“I reckon one more trip won’t hurt me,” Joe said. He had a half dollar in his pocket. Mrs. McEachern had given it to him. He had asked for a nickel. She insisted that he take the half dollar. He took it, holding it on his palm, cold, contemptuously.

“I suppose not,” McEachern said. “You have worked hard, too. But town is no good habit for a man who has yet to make his way.”

He did not need to escape, though he would have, even by violence perhaps. But McEachern made it easy. He went to the restaurant, fast. He entered without stumbling now. The waitress was not there. Perhaps he saw, noticed that she wasn’t. He stopped at the cigar counter, behind which the woman sat, laying the half dollar on the counter. “I owe a nickel. For a cup of coffee. I said pie and coffee, before I knew that pie was a dime. I owe you a nickel.” He did not look toward the rear. The men were there, in their slanted hats and with their cigarettes. The proprietor was there; waiting, Joe heard him at last, in the dirty apron, speaking past the cigarette:

“What is it? What does he want?”

“He says he owes Bobbie a nickel,” the woman said. “He wants to give Bobbie a nickel.” Her voice was quiet. The proprietor’s voice was quiet.

“Well for Christ’s sake,” he said. To Joe the room was full of listening. He heard, not hearing; he saw, not looking. He was now moving toward the door. The half dollar lay on the glass counter. Even from the rear of the room the proprietor could see it, since he said, “What’s that for?”

“He says he owes for a cup of coffee,” the woman said.

Joe had almost reached the door. “Here, Jack,” the man said. Joe did not stop. “Give him his money,” the man said, flatvoiced, not yet moving. The cigarette smoke would curl still across his face, unwinded by any movement. “Give it back to him,” the man said. “I don’t know what his racket is. But he can’t work it here. Give it back to him. You better go back to the farm, Hiram. Maybe you can make a girl there with a nickel.”

Now he was in the street, sweating the half dollar, the coin sweating his hand, larger than a cartwheel, feeling. He walked in laughter. He had passed through the door upon it, upon the laughing of the men. It swept and carried him along the street; then it began to flow past him, dying away, letting him to earth, pavement. He and the waitress were facing one another. She did not see him at once, walking swiftly, downlooking, in a dark dress and a hat. Again, stopped, she did not even look at him, having already looked at him, allseeing, like when she had set the coffee and the pie on the counter. She said, “Oh. And you come back to give it to me. Before them. And they kidded you. Well, say.”

“I thought you might have had to pay for it, yourself. I thought—”

“Well, say. Can you tie that. Can you, now.”

They were not looking at one another, standing face to face. To another they must have looked like two monks met during the hour of contemplation in a garden path. “I just thought that I …”

“Where do you live?” she said. “In the country? Well, say. What’s your name?”

“It’s not McEachern,” he said. “It’s Christmas.”

“Christmas? Is that your name? Christmas? Well, say.”

On the Saturday afternoons during and after adolescence he and the other four or five boys hunted and fished. He saw girls only at church, on Sunday. They were associated with Sunday and with church. So he could not notice them. To do so would be, even to him, a retraction of his religious hatred. But he and the other boys talked about girls. Perhaps some of them—the one who arranged with the negro girl that afternoon, for instance—knew. “They all want to,” he told the others. “But sometimes they can’t.” The others did not know that. They did not know that all girls wanted to, let alone that there were times when they could not. They thought differently. But to admit that they did not know the latter would be to admit that they had not discovered the former. So they listened while the boy told them. “It’s something that happens to them once a month.” He described his idea of the physical ceremony. Perhaps he knew. Anyway he was graphic enough, convincing enough. If he had tried to describe it as a mental state, something which he only believed, they would not have listened. But he drew a picture, physical, actual, to be discerned by the sense of smell and even of sight. It moved them: the temporary and abject helplessness of that which tantalised and frustrated desire; the smooth and superior shape in which volition dwelled doomed to be at stated and inescapable intervals victims of periodical filth. That was how the boy told it, with the other five listening quietly, looking at one another, questioning and secret. On the next Saturday Joe did not go hunting with them. McEachern thought that he had already gone, since the gun was missing. But Joe was hidden in the barn. He stayed there all that day. On the Saturday following he did go, but alone, early, before the boys called for him. But he did not hunt. He was not three miles from home when in the late afternoon he shot a sheep. He found the flock in a hidden valley and stalked and killed one with the gun. Then he knelt, his hands in the yet warm blood of the dying beast, trembling, drymouthed, backglaring. Then he got over it, recovered. He did not forget what the boy had told him. He just accepted it. He found that he could live with it, side by side with it. It was as if he said, illogical and desperately calm, All right. It is so, then. But not to me. Not in my life and my love. Then it was three or four years ago and he had forgotten it, in the sense that a fact is forgotten when it once succumbs to the mind’s insistence that it be neither true nor false.

He met the waitress on the Monday night following the Saturday on which he had tried to pay for the cup of coffee. He did not have the rope then. He climbed from his window and dropped the ten feet to the earth and walked the five miles into town. He did not think at all about how he would get back into his room.

He reached town and went to the corner where she had told him to wait. It was a quiet corner and he was quite early, thinking I will have to remember. To let her show me what to do and how to do it and when. To not let her find out that I don’t know, that I will have to find out from her.

He had been waiting for over an hour when she appeared. He had been that early. She came up on foot. She came and stood before him, small, with that air steadfast, waiting, downlooking, coming up out of the darkness. “Here you are,” she said.

“I got here soon as I could. I had to wait for them to go to sleep. I was afraid I would be late.”

“Have you been here long? How long?”

“I don’t know. I ran, most of the way. I was afraid I would be late.”

“You ran? All them three miles?”

“It’s five miles. It’s not three.”

“Well, say.” Then they did not talk. They stood there, two shadows facing one another. More than a year later, remembering that night, he said, suddenly knowing, It was like she was waiting for me to hit her. “Well,” she said.

He had begun now to tremble a little. He could smelt her, smell the waiting: still, wise, a little weary; thinking She’s waiting for me to start and I don’t know how Even to himself his voice sounded idiotic. “I reckon it’s late.”

“Late?”

“I thought maybe they would be waiting for you. Waiting up until you …”

“Waiting for … Waiting for …” Her voice died, ceased. She said, not moving; they stood like two shadows: “I live with Mame and Max. You know. The restaurant. You ought to remember them, trying to pay that nickel …” She began to laugh. There was no mirth in it, nothing in it. “When I think of that. When I think of you coming in there, with that nickel.” Then she stopped laughing. There was no cessation of mirth in that, either. The still, abject, downlooking voice reached him. “I made a mistake tonight. I forgot something.” Perhaps she was waiting for him to ask her what it was. But he did not. He just stood there, with a still, downspeaking voice dying somewhere about his ears. He had forgot about the shot sheep. He had lived with the fact which the older boy had told him too long now. With the slain sheep he had bought immunity from it for too long now for it to be alive. So he could not understand at first what she was trying to tell him. They stood at the corner. It was at the edge of town, where the street became a road that ran on beyond the ordered and measured lawns, between small, random houses and barren fields—the small, cheap houses which compose the purlieus of such towns. She said, “Listen. I’m sick tonight.” He did not understand. He said nothing. Perhaps he did not need to understand. Perhaps he had already expected some fateful mischance, thinking, ‘It was too good to be true, anyway’; thinking too fast for even thought: In a moment she will vanish. She will not be. And then I will be back home, in bed, not having left it at all. Her voice went on: “I forgot about the day of the month when I told you Monday night. You surprised me, I guess. There on the street Saturday. I forgot what day it was, anyhow. Until after you had gone.”