“Can you describe him? Do you know who it was?”
I paused, passing the door of my room, for something caught my eye through the glass.
It was David, his head still in his arms, all alone, waiting for the fire to come. So many things were worse than death.
“It was...” Why did I have to be the one to tell? Why was this responsibility mine?
I looked at Jerome. His, too. So many responsibilities would be his.
“It was David’s father,” I said, and I went in to David.
Maybe there would be some assurance I could give David.
But not Jerome.
For he would know assurance was not mine to give.
Nor anyone else’s.
THE THINKERS
by Walt Kelly
SOMETHING BRIGHT
by Zenna Henderson
Readers of those earlier S-F annuals in which Miss Henderson’s chronicles of The People appeared (“Pottage” in 1956; “Wilderness” in 1958) will be happy to know that the long-delayed publication of the complete series is at last a fact (“Pilgrimage: The Book of the People,” Doubleday, 1961).
Miss Henderson is, in private life, a schoolteacher in the primary grades, and most of her stories about children have been from the viewpoint of the sympathetic adult. This time she tells it through the child’s own mind and eyes.
Do you remember the Depression? The black shadow across time? That hurting place in the consciousness of the world? Maybe not. Maybe it’s like asking do you remember the Dark Ages. Except what would I know about the price of eggs in the Dark Ages? I knew plenty about prices in the Depression.
If you had a quarter—first find your quarter—and five hungry kids, you could supper them on two cans of soup and a loaf of day-old bread, or two quarts of milk and a loaf of day-old bread. It was filling and—in an after-thoughty kind of way—nourishing. But if you were one of the hungry five, you eventually began to feel erosion set in, and your teeth ached for substance.
But to go back to eggs. Those were a precious commodity. You savored them slowly or gulped them eagerly—unmistakably as eggs—boiled or fried. That’s one reason why I remember Mrs. Klevity. She had eggs for breakfast! And every day! That’s one reason why I remember Mrs. Klevity.
I didn’t know about the eggs the time she came over to see Mom, who had just got home from a twelve-hour day, cleaning up after other people at thirty cents an hour. Mrs. Klevity lived in the same court as we did. Courtesy called it a court because we were all dependent on the same shower house and two toilets that occupied the shack square in the middle of the court.
All of us except the Big House, of course. It had a bathroom of its own and even a radio blaring Nobody’s Business and Should I Reveal and had ceiling lights that didn’t dangle nakedly at the end of a cord. But then it really wasn’t a part of the court. Only its back door shared our area, and even that was different. It had two back doors in the same frame—a screen one and a wooden one!
Our own two-room place had a distinction too. It had an upstairs. One room the size of our two. The Man Upstairs lived up there. He was mostly only the sound of footsteps overhead and an occasional cookie for Danna.
Anyway, Mrs. Klevity came over before Mom had time to put her shopping bag of work clothes down or even to unpleat the folds of fatigue that dragged her face down ten years or more of time to come. I didn’t much like Mrs. Klevity. She made me uncomfortable. She was so solid and slow-moving and so nearly blind that she peered frighteningly wherever she went. She stood in the doorway as though she had been stacked there like bricks and a dress drawn hastily down over the stack and a face sketched on beneath a fuzz of hair. Us kids all gathered around to watch, except Danna who snuffled wearily into my neck. Day nursery or not, it was a long, hard day for a four-year-old.
“I wondered if one of your girls could sleep at my house this week.” Her voice was as slow as her steps.
“At your house?” Mom massaged her hand where the shopping-bag handles had crisscrossed it. “Come in. Sit down.” We had two chairs and a bench and two apple boxes. The boxes scratched bare legs, but surely they couldn’t scratch a stack of bricks.
“No, thanks.” Maybe she couldn’t bend! “My husband will be away several days and I don’t like to be in the house alone at night.”
“Of course,” said Mom. “You must feel awfully alone.”
The only aloneness she knew, what with five kids and two rooms, was the taut secretness of her inward thoughts as she mopped and swept and ironed in other houses. “Sure, one of the girls would be glad to keep you company.” There was a darting squirm and LaNell was safely hidden behind the swaying of our clothes in the diagonally curtained corner of the other room, and Kathy knelt swiftly just beyond the dresser, out of sight.
“Anna is eleven.” I had no place to hide, burdened as I was with Danna. “She’s old enough. What time do you want her to come over?”
“Oh, bedtime will do.” Mrs. Klevity peered out the door at the darkening sky. “Nine o’clock. Only it gets dark before then—” Bricks can look anxious, I guess.
“As soon as she has supper, she can come,” said Mom, handling my hours as though they had no value to me. “Of course she has to go to school tomorrow.”
“Only when it’s dark,” said Mrs. Klevity. “Day is all right. How much should I pay you?”
“Pay?” Mom gestured with one hand. “She has to sleep anyway. It doesn’t matter to her where, once she’s asleep. A favor for a friend.”
I wanted to cry out: whose favor for what friend? We hardly passed the time of day with Mrs. Klevity. I couldn’t even remember Mr. Klevity except that he was straight and old and wrinkled. Uproot me and make me lie in a strange house, a strange dark, listening to a strange breathing, feeling a strange warmth making itself part of me for all night long, seeping into me …
“Mom—” I said.
“I’ll give her breakfast,” said Mrs. Klevity. “And lunch money for each night she comes.”
I resigned myself without a struggle. Lunch money each day—a whole dime! Mom couldn’t afford to pass up such a blessing, such a gift from God, who unerringly could be trusted to ease the pinch just before it became intolerable.
“Thank you, God,” I whispered as I went to get the can opener to open supper. For a night or two I could stand it.
I felt all naked and unprotected as I stood in my flimsy crinkle cotton pajamas, one bare foot atop the other, waiting for Mrs. Klevity to turn the bed down.
“We have to check the house first,” she said thickly. “We can’t go to bed until we check the house.”
“Check the house?” I forgot my starchy stiff shyness enough to question. “What for?”
Mrs. Klevity peered at me in the dim light of the bedroom. They had three rooms for only the two of them! Even if there was no door to shut between the bedroom and the kitchen.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, “unless I looked first. I have to.”
So we looked. Behind the closet curtain, under the table—Mrs. Klevity even looked in the portable oven that sat near the two-burner stove in the kitchen.
When we came to the bed, I was moved to words again. “But we’ve been in here with the doors locked ever since I got here. What could possibly—”