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“Well, I am Junior Whitshank.”
“I know.”
He wondered how she knew, what she might have heard about him.
“Tell me, Li
“If you want,” she said.
They turned and left the cemetery behind, crossed the packed-earth yard and climbed the front steps of Whence Cometh My Help. The interior was a single dim room with smoke-darkened walls and a potbellied stove, its few rows of wooden chairs facing a table topped with a doily. They came to a stop just inside the door; there was nothing more to see.
“Have you got religion?” he asked her.
She shrugged and said, “Not so much.”
This caused a little hitch in the flow, because it wasn’t what he’d expected. Evidently she was more complicated than he had guessed. He gri
She met his gaze directly, all at once. The paleness of her eyes startled him all over again.
“Well, I reckon I should go pay some heed to the gal I came here with,” he said, making a joke of it. “But maybe tomorrow evening I could take you to the picture show.”
“All right,” she said.
“Where exactly do you live?”
“I’ll just meet you at the drugstore,” she said.
“Oh,” he said.
He wondered if she was ashamed to show him to her family. Then he figured the hell with it, and he said, “Seven o’clock?”
“All right.”
They stepped back out into the sunlight, and without another glance she left him on the stoop and made a beeline for the Moffat twins. Who were watching, of course, as keen as two sparrows, their sharp little faces pointing in Junior and Li
They had been seeing each other three weeks before her age came out. Not that she volunteered it; she just happened to mention one night that her older brother would be graduating tomorrow from eighth grade. “Your older brother?” he asked her.
She didn’t get it, for a moment. She was telling him how her younger brother was smart as a whip but her older brother was not, and he was begging to be allowed to drop out now and not go on to the high school in Mountain City the way their parents were expecting him to. “He’s never been one for the books,” she said. “He likes better to hunt and stuff.”
“How old is he?” Junior asked her.
“What? He’s fourteen.”
“Fourteen,” Junior said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“How old are you?” Junior asked.
She realized, then. She colored. She tried to carry it off, though. She said, “I mean he’s older than my other brother.”
“How old are you?” he said again.
She lifted her chin and said, “I’m thirteen.”
He felt he’d been kicked in the gut.
“Thirteen!” he said. “You’re just a … you’re not but half my age!”
“But I’m an old thirteen,” Li
“Good God in heaven, Li
Because by now, they were doing it. They’d been doing it since their third date. They didn’t go to movies anymore, didn’t go for ice cream, certainly didn’t meet up with friends. (What friends would those have been, anyhow?) They just headed for the river in his brother-in-law’s truck and flung a quilt any old which way under a tree and rushed to tangle themselves up in each other. One night it poured and it hadn’t stopped them for a minute; they lay spread-eagled when they were finished and let the rain fill their open mouths. But this wasn’t something he had talked her into. It was Li
He could be arrested.
Her father grew burley tobacco, and he owned his land outright. Her mother came from Virginia; everyone knew Virginians thought they were better than other people. They would call the sheriff on him without the least hesitation. Oh, Li
“No, Junior, I swear it.”
“Not the Moffat twins or anyone?”
“No one.”
“Because I could go to jail for this, Li
“I didn’t tell a soul.”
He made up his mind to stop seeing her, but he didn’t say so right then because she would get all teary and beg him to change his mind. There was something a little bit hanging-on about Li
They folded the quilt and they got in the truck and Junior drove her back to town, not saying a word the whole ride although Li
“We’ll see.”
“But how will I know?”
“I’ll get word to you when I’m free,” he said.
“I’m going to miss you like crazy, Junior!”
And she flung herself on him and wrapped her arms around his neck, but he pulled her arms off him and said, “You’d better go on, now.”
Of course he didn’t get word to her. (He didn’t know how she had thought he would do that, seeing as he’d said they couldn’t tell anyone else.) He stayed strictly within his own territory — two acres of red clay outside Parryville bounded by a rickrack fence, in the three-room cabin he shared with his father and his last unmarried brother.
As it happened, the three of them did have work that week, replacing the roof on a shed for a lady down the road. They would set out early every morning in the wagon, with a tin bucket of buttermilk and a hunk of cornpone for their lunch, and they’d turn their mule loose in Mrs. Honeycutt’s pasture and go up on the roof to work all day in the blazing sun. By evening Junior would be so bushed that it was all he could do to force supper down. (His brother Jimmy had taken over the cooking after their mother died — just fried up whatever meat they’d last killed, using the half-inch of white grease that waited permanently in the skillet on the wood stove.) They’d be in bed by eight or eight thirty, workingmen’s hours. Three days in a row they did that, and Junior didn’t give more than a thought or two to Li
Then they finished with the roof, and they didn’t have anything else lined up. Junior spent the next day at home, but he was bored out of his mind and his father was acting ornery, so he figured maybe the next morning he would walk on down to the lumberyard and look for work. They were used to having him come and go there; they could generally use a hand.
He was sitting out on the stoop with the dogs, smoking a cigarette — the twilight still at that stage where it’s transparent, the fireflies just begi