“Be brave, Gracie Bell! I’m almost there!” he cried. He gasped loudly. “My strength is almost exhausted, but I’ll save you!”
Cato was calling out, over and over, “Now the ship is sinking inch by inch! Now the ship is sinking inch by inch!”
Small and silvery, their voices echoed in the cold countryside. The moon freed herself from the last field and looked evenly across at the imaginary ocean tragedy taking place so far inland. Emerson lifted Gracie Bell in his arms. She clutched him tightly around the neck and burst into loud sobs, but he turned firmly back, treading water with tiny up-and-down steps. Gracie Bell shrieked and he repeated, “I’ll save you, Gracie Bell. I’ll save you, Gracie Bell,” but did not change his pace.
The mother and stepmother suddenly opened the back door.
“Emerson!” she screamed. “Put that child down! Didn’t I tell you the next time you made that child cry I’d beat you until you couldn’t holler? Didn’t I?”
“Oh Ma, we was just…”
“What’s the matter with you kids, anyway? Fight and scrap, fight and scrap, and yowl, yowl, yowl, from morning to night. And you two boys, you’re too big,” and so on. The ugly words poured out and the children stood about the yard like stage-struck actors. But as their father said, “her bark was worse than her bite,” and in a few minutes, as if silenced by the moon’s bland reserve, she stopped and said in a slightly lower voice, “All right, you kids. What are you standing there waiting for? Come inside the house and get your supper.”
The kitchen was hot, and the smell of fried potatoes and the warm yellow light of the oil lamp on the table gave an illusion of peacefulness. The two boys sat on one side, the two older girls on the other, and Gracie Bell on her mother’s lap at the end. The father and Judd had gone to town, one reason why the mother had been unusually bad-tempered all afternoon. They ate in silence, except for the mother’s endearments to Gracie Bell, whom she was helping to drink tea and condensed milk out of a white cup. They ate the fried potatoes with pieces of pork in them, slice after slice of white “store” bread and dishes of “preserves,” and drank syrupy hot tea and milk. The oilcloth on the table was light molasses-colored, sprinkled with small yellow poppies; it glistened pleasantly, and the “preserves” glowed, dark red blobs surrounded by transparent ruby.
“Tonight’s the night for the crumbs,” Cato was thinking, and from time to time he managed to slide four slices of bread under the edge of the oilcloth and then up under his sweater. His thoughts sounded loud and ominous to him and he looked cautiously at his sisters to see if they had noticed anything, but their pale, rather flat faces looked blankly back. Anyway, it was the night for crumbs and what else could he possibly do?
The other two times he and Emerson had spent the night in the old barn he had used bits of torn-up newspaper because he hadn’t been able to find the white pebbles anywhere. He and his brother had walked home, still half-asleep, in the gray-blue light just before sunrise, and he had been delighted to find the sprinkles of speckled paper here and there all along the way. He had dropped it out of his pocket a little at a time, scarcely daring to look back, and it had worked. But he had longed for the endless full moon of the tale, and the pebbles that would have shone “like silver coins.” Emerson knew nothing of his plan — his system, rather — but it had worked without his help and in spite of all discrepancies.
The mother set Gracie Bell down and started to transfer dishes from the table to the sink.
“I suppose you boys forgot you’ve got to get over to the barn sometime tonight,” she said ironically.
Emerson protested a little.
“Now you just put on your things and get started before it gets any later. Maybe sometime your pa will get them doors fixed or maybe he’ll get a new barn. Go along, now.” She lifted the teakettle off the stove.
Cato couldn’t find his knitted gloves. He thought they were on the shelf in the corner with the schoolbags. He looked methodically for them everywhere and then at last he became aware of Lea Leola’s malicious smile.
“Ma! Lea Leola’s got my gloves. She’s hid them on me!”
“Lea Leola! Have you got his gloves?” Her mother advanced on her.
“Make her give them to me!”
Lea Leola said, “I ain’t even seen his old gloves,” and started to weep.
“Now Cato, see what you’ve done! Shut up, Lea Leola, for God’s sake, and you boys hurry up and get out of here. I’ve had enough trouble for one day.”
At the door Emerson said, “It’s cold, Ma.”
“Well, Judd’s got his blankets over there. Go on, go along and shut that door. You’re letting the cold in.”
Outside it was almost as bright as day. The macadam road looked very gray and rang under their feet, that immediately grew numb with cold. The cold stuck quickly to the little hairs in their nostrils, that felt painfully stuffed with icy straws. But if they tried to warm their noses against the clumsy lapels of their mackinaws, the freezing moisture felt even worse, and they gave it up and merely pointed out their breath to each other as it whitened and then vanished. The moon was behind them. Cato looked over his shoulder and saw how the tin roof of the farmhouse shone, bluish, and how, above it, the stars looked blue, too, blue or yellow, and very small; you could hardly see most of them.
Emerson was talking quietly, enlarging on his favorite theme: how he could obtain a certain bicycle he had seen a while ago in the window of the hardware store in town. He went on and on but Cato didn’t pay very much attention, first because he knew quite well already almost everything Emerson was saying or could say about the bicycle, and second because he was busy crumbing the four slices of bread which he had worked around into his pants pockets, two slices in each. It seemed to turn into lumps instead of crumbs and it was hard to pull off the little bits with his nails and flick them into the road from time to time from under the skirt of his mackinaw.
Emerson made no distinction between honest and dishonest methods of getting the bicycle. Sometimes he would discuss plans for deceiving the owner of the hardware store, who would somehow be maneuvered into sending it to him by mistake, and sometimes it was to be his reward for a deed of heroism. Sometimes he spoke of a glass-cutter. He had seen his father use one of these fascinating instruments. If he had one he could cut a large hole in the plate glass window of the hardware store in the night. And then he spoke of working next summer as a hired man. He would work for the farmer who had the farm next to theirs; he saw himself performing prodigious feats of haying and milking.
“But Old Man Blackader only pays big boys four dollars a week,” said Cato, sensibly, “and he wouldn’t pay you that much.”
“Well…”
Emerson swore and spat toward the side of the road, and they went on while the moon rose steadily higher and higher.
A humming noise ran along the telephone wires over their heads. They thought it might possibly be caused by all the people talking over them at the same time but it didn’t actually sound like voices. The glass conductors that bore the wires shone pale green, and the poles were bleached silver by the moonlight, and from each one came a strange roaring, deeper than the hum of the wires. It sounded like a swarm of bees. They put their ears to the deep black cracks. Cato tried to peer into one and almost thought he could see the mass of black and iridescent bees inside.