Reflections in a Golden Eye - Carson McCullers [32]
During the next few nights Private Williams rested and slept normally. In the late afternoons he sat alone on a bench before the barracks and at night he sometimes frequented the places of amusement on the post. He went to the movie and to the gymnasium. In the evening the gymnasium was converted into a roller skating rink. There was music and a corner set aside where the men could rest at tables and drink cool, frothy beer. Private Williams ordered a glass and for the first time tasted alcohol. With a great rolling clatter the men skated around in a circle and the air smelled sharply of sweat and floor wax. Three men, all old timers, were surprised when Private Williams left his table to sit with them for a while. The young soldier looked into their faces and seemed to be on the point of asking some question of them.
But in the end he did not speak, and after a time he went away.
Private Williams always had been so unsociable that hardly half of his sleeping mates even knew his name. Actually the name he used in the army was not his own. On his enlistment a tough old Sergeant had glared down at his signature L. G. Williams and then bawled out at him: 'Write your name, you snotty little hayseed, your full name!' The soldier had waited a long time before revealing the fact that those initials were his name, and the only name he had. 'Well, you can't go into the U.S. Army with a goddam name like that,' the Sergeant said. 'I'll change it to E l l g e e. O.K.?' Private Williams nodded and in the face of such indifference the Sergeant burst into a loud raw laugh. 'The half wits they do send us now,' he had said as he turned back to his papers.
It was now November and for two days a high wind had blown. Overnight the young maples along the sidewalks were stripped of their leaves. The leaves lay in a bright gold blanket beneath the trees and the sky was filled with white changing clouds. The next day there was a cold rain, The leaves were left sodden and dun colored, trampled on the wet streets, and finally raked away. The weather had cleared again and the bare branches of the trees made a sharp filigree against the winter sky. In the early morning there was frost on the dead grass.
After four nights of rest Private Williams returned to the Captain's house. This time, as he knew the habits of the house, he did not wait until the Captain had gone to bed. At midnight while the officer worked in his study he went up to The Lady's room and stayed an hour there. Then he stood by the study window and watched curiously until at two o'clock the Captain went upstairs. For something was happening at this time that the soldier did not understand.
In these reconnoiterings, and during the dark vigils in The Lady's room, the soldier had no fear. He felt, but did not think; he experienced without making any mental resume of his present or past actions. Five years before L. G. Williams had killed a man. In an argument over a wheelbarrow of manure he had stabbed a negro to death and hidden the body in an abandoned quarry. He had struck out in a fit of fury, and he could remember the violent color of blood and the weight of the limp body as he dragged it through the woods. He could remember the hot sun of that July afternoon, the smell of dust and death. He had felt a certain wondering, numb distress, but there was no fear in him, and not once since that time had the thought shaped definitely in his mind that he was a murderer. The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect The mind of Private Williams was imbued with various colors of strange tones, but it was without delineation, void of form.
Through these first winter days only one realization