The last time Uncle Boyd came to the house, before he went away, Bunny saw him. Bunny was playing in the front hall with a china wolf-hound that used to be at Grandmother Blaney’s before she died. And he looked out of the front window and saw Uncle Boyd coming up the walk. The doorbell rang. His father came to the door and opened it. And there he was—tall and thin, with a gray streak across his hair. And he said, Is Irene here? And his father said, I haven’t the least idea!
“Boyd was very pleasant. He asked after you, Bess, and said how much he thought of you—”
“Yes?”
“And when I got up to go, he went with me as far as the front walk. We stood by the hitching-post and I said good-by, and he said good-by and he was very glad to have seen me, and then he shook hands very formally as if I were a visiting lady from Scotland. And then he went all to pieces…. The things he said—you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Standing there on the sidewalk with the tears running down his cheeks…. It was a mistake. For two whole years he had known it was all a mistake. And the way he found out was that he caught himself looking for me wherever he went. He’d notice some woman at the theater or walking in a park, and the back of her head would be like me. And he’d follow her, thinking possibly …”
Bunny narrowed his eyes as his mother got up, with the box of candy in her hand, and put it on the mantelpiece, where it wouldn’t be so continual a temptation. Then she said, “Speaking of the backs of women’s heads—I took Robert aside the other day and made him promise that if anything happened to me he’d break all my cut-glass. I don’t want some other woman using it when I’m gone.”
Bunny’s eyes flew open. In the nick of time he remembered that he was pretending to be asleep, closed them, and opened them again—more deliberately. The spears waved. He was in a field of green corn.
8
The intense part of the afternoon was over when Irene got up to go home. Bunny and his mother were alone after she left. And it was clear that his mother was despondent over something, for she stopped hemming diapers and gazed thoughtfully into the fire for a long while. Once she sighed.
At the right moment Bunny told her about Arthur Cook, and how Arthur got sick at school. Bunny heard the nurse telling his teacher, outside in the hall, that it was a clear case of flu. This time there was no doubt about his mother’s interest. She sat looking at him anxiously, the whole time. And certain portions of his narrative had to be repeated.
“Bunny, why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me last Friday, instead of waiting until now?”
He started to explain fully, but she had already picked up the receiver of the telephone.
“I’m going to call Arthur’s mother, and find out how he is. And while I think of it, there’s something you can do for me: We’re out of cream. Sophie forgot to order any. And if I make cornbread for supper, we’ll need butter as well. Half a pound…. Nine-nine-two…. Yes, that’s right. … I could send Robert for it when he gets home from Scout meeting, but he may be late.”
It was the unexpected that happened, always. The empty gun, his Grandmother Morison said, that killed people. He would have to put on his rubbers and his coat and cap and gloves and go outdoors.
Weekdays he came straight home from school so that he could have his mother all to himself. At quarter after four Sophie wheeled in the teacart and there was a party: little cakes with white icing on them, a glass of milk for him and tea for his mother. Then he sat on her lap while she read to him from Toinette’s Philip or from The Hollow Tree and Deep Woods Book. About Mr. Crow and the C-X pie. Or about Mr. Possum’s Uncle Silas who went to visit Cousin Glen-wood in the city and came home with a “man” and a lot of new clothes and a bag of shinny sticks.
When his mother read to him, her voice fell softly from above. It turned with the flames. Like the flames, it was full of shadows. While she was reading he would look up sometimes and discover that she had yawned; or she would stop and look into the fireplace absently, so that he would have to remind her to go on reading.
But today there was no pleasant hour with her before his father came home. When he threw open the back door, the sky overhead was clear, the air thin and without warmth. Old John rose and extended his paws unsteadily. Bunny recognized it as a gesture toward following him. But having made the gesture, Old John could do no more. He collapsed feebly upon his square of carpet.
If it had been Robert, Bunny thought sadly—if it had been Robert that called him, Old John would have come along.
Hoping to catch something off guard, he crossed the garden walk. But the sunlight was spread too evenly upon the ground and woven too firmly into the silence under the grape-arbor. Bunny did not disturb it in the least by his coming. Only the Lombardy poplars were a trifle unprepared, so that when he picked up a stick and broke it, their few remaining leaves were seized with a musical agitation.
For a second Bunny wanted to climb up on the kitchen roof, which started behind the flue and from there sloped down almost to the ground, over the cellar stairs. Then he turned and went directly toward the front walk. An iron picket was missing from the fence. Once upon a time he could slip through by ducking his head. Now he had to bend double and squeeze. He was growing. Size nine or nine and a half. And yet the sidewalk seemed no farther away than it had ever been. With his head down, his eyes fastened upon the cement, he started toward the store.
Step on a crack
You’ll break your mother’s back
At the corner he looked up, for no reason. The outer branches of the elm trees met high overhead, shielding the street, which was empty and strewn with dead leaves. Mrs. Lolly’s store was in the next block. Her porch was old and rickety and sagged in places, but it was high enough to stand up under. On the hard ground underneath Mrs. Lolly’s porch three boys were kneeling, their arms outstretched, playing marbles. Johnny Dean, Ferris (who smoked cigarettes), and Mike Holtz. The afternoon became complicated—though it was clear, after the rain, and transparent to the farthest edges.
At the intersection Bunny crossed over. His knees were becoming drowsy with fear. He could go back, of course. He could go home and come again a little later. But what would his mother think? Opposite the store he crossed back again. Mike Holtz didn’t see him, but he saw Mike Holtz. Saw his white face, jeering, his cap pulled down over one ear, his dirty fat knuckles…. If he could get as far as the steps, Bunny told himself carefully. He came to the steps, mounted over the very center of his fright, and closed the door safely behind him.
Mrs. Lolly was middle-aged and sagging, like her porch. She kept a yellow pencil in the knot at the back of her hair. Bunny was grateful to her, as he was grateful now to all things—things standing about in boxes and cases, on shelves all the way up to the ceiling. Everything was so substantial. The crates of apples and oranges, the pears in tissue-paper, the enormous cabbages. And most substantial of all—a very old woman who was worrying with her shawl.
Mrs. Lolly added up figures on a paper bag. When she stopped and looked at him blindly, Bunny saw that her eyes were full of arithmetic.
“Are you in a hurry?”
He shook his head. Not at all in a hurry. Not in the least. What he most wanted was for time to stand emphatically still, the way the sun and the moon did for Joshua.
The old woman, waiting, sucked at her teeth one after another until the pin came out of her shawl.
“Seven”—Mrs. Lolly went on counting—“and two to carry.”
Bunny pressed his nose against the glass case. Looking intently, he tasted gumdrops, licorice, caramels, candy-corn.
“In Chicago,” the old woman said, as she fastened her shawl closely about her shoulders, “I hear there’s people dying of influenza. And in St. Louis.”
A pleasant imaginary voice said: Help yourself. Bunny. Take as much of anything there is in the case as you want.
Mrs. Lolly jabbed the pencil straight into her head. “There’s lots of sickness about,” she said. “Come in aga
in.” And with what was left of the same breath, “Young man?”
“Cream,” Bunny told her. “And half a pound of butter.”
Then hoping by one means or another to delay matters he went in pursuit of Mrs. Lolly’s tortoise-shell cat.
The cat dived under a cracker-barrel.
“Anything else?”
Mrs. Lolly held the cream out to him, and butter from her ancient ice-box. With no reason to stay, and nothing left to ask for, Bunny turned away. He and the old woman went out together. The steps were wet and so they both went slowly. When the old woman reached the sidewalk she stopped to catch her breath and went phifft—with her finger against her nose. Disgust encircled Bunny’s throat.
Crossing the street in the old woman’s wake, he remembered the first time he had ever seen anyone do that. A farmer. Some one they drove out in the country to see about some insurance premiums. His father left the car at the farmhouse. They climbed under a fence and walked side by side through a meadow where daisies were growing. And they came to a field and the man was in the field with his horses. His father talked about the price of wheat—whether it was better to sell now or hold on to it awhile. And everywhere about them the green corn was making a sound like—
“There he goes!”
A voice sang out, with no warning. The voice of Fat Holtz. The trees stumbled and the sidewalk turned sickeningly under Bunny’s feet. He ran, ran as hard as he could, until legs tripped him from behind and hands sent him sprawling in the bitter dirt.
How Robert came to be there, who summoned him in this hour of need, Bunny did not know. Robert was there. That was enough. Robert pulled his tormentors off, one by one, and drove them away. Bunny sat up, then, and saw that there was a large hole in his stocking. And his knee was bleeding.
“Before all my friends,” Robert said.
Matthews and Scully and Berryhill and North-way were crossing over to the other side of the street. They did not look back.
“In front of everybody,” Robert said; “and you didn’t even try to hit them.”
Robert, too, was against him. Bunny looked at the broken glass and the white stain spreading along the walk, and burst into tears.
9
The little brass clock on the mantel struck seven sharply, to make clear that this second Sunday in November, 1918, which had begun serene and immeasurable, was very nearly gone.
From his place in the window seat Bunny observed that the rug was a river flowing between the stable and the long white bookshelves; turning at the chair where his mother sat, with light slanting down about her head and the blue cloth of her dress deepening into folds, into pockets.
When the little brass clock finished, the grandfather’s clock cleared its throat, began to stammer. In the midst of this mechanical excitement Robert took a firmer hold on the lamp cord and with his free hand turned a page of Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar.
When the grandfather’s clock had finished, it was seven (officially) and Bunny exchanged glances with his mother. His father got up to put a fresh log on the fire. Then he took a pack of cards and laid them face down in rows on the library table. His father grew restless if they remained overlong at the dinner table; fidgeted; contrived ways of transferring the conversation bodily to the library, where he could begin his shuffling and turning, his interminable dealing of cards. Bunny turned back to his mother.
“For this time of year,” she said, “for November, it seems to be getting dark too soon.”
She meant what she said, of course. And she meant also whatever she wanted to mean. Bunny was not surprised when his father stopped turning the cards and looked at her.
“I hadn’t noticed it.”
In this fashion they communicated with each other, out of knowledge and experience inaccessible to Bunny. By nods and silences. By a tired curve of his mother’s mouth. By his father’s measuring glance over the top of his spectacles. Bunny drew his knees under him and looked out. The room was reflected in the windowpane. He could see nothing until he pulled the curtain behind his head. Outside it was quite dark, as his mother said. Light from the Koenigs’ window fell across their walk, across the corner of their cistern. If he were in the garden now, with a flashlight, he could see insects crawling through the cold grass. If he waited out there, waited long enough, he would hear blackbirds, and wild geese flying in migratory procession across the sky…. The curtain slipped back into place. Once more he could see nothing but reflections of the room. The night outside (and all that was in it) was shut away from him like those marvelous circus animals in wagons from which the sides had not been removed.
“I stopped in to see Tom Macgregor this afternoon,” his father said.
“Seven of diamonds, sweetheart.”
“I see it.”
“Now, maybe, but you didn’t.”
Although she never paid any attention, his mother seemed to know by instinct when his father turned up the five of spades or the seven of diamonds that he was looking for. And she could tell clear across the room when his father began cheating.
“I did, too.”
“Jack of clubs, then…. How was he?” “How was who?” his father asked. “Tom Macgregor.”
Bunny listened with quickening interest. It was Dr. Macgregor who took his tonsils out; who sewed up a long gash over Robert’s eye the time he fell off his bicycle, so there was scarcely the sign of a scar.
“He has a new hunting-dog.”
“How many does that make?” His mother sat up suddenly and poked through her sewing-kit until she found the package of needles.
“Three, as I recall. But one of them has worms. I couldn’t get him to talk about anything else.”
“Did you see it, Dad?”
His father drew all the cards together and sorted those which were lying face up from those which were face down. Bunny could not bear, sometimes, having to wait so long for an answer.
“Dad, did you see the dog that had worms?”
“Yes, son.”
“What did it look like?”
His father shuffled the deck loudly before he spoke.
“It was an English setter.”
Bunny got up from the window seat in despair; he would go out to the kitchen and pay a visit to Sophie, whose conversation did not leave off where it ought to begin.
To get to the kitchen he must go through the dining-room, which was almost dark. And then the butler’s pantry, which was entirely so. It was safe and bright in the kitchen, but overhead were dark caverns that Bunny did not like to think about—that end of the upstairs hall, where there was usually no light on, and the terrible back stairs.
“I think I’ll go see what Sophie is doing.”
His mother’s nod reassured him. It said Very well, my darling, but go quickly and don’t look behind you.
Under the pantry door there was a line of yellow light. And Bunny heard voices—Sophie, Karl, Sophie again. They were talking to each other in German, but they stopped when he pushed the door open. “Hello!” he said. The warm air of the kitchen enveloped him, instantly.
“And how is Bubi this evening?”
Karl was sitting very straight in the kitchen chair with his raincoat on. Tiny rivers of sweat ran down the sides of his face.
“My name isn’t Booby, it’s Bunny!”
“Hein?”
No matter how many times he corrected Karl, it was always the same. Karl never could remember. He always put his great hands together over his stomach and bobbed his head.
“That is good. And I all along was thinking—what you say it is? … Bubi?”
Sophie laughed then, and rattled the dishes in the kitchen sink—although there was no particular reason, so far as Bunny could make out, why she should do either. Every Sunday night this same conversation took place. Karl appeared after supper, scraped his feet on the mat, rain or shine, knocked once very gently, and came in. While Sophie washed and dried the dishes, Karl sat waiting with his coat on. And if Bunny came int
o the kitchen, Karl lit his pipe, gathered Bunny onto his lap, and told him a story.
After this unsteadying and unreasonable day when he had had so much to think about (the baby coming and Robert taking possession of the back room), after his encounter with Fat Holtz, Bunny gave himself up to the smell of leather and pipe tobacco; to the comfort of Karl’s shoulder.
The story was always the same. Following the certain channel of Karl’s sentences (Already the ditch so deep was …) He saw Karl’s great-grandfather digging in mud and water up to his ankles. He saw trees falling, heard the great wind that blew and blew out of the ditch until at last it blew Karl’s great-grandfather’s pipe out—as Bunny was sure it would. And no sooner did Karl’s great-grandfather’s pipe go out than the real pipe which Karl held between his teeth, a deep-bowled one, went out also. And Karl had to stop and fill the real one before the story could go on.
First he couldn’t remember what he had done with his tobacco-pouch. He looked earnestly on the kitchen table, under the chair, in all his pockets. He felt the sides of his trousers. He made Bunny get down so that he could search through his raincoat half a dozen times. After the pouch was located (in Karl’s inside coat pocket, where he always kept it) Karl had to fill his pipe with great care. He had to tamp it down so that it was not too loose and so that it was not too tight. Then one match after another, before the pipe was lit properly. And just as Bunny was climbing back on Karl’s lap, Sophie gave a final twist to her dishrag and hung it over the kitchen sink.
“Aber next time …” Karl said, smiling at him from the doorway.
But I wanted to hear the ending of the story now, not next time, Bunny thought sadly, as he turned out the light and made his way with one hand along the wall until he reached the dining-room.
“I told you, Bess…. There isn’t any place else for her to go.”
His father and mother were in the library still. By the tone of his father’s voice Bunny was sure they were discussing Grandmother Morison. He waited for a moment among the dining-room chairs until he could decide whether the conversation was worth overhearing, and learned that Uncle Wilfred and Aunt Clara were going to spend Thanksgiving in Vandalia, with Uncle Wilfred’s family.
They Came Like Swallows Page 4
