clearly, I knew, from a remark she once made to me about Gruber's maimed left hand. "Doovel," she said, "that Grber—that hand of his with. the finger gone—it's still better than the hands of other people, only because it's his hand!"
All these old fragments and snatches of Zillah I had pieced together into a clear picture of her. But as I slept that night, in the heavy air, among the snores of the men, my picture dwindled and tapered off to a single sharp vision of a crescent earring. That, in turn, splintered into a dozen chips, which were somehow the signs of the zodiac: bulls and crabs and scorpions running wild. . . . Now a man with black mustaches flourishing a knife curved like a new moon. . . . I awoke shuddering with the sense of impending disaster.
IV
He would kill her for her faithlessness when he came, Zillah had stated. But it was absurd, I argued: killing wasn't so easy; besides, the importance Zillah attached to a mere trifling earring was ridiculous. To Zillah, however, it was not absurd. She was in dead earnest. She lived with her fate—wore the symbol of it, a scratch of pink paper, against her shriveled breast, and wore the look of it in her black eyes. Not for an instant, in the two weeks that elapsed before that amazing climax of Zillah's life, was I allowed to forget it.
On the last Saturday evening which I spent with Zillah, I went down into the hollow to find: her bent over a pack of greasy cards. She was hunched up at one end of the table, from which the dirty dishes had been shoved back, and by the light of a vilely smoking kerosene lamp, she was spreading out the cards, fan-wise, before her and muttering something like an incantation.
"Whew," I gasped, turning down the wick of the lamp and throwing wide the door, "a little air in here! He's gone?"
"He go soon, but you stay, anyhow," Zillah unswered, scarcely looking up. She was wholly absorbed in her cards, frowning over them, mumbling to herself, "I no understand . . . Tony kills me, but the cards, they say . . ."
Gruber, togged out in a red necktie and a pink shirt, his hat over one eye, swaggered through on his way to the village. He was in high good humor with himself, "Lord, tea leaves, and nickels in water, and now cards! What's the big idea? I have it"—Gruber swung his leg over the table—"you can just tell my fortune before I step out—huh?"
"No." Zillah's two hands covered her cards.
"Yes, I say. Come along, shoot!"
"No." But in Zillah's eyes grew a little speculative interest, an odd curiosity; clearly the idea of looking into Gruber's future intrigued her. "Well then, if I dukker for you, may the blame of it hang on your own head."
Slowly she arranged her cards, monotonously she began her chant: "I see a journey—a far black journey. I see a stranger—a black stranger—an' he bring luck . . . is it bad luck? I see—"
"Tryin' to scare me, old woman? But just remember, my luck's your luck!"
"Not so sure," muttered Zillah. She was staring up at Gruber now, and her eyes held their curious sparkle "Do I—go on?"
"Go on!"
"I see—I see a black cloud—the death cloud—"
"To hell with your lucks an' your witch's charms!" he snarled, scattering the cards with a sweep of his thick hand. "Want to spoil my celebration, eh? Well, you can't! See—you can't scare me—Joe Gruber—with your spells and your curses, you old hag, you old devil-ridden—"
There was more of it. Then Gruber pulled himself together, proved his fearlessness by the air with which he adjusted red carbuncle cuff buttons and tipped his hat still further over his eye. He stepped jauntily into the night.
Zillah, her forefinger crooked on the king of spades, ruminated: "The cards, they never lie to me . . . You better have good time, Joe Gruber, while you can . . ."
Now her hand twisted at her breast. She took out the crescent earring, dangled it before her; her black eyes were inscrutable. She hooked the earring in place, and it dragged at the withered lobe of her ear. Before the mirror, she appraised herself, and her face, like a puckered brown cork, was yet not lacking in a certain coquetry. She moved her head, watched the crescent dance and send out silver gleams; she twisted from her hips, studied her whole body, as much of it as was visible in the mirror. She was like a grotesque caricature of a pretty girl whom I had once caught preening before a looking-glass on Prom night.
That was on Saturday. On Monday occurred the one little episode which prepared me at all for the astounding Zillah I was to see: the only forewarning of that sudden freak of her mind and nerves and that lightning-flash of her spirit. I have said that Zillah was meek with an irritating meekness; I have intimated that, if she was kicked, you had a sneaking feeling she was meant to be kicked. Yet I'm afraid, for the sake of the drama, I've shown Zillah at her highest moments; that I've made something more of her than the monotone of submission which she really was. Mostly Zillah was simply dead wood. I give you my word for it, she was a mere thing, a chattel, expressing nothing more lively than a passive adaptation.
But on Monday noon, when Zillah came with Gruber's dinner pail, I saw in her a spark. As she approached, a dog ran from a farmhouse, and snarled, and would have bitten her. I jumped up; two or three other men jumped up. But Gruber was ahead of us. He tackled the dog, gave us an exhibition of vicious temper; in fact, lamed the beast with his heavy shoes. It was the sort of brutality that made him popular in that neighborhood, quite aside from the stories of him that went about!
But Zillah—her face was the thing that caught me: it expressed no fear of the dog, no fear of Gruber, but only a blazing fury of hatred for him. This was the one act even approximating a kindness which Gruber had performed for her, and yet it was the moment at which she hated him hardest.
Afterward Gruber picked up his dinner pail. It contained a slab of the breaded meat which he disliked, and he actually threw it at Zillah. She accepted that insult sluggishly.
But later, when she returned to the house with his empty pail, I followed her, and I saw her fling down the dinner pail and stamp on it in a futile gust of passion. I could only stare.
"Why?" I asked her.
"Why—why! That man—that Gruber—I am not myself, I am his. You have seen it! Can nothing touch, me then without touching him, too? If sharp little teeth stick into me, then must they also stick into him? Can't I feel nothing—nothing"—Zillah hammered at her breast—"but what he lets me feel? Bah, just a mercury for his weather . . . a ruler to measure his feeling for himself. That thick, puffy feeling—that man's feeling of himself—ugh! I tell you, it is like a dough around me—it smothers me—" Zillah's face was sick with her utter loathing of him, of herself; she covered it from me.
After a time she took up the tin pail, attempted to straighten it, went listlessly on down.
