Dagon by Fred Chappell Page B

he would be mollified but sullen. His body would feel too heavy.
    And in the bed too she was relentless. He came away nerveless and exhausted, his face and neck and shoulders aching with the cold bitter hurt. Why, why? Whatever she wanted there finally, it was nothing his body could give, poor dispirited body. She was not satisfied; even blood, he discovered, would not satisfy her. What was it she wanted? How could such stolidness be so demanding? He burrowed against her, spent his last, came fighting for breath. His heart would feel ready to burst; convulsed, con­vulsed. And it was unhealthy, the whole busi­ness.—Or afterwards he would fall into a deep sleep and dream bad dreams which once again he could not remember; but felt in his sleep still the fishy breath of her and the oily taste of her skin.—Or he would have one of the blinding headaches, his mind riven like a stone with the pain. What was it she wanted? There was noth­ing left.—He would not admit that he cried out in her grip.
    After dark the visitors would come again, every night of the week. This time he was drink­ing in the living room, and Mina let him stay there, didn’t lead him through to the bedroom. She closed the kitchen door. He sat in a stupor in the soiled chair and heard without listening the shuffle and thump of the big shoes, the mut­tering. Finally he rose and went out on the back porch. It was cooler than he’d thought and stars of the deep summer were spread all over the sky; no moon. The night smelled good, snug odor of weeds and flowers and field earth and the cool smell of the running stream. It was the first night he had been outside, and going down the bowed wooden steps he felt slightly elated. He stretched out his arms; he felt he had forgot­ten until now the feeling of bodily freedom; it was as if a woolen musty coat had been snatched from him. He wandered about in the sparse lower yard, swinging his arms, and looked up at the stars, held still as if tangled in a net, among the small leaves of the wild cherry tree. A faint breeze moved the branches and the stars moved too, seemed to jiggle quietly.
    He went round the right corner of the house, going up toward the roadbed. The light from the single small lamp in the living room—it sat on a small table next to the stuffed chair—fell on him as he passed the living-room window and caused him to appear pink and insubstantial. It was a queer sensation to stand here outside and look into the room he had just come out of. He could almost see himself sitting there in the chair, drawn and sullenly silent. Such a pitiable figure he made, or so contemptible a figure. The quart jar sat by the lamp; he had drunk half of it. He went up into the road, not walking stead­ily, but sliding his feet before him as if he moved on snowshoes. In the gravel of the road he found two small rounded stones and he held one in each hand, squeezing them slightly, reassuring himself of their solidity, their reality. Then he threw them high away into the field below. The kitchen window framed an irregular rectangle of orange light on the sloping ground, and once more he heard that unfathomable intense cry and was attracted by it to the bare kitchen win­dow.
    He stood angled away from view. The room was choked with large forms of men. Along the edge of the table next the window a hand lay asplay in the lamplight. It looked huge. The freckles on the hand seemed large as dimes, the distent veins thick as cord. It didn’t look like a hand, but, oversized, like a parody of a hand, an incomprehensible hoax. Against the far wall, by the door to the bedroom where Peter slept, a tall farmer leaned. He was dressed in blue jeans and wore a cotton plaid shirt, the sleeves rolled to his biceps, exposing long bony forearms and sharp elbows. His face was narrow and small for his body, seemed as disproportionately small as the near hand seemed large. His nose was prom­inent