huge noise and I would gleefully shoot round after round of
caps, a red paper that sort of exploded and burned. I had a
rifle too and boots. But it was the gun I loved, and Annie
Oakley. She wore a skirt and was a crack shot and once we
went to see her at a live show with Gene Autry. I wanted to be
her or Roy Rogers or the Lone Ranger, not Dale Evans, not
ever, not as long as I lived.
*
The wooden cage would hang from the telephone pole, hoisted
by a rope or a piece of clothesline. It would dangle there, the
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girl inside it not easy to see. They would push her around
before they put her in the cage. Sometimes they would tie her
hands. The wooden cage hung over the black asphalt lined by
garages, some open, some not, and garbage cans, all the fathers
at work, all the mothers inside the houses or in the front on
the steps visiting. It would be desolate on the asphalt, boys all
huddled around the cage with the one caught girl, and slowly
girls converging back there from all the directions they had
run in, some coming back from a long way away, having run
and hidden, run to the very edges of the boundaries of our
street or having run up and down the back ways and in and
out of garages, avoiding boys, hiding from them, and then
enough time would pass, and they would dare to drift back,
lonely perhaps, thinking enough time had gone by that
someone else had been caught or the game was over, and there
would always be the one girl surrounded by boys being pushed
into the cage and the cage being hoisted off the ground, or the
cage would already be tied up there. And the boys would stand
under it, watching it, watching her, and the other girls would
stay far away, around the edges, each alone, afraid to get too
close, afraid perhaps that the boys would grab them and do
something to them, also lonely, also left out. It was our saddest
game. It never ended right.
*
lt would begin in a blaze of excitement. Someone would say
let’s play witch. Everyone’s eyes would look wildly around,
scanning the street for where the adults were. We were
accomplices in this game. We all knew not to tell. No one ever
talked about this game or mentioned it any other time than
when we were going to play. The boys would get together and
count to ten fast because it was a ferocious game: the chase
was fierce and fast and it had to be close and there had to be
the excitement of being almost caught or having a hard time
getting away and they had to be able to see you and get you. It
wasn’t a patient game like hide-and-seek. It was a feverish
game, and it would begin at a fever pitch of the boys chasing
and you running as hard and as fast as you could but you
wanted to keep them after you as much as you didn’t want to
be caught so you would have to slow down to stay in sight,
and they would divide up going in twos and threes after one
15
girl or another and they would hunt someone down but if she
wasn’t the one they wanted they would pretend not to see her
finally hiding or they would suddenly turn and run after
someone else or run in another direction pretending to run
after someone else and in the end they would all have circled
the same girl, whoever they had decided on, and they would
herd her from wherever they had caught her, sometimes far
away from the wooden cage, and push her and shove her until
they got her to the telephone pole with the wooden cage. Once
they caught her it was against the rules for her not to go with
them anyway. The game slowed down after the first few
minutes and each girl was running on her own figuring out,
independent of what the boys had planned, whether she wanted
to be caught or not: and what to do to get caught or not to get
caught: and did the boys want her anyway? It became a game
of slow loneliness, of staggering solitude: breathless, dizzy, she
would stop running in a fever and turn to see no one chasing,
no one following. Had she won, outsmarted them, outrun
them, or had she lost, they had never really been after her
anyway. She might hide, or stalk the boys, dazzle them by
showing herself, and then they would chase her and she would
lose them again or hadn’t they really tried at all? Or she would
see one in the distance, maybe half a block away, and he didn’t
see her, or did he, and she would start running and running
and congratulate herself on getting away, or had she? Then a
long time would go by and she would get bored and tired and
want the game to be over and wonder where everybody was
and make her way back to the starting point and no one would
be there so she would make her way to the back alley and the
telephone pole, but from far away, toward it but not to it, not
directly walk up to it, always stay far away from it and the
boys, safe, and see the boys huddling around the cage and try
to see who was in it and hear the screams and watch the cage
go up, two or three boys hoisting it while the rest stood under
it and watched, and you could never see who it was. Later
when they let her down you could see. They would untie her
hands and walk away and she would be left there and the
scattered ring of lonely girls would watch. She was the witch.
No one talked to her at least the rest of the day.
♦
1 6
The convent gave us the right atmosphere. We never saw anything except the thick stone walls, and they were thick, not brick or cement, but huge stones like something medieval,
black and dark gray with moss and other hanging things and
shadows falling like God over the stones: and above the high
walls thick leafy green trees all casting shadows and it seemed
like no sky or light could ever get through them, in or out. It
was completely silent. We never saw anything or heard anything. No door ever opened or closed. No Latin poured out, no bells chimed, no music pierced the early dawn or night.
The wooden cage was hoisted in the back alley closest to the
convent, and you could see it from there, hanging over the
tops of the houses, a place of gothic mystery, Catholic, eerie.
From the telephone pole, hoisted up, inside the wooden cage,
you were raised above the stone walls and the ghastly trees:
and with your hands tied there you were the witch: and the
Catholics could see you.
They had things called nuns, women dressed all in black, all