Then one evening V was not at the house in time for supper and he went outside to see if he could find her. It was a long summer dusk, with the mountains to the east purple and black with shadow, and the hot wind sighing up the valley from the desert. He looked down through the orchard where the D-4 was parked, a dark mass among the trees, and then he walked slowly back to the corral. Through the kitchen window he could see Mary’s bulky figure silhouetted above the stove, the tall rosy glow of the stovepipe beside her. Juan’s black head was pressed against the glass as he sat leaning back on the stool between the stove and the kitchen table.
Jill let out a single, sharp bark as he entered the corral, and jumped up on his leg. Tony’s feed trough was empty again; he set his lips and shook his head; he would speak to V this time. Tony stood patiently at the trough. His coat, dull copper in the fading light, felt rough and uncurried, and he made a muted sound as Baird patted him on the muzzle.
Going around the shed to get some feed, he halted, frowning, as he came upon Ward’s roadster. Then he stepped inside the shed door, halting again to let his eyes accustom themselves to the darkness.
He heard the sounds before he could see. The sound hit him savagely in the face, but still he did not know what this was he had come upon. Then he knew, and the darkness cleared from his eyes like settling dust and he saw. He saw V’s face turned up toward him, a white triangle in the darkness. Ward’s face, a dark one, and he could hear V’s terrified uneven breathing.
A husky sound swelled in his throat and forced its way through his lips. He staggered a step back; he could have torn his eyes and ears from his head for what they had seen and heard, to punish them, to prove them horribly, monstrously wrong. He almost cried out to her, but the cry was muted and drowned in the surging sea of outrage that swept over him.
He was panting, his body convulsed, his chest pounding, as he hurried toward the house. He passed Tony, who was stamping and snorting, he passed Jill, who whined at him. But he didn’t hear. He could not think; he only knew what he had to do, for the white triangle of face turned up to him from the shed floor had been Cora’s face, confirming past all doubt diseased and crazy suspicions that had been dying now for thirteen years. His boots grated harshly on the path, were noiseless as he cut across the grass, sounded sharply again as he ran up the steps. He paused for a moment before the door, trying to control his breathing, the nauseated, raging fist within him clenching and unclenching with the beating of his heart. “Whore!” he whispered.
He went in and crossed the kitchen without looking at Juan or Mary. The door sprang shut behind him. In V’s room the panting broke loose from him again, like an animal clawing and leaping from his arms. He looked around him, gasping for breath; he dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Whore!” he whispered. He saw the white triangle of Cora’s face staring up at him from the dark floor of the shed, above it Mr. Burgess’ face, above it John Schuford’s face, above it the face of the man who had helped him cut the alfalfa that year, above it the dark face of Jim Lewis, who had brought them milk and ice, and who was dead now, above it myriad, nameless, unknown triangles of faces. He saw Cora tumbling with them all on the floor of the shed. But they did not look up at him in terror, there was no uneven, terror-stricken breathing. They looked up at him and laughed and called him an old hick, throwing at him, like stones he could not dodge, his age, his poverty, his ignorance; looking up at him and talking about poetry and cuckolding him and shaming him and laughing.
With furious haste he pulled V’s suitcases down from their shelf in the closet. He jerked open the drawers of the bureau and blindly dropped her things into the suitcases, mouthing harsh, self-pitying words. And now Cora’s face had separated itself from V’s and was dead and gone, and now it was V who was cuckolding him, lying on the filthy floor of the shed like an animal with Ward.
The suitcases were almost full. He threw in the Texas boots and the gay diploma and the photograph of V on Tony, a diary he had given her for her birthday once and she had never used, a half-eaten box of candy he found in the back of the bottom drawer—and he sank down in the chair and looked wildly around the room once more.
His eyes were blind. He had never known he could hate like this. He had never known rage and madness and somehow terror like this. He knelt and closed the cases on the tumbled clothes, and cinched them fast with the worn leather straps. Carrying them he walked heavily through the kitchen and down the back stairs. He dropped them in the middle of the drive. There was no movement, no sound, from where the squat darkness of the shed loomed, but it was now too dark to see.
He strode back into the kitchen. Mary looked at him enquiringly, then her black eyes knew. Juan sat at the table, staring at his half-emptied plate in carefully arrested motion. A hoarse, unfamiliar voice said, “Put my dinner on the table!”
Mary brought his plate and put it down between the knife and fork that marked his place. Half-rising, he reached across the table and pushed together the other knife, fork and spoon, and pushed them toward her. He saw the fat brown hand pick them up.
He heard Ward’s car start up, stop. When it drove past he didn’t look up from his plate. Frozen in bitterness and hate like a block of ice he thought with a kind of brutal triumph that after supper he would go over and tell Denton.
And he did. And after that he never spoke to Denton again, trying to drive his daughter from his mind as he had driven her from his house. For nine empty, wasted years he had tried, and then one afternoon even the emptiness was gone, when her lawyer telephoned from Bakersfield to tell him she was dead.