in the first village
we stop in our tracks
to look at a waxwork
the old man has shot the pretty peasant girl who looks like Madeleine but younger she lies there shot in the left breast in the blood in the ruts of the road pretty and plump as a little quail
The old man then took off one shoe and put the shotgun under his chin pulled the trigger with his toe and blew the top of his head off we stand looking at the bare foot and the shoe and the foot in the shoe and the shot girl and the old man with a gunnysack over his head and the dirty bare toe he pulled the trigger with Faut pas toucher until the commissaire comes procès verbale
on this first day
of the year the sun
is shining
Newsreel XXXI
washing and dressing hastily they came to the ground floor at the brusque call of the commissaries, being assembled in one of the rear rooms in the basement of the house. Here they were lined up in a semicircle along the wall, the young grandduchesses trembling at the unusual nature of the orders given and at the gloomy hour. They more than suspected the errand upon which the commissaries had come. Addressing the czar, Yarodsky, without the least attempt to soften his announcement, stated that they must all die and at once. The revolution was in danger, he stated, and the fact that there were still the members of the reigning house living added to that danger. Therefore to remove them was the duty of all Russian patriots. “Thus your life is ended,” he said in conclusion.
“I am ready,” was the simple announcement of the czar, while the czarina, clinging to him, loosed her hold long enough to make the sign of the cross, an example followed by the grandduchess Olga and by Dr. Botkin.
The czarevitch, paralyzed with fear, stood in stupefaction beside his mother, uttering no sound either in supplication or protest, while his three sisters and the other grandduchesses sank to the floor trembling.
Yarodsky drew his revolver and fired the first shot. A volley followed and the prisoners reeled to the ground. Where the bullets failed to find their mark the bayonet put the finishing touches. The mingled blood of the victims not only covered the floor of the room where the execution took place but ran in streams along the hallway
Daughter
The Trents lived in a house on Pleasant avenue that was the finest street in Dallas that was the biggest and fastest growing town in Texas that was the biggest state in the Union and had the blackest soil and the whitest people and America was the greatest country in the world and Daughter was Dad’s onlyest sweetest little girl. Her real name was Anne Elizabeth Trent after poor dear mother who had died when she was a little tiny girl but Dad and the boys called her Daughter. Buddy’s real name was William Delaney Trent like Dad who was a prominent attorney, and Buster’s real name was Spencer Anderson Trent.
Winters they went to school and summers they ran wild on the ranch that grandfather had taken up as a pioneer. When they’d been very little there hadn’t been any fences yet and still a few maverick steers out along the creekbottoms, but by the time Daughter was in highschool everything was fenced and they were building a macadam road out from Dallas and Dad went everywhere in the Ford instead of on his fine Arab stallion Mullah he’d been given by a stockman at the Fat Stock Show in Waco when the stockman had gone broke and hadn’t been able to pay his lawyer’s fee. Daughter had a creamcolored pony named Coffee who’d nod his head and paw with his hoof when he wanted a lump of sugar, but some of the girls she knew had cars and Daughter and the boys kept after Dad to buy a car, a real car instead of that miserable old flivver he drove around the ranch.
When Dad bought a Pierce Arrow touring car the spring Daughter graduated from highschool, she was the happiest girl in the world. Sitting at the wheel in a fluffy white dress the morning of Commencement outside the house waiting for Dad, who had just come out from the office and was changing his clothes, she had thought how much she’d like to be able to see herself sitting there in the not too hot June morning in the lustrous black shiny car among the shiny brass and nickel fixtures under the shiny paleblue big Texas sky in the middle of the big flat rich Texas country that ran for two hundred miles in every direction. She could see half her face in the little oval mirror on the mudguard. It looked red and sunburned under her sandybrown hair. If she only had red hair and a skin white like buttermilk like Susan Gillespie had, she was wishing when she saw Joe Washburn coming along the street dark and seriouslooking under his panama hat. She fixed her face in a shy kind of smile just in time to have him say, “How lovely you look, Daughter, you must excuse ma sayin’ so.” “I’m just waiting for Dad and the boys to go to the exercises. O Joe, we’re late and I’m so excited…. I feel like a sight.”
“Well, have a good time.” He walked on unhurriedly putting his hat back on his head as he went. Something hotter than the June sunshine had come out of Joe’s very dark eyes and run in a blush over her face and down the back of her neck under her thin dress and down the middle of her bosom, where the little breasts that she tried never to think of were just beginning to be noticeable. At last Dad and the boys came out all looking blonde and dressed up and sunburned. Dad made her sit in the back seat with Bud who sat up stiff as a poker.
The big wind that had come up drove grit in their faces. After she caught sight of the brick buildings of the highschool and the crowd and the light dresses and the stands and the big flag with the stripes all wiggling against the sky she got so excited she never remembered anything that happened.
That night, wearing her first evening dress at the dance she came to in the feeling of tulle and powder and crowds, boys all stiff and scared in their dark coats, girls packing into the dressing room to look at each other’s dresses. She never said a word while she was dancing, just smiled and held her head a little to one side and hoped somebody would cut in. Half the time she didn’t know who she was dancing with, just moved smiling in a cloud of pink tulle and colored lights; boys’ faces bobbed in front of her, tried to say smarty ladykillerish things or else were shy and tonguetied, different colored faces on top of the same stiff bodies. Honestly she was surprised when Susan Gillespie came up to her when they were getting their wraps to go home and giggled, “My dear, you were the belle of the ball.” When Bud and Buster said so next morning and old black Emma who’d brought them all up after mother died came in from the kitchen and said, “Lawsy, Miss Annie, folks is talkin’ all over town abut how you was the belle of the ball last night,” she felt herself blushing happily all over. Emma said she’d heard it from that noaccount yaller man on the milk route whose aunt worked at Mrs. Washburn’s, then she set down the popovers and went out with a grin as wide as a piano. “Well, Daughter,” said Dad in his deep quiet voice, tapping the top of her hand, “I thought so myself but I thought maybe I was prejudiced.”
During the summer Joe Washburn, who’d just graduated from law school at Austin and who was going into Dad’s office in the fall, came and spent two weeks with them on the ranch. Daughter was just horrid to him, made old Hildreth give him a mean little old oneeyed pony to ride, put horned toads in his cot, would hand him hot chile sauce instead of catsup at table or try to get him to put salt instead of sugar in his coffee. The boys got so off her they wouldn’t speak to her and Dad said she was getting to be a regular tomboy, but she couldn’t seem to stop acting like she did.