face reddened angrily. She had begun to sing in public with the saddlemaker’s daughter.
“You’d better not talk, Steve, until you get a job and quit bumming around,” she said. “You’re a fine one to talk, hanging around pool-rooms and drug-stores all day on your wife’s money. Why, it’s absurd!” she said furiously.
“Oh for God’s sake!” Ben cried irritably, wheeling around. “What do you want to listen to him for? Can’t you see he’s crazy?”
As the summer lengthened, Steve began to drink heavily again. His decayed teeth, neglected for years, began to ache simultaneously: he was wild with pain and cheap whisky. He felt that Eliza and Margaret were in some way responsible for his woe—he sought them out day after day when they were alone, and screamed at them. He called them foul names and said they had poisoned his system.
In the early hours of morning, at two or three o’clock, he would waken, and walk through the house weeping and entreating release. Eliza would send him to Spaugh at the hotel or to McGuire, at his residence, in Eugene’s charge. The doctors, surly and half-awake, peeled back his shirtsleeve and drove a needle with morphine deep in his upper arm. After that, he found relief and sleep again.
One night, at the supper hour, he returned to Dixieland, holding his tortured jaws between his hands. He found Eliza bending over the spitting grease of the red-hot stove. He cursed her for bearing him, he cursed her for allowing him to have teeth, he cursed her for lack of sympathy, motherly love, human kindliness.
Her white face worked silently above the heat.
“Get out of here,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s that accursed licker that makes you so mean.” She began to weep, brushing at her broad red nose with her hand.
“I never thought I’d live to hear such talk from a son of mine,” she said. She held out her forefinger with the old powerful gesture.
“Now, I want to tell you,” she said, “I’m not going to put up with
