Three Plays by Tennessee Williams Page A

just don't go throwing rocks at—
    [Suddenly Reverend Tooker appears in the gallery doors, his head slightly, playfully, fatuously cocked, with a practised clergyman's smile, sincere as a bird-call blown on a hunter's whistle, the living embodiment of the pious, conventional lie. | Big Daddy gasps a little at this perfectly timed, but incongruous, apparition.]
    —What're you looking for, Preacher?
     
    REVEREND TOOKER : The gentlemen's lavatory, ha ha!—heh, heh...
     
    BIG DADDY [with strained courtesy] : —Go back out and walk down to the other end of the gallery, Reverend Tooker, and use the bathroom connected with my bedroom, and if you can't find it, ask them where it is!
     
    REVEREND TOOKER : Ah, thanks.
     
    [He goes out with a deprecatory chuckle.]
     
    BIG DADDY : It's hard to talk in this place...
     
    BRICK : Son of a—!
     
    BIG DADDY [leaving a lot unspoken] : —I seen all things and understood a lot of them, till 1910. Christ, the year that—I had worn my shoes through, hocked my—I hopped off a yellow dog freight car half a mile down the road, slept in a wagon of cotton outside the gin—Jack Straw an' Peter Ochello took me in. Hired me to manage this place which grew into this one.—When Jack Straw died—why, old Peter Ochello quit eatin' like a dog does when its master's dead, and died, too!
     
    BRICK : Christ!
     
    BIG DADDY : I'm just saying I understand such—
     
    BRICK [violently] : Skipper is dead. I have not quit eating!
     
    BIG DADDY : No, but you started drinking.
     
    [Brick wheels on his crutch and hurls his glass across the room shouting.]
     
    BRICK : YOU THINK SO, TOO?
     
    BIG DADDY : Shhh!
    [Footsteps run on the gallery. There are women's calls. Big Daddy goes toward the door.]
    Go 'way!—Just broke a glass....
     
    [Brick is transformed, as if a quiet mountain blew suddenly up in volcanic flame.]
     
    BRICK : You think so, too? You think so, too? You think me an' Skipper did, did, did!— sodomy! —together?
     
    BIG DADDY : Hold—!
     
    BRICK : That what you—
     
    BIG DADDY : — ON —a minute!
     
    BRICK : You think we did dirty things between us, Skipper an'—
     
    BIG DADDY : Why are you shouting like that? Why are you—
     
    BRICK : —me, is that what you think of Skipper, is that—
     
    BIG DADDY : —so excited? I don't think nothing. I don't know nothing. I'm simply telling you what—
     
    BRICK : You think that Skipper and me were a pair of dirty old men?
     
    BIG DADDY : Now that's—
     
    BRICK : Straw? Ochello? A couple of—
     
    BIG DADDY : Now just—
     
    BRICK : —fucking sissies? Queers? Is that what you—
     
    BIG DADDY : Shhh.
     
    BRICK : —think?
     
    [He loses his balance and pitches to his knees without noticing the pain. He grabs the bed and drags himself up.]
     
    BIG DADDY : Jesus!—Whew.... Grab my hand!
     
    BRICK : Naw, I don't want your hand....
     
    BIG DADDY : Well, I want yours. Git up!
    [He draws him up, keeps an arm about him with concern and affection.]
    You broken out in a sweat! You're panting like you'd run a race with—
     
    BRICK [freeing himself from his father's hold] : Big Daddy, you shock me, Big Daddy, you, you— shock me! Talkin' so—
    [He turns away from his father.]
    —casually!—about a—thing like that...
    —Don't you know how people feel about things like that? How, how disgusted they are by things like that? Why, at Ole Miss when it was discovered a pledge to our fraternity, Skipper's and mine, did a, attempted to do a, unnatural thing with—We not only dropped him like a hot rock!—We told him to git off the campus, and he did, he got!—All the way to—
    [He halts, breathless.]
     
    BIG DADDY : —Where?
     
    BRICK : —North Africa, last I heard!
     
    BIG DADDY : Well, I have come back from further away than that, I have just now returned from the other side of the moon, death's country, son, and I'm not easy to shock by anything here.
    [He comes downstage and faces out.]
    Always, anyhow, lived with