With tottering steps, Floyd reached it.
A soft rumble drummed the sky and the clouds parted to let the light through for an instant. The pump reminded him he was thirsty. He worked the handle and brought forth a thin trickle. Leaning over, he let the water drop into his mouth. It was warm and made the weight in his stomach rise to his throat. He spat it out.
With the edge of his blade, he marked the slender crevice formed by the stream and again leaned on his shovel.
It was damp only a short distance down. From the crease in the ground, the clay broke away in scanty bites.
The heavy air now turned clammy with promise. Floyd felt perspiration ooze from his armpits on down his sides and spread along the top of his pants. It broke out in a sparse sprinkle upon his forehead. The rising wind dried him off in humid gusts.
He felt as if he’d been at this job for hours — days, even. In the lowering darkness, he knelt down to finger the earth and discovered he had made a hole only large enough to plant a young bare-root fruit tree.
Bent over the shallow pit, he felt tears form and squeeze forth. He closed his eyes tight and pressed his lips together, a great pity for himself a hard knot in his throat.
He wished he hadn’t done that to Ben. Ben could have told him how to dig this hole. Ben always told him how to do things.
In his confusion, the brewing storm pressed down with a great loneliness.
He rose from his knees and moaned to his feet. He hobbled toward the dark outline of the truck. He’d have to tell ’em in town. He’d have to tell ’em he couldn’t finish that there hole. He’d have to let ’em know about Ben.
“Floyd.”
He whirled, staring through the uncertain night. Then he saw it, the shadow coming toward him. Quick and sharp.
“Floyd,” came the voice and the harsh, dry laugh.
Floyd backed off, his arms spread out behind him. A roll of thunder broke forth. A drop of rain spattered his face. It was rainin’, like Ben said it would.
He retreated, stumbling, his eyes upon the advancing shadow.
“I told you you’d start a job sometime you wished you’d finished. This is it, Floyd.”
The meadow larks fluttered their wings and scampered through the grass. One whistled in frightened wakefulness.
Floyd’s steps stuttered again. He jerked himself upright, backing over the rough ground.
“Never did finish anything, did you?” came the voice. “But I do, Floyd. I always finish what I start.”
The shadow was coming faster now.
The drops came down thicker.
White Sheep
by Theodore Mathieson
I came, at long last, to my ancestral home. I found there horror, vice, incredible evil. And one feeble old lady, who had guessed, my secret...
The cost of my bus ticket from Portland to San Francisco left exactly fifty cents in my pocket, and this I spent on two bags of peanuts and a bar of chocolate, which I washed down with the free ice water in the coach.
When I got off the bus at the S.F. terminal, I walked through the shed, just as if I had a destination, too, like everybody else. But then I sat down in the waiting room, with my battered brown suitcase at my side, and considered my problem. I was fresh out of college, without much working experience, flat broke, and homeless.
Through the waiting room windows I could see across Fifth Street to the dingy store fronts, where, presently, seeing the wire-grated glass of a hock shop, I began wrestling with some sentiment.
The pawnbroker fingered my watch, the one Aunt Kate had given me for Christmas in my sophomore year at O.S.C., with the air of a supercilious Jeeves.
“Certainly not more than twelve-fifty,” he said.
“My aunt paid a hundred for it!”
“The case is rather badly dented, as you can see.” During my last year in college, when I edited the campus daily, I used to sit at the typewriter groping for ideas and whang the case against the base of the machine.
“Okay,” I said, and the pawnbroker gave me the money and a ticket.
I went to a cafeteria around the corner on Market Street and filled up on two orders of turkey sandwiches and three cups of coffee and a bear claw. Then I sat back, lit up my curved-stem pipe, and studed my problem from a more objective point of view.
Aunt Kate, poor dear, would never have approved of my coming to San Francisco, nor would she have been fooled by my saying there were more opportunities for newspaper jobs in California.
“You really came down to see what Edwin could do for you, didn’t you, Dan?” she would say, horrified. “But you mustn’t go to him. Stay away from Edwin. Do for yourself. For the good of your soul, Dan!”
“That’s Portland prejudice, Aunt Kate,” I thought.
It was getting night outside, and I was alone in a strange city, and the cure for the growing coldness in my heart was only twenty feet away, in a telephone booth.
A woman answered first, with an exciting, husky voice, and when I asked for Edwin, she told me to wait.
“Edwin?” I asked, when a man’s voice answered. “This is Dan.”
“Dan who?”
“Dan Gentry. Your stepson. From Portland.”
“Oh, Dan!” The warmth in his voice made the city stop being strange and cold. “Are you in town? Never mind, I know where that cafeteria is. I’ll come right down and get you. No trouble at all. Just stay where you are, boy!”
I went out on the sidewalk then, and enjoyed watching the city lights grow brighter as the evening darkened.
I felt fine. Edwin must have.connections in this city. Maybe he could even get me on a newspaper. It felt good to have somebody interested in me again. Since Aunt Kate’s death, in the middle of my senior year, the world had turned pretty indifferent. Especially after the money ran out.
A tall girl in a red coat went by, giving me an invitational jiggle and glance.
“Sorry, honey, I’m waiting for somebody,” I said. I always like to be tactful.
In a few minutes a long, yellow Cadillac drove up with a chauffeur at the wheel and Edwin jumped out of the back seat and seized me by both hands.
“Dan! My God how you’ve grown, son. You’re six feet, I’ll bet!”
“Six-one.”
“A little thin, but we’ll fix that! Come on, son, get in.”
He put my suitcase inside and we climbed after it, and the car started up Market Street.
Edwin swung around in the seat to get a better look at me in the passing lights, while I studied him. I didn’t know if he’d changed much, since I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years, and my early impressions were rather dim. He was lean, a little above middle height, with tight, durable features and a thin-lipped mouth — amazingly young-looking for a man who must be close to fifty. His hair was raven-black, and I wondered if he dyed it.
“You look very much like your mother,” he said. “Too bad she isn’t alive to see you now. She’d be proud of you. College man, eh? What field?”
“Journalism.”
“Good for you!”
“I try my hand at short stories, too. But right now I think newspaper experience would be valuable.”
“Well, well. We’ll have to see what we can find for you. Sorry to hear of Kate’s death in that automobile accident. I read about it. I wrote you, you know—”
“I know,” I said, embarrassed. Edwin had written me at least once a year as long as I could remember, and never once had I answered. Kate had forbidden it.
“Didn’t Kate leave you anything?” he asked, and I thought his eyes turned sharply probing.
“No, but then I didn’t expect her to. She had a grown son and daughter of her own, and besides, I thought I had a newspaper job all lined up in Portland after I graduated. But it blew up.”