The Progress of Love

you like a red-hot poker in your eye?
    When she finished reading, Violet said, “The thing to do is to show these to the police.”
    She had forgotten that the police did not exist out here in that abstract, official way. There was a policeman, but he was in town, and furthermore King Billy had had a run-in with him last winter. According to King Billy’s story, a car driven by Lawyer Boot Lomax had skidded into King Billy’s cutter at an intersection, and Lomax had summoned the policeman.
    “Arrest that man for failing to stop at an intersection!” shouted Boot Lomax (drunk), waving his hand in its big fur-lined glove.
    King Billy jumped up on the hard, heaped-up snow and readied his fists. “Ain’t no brass buttons going to put the cuffs on me!”
    It was all talked out in the end, but just the same it would be bad policy to go to that policeman.
    “He’s going to have it in for me, no matter. Could be even him is writing them.”
    But Aunt Ivie said it was that tramp. She remembered a bad-looking tramp who had come to the door years ago, and when she gave him a piece of bread he didn’t say thank you. He said, “Haven’t you got any bologna?”
    King Billy thought more likely it could be a man he had hired once to help with the hay. The man quit after a day and a half because he couldn’t stand working in the mow. He said he had nearly choked to death up there on the dust and the hayseeds, and he wanted fifty cents extra for the damage to his lungs.
    “I’ll give you fifty cents!” King Billy yelled at him. He jabbed at the air with a pitchfork. “Come over here and you’ll get your fifty cents!”
    Or could it be somebody settling an old score, one of those fellows he had kicked off the train long ago? One of those fellows from further back than that, that he had cleaned up on at the dance?
    Aunt Ivie recalled a boy who had thought the world of her when she was young. He had gone out West but might have come back, and just heard that she was married.
    “After all this time to come ragin’ after you?” King Billy said. “That’s not what I’d call likely!”
    “He thought the world of me, just the same.”
    Violet was studying the notes. They were printed in pencil, on cheap lined paper. The pencil strokes were dark, as if the writer kept bearing down hard. There was no rubbing out or problem with the spelling—for instance, of a word like “ignoramus.” There was an understanding of sentences and capital letters. But how much could that tell you?
    The door was bolted at night. The blinds were drawn down to the sills. King Billy laid the shotgun on the table and set a glass of whiskey beside it.
    Violet dashed the whiskey into the slop pail. “You don’t need that,” she said.
    King Billy raised his hand to her—though he was not a man to strike his wife or his children.
    Violet backed off but went on talking. “You don’t need to stay awake. I’ll stay awake. I’m fresh and you’re tired. Go on, Papa. You need to sleep, not drink.”
    After some arguing, this was agreed on. King Billy made Violet show him that she knew how to use the shotgun. Then he went off to sleep in the parlor, on the hard couch there. Aunt Ivie had already pushed the dresser against the bedroom door and it would take too much yelling and explaining to get her to push it away.
    Violet turned up the lamp and got the ink bottle from the shelf and started writing to Trevor to tell him what the trouble was. Without boasting, just telling what was happening, she let him see how she was taking over and calming people down, how she was prepared to defend her family. She even told about throwing out the whiskey, explaining that it was due to the strain on his nerves that her father had thought of resorting to whiskey in the first place. She did not say that she was afraid. She described the stillness, darkness, and loneliness of the early-summer night. And to someone who had been living in a town or city, it was very dark and lonely—but not so still, after all. Not if you were listening for something. It was full of faint noises, distant and nearby, of trees lifting and stirring and animals shifting and feeding. Lying outsidethe door, Tigger made the noise once or twice that meant he was dreaming about barking.
    Violet signed her letter Your loving and longing future wife , then added, with all my heart . She turned the lamp down and raised a window blind and sat there keeping watch. In her letter, she had said