The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Read Online Free Page A

fingers pressed white against her temples. “Oh, what’s the use,” she cried, “of thinking over things past and done with?”
    She started to say something more, then turned back to her dishes. Mr. Hardy got up and quietly stole off to bed. At the door he scratched his pate and thought to ask which of them was it that was always thinking over things long ago done with, but decided not to.
    She had to sit; her backbone was like spools on a string. She rocked her head in her hands and wondered would all this misery never end. She thought of Virgie, Safe in Heaven these fifty years, safe in Mr. Hardy’s mind, forever young and pretty. Surely, she thought, shuffling a finger across her withered lips, surely when the Lord called you you didn’t have to come as you were. What else could Hell be?

Quail for Mr. Forester
    W HETHER IT was the same all over Texas I do not know, but in Columbia there was quite a rigid caste system based on the kind of goods a person sold. To deal in notions was probably the lowest, and dry goods was pretty low. Groceries was acceptable, pharmacy quite acceptable, furniture almost genteel. In all this I mean retail. To be in anything wholesale, even in a modest way, was higher than to be in the highest retail. And yet no kind of wholesale was higher than retail hardware. For it was into that that the Foresters went, with that indifference to the conventions which only they could afford, when the last of the old family property was sold at public auction.
    For a while after Mr. Forester bought the hardware store it had looked possible that the town might bankrupt him out of respect for him. No one could picture himself being waited on by a Forester. The first customer told how it seemed as if the world was coming to an end, and said that she had had to turn her head while Mr. Forester wrapped her package. Everyone had been touched and pleased to hear that it had been a very clumsily wrapped package.
    But Mr. Forester had such dignity, and carried through with such an air of remaining untouched, that people grew to feel it was not too insulting of them to trade with him, and he began to show a profit.
    It was not a very big store and certainly Mr. Forester did nothing to bring it up to date; people like the Foresters did not put on show. Yet in ten years, while the town, so to speak, turned its head in order not to see a Forester practicing economies, he saved enough to buy back—just in time for his wife to die there—his family home, the largest house on Silk Stocking Street. That was the nickname of the street, but to show you how generally it was called that, I do not even remember its real name. It was where all the quality lived.
    We lived on Oak Street and every morning at eight o’clock Mr. Forester passed our house on his way to business. My mother would let the milk stay on the porch until it was time for him to pass, and he always tipped his bowler to her, and sometimes he paid her a compliment in the old style.
    My father was a hunter, one who never came home empty-handed, and we never sat down to a dinner of wild duck or woodcock or quail but my mother thought of the faded sovereignty of the Foresters, of the days when none of their many tenants would have dreamed of a trip into town without bringing some fresh game for them. In the lull after I had said grace, while we spread our napkins, my mother was sure to say, “Wouldn’t poor Mr. Forester enjoy some of this.”
    She would have sent my father to him with presents of fish and game, except that she was sure it would be a perfect waste, for though she had never set foot in the house, much less eaten there, my mother had decided that Mr. Forester’s Negro cook was not only a very poor cook, but that she took a vengeful delight in being so.
    Time was, my father recalled, when hunters brought home towsacks full of quail, like to the present-day birds as a Brahma rooster to a bantam pullet;