Terasina Vidavarri.
Frost knocked at the window. Though she had not asked him to remember, yet he lit her virgin every night. By its light he got the stove roaring. Then lit himself a little stick of Byron’s home-grown potaguaya and drew a deep, defiant breath.
‘Crazy Old Hasteth! Little-Time-to-Repent! Old-Cut-Off-Your-Nose-to-Spite-Your-Face – if you’d but hasted me to school instead of playing Gawd for a pack of utter fools I’d have a readin’ ’n writen trade tonight.’
With each draw he rose another inch off the floor.
‘Buggy old Just-As-I-Am’ – suddenly, the stick dangling from his lip, he crossed himself and genuflected, though his knees touched nothing.
‘Pump that out of your hose, old man,’ he told Fitz – ‘let that do fer you, Hell-’n-Brimstone.’
Here was her bedside, here was her bed. Of late she had lain here restless or dreaming and soon would lie dreaming again.
Between the white kerosene lamp’s glow and the virgin’s flickering yellow, he looked at the words of the story that told HOW A GOOD MAN IS ALWAYS RIGHT, for he knew that one by heart:
‘“Always going downhill, and always merry! That’s worth the money.”’
The tip of his narrow cigarette danced like a tiny ballerina in the dark. He turned the page to where the Eastwind, dressed like a Chinaman, told the Prince to hold tight or he might fall.
‘“Oh, have you come from that quarter?” said the mother, “I thought you had been in the Garden of Paradise.”
‘“I am going there tomorrow,” said the Eastwind. “It will be a hundred years tomorrow since I have been there. I have just come from China, where I danced round a porcelain tower till all bells jingled. The officials were flogged in the streets. The bamboo canes were broken over their shoulders and they shrieked, ‘Many thanks, Father and Benefactor,’ but they didn’t mean what they said. And I went on ringing the bells and singing ‘tsing, tsang, tsu!’”’
A scent of the Orient came to him. He left the book and followed his nose, sniffing like a rabbit, right up to a bureau drawer.
A chiffon blouse, a white slip frayed at the hem and a black brassiere like the vestments of some holy order. Dove felt of them with that special reverence of men who have lived wholly apart from women. Under these clothes, it came to him like a mystery, the señora walked naked. The realization weakened him so that he sat on the bed’s edge with the slip lying limp across his knees and stroked it as if it were her flesh. In the nippled cup of the black brassiere he smelled her special smell, like that of Russian Leather.
Here her breast had fitted – why it must be softer yet than this! And tested the garment’s texture against his leathery cheek.
Señora, let me touch your naked heart.
A yearning deep as need can go stretched him onto his stomach, clasping her slip to his chest. Pressing the pillow where her head had lain, his limbs convulsed and a dizzying surge left him limp as the slip. Sweating and passionless, guilty and spent, the boy lay a long moment with shuttered eyes. This had never happened to him before while waking.
‘That’s purty fair pot,’ Dove thought.
And fell into a snoring sleep.
To dream he was coasting gently about a county fair merry-go-round as he had once seen four small monkeys coast. Strapped tight into toy autos, each wearing a jockey cap matching the color of his car, one red, one green, one yellow and one blue; while about the guard rail people crowded and leaned – he touched the peak of his own cap to make sure it wouldn’t blow off when the big race began—
the music began with the happiest bang.
Now he was losing ground, now gaining – now he was almost out in front. O – Hasteth! Hasteth! From his father’s shouting face he saw Eyeless Riley’s skull emerge – the dream wheel tipped straight up, the rails slipped sidewise and out from under.
‘Señora! Save me from Riley!’
He sat in the middle of the floor with the pillow still clasped to his chest. Above him the virgin burned bright. Beside him the stove burned low. Down the dark road Negroes foretold and foretold—
Within the fire Terasina’s eyes saved him from Riley as the dream wheel died with the dream.
‘Old grandpaw came last night,’ was how Fitz said hello one morning to the frost that had come in the night. The roofs of Hooverville shown white and nothing to burn but grapefruit crates and precious few of these.
The single spigot froze, but a Mexican couple two houses down made neighbors welcome to their well. Rumors of a coal train coming through raced from door to door like news of a wedding come June. True or false, it made happy telling: all people would soon be warm once more.
Dove and a boy called Jehova went down the tracks carrying a clothes pole and a sack. Half a hundred men, women and children huddled at the water tower. Barrows and boxes stood about. A Mexican girl held, in a fold of a yellow shawl, a carnival kewpie to her breast. The shawl’s dusty fringes, tumbling past her ankles, had gathered enough soot to start a fire itself. Kewpie and child guarded an empty doll buggy on knock-kneed wheels.
‘Your baby will catch cold, sis,’ Dove teased her, but she gave him only a glance of unmoving enmity for reply.
‘When you’re spoken to, answer,’ Jehova reproached her; but got no more answer than Dove. ‘Wetback fraidy-cat,’ Jehova apologized for her to Dove as the cars came grinding to a clanking screech and the engine began to take on water.
Staking out one side of a car as their own, Jehova climbed atop the coal and lined the iron shelf that runs the length of the car with the biggest lumps he could handle, requiring both his hands. Neither knew why it had to be done this way, except that the other ways were too easy. Dove stood below with the pole. The problem wasn’t only to get the biggest lumps in the shortest time but to keep neighbors from snatching them first.
Jehova finished filling the shelf just as the cars began rolling again. And got down just in time to get the sack open at the shelf ’s end. The first lump, hitting the pole held by Dove, tumbled into the sack. One by one the lumps fell and not one was lost.
As they fell Dove asked Jehova above him – ‘What if these were yams?’ He got no answer, so only asked himself – What if they were onions? At thought of onion gravy his mouth watered – just let somebody tell Dove Linkhorn where he could steal onions and Byron would make the gravy. Somebody shouted – a plain-clothes man was humping down the spine. They lunged down the embankment with the sack between them. In the ditch at the embankment’s foot a doll buggy lay upside down, its wheels still turning this way then that. A few feet away someone had slung a yellow shawl. It stirred. Then its yellow began seeping to black.
‘The wheel caught the buggy but she wouldn’t let go of the handle,’ he heard somebody say.
‘Wait for the priest,’ said somebody else in such a tone that Dove assumed that the priest, when he came, would explain, in low, simple tones, how a child so small could love a doll so much that she had not feared even a freight train’s wheels.
In the final week of January he stood in the woodshed of the Fe warming a glass egg between his palms in remembrance of chickens of summers past. He heard someone trying the front door. His heart raced out of the woodshed before him and his raggedy knees raced after.
Terasina.