False Entry by Hortense Calisher Read Free Book Online Page B

in the suddenly burst air of Tuscana when, leaving the courtroom, I passed Semple’s face, that beaten mask of puzzlement which dared not speak but said silently, “It wasn’t you. Then— why ?”—all, then, are not an entering, but a walking away.
    Where? Some night like this one, writing along in this way, listening to that city of music which lies just below the diatonic three-o’clock silence, I shall drop the pen, hearing my own theme; I shall know.
    There are two chances. There is a chance that the two languages are one—that the place may be a person. Then I need only give these pages to Ruth; she need only take them. Is that what I sometimes fancy I see between others—a person-place where, circled in safety, one need not speak at all?
    Or there is the other chance—do I long for it?—that some night, raising my head to hear, I shall recognize—not whom—but where.
    It is getting light. Hours must have gone by since I wrote that.
    I do not walk away. I see that clear. I do not walk away.
    I walk toward.
    Bit by bit I shall drag myself up, out of the stream. Haply I think on—there.
    I walk toward.

Chapter VII. The Fair. The Cars of Tuscana.
    F ACING ME, THROUGH THE warped door of the privy, a stretch of mongrel fields led behind the town, along past the Negro quarter, to the railroad line. In the half-luminous Indian summer night the weeds looked of an even height, as if they were some bearing crop. Beyond their motionless rim, over near Johnny’s place, the red signal-eye burned and waned, blinking for the 8:38 freight, still a mile away.
    I went outside and waited. It was a quiet night for market day; near us there were no houses close enough for me to see, but over in the black-brown jumble of niggertown, in “the backs” where they paraded in the evenings, all seemed nested down. I could hear the train coming now, but the hour must be later than I thought; this was not the slow freight, creaking along like an endless cradle, to the jerk and settle of its couplings, but an undertow that shook my belly with the ground. This was the 9:50 coming up from the South, all the way from the Gulf maybe, north to the next big city whose name I did not even know; this was the passenger-flyer, going north.
    A huge white core grew toward me, splaying the dark. It rushed past, whistle mute. Under its hard breath, the weedy sidings stood up like wheat. Then it vanished, with a sound of squeezed air, and I heard it for a while far off, running on to all the other small towns ahead that burned and waned. This was the “to-from Memphis” train.
    I put my head on my knees and wept. I wept for my mother, who, having let me see that I was not enough for her, had made me see that she was no longer enough for me. This is the real parting; when she died I did not need to weep.
    I wept for things as they were. The stars, hanging low, crept golden into my tears, and I wept on because I might never know how things ought to be. And when I was done, I went looking for Johnny, because he knew both.
    The signal light lay straight across field, but I took the long way round, delaying. As I walked, I kept touching the envelope of money in my pocket, seeing the two of us, Johnny and me, sitting almost like men together, while I treated him down at the café. As I went on, the image failed me—but I went on. This is how actionless people thrust themselves into action—first the wild image of what will never believably come to be, then the plodding, steadfast as a clerk’s, to make it come to be.
    Ahead, in the backs, it was dark as a cave, but I had often walked there of an evening, for the sake of the distant demi-company of the blacks. Their company—veiled glances and a soft return to their own concerns—was a kind of music to me, a negligent night music to which I need only half listen, and the short, blocked lane of their lives, blurred with oil lamps and people leaning, was a place where I need not watch. It was a