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like shapes through her mind—a gull’s cry, a car on the road, water sucking at the shore. She drowsed somewhere between sleep and waking, seeing the sparrows’ wild fluttering swoop once more and the trembling drops of rain. “… killed herself,” he murmured, and entered. Then he was saying, in the rapt and stricken voice, “Ah, she was too young. God! Too fine. How——
    “Talk to me.” In an agony, it seemed, of desperation, to communicate his distress, he hurried to the kitchen and told Ella Swan. “Lawd have mercy!” Soon then Ella went home, amid lamentations and wails, piled high with bags and boxes, kitchen debris, garbage for her pigs. She turned at the door, a black wraith with yellowed, aqueous eyes. “Lawd God, Miss Helen, caint I help …” but Milton teetered past her, Ella was gone, and ne slumped back down in the chair. The bottle of whisky was empty. He couldn’t find another, so, rummaging about in cabinets and drawers, mumbling to himself like a chronic and fretful old man in search of his pills, he finally came across an old bottle of sweet vermouth, from which he began to drink steadily, intent. For a long while he was silent, and then he said softly: “Humbly, Helen, with all the humid—” she watched him patiently as he tried to form the words, his tongue clutched to the roof of his mouth like a leech—“wiz all humility I ask you to take me back. We got each other now, that’s all. I been an awful stink—” he paused, tried to smile—“I been an awful damn fool.” His tone became suddenly beguiling, deprecatory. He waved his arm into space, toward God, perhaps, or an invisible witness, or nothing. “She doesn’t mean anything to me. Honest. She doesn’t mean anything. You think Dolly’s been anything but a friend to me, a real good friend?” He leaned forward confidingly. “Lissen, honey, she and I’ve been real good friends, thass all. I know it’s hard f’ you to believe it. But thass all. Real good friends.” For a moment he seemed to have forgotten Peyton; his face was absorbed and reminiscent, as if amid all the tangle of his desolation he were contemplating some brighter, happier place, more placid and reassuring. “ ’Member, Helen? ’Member how we used to drive up to Connellsville in the summer? Marion and Eddie’s? ‘Member the time when Peyton almost got stung by the bees? ‘Member the way she hollered, ‘The bees, Daddy, the bees, the bees!’” He was laughing in thick little chuckles and, ceasing, his voice died in a faint wistful sigh, like wind through a shutter. “ Aaah-hah … the way she came running down the hill hollering ‘The bees, Daddy, the bees!’ ” And as he spoke she had a sudden glimpse, once more, of her brother’s home in the Pennsylvania mountains where they had visited in the twenties and the thirties, too: safe and serene in the easy mountain sunshine and the easier money of the Mellons and the Fricks—the good life, the happy life, a hundred years ago. There were huge oaks all around, the house was spacious and wealthy; it stood high on a hill, and from the valley below, made faint by intervening oak trees, the sound of traffic ascended—the only reminder of a noisy other world.
    “ ‘The bees!’ she hollered. I can see her now … running … ‘The bees, Daddy, the bees!’ ”
    Can’t you hear her, Helen?
    Peacefully she drowsed, neither asleep nor awake. Sleep was like a light that trembled and died, swelled, sank back like waves on a shore, fathomless upon lost drowned shoals of memory: she saw trees, sea-deep, cold light, a mountain pool. The bees, Daddy, the bees, and she looked up from the pool where tropical goldfish swam restlessly beneath green interlaced mountain ferns, looked up startled and then amused at Peyton who, fleeing out of the distant woods, fluttered mothlike for an instant on the sunlit hill, then floated down the bright mossy slope with abandoned, shrill cries of fear and