The Saturday Evening Post (4 June, 1932)

The two men drove up the hill toward the blood-red sun. The cotton fields bordering the road were thin and withered, and no breeze stirred in the pines.

“When I am totally sober,” the doctor was saying —“I mean when I am totally sober — I don’t see the same world that you do. I’m like a friend of mine who had one good eye and got glasses made to correct his bad eye; the result was that he kept seeing elliptical suns and falling off tilted curbs, until he had to throw the glasses away. Granted that I am thoroughly anaesthetized the greater part of the day — well, I only undertake work that I know I can do when I am in that condition.”

“Yeah,” agreed his brother Gene uncomfortably. The doctor was a little tight at the moment and Gene could find no opening for what he had to say. Like so many Southerners of the humbler classes, he had a deep-seated courtesy, characteristic of all violent and passionate lands — he could not change the subject until there was a moment’s silence, and Forrest would not shut up.

“I’m very happy,” he continued, “or very miserable. I chuckle or I weep alcoholically and, as I continue to slow up, life accommodatingly goes faster, so that the less there is of myself inside, the more diverting becomes the moving picture without. I have cut myself off from the respect of my fellow man, but I am aware of a compensatory cirrhosis of the emotions. And because my sensitivity, my pity, no longer has direction, but fixes itself on whatever is at hand, I have become an exceptionally good fellow — much more so than when I was a good doctor.”

As the road straightened after the next bend and Gene saw his house in the distance, he remembered his wife’s face as she had made him promise, and he could wait no longer: “Forrest, I got a thing —”

But at that moment the doctor brought his car to a sudden stop in front of a small house just beyond a grove of pines. On the front steps a girl of eight was playing with a gray cat.

“This is the sweetest little kid I ever saw,” the doctor said to Gene, and then to the child, in a grave voice: “Helen, do you need any pills for kitty?”

The little girl laughed.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. She was playing another game with the cat now and this came as rather an interruption.

“Because kitty telephoned me this morning,” the doctor continued, “and said her mother was neglecting her and couldn’t I get her a trained nurse from Montgomery.”

“She did not.” The little girl grabbed the cat close indignantly; the doctor took a nickle from his pocket and tossed it to the steps.

“I recommend a good dose of milk,” he said as he put the car into gear. “Good night, Helen.”

“Good night, doctor.”

As they drove off, Gene tried again: “Listen; stop,” he said. “Stop here a little way down. . . . Here.”

The doctor stopped the car and the brothers faced each other. They were alike as to robustness of figure and a certain asceticism of feature and they were both in their middle forties; they were unlike in that the doctor’s glasses failed to conceal the veined, weeping eyes of a soak, and that he wore corrugated city wrinkles; Gene’s wrinkles bounded fields, followed the lines of rooftrees, of poles propping up sheds. His eyes were a fine, furry blue. But the sharpest contrast lay in the fact that Gene Janney was a country man while Dr. Forrest Janney was obviously a man of education.

“Well?” the doctor asked.

“You know Pinky’s at home,” Gene said, looking down the road.

“So I hear,” the doctor answered noncommittally.

“He got in a row in Birmingham and somebody shot him in the head.” Gene hesitated. “We got Doc Behrer because we thought maybe you wouldn’t — maybe you wouldn’t —”

“I wouldn’t,” agreed Doctor Janney blandly.

“But look, Forrest; here’s the thing,” Gene insisted. “You know how it is — you often say Doc Behrer doesn’t know nothing. Shucks, I never thought he was much either. He says the bullet’s pressing on the — pressing on the brain, and he can’t take it out without causin’ a hemmering, and he says he doesn’t know whether we could get him to Birmingham or Montgomery, or not, he’s so low. Doc wasn’t no help. What we want —”

“No,” said his brother, shaking his head. “No.”

“I just want you to look at him and tell us what to do,” Gene begged. “He’s unconscious, Forrest. He wouldn’t know you; you’d hardly know him. Thing is his mother’s about crazy.”

“She’s in the grip of a purely animal instinct.” The doctor took from his hip a flask containing half water and half Alabama corn, and drank. “You and I know that boy ought to been drowned the day he was born.”

Gene flinched. “He’s bad,” he admitted, “but I don’t know — You see him lying there —”

As the liquor spread over the doctor’s insides he felt an instinct to do something, not to violate his prejudices but simply to make some gesture, to assert his own moribund but still struggling will to power.

“All right, I’ll see him,” he said. “I’ll do nothing myself to help him, because he ought to be dead. And even his death wouldn’t make up for what he did to Mary Decker.”

Gene Janney pursed his lips. “Forrest, you sure about that?”

“Sure about it!” exclaimed the doctor. “Of course I’m sure. She died of starvation; she hadn’t had more than a couple cups of coffee in a week. And if you looked at her shoes, you could see she’d walked for miles.”

“Doc Behrer says —”

“What does he know? I performed the autopsy the day they found her on the Birmingham Highway. There was nothing the matter with her but starvation. That — that”— his voice shook with feeling —“that Pinky got tired of her and turned her out, and she was trying to get home. It suits me fine that he was invalided home himself a couple of weeks later.”

As he talked, the doctor had plunged the car savagely into gear and let the clutch out with a jump; in a moment they drew up before Gene Janney’s home.

It was a square frame house with a brick foundation and a well-kept lawn blocked off from the farm, a house rather superior to the buildings that composed the town of Bending and the surrounding agricultural area, yet not essentially different in type or in its interior economy. The last of the plantation houses in this section of Alabama had long disappeared, the proud pillars yielding to poverty, rot and rain.

Gene’s wife, Rose, got up from her rocking-chair on the porch.

“Hello, doc.” She greeted him a little nervously and without meeting his eyes. “You been a stranger here lately.”

The doctor met her eyes for several seconds. “How do you do, Rose,” he said. “Hi, Edith. . . . Hi, Eugene”— this to the little boy and girl who stood beside their mother; and then: “Hi, Butch!” to the stocky youth of nineteen who came around the corner of the house hugging a round stone.

“Goin to have a sort of low wall along the front here — kind of neater,” Gene explained.

All of them had a lingering respect for the doctor. They felt reproachful toward him because they could no longer refer to him as their celebrated relative —“one of the bess surgeons up in Montgomery, yes, suh”— but there was his learning and the position he had once occupied in the larger world, before he had committed professional suicide by taking to cynicism and drink. He had come home to Bending and bought a half interest in the local drug store two years ago, keeping up his license, but practising only when sorely needed.

“Rose,” said Gene, “doc says he’ll take a look at Pinky.”

Pinky Janney, his lips curved mean and white under a new beard, lay in bed in a darkened room. When the doctor removed the bandage from his head, his breath blew into a low groan, but his paunchy body did not move. After a few minutes, the doctor replaced the bandage and, with Gene and Rose, returned to the porch.

“Behrer wouldn’t operate?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why didn’t they operate in Birmingham?”

“I don’t know.”

“H’m.” The doctor put on his hat. “That bullet ought to come out, and soon. It’s pressing against the carotid sheath. That’s the — anyhow, you can’t get him to Montgomery with that pulse.”

“What’ll we do?” Gene’s question carried a little tail of silence as he sucked his breath back.

“Get Behrer to think it over. Or else get somebody in Montgomery. There’s about a 25 per cent chance that the operation would save him; without the operation he hasn’t any chance at all.”

“Who’ll we get in Montgomery?” asked Gene.

“Any good surgeon would do it. Even Behrer could do it if he had any nerve.”

Suddenly Rose Janney came close to him, her eyes straining and burning with an animal maternalism. She seized his coat where it hung open.

“Doc, you do it! You can do it. You know you were as good a surgeon as any of em once. Please, doc, you go on do it.”

He stepped back a little so that her hands fell from his coat, and held out his own hands in front of him.

“See how they tremble?” he said with elaborate irony. “Look close and you’ll see. I wouldn’t dare operate.”

“You could do it all right,” said Gene hastily, “with a drink to stiffen you up.”

The doctor shook his head and said, looking at Rose: “No. You see, my decisions are not reliable, and if anything went wrong, it would seem to be my fault.” He was acting a little now — he chose his words carefully. “I hear that when I found that Mary Decker died of starvation, my opinion was questioned on the ground that I was a drunkard.”

“I didn’t say that,” lied Rose breathlessly.

“Certainly not. I just mention it to show how careful I’ve got to be.” He moved down the steps. “Well, my advice is to see Behrer again, or, failing that, get somebody from the city. Good night.”

But before he had reached the gate, Rose came tearing after him, her eyes white with fury.

“I did say you were a drunkard!” she cried. “When you said Mary Decker died of starvation, you made it out as if it was Pinky’s fault — you, swilling yourself full of corn all day! How can anybody tell whether you know what you’re doing or not? Why did you think so much about Mary Decker, anyhow — a girl half your age? Everybody saw how she used to come in your drug store and talk to you —”

Gene, who had followed, seized her arms. “Shut up now, Rose. . . . Drive along, Forrest.”

Forrest drove along, stopping at the next bend to drink from his flask. Across the fallow cotton fields he could see the house where Mary Decker had lived, and had it been six months before, he might have detoured to ask her why she hadn’t come into the store that day for her free soda, or to delight her with a sample cosmetic left by a salesman that morning. He had not told Mary Decker how he felt about her; never intended to — she was seventeen, he was forty-five, and he no longer dealt in futures — but only after she ran away to Birmingham with Pinky Janney, did he realize how much his love for her had counted in his lonely life.

His thoughts went back to his brother’s house.

“Now, if I were a gentleman,” he thought, “I wouldn’t have done like that. And another person might have been sacrificed to that dirty dog, because if he died afterward Rose would say I killed him.”

Yet he felt pretty bad as he put his car away; not that he could have acted differently, but just that it was all so ugly.

He had been home scarcely ten minutes when a car creaked to rest outside and Butch Janney came in. His mouth was set tight and his eyes were narrowed as though to permit of no escape to the temper that possessed him until it should be unleashed upon its proper objective.

“Hi, Butch.”

“I want to tell you, Uncle Forrest, you can’t talk to my mother thataway. I’ll kill you, you talk to my mother like that!”

“Now shut up, Butch, and sit down,” said the doctor sharply.

“She’s already bout sick on account of Pinky, and you come over and talk to her like that.”

“Your mother did all the insulting that was done, Butch. I just took it.”

“She doesn’t know what she’s saying and you ought to understand that.”

The doctor thought a minute. “Butch, what do you think of Pinky?”

Butch hesitated uncomfortably. “Well, I can’t say I ever thought so much of him”— his tone changed defiantly —“but after all, he’s my own brother —”

“Wait a minute, Butch. What do you think of the way he treated Mary Decker?”

But Butch had shaken himself free, and now he let go the artillery of his rage:

“That ant the point; the point is anybody that doesn’t do right to my mother has me to answer to. It’s only fair when you got all the education —”

“I got my education myself, Butch.”

“I don’t care. We’re going to try again to get Doc Behrer to operate or get us some fellow from the city. But if we can’t, I’m coming and get you, and you’re going to take that bullet out if I have to hold a gun to you while you do it.” He nodded, panting a little; then he turned and went out and drove away.

“Something tells me,” said the doctor to himself, “that there’s no more peace for me in Chilton County.” He called to his colored boy to put supper on the table. Then he rolled himself a cigarette and went out on the back stoop.

The weather had changed. The sky was now overcast and the grass stirred restlessly and there was a sudden flurry of drops without a sequel. A minute ago it had been warm, but now the moisture on his forehead was suddenly cool, and he wiped it away with his handkerchief. There was a buzzing in his ears and he swallowed and shook his head. For a moment he thought he must be sick; then suddenly the buzzing detached itself from him, grew into a swelling sound, louder and ever nearer, that might have been the roar of an approaching train.
II

Butch Janney was halfway home when he saw it — a huge, black, approaching cloud whose lower edge bumped the ground. Even as he stared at it vaguely, it seemed to spread until it included the whole southern sky, and he saw pale electric fire in it [had heard an increasing roar.] He was in a strong wind now; blown débris, bits of broken branches, splinters, larger objects unidentifiable in the growing darkness, flew by him. Instinctively he got out of his car and, by now hardly able to stand against the wind, ran for a bank, or rather found himself thrown and pinned against a bank. Then for a minute, two minutes, he was in the black centre of pandemonium.

First there was the sound, and he was part of the sound, so engulfed in it and possessed by it that he had no existence apart from it. It was not a collection of sounds, it was just Sound itself; a great screeching bow drawn across the chords of the universe. The sound and force were inseparable. The sound as well as the force held him to what he felt was the bank like a man crucified. Somewhere in this first moment his face, pinned sideways, saw his automobile make a little jump, spin halfway around and then go bobbing off over a field in a series of great helpless leaps. Then began the bombardment, the sound dividing its sustained cannon note into the cracks of a gigantic machine gun. He was only half-conscious as he felt himself become part of one of those cracks, felt himself lifted away from the bank to tear through space, through a blinding, lacerating mass of twigs and branches, and then, for an incalculable time, he knew nothing at all.

His body hurt him. He was lying between two branches in the top of a tree; the air was full of dust and rain, and he could hear nothing; it was a long time before he realized that the tree he was in had been blown down and that his involuntary perch among the pine needles was only five feet from the ground.

“Say, man!” he cried aloud, outraged. “Say, man! Say, what a wind! Say, man!”

Made acute by pain and fear, he guessed that he had been standing on the tree’s root and had been catapulted by the terrific wrench as the big pine was torn from the earth. Feeling over himself, he found that his left ear was caked full of dirt, as if someone had wanted to take an impression of the inside. His clothes were in rags, his coat had torn on the back seam, and he could feel where, as some stray gust tried to undress him, it had cut into him under the arms.

Reaching the ground, he set off in the direction of his father’s house, but it was a new and unfamiliar landscape he traversed. The Thing — he did not know it was a tornado — had cut a path a quarter of a mile wide, and he was confused, as the dust slowly settled, by vistas he had never seen before. It was unreal that Bending church tower should be visible from here; there had been groves of trees between.

But where was here? For he should be close to the Baldwin house; only as he tripped over great piles of boards, like a carelessly kept lumberyard, did Butch realize that there was no more Baldwin house, and then, looking around wildly, that there was no Necrawney house on the hill, no Peltzer house below it. There was not a light, not a sound, save the rain falling on the fallen trees.

He broke into a run. When he saw the bulk of his father’s house in the distance, he gave a “Hey!” of relief, but coming closer, he realized that something was missing. There were no outhouses and the built-on wing that held Pinky’s room had been sheared completely away.

“Mother!” he called. “Dad!” There was no answer; a dog bounded out of the yard and licked his hand. . . .

. . . It was full dark twenty minutes later when Doc Janney stopped his car in front of his own drug store in Bending. The electric lights had gone out, but there were men with lanterns in the street, and in a minute a small crowd had collected around him. He unlocked the door hurriedly.

“Somebody break open the old Wiggins Hospital.” He pointed across the street. “I’ve got six badly injured in my car. I want some fellows to carry em in. Is Doc Behrer here?”

“Here he is,” offered eager voices out of the darkness as the doctor, case in hand, came through the crowd. The two men stood face to face by lantern light, forgetting that they disliked each other.

“God knows how many more there’s going to be,” said Doc Janney. “I’m getting dressing and disinfectant. There’ll be a lot of fractures —” He raised his voice, “Somebody bring me a barrel!”

“I’ll get started over there,” said Doc Behrer. “There’s about half a dozen more crawled in.”

“What’s been done?” demanded Doc Janney of the men who followed him into the drug store. “Have they called Birmingham and Montgomery?”

“The telephone wires are down, but the telegraph got through.”

“Well, somebody get Doctor Cohen from Wettala, and tell any people who have automobiles to go up the Willard Pike and cut across toward Corsica and all through those roads there. There’s not a house left at the crossroads by the nigger store. I passed a lot of folks walking in, all of them hurt, but I didn’t have room for anybody else.” As he talked he was throwing bandages, disinfectant and drugs into a blanket. “I thought I had a lot more stuff than this in stock! And wait!” he called. “Somebody drive out and look down in that hollow where the Wooleys live. Drive right across the fields — the road’s blocked. . . . Now, you with the cap — Ed Jenks, ain’t it?”

“Yes, doc.”

“You see what I got here? You collect everything in the store that looks like this and bring it across the way, understand?”

“Yes, doc.”

As the doctor went out into the street, the victims were streaming into town — a woman on foot with a badly injured child, a buckboard full of groaning Negroes, frantic men gasping terrible stories. Everywhere confusion and hysteria mounted in the dimly illumined darkness. A mud-covered reporter from Birmingham drove up in a sidecar, the wheels crossing the fallen wires and brush............