四川外国语学院考研(11)

基础英语(2004年)

the trouble. Some said it was being an orphan and all. But it wasn‘t that. Girls are different from boys. Girls are born weaned and boys don‘t ever get weaned. You see one sixty years old, and be damned if he won‘t go back to the perambulator at the bat of an eye.

It‘s not that she was bad. There‘s not any such thing as a woman born bad, because they are all born bad, born with the badness in them. The thing is, to get them married before the badness point where the badness came to a head before the system said it was time for her to. I think they can‘t help it. I have a daughter of my own, and I say that.

So there she was. Matt told me they figured up and she couldn‘t have been more than thirteen when Mrs. Burchett whipped her one day for using rouge and paint, and during that year, he said, they would see her with two or three other girls giggling and laughing on the street at all hours when they should have been in school; still thin, with that hair still not blonde and not brunette, with her face caked with paint until you would have thought it would crack like dried mud when she laughed, with the regular simple gingham and such dresses that a thirteen-year-old child ought to wear pulled and dragged to show off what she never had yet to show off, like the older girls did with their silk and crepe and such.

Matt said he watched her pass one day, when all of a sudden he realized she never had any stockings on. He said he thought about it and he said he could not remember that she ever did wear stockings in the summer, until he realized that what he had noticed was not the lack of stockings, but that her legs were like a woman‘s legs: female. And her only thirteen.

I say she couldn‘t help herself. It wasn‘t her fault. And it wasn‘t Burchett‘s fault, either. Why, nobody can be as gentle with them, the bad ones, the ones that are unlucky enough to come to a head too soon, as men. Look at the way they – all the men in town – treated Hawkshaw. Even after folks knew, after all the talk began, there wasn‘t a man of them talked before Hawkshaw. I reckon they thought he knew too, had heard some of the talk, but whenever they talked about her in the shop, it was while Hawkshaw was not there. And I reckon the other men were the same, because there was not a one of them that hadn‘t seen Hawkshaw at the window, looking at her when she passed, or looking at her on the street; happening to kind of be passing the picture-show when it let out and she would come out with some fellow, having begun to go with them before she was fourteen. Folks said how she would have to slip out and meet them and slip back into the house again with Mrs. Burchett thinking she was at the home of a girl friend.

They never talked about her before Hawkshaw. They would wait until he was gone, to dinner, or on one of those two-weeks‘ vacations of his in April that never anybody could find out about; where he went or anything. But he would be gone, and they would watch the girl slipping around, skirting trouble, bound to get into it sooner or later, even if Burchett didn‘t hear something first. She had quit school a year ago. For a year Burchett and Mrs. Burchett thought that she was going to school every day, when she hadn‘t been inside the building even. Somebody – one of the high-school boys maybe, but she never drew any lines: schoolboys, married men, anybody – would get her a report card every month and she would fill it out herself and take it home for Mrs. Burchett to sign. It beats the devil how the folks that love a woman will let her fool them.

So she quit school and went to work in the ten-cent store. She would come to the shop for a haircut, all painted up, in some kind of little flimsy off-colour clothes that showed her off, with her