27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays by Tennessee Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

spring . . .
    S ON:
    Unsatisfied old appetites—And stir these together—carefully, not to slop over—
    L UISA: . . . is bubbling!
    S ON: ( to Luisa )
    You, too, assist in this business.
    Bring a scapular blade to remove the stained parts of the lumber—collection of rags to scrub the splatterings off.
    M OTHER: ( moaning )Ahhh—ahhh . . .
    S ON: ( deliriously )
    For often toward daybreak that rime of the reptile’s diamond-like progress . . .
    L UISA: ( mockingly )He wanders again. The tainted spring is bubbling!
    S ON:
    . . . makes following easy for those who desire to pursue him.
    He depends on his tail’s rapid motion, scimitar-like—green lightning—to stave off hunters!
    You have to skip rope lightly, handy-man, our former repair man,

    you have to skip rope lightly—lightly!—lightly!
    Carry your axe and your bucket
    slow-clanking past frozen hen-houses
    where sinister stalactite fowls make rigid comment
    claw—beak—
    barely, perceptibly stirring their russet feathers—
    on purpose of your quiet passage.
    Go on—go on to where
    the barn,
    that moon-paled building,
    large
    and church-like in arch of timber,
    tumescent between the sensual fingers of vines,
    intractably waits
    this side of your death-coition!
    There halt, repair man, for surely the light will halt you if nothing else does.
    ( Guitar )
    R ANCHER: ( trance-like )
    It stood in a deep well of light.
    It stood like a huge wrecked vessel—in deep seas of light!
    S ON: You halted . . .
    C HORUS: ( like an echo )Halt!
    R ANCHER: Yes.
    S ON: At this immemorial vault,
    C HORUS: Vault!
    S ON:
    this place of plateaux and ranges of Spanish-named mountains . . .
    C HORUS: Mountains!
    R ANCHER:
    Yes.
    I set up the ladder.

    S ON:
    Set up the steep, steep ladder—
    Narrow . . .
    R ANCHER:
    Narrow! —Enquiring
    If Christ be still on the Cross!
    C HORUS: Cross!
    S ON: Against the north wall set it . . .
    R ANCHER:
    Set it and climbed . . .
    ( He clutches his forehead. ) Climbed!
    C HORUS: Climbed!
    S ON:
    Climbed!
    To the side of the loft that gave all things to the sky.
    The axe—
    for a single moment—
    saluted the moon—then struck!
    CHORUS: Struck!
    S ON: And she didn’t cry . . .
    R ANCHER:
    Struck?
    Aye, struck—struck— struck!
    C HORUS: Struck!
    ( Dissonant chords on the guitar, with cymbals. The two men surge together and struggle like animals till they are torn apart. There is a rumble of thunder. )
    T HE J UDGE:
    Thunder?—Over the Lobos.
    Señores, Your passion is out of season.
    This is the time for reflection to calm the brain, as later, I hope, the rain will cool our ranches.

    I know that truth evades the certain statement but gradually and obliquely filters through the mind’s unfettering in sleep and dream.
    The stammered cry gives more of truth than the hand could put on passionless paper . . .
    My neighbor from Casa Rojo, Stand and speak your part in this dark recital.
    You say that the woman Elena never allowed you freely the right of marriage?
    R ANCHER:
    Never freely, and never otherwise.
    It was no marriage.
    They have compared her to water—and water, indeed, she was.
    Water that ran through my fingers when I was athirst.
    Oh, from the time that I worked at Casa Blanca,
    a laborer for her people, as they have mentioned,
    I knew there was something obscure—subterranean—cool—from which she drew her persistence,
    when by all rights of what I felt to be nature, she should have dried—as fields in a rainless summer, a summer like this one that presently starves our grain-fields, she should have dried, this seemingly loveless woman, and yet she didn’t.
    Yes, she was cool, she was water, even as they have described her—
    but water sealed under the rock—where I was concerned.
    I burned.
    I burned.
    I burned . . .
    ( Three dissonant notes are sounded on the guitar. There is a feverish, incessant rustling sound like wind in a heap of dead leaves. )
    R ANCHER: ( hoarsely )
    I finally said to her once, in the late