Proud Flesh by William Humphrey Page B

upon her of Ballard’s wire.
    Amy started. She had the sensation that her thoughts were being read. For her this was no trite figure of speech; indeed, it was not a figure of speech at all. Among Amy’s most vivid memories was having seen a bolt from the blue strike and kill a living creature.
    She was seventeen. One sultry summer afternoon a storm had blown up, one of those sudden prairie storms from out of nowhere that within a minute can change day into night. By the time Amy got to a window it was already so dark that the windowpane mirrored her own face and she had to cup her hands to her eyes to see out. This she was doing when a flash, a flare like some elemental short-circuit illumined the lot beyond the fence, the bolt striking dead the horse pastured there. It all happened in a fraction of an instant, and yet quick as it was, there had been a sequence to the events. The horse had leapt into the air not on being struck but before. It was as if it had been given an instant’s foreknowledge of its doom and had risen to encounter the bolt, rushing to its annihilation. Just such an instant had Amy experienced when, knowing its contents before opening it, indeed already seeing it in her mind, she was handed Ballard’s wire. And just as the stricken horse, suspended in air with its nostrils flaring, its mouth agape, its mane streaming as though each separate strand were electrically charged, had seemed in an ecstasy of dying, so to Amy had come a moment when anguish passed a bound, became a feeling to which she could not give a name, but the memory of which filled her with consternation and with a sense of deepest shame. “Disgusting!” she thought of it now, though why “disgusting” she did not know.
    The very air had been electrified, washed with ozone, and breathing had been almost dizzyingly deep during that instant when the horse hung Pegasuslike in the burst of light against the livid sky. Then as the thunder slammed down overhead, darkness returned, and the horse, rigid as bronze, was dropped lifeless to earth. This too had had its counterpart in Amy’s experience that morning. The halo of light surrounding the pimply-faced Western Union boy, waiting for the tip he never got, burnt out, her mind darkened, her body stiffened: it had been a moment of death, and to recall it now was almost to endure it again.
    â€œA bolt from the blue,” said Gladys.
    Observing Amy’s silence, her sisters turned to her, deferential as always, now a little shamefaced, as the voluble always are before the mute.
    â€œPoor Amy!” said Lois. “It’s hard on us all, but you — ! ”
    Again it was as if her mind had been read, and Amy shrank from her sisters’ solicitous gaze. All day she had been haunted by words her mother had once said to her. Finding the courage to speak of what she could not bear to contemplate in the knowledge that it was even more unbearable, because more real, to Amy, her mother had said, “You will all be sorry when I am gone. But you, Amy, will be the sorriest of all.” The words seemed now to contain some hidden and menacing meaning, like a letter found afterward inscribed, “To be opened when I am dead.”

XII
    She felt sorry for that little wife of his. She really did. Married to a man with no more grit in him than he showed. Them two little tykes of his, too, such a regular doormat for a daddy as they had, ready to just lay down and let anybody walk all over him. Ride all over him, rather.
    All he was trying to do was just be perfectly fair and honest about it, Hugo said.
    Him with his truck laying in the ditch with its wheels in the air and his cotton all strewed from one side of the highway to the other and he was just trying to be perfectly fair and honest about it. Well, said Mrs. Shumlin, she thought she had heard just about everything but—
    All he meant to say was that if anybody was to ask him he would have to