Fire in the Morning

Chapter 18

E I G H T E E N J LINOR moved about her room, hurling dresses, cosmetics and lingerie into two large suitcases she had bought for her wedding trip and had scarcely used since. Junk, junk, junk, she thought, looking in the closet at the discouraging multitude of dresses. Lord, it looks like all Fve done for the past six years is buy clothes. Well, Justin can have most of 'em with my sisterly blessing. Then Lance hit the door, running, but it was locked and he must have fallen back twenty feet the way it sounded, like the disaster of a character in a movie cartoon. "Good-bye, Simon," she had drawled there in the office after Kinloch left. "I lived to see the day you got good and scared and for that I praise the Lord. Maybe you're running low on luck, Simon. Reckon?" She had not waited for an answer. She passed by Justin like she was dirt in the road, going to Lance whom she regarded reflectively for a moment, then kissed him on the mouth. "Poor baby. Good-bye, Lance." He had called after her desperately. "Elinor! Elinor!" and followed, but for all that she had beat him back to the bungalow. She had started out walking and on the edge of town Mrs. Peterson, who was going to the missionary society, picked her up and drove her home. Lance must have waited in town for a ride. Yes, she had lived to see Simon's bluff called, but to seethe day when Lance would walkhome from town, that was too much to hope for. "You can't leave me now," he pleaded at the door. "Now that I need you so much, you can't, you can't—" The telephone was ringing. He went to it. "For you, Elinor." "I can't come," she answered. "Unless it's Ruth come back." 251 E "I think it's Ruth," he said. "You're lying." "All right then, it's Jessie Mae." "I can't come." He returned to the phone; she heard him talking. He came back to the door. "Jessie Mae is getting married tonight up in the Methodist parsonage. To Roscoe Wright. She wants you to come. You and 'that nice Mrs.Armstrong' if she's here." "Tell her I won't be there. Tell her I'm going home." "I cant tell her that. Youknow what a gossip she is." "Then make up your own lies. Don't worry me." Jessie Mae. A husband killed in June. Deserted by a lover in July. Married again in August.She sat down on the edge of the bed. "She says she is all excited, and she wonders if you think people will talk—?" He was back at the door. "Don't cry, Elinor. Oh, Ellie, Ellie, if you'd only let me in. Darling, I— Don't cry, don't cry." "Lance, you silly fool, I'm not crying. I'm laughing." And that was true. But I could cry, she thought, stirring about the packing again. God damn it, I could cry a week, thinking about Daddy (about Amos Anderson Dudley,"Mister A. A!') who's going to ask me a hundred questions so that I won't have to answer any of them; cry for Ary Morgan Dudley, for Mother, who won't ask me anything at all; for both of them when I tell about it and for their never once saying, I told you so; and for the reason why Lance can't break down the door and horsewhip me if he wants me to stay so bad, like he broke my riding crop that day when I hit him, broke it in front of everybody and marched me out and said, "You're going to marry me." But I won't cry. Let Ruth do my crying for me. She's got the shoulder to cry on. And if you haven't got it any more, you haven't got it, and if you never had it, you never had it, and to hell with it, Elinor Dudley, because it's just Elinor Dudley, like it always was and that's all you can make of it, Lance. 252 "Now you know how it all was," Kinloch said to Ruth, "and why I was mad at you and what I thought, and I know how...