“I guess he just didn’t think about it.”
“He’d’ve thought of it if he had to walk two miles through it,” the old man said. “You want somethin dry to put on?”
“It’d just get wet again. Anyway, it don’t bother me. I don’t reckon I’ll melt, I never have.”
“Still, it wouldn’t’ve hurt him. I had a car I’d take ye myself but I never owned one.”
“I don’t mind walking.”
“Well, I don’t reckon it hurts a man, I’ve done it all my life. Or so far anyway. You want me to heat up the coffee?”
“I got to get on. It’s getting dark early tonight. Cooled off some too.”
“Maybe a man can sleep then,” Oliver said. “Here lately, it’s been so hot I ain’t been able to get to sleep till two or three o’clock in the mornin.”
The boy rose. “Go with me.”
“I guess I better set around here.” Oliver seemed to be scrutinizing the boy’s feet. He got up stiffly from the swing. “I got somethin I been aimin to give you if it wouldn’t make you mad. You reckon it would?”
“I doubt it.” Winer grinned.
The old man went back into the house, Winer following. “I bought me a pair of shoes through the mail a year or two ago and then couldn’t wear em. I expect my feet’s about through growin too. I been kindly keepin a eye on them feet of yourn and I believe they’ve growed a size or two since spring.”
They passed through the front room past the dead stove the old man kept up winter and summer and stepped down into the long, narrow lean-to that served as the old man’s bedroom. The room was dark and lowceilinged and Winer stood uncertainly for a moment letting his eyes adjust to the cloistered gloom and watching shapes gain outline and solidity, ephemeral shapes halftransient lock themselves into recognizable form: an old chifforobe whose dusty mirror presented him with a warped sideshow representation of himself, an old rustcolored iron bed, boxes stacked on boxes nigh to the ceiling, old lavender and gray Sunday dresses fading and shapeless on their hangers, faint scent of lemon verbena out of some other time, or life. Oliver fetching up from the bottom of the chifforobe a newlooking pair or black hightop shoes, freshly removed from their box and tissue paper like some memento covertly hidden from time.
“Here we go,” the old man said. He handed the shoes to Winer. “Hold em up agin ye shoes there and measure em.”
“I believe they’ll fit. How much do you want for them?”
“Nothin.”
“I’ll pay you.”
“Take em on. They ain’t doin nobody no good settin there. I don’t need em noway.”
“I’d rather pay you.”
“I may get you to sell my sang for me some Saturday. Either my legs ain’t what they used to be or they keep scootin town a little farther west ever year.”
After the fetid room the air outside seemed fresh and clean. With the shoebox turned upside down and tucked under his arm Winer stepped into the rain. He crossed under the pear tree through the spate of discarded scrapiron that lay like mutant fruit and onto the road. Oliver sat back in the swing. The chain creaked, tautened. He watched Winer out of sight beyond the hedge broke in a curve of the road and the road ascended. The road crossed the creek there and he could hazily see the wooden bridge. Then dusk moved in unnoticed with the rain and a little wind blew chill out of the west and stung him with spray. Winer disappeared in blue dusk. Dark gathered in the shadow of the pear tree and crept toward the porch and Oliver rose and went into the house to light his lamp.
These evenings Winer’s mother would be in the front room awaiting him and she would be sitting motionless on the rocker before the dead fireplace. Tonight she had the lamp lit on the mantle and she sat at the repair of some garment made soft and nigh shapeless by repeated washing and she did not even look up when he came in. A sallow young-old woman whose highcheeked face looked somehow androgynous, nunlike perhaps or resembling an ascetic priest at some vague rites. Coronaed by the yellow halo of light she looked unreal, a ghost at some vigil, faded sepia image on a funeral-home calendar.
His room was in the attic and he climbed a ladder to it, she did not even ask him about the box. He stowed the shoes in a wooden trunk then sat at the foot of his bed a moment looking at them. He figured Oliver could wear them. He sat staring at them in a curiously hopeless way and then closed the lid.
The loft room was unbearable during the summer and Winer had taken to sleeping wherever the heat would let him. Tonight the window was open and the attic cool. Winds had blown the curtains off and they lay on the floor, gauzy specters twice lifeless and crumpled. The floor was damp with blown rain. The roof formed an A above him, with the tin that comprised both roof and ceiling pockmarked by nails that had missed the rafter, and when he laid a hand against the tin it felt cold and damp. He changed hurriedly into dry clothes and went back down the ladder.
She seemed long taken by some vow of silence or a malfunction of whatever produced words or inspired them. He didn’t speak either. He knew she would talk sooner or later, conquer momentarily whatever had closed her lips, anger or simply boredom with one day the same as any other.
She’d left his plate on the table with another upturned over it and he lit the kitchen lamp and sat down to eat. He ate hurriedly, seemingly without tasting the food, fried okra and greenbeans and new potatoes, fending away onehanded moths and bugs drawn by the light or driven in the open window by the windy rain. A candlefly guttered in the quaking heat above the globe, plummeted to the orange flame, convulsed, died in silent white agony behind the hot glass.
She was standing in the door watching him eat. “Did he pay you?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s Friday. He pays off every Friday.” He pushed his plate back.
“I keep lookin for him to cheat you. You just a boy and him in a position to take advantage.”
It was an old argument and he didn’t care to reopen it. “If he does it’s just me,” he said. He arose, fumbling the money from his pocket, offered it to her. She took it wordlessly, he watched it disappear into her apron pocket.
When he had first gone to work for Weiss she had raged against it: a boy shouldn’t have to do a man’s work for a boy’s pay. All she said now was that if he had a proper father to look after him things would never have come to this. To such a desperate pass. She looked at him now as if all this was some contrivance of his own.
“Just walk out and pull the door to,” she said with an old bitterness. “Gone and never a word to nobody.”
That was an old argument too and if he had any words or refutation now he kept them to himself. When he was younger and easier to hurt he had said, “He never run off.”
She had gestured around the room with an expansive arm movement halftheatrical and halfdemented and shouted, “Well, do you see him anywhere? You reckon he’s behind the door playin a prank on you?” He had just watched her with eyes that were no longer child’s eyes and he had had nothing to say.
When he went up the ladder at bedtime the rain still fell and it was still cool. Feeling carefully in the dark he found a box of matches and lit the lamp and then sorted through books in a cardboard box under his bed. The bedclothes were slightly damp but after the day’s heat they felt comfortable. He lay down, positioned the lamp, and began to read, barely hearing the sibilant murmur on the tin. After a time he heard her come up the ladder and cross the floor with a kind of ratlike stealth.
“What are you doin in there?”
“Reading.”
“It’s getting late,” she said. “You blow out that lamp. Coaloil’s high.”
“All right,” he said. He got up and took a quilt from the bed and laid it across the bottom of the door to block out the light. He could hear her, satisfied, retreating back down the ladder. He read awhile longer then blew out the lamp.