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She waited. He went on.
“I’ve been noticing you. Fact is, well, I might as well put it right out on the line and get it over with. We been sitting out here on the porch for quite a few months. I mean we’ve known each other a long time. Sure, you’re a good fifteen years younger than me, but would there be anything wrong with our getting engaged, do you think?”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Lemon,” she said quickly. She was very polite. “But I—”
?
?Oh, I know,” he said, edging forward with the words. “I know! It’s my head, it’s always this darn thing up here on my head!”
She looked at his turned-away profile in the uncertain light.
“Why, no, Mr. Lemon, I don’t think I would say that, I don’t think that’s it at all. I have wondered a bit about it, certainly, but I don’t think it’s an interference in any way. A friend of mine, a very dear friend, married a man once, I recall, who had a wooden leg. She told me she didn’t even know he had it after a while.”
“It’s always this darn hole,” cried Mr. Lemon bitterly. He took out his plug of tobacco, looked at it as if he might bite it, decided not to, and put it away. He formed a couple of fists and stared at them bleakly as if they were big rocks. “Well, I’ll tell you all about it, Miss Naomi. I’ll tell you how it happened.”
“You don’t have to if you don’t want.”
“I was married once, Miss Naomi. Yes, I was, darn it. And one day my wife she just took hold of a hammer and hit me right on the head!”
Miss Fremwell gasped. It was as if she had been struck herself.
Mr. Lemon brought one clenching fist down through the warm air.
“Yes, ma’am, she hit me straight on with that hammer, she did. I tell you, the world blew up on me. Everything fell down on me. It was like the house coming down in one heap. That one little hammer buried me, buried me! The pain? I can’t tell you!”
Miss Fremwell turned in on herself. She shut her eyes and thought, biting her lips. Then she said, “Oh, poor Mr. Lemon.”
“She did it so calm,” said Mr. Lemon, puzzled. “She just stood over me where I lay on the couch and it was a Tuesday afternoon about two o’clock and she said, ‘Andrew, wake up!’ and I opened my eyes and looked at her is all and then she hit me with that hammer. Oh, Lord.”
“But why?” asked Miss Fremwell.
“For no reason, no reason at all. Oh, what an ornery woman.”
“But why should she do a thing like that?” said Miss Fremwell.
“I told you: for no reason.”
“Was she crazy?”
“Must of been. Oh, yes, she must of been.”
“Did you prosecute her?”
“Well, no, I didn’t. After all, she didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Did it knock you out?”
Mr. Lemon paused and there it was again, so clear, so tall, in his mind, the old thought of it. Seeing it there, he put it in words.
“No, I remember just standing up. I stood up and I said to her, ‘What’d you do?’ and I stumbled toward her. There was a mirror. I saw the hole in my head, deep, and blood coming out. It made an Indian of me. She just stood there, my wife did. And at last she screamed three kinds of horror and dropped that hammer on the floor and ran out the door.”
“Did you faint then?”
“No. I didn’t faint. I got out on the street some way and I mumbled to somebody I needed a doctor. I got on a bus, mind you, a bus! And paid my fare! And said to leave me by some doctor’s house downtown. Everybody screamed, I tell you. I got sort of weak then, and next thing I knew the doctor was working on my head, had it cleaned out like a new thimble, like a bunghole in a barrel …”
He reached up and touched that spot now, fingers hovering over it as a delicate tongue hovers over the vacated area where once grew a fine tooth.
“A neat job. The doctor kept staring at me too, as if he expected me to fall down dead any minute.”
