waited him there: he traced the texture of lilac leaves as though touching a young girl’s breasts for the first time. He closed his eyes; his fingers wandered wantonly, to stroke that delicate blooming.
The lilac was blooming in the night.
Cass buried his face deep in lilac-leaf that time, and his heart pained, first trembling a little, then swelling slow.
That was in the springtime when the lilac bloomed, but it never bloomed for him again.
Often in the evenings of that spring and summer he would become uneasy and restless; he would begin to walk because, of a sudden, it would seem hard to stand still. His spindling shanks would start clipping along like a great pair of shears, ever faster and faster, till the walk became a run and the run became a race—then something would give within, and he would be tired, tired. He would return slowly, feeling troubled and strangely dissatisfied. Utterly exhausted, he would climb into bed with his brother.
Then such dreams as he would have! Once he was atop the utmost peak of the highest mountain on earth, clouds and storm winds breaking about him, snow-gales sweeping down. He was naked, and he was laughing—he was not cold among these snows. And everything was so wild and strong that when he woke in the morning he was sickened by the sights and sounds and smells of the house: the stains of Stubby’s spittle and Bryan’s cut-plug tobacco juice dried in brown globs against the wall; the sweaty, yellowish smell of unclean bedclothes beneath him, and the sour smells from the kitchen. The work-a-day world was a sorry place compared to what Cass knew in dreams.
Yet once he dreamed he was walking softly down a dark and narrow way where little blue lights burned all in a row. Black-cowled children stood in darkened doorways as he passed, and he walked ever softer and softer, for everything about this street seemed strange. Then all the little blue lights went out at once, there was no light anywhere in the world, and he woke. And that time it was good to see the work-a-day world once more; Cass felt, somehow, that on that night he had come close to death.
He did not always dream. Sometimes he lay awake beside his sleeping brother, wondering, filled with an adolescent yearning, imagining all manner of far-away places. He saw broad blue waters and woody places, pleasant cities where children played. Sometimes as he lay so Nancy would laugh lowly out of sleep, and he would be recalled from wonder. Then he would think of his father, how Stuart rode switch engines all through the mysterious night. He would think of his father, how, in the chill, smoky mornings, he would come in while Cass was dressing by the wood stove, tracking soot and cinders and sand into the kitchen on his pointed little brown Spanish boots, dangling an empty tin dinner pail from his hand.
In after years Cass never heard the long thunder of passenger cars over a bridge in the dark, but he caught a brief glimpse of a smoky dawn through an opening door; never saw the white steam whistle in the light, but he saw his lather stretched, mouth agape, on the disarranged cot in the corner, brown boot-toes pointing upward.
And in after years Cass always feared a night of storm or wind. On such nights, as a boy, he heard something, or someone, come stealing through darkness out on the road; he heard cold fingers tap along the west wall, wind-fingers trying the knob, then, whispering something quickly, something running like the wind in haste away, driving all small things before it.
Yellow and black, yellow and black: these came, for Cass, before he was grown, to be the colors of sun and blood, the hue of life and the shade of death. To think of living was to see yellow; to see blood was to think of black. He could never in all his life see blood as crimson—it looked too dark for that. When Cass thought of blood he saw a black rivulet running a rail that gleamed in sunlight—an iron rail gleaming yellowly, as though smiling while it drank.
This was because of a thing which occurred when Cass was not quite sixteen.
All one bright windy morning he had worked in the dooryard. (Stuart had forbidden him to run with Mexican boys.) He had built himself a tire-swing; he had turned a clothes-wringer for Nancy for an hour, and had helped her hang out the washing; he had carried in kindling; he had patched a frayed kite.
And all about him, on the roofs of the houses, aslant the old privy, across the small garden, through air, earth and water—over all things streamed the strong yellow sunlight. As though coming like rain from atop Great-Snake Mountain, the deep yellow sunlight. The good yellow sunlight; and the mad March wind.
He had heard the whistle of the noon freight on the Southern Pacific to Houston—three long and two short blasts—and swiftly, as a thing done every day, he hopped down from his tire-swing and raced toward the S. P. tracks. Even though this train would not be hauling coal, as he knew it would not be, yet it remained a duty to watch it pass. To see the ’boes that would be riding the tank cars, to exchange hand-waves with them, to share the excitement that all there would feel—this would be the event of Cass McKay’s day.
He was almost too late. The engine itself was a quarter of a mile east of town when he arrived, and he was only in time to see the last half-dozen gondolas roll by; she was fast picking up speed, and the brakeman was already back in the cab. Two Mexican section hands and several town boys were standing about a thing atop the cinder embankment. A thing huddled. Yes indeed, it wasn’t often that one could come into town without seeing a sight or two for one’s pains. Eagerly Cass clambered up, small stones slipping beneath his bare feet, stepping over the sagebrush that grew up through the cinders: then he pressed himself roughly between the two Mexicans and saw what they saw.
Face downward in the sand beside a clump of thistle a boy was lying, his right arm flung across his eyes, a boy in a brown shirt and blue corduroy slacks.
Over him a tall man stood looking down as though understanding this all to himself.
The left arm was spewed off slantwise at the shoulder, the jaw hung limp. This Cass saw first. One eye hung out of its socket by one long thin wet thread, the filament rising and falling a little straight up and down as it hung. Someone had pitched a small bundle of clothes to one side and strewn it over with sand.
At the waist, between the dark shirt and a broad bright belt, the side began to tuck in and out in short quick violent little jerks. In—out. One of the Mexicans called shrilly. “Look! Look! See what he do now! In and out he going!” Two of the town boys walked toward the bundle and went off down the tracts with it dangling between them.
And all down the gleaming yellow rail there ran the warm wet blood—warm wet blood running black and slow beneath the unpitying sun; black and slow down an iron rail, darkening small stones as it spilled and seeped, into ties; the blood of heart and brain and sinew wetting a thistle in the sand. And black, black, black; black as darkness on the bright sun’s face.
The thunder of the morning freight faded to a low singing of rails through heat, to die at last in the east into silence.
There never came, in later years, a sunny, windy day in March, but Cass would feel the heart within him pumping, pumping momently; and he would be faintly sickened and half uneasy and somewhat afraid.
Yellow and black, yellow and black—these were the colors of sun and blood, the hue of life and the shade of death, the symbol of flesh and the sign of dust.
In August of 1926 Cass saw blood again. Bryan killed an old housecat that had been around the home for seven years; and he killed the creature by wrenching off its head.
Bryan McKay was easy-natured enough when sober; yet when drunk he could be as cruel as malice itself. One day he noticed the old cat chase one of the hens off the porch, but he paid little attention and went on his way. He knew the old tom never killed anything, not even mice. But three days later, drinking tequila in the town with friends, he remembered, and put his bottle down.
Cass was in the kitchen that morning, painting a shoeshine box for use in town. The old tom was curled on a chair beside the sink, pulsing evenly, after the manner of most good cats. Cass heard Bryan’s voice approaching, and he put his brush aside.
“Chicken-chasin’! Bird-killin’! Sly black egg-suckin’ son-a bitch . . .”
Cass grabbed a newspaper off the stove and threw it over the cat