The Butterfly - James M. Cain [3]
"Didn't that make you happy?"
"I hate it."
I asked her a few questions, and she told how Old Man Blount had paid the hospital bill, and was giving Belle an allowance, for the baby's board. Then she broke out: "To hell with it, and to hell with all this you've been telling me, about being good, and always doing the right thing. I was good, and look what it got me."
"No, you were bad."
"I wasn't. I loved him."
"If he loved you, he'd have married you."
"And who are you, to be having so much to say? You were good too, and it got you just what it got me. Didn't you know what Belle was doing to you? Didn't you know she was two-timing you with Moke?"
"He still around?"
"Him and his banjo."
Moke, I guess, had made me more trouble than anybody on earth, and even now I couldn't hear his name without a sick feeling in the stomach. He was a little man that lived in Tulip, which is not a town at all, but just some houses up the hollow from the church. His place was made of logs and mud, and he never did a day's work in his life that anybody hear tell of. But he had a banjo. Saturday afternoons, he played in at the company store and passed the hat around, and the rest of the time he hung around my place and played it. Belle said it was good for the pop drinking, but all I could see it might be good for was to hit him back of the ear with it, and then listen which j, made the hollower sound, it or his head. I got so I hated it and hated him. And then one day I knew what was going on. And then next day they were gone. Kady must have seen, from the look on my face, what I felt, because she said: "Nice, how they've treated you and me."
"That's in the past."
"I want to be bad."
"I'm taking you to church."
But all during the preaching she kept looking out the window at the mountainside, and I don't think she heard a word that was said. And later, when we shook hands with Mr. Rivers and those people from Tulip, she tried to be friendly, but she didn't know one from another even after I spoke their names. And some of them noticed it. I could see Ed Blue look at her with those little pig eyes he's got, and I didn't care for Ed Blue, and had even less use for him after what happened later, but I didn't want him talking around. Some of those people remembered her when she was a little thing, and wanted to like her, and giving him something to talk about wasn't helping any.
For apple-harvest, corn-husking, and hog-killing, I always got in two fellows from the head of the creek, and she fed us all three, and did a lot of things that had to be done, like running into Carbon City in the truck for something we needed, or staying up with me until almost daylight the night we boiled the scrapple. But when it got cold, and things slacked off a bit, and Jack and Mellie went home, she began sitting, around all the time, looking at the floor and not saying anything. And then one night, after I'd been shelling corn all day, she asked what I did with it. "Feed it to the stock, mostly."
"Two mules, six hogs, two cows, and a few chickens eat up all that grain? My, they got big appetites. I never heard of animals as hungry as that."
"Some of it I sell."
"For how much?"
"Whatever they pay. This year, a dollar ten."
"That all you get?"
"It's according's according. Now you can sell it. But I've seen the time, and not so long ago, when you couldn't even give it away, and a dollar, ten was a fortune."
"Bushel of corn's worth more than that."
"Who'll pay you more?"
"Café, maybe."
"Kady, what are you getting at?"
"You meal it and mash and just run it off once. You can get five dollars a gallon for it while it's still warm.