It felt like a lucky day for everybody.
Toward evening a small breeze came up and began blowing the minutes away until it was time to go.
As they left they passed once again the prisons where the wolves lay sentenced, though now their fur had been damped by winter’s first rain. Where still the summer foxes paced made even more restless by the changeful weather.
And still the obedient elephant went bearing children on its back, swinging its trunk like an orchestra leader conducting an old-fashioned waltz.
Where the white-maned merry-go-round stallions raced, one a nose ahead, then the other, then coasted when the music-box stopped.
The homesick lion roared for home. The iron-feathered owl waited only for night to wing soundlessly into people’s dreams and be back in his tree by morning.
Finnerty’s girlfriend, trapped out on a limb too fragile for him to follow, whimpered between fear of falling and fear of Finnerty.
In the haysmelling dark the quick gazelle tiptoed, rehearsing forever some animal’s ballet in which she was sure to be the leading lady.
Deep in the primeval stone the ancient bear had curled, and this time would not be seduced outside for peanuts or people, Devil or daughter.
So they turned back at last to those streets whereon the wildest beast of all roamed free.
At the foot of Canal Street they saw a great white excursion steamer that had come down the river from Baton Rouge that day. With a brave invitation at the foot of the gangplank—
Hallie had not seen a play since her schoolroom days. Dove had never seen one. ‘It’s your day, and that’s all there is to it,’ she decided.
She herself was too heavy with the long day’s sun to wish to do more now than sit on the lower deck and watch the big old river bearing broken box lunches to the sea.
Every ten minutes he returned to her with news: the boat would pull out at eight-thirty and the play would begin at nine! He had been below and was sure the engines were ready to start. Now they were testing the lights in the ballroom. He had seen a tall young fellow and a young woman drinking beer at the bar and had been told they were O-Thello and Dessie-Mona.
Just then they felt the ship tremble and the big wheel began its first slow sure turn – heading for the open sea! He turned and lumbered off to see whether the captain needed his help.
As the lights of the eastern shore swung out, Hallie heard singing down below out of years she barely remembered—
and felt an air of joy and a water-born courting, then a stirring within herself she had felt all day but to which she had paid no heed.
She saw the fore and aft lights of a freight barge being towed downriver. And men and beds and odors, the whole monstrous nightmare of her years since the baby had died seemed to be towed downriver with the barge. And, in the place her heart had been, again felt the faint deep stirring.
The boat rocked in the passing barge’s wake, she shut her eyes, for she felt a pleasant nausea. And in her mind saw, around and around, the white-maned merry-go-round horses race once again. ‘One-sixteenth,’ she thought for no reason she understood, and wanted to laugh but didn’t know at what, unless it was the redheaded boy coming toward her as though bearing news.
She listened but hardly heard. It was only when he took her hand that she understood that a play was about to begin.
In the middle of the first act the boat was caught in a wash and the whole stage tilted a bit. It was by this time obvious to the front rows that Othello, with a bad job of makeup, was tilting slightly on his own. But retained sufficient presence of mind, when he needed to lean against the air, to bear against the tilt of the stage rather than with it. By this instinctive device Othello held the front rows breathless, wondering which way he’d fall should he guess wrong.
But the boat could have turned on its side and Dove wouldn’t have noticed. He had been captured by the roll and trump of lines so honored by old time they justified all mankind:
‘One-sixteenth,’ Hallie’s mind insisted as the stage tilted back and heard herself making a curious prayer all her own: ‘Lord, make it a woman or make it a man, make it black as midnight but let it be mine. This time let it be mine.’ And her heart closed fast on the very thought that any white man might share this child. And in her mind began to toss her French and Spanish forebears like emptied box lunches over the rail.
She wished, and realized she had wished it for some days now, to return to the mulatto village in which she had been born. And there put her hair in pigtails in her people’s ancestral way until the baby came. Things would have to be done quickly before this white man could guess.
But a languid ease arose in her, bringing an irrational contentment that there was plenty of time for everything.
When they left the boat, wearied out with the long day, Dove heard a tiny tinkling and saw a little ice cart at the curb. The night was hot, and ice was what he wanted.
‘What flavor you want, Hallie?’ he asked her.
‘Orange.’
With the orange in his hand and three cents in debt to the vendor, he stood trying to decide between raspberry and pineapple, when a voice behind him said ‘chocolate,’ and a long shadow fell across curb and cart.
Dove didn’t wait to decide, he would do without ice tonight.
‘Someone you know?’ Hallie wondered.
‘Used to.’
‘Why you afraid? He after you?’
‘I don’t know.’
At the corner he dared one glance back. Fort was bent so far over, to make sure the vendor didn’t slip one over by giving him maple instead of chocolate, that Dove realized how hard it must be to tell colors at night behind dark glasses.
In the days that followed Hallie wearied a bit of hearing ‘I kissed thee are I killed thee: no way but this, Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.’
‘If I only thought you knew what you were talking about I’d feel better about it,’ she told him.
She could never be certain that he didn’t know what he was talking about. One evening she heard him read aloud—
and when she asked him what he thought it all meant he replied as if he had known all his life, ‘Oh, somethin’ ’bout old-timey kings ’n other folks there too. There’s goin’ to be a war ’n it looks like our side might get whipped. You want me to go down and bring some srimps?’
Later, when the shrimp question had been settled and the shrimps eaten, she read—