— She! Mine! Aaa, mine!
The rush of shame set his cheeks and ears blazing like flame before a bellows, drove blood like a plunger against the roof of his skull. He stood with feet mortised to the spot, knees sagging, quivering.
“So den?” Izzy spurred.
“So den, she jomps up an nen we seen ev’yting—!”
“Big bush under duh belly!” The others jumbled voice with gestures. “Fat ass, we seen! Big — Wuh! Wadda kinerry! Wee! An’ duh hull knish! All de hairs!”
“Yea? No kiddin’?”
“Sure!”
“Didja watch?”
“No. She gave a look righd ad us.”
“She didn’ look, I tol’ yuh!”
“She did!”
“She didn’!”
“She did! Wod she jump oud for!”
“So?”
“So we run down-stairs — Wee! Wod a kinerry we seen!”
— Aaa! Lousy son of a bitch! Murder ’em! K-Kick ’em! Kill ’em! G-go ’way’—Yuh gonna cry!
“W’a fluh — Yee, wish I wuz dere. W’ea! Tell us — Led’s go—”
Like flying hail against his nakedness their sharp cries stunned and flayed him. Blind with loathing, he reeled away — unnoticed.
(—Ow! Ow! Don’t let ’em see! Don’t let ’em know. Ow!) The hot tears sprang to his eyes, the more scalding for resistance. He twisted about, yanked his head down, and began running to the corner.
— Aaa! Mama! Mine it was! Should have kicked ’em, kicked ’em and run. Go back! Kick em! Kick ’em in the belly. G’wan, you coward! Coward! Coward! Coward! Hate ’em! All! All! Everybody! Shouldn’t have gone over. Never go over again! Never talk to them even! Hate ’em! And she — Why did she let them look. Shades, why didn’t she pull them? Ain’t none! Ain’t none! And she let me look at her! Mad at her! Ow! Don’t let ’em see me crying! Cry baby! Cry baby!
He stumbled blindly across the street, flung himself into the hallway. The obscure stairs. At last he reached his own floor.
— Scared. Don’t care. Scared before. Scared all the time.
— Got to stop crying. She’ll ask why. What’ll I say? From the roof they saw you. No, no, don’t say anything — roof they. Roof … Roof? Never was … up there … I wonder?…
He stared in breathless irresolution from his own doorway to the roof-door overhead. The clean, untrodden flight of stairs that led up, beckoned even as they forbade; temptingly the light swarmed down through the glass of the roof-housing, silent, untenanted light; evoking in his mind and superimposing an image of the snow he had once vaulted into and an image of the light he had once climbed. Here was a better haven than either, a more durable purity. Why had he never thought of it before? He had only to conquer his cowardice, and that solitude and that radiance were his. But quickly, he must go quickly, before someone came out. He mounted the stairs that even underfoot felt differently, as though the unworn mica in them sparkled through the soles — and stopped at the door. Only a catch held it back; it could be lifted. He tugged it with crooked finger. It flew up suddenly — Panic stricken, he watched the heavy door swing away from his hand, squeak leisurely and on reluctant hinges into the sky. (—Down! Run down!) He threw a frightened glance over his shoulder. (—No! Coward! Stay right here! G’wan! G’wan out! It’s light! What’re you scared of?) He lifted a tentative unsteady foot over the high threshold. (—Ow!) The red-painted sheet-iron crackled under his soles with a terrifying report. (—Go back! Run! No! Won’t! G’wan, make a noise! Who cares? G’wan coward!) Breath bound in his lungs, he swung the snickering door back into place. It stayed closed.
— Gee!
He sighed tremulously, lifted his head, and with body pivoting on fixed feet, gazed about him.
The immense heavens of July, the burnished, the shining fathom upon fathom. Too pure the zenith was, too pure for the flawed and flinching eye; the eye sowed it with linty darkness, sowed it with spores and ripples of shadow drifting. (—Even up here dark follows, but only a little bit) And to the west, the blinding whorl of the sun, the disk and trumpet, triple-trumpet blaring light. He blinked, dropped his eyes and looked about him. Quiet. Odor of ashes, the cold subterranean breath of chimneys. (—Even up here cellar follows, but only a little bit) And about were roof-tops, tarred and red and sunlit and red, roof-tops to the scarred horizon. Flocks of pigeons wheeled. Where they flew in lower air, they hung like a poised and never-raveling smoke; nearer at hand and higher, they glittered like rippling water in the sun. Quiet. Sunlight on brow and far off plating the sides of spires and water-towers and chimney pots and the golden cliffs of the streets. To the east the bridges, fragile in powdery light.
— Gee! Alone … Ain’t so scared.
VI
WHEN he came down from the roof a little while later, he crept down a few steps toward the floor below his own. He would stamp up just before he entered his house, stamp toward his door. It would make his coming home seem more natural. He did so.
His mother looked strange when he entered — so strange that for a moment, he thought his ruse had failed, he thought himself discovered. But another glance reassured him, and yet while it reassured him on one score troubled him vaguely on another. It wasn’t awareness or alertness or suspicion that was the cause of that glow in her features, that calm, but something else, something he scarcely ever remembered seeing before — an obscure lassitude, a profound and incomprehensible contentment. What was it? What made the hand that had placed a finger across her lips, warning him that he had made too much noise, come down so slowly and with such peculiar, self-conscious grace as though her whole body found a relish in the very movement of her limbs, and relishing, lingered. It touched a chord of memory within himself, touched it with finger tips — Some thing he had done, felt? What? The wisp of a stir within his beign faded before the mind could fasten on it. It was baffling. He looked about the kitchen. The bedroom door was closed — his father was asleep. And on the wash-tub lay a bulky package, the strings cut, but the heavy brown paper still covering it; and beside it, crossing each other, a new white-handled whip and the butt of the old broken black one. He felt his legs stiffen, brace against the sudden undertow of terror. He turned away. His mother had lowered the finger from her lips and greeted him. (But where were the outstretched arms she always met him with?) And then she smiled. (But was that smile for him or for that inner languor that suffused and harmonized her spirit?) His eyes darted to the parcel and the whips on the washtub and then returned to her — questioningly. She seemed to avoid his query, and asked instead:
“Why is your nose so sunburned? Where have you been?”
The wonder that her singular appearance had produced within himself almost lowered his guard. He came within a breath of telling her the truth — but stopped himself in time. “On the sidewalk.” His eyes wavered between her waist and the linoleum. “We were all sitting. It was hot.”
“Your father’s bought a new whip,” she smiled. “Is that what you wanted to ask me?”
“N-no.”
“Oh, no? I thought you were just dying to ask me if you could have the broken one. Perhaps Albert will give—”
But he was already shaking his head. (It was hard not to be violent, not to be vehement all the time. Sometimes the hoops of caution almost snapped.)
“What’s that?” he pointed to the parcel. “Can I look?”
“Why, of course! But I warn you,” she laughed, as she went over to the wash-tub, “this time it’s really a big surprise!”
There was an old overtone in her words, but he was too experienced now to ask, “Is it for me?” Instead, he merely lifted the heavy wrapping-paper flaps — and stared and blinked and stared again! At his back he heard her expectant laughter. Before him on a shield-shaped wooden plaque, two magnificent horns curved out and up, pale yellow to the ebony tips. So wide was the span between them, he could almost have stretched his arms out on either side, before he could touch them. Though they lay there inertly, their bases solidly fastened to the dark wood, there pulsed from them still a suggestion of terrific power, a power that even while they lay motionless made the breast ache as though they were ever imminent, ever charging.