Another Part of The House.
by
Winston M. Estes


Another Part of the House

Winston M. Estes

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

Philadelphia / New York

Copyright 1970 by Winston M. Estes All rights reserved

First edition

Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress
Catalog Card Number 7O-91674

For Sarah, Dick and Rizzie.Another Part of the House.  1.

Cora came on Mondays to do the washing and help with the cleaning, but
it didn't do any good.  Not if it was a summer day when a dust storm
blew in before she finished hanging the clothes on the line or just
after she had vacuumed the rugs.  Sometimes the dust clouds crouched
across the river, low and threatening like a bully, and waited until
she had finished altogether, but scarcely giving her time to gather up
her paper sacks and bundles and go padding off toward the Addition,
where she lived.  Then the clouds would turn three shades darker, boil
up and explode, and come charging in from the north, sweeping up the
flat, scraggly land and churning it all over the sky, blowing it past
Tolbert's Crossing, past the cemetery, past the Fort Worth & Denver
railroad tracks, and on into town, turning Wordsworth's air into a
swirling, whipping, dirty brown mass with no top, no bottom and no
edges.

Mama would let out a scream and go racing through the house slamming
down windows and stuffing towels and old rags under the doors and along
window sills, hollering at me to run grab the washing off the
clothesline or to see if the windows across the back of the house were
closed tight.  The next day she would make me help her clean house all
over again, which made Cora's work seem pretty pointless, especially if
I could find a more worthwhile way to spend my

time, and I always could.  Anybody with one eye and half sense could
find something better to do than clean house.

Mama didn't complain much, but maybe that was because I complained
enough for both of us and didn't leave her anything to say.  You'd have
to be pretty weak-minded not to complain if you were slaving away on
Saturday morning with the sneaky feeling that you were cheating Cora
out of her regular work only two measly little days away.

"It seems kinda dumb to clean house today when Cora can do it Monday,"
I grumbled.  We were shoving the sofa back against the wall.

Mama threw up her hands.  "Gracious!  And sit around in this dust all
day Sunday?"

"Is there anything in the Bible that says dust can't be two inches deep
on Sunday?"

She laughed and stood back from the sofa to measure it against the
picture that hung above it.  "Maybe not in the King James Version, but
there is in mine" she said brightly as though she were actually
enjoying herself.  "Here--let's push it this way just a wee bit.  The
picture's not in the middle."

"Why can't we move the picture?"  I suggested, but the sofa was already
pushed and squared away before I finished saying it.

She patted the cushions into place, then went on with her sweeping,
wiping and dusting, stopping only long enough to fuss at me for
printing "Larry Morrison" with my finger tip in the coat of dust that
covered the sideboard.  She made me wipe it off and polish the whole
thing with O'Cedar.

"I notice Tad never has to do any of this work," I said.

"He would if he was here," she replied.  "He can't be here and at the
Drug Store at the same time."

"I'd be at the Drug Store, too, if Papa would pay me four dollars a
week like he pays Tad."

"When you're fifteen, maybe he will."  "Tad's got the easiest job in
the world," I went on.  "All he

does is make Cokes and sodas and malted milks.  If Papa ever makes him
clean up dust like you make me, they keep it a deep, dark secret."

"Well, now--how do you think it gets cleaned up?"  She untied a curtain
and watched it unwrinkle itself.  "I imagine that at this very minute
Tad and Ollie Tabor are wiping off the shelves and dusting the
stock."

Mama had an explanation for everything.  An explanation and a smile.  I
wished that she wouldn't, but she did.  She was one of those people who
sparkled all over.  Her dancing brown eyes and the bright expression on
her face seemed ready to burst into a wide smile or happy laughter at
any minute, so it's just possible that I thought she was smiling
sometimes when she actually wasn't.  She took things in her stride,
even the gritty dust, which is the only way you could take it unless
you wanted to lose your mind, and I don't guess that would have helped
matters.  It certainly wouldn't have stopped the dust.  Tad said that
any time the dust got as far as Amarillo, you could bet your bottom
dollar it would come on to Wordsworth, because there was nothing in
between to stop it--no hills, no trees, except a few mesquites, if you
can call them trees; not even W'ordsworth itself, with its low, squat
buildings and its flat, wide, straight streets cutting across the earth
like lines drawn in the dirt with a stick, could head off a single
grain of blowing sand.

"How about Uncle Calvin, then?"  I came back at her.  "I never caught
him doing any work around here."

"Now don't start in on him," she said, without looking up from
straightening the curtain tiebacks.

"Well, he just shows up out of nowhere and parks himself out on the
front porch like he lives here.  All he ever does is snooze, roll
cigarettes and stare across the vacant lot at mr Schmidt's house.  I
bet he's memorized every shingle on mr Schmidt's roof."

I poured a good healthy dose of O'Cedar onto the old undershirt she had
given me for a polish cloth, but it was

too healthy.  It soaked the cloth and dripped over to make a heavy
puddle on the rich, dark surface of the sideboard.

"I wouldn't worry about it," Mama said.  "He won't be staying long.
Your daddy has uncovered a good prospect for him down at Merkel, and he
says--Larry!  Please!  You don't have to use a whole bottle of polish
on the sideboard!  We might need some for the other furniture
sometime."

"You say that every time," I said, straightening out the puddle of
O'Cedar just as it spread to the edge and was about to trickle down the
side.  "The last time he came you said he'd probably stay a few days,
and he ended up staying a whole month.  He's already been here two
weeks this time."

"Oh, I don't think it's been quite that long," she said.  Then she
thought about it.  "Has it?"

"Seems like two years to me, the way he stays in my room like it was
his, I went in there the other day to get my knife, and he chased me
out.  Out of my own room!  He said he was trying to take a nap, and I
was making enough noise to wake the dead."

"Larry!"  Mama was standing behind me now, looking over my shoulder.
"Put the cap back on the bottle before you turn it over."  She spoke
sharply, and I had no trouble this time knowing whether or not she was
smiling.  She wasn't.

"But I'll tell you one thing," I went on, replacing the cap.  "I'd
rather be Tad by a long shot than Uncle Calvin.  I don't care if Uncle
Calvin made four million dollars a week."

"Heavens to Betsy!  That cloth's got enough polish on it for every
stick of furniture in the house!"

"Well, I mean it!  All he ever does is get in the way and poke his nose
in--"

"Run get a dry cloth," she said.  "You'll be rubbing all day like
that."

I felt like I already had.  I went into the bathroom and got another
undershirt out of the rag bag.  When I returned, Mama was untying the
faded blue bandana handkerchief that she wore around her head when she
cleaned house.  She fluffed out her soft brown hair and puffed it up
with her hands.  That

was a sign we were through.  At least, she was.  I still had to wipe
up all that O'Cedar and shake the throw rugs.

"Goodness!"  she exclaimed.  "I must look a sight!"

Of course, she didn't.  mrs Castlebeny, who lived across the street on
the side, was always saying Mama could come in out of a dust storm
looking as if she had just walked out of the Marvella Beauty Shop.  She
might have been right, but I couldn't say for sure, seeing her so much
every day and all.

"He was out there a while ago making fun because I was doing housework
like a girl," I continued.  " "You got housemaid's knee yet?"  he said,
and I said, "That's for me to know and for you to find out," and he
went on and on with a lot of stupid things like that.  If I told you
how tired I got of listening to him, you wouldn't believe it.  He tried
to get me to..."

My voice trailed off, mainly because I was running out of breath from
all the polishing, but also because iMama had gone into the kitchen and
wasn't listening any longer.  My arm nearly broke off at the elbow.  I
barely had enough strength left over to go into the bathroom afterwards
and look at my muscles in the mirror.  Not that it mattered, for they
didn't seem to have grown at all.

On the way out of the house to shake the throw rugs, I was surprised to
hear the clock strike ten.  Or it could have been eleven, depending on
whether I started counting on the first stroke or the second.  I could
have sworn it was much later, considering the great amount of work I
had done and all.  Across the street on the vacant lot, smoke curled up
from the old stovepipe that stuck up through the broom weed  You didn't
need to be too smart to figure out that all the kids were sitting
around in the cave smoking and vomiting, with sweat pouring off them by
the gallons.  Everybody, that is, except P. R. Burns, and he was at
home telephoning me--three times already--to come down to his house and
help him work on our secret formula that he claimed wouldn't work,
which wasn't surprising, when you consider that it was P. R. Burns
working on it.  He couldn't make a doorknob work without me helping
him.

I stopped inside the front door to cool off and catch my breath from
all that furniture polishing.  The hall was the coolest place in the
house.  Splitting the house in half, it tied the front door to the back
like a wide, high-ceilinged tunnel.  The breeze swept across the long,
deep front porch and pushed through the door and on out the back as
fresh and cooling as a tall frosty glass of iced tea.  Sometimes on a
hot, sweaty night when everybody was rolling and tossing and couldn't
sleep, Mama would make me a pallet on the floor in the hall, and by
morning when Papa stepped over me to go outside for the paper, I would
be covered up to my ears and wadded into a tight little ball.  That's
how cool it could get in our hall.

I stood listening to the glass chimes--Chinese, I think they
were--trying to patch together a tune from their icy tinkling.  Hanging
in the living-room door, just to the right of the hall as you go in,
they rustled, dainty and fragile, on the edge of the breeze.  From the
kitchen came the soft strains of Mama's singing:

"There is a fountain filled with blood Drawn from Immanuel's
veins...."

I held my breath to see if she would leave out the line about sinners
plunging beneath the flood.  She did.

"... lose all their guilty sta aaa-ins,

Lose all their guilty stains."

Silently I filled in the missing line for her and opened the screen
door a crack to see if Uncle Calvin was still on the front porch.
Naturally, he was.  Tilted back in the battered old cane-bottomed chair
that Mama was always returning to the back porch where nobody could see
it, he sat with his heels hooked in the front rung and his head resting
against the side of the house.  I pushed the door open wide and went
outside, pretending not to see him.  I draped the throw rugs over the
banister, side by side.

"They won't get shook hanging there," he said.

"What business is it of yours?"

I looked around at him without intending to, for to my great sorrow, I
already knew exactly what he looked like, and he certainly didn't look
like Papa's brother, I'm happy to say.  His tobacco-stained teeth
showed yellow and ugly between his thin lips, which were stretched into
a mean grin.

He gave a nasty little chuckle and turned his head the other way toward
Castleberrys' end for a moment.

"That's too bad," he said, turning back.  "Too bad that all the other
kids'll be at the picture show while you're still at home doing girl
work and shaking rugs."

I went back to pretending not to see him, but he wouldn't shut up.

"It's gonna be dinnertime before you know it," he said.

"What if it is?"

"You'll have to eat dinner, and you won't have time to finish all your
girl work before time to go to the picture show."

He cackled gleefully.

To tell the truth, I would have already shaken those rugs and gone back
in the house if it hadn't been for his smart aleck remarks.  But just
so he wouldn't the idea that he could boss me around, I wandered down
to the other end of the porch--Greggs' end--and plopped down in the
swing as though I had nothing to do for the next ten years but swing.

He pretended to ignore me, but I could tell by the squint in his dead
gray eyes that he was keeping track of every move I made.  His thin,
bony face, topped by iron-gray hair that was plastered too tightly
across his head with too much brilliantine, was as still as death,
except for an occasional twitch at the corner of his thin, tight lips.
His hands were clasped behind his head now.  The sleeves of his old
white shirt were rolled above his elbows to reveal his knotty biceps
and the slick white of his forearms, on one of which was tattooed a
slimy purple snake, coiled and ready to strike.

I rocked in the swing without actually swinging until I

heard Mama's footsteps coming through the house.  Mama's footsteps
always sounded determined.  They were never without purpose.  I could
tell as well as if I had been looking at her that she was headed for
the front door.  I got to my feet and climbed onto the banister and
balanced myself carefully, crouching low and ready to leap.  That
second crack in the sidewalk looked as far away as ever.  Tad claimed
he could jump past it when he was nine years old, but I think he was
mixed up and was really remembering when he was twelve or thirteen.  If
not, he must have been the tallest nine-year-old person in Wordsworth's
history.

With a whoop, I sprang like a kangaroo, landed on one foot and fell
backwards.  My head hit the ground with a thud.

"Ouch!"

I wanted to bite my tongue off.  I didn't dare look at Uncle Calvin.

Not until I tried to get up did I realize that I had twisted my leg
beneath me.  I sank back to the ground.

"Ha!  You got smart and twisted your ankle, didn't you?"  he gloated.

"What do you care if I broke it?"

"You don't know how to land.  You gotta land square on both feet--one
foot ain't enough to support the weight of your body when you land full
force like that."

"I'll land on my head if I get good and ready!"

I stood up and hopped back to the porch on my good leg so as not to
give him the pleasure of seeing me limp.

"Now ain't that too bad?"  he mimicked in a screeching thin voice.
"Hee-heel  Here you're all crippled up and cain't go to the picture
show!  I'll swan--if that ain't too bad I don't know what is."

I got so mad I forgot about my twisted leg and grabbed a rug off the
banister and shook it wildly, creating a junior sized dust storm.

"Hey!  Turn that thing the other way!"  he yelled.

I moved a step in his direction and shook the rug again aiming it
directly at him.

"Watch out there--"

I shook it again.  The front legs of his chair hit the floor, and he
came up coughing and sputtering.

I gave the rug another shake and did a little coughing and sputtering
of my own.

"Why, you little-"

"I hope it chokes you!"  I shouted.

"Larry!"

It was Mama standing inside the front door.

"But Mama-"

"Just watch your tongue!"

"But Mama--he just sits up there and tries to tell me--"

"That'll be enough out of you, young man!"

She came out to the edge of the porch and stood looking from me to
Uncle Calvin with disapproval.  The sparkle in her eyes this time was
the wrong kind.

"Now stop all this bickering--people can hear you all over this end of
town."

"Well, make him leave me alone!"

"I said that's enough]" She tried to keep her voice low.  It was loud
enough to be stern, though, and firm enough to shut me up--but good.

Turning back into the house, she glanced darkly at Uncle Calvin, who
had settled down again and sat smugly, pinching a twisted roll of Bull
Durham between his fingers.  He examined it for a moment, then rolled
it around on his tongue, stuck one end of it in his mouth and lighted
it.  The loose paper flared up and died down.  He tilted his chair back
against the house again and looked at me with a sneering little grin.
He puffed two streams of smoke through his flat nose, and of all the
sorry-looking sights in this world, the sorriest-looking of all was
Uncle Calvin blowing smoke streams through his nose like a dragon.  I
looked the other way

to keep from throwing up and went back to my rug shaking.  I shook the
last rug faintly in his direction and took all of them back into the
house.

When I returned Uncle Calvin had vamoosed.  I didn't do him the honor
of wondering where he went.

mrs Jernigan appeared from around the corner, her brown leather purse
dangling from her arm, taking short little steps and looking down at
the sidewalk as if she were dodging holes.  She was older than Mama and
Papa put together and lived on Eleventh Street back of us, in the
second house from the corner.  As she minced past, she looked up and
saw me.

"Morning, Larry," she called out.

"Hi, mrs Jernigan.  You going to the store?"

It was a silly question.  She went to the store over on the highway a
thousand times a day.  Mama said that mrs Jernigan never bought a whole
sack of groceries at one time in her life.

"I ran out of bread and have to pick up a loaf for dinner," she said.
"You glad school's out?"

"If I was any gladder, I'd bust wide open."

"Oh my!  Don't do that!"  she said happily and moved on.

mr Gregg said that when the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, mrs Jernigan will
come marching around the corner on her way to the store.  I watched her
hurry on past Gregg's, angle across the street and around the next
corner out of sight.  Beyond the vacant lot, mr Schmidt came through
his back gate and emptied a wastebasket into his trash burner.  He set
it afire and stood watching it burn for a moment, then disappeared
behind his high board fence.  mrs Castleberry came to her front door
and looked out.  She waved to me, and I waved back.  Behind me in the
house I heard the rattle of dishes and the clink of silverware.  Mama
was setting the table for dinner.  Down at the corner, where mrs
Jernigan had turned, a tiny heat mirage flickered for an instant and
vanished.

I stepped back into the hall to finish cooling off, wondering if people
in Nome, Alaska, ever had to stop work to cool off,

and if they did whether they stripped only to their union suits or
maybe took them off.  Then that got me wondering how it would be not to
live in Wordsworth, never to have heard of it or seen it in my life.  I
had tried it before, and I don't mind telling you it's kind of hard to
do.  Once when we were coming back on the train from visiting Aunt
Myrtle, Papa's sister in Waco, I pretended all the way from Fort Worth
that I had never laid eyes on Wordsworth.  It didn't do much good, but
it did start me to noticing what a dead ringer Wordsworth was for all
the other towns we passed through.  Bowie, Henrietta, Electra, Quanah,
Childress, all of them stood alike against the sky.  You could see
their water towers, courthouse domes, grain elevators and church
steeples rising high from the flat, dusty, windswept ground for miles
and miles in the distance, only to reach them and discover that they
were not so tall after all.  Against the big Texas sky they didn't
count for much.  Not much at all.  When the train pulled in, I studied
the sign on the depot that read "WORDSWORTH, TEXAS, Pop.  3,126, Elev.
1849 it.," pretending to be reading it for the first time.  Along about
then, however, the train pulled up to where Avery Massey in his dirty
overalls and scraggly whiskers lay spread over the length of a baggage
truck and ruined the whole thing.

Then I got to wondering how I would look to the people on the platform
below if I didn't get off the train in Wordsworth at all but just kept
my seat and looked out the window.  Would I look like the other
passengers, all strangers, sitting in their seats, leaning against the
windows, bored and weary, waiting for the train to take them on to
Amarillo, gazing down Main Street and staring a hole through whoever
got in front of their eyes?  I didn't get very far with that, either.
Not with Mama and Papa filling my arms with bundles and Tad telling me
to hurry and get off before the train pulled out with me still on it.

Through the screen door, I could see smoke chugging up

thick chugs from the battered old stovepipe.  At first glance you
would think that the Fort Worth & Denver switch engine was running full
blast down in the cave.  Thinking maybe the kids had set their clothes
on fire again, I pushed open the screen door and darted across the
porch and out onto the sidewalk, wondering whether to take along a
bucket of water or to call the Volunteer Fire Department to bring a
pulmotor.  Of course, I didn't do either, for who should be angling
across the street in front of Greggs' and coming my way but P. R.
Burns, hopping along like a rabbit, stopping every now and then to pick
a sticker out of his foot.  He was the only person in my entire
acquaintance who could get stickers in his feet while walking on a
concrete sidewalk or an asphalt pavement.

"Hey, Larry!  Wait for me!"  he yelled.

I waited.  What else could I do?  P. R. Burns was my best friend, but I
had been thinking pretty seriously about changing.  He was griping me
to death the way he strutted around and showed off just because he got
saved at the summer revival meeting, and I didn't.  You would think he
was the only person in Wordsworth who ever got saved, and it had only
been three weeks, although to hear him tell it, you'd think he had
invented it.  I must have reminded him a thousand times how Tad had
been saved for two whole years and was still as friendly as ever with
people, including mr Schmidt, who was German, worshiped the Kaiser, ate
Belgian babies, kept a spiked helmet on his bureau and a long,
jeweled-handled sword hanging from his bedpost.  None of that bothered
P. R. Burns, though.  No, sirree, not know-it-all P. R. Burns.

As I watched him come past Greggs' and go out of his way to jump the
hedge that separated their driveway from our yard, I made up my mind
right then and there that if he said one word about getting saved I
would start looking for another best friend before sundown.

"You eat dinner yet?"  he asked, drawing nearer.

"Not yet--it's too early."

"I already ate," he said.

"Why didn't you wait until dinnertime?"

"I did.  We ate early, though.  My dad has to go to Wichita Falls this
afternoon and has to be there at one o'clock or something like that.
Where are you going?"

"I was going to see what's making all that smoke in the cave.

"Junior Bridges swiped one of his dad's cigars," he said.  "That's
wrhat he told me, anyway."

"How come you're not down there with them, then?"

"I quit smoking," he said.  "That's one of the things I had to do when
I got saved."

"Now look here, P. R."  if you're going to start all that stuff about
getting saved again--"

"Well, you oughta get saved, Larry.  You don't know how keen it is."
"How would you know?"  I asked.  "You don't even know what getting
saved means."

"In a pig's eye, I don't!  Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou
shalt be saved."

"What does that mean?"

"If you don't know what that means, you'll have a hard time getting
saved."

"Who said I wanted to get saved?  All you did was go down to the front
of the church and shake hands with Brother Wallace and stand around
while the grown people cried and carried on over you."

"Brother Wallace told me I took a courageous step," he said.

"Brother Wallace is the preacher!  He gets paid to say things like
that, and the more people he saves, the more money he gets."

"--and while he was shaking my hand, he said, "Do you understand this
serious step you're taking, P. R.?"  and I said, "Yes, sir, I do.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved," and he said,
"That's right.""

"That doesn't mean you knew what you did."

"You oughta get saved, anyway, Larry," he went on.  "You don't know how
funny it feels standing in water up to your neck right out in front of
the whole First Baptist Church.  Brother Wallace held me under so long
that I thought he was trying to drown me."

"You going to the picture show?"  I asked suddenly, hoping to change
the subject from such an unpleasant topic.

"I guess so," he said.  "I always go on Saturday, don't I?"

"I thought maybe you got saved from picture shows, too, like you got
saved from smoking."

"It's okay for a saved person to go to the picture show," he said
wisely.

What P. R. didn't understand, and what I couldn't tell him, was that
Mama and Papa wouldn't let me get saved.  They thought I was too young.
Tad had been thirteen, they reminded me, and even that was mighty young
for such a serious decision.  The fact that P. R. was only nine, and
three months younger than me at that, didn't shake them in the least. 
Of course, I would have taped my mouth with adhesive tape and gagged
myself with a bandana handkerchief before

I'd let P. R. in on such a personal matter as all that.  You can see,
then, why I was thinking about a new best friend.  The trouble, though,
was that I'd still have P. R. on my hands, anyway.  He wasn't smart
enough to think up things to do on his own; he was just ignorant enough
to keep on hanging around to see what I intended to do so he could do
it, too.  His next remark proved it.

"What are we gonna do now?"

"I don't know about you, but I'm going to eat dinner," I said.

"I already ate," he said.

"You told me that once."

"I could come in and watch you eat, though."

And that's exactly what he did.  Of course, Mama invited him to eat
with us--provided his mother knew about it and

approved--but he said no thanks, he had already eaten.  Just the same,
he ate three biscuits with butter and a piece of pound cake.  Then all
at once, he jumped up and ran out of the dining room yelling over his
shoulder that he had to go home and get his money for the picture
show.

"I'll see you there!"  he shouted.  "Save me a seat!"

The front door slammed shut.

After dinner, Papa let me ride downtown with him.  The lights were
going out just as I walked into the Texan.  The kids were screaming,
yelling, clapping, stomping and running up and down the aisles.  P. R.
Burns yelled to me in the dark that he was saving my seat, but when I
found him he was arguing with some other kid who was trying to sit in
it.  We chased him away.  P. R. went to the men's room four times and
got mad at me the fifth because I got tired of saving his seat for
him.

It was almost dark when we came out, and only then because the lights
came on and mr Grover, the owner, went up and down the aisle shooing us
all out so he could clean up the theater for the evening run, which was
probably some love picture that nobody could possibly care a hoot about
seeing.  P. R. hurried on home; he was afraid that if he missed supper
again he'd turn to skin and bones, since he had already missed twice in
ten days.  I crossed Main Street to the Drug Store to see if Tad had
already gone home for supper.  All the stores stayed open until nine on
Saturday nights, and Papa, Ollie Tabor and Tad had to take their supper
hours when they could get them.

Ollie had just returned from supper and was scratching around behind
the soda fountain.  Three ladies sat at the back table sipping Cokes
through straws.  One of them was Gallic Davis, who clerked at Delsey
Jacobs Drygoods Store, but I didn't know the others.  They smiled at
me, anyway, and I smiled back.  A gray-haired man in khaki pants and
gray work shirt with the collar buttoned and no necktie, stood in front
of the prescription-room window, waiting.

'"How many times did you see the show, Larry?"  Ollie asked, not with
complete interest, but enough.

"I don't know--three times, maybe."

"Who was it?  Hoot Gibson?"

"Ken Maynard."

I liked Ollie Tabor.  Everybody did.  He was older than Papa and had
been working for him ever since Heck was a pup.  Roly-poly without
being fat, and stubby without being short, he was near-sighted and had
to get up close to things to see them.  He knew everybody in town and
had something pleasant to say to most of them, except people like
Virgil Fuller, who gave him a check once that bounced.  People were
always raw hiding him about being too near-sighted to read Virgil's
rubber check, and Ollie said he wasn't too nearsighted to keep Virgil
out of the store, though.  He never let him set foot inside the front
door, ever again.  Ollie was an Old Bachelor, which Mama said was the
same as an Old Maid, at least in Ollie's case.  She liked him too,
though, and she wasn't being mean when she said that.  He was good, and
he was kind, and he didn't mind chasing me out of the store when I got
in the way any more than Papa did.

"How come you don't ever go to the picture show, Ollie?"  I asked. 
"You don't know what you missed today."

"Just don't have time, I reckon."

"Looks like you'd just have to go sometimes.  Today was Chapter Nine,
and this guy was asleep inside this little shack when it exploded.  I
wish I could see all ten chapters of a serial at one time.  Just
once."

"I guess that would be the best way to see it," he said.  "But then,
what would you do next Saturday?"

He laughed and glanced at the Coca-Cola clock above the
prescription-room door.  I knew he couldn't see it, but he made like he
could.  The man in the gray work shirt had his back turned now and was
talking to Papa through the prescription-room window.  He reached into
his hip pocket and tugged at his wallet until he got it out.

"Hey, Tad!"  Ollie yelled.  "You'd better shake a leg!  Suppertime!"

Ollie had red hair parted straight down the middle.  When he yelled or
got excited, the skin that showed in the part got almost as red as his
hair.  It was kind of like he blushed on the top of his head.

Tad appeared through the rear door and stopped at the window, where he
waited for the gray-haired man in the gray work shirt to leave.  All
you could see of Papa when he was filling prescriptions was his head
and shoulders.  He moved out of sight, then reappeared again.  Tad
leaned through the window and pointed to something on the counter
below.  Papa shoved his glasses down to the end of his nose and peered
over the top of them at whatever Tad was pointing at.

Tad was like Papa, big, blond and friendly, although Tad was the
biggest and blondest of the two, and in some ways, the friendliest. Not
that Papa wasn't friendly enough in his own right, for he certainly
was, only grown people show their friendliness in different ways.  His
hair was thin on top, more sandy-colored than blond, and when he bent
down over some complicated prescription you could see streaks of
baldness sticking through.  Everybody remarked how much Tad was like
Papa, but they never said that about me.  If they compared me to
anybody at all, it was to Uncle Calvin, I'm sorry to say.  I had long
ago made up my mind that if by the time I was forty-two years old I
wasn't taller and bigger than Uncle Calvin, I'd hang myself by the
thumbs from the mulberry tree in our back yard and stretch myself
out.

"Not much going on, Ollie," Tad observed, as he came up from behind the
wrapping counter, which was just in front of the cold remedies.  He
stopped at the back table to see if the three ladies wanted anything
else, and since they didn't, came on up toward the front of the
store.

"Did you leave me plenty of ice?"  Ollie asked, lifting a lid and
squinting down inside.

"I chipped some about an hour ago," Tad replied.  "It ought

to last you."  Then he saw me.  "How many times did you see it--six?"
he asked idly.

"Three," I said.

I was half on and half off the front stool, leaning over the fountain
watching Ollie.

"I believe I'll have a lime Coke, Ollie," I said.  "Lots of ice."

Ollie was checking the syrup in a dispenser and didn't look up.

"You let the Dr.  Pepper syrup get pretty low, Tad," he said.

"It hasn't started to gurgle yet," Tad replied.  He stopped to look
himself over in the big plate-glass mirror that covered the wall back
of the soda fountain.

"Put a scoop of lime sherbet in it while you're at it, Ollie, if you
don't mind," I added.

Ollie replaced the lid on the dispenser and examined the one next to
it.

"I just hope I don't get caught short in a rush," he mumbled.

"If you're getting low on sherbet, Ollie, make it vanilla," I said.

"You ready to go, Larry?"  Tad was still looking at himself in the
mirror, turning to one side and patting down a blond wave that wasn't
behaving.  He turned and looked at the other side, then moved away,
still looking at himself from the corner of his eye.  I couldn't blame
him.  If I looked like Tad Morrison, I'd be looking at myself, too.

"I've got to see Papa a minute," I replied, jumping down from the stool
and starting for the prescription room.  "Make that a small Coke,
Ollie," I yelled back.  "We're in a hurry, looks like."

Ollie had moved to the cigarette counter and was straightening out the
Camels and Wings.  Before I could get to the prescription room, the
telephone rang and Papa picked it up to answer it.  He saw me through
the window and waved.

"Come on, Larry, if you're going with me," Tad called from the front
door.  "I haven't got all night."

I turned and ran after him.

"I guess I'll have to get that Coke later, Ollie," I said on my way
out.  Ollie didn't seem heartbroken exactly, I'll have to say.

I followed Tad through the front door and out onto Main Street.

Saturday night was about to begin.  The sky was disappearing, and no
matter how long I stared at it without blinking my eyes, I would never
be able to catch the exact moment when the last trace of day vanished
once and for all.  I had tried it many times, and I knew.  The sky was
mysterious that way.  Houses, buildings and people were changing
colors, and those in the distance were changing shapes.  Some of the
stores had turned on their lights out front.  Farmers were gathering up
their families and heading back to their farms.  Clerks were hurrying
home for supper.  Street lights came to life.  A switch engine at the
crossing blocked off the other end of IVIain Street, then chugged on
past, uncovering a string of automobiles with headlights burning,
waiting on the other side of the tracks.  Above and behind the
buildings across the street, I could barely make out the spidery frame
of the black water tower.

Cars backed away from the curb and others wheeled in to replace them.
Up and down the street they inched along bumper to bumper, going
nowhere except down to the depot to make a U-turn and back again.
Cora's boy, Ozell, who came to play with me on Mondays while his mother
worked, told me once that he wished Saturday night would go on and on
and on all day every day seven days a week so he could walk up and down
with his mama and brothers and sisters, looking in store windows,
eating Mary Janes and sucking jawbreakers and saying "Hidy do" to
people he knew.  The colored people had fights and cut each other
around on Second Street, but they all returned the next Saturday night,
so I guess they enjoyed the cutting as much as the white people enjoyed
making U-turns and going nowhere.

Tad and I walked out Main Street together, while I tried

to figure out how to get Mama to let me come back with him after
supper.  The electric sign in front of the Texan blinked on; Imogene
Hart sat in the ticket window waiting for customers.  The courthouse
was dark.  A boy and girl lounged on the grass outside.  Tad looked at
them curiously, then turned his attention to me.

"What have you been up to--besides going to the picture show?"  he
asked.

"Mama made me shovel out the dust.  I shook a throw rug all over Uncle
Calvin, and he got as mad as a wet hornet."

"Don't pay any attention to him."

"I wouldn't, if he'd keep his big mouth shut."

We walked almost an entire block in silence.  Out at the end of Main
Street, one last, long skinny streak of daylight remained.  By the time
we got to the Presbyterian Church, it was gone.  The bell tower of the
church was a purple-black silhouette now, and the long white steps that
curved around, up and over each side of the basement entrance couldn't
be seen at all from across the street.  I just knew they were there.
Tad waved at a passing car, and I waved, too, although I'll have to
admit that I couldn't see who was in it.  Tad claimed that he did.

Everybody in town knew Tad, I guess because he worked in the Drug Store
and was on the Wordsworth High School football team.  He was six feet
tall and got as tired of people telling him how big he was for his age
as I got of people asking me when I intended to start growing.  I had
to run to keep up with his long strides.

"Don't walk so fast," I complained.  "I want to ask you a question,"

He thought he slowed down and shortened his steps, but he didn't.

"Ask it," he said.

"How come Uncle Calvin has so much time to visit when everybody else we
know has to work?"

"You can't work if you don't have a job."

"That's what I'm talking about--how come he doesn't have a job like
everybody else?"

"That's easy," Tad said.  "When he gets a job, he either gets fired or
he quits.  And jobs are hard to find these days.  The Depression makes
it tough on everybody."

"The Depression's over with, though," I replied.  "Papa said the New
Deal put an end to it."

"It did--but not yet.  It takes time for the ending to spread all over
the country, and it hasn't had time to spread to Wordsworth yet."

"How far has it spread--to Wichita Falls or Fort Worth?"

"I don't know exactly," he said.  "But to be fair, Uncle Calvin isn't
the only person without a job.  Lots of people can't find work.  You
just don't know all of them personally.  It's the Depression--even
though it's supposed to be over with."

"That's what everybody says!  Any time you gripe about something, they
say it's the Depression."

"It's a fact.  Lots of people older than you have been worrying about
it for years, so I wouldn't let it worry me too much if I were you."

I was tired of worrying about it.  All I understood about it was that
people used the Depression to explain away anything that wasn't good.
The Depression explained away the things I wanted and didn't have, and
it explained away the things I had and didn't want.  It explained Tad's
hand-me down overcoat, my rickety bicycle, my patched-up football that
wouldn't hold air, our old car with tires so thin that Papa wouldn't
trust them to take us to the beach at Galveston.  It explained the
peeling, patchy-gray white of our house and the no-color roof and trim
that once had been green.  It explained why the whole town of
Wordsworth was shabby and had a

secondhand look.  It explained the drought and the dust, but I couldn't
decide if the drought and the dust caused the Depression or if the
Depression caused the drought and the dust.  They were connected,
though.  I knew that much.  The Depression, the dust and the drought
were somehow parts of the

same thing, and this same thing explained away everything that anybody
didn't like.  Even Uncle Calvin, who at that very moment was probably
piled up on my bed reading Love Stories or Crime Facts, or some other
pulp magazine that the very sight of would turn Mama purple if she ever
caught Tad or me reading it.

It was pitch-black dark when we turned off Main onto our street.

"Miss Sweeny said she didn't even get paid real money any more," I
said.

"She does, too!"  Tad said.  "She gets paid in scrip, and she can buy
stuff with that like it was real money."

"That's not what she told us in Civics!  She said that all the teachers
had to cash in the scrip and some people wouldn't give them the full
amount, but I didn't know what she was talking about."

"Papa gives the teachers full amount," Tad said.  "In fact, he buys it
from them and puts it in the bank sometimes."

"What does he do with it, then?"

"Just keeps it there waiting until the Depression is over so he can get
his money back."

"Seems kinda crazy to me," I said.

"It is--but the whole Depression is crazy."

"Well, I'll tell you one thing," I said, half running to keep up with
Tad.  "As soon as the end of this Depression has had time to spread to
Wordsworth, Uncle Calvin has got to stay out of my room."

"Ho-ho!  And who says so?"

"I do, that's who.  I'll walk in one morning and tell him that the
Depression ends today and will he please pack his clothes and kindly
leave."

"I wish you luck."

He sounded amused.  But I meant it.  Every last word of it.

2.

It was easy to get our house mixed up with Greggs' next door if you had
no real reason to separate them in your mind, for they seemed to have
come out of the same box from the same store.  Built at the same time
in the same style, they were enough alike to be blood kin, not new
enough to be modern nor old enough to be interesting, only out-of-date
enough not to be noticeable at all.  Side by side they sat on Tenth
Street, two blocks off Main, ours on the corner of Hobbs with the
garage on the alley, set apart from theirs by a concrete driveway and a
high board fence.  Maybe ours was larger, but not much.  Bulky and
ungainly, it wasn't much to look at, I'll have to admit, but it was
certainly respectable.  The sweeping pitch of the roof might make you
think of a hat three sizes too large, the way it extended over the big
fat porch that stretched along the entire front and made an L on Castle
berrys' end at the corner.  You could tell, just by looking at the
outside, that it was a house with drafty rooms, cracked plaster and
tired floors.  It was a comfortable house, as relaxed as an old
sweater, and it fitted us with the same ease.  Approaching the place,
either out Tenth or up Hobbs, looking at our house was like seeing
myself in a mirror.

You couldn't say we lived on the best street in the best part of town,
for Wordsworth didn't have any best streets or best parts.  About all
you could say was that we didn't live in the

worst.  The worst part was North Side across the railroad tracks
beyond the depot, where the cotton gin, the lumber yard, the storage
tanks and loading platforms were mixed in among rickety houses and
frail shacks along half streets and meandering trails that petered out
beyond the cemetery.  The colored people lived across the tracks, too,
but in an accidental-looking sc raggle of houses known as the Addition,
separated from North Side on the west by mr Winbury's stock pen and
slaughterhouse.  If you wanted to get about as far away from the
Addition as possible and still be within Wordsworth's city limits, you
could come to our house on Tenth and Hobbs, only two streets and the
Old Loop Road away from the south edge of town and the biggest, widest,
flattest and emptiest outdoors you ever saw in your life.

Cora walked all the way from the Addition on Mondays, heavily and
wearily, her big body swaying from side to side like one of mr
Winbury's milk cows, and she moved about as slowly.  Each time her big
foot slapped the ground in front of her, it seemed to be planted for
keeps, never to rise again.  Don't ask me how she managed to make a
complete round trip in a single day at the rate she poked along.  She
just did, that's all.  It's no wonder she wore big shoes and had foot
trouble.  She must have worn a size 90 triple E, and even then she had
to cut holes in them so her little toes could breathe.

Bright and early Monday morning, while it was still cool and the shade
from our house still extended almost to the street, I stood on the
corner of the porch and watched Cora lumber up Hobbs Street while her
son, Ozell, danced attendance, flitting in and out of people's yards
and driveways, a half block behind or a half block ahead, vanishing
around a corner or showing up suddenly at the mouth of an alley, his
face spread out in a white grin you could spot a block away.  And Cora
trudged on and on like a caterpillar with tired feet, steady and
determined, as dependable as Judgment Day, never changing her gait, not
even when Ozell hopped in circles around her, getting in her way and
pestering the daylights

out of her.  She swatted at him once, then again, as they came
alongside the vacant lot, but he dodged her, giggling like a hyena, and
turned up in her rear end to yank the tail end of her dress so that she
would swat at him again.  She obliged, and he ducked again, this time
to run on out in front, to the corner, across the street, into our
front yard and up to the front porch, where I waited.

He climbed over the banister onto the porch, exploding with excitement
about having a new daddy and a new last name.  Harris it was.  Ozell
Harris.

"You mean your mama's name is mrs Harris now?"  I asked.

"Sho' is," he said, "but don't nobody call her Miz Harris 'cept at
church.  They say "Good mornin', Miz Harris, and she say "Good
mornin'."

"Is your new daddy named Mister Harris?"

"Sho' is.  He don't live at our house no more, though.  He done move
away off to New York and California where he the richest man in the
whole town.  He walk down the street and people say "Hidy do, Mister
Harris," and he say "Hidy do' if he feel like it.  If he don't feel
like it, he don't say nothin' to nobody."

Cora had disappeared around the corner of the house.  I heard the back
gate slam with a bang; from inside the house I could hear her talking
to Mama above the gush of running water.  I mulled over Ozell's new
information, trying to find a place for it on his long, apparently
endless list of Facts, Experiences, Warnings and Prophecies.  Ozell
Harris.  Now that was a Fact.  But if his last name was Harris, that
meant that his mother was... Summers began and ended with Ozell.
Starting in June, his mother brought him on Mondays to play while she
worked; then in September he dropped out of sight until June again,
like a bear hibernating for the long winter.  His head bulged with
fascinating information that made me dizzy as all get-out when I tried
to remember it all.  Even then, he wouldn't let

me use some of it.  Last summer he had told me that the blacker you
are, the whiter you'll be when you die, and then wouldn't let me go to
Big Moot's funeral down in the Addition to see for myself.  Big Moot
was a bootlegger with a soul as black as his skin, or three shades
darker than the inside of a cave, and he needed some proving.  But
Ozell stood his ground.

"No, man!  You cain't go to no funeral down in the Addition!"  he said,
rolling his eyes so far back in their sockets that his eyeballs
disappeared.  "If anybody white look at Big Moot all laid out dead,
he'll turn black again and won't have no white ghost!"

He did give me permission to try the beef-Coke trick after I begged
him, but Tad refused to take a piece of roast beef to the Drug Store
and soak it overnight in cherry Coke and turn it into a lock of hair.
According to Ozell, the beef would turn the same color as the person's
hair who soaked it, and I thought it would be interesting to see a
piece of blond roast beef.

The list went on and on.  When you see a white horse, spit on the
ground and turn around three times or you'll drop dead, which, of
course, I was never crazy enough to put to the test.  Kiss your elbow
and turn into a girl.  Your age has nothing to do with the number of
years you've been alive.  It was like your name, and to prove it, he
was thirty-five years old all of one Monday and twenty-three until
dinnertime the next.

Now he had a new last name, of all things.  Ozell Harris.  The thing
that bothered me was that if Harris was a new name, what was it before?
We did a hand leap over the banister and went around in the back
yard.

Cora came out on the screened porch and pushed open the door.

"Heah--go put this in the trash can," she said.  She stuck a paper sack
full of corn shucks through the door at us.

I went up the steps and took the sack from her.

Cora Harris?

Mama felt guilty about spending the money for hired help when there
were so many people in Wordsworth who were hard pressed to put a square
meal on the table, not to mention Papa's customers who never paid up in
full and some who didn't pay at all.  At the same time, if Mama and a
few other ladies didn't hire her by the day, Cora and her family would
have starved.  I don't know how many kids she had--they seemed to come
and go like summer relatives--but Mama always made certain that we had
plenty of leftovers for her to take home on Mondays.  As a matter of
fact, some of our Monday dinners outstripped Sunday's, at least in
size.  Cora never went back to the Addition empty-handed.

Cora herself was too big to look hungry.  Tall and lopsided like a
tallow candle melting out of shape, she was every bit as hot.  She
could work up a sweat in a blizzard.  P. R. Burns said that was because
colored people have bigger sweat ducks than white people.  Even so, I
could be as cool as a cucumber and take one look at Cora's face,
glittery with sweat, and at the huge wet circles under her arms, and
have to go lie down in front of the electric fan to cool off.  She
dipped snuff by the buckets and kept it in a lump inside her lower lip,
shifting it from side to side for no reason that I could see.  She
talked to herself, too.  Once I heard her chattering and laughing to
beat sixty, but when I looked in the kitchen, she was alone.

Out in the alley, we emptied the sack of shucks into the trash can
after laying out a handful of corn silk to dry for smoking later on.
Back in the yard, I skinned the cat on the bottom branch of the
mulberry tree while Ozell stood on his head on the ground with his feet
propped against the trunk.  He stayed that way so long that you would
think all the blood would run to his head.  Maybe it did, but his face
was too black for me to tell.  We sat around in the storm cellar and
under the house popping knuckles and raising frogs on each other's
arms, then went to hide out in mr Castleberry's

cistern with the hole in the side.  mr Castlebeny didn't mind.  The
metal had rusted thin in several places and wasn't long for this world
anyway.  Besides, with the drought and all, he said he didn't see any
point in repairing a cistern to hold water when there wasn't any water
to hold.  We hid out in the cistern until the heat started making us
dizzy and until it began to look as though nobody would ever wonder
where we were and who we were hiding out from.  We crossed the street
again and scaled the fence once more into our back yard, where Cora was
hanging out the wet clothes.

"Good morning, Missus Harris!"  I shouted.

Her big black face and a pair of dollar-shaped eyes appeared above the
expanse of white she was draping across the line.  She stared for an
instant as if she was seeing the Spirits, then let go with such a loud
whoop and a holler that Ginny Gregg came running out to her back porch
to see what was going on.  Mama came to the door and glanced out; then
she turned back into the house with a smile.

The only thing wrong with summer Mondays was that they were seldom long
enough.  Whether we roamed the town, sneaked rides on the ice wagon,
followed the road grader, crawled through culverts on our stomachs or
tramped the blistering sidewalks looking for money that might have
slipped through a hole in somebody's pocket, Mondays were too short.
Today I was thinking about how maybe we ought to make some tin-can
stilts for Ozell to walk back to the Addition on, but he started
talking about his deaf-and-dumb cousin Pomeroy, who went to a special
school in Austin, which naturally pushed tin-can stilts and everything
else clear out of my mind.

He didn't really know wThat caused his cousin to lose his speech and
hearing, although he claimed that one day while he was taking a nap on
the railroad tracks, a train ran over him and scared the talking and
listening out of him.  The only deaf-and-dumb person I knew was Townie
Ledbetter, who had been hanging around the streets of Wordsworth
pointing

and waving at people since the Year One and had never gone to school a
day in his life.  Just how Pomeroy's teacher managed to teach him
anything when he couldn't hear what she told him was too much for me. I
asked Ozell to explain it.

"She make him hear," he said.

"How?"

"See that big tree over there?"  He pointed to the mulberry tree, the
only shade in our yard.  "The teacher she pull up a tree as big as that
and whip Pomeroy with it.  Then she say "You gonna hear me now?"  and
if Pomeroy don't say he gonna hear her, she whip him some more till he
hear her."

"But doesn't that hurt?"

"I mean it do!  Sometime he talk real loud and hear real hard so the
teacher won't whip him no more."

"I'd certainly like to hear him talk sometime."

"Oh, he won't talk to you none.  Not 'less I tell him to be won't. Once
the fire whistle blowed, and he said "Would it be all right if I hear
the fire whistle?"  and I say "I guess it be all right this time," and
he go ahead and hear it.  He say he really enjoy listenin' to it goin'
up and down real loud like."

Of all the tales Ozell expected me to believe, this one went down the
hardest.

"He ought to be able to say something" I argued, "and I don't see what
his ears are for if he doesn't use them to hear.  I believe I could say
at least one word."

"No you cain't!  When you're deaf and dumb, you cain't hear nothin' and
you cain't say nothin'.  Once when Pomeroy pay me a visit he let me be
deaf and dumb with him, and I couldn't hear nothin'.  And I couldn't
say nothin', either.  I mean nothin.""

Then I got this idea.

"How about you and me being deaf and dumb for a while?"  I suggested.

"We cain't do that," he said.  "We already been talkin' and listenin'.
When you deaf and dumb you gotta wake up in the mornin' deaf and dumb
the first thing."

"Maybe we could do it next week, then.  When you come, we won't say a
word--not even hello or good-by."

He studied that for a moment, and I could see the idea taking hold
inside his head.

"The first one that talks gets ten pokes--hard ones.  On the same arm,"
I continued.  "Okay?"

He agreed, but only after I promised not to tell Pomeroy about it on
his next visit.

On the following Monday, I must have made ten trips to the corner of
the front porch before seven-thirty, looking for Ozell.  Only after I
wore out my eyes did he come up Hobbs Street with arms outstretched
like an airplane, cutting a zigzag path across the ditch up onto the
vacant lot and back out onto the street again, making fast lip
blubbers.  He flew close enough for me to hear him and for him to
notice me.  Then he remembered.

He stopped short and clapped his hand over his mouth, but not soon
enough to head off a toothy grin.

I ran to meet him, my lips pressed together and stretched tight.

"Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm."

"Mrnmrnmmrnrnmmm?"

"Mmm!  Mmmmm?  Mmmm?"

With one hand I pulled my eyelids down from the bottom and plugged my
nose with the other and stuck out my tongue down to my chin.  He turned
his head to keep from laughing aloud.  To pay me back, he gave me his
cross-eyed look--the one that he claimed gave him headaches if he held
it too long and that his mother said would get hung permanently if he
didn't stop it.  We both fell to the ground, rolled over on our
stomachs and ended up wrestling, after which we came up with what we
thought were frowns but probably were tickled grins instead.  He
signaled me to follow-the-leader and led me over the banisters onto the
front porch and did hand leaps over Greggs' end onto the grass, over
the hedge, down

Greggs' driveway and onto the top of Greggs' garage, and a flying leap
down into our back yard.  We didn't say a word.

All morning we grunted, groaned, rolled our eyes, pointed, made faces,
gave signals back and forth, and even tried to spell with our hands.
The nearest we came to speaking was when I needed to go to the bathroom
and told him so by crooking my forefinger downward in front of my pants
and making a hissing noise between my teeth.  Mama looked out the
kitchen door at the wrong time.

"Larry," It was all I could do to keep from looking around at her, but
I managed not to.  It wouldn't have made much sense, not with me being
so deaf and all.  We kept up the pretense until dinnertime.

Ozell was eating in the kitchen with Cora while Mama, Papa, Tad, Uncle
Calvin and I sat at our customary places at the dining-room table.  We
had a clear view of each other, though, and we continued our game from
a distance.  Once, when I wanted another glass of iced tea and finally
made Mama understand, she called to Cora to refill my glass.  Ozell
came instead, and when he returned with the full glass, he stood by my
chair trying to make me laugh and spill it.  He but he didn't take her
seriously enough to obey.  Mama was almost succeeded, too.  Cora called
him back into the kitchen, telling Papa about something that happened
at the Bronte Club and some dull church stuff, while Papa nodded his
head and Uncle Calvin chimed in just enough to let them know that he
didn't agree with a word they were saying.  Tad was too busy eating and
probably mooning over Rosalie Wilkins to talk at all.  Nobody paid the
slightest attention to the game we were playing.  Not that it would
have mattered, for our family wasn't like the Burnses, who had a lot of
silly rules against talking and singing at the table.  To watch them
eat you would think they were at Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting.
Finally, Tad noticed my silence.

"What's the matter with you?"  he asked, eying me curiously.  "The cat
got your tongue?"

The day was hot and still.  The doors and windows were wide open, and
for once the wind was not blowing.  The house smelled of soapy water,
wet dust and O'Cedar.  The only sound, aside from the conversation, was
the buzz of the electric fan on the sideboard.

"Yes," said Mama with sudden interest, breaking off her conversation
with Papa.  "You haven't said a word all morning.  Don't you feel
well?" She narrowed her eyes and looked at me critically.

I raised and lowered my eyebrows three times in succession.

From his place at the kitchen table, Ozell snickered.  When I dared
look his way, he was covering his mouth with his hand, straining to
hold back a laugh and snorting like a horse.  Cora watched him with
bewilderment.

Papa caught on.

"Too bad," he said with mock graveness.  "Poor Larry's got laryngitis
and lost his voice!  You think maybe we ought to give him a double dose
of Creomulsion, Mother?"

"Heavens, no!"  she exclaimed, picking up Papa's mood.  "He might start
talking again, and I'm enjoying the peace and quiet."

She wrinkled her nose at me and smiled broadly.

Tad spoke up and joined in.  "I was thinking about inviting him down to
the store for a double malt, but since he can't answer, I guess it
wouldn't do any good."

I risked a side glance at Ozell.  He had toppled sideways into the
chair next to him, his face buried in his arms.  Snorts, giggles and
guffaws escaped from all sides.  Cora was laughing now, but she wasn't
sure why.

"Whatchall up to?"  she asked, her eyes sparkling and her mouth wide
open to reveal an awful mess of half-chewed food.

My mouth was full of iced tea.  I tried to swallow it before I spewed
it all over the table, but it dripped down my chin

anyway.  Mama and Papa burst into laughter.  Tad leaned across the
table and made a big show of holding his cupped hand under my chin to
catch the overflow.  Everybody but Uncle Calvin was having a good time.
He was irritated.

He sat humped over his plate, both elbows on the table, the tattooed
snake on his arm showing purple and wicked.  His flat, bony face was
darkened by a scowl as black as midnight; he was studying a yellow ear
of corn that he had just buttered and salted and peppered.  You could
tell that he was going out of his way not to join in the fun, and most
of all, not to look at me.  Which was okay by me, for having somebody
like Uncle Calvin look at you is certainly no great honor.

"I guess I'll have to take him downtown to stand around writh Townie
Ledbetter," Papa said.

"Yes, why don't you do that?"  said Mama, her brown eyes twinkling.  "I
didn't know that Larry Morrison, of all people, could stay this quiet
for this long."

Uncle Calvin held the ear of corn in one hand and picked a piece from
his front teeth with the other.

"He'll talk when he wants something from this end of the table," he
grumbled.

He bent his head and crunched into the snaggled ear of corn once
more.

The mood was shattered.  Smiles faded from all faces, twinkles from all
eyes.  Suddenly, playing deaf and dumb was no longer funny.  Uncle
Calvin had spoiled the game as surely as he had poisoned the
atmosphere, not by what he said but by the sour manner in which he had
said it.  Remaining silent throughout the rest of dinner was no trouble
now, but the reason was all wrong.  For a brief instant, I hated Uncle
Calvin so hard that it felt good.

Mama and Papa looked at each other sharply.  Papa opened his mouth to
speak, but thinking better of it, returned to his dinner.  Even with
his head down, he couldn't hide the troubled expression in his eyes.
Tad laid his fork on his plate and stared across the table at Uncle
Calvin, ready to climb all

over him.  Papa shook his head at him.  Mama took a deep breath and
tried to pick up the pieces.  She smiled, but it wasn't her regular
happy smile.

"Well, now!"  she said brightly.  "I guess we're all about ready for
dessert.  I made a peach cobbler this morning.  Oh, Cora?"  "Yessum?"

"Why don't you come clear off the table while I dish up the cobbler?"

After dinner, Papa and Tad went back to the store, Uncle Calvin went
off into my room to take a nap, and I went out into the back yard with
Ozell.

We maintained our silence for a while, but this time with no heart.

"This is a stupid game," I said at last.  "I'm tired of it."  "Oh,
that's all right-you uncle he don't like it nohow."  He paid me off
with ten hard pokes-all on the same arm.  Even that wasn't any fun.



S&w&S

I didn't hang around the Drug Store much when Tad was working, because
he found too many jobs for me to do that were not of my own personal
choice.  He would wait until I walked into the store, then suddenly
discover that he was out of ice and make me chip some more.  Sitting
alone in the stock room in the gloomy rear of the store among the trash
barrels and shipping cartons was a pretty sad way to spend your summer
vacation, believe me.  The big double door onto the alley was always
shut, and a single unshaded bulb threw out a bright light that made
spooky shadows on the wall and made me look ten feet tall and zigzagged
in the middle.  And hot.  In the rear of the store I could out sweat
Cora, even down in my britches, which made me look as if I had wet my
pants.  Nobody ever came back there except to go to the toilet or to
get some stock for the shelves.  They never stood around and talked
like they did up front.

What Tad would do was plunk me down on a carton of Miles Nervine with a
twenty-five-pound cake of ice in a wooden box to keep me company and to
reduce to shavings.  Having to slave away in solitary confinement like
that was torture enough, but sometimes he came back and scooped up most
of what I had already chipped, leaving the box empty before I could get
it filled.  If I fussed about it, he only laughed and said I ought to
work faster.

He wouldn't let me do any of the things I liked to do.  I knew how to
make sodas and Cokes and ring up sales on the cash register, but do you
think he would let me do any of those things?  Not on your life!  If I
tried, he chased me away.  He sent me over to the hospital occasionally
with a quart of strawberry ice cream or a prescription that Papa had
told him to deliver.  Once he made me wash off the sidewalk with soapy
water in front of the store where a lady had dropped a bottle of
Phillips' Milk of Magnesia and made an awful mess of chalky goo and
blue glass all the way out to the curb.  So I didn't hang around the
Drug Store much when Tad was working.  It wasn't restful enough.
Besides, Papa didn't like for me to loaf around downtown.  He thought I
was too young.

It was early in the summer, I guess, the day I was coming up from the
rear of the store lugging this wooden box of ice shavings that weighed
close to seven hundred pounds and stopped at the wrapping counter to
rest my burden.  There were no customers in the store.  Papa strolled
out of the prescription room and sidled past me without a word and out
around the soda fountain toward the front of the store.

"I didn't see you ring up that sale, son," he said to Tad, who was
straightening the pyramid of glasses on the back bar.

"He didn't pay me," Tad replied, puzzled.

"Did he tell you to charge them?"

"No, sir.  He didn't tell me anything."

Ollie was on the other side of the store dusting off the cosmetics.  He
didn't look around, but unless he was deafer than Pomeroy, he heard
every word that was uttered.

"And he didn't say anything about paying for them at all?"  Papa
asked.

"No, sir.  He just took them and walked out."

Papa shook his head and sighed.  "Well, you ought to know better than
that."  He sounded perplexed rather than angry.

I slid the wooden box of ice shavings off the wrapping counter into my
arms and went on up front, doing my dead-level

best not to notice the wet puddle it had made on the counter.  I
flipped back the lid of the ice compartment and started to empty the
box, but I was so busy watching Papa that some of the ice spilled off
onto the floor.

Papa leaned an elbow on the soda fountain and stuck his other hand in
his pocket as he did when he visited with customers who were in no
hurry to leave, as most of them seemed not to be these days, only this
time he wasn't visiting exactly.

"We can't do business that way," Papa said.

Tad was genuinely troubled.  "I know that, Papa," he said.  "But it was
Uncle Calvin] I didn't know what to do about it."

"You might have asked him for the money."

"But it was only a package of Wings!"

"It doesn't matter what it was.  It's no way to run a business.  Just
watch it and don't let it happen again."

"What'll tell him?"

Papa ran his hand through his thin hair and gazed out onto the street.
A shadow passed over his eyes.  He sighed again.

"Nothing," he said.  "I'll tell him."

Tad had forgotten the pyramid of glasses and was watching Papa's face
with anxiety.  I guess he was afraid that Papa might fire him or maybe
make him scrub the stock-room floor with hot, soapy water, either one
of which, you'll have to admit, would have been pretty terrible
punishment.

"I've told you again and again the fix we're in here, son," Papa said,
not complaining so much as explaining.  He didn't even raise his voice.
"I'm carrying honest drug bills that honest people can't pay, so we've
got to watch the nickels and dimes.  They add up into dollars quicker
than you realize."  He smiled faintly and with a touch of sadness.
"This is a business, and we've got to treat it that way," he went on.
"This applies to your friends, too.  We can't let them run up nickel
and dime Coke bills that they can't pay.  Anyway, most of their daddies
have given me strict instructions not to give them a nickel's worth of
credit at the soda fountain, and you've got to help me stick to it."

He turned back to the prescription room.  By the droop of his
shoulders, his slightly bowed head, and the absent manner in which he
let his hand trail along the edge of the wrapping coUnter, you could
tell that he was sick at heart about the whole Wing cigarette mess.
Papa was as gentle as a glass of sweet milk, with a nature and
disposition as soft as his voice, which was mellow and pleasantly
reedy.  He wasn't the kind o f person to deliberately turn his back on
unpleasantness and run from trouble, for if he had been, he would have
jumped off a cliff long before, considering the drought, the dust, the
depression and people owing him money and all; but unpleasantness did
hurt him deeply.  Not because he had to face it and deal with it, but
because it was there in the first place.

I raked the last of the ice into the compartment and hastily scooped up
the spillings from the floor before Tad could recover enough from his
tragedy to notice.  Ollie Tabor never looked around.  He went right on
dusting cosmetics that probably didn't have one single, solitary speck
of dust on them.

I was considering leaving before Tad noticed that for all my ice
chipping, the ice compartment was still only half filled, but along
about then some of the high-school kids started drifting in, and I
decided to wait around and listen in on some of their interesting
conversations.  Tad didn't mind if I sat around and listened, which was
a lot keener deal than P. R. Burns had with his brother, Pete, who was
always chasing PR..  away from interesting conversations.  I'm telling
you, if I had Pete Burns for a brother, I'd take poison.  The only
reason P. R. put up with him at all was because he didn't know how not
to, Pete being his blood brother and all.  After PR.  got saved, he was
always mentioning how Pete certainly didn't act like a saved person
with three years' experience.  I think it got him to wondering whether
or not he himself wanted to stay saved.

Before you know it, six or eight high-school kids were lolling around
on the fountain stools, leaning on the counters,

telling jokes, reading magazines, playing tricks, comparing the Major
League standings, framing up on people, making fun of their teachers,
worrying about money for dates, and sneaking in a dirty word every now
and then to keep things lively.  I leaned on the end of the fountain,
listening, and thinking what a lucky duck Tad was to get four dollars a
week for hanging around with his friends at the high-school hangout.
Then Merv Anderson got to telling this interesting tale about driving
his daddy's car all the way to Wichita Falls without permission and
running the speedometer back afterwards so his daddy wouldn't catch on.
Well, Wichita Falls is eighty-nine miles from Wordsworth, and it seemed
like a pretty courageous thing to do, and I must have said something
about it, although I certainly didn't intend to.  For whatever the
reason, Tad suddenly remembered my presence and moved down the fountain
to my end.

"I'm putting the Indian sign on you for this one," he said in a low
voice.

"Cross my heart," I said quickly.

"You'd better cross it again," he said, this time with a threat in his
voice.  "We don't want this getting back to mr Anderson."

I crossed it again.  "Honest, Tad!"  I said.  "You don't have to
worry."

He made the scalping sign at me and returned to his friends.

mr Anderson was my Sunday-school teacher, and I didn't quite know how
I'd feel when I walked in on Sunday morning and he said, "Hello, there,
Larry."  Probably as guilty as sin.  But that was an ordeal I'd just
have to suffer through when the time came.  For the time being,
however, I was plain flabbergasted to learn about Merv Anderson's nervy
ways.

You would think that the Wing cigarette deal plus Merv Anderson's
daredevil trip to Wichita Falls would be all a person could bear in one
day in one drug store, and that's exactly how I felt about it, but then
Buddy Masterson came

along and did this thing that just about topped them all.  He ordered
a Coke, and after he drank it and ate up all the ice out of the glass,
said, "Charge it," just as calmly as you please.

"Can't do it, Buddy," Tad said.  "You know the rules."

"Is that right?"  said Buddy, grinning like a possum.  All the
high-school kids, especially the girls, thought that Buddy Masterson
was the funniest thing on two legs.

"You know it is," Tad said.

Buddy made a big show of turning his pockets inside out.

"Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle!"  he said, looking down at his pockets
with mock surprise.  "Can you beat that?  I went right off and left my
checkbook at home!"

Tad was mad as a wet hen, but he couldn't do anything about it except
perhaps make Buddy vomit up the Coke, and nobody wants a vomited-up
Coke.  He stood there like a brick wall, glaring at Buddy, his eyes
fiery, the muscles in his jaws working busily.  You could tell that he
was remembering the conversation with Papa and at the same time mulling
over ten or twenty different possible punishments he might inflict on
Buddy.  I don't mind admitting that my heart started pounding like a
pile driver, because to be honest, I didn't know exactly what Tad might
do.  Buddy could see that Tad was angry, but rather than get angry
back, he kept on trying to be funny.

"You gotta understand that this turnip ain't got no blood in it!"  he
whooped.

Tad didn't whoop back.  He went right on glaring at Buddy.  I moved
around back of the fountain and inched up to Tad's side.  In a way that
Buddy couldn't see, I gave a jerk on Tad's apron which meant that I
wanted him to punch Buddy in the nose.  He brushed my hand away.

"All right, Buddy," he said between clenched teeth and in a low voice
so the other kids couldn't hear, "but I'm telling you right now and for
good--you won't get anything else out of this store without showing me
the money first."

He was pretty unhappy, and you couldn't blame him.  Buddy let go with
this big smart-alec ky laugh and joined the

other kids at the magazine rack, where they were snickering and
rolling their eyes over the latest issue of Film Fun.  Tad wrote
something on a pad back of the cash register and went on about his
business.  He didn't have much to say to any of the kids after that.  I
kind of halfway expected him to chase them out of the store like he did
sometimes when the place filled up with grown people, but he didn't.
They would have gone no further than the curb outside, anyway.  There
was nowhere else to go and nothing for them to do.

I hung around behind the cigarette counter looking for my cap that had
been there since spring and Mama told me not to dare come home without,
and as long as I was there, I saw no harm in glancing at the pad.  Tad
had written "Wordsworth High School" on it, and that's all.  I doubt if
Buddy ever knew the difference.  I'm certain that Papa didn't, which
was probably the general idea, anyway.

That might have looked dishonest to some people, and it was--on Buddy's
part, not Tad's.  He didn't want to get Buddy in trouble with his
daddy, nor did he want mr Masterson to bawl out Papa for charging
things to Buddy.  I couldn't see for the life of me how Tad could
possibly like Buddy Masterson after that, but I knew at the same time
that he probably would.  I guess when you're fifteen, you know how to
deal with troublesome people.  As a matter of fact, Tad always seemed
to know what to do about everything.  He even knew how to work in the
Drug Store before summer began.  He learned it from pinch-hitting after
school and on weekends when Ollie Tabor's varicose veins got to
bothering him and he had to stay off his feet, or if there was a rush
on during a dance at the Elks Club upstairs.

The sidewalks going home were the hottest in the state of Texas and
parts of Oklahoma, and I was barefooted.  I walked across people's
yards when I could and jumped from shady spot to shady spot when they
weren't too far apart.  At the Presbyterian Church, I followed the line
of shade along the building so I wouldn't have to do so much jumping
and

hopping, but it led me exactly one-half block out of my way to the
back alley, so I didn't try that again.

Ginny Gregg was sitting on her front porch when I came around the
corner on Tenth and angled across the street toward our house.

"Hi, Ginny!"  I yelled.  "You cooling off?"

She waved happily.  "As much as I can," she called back.

Of course, nobody as fat as Ginny Gregg could hope to cool off all the
way at one time.  She probably had to cool off in sections.  She was
the fattest girl in town, as round as a storage tank, with eyes that
vanished into fat wrinkles when she laughed.  She had fat arms, fat
hands, fat legs, and a fat face.  Mama said that Ginny had a pretty
face, but she was always saying that about fat people, even Marcella
Overton, who worked at the courthouse and was as ugly as homemade
sin.

I hurried across the street and onto the dry grass between the curb and
the sidewalk.

"Ouch!-oh!"

"What's the matter?"  Ginny was on her feet headed for the edge of the
porch.  She looked out over the banisters.

"Stickers!  There's a million--owweeeee!"

"Stand still!"  she shouted.  "I'll come get you!"

She wobbled down the steps and out across her yard much faster than
you'd expect a fat person to move.  Then without even asking my
permission, she picked me up as she would a sack of flour and carried
me right under her fat arm all the way to the shady safety of her front
porch, where she deposited me on the top step and stood by panting like
a hot Airedale while I picked the stickers out of my feet.

"Where you been, Larry?"  she asked after she caught her breath.  "Down
at the Drug Store?"

I nodded, then bent down to gather up the stickers from the steps so I
wouldn't step on them again.

"Is Tad working today?"  She tried to sound as though she didn't know
where he was and what he was doing.

"He works all day every day in the summer."

"That's what I thought," she said, "but I wasn't sure.  Not all the way
sure.  You know what I mean?"

She was sure, all right, just as she was sure that after school was
out, when Papa let Tad take off a week to rest up before starting work,
he spent so much time sitting on Rosalie Wilkins' front porch that he
almost got corns on his bottom.  She knew all about it, for she had a
crush on Tad that wouldn't wait.  I'm happy to say, however, that he
didn't return the crush, her being so fat and all.  Not that I didn't
like Ginny.  I liked her just fine.  When Tad wasn't at home, she'd sit
around and talk to me as if I were one of the high school kids, telling
me about her equations and biology specimens and who made D's and F's.
Once when I slid off the top of Greggs' garage smack into mrs Gregg's
new bed of iris that wouldn't grow, Ginny ran out and helped me smooth
the dirt before her mother caught me.  Considering all that and how
well our entire family knew Ginny, it was too bad that Tad couldn't
afford to return her crush.

"I've been so busy practicing my piano lessons, I hadn't really thought
about it much," she was saying, still trying to fool me.  "Lucille
Perkins called up on the phone and talked ages and ages.  She asked me
if I had seen many of the kids since school was out, and I said not
many, and that I thought-but It wasn't rare--that Tad Morrison was
working at the Drug Store this summer."

Actually, it would have been a handy crush for Tad to return.  He and
Ginny were the same age, in the same grade and went back and forth
across the yard all the time, borrowing books, swapping papers,
comparing grades, studying for tests and discussing who was sweet on
who at school.  They walked to school together sometimes, but not
unless Tad wanted to.  When you're generally considered to be the most
handsome and most popular boy in Wordsworth, you just naturally have
more people to walk to school with than you can handle.  He knew a
thousand ways to get away from her, such as telling

her he had to sprint all the way to school for track training, and if
Ginny ever caught on, she was too happy when he did walk with her not
to forgive him.  She thought he wasn't quite as handsome since he broke
his nose in football scrimmage, but I noticed that she didn't think it
enough to stop being stuck on him.  She had it bad, till death do us
part, that's all there is to it.

"Does Tad have to work nights?"  Ginny asked timidly.  "I mean, it
looks like your feet would kill you if you had to stand on them all day
and all night, too."

"Some nights he does," I said.  "He doesn't tonight, though.  He gets
off at suppertime."

"Oh, that's nice," she said with a giggle.

I got to my feet.  "I gotta go, Ginny," I said.  "Mama told me to be
home by three o'clock, or she'd tan my hide."

"What's happening at three o'clock?"

"I gotta get my hair cut.  Miss Nettie Hatcher is coming," I said. "The
last time she came, I ran off when I saw her coming around the corner
with that little black bag.  Mama had to pay her a quarter, anyway--and
all she did was sit on the porch and wait and drink two glasses of
lemonade."

Miss Nettie made her living going to people's houses and cutting their
kids' hair.  She was a hundred and thirty-five years old and about the
size of a gnat--a skinny gnat.  She had a pinched, dried-up face, wore
a permanent grin even when she wasn't laughing and had claws instead of
hands.  Besides, she used a pair of old hand clippers that squeaked and
pulled.  She whined instead of fussed at me to keep my head still, and
if that didn't work, she dug her skinny fingers into both my cheeks and
held me prisoner.  If she didn't mash all my teeth crooked, it wasn't
because she didn't try.  I guess Miss Nettie was about the most
unpopular person in Wordsworth, unless it was Miss Lena Snyder, the
principal of our school, and she was the most unpopular person in the
United States.

"Miss Nettie doesn't still cut Tad's hair, does she?"  Ginny asked.

"Not any more.  She just cuts little kids' hair--when she can catch
them.  She went down to Abernathys' once, and every one of the
Abernathy kids ran off and hid in mr Slaton's chicken house.  Miss
Nettie just sat in the living room and watched the clock until she
figured she had waited long enough to give five haircuts.  Then she got
up and made mrs Abernathy pay her a dollar and a quarter and left--that
is, after she had waited for mrs Abernathy to come home from

looking for all the kids.  When their daddy came home that night he
gave every last one of them twenty-five cents' worth of spanking
apiece."

"You'd better get on home, then," Ginny said.

"I guess I'd better.  You coming over?"

"I don't know," she said.  "By suppertime, I'll be so tired from all
this heat that I might just sit here on the porch and cool off."

"Well, so long, Ginny," I said.  "I'll see you later."

""By, Larry," she called after me.  "Wear your shoes the next time you
go downtown."  She laughed pleasantly.

Poor Ginny, I thought, as I leaped the hedge into our yard.  She'll be
sitting on the porch tonight hoping that Tad will come sit with her,
and he just might do it.  But not for the reasons she hopes he will.
She's too fat.



Mama made me a red devil's food cake for my tenth birthday and let me
invite P. R. Burns to eat birthday dinner with us.  He had never heard
of a birthday cake that wasn't white, but its strangeness didn't slow
down his appetite.  He ate three slices.  Big ones.

"Birthday cakes can be any color you want," I argued.

"Mine are always white," he replied stubbornly.

"Did you ever ask your mother to make you another color?"

"Irs not legal."

"I must of broke the law then, because I asked Mama for a red devil's
food with pecans on top, and that's what she made me.  Last year I had
a lemon cream pie with calf-slobber meringue a foot high."

"A birthday pie?"

"What's wrong with that?"

"Lots of things.  Where did you put the candles?"

"Right where you're supposed to--square in the middle."

"It doesn't sound right.  And that cake just didn't seem like an
honest-to-goodness birthday cake, either."

Of course, nobody held his nose and crammed it down his throat.  That's
just the way he made things sound.  He didn't understand anything.  To
be real honest, P. R. Burns griped me to death.  I know he was my best
friend and all that, but

I don't know any Texas state laws that says your best friend can't
gripe the pants off you.  Why, once when Four Eyes McEntyre called P.
R. a fat ass and I told him to take it back or take off his glasses and
say it again, he took off his glasses, said it again and knocked me
a-winding clear over into mrs Abernathy's lilac bush.  So nobody can
say that we weren't best friends.

The thing about P. R. was that he was from one of those families whose
kids got invited to everything in town without anybody stopping to
think whether they really wanted them to come or not.  He went
everywhere I did and was always hanging around to see what I intended
to do in case he wanted to do it, too.  Usually, he did.  The only
thing I ever heard of his doing by himself was get saved, and if the
truth were known, his mother probably told him it was time to get saved
as she told him when it was time to go to bed or to wash his teeth.  It
was too hot for a birthday party with kids dressed up in sticky Sunday
clothes, so in addition to letting me invite P. R. to eat birthday
dinner with us, Mama gave me thirty cents to pay both our ways to the
swimming pool and buy a nickel's worth of something to eat or drink.
The Wordsworth Municipal Pool was open only three days a week because
of the water shortage, and we moved my birthday up a day early so that
it would fall on one of the open days.

All of Wordsworth seemed to be on fire.  The wind that whipped the town
was so hot that it parched your lips, wind blistered your face in the
shade and wilted the plants on the window sills, while everybody
sampled it, tasted it, held up two fingers to test it for moisture,
shook their heads sadly and blamed the 107-degree temperature on it,
just as if the sun wasn't up in the sky shooting out hot flames.  They
counted up for the thousandth time how long we had gone without rain
and made some pretty gloomy predictions about how much longer we could
survive without burning to a crisp.  Things were so dry that by the
time Cora hung the

last wet garment on the end of the clothesline, she could go back to
the other end and start bringing them in bone-dry.  The City Council
limited yard-watering to two days a month, but the pressure was low,
and the thirsty ground was like a giant blotter that soaked the water
faster than it trickled from the hose.  It was kind of pitiful the way
people stood around squeezing measly little streams of water from the
hose onto brown patches of yard and wiry tangles of shrubbery, hoping
to save it somehow, never quite ready to admit that it was already as
dead as a tumbleweed.  The surest way in the world to get yourself
talked about and investigated by your neighbors was for your yard to be
too green.  You might as well hang a sign on your front porch
announcing that you had been sneaking water at night.

The Wordsworth Municipal Pool was crude and slapdash, only a hole in
the ground lined with rough cement and bordered by rickety planks that
rattled and shook under your feet, but it was full of cold, delicious,
splashing, gloriously wet water, and it was ten feet deep on one end
with a springboard to fall off of backwards, and it was the one place
in town where nobody fretted about the heat.  They just bobbed up and
down like whales, forgetting how hot it was on the ground until they
got out and discovered that they could get pretty dry without using
towels.  Better yet, the pool was handier than Tolbert's Crossing, a
half-dried creek which was free, but six miles north of town and always
too dry or too muddy or too infested with water moccasins for
swimming.

P. R. blabbered to everybody in the pool that it was my birthday, and a
bunch of kids ganged up on me and threw me in headfirst four times. The
lifeguard put us out of the pool twice for chasing each other around
the rickety planks and warned us that the next time would be the
pos-tivehttely last.  But we had a good time anyway, even if P. R. did
spend about as much time deciding between a Baby Ruth and ten
two-for-a-penny Mary Janes as he did swimming.

Back home, where we tried and failed again to jump out to the second
crack in the sidewalk, P. R. helped himself to a few more slices of red
devil's food cake that Mama had left on the sideboard for us to finish
up.  He said he wished his birthday wasn't in December, so he could
take me swimming like I did him.  It was nearly dark when he started
home, too late for supper, but with the extra supply of birthday cake
inside him, plus two glasses of milk and all those Mary Janes, I don't
think he went home and starved himself to sleep.

"I had a nice time, Larry," he said.  "I'm sorry I forgot to buy you a
birthday present, but since you didn't have a party, I didn't know I
was supposed to."

"That's okay, P. R. Mama and Papa gave me a shirt and some new
underwear, and Tad got me an Eversharp pencil at the Drug Store."

"Was that all you got?"

"Well, mr and mrs Gregg and Ginny gave me a pair of socks."

"That's not very much for three whole people to give you."

"It's okay if they're not kin to you."

"What did your uncle give you?"

"Him?  He's not even here.  He went off to look for work, I guess.  I
heard Papa tell him the other night when he didn't know I was listening
that he thought it was about time he went out and found something to
do.  He's probably on the WPA somewhere--if the WPA will have him."

"Don't you know when he's coming back?"

"Never," I hope."

Being ten didn't make me feel as old as you might think, but it did
rush the summer.  I don't know what happened to it.  All I know is that
the Fourth of July flashed on and off like the fireworks themselves,
with Tad and me out on the back porch fussing about whose turn it was
to crank the ice-cream freezer and Papa swiping chunks of ice from us
to put in the

washtub, where he was keeping the watermelon cold.  Then it was
August, and I would have held it back with my hands if I could, for
August was all that held off September and another year of
uninteresting school.

It must have been the last Monday in August, or maybe the next-to-last,
that Ozell and I had snitched a ride on the back of the ice wagon and
rode all the way to the crossing by the Cotton Compress before mr
Boston discovered us and put us off.  Just as he rattled off down First
Street, leaning out and reading ice cards in people's windows, a
northbound freight creaked around the bend by the grain elevator and
rippled itself out into a straight line.

"Lookit all them yellow boxcahs!"  Ozell exclaimed, hopping on one foot
then the other.  "You gotta help me stamp em!

I couldn't get interested in yellow boxcars.  My attention was nailed
by the swarms of men perched in boxcar doors and atop flatbeds like so
many blackbirds.  While Ozell licked his forefinger and stamped the
palm of his hand for good luck one time each per yellow boxcar--I
ticked off forty-eight men aboard the freight train before I lost
count.

They were faceless and neutral, shapes, forms and outlines.  From their
perches, they looked down and through us as if we were sheets of glass.
They didn't seem to notice that they were going through a town, across
streets, past buildings where people worked and houses where people
lived, nor did they seem to care.  They gazed up at the sky or down at
the ground or out into the distance, and whether they were in
Wordsworth, Texas, or in Shanghai, China, didn't seem to make much
difference.  One man, tall, straight and handsome, who stood alone,
framed by the open door of a faded red boxcar, smiled and waved to us,
too friendly, too alive, too real to be one of the others.  Maybe
that's why he rode in a boxcar all to himself.  I wondered who he was,
where he was going, where he had been, whether he was leaving home or
going back to it.  But I couldn't un jumble the others enough

to fix any one of them in my mind.  They were bodies, faces,
nothings.

Ozell said they were hobos, but I asked Papa about it later, and he
said they were only men without jobs going to look for work.  Then he
got that worried look on his face, and I knew that he was seeing Uncle
Calvin dangling his feet from the open door of a boxcar, headed for
Santa Fe or Seattle or some faraway place where no one else had ever
been.  I knew it, because that's the picture I got while Ozell stamped
yellow boxcars for good luck.  I was surprised out of my pants,
therefore, when, exactly two days later, I saw Uncle Calvin at that
house across the street from the jail.

Naturally, I thought everybody at home would be interested and boy!
were they ever!  From the way Mama, Papa and Tad carried on, you would
have thought I had run onto a bed of rattlesnakes or a Comanche
hideout.

It had heard that Pretty Boy Floyd was imprisoned in our jail, and P.
R. Burns and I were walking crossties down the railroad track alongside
the jail to see if we could catch him looking out the window.  We saw
nobody but Avery Massey, whom we could see any time we pleased, reeling
and staggering down Main Street or sprawled all over the curb in front
of Riley's Grocery & Market.

"Hey, Avery!"  P. R. yelled.

Avery waved a tattered, dirty arm at us through the bars.

"Whatcha in jail this time for?"  P. R. shouted.

I raised my knee and let him have it hard square on the tailbone.

"You can't ask him that.  What if he hears you?"

"He don't care.  My dad says that Avery spends so much time in jail
that he doesn't have anything else to talk about."

Avery pressed his grizzled face against the metal bars.  "They claim I
broke the law," he replied in a thin, squeaky voice.

"What did you do?"

"Nothing--but they said I did."

He watched us until we were out of sight.

"You boys watch out now and don't get run over by a train!"  he
screeched after us.  "They go by here awful fast."

We jumped down from the roadbed at Goode Street and started up the
sidewalk, counting the spikes in mrs Claiborne's iron fence along the
way.

Then I saw Uncle Calvin.

He was standing on the porch of a low white frame house two doors up
from mrs Claiborne's, gazing toward the railroad tracks as if waiting
for another freight train to carry him away.  If he saw me, he didn't
let on, and to make sure he did not, I walked on the other side of P.
R. To make double dog sure, I offered to race P. R. to the corner and
broke into a run before he could turn me down.

"How come you didn't speak to your uncle?"  he asked after we had
crossed Second Street at the next corner and were safely out of
sight.

"He didn't want me to see him."

"How do you know?"

"I just know."

"Did he say so?"

"No, but he didn't just the same."

"I always speak to my uncles when I see them."

"You don't have any uncles like Uncle Calvin, though."

"Who's he visiting in that house?"  he asked.

"I don't know--some friends of his, I guess."

"It looks like you could have just said hello to him."

"I already told you, P. R."  he didn't want me to see him!"

"You acted like you were scared of him."

"What makes you think I was scared?"

"I don't know, but that's how you acted."

I could not even explain to myself why I didn't speak to Uncle Calvin,
aside from not wanting to, that is.  Sometimes you just know when it's
the right time or the wrong time to speak.

At the supper table, I brought it up again.

"I saw Uncle Calvin today down by the jail," I said.

Papa stiffened.  Mama laid her fork across her plate.

"Oh, he wasn't in jail," I said, laughing.  "He was on the porch of a
house across the street.  You know the ones where there's three just
alike?"

My explanation was greeted by a suspicious silence.

Then Tad asked keenly.  "Which house?"

"The middle one--I think.  Two doors up from mrs Claiborne's--back this
way."

Mama gasped, raised her eyebrows and looked at Papa.  Papa frowned at
her.  She returned to her supper.

"You know who lives in that house?"  Tad asked, sounding wiser than
usual.

"Tad--finish your supper," Mama said quickly.

"I only asked if-"

"That'll do, son," Papa said.  "We're not interested in who lives in
that house."

"I am!"  I said.  "I'm real interested."

"Just forget it and eat your supper," Papa ordered.

"What's so secret about who--"

"Larry!"

He didn't have to say but the one word.

After supper, Mama and Papa were sitting in the porch swing in the cool
dark, talking and enjoying the late breeze, While I lay with my head in
the window, half listening.  Frankly, I was glad to have something to
listen to, because I had been counting myself to sleep and had already
passed 39,602 without batting an eye.  When the nights were too hot and
too sticky to sleep, sometimes I put my pillow in the window and lay
with my head against the screen, listening to the crickets or the big
trucks on the highway or maybe Ginny Gregg practice her piano lessons
if she was later than usual.  Frequently, I would go sound asleep and
never know it until I felt Mama or Papa straighten me around in the bed
and cover me with a sheet.  I was accustomed to the creak of the
slatted swing or the clank of chains that suspended it from

the top of the porch, even when no one sat in it and the wind twisted
it back and forth.  Mama and Papa had some pretty dull conversations in
that swing, but this time the irritation in Mama's voice made it sound
pretty interesting.

"I just don't think we ought to let him come back here if he's going to
that house," she was saying.

"I suppose you're right," said Papa without much enthusiasm, "but I
don't know exactly how to forbid it.  He's forty two years old, and I
can't order him around like I would Tad or Larry."

"Well, I think you certainly should talk to him about it the next time
he comes back.  If Larry saw him, goodness knows who else saw him. It's
so--it's embarrassing."

They went on talking for the longest, but I fell asleep and didn't hear
how it all came out.  By morning I had forgotten it and might never
have thought of it again if Uncle Calvin had not returned three days
later and set off another argument.

I must have been down in the cave with the other kids when he arrived,
for I didn't see him come down the street and go into the house.  When
I came in, I was worried about being late for supper and having on my
next-to-best pants, which seemed to have got kind of dirty down in the
cave.  Mama and I had walked downtown the night before and sat around
the Drug Store waiting for Papa and Tad to close up.  When we got home,
I slung my pants across a chair and put them on the following morning
without thinking.  I didn't mean to crawl around in the cave and get
them dirty, though.

Nobody heard me come in the front door, and I started into my room to
change pants and maybe scrape off some of the dirt before Mama saw me.
The sound of Papa's voice from the kitchen, however, stopped me.  He
was upset.

"... it's not the way to act, and you know it.  We have decent friends
in Wordsworth who know what you're doing, and it's embarrassing to
us."

"You just don't understand," Uncle Calvin said with his

nasty little snicker.  "How can you think that about somebody you
don't even know personally?"

"I know her," said Mama.  "I've known her ever since I was a little
girl.  Everybody in town knows her--and what she is."

"A lot of long-tongued gossipers!"

"That might be," Mama went on, "but it's embarrassing for us,
nevertheless.  I think you might have some respect."

"Well, just look at my side of it, will you?  Just how do you think I
can make friends around here--considering everything?"

"I don't know," Papa said.  "I just don't know.  But since you put it
that way--why do you keep coming back if you have so much trouble
making friends here?"

"Now, John, you know as well as I do what the unemployment situation is
around the country," Uncle Calvin whined.  "If there ain't no work,
there just ain't no work."

"There certainly isn't," Papa said with sudden firmness.  "Not when you
walk off every job you get."

"Now I told you how that WPA foreman was always riding me and giving me
so much--"

"Cal, Cal."  I didn't have to see Papa's face to know how exasperated
he was.  "We've been through this at least a dozen times."

"--and that smart aleck down at Brownwood found out about--"

"And we've talked about that one, too," Papa cut in.  "Maybe you ought
to have thought about that five years ago when-"

"John!"  Mama's voice was shrill and sharp.

"Well, it's the truth, Gladys," said Papa.  "I don't know how else to
look at it."

"I know, but-"

The telephone rang and cut her off.  I ducked quickly into my room
before they caught me listening.  The smell of Uncle Calvin's dingy
clothes was heavy.  I didn't have time to get griped at the prospects
of losing my room again before I

heard his footsteps coming through the house.  I pretended to be
searching for something in the junk drawer of my desk.

He stopped in the doorway.  I could feel the surprise in his abrupt
halt.  I did not look around.  His eyes were boring a hole in me, I
knew.  It was a strain and a temptation not to look at him, but I
didn't.  Instead, I went on scratching through the drawer while he
moved on into the room and lowered himself onto the bed.

Silence.

The bedsprings creaked slightly.  His noisy wheezing came across the
stillness.  He stirred.  I went on with my poking long enough to make
it look real; then I slammed the drawer shut and turned to leave.  He
had not moved from the edge of the bed.

His eyes narrowed to mere slits.  They were as cold as two chunks of
ice and leveled directly at me with deadly aim.  In his hand he held a
partially filled cigarette paper; from his mouth, a sack of Bull Durham
dangled by its string.  Slowly and without taking his eyes off me, he
reached up and took the string from his mouth and let the sack swing
back and forth like a pendulum on a clock.  Just as slowly, he opened
his mouth to speak.  The words came out in a monotone as cold as his
eyes.

"Did you tell your daddy about seeing me?"

His voice sent icy chills up my legs and along my backbone.  I
pretended not to hear him, but the cold shiver that shook me must have
given me away.  I hurried on through the door, across the hall, through
the living room and dining room, into the good-smelling kitchen, where
it was light, happy and cheerful.  Mama looked up from the stove, and I
was so glad to see her that I didn't mind getting bawled out for
getting my pants dirty.  Papa was in the hall talking on the
telephone.

"Okay, Ollie," he was saying.  "If she's got enough for one more dose,
that'll hold her for the time being.  What?  No no, don't do that.
I'll come back down after supper and refill it for her."

It's a wonder I didn't have to prop my eyes open to stay awake until
Tad came home from the store.  I have never been so sleepy in my life.
It was Ollie Tabor's night to go to Lodge, and Tad had to work until
closing.  When he had come home to supper, he didn't stay long enough
for me to ask about that house across the street from the jail.  He
jumped up from the table, listened to Amos 'n' Andy (no interruptions,
if you please), then raced out the front door and back to the store as
if he were going to a fire.

"How come you're still awake?"  he asked emptying his pockets out onto
the dresser.  With a peculiar glance at me, he stepped to the closet
and moved his hand quickly from his pants pocket to the inside pocket
of a coat on the front hanger.  But he wasn't quick enough.

"Those your cigarettes?"  I inquired.

"Mind your own business," he mumbled.  "Go to sleep like you're
supposed to."

He started to undress, doing his best to ignore me.

"I've been staying awake to ask you something."

"Ask me in the morning."

"Who lives in that house where I saw Uncle Calvin?"

"What do you want to know for?"

,"

I told him about the argument in the kitchen and how Uncle Calvin had
acted when he came into my room.  He listened with more than usual
interest.  When I got to the end of my story, he was standing by the
door in his shorts, half naked, one hand on the light switch,
waiting.

"Is that all?"

"I guess so."

"Okay, then."  He switched off the light and felt his way across the
room in the darkness and hit the bed as if it were a tackling dummy.

"Whose house is it, Tad?"

"Get over on your side and stay there," he commanded.  "How come you
won't tell me?"

"I wouldn't let it bother me.  It's probably somebody Papa doesn't
like."

"Looks like I got a right to know.  You wouldn't of known anything
about it if it hadn't been for me."

"Move over."

I moved over to the wall and waited for him to settle down and get
fixed.

"Who was it, Tad?"

"Look, Larry.  What do you want to be so nosy for?  If you've just got
to know, it's Audrey Tillotson.  Now be quiet and go to sleep."

"What's wrong with Uncle Calvin visiting her?"

"If you don't know, you're too young for me to tell you."  "Maybe she's
a friend of Uncle Calvin's."

Ii'l bet!"

"Maybe he had some business to transact with her."

He giggled.  "That's what Mama and Papa are afraid of.  Now if you
don't go to sleep, I'm gonna stuff a pillow in your mouth."

He turned over on his side with his back to me and fell asleep almost
immediately.  I stayed awake for a while, thinking about Audrey
Tillotson and wondering why everybody was so upset.  I had seen her
around town every now and then.  Although she didn't look and dress
exactly like other women in Wordsworth, she was prettier than most, in
a tired sort of way.  She was nice, too.  At least she was nice to me
the only time she ever spoke to me.  That was the day when she came
into the Drug Store and bought something from Ollie that she wouldn't
let Tad get for her, although Tad was standing around doing nothing and
Ollie was at the top of a stepladder dusting off bottles.  When she
departed, she left her gloves on the counter.  Ollie gave them to me
and told me to run after her.

I caught up with her down the street in front of Aker's Variety
Store.

"You're one of the Morrisons, I'll bet," she said in a smooth, deep
voice that was almost like a man's, except that it was more gentle and
much softer.  Even outside where the wind was blowing, her powder and
perfume smelled good.

"Yes, ma'am, I'm Larry."

"And that's your brother back there in the store?"

"Yes, ma'am, that's Tad."

"You both remind me of your daddy," she said.  "He's a fine man."

It was certainly a relief for her not to mention how big Tad was and
how little I was.

"Thank you for bringing my gloves," she said.  She had a nice smile.

"That's okay.  Ollie told me to do it."

"Then thank Ollie, too," she said.

She smiled again and went on down the street.

That's all there was to it.  I turned and went back to the store.

Her hair was a funny color--a kind of reddish, brownish, artificial
shade--and she wore more beads and bracelets than most women, but I
guess she liked to dress up when she went downtown.  Every time I saw
her she was alone.  Maybe she appreciated company, even if it was only
Uncle Calvin.

I didn't lose any sleep over it, though.  The next day Uncle Calvin
left again.  He must have got the high sign from Papa.  He could have
got it from me if he had only looked at me for about one second.  No
longer.



I don't care what school they're talking about, grown people make it
sound like a keener deal than it really is.  If, as Mama claimed, doing
things you don't want to do builds character, it's a wonder my
character wasn't higher than the water tower, considering the terrible
strain I was under at school from morning until night, five days a
week, when I could have been doing things of my own personal choice.
Ginny Gregg and Tad let me listen to their conversations about the
interesting things the high-school kids did, else my life would have
been plenty forlorn, believe me.

Ginny wandered into our house without knocking, coming through the back
yard and kitchen as often as the front.  You never knew when you might
look up and find the door crammed full of Ginny Gregg, chattering about
all the news, whether it was worth chattering about or not.  She needed
no reason for coming, although at first blush you might get the idea
that she invented excuses to come because she was sweet on Tad.  You'd
be wrong, though.  She came over when she felt like it, whether Tad was
home or not, and whoever was present, that's who she visited.  She
might get no further than the kitchen, sticking her finger in whatever
Mama happened to be cooking and squealing and giggling when Mama
slapped her hand away and asked if she wanted to weigh a ton, which, of
course, she already did.  For years she lounged around with

Tad and me wherever we happened to be in the house, even in my room or
Tad's until mrs Gregg told her that young ladies don't visit young men
in their bedrooms.  Ginny must have taken it to heart, for she stopped
it and stood outside in the hall and talked to Tad through the door if
for some reason he was hiding in his room and trying to get away from
her.  So she visited all of us, including Papa when he was at home.

We couldn't gripe about Ginny coming all the time, for Tad and I
wandered in and out of her house the same free and-easy way.  We had
been doing it all our lives.  mr Gregg, who was a traveling salesman
for the Wordsworth Wholesale Grocery Company, knew more riddles and
jokes than Harley Sadler's comedians, and I wouldn't be surprised if
his customers gave him orders just to hear them.  I would have.  Once
he got me to laughing so hard that I fell down in their kitchen floor
and got these awful pains in my stomach.  I wet my pants, and mrs Gregg
sent me home.  mrs Gregg was plump like a dumpling with a neck bun of
soft auburn hair, lots of freckles and a smile that made her look
prettier than she actually was.  Only Mama could beat her when it came
to nice, warm, friendly smiles.  Ginny was their only child, an unhandy
thing for her personally, but since she was fat enough for two people,
I don't imagine her parents missed having the second one too much.

So I had two good sources of information about the high school kids,
whereas P. R. Burns, whose brother Pete never told him anything, had no
source at all.  Poor P. R.!  The roof could cave in on the high school,
and he'd never know it.  He was surprised and extremely interested,
then, when I told him about Miss Watson slapping Juarez Gonzales in
Algebra for sassing her, and how he jumped out of his seat and chased
her down the aisle, out the door and all the way down the hall to the
principal's office, where she was rescued just in the nick of time by
mr Hightower himself.  According to Ginny, Miss Watson came back later,
trembling, out of breath and pale as a spook, too upset to finish the
day's algebra lesson, for

which no tears were shed exactly.  The kids didn't like her worth a
hoot, but they were relieved nevertheless to see that Juarez had not
stabbed her with his long-bladed, pearl-handled knife, for which he was
famous and feared.

Juarez was the only Mexican kid in the high school.  He had the longest
hair and the shortest temper, and as if that were not enough to set him
apart, the most absences and worst reputation.  The Gonzales family had
come to town several years previously with the regular swarm of cotton
pickers, but when cotton went down to nine cents a pound and was no
longer worth picking, they stayed behind while the others moved on.
They lived on North Side in a ramshackle house adjoining the cemetery
and were on Relief.  Naturally.  I never heard of anybody living on
North Side without being on Relief.  Whether they were on Relief
because they lived on North Side or lived on North Side because they
were on Relief was a question I never found time to go into.

With so much excitement in the air, you can't blame P. R. and me for
taking a shut-eye walk around the top of the cemetery wall after school
one day, hoping to catch Juarez in his back yard where we might get a
good, close look at him.  Of course, I didn't plan on P. R. making him
mad enough to throw rocks at us and cuss us out in Mexican.

We were coming Indian file up the north wall from the back corner with
me in front and were just drawing abreast of the Gonzales back yard
when, with no warning at all, P. R. started yelling in Mexican, of all
things!  He knew how to speak Mexican about as well as I did, which was
exactly zero.

"Mucho gusto, Senor!"  he shouted so loud you could have heard him out
at the river.  "Mucho-mucha-cha, Senor Gonzales!"

Before I could turn around to shut him up, he yelled again.

"La Paloma, Senorita!  La Paloma, Senor!  La Paloma!  La Paloma!  La
Pa-"

"Shut up, P. R.!"

"--loma, Senorita Gonzales!  Yeah, Santa Anna!"

"P.  R.-"

The rock that whizzed past my ear zinged like a bullet.  Juarez was
coming at us across the yard, his black eyes flashing, his mouth open
and spewing Mexican cuss words a mile a minute, his arm drawn back
ready to throw again.

"Watch out, Larry!  Jump!"

I must have obeyed P. R."s warning, for the next thing I knew, P. R.
was inside the cemetery running to beat ninety, and I was on his heels,
leaping over graves and dodging around tombstones as if I had been
practicing.  Another rock flew past, this time landing in front of me
where I could see it.  Talk about big.  If that rock had hit me, I
would be as dead as a doornail this very minute.  Behind us, Mexican
cuss words were still flying over the wall, but growing fainter and
fainter as we headed for the front gate.  I don't know what the words
meant, and anybody with one eye and half sense would not have stopped
to translate them, even if they could.

Well, I nearly fell over backwards on the following Monday after school
when I was coming up Hobbs Street past mr Schmidt's and saw Tad angling
across Tenth Street in front of Gregg's to our house, bringing with
him, if you can believe it, Juarez Gonzales!

The reason Tad wasn't at football practice was because Coach Stallings
always gave the team a day off after winning a game, and Wordsworth had
beaten Crowell 7-6 on Friday, although he did say that he should have
made them practice all day Saturday and Sunday for merely squeaking
past a one horse team that didn't have the strength to blow its nose.
Anyway, that's why Tad was coming home so early, and I'd have to draw
you a picture for you to understand how surprised I felt.  All I could
think about was the cemetery wall, a loud mouth full of Mexican cuss
words, how Juarez had tried to slay me, and a long-bladed pearl-handled
knife for which he was famous and feared.

He and Tad were walking along, laughing and talking just as friendly as
you please, for all the world to see.  They sauntered

across Greggs' yard, across ours and actually went up on our porch and
into our house.

I stopped dead in my tracks and just stared at them as they disappeared
through the front door.  Tad was either the biggest daredevil of all
times, or he had gone loco, I wasn't sure which.  Of course, I had too
much sense to go on home under those dangerous conditions, so I stopped
in the vacant lot and waited for Juarez to leave.

He stayed until dark.

I got plenty tired of waiting, especially when a blue norther swept in
and nearly froze my teeth out.  I had seen it coming from across the
river, all blue and dark, stretched out from one side of the world to
the other, ready to attack, but how was I to know that I wouldn't be
inside my own house before it struck?  The cave had caved in two days
before when Sonny Chiles and Otis Cranston got to horsing around and
fell on top of it, and I had to wait aboveground, where it was
extremely cold.  I couldn't go to P. R."s house, because his mother
wasn't letting him have company or go anywhere for the same number of
days he had failed to brush his teeth, which was seven.  The Drug Store
was too far away.  I dared not go to Greggs', for I figured Tad would
have Juarez in his room, which looked out on Greggs' driveway, yard,
front porch and entire house.  Actually, it would have been as
dangerous as going home.  I considered mr Castleberry's cistern, but I
didn't know how to get to it without exposing myself to plain view, so
I stayed where I was, hidden in a clump of broom weed, which together
with the distance was probably safe enough.

To make matters worse, mr Schmidt came out to burn his trash and saw
me.  I must have been sitting closer to his back gate than I realized.
Close enough, anyway, to see how he looked German daggers at me sitting
out there all by myself, and I don't mind admitting that I didn't hang
around long enough to hear what he had to say about it.  I jumped up
and hightailed it down the alley to the store on the highway,

where I pretended to be looking for something and couldn't remember
what it was.  When Juarez left and it was safe to go home again, I was
probably madder at Tad than I had ever been.

"How come you brought Juarez Gonzales home with you?"  I asked
accusingly, following him into the bathroom to wash up for supper.

He didn't answer me for the longest but went on washing his face and
patting down the blond waves in his hair.  When he got good and ready,
he looked at me as cool as a cucumber and replied, "Because I wanted
to."

"You mean you invited him?"

"I certainly did.  Anything wrong with that?"

"Well, there most certainly is!  He's a dangerous character, you
know."

I stuffed the towel over the rack and raced after him into the hall,
following him into the living room, where he plopped down on the sofa
and picked up the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, pretending to study the
front page, I guess for Current Events--I don't know what else.  I
plopped down alongside him.

"Tad, don't you know Juarez Gonzales is dangerous?"

"What's so dangerous about him?"  he asked, still studying the paper.

"He's just dangerous, that's all.  He carries a knife as long as from
here to Greggs',"

""Who said so?"

"Everybody knows it."

"He didn't hurt me, did he?"

"You're just lucky he didn't!  You gotta take care of yourself if you
want to stay alive."

He laughed without looking up from the paper and seemed to lose
interest in the subject.  Of course, Tad knew how to handle people.
Even the dangerous ones.  He even stopped and talked to mr Schmidt
once!  When he finally came on home, I was never so relieved to see
anyone in my

life.  We had been walking together up Hobbs Street.  mr Schmidt was
out raking his yard.  Tad hollered at him and actually started the
conversation without being provoked into it!  As for me, I kept right
on walking without looking back.  There's such a thing as being brave,
and there's such a thing as being foolish.  On that occasion, I'm
afraid Tad was the latter, I'm sorry to say.

Nor was that the end of the Juarez Gonzales affair.  Far from it.
Apparently, everybody in town knew about it.  At least, Ginny Gregg
did, and she told Tad in no uncertain terms how she felt about his wild
ways.  She said she just couldn't see for the life of her how he could
run around with a person like Juarez Gonzales.

"I don't run around with him," Tad said.  "I don't know what else you
call it," she said.  "You

brought him home from school with you, didn't you?"

"That doesn't mean I run around with him."

"You stand around school and talk to him like he's your best friend."

"I talk to lots of people."

Tad was lolling around in the porch swing.  Ginny was leaning against
the banister.  I was balancing on one foot atop the banister on
Castleberry's end, but I was keeping an eye on Ginny for fear she'd
cave in the side of the porch.

"Juarez is kind of interesting, that's all," Tad went on.  "He had an
uncle in Pancho Villa's army."

"That's nothing to be proud of," Ginny said, all high and mighty.
"Pancho Villa was a bandit."

"That's pretty famous, Ginny, you gotta admit," I cut in.

"It's still nothing to brag about," she said, with only a grown
people's glance at me.

"I'm not bragging!"  Tad said sharply.

I looked at him in surprise.  He had snapped at Ginny.  He usually
didn't snap at people.

"I didn't say you were," Ginny said.

"Anyway--what business is it of yours who I run around with?"

"Well!  If you want to put it that way--it's not any!"  Her eyes
flashed, and she pursed her lips into a pout.  I didn't know who to
stare at the hardest, Ginny or Tad.  Both of them were acting pretty
unusual.  When you come right down to it, though, a mad fat person is
more interesting than a tall mad person, so I watched Ginny.  "And you
don't need to flatter yourself into thinking I really care who you run
around with, Tad Morrison!"  she exclaimed.

Tad relented.  "Okay, Ginny," he said.  "But for crying out loud--I
didn't mean I thought you were getting nosy."

"I should hope not!"

"But I like Juarez--and he doesn't have anybody to run around with.
""We got to know each other in Biology, and he got to asking me where I
lived and things like that.  Then the first thing you know, I asked him
to come home with me after school.  That's all it was, and I don't see
anything wrong with it.  Didn't you ever get acquainted with someone
you sit next to in a class or study hall?"

"You don't have to explain all that to me," Ginny said higher and
mightier than ever, but I could see that she was secretly pleased at
all the pains Tad was taking to explain.  "It's just like you
said--it's none of my business."  She paused.  "And I don't suppose
it's any of Rosalie Wilkins' business, either."

"Rosalie didn't mention it."

They went on like that for so long I got tired of listening.  The next
day everything was peaches and cream between them.  After school, Ginny
came running over with the worst batch of chocolate fudge she had ever
made, and unless you've tasted Ginny Gregg's chocolate fudge, you can't
possibly know how bad that can be.  This batch was more sugary than
chocolaty.  Tad ate three pieces just so she wouldn't suspect how much
he didn't like it.

6.

Tad was not Wordsworth's star football player.  Not by a long shot.  To
be truthful, he didn't get to play much at all.  Just a few minutes
here and there, but enough to letter.  Even then, he made some pretty
bad mistakes.  In the Elkins game on Armistice Day, he was out in the
end zone all by himself without an Elkins man within a city block and
let a pass slip right through his hands!  It was kind of embarrassing,
with everybody in the stands groaning and moaning.  A man behind me
said that Morrison almost cost us the game, and I don't know when I've
ever felt more like crawling under the grandstand.

Tad kicked the grass in disgust and walked back to the huddle.  Coach
Stallings pulled him out after the next play, and I was about as
embarrassed as I ever hope to be for the rest of my natural life.  Tad
humped over on the bench, forlorn and ashamed as if he had been kicked
off the team.

"Your brother ought to get a hammock to catch passes in," P. R. Burns
gloated.

"At least he's on the first string, and that's more than your brother
is," I replied.  Pete Burns was a permanent bench warmer.

P. R. let out a big holler.  "Pete?  He's too dumb!  If he was on the
first string, I wouldn't even come watch this game."

I hardly knew what to say to Tad afterwards, and to make sure I didn't
have to, I didn't go around to the locker room after the game and help
gather up equipment like Coach Stallings let P. R. and me do sometimes.
P. R. got mad at me about that, but I couldn't worry about it.  I had
my hands full trying to figure out what to say to Tad when we got
home.

He came in after we had already started supper, and you have never seen
anybody as silent and gloomy as he was.  "It was a good game, son,"
Papa said.  "You played fine."

Tad grunted miserably and said nothing.

"But we beat Elkins six to nothing!"  I reminded him.

"I know, but..."

That's all he said, and nobody pushed him.  I guess Papa felt the same
as everybody else about the pass, although he didn't mention it
specifically.  Ginny Gregg came in while we were eating, still excited
and carrying on about how she had yelled herself hoarse and how it was
the best football

game she had ever seen in her life.  She didn't mention the pass,
either.  Mama hadn't seen the game, which was just as well, for there
was no point in everybody in the house being embarrassed.

Tad received his first football letter at a banquet a few days before
Thanksgiving, and he was so excited that I thought he would come apart.
Mama practically had to bar the front door and chain him to the bedpost
to keep him from going to the high-school gym an hour ahead of time.

"That sweater will still be there when you get there," she soothed
him.

"I just don't want to be late," he said.

"You won't be late.  Can't you even wait for your daddy and me?"

He watched her with disapproval.  She had just come out of the bathroom
and was still in her kimona.

"But you're not even ready!"  he said, "and Papa's not home yet."

"He'll be here in plenty of time.  And I'll be ready by the time he
gets here."

If looking at a clock can wear it out, it's a wonder ours had any
numbers left on it.  Tad nearly used it up.  Mama tried to get him to
read a book or listen to the radio or go over to Ginny's, but he
wouldn't budge from in front of that clock.  Finally, Mama threw up her
hands and told him to please go on before he made himself sick or wore
out the rug.  He left thirty minutes early.  It took only ten minutes
to get there.  He probably made it in five.  Mama and Papa followed
later in the car.

I tried my best to stay awake and see the sweater, but Tad

' went to the dance after the banquet and I couldn't prop my eyes open
until it was over.  Mama and Papa came on home.  I woke up early the
next morning, though, and raced into Tad's room to see it, and there it
was--coal-black with a big gold W in the middle and a lone gold stripe
around the sleeve.  It was spread across the top of the desk like a
living, breathing thing.  I put it on over my pajamas.

"Turn around where I can see the front of it," Tad said.

I faced him.  As groggy as he was, his eyes lighted up like
Christmas.

"Now go over to the door and walk back this way."

I crossed the room twice, went out into the hall and back in again
while he lay propped up on his elbow, feasting his eye on that
sweater.

He warned me not to wear it outside the house.

"You can't even go out on the porch or in the back yard," he cautioned.
"If anybody sees you in that sweater, the W Club would take it away
from me.  You've got to earn it to wear it."

"Couldn't I just go outside once with it on to see how warm it feels,
Tad?"  I pleaded.  "Nobody can see it in the back yard with the fence
and all."

"No, sirree!  You've got to stay in the house, or you've got to take it
off."

He seemed kind of unreasonable about it, but I was too excited to
worry much.  I ran from mirror to mirror, from one side of the house to
the other, trying to make Mama and Papa agree that the sweater looked
good on me.  They agreed, but they didn't mean it.  The W hit me along
about a very private part of my body; the bottom hung below my knees.

"And there's another thing," Tad said at breakfast, pointing his finger
at me threateningly.  "You can't even wear it in the house if anybody
is here besides us.  That would be as bad

as wearing it outside."

He could have saved his breath, for the only way I could have worn that
sweater would have been to get inside it with him.  He lived in it.  He
wore it at breakfast, at supper, to school, all day Saturdays and on
Sunday afternoons until time to go to B.Y.P.U. If you ever saw Tad
Morrison anywhere any time, you'd see that black sweater with its big
gold W across the middle and its thin gold stripe around the sleeve. 
At night he might sling his other clothes every which way around the
room or drop them where he took them off, but not that sweater.  He
always spread it out, smoothed the wrinkles away and hung it carefully
on a wooden hanger.  He tended it as he would a warm, helpless, cuddly
puppy.

The black-and-old sweater made up for fifty missed passes.  By the time
Ginny Gregg had her birthday party right after Thanksgiving, Tad had
got to standing in front of the mirror holding a finger under the
single stripe trying to get a preview of how the sweater would look
next year with two

stripes.

Naturally, Tad had figured he would take Rosalie Wilkins to Ginny's
party, but Ginny had other ideas.  She invited him for herself.  Tad
was fit to be tied.

"You can make Rosalie understand," Mama reassured him as often as he
needed it, which was pretty often along about then.  "Just explain the
situation to her and stop trying to figure a way out of it."

"I think I'll tell Ginny I can't come," he said.

Mama hit the ceiling.  "And you right next door?"  Her brown eyes
flashed, and I can't say she did much sparkling at that moment. "You'll
do no such thing," she said firmly.  "Even if I have to lead you over
there by the hand."

"But Mama, I can't dance with Ginny!  Nobody can.  When you're as big
and fat as she is, it takes all the fun out of it."

""Tad!  You ought to be ashamed of yourself!  If she's nice enough to
invite you, you ought to be nice enough to go.  All you have to do is
go and have a good time."

"But Mama-"

"Now Tad, you're being unreasonable."

"Nobody will cut in on me, and I'll have to dance with her all night!"
he argued.  "I'll be stuck with her from beginning to end.  You don't
know what it's like."

"If she's the hostess, surely the other boys will ask her to dance at
least once."

"No, they won't.  That's what you don't understand.  You don't ask
girls to dance--you cut in on them.  Anyway, what about Rosalie?  Don't
you think she'll expect me to take her?"

"I don't know," Mama said, trying to dismiss the topic.  "You can think
of something to tell Rosalie, but in the meantime, you march yourself
next door this very minute and tell Ginny you're coming--on her
terms."

"But Mama-"

"Now Tad--I don't want to hear another word about it.  You're making a
mountain out of a molehill.  Just go on."

Mama was usually pretty understanding about things, but I'll have to
say that she dropped the ball on that one.  Tad was upset, but not
Ginny.  Her mother made her a new dress and let her make an appointment
at the Marvella Beauty Shop to have her hair curled on the day of the
party.  You would think she was getting married.

Several days before the party when I was in the Drug Store following
Ollie Tabor around, all at once I saw a way out for Tad.

"Hey, Ollie, don't you get tired of working at night?"  I asked
suddenly.

Ollie was moving a card of Shaeffer pens from one place to another,
trying to find a spot where it wouldn't cover up something else.  Papa
was at the city hall for a planning meeting, whatever that was.  Ollie
and I were in the store alone.

"Oh, I don't know," he said idly.  "I don't think about it much."

"Why don't you ever take off?"

He stepped back from the counter and viewed the fountain pens
critically.

"They don't show up good enough," he decided, looking about the store
with a practiced eye.  He handed me the card.  "Here.  Go put them next
to the nail clippers, and let's see how they look."

I took the card and stood it between the Cutex Polish Remover and the
Gem nail clippers that Billy Matthews and Buddy Masterson were always
borrowing from to clip their fingernails.

"Won't Papa ever let you take off at night?"

"That won't do."  Ollie had followed me, since he couldn't see beyond
the end of his nose and naturally couldn't tell how the Shaeffer pens
looked between the Cutex Polish Remover and nail clippers unless he
went along with me.  "Bring them back," he said, "and let's try them on
the cigarette counter."

"Won't he?"

"Won't he what?"

"Won't he let you off at night?"

"Sure--on my regular nights off.  Why?"

"I was just wondering.  Do you have to work next Friday night?"

"Sure do," he said, still more interested in the Shaeffer pens than my
question.

"Why don't you take off?"

"Because it's my night to work."

He forgot the pens for a moment.

"Anyway, why should I?"

"Oh--I just thought you might like to take off."

"Not unless I've got a good reason."

"I can get Tad to work in your place if you want me to."

"If I need Tad, I can get him myself."

He regarded me with sudden suspicion.  "What are you up to, Larry?"

I came very near telling him, but I decided he wouldn't understand.  He
never went anywhere except to Lodge, unless it was to sit up with
people who died.  He didn't even go to church.  When you come right
down to it, he had no real reason to want a night off.  After all, what
would he do and where would he go?

I think--but I'm not certain--that Ollie told Papa about our
conversation.  I don't think Papa ever told Tad or Mama, though.  Even
so, I made up my mind right then and there never to tell Ollie Tabor
another thing for the rest of my life.

On Friday night I sneaked over to Greggs' front porch and looked
through the living-room window to see how the party was going.  When
any of the couples came out onto the porch to smoke or kiss, I jumped
over the banister and waited in the flower bed until they went back
inside.  Everybody was having more fun than Tad.  They were laughing,
talking and yelling while poor Tad danced on and on with Ginny, having
an awful time.  The other kids did the dip and all kinds of fancy side
steps, but Tad and Ginny danced straight.  I guess she was too large to
do anything else.  Tad's terrible prediction came true: nobody cut in
on him.  Still, things could have been worse, for Ginny had other
things to do besides dance, being the hostess and all.  Poor Ginny! She
tried her best to look popular, but she was just too fat to fool
anybody, and that's all there is to it.

The extra boys stood around the punch bowl, singing louder than the
phonograph:

"Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?  The big bad wolf The big bad
wolf...."

Not one of them made a move to cut in on Tad and Ginny.  Just to watch
him, you would never have suspected that

Tad wasn't having a good time.  He laughed and talked and treated
Ginny as if she were his best girl and the prettiest girl in the room.
They didn't come out on the porch like a lot of the other couples, and
it was just as well.  All the other couples did was talk about how hot
it was inside and what a good time they were having.  Some of them
smoked.  Some of them kissed.  Some did both.  If you ask me, smoking
and kissing didn't seem to be worth all the worry it cost.  Tad was
probably better off than any of them.  And that included Rosalie
Wilkins.  I didn't pay much attention to her, because she wasn't paying
any attention to Tad and Ginny, both of whom were working themselves
into a purple tizzy just trying to enjoy themselves.  They worked up a
good sweat while they were at it, too.

I couldn't tell Mama that everything worked out fine at the party,
because I couldn't let her know that I had been looking through the
window.  The next day she asked Tad if he had a good time, and he said
it was the best party he had ever gone to in his life.

Not long after Ginny's party, the nippy November wind had turned icy,
and Christmas was all but upon us--I got this strange feeling one day
that I couldn't go home after school.  Don't ask me why.  All I know is
that square in the middle of Penmanship, with Miss Sweeny looking over
my shoulder and fussing at me for not cupping my palm, I decided that
I'd better find something keener to do than go straight home.  It was
one of those mysterious feelings that nobody can explain.  Not even
doctors.  I snagged P. R. Burns on the way out of the building and
suggested that we go down to Phillips 66 across the alley from the Drug
Store and look at Alvin Hoffmire's tattoos.

"I've already seen them," he said, with no interest at all.

"I'll bet you haven't seen all of them," I replied.  "He's got too many
to look at all at one time."

Which was true.  He had enough tattoos for a picture gallery, all over
both arms, including two snakes, a dagger, a

dove, MOTHER, and a bleeding heart belonging to VLK, whoever that
was.

"I've seen every one of them just like you have," P. R. reminded me.

"Yeah, but I'll bet you haven't heard him tell about the terrible pain
he suffered to get the tattoos tattooed on."

P. R. would not be moved.

"He told me once that the only way he could get the tattoos off was by
amputating both arms," I went on.  "It's very educational and very
interesting.  Don't you want to go, sure enough?"

"Miss Nettie's coming to cut my hair," he said.  He leaped on ahead and
ran down the street toward home.

I didn't really believe him, because if Miss Nettie was coming, he
would have been griping about it all day long.  Besides, nobody with
one eye and half sense would run home for one of Miss Nettie Hatcher's
squeaking, pulling haircuts.  I was standing in the middle of the
schoolyard wondering what I should do when Archie Duncan slipped up
behind me and goosed me, and I chased him to the other side of the
swings.  I caught him, and we horsed around a few minutes trading pokes
and things like that; then he had to go home, because his mother wanted
to take him down to Delsey Jacobs Drygoods Store and get him a new pair
of school shoes.

I couldn't remember whether Mama would be at home or not.  Sometimes
she went to all-day meetings of the Missionary Society at the church;
once a month she went to the Bronte Club, which boasted that it had
never failed to meet on schedule since its founding in 1904 except once
when the lady having the meeting at her house died and the rest of the
ladies had to go to the funeral.  I tried to remember if maybe this was
her Relief day--she had regular days at the Relief Office, where she
checked Relief rolls to see which families were cheating--but I
couldn't figure it out.  She could have been over on North Side taking
old clothes, bed sheets, blankets or homemade bread to the three or
four families she was always

looking after, but how could I know when she would do that?  Sometimes
she helped out at the Drug Store when Ollie's gall bladder acted up on
him or he got jury duty, but Papa or somebody would have mentioned it
if that was the case.  I had a sneaking idea that she was at home,
after all, but maybe not.  She was always visiting sick people and
shut-ins, plus her healthy friends who didn't have anything wrong with
them and simply wanted to visit.

I gave up wondering about Mama and went on downtown, but to the Drug
Store instead of to Phillips 66.  It turned out to be an unpopular idea
with Papa.  He told me to go home.

"I just thought after sitting in school all day I ought to stretch my
legs," I explained.

"Well, you can stretch them plenty with a nice walk straight out to
Tenth and Hobbs," he said.  He gave me a playful swat on the rear end.
"Does your mother know where you are?"

"I don't think she's at home.  I think she's at the Bronte Club
today."

He pointed to the Fletcher's Castoria calendar hanging above the
telephone and raised his eyebrows.  "Try again, mister," he said
laughing.  "Wrong day."

"Couldn't I sweep out for you?"

"Ollie's already swept out."

"Where'sOllie?"

"In the back checking in a shipment."

"Maybe I ought to help him, then.  I can read the labels to him."

Papa screwed up his face, cocked his head to one side and studied me
with suspicion.  "What's going on here?"  he asked.  "Where did all
this ambition and energy come from all of a sudden?"

"I just thought you might need some help."

"Oh, you did, did you?  Well, what's the matter at home that you don't
want to go?"

"Nothing.  Not a thing that I know of.  Honest!  I just thought I'd
come see how you're getting along."

"I'm just fine.  Just fine and dandy.  So is Ollie He's fine and dandy,
too.  Was there anything else?"

"I am kinda thirsty, since you mention it.  Do you think I can make a
soda or a chocolate malted?"

"Ollie might not like for you to mess up the fountain."

"How about a lemon Coke, then?  I'll be careful and if I spill
anything, I'll wipe it up.  I'll even wash the glass and shine it."

He gave in, but not with as much reluctance as he pretended.  "Oh--all
right," he said, "but hurry it up.  Boys your age don't have any
business loafing around downtown."

I had to stand on tiptoes and stretch my arms out of their sockets to
reach the Coke dispenser, but I didn't make much of a mess.  I sipped
the Coke through only one straw to make it last, but Papa didn't
cooperate a great deal.  He shooed me out of the store.

I stopped by Phillips 66 for a short visit with Alvin Hoffmire, who was
flat on his back under a car and didn't have much to say.  I circled
around by the depot and walked cross ties past the jail to see how many
prisoners there were.  I watched two workmen digging a trench until one
of them tried to send me to get a four-foot yardstick and a can of
striped paint, which I knew all about from previous experience and did
not fall for.  I ran into a game of keepsies down on Second Street and
lost a steelie and two peewees.  Then it was time to go home.  At least
it was after I dropped around by the emergency entrance of the hospital
to see if any interesting cases had come in.  None had.  Solomon
Jackson, the Mayor of the Addition, was sweeping some broken glass into
a dustpan, and when I asked him about it, he said it was dried blood.
With all that, I had to hurry home so as not to be late for supper.  I
barely had time to stop at Rosalie Wilkins' when I saw Tad moving
chairs from the front porch into the house.  "What are you taking those
chairs into the house for, Tad?"  I called to him from the end of the
driveway.

"Rosalie's having a party tonight," he replied, disappearing through
the front door.  I moved up to the steps and waited for him to
return.

"Why doesn't she carry her own chairs?"  I asked.

"Because I'm carrying them for her."  "Did she ask you to, or did you
volunteer?"  He had his hands on another chair, ready to pick it up,
but he turned loose and threw an irritated stare my way.

"What difference does it make?"  he asked.  "I was just wondering.  I
never saw Rosalie carrying chairs at our house."

"You'd better do your wondering at home, then--you'll be late for
supper."  "So will you."

But I hurried on anyway, before he made me help carry chairs.

I wasn't worried about going home now.  When I got there, however, and
as soon as I walked in the front door, I knew right off the bat why I
had got this mysterious warning not to come straight home.  Sprawled
all over the living-room sofa was none other than Uncle Calvin
Morrison, and I knew the minute I laid eyes on him that he had been the
reason.  That's

a pretty spooky thing to have happen to you, believe me.  He said he
could only stay overnight, because he had prospects of a good job in
Throckmorton, which you can believe if you want to, but I wasn't all
that crazy.  I did hope, though.

Ginny Gregg came prancing in the back door, stopping in the kitchen to
see what we were having for supper, then on through the house to pester
Tad about Rosalie's party.  Tad had just come home and was in something
of a dither--too big a dither to put up with Ginny's nosing around.  As
it turned out, he didn't have to.  Airs Gregg called Ginny home and
saved Tad the trouble of going into his room and shutting the door to
get away from her.

At supper, Mama had to practically strap Tad to the chair and make him
chew his food.  He kept asking Papa what time it was, and Papa kept
saying "Four minutes later than it was

the last time you asked me."  Personally, I didn't see what Tad was so
excited about.  He went to parties all the time.  It was what you might
call unspeakable for the high-school kids to have a party without
inviting Theodore Lawton Morrison, probably about as popular a person
as you could find in the Texas Panhandle.  Maybe in the whole state of
Texas.

I was in bed asleep when he came home, which was just as well, for it
saved a lot of fussing.  If he didn't fuss at me for pulling all the
covers over to my side and kicking, I fussed at him for lying
catty-cornered in the bed and snoring.  But he knew exactly how to shut
me up.  All he had to do was threaten to chase me back to my own room
to sleep with Uncle Calvin, and I was his slave for life.  I would
gladly have slept outside on the hard ground in a cold and unfriendly
rain without any cover rather than spend the night in the same room
with Uncle Calvin.  And in the same bed?  Boy!  Even when I had
104-degrees flu and got delirious, I didn't think up anything as crazy
as all that.

It was too bad that Tad knew how I felt, for he held it over my head
like an axe, making me bring him drinks of water and peanut-butter
sandwiches after he was already in bed or kicking me out in the middle
of the night to close the windows if a rain or dust storm blew up. I'll
have to admit, though, that I would have propped my eyes open with
toothpicks and stayed awake until he came home from Rosalie's party if
I had had any inkling that he would dare come home with beer on his
breath.

Voices in the living room woke me.  Low, urgent and grave, as if
someone had died, they brought me upright in bed quicker than a house
full of wild screams.  I slipped out of bed into the hall where the
glow from the living-room light threw out a rosy rectangle across the
old floor and up the wall on the other side.  On tiptoe, I moved
noiselessly across the hall and stood just outside the living-room door
in the half dark, where I could see without being seen.

Papa and Tad were facing one another in the middle of

the living room, Papa in his bathrobe with tousled hair and groggy
eyes and Tad, fully dressed with necktie crooked and shirt collar
unbuttoned.  His head was bowed.  From my half rear view, and in the
shadows and angles carved out by the soft light of the only lamp in the
room that had been turned on, his nose looked as though it had been
broken in three places.

"I'm sorry, Papa," he was saying, his voice unsteady and sad.

"You ought to be," Papa said, sounding rather sad himself.  "Here you
are not even sixteen years old and out drinking!  Don't you know that's
too young to be drinking?"

"Yes sir, but-"

"But what?"  "It was only beer--I only had one bottle."

"Well--you've got no business drinking even one bottle."

He shook his head and tried to stare Tad into looking at him.  Tad,
however, kept his head down as if he were ashamed or sick.  Probably,
he was some of both.

"Look at me, son," said Papa with firmness.  He didn't raise his
voice.

Tad raised his head and looked at Papa, and it was hard to tell who
looked the most miserable.  Probably Papa, because he was the oldest,
but they both acted pretty unhappy, let me tell you right now.  Then
suddenly, smack in the middle of all that sadness, I was struck as if
for the first time by their amazing resemblance, both of them big, both
of them blond, both of them kind, both of them good, and now both of
them sad.

"You didn't get any beer at Wilkins'--that I know," Papa said.  "Where
did you get it?"

Tad opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.  He gulped
noisily.  Papa waited.

"At the river," Tad said at last.

"At the river?"  A flash of surprise on Papa's face turned quickly into
alarm.  "At the beer joint?"

Tad nodded.

"Don't you know that's a bootleg joint?"

Tad nodded again.

"Whose car did you go in?"

"Please--Papa, don't make me tell you that."

Papa considered that for a moment.  He ran his hand through his hair,
then stuck it back in the pocket of his bathrobe.  "All right," he said
quietly.  "I won't ask you--if you'd rather I wouldn't.  But you knew
better than to go, didn't you?"

"Yes, sir--I guess I did."

"What do you think I ought to do about it?"

Tad shook his head and said nothing.

"You know, your mother and I never did actually forbid you to go out to
that beer joint--not specifically, because-well, to be honest about it,
it just never occurred to us that we needed to.  With all the rights
and stabbings and gambling that goes on out there and the low class of
people and the terrible reputation that the place has--well, we just
didn't think about you ever going out there, I guess."  He paused. 
"Did you see any of your friends out there?"

Tad seem surprised by the question.  "Well--no, sir--except the ones I
was with."

"Did you see any of my friends--or your mother's?"

"Of course not, Papa!"

"Did you see anybody out there--whether you ever saw them before or
not--anybody you think you might like to have for a friend?"

Tad shook his head, mystified.

"Would you like for me and your mother to go out there some night and
take you and Larry?"

"Papa!  What are you talking about?"

Papa smiled softly.  "You know I wouldn't, don't you?  You know I
wouldn't take you or your mother or Larry.  You know that.  Do you see
what I'm driving at?"

Tad nodded.  Papa rubbed a hand across his jaw while staring one of
his best Thinking Stares at Tad.

"This puts me in a spot," he said.  "I ought to punish you-and you know
that as well as I do.  But I'll look pretty silly if I'm not
careful--you a big six-footer, left end on the high school football
team.  And I'm not sure it would be fair to restrict you for a week or
two or anything like that, because

--well, you didn't really disobey me or your mother.  Not really.  Oh,
you knew you were doing something you ought not to do--something we
wouldn't approve of--but you didn't break a rule as such.  So..."

Tad waited for the rest of it, and the suspense was showing all over
his six-foot frame.

"So--do you know what I'm going to do?"

Tad stood like a post, unable to move or speak.

"I'm not going to do anything, that's what," Papa said at last.
"Nothing at all."

Tad's eyes bugged out a good three inches, but he still couldn't
speak.

"But there's something I want you to do," Papa went on.  "I want you to
think about what you've done very carefully

--very, ver-ry carefully.  I want you to think about where you went,
the people you saw, the things you did.  Then I want you to decide for
yourself if that's the kind of place where you want to spend your time
and your money, if those are the kinds of people you want for your
friends.  You're the one who must make that decision--not me or your
mother.

Think about it.  That's all I'm asking you to do.  Just think about it.
Do you think you can manage that?"

Tad was paralyzed--that's all there is to it.  He was paralyzed, and if
he could have moved, I'm sure he wouldn't have minded being a million
miles away at that very minute,

"Yes, sir--I guess I can," he said shakily.  He gulped again.  "Is that
it?"

This time, it was Papa who nodded.

There was a long silence, while their words hung uneasily in the air.
Papa moved slightly to one side, and for the first time I saw Mama.
Through the living room in the darkened dining room beyond, I could see
her standing silently, clutching her old red kimona around her.  Her
face was in the shadows, and I couldn't make out her expression, but I
knew that stance.  She stood that way if she was cold, frightened or
worried.  And it was not a cold night.

Papa took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"All right," he said, his tone ending the conversation.  "There's not
much use talking for the rest of the night, is there?"

Silence.

"You'd better get yourself in bed now," he said at last, his voice
little more than a whisper.  "It's late, and school time comes around
early."

Tad turned to go, and Papa did this thing that choked me to where I
could hardly breathe.  He reached out his big hand and laid it on Tad's
shoulder, not for long, but as gently and with as much tenderness as
any mother ever touched a newborn baby.

I turned and raced back across the hall so fast that I scarcely had
time to glimpse Uncle Calvin standing inside the door of my room,
listening.  In the dim light, I could barely make out his lean, slight
figure standing stock still, head bent and eyes on the floor.  If he
saw me, he didn't let on.

In bed, I scooted over to the far side and turned my face to the wall,
thinking about how P. R. Burns was a lucky duck to get lickings with
his daddy's belt instead of "lectures."  A good licking would wear off
soon enough.  Papa's lectures, however, hung on for days and weeks.
Some of them forever.

Tad stole into the bedroom without turning on the light and undressed
in the dark; then he eased himself into bed so quietly that the bed
springs didn't squeak.  Once there, he lay deathly still.  But I lay
stiller.  I didn't dare let him know that I was awake and had
overheard.  I didn't dare let him know

that I was sorry about the whole mess.  I didn't dare tell him that I
understood how miserable he felt.  I knew, but I couldn't tell him I
knew.  We lay in darkness, in silence.  I think I stopped breathing.

After what seemed like hours without a sound from Tad's side, the bed
jerked suddenly.  He sniffed the air as if trying to fix some peculiar,
not-quite-familiar smell.  He sniffed again, this time as if he had a
cold.  Then again and once more, jerky and jagged, as if his cold had
got out of control.  Finally, he let go.  His breath rushed out in
long, raspy gasps.

I knew then that he was crying.

I couldn't say a word.  Not a blessed word.  I couldn't move.  I
couldn't make the least sign of life.  He would never in a thousand
years forgive me if he knew that I knew.  I couldn't turn over and give
him my sympathy, however much I wanted to do just that.  To let him
know that I knew he was alive at that moment would have been to admit
that I knew he was crying.  I couldn't embarrass him with that.

I breathed carefully and silently, not even blinking my eyes.  Every
muscle in my body got as rigid as rocks.  My nose started to itch, but
I didn't dare scratch it.  A frog lodged itself in my throat, but I
didn't dare clear it.  I lay in silence, letting my breath slip out in
the tiniest of little slivers.  And while I lay in torture, my mind
darted back to Uncle Calvin standing in the semidarkness of my room,
listening silently and dreadfully.

He had been laughing.

7.

On a bright, clear and cold Sunday morning in December, Earnestine
Magee's father went out on Old Loop Road south of town and shot himself
in the head.  One of Mama's friends called her on the telephone just as
we were leaving for church, so the rest of us dropped her off at
Magees' and went on without her.  Everybody, that is, but Uncle Calvin,
who never went to church.  His job in Throckmorton--if he ever actually
had a job--hadn't lasted, and he was back at our house trying to decide
which way to jump next.  If he had asked me, I could have told him.
Pronto.

Nobody seemed to get much out of the church services that morning.  Not
that Brother Wallace's long, dull sermons ever inspired people out of
their seats anyway, but nobody had their minds on what he was saying.
Everybody was thinking and talking about mr Magee, even the high-school
kids when they sneaked across the street to the Gulf Station between
Sunday school and church to smoke.  They all wondered what in the world
mr Magee was doing out on Old Loop Road in the first place, and P. R.
said that was easy: he was out there killing himself.  He knew better
than to joke about people dying, and when I laughed despite myself, he
wouldn't let up.

While Miss Addie Barker was singing "Amazing Grace" as

a Special Message in Song, and on through the sermon, P. R. kept
attracting my attention across the church, looking cross eyed and
rolling his eyes up and down trying to make me laugh out loud.  I got
so tickled that I had to hold my breath for hours at a time.  Papa must
have thought I had the asthma the way I had to huff and puff in low
tones.  Had it been Mama next to me, she would have pinched a chunk out
of my leg.  Brother Wallace asked the congregation to remember the
Magees in our prayers, and in his sermon he referred twice to "the
terrible tragedy in our midst."  That's all I heard him say, but I'm
sure he must have said other things just as worthwhile.

Mama stayed at Magees' all day.  She telephoned Papa as soon as we came
in from church to tell him it was time to take the roast out of the
oven.  She didn't know when she could get away, what with all the
telephoning, telegraphing and finding places for Magees' kinfolks to
stay.  One of them was coming all the way from Chattanooga,
Tennessee.

"How's she taking it?"  Papa asked.

He fell silent and looked straight into the telephone as if it were
Mama's face.  He listened, frowned and clucked his tongue.  "That's
terrible," he said at last.  "Ab-so-lute-ly terrible.  Do you think I
ought to come over?"  Silence again.  "Well--all right--okay--if you
think that's best.  What?  No no, we'll make out okay.  The boys can
help me.  Yes... yes... I think so.  Larry can go down to the store and
get another loaf if we don't... don't worry about it.  Well... all
right... all right... let me know."

With Mama absent, dinner didn't seem right.  Not that anything was
wrong with the food exactly.  It tasted fine, I guess.  It was just
that Papa, Tad and I combined couldn't make it look like a regular
Sunday dinner.  We used the Sunday dishes, our best glasses and Mama's
wedding silver, and still everything had a makeshift appearance.  The
serving bowls looked half empty, the bread plate looked too big, and
the

roast looked left over.  None of us knew how to make the gravy.  Tad
tried, and what a mess!  All it was was a bowl full of greasy little
dough balls.

"How much did Magee embezzle?"  Uncle Calvin asked suddenly, helping
himself to the last potato in the bowl without so much as a
how-dee-you-do to the rest of us.

Papa raised his eyebrows, apparently disturbed by the question but
trying to look surprised instead.  "I don't know that he embezzled
anything," he said.

"Well, I know it," said Uncle Calvin, "and so do you, if you'd just own
up to it."

""I don't know any such thing!  Why should I know it?"

Uncle Calvin poked a slab of roast beef into his mouth and swallowed it
half chewed.  "What do you think he blowed his brains out for?"  he
asked.

"There could be lots of reasons.  We don't know the whole story yet.
We'll just have to wait and see."  "Wait all you want to--but the only
thing we don't know about the story is how much money.  I'll tell you
this much-any time somebody around a bank commits suicide, you can bet
your bottom dollar that some of the bank's money ended up in the wrong
pocket."

"You can't be all that sure," said Papa.  "I will admit, though, that
in these cases, it's a possibility that comes to mind."

"Comes to mind?"  Uncle Calvin snorted wildly.  "You're danged right it
comes to mind!"  He narrowed his eyes and screwed up his face something
awful.  "When are the bank examiners coming?"

"I don't know that they're coming at all."

"Oh, they're coming, all right.  They'll be here--you can count on
that.  And I'll tell you something else.  I'll bet you a black-land
farm that they already had a regular visit on the schedule and was due
to come pretty soon."

"And what if they did?"

"What if they did?  John, sometimes you don't act like you

got good sense.  It's as plain as the nose on your face!"  He shook
his fork at Papa.  "Magee knew his goose was cooked-the jig's up.
That's what if he did!  You don't need to be no genius to figure that
out.  He wouldn't be the first bank teller with sticky fingers--not by
a long shot.  And he won't be the last.  Some people you can't tempt
with money.  They can't stand up to it."

Papa ate in silence for a while; then he laid his fork on his plate.
"You never know what a man's up against," he said thoughtfully.  "You
just never know.  Now I'm not saying you're right, Cal--don't
misunderstand me.  But everybody's got their own private worries and
personal troubles.  Some people can handle them, and some can't.  Some
people never lose hope of finding that one way out, and some people
just give up.  What looks only middling bad to one man might look
downright impossible to the next.  Most of us put up with our troubles,
simply because we don't know how not to.  But some people can't.  They
don't know how."  He paused and studied his big hand lying palm down on
the white tablecloth before him.  "Now there wasn't a finer man in
Wordsworth than Forest Magee," he said quietly.  "I've known him for
twenty or twenty-five years--a good man, a good church worker.  He was
a deacon for years.  He was a fine family man.  Always paid his drug
bill on time.  Sure, I knew he was up against it, but just tell me who
isn't these days."  He shook his head in wonderment.  "There's just got
to be some other explanation--his health maybe."  He picked up his fork
again, but he made no move to use it.  "No--from what I know about
Forest Magee personally, what you're saying just doesn't add up, Cal. I
just can't believe it."

Uncle Calvin had finished his dinner now and pushed back his plate.
Reaching into his shirt pocket, he pulled out his old dirty sack of
Bull Durham.  He tilted his chair back on its rear legs and rocked back
and forth while he rolled a cigarette, ran it across his sloppy tongue,
stuck the big end in his mouth and lighted it.  Tad didn't seem to be
paying attention

to what was going on, but you couldn't always tell, the way he mooned
around like a sick calf over Rosalie Wilkins and all.  Papa returned to
his dinner.

"You'd better not let Mama catch you leaning that chair back like
that," I said to Uncle Calvin.  "It weakens the legs.  That's why they
all squeak."

He pretended to ignore me, but he did set the chair upright again.

"Lots of people are more crooked than you think," he started in again.
"They just don't get caught, that's all."

"If they don't get caught, how do you know they're crooked?"  Papa
asked.

"Common sense.  Plain old horse sense.  Lots of people have got a
crooked streak in them a mile wide, but they don't give in to it all
the way, because they're scared they'll get caught.  That's all that
keeps them honest--if you can call that honest.  Personally, I don't
see anything honest about it."

"Since when did you get to be such an authority on people's morals?"
Papa asked idly.

"I don't have to be no authority.  I just know what I'm talking about.
You'd be surprised at how many people right here in Wordsworth are
doing the same thing Magee did, only they do it on a small scale and
get by with it.  That's the only difference.  Everybody doesn't wear
halos and wings like you think, John.  Not by a long shot, and you're
just kidding yourself if you think so."

He stopped and reared back in his chair again.  He hadn't finished,
though.  His manner told us that much.  He had more to say, and he said
it.

"How well do you know Ollie Tabor?"  he asked.

Papa stopped eating, his fork suspended midway between his mouth and
his plate.  He looked at his brother as if he had suddenly gone loco.

"Ollie Tabor"

Uncle Calvin twisted a nasty smirk into a nasty grin, bearing

his ugly yellow teeth.  "Yeah--Old Lady Tabor.  How well do you know
him?  Really know him, I mean."

"Oh, for crying out loud, Cal," Papa cried, and I guess he looked more
disgusted at that moment than he had ever looked in my presence.  "I
know Ollie Tabor like I know the palm of my hand--better than I know
you, as a matter of fact.  And if you're suggesting--even for a
minute--that Ollie takes--"

"I'm not suggesting anything, but you've got to admit that you don't
know for sure that Ollie ain't stealing from you."

"I don't have to admit any such thing!"

"How would you know for sure unless you catch him red handed?  Can you
swear on a stack of Bibles that Ollie hasn't got sticky fingers?  Just
because you never caught him dipping into the till ain't necessarily
proof that he hasn't been doing it."  He let that sink in for a moment.
"All I'm saying is that you don't never know for sure--all the way--who
you can trust."

"I know I can trust Ollie."

"The bank trusted Magee, too, for a mighty long time, and look where it
got them."

"If I listened to you, I wouldn't trust anybody," Papa said.  "How do
you think I stay in business?  By trusting people, that's how.  My
whole business is built on trust.  Anybody's business has to be built
on trust.  That's your trouble, Cal-you don't trust anybody.  The next
thing you know, you'll be asking me how well I know Tad!"

Uncle Calvin did not reply.  Instead, he turned and stared at Tad,
smugly and evenly, as if to say: And why not?  I got so mad that I
almost split wide open.

"You take that back!"  I exploded.

All heads, including Tad's, turned toward me.

Uncle Calvin jerked his head in my direction.  "What's eating him?"  he
said.

"You're telling a big, fat"

Papa stood up suddenly and cut me off.  He surveyed the tableful of
dirty dishes, apparently ignoring my outburst.  I studied Tad's face
anxiously.  He did not appear to be disturbed at all.

"Everybody's got to help clear off the table," Papa said, gazing
straight into my eyes with an expression that was telling me not to
worry.  Everything's all right, his eyes were saying.  "Don't pay any
attention to your Uncle Calvin.  In a way that nobody but me could see,
he gave me a tiny little half smile.

Uncle Calvin got up from the table and wandered off into my room to
take a nap, as you might guess.  Tad and I started out of the room.
Papa called us back.

"You boys wash the dishes and straighten up the kitchen," he said. "I'm
going to run over to Magees' and see what I can do.  Do a good job here
so your mother won't have to bother when she gets home."

It took more than a drastic occasion like mr Magee shooting himself to
make me pleased to wash dishes, but I was kind of lucky, even at that.
Tad let me wash, which was better than drying, even though it did mean
that I couldn't pop him with the dish towel like I usually did.  I
plunged my hands into the hot soapy water and got busy.

"Tad, did mr Magee really steal the bank's money?"  "According to Uncle
Calvin--if you want to believe him-he embezzled it."  "Isn't that
stealing?"

"I guess so.  It was taking money that wasn't his, anyway."  "Sounds
like stealing to me."  "It is."

"What do they call it embezzling for then?"  "Because that's the name
of it."

"I don't believe mr Magee embezzled, then I said.  "He passes the
collection plate every Sunday.  It doesn't look like Brother Wallace
would let him do that if he was a thief."  "Maybe Brother Wallace
didn't know about it."

Something was wrong.  At church, mr Magee was always polite and
smiling, shaking hands and asking people how they felt.  In the bank,
he was the same way--nice and friendly from inside his cage, giving
customers money or taking it from them, laughing and talking as
friendly as you please.  Even at Earnestine's birthday party he knew
all our names, asked how we were getting along in school and helped mrs
Magee serve the refreshments.  No matter how I tried, I couldn't
picture him stealing money from the bank or sitting in his car all
alone out on Old Loop Road holding a gun to the side of his head.  One
picture was as wrong as the other, and all I could conclude was that if
he was nervy enough to do the one, he must have been nervy enough to do
the other.  The problem, though, was in believing that he could do
either.

Along about dark, Tad, Uncle Calvin and I were sitting in the living
room listening to Eddie Cantor when Mama and Papa came home together.
Papa was in charge of the arrangements for mr Magee's friends to sit up
all night at the funeral home and had given himself the
midnight-to-three shift.  Mama wasn't herself, of course.  She looked
as if she might burst out crying at any minute.  She collapsed into a
chair just inside the living-room door and sat there without moving.  I
couldn't tell if she was grieved, tired or both.  I wanted to hear
about conditions at Magees' house, naturally, but I didn't quite know
how to get into the subject grace full.  Uncle Calvin, however, had no
trouble getting to the point.

"How much money was it, Gladys?"  he asked eagerly.

"I don't know," she said, pushing a strand of hair from her face, not
at all surprised by the question.  "Probably not much.  It didn't have
to be much.  He had already got two salary cuts and was at his wit's
end trying to make ends meet.  Poor mrs Magee is awfully bitter toward
Aubrey Clifton about it."

"You can't blame her for that," Uncle Calvin said.

"But Aubrey has to keep the bank running," said Mama.  "And I'm sure
he didn't cut salaries until he absolutely had to.  He's had to cut
down like everybody else, and heaven knows, salary cuts are nothing
unusual these days.  I think mrs Magee realizes that, all right, but
she's in no frame of mind to reason it out just now.  All she can think
about is how Aubrey Clifton cut Forest's salary twice and brought all
this on.

"What else can you expect her to think?"  Uncle Calvin said.  "I'd
think about it, too, seeing the president of the bank strutting around
all high and mighty, living high on the hog.  Why doesn't he cut his
own salary?"

"Oh, surely he has!"

"Oh, surely he has not!  Why would he as long as he can take what he
needs out of his employees' hide?"

"Now, Cal, you're getting it all twisted again," Papa protested.  "Why
don't you just let Gladys finish what she's trying to tell?"

"It's a sorry mess when your own employees have to steal from you to
make up for the money you're too tightfisted to pay them."

Mama was unimpressed and uninterested in Uncle Calvin's theories, but
more than that, apparently she was determined to rid herself of the
entire story once and for all.  "He left a letter," she said.  "In the
letter he said he had done his best to make ends meet and fix things
for her and the children, but no matter what he did, nothing worked out
right.  She didn't say how much money it was at the bank, but whatever
it was, she said it wasn't worth all this.  The poor thing kept saying
it over and over again.  "It couldn't be enough for all this," she kept
saying.  "Not for all this--it couldn't have been enough for all this."
I guess she was trying to make it real."

She began to cry.  Papa switched off the radio and signaled Tad and me
out of the room.  Uncle Calvin didn't budge.  He sat motionless in the
big easy chair, looking on, pleased as

punch that he had scored a bull's-eye in figuring out mr Magee's
troubles.  As for me, I couldn't believe my ears.

Earnestine Magee was absent from school for a week, which was probably
a good thing, since I wouldn't have known what to say to her.  Miss
Sweeny asked us to bring a nickel each to buy a wreath, although some
of the kids didn't have it to bring and could have brought a dollar
bill just as easily.  She pretended that everybody in the room
contributed the same amount, though, and we never knew who did and who
didn't.  When Earnestine came back to school, it didn't take more than
two or three days for me to get to where I could talk to her as free
and easy as everything.

Papa said later that he could never, never understand how a man could
erase himself from the face of this earth and ruin the lives of his
wife and children for fifteen hundred dollars.  I could see that I
wasn't the only person in the world having trouble getting it all
straight.

"The bank examiners said his system was so amateurish and obvious that
it looked like he wasn't even trying to hide what he did," he said in
wonderment.  "It's absolutely unbelievable that a man would kill
himself for fifteen hundred dollars."

It sounded like a lot of money to me, and I said so.  Tad agreed.

"It is a lot of money," Papa said, "but not enough to kill yourself
over.  Most men could borrow on their insurance, but I heard that
Forest Magee had already borrowed to the limit and let his policies
lapse."

Mama was horrified.  "Do you mean that he didn't leave any insurance at
all?"  she gasped.

"That's what I heard.  And he had already borrowed all he could on the
house.  Of course, he couldn't sell it.  I don't guess there's been a
house sold in Wordsworth since the crash."

As terrible as the Magee situation was, it took the Clyde Little
business to drive it out of my mind.  Clyde broke into

the Trade Winds Hamburger Stand one night and stole $7.68.  Clyde was
in Tad's class, he had ten brothers and sisters, lived on North Side,
and was on Relief.  Naturally.  Judge Crawford gave him a suspended
sentence, but Clyde never went back to school.  P. R. said he went off
to join the CCC, but I'm pretty certain he didn't know what he was
talking about.  He never did.  For all he knew, Clyde might have left
town on a freight train, even though fifteen was a little young for
that.

Tad couldn't get over it.  "I still can't believe it," he said again
and again.  "He seemed like a pretty nice guy to me."

Then he would shake his head and try to recall every little word Clyde
ever spoke, as if recalling such details would somehow disprove the
crime.  Ginny Gregg must have told us thirty-seven times how she sat
right next to Clyde in History and never dreamed that he would do such
a thing as steal.  "Why, one day I left a dime on my desk all through a
test on the Crusades," she said.  "Clyde was sitting right across the
aisle, and he didn't touch it!"  I didn't know Clyde personally.  I had
seen him around town, a towr-headed, quiet, timid boy with pale skin
and frightened eyes.  But to tell the truth, I didn't think about him
much one way or another.

Mama wanted to make sure that we didn't judge him too harshly.

"You boys can't imagine how it is to want and want and want for
ordinary things with never a chance of getting any of them," she said.
"Not luxuries, either--but common, ordinary things you take for
granted--chocolate pie, a dime for the picture show, a package of
notebook paper, a pair of shoes.  I'm not trying to make you feel
guilty about the things you do have, but I just want you to try to put
yourself in Clyde's position, where everything--even a loaf of
bread--has to be divided ten and twelve ways.  Don't be too hard on
him."

Clyde Little's predicament bothered Tad far more than the Magee
situation.  Me, too, and not only for the reasons Mama

tried to make us see.  I had a curious uneasiness that centered
squarely on Tad.

Clyde Little was the only high-school kid I ever heard of being
arrested for a real crime.  The rest of them got into other trouble
certainly, but not with the law.  They played hookey, disturbed the
peace, had accidents, and even drank beer, but they didn't steal money!
They swiped a bottle of milk from somebody's porch, snatched a girl's
tarn off her head, sneaked a loaf of bread from the Bon-Ton Bakery's
cooling rack, but those were pranks, not crimes.  Criminals stole
money.  High-school kids didn't.  Yet, Clyde Little was a high school
kid.  Pete Burns was a high-school kid.  Buddy Master son was a
high-school kid.  So was Merv Anderson and Billy Matthews.

And Tad.

Clyde Little's crime almost drove me crazy with worry.  Mama said that
she intended to see what she might be able to do for the Little family.
But that didn't keep me from worrying myself bald-headed just the
same.

When Louise Love got in trouble, everything--and I mean
everything--stopped making sense.  Louise had worked in the office of
the Methodist Church since the Year One and did everything but preach.
She was the Ollie Tabor of the First Methodist Church.  When the church
cut the preacher's salary, they had to let Louise go at the same time.
To pay them back--I don't know what else, unless it was to get some
money for Christmas shopping--she took all the offering from the
Sunday-school envelopes and all the money from the collection plates
one Sunday and left town.  As bad as it was for high-school kids to
steal and for people to kill themselves for embezzling, stealing from
the church was in a category all by itself, for however you looked at
it, it was stealing from the Lord.  And the peculiar thing about it was
that people felt sorry for Louise!  I couldn't figure it out.  You just
naturally wouldn't think that stealing from the Lord would make people
sorry for you.  But it did.  They talked about hard

times and being deprived and how pitiful it was for poor Louise Love
to get desperate enough to run off with the Sunday-school nickels and
dimes.  Nobody ever got around to calling her wicked and sinful, as you
would expect, hers being a church crime and all.  They only talked
about how sad it was.  They mixed me up.

"Tad, did you ever steal anything?"  I asked one morning on the way to
school.  The high school was two blocks beyond nine.

"Certainly not.  Did you?"

"No, but since the Depression makes everybody dishonest, I was just
wondering."

"Who said the Depression makes everybody dishonest?"

"Nobody actually said it, but anybody with one eye and half sense knows
it.  Every time something happens, Mama and Papa blame it on the
Depression and hard times-mr Magee, Clyde Little, Louise Love.  It
looks like the Depression is making everybody a thief."

"Oh, I don't know about that.  There must be a few honest people left,"
he said half jokingly.  "How about you?  Did you ever steal?"

"No."

Then what are you worried about?  If you're honest yourself, you don't
need to worry about everybody else."

We must have walked a whole block before I could get up the nerve to
say the thing that threatened to explode inside me if I didn't get it
said pronto.  Finally I blurted it out.  "You stay honest, Tad," I
said.  "Me?"

"Yes, you.  "When you're working at the Drug Store, you've got all that
money in the cash register and you might get tempted sometimes."

"Larry!  You've gone loco!  I'm not going to steal anything.""

"I know you don't intend to.  But I just want to make sure

you don't change your mind.  I'm getting sick and tired of people
stealing and getting in trouble every time--"

"Hey!  The bell's ringing!"

He broke into a sprint, leaving me alone.  I didn't notice that we were
already in front of my own school until some of the kids started
yelling at me to come play one-and-over.  That's how worried I was.

"I'll see you, Tad," I called out.

But he was already too far away to hear me.

8.

Tad set his heart on a new suit for Christmas--a $29.95 charcoal gray
with pleats, belt in the back, reversible vest, two pairs of pants--and
he threatened to lie down and die if he didn't get it.  Mama and Papa
together and talking themselves blue in the face couldn't persuade him
that $29.95 was more than we could afford to pay for a suit just
then.

"I hate to see you get yourself built up for such a big letdown, son,"
Papa told him.  "I wish you'd get your mind on something else.  Things
are pretty bad at the store."

"You're always saying that," Tad replied peevishly.  "Any time I want
something, you say things are bad at the store."

"Only because it's the truth.  People are using what little cash
they've got for Christmas, and Lord knows, it's not much even at that.
The money's just not coming in."

"If our customers paid their bills," I broke in, "could Tad have that
new suit?"

"I didn't say that," Papa was quick to answer.  "It would be easier,
though."

"But that's not fair!"  Tad exclaimed.  "If the customers owe us money,
they ought to pay it instead of spending it somewhere else."

Papa sighed and agreed.  "You're right.  It's not fair at all, and I
wish somebody could tell me what to do about it."

"You can cut off their credit."

That sounded like such a good idea that I echoed Tad.

"That's easier said than done," Papa said.  "These people you're
talking about are friends of ours.  They all mean well and they'll pay
up eventually, but if they haven't got the money, they just haven't got
it."

We had heard all this more times than you can shake a stick at, and
right along with it we heard lots how people pay their bills regularly,
but it's the ones who never catch up who hurt.  I don't see how Papa
had the patience to go through the whole dreary story for us each time
we griped.  People have other commitments; they have emergencies;
everybody is under pressure these days; the farmers can't get a crop;
the Relief rolls are getting bigger; unemployment figures haven't gone
down as fast as we had expected; everybody dribbles out their cash as
far as they can stretch it; we've got to be patient and hold on;
Roosevelt deserves a chance, and we've got to give it to him; nobody
likes to buy on credit; everybody intends to pay up; what would you do
if somebody's sick and needs medicine?  Throw them out of the store?

None of which kept Tad from wanting that new suit for Christmas.  But
all of which would probably keep him from getting it.

I dribbled out my money for Christmas presents, and all I can say is
that if Papa's customers didn't have any more to dribble out than I
did, they were in terrible shape.  I bought Mama a string of blue glass
beads with silver specks in them at Akers' Variety Store and Papa a
brown bow tie with yellow horses' heads at Delsey Jacobs Drygoods
Store.  As for Tad, I got him a box of three white handkerchiefs, which
ran the number of handkerchiefs in his top drawers to an even million,
but I, too, was stretching my money as far as it would go, and that's
as far as it went.

I don't know how Tad managed it, but he Sacrificed All to buy Rosalie
Wilkins an Evening in Paris set that would put your eyes out.  The
inside of the blue box was crammed with

nests of plushy gray silk like the crinkly draperies in the front
windows of L. T. Ditmore's Funeral Home.  How much he paid for it was a
deep dark secret, but if he got it for one penny less than five
dollars, I'll kiss your foot.  Personally, I don't see how you can
spend such a huge pile of money on a person who's not even kin to you,
but where Rosalie Wilkins was concerned, Tad was half cracked anyway,
so don't ask me to explain his expensive ways any further than that.

"You spent all your money on Rosalie, didn't you?"  I asked him one day
while he was trying to wrap up all his presents.  He wouldn't admit it,
but I noticed that the packages he had wrapped for Mama, Papa and me
were pretty small by comparison.  I raced through the house hollering,
"Yah, yah, yah, Tad spent all his money on Rosalie Wilkins," and he
chased me all the way out into the back yard and held me prisoner with
his big hand over my mouth until I promised to shut up.

When the first day of Christmas vacation finally arrived, Uncle Calvin
left for Corpus Christi, which you can believe if you want to.  I
didn't worry about it one way or another.  I did worry some, though,
that he might come back and spoil Christmas for us.  The first Saturday
of any vacation or holiday period is the best of all, and the first
Saturday of Christmas was no exception.  It was one of those good days
that you didn't have to ration out, since fourteen more just like it
lay ahead.  Tad wandered into breakfast still half asleep.

"Tad!  Not another clean shirt today!"  Mama said.

"You don't want me looking like a bum, do you?"

"But you're not going to school today!  You wore a clean shirt
yesterday."

"It looks like I slept in it."

"I just don't want to spend all my time ironing," she said.  "I've got
a few other things to do.  Now you just march yourself right back in
your room and take it off.  Put on something else."

P. R. came over after breakfast.  He didn't want to walk crossties.  It
was too cold.

"Come on, P. R.!"  I pleaded.  "It won't hurt you to walk them just
once.  Don't you want to see who's in jail for Christmas?"

"I don't care who it is.  I'm not going."

But he went.  I led him past the depot to see who might be standing
around or sitting on the baggage trucks.  No one.  We walked crossties
past the jail.  We jumped down from the roadbed at Goode Street and
counted iron spikes past mrs Claiborne's, past three white frame houses
all alike.  The porches were empty.

"Isn't that the house where we saw your uncle that day?"  P. R.
asked.

"Just keep your mouth shut," I ordered.

"Well isn't it?"

"How should I know?"

"You looked at that one house more than the others."

"So what?  I look at every house I pass.  Anyway, just keep your nose
out of my business."

"I don't see what you want to get so gripy for.  I was just asking. The
lady who lives there is named Tillotson.  Pete told me.  It's a rooming
house."

"Rooming house?"

"I guess so.  People pay money to stay there."

"I don't think it's a rooming house, though."

"If it is, I don't see how your uncle stays there.  My dad said he
never earned a cent in his life."

"P.  R."  I told you to keep your nose out of my business."

"I'm not talking about your business.  I'm talking about your uncle,
and how your father has to support him half the time."

"Well, that's my business, and I'm just warning you--keep your big
mouth shut!"

"He said he couldn't hold a job even if he tried because of his
record--"

"What kind of record?"

"He didn't say.  But it must have been pretty bad if--"

"P.  R.--you'd better shut up--fast!"

"You asked me!  All I was saying was--"

"P.  R.!"

"I don't see what you want to get so gripy for!  I didn't w ant to even
come down here.  I don't see what you're so gripy about!"

He turned off at his street.  I hurried on home to check the clothes in
my closet.  Mine hung alone.  I counted the plates on the dinner table.
There were four.

Everything was still all right.

That night I snuggled warmly beneath the covers, struggling to stay
awake to enjoy my privacy.  A freight train whistled in the distance,
then again as it rumbled into town.  I was uneasy.  Whatever a freight
train took away, it could bring back.  I followed its sounds with my
mind and my heart as it thundered past the depot, across Alain Street,
past the jail, around the bend by the grain elevator, and out past the
Cotton Compress at the edge of town.  When I figured that the caboose
had rolled past the last shack in the Addition, safely on its way to
Amarillo, its two lights growing dimmer and dimmer in the dark, I
counted to sixty ten times.  Ten minutes, maybe less, was all a person
needed to jump off a boxcar and walk to Tenth and Hobbs.  I covered my
head with a pillow to shut out the sounds of Uncle Calvin's heavy
clop-clop on the steps, across the front porch, through the front door,
into the hall, into my room... I uncovered my head and waited.

Outside my window was nothing but windy silence.

When I awoke the following morning I was afraid to open my eyes.  I
stretched, flopped over toward the window and looked out.  I gloried in
the long streaks of sun on the porch.  They came from the other side of
Greggs' and struck the banisters squarely on top and divided the sides
into triangles of shadows.  No school.  Only Sunday school, and that
would pass.  The wind was up.  It whistled around the corner and rocked
the swing back and forth, to and fro.  The chain

squeaked ever so slightly.  Across the street on the vacant lot, the
broom weed waved at me.  No one was about.  In the alley beyond, a thin
spiral of smoke rose into the sky and vanished.  mr Schmidt had already
been out burning his trash.  He never missed a day.  Not even on
Sunday.  I lay back on my pillow and relaxed.  Mama called me three
times before I could bring myself to answer.

I'm telling you, the Christmas season Was so good that I wanted to eat
it with a spoon.  The house was bright, even on the raw days of
Christmas when the sun got lost and we had to turn on the lights before
night.  The conversations were easy and cheerful.  We talked endlessly
about things that didn't matter and laughed about things that were not
funny.  Every morning when we gathered around the table in the
good-smelling kitchen, I wanted to stop the clock, to keep Papa sitting
across from Mama asking uninteresting questions and getting
uninteresting answers, to keep Tad acting grumpy over everything I
said, to keep the four of us in that one little square without anybody
ever moving.  I would have stopped each morning in its tracks if I only
knew how, even when we had Cream of Wheat, and you'll have to admit
that it's kind of hard to get excited about Cream of Wheat.  Everywhere
you looked, felt and smelled, it was Christmas.  The cookies, the mince
pies, the fruitcakes rounded off like giant candy bars, the
golden-crusted turkeys that Mama baked for her North Side families,
lined the kitchen cabinets and pantry shelves.  The crumpled tow sacks
on the back porch spilled over with pecans, apples, oranges and grape
fruit.  The bright row of jellies and preserves that Mama had put up in
the spring and summer gleamed like red lanterns after I brought them up
from the storm cellar and polished them with a damp rag.  Tad brought
three cardboard boxes home from the Drug Store and talked Ginny Gregg
into covering them with red crepe paper.  They were on the back porch
waiting to be filled and delivered to Mama's families.  Leaning against
the screen in the corner of the porch was a

cedar tree, the fullest, the bushiest, the greenest, the best smelling
Christmas tree in the state of Texas, waiting to be strung with popcorn
and cranberries, silver tinsel and twinkling lights, and set before the
front window in the living room for all Wordsworth to see, the center
of our world--a magic world--for the week or ten days still to come.

The Depression was a million miles away.  The dust and the drought were
bad dreams for summer nightmares.  Even Papa's customers who owed him
more money than they could pay were set aside to worry about later, if
then.  I didn't worry about where Uncle Calvin was or what he was
doing, whether he was as far off as Corpus Christi or as close as the
depot, whether he was down at Audrey Tillotson's or in another part of
the house.  As a matter of fact, with him out of the way the house
didn't seem to have separate parts.  It was all one piece, and it was
all ours.

Ginny wandered in and out the back door sampling anything that didn't
have a lid on it.  Tad and I begged her to help us shell pecans that
Mama needed for her baking, but she always had to go home.  That's what
she said, anyway.

"Those people over on North Side are going to have more to eat than you
do," she giggled, her fat eyes disappearing into the fat wrinkles on
her fat face.

"Not unless you keep your hands out of it, they won't," I said.

"Somebody's got to make sure everything tastes all right," she said
good-naturedly.  She moved aimlessly from table to cabinet to icebox to
stove.  "Mother says I've got to help with the Christmas dinner this
year," she said.

"That's too bad," Tad teased.  "Tell your daddy he can come eat with us
if he doesn't want indigestion."

"You don't realize how complicated it is to cook a complete dinner."

"Anybody can cook a turkey," said Tad.  "All you have to do is put it
in the oven and turn on the fire."

"That just shows how much you know about it, Tad Morrison!

You turn on the oven first, then you put the turkey in.  Knowing when
to take it out is the trick, isn't it, mrs Morrison?"  Mama was
greasing a cookie sheet.  "I had never thought much about it," she said
absently.  "I just take it out when it's done--whenever that is."

"Ginny will probably burn it up," I said.

"Gracious!  I hope not!"  said Mama moving back to the stove.  "Turkeys
cost too much to burn up."

"How much?"  Tad asked, suddenly interested.

"You'll have to ask your daddy," she said.  "mr Winbury brought these
in from the farm."  She stirred something in a pot.  "Why?"  she
asked.

"Oh--no reason."  He went back to shelling pecans.

"I'll bet your daddy took them as payment on mr Winbury's bill," Ginny
suggested.  "Or something like that."

"What do you know about it?"  Tad asked.

"Not anything.  But daddy said that mr Morrison is too good to people
for his own good.  So I wouldn't be surprised if these turkeys apply on
mr Winbury's bill."

"How do you know he's even got a bill?"

"I don't--but most people do."

Mama looked over her shoulder.  "I don't think you ought to be
discussing other people's--"

"Gin-eeeeeee!"

It was mrs Gregg.  Without looking, I knew that she was standing on her
back porch, holding open the screen door with her hand while she
yelled, as if that dab of screen wire could shut out her hollering.
Ginny snitched one last pecan-a shelled one.  Tad slapped her hand.

"I've got to go," she said happily.

"I'll bet you told your mother to call you so you wouldn't have to
shell pecans," Tad said.

"Don't you wish you were that smart?"  she said, flouncing out onto the
back porch.  The screen door slammed shut.  We heard the gate open and
close.

Tad glanced at the clock above the icebox and jumped to his feet.  "I
told Ollie I'd come down and work a couple of hours for him while he
Christmas shops."  He ran from the room.

"Who's going to help shell all these pecans?"  I yelled.

"You'll make it," he replied.  "Just stick to it, and you'll get them
shelled--every last one of them."

Mama and I were left in the house together.  It was a wonderful day,
clear, cold and bright.  The kitchen was rich and warm with a roasted,
toasted smell.  Mama sang softly as she worked.

"There is a fountain filled with blood Drawn from Immanuel's
veins...."

I waited for it.

"... lose all their guilty sta-aaa-ins...."

"Mama--you always leave out--"

"Larry, please stop eating the pecans and shell me some for this candy.
I'm about ready to beat it now."

"Mama, did all this stuff cost as much as twenty-nine ninety-five?"

"Gracious!  I hope not," she said.  She was holding a steaming pan at
arm's length over the sink.

"How much, then?"

"I haven't figured it up."  She set the pan in the sink.  "Why are you
and Tad so worried about how much everything costs?"

"I was just wondering if all this costs as much as the new suit Tad
wants."

She released her grip on the pan and turned to face me.  Suspicion
blanketed her face.  "What if it does?"  she asked.

"I was just wondering how we can buy all this stuff if we can't afford
to buy Tad a new suit."

"Larry!  You ought to be ashamed of yourself!"  she said,

leaning against the cabinet.  "Do you realize that this is the only
Christmas dinner those people will get?"

"They'll get baskets from the church and groceries from Relief."

"Flour, corn meal, canned goods--things we all take for granted.  Those
things on the back porch are for the children's stockings.  I don't
know what they'd get otherwise."

"Don't you think Tad needs a new suit?"

"He'd like to have one, if that's what you mean," she said.  "But just
how much he needs one is something else.  Not as much as these families
need these turkeys."

"Tad doesn't think he can make it to all the Christmas parties if he
doesn't have a new suit," I persisted.

She laughed and brushed the hair from her forehead with the back of her
hand.  "Let me know when he misses one!"  she said.  "To listen to him,
you'd think he goes around in tatters.  He wears that football sweater
everywhere he goes.  I can't get it off him long enough to clean it."
"He feels pretty low about that suit, just the same.  Alerv Anderson's
got a new one."

"Don't feel too sorry for Tad--he's just talking."  She grew serious.
"Let me ask you a question.  Suppose Tad could choose between a new
suit and giving boxes to those families on North Side.  Which do you
think he would choose?"

"That's what I don't understand!  Why does he have to choose?  Why
couldn't we do without something else instead of Tad's new suit?"

"We could," she said.  "As a matter of fact, we do.  I'd like to have a
new stove.  Your daddy would like some new tires for the car.  We'd
like to get you a new bicycle.  The list is endless.  You have to
figure out what you can do without, then do without it.  Tad's new suit
just happens to be one of those things for now.  It'll be something
else later on.  He'll get a new suit when he needs it.  He always does.
You know that."

I didn't.  Not really.  Just the same, I went back to shelling pecans.
What else could I do?

By the time we decorated the Christmas tree and hung the patched-up,
battered old silver star on top--once Mama tried to replace it with a
sparkling new decoration of spun glass, gold thread and silver tinsel,
but Tad and I raised such a ruckus that she took it down and put up the
old one--once we got it up, nothing in the world could have invaded our
house to dim the glow that came from within all of us.  We hung the
cookies on the branches--bell-shaped, star-shaped, gingerbread men and
holly wreaths, red cookies, yellow cookies, blue and striped
cookies--despite Tad's annual claim that he was too old to eat cookies
off the Christmas tree.  I noticed, though, that he wasn't too old to
worry along with the rest of us when Mama lost the cookie cutters.  As
a matter of fact, Theodore Lawton Morrison himself, in person, was the
one who finally located them in the old crock churn on the pantry
floor.  They had fallen off the shelf above.

P. R. Burns must have eaten a thousand cookies without stopping, or at
least faster than we could replace them from the kitchen.

"Why don't you eat the cookies around in back of the tree for a
change?"  I complained.

"They're the same kind, aren't they?"

"But you're always making the front of the tree look blank."

"Your mother told me to eat all I want, because that's what she made
them for."

"She didn't say you had to eat them off the front, though."

Ginny Gregg ran P. R. a close second.  Maybe vice versa.

"I was wondering when you were going to hang up the cookies," she said
on one of her regular visits to count the new presents under the
Christmas tree.

"We couldn't find the cookie cutters," I explained.

"Your Christmas tree just never looks like a Christmas tree

until you hang the cookies on it," she said, reaching for a
gingerbread man to match the one in her mouth.

She was right.  You have to do the same thing year in and year out, the
same this year as last year and the year before.  Else, Christmas isn't
Christmas.

Uncle Calvin got it into his head to come back the day after school
started, but at least he had not spoiled Christmas for us.  It had been
a special Christmas, although just how special none of us knew then. We
had no way of knowing that we would never have another Christmas like
it for the rest of our lives.

9.

IMama claimed that she didn't need a calendar to know when January
rolled around, for it was the month in which Tad and I always came down
with the flu.  We never missed.  The only thing she could never predict
was who would be first.  But whether first or last, Tad always had a
keener deal of it than I did; he stayed in his own room alone, whereas
Mama made me stay on the roll-away bed Tad brought up from the storm
cellar and put in her bedroom with her and Papa.  Talk about
embarrassing!

Looking after me was easier that way, she said, but more importantly,
she could keep the covers on me throughout the long cold nights.
According to her, there was no surer way to catch pneumonia than to be
without enough cover at night.  She might have been right as rain, but
we never had a chance to put it to the test, considering how she
worried and fretted about it and all.  If I so much as grunted, there
she was tucking the quilt around my shoulders before the grunt was past
my teeth, day or night.  She had a one-track mind about covers.

This year it was my turn to be first.  After New Year's, when school
had been going on about a week, I guess, and I came in from school
hacking as if I had whooping cough, Mama felt my forehead and shook her
head knowingly.  Without further ado, she sent Tad down to the storm
cellar for

the roll-away.  When she had it all made up and ready for use, she
told me to climb in.

"Why can't I have the flu in my own room?"  I protested.

"You know why," she said.  "Uncle Calvin's in there."

"Make him move, then--it's my room."

"Maybe he won't stay," she said.  "He hasn't said just how long he'd be
here this time.  Anyway, I can't look after you properly in there all
by yourself."

"I don't need any more looking after than Tad does!"  I said, not
mentioning that ten was too old to be caught in Mama's room by P. R.
Burns, Ginny Gregg or anybody else.

We went on like that for the longest, Mama half threatening and half
explaining, and I half arguing and half pleading.  I watched her like a
hawk for signs of weakening or signs of strengthening, ready to jump
either way, prepared to win or lose, but with one eye peeled for the
best way to stay out of trouble.  Eventually I wore her down, else she
ran out of patience.  Uncle Calvin moved in with Tad, and I got my room
back.

As sick as I was, I went over every inch of it with my eyes and with my
heart.  From the worn and raveled blue rug with the faded black border,
to the battered desk with the bottom drawer handle missing-, to the
snaky crack in the gray plaster that started in above my bed and ran
like a river on a map around the corner and across the top of the
windows, I repossessed it all five times a day and ten on Sunday.  I
wallowed in privacy.  Mama looked in on me far more than she needed to,
especially at night after everyone else was asleep, to see if I was
covered, if my fever had gone up, if I wanted a drink of water or
needed to go to the bathroom.  Papa said that I made it hard on Mama
staying off in the front of the house by myself, but he, too, let me
have my way.

I even got my own way about Mama's meeting of the Bronte Club, although
I'm certainly not bragging about how that turned out.  We got into a
real ruckus on that one when she decided to leave Uncle Calvin to look
after me until she

returned from the meeting.  I threatened to get out of bed and go to
the Bronte Club with her if she tried to leave me alone with him.

"Tell him to go down to the depot until you get back," I suggested.

"I'll do no such thing!"  she said.  "I'm not going to leave you alone
in the house and you with the flu."

"Then lock the door so he can't come in."

"Larry, you're being unreasonable.  I'm not going to lock any door."

"Why can't Mrs.  Gregg come stay with me?"

"And I'm not going to ask Airs.  Gregg to come stay with you.  I'll
only be gone two or three hours, and I certainly don't see what your
Uncle--"

"You don't understand--"

"I understand that you can't turn this house upside down just because
you've got the flu."

"I'm not turning the house upside down.  I just don't want Uncle Calvin
to stay with me while everybody else is gone."

"Larry!  If you're old enough to stay in this room alone, you're old
enough to listen to a little reason."

She was standing by my bed, one hand on her hip, her brown eyes
flashing and her lips stretched tight with impatience.

"All right, then," she snapped.  "If it will make you feel any better,
I just won't go to the Bronte Club!"

"No--I don't want you to miss--"

"Well, for goodness sakes!  What do you want, then?  You don't want me
to go, and you don't want me to stay!  Now will you please make up your
mind?"

She spun around, really put out with me for all time, and was off to
the telephone before I could explain.  "You ought to be ashamed of
yourself," she said, passing the door a few minutes later.

"But Mama-"

"Just be quiet and go to sleep," she said, heels clicking on

into the living room.  She didn't even glance through the door at me
this time.  "I've heard just about all I want to hear out of you for a
while."

I hated for Mama to get mad at me, but that's exactly what she had
done, and there are no two ways about it.

When my temperature went up to 104 degrees, white haired Dr.  Beasley
came over in the middle of the night in near-zero weather.  I hardly
remember his being there at all.  I kept it to myself, but I knew that
Mama had slept in the bed with me that night all night long.  I was too
sick too care, and when it was all over, I couldn't plow back through
the hot fuzziness to get a clear picture.  When you've got 104 degrees,
you don't know whether it's night or day, whether you're asleep or
awake, whether you're seeing or dreaming, what's real and what's
imagined.  All I know is that nobody else's hands felt like Mama's.
They were warm and gentle, as familiar as her face.  I knew she was
there without knowing I knew.

By morning my pajamas were as wet as the steamy windows, but Mama
wouldn't let me move a muscle until she had made a few preparations.

"Don't be fanning the covers around while you're so sweaty," she
cautioned.  "Your fever's broken--that's why you're so wet with
sweat--and it won't take much for it to come back up.  We don't want
you having a relapse and catch pneumonia."

She wrapped me in a quilt and helped me into the big easy chair that
Tad had moved in from the living room and placed in front of the gas
heater; then, turning up the blaze as high as it would go, she gave me
a steaming cup of tea with hot milk and lots of sugar to sip while she
changed the sheets on my bed.  When she had finished, she made a kind
of tent from the quilt and looked the other way--because I told her
to-while I changed quickly into dry pajamas.  I didn't admit how weak I
was, but from the way she helped me back into bed, she must have
known.

From then on, having the flu was harder on everybody else than it was
on me.  Papa brought me ice cream, jigsaw puzzles and magazines from
the Drug Store.  Mama racked her brains for ways to keep me occupied
while she did her housework.  She gave me the blue-flowered dinner bell
that Aunt Myrtle gave her for her birthday and told me to ring it if I
needed anything, but before dark the same day, she took it away because
I rang it too much.  Tad almost got a double hernia pushing and lugging
the big Majestic radio into my room and scooting it up next to the bed
so I could tune the dials for myself.  Mama brought me ice water, grape
juice and ginger ale between meals.  She fixed cinnamon toast and
poached eggs for breakfast, chicken broth and fruit Jello for dinner,
and brought it all to me on a tray.  Papa sat in my room to read the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram, but he said he couldn't get much reading done
with me lying there chattering so much.  Tad wandered in and out, not
exactly offering to do things for me, but I could tell that was why he
hung around.  Uncle Calvin didn't come in except to listen to the
newscast, which he did in silence without so much as a glance at my
bed.  Once when he was all rared back in the easy chair, rolling Bull
Durham and listening to the most uninteresting news you ever heard in
your life, I told him that he ought not to smoke in the room where
people are sick, and he said when I got sick enough for the smoke to
make me sicker, maybe he'd stop.  That was about the only conversation
we had during my long illness.

P. R. Burns came by after school several times and stayed until dark or
until his mother telephoned, sometimes both.  He told me about the home
work I was missing and how he wished he could be lucky enough to catch
the flu sometimes and get all the keen deals I was having.  He ate all
the oatmeal cookies Mrs.  Gregg brought me and drank all the grape
juice in the kitchen.  We played flinch, dominoes, old maid, authors,
and when we ran slap-dab out of anything else to do, checkers.  We
listened to Jack Armstrong on the radio, but the static was too bad to
hear.

Ginny Gregg brought over a batch of sugary chocolate fudge, which she
and Tad sat right next to my bed and ate every last piece of, I'm happy
to say.  mr Gregg brought me some sample Post Toasties off his route
and told me two jokes and one riddle.  mrs Castleberry ran back and
forth across the street, but she didn't bring anything very interesting
except a pot of vegetable soup, if you can call that interesting.
Everybody brought something.  Even Cora.  She brought Ozell.

Mama stared at him as if he had suddenly turned white.  "How come he's
not in school, Cora?"  she asked.

"Oh, he don't mind missin'," Cora said gaily.  "He say he jcs' as soon
come wait on Larry."

"That's awfully nice of him, but he ought to be in school," Mama said,
her forehead wrinkled with puzzlement.  "You shouldn't let him miss a
single day unless it's absolutely necessary.  He'll get behind in his
lessons, and it's awfully hard to catch up, you know."

"Oh, that's all right, Miz Morrison," Cora assured her, still pleased
with herself and the situation.  "It don't make him no difference--do
it, Ozell?"

Ozell shook his head and grinned a grin three feet wide.

"No, ma'am," he said, turning his grin on Mama.  "It's all right wif
me."

Ozell was good company--for a while.  Until he got tired of playing
doctor and the novelty of waiting on me hand and foot wore off.  He
didn't know nor care how to play card games; he was not interested in
the magazines that littered the bed, and as for the jigsaw puzzles, he
kept wanting to know how come the picture was cut up.  The dominoes
fascinated him some, but he didn't know what to do with them except
stand them in a row and knock them down.  Of course, we couldn't
wrestle, follow-the-leader, chase one another nor hide from anyone.  We
did see who could hold their breath the longest, and he won.  We raised
frogs on each other's arms and looked cross-eyed, but that's about all.
Once he told me to pull on his finger, which I did, and he pooted.  He
had

a loose tooth, but he wouldn't let me tie a string to it and yank it
out, because it was the one he was saving to turn gold--no later than
next week, he hoped.  By noon we were so bored with each other that he
went out into the back yard to play by himself, but the cold north wind
drove him back indoors, and he returned to my room rather
halfheartedly.  He had nowhere else to go.

"If you wear a piece of wire around your leg, you won't get no more
fever," he said, flopping down on the bed at my feet.

"What kind of wire?"

"Coppah wire."

"What if you haven't got any copper wire?"

"Oh, that's all right--you can get some bailin' wire or chicken wire.
Every morning you gotta twist and twist the wire real tight like and
make it hurt.  You keeps on twistin' and twistin' till it make a deep
rut in you leg."

"But that'll cut off your blood and kill you, won't it?"

"No, man!  It ain't gonna kill you!  Not if you got good blood, it
ain't.  It don't do nothin' 'cept stop the fever.  If you ain't got
good blood, you gonna die nohow, and that piece of wire ain't gonna do
you no good nohow."

"Did yu ever do it?"

"Sho' did--for near 'bout six month, I guess."

"Doesn't it hurt?"

"I mean it do.  Once I twist and twist and I say "OuchV so loud my mama
done make me take it off.  Then I got bad sick and nearly 'bout die. My
mama and my daddy call the doc tah, and he come give me a operation and
cut me wide open.  Everybody jcs' stand around and cry and say "Oh, my!
He is bad sick, sure 'nuff!"  They make a big tombstone wif doves and
baby lambs and OZ ELL HARRIS' and "JESUS' in great big letters that
make everybody cry and cry."

"It wouldn't do any good to put a wire around my leg now," I reminded
him.  "I've already got the flu."

"That don't matter!  You might get the bad fever agin"

"Mama wouldn't let me have any wire In the bed.  She's always fussing
at me about how I mess up the place as it is."

Long before Tad came home from school, we had run out of anything to
talk about.  Ozell picked up the Youth's Companion and flopped across
the foot of the bed on his stomach, trying to work up an interest in
the pictures, but he lost the struggle.  His eyelids grew heavy, and
his white eyeballs rolled around out of control.  Sleep got the best of
him, and he toppled over onto his side, dead to the world.

I straightened my pillow and stretched out, comfortable, drowsy and
warm, hearing only the hissing of the gas heater and the familiar
sounds of Mama's and Cora's voices and footsteps moving about the
house.  Somewhere amid all the fuzziness that was dragging me under, I
heard Mama tiptoe into the room and cover Ozell with a blanket.  The
last sight I saw before I dropped off to sleep was his head sticking
out from under the cover at my feet.  In all that expanse of white
bedclothes, his head looked like a round blob of black ink.

When I awoke, he was gone.  Tad was standing by my bed staring at me.

"I stared you awake," he said.

"How'd you do that?"  I asked sleepily.

"I just stared at you until you woke up.  It means you have a guilty
conscience."

"I was awake when you came in--and I knew all the time you were
standing there looking at me."

"I'll bet!  How long have I been standing here?"

"Twenty minutes."

"See?  What did I tell you!"  He turned to leave the room,

laughing.  "I wasn't staring at you at all.  I made it all up to see
what you'd say!"

Even when the icicles broke from the eaves and fell to the ground like
slivers of shattered glass, Mama wouldn't let me go back to school--not
until the sun came out and the ground had thawed, however temporarily.
Then for a solid week she drove me to school in the mornings and picked
me up in the

afternoons.  I begged her to let me walk with the other kids, but she
was afraid I'd have a relapse.  To humor me, she did agree to let me
out on Eighth Street back of the school, and that helped.  It was still
embarrassing, just the same.

Then it was Tad's turn.

He came down with the flu about the time Papa lost his keys.  Papa was
not a careless man.  Neat and orderly about the house and the Drug
Store, he was no less so about his person and possessions.  The fact
that he couldn't manage to hold on to a simple thing like a set of keys
seemed to bother him more than the loss itself.  "There was a key to
the store, one to the car, one to the house, and several other odd
ones--all in that black leather holder," he told us repeatedly, but
actually telling himself, hoping that the retelling might uncover
something that he had forgotten or overlooked.

"You must have laid them down somewhere in the store," Mama
suggested.

"No.  Ollie and I searched the store from top to bottom.  Anyway, I
never lay them down except at home when I undress.  I take the keys out
of my pocket only when I use them, then I put them back in this
pocket."  He patted his left thigh.  "It's always this pocket."

"Maybe you dropped them in the stock room," I said.  "It's too dark to
see them even if you did."

"I checked that."

"I'll bet you left them in the door," Uncle Calvin volunteered.

"Don't you think I'd have found them by now if that was the case?"

"Well, I heard about a man once who went out and got a new key made for
his house, and the old key was dangling in the door all the time.  He
just didn't have the gumption to look and see."

"When did you last see them?"  Mama asked, as though she

were listening to him practice a speech and wanted to be certain that
he had it down pat.

"I don't know," he said.  "At night I always put them on the bureau
with my wallet and loose change.  I'm never conscious of doing it--I
just do it.  With Ollie opening up in the mornings, and unless I drive
the car, I don't have any reason to notice if I've got them or not. All
of a sudden, though, I felt them missing.  I backtracked and remembered
that I hadn't driven the car in a couple of days or more, so it's been
at least that long since I saw them."

We backtracked with him and recalled that when the temperature dropped
and the icy winds blew up, he said he'd rather walk in the coldest
blizzard of the year than baby a cold automobile in the early morning,
then baby it back home again at night.  Rather than that, he bundled up
like an Eskimo and bucked the north wind all the way to town each
morning and let it blow him home each noon and night.  As far as he was
concerned, the car could just stay in the garage until the weather took
a turn for the better.

Mama went through every pocket of every garment he owned.  She searched
behind and under the furniture, ran her hands around the cushions in
all the chairs, ransacked her purses and all the dresser and bureau
drawers and came up with nothing.  In the meantime, Ollie had his own
keys duplicated for Papa, although he thought they ought to change the
locks on the doors.  Papa, however, thought this would be a needless
expense.

"Even if somebody finds them, they won't know what they unlock," he
explained.  "My name's not on the holder.  As far as anybody else
knows, they could be the keys to the Alamo."

Days went by before the puzzled expression faded from his face.

While the search was at its height, Tad came in from school one gray
blustery afternoon, his face flushed and hot, complaining of a lazy,
aching feeling all the way down into

his bones.  Mama recognized the signs immediately.  She clapped her
hand across his forehead and gave him her best well-I-know-what-this-is
look.

"Well, well!"  she said elaborately, turning down the covers on his
bed.  "We've been expecting you, Mister Morrison.  Climb right in."

"I haven't got the flu--if that's what you think," he protested.  "I'll
be all right tomorrow."

"That's what you said last year.  Now put on your pajamas while I get
some aspirin."

"But I'm supposed to go to Helen Brewer's tonight."

"For what?"

"She's having a bunch of the kids over."

"Call her and tell her you're sick."

"I can't do that, Mama!  If I'm well enough to call her on the phone,
she'll think I'm well enough to come to her house but don't want to
come!"

"All right, then.  Get in bed, and I'll call her.  It's too nasty
outside to go anywhere, anyway."

He didn't need a push.

Winter in Wordsworth could be as disagreeable as spring and summer. Not
as dirty but just as fierce.  In December and January and on into
February, with the temperatures sinking to a low zero, the roaring,
cutting, howling winds made it seem twice as low and twice as cold. The
snow didn't float softly and lazily to the ground as Christmas cards
picture it.  The wind whipped it furiously.  It whirled, twisted and
blasted the air like a zany white dust storm, changing the whole
outside world into a blinding dazzle.  Tiny sleet pellets shot through
the window screens like bullets and slammed against the panes as though
they might come right through the glass and on into the house.  The
house creaked and groaned, the screens sang and whistled, and the porch
swing rattled its chains like a wild, frantic ghost trying to set
itself free.  I'll have to admit that I got a kind of cosy enjoyment

from the winter.  It had an urgency about it that seemed to bind
people together in a common cause.  Just to stay warm and comfortable
required some drastic measures that were almost fun.  But winter was
not a happy time for everybody.  At night, people shut off the water to
keep it from freezing and drained the pipes to keep them from bursting.
They covered the radiators of their cars with tarpaulins and old quilts
and barred their garage doors with two-by-fours so they wouldn't flap
off the hinges in a high wind.  To cut down on gas bills, they closed
off entire rooms of their houses and worried about the hard-to-heat
shacks on North Side and the poorly clad, ill-fed families who could
not keep themselves warm enough to stay well.  They wrapped themselves
up to their eyes in thick sweaters, heavy shirts wool socks and long
union suits with flap seats.  Kids carried lunches to school rather
than make the numbing round trip home for dinner, and some kids didn't
go to school at all when winter was at its wildest.  Winter was
hospital-and-doctor weather, aspirin and-cough-syrup weather,
Vicks-rag-and-nose-drop weather, flu-and-pneumonia weather, and you
couldn't have a five minute conversation about it without somebody
wondering how in the world Dr.  Beasley maintained the pace.  Everybody
feared that if he didn't slow down and look after his own health he
would surely collapse.  But he stayed on his feet, making his rounds
faithfully as a postman, often leaving more confidence at a bedside
than medicine.  It took a lot of doing to stay well.  Some people
managed it, and some did not.  Papa filled more prescriptions in
December and January than all the other months combined, but he no more
rejoiced over a big prescription business than Dr.  Beasley rejoiced
over sickness or mr Ditmore over deaths.  Anyway, prescriptions only
meant more bills that people couldn't pay, more credit that was already
worn out, and more anxiety that more people couldn't cope with.  Yet,
he said, he could refuse them credit for anything else in the store
before he could shut them off from medicine to keep their bodies strong
and to cure them

when they fell ill.  So he filled prescriptions and entered their
prices in the big green charge book, even though he knew that in all
too many cases he was wasting paper and ink.

So, if Tad was trying to follow the fads, he certainly picked a good
time to get the flu.  People were sick all over town.

Mama was apologetic about making me move into my own room with Uncle
Calvin.  "Why can't I stay with Tad?"  I protested.  "I won't catch the
flu again.  I promise!"

"You might," she said.  "Anyway, Tad doesn't feel like having somebody
in the room with him."

"But Mama-"

"I know what you're going to say, Larry, so please don't.  There just
nothing we can do about it."

"I was just going to say that I could watch after him and keep him
covered up at night.  Then you won't have to get up and down all night
long."

"Please, Larry--you'll just have to do as I say."  She smiled thinly.
"Don't make it hard on everybody like this."

"Maybe I could sleep on the sofa in the living room."

"You'd catch double pneumonia."

We had closed off the living room and sat around in the dining room and
kitchen.  The living room was as cold as the front porch.

"Can't Uncle Calvin sleep on the sofa?"

"It's too cold for him, too."

"But Mama, can't I sleep somewhere else?  I don't care where it
is--just somewhere?  Maybe I could go stay with

P. R."

Her expression softened, and for an instant I saw that she would have
given me a ten-room house with servants if she could.  Uncle Calvin was
the problem she didn't know how to solve, the key that wouldn't fit the
lock.  He was taking over territory that he neither owned nor deserved.
It was mine.

She knew it.  I knew it.  Neither of us, however, could do anything
about it.

"I guess I'll be leaving you, Tad," I said when I went into his room to
get my pajamas.

"I don't care," he mumbled from somewhere underneath a pile of
quilts.

"Mama said I've got to go sleep with Uncle Calvin."

"Go ahead."  He stirred slightly.

"I'd stay in here with you, if she'd let me."

Silence.

"Why don't you tell her you want me to stay in here and look after
you?"

He did not reply.

"I wouldn't bother you any, and I could keep you covered up at
night."

"I can keep myself covered," he said grumpily,

"Not if you're asleep."

He turned over and faced the wall.

"Tad, why don't you ask Mama if I can stay in here?"

I stared longingly at his blond head on the pillow and at the other
side of the bed with its acres of unused space going to waste.

"I'll wait on you, if you will," I continued.  "How about asking her,
Tad?  She might agree if you ask her--if she knows you want me to stay.
How about it, Tad?"

He did not move.

I dropped all pretense and began to plead unashamed.

"I'll bring you drinks of water any time you say--at three o'clock in
the morning or any other time.  I'll make you some three-decker
sandwiches--peanut butter and jelly, or vinegar and salt, or bread,
butter and sugar, or ketchup and mustard-any kind you want.  Just name
it, and I'll get out of bed and make it and bring it to you on a
tray--if you'll just ask her.  I'll even wait on you after you get
well. I'll hang up your clothes for you and carry your books, and I'll
come down to

the Drug Store every day next summer and chip ice for you --you'll
never have to chip any for yourself.  I'll do it all--if you'll just
ask her."

More silence.

"Will you?"

He lay still.

"Tad?"

He was asleep.

I took my pajamas from the hook inside the closet and stood helplessly
in the middle of the room, thinking that having a relapse might not be
so bad at that.  My heart sank into my shoes as I left the room, trying
desperately to think of another argument, another proposition to change
Mama's mind.  I could think of nothing.  My last hope was gone.

"I'll see you later, Tad," I said.

I stopped in the door and looked back.

He did not hear me.

I went to bed early, hoping to be sound asleep before Uncle Calvin came
in.  Then I wouldn't know he was there.  I didn't want to know he was
there.  But I lay wide awake, rigid and alert, my body and my mind
tense with dread.  When he came to bed, wheezing and coughing, I inched
over to the wall, scarcely breathing.  I lay deathly still, afraid to
move, until the window and the front porch turned gray with morning.

10.

Something was different about Tad's flu from the beginning.  Mama
always said that when we were sick, I was twice as much trouble as Tad,
but he was twice as unpleasant.  As a matter of fact, you would hardly
know Tad when he had the flu.  Ordinarily he was the nicest and most
pleasant person in Wordsworth, but when he got sick, watch out!  If you
got to within ten feet of him, he'd bite your head off.  The year
before, he fussed at Ginny Gregg something awful when she brought him
the wrong book from school or couldn't find his notebook in his desk.
She nearly worked herself to death for him, and if he appreciated it,
you certainly couldn't tell it from his gripy attitude.  This year,
however, things were not like that at all.  When she did her homework
by his bedside so he could look on and not get so far behind, he
apologized for putting her to so much trouble and said she shouldn't
spend so much valuable time on him!

She could hardly believe her ears.

"That's not the way you talked last year," she said.  "I must have lost
ten pounds writing that book report and working all those equations for
you."

Even so, she didn't argue with him, for if you want to know the truth,
he helped her more than she helped him.  Ginny was no gold-star student
herself when it came to grades.  The C-minus she got for Tad on that
Tale of Two

Cities book report is proof enough of that, not to mention the Cs and
occasional D's she got for herself all along.

But she came over anyway and did her best to keep him up-to-date on
what all the kids were doing.  He didn't seem interested somehow, not
even in her long, breathless account of how Billy Matthews played
hookey and got suspended from school for three days.  Billy hung around
the Drug Store with the other high-school kids and was a first-year
letterman like Tad.  You would have thought Tad would be interested,
but he went sound asleep while she was telling the best part of it,
which was how Billy claimed that he spent his hookey day off visiting
the sick and shut-ins and listening to a trial in County Court about
civil litigation, whatever that is.

That's a sample of how Tad acted and nearly drove Mama out of her mind.
He didn't complain about the meals she brought him; whatever she
cooked, he ate without question.  She tried to get him to ask for
something special--just anything-and he said he couldn't think of
anything.  If she suggested a glass of grape juice, ginger ale, or a
cup of hot tea he agreed and accepted it, but he didn't seem to enjoy
it.  He paid no attention to the magazines Papa brought home from the
store.  I turned on the radio and tried to get him to choose between
Joe Penner and "One Man's Family," and he said he didn't care!  Now
that was really peculiar because he thought "One Man's Family" was the
syrupiest, stupidest, silliest program on the air and was always making
fun of Mama for liking it.  Ollie Tabor clipped a joke out of the
Dallas Morning News and sent it to him, and he read it without cracking
a smile.  He lay in bed, quiet and pale, looking at the ceiling or out
the window as if a great sadness might be weighing him down.

His fever didn't go up to 104 degrees like mine did, but neither did it
go down to normal.

"Tad, I just can't tell how you feel," Mama said in bewilderment. 
"With your fever no higher than it's been, you should have snapped out
of it by now.  Do you still have that aching feeling?"

"I don't know, Mama," he said, as though the subject bored him.  "It's
not exactly an aching feeling.  It's more like a heavy feeling--like
I'm worn out."

She studied his face, felt his cheek, stuck her hand inside his pajamas
to feel his chest and backed away from the bed shaking her head.

"I think I'll call Dr, Beasley to stop by the next time he's out and
around," she decided.  "Something's keeping that fever in you, and I
want to know what it is.  It's been over a week now."

"I don't need Dr.  Beasley," he said.  "There's nothing he can do."

"Well, I'm going to call him anyway.  At least, it'll make me feel
better."

We were at supper that night when Dr.  Beasley burst through the front
door like a blue norther.  If he knocked first, nobody heard him.  The
first thing we knew, he was stomping his feet in the hall and taking
off his heavy overcoat and wool scarf.  Mama and Papa hurried to meet
him, and I jumped up from the table to follow.

"That's right--that-a-a-a-t's right!"  Uncle Calvin crowed mockingly.
"Run right along now and do your snooping so you won't miss
anything."

"I'm not snooping," I said from the doorway.  "Tad's my brother, and I
want to see what's wrong with him.  Anyway, what business is it of
yours?"

Surprisingly, his mood changed.  He did not come back at me as I
expected.  He grew serious.

"Look here--why don't you just come on back here and stay out of the
way until the Doc leaves?"

"Maybe I don't want to."

"They'll tell you all about it," he said, quite earnestly, I'll have to
admit.  "You're not gonna miss anything.  Four's enough people in one
room at one time."

I ran out into the hall, though, without giving him time to talk me out
of it.

Dr.  Beasley was taking Tad's temperature and listening to

his chest through the stethoscope.  He poked and prodded and thumped
on him as he would a watermelon.  When he had finished his examination,
he returned his instruments to his black bag and asked Mama for an
accounting of what she had been doing for him.

"Keep it up," he said when she had finished.  "Keep it up, and he'll be
all right."  Then with a playful nod to Tad, he added, "You can't hurt
these six-foot football players.  They're indestructible."

On his way out, he glanced at himself in the mirror, then at me.  "Why
didn't you wait and catch the flu along with Tad and save me a trip?"

"Goodness!"  said Mama, throwing up her hands in mock horror.  "I don't
think I could stand two of them in bed at once!"

Uncle Calvin was standing in the hall by the front door.  He had on his
heavy coat and battered old hat.

"You going down towards town, Doc?"  he asked.

"Right down Main Street.  You want a lift?"

Papa helped Dr.  Beasley on with his coat.

Uncle Calvin said, "I was thinking maybe I'd go down and-"

"In this weather?"  Mama was astounded.

"Why not?  If it ain't too bad for the doc, it ain't too bad for me."

"But nobody'll be downtown on a night like this, Cal," Papa said.  "I
called Ollie and told him to close up early and go on home if nothing's
going on."

Uncle Calvin, however, was already following Dr.  Beasley out the front
door.

It turned out to be one of the worst nights of the winter, but we
didn't know how bad it was until the next day.  A hard freeze and wild
blizzard pushed the temperature down to five degrees below zero.  KGKO
in Wichita Falls reported heavy ice and snow on the roads up towards
Amarillo and warned motorists to stay off the highways.  Several
carloads of travelers made emergency stops and filled mrs Boyd's
Hotel

for the first time within memory.  mrs Boyd had to run home and get
sheets from her own linen closet to have enough to go around.  A house
on North Side burned to the ground, leaving a large family of seven
children with no place to go until somebody remembered the jury cots in
the basement of the courthouse and all that warm space with nobody in
it.  P. R. Burns' next-door neighbor's three pet pigeons froze up as
stiff as a poker.  He tried to thaw them out in the kitchen oven, but
he was too late.  Water pipes burst all over town, and Shumaker's
Heating & Plumbing Company couldn't make it around fast enough to all
the houses that needed attention pronto.  Mama had filled some pans and
the kitchen sink with water just for such emergencies.  She heated it
on the stove as we needed it, but there was not enough for baths, which
was certainly no heartbreaking disaster, considering how cold it was
and all.

Mama almost smothered me with clothes before she let me out of the
house to go to school.  I must have looked like a stuffed owl--I know I
felt like one--with long union suits, a heavy flannel shirt, a wool
sweater, wool scarf, gloves, knit toboggan cap, with Tad's hand-me-down
overcoat.

"Now don't sit around all day with your sweater on," she cautioned.
Take it off as soon as you get inside, or you won't feel it when you
come outdoors again."

She didn't need to worry.  I nearly melted down into a puddle in the
length of time it took to tell Tad good-by.

The day was gray and blustery.  The snow and sleet that had whipped
through the air all night long had blown away, leaving the ground
speckled and streaked with white.  You could tell by the color of the
sky that we were in for more bad weather.  KGKO issued more storm
warnings, and at 7:45, when I started out the door, the temperature in
downtown Wichita Falls was minus 2 degrees.  The wind had the sharp
edge of a razor blade, and by the time I got to school my eyes watered
and my nose was ringed with tiny crystals of ice.  As for my toes, I
couldn't feel them enough to know if they were still on my feet or
not.

P.  R. went to the boys' room during the first period and rolled his
union suits above his knees, making his upper legs fatter than Ginny
Gregg's.  I did unbuckle my pants below the knee and let them dangle,
and I wouldn't have minded rolling up my union suits like P. R. did,
but by the time you pull down your stockings and roll up your union
suits and pull up your stockings again, it's more trouble than staying
bandaged up like a mummy.  On the way out the door in the afternoon,
Miss Sweeny stopped P. R. and sent him back inside to roll down his
union suits again.  When he caught up with me outside, his black,
stocking-clad legs were as bumpy and lumpy as mine.

We went to his house to work on our secret formula that was supposed to
make newsprint disappear but didn't.  I stayed until Mama telephoned to
see if I was there.  I was ready to leave anyway, because mrs Burns
came into the kitchen and bawled us out for spilling laundry bluing all
over the cabinet and for using up a whole bottle of vinegar and for
ruining the Forth Worth Star-Telegram before mr Burns had a chance to
read it.  Besides, she made us clean up the kitchen and wash a bunch of
pots and pans that we hadn't messed up in the first place.  So when you
come right down to it, I had plenty of reasons for not minding going
home.

At home, though, I could have kicked myself all over the house with a
sharp-toed boot for not going sooner.  All the time I was at school and
at P. R."s house, Mama had been at home knowing that the Drug Store had
been robbed the night before.  She hadn't said a word about it.  How
she could have kept a secret like that is a mystery that will go
unsolved even in my old age.

"How come you didn't call me at school?"  I asked her.

"Oh, I don't think Miss Sweeny would have liked that," she said.
"Anyway, there wasn't anything you could have done about it."

I ran to the telephone and called P. R. He could hardly believe it,
either.

"Gol-leeeeee!  In your daddy's store?"

"Morrison's Drug Store, Wordsworth, Texas."

"Did they catch the robbers?"

"Not yet--but I'm going down to see about it.  You want to go?"

"Gee--I don't know, Larry.  My mother's kind of mad about all that
vinegar."

"Ask her."

"Well--okay.  Wait a minute."

I heard him drop the telephone and get into a terrible argument with
his mother.  Naturally, I figured I'd end up going alone.  P. R. seldom
won an argument with his mother.  But I was wrong that time.  He came
back on the line, shouting so loud that I could hardly hear him.

"Come on!"  he yelled.  "I'll meet you at the church!"

Mama didn't want me to go out in the worsening weather.

"But Mama--P.  R. wants me to go with him.  Anyway, I've already been
outside today.  It won't hurt me."

She peered through the curtains at the sky.

"Those look like new clouds coming in from the north," she said.

"It won't hurt me--please?"

"It's getting so late...."

"I'll go straight to the Drug Store and back home.  I promise!

"Well--all right, but I want you back here before dark, and make
sure--Larry!  Come back here and button up your coat!  You'll catch
your death of cold!"

She yanked and tugged at my clothes and just about wore me out with
jerking.

"--and don't let P. R. run all over the store and get in Ollie's
way."

In the excitement, I forgot to look in on Tad until I was out on the
front porch, but it was too late to go back if I hoped to get home
before dark, which wouldn't be long now.

P. R. was waiting under the steps of the Presbyterian

Church on Main Street, our halfway meeting place.  The shelter was
deep and dark like a cave, clammy and cool in the summer and a good
windbreaker in the winter.

"What took you so long?"  P. R. shouted above the booming wind, which
under the steps sounded weird and hollow like loud noises inside mr
Castleberry's cistern.

"My mother didn't want me to go," I explained.

"Do they know who the robbers are?"

"If they did, they'd catch them."

"Did they use guns?"

"How else could they pull a robbery?"

"And masks?"

"Certainly!  That's why they don't know who it was."

"Did they tie up your daddy and mr Tabor and leave them on the floor
with gags in their mouths?"

"I think so."

"I hope it was Pretty Boy Floyd."

The mob we expected to find in front of the Drug Store was not there.
Main Street was all but deserted.  Lights from the stores were faint
and fuzzy behind steamy windows.  White smoke puffed from the exhaust
of a car at the curb and vanished as if by magic.  An old newspaper
danced along the sidewalk, wrapped itself around a lamppost, then broke
free again.  A sorry-looking old hound dog trotted out to the middle of
the empty gray street, stopped, and trotted back to the shelter of a
store front.  Down at the far end of the street, a dark, heavily
wrapped figure came out of a store and turned toward the depot, leaning
into the wind.  Around back of the Drug Store at Phillips 66, we could
see Alvin Hoffmire bundled up to his ears, checking the antifreeze in a
car and looking for all the world as if he ought to drink a quart of it
himself.  His breath issued from his mouth like steam from the exhaust
and was carried away by the wind.

Even the Drug Store itself was empty, except for Papa.  Ollie was
nowhere in sight.  Papa ambled up toward the front of the store to meet
us.  He wore the old gray coat sweater

with brown leather elbow pads that he hung on a peg in the
prescription room and which Mama was always threatening to steal and
throw in the trash can.

"Did you catch them, mr Morrison?"  P. R. asked, unable to stand still
from excitement.

"Not yet," Papa said with a laugh.  "We don't know who to catch."

"What did they look like?"

"We don't know that, either."

P. R. was hopping first on one foot and then the other.

"Weren't you scared, mr Morrison?"

"Not hardly--I was at home asleep."

Neither of us expected to hear that, either, and our disappointment
must have shown on our faces.  Papa explained hurriedly that the
robbery had occurred during the night to the tune of $38--as near as
they could figure it.

Ollie came up from the rear of the store with a can of chocolate syrup
under one arm, his red hair shining like a railroad lantern.  He smiled
at us.

"What brings you boys out on a day like this?"  he asked.

"The robbery," I said.  "We want to hear all about it."

He went around behind the fountain, while P. R. and I climbed up on
fountain stools to watch him.  He removed the cover from a dispenser
and poured the thick brown chocolate syrup lazily and creamily from the
can.  P. R. looked on in fascination.  Papa wandered back to the
prescription room.

"We haven't figured out exactly just how much money it was," Ollie
explained, craning his short neck to see over the rim of the can.  His
scalp was pink and clean right down the rigid straight line that parted
his red hair.  "It might have been forty dollars, but I doubt it.  The
cash-register receipts for yesterday were--Hey Get your fingers out of
the chocolate,

P. R.!"

P. R. drew back and sat straight on the stool, twirling back and forth
in a half circle.

"The receipts were twenty-eight sixty-three," Ollie confirmed.

"When I put the money in the safe last night, there was already eight
or ten dollars in it.  I didn't count it, but it looked like that
much--maybe more."

"How did they get the safe open, Ollie?"  I asked.

"They must have pried it open with something heavy-maybe a crowbar or
something like that."  For P. R."s information he went on to explain
that it wasn't a real combination safe, but more like a strong cabinet.
"We've got a real safe--a little one--for the registered
pharmaceuticals," he said.  "We're required by law to keep certain
drugs and narcotics under lock and key--but it's too little to put
money and the bookkeeping in."

I looked about for signs of broken glass or a battered door, but
everything seemed to be in good order.  I asked Ollie how they got into
the store.

Papa stuck his head out of the prescription room and told us to take
off our coats unless we were going outside immediately.

"And don't throw them on the tables or on the counter," he warned.
"Take them in the back."

We raced to the rear of the store, slung our coats and caps over a
stack of boxes and hurried back up front just as Ollie was wiping the
chocolate drippings from the rim of the can.

"Papa doesn't care if we have a chocolate soda, Ollie," I said.

"But I might."

"I can make them myself."

"Oh, no, you don't!"  Ollie was not to be hoodwinked.

He held the empty syrup can across the fountain.  "Here-- P. R. Go
throw this in the barrel in the back, and I'll make you both a cherry
Coke--put no sodas."

"How did they get into the store, Ollie?"  I asked.

"That's the funny part of it," he said, taking two glasses from the
mirrored shelves on the back bar.  "We can't find anywhere they broke
in at all.  All the windows are locked, the doors haven't been tampered
with, and the hasp on the

alley door hasn't been broken.  So we've just about decided that
whoever robbed the store had to use a key.  That's what the sheriff
thinks, anyway."

P. R. came up from the rear, bug-eyed and excited all over again.

"The sheriff?  You mean Sheriff Whelan was here, mr Tabor?"
"Naturally!"  Ollie said with pride.  "You can't have a robbery without
calling the sheriff, can you?  And he came right over, too.  I opened
the store at seven o'clock like I always do, but I didn't get the money
out of the safe that minute.  I never do--unless I happen to need some
change right off, and I seldom do.  I turned on the lights, turned up
the heat, turned off the sign out front, brought in the bundle of
newspapers off the curb, chipped some ice, heated the water for the
coffee--you know, the regular opening-up routine.  It must of been
eight o'clock before I got around to thinking about cash for the
register.  Holly Ashcraft came in for a package of cigarettes, but he
had the exact change, and I just laid it on the register without
ringing it up.  Holly was the only one who had been in--you know, the
weather being so bad.  Well--after I finished opening up, I went back
to the prescription room and the door to the safe was open.  Boy-oh
boy!  You could've knocked me over with a feather!  I don't mind
telling you, it gave me a real jolt.  Of course, the first thing I did
was look in the old cardboard box where we keep the cash.  It was
empty--cleaned out!  The ledgers and invoices and charge book and all
that kind of stuff was there, but that's all.  No money."  Two cherry
Cokes sat before us untouched.

"The first thing I did was call your daddy at home, but he had already
left for the store," Ollie went on.  "So I told your mother what had
happened and then I called the sheriff, and he got here by the time
your daddy did.  He went over the place from top to bottom and couldn't
find a single solitary thing out of place."

Ollie had propped himself against the back bar and was now leaning
comfortably against it, both elbows behind him, a fountain towel
dangling from one hand.

"Of course, he asked me if anything was missing besides the money, but
we couldn't tell--not right then, anyway.  We checked the perfume and
the watches, but everything seemed all right there.  That's about all
we could check right off without taking inventory of the whole store,
you see.  They could of got some cigarettes or cigars--and probably
did--but unless they cleaned us out, we wouldn't of missed them,
either.  Like I said, we think it added up to about thirty-eight
dollars, maybe a dollar or two more, maybe a dollar or two less.  We're
not sure."

You could tell that Ollie had been reciting that same story all day
long, and that he'd probably go on telling it for as long as he could
find an audience.  It was polished and smooth, and he told it without a
stammer, stutter or hitch.  I'll have to say, though, that it was not
the exciting tale that P. R. and I had bucked a freezing north wind all
the way downtown to hear.

Sheriff Wrhelan had already crossed off the possibility of lock
pickers.  Lock pickers seldom lock a door behind them, and all doors
were locked when Ollie opened up.  The only way left was for the robber
to have used a key, and the only key unaccounted for was Papa's.  But
who got the key, when and how, made up a puzzle that they did not know
how to solve.

"I know one thing for sure," Ollie said in conclusion, apparently proud
to have been a major character in such a story.  "We lost thirty-eight
dollars that we'll never see again.  You can bet your shirt on that."

Papa had come out of the prescription room and was scratching around
among the cold remedies back of the wrapping counter.

"Ollie, are we out of Bayer Aspirin?"

"No--there oughta be one box left."

Ollie pushed himself away from the back bar and moved toward the
rear.

"It's been on order for a week," he said.  "I noticed yesterday that we
were down to one box, and I remember thinking how that order better
hurry and get here.  As a matter of fact, we're running low on a lot of
things.  Vicks is low, so is Bromo Seltzer and Doan's Liver Pills.
There oughta be another box of Bayer's, though."

"I don't see it," Papa mumbled.  He pushed his glasses down to the end
of his nose and peered over them into the shelf.

Ollie joined him and stuck his face clean into the shelf.

"That's funny--I'll swear there was one box there yesterday."

"Maybe you sold it."

"No--I'd remember that.  It was the last box, and we never have run out
of Bayer's before.  I'd remember if I took the last one out of the
shelf.  Did you sell it to somebody?"

"Not me," said Papa.  "I'll take another brand--or some prescription
aspirin.  They're getting low, too, and I was holding back on them.
With Tad sick, I thought maybe we'd better stock up at home."

Ollie shook his head in amazement and rubbed his eyes.

"I just don't understand it," he said.  "That box was there when I
closed up last night.  I'd stake my life on it."

"Well--you can't expect to remember every little sale you make, Ollie,"
Papa said, half amused.  "Anyway, it's not all that important."

"But I'd remember if it was the last one, John!"

He stuck his hand in the shelf and rummaged around behind the other
bottles and boxes.  "Sometimes they get knocked down or pushed
behind--you sure you didn't sell it yourself, John?"

"I'm sure.  But stop worrying!  It's not anything to get upset about. I
haven't touched that shelf in two or three days."  He

started back to the prescription room, laughing softly.  "I'll
swan--you're just like Gladys when something gets out of place in the
kitchen."

"I'm not worrying, but I know I'd remember the last one.  I know...."

P. R. and I had finished our Cokes and were exploring the magazine
racks.  Papa sent us home.

"Don't go anywhere else," he cautioned.  "The radio said a new blizzard
is headed this way.  Your mother might need you to help draw up some
water again."

"Thanks for the Coke, mr Tabor," P. R. said.

"That's okay, P. R."

We started out the door.

"See you later, Larry."

He closed the door behind us.

We ran all the way to the Presbyterian Church without saying a
word--about the robbery or anything else.  For one thing, it was too
windy to do much talking.  For another, there didn't seem to be
anything left to say about the robbery.

Ollie had said it all for us.

11.

The new blizzard did not turn out to be a blizzard after all, although
I don't know who decides where a winter storm leaves off and a blizzard
begins.  Papa and Uncle Calvin sat around after supper making spotty
conversation about the sleet and snow and what a shame it was for so
much moisture to fly through the air at forty and fifty miles per hour
and not stop on the ground long enough to sink in.  Neither of them had
a word to say about the robbery, which was peculiar, especially in
Uncle Calvin's case.  It was a subject tailor-made for him to spout off
about people's honesty and employers who didn't pay a living wage and
stuff that nobody but him believed.

We were gathered in the dining room, Papa reading the paper when he
could keep his mind on it, and Mama turning the collars on some of his
shirts, when she wasn't looking in on Tad.  A curious restlessness was
upon us all.  Even Uncle Calvin, who could sit like a rock for hours at
a stretch, seemed impatient and unable to settle down.  I was stretched
out on my stomach on the floor in front of the gas heater, making a
stab every now and then at my homework.  It was very uninteresting.

"Too bad the wind won't let the snow pile up," said Papa.  "We could
certainly use the moisture."  He folded his newspaper

carefully and laid it on the dining table.  The sad part of it is that
by the time the ground thaws enough to absorb it, the weather will be
too warm for snow, and we'll be having dust storms again.  So there you
are.

"The farmers are fools to stay around here and dry up!"  Uncle Calvin
said.  "There's lots of good places-Oregon and Washington, just to name
two.  You ought to see the size of the apples in Washington!  Why,
they're as big as your two fists.  And with all them rivers that never
runs dry they've got more water than they know what to do with.  They
can raise anything in God's world they want-just anything.  All they've
got to do is drop the seed in the ground and stand back.  If these
people around here had any gumption, they'd pack up and get out."
"Well, they can't do that," Papa said half wistfully.  "It takes
money-just as much to move as to stay.  All the same Aubrey Clifton was
in the store the other day talking about a place out near Tolbert's
Crossing that's vacant.  Nobody knows, what happened to the family that
lived there.  They just disappeared."  He shrugged.  "Who knows?  Maybe
they did go off some place like Washington or Oregon.  "That's what the
rest of them ought to do.  "They can't, Cal," said Papa impatiently
They don't know about anywhere else.  This is their home They we raised
their families here.  Their friends and relatives and everything they
own is here.  They can't just pick up and go traipsing off across the
country without some kind of job to go to, and they haven't got the
money to travel around looking for jobs.  And suppose they did find
work in Oregon or Washington-or wherever-what do you think they could
do with their places here?  They can't sell them-nobody's buying these
days.  All they've got to sell is a pile of mortgages.  Anyway, do you
have any idea how much money it costs to move a family across the
country?  They just haven't got it.  They couldn't pay for a move to
the next county.  He

shook his head.  "They don't make enough to stay here, and they don't
make enough to leave.  They're trapped."

There was a long silence.  Mama glanced uneasily at the hall door once
or twice, then giving up her collar-turning as a bad job, she laid her
sewing things aside and went to see about Tad.

"Something's got to give, though," Papa continued.  "Another year of
this, and it'll be nip and tuck who'll sink under first.  The merchants
can't go on forever giving credit on these long, indefinite,
pay-ne-when-you-can terms.  There's got to be a settling up somewhere,
sometime.  But how do you keep running in the meantime?  About all I'm
getting out of these people is what Pa used to call a lick and a
promise."

Uncle Calvin smiled.  A real smile.

"A spit and a promise," he corrected.  "That's what Pa called it."

Papa smiled, too.  "He did, didn't he?  A spit and a promise.  Well,
that's about all I'm getting these days--a spit and a promise.  But how
do you stay in business until all the settling up takes place?  That's
the real problem.  You'd be surprised at the number of people right
here in Wordsworth who've barely got their heads above water--people
you wouldn't think are so hard up--people you see all the time, going
about their business, trying to keep up a decent appearance, something
that's respectable.  Earl Gregg was saying last week that about all the
good he does out on the road these days is keep up the good will of his
customers.  But how long can the Wordsworth Wholesale Grocery Company
afford to pay a man a salary for good will?  No.  People have got to
buy something and pay for it--or somebody's going to sink under. 
Earl's getting concerned, believe me, and lots of people are in the
same predicament--not just the farmers.  We're all involved in this
thing. Hard times for my customers means hard times for me.  It's just
that simple."

He studied the blaze in the gas heater.

"I just hope we can hold out until President Roosevelt can get all his
programs to working full steam."

"Roosevelt ain't Lord Jesus Christ, you know," Uncle Calvin said.

"Nobody said he was, but he's trying--and personally, I think he's on
the right track."

"He can't do no worse than Hoover."

"Oh, Hoover wasn't so bad--he just happened along at a bad time in
history."

"He didn't do nothing to make it any better, either."

"I've got a sneaking hunch that any president would've been up against
it just like Herbert Hoover was, if they had been elected at just that
particular time."

"And I wouldn't count on Roosevelt performing no miracles neither,"
Uncle Calvin said.  "If the way he's starting out is any measure, he's
going to have us the rest of the way over the hill to the poorhouse.
Where's he think all this money's coming from that he's planning on
spending?"  "His idea is to get money into circulation."

"What money?"

"The money that this country's got the potential for making.  He says
that the earning power and all that goes with it is right here waiting
to be tapped."

"Well, he's sure-as-shootin' tapping it.  I've never seen the likes of
how he's starting out all these giveaways and make work
programs--without any money to start them on."

I can't swear up and down that they went on talking like that for long,
because it was such an uninteresting topic that I didn't listen.  For a
warm house on wintry night, you would think they could find something
more cheerful to discuss than hard times.  The way they kept mentioning
it, though, it must have been their favorite topic.  But something was
wrong with the feel of things, anyway, and their gloomy subject only
fitted into the strange mood of the evening.  It was as if we were all
waiting for something to happen.

Uncle Calvin went into the kitchen and rummaged around in the cabinets
and the icebox, then into the dark, icy living room for a look at the
weather through the front curtains.  He wandered back into the dining
room and, for lack of something better to do, slumped into his chair
and stared at the row of flames in the gas heater.  Papa picked up the
paper again, opened it wide, closed it almost immediately and stood up.
He stuck both hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth idly on
his feet.  Mama came back from Tad's room and picked up her sewing.

"Did you fasten the garage door tight?"  she asked Papa.

"Yes--with the crossbars."

"Inez Waltham said theirs ripped loose from the hinges last night."

"Our side gate is loose, too," he replied absently.  "But I never can
think to see about it until the wind comes up like this and I hear it
flapping."  He looked at Uncle Calvin for a moment, then away.  If he
was throwing a hint at his brother, he wasted his time.

Mama followed his eyes.

"There never seems to be time," she said.  Then she returned to her
sewing.  "You know, I'm not sure this old shirt is worth all this
bother," she added.  "I wish you'd stop in at Delsey Jacobs and get you
one or two new ones.  All yours are getting in terrible shape."

"Maybe I will," Papa said.

"And go see about Tad, will your" She looked up at Papa.

"You just came back," he replied, a smile on his face.

"I know--and he must be sick and tired of seeing me run in and out
every few minutes."

"He's all right."

He took out his watch and looked at it.

"He ought to be asleep by now."

"I'll go," I volunteered, happy for an excuse to get away from my books
and difficult homework.

Mama wasn't certain it was a good idea.

"You'd better finish your work, Larry," she said without much force.
"You'll only get in there and stay."

"No, I won't," I said, already on my feet.  "I'll be right back."

Stretched out in the bed on his back, Tad looked twice as long as he
did on his feet.  He turned his head to watch me enter the room.

"What do you think about the robbery, Tad?"  I asked, crawling over the
foot board onto the bed next to the wall.  I lay on my back alongside
him.

"You'd better take off your shoes," he said.  "Mama won't like it if
she catches you in bed with your shoes on."

I sat up, unlaced my shoes, threw them on the floor and lay down
again.

"You got any idea who robbed the store?"  I asked.

"No."

"You don't think Ollie did it, do you?"

"No-why?"

"You know--working for Papa and not making a living wage and all that
stuff Uncle Calvin talks about all the time."

"No-not Ollie."

The fact that he was so calm and collected about such a crazy idea was
pretty good proof that he felt terrible.  Otherwise he would have
bawled me out and called me nutty as a peach orchard.

"Do you think somebody found Papa's keys or stole them?"

"They might."

"Which?"

"I don't know."

"You don't seem very interested.  Nobody in the dining room had
anything to say about it, either."

"I don't know what I could do about it."  He sighed.

I propped myself up on one elbow and studied his face carefully.  I had
never seen him like this.  He looked just fine-if you only looked at
him and didn't pay any attention to the

faraway stare in his eyes.  He was staring at the ceiling but not
actually seeing it or thinking about it.  "Isn't it about time you got
a hundred and four degrees?"  I asked.  "I got a hundred and four a
long time before this."

"Maybe I'm a special case."

A suggestion of a smile appeared around his lips, but his eyes did not
match it.

I racked my brain for something interesting to tell him: recess
indoors, the secret formula that wouldn't work, P. R."s rolled-up union
suits; Inez Waltham's garage door, the disappearing family out by
Tolbert's Crossing, anything that seemed worthwhile.  Nothing seemed to
work.

"Four Eyes McEntyre broke his glasses at school this week and ran smack
into the water fountain out in the middle of the school yard.  Joe Ben
Wagner laughed at him, and Four Eyes knocked him backwards--clear over
to the seesaws."

That didn't work, either.

"You feel pretty bad, don't you, Tad?"

"I guess so."

"Papa brought you some new aspirin from the store.  They sold out of
Bayer's for the first time in the history of Morrison's Drug Store--at
least, that's what Ollie said, and he ought to know.  He can't remember
ever selling out before--not even this time.  Papa brought you another
kind.  You want me to get you some?"

"Mama gave me some already."

"Grape juice?"

"I'm not thirsty."

Abruptly, he turned his head away.

I leaned over his shoulder trying to see his face.

"Tad, you're not mad at me, are you?"

He turned back and looked me squarely in the eye.

"What gave you that idea?"

"I was just wondering.  I was just wondering if I made you mad about
something."

"I'm not mad."

He reached from under the cover and hit me on the arm with a loose,
half-doubled fist.  For a poke in the arm, it was a pretty sorry
excuse.  I could hardly feel it.  His hand dropped limply back onto the
covers.

"You must be pretty weak."

"I must be."

"You want me to turn on the radio?"

"If you want to."

"What station?  Fort Worth?  Oklahoma City?  San Antonio?  I got Des
Moines once.  P. R. claims that he listens to San Francisco all the
time, but I don't believe him.  Which one do you want to hear?"

"It doesn't matter."

I didn't move.  I only offered to turn on the radio to pep him up, but
if he wasn't interested, I certainly didn't care to listen to a lot of
static and popping and grinding for my own amusement.  We both lay
silent and still until I began to get drowsy and had to stir myself to
keep awake.

"Well, don't you want anything at all?"  I said at last.

"Not that I know of."

"You must want something.  You know you can get anything you want when
you've got the flu.  All you've got to do is ask for it.  It's a pretty
keen deal--in a way."

"I just don't want anything."

"You want me to get out and let you alone?  I was just trying to keep
you company, but if you don't want me to, all you've to to say is for
me to get out, and I'll get out.  It won't make me mad.  When I had the
flu, sometimes I didn't want to talk to anybody--not even Mama.  Once
she was standing by my bed talking my head off, but I didn't have the
nerve to tell her to get out and leave me alone.  Of course, she never
comes down with the flu like we do, and she doesn't understand how it
is when you don't want to talk to people.  So I won't care if you tell
me to get out.  It won't make me mad.  Go on and tell me--if you want
to...."

He did not reply.

"Tad?"

I raised my head to look at him.  He had fallen asleep.

I pushed myself up from the bed.

"I've got to finish my homework, anyway," I mumbled.  "Miss Sweeny gave
us a thousand problems for tomorrow, and she didn't explain how to work
even the first one.  I guess she thinks we're geniuses."

I started from the room, then went back and pulled the covers up over
his shoulders.  I switched off the ceiling light.  The night light was
too dim.  I flipped the ceiling light back on.  Things were gloomy
enough without darkness to make it gloomier.

Back in the dining room, I rearranged my books on the floor in front of
the heater.

"Mama, did I act sad when I had the flu?  Like Tad acts?"

Uncle Calvin had gone to bed.  I had heard him in the bathroom while I
lay talking to Tad.  Papa was in the kitchen.  A violent gust of wind
hit me as he opened the back door, then slammed it shut and locked it.
The glass chimes in the closed off living room rustled faintly.

Mama considered my question for a moment.  "No, I don't think you
were," she said.  Her voice sounded further away than Tad's eyes
looked.  "It's his fever.  It's hung on so long that it's sapped away
his strength little by little.  He's never been like this
before--neither of you."

I glanced up at her quickly.  A shadow crossed her face.

"He just lies there and stares at the ceiling," I said.  "If it was me,
I'd go slap-dab crazy looking at the ceiling and not doing anything."

I turned back to my books.  "Miss Sweeny gave us all these problems to
work by tomorrow, but she didn't tell us what to use for time.  She
must think we don't have anything to do except homework."

Papa came in from the kitchen and stood in front of the fire.  He
yawned and watched me for a moment.  He took his watch from his pocket
and wound it.

"I think I'll go to bed," he said.  "You'd better finish up what
you're doing, Larry, and get to bed, too."

"I'll be up all night long, looks like," I said.  "I've got to work all
these problems on page ninety-six down to the middle of page
ninety-seven."

"You'd better get on with it, then," he said.  "What have you been
doing all this time?"

"I had to go see about Tad."

"Look in on him before you go to bed," Mama said to him.

"He's asleep," I informed them.

"I'll see," Papa turned to leave the room.  "Don't forget to turn down
the heater when you go to bed," he said to Mama.  "Too many gas fumes
in a closed-up house can be dangerous."

"Mildred Connors was talking at school today about some people the
other side of Childress that turned the gas down one night before they
went to bed, and the pressure got so low the flames went out and the
gas killed everybody in the house.  Even the cat."

"Well--don't turn it down that low," Papa cautioned as he disappeared
into the hall.

The hissing of the gas heater was the only sound left in the house.
Outside, though, the wind was beating against the house like a cyclone.
I shivered and inched up closer to the heater, but even with all its
hissing, it didn't seem to put out any warmth.

"You'll have to stop and go to bed, Larry," Mama said as she finished
the last shirt and folded it neatly.  "You can do what's left in the
morning.  I'll wake you early."

I didn't need to be coaxed.  I slammed my books together and got to my
feet.  She stood up and laid her sewing on the dining table.  She bent
over to turn down the gas.

"Pick up your books off the floor," she said.

I picked them up and dumped them on the table.  She turned out the
light.  I followed her wearily into the hall.

Inside my own room, I flipped on the ceiling light.  Uncle Calvin did
not stir.  He was lying on his back, his mouth wide

open, snoring loud enough to wake himself.  How he stayed asleep was a
mystery.  As I undressed, I looked idly about the room trying to figure
out how one person's stuff could take up so much space.  His heavy
shoes, crammed full of heavy brown socks, seemed to take up half the
floor.  His dark, no color pants were flung carelessly over a chair;
his old gray shirt was draped over the bedpost.  His battered hat hung
from the doorknob.  You couldn't tell by looking that this was my
room--not when everything in sight seemed to belong to somebody else.
Even the top of my desk, which Mama made me keep cleared off, was
littered with Uncle Calvin's things.  From one side to the other I
froze.

My eyes almost left their sockets.  I stared at the desk without
moving.

The contents of Uncle Calvin's pockets were strewn across the scarred
surface--wallet, comb, matches, Bull Durham, a few coins, nail
clippers, a folded scrap of paper, a stubby yellow pencil, this time a
package of Wing sAnd a new box of Bayer Aspirin.

12.

something was wrong.  The new box of aspirin was only part of it, not
all.  The rest of it danced around inside my head and had to do with
Ollie Tabor, with Papa, with an empty space on a shelf that nobody
could explain, with the last box of aspirin that nobody sold.

I could not move.  My feet were fixed to the floor, my eyes welded to
the desk.  Cold terror began to work its way slowly from the tips of my
toes up through my legs, leaving icy goose pimples as it passed my
thighs and pricked its way up the length of my spine.  My heart crashed
against my ribs and beat so noisily that I thought surely it would wake
Uncle Calvin.  I placed both hands on my chest and pressed hard to
muffle the noise.  All strength, however, had gone from my arms.  They
dropped limply and helplessly to my sides.  are you sure you didn't
sell it to somebody"?

The click of a light switch echoed through the hall.  Mama had gone to
bed.

I was alone with him.

Suddenly Uncle Calvin stopped snoring, stirred violently and flopped
over on his side to face me.  I stopped breathing.  One cold gray eye
was open.  It stared straight at me.

I turned away quickly.  My knees buckled.  I reached out for the desk
and steadied myself, afraid to look back at the bed.  I tried to
breathe.

His snoring started up again.  Cautiously, I stole a glance at him.
His eyelid was dropping slowly over the cold gray eye.  that's funny...
I know we had one box left.... The wild pounding inside my body and the
howling wind outside set up a roar that almost split my head wide open.
I had to get out of that room.  I didn't know why--not exactly.  But I
had to get out.  A terrible thing was crashing around in my brain,
banging crazily, screaming to get free.  It didn't matter what it was.
I had to get out... I had to get out... I had.... Somehow I made it to
the door, flipped off the light and stumbled out into the hall.  The
darkness outside felt good.  As my eyes adjusted, the dim glow from
Tad's night light framed the doorway and drew me to it as if a hand
were reaching out and pulling me along.

Inside, I closed the door carefully, collapsed against it and let go.
My breath escaped in big, jagged gusts that racked me down to the
bottom of my feet.

"Tad!  Wake up!"  I whispered frantically.  "Wake up!"

He didn't move.

"Tad!  Can't you hear me?  You've got to wake up."

But Tad didn't wake up.

Instead of raising my voice, I lowered it; instead of pouncing onto the
bed and shaking him, I sank into the chair by the desk and buried my
face in my arms.  I breathed his name down onto the wooden surface.

"Tad--Tad--please wake up, Tad!  Please, please!"

After a time--maybe a minute, maybe an hour, maybe two-I raised my head
and studied the door.  My pajamas and all my clothes were in that room
with Uncle Calvin, and nothing in the whole wide world could drag me
back in there to retrieve them.  I had on nothing but my baggy,
scratchy union suits.

I cracked the door open and peeked into the hall.  All was dark and all
was quiet, except the wind.  It beat against the house as if trying to
get inside.  I could barely make out the

hissing of the gas heater in the dining room.  Papa groaned and turned
in his bed.

Tad was sleeping quietly.

I stood for a long time without the foggiest idea of what to do.  I
closed the door softly, opened it to look out again, then closed it
once more.  For no clear reason, and without a clear thought to guide
me, I crossed the room and crawled into bed with Tad.

I didn't know what else to do.

I turned my face to the wall so that when Mama came in to cover Tad,
she would think I was asleep and maybe leave the middle of a nightmare
and dreaming about a new box of aspirin on my desk?  But if this was
not a nightmare.... Many times when Ollie was in the prescription room
talking to Papa and the telephone rang up front, I had seen him rush
out and make his way up behind the wrapping counter, past the cold
remedies, maybe grabbing a box of 4-Way Cold Tablets or a jar of Vicks
en route to the front.  Many times I had seen Papa and Tad, and even
Mama, take the same route.  Each time, past the cold remedies. I had
done it myself.  Anybody in the prescription room who wanted to go up
front would go past the cold remedies.  Anybody.

Including Uncle Calvin.

The thought hit me like a dash of ice water.

And that was not all that hit me.  The missing keys.... , whoever
robbed the store had to use a key, Ollie had said that.

The terrible weather, and Uncle Calvin riding downtown with Dr.
Beasley.... ...I told Ollie to close up early... Papa had said to
Uncle Calvin.... Uncle Calvin had robbed Papa's storel

Uncle Calvin had robbed the Drug Store--Morrison's Drug Store!  Papa's
store!  Uncle Calvin had robbed Papa's store!  Our store--Morrison's
Drug Store--his own blood brother's store!  Uncle Calvin had robbed his
own blood brother!

But I was wrong.  I had to be.  You don't steal from your brother--not
your own brother.  That was worse than stealing from the church.  Ye
tIt was too much for me to know.  I didn't want to know.  Somebody else
had to help me know.

"Tad!  Wake up!"  I cried desperately.  "Please, please wake up.  If
you'll wake up, I'll do anything you ask me to.  If you'll only--"

I stopped.  I was talking to the wall, and walls don't have ears as
people say they do.

I clinched my eyes so tightly that they burned, pretending that I had
never heard of a robbery, of Bayer Aspirin, of Uncle Calvin, of Ollie
Tabor, of Papa, of Morrison's Drug Store, of a prescription room, of a
cold-remedies shelf.  With everything in me, I tried not to know.  It
did no good.  The more I tried, the more I knew it.  And what I knew
was locked inside me.  Tad was the only person in the whole world I
could tell.  And he wouldn't wake up.

I must have dozed off.... Tad's groaning brought me to with a start. He
was tossing and making strange noises.  I turned over.  His silhouette
was dim and fuzzy against the soft night light.  I sat upright, wide
awake and alarmed.

All the cover was on my side of the bed!

Hastily, I spread the quilts over him and tucked them around his
shoulders, snug and tight.  He twisted violently and fought himself
free.

"Tad--you've got to keep the cover on!"

His body radiated heat like the kitchen oven.  I laid my palm flat on
his forehead.  His skin was ablaze.

"Tad?  Are you awake?"

He moaned.

"Tad--I didn't mean to get all the covers on my side!  Honest!  I meant
to keep you covered up--really I did!  Tad?  You got a high fever?"

He groaned deliriously.

So frightened that I couldn't think, I crawled over the foot board and
onto the floor.

"I'll go get Mama--she'll know what to--"

I turned on the light.

Mama had heard the commotion.  We collided in the doorway as she
hurried into the room tying the cord of her heavy green bathrobe around
her.  Her eyes were the size of phonograph records.

"Larry!  What are you--why aren't you--"

With one glance at Tad, she rushed to the bed and laid a palm against
his forehead, then on his cheek and neck.  Her face went white.

"Dear God!  "she breathed.

"Has he got a hundred and four degrees, Mama?"

"More than that!  Go wake Papa!"

Papa was already awake, sitting on the side of the bed, stepping into
his house slippers.  He looked up sleepily.

"What's the trouble?"

"Mama said Tad's got high fever--more than a hundred and four.  She
wants you to come--"

We found Mama sitting on the edge of the bed, stroking Tad's forehead
with one hand and holding the thermometer in his mouth with the other.
His groaning and tossing seemed worse.  She was struggling to hold the
thermometer still.

"He keeps biting it," she said, as if talking to herself.  "--I
couldn't keep it... Tad, please try to keep it in your mouth-Tad,
honey!  Don't clamp down on it--don't put it--"

She looked up at us, terror in her eyes.

"Get some water, Larry--he's burning up--"

I ran into the bathroom to fetch the water.  Papa was already there
wetting towels in the lavatory.  He stepped to one side to make room
for me.  I looked up into the mirror.  His lips were drawn tightly; the
muscles in his jaws worked busily.  His eyes were dark with worry.  I
tried to find some sign of reassurance in his expression.  None was
there.  Neither of us said a word.

I hurried back into the bedroom with the water.

"Mama, I didn't keep him covered up!"  I said.  "All the covers were on
my side."

She did not hear me.

"I was supposed to keep him covered, and I didn't."

Tad was flopping around mouthing terrible sounds, making pitiful
noises, crying out in a lonely voice.

"What's he saying?"  I cried out.

The sounds of sad, sad weeping filled the room.

"Tad!  Tad, darling!"

He let out a low scream.  My blood curdled.

"Mama!  What's he doing?"

Papa was bathing his forehead with a wet towel.

Tad screamed again.

"Mama!  What's he-"

"Dear Lord in Heaven!"  Mama murmured.  She was holding the thermometer
to the light.  "He's on fire!  Almost a hundred and six] Dear, sweet
Lord Jesus--call Dr.  Beasley-and hurry!"

Papa raced into the hall.  I could hear him jiggling the hook on the
telephone and shouting for the operator.

"Run chip some ice, Larry," Mama said urgently.  "Fill up a pan with
ice--please, hurry!  And see if Papa's got hold of Dr.  Beasley yet!
Tad--darling, it'll be all right... all right...."

The top of the old brown icebox was too high for me to reach.  I pulled
up a chair and climbed onto it.  The heavy hinged lid crashed back
against the wall.  Grappling around

the sides of the cold block of ice, I found the pick and blindly
jabbed and stabbed.

"I didn't keep him covered up," I sobbed.  "I was supposed to--and I
didn't.  I didn't!  I didn't!  It was all my fault--"

"Don't worry about it."

Papa was standing behind me.

"I didn't keep him-"

Gently he lifted me out of the chair and set me onto the cold line
oleum

"It was my fault, Papa.  I didn't keep him covered--"

"Let me have it," he said softly.  "I'll do it."

I handed him the ice pick.  Through eyes that burned with tears, I
could barely make out his face.

13.

We sat by Tad's bed all night, just the three of us-Mama, Papa and
I--they in their bathrobes and I in my union suits.  Over and over
again, they insisted that I go to bed.

"You'll be worn out tomorrow," they said.

"So will you," I replied.

"We don't have to sit around in school all day."

I ignored their pleas and stayed where I was, at the foot of Tad's bed
in the hard-bottomed chair I had shoved across the room from the desk.
How could they possibly worry about me at such a time?  What difference
could it possibly make whether I stayed awake in school tomorrow or
fell out into the aisle from lack of sleep?

"You'd better put on your bathrobe," Mama said.  "You'll take cold like
that."

"Wouldn't you like some coffee, Mother?"  Papa asked her.

"I'd rather you'd stay here than go off into the kitchen to make it."
She turned her brown eyes on him and tried to smile.  "You must be dead
on your feet, too," she said.  "Why don't you stretch out and try to
relax for a few minutes?"

"Don't worry about me," Papa said in his raspy-soft voice.  "You're the
one that ought to stretch out.  Why don't you lie down there by Tad for
a few minutes and rest your back?"

She shook her head and turned back to Tad.

I don't know how many pieces people can divide them

selves into.  Plenty, I guess.  A heart must be made of some magic
material that stretches and stretches and keeps on stretching while you
load it with worry about one thing and still have enough room left to
worry about another and another and still another.

While the white-haired Dr.  Beasley went about his examination, we
studied his face for signs of hope or signals of alarm, trying
desperately to interpret the set of his lips, the businesslike
expression of his eyes, and the deliberate, sure movement of his hands.
After what seemed like forever, he took the stethoscope from his ears
and let it dangle against his chest.

"Sounds like pneumonia," he said quietly.

None of us stirred.

Walking to the window, he raised the shade, cupped his hands around his
eyes and peered out into the darkness.  The wind had not let up.

"I like to get him to the hospital where we can look after him--but not
in this weather."

He turned back to us.

"You'll have to take care of him here.  I'll tell you what to do."

Mama sat frozen to the edge of her chair.  She did not blink an eyelid.
Papa stood behind her, one hand on her shoulder.  His grip tightened.

"Of course, I can't be completely sure without X rays," the doctor went
on.  "But I'm ninety-nine per cent sure.  I've seen enough of it to
know."

He wrote out a prescription and handed it to Papa with a few
explanations and questions.  He gave Mama a box of white capsules from
his black bag and told her how to force one down Tad's throat every so
often without fail and how to get his fever down with wet towels.

"It's started down now," he said.  "Slowly, but it's coming on down.
Just keep on with the wet towels."

He took out his watch from his vest pocket, opened its case and studied
it for a moment.

"I wish I could stay," he said, "but I've got surgery at eight in the
morning, and I didn't get much sleep last night.  You can make out,
though."

"How bad is it, Doctor?"  asked Papa, unnerved and trying not to show
it.

The doctor took his yellow wool scarf from under his hat on the desk
and wrapped it around his neck.

"He's a pretty sick boy, John.  Pretty sick.  We're going to have to be
real careful--real, real careful."

He reached for his overcoat.  Papa jumped to help him.

"The immediate danger is the temperature," he went on.  "It's too
high--but it's on its way down.  His breathing is not good, but I've
treated cases where it was worse--and successfully, too.  It's bad
enough, though, and you might as well know it."

He gave Mama a gentle pat on the shoulder.

"But let's take one thing at a time," he said.  "Let's see what we can
do about getting his temperature down first.  These wet towels are
helping."

Mama had moved to the edge of the bed and was bathing Tad's face.

"Do you think you can make out all right, Gladys?"  Dr.  Beasley
asked.

She nodded without looking around.  I don't think she was so much as
breathing.

"Keep taking his temperature now, and if it starts back up--or if it
stops declining--call me again, and I'll come back.  If we get it down
to around a hundred and one or something like that, that's about as
much as we can hope for at the moment.  Those capsules will help."

He buttoned his overcoat up to his neck and drew on his gloves.

"I'm real sorry about the weather," he apologized.

This wasn't real.  This wasn't actually happening.  Nothing --not the
people, not their voices, not their words, not their grim
faces--nothing was matching the awful picture I had been carrying
around in my mind all my life.  Pneumonia,

scarlet fever, diphtheria--the Unholy Three--and the worst of these
was pneumonia, the nearest, the most threatening, the easiest to catch,
the killer that lurked out of sight, just around the corner, ready to
pounce.  I had always supposed that if it ever did strike, it would
come crashing in, loud and ugly, a monster with horns and tail,
spouting fire, killing everything on sight.  I didn't know that a
person could catch pneumonia and still go on looking like the same
person with the same broad shoulders, with the same broken nose, with
the same blond hair, with the same fair skin.  I had no idea that when
pneumonia struck Mama could still go on being Mama, sitting on the edge
of the bed, bathing Tad's hot face, brushing his hair back from his
forehead, speaking low and soft to him as if he were a baby.  I could
never have predicted that Papa would still have the will power and the
strength to stand on his two feet and help Dr.  Beasley with his coat,
to walk to the door with him, to re-enter the room, to talk to Mama and
to me in his normal, everyday, soft reedy voice.  I was stunned beyond
all belief that while Tad lay sick with pneumonia, I could go right on
being Larry Morrison, that all of us could go right on being us.

After Dr.  Beasley had gone, Papa went to put on his clothes.

"I'd better get on down to the store and make up the prescription," he
said, tearing his eyes away from Tad.  "Will you both be all right?"

Mama nodded.

He turned to go.  She followed him with her eyes.  You could tell that
she would have given all she possessed to keep him there, if keeping
him there would have made any sense.

We heard the kitchen door slam shut and the screen door on the back
porch squeak as it opened and then closed with a thud.  We heard the
up-and-down grinding of the car engine as it turned over and over and
over until it caught.  We heard it sputter and cough through the
sleeping

neighborhood like a series of small explosions.  All else was quiet. 
I realized then that the wind had stopped blowing.  Across the still,
cold night, the shifting of gears as Papa rounded the corner off Hobbs
onto Tenth sounded like the last and only sound on earth.

I sat at the foot of the bed and Mama sat on the edge, both of us
working to keep the covers on Tad.  He was quieter now, but he
continued to toss.

Eventually he lay still.  We listened in terrible suspense to his
hoarse breathing.

"Do you want me to chip some more ice?"  I asked, only to break the
awful silence.  The pan was still half full.

"No--there's enough."

She regarded me with weary concern.

"You ought to put on your bathrobe if you're going to stay up," she
said.  "You'll take cold like that."

"I'm all right," I said, not reminding her of how many times she had
told me the same thing.

"And those union suits!"  She smiled weakly.  "I wonder what Dr.
Beasley thought about your running around barefooted in that long
underwear."

I didn't care.  Neither did she.  Not really.

We sat in silence waiting for Papa to come home.  Whatever was
happening to Tad--to us--would be easier somehow if we had Papa to help
us face it.  I listened to the night, waiting for the sounds of our car
to turn off Main Street onto Tenth, to slow down in front of the house,
to turn the corner on Hobbs, to pick up just enough speed to get it
along the high board fence and into the garage on the alley.  I
listened and I waited.  Then when the screen door squeaked and the
kitchen door slammed shut, the noise startled me.  I had not heard our
car at all.

With Papa there once more, Mama relaxed ever so slightly.  He took off
his overcoat and hung it on the bed post.

"We'll need some water," he said.

"I'll get it," I offered.

"--and a teaspoon."

I ran out into the kitchen.  The linoleum was cold on my feet.

The three of us sat, waited and watched the night away, unaware that
darkness had passed until the dull amber of Tad's night light lost
itself in the early gray of morning.  Papa raised the window shade. 
The outlines of Greggs' house emerged silent, still and cold against
the early light.  Out somewhere a rooster crowed.  Over on the highway,
a truck ground to a halt at the intersection and started up again.

Mama took Tad's temperature once more.

"It's still a hundred and one," she said.

"Dr.  Beasley said that was low enough for the time being," Papa
reminded her.

"I know, but his breathing is so weak."  She laid an ear close to his
mouth.

"It's the congestion.  Dr.  Beasley told us that."

"I can hardly hear him."

"He doesn't have any strength--the fever sapped it away."

"Is he better?"  My own voice was distant and strange.

"Let's hope so," Mama murmured.  "Let's hope and pray that he is."

We went back to our watching.

The sun came up over Greggs' house and struck Tad full in the face.  He
didn't look sick at all.  His hair, slightly damp around the edges and
pushed back from his forehead, his broken nose with the hump that
seemed larger when he lay on his back, his mouth partly open, and even
the crooked position in which he lay in the bed, were no different than
they ever were on any regular morning when Mama or Papa stood over him,
threatening him and coaxing him out of bed to get himself ready for
school.

Papa hurried to the window and drew the shade.

In the next room, Uncle Calvin coughed.

Mama raised her head with a jerk.  Papa's face changed suddenly.

We had forgotten that a person named Calvin Morrison ever existed.

"Larry, you've just got to go to bed for a little while, honey," Mama
said, her voice strained.  "You won't be able to stay awake in school
tomorrow--or today, I guess it is now."

" I'm not going to school today.  I've got to stay.... "

"You'll be better off at school...."

Her voice was fading, fading, fading... she raised it and shouted
across the widening distance... I strained to make out what she was
saying... I rubbed my eyes to steady her swimming, misty figure... I
can't hear you, Mama... can't go to school... to stay... here... you'
II be better off... here... school... When I awoke, mrs Gregg was
standing over the bed looking down at me with a strange expression in
her eyes that I had never seen before.  She must have been standing
there for hours, waiting for me to wake up.

"How did I get in this bed?"  I asked.

"Your daddy put you in their room when you fell asleep," she said.  She
was smiling, but it was not her regular, warm, friendly smile.  This
one was troubled.  It meant something unusual.  It was forced.

"But I didn't want to go to sleep--I didn't mean to.  I was looking
after Tad."

Throwing back the covers, I jumped out onto the floor and ran for the
door.

"Larry?"

mrs Gregg's voice was neither commanding nor urgent, yet it stopped me
in my tracks.

"Where is-"

"Larry--come back," she said gently.  "Please--just for a minute."

The muffled sound of sobbing came from somewhere out in the hall.

"Who's crying?"  I asked, trying to make sense of mrs

Gregg's presence, of the clock on Papa's bureau that somehow said
twelve-thirty, of the unfamiliar movement of feet in the hall, of the
sun that was now out of sight above the house.

mrs Gregg was holding my red plaid bathrobe limply in her hand.

"Put this on," she said, holding the garment out to me.

"Where's Mama?"

"The doctor gave her some pills.  She's resting in your room."

"What did she leave Tad for?"

Her troubled smile disappeared.  She swallowed.  Her plump, freckled
face paled.

"Tad... Tad passed away, Larry..."

"Passed away?  Where--"

"He... he... died...."

"Who died?"

She lifted the bathrobe helplessly.  "My brother, Tad?"

She nodded.  Her eyes were wet to overflowing.

"No, he didn't," I said quickly, shaking my head.  I waited for her to
agree.  She held out her hand instead.

"No he didn't," I repeated, shaking my head again.  "No he did not he
did not I know he did not Tad didn't die he didn't die he didn't he
didn't HE DIDN'T DIE!  You're making it up--"

"Darling, you don't know how much I wish you were right."

"You're making it up!"  I screamed.  "You're telling a lie-- a big
lie--you're trying to scare me--you're making it all up!  I'm going to
see--"

But I did not move.

"Put on your bathrobe, Larry," she pleaded.  "Please, put it on.  The
house is full of people, and you can't run around in those awful union
suits."

"Where's Papa?"

"He's in-there."

I ran into the hall.

"Tad?  Papa?  Mama?  mrs Gregg told me-"

The door to Tad's room was closed.  Blindly I threw my weight against
it.  It wouldn't give.  Somebody reached over my shoulder and turned
the knob.  Vaguely, I recognized Uncle Calvin's hairless hand.

The door gave and crashed against the wall inside.

Tad's bed was empty.

Papa sat in the chair by the desk, motionless.  His big face was a
mask.  His eyes were dull and unseeing.

"Papa?"

He stirred and turned his head.

"Larry--I wanted to call you--"

"Papa?  mrs Gregg said-"

"I wanted to call you--but it happened so quick--it happened so
fast--"

His voice broke.  He brushed a hand across his eyes.

"It happened so quick--so quick--I wanted to call you, but-"

I rushed into the room and stood helplessly before him.  Reaching out,
he took my hand and pulled me to him.  I fell into his lap.

Instinctively, I knew that ten was too old to sit in your daddy's lap,
but it didn't matter.  Had there been a hundred empty chairs in the
room, I couldn't have sat in one of them.  Not one.  Papa's lap was the
only place in the whole world.  There wasn't anywhere else.  Nowhere at
all.

14.

They stood around uneasily.  They leaned against walls.  They sat
nervously on chairs.  They whispered.  They talked in low monotones.
They stepped aside to let each other pass.  They greeted one another
with solemn nods.  They milled about, but they couldn't leave, not
until a decent interval had passed.  Not until their respects had been
paid in full.

A crushing heaviness hung over the place.  At moments there was no
sound but the shuffling of feet, the squeaking of a shoe, a restrained
cough, the timid opening of a door, a lady's sniffling, the creaking of
a chair, a man's nose blowing.  The sick, sweet smell of flowers
floated out of the living room into all parts of the house.  It clung
to the walls, to the curtains, to the furniture, to the Sunday clothes
people had on.

I wandered from room to room, my collar scratching my neck, my shoes
pinching my feet, and my Sunday pants binding me like a bandage.  I
wandered up and down the hall, in and out the dining room, the kitchen,
Papa and Mama's room, my room, onto the back porch, through the hall
and out onto the front porch again, then back inside.  I stayed away
from Tad's room, though.  And the living room.  That's where they said
Tad was.

Aunts, uncles and distant cousins with familiar names but strange faces
tried to make me remember long-ago visits,

long-dead relatives and favorite family sayings.  They compared my age
and my size to their own sons and daughters, and decided, depending on
who was talking, that I was a Morrison through and through, or the
spitting image of all the Lawtons.  Grown people squeezed my arm,
patted my head, asked how I felt and knew it wasn't true when I said
fine.  They invited me to go home with them to rest a while or to play
outside in their yard, but I couldn't leave.

They didn't understand how it was.  They couldn't possibly realize that
while I looked on, home was changing into something strange and
frightening and how I had to stay and grip it tightly lest it get away
from me altogether.  People I had known all my life--Ollie Tabor, mr
Gregg, mr Castleberry, mrs Burns, Brother Wallace--with their white
faces, their stumbling, well-meant words, only made things more unreal.
Mama's eyes, red and swollen from hours of weeping, picked me out of
the milling, uncomfortable crowd and watched me with longing and
anxiety.  Her voice, hollow and unnatural from endless talk with
friends who could think of nothing to say, spoke to me in words that
were not hers.  I wanted to talk to her, and I tried, but the women
sitting on the edge of the bed and occupying all the chairs expected me
to say something sensible, something important, and I knew nothing to
fit that description.  I only wanted to talk to Mama, and to her it
would not have mattered had I said nothing.  Her friends, however,
expected more than nothing.  Silence would not do.  Mama needed me, and
I needed her, but her friends were keeping us apart.  So we gazed
across the crowded rooms at each other in silence, the dry lump in my
throat so big that I could hardly utter a sound.  My heart cried out to
her so loudly that she must have heard what it was saying.

The men drinking coffee in the kitchen stopped talking when I entered
the room.  They stepped aside and waited for Papa and me to say
whatever had to be said between us.  Papa could not break down and cry
in front of his friends

as Mama could and did.  Instead, he was expected to talk about crops
and business and hard times, because his friends knew no other subjects
to talk about, and his duty was to reply to whatever they said.
Watching Papa not cry in front of his friends made me sadder than
watching Mama when she did.  The lump got bigger and drier and all but
choked off my breath.  The hurt, bewildered expression in his eyes, and
the firm, determined set of his chin that, because he was a grown man,
he must not let quiver, made me want to run away to myself and cry for
a week.

"You all right, Larry?"  he asked from across the room.

"Yes, sir, I guess so."

"Don't forget to spend some time with your mother," he said miserably,
knowing all the while that Mama was as shut off from me as he was and
as they were from each other.

"I won't," I said.

I walked about 055solemn vigil.  The same people who in their kindness
kept me apart from Mama and Papa just as surely and just as unknowingly
kept me apart from Tad.

Time after time I wandered to and from the kitchen through the dining
room from where I could see the thick, heavy mountain of flowers in the
living room--red, yellow, white, orange, blue, arranged in beds of
green and tied with wide ribbons--but I could not see behind them up in
the corner, around on the other side of the dining-room wall.  I could
see people standing in front of the flowers looking down, crying, and
turning away, but I could only judge what they saw by how they acted. I
kept looking for and hoping for that one chance--just a moment or an
instant--to see Tad.  The moment never came.  There were too many
people, good people, fine people, well-meaning people.  When I saw Mama
standing there looking down and crying into her handkerchief, I ran out
into the back yard and stayed until I got chilled to the bone.

Ginny Gregg came looking for me.  She asked if I didn't want to come
back indoors where it was more comfortable.

"It's not comfortable anywhere, Ginny," I said.

"I know it."

She took me by the arm and led me toward the house.  I pulled back.

"Ginny?"

I looked up at her to see if she, too, was different.  She was not,
except that her fat, round face was pale and no longer wrinkled by
smiles.  Not any more.  Ginny was real, though.  She was familiar.  Or
maybe it was the mulberry tree and our back yard and our screened
porch, or the lawn mower and the stack of window screens under the
house, or our garage and the top of Greggs' house above our high board
fence.  Or maybe it was Ginny herself, alone without all those other
people and those flowers and all that whispering.

"Ginny?"

"Yes?"

"Do you think that Tad caught the--"

I stopped.  I couldn't ask the question.  Not then.

She did not prompt me.

"Larry, I don't know what to think," she said softly, her voice small
and quavering.  "I don't know what to think about anything--not any
more."

She pulled me to her.  I buried my face in her billowy side and wept
aloud.

She pressed me close.  Her immense body shook with sobs.  Ginny and I
stood shivering and crying, holding to each other for dear life, while
the cold January wind whipped about us.  Our back yard has never been
any colder.

Throughout all of it, amid all the sadness and kindness, amid the
goodness and heartbreak, there was Uncle Calvin, always Uncle Calvin,
reviewing Tad's illness for people who already knew each painful moment
by heart, not bothering to mention that he had not stirred from his bed
while Mama, Papa and I sat by Tad's side counting and measuring his
every breath, unaware that they were his last.  He cornered Ollie Tabor
only when he was sure of an audience, to clap him on the back or to
throw an arm around his shoulders, to call him "Oil," to pass off a
wisecrack as if it was their own private little joke between the best
of friends, while poor Ollie, embarrassed and bewildered by all the
attention, could only submit meekly.  He met the ladies of the church
at the kitchen door and took on too elaborately over the pies, cakes,
salads and casseroles they brought, thanking them too grandly and
complimenting them with tasteless remarks about what "good little
wives" they must be.  Like Ollie, they suffered through his attentions
and escaped as soon as they could manage it.

Every word he uttered, every expression that crossed his face, every
move that he made, was false, second-rate, second-class, and I cringed
at his presence among the good people of Wordsworth in their Sunday
clothes and Sunday manners with their best foot forward, all for us.

Once when I was threading my way through a clutter of people at the
front door, a hand reached out to grasp my shoulder.  I didn't have to
look up to know that it was his.

"Oh, here you are!"  he said in a syrupy, sickly voice.  "How's the
boy, Larry?"

I wrenched myself free and fled to my room without replying or
apologizing for stumbling over somebody's feet close by.

I was ashamed of him.  It was just that simple.

P. R. Burns stayed at home.  His mother thought he would only be in the
way, but she said he would see me later, at the church or at the
cemetery or maybe afterwards.  To be truthful, I did not miss him,
because the occasion seemed to be for grown people, not for
ten-year-old boys who could not sit or stand still.  Pete came, though,
and Rosalie Wilkins and Billy Matthews and all the other high-school
kids.  They streamed in the front door and then out again, blowing
their noses and wiping their eyes.

Then somehow it ended.

mrs Gregg helped me on with Tad's hand-me-down overcoat.

"It's time to leave for the church," she said as she pushed me gently
toward the front door.

Someone held the door open for me, and I walked out onto the front
porch into the cold January sunlight.  The members of the Wordsworth
High School football team stood on either side of the steps, lined up
like soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, waiting for Tad to come out.
Silent, grave and tight-lipped, they waited, bareheaded, neckties
flapping in the wind, obviously wishing that they could be miles away,
but aware that only time, not distance, could separate them from what
they had to do.  People stood about on the sidewalk, on the grass, out
at the curb, watching the front door.  Some were climbing into their
automobiles.  Two or three men stood on the other side of Greggs'
driveway, a respectable distance from the house, and smoked cigarettes.
Only

later--much later--maybe the next day or the next week, I recalled
seeing mr Schmidt on the edge of the crowd, hat in hand, standing
silently and full of respect like the others.

Ill at ease and uncertain, I studied the dark floral spray that hung by
the front door.  Even the lavender ribbon and spots of color among the
foliage were not enough to brighten nor liven it.  A car drove past the
house slowly.  The driver looked curiously out the window.  He picked
up speed as he went on out Tenth Street.

The screen door opened.  Mama and Papa came outside.

Suddenly, I didn't care who watched and heard.  I threw myself between
them.

"Do we have to go?"  I cried.

I could feel them trembling, both of them.

"I'm afraid so, Larry," said Papa.  "I'm afraid we do."

"But I didn't get to..."

"Didn't get to what?"  Mama's voice still had that hollow ring.

"-to see Tad."

"What did you say, Larry?"  asked Papa.

"You mean--why not, Larry?"  she asked.  "Why not?  Why, darling?"

"There were too many people..."

"You mean you didn't see him at all?"

"No, ma'am."

"Oh!  Oh-Larry!  Why didn't you tell us?"

"I don't know.  I kept thinking I'd get to see him."

She was bending down searching my face now.  "But why didn't you
mention it?"  she insisted.  "Why?"

"There were so many people.  I kept hoping they'd all--"

Mama looked up helplessly at Papa.  He looked down at the two of us,
his eyes misty.  Mama put her arms around me and hugged me close.

"Oh, darling--and you didn't get to see him at all!  I had no idea...
no idea."  Her voice broke and she sobbed aloud.

"I should have made sure," she said.  "I should have made sure.  He
looks so nice... so handsome... in his new suit."

"His new suit?"

"Yes-he looks so-"

"I didn't know he had a new suit," I said.  "Did you get him that one
that--"

Papa laid his hand on my head.  "It's the same one.  The same one," he
said hoarsely.

Mama released me and stood up.

"I wish I could see him in it."

She buried her face in her handkerchief and wept aloud.

As I turned to follow them down the steps, something at Castleberrys'
end of the porch caught my eye.  It darted quickly up into view then as
quickly down out of sight again.  It jumped up and down once more like
a jack-in-the-box.  My attention caught firmly now, I turned away from
Mama and Papa and walked down the porch and peered over the banisters
into the flower bed below.

It was Ozell Harris.

I vaulted the banister and landed beside him.  He stood up straight and
looked at me with the biggest pair of brown eyes you ever saw.  He
waited for me to say the first word.  I recognized Tad's old brown wool
jacket with one pocket ripped and the lining showing.  The frayed
collar, fastened with a safety pin, was drawn tightly around his black
neck.  His nose was dripping, and his thick lips were cracked and
chapped by the cold wind.  He gazed at me wide-eyed and frightened.

"Hi, Ozell," I said.  "You look cold."

"It's a hundred degrees freezin'," he said.  "The ocean and the creek
done freeze up.  The gro un it froze up, too, an' they cain't nobody
dig in it.  Them men take a big steam shovel with big, long ice picks
on it to dig you brother's grave with."

"You going to the funeral?"

"My mama done tole me I could come right heah and don't go no place
else.  She tell me not to talk to nobody 'cept you and you mama and
daddy."

"How long have you been standing out here?"

"I done been heah a mighty long time, I guess."

"Why didn't you come in the house?"

"I been waitin' for you to come out heah."

He hopped on one foot then the other and blew on his hands.

"Can't you go to the funeral, sure enough?"  I asked.

"No, man!  I cain't go to no funeral!"

"Can you wait till I get back, then?  You can go in the house where
it's warm.  We got a cabinet full of pies and cakes and all."

"I gotta go back.  We is havin' a big funeral down in the Addition," he
said.  "It be the biggest funeral anybody ever did have.  They's this
big rich man that got the sickness and died.  Ever'body is riding
around in them big, long shiny cahs and wearin' new hats.  They all
say, "Ozell Harris, you jcs' gotta go to this big funeral," and I say,
"Okay, I guess I can go, all right!"  So I guess I gotta go back."

"I've got to go, too," I said.  "Everybody's getting in the cars
now."

He busily studied the cars parked nearest us.

"Which one of them big cahs is you gonna ride in?"

"I don't know.  Whichever one Mama and Papa get in."

"If it was me, I'd ride in the biggest cah they is."

"I wish you could go with me."

"No, man!  I cain't go nowhere 'cept to that big funeral at the
Addition.  You cain't go wif me, neither.  Not you.  That rich man he
might not like it.  He don't know you.  He done tole me 'fore he died
he don't know you.  They cain't nobody go to his funeral 'less they
know him real good."

"I couldn't go anyway."

We stood looking at one another, unable to think of anything further to
say.  I knew lots of things to talk about, and

of course, he never ran down, but we both know that this was not the
time nor the occasion for saying them.  We stood in silence in a
strange situation which neither of us were prepared to cope with.

I heard my name from out at the curb.

"Well-I'll see you later, Ozell."

"G'by," he said, but he did not move.

He reached down into the good pocket of his jacket.

"I done brought you sum ping he said.

He pulled out his hand and thrust it at me.  "Heah!"  he blurted out.

Then he ran with the swiftness of a jack rabbit and disappeared around
the corner of the garage into the back alley.

Into my hand he had placed a rusty length of wire, just long enough to
fit around a person's leg.

Until I got back home from the church and the cemetery and the crowds
had thinned out, that rusty piece of wire was my only touch with
reality.

15.

When Aunt Myrtle invited Uncle Calvin to go home with her after the
funeral, it was more of a command than an invitation.

"Cal, pack up your things, and I'll take you home with me and put you
to work around the house," she said, "John and Gladys and Larry have
some hard adjustments to make, and they don't need you around. Besides,
I hate that long drive back to Waco all by myself."

Nobody, including Uncle Calvin, ever argued with Aunt Myrtle.  She took
no nonsense from anybody, which was probably why Uncle Calvin didn't
hang around Waco very much.  She didn't mind chasing him away from her
house when she got tired of him and his loafing, and now she was
chasing him away from ours.  Her stern manner and gruff voice had
always filled me more with awe than affection, but after the way she
sized up the situation at our house and went about improving it, I had
to take a second and kinder look at her.  If she had any work to be
done around the house, she could hire it done.  We knew it, and Uncle
Calvin knew it.  Aunt Myrtle wasn't fooling anybody.

So he went home with her, leaving us alone to put the pieces of
ourselves back together again.  In the confusion and flurry of people
coming and going, I didn't see them leave.

P. R. Burns came over two days after the funeral, not acting

like himself at all.  He stood on the porch at the front door, polite
and scared, staring in open wonder past me into the hall.

"Will your mother let you come outside--yet?"

"I guess so," I said.  "I haven't asked her.  Can't you come in?"

"My mother told me not to--not if your kinfolks are still here."

"They're all gone.  Papa went back to the store today, and I'm coming
back to school tomorrow."

"Who's that I hear talking?"

"Mama and a bunch of ladies--mrs Gregg and mrs Castle berry and I don't
know who all."

He hesitated.  "Maybe I'd better not," he said.  "Why don't you come
out?"

"Well-"

I didn't know what was proper and what was improper.  Not any more. 
For the better part of a week we seemed to have been living by a new
set of rules, rules that were unwritten and unsaid, but rules,
nevertheless. How long they were to remain in effect, I had no way of
knowing.

Barging into the bedroom to ask Mama certainly didn't seem proper.  Not
in front of her friends who were still sitting around talking in the
same low tones.  On the other hand, I was far from certain how it would
look to go outside and try to enjoy myself, if that were possible.
Everybody kept talking about Time.  We had to give ourselves Time. Time
would heal all wounds.  Time would right all wrongs.  Time would mend
all hearts.  Time would make all things normal again.  Just how much
Time, no one seemed to know.  Whether enough Time had gone by for me to
even want to go outside and play, I could not judge.  But I did want to
go.

Outside Mama's door, I stood in the hall and caught mrs Gregg's eye.  I
motioned for her to come out.

"P.  R. Burns wants me to come outside," I whispered.  "Do you think it
would be all right?"

She gave me a smile.  It was warm and friendly again.  "Why, certainly
it will be all right!"  she said in her normal voice.  "It's what you
need.  Go on and have a good time."

"Is that you, Larry?"  Mama called from inside.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Come on in.  You've been so quiet, I thought maybe you were asleep."

I stepped into the doorway.  Mama had been in bed ever since the
funeral, crying more than sleeping, even after taking the nerve pills
that Dr.  Beasley had prescribed for her.  Her face was sallow and
pinched, and her eyes were shaded by deep, dark-blue circles that added
years to her appearance.  Propped up against two pillows, she looked
twice as sick as Tad had and him with pneumonia.  mrs Gregg explained
that P. R. was waiting at the front door.

Mama managed a weak smile and said, "Go on out and play--and have a
good time.  You've been cooped up long enough."

I turned to go.

"Button up good," she called.

"I've just got to get up from here and start doing things for myself,"
I heard her say.  "This is awful for me to..."

The January wind smelled good, and it tasted even better.  As fresh as
a drink of water and as sharp as a sword, I liked its sting as it
whipped my cheeks, slashed into my eyes and cut through my clothes.  I
breathed deeply and was cleansed inside by icy, delicious, healing,
healthy air.

P. R. wasn't himself at first.  A little too polite, a little too
respectful, a little too anxious to please, he carefully avoided any
mention of the funeral until I brought it up myself.  Then he said it
was the saddest funeral he had ever attended in all his life.  I asked
him if he cried, and he said he did.

"I just couldn't help it," he said.  "I might not of cried at all if I
hadn't looked at Pete sitting down there with those other high-school
kids.  He doesn't know I saw him, but he

took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes twice.  So I just went
ahead and cried."

After that, things were easier between us.

We crossed streets, climbed fences, jumped shrubbery and roamed
aimlessly down Main Street past the Presbyterian Church, past the
courthouse, the Texan Theater, around back of the Drug Store to
Phillips 66, down the alley behind the hospital past the emergency
entrance, past the fire station to the railroad tracks where we walked
crossties past the jail.  For long stretches of time things were like
they used to be.  Then suddenly, one of the high-school kids wearing a
W sweater with gold stripes on the sleeve would cross the street up
ahead, or I'd accidentally look up to see "BEAT ELKINS" scrawled on the
side of the water tower, or worst of all, I'd get a glimpse of Rosalie
Wilkins' empty front porch, and suddenly I would get swooped up by
sadness all over again.  Those flowers, those people tiptoeing and
whispering, the Wordsworth High School football team lined up along our
front walk, the crowded church, the bared heads at the cemetery, Mama
and Papa holding on to one another and to me--all those things would
come back into focus as clear and real as the ground under my feet.
Then I'd get this huge, over-all aching deep inside me unlike any ache
I had ever known.  It was more than pain, and I think more than
sadness.  It was a kind of longing or wistful yearning, and it had so
much good wrapped up in it that I couldn't be certain when it hurt and
when it grieved.

Suddenly there was nowhere left to go, nothing left to do, and not
enough daylight left, even if there had been.

"I've got to go home," P. R. said.  "I was late for supper last night,
and I'll catch the dickens if I'm late again."  Almost from the moment
we stepped down off our front porch, I realized that we would reach
this very point, but I had put off thinking about it.  Now here it was.
I tried to stall it off.

"Can't you come home and eat supper with me?"  I asked.

"Gosh, no!  I'd really get in trouble if I did that--especially with
things like they are."

"We've got lots to eat.  The ladies from the church still bring stuff
every day, but nobody eats any of it.  We've got pies and cakes and
cookies that nobody touches.  They're just sitting there in the
kitchen."

P. R."s interest was aroused.

"What kind of cake?"  he asked.

"I don't know--coconut, I guess.  Chocolate, too.  I remember one
chocolate cake on the kitchen table.  Maybe two."

P. R. struggled with himself.  "How come you didn't tell me about it
when I was at your house?"

"You wouldn't come in."

"You could of told me on the front porch."

"I didn't think about it.  Can you come?"

"You ought to of told me, Larry.  It's not fair."

I didn't want to go home.  I hadn't reckoned with going home.  Papa
would be coming in for supper soon, and I didn't know how that would
be--not now--nor did I know how it would be for me to walk into the
house again, either.  Both of us had stepped outside and beyond the
boundaries of all the sadness, and now we had to go back.  It was
harder than staying there in the first place.

"You ought to quit begging me, Larry.  You'll just get me in
trouble."

"You want me to go home with you while you ask your mother?"

He considered that and decided against it.

"It wouldn't do any good," he said.  "She almost didn't let me come
over at all.  She was afraid I'd get in somebody's way."

"You won't get in anybody's way."

"She thinks I will, though.  I guess she wants me to wait until
everybody quits being so sad."

"I don't know when that'll be.  Mama stays in bed and

cries, and Papa stares at things without seeing them.  But we could go
in my room and close the door where it won't be so sad."

"We couldn't laugh and talk loud, though."

"We might."

He stared at me for a moment, wavering.  Then he got hold of himself
and shook his head.

"I gotta go, Larry.  Really I have."

"Well-okay."

"I wish I could, but you know...."

"Yeah, I know.  So long, P. R."

I watched him wander off down the sidewalk.  Had he asked me to go home
with him, I would have run all the way and got there ahead of him.

"I'll see you tomorrow," he called back over his shoulder.

"P.  R.?"

He turned and waited.

"Nothing--I guess," I said.  "I'll see you at school."

He disappeared around the corner of the Presbyterian Church.

The street lights blinked on just as I turned off Main Street onto
Tenth.  The lights were on in Greggs' living room, and through the
windows I could see Ginny practicing her piano lessons.  Across the
yard, Tad's windows were dark, cold and silent, the lonesome st windows
in all the world in that in between time when it's neither night nor
day.

I walked past our front steps, around the corner of the porch on
Castleberrys' end, down the side of the house.  Through the kitchen
window, I could see mrs Gregg's head bending over the sink.  Down
alongside the high board fence, past the garage, I crossed the alley
and the next street and the next alley and the next street, on and on
to where the houses petered out, and there was nothing left but flat
land, mesquite trees and sky.  I stopped and watched a star twinkle
into place.  The sky grew dark, and I turned back towards home.  The
houses along the way were bright with warm ness

and friendliness.  People were gathering for supper, probably laughing
and talking and discussing little nothings.  My steps lagged when the
light from our own kitchen came into view.  Not even the new chill on
the early darkness could hurry me along.

I kicked a loose plank back into place on our fence and turned in at
the side gate.  Papa drove into the garage just as I latched the gate
behind me.  I stood under the mulberry tree, shivering and waiting.  He
didn't see me.

"Hi, Papa."

"Oh, Larry?  What're you doing out here?"

"I just got home--I've been out playing with P. R."

"That's nice.  I guess it felt good to get outside in the air again."

Then neither of us could think of anything else to say.  Time passed in
silence.  We did not move.  He finally interrupted the quiet.

"I guess we'd better go inside," he said.  His voice was scarcely more
than a whisper.

"I guess so."

He went up the steps, opened the screen door and stepped into a
rectangle of light that fell through the kitchen door onto the back
porch.

I came up behind him.  His hand was on the doorknob.  He hesitated for
a moment.  Then with sudden determination, he opened the door and
stepped into the kitchen.

I followed him inside.

16.

1 The three of us tried to feel our way around again.  But where do you
start?  What do you do?  There's more to it than simply going to bed at
night and getting up the next morning, tearing a page off the calendar
and doing it all over again.  Yet, when you come right down to it,
that's all there is to it.  Papa went to work and came home.  Mama
cooked the meals and we ate them.  Of course, we didn't enjoy the
routine, but we followed it.  What else could we do?

Cora came on Monday before I left for school.  She let herself in
through the back door with scarcely a sound.  Mama discovered her
tiptoeing around the kitchen clearing off the breakfast dishes as if
they were loaded with nitroglycerine.

"I called you on the phone, Miz Morrison," she said.  "On the day of
you sadness, I called up, but some lady say you ain't able to do no
talkin'."

Mama tried to remember.  "They didn't tell me--"

"I tole her I could come do the cookin' and cleanin' up, and she say
they is plenty people around doin' it."

"That was thoughtful of you, Cora.  I wish you had just come on,
anyway."

"I think maybe 'bout goin' to the funeral, but nobody tell me I can, so
I think maybe I come tend the house."

"I'm so sorry, Cora--I should have got in touch with you.  I can't
think of anyone we'd rather have had at the church."