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Zona Gale
Mothers to Men
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4057664590282
Table of Contents
MOTHERS TO MEN
"Daddy!"
The dark was so thick with hurrying rain that the child's voice was drowned. So he splashed forward a few steps in the mud and puddles of the highway and plucked at the coat of the man tramping before. The man took a hand from a pocket and stooped somewhat to listen, still plodding ahead.
"Daddy! It's the hole near my biggest toe. My biggest toe went right through that hole an' it chokes my toe awful."
The man suddenly squatted in the mud, presenting a broad, scarcely distinguishable back.
"Climb up," he commanded.
The boy wavered. His body ached with weariness, his feet were sore and cold, something in his head was numb. But in a moment he ran on, two steps or three, past the man.
"Nope," he said, "I'm seeing if I could walk all the way. I could—yet. I just told you 'bout my toe, daddy, 'cause I had to talk about it."
The man said nothing, but he rose and groped for the child's arm and got it about the armpit, and, now and then as they walked, he pulled the shoulder awkwardly upward, trying to help.
After a time of silence the rain subsided a little, so that the child's voice was less like a drowned butterfly.
"Daddy," he said, "what's velvet?"
"I dunno, sonny. Some kind of black cloth, I guess. Why?"
"It came in my head," the child explained. "I was tryin' to think of nice things. Velvet sounds like a king's clothes—but it sounds like a coffin too. I didn't know if it's a nice thing."
This, the man understood swiftly, was because her coffin had been black velvet—the coffin which he had had no money to buy for her, for his wife and the boy's mother, the coffin which had been bought with the poor fund of a church which he had never entered. "What other nice thing you been thinkin' of?" he asked abruptly.
"Circus. An' angels. An' ice-cream. An' a barrel o' marbles. An' bein' warm an' clean stockin's an' rocked...."
"My God!" said the man.
The child looked up expectantly.
"Did he say anything back?" he inquired eagerly.
"Not a word," said the man in his throat.
"Lemme try," said the child. "God—oh, God—God dear!" he called into the night.
From the top of the hill on the edge of the Pump pasture which in that minute they had reached, they suddenly saw, cheery and yellow and alive, the lamps of Friendship Village, shining in the valley; and away at one side, less in serene contemplation than in deliberate withdrawal, shone the lights of a house set alone on its hill.
"Oh, daddy, daddy—look at the lights!" the child cried. "God didn't say nothin' with words. Maybe he talks with lights instead of 'em."
The man quickened his steps until, to keep pace with him, the little boy broke into uneven running.
"Is those lights where we're goin', daddy?" he asked.
"That's where," said the man. He put his hand in his pocket and felt for the fifteen cents that lay there, wrapped in paper. The fancied odour and warmth of something to drink caught at him until he could hardly bear the longing.
But before he could get to the drink he must do something else. The man had been fighting away the thought of what he meant to do. But when they entered the village and were actually upon its main street, lonely in the rainy, eight o'clock summer dusk, what he meant to do had to be faced. So he began looking this way and that for a place to leave the child. There was a wagon shop. Old wagons stood under the open shed, their thills and tongues hanging, not expectant of journeys like those of new wagons, but idle, like the worn arms of beaten men. Some men, he thought, would leave the boy there, to sleep under a seat and be found in the morning; but he was no such father as that, he reflected complacently. He meant to leave the boy in a home, give him a fair start. There was a little house with a broken picket fence—someway she wouldn't have liked him to be there; she always liked things nice. He had never been able to give the boy much that was nice, but now, he said to himself, he would take nothing second rate. There was a grocery with a light above stairs where very likely the family lived, and there, too, was a dry stairway where the child could sit and wait until somebody came—no, not there either.... "The best ain't none too good for the little fellow," thought the man.
"Dad-ee!" cried the child suddenly.
He had run a few steps on and stood with his nose against the misty pane of Abagail Arnold's Home Bakery. Covered with pink mosquito-netting were a plate of sugar rolls, a fruit cake, a platter of cream puffs, and a tall, covered jar of shelled nuts.
"Hustle up—you!" said the man roughly, and took him by the arm again.
"I was comin'," said the little boy.
Why not leave the child at the bakery? No—a house. It must be a house, with a porch and a front stair and big upstairs rooms and a look of money-in-the-bank. He was giving care to the selection. It was as if he were exercising some natural paternal office, to be scrupulously discharged. Music issued from the wooden saloon building with the false two-story front and the coloured windows; from a protesting piano a dance tune was being furiously forced, and, as the door swung open, the tap and thud of feet, the swell of voices and laughter, the odour of