by Ellery Queen
Mr. Sweeney was not one of those people who only talk to children when there is no adult around. He didn’t sit on a chair but on the table bench by me, with one arm around me, and insisted I have some pie too. He squeezed my shoulders at intervals and when he had finished his pie, he put his chin on the top of my head so I could feel its movement when he talked to grandmother. I thought this hugely funny. When he left, we walked to the gate hand in hand. He got into the car and waved as long as he could see me as he drove down the road, leaving me already lonely for him.
Grandmother spoke of it to grandfather when he came in from the tobacco field for lunch.
“He sure made a lot over her. Didn’t know he was so crazy about children.”
“He ought to get married. He’s plenty young to have a whole raft of youngsters of his own.”
“Mella Wilson set her cap for him. She’s right good-looking too. But she never hit it off with him.”
“Some don’t take to marrying.” I was sitting by grandfather on the bench and slid down to nestle at his side. He patted me on the head and said absently, “Watch out. You’ll get this fork in your eye.”
They loved me dearly, but they were old. Grandfather was considered vigorous for his age and grandmother’s step was brisk as she canned and cooked and cleaned, but they had “slowed down,” my mother said. They had sold the animals until there were only a hog and some chickens left. Grandfather had to “work on shares” because the tobacco crop was too much for him alone. They both took afternoon naps. I had the feeling I must walk on tiptoe and whisper when I really wanted to stamp, run screaming down hills, and jump hurdles. Most of all I wanted my father. I wanted his honey-pie, bristly-cheeked, squeeze-me-tight, toss-me-in-the-air, roll-on-the-rug loving. Mr. Sweeney was the nearest I had found to that in all those lonely months.
I had gone to kindergarten in the city, but there was none here in the country and the nearest house with children was considered too far for me to walk. Only occasionally, when grandfather drove the truck into town, would he drop me off to play at a neighbor’s and pick me up on the way home. Between times I made do with cousins who visited frequently in the summer—“watermelon company,” my grandfather called them. They might grumble about having to draw water from the well to take baths and complain about the heat in the kitchen when grandmother made a fire to cook, but sometimes a cousin would spend a week with us. They were fun, but there were times, especially around suppertime—daddy time—that the loneliness set in. No man’s step in the hall, no man’s voice calling, “Where’s my little girl doll?”—pretending not to see me just inside the living-room door until, suddenly, he swooped in, grabbed me, and swung me about, shouting, “Here’s my doll! Here she is!” Even when my mother came to visit me, it was not enough, even when we could go down to the orchard and cry a little together.
Only Mr. Sweeney was almost right. I began to get up earlier and go down to the fence to wait for the paper. He would hand it to me from his car window, asking, “How’s my sweetie this morning?” And oh, the days he came to collect. Always the meeting at the gate, always the ride on his shoulders, always the squeezing, hugging, hand holding, the cheek rubbing and kiss goodbye.
Then one winter’s day he found me in disgrace. I can’t remember what I had done, but shortly before he arrived, my “sins had found me out” and I had been spanked. He saw the traces of tears on my cheeks. He knelt down to my face level and said, “My, my, whatever is the matter with my sweetheart?” I confessed with shame and he said, “Oh, my, we’ll just have to see about that.” He kissed me on each cheek, lifted me up tenderly, and carried me into the house.
Inside he sat down, still holding me, and said to grandmother, “I see that our little girl has been naughty. Now, we want her to be a darling angel, don’t we? I guess I’m just going to have to punish her too.” He turned me over, raised my dress, and slapped me lightly on my pants. Then he put me on the floor, holding me against his side with his arm around me and kissed my cheek again. “Now you let me know when she needs another good whipping. We are going to have us a good girl, aren’t we?” Grandmother laughed indulgently and said I usually behaved pretty well. I decided to always tell him when I had been bad.
Once when he came I didn’t meet him in the yard. I had had a cold with a slight fever and grandmother had forced me to stay in bed. I had cried, thinking I would not see him, but we had our visit. He bounded up the steps and into my room saying, “We can’t have my sweetheart feeling sick.” He sat down on the bed, raised me up into his arms, and kissed me on the forehead, then lowered me into the bed under the quilt. “Now I’m your own doctor,” he said. He put his hand under the quilt and asked, “Where does it feel bad, mmmmm? There? There? There?” He had me giggling and playing his game. Each time I admitted to feeling bad, he patted the place and kissed my cheek. For the first time, I remember, I kissed him too. He looked into my eyes, got up suddenly, and went away. But he waved at me from the door. And after that, whenever he left, he would bend down and point with his finger to a place on his cheek for me to kiss.
Then the next August I met him at the gate with sad news. I would be in school the next time he came and not see him at all. “Oh, my,” he said. “Now let’s see about that.” He pulled from his shirt pocket a miniature calendar. “What do you know about that?” he asked, amazed. “The good fairy has put collection day on a Saturday.” For the first time that day I noticed that the sun was shining.
I liked school. It was fun to play at recess, to write on the board with colored chalk, to show the teacher how well I could read, to drink water out of the fountain. But Saturdays were the best days. I saved everything for him—the jack-o’-lantern the teacher taught us to make, the picture of the turkey we each drew for Thanksgiving, the secret of whose name I drew for pollyanna, the disgrace of “staying in” for talking, for which he spanked me, the good report card for which he kissed me three times—once for each A.
It was the summer I was eight that the brightness dimmed. From smaller than average, I became overnight as though I’d eaten the cake in Alice in Wonderland. When grandmother made me new dresses, she kept murmuring, “How she has shot up, goodness!” One month when Mr. Sweeney came, he hoisted me up to carry me to the house; the next month we had to walk with our arms around each other. I noticed that he was no longer tall. “My, my! My little girl has become a young lady,” he kept remarking in an astonished voice. In vain I tried to scrunch down to the size of his little girl.
Another month I pressed up to his side and half sat, half leaned against his knee. He quickly put his arm around me to keep me from slipping. Aunt Bess, who was visiting us, frowned. Later I heard her say to grandmother, “She’s just too big to be all over him like that.”
“Nonsense,” grandmother said sharply, “he doesn’t mind a bit. He likes children. He has always made a fuss over her.”
“That’s not the point, Mother,” my aunt said and closed her lips to a line. “She’s just too big,” she added lamely.
I hated my height and developed a stoop. I became quieter, shyer. I sometimes quarreled with playmates at school. One day I was sent home in disgrace. A group of us girls, big and little, were in the schoolyard near the fence right before bell time, when it was too late to start another game, and Mr. Sweeney drove by. Maybelle Purdy, who was 13 and wore rouge, snickered and said, “There goes Touch-up Sweeney.”
“Who?” asked someone.
“Touch-up Sweeney. He touches you up, get it? Touches you down, too.” Maybelle giggled and whispered in the ear of her friend, who giggled and grew red in the face.
A wave of anger swept over me. “You take that back! Take it back!” I screamed at her.
“Can’t take back the truth without telling a lie. What’s the matter? Somebody step on your toes? He been touching you up and down and round and round?”
Screaming, I lowered my head and rammed it into her middle and she sat down on the ground, breathless. The teacher mon
itoring the yard rushed over. Maybelle and I were both crying but some of the other children pieced together a story for her—not the words we had said, just that she had made me angry and I had butted her in the stomach. Maybelle would not tell the teacher what she had said, just that she “didn’t mean nothing.” I would not repeat those awful words, so the teacher sent me home to “cool off.” All the way the name kept beating in my head: “Touch-up, Touch-up, Touch-up!” Since the teacher didn’t send a note, I told grandmother that I’d come home because I didn’t feel too good. By now it was true. I felt miserable. I threw up until I was all dried out. I drank some water and threw up again.
I was home from school for two days. When I returned, everything was seemingly as usual. Maybelle and I were not often in the same part of the yard at recess, so it was not necessary for us to meet. Nobody realized there was any change in me.
The following Saturday was Mr. Sweeney’s day, as I knew. Hadn’t I always counted the days? On the Monday before I began my campaign for permission to visit my mother. I had been to see her twice the past year since I had proved myself capable of riding on the bus, taking charge of my suitcase, and getting off at the right station. I could read signs now. I was a “young lady.”
The next month we had an unexpected visitor on Mr. Sweeney’s day. My youngest aunt arrived in hysterics holding a sobbing child, my cousin Jennie Sue. They handed her over to me and retired behind closed doors. Worn out with sobbing, Jennie Sue fell asleep almost between sobs. I put her on the sofa and went close to the door, though my aunt’s voice would probably have reached me even if I had been another room away. She made it plain that she was determined to get a divorce, that she “had taken all she could,” and no one could talk her out of it. My grandparents agreed to keep Jennie Sue while my aunt went west and they talked soothingly to her, expecting her, I believe, to be more rational the next day. She was not and departed on the train for Reno to be gone six weeks.
It was summer vacation and I had almost sole charge of Jennie Sue, sometimes much against my will. She followed me everywhere on her short plump legs, imitating me in everything as best she could—insisting on drying the silver when I washed dishes, putting napkins at places when I set the table, holding a book before her when I read. Once I smacked her hand because she wrote in my book while I was writing on paper.
She was not with me that Saturday when Mr. Sweeney’s flivver came in sight because I ran quickly around the side of the house and up to my room, leaving her in the yard. I stared out of the window which was up to let in the morning air, so, of course, I could hear too. Mr. Sweeney opened the gate just in time to meet Jennie Sue who was attracted by the arriving car.
“Well, hello, sweetie pie. Now, who are you?”
“I’m Jennie Sue. I’m four,” she confided, holding up four Angers.
He bent, kissed the fingers, swung her up to his shoulders, and marched to the door with her while she giggled delightedly. I heard the murmur of voices below and finally grandmother called to me that Mr. Sweeney was here and wasn’t I going to come down and say “Hello.” Reluctantly I went down to find him holding Jennie Sue on his lap, his chin resting on her curls, his arms folded around her middle.
“Hey, where’ve you been so long? Come here and howdy me,” he greeted me, taking one arm from around Jennie Sue and beckoning me with it. “My, I’ve never seen anyone grow the way you have. It seems just like yesterday when you were the size of this little cutie.” He tried to put his other arm around me. I went closer to him but not that close. I realized it would never do to show how near to heaving I was. “I’m going to pour you some coffee,” I said, getting a cup and bringing the pot from the stove.
“She’s getting to be a real help. She’s been taking care of the little one all week,” grandmother said.
“Yes indeed, a real young lady. And this one here—a little angel is what she is.”
I doubt if he noticed that I didn’t go near him, so absorbed was he with Jennie Sue. I could look at him with her and realize how he had been with me, almost as if I were seeing a movie in which I had starred. As for her, she kept putting her fingers over his mouth when he talked so that his words would kiss them and she put her face against his chest. I wanted to yell, “You are not her daddy! She will never have a daddy again! Quit touching her!”
I brooded over her for the rest of the day. Aunt Susan would get a job and leave her here all the time for me to take charge of after school and she would always be here for Touch-up Sweeney’s visits. Poor child—to miss a daddy all the time—just having somebody touching her. And grandmother didn’t even know. She would let him. Well, I wouldn’t.
I knew then what I had to do. Jennie Sue was only four and didn’t know enough to thank me. She didn’t know how long she would have to live without a daddy. She imitated everything I did. Should I put poison in a cookie for her while I ate a good one? It might taste so bad she wouldn’t eat it. Should I put a pillow over her face like the lady in the movie? She might wake up and scream, then later when I did it right, somebody would remember. Could I push her up real high in a swing so that she would fall out and break her neck? Maybe someone would guess that I did it on purpose.
The thing is, I was still only half serious. Understand, I knew it was the right thing to do, but I wasn’t sure I could do it. I had to do it right the first time. You can’t do it half one time and half the next. Then everything just sort of fell right for me. The water had been tasting funny, so grandfather had men dragging around in the well to see if something was dead was down there and they went home to supper and didn’t close the top to the well.
It was dark when I thought of catching lightning bugs around the back. Jennie Sue and I got some mayonnaise jars. Honestly, I hadn’t even thought it all out. I stepped up on the well platform and looked down just because the top was open. Jennie Sue just naturally came too and stood on tiptoe looking down.
“Look way down and see the moon shining on the water,” I said. She pulled herself up until her feet were not touching the platform at all. I simply up-ended her. She didn’t scream or struggle. The hardest part was waiting a while before running in and pretending it had just happened.
No one thought of blaming me. It was so easy that I could hardly believe I had managed it and for a couple of days I found myself still making plans. The only important result to me was the effect it had on grandmother. She blamed herself and claimed she must be getting too old to manage a child, so mother decided to take me back to the city with her. After all, I would be in school most of the time.
Jennie Sue would never suffer—never wake up in the night to find her face wet with tears for her daddy, never have to see her cousins riding away with their daddies, or miss him in the evenings at daddy time, or have secrets that only a daddy would want to know—and not have a daddy to tell them to. Jennie Sue was safe forever. But what about him? It was not fair that he should go on hugging, squeezing, touching everyone. But what could I do?
The answer came to me one night. I woke up knowing what to do. I couldn’t get him near a well, but I could write, couldn’t I? And I knew where to write from the many receipts he had given grandmother. One of the first words I could read was Sweeney, C. L. Sweeney. Later I could read the names of his office and his employer. I never forgot anything about him.
I poured my heart out to his employer on a piece of mother’s stationery, but I realized that would not do. Finally I wrote a short note on half a sheet of tablet paper. Addressing his boss, I wrote: “I think you ought to know Mr. C. L. Sweeney touches all the girls on his paper route. He touches them everywhere.” And I signed it: “One Who Knows.”
A few weeks later grandmother wrote, “You will be sorry to hear that nice Mr. Sweeney doesn’t work for the paper any more. He gave up his job and moved away. I don’t know where. He never said a word to us.”
That was long, long ago. They don’t have many wells any more, do they? But we can all help in other ways. We ca
n all write. And the telephone is a godsend. Don’t call the person himself. He will just argue and threaten to sue. Find out who his next-door neighbor is or call his boss and call from a drug store. They might pretend that they don’t believe you, but they’ll think about it, you bet. I urge you all to pay attention. They might look nice like daddies. But before it’s too late, tilt the page. Take another look.
Timothy Childs
Is Anyone There?
Timothy Childs was born in Los Angeles in 1941, and is a fifth-generation Californian. But he and his wife, Terri, “have kept on the move, living in seven cities in four countries during the ten years of their marriage.” Mr. Childs’ first novel, COLD TURKEY, was published in May 1979 by Harper & Row (a Joan Kahn book). . .
It is 1981, and there are nightmares that are peculiarly, perhaps uniquely, 1981. But in these violent days, nightmares have broken out of their former limits of time and darkness. Now there are daymares that are peculiarly, perhaps uniquely, 1981. Will the daymares persist past 1981? Or will they be caught, caged, and returned to their former time zone?. . .
My life is truly cursed. I couldn’t run, not in Beverly Hills, not in my last good suit. Eleven ten by my fine gold watch. Perspiration trickled down my back, sure to leave stains. Eighty-eight degrees on the day before Christmas. Ridiculous. I couldn’t run. Running would have been so undignified.
Faster, pavement jarring my ankles until they felt like stumps. The sidewalk was choked with shoppers, their arms clutched around high-stacked Christmas packages. I glared them from my path. At the corners I kept stabbing at the pedestrian buttons, trying to make the traffic lights change faster.
Finally, the Slater Tower Building. Twenty stories high, dark windows, a plaza. A little fountain in the plaza. Workers were rushing out of the building, full of tiresome Christmas cheer, going home early to cook their Christmas turkeys. I couldn’t afford a turkey sandwich, after six months without work. My fine gold watch said eleven fifteen. I would be twenty minutes late. My life is truly cursed.