There are too many dandelions of course. The young couple does not go out often; and while Mrs. Mean dares, during the time of the dandelions’ cottoning, to pace the property line, glaring, her arms in scorn upon her hips, her face livid with furiously staged resignation, watching helplessly the light bolls rise and float above her peonies, hover near her roses, fall like kisses upon her grass, indecently rub seed against her earth; she would not consider — honor would not permit — stepping one foot across the borders if the young couple might observe it, or speaking to them, even most tactfully, about the civic duties of householders; and indeed, she is right this once at any rate; for if those two could not see what we saw so easily, and if they were not shamed or outraged into action by Mrs. Mean’s publicly demonstrated anger against them, she might plow and salt the whole of the land their castle grows on and expect no more effect than the present indifferent silence and neglect.
So there are too many dandelions and they go speedily to seed. The seeds rise like a storm and cross in clouds against her empty threats and puny beatings of the air. Mrs. Mean, then, as with all else, sets her children to it. They chase the white chaff. It dances from their rush. Mrs. Mean screams incoherent instructions. The children run faster. They leap higher. They whirl more rapidly. They beat back the invasion. But inevitably the seeds bob beyond them and float on. Mrs. Mean is herself adept. She snatches the cotton as it passes. She crushes it; drops it in a paper bag. Her eye never misses a swatch of the white web against the grass, and after every considerable wind, she carefully rakes the ground. The children, however, soon make a game of it. They gambol brightly and my heart goes out to them, dancing there, as it goes out seldom: gay as they are within the ridiculous, happy inside the insane.
The children hesitate to destroy their favorites. Instead they begin to cheer them on, calculating distance and drift, imagining balloons on tortured courses. Who would want to bring such ships prematurely down or interfere with their naturally appointed, wind-given paths?
Mrs. Mean.
She waits, motionless. The clusters come, one drifting near. Her arm flies out. Her fingers snap. The boll disappears in the beak of her hand. The prize is stuffed in her sack. Mrs. Mean is motionless again though the sack shakes. I am reminded of lizards on rocks, my wife of meat-eating plants. Mrs. Mean’s patience here is inexhaustible, her skill astonishing, her devotion absolute. The children are gone. Their shouts make no impression on her. Mrs. Mean is caught up. She waits. She fills her sack. But at last the furious fingers close on air, the arm jerks back an empty hand, and Mrs. Mean lowers her head to her failure. Alive, she whirls. Her wide skirt lifts. It is a crude ballet, a savage pantomime; for Mrs. Mean, unlike the other mothers of my street, does not shout her most desperate and determined wishes at her children. She forewarns with a trumpet but if her warnings are not heeded, she is silent as a snake. Her head jerks, and I know, reading the signs, that Mrs. Mean is seeking a weapon. The children are now the errant chaff, the undisciplined bolls, and although they are quite small children, Mrs. Mean always augments her power with a stick or a strap and dedicates to their capture and chastisement the same energy and stubborn singleness of purpose she has given to the destruction of weeds.
No jungle hunt’s been quieter. She discovers a fallen branch, the leaves still green. She shakes it. The twigs whip and the leaves rustle. She catches sight of her oldest boy beside the barn, rigid with the wildest suspense. His boll is floundering in a current of air. It hurtles toward a hole in the barn where cats crawl. His mother hobbles on him, her branch high, stiff, noiseless, as if it were now part of the punishment that he be taken unaware, his joy snuffed with fright as much as by the indignity of being beaten about the ears with leaves.
I think she does not call them to their idiotic tasks because they might obey. Her anger is too great to stand obedience. The offense must be fed, fattened to fit the feeling, otherwise it might snap at nothing and be foolish. So it must seem that all her children have slunk quietly and cunningly away. It must seem that they have mocked her and have mocked her hate. They must, therefore, be quietly and cunningly pursued, beaten to their home, driven like the dogs: bunched on all fours, covering their behinds, protecting the backs of their bare legs from the sting of the switch and their ears with their hands; contorted like cripples, rolling and scrabbling away from the smart of the strap in jerks, wild with their arms as though shooing flies; all the while silent, engrossed, as dumb as the dumbest beasts; as if they knew no outcry could help them; refusing, like the captive, to give satisfaction to his enemy — though the youngest child is only two — and this silence as they flee from her is more terrible to me than had they screamed to curdle blood and chill the bone.
3
Mrs. Mean seizes Ames’s arm, twists it behind him, rains blows upon his head and neck. He pulls away and runs. It’s to her purpose. She permits his flight. Now the words come and I understand that the silence has been a dam. Her arm points accusingly at his eyeless back. She curses him. She pronounces judgment upon him. She cannot understand his laziness, his uselessness, his disobedience, his stupidity, his slovenliness, his dirtiness, his ugliness; and Mrs. Mean launches into her list, not only of those faults she finds in his present conduct, but all she can remember having found since he first dangled from the doctor’s fist and was too slow to cry or cried too faintly or was too red or too wizened or too small or was born with eczema on his chest — a terrible mortification to his mother. He has been nothing but a shame since, a shame in all his days and all his doings. The ultimate word is hurled after him as he slams the door: Shame! He is given to understand by shouts directed toward the upstairs windows that there will be more to come, that she is not done with him, the shameful, disrespectful boy, the shameful, discourteous child; and now and then, though not this time, if the boy’s spirits are unusually high, if he is filled more than ordinarily with rebellion, he will thrust his head from the window of what I take to be his room, for that is where he has been sent, and make a horrible face at his mother, and a horrible bracking noise; whereupon Mrs. Mean will stop as though struck, suck in her breath, pause dreadfully to scream “What!” at the affront; and then explode derisively, contemptuously, “You! you! you!” until she sputters out. She rounds up the other children if they remain to be rounded up and some minutes later howls of pain and grief can be heard over the whole block.
It is on these occasions, I think, that the children are really hurt. The cuffs, the slaps, the switches they receive are painful, doubtless, but they are brief. They are also, in a sense, routine. The blows remind me of the repertoire of the schoolyard bully: the pinch, the shove, the hair-pull, the sudden blow on the muscle of the arm, the swift kick to the shin, elbow in the groin. Evil that is everyday is lost in life, goes shrewdly into it; becomes a part of habitual blood. First it is a convenient receptacle for blame. It holds all hate. We fasten to it — the permanent and always good excuse. If it were not for it, ah then, we say, we would improve, we would succeed, we would go on. And then one day it is necessary, as if there’s been a pain to breathing for so long that when the pain at last subsides, out of fright, we suffocate. So they grow up in it. At any rate, they get larger. They know the rules by heart for it’s like a game, a game there is no fun in playing and no profit. Ames retreats into the house with Mrs. Mean’s damnations at his back while the others, warned now, ready, circle widely out in alleys and around garages and old carriage barns, between the nearby houses, as Mrs. Mean cautiously seeks them, carefully guarding her rear, swiveling often, doubling back, peering craftily around corners until she finds one and the distance has been closed, when she makes a sudden, silent rush with her switch extended, beating before her the empty air, whipping the heels of the child as it runs for home. I don’t know all the rules or I don’t fully understand them but I gather that when Mr. Mean’s at work the front door is always locked, for the children never try to sneak in that way; and I guess the house must be home base, must be sanctuary except in the gravest cases. If they are not let out again, they are at least not beaten. They don’t have to dance after dandelion seeds in the hot yard.