They Came Like Swallows (5 page)

He lost track of the conversation and when he started listening again, Irene was saying, “… and she had her son with her, a youngster about eleven years old. And every time they came on deck she’d light into him because he was sending all his post-cards to the same boy, instead of spreading them around.

“Boyd couldn’t see anything funny in that, and after I explained, he still wasn’t amused. It was completely unimportant …”

Bunny’s eyelashes brushed and became momentarily entangled. Against the light from the bay window they seemed as large and long as spears. His mother got up and went over to the mantel. Then she came back and sat down again, with a box on her knee.

“Will you have some candy?”

“So soon after dinner. How can you, Bess?”

“You’ve forgotten what it’s like to be—”

“Oh, of course. I did forget, as a matter of fact. I mean I forgot you were—But it is important that people laugh at the same things. Or at least enjoy them in something like the same way.”

“If you went back to him, Irene, you’d find—”

“He was there when I took Agnes, this noon. I went in, anyway. I shouldn’t have, I suppose. But I thought what’s the use of going out of my way to make trouble when there’s been enough already.”

The last time Uncle Boyd came to the house, before he went away, Bunny saw him. Bunny was playing in the front hall with a china wolf-hound that used to be at Grandmother Blaney’s before she died. And he looked out of the front window and saw Uncle Boyd coming up the walk. The doorbell rang. His father came to the door and opened it. And there he was—tall and thin, with a gray streak across his hair. And he said,
Is Irene here?
And his father said, I
haven’t the least idea!

“Boyd was very pleasant. He asked after you, Bess, and said how much he thought of you—”

“Yes?”

“And when I got up to go, he went with me as far as the front walk. We stood by the hitching-post and I said good-by, and he said good-by and he was very glad to have seen me, and then he shook hands very formally as if I were a visiting lady from Scotland. And then he went all to pieces…. The things he said—you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Standing there on the sidewalk with the tears running down his cheeks…. It was a mistake. For two whole years he had known it was all a mistake. And the way he found out was that he caught himself looking for me wherever he went. He’d notice some woman at the theater or walking in a park, and the back of her head
would be like me. And he’d follow her, thinking possibly …”

Bunny narrowed his eyes as his mother got up, with the box of candy in her hand, and put it on the mantelpiece, where it wouldn’t be so continual a temptation. Then she said, “Speaking of the backs of women’s heads—I took Robert aside the other day and made him promise that if anything happened to me he’d break all my cut-glass. I don’t want some other woman using it when I’m gone.”

Bunny’s eyes flew open. In the nick of time he remembered that he was pretending to be asleep, closed them, and opened them again—more deliberately. The spears waved. He was in a field of green corn.

The intense part of the afternoon was over when Irene got up to go home. Bunny and his mother were alone after she left. And it was clear that his mother was despondent over something, for she stopped hemming diapers and gazed thoughtfully into the fire for a long while. Once she sighed.

At the right moment Bunny told her about Arthur Cook, and how Arthur got sick at school. Bunny heard the nurse telling his teacher, outside in
the hall, that it was a clear case of flu. This time there was no doubt about his mother’s interest. She sat looking at him anxiously, the whole time. And certain portions of his narrative had to be repeated.

“Bunny, why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me last Friday, instead of waiting until now?”

He started to explain fully, but she had already picked up the receiver of the telephone.

“I’m going to call Arthur’s mother, and find out how he is. And while I think of it, there’s something you can do for me: We’re out of cream. Sophie forgot to order any. And if I make cornbread for supper, we’ll need butter as well. Half a pound….
Nine-nine-two…. Yes, that’s right.
… I could send Robert for it when he gets home from Scout meeting, but he may be late.”

It was the unexpected that happened, always. The empty gun, his Grandmother Morison said, that killed people. He would have to put on his rubbers and his coat and cap and gloves and go outdoors.

Weekdays he came straight home from school so that he could have his mother all to himself. At quarter after four Sophie wheeled in the teacart and there was a party: little cakes with white icing on them, a glass of milk for him and tea for his mother. Then he sat on her lap while she read to him from
Toinette’s Philip
or from
The Hollow Tree and Deep Woods Book.
About Mr. Crow and the C-X pie. Or about Mr. Possum’s Uncle Silas who went to visit Cousin Glen-wood in the city and came home with a “man” and a lot of new clothes and a bag of shinny sticks.

When his mother read to him, her voice fell softly from above. It turned with the flames. Like the flames, it was full of shadows. While she was reading he would look up sometimes and discover that she had yawned; or she would stop and look into the fireplace absently, so that he would have to remind her to go on reading.

But today there was no pleasant hour with her before his father came home. When he threw open the back door, the sky overhead was clear, the air thin and without warmth. Old John rose and extended his paws unsteadily. Bunny recognized it as a gesture toward following him. But having made the gesture, Old John could do no more. He collapsed feebly upon his square of carpet.

If it had been Robert, Bunny thought sadly—if it had been Robert that called him, Old John would have come along.

Hoping to catch something off guard, he crossed the garden walk. But the sunlight was spread too evenly upon the ground and woven too firmly into the silence under the grape-arbor. Bunny did not disturb it in the least by his coming. Only the Lombardy poplars were a trifle unprepared, so that when he picked up a stick and broke it, their few remaining leaves were seized with a musical agitation.

For a second Bunny wanted to climb up on the kitchen roof, which started behind the flue and from there sloped down almost to the ground, over the cellar stairs. Then he turned and went directly toward the front walk. An iron picket was missing from the fence. Once upon a time he could slip through by
ducking his head. Now he had to bend double and squeeze. He was growing. Size nine or nine and a half. And yet the sidewalk seemed no farther away than it had ever been. With his head down, his eyes fastened upon the cement, he started toward the store.

At the corner he looked up, for no reason. The outer branches of the elm trees met high overhead, shielding the street, which was empty and strewn with dead leaves. Mrs. Lolly’s store was in the next block. Her porch was old and rickety and sagged in places, but it was high enough to stand up under. On the hard ground underneath Mrs. Lolly’s porch three boys were kneeling, their arms outstretched, playing marbles. Johnny Dean, Ferris (who smoked cigarettes), and Mike Holtz. The afternoon became complicated—though it was clear, after the rain, and transparent to the farthest edges.

At the intersection Bunny crossed over. His knees were becoming drowsy with fear. He could go back, of course. He could go home and come again a little later. But what would his mother think? Opposite the store he crossed back again. Mike Holtz didn’t see him, but he saw Mike Holtz. Saw his white face, jeering, his cap pulled down over one ear, his dirty fat knuckles…. If he could get as far as the steps, Bunny told himself carefully. He came to the steps, mounted over the very center of his fright, and closed the door safely behind him.

Mrs. Lolly was middle-aged and sagging, like her porch. She kept a yellow pencil in the knot at the back of her hair. Bunny was grateful to her, as he was grateful now to all things—things standing about in boxes and cases, on shelves all the way up to the ceiling. Everything was so substantial. The crates of apples and oranges, the pears in tissue-paper, the enormous cabbages. And most substantial of all—a very old woman who was worrying with her shawl.

Mrs. Lolly added up figures on a paper bag. When she stopped and looked at him blindly, Bunny saw that her eyes were full of arithmetic.

“Are you in a hurry?”

He shook his head. Not at all in a hurry. Not in the least. What he most wanted was for time to stand emphatically still, the way the sun and the moon did for Joshua.

The old woman, waiting, sucked at her teeth one after another until the pin came out of her shawl.

“Seven”—Mrs. Lolly went on counting—“and two to carry.”

Bunny pressed his nose against the glass case. Looking intently, he tasted gumdrops, licorice, caramels, candy-corn.

“In Chicago,” the old woman said, as she fastened her shawl closely about her shoulders, “I hear there’s people dying of influenza. And in St. Louis.”

A pleasant imaginary voice said:
Help yourself. Bunny. Take as much of anything there is in the case as you want.

Mrs. Lolly jabbed the pencil straight into her
head. “There’s lots of sickness about,” she said. “Come in again.” And with what was left of the same breath, “Young man?”

“Cream,” Bunny told her. “And half a pound of butter.”

Then hoping by one means or another to delay matters he went in pursuit of Mrs. Lolly’s tortoise-shell cat.

The cat dived under a cracker-barrel.

“Anything else?”

Mrs. Lolly held the cream out to him, and butter from her ancient ice-box. With no reason to stay, and nothing left to ask for, Bunny turned away. He and the old woman went out together. The steps were wet and so they both went slowly. When the old woman reached the sidewalk she stopped to catch her breath and went
phifft
—with her finger against her nose. Disgust encircled Bunny’s throat.

Crossing the street in the old woman’s wake, he remembered the first time he had ever seen anyone do that. A farmer. Some one they drove out in the country to see about some insurance premiums. His father left the car at the farmhouse. They climbed under a fence and walked side by side through a meadow where daisies were growing. And they came to a field and the man was in the field with his horses. His father talked about the price of wheat—whether it was better to sell now or hold on to it awhile. And everywhere about them the green corn was making a sound like—

“There
he goes!”

A voice sang out, with no warning. The voice of Fat Holtz. The trees stumbled and the sidewalk turned sickeningly under Bunny’s feet. He ran, ran as hard as he could, until legs tripped him from behind and hands sent him sprawling in the bitter dirt.

How Robert came to be there, who summoned him in this hour of need, Bunny did not know. Robert was there. That was enough. Robert pulled his tormentors off, one by one, and drove them away. Bunny sat up, then, and saw that there was a large hole in his stocking. And his knee was bleeding.

“Before all my friends,” Robert said.

Matthews and Scully and Berryhill and North-way were crossing over to the other side of the street. They did not look back.

“In front of everybody,” Robert said; “and you didn’t even try to hit them.”

Robert, too, was against him. Bunny looked at the broken glass and the white stain spreading along the walk, and burst into tears.

The little brass clock on the mantel struck seven sharply, to make clear that this second Sunday in November, 1918, which had begun serene and immeasurable, was very nearly gone.

From his place in the window seat Bunny observed
that the rug was a river flowing between the stable and the long white bookshelves; turning at the chair where his mother sat, with light slanting down about her head and the blue cloth of her dress deepening into folds, into pockets.

When the little brass clock finished, the grandfather’s clock cleared its throat, began to stammer. In the midst of this mechanical excitement Robert took a firmer hold on the lamp cord and with his free hand turned a page of
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar.

When the grandfather’s clock had finished, it was seven (officially) and Bunny exchanged glances with his mother. His father got up to put a fresh log on the fire. Then he took a pack of cards and laid them face down in rows on the library table. His father grew restless if they remained overlong at the dinner table; fidgeted; contrived ways of transferring the conversation bodily to the library, where he could begin his shuffling and turning, his interminable dealing of cards. Bunny turned back to his mother.

“For this time of year,” she said, “for November, it seems to be getting dark too soon.”

She meant what she said, of course. And she meant also whatever she wanted to mean. Bunny was not surprised when his father stopped turning the cards and looked at her.

“I hadn’t noticed it.”

In this fashion they communicated with each other, out of knowledge and experience inaccessible to Bunny. By nods and silences. By a tired curve of his mother’s mouth. By his father’s measuring glance over
the top of his spectacles. Bunny drew his knees under him and looked out. The room was reflected in the windowpane. He could see nothing until he pulled the curtain behind his head. Outside it was quite dark, as his mother said. Light from the Koenigs’ window fell across their walk, across the corner of their cistern. If he were in the garden now, with a flashlight, he could see insects crawling through the cold grass. If he waited out there, waited long enough, he would hear blackbirds, and wild geese flying in migratory procession across the sky…. The curtain slipped back into place. Once more he could see nothing but reflections of the room. The night outside (and all that was in it) was shut away from him like those marvelous circus animals in wagons from which the sides had not been removed.