While the Whole Town Slept

Supper finished, Eleanor O'Neill excused herself from the table. She went up to her room, she had a front room that got morning sun in the summer and cooling breezes later in the day, and selected a magazine. Not that she planned on reading. Her magazine was her prop for going to sit on the porch. The rest of the boarders would retire to the sitting room to watch television. Eleanor couldn't abide television. Oh, maybe it would be all right if she had a set in her own room. Maybe then she could enjoy Sid Caesar or Jack Benny. It would be private enjoyment that way. To sit with the other boarders and feel compelled to laugh when they did, to gasp with shock when some television detective announced who the guilty party was or when some western desperado shot it out with the posse, well, that wasn't her idea of enjoyment.

Better to sit on the front porch, feel the hot summer day fade away to a memory and let the soft evening and its promise of peaceful sleep envelop one's self.

"Not going to join us, Eleanor?" asked Mrs. Pritchard. She owned the boarding house and, in Texas parlance, she was a widow woman. Eleanor bridled at the redundancy; there was nothing to be done about it, however, and years of usage had made the phrase harmless in her mind. Just as, often as not, she described herself as a spinster lady. The first noun signified the sex of the person and to add the second was a waste. Still, it was part of the land in which she'd grown up and lived. "M Squad is starting. Don't you just adore Lee Marvin? He's so rugged and handsome!"

"No, Mrs. Pritchard," Eleanor replied. "I've got the new issue of The Atlantic Monthly and I haven't even had a chance to open it yet."

That was a white lie. The magazine was seven months old and Eleanor had read the magazine from cover to cover. Twice.

She passed the doorless entrance to the sitting room and saw that the other four boarders had already assumed their places and were waiting for the television set to warm up. Eleanor hurried outside.

The broad porch of the rooming house offered several places to sit and catch the evening breezes. There was a porch swing for lovers - had it ever seen any use? -, a wicker love seat and a pair of matching chairs. Eleanor chose the chair farthest from the sitting room window so the noise of the program and the voices of its audience wouldn't penetrate the evening to distract her. Only the silver flicker on the curtains would betray the existence of the television and she could pretend that it was distant summer lightning of an approaching storm that would cool that night air, wash clean the streets and sidewalks, offer sustenance to the parched yards and fields that lay baking under the day's summer sun.

The heat never bothered Eleanor. Even as a little girl, she could run and play in the hot sun and her mother didn't have to caution her against sun stroke. It was as if she had reptilian blood that grew stronger in the full heat of the afternoon. That was silly, of course.

Eleanor was an O'Neill, through and through. Everybody said you could see the face of Colonel Jackson McGarrett O'Neill in her handsome face. And it was indeed a handsome face. High forehead under dark bangs, clear blue eyes that sometimes tinged with green, a short straight nose between high cheekbones, and a firm mouth that smiled easily. And her figure was good, too, if any man had ever chanced to see it. High busted, narrow waisted, and rounded at the hips with the fine legs of a young filly.

In fact, some in the Williford wondered how she had remained single. With a fine name like O'Neill, an alluring body, a sharp mind and fine career, not to mention some money of her own, Eleanor O'Neill was a fine catch for any respectable suitor. None had ever come calling though and if Eleanor regretted the lost opportunities of youth, she kept the information resolutely to herself. And even now, when she had said good-by to her thirties, she was attractive and remained a good catch. Still, no one came calling and the people who knew her, for she had no friends, assumed that she had been born to spinsterhood and was accustomed to the fact.

From the porch, Eleanor pulled the chain on the front porch light and let darkness swallow her up, magazine discarded. She watched the shadows lengthen as the sun settled behind her. She enjoyed this time of day best and watched with heightened expectations as the long Texas twilight lingered. Slowly lights came on in the large houses around her. The occasional automobile crawled past following its headlights and trailing the red glow of it's taillights. Children were all ushered inside. Dogs quit barking; cats, emboldened by the darkness, slipped among the shadows that were the second nature to the felines; doves had made their last love songs and had settled in pairs for the night; and an occasional night bird, once a large owl, called out its presence. Bats, mice with wings as she had thought them in her childhood, making shrill piercing to find their prey, swung around the streetlamps.

Beyond the rooming house and it's neighbors, the soft glow of the town's compact business center spread over ancient oak, elms, and pecans.

Eleanor sat in silence. She was a pale shadow in the darker shadow of the porch. She lifted the skirt of her light summer dress and fanned the hem across her knees. She stretched her legs out in front of her. In a quite unlady-like fashion, she left her skirt above her knees. No one, after all, was present to admire her display.

Flowers had closed up for the night, but she could smell the mimosas around her, as sweet to her as to the honeybee. She breathed deeply. In her imagination, she sensed the distant seashore. Thirty years ago, her father, mother, Minetta, Barry, Edwin, and she had taken the train to Galveston Island and the trip was as real to her as if it were yesterday. Eyes closed, she could smell the tang of the Gulf Of Mexico. Feel the soft grittiness of the sand beneath her feet. Hear the strident calls of the gulls as they swooped about looking for bits of food left by picnicking beachgoers. Even taste the saltiness of the water on her lips after her father had carried her out past the breakers and she had squealed with mock fear as he pretended to toss her into the spume where crabs would nip her toes and fish nibble at her pale legs.

That had been her one trip to the seashore and she could still smell the water although her home was two hundred miles inland. The trip had been so much fun and one of the last taken as a family. He father had died three years later. Heartbroken, her mother had been a changed woman. All the laughter had gone out of her mother's life. Minetta's death from tuberculosis in 1933 was the final straw for the widow and she died the same year. Barry, like his grandfather a colonel, was killed at Kasserine Pass, Edwin had died on Omaha Beach, and Eleanor was alone. The last O'Neill.

That summer at the beach had been the best summer of her life, although she also remembered fondly the summer before her father's death. She had been sent to a girls' summer camp northwest of Austin. For two weeks she had sung and listened to ghost stories around campfires, hiked and learned to shoot a bow, learned to canoe on the lake (a pale substitute for the wider sea), and met a boy.

Eleanor could see him now in the gathered darkness just as she smelled the seaside. She no longer remembered the boy's name; in her mind she called him Byron, after the poet. Taller than she and slender. Red hair and a dusting of freckles, an easy grin, and a friendly confident manner. She was 14, he perhaps two years older. She could run almost as fast as he could, swim almost as far. And he could kiss.

Eleanor had never been kissed. Not like Byron kissed. Full on the lips, forceful yet oddly gentle. Insistent. Leaving her hungry for his lips when she would slip away from the giggling gaggle of girls who knew nothing of such kisses (she thought in her ignorance) to wait impatiently in a leafy glade where mockingbirds, blue jays, and doves watched the teens press their lips together. And not just their lips. Byron held her tightly and she felt the strength of his embrace as if he threatened to break her trembling body. And the questing touch of his tongue.

Byron even bestowed upon Eleanor her only nickname. He called her Nell. Byron actually made a game of that name, calling her Nell. Or in full, Nell-O-Neill. He made a song, too, "Nell-O-Neill - Banana peel/Nell-o-Neill - Yellow peel."

The kisses and embraces continued for three days and would have continued forever if Byron hadn't tried to put his hand inside Eleanor's khaki shorts. She had reacted as the shocked, sheltered girl she was. She screamed. Terrified the birds into flight. Fought her way free of the boy and fled, certain that the Devil himself pursued her, breath full of the scent of brimstone, his talons unsheathed to claw her and drag her to Hell.

For the next three nights, she couldn't sleep and for three afternoons she fought the impulse to seek Byron out in their secret glade and let him know that she forgave him for his impertinent groping, to let him know that she welcomed his lips if not his hands.

Or was she lying to herself?

Would Eleanor have welcomed his eager hands? Responded? She never knew or banished the questions from her mind when she saw Byron on the fourth day with one of the girls' camp counselors and he had his hand where it wasn't supposed to be and the older girl was reciprocating by rubbing Byron's crotch as they kissed with a heat that Eleanor could only estimate.

She fled in silence and tried to force the memory of the sight from her mind. And now, almost thirty years later, the spinster remembered only the feel of the boys lips and not even the butterfly caress of his tongue.

A jalopy drove loudly down the quiet street, three loud teenaged boys laughing, scattering the silence in fear. Then the beat up car was gone and silence, peering from its hiding places, crept back to occupy the night.

Abruptly, Eleanor stood. She was suddenly tired of the silence, of the night. Unusually for her, she no longer wanted them. The boys in the jalopy and their joyous noise wanted her to find some gaiety, some pleasant sounds. She didn't know why. Maybe it was because those happy teens may have once sat in her classroom and thus had a link to her. Eleanor dropped her magazine and strode purposefully from the rooming house porch.

She turned toward the short length of the block. Her long legs covered the distance quickly. At the corner, she turned towards the lights of the business district. Settlers' Park with its large bandstand loomed up on her left, flanked by the statue of her grandfather astride a prancing stallion. He was in full uniform, a dashing man of 33 in his confederate uniform when he commanded the 20th Texas Volunteers during the War of Southern Secession. Eleanor remembered him that way sometimes and sometimes as a kindly old man well into his nineties with a flowing white beard and a stoop. He had buried three wives (being survived by his last bride, a local girl of some twenty years) and seven children. In some European locales, he would have been considered the patron saint of the town. In Texas, he rated a statue three time life sized.

As the park fell behind her, she thought of the whispers from some of her students that the park was the site of many a trysting couple. Maybe teens, maybe older couples, Eleanor had no idea. But she wondered if clasping, gasping lovers huddled among the rhododendrons, azaleas, hibiscuses, and oleanders.

Shocked, Eleanor shook her head. Whence came that thought? Sternly she forced the idea from her mind.

She walked on, her pace relaxed.

The town square was dominated by the dark tower of the town hall, the four faced clock unlit since the hands were motionless and the practical city fathers thought that since there was no money to fix the clock, it was a waste of hard earned dollars to light the tower. Since the hall itself was an embarrassing mixture of Greek Revival and Old Southern Plantation architecture, there was all the more reason to leave the place shrouded in impressive darkness.

The north side of the square which was blocked from her view by the massive town hall, was also dark, the stores closed for the night. The west side was dominated by Williford Café, the Greyhound bus station, both lit and alive, and the quiet and shuttered train depot. Just ahead of her was the brightly lit Texas Movie Palace. The first showing must have just ended as people were streaming from the air conditioned coolness to the steamy warmth of the sidewalk and street.

Not wanting to be around anyone, Eleanor turned abruptly east. There were lights here, too, but not as bright as the café's or movie theatre's. A dark feed store was on the corner, but then in quick succession came the Pasttime Club, McReady's Pool Hall, a nameless saloon, at least it had no sign out front and Eleanor had never heard it called anything but "the bar," a barber shop, and at the end of the block, the Recreation Room.

There were plenty of cars here, nosed in to the curb, faced by the parking meters like so many mute sentinels. The cars testified to the Friday night popularity of the businesses.

The walking woman kept her eyes directly in front of her, not wanting to see inside the bastions of male pleasure. Juke box music filtered from them and intruded on the silent sidewalk. Silent but for her steady footsteps. Unreasonably, she wished the town government would find a way to close down these places. That was as unlikely as finding money to fix the tower clock. Besides, if these places vanished tomorrow, these sorts of men would find other, worse ways to squander their idle hours.

She had almost reached the end of the block and was preparing to make the make the square when a sudden spill of brightness lit the sidewalk directly behind her. She heard gay male voices. And a low whistle.

"Hey, pretty lady!" called a drunken male voice. "Come back 'ere. I wanna buy you a beer."

Eleanor continued her pace.

"I'm talkin' to you, baby."

Another voice said in surprise, "Don't you recognize her, Jack? That's Old Lady O'Neill. The school teacher."

"I don't care if she's old or a teacher, Buzz. She's got nice legs."

The second voice she recognized. George Burke who his friends called Buzz. He had graduated last year. Certainly he was barely nineteen and the legal drinking age was 21, yet here he was coming out of the Recreation Room.

"Damn nice, if you ask me," said a third male.

Eleanor stopped at the curb to cross the street when she recognized the old car. Not half an hour ago she had seen it pass in front of Mrs. Pritchard's.

A hand caught her elbow and pulled.

"Let me buy you a beer, baby. No cause to rush off is there? School's out for the summer. Maybe I can teach you sumpthin'."

"Let me go!" Eleanor yelped and pulled away.

The boy accosting her grabbed her again. She felt a surge of panic as she smelled the alcohol on his breath.

"Is there a problem here?" demanded a strident new voice.

Her arm released, Eleanor turned to see Officer Pfeiffer leaning out the window of his police car. "These boys bothering you, Miz O'Neill?"

"Not at all," Eleanor lied without realizing why. "My heel turned underneath me and I almost fell. This, this young man was just helping me back up."

"Oh, really?" The policeman was getting out of his car, settling his patrol cap more squarely on his head, hitching his shiny leather gun belt more securely around his paunch.

"That's right," said the third young man who she recognized as Bill Taylor. Eleanor had gone to school with his mother and knew she was bitterly disappointed in how her son had turned out, with his friends who were no doubt shiftless ne'er-do-wells.

"I'm not accustomed to having my word doubted."

"No insult intended in that question, Miz O'Neill." Pfeiffer touched the bill of his cap. "Getting some night air?"

"That's right," she answered with less frost than her previous statement.

He addressed the trio. "Where are you boys going?"

"Just headed home," responded George.

"Been drinking?"

"Just a couple."

"Buy it here?"

Bill Taylor said, "You know we're underage and they won't sell to us. We just stopped in to get a pack of smokes."

The nameless boy held out an unopened pack of Chesterfields as evidence.

"My old man got us the beer," added George. "We were drinking at my place."

"Who's heap is this?" The policeman gave the jalopy a kick, making the front bumper vibrate.

"Mine," said Bill.

"OK." Pfeiffer held out his left hand and for the first time, Eleanor realized his right had never left the butt of his .44. "Gimme."

The Taylor youth produced his driver's license. The cop scanned it quickly. He got a flashlight and inspected the jalopy's safety sticker and the rear license plate to make sure it had a current tag.

"OK, boys, Drift. I don't want to see this heap of rusty bolts and bald tires on the street tonight."

Bill Taylor snapped up his license and the three climbed into the hotrod. He fired the engine to life, switched on the lights, and carefully backed away from the curb after looking for oncoming traffic. The car made the block, passed out of sight.

"I apologize for my tone, Officer Pfeiffer."

"No problem, Miz O'Neill." He touched his cap again. "Can I give you a lift home?"

"No, thank you. It's still a nice night for a walk." She smiled at the policeman.

"A word of advice? Next time, don't alibi a worthless piece of debris like that Walters boy. He's trouble. He's gonna wind up in Huntsville some day."

"Maybe you're right. Goodnight, Sam."

"Goodnight, Eleanor."

As he drove away, he wondered why she never married. She was still a good looking woman, not yet dried up by spinsterhood.

As she walked away, she wondered how Sam Pfeiffer was taking the loss of his wife. Gladys had been killed in January, hit by a freight train at an unguarded crossing.

By the time Eleanor had walked the square, she had forgotten the incident. She paused to look at the lobby cards for the Texas Movie Palace and made a mental note that a musical was playing next week. Maybe Dinah Hamilton from school would like to go. That sort of movie was always more fun with a friend.

She was still thinking about the movie when she reached the park. She was less than fifteen minutes from her bed when hands grabbed her arms. A third hand held her mouth to prevent her cry of surprise. Two more hands grabbed her flailing feet. She was lifted and carried across the park to the shrubbery that formed it's western boundary. One of her abductors stumbled once and she almost got free, but the other hands held her tightly.

She knew who they were, of course. She recognized their voices as they cursed, carrying her kicking, struggling form. The trio from the Recreation Room. If only she'd accepted the policeman's offer she'd be safe at home.

And Eleanor had no doubt what the teens intended as they reached the blackest of the darkness among the bushes and the overreaching trees, so dark that there was nothing but a pool of oblivion when they dropped her on the soft grass. The thump of her head against the ground knocked her senseless for a few precious seconds; when she should have screamed, she didn't take the opportunity

"I want her first...I saw her first." It was the one named Walters who had whistled at her, grabbed her in front of the beer joint.

"Go ahead, Lester. Get her warmed up for me an' Buzz."

The hands were back on her. One boy pinned a shoulder to the ground and kept her mouth covered. Another held one leg. Lester Walters held the other leg while his free hand bunched her white summer dress up around her hips. His rough fingers rubbed her smooth thigh.