Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly
and then, not understanding its import and but half
getting its sense, put it in his pocket.
“A dog is dead, eh?” he shouted.
“Well you’re getting too big and smart,
lad. What do I care for a dead dog?”
Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept
around the table and put his hand upon the throat
of the babbling old man.
“I must not kill,” he kept telling himself
aloud, as though talking to a stranger. “I
must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill.”
In the kitchen the two men struggled silently.
Windy, unable to rise, struck out wildly and helplessly
with his feet. Sam, looking down at him and studying
the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with
a start that he had not for years seen the face of
his father. How vividly it stamped itself upon
his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had become.
“I could repay all of the years mother has spent
over the dreary washtub by just one long, hard grip
at this lean throat. I could kill him with so
little extra pressure,” he thought.
The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude.
Across the forehead ran a streak of mud picked up
somewhere in the long afternoon of drunken carousing.
“If I were to press hard now and kill him I
would see his face as it looks now all the days of
my life,” thought the boy.
In the silence of the house he heard the voice of
the neighbour woman speaking sharply to her daughter.
The familiar, dry, tired cough of the sick woman followed.
Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and went
carefully and silently out at the kitchen door.
The rain beat down upon him and, as he went around
the house with his burden, the wind, shaking loose
a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard,
blew it against his face, leaving a long smarting
scratch. At the fence before the house he stopped
and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into
the road. Then turning he went, bareheaded, through
the gate and up the street.
“I will go for Mary Underwood,” he thought,
his mind returning to the friend who years before
had walked with him on country roads and whose friendship
he had dropped because of John Telfer’s tirades
against all women. He stumbled along the sidewalk,
the rain beating down upon his bare head.
“We need a woman in our house,” he kept
saying over and over to himself. “We need
a woman in our house.”
Leaning against the wall under the veranda of Mary
Underwood’s house, Sam tried to get in his mind
a remembrance of what had brought him there. He
had walked bareheaded through Main Street and out along
a country road. Twice he had fallen, covering
his clothes with mud. He had forgotten the purpose
of his walk and had tramped on and on. The unexpected
and terrible hatred of his father that had come upon
him in the tense silence of the kitchen had so paralysed
his brain that he now felt light-headed and wonderfully
happy and carefree.
