by Peter Taylor
The painters arrive that spring with ladders and spotted canvas, and paint his house a fresh white. Ever after he can see only sunken places on the white clapboard where the baskets knocked for years.
His father and the father of the little girl next door like to play “catch.” They play on Sunday afternoons through every spring. Then his father wears a black sweater with yellow stripes that go around him like tiger stripes; and her father, whose hair is gray, wears a sweater that buttons down the front. Each of the men has a big five-fingered glove, and they sit on the porch the first spring-like Sunday and oil their gloves. Sometimes Joseph, the Negro who works next door, plays with them, and then the three men will yell such things as, “Out on first!”
Once the little girl’s mother calls Joseph into the house, and Joseph throws his glove to the boy as he runs toward the kitchen. His father whistles through his fingers and shouts, “Replacement on third!” Joseph’s glove smells sweatier than his father’s. It has more stuffing and no fingers outside; and it’s wet inside. But the boy soon forgets, for he has caught the first baseball ever thrown to him.
In a few weeks he is thinking, “I can catch about as well as either of them.” And after his own yellow mitt comes and a ball and a bat with black taping, he plays catch with other boys during school recess. There he sometimes recalls Joseph and his smelly mitt and wonders what ever has become of the two, for the little girl’s mother now has a Negro who doesn’t like to play catch.
After two years of baseball he is certain that he can catch as well as the men, though he can’t throw as hard as they might. He plays with them often.
A ball comes so straight and hard from the little girl’s father that the boy throws off his glove and rubs his palm on his pants leg.
His father, without a word, speeds toward him and picks up the ball.
The boy did not have to take off his glove. He just feels disgraced because he cannot throw one back as hard.
His father hurls the ball at the neighbor, who sees it barely in time to shield his glasses with his forearm. But the ball strikes the man’s elbow and falls to the ground. As he straightens his arm, he winces. But he makes a sudden lurch and sweeps the ball from the ground with his right hand. His upper lip shortens under his nose, showing his purplish gums. He squints and sends the ball back to the younger man.
The boy watches the ball as it flies. With a quick wave of his hand his father motions him to go. He feels his way backward toward his house, his eyes on the two men who have never before thrown much harder than he.
The ball bounces from his father’s glove, but he catches it in the air and shoots it back.
The older man is smiling. His face is red and moist.
The ball goes straight back and forth.
They stand about sixty feet apart with the big round bed of zinnias and petunias between them.
Again the ball bounces from the younger man’s glove. It falls on the grass. He stoops slowly to pick it up, his gaze on his neighbor. The sod is a fresh green and his body makes no shadow on it, for dark clouds have been gathering in the sky of the March afternoon. The father takes a slow, deliberate wind-up which seems so professional to the boy that his mouth falls open.
But the neighbor laughs aloud and sends a ball back that jolts the boy’s father. The boy blushes.
The speed of the ball is slow for a few throws, then gathers speed, then slows, and suddenly speeds again.
The boy’s back is to the white clapboard of his house. He is breathing heavily, his little chest rising and falling. Across the lawns he sees the little girl leaning against a pillar on her own porch. She is bouncing a red rubber ball, and he thinks, “Why, the dumb thing doesn’t see it at all.” He is sweating as hard as the men when the rain begins to fall; but he feels only an occasional drop, for he is under the eaves of the house. As the rain comes harder and the two men pay no heed, he sees the little girl give closer attention to the game of catch. He smiles in his scorn for her as she steps to the edge of the porch and stands in the afternoon light which is yellow now.
The rain streams now like a waterfall.
It pours off the eaves of the house as from a pitcher and runs about his feet.
Either man can hardly hold the ball. It will slip from his fingers, and he will pick it up and hurl it toward the other. The striped sweater and the buttoned sweater both are heavy and are dripping water.
The older man takes off his fogged glasses and puts them in the pocket of his sweater, and then he throws the ball straight again.
The boy’s father shoots it back quickly, with an oath.
His neighbor stops the ball high above his head and laughs. He dries the ball on the underside of his sweater before he throws it this time.
Now the little girl has begun to cry. She lets her red rubber ball go, and it rolls off the porch and into the rain.
The boy’s father slips and falls on the grass when he stops the baseball in his wet glove, but he jumps up, dries his hand and the ball, and throws the ball again. It smacks the wet leather of the older man’s glove, and he stands shaking a stinging hand, and he has begun to cough now. As he draws back his arm to throw, the little girl begins bouncing herself up and down on the porch and calling to him. And the baseball crashes through his neighbor’s garage window.
The two men stand in the rain, each with his gaze fixed on the blurred figure of the other. Then the boy’s father turns his back and starts slowly through the rain toward his own house. The little girl runs to meet her father, but he pushes her and looks back once more toward the little boy and his father.
The boy and the little girl walk on opposite sides of the street from that time, but, anyway, he is now too old for girls. There are little boys who live in new houses which are now scattered along the winding streets and along his own block, and he is learning to fight with his fists. One day he tears the scab off a sore on his deskmate’s wrist. After school they fight behind a white and red and blue For Sale sign in the lot where the Catholic church is going to be built. During his bath after the fight he finds that the deskmate has given him a bruise on his thigh, and the bruise is still there the next Friday when the deskmate’s sore has gotten a new scab; so he, all of a sudden, tears off the second scab with his fingernail. This time the deskmate goes to the teacher and shows her his sore. The teacher changes their seats. And the last he remembers of the matter is his former deskmate’s writing on the blackboard with a white bandage on his wrist.
The new Catholic church is hardly finished in August when the new school building is started in the next block. The church is of yellow brick with a great round window above the main doorway. And for the new school the workmen are digging in the ground all through August. The lot they work in has always been covered with waist-high yellow grass, and every day the boy looks at the grass which the workmen have trampled down until it lies flat like the hair on a boy’s head. He has never played in that lot with its high grass as he once used to do in the church lot, and has felt that it looked like “the central plains of Africa.” But the workmen dig deep, and now the heaps of red dirt look like the “forbidding Caucasian mountains.”
By Christmas the workmen have only laid the concrete in the long, narrow basement and put up a few concrete shafts, and the thing stands like that until spring. Finally he gets used to the lot looking that way.
Some of the children, especially the new children, like to climb down into the long basement, and they build a snow man there during the last snow in March. But a feeling that the lot isn’t completely changed and yet isn’t as it has been keeps the boy away. Things have changed in the suburb; repeatedly he has told the new children how things once were, he is that conscious of it; but something forever keeps him from trying to observe too closely just how the new buildings go up.
One day the little girl’s father is dead. The boy’s own mother and father talk for a long while in their bedroom with the door closed. Afterward his father goes next door, and s
till later the Negro man comes and asks his mother to come. The boy sits at the window of his little room upstairs all afternoon and watches the other neighbors come and go across the lawns.
Two young neighbor women stand on a lawn across the street and talk, gesticulating; and one keeps shrugging her shoulders. The little girl appears outside the back door of her house with a pair of scissors which glisten in the sunlight. Her dress is white and it’s so plain and long that her legs look short and her body very long. She goes to the round zinnia bed and looks ponderously at the flowers.
The window is up, and the boy sits on the sill, his head leaning against the screen. The girl bobs up and down among dull-colored flowers, very soon holding an armful of zinnias.
The boy begins to whistle a doleful cowboy tune.
She looks up from the center of the zinnia bed. He stops short. She scans the windows of the house, but she cannot make out his figure through the black wire screen. She stoops again, and he whistles one high note. She peers suddenly up at his window, opens her mouth and, sobbing, scampers on her short legs into her house.
And he stays at the window, looking out over the tile and shingled rooftops of the new houses and at the yellow tower of the new Catholic church.
Soon after school starts that fall the house next door is sold, and the little girl and her mother are moved into his own mother’s guest room, the room which was once his grandmother’s.
“I’ll miss having a guest room,” his mother says, “but it’s not permanent.”
One afternoon people come in automobiles and on foot from the neighborhood, and the furniture is moved out of the stucco house into the yard and sold. The boy sits on the edge of the porch and thinks, This is a sight I won’t forget—beds and tables and easy chairs on the lawn, especially with men and women dropping down into the chairs and then getting up and looking at them with their heads cocked to one side.
What didn’t sell is brought into his house, and the sitting room seems a different place with the new green chair and footstool which doesn’t match the set.
The little girl is a grade ahead of him and so goes to the new school which is called “Junior High.” She has to go to school earlier than he, and he is grateful for this. For she is now an inch taller than himself, and it makes him uncomfortable to walk with her.
One Saturday at noon, as he comes in from baseball, she meets him at the front door.
“Something’s happened,” she says.
He is putting his mitt and ball into the closet under the stairs. He looks at her and feels that she is somehow too tall to be wearing the plaid knee socks.
“Your daddy’s lost his job,” she says.
The boy answers resentfully that his father will get another as quickly as he has lost this one, and he goes upstairs. But as he passes his father’s room he sees him stretched across the bed and sees the two women seated in rocking chairs, looking at one another. He tiptoes back downstairs and goes into the sitting room where the little girl is reading a magazine. He sits down and looks at her—lounging in the green chair with her round, bare knees over the green stool. She puts the magazine aside.
“Mama’s going to work,” she says. “And I guess I will, some way.”
The changes that will come flood his imagination. The past seems absolutely static in the light of what he feels is to come.
“So will I,” he says.
Soon he is able to get a paper route, and now his mother rouses him at three every morning and gives him coffee before he goes out. Through the winter he wears a pair of his father’s hunting boots with several pairs of socks to make them fit. One morning his mother runs barefooted through the snow on the lawn, shining the flashlight that he has forgotten. She calls to him:
“Your light! Your light! You forgot your light!”
The sight of her there in the dark and cold, barefooted and in her kimono, is so literally dreadful to him that he turns and runs from the sight. And he can hear her calling, “Your light! Your light! Your light!” until he is almost to the trolley line where he picks up his papers.
The boy’s imagination is soon conjuring pictures of the two families on the fourth floor of a downtown tenement house. Several families on his block have had to move from their houses during this fall, and other houses on his route have been found empty on collection day. But his mother will say to him over his cup of coffee, “The house is mine. I’ll work my fingers to the bone to keep it.” She finally has to give up Cleo, the cook; and they only feed the Negro man who has worked for the little girl’s mother, until he can pick up another job.
The little girl’s mother has started to business school. She and his father leave in the automobile each morning. He can see them pass from the schoolhouse window and realizes that the automobile is getting to be an old number. When he comes home in the afternoons, his mother will sometimes be washing or ironing the clothes in the kitchen. It’s when he comes in one day and sees her on her knees waxing the dining room floor that he first observes how narrow her hips have got; and he turns from her and goes up the stair, two steps at a time, to his room. He looks at the school pennants about the walls, and his tears blur the scene. He looks out his window over the rooftops of the suburb and hears the boys yelling down behind the new school. And he takes off his leather jacket and slips his black football jersey on over his head.
But it seems that even his father’s loss of his job hasn’t been as simple and as quick as he had supposed. His father’s whole company is going out of business, and there are articles about it in the newspaper every few days, his father’s testimony in the courtroom being quoted once. During the weeks that his father is at home, before he has found the new job “on commission,” he will sometimes walk up and down the front porch with his hat and coat on; and the boy’s mother will look out the window at him and say to her son or to the little girl, “Through the whole litigation his innocence, honesty, and integrity were not once questioned.”
By spring the little girl’s mother has an office job at the same place his father sells from. They have not renewed the automobile license this year, and every morning the two breadwinners walk three blocks, by the little hedges and young Lombardy poplars, to the trolley.
One Saturday morning the boy comes back from his paper route late and passes the pair on the sidewalk. The little girl’s mother says something to his father, who calls out to him, “Hold yourself up straight!” and calls him, “Longlegs.” So he throws his shoulders back and begins to run. He hears them laughing until he turns the corner, and then he feels shaken up inside and hot about the forehead.
His mother is at her sewing machine by her bedroom window. He comes and stands beside her and with a half smile on his face says, “I’m catching lockjaw, I guess. I feel stiff in my jaw, under here, and everybody says that’s the first symptom.” His mother slips two fingers down his shirt collar, feeling the nape of his neck.
“Why, you’re cooked with fever,” she says. And she hasn’t got him into bed in his little room before he begins to cough from his chest. It had poured rain through the first half of his route that morning; and she had tried to persuade him to wear his “rain things.” “You’ve caught your death of cold in that rain,” she says.
By the next afternoon he is considered “a very sick boy.” His temperature is 103½. The doctor comes and says that it may turn into pneumonia.
“Now, if this does take a turn for the worst, it will be best to have him in a hospital.”
“No, I want him at home.”
“They can take better care of him.”
“I think not, Doctor.”
“You’ll need a nurse.”
“I must take care of him, Doctor.”
The voices sound like echoes, and the human figures seem far away. Later he can hear the murmur of voices in his mother’s room. His father and the little girl’s mother are arguing with her, and they sound as though they may be away in some valley.
The next day,
Monday, his mother tiptoes about his room, and the doctor comes twice. He can hear the doctor’s voice more distinctly in the front hall downstairs than when he is by his bed talking to him.
Sometimes the little girl will sit in the room with him and read her magazine. He lies there during the afternoon with flannel and plasters about him, content to look at the walls and think of the other wallpapers that he remembers there. One can hardly see the wallpaper, for it is decorated with pennants and calendars.
In the middle of the night he wakes and sees that the light is wrapped in a piece of blue tissue paper. His mother says, “You’ve been out of your head for five hours.”
“How sick am I, Mother?”
“You haven’t pneumonia.”
The doctor comes in a while and tells him he’ll begin to get better now.
His father comes too and pats him on the back of his warm, limp hand, but says nothing. And when he leaves the room, the boy remembers the dreams of his delirium: His father and the mother of the little girl lay dead on the streetcar tracks. Cleo, the cook, was back in the kitchen, and his mother was telling her, “You can’t really call the accident a tragedy.” And he and his mother broke into gales of laughter.
The next fall the boy himself goes to Junior High. But the little girl dresses and acts so much older than he does now that he doesn’t mind walking with her. She has gotten very fat, and he teases her about that and about the boys that talk to her at recess. Occasionally she will lend him money, but it is only to keep him from teasing her about the boys during dinner at night. She is so fat and so polite in public now that she seems a different person from “the little girl,” as different as his mother is from her former self, as different as the corner on the trolley line is with the new drugstore on it.