Norton went off like a mechanical toy, pushed in the right direction. He made a large greasy sandwich with ham hanging out the sides of it and poured out a glass of milk. Then he returned to the room with the glass of milk in one hand and the sandwich in the other.
Johnson was leaning back regally against the pillow. “Thanks, waiter,” he said and took the sandwich.
Norton stood by the side of the bed, holding the glass.
The boy tore into the sandwich and ate steadily until he finished it. Then he took the glass of milk. He held it with both hands like a child and when he lowered it for breath, there was a rim of milk around his mouth. He handed Norton the empty glass. “Go get me one of them oranges in there, waiter,” he said hoarsely.
Norton went to the kitchen and returned with the orange.
Johnson peeled it with his fingers and let the peeling drop in the bed. He ate it slowly, spitting the seeds out in front of him. When he finished, he wiped his hands on the sheet and gave Norton a long appraising stare. He appeared to have been softened by the service. “You’re his kid all right,” he said. “You got the same stupid face.”
The child stood there stolidly as if he had not heard.
“He don’t know his left hand from his right,” Johnson said with a hoarse pleasure in his voice.
The child cast his eyes a little to the side of the boy’s face and looked fixedly at the wall.
“Yaketty yaketty yak,” Johnson said, “and never says a thing.”
The child’s upper lip lifted slightly but he didn’t say anything.
“Gas,” Johnson said. “Gas.”
The child’s face began to have a wary look of belligerence. He backed away slightly as if he were prepared to retreat instantly. “He’s good,” he mumbled. “He helps people.”
“Good!” Johnson said savagely. He thrust his head forward.
“Listen here,” he hissed, “I don’t care if he’s good or not. He ain’t right!”
Norton looked stunned.
The screen door in the kitchen banged and some one entered. Johnson sat forward instantly. “Is that him?” he said.
“It’s the cook,” Norton said. “She comes in the afternoon.”
Johnson got up and limped into the hall and stood in the kitchen door and Norton followed him.
The colored girl was at the closet taking off a bright red raincoat. She was a tall light-yellow girl with a mouth like a large rose that had darkened and wilted. Her hair was dressed in tiers on top of her head and leaned to the side like the Tower of Pisa.
Johnson made a noise through his teeth. “Well look at Aunt Jemima,” he said.
The girl paused and trained an insolent gaze on them.
They might have been dust on the floor.
“Come on,” Johnson said, “let’s see what all you got besides a nigger.” He opened the first door to his right in the hall and looked into a pink-tiled bathroom. “A pink can!” he murmured.
He turned a comical face to the child. “Does he sit on that?”
“It’s for company,” Norton said, “but he sits on it sometimes.”
“He ought to empty his head in it,” Johnson said.
The door was open to the next room. It was the room Sheppard had slept in since his wife died. An ascetic-looking iron bed stood on the bare floor. A heap of Little League baseball uniforms was piled in one corner. Papers were scattered over a large roll-top desk and held down in various places by his pipes. Johnson stood looking into the room silently. He wrinkled his nose. “Guess who?” he said.
The door to the next room was closed but Johnson opened it and thrust his head into the semi-darkness within. The shades were down and the air was close with a faint scent of perfume in it. There was a wide antique bed and a mammoth dresser whose mirror glinted in the half light. Johnson snapped the light switch by the door and crossed the room to the mirror and peered into it. A silver comb and brush lay on the linen runner. He picked up the comb and began to run it through his hair. He combed it straight down on his forehead. Then he swept it to the side, Hitler fashion.
“Leave her comb alone!” the child said. He stood in the door, pale and breathing heavily as if he were watching sacrilege in a holy place.
Johnson put the comb down and picked up the brush and gave his hair a swipe with it.
“She’s dead,” the child said.
“I ain’t afraid of dead people’s things,” Johnson said. He opened the top drawer and slid his hand in.
“Take your big fat dirty hands off my mother’s clothes!” the child said in a high suffocated voice.
“Keep your shirt on, sweetheart,” Johnson murmured. He pulled up a wrinkled red polka dot blouse and dropped it back. Then he pulled out a green silk kerchief and whirled it over his head and let it float to the floor. His hand continued to plow deep into the drawer. After a moment it came up gripping a faded corset with four dangling metal supporters. “Thisyer must be her saddle,” he observed.
He lifted it gingerly and shook it. Then he fastened it around his waist and jumped up and down, making the metal supporters dance. He began to snap his fingers and turn his hips from side to side. “Gonter rock, rattle and roll,” he sang. “Gonter rock, rattle and roll. Can’t please that woman, to save my doggone soul.” He began to move around, stamping the good foot down and slinging the heavy one to the side. He danced out the door, past the stricken child and down the hall toward the kitchen.
A half hour later Sheppard came home. He dropped his raincoat on a chair in the hall and came as far as the parlor door and stopped. His face was suddenly transformed. It shone with pleasure. Johnson sat, a dark figure, in a highbacked pink upholstered chair. The wall behind him was lined with books from floor to ceiling. He was reading one. Sheppard’s eyes narrowed. It was a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He was so engrossed in it that he did not look up. Sheppard held his breath. This was the perfect setting for the boy. He had to keep him here. He had to manage it somehow.
“Rufus!” he said, “it’s good to see you boy!” and he bounded forward with his arm outstretched.
Johnson looked up, his face blank. “Oh hello,” he said. He ignored the hand as long as he was able but when Sheppard did not withdraw it, he grudgingly shook it.
Sheppard was prepared for this kind of reaction. It was part of Johnson’s make-up never to show enthusiasm.
“How are things?” he said. “How’s your grandfather treating you?” He sat down on the edge of the sofa.
“He dropped dead,” the boy said indifferently.
“You don’t mean it!” Sheppard cried. He got up and sat down on the coffee table nearer the boy.
“Naw,” Johnson said, “he ain’t dropped dead. I wisht he had.”
” Well where is he?” Sheppard muttered.
“He’s gone with a remnant to the hills,” Johnson said. “Him and some others. They’re going to bury some Bibles in a cave and take two of different kinds of animals and all like that. Like Noah. Only this time it’s going to be fire, not flood.”
Sheppard’s mouth stretched wryly. “I see,” he said. Then he said, “In other words the old fool has abandoned you?”
“He ain’t no fool,” the boy said in an indignant tone.
“Has he abandoned you or not?” Sheppard asked impatiently.
The boy shrugged.
“Where’s your probation officer?”
“I ain’t supposed to keep up with him,” Johnson said.
He’s supposed to keep up with me.”
Sheppard laughed. “Wait a minute,” he said. He got up and went into the hall and got his raincoat off the chair and took it to the hall closet to hang it up. He had to give himself time to think, to decide how he could ask the boy so that he would stay. He couldn’t force him to stay. It would have to be voluntary. Johnson pretended not to like him. That was only to uphold his pride, but he would have to ask him in such a way that his pride could still be upheld. He opened the closet door and
took out a hanger. An old grey winter coat of his wife’s still hung there. He pushed it aside but it didn’t move. He pulled it open roughly and winced as if he had seen the larva inside a cocoon. Norton stood in it, his face swollen and pale, with a drugged look of misery on it. Sheppard stared at him. Suddenly he was confronted with a possibility. “Get out of there,” he said. He caught him by the shoulder and propelled him firmly into the parlor and over to the pink chair where Johnson was sitting with the encyclopedia in his lap. He was going to risk everything in one blow.
“Rufus,” he said, “I’ve got a problem. I need your help.”
Johnson looked up suspiciously.
“Listen,” Sheppard said, “we need another boy in the house.” There was a genuine desperation in his voice. “Norton here has never had to divide anything in his life. He doesn’t know what it means to share. And I need somebody to teach him. How about helping me out? Stay here for a while with us, Rufus. I need your help.” The excitement in his voice made it thin.
The child suddenly came to life. His face swelled with fury. “He went in her room and used her comb!” he screamed, yanking Sheppard’s arm. “He put on her corset and danced with Leola, he…”
“Stop’ this!” Sheppard said sharply. “Is tattling all you’re capable of? I’m not asking you for a report on Rufus’s conduct. I’m asking you to make him welcome here. Do you understand?
“You see how it is?” he asked, turning to Johnson.
Norton kicked the leg of the pink chair viciously, just missing Johnson’s swollen foot. Sheppard yanked him back.
“He said you weren’t nothing but gas!” the child shrieked.
A sly look of pleasure crossed Johnson’s face.
Sheppard was not put back. These insults were part of the boy’s defensive mechanism. “What about it, Rufus?” he said. “Will you stay with us for a while?”
Johnson looked straight in front of him and said nothing. He smiled slightly and appeared to gaze upon some vision of the future that pleased him.
“I don’t care,” he said and turned a page of the encyclopedia. “I can stand anywhere.”
“Wonderful.” Sheppard said. “Wonderful.”
“He said,” the child said in a throaty whisper, “you didn’t know your left hand from your right.”
There was a silence.
Johnson wet his finger and turned another page of the encyclopedia.
“I have something to say to both of you,” Sheppard said in a voice without inflection. His eyes moved from one to the other of them and he spoke slowly as if what he was saying he would say only once and it behooved them to listen. “If it made any difference to me what Rufus thinks of me,” he said, “then I wouldn’t be asking him here. Rufus is going to help me out and I’m going to help him out and we’re both going to help you out. I’d simply be selfish if I let what Rufus thinks of me interfere with what I can do for Rufus. If I can help a person, all I want is to do it. I’m above and beyond simple pettiness.”
Neither of them made a sound. Norton stared at the chair cushion. Johnson peered closer at some fine print in the encyclopedia. Sheppard was looking at the tops of their heads. He smiled. After all, he had won. The boy was staying. He reached out and ruffled Norton’s hair and slapped Johnson on the shoulder. “Now you fellows sit here and get acquainted,” he said gaily and started toward the door. “I’m going to see what Leola left us for supper.”
When he was gone, Johnson raised his head and looked at Norton. The child looked back at him bleakly. “God, kid,” Johnson said in a cracked voice, “how do you stand it?” His face was still with outrage. “He thinks he’s Jesus Christ!”
II
Sheppard’s attic was a large unfinished room with exposed beams and no electric light. They had set the telescope up on a tripod in one of the dormer windows. It pointed now toward the dark sky where a sliver of moon, as fragile as an egg shell, had just emerged from behind a cloud with a brilliant silver edge. Inside, a kerosene lantern set on a trunk cast their shadows upward and tangled them, wavering slightly, in the joists overhead. Sheppard was sitting on a packing box, looking through the telescope, and Johnson was at his elbow, waiting to get at it. Sheppard had bought it for fifteen dollars two days before at a pawn shop.
“Quit hoggin it,” Johnson said.
Sheppard got up and Johnson slid onto the box and put his eye to the instrument.
Sheppard sat down on a straight chair a few feet away. His face was flushed with pleasure. This much of his dream was a reality. Within a week he had made it possible for this boy’s vision to pass through a slender channel to the stars. He looked at Johnson’s bent back with complete satisfaction. The boy had on one of Norton’s plaid shirts and Some new khaki trousers he had bought him. The shoe would be ready next week. He had taken him to the brace shop the day after he came and had him fitted for a new shoe. Johnson was as touchy about the foot as if it were a sacred object. His face had been glum while the clerk, a young man with a bright pink bald head, measured the foot with his profane hands. The shoe was going to make the greatest difference in the boy’s attitude. Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes. When Norton got a new pair, he walked around for days with his eyes on his feet.
Sheppard glanced across the room at the child. He was sitting on the floor against a trunk, trussed up in a rope he had found and wound around his legs from his ankles to his knees. He appeared so far away that Sheppard might have been looking at him through the wrong end of the telescope. He had had to whip him only once since Johnson had been with them—the first night when Norton had realized that Johnson was going to sleep in his mother’s bed. He did not believe in whipping children, particularly in anger. In this case, he had done both and with good results. He had had no more trouble with Norton.
The child hadn’t shown any positive generosity toward Johnson but what he couldn’t help, he appeared to be resigned to. In the mornings Sheppard sent the two of them to the Y swimming pool, gave them money to get their lunch at the cafeteria and instructed them to meet him in the park in the afternoon to watch his Little League baseball practice. Every afternoon they had arrived at the park, shambling, silent, their faces closed each on his own thoughts as if neither were aware of the other’s existence. At least he eould be thankful there were no fights.
Norton showed no interest in the telescope. “Don’t you want to get up and look through the telescope, Norton?” he said. It irritated him that the child showed no intellectual curiosity whatsoever. “Rufus is going to be way ahead of you.”
Norton leaned forward absently and looked at Johnson’s back.
Johnson turned around from the instrument. His face had begun to fill out again. The look of outrage had retreated from his hollow cheeks and was shored up now in the caves of his eyes, like a fugitive from Sheppard’s kindness. “Don’t waste your valuable time, kid,” he said. “You seen the moon once, you seen it.”
Sheppard was amused by these sudden turns of perversity. The boy resisted whatever he suspected was meant for his improvement and contrived when he was vitally interested in something to leave the impression he was bored. Sheppard was not deceived. Secretly Johnson was learning what he wanted him to learn—that his benefactor was impervious to insult and that there were no cracks in his armor of kindness and patience where a successful shaft could be driven. “Some day you may go to the moon,” he said. “In ten years men will probably be making round trips there on schedule. Why you boys may be spacemen. Astronauts!”
“Astro-nuts,”Johnson said.
“Nuts or nauts,” Sheppard said, “it’s perfectly possible that you, Rufus Johnson, will go to the moon.”
Something in the depths of Johnson’s eyes stirred. All day his humor had been glum. “I ain’t going to the moon and get there alive,” he said, “and when I die I’m going to hell.”
“It’s at least possible to get to the moon,” Sheppard said dryly. The be
st way to handle this kind of thing was with gentle ridicule. “We can see it. We know it’s there. Nobody has given any reliable evidence there’s a hell.”
“The Bible has give the evidence,” Johnson said darkly, “and if you die and go there you burn forever.”
The child leaned forward.
“Whoever says it ain’t a hell,” Johnson said, “is contradicting Jesus. The dead are judged and the wicked are damned. They weep and gnash their teeth while they burn,” he continued, “and it’s everlasting darkness.”
The child’s mouth opened. His eyes appeared to grow hollow.
“Satan runs it,” Johnson said.
Norton lurched up and took a hobbled step toward Sheppard. “Is she there?” he said in a loud voice. “Is she there burning up?” He kicked the rope off his feet. “Is she on fire?”
“Oh my God,” Sheppard muttered. “No no,” he said, “of course she isn’t. Rufus is mistaken. Your mother isn’t anywhere. She’s not unhappy. She just isn’t.” His lot would have been easier if when his wife died he had told Norton she had gone to heaven and that some day he would see her again, but he could not allow himself to bring him up on a lie.
Norton’s face began to twist. A knot formed in his chin.
“Listen,” Sheppard said quickly and pulled the child to him, “your mother’s spirit lives on in other people and It’ll live on in you if you’re good and generous like she was.”
The child’s pale eyes hardened in disbelief.
Sheppard’s pity turned to revulsion. The boy would rather she be in hell than nowhere. “Do you understand?” he said. “She doesn’t exist.” He put his hand on the child’s shoulder. “That’s all I have to give you,” he said in a softer, exasperated tone, “the truth.”
Instead of howling, the boy wrenched himself away and caught Johnson by the sleeve. “Is she there, Rufus?” he said. “Is she there, burning up?”
Johnson’s eyes glittered. ‘Well,” he said, “she is if she was evil. Was she a whore?”
“Your mother was not a whore,” Sheppard said sharply. He had the sensation of driving a car without brakes. “Now let’s have no more of this foolishness. We were talking about the moon.”
The Complete Stories Page 51
