They Came Like Swallows (6 page)

“I stopped in to see Tom Macgregor this afternoon,” his father said.

“Seven of diamonds, sweetheart.”

“I
see
it.”

“Now, maybe, but you didn’t.”

Although she never paid any attention, his mother seemed to know by instinct when his father turned up the five of spades or the seven of diamonds that he was looking for. And she could tell clear across the room when his father began cheating.

“I did, too.”

“Jack of clubs, then…. How was he?” “How was who?” his father asked. “Tom Macgregor.”

Bunny listened with quickening interest. It was
Dr. Macgregor who took his tonsils out; who sewed up a long gash over Robert’s eye the time he fell off his bicycle, so there was scarcely the sign of a scar.

“He has a new hunting-dog.”

“How many does that make?” His mother sat up suddenly and poked through her sewing-kit until she found the package of needles.

“Three, as I recall. But one of them has worms. I couldn’t get him to talk about anything else.”

“Did you see it, Dad?”

His father drew all the cards together and sorted those which were lying face up from those which were face down. Bunny could not bear, sometimes, having to wait so long for an answer.

“Dad, did you
see
the dog that had worms?”

“Yes, son.”

“What did it look like?”

His father shuffled the deck loudly before he spoke.

“It was an English setter.”

Bunny got up from the window seat in despair; he would go out to the kitchen and pay a visit to Sophie, whose conversation did not leave off where it ought to begin.

To get to the kitchen he must go through the dining-room, which was almost dark. And then the butler’s pantry, which was entirely so. It was safe and bright in the kitchen, but overhead were dark caverns that Bunny did not like to think about—that end of the upstairs hall, where there was usually no light on, and the terrible back stairs.

“I think I’ll go see what Sophie is doing.”

His mother’s nod reassured him. It said
Very well, my darling, but go quickly and don’t look behind you.

Under the pantry door there was a line of yellow light. And Bunny heard voices—Sophie, Karl, Sophie again. They were talking to each other in German, but they stopped when he pushed the door open. “Hello!” he said. The warm air of the kitchen enveloped him, instantly.

“And how is Bubi this evening?”

Karl was sitting very straight in the kitchen chair with his raincoat on. Tiny rivers of sweat ran down the sides of his face.

“My name isn’t Booby, it’s Bunny!”

“Hein?”

No matter how many times he corrected Karl, it was always the same. Karl never could remember. He always put his great hands together over his stomach and bobbed his head.

“That is good. And I all along was thinking—what you say it is? …
Bubi?”

Sophie laughed then, and rattled the dishes in the kitchen sink—although there was no particular reason, so far as Bunny could make out, why she should do either. Every Sunday night this same conversation took place. Karl appeared after supper, scraped his feet on the mat, rain or shine, knocked once very gently, and came in. While Sophie washed and dried the dishes, Karl sat waiting with his coat on. And if Bunny came into the kitchen, Karl lit his pipe, gathered Bunny onto his lap, and told him a story.

After this unsteadying and unreasonable day when he had had so much to think about (the baby coming and Robert taking possession of the back room), after his encounter with Fat Holtz, Bunny gave himself up to the smell of leather and pipe tobacco; to the comfort of Karl’s shoulder.

The story was always the same. Following the certain channel of Karl’s sentences
(Already the ditch so deep was
…) He saw Karl’s great-grandfather digging in mud and water up to his ankles. He saw trees falling, heard the great wind that blew and blew out of the ditch until at last it blew Karl’s great-grandfather’s pipe out—as Bunny was sure it would. And no sooner did Karl’s great-grandfather’s pipe go out than the real pipe which Karl held between his teeth, a deep-bowled one, went out also. And Karl had to stop and fill the real one before the story could go on.

First he couldn’t remember what he had done with his tobacco-pouch. He looked earnestly on the kitchen table, under the chair, in all his pockets. He felt the sides of his trousers. He made Bunny get down so that he could search through his raincoat half a dozen times. After the pouch was located (in Karl’s inside coat pocket, where he always kept it) Karl had to fill his pipe with great care. He had to tamp it down so that it was not too loose and so that it was not too tight. Then one match after another, before the pipe was lit properly. And just as Bunny was climbing back on Karl’s lap, Sophie gave a final twist to her dishrag and hung it over the kitchen sink.

“Aber
next time …” Karl said, smiling at him from the doorway.

But I wanted to hear the ending of the story now, not next time, Bunny thought sadly, as he turned out the light and made his way with one hand along the wall until he reached the dining-room.

“I told you, Bess…. There isn’t any place else for her to go.”

His father and mother were in the library still. By the tone of his father’s voice Bunny was sure they were discussing Grandmother Morison. He waited for a moment among the dining-room chairs until he could decide whether the conversation was worth overhearing, and learned that Uncle Wilfred and Aunt Clara were going to spend Thanksgiving in Vandalia, with Uncle Wilfred’s family.

“Why does your mother have to go any place? Why can’t she stay right there while they are away? They could get some one to come in nights so that she wouldn’t be alone.”

“They’re going to close the house up. The gas and electricity will be turned off.”

“For
five
days?”

“Yes.”

Bunny thought of Aunt Clara’s house, standing there on the other side of town. And how Grandmother Morison and he went up the narrow stairs that lay behind a door in the Spare Room. Up to the attic which was Unknown Land, full of boxes he was not
encouraged to look into, pictures, vases, trunks, broken pieces of furniture, magazines, books, old clothes—so much of everything and so many things that he could never get more than a confused geographical impression of the whole. By the double flue were toys that had belonged to Cousin Morison when he was a little boy. These he was not allowed to touch…. By the second dormer window was another collection, which belonged to Robert. Not so many, of course. Few of Robert’s toys survived the treatment he gave them. Bunny was not allowed to touch these, either…. In the far corner of the attic beside the water-tank were his own toys, all carefully put away in an egg-basket. These he could take down with him to Grandmother Morison’s room, which smelled of camphor.

While she made quilting patterns out of brown tissue-paper, he played with the lovely Russian sleigh that worked on spools. With the paperweight Lion of Lucerne. With tables and chairs for the house where the three bears lived. And there were pictures in the basket, as well as toys. Pictures of Daniel, of Ezekiel in the valley, of Joshua with his sword drawn, bidding the sun and the moon stand still.

Bunny could not help regretting those other toys at Aunt Clara’s which he was never allowed to play with. Especially the little gold piano with angels painted on it. Once, as he was going by, he put out his hand and touched one of the keys. And Aunt Clara called up to him through the floor that the little piano
was Cousin Morison’s (who died of typhoid fever) and he was not to touch it.

“I’m telling you what Clara said.”

Bunny moved closer to the doorway. If he went any farther they’d stop talking, but at his back was the dark pantry, and the door into the kitchen was wide open.

“If it were at any other time. But we’ll both be gone, and you know there’s no telling what she may take into her head to do. I don’t really mind her straightening my dresser drawers—I do mind, as a matter of fact—but she feeds Bunny gumdrops and horehound candy until his stomach is upset, and tells Sophie she won’t go to Heaven because she was baptized in the Lutheran Church…. And what about Irene? Shall I tell her that we’ve changed our minds and don’t want her to stay with the boys while we’re away?”

“No, I’d rather she were here.”

“So would I. Much rather. But the house isn’t big enough to hold Irene and your—”

Bunny’s question was decided for him by a disturbance on the back stairs—so sudden that his terrified heart nearly stopped beating. With arms outstretched he threw himself bodily upon the lighted room.

While Bunny waited, the cymbal in his left hand and the large padded drumstick in his right, Robert beside him tapped delicately on the edge of his chair. Light shone on the varnished surface of the piano, on the ivory keys. His father’s hands proceeded up the keyboard in a series of chords twice repeated. Across the living-room his mother was looking at them. She was waiting for them to begin. “Well, gentlemen?”

Bunny met his mother’s eyes at the precise moment when his father started forth upon the opening measures of
Stars and Stripes Forever.
The flood of sound was so sudden and so immense that Bunny came near drowning in it. He caught at the regular six-eight rhythm as if it were a spar, and striking out with the cymbal in his left hand, the drumstick in his right, he tried frantically to save himself.

Once started, the music swept along of its own momentum, carrying Bunny with it. He was helpless. So was Robert and so was his mother. The only opposition came from the room itself. What the green walls threw back, the fire caught at and sent up the chimney. What the fire could not reach, the ringed candelabrum turned nervously into light, ring upon ring.

After
Stars and Stripes Forever
came
Washington Post
and
El Capitan
and
The Fairest of the Fair.
Bunny’s eyelids began to grow heavy. They were weighed down with music. He told himself anxiously that he must keep them open. He must not drop off to sleep. But in a very short while there was Karl’s great-grandfather digging and digging with a pipe in his mouth …

“Now what’s wrong?”

The music had stopped and Bunny saw to his amazement that he was at home, in the living-room. And his father was frowning at him.

“He was falling asleep,” Robert said.

“You can’t expect to play with us, son, if you’re going to fall asleep every five minutes. See if you can’t do a little better.”

Bunny stared self-consciously in front of him, past Robert’s grave smirk.

His father turned back to the piano and with his
left hand struck a chord, then another. “We’ll quit in a few minutes and then you can go to bed.” They took up
The U.S. Field Artillery
where they had left off. Bunny forced his eyelids so wide apart that they ached. If his mother would only look at him! Through the fading light he saw that she was reading. She had picked up a magazine. His eyelids closed for a second and when he opened them the room had darkened permanently. There was nothing, he found, that he could do about it. He heard the rhythm of the piano. Cymbal chinked blindly on cymbal and drumstick beat drum. But he was wrapped comfortably around in music so deep and so firm that he could lie back upon it. He was upheld for a long time and then moved forward into a darkened air where thunder burst concentrically out of red rings … green rings … lavender rings …

“For the love of God!”

“I wasn’t falling asleep!” Bunny said, so wide awake now that he thought he was telling the truth. “Oh balls!”

What this word meant when it didn’t mean a ball that you throw or bounce, Bunny had no idea, but he knew it wasn’t nice, whatever it was. And imprisoned inside him was another little boy who was nobody’s angel child and who didn’t like to be shouted at. That little boy said, “Balls your ownself!”

By the loud silence that had come over the room, Bunny realized that he’d gone too far. He looked at his mother, and then at Robert, who avoided meeting his eyes.

His father said sternly, “Go to bed, son. Go right now.”

Bunny went over to the sofa, and as he bent down to kiss his mother good-night, his eyes searched her face for the indignation he was sure she felt, and he got a terrible shock:
She was trying to keep from smiling.

She was not indignant with his father, she was on his father’s side.

It was all that he could do to get up the stairs.

Bunny woke early to the sound of church bells, though it was Monday morning. Could it be Sunday all over again? Or was there something tremendously the matter?

While he lay in bed, wondering, the sky was split wide open by the whistle from the shoe-factory; by a second whistle from the waterworks. Then the fire alarm began, absorbing whistles and bells into its own dreadful moaning. Until sound became general and the morning throbbed with it.

When Bunny drew his head out from under his pillow Robert was gone, his bed disturbed and empty. One last turn and Bunny got up likewise. Washed himself, dressed, and went downstairs. At the door of the library he waited, uncertain how he might be received. Robert and his mother were eating breakfast
before the fire. His father was sitting in the window seat, reading the
Chicago Tribune.
His father’s coffee was there neglected on the window sill beside him. They looked so nice, sitting there. So like themselves. Was it possible, Bunny considered, that what he remembered about last night had never really happened?

“Good morning, everybody,” he said, politely.

All three of them spoke at once:

“The War’s over.”

“Oh.”

In his sleep he dreamed things that were quite real afterward. Could it have been that? Could he have dreamed that he talked back to his father and got sent up to bed? … He sat down in his place at the breakfast table and tied the napkin around his neck. Last night the music went on for a while without him, and then it stopped abruptly and Robert came upstairs. That much was true, not something he dreamed. And through the fringe of his eyelashes he had watched Robert undressing, taking down the straps of his wooden leg. Then darkness closed in around the sides of his bed and he was free to grieve. If
she
had been the one, he thought—if
she
had been in trouble, nothing in the world could have kept him from going to her. She did not really love him … Tears came, hot and effortless. Ran down his cheeks into the pillow, until he was exhausted and lay quiet, looking at the wedge of light under the bedroom door. After a time it grew wider. He heard them talking downstairs, and then the legs of the card table creak as they slid into place …