Other Voices, Other Rooms

6

"Hold still," said Zoo, her eyes like satin in the kitchen, lamplight. "Never saw such a fidget; best hold still and let me cut this hair: can't have you runnin round here lookin like some ol gal: first thing you know, boy, folks is gonna say you got to wee wee squattin down." Garden shears snipped round the rim of the bowl, a blue bowl fitted on Joel's head like a helmet. "You got such pretty fine molasses hair seems like we oughta could sell it to them wigmakers."

Joel squirmed. "So what did you say after she said that?" he asked, anxious she return to a previous topic.

"Said what?"

"Said you've got a big nerve shooting off rifles when Randolph's so sick."

"Huh," Zoo grunted, "why, I just come right out and tol her, tol her: 'Miss Amy, them hawks fixin to steal the place off our hands less we shoo em away. Said, 'Done fly off with a dozen fat fryers this spring a'ready, and Mister Randolph, he gonna take mighty little pleasure in his sickness if his stomach stay growl-empty. »

Removing the bowl, making a telescope of her hands, she roamed around Joel's chair viewing his haircut from all angles. "Now that's what I calls a good trim," she said. "Go look in the window."

Evening silvered the glass, and his face reflected transparently, changed and mingled with moth-moving lamp yellow; he saw himself, and through himself, and beyond; a night bird whistled in the fig leaves, a whippoorwill, and fireflies sprinkled the blue-flooded air, rode the dark like ship lights. The haircut was disfiguring, for it made him in silhouette resemble those idiots with huge world-globe heads, and now, because of Randolph's flattery, he was self-conscious about his looks. "It's awful," he said.

"Huh," said Zoo, dishing supper scraps into a lard can reserved for pig slop, "you is as ignorant as that Keg Brown. Course he was the most ignorant human in my acquaintance. But you is both ignorant."

Joel, imitating Randolph, arched an eyebrow, and said: "I daresay I know some things I daresay you don't."

Zoo's elegant grace disappeared as she strode about clearing the kitchen: the floor creaked under her animal footfall, and, as she bent to lower the lamp, the hurt sadness of her long face gleamed like a mask. "I daresays," she said, plucking at her neckerchief, and not looking at Joel, "I daresays you is smarter'n Zoo, but I reckon as she knows better about folks feelins; leastwise, she don't go round makin folks feel no-count for no cause whatsoever."

"Aw," said Joel, "aw, I was just joking, honest," and, hugging her, smothered his face against her middle; she smelled sweet, a curious dark sour sweet, and her fingers, gliding through his hair, were cool, strong. "I love you because you've got to love me because you've got to."

"Lord, Lord," said Zoo, disengaging herself, "you is nothin but a kitty now, but comes the time you is full growed… what a Tom you gonna be."

Standing in the doorway he watched her lamp divide the dark, saw Jesus Fever's windows color: here he was, and there she was, and there was all of night between them. It had been a curious evening, for Randolph kept to his room, and Amy, fixing supper trays, one for Randolph and the other, presumably, Mr. Sansom's (she'd said: "Mr. Sansom won't eat cold peas"), had stopped at the table only long enough to swallow a tumbler of buttermilk. But Joel had talked, and in talking eased away his worries, and Zoo told tales, tall funny sad, and now and again their voices had met and made a song, a summer kitchen ballad.

From the first he'd noticed in the house complex sounds, sounds on the edge of silence, settling sighs of stone and board, as though the old rooms inhaled-exhaled constant wind, and he'd heard Randolph say: "We're sinking, you know, sank four inches last year." It was drowning in the earth, this house, and they, all of them, were submerging with it: Joel, moving through the chamber, imagined moles tracing silver tunnels down eclipsed halls, lank pink sliding through earth-packed rooms, lilac bleeding out the sockets of a skull: Go away, he said, climbing toward a lamp which threw nervous light over the stairsteps. Go Away, he said, for his imagination was too tricky and terrible. But was it possible for a whole house to disappear? Yes, he'd heard of such things. All Mr Mystery had to do was snap his fingers, and whatever wasthere went whisk. And human beings, too. They could go right off the face of the earth. That was what had happened to his father; he was gone, not in a sad respectable way like his mother, but just gone, and Joel had no reason to suppose he would ever find him. So why did they pretend? Why didn't they say right out, "There is no Mr Sansom, you have no father," and send him away. Ellen was always talking of the decent Christian thing to do; he'd wondered what she meant, and now he knew: to speak truth was a decent Christian thing. He took steps slowly, awake but dreaming, and in the dream he saw the Cloud Hotel, saw its leaning molding rooms, its wind-cracked windows hung with draperies of blackwidow web, and realized suddenly this was not a hotel; indeed, had never been: this was the place folks came when they went off the face of the earth, when they died but were not dead. And he thought of the ballroom Little Sunshine had described: there nightfall covered the walls like tapestry, and the dry skeletons of bouquet leaves littering the wavy floor powdered under his dreamed footstep: he walked in the dark in the dust of thorns listening for a name, his own, but even here no father claimed him. The shadow of a grand piano spotted the vaulted ceiling like a luna moth wing, and at the keyboard, her eyes soaked white with moonlight, her wig of cold white curls askew, sat the Lady: was this the ghost of Mrs Jimmy Bob Cloud? Mrs Cloud, who'd cremated herself in a St. Louis boarding house? Was that the answer?

It struck his knee, and all that happened happened quickly: a brief blur of light flashed as a door banged in the hall above, and then he felt something hit him, go past, go bumping down the steps, and it was suddenly as though all his bones had unjoined, as though all the vital parts of him had unraveled like the springs of a sprung watch. A little red ball, it was rolling and knocking on the chamber floor, and he thought of Idabel: he wished he were as brave as Idabel; he wished he had a brother, sister, somebody; he wished he were dead.

Randolph bent over the top banister; his hands were folded into the sleeves of a kimono; his eyes were flat and glazed, drunk-looking, and if he saw Joel he made no sign. Presently, his kimono rustling, he crossed the hall and opened a door where the eccentric light of candles floated on his face. He did not go inside, but stood there moving his hands in a queer way; then, turning, he started down the stairs and when finally he came against Joel he only said: "Bring a glass of water, please." Without a second word he went back up and into the room, and Joel, unable to move, waited on the stairs a long while: there were voices in the walls, settling sighs of stone and board, sounds on the edge of silence.

"Come in." Amy's voice echoed through the house, and Joel, waiting on the threshold, felt his heart separate.

"Careful there, my dear," said Randolph, lolling at the foot of a canopied bed, "don't spill the water."

But he could not keep his hand from shaking, or focus his eyes properly: Amy and Randolph, though some distance apart, were fused like Siamese twins: they seemed a kind of freak animal, half-man half-woman. There were candles, a dozen or so, and the heat of the night made them lean limp and crooked. A limestone fireplace gleamed in their shine, and a menagerie of crystal chimes, set in motion by Joel's entrance, tinkled on the mantel like brookwater. The air was strong with the smell of asthma cigarettes, used linen, and whiskey breath. Amy's starched face was in coinlike profile against a closed window where insects thumped with a watch-beat's regularity: intent upon embroidering a sampler, she rocked back and forth in a little sewing chair, her needle, held in the gloved hand, stabbing lilac cloth rhythmically. She looked like a kind of wax machine, a life-sized doll, and the concentration of her work was unnatural: she was like a person pretending to read, though the book is upside down. And Randolph, cleaning his nails with a goose-quill, was as stylized in his attitude as she: Joel felt as though they interpreted his presence here as somehow indecent, but it was impossible to withdraw, impossible to advance. On a table by the bed there were two rather arresting objects, an illuminated globe of rose frost glass depicting scenes of Venice: golden gondolas, wicked gondoliers and lovers drifting past glorious palaces on a canal of saccharine blue; and a milk-glass nude suspending a tiny silver mirror. Reflected in this mirror were a pair of eyes: the instant Joel became aware of them his gaze dismissed all else.

The eyes were a teary grey; they watched Joel with a kind of dumb glitter, and soon, as if to acknowledge him, they closed in a solemn double wink, and turned… so that he saw them only as part of a head, a shaved head lying with invalid looseness on unsanitary pillows.

"He wants the water," said Randolph, scraping the quill under his thumb nail. "You'll have to feed him: poor Eddie, absolutely helpless."

And Joel said: "Is that him?"

"Mr. Sansom," said Amy, her lips tight as the rosebud she stitched. "It is Mr. Sansom."

"But you never told me."

Randolph, clutching the bedpost, heaved to his feet: the kimono swung out, exposing pink substantial thighs, hairless legs. Like many heavy men he could move with unexpected nimbleness, but he'd had more than enough to drink, and as he came toward Joel, a numb smile bunching his features, he looked as if he were about to fall. He stooped down to Joel's size, and whispered. "Tell you what, baby?"

The eyes covered the glass again, their image twitching in the tossing light, and a hand trimmed with wedding gold poked out from under quilts to let go a red ball: it was like a cue, a challenge, and Joel, ignoring Randolph, went briskly forward to meet it.

7

She came up the road, kicking stones, whistling. A bamboo pole, balanced on her shoulder, pointed toward the late noon sun. She carried a molasses bucket, and wore a pair of toy-like dark glasses. Henry, the hound, paced beside her, his red tongue dangling hotly. And Joel, who'd been waiting for the mailman, hid behind a pine tree; just wait, this was going to be good; he'd scare the… there, she was almost near enough.

Then she stopped, and took off the sun-glasses, and polished them on her khaki shorts. Shielding her eyes, she looked straight at Joel's tree, and beyond it: there was no one on the Landing's porch, not a sign of life. She shrugged her shoulders. "Henry," she said, and his eyes rolled sadly up, "Henry, I leave it to you: do we want him with us or don't we?" Henry yawned: a fly buzzed inside his mouth and he swallowed it whole. "Henry," she continued, scrutinizing a certain pine, "did you ever notice what funny shadows some trees have?" A pause. "O. K., my fine dandy, come on out."

Sheepishly Joel stepped into the daylight. "Hello, Idabel," he said, and Idabel laughed, and this laugh of hers was rougher than barbed wire. "Look here, son," she said, "the last boy that tried pulling tricks on Idabel is still picking up the pieces." She put back on her dark glasses, and gave her shorts a snappy hitch. "Henry and me, we're going down to catch us a mess of catfish: if you can make yourself helpful you're welcome to come."

"How do you mean helpful?"

"Oh, put worms on the hook…" tilting up the bucket, she showed him its white, writhing interior.

Joel, disgusted, averted his eyes; but thought: yes, he'd like to go with Idabel, yes, anything not to be alone: hook worms, or kiss her feet, it did not matter.

"You'd better change clothes," said Idabel. "you're fixed up like it was Sunday."

Indeed, he was wearing his finest suit, white flannels bought for Dancing Class; he'd put them on because Randolph had promised to paint his picture. But at dinner Amy had said Randolph was sick. "Poor child, and in all this heat; it does seem to me if he'd lose a little weight he wouldn't suffer so. Angela Lee was that way, too: the heat just laid her out." As for Angela Lee, Zoo had told him this queer story: "Honey, a mighty peculiar thing happen to that old lady, happen just before she die: she grew a beard; it just commence pouring out her face, real sure enough hair; a yellow color, it was, and strong as wire. Me, I used to shave her, and her paralyzed from head to toe, her skin like a dead man's. But it growed so quick, this beard, I couldn't hardly keep up, and when she died, Miss Amy hired the barber to come out from town. Well, sir, that man took one look, and walked right back down them stairs, and right out the front door. I tell you I mean I had to laugh!"

"It's just my old suit," he said, afraid to go back and change, for Amy might say no he could not go, might, instead, make him read to his father. And his father, like Angela Lee, was paralyzed, helpless; he could say a few words (boy, why, kind, bad, ball, ship), move his head a little (yes, no), and one arm (to drop a tennis ball, the signal for attention). All pleasure, all pain, he communicated with his eyes, and his eyes, like windows in summer, were seldom shut, always open and staring, even in sleep.

Idabel gave him the worm bucket to carry. Crossing a cane field, climbing a thread of path, passing a Negro house where in the yard there was a naked child fondling a little black goat, they passed into the woods through an avenue of bitter wild cherry trees. "We get drunk as a coot on those," she said, meaning cherries. "Greedy old wildcats get so drunk they scream all night: you ought to hear them… hollering crazy with the moon and cherry juice." Invisible birds prowling in leaves rustled, sang; beneath the still facade of forest restless feet trampled plushlike moss where limelike light sifted to stain the natural dark. Idabel's bamboo pole scraped low limbs, and the hound, eager and suspicious, careened through nets of blackberry bush. Henry, the sentry; Idabel, the guide; Joel, the captive: three explorers on a solemn trek over earth sloping steadily downward. Black, orange-trimmed butterflies wheeled over wheel-sized ponds of stagnant rain water, the glide of their wings traced on green reflecting surfaces; a rattlesnake's cellophane-like sheddings littered the trail, and broken silver spiderweb covered like cauls dead fallen branches. They passed a little human grave: on its splintered head-cross was printed a legend: Toby, Killed by the Cat. Sunken, a stretch of sycamore root growing from its depth, it was, you could tell, an old grave.

"What's that mean," said Joel, "killed by the cat?"

"It happened before I was born," said Idabel, as if this explained everything. She turned off the path into an area deep with last winter's leaves: a skunk skittered in the distance, and Henry boomed forward. "This Toby, you see, she was a nigger baby, and her mama worked for old Mrs. Skully like Zoo does now. She was Jesus Fever's wife, and Toby was their baby. Old Mrs Skully had a big fine Persian cat, and one day when Toby was asleep the cat sneaked in and put its mouth against Toby's mouth and sucked away all her breath."

Joel said he didn't believe it; but if it was true, it was certainly the most horrible tale he'd ever heard. "I didn't know Jesus Fever had ever been married."

"There's lots you don't know. All kinds of strange things… mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real."

Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only. Now at thirteen Joel was nearer a knowledge of death than in any year to come: a flower was blooming inside him, and soon, when all tight leaves unfurled, when the noon of youth burned whitest, he would turn and look, as others had, for the opening of another door. In the woods they walked, the tireless singings of larks had sounded a century, and more, and floods of frogs had galloped in moonlight bands; stars had fallen here, and Indian arrows, too; prancing blacks had played guitars, sung ballads of bandit-buried gold, sung songs grieving and ghostly, ballads of long ago: before birth.

"Not for me: that makes it not so real," said Joel, and stopped, struck still by the truth of this: Amy, Randolph, his father, they were all outside time, all circling the present like spirits: was this why. they seemed to him so like a dream? Idabel reached back and jerked his hand. "Wake up," she said. He looked at her, his eyes wide with alarm. "But I can't. I can't."

"Can't what?" she said sourly. "Oh, nothing." Early voyagers, they descended together.

"Take my colored glasses," Idabel offered. "Everything looks a lot prettier."

The grass-colored lenses tinted the creek where nervous minnow schools stitched the water like needles; occasionally, in deeper pools, a chance shaft of sunlight illuminated bigger game: fat clumsy perch moving slowly, blackly below the surface. Idabel's fishline quivered in the midstream current, but now, after an hour, she'd had not even a nibble, so, rooting the pole firmly between two stumps, she leaned back, pillowing her head on a clump of moss. "O. K., give 'em back," she demanded.

"Where did you get them?" he said, wishing he had a pair.

"At the travelin-show," she said. "Travelin-show comes every year in August; it's not such a big one, but they've got a flying jinny, and a ferris wheel. And they've got a two-headed baby inside a bottle, too. The way I got these glasses was I won them; I used to wear them all the time, even nighttime, but Papa, he said I was going to put out my eyes. Want a cigarette?"

There was only one, a crumpled Wing; dividing it, she struck a match. "Look," she said, "I can blow one smoke ring through another." The rings mounted in the air, blue and perfect; it was so still, yet all around there was the feeling of movement, subtle, secret, shifting: dragonflies skidded on the water, some sudden unseen motion loosened snowdrop bells brown now all withered and scentless.

Joel said, "I don't think we're going to catch anything."

"I never expect to," said Idabel. "I just like to come here and think about my worries; nobody ever comes hunting for me here. It's a nice place… just to lie and take your ease."

"What kind of worries do you worry about?" he asked.

'That's my business. And you know something… you're an awful poke-nose. You don't ever catch me prying, hell, no. Anybody else in the country, why, they'd eat you alive, you being a stranger, and living at the Landing and all. Look at Florabel. What a snoop she is."

"I think she's very pretty," said Joel, just to be aggravating.

Idabel made no comment. She flipped away her cigarette, and, forking her fingers between her lips, whistled boylike: Henry, padding along the creek's shallow edge, scrambled up the bank, his coat shining soggy wet. "Pretty on the outside, sure, but it's what's on the inside that counts," she said, hugging the hound. "She keeps telling Papa he ought to do away with Henry, says he's got a mortal disease: that's what she's like on the inside."

The white face of afternoon took shape in the sky; his enemy, Joel thought, was there, just behind those glasslike, smokelike clouds; whoever, whatever this enemy was, his was the face imaged there brightly blank. And in this respect Idabel could be envied; she at least knew her enemies: you and you, she could say, such and such and so and so. "Were you ever afraid of losing your mind?"

"Never thought about it," she said, and laughed. "To hearthem tell it, I haven't got a mind no ways."

Joel said: "You're not being serious. Here's what I mean: do you ever see things, like people, like whole houses, see them and feel them and know for certain they're real… only…"

"Only they're not," said Idabel. "The time that snake bit me, I lived a week in a terrible place where everything was crawling, the floors and walls, everything. Now all that was plain foolishness. But then it was a peculiar thing, because last summer I went with Uncle August (he's the one that's so afraid of girls he won't look at one; he says I'm not a girl; I do love my Uncle August: we're like brothers)… we went down to Pearl River… and one day we were rowing in this dark place and came on an island of snakes; it was real little, just one tree, but alive with old copperheads: they were even hanging off the branches. I tell you it was right spooky. And when folks talk about dreams-come-true, I guess I know what they mean."

"That's not like what I was saying," said Joel, his voice small, bewildered. "Dreams are different, dreams you can lose. But if you see something… a lady, say, and you see her where nobody should be, then she follows you around inside your head. I mean like this: the other night Zoo was scared; she'd heard a dog howl, and she said it was her husband come back, and she went to the window: 'I see him. she said, 'he's squatting under the fig tree, she said, 'and his eyes are all yellow in the dark. But then when I looked there was nothing but nothing."

All this Idabel seemed to find rather unexceptional. "Oh, shoot!" she said, tossing her head, the chopped red hair swishing wonderful fire, "everybody knows Zoo's crazy for true. One time, and it was hot as now, I was passing on the road, and she was there by the mailbox with this dumb look, and she says: 'What a fine snow we had last night. Always talking about snow, always seeing things, that Zoo, that crazy Zoo."

Joel regarded Idabel with malice: what a mean liar she was. Zoo was not crazy. She was not. Yet he remembered the snow of their first conversation: it fell swiftly all about him: the woods dazzled whitely, and Idabel's voice, speaking now, sounded soft, and snow-hushed: "It's Ivory," she said. "It floats."

"What for?" he said, accepting a cake of soap she'd taken from her pocket.

"To wash with, stupid," she told him. "And don't look so prissy. Everytime I come down here, I always take a scrub. Here, you put your clothes on that stump where the fishpole is."

Joel looked shyly at the designated place. "But you're a girl."

With an exceedingly contemptuous expression, Idabel drew up to her full height. "Son," she said, and spit between her fingers, "what you've got in your britches is no news to me, and no concern of mine: hell, I've fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I'm a girl; you've got to remember that, or we can't never be friends." For all its bravado, she made this declaration with a special and compelling innocence; and when she knocked one fist against the other, as, frowning, she did now, and said: "I want so much to be a boy: I would be a sailor, I would…" the quality of her futility was touching.

Joel stood up and began to unbutton his shirt.

He lay there on a bed of cold pebbles, the cool water washing, rippling over him; he wished he were a leaf, like the current-carried leaves riding past: leaf-boy, he would float lightly away, float and fade into a river, an ocean, the world's great flood. Holding his nose, he put his head underwater: he was six years old, and his penny-colored eyes were round with terror: Holy Ghost, the preacher said, pressing him down into baptism water; he screamed, and his mother, watching from a front pew, rushed forward, took him in her arms, held him, whispered softly: my darling, my darling. He lifted his face from the great stillness, and, as Idabel splashed a playful wave, seven years vanished in an instant.

"You look like a plucked chicken," said Idabel. "So skinny and white."

Joel's shoulders contracted self-consciously. Despite Idabel's quite genuine lack of interest in his nakedness, he could not make so casual an adjustment to the situation as she seemed to expect.

Idabel said: "Hold still, now, and I'll shampoo your hair. " Her own was a maze of lather-curls like cake icing. Without clothes, her figure was, if anything, more boyish: she seemed mostly legs, like a crane, or a walker on modified stilts, and freckles, dappling her rather delicate shoulders, gave her a curiously wistful look. But already her breasts had commenced to swell, and there was about her hips a mild suggestion of approaching width. Joel, having conceived of Idabel as gloomy, and cantankerous, was surprised at how funny and gay she could be: working her fingers rhythmically over his scalp, she kept laughing and telling jokes, some of them quite bawdy: "… so the farmer said: 'Sure she's a pretty baby; oughta be, after having been strained through a silk handkerchief. »

When he did not laugh, she said: "What's the matter? Don't you get it?" Joel shook his head. "And you from the city, too," she sighed.

"What did he mean… strained through a silk handkerchief?"

"Skip it, son," said Idabel, rinsing his hair, "you're too young." Joel thought then that the points of Idabel's jokes were even for her none too clear: the manner in which she told them was not altogether her own; she was imitating someone, and, wondering who, he asked: "Where'd you hear that joke?"

"Billy Bob told me," she said.

"Who's that?"

"He's just Billy Bob."

"Do you like him?" said Joel, not understanding why he felt so jealous.

"Sure I like him," she said, rising up and wading toward land; her eyes fixed on the water, she was, moving slowly and with such grace, like a bird in search of food. "Sure: he's practically my best friend. He's awful tough, Billy Bob is. I remember back in fourth grade we had that mean Miss Aikens, and she used to beat Billy Bob's hands raw with a ruler, and he never cried once."

They sat down in a sunny place to dry, and she put on her dark glasses.

"I never cry," Joel lied.

She turned on her stomach, and, fingering moss, said with gentle matter-of-factness: "Well, I do. I cry sometimes." She looked at him earnestly. "But you don't ever tell anybody, hear."

He wanted to say: no, Idabel, dear Idabel, I am your good true friend. And he wanted to touch her, to put his arms around her, for this seemed suddenly the only means of expressing all he felt. Pressing closer, he reached and, with breathtaking delicacy, kissed her cheek. There was a hush; tenuous moods of light and shade seemed to pass between them like the leaf-shadow trembling on their bodies. Then Idabel tightened all over. She grabbed hold of his hair and started to pull, and when she did this a terrible, and puzzled rage went through Joel. This was the real betrayal. And so he fought back; tangled and wrestling, the sky turning, descending, revolving, they rolled over, over. The dark glasses fell off, and Joel, falling back, felt them crush beneath and cut his buttocks. "Stop," he panted, "please stop, I'm bleeding." Idabel was astride him, and her strong hands locked his wrists to the ground. She brought her red, angry face close to his: "Give up?"

"I'm bleeding," was all Joel would say.

Presently, after releasing him, she brought water, and washed his cut. "You'll be all right," she said, as if nothing had happened. And, indefinably, it was as if nothing had: neither, of course, would ever be able to explain why they had fought.

Joel said: "I'm sorry about your glasses."

The broken pieces sprinkled the ground like green raindrops. Stooping, she started picking them up; then, seeming to think better of this, she spilled them back. "It's not your fault," she said sadly. "Maybe… maybe some day I'll win another pair."

8

Randolph dipped his brush into a little water-filled vinegar jar, and tendrils of purple spread like some fast-growing vine. "Don't smile, my dear," he said. "I'm not a photographer. On the other hand, I could scarcely be called an artist; not, that is, if you defineartist as one who sees, takes and purely transmits: always for me there is the problem of distortion, and I never paint so much what I see as what I think: for example, some years ago, this was in Berlin, I drew a boy not much older than yourself, and yet in my picture he looked more aged than Jesus Fever, and whereas in reality his eyes were childhood blue, the eyes I saw were bleary and lost. And what I saw was indeed the truth, for little Kurt, that was his name, turned out to be a perfect horror, and tried twice to murder me… exhibiting both times, I must say, admirable ingenuity. Poor child, I wonder whatever became of him… or, for that matter, me. Now that is a most interesting question: whatever became of me?" As if to punctuate his sentences he kept, all the while he talked, thrusting the brush inside the jar, and the water, continually darkening, had at its center, like a hidden flower, a rope of red. "Very well, sit back, we'll relax a minute now."

Sighing, Joel glanced about him. It was the first time he'd been in Randolph's room; after two hours, he still could not quite take it in, for it was so unlike anything he'd ever known before: faded gold and tarnished silk reflecting in ornate mirrors, it all made him feel as though he'd eaten too much candy. Large as the room was, the barren space in it amounted to no more than one foot; carved tables, velvet chairs, candelabras, a German music box, books and paintings seemed to spill each into the other, as if the objects in a flood had floated through the windows and sunk here. Behind his liver-shaped desk unframed foreign postcards crusted the walls; six of these, a series from Japan, were for Joel an education, even though to some extent he knew already the significance of what they depicted. Like a museum exhibit, there was spread out on a long, black, tremendously heavy table a display consisting in part of antique dolls, some with missing arms, legs, some without heads, other whose bead-eyes stared glass-blank though their innards, straw and sawdust, showed through open wounds; all, however, were costumed, and exquisitely, in a variety of velvet, lace, linen. Now set in the center of this table was a little photograph in a silver frame so elaborate as to be absurd; it was a cheap photograph, obviously taken at a carnival or amusement park, for the persons concerned, three men and a girl, were posed against a humorous backdrop of cross-eyed baboons and leering kangaroos; though he was thinner in this scene and more handsome, Joel, without much effort, recognized Randolph, and another of the men looked familiar, too… was it his father? Certainly the face was only mildly reminiscent of the man across the hall. The third man, taller than his companions, cut an amazing figure; he was powerfully made and, even in so faded a print, very dark, almost Negroid; his eyes, narrow and sly and black, glittered beneath brows thick as mustaches, and his lips, fuller than any woman's were caught in a cocky smile which intensified the dashing, rather vaudeville effect of a straw hat he wore, a cane he carried. He had his arm around the girl, and she, an anemic faunlike creature, was gazing up at him with the completest adoration.

"Oh, yes," said Randolph, stretching his legs, lighting a mentholated cigarette, "do not take it seriously, what you see here: it's only a joke played on myself by myself… it amuses and horrifies… a rather gaudy grave, you might say. There is no daytime in this room, nor night; the seasons are changeless here, and the years, and when I die, if indeed I haven't already, then let me be dead drunk and curled, as in my mother's womb, in the warm blood of darkness. Wouldn't that be an ironic finale for one who, deep in his goddamned soul, sought the sweetly clean-limbed life? bread and water, a simple roof to share with some beloved, nothing more." Smiling, smoothing the back of his hair, he put out the cigarette, and picked up his brush. "Inasmuch as I was born dead, how ironic that I should die at all; yes, born dead, literally: the midwife was perverse enough to slap me into life. Or did she?" He looked at Joel in an amused way. "Answer me: did she?"

"Did she what?" said Joel, for, as usual, he did not understand: Randolph seemed always to be carrying on in an unfathomable vocabulary secret dialogues with someone unseen. "Randolph," he said, "please don't be mad with me: it's only that you say things in such a funny way."

"Never mind," said Randolph, "all difficult music must be heard more than once. And if what I tell you now sounds senseless, it will in retrospect seem far too clear; and when this happens, when those flowers in your eyes wither, irrecoverable as they are, why, though no tears helped dissolve my own cocoon, I shall weep a little for you." Rising, going to a huge baroque bureau, he dabbed on lemon cologne, combed his polished curls, and, posturing somewhat, studied himself in a mirror; while duplicating him in all essentials, the mirror, full-length and of French vintage, seemed to absorb his color, to pare and change his features: the man in the mirror was not Randolph, but whatever personality imagination desired him to resemble, and he, as if corroborating such a theory, said: "They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egotist… he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love… poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point."

A shy rap at the door interrupted. "Randolph," said Amy, "is that boy in there with you?"

"We're busy. Go away, go away…"

"But Randolph," she whined, "don't you think he ought to come and read to his father?"

"I said: go away."

Joel let his face reveal neither relief nor gratitude: to obscure emotion was becoming for him a natural reflex; it helped him sometimes not to feel at all. Still there was one thing he could not do, for there is no known way of making the mind clear-blank, and whatever he obliterated in daytime rose up at night in dreams to sleep beside him with an iron embrace. As for reading to his father, he'd made an odd discovery: Mr Sansom never really listened: a list of prices recited from a Sears Roebuck interested him, Joel had found by experiment, as much as any wild-west story.

"Before it happened," said Randolph, resuming his seat, "before then, Ed was very different… very sporting, and, if your standards are not too distinguished, handsome (there, in that photograph you can see for yourself), but, to be truthful, I never much liked him, quite the contrary; for one thing, his owning Pepe, or being, that is, his manager, complicated our relations. Pepe Alvarez, he is the one with the straw hat, and the girl, well, that is Dolores. It is not of course a very accurate picture: so innocent: who could imagine that only two days after it was taken one of us fell down a flight of stairs with a bullet in his back?" Pausing to adjust the drawing board, he stared at Joel, one eye squinting like a watchmaker's. "Careful now, don't speak, I'm doing your lips." Rustling the ribbon-dressed dolls, a breeze came through the windows bringing here in the velvet shade sunshine smells of outside, and Joel wanted to be out there where right now Idabel might be splashing through a field of grass, running with Henry at her heels. The circular composition of Randolph's face lengthened in concentration; he worked silently a great while until at last, and it was as if all that had gone before had indescribably led up to this, he said: "Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject? When one is your age most subtleties go unobserved; even so, I imagine you think it incredible, looking at me as I am now, that I should've had ever the innocence to feel such love; nevertheless, when I was twenty-three…

"It is the girl in the picture, Dolores. And we met in Madrid. But she was not Spanish; at least I do not believe so, though actually I never knew precisely where she came from: her English was quite perfect. As for me, I had been in Europe then two years, living, as it were, and for the most part, in museums: I wonder really whether anyone ever copied so many Masters? There was almost no painting of which I could not do a most engaging facsimile… still, when it came to something of my own, I went quite dead, and it was as though I had no personal perception, no interior life whatever: I was like the wind-flower whose pollen will not mate at all.

"Dolores, on the other hand, was one of those from whom such as I manage occasionally to borrow energy: always with her I knew very much that I was alive, and came finally to believe in my own validity: for the first time I saw things without distortion and complete. That fall we went to Paris, and then to Cuba, where we lived high above the bay of Matanzas in a house… how should I describe it?… it was cloud-pink stone with rooms strewn like gold and white flowers on a vine of high corridors and crumbling blue steps; with the windows wide and the wind moving through, it was like an island, cool and most silent. She was like a child there, and sweet as an orange is sweet, and lazy, deliciously lazy; she liked to sit naked in the sun, and draw tiny little animals, toads and bees and chipmunks, and read astrology magazines, and chart the stars, and wash her hair (this she did no less than three times a day); she was a gambler, too, and every afternoon we went down to the village and bought lottery tickets, or a new guitar: she had over thirty guitars, and played all of them, I must admit, quite horridly.

"And there was this other thing: we seldom talked; I can never remember having with Dolores a sustained conversation; there was always between us something muted, hushed; still our silence was not of a secret kind, for in itself it communicated that wonderful peace those who understand each other very well sometimes achieve… yet neither knew the other truly, for at that time we did not really know ourselves.

"However… toward the end of winter I discovered the dream book. Every morning Dolores wrote out her night's dreams in a big scrapbook she kept concealed under a mattress; she wrote them sometimes in French, more often in German or English, but whatever the language, the content was always shockingly malevolent and I could make no sense of them, for it seemed impossible to identify Dolores with her ruthless dreams. And I was always in them, always fleeing before her, or hiding in the shadow, and each day while she lay naked in the sun I would find the newest page and read how much closer her pursuit had come, for in early dreams she'd murdered in Madrid a lover she called L., and I knew… that when, she found R…. she would kill him, too.

"We slept in a bed with a canopy veil that kept out mosquitoes and sifted the moonlight, and I would lie there awake in the dark watching her sleep, afraid of being trapped in that dream-choked head; and when morning came she would laugh and tease and pull my hair, and presently, after I'd gone, write… well, there is this I remember: 'R. is hiding behind a giant clock. Its tick is like thunderstrokes, like the pulsebeat of God, and the hands, shaped like pointing fingers, stand at seventeen past three; come six I will find him, for he does not know it is from me he hides, but imagines it is himself. I do not wish him harm, and I would run away if I could, but the clock demands a sacrifice, or it will never stop, and life must cease somewhere, for who among us can long endure its boom?

"Aside from all else, there is some truth in that; clocks indeed must have their sacrifice: what is death but an offering to time and eternity?

"Now, oddly enough, our lives were more than ever interlocked: there were any number of times I could have left, gone away, never seen her again; however, to desert would've been to deny love, and if I did not love Dolores, then no emotion of mine has been anything but spurious. I think now she was not altogether human (a trance-child, if such there be, or a dream herself), nor was I… though for reasons of youth, and youth is hardly human: it can't be, for the young never believe they will die… especially would they never believe that death comes, and often, in forms other than the natural one.

"In the spring we sailed for Florida; Dolores had never been before to the States, and we went to New York, which she did not like, and Philadelphia, which she thought equally tiresome. At last, in New Orleans, where we took a charming patio apartment, she was happy, as indeed was I. And during our peregrinations the dream book disappeared: where she could have hidden it I do not know, for I searched every possible place: it was in a way a relief really not to find it. Then one afternoon, walking home from the market and carrying, if you please, a fine live hen, I saw her talking with a man there in the shade by the cathedral; there was an intimacy in their attitude which made me still inside: this I knew was no simple tourist asking direction, and later, when I told her what I'd seen, she said, oh, very casually, yes, it was a friend, someone she'd met in a cafй, a prizefighter: would I care to meet him?

"Now after an injury, physical, spiritual, whatever, one always believes had one obeyed a premonition (there is usually in such instances an imagined premonition) nothing would have happened; still, had I had absolute foreknowledge, I should have gone right ahead, for in every lifetime there occur situations when one is no more than a thread in a design willfully woven by… who should I say? God?

"It was one Sunday that they came, the prizefighter, Pepe Alvarez, and Ed Sansom, his manager. A mercilessly hot day, as I recall, and we sat in the patio with fans and cold drinks: you could scarcely select a group with less in common than we four; had it not been for Sansom, who was something of a buffoon and therefore distracting, it would all have been rather too tense, for one couldn't ignore the not very discreet interplay between Dolores and the young Mexican: they were lovers, even slow-witted Amy could've perceived this, and I was not surprised: Pepe was so extraordinary: his face was alive, yet dreamlike, brutal, yet boyish, foreign but familiar (as something from childhood is familiar), both shy and aggressive, both sleeping and awake. But when I say he and Dolores were lovers, perhaps I exaggerate: lovers implies, to some extent, reciprocity, and Dolores, as became apparent, could never love anyone, so caught was she within a trance; then, too, other than that they performed a pleasurable function, she had no personal feeling or respect for men or the masculine personality… that personality which, despite legend, can only be most sensitively appreciated by its own kind. As it was getting dark in the patio, I looked at Pepe: his Indian skin seemed to hold all the light left in the air, his flat animal-shrewd eyes, bright as though with tears, regarded Dolores exclusively; and suddenly, with a mild shock, I realized it was not she of whom I was jealous, but him.

"Afterwards, and though at first I was careful not to show the quality of my feelings, Dolores understood intuitively what had happened: 'Strange how long it takes us to discover ourselves; I've known since first I saw you, she said, adding, 'I do not think, though, that he is the one for you; I've known too many Pepes: love him if you will, it will come to nothing. The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.

"It was different, this love of mine for Pepe, more intense than anything I felt for Dolores, and lonelier. But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart. There were moments, wonderful moments, when I thought I was free, that I could forget him and that sleepy violent face, but then he would not let me, no, he was always there, sitting in the patio, or listening to her play the guitar, laughing, talking, near but remote, always there, as I was in Dolores' dreams. I could not endure to see him suffer; it was an agony to watch him fight, prancing quick and cruel, see him hit, the glare, the blood and the blueness. I gave him money, bought him cream-colored hats, gold bracelets (which he adored, and wore like a woman), shoes in bright Negro colors, candy silk shirts, and I gave all these things to Ed Sansom, too: how they despised me, both of them, but not enough to refuse a gift, oh never. And Dolores continued with Pepe in her queer compulsive way, not really interested one way or another, not caring whether he stayed or went; like some brainless plant, she lived (existed) beyond her own control in that reckless book of dreams. She could not help me. What we most want is only to be held… and told… that everything (everything is a funny thing, is baby milk and Papa's eyes, is roaring logs on a cold morning, is hoot-owls and the boy who makes you cry after school, is Mama's long hair, is being afraid and twisted faces on the bedroom wall)… everything is going to be all right.

"One night Pepe came to the house very drunk, and proceeded with the boldest abandon to a) beat Dolores with his belt, b) piss on the rug and on my paintings, c) call me horrible hurting names, d) break my nose, e and f and otherwise. And I walked in the streets that night, and along the docks, and talked aloud pleading with myself to go away, be alone again, I said, as if I were not alone, rent another room in another life. I sat in Jackson Square; except for the tolling of train bells, it was quiet and all the Cabildo was like a haunted palace; there was a blond misty boy sitting beside me, and he looked at me, and I at him, and we were not strangers: our hands moved towards each other to embrace. I never heard his voice, for we did not speak; it is a shame, I should so like the memory of it. Loneliness, like fever, thrives on night, but there with him light broke, breaking in the trees like birdsong, and when sunrise came, he loosened his fingers from mine, and walked away, that misty boy, my friend.

"Always now we were together, Dolores, Pepe, Ed and I, Ed and his jokes, we other three and our silences. Grotesque quadruplets (born of what fantastic parent?) we fed upon one another, as cancer feeds upon itself, and yet, will you believe this? there are a medley of moments I remember with the kind of nostalgia reserved usually for sweeter things: Pepe (I see) is lighting a match with his thumb nail, is trying with a bare hand to snatch a goldfish from the fountain, we are at a picture-show eating popcorn from the same bag, he has fallen asleep and leans against my shoulder, he is laughing because I wince at a boxing-cut on his lip. I hear him whistling on the stairs, I hear him mounting toward me and his footsteps are not so loud as my heart. Days, fast fading as snowflakes, flurry into autumn, fall all around like November leaves, the sky, cold red with winter, frightens with the light it sheds: I sleep all day, the shutters closed, the covers drawn above my eyes. Now it is Mardi Gras, and we are going to a ball; everyone has chosen his costume but me: Ed is a Franciscan monk (gnawing a cigar), Pepe is a bandit and Dolores a ballerina; but I cannot think what to wear and this becomes a dilemma of disproportionate importance. Dolores appears the night of the ball with a tremendous pink box: transformed, I am a Countess and my king is Louis XVI; I have silver hair and satin slippers, a green mask, am wrapped in silk pistachio and pink: at first, before the mirror, this horrifies me, then pleases to rapture, for I am very beautiful, and later, when the waltz begins, Pepe, who does not know, begs a dance, and I, oh sly Cinderella, smile beneath my mask, thinking: Ah, if I were really me! Toad into prince, tin into gold; fly, feathered serpent, the hour grows old; so ends a part of my saga.

"Another spring, and they were gone; it was April, the sixth of that rainy lilac April, just two days after our happy trip to Pontchartrain… where the picture was taken, and where, in symbolic dark, we'd drifted through the tunnel of love. All right, listen: late that afternoon when I woke up rain was at the window and on the roof: a kind of silence, if I may say, was walking through the house, and, like most silence, it was not silent at all: it rapped on the doors, echoed in the clocks, creaked on the stairs, leaned forward to peer into my face and explode. Below a radio talked and sang, yet I knew no one heard it: she was gone, and Pepe with her.

"Her room was overturned; as I searched through the wreckage, a guitar string broke, its twang vibrating every nerve. I hurried to the top of the stairs, my mouth open but no sound coming out: all the control centers of my mind were numb; the air undulated, and the floor expanded like an accordion. Someone was coming towards me. I felt them like a pressure climbing the steps; unrecognized, they seemed to walk straight into my eyes. First I thought it was Dolores, then Ed, then Pepe. Whoever it was, they shook me, pleading and swearing: that bastard, they said, gone, sonofabitchinbastard, gone with the car, all the clothes and money, gone, forever and ever and ever. But who was it? I couldn't see: a blinding Jesus-like glow burned around him: Pepe, is it you? Ed? Dolores? I pushed myself free, ran back into the bedroom and shut the door: it was no use: the doorknob began to turn, and suddenly everything was crazy plain: Dolores had at last caught me in her dreams.

"So I found a gun I kept wrapped in an old sock. The rain had stopped. The windows were open, and the room was cool and sweet with lilac. Downstairs the radio was singing, and in my ears there was the roar a seashell makes. The door opened; I fired once, and again, and Jesus dissolved, became nothing but Ed in a dirty linen suit; doubled over, he stumbled toward the stairs, and rolled down the steps loose like a ragdoll.

"For two days he lay crumpled on the couch, bleeding all over himself, moaning and shouting and running a rosary through his fingers. He called for you, and his mother, and the Lord. There was nothing I could do. And then Amy came from the Landing. She was very good. She found a doctor, a little Negro dwarf not too particular. Abruptly the weather was like July, but those weeks were the winter of our lives; the veins froze and cracked with coldness, and in the sky the sun was like a lump of ice. That little doctor, waddling around on his six-inch legs, laughed and laughed and kept the radio playing comedy programs. Every day I woke up saying, 'If I die… , not realizing how dead I was already, and only a memory tagging along with Dolores and Pepe… wherever they were: I grieved for Pepe, not because I'd lost him (yes, that a little), but because in the end I knew Dolores would find him, too: it is easy to escape daylight, but night is inevitable, and dreams are the giant cage.

"To be brief: Ed and Amy were married in New Orleans. It was, you see, her fantasy come true; she was at last what she'd always wanted to be, a nurse… with a more or less permanent position. Then we all came back to the Landing; Amy's idea, and the only solution, for he would never be well again. I suppose we shall go on together until the house sinks, until the garden grows up and weeds hide us in their depth."

Randolph, pushing aside his drawing board, slumped over on the desk; dusk had come while he talked, and swept the room bluely; outside, sparrows were calling to roost, their nightfall chatter punctuated by a solemn frog. Pretty soon Zoo would be ringing the supper bell. None of this was apparent to Joel; he was not even aware of any stiffness from having sat so long in one position: it was as though Randolph's voice continued saying in his head things that were real enough, but not necessary to believe. He was confused because the story had been like a movie with neither plot nor motive: had Randolph really shot his father? And, most important of all, where was the ending? What had happened to Dolores and old awful Pepe Alvarez? That is what he wanted to know, and that is what he asked.

"If I knew…" said Randolph, pausing, holding a match to a candle; the sudden light flattered his face, made the pink hairless skin more impeccably young. "But, my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incompleted episodes?'We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task… It is wanting to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something."

Joel still wanted to know: "Didn't you ever even try to find out where they got off to?"

"Over there," said Randolph with a tired smile, "is a five-pound volume listing every town and hamlet on the globe; it is what I believe in, this almanac: day by day I've gone through it writing Pepe always in care of the postmaster; just notes, nothing but my name and what we will for convenience call address. Oh, I know that I shall never have an answer. But it gives me something to believe in. And that is peace."

Downstairs the supper bell sounded. Randolph did not move. His face seemed to contract with a look of sad guilt. "I've been very weak this afternoon, very wicked," he said, rising for Joel to accept an invitation of open arms. "Do forgive me, darling Joel." Then, in a voice as urgent as the bell, he added: "And please, tell me what I want to hear."

Joel remembered. "Everything," he said gently, "everything is going to be all right."

9

Jesus Fever was a sick man. For over a week he'd been unable to hold anything on his stomach. His skin was parched like an old leaf, and his eyes, milky with film, saw strange things: Randolph's father, he swore, was lurking in a corner of the cabin; all the funny papers and Coca-Cola pictures plastering the walls were, he complained, crooked and aggravating; a noise like the crack of a whip snapped in his head; a bouquet of sunflowers Joel had brought became suddenly a flock of canaries crazily singing and circling the room; he was worried to frenzy by a stranger staring at him from a gloomy little mirror hung above the mantel. Little Sunshine, arriving to give what aid he could, covered the mirror with a flour sack in order that, as he explained, Jesus Fever's soul could not be trapped there; he hung a charm around the old man's neck, sprinkled magic ginger powder in the air, and disappeared before moonrise. "Zoo, child," said Jesus, "how come you let me freeze thisaway? Fix the fire, child, it's colder 'n a well-bottom."

Zoo took a reasoning tone. "Papadaddy, now honey, we all us gonna melt… so hot Mister Randolph done change clothes three times today." But Jesus would not listen, and asked for a quilt to wrap around his legs, a wool sock to stretch over his head: the whole house, he argued, was rattling with wind: why, look, there was old Mr. Skully, his fine red beard turned white with frost. So Zoo went out in the dark of the yard to find an armful of kindling.

Joel, left in charge, started when Jesus beckoned to him secretively. The old man was sitting in a rattan rocker, a worn scrapquilt of velvet flowers covering his knees. He could not stay in bed: a horizontal position interfered with his breathing. "Rock my rocker, son," he said in a reedy voice, "it's kinda restful like… makes me feel I'm ridin in a wagon an got a long way to go." A kerosene lamp burned in the room. The chair, shadowed on the wall, swished a gentle drowsy sound. "Can't you feel the cold, son?"

"Mama was always cold, too," said Joel, prickly chill tingling his spine. Don't die, he thought, and as he pushed the chair back and forth the runners whispered, don't die, don't die. For if Jesus Fever died, then Zoo would go away, and there would be no one but Amy, Randolph, his father. It was not so much these three, however, but the Landing, and the fragile hush of living under a glass bell. Maybe Randolph would take him away: there had been some mention of a trip. And he'd written Ellen again, surely something would come of that.

"Papadaddy," said Zoo, lugging in a bundle of wood, "you is mighty thoughtless makin me hunt round out there in the dark where theys all kinda wild creatures crawlin just hungry for a nip outa tasty me. They is a wildcat smell on the air, they is, I declare. And who knows but what Keg's done runaway from the cabin gang? Joel, honey, latch the door."

When the fire commenced to burn Jesus asked that his chair be brought nearer the hearth. "I used to could play the fiddle," he said, wistfully watching the flames slide upward"… rheumatism stole all the music outa my fingers." He shook his head, and sucked his gums, and spit into the fire. "Don't fuss with me, child," he complained as Zoo tried to adjust the quilt. "Tell you now, bring me my sword." She returned from the other room bearing a beautiful sword with a silver handle: across the blade there was inscribed, Unsheath Me Not Without Reason-Sheath Me Not Without Honor. "Mister Randolph's granddaddy gimme this, that be more 'n sixty year ago." In the past days he'd one by one called forth all his treasures: a dusty cracked violin, his derby with the feather, a Mickey Mouse watch, his high-button orange shoes, three little monkeys who neither saw, heard nor spoke evil, these and other precious things lay strewn around the cabin, for he would not allow them to be put again out of sight.

Zoo presented Joel with a handful of pecans and gave him a pair of pliers to crack them with. "I'm not hungry," he said and rested his head in her lap. It was not a comfortable lap like Ellen's. You could feel too precisely tensed muscle and sharp bone. But she played her fingers through his hair, and that was sweet. "Zoo," he said softly, not wanting the old man to hear, "Zoo, he's going to die, isn't he?"

"I spec so," she said, and there was little feeling in her voice.

"And then will you go away?"

"I reckon."

At this Joel straightened and looked at her angrily. "But why, Zoo?" he demanded. 'Tell me why!"

"Hush, child, speak quiet." A slow moment followed in which she twisted her neckerchief, felt for and found the charm Little Sunshine had given her. "Ain't gonna hold good forever," she said, tapping the charm. "Someday he gonna come back here looking for to slice me up. I knows it good as anythin. I seen it in my dreams, and the floor don't creak, but what my heart stops. Every time a dog howls I think, that's him, that's him on his way, on accounta dogs just naturally hate that Keg and start to holler time they smell him."

"I'd protect you, Zoo," he pleaded. "Honest, I'd never let nobody hurt you."

Zoo laughed, and her laugh seemed to fly around the room like a frightening black bird. "Why, Keg could drop you with just the look of his eyes!" She began to shiver in the suffocating room. "One day he gonna come crawlin through that window, and won't nobody hear nothin; else I'll find him waitin in the dark tween here and the house, gotta long shiny razor: Lawd, I seen it a million times. So I gotta run, gotta go where there's snow and he ain't gonna catch me."

Joel squeezed her wrist. "If you'd let me go with you, Zoo… oh, we could have such a lot of fun."

"Don't talk foolishness, baby."

The yellow tabby scooted from under the bed, darted before the fire, arched its back and hissed. "What he see?" cried Jesus, pointing his sword: firelight ran up the gaunt blade like a gold spider. "Answer me, cat, you see somethin?" The cat relaxed on its haunches, and fixed the old man coldly. Jesus giggled. "Try to joke ol Jesus," he said, wagging his finger. "Try to scare him." His blindlike blue-looking eyes closed; he tilted back his head so that the stocking-foot dangled like a Chinese pigtail, sighed and said: "Ain't got no time left for to joke, cat." And then, holding the sword to his chest: "Mister Skully gimme this my weddin day; me and my woman, us just jumped over a broom, and Mister Skully, he say, 'All right now, Jesus, you is married. Travelin Preacher come tell me and my woman that ain't proper, say the Lawd ain't gonna put up with it: sure enough, the cat done killed Toby, and my woman grieves herself so she hangs on a tree, big cozy lady got the branch bent double: back when I was just so high my daddy cut his switches offen that tree…" remembering, it was as if his mind were an island in time, the past surrounding sea.

Joel cracked a pecan, and tossed the hull into the fire. "Zoo," he said, "did you ever hear of anybody called Alcibiades?"

"Who that you say?"

"Alcibiades. I don't know. It's somebody Randolph says I look like."

Zoo considered. "You musta heard wrong, honey. The name he most likely said is Alicaster. Alicaster Jones is a Paradise Chapel boy what used to sing in the choir. Looks like a white angel, so pretty he got the preacher and all kinda men and ladies lovin him up. Leastwise, that's what folks say."

"I'll bet I can sing better than him," said Joel. "You know, I bet I could sing in vaudeville shows and make a whole lot of money, enough money to buy you a fur coat, Zoo, and dresses like they show in the Sunday papers."

"I want red dresses," said Zoo, entering the spirit. "Look real nice in red, I do. We gonna have us a car?"

Joel was delirious. It seemed so real. There he was bathed by spotlights, and wearing a tuxedo with a gardenia in his lapel. But there was only one song he knew how to sing all the way through. So he said, "Listen, Zoo," and sang, "Silent Night, Holy Night, all is calm, all is bright, round yon Vir…" his voice, up to this point high and sweet like a girl's, broke in an ugly, mystifying way.

"Uh huh," Zoo nodded knowingly. "Little tadpole growin to be fish."

In the fireplace a log, cracking dramatically, sent out a sizzle of sparks; then, with no warning, a nest of newborn chimney sweeps fell into the flames and quite swiftly split with fire: the little birds burned without sound or movement. Joel, somewhat stunned, remained silent, and Zoo's face was blankly surprised. Only Jesus spoke: "In fire," he said, and had it not been so quiet you could not have heard him, "first comes water, and last comes the fire. Don't say no place in the Good Book why we's in tween. Do it? Can't member… not nothin. You," his voice rose shrilly, "you-all! It's gettin powerful warm, it's gettin fire!"

10

One grey curiously cool afternoon a week later Jesus Fever died. It was as if someone had been tickling his ribs, for he died in a spasm of desperate giggles. "Maybe," as Zoo said, "God done told somethin funny." She dressed him in his little suspender suit, his orange-leather shoes and derby hat; she squeezed a bunch of dogtooth violets in his hand, and put him in a cedar chest: there he remained for two days while Amy, with Randolph's aid, decided the location of his grave: under the moon tree, they said finally. The moon tree, so named for its round ivory blooms, grew in a lonely place far back from the Landing, and here Zoo shoveled away with no one to help but Joel: the mild excavation they managed at last to make reminded him of all the backyard swimming pools dug in summers that seemed now so long ago. Transporting the cedar chest was an arduous business; in the end they hitched a rope to John Brown, the old mule, and he hauled it to the foot of the grave. "Papadaddy would be mighty tickled could he know who it is is pullin him home," said Zoo. "Papadaddy surely did love you, John Brown: trustiest mule he ever saw, he said so many a time: now you member that." At the last minute Randolph sent word he could not be present for the funeral, and Amy, who brought this message, said a prayer in his name, mumbled, that is, a sentence or so, and made a cross: she wore for the occasion a black glove. But for Jesus there were no mourners: the three in the moon-tree shade were like some distracted group assembled at a depot to wish a friend goodbye, and, as such gatherings long for the whistle of the train that will release them, they wanted to hear the first thud of earth upon the cedar lid. It seemed odd to Joel nature did not reflect so solemn an event: flowers of cottonboll clouds within a sky as scandalously blue as kitten-eyes were offensive in their sweet disrespect: a resident of over a hundred years in so narrow a world deserved higher homage. The cedar chest capsized as they lowered it into the grave, but Zoo said, "Pay no mind, honey, we ain't got the strenth of heathen giants." She shook her head. "Pore Papadaddy, goin to heaven face down." Unfolding her accordion, she spread her legs wide apart, threw back her head, hollered: "Lawd, take him to thy bosom, tote him all around, Lawd don't you never, don't you never put him down, Lawd, he seen the glory, Lawd, he seen the light…" Up until now Joel had not altogether accepted Jesus Fever's death; anybody who'd lived that long just couldn't die; way back in his mind he kind of felt the old man was playing possum; but when the last note of Zoo's requiem became stillness, then it was true, then Jesus was really dead.

That night sleep was like an enemy; dreams, a winged avenging fish, swam rising and diving until light, drawing toward daybreak, opened his eyes. Hurriedly buttoning his breeches, he crept down through the quiet house and out the kitchen door. Above, the moon paled like a stone receding below water, tangled morning color rushed up the sky, trembled there in pastel uncertainty.

"Ain't I gotta donkey's load?" cried Zoo, as he crossed the yard to where she stood on the cabin porch. A quilt stuffed fat with belongings bulged on her back; the accordion was tied to her belt and hung there like a caterpillar; aside from this she had quite a large jellyjar box. "Time I gets to Washington D. C. gonna be a humpback," she said, sounding as though she'd swallowed a gallon of wine, and her joy, in the dimness of sunup, was to him disgusting: what right had she to be so happy?

"You can't carry all that. You look like a fool, for one thing."

But Zoo just flexed her arms, and stamped her foot. "Honey, I feels like ninety-nine locomotives; gonna light outa here going licketysplit: why, I figures to be in Washington D. C. fore dark." She drew back into a kind of pose, and, as if she were about to curtsey, held out her starched calico skirt: "Pretty, huh?"

Joel squinted critically. Her face was powdered with flour, a sort of reddish oil inflamed her cheeks, she'd scented herself with vanilla flavoring, and greased her hair shiny. About her neck she sported a lemon silk scarf. "Turn around," he said; then, after she'd done so, he moved away, pointedly suppressing comment.

She placidly accepted this affront, but said: "How come you gotta go pull such a long face, and take on in any such way? Do seem to me like you'd be glad on my account, us bein friends and all."

He yanked loose a trailing arm of ivy, and this set swinging all the porch-eave pots: bumping against each other they raised a noise like a series of closing doors. "Oh, you're awful funny. Ha ha ha." He gave her one of Randolph's cool arched looks. "You were never my friend. But after all why should anyone such as me have anything in common with such as you?"

"Baby, baby… " said Zoo, her voice rocking in a tender way"… baby, I make you a promise: whenever I gets all fixed… I'm gonna send for you and take care you all the resta your years. Before the Almighty may He strike me dead if this promise ain't made."

Joel jerked away, flung himself against a porch-pole, embraced it, clung there as though it alone understood and loved him.

"Hold on there now," she told him firmly. "You is almost a growed man; idea, takin on like some little ol gal! Why, you mortify me, I declare. Here was bout to give you Papa-daddy's fine handsome sword… see now you is not man enough for to own it."

Parting the curtain of ivy, Joel stepped through and into the yard; to walk straight off, and not look back, that would punish her. But when he reached the tree stump, and still she had not relented, not called him back, he stopped, retraced his steps onto the porch, and, looking seriously into her African eyes, said: "You will send for me?"

Zoo smiled and half picked him up. "Time I gets a place to put our heads." She reached down into her quilt-covered bundle, and brought out the sword. "This here was Papa-daddy's proudest thing," she said. "Now don't you bring it no disgrace."

He strapped it to his waist. It was a weapon against the world, and he tensed with the cold grandeur of its sheath along his leg: suddenly he was most powerful, and unafraid. "I thank you kindly, Zoo," he said.

Gathering the quilt, and jellyjar box, she staggered down the steps. Her breath came in grunts, and with every loping movement the accordion, bouncing up and down, sprinkled a rainfall of discordant notes. They walked through the garden wilderness, and to the road. The sun was traveling the green-rimmed distance: as far as you could see daybreak blueness lifted over trees, layers of light unrolled across the land. "I spec to be down past Paradise Chapel fore dew's off the ground: good I got my quilt handy, may be lotsa snow around Washington D. C." And that was the last she said. Joel stopped by the mailbox. "Goodbye," he called, and stood there watching until she grew pinpoint small, lost, and the accordion soundless, gone.

"… no gratitude," Amy sniffed. "Good and kind, that's how we were, always, and what does she do? Runs off, God knows where, leaving me with a houseful of sick people, not one of whom has sense enough to empty a slopjar. Furthermore, whatever else I may be, I'm a lady: I was brought up to be a lady, and I had my full four years at the Normal School. And if Randolph thinks I'm going to play nursemaid to orphans and idiots… damn Missouri!" Her mouth worked in a furious ugly way. "Niggers! Angela Lee warned me time and again, said never trust a nigger: their minds and hair are full of kinks in equal measure. Still, does seem like she could've stayed to fix breakfast." She took a pan of biscuits from the oven, and, along with a bowl of grits, a pot of coffee, arranged them on a tray. "Here now, trot this up to Cousin Randolph and trot right back: poor Mr Sansom has to be fed too, heaven help us; yes, may the Lord in His wisdom…"

Randolph was propped up in bed, naked, and with the covers stripped back; his skin seemed translucently pink in the morning light, his round smooth face bizarrely youthful. There was a small Japanese table set across his legs, and on it were a mound of bluejay feathers, a paste pot, a sheet of cardboard. "Isn't this delightful?" he said, smiling up at Joel. "Now put down the tray and have a visit."

"There isn't time," said Joel a little mysteriously.

"Time?" Randolph repeated. "Dear me, I thought that was where we were overstocked."

Pausing between words, Joel said: "Zoo's gone." He was anxious that the announcement should have a dramatic effect. Randolph, however, gave him no satisfaction, for, contrary to Amy, he seemed not at all upset, even surprised. "How tiresome of her," he sighed, "and how absurd, too. Because she can't come back, one never can."

"She wouldn't want to anyway," answered Joel impertinently. "She wasn't happy here; I don't think nothing would make her come back."

"Darling child," said Randolph, dipping a bluejay feather in the paste, "happiness is relative, and," he continued, fitting the feather on the cardboard, "Missouri Fever will discover that all she has deserted is her proper place in a rather general puzzle. Like this." He held up the cardboard in order that Joel could see: there feathers were so arranged the effect was of a living bird transfixed. "Each feather has, according to size and color, a particular position, and if one were the slightest awry, why, it would not look at all real."

A memory floated like a feather in the air; Joel's mental eye saw the bluejay beating its wings up the wall, and Amy's ladylike lifting of a poker. "What good is a bird that can't fly?" he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

Joel was himself uncertain what he meant. "The other one, the real one, it could fly. But this one can't do anything… except maybe look like it was alive."

Tossing the cardboard aside, Randolph lay drumming his fingers on his chest. He lowered his eyelids, and with his eyes closed he looked peculiarly defenseless. "It is pleasanter in the dark," he said, as if talking in his sleep. "Would it inconvenience you, my dear, to bring from the cabinet a bottle of sherry? And then, on tiptoe, mind you, draw all the shades, and then, oh very quietly please, shut the door." As Joel fulfilled the last of these requests, he rose up to say: "You are quite right: my bird can't fly."

Some while later, Joel, his stomach still jittery from having fed Mr Sansom's breakfast to him mouthful by mouthful, sat reading aloud in rapid flat tones. The story, such as it was, involved a blonde lady and a brunette man who lived in a house sixteen floors high; most of the stuff the lady said was embarrassing to repeat: "Darling," he read, "I love you as no woman ever loved, but Lance, my dearest, leave me now while our love is still a shining thing." And Mr Sansom smiled continuously through even the saddest parts; glancing at him, his son remembered a threat Ellen had delivered whenever he'd made an ugly face: "Mark my word," she'd say, "it's going to freeze that way." Such a fate had apparently descended upon Mr Sansom, for his ordinarily expressionless face had been grinning now no less than eight days. Finishing off the beautiful lady and lovely man, who were left honeymooning in Bermuda, Joel went on to a recipe for banana custard pie: it was all the same to Mr Sansom, romance or recipe, he gave each of them staring unequaled attention.

What was it like almost never to shut your eyes, always to be forever reflecting the same ceiling, light, faces, furniture, dark? But if the eyes could not escape you, neither could you avoid them; they seemed indeed sometime to permeate the room, their damp greyness covering all like mist; and if those eyes were to make tears they would not be normal tears, but something grey, perhaps green, a color at any rate, and solid, like ice.

Downstairs in the parlor was a collection of old books, and exploring there Joel had come upon a volume of Scottish legends. One of these concerned a man who compounded a magic potion unwisely enabling him to read the thoughts of other men and see deep into their souls; the evil he saw, and the shock of it, turned his eyes into open sores: thus he remained the rest of his life. It impressed Joel to the extent that he was half-convinced Mr Sansom's eyes knew exactly what went on inside his head, and he attempted, for this reason, to keep his thoughts channeled in impersonal directions."… mix sugar, flour, salt and add egg yolks. Stir constantly while pouring on scalded milk… " Every once in a while he was tantalized by a sense of guilt: he ought to feel more for Mr Sansom than he did, he ought to try and love him. If only he'd never seen Mr Sansom! Then he could have gone on picturing him as looking this and that wonderful way, as talking in a kind strong voice, as being really his father. Certainly this Mr Sansom was not his father. This Mr Sansom was nobody but a pair of crazy eyes."… turn into baked pieshell. Cover with… it says meringay or something like that… and bake. Makes nine-inch pie." He put down the magazine, a journal for females to which Amy subscribed, and began straightening Mr Sansom's pillows. Mr Sansom's head lolled back and forth, as if saying no no no; actually, and his voice sounded prickly as though a handful of pins were lodged in his throat, he said, "Boy kind kind boy kind," over and over, "ball kind ball," he said, dropping one of his red tennis balls, and, as Joel retrieved it, his set smile became more glassy; it ached on his grey skeleton face. Then all at once a whistle broke through the shut windows. Joel turned to listen. Three short blasts and a boot-owl wail. He went to the window. It was Idabel; she was in the garden below, and Henry was with her. The window was stuck, so he signaled to her, but she could not see him, and he hurried to the door. "Bad," said Mr Sansom, and let go every tennis ball in the bed, "boy bad bad!"

Detouring into his room long enough to strap on his sword, he ran downstairs, outside and into the garden. For the first time since he'd known her Joel felt Idabel was glad to see him: a look of serious relief cleared her face, and for a moment he thought she might embrace him: her arms lifted as if to do so, then instead she stooped and hugged Henry, squeezed his neck until the old hound whined. "Is something wrong?" he said, for she had not spoken, nor, in a sense, taken notice of him, not enough, that is, even to mention his sword, and when she said, "We were scared you weren't home," all the rough spirit seemed to have drained from her voice. Joel felt stronger than she, and sure of himself as he'd never been with that other Idabel, the tomboy. He squatted down beside her there in the shade of the house where tulip stalks leaned around, and elephant leaves, streaked with silver snail tracks, hung above their heads like parasols. She was pale beneath her freckles, and a ridge of fingernail-scratch stood out across her cheek. "How'd you get that?" he said.

Her lips whitened, she spit the answer: "Florabel. That damned bastard."

"A girl can't be a bastard," he said.

"Oh, she's a bastard all right. But I didn't mean her." Idabel pulled the hound onto her lap; sleepily submissive, he lay there allowing her to pick fleas off his belly. "I meant that old bastard daddy of mine. We had us a knock-down drag-out fight, him and me and Florabel. On account of he tried to shoot Henry here; Florabel put him up to it… says Henry's got a mortal disease, which is a low-down lie from start to finish. I figure I broke her nose and some teeth, too; leastwise, she was bleeding like a pig when me and Henry took off. We been walking around in the dark all night." Suddenly she laughed in her woolly familiar way. "And up around sunrise, know who we saw? Zoo Fever. She couldn't hardly breathe, she was carrying so much junk: golly, we were right sorry to hear about Jesus. It's funny for that old man to die and nobody hear a word. But like I told you, who knows what goes on at the Landing?"

Joel thought: who knows what goes on anywhere? Except Mr Sansom. He knew everything; in some trick way his eyes traveled the whole world over: they this very instant were watching him, of that he had no doubt. And it was probable, too, that, if he had a mind, he could reveal to Randolph Pepe Alvarez's whereabouts.

"Don't you fret none, Henry," said Idabel, popping a flea. "They'll never lay a hand on you."

"But what are you going to do?" Joel asked. "You've got to go home sometime."

She rubbed her nose, and considered him with eyes exaggeratedly wide and appealing: if it had been anyone but Idabel, Joel would've thought she was making up to him. "Maybe," she said, "and maybe not; that's what I came to see you for." Abruptly businesslike, she shoved the dog off her lap, and took a hearty comradegrip on Joel's shoulders: "How would you like to run away?" But before he could say what he'd like she hurried on: "We could go to town tonight when it's dark. The travelin-show's in town, and there'll be a big crowd. I do want to see the travelin-show one more time; they've got a ferris wheel this year somebody said, and…"

"But where would we go?" he said.

Idabel's mouth opened, closed. Apparently she hadn't given this much thought, and with the wide world to choose from, all she could find to say was: "Outside; we'll just walk around outside till we come on a nice place."

"We could go to California and pick grapes," he suggested. "Out West you don't have to be but twelve years old to get married."

"I don't want to get married," said Idabel, coloring. "Who the hell said I wanted to get married? Now you listen, boy: you behave decent, you behave like we're brothers, or don't you behave at all. Anyway, we don't want to do no sissy thing like pick grapes. I thought maybe we could join the navy; else we could teach Henry tricks and get in the circus: say, couldn't you learn magic tricks?"

Which reminded him: he'd never gone after the charm Little Sunshine had promised; certainly, if he were running off with Idabel, they would need this magic, and so he asked if she knew the way to the Cloud Hotel. "Kind of," she said, "down through the woods and the sweetgum hollow and then across the creek where the mill is… oh, it's a long way. Why'd we want to go anyhow?" But of course he could not say, for Little Sunshine had warned him never to mention the charm. "I've got important business with the man there," he said, and then, wanting a little to frighten her: "Otherwise something terrible will happen to us."

They both jumped. "Don't hide, I know you're out there, I heard you." It was Amy, and she was calling from a window directly above: she could not see them, though, for the elephant leaves were a camouflage. "The idea, leaving Mr Sansom in this fix, are you completely out of your mind?" They crawled from under the leaves, crept along the side of the house, then raced for the road, the woods. "I know you're there, Joel Knox, come up this instant, sir!"

Deep in the hollow, dark syrup crusted the bark of vine-roped sweetgums: like pale apple leaves green witch butterflies sank and rose there and there; a breezy lane of trumpet lilies (Saints and Heroes, these alone, or so old folks said, could hear their mythical flourish) beckoned like hands lace-gloved and ghostly. Idabel kept waving her arms, for the mosquitoes were fierce: everywhere, like scraps of a huge shattered mirror, mosquito pools of marsh water gleamed and broke in Henry's jogging path.

"I've got some money," said Idabel. "Fact is, I've got near about four bits." Joel thought of the change he'd stored away in the box, and bragged that he had more than that. "We'll spend it all at the travelin-show," she said, and took a froggish jump over a crocodile-looking log. "Who needs money anyhow? Leastwise, not right aways we don't… except for dopes. We ought to save enough so as we can have a dope every day cause my brains get fried if I can't have myself an ice-cold dope. And cigarettes. I surely do appreciate a smoke. Dopes and smokes and Henry are the onliest things I love."

"You like me some, don't you?" he said, without meaning really to speak aloud. In any case, Idabel, chanting"… the big baboon by the light of the moon was combing his auburn hair…" did not answer.

They stopped to scrape off chews of sweetgum, and while they stood there she said: "My daddy'll be out rooting up the country for me; I bet he'll go down and ask Mr Bluey for the loan of his old bloodhound." She laughed and sweetgum juice trickled out the corners of her mouth; a green butterfly lighted on her head, held like a ribbon to a lock of her hair. "One time they were hunting for an escaped convict (right here in this very hollow), Mr Bluey and his hound and Sam Radclif and Roberta Lacey and the Sheriff and all those dogs from the farm; when it got dark we could see their lamps shining way off here in the woods, and hear the dogs howling; it was like a holiday: daddy and all the men and Roberta Lacey got hollering drunk, you could hear old Roberta's hee-haw clear to Noon City and back… and you know, I was real sorry for that convict, and afraid for him: I kept thinking I was him and he was me and it was both of us they were out to catch." She spit the gum like tobacco, and hooked her thumbs in the belt rungs of her khaki shorts. "But he got away. They never did find him. Some folks hold that he's still about… hiding in the Cloud Hotel, maybe, or living at the Landing."

"Thereis someone living at the Landing," Joel said excitedly, and then, with some disappointment, added: "Except it's not a convict, it's a lady."

"A lady? You mean Miss Amy?"

"Another lady," he told her, and regretted mentioning the matter. "She has a tall white wig, and wears a lovely old-time dress, but I don't know who she is or even if she is real." But Idabel just looked at him as if he were a fool, so he smiled uneasily and said: "I'm only joking, I only wanted to scare you." And, not wanting to answer questions, he ran a little ahead, the sword spanking his thigh. It seemed to him they had come a far way, and he played with the notion that they were lost: probably there was no such place as this hotel whose name evoked a kind of mist-white palace floating foglike through the woods. Then, facing a fence of brambles, he unsheathed his sword and cut an opening. "After you, my dear Idabel," he said, bowing low, and Idabel, whistling for Henry, stepped through. Off a short distance on the other side lay a roughly pebbled beach along which the creek, here rather more of a river, ran sluggishly. A yellowed canebreak obscured at first the sight of a broken dam, and, below this, a queer house straddling the water on high stilts: it was made of unpainted plank gone grey now, and had a strange unfinished look, as though its builder had been frightened and fled his job midway. Three sunning buzzards sat hunched on what remained of the roof, butterflies went in and out of blue sky-bright windows. Joel was sorely let-down, for he thought this alas was the Cloud Hotel, but then Idabel said no, it was an old forsaken mill, a place where, years since, farmers had brought corn to be ground. "There used to be a road, one that went to the Cloud Hotel; nothing but woods now, not even a path to show the way." She seized a rock, and threw it up at the buzzards; they glided off the roof, glided over the beach, their shadows making there lazy interlocking circles.

The water, deeper here than where he and Idabel had taken their bath, was also darker, a muddy bottomless olive, and when he knew they did not have to swim over, his relief gave him courage enough to travel down under the mill where there was a heavy but rotting beam on which they might cross.

"I'd better go first," said Idabel. "It's pretty old and liable to bust."

But Joel pushed in front of her and started over; after all, no matter what Idabel said, he was a boy and she was a girl and he was damned if she were going to get the upper hand again. "You and Henry come after me," he called, his voice hollow in the sudden cellar-like dark. Luminous water-shadows snaked up the cracked and eaten columns supporting the mill-house; copper waterbugs swung on intricate trapezes of insect's thread, and fungus flowered fist-size on the wet decrepit wood. Joel, stepping gingerly, using his sword to balance, made his eyes avoid the dizzy deep creek moving so closely below, kept them, instead, aimed on the opposite bank where, in sunshine, laden gourdvine burst from red clay green and promising. Still all at once he felt he would never reach the other side: always he would be balanced here suspended between land, and in the dark, and alone. Then feeling the board shake as Idabel started across, he remembered he had someone to be together with. Only. And his heart turned over, skipped: every part of him went like iron.

Idabel shouted: "What's wrong? What're you stopping for?"

But he could not tell her. Nor bring himself to make any sound, motion. For piled no more than a foot beyond was a cotton-mouth thick as his leg, long as a whip; its arrow-shaped head slid out, the seed-like eyes alertly pointed, and all over Joel began to sting, as though already bitten. Idabel, coming up behind him, looked over his shoulder. "Jesus," she breathed, "oh Jesus," and at the touch of her hand he broke up inside: the creek froze, was like a horizontal cage, and his feet seemed to sink, as though the beam on which they stood was made of quicksand. How did Mr Sansom's eyes come to be in a moccasin's head?

"Hit him," Idabel demanded. "Hit him with your sword."

It was this way: they were bound for the Cloud Hotel, yes, the Cloud Hotel, where a man with a ruby ring was swimming underwater, yes, and Randolph was looking through his almanac and writing letters to Hongkong, to Port-o'-Spain, yes, and poor Jesus was dead, killed by Toby the cat (no, Toby was a baby), by a nest of chimney sweeps falling in a fire. And Zoo: was she in Washington yet? And was it snowing? And why was Mr Sansom staring at him so hard? It was really very, very rude (as Ellen would say), really very rude indeed of Mr Sansom never to close his eyes.

The snake, unwinding with involved grace, stretched toward them in a rolling way, and Idabel screamed, "Hit him, hit him!" but Joel of course was concerned only with Mr Sansom's stare.

Spinning him around, and pushing him safely behind her, she pulled the sword out of his hand. "Big granddaddy bastard," she jeered, thrusting at the snake. For an instant it seem paralyzed; then, invisibly swift, and its whole length like a wire singingly tense, it hooked back, snapped forward. "Bastard," she hollered, closing her eyes, swinging the blade like a sickle, and the cotton-mouth, slapped into the air, turned, plunged, flattened on the water: belly up, white and twisted, it was carried by the current like a torn lily root. "No," said Joel when, some while later, Idabel, calm in her triumph, tried to coax him on across. "No," he said, for what use could there be now in finding Little Sunshine? His danger had already been, and he did not need a charm.

11

During supper Amy announced: "It is my birthday. Yes," she said, "it is indeed, and not a soul to remember. Now if Angela Lee were here, I should've had an immense cake with a prize in every slice: tiny gold rings, and a pearl for my add-a-pearl, and little silver shoebuckles: oh when I think!"

"Happy birthday," said Joel, though what he wished her was hardly happiness, for when he'd come home she'd rushed down, the hall with every intention, or so she'd said, of breaking an umbrella over his head; whereupon Randolph, throwing open his door, had warned her, and very sincerely, that if ever she touched him he'd wring her damned neck.

Randolph went right on chewing a pig's knuckle, and Amy, ignoring Joel, glared at him, her eyebrows going up and up, her lips pursed and trembling. "Eat, go on and eat, get fat as a hog," she said, and slammed down her gloved hand: hitting the table it knocked like wood, and the old alarm clock, touched off by this commotion, began to ring: all three sat motionless until it whined itself silent. Then, the lines of her face becoming prominent as veins, Amy, with a preposterously maudlin sob, broke into tears and hiccups. "You silly toad," she panted, "who else has ever helped you? Angela Lee would sooner have seen you hanged! But no, I've given up my life." Spouting intermittent pardon-mes, she hiccuped in succession a dozen times. "I tell you this, Randolph, I would sooner go off and clean house for a bunch of tacky niggers than stay here another instant; don't think I couldn't earn my way, the mothers of any town in America would send their children to me and we would play organized games, blind man's bluff and musical chairs and pin the tail, and I would charge each child ten cents: I could make a good living. No, I need not depend on you; in fact, if I had a particle of sense I'd sit down and write a letter to the Law."

Randolph crossed his knife and fork, and patted his lips with his kimono sleeve. "I'm sorry, my dear," he said, "but I'm afraid I haven't been following: exactly where is it you fancy me at fault?"

His cousin shook her head, took a deep, nervous breath; the tears stopped coming, the hiccups ceased, and all at once she turned on a shy smile. "It's my birthday," she said, her voice reduced to a waver.

"How very odd. Joel, does it seem to you peculiarly warm for January?"

Joel was listening for sounds above their voices: three short whistles and a hoot-owl wail, Idabel's signal. In his impatience it was as if the clock, having unwound, had stopped time altogether.

"January, yes; and you, my dear, were born (if one believes a family Bible, though I'll admit one never should, so many weddings being listed an erroneous nine months early) one January New Year's."

Amy's neck dipped turtlewise into shoulders timidly contracting, and her hiccups racked up again, but less indignant now, more mournful. "But Randolph… Randolph, Ifeel as though it was my birthday."

"A little wine, then," he said, "and a song on the pianola; look in the cupboard, too, I'm certain you'll find a box of stale animal crackers with little silver worms in every crumb." Carrying lamps, they moved into the parlor, and Joel, sent upstairs to fetch the wine, crossed Randolph's room quickly, and raised the window. Below, bonfires of newly bloomed roses burned like flower-eyes in the August twilight, their sweetness filling the air like a color. He whistled, whispered, "Idabel, Idabel," and with Henry she appeared between the leaning columns. "Joel," she said, unsure, and behind her it was as though the falling night slipped a glove over the five stone fingers which, curling in shadow, seemed bendingly to reach her; when he answered, she hurried beyond their grasp, came safely under the window. "Are you ready?" She'd plaited a collar of white roses for Henry, and there was a rose hung awkwardly in her hair. Idabel, he thought, you look real beautiful. "Go to the mailbox," he said, "I'll meet you there." It was too dark now to maneuver without light. He lit a candle on Randolph's desk, and went to the cabinet, searching there until he located an unopened bottle of sherry. Stooping to extinguish the candle, he noticed a sheet of green tissue-thin stationery, and on it, in a handwriting daintily familiar, was written only a salutation: "My dearest Pepe." Randolph, then, had composed the letters to Ellen, but how could he have supposed that Mr Sansom could ever have written a word? In the black hall, lamplight rimmed Mr Sansom's door, which, as he waited, a cross-draft commenced to swing open, and it was as though he were seeing his father's room through reversed binoculars, for, in its yellow clarity, it was like a miniature: the hand with the wedding ring slouched over the bed's side; scenes of Venice, projected by the frost-glass globe, tinted the walls, the crocheted spread, and there in the mirror whirled his eyes, his smile. Joel entered on tiptoe and went on his knees beside the bed. Downstairs the pianola had begun pounding its raggedy carnival tune, yet somehow it did not interfere with the stillness and secrecy of this moment. Tenderly he took Mr Sansom's hand and put it against his cheek and held it there until there was warmth between them; he kissed the dry fingers, and the wedding ring whose gold had been meant to encircle them both. "I'm leaving, Father," he said, and it was, in a sense, the first time he'd acknowledged their blood; slowly he rose up and pressed his palms on either side of Mr Sansom's face and brought their lips together: "My only father," he whispered, turning, and, descending the stairs, he said it again, but this time all to himself.

He set the bottle of sherry on the hall-tree in the chamber, and, hidden by a curtain, peered into the parlor; neither Amy nor Randolph had heard him come down the stairs: she was sitting on the pianola stool, studiously working an ivory fan, tiresomely tapping her foot, and Randolph, bored to limpness, was staring at the archway where Joel was scheduled presently to present himself. He was gone now, and running toward the mailbox, Idabel, outside. The road was like a river to float upon, and it was as if a roman-candle, ignited by the sudden breath of freedom, had zoomed him away in a wake of star-sparks. "Run!" he cried, reaching Idabel, for to stop before the Landing stood forever out of sight was an idea unendurable, and she was racing before him, her hair pulling back in windy stiffness: as the road humped into a hill it was as though she mounted the sky on a moon-leaning ladder; beyond the hill they came to a standstill, panting, tossing their heads. "Was they chasing us?" asked Idabel, petals from her hair-rose shedding in the air, and he said: "Nobody will catch us now never." Staying to the road, even when they passed close by her house, they walked with Henry between them: roses, strewn from the wreath about the dog's neck, soaked the colors of a stony moon, and Idabel said she was hungry enough to eat a rose, "or grass and toadstools." Well, he said, well, when they reached town he'd splurge and treat her to a barbecue at R. V. Lacey's Princely Place. And they talked of the night he'd first come along this road and heard her in the distance singing with her sister. His eyes nailed down with stars, an old wagon had carried him over a ledge of sleep, a wintry slumber dispelled in the exhilaration of recent waking: meantime, there had taken place a dream, from whose design, unraveling now swifter than memory could reweave it, only Idabel remained, all else and others having dimmed-out as shadows do in dark. "I remember," she said, "and I thought you was a mess just like Florabel; to be honest to God, I never did much change-mind till today." Seeming then ashamed, she scampered down the road-bank, and scooped up drinks of water from a thread of creek which trickled there; abruptly she straightened, and, with a finger to her lips, motioned for Joel to join her. "Hear it?" she whispered. Behind the foliage, a bull-toned voice, and another, this like a guitar, blended as raindrops caress to sound a same rhythm; an intricate wind of rustling murmurs, small laughter followed sighs not sad and silences deeper than space. Moss cushioned their footsteps as they moved through the leafy thickness, and came to pause at the edge of an opening: two Negroes, caught in a filmy skein of moon and fern, lay unclothed and enfolded, the man's caramel-colored body braceleted with his darker lover's arms, legs, his lips nuzzling her nipples: oo-we, oo-we, sweet Simon, she sighed, love shivering her voice, love rolling through her like thunder; easy, Simon, sweet Simon, easy honey, she crooned, and tensed then, her arms lifting as if to embrace the moon; her lover sank across her, and there together, limbs akimbo, they made on the bloom of moss a black fallen star. Idabel retreated with splashful, rowdy haste, and Joel, trying to keep up, went shh! shh! thinking how wrong to frighten the lovers, and wishing, too, that she'd waited longer, for watching them it had been as if his heart were beating all over his body, and all undefined whisperings had gathered into one yearning roar: he knew now, and it was not a giggle or a sudden white-hot word; only two people with each other in withness, and it was as though a tide had receded leaving him dry on a beach white as bone, and it was good at last to have come from so grey so cold a sea. He wanted to walk with Idabel's hand in his, but she had them doubled like knots, and when he spoke to her she looked at him mean and angry and scared; it was as if their positions of the afternoon had somehow reversed: she'd been the hero under the mill, but now he had no weapon with which to defend her, and even if this were not true he wouldn't have known what it was she wanted killed.

A whirl of ferris-wheel lights revolved in the distance; rockets rose, burst, fell over Noon City like showering rainbows; gawky kids and their elders, all beautiful in their Sunday summer finest, traipsed back and forth with reflections of the carnival starring their eyes; a young Negro watched sadly from the isolation of the jail, and a rhinestone colored girl, red-silk stockings flashing; on her legs, swished by shouting lewdly up at him. On the porch of the cracked ancient house old people recalled traveling-shows in other years, and little boys, going behind hedges to pee, lingered to laugh and pinch each other. Ice-cream cones slipped from grimy fingers, crackerjack spilt and so did tears, but nobody was unhappy, nobody thought of chores beyond the moment.

Hiya, Idabel-Watcha say, Idabel? but not a soul spoke to him, he was no part of them, they did not know him; only R. V. Lacey remembered. "Look, babylove!" she said, when they appeared in the door of her Princely Place, and those assembled there, beribboned sassy-faced town-tarts and rednecked farmboys with cow-dumb eyes, paused in their jukebox shuffling; one girl advanced to tickle him under the chin. "Where'd you find this, Idabel? He's cute."

"Mind your own business, punk," Idabel said, seating herself at the counter.

Miss Roberta Lacey wagged her finger. "Idabel Thompkins, I warned you time and again, none of that gangster talk in my establishment. Furthermore, I have many times put into words the fact that you are not to set foot inside my place, acting as you do like Baby Face Floyd, and dressing as you do in no proper way befitting a young lady: now skidaddle, and take that filthy hound with you."

"Please, Miss Roberta," said Joel, "Idabel's awful hungry."

"Then she oughta be home learning to fix a man his vittels (laughter); besides which this here's a grown-folks cafй (applause). Romeo, remind me to put up a sign to that effect. Whatismore, Idabel, your daddy has been round here inquirin as to your whereabouts, and it is my serious opinion he means to burn up that saucy little butt of yours (laughter)."

Idabel leveled a slant-eyed look at the proprietress, then, as though this seemed to her the most expressive retort, she spit on the floor, shoved her hands in her pockets and swaggered out. Joel started to follow, but R. V. Lacey clamped a hand on his shoulder. "Babylove," she said, toying with the long black hair extending from her chin-wart, "Angelboy, you're keeping kinda peculiar company. Idabel's daddy said she's done broke her pretty sweet little sister's nose, and knocked out most her teeth." Grinning, scratching under her armpits like a baboon, she added, "Now don't go saying Roberta's a hard woman; she's soft on you," and handed him a bag of salted peanuts. "No charge."

Idabel told him what he could do with those old Roberta goobers, but she relented, to be sure, and devoured the sack solo. She let him take her arm, and they descended on the gala beehive acre where the traveling-show buzzed. The merry-go-round, a sorry battered toy, turned to a jingling sound of bells, and colored folks, who were not allowed to ride, stood clustered at a distance getting more fun from its magical whirl than those astride saddles. Idabel shelled out 35ў at the dart-throw game, all in order to win a pair of dark glasses like the ones Joel had broken, and what a ruckus she raised when the strawhat man tried to palm off a walking cane! You bet she got those specs, but, being too large for her, they kept sliding down her nose. At the 10ў Tent they saw a four-legged chicken (stuffed), and the two-headed baby floating in a glass tank like a green octopus: Idabel studied it a long while, and when she turned away her eyes were moist: "Poor little baby," she said, "poor little thing." The Duck Boy cheered her up; he sure was a comedy all right, quack-quack-quacking, making dopey faces and flapping his hands, the fingers of which were webbed together; at one point he opened his shirt to reveal a white feathery chest. Joel preferred Miss Wisteria, a darling little girl, he thought, and so did Idabel; they did not quite believe she was a midget, though Miss Wisteria herself claimed to be twenty-five years old, and just back from a grand tour of Europe where she'd appeared before all the crowned heads: her own sweet little gold head sported a twinkling crown; she wore elegant silver slippers (it was a marvel the way she could walk on her toes); her dress was a drape of purple silk tied about the middle with a yellow silk sash. She hopped and skipped and giggled and sang a song and said a poem, and when she came off the platform, Idabel, more excited than Joel had ever seen her, rushed up and asked, please, wouldn't she have some sodapop with them. "Charmed," said Miss Wisteria, twisting her gold sausage curls, "charmed." Idabel humbled herself; she bought cokes, found them a place to sit, and made Henry keep his distance, for Miss Wisteria confessed to a fear of animals. "Frankly," she lisped, "I do not think God intended them." Except for rouged kewpie-doll lips, her baby-plump face was pale, enameled; her hands flitted about so that they seemed to have a separate life of their own, and she glanced at them now and again as if they deeply puzzled her; they were smaller than a child's these hands, but thin, mature, and the fingernails were painted. "Well, this is surely a treat," she said. "Now lots of show-people are just plain put-ons, but I don't hold with any put-on, I like to bring my art to the people… lots of whom don't see how come I jog around with an outfit like this… look, they say to me, there you were out in Hollywood pulling down a thousand dollars a week as Shirley Temple's stand-in… but I say to them: the road to happiness isn't always a highway." Draining her coke, she took out a lipstick and reshaped her kewpie-bow; then a queer thing happened: Idabel, borrowing the lipstick, painted an awkward clownish line across her mouth, and Miss Wisteria, clapping her little hands, shrieked with a kind of sassy pleasure. Idabel met this merriment with a dumb adoring smile. Joel could not understand what had taken her. Unless it was that the midget had cast a spell. But as she continued to fawn over tiny yellow-haired Miss Wisteria it came to him that Idabel was in love. No, she would not consider leaving, there was a world of time. "Charmed," said Miss Wisteria to a suggestion they ride the ferris-wheel, "charmed."

A rash of lightning rattled the stars; Miss Wisteria's royal headgear caught fire in this brief tinseled burst, the glass jewels glittering roselike in the pink lights of the ferris-wheel, and Joel, left below, could see her white winglike hands alight on Idabel's hair, flutter away, squeeze the dark as if eating its very substance. They swung low, their laughter rippling like Miss Wisteria's long sash, and, rising toward a new flush of lightning, dissolved; still he could hear the midget's penny-flute voice purring persistent as a mosquito above every fairground noise: Idabel, come back, he thought, thinking he would never see her again, that she would travel into the sky with Miss Wisteria at her side, Idabel, come back, I love you. So then she was there, telling him, "You can see way off, you can almost touch the sky," so then he was aboard the ferris-wheel, alone with Miss Wisteria, and together they watched Idabel diminish as the rocking rickety car started to climb.

Wind swung them like a lantern; it is wind, Joel thought, for he could see the pennants trembling above the tents, trash-paper scurrying animal-like along the ground, and over there, on the walls of the old house where a Yankee bandit had murdered three women, raggedy posters danced a skeleton jig. The car in front contained a sunbonneted mother and her little girl, who nursed a corncob doll; they waved to a farmer waiting below. "Y'all better get offen that thing," he called back, "hitsa fixin to rain." Around they went, wind rustling Miss Wisteria's purple silk. "Run away, is it?" she said, a smile displaying rabbity teeth. "Well, I said to her, and I say to you: the world is a frightening place." She gestured her arms in an arc, and in that moment she seemed to him Outside, to be, that is, geography, earth and sea and all the cities in Randolph's almanac: her queer little hands, twittering midair, encompassed the globe. "And oh a lonesome place. Once I ran away. I had four sisters (Maudy went to Atlantic City as Miss Maryland, she's that beautiful), tall lovely girls, and my mother, bless her soul, stood nearly six feet in her stockings. We lived in a big house in Baltimore, the nicest on our street, and I never went to school; I was so little I could sit in my mother's sewing basket, and she used to joke that I could crawl through the eye of her needle; there was a beau of Maudy's who could balance me in the palm of his hand, and when I was seventeen I still had to sit in a highchair to eat my supper. They said I need not play alone, there are other little people, they said, go out and find them, they live in flowers. Many's the petal I've peeled but lilac is lilac and no one lives in any rose I ever saw; a spot of grease is all a wishbone leaves, and there is only candy in a Christmas stocking. Then I was twenty, and Mama said it wasn't right I shouldn't have a beau, and she sat right down and wrote a letter to the Sweethearts Matrimonial Agency in Newark, New Jersey. And do you know a man came to marry me: he was much too big, though, and much too ugly, and he was seventy-seven years old; well, even so, I might have married him except when he saw how little I was he said bye-bye and took the train back to from whence he'd come. I never have found a sweet little person. There are children; but I cry sometimes to think little boys must grow tall." Her voice, while making this memoir, had stiffened solemnly, and her hands folded themselves quietly in her lap. Idabel waved, shouted, but wind carried her words another way, and sadly Miss Wisteria said: "Poor child, is it that she believes she is a freak, too?" She placed her hand on his thigh, and then, as though she had no control over them whatsoever, her fingers crept up inside his legs: she stared at the hand with shocked intensity but seemed unable to remove it, and Joel, disturbed but knowing now he wanted never to hurt anyone, not Miss Wisteria, nor Idabel, nor the little girl with the corncob doll, wished so much he could say: it doesn't matter, I love you, I love your hand. The world was a frightening place, yes, he knew: unlasting, what could be forever? or only what it seemed? rock corrodes, rivers freeze, fruit rots; stabbed, blood of black and white bleeds alike; trained parrots tell more truth than most, and who is lonelier: the hawk or the worm? every flowering heart shrivels dry and pitted as the herb from which it bloomed, and while the old man grows spinsterish, his wife assumes a mustache; moment to moment, changing, changing, like the cars on the ferris-wheel. Grass and love are always greener; but remember Little Three Eyes? show her love and apples ripen gold, love vanquishes the Snow Queen, its presence finds the name, be it Rumpelstiltskin or merely Joel Knox: that is constant.

A wall of rain pushed toward them from the distance; you could hear it long before it came, humming like a horde of locusts. The operator of the ferris-wheel began letting off his passengers. "Oh, we'll be last," wailed Miss Wisteria, for they were suspended near the top. The rain-wall leaned over them, and she threw up her hands as if to hold it back. Idabel, everyone, fled as down it toppled like a tidal wave.

Presently only the hatless man stood there in the emptiness below. Joel, his eyes searching so frenziedly for Idabel, did not at first altogether see him. But the carnival lights short-circuited with a crackling flare, and when this happened it was suddenly as though the man turned phosphorescent: he seemed to Joel no more than a hand's space away. "Randolph," he whispered, and the name gripped him at the root of his throat. It was a momentary vision, for the lights all fizzled out, and as the ferris-wheel descended to a last stop, he could not see Randolph anywhere.

"Wait," demanded Miss Wisteria, assembling her drenched costume, "wait for me." But Joel leaped past her, and hurried from one shelter to the next; Idabel was not in the 10ў Tent: no one was there but the Duck Boy, who was playing solitaire by candlelight. Nor was she in the group huddled on the merry-go-round. He went to the livery stable. He went to the Baptist church. And soon, there being scarcely another possibility, he found himself on the porch of the old house. Leaves, gathering in a coil, spiralled hissingly across its deserted expanse; empty rocking chairs tilted gently back and forth; a Prince Albert poster swept like a bird through the air and struck him in the face: he fought to free himself, but it was as though it were alive, and, struggling with it, it suddenly frightened him more than had the sight of Randolph: he would never rid himself of either. But then, what was there in Randolph to fear? The fact that he'd found him proved he was only a messenger for a pair of telescopic eyes. Randolph would never bring him harm (still, but, and yet). He let down his arms: it was curious, for so soon as he did this, Prince Albert, of his own accord, flew off howling in the hoarse rain. And could he, with equal ease, appease that other fury, the nameless one whose envoy appeared in Randolph's guise? Vine from the Landing's garden had stretched these miles to entwine his wrists, and he saw their plans, his and Idabel's, break apart like the thunder-split sky; not yet, not if he could find her, and he ran into the house: "Idabel, you are here, you are!"

A boom of silence answered him; here, there, a marginal sound: rain like wings in the chimney, mice feet on fallen glass, maidenly steps of her who always walks the stair, and wind, opening doors, closing them, wind conversing sadly on the ceiling, blowing its damp sour breath in his face, breathing out its lungs through the rooms: he let himself be carried in its course: his head was light as a balloon, and as hollow-feeling; ice as eyes, thorns as teeth, flannel as tongue; he'd seen sunrise that morning, but, each step directing him nearing a precipice permanent in shadowed intent (or so it seemed), it was not likely he would see another: sleep was like smoke, he inhaled it deeply, but it went back on the air in rings of color, spots, sparks, whose fire restrained him from falling in a bundle on the floor: warnings, they were, these starry flies, stay awake, Joel, in eskimoland sleep is death, is all, remember? She was cold, his mother, she passed to sleep with dew of snowflakes scenting her hair; if he could have but thawed open her eyes here now she would be to hold him and say, as he'd said to Randolph, "Everything is going to be all right"; no, she'd splintered like frozen crystal, and Ellen, gathering the pieces, had put them in a box surrounded by gladiolas fifty cents the dozen.

Somewhere he owned a room, he had a bed: their promise quivered before him like heat waves. Oh Idabel, why have you done this terrible thing!

There were footsteps on the porch; he could hear the squish-squish of soggy shoes; abruptly a flashlight beam poked through a parlor window, and for an instant settled on a flecked decaying mantel-mirror; shining there, the mirror was like a slab of jelly, and the figure from outside fumed indistinctly on its surface: no one could've said who it was, but Joel, seeing the light slide away, hearing the steps enter the hall, knew for certain it was Randolph. And there came over him the humiliating probability that not once since he'd left the Landing had he made a movement unobserved: how amusing his goodbye must've seemed to Mr. Sansom!

He crouched behind a door; through the hinged slit he could see into the hall where the light crawled like a burning centipede. It did not matter now if Randolph found him, he would welcome it. Still something kept him from calling out. The squshing steps moved toward the parlor threshold, and he heard, "Little boy, little boy," a whimper of despair.

Miss Wisteria stood so near he could smell the rancid wetness of her shriveled silk; her curls had uncoiled, the little crown had slipped awry, her yellow sash was fading its color on the floor. "Little boy," she said, swerving her flashlight over the bent, broken walls where her midget image mingled with the shadows of things in flight. "Little boy," she said, the resignation of her voice intensifying its pathos. But he dared not show himself, for what she wanted he could not give: his love was in the earth, shattered and still, dried flowers where eyes should be, and moss upon the lips, his love was faraway feeding on the rain, lilies frothing from its ruin. Withdrawing, she went up the stairs, and Joel, who listened to her footfalls overhead as she in her need of him searched the jungle of rooms, felt for himself ferocious contempt: what was his terror compared with Miss Wisteria's? He owned a room, he had a bed, any minute now he would run from here, go to them. But for Miss Wisteria, weeping because little boys must grow tall, there would always be this journey through dying rooms until some lonely day she found her hidden one, the smiler with the knife.