“You want to take it home and see if it suits you first?” the clerk murmured.
“No,” Johnson said. “I ain’t going to wear it at all.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Sheppard said, his voice rising.
“I don’t need no new shoe,” Johnson said. “And when I do, I got ways of getting my own.” His face was stony but there was a glint of triumph in his eyes.
“Boy,” the clerk said, “is your trouble in your foot or in your head?”
“Go soak your skull,” Johnson said. “Your brains are on fire.”
The clerk rose glumly but with dignity and asked Sheppard what he wanted done with the shoe, which he dangled dispiritedly by the lace.
Sheppard’s face was a dark angry red. He was staring straight in front of him at a leather corset with an artificial arm attached.
The clerk asked him again.
‘Wrap it up,” Sheppard muttered. He turned his eyes to Johnson. “He’s not mature enough for it yet,” he said. “I had thought he was less of a child.”
The boy leered. “You been wrong before,” he said.
That night they sat in the living room and read as usual.
Sheppard kept himself glumly entrenched behind the Sunday New York Times. He wanted to recover his good humor, but every time he thought of the rejected shoe, he felt a new charge of irritation. He did not trust himself even to look at Johnson. He realized that the boy had refused the shoe because he was insecure. Johnson had been frightened by his own gratitude. He didn’t know what to make of the new self he was becoming conscious of. He understood that something he had been was threatened and he was facing himself and his possibilities for the first time. He was questioning his identity. Grudgingly, Sheppard felt a slight return of sympathy for the boy. In a few minutes, he lowered his paper and looked at him.
Johnson was sitting on the sofa, gazing over the top of the encyclopedia. His expression was trancelike. He might have been listening to something far away. Sheppard watched him intently but the boy continued to listen, and did not turn his head. The poor kid is lost, Sheppard thought. Here he had sat all evening, sullenly reading the paper, and had not said a word to break the tension. “Rufus,” he said.
Johnson continued to sit, stock-still, listening.
“Rufus,” Sheppard said in a slow hypnotic voice, “you can be anything in the world you want to be. You can be a scientist or an architect or an engineer or whatever you set your mind to, and whatever you set your mind to be, you can be the best of its kind.” He imagined his voice penetrating to the boy in the black caverns of his psyche. Johnson leaned forward but his eyes did not turn. On the street a car door closed. There was a silence. Then a sudden blast from the door bell.
Sheppard jumped up and went to the door and opened it. The same policeman who had come before stood there.
The patrol car waited at the curb.
“Lemme see that boy,” he said.
Sheppard scowled and stood aside. “He’s been here all evening,” he said. “I can vouch for it.”
The policeman walked into the living room. Johnson appeared engrossed in his book. After a second he looked up with an annoyed expression, like a great man interrupted at his work.
“What was that you were looking at in that kitchen window over on Winter Avenue about a half hour ago, bud?” the policeman asked.
“Stop persecuting this boy!” Sheppard said. “I’ll vouch for the fact he was here. I was here with him.”
“You heard him,” Johnson said. “I been here all the time.”
“It ain’t everybody makes tracks like you,” the policeman said and eyed the clubfoot.
“They couldn’t be his tracks,” Sheppard growled, infuriated. “He’s been here all the time. You’re wasting your own time and you’re wasting ours.” He felt the ours seal his solidarity with the boy. “I’m sick of this,” he said. “You people are too damn lazy to go out and find whoever is doing these things. You come here automatically.”
The policeman ignored this and continued looking through Johnson. His eyes were small and alert in his fleshy face. Finally he turned toward the door. ‘Well get him sooner or later,” he said, “with his head in a window and his tail out.”
Sheppard followed him to the door and slammed it behind him. His spirits were soaring. This was exactly what he had needed. He returned with an expectant face.
Johnson had put the book down and was sitting there, looking at him slyly. “Thanks,” he said.
Sheppard stopped. The boy’s expression was predatory. He was openly leering.
“You ain’t such a bad liar yourself,” he said.
“Liar?” Sheppard murmured. Could the boy have left and come back? He felt himself sicken. Then a rush of anger sent him forward. “Did you leave?” he said furiously. “I didn’t see you leave.”
The boy only smiled.
“You went up in the attic to see Norton,” Sheppard said.
“Naw,” Johnson said, “that kid is crazy. He don’t want to do nothing but look through that stinking telescope.”
“I don’t want to hear about Norton,” Sheppard said harshly. “Where were you?”
“I was sitting on that pink can by my own self,” Johnson said. “There wasn’t no witnesses.”
Sheppard took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. He managed to smile.
Johnson rolled his eyes. “You don’t believe in me,” he said. His voice was cracked the way it had been in the dark room two nights before. “You make out like you got all this confidence in me but you ain’t got any. When things get hot, you’ll fade like the rest of them.” The crack became exaggerated, comic. The mockery in it was blatant. “You don’t believe in me. You ain’t got no confidence,” he wailed. “And you ain’t any smarter than that cop. All that about tracks that was a trap. There wasn’t any tracks. That whole place is concreted in the back and my feet were dry.”
Sheppard slowly put the handkerchief back in his pocket. He dropped down on the sofa and gazed at the rug beneath his feet. The boy’s clubfoot was set within the circle of his vision. The pieced-together shoe appeared to grin at him with Johnson’s own face. He caught hold of the edge of the sofa cushion and his knuckles turned white. A chill of hatred shook him. He hated the shoe, hated the foot, hated the boy. His face paled. Hatred choked him. He was aghast at himself.
He caught the boy’s shoulder and gripped it fiercely as if to keep himself from falling. “Listen,” he said, “you looked in that window to embarrass me. That was all you wanted—to shake my resolve to help you, but my resolve isn’t shaken. I’m stronger than you are. I’m stronger than you are and I’m going to save you. The good will triumph.”
“Not when it ain’t true,” the boy said. “Not when it ain’t right.”
“My resolve isn’t shaken,” Sheppard repeated. “I’m going to save you.”
Johnson’s look became sly again. “You ain’t going to save me,” he said. “You’re going to tell me to leave this house. I did those other two jobs too—the first one as well as the one I done when I was supposed to be in the picture show.”
“I’m not going to tell you to leave,” Sheppard said. His voice was toneless, mechanical, “I’m going to save you.”
Johnson thrust his head forward. “Save yourself,” he hissed. “Nobody can save me but Jesus.”
Sheppard laughed curtly. “You don’t deceive me” he said. “I hushed that out of your head in the reformatory. I saved you from that, at least.”
The muscles in Johnson’s face stiffened. A look of such repulsion hardened on his face that Sheppard drew back. The boy’s eyes were like distorting mirrors in which he saw himself made hideous and grotesque. “I’ll show you,” John son whispered. He rose abruptly and started headlong for the door as if he could not get out of Sheppard’s sight quick enough, but it was the door to the back hall he went through, not the front door. Sheppard turned on the sofa and looked behind him where the boy had disappeare
d. He heard the door to his room slam. He was not leaving. The intensity had gone out of Sheppard’s eyes. They looked flat and lifeless as if the shock of the boy’s revelation were only now reaching the center of his consciousness. “If he would only leave,” he murmured. “If he would only leave now of his own accord.”
The next morning Johnson appeared at the breakfast table in the grandfather’s suit he had come in. Sheppard pretended not to notice but one look told him what he already knew, that he was trapped, that there could be nothing now but a battle of nerves and that Johnson would win it. He wished he had never laid eyes on the boy. The failure of his compassion numbed him. He got out of the house as soon as he could and all day he dreaded to go home in the evening. He had a faint hope that the boy might be gone when he returned. The grandfather’s suit might have meant he was leaving. The hope grew in the afternoon. When he came home and opened the front door, his heart was pounding.
He stopped in the hall and looked silently into the living room. His expectant expression faded. His face seemed suddenly as old as his white hair. The two boys were sitting close together on the sofa, reading the same book. Norton’s cheek rested against the sleeve of Johnson’s black suit. Johnson’s finger moved under the lines they were reading. The elder brother and the younger. Sheppard looked woodenly at this scene for almost a minute. Then he walked into the room and took off his coat and dropped it on a chair. Neither boy noticed him. He went on to the kitchen.
Leola left the supper on the stove every afternoon before she left and he put it on the table. His head ached and his nerves were taut. He sat down on the kitchen stool and remained there, sunk in his depression. He wondered if he could infuriate Johnson enough to make him leave of his own accord. Last night what had enraged him was the Jesus business. It might enrage Johnson, but it depressed him. Why not simply tell the boy to go? Admit defeat. The thought of facing Johnson again sickened him. The boy looked at him as if he were the guilty one, as if he were a moral leper. He knew without conceit that he was a good man, that he had nothing to reproach himself with. His feelings about Johnson now were involuntary. He would like to feel compassion for him. He would like to be able to help him. He longed for the time when there would be no one but himself and Norton in the house, when the child’s simple selfishness would be all he had to contend with, and his own loneliness.
He got up and took three serving dishes off the shelf and took them to the stove. Absently he began pouring the butterbeans and the hash into the dishes. When the food was on the table, he called them in.
They brought the book with them. Norton pushed his place setting around to the same side of the table as Johnson’s and moved his chair next to Johnson’s chair. They sat down and put the book between them. It was a black book with red edges.
“What’s that you’re reading?” Sheppard asked, sitting down.
“The Holy Bible,” Johnson said.
God give me strength, Sheppard said under his breath “We lifted it from a ten cent store,” Johnson said.
‘We?” Sheppard muttered. He turned and glared at Norton. The child’s face was bright and there was an excited sheen to his eyes. The change that had come over the boy struck him for the first time. He looked alert. He had on a blue plaid shirt and his eyes were a brighter blue than he had ever seen them before. There was a strange new life in him, the sign of new and more rugged vices. “So now you steal?” he said, glowering. “You haven’t learned to be generous but you have learned to steal.”
“No he ain’t,” Johnson said. “I was the one lifted it. He only watched. He can’t sully himself. It don’t make any difference about me. I’m going to hell anyway.”
Sheppard held his tongue.
“Unless,” Johnson said, “I repent.”
“Repent, Rufus,” Norton said in a pleading voice. “Repent, hear? You don’t want to go to hell.”
“Stop talking this nonsense,” Sheppard said, looking sharply at the child.
“If I do repent, I’ll be a preacher,” Johnson said. “If you’re going to do it, it’s no sense in doing it half way.”
“What are you going to be, Norton,” Sheppard asked in a brittle voice, “a preacher too?”
There was a glitter of wild pleasure in the child’s eyes.
“A space man!” he shouted.
“Wonderful,” Sheppard said bitterly.
“Those space ships ain’t going to do you any good unless you believe in Jesus,” Johnson said. He wet his finger and began to leaf through the pages of the Bible. “I’ll read you where it says so,” he said.
Sheppard leaned forward and said in a low furious voice, “Put that Bible up, Rufus, and eat your dinner.”
Johnson continued searching for the passage.
Put that Bible up! ” Sheppard shouted.
The boy stopped and looked up. His expression was startled but pleased.
“That book is something for you to hide behind,” Sheppard said. “It’s for cowards, people who are afraid to stand on their own feet and figure things out for themselves.”
Johnson’s eyes snapped. He backed his chair a little way from the table. “Satan has you in his power,” he said. “Not only me. You too.”
Sheppard reached across the table to grab the book but Johnson snatched it and put it in his lap.
Sheppard laughed. “You don’t believe in that book and you know you don’t believe in itl”
“I believe it!” Johnson said. “You don’t know what I believe and what I don’t.”
Sheppard shook his head. “You don’t believe it. You’re too intelligent.”
“I ain’t too intelligent,” the boy muttered. “You don’t know nothing about me. Even if I didn’t believe it, it would still be true.”
“You don’t believe it!” Sheppard said. His face was a taunt.
“I believe it!” Johnson said breathlessly. “I’ll show you I believe it! ” He opened the book in his lap and tore out a page of it and thrust it into his mouth. He fixed his eyes on Sheppard. His jaws worked furiously and the paper crackled as he chewed it.
“Stop this,” Sheppard said in a dry, burnt-out voice. “Stop it.”
The boy raised the Bible and tore out a page with his teeth and began grinding it in his mouth, his eyes burning.
Sheppard reached across the table and knocked the book out of his hand. “Leave the table,” he said coldly.
Johnson swallowed what was in his mouth. His eyes widened as if a vision of splendor were opening up before him. “I’ve eaten it!” he breathed. “I’ve eaten it like Ezekiel and it was honey to my mouth!”
“Leave this table,” Sheppard said. His hands were clenched beside his plate.
“I’ve eaten it!” the boy cried. Wonder transformed his face. “I’ve eaten it like Ezekiel and I don’t want none of your food after it nor no more ever.”
“Go then,” Sheppard said softly. “Go. Go.”
The boy rose and picked up the Bible and started toward the hall with it. At the door he paused, a small black figure on the threshold of some dark apocalypse: “The devil has you in his power,” he said in a jubilant voice and disappeared.
After supper Sheppard sat in the living room alone. Johnson had left the house but he could not believe that the boy had simply gone. The first feeling of release had passed. He felt dull and cold as at the onset of an illness and dread had settled in him like a fog. Just to leave would be too anticlimactic an end for Johnson’s taste; he would return and try to prove something. He might come back a week later and set fire to the place. Nothing seemed too outrageous now.
He picked up the paper and tried to read. In a moment he threw it down and got up and went into the hall and listened. He might be hiding in the attic. He went to the attic door and opened it.
The lantern was lit, casting a dim light on the stairs. He didn’t hear anything. “Norton,” he called, “are you up there?” There was no answer. He mounted the narrow stairs to see.
Amid the st
range vine-like shadows cast by the lantern, Norton sat with his eye to the telescope. “Norton,” Sheppard said, “do you know where Rufus went?”
The child’s back was to him. He was sitting hunched, intent, his large ears directly above his shoulders. Suddenly he waved his hand and crouched closer to the telescope as if he could not get near enough to what he saw.
“Norton!” Sheppard said in a loud voice.
The child didn’t move.
“Norton!” Sheppard shouted.
Norton started. He turned around. There was an unnatural brightness about his eyes. After a moment he seemed to see that it was Sheppard. “I’ve found her!” he said breathlessly.
“Found who?” Sheppard said.
“Mamma!”
Sheppard steadied himself in the door way. The jungle ol shadows around the child thickened.
“Come and look!” he cried. He wiped his sweaty face on the tail of his plaid shirt and then put his eye back to the telescope. His back became fixed in a rigid intensity. All at once he waved again.
“Norton,” Sheppard said, “you don’t see anything in the telescope but star clusters. Now you’ve had enough of that for one night. You’d better go to bed. Do you know where Rufus is?”
“She’s there!” he cried, not turning around from the telescope. “She waved at me!”
” I want you in bed in fifteen minutes,” Sheppard said.
After a moment he said, “Do you hear me, Norton?”
The child began to wave frantically.
” I mean what I say,” Sheppard said. “I’m going to call in fifteen minutes and see if you’re in bed.”
He went down the steps again and returned to the parlor. He went to the front door and cast a cursory glance out. The sky was crowded with the stars he had been fool enough to think Johnson could reach. Somewhere in the small wood behind the house, a bull frog sounded a low hollow note. He went back to his chair and sat a few minutes. He decided to go to bed. He put his hands on the arms of the chair and leaned forward and heard, like the first shrill note of a disaster warning, the siren of a police car, moving slowly into the neighborhood and nearer until it subsided with a moan outside the house.
The Complete Stories Page 53
