.
But along about the first of June, instead of reading on that afternoon, we walked down to the commercial district, Mrs. P. holding my arm, both of us real grand. She had decided I must have a new pair of boots. I already owned four or five, but she said the new bootmaker was an amazing craftsman in leather, hailing from Florence, Italy, and it was almost disgraceful not to wear the product of his hand, now such was available.
So we went to the shop, which was owned by a flabby-faced individual named Cushing, who rushed up as we entered and all but kissed the floor underneath Mrs. P. The Italian bootmaker was at his bench towards the back, a wiry, dark-complexioned fellow in his middle twenties. He wore a leather jerkin without sleeves and was hairy as an animal on the lower arms, and also I reckon the chest, for where the garment was open at the base of his neck was all curly black.
Cushing fetches forth a pair of Russia-leather slippers Mrs. Pendrake had ordered earlier, unbeknownst to me. They were cunning little red things, for she had tiny feet. Cushing come almost to the point of slaver here, a woman’s foot in them days being thought almost unbearably sexy.
