"Will you do me the favor of stopping and seeing a friend of mine?" Ann Leary said thi
s haltingly, awkwardly.
"Why?"
"She's a good friend. I've told her of you. I'll give you her address. Just a moment." When the rig stopped at her farm she drew forth a pencil and paper from her small purse and wrote in the moonlight, pressing the paper to her knee. "There it is. Can you read it?"
He glanced at the paper and nodded bewilderedly.
"Cecy Elliott, 12 Willow Street, Green Town, Illinois," he said.
"Will you visit her someday?" asked Ann.
"Someday," he said.
"Promise?"
"What has this to do with us?" he cried savagely. "What do I want with names and papers?" He crumpled the paper into a tight ball and shoved it in his coat.
"Oh, please promise!" begged Cecy.
"... promise..." said Ann.
"All right, all right, now let me be!" he shouted.
I'm tired, thought Cecy. I can't stay. I have to go home. I'm weakening. I've only the power to stay a few hours out like this in the night, traveling, traveling. But before I go...
"... before I go," said Ann.
She kissed Tom on the lips.
"This is me kissing you," said Cecy.
Tom held her off and looked at Ann Leary and looked deep, deep inside. He said nothing, but his face began to relax slowly, very slowly, and the lines vanished away, and his mouth softened from its hardness, and he looked deep again into the moonlit face held here before him.
Then he put her off the rig and without so much as a good night was driving swiftly down the road.
Cecy let go.
Ann Leary, crying out, released from prison, it seemed, raced up the moonlit path to her house and slammed the door.
Cecy lingered for only a little while. In the eyes of a cricket she saw the spring night world. In the eyes of a frog she sat for a lonely moment by a pool. In the eyes of a night bird she looked down from a tall, moon-haunted elm and saw the light go out in two farmhouses, one here, one a mile away. She thought of herself and her family, and her strange power, and the fact that no one in the family could ever marry any one of the people in this vast world out here beyond the hills.
"Tom?" Her weakening mind flew in a night bird under the trees and over deep fields of wild mustard. "Have you still got the paper, Tom? Will you come by someday, some year, sometime, to see me? Will you know me then? Will you look in my face and remember then where it was you saw me last and know that you love me as I love you, with all my heart for all time?"
She paused in the cool night air, a million miles from towns and people, above farms and continents and rivers and hills. "Tom?" Softly.
Tom was asleep. It was deep night; his clothes were hung on chairs or folded neatly over the end of the bed. And in one silent, carefully upflung hand upon the white pillow, by his head, was a small piece of paper with writing on it. Slowly, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, his fingers closed down upon and held it tightly... And he did not even stir or notice when a blackbird, faintly, wondrously, beat softly for a moment against the clear moon crystals of the windowpane, then, fluttering quietly, stopped and flew away toward the east, over the sleeping earth.
4
THE WILDERNESS
Copyright, 1952, by Triangle Publications, Inc.
"Oh, the Good Time has come at last--"
It was twilight, and Janice and Leonora packed steadily in their summer house, singing songs, eating little, and holding to each other when necessary. But they never glanced at the window where the night gathered deep and the stars came out bright and cold.