Proud Flesh by William Humphrey Read Free Book Online Page A

stifling a scream of impatience. She had done right in coming to him. If there was anything he could do to help prevent trouble, family differences …
    That marriage had been a terrible mistake, a tragedy, she said, tears coming to her eyes. She would never understand how a young girl, nice-looking, popular, smart in school, with a good chance to be somebody in life, could throw herself away like that. But Shug had made her bed and now she must lie in it. She herself had been against that marriage with her whole heart and soul, but she was determined now to do what she could to see that it did not end in scandal. And that was what was fixing to happen unless something was done before her husband woke up to what was going on. When a young girl married an old man (Clyde winced; though a lot older than his wife, Jug was not much older than he) trouble was bound to come of it sooner or later. When it was an old man in love with the bottle, sooner than later.
    He succeeded somehow in asking what it was that she had seen to make her think …?
    Over her eyes she had drawn that film, like that membranous inner eyelid that dogs have, as though to shut out the sight, and she shook her head, as though she could not bring herself to say it, as though to deny to herself what she had seen.
    Left to imagine the details, he imagined the worst. The worst was, images, scenes of Shug doing with some other man the things he had taught her to do with him. Faceless that man was, but otherwise the details were all there, and once painted upon the surface of his mind they penetrated to its bottommost layer, like fresco on a wall.
    In the midst of the blackness that engulfed him a light sprang on. The man in the picture in his mind assumed his own features. What she had seen, what she was reporting to him without knowing it, was a meeting she had witnessed from afar between Shug and him. In his relief, his elation, he almost told her so.
    â€œAnd when you got a bunch like them cottonpickers right on the place,” she had said, “trouble don’t got far to come.”
    Now she caught up with him, panting, old face puckered as a prune, and had this to say:
    â€œMista Cly, you going down to the field? Do me a favor, would you? Shug never has come up this morning and she not in her house either. If you see her hanging around down there please tell her to come on up to the house. Don’t tell her I said so. She don’t pay me no more mind than she do her mother. You tell her to. Will you do that for me, please, Mista Cly? I be much obliged.”
    The row of workers’ shanties—rusty quonset huts and peeling sheetrock barracks bought at the disbandment of the nearby prisoner of war camp after the Italians had been repatriated—stood with their forefeet in the dusty lane and their backs in the cotton. In front of each one now stood a car, always a big model, sometimes a Cadillac, some of them not more than three or four years old. Those were what they liked, they got them cheap second- and third-hand, and in them they could transport their teeming families: Clyde had counted as many as ten come tumbling out of one. In front of the biggest building sat an ex-school bus with a Louisiana license plate. As soon now as Clyde had laid them off for the day they would pile into their cars and head for town where by midnight half a dozen of them would be in jail for drunkenness and disturbing the peace, carrying a dangerous weapon, maybe for assault with intent to kill. Clyde, a roll of bail money in his pocket, made a regular call at the jail each Monday during ginning season, looking into every cell, like a doctor going his hospital rounds.
    In front of the first shack, one of the barracks, he stood for a moment listening, watching. There was no sound save for the everlasting work chant, and the lane was as bare as a dry creek bed. He stepped quickly and noiselessly onto the sagging porch and listened to the interior for a