“An automatic dishwasher washes the dishes by itself without you having to do anything,” said Emily with her usual prim correctness. Emily always wore starched plaid dresses with little white collars, and I couldn’t help wondering if this were not what made her right all the time.
“Very good,” I said. “The ‘auto’ part of the word means ‘self.’ Like an automobile is something that runs by itself instead of having to be pulled by horses.” I hunted around in my distracted mind for other “auto” words suitable for the fifth grade.
“Thunk!” went the clock.
The door clattered, creaked and opened, and in came Joyce leading Jerome. Joyce carefully closed the door behind her and led Jerome to where I was standing in front of the blackboard.
What now?
Gerald had his hand up, swelling out of his desk with eagerness. Poor Gerald so seldom knew anything at all that whenever his hand was one of the raised ones, I called on him. “Yes, Gerald?”
“An autocrat,” he said, triumphantly remembering from the morning spelling lesson, “is a man who is king all by himself instead of having a president and senators.”
Jerome just stood there. Wondering, no doubt, what forgotten misdemeanor on the playground I might want to scold him about
I wondered what it was I had expected him to do about Mr. Mines.
“Jerome,” I said, taking him by the shoulders and turning him to face the back of the room, “this is David’s daddy, Mr. Mines.”
Puzzled, Jerome looked.
Mr. Mines was at the door, his hand on the knob, his face pale and frightened.
“Thunk!” went the clock.
Suddenly I could feel Jerome’s little body grow taut under my hands, and he looked around at me with bottomless eyes.
“It’s going to blow up,” he said, “when the hands are like that.” And he made two-thirty with his arms.
I swallowed and looked around at the clock.
“Thunk!”
Two twenty-five.
“Bang!” went the door. It was Mr. Mines, gone.
And Jerome and I were alone with it. We were the only ones who really knew.
“Monitor!” I said, and Gerard marched up and came to the front of the class.
“Messenger!” I said, and Delia marched up. “Get Mr. Buras immediately.
I brought Jerome outside the room and closed the door behind me. It was too late to try to catch Mr. Mines. It was too late for almost anything. It was all up to Jerome, now.
* * * *
Through the glass-topped door I could see David with his head down on his desk, quietly sobbing. He didn’t know about the bomb. But he knew about his daddy. And now everyone else did, too.
“Thunk!” went the clock in the hall.
“Where is it, Jerome?”
“A dark place,” he said. “A little place.”
I ran down the hall to the broom closet.
Mr. Buras came out of his office with Delia.
“Go back into the room, Delia,” I said. “Run.”
She ran.
“There’s a bomb in the school,” I said. “I’m finding it now. We have four minutes.”
“I’ll fill a washtub with water,” he said, “while I get the kids out and call the police.”
There was no time to find out how I knew or if I was crazy.
He looked into the seventh-grade room and called out three of the big boys.
He rang the bell for fire drill. But there wouldn’t be time. Time. I hoped my class would know enough to follow Miss Fremen’s and get out safely without me.
Jerome and I ran to the little room where old books and the movie projector are kept. He shook his head.
“Which way?” I asked.
He didn’t know. Only he would know the room if he saw it.
I waved my class toward Miss Fremen’s room as they came filing out. One look and she took them over.
Small, dark room. Jerome and I ran down the stairs to the boys’ lavatory. He shook his head.
Girls’ lavatory.
No.
Dear God!
We rushed in and out of cloak rooms.
No.
No.
No.
“Jerome,” I said. “You’ve got to. What else besides small, dark room?”
“Scared. Very scared.”
“Of course. What else?”
“No. Scared of a whipping. Scared of God.”
“Scared of...” I dragged Jerome into Mr. Buras’s office. “Surely not here? And it isn’t small and dark.”
“Almost,” said Jerome, “This is how it feels, but this isn’t where it is.”
I looked around the office. So bare and clean. No big, empty boxes with small, dark places in them. ‘
“The john!” I cried, for there is a little men’s room attached to the principal’s office. I yanked open the door.
“Yes!” said Jerome. “Oh, quickly!”
Yes, but where? Such a bare, clean little room. He must have slipped in during lunch hour, probably even before I saw him hanging around the playground.
Where? Just walls, the wash basin—the radiator! It was too warm a day for the heat to be on and perhaps there was room behind—there it was!
“Run, Jerome,” I cried, and I edged the thing out carefully. It was a briefcase affair, with one broken handle. A sad, forgotten briefcase.
But Jerome didn’t run. He hung on to the back of my skirt and followed me into the teachers’ washroom where I could hear the washtub filling up.
I threw the briefcase into the washtub, and splashed water all over Jerome and me, and I pulled him out of the room and closed the door behind me and sat down in the middle of the hall and had hysterics.
Mr. Buras was there and it was a while before I realized he had two aspirin tablets and a glass of water for me.
“Thank you,” I said. “Oh, dear God.”
“Come in my office and sit down,” Mr. Buras said. “The police will be here any minute. Maybe they can catch him. If you can describe him.”
I stood up as best I could, ashamed of having broken down in front of Jerome. Children are terribly frightened when grown people lose control.
We walked through the hollow school, so strange with all the children outside. I looked down at Jerome. Those eyes! I thought of the things he must know, with that reaching mind of his. He knew. He knew the most frightful thing there is to know in the whole world. That there is nobody, nobody at all who is sure about anything. Children should not have to know this thing.
“Can you describe him? Do you know who it was?”
I paused, passing the door of my room, for something caught my eye through the glass.
It was David, his head still in his arms, all alone, waiting for the fire to come. So many things were worse than death.
“It was...” Why did I have to be the one to tell? Why was this responsibility mine?
I looked at Jerome. His, too. So many responsibilities would be his.
“It was David’s father,” I said, and I went in to David.
Maybe there would be some assurance I could give David.
But not Jerome.
For he would know assurance was not mine to give.
Nor anyone else’s.
<
* * * *
THE THINKERS
by Walt Kelly
<
* * * *
SOMETHING BRIGHT
by Zenna Henderson
Readers of those earlier S-F annuals in which Miss Henderson’s chronicles of The People appeared (“Pottage” in 1956; “Wilderness” in 1958) will be happy to know that the long-delayed publication of the complete series is at last a fact (“Pilgrimage: The Book of the People,” Doubleday, 1961).
Miss Henderson is, in private life, a schoolteacher in the primary grades, and most of her stories about children have been from the viewpoint of the sympathetic adult. This time she tells it through the child’s o
wn mind and eyes.
* * * *
Do you remember the Depression? The black shadow across time? That hurting place in the consciousness of the world? Maybe not. Maybe it’s like asking do you remember the Dark Ages. Except what would I know about the price of eggs in the Dark Ages? I knew plenty about prices in the Depression.
If you had a quarter—first find your quarter—and five hungry kids, you could supper them on two cans of soup and a loaf of day-old bread, or two quarts of milk and a loaf of day-old bread. It was filling and—in an after-thoughty kind of way—nourishing. But if you were one of the hungry five, you eventually began to feel erosion set in, and your teeth ached for substance.
But to go back to eggs. Those were a precious commodity. You savored them slowly or gulped them eagerly—unmistakably as eggs—boiled or fried. That’s one reason why I remember Mrs. Klevity. She had eggs for breakfast! And every day! That’s one reason why I remember Mrs. Klevity.
I didn’t know about the eggs the time she came over to see Mom, who had just got home from a twelve-hour day, cleaning up after other people at thirty cents an hour. Mrs. Klevity lived in the same court as we did. Courtesy called it a court because we were all dependent on the same shower house and two toilets that occupied the shack square in the middle of the court.
All of us except the Big House, of course. It had a bathroom of its own and even a radio blaring Nobody’s Business and Should I Reveal and had ceiling lights that didn’t dangle nakedly at the end of a cord. But then it really wasn’t a part of the court. Only its back door shared our area, and even that was different. It had two back doors in the same frame—a screen one and a wooden one!
Our own two-room place had a distinction too. It had an upstairs. One room the size of our two. The Man Upstairs lived up there. He was mostly only the sound of footsteps overhead and an occasional cookie for Danna.
Anyway, Mrs. Klevity came over before Mom had time to put her shopping bag of work clothes down or even to unpleat the folds of fatigue that dragged her face down ten years or more of time to come. I didn’t much like Mrs. Klevity. She made me uncomfortable. She was so solid and slow-moving and so nearly blind that she peered frighteningly wherever she went. She stood in the doorway as though she had been stacked there like bricks and a dress drawn hastily down over the stack and a face sketched on beneath a fuzz of hair. Us kids all gathered around to watch, except Danna who snuffled wearily into my neck. Day nursery or not, it was a long, hard day for a four-year-old.
“I wondered if one of your girls could sleep at my house this week.” Her voice was as slow as her steps.
“At your house?” Mom massaged her hand where the shopping-bag handles had crisscrossed it. “Come in. Sit down.” We had two chairs and a bench and two apple boxes. The boxes scratched bare legs, but surely they couldn’t scratch a stack of bricks.
“No, thanks.” Maybe she couldn’t bend! “My husband will be away several days and I don’t like to be in the house alone at night.”
“Of course,” said Mom. “You must feel awfully alone.”
The only aloneness she knew, what with five kids and two rooms, was the taut secretness of her inward thoughts as she mopped and swept and ironed in other houses. “Sure, one of the girls would be glad to keep you company.” There was a darting squirm and LaNell was safely hidden behind the swaying of our clothes in the diagonally curtained corner of the other room, and Kathy knelt swiftly just beyond the dresser, out of sight.
“Anna is eleven.” I had no place to hide, burdened as I was with Danna. “She’s old enough. What time do you want her to come over?”
“Oh, bedtime will do.” Mrs. Klevity peered out the door at the darkening sky. “Nine o’clock. Only it gets dark before then—” Bricks can look anxious, I guess.
“As soon as she has supper, she can come,” said Mom, handling my hours as though they had no value to me. “Of course she has to go to school tomorrow.”
“Only when it’s dark,” said Mrs. Klevity. “Day is all right. How much should I pay you?”
“Pay?” Mom gestured with one hand. “She has to sleep anyway. It doesn’t matter to her where, once she’s asleep. A favor for a friend.”
I wanted to cry out: whose favor for what friend? We hardly passed the time of day with Mrs. Klevity. I couldn’t even remember Mr. Klevity except that he was straight and old and wrinkled. Uproot me and make me lie in a strange house, a strange dark, listening to a strange breathing, feeling a strange warmth making itself part of me for all night long, seeping into me …
“Mom—” I said.
“I’ll give her breakfast,” said Mrs. Klevity. “And lunch money for each night she comes.”
I resigned myself without a struggle. Lunch money each day—a whole dime! Mom couldn’t afford to pass up such a blessing, such a gift from God, who unerringly could be trusted to ease the pinch just before it became intolerable.
“Thank you, God,” I whispered as I went to get the can opener to open supper. For a night or two I could stand it.
I felt all naked and unprotected as I stood in my flimsy crinkle cotton pajamas, one bare foot atop the other, waiting for Mrs. Klevity to turn the bed down.
“We have to check the house first,” she said thickly. “We can’t go to bed until we check the house.”
“Check the house?” I forgot my starchy stiff shyness enough to question. “What for?”
Mrs. Klevity peered at me in the dim light of the bedroom. They had three rooms for only the two of them! Even if there was no door to shut between the bedroom and the kitchen.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, “unless I looked first. I have to.”
So we looked. Behind the closet curtain, under the table—Mrs. Klevity even looked in the portable oven that sat near the two-burner stove in the kitchen.
When we came to the bed, I was moved to words again. “But we’ve been in here with the doors locked ever since I got here. What could possibly—”
“A prowler?” said Mrs. Klevity nervously, after a brief pause for thought. “A criminal?”
Mrs. Klevity pointed her face at me. I doubt if she could see me from that distance. “Doors make no difference,” she said. “It might be when you least expect, so you have to expect all the time.”
“I’ll look,” I said humbly. She was older than Mom. She was nearly blind. She was one of God’s Also Unto Me’s.
“No,” she said. “I have to. I couldn’t be sure, else.”
So I waited until she grunted and groaned to her knees, then bent stiffly to lift the limp spread. Her fingers hesitated briefly, then flicked the spread up. Her breath came out flat and finished. Almost disappointed, it seemed to me.
She turned the bed down and I crept across the gray, wrinkled sheets and, turning my back to the room, I huddled one ear on the flat tobacco-smelling pillow and lay tense and uncomfortable in the dark, as her weight shaped and re-shaped the bed around me. There was a brief silence before I heard the soundless breathy shape of her words, “How long, O God, how long?”
I wondered through my automatic Bless Papa and Mama—and the automatic back-up because Papa had abdicated from my specific prayers—bless Mama and my brother and sisters—what it was that Mrs. Klevity was finding too long to bear.
After a restless waking, dozing sort of night that strange sleeping places held for me, I awoke to a thin, chilly morning and the sound of Mrs. Klevity moving around. She had set the table for breakfast, a formality we never had time for at home. I scrambled out of bed and into my clothes with only my skinny, goosefleshed back between Mrs. Klevity and me for modesty. I felt uncomfortable and unfinished because I hadn’t brought our comb over with me.
I would have preferred to run home to our usual breakfast of canned milk and shredded wheat, but instead I watched, fascinated, as Mrs. Klevity struggled with lighting the kerosene stove. She bent so close, peering at the burners with the match flaring in her hand that I was sure the frowzy brush of her hair would catch f
ire, but finally the burner caught instead and she turned her face toward me.
“One egg or two?” she asked.
“Eggs! Two!” Surprised wrung the exclamation from me. Her hand hesitated over the crumpled brown bag on the table. “No, no!” I corrected her thought hastily. “One. One is plenty.” And sat on the edge of a chair watching as she broke an egg into the sizzling frying pan.
The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6 - [Anthology] Page 26
